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Stephanie Weaver

@weaverbosity.bsky.social

101 followers 112 following 35 posts

Grant writer. Geek girl. Knitting rhetorician. Based in MQT, MI.

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Stephanie Weaver @weaverbosity.bsky.social · 23/02/2025

Book 6/50 of Weaver's 2025 Reading Challenge was Benjamin Labatut's "When We Cease to Understand the World." Thanks, @jlavsm.bsky.social; it took me a while to get around to reading it, but it will stay with me a long time.

The cover of When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut shows a black circle eclipsed by a semi-translucent yellow circle with fuzzy edges. Where the yellow has covered the black circle, a texture like the surface of the moon shows.

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Stephanie Weaver @weaverbosity.bsky.social · 14/02/2025

Book 5/50 of Weaver's 2025 Reading Challenge was Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi. I picked this one up from a professor's free book pile in grad school and hauled it through 2 states just because the cover was interesting. This book inspired this whole challenge, and now I can let it go to a new home.

The cover of Mr. Fox shows an illustration of the front half of a fox disappearing into a yellow midi skirt with matching tights and shoes below. By the fox, a disembodied hand in a white glove holds the handle of a closed umbrella. It is as if someone had cut an illustration of a woman in half. Below this, the end half of a fox disappears into the top half of a man in a suit, who is missing his head.

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Stephanie Weaver @weaverbosity.bsky.social · 08/02/2025

Book 4/50 of Weaver's 2025 Reading Challenge was Gail Carriger's Soulless. It promised vampires, werewolves, and parasols, and it certainly delivered. (Also, if you're wondering why I'm posting these updates while the whole US government is falling apart, the answer is Spiteful Joy.)

Cover of Gail Carriger's Soulless shows a white woman in a dark magenta dress of approximately Victorian design. She is holding a black parasol with a steam punk style. The tag line says, "A novel ox vampires, werewolves, and parasols."

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Stephanie Weaver @weaverbosity.bsky.social · 06/02/2025

For people who really love that wet wool smell?

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Stephanie Weaver @weaverbosity.bsky.social · 03/02/2025

Book 3/50 of the 2025 Weaver Reading Challenge was The Chemical Choir: A History of Alchemy by P. G. Maxwell-Stuart. Somehow I didn't realize this was an academic book until the author started getting snarky about Carl Jung in a way only academics can.

Book cover of The Chemical Choir. A drawing of a hermaphroditic figure with wings and a crown stands on two pieces of stone while a dragon with a head at each end passes below.

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Stephanie Weaver @weaverbosity.bsky.social · 11/01/2025

Book 2/50 for the 2025 Weaver Reading Challenge is Nice Dragons Finish Last by Rachel Aaron, which I found when I was looking for urban fantasy novels set in Detroit. I especially liked the historical context that allows mages and computer-controlled cars to exist in the same world.

The book cover of Nice Dragons Finish Last by Rachel Aaron. A young white man in casual clothes leans against a wall with a neon-lit cityscape behind him.

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Stephanie Weaver @weaverbosity.bsky.social · 10/01/2025

Finished Book 1/50 for The 2025 Weaver Reading Challenge: Per Wahlöö's The Assignment. It was a reminder that moderation in the face of fascism can far too easily become complicity in fascism. Here was my favorite passage.

A photo of a book page with the following text: Manuel Ortega was no longer thinking about the assignment. He was thinking about himself. He thought about himself and his marriage and his family. Everything was perfect. His wife was perfect, apart from that little bit of corpulence. From the very beginning their marriage had been successful and had never really ceased to be. Sexually, it was technically perfect even now. The children were so perfect it almost scared him. Sometimes he wondered whether the years in this perfectionist little country, with its bad climate, had not transformed them into an ideal family, into museum pieces. He could see them standing in a glass case, with labels. Father of family, 42, born in Aztacan, Latin type. Boy, 7, born in London, utterly satisfactory model. Girl, 5, born in Paris. Woman, 35, mother of two children, well preserved. Perfect relationship between equal partners. Please note their tenderness and absolute openness toward each other.

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