Hi,i am new on this community and on dreamwidth in general and some days ago i drew this fanart of Gary x misty,I LUV GARY X MISTY they are two Idiots and one of my favorite pokemon ships,they almost never interact but ok i have fanon.
Last night I watched The Miseduation of Cameron Post, a film about an 11th grader whose aunt sends her away to a Christian conversion camp after she gets caught hooking up with a female friend. The film is set in 1993.
It’s a heartfelt film about Cameron’s resistance to being changed and her developing identity (Asked early on at camp when she started to think of herself as a homosexual, Cameron asserts “I don’t think of myself as a homosexual. I don’t think of myself as anything, really.”), but it doesn’t differ meaningfully from other conversion camp films I’ve seen. Boy Erased made me cry and this one didn’t, if that’s worth anything.
The film swings between the current moment, and flashbacks to Cameron’s relationship with Coley, the friend with whom she was caught, in ways that both show us the line of Cameron’s thoughts and also become somewhat confusing. It was unclear to me for much of the film what actually happened that resulted in Cameron getting caught. Both that experience and the letter Coley sends Cameron later make it seem like that was their first hook-up, but the flashback sections suggest they had been together several times before, which makes it unclear of those are actual memories or just Cameron’s fantasies of what could have happened (further complicated by a couple of actual dream sequences). It was not helped by the actors frequently dropping into whispers and mumbling; I missed entire exchanges because I couldn’t hear.
Either of Cameron’s two buddies at camp—Jane, a Black girl who grew up on a free love commune but whose mother recently married a conservative man whose decision it was to send Jane away (and who has been at this camp for over a year); or Adam, a Lakota two-spirit whose father recently got into politics, converted to Christianity, and demanded his child follow suit—would have made for more interesting protagonists. Cameron comes off pretty nondescript, which is exacerbated by how internalized she is, rarely speaking or expressing herself. It’s not until the end of the film where she really starts saying anything.
One thing The Miseducation of Cameron Post does do differently is that the staff at the camp lack the total, violent conviction of other conversion camp narratives I’ve seen. Some staff have that attitude, but others visibly doubt if they’re doing the right thing, particularly after some exchanges with the campers (and I maintain there’s a scene at the end where one staff member chooses to be passive in a way that helps Cameron and her pals, when he could have done otherwise). This adds an interesting tension, where it’s not just the campers asking themselves if what’s going on here is right or wrong.
The ending is pretty open in a way that’s not totally satisfying (one of those “Okay…but what now?” kind of endings) but it is a sweet final moment and it’s so easy to root for Cam and her friends, even though we just got a reminder of how little the rest of society cares about what’s happening to the kids in these camps.
This film is based off the book of the same name by Emily M. Danforth, which I haven’t read. Turns out it’s a bit of a chunker, at 500 pages, and reviews say Cameron doesn’t go to camp until halfway through, with the first 250 pages just backstory on her relationship with Coley. The film cuts out almost all of this to focus on the conversation camp narrative, which I think is the right choice, because it’s where the real story is.
On the whole, I enjoyed it, but it doesn’t stand out to me in any way.
Mark Helprin’s A Kingdom Far and Clear, a single book containing all three books of Helprin’s Swan Lake trilogy, the first of which is a retelling of Swan Lake (tragic mode), and the second and third of which are a continuation of the story based on the question, “But what if Rothbart wasn’t defeated at the end of Swan Lake? And also Rothbart wasn’t just a garden variety sorcerer, but a totalitarian dictator, but in a weirdly whimsical way where (for instance) our ten-year-old heroine spends an entire Joan Aiken-esque sequence working as a yam curler, wearing a special orange and black yam kitchen uniform to roll yams off the yam conveyor belts, and the yam kitchen is so gigantic it has 6000 employees?”
Bizarre. Bleak. Beautifully written! Beautiful but sometimes strangely static illustrations by Chris Van Allsburg. As a retelling I felt this was this not so much engaging with the original as using it as a springboard to deal with its own thematic preoccupations. ( spoilers )
Conclusion: books two and three could have done with a LOT more swans.
I also read Michiko Aoyama’s The Healing Hippo of Hinode Park, translated by Takami Nieda. Like Aoyama’s Hot Chocolate on Thursdays, this is a warm, gentle book about a series of loosely linked characters, linked in this case by the fact that they recently moved into a new condominium development near a park with a concrete ride-on hippo named Kanahiko, the eponymous Healing Hippo. He probably doesn’t actually have healing powers (this book has less of a fantasy undercurrent than Hot Chocolate on Thursday), but even just hearing about these healing powers helps people reexamine the problems in their own lives.
