I forgot to link to kate_nepveu's post on Moving Pictures, despite the fact that she got it up in a way more timely fashion than me and also asked better questions than I did. I TOO am curious about the overarching metaphorical themes, if anyone has thoughts!

Anyway, on to Reaper Man. All I ever remember about Reaper Man is the Death-acts-human-and-has-a-sort-of-romance plot, and completely forget about the other half the plot. It turns out this is because I just sort of don't care about the other half the plot. The Death plot is poignant and interesting and raises thoughtful questions about humanity and mortality; the other half of the plot . . . has shopping malls? And some cheap shots at activism, and some pre-Angua Werewolves Lite? I don't know, if anybody likes it better please do argue its merits at me, I'm willing to be convinced! I mean, Reg Shoe, Zombie Activist does lend himself to endless comedy lols in discussion, but it turns out he's much funnier in my head than he is in this book, at least.

Also, I spent about half an hour after I finished the book trying to come up with one personality characteristic of undead Windle Poons other than 'undead,' and I couldn't.

It's worth it for the Death plot, though. I remember some people talking back when I reread Mort about whether the Death-approaches-humanity plot was going to get old or feel rehashed over the series, and as of this point it doesn't to me. The thing about Reaper Man that differentiates it from Mort is that this isn't really a book in which Death tries to be human. (Or is any good at it, but that's, you know, ever.) It's a book about Death having compassion for humanity, which is, I think, a very different thing. And a thing I like.

. . . also, Death trying to buy the appropriate accoutrements for a date is adorable, I'm sorry, IT JUST IS.

This entry is cross-posted at Livejournal from http://skygiants.dreamwidth.org/273672.html. Please feel free to comment here or there! There are currently comments on Dreamwidth.

Festivids is my absolute favorite fannish exchange that I do nothing to participate in. It is also conveniently small enough that I feel comfortable doing a recs post for some of my favorites!

( AWESOME VIDS ARE AWESOME under the cut )

This entry is cross-posted at Livejournal from http://skygiants.dreamwidth.org/273470.html. Please feel free to comment here or there! There are currently comments on Dreamwidth.

Before I reread The Eagle and the Nightingale I went back and found my copy of The Lark and the Wren, because I wanted to remember how Wacky Bardic Fantasyland worked without being distracted by JUST ENOUGH DUDE.

And I might not have gotten a chance to make this properly clear in the last review, but I feel like it's important to note that Wacky Bardic Fantasyland is the most comfortably low-rent fantasy universe imaginable. It is full of every possible cliche. It is also called Alanda, because Mercedes Lackey could not be bothered to come up with a country name that was literally not just "A LAND."

The Lark and the Wren doesn't really have a plot, per se. The first part is about our plucky musical teenaged heroine Rune running away from home and trying to become a Bard, in the course of which quest she learns that:

- the pseudo-Catholic Church is evil and oppressive and spies on everyone
- prostitution is terrible, except when you're hanging out with the special CLASSY FEMINIST PROSTITUTES who are totally happy with what they do and only entertain sweet-hearted guys who sometimes just come to play board games with them, and then it's totally okay
- because she's a good person, all the other good and righteous people in A LAND will like her on sight, and all the bad and/or annoying people in A LAND will dislike her on sight, and vice versa!

The second half of the book comes after she has tried out for the Bardic Guild and learned that they are all terrible people and then joined up with the Free Bards, who are composed mostly of free-spirited magical mysterious musical Gypsies, although their leader is a middle-aged white dude called Talaysen who is the best of the best of the musicians ever.

The second part of the book is pretty much a hundred pages of this:

TALAYSEN: Oh no, I am lusting after Rune! But she is a teenager! And my student! I'M A MONSTEEEEEEER.
RUNE: Hey sexy, what is it going to take to get your pants off? I will strip naked and get in your bed if I have to.
TALAYSEN: . . . Rune clearly does not understand that her simple country friendliness has the potential for misinterpretation. :( :( :(

True story: I remembered Talaysen as being at least forty. varadia remembered him as being over fifty. jothra informed us that he was only thirty-five.

"THERE IS NO WAY," I said. "He was like a million years old!"

But it turns out that Talaysen was actually only thirty-five, it's just that it was hard not to remember him as like a million years old because he KEPT GOING ON ABOUT IT. Cheer up, Talaysen! Yes, the age difference is problematic, but at least you're not a giant bird.

