This is apparently a memeish week for me! Anyway I like this one, so I am stealing:

Today has been declared lurker amnesty day! Have you read me but never commented? Do you surf by occasionally? Here for the fic book babbing? Say hello! You are under no obligation to ever comment or delurk again, but here's a chance to do so in a post just for that.

I am friendly, I promise! My babble is worse than my bite. :D

ceitfianna gave me icons to babble about!

The meme: Comment here and I will pick six of your icons, you then copy and paste this in your LJ along with your explanations/comments/squeeage about each one.

( Extensive babbling goes here! )

I love babbling about my icons, especially since some of the ones I like best I never use. I love babbling about other people's icons, too!

Months ago schiarire told me that Hilary Mantel was writing a book set in Tudor England, to which my response was basically "wow, she is writing a book FOR ME."

(Look, I know I am not the only person here to confess to an enormous fascination with those wacky Tudors. I would say, 'in my defence, I liked them before it was cool!' On the other hand . . . I don't think there ever was a time when it wasn't cool. But I didn't know it was cool when I was eight!)

Anyway, Wolf Hall is a biopic novel about Thomas Cromwell, a man of Humble Origins who became extremely powerful and influential with Henry VIII during the years of wacky shufflings when he was trying to ditch Katherine and marry Anne Boleyn. Cromwell has been portrayed pretty negatively in Tudor media before, generally as contrasted against Saintly Thomas More (see: A Man for All Seasons) and Mantel is pretty clearly writing against that, showing him a as a logical and clear-thinking as well as ambitious person who is trying to create a different kind of country than the one he grew up in. People of rank frequently remark that Cromwell is a person, with mild surprise; the line that sticks with me is where he's thinking about the struggle to get people to accept Anne Boleyn, and muses that a country where Anne Boleyn could be queen might be a country where Cromwell could be Cromwell.

Mantel is also really, really good at writing complicated politics, and the way they do and don't intersect with the personal - how political enmity can be a kind of friendship, and alliances can turn to enmity like that. I think it's a very good book. I didn't love it the way I loved A Place of Greater Safety, but that's possibly because the emotional intensity did not run quite so high. It's a more logical, quiet book, to fit the protagonist.

( Notes for people who have read Mantel before )

Anyway, while I am talking about Tudors, I am curious: how much of a widespread phenomenon is Tudorphilia? Are the Tudors crazy overrepresented? Does everyone know the names of Henry VIII's six wives growing up? I feel like it's a bit of trivia that people are way more likely to know than, uh, any other piece of English-history trivia, and not only because of John Rhys Meyers (though the overrepresentation has increased in recent years). But I could be wrong on this. I would like to know all of your thoughts!

Okay, so up until now I've been liveblogging Fullmetal Alchemist as I read through scanlations, which basically comes out to a lot of cheerful random babble. I'm not saying I'm not going to do that anymore - I may or may not - but I want to talk about Volume 15 separately.

Fullmetal Alchemist is a shonen manga; the main plot, as advertised, follows two teenaged brothers who committed an ill-advised attempt at bringing back the dead, who are On A Quest to reverse the damage they did to themselves in the attempt. They work within the military system, and it's clear from the beginning that the country's military - and therefore most of the adult characters in the story - has been deeply shaped by a campaign that took place six years ago, the Ishvalan War of Extermination. As the story progresses, you learn bits and pieces about the war. Most people won't talk much about it; almost everyone is scarred by it; the initial main antagonist is a survivor from the other side, out for revenge, and the kids can't understand why some of their superiors think he might have a point.

In Volume 15, Edward Elric, the Hot-Tempered but Idealistic teenaged protagonist, who doesn't believe in killing or revenge, finally asks Lieutenant Hawkeye to tell him about the war. The rest of the volume is a brutal and complex extended flashback of a genocidal war - largely from the perspective of the soldiers who are on the attacking side. ( Cut for length. )

There's a note at the front of the volume from the author: In researching this volume, I interviewed veterans who had been at the front during World War II. I read countless books, examined film footage, and listened to many detailed and intense stories firsthand, but the comment that affected me the most came from a former soldier, who lowered his gaze to the tabletop and said, "I never watch war movies."

