so throw your pedestal of stone in the forgetful sea
yo!
If you were a kid of a certain age in the US in the 90s, chances are you found yourself enrolled in the Book It! program. It went like this: you got a fancy holographic button with spaces on it for 5 stickers. Every time you read a book (only at school? also at home? i don’t remember the specifics), you were given a sticker, and when your button was filled with stickers, you’d take it to Pizza Hut, where you were given a free personal pan pizza.
I’ve never been terribly athletic or competitive. I seem to remember joining a tee ball team because it was called the Hamsters and sitting in the outfield a lot. What I was was the kid who ripped through all the books in the classroom within the first month of the school year. So this, this! was groundbreaking. I could win at something! By reading! I was pretty into Book It. The pizza was incidental, honestly, for me it was about the glory.
This year for the first time, I’m doing a Goodreads challenge, which is when you set a goal for the number of books you’re going to read in a year. I’m limiting myself to prose books only and last week I noticed that I was 15 books behind where Goodreads thought I should be to meet my goal. I realized, then, that in my soul I will apparently always be a kid with a Book It! button. I’ve been reading an awful lot of books.
Notable Breakfast
Dog Thing
Mixed Media
I first read Garth Nixon’s Old Kingdom trilogy in high school. It took me a couple of tries to get into it, but once I did, I was stuck. Sabriel, Lirael, and Abhorsen are about two women in a world which has trouble keeping the dead down. (I should emphasize: these are not zombie books. It took me until recently to even realize the dead in these books could be qualified as zombies, and I hate zombies.)
(look at those Leo and Diane Dillon covers!!)
Sabriel is a fantastic story of a girl coming into her own and learning about her world just as she has to defend it, and it stands on its own. But the rest of the trilogy is so, so good, and the world that Nix builds and expands on starting in Lirael (look how big that book is) is one of my very favourites. Lirael is a very different protagonist, but still excellent, and she has a dog side-kick.
I last read these books maybe a decade ago, so when Goldenhand came out, continuing the story, I felt I would be doing a disservice to the universe if I didn’t reread the trilogy. Plus, there was Clariel, a prequel novel I’d skipped, and a novella and short story I’d also never read. I decided I’d read all of it.
It was an excellent decision. All told, I read 4 books, 2 novellas, and one short story before starting Goldenhand, and was so glad I had. Clariel was the one part that dragged a bit (I don’t tend to find prequels terribly interesting if I already know where the character ends up–see: why I don’t care at all about young Anakin Skywalker), but I was glad I’d read it for the context it gave me for parts of Goldenhand. Same with To Hold the Bridge, the novella in this collection, and Nicholas Sayre and the Creature in the Case in this collection, which is essentially a direct prologue to Goldenhand.
I read all of that in under a week, because once I started I couldn’t stop. If you’re looking for a new universe to dive into, I can’t recommend many better than the Old Kingdom.
I started V.E. Scwab’s Shades of Magic series with A Darker Shade of Magic, and liked it enough to immediately read its sequel, A Gathering of Shadows, which I liked even more. They’re about many Londons and the man who can pass between them. After seeing K.J. Charles show up on innumerable rec lists for queer fiction, I read Think of England, which was a delightful historical action/romance, then, because I’ve still got fantasy on the brain, read her entire Charm of Magpies series, which was excellent. I read Boundless, Jillian Tamaki’s incredible story collection. I can’t recommend this one highly enough, Jillian’s art is brilliant as always, but her ability with short fiction is breathtaking.
I saw Wonder Woman! And liked it a lot! I’m not crazy about the look of DC’s films, and the longer I work in comics the less I seem to enjoy comics-based movies and tv, so I went into this with trepidation, to say the least. But I had a great time, and just the sheer experience of seeing a superhero movie, particularly this one, done by a woman director, was huge.
Fics I Shouted About
forever is just a day by magneticwave // Yuri!!! On Ice, Yuri/Otabek, future fic. This is mostly Otabek character study, which I didn’t realize I was craving until it was given to me on a platter. It’s so good.
untitled by apvrrish // Voltron, Keith/Lance. This is a lovely little sickfic, where Keith is ill and not dealing with it terribly well. apvrrish/aknightly is my fav writer of these two, so this was a small delight.
Hey, Jealousy by RC_McLachlan // Yuri!!! On Ice, Yuri/Otabek. The Russian national hockey team pays the rink a visit, Yuuri uses it to his own advantage, and Yuri accidentally says more than he means in a text.
don’t look back in anger by dadvans // Yuri!!! On Ice, Yuri/Otabek, faaaar future fic. This is about Yuri and Otabek being very, very old, and in love, and still very themselves. This is so terribly good.
Lastly
My favourite newsletters right now are by Bim Adewunmi and Mallory Ortberg, both of whom are professional writers and use the medium to muse on any number of subjects, often personal. Both letters come sporadically, arriving like an unexpected dessert in my inbox.
I learned this week that Goodreads now lets you mark a book as a reread, which was huge for me, a chronic rereader.
OKAY THAT WAS A LOT I LOVE YOU BYE
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