On December 29th, after a semester learning about Irish film, literature, and history, I set off on a two and a half week tour of Ireland and Northern Ireland. I have a lot of issues with travel, so I was delighted to find that I actually enjoyed myself (besides the stomach cramps and Martian death flu, of course) and I spent a lot of time thinking, as well as rushing about from site to site with my tour group. Because we covered so much ground, my coverage of my trip will take up a few posts—three, most likely, but perhaps more if more comes back to me.

A lot of the “literary” part of “Literary Ireland” consisted of us reading poetry at important sites. I read at the Hill of Tara, where the banquet hall used to be, and in front of Countess Markievicz’s cell at Kilmainham Gaol, among other sites. Our site visits were a lot of historical sites, for obvious reasons, which I was over the moon about—I love cathedrals and castles, especially ruined ones. I even kissed two of them, little Galadriel blessing kisses. (You can take the woman from her The Lord of the Rings, but you can’t…) But we did visit several sites of literary interest.

We spent several days in Dublin at the beginning and at the end of the trip—I’ll be devoting an entire Sunday Salon to Chapters, the most fantastic independent bookstore. On New Year’s Day, we went to the Dublin Writers Museum. I’d actually been before; to celebrate my high school graduation, my parents and I travelled to England and Ireland. (My photos from that trip consist of the sky, the landscape, and photos of me standing in front of things in County Clare.) To be honest, it’s not my favorite—it offers a brief overview of Irish authors and has a pretty sizable collection of their possessions, but it’s a very small space. It’s still worth a visit, though. Unfortunately, photography wasn’t allowed, so here’s a photo from Glasnevin Cemetery to make up for that. (There were several graves with the exact same statuary. Awkward.)

The next day, we left Dublin to make Waterford by nightfall. (Yes, we did go to Waterford Crystal, and, yes, I did break a glass.) For tea, we stopped in Laragh at the Wicklow Heather Restaurant and dined in their Writers’ Room. It’s a lovely room with cabinets practically stuffed with first and other rare editions of Irish writers’ works, including a first edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses (one of seven hundred and fifty!), a book of Yeats’ poetry signed and inscribed by him, and, of course, an Oscar Wilde cabinet. (I’d mention Samuel Beckett, but I find him cruel, so there.) This is a copy of Rennell Rodd’s poetry collection Rose Leaf and Apple Leaf, which has an introduction by Oscar Wilde; the inscription reads, “To Madame, with my best compliments, Oscar Wilde”. I’ve seen and read his handwriting! Swoon.

A few days later, we visited Coole Park, the home of Lady Gregory and a famous haunt of W. B. Yeats. We got there late, so the light was fading fast, but I actually enjoyed that. With Lady Gregory’s home missing, the dense, dark trees, and a variable lake, there was something romantically spooky about it. We had to walk past a thick copse of woods to get to the lake to do our reading; I tried to get photos of its freaky atmosphere, but alas, they didn’t come out. This is Lady Gregory’s autograph tree, which features her own signature, her husband’s, Yeats’, and George Bernard Shaw’s. Yeats’ autograph should be directly under that ten.

My notes start to fail me here, as I’d contracted my Martian death flu and spent my time either suffering under the pressure of my sinuses or spacing out under the influence of decongestants. Whee! But while in Sligo around the ninth, we visited W. B. Yeats’ grave in Drumcliff. (I, shamefully, nodded off in St. Columba where we were listening to a lecture; again, sick as a dog.) Several of our members read appropriate poetry here. This is a photo of the memorial in front of the church, which I quite liked.

Back in Dublin at the very end of our trip, we had a free day. My friend Isobel and I visited several museums, which were delightful (bog bodies!), but we had tea at a cafe we just randomly found on Grafton Street. Imagine my surprise when the stained glass windows inside bore a striking resemblance to the art of Harry Clarke, one of my favorite illustrators (some of his originals were on display in the National Gallery!). Of course, they were actual pieces of his, and the cafe, Bewley’s, has a fantastic literary heritage. It’s mentioned in Dubliners and Patrick Kavanagh often visited, as did Beckett. (Hsss!) It was a delightful treat to just stumble across it, especially as the last major literary site of the trip.

