This week I've been working a bunch and desperately trying not to catch the nasty cold that's cutting a swath through my coworkers. On the more positive side, I've been writing and playing music and spending time with people I like, but those things also take a toll physically and emotionally. What I'm trying to say, here, is that I really wanted to just watch The Magicians tonight and enjoy it, without worrying about cranking out a coherent 500-1000 word recap.
Instead, I decided to live tweet the show. It's not as comprehensive as my usual, but it was still fun. The official show account teased me for criticizing the writing, but I stand by what I said. Here's a storify of my tweets from the hour.
Like I said, not as much detail as we're used to, but if there are things I missed that you want to discuss, hit me up in the comments!
It’s only the third episode of the season, but we are getting into some season-finale levels of drama. Storylines are converging. Characters are in real danger.
There’s so much going on, and I’m sure I missed things. This might not be the most coherent analysis, but I promised a blog post, and a blog post you shall have.
Warning for language, mention of violence against humans and animals.
The Beast’s Curse on Castle Whitespire
Who knew sitting on a Fillorian throne would bring about the urge to murder the other monarchs? Martin apparently. I really enjoyed Penny as the last non-cursed man, cooperating with Fen to keep their only-recently-reconciled friends/lovers/found family from killing each other.
I’m not saying it wasn’t fun to watch, but it felt a little out of place compared to the emotional intensity of the rest of the episode.
Julia, Marina, and Martin in New York
The plan to summon Reynard works, although not exactly as Julia and Marina planned. Martin teleports Julia out of the room before Marina can finish the summoning, and then takes his sweet time unpicking the wards on her apartment (hmmm). Meanwhile, Reynard is inside horrifically torturing Marina. I appreciate the brave face that Marina puts on as Reynard turns her cat inside out and talks about eating her alive. This is some horror movie shit, you guys.
Julia and Martin drop back in just in time, prepared to kill Reynard with the knife. This is all taking place at the exact same second that Alice is powering up her battle magic in Fillory. Penny’s job is to travel to Earth, grab The Beast and bring him back so Alice can do her thing. But Penny’s lost one of the bindings that Sunderland put on his wrist and Julia is too close to The Beast. She ends up getting dragged into the fray as well, leaving Marina to grapple with Reynard.
The Aftermath
Alice manages to wound but not kill The Beast, perhaps because she was pulling her punches to not hurt Julia? I definitely need to watch this bit again. Martin disappears, one of his arms rendered useless. Everyone else blames each other or themselves for a few seconds, as is customary. Then Penny grabs Julia and transports her back to Earth, sans Martin, and she is pissed so she tears off his other bracelet, leaving him with no control over his magic.
The last shot we see of Julia is her kneeling by Marina’s bloodied body, quite likely blaming herself for another death and for letting Reynard get away. This is framed as a wound Julia won’t recover from easily. I suspect when Martin resurfaces, she might be vulnerable enough to ask him to remove her shade, as he’s been offering. I also have suspicions about how and when the knife is going to show up again, but those are influenced a bit by some things that happen in the books so I’ll keep my mouth shut for now to avoid spoilers.
Final Confrontation
Meanwhile, the kings and queens of Fillory regroup. Eliot and Margo go to petition Ember for help, but he’s not immediately available because he’s pooping in the well so Martin can’t use the water to heal himself. Totally fits with what we saw of Ember last season—he’s disgusting most of the time, but occasionally in useful ways. Is the rest of the season going to be about how the universe is out of balance because a god took a dump in the source of all magic? Tune in next time to find out.
Alice and Quentin travel by carriage to confront The Beast. Emboldened by the fact that he’s probably going to be dead soon, Quentin initiates a frank discussion about his feelings for Alice. She lets him get away with exactly zero bullshit and they kiss.
When they finally face The Beast, he’s wounded but still powerful. Quentin jumps in front of an attack and is wounded. Alice’s god powers desert her. Se resorts to the patchwork spell she invented in “Consequences of Advanced Spellcasting” to save Charlie. That’s a respectable foreshadowing game, man. The spell burns through Alice, turning her into a niffin, a being of heightened magical power and malice. She tears The Beast apart with her bare hands.
Newly absent a moral compass, Alice turns on Quentin. He probably would have tried to talk sense into her right up until she murdered him if Margo and Eliot weren’t there to draw her fire. Unable to watch his friends suffer, Quentin releases his cacodemon and watches it kill Alice. Quentin tries to move towards her body, in denial. Eliot and Margo know exactly what happened and do their best to keep him away.
So here is where we leave our intrepid heroes at the end of the episode:
Penny: MIA, not in control of any of his powers
Julia: Emotionally wrecked, allies gone
Marina: Dead
Cupcake the Cat: Dead
The Beast/Martin: Dead
Alice: Dead
Quentin: Physically wounded and responsible for the death of the woman he loves
Eliot: Alive, probably going to try to pick up the broken pieces of Quentin
Margo: Also alive, probably going to try to have sex with a talking horse
Fen: ???
Fogg: Didn’t miss him tbh
Kady: Absent from the credits, present in my heart
I could literally ramble for 1000 more words, but I need to sleep. Do come discuss the finer points of Alice’s ice cream toppings or Margo’s love of Conan the Barbarian in the comments with me, though.
