incidents and accidents, hints and allegations

and I even booklogged it! Okay, "a bunch" here is four books, but they're all long: Cyteen; 40,000 in Gehenna; Downbelow Station; and Regenesis.

And I wrote it up for the booklog: non-spoiler post, spoiler post.

I'd love it if you discussed over there, but I'm leaving comments open here because I'm also soliciting fic recommendations.

Y'all. Y'all.

What if Merricat discovered that she really was a werewolf?!??!!!

Down in the Boneyard (1055 words) by enemyofrome
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: We Have Always Lived in the Castle - Shirley Jackson
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Constance Blackwood & Merricat Blackwood
Characters: Merricat Blackwood, Constance Blackwood (We Have Always Lived In The Castle)
Additional Tags: Werewolf Merricat, Character Death, Child Death
Summary:

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am almost nineteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. On the night of the fire I learnt that I was a werewolf. On some level I had always known, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length; and as any wise woman could tell you, that is the surest sign of one touched by the moon. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cap mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.

After the fire, a blight comes upon the village.

It's so good, please go read it immediately.

My Whale Weekly posting has been all over on Tumblr; I am temporarily paused on Les Mis Letters until I have time to read all the rest of Part One in one fell swoop, because parceling it out day-by-day was making me too sad, but I did post a little bit about it previously.

My #whale weekly tag is full of reblogs, unfortunately if that's not your thing; less so for #les mis letters. I do tag stuff that's got sufficiently significant content of my own, however; I've gone back and forth on what I want that tag to be, so if that link ever fails to work, just go to katenepveu and check the pinned post.

(I am also reading Frankenstein but my head is too full of whales to be talking about it yet.)

What are you reading these days, communally or otherwise?

My booklog needs a complete WordPress reinstall and possibly some more stuff as well, so in the meantime, I present: all the books I read on an 11-day Caribbean cruise.

1) A Restless Truth, Freya Marske. Set on an ocean liner! Lovely: fun, quick, great characters (I am especially fond of the one who's got all the skills to be awful but has emphatically committed herself, with all of her iron will, to be good) and excellent romantic dynamic.

2) Ocean's Echo, Everina Maxwell. The ocean is metaphorical, but it still counts. Rhymes well with the prior book in the main characters; nicely id-tastic relationship dynamic (we'll fake a soul-bond to keep from being forced to it). I got a smidge lost in the politics and reversals by the end but that may well have been my fault, and on the whole I enjoyed it immensely.

3) Moby Dick, Herman Melville. The ocean is literal and metaphorical! Yes, I read the whole thing. Though Ishmael's sentences take some concentration, this did not feel that long to me, honestly. I would like to say that the book's many non-white characters rise above being Noble Savages but I can't really convince myself of it. At least it wasn't being intentionally malicious, so I could shrug past it. And on the whole I enjoyed it quite a lot and look forward to rereading it more closely with Whale Weekly (which is quite busy at the moment as Ishmael gets ready to sail, but will settle down after that).

4) Dead Collections, Isaac Fellman. Decided I needed an emphatic break from the ocean theme, having gorged myself on it with Moby Dick. This is a short book (60k, so a novel by Hugo standards, but) that I respected more than liked. It's very tight and thematically-intertwined, but it almost seemed too much so to me.

5) Illuminations, T. Kingfisher. Her most recent middle-grade book. Enjoyable until the end when I abruptly wanted it to be a different genre, which is her second book in a row like that.

6) The Border Keeper, Kerstin Hall. Another short one (54k). I reread something for a Yuletide beta that was kind of gently and numinously magical, and wanted something in the same vein. This fit the mood (though less on the gentle end) and was well-written and evocative, but maybe a little sparse, especially when I hit the end and went "wait, what?"

7) Travel Light, Naomi Mitchison. A true novella (37k). Just a lovely, unusual story about a girl that starts as a fairy tale and moves into historical times but stays with the same kind of considerations.

8) The Corn King and the Spring Queen, also Mitchison. My flight is being called so I'll just say that this is a brick (270k) but excellent historical/fantasy, really good at the mindsets of the characters, highly recommended.