What I’m Reading Now
I’m reading Clay Risen’s The Crowded Hour: Theodore Roosevelt, the Rough Riders, and the Dawn of the American Century. I got to the part where the whole army starts converging on Tampa for the invasion of Cuba (Tampa had only one railway line and no port, but an entrepreneur had suggested using it at a staging ground and Washington said “Yes” without actually checking into the details), and the officers are hanging out at the hotel with thirteen silver minarets… “I’ve been there!” I shrieked. This hotel is now the flagship building of the University of Tampa.
What I Plan to Read Next
Michiko Aoyama’s What You Are Looking For Is in the Library, which looks similar to Aoyama’s other books in that it is about a bunch of loosely linked characters (connected in this case by a library) who figure out a way forward through their problems. Then I’ll be out of Aoyama books until Matcha on Monday comes out in July.
Previous poll review In the Search engine recs poll, 49% of respondents use Google, 46.9% use DuckDuckGo, and 10.2% use StartPage. There were two write-ins for Kagi, a paid search engine that apparently works like it's 2004.
In ticky-boxes, apocalypse fatigue came second to the inevitable winner, hugs, 42.9% to 69.4%. Clumsy parrots came third with 42.9%. Hugs to you all, and thank you for your votes! ♥
Reading Andrew and I finished Bujold's The Vor Game, and I've downloaded Cetaganda but we haven't started it yet. I've also grabbed the new Murderbot, which might save me from my swamp of easy-listening podcasts.
Still dipping into Refuse to Be Done by Matt Bell. Really need to pick up a novel and devour it with my eyeballs sometime, but I accidentally filled my spare moments with something else (see Language Learning below).
Kdramas Finished Phantom Lawyer, which was enjoyable enough. I wasn't invested in the romance, but the general vibe was good-hearted and cosy.
The Red Sleeve is heavy on the palace politics, so I don't know how long I'm going to last. Ot1h, Junho; otoh, a hundred scheming ministers and princesses. Maybe I should rewatch The King Loves instead?
Absolute Value of Romance is on a collision course with my DNWs, so I have my fingers crossed that it isn't going where everyone seems to thinks it is.
Other TV We finished Dark Winds season 4 last night. It is a great show with very charismatic leads.
Still watching Rooster, Fringe, Bluey, Deadloch season 2 (no spoilers, please!) and People of Earth. Also original flavour Scrubs, though the comedy is wearing thin on the workplace bullying and constant misgendering, hmm. (Does the reboot keep those elements?)
Not sure what we're replacing Dark Winds with -- probably the latest season of The Lincoln Lawyer.
Audio entertainment Like, just way too many episodes of Bill and Frank's Guilt-free Pleasures. /o\ Writing Excuses and half an ep of Cross Party Lines, which is diminished by the loss of one of its hosts to offline politics.
Online life I'm really enjoying polyamships' prompts for 3weeks4dreamwidth and, similarly, maevedarcy's memes. Continuing to struggle with keeping up with my reading page, but that's probably the new normal.
The Slo-Mo Rewatch on sid_guardian has quietened down a little, but it still absorbs about a quarter of my fannish/writing time, and I love it.
Writing/making things I'm being incredibly slow to make beta edits to my 520 Day fic. Where do the hours go? Never mind, I'm working reasonably steadily, and that's more important to me than output rates.
Life/health/mental state things Sleep is improving, but my shoulder's been sore for a week... since I downloaded certain apps. Hm.
I have a number of political submissions on my to-do list, each of which require me to think coherent thoughts.
For those following the saga of my car, we called NZAA on Monday 4 May, took it for a long drive (and finished The Vor Game while we were at it), and it's now snuggled against the bank at the bottom of my path, with the trickle charger theoretically doing its thing. I've only driven it once for non-battery-recharging reasons since the oil crisis started, and that outing was at least partly motivated by keeping the battery charged. I'll see how the Warrant of Fitness goes on Monday.
House The reputtying is complete, and the builders have decamped with the scaffolding, hooray! The next big job will either be [paint upstairs, replace the 1960s gas oven with electric, and refloor the kitchen] or [replace the toilet with a non-cracked, less water-hungry model, and refloor the bathroom]. Neither of these is super urgent, and both require research, decisions, and expenditure, blah, so I'll catch my breath first.
