It's a magical world

Lo, Malinda. Huntress. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2011.

It took me way too long to find the time to read this novel, which is longer and less of a fairy tale than Lo's debut novel Ash, and I think, even better for it. Although it's set in the same Sino-Celtic world as Ash was, Huntress takes place many centuries earlier, when the Chinese influences of Lo's secondary world are much more evident, and the institution of King's Huntress had not yet been created, or transformed into what we saw of it in Ash. Happily, as in Ash, a queer love story lies at the heart of the book, and though it ends differently than I was expecting, it's very satisfying all the way through.

The meat of the novel concerns Kaede, a student at the Academy for sages who has no real talent with magic and whose powerful father, the King's Chancellor, wants to marry her off to someone who will make a good political alliance. Kaede is delayed from this unenviable fate when the sages declare that she must accompany a novice sage, Taisin, along with the King's son Prince Con, to the court of the Fairy Queen in the north at her invitation. Everyone presumes that the disorder in the natural world for the past two years--no seasons, no sun, and then no harvests--is due to some breakdown in the balance between fairy and human realms, and the hope is that Kaede and Taisin, who is besieged by the dubious gift of true visions, will somehow be able to restore it. Needless to say, the journey along the way, and what lies at the end of it, irrevocably changes them both.

I had the pleasure of being on a panel with Malinda Lo at Sirens 2010, and one of the things she said at some point that weekend was that Robin McKinley had been a huge influence on her as a writer and as a reader. I think you can see that in Lo's prose, which is perfectly pitched and measured; I couldn't tell you the last time I noticed someone using the word "gelid," but in her writing, it works, and it works beautifully. Without spoilers, I thought the way the plot resolved was innovative--at least, not what I was expecting, which was quite nice--and very real. All in all, an excellent book.

There is also a story at Subterranean Magazine, "The Fox," set two years after the end of the novel.

I was lazy this break and didn't get to any of my intended destinations in Old City--I did stop by my old orchestra and see some people, and I saw my friend J for lunch in between her interviews at the APA conference, and I also wound up hanging out withshveta_writes and solanine at the launch party for K.M. Walton's novel Cracked in Chester. I couldn't even tell you the last time I've been that far down the Blue Route; it has to be high school, when we played away field hockey games at Westtown.

But I did go to the best gelato place in the States, Capogiro, and my friend M and I had sushi at Raw, which I really like, dodging Mummers straggling back from the parade all day, and I did see snow flurries in between getting a $76 parking ticket (thank you, Philadelphia). I'm still not sure what the best coffee shop in Philly might be--I like Old City Coffee and La Colombe a lot, but I'm also a fan of Ultimo Coffee down in South Philly. I finally got down to the place in South Jersey on the espresso map, Crescent Moon Coffee and Tea Company, for a writing date with shveta_writes. I haven't been to Mullica Hill since elementary school, so of course I thought, oh, the indie coffee shop will be in one of these lovely converted Victorian homes on Main Street! No, it being South Jersey, the excellent indie coffee shop is in the strip mall a mile outside of town. Let that be a lesson to you, young Jedi.

You can't find a whole head of lettuce in supermarkets in Jersey in winter to save your life, but it's home.

# My friend J and I have had an ongoing debate about the relative merits of In 'n Out, Five Guys, and Shake Shack in terms of which has the best burgers. We were stymied in coming to a consensus by the fact that I'd never been to Shake Shack in Manhattan, which deficiency we remedied on Friday. J has actually modeled his burger recipe on Shake Shack's; both his version and the original are darn tasty. Five Guys clearly wins on fries, as we noted, but throw in the fact that Shake Shack has Abiita root beer (and actual beer) on tap, and custard, and there's no real contest.

# I went to the Met (the suggested student rate of $12 is, I think, reasonable, though I suppose I could have given less) after J went back to the UN archives. I make it a point to stroll through either the Roman or the Egyptian galleries every time; this time I wandered through Egypt to the Temple of Dendur, and took note of all the stuff in the cases from the Eighteenth Dynasty and later that don't just look bloody "Aegean," they look Minoan (the dolphin vessel) and then Mycenean (the ceiling paintings from the 1300s BCE). This is a problem, I find, that I have now; I always want the museum cards to go into more detail. And the other, more crucial thing is that rigidly dividing up stuff in museums even by civilization or by contemporary national boundary means that the interactions between cultures and regions get marginalized or just left out entirely. The map is not the territory; sometimes it's not even a good map.

The Temple of Dendur is still one of my favorite places in New York, of course.

