pretty_plant

So I wrote something based on a small section in "The Bishop of Durham attempts to surrender the City", Clarke's newest short story. Don't read this if you want no spoiler for that short story.

Jealousy (1442 words) by A_box_of_chocolates
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell & Related Fandoms, The Bishop of Durham attempts to surrender the City - Susanna Clarke
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Thomas of Dundale & John Uskglass | The Raven King
Characters: Thomas of Dundale, John Uskglass | The Raven King
Summary:

Thomas de Donville fed and kept John Uskglass warm when they were slaves.

There are spoilers for Clarke's The Bishop of Durham Attempts to Surrender the City so please beware.

Why are synopses of older novels on Amazon etc...so very useless?

They always summarize the plot and go on and on about how amazing the books are but never touch on the version of the books that are included in the novel. Older books tended to be revised by the authors, editors, family members, etc...so I really want to know which version of the novel I am reading. The synopses absolutely fail to give me this information and I need to read the damned introduction, editor's intention, etc...to figure out what I will actually be reading.

Note: Everybody, feel free to join in!
You are a minor practical magician who have practiced magic for around three years with some basic understanding of common spells.
Today, your fiance, a pretty girl of eighteen, suddenly disappeared and in your attempts to find her, you walk on a fairy road and find a majestic castle with tall towers. Music comes from the windows into the room and you can tell that a ball was going on.
Walking into the chamber, you see many ladies and gentlemen of superb handsomeness in a dizzying array of outfits that escape human comprehension.

What do you do now?
A. Approach a lady and ask her for a dance.
B. Stay next to the wall to observe.

Dear JSAMN fic exchange author,

I am glad that you got assigned to me as the writer whomever you are and I am looking forward to reading the fic you will write for me.
I would also love to receive any gifts and have changed my account settings to allow gifts from anybody.

Here are the lists of what I like which you do not necessarily have to include in the fic:

- Angst, mental conflicts. It does not have to be very heavy or very angsty: I just love exploration into a person's thought, their struggles and joys, etc...
- Scholarly articles and arguments
- Worldbuilding, expanding the world of JSMN in any way possible by describing the world of JSAMN in the past, future, or another country.
- Vivid imageries and descriptions of weird fairy and magical stuffs.

I am fine with R18 elements in my fic, including violence and sexual content. Here is a list of what I enjoy (I will graybar the entire thing and if you do not feel comfortable reading or writing this sort of content, you don't have to read it. If you do, just highlight the entire thing and it will show up):
- Regarding violence, I can enjoy reading characters getting hurt, maimed, or killed in explicit details. I can also like gore and the macabre.
- Regarding R18 content, I would love to receive anything whether it is sweet and gentle or rough and kinky. If you want to make the work rough and kinky, however, I have found myself enjoyed works with these tags: tentacles or tentacle-like things, rough sex, dubcon. I am generally fine with most R18 content as long as it does not have anything ABO-related.
DNWs: ABO

Regarding the four requests I have made, here are some optional prompts that you don't really necessarily have to follow:

1. John Uskglass (Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell):

- It is written in the book that there are many fairy tales in which John Uskglass was put at a decided advantage such as the tale of the Charcoal Burner of Ullswater or the tale of the Hag and the Sorceress.
- John Uskglass and something that happened when he was reigning over England.

2. Thomas of Dundale (Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell):

- Thomas of Dundale and how he became Uskglass's servant.
- It is mentioned in the book that Chretien de Troyes wrote something on him so I would love to read a story focusing on a knightly feat of Thomas of Dundale.
- Honestly just a story about Thomas of Dundale doing anything in medieval times or the Regency. I just want to read anything about him.

3. John Hollyshoes (The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories):

- How John Hollyshoes kidnapped the wife who died in the beginning of the story.
- A story focusing on John Hollyshoes and Simonelli.
- A story focusing on John Hollyshoes and his fairy cousin, Thomas Fairwood.

4. Worldbuilding:

I am really curious about what the popular culture is like in JSAMNN in modern day times or just people's reactions to well-known magicians or historical figures from the book. Maybe people write a lot of books (historically accurate or inaccurate) that fictionalize the lives of the magicians, maybe there are video essays on them, maybe there is an anime or a game with these characters and Jonathan Strange gets genderbent into an extremely attractive red-haired tsundere female character. The possibilities are endless.

Reading The Mysteries of Udolpho was interesting...

It was in fact a quite absorbing read, I was excited to know more, even though some sections bored me to death. The first and second part were quite fun, Montoni was an interesting villain. However, I think it got less exciting when Count de Villeforte's family showed up. I never care much for that family, Blanche de Villeforte was very much bootleg Emily while her father, the Count, was very much the bootleg version of Emily's father.