In the meantime, Andrew is filling some gaps in the kitchen wall, and I've ordered an IKEA shelving unit for the built-in wardrobe in my spare room. Which means soon there'll be less random clutter around the living-room, woohoo! In theory, it won't all go into the cupboard; I'm hoping to dispose of some of it while tidying away the rest.
Language Learning I've spent the last eight years in a Chinese drama fandom, going, "Sunk cost, sunk cost, Korean is my One True Asian Language Love ♥ ♥ ♥" and "I wouldn't have the first clue how to even start with Mandarin" and "argh, tones! argh, characters!" Now, thanks to starandrea's inspiring/encouraging post about starting their Chinese-learning journey, I have nine-day streaks for both Duolingo and Hello Chinese.
I prefer Hello Chinese: it has a good mix of speaking/listening/reading/writing, a variety of practice options, and occasional audio lessons about usage. I like its focus on teaching grammar-adjacent words like "to be", "this", "possessives", etc, rather than Duolingo's noun clusters (though of course you need both). But I've finished the free portion and am now wrestling with whether I'm actually doing this and whether tracing characters on my screen is what's messing up my shoulder. Also, I had a moment of extreme outrage about stroke orders yesterday, lol.
Idk. I'm not sure how much of this I can cram into my aphantasic little head. *dithers with finger hovering over the "one month" (ie, lowest commitment, least cost-effective) option*
Good things The re-puttying is complete! My sister's coming over tonight. My lemon tree is singing a song of a hundred lemons. My 520 Day fic is nearly done. Guardian, fandom, Dreamwidth.
#mybooks meme via maevedarcy, adapted by me to suit myself.
This week I'm reading: The Vor Game by Lois McMaster Bujold, read by Grover Gardner; Refuse to Be Done by Matt Bell; and a bunch of Kdrama subtitles... ;-p
My favorite book of all time is: What kind of question is this? Completely impossible! I can't even name a favourite author. My current favorite book (read or re-read in the last 3 months) is:
Since February, I've read a bunch of new-to-me Bujold in audio, narrated by Grover Gardner (from the Vorkosigan and Penric series), some Courtney Milan in ebook (Wedgeford series), The Bookish Life of Nina Hill by Abbi Waxman (hardback from the library), The Hymn to Dionysus by Natasha Pulley in audio, narrated by Sid Sagar, Refuse to Be Done by Matt Bell in ebook, Good old-fashioned Korean spirit by Kim Hyun Sook (paperback from the library), and half of Siren Queen by Nigh Vo in audio, narrated by Natalie Naudus.
Of those, my favourite was The Bookish Life of Nina Hill by Abbi Waxman, mostly because I chose it fairly randomly, and it was delightful, enjoyable, thoughtful, and unexpected. (I love random library finds!) Runner up goes to The Hymn to Dionysus (thanks to profiterole_reads for the rec).
If we went back another six or eight weeks, it would be Swordcrossed by Freya Marske (secondary-world high-society m/m, with guilds). The last book I bought was: The Earl Who Isn't by Courtney Milan, in ebook.
The first book I bought with my own money was: LOL, no idea. At all.
The first book I received as a gift was: We're talking 50+ years ago. I do remember having an older (20-something?) penpal who would send me books when I was in my early-teens. In particular, she sent me I Am David and The Hobbit.
The last book I received as a gift was: Siren Queen by Nghi Vo, in audio.
The last book I borrowed from the library was: Hine Toa: a story of bravery by Ngāhuia Te Awekōtuku. I only read the prologue before I had to return it. /o\
The book physically closest to me right now is: assuming ebooks don't count, it's Getting Bi: Voices of Bisexuals from Around the World, edited by Robyn Ochs and Sarah E. Rowley, which is at this end of the bookshelf behind me, in the queer section natch. This or that: Physical book, e-book, or audio: ebook or audio, depending on the book, the narrator, and my mood. Used, new, or fell off the back of the internet: Any. Fiction or non-fiction: Mostly fiction, but I go through NF phases. Read at a coffee shop or at the park: In ebook, mostly on the couch at home or while I'm stretching after exercise; in audio, while I'm doing dishes, stretching after exercise, walking, folding dumplings, etc. Paperback or hardcover: physical books can be pretty hard on my hands/wrists/arms/neck, so if I'm reading in hard copy, anything that will lie flat on its own. Romance or Crime: Romance.
