alias | Reading

The other Polly Barton-translated book I read recently was Asako Yuzuki's Butter: A Novel of Food and Murder, which I ended up suggesting for my book club on account of intriguing DW posts from several of you.

Butter focuses Rika Machida, a magazine journalist, on the cusp of becoming the first woman in her company to break the glass ceiling and join Big Editorial, who decides that her next big feature is going to be an insider interview with the infamous prisoner Manako Kajii. Kajii is accused of murdering several men that she met on dating sites after seducing them with a fatal combination of sex, personal attention, and French cooking; in the eyes of the public, however, her greatest crime is that she somehow managed all this femme fatale-ing while being Kind Of Fat.

After a tip from her best friend Reiko -- a housewife who quit her own promising career in hopes of starting a family -- Rika, despite having no previous interest in cooking or domesticity, writes to Kajii about getting her recipe for beef stew. This opens the door for a connection that gets very psychologically weird very fast; Kajii, behind bars, tests Rika with various little living-by-proxy challenges -- eat some good butter! go to the best French restaurant in town! eat late night ramen! after having sex! and tell me all about it -- and Rika, fascinated despite herself, allows herself to be manipulated. For the interview, of course. And also because it turns out good butter is really good, and that eating and making rich food for herself instead of working to keep herself boyishly thin (the prince of her all-girl's school! One of the Boys at work!) is changing her relationship to her body, and her gender, and to the way that people perceive her in the world and she perceives them.

This is more or less what I'd understood to be the plot of the book -- a sort of Silence of the Lambs situation, if the crime that Clarice was trying to solve by talking with Hannibal was societal misogyny -- but in fact it's only about half of the story, and societal misogyny is only one of the big crimes under consideration. The other one is loneliness, and so the rest of the book has to do with Rika's other relationships, and the domino-effect changes that Rika's Kajiimania has on the other people in her life. The most significant is with Reiko, which is extremely fraught with lesbian tension ( spoilers I suppose ) But there's also Rika's mother, and her boyfriend, and the older mentor that she has secret intermittent just-lads-together meet-ups with in bars to get hot journalistic tips; all of these relationships are important, and usually ended up in places I didn't expect and that were more interesting than I would have guessed.

Not everything landed for me about this book, but this was one thing it did pretty consistently that I appreciated -- Rika would think about something, and I would go, 'well, that was didactic, you just said your theme out loud,' and then the book and Rika as protagonist would revisit it and have a more complicated and potentially contradictory thought about it, and then we'd go back to it again, and it usually ended up being more interesting than I would have thought the first time around. It's a long book, possibly too long, but it's equally possible I think that it does need that space to hold contradictions in.

It was however quite funny to read this shortly after Taiwan Travelogue -- another book I have not written up and should probably do so soon -- and also shortly after What Did You Eat Yesterday and also seeing a lot of gifsets for She Loves To Cook and She Loves To Eat ... fellas, is it gay to be really into food? signs point to yes!

musesfool

I really enjoyed this season of Slow Horses, though 6 episodes is too short. I don't need a full 22-episode season, but like 8 or 10 would be better. ( spoilers for all of this season )

I keep thinking about reading the books, but I haven't worked up the energy to do that yet.

There's still so much other TV I need to catch up on, but probably not until the World Series is done. I've been enjoying it a lot, though I went to bed on Monday night in the 12th inning, not really thinking they'd play 6 more! And when I woke up, I was like, as I expected Freddie Fucking Freeman walked it off, because that is what that guy does. Ugh.

Tangentially, I thought this was a really good read: Matt Berninger traded his notebook for a baseball. And the words kept coming. I'm not a huge fan of The National but I do like some of their songs and this was interesting.

*

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Terrible Love - the National

cyphomandra

What did I spend August doing instead of reading? Writing, mostly.

Play date, Alex Dahl. Elisa lets her daughter Lucia have a play date and spend the night with a new classmate - but Lucia isn’t returned in the morning, and when Elisa goes to the house where she dropped Lucia off, it’s a rental being cleaned out and there’s no trace of the people she met. Who has taken her? Why? Will they ever find her etc etc. I liked that this was set in Scandinavia but otherwise it’s pretty clunky and the twists are irritating.

Love in the afternoon, Lisa Kleypas. Cyrano de Bergerac style het historical romance. Quirky nature-loving Beatrix takes over writing back to the dashing soldier Christopher when her much sought after friend Prudence can’t be bothered - and, as war takes its toll on Christopher, the letters grow more intimate. He comes back intending to marry the woman he’s fallen in love with, but Prudence seems fonder of the decorated war hero than the man who wrote the letters… This was okay. I liked what Kleypas was doing with Christopher’s PTSD but it didn’t always mesh with the romance, and Beatrix is both super certain of herself and yet determined not to tell Christopher who she is. There’s a great dog in it, though.

