Reading Record 30

 (Ugh.  Typing on my phone is a nightmare due to my big fat fingers:  first attempt at that post title said "Reafong Tecord 40".  😭)  Not sure if 30 seems like a big number or a really small one in this context...

Anyway, the book I just finished was A Nobleman's Guide to Seducing a Scoundrel by KJ Charles.  And like the previous of her books I read, the title itself, while a good title, doesn't entirely seem to fit the book.  Which is sorta...I dunno, as someone who can't title her works 9 times out of 10, I suppose I have no right to comment on the titles of others.  (Though at least a lot of what I write are fanfics, and can thus be titled with song lyrics if I want.)

As to the book itself, turned out it was a sequel of sorts to a book I haven't read, but a "thirteen years later and centering on a different couple, one of whom was a minor (in both senses of the word, lol) character in the first book" kind of way, so...🤷🏻‍♀️  I should probably order the first book online sometime (since I cannot figure where, in store, these books would be located, as they weren't in regular fiction, and I even held my breath and checked the romance section, but they weren't there, either) but who knows if I actually will.

Like the last one I read by this author, it did feel a bit like a "guilty pleasure" kind of read, but I'm not sure why that is.  I mean, yes, a gay romance by a(n apparently straight) female author is a bit sketchy, but I don't have that same feeling when I read danmei, much of which is also written by women (though at least one of the danmei authors I read is male, and several have gender-neutral pronouns in the "about the author" blurbs from the publisher, so I have no idea about them) so it's something of a curious feeling.  I don't recall feeling that way about the Magpie series, so maybe it's the lack of a fantastic over-narrative that's got me uncomfortable?  Like, these two have been much more focused on the romance than most of the danmei novels, so...?  I don't know. It's an odd reaction on my part, ultimately.

But getting back to the book itself!  It seemed very well-researched on both the location (Romney Marsh in Kent) and the era (1823), even down to various regional and period terms, without being bogged down by an excess of them.  And it was a delight to read, like all the author's other books I've read.  Which is, ultimately, the most important part, right?

Original language:  English

Reading Record 29

     So, I have to start this post with a statement of the most extreme stupidity.  I finished reading this book about midday on Tuesday, but my brain immediately said "ah, rats, I'll have to wait and post tomorrow morning, because otherwise it'll muddle up the IWSG post."  Because for some reason I thought it was Wednesday.  And then the next morning, as I was getting up, I thought about the post I had put off and realized "oh no, today is Wednesday!"  Meaning that I could have posted straight away, and because I had waited I had to wait another full day.

    Because I am a total freaking moron, apparently.  :<

    Anyway.

    What is not stupid is the book I finished reading on Tuesday.  The book in question is The Once and Future Sex:  Going Medieval on Women's Roles in Society by Eleanor Janega.  It caught my eye when I was passing by the History section in the bookstore, and I picked it up especially because I'm thinking of writing a game for the Queer Medieval Jam on itch.io that runs from September 1st to December 1st.  (Assuming I can ever finish my current project of getting the revamped text of The Golden God of Aiolia released.  Which is constantly becoming a longer and longer process because every time I look at the text I find more problems I missed the previous times...)

    Uh.  But setting my own stuff aside and getting back to the book I read.

    This book is an intensive study into the actual facts of how women lived in the Middle Ages, setting aside the myths that have been repeated so often in virtually everything.

    Probably the part that comes across most strongly is the fact that women have always worked.  Not just domestically (a particularly hard work that cannot be denied in pretty much any era), but also out of the house.  It's just that people of the Middle Ages didn't talk much about women working.  Partially because they didn't entirely think of women as being people, and partially because they didn't think anything of it, because things had always been that way.

    Anyway.  Incredible book (although some of it was naturally infuriating, because Medieval 'philosophy' was horrifically misogynistic), one which everyone should read.

    Original language:  English

IWSG - um title goes here?

 

    Pre-writing this one so last month's problem won't recur!

    Anyway...

