Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 16

some reading notes, some dashing birds

rachelmanija 's great review of Goddess of Yesterday (by Caroline Cooney) made me want to read it too--I did, and I enjoyed it very much. It really truly felt like the story was being told to me by a young girl from Trojan War times. I liked Anaxanadra very much, liked how observant she was, how she learned quickly and worked for her own survival, and that she took a liking to--and then felt loyalty and concern for--the various people she met.

What had absolutely pushed me from "Hmmm, cool book; ...

clades!!

In Ann Leckie's Translation State, Presger Translator society thinks of itself in terms of clades--like lineages among plain old non-Presger Translator humans, but clade also has an everyday, this-world meaning, which is a taxonomical group that shares a common ancestor.

Humans, chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, and gibbons are in the hominoid clade. They share with Old- and New-World monkeys the clade of anthropoids. Anthropoids and prosimians (a group that includes lemurs and tarsiers) compris...

un caballo misterioso

There's something inherently mysterious about living on the edge of thousands of miles of rain forest. Mysterious things just happen; that's just the way it is.

My tutor sent me this video (and gave me permission to share it) of an eerie encounter she had with a horse the other evening. For the record, I saw no horses whatsoever while I was down there, and though I'm sure that there are people who do have horses, I find it hard to imagine them in the neighborhoods I was in. This horse was apparen...

"I'm teaching myself Hebrew"

The teacher I used to work with in Holyoke asked me back to give a talk on writing to her high school-aged students, who are working on personal narratives. These are all kids for whom regular high school hasn't worked out, but they are still fighting for an education and a future, and the teachers at this program are 100 percent dedicated to helping them with that.

This happened in front of the building housing the program. This is these kids' daily life.

We talked about what makes writing hard, ...

croisssssssants!

osprey_archer has been visiting, and together we embarked on an epic task: baking croissants from scratch. This truly is an epic task as you need to roll out the dough multiple times, and in between, it should rest in the fridge for eight hours (you can shorten this, but the longer the better, say the experts. Or at least one expert. This is the video we used for instruction. )

We documented the last rolling out, cutting into triangles, forming into the proper croissant shape, final rising, and em...

the language of buttons

I dreamed there was a book, an Edwardian guide to the meanings of buttons, the way there are guides to the meanings of flowers. I was looking at the cover, which had lovely old lettering and slightly bad printing (colors not quite aligned). I knew without opening it that it would say what bone buttons mean, and wood, cloth-covered ones, metal ones, clay and ceramic. What it means if the pattern is a crest of arms or flowers, nautical themed or woven.


"There was a guy, the buttons on his jacket we...

Antiphony, by Sherwood Smith

Probably most people who read my journal also read sartorias , but for those who don't, or who missed it, Antiphony, the culmination of her stories set on Sartorias-deles, is out now.

This is a wonderful one, full of people finding each other, healing and growing, and getting themselves in a good place for the next great adventure, whatever that might be. It's an absorbing delight to read. You see Carl (a woman; her actual name is Mersedes Carinna), a nervous, conscientious shadow cast by a domin...

el árbol de gusanos

I think I maybe shared earlier that the Tikuna see a linking between certain creatures of the land and certain creatures of the water: for example, river dolphins are linked with humans--every time a human dies, a dolphin is born, and every time a dolphin dies, a human is born. Thinking of the world population of humans versus the world population of river dolphins, the connection must be between only limited human populations.... maybe just Tikuna.

And they see a similar connection between mana...

What's going on with the Presger Translators in Translation State?

These thoughts will make most sense if you've already read Ann Leckie's Translation State. They may be comprehensible even if you haven't--but you have to not mind spoilers. With that warning...

(  What's going on with the Presger Translators?  )

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coming soon, Translation State essay

I'd hoped to finish this today, but I probably won't. But look for it soon! I have so many THOUGHTS.

I really love Ann Leckie's books; I've enjoyed all of them, and I gobbled this one right up and did enjoy it ... but not as much as the others. I was more quizzical about narrative decisions, etc. (I have a review here on Goodreads.)

The essay's not going to be about the book overall, though: it's going to be about the Presger Translators.

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