Edit:

I finished the above on the first leg of our flights today, not technically on the cruise, so in that spirit I'll add in

9) The Empress of Salt and Fortune, Nghi Vo. Novella started on one flight and finished on other (I'm waiting for luggage now). A cleric and their talking bird hear the story of the title character, satisfyingly done, little tension (not a complaint).

You can do spoilers in comments by using HTML mode and using (details)(summary)cut text(/summary)(/details), only replace with pointy brackets.

Which is the sequel to Unnatural Magic that I read and enjoyed last summer. It's f/f fantasy and has lots of women with nicely varied relationships, also an undead mouse. Check it out.

Susanna Clarke Returns With the Beautifully Kind Piranesi: my review over at Tor.com.

I was supposed to be doing the dishes...

Anyway, I gave up on Elizabeth E. Wein's Arthurian/Aksumite Cycle with The Sunbird, because too much whump, and then somehow I read a noir novel, Margaret Millar's Vanish in an Instant? My brain is weird. But I knew at least the first of these would be of interest to some people here, so I thought I should bring over links.

I have accumulated many fewer links than I usually bother to post, but:

John M. Ford's entire backlist will be coming back into print, starting next year! (Except the licensed IPs, of course.) And a collection of miscellany and the unfinished epic Aspects, too.

I am so, so happy about this.

The linked article has some information on how this happened, which is fascinating—basically Isaac Butler, who co-wrote that epic oral history of Angels in America, read The Dragon Waiting at a friend's urging and went on A Quest to find out why Ford was so out-of-print. He ended up contacting Ford's family and agent, both of whom had been out-of-touch with everyone in publishing, and after a year-long negotiation, Tor reached this agreement with the family. The article disclaims any attempt to determine What Really Happened, and I'm not interested in vilifying or vindicating anyone—I do think there are some lines that can be read between, but we don't need to do that here.

I had genuinely resigned myself to this never happening.

A few links:

• A story at Tor.com by Brenda Peynado called "The Touches". I am not sure the ending fully works for me, but I read it avidly all the way through.

  I’ve been touched exactly four times in real life. The first was when my mother gave birth to me, picking up her bacteria as I slid out of her womb, the good stuff as well as the bad. My father caught me, and his hands, covered in everything that lives on our skins, made contact then, the bacteria, yeast, shed viruses, and anything else from under his fingernails spreading to my newborn epidermis. That was the second touch.

  I must have been gooey and crying, and they both held me for a moment before the robot assigned to me snipped my cord, took me up in its basket, and delivered me to the cubicle where I would live the rest of my life.

• The Speculative Literature Foundation is running a membership drive; over on Facebook, its director Mary Anne Mohanraj explains the very cool projects the SLF is hoping to pursue. They do good work, check them out.

• At Vulture, The Story of the 1991 Beauty and the Beast Screening That Changed Everything: it was a work-in-progress cut, which "incorporated four different stages from the movie’s long, arduous creation: storyboards, rough pencil-sketch animation, cleaned-up black-and-white animation, and final color footage." There's an embed of the song "Belle" in the article, or you can go directly to YouTube; it's weirdly interesting to watch, and it's also a nice reminder of how great the music is.

• At Vanity Fair, an article whose headline answers its own question: "You're Essentially a Prisoner": Why Do Dubai's Princesses Keep Trying to Escape? I remember hearing last year about the princess who was caught and was eventually visited by Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland; I hadn't heard about additional developments until now.

• For some reason the font on this article is GIANT, but the NYT has a meaty article on China's Internet, more specifically on WeChat's dominance and how it is "an alternative vision of the mobile internet, one that is integrated across multiple dimensions and that is in essence a single large market."

My new motivational reminder is "be the competence porn you want to see in the world," because I realized that I get the same nice warm glow when I accomplish what I know that I'm capable of. (Shocking, I know.) We'll see how long that is effective.

Meanwhile, rec your favorite competence porn, ideally text because time and access, and ideally not dude-heavy, as I have just finished an Aubrey-Maturin skim/skip re-read and am likely about to embark on a Dick Francis binge.

Also, speaking of Dick Francis, rec me your favorites. I think all I've read is Proof--or at least if I've read more, I don't remember a thing about them. I've already checked rachelmanija's tag and seen skygiants's review of The Edge.