Slugfest, Gordon Korman. Yash is a fantastic athlete but unfortunately the fact that his middle school has been sending him to play on high school teams comes back to bite him when he doesn’t have the state-mandated PE credit for 8th grade. He’s sent to the summer school PE program, which is nicknamed Slugfest because it’s usually populated by non athletic losers - can they all come together as a team? Multi pov, and a satisfying story with just enough surprise to keep things interesting. Not one of my all time Korman faves but I can see myself re-reading this sometime.

Ellen Foster, Kaye Gibbons. I went along to the first meeting of a local book group in a spirit of enquiry, which was serially dashed by a) the person who said she didn’t want to analyse books like we did at school and probably half an hour of book talk would be enough, after which we could talk about things like what Netflix series we are all watching b) the person who said she reads five books a week but ONLY real books not those e ones and only motorcycle club het romance, fostering stories and cosy mysteries c) the person who said she’s written a book, it’s amusing things her children have said interspersed with parenting tips and she’ll bring us all a copy next time d) everybody in their introductions except me saying they didn’t like sf/fantasy (we’d been told to bring a book we’d recently enjoyed and I was waving around my e copy of Black Water Sister) and e) the person who was telling one end of the table about how her teenage daughter had decided she was trans and now wouldn’t talk to her and how unreasonable this is.

Despite this really rather appalling start, there were two other people there I vaguely knew & liked, and one of them seemed to be capable of talking about books. One of the more organised people there came up with a choice of three possible books to read for each meeting, and although I missed the next one due to other commitments I decided rather belatedly to go back at least once more, which meant I ended up having an afternoon to read either Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake, William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, or Kaye Gibbons’ Ellen Foster. I have largely avoided Faulkner apart from a few short stories and saw no reason to change this, so I borrowed the other two from the library and started on Tom Lake. I think Patchett is a great prose writer who writes books I don’t like - I was not wild about Commonwealth - and although I enjoyed the opening few chapters of the process of casting for a production of Our Town once I realised the book set up was going to be mother tells daughters about her past fling with now famous Hollywood actor I was almost entirely disengaged.

So I read Ellen Foster, which is about a poor white girl growing up in the American South in (probably) the 1970s, whose father is abusive, whose mother overdoses and dies, who has a Black friend (Starletta) to whom she is racist, etc, etc, etc, all told in non standard English. It’s readable and Ellen’s voice works well, and it isn’t as unrelentingly miserable as I’ve made out, but it ’s in a weird space book-wise where I’d probably rather either have a memoir or something explicitly fiction (as I’m typing this, what I really want to do is re-read the Tillerman series by Cynthia Voigt). One other person at the follow up meeting had read it and hadn’t loved it (two of them had read Tom Lake, the motorcycle foster cosy person hadn’t been able to bring herself to leave her comfort zone, another person was immured in Lucinda Riley’s Sister series, and everyone else cancelled at the last minute). Will I go again? Hmm.

skygiants

Speaking of literary sff about how humans project out their loss and grief, Mai Ishizawa's The Place of Shells is sort of the opposite of Luminous -- where Luminous sprawls out into big branching intersecting plotlines and detailed, evocative worldbuilding, The Place of Shells spirals in on itself, carefully layering its metaphors on top of each other as the world echoes its protagonist's own interiority.

The unnamed narrator is a Japanese PhD student studying medieval saints in Göttingen, Germany, in the summer of 2020. The first quarantine regulations are just beginning to relax, and, as the world opens up a little bit again, she's visited by her old grad school friend Nomiya, who unfortunately died in the 2011 tsunami, and whose body was never recovered. The meeting is, inevitably, a bit awkward, mostly small talk -- it's hard to make a connection after nine years, especially when one person has been changing and moving through the world and the other has not -- but Nomiya seems to be enjoying Göttingen. He decides to stay for some time. The narrator feels that it would be rude to ask him whether he's going to return home to Japan for the Ghost Festival.

As the summer unfurls, in a series of encounters and re-encounters with friends new and old, the city of Göttingen gets stranger. The planet Pluto, which was removed from Göttingen's scale-model planet-themed walking trail some time ago, keeps intermittently re-appearing. The narrator's roommate keeps taking her dog out to look for truffles and instead the dog finds strange lost objects, all of which seem to have profound significance to somebody. Nomiya comes to dinner with the narrator's old grad school advisor and brings a friend, a nice man who appears to be experiencing the city from approximately a century previous. In fact, time is slipping all over Göttingen: and what is time, or memory, except something that lives in a landmark or an object? The narrator studies medieval saints. She understands things in terms of iconography.

