A Certain Slant of Light

sovay just posted this delightful meme, so I had to snag it.

1. Lust, books I want to read for their cover.

I just put a book on hold for this very reason: Sophia Gonzalez’s Nobody in Particular. Isn’t that a gorgeous cover? A bit suspicious of modern YA on principle, but I figured I owed it to the cover designer to at least give the book a try.

2. Pride, challenging books I've finished.

Lydia Chukovskaya’s Sofia Petrovna, in the original Russian, which I read for a class in my senior year of college. I got caught up in the story and spent an afternoon curled up before the fire, plowing through the remaining chapters. This apparently unlocked the next level of my Russian ability, because the next time I had to read aloud in class, I read so well that my professor asked me to read the next paragraph too, I think just to make sure that it wasn’t a fluke.

3. Gluttony, books I've read more than once.

Many! I’m an inveterate re-reader. Mary Norton’s The Borrowers, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books (as a child I always called them the “Laura and Mary” books, and have never quite accepted that the general name for the series is Little House), Charlotte Bronte’s Villette, Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s The Changeling and The Headless Cupid and The Egypt Game, and so forth and so on… why buy books if not to reread? If I just want to read a book one time, that’s what the library is for.

4. Sloth, books on my to-read list the longest.

Jennifer Crusie’s Bet Me is probably the one that’s been there longest, but honorable mentions to Elizabeth Kostova’s The Swan Thieves and Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. There are just too many books! I can’t get to them all!

5. Greed, books I own multiple editions of.

I don’t think I actually own multiple editions of any books right now. I DID have two editions of Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s The Changeling at one time, because I found a signed copy (!) at Goodwill, but then I lent my unsigned copy out to someone who never gave it back (and can you blame them?) so I’m down to one again.

6. Wrath, books I despised.

Well, I did just finish a four-post series ripping The Amber Spyglass to shreds…

7. Envy, books I want to live in.

At this particular moment in world history, an awful lot of books look like a better place to live than reality. Anne of Green Gables and The Secret Garden are perennial choices, of course. (A Little Princess is dearer to my heart than The Secret Garden, but I wouldn’t want to live at Miss Minchin’s!) Betsy-Tacy’s Deep Valley. As a child I would have loved to live in any one of a number of fantasy novels, but as an adult I prefer to visit at a literary remove on account of the high degree of Mortal Peril.

I enjoyed doing the 100 books list so much (and doing everyone else's, too) that I decided to do one for movies, as well. Here it is!

Simply cannot resist the five questions meme! This set is from littlerhymes. As always, feel free to ask for questions if you’d like some.

1. If you could pluck one out of print author from obscurity and bring them to light again, who would you choose?

Okay, it would have to be D. K. Broster, so that some bright young spark of a television producer could discover her work and make incredibly slashy miniseries out of The Wounded Name, specifically. I want eight episodes of Laurent with hearteyes and Aymar thrashing feverishly on the bed and gentle forehead caresses and Laurent actually fainting from looking after Aymar so lovingly and gentle handclasps and the entire fandom screaming KISS KISS KISS KISS and they exchange manly kisses but it’s France in 1816 so what do those kisses MEAN and Aymar gets TORTURED and Laurent sits at his FEET and rests his head against Aymar’s KNEE and they share a bed by the SEA and—

Um, so, anyway, yeah. I just feel that this is a show we all deserve, you know?

2. Sofia Coppola is going to direct a new movie and wants to know your thoughts - what is your advice to Sofia?

FOLLOW YOUR HEART SOFIA! Don’t let yourself be trammeled by my opinions!

But if Sofia really insisted, I would say that she’s at her strongest with period pieces: The Virgin Suicides, Marie Antoinette, The Beguiled. She’s got a great pastel goth thing going, girls in fluttering white drifting through the sunlight in dark stories full of death. I’m seeing, like, something about the Romanov sisters maybe. Or I’d love to see her take on an adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca or My Cousin Rachel.

3. When you have visitors, what's the one thing you recommend they do in your local area?

I always drag them to Von’s, the local book/record/bead/rock/stuffed animal/novelty store, which has a death trap used book department in the basement where you pick your way through the piles of books between the shelves. Amazing. 10/10 would risk death by book avalanche again.

4. Please tell me something about your cats.

I have two cats, Bramble and Baby Boy. Bramble is a sweet and snuggly black cat who is also a stubborn adventure boy: he was so obnoxiously insistent on sneaking outside (usually when I needed to go to work) that we eventually formed a detente where I sometimes let him out for a Bramble Ramble and he, in return, does not sneak outside without leave. This mostly works except when he can see another cat outside, at which point he has to bound out to greet his friend, because he’s convinced that all other cats are his friends even if they don’t know it yet.

Baby Boy is a well-upholstered tabby with a sweet round face and big round eyes who has become slowly more affectionate in the year since I got him. (I adopted him because in his previous home he was being bullied by a three-legged cat half his size.) He is not a lap cat, but he likes to lie beside me on the chaise or on the bed, not close enough to touch so I don’t know he’s there until I try to get up to go to the bathroom and accidentally kick him. He accepts this without rancor. More even-tempered than Bramble. He comes out to greet guests and allows them to pet him while Bramble is still observing from the kitchen.

