Seven Seas gauging interest in baihe novels!
Saturday, July 12th, 2025 15:15![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aurumcalendula posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
cnovelsSeven Seas gauging interest in baihe novels
Saturday, July 12th, 2025 14:58aurumcalendula posting in baihe_media(no subject)
Saturday, July 12th, 2025 11:29skygiantsThis is another one that's been on my list for years -- specifically, since I read Between Silk and Cyanide, as cryptography wunderkind Leo Marks chronicling the desperate heroism and impossible failures of the SOE is of course the son of the owner of Marks & Co., the bookstore featuring in 84, Charing Cross Road, because the whole of England contains approximately fifteen people tops.
84, Charing Cross Road collects the correspondence between jobbing writer Helene Hanff -- who started ordering various idiosyncratic books at Marks & Co. in 1949 -- and the various bookstore employees, primarily but not exclusively chief buyer Frank Doel. Not only does Hanff has strong and funny opinions about the books she wants to read and the editions she's being sent, she also spends much of the late forties and early fifties expressing her appreciation by sending parcels of rationed items to the store employees. A friendship develops, and the store employees enthusiastically invite Hanff to visit them in England, but there always seems to be something that comes up to prevent it. Hanff gets and loses jobs, and some of the staff move on. Rationing ends, and Hanff doesn't send so many parcels, but keeps buying books. Twenty years go by like this.
Since 84, Charing Cross Road was a bestseller in 1970 and subsequently multiply adapted to stage and screen, and Between Silk and Cyanide did not receive publication permission until 1998, I think most people familiar with these two books have read them in the reverse order that I did. I think it did make sort of a difference to feel the shadow of Between Silk and Cyanide hanging over this charming correspondence -- not for the worse, as an experience, just certain elements emphasized. Something about the strength and fragility of a letter or a telegram as a thread to connect people, and how much of a story it does and doesn't tell.
As a sidenote, in looking up specific publication dates I have also learned by way of Wikipedia that there is apparently a Chinese romcom about two people who both independently read 84, Charing Cross Road, decide that the book has ruined their lives for reasons that are obscure to me in the Wikipedia summary, write angry letters to the address 84 Charing Cross Road, and then get matchmade by the man who lives there now. Extremely funny and I kind of do want to watch it.
Weekly Chat
Saturday, July 12th, 2025 13:55dancing_serpent posting in c_entWhatever it is, talk to us about it here. Tell us what you liked or didn't like, and if you want to talk about spoilery things, please hide them under either of these codes:
or
some good things
Friday, July 11th, 2025 23:56kaberett- The fan. Got house down to Actually Matching Outside Air Temperature in finite time; set up to experiment with running it in the bedroom overnight. (It has been Too Warm For Cuddles, which is Bad.)
- Made the nonsense lavender-and-honey Welsh cakes for breakfast. I was sure I had picked way too much lavender but it actually fit in the measuring spoon pretty much perfectly, and wound up being noticeable but not Overwhelming.
- New Murderbot novelette! I have not launched right into reading it because I am just about a quarter of the way through a System Collapse reread (and fascinated by how little of it I remember, though I concede I've read it many fewer times than All Systems Red...) so I'm going to finish that first. Which I am not expecting to take me very long.
- Having spent a bunch of time poking around Wikipedia, I've gone back to Nerve and Muscle and, now almost two whole pages in, it is making significantly more sense than my previous attempt. (I have not yet started making myself notes on neuroanatomy but I am definitely considering it.)
- It is The Time Of Year when strawberries are relatively cheap, so after dinner we wandered down the hill in service of me getting my steps, and us getting some exposure to The Breeze, and acquiring me a giant box of strawberries, and also picking up Ice Lollies to consume on the way back up.
- Realised I could stick a jug of water in the fridge. This has made hydrating significantly easier. (I do not do well at drinking water that isn't Cold, and the magic ice dispenser on our freezer is currently out of action.)
- The online Oxfam shop. Shortly to be on their way to me: a pair of cargo shorts; two pairs of linen cargo trousers; a book I previously had out from the library but which I wanted to have a reference copy of at least briefly for writing purposes.