Anyway then there is a whole slew of helpful cliches involving a STORM and EVIL ELVES and NEAR HYPOTHERMIA and I MUST GET NAKED TO SAVE HER LIFE, and then after all this is sorted out they kind of stumble into the third part of the book, which involves a lost prince and magical assassins and an anti-coup and all this other suddenly very dramatic after the first four hundred pages of Rune tooling around with her fiddle. However I don't mind the sudden DRAMA, because it is also actually kind of weirdly adorable, and Mercedes Lackey is trying really hard to subvert cliches. Given that A LAND is made up 100% of cliches, this is sort of difficult, but it's nice to see the effort!

Now I am trying to decide if I want to reread the rest of the Wacky Bardic Fantasyland books now that I've begun. DON'T YOU JUDGE ME. TASTE IS FOR THE WEAK.

This entry is cross-posted at Livejournal from http://skygiants.dreamwidth.org/273096.html. Please feel free to comment here or there! There are currently comments on Dreamwidth.

So a few weeks back, jothra had come down to visit and we were hanging out in my living room, and the conversation turned to Mercedes Lackey and other books that we read when we were thirteen, as it so often does.

The relevant dialogue went something like this:

"Remember how she had all those animal people as love interests? Part-animal people? But somehow it was never a problem for sexytimes, because they were only part animal, and -"
"JUST ENOUGH DUDE!"
"YES! JUST ENOUGH DUDE in the place where it counted!"

And then we proceeded to shriek "JUST ENOUGH DUDE!" at each other all the rest of the week, because we are twelve.

The best example of this phenomenon was definitely The Fire Rose, in which the hero gets cursed with a terrible hairy wolfy appearance . . . from the nipples up and the knees down. In between, he's totally normal!

I have sadly lost my copy of The Fire Rose, but, as it happens, I do have my copy of The Eagle and the Nightingale, the one where the hero is basically a man-sized raptor who happens to have a penis. Not only that, but some strange impulse had prompted me to bring it up from me when I came back from Philadelphia the day before Jo actually arrived in New York. Jo also had her copy at home, so the path before us had clearly been prepared.

I am now going to present ( a book review via VERY SERIOUS text message. )

This entry is cross-posted at Livejournal from http://skygiants.dreamwidth.org/272686.html. Please feel free to comment here or there! There are currently comments on Dreamwidth.

Vacation messed me up, so I am one cycle behind on my Terry Pratchett reread, but this should not imply any lack of enthusiasm for Moving Pictures because, you guys, I LOVE Moving Pictures. I have always loved it, probably far more than its deserts, and I don't know why this is.

And the thing is that it makes total sense that I love it now. It's about Hollywood and the birth of film! It actually does a pretty hilarious job of condensing and Discworld-izing all the myths about how the Lumiere Brothers banged their projectors on the ground, and lo and behold, Clara Bow sprang out fully-formed and became the It Girl! It has the race for sound technology, which I actually wrote a paper on this semester, and the celluloid fires, and the birth of on-screen advertising, and all these things that are completely hilarious if you are interested in film history - which I was not actually much at all until recently. So this cannot explain why it's been one of my favorites since my first read-through more than ten years ago.

This is the book that introduces Ridcully, who was one of my favorite characters as a kid, which may partially explain it -- although I always forget that this book is the one where that happens. (I don't think of Moving Pictures as a wizard book, I think of it as a standalone, but it totally is a wizard book.) In fact most of the permanent cast of lulzy wizards first appear here, with the possible exception of the Dean, since this Dean is staid and rule-abiding and every other time that the Dean shows up he is the wildest and most immature of ALL WIZARDS EVER. Anyway, I like the permanent cast of lulzy wizards, so maybe this is part of my abiding fondness?

And there is also the fact that the pre-climax slapstick orgy is completely hilarious and the high-speed broomstick-wheelchair chase gets me every time. Sometimes I am a very easy sell.

But I think the actual reason I like Moving Pictures so much is that it always feels to me like the creepiest Discworld novel. I mean, Pratchett has used eldritch horror before and will use it again, but the Creatures from the Dungeon Dimensions don't really scare me so much. Ghost towns whose history you are doomed to repeat? Sleepwalking to wake strange things without any control over your own actions? The permanent movie theater where all your friends will sit staring glassily ahead forever, until the roof caves in on their heads? That creeps me out.

Anyone else agree with me? Other votes for creepiest Discworld book?

(Reread caveats: . . . oh dear, the treatment of the trolls is really awkward in this book, isn't it.)

This entry is cross-posted at Livejournal from http://skygiants.dreamwidth.org/272306.html. Please feel free to comment here or there! There are currently comments on Dreamwidth.

This Yuletide I read a pretty excellent, novella-length Blossom Culp fic that, among other things, managed to send the kid who sees ghosts to WWI, and make it both plausible and not awesomely depressing. It's called As Our Roads Converge and if you have some time to kill, you should read it! I barely remembered the Blossom Culp books and I enjoyed it a lot.

