blotthis

Since I last musicblogged, I've listened to a fair amount of new-to-me music!

( Miki, Yoa, Marguerite, PinkPantheress: Electropop I liked )

( The War and Treaty, Daisy Grenade, MUNA, Natalie Jinju, Melanie Martinez: Some disappointments :( )

In singles, I am absolutely loving Olivia Rodrigo's "Drop Dead" and "The Cure" is growing on me; Lola Young is really something, and I love "From Down Here (From The Water);" Isleña Antumalen & Javiera Mena's "Madrugadas de nada" is a fun crepescular summer track; I don't like Adéla's "KGB" as much as I hoped, but "DeathByDevotion" still slaps.

I'm looking forward to checking out what Grace Ives is up to (SHE'S OPENING FOR OLIVIA? LAST I CHECKED SHE WAS ELIGIBLE FOR A UNDER 25K FOLLOWERS MUSIC LEAGUE ROUND); the new album from María José Llergo; going back for old Paramore; finally listening to Alligator Bites Never Heal, the recentish Tate McRae, and continuing through the absolute trove of ambient from

imbir in this comment.

But as you can see I'm currently really enjoying summery electronic pop (sad or bouncy or dead inside) and pop-inflected metal and punk. Any recommendations warmly welcomed!

Finished The Forgotten Beasts of Eld on audiobook, which I started... in ... April? Probably? Worked out really well for me on audio: the reader was excellent; I read the book decades ago, so I barely remembered it beyond "cat ... takes people away? maybe?"; the book's 1974 attitudes towards gender politics, independence, harm, and forgiveness are crunchily messy, which I enjoyed spending time with.

( the je ne sais quoi of decades-old feminism )

I also read The Wolves of Willoughby Chase last night in like. An hour??? Wow that went down fast.

( Dickens, tension, and Gothics, oh my! )

Anyway. If anyone has recs for Gothic novels or writing about the Gothic, I'd love to---- add them to my TBR.

Finished Half Magic yesterday! Somehow for the first time. Wild. I picked it up because I'd added Seven-day Magic to my TBR because it was on someone's 100 books list and was going to pick it up, when the library told me it was the seventh in a series. "Oh I see! My mistake!" And here we are.

Eager apparently wrote it for his kids after discovering E. Nesbit, and It Shows. The premise of Half Magic is nearly the same as Five Children and It: Four+ siblings find a wish-delivering [fairy/coin], which, for the most part, causes more problems than it doesn't. However, they have a grand time, overall, and, when you think about it, Probably Learned Something. Both books have a terrific grasp of sibling dynamics and of authorial voice; both books are episodic, including one to Chivalric Times; ...both books have "yikes" attitudes about gender, race and class.

They're fine! I loved Five Children when I read it as a kid and was disappointed to find it didn't hold up to my narrative interests as an adult, but both are really interested in the childhood as she is lived (for a certain white and more-affluent-than-they-think class of child) and magic as same. There's a bit in Half Magic where Eager discusses the relief and kind-of-magic of encountering an adult that 1) knows they're an adult, 2) knows you're a kid, and 3) thinks you can have a relationship anyway. I think both these books have something of that in them.

Also played two free deduction-type games yesterday! Yesterday I accomplished very little!

The Archives of Trevosa is a The Roottrees Are Dead-alike, in that someone has come to you with a collection of documents and asked you to figure out their family tree in order to solve an inheritance problem. The wrinkle in this one is two-fold: The documents are from a country called Trevosa, whose language has not been fully translated, and when you search the documents for a term, only the first three documents will show up. So there's some note-taking and creative termsearching involved! It's a quick game, but it's a good time. Some cute Easter eggs.

The Red Pearls of Borneo is a Type Help-alike, in that someone has come to you with the story of a bunch of people who died on the same day, and given a few documents, you must use your special powers (in this case, being psychic), to figure out not only everyone's name and face, but which room they were in at which time. It took me about four hours to finish the whole thing, including the two side stories.

It is kind of a downer!! Unlike Dinn and Type Help, which are horror stories, or Trevosa and Roottrees, which are part family drama part another ingredient, Borneo is about the escalation of the war in the Pacific during WWII, filtered through the experiences of folks living on a tobacco plantation in Borneo. It--maybe even more than Dinn, although it's been a long time--is successful at telling a narrative with character stakes. So it's kind of a bummer that people die. I honestly kind of forgot they were all supposed to die! That's on me... Much sadder than the other four I've played.

Worth noting, that although there's some clear authorial awareness about Colonialism, most of the characters are British colonists, and they don't have any. You can also opt in or out to period-accurate racial slurs against the Japanese. Not complaining, but it's an interesting choice, given who were global colonizing powers in the area at the time--there's no such option given for cleaning up how the Brits talked about indigenous Borneans. In fairness, it's not really through racial slurs in the same way, within the game. Although of course they're still racist. One can also unlock "glossary" (not what that means......) entries that are nonfiction overviews of different economic, political, etc. forces at large at the time. I know very little about it, to be honest, but it seems the kind of well researched that bespeaks a guy for whom this is his Special Interest... It's also available in English and Chinese!

Both Trevosa and Pearls are apparently still in development, so, idk, watch this space? Watch those spaces? I will do a bad job of keeping track of it myself, but someday maybe I'll come back to them... Roottrees DLC I still won't pay 20 dollars for you....

I'm still reteaching myself how to read, but I did get through Charmed Life in about a day last week.

Huh! I've definitely read this book at least three times, but it slides right out of my brain after. I remembered that Gwendolen burned up her brother's lives in a matchbook, but which Chrestomanci that brother turned out to be, and how she did it, and why, or what anyone did about it--simply could not remember. Having just reread it, I think that might be because the book's a bit of a muddle.

( Spoilers )

crawls slowly into frame. hello. In April, I read.... one non-work book. I'm a copy/editor (linkedin voice: open for work!), so I was reading books, but I think they're under embargo, and furthermore, I didn't like most of them and wouldn't recommend them and also don't want to talk about them anyway, so. Wow. What a month. (linkedin voice: i wouldn't think that about YOUR books! context available upon request)

I did listen to some more music, though.

( Emancipator, NMIXX, Kacey Musgraves & Aesop Rock )

Finally, around the winter holidays I started putting together a playlist of "instrumental-forward music to work to" for my dad. I just finally finished it and sent it over, and I used the occasion to relisten to several of the albums included.