The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai
Friday, July 11th, 2025 09:18rigormorphisI finished The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai last night. It was a wonderful, wonderful book, and a devastating one. I think kitschlet made this same observation on Mastodon when she posted about it recently (and thank you, Kitsch, for putting it on my radar!), but it's wild that the last Makkai I read was just, like, a murder mystery, and this one is a multi-timeline saga about the generational effects of catastrophes like the AIDS crisis and also WWI and the Spanish flu. Like, okay. Did not know girlfriend had the range! It makes me want to revisit the only other Makkai I've read—The Hundred-Year House, which I remember precisely about nothing about†—and see what I think of it now.
The characters in The Great Believers felt incredibly human; one of the protagonists, Yale, genuinely came to feel like a real person that I knew. Based on the acknowledgments at the end of the book, Makkai interviewed tons of people who lived through Chicago's AIDS crisis and were willing to tell her about some of their most difficult memories, and the care she put into honouring those stories shows. The book was somehow both a page-turner—I needed to know what happened next—and increasingly difficult to read as it went on because I knew characters were going to die and I did not want to see them die. That's a testament, I think, to how well Makkai executed her story that was in part about knowing your friends are going to die and wanting to freeze time to keep from ever having to see it happen.
†This is a lie. For some reason, I remember the detail that one of the characters in Hundred-Year House ghostwrote for a tween book series in the vein of Baby-Sitter's Club and got fired because he introduced an eating disorder storyline without permission. I remember literally nothing beyond that, though, including how I felt about the book.
always rooting for the anti-hero
Friday, July 11th, 2025 10:28arundels( all about the anti-hero )
( and all about the ship )
(no subject)
Thursday, July 10th, 2025 23:33skygiantsI somehow have spent most of my life under the impression that I had already read The Pushcart War, until the plot was actually described to me, at which point it became clear that I'd either read some other Pushcart or some other War but these actual valiant war heroes were actually brand new to me.
The book is science fiction, of a sort, originally published in 1964 and set in 1976 -- Wikipedia tells me that every reprint has moved the date forward to make sure it stays in the future, which I think is very charming -- and purporting to be a work of history for young readers explaining the conflict between Large Truck Corporations and Pugnacious Pushcart Peddlers over the course of one New York City summer. It's a punchy, defiant little book about corporate interest, collective action, and civil disobedience; there's one chapter in particular in which the leaders of the truck companies meet to discuss their master plan of getting everything but trucks off the streets of New York entirely where the metaphor is Quite Dark and Usefully Unsubtle. Also contains charming illustrations! A good read at any time and I'm glad to have finally experienced it.
today's window into another world
Thursday, July 10th, 2025 22:39kaberett
(I am continuing to think a lot about sensory systems; today I have mostly been discovering how many of the things I thought I half-remembered about nerves are wrong.)
Reas-in-Progress Wednesday
Thursday, July 10th, 2025 10:33geraineon posting in cnovelsFor spoilers:
<details><summary>insert summary</summary>Your spoilers goes here</details>
<b>Highlight for spoilers!*</b><span style="background-color: #FFFFFF; color: #FFFFFF">Your spoilers goes here.</span>*
(no subject)
Wednesday, July 9th, 2025 19:20skygiantskate_nepveu started doing a real-time readalong for Steven Brust & Emma Bull's epistolary novel Freedom and Necessity in 2023, I read just enough of Kate's posts to realize that this was a book that I probably wanted to read for myself and then stopped clicking on the cut-text links. Now, several years later, I have finally done so!Freedom and Necessity kicks off in 1849, with British gentleman James Cobham politely writing to his favorite cousin Richard to explain he has just learned that everybody thinks he is dead, he does not remember the last two months or indeed anything since the last party the two of them attended together, he is pretending to be a groom at the stables that found him, and would Richard mind telling him whether he thinks he ought to go on pretending to be dead and doing a little light investigation on his behalf into wtf is going on?