Anyway, because I did in fact barely remember the Blossom Culp books, I was sort of thinking about rereading, and then genarti and I happened across one of the books on sale for a quarter at a grocery-store book sale and I decided that a reread was clearly in my destiny.

. . . but I have to wait for the first one to come in at the library, so while I was waiting instead I read the one other Richard Peck book I did own, Voices After Midnight.

Voices After Midnight is a weird, matter-of-fact little ghost story. It starts with our fourteen-year-old protagonist's family -- including boy-crazy big sister Heidi and weird and eerily self-possessed little brother Luke -- moving to New York for a two-week vacation.

(Our protagonist's name is Chad, but fortunately, since it was a first-person story, I was able to forget that mostly.)

Anyway, the book would be worth reading for me just from the suburban California family's hilarious culture shock at their visit to eighties New York; it's all "OMG THERE ARE NO SUPERMARKETS, JUST BODEGAS, HOW WEIRD" and "WE HAVE NEVER TAKEN A WALK AS A FAMILY ON SIDEWALKS BEFORE." However, the kids are also running into a bigger problem, which is that New York is full of history and all of them keep accidentally time-slipping into it.


CHAD: Maybe this is just a dietary thing! Maybe it's a chemical imbalance. MAYBE IT'S PUBERTY.
LUKE: Obviously we have some business in the past we need to fix.
CHAD: How do you know this! You're EIGHT!
LUKE: Have I not mentioned this has been happening to me all my life? I mean, did the fact that I have always been a weird and and eerily self-possessed child not give you any signs? Seriously, I'm curious.
HEIDI: So, uh . . . who's the hot Gilded Age guy hanging out in my bedroom?

Heidi is kind of a caricature of an eighties teenaged girl, but she does get her moments of awesome. The ghost story, meanwhile, is actually pretty creepy, and turns out to be the reason I always get vague premonitions of doom every time I get into the hand-cranked old elevator at Housing Works.

I also spent the whole book trying to think of other examples of eerie and otherworldly younger brothers in YA fiction. (I find it such a weird trope because it is so not my experience of having a little brother!) I mean, Charles Wallace is a gimme, and I know there are more, but I'm drawing a blank. Help me out? (Moril from the Dalemark Quartet might also count, if the story weren't told from inside his own head.)

This entry is cross-posted at Livejournal from http://skygiants.dreamwidth.org/272037.html. Please feel free to comment here or there! There are currently comments on Dreamwidth.

The thing about Hiromi Goto's Half World is that in my head it's a shadowy, noir-flavored animated film, accompanied by a scratchy soundtrack of a thirties jazz band. It feels so much like this in my head that it's hard to write about it as a book.

I mean, as a book, it's an interesting book, and doing some bold things. The opening scene involves our heroine's parents trying to flee Half World, a place of eternal purgatory where hopeless inhabitants are forced to live out their greatest trauma over and over. The toll is a little finger; there are no sharp implements around; the heroine's pregnant mother bites her father's pinky off. You may gather that this book is NOT PLAYING AROUND.

And that unborn child grows up to become unhappy, exceedingly un-special adolescent Melanie Tamaki, who has to find her way to Half World fourteen years later to rescue her mother and discover her inner strength and alter the eternal cycle of doom. And this is all a satisfying story, reasonably complex, if sometimes weirdly balanced between the horror of the setup and the deus ex machinas/helpful gears of prophecy required to make the YA fantasy plot work out all right, and that would be fine -- but then the visuals!

Half World is all black and white and grayscale and Melanie's living color marks her out like a brand; she covers herself in dead-white makeup, and is given away, at one point, by her blood. Melanie's mother plasters their Canada home with bizarre, twisting prints of Escher and Bosch in an echo of the place she comes from. And there's a grotesque hotel where the grotesquely tormented try to drink and dance away their sorrows, and a climactic scene takes place at a terrifying party in the hotel's penthouse suite with a piano that plays by itself, and you may see what I'm talking about when I say that this book calls out to be animated. It demands a creepy soundtrack. In my head, it has one.

(This was a Floating Diversity Book Club read and you can see other reviews/opinions/discussion over here.)

This entry is cross-posted at Livejournal from http://skygiants.dreamwidth.org/271794.html. Please feel free to comment here or there! There are currently comments on Dreamwidth.

So I saw some movies over break!

The usual family-holiday-movie-compromises resulted in:

War Horse: It's a heartwarming animal story about World War I. This . . . really says all that needs to be said, I think.

