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mrissa ([personal profile] mrissa) wrote2025-10-16 05:55 am
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Books read, early October

 

K.J. Charles, All of Us Murderers. In a lot of ways more a Gothic thriller than a murder mystery, I found this gripping and fun. I hope Charles keeps writing in the thriller and mystery genres. The characters are vividly awful except for a few, and that's just what this sort of thing calls for.

Virginia Feito, Victorian Psycho. And speaking of vividly awful, I'm not sure I would have finished this one if it hadn't been both extremely short and part of a conversation I was having. There is not a piece of vice or unpleasantness not wallowed in here. It's certainly affecting, just not in a direction I usually want.

Frances Hardinge, The Forest of a Thousand Eyes. I'm a little disappointed that Hardinge's work seems to have gone in the direction of illustrated middle grade, more or less, because I find the amount of story not quite as much as I'd like from her previous works, and I'm just not the main audience for lavish illustration. If you are, though, it's a perfectly cromulent fantasy story. I'm just greedy I guess.

David Hinton, trans., Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China. An interesting subgenre I hadn't had much exposure to. Translating poetry is hard, and no particular poem was gripping to me in English, but knowing what was being written in that place and time was interesting.

Jeanelle K. Hope and Bill V. Mullen, The Black Antifascist Tradition: Fighting Back from Anti-Lynching to Abolition. Kindle. If you've been reading anything about American Black history this will be less new information and more a new lens/synthesis of information you're likely to already have, but it's well put together and cogently argued, and sometimes a new lens is useful.

Im Bang and Yi Ryuk, Tales of Korea: 53 Enchanting Stories of Ghosts, Goblins, Princes, Fairies, and More! So this is a new and shiny edition, with a 2022 copyright date, but that applies only to the introduction and similar supplemental materials. It's actually a 1912 translation, with all the cultural yikes that implies. Even with the rise in interest in Kpop and Kdramas information about Korean history and culture is not as readily available as I'd like, so I'm keeping this edition until a better translation is available.

Emma Knight, The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus. This is a novel, and I knew it was a novel going in. It's a novel I mostly enjoyed reading, except...I kept waiting for the octopus. Even a metaphorical octopus. And when it did come, it was the most clunkily introduced "HERE IS MY METAPHOR" metaphor I recall reading in professionally published fiction. Further, using it as the title highlighted the ways that most threads of this book did not contribute to this thematic metaphor. I feel like with two more revision passes it could have been a book I'd return to and reread over and over, and without them it was...fine while I was reading it, not really giving me enough to chew on afterwards. Sigh. (It was set on a university campus! It would have been trivially easy for someone to be studying octopus! or, alternately, to be studying something else that was actually relevant and a source of a title and central metaphor.)

Naomi Kritzer, Obstetrix. Discussed elsewhere.

Rebecca Lave and Martin Doyle, Streams of Revenue: The Restoration Economy and the Ecosystems It Creates. Does what it says on the tin. The last chapter has a lot of very good graphs about differences in restored vs. natural streams. Do you like stream restoration ecology enough to read a whole book about it? You will know going in, this is not a "surprisingly interesting read for the general audience" sort of book, this is "I sure did want to know this stuff, and here it is."

Astrid Lindgren, Seacrow Island. Surprisingly not a reread--not everything was available to me when I was a kid back in the Dark Ages. I had hoped it would be Swedish Swallows and Amazons, and it was not, it was a lot more like a Swedish version of something like Noel Streatfeild's The Magic Summer, but that was all right, it was still delightful and a pleasant read. I will tell you right up front that Bosun the dog is fine, nothing terrible happens to Bosun the dog in the course of this book, there, now you will have an even better reading experience than I did.

Kelly Link, Stranger Things Happen. Reread. Probably my least favorite of her collections despite some strong work--least favorite of a bunch of good collections is not actually a terrible place to be, nor is improving over one's career.

