(no subject)
Jul. 7th, 2015 08:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretThey Might Be Giants are playing an all-Lincoln show in Brooklyn in a few weeks. I was considering going until I checked the calendar and realized it's on Tisha B'Av. It's not that big a deal- I wasn't even sure I wanted to go before I realized, and I've probably already seen TMBG a half-dozen times. And there are things that have been much more important to me that I missed for religious reasons. But sometimes it hits you unexpectedly and a bubble of resentment wells up anyway, a realization that if not for the arbitrary rules I have accepted on myself (in service to God's commandments), this little piece of entertainment would be available to me.
Reading lately has mostly been oriented around![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fic_corner canon review, which has been more of a chore than anticipated, because I read enough to write the characters within two days, but there's this whole well of canon and I keep dipping deeper in spite of myself. But I've read other things too.
I'm up to Book 8 of the Dresden Files. The books are better now! They're still flawed, and I'd probably be quitting again now if not for the goal of reading the Hugo nominated one, but they're tolerable and sometimes enjoyable to read now. Characters introduced later in the series tend to be richer and more interesting than characters introduced earlier in the series, and when Susan reappeared after being missing for a book, she'd gotten a serious upgrade in character complexity. It's not clear if I'll make it to Book 15 by July 31st, but we'll see.
I read Rainbow Rowell's Fangirl last week, which did pretty well by its teenage characters, but didn't connect to me on a fannish level. Cath's interactions with her fans had a persistent One-to-Many feel that was not consistent at all with my experience of fandom. They comment on her fics, she thanks them, but she doesn't interact with them as people. And culminating the book with Cath finally setting aside her fanfic opus to write original fic was similarly alienating. I'm in fandom for fandom, not because I'm scared to write original fiction, and I am so thrilled for all the friends I have met here who feel similarly.
I also reread DWJ's Dark Lord of Derkholm, after I made a comment on one ofskygiants's posts that revealed I'd completely forgotten the plot of the book and remembered an entirely different book in its place. Dark Lord is such a weird book... The inconsistent relationship to The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, the arbitrary and emergent metaphysics, the bizarre recombinant genetics, but most of all, the way DWJ just doesn't do exposition in this book! Derk's family has eighteen years of history and backstory and a lot of the stuff we would need to actually understand the family dynamics, we're not given, or at best we're given allusively. Figuring out why particular siblings get along or don't get along or evolve in their relationships to each other requires way more context than Jones gives. Figuring out why Derk is so terrified of losing Mara is just about impossible because we see so little of their marriage, and figuring out why Querida tampers with their relationship is even harder because we don't see Querida's relationship to Mara's father at all. The way DWJ stacks twisty manipulations on top of each other is brilliantly hilarious, though. When they confront Barnabas at the end and it turns out he's been like, a quadruple agent and they have to untangle which things he sabotaged on behalf of who, and which he screwed up because he's just a drunk, it's amazing.
Reading lately has mostly been oriented around
fic_corner canon review, which has been more of a chore than anticipated, because I read enough to write the characters within two days, but there's this whole well of canon and I keep dipping deeper in spite of myself. But I've read other things too.I'm up to Book 8 of the Dresden Files. The books are better now! They're still flawed, and I'd probably be quitting again now if not for the goal of reading the Hugo nominated one, but they're tolerable and sometimes enjoyable to read now. Characters introduced later in the series tend to be richer and more interesting than characters introduced earlier in the series, and when Susan reappeared after being missing for a book, she'd gotten a serious upgrade in character complexity. It's not clear if I'll make it to Book 15 by July 31st, but we'll see.
I read Rainbow Rowell's Fangirl last week, which did pretty well by its teenage characters, but didn't connect to me on a fannish level. Cath's interactions with her fans had a persistent One-to-Many feel that was not consistent at all with my experience of fandom. They comment on her fics, she thanks them, but she doesn't interact with them as people. And culminating the book with Cath finally setting aside her fanfic opus to write original fic was similarly alienating. I'm in fandom for fandom, not because I'm scared to write original fiction, and I am so thrilled for all the friends I have met here who feel similarly.
I also reread DWJ's Dark Lord of Derkholm, after I made a comment on one of
skygiants's posts that revealed I'd completely forgotten the plot of the book and remembered an entirely different book in its place. Dark Lord is such a weird book... The inconsistent relationship to The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, the arbitrary and emergent metaphysics, the bizarre recombinant genetics, but most of all, the way DWJ just doesn't do exposition in this book! Derk's family has eighteen years of history and backstory and a lot of the stuff we would need to actually understand the family dynamics, we're not given, or at best we're given allusively. Figuring out why particular siblings get along or don't get along or evolve in their relationships to each other requires way more context than Jones gives. Figuring out why Derk is so terrified of losing Mara is just about impossible because we see so little of their marriage, and figuring out why Querida tampers with their relationship is even harder because we don't see Querida's relationship to Mara's father at all. The way DWJ stacks twisty manipulations on top of each other is brilliantly hilarious, though. When they confront Barnabas at the end and it turns out he's been like, a quadruple agent and they have to untangle which things he sabotaged on behalf of who, and which he screwed up because he's just a drunk, it's amazing.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-07-07 04:19 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-07-07 04:24 pm (UTC)Looks like Ghost Story is book 13.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-07-07 05:00 pm (UTC)I definitely get through them faster by reading them, but hearing Marsters is such a treat, and I don't have a deadline. :-)
(no subject)
Date: 2015-07-07 08:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-07-07 08:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-07-07 09:06 pm (UTC)Ah, OK. I think I actually liked 7 more than 8 in that case (dinosaur more than horror convention). But I am fuzzy on the details -- they were good popcorn reading and fit with whatever emotional shit I was dealing with at the time.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-07-07 10:13 pm (UTC)And yes to everything you highlight as weird about Dark Lord of Derkholm. It's amazingly tell-not-show for all the characters' emotional lives. Why does Shona hate Kit? What's going on with Don? We just don't know.
I was thinking about Flury (a griffin character in the following book) the other day and wondering what on earth it sounded like to the other-continent griffins - "So there's this human wizard over on the mainland who's making griffins out of lions and eagles and raising them as his childen."
"What? Why? That's bizarre!"
And somehow, despite being griffins made by a person who may not have seen a real griffin prior to this - I don't know if it's confirmed that he did - and despite using a different mix each time, Derk makes griffins that are biologically compatible with true griffins. ???
My favourite part of the book is definitely the project management aspect. As a deconstruction of fantasy tropes, it gives me emotional whiplash, but I could have read several more books about planting clues and gizmos, improvising with geese, and timetabling the Dark Lord's demise. And the difference (or lack of) between things going wrong by accident and things going wrong on purpose.