Hm. Okay. The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making: I read the first chapter when it was posted online, realized I was never going to get around to contributing to the online donation thing it was meant for, and felt guilty enough about that that I waited to buy a copy for real when it was published in hardcover.

So by the time I actually got around to reading that copy, I was very well aware that The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland is a Child Meets Wacky Magic Land Book In The Vein Of Oz And The Phantom Tollbooth And Every Other Book You Loved As A Kid Except Also Responding To Those Books And Being Feminist.

And it . . . I mean, it does what it says on that label! I have no complaints with it! I guess -- well, early on, as one of those Things Narrators Say in Books Like This, the narrator explains to us that children's hearts grow at different rates, and some children have none, and some children have lots, and Our Heroine September is at the moment not Utterly but Somewhat Heartless.

And that sounds about right to me. The book was very entertaining, and did what it did very well, and it felt like it had approximately 40-50% of the proper level of heart. There were places that it made great leaps, and then I was like, oh, there, that's where your heart is! That's why I should care!

( These places are spoilery )

Anyway, you'll know pretty easily I think whether you want to read this or not. There's a lot of Look How Clever I Am, which you should avoid if you'll find that frustrating; personally I think it's fine, it's appropriate for the kind of book this is. Shelve it next to Un Lun Dun on the "We're Fixing Our Fairyland Forebears" shelf and maybe they'll breed! Valente and Mieville probably would make very, very pretty if somewhat insufferable prose babies.

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So I am done! DONE WITH EVERYTHING, or at least everything that isn't optional extras like conference applications and so forth which I am not worrying about at this time. The point is: ONE YEAR DOWN, one to go.

In celebration of having turned in my archiving-apocalypse paper I guess it is only fitting that I take today to talk about the magical gift that fell into my lap courtesy of genarti: Tomes and Talismans, otherwise known as AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA OKAY.

So Tomes and Talismans is an educational TV series from 1986. It is meant to teach children about the value of LIBRARIES!

But because the nice people at the Mississippi Broadcasting Corporation don't want the kids to be bored, the story has a plot, and the plot is: ALIENS CAME TO EARTH AND SCARED AWAY ALL THE PEOPLE AND RAN AROUND DESTROYING EVERYTHING.

( My classmates kept asking me if I was making this up. I am not making it up, and I have screencaps to prove it. )

For any of you library-minded individuals who may be interested in investigating this gem of a series, or feel that you need a refresher on the proper use of microfiche in preventing the apocalypse, it is all up on YouTube for your viewing pleasure.

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So as you guys may have guessed, grad school and finals have set me WAY BEHIND on booklogging. But I am so close to being done for the year! And therefore it's time to start catching up.

However I can't make finals my excuse for not having written up Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy, which I started reading last year and finished in like January or something.

The real problem here is that these books were just so good and hit me so hard that they left me kind of speechless, a condition that has apparently lasted for six months. I am going to attempt to fight through it to you to convey how fantastic they are, because -- man. Okay.

Regeneration is the first book in the trilogy and I think also the best one. It's a World War I book that's not set at the front; the central characters are a psychiatrist, John Rivers, and two of his patients, Siegried Sassoon (the poet) and Billy Prior (the irritant.)

Rivers' job is to a.) cure his patients, to the best of his ability, and b.) to convince them that returning to the front, that supporting the war, is a sane and rational thing to do.

As you can imagine, there are some challenges.

Regeneration does two things better, I think, than any other book I have ever read: first, convey the sheer horror and senseless damage of World War I; second, convey the kinds of things that the mind can do to itself when dealing with that kind of strain, and convey them with understanding and compassion and respect. Very few books deal with invisible illnesses well. This does.

The sequels -- The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road -- are both very good also. Both contain secondary plots that might on paper have been more exciting than the rest of the book, and they were interesting enough, but each time I found myself just waiting until I could return to the quiet, introspective psychological discourse that forms the real heart of the story. Which is not a way I usually expect to feel!

I suspect that Regeneration will continue to top my list of WWI books, but if anyone else has recommendations for books about that era (fiction or nonfiction), I'm in the market.

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So here is the question: if you know the earth is basically about to be destroyed, and you're picking your team to rebuild humanity, who are you gonna call?

If your answer is 'a bunch of diverse and awesome ladies,' then you are not thinking like Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle (yes, I am still bitter), but you are thinking like Yumi Tamura! SO LET'S TALK ABOUT SOME 7 SEEDS LADIES.

( Click for PICSPAM OF AWESOME LADIES! )

And here's what I love about 7 Seeds, in the end: pop singers are awesome. Dancers are awesome. Action girls are awesome. Smart girls are awesome. Girls with social anxiety who love their cats are awesome. Maternal women are awesome. Women who never ever want kids are awesome.

And they all have something to contribute, to the world and to each other. AND IT'S GREAT.

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So as you guys know, I am currently writing a paper on archiving and the apocalypse. Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle wrote a book about apocalypses that involves a subplot about a guy trying to archive books! So I borrowed batyatoon's copy of Lucifer's Hammer last week.