Freya Marske, Cinder House. A reverse Gothic where a nice house triumphs over a terrible human. Short and delightful.

Lio Min, The L.O.V.E. Club. I really hope this gets its actual audience's attention, because it is not about romantic love or even about people seeking but comically failing to find romantic love. It's about a teenage friend group trapped in a video game and dealing with their own friend group's past plus the history that led to their lives. It was about as good as a "trapped in a video game" narration was going to be for me, sweet and melancholy.

Nicholas Morton, The Mongol Storm: Making and Breaking Empires in the Medieval Near East. Two hundred years of Mongols, and this is a really good perspective on how Europe is a weird peninsula off the side of Asia. Which we knew, but wow is it clear here. Also it's nice to read books where people remember the Armenians exist, and related groups as well. My one complaint here is not really a fault in the book so much as a mismatch in it and me: I'm willing to read kings-and-battles kinds of history, and this is a khans-and-horse-troops kind of history, which is basically the same thing. I prefer histories that give a stronger sense of how actual people were actually living and what changed over the period that wasn't the name of the person receiving tribute. But that's not a problem with this book, it was clear what kind of book it was going to be going in.

Caskey Russell, The Door on the Sea. This debut fantasy (science fiction? science fantasy?) novel is definitely not generic: it's a strongly Tlingit story written by a Tlingit person, and it leans hard into that. Raven is one of the major characters; another character is a bear cousin and another straight-up a wolf. It's a quest fantasy, but with a different shape to harmonize with its setting. I really liked it, but let me warn/promise you: this is not a stand-alone, the ending is not the story's end.

Vikram Seth, Beastly Tales (From Here and There). Very short, very straightforward animal poems. If you read something like this as a child, here's more of it.

Fran Wilde, A Philosophy of Thieves. A very class-aware science fiction heist novel that looks at loyalties and opportunities at every turn. Who's using whom and why--if that's your kind of heist, come on in, the water's fine.

oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
oursin ([personal profile] oursin) wrote2025-10-16 09:34 am

(no subject)

Happy birthday, [personal profile] desayunoencama!
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flemmings ([personal profile] flemmings) wrote2025-10-15 07:14 pm

(no subject)

Physio says the recurring and random pain in my foot might be a nerve gone wonky and advises cushioning on the sole to take pressure off. Evidently these things will go away on their own so all I need is patience.

Recycle tomorrow and having gone through most of my surplus manga, I began throwing out paper. Stacks and stacks from the late 80s and 90s, APA articles and Japanese lessons. And no, they will not come in handy some day. I give up on Japanese grammar: kanji are enough to be going on with if I ever get back to them.

But someone somewhere mentioned the book they learned ancient Greek from, a reading course that seems to give you basic grammar at the end of each section but no vocabulary at all.  It's on archive.org and delineates the post-mortem adventures of a boy called Themistocles and, well, I discover that google will define the words for me even if Chrome won't give me the Greek alphabet to do it in. Keyboard will only switch to one language other than English, and I need mine for Japanese. But I might take Japanese off the downstairs tablet and see if Greek will work there because downstairs is where I'd be reading Themistocles.

Otherwise have finished only a Charles Lenox, the latest Flavia Albia, and a couple of mysteries by Cyril Ten-names. Have Walpole and Leonardo desultorily on the go and more Cyril on the tablet,  though it seems I like Burton more than Rhode, when I thought it was the reverse.
yhlee: Alto clef and whole note (middle C). (Default)
yhlee ([personal profile] yhlee) wrote2025-10-15 03:12 pm

en passant

Still recovering from recent/ongoing health stuff but:



Resumed work on Candle Arc #2 (comic) pursuant to continued 2D animation preproduction, since the comics double as partial storyboards. I just processed the Ninefox Gambit: Prelude: Cheris #1 (comic) files for eventual print-on-demand as well, but it's on the website as well.
oursin: Photograph of small impressionistic metal figurine seated reading a book (Reader)
oursin ([personal profile] oursin) wrote2025-10-15 07:19 pm

