#a swiftly tilting planet

[specificpollsaboutbooks]

Famous Authors, Lesser Known Works

Round 1

Madeleine L'Engle is better known for A Wrinkle in Time

A Ring of Endless Light :

This is my favorite book in L'Engle's subseries about the Austin family. While this series is linked to her more famous books about the O'Keefe's, there aren't nearly as many fantastical elements in it. I love this book because of the nuanced way it explores grief. Also, it made me really want to swim with dolphins at some point in my life!

A Swiftly Tilting Planet :

I didn't even know stories could have a structure like this when I read it as a kid, I feel like it genuinely expanded my brain or something. Just read the wikipedia plot summary for this book, it's absolutely wild, and when the Madoc/"Mad Dog" thread finally comes together at the end and you realize what all the time travel soul-merging stuff has been about, it just really blew my mind when I first read it. Also, the variation on St Patrick's Rune stuck in my head for years.

[lostetiquette]

TS 12: A book release?

Quick thoughts,

I recently watched a video made by @Tiffers on the TickyTok, I'll go repost if anyone is interested, my TT is @olivia_iloveya

The video brought up a possible book theory...

I can't get too in-depth on the details, but here are some of my thoughts/theories.

Thoughts, a book could serve as a guide or key to connecting some missing details in the story...I love all the small details, but these are what is needed most for the majority of fans to connect this story.

Keys 🔑 🗝️🔐 are rotated 🔄 to unlock 🔓...

We received BOOKMARKS in the collectors edition CDs for TTPD.

Taylor ties albums' loose ends together, for example,

at the end of Midnight, HITS DIFFERENT:

I heard your key turn in the door down the hallway

Is that your key in the door?

Is it okay? Is it you?

Or have they come to take me away?

To take me away

TS 10 ties to TS 11 🧶

TTPD, Fortnight:

I was supposed to be sent away

But they forgot to come and get me...

So how might a new project, say whatever Taylor has planned for TS 12, begin?

Well let's see...

The Tortured Poets Department ends with The Manuscript (MAN U SCRIPT)

Now and then I reread the manuscript

But the story isn't mine anymore

Is Taylor's story not hers anymore because it's now going to be shared with US?

The Story of Us

Gracie Abrams teases us a little with her own album, The Secret of Us

I have a date 9/6...

9/6 rotated 🔄 is 9/6

Spotify spiral 🌀 alice playlist...pointed me to this date when it was released after You're Losing Me Came out

...remember Taylor credited her heartbeat in YLM, by listing spiral alice

spiral alice (anagram) ↔️ "capillaries" 🫀

The spiral 🌀 alice playlist has 9 TS songs, every 6th song...

Spotify Artist of the Year, friendship bead road only has 8, 9, and 6 beads...there's also some other "random" beads, and one ☝🏼 tiny H bead to the left of the Earthquake seismograph 🤭

It was after listening to @Tiffers speak about the possibility of a book, that I realized 9/6 is also

🥁

Sooooo, thoughts?

It would be so unexpected in the most expected way?!?

Thank goodness we have only 1 more day until SeptEMBER 9th

🔥🐦‍🔥

[cultivating-wildflowers]

2024 Reading - August

There I was at the beginning of the month all worried about my potential page count for August, and then I went and read well beyond that. It's fine. I'm just a baby. The good news is that I seem to have caught my reading stride again--I actually wanted to spend my evenings reading a physical book, and didn't feel like reading was a slog. And even though I'm only halfway toward my original reading goal for the year, I've made good progress through my digital TBR.

Total books: 9  |  New reads: 8  |   2024 TBR completed: 1 (0 DNF) / 27/36 total   |   2024 Reading Goal: 53/100

July | September

potential reading list from August 1st

First of all, please admire this graph:

I haven't read this many pages in a month in like two years. (This does count pages and hours I read for books I ultimately DNF.)

Moving on.

#1 - The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion, Vol 1 by Beth Brower - 5/5 stars

A quick, charming read with surprising depth. I actually cried at one point. And I definitely want to read more. It’s a pity each volume is so small and that none are available through any library in the state.

Note from end-of-the-month Phoebe: I bought Volume 2. And another book by the same author.

#2 - Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke - 5/5 stars ('24 TBR)

Expertly crafted historical setting effortlessly blended with the dangerously fantastical. Rich, complex characters who are people of their time. A totally engrossing writing style with asides and footnotes and sharp dialogue that left me laughing with delight. So many tiny elements that combined to make up exactly the sort of story I crave. I wasn't expecting to be enthralled, but I was from the first page. Maybe it rewired my brain a little bit.