And that’s it for the first installment. Next week, I’ll be talking about seeing Little Women at the Gate Theater in Dublin.

This week has been my first full week of classes. I’m pretty tired at the moment, but it’s nice to finally be back into the swing of things. (And being able to claim an elliptical machine for myself every other morning has definitely helped.) I did manage to mess up my back pretty badly in Ireland from sleeping on the bus and generally being poor to it, which will take a few more chiropractic appointments to fix. I also managed to book my hotel room for Dragon*Con this week and I ended up liveblogging the Florida Republican Debate for my school newspaper, which was… interesting. I’m just about to polish off Mélusine, but I don’t know what I’ll be starting on next…

TheOneRing.Net is giving away a statue of Gandalf the Grey until Wednesday. The Baen Free Library is full of free downloads, including The Shadow of the Lion and On Basilisk Station. Night Shade Books is offering Butcher Bird and Grey as free downloads at the moment. Vertigo Comics is offering free downloads of the first issue of several series, including Fables, The Unwritten, and Y: The Last Man. (And you will go download The Unwritten.) Small Beer Press offers several of their books as free downloads, including Kelly Link’s Magic for Beginners. If I’ve missed your giveaway or freebie, drop me a line!

Is there any you’d like me to elaborate on in future posts about my trip?

(This is one of my “lost reviews”—reviews I wrote and finished but, somehow, never posted to the blog! I read this last May. Enjoy!)

Let me just say this upfront—this book made me want to be a better fan, to the extent that I finally joined TheOneRing.Net’s forums and decided to actually make a conscious effort to get through Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (I like it just fine, but it’s just… it’s just not clicking like Doctor Who does, you know?) I stumbled across Henry Jenkins through his discussions on the implications of fanvids and was blown away by the fact that Media Studies actually studies fandom and takes it seriously in an academic context. You can imagine the sense of immense validation I felt. Alas, because his work is academic, his books are harder to find through public libraries—but PINES did kick up Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers, which I gleefully put on hold.

Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers collects Jenkins’ essays on fandom, fan culture, the digital age, and media consumption into three distinct categories—“Inside Fandom”, which looks at the pre-digital and very early digital fan experience in science fiction fandoms (specifically Star Trek), “Going Digital”, which looks at how the Internet affected fan experiences, and “Columbine and Beyond”, which examines both fandom and the Internet as a safe space for young people and a locust for the fears of their parents and the adults that govern them. As Cory Doctorow says on the back cover, Jenkins is a fan, writing from the inside about that glorious thing known as fandom.

As a wee lass, I came at fandom through anime. For a while there, I thought fandoms were almost exclusively targeted at Japanese media (I was not the brightest child), which ultimately meant that it took me well into high school to discover Western fandoms and my fandom heritage therein—discovering the importance of women in the early Star Trek fandom (which now serves as the template for any new fandom) and hearing tales of the old days, when you traded tapes across the pond to help out a fellow fan. Being a digital native, I’m utterly fascinated by pre-digital fandom, so the first third of Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers fixed me to my seat. Because Jenkins is a fan himself, it often reads like a cross between listening to a fascinating professor and running into a kindly old-school fan who’ll tell you what it was like in the olden days. (And, of course, doesn’t distrust you for your newbie status—you should have seen the Star Trek fandom after the reboot came out…) Of particular note is “Normal Female Interest in Men Bonking”, which is less of an essay and more excerpts from a slash fanzine Jenkins and his wife were a part of in the late eighties and early nineties; it’s fascinating to watch women, both straight and queer, trying to hash out the implications of their attraction towards pairing off male characters instead of focusing on female characters.

