cahn

So I'm back from seeing family, etc. and I read some (though not all) of Hugo stuff and I have a lot to talk about, but then about when I was excited to be able to interact on the internet again, I also managed to (somewhat stupidly) fracture a finger. Fortunately left hand. While I can still type awkwardly, I have to save most of awkward typing for work right now. So... just consider that I would like to respond to you, but most likely won't in any great detail for the next several weeks at least, bleh :( (though I'll be reading DW)

I have been kind of busy and have not been doing my Hugo reading as I should. But I finally got around to finishing at least the short stories and novelettes. Working on the novels, and the novellas are this big blank space for me right now. ( Novelettes and short stories: )

This book is about a nostalgic kid's TV show that... somehow... everyone remembers watching as a kid... but no one can actually find any information about it online or anywhere. (One of my favorite parts of the book are the found documents that sometimes arise after chapter breaks: a blog post or a wikipedia post or even once the notes of a fanfic!) The six kids who were featured on the show, now grown-ups, are having a "cast reunion."

The POV character, Val, finds out that she was one of the six kids, but she doesn't remember anything about it. Doesn't remember being on the show, doesn't remember what it was like, barely remembers the other kids -- only remembers a vast sense of guilt and shame, and knows that her dad hid both of them away for decades, but she doesn't remember why.

About midway through the book, the clue dropped for me. The clue was one of the grown-up kids, Jenny, saying, "This is the way to live, you know? In the world, not of the world." ( Thematic meanderings, no explicit spoilers. )

Spoilers for the end

Something I really liked about the ending is that it's been a long-standing complaint of mine that while it's a reasonably common trope of a main character ascending to become the wise mentor figure, that character is almost always male, ugh. Not this time, yeah!
(I also thought the fakeout, where Isaac becomes Mister Magic, was well done -- I was all "okay..." which quickly became "wait, what?" and "but...!")

It's a very fast and almost breezy read in style (if not not in content) -- it reads like YA, though the concerns of the characters, who are all grown-ups now, are adult.

In the Imperial Radch universe, Enae's life gets upturned from sie's previous circumscribed existence as sie is given the task to track down someone who has been missing for a couple of hundred years; at the same time, Reet struggles with never fitting in, and Qven grows up in a milieu that is alien to a human POV.

So for some reason, the only part of this I knew before starting was a little bit of Enae's opening dilemma. It was a much more complex and fascinating book than my priors made it sound! Which I should expect from Leckie; I love about her work that it always has a whole lot of threads running through it.

It's the sort of book where there are so many things I could talk about, but it turns out that I really only want to talk about a couple of things enough to type it out:

a) I really really like alien books from the POV of the alien, which probably says something about me, but anyway, I really like the idea that things look very different from the alien's POV and that they might have very different motivations and imperatives than a human in many ways. (This is something I loved about the Ancillary books.) This book kind of did that superficially -- Qven's upbringing is certainly very, very different than a human's and I enjoyed reading that (unsurprisingly, I especially enjoyed reading Qven's viewpoints about human scripts) -- but as the book goes on, I feel like it becomes clear that e's upbringing is just flat abusive and there's just nothing good or acceptable about it, which makes it much less interesting to me.

b) There is one character in the book that was absolutely my favorite -- who does try to do the right thing to the extent they are capable of, for no other reason than that they feel it's the right thing, as they are likely to not have gotten any reward or happy ending from it. I am speaking, of course, of ( Spoilers. )

I'm really glad this was Hugo homework, because like everything I've read by Leckie it was very worth reading. I still prefer Some Desperate Glory for the Hugo because it played to all my tropes, engaged even more with questions that really interest me, and blew my mind in ways that TS didn't, but TS would be a worthy Hugo winner, and I could totally see others preferring it to SDG.