I will grant it's not for everyone, but it was PERFECT for me. Just don't ask me what the plot is.

Reasons you may not like it: 1) It's huge and a bit of a time investment. 2) It is largely character-driven and, while well-paced, doesn't have a lot of external pressure to keep the story exciting. 3) It's somewhat verbose, in a Tolkien sort of way. 4) Something of an open ending (which, weirdly, didn't bother me?). 5) As the magic tips from human to fairy, it develops a dark and occult flavor. This is nice for people who like their fairies to remain distinctly wicked within the narrative (rather than roguishly morally gray), but there are decidedly dark elements. I tried to watch the show a few years ago and didn't make it through the first episode, and as I recall it was because the fairies came off a tad too dark for me. Somehow it was better on the page.

#3 - Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West by Blaine Harden - 4/5 stars

This is both the biography of a man who escaped the North Korean prison camp where he was born, and also a biography of North Korea itself over the past 50-odd years. Sparse and somewhat stilted, full of facts and figures, it reads more like an article than a story. I'll say it's an important story, despite the surrounding controversy, but the writing style didn't do it any favors.

Note regarding the peculiar controversy surrounding this book: A few years after the book was published, Shin Dong-hyuk contacted Harden and revised his story as told here. The base details remained the same, but timelines and locations had changed. Yeonmi Park faced the same controversy following the publication of her memoir of her childhood in North Korea (In Order to Live; which, weirdly, I read in August of last year), which to me says less about the veracity at the heart of both individuals' histories and more about how trauma, in particular that brought about by political violence, can impact emotions and memory. If you're interested in reading this book, definitely check out Harden's updated forward examining Shin's altered account. Harden himself repeatedly acknowledges Shin as "an unreliable narrator of his own life".

More like this: "In Order to Live" by Yeonmi Park with Maryanne Vollers; "A Long Way Gone" by Ishmael Beah; "Infidel" by Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

#4 - Time Travelling with a Hamster by Ross Welford - 4/5 stars (audio)

If you couldn't tell, I'm desperately trying to fill in some of the missing letters for my second year of a self-imposed alphabet titles challenge. This is my fifth attempt at a "T". Attempts three and four are below in the DNFs. I decided to bank on an extreme change of pace with this one.

A solid middle grade adventure, and one I'll definitely recommend in future. Fun and unpredictable and my head hurts, because time travel always does that to me. Ridiculously short chapters, for some reason.

More like this: A bit like "A Wrinkle in Time", a bit like "Meet the Robinsons" (the movie; haven't read the books).

#5 - The Empty Grave by Jonathan Stroud - 4/5 stars

I DNF'd this last year after trying and failing for a month to get into it. I had definitely been in the perfect mood when I started the series last year, but for some reason The Empty Grave gave me no end of trouble, and I gave it up about a quarter of the way through.

Not so this time. This time it took me all of four days to finish.

Thankfully this follows the tradition of refreshing the reader's memory of previous events in the series, because I'd forgotten some of the pertinent details. Either because of my foggy memory or because of something else in the story, the ending fell kind of flat for me, like it was missing an element to deliver a good emotional conclusion, or like it didn’t fully satisfy the stakes set up at the start of the book. I consider this series more young adult than middle grade, but the way it wrapped up definitely felt middle grade in style.

Still a solid ending for sure, just a little confusing.

#6 - A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L'Engle - 5/5 stars (reread) - 50th read of the year!

Comfort book my belovéd.

#7 - The Swamp Fox: How Francis Marion Saved the American Revolution by John Oller - 4/5 stars (audio)

Francis Marion is one of my dad's favorite figures of the Revolutionary War, and man, I can see why.

The writing itself is somewhat dry, crammed full of names and dates technical details of battles; but Oller manages to weave a solid narrative as he combs through the legends surrounding Marion and picks out the facts.

More like this: "Lion of Liberty" by Harlow Giles Unger.

#8 - Heidi by Johanna Spyri - 4/5 stars (audio)

"Heidi" was one of the movies I watched on repeat as a kid. Not the Shirley Temple version, but the 1968 made-for-TV version that apparently took some liberties with the plot. (But according to Wikipedia, it's most memorable for interrupting a football game for its premier.)

The book is a cozy classic children's book, plain and simple. It feels a bit like The Secret Garden with an orphan coming to an unfamiliar place and thriving there (plus helping an invalid thrive as well); and a bit like L.M. Montgomery pushing all of us to get outside and breathe some fresh air.

#9 - The King of Elfland's Daughter by Lord Dunsany - 4/5 stars (audio)

Absolutely gorgeous.