This was a very solid follow-up to last week's premiere. We have a lot of different storylines already, so "Hotel Spa Potions" felt a little rushed to me. Still, it's all good stuff, as I've broken down below:
The Brakebills at Brakebills
Through the fountain and to Earth we go. Quentin and co. need to learn battle magic that can kill The Beast. They go on a scavenger hunt through the library in order to track down Bigby, a former Brakebills professor and old flame of Dean Fogg’s. It’s all fun to watch, if a tad drawn out.
Alice blames herself for not killing The Beast, and her guilt combined with her waning god powers drive her to get this done. Her insistence to Quentin that “not everything that hurts is bad” is worrying.
Penny gets an assist with his out-of-control magic from Professor Sunderland. Honestly this is my favorite thing from this ep, it’s such a good companion to the scene in “The Strangled Heart.” Sunderland performs a ritual that involves tying Penny’s hands, because light bondage is the real source of magic. Penny starts trying to seduce her again, but he’s less aggressive this time, almost clumsy. By stepping in as his teacher to help him, and by turning him down in no uncertain terms, she’s re-established boundaries. Good for her.
Then we got to see the cacodemon scene and I died of happiness. In a direct shout-out to the first book, Dean Fogg give Quentin, Margo, Penny, and Alice tattoos. The tattoo serves as a portable prison for a powerful demon that the wearer can release with a word. The plan in this case is to have the demons distract The Beast, giving Alice time to deploy her battle magic.
Eliot in Fillory
In the absence of his friends, Eliot faces his first challenges as High King. Thanks to the Beast’s magical drain, the crops aren’t growing. Luckily for the starving populace, Eliot grew up on a farm. He’s well-equipped to learn them a thing or two about agriculture, mostly by hand-delivering manure to skeptical citizens who have only ever fertilized with magic. It’s funny and a little poignant to see Eliot embracing his least favorite parts of himself for the greater good.
Fen gets to have a bit more personality in this one. As Eliot said last week, I think I like her. She’s devoted to Fillory and to helping her husband succeed as a ruler. They clash, albeit politely, over sex. Eliot proposes inviting other partners into their bedroom as a sort of compromise, and Fen isn’t interested. She also points out the inherent consent issues—no one feels comfortable saying “no” to their king. I didn’t love that the last season ended with Eliot in this marriage, and I’m glad this season is tackling that problem head on. I feel for both of them here, and I hope the show continues to explore their dynamic.
There’s also the little matter of the curse that The Beast put on Castle Whitespire, but Eliot doesn’t know about that and it’s not clear if his struggles so far are curse-related or not.
Julia and Martin in New York
Julia is working on a way to summon Reynard. She’s willing to offer herself up as bait, but Martin claims Reynard won’t be tricked. They need someone new. I was expecting this to be Kady, but Martin shows up with Marina, the leader of the safe house where Julia cut her hedgewitch teeth. Julia isn’t up for holding Marina against her will, which Martin sees as a sign of weakness. He reiterates his offer to remove her shade/emotions, she makes a counter offer to remove some of his body parts.
Back on the street, Marina recognizes the threat posed by the Julia-Martin partnership and tries to team up with her West Coast counterpart to take them down. But Reynard gets there first, killing the other hedgewitch. This is the first time we’ve seen Marina truly scared, I think. She goes to Brakebills to ask for help and gets rebuffed by Dean Fogg before returning to New York. Marina has never been a favorite character for me, but I’m kind of enjoying her and Julia and their “so done with your shit” faces back together again.
Quentin and Julia have a brief reunion in New York, unbeknownst to any of their co-conspirators. They both want some of the same things, in the big picture sense—to go back to Fillory, to have magic in both worlds remain intact—but their short-term goals are at odds. Watching them admit that they’re on opposite sides again is tough, but that just seems to be the way it goes with these two.
Let me know what you think in the comments, and see you next week!
Warning: This post contains discussion of rape, murder, and torture.
I’ve been vibrating with excitement over The Magicians premiere for like a week now, and “Knight of Crowns” did not disappoint. Lots of stuff happened in this episode, and you all know how I feel about stuff when it happens.
Julia and Martin on Earth
Julia is holding the only weapon that can kill Martin/The Beast, so she offers him a deal. She won’t kill him as long as he helps her get her revenge on Reynard, the trickster god who took over her mentor/friend/lover Richard’s body, raped her, and killed her friends. Once Reynard is dead, provided Martin hasn’t harmed Julia, Quentin, or any of Quentin’s friends, she’ll hand over the knife. They seal the agreement with a magical sigil that will automatically kill Martin if he breaks it. I’m unclear on what the consequences for Julia will be if she doesn’t hold up her part of the bargain, but let’s assume they’re also dire.
Both Julia and Martin are magically talented, both were denied their desires (Brakebills and Fillory, respectively), and both were victims of sexual assault. Martin, despite his stated desire to find a loophole in Julia’s deal, takes a bit of a shine to her. While she struggles with the aftermath of the rape, he offers her a way out of her pain—a spell that will remove her deepest self, her “shade.” Julia is clearly tempted by the offer, but she sees that Martin, cut off from his own emotions, has become a predator in his own right and refuses. For now, anyways.
These sections of this episode felt slow to me, even if they did pack an emotional punch. It was so satisfying to see Julia and Quentin’s storylines converge last season, and I’m sorry to see them separated again. New York has grown even grayer and grittier to contrast with the lush fantasyland that is Fillory.
