#it's making me want to read more tolkien related nonfiction

[lizziestudieshistory]

31.08.2034 - Dusting off my very much neglected musical knowledge to read Doug Adams's The Music of the Lord of the Rings Films. It's a beautifully nerdy book and gives me an excellent excuse to listen to the complete recordings for each of the films again. I'm just over half way through Fellowship at the moment and very much enjoying myself.

Currently reading: The Music of the Lord of the Rings Films by Doug Adams; Morality Play by Barry Unsworth

[similistic]

Books of 2021

Favorites: (in order of date read)

- Graceling by Kristin Cashore This was recommended to me by Diana (again LOL), although I had heard of it before, it hadn’t really been strongly on my radar. Graceling is book one in the series and my favorite by far. I think the main characters reminded me a little of On Fortune’s Wheel, one of my old favorites (that I should reread again soon I think). Fire is book two, and I gave it five stars. I also read and enjoyed books three and four, which got 4 and 3 stars from me respectively.

- Dear Ijeawele by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie A non-fiction collection of letters on the topic of many things, but based on suggestions on how to raise our daughters.

- The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia A. McKillip A recommendation of Elizabeth Lim’s favorite fantasy novels. I described it as "Tolkien-esque, but made more palatable for younger readers."

- Dear Girls by Ali Wong I thought it was sort of feminist and empowering, but in a very different way than Dear Ijeawele. More like a sleepover with your high school/college girlfriends.

- Dealing with Dragons / Talking to Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede Another Elizabeth Lim recommendation from the same Instagram reel. I ended up reading al four books in the series, and enjoyed them all, but the first one is the best, in my opinion. A very nice “unconventional princess” story. Talking to Dragons is book four and is very tongue in cheek about traditional hero stories.

- A Court of Thorns and Roses / A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J. Maas Recommended to me by basically everyone, but I finally caved when someone told me that ACoTaR was a Beauty and the Beast retelling. I’m a sucker for BatB retellings and I was not let down. ACoMaF is very very different (the same friend described it as a Hades/Persephone retelling). The plot of the series can give you a bit of whiplash. I also read and enjoyed book 3 but thought it was much weaker and it didn’t make me interested in reading book 4, which came out this year.

- A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers Loved it, wanted more, but book two isn’t slated to come out until next year, and I don’t trust publishers to keep their word so I’m trying not to hold my breath on it. The world reminded me weirdly of The Giver (Lois Lowry), even though it... is not at all related. Robots.

- The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang A genderbent retelling of “Pretty Woman” where the main female character is austistic. I read it and then immediately wanted to reread it.

5-Star Ratings in 2021:

Fiction--

- The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu Really epic; Asian inspired world building.

- Daughter of the Forest by Juliet Marillier Another Elizabeth Lim rec; Wild Swans (ATU451) retelling.

- Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir More similar to The Martian than Artemis was, but with a more fantastical element.

- Six Crimson Cranes by Elizabeth Lim Lim’s “Wild Swans” retelling; Asian-inspired world building.

Nonfiction---

- The Story of Stuff by Annie Leonard Consumerism and it’s impact.

- Educated by Tara Westover A memoir written by someone who grew up off the grid.

- Dear Memory by Victoria Chang Poetry in the form of letters that really resonated with me, as this woman’s life closely paralleled that of my close family.

[omgreading]

May 2020 Wrap-up

I read 8 books in May. This month there wasn’t a bookclub pick. We were just reading anything on our TBR, so I didn’t consider it a bookclub month.

I had a lot of 30 minutes days. I spent a lot of time in bed not feeling well. I went to the hospital twice for various viral infections.

Two of the books were Scribd ebooks, one was from the library, and I owned the rest.

Only two of the books were not Shadowhunter related.

May Reads:

City of Ashes (The Mortal Instruments #2) by Cassandra Clare [★★★★☆]

City of Glass (The Mortal Instruments #3) by Cassandra Clare [★★★★☆]

Clockwork Angel (The Infernal Devices #1) by Cassandra Clare [★★★★★]

City of Fallen Angels (The Mortal Instruments #4) by Cassandra Clare [★★★★★]

The Shadowhunter’s Codex by Cassandra Clare and Joshua Lewis [★★★★★]

Bossypants by Tina Fey [★★★☆☆]

The Language of Thorns: Midnight Tales and Dangerous Magic (Grishaverse) by Leigh Bardugo [★★★★★]

Clockwork Prince (The Infernal Devices #2) by Cassandra Clare [★★★★★]

Books in bold are the ones I own(ed)

The Language of Thorns was my favorite book this month.

I thought I would finish both The Mortal Instruments and The Infernal Devices this month, but in the last two weeks I haven’t been very interested in reading. 

Bossypants went towards my 2020 Goal for the TBRBuster challenge made by @bookbandit of reading one nonfiction book a month I’ve owned a year or longer.

I am halfway to reading 100 books. My first goal was 24, and I surpassed that in February, so I moved it to 100. With seven months left, I hope I can manage the other 50, knowing that school will start up for me. 

Overall Goals Check-in:

Read 30 minutes a day [152/366]

Read 100 books [50/100]

Read 10 books that have been on my shelves for more than a year [5/10]

Become more active in the booklr community (not this month)

Read one book that is 1,000 pages or more

Complete one series I’ve already started (A Series of Unfortunate Events, The African Trilogy, Heroes of Olympus, Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children)

Write in my journal every day, even if it is only one sentence [152/366]

TBRBuster Check-in:

all books have to be owned for a year or longer at the time of reading

Read one nonfiction book a month, these do not count towards yearly goal [5/12]

Read one book I own by J. R. R. Tolkien

Read one book that is 800+ pages

Read one book that is more than a 100 years old

Read one book that was written in or before the 16th century

I enjoyed the books I read this month for the most part, but I expected to read more. I got in a reading slump halfway through and spent a lot of days this month only reading for 30 minutes. 

My library is putting protocols in place for picking up holds and returning books, so I need to to follow-up on that. I have 19 library books left to read out of what I have. I am returning two unread because I realized I didn’t want to read them and then another two I now own, so I am returning those. I don’t think I will make a lot of progress on the library books this month, but I would like to read at least two. 

I would like to finish The Mortal Instruments and The Infernal Devices in June and then maybe work on some of the other books I’ve recently bought. Or if I am interested enough, I might try to go through the other books in The Shadowhunter Chronicles. I would like read at least one book from Scribd in June. 

Scribd has a lot of great books available, both ebook and audiobook. If you use this link to signup, you will get 60 days free. I am relying on the service to finish The Shadowhunter Chronicles and I know it has so many other great series and stand alones available.

*My check-in info is as of 5/31 so it only contains things for May

[janiedean]

After joining tumblr, my dream of becoming a published writer is forever broken and ruined. It may be drastic but I cannot imagine a future in which I'm a happy writer, knowing that what a large amount of people think is that you can't write about a gay character if you're not gay yourself, you cannot have a poc character if you're not poc yourself etc. It's frustrating and sad. That's what tumblr taught, along with simultaneously complaining all the day about the lack of rep

anon, let me tell you something first and foremost: tumblr is not a good audience when it comes to original fiction and if that’s what you want to do, delete tumblr from your perspectives.

now, I’ll go and say a lot of unpopular things before addressing your concerns, but here we go:

people on tumblr don’t read. or better: either they read fanfic which then they decide to consider the same thing as published writing, and like... while there’s a lot of fic that’s better than some published writing technically, the fact that they say it about classics or stuff they’re supposed to study in school shows that they have no idea of the basic difference in between the two media... or they read YA that gets hailed as the Next Best Thing In Literature when at most it’s a good YA and at worst it’s mediocre stuff that looks revolutionary because they haven’t read the fifteen other things that YA has taken inspiration from. at most they read harry potter when they were kids and never moved on from it, as showed by the fact that it’s 2019 and I still have to see people arguing about sn/ape being BAD OR GOOD when he’s the standard gray archetype, and if you can only think of sn/ape when you think about a gray character and you still haven’t made sense of his moralities or lack thereof, then you haven’t read anything else; (never mind that once I read writing advice like SORT YOUR CHARACTERS INTO HOGWARTS HOUSES LIKE FFS SOME OF US HAVEN’T READ HP THAT’S NOT A UNIVERSAL ADVICE FOR CREATING A CHARACTER’S BACKGROUND)

