starlady | Recent Entries

All of my fanfiction can be found at

starlady; DW links are listed where extant.

You don't need my permission to remix, record, translate, scanlate, and/or transform anything I've written (though a link to your transformative work is always appreciated!).

I generally follow AO3 policy on warnings; namely, I warn for rape and/or noncon, major character death, and graphic violence. I also will warn for topics that may be triggering on an as-needed basis. If you have a question about the content of any of my stories, or a concern about the warnings or lack thereof on same, please email or pm me and I will do my best to address your concerns respectfully.

( Fanfic )

Translations
My translations of manga series may be found using the links in this journal's sidebar.

( AMVs )

( Vids )

what I'm reading
I thnk technically I'm reading the Bloodchildren anthology. I've only read the introduction, though, so I have no impression of it yet.

what I've just read
I devoured The Summer Prince by Alaya Dawn Johnson on Monday and LOVED it. It's SO GOOD, AUGH. I also read Hawkeye: My Life as a Weapon on Sunday and finished up Carthage Ascendant last night. Hawkeye was great, though the art by the dude who isn't David Aja isn't anywhere near as good, and the fully-drawn superhero style of Young Avengers #6 weirds me out: it's too hyper real. Yes, I am first and foremost a manga and alternative comics reader.

what I'll read next
I have two John M. Ford Star Trek novels, How Much for Just the Planet? and The Final Reflection, to take with me on my three-week cross-country odyssey, as well as the next Book of Ash and a bunch of ebooks. HMfJtP? went way over my head when I read it in middle school (I was never a musical theater nerd), so hopefully this time around I'll get the jokes.

Slonczewski, Joan. Still Forms on Foxfield. New York: Del Rey, 1980.

"With a book and a steeple,
With a bell and a key,
They would bind it forever--
But they can't!" said he.

I was sold on this book as soon as I understood that it was about Quakers in space, and all in all, both as a science fiction book and a book about Quakers in space, it did not disappoint. For various reasons, though, I'm not sure how this book would play to people who don't have my particular background.

The book follows the colony of Foxfield, and in particular its main systems engineer Allison Thorne, when the unified government of Earth makes recontact with them and insists both that the Foxfielders accept their UNI citizenship and the various impositions, as well as liberties, that it entails. The Foxfielders are a bit of a wonder to the Terrans given that no one on Terra has religion anymore, while the Foxfielders are still practicing the Philadelphia Quakerism they learned from their ancestors, who took ship into the stars from the post-nuclear wasteland of Pennsylvania. It's funny how I'm relatively blase about the concept of New York being a post-nuclear wasteland, but talking about the irradiated ruins of Pennsylvania gets to me a little.

Slonczewski wrote this book after her time at Bryn Mawr College outside of Philadelphia, and it's interesting seeing in this book the viewpoint of someone who was convinced thirty years ago, when there were still Friends wandering around who routinely used informal English pronouns and could remember the time before the Hicksite/Orthodox division was healed. There's a lot of "thee" and "thou" and talking about the Queries and quoting of John Greenleaf Whittier, but there's also a much deeper feminist Quaker commitment at the level of the plot, which doesn't proceed by violence. Consensus and clarity in the Quaker sense of the terms rule the day, and Slonczewski is very good at describing the experience of Meeting, how sometimes you know you have something to say and you're compelled to say it and other times you sit there thinking about nothing in particular or fanfiction or your grocery list. The aliens who are native to the planet are also believably alien, and the Friends live together with them in a manner that is gratifyingly non-exploitative, just as the burgeoning conflict with them over the arrival of the Terrans is resolved believably.

I doubt I've succeeded in making this book sound interesting to those who didn't grow up attending Quaker schools in and around Philadelphia, but I really enjoyed it. It was also, on the level of "gee, the future has changed" an interesting mix of things that seem dated now (the idea of gay marriage as a radical thing in The Future), the historical (i.e. the sketched-out history of the nuclear apocalypse and its aftermath) and the things that I think may have been radical in 1980 but seem pretty unremarkable now, namely having a single mother as the protagonist. Or the fact that everyone on Earth is female and thus by default lesbians. There's a few weird moments with the Japanese systems engineer having to do with cultural history and the Japanese language, but all in all, this was a fascinating little book. And so, so Quaker--even more than Allison and her concern about whether she's letting her Light speak to her properly, the final image of ancient Celia Blyden, filled with the fire of her concern to be a public Friend and go back to Earth and speak truth to those who need to hear it, is as Quaker as it gets. I take off my hat to her, and to Slonczewski.

