Reading notes, week 5

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Currently reading: Liar’s Dice by Jeannie Lin. Haven’t really started it yet because the ereader complained of low battery (doesn’t surprise me with the use it’s been getting).

Het feestgelag van Briciu, translated by Maartje Draak and Frida de Jong — Maartje Draak is a hero of mine, and has been since she received seventeen-year-old me at her house to help with my high-school graduation project (an investigation of King Arthur in Dutch literature) and gave me prints of some of her articles. (Spouse saw it in a shop window and assumed rightly that I would want it.)

And still The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road, 1567-1659 by Geoffrey Parker, a very different take on the Eighty Years War than Dutch kids learn in school. (Or at least used to learn in school when I was in school; I don’t know what history teaching is like now.)

Earlier reading notes: Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, Week 4

 

Reading notes, week 4

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January 25: Tales from Perach (reread) by Shira Glassman, because something that happened in A Harvest of Ripe Figs made something in one of the stories much clearer.

January 25: A Harvest of Ripe Figs by Shira Glassman. I bought the two Mangoverse books I didn’t have yet and don’t want to stop after The Second Mango. I like it when queens do their own detective work!

January 25: The Second Mango by Shira Glassman, as unicorn[1] chaser for Artists in Crime. It’s the first, and that shows, it doesn’t have the easy swing of the others yet, but full of nice people (and a couple of nasty people who are Dealt With). I’m reading it as a prequel but that works perfectly because it’s got large flashbacks itself.

[1] No unicorn though, only a big not-quite-a-mare that can turn into a green dragon.

January 23: Artists in Crime by Ngaio Marsh. Seems to be one of the less irritating ones. Finished it, though it was hard going: I remember now why I stopped reading Ngaio Marsh: pretty much all the characters are annoying unpleasant people. And they smoke so much! I wish I’d counted from the beginning because I don’t want to go through it again to mark every time someone lights a cigarette. Long enough since previous reading that I didn’t remember whodunnit. It’s foreshadowed rather cunningly, though (never said she was a bad writer, just that her characters are unlikeable).

January 19: Mio, min Mio by Astrid Lindgren (in translation). Childhood favourite, still gives me all the feels (but I didn’t remember the genie at the beginning!).

January 19: Het spiegelkasteel by Paul Biegel (exists in English as The Looking-Glass Castle). Somewhat more symbolic and less plotty than I remembered, a magical mystery tour rather than a magical journey.

January 19: The third Shakespeare and Smythe, Much Ado About Murder. More of the same but hard to stop. I can’t read on in #4 though: Kobo has never heard of it, only of Simon Hawke’s Star Trek novels (the one I’ve got is rather military and that’s not what I want to read right now). Shakespeare and Smythe did get ever more splainy as I read on, and retreading the earlier books, so perhaps it’s all for the best.

Earlier reading notes: Week 1, Week 2, Week 3

I wrote a thing

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Sunday morning, in church, during the Lord’s Prayer in various languages, a tiny story idea (an idea for a tiny story, not a tiny idea for a story, I get the latter all the time) fell into my head ready-made. At post-service coffee I told the plot to a couple of choirmates and they said “you’re beaming!”

When I got upstairs I mentioned it in public:

And David got inspired:

two small ugly mirror-image demons bickering

Picture by David Bowman (click to embiggen)

So I wrote it, and he drew it, and we coordinated, and here it is: Angels. Read it here without downloading, or get the epub or mobi here. (Spoiler: ten paternosters is about three minutes.)

It’s set in my alternate-history Germany, but the story is too short to show much of the setting. I think I should call the genre “fabulism” because witches are a normal part of the world, demons are in evidence, and prayer has immediate effect. (I thought “magical realism” at first but it’s not set in Latin America, nor am I Latin American, and I don’t want to be accused of cultural appropriation for a measly 461 words.)

Reading notes, week 3

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By now we all know it’s 2020, don’t we?

