Round Up

Recent Reading:

Remnant Population by Elizabeth Moon.  Liz has been recommending it to me for ages, but it was only a few weeks ago that I finally remembered the rec at the exact moment I was loitering in front of the bookshelf. [ETA: Oh, and I like it because it's a really good first-contact kind of story with an interesting protagonist. Smart old women with no patience for fools, yay!

Death Be Not Proud by John Gunther, because apparently sometimes you just need to read a maudlin perfect-child-dies-young-from-cruel-disease memoir. 

Bits of The Cunning Man and Tempest-Tost by Roberston Davies - mostly the descriptions of services at St. Aidan's in Man as a point of seasonal interest, and the first few chapters of Tost as antidote to the quiche angst of last Saturday. 

Current Reading:

A Summer Birdcage by Margaret Drabble.  One of her early works, more Millstone than Realms of Gold, and more Realms of Gold than The Peppered Moth.  I enjoy Drabble's style, and she tends to consider influences on and choices made by thinky, introverted women, something I also enjoy.  The setting for this book is particularly dated (upper-middle-class parties in London in the mid-sixties) which makes it an interesting parallel to early Margaret Atwood.


Recent Viewing

Team America: World Police is a movie, entirely performed by marionettes, written by the makers of South Park, which tells you everything you need to know.  Bits of it are quite amusing (the parody of Rent is particularly good) and much of it is horrifying. 

Star Trek: DS9 Seasons 1 and 2.  We ( breadandroses and Pony and Angry Zombie and me) have been working our way through DS9 together.  I saw bits and pieces when it first aired, but my family tv received the relevant channel very poorly,and at that point I had youth group on Sunday nights and so had to depend on my brother to tape it for me, and he started watching seaQuest DSV and then I became seriously fannish about seaQuest... well, anyway, everything beyond the main credits characters is new to me, and I'm enjoying it a lot.  We (B&R and I) engage in some mocking.  There's a lot of "I'm calling it... she's a traitor!", quoting Futurama ("It's like a balloon... with something bad happening!") at the more egregious runs of technobabble, and hilarity every time O'Brien gets yet another responsibility.  ("What, now he's Sisko's receptionist?")

A couple episodes of Wonderfalls.  LOVE.  Oh my.  I may need to buy it.

Excuse me, I need to call everyone I've ever met..

As Time Goes By by Yahtzee

Buffy/Angel fans, YOU MUST READ THIS.  This is one of those pieces that totally blows the scale on "good fanfic."  There are stories that are good because they hit your kinks, or have vivid character voices, or evocative descriptions, or plots with the right mix of drama and humor and mystery-solving, or strong emotional arcs, or sometimes many or all of the above.  And then there are the stories that take the source and leap into the stratosphere, making something at once totally new and totally congruent with the source.  This is one of those stories.  And yes, it's from 2002, so I'm way late to the party, but I am still not at all kidding. 

It's a retelling of Casablanca in a future Buffyverse AU (branching off from BtVS S6/AtS 3, more or less.)  It sounds strange, maybe, but if ever a show examined the question of "do the problems, or loves, of three little people amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world?" it must be Buffy.  This is a drama of self-interest vs idealism vs love played out against an apocalyptic backdrop, and... ohjustgoreadit.