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Recent reading
Aug. 2nd, 2020 08:49 pmA Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar (2012)
For my fannish book club. I've been a bad book club participant the last few times, so I was determined to finish this, but it was a bit of a slog. There's a ton of lush descriptive writing, but I felt that it wasn't relevant enough to the plot and to the characters. The characters felt distant to me—at one point there was a dramatic moment where the main character chooses to save his friend over some important object, but all I could think was "...they're friends? I hadn't noticed." I can imagine this book working much better for other people, though!
Also I have been reading![[archiveofourown.org profile]](https://p2.dreamwidth.org/b164c54b26e4/-/archiveofourown.org/favicon.ico)
AMarguerite's epic Elizabeth Bennet/Colonel Fitzwilliam series where Elizabeth is a dragon captain a la Temeraire, because the long sequel just got finished. Definitely enjoyable.
I've also been reading various interesting essays/blogs online. There's Ada Palmer's Black Death, COVID, and Why We Keep Telling the Myth of a Renaissance Golden Age and Bad Middle Ages. Then I discovered the amusing and interesting Going Medieval blog, by another historian. Recommended! Oh, and also there's this article about how women handled their periods in early modern Britain (why yes, I am eventually going to write a female POV in a Flight of the Heron fic...)
For my fannish book club. I've been a bad book club participant the last few times, so I was determined to finish this, but it was a bit of a slog. There's a ton of lush descriptive writing, but I felt that it wasn't relevant enough to the plot and to the characters. The characters felt distant to me—at one point there was a dramatic moment where the main character chooses to save his friend over some important object, but all I could think was "...they're friends? I hadn't noticed." I can imagine this book working much better for other people, though!
Also I have been reading
I've also been reading various interesting essays/blogs online. There's Ada Palmer's Black Death, COVID, and Why We Keep Telling the Myth of a Renaissance Golden Age and Bad Middle Ages. Then I discovered the amusing and interesting Going Medieval blog, by another historian. Recommended! Oh, and also there's this article about how women handled their periods in early modern Britain (why yes, I am eventually going to write a female POV in a Flight of the Heron fic...)