I picked this up largely because it was translated by Polly Barton, who also translated Where The Wild Ladies Are and Butter (post on which forthcoming) and at this point I've decided I should probably just read everything she translates because it's clearly going to take me interesting places. This book, absolutely another data point of reinforcement.

musesfool

Holy forking shirtballs, The Good Place isn't on Netflix anymore! And when I tried to cue it up on Prime, it wouldn't play - I got an error. So I ordered the dvds. I can't be having with this bs anymore. I also need to buy Leverage at some point, and The Expanse. Maybe I will for Christmas this year, as long as I'm not furloughed or anything.

*

Current Mood: annoyed
Current Music: Ship to Wreck - Florence + the Machine

cimorene

Yesterday Wax and I went and bought a new curtain rod to replace the one in the bedroom that's been hanging crooked for... several years.

We haven't put it up yet, but we got it!

sakana17

( Assorted picspam )

( Their new content (briefly) )

musesfool

As seen all around these parts, the AO3 alphabet meme:

Rules: How many letters of the alphabet have you used for [starting] a fic title? One fic per line, 'A' and 'The' do not count for 'a' and 't'. Post your score out of 26 at the end, along with your total fic count.

A - Another Gravity (Firefly, Mal/Zoe)
B - The Boys of Summer (Hot Corner Rag) (SPN, Sam & Dean)
C - Courtship Rituals of the World's Most Awkward Superheroes (Avengers/Amazing Spider-Man, Steve/Peter)
D - the dream of flight persists (Star Wars/Firefly, Anakin/Kaylee)
E - Eight the Hard Way (Ocean's 8, Amita/Daphne)
F - The Forces Ranged Within Us and Against Us (SPN, Sam/Dean)
G - Girl, You're Like a Weird Vacation (Blue Beetle, Brenda/Paco)
H - The Hubbert Peak (Dark Angel, Max/Alec)
I - The Injurious Internet Meme Incursion (The Middleman, Wendy, MM, & Ida)
J - Joy has he whom she embraces (Amelia Peabody, Peabody/Emerson)
K - Katie, Bar the Door (DCU, Jason, ensemble)
L - A Little Less Conversation, a Little More Action (Ocean's 11, Danny/Rusty)
M - Mother Is the Name for God (Star Wars, Leia & Padme)
N - No Exit (Star Wars; Darth Vader/Ahsoka)
O - Only where love and need are one (L'Engleverse, Adam/Joshua)
P - Paint a thank-you on my palm (Six of Crows, Inej, ensemble)
Q - Quality (LotR, Faramir)
R - Retail Therapy (DCU, Cass, ensemble)
S - Stuck in the Middle with You (Star Wars, Anakin, Obi-Wan, Ahsoka)
T - There's Still Time to Change the Road You're On (Star Wars, Anakin, Luke, Leia)
U - Until the Sea Shall Free Them (The Iliad, Achilles/Patroclus)
V - Visiting Hours (DCU, Alfred & Jason)
W - with our way lit only by stars (Earthsea, Ged/Tenar)
X - Xue Bai, Xue Hong (Firefly, Mal/River/Simon)
Y - you and your high top sneakers and your sailor tattoos (Avengers, Steve/Darcy)
Z - The Zombie Love Bug Concatenation (SPN/The Middleman, Dean/Wendy)

26/26, out of 950 stories on AO3. I ignored the ones that start with parentheticals and numbers. I also went mostly on vibes, so it's not a real overview of my stuff, but it is one title for every letter of the alphabet.

*

Current Mood: caffeinated
Current Music: Giants losing to the Eagles

skygiants

ME, THREE CHAPTERS INTO SYLVIA PARK'S LUMINOUS: I often experience powerful sad pet emotions in books about humanoid robots so I think it's unfair for Luminous to also contain actual dead pet emotions
MY BEAUTIFUL WIFE: if it helps I don't think there are a lot of sad pet emotions in the rest of the book, I think you've hit the worst of it! the robots are not really sad pets
ME, WITH AN EMOTIONAL HANGOVER AFTER FINISHING SYLVIA PARK'S LUMINOUS: well, broadly speaking, you were right about the robots, but you were absolutely wrong about hitting the end of the sad pet emotions --

So Luminous, as you may have gathered, is a book that made me feel emotions; also a literary science fiction novel about humanoid robots; also a near-future cyberpunk noir; also a bittersweet children's adventure; also, or perhaps most of all, a family saga about three estranged siblings in post-unification Korea:

Jun, the middle child, a transmasc army veteran turned robot crimes cop whose war injuries have resulted in a VR addiction, an unsurmountable amount of debt, and a messy combination of gender euphoria and dysphoria about his new mostly-cyborg body
Morgan, the baby of the family, a successful MIT graduate with a well-paying tech job in robot design and a secret illegal off-the-books robot housekeeper-slash-personal-assistant-slash-boyfriend designed to help her get over her miserable insecurities, a task at which they are both Unfortunately Aware that he is Not Succeeding
and Yoyo, oldest and forever youngest, the advanced prototype child robot designed by their brilliant roboticist father who entered Jun and Morgan's lives as children and played the role of big brother for a few critical years, leaving them both haunted by his absence and his ghost

Where is their brilliant father now, aside from living rent-free inside his children's brains? Great question. For mysterious reasons he's decided he no longer wants to work on humanoid robots and has bounced offscreen to Boston to work on designing robot whales and tigers and so on, a project that museums love but which most serious roboticists think is rather silly.

