maplemood: (typewriter)

Dear Chocolatier,

Hi, and thank you so much for writing for me! We’ve already matched on some wonderful fandoms, so I know I’ll love whatever story you come up with, and please don’t feel like you need to follow my prompts to the letter—or at all, if none of them inspire you. I’d much rather you create the story of your heart, so feel free to mix, match, or completely ignore as you see fit. As long as you don’t ignore my DNWs (which aren’t exactly extensive), you’re golden.

DNWs:

· PWP (I love a good sex scene, but I’d prefer it weren’t the one and only focus of the story)

· Character Bashing

· Unrequested non-canon ships

Hard Sells:

· Setting-change-AUs, especially mundane AUs. (Usually, the setting and worldbuilding are a big part of why I love the story. That being said, I won’t say no to an interesting setting change, especially if it’s a bit more unusual than, say, coffee shop or high school.)

Likes:

· Missing Scenes

· Canon Divergence

· Complicated family and relationship dynamics

· Hurt/comfort

· Found Family

· Kid Fic (Non-canon kids, canon kids, or canon adult characters as kids—I especially love fics focused on characters’ pre-canon childhoods.)

· Loyalty

· A messed up (but interesting!) power dynamic

· Mentors and mentees

· Moral ambiguity

· Age Gaps

· Worldbuilding

· Happy Endings

· Sad Endings

· Bittersweet Endings

· Unhappy marriages or good relationships gone bad (Especially if there’s a glimmer of hope at the end, or the characters actively start working towards making their relationship better, but straight-up angst is good, too!)

· “Good is not Nice”-type characters; characters who are kind without necessarily being merciful, or characters who are merciful without necessarily being kind

· Banter

· Period-accurate details

· Mythology; fairy tales and folktales; ghost stories

· Storytelling

· Siblings

· Genderswap; Always-a-Girl!AUs

· Female Friendship

Fandoms: Earthsea, His Dark Materials, 28 Days Later, Ondine )

Yuletide!!

Dec. 25th, 2019 09:22 pm
maplemood: orange pomanders (orange pomanders)
I got a very fun and bittersweet Treasure Planet fic featuring not-quite-post-canon Jim & Silver meeting up one last time and now feel very spoiled, not just because Treasure Planet is the near-and-dear movie of my heart (and the request I was secretly most excited about) but because after having to default I wasn't expecting a gift. 

Learn What's Never Shown: Jim Hawkins stumbles across an old friend while on a mission from the Intersteller Academy. 

Other great fics that jumped out during my first pass through the collection:

The Colors of Lorbanery (Earthsea): The woman who had once been Akaren stayed inside her house for several days, changing.

A wonderful, compassionate look at one of my favorite characters from The Farthest Shore. 

And stormy grew the sea (Sir Patrick Spens): They say that the King of Scotland will never touch wine.

A ghost story with gorgeous, folktale-style prose. 

Inauspicious Auguries (The Fantod Pack): Fragments of a life refracted.

Not a ghost story, but still creepy; this fic is based around Edward Gorey's Fantod Pack, an eerie and nonsensical deck of tarot cards. It's eerie and nonsensical, and also a total treat.

Flora's Adventures in Ghostland (The Turn of the Screw): An excerpt from the beloved children's novel. 

Henry James meets Alice in Wonderland
maplemood: (wintery)
Reading

I'm juggling a couple different books right now and not feeling especially motivated to finish any of them, probably because I have one last (quick and easy, but still) assignment dangling over my head. That'll be finished and submitted tomorrow, though, and as far as my plans for Christmas break go, I'd just like to catch up on reading. 

Read

I had more thoughts on both The Turn of the Screw and The Girls at the Kingfisher Club after I finished them, but it's been a while and those thoughts are gone.

Mississippi Jack by L.A. Meyer--In my personal ranking of the Bloody Jack books this one goes below Bloody Jack, The Curse of the Blue Tattoo, and In the Belly of the Bloodhound but above Under the Jolly Roger (which in theory should have been my favorite, since it's all about privateers and not-so-accidental piracy, but man, did the middle drag for me). It's a lot of fun, and often very funny, and Jacky is--as always--an absolute delight; I also loved that Katy Deere, one of my favorite girls from the Bloodhound, gets to join in for another adventure and gets her own ride-off-into-the-sunset happy ending. There were a couple slow points towards the middle (again), but (again) things picked back up just in time for the ending. 