Mashrou' Leila's Ibn El Leil is still a no skip album, huh.
Huge fan of ataataga, by Riit, an Inuktitut electopop artist
Ibrahim Maalouf's trumpet makes me insane. Huge reco for Diagnostic, particularly "Lily (Is 2)," "Maeva in Wonderland," "Diagnostic," "Beirut"--ok basically the whole album
Gwilym Bowen Rhys's O Groth y Ddaear is a fun time if you ever find yourself thinking, you know what I want to listen to right now? Welsh folk

Work's a bit more normal, so hoping to get going on the backlog of reviews this weekend! xoxo gossip girl

Lately, I've largely been listening to ambient or ambient-like music, because when I'm not working, I'm working. :upsidedownsmiley: As mentioned elsewhere, I've adored the Monument Valley soundtracks for this, as well as the Disco Elysium OST, which I think, even aside from its efficacy as a focus-machine, might be one of my new favorite albums. Highly recommend.

I've played those two (four) games, so that may be a key part of my enjoyment. Maybe? I've also found that the Skyrim: Elder Scrolls V and The Witcher game soundtracks work pretty well, and I haven't played either. I've additionally bounced off of Hades I (game I have played), Katamari Damacy, Night in the Woods, Expedition 33, and Death Stranding (games I haven't), and the Game of Thrones soundtracks (show I haven't).

Who knows.

queenlua gave me an excellent reco for Emancipator, which has been going great! If any of you are also looking for that sweet spot of propulsive-but-background that video game music can be excellent for, here's a non OST contender.

Outside of video game OSTs and their alikes, I relistened to three albums recently, on the strength of Really Loving a Track or Two. In the cases of Zach Bryan's Zach Bryan and NakamuraEmi's Nippon no Onna wo Utau Best, I barely remembered the album, but had come to love a track or two so deeply I felt nearly certain I probably just hadn't been ready for it.

Wrong in both cases! Both albums are fine. I might come back to ZB again, someday, for one more 'gain, but I suspect I've pulled the greats off of it. For those curious, the tracks in question are, from ZB, "East Side of Sorrow," which made me cry every time I heard it for a week (personal problem); and "Hey Driver," a terrific collaboration with the War and the Treaty; and from NakamuraEmi, "I," which slaps.

I'm doing my yearly "listen to all my likes in alphabetical order," which has taken me, at this point, to the Ms. Last month, I rediscovered Tracy Grammer's "Hey Ho," and was like oh hey. Let me get some more of that! So I turned to Flower of Avalon, that album it appears on. I was really hoping to love this album as well, and I really love "Laughlin Boy" and "Preston Miller," but we didn't hit the majority-bangers rule that makes an album a favorite. That said, damn, T. Grammer can sing. Voice like if a campfire was a drink of water, if you know what I mean.

Mitski has a new album out! Have I listened to it? No, I have not. Instead, I relistened to Puberty 2, the album she released prior to Be the Cowboy, which IS (according to me), majority bangers. In this case, I'd sincerely forgotten how many songs I loved were on this one. "Happy," obviously, and "Your Best American Girl," but this is where "Thursday Girl," "A Burning Hill," and "I Bet on Losing Dogs" live! I'd moved them earlier in my mind! Someday I'll listen to Bury Me at Makeout Creek! I don't love this album as much as I do Cowboy, but it was reallly interesting to listen to it all the way through post-Cowboy, as the last time I'd done it, Puberty had just come out. Cowboy's production values and poppier songs came as a surprise to a lot of Mitski's listeners, and to the critical apparatus at the time, as I remember it, but it's fascinating to see how much they have in common. "A Burning Hill," the less-than-two-minutes album closer, for example, reminds me of nothing so much as "Pink in the Night," a nearly less-than-two-minutes track from Cowboy, and both are two of my favorite Mitski songs ever. There might be something in the shortness that particularly fits how she likes to play with structure--to build it up, and then leave it unfulfilled. Finally, of course I spent a lot of Puberty thinking about "Geyser," another favorite track from Cowboy, and one of the few on that album that used the fuzzy sounds from her previous ones. I should really listen to the newest. They are telling me it has guitars in.

Anyway. I am requesting music recs, both of instrumental-only, and/or music from the past (checks watch) five years? or ever? that you love? (I particularly love when people are getting at least a little weird with it, although that isn't a hard and fast rule.)

Louise Fitzhugh's The Long Secret is not a sequel to Harriet the Spy. This is the only thing I knew about it, when I picked it up; I'd put it on my TBR list because Lemony Snicket had mentioned it in Poison for Breakfast, and it had sounded interesting. Could I remember what sounded interesting? No I Could Not. But it was available as an audiobook at my local library, and I needed a new one, and the last Snicket-recommended kids book had gone well, so, why not, I guess? (More on that tomorrow, probably.)

The good news is the reader was phenomenal, so that was a win immediately. The book takes place in Water Mill, Long Island, where Harriet and her friend Beth-Ellen ("Mouse") are spending the summer with their families. There are a several sources of friction:

Harriet and Beth-Ellen aren't really friends during the school year, and their summer friendship is clearly one of necessity. Their personalities, from time to time, definitely make each other Worse;
Beth-Ellen wants to go look at the middle-aged piano player at the hotel, Bunny, while Harriet wants to spy on the newcomers to town and write stories;
Someone Is Leaving Pointed Notes in Red Crayon for the people of Water Mill. We're introduced to this when the mean grocer gets one that says "Jesus doesn't love you," and she goes into hysterics. Harriet is consumed by finding out who is doing it. Beth-Ellen could not be less curious;
The town newcomers, the Jenkinses, are Southern, poor, and very religious, and extremely capable at bless-your-heart-ing Harriet into an apoplexy;
What Is Religion, Actually?
Beth-Ellen's flighty, socialite mom, Zeeney, is coming back from Europe with her new husband. Beth-Ellen has not seen her mom since she was a baby. Beth-Ellen Would Prefer Not To.

At first, I didn't know what Snicket meant when he said this book is not a sequel. Harriet is there! She's trying to solve a mystery! I don't remember very much about Harriet the Spy!

But it became clear that not only is Harriet not the protagonist, I'm pretty sure the pacing and tone of the book is markedly different than that of Harriet. We spend some time with Harriet, and in Harriet's mind, but the book is Beth-Ellen's, and Beth-Ellen is deliberate and unsure; polite and reserved. Harriet, through Beth-Ellen's eyes, is bluster and explosions. Harriet yells at her frequently. Topics include but are not limited to: not being curious; for taking too long; for wanting to be a housewife; wanting to go see Bunny; saying that she (Beth-Ellen) goes to Sunday school when Harriet didn't know that; making fun of Harriet with Jessie-Mae Jenkins; and that Beth-Ellen (12) gets her period when Harriet (11) has not.

Harriet, experienced this way, is excruciating. It's a really affective portrait of a certain kind of friendship! Even as I cringed every time Harriet talked over Beth-Ellen or told her how to feel or not to feel, I felt appreciative of 1) a companion book that is like hey remember our fun protag? she kind of sucks; and 2) the close observation of how children can relate to each other. Beth-Ellen shrinks from Harriet; she gets mad at her; I think I remember her saying she hates her; and she also articulates her tremendous gratitude for Harriet's bluster and the kind of peace it gives her; she takes Harriet's opinions and questions seriously, particularly about what she should do with her life; and there are two distinct ways, toward the end of the book, where Harriet offers Beth-Ellen much needed support. I feel as if one could as easily imagine Beth-Ellen and Harriet remaining good friends for the rest of their lives based on this shared history as one could imagine them drifting apart once they didn't share proximity. Both possibilities feel live.

