motetus

What I've recently finished reading:

Lamentation by C.J. Sansom, the 6th Shardlake novel. This is all about the heresy hunts in the last few years before Henry VIII's death - one faction wanted to go back towards Catholicism, one wanted a radical re-imagining of religion and social structures, and if you wanted to stay in the regime's good graces, you walked the narrow path of "the King is the divinely ordained leader of the Church, and whatever he says goes." Warning for historical burning of heretics, plus canon-typical violence; also for weird religion and contentious legal cases. Matthew Shardlake still has a crush on the queen (Katherine Parr).

What I'm reading now:

My hold on Katherine Addison's The Tomb of Dragons came in, so that. Just barely started.

What I recently finished watching:

American Primeval, which, huh, I've never before encountered media in which the Mormons are the bad guys. (This is not a spoiler. It's pretty clear from the get-go, but it gets more pointed and cartoon-villainy toward the end.) Definitely violent and gory, though also it felt very clearly written to Tug The Heart Strings (and then, often, deliberately kill the character it's just tried to make you care about) at which at least for me it failed to do. I liked Abish, Two Moons, and Captain Edwin Dellinger, and James Bridger amused the hell out of me, but - I mostly enjoyed it, but I don't feel it was superlative. I got tired of the filter to wash out colors so it looked almost old-photo sepia.

I did enjoy the historical setting of the Mormon War; as I mentioned last time, I researched it for my Yuletide story, and I think it's just an interesting time, the settlement/colonization of western North America.

What I'm about to start watching:

Murderbot! We always wait until enough episodes are out that we can watch ~every other day and not have to wait.

What I'm playing now:

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, which was recommended to me as a "spooky atmospheric puzzle game", and I'm enjoying it a lot. You play as a mysterious woman who has come to a mysterious hotel full of locked doors in what might be Germany in 1963, at the request of a mysterious man for reasons of ??? I told my brother about it because it's cheap in the summer sale at Steam, and he decided it sounded good so he is playing it now, a bit behind my progress but because of the nonlinearity he's ahead of me in some things. We're trying to give each other elliptical hints when needed.

osprey_archer

Today is my birthday! Happy birthday to me!

Yesterday I took chocolate white chip cookies to Dulcimer Gathering and everyone played me Happy Birthday. Today, I caught up on my correspondence while sipping my free hot chocolate at Starbucks, then spent the rest of the day happily puttering: a little cross stitch, a little dulcimer, a little reading with tea and the last of the aforementioned chocolate white chip cookies.

Next up: dinner with the family, and then I will be taking them on a tour of the Hummingbird Cottage! This is the first time that my brother and sister-in-law have seen the place with actual furniture, so I also spent some of my puttering time tidying so that everyone will believe that I live in an oasis of peace and cleanliness.

The herbs and the cherry tomatoes are growing well. There are little green tomatoes on the tomato vines now! Also, one of the tomatoes is next to a climbing vine of some variety, which has latched onto the tomato cage and as far as I can see tied itself there. Most impressed with the plant’s knot-making abilities.

osprey_archer

This week I’m doing Wednesday Reading Meme a day early, as tomorrow is MY BIRTHDAY and I will therefore be frolicking through birthday festivities.

Books I Quit Reading

Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, which I’ve meant to read for ages because it’s been recced to hell and back. It’s an excellent example of literary fiction, which unfortunately means it’s reminding me why I don’t read much modern literary fiction, which is that I find it depressing. Olive is just so mean?? She’s so contemptuous to her husband in chapter one that I was actually rooting for him to ditch her and run away with his pharmacy clerk, and I never root for male characters to leave their wives.

I read a few more chapters, but then I realized I was actively dreading picking it up again, and life is simply too short.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Nothing this week! The birthday festivities have already begun, and I spent the weekend in Bloomington, meeting a friend’s new baby and having cocktails at a speakeasy, where we had the best seats in the house watching the bartender make the drinks. He had a wonderful contraption for blowing a giant smoke-filled bubble over a drink, which clung to the rim of the glass until you popped it, and then the smoke wisped away in the dimness of the bar.

What I’m Reading Now

Hilary McKay’s The Time of Green Magic, which is a magical house children’s fantasy, and I LOVE a magical house children’s fantasy. Gorgeous. The heroine is already slipping into the books she reads, tasting the sea salt on her lips. Excited to report back.

What I Plan to Read Next

Blue Balliett’s Out of the Wild Night.

osprey_archer

Although I got Sarah Chihaya’s Bibliophobia: A Memoir for the book talk, in fact it’s a mental illness memoir with some books in. Chihaya is pondering about the stories we tell ourselves - in her case, her certainty that her story would end in suicide, and the concurrent certainty that this could only be averted if she found the exact right book to save her.

