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Big backlog on reviews, but will work on it.
My daughter has consented to watch ST:TOS and I am constantly dumbfounded by Shatner's luminous beauty, always sweating/glowing under the studio lights, giving him a dewy masculinity that's such a huge contrast to the other, craggier male castmembers. He's even regularly lit like a femme fatale, a band of light across his eyes, though they don't blur the lens for him the way they do when a young woman is the only one in frame. (Uhura gets the blur, I was deeply relieved to see; she and Spock are already my daughter's favorites.)
Foz Meadows, A Tyranny of Queens: Didn’t realize this was a sequel until I started; a young Australian girl has returned from a magical land that transformed her—she spoke with dragons and became a queen—and her family thinks she’s traumatized from abduction and perhaps assault. As she becomes more convinced that her home is no longer safe for her, the world she left is still in trouble because of a rogue queen seeking to expose the secrets that keep the worlds linked but separate from one another. That part was less interesting to me, which might have been because I missed the first book; the matriarchal culture with lots of multiple-person political marriages that didn’t have to involve sex was interesting, but I never quite got into it.
Jane Austen, Emma: Never read it before, but glad I did at last.
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey: Ok, yes, it’s cruder than her later works, but I loved it. Austen the narrator is so archly present, so willing to bring us in on the joke but so fond of her subject—she begins with a defense of reading novels!—that I had a rollicking good time with a gothic romance with no actual threat in it at all.
Jane Austen, Persuasion: Another one where it’s obvious why it’s not the most famous or beloved, but takes domestic struggles (of the rich) quite seriously while also making room for the things their class position enables them not to see.
C.L. Polk, The Midnight Bargain: In a patriarchal society that collars female mages to prevent their unborn children from being possessed by spirits, a young woman studies magic and hopes to avoid collaring with the help of the secretly printed grimoires for women. There’s love and loyalty and, possibly my favorite, dedication to helping people put above personal romance. It’s generally good fun though perhaps a bit sanguine about the easiness of big social change.
Chuck Wendig, Blackbirds: Miriam’s talent allows her to see how people will die, but not to do anything about it. She survives on the road mainly by robbing the newly dead. When a grifter figures out her ability, he plunges her into deadly danger; meanwhile, the nice trucker she met is going to die shortly, saying her name. Gritty noir horror-ish story, edging towards crapsack world without going all the way over.
David Brin, The Best of David Brin: Short story collection (ranging from a few pages to the novella that became the first part of The Postman). Speculative fiction in the classic sense; my favorite was the story about the geneticist who worked to reawaken now-useless DNA, first to help us regrow organs and later for a much more complex purpose, ignoring what the biologists would have told him.
Chuck Wendig, The Book of Accidents: Stephen King-esque story of Olly, a boy who can sense others’ pain, and his parents, an artist and a cop turned park ranger, who move into the father’s old house. Olly’s new friend Jake is pretty dangerous, and there’s a serial killer who is convinced that killing 99 girls is the way to end/save the world mixed in. If you are feeling King thirst, this might do it for you.
My daughter has consented to watch ST:TOS and I am constantly dumbfounded by Shatner's luminous beauty, always sweating/glowing under the studio lights, giving him a dewy masculinity that's such a huge contrast to the other, craggier male castmembers. He's even regularly lit like a femme fatale, a band of light across his eyes, though they don't blur the lens for him the way they do when a young woman is the only one in frame. (Uhura gets the blur, I was deeply relieved to see; she and Spock are already my daughter's favorites.)
Foz Meadows, A Tyranny of Queens: Didn’t realize this was a sequel until I started; a young Australian girl has returned from a magical land that transformed her—she spoke with dragons and became a queen—and her family thinks she’s traumatized from abduction and perhaps assault. As she becomes more convinced that her home is no longer safe for her, the world she left is still in trouble because of a rogue queen seeking to expose the secrets that keep the worlds linked but separate from one another. That part was less interesting to me, which might have been because I missed the first book; the matriarchal culture with lots of multiple-person political marriages that didn’t have to involve sex was interesting, but I never quite got into it.
Jane Austen, Emma: Never read it before, but glad I did at last.
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey: Ok, yes, it’s cruder than her later works, but I loved it. Austen the narrator is so archly present, so willing to bring us in on the joke but so fond of her subject—she begins with a defense of reading novels!—that I had a rollicking good time with a gothic romance with no actual threat in it at all.
Jane Austen, Persuasion: Another one where it’s obvious why it’s not the most famous or beloved, but takes domestic struggles (of the rich) quite seriously while also making room for the things their class position enables them not to see.
C.L. Polk, The Midnight Bargain: In a patriarchal society that collars female mages to prevent their unborn children from being possessed by spirits, a young woman studies magic and hopes to avoid collaring with the help of the secretly printed grimoires for women. There’s love and loyalty and, possibly my favorite, dedication to helping people put above personal romance. It’s generally good fun though perhaps a bit sanguine about the easiness of big social change.
Chuck Wendig, Blackbirds: Miriam’s talent allows her to see how people will die, but not to do anything about it. She survives on the road mainly by robbing the newly dead. When a grifter figures out her ability, he plunges her into deadly danger; meanwhile, the nice trucker she met is going to die shortly, saying her name. Gritty noir horror-ish story, edging towards crapsack world without going all the way over.
David Brin, The Best of David Brin: Short story collection (ranging from a few pages to the novella that became the first part of The Postman). Speculative fiction in the classic sense; my favorite was the story about the geneticist who worked to reawaken now-useless DNA, first to help us regrow organs and later for a much more complex purpose, ignoring what the biologists would have told him.
Chuck Wendig, The Book of Accidents: Stephen King-esque story of Olly, a boy who can sense others’ pain, and his parents, an artist and a cop turned park ranger, who move into the father’s old house. Olly’s new friend Jake is pretty dangerous, and there’s a serial killer who is convinced that killing 99 girls is the way to end/save the world mixed in. If you are feeling King thirst, this might do it for you.
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He's still at 90 a pleasant-looking gentleman, but my goodness he was glorious in his youth.
I enjoyed your comments on Austen's novels. I do think you've hit the nail on the head when you write, "Austen the narrator is so archly present, so willing to bring us in on the joke but so fond of her subject" - my theory about why Austen's work is so popular is that it's not just the wit, the charm, the characterisation, the romance - it's also the way it's hard to be lonely when you're reading her novels in particular. :)
Thanks for your reviews. I always enjoy them.
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Austen reads so much better to me now than when I had to read it in high school. (Did you mean to do the cut on it oddly?)
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I'm not sure if I've ever read Northanger Abbey (I've got a complete works of Jane Austen next to my bed, but I've spilled coffee on it so many times it's become a brick), but Persuasion is definitely my favourite Austen. There's just something so much more mature about it than her other work.