I read the Ishval flashback arc of the manga in scanlation over the weekend. Yesterday, I went out and bought the volume - the first one I have actually bought, although now I think I do eventually intend to buy them all (if only for the hilarious commentary at the back of each volume) - and reread it through again. I don't know if the volume would stand on its own without the rest of the manga, though I think it might; on the one hand, it's a powerful story in and of itself, and on the other I suspect it has a lot more impact once you've already spent fourteen volumes getting to know the postwar versions of the characters involved. Either way, it's one of the strongest fictional depictions of war and its consequences that I've ever read.

Am I ever going to pass up an opportunity to babble extensively about AWESOME LADIES? The answer is: no, I most certainly am not!

Therefore, stolen from in_the_blue and a few other people by now: name a canon you know I know, and I'll tell you (in no particular order) my three favorite females and why. And then I'll name a canon for you, because I'm just as curious as I am eager to share.

Over at the milliways_bar-specific Haiti auction, I offered, among other things, custom romance novel covers for a $2 donation. (People to whom I owe mixes and icon sets, they are on their way soon!)

Anyway, the auction closes tomorrow, and I kind of have my hands full on mixes and icons for a bit, but if anyone over here wants another romance-novel cover for a $2 donation, that is definitely a thing I can do - they're easy, I have fun making them, and every $2 helps!



( For Lexie - Holmes and Watson )


( For Amanda - Carlisle and Edward Cullen )


( For Gen - anything Princess Tutu )

So a certain household in Boston and I seem to have created a kind of unofficial mutual lending library; most recently, genarti lent me Mary Paik Lee's autobiography, Quiet Odyssey: A Pioneer Korean Woman in America.

Mary Paik Lee and her family were part of a relatively small group of Koreans who came to America answering a call for farm laborers in Hawaii in 1905, before the anti-Asian immigration laws that shut that option down; her family spent the next several years wandering from place to place trying to make a living and support themselves through various depressions and in spite of the fact that they were very often made unwelcome. The most incredible thing about her autobiography is just how much history it spans - it was published in 1990 when Lee was ninety years old, and, uh, not to belabor the obvious, but eighty-five years covers a LOT of time and changes in society. As always, even if you know about the history abstractly, it is very different reading a first-person account of it. (I have a vague memory of schiarire reading this book a while ago and remarking that Mary Paik Lee was extremely nice about everyone she encountered. This is true! However, every once in a while she does write about standing up and spitting a piece of injustice in somebody's face, and every time she did I wanted to cheer.)

I will say, I felt sort of uncomfortable reading the appendix in the back where the editor, scholar Sucheng Chan, carefully recounts every change she made to the manuscript. I don't know the conventions of scholarly historiography; maybe every editor of an autobiography that is meant to be used as a historical record goes through afterwards and takes out all mentions of things that seem to be incompatible with recorded facts. I'm an English major, not a historian, and I kept having this instinctive cringe reaction: "Stop altering the text! THAT IS WHAT FOOTNOTES ARE FOR!"

Some reasons why Elf Queen of Shannara was one of my favorites as a kid:

1. It is about a girl! There is one other Shannara book that is about a girl (or at least, there was at the time I was growing up; there may be more now.) She is Headstrong and Overconfident and at the end her brother has to rescue her from going evil. Not so in Elf Queen, where Wren basically tears through the jungle overcoming demons and moral dilemmas all by herself. (Well, the snarky porcupine-cat helps too.)

2. It is also the only Shannara book EVER to pass the Bechdel Test, which I liked even though I did not know what the Bechdel Test was. Wren has important relationships with other ladies! That have nothing to do with dudes! It is sad how excited I get about this, but you must understand that this never happens in Shannara books EVER.

