One plays the violin and sleeps inside a fridge
And today, Ajit Pai and the FCC burnt net neutrality. I guess this is one of the nights we sit up in the hills and plan how to hit the Seleucids so hard, Alexander's teeth will hurt. (Also he'll be confused, since his relations with the Jews were cordial enough to rate a touching if fabulous scene in Josephus and an equally positive appearance in Lights (1984), but you can't go around leaving empires where people live and expect not to get socked sooner or later.)
Here are some whiplashily different things.
1. Courtesy of![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
brigdh: I had of course encountered "absquatulate" in the works of Barbara Hambly, but I had never heard of "dumbfungled" or "goshbustified" and I laughed like a loon.
2. I was asked on Facebook if I knew any weird or spooky traditions associated specifically with Hanukkah. I did not, and said that I associate the tradition of ghost stories around this time of year almost strictly with British Christmas, but I could offer a literary option: Eric Kimmel's Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins (1989), an original tale of Hershel of Ostropol which has so successfully passed into folklore that I have heard it retold in the wild. (I put it into a poem myself.) I wondered if it had antecedents in two stories in Isaac Bashevis Singer's Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories (1966) in which demons visit households on Hanukkah—frighteningly but harmlessly in "Grandmother's Tale," with the real possibility of death and destruction in "The Devil's Trick"—but I just found this recent interview with Kimmel and the influence he cites is Dickens. I guess ghost stories for Christmas were relevant after all. I am honestly delighted.
3. Courtesy of David Schraub: Courtney Milan's #metoo story. It has since made the Washington Post. Since it becomes very clear in the course of her post that romance novels are the career she adopted after she was traumatized out of her previous profession, I figured the strongest gesture of support I could make was to buy one. I remember eitherphi or skygiants saying something that made Unraveled (2011) sound attractive to me, so that's where I'm starting.
ETA: I am sneezing my face off and going to bed.
Here are some whiplashily different things.
1. Courtesy of
brigdh: I had of course encountered "absquatulate" in the works of Barbara Hambly, but I had never heard of "dumbfungled" or "goshbustified" and I laughed like a loon.2. I was asked on Facebook if I knew any weird or spooky traditions associated specifically with Hanukkah. I did not, and said that I associate the tradition of ghost stories around this time of year almost strictly with British Christmas, but I could offer a literary option: Eric Kimmel's Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins (1989), an original tale of Hershel of Ostropol which has so successfully passed into folklore that I have heard it retold in the wild. (I put it into a poem myself.) I wondered if it had antecedents in two stories in Isaac Bashevis Singer's Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories (1966) in which demons visit households on Hanukkah—frighteningly but harmlessly in "Grandmother's Tale," with the real possibility of death and destruction in "The Devil's Trick"—but I just found this recent interview with Kimmel and the influence he cites is Dickens. I guess ghost stories for Christmas were relevant after all. I am honestly delighted.
3. Courtesy of David Schraub: Courtney Milan's #metoo story. It has since made the Washington Post. Since it becomes very clear in the course of her post that romance novels are the career she adopted after she was traumatized out of her previous profession, I figured the strongest gesture of support I could make was to buy one. I remember either
phi or skygiants saying something that made Unraveled (2011) sound attractive to me, so that's where I'm starting.ETA: I am sneezing my face off and going to bed.
no subject
Her Brothers Sinister series is probably my favourite - late Victorian, which she enjoys as an era because she views it as having handy analogies to our time, in terms of sudden changes in available technology and social issues struggling to keep up.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy her, and if you enjoy Unravelled, I'd venture to say that you'll enjoy her later works even more. Her YA series is also a heap of fun.
no subject
People keep telling me this!
from memory, it was the book after that where she went the self-publishing route, because she was tired of publishers telling her that she couldn't have a hero who was a virgin (he wound up as the hero of the next book), or who had mental health issues, or any of the other fun things she has been doing since then.
The paperback edition hails from CreateSpace, so I think it must have been self-published. I don't know where it falls in her decision to do so, though.
Her Brothers Sinister series is probably my favourite - late Victorian, which she enjoys as an era because she views it as having handy analogies to our time, in terms of sudden changes in available technology and social issues struggling to keep up.
Data point duly noted.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy her, and if you enjoy Unravelled, I'd venture to say that you'll enjoy her later works even more. Her YA series is also a heap of fun.
Thank you! (I didn't even know she wrote YA.) I read almost no romance as a genre, so this is something of an experiment.
no subject
Also, I got her Un-books mixed up. I LOVE Unravelled, and yes, it was her first self-published one. It's Unveiled that I can take or leave.
I'll be interested to see what you make of Milan, coming to it as a non-romance reader. For me, one thing that is really fun is the way she subverts the tropes to make them more feminist, and I'm not sure how obvious that will be to someone who hasn't met those tropes in the wild...
And since we are all gushing about Milan on this thread, here's my two cents on why she is probably my favourite romance author. First, she has a real gift for comedy, but also for underlying emotional punch. Second, her work is overtly feminist, and her heroines are not afraid to be clever (or sciencey - Milan's science background shines through in a lot of her choices of plot, I think). And third, Milan is consciously inclusive in her writing – she has women of colour, trans heroines, bi and gay heroes - and this is always just part of their emotional landscape rather than The Big Issue That They Must Overcome, which I really like.
My top Milan picks would be The Suffragette Scandal (historical, with a suffragette journalist heroine, because I adore the blackmail / counter blackmail scene), Hold Me (contemporary new adult with a trans heroine who writes a blog I am desperate to read, because she gets the world of scientific research horrifyingly right, but also fixes part of it), and The Pursuit Of (a novella in Hamilton's Battalion, with a gay, mixed-race couple, and a hysterically funny subplot about cheese). But honestly, it's very hard to go wrong with her work.
OK, I shall stop procrastinating my baking and babbling endlessly on your blog now...
no subject
Awesome. That does appeal to me.
OK, I shall stop procrastinating my baking and babbling endlessly on your blog now...
You should definitely bake if you were planning to, but you don't have to stop talking about books you like!