    September 2 question - Do you have a favorite character archetype you tend to gravitate toward in your writing?

    Hmm.

    Not sure if I'd say there's any archetype, as such.  I do tend towards characters that are either filled with doubt in themselves or who are convinced they are absolutely always right about everything...or who vacillate between those two positions.

    I fear that's less an archetype and more just a reflection of myself.  😰

    I've noticed I also have trouble writing people who are unapologetic.  (Like to the extent that in my extensive amount of MDZS fanfic, I frequently find myself writing the hero, Wei Wuxian, as apologizing for things, even though it's a literal plot point in the original novel that he never apologizes for anything (until a certain time when the problem with his behavior is hammered into his skull, but even after that he almost never apologizes).  As long as I notice before I post a fic, I can always change it to get rid of the inappropriate apologies, but...ugh, it's a problem.)

    Atalanta, the heroine of my Greek mythology novels, apologizes a lot, and also has huge doubts in herself.  Well, no, actually it's more like she has a negative character arc over the series:  she goes from being all "ha ha, I'm the daughter of Achilles, and I'm gonna kick your butt!" to "I'm just a worthless runaway slave, how could I dare think of myself as the daughter of a demigod?" despite that by the end she's been acknowledged as Achilles' daughter by her grandmother and an assortment of Olympian gods, and she's battled defeated various supernatural forces, some of them divine-adjacent.  (She also fights against an actual Babylonian god in book four, but she's not the one who defeats him, so...)

    Tch.  As usual, I find I have nothing much to say.

    Oh well.

    Anyway, I got the email about posting links to any books we have on sale, but I make it a point not to sell my writing because my writing is not worth anyone else's money, so there's nothing I can do about that.  I'll try to remember next week (ie the day this post goes up) to buy the books of some of the other people in the group, though!

Reading Record 28

     Okay, so this morning I finished reading Feet of Clay by Terry Pratchett.

    It's the last of the Discworld books in the volume I borrowed from my brother, so probably the last one I'll read for a while.  (Since, after all, I have an already overflowing to-read shelf as it is.)

    I don't really have a lot to say about the book, I guess?

    Not without trying to go into a deep-dive about gender issues that I'm 100% not prepared for and really would have needed to read the book with a much more careful eye if I wanted to do that.  Also probably I wouldn't be able to say anything anyone hadn't already said.  Probably.  I have zero idea what kind of discourse there is about this book.  I mean, it's from like the early 1990s, right?  So it's not old enough to be the subject of debate as anything historical, but it's too old to be of much modern debate?  Also, various societal changes hadn't happened yet, and...

    Eh.

    Like I said, not ready for a deep-dive anything.

    Besides, today is the day I start updating the AO3 text for the second of the Atalanta and Ariadne books, since I finally finished the rewrites yesterday.

    But first I need to pre-write next week's IWSG post so I don't end up hastily writing the post around bedtime like I did this month.  😰  (Ugh, I hate the Windows 11 emojis.  Why did they have to redraw them all to be ugly?)

Original Language:  English

Note to self

 Just so future me doesn't think it took me this long to read the next book...

Since I had thought I would have a new volume of danmei to read on the 18th, I decided to put off starting to read a new book, and decided to spend a few days phone-proofing one of my own works instead.  (I always spot more/different errors when proofreading on my phone than on my computer.)

The danmei got delayed until the end of next month 😭😭😭😭 and the proofreading ended up being a couple of different works, so....only actually starting the next book today.

Reading record 27!

 (Exclamation point because finally the decimal points are gone!)

So, this super-short, one-sitting-by-design book was Vivi and Grandpa's Memories for the Sky, a Final Fantasy IX picture book (released for the game's 25th anniversary last year), with story by Kazuhiko Aoki and art by Toshiyuki Itahana (both of whom worked on the original game).

Highly adorable, because Vivi.  😁  Not the deepest story, even as picture books go, but very sweet.

