sanguinity

Chencia C. Higgins, A Little Kissing Between Friends (2024)

Black Sapphic romance between a music producer and an erotic dancer, best friends for three years, until the day they suddenly developed the hots for each other. I really enjoyed this, largely because the conflict felt like it had organic depth to it. Jucee, the dancer, isn't interested in dating around, but is in it for something serious or nothing at all; meanwhile, Cyndi, the musician, only does casual relationships, and goes into a tailspin over having gone to bed with someone that she decidedly can't be casual about. But even more than that: they feel like a new couple who are still learning how to constructively fight. (Does that make any sense? It's possible to be friends for years on the mutual agreement that you don't fight. But when the stakes are raised to romantic, you suddenly discover you don't know how to constructively work through disagreements with this specific person, that each of your reflexive habits during arguments are non-constructive (either in general, or are specifically incompatible with what the other person does in a fight), and you urgently need to figure out some way to productively work through arguments together if you're going to make this work.) So, yes, there's a lot of miscommunication missteps along the way, things that each of them should have handled better, but it felt realistic and organic, like a couple who is only just now figuring out how to work through problems together. The love and respect and will are there! The how-to is not—or not at first, anyway.

I also just really liked the characters and the supporting cast: the opening scene is when Cyndi came out to her father as a child, and it 100% sold me on why she loves her dad so much. Also loved the stud representation—I found this book on a rec list for Black butch and Black stud characters, and Cyndi did not disappoint.

Laban Carrick Hill (illus. Bryan Collier), Dave the Potter: Artist, Poet, Slave (2010)

Children's picture book about an enslaved South Carolina potter, known for most of his life only as Dave (later known as David Drake, after several of his owners). Dave is remembered today for his skill—he was one of the few who could make jars that held twenty gallons and more—and for his poems, which he sometimes inscribed on his pots.

a better thing, I never saw
when I shot off, the lions Jaw
—November 9, 1836

Dave belongs to Mr. Miles /
wher the oven bakes & the pot biles ///
—July 31, 1840

another trick is worst than this +
Dearest miss: spare me a Kiss +
—August 26, 1840

I wonder where is all my relation
friendship to all—and, every nation
—August 16, 1857

the sun moon and—stars=
in the west are a plenty of—bears '''
—July 29, 1858

I, made this Jar, all of cross
If, you dont repent, you will be, lost=
—May 3, 1862

The text of Dave the Potter is a poem about the making of a single pot, from digging and grinding the earth to writing the inscription (not shown: glazing and firing). I was a little surprised at the inclusion of technical language without a glossary to define terms. An afterword gives a mini-biography of what is known about Dave's life, punctuated with a selection of his poems.

The illustrations are lovely and rich—the fold-out page of shaping a pot was especially beautiful. The illustrations are worth a second look, too: the backgrounds often show other enslaved characters, depicting the context in which Dave lived his life. I especially appreciated the burnt-umber ancestral tree, with the faces of Dave's ancestors and relations barely visible in its bark.

Compton Mackenzie, The Monarch of the Glen (1941)

I seem to have missed blogging about this, back when I read it?

Comic novel set just before WWII detailing the showdown between a Highland laird and the hikers that inadvertently ruined his hunting—the hikers are variously Scottish Nationalists and Londoners, and the one kind is quite as infuriating to Ben Nevis as the other. The dramatis personae also includes a rich New Yorker (who discovers a fondness for shockingly bold kilts) and his Canadian wife (who has had romantic feelings about the Highlands since she was a young girl). I had a particular fondness for the laird's two "hefty" daughters, who can pick up an errant hiker and carry them around over their shoulders. (Justice for Ben Nevis's daughters!)

Characterizations and incidents are exaggerated and over-the-top, a la Wodehouse, but the characters were fun, the narrator amusing, and the prose masterful. (Quite a few passages I read aloud to

grrlpup, sometimes because the observation was on-point, but more often because the phrasing was so much fun.) I had to read with my phone in hand to look up all the references and allusions (some of which were NOT straightforward), but I usually found that rewarding, as well. (I... usually do not struggle this much with a vintage novel? But comedy/satire can be very of-the-moment, and I guess the popular culture of Interwar Britain is not my strong suit.)

Gutenburg.ca has a selection of some the author's earlier novels, but nothing that appears to be from this series.

And while I'm wrapping up Hum 110 posting for the (academic) year, here are a bunch of topically-adjacent children's books we wandered into while reading the assigned curriculum. (To be clear, none of these were assigned: they're all things we found that are based on stuff we read in bookgroup, or drew upon art styles we studied, etc.)

Vivian Mansour (illus. Emmanuel Valtierra, trans. Carlos Rodriguez Cortez), Pilgrim Codex (2025)

Heroic account of a Mexican family who, driven from their homes by violence, cross the US-Mexico border to try to find a safer home. Re-imagined through the lens of Mesoamerican codices, the family's peril, sacrifices, and bravery are told with sympathy and pride. Alas, not everyone in the family makes it alive to the US, and some of the scenes are genuinely harrowing. Nevertheless, I'd still call this age-appropriate: given that some children have themselves survived similar events (or have classmates or playmates who did), this could be a useful text for helping children discuss and make sense of their world.