The book, published in 1965, is at least in conversation with the problem novel if it isn't one itself. (I do not read enough 1960s books to know for sure.) It's certainly intended to be instructive, and some of the Instructive Scenes are the least successful, I think, particularly the menstruation conversation, when Fitzhugh has Janie (in town for the weekend), tell Beth-Ellen and Harriet to Remember That the Older Generations Thought Different Things Than We Did (But Lord Above There Are No Rocks in Your Uterus); and the conversation Beth-Ellen, Harriet, and Jessie-Mae have with the Preacher, a Black, southern ex-preacher who lives on his own in the woods, about religion as a tool that can fail.

In that second, it's not so much that I disagree, as that it's a little funny in context. Both Beth-Ellen and Harriet think about their relationships to religion a lot, particularly Harriet, who hasn't been raised with any. In fact, one of my favorite scenes in the book is her asking her dad about it; their conversation, notably about religion, does a tremendous job of being about marriage and about childhood, in terms of the things Harriet's dad says and what Harriet hears. A feast of doing three things at once! But it's notable that Harriet's dad doesn't have religion and doesn't know whether her mom prays. Her mom, when Harriet asks, says she does, and she believes in God, but since neither she nor Harriet's father are church-going, they decided to let Harriet make her own decision about it as she got older. They're good scenes. I just do find it Revealing that Fitzhugh has the ex-preacher explain to Jessie-Mae, who is planning on starting her own church, that he lost his job as a preacher down south because religion stopped being enough for people. Again! I do not! Disagree! I just also think! Fitzhugh! Has a particular take! That is largely individual-forward!

The book's ending fully executes on the promise of Beth-Ellen and Harriet as foils, and I liked it very much. (I was surprised by who was leaving the notes.) That said, the book's pretty atrocious about fat people, and its depictions of the poor and the One Black Person in the Book are mixed at best.

Well, I guess. March??? I haven't read anything other than Duncan the Tall getting his shit wrecked literally, sexually and metaphorically by various nobles for a like a week, which is because I Couldn't Read while I was trying to write about reading... Still not Ideal. May switch approaches for April/May. I have a few ideas, but. We'll see. The search for a sustainable and rewarding approach continues.

In the meantime, feel free to request thoughts on the following. Liked a lot of things last month better than I expected to.

( 10 books, 2 comics, 4+ albums, 1 tv show )

After the success of listening to Emily Wilde's Encyclopedia of Fairies, I was genuinely hopeful that Sarah Beth Durst's The Spellshop (for door) would also serve. The premise is silly--a city librarian returns to her childhood home on an island with a bunch of spellbooks, starts a shop, falls in love. That's okay! That's fine! I'm ready to put a silly premise aside! I'm ready to accept the givens, in return for a well-told story!

Ah. A problem arises...

Well, first. The book opens on Kiela, literally sorting books as fantasy!Rome burns. She's dismayed when her assistant, Caz, a sentient, talking spider plant, sprints through the stacks to tell her the library is on fire. All the other librarians left days--or weeks--ago. Kiela has been filling crates of books and putting them on a boat, in case of disaster, but the disaster won't really come. The revolutionaries--she read this in the paper--wanted to bring the knowledge in the library--which contains all the spellbooks in the Empire--to the people! She'd vaguely thought that seemed nice and stopped worrying. How could they be burning the library? She throws as many books as she can into her open crate; she and Caz take the elevator through the burning building to the docks; Caz tries to convince her to leave the crate behind; Kiela refuses; they load it onto the boat; they sail away. (The empire is a collection of islands.)

Imagine me fist-pumping. Here we have a book-person whose obsession with books has not only made them self-obsessed and blind in a way that's decent Romantic Comedy Fodder for a new relationship, but whose blindness to others has gotten her entangled in a messy political situation! How fun. I wasn't overly hopeful that the political undercurrent of the book would be very subtle, but I hoped that it would do something with the thorny knot of intention versus execution.

I didn't expect it to basically disappear. More fool me. Fine! Fine. I gritted my teeth through Kiela finding her way to her parents' home; finding it basically habitable after 18 years or so, including furniture; finding her mom's clothes--also wearable--after same; Why didn't they sell or take these things?? shhh, shhh, you're the one who picked up a "cozy" novel, shhhh now; through Kiela meeting a baker who says something like anyone who likes butter is a friend of mine; through Kiela noticing the baker has no jam-based pastries; none???? no one makes jam on the WHOLE ISLAND? you've mentioned fruits a couple of ti--through Kiela deciding to open a jam shop/secret spell shop--ah; through Kiela making pounds and pounds of jam and not sealing them. Fine. The book doesn't make economic or culinary sense. Fine. From skimming reviews of other cozy novels, The Spellshop's chosen boutique shop niche was less ridiculous than others, and in either case, I was sincerely ready to let it slide.

I was also disappointed but not surprised by that I still don't know what Larran, Kiela's love interest, sees in her, even though they do have a shared background. They were children on the island at the same time, and Kiela helped save a seahorse he was tending when they were children... But 1) she didn't know he was tending the seahorse; 2) she wasn't particularly trying to save it; 3) she doesn't remember him at all, and she tells him all these things. Despite this, and despite Kiela being very rude to him for most of the book, he resolutely brings her cinnamon rolls, fixes her house, builds her bookshelves, and takes her out riding seahorses. How hot is this woman.

The straw that broke the camel's back, for me, was the sheer number of unforced errors. Kiela, in the library, sensibly articulates that if the revolutionaries have gotten to and started burning the library, 1) the empire has other problems; 2) no one will know; 3) she's saving treasures. Once she gets to the island, she's obsessed with that she's stolen the books and is going to be turned into a statue in punishment. Now, this is how anxious people think! This would be so easy to sell! All Durst would have to do is have Kiela reflect for a moment that well, maybe, she could convince people she'd been saving the books! If she then was like no one would ever believe me, the empire is sososo cruel, at least we would have acknowledged that at any point Kiela thought something else. But no. It's like that framing of taking the books disappears. To write a less-accurate version of anxiety?

THEN IT COMES BACK BUT IN THE SAME WAY. KIELA CONVINCES HERSELF SHE CAN DO MAGIC BECAUSE NO ONE WILL EVER KNOW. DOES SHE WORRY ABOUT HAVING STOLEN THE SPELLBOOKS AND BEING TURNED INTO A STATUE? SHE DOES NOT. what? what? what? what? simply do not worry about it. What Kiela thinks about her own life and situation is driven by what is plot-convenient.

