Rachel Manija Brown's Blog, page 97
February 3, 2020
Madam, Will You Talk? By Mary Stewart
Re-read.
Charity, a young widow, is on vacation in France with a friend when she gets entangled in an adventure, or more accurately, entangles herself. There is kidnapping and kissing, but both are overshadowed by the truly impressive car chases.
An effervescent and exciting romantic suspense novel, with excellent prose, atmosphere, and supporting characters. Charity is a very active, competent, courageous, and confident heroine, which is refreshing.
( Read more... )
Only $1.99 on Kindle!
Madam, Will You Talk?[image error]
[image error] [image error]
comments
Charity, a young widow, is on vacation in France with a friend when she gets entangled in an adventure, or more accurately, entangles herself. There is kidnapping and kissing, but both are overshadowed by the truly impressive car chases.
An effervescent and exciting romantic suspense novel, with excellent prose, atmosphere, and supporting characters. Charity is a very active, competent, courageous, and confident heroine, which is refreshing.
( Read more... )
Only $1.99 on Kindle!
Madam, Will You Talk?[image error]
[image error] [image error]
comments
January 26, 2020
Chick Pics!
I'm still working on getting photos on DW, but if you can see Facebook, I put some chick pics there.
When we got them, the Americauna (they lay blue eggs) was half the size of the others and had splay-leg. The poor thing could barely walk, kept getting knocked over by the others (unintentionally, but still), seemed depressed, and mostly lurked under the incubator, not eating or drinking.
We treated her with a hobble to strengthen her legs, but we were worried she'd die - birds are delicate and baby birds even more so. (We tried other things too, but suffice it to say they were all wretched failures and the hobble was the only thing that seemed to do anything but stress her out even more.) Kebi named her Beauty to encourage her.
After a week, in which she kept seeming to be hanging on by a thread, we took the hobble off. Two days later, she was zipping around the pen. We moved them all to a big horse trough, since they were too big for the original box. And now, at three weeks old, Beauty is the same size as the smallest of the other chicks, and by far the fastest!
It's hilarious to watch her go for mealworms. She's a spherical ball of black feathers with a fuzzy white butt, and she zig-zags madly around, twice as fast as any of the others, moving like a character from an 80s video game. Kebi says she looks like Pac Man, but much faster.
The chicks all have distinct personalities. Dotty and Wanda like to perch on my hand, and Whiskers (who has muttonchops) made me realize the origin of the word "peckish" because she gobbles so much that at times you can watch her visibly get fatter.
In conclusion, I now want chicks of my own. It's impossible with my current apartment, but I've been thinking of getting a place with a yard for a while now - I want to garden more, I need a generator for medical reasons (refrigerated meds) and it's impossible in my current situation, and now I want chickens.
I have long had a dream of living an at least partly self-sufficient life, ever since I was a kid reading the Little House books. (The Ingalls were also only partly self-sustaining - very few humans have ever lived entirely without the help of others. The only one I can think of offhand is Juana Maria, the inspiration for Island of the Blue Dolphins. Modern-day hermits don't make ALL their own stuff like she did.)
So this last year, I learned to garden and bake bread. My ambition is to garden, eat my own vegetables, feed the chickens some scraps and compost the rest, and eat their eggs. And, of course, enjoy their twittering company and pretend I'm a Disney princess when they flock to perch on my outstretched arms, which has now literally happened. See photo proof!
comments
When we got them, the Americauna (they lay blue eggs) was half the size of the others and had splay-leg. The poor thing could barely walk, kept getting knocked over by the others (unintentionally, but still), seemed depressed, and mostly lurked under the incubator, not eating or drinking.
We treated her with a hobble to strengthen her legs, but we were worried she'd die - birds are delicate and baby birds even more so. (We tried other things too, but suffice it to say they were all wretched failures and the hobble was the only thing that seemed to do anything but stress her out even more.) Kebi named her Beauty to encourage her.
After a week, in which she kept seeming to be hanging on by a thread, we took the hobble off. Two days later, she was zipping around the pen. We moved them all to a big horse trough, since they were too big for the original box. And now, at three weeks old, Beauty is the same size as the smallest of the other chicks, and by far the fastest!