I went to see Iron Man 3 with several awesome people last night. Many awesome people have said more interesting things than I have to say about this movie, so the following is mostly a collection of links and a few bullet points of commentary, but it's all going under a spoiler cut all the same.
( When the big guy with the hammer fell from the sky, subtlety went out the window. )

Pope, Elizabeth Marie. The Perilous Gard. New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1974.

I borrowed this from

oyceter and I'm really glad I did, because it is being excellent.

The Perilous Gard follows young Katherine Sutton, a lady-in-waiting to Lady Elizabeth Tudor who is, due to her sister's thoughtless transgression, banished from court to the eponymous castle of the title. Its master departs posthaste, leaving Kate alone with the castle folk, who won't tell her anything, the villagers, who avoid her like the plague, and the lord's younger brother, who lives in a run-down leper's hut on the grounds as self-imposed penance for, he thinks, being responsible for the death of his brother's young daughter. It turns out otherwise, for this is both a very literal fairy tale and a clever play on Tam Lin. But, as we all know by now, I don't really care about fairy tales, and what makes this book so excellent are two separate things. The first of these is Pope's interesting, revisionist take on the Fair Folk, who they are and how they operate--there are still some parts of their story that are mysterious to me, even after reading the book, and that's just how it should be. The second of these is Kate herself.

OMG KATE I LOVE YOU. Kate is plain and pragmatic and logical and awesome, and she has not only the wit but the will to see the world with eyes unclouded, and the entire story comes down, in the end, to her strength to do just that, and at the end my heart nearly broke with her. Recommended if you like Elizabethan tales, fairy tales, or awesome female protagonists.

Fallaci. Written by Lawrence Wright, directed by Oskar Eustis. Performed by Berkeley Rep.

I'd never heard of Oriana Fallaci before I went to see this play in three acts, which surveys her life and work and her turn to Islamophobic "clash of civilizations" fundamentalist rhetoric beloved by neoconservatives after 9/11 and doesn't come up with any easy answers. I liked the play, but I also had issues with it.

Some of these can be attributed to it being a world premiere--though Fallaci's cancer is a leitmotif throughout, it's totally unclear what kind of cancer she had, which is confusing given that in the play as in life she blames Saddam Hussein burning the oil fields of Kuwait for her developing lung cancer. That was a minor note; more important was the fact that the foil character, a young Iranian-American journalist, feels at times more like a caricature than a real person. Particularly given the arc of her development in the play--ably symbolized by her sartorial transition from short skirt and sleeveless blouse to full-on chador in the final act--I had problems with this. (It doesn't help that the performance of the actress in question was, I thought, a bit wooden in the first act.) It seemed to me too pat, too easy (and I particularly didn't like the very final bit at the end, about Emilia) in a lot of ways that were questionable.

It's hard not to admire Fallaci for her lifelong commitment to fighting tyranny wherever she saw it, regardless of her tendency to embellish her narratives after the fact. The play exploits this tension between her courage and her Islamophobia very productively; she was fascinating, uncompromising, and compelling because of that. At the same time, though, I know that I wouldn't be anywhere near as willing to cut Fallaci or the play any slack if it were about, say, a man like Christopher Hitchens. And I guess my problem with the play is that in the end, in the person of the Iranian-American journalist and her relationship with Fallaci, it seems to come down on the opposite side of the scale.

I went to Toronto last weekend! It was pretty great.

toft had urged me to check out the AGO, and I did, and it was really awesome. I am a big fan of contemporary architecture, and the building itself is really cool (pictures may be forthcoming on Tumblr if I can get all my ducks in order). I checked out the Group of Seven, whose landscape paintings are as a group pretty phenomenal and which form the cornerstone of the AGO collection. I also saw the Henry Moore gallery, which includes many of his really striking monumental sculptures, and which currently has Janet Cardiff's 40 Part Motet installed in part of the gallery.

