A Lightkeeper's Log

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki. Came into Ozeki though My Year of Meats, which had a lot of similar cultural themes, but didn't really hit on the zen, meaning of life and ethics stuff that this book was more or less about.

I liked the sections set on the North West coast, they really grabbed small island life (though I agree with everyone in story who said that there's NO WAY IN HELL tsunami debris has made it to Desolation Sound yet). The play between Ruth reading the story, and Nao writing it was really well done, better played then many Finding Historical Documents stories. Needing things translated and poor Internet connections seemed like a plausible way to spin out the drama.

It's interesting that the last two Japanese stories I've read have had kamikaze pilots as major elements. That story and Nao's about being a Japanese outsider in Japan were pretty brutal, in the "I hesitate to rec this because it has lots of explicit torture and sexual assault" kind of way. I liked a lot of the ethics discussion, and how different family members handled similar problems over the generations.

I'm not sure how I feel about the ending. I know it's meant less as a Left Turn at Albuquerque, and more as a culmination of everything the book had been leading too but... I don't care about quantum physics? It kind of just felt out of tune with the rest of the book. I was also sad we never did get much of Jiko's backstory, though that may have been the point as well.


The Doomsday Vault (Clockwork Empire, #1) by Steven Harper [please note that it's with a V and not a PH]. I really liked the gender dynamics here. Gavin was basically a manic pixy dream boy (He only wants to fly, he's from an exotic country (the US), the colour of his hair is described more often than any other physical feature in the book, he sings and plays the fiddle astoundingly beautifully, he spends a good deal of time getting rescued, and more or less exists to convince the heroine to break convention and follow her dreams). Alice is a genius mechanic who fixes giant robots as a hobby. She also gets stuck with a traditional marriage plot, which was one the weaker areas of the book, but mostly it was about her fixing robots and rescuing Gavin. The two chessmaster characters moving the plot forward were both middle-aged women, and that's not even counting in Queen Victoria. It felt great to read a Victorian set novel that was so deliberately breaking out of period gender roles.

Speaking of, this book also had feelings about colonialism and empire. It wasn't preachy, but it looks like the series is going to run in that direction. While the mandatory queer character was pretty secondary, and didn't get a lot of characterisation, he was there. Always nice to see.

None of it felt lick a diversity checklist! The writing was light and often funny, and though I saw a few plot twists a mile off, the ending surprised me. Always nice to read. I will say that it's very, very much the first book in a series. It had self-contained story and character arcs, but I've got to say, if when I catch up to where the series is now, if they're still doing these cliffhanger endings, I shall feel cross.

Saw The Great Gatsby last week. It was fine, I guess. I think what I loved most about the book was the beautiful writing, and the glitz and sound track didn't really make up for losing that. I thought the cast did a good job, and I really did like the sound track, but eh.

Saw Star Trek into Darkness today. Except for spending almost all of the movie wishing Benny Cumberwhatsit was not in the movie, and a few pacing issues towards the end, I enjoyed it immensely. Would see again.

Meme from a couple of people: I have 65 works archived at AO3. Pick a number from 1 (the most recent) to 65 (the first thing I posted there), and I'll tell you three things I currently feel about it.

First and foremost, my lovely author wrote this for me:

Title: Memories
Author: ariestess
Fandom: Babylon 5
Words: 1,200
Rating: Teen
Summary: "Five years ago today, Lyta Alexander came onto Babylon 5 with this big story about a Psi Corps mole on the station. Do you remember that?"
Notes: I love "Divided Loyalties" AUs so much. This fic has great Susan/Talia domestic touches, too.

( Ten other stories I liked )

So with that Sinbad fic that just went up, my WIP folder is down to five stories, which is nice.

As I'm currently in a fandom of three there (and one of them is Nenya who has to be in that fandom), my current feelings toward Defiance are more eyerolly than fanish, and Elementary is perfect and needs no fic, I'm planning to chug back through the folder and hopefully cough something up.

(It's funny how writing non-Steve/Tony makes one feel that triple-digit hit counts are a real achievement)

I'm kind of stalled out on reading rarewomen fic. Like, I have all these tabs open, and I know I'll enjoy the fic, but I'm... just not reading it. If I haven't commented on your fic, it's probably because I haven't gotten to it yet. Also, I'm sorry!

I don't really feel like reading fic right now, unless it's Sinbad fic, which I would read, but only one other person ever writes it. I have a tumblr tag called "I miss that show so much it breaks my heart."

I'm also horribly behind on comics.

I'm mostly reading books. I like books. For example, I just finished London Falling by Paul Cornell. Interesting what former Doctor Who writers get up to, though isn't it? The universe here feels like Peter Grant's London, if there were no Thomas Nightingale and hadn't been for some time, allowing the Faceless Man freer rein. That probably makes this book darker and closer to horror than I usually read, and I loved it all the same. Possibly because much of the horror was emotional, and it was very effectively written. The writing itself had just enough police slang to feel authentic, but not too much to drown in, and had Cornell's usually somewhat dark humour.