Middle-grade graphic novel about eleven-year-old Avery Lee, one of seven children, as she navigates sibling conflicts (she really wants her own room, but instead her older brother gets his own room and her baby brother moves into the room she already shares with her sister), friendships (one of her best friends seems to be drifting away a bit), and family conflicts (there is the possibility they might move, which she really doesn't want to do). My 9-year-old niece brought this home from the book fair while we were visiting them, and I picked it up.

I really loved this book. I only had the one sibling, but I know a lot of people who have quite a few kids in their families, and this rang true to me in terms of both the good and the bad of having a large family. Avery is a realistic and sweet kid -- she gets into fights with her big brother where both of them are at fault and exchange harsh words (and apologize later), she loves art and wants her own room so that she can do her art without her younger siblings getting into it, she helps out her younger siblings and gets exasperated with them in equal measure.

Also, it's not made a big deal of (I don't think it's ever stated explicitly), but the Lees are Korean-American. And also the mom is in the process of becoming the major breadwinner (it's her job search that is driving the plot about the possible move) but it's also not a big deal, which I also loved.

I also read Allergic by the same authors because my niece happened to have that one around too, which I liked a lot as well but not as much as Squished, which I thought was richer both in story and art.

rachelmanija and I have a whole system now when a new Catriona book comes out: we are extremely excited and promise that we'll read it together ASAP, and then inevitably one of us is busy and the other one is busy and then Yuletide happens and then someone else has checked it out of the library and... BUT the stars finally aligned and we read it together during chat! (Actually kind of a while ago, but I'm really behind in book writeups.)

This is a kind of amazing book. First of all, a novel's worth of twists and turns is crammed into the first third of the book! (Which is largely its own self-contained novella, though it of course also sets up the rest of the book.) Honestly, the first third would have been a perfectly good story all by itself for any other author, but then the rest of it is -- well, both rachel and I kept chatting each other with connections we'd noticed and of course we were trying to figure out what was going on the whole time, and as the book went on we started chatting things like, "This is BONKERS!" and "WTF is all this?!" And a few pages left to go I was still like, "...how is she going to make everything work?" And then we got to the end and started teasing apart the strands of, wait a second, that means this, and this makes sense of that part... it was a wild ride!

I don't know that this is my favorite Ward -- I think Little Eve is still my favorite because I loved Eve and Christopher Black and how they related to each other so much, whereas I didn't feel nearly as strongly about these characters or their relations with each other (and in fact almost all of the characters are rather unlikeable -- one of them ends up being likeable, actually, but because of the way the book is structured it sort of becomes clear very late in the game). But I think it is the Ward book that I am most impressed by, because pulling that whole thing off really just clearly took so much skill.

Spoilers: discussing the end

The implications of the very end are so fascinating. How does it work for them to be in the book? How does Wilder communicate via typewriter?? The communication clearly implies he has some sort of independent agency; he's not just a character, once he's in the book. Also, I felt so bad for Wilder: he was much nicer than Sky(e) thought he was, and I like to think that in the AU where he'd actually had his future (in the outside world) that it would have turned out much better than Skye had imagined. (And what happens if Pearl writes a book with that AU?)

Also, there is a completely gratuitous severed finger in this book, and I am convinced she put it in specifically for our bingo board :PP (Oh, I suppose I should do content notes. Umm, there's a serial murder/murderer involved, and some non-explicit descriptions of same, and a very creepy doll made out of hair. Also at least one death occurring on stage. I don't think there was actually much animal harm in this book, surprisingly!)

A. really likes me to read books that he enjoyed, and will keep gently pushing until I do (including adorably setting up a little reading nook for me with a pillow and book holder), so along with many Diary of a Wimpy Kid books, I have now read the first Keeper of the Lost Cities books (and am maybe a quarter of the way through the second one).

I first became aware of these books maybe five years ago, when D's niece told me how much she loved them (which then led to a rather distressing conversation with D's sister in which she said she didn't see the point of fantasy -- I need hardly say that D does not share this sentiment -- and in which she was probably not expecting my passionate defense of fantasy; to be fair to her, she has not objected to my giving her daughters fantasy books for Christmas almost every year since then). I read the first chapter and could see the appeal. Sophie, the main/POV character, is a 12-year-old blonde genius with a photographic memory who can read minds; she has never quite fit in with either her family or her world. In that first chapter, she meets a mysterious and strangely attractive boy who reveals to her that she is not human, but an elf!!

