calandrahunter | Reading

I was excited about Ghost Story: The Turn of the Screw, because it stars Michelle Dockery and Dan Stevens (pre-Downton Abbey!), and the screenplay was written by Sandy Welch, also responsible for the screenplays of such winners as the Romola Garai Emma and the 2006 Jane Eyre.

However, this adaptation leaned very hard on the Edmund Wilson interpretation of The Turn of the Screw, which is that the “ghosts” are in fact products of the repressed governess’s overheated imagination. And whoever had charge of the filming clearly felt that one should never imply when one could show, so we are treated to multiple scenes of evil Peter Quinn having sex with the former governess, sexually assaulting the maids, etc, which I feel is a counterproductive choice in a ghost story.

They also introduced a frame story where the governess is in an asylum, with Dan Stevens as her psychiatrist. I always enjoy seeing Dan Stevens but I must admit that here his entire plotline seems superfluous. Why keep cutting away from the central story? It constantly undermines the atmosphere of claustrophobic horror that the ghost story is trying to build up.

So I was all set to complain about the film, but in fact I’ve been thinking about the story on and off since I saw it. Is the governess truly seeing ghosts? What did happen to the children before our governess arrived? And what truly happened in the end? So I suppose I must crankily admit that the film is effective even if it’s not artful.

Will this finally inspire me to read Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw? Probably not, as I’ve never fully recovered from how much I hated Daisy Miller. But maybe someday.

osprey_archer

What I Just Finished Reading

Hilary McKay’s Rosa by Starlight, an enchanting short children’s fantasy featuring cats, Venice, a deliciously wicked aunt and uncle (but ARE they really Rosa’s aunt and uncle?), and an intrepid orphan facing down her problems as best she can. Perfect if you like classic children’s fantasy that swirls a soupcon of magic into the real world.

Damon Runyon’s Guys and Dolls. Although the musical isn’t based directly on any one of these stories (in fact, I think the only direct reference might be Nathan Detroit’s craps game), it is at the same time exactly like Damon Runyon’s short stories.

troisoiseaux suggested a similarity to the work of P. G. Wodehouse, which I definitely also see: it’s easy to imagine a crossover where Wodehouse’s upper class doofuses get into a caper with Runyon’s Broadway gangster idiots, probably ending in a double wedding where an upper class doofus marries a Broadway doll, and a Broadway guy marries Muriel Broadbent.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve started my St. Patrick’s Day Maeve Binchy early this year, because I’ve picked her short story collection A Few of the Girls, and even starting now I probably won’t finish it by St. Patrick’s Day. (I usually read story collections one story a day.)

What I Plan to Read Next

You will be shocked to hear that a steady diet of Horatio Hornblower and Aubrey-Maturin have made me want to read a book about the history of the Napoleonic Wars, preferably an overview so I can get a general idea of the most important dates so I can orient myself as we go along. Any recommendations?

denise posting in

dw_news

Back in August of 2025, we announced a temporary block on account creation for users under the age of 18 from the state of Tennessee, due to the court in Netchoice's challenge to the law (which we're a part of!) refusing to prevent the law from being enforced while the lawsuit plays out. Today, I am sad to announce that we've had to add South Carolina to that list. When creating an account, you will now be asked if you're a resident of Tennessee or South Carolina. If you are, and your birthdate shows you're under 18, you won't be able to create an account.

We're very sorry to have to do this, and especially on such short notice. The reason for it: on Friday, South Carolina governor Henry McMaster signed the South Carolina Age-Appropriate Design Code Act into law, with an effective date of immediately. The law is so incredibly poorly written it took us several days to even figure out what the hell South Carolina wants us to do and whether or not we're covered by it. We're still not entirely 100% sure about the former, but in regards to the latter, we're pretty sure the fact we use Google Analytics on some site pages (for OS/platform/browser capability analysis) means we will be covered by the law. Thankfully, the law does not mandate a specific form of age verification, unlike many of the other state laws we're fighting, so we're likewise pretty sure that just stopping people under 18 from creating an account will be enough to comply without performing intrusive and privacy-invasive third-party age verification. We think. Maybe. (It's a really, really badly written law. I don't know whether they intended to write it in a way that means officers of the company can potentially be sentenced to jail time for violating it, but that's certainly one possible way to read it.)

Netchoice filed their lawsuit against SC over the law as I was working on making this change and writing this news post -- so recently it's not even showing up in RECAP yet for me to link y'all to! -- but here's the complaint as filed in the lawsuit, Netchoice v Wilson. Please note that I didn't even have to write the declaration yet (although I will be): we are cited in the complaint itself with a link to our August news post as evidence of why these laws burden small websites and create legal uncertainty that causes a chilling effect on speech. \o/

In fact, that's the victory: in December, the judge ruled in favor of Netchoice in Netchoice v Murrill, the lawsuit over Louisiana's age-verification law Act 456, finding (once again) that requiring age verification to access social media is unconstitutional. Judge deGravelles' ruling was not simply a preliminary injunction: this was a final, dispositive ruling stating clearly and unambiguously "Louisiana Revised Statutes §§51:1751–1754 violate the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, as incorporated by the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution", as well as awarding Netchoice their costs and attorney's fees for bringing the lawsuit. We didn't provide a declaration in that one, because Act 456, may it rot in hell, had a total registered user threshold we don't meet. That didn't stop Netchoice's lawyers from pointing out that we were forced to block service to Mississippi and restrict registration in Tennessee (pointing, again, to that news post), and Judge deGravelles found our example so compelling that we are cited twice in his ruling, thus marking the first time we've helped to get one of these laws enjoined or overturned just by existing. I think that's a new career high point for me.

