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Continuing the Mabinogion Tetrology discussion started here.

Walton's adaptation of the Fourth Branch of the Welsh Mabinogi is her first major book, written in the 1930s, and this may be why it's a bit rough. It also inherits an oddly structured, complex story and navigates it faithfully. It's an ambitious attempt at adding modern psychological depth and realism to this tale, and it's a great idea but not successfully executed, in my opinion. For me as a non-Welsh, lay reader, this is an endeavor that deserves to be redone. The potential is there, but the story falters for two main reasons: too much telling vs. showing and the fact that it's just hard to write a compelling story about unlikable characters.

See my previous post for a spoilery summary. Spoilery thoughts follow... Read more... )
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The Perks of Being an S-Class Heroine, Vol. 3 by Grrr

Spoilers ahead for the earlier volumes.

Read more... )

Stage-Land

Oct. 3rd, 2025 11:47 pm
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Stage-Land by Jerome K. Jerome

A work in which Jerome scores off the stereotypes of theater in his day. Those who have read Three Men And A Boat will recognize the style and humor.
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Kink Hub: A Sharing & Reccing Community for Kink Fics

Links:[community profile] kinkhub | Community Rules | Posting Guidelines | Monthly Themes & Free-For-All | October: Kinktober

Description: Kink Hub is an 18+ comm for anything kink fic, where you can self-promote, share and rec fanfics of all fandoms and original works. RPF is welcome.

It's [community profile] kinkhub's second anniversary! For the month of October, the theme for all shared fics is "Kinktober". All works written for Kinktober (any year, any prompt list) count for this theme. If you've written or read any Kinktober fics, you're very welcome to share the links to them in the comm.

Birdfeeding

Oct. 1st, 2025 01:46 am
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[community profile] birdfeeding is a community started on January 1, 2023. It's all about birdfeeding, birdwatching, and other topics relating to birds. It also touches on nature in general, and observations that may effect bird activity such as local weather. Both text and image posts are welcome.

Community resources include posts about birding events, nurseries that sell seeds or plants attractive to birds, bird identification apps, the benefits of birdwatching, and other useful materials. Check out the anchor posts from Three Weeks for Dreamwidth.


Recent posts:

Holiday Activities

Climate Change

September Garden Tasks
silveradept: Domo-kun, wearing glass and a blue suit with a white shirt and red tie, sitting at a table. (Domokun Anchor)
[personal profile] silveradept
Let's begin with an academic paper exploring the way that online puppygirl culture embodies a rejection of those things used as markers of human success because of the way that the highly transfeminine nature of puppygirls are usually denied the full markers of humanity based on their transness. The author notes at the end the limitations around embracing inhumanity for persons who have been and continue to be treated as inhuman based on their skin colors and perceived origins, and that the relative homogeneity of participants in online puppygirl culture and media often gives them blinkers in places they could stand to be more inclusive. I enjoyed reading it, perhaps you will, too.

The still-apparently-novel concept that people who have systems tuned toward novelty and curiosity might be beneficial to current society (instead of only the hunter-gatherers) and that environments made for others are not helpful to them.

The Archive of Our Own reminds us that they are dealing with an influx of spam accounts that leave generic praise comments and then offer to discuss off-site things like making fanart for your story. Part of it is that such commercial solicitation is barred on the Archive, but the easiest way to spot it, other than the invitation offsite, is that the comment itself doesn't have anything specific about the story. It's usually posted to the most recent story that's available. And some of these spammers are creating AO3 accounts to spam with, so disabling guest comments won't necessarily protect you from receiving them.

Nostalgia for times where scarcity required planning and people got a certain thrill out of the act of chasing things and not knowing whether their selections would turn out to be good ones. I am more inclined not to be nostalgic for that, but to be annoyed at the way that the expertise of the record clerk, the librarian, and the bookstore buyer are being devalued in favor of machines that their promoters claim have intelligence and can do all of those things a human can do, and better.

Robert Redford, actor, director, and well-known environmental activist, has left the world at 89 years of age. He is also responsible for the body that produces the annual Sundance Film Festival.

Anonymous art creators have unveiled a statue of the current administrator and known child trafficker and pederast Jeffrey Epstein holding hands, celebrating their friendship, and using the text of the administrator's birthday note to Epstein as commentary. You know, that text that strongly suggests that the two of them share an interest in pederasty and molestation of women and young girls, buttressed by some of the public statements the administrator has made about his interest in such. (As well as having been found liable for sexual assault earlier on in his life.)

EA acquisitions, foolishness and buffoonery, and the usual issues that come with having the unqualified promoted well beyond their incompetence inside )

Last out, the ways in which our understanding of classical Greek depends on the surviving texts that we have to work with, and therefore while sometimes a word does mean dildo, other times, it does not.