Yes, it is basically every wish-fulfillment and Special Snowflake trope you could hope for, all rolled into one; I can see why it has such appeal for the middle-school age group (which this is solidly aimed towards). I stopped reading there. When E was in sixth grade these books swept over her class like wildfire, and even E. who is impervious to her peers tried them out and liked them; however, because E. does not care at all whether I read the books she likes or not, I didn't read more until A. wanted me to.

In subsequent chapters, Sophie is taken to live in the elven cities (it's not entirely clear to me or to my kids where these cities are... one of them is Atlantis but others seem to be sort of... on Earth but I guess hidden really really well or in a pocket dimension or something??) which feature the beautiful, super-intelligent, magical elves who all wear fancy clothes all the time, eat super delicious food all the time, and also where there are dinosaurs and other such exciting creatures. Sophie, of course, is Super Special even within elven society; her telepathy is so strong they've never seen the like before. I think my favorite part is the bit where Sophie has brown eyes, but it turns out that this is exotic in elven society, where everyone has blue eyes. (I note that the author appears to have brown eyes.) Anyway, she then goes to elven school ("Foxfire") where she takes classes, attempts to catch up to many years of living with humans instead of other elves, and makes friends with the other elven students, all while trying to figure out her mysterious backstory that other adult characters will allude to without actually telling her things except when she manages to figure out enough stuff to confront them.

(If this is giving you super Harry Potter vibes, well... yeah, I was getting those too.)

Elven society appears to be extremely classist. There are "nobles": whether you are noble seems to hinge on a) whether you can get into Foxfire, the school that trains nobles; b) whether you have a Special Ability (not all elves do; Sophie, of course, turns out later to have more than one); c) whether you can pass all your Foxfire classes. If you aren't noble, you have significantly less status, you can't be in the government and such, and other noble elves will be mean to you about it. Also, if your parents are a "bad match" (it has not yet been explained what that means), that also lowers your status dramatically. So maybe eugenics in there too? I don't know whether this will be followed up on or whether we're supposed to conclude from the fancy clothes and delicious food that everything is A-OK with the way the society is structured, though I suspect the latter. (There are certainly hints, and eventually more than hints, that the society is not entirely stable, although I don't think the instability has to do with the rampant classicism. Maybe I will be proved wrong in subsequent books, though.)

The target audience is definitely middle school, and an adult might, er, have other opinions (about elven society, say; or the parallels to HP) than the ones a middle schooler might have. But I will say that Messenger does write compellingly, and it wasn't nearly as much as a slog as I was fearing. Which is good because there are, like, 9 of these (so far), and I think A. wants me to read them all.

Some awesome historical RPF candyheartsex stories for meeeeee (or by me, in one tiny case) with historical characters! I'm just going to note whom the stories are about here. They are all so good!!

Anne Boleyn/Catherine of Aragorn
Frances Howard and Frances Coke (or: James I's court was basically a HOTBED of scandal, omg)

And two that are also historical RPF but also consistent with the Jude Morgan novel The King's Touch, which is an excellent historical novel narrated by James ("Jemmy") Scott, Duke of Monmouth, Charles II's illegitimate son.

Princess Henrietta of England (Charles II's sister and wife of Philippe I duc d'Orleans)
James of Monmouth/William/Mary

I have read Seven Surrenders!

I am glad that hamsterwoman mentioned in her Terra Ignota post that SS was really meant as the second half of Too Like the Lightning, because it really was. It's like TLtL carefully set up a lot of dominos, and SS... knocks them all down. It's pretty amazing to watch (well, read) and I'm glad I read it even though I suffered a lot from not reading the first one carefully enough (though I think if I'd read it as carefully as I needed to in order to catch everything, I'd never have finished, so it's just as well). Very curious as to what I'll think on a reread; this seems like the kind of series that well rewards rereads.

