I have an unusual name. I've never met anybody with my name (although I am assured they exist). So imagine my surprise on finding a book in which one of the main characters has my name but is otherwise as pretty much non-me as it is possible to get.

Reading all 500 pages was rather odd. Seeing my name printed on the page jarred every time, since I knew it meant someone else - someone whom I rather like, but someone whom I would never confuse with me.

Huh. It's been a weird month all round.

Good lord but Henleigh Grandcourt is the scariest Victorian baddie out there by a long shot. Nice job BBC for catching that chilly manipulative streak in the miniseries. i mean, Daniel is cute and Mirah is sweet and Gwendolyn is a gorgeously unstable basket-case, but the rendering of Grandcourt's marriage proposal freaked me the hell out.


There's something terrifying about Daniel Deronda that never wears out - at least if you're a Gwendolyn reader, which I am. The Kabbala and nascent Zionism can wait, but women and performance are going to get my attention every time. Poor, silly Gwen and poor, noble Mirah: life sucks and then you have to marry someone like Grandcourt. For what it's worth, tension like this was why I started writing Harry Potter fanfiction. I was convinced that the Malfoy house ran like Diplow or Manderlay.

I still think that. I just don't write about it any more.

Extra points for spotting Anne Elliot (!) and Mr. Collins (!!).

In the New Books section of Barnes & Noble today:

1) A lovely hard-back copy of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies with a ribbon marker and new illustrations. I approve.

2) Something terrifying called Vampire Darcy's Desire. What the fresh hell is this? Will my head explode if I try to read it?

Is this the first sign of the apocalypse?
 

 

Getting caught up on the True Blood craze in annoying little jerks of motion, since my computer is not buffering very well right now.

It's more fun than the books, anyway, and I think Anna Paquin is a pretty decent actress so I do want this to be good.

I'm only four episodes in (don't worry; I know what happens already), and still building impressions, but...
Eric - pretty
Grandma - funny
Credits sequence - eh. Why does HBO do this?

Jason - stupidest murder suspect in the state, if not the world.

I don't ordinarily think of myself as a slash person, but good lord how I love the gender freefall in Stage Beauty.

Look, a preview I don't know how to embed!

( Cut for some rambling about pretty men )

I don't think I can actually do this book justice, but Wintergirls is exquisite.

Really.

Laurie Halse Andersen has this disturbing, special talent that lets her reach into my soul and yank out the bits that make me nervous and that I didn't really want to look at in much detail anyway. Megan McCafferty is actually better at this, but Andersen can do it sometimes too.

( Depressing. Depressing is good, right? )

This might be one of the most compassionate and scary books I've read in a long time. I'm not going to say it's fun, but it's strong and it's moving and it's worth reading if you're willing to take something harder than the standard Sarah Dessin fuzziness in your YA.

And I'm posting about...why? Because I can.

( Cut for Storm of Swords spoilers )
Sorry. It's been that kind of a day.

Can anyone lead me to a maker of funny GRR Martin icons? I've seen some beautiful fanart, but I don't want a post-pre-Raphealite Sansa or "Hear Me Roar" in elegant calligraphy. I want some kind of Theon Greyjoy = fail macro, or a picture with Dany with her hair on fire captioned "dracarys?" "Castle Black: Keeping the South Safe from Zombies since XXXX" Something along those unsophisticated lines.

Best I can do for the moment seems to be illustrated snark, but even that is tricky to find.

You know those moments when you realize that your reaction is ridiculous and you really need to chance something about your life because this is just silly?

I just looked up "sarcastic" in Word's thesaurus tool and discovered that, not only do I know every one of the six recommended synonyms, but the reason I know them is because I've seen all of them in historical fiction novels. Applied to the hero.

The last time this happened was when I looked up "Fictional Baronet" and Wikipedia and discovered that I was roughly familiar with nearly every name on the list. Sheeeeesh.

Maybe it's time to vary my reading? 

There's something wired wrong in my brain that is just impelled to posit cross-overs. If I know two books take place in the same time and/or space, the changes are high that I've tried to brainstorm a cross-over. Fortunately for everybody, none of my attempts got beyond a page, but there's still a switch that goes on and off in my head.

