jinian

Currently reading: Most of the way through Katawa Shoujo [link is to Wikipedia, not anywhere horrifying]. This is a visual novel the first of whose problems is the name: "katawa" is not a polite way to refer to people with disabilities. I got interested because so many people referred to it in discussions about Hatoful Boyfriend, and because it turns out to be an internet phenomenon in which people got interested in a (satirical?) piece of art and put together a game around it.

The second enormous obstacle is the premise! The idea is that the male protagonist has a heart attack and goes to attend a high school for students with disabilities, at which of course he meets a bunch of cute girls to date, all of whom have various physical issues. So we have the overlapping concerns of attraction to disability and the gross side of moe, in which incompetence is so cute because that person must need you. However, I've been quite pleased with how well the structure of the game pushes back against the intrusive caretaking impulse. No one is remotely incompetent, and, in every storyline I've played, there's at least one time when the player has to pull back and let the girl find her own way through a problem rather than smothering or micromanaging.

The sexual content is, well, pretty convincingly Japanese-style. Foreplay is rare*, though I admit that as a virgin I made similar mistakes myself. (Obligatory recent Earth Day reference!) There is some not-quite-vanilla stuff I was not expecting, though the queer threesome I was hoping for did not appear. The queer storyline is sad and a little predictable, but at least it's there.

* Personally I have decided that Lilly's storyline is the optimal one, partly because foreplay exists and partly because Hanako actually seems happier than when you date her, hmm.

Just finished reading: Tam Lin, which I read this time with completely justified suspicion toward all the boys. And a test read of a novel for a friend, which has killed me dead.

Soon to be reading: SOMETHING WHERE NO ONE DIES OR HAS DEMENTIA

Also Moby-Dick! Successful talking about its funny awesomeness with Wim occurred over dinner last night (the nautical sermon! the friendship with Queequeg! the landlady's bargain sign-painting utilization!), though he hasn't gotten to the whale taxonomy yet. Soon we'll be caught up.

• What are you currently reading?

Moby-Dick still, in bits and pieces.

Protector, C.J. Cherryh. Newest one is out! Probably I should've timed my mass reread better (which could have meant doing it a month later than I did or moving it entirely to before the release date of the last one in a trilogy). I am pretty sure someone's name is being spelled differently than it used to be, but I can't quite recall.

The Testing by Joelle Charbonneau, in which there is Team Summer A. Why yes, you should read 7 Seeds so that you understand what I mean. (Also because it's way better, though this is not bad.)

• What did you recently finish reading?

ALL the mass market comfort paperbacks:

- Sharon Shinn's Twelve Houses books.

- the three most recent of Carrie Vaughn's Kitty books, which, oops, I had read the third-to-last already, only I forgot because she somehow made Monkey kinda boring.

- Stranger at the Wedding by Barbara Hambly, which I had forgotten the entire last third of, so maybe it's not about book quality because this one rules.

- A Brother's Price by Wen Spencer, still my favorite of hers and purely adorable.

• What do you think you'll read next?

Tam Lin and War for the Oaks are on deck for bedtimes, and I have Svetlana Chmakova comics coming in at the library.

Weird day. Up at 4am, went to work for a few hours to find failing experiment, let it go longer and came home to crash; after a four-hour nap, went to acupuncture to try to fix ongoing digestive doom, and hit the central library on the way; saw Sakura-con cosplayers including obligatory Sephiroth with giant tinfoil sword, very cheering; back to lab to find experiment going okay (the seedlings were just slow starters for some reason); home to make teriyaki with sherry instead of mirin (pretty good, actually). And there was a gender theme all day, which I will now share:

1. Whitehouse.gov petition to recognize non-binary genders

2. Email from my department:

It has been called to our attention that in trying to relabel the restrooms in HCK so that people weren’t inadvertently entering the wrong one (they are in opposite locations on alternating floors), we were sending the wrong message to transgender populations. This was unintended.

We encourage transgender employees and students to use the restroom or locker room corresponding to their expressed gender but most importantly, transgender employees and students should use the restroom that they are most comfortable with for their individual situation, irrespective of expressed gender.

