anactoria | Reading

Important Hummingbird Cottage updates! First, I am sad to report that the geese after all decided not to nest on the pond, presumably flying off in search of a larger pool. However, the pond is still frequently visited by ducks and geese, and also a red hawk which swooped across the pond and snatched something small and dark from the rocks. You go, red-shouldered hawk! Keep the small rodent population in check!

The flowers have begun to blossom. Velvety purple irises, blue-violet columbines, yellow roses, lovely gold-pink roses like a sunrise, these last outside the window of the downstairs bedroom, which at last forced me to remove the mattress blocking the window -

I have not yet told the story of the mattress. So. At a mattress fundraiser for my old high school, I bought a queen size mattress on clearance, only to discover upon delivery that my bed frame was, in fact, a full. This ended with the mattress leaning against the window for a month, until the roses forced my hand, and I took apart the old bedframe and lowered the new mattress to the floor, where it will reside till I get an appropriately sized bedframe.

(Hilariously, a week after my mattress misadventure, my former roommate bought a new mattress for a bedframe that was surely a full. But NO. That bedframe was in fact a queen.

One would like this to end with the trading of the bed frames, but Julie understandably wished to keep the charming wooden sleigh bed and therefore cut it down to size.)

The weeds are getting away from me, in particular the lemon balm (a variety of mint that is spreading all along the shady north side of the house). However, yesterday evening I did get rosemary and chives from the farmer’s market, which I planted, having cleverly come out through the garage in order to keep Bramble inside… only to look up from planting the rosemary at the sound of a happy meow. Bramble trotted past, intent on exploring the neighbor’s patio, which I must admit I’ve also been curious about, so I followed him nothing loath.

The Hummingbird Cottage is half of a duplex - all the houses in this condominium development are, except the ones that are fourplexes - but I’ve never seen the neighbors in the other half of my duplex. Nor have I heard any noise from their half of the house, seen their car, or seen a trash can pulled to the curb by their driveway.

Through the patio door as I chased Bramble (happily hiding under an overgrown bush), I saw a dining room set with a jacket draped over a chair, so someone must live there at least occasionally? A mystery.

Bramble eventually scampered down to the pond, and then apparently decided he’d had enough, as he docilely allowed me to pick him up and deposit him inside. Possibly all that water was a little alarming. I finished planting the rosemary and chives and contemplated the best place for a cherry tomato plant, but as I have not yet acquired said plant, that is a problem for another day.

Also, I found the perfect little wicker cart for my houseplants! Admittedly there is currently only one houseplant, but now that I have a home for more they will surely come into my life. The cart is currently a somewhat battered yellow and needs a wash and a coat of white spray paint, but it was only twenty dollars at the secondhand shop, and anyway how often do you see a charming wheeled wicker cart for sale anywhere?

osprey_archer

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Rebecca Romney’s Jane Austen’s Bookshelf: A Rare Book Collector’s Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend, in which Romney tracks down many of the books Jane Austen admired (often as ebooks, which I must admit takes much of the romance out of the rare book hunt) and discovers many lost gems of literary excellence. (And also Hannah More, whom she did not take to.) An engrossing read.

D. E. Stevenson’s Mrs. Tim Gets a Job. Like all of D. E. Stevenson’s novels, this is cozy like sitting curled up in an armchair by the fire with a cup of cocoa while a thunderstorm beats against the window in the night. It’s not that she’s writing in a world where bad things don’t happen, or even where bad things don’t happen to our heroes, but by the end of the book it will all turn out right.

Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States, edited by Mikail Iossel and Jeff Parker. An essay collection published not long after 9/11, although only a few of the essays actually touch on that event. Many of them include potshots at American political correctness (hard to embrace the concept if you come from the country where you could literally be sent to a gulag for “political incorrectness”), as well as lists of American books the authors read at a formative age.

I thank my lucky stars that I didn’t read this before Honeytrap, as the book might have been delayed indefinitely while I tried to work my way through the works of Kurt Vonnegut, Ray Bradbury, Ursula K. Le Guin, Isaac Asimov, as well as some other authors I’ve never even heard of. With truth the author of this essay notes “the average Soviet person probably knew [American science fiction] better than the average American.”

