lin·gua·phile

delladilly:

you know those things that feminists and social revolutionaries who mostly consume fiction and analyze it to death (aka tumblr) are always wishing for

like gosh it would be fabulous if we had young adult fiction where all the main characters were of color

or where the most important relationship was between two women

or where no women were demonized or hated or belittled or unrealistic or scapegoats, where all women were treated with compassion and respect

or where the love interest actually genuinely respected and listened to the protagonist

or if fantasy used its freedom to investigate the shitty things that bind our world, colonialism and racism and misogyny and a thousand forms of structured oppression that we’re so deeply trenched in that it’s hard to see them properly

like ALL OF THOSE THINGS, if you told me that a book could give me ALL OF THOSE THINGS, I probably wouldn’t believe you, and if I did, I would be satisfied with it, I would be bloated by it, it would be all I would need or want

and I know I sound like an infomercial, but Cold Magic has all of that— AND MORE

it’s steampunk— genuinely steampunk the way steampunk was meant to be, reconstructing history from the ice age onwards to make you think about the way our history happened and how it formed the society that we assume is unavoidable and authentic and real

and this ice age went on longer, and the Roman Empire didn’t fall till the year 1000, and one of the principle arguments of the book, which takes place 800 years later, is that the Romans told lies

and plus there are sentient dinosaurs. 

REVOLUTIONARY ANTI-COLONIALIST FEMINIST THEORY

AND

SENTIENT

DINOSAURS

and the heroine is brave and rude and a little cocky, and she holds her secrets tight to her chest, and she thinks with her feet and keeps going

and she gets the dreamiest unlikeliest most besotted love interest you’ve ever met, who takes an absurd amount of pride in his clothing, who is angry about having sweet tender feeeeeelings

and let me remind you that both of them (plus everyone else of importance!!!) are of color

and there is magic, and magic interacting with politics, and with it investigations into freedom/power/safety/oppression/obligation/choice, and also it is sexy

and there are plagues and ghouls and a beautifully drawn spirit world, actually the most complete world building I’ve seen since His Dark Materials or Harry Potter

and the talking heads of poets

and also kissing, and hilariousness, and thrilling action, it’s described in the blurb as an Afro-Celtic Roman icepunk, like DO I HAVE TO BEAT YOU OVER THE HEAD WITH THIS BOOK TO MAKE YOU READ IT

BECAUSE I WILL

Having now read this and its sequel, Cold Fire, I can get 100% enthusiastically behind this whole squee. I did have some issues with the technical/writerly/craft aspects of the first book in the series, but most of those evaporated in the second installment, and I was able to do what I really wanted to do throughout the entire first book, which is be absolutely in love with everything these books are trying to be.

(Also in context of the whole “wow these are awesome because CHARACTERS OF COLOR,” the cover model for Cat bothers me. I’d be interested to see if Elliott had any say in this. Sometimes her admirable desire to be non-anachronistic and internally consistent makes it hard for me to visualize the people she is describing — and of course human history has just gone differently in this world and certain interracial mixes are way more common there than here, so this adds to the estrangement effect — BUT STILL, I picture Cat and Bee and definitely Andevai as darker-skinned than this cover model, and with a facial structure slightly less recognizably euro/western.)

kellymariataylor:

Day 87

The problem is how few adults take the time to engage with children’s stories nowadays. I sometimes think that if we didn’t grow out of our childhood reading, the world might actually be a better place because of it.

(via the-eyre-affair)

SHANNON

SHANNON

I LIVE IN A WORLD OF MAGIC AND WONDER (granted we already knew that this was the definition of New York because, hello, Young Wizards)

BECAUSE I WALKED ACROSS THE STREET FROM MY APARTMENT TO THE BOOKSTORE THAT USUALLY DOES NOT HAVE MUCH SFF OR YA

AND THEY HAD THIS ON MARKDOWN!

Good thing I was a diligent student earlier today, won’t feel bad about reading & liveblogging this til ungodly hours of the morning, surviving on tea & chocolate biscuits & girlpower & MAGIC!

(In case you can’t tell I am expecting a lot out of this book but luxheroica’s judgment = flawless, so I really doubt I will be disappointed. Also do you see that tagline? WHEN SCIENCE AND MAGIC COLLIDE! That is basically a definition of every book I have ever loved, ever.)

librarianheygirl:

Thanks thatfaeriechick.

(Photo from http://david-cutefaces.blogspot.com.)

I realized over break that 99% of the books I have read and loved were a) written between 1700 and 1900 and/or b) written for teenagers.

(via theknittingnerd)

I already know which “serious” books I’m reading this winter break (and “serious” is in scare quotes because I don’t really believe in categorizing books like that), but I don’t have any plans for fun reading. 

I am a strange reader. I hardly ever just “like” books. Either I dislike them, or I love them. The middle term is not “like” but rather “am interested in”; there are many books that I’ve read for school which I’m not in love with, but which (for a complex and generally more intellectual set of reasons) I am interested in.