The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman--The worldbuilding of these books has always been one of their biggest draws for me, which is funny because aside from the witches (Serafina Pekkala was and still is one of my absolute favorite characters in any book, ever) and the daemons I'd forgotten some of the coolest bits, like the gyptians and all the politics going on...everywhere, but especially with the armored bears. I actually don't have plans to watch the new show, at least not until I've reread the main series, but it's been wonderful to drop back into this world. 
maplemood: (wild swans)
Reading

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, a reread I meant to do over the Halloween season and never got around to. The first time I read this I was in high school, maybe even middle school, so even though before diving back in I remembered the basic plot and the creepiness, I didn't remember most of the actual encounters with the ghosts--which are eclipsed in creepiness only by some of the conversations the narrator, a governess, has with the two kids in her charge, Miles and Flora. There's such a shivery, I-know-you-know-I-know vein of horror running under most of their interactions, especially her conversations with Miles. It's fantastic. 

The Girls at the Kingfisher Club by Genevieve Valentine--another reread! This doesn't quite nab the #1 spot as my favorite 12 Dancing Princesses retelling of all time (that would be Entwined by Heather Dixon: it has a lot less bite than Kingfisher Club, but it's sweeter, with a big ol' dash of Gothic horror). It comes in a very close second, though.  I love the setting (1920s New York! Flapper princesses! Dance halls and speakeasies!), the prickliness of all the sisters, and the fact that it's ultimately much more their story than the story of their romances--though there are romances, and those romances are handled in some unusual, interesting ways. 

Read

I finished Trick Mirror. 

The Mark of Cain by Lindsey Barraclough, the sequel to Long Lankin. It suffers a bit from not having the same sense of mystery, but it does have the same sense of oppressive atmosphere, and the ending wraps things up with a little more resolution for the characters, which is nice. 

Watched

Он – дракон | I Am Dragon, aka the big dumb Russian dragon movie I loved with all my heart. The story--a princess is kidnapped on her wedding day by a dragon who oh-so-conveniently can transform into a hot and sweet, if angsty dude; at first she's solely focused on getting back to her equally hot but much less sweet fiance, until of course dragon dude wins her over with his angst and sweetness--is more or less Beauty and the Beast, but with dragons, so there's never any doubt that Miroslava (the princess) will end up with Arman (the hot dragon dude). Instead, you can sit back and enjoy scenes like Princess Teaches Hot Dragon Dude How to Spruce up His Man Cave (I love that most of Miroslava's advice for living as a human boils down to "Get better at interior decorating; also wipe your feet,") and Hot Dragon Dude Teaches Princess How to Fly a Kite.

The scenery and costumes are both gorgeous, and the worldbuilding is a little thin, but satisfying; there are lots of cool details like a wedding ritual where the bride gets decked out in a gorgeous costume, lies down in a little gondola, and floats across the water to her groom. The whole thing reminds me of some of the Russian movies and soap operas I used to watch with my sisters and my mom, in that even when things get cheesy there's this genuine feeling and sweetness to them, which makes the cheesiness not just bearable but enjoyable. 
maplemood: (mercer mayer)
Reading

My highlight of last week was finding a brand new copy of Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino on the college library's "Free Books" cart (maybe they ordered too many copies?), so I've been working my way through that! Currently about halfway through the "The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams" essay, which is great, though my favorite so far is probably "Ecstasy"; I didn't grow up Evangelical or in a megachurch, but her descriptions of drifting away from it as a teenager, plus that weird, mixed-up feeling of ambivalent on the one hand, needing to be a part of something bigger than yourself on the other, hit close to home.

I stalled out in the middle of Mississippi Jack (aka Bloody Jack #5) and am working on getting back into it.

Read

Thérèse Raquin by Emile Zola, which a good friend recommended to me with the selling points "It's about a repressed woman in an unhappy marriage and also Amber Gray would make a fantastic Thérèse in the stage version." (And yep, there's a stage version! And Keira Knightley starred in a production in 2015! And Elizabeth Olsen starred in In Secret, the 2013 movie adaptation! With Oscar Isaac!!) Which, I won't say my main take away from this book was "Amber Gray would make a fantastic Thérèse," but boy would Amber Gray make a fantastic Thérèse--she's a bit of a Helene Kuragina dialed up and down at the same time, much more reserved and not willing to flaunt her affair in her husband's face, but also willing to conspire with her lover to get rid of her husband. Which, you know, murder doesn't tend to make you any less repressed or any happier than you were to begin with, especially when your husband was selfish and ineffectual but basically harmless, and your lover is, at best, a bit of a sociopath. 