3. It is a freaking creepy book. Props to Terry Brooks, who had me jumpy with tension all through the reading of it - most of the book involves our protagonists traversing through Creepy Jungle and getting attacked by monsters, which you'd think would get old after a while, and admittedly occasionally does, but it is a really, really creepy jungle!

4. The Dark Secret of the origins of the monsters, which is not super-original, but is, nonetheless, very creepy. See above.

5. The snarky porcupine-cat, who is too good for the elves, and knows it.

( More reasons are spoilery! )

Other rereading notes: I felt a little bit like a clairvoyant while reading this, because every time a character was introduced, I would remember nothing about them except whether or not they were going to die, and sometimes how. Turned into a vampire! Eaten by a spider! It was a little creepy. Vague premonitions also made the one Coll chapter much harder to read, because I really like Coll and what already looks like a bad decision on the first read looks TEN TIMES MORE AWFUL as a decision when you have faint memories of doom running through your mind from when you were twelve. Soooo I spent that chapter pretty much trying to telepathically send the message "DON'T DO IT DON'T DO IT DON'T DO IT" to a fictional character. Tragically, it did not work. (It never does.)

Also, for some reason, although Wren was totally my point of identification as a kid (see above re: lady protagonist), these days I still continue to identify with Walker Boh more than anyone. I wish I knew WHY.

A REMINDER: No, self, your list of books-to-read is already as tall as your head. You are NOT ALLOWED to go on a Discworld-rereading spree. Yes, you did just get all your Discworld books back from the FBI agent who was holding them hostage for the past three years. But that is no excuse.

SOME CLARIFICATION: I have finally read Unseen Academicals!

My thoughts: on the one hand, I can see why some people are saying this is a weaker Discworld book. As a Discworld book, it is not the best there ever was. There are some things that feature prominently that sort of felt like they came out of left field, for me (the biggest one: Mr. Nutt's BIG SECRET. Like, on the one hand, yes, okay, Terry Pratchett, I see what you did there, and on the other hand . . . what?) and not as many footnotes and a wild spree of plot threads and half-finished parallel/parodies that do not seem quite as tightly-woven as Pratchett can do. I mean, I love the Romeo and Juliet theme and the Cinderella theme, but when you add it to the football parody and the fashion industry parody and the academic politics parody and the whole central issue of Mr. Nutt, that is kiiind of a lot of themes for one book.

On the other hand, there are ways in which I think Unseen Academicals is among the highest tier of Pratchett's stuff - not even necessarily as a Discworld book, but just as a book, if that makes sense - and most of those have to do with the four main characters and their dynamics. At the heart of this book, what you have is four characters who all have interesting and developed and important relationships with each other. The shift in Glenda and Juliet's friendship is as important as the growing friendship between Trevor and Nutt is as important as Nutt learning to trust Glenda is as important as Glenda learning to trust Trevor is as important as the romance between Trevor and Juliet - they all get to grow and change as people through their interactions with all of the others. And I kind of love that a lot. I mean, the Discworld books are always very human in their satire and character growth is at the heart of the best ones anyways, which is why I love them. But this is one of the best, I think, for balancing that growth among an ensemble, and centering it in their relationships, instead of having it triggered by outside factors like, you know, the end of the world.

(Also, I am a total sap for the romance in this one. SHUT UP I am allowed to be shippy sometimes if I want.)

Also also, this is just a ridiculously fun book to read if you are familiar with the series enough to pick up on all the continuity nods. The Old Sam and the Lady Sybil! Rincewind and the half-brick in a sock! Professor Turnipseed! MIGHTILY OATS!

So basically, despite some flaws, when it comes down to it I adored Unseen Academicals. What about you guys? I know a bunch of you must have read it before me - what did you think?

Writing about Fuyumi Ono's The Vast Spread of the Seas is going to be a little hard for me because I simultaneously was a little disappointed in it, and loved it passionately. My feelings are sometimes complicated!