You might like this is you like: The Ballad of the White Horse by G.K. Chesterton; or the narrative style of the legends told by characters in the Queen's Thief series.

Useless fun fact: Lord Dunsany's name was Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett.

DNF

Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell - Hilarious two-star reviews proved it's not something worth finishing and it doesn't deliver on the premise. (It's not even about Hamnet. It's a "re-imagining" of Anne/Agnes Hathaway-Shakespeare and guess what. She's a strong, wild woman who practices witchcraft in late 16th century England. Groundbreaking. I need to stop skimming summaries.)

The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert - Got about a third of the way through this one before I realized...I just didn't care. The premise was good, and the delivery was kind of meh but not bad--which, considering how rarely I read newer YA these days, was actually a point in its favor. But then we got to the reveal and I went "Wait. That's it?" and lost interest. I don't think magical realism is for me. Also, it didn't affect my decision to stop reading, but I didn't like the audiobook narrator.

Tales from the Hinterland by Melissa Albert - A companion book to the Hazel Wood duology, presented as the book-within-a-book that the Hazel Wood revolves around. I read a couple of the stories out of curiosity, but the allure of that book-within-a-book is gone when it's told in the same voice as the actual story.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith - I...have no idea. What is this? I got a little over halfway through it before it got to be too much and I gave up. I liked the writing voice well enough but the story meandered along a plodding, darkly sentimental route and I got lost. And a little disgusted.

Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughart - I wanted to like it, but it was too bawdy for me.

The Outlaws of Sherwood by Robin McKinley - Robin is such a hit-or-miss author for me, and this one was a solid miss. The premise was too absurd for me to stick it out. I might have given it another chapter, but none of the characters were really grabbing me, and I wasn't fond of how McKinley chose to portray Marian.

Currently Reading:

The Disorderly Knights by Dorothy Dunnett - I swear I'll have finished this by the end of the year.

The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown - I'll finish this one pretty quickly.

[s1utspeare]

Me: oh boy I’m gonna do so much world building and space/sci-fi shenanigans in this first chapter of Eternal Voyage!

Also Me: *spends basically the whole chapter whumping Zhang Rishan*

[myownastraldress]

The Time Quartet really is astonishingly good for children's lit. I mean that. It's a rare series that gets better as you grow up.

[iviarellereads]

The Time Quintet Home Post

There aren't a lot of books written before the current century that I still really hold dear. Obviously, the Wheel of Time is up there. The Neverending Story was there as well, though I'd grown less familiar with it over the years. Not all, but some of Madeleine L'Engle's work was available at my local library, and it Spoke To Me in a way few other books did when I needed it most.

Though the series started in 1962, and the final book is actually the end of a second-generation series as well, the Time Quintet's first four books were extremely my middle school shit in the 1990s. They're coming-of-age stories, with fantasy, and science fiction, and science, and God, but not the CS Lewis kind of God, like, this one's more of a force of truly universal love and less of a preachy lion. (L'Engle was a Christian Universalist, and made no secret of her beliefs in her stories.)

I'm not going to be able to do a very good job of selling this one to a new reader. Partly, this series gets WEIRD in a delightful and occasionally horrific way. Partly, it's too close to my heart to push it away far enough to be objective. I can't even guarantee that if you've liked the other books I've covered, you'll enjoy this one. But, I'd be real honoured if you'd give it a try.

(Necessary caveat: I've still never read the fifth book in the quintet. See above: the point about it being second-gen. I read one of the second-gen books and it sat with me in my heart deeply, but I never got as far as An Acceptable Time because my library never had it, and it never felt like a high priority to finish anything about the series after Many Waters. So, we'll see if I add it to this post when I get closer to it.)

A Wrinkle In Time 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12

A Wind in the Door 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12

A Swiftly Tilting Planet 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12

Many Waters

[kbkirtley]

A Light So Lovely - Sarah Arthur

Madeline L’Engle is one of my favorite authors and this is one of my favorite biographies. Sarah Arthur does a brilliant job of explaining L’Engle as someone who thrived within paradoxes, holding competing ideas in tension and saying that it’s okay to do so. L’Engle’s most known work is A Wrinkle in Time (which I posted about earlier this week!), but Arthur goes much deeper than that I’m exploring the world through L’Engle’s unique perspective. A singular biography about a singular author that I can’t recommend enough to fans of her work!

[chavisory]

-It is nice getting the perspective of Murry/O'Keefe kids again. I missed it in Arm of the Starfish.

-L'Engle's racial politics are... not good. Like she is very obsessed, for some reason, with the idea of a mystical indigenous race, of almost wherever we are.