But this collection isn’t just an academic fandom history; Jenkins explores the conflict between old forms of consuming media (and what media is worth consuming) and the new, fannish way of consuming media. As Jenkins puts it in “Star Trek Rerun, Reread, Rewritten”, “Consumption becomes production; reading becomes writing; spectator culture becomes participatory culture” (60). This not only leads to conflict when the textual producers—the companies that own it—try to contain fannish activities, but conflict when people who assume that spectator culture is the only form of consumption that exists… like government officials trying to regulate the consumption of video games. Did you know at one point, a legal official in the United States ruled that video games weren’t protected under free speech, because they apparently had no redeeming values? It’s since been overturned, but the tension that led to it still remains. Jenkins in particular focuses on violence in video games, which he was called to Congress to testify on in the aftermath of Columbine, as he relates in “Professor Jenkins Goes to Washington”. Jenkins points out how anti-popular culture folk view “children” (in actuality, adolescents) are considered to be empty vessels who don’t analyze or even think about what they’re consuming—which is downright insulting to our youth and gamers. (If you want to learn more about how video games can be an art form, I highly recommend Extra Lives by Tom Bissell.) Jenkins points out that the supposed dilemma is framed all wrong; “The key issue isn’t what the media are doing to our children but rather what our children are doing with the media” (194). It’s powerful stuff.

Jenkins is, naturally, a huge proponent of fandom—in the introduction to “The Monsters Next Door”, wherein he and his son examine episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer to point out the value of analyzing popular culture, he points out that he and his wife specifically chose to teach their son to “play with pop culture” (226). But while he’s positive about it, fandom is not perfect… although he doesn’t analyze some of these implications as much as I would like. I suppose I’ll have to seek out one of his books, not a collection like this. In any case, “Pop Cosmopolitan” explores globalism and fandom, especially when it comes to anime fandom—where is the line between new orientalism and honestly being interested in another culture? There’s a lot of ground here to cover, and it’s all fascinating.

Bottom line: If you’re any kind of fannish, Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers will appeal to you, since some essays feel like a old fandom veteran telling you stories about what it was like back in the day when you had to tape your shows on VHS—which it is, since Jenkins is one of us. For the non-fannish, this collection asks and explores important issues, like the conflict between the old consumption of media and the new, fannish consumption of media. A worthy read.

I rented this book from the local library.

• Jenkins, Henry. Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers. New York: NYU Press, 2006. Print.

What’s more important: Good writing? Or a good story?

(Of course, a book should have BOTH, but…)

Oh, these ultimatums are always so nerve-wracking! In my sleepy haze, I initially reached for “good story”, and I think that remains true. If it’s a good story, simply efficient writing doesn’t bother me. We can’t all be great stylists, but the construction of a a good plot requires equal talent. Of course, I value both equally, but the idea of reading a beautifully written book where nothing really happens doesn’t appeal to at the moment.

However, that being said, bad writing ruins good stories. Bad writing ruins everything, really. So you really do need both.

While I don’t care for N. K. Jemisen’s fiction, her musings on speculative fiction as a genre are usually worth a look. So when she mentioned A Companion to Wolves in passing in a post on the possible feminization of epic fantasy, I investigated further. While the “companion animal” idea smacks too much of supermarket paranormal romance to me, the fact that Monette and Bear were brutally deconstructing it grabbed me. I love deconstruction, especially in speculative fiction. I was expecting something along the lines of The Magicians (but with spirit wolves!)—what I got was something much more.

I love it when that happens!

A Companion to Wolves is set in the far North, where the only defense between the people and the trolls are the wolfcarls—warriors bound to wolves, who live in a maligned society of their own creation. When the wolfheall comes to collect their tithe in Nithogsfjoll, the jarl’s son Njall is enthralled by the wolves, despite his father’s vehement protests. Njall is taken into the fold, renamed Isolfr, and bound to a female wolf, the future alpha Viradechtis. But even as Isolfr struggles to find his place in the wolfheall, the trolls are growing restless and more violent, until there can only be one answer—the wolfcarls and the common folk must band together to destroy the trolls, once and for all.

