Wednesday(?!) books
Aug. 15th, 2024 05:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sorcyressOKAY HELLO HI!
It is actually Wednesday again, and that's fine, I can do Wednesday books on a Wednesday sometimes. I should probably give other updates sometime --short version, the woods were very nice and I was glad to dance in them-- but let's do books! Because it's been two months and I've actually read some books!
Finished Reading Recently -it's gonna be many!
I last reported I was going to read Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner and I did! It was gay! I wasn't expecting it to be gay, and that part was pretty fuckin' great, ngl. The fancy intrigue parts of it were kinda whatever, the swords parts were solidly alright, but the gay bits kicked ass! I should probably go ahead and read more Tremontaine, but I think I won't love it as much as Racheline does and that's okay.
When I was in Maryland, I had a hankering to reread an old humour novel from my childhood, so I went through Rohan Candappa's Autobiography of a One-Year Old. It's a little dated (in terms of Teletubbies being The Big Thing) but still perfectly pleasant.
Off I went to Pinewoods! During ESC/Scots I didn't read much, but I did read "Joe Diabo's Farewell" from Andy Duncan's An Agent of Utopia out loud with SamSam (we were experimenting with reading books aloud to each other, which turns out to be grand). I think that was all during campertime, but then I returned as crew, and had a lovely mutual day off with SamSam where we read MM Kaye's The Ordinary Princess to each other over the course of the day. It's quite short enough to have managed the whole thing, and still a completely lovely fairy tale (though gosh as an adult the economics are not to be believed).
On crew I had a lot more time/inclination to read books (which is to say, tired after shift -> go to the hammock chair and read something) and so I reread the entire Murderbot Diaries series (by Martha Wells), in the order 1234576, which may or may not be correct. I had a lot of energy through number five, and I continue to love that number 6 is a true crime novel (in space!) but found it surprisingly hard to get through 7, probably because Everyone Is Traumatized And That's Hard. I do _really_ love the resolution of 7 though, I feel like it's such a perfect culmination of SecUnit's arc.
I also read a random book off the crew bookshelf, since it caught my eye and then proved interesting. Nonfiction, which I hardly ever partake in: Goat Man by Thomas Thwaites. It's about a British fellow who decides that life would be simpler if he was a goat, and sets out to make it happen. It contains quite a lot of ruminations (haha) about goats and how exactly they work, and about the differences and similarities between humans and animals. It was surprisingly neat, albeit somewhat unsatisfying --not because he didn't reach his goal, but because the part where he was a goat for a few days was such a fast part of the book which seemed rushed after all the buildup.
Around the time I was returning home from camp, Sam was excited about a new romance he'd stumbled on at random, The Missing Page by Cat Sebastian. I am not usually one to start series in the middle, so I grabbed Hither Page first, and we had a brief and cute series of texts where we were going "awww!" mutually about these two adorable post-war gay men at different stages of their relationship. When I mentioned all this to Ezri, they were very much "oh yeah, Cat Sebastian is the good shit wrt queer historical romance" so I may put more of her stuff on the list. The Page books felt real good in that they're not dissimilar to my beloved Lord Wimsey, who gets credit for sorta kicking off this whole thing where I actually read books regularly again. By which I mean, they are murder mysteries (fuck yeah) in addition to being cozy queer romances about traumatized war boys.
(Lord Peter Wimsey is not on-the-page queer, and his war was the first not the second, but uh...come on. The genre is not that far a stretch).
When walking to the train station the other morning, I passed by a free copy of Daniel Pinkwater's The Last Guru sitting on a wall, and immediately put it into my purse. I have read surprisingly little Pinkwater for how good he is (I read The Big Orange Splot to Austin not too long ago and was reminded how much it is the distillation of who and what I am). I read the whole thing yesterday while going to and from hanging out with mom, and it's just...charming, and weird, and what Pinkwater ought to be.
Speaking of hanging out with mom, we went to the central branch of the Boston Public Library today, and in addition to *amazing* architecture and general bragging, I showed her the exceptional childrens' section. As we were passing by, she saw something saying Knuffle Bunny and was all like "oh that's a great title". At which point I had to go all "hang on, you mean you don't know Mo Willems?" and immediately grabbed Knuffle Bunny and literally the only Elephant-and-Piggie book they had on the shelf (Listen to my Trumpet) and I dragged them over to mom where we were sitting carefully outside kids room and you know what? It is still great, at age 34, to have your mother read good picture books to you. If you have a mom that doesn't suck and a life where this makes sense, please try it sometime.
I explained that Mo Willems is basically the modern day Seuss, and I stick to it --he's doing such brilliant and charming work in the picture book space, and I love the Elephant and Piggie series so so so much! It felt really good to get to introduce mom to them.