Yacht Club Games on the development of modes for Shovel Knight that allow for different-bodied designs and pronoun usage, and a good decision made by them to decouple body designs and gendered pronouns.

And a story of corvids who help break the cages around their fellows. Be gay, do crow. And, perhaps, show solidarity by demonstrating how foolish it is to require girls to declare they're "biological females" before they can play in sport. (While the article quotes someone saying it's foolish not only require girls to do this and not boys, and that girls teams are suffering because they can't field enough affirmed players, the real meat is from the teachers saying it's not fair to require this, and the athletes who are also choosing not to participate because of fairness issues.)

(Materials via [personal profile] adrian_turtle, [personal profile] azurelunatic, [personal profile] boxofdelights, [personal profile] cmcmck, [personal profile] conuly, [personal profile] cosmolinguist, [personal profile] elf, [personal profile] finch, [personal profile] firecat, [personal profile] jadelennox, [personal profile] jenett, [personal profile] jjhunter, [personal profile] kaberett, [personal profile] lilysea, [personal profile] oursin, [personal profile] rydra_wong, [personal profile] snowynight, [personal profile] sonia, [personal profile] the_future_modernes, [personal profile] thewayne, [personal profile] umadoshi, [personal profile] vass, the [community profile] meta_warehouse community, [community profile] little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
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I have just finished The Mabinogion Tetrology by Evangeline Walton, compiled novelizations of the Four Branches of the medieval Welsh Mabinogi. I highly recommend this work to fantasy fans who like tie-ins to traditional stories and don't mind a non-scholarly approach from a cultural outsider (Walton was American). It's a very "faithful" adaptation in that it takes virtually nothing out. The Four Branches themselves are just a few pages each, so Walton interpolates a lot, clearly from a 20th-century cultural standpoint (including idolization of "progress" and a surprising amount of Buddhism). One book was published in the 1930s, the others in the 1970s. The whole work is about 650 pages long, with the first three branches being novellas and the fourth a short novel. It is out of print but available as an e-book at Bookshop.org.

Speaking as a cultural outsider and lay reader myself, I think she does this quite well. Specifically, I think she does good work with the First Branch (The Prince of Annwn), and the Second (The Children of Llyr) and Third (The Song of Rhiannon) are among the most engaging and rewarding works I've read in a very long time! The Fourth Branch (The Island of the Mighty, a.k.a. The Virgin and the Swine), which was the first she wrote, is hit and miss for me but still worth reading. The whole work is generally quite feminist; I have no doubt was a huge influence on The Mists of Avalon.Spoilery review follows...Read more... )

Hanging Woman Creek

Sep. 30th, 2025 04:50 pm
marycatelli: (Golden Hair)
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Hanging Woman Creek by Louis L'Amour

Adventure in the West.

Read more... )
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In case I haven't worn you all out nattering about Earthsea yet, here's some more. On Friday when I finished the Cycle I went online, as one does, and discovered that last year there was published a graphic novel edition of A Wizard of Earthsea, the first book in the series. So naturally this weekend I had to run out and buy it and read it all at once. The art was done by Fred Fordham and the project was overseen by Le Guin's son, Theo (she having passed away in 2018). 

Theo, like Le Guin herself, was trepidatious about any visual representation of Earthsea, after decades of white character designs; white, middle-aged actors; and general tom-fuckery when it comes to representing Le Guin's work. It wasn't until Theo saw Fordham's work in To Kill a Mockingbird that he first considered it might be worthwhile to consider a graphic novel adaptation of his mother's work, and so here we are.

Fordham appears to have been the right man for the job--this graphic novel edition of A Wizard of Earthsea captures the characters as Le Guin may have envisioned them when she wrote. Theo in his forward acknowledges that one of the beautiful things about how the characters are described in Le Guin's work--enough to give an idea of their appearance, but also vague enough that readers can all use their own imaginations to some degree--becomes limited when creating an "official" visual representation of those characters. So he considers Fordham's designs just one of many possible looks for these characters, but one that cleaves to his mother's original descriptions. 

His expressions neatly capture the shift in Ged's attitude over his schooling at Roke, from the proud, angry boy who first arrives to the sobered, haunted young man who departs.

Nearly all of the wording in the book is lifted directly from the original novel, which means Le Guin's original hard-hitting dialogue and beautiful descriptions of Earthsea survive to accompany Fordham's gorgeous scenic illustrations. He really captures the moody atmosphere of some of the book's darker moments, while also creating some truly stunning vistas of the ocean, which of course is a considerable part of the world for the characters of Earthsea (who live in an archipelago). I particularly enjoyed some of the rainy scenes--felt just like home here in the PNW!

