Reading

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The Secret History - Donna Tartt

I saw this in the bookstore on Friday while I was idly browsing for something to buy so I didn't just walk out with my drink from the cafe and nothing else, and I remembered that I had meant to read this for a while. By Sunday night, I was done with all 500+ densely typed small-print pages.

I needed something different from the light, forgettable books I've read so much of in the last few months, and this definitely filled that need. It was absolutely immersive in the best way. The writing is gorgeous, not just on the wordcraft level (although that, too; this book is a lavish feast of description) but also thematic and structural and just generally ... good! Good in the way where you feel that every choice was deliberate, every thematic styling meaningful. It was a really good book about incredibly compelling, terrible people. I did almost nothing on Saturday except read this book.

Also, in a twist that will surprise no one, it made me think of Babylon 5 in a couple of very specific ways. I'll put that at the end.

The other thing it reminded me of was The Great Gatsby, which .... knowing that the book is almost 40 years old and has been widely dissected, I don't know if this is something that's been talked about to death (is it widely known by basically everyone that it's sort of a Gatsby retelling? is that like the most obvious of obvious comparisons) but in any case, it was a similar reading experience (for me) of being slam-dunked into a world of terrible rich people who I want nothing more than to follow and find out what new entertainingly terrible thing they'll do next.

Also, the narration is lovely. This book has some shatteringly beautiful descriptions of fall/winter/spring in New England.

( Spoilers galore, I mean really, so many spoilers )

( Babylon 5 vs The Secret History )

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Batman: Secrets #5

( Scans under the cut... )

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Strength within Sorrow: minoanmiss’s Online Memorial

I attended minoanmiss’s online memorial yesterday afternoon. It was strengthening to share our sorrow. Witnessing the depth of our online connections bolstered my resilience. The children she co-raised loved her and knew her. I’ll link to the recording when it’s public.

~~One mourner~~ werpiper worked in public health for 40 years, and made it very clear that

minoanmiss had asymptomatic COVID which caused her death
that wasn’t documented in the hospital record and there’s almost zero chance to change that
many people are still dying due to COVID, which is systematically not being reported
continuing to mask is a fundamental contribution we can make to the health of our communities

The full text is at archiveofourown.org/works/82932386

There were lovely stories and slides and recipes — a poem and a song in the cut.

( Every Land and Acts of Creation )

ETA 21 April 26 to add in werpiper's pseud and text

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Yesteryear, by Caro Claire Burke

Natalie is a wildly successful trad wife influencer. She and her husband Caleb have a farm and six adorable children, and Natalie has parlayed carefully edited clips of her perfect life into a lucrative career. (She leaves out the two nannies, 30 farm hands, and the fact that Sassafras the cow is actually four sequential cows, replaced every time one dies, like goldfish.)

Then Natalie suffers a mysterious fall from grace. And then she finds herself in what appears to be an alternate version of her own life in the 1800s, with a husband very similar but not quite identical to her original husband, and children who claim to be her own. Has she time traveled? Is she delusional? Has she gotten kidnapped into a non-consensual reality show?

This is an extremely interesting novel that makes a good companion to Saratoga Schrader's Trad Wife. The beginning of the book is extremely similar, though Natalie is much more successful than Camille. Burke's version of a trad wife influencer deluding herself and lying to her followers about her supposedly perfect life is much better-written than Schrader's. But that's a double-edged sword, because it makes Natalie much more unlikable. She's an incredibly hatable character and the book is from her POV, and that makes a lot of the book not really enjoyable to read.

But the book turns out to be much more ambitious and clever than it seems at the beginning. When I finished it, I was glad I'd read it and appreciated it a lot. That being said, I enjoyed Trad Wife more on an emotional level.

I highly recommend not clicking on the cut unless you're 100% positive you'll never read the book. I really enjoyed the non-spoiled experience.

( Read more... )

Content notes: Domestic violence, rape (on-page, graphic), child abuse and neglect, farm animal neglect/poor caretaking (just mentioned), gaslighting, non-consensual drugging, current American right-wing stuff.

