selenak: (Young Elizabeth by Misbegotten)
[personal profile] selenak
German-French channel ARTE also put up the complete Wolf Hall, so I was able to watch the six parter they did based on Hilary Mantel's third Cromwell novel at last. What I thought of the novel itself, its plusses and minuses and how it deals with the history, you can read here, so this review is mostly about how it fares as a book adaptation and tv miniseries.

Spoilers have heretical opinions on Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell )
nineveh_uk: Illustration that looks like Harriet Vane (Default)
[personal profile] nineveh_uk
It's forever since I posted, which is due to a variety of things, quite high among them being tired and returning to work, and also that I prefer to do DW posts on my laptop and this one is reaching the end of its life. Though I have done some more enjoyable things this summer, and am just back from visiting my parents. So with the train delay compensation payment requests submitted, it's time for a post. Books.

To Each His Own, Sciascia. What can I say, other than that I should have read it years ago? This is simply a superb book. The form may be a detective novel, the subject is political, the condemnation sharp, the writing exquisite (I read it in English). A pharmacist in a small Sicilian town receives an anonymous death threat, and is duly murdered. Life continues much as before, except for mild-mannered academic Professor Laurana, a little vain and certainly naive, who finds himself following a lead and slowly drawn into a dangerous situation. I can't recommend it highly enough to people who enjoy a book that is really, really well-written. Especially as it isn't even a challenging ride - part of the beauty of the prose is its straightforwardness. The narrative isn't complicated, but perfectly chosen; it is the situation that is twisted.

Legend of the Condor Heroes, Jin Yong. A wuxia (martial arts society historical fantasy, think Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) novel set in the 1200s, this is the first of a trilogy published in the late 1950s and with many, many film and television adaptations since then. Like a lot of genre ur-texts that are basically pulp, it tells a rollicking story in sufficiently competent prose and makes for a fun read, although the translator's choice to translate some names* and not others felt a bit odd. If I tell you that chapter 2 involves a lengthy fight in an inn, it will give those who have watched cdramas a sense of the kind of book this is. Long-lost relatives, treachery, and beautiful chaste women abound. At some point, I'll read the next one.

*Her argument for keeping the title, despite the birds not being condors, is much stronger.

The Incandescent, Emily Tesh. I ordered this from the library and was very much looking forward to it after enjoying Some Desperate Glory, but alas, I wasn't impressed. The concept of a magical boarding school story from the perspective of the teachers is great, but unfortunately I found this deeply unconvincing: thinly plotted, didactic, a trifle smug, and the worldbuilding doesn't hold up at all. Paired with Some Desperate Glory, I can see that Tesh feels passionately about education, but you need more than that to make a good novel, especially given the aforementioned worldbuilding, which fails specifically in terms of secondary/tertiary ed. You can have learning magic at school being basically socially irrelevant like Classics, so it doesn't matter that it is only taught in very expensive private schools and the entire rest of the population is shut out except for a few who have to learn it for public safety, or you can have magic be something that military R&D are passionately interested in and every shop needs to pay for magical wards for safety, but you can't have both. In the world she sets up, in every respect except "this school is unjustifiable and of course the protagonist is appropriately aware but it is also old and special and lovely", there is no way that several Scottish universities and the redbricks wouldn't have been teaching sorcery ab initio since the 1920s at the latest and the government funding it. Also, if you are telling me that the teacher cares, she really cares, and is a sensible, competent professional woman, then why the hell is she repeatedly behaving like Harry Potter and his progenitors going off to investigate things without telling anyone? I could go on (the caretaker!), but I'll spare you.

Idlewild, James Frankie Thomas. A fandom osmosis read, except it turned out to be a misosmosis. I was under the impression that it was about intense Theater Kids (US spelling for what seems to be a US phenomenon) at New England private university level possibly murdering one another, i.e. a bit of a The Secret History rip off. It is not. It does feature sort of Theater Kids, but at an expensive New York private high school. Unfortunately, fairly contemporary US private high schools are about the last setting that I am interested in reading a novel so this book started out as not really my kind of thing and remained so. But, I did read it, and I did think it was a good book. There is no murder, but there are a couple of very intense queer teenagers in a very intense friendship at a Quaker-ethos school that I thought was rather well depicted as supposed to be offering something different because it was a Quaker-ethos school, but that actually was failing its pupils in a highly conventional manner*, and US 2003 setting that seems well-drawn but that, obviously, I didn't personally relate to. Mostly what I admired was the novelist actually having something to say and saying it in a book about queer and trans experience, in a particular time and place, and accepting that something with any depth is inherently not going to speak to everybody's experience, and Thomas doesn't waste his or the reader's time hesitating to commit to his story and characters. It didn't speak to me personally - much though I enjoyed the recognisable early 2000s LJ milieu - but what does that matter? It spoke to other people, and it made an effort to be something.