To make matters more excruciating, Kiela is constantly rehashing her own thoughts. She does it with the above, multiple times a problem-arc, but also with anything she thinks about. To the extent. Sorry this one makes me insane. To the extent that after spending a minute or two, so at least a page or more of the book, ruminating on how she now feels at home on, and connected to the island, Kiela turns from one grove of trees to see a vista, or her house, or something, and is like "home! wait, when did she start thinking of the island as her home?" TWO PAGES AGO? TWO PAGES AGO. YOU WERE. LITERALLY. JUST TALKING ABOUT IT------------------

I called these unforced errors, but I am afraid that they were added on purpose. Without any direct proof, I suspect that this book is suffering from the same malady as many contemporary TV scripts, where the writers are being asked to repeat themselves so that people who are cooking, or calling their friends, or listening at 2x speed, or whatever, can follow the story without paying attention. Fine. The unfortunate side effect, of course, is that if you do it the courtesy of paying attention you end up wanting to scrape out somebody's eyes with a spoon.

The book's plot is. Fine. A person shows up, says she's a magic inquisitor from the empire. Will she catch Kiela? Is she an inquisitor? Will Larran like her better? Who could say!

I enjoyed more of the book than this makes clear; it's about a 3.5 stars, if I had to rate it. Some parts of it are cute. I just can't recommend it for more than a skim read, whatever a skim read might look like for you.

April second, no problem. Ok. Diana Wynne Jones's Dogsbody, for

pauraque and door. I had vague intentions of writing this up before I listened to the Eight Days episode about it, but time very obviously intervened. So, for a deep dive into the book's Actual Summary, as well as its reflections on sex, the Troubles, and Welsh myth, among other terrific insights, check that out.

Things I thought about Dogsbody:

Wow, death enters this book early. It technically enters at the beginning, as Sirius is on trial for murder, sticks around, obviously, in the deaths of Kathleen's dad and in the Actual Literal Figure of Death (probably), but it's the puppy drowning that sticks with you. By you I mean me. It strongly seems that for DWJ, cruelty to animals is one of the real unforgivables, which is born out throughout the book, but it's the closeness of the experience that shocked me and interests me as an introduction to Sirius's life-as-a-dog. Actual thoughts about how the closeness of this experience is or is not born out throughout the book? How it relates to book openings or books for children? Not in this post!
I really need to read the Mabinogion... I liked the figure of death/the hunted and his rolling hills, but even though I could identify him as a death-figure, it was clear to me there was Something Else Going On, and I want to know what it is. Was. Might've been. I could have spent much more time with him, although it would have pulled the book out of shape----
On that note, there's a lot of being stuck in close, dark spaces in this book. I don't know where, if anywhere, this takes one, but from the sack thrown in the river, the fox den, and death's abode, they're there, and they're at key points, and they don't all feel the same. One could certainly say something about wombs, but I'm not sure I would.

And now, obsession time. Give me a DWJ book, and I will examine it looking for an example of a loving-Other situation. It shows up a lot, in DWJ, from Spellcoats to Eight Days of Luke, and it shows up again here, between Sirius and Kathleen. I'm fascinated by this thread. I'm fascinated by how DWJ returns to it like an old scab/fountain. I've talked about it before at length when I wrote up Luke, but I am about to talk about it again---

Not true voice: There's something in the end of Dogsbody that is the end of Howl, stretched thin. Powerful and emotional supernatural man is taken care of by a practical young woman who loves him. Dogsbody isn't Howl, of course. It's not a romance; it's not half as funny, and it doesn't mean to be. Its project is both more earthy and empyrean than that, although Sirius certainly hopes it's Howl. But there's something in this particular shape that DWJ comes back to, time and again. Sometimes it's semi-tragic, as here, and sometimes it's triumphant...

Unfortunately, I don't think this comparison particularly illuminates either book. I'm mostly just adding them to my red string board about loving-Other in DWJ. I think the most interesting thing to come out of this instance of rumination is this comment Becca made when we were chatting about the book at the time: "I do think she believes in her heart that loving things unlike yourself is a lifeline when what you have known is not designed to teach you how to love. If you can't love yourself then where do you go from there. Well--"

I think this is true, and I think it's such a good lens through which to view Dogsbody... Obviously, this applies to Sirius. But I'm honestly most interested in how it applies to Kathleen. How does Kathleen learn how to love, because of the events of Dogsbody? How does the experience of having loved and lost shape her? This is the most hopeful I've been that Kathleen won't become Sirius's Companion. She's already learned from you, sir, and lost the Other that could not stay. Maybe. Crossing my fingers.

None of this more than obliquely answers pauraque's question about what it was like to encounter this book for the first time as an adult. Interesting! I read it in a day; I enjoyed it; the workplace comedy, close-up depiction of abuse, and extended rumination on death as haunting/present/inescapable/pursued by living didn't quite hang together for me as an adult, although I like them separately, and I think Jones thematically makes a good case for their coexistence. I didn't really care for the MacGuffin... Dogs are not my animals, so I don't know if I'd have attached desperately to this book as a child, but it's also impossible to say. I could see myself having gone apeshit for the under the earth Death scene.

I also thought I'd like Pamela Dean's Tam Lin (for several) and then felt something rather different about it. I did quite like parts of the novel, but not at all in the way I expected.

It's possible that reading several versions of the Scottish border ballad beforehand didn't set up the read fairly. I found the ballad surprisingly short and unexpectedly punchy. And Dean's novel is ... not that.

Tam Lin is set at a fictional Minnesotan liberal arts college in the 1970s. Our protagonist, Janet Margaret Carter (Dean: did you see I used both extant names used for this character in the ballads, O, the cleverness of me), is the daughter of an English professor and starting her first year of undergrad. Wow! I thought. Wow! Starting your book in September when the fairy procession happens on Halloween! Wow! What a choice! It's all going to happen in two months! Wow!

No.

( How the hell is this book structured. Spoilers! )

We're going to try our best, sport. CMAT's Euro-Country for

littlerhymes and Rosalía's Lux, for same and

recognito .

Both these albums are full of incredible musical hybrid vigor. That's not a fair use of the term, as plenty of genre mashups are bad. These are not. These are so, so good. I'm grateful for the chance to talk about both, because I love them. I haven't done much research into their making, or even CMAT and Rosalía themselves, and I know next to nothing about music theory so my understanding of both albums is limited, I just really like them.

I really like all of Euro-Country, but I think it might be easiest to talk it via two of my favorite songs on the album, "When A Good Man Cries," and "The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station." "Good Man" is a country song. It starts out with a country fiddle. It has a swing on it. Thompson croons twangily while taking herself to task for making a guy cry. And then, in the last third of the song, as the production thickens, she starts wailing, against her own voice in descant, Kyrie Eleison! It about knocked me out of my seat. In a country song? In a COUNTRY song? And it sounds absolutely at home. Even with the descant, which is pulled straight from Catholic mass, it sounds at home. It makes me crazy. What a fucking bridge. What a fucking ending.