The Brakebills in Fillory
This part of the episode was everything I could have asked for and more. The plot is basic—The Beast is still at large, and without the knife the gang needs a new weapon. Quentin, still our foremost Fillory expert, suggests the armory, a stockpile of books in Castle Whitespire that holds texts on powerful battle magic (Side note: magic that Rupert Chatwin may have used to win World War II. I’m actually very curious about Rupert. He was the only Chatwin to enter Fillory for the first time as an adult, and he’s also possibly buried there. Since the book-to-show adaptation had no problem ditching two Chatwin sisters, I imagine they must have needed Rupert around for something).
Before they can get to the castle, Eliot needs to be crowned high king, and crown his three co-rulers. This scene, with the titular knight, is both absurd and touching. The Magicians flirts with being a little too self-aware at times, and I tend to cringe at pop-culture references shoehorned into my fantasy. That said, I would not trade Eliot reciting the final speech from Dirty Dancing for anything in the world.
The whole impromptu crowning ceremony gives the group a chance to start patching up their somewhat tattered relationships. There are apologies and affirmations all around, but I particularly like Eliot’s face when Quentin asks him to kneel. It’s the perfect mix of I want to make a dirty joke right now and I’m still not totally over that time we had sex and Thank you for believing in me when I don’t believe in myself.
Penny, with his hands newly re-attached, stays in character and well out of all this sappy nonsense. Which like, okay, he’s not actually getting a crown, but maybe he has some issues he needs to talk about? Or possibly he would just like a hug and/or a forehead kiss? Anyways, I’m glad to see that he’s physically intact (let’s be honest, this show has better things to do with its budget than CGI Arjun Gupta’s hands off), but I’m also glad he doesn’t get off too easily. The least genre-savvy character, he breaks one of the cardinal rules of traveling in a magical land: always, always be polite to strangers you meet in the woods. Now Penny, who went to such lengths last season to learn control, has more unpredictable quirks to his magic.
“Knight of Crowns” puts down some groundwork for the rest of season. Here are some dangling plot threads that I sincerely hope will be picked up again:
-The vial of Quentin’s blood has to come up again. Otherwise, why the whole sequence in the woods with the healer/witch?
-The time-sensitivity on Alice’s godlike powers intrigues me, but mostly because it’s been implied that Julia has similar abilities. Not to be gross, but does the manner in which god-semen enters the body affect the endurance of its effects?
-I loved the tree growing scene, and that Alice initiates the kiss. An arc where Alice discovers her own strength would be fantastic, and if Quentin can be helpful and supportive without asking for anything in return, so much the better.
-The time difference between Fillory and Earth—what’s Eliot going to get up to while Quentin and co. are back at Brakebills? He might have years to rule Fillory by himself. I appreciate the poignancy of the scene between him and Quentin, but like, why not just leave Margo there too?
-What’s up with Eliot’s wife? She could be a valuable source of information, but she is mostly being ignored right now. I hope she doesn’t wind up dead just so Eliot can have feelings. Enough bad things have happened to him, guys, let’s just chill for a minute
-Okay this is digging back into season one stuff, but whatever happened to the Margolem? Is she in a closet somewhere? Is she attending classes at Brakebills, pretending to be Margo? There were some problematic elements of that subplot but I still want to know
-Not really a plot thing, but I miss Kady.
I’m predicting that from this point on, the series will continue to diverge from book canon, like Game of Thrones or True Blood did. The showrunners are doing their own thing here, and I can’t wait to see where they take it.
Hello lovelies! January is flying by, I think in part because I’m not used to winter in North Carolina. Shouldn’t I be hip deep in snow and miserable right now? But anyways, I did promise you an update about what to expect from me in the coming months, so here goes…
Working
As of about a week ago, I’m working full time again! My schedule is still settling in, but right now I’m teaching instrument lessons 1-2 days a week and working at a bookstore the rest of the days. I promise this blog won’t turn into “Andie’s Adventures in Working Retail,” but my employee discount is pretty sweet and should keep me sufficiently inspired to write
Reading
I want to keep discovering new books, series, and authors, but I also want to read deeply, to really engage with the texts. I’m going to start by re-reading some books I consider influences, but maybe haven’t visited in a while. On top of the pile right now are Stephen King’s On Writing, Mary Doria Russel’s The Sparrow, and Cate Tiernan’s Speak series. I’ll let you know how that’s going periodically.
Writing
…is a thing that I do, still. Draft six of the novel is underway, currently. More tidbits about that process on my Twitter, as always.
Watching
If you follow me on Twitter or Tumblr, you know that I’m super excited for the second season of The Magicians, which starts next week. The show has moved to Wednesday nights, so I’ll be posting recaps here every Thursday. Looking forward to yelling about that with all of you.
So that’s what’s coming up for me in 2017! What’s new with you?
Ninjas don’t wear black. They used to disguise themselves as civilians. Unlike ninjas in movies, the real guys were smart enough to know that wearing a black outfit with a face mask wasn’t the best strategy for blending in. Source
But this leaves out the really neat part! The reason we equate the above image with a ninja comes from Kabuki theatre. Within Kabuki theatre there’s a convention of having Kuroko (stage hands) dress in all black (with a full face covering) and move around among the costumed actors in full view, moving scenery, props and costumes. In a similar way, Bunraku puppeteers dress in all black, and only the lead puppeteer’s face would be uncovered. The audience knew to ignore these people and focus on the actors, and to only see that the scene was “magically” changing. So when a play called for a ninja assassin to jump out of nowhere and kill someone, the easiest way to create the surprise reveal was to disguise the ninja in the all black garb of the Kuroko and to remove the face covering and start acting at the last second. This would shock the audience, who were conditioned to not focus on them. Pretty cool, yeah?
