What I've been reading

I read the latest two Roma Sub Rosa books and also the second collection of short stories. I'm still not sure what the materialistic explanation for some of the supernatural-seeming goings-on in The Judgment of Caesar is actually supposed to be, but I totally ship Cleopatra/Caesar/Ptolemy now. Bisexual incestuous threesomes are my preferred method of conflict resolution.

Then I was in a very Latinate mood and I flicked through X-Treme Latin, one of Henry Beard's collections of ridiculous things translated into Latin. I'm a sucker for any old dumb joke if it's translated into Latin. Also, 'SpongoRobertum QuadratoBracatum'.

I reread T-Backs, T-Shirts, COAT and Suit, which is still the only place I have ever heard or seen thongs referred to as "t-backs". Kind of middling Konigsburg, but I do like Chloë and her dieresis as a narrator. And at least all the items in the unwieldy list title are of equally great significance to the plot, unlike some other titles I could mention. Well, t-shirts are iffy compared with the others, but I'll let them slide.

I read/reread Neil Gaiman's Make Good Art Speech with the bonus fancy typography for gift-giving and such. It is very attractive as a physical object and it is a nice speech.

I read Holly Black's new middle-grade book, Doll Bones, which is nicely creepy but I felt like the kid characters were a little too self-aware or too articulate about being right on the cusp of being Too Old to Play With Dolls. It's a fine line to walk and I tend to prefer not saying anything outright that you can imply vaguely instead.

I read Why Read the Classics?, which collects the titular essay and 35 introductions/essays/bits of literary miscellany by Calvino, who is of course always interesting about anything, including the books I haven't read yet or never plan to.

I really enjoyed Inseparable: Desire Between Women in Literature by Emma Donoghue, an entertaining survey of implicit or explicit lesbians in literature, grouped into six categories or tropes: the Travesties (that is, cross dressers, in both directions), the Inseparables, the Rivals, Monsters, Detection and Out. I particularly liked that she included a lot of medieval and Renaissance materials, since that's one of my things.

The Shadow of the Sun is A.S. Byatt's first novel and the last one I hadn't read. My copy has a nice new introduction by the author, who is always good at writing about people who write and writing about her own writing. As for the book itself, well…it's like a dry run at the Frederica Quartet, only all the characters are seriously 100x more annoying. (I loved the Frederica Quartet, but let me tell you, it was certainly not because of how completely non-annoying the protagonists were.) Byatt is so worried about making her girl-who-goes-to-Cambridge character a Mary Sue that she goes overboard in the opposite direction, making her a dull and incurious slab. Meanwhile, the older academic who grooms her, seduces her, dominates her (although not, mysteriously, employing any of the breathlessly-alluded-to-but-never-elaborated-upon sadistic practices with which he makes his wife's life a misery during his affair with her), impregnates her and finally entraps her is so goddamn creepy that I could throw up. On the other hand, it is Byatt, so it is all beautifully written with lots of nicely observed little moments.

I also read On Histories and Stories, which collects some of Byatt's essays about writing, including her own.

What I'm reading now

I have this book, Antigones, which looks great, except the beginning is all about Hegel and I hate Hegel so it's kind of a slog.

What I'm reading next

If I knew, I'd probably be reading it now instead of posting here. I think I may just amputate this part of the meme in the future unless I have something specific in mind.

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I saw Star Trek this weekend with my dad and let me tell you, I have been dodging spoilers for this movie so long now that it feels wrong just reading those words without my eyes skittering off of them into a safe corner where the spoilers can't get me.

( Star Trek: Into SpoilersCollapse )

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What I've been reading:

I've been reading Steven Saylor's Roma Sub Rosa books and really enjoying them. I just finished #9, A Mist of Prophecies, and I've been really enjoying how the last few books have been shaking up the usual mystery formulas, not to mention the rise of Caesar. The only reason I'm not reading the next book in the series right now is that I'm waiting for one of my library's virtual "copies" to be "returned".

I reread Father's Arcane Daughter as part of my kick to reread all of E. L. Konigsburg's books after she died last month. I don't own a copy and had only read it once before, and I believe the last time I read it, I didn't anticipate the unexpected reveal and it left me cold. On reread, I was not paying enough attention and it is adequately set up and also a really good book.

I read China Court because I really loved In This House of Brede (the made-for-TV adaptation with Diana Rigg is merely okay, but it does have Diana Rigg in it, so) and also because Jo Walton namechecked it when she was talking about what she did with her book Lifelode, which I loved loved loved. This book is sort of like what L. M. Montgomery might have written if she was doing something really experimental with narrative structure.