This works with actors as well, and I always get very distracted when someone I "know" as one character plays someone else. Ciaran Hinds, for instance, has only recently gotten his own name back; I referred to him as "Captain Wentworth" for years. So probably my decision to watch Jerry Burkheimer's trashy King Arthur yesterday was a bit of a mistake, because the bits where I wasn't laughing at the historical inaccuracies or Burkheimer's attempt to update the battle on the ice from Alexander Nevsky, I was staring at actors going, "what are you doing in this movie?"

Dear Elizabeth Swann, you are needed in Port Royale and I don't care if you do get to get friendly with Clive Owen here
Oh, that IS Jane Austen Bookclub Grigg under that beard. Weird. It's also Daniel Deronda, which is even weirder.
Why is the horrible abusive drunk from Nil By Mouth so fond of his 11 children? Creeepy...
And, most important, what is Titus Pullo doing in Britain???

On the plus side, a very pretty movie and slightly better than Kingdom of Heaven.

Oh. My. God.

I strolled into the last performance of Mary Stuart and was treated to nearly three hours of Janet McTeer being impetuous, John Benjamin Hickey being snarky, and Harriet Walter being beyond superb.

( Cut for Schiller, Austen, Webster, and fangirling )

It's so humid right now that I feel hot if I even think about moving.

Silly August.

Otherwise: some librarians, bless them, are trying to make fanfic a fun game at your library. Although in all of that nice article, never a shout-out to Sugarquill? How sad. I used to adore that site.

Blogger flare-up leads to a gorgeous new cover for Justine Larbalestier's Liar. Hooray! I really like this one - I like the shape you get with her hands in the picture, and the model is beautiful.

Going by a couple of comments on JL's blog, the question has shifted a bit to whether the girls on the front of your YA book should be pretty or not. As a slim(ish; I'm not overweight, anyway) white brunette, I can't speak emotionally to being under-represented in cover art, but as a YA reader, I do think that having a hot girl on your book is like having a picture of a hot movie star on your wall. You need something to live up to, because your heroines are usually who you want to be anyway. When I was sixteen, I wanted my heroine to be pretty, because I wanted to be like her or to be friends with her. I needed to aspire to something, preferably an ugly duckling who grew into her looks, or got them as an extra bonus at the end. I really don't buy the argument that making your heroine get all pretty does her disservice: half the time, she's earned it anyway. And I'm not even restricted to fantasy here: as far as my seventeen-year-old self was concerned, there was absolutely nothing more satisfying than a pretty and (comparatively) happy Jessica Darling putting on a red silk prom dress ten pages from the end of Second Helpings so Marcus Flutie could finally - finally! - take it off five pages from the end.

But my high-school attachment to Megan McCafferty can wait for another day and a longer word count.

And The Magicians is finally out. Got to read a galley early and it's exactly the sort of thing I unabashedly and unashamedly like. I can't tell you exactly why, because obviously it's got its flaws, but I really enjoyed it. And Jeff Giles at Entertainment Weekly has this book nailed, which is good, because I'm too inarticulate to do a review right now.

...must...have...ice cream...

Took the day off to be perfectly and utterly useless, and it was lovely. I read all of Trickster's Queen, which I somehow missed when it came out, and thoroughly enjoyed being back in Tamora Pierce land. I'm not sure how I feel about Aly bearing children at age 17, but I guess she's a mature young lady. I'm also not sure how I feel about the Piercian take on Other Cultures, particularly when it has that didactic edge to it. But she means so well I can't fault her too much for veering off into preachy now and then. I edited my stress-busting WiP: introduced a new character, removed a superfluous (but stubborn) one, beefed up the villain, and got over at least part of a stumbling block. 

( And let me tell you about the animals... )

Friend forwarded me this link for Hot Library Smut.

Shiny. I think I want to bake something now.*

*No, there's actually no connection there.

Also - although I distrust Channel 4 costume dramas on principle, I think I might have to make an exception for The Devil's Whore, which I'm watching - in terrible resolution - on Youtube.

Hmph.

Did anybody else see the Jezebel article about the bad US cover of Liar? Or did you read Justine Larbalestier's posts about why she doesn't like it? Larbalestier has a YA book due in September; the point is that the heroine is a compulsive liar. She's also black and wears her hair short - so why is there a long-haired white girl with racoon eyes on the cover? No one knows, and especially not the author.

Publisher's Weekly has this to say about it. Interestingly, the author of the article describes the heroine as African-American but a woman quoted in the story seems convinced that Micah is mixed. What?

