ermingarden | Reading

This week I’m doing Wednesday Reading Meme a day early, as tomorrow is MY BIRTHDAY and I will therefore be frolicking through birthday festivities.

Books I Quit Reading

Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, which I’ve meant to read for ages because it’s been recced to hell and back. It’s an excellent example of literary fiction, which unfortunately means it’s reminding me why I don’t read much modern literary fiction, which is that I find it depressing. Olive is just so mean?? She’s so contemptuous to her husband in chapter one that I was actually rooting for him to ditch her and run away with his pharmacy clerk, and I never root for male characters to leave their wives.

I read a few more chapters, but then I realized I was actively dreading picking it up again, and life is simply too short.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Nothing this week! The birthday festivities have already begun, and I spent the weekend in Bloomington, meeting a friend’s new baby and having cocktails at a speakeasy, where we had the best seats in the house watching the bartender make the drinks. He had a wonderful contraption for blowing a giant smoke-filled bubble over a drink, which clung to the rim of the glass until you popped it, and then the smoke wisped away in the dimness of the bar.

What I’m Reading Now

Hilary McKay’s The Time of Green Magic, which is a magical house children’s fantasy, and I LOVE a magical house children’s fantasy. Gorgeous. The heroine is already slipping into the books she reads, tasting the sea salt on her lips. Excited to report back.

What I Plan to Read Next

Blue Balliett’s Out of the Wild Night.

dr_zook

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troisoiseaux

Following a conversation with

sovay about formative mermaid media, spent the evening re-reading The Tail of Emily Windsnap by Liz Kessler - a 2003 middle-grade novel about a girl who discovers she can turn into a mermaid - to see how it holds up as a recommendation for a young reader 20+ years (oof) later. Emily's mermaid adventures include but are not limited to befriending another tweenage mermaid, exploring a sunken ship, and discovering that her long-lost father is a merman and sneaking into the underwater prison (!) where he's been languishing for the past 12 years (!!) for breaking the law against fraternization with humans (!!!). (Also, that her mom's memory of their relationship was wiped (!!!!) and their family friend the creepy lighthouse keeper has been an agent for the anti-human-fraternization king of the merfolk the whole time. (!!!!!)) So, yeah, the plot is kind of bananas, but it's charming and, most importantly, the descriptions of how cool it would be to swim in the ocean as a mermaid and explore kelp forests and sunken ships, etc., are great. Verdict: it holds up! I don't think I'd noticed as a kid how many of the throwaway minor (human) characters had punny or otherwise nautical names like "Sandra Castle" and "Mrs. Brig"; I definitely had never realized that the author is British and therefore the book presumably takes place in England rather than, like, Florida (as I'd pictured as a kid) or Maine (as I imagined it this time).

Made some progress in the Dune audiobook over the weekend; I'm through Book One (of three). Unfortunately, so far Book Two has mostly involved Paul being rude about his mom not being able to follow along with whatever Space Jesus logic-connections-as-revelation thing he has going on, which I'm finding less interesting than the Space Medici politics and backstabbing of the first third.

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We're having to rebuild the search server again (previously, previously). It will take a few days to reindex all the content.

Meanwhile search services should be running, but probably returning no results or incomplete results for most queries.

pauraque

Ox-eye Daisy.

( more flowers [7 photos] )

( birds [3 photos] )

( bugs [4 photos] )

( miscellaneous [4 photos] )

oracne

My schedule is finalized! I didn't list participants in case there were changes.

Who will I see at Readercon next month?

The Works of P. Djèlí Clark

Salon I/J Friday, July 18, 2025, 1:00 PM EDT

Our Guest of Honor P. Djèlí Clark rounded out his first decade as a published author with a Nebula and a Locus for his fantasy police procedural novel, The Master of Djinn, and both those awards plus a British Fantasy Award for his monster-hunting novella Ring Shout. His short story "How to Raise a Kraken in Your Bathtub" is short-listed for the Hugo this year. As a History professor at University of Connecticut, he investigates the pathways leading from West African storyteller/poets (griots, a.k.a. djèlí) to the American abolitionist movement. Help us celebrate the works of our honored guest!