The 40 Part Motet is extraordinary, particularly installed as it is in a light-filled gallery filled with amazing sculptures. I can't remember the last time I had such a trasnporting experience in an art museum. I would have stayed much longer than I did, but I wanted to get to the special exhibition of Cardiff's works with her collaborator George Miller, Lost in the Memory Palace. I could have stayed hours in there; everything was amazing and absorbing. Cardiff does multimedia installations that suggest narrative but withhold it at the same time. Storm Room is a room in a house in northern Japan with a thunderstorm outside. Experiments in F# Major (name?) is a shadow-activated spontaneous jam session of different kinds of music in the same key. Opera for a Small Room and Dark Pool are like a page from the old I Spy books, in which you know there's a story that beyond your reach, and in the meantime there are many amazing things to look at.

If you can go to the AGO and see this exhibition, you totally should, and if you have an opportunity to see Janet Cardiff work's ever, take it.

What I'm reading
Carthage Ascendant by Mary Gentle, i.e. The Book of Ash #2. She's a very engaging writer, though I'm not very far in and don't have any complex thoughts about the book yet.

What I've just finished
Battle by Michelle West. I loved it! Just like Skirmish, a lot of stuff happens in this book, and though it's not quite as funny as Skirmish was at times, we do get a lot of backstory about Meralonne, who's always been one of my favorite characters (I used to think the one ship I shipped in these books was Meralonne/Kallandras, but now I think it's Meralonne/his pipe), and as I said on Twitter, I am really impressed at how West can tie things together across 13 books and counting in a meaningful way, viz. Angel's hair. Great stuff. I can't wait for War.

What I'll read next
Probably The Summer Prince by Alaya Dawn Johnson. I'm really excited.

What I'm reading
Well, I have Mary Gentle's Carthage Ascendant literally lying at my right hand, and I just bought Michelle West's Battle and Hiromi Goto's Darkest Light, and the sequester flight delays being what they are, probably 2/3 of these will be read by the time I get back home to Berkeley (whenever that may be).

What I just read
The Queer Art of Failure by Judith Halberstam and Brain Plague by Joan Slonczewski. Both excellent, fascinating, thought-provoking books. That more people haven't read Slonczewski is as clear an example as any of the impoverishment that systematic bias and oppression force on our intellectual and cultural life.

What I'll read next
See above. I also bought Unnatural Creatures, because I mostly hate Neil Gaiman at this point but he is a damn fine editor.

Current Location: Toronto

Happy Birthday to

recessional!

And Happy Birthday and Deathday to WS, the onlie begetter. Really given my druthers I would just repost Sonnet 107 ad infinitum, or more precisely to the grave, but novelty is the soul of fashion, and so we must on. Despite the fact that I have read the entire sonnet sequence at least three times, I had a really hard time choosing this year, until I remembered 81--

Or I shall live your epitaph to make,
Or you survive when I in earth am rotten,
From hence your memory death cannot take,
Although in me each part will be forgotten.
Your name from hence immortal life shall have,
Though I, once gone, to all the world must die:
The earth can yield me but a common grave,
When you entombed in men's eyes shall lie.
Your monument shall be my gentle verse,
Which eyes not yet created shall o'er-read;
And tongues to be your being shall rehearse,
When all the breathers of this world are dead;
You still shall live, such virtue hath my pen,
Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men.

Previous sonnets: 107, 77, 56, 65.

I am reading the epigrams of Martial for research for a fic (the XMFC Roman AU, to be precise). Martial is really not that great a poet. He keeps comparing himself to Catullus and implying he's better; he isn't. But the poems are a wealth of sociological and topographical information about Rome, Roman habits, and particularly Roman sexual habits and mores. So far the second half of book III, in which the poet is unabashedly dirty, is my favorite.

I'm reading the most recent Loeb edition because it's bilingual, and I've gotten to the point where I very much distrust not being able to compare the actual text with the translation. Bowdlerization is a longstanding problem in classics, and continues via the watering-down of the standard lexicons (i.e. Liddell for Greek and Lewis & Short for Latin) and even many contemporary translations--most of my dirty Latin I learned from my student's Catullus, and thank goodness for that.

