Ragged Feathers

So, I’m developing a girlcrush on Sarah Rees Brennan, for her Gothic Tuesdays. This week’s winner was Collie Wilkins’s Woman in White. (Project Gutenburg can hook you up too.)

LAURA: I’m going to tell Sir Percy Cruelpants that I will marry him, but I love another, so he won’t want to marry me.
MARIAN: Well, he will if he doesn’t give a crap about your feelings, though?
LAURA: Nonsense, I’m sure this will work out awesome. Sir Percy Blackheart, I love someone else and I don’t wanna marry you. Still want to marry me?
SIR PERCY RIDICULOUSLY EVIL: Still rich?
LAURA: Yes.
SIR PERCY THE PERFIDIOUS: Then yes.
LAURA: … That did not go the way it did in my head. (Sarah Rees Brennan)

The whole thing is pure gold. You should also look at her Jane Eyre one.

Also, here’s a free documentary on Haruki Murakami. I enjoy Murakami’s work–frex, I read his latest, 1Q84, in a few long gulps. (No, LONG gulps. Nearly a thousand pages, OMG.) Seriously, you don’t read Murakami for linear coherence just like you don’t watch a David Lynch film for it. They’re both harvesters of subconscious gas-bubbles. (Also, really fricking weird, and not too good with the portrayal of teenage girls, meh.)

And the Heart Attack Grill has its first moment of truth in advertising.

In other news, the first book of the new YA series is back with the editor for another revision pass. And the second Bannon & Clare book, The Red Plague Affair, is heating up inside my skull. Rest is overrated, don’t you think? Plus there’s martial arts for the kids, a four-year-old I’m watching for a few days, and a dog who thinks the Roomba is a demonspawn predator I need protecting from.

So…off I go. Be careful out there, Gothic Lady Sleuths!

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It’s chicken-with-head-cut-off time. There’s the trip next week and wordcount and ARGH. So, three things today.

* First off, more on the Google Books Settlement. Richard Curtis asks where all the “concerned” people were before all the work was done. More links, of course, as I find them. Feel free to post links in the comments, but keep the shouting/arguing to a minimum, ‘kay? Thanks.

* Just finished The Storm of War, which for a one-book history of WWII was magisterial and pretty good. Some of the author’s assertions I don’t agree with, but I can see how he got there. Moved from that to digesting Disease, Desire, And The Body… in little pieces, and was thrilled to find an intersection with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s thought in the Introduction. (Homosocial bonds, etc.) I’m also blazing through The Vagabond. I’d forgotten how much I love Colette.

I’m trying to figure out which books to take with me on the trip. I’ll have a lot of time while on the plane and train to read. I’m thinking some JR Ward and This Republic of Suffering, with Epistemology of the Closet for when I feel ambitious.

Yes, I am obsessing over what books to take. It’s better than my usual angst over flying. You don’t even know.

* From Digby:

Seriously, if they can’t support those reforms, which are even supported by the insurance companies themselves, then regulation will never be enough to keep the system honest. A public plan will be impossible to dismantle once it’s in place and will not discriminate against sick people. If they keep premiums low enough to attract some healthy people as well, it will provide enough competition to keep these insurance company greedheads and psycho Republicans from doing their worst. It’s a necessity.

I love how it’s the reformers who everyone believes are trying to kill people when it’s these defenders of the status quo who actually are. (Digby)

It’s funny, but the conservative side of the healthcare debate, with its lunatic fringe yelling about Nazism and death panels, is a huge exercise in projection. They’re trying to pin on everyone else the things–i.e., killing people who don’t agree with them–they actually ascribe to, the things their poster boys do. Words can’t express my disgust at this point. Though Barney Frank does a good job. And so does the Rude Pundit, who is not for the faint-of-heart and NSFW either. (You’ve been warned.)

Glenn Greenwald, in his typically logical and nonemotional way, details what’s actually driving the healthcare reform process and debate.

I just feel like, come on people. We could put a man on the moon, fer Chrissake. We can figure out how to get healthcare for everyone, the way other developed countries do. Quit being idiots. And at the same time, I feel weary contempt for the lies and fear-and-hatemongering going around, but I don’t know why I’m surprised. This is business as usual from the jerkwads who brought us Fox News. Yawn. Let’s do something productive instead, mmmkay?

I’m almost glad I’m going to be taking an enforced break from blogging next week while traveling. I’m worn out.

And that, as they say, is that.

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I’ve had good luck on the book front recently:

* The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery. Oh. My God. I LOVED this book. It was beautifully written, wonderfully constructed, lovingly translated, and Barbery did not punk out on the ending. The concierge Madame Michel looks like any other 54-year-old concierge in an upper-class Paris apartment building. This is camouflage. She is in reality an autodidact, a connoisseur of art, literature, classical music, and film. The privileged, hyperintelligent girl Paloma plans to kill herself on her next birthday because adult life is a sham. Both of them are doomed to loneliness and self-destruction…but then a new tenant moves in, and an odd sort of salvation between dissimilar creatures takes place.

I won’t lie. The book made me cry, especially the part about the camellias. And I expected Barbery to go for the Hallmark ending and ruin a great book, and she didn’t. My faith in humanity is officially restored.

* Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri. I blame Bam for this. She was reading Lahiri the other day and tweeted that Interpreter of Maladies got a Pulitzer–a collection of short stories, getting a Pulitzer. I had to read it. I flat-out loved every story. I am still thinking about Mrs. Sen, though I suspect my favorite story is a toss-up between Sexy and A Real Durwan. The only wrong note was The Third And Final Continent, mostly because the exposition at the end seemed like a case where the writer got tired and took the easy way.

I find Lahiri very Ibsen-like. There is not a great deal of motion on the surface; it is mostly interior action. This is difficult to pull off without getting boring, but Lahiri does it brilliantly.

* Her Majesty’s Spymaster, Stephen Budiansky. This is history the way it’s meant to be told. Action-packed, deftly explained, and occasionally hysterically funny in a dry academic way, this slim biography of Walsingham–the man who, more than anyone other than Cecil, kept Queen Elizabeth I on the throne–just knocked it out of the park for me. It starts with a gripping description of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and managed to make me finally understand what the hell was going on with Mary Queen of Scots and why she and Elizabeth acted the way they did. I’ve read other books that haven’t given me half as much insight into Elizabethan society and political maneuvering.

* Along For The Ride, Sarah Dessen. I’m a big, big Dessen fan. I bought this in hardcover because I couldn’t wait. (Dessen’s Dreamland is one of the best YA books I’ve ever read, hands-down.) The protagonist, Auden, is an insomniac overachiever, dealing with her parents’ divorce. In trademark Dessen style, with lyricism and deft characterization, Auden finds solace in nighttime rambles with another insomniac, a boy haunted by a deadly accident. However, it’s in Auden’s relationship with her stepmother and her halting, painful relationship with her demanding mother, that Dessen’s craft really shines. A very solid, very beautiful YA book.

If I ever meet Sarah Dessen in person my brain is going to melt from the sheer fangirl squee. Nuff said.

So, it’s been a good run for me lately. I’m still working very slowly on other books, ones I either have to savor or slow down and really untangle each word of. Obfuscation is considered a sign of academic and literary athleticism, but it’s hell to work through even when one loves the material.

Poor, poor me. Yeah, I’m just unlucky all over, ain’t I.

Over and out.

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