Wednesday Reading Meme
Aug. 31st, 2022 07:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Elizabeth Wein’s “No Human Hands to Touch,” the Medraut/Morgause companion piece to The Winter Prince published in Sirens and Other Demon Lovers, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. It is exactly as “Dead Dove, Do Not Eat” as you might imagine from the fact that Medraut spends a large proportion of The Winter Prince waking up with screaming nightmares about his incestuous affair with his mother.
From The Winter Prince, I already knew that Morgause had punished Medraut by rebreaking his injured fingers so they would be crippled, so that scene didn’t hit me as hard as the part where she slices open his arm. He has to cauterize his own wound to avoid bleeding to death, faints on the floor, and when he wakes up twenty minutes later, he asks, “Would you help me now?” and Morgause responds, “For a fee.”
Meaning, she will help him if he sucks her off, right here and right now, as he lies “flat on his back on the ruined leopard skin [ruined with his blood!], his body drained of blood and his burnt arm blistering…” It’s just! So much! Good God Morgause!
This has been quite a week for creepy sex books, because I also read Anne Serre’s The Governesses (translated by Mark Hutchinson), an exceptionally strange French novella about three governesses who show up at a country house where there are no children. Never fear: the governesses come with their own batch of little boys in tow! Not that they spend much time actually looking after the children, mind: most of their time goes to enticing strange men in the estate and devouring them out in the woods. (The devouring is probably a sexual metaphor, but it wouldn’t exactly surprise me if the governesses were vampires. Or fae. Or some other supernatural bitey creature.)
A weird, atmospheric, sex-drenched book. I have no idea what it’s trying to say, if indeed it is saying anything - might just be an exercise in vibes? Odd and interesting.
And now for something completely different: Rebecca Caudill’s Tree of Freedom, a Newbery Honor book from 1950 set during the American Revolution. When the Venable family moves from North Carolina to Kentucky, young Stephanie Venable takes along a seed from an apple tree, which in turn sprouted from a seed brought across the Atlantic when her Huguenot ancestors fled persecution in France. Inspired by her brother Noel’s patriotic fervor, she names the resulting sapling the Tree of Freedom, even though the seed at one point gets eaten by a chicken (!) and then Stephanie cuts the chicken’s crop open to get at the seed (!!) and then sews the crop back up (!!!!!!)... but don’t worry, both seed and chicken are fine. (Would a chicken be fine after that? Maybe I don't want to think about this too deeply.)
What I’m Reading Now
In Mrs. Pollifax, Innocent Tourist, Mrs. Pollifax is on her way to Jordan to pick up the manuscript of a novel by a recently murdered Iraqi author! In her undercover role as an innocent tourist, she has returned to her roots with a truly massive floral hat, and I love her.
In Dracula, Lucy is feeling better! Thank God her illness is all over. She’s definitely going to survive till her wedding at the end of September.
What I Plan to Read Next
I would like to track down a copy of Elizabeth Wein’s other extended Lion Hunters’ ‘verse story, “Fire,” but we shall see. In the meantimelittlerhymes has sent me a copy of Cherith Baldry’s Exiled from Camelot, the woobiest Kay novel, which I am VERY much looking forward to reading.
Elizabeth Wein’s “No Human Hands to Touch,” the Medraut/Morgause companion piece to The Winter Prince published in Sirens and Other Demon Lovers, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. It is exactly as “Dead Dove, Do Not Eat” as you might imagine from the fact that Medraut spends a large proportion of The Winter Prince waking up with screaming nightmares about his incestuous affair with his mother.
From The Winter Prince, I already knew that Morgause had punished Medraut by rebreaking his injured fingers so they would be crippled, so that scene didn’t hit me as hard as the part where she slices open his arm. He has to cauterize his own wound to avoid bleeding to death, faints on the floor, and when he wakes up twenty minutes later, he asks, “Would you help me now?” and Morgause responds, “For a fee.”
Meaning, she will help him if he sucks her off, right here and right now, as he lies “flat on his back on the ruined leopard skin [ruined with his blood!], his body drained of blood and his burnt arm blistering…” It’s just! So much! Good God Morgause!