5. What's something you want to bake or cook, but haven't got around to/haven't found an opportunity?

Oh, I’d love to make a raised game pie, like they make on the Great British Baking Show, except much less fancy of course. I even have the fancy fluted mold (my mother bought it years ago in France and to the best of my knowledge never used it either), but I’m so intimidated by the hot water crust!

It’s been ages since I’ve done a meme, but this five questions meme was going around and I couldn’t resist. If you’d like questions, comment “Questions, please!”

Questions from troisoiseaux

1. Who was your childhood hero?

Emily Dickinson. The thing where she was a recluse who never spoke to anyone but sometimes drifted through the fields and woods and went home to weave her gossamer webs of poetry really spoke to me. I understand that in recent years there has been some pushback against Emily Dickinson, The Recluse, but as a child I was blissfully unaware of this and frankly would have lost a lot of interest in her if anyone had managed to convince me that she wasn’t actually as reclusive as all that. You want my heroine to be some NORMIE with a SOCIAL LIFE? Get out. Emily and I will sit here blissing out on being nobodies and you can go be a somebody, public as a frog, somewhere else.

2. If you could spend one day with a fictional character (in their world), who would it be?

Oh, this is hard, but upon given the matter serious thought, I think I would visit Greensky (of Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s Greensky trilogy), because the characters live in a tree city on a planet with such light gravity that they can glide just by stretching out their arms so their shubas (big cloaks that are bound at the wrist) act like wings. I would fly!

And also preferably I would be about eight so that I could spend the day hanging out with Teera and Pomma as their new best friend and we could all play telepathy games together.

3. What's your favorite type of weather?

A crisp, sunny autumn day, with just enough of a breeze to send the leaves skittering along the paths.

4. You can teleport anywhere, but only twice (there & back)! Where do you go?

Oh, this is hard! I think I’d pick Japan, though, because I’ve never been there and the plane ride is sooooo long. I would spend a month or so journeying about Japan, hitting Tokyo and Kyoto of course but also some of the smaller and less famous places (have not yet done a lot of research on where exactly), and then teleport home.

5. What's your favorite holiday and/or specific holiday tradition?

This is so basic, but I love decorating the Christmas tree. Once the tree is up and the lights are on (the hard bits), I get a hot chocolate and turn on the Christmas carols and unpack the ornaments, and it’s so nice to see them again after they’ve been packed away for a year, and reminisce about, oh, I got this one in Chicago when I was visiting Rachel, and this one is from the Irvington Holiday Bazaar, and these little guys came from the Bloomington Nutcracker and I named this ballerina Nina because I watched Black Swan that year…

Stealing troisoiseaux’s five question meme! I've been given five questions to answer and I'll give the first five commenters their own five questions.

1. How did you pick your default icon?

I’ve had this default icon for well over a decade now. I wanted something that wasn’t fandom-specific, because I knew that if it was a particular fandom icon I’d have to change it out when my fandom interests drifted, and I like the suggestion of daydream and imagination in the girl gazing out the open window.

2. Have you ever read a fic that you liked better than the source material (or that you liked despite not being familiar with the source material)?

Ahahaha so in my misspent youth I read LOTS of fic for fandoms with which I was unfamiliar (look, it was all right there on the crack_van LJ community, what do you want from me?), chief among them Man from UNCLE. Much later I saw a few episodes of the show, but I never really got into it, and if I’d been strictly truthful in the historical note in Honeytrap I would have copped to the fact that the germ of the idea came straight from the fanfic with no intervention from the show itself.

3. What's your favorite type of nature (forests, ocean, etc.)?

Forests, particularly northern forests: birch woods, spruce woods, the heavy dark trees and the stony shores of Lake Michigan behind.

4. What was your favorite class in undergrad?

Oh, this is hard to answer! This is not one specific class, but probably my Russian classes - I was with basically the same group all the way through, and we had class every day (the first year it was at 8:30 every morning), plus Russian table once a week and a yearly trip to the campus’s forest retreat Bjorklunden, where after dark the night before Easter we walked around the Bjorklunden chapel trying to keep our candles alight…

The Russian department did a wonderful job conveying not just the language but the history and the culture and the literature of Russia: in first year Russian they already had us reading Korney Chukovsky’s children’s poems and Daniil Kharms’ micro-stories. It’s fascinating to feel that you’re learning not just a language but a whole universe.

5. What's a childhood favorite media that didn't hold up to the nostalgia, and one that definitely does hold up?

When I was about eleven I fell headlong into a Tortall obsession, particularly with Daine the Wildmage and Keladry of Mindelan (and even now, you will pry Kel from my cold dead hands), but as I’ve gotten older I’ve become more aware of the shortcomings of the prose and the, IDK, underlying imperialism of the books’ worldview? The selectively approved-of imperialism. When Carthak conquers people it’s Bad, but when Tortall conquers people it’s whatever.

