Ice ice baby
SASTRUGA, n. This word comes to English through German and originally from Russian, and it’s usually seen in the plural as “sastrugi.” Sastrugi are snow and ice formations that occur in polar regions where the wind sculpts the snow into dune-like ridges. Sometimes they’re several meters tall, and they look like this:
An image of sastrugi from NOAA. (Sourced from Unsplash.)
Anyway, I learned “sastrugi” from a romance novel, and have been thinking all week about how terrifying Antarctica is. A refreshing change from thinking about how terrifying everything else is! (Is this mindfulness? Am I doing it right?)
Anyway, whatever else is happening, at least I’m not running for my life at the South Pole, a place I would surely die even if an ultracompetent babe was trying their best to keep me alive.
I actually did read some Capital-R Romance this week—a little Victor Hugo with my students—but we’re trying to feel good here.
This week in small-r romance, I read
The Boyfriend Project (m/f, both cis and het, contemporary) by Farrah Rochon. The opening of this is so great: Samiah discovers via a viral twitter thread livetweeting a bad date that her boyfriend is with another woman. She goes to his date to confront him and meets a third woman who’s been lied to by this guy. She and the other two women support each other through their viral dating disaster and become friends, and their friendship is one of the most fun parts of the book. I loved all the details about Samiah’s work in software and how hard she had to work to get her position and how much she wanted to help other Black women in STEM fields. Also, her idea-stealing awful coworker is named “Keighleigh,” which is amazing. Plus, the hero has a whole secret-identity thing going on! I don’t wanna ruin it by saying too much. Content warnings: a supporting character is pregnant and gives birth, sex.
Common Goal (gay m/bi m, both cis, contemporary) by Rachel Reid. This book about a divorced 41-year-old goalie coming to the end of his pro hockey career and coming out as bisexual is so easy to sink into. It’s funny and warm and sexy and it held my attention despite, you know, the world. That’s a high bar to clear these days. A treasure. Content warnings: minor homophobia (remarks from other hockey players), one MC was manipulated into an extramarital affair at the age of 18, an unsupportive family, sex.
Whiteout (m/f, both cis and het, contemporary, suspense) by Adriana Anders. The sastrugi book! Look, I’m a simple creature. If a book has two characters who don’t really like each other get stranded in the wilderness so they’re forced to work together to survive, I’m there. Glaciologist Ford Cooper and cook Angel Smith work together—grudgingly—at a research facility in Antarctica, and when the facility is attacked so someone can steal Cooper’s research, they end up on the run from a deadly conspiracy… in Antarctica… at the beginning of a brutal, impassable winter… with three hundred miles between them and the nearest station. Whew. This has killer pacing, and I loved sunny people-person Angel and grouchy misanthrope Ford—plus Ford has trouble with people because he’s neurodivergent! Good stuff. The middle stretch of this book, the surviving-the-wilderness bit, is basically perfect. I’ll admit the end fell a little flat for me, but it’s not Adriana Anders’s fault that seeing the words “the U.S. President” makes me want to puke. Romantic suspense in contemporary settings always runs the risk of getting too close to reality for comfort. This one features the threat of a virus starting a pandemic—imagine if that happened here. Content warnings: murder, violence, sex, abuse (in the past), a car accident, minor ableism (idk, the villain is the only person in the book who uses a cane—protagonist Angel has an old knee injury that makes her limp sometimes, so there is some other disability rep, but she doesn’t use a mobility aid).
In things that are neither Romance nor romance, last week I mentioned tentacles in the newsletter, and then my twitter timeline had all sorts of octopus-related stuff on it, most importantly this 2017 London Review of Books essay by Amia Srinivasan called “The Sucker! The Sucker,” which both broke my heart and made me gasp “aww” out loud. Just generally real good reflecting-on-consciousness-and-embodiment shit:
Octopuses are the closest we can come, on earth, to knowing what it might be like to encounter intelligent aliens.
Srinivasan’s article discusses Hokusai’s 1814 erotic print called “The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife,” which is a woman getting eaten out by a big octopus while a small octopus kisses(?) her and pinches her nipple. I had to look it up myself because apparently that shit doesn’t fly with the London Review of Books, but I didn’t wanna put tentacle porn in your inbox without your consent, esteemed Word Suitcase readers, so click or don’t click, it’s up to you.
And for some (mostly) non-erotic octopus content, here’s Chris Fleming with one of the best things on the internet:
See ya in Akron!
