face the strange

What I’ve Read
Persuasion – Jane Austen – I was sick this week and re-watched the 1995 adaptation and, as often happens, lead to me returning to the book. The movie is wonderful, the book is wonderful, I was comforted by the world that Austen builds and writes in. I think this one is growing on me to the point it passes Pride and Prejudice now for me. I just love Anne Elliot, I love Wentworth, I love the whole stupid bunch of all the young people in a flurry of attraction and engagement bouncing off each other like superheated particles.

The Books of Magic – Neil Gaiman – Yeah, that guy. I picked this up because I had come across an article talking about the unacknowledged influences that JK Rowling (yeah, that guy) had on Harry Potter – and the dark haired working class boy with dumb glasses and a magical owl, getting introduced to the secret world of magic by a stranger, seems like it very well might have been in her mind when she started writing Harry Potter. (This series is from 1990). However, this book is largely a retrospective of magic characters in DC Comics thru the lens of a new character, Timothy Hunter, who could be “the greatest magician of his age” as he gets the guided tour from several magical trenchcoat guys from DC’s vault. It feels like themes that have been done before by better people. The charm of the comic-specific retrospective relies on Gaiman’s skill at re-working existing comic characters into the brief cameos they get in the story along with existing myths and legends. My opinion is that Gaiman did this better and more gracefully in Sandman, but, I am inclined to be far less charitable towards him because of his whole fucking shitshow of a personality. I recalled reading this book and thinking it was good – but I realize now that I was thinking of the continuing series that came after this by John Ney Rieber and Peter Gross, and that certain key moments are simply the work of other writers. (Also, I didn’t like the art in this series except for book three, so, there’s that.) I don’t feel like I can entirely rule out my suspicion that Rowling had seen or read this series before she wrote Harry Potter, but I also can’t prove it and I’m not willing to take the law suit. In short, I think it can be skipped unless you are particularly interested in DC Comics magical characters.

What I’m Reading

The Fortunate Fall – Cameron Reed – Static, due for book club next week.

Into the Drowning Deep – Mira Grant – about 70% and while I made a comparison to Michael Crichton last week, I think that was perhaps too generous. I’m not losing interest in this book so much as I get frustrated with the scene-level pacing. Multiple scenes have seemed like they are building up to punchy scientific revelations!Only to have decidedly unurgent exposition pop up in the middle and drag out the scene, taking the delicious tension with them. It ends up taking the steam out of my excitement to have it happen so often. I can’t really give details without spoilers. But, for example, our intrepid scientist who is on a mission to discover the deep sea creatures who killed her sister are real and dangerous, uses her scientific subskill (which has been described before) to discover that her ship’s about to face an immediate threat! And in the middle of that action, the narration of the book picks up on how she’s typing really hard and throws in a flashback to let the reader know that the main character has actually broken the keyboards on several of her laptops this way! Now, that detail is good character work! I like it! It just doesn’t belong in the space between the set up and payoff of her big discovery because it let the tension out of the scene like a balloon – you should have popped that balloon for a big bang, but it’s just farted it all away. I remembered this being a frustration with Mira Grant’s Newflesh book, so I feel like this is a writer/reader mismatch – she’s clearly doing all right for herself in getting her works published! She loves to tell you about how things work. But it keeps interrupting the action, and I’m getting fussed.

A Contracted Spouse for the Prizefighter by Alice Coldbreath (audiobook) – Audiobook romance by a favorite author. This is the third in a series that focuses on the lives of Victorian working class people in a variety of jobs. Our heroine, Theodora, wants to be on the stage doing the fun, risque musical hall act that she has been working on for years – but her stuffy family wants to be respectable and will not allow that kind of act in their theatre! When her sister elopes and her brother pulls her out of acting entirely to work as the family’s drudge, Theo runs off to a prizefighter turned music act manager as part of a deal -he’ll get a share in her family’s much larger theatre and she’ll get her chance on the stage!

I often find the structures of historical romances less grating to my brain than modern romances – something about the stronger patriarchal structures makes the genre less silly to me. Modern women can simply not get married and have a perfectly fine life – historical women leads have to figure this shit out and fast. (This is like monarchy – makes for a great drama, I’d rather it only appear in fiction.)

Guillermo del Toro: Cabinet of Curiosities – on hold. (This book is just obnoxiously large.)

What I’ll Read Next
Natural History of Dragons
The Hunger Games
The Grief of Stones
heated rivalry, since the show is all the rage