About a year ago, I posted a run-down of the books I read in 2015, as well as three separate posts detailing my reading plans for 2016. Brevity may be the soul of wit, but it is not the soul of this blog.
That was early January, but since it feels unlikely that I'm going to finish anything tomorrow, I thought I'd get a jump on the reflecting. This year, I made myself a spreadsheet to track my reading (my engineer husband is so proud). I finished 87 books. Of those, 42 were written by people of color, which is a drastic improvement from my mostly-white 2015 reading list. The breakdown of author gender was pretty similar, with about 2/3 female authors and only one non-binary author.
Wiser people write about the issue of diversity in publishing every day, but here’s my two cents: I had a harder time finding new fiction by people with backgrounds different from my own. These books were not always on library or bookstore shelves. Many of the ones I did find were indie or self-published, rather than from a major publishing house. The discrepancy has certainly made me more conscious about where I spend my book-buying dollars.
I read more nonfiction this year- thirteen books total. A good percentage of those were writing books that I read in an effort to improve my own craft, or maybe figure out what genre the book I’m writing is (With some help from friends and books, I've settled on calling it paranormal suspense). Reading with a goal in mind helps decrease the feeling that I’m doing pointless homework.
There was less fantasy this year, or maybe it just looks that way because I stopped lumping “paranormal” in with “fantasy." There were a lot more romances this year—I was craving happy endings, for sure. According to my lovely spreadsheet I read somewhere in the neighborhood of 24,600 pages total, which is a basically meaningless number because of font sizes and different editions and illustrations and such, but still fun to look at.
I’ll be back sometime next week to let you know what to expect from this blog in 2017 (hint: it is mostly books and yelling about The Magicians). In the meantime, here are my favorites from the past twelve months:
Favorite New Series: Gail Carriger’s Parasol Protectorate. I picked up Soulless back when it first came out in 2009. I can’t remember if I was having paranormal burnout or het romance burnout or what, but I didn’t finish it then. I’m so pleased I got it out of the library again. I’ve never purchased a box set that fast.
Favorite Continuing Series: The Obelisk Gate is the second book in the Broken Earth Trilogy. N.K. Jemisin continues to break my heart in new and creative ways.
Favorite Re-Imagined Story: The Goose Girl by Shannon Hale. I love a good fairy tale retelling. Even though I’ve never read Hale before, this felt like coming home.
Favorite Classic That I Finally Got Around To: Kindred by Octavia Butler. Newer, as “classics” go, but wrenching and still so necessary.
Favorite Comic: I am a little sad to be coming to the end of Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing, which gets better and better as it goes.
Favorite Surprise Discovery/Debut Author: I’ve already written about how much I found Mishell Baker’s Borderline thanks to a bookstore staff recommendation. It’s a stunning paranormal mystery full of complex characters, fairies, and modern Hollywood intrigue, and I’m so so happy I picked it up.
Favorite Overall: Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen is the 16th book in Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga. Bujold has incredible range as a writer, but this is how I like her best—sci-fi with a twist of family drama, romance, and comedy.
What other excellent and life-changing literature did you experience this year? Tell me in the comments, and have a safe and happy new year.
Hi there! It’s been a while. This started off as a lighthearted piece about when it's good to come back to something you had previously given up on- a book, a television series, a story idea. Something more personal was lurking under the desire to write about those things, apparently. Be warned, feelings ahead:
My husband and I moved to Charlotte about two months ago. We’re about as settled as we can get considering the place we’re renting now is intentionally temporary, somewhere to stay while we look for a house to buy. There are lots of boxes that it doesn’t quite feel worthwhile to unpack, pictures that don’t go on the wall because they’ll just be coming down again so soon. I’m trying to make myself comfortable with the transience.
The first time I visited Charlotte was in 2012. I was with my then-boyfriend-now-husband. He was in town for a business related conference, which we’ve since realized are not good things for me to tag along on. There wasn’t anything objectively bad about the city. We had friends already living here, and we could have moved then, too. At the end of the week, though, we looked at each other and decided we would stay in Connecticut. It wasn’t until this past spring, three apartments, three jobs, one wedding, and almost four years later, that we really reconsidered.
The view from our porch
It wasn’t love at first sight. Maybe it’s not even love at all yet. When my family and friends ask how I’m doing, I want to be enthusiastic. I want to tell them that everything is perfect, but I can’t yet. I’m tired of the traffic, the job search, the way I can’t walk or run in my neighborhood. I miss the people I’m far away from.
But there are good things, too. A new coffee shop, a band to play in, a part-time job. The weather is glorious. We’ve been hiking, an activity I resisted for years but found myself enjoying in practice. I’m finding my footing, one step at a time. There is enough here to convince me that Charlotte will be worth the second try.
Hope everyone is settling in right where they need to be this week- talk to you soon.
I get scared easily. You could call me a wimp, and you wouldn’t be wrong. I approach horror movies with extreme caution. If I’m going to watch one, I’ll do it at home, where I can cover my eyes and keep a light on if I need to.