You know, for a book whose cast is principally composed of hard-living, hard-drinking, hard-loving male warriors who are spiritually connected with enormous wolves, A Companion to Wolves’ central theme is certainly femaleness in its infinite variations—being coded as female (as Isolfr is), the way patriarchy demeans femaleness, and the role of females in perpetuating culture, to barely scratch the surface. (I say “female” here to specifically refer to being female sexed. Memory tells me some transmen appear in the sequel, The Tempering of Men, which introduces a whole new and very welcome angle to explore these issues.) Isolfr’s father is against him joining the wolfheall because he might bond with a female wolf and thus be sexually submissive to the men bonded to his wolf’s mates. In a way, it reminds me of Kushiel’s Dart, which also explores how being submissive sexually does not make one weak. (The two books also tastefully render sex scenes that might overwhelm a delicate constitution—the mating rituals of the wolfcarls are, in a word, brutal.) But A Companion to Wolves goes further. Isolfr occasionally thinks of himself in comparison to his younger sister as other wolfcarls court him and his wolf for the chance to lead the wolfheall he will one day found with Viradechtis, he experiences childbirth alongside her, and, most importantly, every other culture Isolfr encounters is a matriarchy. As Isolfr comes of age, he must also learn to negotiate and recognize female power in contrast and comparison to the male power he is so familiar with. I really wasn’t expecting this, and I was absolutely blown away by it.

Monette and Bear’s worldbuilding is quite interesting—the heavy Norse influence (complete with consonant-laden names) is refreshing, as is the culture of the wolfcarls. Like most deconstructions, the authors have merely taken the concept of the companion animal to their logical extremes. Isolfr and Viradechtis occasionally blur identities, the mating rituals of wolves are mapped onto men (no women are bonded to wolves, but this seems more a societal construct than a fact), and the wolfcarls have a difficult time integrating back into “wolfless” society. The wolves don’t speak the language of men; Isolfr is floored when Viradechtis, late in the novel, constructs an extremely simple sentence. Rather, they have a low-level telepathy that allows them access to a hive-mind (variations on which pop up through the novel). It’s beautifully thought out, and I look forward to seeing it expanded in The Tempering of Men. (Finding out there was a sequel after a breathless few hours of reading the novel was amazing.)

I’ve not read Monette or Bear before, so I can’t comment on who seems to have more creative control, but the writing is fantastic, with leanings towards the epic. The action scenes are often rendered briefly, placing the focus more on Isolfr’s personal struggles, which become more and more important as the novel progresses. I was a bit thrown by the inclusion of some modern language in an otherwise ancient setting—for instance, when Isolfr considers the motives of a snappish wolf, he concludes that he wants to “get laid”, which runs too modern for me. The characters can also run a little too close together; while Isolfr and his compatriots are well-drawn, the complex names had me confusing characters for other characters. This gets dicey, since wolfcarls change their names once they’re inducted into the brotherhood, and gets worse when Isolfr and Viradechtis begin to think about selecting a more or less permanent mate. A character list would have been much appreciated. Still, I can’t fault them too much—they’ve given me Tin, a character whom I won’t spoil you for, but whom I am seriously thinking about going as for Halloween. (Dear Lord, another costume for 2012? I need to settle down.)

Bottom line: For a novel about a bunch of burly Viking-esque dudes bounded to wolves, A Companion to Wolves sure is about being female (or being coded as such). The exploration of gender issues is brilliant and the worldbuilding is quite interesting, even if the naming conventions can get very murky very quickly. Highly recommended.

I rented this book from the public library.

Quite shamefully, I know very little about queer history. (To be fair, I was humiliatingly late to the game.) But there’s no excuse for ignorance when there are libraries to learn from, so let the education begin.

Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers by Lillian Faderman

As I’ve mentioned here before, I enjoy volunteering at my local library in my hometown. (Even if other volunteers keep scheduling themselves over my hours, exactly how our supervisor asked us not to. Ahem.) Over the summer, I came across The History of White People, which I was putting on hold for a patron. After encountering the antiquated concept of “white races” in Kathy Peiss’ Hope in a Jar, I was intrigued by the construction of race. On top of that, my school is offering a class on constructions of race in antiquity, which I cant’ take because it conflicts with another class. But it sounds so interesting! I’ve realized how important it is to see your own culture and experiences through someone else’s lens, and this seemed like a fantastic place to start.

In The History of White People, Nell Irvin Painter traces the concept of a superior white race—even among other white races—to its misconceived roots in antiquity, the convoluted race theories of Victorian England and America, and the various enlargements of the “white race” over the years to include groups who were not defined as white (and exclude groups who were).

I’ve been having trouble writing this review because The History of White People falls into perhaps the worst category of book for me—boring. I love to write about books I love; I love to write about books I hate. (Whenever I find myself with like-minded female peers, the conversation inevitably turns to Twilight and why it’s awful for teenagers to read.) But writing about a book that’s left me neutral is very difficult, because I feel it can be so subjective when it’s just eh. Obviously, any review is subjective to the views of the reviewer. But there’s a difference between telling someone that, say, The Paladin is bad and telling something that this wasn’t exactly my cuppa.

In my case, The History of White People simply wasn’t engaging. The first problem is the structure. Painter starts in ancient Greece and Rome, two civilizations that suffer from whitewashing (especially when theories of at least two white races abounded). She starts here to show how race can be alternately constructed through geography rather than skin color, the method that the ancient Greeks and Romans actually used. While it’s fantastic to have this background as we watch Victorian anthropologists argue that the Greeks (and, more alarmingly, Jesus Christ) were, in fact, Anglo-Saxon rather than Teutonic, it doesn’t quite mesh, and that’s a theme for the entire book. There’s plenty of interesting information about race theory and other scientific justifications for racism. For instance, the white race distinctions, however myriad, often boiled down to the strapping, virile Anglo-Saxon (blonde and blue-eyed, of course) and the Teutonic (dark and of a slender build), distinctions which actual scientific observation disproved and were, more or less, elastic. The Irish migrated from Teutonic to Anglo-Saxon over the years, as more racial variation “threatened” whiteness. And Latino-Americans were considered white until quite recently.

I could go on, but the effort required to get to this fascinating information was exhausting. Not because Painter’s prose is at all dense or hard to read, but because it’s so… bland. There’s a lack of critical analysis here. Not that a good piece of historical nonfiction needs critical analysis, but would have spiced things up here. It took me a week to polish this off, because I just couldn’t muster up the desire to continue reading. I’m writing this review pretty well after the fact, and all I can remember is a flat “eh”.

So… eh. It’s a wildly interesting topic and I learned quite a lot about the construction of white identity and how, like traditional masculinity, it is incredibly fragile and anxious. But this is not the book to do it with.

Bottom line: While the construction of race throughout history is a wildly interesting topic, Nell Irvin Painter’s The History of White People is poorly structured and, unfortunately, bland. Seek this topic elsewhere.

I rented this book from the public library.

And so, I return from Ireland, with much work to do—academically, professionally, and personally. I feel really behind; I mean, it barely feels like 2012 to me, since I experienced it in Ireland and not here. (And my posting buffer has been much reduced, to my dismay.) I’ll be writing a series of Sunday Salons on my adventures abroad (about three or so), but I thought I’d take this first Sunday back to do something most people did weeks ago—my New Year’s resolution!

Looking back at last year’s resolutions, I’ve kept up giveaways and was doing well on writing until fall semester—I have a manuscript I need to finish before I can embark on the next one. (Because I will be so bitterly disappointed in myself if I just have a half-finished manuscript lying around. This is either a really twisted or really awesome side effect of French Catholic guilt.) I’ll be hashing out this year’s giveaways soon, but I already know what I’m giving away in February and April. I’m going to stick to the schedule I started last year, since it will allow me to give away a copy of The Hobbit in December, when the first film comes out. I’ll also be making more of a concerted effort to put my services as a freelance editor out there, but I’ve got some research to do beforehand.