The Purposes of Memorable Insults in Sci-Fi and Fantasy

Salon I/J Friday, July 18, 2025, 5:00 PM EDT

Some of the most quotable lines in science fiction and fantasy are zingers. Wit can do a lot to build a character, a world, and a universe, and has the ability to either support or undermine reader expectations. This panel aims to explore and elaborate on the use of wit—and especially takedowns—in literature, exposing how a verbal jab can serve as more than just a punchline.

Moving from Traditional Publishing to Self-Publishing [I'm moderating this one]

Salon G/H Friday, July 18, 2025, 7:00 PM EDT

It's becoming increasingly common to hear of authors whose self-published work was so successful that they were picked up by a traditional publisher. But what of the authors who have gone the other way, by turning their backs on traditional publishing and going into self-publishing? Panelists will survey the varying reasons for making this transition, how authors have navigated it, and what this might say about the state of publishing overall.

Kaffeeklatsch: Victoria Janssen

Suite 830 Friday, July 18, 2025, 8:00 PM EDT

Meet the Pros(e) party

Salon F Friday, July 18, 2025, 10:15 PM EDT

Program participants are assigned to tables with a roughly equal number of conferencegoers and other participants, and then table placements are scrambled at regular intervals so that everyone gets to meet a new set of people in a small-group setting. Think of it as a low-key sort of speed dating where you need never be the sole focus of anyone's attention, and the goal is just to get to know some cool Readerconnish people. Please note that this event will include a bar and is mask-optional, unlike most other programming.

The Works of Cecilia Tan [I'm moderating this one]

Salon I/J Saturday, July 19, 2025, 12:00 PM EDT

Our Guest of Honor, Cecilia Tan, has a publication history that spans Asimov's, Absolute Magnitude, Ms. Magazine, Penthouse, and Best American Erotica, among others. Writer and editor of science fiction and fantasy, especially as they intersect with erotica and romance, she is also the founder of Circlet Press, an independent publisher that specializes in speculative erotica. Her own writing earned a Lifetime Achievement for Erotica in 2014 from Romantic Times magazine. She also contributes to America's other pastime, baseball, in her role as Publications Director for the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR). Come hear our panel discuss Cecilia's many talents and accomplishments.

Un-Kafkaesque Bureaucracies [I'm moderating this one]

Salon I/J Saturday, July 19, 2025, 7:00 PM EDT

In fiction, bureaucracies are generally depicted as evil in its most banal form, yet many of the actual bureaucracies that shape our lives exist to protect us from corporate greed. How can—and should—we tell other stories about bureaucrats and bureaucracies, particularly as the U.S. stands on the precipice of disastrous deregulation? And might fantasies of bureaucracy (such Addison's The Goblin Emperor and Goddard's The Hands of the Emperor) be the next cozy subgenre?

The Endless Appetite for Fanfiction

Create / Collaborate Saturday, July 19, 2025, 8:00 PM EDT

In an article of the same name (https://www.fansplaining.com/articles/endless-appetite-fanfiction), Elizabeth Minkel discussed how "2024 was the year [fanfic] truly broke containment—everyone seemed to want a piece of the fanfiction pie, leaving fic authors themselves besieged on all sides." Attempts to steal and monetize fanfic proliferated, as did reviews treating living authors as distant and unreachable. What do these trends say about larger changes in attitudes toward stories and creators? How can fans of all kinds nurture supportive connections to authors?

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dreamwars

Welcome to your weekly free-for-all chat post. Anything SW-related is fair game.

Have fun!

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shirebound

I attended the Celebration of Life for

lbilover yesterday, and it was lovely. She passed on November 24, 2024. It was held in the library in northern New Jersey at which she worked for many years, and there were 40-50 relatives, friends, and co-workers there from all over. Folks from her beloved Deerhound community also came, as did students from local schools who met Ellen when she brought whippet Winston -- “Fastest Dog in the USA 2023” -- to meet them. Ellen’s passions were so numerous – nature photography, sighthounds, education, workers’ rights (she was a proud President of her Library Union), hiking, bird watching, training and showing dogs, and of course writing. Her sister Lisa presented a slideshow of Ellen’s life, accompanied by music from “The Fellowship of the Ring” in honor of her longtime passion for Tolkien and her many extraordinary stories and friends around the world. Several of us in the audience, as well as folks watching the service via Zoom, spoke about their love and respect for Ellen. I spoke about our tight-knit fanfiction community, as well as my delight and astonishment when meeting her gentle Deerhound Gandalf for the first time – he was so tall he looked me right in the eyes.