Also about her relationship to her Japanese-American identity, her feeling that as a person with ancestors who were in Japan during World War II she doesn’t really belong in the Asian-American community (because of the whole bit where her ancestors were brutally invading other Asian countries), the effect of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye on her own sense of racial identity, A. S. Byatt’s Possession as a book that shaped her understanding of what it means for “reader” to be a load-bearing identity, the fact that she doesn’t usually relate to characters in the way that many readers do as the point of a book, for her, is not to see yourself in it but to become an invisible eye experiencing things without having to be perceived…

Until she realizes upon rereading The Last Samurai that she actually does identify with one of the characters in the story, and maybe that was why she found herself able to read this particular book after her hospitalization, when for a time she found it impossible to read anything. Not just in a “I’m psychologically blocked on reading” kind of way, but in the sense that the text generally appeared to be swimming.

And it’s about the writing of books, the fact that what precipitated her long-awaited hospitalization (because she’d been waiting for this to happen for years) was, in part, her failure to write the book that she needed to write to get tenure. She didn’t write it and didn’t write it and then she lost the tenure-track position and therefore the need to write it and then wrote this book instead.

And she ponders: does that make this book the one that saved her? Or was it unrealistic all along to expect any one book to bear so much weight?

So, although it wasn’t quite what I was expecting, an interesting read for sure.

osprey_archer

A few weeks ago, I was browsing the children’s section at the library, and I sent

skygiants a photo of a book. “It’s about a Jewish boy who is evacuated during World War II and becomes a spy! Also he has a kobold and a dybbuk living on his shoulders!” I said. “You should read it!”

I was hoping hereby to offload the book onto someone else instead of adding it to my ever-growing to-read list, but of course this backfired and instead we both had to read Adam Gidwitz’s Max in the House of Spies.

Max, a child genius with a special gift for radios, escapes Germany on the Kindertransport in 1938. He ends up living with the Montagus, where he slowly realizes that Uncle Ewen Montagu is a spy, and sets his little heart on becoming a spy too so he can go back to Berlin and rescue his parents.

(“That Ewen Montagu?” some of you are saying. Yes, that Ewen Montagu, and this book also includes Jean Leslie, Cholmondeley, and Lord Rothschild who keeps blowing stuff up. I didn’t realize at first that these were real people, but

skygiants and

genarti clued me in, and now at last I’m going to read Ben McIntyre’s Operation Mincemeat, which Gidwitz mentions in the bibliography as the book that inspired this duology.)

(Also I didn’t realize going into it that this was a duology, but I just happened to see the second book on the processing cart when I was processing library books with my mother, which is fortunate because otherwise when I reached the cliffhanger ending my scream might have been heard round the world.)

Because Max is the plucky hero of a children’s adventure novel, he does in fact manage to finagle Ewen Montagu into recruiting him, and ends up going through a thrilling training regimen at Lord Rothschild’s manor, where he meets the aforementioned Jean Leslie, Cholmondeley, and Lord Rothschild. Fun training exercises ensue! (Fun for the reader, not for Max.)

Meanwhile, the kobold and the dybbuk are sitting on Max’s shoulders providing color commentary, which during the spy training mostly becomes focused on “I can’t believe they are sending an ACTUAL CHILD to spy in NAZI GERMANY.”

Now on the one hand, they certainly have a real-world point, but on the other hand, we’re not in the real world here. We’re in a children’s adventure novel, and it’s a convention of the genre that children can and should have deadly adventures, just like it’s a convention of cozy mysteries that one quirkily charming small town can have 50 murders in an indeterminate but relatively short time span without having any impact on that quirky charm.

No one reading this (well, no child reading this, adults can be spoilsports) is going, “Gosh, I hope they don’t send Max on a spy adventure.” We’re all rooting for him to go forth and spy! “Children shouldn’t be sent into deadly peril” is merely a killjoy obstacle to the adventure we all crave! The emotional dynamic here undercuts the moral point.

I also don’t think it quite worked to saddle Max with two mischief spirits who get up to no mischief beyond serving as a sort of mobile peanut gallery. I enjoyed Stein and Berg, but I also felt that the book would have been stronger without them, actually.

Criticisms aside! I really enjoyed this book, and I’m mad at myself that I didn’t get the sequel before I finished it, because it ends on a cliffhanger and now I will have to WAIT to find out what HAPPENS and the suspense is killing me.

osprey_archer

A couple weeks ago, I was browsing my favorite local bookstore when I happened upon a book about maintaining a kitchen garden. I picked it up and idly flipped through it, began to consider buying it because the advice seemed so well-suited to my garden and also the illustrations were so charming… and strangely familiar… so I flipped to the title page and shrieked like a tea kettle when I realized it was illustrated by Tasha Tudor.

