lirazel: Sara from A Little Princess peeks through a door ([film] kindle my heart)
lirazel ([personal profile] lirazel) wrote2025-07-15 08:36 am
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lauren's never-ending search for words to describe the vibes of specific books

[personal profile] troisoiseaux just reread A Brief History of Montmaray, reminding me of the existence of this series, which got my mind to churning.

There's a very specific sub-genre of books written for bookish teenage girls that I need a name for. They're either set in or written in a previous era (usually late Victorian to WWII), usually in the UK though occasionally in the US (though some have scenes set elsewhere, especially in Ibbotson). They're self-indulgent but well-written, focus on the inner lives of their heroines, are chock-full of lovely period details, and have a sense of whimsy without going too far into the precious or twee. They're often more episodic than plot-driven. The characters are always well-drawn, eccentric, and wide-ranging in age and sometimes class, though not (sadly) in race. Honestly, the books are...very white. They are not cozy in the sense that word gets thrown around today--there's always loss or death--but they feel cozy aesthetically despite this.

Here are the examples I've come up with:

Eva Ibbotson's young adult novels (A Countess Below Stairs, A Company of Swans, The Morning Gift, A Song for Summer, Magic Flutes)
I Capture the Castle
The Montmaray Journals
The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion
the Gone-Away Lake books (this duology is an outlier in that it's MG and has a male co-protagonist, but they feel this way in my memory, though admittedly I haven't reread them in 20 years)
Daddy Long-legs

Strangely, I would not include L.M. Montgomery's books in these categories, except, maybe, The Blue Castle? I don't know why, but the vibe is different enough to me that they don't belong in this category.

O Caldeonia is this genre taken and turned sharper and crueler. It's this genre with an edge.

[eta] This is a sub-set of the Special Girl genre articulated by [personal profile] qian below. To me, Ibbotson is the epitome of this genre. It's got a glittering-ness to it that sets it apart from things like Little Women and Montgomery (The Blue Castle aside. Maybe it feels almost fairytale-adjacent? Like, the world they're operating in has things like crumbling castles, dukes (though they may be driving taxis now, as in Ibbotson), a kind of air of not-realism to the world they're operating in even if the emotions of our main character are realistic. Like I have to accept that I'm in a different world with different laws for how things work and to complain about the way things work would be as silly as complaining about how things work in a fantasy novel. They are the spiritual children of Frances Hodgson Burnett.



So my questions are:

a) what should we call this genre?

and

b) does anyone have any other titles they think belong in it? I'd like to compose a list and also I would like to read those books because this genre exists for me specifically and I eat it up with a spoon.
lirazel: Scully standing in front of Mulder rolling her eyes with the text UGH above her head ([tv] seriously mulder?)
lirazel ([personal profile] lirazel) wrote2025-07-14 01:32 pm

omg y'all

Has anyone else started getting those spam-y grift-y "I like your writing, let me make art for you" messages here on DW??? I've gotten them on plenty of other sites (including FF.N, where my account is still apparently linked to my email address!) but I never thought to see them here!
lirazel: Miroslava from On Drakon stands in her boat wearing her wedding clothes ([film] offering to the dragon)
lirazel ([personal profile] lirazel) wrote2025-07-14 12:07 pm

(no subject)

Anybody got any book recs for either nonfiction or fiction set in Central Asia and/or Afghanistan prior to the 19th century? (Going back as far as you like.)

I just find this area of the world really interesting but find little information on it. I'm super interested in Samarkand, the Silk Roads, etc.

There are a number of travelogues that people have written, like, tracing the Silk Roads and things. And those are interesting! But I'm really looking for something that isn't filtered through a contemporary perspective.
lirazel: Lead couple from Healer ([tv] lois and clark)
lirazel ([personal profile] lirazel) wrote2025-07-12 05:49 pm
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Superman (2025)

I saw Superman! I liked it a lot!

Positive stuff:

+ Finally, a superhero movie that cares about every single life! I did not think we would ever see such a thing--superhero movies use "collateral damage" to raise stakes while not actually caring about the people who die. But this movie cares because Superman cares. And I love that so very very very much. Even if it hadn't done anything else, I would have thought it a success for that.