Oh, also, for fandom's reference, Tom Hiddleston and Benedict Cumberbatch are both in it, and I was like 'hey, it surprises me that I haven't seen some parts of my flist talking about that!' and then ( spoilers )

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows: My deepest thought about the feature film Sherlock Holmes franchise is that somehow, although Jude Law always looks annoying and smarmy to me, put him in a lulzy Victorian moustache and suddenly he's totally endearing! I don't know what mysterious law of physics causes this to occur.

No, but basically, this was more of the same: lulzy hijinks, enjoyable set pieces, plot that doesn't really make any sense when you squint at it too hard, Mary Morstan being awesome for the ten seconds she's on screen. Would I rather watch 'Mary Morstan and Stephen Fry As Mycroft Holmes Break Ciphers'? Yes, probably, but oh well. As for ( that spoilery thing )

X-Men: First Class: The funniest part is that when we were trying to settle on a Christmas Eve-ish movie, my mom tried to sell us on Sarah's Key and my brother nixed it: "no Nazis on Christmas Eve!"

Then, of course, we fire up X-Men: First Class and get ten straight minutes of Nazis.

. . . then when that was over, we turned off the movie and landed on Bedknobs and Broomsticks just in time to watch Angela Lansbury fight some Nazis. So, uh, yes. (But it did make me wish that X-Men: First Class had been "Angela Lansbury leads some teenaged X-Babies in fighting Nazis." Look, there's a lot of awesome movies in my head, all right?)

Hugo: This was not actually a family compromise, I saw it before break with obopolsk, and it was seriously gorgeous. The cinematography was beautiful, the kids were adorable, it was about OLD FILM PRESERVATION and so I got tiny dorky frissons of glee throughout the whole thing -- it wasn't actually fabulist or fantastical, but it was very much in the style of those just-on-the-verge-of-fantastical films like Amelie, where there's no magic per se but it makes you see the world as magical. Like that. It would have been the best movie I saw over the past few months, hands down, except then rushin_doll and jothra and I went down to the Studio Ghibli festival to go see . . .

Whisper of the Heart: OH MY GOD, GUYS. I fell in love with this movie so hard! It is now rivaling Spirited Away for my favorite Studio Ghibli film, and I don't say that lightly.

Whisper of the Heart is a coming-of-age movie about a girl who reads. She gets a crush on the boy whose name she sees on the library cards above her own, because he's checked out all the same books she has; she negotiates friendships that are suddenly becoming more complicated; and she tries to see if she has what it takes to write stories, if she has the passion and the work ethic to create something instead of just taking it in, to figure out who and what she wants to be.

So basically Studio Ghibli made a movie for me, and it's just - ahh! Guys! Jo and I both staggered out of the theater clutching our hearts going "FEELINGS." I am still kind of clutching my heart and going "FEELINGS" a week later.

Also I can't stop listening to the movie's theme song on repeat, which is Our Heroine's arduous and adorable translation of John Denver's "Country Roads" into Japanese. IT'S A PROBLEM.

This entry is cross-posted at Livejournal from http://skygiants.dreamwidth.org/271602.html. Please feel free to comment here or there! There are currently comments on Dreamwidth.

Ironically, Joe Sacco's Footnotes in Gaza was a Hanukkah gift from my dad to the family at large. None of us knew anything about it, except that my Mystery Cousin Mark has a cameo appearance on the first page, and we are all super fascinated by Mystery Cousin Mark.

(Here is what I know about Mystery Cousin Mark: he currently works as a misinformation agent for the government of Dubai; his ex-wife is some kind of Saudi Arabian heiress; and he has a murderous vendetta against the squirrels of Denver, where he keeps a spare house. I've met Mystery Cousin Mark three times - the first time at my cousin's super epic wedding in Israel, at our family reunion in the wilds of upstate New York, where he and my mom reconnected; the second time at a New York dinner party that he invited us to thrown by his buddy the Bosnian sniper; and the third time at our family reunion this past fall, when he picked up this book and was like "see that dude Mark on the front page? That's me! :D" SO YOU SEE THE INTEREST.)

Anyway. It turns out, once I got past Mark's cameo, that Footnotes in Gaza is a work of graphic journalism investigating two massacres of Palestinian citizens from the Israeli occupation of the Gaza strip in 1956. The book is explicitly trying to present the Palestinian view on the incident, and it does a very powerful job of that. Which would make it a hard read for anyone, I think, but kind of especially so for an American Jew with Israeli relatives.

I'm gonna say right now, I really do not want to debate any issues about Israel and Palestine in this journal. I have too many biases and not enough actual information to say anything that I would feel comfortable with living on the internet forever.