BATYA: Here you go! I've marked everywhere that that subplot pops up so you can just go in and find it.
BECCA: Thanks! But now that I have it I feel like I should probably read the whole thing. I want to get the full context, and it makes me feel silly to read only bits of books, so . . .
BATYA: Um, are you sure? It's pretty long, and there's a lot of kind of cringeworthy parts that will probably bother you, so you really don't have to --
BECCA'S BRAIN: WELL NOW IT'S A CHALLENGE. I WILL READ THIS BOOK!

. . . Batya, I'm so sorry. You did your best to warn me, and now I'm going to publicly complain about this book that you lent me (which will indeed be very useful for my paper and which I much appreciate the loan of!)

Because here's the thing. Lucifer's Hammer is a book about how a meteor hits the Earth and the apocalypse happens and everyone does terrible things in the name of survival and we should all very much appreciate our nice technology while we have it. And I'm fine with Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle having an agenda to do with appreciating technology! I like technology! I love my hot showers and my working electricity as much as they do!

But when one large piece of your pro-technology narrative argument can be boiled down to "Technology is great! It will allow us to reinvent mustard gas, nerve gas, and napalm to use to win the decisive war against that army of angry black inner-city cannibals and other unhelpful anti-technology hippies over there!"

Well, then it makes me want to go start blowing up every single one of your beloved nuclear power plants just out of spite.

Because -- even leaving the terrible racism aside! Even leaving the sexism aside, which is also pretty bad, and if I never have to see an example of "when the apocalypse hits we will instantly jettison feminism and women will instinctually gravitate to the men who can protect them best" ever again it will still be too soon for me! -- even leaving all that aside, "BECAUSE WE ARE WILLING TO EMBRACE TECHNOLOGY, WE CAN REINVENT MUSTARD GAS AND NAPALM!" is, hands-down, THE WORST argument in favor of technology I have ever heard. THE WORST.

It makes me furious, and, you know what, it makes me buy a grim worldview, but not in the way I think Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle want me to -- not the one where human beings do terrible things to survive but they're still surviving and that's pretty neat, go us. I get that's what they're going for, but no. If that's your argument, if we're never going to do any better than that . . . then yeah. We don't deserve to be here. Go ahead and burn it down.


(Fortunately in my heart of hearts I still do believe human beings are better than this, so as a post-apocalyptic palate cleanser expect a long and picspammy post about the awesome ladies of 7 Seeds sometime soon. I know no one will care besides me but it will MAKE ME FEEL BETTER.)

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Well, you guys got the teaser trailer last week -- and everyone who guessed what book that line came from gets a prize! The prize of knowing your inner thirteen-year-old is way stronger than you want it to be -- so I guess today it is time to talk about Mercedes Lackey's The Fire Rose! (Copy courtesy of the fiendish silveraspen.)

At its heart, The Fire Rose is a Beauty and the Beast story. Beauty, or Rose, is a PLUCKY FEMINIST TURN-OF-THE-NINETEENTH-CENTURY GRAD STUDENT fallen on hard times.

ROSE: Oh no! My father is dead and I can no longer afford to finish my dissertation on medieval literature! Clearly the only option is SUICIDE.
A MYSTERIOUS ADVERTISEMENT: Hello! I am a rich, sexy rail baron looking for a tutor for my two fake children. It is very important that my fake children learn ancient Latin, classical Greek, medieval French, German and Latin, and ancient Egyptian and ancient Celtic languages for sinister magic purposes. Bonus points for sexy impoverished ladies with no family who will miss them if they disappear.
ROSE: . . . well, at least I'll be making some money. I can buy an opera ticket and a fancy dress and commit suicide in the middle of the second act, in style!

So Rose jaunts out to San Francisco, where she gets to her new rooms and hears a mysterious voice coming at her through a speaking tube! The voice belongs to THE BEAST, aka JASON CAMERON, a sexy firebending rail baron who has accidentally turned himself into a wolf FROM THE NIPPLES UP and THE KNEES DOWN. The rest of him is totally normal. Well, besides the tail.

( A tale as old as time . . . I guess . . . )

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SO FOUR DAYS LATER I have now read everything that is available to read in English of Seven Seeds, and all I have to say is that I feel like I've been punched in the gut forty times over and I keep happily walking into the fist. Yumi Tamura's brain, man. YUMI TAMURA'S BRAIN. I kind of want to spoil everything and gibber about it, but I'M NOT GOING TO.

I am, however, going to make a short list of things Yumi Tamura has done in her post-apocalyptic shojo manga that I never thought I would see in a post-apocalyptic shojo manga:

1. Two teenagers have sex for the first time; it's pretty uncomfortable, and they get halfway through and decide that they're not all that into it, and it's completely not a big deal.

2. Heterosexual teenaged boy: "Aw, man, sex is off the menu if it means popping off kids."
*TWO MALE TEAM MEMBERS APPEAR, COVERED IN BISHIE SPARKLES*
Heterosexual teenaged boy: "Hmmm. . . ."

3. A character gets pregnant. There is a reasonable amount of page space devoted to her prenatal yoga lessons.

4. One female character has long flowing hair that she's really proud of. But, you know, it's the apocalypse, so she grumbles for a bit about not having conditioner and all her split ends, and then cuts it all off.