Wednesday was complimented on the green hair

What I read

Finished Queer Cambridge and the author is very aware that it is a microhistory of a very particular group of gay (if one can define them thus over the several generations in question) men in a very specific place, who had a considerable amount of privilege and protection, even if that was sometimes just 'we do not discuss these matters' and look away. And that not all of them were particularly nice (some of them sound horrid) and also the awareness of how being a lovely young bloke of the disposition could accrue valuable patronage (in a way that has never been open to women) - this was so much so with Dadie Rylands. Of interest, well-done, pretty well-researched but I picked up on what I thought was skipping over something I Haz Knowinz about, and which when I went back and checked my notes, yes, there WAS a connection, hah.

Then on to Rachel Ferguson, Alas, Poor Lady (1937), which is part of that cycle of novels of that period of The Horrors of the Victorian Ladies Who Failed To Marry and the lurking fate of being a Distressed Gentlewoman. It's pretty much downhill all the way - the parents are pretty hopeless in both preparing their daughters for life and actually providing for them, and then there is all the Burden of Historical Events. Ferguson is no Delafield, alas, though on the other hand this lacked the sheer excruciation of Consequences or Thank Heaven Fasting I suppose.

On the go

Some while ago somebody somewhere was mentioning the novels of Susan Howatch and I can't remember if they were specifically name-checking The Wheel of Fortune, but anyway, brought that to my mind as the one which is doing a story based on the late Plantagenets/rise of the House of Lancaster so I picked up the ebook.

This was what had me thinking of the Starkadders. In fact looking back though it is years since I read any of her books - it's a while since I even read the more recent spiritual-angst + sex ones - they tended to involve intricate and lurid family dynamics based on some historical avatar + family estate. Come on down, Flora Poste!

(Also, book for review that I have been longing to get to for months while I did the interminable essay review.)

Up next

Gosh, that's long, though. However, still have several birthday books, plus, latest Literary Review.

larryhammer: floral print origami penguin, facing left (Default)
Larry Hammer ([personal profile] larryhammer) wrote2025-10-15 08:00 am
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“so you let time forgive the past / and go and make some other plans”

Traditions and moderns, mixed:

Ndlovu Youth Choir covers Bohemian Rhapsody in isiZulu (ETA: link fixed). Stays acapella for a lot longer than you might expect, but eventually leans into full Afropop for the climax. (via)

Mixing classic art with contemporary UI.

Wikipedia’s collection of pointers for identifying AI writing. (via)

---L.

Subject quote from Not Alone, Patty Griffin.
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
oursin ([personal profile] oursin) wrote2025-10-15 09:42 am
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flemmings ([personal profile] flemmings) wrote2025-10-14 06:25 pm
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Saints, Sinners, Lovers and Fools at the ROM

Nuit blanche last night, very annoyingly. Got off close to 4, woke  up at 9 something, finally got up at 11. Supposed to be warm today so I bit the heavy-eyed achy-limbed bullet and called a cab to go to the ROM. Bloor past Spadina is a parking lot for reasons known only to itself. One of which might be the extremely wide bike lanes on that stretch. I'm all for bicycle lanes but can't quite see why the ones by Mink Mile need to be two metres/ 6'6, especially as the ones farther west are much narrower, where all the restaurants, ergo all the bike couriers, go. Whatever, the ROM  is redoing the Chin Lee Excrescence so one can again, and happily, enter by the Romanesque entry round the corner, into the familiar rotunda from my childhood.

Must say the AGO is much more wheelchair friendly than the ROM, even though both were built when the concept of catering to disability didn't exist. Maybe the AGO's renovation is more recent than the ROM's, or rather the late 80s renovation that preceded the Excrescence. Because if you want to go to the third floor where the Flemish painting exhibit is, there's only one elevator you can take,  tucked away around a corner, because all the others involve stairs when you arrive there. And then one goes down these very narrow corridors-- I mean, not wide enough for two people to pass each other-- between the new interior walls and the old outer stone walls to get you to where you're going. My friend the architect's daughter said All architects are assholes (like surgeons, apparently) and while I wouldn't go quite that far, I'll opine that the ROM has certainly hired asshole architects. 