My New Year’s resolution for 2012, then, is pretty simple—I won’t be buying any books from anything other than an independent bookseller this year. I wish I could say this was because of something that happened to me while in Ireland, but I was inspired by Laura Miller, one of my favorite people on Earth. (This is your regular reminder to drop what you’re doing and pick up The Magician’s Book. Thank you.) Last week, Miller posted about her decision to purchase ebooks from independent booksellers rather than Amazon. While I’ve drunk the Kool-Aid and rely heavily on Kindle applications for my digital reading, I’ve actually never paid for a single ebook—I use it to read books that are in the public domain. But I think it’s very much worth it to take my business to a local independent bookseller rather than Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Books-a-Million. In fact, there’s really no reason not to.

This gets difficult when it comes to hard to find books, but I think I’ll be using AbeBooks and Indiebound to seek out out-of-print books and, ideally, textbooks, although I know that might be a little dicey. But I definitely think I can make it through the whole year making book purchases only from independent booksellers. My book haul from Ireland, which I’ll detail in a later post, came from two independents—save for the one book I got at a bargain bin shop. And I’ve been downloading more free classics from Amazon. So I think I’m off to a pretty good start!

Well, this week has been going full throttle—I landed on Monday, moved back to school on Tuesday, and started class on Wednesday. I’ve since applied for a campus job and am generally trying to beat the remnants of a cold and trying to read. I finished Boldly Writing and started on Mélusine, but I’ve got a bit of a buffer constructed from my Ireland reading, so I’m happy. And kind of exhausted.

The Baen Free Library is full of free downloads, including The Shadow of the Lion and On Basilisk Station. Night Shade Books is offering Butcher Bird and Grey as free downloads at the moment. Vertigo Comics is offering free downloads of the first issue of several series, including Fables, The Unwritten, and Y: The Last Man. (And you will go download The Unwritten.) Small Beer Press offers several of their books as free downloads, including Kelly Link’s Magic for Beginners. If I’ve missed your giveaway or freebie, drop me a line!

So, catch me up—what were your New Year’s resolutions?

After watching X-Men, I wanted to look into Ian McKellan’s filmography a bit more. In doing so, I stumbled across Restoration, a period film from 1995 that not only features Ian McKellan, but also stars Robert Downey Jr. Since I haven’t seen much of Downey’s work pre-drug bust, I nominated it for Tuesday Night Movies with a cinephile friend of mine since it was unavailable on Netflix as a DVD but available on Instant. (Obviously, this was before Netflix separated the two services in a frankly rude move.) I didn’t even realize it was based on a novel until the credits, but I was sufficiently stunned.

Restoration takes place in the 1600s, during, well, the Restoration. Robert Merivel is a thoroughly debauched young doctor, to the chagrin of his Quaker best friend, John Pearce. When Merivel catches Charles II’s eye by daring to touch a beating heart, he’s summoned to the court to heal one of his spaniels, which he does by a complete fluke. Merivel revels in life at court, abandoning his medical career and falling into debauchery. But when Charles II decides to hide one of his mistresses by marrying her to Merivel, Merivel does the one thing Charles asks him not do—fall in love with her. Disgraced and cast out, Merivel returns to doctoring at John’s side and working with the mentally ill, where he meets Katherine, an abandoned Irishwoman. But even as Merivel rebuilds his life, the plague creeps closer and closer to England’s shores…

While we watching this movie, I began to refer to it as Last Friday Night: The Movie. You see, I have concluded that the Katy Perry song “Last Friday Night” is about an alcoholic desperately trying to reassure herself that her weekly booze-fueled rampages are cute and make people like her. Oddly enough, the first half of Restoration reminded me of that. Once Merivel has gotten into the court, he forgets everything but drinking, wearing increasingly ridiculous clothing, and womanizing, and he barely realizes that the reason Charles brought him to court was because he was a rakish doctor, not just a rake. It’s actually quite hilarious; Merivel has little to no idea what’s going on around him at any given moment, and just tries to sail through it until he can get back to partying. But once Merivel falls out of favor, the film takes quite a dark turn—even as Merivel finally realizes his true calling is, in fact, medicine, he loses the people he loves and is forced into a desperate situation. Oh, and then London catches on fire.