"The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station" is formed much in the same way, in that it builds from a clear thesis (she was at the Jamie Oliver Petrol Station, and god she hates him, but okay, don't be a bitch, the man's got kids and he wouldn't like this) to an inescapable musical explosion that blows my head off. But through all this she's doing crazy little things with rhythm--the FEAR and the FREEdom of BEing RE/leasedagain to FEEl svnTEEnagin--and also being really lyrically and logically hard to follow. She's got this incredibly clear thesis in the chorus, and then she keeps saying things like "Let me explain though," and "This is making no sense to the average listener," and "I'm still not explaining myself very well at all, let me try, let me try, let me try," and the whole thing's build suddenly is not about having a mantra about not being a bitch for no reason, it's about needing one, about feeling like you're flying apart at the seams where there aren't seams, and that's what the drums are doing. It rules.

The whole album slides in and out of this kind of legibility to self and listener and illegibility to self and listener, and most of them are doing more than one thing at once. I really really want to see her live, if I can.

Rosalía, however, I've probably lost my chance. I could theoretically see her in a stadium sometime, but I don't really care for stadiums, so. Alas. This is a very tortured transition. Anyway!

God I love Lux. The first time I listened to it, I stopped what I was doing by like the seventh song to just lie on my bed and cry due to being Artistically Moved. I looked up several publications' best albums of 2025, and I was shocked that it wasn't in almost anyone's top 10. I still don't know how that's possible. I can't listen to Lux and do other things because (Jenny Slate voice) it makes me too crazy.

Much has been made of the number of languages featured on Lux, (Rosalía sings in 13), but it's not just the languages. It's the styles. (puts face in hands and screams) Sorry. Sorry. I'm trying to be normal, I just keep listening to the tracks to have something clear to say and it's not actually helping----god. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. The range of this fucking album. It's got house music. It's got flamenco. It's got Italian arias. It's got Wagner. It's got spoken word. "Berghain," the one that Bjork is on, is the first track I heard and an incredible example. It comes right after the Italian aria and starts with an orchestra, like being slapped in the face. Then we get the Wagnerian chorus sung by an actual chorus, chanting in German that his fear is my fear, his rage is my rage. Like being slapped in the face. Then Rosalía comes on in possibly the highest soprano we've heard from her, and her descant is another slap. Bjork and Yves Tumor's entrances to the song are no less shocking and no less successful. It is an incredible feat of operatic maximalism and it is still somehow in conversation with a pop song. And it's not even my favorite song on the album!!!!

I also love "La Perla," the slower, somehow-playful breakup ballad that follows "Berghain" and which is such a change of tempo and performance it's like what the FUCK; "Reliqia," a sparkling, somehow triumphant-sounding piece about losing pieces of yourself and becoming a holy relic; "Mio Christo Piange Diamanti," the aforementioned Italian aria she wrote at least in part for her classical-music-loving Grandmother, and in which she uses her ability to span trembling pianissimo to firm vibrato; "Dios Es Un Stalker," a chamber-pop-salsa depiction of love from the divine's watching eye... It's a good album, Brent.

As March slips from my fingers, it's Hunter x Hunter, for recognito!

Since the end of February, I've read two and a half more volumes, putting me mid volume 13, so I'm just going to consider them along with the volumes I read before Feb.

Hunter x Hunter has been ... an interesting reading experience. As a known shounen-enjoyer, I, and I think everyone else, assumed I'd like it. And I have liked it. Parts of it. But I haven't loved it, and I expected to, which did make me have a kind of hormone-driven breakdown mid-this month. Normal!

Under the cut, I'll talk about what I've liked and not liked, and what I've found interesting and what escapes me entirely; most of this, I admit, is me trying to figure out what I think, and I discuss violence quite a bit. I'm also rather free with spoilers, so, careful, if you mind spoilers for a 20-year-old manga.

( This ended up so long. I'm sorry )

I haven't yet started Greed Island, the next arc. Part of me is dreading it, because I'm afraid it's going to be another Yorknew or Hunter Exam, where I don't really care for it until I reach the end of the arc. Another part of me is interested. When HxH is chewy, it's chewy. And maybe I'll learn about plot????

Merlin Sheldrake's Entangled Life (for

genarti ) is the second book I started in 2023 I finished last month! Like Middlemarch, I liked the book very much, and I was surprised by the ending.

In this case, it's because I got got by the sheer amount of backmatter! I thought I had about half the book left... no. Around 60 pages. Idiot. It's likely, though, if I had finished it in 2023, I wouldn't have written it up, so who's winning NOW???

I largely found the book delightful. I found Sheldrake particularly good at structure, a skill I desperately wish more science writers had, and which makes him very successful at writing science. He was able to, particularly chapter by chapter, structure the book around science-as-she-is-lived, following the complications, inversions, changes, misses, and upsets that characterize close attention to the study of any subject. It was such a pleasure to follow him down a line of thought and study, and then have him raise a question that undercut it, introduce a new study that changed the thinking, or reveal a limitation in the study or studies that I wouldn't have thought to consider. He understands that understanding is not just a constantly-changing, often-wrong activity, but the drama of that activity, and that that drama is best relayed through making the reader re-experience it... I loved it every time, from his discussion of how it's completely impossible to study mycorrhizal networks in a lab (not enough variables) or in the field (too many variables) to his clear impatience with the notion of tree "nurseries," which to him seems embarrassingly forgetful of that fungi are also living organisms with needs, like a plant-world version of androcentrism.

Many of my delights in the book were also in his attention to metaphor, which also serves him extremely well as a science writer and history-of-science writer. From the beginning, he pays close attention to how the metaphors used to describe fungi affect how they were seen and studied, from the conception of a "parasitic" partner in lichens, to the idea of symbiosis, to the idea of networks. He interrogates the terms used by contemporary scientists, such as "market" or "supply and demand," and also of the power of inverting expected metaphors, like when he calls a company that makes building material out of mycelium "the industrial equivalent of a Macrotermes termite mound," asks if yeasts domesticated US, or points out that the existence of in-plant fungi should trouble our understanding of what an individual plant is, or if one exists. Meanwhile, he is fully aware--and seems thrilled by--that it is impossible to do the work of science without metaphors. That we come to understanding via comparison doesn't seem to be a drawback, for Sheldrake... His enthusiasm for fungi, and for the study of fungi, seems only deepened by his sense that our understanding will be in constant revision.

