Recent reading
Dec. 4th, 2023 05:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
luzulaA Man of Independent Mind by L A Hall (2019)
I have a cold, so it's time for comfort reading! This is basically the 14th in the series, so don't start here. I wasn't quite sure what to expect of this volume focusing on the character Alexander "Sandy" MacDonald--it starts out with some diary entries shedding light on previous events from his POV, but then it jumps forward in time quite a lot, and we get the story of two close friends supporting each other and both grieving their romantic partners. I really enjoyed that part, it was beautiful and sympathetic. Later on we finally get Sandy and Clorinda having sex in the spirit of scientific enquiry, which I had been wanting to read. *gleeful* I mean, it's not like I ship them as anything other than close friends, but there had been a certain tension/curiosity there. And then there's a final part where Sandy meets someone new and also there are complications surrounding the Bexbury inheritance. All very enjoyable, A+ comfort reading.
A Stranger Came Ashore by Mollie Hunter (1975)
A Scottish children's (young adult?) book about selkies, which I enjoyed a lot--it's told from the POV of the twelve-year-old human Robbie and has intriguing folklore and details of the nature and culture of Shetland. I do have thoughts about gender, though? The most common selkie story I've read is the one about a female selkie whose skin is stolen by a man, and then she becomes his wife and bears his children, and years afterwards she finds her skin again and leaves. This is not that. I think you only need to read the back cover to figure out that the male stranger who comes ashore is the selkie, and that he is a threat to the family's daughter. So in both cases, regardless of whether it's the man or the woman who is the selkie, it's the man who is the threat. Which I guess makes sense, because patriarchy, but it makes for a very different view on the selkies.
Oh, and you might be interested to know that Annick Trent has a free novelette out: Harvest Season, which is historical f/f with two working-class protagonists.
I have a cold, so it's time for comfort reading! This is basically the 14th in the series, so don't start here. I wasn't quite sure what to expect of this volume focusing on the character Alexander "Sandy" MacDonald--it starts out with some diary entries shedding light on previous events from his POV, but then it jumps forward in time quite a lot, and we get the story of two close friends supporting each other and both grieving their romantic partners. I really enjoyed that part, it was beautiful and sympathetic. Later on we finally get Sandy and Clorinda having sex in the spirit of scientific enquiry, which I had been wanting to read. *gleeful* I mean, it's not like I ship them as anything other than close friends, but there had been a certain tension/curiosity there. And then there's a final part where Sandy meets someone new and also there are complications surrounding the Bexbury inheritance. All very enjoyable, A+ comfort reading.
A Stranger Came Ashore by Mollie Hunter (1975)
A Scottish children's (young adult?) book about selkies, which I enjoyed a lot--it's told from the POV of the twelve-year-old human Robbie and has intriguing folklore and details of the nature and culture of Shetland. I do have thoughts about gender, though? The most common selkie story I've read is the one about a female selkie whose skin is stolen by a man, and then she becomes his wife and bears his children, and years afterwards she finds her skin again and leaves. This is not that. I think you only need to read the back cover to figure out that the male stranger who comes ashore is the selkie, and that he is a threat to the family's daughter. So in both cases, regardless of whether it's the man or the woman who is the selkie, it's the man who is the threat. Which I guess makes sense, because patriarchy, but it makes for a very different view on the selkies.
Oh, and you might be interested to know that Annick Trent has a free novelette out: Harvest Season, which is historical f/f with two working-class protagonists.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-12-05 06:33 am (UTC)More or less so than reading Seaward and The Dark Is Rising and then hitting Susan Cooper's Dawn of Fear?
(no subject)
Date: 2023-12-05 01:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-12-05 09:56 pm (UTC)Fair! It's from 1970; it is not directly autobiographical of Cooper's childhood, but it is about being a child when a war is just part of normal life—scrap drives, air raids, barrage balloons, the false sunset on the horizon of London burning—much less daily relevant than the cruelties and games of other children, until all of a sudden it isn't. I read it in elementary school and have it sort of mentally aligned with Robert Westall's The Machine-Gunners (1977), although Dawn of Fear has much less conventional action.
It's ultimately a hopeful book, but it is a book about grief, with a protagonist growing up in poverty surrounded by WWI veterans with PTSD.
I will consider myself warned accordingly. I've never even seen a copy and I read a lot of Mollie Hunter out of libraries over the years.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-12-05 11:14 pm (UTC)A Sound of Chariots won a Phoenix award in 1992, which probably let to it being reprinted in the 1994 edition I found at the library as a kid. There's a copy in OpenLibrary, which is how I reread it a few years ago.
There's also a sequel, Hold on to Love, which I have not read since I was a teenager, and is probably even harder to find! (I just noticed that it also has the alternate title The Dragonfly Years, which is a much better title, but not the edition that was available in my library!)