I brought my Rena, and there were four other doggies in attendance including Ellen’s whippets Kivrin and Clementine, who were adopted by loving families. Her Winston and Deerhound Wren had also found good homes, as had tortoises Fred and Ginger.

When the service was over, we gathered at tables or around a buffet area to talk talk talk more about Ellen and what she meant to us. I especially enjoyed my conversation with a lady who had read Bilbo’s moving poem “I Sit Beside the Fire and Think” during the service. I always get emotional reading it myself, and hearing it read this way created a wash of emotions.

I enjoyed Rena’s companionship on the way home (about an hour’s drive). :)

Ellen’s nephew said he’d send out a notice if he’s able to get the Zoom presentation online, so if he does I’ll let folks know how to access it.

Namárië, dear Ellen!

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Current Mood: hot
Current Location: somewhere
Current Music: Patrick Shiroishi & Arturo Ibarra - projection 8

troisoiseaux

I managed to swing a last-minute day trip to NYC to see Dead Outlaw yesterday after it was suddenly announced (last weekend) that the show was closing early (this weekend), making this the second time in six months I've caught one of the last performances of an unfairly short-lived folk-rock musical at the Longacre Theater that's more or less based off of a real event involving weird things happening to a corpse. (The other was Swept Away; seriously, is the Longacre cursed or something?!) (ETA: ...apparently yes??)

Dead Outlaw is based on the weirder-than-fiction true story of Elmer McCurdy, a train robber killed in a 1911 shootout whose preserved corpse ended up being displayed as part of various carnival sideshows and movie sets throughout the 1920s-40s, until eventually rediscovered in the funhouse of a California amusement park in the 1970s. (Yes, really.) The musical spends approximately equal time on McCurdy's life - a childhood unmoored by a family revelation, a teenage descent into hooliganism and attempt to restart out west, a near-engagement to a nice girl until he self-sabotages, a short and wildly unsuccessful career as an outlaw - and afterlife, which the musical fills with sort of one-song vignettes: the Oklahoma coroner and subsequent series of carnies who displayed McCurdy's body to make a quick buck; the Cherokee runner Andy Payne, who won the 1928 Trans-America Footrace at which McCurdy was displayed as part of the sideshow (only a tenuous connection, but such a cool story I see why they included it); the daughter of a movie director who purchased McCurdy as a film prop, who treats him as a sort of confidant; the 1970s Los Angeles County coroner with a star-studded "client" list.

This show slapped unbelievably hard, as the kids say. I loved the format! It wasn't quite a full-on "concert with a plot" a la SIX, but had an on-stage band that was kind of the focal center— literally, in that the main set piece was this sort of movable, patio-style stage where the band played while the action/narrative scenes played out around and occasionally on top of it, as narrated by the band's frontman; a friend who saw the show before I did described it as "feeling like you were watching a podcast." Some - most? - of the characters' songs are staged... diegetically, as it were, but sometimes they'd join the band "on stage"(-within-a-stage) and take over the frontman's microphone, such as Elmer McCurdy's rock-star-tantrum crash-out ("Killed A Man in Maine", which the narrator informed us afterwards is probably not even true), or more poignantly, as McCurdy's girlfriend's song ("A Stranger") shifts from the in-story action/conversation - identifying his body - to imagining the future they could have had together when she steps up to the microphone alongside the band. Other than Andrew Durand as Elmer McCurdy - whose athleticism in the first half of the show and ability to remain disconcertingly corpse-still in the second half were equally impressive - everyone in the cast played a bunch of different characters; even the narrator doubled as the outlaw who recruited McCurdy, thinking that he was an explosives expert. (He... was not.) The music was actually not as consistently folk-rock as I had expected from the couple of songs I'd heard beforehand— particularly in the second half, with its rotating cast of one-off characters, the styles ranged from more typical Broadway numbers to barbershop quartet vibes (the carnival promoters who buy McCurdy off the first coroner, claiming to be his brothers) to nightclub-crooner jazz (the LA coroner). It was also SO clever and SO funny— the set-up and payoff of the humor was just brilliant. (In particular, utilizing the under-tapped comedic power of letting the audience stew for a bit: at one point, the narrator is like "and then Elmer was stuck in a closet for 20 years" and then there's a solid minute or two of just... a completely dark stage except for a spotlight on Andrew Durand's motionless face, the audience stifling giggles like elementary schoolers told to behave at an assembly.) Very glad I saw this!!