It's hilarious to watch her go for mealworms. She's a spherical ball of black feathers with a fuzzy white butt, and she zig-zags madly around, twice as fast as any of the others, moving like a character from an 80s video game. Kebi says she looks like Pac Man, but much faster.
The chicks all have distinct personalities. Dotty and Wanda like to perch on my hand, and Whiskers (who has muttonchops) made me realize the origin of the word "peckish" because she gobbles so much that at times you can watch her visibly get fatter.
In conclusion, I now want chicks of my own. It's impossible with my current apartment, but I've been thinking of getting a place with a yard for a while now - I want to garden more, I need a generator for medical reasons (refrigerated meds) and it's impossible in my current situation, and now I want chickens.
I have long had a dream of living an at least partly self-sufficient life, ever since I was a kid reading the Little House books. (The Ingalls were also only partly self-sustaining - very few humans have ever lived entirely without the help of others. The only one I can think of offhand is Juana Maria, the inspiration for Island of the Blue Dolphins. Modern-day hermits don't make ALL their own stuff like she did.)
So this last year, I learned to garden and bake bread. My ambition is to garden, eat my own vegetables, feed the chickens some scraps and compost the rest, and eat their eggs. And, of course, enjoy their twittering company and pretend I'm a Disney princess when they flock to perch on my outstretched arms, which has now literally happened. See photo proof!
comments
January 24, 2020
The Red Tree, by Caitlin Kiernan (FF Friday)
This just might be the scariest book I’ve ever read. Reading it in January, along with Wylding Hall, makes for a great year of reading horror even if I don’t read anything else in that league for the rest of the year.
The Red Tree is one of my favorite horror genres, the “found manuscript.” This one is especially satisfying in that manner because it involves found manuscripts within found manuscripts within found manuscripts.
It begins with an introduction by the editor of deceased writer Sarah Crowe, explaining that the journal she kept in the last months before her suicide was mysteriously mailed to her. The editor then details her trip to the house in rural Rhode Island that Sarah had been renting when she died; she visits the tree that she says is often mentioned in the journal, but doesn’t dare go into the basement...
Is your skin creeping already? Mine was. But it gets exponentially scarier as it goes along. Similarly to Wylding Hall, this is the restrained, things-glimpsed-from-the-corner-of-your-eye, minimal gore type of horror. Which, to me, is nearly always the scariest kind.
Sarah rented the house on the pretense of finishing an overdue book which she’s completely blocked on, and also to escape from reminders of her ex-girlfriend Amanda’s suicide. She discovers after she’s already moved in that the house was previously occupied by Charles Harvey, a professor who also killed himself; in the extremely creepy basement, she discovers his unfinished work of nonfiction documenting the horror surrounding the red oak growing near the property, and also the typewriter and ream of onionskin paper he wrote it on. Using the same typewriter and same paper, Sarah begins a journal.
Then she learns that her landlord rented the attic of the house to Constance, an artist from Los Angeles. And that’s when things start to get really weird...
The Red Tree is incredibly atmospheric, beautifully written, and with an unusual, vivid main character in Sarah, who is hard to get along with and easy to love. It has the unusual quality of being both an easy read in terms of prose and extremely dense in terms of narrative complexity.
This is an extremely ambiguous book, which deploys multiple possible explanations, along with a total lack of explanation, to paradoxically satisfying effect.
Sarah is, at the very least, depressed. She has seizures, which can cause blackouts, and drinks despite medical advice not to. In her journal, she confesses to a number of lies in the past, in addition to sometimes outright claiming to have made up or fictionalized aspects of things she just wrote about. And, of course, she’s a fiction writer. In other words, she’s an extremely unreliable narrator.
But maybe she’s not that unreliable. There is a ton of local lore about that tree. Maybe it’s all true. But how reliable is the manuscript she finds? Sarah says she can’t find sources for much of what’s in it.
And then there’s Constance. She’s present for a number of the creepy supernatural moments. But there’s reasons to question her reliability, too.