I need to find an afternoon to sit down and write an update for

dw_advocacy highlighting everything that's going on (and what stage the lawsuits are in), because folks who know there's Some Shenanigans afoot in their state keep asking us whether we're going to have to put any restrictions on their states. I'll repeat my promise to you all: we will fight every state attempt to impose mandatory age verification and deanonymization on our users as hard as we possibly can, and we will keep actions like this to the clear cases where there's no doubt that we have to take action in order to prevent liability.

In cases like SC, where the law takes immediate effect, or like TN and MS, where the district court declines to issue a temporary injunction or the district court issues a temporary injunction and the appellate court overturns it, we may need to take some steps to limit our potential liability: when that happens, we'll tell you what we're doing as fast as we possibly can. (Sometimes it takes a little while for us to figure out the exact implications of a newly passed law or run the risk assessment on a law that the courts declined to enjoin. Netchoice's lawyers are excellent, but they're Netchoice's lawyers, not ours: we have to figure out our obligations ourselves. I am so very thankful that even though we are poor in money, we are very rich in friends, and we have a wide range of people we can go to for help.)

In cases where Netchoice filed the lawsuit before the law's effective date, there's a pending motion for a preliminary injunction, the court hasn't ruled on the motion yet, and we're specifically named in the motion for preliminary injunction as a Netchoice member the law would apply to, we generally evaluate that the risk is low enough we can wait and see what the judge decides. (Right now, for instance, that's Netchoice v Jones, formerly Netchoice v Miyares, mentioned in our December news post: the judge has not yet ruled on the motion for preliminary injunction.) If the judge grants the injunction, we won't need to do anything, because the state will be prevented from enforcing the law. If the judge doesn't grant the injunction, we'll figure out what we need to do then, and we'll let you know as soon as we know.

I know it's frustrating for people to not know what's going to happen! Believe me, it's just as frustrating for us: you would not believe how much of my time is taken up by tracking all of this. I keep trying to find time to update

dw_advocacy so people know the status of all the various lawsuits (and what actions we've taken in response), but every time I think I might have a second, something else happens like this SC law and I have to scramble to figure out what we need to do. We will continue to update

dw_news whenever we do have to take an action that restricts any of our users, though, as soon as something happens that may make us have to take an action, and we will give you as much warning as we possibly can. It is absolutely ridiculous that we still have to have this fight, but we're going to keep fighting it for as long as we have to and as hard as we need to.

I look forward to the day we can lift the restrictions on Mississippi, Tennessee, and now South Carolina, and I apologize again to our users (and to the people who temporarily aren't able to become our users) from those states.

osprey_archer

In 2005, my family went on a three week trip to Australia and New Zealand, on which I embarked determined to bring back gems of antipodal literature.

Unfortunately, I was not very internet savvy at that point, so I didn’t successfully manage to search for the titles of these gems. Presumably I could have asked the booksellers, but this literally didn’t occur to me until I was writing this post, so clearly that was a non-starter.

So mostly I purchased the complete works of Isobelle Carmody, plus some of Lynley Dodd’s Slinki Malinki books (happy to report that my niece now enjoys them). But I did consider Randa Abdel-Fattah’s Does My Head Look Big in This?, before concluding that this book would obviously make it to the United States before long.

I was correct! The book made it to the United States within a year or two after that trip. I proceeded not to read it for another twenty years.

But finally I have read it. At this point it’s kind of a period piece of my own youth. CDs! DVDs! Young people who use their cell phones to actually call each other! Be still my beating heart.

But also, the character who is so relentlessly fat-shamed by her mother and her classmates that she informs our heroine that she wishes she could become anorexic. Unable to achieve this fatal disease, she instead takes up smoking. She ultimately gives it up when she gets a boyfriend who likes her curves, but still. Oh, 2005, how I don’t miss you. What an awful year. Awful decade in fact. Sometimes I feel like an old curmudgeon shaking my metaphorical cane at The State of the World These Days, so it’s cheering in a way to be reminded that I hated the world when I was a teenager, too.

“But Aster,” you complain. “The actual book? Do you have any thoughts about Does My Head Look Big in This?”

Well, to be honest, the book also reminded me that I had a tortured relationship with contemporary YA even before its Twilightification. It also seemed to me that the move from children’s literature to YA echoed the arc of Fern’s character growth in Charlotte’s Web: at the start she saves Wilbur the runt pig and spends hours listening to the talking animals, but at the end all she cares about is some stupid boy who took her for a ride on the Ferris wheel. It’s a shift from wonder and possibility and talking animals to boring romance and clothes and makeup (or boring sports if the main character is a boy).

As an adult I have more tolerance for this sort of thing, but I suspect that in my youth I would have been horrified that our heroine starts wearing the hijab full-time and still spends most of her time thinking about clothes and makeup and boys. To my seventeen-year-old mind, the chief benefit of wearing the hijab would be never having to think about any of those things ever again! Or at least until you’re ready to get married. (I recognize that this is not how it actually works, but it’s still what I would have thought.)

So in fact it’s a good thing that I waited 20 years to read the book, because I probably would not have much appreciated the book in 2005. But in 2026, it’s given me a nice wander down memory lane.

sholio

So I read the fourth book in this series (by accident, not realizing it was the fourth) a couple of years ago, and stalled out on book 1. After reading the SCP Foundation book last week, I decided there would never be a better time for a cosmic horror-comedy book I already owned - and I was so right, I marathoned the entire series this past week and absolutely loved it. There's a new book coming out in 2026 and I cannot WAIT.

These books, and especially the first half of book 1 (by far the weakest part of the series), are dudebro-ish and sometimes very early-2000s deliberately transgressive humor (i.e. South Park - this gets MUCH less as it goes on, but never really goes away), and they are sometimes lovely and insightful, and sometimes just incredibly stupid, and I can see why someone would bounce off them, especially considering how I struggled to get through the early parts of book 1. But after four books, I love these characters so much that I will follow them anywhere. Even through the stupid parts!

