it's a magical world

CHRISTMAS CAME EARLY THIS YEAR

By which I mean Yuletide, by which I mean it opened a lot sooner than I was expecting! I got a fukking awesome gift fic: What the Fuk Is That?, a bit of excellent bantery team!fic for Tanya Huff's "Valor" series.

Which, okay, let's pair this with a book rec: everyone in fandom needs to read the Valor books (also called "Confederation" series) like YESTERDAY, because it is everything you have ever wanted and I weep daily that there is no real fandom for it. Sci-fi/space opera adventure war stories starring a totally kickass female Staff Sergeant in the Marines; well-thought-out alien species and worldbuilding, featuring our closest allies, the aliens that will eat just about anything in sight and the aliens that will screw just about anything that moves; a total absence of anything resembling predetermined gender roles or heteronormativity; canonical gay (and completely badass) alien couple (of the species that eats everything, not the one that fucks everyone); compelling overarching mystery plot that develops as the series progresses; and just all-around excellent storytelling. HIGHLY RECOMMEND.

And then read this fic, too.

Okay, so I just finished reading the first Kushiel's Legacy trilogy, by Jacqueline Carey, and I am in raptures of love and adoration. Now, I know she's written a second trilogy in that universe -- I think the last book is just coming out this month, actually -- and, y'know, my inclination is to go out and continue merrily along. Which I probably will anyway. But I was wondering: have any of you read it? Does it continue in awesomeness? Because while Imriel is cool and all, I love Phedre and Joscelin and Hyacinthe times a billion, and...I don't know. I guess I just want to make sure it stays good before I go out and buy the rest.

For the Top 5! meme, courtesy of such_heights:

( Top 5 History Boys moments )

( Your 5 favourite fics you've written )

( Your 5 most read books )

Also, ldmoonflower asked for Top 5 Ben&Jerry's flavors, but you know what's weird? I almost never eat ice cream, so I really don't know. A lot of them look tasty, but generally my sweet tooth calls for cookies/cupcakes or candy, not ice cream. Unless it's the middle of summer, and even then, not so much. It's weird. I really like ice cream. I just never crave it.

In other news, Madeleine L'Engle just passed away. Her books were never quite at the top of my favorites list, but I still loved them quite a lot, and she will be missed.

And Sandy & Dennys were totally the original Fred & George. I'm just sayin'.

Okay, I've been wanting to pimp these books out since about a third of the way through the first one, but I figured I'd better wait until I'd finished out the series first, just in case the author went nuts and fucked everything up. But she didn't, and in fact they just kept getting better, so! Book rec! The Crown of Stars series, by Kate Elliot, which is comprised of seven books (the last of which just came out this spring): King's Dragon, Prince of Dogs, The Burning Stone, Child of Flame, The Gathering Storm, In the Ruins, and Crown of Stars. I'd never heard of either the books nor the author before randomly stumbling across the first book in the bargain basement of a bookstore in Dublin, but oh, I'm so very glad I did.

What I really love about this series is that it takes a number of your standard fantasy-world cliches -- the varied races (humans/elves/orcs/uruks/what-have-you), for example, and the medieval Europe-ish setting -- and completely change the way you look at them. For example, the elven race is not all-knowing and benevolent and immortal and wise-yet-fading; rather, they are an angry, often cold-hearted race constantly at war with humankind, with a fascinating culture reminiscent of the Aztecs or Incas, and lord knows they aren't any longer-lived than us. And then, the sort of uruk-hai race (here called Eika) -- they aren't mindless evil beasts, they've got their own culture and history that's just as compelling as anyone else's, and we follow an Eika's POV for a significant part of the books. And the human culture, which is deliberately based on Christianity but has a lot of really well-crafted alterations, just enough to make it new and interesting, and which does what I've very rarely seen done in this type of fantasy: an almost matriarchal society, in which women are often considered superior to men, particularly in matters of administering lands and succession. And also, no evil overlord to be destroyed, and no destinies, and none of that other crap that so frequently pops up in these things. There's one primary character who could appear to be Mary-Sue-ish, but she's compelling and flawed and very wonderful, so I really don't care. (Also, is it possible to create a strong female character without having the Mary-Sue accusation hurled at you these days? But I digress.)