Duncan Tonatiuh, A Land of Books: Dreams of Young Mexihcah Word Painters (2022)

Story of young tlahcuiloqueh (scribes) in training, learning to paint amoxtin (books, aka codices). Illustrations draw heavily on Mesoamerican glyphs, and shows several example of completed codex-pages in progress. The more one knows about how to read Mesoamerican codices, the richer this book becomes. Glossary of Nahuatl in the back (used liberally in the text), but unfortunately does not include a guide to Mesoamerican glyphs, dating systems, or other conventions of the Mixteca writing system. I highly recommend pairing this with Gordon Whittaker's Deciphering Aztec Hieroglyphs (not a children's picture book) or similar, to get insight into everything Tonatiuh is doing here.

Duncan Tonatiuh, The Princess and the Warrior (2016)

Tonatiuh's version of the Mixteca origin story of the volcanoes Iztaccihuatl and Popocatepetl, which are visible from Tenochtitlan / Mexico City. As above, the illustrations are inspired by Mesoamerican codices, and the text is rich with Nahuatl vocabulary. As ever, I am caught by random side-characters: what became of the messenger who was bribed to betray Popoca? He lucked out that Popoca was too caught up in Itza's illness to hunt him down for revenge...

Duncan Tonatiuh, Feathered Serpent and the Five Suns (2020)

Another Mixteca origin story, this one for humanity itself. We read in bookgroup one of the sources Tonatiuh draws upon, but I didn't recognize the middle section of Tonatiuh's narrative--and the afterword suggests that the novel-to-me section was Tonatiuh's own creation, imaging that Quetzalcoatl faced the same challenges on the path to the underworld that the dead do.

Duncan Tonatiuh, Diego Rivera: His World and Ours (2011)

Introduction to the life and works of Diego Rivera, who was one of the principal artists of the Mexican government's muralism campaign of the 1920s and 30s. The art is a Mixtecan riff on Rivera's style, and alternates between Rivera's work, reimagined in Tonatiuh's style, and speculation about what archetypically Mexican subjects he might have immortalized had he been working today.

There may or may not be further posts of Hum-110-adjacent materials dribbling in as we go: there are a number of books I checked out from the library as potentially interesting, but which I didn't get to while we were reading related units. We'll see how it goes!

I've been in remiss in logging our Hum 110 reading/viewing for the second half of the year! As previously mentioned, we centered our studies on Mexico City this last year. The material blogged here runs from the seventeeth century through the near-present, and took us half of an academic year to cover.

Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (trans. Margaret Sayers Peden), Poems, Protest, and a Dream, (late seventeenth century / 1997)

This was a fascinating collection of works. Sor Juana was both a courtier and a nun (at different times), and this collection samples both eras: at the one end we have secular diss poems and show-off pieces composed for competitions, while the other end includes a virtuoso defense of scholarship by female clerics and education for women. (The defense is the titular "Protest", which is a politically complex work in which Sor Juana responds to a rebuke by a church official who himself took on a female pseudonym for the purpose of chastising Sor Juana. Sor Juana then proceeded to play a "tee-hee, we're all just girls here" card while absolutely eviscerating the man -- while keeping up her own pretense of subjecting herself to church authority.) There's also a complex interplay between new world and old world symbols and signifiers in these works, which reflected tensions over whether New Spain or the Iberian Peninsula was the true center of the empire. Also, shoutout to the lesbian poem: we were very pleased to see it.

( III: One of Five Burlesque Sonnets )

Spanish and English on facing pages, for the convenience of the multilingual.

H.N. Branch (trans), The Mexican Constitution of 1917 compared with the Mexican Constitution of 1857

We leapt from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth and twentieth century, which was an unbelievable degree of whiplash: I had soooooooo many Britannica tabs open, trying to figure out what was going on with the century-plus of revolutions, counter-revolutions, deposings, assassinations, the Mexican-American war, and oh yes, the brief installation of an emperor again (by France, when the US was too busy with its own Civil War to meddle).

Discussion this month was mostly trying to get a grasp on the history and the problem of cultivating a stable government. But we also had a lot of admiration for the 1917 Mexican Constitution, which was extremely forward thinking in terms of labor rights, up to and including things like worker safety, union protections, and paid pregnancy leaves. (The seething envy in the room could be cut with a knife!) Surprisingly to us, the 1917 Constitution was also strongly anti-Catholic, seizing Church property and mandating secular (and universal!) education. (The weakening of the Church's power led to a few more years of revolution, of course, as pro-Catholic forces objected to that part of the Constitution.)

Mexican Murals: Diego, Orozco, and Sisquieros (1920s-30s) (online gallery)
David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, and Xavier Guerrero, "Manifesto of the Syndication of Technical Workers, Painters, and Sculptors," (1923-1924)

Cool art! Also, interesting things to discuss re auteur's vision vs. government propaganda; the radically ethno-nationalistic and peasant-centric vision of Mexico (vs. the context of European-trained artists who had been working in the U.S. for a living, and all painted on urban buildings, not so easily accessible to the rural peasantry); and murals as a public form of art (in contrast to easel painting).

Los Olvidados | The Forgotten Ones | The Young and the Damned (1950, dir. Luis Buñuel)
Cesare Zavattini, "Some ideas on the Cinema" (1953)

Realist film about life in the economic/criminal underclass of Mexico City. The original cut of the film depicts the inescapability of the circle of violence, but that ending played badly to test audiences, so a second, "happy" ending was filmed, in which the child protagonist slays his abuser (instead of being slayed by him), and returns to reform school. (Yay?)

( discussion )

All that said, I kinda enjoyed... maybe not watching the film, but having watched it? There was a lot of toothy chewy shit going on in and around the film, and it was satisfying to discuss, at a number of different levels.

Available on youtube with English subtitles, if you're interested.

