subdee

I got one vote for Anomaly and one for my favorite Death Note fic. Since I don’t have a favorite (lies! it’s I'm Your Greatest Fan), Anomaly it is.

( rambling introduction, feel free to skip this part )
( actual commentary starts here )

Loveless content I forgot to cross-post here:
Loveless oneshot, Ritsu and Nagisa
Loveless oneshot, Ritsu and Soubi
Loveless drabble, Ritsu, Nagisa and Seven

I might have linked to the first one, but I don't think I linked to the second, and the third is new. Anyway the first fails because I didn't really know where I was going with it. At first I only wanted to make a point about Soubi, but I ended up spending more time on Ritsu, which was a problem because the original story called for a wallpaper-like Ritsu whose only purpose was to comment on Soubi. I think I did a better job with Ritsu-the-person (as opposed to Ritsu-the-plot-device) in stories two and three.

But I'm proud of this line:
Nagisa could understand the urge to pin helpless creatures to a piece of styrofoam, to watch them die; what she couldn't understand was Ritsu's clinical fascination with the corpses.

It's a commentary on active versus incidental cruelty. Some day I will (maybe) expand this idea into a full-length fic.


...at fanthology, July comes after June. The next session's theme isn't Anything Goes Month (that's in August), it's Mysterious Shop Fic. XxxHolic and Petshop of Horrors crossovers count. I need to make the announcement. But I want to combine it with a schedule for the next few months. But I'm waiting on the go-ahead. HELP HELP WHAT DO I DO.

Reading Maria Doria Russel's The Sparrow. So far I really, really like it. Half is set in 2019, before and during a Jesuit mission to an alien planet, and half is set in 2060, after the return of its sole survivor. Besides apintrix and canis_m, my ex-Catholic atheist housemate Marie also recommended this book.( Read more... )

Linkblogging:

Overheard in New York
(via sesame_seed)

Formal Thought Disorder
(Wikipedia article)

rarelitart
(fanart for rare (meaning: not Harry Potter) literature)

I found a list of recommended fantasy book authors and since I am just made of time (read: I have another essay to write and haven't slept in two days) I decided to make a list of how many I'd read already, which new authors sounded particularly interesting, etc. Somehow this morphed into entirely subjective descriptions of every book on the list I was familiar with, clearly I am insane.

If you have a little bit of time, comments are below the cut. WARNING: not feeling particularly coherent right now.

( Long list, but not as long as it could have been (ie my mind is a sieve) )


Before I started blogging, my memory was terrible: everything earlier than 11th grade is hazy, so it's likely I've read more listed fantasy and simply don't remember it. With all of my books at home, I can't make this complete, but here's some fantasy I liked that wasn't on the list:

Lawrence Yep
#Dragon of the Lost Sea
#Dragon Steel
#Dragon Cauldron
#Dragon War

Shimmer/Thorn OTP!!! Snooty disposessed dragon princesses who are forced to rely on intrepid but uneducated peasant boys for the win. I seem to recall Shimmer had a human form, which puts her a step ahead of Temeraire, but that she considered it beneath herself to use it. XD. This series intersects with Chinese folktales, most noticeably Monkey (a major character from Steel onwards).

Anne Logston
#Waterdance

More than anything else, this reminds me of Patricia Wrede's Lyra books. No literary merit, but I liked the romance subplot, the cultish main plot, and the characters.

Kate Forsyth
# Dragonclaw
# The Pool of Two Moons
# The Cursed Towers
# The Forbidden Land
# The Skull of the World
# The Fathomless Caves

This series must be good because it is Celtic fantasy and yet I still liked it. (For those just tuning in, I HATE Arthurian and Celtic fantasy, there is something about the half-wild mindset that drives me absolutely crazy.) This book is full of characters doing dumb things with terrible consequences, another thing I am not so wild about in fantasy -- but the worldbuilding is amazing, the pacing is very consistent and there are a lot of memorable characters.

Chrono Crusade (vol 6), Daisuke Moriyama
Very rushed. There are so many parts that could have greater emotional impact, if only they hadn’t all been crowded together. Daisuke Moriyama doesn’t work by surprise, he works by taking every available opportunity (+ creating opportunities) to unambiguously push across the same themes he’s been going on about since the very beginning. ( Read More... )

Earthian (vol 2, vol 3), Yun Kouga
I really liked volume two, but volume three didn’t live up to the hype. (Wait, that’s it?! Where is my stunning conclusion?!!) Detailed comments on volumes 2 and 3 behind the cut: ( Read More... )

Originally published at SD Alternative. You can comment here or there.