cherith

This is my second time taking a December talking meme prompt and using it for a Friday open thread. Today's prompt comes from thatjustwontbreak and is: talk about your earliest experiences using the internet and how it felt to you.

( They looked towards the sun, and walked into the sky )

I imagine it won't be as ... so much as all that, but what about you? How do you define your first time using the internet, and what did it feel like?

Today's December talking meme prompt is from edwardianspinsteraunt and it is: places which have had the greatest impact on you as a person, or which you strongly associate with a particular period in your life.

I think it will surprise no one to discover that I'm someone who feels a lot of intense feelings about specific landscapes and places, so when I saw this prompt, I felt a) very enthusiastic and b) a bit daunted, as there are so many places I could talk about here! So I've decided — to keep things manageable — to limit this to one type of place per decade of my life.

( Cities and oceans )

Today's December talking meme prompt is from yarnofariadne, and it's a great one: favourite folktale or fairytale, and why.

I like folktales about crossing places, and moving between one state and another, and above all women transformed, and I feel a very intense set of feelings about the sea, so it probably surprises no one that my absolute favourite folktale of all is the story of the Selkie Bride, in all its variants.

It's a hard story, and a cruel story: at its heart it has such a monstrous violation — the selkie woman, trapped on land, in human form, and in marriage by a man who steals and hides her sealskin — and the resolution is cruel, too, since although the woman regains her freedom and her shapeshifting ability, she has to part with her land-born children as a consequence. (The touch in many variants of the story — that the woman's youngest child is the one to discover the hidden sealskin and innocently gives its existence and location away to the trapped mother — is just the final, brutal twist of the knife.)

(It feels gauche to link to my own fic here, but I've tried so many times to write stories that grasp at what it feels like for those children in the aftermath, standing on the shore, and my AO3 account has many variations on this theme, plus stories for other fandoms that are essentially 'woman has emotions triggered by, about, and near body of water.' It's my very, very favourite thing to write.)

What I love about this folktale in particular is how it's all about the relationship between people who live at the water's edge, and the sea that lives beside them, and about the way those watery tideline places have a sense of liminality and blurred boundaries, and that the beings of the sea, and the humans on land can sometimes cross over, in both directions. The sea sustains those coastal communities, but it can also be violent, unpredictable, and dangerous. It gives and takes, but remains fundamentally unknowable.

This week's prompt is my sneaky way of getting a two-for-one deal when it comes to Friday open threads plus December talking meme, and was suggested by morbane: talk about a book that changed the way you read books.

( My answer )

Do any of you have books that changed the way you read, for any reason?

This is a belated attempt to catch up on some book logging, and consists of stuff read while flying to, from, and within Australia, plus on some Australian train journeys. As most of the flights took place at night, I didn't read as much as I could have given the time available, so I feel this list is somewhat shorter than expected.

In any case, I read five books.

The first two were the latest to me in the Clorinda Cathcart series, Dramatick Rivalry and Domestick Disruptions. This series by LA Hall is written from the perspective of the journal entries of a comfortably well-off courtesan in 19th-century London, and the various aristocrats, wealthy businesspeople, intellectuals, scientists, playwrights, theatrical actors, Bow Street Runners, and other interesting fictional luminaries who end up in her circle. The books are written with a wryly observant tone, and each contains various high- and low-stakes challenges and conflicts that are cleverly resolved by the end. I find them extremely relaxing to read — cosy fiction is a hard sell for me, but this series works well in that regard, although I'm making my way through it quite slowly, as I find two books in succession is enough for a while.

In general, my brain focused better on nonfiction during long-haul flights, so I spent a lot of time reading Diary of an Invasion (Andrey Kurkov), which is what it says on the tin: the author's experiences in the first few months of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Kurkov is an accomplished Ukrainian author of both literary and historical detective fiction, but in those intense, frightening first few months of the full-scale war, he turned his talents to memoir, documenting his family's flight from Kyiv to the west of the country, when it felt as if the entire country and wider world held its breath, and every action was harnessed to survival, until the dawning realisation that Ukraine had withstood and pushed back against the first blow, but that what remained would be an almost unfathomably difficult military, diplomatic, economic and psychosocial marathon with no end in sight. I remember those times well: shock and outrage warring with wild hope and optimism, typified by this Onuka song. Kurkov has since followed these initial reactions with a memoir about the long years of the ongoing war, which I will certainly be seeking out.

From history to historical fiction, with Cecily (Annie Garthwaite), the first in a series of novels about the Wars of the Roses from the perspective of Yorkist matriarch Cecily Neville. This book follows Cecily from the early years of her marriage, her years manoeuvring from behind the scenes to further her husband's political ambitions, his battlefield defeat and execution, and the dawn of a new day with Cecily's eldest son Edward on the throne. I'm pretty familiar with this period of history as depicted in popular fiction, and Cecily didn't really bring anything new to the party, but I enjoyed it all the same. In terms of vibe, it's essentially Hilary Mantel meets Sharon Kay Penman: lyrical writing that luxuriates in the interiority of its protagonist's mind, and uncritically Yorkist partisanship. The term grates, but Cecily Neville really is Garthwaite's precious blorbo who can do no wrong: the most politically savvy, the one whose read on every situation is always right, whose only misfortune is to live in a time in which those skills and that intelligence must instead be harnessed to advance the cause of the men in her life, rather than on her own behalf.

Finally, I picked up Kate Elliott's latest epic fantasy doorstopper: The Witch Road, the first of a secondary world duology in which Elen, a low-ranking courier at the edge of a vast empire is suddenly thrust into an unwanted spotlight when she is required to accompany an imperial prince and his retinue on a perilous journey. Elen and her travelling companions contend with challenges both political and supernatural, in a sweeping road trip peopled with a fantastic cast of characters. Kate Elliott's considerable strengths as a writer: the meticulous world-building that gives us a fictional world that feels at once three-dimensional and lived-in, and her devastatingly perceptive depiction of the tensions inherent in navigating profoundly power-imbalanced relationships (on a national, communal, and interpersonal level) are on full display here, and I enjoyed this almost as much as I enjoyed my favourite of her series, the Crossroads trilogy.

That's it for reading so far, although I did trudge through the rain to pick up a library book today, so I may have more to say about books tomorrow. But for now, I'll draw this post to a close.