Tasha Tudor, for those who don’t know, wrote and illustrated Corgiville Fair. She is also responsible for the iconic illustrations for Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess and The Secret Garden, as well as a lovely illustrated edition of Emily Dickinson upon which I doted in my youth. She also put the core in cottagecore, living in a classic New England farmhouse atop a hill in Vermont with her Nubian goats and chickens and corgis and her many, many gardens.

So of course I bought Betty Crocker’s Kitchen Gardens. And it reminded me that there’s a book about Tasha Tudor’s lifestyle, which is called The Private Life of Tasha Tudor, so I went to put it on hold… and it was gone! The library had weeded it! (The library is forever weeding things that I’m intending to check out as soon as I have the time.)

I consoled myself with Tasha Tudor’s Garden), which is full of gorgeous photographs of Tasha Tudor’s many gardens, full of roses and hollyhocks and crabapple trees. The focus is on the photogenic flowers, of course, as well as her lovely bouquets, but she also had a kitchen garden with plenty of fruit and vegetables and herbs… and also plenty of flowers, because why not? That made me feel better about the fact that my current herb and cherry tomato plants found homes on the theory of “Well, there’s some space between the flowers here…”

Anyway, fortunately the OTHER library has The Private World of Tasha Tudor, so you’d better believe I put a hold on it. They also have Tasha Tudor’s Heirloom Crafts, Tasha Tudor’s Dollhouse, and a documentary called Take Joy!: The Magical World of Tasha Tudor.

There’s also a Christmas documentary, and quite a pile of Christmas books, and of course Tudor’s many children’s books… but I already have so many books out that I’d better stop myself for now! There are so many books in this world and it’s both a blessing and a curse.

osprey_archer

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finally wrapped up Harold R. Peat’s Private Peat, a World War I memoir written in 1917 by a guy who looks, according to the frontispiece, like pre-serum Steve Rogers. Despite looking like a strong breeze would blow him over, he bluffed his way into the Canadian army soon after war was declared (he told the recruiting sergeant that he had family in Belgium, whom he needed to avenge) and fought for two years before being too injured to return to the front.

But even injured, Peat continues to serve the war effort by writing this memoir to whip up war support among Americans, who by this time have declared war but are still dragging their feet about the whole thing, in part because even at this late date many Americans doubted the atrocity stories about German troops. Peat always emphasizes that the only atrocities he is mentioning are ones where he saw the evidence with his own eyes, especially the Belgian girls raped and impregnated by German soldiers.

One begins to suspect that British war propaganda, usually lauded as so effectively, actually backfired, not only after the war but to a great extent during the war itself. The sensational accounts were so sensational that they made many people disbelieve real accounts of rapes and mass executions.

My latest Newbery is Padraic Colum’s The Big Tree of Bunlahy: Stories of My Own Countryside, which is about Colum’s own countryside not merely in the sense of Ireland but in the quite literal sense of stories that come from the specific area where he grew up, close to the Big Tree of Bunlahy. He relates the tale of the local manor, stories of local people, local variants of folktales, all in a lively and entertaining voice. An excellent read if you like folktales.

Finally, I finished William Dean Howells’ Literary Friends and Acquaintances, which really ought to be called Literary Friends and Acquaintances of the 1860s and 70s, because although he’s writing in 1900 he’s not writing about anyone more recent than that, possibly because they’re still alive to object if he says anything too nice about them. Howells is not sharing hot gossip on anyone; he’s reminiscing about people that he knew and liked and wants to present in a good light, Longfellow and Lowell and Whittier and Professor Child (of Child Ballad fame) and so forth and so on. A restful book.

What I’ve Reading Now

Nothing that requires a progress report right now.

What I Plan to Read Next

Howells wrote so charmingly about his friend the Norwegian-American author Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen that I decided to read one of his books. Gutenberg doesn’t have Gunnar, the one Howells identifies as most famous, but they do have Boyhood in Norway: Stories of Boy-life in the Land of the Midnight Sun, and as you know I LOVE a good childhood memoir.

seascribble

Spoilers for everything. I have over-all been enjoying it still! Learned that it was conceived as a 6 episode show but Apple ordered 10, which definitely explains some things.

( It isn't EVEN a premium quality show )

Shipping feelings: I have read a lot of good, weird stuff about Gurathin and Murderbot being autistic and strange at each other in various ways involving wirefucking, gunport fingering, and Fucking For Science. As the author of that last one says, "aroace murderbot truthers do not @ me. you know already that god likes you best," I think there's a world where MB can be like "ew put my mouth that I use to talk on a human?" and also be kinky without obliterating the character we get in the books.

Also have read a bunch of good stuff about ART and Murderbot: this amazing one where ART writes Murderbot a sex act code and it's weird and they talk and I just found the vibes and the voices and the way the topic was approached to be perfectly in character.