The real draw of the museum for me right now--I actually bumped into one of the people from my classical Japanese program last summer in the coat check line--is the exhibit on Japanese storytelling, which is rich, intense, and pretty darn fabulous. It's an exhibition of emaki (picture scrolls), illustrated screens, playing cards, and other items that have been used to tell narratives visually since the late classical period in Japan, and it's amazing. The two standouts of the show, for me, were the illustrated Tales of Kitano Shrine, which is a medieval embroidering of the classical stories about Sugiwara no Michizane: you can tell it's medieval because in one of the scrolls a wandering monk goes down to visit Emperor Daigo and retinue in Hell, but before that there's an absolutely fabulous painting of the waters of the Kamo river (which would have to be a bloody millennial flood to reach the site of the classical palace!) flooding the palace while Michizane in his guise of Raijin terrifies those who did him wrong. Stellar, and on view all together for the first time ever. Several of the other illustrated scrolls are amazing too, particularly one of the chigo (monk falls in love with a beautiful young acolyte) tales, which leads me to wonder just how many times those jerks up on Mt. Hiei marched on Mii-dera and burned it down. Needless to say, there are several screens showing episodes from the Heike, which were also awesome. The other best thing, though, aside from the fact that the exhibit (welcomely) sidelines the damn Genji emaki, is that it concludes with an extraordinarily well-preserved demons' parade scroll, which is delightful. I just wish the cards had pointed out more explicitly just how much of all this is a medieval invention or innovation. That said, I was pleased at how much of the handwriting I could read, even without having kept up my kuzushiji practice much at all, particularly since Japanese people around me remarked at several points that they couldn't read any of it. Several of the scribes whose manuscripts are on display had extraordinarily clear handwriting. Others, not so much.

# I went down to meet my friend M at the Strand, which is quite a brilliant bookstore but not one for keeping older books in stock, and then we went to Family Recipe. Verdict: delicious, innovative, and not too unreasonably priced. The portions are small, but if you eat slowly, and order at least two courses, you'll get enough to eat, and the food is really, really good, and so is the sake selection. We'd talked about seeing a movie, but there was nothing at all showing in the 8 o'clock hour in lower Manhattan, so we wound up retiring to a bar, which had something to do with my taking the wrong subway back to Penn Station, and thus not catching the earlier train to New Jersey, later on.

The Other Change of Hobbit is in a peculiar predicament: since the store is behind on its state sales tax payment due to cash flow issues, the state of California in its infinite wisdom and logic has…revoked the store's permit to sell things. I learned all this today when I tried to go buy Skirmish. The book was there on the shelf, but I could not buy it! I made a donation to the cause of helping them be able to sell things again, and of the bookstore cats no longer being so starved for human customer contact that they both converged on me demanding petting.

So, if you're a Hobbit customer and you'd like to see them weather this rough patch, I urge you to stop by the store or give them a call and do the same if you can (they'll take donations by credit card). Here's hoping.

# Lunch at Pret a Manger, because I have loved their sandwiches since I first had them in London eleven years ago, and no I don't care that they're apparently the Starbucks of sandwich shops in Manhattan nowadays.

# Ob!stop at Book-Off, though I resisted temptation bravely. Or more precisely, I couldn't remember which volumes of 20th Century Boys I still need.

# My friend B and I went up to The Frick Collection--the student rate is pretty good, only $10. I hadn't been there in, oh, at least five years; the first and only time I went was with my mother. That was a good day. Anyway, currently they have an exhibition of Picasso drawings in the basement galleries and have created a new glassed-in portico gallery which has a small but fine exhibition of early European porcelain, well worth seeing in the sun. I enjoyed the Picassos, since now that I've learned that African art heavily influenced Cubism I can finally begin to understand it, though I suspect I'll never like it much.

But the real draw of the Frick is the permanent collection of Old Masters, Asian art, and decorative art objects amassed by Henry Clay Frick before his death. I love these personal tycoon museums, partly because they have such a strong personal vision, and the Frick is certainly the least eccentric of the three I've been to in the States (the Barnes Foundation and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum being the other two). The house and the collection suit each other, comfortably and brilliantly, and moving through them offers a very different experience than the cattle call of many major museums. Also it has my very favorite Vermeer (Officer and Laughing Girl) in a perfect spot just off the grand staircase. I could stare at that painting for days, it's so lovely. And they have two others, which are also wonderful but not as good.

# My favorite coffee shop on the East Coast, joe the art of coffee, has opened a new location on the Upper East Side, so recently that they're still sanding the walls in between customers. I can't decide whether I like joe or Ritual better; but damn, joe is good.