January 18: Simon Hawke, The Slaying of the Shrew. I was on the train and quickly wanted something to read without a lot of scrolling through the list and the burden of choice. It’s got the same advantages and disadvantages as #1: not spectacularly good but a lot of fun, with nice main characters and secondary characters who are mostly caricatures, but good ones. The first 5% was rehashing the first book in its entirety, which might be useful for people who don’t go straight from one to the other. There are 5; I have 3 (and a Star Trek novel by the same author). I like it that fully three-quarters of the book happens before there’s an actual murder, and all the stuff that does happen moves the plot forward and/or is entertaining.

January 17: De schilders van Dongen, catalog of the exhibition we went to. Paintings by a number of 19th-century artists, all of the same village and especially one woman in that village who had the looks to pose as a witch.

January 17: A Mystery of Errors by Simon Hawke, #1 of Shakespeare and Smythe, which happened to be the first thing in my ereader’s “unread” list that I felt like reading. Didn’t make a vow to avoid reading books by cis white men in 2020, after all (I don’t know if he’s straight, and I made sure he wasn’t the Simon at Worldcon whose books I will avoid). Pleasant historical mystery, not completely historically accurate but fun. It does suffer a bit from “mention all the local colour at once” syndrome, especially when the protagonists enter London. Some annoyingly splainy bits; I like exposition, and even (relevant) infodump at times, but I don’t need to have everything explained to me.

January 15: Gifts of Spring by Shira Glassman. I forgot I’d pre-ordered it from Gumroad so the announcement fell into my mailbox as a wonderful surprise! (note: “wonderful surprise” is usually an oxymoron for me but this really was one) Slightly disconcerting that the protagonist is called Rosamund so my brain half-expects another Beauty and the Beast story, but I got into the story before I could go and read something else first. Sweet! (And I wish some of the magic in it could work for some of my friends!)

January 15: The Fire Rose by Mercedes Lackey. It has issues. Apart from the large issues, there’s the tiny but annoying issue of calling women ‘females’ (and men ‘males’, granted).

Chapter 1 is full of suicidal ideation.

First fat shaming at 6%, second at 16%, both of the “I’d get so fat if I ate that all the time/didn’t exercise when eating that” sort. Third instance of fat shaming at 54%, “I would need my corset pulled tight just to get into my dresses after a few of those!” and fourth at 56%, when protag takes energy-giving herb tea she’ll need to eat a lot “without fear of gaining weight”. Fifth at 84%: “I take my walks so that I don’t turn into a fat little Milwaukee bratwurst-frau” – now you go take your rides, or I fear you will do the same!” Finally, at 93% Enrico Caruso (yes, the opera singer) is called ‘fat’ and ‘pudgy’ (but perhaps that’s only descriptive…) and the villain’s “figure suggested that he might be allowing good living to overcome the athletic physique of his youth” (while the love interest, even in partial werewolf form, has “a waist that was becomingly narrow”).

Argh, and she thinks she’s not good enough ALL. THE. BLEEPING. TIME. So does he, come to think of it. Mercedes Lackey’s signature plot point: they don’t communicate.

I used to love that book; what happened? Did I catch SJW cooties?

January 12: Bryony and Roses by T. Kingfisher. Another Beauty and the Beast, inspired by Robin McKinley. Much more creepy than I remembered (only barely not too creepy). Perhaps it’s the pervasive humour that makes the horror-adjacent stuff not get to me so badly.

Week 1 and week 2 reading notes are here.

2020 reading notes, week 2

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I notice that so far this year I’ve only read one book by a man (the Judge Dee one). I’m not aiming to read only or mostly books by women, but it happens. Mostly white women, though, like myself (and still not for that). Obviously I don’t know about the fanfic but it’s statistically probable that the women are in the majority there as well.

January 11: Rose Daughter by Robin McKinley. A lot more baroque than Beauty. –Eek, I’d forgotten it has Meaningful Names, like the draper being called Mrs Bestcloth and the head groom Mr Horsewise. Ah well, I can cope. (The baroqueness grows on one and actually becomes part of the attraction. The Meaningful Names grate more and more.) Most people who give it only 1 star on Goodreads do that because either they think it’s too slow, or they hate the ending; I love both the pace and the ending. Could, and perhaps will, write a whole blog post about it or about all four of the Beauty and the Beast adaptations I just binge-read. Perhaps I’ll need to reread In the Vanishers’ Palace too before I do that.

