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temporarily around
Jun. 14th, 2015 08:50 pmOn Friday, having just been paid, I gave in to my craving for proper internet access and bought a week's worth. So I'll be around for a bit.
I posted here about the movie Kingsman and am still hoping more people will want to talk about it, because I appear to be obsessed but the fandom itself is, well, not interested in the aspects I'm interested in.
And on other fronts:
1) Reading
Somewhat to my surprise, given that it's a YA-marketed book about a girl who's half dragon, I very much enjoyed Rachel Hartman's Seraphina and its sequel Shadow Scale. These are smart, well-thought-out, morally complicated books, with interesting characters and worldbuilding. There's a het romance for the protagonist, but it's never the main focus, and the way it's handled (with the two lovers showing consideration and care for other people as well as each other) is refreshingly, well, adult. And there are a variety of queer characters. At times it felt the book was trying very very hard to be inclusive (Hartman creates a culture where the first thing you ask a stranger is "how may I pronoun you?"), but that's vastly better than all those Worlds Without Queer People out there, and I guess it only feels slightly forced because our own world is so bad about that stuff.
The most recent book I finished was Elizabeth Bear's Karen Memory, a sort of steampunk western. I'm not a Bear fan, particularly, and I grabbed it from the library thinking I would probably hate it but hey, it's not like I'm spending money. To my surprise, I did like it, especially the first half (the second half, and in particular the last fifty pages, tried to cram in too much action and threw the story out of balance). I think it helped that the protagonist is a woman; part of what's put me off other Bear books is that I've read the ones with queer male main characters, and so far I've found the way she writes queer men to be kind of . . . condescending? Not quite Tragic Queerness, but close, and off in a way I can't put my finger on more specifically. Anyway, I didn't sense that at all with Karen, who is also queer. The romantic subplot was well-done, but I liked that the book is an adventure story with romance, not a romance story. I also enjoyed the setting, a Seattle-ish city in the late 1870s that mostly exists to supply and transport miners heading to Alaska. It's the west, but it's not the mesas-and-gunfights west that's so overdone.
Finally, at work I picked up an Advance Readers' Copy of Welcome to Night Vale, the forthcoming novel. That's my planned next read. I haven't listened to the show in a while, because after the Strex Corp arc, which I loved, I got bored by the return to randomly creepy business-as-usual. But I'm curious to see what Fink and Cranor can do with a (presumably) more structured narative.
2) Cooking
I'm still on my Mediterranean kick, which has caused unprecedented levels of salad-eating. Recently I made a delicious ( Radish and Fava Bean Salad )
Mostly these days I feel like I want to cook all the food in all the Ottolenghi/Ottolenghi & Tamimi cookbooks, forever. Their recipes are interesting without being recherché, cheffy, or even very complicated; there's something of the down-to-earth perspective I like in Nigella Lawson, but without Lawson's occasional tendency towards too many shortcuts. I feel . . . almost fannish about their books? It doesn't hurt that they're two very attractive gay men, either.
I posted here about the movie Kingsman and am still hoping more people will want to talk about it, because I appear to be obsessed but the fandom itself is, well, not interested in the aspects I'm interested in.
And on other fronts:
1) Reading
Somewhat to my surprise, given that it's a YA-marketed book about a girl who's half dragon, I very much enjoyed Rachel Hartman's Seraphina and its sequel Shadow Scale. These are smart, well-thought-out, morally complicated books, with interesting characters and worldbuilding. There's a het romance for the protagonist, but it's never the main focus, and the way it's handled (with the two lovers showing consideration and care for other people as well as each other) is refreshingly, well, adult. And there are a variety of queer characters. At times it felt the book was trying very very hard to be inclusive (Hartman creates a culture where the first thing you ask a stranger is "how may I pronoun you?"), but that's vastly better than all those Worlds Without Queer People out there, and I guess it only feels slightly forced because our own world is so bad about that stuff.
The most recent book I finished was Elizabeth Bear's Karen Memory, a sort of steampunk western. I'm not a Bear fan, particularly, and I grabbed it from the library thinking I would probably hate it but hey, it's not like I'm spending money. To my surprise, I did like it, especially the first half (the second half, and in particular the last fifty pages, tried to cram in too much action and threw the story out of balance). I think it helped that the protagonist is a woman; part of what's put me off other Bear books is that I've read the ones with queer male main characters, and so far I've found the way she writes queer men to be kind of . . . condescending? Not quite Tragic Queerness, but close, and off in a way I can't put my finger on more specifically. Anyway, I didn't sense that at all with Karen, who is also queer. The romantic subplot was well-done, but I liked that the book is an adventure story with romance, not a romance story. I also enjoyed the setting, a Seattle-ish city in the late 1870s that mostly exists to supply and transport miners heading to Alaska. It's the west, but it's not the mesas-and-gunfights west that's so overdone.
Finally, at work I picked up an Advance Readers' Copy of Welcome to Night Vale, the forthcoming novel. That's my planned next read. I haven't listened to the show in a while, because after the Strex Corp arc, which I loved, I got bored by the return to randomly creepy business-as-usual. But I'm curious to see what Fink and Cranor can do with a (presumably) more structured narative.
2) Cooking
I'm still on my Mediterranean kick, which has caused unprecedented levels of salad-eating. Recently I made a delicious ( Radish and Fava Bean Salad )
Mostly these days I feel like I want to cook all the food in all the Ottolenghi/Ottolenghi & Tamimi cookbooks, forever. Their recipes are interesting without being recherché, cheffy, or even very complicated; there's something of the down-to-earth perspective I like in Nigella Lawson, but without Lawson's occasional tendency towards too many shortcuts. I feel . . . almost fannish about their books? It doesn't hurt that they're two very attractive gay men, either.