I don't have much really to say about it as a whole except "whoa, that ALL HAPPENED" but I have a few random thoughts:
-I feel like the prose is smoother and less, idk, irritating than I found the first book. Some of the mannerisms that annoyed me in the first book are toned down a lot in this one, like, Mycroft spends significantly less time explaining random Enlightenment stuff and praising Voltaire, and there are fewer times where he feels that, for example, he needs to have a literal conversation with the reader from his future. (Also, Émilie du Châtelet is namechecked in the acknowledgements, nice!)

-There was one point where Cornel MASON is speaking where I said to myself, "Palmer has read John M. Ford!" Now, I know she's friends with Jo Walton, and Walton has read JMF, so I'm not saying this in a vacuum either... but... yeah, I'd be shocked if she hadn't.

-After this book Utopia has now become my favorite problematic Hive, in the sense that I don't want to be a Utopian at all (it sounds completely exhausting!) but I am so intrigued by everything they do: their particular mode of surrender when confronted with the events of SS, their planning 150 years in the future (like... seriously?? modeling is clearly MUCH better in the future, lol!), their constant visor tagging of "how things could be better"... I would super like to know what's up with them. (The title of the fourth book makes me believe that we will find out more...)

Spoilers:

-BRIDGER! Gosh, poor kid. (I think I cared about him more than anyone else, as the only character who a) wasn't complicit in about five different plots at once and b) wasn't literally a god, even if he had godlike powers.) He even kind of says that he's fulfilled his element of the plot and now he's gonna off himself :(
(Mycroft, Bridger is not the protagonist as you said in TLtL, much as you would have liked him to be. He is the plot device :P Unless there's more about him later I don't know about :PP I mean, I guess we've had one resurrection already, why not two?)

There were two spoilery places where I was like, really?

-First: when Heloise talks about how they are super missing something in their society by not recognizing the old cultural constructions of gender, like the part where women are nurturing and men are manly, and they need to have a conversation about that. She says "Back when half the race identified as feminine it meant that half the race was devoted in some way to nurturing, peace, and charity, and we never developed a substitute for that."

I've read this bit about ten times now, trying to articulate what I disagree with, and after about my tenth read I guess... I don't disagree with most of what Heloise says. (For what it's worth, it seems pretty clear to me that Palmer meant to present this in an intentionally shocking way that would inspire disagreement -- because I also think it's the process of having the argument that Palmer is interested in.) I can see a lot of her points: maybe in a genderless world you don't have a world where half of everyone is devoted to nurturing, peace, and charity (and I do get her point that culturally that's sort of the effect of gender, and I can definitely see that if you got rid of gender all at once that the default might tend to be sort of a leaning-masculine sort of persona and not a leaning-feminine one), and maybe that's a problem, and maybe you DO need something to bolster that.

I think my point of remaining disagreement is that Heloise says things like "...the words are taboo so no one dares admit [the Cousins are "feminine"], and it feels like the Hive is weak and teetering. Of course it's teetering! The Masons would teeter if we banned the word 'Empire' and Gordian if we banned the word 'psyche'." I... don't really think this is how people and language work? People would come up with new words for the same concept. :P

Also, I feel like this ties into my wondering about the educational system and raising kids. Idk, I think either you have enough people who are "nurturing" that you are able to raise and educate the next generation, and then they also have role models who (one hopes??) teach them to be nurturing... or you don't? how does this society propagate itself at all if no one is nurturing enough to actually raise kids??

Heloise says, "Think of the Set-Set riots. How many fewer people might have died if the Cousins had felt free to say overtly why they were really upset? That their motherly feelings judged it inhumane to do such things to children. Without that vocabulary, the real cause of the conflict couldn't even be discussed!" I... do not agree with this AT ALL. First, any parent might think it inhumane to do Thing X to children. Also, there's another issue in there about "sanctity" of humanity and what we might think is humane vs inhumane that I think overlaps with this but which should be disentangled a bit, and which I think belongs more on the axis of conservative-liberal, if anything, than male-female.