I THINK THAT'S EVERYTHING I CAN REMEMBER. DAMN.
Currently Reading
This morning over breakfast, I found that Ezri had taken out my copy of The Poorcraft Cookbook somewhere in the process of moving everything around the kitchen while I was gone, and so I read a good forty pages of the beginning or so. Not gotten to the receipe part, but the background part is interesting. I should really read all my Poorcraft books (by C. Spike Trotman).
Back on Juneteenth, I grabbed something that sounded interesting from the local library, and managed to get through 2/8 essays in Ta-Neshi Coates's We Were Eight Years in Power. They were good! I should read more of this shit! I'm just generally disinterested in nonfiction of all sorts, and I got real busy real fast so my borrow of that one lapsed.
At camp I started a reread of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy which is...still good? I'm very pleased/relieved that it's still more or less as good as I remember. Zaphod is still hashtag-life-goals (this tells you a lot about my life) and the whole experience keeps tumbling me in weird high school nostalgia, but yeah, Douglas Adams knew what he was doing.
Hitting the random button at Erosblog (my favourite sexblog, look it up at your own risk) brought me an exceprt from Nancy Friday's The Secret Garden, which you maybe read as a teenager in the 70s and felt very liberated and sneaky doing so. Since I did not read it clandestinely as a teenager, I'm reading it openly now as an adult. It is incredibly dated but also really interesting as an artifact of the clash between the feminist and sexual revolutions (and of course stubbornly maintains that there shouldn't be a clash at all, that the one should feed the other.) It's all about ~the female fantasy~ and has a very broad and fascinating collection of stories. I think I like it as pornography, even as it vacillates between "totally tame by my liberated slutty standards" and "jegus fuck I did not expect beastiality that early in the collection". I definitely like it as a historical artifact, in much the same way I enjoy reading things from The Rialto Report (which collects stories the of golden age porn scene in Manhattan). Sex is so neat to learn about! People are fuckin' weird!!!
Yesterday, expecting that The Last Guru wouldn't quite be enough to get me through the trains, I also grabbed my copy of The Silver Gryphon off the shelf and have been rereading that. I'm about halfway through, and it's just...it's so _comforting_ to have books that I reread like once a year or whatever. I hope keeping actual data on what/when I read isn't going to fuck me up for my rereads, but I don't think it will. Anyways, this is probably either my favourite or second favourite Mercades Lackey (the other would be By the Sword), and I skipped it when I was doing a lot of Lackey last fall so it's nice to get to it now.
Reading in the Future
Have I mentioned how great it is to have Libby working well and integrated with multiple cards? It's pretty great! Get hooked into many library systems if that's a thing you can do, I totally recommend it!
I have Once Upon a Blue Moose by Pinkwater, which appears to be a compilation of the first three Blue Moose books. Deep-cut Narbonic fans will know why I was so drawn to this one in particular. So that's probably next after I finish Silver Gryphon. Speaking of Pinkwater, I have a hold out on Lizard Music, another extremely classic of his that I've never gotten to. Eventually I will probably get around to rereading Atilla the Pun as well, since that's the one I remember most from my own childhood.
I put both The White Gryphon and The Black Gryphon (by Mercedes Lackey) on hold because it's been _ages_ since I reread either of them. Like...since college? Before? No idea. Silver Gryphon is such a phenomonal standalone that I don't really feel the need to figure out what Skan and Amberdrake were up to before having awesome kids, but every once in a while I feel I'm due? Or maybe I'll reread them and (like with the Winds trilogy) confirm that actually I'm just done with them now.
Mom mentioned having Bury Your Gays recently come in from preorders, and oh yeah, I have not actually read Chuck Tingle but I think his internet presence is Good and I would like to consume his books. I should find out if the libraries have any of the pounded-in-the-butt books and try some of those too, but this feels like a good start.
Mom also mentioned Uglies by Scott Westerfield and was astonished I'd missed it. She said the sequals I could pass on, but this one is excellent (and apparently about to be a movie or tv series or whathaveyou).
Other recent classics that mom encouraged me in: Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin which fuckin' _everyone_ is reading and loves (and holy wow, just saw that Libby says "479 people total are waiting" dang). And then I'm also gonna try and read The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman, since I do like his humour and I've been meaning to see how it translates to the page.
And then of course in the very near future school will start again. On the plus side, maybe then I can get back into the proper habit of reading all my webcomics (I have basically abandoned everything since late June) and here.
~Sor
MOOP!
It is actually Wednesday again, and that's fine, I can do Wednesday books on a Wednesday sometimes. I should probably give other updates sometime --short version, the woods were very nice and I was glad to dance in them-- but let's do books! Because it's been two months and I've actually read some books!
Finished Reading Recently -it's gonna be many!