January 10: Beauty by Robin McKinley. Plain and direct, and I think it’s the one I prefer now (but won’t know that until I’ve finished the other one.) Eyes teared up at the end. I tried to find some crit that mentioned Stockholm syndrome or similar and wasn’t about the Disney movies, but that’s amazingly hard. Best I found was this, which is about the Disney movies but also mentions the 18th century French original designed to help girls come to terms with being married off to older men. (Yes, also ick. But kind of appropriate for its time and surroundings.)

January 8: Ars Historica by Marie Brennan. A short story collection I didn’t know I had. On the dark side and difficult to read (those things are related but not identical). Of the 7 stories I like the penultimate one (False Colours) best; it put me pleasantly on the wrong foot, and I think it’s quintessential Marie Brennan. There’s a very short and somewhat nasty story after it, which rereading False Colours won’t flush so I’m going to need more Shira Glassman or something equally sweet and fresh.

January 6: Knit One, Girl Two by Shira Glassman. A nice bit of sweet fluff to get the taste of Bedlam Boyz out of my brain.

January 6: Bedlam Boyz by Ellen Guon. A bit of a curate’s egg, in the modern sense rather than the original one: parts of it are excellent or I wouldn’t want to reread it. Parts of it are meh, parts of it are cringeworthy, and the ending is very abrupt and only faintly satisfying. I do like the way she handles magic, and I love Elizabet Winters.

January 5:  A slew of fanfic stories which I’m now consolidating into a proper list (run out of fanfic for now, looking for something longer to read next).

  • The Importance of Choosing the Right Pediatrician. DNF, I’m sorry to say. The premise seems so good (people trying to do the best for their unusual baby) but I didn’t have enough background because I didn’t watch that particular series of Star Trek and I keep being less than interested in the medical stuff. I’m counting the whole series as one thing; did finish parts 1 and 2.
  • The Butterflies!Verse, Young Wizards fanfic. The first story is also the beginning of another series but I read it for Sadie and Barty, not for Harry. Wonderful insight in kids and cats. May read the other series later.
  • Yet another widower!Harry story (a joyful one) and a cute but weepy story about Dairine’s electronic associates.
  • The Wizard’s Oath (tiny series of 2 short stories), okayish but very situation-specific (Israel, political).
  • My Oath and Morning, Young Wizards with a nonspeaking autistic main character. I want more Amanda! Faintly remember something else with an Amanda in it but that might be a different story, at least it’s not one in the author’s list. [ETA: Nope. Angela.]
  • The Day Before Forever, Young Wizards with a real historical figure. Weird little thing about Vienna.
  • Also The Day Before Forever, but this one is Bible fanfic that gets me RIGHT IN THE SOLAR PLEXUS.

Week 1 reading notes are here.

Protestant art

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Or craft, whatever. I’m taking part in a series of three workgroup sessions about gratitude, organised by the local Protestant church where I know some people. I think I and a Bahá’i woman were the only non-Protestant participants. We had a round of introductions (ick), then someone told a very condensed version of the story of Ruth in the crypt, using wooden figurines and a blue braided cord for the River Jordan. At one point, when most of the wooden people were standing on the Bethlehem side (Naomi, Ruth, Boaz, Obed –whose name never got mentioned for some reason–, Jesse and David, also David’s gold paper crown, so large that it was almost a character in its own right) and wooden Orpah by herself on the Moab side, I said “poor Orpah, all alone over there!” so the storyteller gave her a wooden family.

After the story, we got to choose craft materials from a large selection to “work on the story”. It’s not something I’m used to doing, and I was a bit apprehensive before I started, but the storyteller’s River Jordan as connection/barrier had inspired me and I made this:

Ruth and Orpah have the same skin colour; Ruth and Naomi have the same dress. Ruth and Naomi are standing on one side of the blue ribbon river, Orpah on the other. I wanted to show the connections between them and went back to the materials table for a ball of yarn or something, and then I found two ribbons with “LOVE LOVE LOVE” in the ribbon box (I squealed with joy when I did, and someone asked “did you find what you were looking for?” and I said “no, I found what I needed!”) so I could wrap one around Ruth and Naomi, and the other around Orpah and push it between the other two. Orpah’s ribbon is also stuck to the land.

