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2026/087: 1177 BC: A Graphic History of the Year Civilisation Collapsed — Eric H Cline & Glynnis Fawkes

A gorgeously illustrated update to Cline's original 1177BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed, featuring Cline and Fawkes as narrators with a modern viewpoint (for archaeological discoveries et cetera), as well as a pair of fictional characters -- Pel, of the Sea Peoples, and Shesha, an Egyptian scribe.

Together Pel and Shesha time-travel through the Bronze Age, the centuries leading up to the collapse: and they travel physically too, from Amenhotep’s palace to the city of Hattusa via shipwrecks, battles and quayside bartering. Their interactions help to humanise the stories of the people affected by the collapse: migrants (with a comparison to Syrian refugees), merchants (whose luxury goods are no longer obtainable), families listening to grandfather's stories about the good old days...

( Read more... )

Current Mood: impressed

osprey_archer

At the end of April, I had just finished a draft of my secondary world fantasy novelette The Paper Bird.

asakiyume agreed to give it a beta read, and liked it! At which point my head promptly swelled to the size of the Goodyear blimp and I cheerfully informed everyone that I was finally going to write the dozen or so secondary world fantasies that have been knocking around in my brain for the last fifteen years, fifteen years ago having been about the time that I concluded I needed more life experience and primary world knowledge before I could attempt a secondary world fantasy again.

Since then my head has returned to its normal size (hot air balloon). I have recalled that it is not in fact possible to write a dozen stories at a time and have therefore settled on one that has been knocking around since my senior year of high school: the tale of Jess and Innis, which begins when Jess’s cousin (commandant of a prisoner of war camp) foists one of the prisoners of war on Jess, who objects that actually he doesn’t WANT a pet prisoner of war.

Cousin Commandant: Too bad! We have a big overcrowding problem! He can help you sail your little sailboat through the archipelago helping you collect folktales or whatever if is you do.

I’m not absolutely wedded to the folktale collecting of it all, mostly because it would definitely require me to write some folktales, not just for Jess’s people (the Naditai) but also for Innis the prisoner of war turned folktale gathering assistant. Obviously less work for me if Jess is collecting butterflies. However, probably also less thematic resonance.

ANYWAY obviously Jess and Innis fall in love, obviously there is culture clash, different expectations about what love is, for instance, marriage doesn’t exist in Jess’s culture and honestly they consider the whole idea kind of titillatingly weird. Romance genre imposes an ending to shoot for (happily-for-now in this case) which is very helpful to me; the challenge with a LOT of my other ideas is that I have what I consider a wonderful set-up but no actual vision for how to structure a story on top of it.

Among its other fine qualities, this is one that I could self-publish as a trial balloon to see how my readers feel about secondary world m/m. Hopefully positive? It’s just like my historical m/m, except this time the culture clash is between cultures I made up!

isis

I haven't finished any books recently, mostly because I ran out of fiction at hand and started in on some nonfiction that is requiring a lot of brain (Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime by Sean Carroll), and so is going very slowly as I absorb it. However as is typical (I'm sure there's a Somebody's Law on this) all my library holds came in at once, so I have also started The Rook by Daniel O'Malley, which

merit had recommended and sounded interesting - so far, it is indeed!

But we have watched a few things. First, we finally finished 1923, which is part of the Taylor Sheridan Cinematic Universe, i.e. Yellowstone and related spin-offs. We had watched the first four seasons of Yellowstone, at which point I decided I didn't enjoy watching characters I dislike doing obnoxious things. We then watched the prequel 1883, which was generally more to my taste (we typically only watch historical, SF, or fantasy shows) but a general downer as although there were more characters I actually liked, they mostly ended up dying. So I was not really excited about 1923, but hey, Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren as cranky old western ranchers was certainly a draw, and I let B convince me. (Also, Jerome Flynn, who was Bronn in Game of Thrones, plays an interestingly nuanced villain, and Timothy Dalton (Timothy Dalton!!) plays a boringly un-nuanced villain who fortunately didn't have a pencil mustache because if he did, he would have been twirling it.)

