book blogging

Books and words and stuff.

[disharmonious]

I had already found that it was not good to be alone, and so made companionship with what there was around me, sometimes with the universe and sometimes with my own insignificant self; but my books were always my friends, let fail all else.

Joshua Slocum (via disharmonious)

[disharmonious]

Almost seventy years later I remember clearly how the magic of translating the words in books into images enriched my life, breaking the barriers of time and space…

Mario Vargas Llosa (via disharmonious)

[neyruto]

a dystopian novel about some guy who works in the government and is just trying to get by while some shitty kids try and overthrow society

[soarry]

I will know my life is successful when I have a library with a rolling ladder

[marginalutilite]

It was when she stepped a little aside to let someone else get to the basin and stood up and glanced into the mirror that she realized with a slight stinging shock that she had no idea which face was hers. She looked into the mirror as though into a group of strangers, all staring at her or around her; no one was familiar in the group, no one smiled at her or looked at her with recognition; you’d think my own face would know me, she thought, with a queer numbness in her throat. There was a creamy chinless face with bright blond hair, and a sharp-looking face under a red veiled hat, and a colorless anxious face with brown hair pulled straight back, and a square rosy face under a square haircut, and two or three more faces pushing close to the mirror, moving, regarding themselves. Perhaps it’s not a mirror, she thought, maybe it’s a window and I’m looking straight through at women washing on the other side. But there were women combing their hair and consulting the mirror; the group was on her side, and she thought, I hope I’m not the blonde, and lifted her hand and put it on her cheek. She was the pale anxious one with the hair pulled back and when she realized it she was indignant and moved hurriedly back through the crowd of women, thinking, It isn’t fair, why don’t I have any color in my face? There were some pretty faces there, why didn’t I take one of those? I didn’t have time, she told herself sullenly, they didn’t given me time to think, I could have had one of the nice faces, even the blonde would be better.

"The Tooth" by Shirley Jackson in The Magic of Shirley Jackson (via marginalutilite)

[ridleaf-archive]

the harry potter fandom actually has some of the weirdest crack pairings in fanfic I have ever seen like

and my personal favourite

[kaminmh]

"Dobby had always wanted clothes, but never like this."

[redandyellowmakepurple]

oh my god

[like-bicycles-horses-and-ch-blog]

"I never figured you for a quitter." "I’m not quitting! I-I’m protesting! I’m protesting unfair treatment- and- and being worked till I drop. I want to have time to myself. I want to learn how to fight with a sword now, not when they decide. I want-" "Ye want. Ye want. ‘Tis something different ye’re learning here. It’s called ‘discipline’. The world won’t always order itself the way ye want. Ye have to learn discipline."

Alanna and Coram, Alanna: the First Adventure, Page 54. (via almostalanna)

[my-graceless-heart]

A Song of the Lioness TV series though

can you imagine it?

it starts with Thom and Alanna switching places to go to their chosen professions. The first season follows Alanna through her pagehood: all the trials she has to face with learning to fight, getting bullied, getting a horse, her friendship with George, and climaxing with the battle in the desert. It ends when they go back to Corus, Jonathan and the others go through their Ordeals, and Alanna is chosen as Jonathan’s squire.

The second season follows her time as a squire, with the battles with Tusaine and her romance with Jonathan. Also George’s budding feelings for her and the upcoming Ordeal of Knighthood. It climaxes with her confrontation with Roger and being revealed to the whole court- after she hears her Knighthood- that she’s a girl! It ends with her and Coram leaving the court behind to go traveling.

The third season is her Bedouin life, becoming the shaman of a tribe and learning to fully accept her Gift. She helps Jonathan become the Voice of the tribes and brings peace between the tribes and Tortall. It ends with her going traveling again- she needs to do something incredible to get recognized as a true knight of Tortall.

The fourth season would be her rescuing Thayet, getting the Dominion Jewel, and saving Tortall by stopping Roger (again). It ends with her becoming the King’s Champion.

I know I left out a lot of little details, but I REALLY like the idea of a Tortall TV show and I really want one gah

[neitherheavenorhell]

Maybe ‘okay’ will be our ‘always’.

[senseandeducation]

Character Judgment Revisited

[lbdeffteedubs]

Elizabeth does TALK about being a great judge of character, but she is actually a very shitty one. She gets almost everybody wrong.

She’s wrong about Wickham. She’s wrong about Darcy, she can’t even tell that he’s into her. She’s wrong about Bingley, in assuming that he’ll just realize Jane loves him without Jane having to give him any indication of it….Basically, for all that she’s sparkling and fun and sociable and smarter than most of her set, at the start of the book, Elizabeth Bennet has no ability to read people at all.

[senseandeducation]

or, how Socially Awkward Darcy memes improved my understanding of Austen

Back in, what, September? I wrote this long thing about how LBD had made me realize that Lizzy Bennet has no idea what she’s talking about in re: other people for like the whole first half of Pride and Prejudice.  (I’m the Emily of @lbdeffteedubs …bee tee dubs.  Yes, #DarcyDay pushed me onto tumblr finally.  What.) 