These books, especially the first one, are primarily narrated by Dave, a slacker dudebro in the general style of early 2000s movies etc (this is very clearly in the style of the Kevin Smith movies, South Park, and other things of that era). Dave is a depressed loner working at a video store whose best and only friend is John, a Bad Idea Friend who takes every drug he gets his hands on, belongs to a shitty band, and drags Dave into a never-ending series of terrible, terrible life choices.

The plot-relevant one of these is taking a new drug sweeping their depressed Midwestern town of [Undisclosed], a drug which looks like mobile and intelligent used motor oil. It turns out that it kills most of the people who take it, but they are among the few survivors, and are suddenly able to step outside time and space, and see everything going on their small depressed Midwestern town -- all the ghosts, all the cosmic entities. They can uncontrollably travel in time, they can freeze time, and they're swept up in an attempt to fix a series of goddawful cosmic horror rifts in time and space that are wrecking their whole dimension.

The third member of the group is drawn in during the first book when she becomes a victim and later a friend: Amy, who was shattered physically and emotionally in a car accident, and then comes to the attention of cosmic horrors; starts off as one of the people they're trying to help, and gets sucked into weird spacetime shenanigans with things that she (unlike John and Dave) can't actually see. It's with Amy's introduction that the first book feels like it really kicks off and gets good.

The body count is high and gory, there are tons of gore and grossout humor and some incredibly soft, emotional and deeply affecting moments as well. This is a series where

some spoilers for one of the books

the big dilemma can be how do we kill some giant extradimensional maggots that pretend to be adorable human children, who everyone else sees as adorable human children, while they munch gorily on their caregivers and no one else can see it ... or maybe it's the realization that the hideous maggots are also children, deserving of care and consideration as any other children, and maybe the people you need to stop are the government agents coming to kill them.

If whether the dog dies is an important factor in your reading or viewing, please click

this spoiler

there is a dog, and the dog dies.

These books are so hard to rec, because you have to slog through the worst part of the series (the first half of book 1) to get to the almost transcendentally good late middle of book one; it can be lovely enough to make me cry or just spectacularly stupid within a chapter or two. A lot of stuff is brought up and then never explained. But sometimes the explanations made me put the book down and have feelings for a while. It made me laugh a lot. There are so many bodily fluids and terrible bodily function jokes. Some of its best moments involve the characters being forced to contend with the fact that life is complicated and stupid and cruel, and the best thing you can do, maybe the only thing you can do, is to simply be kind, and make the kind choice, if that's the only choice you have to make.

Sometimes defeating the apocalypse cultists means sitting down with them and understanding their heartbreaking loneliness and convincing them to walk away because you can be the person who turns them around and becomes the only person in their lives to ever believe in them and tell them that they can be something better than this.

... And sometimes it involves a triple-barreled shotgun and a plan involving a room full of fake silicon butts. That's what this series is like.

( A spoiler from book 4 )

osprey_archer

I was quite excited about the picture book Only Opal: The Diary of a Young Girl, as I’ve been low-key obsessed with Opal Whiteley for years, and what could be better than a book about Opal illustrated by Barbara Cooney?

For those of you who don’t know, Opal Whiteley came to national attention in 1920 when the Atlantic Monthly published her childhood diary, in which young Opal wrote lyrical descriptions of nature and her animal friends, who have Lars Porsenna (the crow) and Brave Horatius (the dog). Some people were and remain bowled over by the beauty of her nature writing. Other people accused Opal of making up the diary wholesale. Would any kid really name a crow Lars Porsenna? It’s just too too precious.

I believe that the diary was real, though. Opal was an extremely bright child, and extremely bright children sometimes do things that strike people who don’t know them as completely unbelievable. She also suffered from a very unfortunate accident of timing, in that she fit perfectly a cultural archetype that was just coming under attack when she published her diary. A child of Nature, growing up in poverty but learning from the trees and the flowers and a few good, solid books (traditionally the Bible and Shakespeare, but in Opal’s case a book of historical figures).

After World War I this whole “child of nature” idea came to be seen as an offshoot of a sickeningly naive vision of human nature that had been exploded by the war. And then here comes Opal Whiteley, presenting to the world this diary supposedly written when she was five and six, which completely embodies this discredited vision. Well, it’s much easier to say “She’s a fraud!” than to wonder “Is there something in the child of nature idea after all?”

Unfortunately, as I recalled as I began to read the picture book, although I find Opal as a person very interesting, I can’t stand her diary. I think it’s a real diary, truly written by Opal as a child, but even in the immensely abridged form of a picture book, it does strike me as too too precious. “One way the road does go to the house of the girl who has no seeing” - good gravy, Opal, just say she’s blind. You named a mouse Felix Mendelssohn! I know you know the word blind!

But of course Barbara Cooney’s illustrations are lovely as always. I particularly liked the picture of the mouse Felix Mendelssohn asleep on a pincushion under a little square of flannel. Just the right level of precious.

sholio

In a generally unsurprising plot twist, all three of the Babylon 5 vids in this year's Festivids were by me. I haven't gotten around to properly reposting them to my signed vid account, but for now the signed vids are uploaded to the anonymous account and they can also be downloaded by clicking through to Vimeo as an interim measure until I get them properly posted for download.

I also added them to my Sholio Vids collection.

Some random notes on this year's vidding under the cut.

( Talking a lot about Babylon 5 )

osprey_archer

Although Lieutenant Hornblower is the second book chronologically in the Hornblower series, it was one of the later books written in the series. So, although the narrator is in fact Lieutenant Bush rather than Hornblower himself, it is very much a Hornblower book, which has the presumably unintentional effect of making Bush sound absolutely obsessed with Hornblower.

