Scribbling in the Margins

So! Things I have managed to read since the last time I did this:

The usual boatload of fanfic, of course.

The Boneshaker, by Kate Milford: Strange things can happen at the crossroads, which is something Natalie Minks--thirteen, obsessed with all things mechanical, in possession of the fastest bicycle in the world--discovers when Dr. Jake Limberleg's Nostrum Fair and Technological Medicine Show comes to her small town. All of a sudden, things seem to start going wrong and strange as Natalie begins catching glimpses of things that aren't real and her mother's behavior changes drastically as the strangers set up shop. Worst of all, it may be up to Natalie to face evil in the eye in order to set things to rights.

I borrowed this one from the library, and when I finished reading it I went and bought a copy for myself, plus the two associated books. So you could say that I enjoyed this one, yes. The dust jacket says that this one is a first novel, but it doesn't have the feel that a lot of first novels do--it's tightly written and plotted and it doesn't pull its punches at all. (And it's in third person POV, which is frankly a thing I have begun to treasure these days.)

The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak: In which Death tells the story of a young German girl obsessed with books, set against the backdrop of World War II. It was an absorbing read with the expected tragic ending, and it might be heresy but I think I enjoyed the movie more (even if it had the same fangirl German as the book).

Today, in things Em has finished reading this week, we have Libriomancer by Jim Hines. This is the first installment of his series in which magic arises from books and the power of belief imbued in them by the readers who love them, and it reads very much like a love letter to all things science fictional and geeky. Our protagonist, Isaac, is a semi-disgraced member of the secret society of Porters who know how to use the magic of books and whose job it is to protect this secret world of magic and magical creatures from discovery by the ordinary folks who can't use magic themselves. Unfortunately, Isaac finds himself in the middle of a brewing war between the Porters and the vampires and on the hunt for Johann Gutenberg, who founded the Porters several centuries ago and has gone missing at precisely the wrong moment. If that weren't problem enough, he's also trying to balance a tricky love triangle on top of everything else.

This was a pretty quick, light read, and as I said above, very much a love letter to pop culture and science fiction, and it earns props for dealing with the love triangle in a way that did not make me want to grind my teeth--which is pretty rare for the standard urban fantasy love triangle trope, I must say.

If it's Wednesday, it must be time for a reading post!

So here's what I read over the past week.

Trio for Blunt Instruments, Rex Stout: Three novellas. In "Kill Now--Pay Later," a bootblack arrives to find that his client has just gone out a tenth-story window; shortly thereafter, he turns up dead too, and his daughter wants Wolfe to find out whodunnit. "Murder Is Corny" requires Archie and Wolfe to figure out who killed the guy who delivers their weekly order of sweet corn. "Blood Will Tell" starts off when Archie receives a man's tire in the mail and quickly becomes a rather involved murder mystery.

A Right to Die, Rex Stout: This one was a little odd; Stout engages in the political environment of the Sixties by writing a murder mystery that involves a lot of the racial politics of the time. His attitudes are dated, though I suppose generally on the side of the angels, and he namedrops a town that I am familiar with, which may be the strangest part of all (to me).

The Doorbell Rang, Rex Stout: This time Wolfe and Archie take on J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, and it is very clear just how much Stout disapproves of the FBI's methods of that era. Deeply amusing and also very re-readable.

Death of a Doxy, Rex Stout: In this one, which is pretty tightly written, Wolfe and Archie must assist in exonerating one of their usual working partners when he comes under suspicion of killing a certain prostitute he had been seeing. Worth a reread.

The Father Hunt, Rex Stout: A young woman hires Archie and Wolfe to figure out who her father is, which they contrive to do against very long odds. They also manage to solve the mystery of her mother's murder while they're at it.

Rereads:

Sparrow Hill Road, Seanan McGuire
Hercule Poirot's Christmas, Agatha Christie

...It's easy to read a lot when your laptop is down and you have a four-day weekend.

Wednesday again already, huh? Geez, the time does fly. Anyway, here's what I've managed to get read since last week:

Diamonds and Deceit, Leila Rasheed: The second book of the At Somerton series picks up a little after the end of the first book, and follows Rose’s struggles to adjust to life as a member of the upperclass after having been raised as a servant, plus Charlotte’s schemes to marry a suitably rich husband while humiliating Ada, and Georgiana’s growing skill at managing Somerton proper. Meanwhile, WWI looms on the horizon.

Still totally soap-operatic, utterly ridiculous and very fluffy, and a good way to pass the afternoon.

In the After, Demitria Lunetta: Amy Harris has divided the life into two sections, the Before and the After. The line of demarcation is the day that They arrived, voracious and nearly mindless aliens who hunt in the daylight and have exquisitely sensitive hearing. In the After, the only way to survive is to stay utterly silent, and Amy has done so, along with the toddler Baby she found while out scavenging for food. After events force Amy and Baby to leave their home, they encounter other survivors, and that’s when the real challenges begin.

This was a pretty brisk read, moderately entertaining, though it’s pretty much a debut novel in a lot of ways. The book’s broken into three sections, and honestly, I found the first section the most compelling. The second and third sections are broken up between flashbacks and flash forwards, which is pretty gimmicky and distracting. I think it would have been much more effective if the story had been told in standard linear fashion.

Besides that, I may have managed to mainline thirty-three episodes of Yowamushi Pedal and started reading the manga as well, despite the fact that I really need to be packing up and getting ready to move on Saturday. Priorities, y'all, I have them.

(Seriously, though, this series gives me far too many feels and the inevitable end of the Inter-High is going to kill me.)

(Also I kind of want everyone to be sleeping with everyone else, because this is the handsiest shounen sports extravaganza I've seen in a good long while.)

(Except for Midousuji. I think Midousuji needs to be hit by a bus. Or for his captain to get tired of his shit and bury him in a shallow grave out back of the clubhouse and tell the police that no, Midousuji just stopped showing up for practice, we haven't seen him lately, etc. And no amount of tragic backstory can change my mind on this point.)

Hey, look, I'm actually managing to post my reading round-up on an actual Wednesday! Wonders will never cease.

Anyway, over the past few days I've read the following:

The Martian, Andy Weir: Mark Watney has a problem. The Ares 3 mission to Mars has been scrubbed due to an unfortunate dust storm, but his crewmates think he's dead and lifted off without him. The next Ares mission won't show up for another four years, and he's only got food and water to last him for a hundred days or so. Lucky for him, he's stubborn, smart, and a smart-ass, and he's determined to survive, no matter what it takes.

This was really engaging, and a pretty compelling read. It's mostly journal entries interspersed with a modicum of narrative, so it was a brisk read too. And Watney's narration is full of black humor, which leavens what is honestly a pretty grim narrative.

Without a Summer, Mary Robinette Kowal: Jane and Vincent decide to take Melody with them to London in order to increase her chances of finding a husband, but civil unrest over the unemployment of the coldmongers and the unhappiness of the Luddites, along with Vincent's tense relationship with his father, means that things don't go quite as smoothly as planned.

Longbourn, Jo Baker: In Pride and Prejudice, the servants are pretty much invisible. In Longbourn, Jo Baker explores the lives of the servants who work in the background of Jane and Elizabeth's lives the protagonists, exploring the sheer amount of work underpinning their lives of leisure. The events of Pride and Prejudice play through the lives of Sarah (the housemaid), Mrs. Hill (the cook/housekeeper), and James (the new footman). As the author's afterword notes, every time a carriage is requested for Jane or Elizabeth, James drives it; every time a proxy is sent to purchase shoe roses, Sarah must go to fetch them (even in the pouring rain). But the plot of this novel is not driven by Jane and Elizabeth's narrative arcs--Sarah, Mrs. Hill, and James all have their own lives and their own narrative journeys to follow--and some of the characters who get short shrift in Austen (Mrs. Bennet, Mr. Collins) are rendered more sympathetically here.

This was a really good read.

My sister was over this weekend, and before she started going off on how weird and creepy fandom people are (despite knowing full well that I am a fandom person, argh), we had a conversation about dystopian YA books and how we are both so over them.

Well, I should unpack that a little bit. We're both agreed that we're extremely tired of the first-person narration, pretty much regardless of genre or target audience, because so much of the time it's extremely clunky, clumsy, intrusive, or affected. I think a lot of authors think that first person is easier to write, when in fact it really isn't. It only feels easy. We're also both pretty tired of the obligatory love triangle business, especially when it's used to denote how ~special~ the female protagonist is. Not that being the object of affection from multiple people is a bad thing, of course, just that a lot of the times the romances are pretty transparent and contrived and the endgame pairing is usually telegraphed from the get-go. Basically we object to the love triangles that are unnecessary to the actual plot, and the fact that romance is assumed to be necessary to the plot (if the protag is female; when the protag is male it's less necessary and the romantic interest is more like a reward than anything else, if you ask me, but I digress).

Anyway, that's not terribly important, and not why I'm writing this post.

I've continued to think about our conversation since then, and this morning I finally managed to articulate what it is about the whole dystopian trend that really annoys me. I thought about it first in terms of YA, since the dystopian future/alternate reality trend is strong there, but I suppose it extends to broader audiences than merely YA.

The problem is that most of these dystopias feature an authoritarian and oppressive society, often with clearly marked divisions between the privileged and the oppressed, but that the reasons for the oppression and the divisions are often gimmicks that make no logical sense as an outgrowth of real, lived human history and human nature. Furthermore, these divisions often ignore the actual fracture lines of oppression we can see in the world today (race, class, gender identity, sexual preferences, (dis)ability, and so on and so on), treating them as if they don't exist. Or they conflate these axes of oppression with their artificial gimmick world-building in ways the reinforce those oppressions. Or they use their world-building gimmick as a hamfisted metaphor for real-life oppressions.

This sets my teeth on edge.

I'm willing to suspend my disbelief, don't get me wrong. I love me some good escapist fiction as much as the next person, and if the writing is good enough, I'll even entertain ridiculous world-building gimmicks for the duration of the story. (Most of the time the writing is not good enough, but my feelings about the literary quality or lack thereof in YA writing is another discussion entirely.) On the other hand, if the current trend for dystopian fiction that we see is a reflection of our anxieties about our world--which I would argue it is, at least in part--then why on earth ignore the actual sites of oppression in favor of making shit up? I mean, think of the ongoing struggle over a woman's right to her own bodily autonomy. Extrapolate from that and all of a sudden you have The Handmaid's Tale, right? Which has its speculative fiction tropes whether Atwood likes to admit to it or not--there's the vague reproductive disaster that has affected the population, and as a consequence you get (fertile) women being pressed into service as human broodmares. Or consider colonialism, and look at Octavia Butler's Lilith's Brood as a critique of the idea of the benevolent colonizer while fucking around with ideas of gender while Butler's at it.

Instead we get things like this, where the world is divided by the privileged people who are only allowed to go outside during the day, and the oppressed worker types who are confined to the hours of darkness. (This review, btw, is what crystallized this whole thing for me. Heh.) Apparently this division was a response to the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic, as a measure to control its spread.

...yeah. If you're banging your head against your desk after reading that sentence, know that you are not alone. I have a pretty large bruise on my forehead from reading that.

I'm not against dystopian fiction as such. I'm not even against the plucky-female-protag-bucks-oppressive-system genre, not really, though I'd love to see it become less formulaic. I'm just saying that I'd like to see the authors of these kinds of books show a little more awareness of the actual world around them and maybe think a little bit before reaching for ridiculous plot devices upon which to hang their stories.

(And while I'm at it, I would also like a pony. One with wings. A pega-pony, if you will.)

I feel like I've finished reading enough books lately that it's worth writing a post about them, so here we go. I've been in an upswing of reading since finishing up the hookerfic and the excesses of Porn Battle, but I think my writing mojo has wandered back in. Now makes as good a time to update as any, no?

Things I've read lately:
Dust Girl, Sarah Zettel: Set in Kansas during the Dust Bowl, this is the first in a YA trilogy. The protag is Callie, who just wants out of Kansas and struggles with her mother's refusal to leave before Callie's father returns to them. This is complicated by a couple things: Callie's parents never married, and Callie herself is mixed-race on a couple of axes--not only is her father a man of color, he's also a member of Faerie. Callie doesn't discover the second fact until a devastating dust storm and her mother's disappearance, and spends the rest of the book navigating her newfound heritage as well as the power struggle the two courts of Faerie are having over her as she sets off in search of her parents.

I liked this one and will be reading the next installment of the series, though I think that the setting and politics of the two courts alone would be enough to sustain a trilogy without making Callie into a character marked by a mysterious prophecy. That prophecy feels sort of de rigueur rather than plot essential, but perhaps it will become integral in the next two books.

84, Charing Cross Road, Helene Hanff: A reread for me. This is the collected correspondence between NYC-based Helene Hanff and the staff of a bookstore in London, and it is utterly charming. Will make you want to go out and buy books even if you are not particularly interested in the kinds of books Hanff was purchasing from her friends.

Prisoner's Base, Rex Stout: A woman comes to Nero Wolfe, wanting to board with him for a week until she comes into control of her inheritance; Wolfe refuses and she is murdered within hours of leaving his presence. Archie feels responsible for this and drags Wolfe, willy-nilly, into an investigation.

The Golden Spiders, Rex Stout: A young boy comes to Nero Wolfe, wanting advice about a woman he saw being menaced in a car. Shortly thereafter, the boy ends up dead and Wolfe and Archie end up delving into the reasons why.

Three Men Out, Rex Stout: Three novellas, "Invitation to Murder" (a client wants Wolfe to figure out who his wealthy invalid brother-in-law intends to marry); "The Zero Clue" (a probability expert who consulted Wolfe ends up dead after trying to consult him about which of his clients may have committed a crime); and "This Won't Kill You" (Wolfe and Archie go to the World Series, but the players are drugged and a body shows up in the locker room).

The Black Mountain, Rex Stout: One of Wolfe's closest friends is murdered, and the investigation takes Wolfe and Archie overseas to Wolfe's homeland.

Before Midnight, Rex Stout: Wolfe and Archie become embroiled in a perfume company's promotional contest when the man in charge of the contest is murdered and the answers to the contest's riddles are stolen from his body.

Three Witnesses, Rex Stout: Three novellas, "The Next Witness" (Wolfe is due to be called to the witness stand in court when he decides the defendant is innocent and walks out in search of the truth); "When a Man Murders" (a man and a woman hire Wolfe to persuade her returned-from-the-dead former husband to let her divorce so she can remarry, but the former husband turns up dead after all and hijinks ensue); and "Die Like a Dog" (in which Archie brings home the black lab of a murder victim in order to needle Wolfe and it turns out Wolfe is a dog-lover, and incidentally they solve the murder as well).

Yes, that is a lot of Nero Wolfe, but what can I say? I'm not reading them for the mysteries, I'm reading them for the characters, because Archie Goodwin is a delight forever. I'm not really into first-person narration anymore (too many bad YA and urban fantasy novels have put me off it) but I make an exception for Archie, because Stout was so good at clever narration with just the right amount of snarky understatement and brilliant little flashes of detail. I'm also starting to panic over the fact that I only have twenty or so Nero Wolfe novels left to read. That's not enough, it really isn't.

The Blue Castle, L. M. Montgomery: Reread. Valancy Stirling has just turned twenty-nine and is certain that she's going to be an old maid all her life, which is a prospect made all the more depressing by the way her domineering mother and clan treat her as an afterthought and an object to be pitied and patronized. When she goes to the doctor and discovers that she has a year (or less) to live, however, Valancy runs out of fucks to give about her family and decides to enjoy the rest of her life to the fullest extent possible... and does not regret it.

I think I only found out about this book last year? And since then I've reread it at least three times.

Frederica, Georgette Heyer: The Marquis of Alverstoke is very rich and very bored and very disinclined to throw a ball for his two nieces despite his sisters' efforts to persuade him to the contrary. Frederica Merriville is tenuously related to him, has a gorgeous younger sister, and is determined that this sister should have a grand season in London and find a rich, suitable husband. Alverstoke decides to assist her in this (mostly to spite his sisters), and he finds himself become embroiled in the Merriville family's adventures... which, to his surprise, do not bore him at all. As this is Heyer, you can certainly imagine what ensues.

One of my favorite Heyers to reread.

You know the one, with the list of dates and the suggesting of topics. I'm not organized enough to even think about promising to write about such-and-thus on a specific date, but I suppose that if anyone on the dwircle has a specific topic or topics they'd like me to natter on about, I'm willing to take requests.

Dear fellow anime/manga fandom people on my dwircle:

1. How many of you post fic/read fic on AO3?
2. ...for fandoms featuring characters under the age of 18?
3. ...including fics featuring smut between those characters?

I'm wondering, because I guess we're supposed to be tagging that stuff as underage? Only I don't think I've ever used the "underage" tag for anything I've posted to AO3. In my head, the average shounen sports/battle story protagonist may technically be a teenager, but they tend to act more like adults than not. In the case of the battle story types, they often have lived experiences that force them to behave like adults. I probably wouldn't use underage as a tag unless it were for something more like children in sexual situations, which frankly I wouldn't be writing in the first place.

In any case, the fact that the label "underage" means any sexual contact involving a character who is not yet 18 means that I either need to add that tag to a whole bunch of fic, add the "choose not to warn" label to a whole bunch of fic, or go on as I have been by not adding that label, in clear defiance of the site guidelines. *grumpy* I don't like any of those options, either.* "Choose not to warn" implies that there's something warn-worthy about two fifteen-year-olds screwing each other silly, "underage" carries a connotation that I just don't like, and not labeling at all means that I'm putting readers from countries with draconian child porn laws at risk.

I think I'd actually be okay if the label was something like "Characters under 18 in sexual situations" rather than "underage." I realize that the former is more cumbersome than the latter, but it has the virtue of being much more explicit as well.

I mean, surely I'm not the only person who was misinterpreting "underage" right? ...right?



*Or the fact that changing the labels means going through 400+ stories and editing the tags, which is not my idea of a fun afternoon, especially given how annoying the AO3 interface is. Argh.


ETA 6 Aug 2012: This post has been unlocked for reference.

And with a single post, Captain Awkward demonstrates why she is the best advice columnist ever. That is, she illustrates her advice with extracts from the Vorkosigan Saga.

(Not enough to convince you? Then please permit me to direct you to the post The Golden Retriever/Kwisatz Haderach of Love, in which Captain Awkward counsels the lovelorn with illustrations from Dune. Oh yeah, it's even more excellent than it sounds.)