-The white savior thing especially in this book is... not great.

-Though it's interesting that there seems to be something really similar going on in Dragons in the Waters as what's happening in A Swiftly Tilting Planet, where there's some kind of notion of the ancestry of a key person in history being pivotal or important.

[none-ofthisnonsense]

Okay time to get to the REAL debate

(there is a right answer)

[commodoreshock]

I love when Sandy and Dennys play the skeptics in the family to Meg and Charles Wallace’s fantastical theories because… you two time-traveled back to literal biblical times, fought angels, rode unicorns, and helped Noah build his freaking ark. But nooo, *Charles Wallace’s* time-traveling unicorn is crazy and unscientific.

[moderncivilization]

This is the most stunning book cover I've seen in years

[josephconrads]

Title: A Swiftly Tilting Planet

Author: Madeleine L’Engle

Rating: 4 out of 5

Review: Enjoyed how this wrapped up the trilogy and the story of Charles Wallace and Meg. It’s an intriguing look at the history of both the Murry family and the O’Keefe family as well as the situations and decisions that can change the course of history. It was well connected to the first two novels and while it didn’t have much of the physics aspect as one may have expected after reading those first two, the history aspect of this was still very enjoyable and seemed a natural part of the storytelling.

[s1utspeare]

WIP Snippet Game

i was tagged by one of my faaaaavvvvvoooorrriiiitttteeeeeessss @lucientelrunya and once again I'm going feral over mecha!FuBa like literally shut up!!!!!!! they fit that AU so wellllll ghghghghghghghgh

anyway! i have no idea when it's going to be ready cause it is very slow going but! Here's an Eternal Voyage snippet for you all >:)

Zhang Rishan obeys. He unstraps one of his gloves and yanks it off with his teeth, grabbing his pocket knife with the other hand and flipping up the blade. He drags it across his palm, making sure to squeeze a pool of blood into his fist, not that it will really matter; it’s too cold in here for him to heal the cut as quickly as he normally would.  He gets up and goes to the cargo, holding his fist above the crates and letting his blood drip into the seam where the lid snaps into place. He walks down each of the rows, squeezing blood out of the cut on his palm and onto the boxes, waiting for it to seep in, to do the hard work for him. He finishes the task and goes to crouch by the door, waiting.  It doesn’t take long. At the far end of the middle row of cargo, a box begins to rattle, the electromagnetic hinges sparking and disengaging as the crate falls off of the stack, opening with a thud and sending several glowing spheres of yellow smoke tumbling out, rolling across the floor. Zhang Rishan scoops one up with his uninjured hand, careful not to get any blood on the glass, and examines it. It’s definitely the alsorbium; he recognizes the smoky appearance.  He flicks on his eye visor with a nod, the sensors at his temple reacting to the movement and sliding the screen around. He navigates to the camera, snaps three pictures with blinks, and sends them to their ship.  He’s just gotten confirmation that the Qiongqi has received his notification when the cargo bay door slides open, revealing four smugglers in dark, space-grade clothing, goggles over their eyes and scarves pulled up over their mouths. They stand in the doorway and stare at Zhang Rishan. Zhang Rishan stares back. Slowly, he watches as their gazes travel to the orb he’s holding in his hand.  “Right,” Zhang Rishan says. “That.”

[cdchyld]

Just added to the Vintage shop!

~ “A Swiftly Tilting Plante” by Madeleine L’Engle (1978)

[iviarellereads]

A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Chapter 12 Between myself and the powers of darkness

(THIS PROJECT IS SPOILER FREE! No spoilers past the chapter you click on. Curious what I'm doing here? Read this post! For the link index for the Time Quintet, read this one! Like what you see? Send me a Ko-Fi.)

In which it couldn't have ended any other way.

Meg and the twins and Mrs. O'Keefe run to the star watching rock. Charles is there, pale and unmoving. Mrs. O'Keefe and Meg cry out the rune, and Charles finds himself on the rock again, with Gaudior.

The unicorn explains that Matthew died sooner than they expected, and they barely got Charles out in time.(1) Charles marvels at having the use of his legs again, after so long in Matthew. As he rides Gaudior home, he passes through the memory of all the people he has been in the book.

When they land, Gaudior's horn flashes, blinding each of those present in turn. Meg hears Charles call a goodbye to Gaudior, but she forgets who Gaudior is. Sandy and Dennys talk about the lightning flash they interpreted. Charles says they came just in time, and thanks them, especially Mrs. O'Keefe, Beezie.