Oh, sure, he’s constantly running down Hornblower’s appearance (he looks like a scarecrow! He looked like he dressed in the dark and forgot to straighten his clothes!)... but that just shows he’s extremely aware of Hornblower’s appearance, as he rarely comments on how anyone else looks. He stares at Hornblower’s beautiful, skillful, fascinating hands (yes, he actually describes them as fascinating), and wonders if admiring a junior lieutenant smacks of French equalitarianism. He watches Hornblower drink a bucket of water from the well, which sluices down his chin and soaks his white shirt, and “The very sight of him was enough to make Bush, who had already had one drink from the well, feel consumed with thirst all over again.”

I mean yes they did just complete a sneak attack during which no one had a drink in the tropical heat for at least 12 hours, but also WOW. That’s what seeing Hornblower in a wet shirt does to a man, huh!

And then Bush is wounded, and the last thing he remembers before he blacks out is Hornblower’s pleading, tender voice… his gentle hands… the feeling of being safe and comforted by Hornblower’s presence… And once he’s in hospital on land, Hornblower brings him an entire basket of tropical fruit, and Bush is so bowled over he barely manages a “Thank you,” and then they just gaze at each other, which, let’s be real, is probably Hornblower’s preferred love language: Significant Looks.

Then later on Hornblower gets appointed captain, and Bush is so thrilled and so drunk that he ends the night stumbling down the hall, both arms around Hornblower’s neck, bellowing “FOR HE’S A JOLLY GOOD FELLOW” at the top of his lungs as Hornblower helps him to bed. One presumes that Forester simply cut out before Bush dragged Hornblower in for a sloppy drunken kiss and Hornblower patted him awkwardly on the shoulder and fled.

So yes, all the people who recced Hornblower on the grounds that it is very slashy are 100% right. Amazing. This may in fact be the high point of slashiness for the series, as it seems unlikely that Hornblower POV is ever going to be quite as obsessed with Bush as Bush is with Hornblower (the series after all is not called Lieutenant Bush), but we shall see.

Oh, as for the actual plot, ( spoilers )

oracne

This is actually all of December and January, which I wrote up for my professional blog.

The Woods All Black by Lee Mandelo is horror, a genre I read only rarely, but I was completely gripped by the 1930s rural setting. Leslie Bruin, a trans man and veteran nurse of World War One, now works for the Frontier Nursing Service. Sent to the tiny, isolated town of Spar Creek, he is quickly put on his guard by unfriendly townspeople and louring forest, but stays to try and help young Stevie Mattingly, a tomboyish local whom the entire town seems to want to control. The building tension is very effective, and finally explodes in dark magic and violence. Trigger warnings for off-screen sexual assault and some gory justice doled out towards the end.

The Incandescent by Emily Tesh is very excellent. It's a magic school story from a teacher's perspective, which fully demonstrates the ridiculously huge workload of a senior administrator/teacher and the difficulties of having a "human" life separate from teaching. It has great characters and deep worldbuilding, and even shows what graduate school and career paths the students might take. The solidly English middle-class point of view character Sapphire Walden, socially awkward with a doctorate in thaumaturgy, is brilliantly depicted, including her grappling with how to communicate with her students who vary in race and class. This novel read as a love letter to teachers and teaching that also showed their humanity with its mistakes and flaws.

Troubled Waters by Sharon Shinn is first in the "Elemental Blessings" series, a secondary-world fantasy with magic and personality types associated with/linked to elements or combinations thereof. The protagonist, for example, is linked mostly to water, which has a relationship to Change; in her case, she's part of major political changes. The story begins just after Zoe Ardelay's father has died. He was a political exile, and Zoe has mostly grown up in an isolated, tiny village. Darien Serlast, one of the king's advisors, arrives to bring her to the capital city, ostensibly to be the king's fifth wife. At this point, I was expecting a Marriage of Convenience, possibly with Darien. This did not happen; instead, the first of several shifts in the plot (much like changes in a river's course over time) sent Zoe off on her own to make new friends. While there is indeed a romance with Darien, eventually, it was secondary to the political plots revolving around the king, the machinations of his wives, and Zoe's discoveries about her heritage and associated magical abilities. I enjoyed the unexpected twists of the plot, but by the end felt I'd read enough of this world and did not move on to the rest of the series.

A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett is second in a series, Shadow of the Leviathan, but since my library hold on it came in first, I read out of order. As with many mystery series, there was enough background that I had no trouble reading it as a standalone. This secondary world fantasy mystery has genuinely interesting worldbuilding, mostly related to organic technology based on the flesh and blood of strange, metamorphic creatures called Leviathans who sometimes come ashore and wreak destruction. The story revolves around a research facility that works directly with these dangerous corpses and is secretly doing more than is public. Protagonists Dinios Kol and his boss, the eccentric and brilliant detective Ana Dolabra, are sent from the imperial Iudex to an outlier territory, Yarrow, whose economy is structured around organic technology and the research facility known as The Shroud. Yarrow is in the midst of negotiations with the imperial Treasury for a future entry into the Empire when one of the Treasury representatives is murdered. Colonialism and the local feudal system complicate both the plot and the investigation. If you like twists and turns, this is great. There are hints of the Pacific Rim movies (but no mecha) in the leviathans, and of famous detective pairings including Holmes and Watson and Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, the latter of which the author explicitly mentions in the afterword. (Similarities: Ana likes to stay in one places, is a gourmet of sorts, sends Kol out for information; Kol has a photographic memory and is good at picking up sex partners.)

The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett kicks off the Shadow of the Leviathan series. Kol and Ana begin the story in a backwater canton but soon travel to the imperial town that supports the great sea wall and holds back the Titans that invade in the wet season. The worldbuilding and the mystery plot are marvelously layered, and Ana's eccentricities are classic for a detective. I kept thinking, "he's putting down a clue, when is someone in this story going to pick it up?" and sometimes, I felt like the pickup took too long. This might have been on purpose, to drag out the tension. As a writer, I was definitely paying attention to the techniques the author used.

