landingtree | Reading

Continuing these reading list posts! This one is the 2013 lists.

Sarah Rees Brennan - Tell the Wind and Fire

Rosemary Sutcliff - “Shifting Sands”

Frances Hodgson Burnett - Sara Crewe, or What Happened at Miss Minchin’s

Ethel Cook Eliot - Ariel Dances

Kate Seredy - The Singing Tree

Katherine Applegate - Odder

D. E. Stevenson - Mrs Tim Carries On

Elizabeth Goudge - The Lost Angel

Adam Gopnik - All that Happiness Is. Didn’t review this one. An essay about happiness published as a book. Can’t remember what Gopnik concludes happiness is, but probably some variation on “work and love,” a la Freud.

F. Scott Fitzgerald - Tender Is the Night

osprey_archer

In April, I wrote a piece of flash fiction called “Skysail Jack,” about a young vagabond who likes to hitch rides on zeppelins, with occasionally disastrous results. This was not accepted to Flash Fiction Online but may nonetheless spark a flash fiction series with classic adventure story titles like “Skysail Jack and the Flying Dutchmen.”

I’m also continuing very slow work on my fantasy novelette The Paper Bird. I believe I will complete a draft this month! It’s going to be about 15,000 words, which is an awkward length, but I’m just so pleased that I’m going to have a draft, since I started this story 16 years ago at a time when I was starting (and occasionally finishing) many secondary world fantasy stories. They were all terrible, and I couldn’t understand why. I was so faithfully going through those websites of worldbuilding questions! Reading books about crafting imaginary languages! Carefully creating maps and sprawling family trees!

But I believe that at long last, I may be writing a secondary world fantasy story that is actually good. This is partly because I have grown as a person and a writer, and partly because I’ve finally grasped that I need to leave out like 95% of that beautiful worldbuilding.

I am therefore cautiously considering the possibility that I might be able to write about some of the other secondary world characters who have obstinately refused to die despite ~15 years of neglect. In fact, I tried to describe some of these story ideas in this post, but ran up against the fact that they tend to have characters and a setting but not what you might actually call a “story,” which makes it difficult to describe them in a way that might interest other people.

But good news! The Paper Bird also languished for years with characters and a setting but no story, so I just need to replicate the process whereby I gave it a plot. Unfortunately I don’t know quite how I did it, but no worries! I’m sure I can work it out.

Also, I don’t think that most of these potential stories are very marketable in self-pub, with the possible exception of Innis and Jess (prisoner of war and guy who really didn’t want a pet prisoner of war; obviously they fall in love, obviously their cultures have wildly different views on sex/love/romance/etc), but that is a problem for future me. At the moment it’s just nice to be writing again.

sovay

tl;dr my body is chewed up by medical conditions and their treatment and I have not slept more than two or three hours in five nights, but this afternoon I had to walk into Davis for a prescription and I photographed some flowering things along the way. The cherries are still blooming.

( One step over the line. )

I am still watching almost nothing in the way of movies, but

spatch and I are enjoying the introductory riffs on weird New England in Widow's Bay (2026–). The series so far feels more like a collection of strange stories than a puzzle-box, off-kilter without tipping as far as spoof. I hope it can hold. I'd had no idea I should have been following Matthew Rhys for his powers of +10 mortal fear. In other art, I had missed the gloriously angular revival of the Pylon Reenactment Society's Magnet Factory (2024). I believe

moon_custafer that this musician is doing his impressive best in the absence of his natural frog form. The doom-folk of Jim Ghedi's "Wasteland" (2025) once again suggests a Cloudish cinema.

Current Music: Pylon Reenactment Society, "Fix It (feat. Kate Pierson)"

cahn

( Math competition(!), math summer, standardized testing, A's school has not imploded this year... yet. New calling for me. )

rachelmanija

I'm still going through books and discarding ones that don't grab me after a chapter or so. (Lots grab me within one paragraph).

Stir it Up! Ramin Ganeshram

A Trinidadian-American girl wants to be a celebrity chef. It begins with a recipe for "two cups of love, a pinch of sharing," etc. BARF.

Before the Fall, by Noah Hawley

Hawley is a TV writer/creator who did a show I loved (Legion) and a show I liked (Fargo). The premise of this book - a man who, along with the young boy he saves, is the sole survivor of a plane wreck and starts investigating the victims to find out if it wasn't an accident - really appeals to me. Unfortunately, it's written in a style I can only describe as "Middle-aged white dude writes New Yorker fiction." Not for me.