There are, of course, so many things wrote with this situation that I don't know where to start. It's a problem that the prevailing view in America may be that "people" (not sure who that is; maybe the affluent ones who regularly spend $26 on hardcovers?) won't buy books with black women on the covers. It's a problem that American readers apparently don't feel comfortable enough with an African-American heroine that they have to question her race. At least Larbalestier thinks so; I'm a little unconvinced by this evidence of American racism, partly because if the girl is erasing her gender, there's no reason why someone - and lord knows there are some crazy readers out there - might suspect her of erasing her race. It's probably easier to misrepresent yourself as black than misrepresent yourself as a boy, especially at age 16. I'm also a little unsure that the fact that the Australians didn't call in and ask about Micah's race means they are less racist. I think that just means they react different to specifically African-American characters. But I am not Australian, so I actually have no idea. It's a problem that I can't make any statement in this paragraph without weighing it down with qualifiers.

But mostly for me it's a problem that an excellent children's publisher chooses to (arguably) misrepresent one of their novels. YA traditionally has a committment to - and does an great job at - speaking to minority readers, and it's a shame that they have to pull back from this one on some level.

I'll respect the economic explanation to some extent: white teenaged girls sell books, so put one on this cover and people will buy it. OK, it's a recession, Bloomsbury USA is newish, and editors don't make a lot of money anyway. I hear you. Tomorrow we'll fix the publishing business model. But this thing of putting the wrong characters on the cover of the book? I thought that only happened in trashy mass market sci-fi, not edgy and perfectly legit, interesting commercial YA from one of the hot new up-and-coming authors.

Argh.

(P.S. Just spent half an hour looking for a new lolcatz or fail icon. Didn't find anything I wanted, and I'm too lazy to do my own, but if you search "fail" in the LJ interests section, the first five hits are Twilight-related and the 8th is devoted to Dr Who macros. Which would be funnier if Torchwood hadn't taken over the section)

Or, 1200 words of what I really thought of Harry Potter.

For some reason I’m almost completely incapable of criticizing Harry Potter – books or movies. But the more I talk to my friends about The Half-Blood Prince, the more it becomes clear that, while my ears can’t think much during the film, my eyes work just fine.

The best thing about the newest movie is the introduction of cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, who is responsible for all those weird green filters in Amélie and the bizarre color-fest of Across the Universe. Here he does a really fantastic job of making the world of Harry Potter, well, not artistic so much as crafted. Watching the color interplay in a scene in the men’s bathroom (apparently the same one that featured in The Chamber of Secrets – just how much plumbing has Harry destroyed in six years of schooling anyway?) filmed in greyscale was practically a revelation: of course someone with Tom Felton’s coloring should be filmed in hard grey palette, because then when he starts bleeding the red is electrifying. And while Snape is at his best sweeping down hallways like a very long procession of one, he is at his second-best in silhouette, framed by the Gothic arches of the Astronomy Tower windows.

( Basically Draco Malfoy has the best damn costume in the movie )
The things you wear and the things you use send out signals about people as people – witness the incredible care the Lord of the Rings production team took in giving their characters different swords and costume items – but they also send out signals about people as characters. That’s why Draco needs to be wearing, not just a suit, but a dark suit with a white shirt, and why Bella’s Goth princess dress needs to be meticulously planned. Because there’s art going into how these people look, and it’s finally coming across as art. God bless them.

This is not the greatest movie I’ve ever seen, and not the greatest addition to the Potter franchise, but I really appreciate the care that they put into this one. Maybe it’s Delbonnel, or maybe I’m finally seeing something that’s always been there, but either way I like it. Craftsmanship, attention to detail: that’s something I see even if my critical facilities have been dulled by the enthusiastic and uncritical response of the little eight-year-old girl inside me who likes Stories About Magic.

And it's a fangirly, linkspammy kind of moment.

The cover for the new Megan Whalen Turner book has been released - good news not only because another book from her is always and wholly A Good Thing, but because whoever does her cover art makes it absolutely beautiful. Honest-to-god, I LOVE THIS COVER SO MUCH.

Composition - love the title line at the bottom with those Byzantine arabesques and the triangle of his shoulder and the horse's head at the top. We still have a hand in the foreground - how could we not? - and that ring looks nice and promising.

Color - always fabulous for this series. The first book drew your eye straight to the stone in the center, and then you had to go out again: "OMG shiny! Oooh, hands. Who's hands? Why's he holding that thing? Where'd he get it?" And then you read it because all those questions must be answers.