Paladin's Grace by T. Kingfisher is first in the "Saint of Steel" series, which has been recommended to me so many times by this point that I've lost count. While the story is serious and begins with an accidental massacre, the dialogue has Kingfisher's trademark whimsy, irony, and humor. When the supernatural Saint of Steel dies, its holy Paladins are bereft but still subject to a berserker rage no longer guided by the Saint. The survivors are taken in by the Temple of the White Rat and then must...survive. Paladin Stephen feels like a husk who serves the White Rat as requested and knits socks in his downtime until he accidentally saves a young woman from danger and becomes once again interested in living. Grace, a perfumer, fled an abusive marriage and has now stumbled into a murderous plot. Meanwhile, a series of mysterious deaths in the background eventually work their way forward. This was really fun, and I will read more.

Paladin's Hope by T. Kingfisher is third in the "Saint of Steel" series and features the lich-doctor (coroner) Piper, who becomes entangled with the paladin Galen and a gnole (badger-like sapient), Earstripe, who is investigating a series of very mysterious deaths. Galen still suffers the effects of when the Saint of Steel died, and is unwilling to build relationships outside of his fellow paladins; Piper works with the dead because of a psychic gift as well as other reasons that have led to him walling off his feelings. A high-stress situation helps to break down their walls, though I confess that video-game-like scenario dragged a bit for me. Also, I really wanted to learn a lot more about the gnoles and their society.

Paladin's Strength by T. Kingfisher is second in the "Saint of Steel" series but arrived third so far as my library holds were concerned; I actually finished it in February but am posting it here so it's with the other books in the series. This one might be my favorite of the series so far. Istvhan's level-headedness and emotional intelligence appeal strongly to me. Clara's strong sense of self made me like her even before the reveal of her special ability (which I guessed ahead of time). They were a well-matched couple, and a few times I actually laughed out loud at their dialogue. I also appreciated seeing different territory and some different cultures in this world. I plan to read the fourth book in this series, and more by this author.

Wrong on the Internet by selkit is a brief Murderbot (TV) story involving Sanctuary Moon fandom, Ratthi, and SecUnit. It's hilarious.

Cold Bayou by Barbara Hambly (2018) is sixteenth in the series, and I would not recommend starting here, as there are a lot of returning characters with complex relationships. Set in 1839 in southern Louisiana, the free man of color Ben, his wife Rose, his mother, his sister Dominique and her daughter, and his close friend Hannibal Sefton travel via steamboat to an isolated plantation, Cold Bayou, for a wedding.

As well as the inhabitants of the plantation (enslaved people and the mixed-race overseer and his wife), the sprawling cast includes an assortment of other family related by blood or otherwise through the complex French-Creole system of interracial relationships called plaçage or mariages de la main gauche. These involved White men contracting with mistresses of color while, often, married to White women for reasons of money or control over land rather than romance. The resulting complexities are a constant theme in this series, as Ben and his sister Olympe were freed from slavery in childhood when their mother was purchased and freed to be a placée; meanwhile, his half-sister Dominique is currently a placée, and on good terms with her partner Henri's wife, Chloe, who later has a larger role in the mystery plot.

Veryl St.-Chinian, one of two members of a family with control over a vast quantity of property, is 67 years old and has decided to marry 18 year old Ellie Trask, an illiterate Irish girl whose past is revealed to be socially dubious. Even before Ellie's rough-hewn uncle shows up with a squad of violent bravos, tempers are fraught and no-one thinks the marriage is a good idea, because of the vast family voting power it would give Ellie. Complicating matters is the inevitable murder and also a storm that floods the plantation and prevents most outside assistance for an extended period.

Hambly is one of my autobuy authors and I greatly enjoyed revisiting familiar characters as well as seeing them grapple with mystery tropes such as "detective is incapacitated and must rely on others for information" and "isolated assortment of plausible murder suspects." She's great at successively amping up the danger with plot twists that fractal out to the rest of the story, and though justice is always achieved in the end (as is required for the Mystery genre), the historical circumstances of these books can result in justice for some and not others. I highly recommend this series if you like mystery that successfully dramatizes complex social history.

osprey_archer

Last time I posted one of these reading lists,

asakiyume noted that I’d already read, like, half the books, and I decided that it might be the path of wisdom in the future to try to post these lists BEFORE I started reading the books on them. So! Behold! The authors I intend to revisit from my 2018 reading list!

Juliana Horatia Ewing - the university library has Mrs. Overtheway’s Remembrances (memories of early nineteenth-century England), The Story of a Short Life (unclear, but I think a child soldier dies valiantly?), and Lob Lie-by-the-fire ; Jackanapes ; Daddy Darwin's dovecot (three short stories, possibly fantasy). Any preferences?

Ngaio Marsh

Jerry Pinkney

Rosemary Sutcliff - We Lived at Drumfyvie, on the basis of

regshoe’s review

Frances Hodgson Burnett - The Head of the House of Coombe

Roald Dahl - I’ve read the most famous ones (Matilda, James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), plus his memoirs Boy and Going Solo. But I’ve barely skimmed the surface otherwise. Recs?

Caroline Dale Snedeker

M. T. Anderson - Nicked. Recced by multiple people!

D. E. Stevenson - Mrs. Tim Flies Home. The last of the Mrs. Tim quartet.

E. M. Delafield - technically The Provincial Lady in America is next, but I’d have to get it through ILL, whereas the library has The Provincial Lady in Wartime. Will probably get Wartime unless someone feels strongly the books must be read in order and/or the America is wonderful and I simply mustn’t risk missing it.

Elizabeth Enright - Spiderweb for Two. Wrapping up the Melendys!

Rick Bragg - I really liked his food memoir The Best Cook in the World: Tales from My Momma’s Table, so I meant to try some of his other books, but… I have not. Any suggestions?