Not-really-spoiler alert: I have come to the conclusion that the Taylor Sheridan Cinematic Universe is not for me. There were three main storylines: the eeevil Irish sheepmen who want to take the ranch land, followed by the eeevil mining baron who wants to take the ranch land; the nephew, emotionally scarred by his WWI experience, who has become a hunter for the Crown in British Africa, and the British noblewoman who throws over her old life to be with him; and the Crow girl at an Indian boarding school run by basically eeevil priests and nuns, who suffers one beating too many and fights back and runs. These storylines were weirdly separate, with the only connection being that the old ranch lady played by Mirren writes letters to her nephew in Africa begging him to come back to help them save the Yellowstone - and much of his plot is the over-the-top trauma and drama involved in he and his new wife overcoming one ridiculous obstacle after another to get to Wyoming. I kept waiting for the runaway native girl plot to intertwine with the rest, but other than glancing very slightly off the nephew plotline, it never did; I guess it's intended to be prequel for another installment between 1923 and the present (one of the native actors was the son of one of the actors in Yellowstone, so I could see a possible connection being drawn), but I'm not going to watch it.

Also I would not believe I would ever say that a show has so much kinky sex it got boring, but. Yeah.

The ending was over-the-top and relentlessly emotional (yeah, I cried) and very on-brand for the TSCU. But I admit I was hoping

this is actually spoilery

that well, Elizabeth, Alex, and Teonna were all pregnant, and the sweethearts of two of them were killed, so I figured Spencer would get killed as well and then the three of them could set up together in the huge Yellowstone house!

Okay, I never actually believed that would possibly happen, but what we got just annoyed me by the pointlessness of all the dramatic struggle along the way. But I did like the cranky old ranch couple, and the theme of progress being good for some and bad for others.

The next thing we were planning to watch was Dark Winds S4, but B said, "You know, we just saw a lot of people shooting each other amid trauma and drama, and maybe something lighter would be a good palate cleanser?" He had recently watched (on his own) some movie about a golfer (?) played by Owen Wilson, and he was looking for other films Wilson had done and came up with Woody Allen's 2011 romantic comedy Midnight in Paris.

Which just proves how well he knows me, because this movie was absolutely up my alley: hack screenwriter hoping to become a novelist, on vacation in Paris with his fiancee and her parents, somehow accidentally travels back in time and meets famous historical literary and art figures! And it's hilarious and sparkling and the various historical characters are amazing. Tom Hiddleston as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Kathy Bates as Gertrude Stein, Adrien Brody as Salvador Dalí. I didn't know Corey Stoll but his Ernest Hemingway was maybe my favorite. (I mean, all the dialogue was brilliant, it's Woody Allen through and through.) The ending is pretty obvious a mile off, but I found it satisfying.

tamaranth

2026/086: Glyph — Ali Smith

Whoever you thought you weren’t speaking to must’ve heard you after all. [loc. 607]

This is indeed connected to Gliff, but not in the way I think I expected. The roughly contemporary setting allows the characters -- Petra, her estranged younger sister Patricia ('Patch'), and Patricia's adopted daughter Billie -- to literally and figuratively protest the war in Gaza, and to tie society's lack of empathy to the Covid pandemic. ( Read more... )

Current Mood: thoughtful

osprey_archer

I trundled on in Three Moments of an Explosion until the story with three dead women (one of them died 500 years ago, but still) returned the ratio of stories to dead women to one to one. Then I decided enough was enough and I stopped.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s The Bronze Pen. A budding young writer acquires a bronze pen that seems to make what she writes come true. Propulsive while I was reading, but not very memorable aside from the fact that the main character is named Audrey Abbott - like Martha Abbott in The Changeling! - but evidently no relation.

Also Alexander Woollcott’s Two Gentlemen and a Lady, a trio of dog stories that I purchased in Bloomington in the interstices of the wedding I was attending. The stories were cute, but what I liked best were the illustrations by political cartoonist Edwina. Political cartoonists often make a very successful transition to illustration, I find. (See also Tenniel’s illustrations of Alice in Wonderland.

What I’m Reading Now

In The Romanovs, Nicholas I has just blundered into the Crimean War, which is going poorly because he has failed to modernize the Russian army since the Napoleonic Wars. Fortunately for him, the British and the French are catastrophically mismanaging their modernized armies, so Russia is not getting nearly as trounced as you might expect.

What I Plan to Read Next

I purchased two other books in Bloomington: Nigel Andrew’s The Butterfly: Flights of Enchantment, and Christopher Morley’s Parnassus on Wheels.

tamaranth

May culture
01MAY26: Samurai -- British Museum
( Read more... )
01MAY26: Iberia: Gabriela Montero in Recital -- Barbican Milton Court
( Read more... )
16MAY26: Unforgettable: Women artists from Antwerp to Amsterdam, 1600–1750 -- Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent
( Read more... )
21MAY26: Dido and Aeneas (Purcell, ~1688) -- Cutty Sark
( Read more... )
29MAY26: Backrooms (Parsons, 2026) -- Greenwich Picturehouse
( Read more... )
Also in May: a night in A&E for what was ~~almost certainly~~ not a stroke. Investigations ~~continue, tediously but necessarily~~ indicate probably a chronic sinus thing.

Current Mood: thoughtful

osprey_archer

I love books that delve into the customs of other countries, so of course I had to read Marie Kondo’s Letter from Japan, written with Kondo’s interpreter Marie Iida.* The book is a collection of essays exploring various Japanese customs, practices, ways of seeing the world, often with an exploration how these concepts influenced Kondo’s tidying method, but the focus remains on exploring the customs themselves.

*Slightly unclear to me if Kondo wrote the book in Japanese and Iida translated into English, or if Kondo wrote in English and Iida helped with the English as she wrote. I waffled and decided to tag it as a Japanese translation.

Some essays I particularly liked:

The one about Japan’s traditional calendar, which breaks each season into six segments, which are further divided into five-day ko, or microseasons. If there’s a book in English just about the microseasons, I’d love to read it.

The concept of mottonai, the regret over wasting something that could still serve a purpose - Japanese mothers will cry “Mottonai!” if their children try to discard something still useful.

The Japanese tea ceremony. I knew about the tea ceremony but enjoyed getting more details about the theory behind the tea ceremony (although clearly this could also fill a book!), and also I was tickled when Kondo explained why she chose the tea ceremony as her extracurricular in high school: she had heard that students in the tea ceremony club got to eat a sweet treat every day!

The concept of do, the way - not any specific way, but the concept itself, the joy of striving for mastery. Currently (on the English-language internet, at least), there’s often an emphasis on the dangers of perfectionism and the joy of accepting good-enough, so it was invigorating to read Kondo’s assertion, “When you make a decision to perfect something, your life opens to a kind of meditative stillness and satisfaction… Continue on with faith in your own joy and soon enough, a path will emerge.” The concept of mastery/perfection as an expression of joy - of loving something so much that you want to take the time to do it right.

Kondo also notes the contrast between American English and Japanese, particularly the fact that American English tends to reward and value speaking loudly and confidently - to frame being able to speak loudly and confidently as inherently freeing. But Kondo comments, “When I speak in Japanese, I feel I can get away with speaking softly”; and it struck me that being able to shout your views is one kind of freedom, but being able to speak softly and still get a hearing is another.

tamaranth

2026/085: The Cat and The Masked Woman — Colette (translated by Helen Constantine)

Though Saha, like a human, was watching Camille leave, Alain was sprawling in the chair, his upturned palm like a paw, skillfully playing with the first green prickly conkers of August. [final line of The Cat]

The Cat (original French title La Chatte, feminising the masculine noun) is a short novel set in 1920s Paris. ( Read more... )

Current Mood: nostalgic

duskpeterson

The semi-attached bedchamber I mentioned before is assigned to the Chara To Be – that is, the heir to the Chara.

For centuries, no women except the Consort and the High Lord's wife have lived in the East Wing of the Chara's palace. Any children of the Chara and the High Lord have been raised elsewhere in the palace. The current High Lord visits his children daily, often spending entire evenings with them.

The one exception to the rule against families dwelling in the East Wing is that, upon reaching the age at which he can read, the Chara To Be is moved to the bedchamber directly next to his father's quarters, so that he can begin to learn the law. He is tended by servants and, in recent decades, by a tutor assigned to him. The tutor lives elsewhere in the East Wing; however, the Chara To Be may enter the Chara's quarters at any time, and he is permitted to spend time playing with the scribe-boys across the hall. He is thus less isolated than were earlier Charas To Be: young boys who were expected to quietly read law books all day.

The previous Chara To Be is now Chara. He is young enough that he has not yet married, but presumably he will do so and will install his own heir in the bedchamber.

The bedchamber is guarded by the same men who guard the Chara. Do not approach that door in the corridor.

[Translator's note: The Ambassador first came to know the Chara To Be's chamber during the period of Re-creation.]

tamaranth

2026/084: Heaven's Graveyard — Grace Curtis

"No one can decide if it was a mass hallucination or a -- a mir --" Her lips convulsed. "Some kind of divine event... But I know what this is. It's fuckery." [loc. 3613]

Heaven's Graveyard is a fantasy novel, set in the same world as, though long after the events in, Curtis' earlier Idolfire (which I have not read), and featuring archaeology, sapphic romance, a protagonist who mostly lives in her head, and a murder mystery.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: calm

bunn

Today I sold our RIB, Annic Nova, and her new owners (a family with four young kids) came to collect her. They had driven four hours on a hot day starting at 7am (with a baby!) and they didn't even want to give her a test run (I suppose it would have been difficult to do so safely, since I hadn't brought enough PFDs for four kids, and don't have anything suitable for a baby anyway).

Still, it felt like a lot of trust they gave me for all that money and effort from them, even though we had taken her out earlier in the week to get a bit of video at their request. Pp had fun whizzing around while I took some video from a pontoon. It was a bit too windy to comfortably go out to sea, which was a pity. I would have taken her out for one last run on Sunday if they hadn't been quite so keen to come pick her up.

Watch on YouTube

She sold via Ebay in the end. I also advertised her on Facebook Marketplace, and on Apollo Duck (a specialist boat ad website). Apollo Duck was the most expensive, and the least effective place to advertise.

I'm kind of sad and relieved. It was an amazing thing to have a boat to run out to the islands, to float among the puffins and seals. She was very fast and very fun to drive, but she was also undeniably noisy, thirsty, and expensive.

I am hoping I may be able to go out in Mew the Mirror tomorrow: a much quieter, cheaper and slower kind of boating.

regshoe

Book meme borrowed from

phantomtomato.

General Questions

This week I'm reading: Just finished The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst, about which I have mixed feelings. I'm not sure what to start next; options are a femslashy boarding school book, a(nother) non-fiction book on women sailors and Michelle Paver's Wakenhyrst.
My favourite book of all time is: Oh, you know... :)
My current favourite book (read or re-read in the last 3 months): Best book of the last three months was The Celestial Omnibus by E. M. Forster, and I am pleased to remember I have The Eternal Moment still to read at some point.
The last book I bought was: The Persian Boy by Mary Renault. I don't know why I keep doing this to myself.
The first book I bought with my own money: I do not remember; thinking of my taste around the time I started buying things independently, it may well have been one of the twentieth-century domestic middlebrow-type authors.
The first book I received as a gift: Definitely too long ago for me to remember!
The last book I received as a gift was:

edwardianspinsteraunt surprised me with A Schoolgirl Adventurer: A Story of the '45 by Dorothea Moore, which is a very funny concept. Interested to see if this is the het version of White Cockades which it kind of looks like.
The last book I borrowed from the library: The above-mentioned Wakenhyrst. I live near a county boundary and am therefore fortunate to have access to two local library systems; one of them said it was on the shelves at the branch nearest me, but I couldn't find it there, so I reserved it in the other one.
The book physically closest to me right now: On the floor on either side of my chair are Concise Guide to the Moths of Great Britain and Ireland by Martin Townsend, Paul Waring and Richard Lewington and From Cabin 'Boys' to Captains: 250 Years of Women at Sea by Jo Stanley.
Do you read bookfic, and if so what is your favourite bookshop fic? I don't think so. Books set in bookshops always seem a bit suspiciously cutesy-sounding to me, but perhaps I'm being unfair.

This or that

Physical book or e-book: Physical book for the reading experience. Ebooks are a good way of getting to read obscure out-of-copyright books for free.
Used or new: I know 'second-hand' isn't always strictly accurate (I own some books bearing evidence of having been sold more than once before I bought them, as well as a few old enough to be virtually certain to have had more than one previous owner), but I don't like the term 'used' applied to books. Books aren't tools. Anyway, second-hand.
Fiction or non-fiction: Fiction.
Read at a coffee shop or at the park: Coffee shop. I will get distracted by natural history at the park.
Paperback or hardcover: My ideal book format is a hardback, but it's a very rare and now virtually extinct type of hardback (I have three perfect examples on my shelves, none much less than a hundred years old, and maybe a dozen 'almost's). I prefer the average paperback to the average hardback.
Romance or Crime: *E. W. Hornung voice* Why not both? ;) (Serious answer, I'm not particularly into either genre, though I occasionally enjoy both gay historical romance and murder mysteries.)

Yes or no

Stream of consciousness? No.
Poetry? Yes to the old-fashioned kind with some structure and metre (one stereotypically says 'the kind that rhymes'; rhyme is good, but I don't need it—I like Tolkien's Anglo-Saxon-style alliterative poetry and Shakespeare's non-rhyming iambic pentameter—I do need metre). No to more modern free verse, which can be very beautiful in its language but which my literal-mindedness struggles to keep up with.
Memoirs? Not really.
Philosophy? I like a bit of philosophy in fiction, and sometimes read sort of philosophical-theological religious books, but not philosophy books as such, no.
Thrillers? Usually no.
Chronicles? Like, the kind of fantasy books that have 'The Chronicles of...' in the series title? Yeah, OK. I have not read the actual Anglo-Saxon Chronicle or anything like that.
Dialogue heavy? All right, but I prefer more narration.

isis

A lot shorter this time 😁

What I've recently finished reading:

In eyeball, Echo of Worlds by M. R. Carey, the second book of the Pandominion duology. I liked it and thought it was a good conclusion to the set-up of the first book. Also, I just realized it's basically Mass Effect 3 with the Synthesis ending, which I guess makes Paz Female Shepard...okay, not really. But the theme of organic intelligence and machine intelligence coming to terms with each other is a relevant theme in these days of "AI" growth.

In audio, Heaven's River by Dennis E. Taylor, the fourth Bobiverse book. I really loved this one, even though there was a bit of idiot-balling at the climax - why would you go through the town to get to the transit station, instead of going around it and coming in from the other side, when you know your opponents are looking for you?!?! But otherwise it was a well-assembled story, another "first contact with an alien race" narrative with some interesting twists. The bits and pieces of the separate storylines come together in some surprising ways at the end. And heh, it's the same theme in a way, machine intelligence and human intelligence and human-mapped-into-machine intelligence. I'm looking forward to the fifth book!

What I'm playing (again):

No, not replaying, I never do that 😁 but I had not started up Ghost of Tsushima since before my first bit of spring travel back in late March, so even though I was just about to do the final quest of the second part of the game, I noodled around with some random sidequests (freeing fishing villages from their evil Mongol overlords) for a few sessions, until I felt ready to free Castle Shimura. Now I'm out the other side and ready to complete the last act of the game!

sineala

What I Just Finished Reading

Nothing!

What I'm Reading Now

Comics Wednesday!

( Avengers Armageddon #1, Captain Marvel Dark Past #3, Civil War Unmasked #2 )

What I'm Reading Next

Not sure. Still slowly working through this baseball autobiography of Billy Bean that

lysimache got me I think for Christmas. (Not Billy Beane with an e, that is a different former baseball player. This one is the gay one.)

Current Mood: hot

osprey_archer

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Tamar Adler’s Feast on Your Life: Kitchen Meditations for Every Day, which is a collection of 365 brief kitchen meditations. Most of them are bitty and ultimately I felt that the book seemed fairly bitty too, but we’ll see how I feel about it in the long run - I’ve had Adler books sneak up on me before.

I also read Caroline Dale Snedeker’s The White Isle, in which a young Roman girl travels to her family’s new home in Britain. First third of the book is road trip (Snedeker does a great landscape description), second third is settling down in Britain (more beautiful landscape), we’re getting near the end and no suitable suitors have appeared… but then Lavinia and her mother travel to Cornwall to visit a friend and they are kidnapped by Durotrigs, only to be rescued by a band of Christians!

Lavinia instantly gives herself up for dead, because as we all know the Christians sacrifice human beings in order to drink their blood. Except apparently? This is not actually true?? Which is convenient, because Govan (the leader of the band that rescued Lavinia and her mother) is just SO handsome.

“I cannot believe you are conversion narrativing at me,” I griped at Snedeker. Then we got to the part where Govan is comforting Lavinia after a death, and I unexpectedly burst into tears. So grudgingly but with feeling, I must say well-played.

What I’m Reading Now

“Then the Prussian general Blucher, a gnarled cavalryman who shared Alexander’s bellicosity, defeated Napoleon and was ready to advance - till he suffered a nervous breakdown and went blind, convinced he was pregnant with an elephant (fathered by a Frenchman). The advance faltered. Had a septuagenarian cavalryman pregnant with an elephant saved Napoleon?”

When I got to this part in The Romanovs, I laughed so hard I cried. Obviously Blucher got it together to help put Napoleon on Elba (and then help defeat Napoleon again after he got off Elba), but WOW.

I have also continued China Mieville’s Three Moments of an Explosion - making better progress once I concluded these stories are too stressful to read at bedtime. I just read the one about the people who live in a settlement where they can see ships passing, and sometimes the ships sink, but the ships never land and sailors never wash ashore after the sinking… also a character dies who MIGHT not be a woman, but Gam never gets a pronoun so it could go either way.

I’m also reading Marie Kondo’s Letter from Japan. More about this later, but for now, it has definitely inspired me in some tidying! (Not a full KonMari, but smaller scale tidying of things that have accreted on flat surfaces.)

What I Plan to Read Next

I’m off to Bloomington this weekend to be a bridesmaid(bachelorette party tomorrow in fact!) so I don’t expect to have much time to read. But I’ve got Rosemary Sutcliff’s Flowers of Adonis along, and I DO intend to snatch some time to visit my four favorite used bookstores in town.

tamaranth

2026/083: A Trade of Blood — Robert Jackson Bennett

We have stolen secrets from the bloods of the titans and taught all of nature to grow and warp and shift at our pleasing. [loc. 545]

Cat-herders! Unexpected siblings! More of Ana's background! Another ill-judged liaison! Blue grass! And a very knotty murder mystery... This was an excellent read, and very much not the culmination of a trilogy: this series could run and run, and I for one will be grateful for each new volume.

Full review nearer publication date, but I note that the 'Shadow of the Leviathan' series is rooted firmly in the mundane world, the place where we're reading. The first novel, The Tainted Cup, explored civil servants and builders, and regulatory frameworks: the second, A Drop of Corruption, tackled autocracy, with a side order of shady banking practises. This time...

Farms are not sites of hallowed tradition. They are, if anything, laboratories for profound biological change. [Author's Note]

Read because: I enjoyed the first two books so much, and leapt at the chance to get an ARC. Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for the full honest review I'll write closer to UK publication date -- 4th August 2026.

Current Mood: impressed

osprey_archer

Even people who do not approach the Hornblower and Aubrey-Maturin books by reading the two series concurrently more or less inevitably end up drawing comparisons between the two. The general consensus seems to be that the Aubrey-Maturin books are better, and in terms of literary quality and depths of research I do not disagree; but at the same time there is no one in the Aubrey-Maturin books I want to stick a pin through and study like a bug like I want to study Horatio Hornblower.

Four books into the Hornblower series chronologically, we have arrived at the first book in publication order: Beat to Quarters, otherwise known as The Happy Return. (

littlerhymes’ review here.) Hornblower’s neuroses, which spent the first four books slowly growing, here appear on the page fully formed.

Hornblower has an ideal of a perfect captain: firm, decisive, unsurprised by any contingency, in complete command of himself at all times, and completely without human weakness. He yearns to be RoboCaptain, and as he is instead a mere human being of flesh and blood, he is constantly disappointed with himself for such crimes as betraying to his steward the wicked and detestable fact that he’s hungry after not eating for hours upon hours of battle.

He’s constantly analyzing himself for any infraction of these self-imposed rules, but this constant self-analysis is combined with a crushing inability to understand himself at all. For instance, partway through the book, the aristocratic Lady Barbara Wellesley seeks passage on the ship, and Hornblower spends the next three chapters or so throwing a series of controlled but deeply felt temper tantrums about the situation.

She is so independent and intelligent, just like a man, and Hornblower prefers a woman to be a helpless clinging vine. (I think this is Hornblower’s desperate attempt to convince himself that his wife Maria, the original clinging vine, is the perfect woman for him.) She might be thinking that his clothes are shabby. (As far as I can tell she gives not a single hoot about Hornblower’s clothes, but she MIGHT.) She interrupted his sacred morning walk on the quarterdeck to ask him to breakfast. HOW VERY DARE.