Guns in the Heather, by Lockhart Amerman

In a fast-moving tale of international espionage, Jonathan Flower is lured by a false telegram from the school he is attending in Edinburgh. With his father, he is involved in a grim hunt in which they are stalked by a ruthless band of foreign agents.

The plot sounded fun but was actually kind of tedious. The best part was the author amusing himself with the dialogue. I am recording some for posterity:

Tommy is a fat, jolly sort of character who likes to talk jive with a Glasgow accent. This is purely so he can say stuff like "We dig it, mon, but good."

Her voice and her person both reminded me of the Scots adjective "soncy." This is purely so she can say stuff like "There's a bit sandwich forby - under yon cover."

"Wullie's awee the dee?" (His accent was what we call in school "pure Morningsayde.")

"We're teddibly soddy, of course. It's so fearfully dismal to be doodly with a gun."

My new band name is Doodly With A Gun.

mrissa

Posting a bit early because I will be on vacation until it's time to do another one of these, and doing a whole month at once is too daunting.

K.J. Charles, Unfit to Print. Quite short mystery and m/m romance, with intense conversations between the characters about what kinds of pornography are and are not exploitative. Not going to be a favorite but interesting at what it's doing.

Agatha Christie, The Unexpected Guest. Kindle. I've read Agatha Christies before, and this sure is one. Absolutely chock full of loathsome people and not particularly great about disability. Jazz hands.

Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World. Kindle. I finished reading this just so I could complain about it accurately. My God what a terrible book. I wonder if I should be skeptical of all "new histories of the world." I suspect so. The thing is that he does such a completely terrible job of actually talking about the Silk Road that this is still largely a book about the British and American empires, but not a detailed accounting of their presence in the region. Partition of India? never met her. Chinese Communist Revolution and Cultural Revolution? how could that possibly matter, probably not worth the time. What. Sir. So many things I would like to know about Central Asia and still do not know, because Frankopan fundamentally does not care. Not at all recommended, I read it so you don't have to.

Alaya Dawn Johnson, Reconstruction: Stories. Kindle. Some really lovely and vividly written stories here. Not all to my taste, but it's rare that a collection is.

Ariel Kaplan, The Kingdom of Almonds. I really just love getting to write "the thrilling conclusion." I really do. Don't start here! This is the third book in its series, it is the thrilling conclusion! Start at the beginning, the beginning is still in print, and this is going to wrap things up nicely but you won't know how nicely if you don't read the whole thing.

E.C.R. Lorac, Death Came Softly and The Case in the Clinic. Kindle. Cromulent and satisfying Golden Age mysteries, with Golden Age assumptions but not as bad as in your average, oh, say...Agatha Christie.

Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: An American Life. Kindle. Well-done bio of a fascinating person, lots of what was going on with the Transcendentalists, early American feminism, loads of people you'll want to know about and then Fuller herself trying to fight her way through a system entirely not set up for people even remotely like her. She's part of how that changed, and she died a horrible death fairly early all things considered, and Marshall handles that reasonably as well.

David Thomas Moore, ed., Not So Stories. Kindle. The real stand-out piece for me in this book was Cassandra Khaw's, which opened the volume. What a banger of a story, and how perfectly she nailed the Kipling-but-modern brief. Worth the entire price of admission. (Okay, this was a library book, so my price of admission was free. Still, though.)

Anthony Price, The Hour of the Donkey, The Old Vengeful, and Gunner Kelly. Rereads. I am finding the middle of this series less compelling on reread than the early part. I don't remember the individual late volumes well enough to say whether it just went off a cliff never to return or whether it will bounce back a bit before the end. One of the problems is that I am just not that keen on his WWII stories (The Hour of the Donkey), and he keeps trying to write women and doing it badly. Anthony, apparently you spend all your time with plain women thinking how plain they are, but it turns out that many of them have other things on their mind, and thank God for that. Sigh.

Una L. Silberrad, Princess Puck. Kindle. What a weird title, it's a nickname that one character gives the protagonist and only he uses. This feels like...it feels like it's got the plot of a Victorian novel but even though Queen Victoria has just died five minutes ago, Silberrad can no longer really take some of the Victorian axioms quite seriously. She is very thoroughly an Edwardian at this point, in all the ways that felt modern and challenging at the time, and as much as I love a good Victorian novel, I'm all for it.

Maggie Smith, Good Bones. Kindle. I always feel odd when the best poems in a volume are the ones that got widespread reprinting, but I think that's the case here. And...good? that many people should have seen the best of what's in this? I guess?