Sheldrake, in fact, so communicates his enthusiasms that when, at the end of the book, he states that he plans to make a beer out of pulping one of copies of the book (fermentation) and growing oyster mushrooms on another, it's barely even a surprise. Of course he does. (And, per his Instagram, did.) This kind of excitement made him an excellent guy to spend time with, although I think it may have contributed to my least favorite parts of the book. There are moments where Sheldrake indulges, it seems to me, in a kind of grandiosity, most commonly at the beginning and endings of chapters. It's not, so much, that I don't think the subject deserves grandiosity, but that it sometimes seemed attached to personal anecdote, or taped onto a chapter to remind the reader there was a reason to keep reading about mushrooms. I don't know if it was an authorial choice or an editorial one, but it frequently made me roll my eyes. Please, sir! I am bought in! That said, it could be that after reading it once, I'd roll my eyes less, and just think happily to myself, Yes that's right. How will the study of fungi expand our understanding of ourselves?????

Finally, a few favorite factoids:

Some lichens don't live on anything. They just blow around, like symbiotic tumbleweed
PENICILLIN WAS CROWDSOURCED
when fungi (Ophiocordyceps) take over ants it becomes up to forty percent of the ant's biomass BUT ISN'T IN THEIR BRAIN

Ok I can't leave it there. Too horrible.

I really liked the book, and I was honestly disappointed when I realized my foolishness about backmatter. More please!

Ok, about three weeks later than I wanted to get to this, heeeeere's Middlemarch! For

queenlua and

recognito , per this post, if you reasonably don't know what I'm talking about. (In my defense, I was proofing a book, and every time I had spare language-brain, I felt like I had to go make sure no words had been misspelled.)

First, a confession. I did not read all of Middlemarch last month. I didn't even read all of it this year. I started it in 2023, got about 60% of the way through, and then put it away. Until this past month. I read the chapter summaries of the book I was on (Book 5 of 8) on Sparknotes, reviewed my chat comments from 2023, and decided that would suffice.

So, I can't really talk about the book as a book-shaped thing. Not really. What can I say...

Did any of you ever run into a book--the name of which escapes me--that was a set of joke summaries of famous books? The Ulysses one was the shortest: "June 16 came, and went, in Dublin." It's not that funny, but I kept thinking that one summary of Middlemarch, as true as anything else, might be, "Some years came, and went, in Middlemarch."

It's a bad summary, of course, but it at least hints at the scope of the novel... Well. Arguably. There aren't that many working class or poor people in Middlemarch. "Some years came, and went, in Middlemarch, where several upper class families with different fortunes-------------"

Drags hands down my face. I just checked my trusty notes where normally I have some sort of review to use as crib notes, and what did past blotthis write? "good book." Thanks, buddy. Okay. In the interest of writing this up at all, have some messages copied from DMs I sent people while reading. Unless indicated, it's just me babbling:( I'm losing my mind george is so excellently filleting the poor the rich the religious the technocrat and the technophobe in TWO PARAGRAPHS ABOUT ATTITUDES ABOUT TRAINS. )

Sighs. I really, really liked it. As you can see, I particularly lost my mind over the Lydgates, a toxic marriage so bad it made me want to strip my skin off instead of chanting sexy divorce! like a little goblin and over the homosocially-charged scene between Rosamund and Dorothea. Every day I am praying to the Yuletide gods that someone will write the version where they make sexy gay mistakes. For me. I also loved Fred and Mary, Mr. Featherstone, and, god, I loved reading about Bulstrode from Eliot's pen.

I am honestly still agog at both Eliot's powers of observation and at her power to transmit that observation. I saw (but didn't read) some article about how it's simply not possible to write in this style of aphoristic-all-seeing-judgement-cum-fairness anymore, and I don't know if I believe it, but I do think Eliot is on some dope shit. I certainly don't know anyone else who writes like this. (It did make me feel like I needed to go read some Tolstoy?? Is this two cakes????)

I enjoy Austen best when she's making her narrator a coy little bitch to her characters, and Eliot somehow is a coy little bitch to all her characters by never doing that. Or almost never. I don't know. I'd have to reread it, or at least write out all my highlights by hand to get a handle on it. Either'd be a worthwhile project, for sure, but neither are in my near future... Anyway. She's got a phenomenal control of tone and POV, I can tell you that.

I'm also still stunned at how fucking gripped I was by the ending arcs of the novel. I knew some stuff from summaries, but knowing where the Lydgates end up and what Dorothea chooses to do simply does not do justice to the intensity of those last 100 something pages. I still don't know how she did it. I mean, several dark nights of the soul in a row, but to have those Dark Nights feel like, Yes. This is where this was all heading. 600 pages ago. For like six different characters. Insane shit.

The very ending is funny, because Eliot tries to suggest that Dorothea is the book's main character? Or something? Which. Well. Okay. The comparison I made above to TNY is in the way The New Yorker Story gives you a character, lets you watch them make decisions, and then invites you to judge them. There's some of that, in Eliot. I mean, Eliot also invites you to consider how you judge them, as well as tells you about why you might judge them, etc., etc., so it's not like they're that similar in form, but there certainly is an overlapping interest in the Foibles of the Upper-Middle Class and How They Have or Don't Have Dark Nights of the Soul. Anyway. The end of Middlemarch is NOT the ending of a New Yorker Story. She will be telling you some more things you should think about. It's not nearly as strong--to my mind--as the rest of the ending, but I can forgive it, given how good the rest of the book is.

It's worth noting, if you are inspired to read it, that Eliot's occasionally Upper Middle Class English weird about Jewish people. (Note: Gogol kindly corrected me here, particularly re: Eliot's Orientalist-ish attitudes not being exactly of her time. Thank you, Gogol. I know so very little of the English and it's silly to have guessed lololol) Not the worst, but Becca let me know that Daniel Deronda is about how hard it is to be hot Jew, and that tracks. And is kind of embarrassing. George... C'mon. C'mon.

Anyway. Great fucking book. One of my favorites of the year so far, for sure.

Several folks requested texts about which I don't have too much to say... We didn't think it was possible.... Perhaps it's better this way... Anyway! Collected for your pleasure and my peace of mind:

The Lady's Not For Burning for

nextian

Wow. The language is good in this one, huh??? I'm afraid I read it right after finishing Tam Lin, which ended up being an interesting experience... Couldn't help comparing it to Dean's interests--beautiful language, the marriage of minds alive to the world surrounded by idiots, particularly of a depressed man and a life-hungry woman--and the pacing flaws in Tam Lin... Lady, I think, might echo them. Not that Lady is too long, but the ending... we rise to a pitch and then we--don't. This could work on stage, I think, if you played the silences right. Worked less good in TL.

Damn it was delicious to read, though. And I'll always happily read about people getting their belief systems shaken. And they're foils? How fun.

Fleabag, Ep. 1 for

queenlua and

osprey_archer

I liked it! I like watching people make expressions. I Love to See Olivia Coleman. I'm interested in the fourth wall, and I'm especially interested in reading the play that birthed the tv series, and comparing the choices. It's depressing, and the narrator sucks, but I was surprised and interested in the Friend Situation Reveal at the end of the episode, and the control of tone that reveal ... revealed. I'd love to hear why you each bounced off!

