stuff i read 22 Jul 2020
Jul. 22nd, 2020 01:25 amZen Cho, “The House of Aunts” AAAAAAAhh I now have #auntgoals. The tone is a departure from Sorcerer to the Crown, which was Cho doing Regency pastiche. This is raw unfiltered Cho and she does that really impressive thing where the dialogue is liberally sprinkled with a language(s) I have zero familiarity with (Malay, Hokkien) and she makes it both authentic and legible to me, an English speaker? Well done and funny af to boot.
Edmond Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac (1897) | tr. from the French There should be a law against the quantity of wigs one is permitted to snatch per line of dialogue. Which is to say, this play is a veritable compendium of sick burns (my favorite: “this production is so bad we’re gonna refund everyone’s tickets”). The main character, Cyrano, is sharp of wit and a master of both wordplay and swordplay. He’s got a tragically, comically big nose which prevents him declaring himself to the object of his affections; instead he undertakes to woo her on behalf of a comrade, by writing love letters. The lady unknowingly falls in love with him through the letters. This book was recommended to me as tragedy masquerading as a comedy, and that it is. That it most assuredly is. Every time the pastry-chef-slash-groom came onscreen I was giggling uncontrollably. It was a bit slow to start but from about 70% onwards the tension was unbearable.
Diana Wynne Jones, Dark Lord of Derholm (1998) Syncread with![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
cafemassolit here. This was advertised to me as tourism=colonialism and “let’s takedown fairyland capitalism,” which is true as far as it goes and y’all know I’m always down to dismantle capitalism. But! I am still recovering from the shock that Diana Wynne Jones has it in her to write a functional family. Wizard Derk and his half-human, half-critter brood live in a universe that is being ruthlessly plumbed for resources (just how ruthlessly will take your breath away) and turned into a theme park by a bloodless ghoul of a capitalist from our world. This is, as all DWJ’s books are, an uproarious and sharply observed story, but it’s a less cohesive and more patchwork than I’m used to—she’s always chaotic but she usually ties it together with a bow at the end, and I felt there were more haphazard pieces sticking out than is her wont. Thoroughly enjoyed it however! The part that I enjoyed most was in fact not the anticapitalist sentiment (of which there is plenty, rejoice) but the commentary on parenting? Like, Derk and Mara are not perfect parents but they are 100% committed and present parents, which we don’t get a lot of in fantasy. Their failures offer an opening to my favorite character, the grumpy mentor-dragon, to step into the gap.
Claudia Gray, Lost Stars (2015) (Journey to Star Wars: The Force Awakens #1) What if Romeo and Juliet were best friends and also ace pilots at the Imperial Academy in the years before the first Death Star was built? Hello friends and welcome to my keyboardsmashing review of a book that I will proceed to quote EXTENSIVELY, more because it hit all my buttons than because it’s an earth-shatteringly original story. It is for sure a testament to how well my friends know me thatazdaema came to me bearing this rec—thank you, it was exactly my speed—and that as soon as I told witcherology I was reading a Star Wars book she knew instantly which one I meant—because my Brand is evidently that strong. I mean, childhood bffs!!!! Fighting on opposite sides of a war!!! Lost Stars is a competently executed novel but not in any way a transcendent one—it’s a seaworthy vessel, it’s just that if you’re not interested in the destination there’s no sights or fancy amenities to make it worth your while. I feel obliged to warn that we’re denied a happy ending, because it has been borne upon me that this is a thing folks care about; for myself I only care that they recognize each other as the most important person in their lives. It ends on a cliffhanger because…they want us to buy the next book in the series, ig.
