brown_betty

What I'm reading: Joel Shepherd, Petrodor. Part II of A Trial of Blood and Steel. I had picked up the first volume of this series, Sasha, on a whim, I don't recall why. It looks like a fairly rote fantasy series, with battles and elves and a young heroine who is unusually gifted in the martial arts, and who happens to be a princess. But the world-building is very strong: complicated politically, religiously, and ethnically. The elves are inhuman but not very magical, and they do not understand how human societies work, often to their peril. The lead is an immature hothead who gets herself into far more trouble than she should be able to survive--but who appears to be learning from her mistakes. The politics are very well conveyed, and brutally dangerous. And after a somewhat rocky start in book 1, this book is passing the Bechdel test with flying colors. Shepherd is pretty clearly someone with a solid grounding in martial arts, as the battle scenes are vivid and precise. And there's even an ongoing subtextual conversation about what it means to be a Strong Woman Character.

If you're in the mood for a fairly traditional fantasy (it does have a mostly western/European cultural structure) with realistic, complicated politics and no sexual violence driving the plot or characterizations, I would recommend this.

What I just read: Shades of Milk and Honey and Glamour in Glass, by Mary Robinette Kowal. I enjoyed the first well enough to pick up the second. But I can't say I thought they were awesome, merely fairly enjoyable. They're basically Austen with a gloss of magic, and far less precise & nuanced characterization. The heroine is well-drawn, as an unattractive woman of good family who develops her artistic skills (including magical glamour) as a means of making herself a marriageable prospect; but her sister is shown to be spiteful, jealous, and self-absorbed, and their affection for one another is not believable. Still, I liked the way Kowal opened out the world in the second novel, and perhaps she continues to do so in the third, and I found the heroine's reactions to some of the events of the 2nd novel reassuringly complicated.

What I will read next: probably the next of the Shepherd novels, if I like the way this one ends. If not, The River of No Return by Bee Ridgway, which got such a stellar review I bought it immediately. Oh the dangers of online book reviews with embedded Amazon links!

Crossposted from DW, where there are comments; comment here or there.

What I read

• Barbara Hambly, Stranger at the Wedding - Reread. This isn't one of my favorites, but Hambly's virtues are so consistent it is almost always a great comfort to read her. I picked it because I've reread it much less often than my favorites.
  
  Many of Hambly's fantasies are about European-inflected worlds undergoing great technological change and attendant social shifts (sometimes it's trains, sometimes it's printing presses, sometimes it's lost access to previous wonders as transportation networks and archives break down). The background attention to the economics of her societies is one of the things that makes them feel so solid. There's also the way her take on the magic of naming seems based in scientific observation (rather than McKillip's poetry or Le Guin's meditation), and characters who are unusual for fantasy. The heroine here is tall, clumsy, arrogant, splendidly dressed, and not secretly beautiful. She returns home because of premonitions that her younger sister will die on her wedding night. The book is an investigation into a mystery and an examination of tensions within the family that cast her out six years ago.
  
  
• JoSelle Vanderhooft (ed.), Wiscon Chronicles 7: Shattering Ableist Narratives - The Wiscon Chronicles 5-7 have really felt like they're describing my Wiscon.
  
  
• Rachel Manija Brown, A Cup of Smoke: stories and poems - Noted without comment because Rachel is too close a friend for me to be objective.
  
  
• Kathryn Immonen & Valerio Schiti, Journey into Mystery Featuring Sif: Stronger than Monsters - After Kieron Gillen's Kid Loki run, Marvel relaunched Journey into Mystery with a focus on Sif, who is Thor's wife in Norse mythology and a great warrior and Thor's sometime girlfriend in the Marvel version. Asgard has recently fallen and been besieged, and Sif is determined to become better able to protect it. The means that she chooses carry an unexpected price, and make her dangerous to her friends as well as her enemies.
  
  This suffers from coming after the Gillen run, because it's well-done but not brilliant. The change in characters, focus, and tone do help diminish the comparison. (Although Immonen keeps some of Gillen's supporting cast, particularly Volstagg's family.) This arc makes a pretty good fantasy adventure, except that the last issue wraps the storyline up too quickly and in a slightly confusing way.
  
  The series is being canceled soon, which is sad; I like it so much better than others that appear to be going strong.
  
  The art is nice and nicely nonobjectifying -- Sif stands like a warrior, not a pin-up, and there are no panels oh-so-carefully arranged to show off her ass.
  
  Well, mostly nicely nonobjectifying. The supporting cast are all in medievalish clothing, with both women and men clothed for the Norse winter. Sif, however, is walking around in fur-lined shorts. Her shirt actually covers her entire torso, though! (Oh, superhero comics.) And she does not wear ridiculous metal boob armor.
  