To recap: this is the third book in the Twelve Kingdoms series which I am following with extreme interest. The Vast Spread of the Seas is a prequel that follows a pair of characters who, when you meet them in the first book in the series, are firmly established as Awesomely Successful King of En and Advisor. Obviously back in the day things were not so easy! In this universe, kings literally chosen by divine mandate - magical creatures called kirin basically go around looking for them until they experience a revelation and find the right person, and they rule (with the kirin's help) until they screw up enough that they lose the divine mandate, at which point both kirin and king start to sicken. But this process can take a while, and by the time baby kirin Rokuta finds Shoryu, the new king of En, the kingdom has been basically turned into a wasteland by several years of terrible management followed by several more years of no management at all.

Now skip twenty years into the future. The kingdom is slowly getting back on its feet, but Shoryu seems to be your classic Prince Hal-type irresponsible ruler, wandering out of meetings and spending all his time getting drunk and hanging out with the ladiez, much to the chagrin of his advisors. (Who are hilarious, by the way - they are basically all lower-ranked people who got promoted by insulting the king during his first few months of office, and spend most of their time ranting, facepalming, and insulting the king some more.) Meanwhile, Rokuta - who is an eternal thirteen-year-old as well as a magical kirin, and has some backstory issues of his own - is pretty dubious about the whole kingship concept to begin with, and Shoryu's apparent inability to take anything ever seriously doesn't help. So when Rokuta is kidnapped and held hostage by a group of rebels that includes a lonely boy he befriended a long time ago, who say that ALL THEY WANT IS FOR THE KING TO BUILD THEM SOME AQUEDUCTS, SERIOUSLY, he finds himself kind of sympathizing with their cause even as the situation in En starts to build to civil war.

Reasons I loved this book: first of all, I really like Rokuta, the magical chooser of kings who is actually really skeptical about the whole concept of magically chosen kings! (I also love how he is simultaneously a cranky brat, and a holy creature of kindness who literally runs a fever when exposed to too much blood.) He has a lot of conversations that go like this:

PERSON A: Rokuta, the king isn't doing his job!
ROKUTA: Dude, don't ask me, I didn't pick him.
PERSON A: But . . . actually, um, you did. You had a divine revelation and everything.
ROKUTA: Look, take it up with heaven, okay? KINGS SUCK. THE END.

I love all the political discussions and how Ono problematizes her own magical kingship system, and I love the shades of gray and the emphasis on difficult decisions - once again, Ono shows how much she loves stomping on and complicating tropes, and I eat it up with a spoon! And I did love Shoryu, who I don't think it is spoilery to say hides a lot of competence underneath his flippant surface of constant LOL. (I kept picturing him as played by Dam Duk from The Legend.) The dude knows how to work the propaganda machine! It's an important skill in a ruler. I also really loved the constant and deliberate paralleling of Rokuta and Koya, the demon-riding war orphan that Rokuta sees a little too much of himself in, and the way their roles are reversed at the end.

On the other hand, a lot of the stuff I loved with all my heart also had a flip-side that I had my doubts about, or didn't go as far as I wanted it to. ( Cut for spoilers! )

These issues aside, though, I continue to love this series so much. SO MUCH. Sea of Shadows is still my favorite, but this is a really excellent book too, and I am so massively looking forward to the next one. March! Get here faster!

Monday of this week saw me exhausted, cranky, and full of sorrow at having to leave Denver and all the amazing people there. Fortunately I happened to have an unread Georgette Heyer novel out from the library waiting for just such a time!

The Convenient Marriage turned out to be one of my less-favorite Heyers, which does not mean it didn't have me cracking up on the subway several times. The first two chapters are actually pretty brilliant, and go like this:

BEAUTIFUL HEROINE: Oh woe is me! The hero has decided to wed, and I must marry him to help my family out of our financial straights! Now I can never be with my TRUE LOVE.
HEROINE'S LITTLE SISTER: Don't worry! I have a PLAN.