This was half an hour’s work, and it doesn’t stick together properly so I had to repair it all the time at the show-and-tell, but we’ll have some more time with it next session before we go on to philosophical and theological questions. I’m all in favour of philosophy and theology, but the craft is so much fun!

2020 reading notes, week 1

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Sara had a splendid idea, and this is my modified version of it: I’m starting now, January 1, and updating the post whenever I finish reading something (fiction or nonfiction, any length, new or rereads; no blog posts but notable articles may slip in), keeping the newest on top so people following it won’t have to scroll down in increasing amounts. Notes only; if I want to write more extensively about something it will get its own post.

Edit: Goodness, I read a lot. Finally decided to restart every week but the year started on a Wednesday and Wed-Tue is awkward because calendar weeks have numbers. I can force it into Sun-Sat, as my paper kitchen calendar has, instead of Mon-Sun as most other calendars have, but that’s about as far as it will stretch (argh, there is a way to set the system calendar to start weeks on Sunday but that involves messing with the locale and I’ve already had enough trouble with that). Half a week, then, Wednesday-Saturday, and start the next post today, Sunday, January 5.

January 4: Kit and Nita fluff. I’ve read better, and the second story kicked Nita upstairs way early.

January 4: A Wizard Abroad (reread). I wanted to read about Ireland, and Powers that Be who walk the earth in human guise are always exciting, and the spear-forging scene is SO POWERFUL. Found what I thought was a little continuity error (Nita’s father called “Ed” when in later books he’s definitely “Harry”) and alerted the writer on Twitter (turns out some of his family call him Ed because he’s Harold Edward. Nice when writers reply!)

January 2: Susan Pevensie fanfic by dirgewithoutmusic (new, except Part 1 that was already on my Kobo, found out that there were 6 more when looking for something else, as one does). Poignant and moving. Also a short bittersweet Young Wizards story (new) about grown-up Nita and her young daughter which makes me want to find the stories about an even younger wizard [ETA: found, it’s the Butterflies!Verse finished on January 5], and a silly Young Wizards M/M and F/alien story which I must have read at some time because I recognised scenes. Not without its own poignancy, that last one: “Your entire continent [i.e. Australia] seems to be trying to kill you.”

January 2: Robert van Gulik, The Willow Pattern (reread, have read it several times both in Dutch and in English). Lost the Dorothy Sayers mood completely, probably because I was trying to read in order instead of picking my favourites and got stuck in The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, definitely not a favourite. I did want to read a mystery and grabbed a random Judge Dee instead, rewarded with (for Van Gulik) very strong female characters. It struck me once again that the men all have untranslated Chinese names and the women all have translated names (usually flowers or jewels; in this one jewels, and one renamed to only the colour of the jewel because of an unfortunate event that made the original name unlucky). Unless they’re married, then they’re just Mrs Husbandsfamilyname.

January 1: Malika Older, Actually Naneen (from Twitter link). Reminds me of why I rarely read short SF stories: it’s trying very hard to make a point. Not bad, just not my kind of thing. Reading the response essay too made it a lot clearer (link in the actual post 404ed for me but it was also linked in the sidebar). Looked at a few other stories linked from that but they all seemed to be the same genre (the one about religion looks okay, though).

January 1: Lewis Carroll, What the Tortoise said to Achilles (new to me). The head, she spins. In the most delightful way.

 

 

Is it Christmas yet?

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Is it Christmas?

Is it Christmas yet?

(both sites detect where you are by your IP address, and the first also guesses your language by that: I did a small double take when I asked a question in English that was answered in Dutch)

partly deflated inflatable Santa figure between market stalls

I wonder what he died of. Probably exposure.