Spoiler (highlight the grey section to read the spoiler) I do not share the Emily's favorable view of the Count. He always appears very impetuous to me and rather sets in his own way. He has no qualm about sending his daughter to a monastery at the injunction of his wife even though Blanche was miserable in it. He also had no reservation about making his wife join him in the middle of nowhere despite his wife's love for festivities and constant proclamations of dislike towards a secluded lifestyle. He was never compelled to fact-check before telling Emily to give up her lover.

This book was also very irritating because everybody took a damned long time to share anything out of a sense of propriety. It would be half this length if everybody just got to the damned point sooner instead of just skirting around the truth and indulging in all kinds of melodramatic fainting and crying fits. I know that was the point but I was super annoyed about this.

Another complaint is spoiler how the protagonist and her lover are said to be poor the entire book until the end, when they both turn out to be rich. Emily is certainly not very well-off but her aunt, who is widowed and childless at the beginning of the novel, is very rich. The money then goes to Emily once the aunt dies. Certainly, it will not be hard to imagine prior to the aunt's death that the money will go to Emily because the aunt has no closer relative to pass her property onto. Valancourt has a rich brother who is also unmarried and childless and it is stated at the end of the book that it is likely the brother's property will go to Valancourt after his brother dies but throughout the book, everybody keeps talking about how poor Valancourt is as if he were not in expectation of a great estate. Despite all the constant emphasis on how poor Emily and Valancourt are, they both seem terribly connected to so many childless, affluent relatives that it feels like they are never in any actual danger of financial hardships and Radcliffe just made a fuss over a problem that never even existed in the first place. However, of course, I am not the best judge of financial hardships of rich, well-connected people in that time period because I am certainly not a rich person of my time period.

Despite all the sympathy Emily gave for the poor, the book seems highly insensitive to the poor themselves. There was one section in which the Count encountered a group of huntsmen and told them: how I wish I could be a huntsman and lived like that for a week (or a month). Yeah, this titled, rich gentleman totally would be willing to give up his property to be huntsman. It has the same energy as Marie Antoinette dressing up as a peasant to enjoy her idyllic, Arcadian life in the village specifically built for her enjoyment. This book, in fact, has a lot of idyllic scenes of peasants being simple and natural, as opposed to the elegant artificiality of Paris like.

I, in fact, enjoyed reading this but it also made me strangely mad that I need to rant adkewnfiuehfirefj.

For a while, I did not read a lot of books because my brain felt dull and I felt most comfortable doing nothing, scrolling social media so when I finally got my break, I decided to catch up on my reading.

I read some stuffs that I really do not want to admit I read outside of some special circles. After that, I read one Lankhmar book as it is an important and influential work in the genre of sword and sorcery. Haha, Pratchett totally parodied these Lankhmar book in his Discworld novels. It is interesting and fast-paced and fun enough but I wonder whether Leiber had any bad experiences with women considering he had very interesting presentations of the female characters in his book. But generally pulp fictions targeted towards men do not tend to have nuanced portrayals of women so Leiber was not the first and would not be the last. I think the best portrayals of women of in older male-power-fantasy works that I have read definitely belong to Jin Yong.

After that I read The Flight of The Heron by Broster because Regshoe loves it. I thought Broster was a man at first but after her description of Ewen's glistening chest during the first part of the book, it did not take long for me to realize Broster definitely was interested in men. So I thought he was a gay man because I am dumb. When I got to the last page and realized what the initials actually stood for, it then made perfect sense for me why Broster wrote that way, though. It is definitely interesting how the word "glistening" was used by both an old writer and modern day's romance writer to describe a hot man. And how Broster described Ewen so much resembled present day's romance writers that I have to say, we have not changed at all the last one hundred years or so. The book is engaging but I can't say its focus on hyper-masculine values appeals to me.

I am currently reading The Legends of King Arthur and His Knights by Knowles and Malory and I have read more than half of it. When I was about one fourth into the book, I was interested by one of the tale because I am a hopeless JSMN fan. In the tale, one knight had to fight his own brother and they both did not know the other person was their brother. The brother of the knight was stuck to the place after he defeated another person and had to fight any knight that came to the area. If the knight defeated his own brother, he would have to take up his brother's spot and got stuck there. There was also a castle in this story and the castle was filled with many people. (I am sorry with my very unclear description of the story, I did not want to scroll through the ebook and lost my current place in the book). This story resembled Lascelles's fate so much that I could not doubt that Clarke had been inspired by it especially when it is very well-known. It is always interesting to read stories and legends and come across one that definitely inspires Clarke.

I was surprised by how much I do not know about Arthur despite encountering him everywhere. For example, I definitely do not know he was supposed to be a Britton force that resisted Saxon's invasion into England. I always thought he was a mythical king that ruled a mythical Britain completely divorced from historical events.