So, here's what may be my favorite poem of them all thus far:

Ut faciam breviora mones epigrammata, Corde.
"fac mihi quod Chione": non potui brevius. (III.83)

( Cut for some rather NSFW translations and Latin )

Trance. 2013. Dir. Danny Boyle.

I went to see Trance at the Shattuck Cinema's "screener lounge," which has couch seating and lets you drink beer, on Sunday, and it was a wonderful break from entirely too much time over the past few weeks spent with my face buried in spreadsheets. I recently saw somewhere someone going on about how we are in a terrible era for cinema, but somewhere in the middle of the introductory heist sequence in Trance I found myself thinking, "Well, there's at least one director out there who still knows how to make a movie," and I stand by that statement.

Although I've enjoyed other Danny Boyle films, the real reason I went to see this was that it stars James McAvoy, who is a fantastic actor, and his performance and those of the other two leads, Vincent Cassel and Rosario Dawson, did not disappoint. The script is also quite clever--although I was able to guess some of the plot twists, I didn't guess all of them, or their full scope, and I enjoyed not being able to entirely predict where it was going. Aside from the acting and the script, the cinematography and the colors of the film are also brilliant, and the music is fantastic. It helped that I was forewarned by the NYT review not to be distracted by the McAvoy pretty.

( No work of art is worth a human life. ) One of the things I really liked the movie overall was the way the script gradually reversed our perspectives on Simon and Elizabeth, and though I still had some unanswered questions at the end, it was a really enjoyable and satisfying film all in all.

I was really pleased to realize that I've written and posted more than twenty-one finished fanfics. I just need to acknowledge that I am not anywhere near as prolific as some other people I know.

It's ridiculously obvious which of these was posted unedited to tumblr. Also, I found a typo in one of these lines while doing this, so that's a win.

All fic at my AO3 account.

( In reverse chronological order )

Stoppard, Tom. The Coast of Utopia: Shipwreck. Performed by the Shotgun Players. Dir. Patrick Dooley.

The Shotgun Players continue their adaptation of Tom Stoppard's masterpiece. I liked it much, much better than their production of Voyage, the first play in the trilogy, which I saw last year, though that may be because I saw the last show of previews this time around, whereas last year I saw the second or first. Regardless, this is a much stronger cast in which Patrick Kelly Jones, playing Alexander Herzen, is no longer head and shoulders above his fellow performers.

The other thing is that this production has the great good fortune to piggyback on the recent cinematic adaptation of Les Miserables. Although that story centers around the failed student revolution of 1832, and Shipwreck has the great drama of 1848 at its center, the essential activity of revolution--barricades in the streets of Paris, people with tricolor cockades shouting "Vive la France!" and "Liberte! Egalite! Fraternite!", the gutters running with blood and the buildings echoing with cannon fire--are similar enough that one feels, watching Shipwreck, a powerful sense of deja vu: I've seen this before, and this time it isn't going to work out any different.

I never wrote up my reaction to the Les Mis movie, but suffice it to say here that I found the politics of the denouement execrable, especially for an author who claimed to be a liberal, and by that measure Shipwreck comes out far ahead, for its would-be revolutionaries (with the exception of course of the inveterate rabble-rouser Bakunin, who nonetheless like Lucifer has his designated part to play) are much more intellectually honest about their positions, privileges and commitments than were the students of 1832--at least politically. In terms of their personal affairs, no one quite knows what the fuck they're doing or can be fully honest about it, particularly Natalie Herzen, Alexander's wife, who anchors the romantic plotline. I talked in my review of the collected play scripts about the gendered nature of revolution, but one thing seeing this play staged does make clear is that in the end the personal and the political aren't really separate for any of the people whose lives we follow, to their sorrow and our interest.

I also found myself having complicated and half-coherent feelings about history and revolution and just whose blood and sweat it is that must be sacrificed on the altar of "Progress" (I hate Hegel, and I cheered a little inside every time anyone in the play slammed Hegel), and I found that this post at

ladybusiness, or at least the first half of it, echoed a lot of my sentiments about why these are always questions we should be asking ourselves, and especially now. (When she gets into the song-by-song analysis of the movie, I stopped caring and agreeing quite so much.)