What I’m Reading Now

Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Sadly suspicious that none of these characters are ever going to make it to the lighthouse.

What I Plan to Read Next

Does my lightning zoom through Jane Austen’s Bookshelf mean that I will at last read an eighteenth century novel? MAYBE. The library boasts Fanny Burney’s Evelina, Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Romance of the Forest, Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote, and Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda. Any recommendations among those works?

osprey_archer

Eugene Field’s poem Wynken, Blynken, and Nod must be catnip for picture book publishers. We had a version published in the 1980s or 90s when I was growing up, and I just recently discovered that Barbara Cooney also illustrated the poem in the 1960s.

Cooney’s illustrations look like white chalk on blue-black paper - some highly textured paper, because she’s worked the texture into the illustrations, so that it’s visible in the sparkle of the moonlight on the water as Wynken, Blynken, and Nod sail their wooden shoe to catch the herring fish that are the stars in the sky.

They are three identical little boys with a soft dandelion fluff of hair, and they sail their shoe back to a tower by the water, where they unload their fish in the shade of the weeping willow. And then - and then - it’s all a dream, for “Wynken and Blynken are two little eyes, and Nod is a little head.” They come together to form one baby, asleep in a cradle draped with a sort of half-tester canopy, which is held above the bed by a hook shaped like the head of a heron.

(This detail of the heron-shaped canopy holder particularly enchanted me.)

This is of course a bedtime poem, and the book would work beautifully as a bedtime book: the illustrations are so enchantingly subdued, the black backgrounds spangled with occasional white dots like stars. It would be lovely to slip into the illustrations and sail on the sea of dew.

kat_lair

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A reminder that my AO3 bookmarks all count as recs and I read widely so feel free to mine them for your own entertainment.

Kat Reads Books

Celestial Monsters by Aiden Thomas - This is the second part of a duology that started with The Sunbearer Trials reviewed here https://kat-lair.dreamwidth.org/908178.html. The sun is going out and Theo, his crush Aurelio and bff Niya are on a quest to save the world. And maybe also their friend turned traitor turned friend again Xio. This was cute and fun. I likes the friendships and the message of getting hold of your own fate and stopping the gods from meddling was good if not particularly subtle even before the final showdown. The romance was sweet. My main criticisms are that the female bff was written a little one-dimensional, and the redemption arch had the realisation/decision of 'oops maybe I am on the wrong side' moment off page and I was so frustrated by that like, no, this was a peak character moment why would you not show it? I was fully expecting the story to go end in a cliffhanger but no, it's a duology, not a trilogy and honestly, right choice.

Oikeusjuttu (Der Prozeß/Trial) by Franz Kafka - So, a colleague is making an installation for a conference on theme of AI & (In)Justice and for that wanted several different translations of this book. I sourced the Finnish translation for him, and since I had it, I thought I should read it. And I did. So, let me preface this by saying that I've never read Kafka before, I had no knowledge of the novel beyond the general theme I could guess from the title and colleague's installation topic. It was. Hmm. So, firstly, I see what he did there and why he did and I respect the way he did it as well. Secondly, I very much see why this is a relevant book for colleague's installation. For those of you who don't know, the story evolves around a man who is told he is on trial, accused of something which is never explained, and whose attempts to defend himself are hampered by impenetrable bureaucracy, incomprehensible justice system and officials who talk a lot and say little. In fairness, that also a running theme of the book which is full or extremely long meandering sentences, paragraphs that go on for pages, all of which may just be a reflection of being written a century go or a deliberate stylistic choice to further underline the confusion and frustration of the protagonist. Saying that, there are several lines that would not be out of place as an opening on a contemporary report or article on (in)access to justice, inequity in law, issues around power and influence, trial by public etc. As a satire it was painfully accurate, depressingly so a century after publication, but there was only one line that made me laugh (said by one of the female characters). I can't say I liked the book, nor the protagonist really, but also I'm quite sure I wasn't meant to.