Anyway, kudos to Palmer for making me so annoyed that I had to reread Heloise's speech several times to articulate the things I actually did disagree with, versus the things I thought Heloise was saying but that she actually isn't (for example, she never said that she thinks gender is necessary or that she thinks there aren't other ways of structuring society without it, but my first draft of this post assumed she did).

-Second: Madame being all "so, I did the amazing educational thing of raising a child with all philosophies/languages/beliefs at once and it produced Enlightened Man, which turned out to be a god." (Paraphrased, of course.) It's really unclear whether the narrative a) expects you to take this at face value b) expects you to believe that Madame's education made it possible for the god to appear in J.E.D.D. Mason, or c) is just something Madame is saying that is her belief but is actually not even kind of relevant to the god appearing and that we're not supposed to take at all seriously. I think (b). (I would prefer to think (c) but in that case I don't see any Doylistic reason why she's saying it to begin with.) In any case, this is the kind of thing where I honestly think Madame is deluded.

Because a) everything you teach is a choice. I don't care if you are being so very careful about giving all philosophies equal time or whatever, by teaching anything you are making choices about what you present and how you present it, that is just the way of things b) anyone, anywhere, who has ever been around kids KNOWS that kids literally have minds of their own and no matter how you construct their education, they are gonna come out with things that you didn't intend and that you didn't want to teach them (*) -- Madame thinks she's teaching disregard for social values by showing Jehovah "the people our world respects most, emperors and kings... fucking like animals," but honestly a kid is just as likely to get out of it something super unintended and possibly untrue, like "fucking is sacred" or, idk, "maybe only kings fuck, peasants reproduce via parthogenesis." Kids can come up with super weird things!
c) kids learn A LOT from other kids, and Madame said she could only do this once, so basically in order to run her experiment J.E.D.D. must have been isolated from any other children while he was growing up for this to work (because those children would have wrecked the experiment by being not steeped in this "all-philosophies" education). In fact, he must have been isolated from any other people who were not part of Madame's educational program. Which is NOT OKAY. Even Ferdinand of Parma was able to run away and have lower-class friends! Maybe the god was attracted to this poor kid because he was the loneliest kid in the world!

(*) All this makes me think of Ferdinand of Parma, or at least did once mildred_of_midgard reminded me what his name was, lol. To be fair childhood education has advanced a lot since then! Probably Madame did not beat her child! But... this is the kind of thing that can happen in real life in the Enlightenment Madame is so proud of, Diderot and all, when the kid doesn't end up thinking about things the way you want them to.

Anyway, I was satisfied by this one, and the question now is whether I will have to dive in to the next book (because I want to know what happens next!) or whether I will have to take a break first (because these books are also hard going!)

Peter Schickele died yesterday, at the age of 88. He was a composer in his own right, but I at least knew him primarily as the man behind P.D.Q. Bach, (1807–1742)? "the twenty-first of Johann [Sebastian Bach]'s twenty children," the composer of many hilarious musical parodies.

I was introduced to Peter Schickele / P.D.Q. Bach by the orchestra kids I hung out with freshman year of college (L, T, and F) -- it was L who made me sit down and listen to the 1712 Overture, clearly taking great delight in introducing a newbie to it. I went to listen to it tonight in honor of Peter Schickele and was so charmed to find that there is a live performance of the 1712 Overture on Youtube. (Non-Americans might benefit from listening to the tunes of Yankee Doodle and Pop Goes the Weasel first.) I also love Schickele's Eine Kleine Nichtmusik, which he did have under his own name.

I introduced D to P.D.Q. Bach when we were dating, and when I told him the news of his death, D said, "They should perform the Missa Hilarious at his funeral." RIP, you gave laughter to a lot of people. <3