The nineteenth century was wild, as some of my fellow grad students and I agreed at lunch today. This production was excellent, and there are still some tickets available.

I make these so often I should have it memorized, but I don't.

Ingredients
¾ c unsalted butter, frozen, plus more for dish
1 ¾ c all-purpose flour
¾ c confectioners' sugar
¾ tsp coarse salt

4 large eggs, lightly beaten
1 1/3 cups sugar
3 Tbsp all-purpose flour
¼ tsp coarse salt
¾ c fresh lemon juice (from 6-7 Myer lemons)
¼ c whole milk
confectioners' sugar, for dusting

1. Preheat oven to 350ºF. Butter a 9x13 inch glass baking dish, and line with parchment.

2. Whisk together flour, confectioners' sugar, and salt in a large bowl, then grate frozen butter over the bowl and stir to combine, until mixture looks crumbly. Best results if your butter has frozen for at least an hour.

3. Transfer mixture to prepared dish and press evenly onto bottom with your hands. Freeze crust 15 minutes, then bake until slightly golden, 16 to 18 minutes. Leave the oven on.

4. Whisk together sugar, flour and salt in the bowl from the crust mixture, then whisk in lightly beaten eggs. Stir in lemon juice and milk and whisk until smooth. Pour over hot crust.

5. Reduce oven temperature to 325ºF, and bake until filling is set and edges are slightly golden, about 18 minutes. Let cool slightly on a wire rack. Lift out and cool completely on rack before dusting with confectioners' sugar. Cut into 2-inch squares. Eat immediately, or keep in fridge for up to 2 days. (I find they're best after a few hours in the fridge.)

--Adapted from Martha Stewart's Cookies

Fandom Is Love: Organization for Transformative Works Membership Drive, April 3-9

Fandom is love. It's also, in the form of the OTW, a tremendous amount of work, and a rather impressive set of costs associated with doing that work. The OTW is run by fans, for fans, and we need the support of our fellow fans to keep doing what we've done.

And we've done a lot: Transformative Works and Cultures, Fanlore, Open Doors, and of course the Archive of Our Own, to say nothing of the OTW's legal advocacy, which has secured fair use exemptions for vidding under the DMCA before the U.S. Copyright Office for two cycles running, are all supported exclusively by donations from our supporters. A donation of US$10 or more will allow you to become an OTW member for the next calendar year, giving you voting (and bragging) rights and giving us the financial support we need to keep doing what we've been doing, and to become better at it.

Over the past four years I've continually been impressed by the dedication and commitment of OTW staff and volunteers. But we wouldn't be anywhere without our supporters who donate, so thank you.

What I'm reading
I started Brain Plague by Joan Slonczewski for Wiscon and I'm thrilled to report that it's really interesting so far. I've heard mixed things about The Highest Frontier, and I won't have time to read The Door into Ocean before the con, but this is a pretty cool book in its own right. I'm also still poking away at Martial. I like him better than Statius, but not better than Catullus. I would totally trade Statius for more of the poetae novelli, not gonna lie. (I'm sorry, Statius. The Thebaid just isn't that interesting. I know from experience.)

What I've just read
I buckled down and devoured The Perilous Gard all in one night over the weekend. I LOVED IT.

What I'll read next
I need to read Judith Halberstam's The Queer Art of Failure before the person who leant it to me graduates next month. I have a recent dissertation that should go quite well with that to read, and I also finally trekked over to Kinokuniya and bought volumes 8 and 9 of Ôoku (yes, this is all related). It's April, which is the cruelest month, and I have a copy of Grief Lessons staring at me from my shelf. Anne Carson is also going to be giving a reading on campus in two weeks (!). I'd also like to read Cast in Ruin before I head to Toronto at the end of the month and buy Battle from Bakka Phoenix Books, where Michelle West works. (!!!!!!!!!)

Jones, Diana Wynne. Charmed Life. 1977.
-----. The Lives of Christopher Chant. 1988.