D.E. Stevenson, Spring Magic. Kindle. This is such an interesting reminder that during WWII people were still writing upbeat contemporary novels sometimes. A young woman goes and finds a life by herself, away from the crushing control of her aunt, near a military outpost during World War II, and nearly all the other characters are highly involved with the war. But it doesn't have that fraught feeling that books with that plot would have if the war in question was over. We have to be sure that the proper characters will have a quite nice time, because the target readers are in the same situation and would prefer to think more about introducing small children to hermit crabs, figuring out something useful to do, and resolving romantic difficulties than about, hey, did you know that death is imminent? So. Possibly instructive for the present moment in some moods. Not a hugely important book, which is fine, they don't all have to be.

Anthony Trollope, The Eustace Diamonds. Kindle. Dischism is when the author's interiority intrudes on the narrative, and gosh were there several moments when I could see Trollope's own mental state peaking through regarding the titular objects. "She was tired of the Eustace diamonds." "He wished he had never heard of the Eustace diamonds." Shh, it's okay, Anthony, we get it. Because yes, this is not a title tossed off about something that's only peripheral to the story. The Eustace diamonds are absolutely central to the narrative. The thing that's fascinating to me is that the entire plot depends on a sensibility about heirloom and ownership that was as completely foreign to me as if the characters had been going into kemmer and acquiring gender. They are fighting about whether the titular diamonds are properly the property of a toddler or of the mother who has full physical custody of him. And Trollope makes that fight clear! It's just: wow okay what a world and what assumptions.

Darcie Wilde, The Secret of the Lost Pearls. Kindle. This is not the last in this series, but it's the last one I got a chance to read, and honestly I think it's the weakest of the lot. Wilde (Sarah Zettel) still and always has a very readable prose voice, but it felt a bit more scattered to me than the others--so if you're reading this series in order and wonder if it's going downhill, no, it's just that it's quite hard to keep the exact same level for a long series.

osprey_archer

What I Just Finished Reading

Michiko Aoyama’s Hot Chocolate on Thursday, which begins with a woman who goes to the cafe every Thursday to have a hot chocolate and write letters. “OMG TWINSIES!” I shrieked. “I also go to the cafe once a week (my day is Saturday) to have a hot chocolate and write letters!”

The book continues its gentle meander from character to character: from the cafe manager to the mother of a kindergartner who often gets a hot chocolate at the cafe, to the kindergartner’s teacher, to the teacher’s supervisor, and so forth and so on, all the way to Sydney where a young artist gets a kiss from what appears to be the spirit of the Royal Botanic Garden. (The book is not exactly fantasy but also not not fantasy.)

Continuing the fantasy theme, I read William Bowen’s Merrimeg, a 1920s children’s fantasy, largely in the nonsense fantasy mode that was so popular at that point. I largely thought it was fluff, but then the final chapter (each chapter is pretty much a short story) featured the nymph who lives behind the waterfall taking Merrimeg on a journey in a glass carriage, asking the driver to stop at “15, 30, and 80,” which turns out to be those years in Merrimeg’s life - and Merrimeg is not merely looking at her life in those years, but actually being that age briefly… I found it unexpectedly moving. So well played, William Bowen.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve begun Simon Sebag Montefiore’s The Romanovs, having decided that it would behoove me to learn more Russian history pre-1890. So far I’ve pretty much just read the introduction, but already learned that Ivan the Terrible and Boris Godunov were both pre-Romanov tsars. (I must confess to my shame that I previously had the vague impression that Boris Godunov might be fictional, probably because I knew Pushkin wrote a play about him, but this play was clearly in the tradition of Shakespeare’s Henriad rather than his King Lear.)

What I Plan to Read Next

Michiko Aoyama’s The Healing Hippo of Hinode Park.

sovay

The Leon Garfield novel that I read last week as The Stolen Watch (1988) was first published as Blewcoat Boy and I may have read it originally under its American title of Young Nick and Jubilee, which I am taking as an excuse for its absence from any kind of mental index even after various turns of its plot had gone into long-term storage. I loved it peculiarly in elementary school, right around the age of its pair of orphans introduced living like foxes in a den of hawthorn on the wild side of St James's Park. I may always have been more at home to found family when it is discovered through crime.

It was soon after nine o'clock, and the dazed air was staggering under the booming and banging of the bells of Westminster Abbey; for Devil's Acre was right next door to God's front yard. In fact, you could have heaved a brick out of the Abbey and hit the Devil right in the eye—if he'd happened to be on his property at the time instead of sitting in Parliament and making the laws.