I will say, though, that -- there are a lot of narratives, true narratives, about Jews as victims. It's the familiar story that we get, at least in the US. And I do think it's always important, for anyone, to take a look at the other narratives, no matter how uncomfortable -- to get used to the idea that there are stories where that's flipped. I think it's important for anyone to get a grip on the fact that there are places and times and stories in which they are the bad guys, the people who have privilege and power and abuse it, and that those narratives can be true, too.

This entry is cross-posted at Livejournal from http://skygiants.dreamwidth.org/270990.html. Please feel free to comment here or there! There are currently comments on Dreamwidth.

Over the past month or so I have been making my roommates watch Sunkyunkwan Scandal with me. We're about halfway through the twenty episodes now, and at this point it is FILLING ME WITH DELIGHT, which means that it's time to tell you guys about it to preserve this feeling of joy in case it takes the kdrama nosedive over the next ten episodes into gloom and misery!

Sunkyunkwan Scandal is basically a lulzy college-hijinks drama! . . . set in eighteenth-century Korea.

( Cut for picspam! )

This entry is cross-posted at Livejournal from http://skygiants.dreamwidth.org/270757.html. Please feel free to comment here or there! There are currently comments on Dreamwidth.

This write-up is long overdue -- genarti lent me the book sometime in August -- but Anne Fadiman's The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down made an enormous impression on me in a way that I wasn't really sure how to put into words, and still am not quite.

I will freely admit I was wary going in. The book traces the case of Lia Lee, a Hmong immigrant child with a severe seizure disorder, and the clashes and miscommunications between her family and the doctors treating her disease. There are a few things I was worried this book might be:

- a voyeuristic indictment of the quaint, ignorant customs of the Hmong and their tragic inability to adapt to modern life

- one nice white lady's effort to pat herself on the back for being so understanding about the quaint, ignorant customs of the Hmong

- a vicious attack on the failures of the medical profession and the uncaring US hospital system

Miraculously, Anne Fadiman somehow manages to walk the very narrow line of telling the story of a terrible case of cultural misunderstanding and miscommunication without privileging one culture over another, even though one is her own; of showing everyone's mistakes without dehumanizing or othering anybody involved; and of clearly stating her own biases and involvement in the story without making it a story about herself or taking the attention away from where it should be, which is on Lia and her family.

I know! I didn't think it was possible either!

It's a long book, but every bit of length is cultural context for something, and, in my opinion at least, it's all important, and all absolutely worth it. (For the record, my mom is a neurologist specializing in seizure disorders, so I have at least a little bit more than the layperson's knowledge of the current handling of epilepsy in US medicine. That may have affected the way I read the book, but I don't think it did except in a general way. The book is about much broader issues than epilepsy.) I would recommend it to almost anyone; I hear it is currently required reading in a number of medical programs, and I'm glad. It should be.

This entry is cross-posted at Livejournal from http://skygiants.dreamwidth.org/270474.html. Please feel free to comment here or there! There are currently comments on Dreamwidth.

Yuletide reveals are live! I wrote three fics this year, thus officially ending my streak of writing one more fic each year than the year previous, ah well.

My main assigned fic was Nice Holystone Remains Unafraid To Throw Herself Into Explosive Situations, a Baccano! fic about Nice and Jacuzzi, and Eve Genoard, and Al Capone, and obviously a whole lot of bombs.

I got called out as the author of this almost the first day the archive opened, which, I will admit I was sort of expecting, given that it is exactly like all my other Baccano! fics in being enormously long and having a ridiculously convoluted plot full of lulzy cameos and too many puns. In short, I AM THE SNEAKIEST NINJA. (Although I laughed so hard when I saw the comment -- nextian, it's not fair, I didn't even know you'd seen Baccano! I guess you have probably earned some sort of fic-shaped prize if you want one though, so let me know!) One way in which this is not exactly like all my other fics: people actually make out onscreen! THIS IS A STRANGE AND PERPLEXING THING FOR ME. Generally as far as I get is people hanging around not making out due to their issues. So go me, I guess?

The other full-length fic I wrote was And Every Homestead Holds a Ghost, a Downton Abbey pinch-hit I grabbed for newredshoes, because a.) I love her and I wanted to write something for her and b.) I'd been eyeing her prompts for the past two months. So, uh, HAPPY YULETIDE, ESTHER! :D

I think I may have been slightly more successfully sneaky on this one,even though it's much more the kind of thing I usually write - gen, ensemble-fic, and what genarti called a very Diana Wynne Jonesish ghost, although thinking back it was probably based more on the Shirley Jackson I'd been reading than anything else. I spent a few days complaining to my long-suffering betas about my extreme frustration with the fact that the Downton Abbey Christmas special was not going to air until the day after fics were due; then it did air and ( spoilers! )

Lastly, I wrote Barriers for Hexwood as a Yuletide treat, mostly because dictator_duck and I had been talking about Hexwood a lot recently and I had it on the brain.