I am not one of those people who read Diana Wynne Jones in childhood and fell in love for life. By whatever quirk of timing + the suburbs + publishing ??, the only Jones books I read as a kid were the Dalemark quartet, which I enjoyed at the time, but which didn't leave me hungry for more and which friends of mine who've read more Jones than I have tell me are not her best works. I kind of had already figured that. My apathy was cemented when I read Howl's Moving Castle after seeing the movie and thought the book was pretty terrible in comparison.

NB: I'm willing to revise my opinion of the book, if I reread it, but I'm not really willing to be browbeaten by the hardcore DWJ fans out there about my opinions on the movie versus the book, so please keep your thoughts on my heresy to yourself unless you can express them politely.

Of course, the very fact that I felt the need to make the above warning says something about the passion of DWJ fans for her works, and when Jones died last year the many wonderful tribute posts that people made, such as this one by Karen Healey and this one by

rushthatspeaks, made me think that I should give Jones another shot. I also fortuitously lucked into a few random Jones books through friends moving away, and also through The Other Change of Hobbit's firesale last fall, so I figured I was set.

I started with the Chrestomanci Chronicles, and with volume 1 of the three-volume MMPB bind-up set, which contains the above two novels. I was really puzzled by the publisher's decision to lead with Charmed Life, because reading it first spoils some important plot points in The Lives of Christopher Chant and also sabotages some of the force of the ending. Well done, publisher. Also, the early 2000s cover art for the bind-ups is hideous--I'm happy to report that the recent reprint art is much better.

Jones is a really subtle writer. She'd have to be, to pack the force she does into the word limits of old-school YA, but I nearly missed the turning point of the whole story in Charmed Life, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's other bits that I missed too along the way. In some ways I'm sorry I didn't read Jones in childhood, because I just don't read as single-mindedly and wholeheartedly now as I did then (who does?), and because some plot developments that were obvious now might have been less so to me then, but I did enjoy these books, although Cat's passivity was quite annoying at times. Maybe the upside of reading her as an adult is that I did actually fully appreciate the irony and the humor, both on the characters' part and on the author's, all of which was pretty great. I'm also amazed that Jones was able to pull off a book in which the main character is so passive, and although Christopher might be an ass, he's an interesting ass. (I also find it significant that we see that he grows up to treat Cat in more or less the same fashion that he hated being treated as a child. Given Jones' history, it's not surprising, but it is the sort of touch of reality that I wouldn't expect from many writers.) I think Throckmorton wound up being my favorite character, closely followed by Julia, but that's not really surprising either.

I had a really nice break with my sister in Portland, but when I came back I promptly started freaking out about how much work I have to do in the remainder of the semester.

# On Friday afternoon I got a letter from a collection company saying that I owe my health insurance company $1200 for the services they paid for me for my bike accident 18 months ago. This is the first I've heard of this, although I looked and there is a page in the policy handbook that says I'm obligated to get the money from the third party's insurance company and pay back my health insurance company first. I've been told that in California you have up to three years to claim medical expenses related to an accident. I also called my health insurance company today and spoke with a representative who said she couldn't see any information about this claim in my file. So I have to figure out a) whether the CA thing is true; b) whether the claim from the collection company is genuine; and c) if both a and b things are true, whether I can claim more money from State Farm. I did receive a payment from them, but it did not cover these expenses, so we'll see. I may well wind up having to pay $1200. I'm certainly going to spend a lot of time tomorrow on the phone with insurance companies. All of which I need like I need a hole in the head.

# I got a series of emails this morning saying I've been accepted off the waitlist into the Critical Language Scholarship program in Qingdao, China. Which would be fantastic…except that I've already made a summer commitment and I'm really starting to worry about finishing this 285 [50-page research paper] for my professor, which is a prerequisite to advancing to candidacy, which I need to do next year, period. I had been planning on doing that over the summer and going to China next year (i.e. post-exams, pre-dissertation research). I will probably decline (and I have to decide quickly--the deadline is April 8), but this is another thing I didn't really need to be thinking about.

# I also need to figure out whether I should be paying estimated taxes for 2013. Quickly, because the first payment is due April 15.