I read The Tyrant's Law, the new book in Daniel Abraham's The Dagger and the Coin series, and it was as compulsively readable as the last two, although as the middle book in a five-book sequence (and not the third book in a trilogy as I had oh-so-mistakenly gotten into my head) it kind of has that middle-book feeling that the second book in a trilogy gets. I would totally recommend these books to fans of A Song of Ice and Fire, and also to people who feel like they would enjoy ASoIaF more if it involved less rapiness and more banking.

What I'm reading now:

I just started The Silver Pigs, the first book in another series of ancient Roman mysteries, which is also a hard-boiled detective pastiche. I have not yet decided how well this combination is working. (To be fair, it is the first book and it may come to work better.)

What I'm reading next:

Well, the rest of the Gordianus the Finder books, when I can get them. Also I have a collection of Damon Runyon stories from the library that I've been wanting to reread since I watched Cinderella Man (which frankly could have used a little more Runyon in the script department).

Also I want someone to read Dan Brown's Inferno for me and summarize how terrible it is wittily.

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I saw the poster for this in the window of Barnes & Noble and nearly swooned with horror, and with no Virgil there to catch me, either.

This, of course, means it's time for another round of the Inferno Game, where you decide in which circle of Dante's hell to place your least favorite people. I'm definitely eying one of the Malebolges here; they're so tempting when you're playing the Inferno Game, because there are so many of them with such precise distinctions and anyway when you're sufficiently vexed with someone to start thinking about which circle of hell they would be sent to there is generally an element of fraud involved.

I think Dante might have opted to place Dan Brown with the sowers of religious divisiveness for bamboozling so many credulous readers with the weaselly truth claims attached to his ridiculous me/Jesus's hot super-great-granddaughter Mary Sue fantasy, although really, Dante is not well-placed to criticize other people's religious Mary Sue fantasies. I'm more inclined to put him in the adjacent evil pouch with the misusers of rhetoric, since my real problem with his Mary Sue fantasies is that they are terrible.

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You know when you find yourself deep in the throes of a shiny new crush on someone and you realize that you now find absolutely everything about them comprehensively adorable and have lost all ability to form disinterested opinions?

And you also know how sometimes you're reading the tumblr tag for one half of your OTP¹ and people are posting tweets from the famous actor who played him in a recent movie adaptation and from there you start reading his twitter and it's so dorky and funny and charming that you kind of have to follow him and track his tumblr tag and your Downloads folder keeps filling up with pictures of his stupid face³ and there is literally no movie of his that you will not watch and you have already somehow worked your way through like half of them?

Okay, maybe that is slightly less of a universal experience. But it happened to me! I feel vaguely silly, because, like, I wasn't even interested in Russell Crowe before, and it's not like I wasn't aware of him before, WTAF.

Luckily for me, my friend Bev has been extremely supportive as I've succumbed to this debilitating Russell Crowe obsession, fielding emails from me at all hours saying things like, "Bevy, Russell Crowe is tweeting ridiculous things and I can't even," "Bevy, Russell Crowe is telling stories on the Gladiator commentary track about how Joaquin Phoenix basically tried to dubcon him into a D/s relationship so he could get into character and why has no one written Russell Crowe/Joaquin Phoenix porn," "Bevy, Russell Crowe hasn't tweeted anything in like an entire day and I can't even," "Bevy, I just watched this movie where Russell Crowe is in a love triangle only other two members are horses."⁴

The latter emails basically spiraled into fully-fledged recaps which have been privately circulating and which I am informed that I should share with a wider audience, so I hear and obey. I feel like they really should be properly chronological, but I've already been watching movies in a completely whimsical order and I'm waiting on interlibrary loans for DVDs of some of them anyway, so I'll probably end up posting them chronologically in the order that I've been watching them instead of anything more sensical.

Either way, consider this your advanced warning about my new fandom.

(Look, his tweets have fanart! It is totally a fandom!)


¹ Because stupid tumblr tags don't support slashes for pairing names² and anyway he only has the one name, which he reminds people of constantly, so he's easy for people to tag consistently.

²Tumblr and the rest of smushname-using fandom seem to have since coalesced around "Valvert", which sounds like an aftershave or a 19th century French cheese food product, but I'll use anything to get my Valjean/Javert fix.

³I totally made icons out of this entire photoshoot. If I were only allowed to have four icons these would totally be my icons.

⁴The Silver Brumby (AUS) / The Silver Stallion (US). Seriously.