As a novel, it's short, sweet, and satirically edged, a fairy tale of Victorian London in the right key of droll color to social rage. In need of a dad to sponsor them into the charitable advantages of the Blewcoat School and the genuine article no closer than a child's dream of Kilkenny, the raggedly resourceful Young Nick and his sister Jubilee locate an expedient substitute in the amiable, if not precisely upstanding person of Mr Christmas Owen and share his horror when it develops that he will have to stand as their father for more than the morning if all three of them want to keep out of trouble with the law. It is all but inevitable from this set-up that their inconvenient imposture should convert with time and responsibility into the real thing, but it happens by awkward, inadvertent degrees, without much in the way of schmaltz or saccharine, and without losing hold of the social thread. The win conditions of a reformation are not riches or even middle-class respectability. Gainfully employed and integrated into a community, Mr Owen and his chicks still belong to the rookeries of London, living half in the pockets of their downstairs neighbors and busking for their suppers the rest of the time and because it matters that children are cared for and adults act like it for once in their aimless lives, it feels like a triumph rather than a concession that the narrative concludes, modestly but meaningfully, in the none more Dickensian unity of carols at Christmastime. On the slant of a punch line or a prophecy, Young Nick's wishful, signature boast even comes true: "Our dad's a big feller, big as a church!"

When you go shopping for a dad, you got to be careful. You don't want any old rubbish . . . You got to try the bottom end of the market, where there's always a chance of picking up a bargain among the damaged goods.

As a re-read, it was one of those dual-layered experiences because the title meant nothing to me, I recognized the text from the second page, and not having read it in at least thirty-five years kept remembering the events of future chapters while simultaneously discovering all the details in the story that I had not originally been able to appreciate or even recognize. Please not to look surprised that at any age I was gone for quirky, rackety Mr Owen with his absentminded snapping-up of trifles and his rueful habit of sighing, "Sharp as pickles!" whenever the children catch him out in a cheat, as unprepossessing a father-figure as ever rocked up half-lit to an admissions interview. He looks half the size of his voice that can soothe a wakeful tenement and gets himself epically pasted in a barroom brawl. The text which slips conversationally between the wry omniscience of a nineteenth-century narrator and the near stream-of-consciousness of the children has him tagged with the antiheroic epithet of "old parrot-face." Watching his makeshift kindness deepen into real concern would have won me over as much as his fallibility, but then I did not have, like Young Nick, the dog-eared, partly fantasized memory of an ideal parent to interfere with accepting the imperfect reality of one, an embarrassing and surprising adult with their own charms and crotchets and fears who may need rescuing from the locked wilderness of a park one night and risk their freedom for the sake of one of their formerly burdensome charges the next. "Our dad!" Jubilee names him more readily, captivated by his ballads and thrilled that he started a fight he couldn't finish over her very first handkerchief. She herself could go toe-to-toe with any feral heroine out of Aiken or Hardinge when she beats up a bigger boy with a fish; it pairs her classically with the more anxiously adult Young Nick, who after all landed them with a new dad through fretting over a dowry for his sister at the age of ten. It may occur to the grown reader that the sooner he can let go of the expectation of heading the family, the healthier. Mutual rescue need not be confined to romances and I like its involvement in the bonding of the eventual Owens. It will still probably never be a good idea to lend anything to the dad if six months later you don't want to have to ask for it back.

Then he give Jubilee the violin and the bow and, after a scrape or two, she starts rendering The Ash Grove all over again; and it were very queer, what with her being only nine, and the fiddle being a hundred and fifty, how well they got on together!

It were different from them other fiddles. It were very sweet and strong; and, as Jubilee stood in the middle of the room, with her fingers fluttering and trembling like white butterflies, and her face nestled into the golden brown of the old fiddle, like a flower asleep, nobody moved nor said a word.

It were something wonderful, you had to admit it. If she'd gone fishing for a husband, she wouldn't have needed no more dowry than her earrings and the old violin. She'd have caught a king!