I came to the conclusion that most of Austen’s books (also, I spoiled pretty much her entire oeuvre without checking whether Lexie had read them all or cared.  This is the story of our friendship.  I’m sorry, Lex.)  are about girls learning from men who has good character and who doesn’t.  I stand by this for the most part, but reading the fallout from Darcy Day, especially the Socially Awkward pic above, was a good reminder that…Darcy also basically sucks at reading characters.  Or, if not in judging other peoples’ moral characters (Bingley is a good guy, Wickham’s a shiftless cad, Jane’s a decent if undemonstrative person, Elizabeth’s awesome, the rest of the Bennets are a little crazy, Caroline is shallow, and he himself is “ill-qualified to recommend himself to strangers”) then in understanding their core emotional truths.  Jane is reserved and he thinks she’s unfeeling; Lizzy’s fun and kind of a flirt and he just assumes she’ll be into him. Lizzy misjudges people; Darcy misunderstands them.

Darcy lacks empathy where Elizabeth lacks astuteness. Their relationship is, in part, about finding the right balance between his cynicism and her disastrous naivete, and while there is a genderedness to this polarity (and I’m not sure whether LBD is trying to flip it or not), I think that I didn’t give Austen enough credit a few months ago for doing a lot to write characters who are more complex than romanticized ideal gender roles. She does generally breaks down good judgment/good feelings along gendered lines, and it’s hard to parse how much of this is her attitude about men and women’s differing capabilities versus the social reality that men and women had different access to information.  But!  While her dynamics are often gendered they are not exclusively so, and in fact her sharp eye for character-driven social commentary often gives us characters who undermine the traditional gendered set-ups about who is naive and who is wise and who is emotionally tone-deaf.  Charles Bingley, for example, is emotionally and morally rudderless to the point that he lets himself be talked out of love (he’s the young Anne Eliot of P&P).  Knightley is the one to school Emma in Not Hurting Peoples’ Feelings.  Darcy, and this is what I think Austen fully intended but the LBD has made more brilliantly clear (to me) in 4 minutes of screentime than any of the period adaptations, is perfectly endowed with looks, wealth, and breeding, and yet manages to be utterly socially hapless. 

There is an age dynamic at work as well in most of the books, and this ties in with Lexie’s earlier comment about P&P as a coming-of-age story.  Of course the men are universally older - in P&P I know Lizzie is 20 and Darcy I want to say is 28; Brandon has decades on Marianne and Knightley famously spends the whole book talking creepily about his teenaged memories of how cute Emma was as a baby.  (Exception: Wentworth!)  But there are also a few more mature women - Elinor and Anne, or even, more peripherally, the Bennets’ Aunt Gardiner or Emma’s old governess (…there is never a very wise mother, I think.  How interesting.  And now I’m rampantly abusing punctuation for my asides) - who accurately judge the characters AND the feelings of people and who dish this out as wise advice to their younger or more foolish relatives.  I do think Austen is serious in trying to teach young, single women the object lesson that they cannot afford to misjudge characters at this crucial stage of their lives. 

But ANYWAY, I think there is more of a coming-of-age element in Pride and Prejudice, outside of the romance, than I would have said a few months ago.  (The fact that non-romantic coming-of-age stories with female protagonists is a pretty thin genre is part of my beef here, but that’s a discussion for another time.)  Austen gets credit for not only occasionally showing women across the threshold of growing up who has learned how to tell what people really are, but for giving us heroes like Darcy who have their own interpersonal lessons to learn, about not black-boxing people based on status or mannerisms and leaping to conclusions about their inner beings based on short acquaintance.  Not to mix canons horribly, but if Elizabeth has to learn sense, Darcy has to learn sensibility.  And for both of them, these lessons are fundamentally about the importance of getting to know a person, instead of relying on first impressions.  (see what I did there…)

Bernie pointed out in his Q&A post today that having Lizzie tell Darcy about the videos was an intentional and essential gamechanger for the narrative of this show.  It also does for Darcy more plausibly what Austen asked us to believe obsessing on Elizabeth’s rejection speech (“ungentlemanlike manner”) did for him in 1812: gives him clear-eyed insight into what’s going on in her head.  Lets him get to know her, really, for the first time.  This is what is so great about LBD: even as the characters change in modernization, the ways in which they stay basically consistent with Austen’s exploration of people make me more aware and impressed with the depth and veracity of her work. 

I was going to say it’s remarkable how much more obvious it all seems without the distraction of ascots and empire waisted gowns, but I’ve spent the last two days obsessing on Darcy’s red checked shirt, so that might not be it after all.

Anyway, well done, LBD.

[the-library-and-step-on-it]

INTERVIEWER Can a writer learn style? CAPOTE No, I don’t think that style is consciously arrived at, any more than one arrives at the color of one’s eyes. After all, your style is you. At the end the personality of a writer has so much to do with the work. The personality has to be humanly there. Personality is a debased word, I know, but it’s what I mean. The writer’s individual humanity, his word or gesture toward the world, has to appear almost like a character that makes contact with the reader. If the personality is vague or confused or merely literary, ça ne va pas.