And this one which fucking REWROTE MY BRAIN CHEMISTRY, half the TL has already rec'd it because I've been screaming about it to anybody who opens a DM with me, the fucking INTIMACY, the tenderness, the most relatable piece of media since the actual books. The voices and interaction are perfect, the feelings are perfect, the nonsexual kink and sensory overload and praise kink ("ART said, Your recent security performance continues to meet expectations. I couldn’t deal with that either,") are perfect, it's all perfect, go read it.

And because I wouldn't be me if I weren't bringing the gross: here's some fic where Iris masturbates with Perihelion's help and it gets its robot rocks off on acoustics. It's the highest quality what if you jerked off with your sibling and your sibling was a giant sentient space ship fic out there, I'm convinced.

isis

What I recently abandoned reading:

I got just over halfway through Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao before deciding that YA mecha is not my thing, even when it's a YA mecha AU of Chinese history. I think I'd rather read an actual historical novel or even nonfiction about Wu Zetian, who seems to have been an impressive-as-hell woman. (I will take recommendations!)

What I'm reading now:

Lamentation, the 6th Shardlake book by C. J. Sansom. (An actual historical novel! 😁)

What I recently finished watching:

S2 of Andor, which as I said, weirdly ironic to be watching as we grapple with our own ascendant Evil Empire. The pacing of this season was strange, big time-skips and characters that had seemed important in S1 (or in early episodes of S2) disappearing completely, or reappearing briefly only to be killed. I was expecting more about Mon Mothma's family, after all the screentime lavished on the wedding and her sort-of-blackmail situation. I was also expecting more of a resolution, though that's probably because I only vaguely remember Rogue One, so a lot of the breadcrumbs were, "wait, who was that again?" instead of, "aha!" for me. But I liked Kleya a whole lot, and also the snarky ex-Empire droid, and some of the spycraft bits were fun.

What I'm watching now:

We are giving American Primeval a try, despite it probably being on the violent/gory side for our tastes. We're two episodes in, and - I immediately recognized Shorty Bowlegs from the most recent season of Dark Winds! (Derek Hinkey, playing Red Feather.) Also, there is a local(ish) woman in it, Nanabah Grace from Cortez just down the road, who plays Kuttaambo'i. An article about her in the local newspaper was the way I first heard of this series, actually.

I'm enjoying the historical stuff; it's set during the Mormon War, which I actually researched a bit for my Yuletide fic, the premise of which was that the main reason that Deseret became an independent republic in the alt-history of Francis Spufford's Cahokia Jazz was that President Buchanan backed down in the face of united Mormons and natives, as both religion and respect for the tribes were stronger in that universe's US. I also like seeing the Old West, even though it was all filmed in New Mexico pretending to be Wyoming, although I'm getting a bit tired of the washed-out sepia filter.

What I recently finished playing:

Okay, not quite finished, but I have completed the last major quest in Mass Effect: Andromeda, so it's basically over. (I mean, the credits rolled! Therefore, it's over!) I know that Andromeda is considered ME's poor stepchild, but - I really enjoyed it. The "major threat to the world as we know it!!1!!one!" of the main trilogy is such a staple plotline of video games like this that I appreciated the "survive, explore, and (hopefully) thrive in a NEW UNIVERSE (and also defeat the major threat to the world as we know it)" plotline for its novelty. I thought the structure of quests opening new planets and objectives in a rough but not strict order worked well, and I really liked that most (maybe all?) decisions are not hugely critical, so you don't doom yourself to a bad ending by choosing X instead of Y. I did check the wiki a few times when I was nervous about things, but pretty much none of these decisions made any real difference, which meant I was free to actually role-play as "what WOULD (me as) Sara Ryder do?" and I find that much more relaxing.

I wasn't quite completionist - I didn't do all the fetch quest type quests, and I didn't do one vault (Elaaden, which I might go back and do), but I did pretty much everything else. I liked the glyph puzzles, and I hated the Architects, ugh. I played mostly as what in the main trilogy would be Infiltrator (combat + tech). I romanced Liam (after a fling with Peebee). It was fun!

What I'm playing next:

I think I will try some shorter games; I got Lorelei and the Laser Eyes a while back because a friend recommended it, and Skabma - Snowfall from a recent deal, because it looked pretty. I might try Baldur's Gate 3 again - I never managed to get into it and found it frustrating and annoying. Eventually I plan to get Dragon Age: The Veilguard, and also probably Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which I've heard good things about.
(Or sell me on your favorite adventure game!)

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Motetus

Page generated Jul. 3rd, 2025 07:48 pm

Reading

wednesday reads and things

Happy Birthday to Me!

Wednesday Reading Meme on Tuesday

Book Review: Bibliophobia

Book Review: Max in the House of Spies

The World of Tasha Tudor

Wednesday Reading Meme

media post: murderbot

thursday reads and things

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