This has been quite a week for creepy sex books, because I also read Anne Serre’s The Governesses (translated by Mark Hutchinson), an exceptionally strange French novella about three governesses who show up at a country house where there are no children. Never fear: the governesses come with their own batch of little boys in tow! Not that they spend much time actually looking after the children, mind: most of their time goes to enticing strange men in the estate and devouring them out in the woods. (The devouring is probably a sexual metaphor, but it wouldn’t exactly surprise me if the governesses were vampires. Or fae. Or some other supernatural bitey creature.)
A weird, atmospheric, sex-drenched book. I have no idea what it’s trying to say, if indeed it is saying anything - might just be an exercise in vibes? Odd and interesting.
And now for something completely different: Rebecca Caudill’s Tree of Freedom, a Newbery Honor book from 1950 set during the American Revolution. When the Venable family moves from North Carolina to Kentucky, young Stephanie Venable takes along a seed from an apple tree, which in turn sprouted from a seed brought across the Atlantic when her Huguenot ancestors fled persecution in France. Inspired by her brother Noel’s patriotic fervor, she names the resulting sapling the Tree of Freedom, even though the seed at one point gets eaten by a chicken (!) and then Stephanie cuts the chicken’s crop open to get at the seed (!!) and then sews the crop back up (!!!!!!)... but don’t worry, both seed and chicken are fine. (Would a chicken be fine after that? Maybe I don't want to think about this too deeply.)
What I’m Reading Now
In Mrs. Pollifax, Innocent Tourist, Mrs. Pollifax is on her way to Jordan to pick up the manuscript of a novel by a recently murdered Iraqi author! In her undercover role as an innocent tourist, she has returned to her roots with a truly massive floral hat, and I love her.
In Dracula, Lucy is feeling better! Thank God her illness is all over. She’s definitely going to survive till her wedding at the end of September.
What I Plan to Read Next
I would like to track down a copy of Elizabeth Wein’s other extended Lion Hunters’ ‘verse story, “Fire,” but we shall see. In the meantime
littlerhymes has sent me a copy of Cherith Baldry’s Exiled from Camelot, the woobiest Kay novel, which I am VERY much looking forward to reading.
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Date: 2022-08-31 02:49 pm (UTC)And I’m sure Lucy will be fine! Everything is definitely okay.
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Date: 2022-08-31 08:11 pm (UTC)And Lucy will be just fine! Never mind Arthur's worried letter to Dr. Seward today. Clearly he's overreacting, probably just stressed out by their upcoming wedding!
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Date: 2022-08-31 02:50 pm (UTC)I had the exact same reaction when I read The Governesses a few years ago. There are some books you read and are just like, Well, That Was Certainly A Combination Of Words Organized Into Sentences. Good Job, Team, Hit The Showers, etc. etc...
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Date: 2022-08-31 08:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-08-31 06:41 pm (UTC)I enjoy those! Your description makes it sound a little like a novel by Tanith Lee.
"Fire" was written very close in time to The Winter Prince, so if you find it, I will be very curious to know what it's like. Based on the title and its date of publication, I don't see how "The Ethiopian Knight" can't be in her Aksumite Arthurian continuity, but I've never even seen a copy of the magazine it was published in; ditto "A Dear Gazelle," which I am less confident but still curious about. I am in a similar position with a lot of Phyllis Ann Karr's short Arthuriana. Basically writers I like should just make all of their short fiction available; it would simplify my life.
I find "No Human Hands to Touch" beautifully written and unusual and it does kind of require all the content warnings: "Do you think I love kindly?" It remains one of the very few Morgause-POV stories I have ever encountered, speaking of.
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Date: 2022-08-31 08:19 pm (UTC)I bet you're right about "The Ethiopian Knight," and "A Dear Gazelle" could go either way. It's a pity they're not more readily available...
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Date: 2022-08-31 07:57 pm (UTC)Everything's fine!
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Date: 2022-09-01 01:41 am (UTC)Honestly not too sure about this whole apple seed thing given that apples don't grow true from seed, but hopefully she'll get something vaguely palatable.
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Date: 2022-08-31 10:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-09-01 01:41 am (UTC)