I don’t think you need to agree with the underlying worldview of a book to enjoy it: for God’s sake, I read Mary Renault. But the Tortall books are meant to be didactic - their didacticism is part of what I liked about them! I liked the fact that they were so baldly in-your-face about their feminism, so blatantly enraged by the limits that society sets on girls. So it becomes a real problem when some of the lessons turn out to be wrong.

On the other hand, Lillian and Russell Hoban’s Frances books are just as good as ever. What’s not to love about a sometimes cranky badger child who likes to sing to herself and go on long expeditions with picnics?

29. Have you ever tried to write for a fandom or ship, and found you couldn’t?

I tried valiantly to write Pushing Daisies fic - in fact, I even posted some, in the dubious hope that it was better than I thought it was - but really it never came together. The show had such a specific visual and audio aesthetic which was central to the whole experience, and I found it basically impossible to translate into the written word.

As I recall, a lot of other fanfic writers had this problem too. I think this was the first show where I really grasped that just because you loved a show (or any other piece of media), that didn’t mean that you would love the fic. In this case it wasn’t even a clash in shipping priorities - I loved Ned/Chuck, which was the big ship. The fic just didn’t scratch the same itch as the show and it didn’t seem to scratch any other itches, either.

I’ve also never been able to write sitcom fic. It’s partly the rapid one-liners (honestly, I have so much admiration for people who can write that, either in a TV show or in fic) and partly the sort of absurdist logic that many sitcoms employ. The characters’ actions seem perfectly natural when the actors on screen are doing it, but when I sit down and try to write a fic about them, everything just seems to fall apart in my hands somehow.

27. A trope which you are virtually certain to hate in any fandom.

Man, at this point I just don’t read fics with tropes I usually dislike, because there’s just not enough time in the day. Why would I willingly subject myself to Major Character Death on the off chance that THIS time I might like it? Or a shipfic in which one member of the pairing is dying of a long, slow, degenerative illness? Clearly some people enjoy reading these (there seems to be at least one fic of this kind highly recced in every megafandom) but I personally would rather cross a railroad trestle bridge at night with naught but the faltering light of a lantern to guide my halting steps.

I also dislike it when canonical badasses become weeping incompetent messes. Make them a competent weeping mess who can still kick ass as required!

23. Your rarest fandoms.

God, so many book fandoms. After all, many books never have what you might call a “fandom” at all. I think the smallest one I’ve actually written fic for is Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s The Changeling, for which I wrote the only fic on AO3.


24. A fandom you’ve abandoned and why.

There are really two reasons why this happens: either the canon is closed and I run out of ideas to write so I just drift away (Sutcliff fandom, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Lost Prince), or the canon is open and the new developments strike me as disappointing/enraging (Torchwood, Downton Abbey, the MCU) so I quit, sometimes in a huff.

Is this because the later installments are in fact disappointing, or because I’ve gotten so attached to my own interpretations that the later canon can’t help but annoy me? Of course I tend to feel that it’s the former, but it’s happened with so many fandoms now that I’m beginning to wonder if maybe this is just the curse of getting super-involved with an open canon.

OTOH it’s very common for me to get annoyed at a TV show and stop watching, so maybe it’s more of a general TV show thing. (I realize the MCU is not mainly a TV show, but like a TV show it is an ongoing property, and ongoing properties are liable to go off the rails at any time.)

19. Has social media caused you to stop liking any fandoms, if so, which and why?

I don’t think so. Or, rather, there are some canons where I don’t follow the fandom on social media because I have a healthy regard for my blood pressure, but my feeling about the fandom as a social phenomenon doesn’t harm my feeling about the canon.


20. What fandom broke your heart?

Can you say DOWNTON ABBEY? It did Sybil so dirty and I’ll never forgive it. I actually quit the show partway through that episode, so in my mind Sybil lives FOREVER, dammit.

This means that I never got to Matthew’s death, but never fear, I refuse to forgive the show for that too. And from what I hear the show didn’t do too well by many of the characters who lived, either. Downton Abbey, WHY you gotta be like this?

17. What is your favourite source text for fandom stuff (e.g., TV shows, movies, books, anime, Western animation, etc.)?

For a long time I would have answered this “books,” but in terms of absolute volume of fic written the answer is obviously “movies,” specifically Captain America movies, specifically The Winter Soldier, a thing of beauty and a joy forever.

However, I think in terms of the number of fandoms written in… actually, I’m looking at my AO3 page now, and it looks like it’s a pretty good mix of movies, books, and TV shows. Only one anime fic, for Princess Tutu. (My Hetalia fics were all written from the scanlations, before I watched the anime, possibly before the anime even came out.)

HOWEVER, book fandoms have a special place in my heart, because books are my first love, and because I always enjoy trying to pastiche the author’s style. I think this is great training for an author, especially an author of historical fiction, because it shows how much the style in which someone expresses things can shape what feelings and experiences can be expressed.