However. Did indeed see the Flemish paintings in all their glowing colour and 16th/ 17th century extravagance. I prefer early Flemish myself, but the best we could do here was a school of Bosch copy of details from the right hand Hell panel in the Garden of Earthly Delights, and a rather pleasant Nativity by Hans Memling. Note also Michaelina Wautier, from the mid-1600s, a natural and pleasant contrast to some of her overdone contemporaries. Though the rooms of the exhibit were still pretty small and I had to be careful where I went with my walker: and when a tour group came through, wait for them to pass.

Then did a revisit of the Chinese collection on the ground floor, any number of Buddhist statues and the stone camels from the tomb area. I think we may have climbed on them as children, which people did in those days, and fortunately do not do now.

Having gone nowhere yesterday, I was determined to walk back the four anna half subway stops to get my steps in, and did, barely. The sole of my right foot has been panging me for several weeks now: physio thinks it's bunions, I think it's plantar fascitis, who knows. But I limped along gamely and when I passed Wiener's went in, with no great hopes, to ask if they had ever got the tree lopper in that was on back order since June. And they did! And it was cheaper than at 'we do not deliver' Canadian Tire,  and it fit in the basket of my walker, sort of ie it scraped the branches of any tree I passed, so I brought it home in triumph, go me. Of course it also weighs a ton and I hope I can lift it when it's extended, or even when it's not, but that's one itch scratched.
oursin: Photograph of small impressionistic metal figurine seated reading a book (Reader)
oursin ([personal profile] oursin) wrote2025-10-14 07:28 pm

Thinking about reading seems a bit of a theme lately

Maybe reading is having a moment with people going on about it in various places??

Anyway I was beswozzled, bothered and quite boggled to read somewhere - and seem to have failed to have retained a link anywhere - somebody saying they were getting back into reading, and what they found actually helped was taking the time to look up New Words They Had Not Come Across Before.

Which is the sort of thing that I remember we were given as homework once, and you know, I was hard put to it to find words in the chapters of the relevant set text that I did not know already or could work out from context what they meant or fair approximation.

I can't imagine anything more dreary, but hey, diff'rent strokes for diffr'ent folks, I am no better and neither are you, etc etc etc.

On the other hand I think I can quite get behind this, which popped up on bluesky today:

What you read is less important than whether you ever spend time thinking about what you've read.

And while there are things which slip past and leave no mark and I may not even remember I have read them, I do also think about what I read - I'm not sure 'spending time' doing it is quite the way I'd put it, suggests more deliberation than going about my business and spontaneously thinking (as I did today) that characters in work I am currently reading srsly need Flora Poste to do an intervention, and in fact the author pretty much has form for heavily disguised Starkadders at Cold Comfort Farm....

And on reading and also writing and not always doing big showing: Say it, don't show it: A contrarian take on exposition:

almost as if the reader is being enlisted as a collaborator, using their own imagination to fill in details that are merely implied in the words of the book.

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flemmings ([personal profile] flemmings) wrote2025-10-13 09:08 pm
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(no subject)

Why do I keep sleeping in to noon? And not even going back to sleep, but uninterrupted ten and eleven hour stretches? It isn't even that cold anymore.

Whatever, I woke up at noon and did manage to do a wash and get it on the line. Where it still sits because the day was cloudy and cool and nothing got dry. Sun tomorrow which may do the trick, or I shall simply hang them from the stair rails.

Otherwise was all couch potatodom all the time. Finished my Charles Lenox hardcover and bought a bunch of Golden Age mysteries on Kobo, all by the same author using various aliases. John Rhode is Miles Burton is Cecil Street, NB. 
watersword: Parker running across a roof with the words "tick tick tick (boom)" (Leverage: tick tick tick (boom))
Elizabeth Perry ([personal profile] watersword) wrote2025-10-13 07:29 pm

(no subject)

I have not accomplished much on my staycation, but I did spend Saturday at the Preservation Society's Festival of Historic House (this year's theme was modernism), and thoroughly enjoyed myself. I did not get to all of the houses on the tour, alas, but if this nor'easter ever clears up, I am going to spend an afternoon gawping at the houses which were marked as "outside viewing only" on the map, and which I ignored in favor of looking at interiors.

The stained t-shirt needs to be mended before I can put it away for winter, so that's this week's project. First I gotta suffer through split stitch, then satin stitch, then French fucking knots, and then I get to have fun with fishbone stitch, which is one of my favorites if not my favorite.

I am making rice pudding with the rice I undercooked, with vanilla and dried sour cherries, and there are fresh cranberries at the grocery store, which means it is properly fall, and I am going to make a cranberry ricotta cake and feed it to everyone I know.

oursin: Painting of Rydale by Barbara Bodichon (Bodichon)
oursin ([personal profile] oursin) wrote2025-10-13 07:39 pm

Aaaahrting

Today we went and had an Art Experience.

Ever since I saw there was going to be an exhibition of Ithell Colquhoun at Tate Britain I had the intention of going to it but somehow we never got round to it until this final week (and I still have not read the book on her I have).

But at least I did get to it.

'engagement with the surrealist movement... fascination with the intertwining realms of art, sexual identity, ecology and occultism'.

Mix them up, shake and stir. She left the Official Surrealists because they made an edict that you were apparently not allowed to belong to other organisations if you were a True Surrealist and she was not about to quit her various occultist movements -

- of which there were several and one wonders a bit whether they were at all contradictory....

- but her work remained pretty surreal and involving unconscious picture-making and various methods that brought random patterns into the mix.

There was a v early work from her time at the Slade which was Judith and Holofernes, and one wonders how many women artists since Gentileschi have been moved to depict that, eh.

The ticket also admitted to the Edward Burra exhibition - I found it a tad odd that while the labelling on Colquhoun's work mentions eroticism and her involvement with women this element was not mentioned re Burra in spite of the saucy Marseilles sailors, doing designs for ballet, etc, which rather had my period gaydar pinging.

We had vaguely thought of doing the Lee Miller photography as well, but the previous were already quite enough and that has only just started.

We did flaneuse a bit about the galleries generally and spotted a portrait of Emma Hart (later Hamilton) as Circe: nothing like that hideous reconstruction recently posited, hmmmm?

larryhammer: floral print origami penguin, facing left (Default)
Larry Hammer ([personal profile] larryhammer) wrote2025-10-13 07:35 am
Entry tags:

“i see the girls walk by dressed in their summer clothes/i have to turn my head until darkness goes”

For Poetry Monday:

Fall, leaves, fall,” Emily Bronte

Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away;
Lengthen night and shorten day;
Every leaf speaks bliss to me
Fluttering from the autumn tree.
I shall smile when wreaths of snow
Blossom where the rose should grow;
I shall sing when night’s decay
Ushers in a drearier day.


Contrast with Hopkins’ Spring and Fall. Seriously—hold them both close. It’s worth it.

---L.

Subject quote from Paint It, Black, The Rolling Stones.
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
oursin ([personal profile] oursin) wrote2025-10-13 09:27 am

(no subject)

Happy birthday, [personal profile] mystefaction and [personal profile] norabombay!
yhlee: Alto clef and whole note (middle C). (Default)
yhlee ([personal profile] yhlee) wrote2025-10-12 09:49 pm
Entry tags:

emotional support spinning: cotton



Cotton handspun single from combed top, a "completed" bobbin. I'm spinning threadweight so I don't...feel the need to "fill" the bobbin even halfway (for a planned 2-ply).