Anyway. I loved this book a lot. Its biggest strength is that it's ridiculously readable and enjoyable despite being creepy, gruesome, and depressing with some honestly sickening moments. Nobody comes off that well (duh), least of all Thérèse, but everybody is layered and complex in their awfulness, and Thérèse's romance (?) with her lover, Laurent, is both the least romantic romance in the history of unromantic romances and very hot in its own way. 

Oh, and:

* I was listening to "Down by the Water" by P.J. Harvey a couple days after finishing the book, and now the two are fused together in my head. This should give you some idea of how Thérèse and Laurent decide to off her husband.

* Aside from the husband, the character who comes the closest to an innocent victim in the book is the mother-in-law, Madame Raquin, and by the end your heart will absolutely break for her. 

* There's a cat. At first you'll be creeped out by the cat. Then your heart will absolutely break for the cat.
maplemood: (snow white and rose red)
One day I'll have it together enough to post more than belated exchange reveals, but that day is not today. 

I ended up writing in two fandoms that I'd never written in before, which is always a little nerve-wracking, but overall I'm pretty happy with how both fics turned out. 

A House by the Sea (Ghost Quartet): Pearl White is snow-white, and Rose Red is blood-red, and they live together in a house by the sea.

like gun metal, cold and unsure (Peaky Blinders): Naturally, Esme meets the brother who styles himself head of the Shelby family days before she meets the brother she’s to marry.   
maplemood: (lydia deetz)
And a happy belated Halloween! (Which we did end up getting; there was a tornado watch Thursday night, plus rain pouring down in buckets, so trick-or-treating got rolled back to tonight instead.) The [community profile] trickortreatex  collection revealed and I got two (!!) wonderful, bittersweet Hadestown fics, both Hades/Persephone: 

the tale you tell, that is the spell: This one works in a bit of the circular structure I love from the show, and aside from Hades/Persephone it's got great appearances by Hermes and Eurydice. 

A Crack in the Wall: Post-canon Hades/Persephone reconciliation, plus coffee and a good ol' shot of angst.  

Not gifted to me, but equally great: 

A Slight Delay (Hadestown): Hades/Persephone; this does a lot with both of their addictive tendencies. Angsty but not hopeless. 

No Solace (The Left Hand of Darkness): Post-canon fic and a bit of a ghost story. The style/voice matches up with the novel perfectly.

Only Sleep (Peaky Blinders): Tommy/Esme. Creepy, sexy, and sad. 

 
maplemood: (Default)
First off, I read Paperbacks from Hell by Grady Hendrix, which is an absolutely hilarious/delightful, and very pretty (for a definition of "pretty" that includes all the bizarre 80s pulp horror covers you could ever ask for) overview of the insanity that was 80s horror paperbacks. Just thanks to my own interests, I was especially into the "Creepy Kids," "Real Estate Nightmares," and "Gothic and Romantic" chapters, but the entire book was a treat. Being an overview, it's more interested in getting you interested in the genre (which, mission accomplished) than going super in-depth, though it also paints a great broad-strokes picture of both the publishing history of horror paperbacks and the cultural context that would make writing a book about Nazi leprechauns seem like a good idea. Oh, and there are also lots of great one-liners, though my favorite has to be this one describing Robert Marasco, who wrote the incredibly creepy-sounding haunted house novel, Burnt Offerings: "Marasco was a high school English teacher, which meant any illusions he’d ever had about human nature had long since been stomped to death." 

I also decided to reread Long Lankin, which scared the crap out of me in high school: it's a YA ghost story based on the Child ballad (which is scary enough on its own) and set in 1950s England. For some reason, YA horror is pretty hit-or-miss for me--either I really click with it or I absolutely don't. Long Lankin was one of the ones I remember really clicking with; I loved it to pieces even though I literally had trouble sleeping after I first read it, and rereading it I wasn't quite as scared (either because I already knew what was coming or because I've read and watched a lot more horror since high school), but I still loved it to pieces. The atmosphere is so creepingly oppressive, even from the get-go, and as things unspool it only gets worse and worse, until by the end you're praying that the characters will all make it out okay while being so, so scared that they won't. It's also got an unsentimental but very sweet depiction of a big family, three fantastic narrators, and creepy ballads being sung by an invisible someone just behind you. 
maplemood: (penny dreadful)
Had a couple picture-perfect fall days and now it's all November weather in October: gray and drippy. Which, hey--I'll take what I can get. Also! There's been progress on the list of horror-ish movies.