I got so annoyed with people saying it was Christmas that I answered a tweet with “s/Christmas/Advent/ but yes” — I did want to say yes because it was an optimistic message I agreed with — promptly to be atheistsplained at with “ ‘Christmas’ for non-religious people is a season, not a day.” Yes, it so is a season. Only it’s a season that starts on December 25 and lasts until the Theophany on January 6, not a season that starts at some unspecified time in mid-autumn and ends the moment the calendar flips from December 26 to 27.

IT IS NOT CHRISTMAS YET.

candles dryingThat said, it’s only one week now. We haven’t done any decorating yet but Spouse bought cards for people we really can’t skip, like ancient relatives who would otherwise be annoyed or even worried, and I’ve been making candles from the church’s 2018 Easter candle which I’ll hand out to whoever I see face-to-face, mostly people in church but also our neighbours and any offspring who happen to be around between now and the New Year.

Incidentally, it’s as impossible this year as it was last year to buy a roll of simple red ribbon or really cute but non-tacky gift tags, so I got a box of mostly empty space, string, wooden pegs, and 14 plain but serviceable gift tags. I’ll probably need another box unless the shopping centre where I’m going today yields something more useful. (I’ll use the string to make bunches of three candles with a tag; I don’t know what the fillers of the box intended the pegs for but they’re of a particularly useless size, larger than the tiny ones in our Christmas-card-hanging-up kit.) [ETA: the pegs were admirably suited to fasten the Christmas-tree-stand cover and they’re in the decorations box for next year.]

Then there’s the Dickens Festival. I always think it’s the Sunday before Christmas but more often than not it’s the Sunday before that, possibly every time unless Christmas Day is on a Sunday. It becomes more scripted every year, and I thought it had had its time but it still seems to be unflaggingly popular. Some of the people it attracts are… well, when I went out late Sunday afternoon for some emergency shopping I first passed a couple of middle-aged women with Randstad accents who were fingering the leather goods outside the leatherworker’s shop and saying “passing off fake as real again, can’t do it for that price”. I know that anything in this shop or in front of it labelled “leather” is guaranteed to be real leather. It may not be good quality, and I don’t know if any of it fell off the back of a truck, but it’s definitely not imitation. I didn’t trust my voice enough to say something stinging; waspish remarks in a sore-throat voice are unlikely to sting enough.

In the supermarket a similar woman (only older and possibly richer) thought herself so important that she physically pushed me and someone else aside to get to the cash desk. If she’d said “sorry, I’m in a hurry, can I go first please?” I’d have said “yes, of course!” but now I could only roll my eyes at the checkout girl and my fellow pushee.

Some other Dickens-goers, including Germans, seemed to think all of the town, not only the festival, was a tourist attraction set up for their benefit and all the pesky locals did nothing but spoil the effect.

There were some good things too. A shepherd with two large grey donkeys and a small flock of diverse sheep, most of them with impressive horns (the sheep, not the donkeys). I patted one of the donkeys on the rump because that was the only part of it I could reach, but I don’t think it even noticed. End-of-shift Dickens “actors”: two teenage girls in beggar clothes, their faces smeared with dirt, eating fries from a plastic box; a gentleman, a lady and a very young gentleman of eight or so who loosened the more restrictive parts of their clothes as they walked away.

Yet another effort, on Monday, to buy ribbon didn’t give me any ribbon either, but a nice case of ambiguity. It’s just as easy to be ambiguous in Dutch with “only” as it is in English. “We only sell fireworks to people aged 14 and over.” I’m visibly over 14, and they sold me chocolate!

 

Scaffolding

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I’m glad I’m a woman. Not only in general terms though that’s true too, but I’m glad I’m a woman with a strong liturgical calling in the Orthodox church. If I were a man I’d probably be a deacon or even a priest now. I don’t agree with women not being allowed in the altar (1), but it’s convenient because it enables me to use my calling where it’s useful: in the choir.

(1) Not a hill I’m willing to die on, though. I admit it’s an injustice, and often a major inconvenience, and I’ll applaud and support people who take action about it, but when I tried that it only sapped my energy without any other effect.

I’m now calling myself “liturgist” in my Mastodon bio, an upgrade from “Orthodox church music wrangler”, because I’ve discovered (in practice, and in conversations with Choirmistress and other people) that what I wrangle is not the music as such, but the liturgical scaffolding. It helps that mild synaesthesia makes me able to perceive music as architecture.