Yes or no: Literary fiction? Sure. Sci-fi/fantasy? Yes, please. Poetry? Not as much as I used to, but sure. Memoirs? I'm not opposed to them, but rarely pick them out. Philosophy? Yep. Also, science and pop psych. Thrillers? Only if there's another aspect to draw me in. Chronicles? I don't know what this is. Travel logs? No. Dialogue heavy? Sure.
Also, I thought I'd add a note on what makes me try a book: I have a google doc of recs from offline friends and my reading page; I'm definitely influenced by recs. There are some authors and audiobook narrators that will lure me in. I am predisposed towards SF/F and romance, often in combination. I enjoy narrations with a sense of humour and queer rep, and I will generally try Korean books in translation, if I encounter them. As mentioned above, I love browsing the library, semi-randomly choosing a book, and discovering something unexpected and great. But I don't do it very often, because hard copy...
Season of Drabbles is revealed! I wrote 5 things, and enjoyed being super sneaky about at least a couple of them for a change.
As Sholio:
Orchestral (Biggles, 200 wds) Biggles/EvS on a music-related "date."
Time and Tide (Star Trek TOS, 700 wds, Spock/McCoy [sort of]) I was hunting around for other people to treat, saw this person mention time loops among their interests, and realized it would be really interesting to try writing a drabble sequence in which each drabble was an iteration of the time loop.
(This was also one of the ones I mentioned that was a fandom I've never written before. Particularly neat in this case since this is far and away one of my oldest "fandoms" - I use that in quotes because I'm not sure if you can call it that when you're as young as I was when I first watched episodes on TV a very long time ago, but it's definitely something I've had feelings about since an early age.)
As AltSholio:
A New Normal (Agent Carter, 100 wds, Jack & Peggy) My actual assignment, and I had fun with it! Just a bit of post-canon adjustment and banter.
Stay (Biggles, 100 wds, h/c) H/C fluff for the win.
Second Contact (Project Hail Mary, 300 wds, Grace & Rocky & Adrian) Grace meeting Adrian. This would be the other fandom I hadn't written before, and probably wouldn't have under my main because there's not likely to be any more of it, but I enjoyed writing this little treat!
After a lengthy hiatus, 100 Books That Influenced Me has returned! I reread Matt Bell’s Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts, and it fit too perfectly into this series to be reviewed anywhere else.
When the urge to reread struck, I actually had a bit of trouble finding this book, because I had misremembered the title as Dare to Be Done. This was, after all, what the book allowed me to do: I was in despair over ever finishing The Sleeping Soldier, which had sprawled into ten massive, messy drafts. Bell’s methods helped me sort this enormous mass of material, organize the pieces, and at long, long last put them together in an order that actually functioned as a story.
These methods are the two strategies that Bell describes in part two of the book, the section about transforming your rough exploratory draft (discussed in part one) into a solidly plotted novel (which you will then polish, polishing techniques described in part three). The first is to make an outline of everything that you’ve already written.
It turns out that it’s much easier to deal with ten drafts worth of material when you’ve reduced all those thousands and thousands of words to outline form. You can see at a glance what scenes you already have, and which scenes must logically come before which other scenes, and which scenes you need to have but haven’t written yet. Then suddenly you’ve got a working outline, which has given you a ton of new interest and enthusiasm, because the project seems so much more possible that you’ve accidentally written a bunch of those new scenes into the outline and simply need to type them up!
The other strategy Bell describes is not to copy and paste from one draft to another, but to retype everything. I scoffed as I read this strategy, but since I was desperate, I decided to give it a try, and goldarnit if it didn’t work.
First of all, although you can copy-paste a scene that doesn’t quite work across ten drafts, if you retype it, you find that you have to fix it.
Second, since the outlining ended up moving a lot of scenes around, almost all the scenes needed some revision anyway, so they weren’t accidentally referencing scenes that now happened later on. Retyping the scenes in order following the outline made this work happen naturally, since I knew what I’d already retyped.
Third, this made it very obvious if there were scenes I still needed to write that I’d missed in the outlining stage.
Absolute convert. Never copy-pasting anything again. The method worked so well that I used it on Sage, similarly a wilderness of many messy sprawling drafts, and transformed it into Diary of a Cranky Bookworm.
I’ve used the second-draft tools in this book most extensively, but since those tools work so well… I mean, I have been having a bit of trouble with the first draft of The Paper Bird. Maybe I should poke through Bell’s first-draft suggestions and give a few of them a try.