What’s strange about Restoration is that things just happen to Merivel. Rose Tremain, who wrote Restoration, said that “the story has no logic”, which is more or less true (Dedukhina). We mostly just watch Downey’s Merivel drift from situation to situation until he finally settles down at the end of the film. It’s a testament to Downey’s acting ability that this isn’t painful. I always find it oddly dissonant to see the younger Downey in films—he has this dewy, beestung, Raúl Juliá quality to him that he’s grown out of since, as well as the strange habit of going slack-jawed to convey astonishment. But he’s still a fine actor, making the first part of the film enjoyable by being a complete idiot and the second part enjoyable as Merivel develops into an actual human being once he’s faced with people who do things for reasons other than pleasure. David Thewlis’ John Pearce is absolutely lovely; slim, aristocratic, and his faith is presented as something positive that Merivel lacks. Their scenes together are fantastic; while they don’t have large amounts of screen time together, they have a warm, friendly chemistry that’s lovely to watch. Less lovely to watch is Meg Ryan as Katherine; she does just fine, but she seems so concentrated on keeping up the accent and the crazy that she doesn’t physically emote, which makes her suffer in comparison to Downey and Thewlis. While I found this film by rifling through Ian McKellan’s filmography, he has a minor part as Merivel’s housekeeper; he’s lovely, but fleeting. Hugh Grant playing Elias Finn, an artist trying to get into court via painting a portrait of Merivel’s wife, has a bigger impact, in that it is hilarious to watch Hugh Grant playing a scheming dandy.

It’s a beautiful film—it did win Oscars for set decoration and costume design. It’s lush and, especially when it’s at court, just fun to look at—Merivel’s wedding, in particular, is a brightly colored and dimly light bacchanal. But there’s still something very nineties about it. Period films usually escape dating by, of course, dating themselves in the story; you can’t call Elizabeth very nineties. But there’s something very dated in this film’s approach to its setting. I have a feeling it’s the efficient cinematography on top of the rather poor video quality. Restoration is actually coming to DVD this year, so here’s hoping that it’s been remastered, even if it barely deserves it.

Bottom line: In Restoration, Robert Downey Jr.’s Merivel floats from situation to situation without any impetus from himself, but he makes the light-hearted foppishness of the first half fun and does quite well in the darker second half. The cast is solid, save for Meg Ryan’s Katherine, and lush and period in a strangely nineties way. If you’d like.

I watched this film on Netflix Instant.

• Dedukhina, Elena. “Interview with Rose Tremain.” Wisdom and Sense. Blogger, 13 Oct. 2006.

I saw this article the other day that asked, “Are you ashamed of skipping parts of books?” Which, naturally, made me want to ask all of YOU.

Do you skip ahead in a book? Do you feel badly about it when you do?

Oh, what a ghastly thought! I can’t skip ahead in books, even if the book is a collection of essays or short stories that actually allows you to do so without possibly missing anything important. I’m just petrified that I’ll miss something, you know? I have the same problem with television, films, and book series. For instance, I want to read Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy so I can watch the film, but I feel like I have to start at the beginning of the George Smiley novels because I might miss something. Perhaps this is why I feel so lethargic when it comes to mysteries, since they’re nearly inevitably series…

My recommendation for Far From Xanadu comes from the dearth of butch heroines in literature, let alone young adult literature. Malinda Lo recommended it on Tor.com, so I thought it was worth picking up. This is actually a harder title to come by, if only because this book actually has two titles—the original Far From Xanadu and the recent reissue under the title Pretend You Love Me. But rest assured, they’re the same book.