5. Girls have periods!

6. NO, I MEAN, SERIOUSLY, and not in a way that's a sketchy plot device! I got really excited about one quick scene where a character was washing out her sanitary napkins, because even that much is never acknowledged in fiction. But then I got to the next arc, which includes a part where a female character has to climb her way through an giant creepy abandoned shelter and single-handedly rescue her two male teammates, while coping with cramps. Her next step, after all this exertion and successful heroics: check out the creepy abandoned shelter bathroom so that she can change her pad. (Then they carry off all the toilet paper.)

I LOVE YOU, YUMI TAMURA.


I was going to add a separate section in which I was going to complain about one non-realistic thing I would want fixed, which is that despite a reasonable amount of subtext (seriously, the Team Winter OT3 is so close to canon it might as well be) and the nod to homosexual sex as an alternative to procreation, everyone at this point seems basically heteronormative. But as of the most recent chapter I am pretty sure we are getting indicators that Yumi Tamura is shipping two male characters for real, so . . . never mind! Carry on, Yumi Tamura!

(But if you wanted to throw in some lesbians, I mean, that would be nice. Those two badass morally ambiguous constantly bickering rival architect ladies are right there.)

PS. It's been pointed out to me that I should put in trigger warnings here! So . . . yeah. There is definitely triggery stuff in here, and if you want details I can provide.

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So as I was rereading Soul Music, I kept thinking about how glad I was that I was doing this epic reread project and talking everything over with you guys. Because, man! Soul Music is great for many reasons, but -- I mean, Susan is a protagonist of this book, and Buddy & Co. are protagonists of this book (well, sort of, I mean, Buddy only kind of has a personality to begin with, but we'll forgive him that), but the real protagonist of the book is Death.

I think someone at some point in the comments was talking about whether all the 'Death takes a holiday' plotlines were going to get repetitive. And in some bits, they do. I mean, every time Death walks into a bar, the scene goes basically the same way. But at the same time, there's continuity, and there's change. Death has changed enormously since the Death we saw in Mort. Death's learned that he has to cope with grief. Death's learned to accept other people's choices. And Soul Music reminds us of that, and it's just -- it's really satisfying to follow, as a slow and tremendously earned arc. I barely remember what Death is like in Hogfather, because I barely remember Hogfather as a book, but I'm looking forward to seeing that now, so very much.

(Death's house has a field of golden wheat growing in the back. And Susan is like ???? and I'm like \o/ YEAH IT DOES.)

. . . there are other great things in Soul Music! Buddy is not one of them. Buddy is kind of boring and I'm totally okay with the fact that he's hilariously built up as Susan's Destined Love Interest all through this book and then disappears forever. Glod and Cliff are way more interesting, which is yet another example of irritating human-centricness in the series. But then: Susan! Who I totally identified with as a kid, and it's funny to look back on that, because now I read sixteen-year-old Susan and I'm just like OH KIDDO. PLEASE NOBODY LET YOU DECIDE THE FATES OF ACTUAL HUMAN BEINGS, that would be a TERRIBLE PLAN.

Also, this is totally embarrassing, but I only just caught on this read that the reason the Dean is the one who's super affected by the Soul Music is because of James Dean. Um. Can we just pretend I knew that all along . . .?

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I am reading manga online again! As we know this is a dangerous proposition and should probably have been saved for after final papers were due. BUT ANYWAY, I am now about four volumes into the sadly only-available-in-scanlations 7 Seeds, the currently-running manga by Yumi Tamura, the creator of Basara.

7 Seeds is not quite as precisely tailored to my tastes as Basara so far -- for one thing, there is no crossdressing -- but it does hit a secret button of mine from when I was a kid, which is 'plucky groups of teenagers survive the apocalypse and must rebuild society!' 7 Seeds is ALL ABOUT THIS. The basic premise is that government scientists, finding out that the world was quite possibly DOOMED, selected healthy teenagers and put them away in cold sleep storage in teams of seven kids (with one grown-up guide to explain things when they woke up) until some ambiguous time after the apocalypse was over and life was presumably sustainable again. What this means in actuality is groups of kids going to bed one night at home and waking up the next morning to find that everything they know is gone and they are in the middle of a DESERTED ISLAND FULL OF MUTANT INSECTS. I don't even have words for what a great plan this is.

There are apparently five teams, and so far we've mostly been following three of them:

1. TEAM SPRING, aka TEAM LADYFRIENDSHIP

Team Spring has one tomboy girl with survivalist training, one logical and scientifically-minded med student trainee girl, and one very ladylike traditional Japanese girl who's good at cooking and mending and taking care of small children, and a large part of the Team Spring arc is them bonding and being friends and figuring out each other's strengths! There are also some dudes. One of them is a twelve-year-old genius and another one is a concert pianist who is like "well, I clearly have the perfect skillset for this mission. THANKS, JAPANESE GOVERNMENT. >.<" They make him an ocarina out of a potato.