This rundown makes the book sound like a “magic or madness?” type of story, but that’s much too simplistic. The Red Tree resists simple explanation, instead opening up layers and layers of horror, grief, obsession, history, myth, identity confusion, dreams, and art. It rewards close attention, and I’m sure it will reward re-reading, but not to find straightforward answers. There are none.
Huge spoilers below. I’d love to discuss this book and hear others’ thoughts on it!
( Read more... )
This was the first thing I'd read by Kiernan, and now I want to read everything.
The Red Tree[image error]
[image error] [image error]
This should win some kind of prize for most inappropriate cover. It looks like a standard urban fantasy, and it is not even remotely that. It needs a cover indicating literary horror. This sort of thing:
[image error] [image error]
[image error] [image error]
comments
The Red Tree is one of my favorite horror genres, the “found manuscript.” This one is especially satisfying in that manner because it involves found manuscripts within found manuscripts within found manuscripts.
It begins with an introduction by the editor of deceased writer Sarah Crowe, explaining that the journal she kept in the last months before her suicide was mysteriously mailed to her. The editor then details her trip to the house in rural Rhode Island that Sarah had been renting when she died; she visits the tree that she says is often mentioned in the journal, but doesn’t dare go into the basement...
Is your skin creeping already? Mine was. But it gets exponentially scarier as it goes along. Similarly to Wylding Hall, this is the restrained, things-glimpsed-from-the-corner-of-your-eye, minimal gore type of horror. Which, to me, is nearly always the scariest kind.
Sarah rented the house on the pretense of finishing an overdue book which she’s completely blocked on, and also to escape from reminders of her ex-girlfriend Amanda’s suicide. She discovers after she’s already moved in that the house was previously occupied by Charles Harvey, a professor who also killed himself; in the extremely creepy basement, she discovers his unfinished work of nonfiction documenting the horror surrounding the red oak growing near the property, and also the typewriter and ream of onionskin paper he wrote it on. Using the same typewriter and same paper, Sarah begins a journal.
Then she learns that her landlord rented the attic of the house to Constance, an artist from Los Angeles. And that’s when things start to get really weird...
The Red Tree is incredibly atmospheric, beautifully written, and with an unusual, vivid main character in Sarah, who is hard to get along with and easy to love. It has the unusual quality of being both an easy read in terms of prose and extremely dense in terms of narrative complexity.
This is an extremely ambiguous book, which deploys multiple possible explanations, along with a total lack of explanation, to paradoxically satisfying effect.
Sarah is, at the very least, depressed. She has seizures, which can cause blackouts, and drinks despite medical advice not to. In her journal, she confesses to a number of lies in the past, in addition to sometimes outright claiming to have made up or fictionalized aspects of things she just wrote about. And, of course, she’s a fiction writer. In other words, she’s an extremely unreliable narrator.
But maybe she’s not that unreliable. There is a ton of local lore about that tree. Maybe it’s all true. But how reliable is the manuscript she finds? Sarah says she can’t find sources for much of what’s in it.
And then there’s Constance. She’s present for a number of the creepy supernatural moments. But there’s reasons to question her reliability, too.
This rundown makes the book sound like a “magic or madness?” type of story, but that’s much too simplistic. The Red Tree resists simple explanation, instead opening up layers and layers of horror, grief, obsession, history, myth, identity confusion, dreams, and art. It rewards close attention, and I’m sure it will reward re-reading, but not to find straightforward answers. There are none.
Huge spoilers below. I’d love to discuss this book and hear others’ thoughts on it!
( Read more... )
This was the first thing I'd read by Kiernan, and now I want to read everything.
The Red Tree[image error]
[image error] [image error]
This should win some kind of prize for most inappropriate cover. It looks like a standard urban fantasy, and it is not even remotely that. It needs a cover indicating literary horror. This sort of thing:
[image error] [image error]
[image error] [image error]
comments
January 21, 2020
The Hyena and the Hawk (Echoes of the Fall 3), by Adrian Tchaikovsky
I keep trying and failing to do a proper review of this, so I will just say that I loved it and found the ending very satisfying. I could have read ten books of it—let’s be real, I could have read an infinite number of books of it—but it was also perfect as was.