When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill - I gather the book's gotten a good amount of hype and I'd probably sign that. In 1955 tens of thousands of American women from all walks of life suddenly transform into dragons, devour some men and then vanish. Discussion and research on what happened, why and how, and the fact that it isn't a historically isolated phenomenon is systematically suppressed. The story is told via eyes of Alex who is a school girl at the time but loses her aunt, gains a sister, and struggles with finding her own path to science and family. Her personal narrative is interspersed with extracts from scientific papers, letters etc. Two thirds of this book made me incandescent with rage. Which is absolutely the purpose of it. The final third had the utopian 'god it could be this good, it could be' catharsis to it which was a good balance but avoided being fully rose-tinted. There are some nods to intersectionality of women (e.g. the differing experiences of Black women are noted, as is the fact that some of the women who dragon are women through the desire of their heart not their physiology) but they aren't super developed beyond the wlw aspect which is a central part of Alex's own story.

Kat Consumes Media

Dumbo live action remake - This was better than I expected to be honest. The story was updated appropriately with Dumbo and his mama being released in the end. And I really liked how they did the pink elephants sequence as well, that was rather clever. Lots of familiar faces in various roles, and I even detected even some mild self-awareness what with the big commercial amusement park with its Dumbo plushies going up in flames...

Artifice Girl - A man creates a programme to trap online child abusers, gets recruited by a law enforcement organisation to do the same with more resources. What he neglects to mention that his programme, Cherry, is exceeding its/her programming fast... This is told through three indoor scenes with a small cast and relies entirely on the dialogue and interactions and mines the ethics and limits of consciousness and autonomy. For some reason ratings for this were lukewarm but I found it absolutely fascinating to watch. The performances were great throughout and it didn't result in any easy solutions.

Hercules - Alright, yeah, I put it on the background while I did other stuff. Hercules and his merry men (and one token Amazon) get involved in a civil war, train some farmers, blah blah sorcery and monsters and political betrayal (extremely predictable one). I assume this was a slow period for The Rock and he needed the money. It was... Watchable. Bonus points for the fact that there was no romantic plot that blossomed during the movie. But there was a fridged wife and family so those points were lost there.

Wild Robot - Ahhhh this was wonderful. A service robot gets shipwrecked on an island full of nothing but wild animals, recalibrates itself to understand them and adopts a little gosling and a lonely fox. Families are made, emotions are learned etc. The animation was stunning and the story itself was sweet. My only niggles are the tone of motherhood = purpose, and the fact that foxes don't fucking hibernate wtf was that. But generally absolutely recommended.

Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse - Rewatch, still absolutely great with a solid story and outstanding animation.

Various YT reactors and their Patreon content - I rather assume no one is interested in these but if I'm mistaken and you wanted to know whose Kpop content I'm enjoying, hit me up.

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brightly_lit

I'm about to post the final chapter of my novel-length fic -- my very first multi-chapter fic! My best friend had such fun writing a multi-chapter fic that I wanted to get in on that action, too: people reading along, getting invested in it, saying what they thought would happen and hoped would happen. Crossing Stars is an extremely complex fic, interweaving large numbers of characters, timelines, and fandoms (a big part of why I'm so proud of it!), so I rather hoped to have readers along the way to help me keep track of everything, say whether they'd like more follow-up on one part or another ... but no. :-( One person apparently read about a half of it and then never commented again, and another person recently commented on the third-to-last chapter, but otherwise, the few comments I got were spam. (The spam comments on AO3 are a new thing! And ugh.) So I ended up being basically on my own all the way through. JUST LIKE MY CHARACTERS! Well, so it goes. I was bummed about that ... but I am incredibly proud of the fic.

The irony in how unpopular it is is that as I was writing it, I thought it's one of my more crowd-pleasing fics?? At least, according to the usual standards: lots of action, high body count. I guess there's no real romance, and it gets a little technical at times, but people like time-travel stories too, right?? But alas, this did not translate into readers.

I have a few theories about why people weren't reading it. The main character (an OC -- another thing people usually avoid) is fifteen or under for the entire fic and is infatuated with a grown man member of her team. She's in the body of a grown woman and can thus (try to) trick him into believing she's also an adult and into having a relationship with her, an effort which persists throughout the fic -- is indeed a focal point of the fic -- and has repercussions for the plot and for all the characters unto the end, but he always senses something is off and nothing ever happens (except she steals a couple of kisses). I certainly understand people avoiding an unfinished fic where they think something underage might happen, because it would not be at all surprising on AO3 if someone posting a WIP suddenly sprang underage content on the audience, not having tagged for it before the chapter in which it happens, and readers don't want to get invested in a fic they might suddenly find themselves turned off by and unable to finish. So maybe once the fic is complete and they see there's no tag for underage, they'll give it a chance where they were afraid to before. I hope so.

There are also the people who just don't read WIPs until they're complete, which I also get, since the number of abandoned WIPs must be legion. My fic in particular is one where everything leads up to the end, where all the plot points and themes aren't fully realized until then, so getting invested in such a fic would be especially bad while there remains fear it will never be finished.

Also, I didn't realize until I'd already written most of it that all three of the main fandoms (Travelers, 86, and Classroom of the Elite) are essentially dead fandoms, sigh. Just my luck. They are not dead to me; they live on very brightly inside me, but I guess most people lose interest shortly after a show is no longer releasing new episodes.

It's also occurred to me that maybe people think it's gonna be one of those fics that throws a million shows in the tags that are barely actually touched on in the fic? I've never really gotten what's going on with those fics. I've tried to read them before to see what they did with a tagged character I like, and in the couple I did try to read, they like ... passed by in a hallway or had a single line, lol. I don't get it! Unless it's like I felt in my teens about the real people my friend and I had an 'oral tradition' of ficcing about, where I was thrilled by the idea of them simply being present and making a little fun cameo. Is that it? Or is it maybe that they're throwing in a hint of every show they can think of so they can include it in the tags in hopes of getting more readers? Seeing the tossed-off cracky quality to those fics I did try to read, I don't think that much thought went into it, lol.

In any case, Crossing Stars is not one of those kinds of fics; the three main fandoms and the three main characters are all a very fundamental part of the fic. Natasha, Bucky and Steve from MCU also have a pretty important part, although much smaller, as the main characters' senpais. Finally, the My Hero kids have a small but important role as their kohais, as I needed literally a hundred kids fighting against impossible odds, a fandom where putting the kids in such a situation wouldn't be off brand lest I traumatize the fans of some lighthearted fandom with my very dark fic lol, and My Hero fit the bill perfectly. I don't want to trick anyone into reading the fic thinking it's a My Hero fic, because it isn't, but those characters are also present so I've got to tag for them. But I did include the show listing in order of importance to the fic in the tags.

I've never been so proud of a fic I've written. It's incredibly complex, interweaving multiple fandoms and timelines imo quite skillfully. It's got action and heart. It does justice to the amazing shows that inspired it. It covers 15 years of the main characters' lives, so you get to see long growth arcs for all of them. It was fun but challenging to write their characters at all those ages when people grow and change so much, taking into account that these are also highly trained genetically designed geniuses. It was so hard!! But so fun to write, and so personal to me. I went through probably the biggest transition of my entire life over the course of writing it. I started the fic during a trip that represented a big part of that transition, even though I hadn't been able to write in a long time (now that I can write again, I think all my creative energy was going toward manifesting my new life, but at the time, I believed I would probably never be able to write again, and this fic was the singular exception), and finished it only recently. The fic kept me company through what was ultimately a wonderful transition, but which was at times extremely grim and scary. At the end of the transition, I had to leave behind so much about the life I'd lived up to that point. That old life is the life I honored with this fic so that I could give it a good burial and leave it in my past. So I can't fully put into words just how much this fic means to me. Maybe in the end the fic will only have been for me. But it really is a killer fic that has in it so much I think would move a reader and that they would enjoy, so I really hope more people give it a try.

ltleflrt

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kat_lair

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Title: Antigen
Author:

kat_lair
Fandom: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Pairing: James T. Kirk & Leonard "Bones" McCoy, James T. Kirk/Leonard "Bones" McCoy
Tags: Anti-sex pollen, Gen or Pre-Slash, Touch Aversion, Touch-Starved
Rating: T
Word count: 2,111

Summary: Jim was familiar with all the evolutionary, physiological, psychological, cultural reasons why humans needed touch. Group and individual variation obviously existed, but as a species the requirement for connection went DNA-deep and the impacts of being deprived of it were well-documented and happening right in front of his eyes, right in his own body too.

Author notes: Picked some spring themed prompts to get me out of a writing slump. This was for the prompt 'pollen'. Unbetaed so if you spot a typo or mistake you should tell me.

Antigen on AO3

( Antigen )

***

kat_lair

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Title: Vernal
Author:

kat_lair
Fandom: Wheel of Time (both book and tv-show applicable I think)
Characters: Aviendha, Moiraine Damodred, Egwene al'Vere, Bair, Melaine
Tags: Canon Compliant, Rain, Ficlet, Rhuidean
Rating: G
Word count: 737

Summary: The rain lasts until sunset.

Author notes: Picked some spring themed prompts to get me out of a writing slump. This was for the prompt 'vernal'. Unbetaed so if you spot a typo or mistake you should tell me.

Vernal on AO3

( Vernal )

***

flo_nelja

once_upon_fic is one of my fave exchanges, with public domain myths, legends and fairy tales as fandoms.

Here is my fic! Galehaut/Lancelot romance! Not one-sided, for once ^^

Title : The captive of Shame
Author : Nelja
Fandom : Arthurian legend
Characters/Ships : Galehaut/Lancelot
Genre : Romance, smut
Summary : Galehaut wants to spend the night with Lancelot; Lancelot isn't sure about what he agreed to.
Rating : NC-17
Disclaimer : Public domain!
Word Count : ~6000
Warnings : Complicated situations that might be seen as threat of dubcon - but it doesn't happen.

( Link to AO3 )

Here is my gift, a cool fic about Coleridge's Christabel with fairies, I loved it.

The Twice-Stolen Child by regshoe (Christabel's mother, PG, 2882 words)
The curious story of Geraldine’s true origin—and Christabel’s.

And two stories that were not for me, but that I enjoyed. One of them is another Christabel story, with a very different theory about her origins.

Why Have You Called me Forth? by avaloncat555 (Christabel/Geraldine, T, 4437 words)
Christabel closes her eyes.
Within the dream, Geraldine waits.

And a darkly funny Odyssey fic, with some inspirations from Epic: the Musical, and from the Clue board game :D

The Burial Shroud Was Just a Red Herring by MimiHylea (Penelope + Telemachus, T, 2168 words)
When Penelope's suitors plot to kill her son, she decides it's time to convince them to leave.

osprey_archer

Recently

sholio review Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout, and as I have long vaguely followed Newport’s career, and also am a choir who loves to be preached to about the problems of productivity culture, I picked it up.

Newport lays out a seeming contradiction I’ve vaguely noticed before but never formulated: the people who find productivity culture most enraging are often, in fact, very productive people, who yearn to achieve great things. But the contradiction is purely a matter of semantics: “productivity culture” enrages such people precisely because it often leads to a kind of distracted busy-ness that makes it hard to actually dig in and accomplish something meaningful.

The problem, Newport explains, is that current productivity culture privileges steady work, and moreover steady work that is pretty close to the outward edge of a worker’s capacity, whereas innovative artistic or academic work by its nature requires more slack. There are periods where you’ll work sixty hours a week (and be happy to do so! The ideas are flowing! Work is the thing you most want to do in the world!) but also periods where you’ll outwardly be doing nothing.

He illustrates the point with stories about artists and scientists from the past: Jane Austen, Isaac Newton, Marie Curie, New Yorker feature writer John McPhee. I love reading about people creating things, whether it be a novel or the theory of gravity, so very much enjoyed these interludes.

But my main takeaway from this book is that, although I enjoyed it, it’s not really the book I need right now. My problem in this moment is not “how to step away from meaningless busy-ness toward true accomplishment” but “how do I start writing fiction again?” (Obviously I’m still banging away at book reviews and letters to penpals etc. etc.)

The problem is twofold. One, I haven’t made time to write; and two, I don’t currently have a story I feel an urgent need to tell. I have written some short stories this year (eight currently in the caddy!), and when I’m excited about a story, suddenly it becomes easy to make time to write. But I think that if I were writing more regularly, I’d have more story ideas, perhaps even more long-form story ideas, which is really where my heart lies.

(Actually, the problem is not ideas per se, but ideas I’m so invested in that I’ll keep working through the frustrations inherent in writing a novel. You can scamper through a short story on inspiration alone, but a novel always has bits where you yell “This is the worst story ever written and I am the worst writer ever born!”)

However, if you make time to write and then sit down with nothing you want to write, you may just end up staring out the window at the Canada geese. There’s a bit of a chicken and an egg problem.

But the first step to fixing any problem is to define the problem, so at least I’ve done that?

osprey_archer

One nice thing about the Newbery project is that I learn so much about places that I previously knew nothing about. For instance, until I read Elizabeth Miller’s Pran of Albania, I knew nothing about Albania except the sworn mountain virgins, women who swear to remain virgins and hitherto go dressed as men with a rifle slung across their back.

(Miller, searching for a reference point her readers will understand, once describes them as “nuns,” which inevitably made me think of demon-fighting nuns from anime. Nuns! With guns!)

For a while it looked like this book wasn’t going to have any sworn mountain virgins, but I should have had more faith in the 1930s Newberies to go charging right into whatever Gender is available to their plucky heroines. Of course there are sworn mountain virgins in this book! Indeed, Pran herself is a sworn mountain virgin for five whole chapters!

Then she realizes that the man she is betrothed to IS in fact the boy she has a crush on and decides that after all she wouldn’t mind getting married, because at the end of the day it’s still the 1930s and the toys have to go back in the box at the end. But before that, she uses her sworn mountain virgin status to speak at a council meeting (only men and old women and sworn mountain virgins can speak) in favor of continuing the truce that has temporarily put a halt to the law of blood feud.

The truce is in place because the mountain tribes of Albania had to band together to fight off a Slav invasion earlier in the year. During this war, Pran had an epiphany about the futility and ugliness of all war, and her later speech against the blood feud is a step on the long, long pathway toward getting rid of war entirely.

Now, to be honest, I normally groan over children’s books with the message War Is Bad, simply because I’ve read so many of them at this point. Yes, yes, war is bad, tell me something I don’t know. But it worked for me here, I think because Miller is not simply parroting received wisdom but sharing her own passionate, personal conviction, in a literary world where children’s books will argue other sides of the question.

In Miller’s Pran of Albania and Kate Seredy’s The Singing Tree, war is bad. But Herbert Best’s Garram the Hunter is an argument that war preparedness is necessary for any people who means to remain free. In Julia Davis Adams’ Vaino: A Boy of New Finland, the people of Finland win their freedom through a war that is dangerous and frightening but above all necessary, a point she makes again in Mountains Are Free, a retelling of the tale of William Tell.

You don’t know what you’re going to get, and it means that whatever you end up getting is interesting. There’s a lot to be said for cultivating the unexpected.

ltleflrt

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osprey_archer

A rare edition of What I Quit Reading. Last week I was struggling with Sebastian Smee’s The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art, but decided that might be because the first part was about two artists I’m not familiar with, Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. So I went on to part two, which is about Degas (I love Degas!) and Manet (Smee’s other book Paris in Ruins made me interested in Manet!)... and unfortunately I didn’t particularly care for this section either. It lacks the firm grounding in the wider historical milieu and social world of the Impressionists that made Paris in Ruins so absorbing. So onward and upward to other books.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

My break from the Newberies lasted about two seconds, and then I was back in the saddle with Lesa Cline-Ransome’s One Big Open Sky, which is written in verse (ever since Out of the Dust, Newbery books written in verse have frightened me), and printed in eight-point font, which is not the author’s fault but MY EYES.

However, despite these unpropitious first impressions, I enjoyed the book as a whole. Like Out of the Dust, it’s historical fiction about a family in a hard time. In this case, Lettie’s Black family is migrating from Mississippi to Nebraska in 1879, looking for a new start. A covered wagon story with all the covered wagon trials (is someone going to get cholera?) plus the extra concern that white men might attack their caravan, but overall more successful than Out of the Dust at portraying hardship without slipping into misery porn.

I also read Patrick Bringley’s All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me, which is about Bringley’s decade as a security guard in the Met after his brother Tom’s death.

There is a very moving passage about going to a museum with his mother soon after Tom’s death, and finding his mother standing in front of a painting of a Pieta, Mary holding the body of her dead son. Throughout the book Bringley insists on the importance of an emotional connection to art, the primacy of the personal above learning facts by rote - primacy in the literal sense that this is what comes first: why would we care to learn facts about Degas if his ballerinas weren’t so beautiful?

But, as with Paris in Ruins, sometimes learning more about an artist’s life can make you want to revisit their art - to feel that there is more to be seen in it than you have seen heretofore…

Anyway he’s not in any sense arguing against learning facts, just arguing that to really experience a work of art you have to bring not just your intellect and your facts but your whole self, your emotions; to allow yourself to be moved.

What I’m Reading Now

D. E. Stevenson’s Mrs. Tim Gets a Job, which is like a warm bath. Right after World War II, Mrs. Tim’s husband has been posted to Egypt and her children are both in boarding school. At loose ends, she takes a job helping to run a hotel in Scotland. On the train to the hotel, she meets a man who is baffled because his fiancee has just broken off their engagement after years of correspondence over the war. And then at the hotel, Mrs. Tim meets a girl who just broke up with her fiance, because she is simply so exhausted after years of looking after an invalid aunt that she feels she can never make a good wife…

What I Plan to Read Next

Eight Newberies left. The next one on deck is Ralph Hubbard’s Queer Person.

osprey_archer

After Is Underground,

littlerhymes and I approached Cold Shoulder Road with trepidation. However, I am happy to report that our concerns were unwarranted. In this book, Joan Aiken returns to form with an adventure story that is gristly but mostly in a way that is fun for the reader, like the Edward Gorey covers that grace many books in this series.

(Except for a very minor character who she kills at the end for no apparent reason except to remind us that she can. Spoiler redacted didn’t deserve that fate!)

Anyway. Is Twite and her cousin Arun have made their way back to Arun’s hometown, where Arun will be briefly reunited with his mother, whom he hasn’t seen ever since he ran away from the Silent Sect because he couldn’t stand not being allowed to sing or talk. They arrive at the family home in Cold Shoulder Road… and find it empty! Arun’s mother has disappeared! And the Silent Sect has been taken over by a charismatic leader by the name of Dominic de la Twite…

Later in the book Is and Arun learn a song, the substance of which is that “When Twites are good, they are very very good, but when they are bad they are horrid.” Old Domino, as Is calls him, is definitely on the horrid side. He also appears to have command of at least an unconscious form of the thought speech that Is discovered in Is Underground, which he uses to mind-whammy Arun into submission until Is drags him away.

Other typical Aiken touches:

A down-trodden but plucky orphan

The Admiral’s giant pet spider Rosamunde

The Admiral’s dupli-gyro (bicycle), which he likes to ride while flying a kite

The system of caverns beneath the Admiral’s house where Is and Arun find three large vats of treasure.

(The Admiral is doing a lot of work to bring the quirkiness to this book.)

And of course the reappearance of Is’s cat Figgin, who occasionally appears in danger but pulls through at the end, which almost made me forgive Aiken for killing spoiler redacted. (But not quite.)

Next book, we’re returning to Dido! We had the briefest mention of her when the downtrodden but plucky orphan brushed minds with her across the sea, as Dido has been Sir On a Vacation to Nantucket for the previous two books. Does this mean that Dido is going to carry the thought speech forward into the last two books of the series? To be honest I’m not madly keen on the thought speech, so I kind of hope not, but we’ll see.

kat_lair

***

Title: no finer details than yours
Author:

kat_lair
Fandom: Guardian RPF
Character: Bai Yu/Zhu Yilong
Tags: Sensuality, Getting Together, Drabble Series/Sequence (Mix & Match)
Rating: T
Word count: 100 + 100 + 100 + 300 + 300

Summary: Anything is possible when you want it bad enough.