Daphne Du Maurier

Edward Eager - Playing Possum (the last of his little-known picture books)

Deborah Ellis - One More Mountain, the newest Breadwinner novel, published in 2022

Fyodor Dosteovsky - The Brothers Karamazov. Thoughts which translation I should get?

Jacqueline Woodson

Eliza Orne White - I, the Autobiography of a Cat. I am including White on this list solely because the archive has this book, and how am I supposed to resist a title like that?

Zilpha Keatley Snyder

C. S. Lewis

Elizabeth Gaskell - Mary Barton or Ruth, probably.

Dorothy Gilman

E. Nesbit - The Wouldbegoods

Thanhha Lai - When Clouds Touch Us, the sequel to Inside Out and Back Again. Always nervous about sequels but going to give this a try.

Vera Brittain - Testament of Youth. Another book I’ve meant to read for AGES.

sholio

I reposted some of my longer 3 Sentence Ficathon fills on AO3.

An Immodest Proposal (Babylon 5)
State of Change (Babylon 5)
Hypotheticals (Gattaca)

And a new B5 fic, written a little while back because I had the idea, but not posted until now:

Reliquary (Babylon 5, post-canon, canon compliant, character deaths)

Reposted under the cut.

( Reliquary - Babylon 5 - 1500 wds )

sholio

This book is hard to tag - it's basically cosmic horror, or horror scifi. It is also one of the creepiest and trippiest things I've read in a long time and maybe ever.

I kinda vaguely knew about SCP as a collaborative wiki project from the 2000s, with user-submitted descriptions of imaginary (and frequently extradimensional) objects. This book is based on it. It's about a group of characters who work for the Antimemetics Division of the SCP Foundation, a department most people don't know about (because it's impossible to remember it for more than a few minutes after finding out about it) that handles "antimemes," which are the opposite of memes - if memes are catchy and transmissible, antimemes are intentionally unmemorable, to an extent where you need to use extraordinary measures, such as memory-enhancing drugs, just to recognize that they exist at all. It's information that functions as anti-information. And it turns out there are living creatures with antimemetic properties, as well as weapons that use it ...

( Lots and lots of spoilers )

osprey_archer

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

D. E. Stevenson’s The House on the Cliff. This was Stevenson’s last novel, and although it’s technically set at the time it was written (the 1960s), it feels more like an interwar period piece. But otherwise it’s classic charming Stevenson. Young Elfrida Jane inherits a house in Cornwall from her estranged grandparents (who disinherited Elfrida’s mother after she married an actor), and the book is all about her settling into the neighborhood, reveling in the possession of her own home, learning about farming and gardening, and swimming on the delightful little beach at the base of the cliffs.

E. M. Delafield’s The Provincial Lady in London. Somehow Stevensons and Delafields often end up going together in my reading, although I think Delafield at her grimmest gets much darker than Stevenson, who doesn’t have a grim mode. In any case, the Provincial Lady books feature Delafield at her most sprightly. In this book, the Provincial Lady uses the funds from her first book (Diary of a Provincial Lady) to get a flat in London, and also meets many literary people on the strength of her newfound literary fame.

Finally, I zipped through Jane Langton’s Her Majesty, Grace Jones. After a neighbor tells Grace that she looks just like the little English princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose, Grace Jones decides that she’s obviously a secret, third Windsor sister, growing up in secret in America to take the throne once she gets older! Mostly family hijinks. The kids put on a circus, which is always great fun.

What I’m Reading Now

Hilary McKay’s latest, Rosa by Starlight. Loving this book! Finally, a book that remembers fictional orphans are for Gothic Whump and Adventure and Magic. I believe we may be getting a literal magic cat and I’m so excited.

What I Plan to Read Next

I am going to give Project Hail Mary a try if it kills me. Baffling that I feel so resistant to it, because I really liked The Martian! But here we are.

mark posting in

dw_maintenance

Hi all!

I'm doing some minor operational work tonight. It should be transparent, but there's always a chance that something goes wrong. The main thing I'm touching is testing a replacement for Apache2 (our web server software) in one area of the site.

Thank you!

osprey_archer

Next up in the Hornblower movieverse: The Wrong War (originally The Frogs and the Lobsters), featuring Horatio Hornblower’s involvement in the ill-fated attack French royalist landing at Quiberon. (“Quiberon! There was a D. K. Broster book about that!” I crowed.)

Enjoyable as usual, although the slashiness quotient was low (very little Kennedy, Bush hasn’t appeared yet). Once again the film is telling pretty much the same story as the book but changing the thematic valence: in the book, the point of Quiberon seems to be that the strict discipline of the marines saves the day (for the British retreat, anyway, the undisciplined Royalists are screwed), whereas here, Captain Pellew saves the day by disobeying his orders to stay at one beach and instead heads to the other to pick up the possible survivors.

(Basically I think the Hornblower movies were made by people who are really more sympathetic to the liberte, egalite, fraternite of the French Revolution than the ideals of the Royal Navy circa 1800: obedience, order, discipline, respect for rank, etc. etc.)

Also, the filmmakers decided that it was time for Hornblower to have a romance (with a girl), and have therefore introduced the character of Mariette, a French peasant girl who became a schoolteacher following the Revolution. This led (I imagine) to some version of the following conversation:

FILMMAKER #1: But what will we do with Mariette in the later films?

FILMMAKER #2: Don’t worry about it! We’ll kill her at the end of this one.

I did not care for this ending, so I have taken the liberty of rewriting it, starting from the scene in Mariette’s house where Hornblower begs her to run away with him while the townsfolk outside riot.

HORNBLOWER: I won’t leave without you!

MARIETTE: Climb out ze window!

HORNBLOWER climbs out the window. MARIETTE leans out the window looking after him, but does not move to climb down.