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Yay, Doctor Who is back! I seriously considered changing the SSID of our wifi network, and then I remembered how hard it was to get my main and remote base stations into a relationship with each other so I did not do this.

( Mild Who spoilers.Collapse )

Game of Thrones is also back! By the beginning of A Storm of Swords we have hit the point where it takes an entire one-hour episode just to check in with all the characters/locations and say hey, so this was that episode. I was amused by ( spoilers for minor but show-only sceneCollapse ).

Let me see, right now I'm also following Castle, Psych, Revenge, Community and Arrow, with varying levels of enthusiasm, and I think I'm also going to be forced to look into this Vikings show I've seen so much about.

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I needed some heavy-duty relaxing this weekend, so I took a bath with my third-best copy of Trojan Gold. (What, you don't hoard multiple copies of your favorite books? I mean, you can't take your only copy of your favorite book into the bath!)

This, naturally enough, prompted me to look for more recordings of BWV 140, which led to the happy discovery of John Eliot Gardiner's Bach Cantata Pilgrimage. Their version of Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme is so lovely that I just had to share.

Also, because I share Vicky's taste in theologically-deficient misprisions of the text and because I am secretly still twelve, I really love the other aria in the cantata, where the soprano (the soul) sings "Wenn kömmst du?" and the bass (Jesus) sings "Ich komme!" ;)

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In my capacity as family systems administrator, I decided that now was the time for our family to sign up for a VPN so we can internet in peace without being harassed by the brain trust who sent Google a nastygram demanding that they stop linking to the flagrant pirates of HBO content at HBO.com.

A very welcome side effect is that I am now able to use the BBC iPlayer with a UK IP address, which provides access to material that I was missing out on through other channels, namely, University Challenge. All these memories of my quiz bowl glory days are flooding back. I have made those faces while questions were being read to me! I have leaned left and right, trying to get answers to bonus questions from my three teammates around me! I have thrown out answers that I had no confidence in, only to be pleasantly surprised that they are correct! I have delivered those rueful 'I don't know's when I didn't even have a bad guess!

It's too bad we no longer have televised College Bowl in the U.S. where it originated, because I would like to watch it. On the other hand, our college bowl shenanigans would have gone down way differently if there were cameras and we had to give our real names.

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I happened to wind up at the gym at the exact time to catch the last twenty-five minutes of the Firefly episode "Trash" on the Science channel (which, apparently, shows science fiction, which I suppose is logical, since the SciFi/SyFy/Syphilis channel shows "reality" shows about ghosts). This made me happy, because the last twenty-five minutes of Trash contains my single favorite scene in the entire show, and then made me sad, because it reminded me that virtually nobody ships Simon/Jayne, and worse still, the vanishingly few people who do ship it incorrectly.¹

I mean, I can readily see why it's a niche pairing. People might prefer Simon and Jayne in canon pairings, such as Simon/Kaylee, Simon/River, Jayne/Vera, or Jayne/his bunk.² I can also see why there is virtually no toppy!Simon, because pretty much every main character, reoccurring character, or extra on the show would top⁴ Simon in their actual or theoretical relationship. I'm not 100% certain that Simon could top a Tupperware container.

Except. Except. He completely dominates Jayne in the scene in the infirmary at the end of Trash. Comprehensively. Effortlessly. There is no way in which Simon is not in control, from his physically paralyzing Jayne so they can have this little chat to his utterly calm assertion that no matter what Jayne does, Simon will never ever harm him, that he will be trusting Jayne and that Jayne should do likewise. I find this utterly, scorchingly hot.

And yet no one ever writes them like that. Or if they have, I have yet to find it. This makes me sad like the end of Serenity.<sup>5


1</sup>Which they are entitled to do! I mean, they're completely wrong. But if they enjoy being wrong, they should feel free to do so.

²Yeah, I don't really ship Jayne with. You know. People.<sup>3

3</sup>This pairing being something of an exception, obviously.

⁴Here used in a very loose sense to indicate a whole range of behavior ranging from mild sexual assertiveness to formalized D/s regardless of sexual positions employed, if any.

⁵Yeah, I know, I should write it myself. But I'm really, really lazy!

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I have an entire playlist now that is just different versions of 'The Confrontation'. I pretty much think that everything would be better with men fighting while they sing angrily about their feelings. Not gonna lie, the film version is kind of my favorite because of the audible fighting in the background. Rawr. And then there's the live versions where Hugh Jackman and Russell Crowe serenade each other like precious musical boyfriends, which are differently adorable.

Also I don't have any Javert/Valjean icons yet so I keep using my Sark/Vaughn icons which is actually working for me on multiple levels.

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