While attempting to buy Saratoga Schaefer's Trad Wife, I accidentally bought a different novel called Trad Wife by Michelle Brandon. And Sarah Langan is coming out with yet another book called Trad Wife in September. I am now on a mission to read all four trad wife books, to compare and contrast.

Current Mood: awake

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Weekend notes

In a fit of optimism, The Boy and I planted some cherry tomato seedlings behind our condo. Neither one of us has any knowledge or experience of vegetable gardening, so we're going by random internet advice and hoping that the San Diego climate will make up for our inadequacies.

Saturday morning, we went hiking in Torrey Pines, which has been reopened again after being closed all winter "to improve the trails." If there was any actual improvement, we didn't see it, but it was still an excellent hike, with lots of great wildlife views, including a Gray Whale hanging out unusually close to shore. We also spotted three brush rabbits at different spots along the trail, and a flock of migrating lazuli buntings.

( all photos courtesy of The Boy )

Staycay!

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

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Bialya With Seeds in the Center: JLE #30, JLA #55 (JLI 82)

JLE Giffen-Jones-Robertson, JLA Giffen-DeMatteis-Wozniak.

Storytelling is as much about what you don’t include as what you do. Giffen and company were often inspired in terms of what they left out or minimized. This appealed to a smart audience who could fill in the blanks.

But sometimes you leave too many blanks. Sometimes you cross the line between making your reader an enthusiastic participant in the storyline and making them wonder why they’re doing all your work for you.

___ ______ ________ ______ _______, and that’s why this final Queen Bee of Bialya storyline leaves too many blanks. ( ____________ __ __ ____ _____ ____ ___ _____ _______ __ ____ ___ __, ___ ______ ___ _______ ____ _____ ________ __ ____ ____ ____ ___ __ _________, _______ __ _ _____ ________ ___ _____ ____ __ ___ ______! ___ _________ ___ _____ ___ ____ ______… )

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Gail Simone presents April 'Pool's Day

Yeah, I only bought this because of that variant cover (by Mike Spicer). But hey, the interior isn't bad!

( Read more... )

Current Mood: awake
Current Location: House in the woods at the edge of town
Current Music: Tinderly Twitch stream

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Sam Heughan of 'Outlander' at the NYC Tartan Day Parade 1

Watch on YouTube

FFA DW Post #2463 - I like my metaphors like I like my PIs: hard-boiled, hard to crack

... and unsure of whether or not it came before the chicken.

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exchange:misc

Space Swap

Space Swap revealed today, and I got a lovely gift!

Not Their Hero (Murderbot books, gen, 9K!!)
SecUnit and Gurathin accompany Ratthi to a scientific conference, where they end up accepting a request for assistance against a corporation. It goes about as well as one might expect, given Murderbot's history.

I was amazed and delighted to find out that I had received a 9K gift, and it was a great time - plotty casefic with a dash of h/c, very canon-feeling, with interesting OCs and worldbuilding, fun character dynamics, and a great Murderbot voice.

(I have *no* idea who wrote this and cannot wait to find out.)

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Resident Evil Requiem [2026]

Resident Evil Requiem (2026)
[ leon s. kennedy ]

[ here @

axisandallies ]

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Erin Watches: Wonder Man

Finally got a chance to see the Wonder Man TV series.

(It’s already renewed for season 2, which is delightful to see. Come on, MCU, let more of your characters have ongoing arcs again.)

Spoiler-light reactions:

It’s good! Funny, charming, with a great weird-but-somehow-it-works (even in spite of [spoiler]) friendship between the two leads.

There were a couple episodes where I was bracing myself for some heavy embarrassment squick, and then the scene went in a whole different direction and didn’t hit it at all. Refreshing.

