the mermaid cafe

Tall Ships!!! So beautiful!!!

Wednesday reading, also beautiful!

What I've just finished
Six of Crows: A Darker Shore: Letters from Ketterdam by Leigh Bardugo. I don't know why the title is longer than the short story but I loved it! It's an epistolary story, using an investigation of the mysterious captain of The Wraith (tall ships!!!) as the framework, and letters between Kaz and Inej make up many of the documents the investigators are using. Ugh, I love them so much! ( spoilers )

I really hope this isn't the only time Bardugo chooses to revisit the Dregs and Ketterdam, because I would pay full hardcover price for a full-length, getting the band back together heist novel.

What I'm reading now
Radiant Star by Ann Leckie. I'm enjoying it but I only have a very vague recollection of what happened in the main trilogy, so some of it is probably going over my head. And I also realized I haven't read Translation State so hopefully that is not to relevant to this one. I do enjoy how Leckie plays with POV though.

What I'm reading next
As always, who can say?

*

I've finished s2 of Shadow and Bone and I'm trying to pull together my thoughts about it. I will say, without spoilers, that I enjoyed it and that the casting remains excellent, especially for the Crows.

( spoilers, including spoilers for all books )

So yeah, I feel like there was a lot to like and I want to watch it again. I also really hope they get a third season that focuses on the Crows and the Ice Court heist.

*

I was up early yesterday morning for my grocery delivery (I hate being up at 6:30 am on a Saturday - even in the Before Times when I had to commute, I slept until 7:20 - but it's worth it for getting things done and also frequently being the first top in the 7 - 9 am delivery window), so I made a lemon sour cream pie, this time with the called-for pie crust, rather than the graham cracker crust I typically make with it, and meh. I don't find the pie crust (store-bought; I've never made a pie crust at home) adds anything to the pie, whereas the graham cracker crust adds texture and flavor. Maybe a shortbread crust would also work. I might try that next time, as the filling (basically it's lemon curd with sour cream folded in) is delicious and easy to make, especially when you've got some old lemons hanging around.

But being up early gave me time to start (and eventually, last night, finish) Shadow and Bone. My feelings about the first Grisha trilogy is that they were pretty rote YA and that Bardugo upped her game by several levels with the Crows duology (I read Six of Crows first, then the Grisha trilogy while waiting for Crooked Kingdom to come out), and also I think I just prefer the heist narrative and enjoyed the characters more (which isn't to say I don't love Nikolai, Zoya, and Genya, because I do), so mostly I was excited about seeing my faves in a show even if I wasn't quite sure how they were going to do it since their book starts a few years after Alina's ends.

If you had similar worries, I'm here to say don't. They, like, 96% pull it off (more specifics under the cut), plus they improve Alina's story a lot imo with some minor changes. Ben Barnes is AMAZING, as I was sure he would be, and even if he weren't, he's just so handsome. Zoe Wanamaker makes the most of her brief screentime as Baghra, and the mostly unknowns they cast for everyone else are really well cast and also everyone looks like they're in their early 20s, which makes everything make more sense than them being 16. *rolls eyes* Plus, there's an almost unrecognizable Howard Charles playing a made for the tv show character!

( spoilers )

I just hope that if they do a second season (and I really hope they do!), they make the scenes in Ketterdam better lit.

*

Today's poem:

Oasis
by Beth Bachmann

We want what God wants: to be pure.

Take the water. We'll pay for it in glass.

Poseidon, now there's a god, a real king of water.

We want what a god wants: to own it, all.

Water baron, barren woman, what do you know of the sea?

The sea never ceases ringing.

I swallowed the seahorse because I could not swallow the seashore.

How to track an animal?

It takes one to know one.

You need it so bad it will kill you.

Is water a human right?

How much you got?

How far are you willing to go for a taste?

Look at the horses on the beach at Assateague: swim or die.

That's nature—so feral they'll perish if they eat a whole bag of sugar.

Red, green, or golden, horses love an orchard.

Storm rising? Star gazing.

God of the sea: god of the horse.

In the body in the body of the centaur, which part is human and which part animal?

The difference between liminal and subliminal is regional.

Look up.

It was a half­‐man half-­horse that first grouped the stars into shape, the first shape in the sky—a hybrid—a half­‐man half-­horse selfie.

You can't have a half-­man half‐horse without a half­‐female half‐horse; with Hylonome, they say Ovid explores "possible combinations of a number of conceptual opposites: natura and cultus, human and animal, male and female, love and war, and the contrasting values of lyric—elegiac and epic poetry."