Massive spoilers under cut.
( Read more... )
Tchaikovsky has gotten a lot better at writing romantic relationships. I actually shipped people in this book, while in the kinden books I was mostly anti-shipping them, especially the canon romances.
The Hyena and the Hawk (Echoes of the Fall Book 3)[image error]
[image error] [image error]
comments
Massive spoilers under cut.
( Read more... )
Tchaikovsky has gotten a lot better at writing romantic relationships. I actually shipped people in this book, while in the kinden books I was mostly anti-shipping them, especially the canon romances.
The Hyena and the Hawk (Echoes of the Fall Book 3)[image error]
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comments
January 17, 2020
The Wilder Girls, by Rory Power (FF Friday)
Much like Annihilation if the Shimmer was over a girls’ boarding school on an island and there was 100% more squicky body horror and YA dystopia tropes.
The Tox is a disease which strikes an island entirely inhabited by a girls’ boarding school and the father of one of the girls, killing many and horrifically transforming the rest. Animals and plants are also affected. To make it worse, it doesn’t just transform you and then stop, but keeps coming back in flares that do different things, most likely until it kills you. Unsurprisingly, it is promptly placed under quarantine.
The Tox symptoms are GROSS and often involve vomiting horrifying things, which is a particular squick of mine. I would not have gotten past page two if I hadn’t gotten immediately sucked in by the striking narrative voice and the way the girls deal with their situation; as it was, I had to skim a lot of extreme grossness.
The book picks up a year and a half after the quarantine. There are two adults left alive, the Headmistress and Miss Welch, and about half the girls. They subsist on the edge of starvation on insufficient supplies dropped off by the Navy, but rather than turn on each other a la Lord of the Flies, they’ve responded by forming a tight community, plus extremely close relationships with each other in couples or smaller groups, some platonic, some romantic, some where it’s hard to make that distinction. A lot of aspects of the community and smaller groups are messy and violent, but they carry on and care for each other too.
Hetty, the narrator, lost one eye to the Tox but is still an excellent shot. She has an extremely close relationship with Byatt, her best friend, who has a second spine protruding through her back. The third girl in their group is Reese, who has bioluminescent hair and a silver lizard’s hand; Reese is ferocious and prickly and secretive, and it’s not immediately clear what binds all three of them together.
There is a significant F/F relationship which I’ll explain beneath a spoiler cut, but boundary-blurring, both physical and emotional, is a big part of the story so the exact nature of relationships is hard to pin down.
Despite forever teetering on the edge of my tolerance for body horror and vomit, I found the first half of this book extremely compelling. From the title I expected it to be about girls discovering their wild sides, and there are aspects of that, but I was more struck by the way in which it’s about living with chronic/terminal illness. The relationships and emotions are vivid and desperate, with a surprising amount of love and compassion given that this genre is normally more “when things go to hell everyone immediately resorts to cannibalism.” The doomed community caring for itself and its members as best it can is by far the best part of the book, in my opinion.
The second half of the book also has some striking images but gets much more conventional, to its detriment: 50% Annihilation, 50% nonsensical YA dystopia tropes. It also had one of the most frustrating endings I’ve ever read. This is partly because it stops more-or-less randomly rather than ends, and no sequel appears to be planned. This is also because the climax leading up to the point where the book stops is so utterly WTF.
( Massive spoilers and a lot of ranting about nonsensical plotting )
Author has lots of talent but this was an extremely frustrating book. For me. I’ve seen a bunch of unqualified raves about it, as well as raves qualified due to the non-ending.
Wilder Girls[image error]
[image error] [image error]
comments
The Tox is a disease which strikes an island entirely inhabited by a girls’ boarding school and the father of one of the girls, killing many and horrifically transforming the rest. Animals and plants are also affected. To make it worse, it doesn’t just transform you and then stop, but keeps coming back in flares that do different things, most likely until it kills you. Unsurprisingly, it is promptly placed under quarantine.