Language-level, it's a pleasure, careering from sentence to ironic, high-flown, argumentative sentence as if the story is tumbling out through a visit to a long-razed slum. Garfield has the historical knack of pinpointing his time without obvious references like battles or coronations: the smattering of cant in the richly demotic narration helps, but so does the slight distance in habits of mind as well as the plot winding through charity schools and one-man bands, marginalizations of class and nationality and a baby named Parliament Smudgeon. Jubilee's own appellation is the result of "the Pope having done something wonderful in the year she was born," while her brother's diminutive distinguishes him from the Devil. I take Mr Owen's uncommonly Christian name as a seasonal consequence à la Christmas Evans, but the fact that he's a pickpocket—a popular trade around Onion Court—is not an encouragement to the reader to follow the casual bigotry of the police who treat Taffy was a Welshman like forensic gospel. The law in this children's novel is a primer in ACAB, an unappetizing mass of "bluebottles" buzzing fawningly round their social betters with their truncheons at the ready for anyone below. "Real life ain't like a beanstalk, lad! Climb up out of your proper station, and you'll just get knocked down again!" Whereas Mr Owen may need a stiff belt of gin to face a schoolmaster, but as soon as he learns that Young Nick has a head for figures and Jubilee's as musical as his own child, he's determined to support them in their talents. I had a better ear for his own this time around: in the seven-to-ten range I knew a different set of English lyrics to "All Through the Night," but I wouldn't hear "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen" until high school or "The Ash Grove" until college and I still couldn't render you "The Bluebells of Scotland" without listening to the Corries first. As I kept hearing the folk songs arranged by Stephen Oliver, however, I have ended up showing the 1982 RSC The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby to

spatch. The double bill works. I hadn't read enough Dickens in elementary school to know.

But it turned out to be a dirty lie as it wasn't the little 'un in the story what got thumped and had to be helped out of the boozer with a nose like a bee-cluster that didn't go down for a week!

Current Music: Peter Bellamy, "Rigs of the Time"

heresluck

So What
fandom: Heated Rivalry
vidder: here’s luck
music: MUNA
summary: I won’t even notice.
Also on: AO3 | Tumblr

Watch on YouTube

If YouTube is being difficult, you can also try this Vimeo link.

As I said over at the AO3, the club scene in 1x04 is brilliant, and also, with all love and respect to Jacob Tierney and Scotty Taylor (the show's music supervisor), I wanted to see Ilya Really Going Through It set to a song by actual lesbians. (Tegan & Sara, being Canadian, were the obvious choice, but, uh, I have some prior associations there.)

So when I got stuck on a different vid, I pulled one of the new MUNA sad bangers into Premiere and started throwing club scene clips over the chorus to entertain myself. And then I wanted the rest of the vid. So I made it.

Big thanks to

sisabet for beta,

kouredios and

kass for cheerleading, and

sdwolfpup for providing encouragement even though she seriously could not care less about Heated Rivalry. ♥

rachelmanija

This was Robinson's first novel, one of a set of three set in future Orange County, Californias, exploring three different futures for America. The second one is about a future much like the present day, hyper-capitalist and dystopian. The third is set in an ecotopia which apparently involves lots of softball. (I've only read The Wild Shore, and gleaned this information from reviews of the others.) After reading The Ministry of the Future, I thought I'd give Robinson another try, and this book sounded most relevant to my personal interests. (I've attempted Years of Rice and Salt multiple times and never gotten very far in. It sounds so interesting!)

The Wild Shore is set about sixty years after the US was shattered by multiple neutron bombs, then quarantined by the rest of the world. It's now a bunch of extremely small, struggling towns which are kept separated from each other as the rest of the world uses satellite imagery to bomb them any time they attempt to do something like build railroad tracks. The California coast is patrolled by Japanese vessels who prevent them from sailing too far out. No one in the book has any idea who bombed the US or why, but given the quarantine I assume the US started the war and someone else finished it.

The book is narrated by Henry, who is 17 and lives in a village of 60. He hangs out with a bunch of mostly-indistinguishable other teenage boys. (I spent three-quarters of the book thinking Steve and Nicolin were two different boys. They are not. I wish writers wouldn't randomly call characters by their first or last name.) They fish and farm and trade with scavengers. Henry is the prize student of Tom, one of four elders who recall the pre-catastrophe days. It is immediately obvious that Tom's teachings are a mix of real and complete bullshit, but as the younger generation has no context or means of fact-checking, they tend to think it's either all true or all bullshit.

The village gets contacted by the remnants of San Diego, which wants to build a rail line and fight back against the quarantine. Henry gets sucked into this, with disastrous results.

This book is SLOW. I often like books that are mostly about daily life, but Henry's daily life was not that interesting - he spends a lot of time hanging out with boys and talking and thinking about girls and daddy issues, and you can get that in any contemporary novel about teenage boys. The only real character is Tom - everyone else is lightly sketched in at best. Girls and women are only present as girlfriends, potential girlfriends, and moms. (There's one girl who's the leader of the farmers, who are mostly women - the men are mostly fishers - but she doesn't get much to do.) The book was just barely interesting enough that I finished it, but it didn't end anywhere more interesting than the rest of it.