+ Honestly, Superman is my favorite superhero because he's so ridiculously good and decent, and this movie gets that. It's earnest and sincere and isn't winking at you but it also isn't saccharine--it knows that it can be HARD to be good, and intentions aren't everything.

+ Top tier casting. Everyone is doing a fantastic job. Corsenswet, Brosnahan, and Hoult ARE their characters. They were just as good as I hoped, but I was not expecting how much I would love Edi Gathegi as Mister Terrific.

+ This movie loves the relationship between Clark and Lois, which means that this movie has good taste. Their chemistry is lovely and the scene where they're doing the interview is probably my favorite scene in the whole thing.

+ Lex is realistically evil in a way that many of our real billionaires are, which I appreciated a lot. His motivations are completely foreign to me, but I only have to look at the real world to see that there are really people who are like that.

+ The twist involving Superman's backstory was so ridiculously good and meaty. A really bold writing choice, but a great one.

+ I thought the pacing was really good! It never felt like it lagged!

+ Everything was bright! You could see what was going on even in the dark scenes!

+ Lots and lots of fun details that made it feel like the people who were making the movie were having fun making it.

+ Krypto!

Mixed stuff:

+ Being a rabid John Williams fan, I was delighted that they adapted his Superman theme for the film, but I really wish we had gotten just one scene where they used the full-throated original. None of the music was that level of thrilling.

+ I could have done with a lot more Clark at the Daily Planet, living his normal life, letting us get to know the Daily Planet people. The action scenes were very good action scenes, but as always in an action movie, I want way more of characters interacting. Imagine how much more Clark & Lois we could have had! However, I understand that the masses do not share my taste so I get why there wasn't more of that, and there was enough that I'm not angry about it.

+ The plot could have been better. It wasn't bad, and it provided a fine backdrop and set piece for the characters to show who they are, but I didn't love it, you know?

+ #teamsomebodyloveeve

+ I wish we'd had a smidge more showing us how Lex inspires loyalty in other people. I mean, yes, in real life, there are a bunch of people who will follow a billionaire that they think is smart without thinking about his morality at all. It's very realistic! but I want to know about this specific dynamic. Is he paying them obscene amounts of money? What is his view of the world that he could convince the engineer to do what she did to her own body?

Negative stuff:

+ Okay, what was the Kents' accents???? If the movie had been set in Alabama, sure, that would be reasonable, but I do not believe that people in Kansas talk like that? Nobody Iw've ever known from Kansas talks like that? It’s so weird how media uses "very southern accent" as stand-in for "country" even when the country the people are from is the Midwest.

If you are from Kansas and I am wrong about how people talk there, please tell me so I can stop being annoyed about this.

[as an aside, Mister Terrific's accent was so lovely that I immediately looked to see where Gathegi grew up, and to my shock found he grew up in California! I would never have guessed it! His southern accent was so realistic! Well done, sir!]

Me trying to work out the geography of these made up countries: ??????? The one is clearly Russia, the other is inspired by Pakistan, Afghanistan, or possibly a province of India, yet we're told this is all happening in Europe. Which makes no sense. Russia is half in Asia, it would have made so much more sense to just say Asia instead????

But my complaints are small.

So yeah! A fun movie! I recommend it even if, like me, you're not such a big superhero person and are exhausted by too many superheroes.

Now can we pretty please have a prequel movie about how Clark and Lois met and how she found out he's Superman???????
cimorene: Pixel art of a bright apple green art deco tablet radio with elaborate ivory fretwork (is this thing on?)
Cimorene ([personal profile] cimorene) wrote2025-07-12 05:16 pm
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Reading adventures

I haven't been able to get invested in reading a specific fandom in several years. Every now and then I look at fandoms I have read in the past and manage to spend a few weeks rereading some of them before I run out of patience to keep looking, but that's not very long.