Where is Yoyo now, aside from living rent-free inside his siblings' brains? Also great question! Two of the book's plotlines (cyberpunk noir) follow Jun investigating the increasingly troubling case of a missing child robot, and Morgan working on the launch of a new next-gen child robot, Boy X. (Crimes against robots are not illegal broadly except as theft, but crimes against child robots are illegal in the same sort of way that child porn is illegal.) In the third major plotline (bittersweet children's adventure), classmates Ruijie and Taewon -- a bright girl from a wealthy family with doting parents and the best high-tech leg braces for her advancing neurodegenerative disorder, and a bitter North Korean refugee boy more-or-less under the care of his criminal uncle, respectively -- find a strangely advanced child robot abandoned in a junkyard ...

(In this near-future Korea, btw, reunification was brought about by an event that propaganda cheerfully characterizes as "the Bloodless War" because it was mostly fought by robots. The experiences of several of the characters beg to differ with this characterization.)

There's a massive amount going on in this book, and all of it is complicated and none of it maps onto simple metaphors. For all the POVs that we get in the book, for all the fact that unexpected robot actions are frequently driving the plot, we're never in the heads of any of the robots themselves: all we can really know is what the various characters project onto them, an endless sea of human emotions about gender and disability and parenthood and childhood and societal expectations and trauma and grief.

On a plot level, I'm not at all sure it fully comes together at the end -- there's so much going on that 'coming together' seems almost impossible, tbh -- or that I actually understood all of what had, technically, happened, per se. On an emotional level, I will reiterate that the book made me feel feelings!! laudatory!!!

nicky_gabriel posting in

white_lotus

Title: Wanted (Modern AU)
Author: Nicky Gabriel
Fandom: Avatar: The Last Airbender (Cartoon 2005)
Word Count: 32K (WIP)
Rating: M
Category: gen
Characters: Suki, Hakoda, Bato
Relationships: Bato & Suki, Hakoda & Suki, Bato & Hakoda, Sokka/Suki (very background)
Tags: Father-Daughter Relationship, Adoption, Friendship, Family, Platonic Bed Sharing, Platonic Cuddling, Fluff, Angst, No Romance, Modern Setting
TW: in the description of the series, rather heavy stuff
Summary: It’s a story about how Suki has fallen in love with Sokka’s Family.
Link: Wanted
(Some parts of this series are locked and available only for registered users on AO3)

musesfool

I made this apple cider doughnut holes recipe today and meh. I didn't even like them enough plain to make the glaze. They just tasted so strongly of nutmeg to me and nothing of apple cider or even cinnamon.

I was also going to make char siu today and then pork buns with the leftovers tomorrow, but I forgot the meat has to marinate overnight so now I will make the ribs tomorrow, freeze the leftovers, and try to make the buns next weekend. Or maybe I'll just make pork fried rice. Idk. I used to always order pork buns but I don't see them on menus anymore (lemon chicken, another Chinese restaurant fave, has also seemed to disappear, at least from the places around here), so it would be fantastic if I could make them myself. It doesn't seem too hard. I mean, the hardest part for me will probably be rolling and sealing them. *hands* Eventually we'll see!

In other news, Baby Miss L has settled on being a witch for Halloween and her costume is ADORABLE. But she also has a secondary costume, as she has quite the busy social schedule, which is a cow, which doubles as pajamas, for those nights where she's out past bedtime. SO CUTE. I also got some pictures of her pumpkin picking while wearing a jack o'lantern t-shirt and she remains the cutest and best dressed kid around. 😍😍😍😍😍😍

*

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: Brass Monkey - Beastie Boys

skygiants

Last night

genarti and I took advantage of Skirball Theater's remote Halloween production, a virtual Phantom of the Opera broadcast live every night for the next two weeks from a tiny apartment in New York City with a handful of actors, a variety of very small sets and very large cardboard props, and a lot of neat visual/camera tricks.

As a bonus feature, you can see exactly how most of the visual/camera tricks work because there's a second camera set up from the front of the apartment that shows the broader view of the cast and crew rushing around to cram themselves into the tiny sets and lurk in front of walls to cast dramatic shadows and so on. As a viewer, you always have the option to toggle between the main, intended view and the backstage view to see how they're doing whatever they're doing -- tbh this in itself made it worth the price of admission for me, as a person who loves practical effects. See Carlotta's entry evoked by a giant high-heeled foot and then toggle over to the crew member carefully dangling the foot into the frame! Superb!