2. TEAM WINTER, aka TEAM BROS, aka TEAM THREESOME

The most prominent characters in Team Winter are two boys and a girl. The boys are teen-prodigy baseball players who have admired each other from afar and hoped to come up against each other in a match for years and are SO EXCITED to be in a survival team with each other that being stuck in a post-apocalyptic landscape doesn't even seem that bad. They can play catch! They'll keep in practice! The girl is a bossy dancer with an annoying laugh who says things like "oh, so if it's coming from a boy it's self-confidence and from a girl it's arrogance?" and "um, come on guys, we might be the last humans left alive in the world, I THINK YOU CAN GET OVER SEEING ME NAKED SOMETIMES, jeez," which pretty much guarantees she was destined to win my heart immediately. Their arc involves adorable puppies and ( spoilers )

3. TEAM SUMMER B, aka TEAM FAILBOAT

So when the government was choosing people for this project they made up four teams out of the most attractive, talented, socially well-adjusted kids they could find . . .

. . . and then someone in the project got genre-savvy and was like "wait, wait, hang on, guys. We've forgotten something important. What if all our perfect people aren't the ones who can save humanity? WHAT IF the only way to keep humanity alive is to create . . . a RAGTAG BAND OF MISFITS?!"

Cue Team Summer B, the most protagonist-y team of all, which includes the girl so shy she can't raise her voice even if she's trapped on an island and menaced by monsters; the drug-dealing delinquent asshole; the boy who once nearly killed a few of his classmates; the teen-girl runaway; the weird psychic girl; and the boy who never talks. They'll have fun! Fortunately their guide is an awesome lady police officer who appears to be the only competent adult involved in any part of this operation.

I've read about up to where we finally encountered Team Fall, aka Team Mysterious Jerkfaces. We don't know much about them yet, but one of their dictates is totally hilarious to me: after learning that the project that stuck them in post-apocalyptic hell was intended to ensure the survival of humanity, and therefore no contraceptives were included in their survival kits, they placed a firm ban in their group on penetrative sex JUST TO SAY FUCK YOU TO THE (LONG-DEAD) MAN. No babies for anyone! HUMANITY IS DOOMED, SUCKERS.

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I read Pearl North's Libyrinth mostly for rachelmanija's YA Diversity Book Club, but also partly because it happens to conveniently align with certain other interests I have at this time (archives! apocalypse! final papers! but ahhh let us not speak of those.)

Libyrinth is one of those books that really just falls apart if you poke it too hard in terms of worldbuilding, but is pretty charming regardless -- it just wants to convince you that BOOKS can change the WORLD, guys! Our Heroine is Haly, who has the semi-magical power of having books read themselves out to her in her head every time she gets near them.

(Personally I think having this power would get really, really maddening after a while, but then, considering the books I am likely to have near me -- well, as an example, if I had this magic power right at this very moment, I would be hearing Mercedes Lackey declare No healthy, sane woman would find him anything but repugnant, although he did look mostly human from the nipples to the knees in my head as I wrote this review, and also as I tried to do my homework afterwards, and no.)

Anyway, Haly lives in a society built around a postapocalyptic library, which for some reason mostly stocks YA lit such as Life of Pi, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh, and of course that forever classic, Anne McCaffrey's Dragonflight. At one point a character confesses that the one book she's connected with in her life is A Cricket in Times Square, which is certainly a great book, but . . . I would imagine really hard to connect with if you live in a postapocalyptic library with no knowledge of New York City . . .

BUT ANYWAY. Haly, her boss Selene, and her lesbian BFF Claudia end up going on a Quest to find The One Book With All The Secrets of the Ancients, and then Haly gets captured by The People Who Hate Books And Want To Burn Them. That's one plotline, and the backstory/rationale doesn't really make sense, but Pearl North does do a pretty good job of demonstrating how the book-loving society has some serious flaws and how The People Who Hate Books And Want To Burn Them also have some valid points in their distaste for them, and basically all the societies in this book do come across as three-dimensional, so I'm willing to run with it.

Meanwhile, Selene and Claudia are off in The Land of the Amazons I Guess Because Why Not trying to get up the resources to rescue Haly, and I actually really liked this half of the plot, because Claudia is a kind of heroine I feel like I don't see an awful lot -- not just because she's a lesbian, but because she's girly and gossipy and ambitious to the point of being slightly self-centered, and none of these things are presented as bad traits. POWER THROUGH GOSSIP! I wish we saw that more.

And then everything comes together at the end and . . . still sort of doesn't make sense, but hey, the power of BOOKS brings EVERYONE TOGETHER, so that's fine, right? Yeah! Anyway, I enjoyed it, that is the main thing. Although I still crack up every time I think about that time Haly comments on the fact that "the paper and ink used by late-period Earth publishers were nearly indestructible." Because if late-period Earth publishers are the generation that were putting out Dragonflight and so on, then . . . LOL NO.

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I picked up Edith Pattou's East in a bookstore ages ago because . . . well, basically because it's a fairy-tale book. I like fairy-tale books! And I always liked "East of the Sun and West of the Moon" as a fairy tale; it's one of the ones where the plucky heroine goes off adventuring to save her love interest, and that's always fun, especially in comparison to the ones where the plucky heroine hangs out in a coma.