I planned on starting with The Witch, since it's the only one still available on Netflix. Of course then I decided that I didn't really want to watch it that much, since I'd already rewatched it some time back in August or September and also it's the kind of movie you need to be in just the right mood for. Anyway, I poked around on Netflix and decided to try The Ravenous, which is a French-language Canadian zombie movie that's kind of one part artsy Walking Dead and one part the single Catherynne M. Valenete short story I've ever clicked with, The Days of Flaming Motorcycles. People get chomped up and strange, maybe-altars of random household objects get built, and it was all very good and very, very understated, to the point that you wish it weren't quite so understated. (I especially would've liked more elaboration on the found-family dynamic that develops between the two main characters and the little girl they rescue from an abandoned farmhouse--it's supposed to be the heart of the movie [I think?], and it's great for what it is, but still. So. Understated.) 

And then I finally checked Midsommar off my list of movies-everyone-keeps-telling-me-to-watch-and-I-really-should-watch. It was very long (I think I might have rented the extended cut by accident)! It could've been shorter! It was also gorgeous, and brutal and nasty in a way that got under my skin and that I'm still thinking about, which was all I wanted out of it to begin with. Dani was fantastic. Christian was pitiable in the end even though honestly I had zero interest in him otherwise. Pelle was pretty much your ideal romance-novel boyfriend, if your ideal romance-novel boyfriend was also part of a trippy Swedish death cult. I don't quite buy that the ending leaves Dani any more empowered than she was to begin with (because, well, trippy Swedish death cults), but it does leave her free of Christian, and even though the movie's not not saying anything about her empowerment, I don't think, I also don't think it's especially interested in boiling itself down into one easy theme or interpretation. (I also think that I just got through midterms week and even if there is One True Theme, I'm way too much of a wreck to find it.)

Fic Roundup

Oct. 7th, 2019 02:16 pm
maplemood: (gig poster)
I'm increasingly bad at keeping track of them on DW, but here are three of my latest fics, all Hadestown, all written in the last three months or so. 

Awful Lot of Medicine: She samples it on the regular is the thing. Wind, rain, sunshine. Moonshine if she ain’t swapped moonshine out for starlight and starlight if she has. Not so much as’ll have Persephone falling-down drunk—that she saves for behind closed doors, mostly, where her husband can take to his office with a jaw set tight like a snare and the lips over that jaw zipped tighter. Just enough to warm her belly and her head pleasant-like, enough so as she feels halfway through winter already, halfway to home. [Technically the oldest of the bunch--I think I wrote it back in August, maybe even July--but [community profile] fandomgiftbox  didn't reveal until yesterday, so I'm counting it as the newest.]

trembled when he laid me out: Mortal girl in question raises her chin. Says, “All right then.” [Missing scene; Hades/Eurydice.]

Letters from the Underground: Boss has got something pumping the black, cold blood through his black, cold veins. And something, she will admit, ain’t nothing. [Post-canon Hades & Eurydice, with Hades/Persephone and Orpheus/Eurydice ever-present in the background because of course. I wrote both this and Awful Lot of Medicine for [personal profile] acequeenking , who's a lovely person and who wrote me an absolutely fantastic--and fantastically long--Hades/Persephone fic way back when for[community profile] hurtcomfortex . I'm pretty sure I'll never be able to repay her in kind, but I've been trying.]
maplemood: (ships in the night)
Picked it up from the library today. The front cover flap promises tarring and feathering, and you know what? At this point I'd expect nothing less.  
maplemood: (beetlejuice)
...but I do have a Lydia Deetz icon, which is pretty much the same thing!

October weather has...very much not been a thing so far (even though we're only two days into the month, so I shouldn't complain, but also I should and will complain, because ninety-degree weather past September is ridiculous); I'll have to jury-rig myself some October/Halloween spirit.

I did rewatch Coraline the other night, and even though I'll always think the book is scarier (not by much, to be fair), the movie is also incredibly creepy in a way that gets under my skin. The intro sequence with the mechanical spider hands and the doll! The landlady's long-lost twin sister who disappeared in the same house! The Other Father, who actually loves Coraline in his own way (and how he eventually transforms when the Other Mother doesn't need him anymore always breaks my heart, in both the book and the movie). The mice-rats! The buttons!