About a month ago, I tried to read some 911 fic from [personal profile] waxjism's spreadsheet. She is keeping a spreadsheet of every fic in this fandom she has read. She records the title and author; pairing (even though they're all the same pairing); summary - which is sometimes the author summary and sometimes she writes something in this field like a comment, or a whole rant, that doesn't actually include a summary; a column called "good/no" where she categorizes them as very good, good, above mid, mid, "sub mid", or bad; and a column called "comments" where she sometimes rants, or continues the rant from the summary columnn, and sometimes just says things like "fun-ish" or "not flawless" or "pretty hot" or "unbearably written by a child or a super-offline person". This is different from how I, at least, used to keep track of a recs list when I had to do it manually, because she puts in everything she starts even if she DNF immediately, and also it's for private use. I tried to use it to find things to read, and it's not like I'm unfamiliar with reading fanfiction without canon but also I had seen some of this show accidentally while she was watching it. I did keep trying for a while and I read... some... number of the ones she marked very good or good, based on the comments and summaries, but I kept getting bored and annoyed at the characters. It just wasn't grabbing me. Very disappointing because there would've been a lot to read. (A huge amount of the things on this spreadsheet are marked bad or sub-mid even by her, and I think she is in general more forgiving in judging quality than I am even though unlike me she never reads things that seem kinda bad or mediocre to her for fun. And she has never gone archive-spelunking or read directly from the tag: she ONLY reads from recs and bookmarks. There's no control to test it here, but I think this bears out my personal conviction that there is a 0% increase in quality from recs and bookmarks (of random people that you don't know as opposed to someone vetted and trusted) vs. the slushpile (the entire content of the archive at random)).

A couple of weeks ago I saw a post on Tumblr that said something like, paraphrased, "There's a very popular notion that in the past all literature was good quality compared to now, but that's not true. This is survivorship bias. The stuff we still know and read in the present day is the good stuff, but a vast quantity of bad and mediocre stuff is lost to time." Someone responded by linking to The Westminster Detective Library, a project investigating the earliest history of the detective fiction genre. Apparently the professor who began it was initially inspired by a conviction that Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue was not actually the first detective short story based on features of its writing which in his opinion betrayed the signs of a genre history. The website contains transcribed public-domain detective fiction that was published in American magazines before the first Sherlock Holmes story's publication. I have been enjoying reading through it chronologically since I read the post. Reading in one genre is a bit like reading in one fandom, and reading very old fiction has several special points of interest to me because I love learning about history and culture in that way. Of course on the minus side, it isn't gay. But I'm getting fascinating glimpses of the history of the genre and the history of jurisprudence in both America and Britain. And although there is definitely mediocre and "sub-mid" writing published in the periodicals of the 18th-19th centuries, awash in silly cliches and carelessly proofread if at all, they are still slightly more filtered for legibility and literacy than the experience of reading modern fanfiction (even, as mentioned in the last paragraph, from recs lists and bookmarks, unless you have a supply of trusted and well-known reccers to follow. I sometimes come near tears remembering the days when I could always check what [personal profile] thefourthvine and [personal profile] norah were recommending, but I can't blame them for the decline, either, because I was generally reading and at least bookmarking if not reccing just as productively at the time).

The other thing that has happened to affect my reading is that my little sister's high school best friend got engaged and invited my sister to her engagement party in Florida, which is going to be "Gatsby-themed". The 1920s is possibly my single oldest hyperfixation, dating from before the age of 10, and it's the historical period that I know and care the most about. For the past ten years or so the term "Gatsby" has, consequently, inspired me with the most intense rage and irritation, because its popularity after the movie version of The Great Gatsby flooded the internet with so much loathesomely inaccurate "information" about and imagery of the 1920s as to actually make it harder to find real information, and nearly impossible to filter out this dreck. So my sister began shopping for her Engagement Party Outfit, which is supposed to be "Gatsby"-themed, and I am the permanent primary audience for this (just as she is the permanent primary audience any time I am planning outfits or considering my wardrobe). This has led me to reading 1920s magazines online from the Internet Archive and HathiTrust - initially the middle-class fashion magazine McCall's; then also Vogue and Harper's Bazar (much more pretentious and bourgeois). I tried to branch out into interior design magazines of the same period (House & Garden and Better Homes & Gardens), but it has been harder to find scans of them. I find 1920s romantic fiction (serialized copiously in all these magazines) much less readable and enjoyable than the 1920s detective fiction which I am more familiar with (I've read plenty of it thanks to my interest in Golden Age detective stories)... but I've also learned a lot more physical and aesthetic details about women's fashion and interiors from the romantic fiction, which makes me think I perhaps need to seek out more of it.
lirazel: A drawing of Emma M. Lion against a yellow background ([lit] imperterritus)
lirazel ([personal profile] lirazel) wrote2025-07-11 10:00 am