*I found myself wondering whether Fay would have been better off at a standard school that would haved force all pupils through the hoops to higher education and its potential for self-discovery, or whether that would have been even more destructive.

Balance

Sep. 22nd, 2025 11:59 pm
nineweaving: (Default)
[personal profile] nineweaving
I like that the New Year and the equinox are in balance. May this year bring peace.







Nine

Yuletide nominations

Sep. 22nd, 2025 11:20 pm
likeadeuce: (Default)
[personal profile] likeadeuce
I swore off exchanges after last year, ESPECIALLY yuletide, but I keep getting obsessed with weird little movies and so i have submitted nominations.

username: Likeadeuce
Did you add this to the spreadsheet already?: Yes
Nomination OR Request?: Nomination
Fandom: A History of Sound (2025)
Character 1: Lionel Worthing
Character 2: David White
Character 3: Belle White Sinclair
Character 4: Vincent (The History of Sound)

Fandom:Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)
Character 1: Llewyn Davis
Character 2: Jean Berkey
Character 3: Mike Timlin (Inside Llewyn Davis)
Character 4: Al Cody

Fandom: A Complete Unknown (2024)
Character 1: Bob Dylan (A Complete Unknown)
Character 2: Johnny Cash (A Complete Unknown)
Character 3: Joan Baez (A Complete Unknown)
Character 4: Pete Seeger (A Complete Unknown)

Fandom: Babygirl (2024)
Character 1: Romy Mathis
Character 2: Samuel (Babygirl)
Character 3: Esme Smith
Character 4: Jacob Mathis

Fandom: Saltburn (2023)
Character 1: Oliver Quick
Character 2: Felix Catton
Character 3: Venetia Catton
Character 4: Farleigh Start
a_t_rain: (ravenclaw)
[personal profile] a_t_rain
So, I think this was my first time coming back to a book I really loved when I was a teenager but haven't picked up in at least thirty years. (My mom has been nagging me to move my books out of their house, so I've been doing it bit by bit with the ones that I feel sentimental about, and I grabbed Fahrenheit 451 off the shelves this summer because it seemed timely.)

It is. Like, there's a lot of stuff that is obviously, amusingly dated, like Guy's salary being six thousand dollars a year,* and some stuff that didn't really bother me in high school but does now. (Clarisse is very, very obviously a Manic Pixie Dream Girl now that we have a name for it, and Millie ... well, there are hints that might have been developed in really interesting directions, like the way she's clearly miserable enough to attempt suicide but wholly unable to acknowledge THAT she's miserable, let alone why -- but they just aren't.** Also, Guy, maybe you should try talking to your wife's friends without haranguing them and randomly bringing their reproductive choices into it?)

But there is also stuff that didn't make much sense to teenaged-me that seems grimly logical now, like the ease with which a whole culture can make the leap from "books disturb us and make us uncomfortable" to "books should be banned." Also, the idea that people might actively prefer an immersive, participatory simulacrum of human relationships to the real thing seems way too prescient for comfort, even if the "participatory" part involves the adorably quaint method of sending scripts through the mail.

I'd been vaguely thinking of this as a 1960s sort of novel, but it isn't, it's McCarthy-era. (I guess the treatment of nuclear war should have been a tipoff that it had to have been written in the narrow window between Hiroshima and mutually assured destruction, but I'd sort of forgotten there was a nuclear war in this book.) And, as such, it feels an awful lot like it belongs to our times as well.

* Bradbury (wisely) didn't specify the exact year in which the story is supposed to take place, but it's definitely after 1990.

** If you have fic recs, I'm all ears!

Films! Some Films!

Sep. 22nd, 2025 09:24 pm
netgirl_y2k: (Default)
[personal profile] netgirl_y2k
Renfield - Nicholas Hoult! Awkwafina! Shohreh Aghdashloo! Talk about a movie that was less than the sum of its parts!

A Working Man - I have had a soft spot for Statham ever since Spy. This was fine, but the peak dumb Statham action flick is still the The Beekeeper.