The production itself evokes the aesthetics of German expressionist film, with an operatic organ soundtrack and most of the dialogue conveyed by classic silent film inter-, sub- or supertitles. It's a shock when the Phantom speaks out loud to Christine, and she speaks back to him. When Raoul says he heard someone in her dressing room, Christine looks understandably baffled by the way this breaks the rules: how could a silent film man hear an angel speak?

Christine can also break the silent film framework to sing, as trained, and, eventually, talk out loud about the Phantom as well as to him, but not about anything else. I love this conceit and I think it's probably the coolest thing the show does thematically.

genarti remarked while watching that she'd also never seen a Phantom with this much actual opera in it. The production is definitely interested in Opera qua opera -- trying to say something about Art and the temporality of all artistic media and the fact that opera itself is a dying form, and tbh I'm not sure that it fully landed for me. However this may have been because these Themes were mostly conveyed in a big speech by the Phantom actor at the beginning as he puts on his makeup, and the biggest technical problem with the show (at least on the night that we saw it) was that the Phantom actor's mic was way out of balance with the background music and he was always kind of hard to hear. Which perhaps is thematic in and of itself!

Anyway, I really enjoyed the experience, worth my $20 to sit on my couch with the lights out and toggle between a Spooky Silent Phantom and a tiny apartment full of theater professionals moving tiny sets back and forth to make Spooky Silent Phantom happen, would recommend.

mark posting in

dw_maintenance

Good morning, afternoon, and evening!

We're doing some database and other light server maintenance this weekend (upgrading the version of MySQL we use in particular, but also probably doing some CDN work.)

I expect all of this to be pretty invisible except for some small "couple of minute" blips as we switch between machines, but there's a chance you will notice something untoward. I'll keep an eye on comments as per usual.

Ta for now!

skygiants

I recently had the excuse to reread my favorite epistolary romance, Zen Cho's novella The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo, which I love just as much now as I did when it came out in 2012, if not more.

The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo is set among the avant-garde literary circles of 1920s London, and Jade herself is a sharp young Malaysian writer who accidentally becomes the main character of the day by penning a scathing review of the latest book by Literary Darling Sebastian Hardie. Fortunately or unfortunately, Hardie thinks this is the hottest thing he's ever seen anyone do; moreover, Hardie's very accepting wife thinks Jade is so charming; and as for what Jade's handsome and serious editor Ravi thinks ... well, events unfold from there, carried along by Jade's unique and delightful and irrepressible voice. If every first-person protagonist I met had even a quarter of Jade's verve and personality, I would be content, but the fact that they do not just makes me cherish Jade all the more.

If you've not met Jade Yeo, or if like me you have indeed already met her and would like her to live in your house forever, the book is getting a new print edition through the small press Homeward Books and preorders have just opened!

(The Kickstarter also has NYC and Seattle book rec party tiers which unfortunately I cannot attend as i will not be anywhere near those locations but I very much hope someone else does and tells me about them.)

cyphomandra

Dear Yuletide writer,

I love Yuletide, as a challenge, a community and a tradition. I am thrilled to see what you come up with and I hope you enjoy creating it.

What I like hasn't changed much from previous years (including this sentence, its time come round again, slouching towards AO3 etc). I like humour that cares about the characters. I like characters who are outsiders in some way, but (sometimes even despite themselves!) become part of something larger - a relationship, a cause, a community. I like food as a way of showing character or worldbuilding (and for eating!). I like bittersweet endings. I like justified angst, pining, weirdness, and invention. I like pretty much any style of writing - epistolary, experimental, Dickensian - and even second person, if it works for the story. In a previous year I got IF for one story and that was fantastic. Artwise, I like quiet moments, possibly with tea or food, and prefer stylised to photorealistic. I love treats.

I have no problem with sexual content as long as it fits with the characters. I like stories that make me remember why I love the original inspiration as well as stories that make me think about it differently (and both! both is great). And I do like the canons themselves. I like these characters being part of their worlds, even when they struggle against them.

With my noms this year I am happy with crossovers (with other noms or any fandoms I've written). For AUs see specific fandoms. If you’re looking for short fandoms, either Dogsbody (one short book) or Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (one average movie) would suit.

DNWs: child or animal harm &/or death as a major plot point (outside of canon). If you’re looking back through old letters I have previously excluded earthquakes but it’s been over ten years and now I’m okay with them but would like them tagged. No noncanonical trans characters, please (exception for Jumanji - see below).