Still, sometimes it’s fun to be a little scared. I’ve never had the same aversion to horror books that I do to horror movies. It’s easier for me to get past spooky stuff on a page than it is on a screen. Besides, when I read a book over the course of several days, it gives me time to get invested in the world and characters in a way I can’t with a two-hour movie. The thrills, when they come, don’t seem so cheap.
When I was a pre-teen, I loved authors who wrote about ghosts and hauntings, like Mary Downing Hahn and Betty Ren Wright. John Bellairs was my #1 favorite for years, although I have to admit I shamefully preferred some of his posthumously published, co-written books to the ones that were all Bellairs. (*whispers* sorry John I still love you if you’re a ghost and you’re reading this let’s hang out).
As I got older and started to read more adult fiction, horror often blended with fantasy. I preferred the paranormal to straight-up thrillers. Still true. That’s partly my general “wizards, aliens, or get out” attitude about fiction and partly self-defense. I can get a satisfying shiver from zombies or vampires, but I’m too much of a skeptic to worry about them after I close the book. Actual human monsters have been known to exist, though, and the feelings those stories inspire aren’t as easy to shake.
I remember being fifteen and reading House of Leaves while I lay in the grass outside my high school, waiting for my mom to pick me up. The sun was shining, but I was completely absorbed in this dark, twisty book about a book about a documentary about a house with hidden secrets and a family coming apart. File this one under “things I am afraid to reread because adult perspectives might crush my happy memories.”
I discovered H.P. Lovecraft, like many horror fans do. I also discovered that I prefer other authors’ pastiches of Lovecraft to the real thing. Neil Gaiman and Caitlín R. Keirnan come to mind. I read enough of the genuine article to understand what the fuss was about, though.
I came to Stephen King relatively recently. I can’t explain my reluctance on this front, except I have a giant hipster mental block that makes me assume I will dislike anything that lots of other people like. I’ve read Pet Semetary, The Shining, and ‘Salem’s Lot all within the last year. They’re all really good, good enough to shut up my hipster brain for a bit.
Being a lightweight horror fan is good in the way being a lightweight drinker is—it takes way less effort to get my fear-buzz on. If you have any good books to recommend, I’ll be over here, with the lights on.
These days I do most of my reading on my Kindle. It’s portable and easy to support when I’m lying on my side in bed (which is where I do a lot of my reading). The only downside is that for convenience’s sake, I wind up giving a lot of my book budget money to Amazon. So, in the name of supporting local businesses, I do try to buy something whenever I find myself in an actual bookstore.
Even big box stores like Barnes & Noble won’t always have exactly what I’m looking for, so I feel like it’s best to go in without specific goals. Almost anywhere will order a book for me if it’s not on the shelves, of course, but I find joy in aimless browsing.
I love it when stores have displays that highlight the employee’s favorites. Who better to recommend a book that the people who work in the bookstores? A couple weeks ago a placard caught my eye at the Savoy Bookshop. I don’t recall the name of the staff member, but the novel was Borderline by Mishell Baker. The description seemed to be full of things that I like—urban fantasy, adventure, fairies—so I bought it.
I was and still am immensely pleased with my decision. Borderline isn’t a short book (around 400 pages) but I tore through it in less than two days. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since.
The story centers on Millie, a former film student and double amputee with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) living in Los Angeles. A year after the suicide attempt that cost Millie her legs, she gets offered a job with the mysterious Arcadia Project. Enticed by the prospect of re-entering the world and possibly the film industry, she accepts.
The Arcadia Project is a pseudo-governmental agency that regulates traffic between the human and fairy worlds. A gate hidden in Los Angeles allows fey creatures to travel to the human world, but there are strict rules about what they can do while they’re here. The fairies in Borderline play to a lot of the same tropes that we’ve come to expect. They’re sensitive to iron, they can’t lie, they’re functionally immortal and can change their appearance at will. Still, most of them move effortlessly in the modern world, moonlighting as movie stars or bartenders without humans catching on.
The plot is twisty, fast-paced, and fun. Millie and her new coworkers are assigned to track down a missing member of the fey nobility, which leads them to a deeper conspiracy involving both fairies and humans. Millie’s narrating voice really shines. She’s self-depreciating but smart, capable in many ways but vulnerable in others. Her disabilities aren’t just set dressing, nor are they treated as blessings in disguise. They’re indelible parts of her life, and they create challenges that need to be considered just as seriously as any supernatural threats.
One of my favorite things was the interaction between Millie and the other members of the Arcadia Project—her enigmatic boss Caryl, her cranky idealistic partner Teo, and her delightfully catty rival Gloria, among others. They come this close to being a heartwarming found family, but the book doesn’t give them quite enough time to get past their own emotional baggage. The opportunity to learn more about the whole cast is one of the reasons I’m glad to hear there’s a sequel scheduled for 2017.
That was my discovery this month. What’s been your best bookstore find recently? Let me know in the comments, and have a great week!