Pierce, Tamora. Mastiff. New York: Random House, 2011.

I can still remember the day I first picked up, and bought, Alanna: The First Adventure, when I was nine, in Borders. There had been a distinct lack of girls with swords in books in my life up until that point, and Tamora Pierce's books will always hold a special place in my heart--not only because of all the great books she's written, showing a diverse palette of choices and lives available to girls and women, but also for the way in which she has continued to push herself as a writer, and has continued to be sensitive, and responsive, to questions of representation in her books. Her winning the 2013 Margaret A. Edwards Award from the ALA is very well-deserved.

Mastiff is the third and final book in the Beka Cooper trilogy, which is set 200 years before the Tortall that we see beginning in the Song of the Lioness books and which was, to be blunt about it, much more interesting. Beka Cooper is a young woman who enters the Provost's Guard of Tortall in the first book, and in the final story she faces her greatest challenge yet. The entire trilogy is framed very thinly by scenes with her famous descendant George Cooper, whom of course we know well.

I've really liked the Beka Cooper books--although Pierce's books have had some notable instances of fail (the Bazhir in the Lioness books; the Trickster duology and its white savior narrative), in these books she's pushed the bar both in terms of her own writing and in terms of what kinds of stories get told in YA books. (She's also pushed the page limits, but quite frankly I could read hundreds of pages of 200 years ago!Tortall being interesting, so YMMV on that.) I enjoyed Mastiff, and I enjoyed the ending. I don't think Beka has Ali's dubious flaw, namely being too competent, but Kel and Daine are still my favorites.

I read with interest this entry on

swan_tower's LJ, in which the book's structural weaknesses are dissected in depth. I can see how Mastiff could have been a stronger book, structurally, but I don't know that every book needs to be a marvel of structural power. I'm also not sure that making the book stronger, structurally, would have enabled a realistic depiction of the central element of social change which is the emotional payoff of the whole trilogy--as it stands, it stretches the bounds of credulity, and stays inside them mostly because this is, in the end, a YA book. (Much more interesting, and credible, is the depiction of the slow shift in social mores that will, after Beka's time, end the age of lady knights for two centuries.) I also don't know that the frame-tale stuff with George is even necessary, except that this book is part of the larger Tortall universe, and the verse needs it, not the novel itself. But as part of the Tortall universe, this is a strong and interesting book, and if you liked Beka Cooper or Pierce's other books, I would wholeheartedly recommend it.

What I'm reading
Volume 1 of the poems of Martial in the Loeb Classical Library edition. Bilingual text ftw! (Actually trilingual, because every so often Martial just drops in some Greek, which is pretty cool.) I've not read much post-Augustan literature, so this is interesting on multiple levels.

What I've just read
I finally finished Sylvester by Georgette Heyer. It got much more amusing once I had two glasses of free beer on an empty stomach on my Alaska flight to Portland on Saturday. I never really liked Phoebe or Sylvester all that much, I have to admit. I have False Colors on my shelf and will probably read that too for completeness' sake, but I suspect that will be enough for me to feel as though I've had sufficient Heyer experience.

What I'll read next
I got Alaya Dawn Johnson's The Summer Prince at Powell's, as well as The Dazzle of Day by Molly Gloss and John M. Ford's two classic Star Trek novels, but I still need to get through The Perilous Gard as well as many other books.

It's a magical world

Sticky: Fanworks masterpost [updated 2013.01.22]

For once I've actually read things: Wednesday edition

Still Forms on Foxfield

Iron Man 3 (2013)

The Perilous Gard

Fallaci.

Art Gallery of Ontario

Still Wednesday

Thursday is the new Wednesday

NPM: William Shakespeare, Sonnets 81

Dirty Latin poetry: needs more dirt. Also, a question

Trance (2013)

Twenty-one first lines

The Coast of Utopia: Shipwreck

Recipe: Best-Ever Lemon Squares

April OTW Membership Drive

I was 20 minutes late to a meeting because I forgot it was Wednesday

The Chrestomanci Chronicles, vol. 1

Life keeps pitching lemons at me

Mastiff

I'm not actually sure what day it is

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