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle

Sheldon ("Shelly") Oberon
Jefferson (“Seaplane”) McDonough

I loved this so much, and it was so unexpected - I loved the van Allsburg book, really liked the Robin Williams film while being a bit disoriented about the undoing of the past, and went into this expecting it to be a bit of a let-down, and it was great. Everybody really leaned into the gaming aspects, NPC briefings, strengths/weaknesses, limited lives, and all, and this time the undoing of the past is actually heartbreaking in its consequence for Bethany as Shelly, and her/his relationship with Jefferson (I ship them in game but not in real life).

I've nominated the real world and game versions, but I'm much more interested in the experience in-game than in the real world. For this request I'd like to ignore The Next Level (although references to it welcome!), but apart from that, anything and everything goes. A sidequest within canon? AU where they don't make it past one of the challenges and have to find another way out? Another trip back into the game, just the two of them? Go wild.

I've put no non-canonical trans characters in my DNWs but for this fandom I am happy to have either/both (or anyone else) as trans.

Worrals series - WE Johns

Betty "Frecks" Lovell (Worrals Series - W. E. Johns)
Joan "Worrals" Worralson (Worrals Series - W. E. Johns)

So fantastic! So action-filled, with so many sudden reversals - and Worrals & Frecks are great, competent and brave, but never over-confident or perfect. I would love more adventures and I would also love femslash, h/c, spies, plane dogfights/crashes, coping with being in some form of wilderness after a plane crash, space AUs, or even just a quiet moment between the two of them in-between adventures. I like spies and betrayal and working with the Resistance, if you're looking for WWII themes, I would prefer the Nazis to not be massively emphasised and obviously I know that horrible things happened to British agents in reality but would prefer the narrow escapes and last-minute dashes of these books. I also love the plane bits and know almost nothing about planes so feel free to invent things.

I’ve read the first few non WWII ones (which unfortunately do have some terrible racial bits). I do have a slight preference for keeping the war setting BUT I am also totally up for leaping forward 10 years or more to see what the two of them are like. More spying? Test piloting? Involvement in the space program? Go for it. AUs of any kind fine as long as it's still them and there's danger and determination in bucketloads.

Dungeon Crawler Carl

Carl (Dungeon Crawler Carl)
Katia Grim
Princess Donut (Dungeon Crawler Carl)

I totally love this series, the world and the characters (I have read all seven books as well as listening to the audiobooks). Such a great concept, carried through with ruthless elan and with unexpected depths of feeling and insight. I love Carl, who is trying so hard despite everything being so stacked against him, and how he teeters between his goals and their costs. I love Princess Donut, who is very much a cat despite everything, and Katia, who has grown so much (ha!) during her time in the dungeon. I love the gamelit/RPG tropes (loot boxes! stat increases!) and the horror tropes and the pokes at reality TV. I love that everyone has their own agenda (look at Donut, running a revolution in her spare time) and I really, really love the way that Carl, even as he blows everything up and gets increasingly unstable, can listen to others, respect their opinions, and give them chances to make their own paths.

Prompts - go wild. Carl or Katia’s past, before they go into the dungeon? (Or Donut’s - what was she like as a kitten? What was her take on Carl when he first showed up?) A bit from Mordecai’s crawl? An outsider pov from a fan, an NPC, or another top ten crawler? Another convention appearance? An AU - feel free to design your own floor!! - or an outtake? What if, when they’d ended up in the Ghosts of Earth section, they’d been in a different area, or they’d lost their memories and thought they were back? What if they find themselves (apparently) outside the dungeon?

I do not ship any of the nominated characters - one of the things I like about DCC is that Carl hasn't had any sexual relationships since entering the dungeon. Canonical relationships (Katia/Bautista and I SUPPOSE Donut/Gravy Boat) are fine but I don't really want them to be the focus.

Feel free to play with formats. Please don't permanently kill any of the requested characters but otherwise darkness consistent with canon is fine. I am fine with gore. AUs - tbh you could probably do a terrifying coffee shop AU with this group and I would love it, as long as I still recognise the characters, but no American high school AUs, please.

Dogsbody, Diana Wynne Jones

Kathleen O’Brien
Sirius (Dogsbody)
Sol (Dogsbody)

I recently re-read this and it’s so good and so heart-breaking - DWJ is just the best at devastating endings, and this one, where Sirius hasn’t quite realised what his victory means, even while Kathleen struggles with yet another horrific loss, is still reverberating through me. I would love to read more. Does Kathleen meet Sirius again, or even end up becoming his companion - how, and what does that mean for her ties to Earth? What about Sol, who has previously avoided politics, and how do he and Earth feel about the loss of the Hunter? And Sirius, who has changed so much and come so far - what does he do now? And does he miss being a dog? I would be fine with canon AUs (perhaps a different bargain with the Wild Hunt) but am not looking for major setting/theme AUs, and it doesn’t have to end happily - but I do want more.