The buttons. 

I've been putting together a (short) list of other horror and horror-ish movies to hopefully watch in the lead-up to Halloween. Not promising myself that I'll get to them all in time, but here are the ones I've been thinking of:

Beetlejuice (see above)
The Witch
Little Shop of Horrors
Midsommar

The Suspiria remake

Beetlejuice and The Witch I've seen before, and all the rest are movies I've been meaning to watch for ages--I love horror in theory, but in practice I haven't seen a whole bunch of it. With any luck, I'll try to write up at least a couple thoughts on each movie, too. 

maplemood: (sea change)
September so far has been jam-packed (by my standards, anyway) and stressful; things should calm down by the end of the month but probably not before then, so in the meantime here are some nice things that happened in between stressing about travel and stressing about classes:

1.) I finished Under the Jolly Roger...which probably isn't quite my favorite Bloody Jack book, but still most definitely worth reading and a ton of fun. Almost too much fun, considering this is the book where Jacky gets press-ganged into the Navy and nearly raped by a sadistic captain, only to be saved at the very last second when the captain's heart fails and he literally dies on top of her. And okay, there's usually at least one rape threat per book (Do I love this series to pieces? Yes. Does it have its issues? Also, yes.), so I came to this one prepared, but...yeesh. Of course Jacky manages to turn the situation to her advantage and bounce back in record time; there's much more focus on the trauma of her battle experiences than, y'know, the trauma of being under constant threat of sexual assault.

2.) I started In the Belly of the Bloodhound, which I had to buy since it's one of the books in the series that none of the libraries in my area (NONE) have for some reason, and so far it's been seven bucks well spent; this just might end up being my favorite (next to the original Bloody Jack, obviously). This time around in breezily traumatizing plot points, Jacky and a bunch of other students from the Lawson Peabody School for Young Girls in Boston are kidnapped by slavers to be sold to harems on the Barbary Coast. I have a huge weakness for we-all-need-to-band-together-in-order-to-get-through-this storylines, and this one is shaping up to be a good one. 

3.) I've been tossing around the idea of writing about War and Peace for my senior capstone--aka the final huge paper you have to write as an English major--so I checked out a book called Slavic Sins of the Flesh: Food, Sex, and Carnal Appetite in Nineteenth Century Russian Fiction from my college library. Sadly, I haven't got a chance to read the Leo Tolstoy section yet, but with a title like that it's got to be at least interesting, and hopefully helpful.

4.) I wrote a fic for [community profile] jump_scare_exchange ! And received an awesome fic in return! Both my fic and my gift are for Black Sails--I requested a couple different characters and pairings and got my favorite tiny rarepair plus ghosts. (And totally in-character dialogue! Seriously, what more could a girl ask for?)

My gift:

hope your road is a long one by [personal profile] thedevilchicken : Abigail has had a good life. Charles Vane might be dead, but he's been there for most of it.

My fic:

A Kingdom of Sand“This place ain’t right. Never has been.”

Among other great prompts, I got Anne/Jack and haunted/eldritch places, which I tried to do my best by. I did tinker with this fic quite a bit before it gelled in a way that I was even halfway happy with, and I'm still not sure I really nailed what I was going for, but then again I never am. (And while I was grabbing the link for this post I realized I'd completely overlooked a typo in the first few sentences...oops.) Anne was ridiculously fun to write, though, and I'd love to write more of her some day. 



maplemood: (lighthouse)
Finished Black Sails! ...And the fourth season (especially the season/series finale) was so good I can't think of much else to say; it was incredibly well-plotted and ridiculously satisfying and if you love pirates or Treasure Island or gritty, playing-fast-and-loose-with-the-facts period pieces or complicated, not-necessarily-heroic characters who grow and change over time or lots of canonically queer characters or unexpectedly hopeful endings or any of those things in any combination, just watch it. Do not pass go, watch it and then come back here and we can talk about how amazing it is.