Thane and Ciena are two kids from clashing cultural backgrounds (in crude terms, he’s a city boy and she’s a valley girl; they grow up on a backwater planet) with radically divergent moral philosophies (this becomes particularly glaring in the arena of oaths and loyalty: what does one owe to people/institutions who do not keep faith with you?). Thane is a cynic and Ciena an idealist; Thane is inclined toward chaos, Ciena toward order. Thane defects to the Rebellion and Ciena rises high in the Imperial ranks. Thane is obviously right and Ciena is wrong. The conversations between them are handled with more nuance than that, of course, but the problem isn’t that Ciena doesn’t have perfectly comprehensible motivations: It’s that the secondary cast, and the entire weight of the narrative momentum, is busy proving Thane right and Ciena wrong. Which makes the romance ultimately less interesting and less urgent because it’s just an impossibly tall order for me as a reader to identify with fascists, sorry! Anyway here are some tropes that made me swoon:
Co-piloting as a metaphor for a lifelong partnership? Never ever gets old. They have their own secret hideyhole/batcave!!! Omg it’s Field Day and they run the pilot equivalent of a three-legged race—and smoke the competition. The post-pubescent “he’s handsome/she’s beautiful” revelations also never get old. Faithfully adopting the mourning rituals of your beloved, even if there is a large cultural chasm between them and you!!! He guesses her password on the first try!!
“(Thane’s older brother) had said there was only one reason to pick up some girl from the valleys—and if that was what Than was after, he ought to get one who had breasts already. Than had split Dalton’s lip before their parents pulled them apart.” “Taught him that it didn’t matter who was really right or wrong—because the rules were set by whoever held the cane.” “Ciena Ree’s one of the best pilots here. You could’ve gone to twenty different worlds and never found anyone better to fly with.” “Sometimes even looking at her hurt—No. It irritated him. Angered him. It didn’t hurt.”
“You think everything the academy and the Empire does is perfect!” “And you think every authority figure is evil like your father!”
“It’s not whether he’s my friend or someone I love. He’s both. Thane’s always been both, since the beginning.” “But it hadn’t changed. That was the amazing thing. They’d always belonged to each other in ways that were difficult to define; Thane felt as thought they’d simply acknowledged what had been true from the start.” —>MY SOUL HAS STRAIGHT-UP ASCENDED TO ANOTHER PLANE
“But it wasn’t against regulations to love what she did—or to remember what she had lost.” “You don’t have the right to risk lives you’re responsible for to save those you aren’t.” “Th excellence of her service had long since ceased to be only a matter of honoring her oath. She also thought of it as the price she paid for giving Thane his freedom. No one would ever be able to say she hadn’t paid in full.” “…not because he believed the Rebellion was pure good but because he’d learned the Empire was pure evil.” “Always Ciena. Did Thane possess a memory worth having that she wasn’t a part of?” “And I don’t want other people to die because I’m afraid of hurting this one person in the entire Imperial Starlet that I love.” “He didn’t love the Rebellion more than he loved Ciena. But he could be willing to die for only one of those things.” “Before they were ten years old, they’d known when to let each other remain silent, how to be close to each other without intruding. How many people ever understood someone that well?” “Nobody ever knows the whole truth. That’s why promises mean something. Otherwise they’d be too easy.” “Just for the record, Kyrell? The galaxy is full of women who don’t fight for the enemy.” “It was his own business if he crossed the galaxy, or broke his heart, or steered his X-Wing straight into the core of a star.” “He knew what Ciena would do as surely as if he’d come up with the plan himself. ‘She’s going to crash it.’” “All I ever asked, in all those battles, was not to be the one who killed you.” “But she thought she would always know him, by his step or his flight or his eyes. Some about his eyes never changed.” “Because the deck is always stacked, Ciena. All we can do is stack it in our favor.”
“You would, if it were me inside that cell.” “…yes. I would.”