The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Stephen R Donaldson

Linden Avery

Linden Avery was hugely important to me in my teens, when there weren't a lot of adult females in sf/fantasy I could see myself in. I still love her as well as what the Second Chronicles do with portal fantasy, which was fascinating and heart-breaking all in one, while Thomas himself is much more of an ambivalent reading experience. I have read only the first two of the third and am not yet convinced by them.

I would like; more Linden! On Earth or visiting the Land, and I'm happy to ignore the third series or go AU from the second if you have a better idea. What if she’d gone to the Land first, instead of Covenant? What if someone from the Land comes to visit her world? I do like the third chronicles' idea of time-travelling within the Land's history, if you wanted to do that, and would love exploring more of the Land anyway. I also wonder how Linden reconciles her experiences with her everyday life on returning to our world, especially her healthsense given her job, and I'd like to see her finding some peace or happiness there, having healed from her past. I would also be interested to see Linden crossing into other fantasy worlds (for the Yuletide eligible, anything from Diana Wynne Jones or Piranesi).

I understand Covenant himself isn't everyone's cup of tea, and I haven't nominated him. I don't have strong feelings about him showing up or not; he is important to Linden, but not essential. I don’t mind either of the other nominated characters showing up; if you don't mind non-nominated, I have a weakness for Nom the Sandgorgon.

England series - KJ Charles

Archie Curtis (England series)
Daniel da Silva (England Series - KJC)
Fenella Carruth
Patricia Merton

My favourite KJC, and the one I am most likely to accidentally end up re-reading after just looking up one thing. I love everyone in these books (well, certainly all the nominated characters) - I love Archie’s reliability and Daniel’s spark, and Fenella’s well-concealed practical ruthlessness and Patricia’s determination. They’re all fantastic! I would be equally happy with slice of life or case fic, isolated country houses or London city life, supernatural AUs or inexplicably having everyone in space. I don’t want anyone to break up and I also don’t want any weddings, but otherwise I would be delighted by any and everything you can come up with.

Thanks so much!!

skygiants

( Yuletide letter )

musesfool

I'm off work today because I had to go get a tooth crowned. They've streamlined the process since early last year, when I had to go one week for the preparation and then back again a week later for the installation - they did it all in one day today, with about a 30 minute break between parts 1 and 2, where I just sat in the exam chair and read my book on my phone. This time I had to stop them a couple of times during the first part because they just spray water everywhere without sufficient suction so I felt like I was drowning a couple of times. The dentist warned me about it ahead of time and was apologetic about it, so I didn't feel like I was too much of a problem patient for stopping so I could, you know, breathe. One of the things I like about this particular dentist (there's a bunch of them at the practice and I've seen most of them over the last 5 years) is that he tells you what he's going to go ahead of time and answers questions, and then he tells you each thing he's going to do during the process right before he does it, and he gives you a heads up as to how far along in the process you are/how much more time it's going to take. Because it's unpleasant, at best. I mean, I was all numbed up for it (so numbed that my right EYE was feeling numb - the tooth being crowned is on the top right way in the back - which is a real fucking weird feeling), but ugh. I'm sure there are probably other crowns in the future - they want to get out all those old, old silver fillings, and he said this tooth did crack while he was removing it, so we caught it before it happened on its own.

I'm glad I didn't get new glasses this year - that left $950 in my FSA, which I had to supplement to pick up the rest of the cost, because I do not know what my insurance will cover as the dentist is out of network. I know I should find someone in network (and preferably near my apartment instead of in Manhattan), but as mentioned above, I like this guy and I think that is an important factor with any medical practitioner if you can get it.

So I came home and took a 3 hour nap because I didn't sleep much last night due to anxiety over all of this. Oh, and I mailed my ballot for Mamdani. I'm very curious to see if his lead in the polls translates to winning the election or if all the people who are scared because he's Muslim will turn out for Cuomo (or Sliwa, I guess, but I cannot take him seriously as a candidate). We have tended to pick terrible mayors recently, so it'll be interesting to see how this all turns out.

And I guess I mentioned reading up there, so yes, I am in the middle of a reread of Blue Lily, Lily Blue, which I am enjoying! ♥BLUE♥ remains my favorite.

*

Current Mood: sore
Current Music: Ghost - Indigo Girls

cimorene

I decided a little while ago to try one new recipe per week as far as I can manage.

Since then we have made:

Ina Garten's Black Bean Soup, which is basically a mirepoix+bell peppers plus a bunch of black beans, Southwestern seasoning, and vegetable broth. It's similar to a couple of our favorite soup recipes and also to just the way I make black beans for burrito filling, but it's good.

RecipeTinEats' Country Harvest Root Vegetable Soup, which is very simple: a huge quantity of root vegetable chunks (she gives weight of each and we followed this pretty closely, but this style of recipe is easy to substitute of course) and some alliums sauteed with thyme and curry powder for seasoning and then cooked in water till soft, with cream added at the end, pureed with an immersion blender. This was delicious and we will definitely be having it regularly.