HERO: Beautiful Heroine seems very pretty and I expect we'll be very happy.
HEROINE'S LITTLE SISTER: WHY HELLO THERE! I have come SECRETLY to your house to tell you that ACTUALLY I think it would be way more convenient for everyone if you marry me instead.
HERO: . . .
HEROINE'S LITTLE SISTER: I mean, if you are man enough to deal with my enormous Zachary Quinto eyebrows. And the stammer.
HERO: . . . not that this isn't all kind of adorable, but aren't you like twelve?
HEROINE'S LITTLE SISTER: Seventeen! That is totally legit for a Georgian romance. You can have affairs if you want, too, I actually kind of don't care.
HERO: I . . . okay?

HEROINE'S LITTLE SISTER: So actually I'm the heroine of this novel and my beautiful sister will never appear again, is everyone okay with that?

Alas, after this excellent beginning, the plot pretty much revolves around the hero's GREATEST ENEMY trying to create a Big Misunderstanding between our awkwardly married pair while the heroine frets about her husband's old mistress and gets a gambling problem, which as plots go is kind of annoying. (This is not to say that a heavy-eyebrowed, stammering heroine with a gambling problem is not awesome! But that imagined heroine deserves a better plotline than this one, which is about showing her how headstrong she is and how awesome her kind of jerktastic husband is.)

On the other hand, there are also some plot developments of ( GLORIOUS SPOILERS )

Also, I was totally rooting for the hero's long-suffering secretary, who was way too sane for this novel, to get together with the heroine's long-suffering middle sister, who was way too exasperated for this novel. I actually think the romance novel about them would have been twice as interesting as this one! And we could have kept all the hilarious side characters. And possibly even the wacky highwayman hijinks.

Speaking of romances that would be twice as interesting as the ones we're actually shown: last night I went to go see a production of As You Like It with obopolsk. It was a decent if lengthy production (with gorgeous music - I am actually really excited for that company's Tempest now, coming up next, since I suspect they will do a better job with eerie atmospheric than with straight-up comedy) but I came out of it with a desperate desire to know more about Celia and Oliver and their WACKY SURPRISE ROMANCE. Partly this is because that production's Oliver had amazing comic timing and ended up one of my cast favorites, but also, I mean, look, he is a murderous Unspecial Brother on the road to reform! She is the constantly facepalming villain's daughter who is possibly in love with her cousin! I WANT TO SEE HOW THIS HAPPENS.

I have just recently decided to do some reading up on pre-Columbian America, for reasons that are not important at this time. The important thing is that I suck at research. (No, really; there are reasons I decided to write my undergrad thesis on little-known YA novels, and one of those reasons is "look, no one else has ever written any academic analysis on them before anyway! SO NYAH.")

Susan Gillespie's The Aztec Kings: The Construction of Rulership in Mexican History was the first book to come in at the library for me. I brought it as my airplane reading for Denver in the theory that if I spent hours with it on a plane and no other entertainment I would have to pay close attention to it! In practice what ended up happening is that I slept the whole trip in both directions. But anyway, I have finished the book. Research-wise it was not that helpful; it is trying to deconstruct some assumptions about the cycle of Aztec kings and the generally accepted story of the Conquest by pointing out that most of the 'history' we know was certainly affected and mythologized post-Cortez, which I definitely believe! However, I am not sure that "well, I think it actually worked THIS way because . . . THAT'S HOW IT WORKED IN POLYNESIA!" actually convinced me of her alternate hypothesis either. Or all the very complex patterns that were based off of one reference in one source matched up with a different reference in a different source, out of the ten or twelve primary sources extant.

Anyway. That is one method of research: read all the way through a book very fast and see what sticks with you. Other methods involve: reading through books one by one and taking five million notes on every little detail; reading through books bits and pieces at a time, keeping separate note files, and forgetting to ever actually finish said books; doing frantic last-minute research by looking in the index for important keyword and stuffing down quotes that seem like they might be relevant. I have tried all of these research methods and none of them are ideal for me, but this is probably because I suck at research! I live in hope that one day I will actually get better at it, though.