Time (时光, pinyin: shiguang) is Ning Yuan's realist tragic baihe novel, begun in 2011 and completed around 2017. It's unusual for several reasons: first, it's Ning Yuan doing realism in a way that's reminiscent of Niu Er Er (i.e. she manages to suppress her usual tendency to slip melodrama into the closing chapters), and second, the nature of the tragedy itself.
The one-line pitch for this novel: it's the 1990s Chinese version of the k-drama Reply 1988 (my favourite of the Reply series), but more brutal, and with queer women as its focus. Spanning 1997 to 2017 (twenty years in which China saw a massive amount of upheaval and economic, social and cultural change, which the novel fully leans into), the novel begins with protagonist Wang Yutong and her childhood friend and later sweetheart Qi Yin as high school students. Their fathers work in a state-owned car factory located in the south of China (almost certainly Fujian, where Ning Yuan is almost certainly from), and their families live in the surrounding compound (which also has all the amenities you'd expect of a small town, though not at a particularly luxurious level). Wang Yutong has loving parents who've done their best to provide for her materially, but Qi Yin has a much more difficult life. Her father is an alcoholic who is often abusive to her and her mother, and her mother is quadriplegic as a result of an accident whom many neighbours believe to have been caused by her father. At the start of the novel, Qi Yin's father dies, and she becomes primarily responsible for the care of her mother at the age of thirteen.
So for something that offers a completely different take on romance from much of the baihe genre, for a compelling sketch of China's socio-economic development between 1997 to 2017 and its effects on (especially) the working class, for a sobering reminder of why a strong social welfare state is necessary, I highly recommend this novel.
I read the Chinese original of the novel here on JJWXC.
Happy Star Wars Day! I had high hopes this year of finally getting around to playing Knights of the Old Republic (2003) which is considered one of the best Star Wars games ever made. But sometime in mid-April I had to concede that I did not have time to do that, so instead I decided to replay Rebel Assault, a rail shooter from 1993 that I played a lot as a kid. It is, uh... not considered one of the best Star Wars games ever made. You might be in the wrong galaxy, then In Star Wars: Rebel Assault, you play as a humble moisture farmer from Tattooine who becomes a pilot fighting for the Rebellion and eventually blows up the Death Star. But you're not Luke Skywalker because of... reasons. I guess it's like a self-insert AU where YOU get to vanquish the Empire instead of Luke? But there's no character customization except that you can choose whether your character, "Rookie One", is male or female. I always picked female because even at age eleven I found the male voice acting unbearably hammy.
A great deal of what I have just said is based on my childhood memories of the game and not on my recent attempt to revisit it, which was largely stymied by not really being able to get it to work. I mean, it runs! But on modern hardware the controls are somehow both barely responsive and wildly oversensitive—you try to steer and it's like nothing, nothing, nothing, BAM into the wall—and none of my troubleshooting efforts made much of a difference. I see from reviews I am not the only one who has this problem. The game probably needs a patch, and quite possibly nobody who has the skills cares enough to put in the effort. Oh well.
I got the game in a bundle with the sequel, 1995's verbosely named Star Wars: Rebel Assault II - The Hidden Empire, so I figured I might as well try that one even though I never played it at the time. Surprise—this one actually works well enough to play it!! Gameplay achieved! ( More on Star Wars: Rebel Assault II - The Hidden Empire )
Both Rebel Assault games are available in a bundle on Steam and on GOG, currently on sale for $2.49 USD. And even at that price, be aware that unless you are some kind of retro software wizard, you're really only buying the sequel, because the first game is not in a playable state.
Like The Empire Must Die, Sara Jeannette Duncan’s An American Girl in London is another book that I almost certainly read but didn’t actually mark as read on my Kindle, which is perhaps fortunate as this gave me the very great pleasure of rereading it.
The book was published in 1891, catching the zeitgeist of stories about the culture clash occasioned by Americans descending on England, sometimes as tourists and sometimes on the hunt for aristocratic husbands. (Edith Wharton’s The Buccaneers is a late entry to this genre, but probably the most famous.)