Additional signs will be posted on the restroom doors.

The decals she's talking about went up a couple of weeks ago, leading to mockery and grumpiness from many of us. They're giant and PINK or BLUE with the zodiac symbol around a silhouette or silhouette-with-skirt, really about the most gender-essentialist thing you could possibly imagine. This mail doesn't quite get it right, but they're doing their best to be aware and I wasn't expecting them to do so well.

3. And when I was at the library I had a major Yomiko Readman moment on finding three giant volumes of the beautiful translated edition of Hourou Musuko. I have read them, but I don't care, I am going to read THESE ONES.

• What are you currently reading?

Maureen Johnson's The Name of the Star, which seems to be modern-day YA about an American girl in boarding school in London, plus supernatural Jack the Ripper recurrence. Okay. So far, so good: cute adjustment to different culture, none of the gross thriller-mystery tricks of killer POV or "let's make you care about the victim for five pages."

• What did you recently finish reading?

Patricia Wrede's The Thirteenth Child trilogy. It was done, so I wanted to see how it turned out. It is wall-to-wall magic-geeking and natural (magical) history of plants and animals (and even mentions magical fungi!), which means that in a world where its foundational premise didn't link directly to the actual genocide of Native Americans and the erasure of their names for much of the continent around me, I would have loved these books. There are other flaws, mostly the unreasonable-seeming alternate history, but I could have gotten past all that if I hadn't been wincing every single time she called the Mississippi the Mammoth River. The magic and naturalism are pretty great if you can bring yourself to read it, but those are my biggest narrative kinks (plus there were lesbians in the last book) and I still had a hard time.

Leia Weathington's The Legend of Bold Riley is pretty comics about a lesbian adventurer from a heavily Hinduism-inspired culture. The blue, goat-herding god has a different name, though, so clearly there was no need to worry about cultural appropriation. Coming so soon on the heels of Quvenzhané Wallis' name issues around the Oscars, the thoughtless and dubiously consensual (teacher-child power dynamic) nicknaming of Rilavashana to Riley was interesting. I liked her travels, in which she was sometimes wise and sometimes foolish, and the women that she met.

• What do you think you’ll read next?

Something I don't have any problems with? This seems unlikely. Scalzi's Redshirts?

• What are you currently reading?

Between books while finishing thesis draft. Azumanga Daioh at bedtime.

I am NOT reading The Seedbearers by Peter Valentine Timlett, which I had as an Office Shelf Book due to the title and misguidedly decided to attempt on the bus home tonight. On the first page, a 13-year-old girl who has been gang-raped is murdered. On the second, they debate what to do with her body and decide to give it to the black guys to eat. YEAH NO NOT READING THIS. ... I did get curious whether the young girl had been Aryan-pure since the murdering rapists were Toltec (all this happened in Atlantis, obvsly), and skimmed while waiting for the bus -- surprisingly, a later misogynist caricature from the same race is described as having golden-brown skin. So I guess there's that? Not sure I can keep this on my shelf, though. Nasty stuff.

• What did you recently finish reading?

Justina Chen's Return to Me wound up being way too cheerful and "everything is for the best" for me to really buy into it. That divorce was supposed to happen, and now everyone is just fine, all the things that have gone wrong for the past twenty years, including other people's relationships, are now fixed. Maybe it's mean, but I feel like the author was trying to convince herself? Also all of the protagonist's matriline was New Agey psychic, ugh, and part of her self-assertion at the end was that people need to respect her woo-woo.

Caught up on 7 Seeds. OMG YAY (SPOILER) IS BACK! *happy dance* People are escaping badness and being emotionally healed left and right, though Arashi is in for sad emo times. The series is reaching the time when I usually think it's time to wrap things up, but there is no reason to do so in this case. It's not every narrative where someone saves the world with menstrual blood.

Deceiver, in which Bren is slightly unbelievable in his hardassery.

• What do you think you’ll read next?

Gemma Files! I still haven't reread the whole trilogy all together.