HORNBLOWER: Jump!

MARIETTE: (with tears in her eyes) Nevaire can I leave la belle France! Vive la Republique! Adieu, ‘Ornblowaire!

MARIETTE shuts the shutters. HORNBLOWER looks like he wants to climb back up and argue, but suddenly the yelling is getting much closer, and he must flee.

HORNBLOWER makes it to the bridge literally seconds before the British blow it up. The British retreat to the beach, where they are rescued by the Indefatigable.

HORNBLOWER stands by the rail, staring out at the receding coast of France. KENNEDY comes to stand beside him.

HORNBLOWER: “I could not love her, dear, so well/loved she not la belle France more.”

KENNEDY clasps Hornblower’s shoulder in manly sympathy. They gaze together at their one true mistress, the sea.

FIN

sholio

There's a Biggles February prompt fest, Biggletines, going on over at

bigglesevents:

https://bigglesevents.dreamwidth.org/18654.html

Feel free to leave prompts, answer prompts, or both!

osprey_archer

Like many of Solzhenitsyn’s books, In the First Circle has a tortured publication history. It was first written in the 1950s, revised in vain hope of official Soviet publication in 1964, published in the West in 1968, and then republished for the first time in its full form in 2008, which is the version I read. So if you’ve read the book but this review sounds like it came out of an alternate universe, possibly you read the earlier version.

The biggest change was to the action that kicks off the novel. In the first published version, Volodin makes a telephone call to a doctor to warn him not to share information about an experimental drug with his Western colleagues, as the security apparatus would consider that a traitorous act. In the 2008 version, Volodin calls the US embassy to warn them that a Soviet spy is going to try to steal the secrets of the nuclear bomb.

In both versions, this telephone call kicks off a flurry of activity in a sharaksha - that is, a special secret prison where prisoners with scientific skills work on making inventions for the state. One of these inventions is a process for identifying the voice of a caller on an anonymous phone call, which has just jumped to number one priority for the security services.

In other hands, this premise might set off a suspenseful game of spy-vs-spy. In fact, the New York Times review quoted on the cover says the story is “filled with suspense,” which frankly makes me suspect that the reviewer read a synopsis rather than the book, which could not be less interested in suspense.

Instead, Solzhenitsyn uses this incident as a kaleidoscope to explore not only the world of the sharaksha, but all the many lives touched by the existence of this special prison: not just the prisoners themselves, but the guards, the guards’ supervisors, the entire security apparatus up to Stalin himself, not to mention the prisoner Nerzhin’s wife and her fellow grad students and the young man she’s been flirting with, even as Nerzhin flirts with one of the female state employees in the prison…

Ostensibly, the First Circle of the title is a reference to the sharaksha, Dante’s first circle of Hell where the virtuous pagans live: the nicest part of Hell, but still Hell. But in fact it seemed to me that this circle expanded to include the lives of everyone touched by the prison, perhaps everyone in the Soviet Union in 1950. A grad student struggling over whether to turn informer or risk having her thesis failed if she refuses. A minion of Stalin’s struggling to find a reply when Stalin puckishly suggests that if they bring the death penalty back, the minion might be the first to go! Stalin himself, miserable and alone, isolated by the terror he has created in everyone around him.

What will you do to make yourself comfortable? Who will you hurt to make your own life better? Solzhenitsyn is not an ascetic for asceticism’s sake - some of the most charming scenes in the book are little moments of comfort that the prisoners have managed to scrape out - but he is absolutely opposed to purchasing comfort, safety, or indeed even survival at the cost of someone else.

(Once Solzhenitsyn was exiled to America, Americans were apparently distressed by his disdain for American materialism, but we really should have seen it coming. We are after all a nation of people largely happy to treat “Well of course Amazon exploits its workers and undermines local businesses and is simply overall evil, but it’s so convenient” as a clinching moral argument in favor of shopping at Amazon.)

A note about how to read this book: I struggled for the first hundred pages or so because I was trying to keep track of all the characters. As Solzhenitsyn introduces a new batch of characters every five chapters or so, this swiftly becomes impossible, especially because he never stops doing this. You might expect that at some point he’d decide he’s assembled the whole cast, but no, right up till quite near the end he’s happy to hare off for two chapters to go on a digression (fascinating! Rich in psychological and philosophical detail!) about a character we’re never going to see again.

As you can imagine, trying to keep track of all these characters (each of whom has their own little cast of side characters) is very frustrating, and my reading experience became much more pleasant when I realized it was also unnecessary. Much better just to read the book like you’re floating down a river. The most important characters will bob up again and again, so you’ll come to know them quite well. Other characters may just be islands that you’ll float past, interesting in their own right of course, but it’s also fine if you can’t remember all the details about Yakonov and his ex-girlfriend who goes to church because the regime is anti-church, which all occurred decades ago so why are we having two chapters about it now? Well, because it’s another little chip of colored glass in our kaleidoscope, that’s why.

And if it turns out a character you thought was an island is actually a boat who keeps floating along, so you do need to know that name after all? Well, that’s why there’s a character index at the start of the book.

Solzhenitsyn is not the least interested in suspense, in plot. He’s interested in character, in exploring different viewpoints on how to live in the world, and in exploring different facets of that world until it feels like a real and breathing place. The book is nearly 750 pages, but in the end, I still wanted to keep on exploring.

oracne

I am learning to knit! I am very proud of my casting on, and am working on the tension while actually knitting. Today, I did multiple rows for the first time; I got up to row four before I tangled something too badly to continue and started over.

I am currently using a giant pair of kids' plastic needles that C. had from a kit she did last year, and some neon purple acrylic yarn. I also have a nice pair of circular needles that

drinkingcocoa helped me to pick out at our local yarn store; I started with those, but am now seeing how a longer row works.