Joan Wolf, His Lordship’s Desire (1996) It is unclear to me if Joan Wolf is writing romances or horse-management manuals, but either way my id is very gratified by the prolific quantity of her output. Is she a one-note writer? Yes. Does that one note (childhood-bffs-to-lovers) happen to float my particular boat? Also yes.
asoiaf | Traveling Far by astolat (23k) Jaime and Brienne leave Riverrun and take a detour. Instead of being captured by Bloody Mummers they rescue Arya from the Hound and go to live on Tarth, farm sheep, have babies, and raise Arya + Sansa (whom they collected from KL). The final 10% is Tyrion outsider POV and I have literally never enjoyed a Tyrion POV as much as this. All-around effervescently soft story. I throw a lot of shade at show-first fans but I will give them this: Book!Tywin fucking exhausts me; show!Tywin could, conceivably, be the patriarch of a semi-functional family. Can I just get on my Arya Stark stan soapbox and protest that Nymeria is not Sansa’s direwolf and Arya offering to share her with Sansa is ….somewhat problematic? Also if we need 7 people to witness a wedding are you really going to recruit Arya to stand in for the Stranger??? This version of Arya has never even trained as an assassin wtf. Idk why I am griping about a fic that I enjoyed so much, pay no attention, ilu astolat plz continue to bless us with the content.
Edmond Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac (1897) | tr. from the French There should be a law against the quantity of wigs one is permitted to snatch per line of dialogue. Which is to say, this play is a veritable compendium of sick burns (my favorite: “this production is so bad we’re gonna refund everyone’s tickets”). The main character, Cyrano, is sharp of wit and a master of both wordplay and swordplay. He’s got a tragically, comically big nose which prevents him declaring himself to the object of his affections; instead he undertakes to woo her on behalf of a comrade, by writing love letters. The lady unknowingly falls in love with him through the letters. This book was recommended to me as tragedy masquerading as a comedy, and that it is. That it most assuredly is. Every time the pastry-chef-slash-groom came onscreen I was giggling uncontrollably. It was a bit slow to start but from about 70% onwards the tension was unbearable.
Diana Wynne Jones, Dark Lord of Derholm (1998) Syncread with
cafemassolit here. This was advertised to me as tourism=colonialism and “let’s takedown fairyland capitalism,” which is true as far as it goes and y’all know I’m always down to dismantle capitalism. But! I am still recovering from the shock that Diana Wynne Jones has it in her to write a functional family. Wizard Derk and his half-human, half-critter brood live in a universe that is being ruthlessly plumbed for resources (just how ruthlessly will take your breath away) and turned into a theme park by a bloodless ghoul of a capitalist from our world. This is, as all DWJ’s books are, an uproarious and sharply observed story, but it’s a less cohesive and more patchwork than I’m used to—she’s always chaotic but she usually ties it together with a bow at the end, and I felt there were more haphazard pieces sticking out than is her wont. Thoroughly enjoyed it however! The part that I enjoyed most was in fact not the anticapitalist sentiment (of which there is plenty, rejoice) but the commentary on parenting? Like, Derk and Mara are not perfect parents but they are 100% committed and present parents, which we don’t get a lot of in fantasy. Their failures offer an opening to my favorite character, the grumpy mentor-dragon, to step into the gap. Claudia Gray, Lost Stars (2015) (Journey to Star Wars: The Force Awakens #1) What if Romeo and Juliet were best friends and also ace pilots at the Imperial Academy in the years before the first Death Star was built? Hello friends and welcome to my keyboardsmashing review of a book that I will proceed to quote EXTENSIVELY, more because it hit all my buttons than because it’s an earth-shatteringly original story. It is for sure a testament to how well my friends know me that