Paris Review interview with Truman Capote (The Art of Fiction, No. 17). (via the-library-and-step-on-it)

[sarazarr-deactivated20160519]

…no, [writing] never does get easier, and the writer who thinks it should is involved in a dangerous self-deception. Because you know more, and are more apt to see more of the possibilities in each line or gesture, the task becomes all that much more difficult. And the heavy doubts never go away. Better make friends with them now, because they really won’t ever go away.”

Richard Bausch in a great, meaty interview in current Writer’s Chronicle. (via sarazarr)

[spookymrsboo-deactivated2018113]

Wikipedia Entries to Read in the Dark

[disharmonious-reads]

5 Wikipedia Entries for When You’re Feeling Possibly Receptive to the Idea That Ghosts Might Exist

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belchen_Tunnel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moberly-Jourdain_incident http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenheim_Poltergeist http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bachelor’s_Grove_Cemetery http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kate_Morgan

5 Wikipedia Articles for When You Want to Take Your “Walking Dead” Costume to The Next Level

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorruptibility http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premature_burial http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felicia_Felix-Mentor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercy_Brown_Vampire_Incident http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necromancy

5 Wikipedia Articles for When You Find Yourself Wondering About the Historical Accuracy of ‘Hocus Pocus’

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malleus_Maleficarum http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moll_Dyer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Sherwood http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_name http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Talbye_Trial

5 Wikipedia Entries for When You Start to Wonder if Your Pet Knows Something You Don’t

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clapham_Wood_Mystery http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overtoun_Bridge http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greyfriars_Bobby http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_(therapy_cat) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_dog_(ghost)

5 Wikipedia Entries for When You’re a Complete Anglophile, Even on Halloween

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spring_Heeled_Jack http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borley_Rectory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_of_Glamis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princes_in_the_Tower http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_the_Ripper

5 Wikipedia Articles for When You Decide Your Little Cousin/Nephew/Sister Isn’t Appropriately Scared of Monsters, and You Need to Remedy That ASAP

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mothman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Lick_Monster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melonheads http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cryptids http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loch_Ness_Monster

5 Wikipedia Entries for When You Want Something Mystifying to Discuss on GChat All Day

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taman_Shud_Case? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bloop http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyatlov_pass_accident http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Dahlia

5 Wikipedia Articles for When You Feel The Need to Brush Up on All Things “The Devil,” (As One Does From Time to Time)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil’s_Footprints http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Thunderstorm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Jersey_Devil http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil’s_Chair http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil’s_Tramping_Ground

5 Wikipedia Entries For When You Feel The Need to Prove That Women Can Be Heartless Murderers, Too

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Báthory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amelia_Dyer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belle_Gunness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphine_LaLaurie http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_bell

5 Wikipedia Articles For When You Find Yourself Scoffing at This List Because You’re Still Not Sufficiently Creeped Out

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zodiac_Killer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anneliese_Michel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faces_of_belmez http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Amityville_Horror http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_paralysis

[katrani]

george can be confused by aly’s so-called lack of ambition all he wants

but he’s clearly missing the thing here. she’s grown up privileged. she’s listless. all the crooked things are obviously not what she’s interested in- and even if she was, i have a feeling everyone would want to keep her away from that. george grew up a commoner and so the highest he could aim besides merchant was the rogue. but she’s a noblewoman that doesn’t want to be a wife or a warrior or a scholar. there’s not a lot of options to her. she says she wants to be a spy, and he won’t let her (plus no one else letting her do anything close to the war). there’s her ambition, and he’s blocking it.

also he really should’ve seen this going wrong did he forget that his wife DISGUISED HERSELF AS A BOY FOR EIGHT YEARS and that HE WENT BEHIND HIS MOTHER’S BACK TO BECOME THE ROGUE and he really expects all of his kids to want to play by the rules?

and then alanna is the same like you don’t mind her possibly being on a battlefield where she could die but dying by doing spywork is so horrible? ALANNA DO YOU NOT REMEMBER YOUR OWN CHILDHOOD.

(and like i know that aly gets forced into her situation pretty much but i have no doubts she would’ve come up with some way to trick her parents at some point)

[disharmonious]

Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.

Louis L’Amour

Best known for his Western novels, author Louis L’Amour (born March 22, 1908) traveled the globe in his youth, sometimes as a merchant seaman, sometimes as a professional boxer (he later coached several Golden Gloves teams), and sometimes just hopping freight trains.

(via disharmonious)

[disharmonious]

A bit of trash now and then is good for the severest reader. It provides the necessary roughage in the literary diet.

Phyllis McGinley (via disharmonious)

[corseque]

When her kiss transforms the Beast, she is furious. "You should have warned me! Here I was smitten by an exceptional being, and all of a sudden, my fiance becomes an ordinary distinguished young man!"

the 1909 play Beauty and the Beast:  Fantasy in Two Acts by Fernand Noziere, the very first published version of the story where the Beauty is disappointed when the Beast transforms into a human at the end. (via mylittlepocketwitch)