God gave me a strong useful voice, the ability to carry a tune, a head for detail and structure, and the gift to use all of those to further leitourgia (2). Recently I’ve come to think that this particular gift is not very common.

(2) Greek: “public office”, or simply “the work that needs to be done to keep everything running smoothly”; in modern Greek it somewhat disconcertingly means “roadworks”.

It’s very hard for one person to have their attention on directing a choir of more than, say, 3 people AND on the interaction between choir and altar AND on the book; a director and a liturgist together work much better than either one on their own because the director can take care of the “inside” work and the liturgist of the “outside” work. Choirmistress and I have been doing this together so long that we’ve come to a perfectly working division of labour. She makes up the books; I can do that too, and she’ll probably have me take over if she can’t do it any more for any reason. She directs the choir; I can do that but not comfortably. I turn the pages, which I can by now do almost blindly, and pay attention all the time to catch unexpected things like a deacon repeating something he should have said only once and then skipping the next bit. This does mean that if my attention flags for just one moment, like when I’m distracted by a cute little kid or a sudden prayer impulse, everybody will notice. It can be exhausting.

Last Saturday I had no voice at all from a bad cold, so I stayed home from church, making poor Choirmistress the totality of the choir by herself but it couldn’t be helped. The Vigil is a quiet service and there are usually only a few people, and it’s easier to stop and pick up when something derails than it is in the Liturgy with a larger choir and higher stakes. I’d promised to come on Sunday, voice or no voice, to handle the book. As it was, I could sing slightly more than half the service, and the half I couldn’t sing was mostly because my voice had only the lower part of its range. Fortunately I could depend on Other Alto, who can now do everything I could do when she joined the choir something like 15 years ago, and who was doing the reading as well.

Related very good news: Unesco now acknowledges Byzantine chant as part of humanity’s intangible cultural heritage. It’s a different tradition from ours (we sing mostly an adapted form of znamenny chant, developed by Father Michael Fortunatto for (small) Western choirs). I’d very much like to learn “original” Byzantine chant, but I’m afraid it would not only take another 35 years but it might cause bad interference, somewhat like singing in a non-church choir would but in the other direction.

Catfishing on CatNet

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Cover of Catfishing on CatnetNaomi Kritzer, Catfishing on CatNet

I’d already read, loved, nominated and voted for Cat Pictures Please, so I was excited when the whole novel on the same premise came out, and bought it the same day (Kobo doesn’t let me pre-order without a credit card, or I would have pre-ordered).

I was right.

I can’t really do this book justice.

I don’t know how the title came into being; there’s definitely someone passing as not entirely themself, but it doesn’t fall under what I think is catfishing — for one it’s not malicious at all, not intended to deceive or defraud someone, only to protect themself and others.

The title aside, it’s a magnificent book. I could have got impatient with the protagonist Steph being a teenager (or indeed any of the teenagers being teenagers) but it all fit so well. The way the teenagers talk online reminds me of my now-adult offspring talking online at that age, only with more familiarity because the story is set in the nearish future, when online is a normal place to be. I don’t know if teens driving a car as if that’s a normal thing is nearish-future too, or just US praxis, but that is actually more alien to me than all the virtual interaction. (When I was a kid I loved to read books set in different countries or in the past, especially if translators or modernizers hadn’t adapted too much, because I read all the things different from what I was used to as fantasy.)

I liked the twist of “paranoid-seeming person isn’t just paranoid, they’re just plain right“, which made the dangerous parts of the adventure so much more plausible. However, if there hadn’t been any danger, any mystery, or especially any romance I’d still have loved the book for the local colour and teen friendship and building of a web of trust. The eventual romance was a nice payoff of the slow, enjoyable buildup, but I don’t think it’s necessary for the book. They both deserve it, though.

And now that I’ve discovered that Naomi Kritzer has also written ordinary fantasy I may want to seek out some of that too, though they’re all in a price range in which I only buy a book if I really want it (like this one, and Floodtide), not get a handful of books casually for a few zorkmids each.