And East is a perfectly good retelling of "East of the Sun and West of the Moon." If you didn't know, the fairy tale goes something like this:

WHITE BEAR: Hello, impoverished family! I will make you rich and solve all your problems, but I would like your youngest daughter for unexplained purposes.
IMPOVERISHED FAMILY: . . . 'kay.
WHITE BEAR: So hey, human lady, how do you like this magic castle I brought you to?
OUR HEROINE: Well it's fine and all, except I keep getting this creepy feeling that there's someone I can't see climbing into bed with me every night. @___@
WHITE BEAR: . . . weird. >.>
OUR HEROINE: However if it's all the same to you, I've been cooped up in a castle with nobody for company and I'd kind of like a chance to . . . go home . . . and see my mom?
WHITE BEAR: If you must! But don't talk to your mom alone, that will RUIN EVERYTHING.
OUR HEROINE'S MOM: I don't think I'm okay with creepy strangers climbing into bed with you, honey.
OUR HEROINE: Moooooom, I'm fiiiiiine --
OUR HEROINE'S MOM: Here's a magic candle for seeing things in the dark, and I would seriously recommend that you use it.
OUR HEROINE: Well, I am super curious. And it's not like anybody here tells me anything. *lights candle*
WHITE BEAR: WELL NOW YOU'VE DONE IT. I'm really a handsome prince, and if you'd just held out for a while longer in complete ignorance, I would have been turned back into a human full-time and we would have got married and it would have been great, but nooooo, you just had to look at my face and now I'm tragically cursed to marry a troll! NICE GOING.
OUR HEROINE: Ack! Sorry sorry whoops sorry it's all my fault sorry sorry --

And I'm going to pause our story here, because this is the part where I realized that "East of the Sun and West of the Moon" is a fairytale I like less than I thought; or, in other words, it's the part where I had to put down the book and get unexpectedly furious.

I mean, what happens next is our heroine has some hardship and some adventures and goes and rescues the prince from the troll. Fine. And East is doing some interesting things with the storyline -- it turns our heroine into a RESTLESS CHILD who is all for the opportunity to go off with a mysterious white bear, it spends a lot of time with our heroine's family and how they're reacting to everything, there's all this stuff with culture and superstition . . .

. . . but this bit, it plays completely one hundred percent straight. Our Heroine's foolish, superstitious mother (whom the narrative consistently treats as silly and laughable despite the fact that her superstition is always proven to be right) gives her the candle. Our Heroine lights it, because she's been in this castle for a year and had no answers to anything that's going on -- and then OH NO! You weren't patient! You weren't trusting! You wanted to actually KNOW something about what was happening to you! And THAT RUINED EVERYTHING.

The story says "if you had just waited with the monster, he would have turned into a prince." Because that's totally how it works.

I would like to write in to the show going on here and offer some different advice, if I may. My advice goes: you know what? Listen to your mother when she says, "if a strange man is climbing into bed with you, you might want to get a look at his real face." Be curious. Be clever. if the rules that say you should be patient and wait in silence, they're stupid rules. Wanting to know the truth isn't a betrayal. It is, in fact, your right.

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I was really excited to get to Men at Arms in my Discworld reread! I . . . did not realize how conflicted I was going to end up feeling about it.

Because -- okay, here's the thing. All the Guards books are about class and race and the other kinds of complicated unhappy -isms that exist in a city; we've talked about this already. And Discworld can do class great, it can at least make a decent effort on sex and gender, it is fantastic on 'war is crap' and general sentiments of the 'wouldn't it be great if people would stop killing each other over stupid things' variety. But Men at Arms is the Book About Racism like no other, and . . . it's not good enough.

(I'm going to leave aside the fact that the Discworld books always do that super-problematic fantasy novel thing where they conflate speciesism with racism because I don't have anything new to say about it, but that's the first issue, so. Anyway I'm just gonna go on talking about racism instead of speciesism because that is what the book's about and we all know it.)

So here's the thing: I think I could deal with the plot of the human members of the Watch starting out racist and learning their valuable life lesson about becoming less racist. I mean, I think our lovable characters in the Watch should be shown to be horribly racist and it should shock us, because they are based on a police force that is very often horribly racist. That would be great! . . . if we got to get into the heads of the actual people who were affected by that racism, and those people got a chance to get angry and properly call them on it.

But every time Carrot or Vimes says something that's terrible, either no one else is around to get mad, or we don't see it, or -- you know, it's Angua, and she gets hurt because Carrot says terrible things about the undead and she's crushing on Carrot; she gets hurt, but she doesn't get mad. Which would be fine if there were other times we saw people getting their righteous anger on, with narrative support, but we don't see that. We don't see that righteous anger directed at our favorite characters, not when they're being terrible. Dwarves and trolls get mad at each other, sure, but it's written into the plot that nobody ever gets mad at Carrot. Angua gets sarcastic about Vimes, and then Carrot gets all snitty and proves to her that she's Wrong About Vimes and Angua apologizes and stammers that she didn't know -- and Angua shouldn't have to apologize for thinking Vimes is a dick. I love Vimes a lot and you guys all know that, but he is a racist sexist asshole on top of his overall misanthropy, and the fact that he's nice to widows and orphans and will generally deep-down do the right thing doesn't mean that people aren't allowed to think he's a dick for that.