Fannish Friday: your ultimate microfandom

I want some conversation! So let's talk about the stuff we love that nobody else loves. I feel certain I've asked about this before, but it can never hurt to ask about it again!

What is the one (or two or three) canon that you love so very much that you're ravenous for fic/meta/fanart/squee about it but you simply can't find it?

The three that come to mind for me are:


+ The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion, which has such rich worldbuilding and side characters that I wish could read a thousand fics about virtually anything!

+ M.M. Kaye's The Shadow of the Moon, which has one of my ultimate OTPs, who I would like to read a thousand canon divergence fics in which Alex and Winter fall in love in a thousand different ways.

+ Shut Up! Flower Boy Band, a kdrama about a rock band that has a brush with fame, which has such rich characters and relationships that I would could (again) read a thousand fics about these characters bumping into each other! Jamie wrote me one OT4 fic back in the long-ago days after the show came out, but other than that, there's almost nothing.
lirazel: Anne Shirley from the 1985 Anne of Green Gables reads while walking ([tv] book drunkard)
lirazel ([personal profile] lirazel) wrote2025-07-09 10:10 am

what i'm reading wednesday 9/7/2025

What I finished:

+ A Lonely Death by Charles Todd, another Ian Rutledge mystery. I don't really have anything to say about this! It's an entry in a mystery series--you know what you're getting!

+ The Doors of Eden by Adrian Tchaikovsky. This is only the second Tchaikovsky I've read--I've started a few but up till now, the only one I liked enough to finish is Elder Races. I don't read nearly as much scifi as I do fantasy, mostly because most scifi (emphasis on most) seems like it's more focused on the ideas than on any of the other stuff that makes a book for me--characters, emotional resonance, even worldbuilding from a cultural perspective rather than a technological one.

However, I do like to read them now and then, and this was an example of one where the idea was indeed very intriguing--extradimensional cracks between worlds as an excuse to think about what sentient life might have looked like if it had developed at other points on the evolutionary tree. Very cool, actually! I liked the idea, I liked Tchaikovsky's prose well enough, I liked the unconventional way of giving information (via excerpts from a diegetic text--btw, can you use diegetic to talk about things other than sound? I am simply going to do so because I think it's a very useful word).

There's a wide-ranging cast of characters, too, which I enjoyed, varying in race, gender, and sexual orientation though not nationality (all the human characters are British). I could have done with some truly old characters--I am one of those people who thinks that every story can be improved by the inclusion of an old lady--but I won't complain about that since if I complained about that I'd have to complain about 90% of books. The characters were pretty well-developed but for reasons I can't articulate, I didn't emotionally connect very deeply with any of them. It was more like me going, "That's a good character design," than me truly caring about the characters. But I find this is true in a lot of scifi, and it's not a dealbreaker for me when there's other interesting stuff going on.

This is one of those books that ended up being so long that if I'd gotten the physical copy and seen that it was 600 pages, I might not have started it at all, but it was an ebook so I didn't know when I started! And I did read the whole thing over the course of a long weekend, so clearly it was readable enough even at that length. I thought the pacing was good, and the toggling between character perspectives was enough to keep it moving briskly, so it didn't feel as long as it is.

All in all, a book I enjoyed but did not love.

What I started but abandoned:

+ A Fate Inked in Blood, a Norse-inspired fantasy that was a massive bestseller, which I'd heard good things about from someone whose taste usually completely aligns with mine, but...nah, this isn't for me. I was initially intrigued by the fact that our heroine is married to a terrible guy, which is just not something you see a lot. But then in the opening chapter, along comes this super hot guy who is so clearly coded as Our Male Romantic Lead that I found it annoying, and then they started flirting, and I was like, "I am too ace for this," and I peaced out. I also wasn't impressed by the first person perspective/prose style, so I don't think this is any real loss for me.