# McNally Jackson on Prince Street! What the hell is wrong with Berkeley that there are no bookstores this good there? And where are they hiding in San Francisco? I couldn't remember which Joanna Russ novels I own in late '70s and early '80s paperbacks, so again, no purchases, but their SFF shelf alone is better than B&N, despite the fact that they only have three bookcases total.

# Failed excursion to Family Recipe turned into yet another delicious meal at Hampton Chutney Co. I swear I end up there every other time I am in the city, and I never regret it because the dosas and chai and chutney are so damn good.

# Home again home again, jiggety-jig. As ever, I am grateful for friends who will drag me out of my vacation cocoon.

Bodard, Aliette de. Harbinger of the Storm. New York: Angry Robot, 2011.

I'm a big fan of French-Vietnamese writer Aliette de Bodard's work; this is the sequel to her debut novel Servant of the Underworld, and just like Servant, I enjoyed it a lot.

The action resumes about a year or so after the events of the first book and centers around the succession to the crown of the Revered Speaker of the Mexica, the ultimate monarch of the Triple Alliance, better known as the Aztec Empire. Bodard is really good at marrying what we know from history and archaeology with magic and fantasy elements, and I continue to sympathize with the tribulations of her protagaonist Acatl, whose elevation to High Priest of the Lord of the Dead before the start of the first book continues to structure his life, and his problems.

( Remember, the gods are already dead. )

The first three chapters of MoHoD are up here, and if you'd like to check out some of Bodard's other fiction (I love her short stories), she has a Chinese postcolonial space opera story out this month in Clarkesworld, "Scattered Along the River of Heaven." It's painfully good.

Also, the book trailer for Harbinger is under the cut.
( Book trailer under here )

Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol. Dir. Brad Bird, 2011.

I'd pretty much given up on the M:I movie franchise, but it seems that Hollywood hasn't, and, happily for its continued prospects, this is probably the best of the lot since the first one. The gadgets are cool (and not perfect), and the action scenes are great--I especially liked the very grounding focus on footchases and mistakes, which fits with what character arcs there are in the movie, particularly between Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise, looking older but still good) and Jeremy Renner's character, Brandt, who is damn smooth. Also damn good looking, particularly when he is being angsty. I could get used to seeing more of him (and indeed, I won't lie, he's a big part of why I dragged my dad to the movie in the first place). The other agents were good, particularly Simon Pegg, and as well as being intelligently written the script also has a welcome dose of humor, which serves to break up the near-constant action.

( M:I Emerging Economies  )

What I actually find most interesting, on a sort of meta-cinematic level, is the question of just why Hollywood is suddenly obsessed (again) with nuclear war. It's the central plot device of two major movies this year (XM:FC and M:I 4), and I just don't quite get it. Something like Goldeneye, that made a lot of sense (though it wasn't even about nuclear weapons, but EMP) for its time and place, but why are we suddenly worried about nuclear war and nuclear terrorism so much again? Did I miss a general societal memo somewhere?

So, as of right now I've read 87 books this year; I'm hoping to finish Harbinger of the Storm this evening, which will make it 88. Quite a step down from last year, by the numbers, though I'm pleased to note that 46 of these books (slightly more than 50%) were by chromatic authors. NB: I count manga as individual books, because I almost always read manga in Japanese, which is where most of this total comes from.

So, here's a few books I think everyone should read, in no particular order:

• Nnedi Okorafor, Who Fears Death
• China Miéville, Embassytown
• Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
• Yoshinga Fumi, Ôoku (series)
• Gene Yang, American Born Chinese

All of these books are excellent, and well worth the time. Happy reading in 2012! As always, my resolution is to read more in the new year. 

I honestly don't really care about LiveJournal's latest outrages anymore, because my emotional home has long since become Dreamwidth. That said, I know some people still care about LiveJournal, and I'm happy to keep crossposting my content for them. But I can't even leave a comment on the new version of LiveJournal while running my primary browser (Firefox, latest), and my comment volume has dropped to almost nil anyway, so I'm going to be disabling comments on the LJ crossposts of my journal entries, effective immediately as soon as I find the box to ticky.

Anyone who likes will be able to leave comments on the DW entries using OpenID; I also invite you to consider creating a Dreamwidth account--you don't need a code to do so until the end of 2011 (two whole days, I know). after which you'll need an invite code, which are easily had via dw_codesharing's codes available tag.

rydra_wong has a great post on transitioning from LiveJournal to Dreamwidth.

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In the meantime, since some people may be transitioning form LJ to some other platform entirely, here's where I can be found on the internet:

starlady
starlady38
starlady

I also have a locked Twitter account under my legal name; if I've granted you access, PM me and I'll be happy to give you the info.

See you around the galaxy. ♥