I really liked all the characters, but especially... no, wait, I universally liked all the protagonists (a team of four copper able to see things what go bump in the night). I loved the dark and twisty compassion and dedication they put into the job, their convoluted feelings about their new talents and each other. I want to see what happens with them next. I appreciate, as always, Cornell's easy touch with diversity. The main team is %50 black, has one woman, and one gay man, and none of those things are either defining or ignored.

Cornell mentions in his afterword that he originally planned this as a tv pilot, which makes sense in terms of pacing and characterisation. Though the plot is complete in itself, the transition and set up in this book seems to be establishing the status quo for a serial. That has its ups and downs, mainly downs in that once you saw the shape of the plot, several of the characterisation twists because very obvious. I spotted the epilogue's reveal very early in, and given how Cornell writes, who was going to live and who was going to die wasn't much of a surprise.

I'm quite interested in how this book uses religion. Lip service is paid to Wicca not being evil witches, but then Wicca is also shown as more or less totally ineffective and there's an evil witch with real power, but then the Abrahamic Big Three are also shown as totally ineffective, but then hell has real power, but then there doesn't seem to be any concept of Divine Grace. I know Cornell's wife's a vicar, and he's a practicing Christian, and I'm interested to see where he goes with the theology angle.

Title: New Yesterdays, New Tomorrows
Author: muccamukk
Fandom: Star Trek: The Next Generation (Yar, Troi, Picard, Guinan)
Rating: Teen (Contains: Spoilers for 3.15 "Yesterday's Enterprise")
Word Count: 3,300
Notes: For pleonasm for rarewomen, thanks so much for the great prompt. Thank you also to Nenya for beta reading, even when she'd rather have been watching Defiance.
Summary: Tasha escapes the destruction of the Enterprise C, but what does it mean to be back on her own ship when the war she remembers never happened at all?

Saw Iron Man 3, liked basically everything about it immensely and have no real comment. Except there needs to be Rhodey/Pepper/Tony fic, and plenty of it.

Picked up Ruse: The Victorian Guide to Murder by Mark Waid with lines by Mirco Pierfederici and Mink Oosterveer, and was kind of meh on it. I haven't read any of the old Crossgen stuff, but I like Waid, so I gave it a go. It was fine, I guess. The art was nice, and the plot was moderately good, but in the end I didn't really care much about the characters. There's nothing in this that makes the Male Victorian Detective and his Female Partner/Assistant/Handler plot feel at all fresh. It just kind of plodded along, hitting all the notes, I guess, but not really moving me.

I really liked, however, Here If You Need Me: A True Story by Kate Braestrup, which was the memoirs of a chaplain to the Maine State Parks Service. I think above all else the style dragged me in. It's funny because the reliance on metaphor and non-linear storytelling drove me buggy in my last book (Lighthousekeeping), but I felt it really worked here. It reflected how we don't live linear lives because of all the memories and connections and stories we tell, and for the memoirs of a chaplain, who exists by connections and stories, it was perfect, plus the author is REALLY funny.

I also really liked the author's call to service in a very practical way, I loved the bit where she was studying Iranaus' writing on Christ divinity and saying, "Yes, fine, but what do I do?" I the conclusions that she came to about where God is in times of tragedy (in the hands of the humans holding you up, much like that Mr. Rogers quote that was going around recently).

A lot of the story is about transition, and about mourning, and that was beautifully and unflinchingly written. How unbearable that is, and how others carry us through. I loved her relationship with her kids, and the rest of her family, the hypothetical and sceptical e-mails from her agnostic brother.

Mostly though, I loved reading about how people carry each other along, and find compassion and grace in the worst times. The author tells a story about how she comforted a man whose sister had killed herself, and her words to him moved me to tears. That is the kind of God I want to see working in the world.

(On a side note, there's a casual side-swipe at Islam that I didn't really appreciate. It's only about a page long, and it's more ill-informed than anything, but it really didn't fit the tone of the rest of the book).

Go leave prompts over at Female-character Trop Fest! I almost missed it, only open until tomorrow!

Alternately, wait until it opens, then go fill my prompts.

Hmmm... I'm not rocking this show as hard two episodes in. I felt like this episode had pretty massive pacing problems, one of the main characters just vanished, and the dialogue isn't really getting any better. However, Graham Greene!

( Spoilers )

Overall, mixed bag. Will keep watching for Irisa and Graham Green.

Then we watched the first episode of Da Vinci's Demons, which wasn't very good. I guess it's nice that Alexander Siddig and Elliot Cowan are getting work?