And there's even a bit of canon slash, which was the greatest thing ever, since I'd been privately slashing these two characters for quite a while and then they HAD SEX, and I just sort of gaped at the page for a few minutes because I'm so unused to seeing canonically gay (or bisexual, one of them is bisexual, or possibly just heteroflexible but who CARES) characters in medieval-type fantasies. So much awesome. But anyway.

So. Yes. If you're into fantasy, read these books. So worth it.

Over the long weekend with the Boyfriend's family, his younger sister and I deliberated over fully casting the fantasy movie version of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. It took us several hours, but we're (mostly) satisfied with the results. ( presenting the fantasy cast of Strange&Norrell, with explanations )

Hi. I just listened to Neil Gaiman talk for an hour. I sat in the second row. He was about ten feet away from me for an hour. And newredshoes asked him a question about fannishness and got him to sign a card. And I WAS IN A ROOM WITH NEIL GAIMAN (and about fifty other people) FOR AN HOUR HI.

Wandering the Village after dinner tonight, I passed an old bookstore that was having a used book sale outside. I perused.

Then I bought myself A Dictionary of Angels (including the fallen angels).

It's a dictionary of the angels. Like, ALL of them. Almost 400 pages' worth of angels. Some have long passages of description (Gabriel gets practically two full columns), others are barely noted (well, who the heck has ever heard of Kered?). It's, like -- I can finally go back and look up the angels from His Dark Materials. Understand arcane references. Make my OWN arcane references.

This is so cool.

Hey, did you know Metatron has 76 names? (My parents didn't even know who Metatron was. I wept.)

...and in other news, since it's past midnight, Happy Birthday, versaphile!

I am exactly 31 pages into Good Omens, and it's already shaping up to be the Best Book Ever. Not only that, but it's a Dom/Billy shipper:

It meant that Crowley had been allowed to develop Manchester, while Aziraphale had a free hand in the whole of Shropshire. Crowley took Glasgow, Aziraphale had Edinburgh...

See? Crowley created both Manchester and Glasgow. Obviously, Dom and Billy were Meant To Be.

Yeah.

Ehm, yes. GIP. Because, really, he was SO talking about fanfic. Or something. Right. (Deasey is so obviously the sort of person I will grow up to be. I weep.)

I shall stop raving about this book now, I promise.

Few things in life quite compare to the perfect beauty of reading an excellent novel on a plane and pondering its lovely homoerotic undertones and slash potential and then suddenly it TURNS INTO A SLASHFIC RIGHT THERE ON PAGE 352. A long, beautiful, accurate, well-written slashfic, no less.

...DUDE!

My love for this book has just grown exponentially much. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, by Michael Chabon. Read it. Now. (No, it's not Kavalier/Clay. They're cousins. That's just icky. ::whistles the oh-no-I-don't-write-Merry/Pippin-nope-not-me song innocently::)

It seems like a crime to be writing an AP Hell mini-essay on this passage. It's too beautiful/painful to be analyzed to death.

( Possibly the most heart-wrenchingly sad and gorgeous passage in 20th century literature. )

Sorry, Tolkien. Love your books, but even the Grey Havens, Mount Doom, and Cirith Ungol together have nothing on this.

Instead, New Line] is developing another possible trilogy drawn from children's novelist Philip Pullman's fantasy series, "His Dark Materials," which includes "The Golden Compass," "The Subtle Knife" and "The Amber Spyglass." This time, a precocious 11-year-old orphan girl raised by Oxford scholars is the heroine. Playwright Tom Stoppard is writing the screenplay for the first movie. New Line says it could be ready for release in 2005.

The man who brought us Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead AND The Invention of Love is writing the screenplay to the Philip Pullman trilogy? Say it with me: KICK ASS!!! Now if only they can find some kids who can act...