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osprey_archer

Although I got Sarah Chihaya’s Bibliophobia: A Memoir for the book talk, in fact it’s a mental illness memoir with some books in. Chihaya is pondering about the stories we tell ourselves - in her case, her certainty that her story would end in suicide, and the concurrent certainty that this could only be averted if she found the exact right book to save her.

Also about her relationship to her Japanese-American identity, her feeling that as a person with ancestors who were in Japan during World War II she doesn’t really belong in the Asian-American community (because of the whole bit where her ancestors were brutally invading other Asian countries), the effect of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye on her own sense of racial identity, A. S. Byatt’s Possession as a book that shaped her understanding of what it means for “reader” to be a load-bearing identity, the fact that she doesn’t usually relate to characters in the way that many readers do as the point of a book, for her, is not to see yourself in it but to become an invisible eye experiencing things without having to be perceived…

Until she realizes upon rereading The Last Samurai that she actually does identify with one of the characters in the story, and maybe that was why she found herself able to read this particular book after her hospitalization, when for a time she found it impossible to read anything. Not just in a “I’m psychologically blocked on reading” kind of way, but in the sense that the text generally appeared to be swimming.

And it’s about the writing of books, the fact that what precipitated her long-awaited hospitalization (because she’d been waiting for this to happen for years) was, in part, her failure to write the book that she needed to write to get tenure. She didn’t write it and didn’t write it and then she lost the tenure-track position and therefore the need to write it and then wrote this book instead.

And she ponders: does that make this book the one that saved her? Or was it unrealistic all along to expect any one book to bear so much weight?

So, although it wasn’t quite what I was expecting, an interesting read for sure.

extrapenguin

I recently got Pertti Nieminen's compilation of translations Veden hohde, vuorten värit, with a bunch of translations from the Book of Poetry (詩經 Shi Jing) onwards, and have been slowly making my way through it. (Out of print, so I got it via antikvaari.fi and ended up paying more for postage than the actual book lol. Joys of living abroad.) This was for the most part an exercise in seeing whether Chinese poetry works better translated into Finnish than into English, given that all three poetic traditions have different defaults of what is considered poetic. Anyway, the short answer is "yes". I picked a few poems I liked from the Shi Jing to illustrate the differences. The text itself is available on ctext, along with out of copyright 1800s translations by James Legge, to which I shall compare.

(My largest annoyance with the book so far: the transliteration chosen is, uh, not pinyin, so I'm here like "who tf is Su T'ung-po" whenever a name comes up. My copy already has a random inscription on the front so I might add a pinyin gloss to the authors' names with pencil at some point.)

( intenseish poetry discussion )

I might do some similar comparisons of the Tang poets and then, later on, other sections – I think there must be enough famous Ming poets that one of them has also been translated into English, and at the very least I can talk about Mao Zedong's stuff for the Republic/People's Republic section.

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starspray

Fandom: Tolkien
Rating: T
Characters: Maglor, Elrond, Maedhros, various others
Warnings: References to torture and trauma
Summary: Maglor keeps a promise, and comes to Valinor, only to find the ghosts he thought he'd left behind are alive and waiting for him.
Note: This fic is a sequel to Clear Pebbles of the Rain, which is itself a sequel to Unhappy Into Woe.

Prologue / Previous Chapter

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Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Luck - American Authors

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Non-Actionable Puffery

Reading

Wednesday Reading Meme on Tuesday

the use of 'Laufeyson' is unlocking something (pleasant) in my brain

NU: Carnival Flash Fic Fest

Recent reading

Rebuilding journal search again

pictures for June

Readercon 2025 Schedule

Chat corner: Free-for-all

No True Crossover

For friends of lbilover

Merry Pretty Cure & Tokusatsu Prompt Christmas in July!! 🎄🎉🎁💝🍰

Theater review: Dead Outlaw

Creative Jam

July Bingo Fest

Book Review: Bibliophobia

Poetry in translation: Chinese to Finnish

Let's count down to Pokémon Legends Z-A!

CLASSIC FILM EXCHANGE: 2025 schedule

Collecting prompts for a X-Men unconventional pairings Fic Meme/Drabble-a-Thon

High in the Clean Blue Air - Chapter Forty

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