We soon learn that a.) James has been involved in something mysterious and political; b.) Richard thinks that James ought to be more worried about something differently mysterious and supernatural; c.) both Richard and James have a lot of extremely verbose opinions about the exciting new topic of Hegelian logic; and d.) James and Richard are both in respective Its Complicateds with two more cousins, Susan and Kitty, and at this point Susan and Kitty kick in with a correspondence of their own as Susan decides to exorcise her grief about the [fake] death of the cousin she Definitely Was Not In Love With by investigating why James kept disappearing for months at a time before he died.
By a few chapters in, I was describing it to
genarti as 'Sorcery and Cecelia if you really muscled it up with nineteenth century radical philosophy' and having a wonderful time. Then I got a few more chapters in and learned more about WTF indeed was up with James and texted Kate like 'WAIT IS THIS A LYMONDALIKE?' to which she responded 'I thought it was obvious!' And I was still having a wonderful time, and continued doing so all through, but could not stop myself from bursting into laughter every time the narrative lovingly described James' pale and delicate-looking yet surprisingly athletic figure or his venomous light voice etc. etc. ( mid-book spoilers )
Anyway, if you've read a Lymond, you know that there's often One Worthy Man in a Lymond book who is genuinely wise and can penetrate Lymond's self-loathing to gently explain to him that he should use his many poisoned gifts for the better. Freedom and Necessity dares to ask the question: what if that man? were Dreamy Friedrich Engels. Which is, frankly, an amazing choice.
Now even as I write this, I know that
genarti is glaring at me for the fact that I am allowing Francis Crawford of Lymond to take over this booklog just as the spectre of Francis Crawford of Lymond takes over any book in which he appears -- and I do think that James takes over the book a bit more from Richard and Kitty than I would strictly like (I love Kitty and her cheerful opium visions and her endless run-on sentences as she staunchly holds down the home front). But to give Brust and Bull their credit, Susan staunchly holds her own as co-protagonist in agency, page space and character development despite the fact that James is pulling all the book's actual plot (revolutionary politics chaotically colliding with Gothic occult family drama) around after him like a dramatic black cloak. And what about the radical politics, anyway? Brust and Bull have absolutely done their reading and research, and I very much enjoy and appreciate the point of view that they're writing from. I do think it's quite funny when Engels is like "James, your first duty is to your class," and James is like "well, I am a British aristocrat, so that's depressing," and Engels is like "you don't have to be! you can just decide to be of the proletariat! any day you can decide that! and then your first duty will be to the proletariat!" which like .... not that you can't decide to be in solidarity with the working class ..... but this is sort of a telling stance in an epistolary novel that does not actually center a single working-class POV. How pleasant to keep writing exclusively about verbose and erudite members of the British gentry who have conveniently chosen to be of the proletariat! James does of course have working-class comrades, and he respects them very much, and is tremendously angsty about their off-page deaths. So it goes.
On the other hand, at this present moment, I honestly found it quite comforting to be reading a political adventure novel set in 1849, in the crashing reactionary aftermath to the various revolutions of 1848. One of the major political themes of the book is concerned with how to keep on going through the low point -- how to keep on working and believing for the better future in the long term, even while knowing that unfortunately it hasn't come yet and given the givens probably won't for some time. Acknowledging the low point and the long game is a challenging thing for fiction to do, and I appreciate it a lot when I see it. I'd like to see more of it.
today I have mostly been at the plot
Wednesday, July 9th, 2025 23:58kaberettI had a first-thing physio appointment, so I dragged myself over to the hospital for that and then nestled down in my Surrounded By Green and... mostly read Murderbot, with occasional fruit harvest and weeding.
(I have also had lots of opportunities to practise self-compassion, both in re the number of things I did not manage to harvest before they went over and in terms of having realised within the last half hour or so that one of my pens has vanished from all of the bags it was nominally in; I hope that if I go and poke around the table etc tomorrow it will rematerialise...)
The OTW is Recruiting for Fanlore Social Media & Outreach Volunteers, Policy & Abuse Volunte
Wednesday, July 9th, 2025 13:07![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
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Are you interested in social media, community management or outreach? Or would you like to assist AO3 users by resolving complaints? Do you want to create videos and connect with fellow fans on TikTok? The Organization for Transformative Works is recruiting!
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