On the merry-­go-­round, I always go for the gold‐ring. Alchemy.

Of all the psychopomps, I ride the horse.

*

I meant to go to bed early last night and ended up staying up too late reading fic that turned out not to even be complete. Sigh. Why is that always the way?

Anyway, in terms of other reading, let's do the meme:

What I've just finished
The Tyrant's Tomb (Trials of Apollo #4) by Rick Riordan, which I enjoyed a lot. Apollo has really grown as a character and also in terms of how much I enjoy him now as a narrator, so that's good.

I also did a reread of Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom and they are even better the second time around when you know how things are going to work and you can see how Kaz is manipulating things and then how he has to think on the fly when things don't work the way he planned. ♥KAZ♥

I really want to write some Kaz/Inej now, but mostly I just have nebulous OTP feels, no real story ideas aside from "they learn how to touch each other, and also Inej becomes the scourge of slavers everywhere" so if you've got any story ideas lying around, I'm willing to accept prompts. I did look at last year's yuletide prompts, but they were mostly of the "post Crooked Kingdom, Kaz and Inej figure out their issues and learn to be together" variety (my own included!) without any real inspirational hook to hang a story on, at least for me.

Penhallow Amid Passing Things by Iona Datt Sharma, which I liked but wished were longer.

What I'm reading now
All Our Pretty Songs by Sarah McCarry - so far the writing is really evocative but the plot hasn't kicked in yet - I only started it this morning on the train.

What I'm reading next
Well, the next Rivers of London was bumped to February, so I'm just waiting for the Ronan book to come out and I'll see which of the many, many books on my iPad I can mark as read before that happens. *g*

***

I said this on Tumblr last night, but that frequently feels like shouting into a void, so I'm going to say it here too, in the hopes that casting it out into the universe means it will shortly appear on the internets for my reading pleasure:

There should be a Leverage/Timeless crossover, where the Leverage crew gets hired to infiltrate Mason Industries ("Let's go steal a time machine!") and they have NO IDEA that the time machine is real, so they are in for QUITE A SHOCK when Parker accidentally sends herself and Lucy back to the Gold Rush or something. Of course, when they discover Rittenhouse it becomes "Let's go steal history!"

I feel like Eliot and Wyatt would have run into each other before (surely something very distinctive will be mentioned, or perhaps that's in regard to Flynn, whom Eliot would also know and dislike immensely), and Jiya and Rufus know Hardison from somewhere online (or maybe MIT?), while Lucy and Parker would just be super awkward when they got stuck in the past together. Parker might learn a few interesting if non-pertinent historical facts, and Lucy might learn how to crack a safe.

Someone who is not me should totally write that! :D :D :D

In other news, I meant to link to this the other day and forgot in all the househunt excitement: wonderful Kaz/Inej fanart by mimiscribbles. His bare hand! Their linked fingers! Her knives! The twin "we're going to fuck you up" expressions! <333 #otp: we never stop fighting (Thanks to umadoshi for the link!)

***

I went home and slept a lot yesterday and ate some bland food, watched Brooklyn Nine-Nine and slept some more, and now I feel at least 90% better, which is good, because I have L's birthday dinner tonight.

Brooklyn Nine-Nine: Coral Palms Part 1
( spoilers ) I'm so glad this show is back!

***

Wednesday reading meme:

What I've just finished
Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo, which I loved! I would have given it five stars had it not ended on a cliffhanger. Luckily, the sequel comes out next week, so I don't have a months-long wait in front of me. Anyway, magical heists are awesome and Inej is the best and I ship her and Kaz really hard. ( spoilers )

Other things I really liked about this book: no love triangles - the pairings are made pretty clear from the outset so there's no "who will they choose?" nonsense; believable world-building; friendship between the two girls on the crew; unremarked upon homosexuality; and as I mentioned behind the cut, so much delicious pining. I still feel like they all have to be in their 20s for any of this to make sense, but whatever, that's easy enough to handwave.

Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo, which is set in the same world as above, though slightly earlier in the timeline I guess? Anyway, I didn't enjoy this nearly as much - it's a much more typical YA with a first person special girl narrator who I didn't really connect with. She feels kind of generic to me.

What I'm reading now
Still, I'm reading the second book in the trilogy, Siege and Storm, though I was hoping for a Mal POV, or at least some relief from the unrelenting Alina POV.

What I'm reading next
Probably the third in the Grisha trilogy, just to see how the story ends, but also the sequel to Six of Crows, which comes out next week. ♥INEJ♥

***