In An American Girl in London, our heroine Mamie is the heiress to a baking powder fortune out of Chicago, who decides to travel to London on her own after her parents are unavoidably detained by political business in America. (Poppa is a senator, you see.) Indomitable and archly funny, she visits Madame Tussaud’s, goes to Ascot, and is presented at Court:
I liked going to Court better than any other thing I did in England, not excepting Madame Tussaud’s, or the Beefeaters in the Tower, or even “Our Flat” at the Strand. It did a great deal to reconcile me, practically, with monarchical institutions, although, chiefly on poppa’s account, I should like it to be understood that my democratic theories are still quite unshaken in every respect.
(The concern that contact with monarchical European institutions would corrupt American democratic principles is a recurrent one in 19th century American books, possibly because at that point American democracy was politically speaking a weird outlier in a monarchical world. At another point, Duncan assures us that “My democratic principles are just the same as ever, though – a person needn’t always approve what she likes.” You can enjoy the pomp of someone else’s monarchy without wanting to bring it home!)
Aside from being deliciously funny, the book is full of fascinating tidbits about the differences between American and British English in the 1890s, like Mamie’s shipboard exchange with a woman who inquires, “Have you been bad?” Mamie, after some hesitation, replies that she doesn’t think so, but after all the prayer book says that we’re all miserable sinners… The lady, startled, informs her that she was asking if Mamie had been seasick.
Or the bit where a man accuses Mamie of “pulling his leg,” an expression that was clearly not current in America at the time.
Or the entire subplot where Mr. Mafferton decides that he should like to marry Mamie, but neglects to inform her of this fact by so much as a single bouquet or box of chocolates, so that Mamie remains completely in the dark until she’s actually having dinner with his family and discovers that they think she will be joining the family on a permanent basis very shortly. Awkwardly, Mamie is already engaged to a fellow back in America.
Honestly just the perfect combination of business and pleasure. Some of the most delicious research material I’ve ever had the joy of experiencing. I’m now overcome by the desire to reread the sequel, A Voyage of Consolation, in which Mamie takes Europe.
Last week: Astrological phenomena and the star of Bethlehem. Messianic (?) prophecy about Vespasian. Brutality of the siege, and discussion of the law of war protecting prisoners from the enemy army (or lack thereof). Imperator.
This week: Book 7. Wrapping up of the war. The Masada fortress and group suicide (which I think is interesting to think about given the discussion we had a few books back). The temple of Onias. (Dedicated commment threads for both of these below, for anyone who wants to join in!)
I was talking to The Husband last night about a video game he's been playing, an indie game that is apparently a two-person production (it's made by a husband and wife team of developers) and that segued into talking about Babylon 5 and Marvel, and he said something that I wanted to write down because I think it's always going to stick with me.
"Every person's brain emits a particular color of paint. If you mix too many of them together, you just get mud."
You can massage the metaphor in various directions - sometimes mixing together different paint colors is lovely! Or, if all you have to look at is suburban beige, any color really stands out. One person's garish or too pastel is another person's perfect hue. And so forth. It's just such a lovely way to look at it, and I will be thinking about that for a while. I like having different unique paint colors to look at, and refining my own.
I signed up for Season of Drabbles on an impulse under a new account called AltSholio (note my A+++ socking skills). In the past I've been slightly inhibited about signing up for some kinds of exchanges that I would've been more likely to try back on LJ - drabbles, fanart, that kind of thing, stuff that's a bit out of place on my main account - so I created this new account so I can play around with things that I might otherwise hesitate to try.
Anyway, I had fun and I ended up writing 5 things across both that and my main account - two of which are for fandoms I've never written before! And I got two delightful gifts as AltSholio:
Bygones (Agent Carter, 200 wds, Jack & Peggy) A sweet little season 2 coda, very much in character.
We'll Meet Again (Biggles, 600 wds) Slightly AU next meeting for Biggles and EvS, set in the early 1920s. Great characterization and a delightful concept!