I last reported I was going to read Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner and I did! It was gay! I wasn't expecting it to be gay, and that part was pretty fuckin' great, ngl. The fancy intrigue parts of it were kinda whatever, the swords parts were solidly alright, but the gay bits kicked ass! I should probably go ahead and read more Tremontaine, but I think I won't love it as much as Racheline does and that's okay.
When I was in Maryland, I had a hankering to reread an old humour novel from my childhood, so I went through Rohan Candappa's Autobiography of a One-Year Old. It's a little dated (in terms of Teletubbies being The Big Thing) but still perfectly pleasant.
Off I went to Pinewoods! During ESC/Scots I didn't read much, but I did read "Joe Diabo's Farewell" from Andy Duncan's An Agent of Utopia out loud with SamSam (we were experimenting with reading books aloud to each other, which turns out to be grand). I think that was all during campertime, but then I returned as crew, and had a lovely mutual day off with SamSam where we read MM Kaye's The Ordinary Princess to each other over the course of the day. It's quite short enough to have managed the whole thing, and still a completely lovely fairy tale (though gosh as an adult the economics are not to be believed).
On crew I had a lot more time/inclination to read books (which is to say, tired after shift -> go to the hammock chair and read something) and so I reread the entire Murderbot Diaries series (by Martha Wells), in the order 1234576, which may or may not be correct. I had a lot of energy through number five, and I continue to love that number 6 is a true crime novel (in space!) but found it surprisingly hard to get through 7, probably because Everyone Is Traumatized And That's Hard. I do _really_ love the resolution of 7 though, I feel like it's such a perfect culmination of SecUnit's arc.
I also read a random book off the crew bookshelf, since it caught my eye and then proved interesting. Nonfiction, which I hardly ever partake in: Goat Man by Thomas Thwaites. It's about a British fellow who decides that life would be simpler if he was a goat, and sets out to make it happen. It contains quite a lot of ruminations (haha) about goats and how exactly they work, and about the differences and similarities between humans and animals. It was surprisingly neat, albeit somewhat unsatisfying --not because he didn't reach his goal, but because the part where he was a goat for a few days was such a fast part of the book which seemed rushed after all the buildup.
Around the time I was returning home from camp, Sam was excited about a new romance he'd stumbled on at random, The Missing Page by Cat Sebastian. I am not usually one to start series in the middle, so I grabbed Hither Page first, and we had a brief and cute series of texts where we were going "awww!" mutually about these two adorable post-war gay men at different stages of their relationship. When I mentioned all this to Ezri, they were very much "oh yeah, Cat Sebastian is the good shit wrt queer historical romance" so I may put more of her stuff on the list. The Page books felt real good in that they're not dissimilar to my beloved Lord Wimsey, who gets credit for sorta kicking off this whole thing where I actually read books regularly again. By which I mean, they are murder mysteries (fuck yeah) in addition to being cozy queer romances about traumatized war boys.
(Lord Peter Wimsey is not on-the-page queer, and his war was the first not the second, but uh...come on. The genre is not that far a stretch).
When walking to the train station the other morning, I passed by a free copy of Daniel Pinkwater's The Last Guru sitting on a wall, and immediately put it into my purse. I have read surprisingly little Pinkwater for how good he is (I read The Big Orange Splot to Austin not too long ago and was reminded how much it is the distillation of who and what I am). I read the whole thing yesterday while going to and from hanging out with mom, and it's just...charming, and weird, and what Pinkwater ought to be.
Speaking of hanging out with mom, we went to the central branch of the Boston Public Library today, and in addition to *amazing* architecture and general bragging, I showed her the exceptional childrens' section. As we were passing by, she saw something saying Knuffle Bunny and was all like "oh that's a great title". At which point I had to go all "hang on, you mean you don't know Mo Willems?" and immediately grabbed Knuffle Bunny and literally the only Elephant-and-Piggie book they had on the shelf (Listen to my Trumpet) and I dragged them over to mom where we were sitting carefully outside kids room and you know what? It is still great, at age 34, to have your mother read good picture books to you. If you have a mom that doesn't suck and a life where this makes sense, please try it sometime.
I explained that Mo Willems is basically the modern day Seuss, and I stick to it --he's doing such brilliant and charming work in the picture book space, and I love the Elephant and Piggie series so so so much! It felt really good to get to introduce mom to them.
I THINK THAT'S EVERYTHING I CAN REMEMBER. DAMN.
Currently Reading
This morning over breakfast, I found that Ezri had taken out my copy of The Poorcraft Cookbook somewhere in the process of moving everything around the kitchen while I was gone, and so I read a good forty pages of the beginning or so. Not gotten to the receipe part, but the background part is interesting. I should really read all my Poorcraft books (by C. Spike Trotman).