Shazam! Fury of the Gods - A kid says a magic world and turns into an adult man with superpowers was a cute premise for a movie; a grown man says a magic world and turns into a different, worse adult man less so.

Thunderbolts - Er...why did this look like it was filmed in a cupboard?

Becky/Wrath of Becky - Killin' nazis in the woods!

Sisu - Killin' nazis in the snow!

Red Sonja - Was this film good? Good grief, no. Was the film excellent? Hell yeah!

Heathers the Musical - Candy Store is a bop. Do the kids still say bop?

What should I watch next? Killin' nazis optional but obviously preferred.

Miss Austen (Miniseries)

Sep. 20th, 2025 02:21 pm
selenak: (Max by Misbegotten)
[personal profile] selenak
Miss Austen: is a delightful four part miniseries. Now with the exception of the excellent Miss Austen Regrets, featuring Olivia Williams as an older Jane A., biographical media on Jane Austen has suffered from the usual flaw of biopics or bio series focusing on female authors, i.e. insisting on inflicting plots of their most popular work on their life. Miss Austen also avoids this, not least by the fact the titular Miss isn’t Jane, it’s her older sister Cassandra, played in middle age by a superb as usual Keeley Hawes and in flashbacks when young by SinnØve Karlsen, who is so versatile that despite having seen her being very good as Clarice Orsini, Lorenzo de’ Medici’s wife in Medici and superb most recently as Bayta in Foundation’s third season, I didn’t recognise her until googling her. (In addition to great acting, I blame the regency outfit and hairstyle in the flashbcks. *g*) Jane Austen is played by Patsy Ferran who is also great, both when being mischievous and witty, passionate about writing and her sister, and depressed (for various reasons, not least the early lack of success). In fact, this miniseries has led me to the conclusion that Jane Austen is like Benjamin Franklin in that the best way to treat her is as a supporting character where she can shine and leave the audience asking for more, whereas when Ben or Jane get the main character treatment, the increased focus reduces their charisma and attraction.

(This is also why back in my Highlander days, I never wanted a Methos spin-off, despite being as fond of the character as any other fan. He is perhaps THE example of a character who needs to remain a recurring guest star in order to maintain what makes their charm and mystery.)

Attend the saga of sisters and a sister-in-law… ) The script manages to avoid the obvious quotes while coming up for Austenish sounding things the characters to say, and does great both with the social comedy of manners and the emotional drama. All in all really superb. Anyone either German like me or French: I watched it on ARTE, which also offers the undubbed, original version. Enjoy!

Alien: Earth 1.07

Sep. 18th, 2025 04:28 pm
selenak: (Agent Brand by Likeadeuce)
[personal profile] selenak
In which it's very useful to know the numbers of pi by heart. Or eye.

What have you done? )

wednesday book about a Great Man

Sep. 17th, 2025 07:51 pm
landofnowhere: (Default)
[personal profile] landofnowhere
Gauss, Titan of Science by G. Waldo Dunnington, with additional material by Jeremy Gray. I mentioned in last week's post that during recent air travel I watched a movie with a dubiously historical version of Gauss and was entertained but ultimately would accept no substitutes for actual historical Gauss.

This is the biography of Carl Friedrich Gauss that I picked up off a university library shelf when I was 15, and made me go all swoony over Gauss's letter proposing to his first wife (link is to the original German manuscript). Returning to it with less swooniness and a more mature ability to evaluate historical sources, and also reading a new edition with helpful front matter, it's clear the book is not 100% "actual historical Gauss": it starts off with a version of the famous 5050 story, which is based on an anecdote that Gauss reportedly told about his childhood, but probably didn't happen exactly that way.

Indeed, as I learned from the front matter, G. Waldo Dunnington was a professional Gauss stan; one of his elementary school teachers was a great-granddaughter of Gauss, and learning that there was no Victorian Great Man biography of Gauss, he spent his entire academic career (interrupted by WWII) remedying that lack. Since I'm also a Gauss stan, I found the book generally readable if sometimes a bit repetitive, and enjoyed various fun Gauss facts. (In the department of obscure historical figures who ought to be fictionalized, there is Friedrich Ludwig Wachter, Gauss's student who studied non-Euclidean geometry and vanished without a trace at age 25.)