  I am so frustrated Marvel can't manage an art team like this for Captain Marvel. I have to admit to wishing that Schiti and Matteo Scalera would be switched over to Captain Marvel after Journey into Mystery ends.

What I'm reading
Skipping around a lot. Kevin Young's The Grey Album is my morning commute book, but I haven't settled on an evening read, which needs to be less thinky and probably fiction. Tried Karen Lord's The Best of All Possible Worlds, but I'm not in the right mood for it.

What I've acquired

• Heather Gladney, Bloodstorm - The sequel to Teot's War, which I ordered before I realized I didn't like the first book that much
  
  
• Annemarie Schwartzenbach, All the Roads Are Open: The Afghan Journey - Translated by an old friend.

I am now back up to four books I have acquired this year but not yet read. But I will read them! I will read them before I get Ancient, Ancient! I am determined to stick to my arbitrary but comforting book rules. Also, they have greatly slowed my TBR shelves' conquest of my living space.

[their transcript has no timestamps, but just assume that each line of the chat is at least 30 seconds apart from the next one, and often more than a minute.]

Secure Connection

You are now connected with Angela Mae from BN.com

Elena: I would like to delete my account.

Elena: Hi. Can you please tell me how to delete my account?

Elena: Is anyone there?

Elena: Well, if I didn't want to delete my account already, I certainly would now.

Angela Mae: Hi, Elena.. This is Angela Mae. Thanks for joining Barnes and Noble Chat.

Elena: Hi. Can you please tell me how to delete my account?

Angela Mae: I understand that you would like to deactivate your account. Let me help you with this.

Angela Mae: May I please have the email address linked to your account?

Elena: [redacted]

Angela Mae: Thanks for the information.

Angela Mae: For security reasons and before I can complete your request, can you please provide me the Mailing address that is linked to your account?

Elena: [also redacted]

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Angela Mae: We have successfully deactivated your BN.com account linked to [redacted]

Elena: Thank you. Goodbye.

Angela Mae: You can use the same email address to reactivate your account.

Angela Mae: Is there anything else I can do for you?

[chat disconnected]

No, there isn't. I didn't actually want my account deactivated, I wanted it removed from the database altogether. And I didn't want to use your extremely crappy online chat, I wanted to delete it myself, but there was no way of doing that, and the FAQs gave no information about that. Nor did the FAQs on buying ebooks, or the page for the book I wanted to buy, make it clear that the book I wanted is only available to US customers. I had to sign up for an account and give them all my info and dig out my debit card (they don't take PayPal!) all to find out that Australians are not welcome here.

I want to do something REALLY REALLY UNPLEASANT to whoever writes their documentation, and to whoever Angela Mae actually is (because I have worked site support, and know a canned answer when I see it.)

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So, I am an idiot and never made hotel arrangements for Dragoncon. If anyone knows anyone who has space for one more in their room, I would be eternally grateful.

I can also offer a ride in my car to anyone heading down from DC.

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Hello, Internets!

I of course must respect the privacy of my students, so I don't talk about them directly here, or much about what I do with them (and wouldn't even if I had the time!) but I think professional conduct allows me to say this:

Today we were doing a creative writing lesson on writing an action scene. I gave the students this for an example:

At the soft scrape of a bare foot on stone , Luisa whirled.

The Grey Man stood directly behind her, reaching for her throat. Luisa didn’t waste a second. She took one step forward, lifting her knee sharply. Her tensed foot snapped up. Too late! With the speed of a snake, the Grey Man caught her ankle and yanked.

Luisa went down hard, the gritty rock of the clifftop scraping her hands and knees raw. She tasted blood in her mouth and felt the sharp pain of a bitten tongue. With a monumental effort, she forced herself back to her feet. The Grey Man was waiting. Watching.

“Give me the stone,” he said, his voice soft and sibiliant. “The secret stone. Give it to me.”

Luisa risked a look over her shoulder. The ocean below was rough, the sharp rocks jagged teeth. And there were predators in the water.

But none of those were as dangerous as the creature that blocked her exit.

No safe way past him. The only way out was down.

With her heart pounding in her chest, thumping against the stone in her pocket, Luisa turned on her heel and fled. Towards the edge of the cliff.

She felt a tug at her hair, but she wrenched free and leapt. For a breathless moment, she felt suspended in air, flying past the startled gulls who screamed their displeasure.

Then, she fell.

"What happens next?" they wanted to know.

"You tell me!" I said merrily, and set them brainstorming, planning, and drafting.