The second book pulled the frame out a notch and turned everything a really uncomfortable grey-filtered green so, again, your eyes went straight to the hands on the center of the book (I love that spark of light off the hook - it's like a cherry on top). I'm not completely a fan of this cover, actually, just because the green is so murky and dismal and I would have liked to see more Mede conflict somewhere here, but I will say this: Attolia's rubies pop like nobody's business, and to put three hands on the cover of this book is pretty much genius.

My hands (hah) down fave, though, is the cover for the third book. I like the solidity of the figures and the square they make: you know the minute you pick up this book that Gen and Attolia know exactly what they're doing, and that it's going to work. It's not just that she's standing behind him, but there's a real sense of partnership here. I love that those pale blues and golds brighten the whole thing up. I like that this time there's one of Gen's hands and one of Attolia's (which are still lovely; Phresine is quite the manicurist), and that there's only that hint of a profile rather than a full figure. Basically, it's just gorgeous.

And the new one looks fantastic too. Red jacket, brown horse, shadowed yellow hair - yummy colours. Love that palette.

I have a huge soft spot for pretty books, and these are, for me, stunning. The artwork is so right for the books, and so good in it's own right...In terms of covers, there are up there next to Ace's lovely Kinuko Craft covers for Patricia McKillip's books. And again, the art is not only beautiful but perfect for the book.

---

Also, I found a copy of a recording of Chess that stared a triple-whammy of Josh Groban, which is interesting because I thought the Russian was a bariton...God knows why, since it's perfectly obviously that he is, in fact, a tenor; Idina Menzel, which is not completely crazy, even if Florence is suddenly American. But oh, Idina, why are you murdering my favourite duet by being all nasal?; and Adam Pascal - which, actually, is not a surprise. Who better than Pascal to take the role of an emotional screw-up rockstar chess player?

Nothing's going to win me away from the truly fabuous London original cast recording, but this seems interesting.

And, speaking of musical theatre, I found a promo for Zorro: The Musical. The concept cracked me up, but...you could do a lot worse than this.

I've been living in a hole for the last three months, and I was it was particularly deep and dark in the beginning of June...

...which is why I missed the explosion of Twitter and the sudden appearance of Amanda Palmer. But I found myself killing time earlier tonight and spending an ungodly amount of time catching up on the (very public) love life of one of my favourite authors. I now feel a little voyeuristic.

My conclusion: AFP's blog is the most all-out romantic thing I've encountered in a while, and it's all real. Best entry is this one, and the third picture down. You know, the one labeled (appropriately) "fuck he's handsome." Yeah, I thought you probably saw it.
"we don’t need to change each other at all. it may sound absurd but he’s the only man i’ve ever met who’s willing to love me unedited, to take me as i am, completely, utterly."

Love me unedited? YES. May we all find one of those (perhaps with unruly curls and half a British accent as well).

I think I'm the last one on this boat, but everybody and their sister have been talking about The Hunger Games recently, so I snagged a copy when it walked past me on Monday. The girl next to me - a big fan - warned me not to start it at night because I wouldn't sleep, so I took her advice and put it off for a day or so...and then promptly lost all of today finishing the stupid thing. It's as compulsively readable as Twilight and a lot better. Review below the cut.

( Why teen romance is better battle royale style )
I'm also reading Pillars of Earth, which turns out to be the Great Historial Novel that was missing in my life. It is extremely good fun.

(incidentally, when did a mythical beast in a Lewis Carroll poem become a word for "making snide comments"? It's a great word, but the etymology is weird)

Just finished Rooftops of Tehran, which I liked - although I'm not sure it's as enlightening as the sacharine reviews on Amazon suggest. People say it's reminiscent of The Kite Runner, which I presume it is, but I haven't read that one so I really can't comment. What it did remind me of was Ali and Nino, which I suspect very few people have read. And what Ali and Nino did much better than Rooftops was bring to life the culture of Baku, Iran, Georgia, and the Caucasus in a particularly brilliant way. I couldn't see and hear and breath the setting in Rooftops the way I could in A&N. Not to say the former is bad - it's not; it's just not indelible - but it doesn't have as strong a sense of place as the latter.

If historical fiction makes me want to visit the setting, it's doing it's job - and A&N sold me on to Baku, but I have no particular yearing for Tehran. Except in the context of Alexander burning down Persepolis or even (and I probably shouldn't admit this) as the setting for the best part of Susan Kay's Phantom.