as people on tumblr don’t read, their understanding of how you write or anything else related to the craft is pretty much useless - like, the only thing each single writing manual agrees on is that if you want to be a writer you have to read a lot, because how are you going to deconstruct tropes (to say one) if you don’t know how those tropes work? or how are you going to play into them if you don’t know how they work regardless? I can’t write a tolkien deconstruction if I haven’t read all of tolkien’s writings back to back ten times at least, I can’t write a good novel about vietnam veterans in the early eighties if I don’t read all the history books on the topic I can find and at least ten tomes about how war-related ptsd in veterans works and possibly a lot of books written by vets themselves. I can’t write a stephen king deconstruction if I haven’t read stephen king back to back ten times either. which shows they think original novels are like fanfic - like, I personally have researched the shit out of things for fanfic, but I wouldn’t ask anyone to do it for a thing they do for free. like, if I see badly researched italian reinassance AU fic I won’t gaf if the author just wrote it based on the anglosaxon tv shows about the borgias around because I can’t expect them to read ten books about the topic to write a thing they don’t get paid for and that just people in fandom most likely will touch, but if it’s a published author that gets paid for it I’ll expect that at least they’ll do some research if they want to write stuff somewhat realistically. people on tumblr think that writing a novel requires the same effort as fanfic, as in, not much when it comes to background work, which is ridiculous, because that’s the difference - with fanfic, unless I write a detailed AU or smth, the author already did that work for me. I just have to expand on it and trying to understand the characters. like, it’s nowhere near the same thing;

which means that people have gone with this concept that ‘you can’t write X if you’re not X’, which is honestly ridiculous and counter-productive because it shoots down any chance that you, as an author, might actually understand what people who aren’t from your background feel like. also, I personally think that if you want to do that and you want to be good at it you need to a) find a way to relate to your characters that goes beyond your differences, b) talk to people from the category you don’t belong to. now, if I had to write a 50k short romance novel about two guys falling for each other at a record shop without too much drama happening, I’d probably just write it myself, some people who are actually guys into guys, ask them to read it, tell me if I fucked it up, get them to explain me how I fucked it up and run it by them until I’m done, but admittedly I don’t need research to find out how people run a record shop. if I had to write a story set in europe but idk there’s a zombie plague and one of the protagonists is a black american tourist I’d go ask someone who is black and american and possibly from the area I decided that person is from to give me background info on how I could write this person etc. and then run it by them after I’m done. if another of the protagonists is idk polish (because there’s not many polish people in mainstream european fiction outside of polish authors), I’d find a polish person to do the same thing and run it by them etc., because I’m not a black american nor a polish person but I still want to write those characters etc. but I mean, let’s say it’s the zombie apocalypse - can I make sure people connect with both of them because they’re surrounded by zombies and as all human beings in existence they don’t want to die? most likely I can. meanwhile I’ll have learned a lot of things about both categories because I talked to people belonging to them;

or, let’s say I want to write some story with a large cast where I decide that for the purposes of it straight character falls for a trans character and it ends well because fuck that I want people to be happy. I’m not trans, but I do know people who are. I’ll definitely talk to them running stuff and ask if thing X is offensive or not etc. because of course I’m not so I can’t know for sure, maybe I’ll stick with the straight POV or maybe not but I’ll definitely run it by them to make sure the thing is actually well-planned/not in poor taste, and meanwhile I’ll have learned a lot about the topic that I might not have known before, which is good because it means I know more about experiences I don’t have which is, guess what, how the entire point of writing stories is. you want people to empathize and feel for characters that might be not the same as them, that’s exactly your damned job, but if you don’t do it yourself first how do you assume others will?

all these people who think you can’t write a gay character if you’re not gay are the same people who think that if you’re a straight woman you can’t write about two men being in love/fucking but you should be able to do it about f/f pairings because since you’re a woman then you have to guess how that works out of that, which shows that they have no idea of how anything works - like I argued with half of tumblr on this topic so whatever, but as a straight woman I think I have more aesthetic tastes in common with a gay man since we both want to fuck men and we both are familiar with handling that equipment, so I’d find it easier to write about that rather than about the contrary as I don’t generally find women attractive in that sense except for like two very specific people who are not a very common aesthetic in general. but like, assuming that in virtue of being a woman then you have to know how it feels to be attracted to women while you can’t possibly do 2+2 about how gay men are into each other when technically you’re into men yourself shows exactly how these people have No Idea Whatsoever of how attraction works, never mind how empathizing with someone else works, never mind of how writing things with research behind it goes;

also, assuming that if you’re X then you can’t understand Y is extremely damaging because it means you can never understand other people’s struggles and that’s......... worrying? I mean, it’s an incredibly dangerous (and calvinist) position to say that if someone is X and so doesn’t know how it feels to have a specific kind of issue then they can’t get it not even intellectually. idk, I’m straight so I can’t possibly understand or relate to why would lgbt+ people want to marry and adopt kids/have their children recognized/have the same rights as I do? are we serious? so if idk I wanted to try and change some bigot’s mind about it when I see that they’re just parroting bullshit and they haven’t thought about it I shouldn’t even try because they’re a bigot and they’ll never understand or change their mind? so people who used to be bigots, then found out their kids or their kids’s friends were lgbt+, listened to them, realized they were bigots and are now allies/supporters couldn’t have done that because at some point they used to be bigots? how the hell do you want people to change or to be an activist or change the world if you don’t believe that people can change themselves or worse that you don’t believe that people coming from any background can’t understand people coming from another background? that’s not how it works. I mean guys ffs I read a bunch of nonfiction lately about endemic poverty in the center of the US out of personal interest and I’m as far from the US and any of those situations as it goes (I’m not a veteran, I never was not taught to read and write even if I finished high school, I never lost 90% of what I had after getting sick, I never needed to hop on a train illegally to go places, I never had to sell my own plasma to buy lunch, I never needed to live in a tent when I was going to middle school after my parents had to move to a totally different state and I never had to go live in a trailer after my house was sold by a bank before I couldn’t pay off my loan, I don’t have a five year old child that won’t be insured because she was born with a pre-existing medical condition), and like... I cried while reading some of them? because I could envision it and I felt like the system failed them and I hate reading about people being failed by a system that should support them, and I swear I’m not a US person who comes from that background whatsoever. I could probably write you a full novel about how immigrants in Italy have it like shit whether they’re legal or not because I worked in the field for two years and one of my oldest friends has immigrant parents and she was born here and she can’t use her ID to travel in europe only because she still doesn’t have a citizenship and she’s been waiting for years to get it. I’m not an immigrant in italy but I’ve known enough, seen enough and heard enough from them that I could most likely do it and it wouldn’t be badly researched. like, you can’t tell people to not tell stories if they want to do it with respect and not wanting to make it about themselves only. that’s bad writing. but if you care about the people you’re giving rep to then you should try imvho;

now: I suppose that you’re belonging to categories that are Not Minorities given how the ask is worded. (same as me more or less unless you consider atheists a minority but nvm that.) there’s a lot of writers around that are Not Minorities and most get published more than people who are actually minorities. people saying that you can’t write X if you’re not X and X = minority are pretty much telling you that you shouldn’t use your spotlight to give people rep when you could and you could do it reasonably well if you do your research and talk to those minorities. so they’re basically going against everyone’s interests because you could learn things and become a better person and make sure your readers empathize with your characters and more rep is always good esp. if well-done. I personally think that people should write about what they want - there’s topics I wouldn’t feel comfortable touching because idk if I could do that well and things I really wouldn’t want to write about so I most likely never will -, but that they should also go for what they want if it’s what they believe they can do. so if you feel like you want to write gay characters or whatever go for it and then find yourself a sensitivity reader or ten before you send your book around instead of worrying about what kids on tumblr who are still arguing about snape’s morality and think that writing the divine comedy is the same as self-insert fanfic think, because they will never create shit for anyone, you might. and you’ll have automatically done more than people who complain about everything but wouldn’t produce one single piece of fiction themselves and wouldn’t most likely waste ten minutes of their life researching the fiction they want to write.

tldr: if you want to write professionally, influence people and give the world good stories, don’t give a fuck about what tumblr says because it’s people who most likely will never read your books anyway unless you want to write the next YA saga that has the same six archetypes of characters in which then the only slightly problematic white cishet dude will be without further ado compared to sn/ape and everyone is going to get sorted into hogwarts houses and people will fight about that rather than giving a damn about whatever message you wanted to pass. don’t give a damn about tumblr and do your thing anon, no one deserves to have any perspective ruined because of this hellsite’s opinions on anything. ;) 

[bibliophileiz]

The Three Fandoms Asks

I keep seeing this around tumblr, and it looks fun. 

3 fandoms (I chose three important ones from my childhood)

1. Harry Potter - The Original Fandom. I mean, not the original original obviously, but probably the original for my generation. It was a huge part of my childhood and the story itself formed a lot of my opinions about how to tell good stories. I also have fond memories associated with this series -- Harry Potter was the first reason I ever had for Googling anything. “Harry Potter Book 5 news” and “Harry Potter Book 6 rumors” became frequent searches of mine. (The rumors took me to a lot of chat rooms where I read up on the wildest theories. It was a blast.) And then there were the midnight visits to Barnes and Noble and, in one memorable case, Walmart the nights of the book releases. Harry Potter was my childhood.

2. Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit - Like Harry Potter, these books (and movies) taught me a lot about storytelling. Tolkien’s works have become more complex to me as I’ve gotten older, and I’ve found there are plots and characters I like more now than I did as a kid (as opposed to Harry Potter, which my opinions about have mostly stayed the same). I also love Tolkien’s writing and world building. I’m one of the few people I know who enjoys reading all the poetry, and I read “The Council of Elrond” chapter three or four times before I got tired of it on Fellowship rereads. Lord of the Rings is a fantastic example of a really good book being adapted into really good movies. Both the book and the movies are each their own thing while also complementing each other. Just -- Lord of the Rings, man. I love it.