Far From Xanadu is set in tiny Coalton, Kansas, and follows Mike Szabo, a butch teenage girl still reeling from the suicide of her father two years previous. Her morbidly obese mother hasn’t talked to her in those two years, and her older brother Darryl has let the family plumbing business go downhill. With only softball and her catty best friend Jamie to distract her, is it any wonder Mike falls—and falls hard—for the stunningly beautiful Xanadu, a new transfer student? But there’s a problem—Xanadu is straight. As Mike struggles with her crush, her family, and her future, she must reexamine one of the fundamental elements of a human life—love.

Katie at Unravelled Threads and I have been talking about the threat of a single queer story; namely, the fact that most fictional depictions of queer folk focus on their struggle with their sexuality and their further struggle with coming out. This is an important story to tell, of course, but it’s also the loudest. It’s rare to see, especially in contemporary fiction, novels or short stories that treat alternate sexuality as a given and go on from there. (For instance, the current shining beacon for asexuals is Benedict Cumberbatch’s interpretation of Sherlock Holmes in Sherlock, whom the production explicitly labels as asexual—but even then, he develops an enormous crush on Irene Adler when she turns up. Not heterosexual per se, but certainly heteronormative.) While Mike isn’t entirely comfortable with her identity as a butch lesbian, she (and her community) don’t care that she’s attracted to girls. The worst thing thrown her way is someone assuming that she won’t want children because she’s gay. Far From Xanadu, despite what’s written on the cover flap, doesn’t concern itself with that single queer story.

Rather, Mike has plenty of things to worry about before Xanadu walks into her life. Her family life is in shambles, and her father’s suicide has left her alternately doubtful she can’t do better and too proud to accept help. It’s love in general that’s Mike’s problem—her struggles to reconnect with her family (she and her father were close) and her struggle to recognize the desire of her community to help her as love rather than pity. In fact, Mike’s unease with labeling herself probably stems from that. All of this is why Mike falls for Xanadu, who is clearly bad news (although Mike refuses to hear a word against her). Here Peters absolutely nails being in love—when Xanadu talks about what she’s looking for in a guy, Mike finds herself thinking that she could be anything for her, and she’s hyper-focused on any physical interaction they share. Xanadu doesn’t help, of course. As the novel progresses, it becomes clearer and clearer that Xanadu is playing with Mike and doesn’t understand Mike’s struggles; the two are separated not only by a sexual orientation, but by class and values. It’s only towards the end, as Mike repairs her relationships with everyone (including herself), that she sees Xanadu for who she really is.

…well, that’s quite a bit on how Far From Xanadu is useful as a novel that avoids the single queer story and focuses more on love in all its various forms, and not much on the actual novel itself. The writing is straightforward and quite readable, and Mike is a charming protagonist. (Although I’m not quite sure who the girl on the cover is supposed to be; I’ll say Xanadu because she’s a redhead.) Less successful as a character is Jamie, Mike’s male best friend who fulfills every gay stereotype you can think of. He’s important as someone to occasionally poke Mike about her unease about calling herself gay, but it would work without him—twice in the novel Mike encounters other queer women and feels camaraderie and even jealousy. (I’m not going to lie, I was kind of hoping Mike would end up with one of the girls she meets in those two instances.) She even wonders if they’re only friends because they’re both gay. Peters deconstructs this a bit—Jamie is very aware of how he presents to the world and just does not care—but he just seems to reinforce the gender binary Mike thinks in. I had been initially hoping Jamie was a girl (Peters introduces both Mike and Jamie in ways that their gender must be revealed), to contrast a female friendship with a female romantic relationship, but alas. Ultimately, it’s just alright—I probably wouldn’t pick this up if representations of butch women weren’t few and far between in young adult fiction. But they are, and Far From Xanadu is nicely complex to boot.

Bottom line: Far From Xanadu is a decent young adult novel elevated by its focus on a butch heroine (extremely rare!) and issues of love far beyond the usual coming out story so prevalent in stories focused on queer protagonists. If you’d like.

I rented this book from the public library.