I do think I'd probably have a more pleasant time spinning cotton and silk if I had a dedicated treadle wheel for them, someday; but the wheel I own works. :3

(The background art on the wall is a poster of Wonder Woman artwork by Nen Chang.)
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flemmings ([personal profile] flemmings) wrote2025-10-12 05:42 pm
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(no subject)

So of course it rained this morning which put paid to any ideas I might have had about laundromats or getting a wash on the line: quite apart from me sleeping in to 11 yet again. But things dried up and cleared up by mid-afternoon so I went out in the washy grey and white clouds of autumn to Pauper's for their Thanksgiving turkey dinner. Now Pauper's has a bunch of older male servers and a few younger female ones who will get you seated and bring you your menu when. they. feel. like. it. and take your order ditto because they're busy talking to their coworkers or the regulars. So one is advised to bring an ebook on the phone or even a paper book, and I cursed myself because I finished my sole ebook last night. But in fact a new blonde hostess greeted me at once and waved me to 'anywhere you like', and a new blonde waitress brought my menu and took my drink order immediately. And my order arrived quicker than I'm used to and the waitress checked in on me twice to be sure I had all I wanted. Either a change in management or a Be Kind to Grannies Day, but I was grateful for it and tipped heavily in cash to encourage them to keep it up.

Their meal seems to be slightly smaller than usual, but I was still stuffed by the time I finished, and passed on pie and coffee. I mean, I really want pie, but there's still those eclairs to be accounted for, so no.

There was a weird smell in the house last night starting around 10, like someone cooking garlic and spices. Cooking smells do occasionally pass through the common wall here but I can't see anyone cooking at 10, especially not anyone with a kid who wakes up at 6. Sniffed outdoors in case it was something burning somewhere but couldn't smell a thing. Yet when I first went out today there was a lingering tinge of it on the air. Fortunately, by the time I got home it had been replaced by the much more autumnal aroma of woodsmoke. Trees all yellow and red as they should be, but a sweaty 18C because the sun was shining.  Same temp this morning was chilly because it wasn't, and the wind was blowing. Thus autumn, always.
jesse_the_k: kitty pawing the surface of vinyl record (scratch this!)
Jesse the K ([personal profile] jesse_the_k) wrote2025-10-12 05:01 pm

music: Windborne Sing "The Grey Funnel Line"

[personal profile] sonia introduced me to Windborne, the acapella group from Massachusetts. Their version of "The Grey Funnel line" makes my head go sproing in a pleasant fashion.

uncaptioned video within )

I’ve loved this 20th century ballad since I first encountered it on Silly Sisters in 1976. I recently learned that Cyril Tawney wrote the song as he was leaving the UK’s Royal Navy, called "Gray Funnel Line" by those who toiled there. Full lyrics at that link.

oursin: Frontispiece from C17th household manual (Accomplisht Lady)
oursin ([personal profile] oursin) wrote2025-10-12 06:56 pm
Entry tags:

Culinary

Bread made this week (because last week's developed mould, sigh): a very nice loaf of Marriage's Golden Wholegrain Bread Flour.

Saturday breakfast rolls: the ones loosely based on James Beard's mother's raisin bread, Marriage's Light Spelt Flour, perhaps overdid the raisins a bit, mace a bit too subtle? even though is new supply.

Today's lunch: seabass fillets which I cooked thusly (think this is a bit better with plaice, though): served with miniature potatoes boiled and tossed in butter and dried dill, steamed asparagus with a sauce of melted butter, lemon juice and lemon zest (I now have a zester that actually zests), and cauliflower florets roasted in pumpkin seed oil with cumin seeds.

wickedgame: (Nick | Heartstopper)
wickedgame ([personal profile] wickedgame) wrote in [site community profile] dw_community_promo2025-10-12 08:37 pm

LGBT Rainbow Promo.



Join LGBT Rainbow, a rainbow pass-it-on icon challenge focused on LGBTQ+ characters from any media.

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