I also don’t love many books anymore, it seems. I want to change that. And this is where you come in! I have found most of the books I love through the recommendations of friends who loved them first, and I’m reaching out to see if anyone else has suggestions for what I should read.

My current favorite books include, in no particular order:

• Diane Duane’s Young Wizards series 
• Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan series 
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen 
• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte 
• Middlemarch by George Eliot
• Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files series 
• Sabriel by Garth Nix
• The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin
• Heart’s Blood by Robin McKinley
• J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series
• Holly Black’s Curse Workers trilogy-in-progress

In general I’m really interested in books with:

• strong female characters (who have positive relationships with other strong female characters!): note, protagonist need not be female
• interesting emotional relationships between characters, the development of which somehow matters to the plot
• sci-fi that’s more on the anthropological side of things, like LeGuin
• urban fantasy: any time magic coexists with the real world I’m hooked (even if it’s coexisting with a real historical world, or this coexistence has created an alternate world), but to keep me hooked the book has to think about how magic impacts the everyday instead of just allowing characters to escape from it
• a generally positive worldview, or at least a belief in the power of humanity to persist against struggles and create things of beauty (even if those things don’t last)

And it would be really hard to sell me on:

• vampires, fairies, zombies
• anything in which the (probably white, probably male) main character wanders through his ennui, contemplates his place in the world, is dissatisfied with life and his job and his relationships, then discovers (probably via the help of some quasi-spiritual experience that appropriates and/or romanticizes the pain and suffering of less fortunate others, and/or via a manic pixie dream girl) that all this pain and suffering is somehow worth it, man, and we gotta keep movin’ through it
• anything where there isn’t a sense of emotional connection to the characters, or some other kinds of emotional engagement that leads to a feeling of payoff at the end
• anything that doesn’t demonstrate basic knowledge of grammar and style

If for some reason you are really into this and want to know more you could check out my Goodreads account.

Also because this didn’t show up explicitly above, I should mention that I love YA books and I especially love reading them over the holidays because they’re like brain candy compared to the stuff I read for school (and also some of my favorite books of all time are YA).

So, dear followers and people here via the tags: What should I read over break?

lazybookreviews:

Apparently Pierce Brosnan periodically mentions they’re working on a film adaptation of (brace yourselves, former tweeners) ‘The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle’ with him as the captain, Saoirse Ronan as Charlotte, and Morgan Freeman as Zachariah.

Squeeeeee.

AGH MY LIFE. This was one of my first favorite books of all time. My fifth grade teacher read it aloud to us and I fell in love and have not STOPPED being in love with it since then, and THIS NEEDS TO HAPPEN.

If you have not read this book, you should go read it absolutely right now. It has sea voyages and storms and mutinies and young ladies being absolutely awesome.

(And in retrospect, my childhood love of The True Confessions is also probably one reason for my current love for the Leviathan trilogy…I suspect Charlotte and Deryn would get along quite well!)

…and I swear to god, every other sentence just makes me happy. This is the primal joy of reading. This is why I spent four years working on a BA in English, this is why I’ve just started a six-year PhD program in the same. And if anyone ever suggests to me that I shouldn’t like young adult and/or genre and/or contemporary fiction, because it is somehow less historically significant or less respectable or just not as good as the kinds of things I spend my “work week” studying, I will stare that person down and tell them that all genres are created equal and that if they think otherwise then they are the ones missing out. And then I will stop talking with them and get back to reading my illustrated young adult alternate-history quasi-steampunk novel with cross-dressing.

I’m sure everyone and his mother has opinions about the age appropriateness of certain books, and that the large community of YA readers, writers, reviewers, and their mothers have more opinions than most. Until recently, I was pretty sure I didn’t have opinions like that. […] But now that I am slightly older, with two younger cousins coming to me for reading recommendations, I’m realizing that there’s another side to parental control of reading — not just what grown-ups forbid, but what they never recommend.

Some thoughts on YA lit, prompted by Holly Black’s White Cat and Jane Yolen’s Dragon’s Blood.

When I first started my blog over at Austen and Aliens almost a year ago, my goal was clear: I needed someplace to squee, rant, and flail — albeit in a slightly more academic manner — about the things that I loved most in life and literature. Up at the top of the flail-worthy list is, and has always been, Diane Duane’s Young Wizards series. I started reading these books when I was in the sixth grade, waiting for something to fill the void between Harry Potter books, and ended up falling head over heels for characters and a story and a world that made Harry Potter look like child’s play, even to an eleven-year-old.

Since then, I’ve been attempting (and failing) to come up with some coherent way to express my love for this series while simultaneously making every single person who read my explanation go to their local library and find a copy of So You Want to Be a Wizard. I’ve recommended the series to everyone I know. I’ve posted about it on other sites. I’ve even made my mother read it.

None of this has served the ultimate purpose: to create a world in which all the cool people have read these books. This post probably won’t either. But in the wake of Diane Duane’s release of the long-form blurb for the tenth book in the series, tentatively titled Games Wizards Play, I feel the need to talk a little more about why these books have such a special place in my heart.

Click the link for the rest!