But of course, I'm forgetting -- there's Cuddy! Cuddy gets mad! Cuddy even gets mad and sarcastic at humans! Cuddy even gets to be a POV character sometimes!

( Normally I don't cut for spoilers in these reviews but I guess this is a pretty big one. )

Don't get me wrong -- there are a lot of things to love about Men at Arms. Cuddy and Detritus' epic friendship is great! It's Angua's first book! Lady Sybil is in it!... although really Lady Sybil gets the incredibly short end of the stick in this book, but that's another rant that would take a whole other post. The Patrician is in fine form all around!

But in terms of what the book is, at heart, about . . . it's not good enough.

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Some of you guys may remember when I reread Fifth Quarter, Tanya Huff's GLORIOUS MASTERPIECE of a novel about incestuous assassins and the bodyswapping serial killers who love them, and the magic singing lesbians who also love them, and also a zombie master.

Given that, I don't know why it took me a year and a half to get around to reading the sequel, but I just did now, and it was EVERYTHING I HOPED AND DREAMED.

For those of you to whom this is a new journey, I will re-introduce you to our primary players:

VREE: A hot and tragic assassin trying to FIND HERSELF
GYHARD: A bodyswapping serial killer, reformed now through the POWER OF LOVE!
BANNON: Vree's codependent hot assassin younger brother. Still bitter that Vree would not let him have sex with anything while he was sharing a body with her
KARLENE: A lesbian bard with a thing for hot and tragic assassins
KARS: STILL A ZOMBIE MASTER

( HIJINKS OF COURSE ENSUE )

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The first time I met aquamirage --

-- well, okay, the first time I met aquamirage, it was for about five minutes when I was passing through Reading Terminal Market and I heard an unfamiliar voice shout "BECCA!" and I turned and said "????" and she said "It's Meredith! From the internet!" and I said "!!!!" because a.) it was Meredith from the internet and that was super exciting! and b.) I still don't know how she recognized me. Meredith is magic, that's all. (This is not actually relevant, I just enjoy telling that story.)

Anyway, the second time I met Meredith, she started telling me about this book that she'd read for her women in Victorian Fiction class.

MEREDITH: It's a Gothic novel about a plucky heroine who goes around rescuing ladies and spends some time cross-dressing as a Newsie!
BECCA: . . .
MEREDITH: So I'm lending it to you because I'm pretty sure it has your name written in it.
BECCA: YES. YES IT DOES. >:D >:D >:D >:D

Which is how I acquired The Hidden Hand, or, Capitola the Madcap. And I am now going to share it with you because I am generous that way!


( Read more... )

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Some exciting things:

1. I have a story appearing in an upcoming anthology! This one is a bit more niche than the other, but I know there at least a few of you for whom the words STEAMPUNK SHAKESPEARE are not entirely devoid of interest, in which case you should check out The Omnibus of Dr. Bill Shakes!

My story is basically a bit of Measure for Measure WITH CYBORGS. It is not much like my previous story Granada's Library, except that it's also an exploration of religion involving a steampunk nun, which is now a niche I feel pretty safe in saying I have down. Other aspiring steampunk nun chroniclers: BACK OFF. THIS IS MY TURF.

However if CYBORG MEASURE FOR MEASURE does not sound appealing -- which I do not blame you in the least if it does not, it's a weird play -- you also have Steampunk King Lear, Much Ado About Nothing, Julius Caesar, and Richard III to look forward to, among many others and also sonnets. They're taking pre-orders for the print run (which will be limited) over here, so if you're interested, speak now! (As an author, I also get a 40% discount on the cover price, which brings the hard copy price down to $12, so if you want to work that angle I am totally willing to facilitate that.)

2. And now switching over to my other career: I'm going to be spending the summer interning at Harvard Film Archive processing one of their collections! This is SUPER EXCITING. However it also requires some logistical wiggling, primarily, uh, a place to stay. I was originally supposed to be taking over my brother's lease in the summer, but he went and rented it out from under me, so hey, Bostonians, if any of you know of someone looking to sublet for the months of June and July, give me a heads-up, because I would very much appreciate any leads! I am a great and undemanding roommate, just ask innerbrat and rushin_doll. (I am also only interning four days a week, so I will probably be zooming back and forth to NYC many weekends.)

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Lords and Ladies, oh gosh, Lords and Ladies. A reasonable proportion of the Pratchett books I've been trucking through have pleasantly equalled my expectations, but I think I had literally forgotten how good Lords and Ladies was. Not that I didn't remember it as good! I just didn't remember it was that good.