Possibly more of a .1 than a .2 in length, but...I gave it that numbering to get rid of the danged decimal points for good!  From now on, when I get a new work that doesn't feel like it should count as a full number, I'm just gonna put it on the to-read shelf until there are enough similarly short works to add up to one, and then I'll go through them all in a row and put them in a single post.  'Cause this was just plain getting stupid.  Also exceptionally frustrating.  I'm not keeping track of my reading to annoy myself with being pedantic about what counts as a book, I'm keeping track of it 'cause otherwise I'll forget what I read when!

Original language:  Japanese

Reading record 26.8

 Argh, I am so sick of those decimal places!  🤬

Uh.  Anyway.

Today's book was Theseus, Volume Three, by Jordan Holt.  A graphic novel I backed on Kickstarter.  Volume one was back in 2020, so it's been long enough since the previous volumes that I forgot many of the individual quirks of this telling of the Theseus myth.

Or rather I forgot the problematic one:  the author chose to include the "Medea subplot."

Which is a genuine part of some ancient tellings of the myth, but it sucks.  (The subplot, not this book.)  Basically, it makes Medea into Theseus' evil stepmother, and...yeah, actually, that's pretty much all that needs to be said.  Making Medea into a villain instead of a victim was emblematic of the misogyny and xenophobia that was so prevalent in ancient Greek society.

There's something extra demented about adding Medea to Theseus' tale in particular.  (Again, I am specifically here talking about whatever ancient Athenian chose to add her into the story.)  Because let's look at the facts:

1) Medea playing the evil stepmother comes hard on the heels of the conclusion of Theseus' brief affair with Ariadne, who he abandoned on Naxos at the orders of Dionysos.  (Surprisingly, the author of this modern book chose to leave that out, so Theseus actually ended up with Ariadne.)

2) Medea and Ariadne play the exact same role in their own stories:  they are both foreign princesses who betray their fathers in order to enable the Greek hero to achieve his goal successfully, rather than dying miserably as they would have done unaided.

3) Both Medea and Ariadne are thrown over by their dependent Greek beau as soon as they are no longer useful.  (Excuses were made in both cases, but they don't change the hard facts of the matter.  Especially since there are versions where Dionysos does not order Theseus to abandon Ariadne, and merely picks her up after Theseus has sailed off and left her.  (Those versions presumably came from somewhere other than Athens...))

4) Medea and Ariadne are actually first cousins!  Ariadne's mother, Pasiphae, is the sister of Aeetes, Medea's father.

5) (And this is the big one!) It's actually chronologically impossible for Medea to have been courting/marrying Aegeus during Theseus' youth.  This is why:  in his old age, the twice-widowed Theseus abducted an underage Helen of Sparta, planning to make her wife #3.  Her twin brothers, Castor and Polydeuces, rescued her while Theseus was held prisoner in the House of Hades for trying to help his bestie kidnap Persephone in an attempt to marry her.  Castor and Polydeuces went along on the voyage of the Argo to steal the Golden Fleece from Colchis.  (This event basically had to be after the abduction of Helen, since Castor and Polydeuces are the same age as Helen, and surely would have been viewed as too young to Argonauts before that time!)  Therefore, Theseus is already old and twice widowed by the time Medea leaves Colchis!

This is, of course, the big trouble in trying to work with Greek myths, because you have centuries of ancient texts (even setting aside Roman versions...which very few people do, as pretty much anyone you ask is likely to know Ovid's version of Medusa's 'origin story,' despite that his version is literally not attested anywhere prior to his Metamorphoses, strongly suggesting that he just effin' made it up), which were written drawing on different traditions from different regions, and which represent the different opinions and agendas of different authors, etc.  There is no hint of consistency even in the actual Greek versions, and as soon as you start looking at modern versions as well (to say nothing of Medieval and Renaissance versions!) it becomes even more wildly muddled.

Uh...

Yeah, I have completely lost track of anything else I may have wanted to say.

So.

Erm.

Well.

Guess that's the post, then.

Original language:  English