Barriers was a weird fic for me to write. Basically, it was my effort to show some of Mordion's severe and complex psychological trauma, while keeping a DWJ-ish style, and also trying to deal with the fact that Hexwood -- while containing absolutely nothing sexual and barely even romantic onscreen -- is nonetheless one of the most strangely sexual of DWJ's books. (ALIENS TRY TO MAKE THEM DO IT. Still not over that one.) I have no idea if I succeeded in any of this, and basically what it boils down to is a proud return to form of people hanging around not making out due to their issues, so, uh . . . happy Yuletide, world!

Edited to add: I forgot that I was also going to use this time to talk about what I wrote for Kaleidoscope, since I never did that! I wrote Soulmates Never Go Out of Fashion, a Capital Scandal backstory fic about Cha Song Joo and Woo Wan being lulzy friends that officially means that 50% of the Capital Scandal fic in existence was written either for or by me! CAPITAL SCANDAL-INATING THE COUNTRYSIDE, ONE FIC AT A TIME.

Also now I can say thank you to everyone who took the time to listen to my Yuletide (and Kaleidoscope) flailing and read my fics in their proto-form: genarti, thewickedlady, agonistes, saramily, rushin_doll, and dictator_duck. (Special kudos go out to Gen, who refused to let technology defeat her and wrote out a detailed line beta for my fourteen thousand word Baccano! fic THREE TIMES OVER. That is dedication far above and beyond the call of duty.)

Speaking of Gen: I may have forgotten to mention it, but I kidnapped her for an awesome weekend that included hijinks and fic-planning and the lovely aquamirage, and today she's driving me back up to New York, where we will proceed to kidnap jothra! So I have been scarce and will probably continue to be for a few days, and you can all spend your time being jealous. :D

This entry is cross-posted at Livejournal from http://skygiants.dreamwidth.org/270113.html. Please feel free to comment here or there! There are currently comments on Dreamwidth.

Annual reading log post! (DW readers, sorry that all the review links go to LJ posts -- next year I'll try to keep better track on both platforms.)

Overall, if I kept track accurately -- which is always sort of a big 'if' -- it looks like I read 143 books this year, plus 128 volumes of comics and manga. Weirdly, I think grad school actually caused those numbers to go up rather than down, partly because between school and work I spent more time on the subway, and partly just because I let myself read more speedy self-indulgent fiction instead of sticking through the denser stuff. I'm glad I stuck out the quotas as long as I did, though, and may pick them back up once I'm out of school again.

I'm also behind on a few write-ups from the end of the year, but I am going to catch up on the ones I haven't done! Especially since some of the best books I read this year are ones I haven't figured out what I want to say about here yet.

( And now, the list )

As always, feel free to talk to me about any of these!

This entry is cross-posted at Livejournal from http://skygiants.dreamwidth.org/270064.html. Please feel free to comment here or there! There are currently comments on Dreamwidth.

At the recommendation of my friend Rahul over at Blotter Paper, I read my first two Shirley Jackson books over the past month or so: The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

I have lots of thoughts, obviously, but my strongest and most envious thought is that Shirley Jackson is one of the best writer of first sentences and paragraphs that I have ever come across.

Look at the opening of We Have Always Lived in the Castle:

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantaganet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.

DOES THIS OR DOES THIS NOT make you instantly want to know everything else about Mary Katherine Blackwood and her sister Constance and her dead family? It does me! (Everything else about Mary Katherine Blackwood and her sister Constance and her dead family is not that hard to guess in terms of the facts of what went down just from that first paragraph, but it's the way that it plays out that's so creepy.)

Then there is the first sentence of The Haunting of Hill House:

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.

I liked The Haunting of Hill House a lot - it's the kind of book that features four people in a situation together and starting to like and trust each other and then the psychological horror turning everything wrong, which is probably the kind of that gets me worst - but to be honest, the rest of the book, however excellent, couldn't quite live up to that sentence.

-- although seriously, the book is really good. The heart of it is the relationship between Eleanor, who's lived her whole life without doing anything for herself until she gets the invitation to participate in a psychic experiment, and Theodora, a lighthearted lesbian artist who pretty much only ever does things for herself. Eleanor is the POV character, and the horror is horrible because of how much hope it dangles at first.

Anyway, the thing is, I honestly can't do that kind of opening at all. I always feel like the beginnings of my stories are the weakest part.

