I have read Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk twice now and not yet succeeded in writing it up, but I am going to make a solid go of it now and we'll see what happens.

The trouble with trying to write up H is for Hawk is that it is such a deeply personal book, for Helen Macdonald, that I don't know what to say about it that won't sell it short or ( Read more... )

When I was young I was formatively influenced by a portal fantasy trilogy by Nick O'Donohoe in which vet students go patch up unicorns and griffins. However, my personal copies disappeared mysteriously sometime in the two thousands. For years I have been scouring libraries and used bookstores, but the only one I could find was the third book in the ( Read more... )

I was browsing through the nonfiction available from Open Road Media's free-books-bonanza a few months back, and a book caught my eye immediately and held it -- Marlene Dietrich's ABC: Wit, Wisdom and Recipes.

I immediately did the internet equivalent of grabbing the people I'd been chatting with by the collar in order to shout, "Marlene Dietrich* ( Read more... )

I made a Festivid!

Title: Kids in America
Fandom: Annie (2014)
Song: "Kids in America," by Kim Wilde
Summary: It's a hard-knock life.

Made for
( Read more... )

So I've fallen into a bit of a Baccano! vortex, due to the fact that Yen Press is now at last translating the light novels!

For those unfamiliar, Baccano! is an anime that came out in 2007. Set in the 1930s, it features about five colliding train heists, two blithely clueless thieves, four different gangs, a collection of conspiratorial immortal ( Read more... )

I have a new chapter of my long-running Jupiter Ascending fic up!

Don't get too excited, a business meeting is literally the only thing that happens here. Action-packed thrills a minute!

This entry is cross-posted at Livejournal from http://skygiants.dreamwidth.org/465676.html. Please feel free to comment here or there! There are currently
( Read more... )

Today is a snow day! THIS IS VERY EXCITING and also obviously impetus to write up the most tropical book in my backlog.

I can't remember where it was I saw Célestine Hitiura Vaite's Breadfruit recommended -- maybe via
( Read more... )

So my assigned fic for this year's Yuletide was Statistical Methods in Risk Assessment, a Bletchley Circle fic. Bletchley Circle is an extremely historically-grounded mystery series about the aftermath of WWII and the codebreakers at Bletchley, which meant that I spent a fair bit of November and December falling down a wartime Britain research hole ( Read more... )

Are you guys tired of Gothics yet? Because I have TWO MORE! And then I am caught up (on Gothics) (not on books in general) (despite my best efforts, that is unlikely to ever happen ( Read more... )

Mary Stewart's Wildfires at Midnight was another emergency used-bookstore Gothic novel purchase for my plane ride today, but, alas, kind of a disappointing one.

Wildfires at Midnight traps Our Heroine, fashion model Gianetta, at a vacation-and-fishing lodge in the beautiful mountains of Skye with a Wacky Cast of Characters including ( Read more... )