Author notes: This was my

seasonsofdrabbles assignment, written for

facethestrange whose likes I had fun shoving in here.

no finer details than yours on AO3

( no finer details than yours )

***

osprey_archer

I’ve read Sarah Orne Jewett’s short story “A White Heron” before, but when I saw that Barbara Cooney had illustrated it, of course I had to pick it up. Sarah Orne Jewett was a writer of the “local color” school famous for her works set in Maine, while Barbara Cooney was an illustrator who spent her childhood summers in Maine and eventually settled there.

The pairing is propitious. Cooney draws out the twilight loveliness of Jewett’s story, Sylvia driving the cow home in the dusk, meeting a young man in the woods who is hunting birds for his collection, rising before dawn to climb the highest tree in the forest to seek out the home of the rare white heron for him… standing near the top of the tree, gazing out over the treetops to the vast sea “with the dawning sun making a golden dazzle over it,” and the birds flying below her. Hawks, sparrows, and the heron itself, which perches on a bough of Sylvia’s own pine tree.

But though the text describes the heron perching, in the pictures it is always shown in flight.

In the illustrator’s note at the back, Cooney notes that she wanted to capture “the superimposed layers of countryside and trees separated by rising mists or incoming fogs… something like an ethereal Japanese screen,” and YES, that is exactly the feeling that her landscape images often give. It’s especially present in this book in the last large picture, four shouting catbirds perched on a branch that spreads across the top of two pages, and in the misty distance below soft gray pines… and a few sharp black pines closer… and the white heron flying past.

I feel that this comment has unlocked something that I’ve responded to in Cooney’s illustrations without ever putting a name to it. I want to revisit some of my favorites now and trace this Japanese influence in her work.

kat_lair

***

Title: Metamorphosis
Author:

kat_lair
Fandom: 방탄소년단 | Bangtan Boys | BTS
Character: Kim Namjoon | RM, Kim Seokjin | Jin, Min Yoongi | Suga, Jung Hoseok | J-Hope, Park Jimin (BTS), Kim Taehyung | V, Jeon Jungkook
Tags: Metamorphosis, Ambiguous Relationships, OT7, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, Ficlet
Rating: G
Word count: 544

Summary: The scales appear slowly. They bloom across his arms, like cherry blossoms opening in the spring, pale pink at first before deepening into fiery crimson.

Author notes: Picked some spring themed prompts to get me out of a writing slump. This was for the prompt 'metamorphosis'. Unbetaed so if you spot a typo or mistake you should tell me.

Metamorphosis on AO3

( Metamorphosis )
***

kat_lair

***

Title: Burgeoning
Author:

kat_lair
Fandom: Wheel of Time (both book and tv-show applicable I think)
Character: Nynaeve al'Meara
Tags: Drabble, Women in Power
Rating: G
Word count: 100

Summary: It unfurls inside her.

Author notes: Picked some spring themed prompts to get me out of a writing slump. This was for the prompt 'burgeoning'. Unbetaed so if you spot a typo or mistake you should tell me.

Burgeoning on AO3

( Burgeoning )

***

ltleflrt

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ltleflrt

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

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anactoria

September 2024

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Page Summary

osprey_archer - Hummingbird Cottage Updates
osprey_archer - Wednesday Reading Meme
osprey_archer - Book Review: Wynken, Blynken, and Nod
kat_lair - Kat Reads Books and Consumes Media
brightly_lit - Fic: Crossing Stars
ltleflrt - About Dem's Accent
kat_lair - ST:AOS Fic: Antigen
kat_lair - WoT Ficlet: Vernal
flo_nelja - Fic - once-upon-fic - Arthurian Legend - Galehaut/Lancelot
osprey_archer - Slow Productivity
osprey_archer - Book Review: Pran of Albania
ltleflrt - Sales people are stupid
osprey_archer - Wednesday Reading Meme
osprey_archer - Book Review: Cold Shoulder Road
kat_lair - Guardian RPF Drabble Sequence: no finer details than yours
osprey_archer - Picture Book Monday: A White Heron
kat_lair - BTS Ficlet: Metamorphosis
kat_lair - WoT Drabble: Burgeoning
ltleflrt - kids these days
ltleflrt - I'm missing my cat Bobby something fierce today.

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