He also does a great job making Ged and the Lookfar feel small on some of Ged's journeys. Looking at it some of these full-page spreads, you really feel that Ged is just one young wizard on his own in a vast and unknowable world. 

If I had any issues, it's only that some of the palettes run quite dark, so that a few panels can be almost impossible to distinguish unless you're looking at the book directly under a light source, and that there is some occasional visual awkwardness (not sure how to describe this--maybe Fordham used a 3D rendering tool and it shows?)

Overall, I was delighted with this, and I really hope Fordham and Theo press on to do Tombs of Atuan as well--I would love to see Tenar and Atuan rendered as well!

The Iron Marshal

Sep. 29th, 2025 03:33 pm
marycatelli: (Golden Hair)
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The Iron Marshal by Louis L'Amour

An Irish boy grows up in New York -- and has just landed in Kansas.

Read more... )

The School Reader: Second Book

Sep. 28th, 2025 03:27 pm
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The School Reader: Second Book by Charles Walton Sanders

A book concerned chiefly with reading. Vocabulary words listed before each story, poem, or bit. Interesting for the view of what they used to teach children. Views of science and of character.

Flint

Sep. 27th, 2025 10:54 am
marycatelli: (Golden Hair)
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Flint by Louis L'Amour

A man who left the West, and the fame he won in one shooting, to grow rich in the East, returns to the West.

Read more... )

Tucker

Sep. 26th, 2025 10:50 pm
marycatelli: (Golden Hair)
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Tucker by Louis L'Amour

An tale of adventure.

Read more... )
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That's a wrap, folks! Today I concluded the entirety of the Earthsea Cycle by Ursula Le Guin for the first time. The final book in this series is The Other Wind, but the collected volume I have also includes after that a few short stories by Le Guin set in the Earthsea universe as well as a lecture she gave at Oxford on gender and the Western archtype of a hero. Seemed best to lump these all together for this review.

I was emotional about this book from the start, and I can only imagine it was moreso for those who had been familiar with Ged and Tenar for decades before this book was published. The Earthsea Cycle begins with A Wizard of Earthsea in Ged's childhood, before he's even discovered his propensity for magic, and here at the start of The Other Wind, he is a man in his seventies, puttering about his old master's house and waiting for his wife and daughter to come home. We've gotten to see Ged throughout his life--as a child, apprentice, wizard, archmage, goatherd (take 2), old man--and this continuity and journey really got to me.

At the end of the previous novel, Tehanu, the mantle of hero is passed on narratively from Ged and Tenar to their adopted daughter, Tehanu, but it's here in The Other Wind that Tehanu really comes into herself. Given Tehanu's past trauma, the way she clings to Tenar and Ged makes sense, so it was very rewarding to see her grow into herself here and eventually claim the power she was told by the dragon Kalessin she possesses at the end of Tehanu

As with Tehanu and Tales of Earthsea, women play a much more central role in The Other Wind. Our noble king, Lebannen, who came into his own in the third book of the original trilogy, is really blown hither-and-thither by the women of the book, who are the real plot-movers. Tehanu, the youthful rising power; Tenar, the wizened heroine; Irian, the free woman who's embraced the power Tehanu shares; Seserakh, the foreign princess who brings Kargish knowledge of dragons; these are the real players of the game. The kings and wizards who follow in their wake exist to help them carry out the plot. 

As with all the Earthsea books, Le Guin focuses her fantasy without centering violence. The great plot of The Other Wind essentially boils down to righting an ancient wrong, and it is resolved through shared knowledge and cooperation. On the whole, the book feels quite positive and we leave Earthsea for this final time on a sweet and hopeful note.

The conclusion itself feels perfect: Ged and Tenar on Gont, talking of nothing, in the end. Who else but Le Guin would have concluded her epic fantasy series with her male hero explaining how he'd kept up the house in his wife's absence? The pair go for a walk in the woods, and that's where the overarching plot of Earthsea ends, beautiful in its simplicity. 

If I had a complaint about Le Guin's writing, it's that she sometimes stows key elements of the plot in opaque dialogue between characters, which comes up a little here, but not as much as in Tehanu.

After The Other Wind come a few short stories by Le Guin set in the world of Earthsea. These are fun little tales, none longer than fifteen pages, which have nothing to do with any of the characters we know, until the final one. If you like the worldbuilding of Earthsea, these will be a great addition. The final one, for reasons I won't spoil, had me getting choked up even though I suspect from the opening paragraphs what was happening. 