I kept expecting Trevor Slattery to be the full-blown “Planet of the Apes was amazing, they taught monkeys to act!” doofus we saw in Shang-Chi’s movie, and he’s not. Still a bit of an airhead, lots of fun comic relief, but he’s surprisingly competent when he makes an effort. The character is consistent enough otherwise that it works if you headcanon he was high for most of the movie — the show even goes into his backstory about problems with getting high on-set, which fits right in.

There’s a side character who has a connection to the Darkforce! Nobody in the show uses the word — none of them are in a position to know it’s called that — viewers can just recognize it from other Marvel properties. (Other MCU appearances, even.)

I always like this kind of sidebar, making the MCU feel textured and lived-in. It’s not solely populated with Main Characters, who get cool dramatic origin stories and end up joining the Avengers. It’s filled out with bit characters, who also sometimes touch the improperly-sealed hazardous waste in a Roxxon dumpster, they just mostly keep doing their day jobs with bonus superpowers.

We get some nice leveraging of “Disney can freely put references to Other Things They Own in Marvel shows now.” A+ use of Josh Gad, no notes.

Since we’re already guaranteed another season, and since the status of [spoiler] is left a mystery at the end, I’m sorta hoping Simon will end up rescuing them in S2. Not setting my hopes too high — we don’t see him actively planning this rescue, or even thinking he could do it — but it would be thematically very satisfying if he eventually figured it out.

—

…So the rest of this post is complain-y.

In the sense of “the show missed opportunities to do these cool things,” not “the show did bad things and I’m mad about it.”

One of the main plot threads is, Simon Williams is trying out for the lead role in a remake of the (in-universe) 1980 Wonder Man movie. Other characters pay some lip service to the idea of “updating a vintage superhero story for the modern age will be a great opportunity to reflect on the change in culture, now that superheroes are just a part of our everyday lives.”

And then…we never see that in action. How does the writing change? How do everyday people in the MCU react to a fictional superhero in the post-Blip world? We have no idea!

It would’ve been so easy to give us a clip of, say, J. Jonah Jameson ranting against “Hollywood liberal pro-superhero propaganda.” But nope. Nothing.

The movie itself doesn’t have much to do with Avengers-type superheroes anyway. It’s straight out of the Buck Rogers/Flash Gordon genre: a man from Earth gets stranded on another planet, has swashbuckling space adventures, rubber-suit aliens get shot with ray guns, etcetera. If anything, that’s a setup for a cultural commentary on human-alien relations, now that “alien refugees are the ones stranded on Earth” is also a part of MCU humanity’s everyday life.

But the show isn’t interested in exploring that either.

All we really know about the movie is enough to establish “Simon and Trevor are auditioning for the roles of two characters whose relationship mirrors their real-world relationship.” Look, as a narrative parallel crafted by the MCU writers, that’s fine. But in-universe it’s a coincidence, and I still want to know what decisions those writers are making, how their job is shaped by the world they’re in.

Also! Simon is auditioning to play a human character stranded among aliens. This is the perfect setup for him to worry “what if the reason I have superhuman powers is, I’ve been an alien stranded among humans this whole time?” Trevor…okay, Trevor is still doofy enough not to think of it, but agents at the DODC should’ve had the same suspicion. When grade-school Simon first showed super-strength, his parents should’ve worried “did the hospital accidentally switch our biological son with a secret baby Asgardian?”

Again: no! This whole obvious question is never floated by anyone.

Note that 616 Wonder Man doesn’t have much in common with either of these guys — Wonder Man the 1980s space adventurer, or Simon Williams the present-day Haitian immigrant with a struggling acting career.

This isn’t inherently a bad thing (after all, 616 Steven Grant doesn’t have much in common with either Steven Grant the Indiana Jones knockoff, or Steven Grant the present-day London gift-shoppist)…

…But I really wish the 1980s movie character was just a direct riff on comicverse Simon Williams. That way, it would be so easy to make contrasts with “the career in-universe writers imagined a super-powered guy would have in the 1980s” vs “the career in-universe writers imagine for a super-powered guy in the post-Blip MCU” vs “the career a real super-powered guy is having in the post-Blip MCU.”