I'll probably do more Gauss reading (though also I now have an unproofread scan of Teresa by Edith Ayrton Zangwill so I may read that first); I've started with the letters online, but may also seek out other biographies. I continue to be fascinated by Gauss's youngest daughter, whose story would make a good historical romance; and having done some Gauss reading I'm starting to think I can actually write this fic.
juushika: Photo of a cat in motion, blurred in such a way that it looks like a monster (Cryptid cat)
[personal profile] juushika
Title: John the Skeleton (Luukere Juhani juhtumised)
Author: Triinu Laan
Illustrator: Marja-Liisa Plats
Published: Yonder, 2024
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 65
Total Page Count: 540,855
Text Number: 1999
Read Because: more spooky picture books, hardback borrowed from the Timberland Regional Library
Review: A classroom skeleton retires to live with Gran and Gramps in the country. This is unlike any picture book I've read; maybe that's the author, maybe they write different in Estonia, but I appreciate it and hope to see more picture books in translation. Episodically structured, this cleaves to its premise: the small adventures of an inert anatomical skeleton, scaring off ne'er-do-wells and hanging out at a sauna; it has a candid respect for the eccentricities of private life, and trusts children to inhabit new perspectives and experiences, like aging and death. The black and white sketches with blinding red accents aren't aesthetically pleasing, but the human forms are diverse and realistic, drooping and bulbous and beautifully normal.

All of that makes for a grounded, dense picture book with little momentum; this is one I put in the "more interesting than enjoyable" category, but one of the joys of picture books is that they're a prime medium for experimentation. Constrained by their format, alleviated by illustration, they can get as weird as they want to without overstaying their welcome.


Title: Bog Myrtle
Author: Sid Sharp
Published: Annick Press, 2024
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 145
Total Page Count: 541,000
Text Number: 2000
Read Because: more! but this one is a graphic novel, hardback borrowed from the Timberland Regional Library
Review: In an effort to make a nice gift for her miserable sister, our protagonist accidentally offends and then befriends the local swamp witch. I liked that half of the book, which has an offbeat, blasé humor, generous illustrations and dynamic text, a blandly spooky forest and a cynical whimsy. But the anti-capitalist screed in the second half doesn't work for me. Exploitation at the scale isn't inter-familial, isn't a power differential determined by a few years and a bad attitude, so the message feels incoherent, and I'm not sure how well jokes about unions land for the target audience. I'd love to read more by the author, because when this is good I adore it, but it needs refinement.


Title: Millie Fleur's Poison Garden
Author: Christy Mandin
Published: Orchard Books, 2024
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 40
Total Page Count: 541,040
Text Number: 2001
Read Because: more!, hardback borrowed from the Timberland Regional Library
Review: A girl's strange garden is unwelcome in her neat and uniform town. Fascinating that two nearly identical picture books came out in the same year (the other being Ferry's Prunella); the premise could be a coincidence, but the remarkable similarity of the plot feels telling: strangeness is first isolating and then a site of social bonding, although in this case the protagonist initiates, creating rather than finding like-minded fellows. Neither approach is superior, although I prefer the more realistic plants in Prunella. It's an optimistic, pointed, reassuring message about being different—so much so that it grows trite. Picture books are allowed that kind of wholesomeness, but I find it almost alienating: this isn't why I read about weird little girls, or the kinds of reassurances I wanted or trusted when I was one.

(Identical right down to the diverse group of kids visiting the garden including a wheelchair-user who struggles not at all with the unfeatured grass? paving? you don't know, don't worry about it, there is a by-the-book-ness of modern picture books which is embarrassing when quite this obvious. While I'm being petty, the title and obviously premise of this one is inspired by the Alnwick poison garden, so the cartoony, anthropomorphized, distinctly not poisonous plants are such a let-down.)

Raindrops keep falling on my head....

Sep. 16th, 2025 04:47 pm
selenak: (Ben by Idrilelendil)
[personal profile] selenak
RIP Robert Redford. A fantastic run of movies especially in the 70s as an actor, later as a director never made an uninteresting movie, founded a film festival of several decades running, and to the best of my knowledge never abused his fame and status and instead used both to help others.


Reading, or Lack Thereof

Sep. 16th, 2025 03:27 pm
netgirl_y2k: (Default)
[personal profile] netgirl_y2k
I talk a good game about giving up on books you're not enjoying, and I am pretty good at DNF-ing books at, like, 10-15%, but I find it very difficult to give upon a book after I've gotten much past that.