José Emilio Pacheco (trans. Katharine Silver), Battles in the Desert (1980)

Novella of a man's remembrances of a specific year of his childhood, when he fell in love with his best friend's mother, and her ultimate erasure from (apparently) all memory and record but his own.

( A LOT going on )

We discussed this one to death and came to no agreement on it, but I can say it was one of the most enthusiastically discussed works of the unit.

Elena Poniatowska (trans. Helen R. Lane), Massacre in Mexico (1971 / trans. 1975)

( content warning for state violence, including massacre, imprisonment, and torture )

It's a powerhouse of the book, although most in my book group did not read it, or only read sections of it, because of the violence it relates. I found that frustrating, for in addition to discussion of the content, there's also ample opportunity to discuss the format of the book: how does one take reams of interviews and publicize their content, especially before one could dump a massive file of sources on the internet? How does one handle the vagaries of eyewitness accounts, the multiplicity of viewpoints, the uncertainty of memory, and conflicting testimonies? How does one do all this under a hostile government, that would much rather see your book suppressed than published? I'm a little reluctant to call this book my favorite of the course, given how challenging its content was, and yet it was definitely the one I found most rewarding, both to read and to discuss. Excellent choice for capstone of the Mexico City unit!

And with this installment, I have finally caught up on my library overdues -- things got a little hairy there, while I was trying to bull my way through our final Hum 110 book of the year. Happily, we don't get charged overdue fines, just a replacement fee when the library decides getting their book back has become a lost cause. Which hasn't happened yet, knock wood. *juggles books faster*

Kelley Armstrong, An Ordinary Sort of Evil (2026)

Fifth novel in the Rip Through Time series (not counting another four novellas under the author's private imprint), in which a police detective from 2016 Vancouver BC becomes displaced in time and solves crimes in 1860s Edinburgh, Scotland.

This was a particularly fun installment, but the big question I had going in was: do Duncan and Mallory finally kiss? The novel came out a month ago, and this is the first time in years when a Rip Through Time novel has come out and I haven't gotten a rash of comments on my Duncan/Mallory story (the only one on AO3!) from readers frustrated that they STILL weren't kissing in the novels. So I had my suspicions.

Spoiler:

They kiss. And a decent kiss it was, too! Although I flatter myself that I did it better. ;-)

I need to go back and pick up the most recent novella, which is sitting unread on my ereader, but all in all, I'm very pleased with this installment.

Lois McMaster Bujold, Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen (2016)

Read-aloud with

grrlpup; first read for her and second read for me. Unlike nearly every other book in the Vorkosigan Saga, this one is neither mystery nor MilSF, instead being very domestic. (It is hilarious to me that every time I prepared to read the next section and asked Grrlpup for a "last time in Gentleman Jole" recap, she nailed it. She does not nail it with mysteries or MilSF, at least not without a ton of scaffolding on my part.) I still very much like this one for all the things it made canon, although as noted before, it is rather babies-forward. I've been holding off on finishing writing a couple of fic until I finished my re-read of this; I suppose it's time now to push those higher in the queue.

Btw, this finishes our planned reading of the Vorkosigan Saga (although we may go back and pick up Ethan of Athos at some point). Next up for cooking-and-picnics read-aloud time: the Temeraire series by Naomi Novik.

Grace Lin, The Year of the Dog, (2006 / 2018)

Middle-grade semi-autobiographical novel about a fifth grader deciding what she wants to be when she grows up, all while learning to navigate her second-generation Taiwanese-American identity. (Spoiler: she wants to grow up to be an author who writes books with Chinese people in them! Congratulations, Grace, on achieving your childhood dreams! So few of us do!)

Published for the 2006 Year of the Dog, then reiussued for the 2018 Year of the Dog, this new edition has more family stories at the end, as well as an interview between Grace Lin and Alvina Ling, Grace's childhood friend, present-day editor, and a character in the book, reminiscing on the development of the book and how Grace altered events from their childhood and for what narrative purpose.

(btw, Grace and Alvina host a children's lit podcast together: Book Friends Forever. Grrlpup is a regular listener -- I honestly thought the podcast was called "Grace and Alvina" until two minutes ago.)

Loved this book when I first read it, and I'm delighted to say it holds up on re-read. And the new bonus material at the back is a real treat!

Meredith Broussard, More Than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech (2023)

Exceptionally clear overview of technochauvanism (tech bros thinking they're smarter and better than anyone who has ever tried to solve a particular problem before) and algorithmic bias (when technology reproduces the same racist, sexist, cissexist, and ableist biases of society at large). Each chapter discusses specific algorithmic failures in a different domain: facial recognition, policing and courts, testing and academics, digital accessibility, gender, and medical diagnosis. She also has a chapter devoted to algorithmic auditing and a concluding chapter that highlights various efforts to check, correct, or regulate biased algorithms. (Alas, a lot of the U.S. efforts have since been set back, if not gutted, by the Trump Administration. Stay strong, E.U. -- we're counting on you!)

This book played havoc with my library holds list. It also wasn't great for my browser tabs. Let me share two:

Heat Listed. Chicago's predictive policing program told a man he would be involved with a shooting. But it couldn't determine which side of the gun he would be on. Instead, it made him the victim of a violent crime -- twice. (Person of Interest was ripped from the headlines -- this story even happened during 2013! But instead of "the Machine" saving Robert McDaniel's life, it got him shot instead. Twice.)
How Eugenics Shaped Statistics. Exposing the damned lies of three science pioneers. (Galton, Pearson, and Fisher, damned eugenicists, all, and one of them was in bed with Nazis. Basically, how the p-test was invented to give eugenics the veneer of objective truth. I am pissed that NOT A SINGLE ONE of my years of statistics classes mentioned any of this. Article has some good conclusions that statistics needs to relax its death grip on "objectivity" for ethics reasons, which my statistics classes have done, but it'd have been nice to have the ethics object lesson actually in class.)