Back on Juneteenth, I grabbed something that sounded interesting from the local library, and managed to get through 2/8 essays in Ta-Neshi Coates's We Were Eight Years in Power. They were good! I should read more of this shit! I'm just generally disinterested in nonfiction of all sorts, and I got real busy real fast so my borrow of that one lapsed.
At camp I started a reread of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy which is...still good? I'm very pleased/relieved that it's still more or less as good as I remember. Zaphod is still hashtag-life-goals (this tells you a lot about my life) and the whole experience keeps tumbling me in weird high school nostalgia, but yeah, Douglas Adams knew what he was doing.
Hitting the random button at Erosblog (my favourite sexblog, look it up at your own risk) brought me an exceprt from Nancy Friday's The Secret Garden, which you maybe read as a teenager in the 70s and felt very liberated and sneaky doing so. Since I did not read it clandestinely as a teenager, I'm reading it openly now as an adult. It is incredibly dated but also really interesting as an artifact of the clash between the feminist and sexual revolutions (and of course stubbornly maintains that there shouldn't be a clash at all, that the one should feed the other.) It's all about ~the female fantasy~ and has a very broad and fascinating collection of stories. I think I like it as pornography, even as it vacillates between "totally tame by my liberated slutty standards" and "jegus fuck I did not expect beastiality that early in the collection". I definitely like it as a historical artifact, in much the same way I enjoy reading things from The Rialto Report (which collects stories the of golden age porn scene in Manhattan). Sex is so neat to learn about! People are fuckin' weird!!!
Yesterday, expecting that The Last Guru wouldn't quite be enough to get me through the trains, I also grabbed my copy of The Silver Gryphon off the shelf and have been rereading that. I'm about halfway through, and it's just...it's so _comforting_ to have books that I reread like once a year or whatever. I hope keeping actual data on what/when I read isn't going to fuck me up for my rereads, but I don't think it will. Anyways, this is probably either my favourite or second favourite Mercades Lackey (the other would be By the Sword), and I skipped it when I was doing a lot of Lackey last fall so it's nice to get to it now.
Reading in the Future
Have I mentioned how great it is to have Libby working well and integrated with multiple cards? It's pretty great! Get hooked into many library systems if that's a thing you can do, I totally recommend it!
I have Once Upon a Blue Moose by Pinkwater, which appears to be a compilation of the first three Blue Moose books. Deep-cut Narbonic fans will know why I was so drawn to this one in particular. So that's probably next after I finish Silver Gryphon. Speaking of Pinkwater, I have a hold out on Lizard Music, another extremely classic of his that I've never gotten to. Eventually I will probably get around to rereading Atilla the Pun as well, since that's the one I remember most from my own childhood.
I put both The White Gryphon and The Black Gryphon (by Mercedes Lackey) on hold because it's been _ages_ since I reread either of them. Like...since college? Before? No idea. Silver Gryphon is such a phenomonal standalone that I don't really feel the need to figure out what Skan and Amberdrake were up to before having awesome kids, but every once in a while I feel I'm due? Or maybe I'll reread them and (like with the Winds trilogy) confirm that actually I'm just done with them now.
Mom mentioned having Bury Your Gays recently come in from preorders, and oh yeah, I have not actually read Chuck Tingle but I think his internet presence is Good and I would like to consume his books. I should find out if the libraries have any of the pounded-in-the-butt books and try some of those too, but this feels like a good start.
Mom also mentioned Uglies by Scott Westerfield and was astonished I'd missed it. She said the sequals I could pass on, but this one is excellent (and apparently about to be a movie or tv series or whathaveyou).
Other recent classics that mom encouraged me in: Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin which fuckin' _everyone_ is reading and loves (and holy wow, just saw that Libby says "479 people total are waiting" dang). And then I'm also gonna try and read The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman, since I do like his humour and I've been meaning to see how it translates to the page.
And then of course in the very near future school will start again. On the plus side, maybe then I can get back into the proper habit of reading all my webcomics (I have basically abandoned everything since late June) and here.
~Sor
MOOP!
no subject
on 2024-08-15 09:28 am (UTC)I'm pretty sure that not reading Peter as queer is reading against the text. (Extra-diegetically, too.)
no subject
on 2024-08-18 10:35 pm (UTC)Interesting! I'm currently 1234657 (ie "internal chronology") because 5+7 really do need to be adjacent, so my usual go-to of "straightforward pub order no exceptions" doesn't work well. Hadn't considered just treating 7 as the coda to 5 it obviously is and pushing 6 to the end. Bonus: 4 and 6 have similar resolutions, which is only really noticeable if you read them one after the other.
no subject
on 2024-08-20 09:57 pm (UTC)Westerfeld's Midnighters series is also really good, as is So Yesterday. (I like him a lot as an author : ))