Today, as I was looking through Amazon, I was surprised to see a book by Peter D. Matthews titled English Magic and Imperial Madness that has not yet been released. The book will focus on Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Clarke. I am pleased to know that someone will do an in depth analysis into the book because JSMN definitely deserves it.

I remember a few years back, when I randomly took a book out of a shelf in the library, I was pleasantly surprised to see the book mention JSMN. It was a book about fairy tales and the author wrote that they liked The Ladies of Grace Adieu. They also told a fascinating story about the tale that "On Lickerish Hill" was based on. Apparently, the tale was first penned by a woman but was later revised and republished by a man (and was then later republished by another man). The woman who wrote it was peeved by the fact she received no acknowledgement. In her story, Clarke also did not acknowledge the authoress who first penned the story. I think that is the basic story though I read it so long ago, I probably forgot all the important details. But this whole thing is particularly interesting because it fits the theme of The Ladies of Grace Adieu so well. I wish I had noted the name of the book and the author down. I will probably go to the library one day to try to find it again.

I did say some time ago that I have two contrasting headcanons about Thomas and John growing up together and not growing up together. I published a fanfic about them not growing up together so this is the other version. I actually wrote this a long time ago. I forgot about it for a long time and did not edit it. I finished editing it today.

Title: Things that had not changed
Summary: Thomas first met Starling many years ago, in a brugh of the fairies. Many years had passed and there were things still left unchanged.
Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30338520

So after a break from Pratchett, I decided to continue to read some more of his Discworld novels. I think I have forgotten basically everything about the previous because I have a bad memory. However, Discworld novels are standalone books anyway so remembering doesn't matter too much anyway.

I just finished reading "Thief of time". Before I started reading, I was not too thrilled about reading another book about Death and Susan because I did not want to read a rehashed plot but I was pleasantly surprised. In this book, Death and Susan do not take center stage and the protagonist are Lobsang and Jeremy. Lu-Tze and Lobsang have interesting interactions and complement each other well so in my opinion, the parts with them are the best parts of the book.

One issue I have with this book is definitely the uninteresting romance between Lobsang and Susan if that can be called romance. Maybe it should be called vaguely romantic interaction or something. It really comes out of nowhere and feels unnecessary to the plot. In Soul Music, Susan has a sudden crush on a boy that leads to nothing but she is very young in that book so it makes sense. In Thief of Time, it doesn't.

Besides that, I definitely like the book. I still believe the best book featuring Death is Reaper Man but this is probably the second best. However, I might change my mind later when I read the next Death book.

I will try to keep this review as spoiler-free as possible.

This book definitely does not disapppoint.

For some time before reading Piranesi, I actually avoided reading all the interviews or reviews of the book so I knew nothing about the book besides the fact that it was supposed to have a house and magic. I thought that the book would be set before the modern time or in a vaguely unspecific historical time but I was wrong. This book is set in the 21st century. At the beginning of the book, the main character has an air-headed, innocent feel to himself so he describes everything with a childlike wonder but as the book progresses, there are many sections of the book that are modern in tone. Those sections are very matter-of-fact in a way that reminds me of a crime or mystery novel. The wondrous and modern tones are blended together very well so the change does not feel jarring but natural and adds much to the book.

As for the House, while I was reading the book, I could not help thinking of Gormenghast. I wonder whether Clarke was heavily inspired by Gormenghast because it feels that way. Like Gormenghast, the House seems to have a life of its own. Like Gormenghast, it is filled with so many rooms and passageways that even the person living inside it is unsure of all of its mystery. I have read Gormenghast a few years ago so I can not bring up the specific details that are very similar to Piranesi's the House.

The main plot is about a mystery that slowly unfolds as Piranesi pieces together information. There are not a lot of red herrings in order to obfuscate the readers. The plot is pretty straightforward. All the information is clearly laid out so I knew what was coming while reading it.

The book is quite short so it does not go in-depth into the characters as much as JSMN has done. It does not feel as character-centric. However, many characters are revealed from their dialogues and interactions so even though the books do not go deeply into them, they still feel like characters with personality. Some stand out more than others. In this book, the villains are definitely the ones that stand out most. Despite being absolutely unlikable, they are also fascinating.

While the book feels very different from JSMN in tone, characters, time, they have many similarities. One similarity is definitely the fact that many characters are academic. The book does not have any footnotes but that only makes sense considering that this book is supposed to be a journal that Piranesi is writing. However, the book mentions a bunch of academic-sounding books and there are actual reference lists inside the book. They are probably made-up. One, however, mentions Steven Moffat. I wonder whether there are more references to actual books and people that I have missed.

There are many more similarities but I don't want to give spoilers in this post so I guess I will talk about them later.