When he thought along those lines he was overwhelmed by waves of despair and of self-contempt, and there was no one to comfort him. The day of his birthday, when he looked at himself at the vast age of eighteen, was the worst of all. Eighteen and a discredited prisoner in the hands of a French privateersman! His self-respect was at its lowest ebb.

—C.S. Forester, Mr Midshipman Hornblower

Happy 250th Birthday, Mr Hornblower! We know you won't enjoy it.

(Icon, of course, is the birthday boy in his birthday suit—his favorite way to celebrate every and any occasion.)

Nghi Vo, Mammoths at the Gates (2023)

Book four in the Singing Hills Cycle, an Asian-inspired fantasy series about an abbey of archivist clerics, who have dedicated themselves to collecting and preserving histories/stories. (They apparently do archaeology, too, according to a throwaway comment in this volume!)

This particular volume is a meditation on death and memory: how to best honor the fullness of a life, and too the fullness of the grief of the mourners. A quiet and meditative story, despite the threat of open violence over who has best claim to a recently deceased cleric's body: the abbey, or the granddaughters from the cleric's prior life. The granddaughters never knew him in life, but did know and do honor their grandmother's grief for the husband who left her. This installment also adds quite a bit to the lore of the neixin, the talking hoopoes/memory-spirits who serve as companions and advisors to the clerics.

I forgot how much I enjoyed this series, and am looking forward to catching up on the latest few installments.

Sarah Levine, Treasure Island!!! (2012)

Goddamn, but that was a wild ride. All three of those exclamation points are justified. Great swathes of this I read in sheer incredulity, then immediately turned around to read them aloud to

grrlpup, sometimes entire chapters at a time. (She giggled through each, and demanded regular updates between.)

I have no idea what to say about the plot, beyond: a twenty-something washed-up English major reads Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island and promptly loses her mind. She decides to model her life on Jim Hawkins (whom she feels emulates the Core Values of BOLDNESS, RESOLUTION, INDEPENDENCE, and HORN-BLOWING), but honestly, she's closer to that dagnab fool Squire Trelawney. Squire Trelawney, if he was viciously self-centered and felt himself compelled to bring everything around him to ruin in the name of boldness, etc.

Needless to say, this will be a more rewarding experience if you're familiar with Treasure Island, if only so you can fully appreciate her misreading of it.

Content warning for animal death.

Michael Nicoll Yahgulangaas, Carpe Fin: A Haida Manga (2019)

Prequel to Red, giving the backstory of "how the Carpenter was found alive on a rock in the middle of the ocean."

Twisty half-world story wherein Carpe, on returning to his home village in the present-day, finds all the local extractive businesses failing, the seashore poisoned by an oil spill, and his people hungry. He and his friends go hunting for sea lion on a mid-ocean rock where they are wintering, and through a twist of chance and weather, Carpe is left behind. What follows is a half-world story where Carpe is taken down to the bottom of the sea, is returned to his village as a spirit, and eventually comes to settle on the original sea-lion rock, unrooted from time.

I loved the art and humor and twistiness of this, with the shifting between the concrete present-day and the undersea world of the Lord of the Rock. As with Red, if you buy two copies of the book, unbind them, and reassemble the pages, they combine to make one giant black-line mural. Unlike in Red, this edition doesn't include an illustration of the all-in-one whole.

Michael Nicoll Yahgulangaas, Red: A Haida Manga (2009)

And because I'd just read the prequel, I came back to re-read the original...

Ancient-times story of an orphaned boy whose sister is stolen and enslaved by another people. As an adult, he goes on a quest for revenge, which has tragic outcomes across the board: as his people militarize, they becomes less trusted and more targeted by their neighbors; meanwhile, his quest to rescue his sister becomes the murder of her beloved husband, thereby orphaning his nephew. In his remorse, Red commits suicide, leaving the village elders to clean up the mess.

This one doesn't appeal as strongly to me as the prequel, but the inside jacket does unfold into the assembled mural.

Nora Nickum (illus. Elly McKay). Twelve Daring Grays: A While Migration Adventure (2026)

Children's picture book about a group of twelve gray whales that sometimes make a detour into the Puget Sound on their annual journey from Baja California to the Arctic. With an eye to the tides, these twelve specific whales come into shallow water at high tide and filter mouthfuls of mud for ghost shrimp. At low tide, when the feeding area becomes exposed mudflat, you can see the gouges in the mud left behind. Obviously they risk stranding in doing this! But there isn't always enough food in the open ocean on the migration from Mexico to the Arctic, and so this can be a life-saving strategy. (But obviously not one widely adopted! Some twenty-thousand whales don't make this detour into the Puget Sound.)

For more info about these whales, see Cascadia Research's page about the Puget Sound gray whales.

Over on tumblr, oldshrewsburyian tagged me to post the first lines of my last ten fics. Cross-posting here, because why not? Anyone who would like to play, please do!

(This is also an experiment in posting in markdown. Tumblr accepts markdown, so a lot of things I post over there, I compose in markdown in a text editor first. Which makes this an attempt to cross-post to DW without further markup-related editing.)