azdaema came to me bearing this rec—thank you, it was exactly my speed—and that as soon as I told witcherology I was reading a Star Wars book she knew instantly which one I meant—because my Brand is evidently that strong. I mean, childhood bffs!!!! Fighting on opposite sides of a war!!! Lost Stars is a competently executed novel but not in any way a transcendent one—it’s a seaworthy vessel, it’s just that if you’re not interested in the destination there’s no sights or fancy amenities to make it worth your while. I feel obliged to warn that we’re denied a happy ending, because it has been borne upon me that this is a thing folks care about; for myself I only care that they recognize each other as the most important person in their lives. It ends on a cliffhanger because…they want us to buy the next book in the series, ig.Thane and Ciena are two kids from clashing cultural backgrounds (in crude terms, he’s a city boy and she’s a valley girl; they grow up on a backwater planet) with radically divergent moral philosophies (this becomes particularly glaring in the arena of oaths and loyalty: what does one owe to people/institutions who do not keep faith with you?). Thane is a cynic and Ciena an idealist; Thane is inclined toward chaos, Ciena toward order. Thane defects to the Rebellion and Ciena rises high in the Imperial ranks. Thane is obviously right and Ciena is wrong. The conversations between them are handled with more nuance than that, of course, but the problem isn’t that Ciena doesn’t have perfectly comprehensible motivations: It’s that the secondary cast, and the entire weight of the narrative momentum, is busy proving Thane right and Ciena wrong. Which makes the romance ultimately less interesting and less urgent because it’s just an impossibly tall order for me as a reader to identify with fascists, sorry! Anyway here are some tropes that made me swoon:
Co-piloting as a metaphor for a lifelong partnership? Never ever gets old. They have their own secret hideyhole/batcave!!! Omg it’s Field Day and they run the pilot equivalent of a three-legged race—and smoke the competition. The post-pubescent “he’s handsome/she’s beautiful” revelations also never get old. Faithfully adopting the mourning rituals of your beloved, even if there is a large cultural chasm between them and you!!! He guesses her password on the first try!!
“(Thane’s older brother) had said there was only one reason to pick up some girl from the valleys—and if that was what Than was after, he ought to get one who had breasts already. Than had split Dalton’s lip before their parents pulled them apart.” “Taught him that it didn’t matter who was really right or wrong—because the rules were set by whoever held the cane.” “Ciena Ree’s one of the best pilots here. You could’ve gone to twenty different worlds and never found anyone better to fly with.” “Sometimes even looking at her hurt—No. It irritated him. Angered him. It didn’t hurt.”
“You think everything the academy and the Empire does is perfect!” “And you think every authority figure is evil like your father!”
“It’s not whether he’s my friend or someone I love. He’s both. Thane’s always been both, since the beginning.” “But it hadn’t changed. That was the amazing thing. They’d always belonged to each other in ways that were difficult to define; Thane felt as thought they’d simply acknowledged what had been true from the start.” —>MY SOUL HAS STRAIGHT-UP ASCENDED TO ANOTHER PLANE
“But it wasn’t against regulations to love what she did—or to remember what she had lost.” “You don’t have the right to risk lives you’re responsible for to save those you aren’t.” “Th excellence of her service had long since ceased to be only a matter of honoring her oath. She also thought of it as the price she paid for giving Thane his freedom. No one would ever be able to say she hadn’t paid in full.” “…not because he believed the Rebellion was pure good but because he’d learned the Empire was pure evil.” “Always Ciena. Did Thane possess a memory worth having that she wasn’t a part of?” “And I don’t want other people to die because I’m afraid of hurting this one person in the entire Imperial Starlet that I love.” “He didn’t love the Rebellion more than he loved Ciena. But he could be willing to die for only one of those things.” “Before they were ten years old, they’d known when to let each other remain silent, how to be close to each other without intruding. How many people ever understood someone that well?” “Nobody ever knows the whole truth. That’s why promises mean something. Otherwise they’d be too easy.” “Just for the record, Kyrell? The galaxy is full of women who don’t fight for the enemy.” “It was his own business if he crossed the galaxy, or broke his heart, or steered his X-Wing straight into the core of a star.” “He knew what Ciena would do as surely as if he’d come up with the plan himself. ‘She’s going to crash it.’” “All I ever asked, in all those battles, was not to be the one who killed you.” “But she thought she would always know him, by his step or his flight or his eyes. Some about his eyes never changed.” “Because the deck is always stacked, Ciena. All we can do is stack it in our favor.”
“You would, if it were me inside that cell.” “…yes. I would.”