I actually wanted to do a from-episode-one rewatch as soon as I finished the last episode, and luckily for me my sister also wanted to start watching it, so we're working through about an episode a night (she works and I'm heading back into classes next week). It's interesting, having just blown through season 4, to go back to season 1 and see how different everyone is starting out: Eleanor's more or less secure in her role as the head fence/pirate queen of Nassau, secure enough to be a little cocky about it; Max sure isn't guileless but she comes across as much more innocent. Silver is a little shit (enjoyably so, but still); Jack is either going through a rough patch or nowhere near as competent as he thinks he is (yet); Vane is also nowhere near as competent as he thinks he is; Anne is exactly as competent as she thinks she is but saddled with Jack and Vane (and also about to be thrown into a major tailspin re: Max). Season 1 is also a good bit funnier than, I think, any of the other seasons--there's that absolutely hilarious part during negotiations in the third episode when Gates has to keep pulling Flint outside to remind him to at least try to be diplomatic. Come to think of it, a lot of the humor in the first season is thanks to Gates. He's a wonderful character, and knowing how the season ends I'm appreciating him a lot more this time around. 

You get the sense in the first season that everyone is just starting to get a feel for these people and how they interact with each other and what their core characteristics are. Sure, the main pieces are already in place, but the tone is a little more unsettled and a little more fluid...is it a funny, swashbuckling adventure story (sort of a TV-MA Pirates of the Caribbean minus all the magic) with some darker undertones or are the darker undertones the whole point? I mean, obviously there are plenty of dark and tragic and horrible things going on from the beginning, and though the later seasons get darker none of them are hopeless or humorless, but the first season, and, say, the first three episodes of the first season especially (right up until the last couple scenes of episode 3) feel lighter by comparison in a way I obviously didn't catch on to when I first watched them.

Oh, and of course now I have an ungodly amount of Black Sails fics saved to my "Marked For Later" list on AO3; I've been working my way through and might try to have a rec post up at some point. So far this one is a great exploration of the Jack & Anne & Vane relationship pre-canon, and this one focuses on Abigail Ashe (one of my favorite minor characters) finding her way forward after season 2. 
maplemood: anne bonny from black sails (anne bonny)
I finished the third season this Tuesday, so my plans for having the entire show over and done with before classes start back up again are on track. I also finally cracked and snagged an Anne Bonny icon because she's, as ever, my favorite, and was especially wonderful this season.

So, unlike the second season, which picks up almost exactly where season 1 left off, season 3 starts a good couple months after the end of season 2; it's maybe a bit darker than the other two seasons, but not that much darker: Flint's ready to wage war on England; Silver's sometimes-coping, sometimes-not with the loss of his leg and also with being Flint's new quartermaster (otherwise known as the most thankless job on board--I mean, look what happened to Gates); Max, Anne, and Jack are trying to rebuild the fort at Nassau; Eleanor's set to be executed in England until she's offered an opportunity and grabs it; Vane reunites with his old mentor/rival/friend, who just happens to be Edward Teach/Blackbeard. I tend to pick and choose which storylines and/or characters I'm most interested in, but this time around everyone interested me more or less equally, and their stories all seemed to be woven together extra tightly. If I absolutely had to pick I'd still have to go with Anne, Jack, and Max. (And of those three--only if I had to pick!--Anne.)
Spoilers )
maplemood: (natasha)
Did I love this book as a whole? Absolutely. Did I love the (first, plot-relevant) epilogue? ...Not so much.
Longish, probably incoherent rant, plus 151-year-old spoilers )
maplemood: (bacall & bogart)
Derry Girls! On Sunday I figured out season 2 had dropped on Netflix and spent a very enjoyable evening marathoning the whole thing--it's only six episodes long, like the first season, and each episode is only around thirty minutes (so, in terms of bingeing, practically nothing). Season 2's still got plenty going for it on the black humor front, but it's maybe not quite as focused on the people-doing-awkward-insensitive-or-downright-terrible-things kind of humor as the first season; not that those kind of situations aren't there (Clare tries to connect with a Protestant boy during their Friends Across the Barricade weekend trip and ends up freaking out when he [apparently] says he hates all Catholics; Joe still hates Gerry for no good reason; Aunt Sarah wears a floor-length white ballgown to a wedding with predictable results), but they're all mixed in with a lot of warmth. This time around there are even more great friendship moments, and also the whole set-up continues to be heartwarming in a low-key way--like, it's never pointed out that the Quinns are more or less a second family for Clare, Michelle, and James, but they absolutely are. Also, for all that Joe keeps sniping at Gerry, everyone actually gets along pretty well for one big family forced to share one small house. Things can get tense, but at the end of the day they stick by each other and love each other. (Another really cute moment is when Orla invites Joe to the prom as her date, since "everyone kept saying you have to ask a fella you really like, and he's the fella I like the most.") And of course Sister Michael is and always will be the best: "You will go far in life, Jenny, but you will not be well-liked."