Dennys and Sandy both tell them they need to get inside and out of this chill. They support Mrs. O'Keefe on the way back, and Meg holds Charles's hand as though they were children again. The Murry parents fuss over them coming back in, though more over Ananda's excited tail wagging disturbing their work in the lab.

Meg remembers a phone call from the president, but only vaguely. Everyone asks where Charles was, and there are some cheeky double-entendres about his going for a walk and an adventure. Meg tells them to show Charles the letter, which has changed: it's now from Bran and Zillah to Gwen and Rich, the sadness over the death of Mr. Maddox, and Bran and Zillah's sons, Rich and Matthew, the latter of whom picked up an odd nickname from the "Indian" children,(2) who combined his parents' names into Branzillo.(3)

Mr. Murry asks if that's the same letter he read before. Mrs. Murry says it sounded a bit different, but they're all quite tired. Sandy says it has to be the same letter, logically.

Charles asks Beezie what happened to Chuck. She says he died, about six months after going to the institution. As for her other half-brother, he took after his father, and went to prison for embezzlement and died there. Meg connects that Beezie married Paddy for the same reason Beezie's mother married Mortmain.(4)

Another phone call, from the president, but this time about El Zarco AKA Madog Branzillo setting up a peace plan conference, inviting Mr. Murry to consult. When the call is over, Meg asks about the threats, but Mr. Murry no longer remembers any. In fact, only Charles and Beezie remember it the way Meg does, because they traveled with Gaudior.

Mrs. O'Keefe gestures at Meg and says the baby will be born. Meg asks if she's glad to be a grandmother, but she says she's not going to make it. Her grandmother and her Chuck are waiting for her. As Mr. Murry takes her home, Dennys says Mrs. O'Keefe is showing signs of heart failure, and really probably won't live to see the baby, especially after running to the star watching rock.

Sandy says the whole evening's been one big confusion and they should all go to bed and forget it. Meg's just sad at the thought of losing Beezie just as they really found her.

Charles Wallace had once again been contemplating the intricate model of the tesseract. He spoke softly to his sister. “Meg, no matter what happens, even if Dennys is right about her heart, remember that it was herself she placed, for the baby’s sake, and yours, and Calvin’s, and all of us—” Meg looked at him questioningly. Charles Wallace’s eyes as he returned her gaze were the blue of light as it glances off a unicorn’s horn, pure and clear and infinitely deep. “In this fateful hour, it was herself she placed between us and the powers of darkness.”

=====

(1) Every story has certain things you have to handwave to get past, as part of immersion and as part of story structure. But I think this book uses a few too many of the convenient just in time rescues, even though I also think that no explanation would really make it better, and making it longer just to explain would just make it more tedious. I'm not a fan of the structure, is what I'm getting at. (2) I'm still super annoyed at how white men's presence basically takes over Indigeneity in this book, and overwrites it, and subsumes it. It's been a journey of colonialism all over again. We! Are! Still! Here! Living among you, everywhere, every day. And all this has just smacked of the whole "1/32 Cherokee princess" white people like to trot out, which also complicates it for people like me whose cultural practices were banned so hard it was almost entirely lost until the last couple of generations. Just. This book has made me so tired I fell a whole week behind on posts out of dread of each next development. I need to rant somewhere. (The next one will be slightly less personally relevant at least.) (3) And, even though it couldn't have ended any other way because of it, here's where I start getting real skeptical of what L'Engle was trying to say in this book besides the Indigenous stuff. The name "Branzillo" hasn't changed since the opening chapter's fearfulness about him. Without that connection there couldn't have been the story at all, but, why did the evil one have the same name, when it's derived from the "good" people? His nickname changed from the rabid to the blue-eyed, but "Mad dog" to "Madog" is barely anything, and "Branzillo" didn't change at all. What do you think she was getting at with this, intentionally or otherwise, because I'm at a loss. (4) It's more or less a children's book, YA at oldest, so I'm not mad at L'Engle for saying it directly, but I do find it a little puzzling that she says this out loud but passes right on past so much else in this book.

[kbkirtley]

A Wrinkle in Time - Madeline L’Engle

A Wrinkle in Time is one of my favorite books from when I was a young reader (so obviously I had to get the beautiful B&N edition). L’Engle does a great job of making science fiction accessible for a young audience without feeling like it’s being “dumbed down” or patronizing. A Wrinkle In Time was like the book version of a playground for me when I read it, letting my mind see the possibilities that existed in the imagination in a way other books couldn’t seem to match. There’s something almost ethereal about journeying with Meg to the far side of the universe through L’Engles writing and it’s a story that stands the passage of time well.

A great sci-fi read for all ages!