What I'm reading/what's on pause:

+ On recommendation from [personal profile] chestnut_pod, I started Sofia Samatar's The White Mosque, and I am very enamored of it despite wishing that Samatar's prose style was about 15% more conventional (more on that when I actually write this up), but I have put it on pause. The book is a memoir about half-Mennonite, half-Muslim Samatar tracing the steps of a 19th century group of Mennonites who traveled through and settled in Central Asia for a few decades--one of those unexpected quirks of history that gets me wildly excited. But I got a chapter or so in and she referenced a nonfiction book about the same topic that covers the historical trip in detail, I saw that we have it at the library of the university I work for, and so I decided I would go read it before I read this book. But I am so looking forward to getting back to this. [personal profile] chestnut_pod was correct that this book is Extremely Relevant To My Interests.

+ I also started Godkiller by Hannah Kaner but I am literally a chapter and a half in so I can't possibly speak to whether I'll like it or not.
summerstorm: (Default)
summerstorm ([personal profile] summerstorm) wrote2025-07-08 03:41 pm

(no subject)

Does anybody need someone to copy-edit/proofread a blog post or article or TTRPG notes or something? I'll do like 1k for, I don't know, 10 bucks? I have a really hard time making shit up for portfolio reasons and setting up a Fiverr gig requires samples of your work. Gross.

I'm probably not even going to use that, because I'm pretty sure I can offer that sort of work on Ko-Fi and I hate the shit out of content mills, but all the same.

Today's D20 list (where I write down twenty things and then roll a d20 to see what I do next) is mostly research; so far I've compiled a few examples of printable item and spell cards for D&D, done the above, and found out the reason Inprnt wouldn't accept my files is that I've been saving JPGs in Apple's Display P3 color profile. I thought they weren't big enough, which is probably ridiculous, I have a fucking Canon DSLR.

I don't think I talked about this here, but back in May my mom stopped receiving her minimal basic income, so we're surviving on kindness and savings, and there's not that much in savings. If anyone wants to help out, my Paypal account is battlesinthemorning@gmail.com. Literally every bit helps. But I am also trying to do actual work without driving myself up the wall. It's hard because every time my mom asks my sister for money*, my mental health takes five steps back, but I'm trying.

* venting )
cimorene: Blue text reading "This Old House" over a photo of a small yellow house (knypplinge)
Cimorene ([personal profile] cimorene) wrote2025-07-04 11:03 pm
Entry tags:

Wax's summer vacation, the only time we can do renovation tasks

It's taken five years to caulk the seam between the two pieces of butcher block on our counter, so I had to dig a bunch of breadcrumbs out of it first with a fruit knife (it's right in front of the toaster). We also re-caulked the seam between the butcher block and the stainless part of the counter by the sink. (The sink is only a few cm from the edge of it, which is very bad design, and the edge of the butcher block there has inevitably suffered and swollen, as the caulk was never going to be adequate; there was no easy way to get the whole counter in stainless, but we should have figured it out anyway. Or alternately, just called up the companies that make tiles and fireplaces out of Finnish soapstone until we found one that would sell us a counter, even though none of them make counters.)

We also oiled the hinge of the bathroom door - the one modern, new door in the house - which has been squeaking for years (unlike all the other doors, which are from 1950 and work flawlessly). And then we glued the aluminum threshold down over the tile floor at that door - it was already loose when the contractors left because the initial adhesive they had used wasn't in contact with the front face of the cement under the tiles, because the tile sticks out a few mm proud of the subfloor. I scraped a layer of gummy glue off the back of the threshold (glue which had never stuck to the tile and instead became impregnated with dust and dirt), then applied some construction adhesive. It's extremely stinky upstairs now as it dries, even with the windows open.

But anyway, all that didn't even take all day. We've done a bunch of laundry and sat on the sofa cuddling cats in between. Can't believe it took us five years.