Songs That Remind Me of Books, Science Fiction Edition
My post on songs that remind me of fantasy novels is here. Like I said, these book-to-song associations have more to do with the workings of my own brain than with actual plot or lyrical content. I know there are dozens of rock songs that directly quote or name drop 1984, but you’ve probably heard of those already. Here are some tunes that remind me of my favorite dystopias and space operas:
Song: “Pompeii” by Bastille
Book: Biting the Sun by Tanith Lee
Biting the Sun, originally published as the two novellas Don’t Bite the Sun and Drinking Sapphire Wine, is one of my all-time favorite dystopias. In this vision of the future, there are no evil overlords intent on oppressing the human race. Instead, there are just super-helpful robots who are intent on doing everything for us. Bored and disaffected by all the state-sanctioned hedonism, the heroine goes to great lengths to find authenticity in her own life. There is a volcano, actually, but that’s only a warm-up act to the disasters that take place later on, leaving the characters wondering what life after is going to look like.
Song: “Team” by Lorde
Books: Uglies Series by Scott Westerfield
There’s something a little dystopian about a lot of Lorde’s songs—it seemed really fitting that she has a song on the soundtrack to the Mockingjay movie. “Team” in particular seems to speak to a life lived off the grid, breaking rules and living by your own code. Uglies, like Biting the Sun, imagines a world where humans are provided with every possible luxury and the chance to be inhumanly beautiful. Over the course of the trilogy, the main characters find out that there’s a hidden cost for all of it, and they have to decide if the compromise is worth it.
Song: “The Gambler” by Fun
Books: The Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold
I spent the summer of 2012 working at summer school, drinking at bars, playing in bands, reading every book in the Vorkosigan Saga, and listening to the albums Aim and Ignite and Some Nights on a constant loop. It makes some sense, then, that I relate the music of the band Fun with the works of author Lois McMaster Bujold. “The Gambler” is one of my favorite tracks for a lot of reasons—the lyrical melody, the surprise French horn solo, and the way a 4-minute song manages to tell the whole history of a family. Bujold’s series is like that, too. Each book stands alone, but the saga taken together tells the story of Miles Vorkosigan and the people caught up in his orbit. The most recent entry, Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen, is my favorite book of 2016 so far.
Song: “Hands Clean” by Alanis Morissette
Book: Crystal Line by Anne McCaffrey
I’ve written before about my love for the audiobook of McCaffrey’s Crystal Singer trilogy. The last book, Crystal Line, is the only one I read in print before listening to. It was the winter of 2002, and Alanis Morissette’s “Hands Clean” was all over VH1, my preferred method for experiencing new music, at the time. The lyrics are about a young woman having a secret affair with an older man, rumored to be based on actual events in Morissette’s past. I was thirteen and I hadn’t had a job or a boyfriend yet, let alone a romance with my boss. But Killashandra Ree has exactly that in Crystal Singer. By the third book, that relationship gets swept under the rug thanks to circumstances that I find more chilling as I get older.
That’s my science fiction playlist. Enjoy your week, everyone!
Recently a friend emailed me saying she wanted to try reading something by Neil Gaiman and asked if I had any recommendations. My first reaction was to be gratified that someone had recognized me for a Gaiman superfan and wanted my expert opinion as such. When the glow of flattery wore off, though, I was overwhelmed. There’s so much to choose from. Where to begin?
After a little dithering, I did manage to send a reasonably coherent email back. I’ve adapted it here for Gaiman virgins and veterans alike. He’s written and contributed to works for all ages and across many different genres, so you can stick with what you know or try something completely new.
All Time Favorite: Good Omens (co-authored by Terry Pratchett)
My first encounter with Gaiman’s work was his collaboration with another favorite author of mine, Terry Pratchett. Good Omens is a novel about the Apocalypse, as predicted in The Book of Revelation. Except it’s funny. I’ve given this as a gift many times. I also find opportunities to quote Good Omens in my daily life, thanks in no small part to all the music jokes (If I’ve ever confused you by attributing “Fat Bottomed Girls” to Ralph Vaughn Williams, this is why).
Short Stories: Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders
I resent 90% of all short stories, but I love the ones by Neil Gaiman. They are bizarre and haunting, full of familiar characters from fairy tales and classic literature reimagined and made strange. Fragile Things is my personal favorite collection of his but Smoke and Mirrors has many gems as well. If you like those, the novel The Ocean at the End of the Lane maintains the folkloric, dreamy feel of his best stories while being a bit longer.
Comic: The Sandman (illustrated by various artists)
This series was what got me into American comics, and I'm very pleased it did. The central plot concerns Morpheus, the King of Dreams. But in a universe where everything you dream exists in a parallel reality, anything is possible, and Gaiman thoroughly explores those possibilities. If you’ve been thinking about getting into comics but are daunted by the sheer volume of complex worlds and stories out there, Sandman is a good place to start. Also it's available at any library with even a small graphic novel selection. I own the 7 1/2 pound hardcover editions and reread at least once a year.
Adult Novel: Anansi Boys
I recommend this to first-time Gaiman readers since it’s fun and stands alone. The main character, Fat Charlie, discovers that his father is the West African trickster god Anansi. It takes place in the same universe as American Gods, which is obviously a masterpiece but it's very sad and dense and I need to be in the right mood for it. Anansi Boys is, by comparison, a romp.
Radio Play: Neverwhere (dramatized by Dirk Maggs)
This has also been a novel and a miniseries, but I think the BBC4 radio adaptation really shines. Starring James McAvoy, Natalie Dormer, and a host of other notable voices, it’s a wonderfully creepy portal fantasy about a city beneath a city. Highly recommended if you’re into London and its tube stops.