I had such fun exploring Earthsea and while I wish I had gotten into them when I was younger (because I know how much I would have enjoyed them as a teen!) I'm still glad to have found them now (and I can just envision the daydreams I would have spun about my own female mage OC if I had known about these books then...) I know I'll revisit Earthsea and the adventures of its heroes again, although I'll stick to the paper versions--I've heard nothing good about any of the attempted screen adaptations! It truly feels like this has been a journey, and what an enjoyable one its been.

Recent Reading: Road to Ruin

Sep. 25th, 2025 04:18 pm
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I have a job again! \^o^/ This means I am back on the audiobook train and today I wrapped up Road to Ruin by Hana Lee, book 1 of the Magebike Courier duology. This is a low fantasy dystopian novel located in a place called the Mana Wastes, where protagonist Jin works as a courier transporting goods between protected cities. Jin runs a lot of odd jobs for various clients, but her most lucrative by far are Prince Kadrin and Princess Yi-Nereen. Jin has been ferrying love letters between them for three years--while hiding the fact that she's fallen in love with both of them. But everything changes when Yi-Nereen decides to run away and asks Jin to help her.

First, don't let the hokey title put you off. I started this one a bit warily, but it turned out to be quite a lot of fun! The worldbuilding is pretty light, but the novel seems aware of that and doesn't overpromise on that front. What is there serves its purpose well. It's not anything particularly novel, but not every book needs to be.

Jin, Yi-Nereen, and Kadrin are all wonderful protagonists; each of them has a distinct personality, perspective, and motivations, and I really enjoyed all of them. I was rooting for them the whole book and it was great to watch their various interpersonal dynamics unfold. If you're a fan of stories about mutual pining, this one is definitely worth checking out. However, if that's not really your speed, I didn't feel like the book spent too much time harping on about feelings we all suspect or know are requited. The romance element is definitely there, and it's a significant motivator for all three of them, but there's plenty else going on in the book too. 

The book avoids falling prey either to the Charybdis of black-and-white morality where everyone who stands in the way of the protagonists is evil, or to the Scylla of "everyone is friends if we just talk things out," which is a relief after some recent reads. There's definitely a sliding scale of antagonism here, with some characters who are obstacles but not necessarily bad people, and others who run much darker. 

I also enjoyed the presence of the "Road Builders." Jin and her peers inhabit the Mana Wastes, a treacherous desert wasteland where little survives and almost none of it without human intervention. They sustain themselves with "talent"--magical abilities common among humans, but becoming less common by the day--and travel along ravaged roads built by some culture who came before, about which Jin and her peers know very little. These are the "Road Builders" and are, I believe, strongly hinted at to be us. Lee keeps them a pleasant mystery humming in the background of everything else going on.

There were a couple contrivances near the end to aid a dramatic conclusion, but nothing so egregious I wasn't willing to continue to play ball with the book. Similarly, I'm on the fence about where this book leaves the relationship between the main trio, because it feels a little too much like Lee felt it was a necessary hook into book 2, but I'll reserve judgement until I've actually read book 2. And perhaps it's better that everything doesn't wrap up too neatly here. 

On the whole, I had a lot of fun with this book and I will definitely read the next one. 

celebrity20in20 Round 17

Sep. 25th, 2025 04:45 pm
reeby10: Zachary Quinto and Christ Pine standing next to each other with "xoxox" at the bottom (pinto)
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Link: Round 17 Sign Ups | Round 17 Themes

Description: [community profile] celebrity20in20 is a 20in20 community dedicated to making icons of actors and actresses. You have 20 days to make 20 icons about a celebrity of your choice, based on a set of themes for the round.

Schedule: Round 17 sign ups are open NOW. Icons are due October 13, 2025.

Jeeves and the Tie That Binds

Sep. 25th, 2025 03:36 pm
marycatelli: (Golden Hair)
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Jeeves and the Tie That Binds by P.G. Wodehouse

The continuing adventures. Spoilers for the earlier works ahead.

Read more... )
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Sanders' Rhetorical, or Union Sixth Reader by Charles Walton Sanders

An advanced work of elocution.

Perhaps chiefly useful now for its selections and the light they cast on the era. It has several on the importance of the Union. It boasts of a wide variety, to fit young readers, and it does feature both prose and poetry on many different topics, fiction and non-fiction. I think it has more biographical essays than the earlier books in the series.

(Though it was amusing to read the side note that people used to eat a dish of fried dough known as a doughnut.)

Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves

Sep. 22nd, 2025 01:15 pm
marycatelli: (Golden Hair)
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Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse

The continuing adventures of Jeeves and Bertie.

Read more... )

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