I also have a video game lined up for after the thesis draft is sent off, Journey.

It hasn't been that long, but I'll get myself back on schedule.

• What are you currently reading?

Conspirator, which I managed to leave behind in a bathroom at school yesterday. Embarrassing, but I did get it back easily, unlike many places I could've left it. Return of the revenge of the doomed fishing trip! Barb being awful and Jago volunteering to "talk to her reasonably" is lovely, especially when paired with Jago saying unapologetically that she's too blunt-spoken to be the polite liaison to human family members. What would the reasonable have sounded like, exactly, Jago-ji?

It's strange to me that I like Jago's prickly jealousy so much, when I don't quite know what to think about human jealousy a lot of the time. Maybe it's the explicit dissociation of the whole relationship from human emotion and human expectations of fidelity; we did start out with Bren sort of assuming he was secondary in a relationship he thought was maybe open. I never feel like there's an unexamined notion that of course she'll be jealous, though in this one we do see it paying obvious sexual dividends, and it fascinates me that we have no real idea whether his reassurances are working as he hopes. Basically I continue to just love Jago. The little things add up over all the books to show us how strongly she just does her own thing, unusual and scandalous things included. Fancying Bren and going for it are pretty obvious, but there's definite disapproval a few times of her working for a man as work-partner to a man, when she should traditionally be partnered with and working for people of her same sex.

Homosexuality has not been addressed at all so far in these books, though of course I'm looking for it, but her social orientation is very interesting.

Return to Me, Justina Chen. A hopeful divorce book. Beyond that, I need to finish before I decide what I think.

• What did you recently finish reading?

Really just Deliverer. I used to read more when I was stressed out.

Since I'm writing in my office a lot, I'm glad to have collected a few absurd old SF novels for my shelf. I knew it would make me happy to read the spines when I needed distraction. Here they are:

The Pollinators of Eden
The Diploids (short stories; the diploids are superhuman!)
The Morphodite ("a genetically-patterned [sic], laboratory-raised human genius... its thoughts were total subversion")
The Planet Dweller (Women's Press: two collection impulses in one)

• What do you think you’ll read next?

Hopefully some of my languishing library books, though the reason they're languishing is that I'm not that into them.

• What are you currently reading?

Pretender, C.J. Cherryh. Honestly I am not paying that much attention to this book's plot, as I am still hung up on the amazing Jago moment two books ago, in which she says SO IS BARB A COMMON NAME? and Bren has to scramble not to allow the person who is now his brother's girlfriend to be strung up by her heels or something. Also still thrilled by Cajeiri's sudden acquisition of D&D-style followers as if with a level-up -- with legitimately fascinating atevi emotions, I'm not knocking it. In this book, boobytraps mecheiti Tabini Astronomer aeroplane OMG Algini.

Chrysanthe, Yves Meynard. Recommended by rysmiel. So far, severe side-eye for the Evil Therapist and the sexual-abuse (only not! because she's the virginal protagonist! god I hate this trope) setup. We shall see where it goes.

Skip Beat!, Yoshiki Nakamura. (The library copies of v2 and v3 are all in use, which made my mind up as to method.) I do not see why the Beagles are necessary.

But mostly my own previous papers and other people's theses, due to the arrival of Dissertation Time.

• What did you recently finish reading?

The Day Boy and the Night Girl, George MacDonald. Why are there so few perfect stories in the world?

Silhouette of a Sparrow, Molly Beth Griffin. Jazz Age lesbian scientist YA with hot flapper girlfriend and independence for ladies! That is right. Ebooks from the library for the win, and thanks to coffeeandink for the rec.

• What do you think you’ll read next?

This new Melissa Scott, Point of Knives, is in my shopping cart at Smashwords.

• What are you currently reading?

Defender. Well, that would be the timeskip. I thought one must exist, but expected it to fall between trilogies. No, Cherryh found it necessary to instead skip the "Ilisidi gives the station what-for" section that I would have deeply enjoyed reading. At least we have Cajeiri now. Age six; does he ever get to be a fortunate age?