Here are the top ten things that are great about Lords and Ladies:


10. Once again, all of the important battles and shifts in power dynamics happen between women. That's just HOW THEY ROLL in Lancre.
9. That being said, Shane Ogg the Perennially Ridiculous and Jason Ogg the Somewhat Less Ridiculous both get to be legitimately awesome.
8. On a related note, Ridcully is unhelpfully soppy and lovestruck and it's taken exactly as seriously as it deserves. (I am actually really sad that Ridcully and Granny never get to meet again in the series, I would read a million books in which they fight crime, or possibly each other, while having belligerent sexual tension. YES I WOULD. You can't judge me, YOU TOTALLY WOULD TOO.)
7. And he got the Librarian to Lancre by telling him they had shelves and shelves of UNCATALOGED BOOKS! THIS HURTS THE LIBRARIAN IN HIS PRESERVATIONIST SOUL.
6. Being engaged to a king doesn't have to be about sitting around doing embroidery, and being kind and sort of soppy doesn't have to mean being weak.
5. Nanny and Granny are the best of teams. The challenge in the square! That may well be my favorite scene, hands down.
4. Granny Weatherwax IS A STONE COLD BADASS
3. Nanny Ogg is a SEXY badass.
2. Magrat Garlick is a soppy, kittens-loving, ARMOR-WEARING ELF-SLAYING BADASS QUEEN
1. No, actually, even after Magrat put on her shining armor, hoisted her weaponry and went charging off to rescue her prince, Granny Weatherwax is STILL THE MOST BADASS OF THEM ALL, FOREVER AND ALWAYS

Guys, I am excited for Maskerade and for Carpe Jugulum, I know that these are books I also love enormously, but right now I'm just sort of like how does it get BETTER?

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So I'm back! The road trip was awesome, the Library of Congress was awesome, all the fabulous ladies that I don't see nearly often enough and got to hang out with in DC on my way back were awesome (with special bonus points to gramarye1971 for hosting me), and then I got on the bus home and collapsed in an exhausted heap for about twenty-four hours.

SO BASICALLY TODAY HAS NOT BEEN SUPER PRODUCTIVE, and I'm okay with that! I have spent most of the time I was awake doing a nostalgia re-play of King's Quest VII, which was my favorite computer game as a kid. There is a very easy explanation as to why it was my favorite:



Oh hey, the heroine is a lady!




OH WAIT NO. The heroines are two ladies, and one of them is a MIDDLE-AGED MOM looking for her daughter. That NEVER HAPPENS, and it especially never happens in video games in the nineties!

Heroine 1 is Princess Rosella of Daventry, who runs away to have ~adventures~ and finds herself accidentally turned into a troll and pursued by an evil fairy, whoops. She spends the rest of the game teaming up with a badass troll witch-nanny to save the troll king and also rescue her hilariously incompetent eventual love interest (whom she also rescued in a previous game, apparently, which I guess makes the fact that he spends every moment he has onscreen babbling on about her beauty and wit and courage and being otherwise brainwashed and useless pretty understandable.)

Meanwhile, Heroine 2 is Rosella's mother Valanice, who is looking for her daughter but is not apparently not averse to rescuing some ladies from tragic fates while she's at it. (Three over the course of their game, by my count. Plus two of their husbands and a sad dog. Valanice just really likes getting families back together, okay?)


I will be the first to admit that the game has its problems. I mean, it is SUPER NINETIES, and when Rosella moves around she does this terrible uncomfortable-looking fashion model walk that makes me want to bang my head against a wall, and there is a whole section about looking through the villainess' underwear drawer and making judgy comments about her cosmetics usage that is really, really unnecessary.

But it's still a video game about a mom and a daughter, and neither of them is an Action Girl or ever uses any weapon except their common sense and the occasional hammer and chisel, and that's not just okay, that's AWESOME.

(Predictably, fanboys hate this game. Rosella is too whiny, and Valanice cries too much, and the animation is too Disneyish, and it's the beginning of the end for Sierra. To these gentlemen, I say: MY CHILDHOOD TELLS YOU TO SUCK IT.)

PS. I also saw The Hunger Games and it was great.

PPS. I ALSO SAW THE FIRST TWO EPISODES OF KORRA AND MY HEART EXPLODED.

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Today I am going to Culpeper with my class to play around in the Library of Congress' SECRET FILM VAULTS (they are actually not so secret) for a week! I have no idea whether they let you have the internet in Culpeper so this may possibly be a notice of total disappearance. If you guys promise not to burn down the internet, I will promise not to let the nitrate film catch fire. Deal?

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I have to take a moment to do what I meant to do last week and glee out about my PURIMGIFT FIC! Because the glorious nextian wrote me glorious A:TLA/BACCANO CROSSOVER FIC featuring SOKKA and TOPH and ISAAC and MIRIA and it is basically the best thing in the world, and if you doubt me you should be able to tell by the titles:

Toph Bei Fong Overcomes Her Initial Misgivings To Discover Newer, Fresher Misgivings Beneath Them

Isaac and Miria Involuntarily Spread Dissension Between Two People Who Sorely Need It

Sokka Explains Things Discreetly, And Against All Odds Nothing Explodes

So basically Emma wins everything in the universe. To everyone else in the universe: sorry, better luck next time?

Purimgifts reveals also means that I can take some time to talk about Fiddler on the Roof, which I watched in order to write my Purimfic (which for the record was Chava and Hodel for opalmatrix, about sisters postcanon) and which I ended up with a surprising number of feelings about on the rewatch.

First of all: so Fiddler on the Roof is basically the Russian Jewish Pride and Prejudice AU, right? You have a not-very-well-off couple, and they have five daughters, and one of them turns down the well-to-do guy that their mom would really like them to marry, and one of them runs off with a slightly shady fellow who is not exactly on the right side of the law . . .