. . . well, and the endings. Actually there are a lot of weak parts, ah well. But I've never had that gift of launching in and grabbing the reader's attention with a stunning start; I usually just kind of fumble my way in to what I want to talk about. What about you guys? Do you find brilliant openings jumping into your head, or is an opening just a chore to get through to the meat of the story?

This entry is cross-posted at Livejournal from http://skygiants.dreamwidth.org/269607.html. Please feel free to comment here or there! There are currently comments on Dreamwidth.

YULETIDE YULETIDE YULETIDE! I got all my stories (two full-length and a treat) finally tweaked to my satisfaction and uploaded in complete form late last night, and in return I was lucky enough to receive two INCREDIBLY DELIGHTFUL stories! Both of them are warm and fuzzy and make me want to wrap myself up in Yuletide joy.

One, Two Three, and Four, Skip Beat!

Big sister’s friend had a very big presence sometimes, strong and vibrant and electrifying-- not as good as Kyoko’s, which was much purer--but when she scowled Maria could almost see the blackness behind her. Ah, it was great, but why was she projecting it at big sister?

Maria! And Kyoko and Moko! and SPONTANEOUS ARABIAN DANCES! This story is ridiculously sweet, guys, it is all about ladies having careers and being friends and tiny dark-aura-loving little girls hanging out with their fake big sisters. Also Lory rides a camel, but that's not exactly new, I guess, just an example of how well this author captures the wacky feel of Skip Beat!


From the Tiniest Ripple, Pumpkin Scissors

"It beats killing people, that's for sure. Am I right, Randel?"

He blinked and glanced at Alice before nodding at Oreldo. "You're right."

I was surprised to see two stories in my Yuletide waiting list; I was EXTRA surprised to have one of them be Pumpkin Scissors, which was one of my last year's requests that I was super sad not to have room to request this year! WHICH SOMEONE MUST KNOW, sooo I have my guesses about who the mystery author of this one might be. Anyway, Alice & Team plant a community garden, FOR THE PEOPLE, and it is exactly as adorable as it sounds.


Happy Yuletide to everyone! And happy holidays, too, whichever those might be.

This entry is cross-posted at Livejournal from http://skygiants.dreamwidth.org/269386.html. Please feel free to comment here or there! There are currently comments on Dreamwidth.

So shati and I watched the first couple episodes of Mawaru Penguindrum together this summer, and ever since then, Shati has been periodically asking me whether she should catch up.

For the first few episodes, my answer was: "I don't know! There is a lot of stalking! But I'm still watching?"

For the five or six episodes after that, my answer was: "I don't know! There's a lot of attempted date rape and also someone made a frog spawn on somebody else's back and it was really disturbing! But I can't seem to stop watching . . .?"

For the five or six episodes after that, my answer was: "I don't know! There's a lot of child abuse! But I think it's actually going somewhere really interesting, and . . . I seem to have feelings . . . about everyone?"

And now the last episode has gone by, and all I can say is ;ajlsdk;fkjds;HOW IS MY HEART BREAKING FOR THIS SHOW I DIDN'T EVEN KNOW I LIKED UNTIL HALFWAY THROUGH.

So: Mawaru Penguin Drum! It's about a girl who is dying, and her brothers who are sort of obsessed with her, and the magical penguins that come to save the day, except it isn't, actually, at all.

( Picspam under the cut! )

. . . . this is the most incoherent write-up of a show ever. I blame Ikuhara. But, yes! If you're easily triggered: BEWARE, because this show hits just about every trigger you can name, from attempted date rape to incest to severe child abuse. But if you're not, and you like Ikuhara's style, and you're interested in stories about families and damaged kids trying to figure out how to save themselves . . . then, yeah. It's worth it.

(PS: If you are like 'but it's an Ikuhara show! Where are the lesbians?' then -- well, there are not as many lesbians as in Utena, but . . . Yuri's name is not irrelevant. Nor is the ending song with Himari in. AND THAT'S ALL I'M GONNA SAY.)

This entry is cross-posted at Livejournal from http://skygiants.dreamwidth.org/269206.html. Please feel free to comment here or there! There are currently comments on Dreamwidth.

Oh gosh, thank you to sandrylene and whatever other kind person gifted me with DW points! (Soooooo many icons I will put on here. *___* SO MANY! And I can do polls here now too! SUPER EXCITING.)

This entry is cross-posted at Livejournal from http://skygiants.dreamwidth.org/268854.html. Please feel free to comment here or there! There are currently comments on Dreamwidth.

ceitfianna recommended me The Discovery of Jeanne Baret: A Story of Science, the High Seas, and the First Woman to Navigate the Globe. Which she was quite right to do, since, in addition to SCIENCE and ADVENTURES and AWESOME HISTORICAL WOMEN this particular bit of history also features CROSS-DRESSING and as we all know that is my kryptonite.