Current Music: Cornershop, "Brimful of Asha"

From the morning past the evening to the end of the light

I had to quit out of this afternoon's virtual memorial for

minoanmiss right after the singing of "Lift Ev'ry Voice" in order to meet my mother for advance birthday baking, but I got to hear remembrances in the form of stories, poems, an illuminated manuscript of a slide show, a painfully pertinent lesson in public health, songs both folk and filk, and people just talking with love and grief and anger that she need not have died; she did not consent to the sacrifice. She had formed an incredible constellation of interests and affections that her mourners flared to life. It is just that one wants the person herself and not only the space left between her stars.

In memoriam: the braided liberation of Anthony Russell and Veretski Pass' "Lift" (2018). The queer shift of Jake Blount's "Where Did You Sleep Last Night" (2020). Kadra Ahmed-Omar in late-nineties Goth haute couture. A Graeco-Armenian papyrus from late Roman Egypt. Apparently people need reminding that Carthage was bad-ass. The election news from Hungary. The full-body college flashback I experienced on hearing Aimee Mann's "Say Anything" (1993) on WERS. Earth.

I cried when I got off the Zoom and then I made myself a bowl of angel hair pasta with lemon and pepper and sardines and thinking of food among her love languages went off to turn a recipe into a savory pie. I am glad she was remembered so well and so fully. I will always want to have seen her art for Artemis II.

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fandom: other tv

The Other Bennet Sister (2026)

Whoever wrote this has read a non-zero amount of The Comfortable Courtesan.

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Clay's Ark by Octavia E. Butler (1984)

In the grim future year of 2021, safety is found only in certain walled communities, while lawlessness prevails in outlying areas. While driving through the California desert to visit family, a doctor and his twin teenaged daughters are captured by members of an isolated cultlike group whose founder was the sole survivor of a deep space mission to Proxima Centauri. The prisoners expect to be killed if they don't escape, but it might be even worse—the former astronaut and his followers carry an alien pathogen that gives them strange powers and bizarre compulsions, and they want to infect their three captives.

This was the last-published book in the Patternist series, but the third one I've read, as I'm following the suggested chronological reading order. I was warned that in this reading order it's totally opaque how this book relates to the others, which certainly is the case! The only apparent connection is Clay Dana, a minor character from Mind of My Mind who is said in this book to have invented interstellar travel using his psionic abilities. But the other characters don't seem to be aware of the telepathic Patternists as a group, so it seems that in the intervening decades they've managed to continue influencing society without fully revealing themselves.

Reading it basically as a stand-alone, the book seems to be about what it means to be human. It questions the dichotomy of human and monster, as the "ordinary" humans of the lawless desert prove more brutal and violent than the infected half-aliens are. The characters assume that allowing the pathogen to spread across Earth would be a bad thing, but when you see what human society is becoming, you wonder if altering more people's nature might be an improvement.

I felt that the book was too long, which is surprising at just over 200 pages. The characters are strongly written (as expected from Butler) but I think there might be too many of them, and sometimes the same events are needlessly reiterated from multiple POVs. I also had trouble with the level of violence. I didn't think it was gratuitous since it seemed necessary for the book to make its thematic points as I understood them; violence is just hard for me to read and there's a lot of it here, including rape and the constant threat of rape.

It'll be interesting to see how my perspective changes once I've read the whole series and seen what readers knew of the Patternist universe when these prequels were published. Worth noting that I will indeed be reading Survivor, a book in the series that's been out of print for ages because Butler apparently hated it. Very curious about that one.

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Hockey RPF: You're the One That I Want by thehoyden

Fandom: Hockey RPF
Characters/Pairings: Sidney Crosby/Evgeni (Geno) Malkin, Alexander Ovechkin, Shea Weber, Joe Thornton
Rating: Explicit
Length: 15,934
Content Notes: no AO3 warnings apply
Creator Links: thehoyden on AO3
Themes: Arranged marriage, First time, AU: royalty, Secret identity

Summary: It’s actually his father who suggests it.