After stalling out a bit I have seasons 3 and 4 of Black Sails checked out from the library. I'm hoping to finish them before school starts back up (three more weeks?!). I'm expectedly super invested in Anne and unexpectedly super invested in both Jack and Jack/Anne; Silver's also grown on me a lot since the first season, where he wasn't a bad character (imo, anyway), just one without any human connections at all. He was completely in it for himself, and even though he still is, a bit, in his own way he's genuinely loyal to the crew by the end of the second season, and they're loyal to him--the season 2 finale caps off with the most heartwarming amputation scene ever (maybe the only heartwarming amputation scene ever?) and in season 3--though I'm not very far in yet at all--he seems like he's trying to do right by them, as opposed to just do right by himself. He's still Silver, though, so who knows. 
maplemood: illustration from "the tinder box" by hans christian andersen, art by kay nielsen (the tinder box)
Wi-fi was out through most of last week, so I got a lot of reading done, if not much else:

Read

Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat: A novel that reads more like interlocked novellas and covers the protagonist's life from when she's about twelve until up into her early twenties. When she's twelve, Sophie Caco leaves Haiti--very much against her will--to join her mother in New York City. By the point she eventually settles in and starts to become more "Americanized," secretly dating a non-Haitian (and much older) man and longing for some independence, her mother's own neuroses, which stem from an incredibly traumatic event in her past, are driving them apart. The mother-daughter relationship is the highlight of this book, and it's incredibly well-done; there's a lot of ugliness in her mother's past, and even though Sophie understands that the things she doesspoiler ) are motivated by a mix of tradition and trauma and genuine love, it doesn't make their reconciliation any easier. This book is hard-going, especially towards the end, but I enjoyed it quite a bit.

The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat: "Dew breaker" was a synonym for "torturer" during the Duvalier regimes in Haiti; this novel/short story collection focuses on one who put that past behind him and fled to New York City. The short stories that make up the book are all for the most part interconnected--some of them focus on the dew breaker and his family, others on his tenants, and others on his victims or possible victims. Though in his past the dew breaker was by far and away a worse person than Sophie's mother in Breath, Eyes, Memory, both books are kind of similar in that they deal with the forgiveness of seemingly unforgivable things and how complicated that forgiveness is. Sure, the dew breaker is a different man now--but he's still in hiding. His wife constantly worries that one day they'll be found out and he'll be returned to Haiti to answer for his crimes (the story of how they met and she more or less redeemed him is my favorite in the whole book) and as a reader you aren't given much guidance on how to feel about that. Should he go back? Is living with all the memories of his past, plus the constant fear of being found out, punishment enough? For all the questions it raises the book doesn't give any straight answers, and I loved that. YMMV, though, considering what the guy's done.

AND

War and Peace: I'm officially (...minus the second epilogue, okay, but we don't need to talk about that) finished! It really deserves a post of its own, which I'll try to write up soon, but the Cliff's Notes version is I still love it very, very, much. The first epilogue did throw me for a bit of a loop--Tolstoy was by no means a feminist and had some...let's call them interesting views on women and marriage which come through pretty strongly in the last few chapters--but it's still a gorgeous book, large-scale and small-scale all at once, sweeping and romantic and philosophical and just...gah. A real joy to read.

Currently Reading

Tolstoy: A Russian Life by Rosamund Bartlett: Started this on my mom's recommendation. So far it's been great, easy to read and (from what I can tell) pretty thorough.
maplemood: cover art from the queen of attolia by vince natale (attolia irene)
AKA my shows-up-fifteen-minutes-years-late-with-Starbucks Queen's Thief fic that I tried to start...oh, some time last year and never got to quite gel until a few days ago. I think I've got around four, maybe five versions of this buried in my "Bits & Pieces" file, so it's a huge relief to finally get it to the point where I feel like it works, mostly, and is, apart from everything else, finished.

Queen of Shadows (Queen's Thief): Under the Thief’s eyes shadow and stone had become flesh again; Attolia hadn’t felt her own body for some time before then, and she couldn’t stop feeling it for a long time afterwards.  

Profile

maplemood: (Default)
Alex

June 2022

S M T W T F S
   1234
5 67891011
12131415161718
19 2021 22 232425
2627282930  

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 3rd, 2025 03:57 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios