The Stupid, Little Things

Tags

definitely not a killjoy, New Years, rambling, real life

Is there a word like “scrooge”, except for all holidays instead of just for Christmas? Hallowe’en, Valentine’s Day, Thanksgiving – hell, even my birthday, most of the tI’m not a curmudgeon, and I wouldn’t say I’m a kill-joy; I have no problem with other people having fun or getting into the spirit of whatever season we’re dealing with.

I just personally have a really hard time matching my feelings to an arbitrary calendar date, whether those feelings are supposed to be spooky, romantic, thankful or, in this case, resolute. I also don’t really like fireworks, and I can’t really drink anymore, and I am not a fan of standing in the cold or watching other people stand in the cold on TV. Suffice it to say, I’m not so big on New Years.

And I’ve always hated the idea of New Years Resolutions. They almost always feel contrived and artificial, born out of a sense of obligation to social norms rather than out of anyone’s real desires or needs, and we all know that nobody follows through with them anyway. The idea is so prevalent that the “buy a three month gym membership so that you can start in January and give up in March” thing is a running cultural joke.

“Aha,” we say. “It is the 1st of January, all of a sudden I see with perfect clarity and will create a plan in the next five minutes that I will adhere to for the next 365 days.”

Yeah, right.

ON THE OTHER HAND …

I am a really big fan of hacking your brain to get it to do what you want, and taking advantages of resources that are available. That isn’t going to work when the goal is something that everyone expects to fail; “I’m going to try to eat better” is basically pointless, because you were either going to do it already or you’ll start failing when the people around you start giving up. Same thing with “I’m going to lose x pounds” or “I’m going to wake up early and make breakfast every day” … no one around you is going to hold you accountable to that sort of promise, because so many people mean well and then drop out that you’re just another statistic. And if you know that nobody else cares, you lose any external assistance with meeting your own goal.

Likewise, resolving to do something that you think you should do but don’t actually want to do is pretty much dead before it begins. Either you’re the sort of person who can motivate themselves with willpower and a sense of duty alone (if you are, can I have some?) or you’re the sort of person who wants to be better than they are, but can’t actually ever seem to make it happen because willpower and a sense of duty are great but when you’re spending those things on being a productive member of society or being kind to your family or getting through the day without dissolving in a puddle of depression, your willpower already has its work cut out for it.

But there are some things that can really benefit from some New Years attention. Little things, usually, the kinds of things that seem harder than they are, that will actually lead to concrete, observable improvements in your life without costing more than you have to give. The sorts of things that just need a little push to get going, and maybe some loving attention for the first steps of the journey. Maybe “take the stairs at work at least once a day” or “dump the spare change in my pocket into a savings jar at the end of the week”.

Yes, they seem small and kind of stupid … and that’s probably because they are, because sometimes the small kind of stupid things are important, and at a time when everyone tends to think in these grand sweeping arcs, paying attention to the little things is especially important.

They’re also useful, because it’s often easier to bring people in to help you with the little things. It’s a lot easier to convince a roommate to dump their spare change sometimes than it is to convince them to go vegetarian; coworkers might take the stairs with you sometimes when they wouldn’t be willing to give up going out to lunch every day.

There are a lot of things that I want to accomplish in the next year: make a certain amount of progress with my writing, do some paid work, get my health into a better place and keep improving my diet. I’d like to build my sense of personal style and learn how to wear bright lipstick again. None of those things are resolutions, though. They’re important, and if I work at it, I’ll be able to achieve what I can, and no amount of arbitrary promises will keep me from failing if something really gets in the way.

I am, however, going to make two resolutions:

1. I will write every day.
2. I will try keeping a journal and see how that goes.

Now, writing every day doesn’t mean that I’m going to end up producing something that will go into a novel. It might be a blog post, or maybe a character sketch or a ‘what-if’ scene or some kind of self-insert wish fulfillment fanfiction, I have no idea. The point isn’t what gets written, it’s that anything gets written at all. The only way to get better at something is to practice, and I know that, and so now I’ve gone and made it official. Maybe I’ll start some kind of hashtag thing so I can keep track for myself, and then people can pretend they care when they follow me on twitter!

😀

As for the journal … I have no idea how that one will go. I’ve never been the kind of girl who kept a diary, and I’m definitely not going to start that now. But I’ve seen enough writers I admire talk about how jotting things down each day helps them with their work later on that it seems like it’s worth trying, so I’m going to give it a shot! No hashtags for that one, just a crappy spiral-bound notebook that I bought for Spanish class and never ended up using.

At the end of the day, I guess I see the beginning of a new year as a chance to check in with yourself and see what you struggle with, what you’re striving for, and what’s important to you. It’s a chance to be honest in a kind of way you don’t get very often, and if you use it wisely, it can be a chance to take yourself by the hand and give yourself a little push in the right direction.

So don’t waste it on a gym membership or a juicer, I guess.

UPDATE: see how it’s going here!

Gamergate, Women, and Unpopular Opinions

Tags

Anita Sarkeesian, Brianna Wu, dungeons and dragons, feminism, Gamergate, John Scalzi, Seanan McGuire, video games, writing, yesallwomen, zoe quinn

It should surprise very few people who know me to hear that I’ve been keeping up with Gamergate. I’ve been trying to follow the story ever since I first heard about Zoe Quinn and the campaign that was started to ruin her life, and I keep feeling like I should be saying something about it.

I feel like I’m letting myself down every time I see another story about what a group of people are willing to do to terrorize the women they disagree with and stay silent. What’s going on right now is incredibly important, and incredibly brutal, and it’s not so much that something needs to be said – because people who know more than I do are already saying things – as that those things need to keep being said by as many people as are willing to say them, or nothing will change.

At the same time, I find myself struggling to figure out where to begin, because for me, Gamergate feels like it’s just one part of an ugly puzzle.

Image from We Hunted The Mammoth

I’ve always known that the Gaming Community contained pockets of anger, hatred, and vitriol. It’s why I’ve only ever tried to play a multiplayer game once. The results didn’t surprise me, they won’t surprise anyone, though they hurt me deeply; from nearly the moment I joined the game I found myself subject to a torrent of verbal abuse on account of my newness. My team tried to kill me to keep me from ruining their game, told me to leave (though I had thought I was in a new-to-the-game zone). When someone messaged me, sounding friendly, asking for my A/S/L, I told them that I was a 21-year-old Canadian girl.

And wouldn’t you know it, people stopped calling me the “f%cking noob” and started calling me a whole lot of other things, of which “whore” was probably the nicest.

The take-home message: Being a new player in a multiplayer game is a sin; being a female gamer is even worse.

So it doesn’t really come as a surprise to me that these people who responded so angrily to my moderate-incompetence, which served to only inconvenience them, have taken that anger and let it boil over into death threats against women who actually challenge the status quo. It hurts me, though – particularly, oddly enough, because in many ways I have more in common with the gamers who do the threatening than I do with the women who receive the threats.

I’m a feminist, but I don’t really participate in what I think of as feminist appreciation of culture. I read books about men going on adventures, I watch movies with minimal plots in which the women are dressed to look sexy, I play games where I run around shooting things whose only real crime usually amounts to ‘working for the wrong person or getting caught up in the wrong toxic disaster’. I frequently wish that women were doing more things in these pieces of entertainment I consume, and I’ll object to the use of rape as a tool for character development until I’m blue in the face, but from the outside, my feminism and my recreational pursuits seem fairly segregated from each other.

And fish. Sometimes I shoot fish.

I play violent video games. I’ve never played GTA, but I’ve played games that were similar. I play big-name big-ticket games, the same ones enjoyed by the men who want women out of their pastime. Most of my self-indulgent spending is split pretty much evenly between the buying of video games, and the buying of fashion dolls. I don’t think we’re so very different, the men and I, or at least I don’t think we have to be (except for the dolls).

But evidently they do – or, some of them do, because while we may all be getting tired of the contractual obligation to acknowledge that yes, #notallmen send death threats, I think I’d still rather err on the side of polite, open communication than risk seeming generalist.

Evidently, some men think that women don’t belong in their treehouse, and that a woman who dares to enter should be on her best behavior, that failing to do so in an online context should be met with abuse, the threat of violence, and real-world harrassment.

Okay, if this is their treehouse, I can understand not wanting to share.

That’s bad enough. Really, that’s enough bad right there. I’d love to be able to say that it doesn’t get worse, but I can’t.

The problem isn’t just that a fragment of the gaming community has taken upon itself the mandate to ruin the lives of the women it doesn’t like. The problem is that as far as I can tell, this phenomenon itself is being viewed by the rest of our society as a little fringe problem.

Gamers have a history of being picked on. It’s only fairly recently that 58 percent of Americans have started playing video games (45 percent of those players being women). When I was a teenager, a “gamer” was someone who played Dungeons and Dragons, and there was a lot of media hype at the time wondering about the psychological dangers that D&D posed to its players. Gamers are still viewed with suspicion in the media; when someone kills people in a school or a theatre, the media starts wondering how many violent video games they played. Many people who play games today remember what it was like to be mocked for their hobby. Gamers were a minority, they were marginalized and persecuted.

So it must be hard have to set aside that mantle of oppression. It must be difficult for those people who can now celebrate their social power by playing Call of Duty or Assassin’s Creed or Halo with their coworkers, who can exercise their financial power by purchasing a constantly-cycling series of systems and games, to realize that being a gamer doesn’t represent the same things that it used to. And it seems to be incredibly hard for the rest of the world to understand that this group of people they used to eye sideways now occupy more social space than the people who don’t like to unwind by throwing birds at pigs, or decapitating pirates.

Hard as it is, though, both sides need to understand that the world is changing. The subset of gamers who used to make up the entire group are now just a part – and while the opinions of the people who helped shape the culture are important, “I got here first” can’t be allowed to hold sway in the real world the way it did in the schoolyard.

And the opinions of a caustic, aggressive group of people shouldn’t be treated as the mutterings of a few angry nerds, no matter how small a percentage of gamers they make up.

Gamers aren’t the Other anymore. Gamers are people too, and when a group of people starts launching systematic attacks against another group of people, when someone in a group threatens violence or murder, we can’t afford to trivialize it.

I was thinking this morning about a story I read, about how Anita Sarkeesian was warned against speaking at Utah State University with the threat of a mass shooting, and how she eventually had to cancel because adequate security measures would not be provided for her. Guaranteeing that students can’t bring a concealed weapon into a room wherein mass murder has been explicitly threatened is, apparently, not something that we can do.

I wonder what had to be going through the minds of the people who made that decision. They couldn’t have believed that the threats were credible, or else how would they allow a room full of people to face that kind of danger. Did they think that an angry person has never before decided to murder women for what they dared to think?

I wanted to remind people about the Montreal Massacre, where in 1989 a young man walked into a school, separated the men and the women, and then shot the women in an attempt at “fighting feminism”. I wanted to say that this kind of manifest hatred has already taken the lives of at least fourteen people – but then I saw that I didn’t have to. The person who made the threat against Sarkeesian signed with the name Marc Lepine, the name of the shooter in the Montreal Massacre. Evidently, deliberately invoking the identity of a man who murdered women because of what they were doing in a school was insufficient to convince law enforcement to protect a woman, who was being threatened because of what she was doing in school.

These fourteen women were victims of the fight against feminism. Je me souviens.

I can only imagine how different the response might have been, if a Catholic organization were to have received threats from an individual identifying themselves as part of an Islamic hate group. Would concealed weapons still have been permitted in that context? I have an incredibly difficult time believing that they would.

What it boils down to is that somehow, society doesn’t seem to think that violence against women is a problem. Oh, people are aware that it happens – but not as much as women like to claim it does. Maybe it ties into an attempt to be positive? Accepting that a group of people are out to get women would require seeing women as a distinct group, rather than seeing them as part of ‘people’. I’ve heard it suggested that to single women out as the victims of specific violence is exactly the kind of thing that feminists are supposed to fight against, as though in order to be a good feminist I’m supposed to sit by and pretend that people weren’t out to get women just for being women. I’m supposed to accept that Facebook pages dedicated specifically to violence against women are “controversial humor“, not hate.

They’re not.

It’s not in our heads.

People are out to get women.

I follow John Scalzi’s blog, because he thinks a lot of interesting things and he’s not afraid to talk about them. I look at him and I see a part of what I want to achieve – he writes good novels, and he thinks good thoughts, and he puts himself out there when he thinks it’s important. I’ve seen what he gets in response: he seems to be mocked on a regular basis, for daring to speak for feminism, and he handles it with incredible grace. He also posted a picture of his house today, something my brain tells me would be an incredible risk for any woman with a controversial opinion. It feels like another part of the puzzle: men who provoke with what they say get derided, insulted, yelled at, threatened – women have campaigns launched against them. Men are hassled, women are forced to flee their homes for their own safety.

Women get attacked.

It’s hard not to think about this, as a woman who wants to write books. It’s hard not to see what a small but violent group of gamers is doing to the women who cross them, and wonder what might happen to me if I dare to speak my mind after (if? after!) my first book hits the shelves.

I want to work in an industry where it seems to be tacitly understood that men write books, and women write books for women and children. I want to work in an industry where the product is as much about the ideas as it is about the way they’re packaged, and almost as much about the author of those ideas as the thoughts themselves. I read Seanan McGuire’s explanation for why she won’t write rape, and how the simple fact that none of her female characters have been violently abused is interpreted by a reader as a lack of respect for her craft, rather than a sign of respect for her creations.

My characters will not get raped.

My characters will not all conform to social norms. I began the novel I’m currently writing with no intention to create an ‘alternative’ cast, and ended up with an asexual woman, a homosexual elderly man, a bisexual frat boy, and a heterosexual young woman as my four main protagonists. How many people will take issue with that?

How many of them will decide that I deserve to be punished for subjecting them to it? Or if I choose to speak my mind about why I make these decisions?

Somehow, if I ever achieve the level of success that Scalzi has earned, I doubt I will be in a position to feel safe posting pictures of my house.

Top Ten Tuesdays – Romances That Make Me Swoon

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romances that make me swoon, top ten tuesdays

It’s that time again! The Broke and the Bookish have thrown down the Valentine’s gauntlet with the top ten books that make you swoon. Well, I’m not really a hearts and roses kind of reader – I’ll cry at the drop of a hat, for sentiment or generosity or loss, but books don’t generally make me flutter. I am, however, a sucker for a well-written romantic subplot. So, with no further ado, I’m probably more pleased than I should be to present my ten favourite romances.

~

1. Armand and Reine-Marie Gamache {The Three Pines Mysteries – Louise Penny}

It seems sort of fitting that the first item on the list for me isn’t some big, showy, good-looking duo who swoon and strip sensually for the camera – as it were. What makes a good romance for me has always had very little to do with how shiny the people’s hair is, or how toned their abs are (not that I’ll complain about a nice body); the important part is how the partners connect, and how well that connection is passed on from the writer’s mind to the reader’s heart. Armand and Reine-Marie Gamache are a middle-aged couple that give me hope for the possible future of all couples everywhere. They’ve been together for decades, and they’ve had their trials, but there is no doubt for me that they love each other as much as it is possible for two people to love each other. They talk, and they tease, they support each other in hard times and they challenge each other, and they’re just really freaking cute, and I’ll be lucky if I have half of what they do when I’m fifty.

~

2. Rodrigo and Miranda Belmonte {The Lions of Al-Rassan – Guy Gavriel Kay}

This is another couple who laid their foundations long before the beginning of their book. Rodrigo is a warrior, modeled loosely after El Cid, and he spends most of this novel away from home on one adventure or another. Sure, he’s mostly surrounded by men, but that doesn’t stop him from entangling himself with a charming, vivacious woman who captures his heart – he acknowledges it openly later in the book. And yet, somehow, the relationship he has with his wife back home is one of the stronger threads winding through this story. Miranda is one hell of a woman, intelligent and brave and fierce, unafraid of fighting for her home and her family and her husband, and their marriage delights me because it’s one of love, and longing, and trust. Rodrigo makes it clear that though he may love two women (and yay, we need more books that show this as a possibility) he’s not willing to go against the promise he made. He doesn’t seem to view it as a burden, but a choice he happily made – and their reunion, when they do briefly intersect, was a delightful glimpse into a passionate love affair that two children and some grey hairs did nothing to dampen.

~

3. Jehane bet Ishak and Ammar ibn Khairan {The Lions of Al-Rassan – Guy Gavriel Kay}

Okay, so I really just adore all of the romances in this book. If Rodrigo and Miranda were the fire in the hearth, Jehane and Ammar were the literary brushfire. Both are brilliant, both are independent and capable, and both were willing, if with some difficulty, to admit that there was something missing in their lives that so far only the other had been able to properly fill. I think what appealed to me most about this romance was that both Jehane and Ammar had had experiences with other partners before. In fact, each had relationships during the course of the book, and neither of them were the sort to be a fool for love. I suppose the blind leap into passion is nice, but I prefer watching the playful, intelligent build, the dance of wits that doesn’t have to burn hotter than reason because when the sun comes up, both parties know that they’ll still think the night was worthwhile. Also, Ammar is a poet, and one of those men you meet sometimes in fiction who has a knack for saying the right thing and not saying the right thing, and I think I might have fallen a little bit in love with him.

(An honourable mention at the end of this goes out to Jehane and Ammar and Rodrigo, and to Guy Gavriel Kay for being willing to explore the idea that people might love more than one person at the same time without it being the grounds for a hideous love triangle arc. Jehane loves both men, and Rodrigo loves Jehane and Miranda, and if other things hadn’t gotten in the way I think there might have been a place for all of them to figure something out between them. Part of the reason I cried at the end.)

~

4. Veralidaine Sarrasri and Numair Salmalin {The Immortals – Tamora Pierce}

This romance made me starry-eyed when I first read it – and it might or might not have summoned a couple of hearts and butterflies when I reread the Immortals series last summer. I fell in love with Numair basically instantly. He’s competent, and intelligent, and thoughtful, and kind, and dreamy, and that on its own might have been enough. When you add in the way he interacts with Daine, though … I normally don’t go for the student-teacher romance. I find the discrepancy of experience between the two almost always turns me off, but somehow Pierce managed to craft a romance narrative that flowed through from a professorial or fraternal affection into romance in such a way that I bought it. Numair cares deeply for Daine, and while her occasional bursts of juvenile reaction frustrated me, she’s willing to invest so much trust and hope in him it’s almost heartbreaking. While I stopped reading Pierce after the first Kel book, the glimpse we got of Daine and Numair being quietly, comfortably, adorably together in the background just confirmed for me how wonderful they are together.

~

5. Alanna and George Cooper {Tortall-verse – Tamora Pierce}

I think we were supposed to root for Jonathan in the beginning of the Lioness series, but George had my heart from the beginning. I’ve always been a fan of romance that comes out of friendship; every real relationship I’ve ever had as come out of at least a year of solid friendship, and the better ones have a foundation of two or three years on which the passion was built. Maybe I should credit my appreciation of that style to this couple, who stood by each other through thick and thin for years. Every time someone complains about how nice guys don’t get shown the appreciation they deserve (sex) I kind of want to drag them to George by their ears. Here is a man who learned he was in love with a woman, and saw that she wasn’t ready for him and accepted it, and her choices. He stood by her, was there for her when she needed a friend, and while he had no problem cuffing her on the back of the head and reminding her that he wanted her, he did it on her schedule. Alanna didn’t play the most conventional role in their courting – her lack of comfort with her femininity was a major plot point in the series – but I think that’s what made me so happy for them, in the end, and what made her and George work so well. She didn’t have to be a blushing, ballgowned beauty, and he didn’t have to be titled or respectable: when the time was right, they found each other, and were able to accept each other for exactly who and what they were.

~

6. Amelia Peabody Emerson and Radcliffe Emerson – {The Amelia Peabody series – Elizabeth Peters}

I adored these two when I was a teenager, and although I haven’t read the series in ages, they still hold a fond place in my heart. I think it has something to do with the way that these two fiercely stubborn people are able to wind themselves around each other while holding onto their essential, individual sparks; Peabody is blunt, opinionated, fearless, and not even remotely afraid of a challenge. Emerson is about as stubborn as she is, and they’re both a little bit silly about it, and it was absolutely delightful reading their sparring match cum marriage. This is one couple who managed to have children without turning into boring, doting parents, a couple that really made the marriage a partnership of mind and body rather than an institution. Love comes in many shapes and sizes, and these two prove that you don’t have to sand off all the rough edges in order to earn it.

~

7. Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes {The Mary Russell series – Laurie R. King}

I’m noticing a recurring theme here: my favourite couples tend to be those who favour marriages of the minds, and Russell and Holmes are no exception. Again, the whole teacher-student dynamic tends to frustrate me, and I’m also not hugely keen on stories where an author takes someone they expect me to like and then throws them at their new character. It often comes across like they’re trying to force me to like their baby by making someone else like them, and I don’t like being played. Russell and Holmes, though, are an exception on just about every level. The bond formed between them is one that took many forms over the five years between meeting and marriage, and their relationship is founded in equal parts on shared experiences, and a shared brilliance. What really makes the pairing ring true for me, though, aren’t any of the exciting bursts of intellectual passion or even the incredibly rare moments of physicality between the two. It’s the little moments, two knocks on the door frame, a touch of a hand in a quiet moment, a word or a look or a breath that manages to speak volumes about the extent to which these two people care about each other. Russell and Holmes’ relationship is built in the spaces between moments, in quiet and calm and fear and hope, and it’s beautiful.

~

8. Vanion and Sephrenia {The Elenium and the Tamuli – David Eddings}

These two were not the main subject of the books in which they appeared, and I think that’s why I’m so fond of them. The quiet love between them is a major theme in the first three books, a secret that wasn’t a secret that grew and grew until at one point, the two of them were simply unwilling to not be together as a couple. A priest from an order of religious knights and the high priestess of a goddess from a rival religion, both of them were forbidden from entering into a relationship with the other … and it’s not that neither of them cared. It was just that neither of them could believe that their gods could possibly have a problem with them, because that’s how important their love was, and it turned out they were right. They were willing to quietly defy two major religions and offend dozens if not hundreds of powerful figures, and they did it without a second thought, while the main characters were off having their epic quest. I don’t often find myself truly admiring the courage of fictional characters, but I’ll take my hat off to these two.

~

9. Sabriel and Touchstone {The Abhorsen Series – Garth Nyx}

This relationship rivaled Numair and Daine for the Most Significant Fictional Pairing Of My Childhood, and I honestly can’t explain why. Touchstone was sort of weird, deeply influenced by trauma, and Sabriel was desperately trying to figure out how to save a world she didn’t really understand while coming to terms with her father’s sort-of-Death. Neither of them was exactly thinking straight, and they were both caught up in a lot of heavy emotion, so it’s sort of inevitable that they turned to each other when things got rough. Maybe that’s it. Maybe the simple, clean inevitability of it won me over? I don’t know, all I know is as soon as you mention the two of them I find myself smiling a strange little smile, and wanting to draw kisses.

~

10. Phèdre no Delaunay de Montrève and Joscelin Verreuil – {Kushiel’s Legacy – Jacqueline Carey}

I didn’t want to like these two. The book so desperately wanted me to, part of me was dead set on opposing it just out of sheer stubbornness. Joscelin is too beautiful and too tragic, and Phèdre is basically a walking drama magnet, and then you go and add a love-crossed curse from the gods and it should be horrible. I don’t blame anyone who finds them cloying, or overwrought, I really don’t.

But so help me, my heart goes out to these two each and every time. I think it has something to do with the lengths each of them was willing to go for the other, for good and for ill. They argue in the course of their series, they struggle. They put each other through hell, both accidentally and out of spitefulness, defensiveness, pride. On the other hand, they each prove willing to endure the unendurable for each other. They might be destined for the most epic romance of all time, but they didn’t just get it handed on a silver platter.  Their love might be as beautiful as they are, but they’ve had to work for it. Each was offered a dozen chances to turn away, give in, take an easy road. Each struggled with that choice, and each actually went as far as taking the first steps – not something romances often have the guts to show. In the end, they came back to each other, aware of the costs and willing to pay, and all of the toil and the sacrifices and the pure intentional effort they put in creates something incredibly valuable in the end. If love is what you make of it, these two’ve forged some kind of indomitable sky-castle, and I find myself crumbling before its might every time.

The Sisters of Saint Avice had never meant to forsake their lives of quiet prayer and contemplation in favor of violence and counterintelligence, but any real religious figure would say that only the angels can know in advance what god will ask of them. The legend went that the Sisters had been quartered in a little abbey out in the middle of nowhere, somewhere north in the Commonwealth, and they’d never quite been able to convince their chapter-house exactly how infested with bandits and brigands the region was. Given the choice between being pillaged and slaughtered on a semi-regular basis or learning how to defend themselves, the sisters decided to turn from God’s scroll to his sword.

Over the course of the next three hundred years, woman after woman was sent to the abbey of Saint Avice. Woman after woman learned how to use the weapons that god gave her, hand and elbow and foot and mind, to keep herself alive against the damned persistent masses of heathen barbarians who seemed incapable of just giving up and going home.

It didn’t take long for the locals in nearby villages to recognize the potential solution to their frequent bandit problems. Slowly at first, and then in greater numbers, young sons and even daughters of craftsmen and farmers started appearing at the doors of the abbey. They brought coin when they could, grain or blankets or in one memorable case a cow when they couldn’t. They came humbly, not quite sure what they were asking for, exactly, other than a means to protect their families.

Top Ten Tuesdays – Worlds I Never Want To Live In

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top ten tuesdays, worlds I don't want to live in

The blog, she lives! And, true to form, rather than contributing one of the couple of Blog Ideas I have written down, I’m jumping in with Top Ten Tuesdays, by the Broke and the Bookish! I adore this week’s theme – it’s been interesting taking a look at the series I adore and imagining how utterly terrible it would be to join the adventures.

All of these stories already have their heroes and their gods, so for the purposes of this blog I’m imagining what it would be like to join in as “a normal person”, whatever that looks like in any given universe. No world-saving for me, just a girl trying to get by.

In no particular order, then: The Top Ten Fictional Worlds that I NEVER Want To Live In:

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1. Dresdenverse – The Dresden Files, by Jim Butcher

On the surface, the world Jim Butcher created seems kind of fantastic: magic exists, supernatural creatures walk among us, anything is possible. Unfortunately, the story doesn’t look quite as pleasant from the point of view anyone who isn’t a wizard. If you don’t happen to be one of the few powerful supernatural entities, you’d have to deal with the fact that your entire world is really just a battlefield for more distinct types of baddies than I can conveniently count. If the fae aren’t fighting a war, the vampires are trying to make a name for themselves. Wizards don’t really care much for regular mundanes, and most other people seem to think of them as little more than food.  About the best thing I could hope for in this world would be to be ignored by everyone interesting. Worst case scenario, I see something I shouldn’t and go insane, or end up in service to some kind of big crazy evil for the rest of my life …

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2. The United Isles – The Rithmatist, by Brandon Sanderson

In this world, a small percentage of the population are somehow magically imbued with the ability to make their chalk drawings come to life. The United Isles (of America) are also under attack from a horde of evil chalk creatures who seem to want to devour everything. Everyone who’s able to bring drawings to life is drafted into military service, sending their drawings against the attacking monsters. Everyone else … well, I guess they just sort of hope that the Rithmatists don’t lose, because if they do, they’re all screwed. I’m not sure which would be worse, having to sit helplessly, or having to live your entire life knowing that you’re the only thing standing between your country and certain destruction at the hands of murderous doodles.

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3.  The Maze – The Maze Runner, by James Dashner

The world is a plague-filled sun-blasted wasteland, wherein the cleverest children are thrown into a giant death maze to see if they have what it takes to become the subjects of further experimentation.

Yeah, I think that kind of covers it.

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4. Oz – The Wizard of Oz, by Frank L. Baum

… I’ve got no clever explanation for this one. Oz has freaked me out from the very beginning. A bunch of creepy races with talking animals who’ve been convinced not to talk, where the most powerful person is a fake? That doesn’t even begin to take into consideration the woman with the creepy swapping heads, and the rollerskate stilt men, and the part where there’s a village of china people.

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5.  Panem – The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins

I think at this point if I have to explain why I don’t want to live in this world, I worry about you all.

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6. Idris, &c – The Mortal Instruments, by Cassandra Clare

There’s a magical invisible country in the middle of Europe which has somehow never been discovered. It is home to a group of human-angel halfbreeds who spend their time alternately protecting humanity from demons and ignoring humanity altogether. Humanity’s protectors are out of touch with daily life, seem largely indifferent to everything outside of their own little magical borders, and they’re less governed than they are occasionally guided by counsel that pays no more attention to the larger context than anyone else. Their laws are arbitrary and only occasionally enforced. Justice seems to be the domain of one individual inquisitor, who has no oversight, checks, or balances. This universe also provides one of many examples of a world in which children only seem to have to sit through a minimal academic education, before they’re considered to be mini-adults and sent into practical magical training. It’s no wonder the government’s suffering, if none of its members ever had to master critical thinking.

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7. The End of the Lane – The Ocean at the End Of The Lane, by Neil Gaiman

Even now, I’m not quite sure why this world unsettles me as much as it does. The world Gaiman shows in this novel is very similar to the real world, which is part of what makes the story so compelling … but the subtle differences disturbed me on a fundamental level. In this world, ancient forces exist in the quiet little corners, minding their own business and engaging in their little squabbles. They’re largely inaccessible to humanity in general, except when the occasional window opens and someone catches a glimpse of something they shouldn’t. While this might seem charming, what it means that those few people who cross the wrong threshold have absolutely no one they can talk to. The standard prejudices and misconceptions exist, but the likelihood of encountering something that goes bump in the night has increased thousandfold. And because the magic is hidden, the odds are that any creature you run into won’t be tame, or bear any resemblance to something you’ve seen on TV. You’re either oblivious, or trapped in a situation beyond your comprehension with little to no chance for acceptance or support.

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8.  Elantris – Elantris, by Brandon Sanderson

Part of what I think I enjoy about Sanderson is the way he can take a world and break it; watching the characters try to survive in the mess he’s left them is always fascinating, and I love seeing the various ways beautiful fantasy lands can be twisted and warped. In this case, a blessing that used to turn a fraction of the population into gods was broken one day, leaving all of the gods stuck as never-healing, undying monsters. If that weren’t bad enough, the world is hovering on the edge of being dominated by a militant religious sect, whose priests will stop at nothing to convert and conquer the heretic lands. Living by Elantris means facing the constant threat of waking up one day and finding out that you’ve been turned into a zombie, or else discovering that the priests have come to convert you to the worship of their god-king by the sword, if necessary. At least there’s an interesting merit-based system of nobility, so there’s that.

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9. Partialverse – Partials, by Dan Wells

This might be my biases showing, but I’ve never really found that scifi works out too well for random citizens trying to live a normal life here on earth.

In this case, a technological advance years ago resulted in a race of android super-soldiers who were engineered to fight humanity’s wars for it. At some point, the soldiers decided they didn’t really like being slaves, and they supposedly unleashed a virus that killed 99.99% of the human race and kills every newborn child within a few days of birth. When the novel begins, humanity is desperately searching for a cure to the disease, while preparing itself to fight against a race of inhuman killing machines. To make matters worse, since humanity is a dying breed, all women are legally obligated to get pregnant as often as possible, in hopes of giving birth to the miracle baby who will be immune to the disease. I could endure the war and the fear, but any world that wants to turn me into a walking incubator just creeps the everloving hell out of me.

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10. The Wizarding World – Harry Potter, by J K Rowling

I loved reading these books, and I’ve enjoyed writing in the universe, but good lords is this world messed up? A random percentage of the world has magic, and the way they decided to deal with life was to lock themselves away in a hidden world behind the world, where they then proceed to ignore as much of our reality as they possibly can. Even assuming you’re lucky enough to be born a witch or wizard, and therefore not subject to just being a victim of a random act of magic, life is still bleak and terrifying. As far as we can see, education in the wizarding world goes until the student is 17, at which point they seem to be directed straight into a career in politics, law enforcement, education, or professional sports. Within the only school we see, most of the subjects are designed to give young wizards a practical magical education, with little or no attention paid to such basic necessities as math, literacy, or home ec. It’s no wonder the ministry is incompetent, if half of its members were shipped there straight out of high school with no real understanding of how to think critically, do basic math, or prepare and edit standardized documents.

Also, you know, the part where they rely on the honour system as the only thing standing between you and some random kid with a pointystick, and a killing curse.

Siobhan shook her head briefly, and started again from the beginning.

“I don’t quite know what happened last night. It’s all sort of a blur, and I”m not sure I even want to remember all of it, but … I know I was in bad shape. The last thing I can remember is falling off of the highway, and I don’t think that sort of thing is normally very good for someone.”

She looked down at herself, clean and neat, and then back up at the woman.

“I sort of expected to wake up dead this morning,” she said, managing this time to ignore it when Alton abruptly looked over at her. “Or at least, in a lot of pain. I don’t know exactly what you did, but … thank you.”

If it was harder than it should have been to say that without shuddering at the idea of it, well. She’d managed.

For a moment, Donna didn’t respond – to chide, or demure, or wonder what a random coed was doing on a highway in order to in a position to fall off in the first place. She gave Siobhan a long, steady look that seemed to contain more than it had any right to, and then tipped her head slightly to one side in acknowledgment.

“I didn’t really have to do very much,” she said. “I’ve never been much of a healer. You’d already mended the worst of it on your own, before Sam even found you.”

It was Siobhan’s turn to hesitate.

“I don’t understand,” she said – the truth, although she was developing unsettling suppositions.

“He lives out in the woods a little ways out from town,” Donna said. “He found you while he was out, and brought you here. Don’t worry, he’s a lovely man.”

“No, no.” Siobhan held up a hand. “Not him. What do you mean, I’d mended the worst of it?”

Donna opened her mouth as though to speak, then closed it. She narrowed her eyes slightly, used one finger to tug down the specatcles she was wearing until she could examine Siobhan over them. Her gaze rested for a long time on Siobhan’s face, before flicking down to her chest. That was going to take some getting used to, Siobhan thought, fighting the urge to blush.

“You’re from Ramport,” Donna said finally.

“Yes.”

“Is this your first time out of the city?”

Siobhan frowned.

“No offence,” she said, “but I’m not really sure why I should answer that.”

Alton had moved away until he was standing just behind Donna, easily visible even when Siobhan wasn’t trying to look at him. He folded his arms, and cocked his head.

“You said you wanted answers,” he said. “You might want to try giving a little.”

Top Ten Tuesdays – Books I’d Recommend to Mystery Lovers

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Books I'd Recommend to Mystery Lovers, top ten tuesdays

I almost wasn’t going to do something this week. I tend to read within a genre, and I’ve already raved about most of my favourite fantasy authors in the last three Top Ten Tuesdays. Somehow, I didn’t think a list of “ten books I’d recommend to people who already know that I like these books” would be the most thrilling way to spend any of our time.

Then I remembered my other favourite genre, one which hasn’t received enough representation on this blog because I don’t actually have any intention of writing within it. As much as I’m a fantasy girl through and through, mystery actually held my heart through most of my teens, and as soon as I started thinking about it I got all warm and fuzzy, so I guess they’re worth passing along in hopes that anyone else feels the same!

I like to try and offer explanations behind each of my picks on these lists, but honestly, I can’t do that properly this week. It’s been ages since I’ve read most of these, to the point where all I can really remember is absolutely adoring them at the time. I remember crediting these authors with interesting characterization, with plots that were complex enough to catch my attention without driving me to distraction with convolution, and I would never recommend a book whose writing didn’t please me (except the first few Dresden books, because Travis was right, they’re worth it).  I’m not entirely sure I’d feel the same way now, but the impression they left is enough for me to at least suggest them to anyone looking for an interesting mystery.

So just to miss the brief on all possible notes – here are the Top Eight Authors I’d Recommend to Potential Mystery Lovers, plus Two I’m Fairly Sure my Friend Maggie Would Add If This Were Her List.

Whew.

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1. Laurie R. King – Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes (series)

Now with a new cover, so you don’t keep seeing the same thing every time I recommend this book! This series highhandedly started my love of Holmes when I was about eleven. I could not be happier that she is still writing.

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2. Elizabeth George – Inspector Lynley (series)

This series kept me sane while I was stranded in the Dominican Republic with my grandparents when I was fourteen. It also gave me nightmares. I loved the main character so much that I named a character of my own after him!

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3. Ian Rankin – Inspector Rebus (series)

This series has made my list before, and probably will again. I got my dad hooked on it a couple of years ago after my grandfather gave it to me because he mistakenly thought it had something to do with tabletop RPGs.

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4. Elizabeth Peters – Amelia Peabody (series)

Oh, how I loved this series. I don’t normally go for period novels (other than Holmes, apparently), but I happened to find this just after I’d seen The Mummy and I guess I was open to Egyptology? I’m quite glad I gave this a chance. It sticks in my head for two reasons: first, a lovely, unconventional romance and second, a child character who didn’t make me want to throw the book against a wall and storm out in a rage.

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5. Agatha Christie – Hercule Poirot (series)

People who read Christie seem to have their hearts won over by whichever of her detectives they met first. For me, it was Poirot. I loved him as a nice counterpoint to Holmes, the stuffy sedentary thinker who is oblivious to his own ridiculousness. Bless him, and his square eggs. Murder on the Orient Express in particular always chilled me wonderfully when I was a kid.

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6. P. D. James – Adam Dalgleish (series)

I have only read two of James’ books, and I read them out of order, but I liked them enough that I’ve bought and lost four others over the years and she’s high on my list of authors to catch up on. If I think she’s worth my own checking out, I must think she’s worth recommending to someone else?

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7. Ellis Peters – Chronicles of Brother Cadfael (series)

All right, apparently I actually don’t mind period mystery series. I remember I started reading these after falling in love with the TV show (Derek Jacobi will forever be one of my favourite people ever, a status only boosted by his appearance on Doctor Who), and the books were just as glorious in their own way.

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8. Dorothy Sayers – Lord Peter Wimsey Mysteries (series)

Two friends recommended this series to me, and I put it off. Then Lord Peter made a small guest appearance in one of Laurie R. King’s books and I decided I needed to see what the fuss was about – and it turns out, they’re lovey!

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9. Lousie Penny – Chief Inspector Armand Gamache (series)

Maggie’s own review of the latest will probably do a better job than I could at explaining her fondness for the seires, if you don’t mind potential spoilers. Penny is next on my list; you should all add her to yours too.

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10. Kathy Reichs – Temperance Brennan (series)

Everyone I’ve ever spoken to about this has been clear on the importance of separating the books from the TV series. Since I’m only moderately fond of the series, I’m inclined to listen to Maggie’s suggestion and give the books a go – if for no other reason than that we need more things set in Quebec!

Top Ten Tuesdays – Covers I Wish I Could Redesign!

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Covers I Wish I Could Redesign, top ten tuesdays

So I’ll admit straight away, I’m doing this one wrong. The friend who always tells me what the Broke and the Bookish top ten theme is phrased it as something like “top ten worst covers”, and so that’s what I went and found. ‘Which covers would I like to redesign’ is a rather different idea for me, but by the time I realized  I was wrong I’d already collected my covers and my explanations, so instead you get the ten worst covers from books I love, and with them the ten covers I have always liked better.

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1. Alanna: The First Adventure – Tamora Pierce

And so young Alanna of Trebond begins the journey to knighthood. Though a girl, Alanna has always craved the adventure and daring allowed only for boys; her twin brother, Thom, yearns to learn the art of magic. So one day they decide to switch places: Disguised as a girl, Thom heads for the convent to learn magic; Alanna, pretending to be a boy, is on her way to the castle of King Roald to begin her training as a page. 

But the road to knighthood is not an easy one. As Alanna masters the skills necessary for battle, she must also learn to control her heart and to discern her enemies from her allies. (Summary from Goodreads.)

Part of the job of a cover – maybe the most important part – is to get people interested in the book. More specifically, though I really shouldn’t have to say this, to get people interested in the book whose cover it is, to offer a taste of what’s going to come. I suppose on some commercial level it doesn’t matter if 80% of readers buy a novel based on a cover and then abandon it five pages, sales are sales, but if we’ve devolved to the point where that’s the only thing that matters, I don’t think I want to live in the world anymore.

Not only is the left hand cover a mediocre image at best, it also tells a reader nothing about the spirit, much less the plot, of the novel. Ooh, redheaded violet-eyed probably-female person has a hood. The sepia tone and conservative nature makes me more inclined to suspect some kind of piece about pilgrims than an epic adventure of a young girl who becomes a knight.

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2. The Beekeeper’s Apprentice – Laurie R. King

“So this is a story about a girl, right? In the 20’s?”

“Yes, she’s Sherlock Holmes’ apprentice. Tall, long blond hair down to her waist, usually braided. Boyish figure, wears her father’s clothes. She’s an academic, and they spend a lot of time in cities being threatened, occasionally blown up, and generally mysterious.”

“Awesome. Thin blond girl in the 20’s. Got it. What were you saying about bees and the English countryside?”

This time it’s not actually a bad cover. Again, though, it’s so very far from being an appropriate cover for the book in question, I can only imagine the person in charge of the design was never actually told what they were supposed to be doing. In contrast, I really like the series that was released some time in the mid 2000’s. While the woman is too old to be accurate on the first cover, the housecoat and the pipe and the book all provide a nice air of Holmesian mystery that feels apporpriate, and the subtle changes from book to book (housecoat design, the image behind her) look very nice and cohesive set side by side.

And yes, this book made my list again. It’s one of my all time favourites, so while I may to change things up a bit every now and then by leaving it off, I doubt it will ever be gone for long. Hey, at least Sanderson’s not here this time!

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3. Captain’s Fury – Jim Butcher

This just makes me hurt.  Poorly-placed Roman soldier man fights poorly-photoshopped hyena things, in front of a poorly photoshopped castle thing. In fact the entire first edition of the series is like that, with an awkward-looking legionnaire facing off against some weird, uncomfortable looking elemental animal or other, with whatever other background elements they could find. I may not have any idea what the weird symbol is on the newer edition cover, much less why it’s so prominent, but at least the thing has a bit of dignity.

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4. Definitely Dead – Charlaine Harris

I hate these covers. I hate them so much. I could have picked any of them for the list, but then it would have been more “why I hate the Southern Vampire Mysteries covers”, so I’ve just picked my least favourite of many horrible choices. They all look like they’ve been put together by an elementary school class, and sometimes they don’t even make sense with the plot. This one technically does, I guess, since there is indeed a vampire, a tiger, and a blond girl … but why exactly was it necessary to dress her in a horrid pink nightgown and then put her on some sort of weird shadowpuppet stage? Steamy supernatural romance it is not.

There really aren’t any good covers for this series, but the blood splash covers have the advantage of being simple, not actively lying to the readers (so many of the SVM covers imply that Sookie is a vampire) and don’t look like the product of an enthusiastic teenage girl’s afternoon on photoshop.

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5. Fionavar Tapestry (The Summer Tree) – Guy Gavriel Kay

I’ll own up here: I’m biased. I bought the omnibus edition of this trilogy, the one with the epic crystal dragon and mountains and glorious colour … So when someone I know posted about this book she was reading, it honestly didn’t occur to me to connect the weird wood-print style cover with the weird dude on the flying unicorn and the lonely little wolf with the same novel. The left cover looks like someone with only the barest knowledge of fantasy heard some key points about the book and just slapped them all together wherever they’d fit. It may contain more literal truth, but it makes me way less inclined to read about it.

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6. The Hand of Oberon – Roger Zelazny

I hate old sci-fi and fantasy covers, I’ll make no secret of that. But as bad as the posing men and fireballs and mountains are in general, this is even worse. There’s no white horse in this book, and I’m not sure there’s a lightning storm. I’m not sure who the man standing to one side is, and the weird UFO galaxy thing just … no.

In fact, every single one of the covers I could find for this were horrible in some way, so my nomination for the best option here goes to the cover of the audiobook. It may not be interesting, but at least it’s not hurting my eyes.

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7. Knife of Dreams – Robert Jordan

“So there’s this awesome scene, right, where Rand is fighting this awesome creepy chick and she throws a fireball at him, and -”

“Mhmm, right, right. But what about the one where Perrin spends an hour talking with minor characters?”

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8. The Lies of Locke Lamora – Scott Lynch

I’m often a little astonished by what an impression the cover of a book will make on me.

I know, I know, don’t judge.

I first met this particular book wearing my cover of choice, there on the right. It spoke to me immediately – a tight, tangled city that lies half under water, a figure poised to stand guard or maybe take advantage of hidden weaknesses. Coupled with the title, the cover painted a picture that proved remarkably accurate.

And then I saw the purple thing, and I was sad. As with so many on this list, it’s not actually a bad cover, but it gives me the impression of some quiet philosophical text, an open expanse of dove grey with a graceful tower above, doves or pigeons or soothing leaves swirling in the sly. It does almost nothing to capture the dark, seductive, broken setting, the tricks and nuances of the character, the sinister merriment. In short, it is quite a pretty cover, for the wrong book.

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9. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban – J. K. Rowling

The American covers are horrible.

Like, across the board.

I didn’t love all of the Canadian/European ones, but damn do they not compare to the Americans. PoA is not the happy story of a red-cheeked ten year old and his grinning girlfriend joyriding some giddy eagle-pony. Also, I only just noticed this, but the weird angle/perspective makes it look like they’ve been shrunk down to the size of sparrows and I need to stop talking about this before I get too upset and explode.

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10. The Subtle Knife – Philip Pullman

Compared to my red-washed fury at number nine, my complaints about this one are really fairly trivial. Really, it boils down to the fact that even when I was a child reading these books, I always thought that the cover looked sort of … boring. If I hadn’t known what the previous book was about, I might think this was the adventures of a pair of siblings who liked cats – although what that has to do with knives, subtle or not, I cannot say.

My cover of choice now is based on admittedly more adult design sensibilities. There’s another fairly serviceable one in shades of green, with the cat watching from on high, and I think that might objectively be a better cover to attract younger readers. The point of this was not to propose the ideal cover for any given market – in fact, ‘versions of the cover you like better’ wasn’t even in the brief in the first place, so I will not apologize for my adult biases.

I feel it worth noting that while some covers of these books irritated me, all of the books themselves would be on my recommended reading list, for one reason or another. Go forth, ye the people! Read and enjoy!

Thursday Quotables – First Lord’s Fury by Jim Butcher

So every Thursday, Bookshelf Fantasies challenges people to share an awesome quote from whatever they happen to be reading at the time. Last week I couldn’t think of any quote that stuck in my head more than any other, but this week there is no challenge!

“When we get back, you and I are going to have a talk in which you lose your teeth,” Antillus replied. “Because I’m going to knock them out of your head. With my fists.”

That’s another series done now, which is as always equal parts exciting and sad. Now I’m rereading the Abhorsen series by Garth Nix, but I doubt that will carry me through to next week … I wonder what I’ll be quoting on the 16th!

Top Ten Tuesdays – Sequels I Can’t Wait To Get My Hands On!

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sequels I can't wait to read, top ten tuesdays

And we’re back!

Every well, The Broke and the Bookish host Top Ten Tuesday, which I had had every intention of contributing to last week until I realized I couldn’t think of any books with scary covers.

This week, I have no such dilemma. A couple of hours pouring over my audible and goodreads accounts, if anything I seem to be suffering from a surfeit of books I’m itching to read.  The trouble this time was more one of figuring out which titles should be on here in which order, and formulating discrete explanations behind each that didn’t just come out in a giant ball of :

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1. Words of Radiance – Brandon Sanderson – (Stormlight Archive #2)

Anyone who sticks with me for very long will quickly learn that Sanderson is one of my favourite authors of all time, and the first book in this new series was as much of a joy as I had expected. The Way of Kings was 45 hours (1000 pages, for those who don’t trade in audiobooks) of delicious exploration of a bizarre new world, and I enjoyed almost every minute of it. Sanderson introduced multiple sets of characters, and spent just enough time to give me a sense of what their overarching plotlines might become, and then had the nerve to end the novel! I love the slow, almost luxurious pacing of the first book, and can’t wait to see what the second in a potentially 10 book series adds.

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2. The Doors of Stone – Patrick Rothfuss – (The Kingkiller Chronicle #3)

Patrick Rothfuss was an author I stumbled upon by accident. He’s received fantastic reviews, and all I can really do is add to them: I think he’s a masterful storyteller who knows how to let a tale tell itself in its own time. The first book of this … trilogy? Quadrilogy, if I’m both lucky and right? Sets the stage by showing us the main character after it’s all done. Rothfuss has since spent two books going back to the beginning, and by the end of the second book I had almost more questions than I knew what to do with. I hope that book three won’t be the last, because part of what I love about the Kingkiller Chronicle is that they meander and take their time about things, and if we have to wrap up all of the twisting possibilities in one novel I’m afraid it’ll be tangled and rushed. So I’ll cross my fingers on this one, and hope that some time in the next year I’ll be able to learn how Kvothe ended up where he is now, and will have even more questions about where he’ll be going in book 4!

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3. Skin Game – Jim Butcher – (Dresden Files #15)

I’ll admit, this series took a while to grow on me. I think I nearly abandoned it about six times in the first three books, and only continued reading because a good friend promised me that it was worthwhile. Well, I’ve always been a fan of mystery, and of magic, and Harry Dresden as a character won me over from the beginning. Butcher has grown steadily as a writer since he began this series, and both the story and the characters have developed into things I now thoroughly enjoy. Cold Days, the most recent book, has brought with it some significant and IMHO positive changes to the status quo, and I’m really looking forward to seeing how Dresden adapts to the new world! Here’s hoping the January release includes an audiobook?

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4. Cress – Marissa Meyer – (Lunar Chronicles #3)

A friend of mine threw this series at me a while ago, and I was totally not surprised to find I loved it. I’ve always enjoyed fairy tales – the novel I just finished involved reinterpreting classic stories, and while I don’t normally go in for sci-fi, Meyer’s story so far has been focused more on the people than on gadgets and space. I really like the way this series mixes classic predictable elements (balls, stepmothers, girls in red with grandmothers) with original plot ideas, and the notion of throwing Rapunzel up in space and giving her mad hacking skills? I’m already fond of the girl, so the giving her a book of her own promises to be awesome!

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5. The Broken Eye – Brent Weeks – (Lightbringer #3)

I’m not quite sure how I found Brent Weeks, but my first experience with him was the Night Angel trilogy. That series almost turned me off of the author entirely, which would have been a shame, because while the Night Angel books were a fairly predictable epic fantasy assassin story, the Lightbringer series has been a whirlwind of interesting new ideas mixed with well-crafted staples. The magic system is neat – colour can be made manifest, each shade having its own properties, and if you use too much you go crazy – and most of the characters intrigue me in one way or another. Weeks has managed to turn the unfortunate loner hero into someone I actually want to root for, and he is possibly the first writer I’ve ever met who’s created a powerful bully of an antagonist who I don’t just absolutely hate. (Though I am eagerly awaiting Andross Guile’s downfall, thank you very much.) He’s not afraid of complex politics, he has characters who aren’t all white, and I’m actually rooting for the people I think I’m supposed to be rooting for, instead of finding myself perversely adoring some minor character or villain. If book 3 follows the trends set by books 1 and 2, it will be an awesome read.

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6. Shadows of Self – Brandon Sanderson – (Mistborn #5)

This series is what I think of when I think of modern fantasy. Sanderson has created an interesting world, an awesome magic system, and political nightmares that make the poli-sci-and-religion major in me do happy cartwheels. I loved the first trilogy, and felt reassured when I enjoyed Mistborn 4 (Alloy of Law) just as much, in spite of a radical change in era. We see a lot of pre-industrial fantasy, so it was fascinating getting to watch as an author brought his world from the castles-and-lords era into the carriages-and-pistols era. Sanderson has all of the love. That is all.

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7. Arram – Tamora Pierce – (Numair #1)

I actually had no idea that Pierce was still writing until I went looking through a list of books people were looking forward to in 2014 and stumbled upon this. I’ll admit, I’m a bit out of touch with Pierce. She was my first real fantasy author, and I adored Alana and Daine, and Circle of Magic, which I think I might be the only person in the world to have read, but Kell didn’t enthrall me quite the same way and I eventually lost track of things. I will openly and unashamedly admit, though, that Numair was my favourite character ever when I was about 13. I had the biggest crush on him a girl could have on someone who doesn’t actually exist, and when I learned that there’s going to be a series about him I might or might not have squealed for two minutes straight. This might not be a sequel in the strictest sense of the word, being as it is the beginning of a new series within the universe and set prior to the Daine novels on top of that, but shut up, I don’t care. Numair was my first love, and now he has books, and I am happy forever.

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8. Republic of Thieves – Scott Lynch – (Gentleman Bastard #3)

There’s no good reason why I shouldn’t have read this book yet. This series was recommended to me by the same friend who suggested Mistborn and Dresden Files (I should go see what he’s reading nowadays) so I sort of knew going in that I’d enjoy it. It’s a culture-centric fantasy story that uses magic as an accent, rather than a focus, and that on its own was a nice change from a lot of what I read. I also love stories about scoundrels, so finding a series that’s basically fantasy-Venice-meets-Ocean’s-Eleven is really win-win-win. Less thrilling for me is the part where Audible doesn’t seem to have the title yet, although it had both of the first two volumes. If things don’t change soon, I may actually have to suck it up and buy the physical book!

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9. Clariel – Garth Nix – (Abhorsen #4)

This is another book I didn’t know existed until I accidentally stumbled upon it in a book list. Sabriel was one of my favourite books when I was young, and I’ve reread it several times in the intervening years.  I didn’t expect to like Lirael, but I think in the end I decided that the series only improved as it progressed! So to hear now that Nix is planning on picking the universe back up is a little bit like hearing that my birthday is coming on a weekend, and I still get paid. His characters always really resonated with me, and I love the quiet, shabby, desperately hopeful feeling of the world – both worlds, on either side of the wall. It will be really, really interesting to see a story set hundreds of years before everything I know, and get to experience a part of history with fresh eyes.

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10. Pirate King – Laurie R. King – (Mary Russell #11)

I gushed over the first book in this series back in my Top Ten Tuesday post two weeks ago, so it should come as little surprise that I’m enthusiastic about continuing the series. I feel a little bit ashamed, if anything, that I somehow lost track of what one of my favourite authors was doing to the point that I didn’t realize there were a whole two books that I hadn’t heard of, much less read. Fortunately, that means that I get to dive right into one of my favourite series and read two books in a row, now, instead of having to wait the traditional year-or-more between installments. I love King’s Holmes, adore Mary Russell, and can’t wait to download this tomorrow!

NaNo word count: 8417!

“Tell me: why might someone like me send someone like you to watch over some fluttering noble butterfly?”

 Brenn considered for a moment.

 “Because you want to make me suffer,” he commented darkly. She laughed at that, equal parts indulgent and expectant, and he obediently forced himself to consider the question from a broader, slightly less personal angle. “Because she’s worth watching over? Because you’ve got some reason to think that something will happen.”

 Pride grunted.

 “If I did,” she said, “I’d want someone I can trust keeping an eye on things.”

 “So why not just ask me to stand guard?” he asked, ignoring the flush of pleasure and pride at the compliment.

 She scowled.

 “Firal’s got his fingers in too many pockets. He’s bribing half the clerks in the temple with varying degrees of success, and I’m not sure he hasn’t managed to pull a couple of coursers into his pocket too. I don’t know how much influence he’s really got, but he seems to be using as much of it as he can manage today. I had to pull strings of my own to get myself on the judiciary committee – somehow Sloth was listed as the supervising hunter, because clearly a man who’s been away in Follend for the last six weeks is in a perfect position to offer mediate. Then the time and place of the committee meeting was changed, and the novice sent to inform me was somehow given the impression that I was off in the heights …”

 Brenn whistled. Pride’s lips twisted in a little grimace of acknowledgment.

 “Nobody seems to know what happened or why, of course, and at least on the surface it seems to be a giant series of unfortunate accidents. Clerical errors, mistakes. For my part, I just happened to be in the right places at the right times to keep anything from going off the rails, and no harm was done.”

 “But if you turn around and assign someone who doesn’t normally have to deal with babysitting to watch things,” Brenn picked up for her, “it basically amounts to telling everyone you know what’s going on.”

Top Ten Tuesdays – Books I Was “Forced” to Read!

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books I was forced to read, top ten tuesdays

Last Tuesday at about 11:58 PM, my dear friend Maggie shared something she’d found on the internet: Tuesday Top Tens, hosted by the Broke and the Bookish! Each week they post a different subject for bloggers to make a list for, all on the themes of books and plots and characters. Awesome as that sounded, though, there was only so much I could do in two minutes, and so none of you got to hear my opinions on the best and worst series enders.

This week, for those who haven’t read the title:

Top Ten Books I Was “Forced” to Read (in no particular order):

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1. The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm – Nancy Farmer

I think I was in sixth grade when I read this book. My experience with reading had thus far been split into two groups; there was fantasy, which I read by choice and loved, and there were the books I had to read in school, which I mostly just tolerated the way one tolerates broccoli or cold weather. We had already read a book with an African protagonist that year, and while I ended up liking A Girl Named Disaster I can’t say it really interested me. I prepared to loathe this book. Instead, I found myself barreling through a sci-fi mystery set in futuristic Zimbabwe, finishing it within a week, and rereading it at least five more times that year. While I have to admit that the finer points of plot are lost on me some 15 years later, I’ll always remember the thrill I felt reading ‘yet another African novel for English class’.

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2. Sophie’s World –  Jostein Gaarder

Technically, this is a book I was forced to reread. I first read this book on a train going to a small town in Quebec, and I remember loving the philosophy lessons and largely ignoring the plot that supported them. A year later, my grade 12 English teacher assigned a project that involved dissecting an old favorite, and oh, it opened my eyes. Rereading this book with a critical eye taught me more about myself as a reader, and about critical reading in general, than anything has since. I still have fond memories of this story – the explanation of various schools of philosophical thought were accessible and entertaining to me as a fifteen year old – but it’s the scribbled notes in the margins and the understanding that there’s more to a book than first impressions that really stay with me.