The Tox symptoms are GROSS and often involve vomiting horrifying things, which is a particular squick of mine. I would not have gotten past page two if I hadn’t gotten immediately sucked in by the striking narrative voice and the way the girls deal with their situation; as it was, I had to skim a lot of extreme grossness.
The book picks up a year and a half after the quarantine. There are two adults left alive, the Headmistress and Miss Welch, and about half the girls. They subsist on the edge of starvation on insufficient supplies dropped off by the Navy, but rather than turn on each other a la Lord of the Flies, they’ve responded by forming a tight community, plus extremely close relationships with each other in couples or smaller groups, some platonic, some romantic, some where it’s hard to make that distinction. A lot of aspects of the community and smaller groups are messy and violent, but they carry on and care for each other too.
Hetty, the narrator, lost one eye to the Tox but is still an excellent shot. She has an extremely close relationship with Byatt, her best friend, who has a second spine protruding through her back. The third girl in their group is Reese, who has bioluminescent hair and a silver lizard’s hand; Reese is ferocious and prickly and secretive, and it’s not immediately clear what binds all three of them together.
There is a significant F/F relationship which I’ll explain beneath a spoiler cut, but boundary-blurring, both physical and emotional, is a big part of the story so the exact nature of relationships is hard to pin down.
Despite forever teetering on the edge of my tolerance for body horror and vomit, I found the first half of this book extremely compelling. From the title I expected it to be about girls discovering their wild sides, and there are aspects of that, but I was more struck by the way in which it’s about living with chronic/terminal illness. The relationships and emotions are vivid and desperate, with a surprising amount of love and compassion given that this genre is normally more “when things go to hell everyone immediately resorts to cannibalism.” The doomed community caring for itself and its members as best it can is by far the best part of the book, in my opinion.
The second half of the book also has some striking images but gets much more conventional, to its detriment: 50% Annihilation, 50% nonsensical YA dystopia tropes. It also had one of the most frustrating endings I’ve ever read. This is partly because it stops more-or-less randomly rather than ends, and no sequel appears to be planned. This is also because the climax leading up to the point where the book stops is so utterly WTF.
( Massive spoilers and a lot of ranting about nonsensical plotting )
Author has lots of talent but this was an extremely frustrating book. For me. I’ve seen a bunch of unqualified raves about it, as well as raves qualified due to the non-ending.
Wilder Girls[image error]
[image error] [image error]
comments
January 15, 2020
Wylding Hall, by Elizabeth Hand
A fantastic dark fantasy/understated horror/Gothic short novel about a group of musicians in the 60s who record an album at an old English house in one of those old English towns where everyone who lives there knows where not to go and what not to talk about. It's told entirely in interviews with the surviving band members and a few others, with complete with offhand remarks that are utterly chilling in context.
The style is very different from what I've read by hand before: very pared-down, as fits the conceit, while her other works I've read were very dense and lush. The style works beautifully with the old-school horror in which there is no graphic violence, no gore other than a few (fucking terrifying, in context) drops of blood, and almost everything is scarier for being glimpsed and hinted at rather than shown or explained.
And then every now and then something is shown, and it nearly gives you a heart attack.
( Read more... )
The band seems to be loosely based on Fairport Convention, which also spent a month at an old building rented by their manager so they could record an album and recover from a tragedy. (Their roadie fell asleep at the wheel; in the ensuing accident, all of them were injured, some severely, and their drummer Martin Lamble and Jeannie Franklyn, Richard Thompson's girlfriend, were killed.) Like the band in the novel, they were all in their late teens and early twenties. Though Julian, the singer/songwriter, seems based on Nick Drake.
The atmosphere of the 60s folk-rock scene is beautifully evoked, as is the atmosphere of creeping horror. I read this book before going to sleep, and dreamed that I was lost inside what had at first appeared to be a normal apartment complex, but I couldn't find my way out and I kept coming across horrifying things. The only one I remember was the sort of amusement-park type pool that has life-size dolphins attached to moving rods so they move above the water and then go under it. Only instead of fake dolphins, it was those horrible mummified "mermaids" made by sewing the top half of a monkey to the bottom half of a fish, and they were dolphin-sized and rotting.