“Take the rest of the summer for yourself,” he says. “Do something fun.”

“Fun,” Sidney repeats blankly.

Reccer's Notes: I'm into hockey fics now! This is a classic, already reccd here ages ago and worth revisiting. It's a royalty AU with added hockey, which is where Sid meets Geno. There's a fun, hot and charming initial romance, then Sid has to get on with his life of obligations, including the frustrating search for a suitable royal-lineage husband to cement political ties. Ultimately, love wins, of course, and it's a satisfying, well written story.

Fanwork Links: You're the One That I Want (locked to AO3)

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A cunning plan

It's really too early for me to feel like doing a full Babylon 5 rewatch yet, so instead I had a possibly cursed idea, which is to watch IMDB's top 10 and bottom 10 rated episodes and report back on them. And in fact I think I am going to do exactly that.*

*Unless I get distracted by something along the way, as often happens.

The best/worst lists are hidden in case you want to preserve the element of surprise.

The 10 best episodes according to IMDB, starting at the top

1. Severed Dreams 3x10
2. War Without End Part 2 3x17 (Since Part 1 is also in the top 10, I'm just going to watch them together, I think)
3. Z'ha'dum 3x22
4. Endgame 4x20
5. Sleeping in Light 5x22
6. The Long, Twilight Struggle 2x20 (By about this point I will probably have died of Drama and Tragedy. RIP me.)
7. Point of No Return 3x09
8. The Coming of Shadows 2x09
9. The Fall of Night 2x22
10. War Without End Part 1 3x16 (will be combined with part 2)
11. No Surrender, No Retreat 4x15

This looks fun! (For Babylon 5 values of fun.)

And as an escape from all of these heavy episodes, apparently I will be watching, in order of worst to ... slightly less worst:

IMDB's lowest rated

1. TKO 1x14
2. Infection 1x04
3. Secrets of the Soul 5x07
4. The Gathering 1x00
5. Grey 17 is Missing 3x19
6. Grail 1x15
7. The Long Dark 2x05
8. Strange Relations 5x06
9. The War Prayer 1x07
10. Survivors 1x11

Genuinely surprised that they're not even all from season one and five! Absolutely unsurprised that most of them are! I do genuinely like some of these, and at least one of them, I skipped most of when I was originally watching season one, so it will be interesting to see what I think of it now.

Not starting this tonight (probably) because I have other things to do, but Soon™.

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rl: fandom

Fannish Update

I still haven't found a new fandom to immerse in.

FTH 2026 is proceeding apace:

~ 3,371/5k - 1st auction (Doctor Who)
~ 2,350/5k - 2nd auction (Multi-fic fulfillment [thank you so much, recipient!] that has a completed Highlander fic. Toying with my options for the next part.)
~ 2,030/5k - 3rd auction (Also Multi-fic fulfillment, but all will be DCU comics)
~ 3,006/5k - 4th auction (Star Wars, pre-Prequels era)
10,757/20k - OVER HALFWAY!

I only have one work in progress, a sequel to a previous fic, that is going to be at least twice the length of the original. Just having too much fun playing with different dynamics for the Do'Urdens.

I think, given how much my new Queensryche playlist is soothing me, I am going to be making more dedicated artist playlists. As many of my FAVORITES still have albums I can't stand, or songs I skip every time. Corey Hart will likely be the next one I make in this fashion.

Trying to decide what book to read again. No, nothing new. I am... not coping with new books. I need a tried and true. Clan of the Cave Bear was very happy-making to revisit, but not sure I want to read any of the others. Maybe a McCaffrey or a Heinlein... or back to Barsoom again.

Sense8 rocked my socks. Some difficult moments to get through, but then Black Sails was the same. No fic vibes in my soul for either fandom. Hey, wait, maybe I can start watching Ted Lasso and see what happens, since I already drabble in it.

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Crossover Galore Challenge

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