You should see us in the shade

[sovay]

Like everyone else, my niece has been having a tough time lately, so I ordered her a plush Tiktaalik from the Paleontological Research Institution, makers of the Paleozoic Pals. It arrived this afternoon ahead of schedule—all hail the USPS, dammit—and my mother sent me the visual evidence in the form of photos and a few brief seconds of my niece on her way to bed with a 37-million-year-old fishapod, saying, "Thank you," while she makes its finny tail wave gently. It has an even sweeter face in person than on the website.



1. thisbluespirit has made an excellent quantity of gifs for Count Dracula (1977), which I now wish I were rewatching. I can't believe I had managed to forget that its Renfield and Mina actually kiss.

2. Back sometime before the Cambrian radiation, I had ordered Emily Tesh's Silver in the Wood (2019) from Porter Square Books; then the state shut down and my friendly local independent bookstore with it. They finally just delivered the book to me this week and I very much enjoyed its charming, Victorian-ish, old weird m/m (I am tempted to write m/tree) romance; it suffered a little from the difficulty I am having lately with a lot of published novellas, namely that I would have enjoyed them even more as novels, but it contained elements reminding me by turns of Robert Holdstock, Peter S. Beagle, Greer Gilman, and (mostly because I can't see a quartered circle in a context of British myth without thinking of) Susan Cooper, and still felt like itself. I am entertained that one of the characters was exactly the sort of person whom I normally like best and then I liked his mother even better. I am fascinated that it is now possible to jump from AO3 to Tor. The sequel coming out this summer is called Drowned Country, so of course I've preordered it.

3. I can't wait for there to be used book stores again so that I can hunt for my own copy of the published script of Aki Kaurismäki's I Hired a Contract Killer (1990). Actually, I can wait as long as it takes to be safe, because I have a lot of opinions about that.

Comments

[sovay]

Aww, I can think of no better plushy companion than an intrepid fishapod! It is wonderful!

I hoped she would like it—it was a surprise—and she did. She has a trilobite and a buzzsaw shark already. But a Tiktaalik just seemed like a good thing to have right now.

And as for Silver in the Wood reminding you of Susan Cooper, I have to do a double take every time I see that title mentioned and think hard to understand we're not talking about Silver on the Tree.

Understandable! And I would be surprised in the extreme if the author hadn't read the books.

Not that I remember very much [read: anything, really--the only book I remember in the series is The Dark is Rising].

The sequence holds up. There's one element of the ending I have never liked and fortunately genarti wrote the fix-it, but otherwise I've always been able to return to it, and there's always been something to catch each time around.

But I do love the title, and I love the title of the sequel even more!

I can't speak to the sequel yet, but I do think you would like the book.