The audio book has multiple narrators; I'd love to listen to that. But not at night.
Wylding Hall[image error]
[image error] [image error]
![[personal profile]](https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1491408111i/22407843.png)
skygiants
, thanks so much for the rec!
comments
The style is very different from what I've read by hand before: very pared-down, as fits the conceit, while her other works I've read were very dense and lush. The style works beautifully with the old-school horror in which there is no graphic violence, no gore other than a few (fucking terrifying, in context) drops of blood, and almost everything is scarier for being glimpsed and hinted at rather than shown or explained.
And then every now and then something is shown, and it nearly gives you a heart attack.
( Read more... )
The band seems to be loosely based on Fairport Convention, which also spent a month at an old building rented by their manager so they could record an album and recover from a tragedy. (Their roadie fell asleep at the wheel; in the ensuing accident, all of them were injured, some severely, and their drummer Martin Lamble and Jeannie Franklyn, Richard Thompson's girlfriend, were killed.) Like the band in the novel, they were all in their late teens and early twenties. Though Julian, the singer/songwriter, seems based on Nick Drake.
The atmosphere of the 60s folk-rock scene is beautifully evoked, as is the atmosphere of creeping horror. I read this book before going to sleep, and dreamed that I was lost inside what had at first appeared to be a normal apartment complex, but I couldn't find my way out and I kept coming across horrifying things. The only one I remember was the sort of amusement-park type pool that has life-size dolphins attached to moving rods so they move above the water and then go under it. Only instead of fake dolphins, it was those horrible mummified "mermaids" made by sewing the top half of a monkey to the bottom half of a fish, and they were dolphin-sized and rotting.
The audio book has multiple narrators; I'd love to listen to that. But not at night.
Wylding Hall[image error]
[image error] [image error]
skygiants
, thanks so much for the rec! comments
New Year Reading Projects
1. For the new year, I am once again attempting to write up everything I read, even if my write-ups are extremely short. Anyone want to join me?
2. I am back in an F/F mood, so will be trying to post more to![[community profile]](https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1497869825i/23063418.png)
fffriday
. Possibly not exactly on Friday.
3. There is a new romantic suspense community,
girlmeetstrouble
. It has just started a group read of Madam, Will You Talk by Mary Stewart.
ETA: A bunch of Mart Stewart novels are currently $1.99 on Kindle, including Madam, Will You Talk?[image error], Nine Coaches Waiting[image error], and The Ivy Tree[image error].
[image error] [image error]
comments
2. I am back in an F/F mood, so will be trying to post more to
fffriday
. Possibly not exactly on Friday.3. There is a new romantic suspense community,
girlmeetstrouble
. It has just started a group read of Madam, Will You Talk by Mary Stewart.ETA: A bunch of Mart Stewart novels are currently $1.99 on Kindle, including Madam, Will You Talk?[image error], Nine Coaches Waiting[image error], and The Ivy Tree[image error].
[image error] [image error]
comments
January 10, 2020
Peep!
I am up in Mariposa again. Last time I was there, Kebi and I got together and mail-ordered eight just-hatched chicks! The chicks arrived the other day, and they are darling. And loud. They are in the bathroom and I have been visiting them regularly.
We got one Easter Egger (lays blue-green eggs), one Olive Egger (lays green eggs), one Silver-Laced Wyandotte (lays brown eggs), one Gold-Laced Wyandotte, one Blue Wyandotte, one Americauna (lays blue or blue-green eggs), one Blue-Splash Maran (lays dark brown eggs), and one Austra White (lays white eggs). They were supposed to come color-banded but mostly didn't, so we mostly don't know which are which.
One of the ones we do know, the Americauna, is not only tiny - half the size of the Austra White - but has splay-leg, which we've been treating by creating a tape hobble for her wee legs. Poor thing. Kebi named her Beauty to encourage her.
We are guessing about the breeds of the chicks, but they are...
Dotty: White with two black dots, the alpha. Probably the Austra white.
Beauty: The teeny Americauna.