It's worth noting that I've only seen the one episode, and that I saw it on Dracula night, so I'd watched, in order, Bram Stoker's Dracula, and then Gatiss/Moffat's Dracula ep 1, and then topped it off with this. At that point, I was thrilled to watch a whole cast act. Also it was midnight by the time it finished. I do plan to watch the rest of the series, though!

The Freelancer's Bible for

genarti

I read this for my Business of Copyediting class. It's very good. I'm certain it was helped by the context, which forced me to Actually Do Things with the Information, but I really was impressed by this self-help book, alas. The writing is clear, the advice specific, the resources relevant, and the tone is cheerful and excited about the opportunities freelancing can afford people while being extremely clear-eyed about the difficulties of being a freelancer, both on the individual level and the systemic. The main author is the founder and former president of the Freelancer's Union, and so she brings a fiery labor organizer's point of view to a very entrepreneurial topic that I Appreciated. The book's a bit outdated in some respects--not everyone has a cellphone! you might consider getting wireless internet! AI doesn't exist!--but the overall guidance I found as helpful as ever.

Spirited Away for

genarti,

osprey_archer, and geestellar

Stares into the middle distance. It's a good movie, Brent. No. Sorry. I watched it at a friend's place with a ton of friends, and my takeaway was, "Don't watch good movies with friends." Bless 'em. Nobody would shut up.

It was kind of an interesting experience, in that before we got started, friend H said it was one of his least favorite Ghibli films, because it doesn't have a plot. This was a shocking statement to me. Of course it has a plot. It's about Chihiro... not growing up, exactly, but becoming More Herself. We argued about this a bit to start, and friend Z brought up that it has a Japanese-style plot, and Z is of course right. The movie's a bit episodic. There's a whole near-silent sequence on the ocean train. (Beloved.) But I also just think friend H is wrong and didn't grow up reading books about practical heroines who learn to Be Themselves. Or appreciate the soot sprites enough. Or Chihiro running down the stairs. Or my wife. Or---

Spirited Away doesn't pry me open with an oyster knife the way Kiki does. It doesn't have the evil lesbian capitalist foil to a hot feral wolf girl that Mononoke does. But it's my favorite.

As requested by

passingbuzzards,

skygiants and door, it's.... Dracula!

I'd never seen any Dracula adaptation at all ever--unless one counts Buffy as a Dracula adaptation, in which case I've seen Hush and the singing one--and may I just say, I would not recommend starting with any of the three adaptations I saw this month!

I've a longstanding interest in adaptations, though, so when some friends decided to go see Luc Besson's Dracula (2026), I joined them. Now, none of us knew that in other markets, this movie was subtitled "A Love Tale."

Me: Between... Mina and Jonathan?
Besson: Mais non! Dracule et Mina!

( Oh dear. )

I had a great time. What a series of swings. My takeaway was "Terrible movie. Everyone should see it." I laughed so much that I made friends with the folks on the other side of our group. I haven't even mentioned the gargoyles, which ended up being one of the funniest things I've seen in a movie in recent memory. Do not spend 20+ dollars to see it, but if you're hanging out with buddies, eating snacks, and ready to yell delighted disparaging comments at a Bad Movie with A Huge Budget, put it on the list.

I mentioned seeing Dracula (2026) to a Media Professional friend, and when she learned I hadn't seen Bram Stoker's Dracula, she was like oh, we should get high and do that. And I was like can we please, actually. So last weekend, we did. Minus the getting high, plus another Media Professional friend, whose apartment we invaded. (He has a TV and a couch.)

( New astonishments )

Ok. So, after we finished BSD, we tipsily decided it was early (10pm) and we could watch!! the first episode!!! of BBC's Dracula! They did not tell me it was an hour and a half and a Gatiss/Moffat production!!!

I'm not going to write this up in as much detail. I had fun with it, actually. There are parts in it that Gatiss and Moffat Simply Cannot Stop Themselves, of course, but overall I liked the Jonathan, Mina, Van Helsing (a Religiously Troubled but Very Self-Confident nun), and Dracula. Claes Bang, who plays Dracula, has more fun as he gets younger and sexier, and absolutely homosexually tortures Jonathan to pieces. Loved that. (Oldman and Landry Jones both become wooden as hell as they get younger and sexier, which was homosexually torturous for me---) I also adoooored Dolly Wells as Sister Agatha Van Helsing.

My understanding is that the third episode absolutely blows shit. From Gatiss and Moffat? Shocking. But the first episode, at least, felt more interested in the book's specific death-dread than the two movies, even as it turned much of the plot on its head. I've been told the second episode is even better. It's unlikely I'll watch it on my own, but I'm happily passing that information on to you.

Here we go, again on my bloooooog~~

Much higher highs and lower lows in the reading this month. As before, write-ups as requested.

( 10 books, 3 volumes of manga, 4 movies, 2 TV eps, and 4 albums )

ETA: I had read Lady's Not For Burning before, multiple times, because we did a Zeater read of it in 2020 or something. I didn't forget! I simply forgot to. Star it. Sorry about any and all confusion: You aren't crazy. That happened.

LAST ONE FOR JANUARY.

Monstress has been on my list for ages, and I noticed the electronic version was available at my library, so I picked it up. What did I know about it? Beautiful art. My friend thenjw really liked it, years ago. Monsters, probably?

Turns out, it is as relentlessly violent as the art is beautiful, and the art is very beautiful. Maika is a sixteen-year-old arcanic--part human, part... demi-god?--who is missing part of her left arm, a bunch of memories, and her mom. What she does have includes rage, passive suicidal tendencies, a lot of trauma from surviving the recent war between the arcanics and the humans, a Dark Passenger, a tendency to eat people, and half of a photo, in which she and her mom are buddying up with one of the Evil Nuns who Eat Arcanic Bodies to heal themselves, stay young, and amplify their magic powers.

The graphic novel begins with Maika getting sold to these nuns. Violence arrives, delivered as often by Maika as otherwise, and It Maintains Its Presence. Monstress definitely has a lot to say about trauma and power and WILL use cannibalism to do it. Often. Over and over. I found it kind of relentlessly bleak.

There are so many mysteries in this world (what is this mask, what is this Dark Passenger, where's her mom, who's that, who's THAT, how are those people related, what's the Dusk Court, is that person dead or not, what happened to Maika, what does the Dark Passenger want, why is Maika special) it's hard to keep track, and a mystery--where finding out solves the problem--is not that fundamentally interesting to me. Personal problem! But. The volume certainly opens enough threads to keep an epic fantasy humming for a while, and if this is a volume-one-only situation, that's not so bad. If the comic maintains this level of adding mystery on top of mystery, I think I'd lose my mind.