Middle Grade: Coraline (illustrated by Dave McKean)
Another portal fantasy, on a smaller scale. Coraline is transported to an alternate-universe version of her home, complete with her “Other Mother” and “Other Father.” At first the new world is wonderful, but soon turns sinister and dangerous. It skips the gross-out factor present in lots YA and adult horror, but it’s still delightfully spooky and suspenseful.
Picture Book: The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish (illustrated by Dave McKean)
I don’t read a lot of picture books these days, but I delighted and terrified some kindergarteners with this once. The illustrations are quirky and complex, with lots of details that kids love to point out and wonder about. It’s also just scary enough to be fun.
Those are my best ones for Neil Gaiman. What do you recommend to people who are curious about your favorite author?
I’m not that good at keeping up with new releases. So many of the books I want to read are already published. Some of them are on my bookshelf. Even if I’m interested in an upcoming book, there’s very rarely one that I need to start reading as soon as it comes out. Most of them can wait.
There are exceptions, of course, usually by my favorite authors. Here are three that I will need to have on my Kindle as soon as humanly possible:
The Obelisk Gate, N.K. Jemisin, August 16th, 2016
I read my first book by N.K. Jemisin three years ago, and I haven’t shut up about her since. The Obelisk Gate is the second book in the Broken Earth series. The first book, The Fifth Season, was hands-down the best book I read last year. The story takes place on the Stillness, a continent plagued by natural disasters and social unrest. Unlike most of Jemisin’s books, which tend to be self-contained, The Fifth Season ended on a pretty spectacular cliff hanger. I’m so excited to find out what happens next in The Obelisk Gate.
Goldenhand, Garth Nix, October 4, 2016
It would be difficult to overstate the influence Garth Nix’s Old Kingdom series has had on me. I can trace my love of hyper-competent ladies fighting dead things right back to his books. The Within the borders of the kingdom, the dead don’t always stay dead, and a powerful necromancer called the Abhorsen is on hand to put them back in the ground. If that sounds like your jam, you should check out Sabriel, the first novel in the series, which was published in 1995. If you’ve already visited the Old Kingdom, you’re probably also looking forward to catching up with your favorite characters, seeing as it’s been more than ten years since The Creature in the Case.
Miranda and Caliban, Jacqueline Carey, February 14th, 2017
Jacqueline Carey has many talents. She moves smoothly between high fantasy and urban fantasy, coming-of-age stories and erotic romance, and everything in between. Her newest project is a re-imagining of The Tempest. Shakespeare’s play focuses on Prospero, a wizard plotting revenge on a remote island. The novel will tell the story of Prospero’s daughter Miranda and his slave Caliban. I don’t have a lot of strong feelings about The Tempest (or Shakespeare in general, tbh) but I trust Carey’s ability to recognize and tell an amazing story.
Those three are at the top of my pre-order list right now. What new releases are you looking forward to?
Congratulations, everyone, we made it halfway through the year! It hasn’t been easy. The news has not been good. But here you are, six months in, still kicking, still making it work. Nice job. I’m proud of you.
It seems like a good time to check back in with the reading resolutions I set for myself in January. So far I’ve finished 41 books. I have a spreadsheet, you guys.
Books by Authors of Color
My goal is to read at least 35 books by authors of color this year, and so far I’ve finished 23. This is already a huge upswing in diversity from 2015, when I only finished 10. I had some reservations about the wording of this resolution, which I go into in my original post. But overall I think it’s been a good exercise for me. If nothing else, it’s encouraged me to check out authors I haven’t read before, like Octavia Butler and Daniel José Older.
Nonfiction Books
I have read as few as four or as many as seven nonfiction books. I was aiming for five, so okay, but why the discrepancy? Well, I didn’t really think this one through as well as I should have. I didn’t really have poetry in mind at first, but if you want to get technical, it is shelved in nonfiction. Then there’s the issue of books The Water is Wide, which walk a thin line between memoir and novel.
Of the four incontrovertibly, uncontestably nonfiction books I have read, two were about writing craft and two were about feminism. Make of that what you will.
Authors with Different Gender Identities
I was getting a little weary of goal setting by the time I came to gender. I read about an equal number of male and female authors last year, but to my knowledge no trans or non-binary authors. The very low bar I set for myself was a vague sort of “I can do better” statement.
And I’ve done…better, I guess, if you count one book. One in Every Crowd by Ivan E. Coyote is another semi-fictionalized memoir, geared towards a young adult audience. It deals with the narrator/author’s own experience growing up as a gender nonconformist in rural Canada, as well as their adult experiences mentoring queer youth.
Look, I don’t cry a lot. If I type “this made me cry” in a text or a tweet or a blog post, you can read it as “this made me emotional and maybe my eyes watered a little.” But while I was reading One in Every Crowd there were big, wet, I-need-to-stop-and-get-a-tissue-before-I-short-out-my-Kindle tears running down my face. Five stars, highly recommend.
Other Observations
Most of the authors I’ve read are American, with a handful from the UK and a very small number from anywhere else. My most-read genre is sci-fi (11 books) closely followed by fantasy (10 books). Overwhelmingly I read ebooks rather than any other format, although I did have a few audiobooks and paperbacks as well.
So that’s where I’m at as of July 1. I’ll check back in around December and let you know how I did.
A few days ago I found a Kickstarter for a film adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Lullaby. Or rather, I got a direct message from whoever runs Palahniuk’s Twitter (it’s not him) pointing it out to me, in case I wanted to contribute any money to getting the movie made.