I think Luisa dies in about half the stories. 14 year olds LOVE gore.

This entry was originally posted at http://karenhealey.dreamwidth.org/67823.html. You can comment here, at Dreamwidth using OpenID, or at my website, karenhealey.com

To make flights shorter or waiting at the airport fly by:

Georgiana Darcy's Diary, Pemberley to Waterloo: Georgiana Darcy's Diary, Volume 2, and Kitty Bennet's Diary by Anne Elliot

These are ultra-short, ultra-fast, ultra-light reads. If you like P&P fanfic, these are the published version and currently the first book is free! I will admit, the strength of these is in the Kitty Bennet; I can count on one hand the number of times there's a honestly sympathetic Kitty story, and two that were about her, one of which was a very short story in a P&P anthology.

Through a Glass Darkly, Now Face to Face, and Dark Angel by Kathleen Koen - here's the weird part; this is a freakishly depressing series, with the last book being the only book you don't feel a growing sense of ennui and despair with the world and human relationships, and only because its a prequel and you already know when you read it that it's the only one doesn't go tragically from various suicides and duels. Which means I think Koen depressed herself with the first two books.

The first and second I read in my teens, and I loved them for their tragedy and reading them as an adult added in the much more depressing mundane tragedies of life and living. They're very rich, sweeping epics, the first two covering the life of Barbra Alderly, the daughter of a Jacobite viscount and granddaughter of a war hero turned duke, and the third that of her grandmother. However, the first two are not, in any sense of the word, something you invest time in unless you're willing to go through a lot of both tragedy and grinding--and I do mean grinding--misery. I still can't read them in a sitting due to emotional exhaustion. The third is lighter on that--which considering the plotline is saying something--but it also has the advantage of the author being restricted on her own established later canon and can only do so much to her characters. She does try, though

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Review copy provided by Netgalley. The galley is copyrighted 2013, but Goodreads says a version was published in 1997.

Content note: Some discussion of rape, murder, and mutilation.

This is a hard book to review because my reaction to it is basically, "Eh."

It's not a terrible book, it's not a great book, it's not off-putting, it's not absorbing. Typically, my rule for deciding if I want to watch a TV show is, "Is this more fun than reading a book?" For this book, I would much rather have been watching TV.

Euripides wrote the version of Medea best known to modern audiences: the princess of Colchis falls in love with the adventurer Jason and betrays her family -- to the point of murdering her brother -- to help Jason steal the Golden Fleece. She then has a checkered career murdering people for Jason's advancement, which ultimately leads to him becoming king of Corinth. Eventually, Jason decides to abandon her in favor of another princess. (I am not sure I have ever read a single version of this myth in which Jason is not a total schmuck.) In revenge, Medea kills the other woman and her own children. In earlier versions, Medea kills the children by accident or the children are killed by the citizens of Corinth.

In most versions, there is yet more wandering and killing and attempted killing. Most notably Medea marries Aegeus and then tries to poison Theseus when he comes to claim his birthright. (This is included in The King Must Die, because sadly Mary Renault does not seem to have ever encountered a misogynistic trope she didn't like.) Medea is often said to have escaped from both Corinth and Athens in a chariot drawn by dragons. I wonder where she stabled and fed the dragons in between witchy midnight escapes. Possibly she just borrowed them from Hekate in her times of need.

Most versions of Medea's history end with her returning to Colchis and killing her uncle to restore her father to the throne. Presumably her father felt that this made up for that one time she murdered her brother and chopped his body into little pieces to scatter in the sea.

( Mildly spoilery, but you already know most of this.Collapse )

I suspect I am officially Not Allowed to buy any more vintage art.



On the bright side, I got a bunch of vintage children's books to restock my bookshelf at the shop. Does anyone want a first edition of Emily of New Moon?



Sadly, I have not been finding much in the way of clothes. This time of year, they're always a little thin on the ground, but it's still annoying.

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OK, so do/how do you all separate fiction from comics?  My system is breaking down.  (We use Library of Congress for nonfiction, but that's terrible for fiction.)  I have a rough system of "nonsequential comics like Gorey or xkcd shelved with fiction, sequential shelved as comics."  But it's only rough and I'm not really sure I want Maus shelved alphabetically by title with the comics instead of alphabetically by author name with the fiction.

Any suggestions?  (To make matters worse, I shelve tie-in novels and scripts alphabetically by series title in with the fiction, except for screenplays by Robert Bolt.)  A pure mix is unlikely because of shelf height issues; I think it makes sense to have the noncollected comics, issue by floppy issue, segregated from regular fiction, though I could probably be argued into a change.

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