( Read more... )

Content note: Characters use racial slurs for Japanese people.

osprey_archer

Since I started posting my book log challenge lists, it’s been bothering me that I never posted the lists for years 2012, 2013, and 2014. I’ve decided to correct this, starting today with 2012.

You may notice that this list includes multiple entries for Frances Hodgson Burnett and Rosemary Sutcliff. In subsequent lists I decided that I could include each author only once per year, having realized that otherwise repeat author names might clog up the lists for ages.

Frances Hodgson Burnett - Editha’s Burglar

Franny Billingsley - The Robber Girl

Rosemary Sutcliff - The Chronicles of Robin Hood

Lisa See - Lady Tan’s Circle of Women

John Scalzi - Starter Villain

Rosemary Sutcliff - The Iliad. I never reviewed this book (or its companion The Odyssey. They had gorgeous illustrations by Alan Lee but otherwise were very standard retellings.

Frances Hodgson Burnett - The Cozy Lion. Didn’t review this one either. A bit of fluff.

Rosemary Sutcliff - The Odyssey

Elizabeth Wein - Cobalt Squadron

rachelmanija

An incredibly beautiful book and a very faithful adaptation. Much of the language is word-for-word from the book. I would happily hang most panels on my wall.

A number of sequences are completely wordless, and while very beautiful I don't think I would have understood what was going on in all of them if I hadn't already read the book. There's also a lot of panels which are extremely dark, so much so that it's hard to tell what's happening. Most of these are indoors. I know there's no electricity but in most of these there is magelight!

Also, the otak is the size of a mouse and looks very much like a mouse. That is too small - in the book it catches a mouse and brings it to Ged, and other people tease Ged that it's a rat or a dog. I pictured it the size of a kitten or squirrel, and looking somewhat like a stockier weasel, or a small wolverine or marten. Definitely not a mouse!

It's always interesting to see other people's visualizations of books. The dragon of Pendor is seen mostly through a thick fog, all glowing eyes and fiery breath and insinuation. The flying creatures that pursue Ged and Serret from the Court of the Terrenon are not monstrous pterodactyls, as I always imagined them, but hideous living gargoyles.

I highly recommend this to anyone who's already read the novel, but I don't suggest reading it instead of or before the novel.

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rivkat

Stephen Graham Jones, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter: ( horror horror )
T. Kingfisher, Illuminations: ( fun for younger readers )

Dessa, Tits on the Moon: ( poetry )

Cat Sebastian, Star Shipped: ( romance on set )

Nnedi Okorafor, Death of the Author: ( racialized posthumanism )

Kai Butler, Shadow Throne King: ( assassin's need )

T. Kingfisher, Snake-Eater: ( western approaches )

Laura Elliott, Awakened: ( grumpy review of apocalypse premise )

Tasha Suri, The Isle in the Silver Sea: ( excellent fantasy about stories )

Jim Butcher, Twelve Months: ( the saga continues )

Ilona Andrews, This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me: ( isekai done just right for me )

osprey_archer

Another budget of picture books! I rarely have a full post worth of stuff to say about a picture book, but also often have a thought or two I want to share, so have decided to continue in the template of the picture book compilation posts I wrote during during Picture Book Advent.

Lentil, written and illustrated by Robert McCloskey. Young Lentil can neither sing nor whistle, but when the brass band can’t play to welcome the town’s leading citizen back home, Lentil saves the day with his harmonica. The instant this leading citizen was mentioned, I pegged him for a bad ’un, but McCloskey was writing in a different era and the guy who keeps giving the town schools and libraries and hospitals is a public-spirited good ’un even if he does name it all after himself.

Mike’s House, by Julia Sauer, illustrated by Don Freeman. Young Robert loves Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel so much that he calls the library “Mike’s house.” Hilarity ensues when Robert gets lost on a snowy day and asks a police man to help him find Mike’s house. Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel was published in 1939, this book was published in 1954, my brother and I loved Mike Mulligan in the late 80s and early 90s, and now my soon-to-be-three-year-old niece loves Mike Mulligan too. Just lovely to see this chain of connection stretching for close to 90 years now.

The Sunday Outing, by Gloria Jean Pinkney, illustrated by Jerry Pinkney. Published later than the other books in this book but set in the same 1930s-1950sish time period. Young Ernestine loves to go to the North Philadelphia train station every Sunday to watch the trains with her Aunt Odessa Powell. (Truly a satisfying name to say.) But she’s never gotten to ride the trains and is afraid she never will, till Aunt Odessa Powell suggests that Ernestine come up with a way to save money so her family can buy her a ticket to go visit her mother’s folks in North Carolina.

Gorgeous evocative detail, as always in Pinkney’s illustrations. Love his skill at capturing the peculiar ways that children sometimes move. Also love the 1930s/40s style of it all. Did worry slightly about Ernestine crossing into Jim Crow territory all on her lonesome in the train, but decided that in Picture Book Land perhaps this would not be a problem.

Playing Possum, written by Edward Eager, illustrated by Paul Galdone. The last of the little-known Edward Eager books that I discovered through Wikipedia. A possum falls into a garbage can; the adults are appalled at the sight of this ugly dying rat, and only the little boy recognizes that it is in fact a possum, and is in fact playing possum. Underwhelming. If you’re going to read one of the lesser-known Eagers, definitely make it Mouse Manor.

sovay

My poem "Reap the Rules" is now online at Reckoning.

It is my first publication with the magazine; it appears as part of the special issue on war, conflict, and environmental justice. I was honored to have it chosen when I had submitted it for another call and it should not have become more relevant than when I wrote it last summer, after the first U.S. strikes on Iran. The Elamite cuneiform means a prayer to Pinikir, the oldest goddess I know in that region. The English title is a mondegreen from Johnny Flynn and Robert Macfarlane's "Coins for the Eyes" (2022). I wanted it so much to be an artifact of that moment's anger. The need for curse tablets appears inexhaustible.

Current Music: Johnny Flynn & Robert Macfarlane, "Coins for the Eyes"

troisoiseaux

Finished The Ritz of the Bayou by Nancy Lemann, a novelist's-eye nonfiction account of her time as a "girl reporter" covering the 1985 racketeering trial (and 1986 retrial) of the then-sitting Governor of Louisiana Edwin Edwards on assignment for Vanity Fair,* in airy snapshots with a vivid eye for personality and atmosphere, populated by characters referred to obliquely as "the jazz-crazed assistant prosecutor," "the courtroom existentialist" (distinguishable from "the courtroom philosopher" by his quirk of keeping a diary, since the 1950s, to rate every oyster he'd eaten), "the man from the train", "the Yankee reporter", etc. Truly just 100% vibes rather than any sort of political or legal commentary, but I found myself thinking, throughout, that there were still dots to connect between the attitude that, in the mid-1980s, Lemann credited specifically to "Louisiana politics"— that the public seemed to enjoy charismatic politicians behaving badly, as "the two great enemies of Louisianians are boredom and lack of style"; that, at one point, an "alleged bribe . . . was scoffed at {by the defense} as being an amount too low to constitute a decent bribe, an indication of the moral tenor"— and American Politics These Days; Lemann does in fact connect them in her afterword to this new 40th anniversary edition.

* She turned in her story and the Vanity Fair editor "basically said Huh? What?" and paid her a "kill fee" and then Lemann turned that story into this book.

Turned back to War and Peace, which I've been neglecting lately. Since joining the Freemasons, Pierre has made a half-hearted (or, rather, whole-hearted but half-assed?) attempt at improving the lot of his serfs— unfortunately, he let himself be talked into downgrading Plan A: free the serfs!!! into Plan B: improve the lives and workload of the serfs...?, which under self-serving estate managers turned into paving the road to hell with good intentions— and visited the Bolkonskys, while an increasingly cynical Andrew tries to adjust to widowered fatherhood and civilian life.

cahn

Last week:Lament for the destroyed trees and landscape around Jerusalem. A woman eats her own child. More discussion of Titus and whether he wanted to spare the Temple or not. The Carthage and Alexandria precedents for Romans treating defeated opponents. Torching a temple = REALLY BAD LUCK. The timetable of the siege of Jerusalem set by Vespasian's ascent as emperor.

This week: The aftermath of the burning of the temple, and the end of the siege of Jerusalem. Still some pretty awful stuff.

Next week: Okay, going to try to read all of book 7! We'll see how this goes.

skygiants

It's been several days since I finished Cristina Rivera Garcia's No One Will See Me Cry (translated by Andrew Hurley) and I've still sort of singularly failed to formulate an opinion about it; I just keep sort of mentally picking the book up and turning it over and putting it uneasily down again.

In some ways this book reminds me of A Month in the Country, in that both are historical novels that delicately build up a picture of lives destabilized by and lived in the cracks after an epoch-shaking event, while carefully avoiding -- tracing the parameters of, writing around, turning the camera consistently away from -- the event itself. The difference is that A Month in the Country does in fact feel light, delicate, balanced against the heavy thing at its center, while No One Will See Me Cry isn't in any way a light book; aside from the heaviness of its subject matter, feels laden with symbolism at every turn, although the symbolism itself is often specific and startling.

The premise: in 1920s Mexico City, an aging, morphine-addicted photographer who's been hired to take portraits of asylum inmates meets Matilda, a woman he last photographed many years ago, when she was a prostitute. Joaquin engages in a kind of narrative barter with, first the asylum doctor, then with Matilda herself, in an attempt to understand her story and how it intersects with his own to bring them both to this asylum. Both of them, it turns out, formatively knew and formatively loved the same woman, a revolutionary, in the years before the war -- but neither of them was actually involved in the Revolution, neither of them were active agents for or against the transformation of their livetimes; Joaquin describes himself more than once as the only photographer of his generation who didn't take any photographs of the war, and Matilda was, at the time, involved in an emotional affair with a desert landscape.

There are some tropes that one expects, and is braced for, around Women and Lost Women and Madwomen, especially when insanity is used as a thematic metaphor around national trajectory, especially when all that is inextrictable from questions of poverty and indigineity. Rivera Garcia is definitely deploying some of those tropes with purpose and to a point and I absolutely do not know enough to have a full sense of what she's doing with them. This is one of those situations where I wish I was reading a book in context of a class or a club. As it is, what I'm left with is interest, unease, some beautiful and surprising images, and a sense that I ought to read a lot more about the Mexican Revolution.

utilitymonstergirl

I saw Femtanyl on the Chicago stop of their MAN BITES DOG tour, my third time seeing them after their opening for Danny Brown and their smaller Chicago show last June. I was only able to get tickets for that June show at a ridiculous scalper's markup, so this time I wanted to be quick on the draw for the presale, and as I fumbled with my phone on the train I could only seem to complete the sale by getting a VIP ticket. And even if it was mainly by accident, I'm glad I did - I got a lovely signed tour poster out of it, and even though I usually spend concerts chilling on the balcony,* I knew I'd be a fool to pass up the perfect chance to get a good spot in the pit.

And it ruled! My feet ached and I had to hold steady against moshers, but seeing the performance up close is stunning in a way the balcony can't capture. I even got to stage-dive for the first (and likely only) time, and did my part holding up other divers.

The show was 18+, unlike last summer's all-ages event, which seemed a little icy to their large teenage audience. But I imagine that it makes a lot of the safety logistics easier, and the show still sold out anyway, so the age restriction might've been a way to make it at least sell out a little slower. And I appreciated the greater leeway for the crowd to be openly horny, even if I didn't see much overt flirting from the edge of the pit.

Speaking of: good lord is Noelle hot, in both a "scrawny wet rat" way and a "living cartoon character" way. Her eyeshadow and grand gestures are great for playing to the cheap seats, and together create a vivid sense of "gen-Z tgirl Gerard Way" that I expect will take her far. I would not be surprised if she eventually builds up a decent acting career.**

MAN BITES DOG gave the set some good depth and variety, and the tracks went over well, but each concert impresses on me more just how iconic CHASER truly is. In six tracks - less than fifteen minutes - they made a pristine mission statement that I'm so glad this generation of faggots gets to grow up with. BODY THE PISTOL went hard as an opener, but there's a reason the encore was P3T and ACT RIGHT.***

I've got some more concerts lined up for May and June, I'll be back to write about them too.

*At my last show, seeing Stomach Book on Valentine's Day, I was on the balcony next to a very sweet, very normie older couple who turned out to be the parents of Vialice, one of the openers. They were politely bemused by all the gay-ass nerd kids down in the pit, and I'm glad I got to tell them "that girl at the merch table is zombAe, she's another great artist worth checking out."

**I would love to see a buddy comedy with her and underscores.

***My one kvetch about the setlist: they played M3 n MIN3 with a recording of Danny's verse, and didn't play it last November when he was right there with them. (I get that there are broader setlist considerations, but I think it absolutely clears 1L0v3myL1f3!.)

sovay

I made no sea creatures in marzipan for my father's birthday observed, but he still liked his strawberry-variant marmalade cake. My brother told stories about driving the Nürburgring with a minivan. I curled up with my husbands.