Mary: Silver. Probably the blue-splash Maran.
Hattie: Has a white spot on her head.
Wendy: Silver Wyandotte.
Willow: Lighter Wyandotte.
Wanda: Darker Wyandotte.
Whiskers: Orange with muttonchops like an Edwardian gentleman.
I will post photos if and when I figure out how to do so on DW. My former photo service no longer works, I've maxed out DW storage, and I have to take some time to figure out a whole new multi-step system using Google Drive.
comments
We got one Easter Egger (lays blue-green eggs), one Olive Egger (lays green eggs), one Silver-Laced Wyandotte (lays brown eggs), one Gold-Laced Wyandotte, one Blue Wyandotte, one Americauna (lays blue or blue-green eggs), one Blue-Splash Maran (lays dark brown eggs), and one Austra White (lays white eggs). They were supposed to come color-banded but mostly didn't, so we mostly don't know which are which.
One of the ones we do know, the Americauna, is not only tiny - half the size of the Austra White - but has splay-leg, which we've been treating by creating a tape hobble for her wee legs. Poor thing. Kebi named her Beauty to encourage her.
We are guessing about the breeds of the chicks, but they are...
Dotty: White with two black dots, the alpha. Probably the Austra white.
Beauty: The teeny Americauna.
Mary: Silver. Probably the blue-splash Maran.
Hattie: Has a white spot on her head.
Wendy: Silver Wyandotte.
Willow: Lighter Wyandotte.
Wanda: Darker Wyandotte.
Whiskers: Orange with muttonchops like an Edwardian gentleman.
I will post photos if and when I figure out how to do so on DW. My former photo service no longer works, I've maxed out DW storage, and I have to take some time to figure out a whole new multi-step system using Google Drive.
comments
Google photo link no longer works
I used to use this to take links from Google photos and post them to DW. https://ctrlq.org/google/photos/
It now says "please try another Google photos link" no matter what link I use. Any ideas for fixing this? Or suggestions of some other way to post photos on DW? I've already maxed out DW's own storage.
comments
It now says "please try another Google photos link" no matter what link I use. Any ideas for fixing this? Or suggestions of some other way to post photos on DW? I've already maxed out DW's own storage.
comments
January 6, 2020
The Secret Commonwealth (The Book of Dust 2), by Philip Pullman
Since I had both books out from the library, I read the second out of morbid curiosity. What the actual fuck.
The second book is mostly about something which sounded very interesting, which is what happens if a person is at odds with their daemon, separates from their daemon in a way other than being severed, etc. Since the daemon is the soul, this seems like a metaphor for profound trauma, being deeply divided within oneself, mental illness, spiritual malaise, etc. All really fascinating stuff.
Spoiler cut now actually in place, SORRY. Lots of details below.
Warning: there is more rape in this book.
( Read more... )
I was originally going to say that I think I will think of the entire second trilogy as fanfic, but upon more thought, I will think of everything except the first book and the TV series to date as fanfic. Weird feral lying Lyra and her beloved Pan, Iorek Byrnison, and Lin-Manuel Miranda as Lee Scoresby are my one and only canon from now on.
The Book of Dust: The Secret Commonwealth (Book of Dust, Volume 2)[image error]
[image error] [image error]
comments
The second book is mostly about something which sounded very interesting, which is what happens if a person is at odds with their daemon, separates from their daemon in a way other than being severed, etc. Since the daemon is the soul, this seems like a metaphor for profound trauma, being deeply divided within oneself, mental illness, spiritual malaise, etc. All really fascinating stuff.
Spoiler cut now actually in place, SORRY. Lots of details below.
Warning: there is more rape in this book.
( Read more... )
I was originally going to say that I think I will think of the entire second trilogy as fanfic, but upon more thought, I will think of everything except the first book and the TV series to date as fanfic. Weird feral lying Lyra and her beloved Pan, Iorek Byrnison, and Lin-Manuel Miranda as Lee Scoresby are my one and only canon from now on.
The Book of Dust: The Secret Commonwealth (Book of Dust, Volume 2)[image error]
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