Permanent Objects

A collection of miscellany

Archives for September 2025

52 IN 52, Book #40: Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

I have no idea what I was expecting from this book, but it sure wasn’t that!

I guess a part of me kind of thought that a book by a Nobel prize-winning author would be very serious and heavy. And that’s not to say that this book isn’t serious and heavy in places, but I was really surprised by how genuinely funny it was for most of the time. Janina, the narrator, is a weird as hell old woman living in the remote Polish woods–she studies astrology, translates poetry, cares deeply about animals, and gives largely unflattering nicknames to her neighbors. When a neighbor turns up dead and suspicions start to grow, Janina gets herself involved in the investigation, convinced she knows what’s going on.

There were a lot of parts of this book that made me laugh out loud. In fact, I’m going to quote one of them here because I liked it so much I screenshotted it to save on my phone and send to my dad:

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52 IN 52, Book #39: Jade Legacy by Fonda Lee

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I fuck so heavy with this series… what an absolutely masterful weaving together of stories. This review contains spoilers so be warned!

I appreciate so much about this whole series but in particular I want to highlight that Fonda Lee is an absolute craft master of echoes—Chekov’s gun, the way she plants things that pay off 200 pages later, and also how she creates these little moments that mirror each other in different ways across the story. In particular, the way she has Hilo learn how to use his jade abilities to deflect a car bomb and then like half the book later, just when we’ve forgotten about him learning how to do that, he gets blown up by a bomb and ends up protecting himself from it?! She had me a nervous wreck waiting to find out if Hilo would still be alive and I didn’t even remember that he probably had the skills to handle an attack in that way! 

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52 IN 52, Book #38: The Entanglement of Rival Wizards by Sara Raasch

This was such fun read and I loved it! 

The base premise of “what if grad school but for D&D classes” is absolutely delightful, and although I could absolutely see the Critical Role influence a mile away I thought this was such a fun and fresh interpretation! As an avid D&D player myself I am hugely in favor of stories set in that kind of universe, particularly if they have a new and modern twist, so this book was a perfect fit into that niche for me. 

I also really like the type of storytelling where you can tell that there’s something major in a character’s past, but the character themselves doesn’t reveal it until later on and mostly thinks about whatever it was in little glimpses—I find that much more realistic than a big info dump at the beginning of the story, because after a certain amount of time I think a lot of us don’t consider our traumas to be a narrative, rather we think about the bits and ways it affects our daily lives but don’t necessarily reflect on the whole. Getting to learn about Sebastian’s past in little bits, seeing how it impacts the development of his relationship with Elethior, and yet not really getting to put the entire picture together until the very end was a really interesting tactic and I felt that it paid off well here.

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