In bed, Forgotten Truth, and boy I wish Dawn Cook were getting to write instead of Kim Harrison. I do not give one fuck about the Hollows series, and Cook's stuff is quite enjoyable. I also had a fine interaction with a librarian about getting the ebook for the next one in this series, as the site was confusing. Now the bug has been reported, I understand why similar things are trouble, and I know how to look in a place that will give me accurate info. I think the only times I've been satisfied by online-chat customer service have been with librarians.

• What did you recently finish reading?

Previous Truths, previous atevi books. I feel like there must be more than that, but I think no. Doom and illness have reigned.

• What do you think you’ll read next?

Having claimed I would read Les Miserables, clearly I should proceed to do something completely different.

• What are you currently reading?

Ashes of Honor by Seanan McGuire, thanks to pameladean's alerting me to its existence. (Next one in 2013 sometime, can't tell if the FAQ really means it's in September or if there's a cut-and-paste error.)

• What did you recently finish reading?

Successful reading of The Magicians of Caprona was accomplished! (Also look at skygiants' lovely Chrestomanci fic if you like that sort of thing.)

Feed, which remains brilliant.

Ellen Forney's Marbles, a graphical memoir of her bipolar diagnosis, which, well, now that I've said that you know exactly what it says. It's charmingly drawn, and I am enough of a fan that I liked seeing her particular experience; also there was one bipolar in-joke that I managed to get and I cracked up. (No, I'm not going to ruin it for you.)

More Yuletide, including a delightful Babylon 5 story, obviously an actual episode which had been mislaid. Ivanova hilarious, Delenn great, everybody is there and being exactly right.

(For next Yuletide, you all need to read/play some Christine Love games so we can have fic for those!)

• What do you think you’ll read next?

Atevi are still in the notional queue. I have had brief periods of mental acuity yesterday and today, so maybe it's time!

Someone mentioned this, maybe coffeeandink someplace? I need to either keep better notes or find a good way to search "all the things I've looked at on the web in the last month."

The Touchstone trilogy (Stray, Lab Rat One, Caszandra) is not only portal SF, but also takes place largely in military school for psychic kids. I believe it is relevant to many of your interests.

Cass is an Australian who's just graduated high school and is on her way home when suddenly she's in another world struggling to survive. The format threw me off a little at first -- it's meant to be a paper journal that Cass is writing by hand, but all the entries have subject lines. I decided it makes sense as a way someone who learned to journal from software might do it. She does pretty well for someone with no survival training, and, after finding some strange and helpful technology that becomes important later, manages to live long enough to be rescued into a society of rather alien humans.

The tone is smart and young; I completely bought Cass as a late-teen, somewhat fannish person. Her growing proficiency in the new language across the three books is handled well. Actually, I kept imagining her inventing second-language curricula; it's normal, if infrequent, for the alien society to have the occasional stray person show up through natural wormholes, but vanishingly rare for those people not to be from known worlds in the same language group, so they haven't any systematic way to teach the grammar.

My feminist rage quotient was generally low: depilation is, unexamined, a "girl thing" Cass has to learn how to do in this society, but men traditionally change their names at marriage and the military types are completely egalitarian. Lots of good female characters, some standoffish, some bouncy, some nasty, some kind. Cass is perceptive enough to make the characters and relationships clear despite her difficult situation. The inevitable romance is handled responsibly on both sides, which is really nice. Plus, sex is okay and a normal part of life, which different people handle differently. (Some weirdness about ZOMG they control reproduction!!1! early on, though. They basically live in domes, of course they'd need baby permits.)

As for plot, it goes: Survival! Super special talents! Scary immaterial enemies! Psychic space ninjas! Having your life made into television! Archeology! Relationships! Building a new society! Saving the universe!

So that's pretty much all awesome.

The author self-publishes, so there may not be paper copies sitting in bookstores, but there's a good variety of ebook formats available. The books have a few minor quality issues such as search-and-replace errors, but I've seen worse from publishing houses many times. I really enjoyed these, and the ebooks are reasonably priced. I recommend them.