So my question for you guys today is: how do you research? What works best for you?

(And also, do you have any good nonfiction recs for books about pre-Columbian America?)

As I have said here I think before, I sometimes have a hard time with literary short stories. Epiphany Stories often do not do it for me. Stories about marriages that are falling apart especially do not do it for me. This is a problem, since I often feel like 70% of the short stories out there are about marriages that are falling apart.

I was having a hard time connecting to Sherman Alexie's The Toughest Indian In the World for this reason up until about halfway, at which point I hit all the surreal and AMAZING stories that Alexie was apparently saving up for the end. (Okay, I also liked South by Southwest, which was apparently in the first half, but my brain keeps wanting to switch it out with one of the stories I didn't like as well in the second half.)

( Brief reviews by story )


In unrelated news, this meme intrigues me! Although I do not expect many responses, since most of the time I am tragically predictable like a Dan Brown novel:

What's surprised you the most about me (if anything) since beginning to read my LJ (or when you met me IRL, for those who have)? Has anything about me been completely unexpected or have I always fit the picture of me you had in your head?

Thing the first: I'm offering a New York brunch care package over at help_haiti. Fandom auctions are obviously not the only way to help, but I do think they're a good way to encourage people to actually give that little bit of extra they might have been thinking about without ever getting around to. So if you can offer something - or you see something you like and want to make a bid - it is a good thing to do.

Thing the second: After I leave work today, I will be away until Monday (SEEING AWESOME PEOPLE) and may or may not be checking email. If you need me for something, drop me a comment here!

Thing the third: three more volumes means it's time to dump some more FMA liveblogging on you guys before my files grow too big. Chapter 50 means I'm halfway through, right?

( FMA liveblogging volumes 10-12 )

Sometimes, people have inexplicably terrible taste.

Sometimes, um . . . sometimes those people are me.

This story starts - as so many regrettable stories do - at tvtropes.org, where I was wandering idly a few weeks ago and stumbled over the page for Terry Brooks' Shannara series. Of course I read it. I read the whole thing. And suddenly I found myself on NOSTALGIA ALERT.

For those of you unfamiliar: the Shannara series begins with The Sword of Shannara, which has the distinction of being the most unabashed Lord of the Rings ripoff ever to make it onto the New York Times Bestseller list. (Our plucky band of hobbits Valemen, elves, dwarves, dispossessed princes, and one mysterious wizard Druid travel through marshes and mountains and halls of the dead while chased by wraiths! Seriously, you can compare the plots point-by-point, and it is hilarious.) At age 11, I found this enormous tome buried somewhere in a pile of my dad's old sff novels from the seventies, ate the whole thing up with a spoon, and went looking for more. There are two slightly more original sequels in the first trilogy; the books I really loved, however, were the Heritage of Shannara series. These were set three hundred years after the original book and followed some super-distant descendants of our original Plucky Valeman, as they all simultaneously went out on quests for Magical MacGuffins to save the land from the evils of democracy the evil subjugating and magic-suppressing Federation. I loved these books so much I tried to write myself into them. You are probably thinking "Mary Sues!" here, but no, no; I was not yet that fannishly far advanced. My version was much simpler: I just sat down at a computer and started retyping it out with myself inserted. "They had arrived in Varfleet two weeks earlier, Coll and Par and Becca." IT WAS VERY SATISFYING. (I WAS TWELVE. STOP JUDGING ME. ;_;)

ANYWAY. I am now twice the age I was then and had not thought about Terry Brooks in many years . . . until that fateful day on TVTropes, when all of a sudden I found myself thinking about the Heritage of Shannara books, ( and to make a long story short, NOSTALGIA REREAD AHOY. Spoiler: I still totally love the books. )

And now, a poll, because as always I am curious about other people's formative childhood influences:

Poll #1511148
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 37

In my misspent youth, I was addicted to . . .

I still really enjoy reading . . .