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3. Dead Until Dark – Charlaine Harris

This book is the first of many that were forced upon me by well-meaning friends, and I quite enjoyed it. It’s a first novel in a series and it reads a bit like one, with characters working to find their voices and characters, but I enjoyed the look into smalltown Louisiana, the politics and the mysteries, and the world Harris created. I warmed to characters I didn’t expect to warm to, and occasionally found myself pleasantly surprised by plot twists! The series that follows is a fun read, if not without flaws in both writing and plot or character development.

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4. Nine Princes In Amber – Roger Zelazny

Another friend recommended this one to me, largely because I’m planning to write a novel featuring an amnesiac protagonist. While Corwin’s amnesia doesn’t really last long enough to make this a useful ‘how did someone else do this’ book, it was really interesting reading one of the founding father figures of speculative fiction. Zelazny was doing things before everyone else did them, and I found the entire work to be oddly nostalgic and novel at the same time. I was not nearly as fond of the last five books in his ten book series, but even the elements I didn’t care for gave me ideas for what not do write, so I consider the entire series time well spent.

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5. Payment In Blood – Elizabeth George

I read this book while I was stuck in the Dominican Republic. My mother had just broken her ribs falling off of a horse, leaving us with a sudden abundance of free time, and this was the only book she had packed. I was fourteen, and she warned me that the book might be a bit too adult for me; the description of the murder scene gave me nightmares for a week, so I guess she was right, but aside from that I absolutely fell in love with Peter Lynley and Elizabeth George. She writes mysteries like no one else I’ve ever read, with an addicting blend of fast-paced drama and soft, slow, intensely personal moments. Her stories feel real, which is both captivating and a little bit terrifying. And I just realized that I’m about three novels behind in this series now – brb!

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6. The Falls – Ian Rankin

The day before my fifteenth birthday, my grandfather gave me this book and said “so, I saw you were reading that George woman. [see above.] Maybe you’ll like this, you like computer things.” I’m not sure if he knew that he was giving me the twelfth book in a series – I’m not sure whether or not he’d read any of the other books. I think he probably just saw a mystery that involved computers and thought “my computer-addicted granddaughter who reads mysteries will like this”. Well, he was right. Rankin is another author who has a way of weaving the public sphere of a murder investigation with the private lives of the characters so that I cared about absolutely everything, and his stories can still raise goosebumps in me sometimes.

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7. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone – J. K. Rowling

I love Harry Potter. I was in the fandom for years, I waited in line at midnight to see the movies. However I feel about the seventh book, this series was my childhood and I regret nothing. The funny part, though, is that I was REALLY resistant about starting it. I was in seventh grade before I picked up the first book, and I did it under protest. Everyone in my class was obsessed with this series about some wizard kid, and I remember thinking that it was almost certainly going to be crappy fantasy-lite, for people who couldn’t handle real fantasy. I told everyone I knew that I’d the first three books, all that were out at the time, and hadn’t really liked them. Then I got invited to a Harry Potter themed birthday party, and figured my lie might be sort of obvious there and that I might as well just suffer through them. The rest, as they say, is history.

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8. Cinder – Marissa Meyer

Oh, this book is fun. Maggie pestered me to read this, and I have absolutely no regrets. The writing is pleasant, the story is an interesting blend of original plot and fairy tale standards, and I really like pretty much all of the characters! It’s always nice to see a story about a competent young woman, but it’s rare to find one where that young woman both gets a romance plot and also keeps something resembling logic. I can’t wait for Cress to come out.

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9. The Beekeeper’s Apprentice – Laurie R. King

You shouldn’t judge books by their covers. This book was given to me as a birthday present, and it was not new when I got it. I almost didn’t read it because of that, and because the cover had no pictures and looked like about the most boring thing ever. Fancy victorian women, men with pipes, and beekeeping? I read it because the woman who gave it to me came back to visit a couple of weeks later, and I was warned that she would be wondering if I’d liked it. I have since read this book a total of twenty-seven times. A book later in this series remains my favourite novel of all time, and this one is a close contender for the title. I love King’s Holmes, who is both fierce and brilliant, and following his story through the eyes of a young, intelligent woman rather than the slightly-clueless Watson (who was the only reason I could ever cite for why I didn’t really like Holmes before) was amazing. This is my go-to book whenever I need something beloved and familiar, and it’s actually kind of scary to realize how close I came to not reading it at all.

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10. Mistborn: The Final Empire – Brandon Sanderson

And last but not least, another book forced on me by a friend. He championed this book for ages, and I resisted; I recognized the name “Sanderson” as “that guy who finished the Wheel of Time books”, and I’d ragequit WoT back in High School so that didn’t really recommend him to me. Eventually, I realized that the recommendations wouldn’t stop, and so I allowed myself to be introduced to my favourite author. The writing in this book, the plot and the politics, captured me in an instant. I devoured it and its sequels, and have gone on to read everything Sanderson’s ever written. So thank you, Travis, for not shutting up about this – or the Dresden Files, which almost made it onto this list, and are now sort of sneaking in accidentally aren’t they?

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Honourable mentions: Sabriel; Polgara the Sorceress; Julie of the Wolves; Eats, Shoots, and Leaves

T’was The Night Before Moving Day …

Tags

changes, moving day, rambling

Also known as: having little, or nothing, to do with writing.

The thing is,  it only just sank in that this place I’ve been living in for the last year and a half isn’t going to be my home for very much longer.

 This happens to me every time I move; I’m in the middle of packing, or procrastinating, or whatever, and I look around and I suddenly realize that the room where I’m standing, the one with my bed and my desk and my however many years of memories, is going to be somebody else’s Home in about 24 hours. I’m going to be standing in a new room, looking around at a new set of walls with my bed positioned differently relative to my bed. Will I even have room for both my chest of drawers and my bookcase? Where will I hang my calendar? Where will my cork board live?

I inevitably find myself going back to my first memory of my current home, looking at a now-familiar space through the memory of new eyes. It always seems bizarre, at this stage of the journey, it’s always all but impossible to remember thinking my bedroom once looked foreign, that I wasn’t sure about the closet, that the electrical outlets were weird and how unsettling it was to be sleeping in a space where I owned none of the furniture. By the same logic, the strange space I’m going to be moving into tomorrow will be as comfortable and precious to me as this place is now …

I have, on occasion, been told that I think too much. Right now, I might almost be inclined to miss them.

Goodbye, oldroom. You were weird, and your windows sucked, but you were good to me, all things considered. I will miss you.

“She’s a sweet girl. Her name’s Audrey, I think she’s French. Or Canadian? We’ve chatted at the bar.” Audrey looked up from her hamburger and saw Tameron’s eyes on her. She smiled around a mouthful of food and waved her two little fingers by way of greeting, realized that her mouth was full, flushed, and looked away again. He chuckled softly.

Gloriana’s eyebrows rose expectantly, and the amusement faded just that quickly.

He sighed.

“She reminds me too much of Janet,” he said. “It’s … I just can’t.”

 “I met your wife,” Gloriana interjected in the hasty tone of someone who saw where things were going and had no intention of letting them get there. “As I recall, I liked her a lot. She had about as much in common with Audrey as I have with your partner.” A quick wit and no patience for beating around the bush, Forbes thought, but didn’t say because she was still going. “If all you’ve bothered to remember about Janet is brown hair and brown eyes, boyo, I think I’m ashamed to be sitting here talking about it with you.”

 It struck him like a blow.

 Janet … Janet had been his world. She’d been tall and strong and fiercely intelligent, with a mischievous smile and a generous heart and eyes he’d felt he could happily lose himself in for years. But she had died centuries ago. He could only remember fragments of his life that long ago, lost in a haze of nostalgia and bias. Tameron still remembered her face, remembered sitting with her by the hearth in a thunderstorm reading … reading something, until a leak they hadn’t known about worked its way through and dumped half the heaven’s worth of rain on them in an instant. He remembered riding with her, helping her roll pie crusts, and he remembered one glorious fight that had them not speaking for almost a week before either of them could calm down enough to see things rationally.

 He remembered sitting still while she sketched him, and how difficult it had been to let himself laugh at the results, which more often than not made him look more like a squash than a man.

 He remembered when her skin had turned to parchment, and her breaths had turned to whispers and then faded away into nothing at all.

 But there was so much else he couldn’t put a finger on anymore. That thought made him ache somewhere deep inside, but even as he swallowed against a pressure at the back of his throat he found a peace there too. Nothing lasted forever. Nothing was meant to.

 Whatever Gloriana saw on his face, her eyes softened. She set her hand on his and squeezed once, gently.