Which is probably why I have spent weeks now trying to convince myself that I really am going to go back to Awakened by A.E. Osworth (put down at 40% sometime in mid August). I so wanted to like it - the summary is a coven of trans witches fight an evil AI. Cool, eh? I never got to that bit, I bounced off it for, actually, the same reason I can't get on with the Gideon the Ninth books; the narrator has the same too online, wryly twee, queer elder millennial voice. And I know that the reason I find that voice oh so grating is that I talk like that. During one of the hotter days this summer I was in a pub beer garden with a mate and I described our environs as 'a bit fire hazard-y.'

Moving on, what should I read instead? Read anything good recently?

Comics wise I did read Absolute Wonder Woman: The Last Amazon which I loved almost as much as Absolute Superman. The AU is that Diana was raised in Hell by Circe the witch. So like, she's still Wonder Woman, still extending her hand in friendship, but she is riding a skeletal pegasus, and performing dark magic, and constantly covered in blood. She's got a magic prosthetic arm because she sacrificed her real arm as part of, like, a blood spell. It's badass...and Steve Trevor is still kind of a lame love interest.

I only got as far as the first issue of Absolute Batman, but I am generally a harder sell on Bruce in general. I do want to give some of the other absolute runs a shot before they get folded into the wider DC universe or some sort of giant, ridiculous crossover event and I completely lose interest.

And I did read the first issue of G. Willow Wilson's Black Cat, which seems like it's going to be a lot of fun, although I will be bummed if it turns out Felicia wasn't actually flirting with Night Nurse.

Speaking of comics, I think I got my friend Al in trouble with his wife. So Al has no fewer than one thousand (1000) trade paperbacks stacked up in his garage, and the reason that he has been giving for why he hasn't gotten rid of them yet is that I was going to come round to go through them and take anything I wanted. So the other week I'd been round watching a movie with the wife and she said "Hey, while you're here do you want to have a look at those comics in the garage?" and I said "Huh?" while clearly wearing the facial expression of someone who was just learning this information for the first time.

Oops.

So someday soon I have to clear a morning so I can go round and stand in Al's garage going through a literal ton of comics.

To start the week with

Sep. 15th, 2025 11:59 am
selenak: (Music)
[personal profile] selenak
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds finished its third season, and you may have deduced from the fact I didn't review the remaining episodes that for me, it did not take a turn for the better. The Ortegas episode was probably the most, in lack of a better term, Trekian, not to mention the long awaited one with a focus on Ortegas beyond "I fly the ship", but it shares with far too many ST: SNW episodes the way it is just incredibly derivative, of both other franchises and earlier ST. And the series finale chose to pick my least favourite DS9 plotline and scenario, sigh. To complete my turn to an old grouch, the feeling of this season as Star Trek: The Rom Com didn't help, either. Anyway. I'll always have Discovery and Prodigy in terms of new ST that manages to unite both affection for the past AND originality and the courage to try out new paths and characters.
*****

Given the daily horror show that is the news, it's all the more important to find joy in fannish things, so I was delighted to discover this new Sense 8 vid. Now there was a show celebrating joy and diversity:

Sense 8

Voice in my Throat

***

And on another joyful note: Yuletide nominations have started!

That Sure Was a Season of Star Trek

Sep. 14th, 2025 06:15 pm
netgirl_y2k: (Default)
[personal profile] netgirl_y2k
Strange New disappointments
Straight New Worlds
Strange New Worlds

I frickin' loved the first season of SNW. The second season included one of my all time favourite episodes of Star Trek (the Lower Decks crossover). I was so hyped for season three...and, like, it was bad? So bad that I was like...did I hallucinate this show ever being good?

Thus follows a brief list of my gripes about S3 of SNW:

1. It's not funny. I agree with the reviewer who said that this season desperately wants to be Lower Decks, except the writers don't have the comedy chops, so you end up with a season that is 50% "comedy" episodes, culminating in the episode Four and a Half Vulcans a thuddingly unfunny episode of television that was nonetheless teased at comic con last year, like they inexplicably thought that was them putting their best foot forward.

2. Speaking of Lower Decks, the nostalgia bait of LD worked because sometimes it was super weird, and sometimes it was a deep cut, but it always felt like it was written by people with a deep knowledge and love of Star Trek, while the callbacks in SNW all feel like they were written by people who vaguely remember having watched The Original Series as kids.

Like, at the end of the episode Terrarium, actually one of the better episodes of the season, the freakin' Metrons turn up to monologue, all like, "We have trapped a human and a Gorn together on a planet, and we will do it again!" And, like, we all remember the episode with Kirk and the Gorn. It's a very famous episode! They made fun of it in Galaxy Quest. And, like, anyone who doesn't know, doesn't know who goshdarn Metrons are either!