I feel like I start book reviews quite a lot with "one of the things I love most is" . . . but I can't help it! There are lots of things I love! And one of the things I love most, along with all the other things I love, is a good genre-cross. Give me a good mystery WITH HOBBITS or a comedy of manners IN SPACE and I am happy as a very pleased clam.

Seanan McGuire's Rosemary and Rue is an excellent example of this - a genuine noir urban fantasy novel. It even takes place in California! (Everyone knows that all the best noir takes place in either LA or San Francisco. It is just one of those things.) October 'Toby' Daye is a hard-boiled San Francisco private eye who happens to be a half-Fae changeling, which comes with a few benefits and a lot more inconveniences. Something that I won't spoil, because it took me by total surprise and I think the surprise is worth it, happens at the end of the first chapter that causes her to try and isolate herself completely from the supernatural world. When she's called in to investigate the murder of an old friend, she has to get in touch with all her old contacts to try to find the answer before TIME RUNS OUT.

One of the key elements of noir is the sense of a world that is fundamentally wrong and unjust, with the lower-class characters, protagonist included, struggling to get by with the deck stacked against them. In this book, it's the class issues between full fairy creatures and changelings that provide the necessary backdrop for a noir story to play out, which I thought was an incredibly cool way to meld the two genres. There are other nice plays on the noir genre too - instead of femme fatales, there are dude fatales (I was wrong on which one was going to turn out evil, but I hold out hope that my suspicions about the other one will come true in a later book!), there's a high-speed car chase over the Golden Gate Bridge, there are Tough Kids In Over Their Heads and High-Class Families Hiding Complicated Family Secrets, and, in short, in my fantasy casting, someone would be played by Lauren Bacall.

The supernatural worldbuilding itself did not excite me particularly - it's your standard almost-entirely-European mix of fairy creatures (Sidhe, undines, selkies, etc.) with a few choices that I found a bit perplexing and potentially problematic (the German-mythology-based undine is Japanese, for no given reason, while the one fairy creature that comes from non-European mythology, a kitsune, seems to be white). I also had a really hard time taking "oak and ash!" seriously as a swear word. This aside, though, I enjoyed the book a ton, and I am totally looking forward to the next one, which comes out I think in March?

I also know there are a bunch of you on my flist who are urban fantasy fans, so if you are looking for a fun mystery-fantasy read that is high on the awesome noir tropes and low on the completely gratuitous sex (coughLaurellKHamiltoncough), maybe give this a go! (Feel free to defend other urban fantasy to me in the comments, too.)

I just finished Michelle West's Sea of Sorrows; four books in, the series continues to focus amazingly on the ways in which women hold power, which is a thing I continue to really appreciate!

The first half of the book was a bit scattered - the Ospreys are doing some stuff here! and the Voyani are doing some other stuff there! and Jewel's gang are over here! and the demons are doing some stuff too! and here's Valedan! and here's Kiriel the angstiest eighty-page fight scene known to man! and and - and it all felt a bit like getting pieces in place for the next book, but I kind of loved the second half, aka Diora and Teresa and Jewel and Avandar and Margret and Elena and Kallandras and a magic elf and a magic stag and bunch of Voyani GO ON A FIELD TRIP. Uh, more specifically, I really liked the focus on the relationship between Diora and Margret as they learn to appreciate each other and the different-but-not-bad rules for being powerful women in their cultures - and by the way, dude, you can't tell me I am not supposed to be shipping them. Margret spends about 50% of her time thinking about how beautiful Diora is, and Diora keeps going on about how much Margret reminds her of one of her tragically dead wives, and the amount of time they spend musing on the texture of each other's skin whenever they have to take hands for whatever reason is - well, it's a lot of time! ( And spoilers! )

My glee, however, was a little bit harshed when I went to Amazon to link to the book and stumbled over this review:

Anybody picking up a book by a female fantasy writer knows not to expect much. As a rule anything on the physical world will tend to be sketchy. Anything to do with war and combat will be flat, with pretty colors. On the upside, female fantasy authors will generally have interesting characters, set in interesting cultures. Too, they will devote some attention to their writing style.

Thank you for your incisive generalizations, mystery Amazon reviewer! Yes, I am sure every single book written by a female fantasy author does conform to your rules. EVERY ONE.

So, I was planning to wait until I was all caught up on the FMA manga to make this post . . . but seeing as I still have around sixty chapters left, that will probably be a while. And I am impatient!

I knew when I started watching the new Full Metal Alchemist series that it was a shounen show about a pair of angsty brothers and a military officer with ambitions. And that is fine, and also accurate! But nothing that I had heard about the show prepared me for what would happen: that I would fall completely in love with the story's surprisingly full complement of badass women. With a few exceptions, FMA has surprised me again and again with how consistently awesome its female characters are, whether they are leads or just passing through the storyline. And because I am sure I am not the only person here who loves awesome ladies: here, have a picspam!



( Cut for length and images. AND AWESOMENESS. )

I will say that the series is in no way perfect with feminist issues; although there are, as demonstrated, a whole lot of awesome female soldier characters, the background military characters tend to default male, and there are a few (three, to be exact) female characters who seem to exist for no other purpose that I can see other than to be sweet and motherly angels in the house whose lives center around their husbands and children. Still, for me, that is counterbalanced by the sheer number of insanely awesome female characters, who kick ass, take names, and in many cases drive the plot.

In other words: I HAVE A CRUSH ON EVERY GIRL.

( Books Read in 2009 )

( Reading habits navel-gazing )

I have spammed you guys with almost everything I read this year in my journal, but as usual feel free to talk to me about any of them anyways! . . . or feel free to tell me to shut up about books. You know, the usual. :D

I did not get a chance to post on the last book I read in 2009 while it was still 2009, because I was busy twirling my villainous moustache as I kidnapped genarti (and, for lesser periods of time, areyoumymemmy and rymenhild. Okay, technically I guess Rym kidnapped me. ANYWAY.) Sadly, all of the aforementioned have now escaped my clutches, so I am left bereft and alone with no way to cheer myself up except by babbling about hilarious 1850's-era urban sensationalism!

I picked up New York By Gas-Light while I was wandering through the history shelves in the Brooklyn library, because it promised me "the festivities of prostitution, the orgies of pauperism, the haunts of theft and murder, the scenes of drunkenness and beastly debauch, and all the sad realities that go to make up the lower stratum - the underground story - of life in New York!"

And yes, it delivered everything it promised. *_*

George G. Foster, the author, was apparently a well-known nineteenth-century sensationalist sketch reporter - sketch in more than one term, since, as the introduction gleefully points out, after spending a lot of time expostulating in his columns about the vice and corruption of the city, the guy was thrown in prison due to forging the signatures of famous actors on his dry-cleaning checks. And then committed bigamy. I was therefore predisposed to be entertained even before I actually got to the meat of the sketches, which can mostly be summed up as: Be careful! New York is full of PROSTITUTES! You can go to the theater if you want I guess. And maybe go have fun bowling! But be careful you don't get cheated out of your money, and also, PROSTITUTES.

( Highlights of ridiculousness! Cut for length, hilarity, newsies, racism, sexism, and PROSTITUTES )

In seriousness, though, it was also pretty fascinating just to read about the geography of the city in the 1850's - whatever dubious accuracy of what Foster portrays as going on inside it - which was, of course, wildly different from the city of today, but retains some similarities. And oh, those rich bastards who live above Bleecker Street!

I am also going to be forever grateful that I read this book because the introduction introduced me to the existence of this glorious book from the same era, entitled The Quaker City: The Monks of Monk's Hall. Apparently it is basically like The Monk, but set in my hometown of Philadelphia! THE PATH BEFORE ME HAS BEEN PREPARED, I MUST ACQUIRE AND READ IT IMMEDIATELY. (Apparently the villain's name is DEVIL-BUG. BRB LAUGHING FOREVER.)