(Okay, so Perchik is a much better dude and definitely a more likeable guy than Wickham, but the fact remains that I think not being totally happy about your daughter running off with a baby Communist organizer who's being sent to Siberia for the foreseeable future is a PRETTY REASONABLE attitude for a parent to have.)

I also remember really shipping Chava and Fyedka as a little kid, because he hits on her BECAUSE SHE LIKES BOOKS and, you know, well. As an adult, rewatching, I can see a lot more of Fyedka's privilege -- man, a Jewish lady not wanting to hang out with a Russian dude is not the same thing as a bunch of dudes harassing a Jewish lady -- but I still have to admit I ship them because, well, books, and also, man, they're both so clueless and somehow that's really sweet?. They've read so many books, so they're like "WE'RE GONNA ELOPE *__* IT'S SO ROMANTIC *___* SURELY ONCE THEY SEE OUR LOVE THEY WILL UNDERSTAND!" and then once the Russians do some bad stuff they're like "WE ~CAN'T LIVE~ IN A PLACE WHERE PEOPLE ARE SO CRUEL, WE'RE GOING TO MOVE AWAY IN A ~NOBLE SHOW OF SOLIDARITY.~" Spoiler alert, kids: people are not going to be better people in Krakow than they are in Anatevka. But it's adorable that you think they might be!

Also in the movie I just really like Tzeitel and Chava's faces.



Tzeitel looks so sensible! Chava looks like SUCH A BABY! Hodel in the movie is super pretty, but she looks like a movie actress. Tzeitel and Chava look like, you know, my cousins.

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I still have no idea what I thought about China Mieville's Kraken, except that, man, I am REALLY IMPRESSED he managed to maintain five hundred pages of this book with a straight face. (I mean, the straight face is necessary to the joke. I think. Probably.)

So Kraken kicks off with the mysterious disappearance of a PRESERVED GIANT SQUID from the London Natural History Museum! Cue wailing and gnashing of teeth from our multitudes of idiosyncratic main characters:

POLICE DEPARTMENT IN CHARGE OF SOLVING CULT-RELATED CRIMES: This is a cult-related crime!
SQUID-WORSHIPPING CULT: Oh nooooooooes someone else is out there with our god, the giant squid!
BILLY, OUR BLAND PROTAGONIST: I dunno guys, I'm just a postgrad preservationist with a talent for squid.
(SQUID-WORSHIPPING CULT: Or are you . . . THE SQUID MESSIAH?!?! Quick, drink some squid ink to show us the waaaaaay!
BILLY, OUR BLAND PROTAGONIST: I don't wanna. :( :( :()
MARGE, OUR BLAND PROTAGONIST'S BLAND FRIEND'S AWESOME GIRLFRIEND: So I don't really care about all this squid stuff and it seems like I'm pretty tangential to the book . . . OR AM I?
WATI, UNDEAD ANCIENT EGYPTIAN STATUE UNION ORGANIZER: I also don't care so much about the squid, I have got my hands full organizing a STRIKE in MAGICAL LONDON. Workers! Unite!
CROUP AND VANDEMAR THOSE TWO REALLY EVIL DUDES WHO EXIST TO BE EVIL: Rampage! Kill! Rampage! Kill!

The plot is basically that stealing the squid is going to trigger an apocalypse of FIERY DOOM, and everyone's like "you would think the cults would be okay with that," and the cults are like "but it's the WRONG APOCALYPSE! And it's GONE WRONG!" and then everyone runs around in a flailing panic being chased by increasingly more surreal inhabitants of magical London, and occasionally checking in with all the future-diviners to be like "did we avert FIERY DOOM APOCALYPSE yet?" and the future-diviners are like "nope" and then they run around in a flailing panic some more.

Our bland protagonist has a bland bromance with a warrior of the SQUID CULT and remains sort of uninteresting. Wati hangs around being ten times awesomer than either of them (UP THE UNION!) and Marge steals the show by refusing to be kicked out of the story and doing her own awesome thing on the sidelines, although the book still fails the Bechdel test. Surreal events continue to take place at an increasingly rapid clip, until you're like "oh, of course the angry skull-in-a-jar angel defender of the Natural History Museum just kicked the ass of a whole bunch of goons with giant fists instead of heads, WHY NOT." China Mieville demonstrates how in tune he is with the culture of the internets by having a character make LOLcats jokes about the stolen squid, which just makes me wonder how very confused even a geek reader will be by seeing a policewoman joke "noooooo they be stealin mah squid!" in ten years' time. (Authors: using very specific and incredibly nerd pop cultural references DOES date your book! TAKE NOTE.) At one point a lady exorcist rabbi pops up at someone's front door with a GIANT SHOFAR, which for me was literally the most hilarious thing to happen all book.

And the book gets increasingly baroque about the metaphysical significance of all these squid-related events, and delves deeply into squid-cult theology, and you are just like "China Mieville, SERIOUSLY, how are you staying straight-faced?" Because the whole thing is clearly all a giant joke on the reader . . . or maybe by the end it isn't. I DON'T KNOW. As I said, I am very confused about this book.

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