One plays the violin and sleeps inside a fridge

[sovay]

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 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.

Comments

[thawrecka]

re Courtney Milan, it's probably hard to go wrong anywhere in her back catalogue (I haven't read much of it, because I'm not into historical romances), but if you're at all interested in contemporaries, I thought Trade Me (2015) was brilliant.

[17catherines]

Oh, Courtney Milan is fantastic! Unraveled is probably my least favourite book of hers, I'd have to say - 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.

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.

[cmcmck]

IIRC, 'absquatulate' also gets into Wells's 'History of Mr Polly' which is an old, old favourite of mine.

[muccamukk]

I'd rec the Brother's Sinister series by Milan, I read the Un--- series first and wasn't that impressed but ADORED most of the more recent self-pubbed one. I think it starts with The Governess Affair. The Heiress Effect is my favourite.

[larryhammer]

Janni has a Hanukkah ghost story out somewhere -- one of the Maccabees haunting a boy with divorced parents. I forget the name of the anthology.

[pameladean]

Your first paragraph made me so happy. Not the news, of course, but I'd heard that already. But the rest of it. Confused Alexander just cracked me up.
P.

[brigdh]

I love Courtney Milan! Her books, even the self-published ones, do follow romance genre conventions, which means there are certain tropes which may or may not appeal to you. Just fyi. I've fairly recently become a fan of the romance genre myself, but I know there are certain things about it that I only tolerate grudgingly and other people – quite fairly! – never adjust to.

I'll throw in another vote for her Brothers Sinister series (The Governess Affair, the first in the series, is a short novella and has a really interesting plot about the heroine recovering from rape – the way the sex scene with the hero was handled in particular impressed me. I also really liked The Heiress Effect, in which the heroine has a younger sister suffering from epilepsy and horrifying medical treatments of the 1800s are a major part of the plot. The sister herself gets a very cute subplot romance with an Indian law student. The Suffragette Scandal, starring a heroine who runs a feminist newspaper and a hero who's a conman was also very good). But I want to also mention Milan's newest series, The Worth Saga. There's only one book out yet (plus a short, fairly disconnected novella), but it appears that a major plot, other than the romances, is going to be the Opium Wars and a criticism of British Imperialism, in a historical AU in which things go a bit better for the Chinese. I've been really excited for her to write more books in this series, so I can see where she goes with such a neat idea.

[skygiants]

Oh good, of all the Milans, Unravelled is the one I would be most likely to rec to you, specifically.

[selkie]

Also, you should read K.J. Charles. All the K.J. Charles you can find. Her f/f is weaksauce compared to her m/m. but her m/m is inclusive and goes all the places and occasionally saunters into coffee toffee chip instead of vanilla, and I am in short JEALOUS, but yes. And if you do want to approach Milan or K.J. Charles digitally, you can borrow from me through the Kindle app. As N says, "It's free because we own it."