3. The overwhelming, bordering of offensive, heterosexuality of SNW is not new - I've said before that making a big ensemble show in the 2020s with not even a token queer character feels like a very deliberate choice has been made - but it did feel like it's stepped up a gear this season. There was a trailer for S3 that went like: "All New Worlds! All New Adventures! All New Relationships!"

And, like, Sorry? What? Pardon? Who is watching Star Trek for the romance?

This gripe has sub clauses, y'all

a) I did not especially care for the Spock/Chapel ship in the first two seasons, it felt like it took over the show slightly, and turned what was basically 'two co-workers have a weird vibe because one has a crush on the other and maybe they had an inadvisable snog at the work x-mas party' into an interminable story of star-crossed lovers. Then they dropped it like a hot potato, because it felt like the writers belatedly realised that the ship as written didn't jibe with turning SNW into the Original Series.

b) I didn't actually hate Spock/La'an; it was low key, didn't overwhelm the show the way it felt like Spock/Chapel had, made sense for both characters. It was just that it fit into a pattern this season of the writers having no interest in their female characters beyond deciding which dude's tongues they were going to shove into their mouthes.

c) I like Patton Oswald, and I'm usually happy to see him pop up, and I might have disliked this less if I felt like I had learned anything about Una this season other than she's definitely straight y'all.

d)Beto Ortegas--

Hang on, this sub clause has addendums

i. Erica Ortegas has a brother, doubling her number of known character traits to 1) flies ship, and 2) has brother.

ii. That brother is the pivotal character in an episode called What is Starfleet? which concludes that Starfleet is a bunch of people who almost do a warcrime and then decide not to at the last minute.

iii. Said brother has a stilted, awkward, and unconvincing romance with Uhura. I mean, it wasn't like they were doing anything else with the iconic character of Nyota Uhura, right?

iv. There is an episode where Erica is lost on a hostile planet and Uhura is orders of magnitude more upset than the rest of the crew which would have made a bajillion times more sense if Erica and Uhura had been the ones to have the flirtation/relationship.

I know writers who use compulsory heterosexuality, they are all cowards.

4. Captain Pike has a love interest named Captain Batel. She nearly died at the end of S2, he was very sad about that; at the end of S3 she turns into a statue, and Pike is very sad about that too. I have no idea what Marie Batel thinks about this Nu Who ass ending because the show cares about her character so little that it can't even be bothered to decide what her job is, over the course of her guest appearances she is 1) a starship captain, 2) a courtroom lawyer, 3) a starship captain again, 4) on the supreme court, I guess.

Anyway, she's a statue now.

Alien: Earth 1.06 und Foundation 3.10

Sep. 12th, 2025 01:32 pm
selenak: (Demerzel and Terminus)
[personal profile] selenak
Alien: Earth:

The internet tells me Sigourney Weaver is watching Alien: Earth and is as enthralled as yours truly. Now if that isn't a compliment to Noah Hawley et al, I don't know what is.

Spoilers are on a quest to use the creepiest Peter Pan quotes in every episode )


Foundation

Is the first season finale necessitating that the next season has to start without a century like time jump. Also, yowsers.

...while the worst are full of passionate intensity )
landofnowhere: (Default)
[personal profile] landofnowhere
Short post because (a) it's actually only been a week (b) busy and (c) while I did spend a bunch of time on planes it was mostly not reading. (I did watch the movie of Die Vermessung der Welt with English subtitles, and while it worked to keep me entertained while very sleep-deprived, on reflection I'm too invested in the actual historical Carl Friedrich Gauss to accept any ahistorical substitutes.)

To Shape a Dragon's Breath, Moniquill Blackgoose. I thought it would be appropriate to read about dragons on the plane trip, and then I didn't read very much, but that's fine as the dragons don't really get to fly in this book anyway. This book was not very subtle in a way that I suspect I'd have preferred if I was younger, which makes sense as it's YA. There are presumably people who would review this book as "I thought I was getting a story about dragons, not a story about how racism and colonialism are bad", but I had read enough reviews to know what I was getting, which was that, but also a school story with interesting alternate-history chemistry and telepathic pet dragons who are not yet a big part of the story, and I enjoyed it! I will definitely be reading book 2 (which I appreciate about summer vacation rather than skipping to the second year of school) when it comes out in January.

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