That said, I told a friend although I wouldn't be rushing to volume 2, I could see the story sticking with me, and the ending of the volume--it's flirtations with hope and with betrayal--certainly offers a kind of upside-down emotional cliffhanger that leaves me curious about if Maika's new direction will to last or immediately be ground to dust.

Recommend, if you're into bloody trauma reckonings, beautiful art, body horror, what we'll do to survive, and how in-groups use the creation of out-groups to get power. Also it's matriarchal, I guess, but that largely means most of the people have boobs. They're still awful people! Complimentary.

BONUS:

As for Akane-banashi, which I love, I read all of the available e-book volumes as fast as the library would allow. Let me crib from others about how it works and why it's great:

Everything rolameny says
Tumblr user arcnoise said, "i love a story that just cares about craft and goes out of its way to point out to its audience all the reasons why you, too, should care about craft" and they're RIGHT

All I have to add that although I appreciate that Akane is an underdog because her dad is dead (fired), I wish she lost more. However, I recognize that the team didn't think the comic would last even a year, so they were really going for it!!! And don't worry, Akane makes plenty of mistakes. I just wish she'd cry...

Okay that and I completely lost my gourd at vol. 14. Incredible, incredible use of comic art to illustrate theatrical art. Made me want to see rakugo so bad. Also really added to my appreciation of Kenshi Yonezu's "Shinigami."

Grimly. I will be flooding your reading page.

Gerald Morris's The Lioness and her Knight is the seventh in Morris's series of Arthurian retellings, which I did not know when I checked out the book. I'd only done so because a friend mentioned it was her favorite book as a kid. Turns out, it doesn't much matter--Gawain and his squire, the main characters of the first few books, show up, but I think the series may be written to be fine in whichever order.

Lioness uses the Troyes romance, "Yvain, the Knight with the Lion," as its main source, although there are references to Gareth and Lynette. I was not familiar with either story. Didn't matter! Our main character, Luneta, is the daughter of Gaheris and Lynet, and she Wants to Go to Court, where people are Fashionable. Her parents agree to send her to her mom's friend, Laudine, after the planting is done. Luneta does not care about the planting! Normal thing for someone who lives in a rural area to think, especially when there is one (1) servant mentioned on the estate! Thankfully, one day, her knight-hopeful cousin Ywain shows up, who is more than happy to take her to Camelot, and from there, to Laudine's. Ywain: It's like a quest!

They meet Rhiance, a fool, shortly after starting off, and he travels with them to Camelot--and onward, because Ywain is super excited that there's a stone that causes storms, protected by a knight in red, who beat up Rhiance. AND the Red Knight told Rhiance he had to be a fool for a year!! Ywain is going to avenge him!! Rhiance: You don't have to do that. Ywain: I gotta!!!! Rhiance: Please don't, I didn't like being a kight. Ywain: WELL I'LL JUST FUCK AROUND WITH THE STONE AND FIGHT HIM ON MY BEHALF THEN

From there we have problems, including, love at first sight, invisibility, killing your loved one's husband, not having a calendar on hand, half of the Malvolio plot from Twelfth Night, parents, madness, burning at the stake, learning magic, King Lear if it was two sisters and Lear was already dead and King Solomon was there, kidnapping, slavery, not wanting to talk about your feelings, and finding this woman your age kind of mortifying actually. Also very, very repressed pining.

Ok. So. In the first third, I was losing my mind a little because Morris cares maybe one fourth of a whit about the materiality, politics, or theology of medieval life. I was reminded of nothing so much as early 2000s Whedon-esque writing, where the point is the banter and the cleverness, and indeed, there's a whole section that's pulled word for word from Twelfth Night for no reason other than Morris was like "who is going to stop me? the twelve year olds?" It's funny! It's not self-satisfied, quite, but it is extremely self-indulgent. God knows, otherwise folks just talk like people in a sitcom; nowhere else (except when cribbing from Shakespeare), does anyone talk with a cadence even remotely approaching verse.

What's more, Luneta (our fashionista) (yells into my hands about medieval fashions simply NOT working on contemporary time scale or-----), turns out to be a practical heroine who is, of course, not like other girls. She wanted to be a boy when she was young! She prefers the company of Ywain and Rhiance to other women her age!*

Medieval hierarchy is also irrelevant--there's a scene where they're having a party in Gawain's rooms, when Gwen comes in, and no one even stands up. This isn't even remarked upon, because no one here would expect anyone to stand up for a queen. Later, a peasant is given a castle, and no one objects. One gets the feeling this is because Morris knows that these people are people, so of COURSE they'd have the same relationship to power structures he would: We love social equality!!!

No one in the book is remotely worried about their relationship with the divine, which is also telling, in terms of Morris's relationship to the stories' original contexts.

That said. I had a great time actually.

I suspected, at first, that the thing Morris most cared about was having fun, and it's almost infuriating how successfully he carried off, since it means he maybe could have put more pussy into it, but I also can't be that mad at a book that meant to be fun and then was!!

Morris, who is a pastor himself, lets only a tiny bit of theology into the book. It's the form of a hermit whose relationship to God is "give thanks to God, enjoy life, and do what you love," who he calls the Hermit of the Hunt. I didn't find any reference to this character when I looked it up, but there is so much cribbed from elsewhere in this book that I wouldn't be surprised to find it's out there somewhere.

Anyway, this idea animates the book. Not only because Morris clearly believes it, but because Luneta and Rhiance have a discussion about how difficult it would be for them to live with that kind of trust. I loved this; I love the dimension it offers Luneta, Rhiance, and the book's world. It echoes the difficulties Ywain, Luneta, and even Laudine have in identifying what they want, as well as the book's underlying joy in happiness. (Am I still just so glad anytime a character encounters friction in their decision-making and relationship to the world? Maybe!!)

Spoilers, but interesting in re: the book's dimensionality. There's also a bit where, after freeing some folk from indentured servitude-cum-slavery, Morris allows himself to surprise his reader with people-who-seemed-nice having known about the slavery, who still wish it would continue, and with a woman whose life was shaped by it so strongly that she doesn't know how to live any other way. Unexpected elements.

Furthermore, for all that Rhiance and Luneta do banter, they avoid becoming banter-vessels. Was lovely to notice myself rooting for them.

I really had a great time. It is not only the kind of Arthuriana I'd have adored as a teenager, it was charming as hell as story. At first I couldn't imagine reading Morris's version of the Green Knight, but now I'm deadly curious. Joy in life is one of the poem's elements I find fascinating, and it might be very fun to see Morris's take on it.

*This is where I say yes of course, I am who I am, and who I am is happy to imagine the AU where Luneta is transmasc and Rhiance is like oh yay, a boyfriend. I think they'd have a lovely time. I'm also happy for Laudine, Ywain, and their live-in third, Philomela.

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