RecipeTinEats' Ultra Lazy Creamy Chicken and Broccoli Pasta Bake. I love pasta casserole and want to try more recipes where you don't have to pre-cook the pasta. The pasta came out great and this was delicious, but it's a little rich for me. It's a bit like oven-baked mac and cheese with broccoli in it. The vibes are very creamy and fatty and it just feels extremely heavy as a main dish.

Trying a white bean soup recipe this week. (I like to make soup once a week at least in the fall and winter.)

lightreads

Being Mortal

5/5. Discussion by a surgeon about how poorly we often handle mortality – care for the elderly in general, and death for both the old and young.

Excellent. I’ve had this book on my radar for over a decade, but the last time I went to pick it up, I found out literally the next day that my father was terminally ill, and I noped out. He lived another eleven months, which was about five months longer than he was expected to, but it’s taken me nearly eight years to come back to this book. I’m very glad I did, though this is depressing and infuriating and did make me cry.

It is also incredibly useful. There is an aging person in my life whom it is likely my wife and I will need to provide care for when it is needed, and this book was incredibly grounding on what that might look like, and in supplying an ethical framework to think about it. It would be oversimplifying to say that the book argues for privileging autonomy over safety, because there’s more to it than that, but the points it makes about how so many elderly care facilities are designed for the psychological comfort of the residents’ families at the expense of the residents’ comfort and happiness is sobering.

Also notable for some candid and messy examinations of how doctors do and don’t approach mortality with patients. There are no easy answers there, as patient need will vary widely. Some need to hear it to be prepared. Some don’t ever want to hear it. But he offers up some really good advice on frameworks for decisionmaking in life or death situations that can, if done right, make things vastly easier for the family making hard calls.

Highly recommended.

Content notes: Terminal illness, death of a parent, medical gaslighting

cimorene

I wonder how many people have gotten about three hours of research deep into "How to break up with all your Google products" and given up because it's too hard or too much work. This has DEFINITELY happened to me AT LEAST three times in the last ten years.

I'm not even doing it today, I'm just reminded because there's YET ANOTHER post going around about Firefox updating to integrate AI and the hidden switches in about:config you have to use if you want to turn it off. The same post talks about switching your default search engine. In one of these previous times years ago I switched from Google to DuckDuckGo, but DuckDuckGo has been pushing AI more over time and it's really annoying so I've been meaning to switch and -

- at the bottom of the post it said we should all switch to Qwant or udm=14, and so I looked up both of those. Qwant is a French search engine that is aggressively integrating AI, but they are big on not storing and selling your data at least, which would've been nice if not for the llm. udm=14 is a string you can append in Google search that gives you the "old" (pre-AI) style results. (There are other search engines - I found a link to The Search Engine Map, which shows all the ones which give English results - but I feel this experience is representative.)

I'm weighing whether I want to switch browsers. I'm definitely mad enough to, but I hate switching browsers...

Profile

Shay

June 2020

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
	1	2	3	4	5	6
7	8	9	10	11	12	13
14	15	16	17	18	19	20
21	22	23	24	25	26	27
28	29	30

Page Summary

skygiants - (no subject)
musesfool - it takes an ocean not to break
cyphomandra - Books read, August
skygiants - (no subject)
musesfool - The chair is an island, darling, you can't touch the floor
cimorene - When two adhd girls get together... ANYTHING could stop us
sakana17 - Well, it's more farmboys (again)
musesfool - to get out and find a tight end
skygiants - (no subject)
nicky_gabriel in white_lotus - Fic: Wanted (Modern AU), gen
musesfool - We're offered Moët, we don't mind Chivas
skygiants - (no subject)
mark in dw_maintenance - Database maintenance
skygiants - (no subject)
cyphomandra - Yuletide
skygiants - (no subject)
musesfool - the last truce we ever came to from our adolescent war
cimorene - Trying one new recipe a week
lightreads - Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande
cimorene - Pushing in everywhere so aggressively and so inappropriately and breaking spellcheck

Style Credit

Base style: Five AM by winterfish
Theme: Velvet Steel by timeasmymeasure

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Oct. 30th, 2025 04:27 pm

Someone to fall back on

Reading

(no subject)

it takes an ocean not to break

Books read, August

(no subject)

The chair is an island, darling, you can't touch the floor

When two adhd girls get together... ANYTHING could stop us

Well, it's more farmboys (again)

to get out and find a tight end

(no subject)

Fic: Wanted (Modern AU), gen

We're offered Moët, we don't mind Chivas

(no subject)

Database maintenance

(no subject)

Yuletide

(no subject)

the last truce we ever came to from our adolescent war

Trying one new recipe a week

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande

Pushing in everywhere so aggressively and so inappropriately and breaking spellcheck

Profile

June 2020

Links

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags