Ten pounds of personality in a five-pound bag
My friend said: “I want a lending bookshelf of the first books of different series”
So I gave them
Sabriel
Gideon the Ninth
His Majesty’s Dragon
The Fifth Season
Mistborn
The Way of Kings
Shards of Honor (surprisingly NOT Sanderson)
Curse of Chalion
Stealing from Wizards, Book 1: Pickpocketing
Someplace To Be Flying
Akata Witch
Binti
Her Soul To Take
What are your suggestions?
I’ll do standalone books in a different post.
I’m currently on Book 3 and I would die for Princess Donut.
The audiobook narrator is incredible.
I expected the genre to be fantasy. It’s horror instead. Be warned.
Carl is nontoxic masculinity personified. He’s always protecting people even when it puts himself at risk.
I don’t understand why people don’t like Lit RPG as a genre. This is better than Greenwood. Hell, it’s better than Salvatore.
“Lud in the Mist” by Hope Mirrless. Really delightful story that inspired Stardust by (damnatio memoriae). I’m inspired to turn this into a roleplaying setting in the vein of PBTA or one of the Sanity mechanics games.
Everything I loved about it (the lush descriptions of the English countryside) are the things people hate about Tolkien.
But I did finally look up what “pleached” meant.
Earlier this year, I listened to “Starter Villain” by John Scalzi on audiobook. It was very good! Wil Wheaton is a great voice actor.
I’m enjoying my audiobooks on my commute.
I think I already posted about Era 1, but I just finished Era 2 and it was so heartbreaking at the end. This is not the post for spoilers. But there are so many good quotes in there.
“You’re meant to be helping people.”
I haven’t read Communion, by JD Vance, and I probably won’t.
I did read Hillbilly Elegy, and my primary impression was that he had never heard the word “classism” or had an intelligent discussion with anybody who understood the concept of intersectionality. (If you’re local to me and want to borrow my copy, which I marked up with commentary, let me know.)
Anyway, in my place, I offer Elizabeth Spiers’s review.
Today I saw the “Revolutionary Girl Utena” movie for the first time, having never seen the show. I told my friends that I expected this *kind* of disorientation and confusion, but not this *degree* of it.
Fortunately, having seen some anime, I went into the movie not expecting to understand it.
I’m not, like, an instant super-fan? But apparently the show was based on the book Demian, by Herman Hesse, which is interesting. (It’s been 27 years since I read that and it changed my life. Maybe I should reread it.)
We watched a couple episodes of the show afterwards. I remain bemused.
It did occur to me, in among all this, that anime may have influenced the American queer aesthetic idea of “being nonbinary means you owe the world skinny androgyny.” (Because I couldn’t tell the gender of half those characters, and that’s REALLY INTERESTING.)
I also wondered how much Tamsyn Muir was influenced by the aesthetics of the movie/show in her Gideon the Ninth books, because the cavalier aesthetic is STRONG there. Plus the sword, the chest wound, everything. It’s SO. WEIRD.
This isn’t how it happens
I’ve been listening to The Martian on audiobook and I love it so much. It’s really a great exemplar of the “Man vs Nature” conflict structure that I learned about in elementary school.
Which, I think, is what the writer meant when he said he likes stories “without politics.” Because yes, I will forever clown on him for thinking that Star Trek, of all things, is “without politics” – the entire show is political storytelling overlaid onto Freudian and Jungian archetypes – but everyone is allowed to discover things they missed. Yes, even late in life. We’re allowed to not all have it figured out by Age Whatever.
But I think the appealing thing about Man vs Nature stories is that there’s no evil intent to contend with. All the other structures involve human motivations; but Nature has no motivation. It just is. We can either adapt around it, or perish. And that adaptation is what’s so satisfying to watch or read about.
Improvise, Adapt, Overcome. MacGyver. Odyssey of the Mind. Destination Imagination. Heck, even puns. The heights of human achievement come from using things in unexpected ways.
I do love the other story archetypes, don’t get me wrong. But right now? There’s something comforting in good old Nature trying to kill us.
Mistborn: The Final Empire
The Well of Ascension
The Hero of Ages
Brandon Sanderson
I first read Mistborn almost 20 years ago, after enjoying Elantris a great deal…and I bounced off it HARD. It was such a grim dark world, Vin was insufferable and “not like the other girls” in my eyes, and I just was not here for it.
But this year, I decided I would give them another try; and I’m so glad I did.
Being immersed in the Cosmere means that I was spoiled for most of the major events of the second two books, but that’s okay. I can accept a few spoilers.
I would like to get a marewill flower tattoo, to go with my bannion flower. Perhaps I will have a whole bouquet of literary flowers someday.
Hemlock and Silver, by T. Kingfisher
I picked up this one at a Boozy Book Fair (the local independent bookstore made a deal with a local pub to host a book fair, and it was a smashing success). Took me a minute to read it, but I was enthralled. I love twists on fairy tales (although this one is unique enough that I’m not even sure that’s an accurate description), and I love stories with middle aged protagonists (I need to reread Paladin of Souls).
Emilybook 