I showed it to my husband. Palahniuk was one of our first shared literary interests when we started dating. We still have duplicate copies of several of his books on our shelves, relics of a pre-cohabiting, pre-Kindle era.
Even though we’re arguably fans, we laughed a little over some of the backer rewards for the Lullaby movie. $15 for a PDF of the shooting script is one thing. But for $500, you can have a leather-bound, signed, limited edition copy of one of one of Chuck’s books. For a little more, you can get a tattoo of the movie’s logo. For two grand, you can be in the movie.
“Didn’t they used to pay people to be in movies?” I asked. “Not the other way around?”
Making fun of the Kickstarter was not classy of me, I’ll admit. Movies are expensive. If fans are willing to put that kind of capital into getting a thing made, they should have something to show for it. I should not mock people for spending money on things that bring them joy.
But I personally am not going to fork over $20k so I can own the prop grimoire from the movie.
Palahniuk’s best-known work is still his 1996 novel Fight Club. By the time I hit puberty, the 1999 film adaptation was on its way to cult classic status. I can’t shake the sad feeling that this, his first published novel, was also the height of Palahniuk’s fame. Fight Club and it’s rules are a part of the cultural lexicon in the way that none of his other books ever were.
When I was in high school, I got into Palahniuk because that’s what all the cool kids were reading. Maybe not the class president, captain-of-the-sports-team cool kids, but the nerdy, witty, acerbic types. These were the people who started bands and wrote poetry and stayed up to see the sunrise. They pushed boundaries and broke rules, or at least it felt that way to me. They were the ones I wanted to be around and be like.
We worshipped these books wholeheartedly. Palahniuk’s words made their way into our yearbook quotes, and we joined MySpace groups called “Chuck Palahniuk for President.” For my junior year science fair project, two friends and I researched all the anarchic chemistry proposed in Fight Club. We didn’t actually attempt to drill holes in a gun barrel or make napalm out of orange juice, but we did make soap. We used grocery store-bought lard that did not come from humans, as far as we knew, anyways.
There’s a sense now that Palahniuk was something we were supposed to give up after a while. The bizarre, gross details that pepper his books, the inevitable plot twists—it could get gimmicky, overly theatrical. Adolescent boy stuff. We were meant to grow out of loving this.
Confession time: I never actually did.
I couldn’t get through Haunted. It wasn’t just the infamous opening story “Guts;” it was the rumors of auto-cannibalism later, and my fear that something bad was going to happen to the cat in the frame story (no one tell me what happens to the cat, I don’t want to know). I stopped reading his new releases after Pygmy. I probably should have quit after Snuff. The porn industry has its problems, but I’m not sure Palahniuk was meant to tackle them. Pygmy was further out of his experience. It read like a bad episode of South Park, a poorly drawn satire that has transformed into the very thing it meant to skewer.
But everything that came before…
Lullaby, the book that is being kickstarted into a movie, is heartbreaking. It’s about a mysterious poem that’s really a spell. Saying it aloud or even just thinking it kills people. Lullaby is also about families, both biological and found. It’s about guilt and grief and how easy it is to do harm, even when all you want to do is help. There’s also a necrophiliac coroner and a real estate agent trying to sell haunted houses. Someone gets gum in their hair, or maybe it’s boogers.
Palahniuk has written some of the most memorable things about boogers I’ve ever read. The only other author who’s come close is Charles Dickens. Both the phrase “pendulous excrescence” and the nose picking in Rant will haunt me to my grave, so thanks for that, Chuck(s).
Invisible Monsters was a personal favorite, reread many times. The events that kick the story off are horrific—the main character has lost most of her jaw to a gunshot wound—but it somehow manages to evolve into a hopeful, chaotic road trip story. It asks how much we sacrifice when we obediently fill the roles others have chosen for us rather than following our own passions. “Find what you’re afraid of most and go live there,” the narrator urges.
There were others, too. Diary, with it’s creepy parody of both art school and small-town living, is my husband’s favorite. I’m least-fond of the protagonist in Survivor, but it’s absolutely worth a read for the counterpoint structure alone. I consider Choke to be the worst-of-the-best, but it’s surprisingly charming for a book about an amoral conman who’s addicted to sex.
These books got into me in a very real way and never left again. They colored the way I looked at the world. The stories are full of ordinary things transformed into fateful objects. IKEA catalogues, birth control pills, suicide hotline stickers, Easter eggs. The cap of a restaurant ketchup bottle, a letter opener, an email password. After you finish one of Palahniuk’s books, it’s like you’ll never feel the same about these things again.
Maybe this is nostalgia talking. I’ve that most people will like the music they liked at age 13 for the rest of their life. They might not listen to it on a regular basis, but when one of those songs comes on, they won’t change the radio station. Palahniuk is literary equivalent to that, at least a little bit.
If the amount of money the Kickstarter has raised is any indication, I’m not the only one who feels this way.
I still believe there was something valuable in those books, though. Hidden beneath the shock value exterior was truth and beauty. Many of them have happy endings. Our younger selves might have pretended to be cynics, but it turns out we were romantics all along.
What's the last book you read that had a ghost or ghosts in it? Bonus points if it was in a genre other than horror. Bonus bonus points if the ghosts were a thinly veiled metaphor for a character's quarter-life crisis