I have no idea how long it will take for me to knit something that I'd actually wear, but the point for me is the process. It requires some concentration plus being in the moment, and will be a good thing to do while waiting for things or, potentially, getting back into listening to audioplays and the like. Plus, it's more mobile than doing a puzzle.

My many friends who knit are so excited..

sholio

Festivids 2025 is revealed!

I got three(!!) gifts, all Murderbot and all very well edited and lovely ♥:

It's a Sin
All the Rowboats
Performance Reliability = ATL

Some other vids I've especially liked of what I've watched so far:

So It Goes - Foundation
The Heart Always Holds Onto Missing Roads - Murderbot
Moose in the Road - Mythbusters

osprey_archer

When we first began to discuss Year of Sail,

littlerhymes and I knew we wanted to give the Aubrey-Maturin series a try. But we approached it with some trepidation, as we have each separately attempted Aubrey-Maturin before and bombed out.

I don’t know the details of

littlerhymes’ first attempt, but I first tried it in the early 2000s, when I was a young teenager, after I read

sartorias’s post about the series. I struggled through chapter three, in which Stephen Maturin receives an incredibly technical tour of the ship’s* rigging, and then he and Jack Aubrey discuss the case of a seaman who is supposed to be court-martialed for committing sodomy on a goat (!). The combination defeated me utterly.

*The ship is not in fact a ship but actually a brig, another point that agonized my tiny teenage brain. “Aren’t they all boats?” I wailed, thus sending all seamen within hearing distance into a state of apoplexy.

I am happy to report that this time we made it past chapter three! Made it all the way to the end of the book, and indeed enjoyed it enough to plan to read the next one! I still have no idea what’s going on with the brig’s rigging or why there’s a type of boat called a snow, but as an older and wiser reader I simply drift past these technical details. Possibly over time it will all fall into place. By the end of Year of Sail I might be talking about topgallants with the best of them.

In the meantime, let me introduce our protagonists.

Jack Aubrey, master and commander of the brig Sophie, which is like being a captain but also, technically, not a captain. The anti-Hornblower. Where Hornblower is cool, logical, awkward, and good at math, Jack Aubrey is warm, loud, emotional, terrible at math, and actually also kind of awkward but in a way where he is almost always completely unaware of it. Witness the scene where he complains to Lieutenant Dillon that lots of new sailors of Irish Papists, remembers that Dillon is Irish and realizes with horror that Dillon might take this as an insult to the Irish, so tries to cover himself by doubling down on how much he hates Papists. JACK.

Stephen Maturin, who becomes the Sophie’s surgeon, even though technically he’s a physician which is WAY better than a surgeon. “We call this thing by a thing that is not its name” is a definite theme here. Part Irish, part Catalan, all naturalist. Loves birds, beasts, medicine, music, and Jack. “He’s so stupid (affectionate),” he explains to Lieutenant Dillon, whom he knew previously when they were both members of the United Irishmen, a non-revolutionary party that perhaps became revolutionary? I’m unclear about the details. Anyway, now quite a dangerous association to have in one’s past.

James Dillon, lieutenant of the Sophie. Not over Jack’s attempt to apologize for the Irish thing by emphasizing that it’s PAPISTS he has a problem with. All but accuses Jack of cowardice, which is almost as wrong-headed as accusing Stephen of not loving insects enough. Realizes Jack is not a coward, briefly likes Jack, then hates Jack again for reasons that are in fact unrelated to Jack.

( spoilers )

Queeney. A childhood friend of Jack’s who helps him get his appointment as captain of the Sophie. Not a protagonist, but I had to include her because I was so proud of recognizing her as a real life person: Hester Thrale’s eldest daughter! Evidence: Hester Thrale’s eldest daughter was called Queeney. Hester Thrale was a great friend of Samuel Johnson’s, and Queeney mentions the family friendship with Samuel Johnson. Jack goes on about how Queeney’s mom married a PAPIST, and indeed after Hester Thrale’s first husband died, she married an Italian Catholic music master named Piozzi, to the horror of Queeney and everyone else in England. (They were so horrified that she’s still usually referred to as Hester Thrale even though actually she should probably be called Hester Piozzi, since that’s the name she published under and the husband she actually loved.)

Both Queeney and the subplot about the United Irishmen are good examples of Patrick O’Brian’s total mastery of his period, as of course is literally everything he says about the rigging. Just casually tosses in Hester Thrale Piozzi’s daughter! A bit of tragic Irish backstory just for fun! Sometimes I do yearn for him to slow down just a bit and explain, but of course that would make the story far less immersive. We are perhaps getting a small taste of the landlubber’s experience of finding oneself at sea and having no idea what the heck is going on.

And so we sail onward. For now the plan is to bop back and forth between Hornblower and Aubrey-Maturin, but over time one series may win out. We shall see!

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calandrahunter

February 2026

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Page Summary

osprey_archer - Ghost Story: The Turn of the Screw
osprey_archer - Wednesday Reading Meme
denise in dw_news - Update on legal cases: one new victory! :) One new restriction :(
osprey_archer - Book Review: Does My Head Look Big in This?
sholio - John Dies at the End - Jason Pargin (series)
osprey_archer - Picture Book Monday: Only Opal
sholio - Festivids vidder reveals and vid nattering
osprey_archer - Book Review: Lieutenant Hornblower
oracne - Wednesday Reading on Thursday
osprey_archer - Revisiting my 2018 Reading List
sholio - Recent fic (mostly Babylon 5) on AO3
sholio - There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm (SCP Foundation)
osprey_archer - Wednesday Reading Meme
mark in dw_maintenance - Minor operations; testing new serving path
osprey_archer - Hornblower, episode 4
sholio - Drive by post
osprey_archer - Book Review: In the First Circle
oracne - An ancient desire fulfilled!
sholio - Festivids!
osprey_archer - Book Review: Master and Commander

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