( spoilers )

I’m glad we decided to read the series chronologically rather than in publication order, because I’m not sure I would have warmed to Hornblower if this was the first time that I met him. But maybe like Bush I would have seen the lonely wounded animal beneath the desperately constructed Perfect Captain front, and yearned to commit the audacity of putting a hand on his shoulder.

tamaranth

2026/082: Generation Loss — Elizabeth Hand

I’ve lived my entire life expecting the worst, knowing it will happen, seeing it happen. Making it happen, people used to think, then photographing it and making other people see it too.

Cass Neary works in the stock room of a New York bookshop. She was a famous photographer for fifteen minutes back in the Seventies: her book Dead Girls was a hit. But her later photography, of dead or dying punks and addicts, didn't have as much impact: a brutal assault, and a series of failed relationships (her last girlfriend died in the 9/11 attacks) have reduced her to a shadow of herself. Then an old friend tells her he's recommended her for an interview with Aphrodite Kamestos, the legendary photographer who inspired Cass. ( Read more... )

Current Mood: thoughtful

duskpeterson

The place where you are standing or sitting is the Chara's sitting chamber. You are privileged to see it; most visitors only encounter the Chara in his court or at receptions. The primary purpose of the sitting chamber is to provide the Chara with a place to relax with his friends during his brief moments of leisure.

To your right is the hearth, and over it is carved the royal emblem. This was added during the reign of the previous Chara. Directly opposite is a doorway leading into a semi-separate bedchamber, of which we will speak later.

Directly in front of you is the law. This impressive display of books, in a floor-to-ceiling bookcase, constitutes the Emorian edition of the Chara's law. You must not touch the books, but if you admire them from afar, the Chara may unbend enough to talk of the law with you. By all means, take this opportunity to learn more about the law from Emor's High Judge.

A small window to the left of the bookcase offers a splendid view of the black border mountains.

Other objects and chambers in the quarters are entirely private. Do not touch anything in the Chara's quarters – I emphasize that. Over the centuries, the Chara's dungeon has been filled with many men who accidentally let their hands touch something forbidden that belonged to the Chara.

In a word, visiting the Chara – at least, the current Chara – is an intimidating experience. Let us leave here as quickly as possible.

[Translator's note: Due caution in these quarters is shown by the protagonist of Law of Vengeance.]

tamaranth

2026/081: Gliff — Ali Smith

Every classic old horse story I’ve ever chanced upon in this brave new unlibraried world deals with the bloodiness of humanity to other creatures as well as each other and more often than not ends in dutiful sadness as if the story, not totally broken, is at least broken in. [loc. 992]

Rose and Bri come home from a visit to their mother (who's taken on her sister's job). Their mother's boyfriend, Leif, is driving the campervan, but he abandons them after they find a red line painted around the outside of their house -- and later, of their campervan. He leaves them with enough canned food to last them a while...

( Read more... )

Current Mood: cold

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tamaranth - 2026/087: 1177 BC: A Graphic History of the Year Civilisation Collapsed — Cline / Fawkes
osprey_archer - Secondary World Fantasy
isis - thursday things
tamaranth - 2026/086: Glyph — Ali Smith
osprey_archer - Wednesday Reading Meme
tamaranth - Monthly culture, May 2026
osprey_archer - Book Review: Letter from Japan
tamaranth - 2026/085: The Cat and The Masked Woman — Colette (translated by Helen Constantine)
duskpeterson - FIC: The Chara To Be's chamber (Tempestuous Tours)
tamaranth - 2026/084: Heaven's Graveyard — Grace Curtis
bunn - RIB is gone
regshoe - A book meme
isis - wednesday reads and things
sineala - Wednesday Reading Meme
osprey_archer - Wednesday Reading Meme
tamaranth - 2026/083: A Trade of Blood — Robert Jackson Bennett
osprey_archer - Book Review: Beat to Quarters
tamaranth - 2026/082: Generation Loss — Elizabeth Hand
duskpeterson - FIC: The Chara's quarters (Tempestuous Tours)
tamaranth - 2026/081: Gliff — Ali Smith

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Style: Neutral Good for Practicality by timeasmymeasure

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