"So, Cousin," Richard drawled as he and Darcy shared a nightcap in the privacy of Darcy's room. —"An Evening at Rosings", Pride & Prejudice, Darcy/Fitzwilliam, Darcy/Lizzie
Dear Miss Bennet, Should you desire speech with me, I am at your instant disposal. —"Another Opinion to Set Beside One's Own", Pride & Prejudice, Darcy/Fitzwilliam, Darcy/Lizzie
"If it isn't passé to ask," Ekaterin said, "what do your earrings mean?" —"A Herm Without Earrings is Like a Cake Without Sugar", Vorkosigan Saga, Bel/Miles/Ekaterin/Nicol
"Do you see?" Hornblower asked. —"Gambler's Fallacy", Hornblower (books and TV), Bush & Hornblower
Joan lost the first several days of her hard-won privacy to a haze of grief and nothingness. —"Perseverance", Elementary x Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century
I roused in the half-dark to fingers exploring my stubble. —"Five Times They Didn't Share a Bed and One Time They Did", Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson (Whitehead & Pickering), Holmes/Watson
"Re our game where speech must be kept down to words of one sound…" Car said, erst the day's flight. —"'Sex' is a Word of One Sound", Cabin Pressure, Carolyn/Douglas
If those were not happy days, there was yet a sweetness to them, and a fullness that would have baffled the turnkeys of Château d'If. —"Better Than Tons of Gold and Cases of Diamonds", The Count of Monte Cristo, Edmond/Faria
I had not slept all that harrowing night, excepting that hour on horseback in the strong embrace of my young officer. —"A Kind of Kinship", Dracula's Guest, The Guest/The Young Officer
Captain Keith Windham, formerly Major, looked down on the mist-filled glen with distaste. —"There My Heart Forever Lies", The Flight of the Heron (Brigadoon AU), Keith/Ewen, Ewen/Alison

We've been watching Person of Interest over the last year or so, a season at a time. There are some things we find eye-rolly (Reese's dead girlfriend back story) and others we find boring (Root), but overall it's been solidly watchable. We've enjoyed Carter getting a larger part of the storyline, plus the addition of Shaw to the main cast. Also always happy to see Bear. "Lady Killer," when Zoe, Carter, and Shaw team up, was a great joy.

Last night we arrived at 3x09, "The Crossing". Under the cut for spoiler reasons, but nothing that wasn't said very loudly in the fandom at the time.

( The Crossing )

Like I said, nothing that wasn't said in fandom at the time. (I didn't go here then, but I dimly remember hearing the furor when it happened.) But they'd set themselves up for a really powerful episode, and then went with the cheapest possible choice, twice. Very disappointing.

I'm behind on my book-logging, so you get this hot on the heels of the previous one.

Rose Lerner, Sailor's Delight (2022)

Gay romance set in 1813 Portsmouth between a Jewish naval agent and a Royal Navy sailing master.

Novella-length, so a straightforward plot and a quick read, narrating when the High Holy Days intersected with Elie's client/friend/crush object's shore leave -- oh, and Elie really must finish his prize accounting, so that said crush object can get married on the proceeds.

I loved all the immersive textural details of Elie's family and faith and job, and his deeply felt (but presumed hopeless) thirst for his friend and client. For a little while it looked like the novella was setting up Augie's fiancée as a controlling and vindictive obstacle to the main romance, but that thread was resolved reasonably well, with Sarah and Elie establishing an amicable business relationship at the same time that Augie and Elie advanced to a romance. Augie's penchant for going about in breeches and no shirt jarred me (my understanding is that clothing didn't work that way in 1813), but I can forgive it, given how much I enjoyed the rest.

Fahrad J. Dadyburjor, The Other Man (2021)

Gay romance set in Mumbai on the eve of the decriminalization of homosexuality. Ved is crushed by parental expectations: his father's expectation that he take over the family business and his mother's expectation that he get married. Meanwhile, he's not over his first-last-only relationship: a man he saw secretly on weekends, who himself decided to get married in deference to parental expectations. (He wanted to keep seeing Ved on the side after his marriage; Ved, insulted, broke it off.)

To placate his mother, Ved agrees to a date with a Parson's graduate, and gets on with her so well that he ends up drifting into an engagement with her. After all, he and Disha are good friends, are they not? He likes her. Surely this could work out? Simultaneously, Ved's Grindr flirtation with a Brazilian man visiting India becomes a fling, then becomes a whirlwind romance. Ved knows he has to come clean with everyone -- Disha, Carlos, his parents -- but a paralyzing combination of denial and fear keeps him from doing it.

I personally liked how sympathetically Disha (the fiancée) was portrayed, and that she and Ved walked out of the mutual wreckage of their engagement still friends. I also liked that the resolution was 1000% dependent on Ved getting his shit together across the board, and not on any big romantic declarations. I'm a little squirrelly about how persistently Ved kept texting Carlos after their break-up, but I presume Carlos could have blocked Ved's number if he felt strongly about it. And I'm a lot squirrelly about Ved's choice of midlife crisis career change:

spoiler

a middle-aged businessman who has been out for two hot minutes doesn't seem the best choice for a counselor for queer youth.

Quick, enjoyable read, but obviously a non-starter for people who can't deal with cheating storylines, or characters who get stuck in a spiral of bad decisions.

Randall Munroe, What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions, 10th Anniversary Edition (2014, 2024)

In fact, these are silly answers to silly questions, typically answered with back-of-the-envelope precision, but it was an amusing read, and I learned some sciencey-engineery facts along the way. For the 10th Anniversary Edition, Munroe added annotations for where the march of time had (or sometimes hadn't) changed an answer, plus additionally answered what would happen if we increased everything by a factor of ten.

From the author of XKCD, and with illustrations and humour in the style thereof. I understand there's a sequel; I may check it out at some point.

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)

Oddly, I've never read this one before. It made its way into the same bucket as The Wizard of Oz during my childhood: I'd seen the movie, so I didn't need to read it.* (I did read the several dozen Oz books that came after the first one! But not the first one, because I'd seen the movie and that was good enough.**) But with Pride and Prejudice, it was even more pronounced: I hadn't seen "the" movie; I'd seen a good dozen or more of them! And read a bunch of tumblr-meta about the book. And... And...

And the book proved very familiar! I knew all of the beats, and many of the famous passages! But every once in a while there'd be a scene that I couldn't recall having seen in any adaptation--for instance, the one with Miss Bingley trying to annoy Mr Darcy into giving her attention as he writes letters. A delightful scene! That I couldn't recall ever having seen adapted! So there was definitely more nuance and detail on the page than I had osmosed over the decades.

And yet not that much more detail. I think this is the first time that I've ever read the book after seeing a movie adaptation, where I discovered I already knew what was going to happen on pretty much every page.

Still worth reading! Austen's prose is a delight, as always. And of course I was reading specifically for Colonel Fitzwilliam, who is mostly Character Not Appearing in the adaptations anyway. But for a book I'd never read before? It felt eerily like a book I had read before.

Alexandre Dumas (trans. by Anonymous), The Count of Monte Cristo (1844-1846)

Exactly the opposite experience! I knew there was a long imprisonment in the Chateau d'If, and thought I knew that he eventually dug his way out with a teaspoon, but that was it. Everything in here was new to me.

phoenixfalls, who has loved this book since childhood, quizzed me early on as to what I thought the book was about. "Adventure novel," I said. "Lots of swashbuckling and swordfighting and shit."

Spoiler: Unless I have forgotten something, there are exactly zero swordfights in this novel. Also, no swashbuckling to speak of, unless we count the intellectual swashbuckling of masterminding a multiple-decade revenge scheme with an absurd number of moving parts. Very sexy of him, that.

I read this as part of a one-chapter-a-day read-along, and enjoyed that experience very much--well, until I neared the end, and said "fuck that" and read six chapters a day until I finished it. (The read-along is still winding up as we speak.) I will say that even at a chapter a day -- which is a good clip! -- there was a section in the middle when there were Too Many Characters*** to keep track of, and I was fighting for my life to keep sorted who was whose daughter, engaged to whom, and also what everybody's name was now. At one point I had to put it down for two weeks to read another time-sensitive thing, and when I picked it up again, I needed to use SparkNotes to get myself oriented again, I was so lost. How the hell people managed when this was serialized weekly, I have no idea.

Some things I especially liked: ( spoilers ahoy! )

All in all, a very satisfying read. I'm a bit meh about Edmond/Haylee at the end, but there's something appropriate about the Revenge Twins pairing off to figure out what one does after successfully prosecuting one's revenge. I'm a little worried that in all of Edmond's masterminding, he didn't do any retirement planning: this is absolutely a guy who is going to go nuts in six months because he didn't take some woodworking classes before he retired. (I propose that he get Faria's manuscript published, and then go on a lecture tour, promoting and defending it.)

I'm not quite in the place where I want to start right over at the beginning again, but I do very much miss reading a chapter every day at lunch. And I am curious to know what it looks like on a second read, when one knows what Edmond is about.

--

( footnotes )

Today is the ten year anniversary of "Something Good (Will Come From That)", my retrospective of a hundred years of Holmes and Watson on film:

Watch on Vimeo

(Vid, commentary, FAQ, and timestamps on AO3.)

language_escapes and I spent a year making it, and a very good year it was. She turned down co-author credit, but I maintain this vid never would have happened with out her.

"Something Good" is ten years out of date now; that's especially apparent when I re-read the commentary. It's been good to see how many more versions of Holmes and Watson have come by in the interval. I'm particularly happy to have female and non-white Holmeses coming out of Korea and Japan: both of those were thin on the ground when we made the vid.

At the time, I thought of this vid as my masterwork, and despaired of ever making anything so good again! Mostly at a loss for what to do with myself, I kept on making things, and I'm happy to say there's been plenty of good stuff in the interim. Good stuff, new fandoms, and new fannish friends. There were even a few more vids!

So here's to

language_escapes and all my fannish friends, new and old, and a hundred years (plus ten!) of Holmes and Watson walking arm-in-arm.

In other, better news: my beta signed off on my revised (revised revised) ending for Langstroth on Bees! Yippee hooray hurrah! \o/

( In which I go on )

We still have the whole damn thing to edit, because it was written over (*checks notes*) twelve years, and I have leveled up as a writer hugely in that time, and... yeah. So we'll see how that goes.

BUT I HAVE OFFICIALLY STUCK THE LANDING. IF WE CAN GET THIS THING EDITED I AM GOOD TO GO. \o/

For

unsent_letters_exchange I was assigned to

luzula again, presumably on the strength of our sharing so many very rare fandoms. However, I thought Luzula might be entertained by receiving not-the-usual from me, so I decided to branch out into a new-to-me fandom, albeit one I was very familiar with via osmosis: Pride and Prejudice.

Luzula's request was for Elizabeth/Darcy/Colonel Fitzwilliam, inspired in part by

AMarguerite's Soulmark AU An Ever-Fixed Mark, an excellent series that I've read and enjoyed. However, I wasn't about to review a half-million words of fic for this assignment, and the request was officially for the novel anyway, so I figured I was in the clear to start fresh.

So I picked up the novel, read through the bit at Rosings Park (which contains all the Colonel Fitzwilliam material that exists in the novel), had a nifty little idea for a fic, and sat down to write it...

...and remembered halfway through that

unsent_letters_exchange is an epistolary exchange. (*looks askance at my story of Darcy and Fitzwilliam sitting around in their shirtsleeves without a pen in sight*) Whoops. Never mind, Luzula would enjoy it as a bonus story after reveals.

As it turned out, that false start ended up being a prequel of the (epistolary!) story I did gift her, which was a little bit awkward, because that required finagling my official fill so it could be enjoyed as a stand-alone, but I'm reasonably pleased with how it all came out.

Together, the series is called A Message Will Bring Me and features Fitzwilliam and Darcy in an established relationship, trying to navigate whether/how/on-what-terms Darcy proposes marriage to Miss Bennet. I may or may not add to the series someday; as it is, I have another partial story in draft and books on the shelf to research it.*

An Evening at Rosings

Pride and Prejudice
Darcy/Fitzwilliam, Darcy/Lizzy

Missing Scene, Polyamory, The Poignancy of Not Calling the Shots

He was not so attached to Miss Bennet as to feel a pang at yielding preference to his cousin, but to see Darcy so much in love… Well, it had always been a day that was coming: they would each find a wife, Darcy for an heir and Richard for a fortune, and that would be all.

Fitzwilliam and Darcy discuss Miss Elizabeth Bennet.

Another Opinion to Set Beside One's Own

Pride and Prejudice
Darcy/Fitzwilliam, Darcy/Lizzy

Missing Scenes, Polyamory, Metamours, Epistolary

If there is one comfort in all this, it is that you never had the opportunity to propose your arrangement to her. What a disaster it would have been if you could have had her but for your attachment to me…

Colonel Fitzwilliam's correspondence with Miss Bennet and his cousin Darcy.

Major props to

phoenixfalls, who insisted I go back and make both stories better (she was right, they are better), and to

grrlpup, for her willing ear and speedy copyedits.

----

* I asked the library for books on the Peninsular War. It tried to sell me on a bunch of Sharpe novels. Thank you but no. I need another long-eighteenth-century military fandom like I need another hole in my head.

unsent_letters_exchange opened last week, and authors are due to reveal later today. But first, let me recommend two stories to you.

Worth Waiting For
The Flight of the Heron
Keith/Ewen/Alison
Epistolary, Long Distance Relationship, Established Relationship, Gardens and Gardening

(no summary provided)

My gift, which makes use of the epistolary format to tease out the peculiar joys and frustrations of a long-distance relationship. Even among the frustration and pining and doubt, there is the anticipation of coming together at last, an anticipation that is almost as sweet as its fruition. The gardening metaphor is beautifully apt, and I especially enjoy thinking of Keith as a prickly artichoke--except that it's not the prickliness or bitterness of an artichoke that his lovers associate with him, but the long cultivation and anticipation. (Have they ever tasted an artichoke, I wonder? Will the prickles be a surprise?) Just a lovely story all around.

Beta Feedback
Vorkosigan Saga
Cordelia/Aral
POV Outsider, Documentation, In-Universe Film Criticism

Three columns, over five years, from the Betan paper of record.

Clever, twisty, multi-layered work in which Cordelia's adventures have been multiply adapted into holovids, and critics tear into them. I love the layers of interpretation and re-interpretation here, and the unreliable-narratorness of both the explicit and implied accounts of Cordelia's life. (Which raises the question of whether we should be taking Shards of Honor as a wholly reliable account...?) Just a hair over a thousand words, and just like any good journalism, makes every one of those words count.

There was a fun list of number-themed writing prompts going around tumblr the other day. (69 words of smut, 101 words about a dog, etc.) A friend over there has an affection for the game-theory passage in my Hornblower novel, Until Death or England Do Us Part.* Wanting to know if I have any other mathematical ideas up my sleeve, they prompted:

Write a 314-word fic that contains a mathematical concept.

Well. It just so happens that there's a bit of mathematical trivia about Hornblower that has burning a hole in the back of my brain for YEARS. Namely: the canonical fact that Hornblower, alleged mathematical genius who sometimes makes his living off of gambling, believes in the Gambler's Fallacy. (gifset of the relevant scene in the episode "Loyalty", but be assured, it comes straight from the novel.)

It's never been a big enough thing to hang a whole story on, but a 314-word ficlet? No problem.

Gambler's Fallacy by sanguinity

Hornblower novels; Hornblower TV
Horatio Hornblower, William Bush
Mathematics, Ficlet

Hornblower may be the alleged genius, but Bush's mathematical instincts are as good as anyone's.

Once again, it pleased me to let Bush be correct about the math. I know canon makes much of Hornblower's mathematical brilliance and Bush being a mathematical also-ran, but I would like to point out: one of these gentlemen passed his lieutenant's exam, and the other one famously did not. Bush may not be mathematically gifted, but I argue that he is competent. So there.

--

* For a discussion of the game theory bit of "Until Death or England", please see my DVD commentary, On Game Theory and The Final Problem. As advertised, it also discusses Sherlock Holmes.

Intro/FAQ

And we have come to my last day hosting for this round! As always, it has been a pleasure to hear what you've been working on and help cheer you on.

Starting tomorrow,

dswdiane will host for us! Everyone gang over there to finish the month!

My check-in: Held a ribbon cutting-ceremony for a new story by writing an alibi sentence. ("You have surely heard, Maria, that a Royal Navy captain is married first and foremost to his kraken?") Also wrote an AO3 summary for another story, and did some light editing on a third.

Day 15:

acorn_squash,

badly_knitted,

carenejeans,

chanter1944,

china_shop,

cornerofmadness,

dswdiane,

goddess47,

ofmonstrouswords,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

the_siobhan,

trobadora,

ysilme

Day 14:

acorn_squash,

badly_knitted,

carenejeans,

chanter1944,

china_shop,

cornerofmadness,

dswdiane,

goddess47,

ofmonstrouswords,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

the_siobhan,

trobadora,

ysilme

Day 13:

acorn_squash,

badly_knitted,

carenejeans,

chanter1944,

china_shop,

cornerofmadness,

dswdiane,

goddess47,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

the_siobhan,

trobadora,

ysilme

( More days )

When you check in, please use the most recent post and say what day(s) you’re checking in for. Remember you can drop in or out at any time, and let me know if I missed anyone!

Mark Russell (illus. Steve Pugh), The Flintstones, Vol. 1 & 2 (2017)

Two volume collection of Mark Russell's run of The Flintstones, in which Bedrock is a satire of late-20th-century US society. Fred and Barney struggle with the guilt of having participated in an unacknowledged genocide during their military enlistment; consumerism is rampant; the electorate is easily led; Mr. Slade and his rich friends are out for nothing but ever-increasing wealth; and the Church of Gerald is making it all up as it goes along. Guest appearances by Carl Sagan, Tony Danza, and the space aliens who use Bedrock as a party planet for spring break.

Weirdly poignant, uncomfortably on the nose, and I ache for Bowling Ball and his best friend the Vacuum Cleaner (an armadillo and miniature elephant, respectively--I'm a little surprised I can't find fic of them!) Also, someone had too much fun writing puns for all the background signs.

Mariko Tamaki (illus. Steve Pugh), Harley Quinn: Breaking Glass (2019)

Delightful graphic novel providing an alternate origin story for Harley Quinn, in which she is an at-loose-ends Gotham High School student, taken in (commendable) by a drag queen and taken in (reprehensible) by the Joker. Her best friend Ivy (who has not yet taken on he 'Poison' moniker) is a shining example of a teenage activist, working to save the neighborhood (and the drag queens, and the community garden) from gentrification, teaching Harleen about intersectionality and community organizing as she goes. The Joker, sheltered by his family's millions, walks away free at the end--or would have, if not for Harley deciding she has her own scores to settle...

Beautiful, understated art by Steve Pugh, and Harleen is an absolute delight. (She is also a nightmare child! But she is above-all a delight and a pleasure to have in ~~class~~ the drag club.) Sadly, this volume appears to be an outside-of-continuity one-off, because I would happily read more.

Ronald Wimberley, Black History in its Own Words (2017)

Cartoons of Black celebrities and historical figures, each with an inspiration quote of theirs. The art is simple and impactful, the quotes powerful, and the selection of figures is an interesting mix of people I was and was not familiar with.

Originally a series published at The Nib for Black History Month 2014 and 2015; Wimberley drew an additional series just for this book in 2017.

Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life, The Illustrated Edition: How Fungi Make Our Worlds (2023)

Author's abridgement of the original edition, but jam-packed with stunning photos of fungi, many taken with an electron microscope. I really liked that the edition was laid out to really let you enjoy the photographs (pages and paragraphs ended at the same time, making it easy to really look at a photo before you turned the page). Flipside, what I wouldn't have given for endnotes! Quite often the author mentions some cool thing in an offhand way, but you're left to do all the sleuthing on your own, with no hints as to sources. Maybe someday I'll read the full version, in order to get the more in-depth versions of all these stories.

Remy Charlip, Arm in Arm (1969)

Delightfully witty and playful picture book. Text and illustrations intertwine to craft narrative inversions of each other, and sometimes straightforward old-fashioned puns and jokes. A classic, and I'm rather surprised I didn't first encounter it on my mother's bookshelves.

Lois McMaster Bujold, The Vor Game (1990)

Another read-aloud-over-dinner-prep book. Re-read for me; first read for

grrlpup. Grrlpup and I skipped the early Miles novels because she struggles with MilSF, but we looped back to pick up this one before starting Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen. Vor Game is a stronger novel than I remembered, although there's still that strange shift in register between the Kyril Island and Hegen Hub sections. Grrlpup liked it because it has so much Gregor content (although she would have liked a lot more!)

Intro/FAQ

Starting on May 16,

dswdiane will host. That's two more check-ins here (this one + tomorrow), and then we'll all gang over to their place to finish the month!

My check-in: A couple of paragraphs, plus some notes.

Day 14:

Day 13:

acorn_squash,

badly_knitted,

carenejeans,

china_shop,

cornerofmadness,

dswdiane,

goddess47,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

the_siobhan,

trobadora,

ysilme

Day 12:

badly_knitted,

china_shop,

carenejeans,

cornerofmadness,

dswdiane,

glinda,

goddess47,

sanguinity,

trobadora,

Intro/FAQ

My check-in: Long brainstorming convo with my other cheerleader last night. If we have not solved my problems, we have clarified objective and means. Today I followed up 150 words of notes and 500 words of story.

Day 13:

china_shop,

sanguinity

Day 12:

badly_knitted,

china_shop,

carenejeans,

cornerofmadness,

dswdiane,

glinda,

goddess47,

sanguinity,

trobadora

Day 11:

acorn_squash,