When I say that reading Aster Glenn Gray's Diary of a Cranky Bookworm feels like spending several delightful hours with an old friend, this is just about the least surprising statement in the world I could possibly make, because:
a.) Aster is indeed a longtime friend, and also b.) both the book and Sage-as-protagonist are drawing explicit inspiration from many other teen-girl-writer bildungsromans (I Capture the Castle, the Montmaray trilogy, the collected oeuvre of LM Montgomery, etc.) that are beloved old friends to me, and also c.) every character and interpersonal dynamic in this book does indeed feel like an exact portrait of someone I either was or knew in high school, with pitch-perfect and sometimes painful accuracy
Sage Perrault, Our Heroine, is an imaginative, judgmental misanthrope from a small town in Minnesota who was fortunate enough to form a small tight friends group in elementary school who also proved themselves worthy of her affection by being precocious readers:
- Georgie, Sage's best friend since kindergarten, when her mother (terrified of Sage becoming a miserable loner like Gay Cousin Rachel who Never Comes Home For Christmas) seized on the other precocious reader in class and started arranging playdates with feverish speed. Sensible, driven, raised by an overprotective mom who never got out of town and is thus double determined to Get Out Of Town. Friends outside of Sage: church youth group - Arielle, the dramatic friend, with inattentive divorced parents, a moderate case of main character syndrome, and a rich life of the imagination often expressed through implausible lies about her past. Passionate in her enthusiasms but will not stop obnoxiously sending you fanfiction that you do not care about. Friends outside of Sage: drama club - Hilary, the chillest friend; always delighted to run with any bit that she's given and make it more fun and funny, but holds her own emotional cards close to the chest. Has a very nice boyfriend and never talks about him. Wonderful to hang out with at any time but is planning for pre-med so will almost certainly be far too busy to stay in close touch with anyone when they scatter. Friends outside of Sage: almost the entire school, everyone loves Hilary because she's a delight, and the fact that she chooses to eat lunch with Sage and Hilary and Arielle is frankly a great compliment to all of them
This has left Sage peacefully free to hold onto grudges also formed in elementary school, continue happily hating the kids in her class that she has hated since they were all eight, and avoid going through the effort of speaking to anybody else. Unfortunately, it's senior year! College is looming, and with it new tensions and unpleasant questions, such as:
- can being a precocious reader really continue as the be-all and end-all of Sage's perception of her own self-worth? and how can she write a college essay about it? - how much of what Arielle's told them all about her plans for college is normal bad ideas, and how much is outright lies, and how much is in fact a cry for help? - how can Sage break it to beloved best friend Georgie that she doesn't want to go to the U [University of Minnesota Twin Cities], which is the ultimate apex of Georgie's ambitions, and instead kind of wants to attend a small liberal arts college somewhere in the middle of nowhere? - but if she doesn't go to college with Georgie, will she ever successfully speak to another human being? - and on that topic, is it possible that a Longtime Beautiful Enemy is in fact a human being worth talking to, to despite the fact that she's bad at spelling and was mean in middle school?
Sage, early on: Arielle always tries to blow on whatever flickering embers of bisexuality she finds within herself, which I admire. I'd be far more inclined to play Whack-A-Mole. And obviously part of the book is also that Sage has to stop playing Whack-A-Mole, but the big emotional question of the Longtime Beautiful Enemy subplot is less "will they kiss" [though they do, eventually] than "can Sage build an emotional connection with a new person, at the same time as she's facing fundamental shifts in all her other most important relationships?" At its heart this is a book about friendship in all its different shapes, the different kinds of ties you build with different people and the way those change with you as you grow.
And also, of course, about being judgmental about books and films and art. There's a whole other conversation that I feel like I've been coincidentally having in various different contexts about the purpose of the literary cross-reference in this sort of text; I am definitely one of the people for whom there's a profound self-indulgent pleasure in watching characters react to another work [Kage Baker's infamous Cyborgs Watch D.W. Griffith scene my beloved; what a bad idea to spend a whole chapter on it and what a delight it was for me personally] as long as I don't believe that the author believes that all right-thinking people should agree with the character's opinions. Fortunately I am in no danger of this with Sage. Sage has a LOT of opinions about books and films and art, and I disagree with many of them but so do many of Sage's friends; this, too, is one of the important shapes of friendship.
The baihe publishing juggernaut that is Miss Forensics continues: the fourth volume of the manhua adaptation is up for pre-order. Pre-orders can be made via the following bookshops:
For a novel that was first serialised in 2019, it's mildly incredible to me that it's still so popular that the manhua publisher is shoving out print volumes as fast as they can. The web version of the novel can be read here.
Also up for pre-order is Missing the Bird (时差十四年, pinyin: shicha shisi nian) by Lin Zizhou (林子周) (do NOT look at me, that's the English title they decided to go with for the audio drama adaptation; the literal translation of the Chinese title is something more like 'a time difference of fourteen years'). This is a (more or less) contemporary romance with a time-travelling element, and I hear it's got either a tragic ending or an open ending. I haven't read any of this author's work yet, but she seems to be known for a sort of melancholy vibe and nuanced, sensitive prose. Pre-orders can be made via the following bookshops:
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