The basic historic facts about Jeanne Baret that seem to be undeniably true:

1. She was the housekeeper and probable-mistress of naturalist Philibert Commercon before he joined an expedition around the world . . .
2. . . . and his plucky botanist assistant 'Jean' while on that expedition.

(COMMERCON, after her disguise was exposed: Gosh, how astounding that my plucky assistant should turn out to have been a girl! Can't think how that happened!)

3. At some point or another on the expedition, everybody pretty much figured out something was up with 'Jean', although accounts are a little conflicted about when.

(CAPTAIN BOUGAINVILLE: Well, here we are on Tahiti, and all of a sudden those wacky Tahitians start telling us that our naturalist's assistant has been a girl this whole time! BIZARRE. Oh well, back to captain-ing.

TWO PASSENGERS KEEPING ACCOUNTS: Well, here we are on New Ireland, and the men on the ship seem to have figured out that the naturalist's assistant is a girl. That was probably pretty tough!

SURGEON VIVES: Hahahahaha come on guys, like anyone ever believed that story about 'Jean' being a eunuch.)

4. Commercon and Jeanne took off at Mauritius and did some more botanizing; Commercon named a bush after her; Commercon died, and a few years later Jeanne Baret married a non-com officer in the French army and got her ticket home.

5. Eventually the government granted her a pension for General Being Awesome On a Famous Voyage-ness which is actually a pretty happy ending for a real-life cross-dressing story, all things considered.

And this is all interesting and I am glad to know it! The problem is that it's not really enough to make up a book. No worries, though! Glynis Radley is more than happy to make up the difference by . . . . wildly speculating about things and then cheerfully assuming them to be true for the rest of the book?

( Cut for ranting! Some of it about possibly triggering things. )

. . . wow, I was more frustrated than I thought by all of this. I think it's -- well, partly because bad scholarship is frustrating, but also partly because the story in its bare-bone-facts version is such an awesome one -- and one that I am glad to know about! -- and yet this book seems so determined to take away as much awesome and provide as much depressing and angsty and cliched speculation as humanly possible.

AND SPEAKING OF things that are making people angry and frustrated: apparently LJ has fallen into its own ass again and done something to the comment pages? If anyone's switching over to DW who hasn't before, say hi over here/there so I know who you are!

This entry is cross-posted at Livejournal from http://skygiants.dreamwidth.org/268604.html. Please feel free to comment here or there! There are currently comments on Dreamwidth.

A problem has arisen with this week's Discworld post! I had almost literally just finished reading Eric when roommate innerbrat came up to me and proudly deposited upon me . . . Eric.

"Oh, thanks!" said I. "But I just finished rereading it. Too bad my copy doesn't have pictures though."

Debi stared at me. "Becca," she said. "You read the Eric without pictures?"

"Ye-es?" I said. "Weren't the pictures added later?"

From Debi's look of mixed horror and pity, I was given to understand that a.) I was wrong, and always had been wrong, and b.) there is no point to an Eric without pictures, Eric had always been meant to have pictures, and c.) and what had I done?

Which leaves me with something of a dilemma, because I was fully ready to write a whole entry about how I was not particularly impressed with Eric (basically, Discworld Faust with Rincewind in) and now it turns out I've read the wrong Eric and therefore I can't really justify any judgments of it at all.

Poll #1804303
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 39

I read Eric...

(I will read the one with pictures eventually! But I can't yet, because I read the one without too recently, and I need time to let it settle and vanish.)

This entry is cross-posted at Livejournal from http://skygiants.dreamwidth.org/268490.html. Please feel free to comment here or there! There are currently comments on Dreamwidth.

I am done everything for school this semester! After classes ended yesterday I went to a bar with classmates, then to the departmental holiday party, then waltzing for a few hours with innerbrat, then back to meet up with my classmates for alcoholic milkshakes and copious group hugs and tipsy announcements of undying friendship and respect for everyone in this program. BEST SEMESTER-END EVER.

Today: Hugo with obopolsk, and working on Yuletide!

Tomorrow: brunch with my dad somewhere in the city, but I can't decide where! New Yorkers, tell me about somewhere awesome that I haven't been before? (That really was the whole point of this post. I guess this is really what people use Twitter for . . .)

This entry is cross-posted at Livejournal from http://skygiants.dreamwidth.org/268270.html. Please feel free to comment here or there! There are currently comments on Dreamwidth.