3. Charmed - Not as good, quality-wise, as the other two I’ll admit, but damn do I love this show. Before Charmed, I kind of watched whatever my family or friends watched -- my brother was a TV hog, and while I liked his cartoons ok, I didn’t like them nearly as much as I did Charmed when I discovered it. I got my dad watching it and it kind of became our thing. The Charmed Ones were kind of role models in a way. I can remember thinking, This is what being in my 20s will be like. Not the magic, but dating and clothes and deciding whether to go corporate or pursue your dream job or go back to school. People accuse the Charmed Ones of being boy crazy, but what I remember most about them is their work ethic. I thought, Prue prioritizes work, and I want to be like Prue. I love this show.

First character I loved:

1. Professor McGonagall is, has been and will always be my favorite character in anything ever. I also remember being small and redheaded and really liking Ginny Weasley before many other people did.  

2. Arwen was the first, but that was only because she appears in the movies before Eowyn.

3. Prue. Although I like all four sisters.

The character I never expected to love so much:

1. Sirius Black is obviously introduced as this terrifying villain, so when I started reading Prisoner of Azkaban, I didn’t expect him to become one of my favorites. To be honest, my fan girl love of him has waned since I was a teenager, but I still appreciate him.

2. Sam Gamgee. Another of my favorite characters in all of literature, though I had to mature a bit before I felt that way. But Sam is so small and overlooked, yet he’s so loyal, brave, determined, sassy and just all around good. He’s a gardener, which is a profession Tolkien holds in high esteem. Also in the books he doesn’t have that awkward break-up with Frodo that he does in the movie, plus he’s less whiny. (To be clear, I’m criticizing the movie’s writing, not Sean Astin’s performance. He did great especially considering the material he had to work with, and he feels the same way about the character I do. Also, his book about making the movies, There and Back Again, is the first nonfiction book I ever read for fun.)

3. Cole Turner. I came into the show in Season 4 right as his baby was turning Phoebe evil, so I was like, “Ah, ruler of Hell, not good.” My dad and I had to start the show over and watch Season 3 to realize he’s one of Charmed’s most complex characters.

The character I relate to the most: 

1. Probably Ginny, especially as a kid. We’re physically similar, but there’s also the temper and the fact that people always end up being surprised she’s as tough as she is. She and I also had to both grow out of self-esteem issues, though hers were more severe since they came from Chamber of Secrets-related trauma.

2. Pippin. He’s not sure if he’s actually qualified to be on that adventure, but hell if he’s being left behind. Also he’s small, like Ginny and me.

3. Prue. Sort of opposite of the Ginny stuff, she’s got the older sister syndrome of being responsible, in charge, bossy and often feeling like the only person who can get a job done right.(I don’t like having help with dishes or laundry, nor do I like assigning other reporters crime stories at work, as a couple of examples.) I am pretty protective of my younger brother and my mom always quoted It’s a Wonderful Life with the “you were born older” line when talking about me. Also like Prue, I tend to over-focus on work and not enough on my social life.

The character I’d slap: 

1. Percy. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a fabulously complex and underrated character, but I would still slap him silly.

2. Denethor. I used language I’d never used before in the theater when he sent Faramir off to fight in Return of the King and I started laughing a few minutes later when Gandalf knocked him out with his staff.

3. Ugh. Leo. (Also Sam.)

Three favorite characters in order of preference: 

1. McGonagall, Harry, Ginny. (That last one was insanely difficult as I also considered Snape, Lupin, Regulus and Luna.)

2. Sam, Eowyn then Aragorn (movies) and Bilbo (books).

3. Prue, Piper, Phoebe (Sorry Paige.)

Character I liked at first but don’t anymore: 

1. I mean, I’m not going to say I don’t like Hermione, because I definitely do, but the movies wore me out by over-glamming her to the detriment of Ron Ginny other characters.

2. I like all the characters except Denethor, who I never liked. Ditto Grima Wormtongue.

3. Believe it or not, I liked Leo when I was a kid. (*shakes head at how naive 13-year-old Iz was*)

Character I did not like at first but do now: 

1. Narcissa and Snape. This is not to say their views or the pro-Death Eater actions are ok, but they were both smart, they surprised me (always a plus) and they helped defeat Voldemort.

2. Didn’t like Boromir or Faramir at first, but now I love them.

3. Paige. 

Three OTPs:

1. Harry/Ginny, Ron/Hermione, Lily/James

2. Arwen/Aragorn (in a doomed, tragic way. Seriously, read the Appendices.) Eowyn/Faramir and Linsdey Ellis got me liking Eowyn/Merry

3. Piper/Mark Chau (I will never be over it!), Paige/Henry, Phoebe/pretty much anyone, including but not limited to: Cole, baby Misha Collins (Eric Bragg) and Aviva from Season 1 (#Phoebeisbisexual).*

* I really just think that everyone Phoebe interacted with before Season 3 should have come back as a love interest after she and Cole divorced. Aviva would have been old enough for that by then, and we could have gotten great sub plots of Eric Bragg’s little conspiracy theory brain trying to figure out which secret organization the sisters work for before Phoebe tells him they’re witches. (Then he and Henry could meet for beers after work and talk about how goddamn weird their lives are.) Any of that would have been better than the post-Cole love interests Phoebe got. (One of them was named Leslie?? And he took her job?? Fuck Brad Kern, honestly.) 

I’m going to break the rules by not tagging people, but whoever wants to play should go for it.

[partiallybooks-blog]

Booklr tag!

I was tagged by @canadianbooklove (thanks!!)

1. Why did you create a booklr?

To be perfectly honest: because I wanted a space where I could yell about my opinions regarding books to a like-minded audience :D I was also hoping it would help me think more critically about the books I’m reading, especially since I might be reviewing some of them.

2. What is your favorite genre? What do you enjoy reading?

My favourite genres are speculative fiction, YA and nonfiction (specifically science, history and biographies), but I also enjoy reading some classics and general fiction.

3. What are some of your favorite books?

Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas, Les Miserables by Victor Hugo and Ursula LeGuin’s books.

4. What got you into reading?

I can’t even remember a time when I didn’t enjoy reading anything from kids’ books to the backs of milk cartons (I can almost recite by heart the most common texts on them about the benefits of calcium and vitamin D). I was a pretty shy and scared kid, so reading was a fun thing to do that didn’t involve a lot of scary things (and also wasn't an outside activity...)

5. Why do you love reading?

Because I like stories and learning new things, I guess. And also because I like the way good books can make you feel things and find characters you can relate to.

6. What are some fun unique things you can bring to booklr?

I try to post some original content nearly every week, mostly in the form of less than amazing iPhone photography, but I’m also hoping I could maybe talk about nonfiction and share my favourites and things like that, because understandably booklr is more focused on fiction (if anyone else loves history/biographies/science books, hit me up!!)

7. What are some difficulties in starting a booklr that will be hardest to overcome?

For me it’s finding my own voice in posts and reviews. English is my second language so sometimes it’s hard to find the right turn of phrase to communicate my meaning, and that’s why my posts probably sound really formal sometimes :D at the beginning I also had some difficulties in thinking of things to talk about, but I just took part in the #readacookie readathon and that was such a great experience I’ll definitely get involved in other community events!

8. Finally, what are you most excited for about this booklr?

I’m hoping to meet other bookworms and find new books to read!

I’m tagging @thelibrariansaid and anyone else who wants to do this!

[ancient-trees]

Reading Meme

(Sorry for taking forever on these, guys...!  I got tagged for a lot of memes at once, and this one is long. I apparently have a lot of things to say about books... who knew?) 

Tagged by @theticklishpear​. Thank you again!

(Tag-ees, btw, don’t feel obligated to read my long rambly answers if you just want to copy/paste the questions.)

1. Which book has been on your shelves the longest?

I have a picture book of St George and the Dragon whose illustrations are BEAUTIFUL (it’s this one). Technically hasn’t been on MY shelves longest - a while ago I found it in our shelves of books from when my brother and I were kids and repossessed it because I love the art so much.

2. What is your current read, your last read and the book you’ll read next?

Currently in the middle of Rosemary and Rue by Seanan McGuire. Also in the pile are The Edge of the Sea by Rachel Carson (whom I love) and Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter by Thomas Cahill (which is ...okay, but more of a slightly-more-opinionated refresher on what I learned in college than anything new). I’m also most of the way through a reread of Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman (one of my favorite books). 

Last thing I finished was Shadowheart, the last book in Tad Williams’s Shadowmarch series. (It’s not without its problems, but overall I really enjoyed that series. It’s got the ensemble-cast-and-unlikely-heroes thing going on.)

I’m not sure what’s next. Fiction might be American Gods by Neil Gaiman or Aftermath by Chuck Wendig... or I might need to keep going with the series and track down the second October Daye book. We’ll see when I get there.  Nonfiction - been meaning to start The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt by Toby Wilkinson or Writings from Ancient Egypt (translations from original sources, by the same). But I also have a book about pirates off the coast of Virginia my mom got on a recent trip to Jamestown... and a book about the Silk Road I happened upon in Barnes and Noble the other week, which MIGHT have edged its way to the top of the list... (this is why I’m all for brick-and-mortar bookstores. Search algorithms are great, but they don’t accomplish quite the same thing as wandering the shelves.)

3. Which book does everyone like and you hated?

Ehh, I’m not sure what “everyone” likes, but a lot of the series my high school friends loved I could never get into. I remember really liking the first Wheel of Time book, but got bored of the series pretty quickly after the first one. Same with Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth. I tried to like Dragonriders of Pern, but didn’t get far with that one either. And I hear the series gets better after the overenthusiastic-Tolkien-fanboying of the first book, but I really didn’t enjoy The Sword of Shannara.

Oh.. and I never read any Discworld JUST because in high school I knew a guy who EXTOLLED ITS VIRTUES TO THE HEAVENS. Constantly. Now that I’ve learned more about the series and the author I will definitely have to read some someday, though.

(I’m not a big fan of most “~Literature~” either, Pear.)

4. Which book do you keep telling yourself you’ll read, but you probably won’t?

I don’t know. My TBR list is pretty ridiculous, and anything’s possible, so I hate to relegate anything to “probably won’t read” status. Finishing A Song of Ice and Fire might be close. I received the whole series as a birthday gift from a friend (long before the TV show existed), read the first two back-to-back at a time when I really wasn’t in a great place, and got burned out on the grimdark rocksfalleveryonedies of it all. I did enjoy the books, and I’ll probably dive back into it someday, but it’s not really high on my Fun Things to Read list right now.

I also come home with an armload of unexpected finds every time the local college has a charity used book fair... most of which end up sitting on my shelves for a long time, still unread...

5. Which book are you saving for “retirement?”

Nothing really, but I’ve got a big stack of novels from Japan that I’ve been saving for “once I’ve brushed up on my kanji” - since reading is excruciatingly slow when I have to look up every other word. I’m being optimistic and not putting them under the “probably won’t read” heading, though.

6. Last page: read it first or wait till the end?

noo, wait till the end! I will confess that sometimes I’ll flip ahead if I’m at a really slow point, or I know I don’t have time for another chapter but can’t quite bring myself to put the book down yet... but I’m trying to get better about it. I always regret it when I accidentally spoil the book for myself.

7. Acknowledgements: waste of ink and paper or interesting aside?

There should ABSOLUTELY be acknowledgements. The ones that involve stories or interesting background info are cool, but even the ones that are just lists of names 110% should be there - they’re for those people, not the reader, and after all the sweat and tears that go into putting a book together they deserve that place of honor.

8. Which book character would you switch places with?

When I was a kid this question would always trip me up - it would be so cool to be a character in the books I read and have awesome adventures... but at the same time, being in a book-world would mean giving up all the other book-worlds... unless you had access to an interdimensional library and spare time for reading while you weren’t busy saving the world...

If I’m being honest, though, I’d probably end up being Ged from A Wizard of Earthsea. I can relate pretty intensely to a lot of his journey.

9. Do you have a book that reminds you of something specific in your life (a person, a place, a time)?

Quite a few books remind me of a certain school librarian who was always ready with a recommendation and frequently asked the student library aides what books the library should add to their shelves. She was really cool.

10. Name a book you acquired in some interesting way.

My copy of the first Harry Potter book was given to me (right after it was first published in the US) by a good friend whose last name happened to be Potter.. along with a message that said “Wow, Harry Potter has such a cool name! I wish I had a cool name like that! OH WAIT...!”

I also seem to inherit a lot of manga from friends who want to free up shelf space.

11. Have you ever given away a book for a special reason to a special person?

I give books as presents a lot, so nothing specific really stands out. For some reason I keep losing copies of The Silmarillion to people I lend it to who never return it...

Come to think of it, I gave a copy of Howl’s Moving Castle to one of my students in Japan before I left - since she’d been doing extra English language work just for fun, and she was a fan of the Ghibli movie.

12. Which book has been with you to the most places?

I don’t know, offhand. This might be more a Question #9 story, but I remember reading Shadowmarch during downtime between classes in the teachers’ room of my schools in Japan. The other teachers kept exclaiming over how HUGE the book was (~800 pages in mass-market paperback). In Japan novels are pocket-sized - words in Japanese take up less space to print than English, they use thinner paper, and they separate books into Part 1/Part 2 etc if they’re too long.

13. Any “required reading” you hated in high school that wasn’t so bad ten years later?

The Hobbit, actually. I’d read it probably in middle school/jr high or so and thought it was kind of silly and childish. Then when it was assigned representing the fantasy genre in high school lit class, I was annoyed enough that I didn’t bother rereading it - just skimmed it well enough to answer test questions. Once I’d read The Lord of the Rings and gotten into the Tolkien mythos I could appreciate The Hobbit a lot more.

14. What is the strangest item you’ve ever found in a book?

In used books and library books I’ve found bookmarks, old receipts, the usual stuff... I think I found a pressed flower once or twice. A friend of mine used to hide money in her books (to be found as a surprise for herself later, after she’d forgotten about it), so once in a while I’d borrow one and find a random $10 bill or so in it. (I left them there, of course!)

15. Used or brand new?

Either one. New is good for supporting authors, but my town has a really good used book store that I’ll check for older series.

And Book Off (huge Japanese used book chain) is a thing of beauty. So much manga is published so quickly over there that people don’t tend to hang onto their tankobon copies once they’ve finished reading them (they don’t have the space to keep them all), so you can get a ton of books for really cheap. I spent way more shipping them home than I did buying the actual books.

16. Stephen King: Literary genius or opiate of the masses?

I haven’t read much Stephen King, apart from The Gunslinger (which I wasn’t really a fan of at the time) and his On Writing.  I admire his work ethic, at any rate.

17. Have you ever seen a movie you liked better than the book?

I think there have been a few, but I can’t think of them now. I grew up with the Neverending Story movie, so I was a little thrown off when the second half of the book continued in such a different direction, but I liked them both. The book doesn’t have quite the same place in my heart that the movie does, though. And I enjoyed the Shannara Chronicles TV show a lot more than the first book in the series (see #3 above), but I haven’t read the specific books the show was based on, so I can’t really say there. (Though “Elessedil” still makes me cringe every time I hear it...)

18. Conversely, which book should NEVER have been introduced to celluloid?

oh god. The Scifi Channel Earthsea miniseries had me laughing-slash-crying within the first five minutes, it was such a garbage fire and breathtaking masterpiece of missing the point. I remember having a similar reaction to Disney’s version of The Black Cauldron, though that was a much longer time ago, and that was less bewildered rage and more a disappointed “what did you do to my Prydain?? And what is this talking schnauzer?”

19. Have you ever read a book that’s made you hungry, cookbooks being excluded from this question?

Not that I can recall. For some reason reading about Tom Bombadil’s always makes me want bread and honey, though.

20. Who is the person whose book advice you’ll always take?

Hah, I don’t know. The friend who gave me the Harry Potter book was a huge influence on what I read as a kid, but I lost touch with her a long time ago, so I don’t know what she’s reading these days.

Tagging: @possiblyelven, @taskitron, @whitherling, @arionwind, @december-soulstice, @byjillianmaria, @eggletine if you guys want to do it!

[dawnfelagund]

On Writing Aman, or the Balance between the Mythic and the Real

This essay was written for Back to Middle-earth Month 2017 for the orange/nonfiction path and the prompt “Worldbuilding.” It can also be read on the B2MeM community and the Silmarllion Writers’ Guild.

"In Valinor, all the days are beautiful."

This was the very first line I wrote in my very first serious Silmarillion fan fiction, Another Man's Cage . But I don't believe it. (Which is okay--those were Celegorm's words, not mine.) In fact, the twelve years of writing Silmarillion-based fiction could be seen as an exercise in proving Celegorm's sentiment here wrong.

Early feedback on the first draft of AMC largely focused on this point. A comment by JunoMagic (now SatisMagic) sums this up nicely:

What I think is most difficult about stories that are primarily concerned with Elves and Elves in Aman at that, is how to keep their inherent elvishness alive and present throughout the story, a feeling that this is not a story about another kind of men, but about a different kind of beings, however closely related they might be. (emphasis mine)

The challenge of writing not-wholly-human beings is hardly new to the fantasy genre. Ursula LeGuin's essay “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie” addresses it. "But the point about Elfland," she writes, "is that you are not at home there. It's not Poughkeepsie. It's different" (145). Most of LeGuin's essay focuses on style and the precarious process of achieving a style that sounds otherworldly without being distancing. But she takes jabs as well at fantasists who veer to close to the human and the our-worldly in their work:

The Lords of Elfland are true lords, the only true lords, the kind that do not exist on this earth: their lordship is the outward sign or symbol of real inward greatness. And greatness of soul shows when a man speaks. At least, it does in books. In life we expect lapses. In naturalistic fiction, too, we expect lapses, and laugh at an "overheroic" hero. But in fantasy, which, instead of imitating the perceived confusion and complexity of existence, tries to hint at an order and clarity underlying existence--in fantasy, we need not compromise. (148, emphasis mine)

So while LeGuin's essay is ostensibly about style, she also argues for characters of a "kind that do not exist on this earth," which is a profoundly different thing. This gets back to the early criticism of AMC: readers' unease with elements of the story that felt too "human" or "not Aman enough," like weapons and predators and Elves who pee. I think this unease is far less common now than it was ten years ago; I like to think that my generation of Silmfic writers had something to do with that, as did the shift away from Tolkien fan fiction as largely a practice by fans already deeply committed to the books (and the orthodoxy of mainstream Tolkien fandom) and toward participation by fans who came to the fandom through one of the film trilogies (as indeed I did). These fans bring practices common to Fanworks as a Whole but not necessarily the Tolkien fanworks community as it existed in its original online form, practices which seem to allow for an easier break with fanon and orthodox interpretive approaches to the texts. But the issue still remains: How does one worldbuild a place like Aman?

Juno's comment on AMC hints at this: The Elves of Aman are different and more difficult to write than Elves in general (who also pose their difficulties). Or: Aman is more of the rarefied, not-of-this-earth Elfland that LeGuin places at the heart of a successful fantasy story. I don't want to say that this is wrong--I admire both women as writers and thoughtful critics of fiction--but I also see this view as posing difficulties that LeGuin does not acknowledge in her essay. (Juno does, in her discussion with me back when.)

Successful fiction, for most people, requires a connection to something real, something they can relate to. (I know some people would disagree with this. But for most of us, reading a story that carries no connection to anything recognizable to us is not a pleasurable experience.) Tolkien recognized this. In his essay On Fairy-stories, he spoke of the necessity of an "inner consistency of reality" and noted, "The keener and clearer the reason, the better fantasy will it make," i.e., one must understand the rules of the world before remaking them (section "Fantasy"). The best of authors are, in many ways, the builders of bridges: They take recognizable human experiences or components of our familiar world and use them to bear us unwittingly across the chasm to an unfamiliar world or existence. Suddenly, sometimes without knowing how we arrived there, we look up to find ourselves existing (fictionally) as a person we detest or inhabiting an experience we knew nothing about--or living in a world not our own: an alien planet, an underworld, an Elfland.

The risk comes when that bridge is so tenuous, so frail that the crossing becomes difficult or even impossible, and we stand on the other side, looking into a world or existence as a character that we cannot really connect to. It isn't quite believable or real. Some might argue that is part of the point--LeGuin makes the case for escapism in her essay, which was a major component of Tolkien's theory of fantasy as well1--but escapism is far from the sole reason for reading or writing fantasy. In fact one could--and I would--make the claim that fantasy functions just as easily as a test environment for ideas that would perhaps stretch the bounds of belief if grounded in our world. Fantasy as a genre, after all, is defined primarily by the author's ability to bend the rules "just because." That allows for the stereotypical sorcery and dragons, of course, but it also allows authors to add gender equality or benevolent monarchs or immortality, or to explore the darker elements of what it means to be human--genocide, colonialism, and slavery are all present in The Silmarillion, for example--without exploiting or misrepresenting the experiences of actual victims of those things in our real world. Adding such elements provokes interesting questions about what it means to be human in our world without becoming so entangled in the complexities of real-world history and modern society and the emotions these things incite.

Which brings me back to the question of Aman and how best to write stories set in this otherworldly place. A good deal of it depends on your purpose for writing about Aman: Is it an escape? Or are you situating a recognizable human experience inside an otherworldly setting to see what comes of it?

For me, it is the latter, and not just because I find this the most meaningful type of fiction to write but because the material Tolkien gave me to work with suggests this approach. Earlier, I emphasized LeGuin's quote that "[t]he Lords of Elfland are true lords, the only true lords, the kind that do not exist on this earth: their lordship is the outward sign or symbol of real inward greatness" (148). If the magic of Elfland comes from language and style, then LeGuin is correct to hold up Tolkien as a master of "the genuine Elfland accent," but what she says here is a whole 'nuther animal, and had LeGuin had access to The Silmarillion--she wrote "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie" in 1973--then she might have been less confident in this assertion about the "true lords" of Elfland (148).

As a nascent Tolkien fan, I fell in love first with The Lord of the Rings and, when I reread it now, love it anew for reasons I need articulate to no fan of Tolkien. But what seized my heart and transported me fully to Middle-earth was The Silmarillion. I've spent thirteen years now writing stories about The Silmarillion, motivated largely by a desire to understand the flawed world and characters it presents. Most of my stories are set in Aman. This possibly seems contradictory: If I love flaws, then why would I set most of my work in "Elfland," in a place described as "blessed, for the Deathless dwelt there, and there naught faded nor withered, neither was there any stain upon flower or leaf in that land, nor any corruption or sickness in anything that lived; for the very stones and waters were hallowed" (Silmarillion, "Of the Beginning of Days")?

One doesn't have to look far to realize that this description is idealized. There is first of all Míriel Serindë, who not only sickened but died, right there in Valinor, in the most exalted of acts: giving birth to her child. Ungoliant dwelled "there in Avathar, secret and unknown," where "beneath the sheer walls of the mountains and the cold dark sea, the shadows were deepest and thickest in the world," in sight of Valmar and the Two Trees (Silmarillion, "Of the Darkening of Valinor"). Of course, Melkor lived there for many ages; the Silmarils, also described as "hallowed" ("Of the Silmarils"), burned his hand when he touched them, but he could abide the also (supposedly) "hallowed" Aman?

Aman isn't a flawless realm but a realm that carries a convincing veneer of flawlessness. This has been essential in my worldbuilding within the bounds of Aman. Over the years, I have given Aman universities, hunger, seaside resorts, a redlight district, and most recently, democracy. One of my favorite Tolkien resources of all time is Darth Fingon's “Twenty-Two Words You Never Thought Tolkien Would Provide” because it gives us a look beneath the veneer of Aman.

I believe this veneer takes strength to maintain that is not possible to sustain over the long term, even for the Ainur. We see this again and again in Tolkien's world--Doriath, Gondolin, Nargothrond, Númenor, Imladris, Lothlórien, all isolated and protected places that eventually fall or wither with time--but Aman is rarely included as such a place. We assume Aman had genuine sublimity--not least of all because many of the realms on the list above imitate Aman; not least of all because it is the creation of the divine and eternal Ainur--but I'm not sure that the land that harbored Ungoliant can be labeled as ideal. The illusion is tattered, and reality is bound to enter in.

In my stories, the effort to keep up the veneer of perfection means that the further one is from Valinor proper--from the part of the realm most carefully constructed and maintained by the Valar--the more ordinary the realm appears. This is based in the fact that Ungoliant's unnoticed occupancy of Avathar--which including weaving vast, black, light-sucking webs among the mountains there--seems at least partially predicated on the fact that it is "far south of great Taniquetil" where the "Valar were not vigilant" (Silmarillion, "Of the Darkening of Valinor"). However, in the same passage, both Melkor and Ungoliant are described as able to descry the Light of the Trees and other features of Valinor; they don't seem to be that far away. The power of the Valar may be more limited than the idealist description of Valinor in the text would suppose and doesn't seem to extend across the extent of Aman. I have used this same idea in my stories about Aman: As one journeys further from the epicenter, the veneer of perfection thins and then disappears altogether. Formenos in the north, in my stories, is set in a part of the land with seasons, including winter, and predators that residents warn their children against. These elements of my depiction of Aman were among those questioned by early readers of my work.

Likewise, some of the residents of Aman were born in Middle-earth and their personalities shaped in the crucible of the early conflicts with Melkor. Aman, therefore, could hardly guarantee an edenic existence for the Eldar, innocent of the knowledge of grief, violence, and death; rather, the Elves who came to Aman doubtlessly brought with them both survival skills and trauma from their tenure in darkened Middle-earth. This is an idea that is frequently explored by Silmarillion writers (including me) in the context of sexuality: Before the laws of the Valar were imposed upon them, the Elves would have had a more naturalistic and lenient view of sex. Without delving beyond its title, Laws and Customs among the Eldar is just that: among the Eldar, and this choice of wording from the semantically fastidious Tolkien feels deliberate and laden with potential meaning. But the presence of Elves from Middle-earth--including all of the leaders of the Eldar in Aman--presents significance beyond sex. Weapons are an issue I wrote about as early as AMC--proposing, somewhat in defiance of canon, that Elves in Aman possessed swords as historical artifacts and also for athletic pursuits--that drew criticism then, at least in part because what use have the people of Aman for weapons? I say that allowing swords to certain groups of Eldar in Aman is "somewhat" in defiance of canon because Tolkien himself waffled on this issue, seeing the question of weapons as a potential plot hole.2 He concluded that it was unreasonable to expect that they didn't possess weapons on the Great Journey. Consider this implications of this. Into the so-called Deathless Realm came Elves experienced in making and using weapons, whose minds most likely devised of instruments of death and violence on their own, possibly among their first creative acts. How is such a culture shaped by the of reality life in Middle-earth, illuminated only by the stars and under duress of an enemy too strong and cunning even for the Valar? How is that effect amplified when those who endured such an experience do not die, leaving their descendents to progress into a more pacific existence without them, but retain that formative mindset, those skills and those traumas, into the ages?

But trauma does not end with those born outside of Aman. Events within Aman wreak havoc upon those likewise born within its borders: In fact, that they occur in Aman seems an inescapable component of the trauma.

Perhaps the most salient example of this is Fëanor. Fëanor lost his mother and watched the Valar bend the rules to allow his father to remarry, ensuring in the process that Míriel could never be reborn. These events alone would have been potentially traumatic. But consider how their occurrence in Aman of all places compounds that trauma, adding a sort of insult to injury, as Fëanor doubtlessly progressed through his life hearing how fortunate the Elves were to live in the safety of the "deathless realm." His own experience would have been very different, and it must have been painful or galling to hear Aman celebrated while understanding that ideal was only a veneer--a concept doubtlessly controversial, if not impossible, to articulate.

Likewise, the conflict in the House of Finwë is worsened by its happening in Aman. When Fëanor draws his sword on Fingolfin, he is accused primarily of having "broken the peace of Valinor and drawn his sword upon his kinsman"; almost as an afterthought, Námo Mandos adds that the "deed was unlawful, whether in Aman or not in Aman," but it is hard to imagine Fëanor would have received a penalty so severe anywhere else (Silmarillion, "Of the Silmarils"). The primary transgression seems to be manifesting an emotion--expressed through the powerful symbolism of the drawn sword--that belies the illusion of a land without corruption. The cauldron of circumstances that produced this rash act are not examined in any meaningful way; instead, the rash actor is hidden away in the name of restoring peace--or at least the illusion of it.

Taken together, I believe that worldbuilding Aman as an "Elfland" as LeGuin understands it is a fundamental flaw. The lords of Aman are the very ones we see on earth: They are idealistic to the point of naïveté (the Valar); they want what they don't have (Finwë); they are jealous, vulnerable, angry, in pain (Fëanor). One can extrapolate outward from these supposedly greatest of the residents of Aman to assume that the land is not as impeccable as the rhapsodizing of the narrator of The Silmarillion would have us believe. To look no further than the dust of diamonds upon one's shoes in walking there, to never glimpse the faces of those who dwell there and what hides behind their eyes, is to be so dazzled by a beautiful illusion as to miss what matters.

Notes

1. On escapism as a motive for fantasy see Tolkien's essay On Fairy-stories, in the section "Recovery, Escape, Consolation":

I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which "Escape" is now so often used … Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?

2. On the question of weapons in Aman, see The History of Middle-earth, Vol. X: Morgoth's Ring, The Annals of Aman, note on §97 (page 106 in the hardcover edition). Tolkien originally stated that "Melkor spoke to the Eldar concerning weapons, which they had not before possessed or known," then emphatically argued with himself in a marginal note: "No! They must have had weapons on the Great Journey," concluding that they had "weapons of the chase, spears and bows and arrows." Swords may be a step too far for some people--although Tolkien's own inconclusiveness on this issue leaves me feeling it is far from carved in stone--but weapons in Aman certainly were not.

[yespoetry]

An Interview with the Authors of 'DICTIONNAIRE INFERNAL' (And Download It For Free Here)

DICTIONNAIRE INFERNAL is a co-authored with Chris McCreary and Mark Lamoureux and was originally published by Empty Set Press on Halloween 2017. With the close of Empty Set earlier this, we have partnered up with ESP and are offering the chapbook as a free ebook. You can read a poem from the chapbook here, an interview with the authors below, and download the collection here and below.

Did you write this collection to any kind of music?

Mark: This is a hard question to answer, because I listen to music more or less constantly and I listen pretty widely (Bill Corbett once told me I have "big ears").  Looking at the poems in Dictionnaire Infernal I see references to Skinny Puppy, Big Black and the theme song for The Karate Kid Part II by Peter Cetera, but that was probably Chris.  I'm sure I was listening to a lot of other stuff, too, but it's impossible to say what.

Chris: In general, I write while listening to instrumental music. The band Earth is probably my favorite for this. That said, this chapbook does have a sestina, “Abraxas,” that is in part a riff on lyrics from the band Baroness, who we both admire. (After the chapbook was published, I sent a message to the band’s singer asking if he would want a copy, but I never heard anything back from him. This might be for the best - it would be mortifying if he read the poem and didn’t like it.)

Describe your favorite meal.   

Mark: There's the socially responsible answer to this question and the honest one.  

The socially responsible one is good moules frites and a bottle of burgundy.  Red wine with seafood because I’m a madman who lives on the edge.

The honest answer is a cheeseburger that they serve at a dairy restaurant where I grew up called Shady Glen where they fry a specific type of American cheese on the fry table so that it gets sort of brown and curled and bubbly, paired with a vanilla milkshake.  Said restaurant was more or less the inspiration for my chapbook 29 Cheeseburgers.  It’s definitely Americana kitsch where the servers all wear these anachronistic uniforms and these little paper hats. 

Chris: Jenn McCreary makes great vegetarian chili. If I could cap off that meal with coffee and a salted chocolate chip cookie or three, all would be right in the world for a moment.

Choose three books that you've always identified with?  

Chris: I’ve always felt an affinity for Tolkien’s hobbits, who mostly want to avoid trouble and stay at home with a book and a good snack. Maybe The Hobbit and The Lord of The Rings count as two of the three books?  I think The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was probably formative for me as well, particularly in terms of its fatalistic dark humor. 

Mark: I’ve definitely always identified with Satan in Paradise Lost--he is actually an ethical person who has no choice but to fractiously rebel against his creator because that’s how he was made.  He feels bad about leading the fallen angels into a conflict they are destined to lose, but he doesn’t know how to do anything else. Like Chris, I was weaned on fantasy and science fiction books--the first book I ever took out of the school library of my own accord was Ursula le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea because I liked the cover.  I felt an affinity to the main character, the wizard Ged, who winds up in a conflict with his own shadow, which he liberated in a ritual he was not supposed to be doing.  The shadow winds up killing his beloved pet otak, which spoke to me at the time because my parents had just gotten divorced and my mother bought me a jet-black rabbit at the state fair that I named Obsidian that was eaten by a coyote about a week later. 

Before I read “serious” books, the first books I read were comic books and I was obsessed with the X-Men, particularly the character Nightcrawler, who was the most freakish of the already freakish team. There is a graphic novel called God Loves, Man Kills in which a televangelist tries to exorcise Nightcrawler, which I found particularly moving.  I have a drawing of Nightcrawler’s signature “BAMF” onomatopoeia that appears when he teleports done by his late creator David Cockrum for me at a comic book convention when I was 12 or so that is one of my prized possessions.

Choose one painting that describes who you are. What is it?  

“The Sphinx & The Milky Way” by Charles Burchfield (Mark)

“Torches Mauve” by Franz Kline (Chris)

What’s a gif or meme that you relate to?

Mark:  I see this as akin to Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog but with more screaming. 

via GIPHY

Chris: This meme is a pretty solid representation of chronic anxiety.

What do you imagine the apocalypse is like? How would you want to die?  

Chris: In middle school, I thought a lot about nuclear war and assumed that we’d all die in a fireball at any moment. (There was a period of several months where I didn’t want to be in a room without a radio or TV playing because I wanted to be able to hear the warning broadcasts as soon as they started.) Now I imagine the apocalypse as slow moving, a game of inches where basic resources like clean water are hoarded by the wealthy. As for how I’d want to die… I hope I’m at peace with friends and loved ones, no matter the circumstances.

Mark: Under the Baron Trump administration, faculty at Trump National Stable Geniuses University College must, in addition to their yearly self-evaluations, submit paperwork detailing how they are employing The Art of the Deal Parts 47-72 in their curriculum to Make America Great Again Again Again in order to justify their annual rations of Trump Sausage and potable water.  I will forget about the deadline and be summarily executed the last semester before I retire at age 108.

If you could only watch three films for the rest of your life, what would they be?  

Chris: The Empire Strikes Back, The Fellowship of The Ring, and Heathers.

Mark: Labyrinth, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  (It was really difficult to just pick three). 

Where do you find inspiration lately?

Chris: The second season of the show Fleabag is one of the best things that I’ve seen in ages. 

Mark:  I have been writing poems to Bill Evans compositions lately, as well as finishing up a project where I “write” poems to episodes of the old Leonard Nimoy paranormal TV docuseries In Search Of.  I have done almost all of the hundreds of episodes, so I will need to find something else pretty soon.  

Where did you write most of your book? 

Chris: The poems in Dictionnaire Infernal are part of five years’ worth of poems that Mark and I have written together. Each April (aka National Poetry Month), we’ve written a poem a day and posted it to a blog. At the point when we were writing this particular series, one of us would choose a picture of a demon and riff on it, then the other person would finish the poem from there. I would often write my half of the poem first thing in the morning before homeroom at the high school where I teach or maybe later in the day while proctoring a study hall. 

Mark:  Likewise, definitely written either at home or at my office at Housatonic Community College. 

What was something surprised you recently?

Chris: This summer, we went to the shore for the first time in a few years. Our kids, who are now 16 years old (they’re fraternal twins), just got up and… went to the beach with a friend, aka without us. It was a jolt to realize that, Oh, right, they’re at an age where we don’t have to watch them in the water the whole time and scold them if they swim out too far. Although of course we ended up doing some of that, too. If I turned this anecdote into a piece of creative nonfiction, I’d begin to work some sort of metaphor here. 

Mark: At the risk of sounding cliché, as Chris mentions, parenting is pretty much a continuous stream of surprises.  To be honest, I was pretty ambivalent about becoming a parent, but ultimately I find it to be the best thing in the world.  Even at 2, my daughter is my best friend and we continue to discover surprising things about the world. I find it really easy to adopt the perspective of a small child and to see the world in that way, which is a nice panacea to the way I usually see the world. 

What do you carry with you at all times?   

Mark: Major depression and my iPod.  Yeah, I still have an iPod. 

Chris: Journal, iPhone, a 20-sided die, and an asthma inhaler.

Tell us a bit about your writing process. What works and what doesn't? What doesn't, but you keep trying it anyway?

 Chris: Left to my own devices, I’m a fairly slow, fussy writer who builds from scraps and takes a long time to shape those fragments into whole poems. I’ve tried to push myself to approach the process differently, often through the use of source texts, but the idea of a larger “project” tends to fall flat each time, and I end up writing more lyric poems with Duran Duran references in them. Collaborating with Mark over the years has freed me from my own obsessiveness - with those poems, I work quickly and don’t look back. Sometimes, though, there is still some Duran Duran.

Mark: I guess I am an ideal counterpoint to Chris because I tend to work quickly and improvisationally.  I identify with Jack Spicer’s adage that writing is dictation--it’s like capturing a mere segment of a steady flow of words.  Most of the “writing” occurs in revision and making things more (or less, depending) lucid and readable to other people, although I don’t necessarily concern myself with this too much.  It helps to have something to focus on, so I do a lot of what might be called ekphrastic writing, though the pieces themselves are rarely that ekphrastic.  Oftentimes I wind up with pieces titled for the source of the inspiration or improvisation that have little or nothing to do with the source content. I liken this to the jazz tradition of improvising upon standards. 

When I try to write something specifically “about” something starting from scratch, it usually fails pretty miserably.  Lately, though, I have been able to write more narrative things stemming from my quotidian life, which is definitely something I’ve had trouble doing in the past. 

 What are some of your daily rituals or routines?  

Chris: I’m trying to get better at establishing healthy routines. I want to meditate more regularly, for instance, but I have a tough time really establishing it as a daily practice. A lot of my established ritual is based around preparation and consumption of coffee, ideally La Colombe’s Corsica blend with Silk soy milk and raw sugar. 

Mark:  Routines are literally impossible for me - despite even my conscious intentions I will subconsciously sabotage anything that smacks of routine to my unconscious brain, which is troublesome when one is caring for a routine-oriented toddler.  I do my best to adhere to her strictly ritualized schedule nevertheless. The only part of my day that is really sacrosanct is reading non-work related stuff, sometimes for even just five minutes due to exhaustion, before I go to sleep. 

What was the hardest part about writing this book?

Chris: The most difficult aspect for me was the self-imposed deadline of finishing a poem every day, but it was also liberating. Mark and I have now completed five Aprils worth of poems - 150 of them! - without missing a day.

Mark: With these and some of the other ekphrastic projects Chris and I have done for NaPoWriMo, it is challenging to write something that isn’t merely a description or a riff on the song or image that we are writing to or about. 

Define happiness for you.  

Chris: Taking an unnecessarily long nap with my cat Frida.

Mark: Hanging out at the beach with my daughter.

Chris McCreary is the author of four books: [neüro / mäntic], undone : a fakebook, Dismembers, and The Effacements. His review of Arrive On Wave, the Collected Poems of Gil Ott, is forthcoming in Tripwire. Mark Lamoureux is is the author of four full-length collections of poems, It’ll Never Be Over for Me, 29 Cheeseburgers + 39 Years, Spectre) and Astrometry Organon. A fifth book, Horologion, is forthcoming from Poet Republik, Ltd. in 2019. Joanna C. Valente is a human who lives in Brooklyn, New York. They are the author of Sirs & Madams, The Gods Are Dead, Marys of the Sea, Sexting Ghosts, Xenos, No(body), and is the editor of A Shadow Map: Writing by Survivors of Sexual Assault. They received their MFA in writing at Sarah Lawrence College. Joanna is the founder of Yes Poetry and the senior managing editor for Luna Luna Magazine. Some of their writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Them, Brooklyn Magazine, BUST, and elsewhere. Joanna also leads workshops at Brooklyn Poets. joannavalente.com / Twitter: @joannasaid / IG: joannacvalente / FB: joannacvalente

[authoreriningram]

ABCs of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

A - The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz is NOT appropriate for all ages. The narration can get very blunt and crass, like teenagers in a locker room, especially when describing female bodies and sexual relations. It’s not obscene or titillating, but I’d give it an R for language if it were a movie.  

B - I understand why the author chose “brief” to describe Oscar’s life, but I don’t understand why he chose this title for the novel. The story belongs as much to other members of his family as to him, in terms of time spent telling their stories.

C - No matter how much you love sugar, this novel will make you very afraid to set foot in a canefield.

D - The novel tells the stories of a Dominican American family - Oscar, his older sister Lola, and their mother Beli.

E - I watched the first minute of 3 youtube videos before I heard someone pronounce Junot Díaz’s name because I wanted to know if the í was pronounced like a long “e” sound. It is. (His first name is pronounced as though it didn’t end with t.)

F - I listened to the audiobook version, so I had no idea until reading the Wikipedia article that this novel is notable for its extensive use of footnotes. I would’ve said Díaz gives a satisfying amount of historical background in just the right places to invigorate rather than detract from the main story.

G - Oscar’s great aunt, La Inca, is my favorite character, although she is relatively minor. She has a fierce faith, compassion, and practicality.

H - I’d put this novel in the genre of historical fiction through family history. I love all the details Díaz adds in to flavor the narrative. The history is as cunningly described and developed as his characters.

I - The audiobook’s illustration of a kid in a superhero mask reading a comic book is not a good fit for the novel. It seems to indicate Oscar will be a kid for the significant parts of the novel, when in actuality he is a young adult. Maybe because he’s always a kid at heart? Even so, I don’t like the illustration.

J - Oscar wants to be the next J.R.R. Tolkien. I appreciated all the references to Middle Earth and other fantasy and comic book elements.

K - An important person is killed in the course of the novel, and it won’t be a surprise who if you’ve read the title. Three other characters are killed. The deaths of historical figures and historical masses are also included.

L - Lin-Manuel Miranda is a fantastic reader! He was the perfect choice for Yunior’s narration. As Miranda read the opening paragraphs about fuku, I thought he was reading song lyrics quoted before the actual text of the novel, but quickly realized his speaking style made the narrative pleasingly lyrical.

M - Like footnotes, I didn’t realize this novel contains magical realism until I read the Wikipedia article. Oscar and his mom, Beli, have visions of a mongoose at crucial moments in their lives, but I didn’t think Díaz meant these visions to be taken as reality by the reader. The Wikipedia article does mention that not all critics believe it belongs in the magical realism genre. I agree with those dissenting critics.

N - Oscar grew up in New Jersey, as did its author. Regrettably, I know as little about New Jersey’s current culture and history as I do that of the Dominican Republic.

O - Karen Olivo reads the sections narrated by Lola instead of Yunior. While I don’t have as much praise for her as I do for Miranda, she does a respectable job. I like that the creator or producer chose a female reader for these parts.

P - Like Wharton’s Age of Innocence, Díaz’s novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Also, he and Wharton were Pulitzer Prize “firsts” - he the first Dominican American to win the prize, she the first woman.

Q - Two quotable quotes from the novel. “It's never the changes we want that change everything.” ““Success, after all, loves a witness, but failure can't exist without one.”

R - I can’t remember exactly why this novel made it onto the reading list I’ve been keeping in a notebook since 2003. (I only started putting in shorthand notes for where I got recommendations two years ago.) Judging by the titles around it, I think maybe a college friend suggested it. Whatever the reason, I’m glad I read it!

S - To get the í in Díaz’s name as I drafted this blog post in a Google doc, I went to the Insert menu, selected Special characters…, typed an i into the box, and chose the character labeled “latin small letter i with acute.” A cute what? I don’t know.

T - I feel guilty that I didn’t know who Rafael Trujillo was in history before reading this. He was a dictator in the Dominican Republic. Why didn’t I learn about him along with Hitler and Stalin? And on that note, why don’t American public school textbooks have more in them about the Dominican Republic, which is such a close neighbor to us? My guilt makes me want to read more nonfiction about the country.

U - Oscar suffers from misadventures in unreciprocated love. It’s hinted at but not explicitely stated that he ultimately doesn’t love himself and can’t be truly contented with who he is. As illustrated in this funny but sad interchange with Yunior:

“- [Oscar:] Nothing else has any efficacy, I might as well be myself. - [Yunior:] But your yourself sucks! - [Oscar:] It is, lamentably, all I have.”

V - I don’t usually like when audiobook readers try to “do voices.” However, Lin-Manuel Miranda is a performer, and he does voices right! I laughed out loud in places because of the way he read dialogue.

W- I consulted Wikipedia to write this post. Yay for collaborative online resources!

X - There are no xylophones in this novel.

Y - Until I read Wikipedia, I didn’t know the main narrator’s name, Yunior, began with a Y. I thought he was Junior pronounced a Dominican way.

Z - When I typed zafa into a Google search, it suggested “zafa oscar woa” as search terms. Yunior is plagued by ideas of fuku and zafa, severe curses and potential counterspells, found in Dominican folklore. I hadn’t heard of these concepts before, but they added an interesting layer to the storytelling.

[dawnfelagund]

This essay was written for @backtomiddleearthmonth​ for the orange/nonfiction path prompts “Meta about Fandom” and “Multimedia.”

“Review Plz?” Feedback Behavior in the Tolkien Fanfic Community

A little over a year ago, I ran an online survey about Tolkien fan fiction as part of my ongoing research on the history and culture of the Tolkien fan fiction community. (Read more about the Tolkien Fan Fiction survey here.) I have been slowly posting the results of the survey over the last year or so. For the orange/nonfiction path prompt "Meta on Fandom," I decided to dig into a topic from the survey based on what other B2MeM participants would like to know more about. People who answer my poll wanted to know more about, "How many readers comment or give feedback on stories? Why do they do this?" I will eventually investigate the other topics as well, most likely over the summer while I'm on break from school.

This essay seeks to answer some basic questions on feedback behavior in the Tolkien fanfic community. Who leaves feedback? How often? I will also begin to look at why people leave feedback, specifically at social pressure to do so. This will be the first post in a series looking at feedback behavior; the series will in all likelihood extent beyond B2MeM; follow my Twitter or the Tumblr tag #tolkien fan fiction survey for updates related to the survey.

Probably the first question to answer when thinking about commenting is: How often do people comment? I asked the question, "Do you leave comments or other feedback on Tolkien-based fan fiction stories?" Of the 1040 people who answered that question, 75.9% of them said YES.

Now it's important to note the "or other feedback" in the statement. This didn't ask just about comments or reviews; it could have included one-click feedback like kudos or likes as well. If I could go back and do this survey over, I'd likely change this question to distinguish between the two. For now, though, it's what I have to work with.

Who Leaves Feedback?

When we break down this question by the participant's role, the results become more interesting. I looked at the responses of writers versus readers only to this question. Writers were far, far more likely to leave feedback on what they read: 86.5% of writers (n = 635) answered YES compared to 59.3% of readers-only (n = 393). My initial reaction to this information is, "Well, of course, writers would best understand how much feedback matters to other writers." I think that's part of it, but there are probably other factors involved as well.

Writers are more likely to belong to the sites where they read. Many sites (SWG and MPTT, for example) do not allow comments from anonymous users.

Writers are more likely to be comfortable enough with English (or the language the story is written in) to be able to write a comment. I can read tolerably in Spanish, for example, but would never dare attempt to comment on something written in Spanish.

Writers are more likely to simply know what to say in a comment. They know what they like to hear on their own stories. They know what goes into crafting a story and are possibly more accustomed to noticing a characterization detail or a particularly good turn of phrase: the kind of thing you'd mention in a comment.

Interestingly, 13.5% of writers responded that they did not leave feedback on stories that they read. I find this group intensely interesting, and a future post will look specifically at this group of participants.

How Often Do Readers Leave Feedback?

Of course, a participant could have left a single comment or liked one story posted on Tumblr and answered YES to the above. Any author can tell you that three-fourths of their readers do not leave feedback on a specific story; many of my stories, based on click counts, would have hundreds of comments, and it is rare for me to exceed ten comments, and I receive more comments than most authors. (The highest percentage of kudos-per-click on my AO3 stories is about 19%.) So what percentage of stories do readers leave comments on?

I asked participants to "Estimate the percentage of Tolkien-based fan fiction stories that you leave comments or other feedback on." Those who responded with a number greater than zero left comments on a median average of 30% of stories.

Breaking down the data a little further also shows that readers willing to leave feedback tend to leave it relatively infrequently. More than half of participants (54.7%) left feedback on one out of three stories, or less. The graph below shows the number of participants who left different amounts of feedback. The numbers drop steadily until spiking briefly around 50%--likely because someone is more likely to respond with 50% rather than dithering slightly to either side of that number; after the 50% mark, the numbers hang rather steadily. There is a small resurgence among the participants that, in my mind as I worked on these numbers, I termed "unicorns": those who left feedback on almost everything they read. The graph at the top of the post shows this data.

It's important to note that these numbers are likely slightly inflated. Even in anonymous surveys, like this one, there is a tendency to overstate positive behaviors, like one's habit of leaving feedback on the fiction one reads for free. To support this point in this particular survey, several participants left brief comments on their answers, suggesting that they'd recently increased their feedback due to growing awareness of its value to authors or that they felt they needed to do more; some participants offered excuses (such as English as a second language) or responded to a perceived low number with self-effacing humor (like a :P emoticon). In addition, numbers were potentially inflated because one is more likely to remember the stories one takes time to leave feedback on, especially comments. A ficlet skimmed quickly on Tumblr, for instance, is more likely to be forgotten than the same ficlet on AO3 where the reader leaves a one-sentence comment or even clicks a kudos; especially the comment requires more careful reading.

Looking at actual feedback numbers supports that 30% is likely inflated. I chose ten stories on AO3 from the section "The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-earth -- J.R.R. Tolkien." The stories had been posted just over a week ago and were on the sixth page of results, so they had likely received the first heavy wave of readership. Since most AO3 readers who leave comments, in my experience, also leave a kudos (and since comment counts on AO3 also include author replies and further conversation on a story), then I looked just at kudos. For those ten stories, the kudos-per-click percentage was a median average of 9.2%, spanning a range of 1.7% to 26.2%: nowhere near the self-reported 30% rate from the survey.

Do Readers Want to Leave More Feedback?

As implied above, there is a degree of social pressure to leave feedback on stories. I was curious if readers felt they needed to do this more, or if they were happy with the current amount of feedback they left, so I looked at responses to the statement "I want to leave comments and other feedback more often on the stories I read." Participants had five options to choose from: Strongly Agree, Agree, Disagree, Strongly Disagree, and No Opinion/Not Sure.

Overwhelmingly, participants wanted to leave more feedback: 77.6% agreed or strongly agreed with the statement. In other words, three out of four readers think they need to leave more feedback. Fewer than one in ten (8.89%) disagreed or strongly disagreed. Of the latter category, a mere eight participants chose this option.

I looked closer at that group: participants who strongly disagreed that they wanted to leave feedback more often. Of those eight participants, three were part of the unicorn group that left feedback on almost everything they read; it's understandable why they felt they didn't need to do more! One participant left feedback a reported 70% of the time--still a relatively high number--so about half responded with Strongly Disagree because they really can't do much more than they already are. One person did not provide a response for the amount of feedback they left but answered NO to the question "Do you leave comments or other feedback on Tolkien-based fan fiction stories?" Three entered "zero" for the amount of feedback they left; these four responses felt somewhat defiant to me given how contrary to correct fandom etiquette it was. (I would say that this etiquette demands that one either leave feedback or feel badly for not doing so.)

I was also curious about the unicorn group: those who left feedback a reported 90 to 100% of the time. Despite leaving feedback on just about everything they read, 65% still agreed or strongly agreed that they wanted to do more. (Including those who reported that they left feedback 100% of the time: 67% of these participants still wanted to do more, including five who strongly agreed with the statement.)

Of the unicorn group, 21.7% chose No Opinion/Not Sure, a percentage much higher than the 13.5% of all participants who chose this option for this statement. I generally avoid making inferences about the No Opinion/Not Sure participants--there are a lot of reasons why people might choose this option, including that they truly do not understand what the statement is asking--but this discrepancy is too interesting to pass up hypothesizing about a little. I suspect that these respondents know that they are going above and beyond the majority of fandom but still feel uncomfortable stating directly that they don't think they need to do more. Choosing No Opinion/Not Sure is quite possibly the more socially acceptable option: a way to circumspectly admit that one really can't do much more.

The unicorns are an interesting group. Why do so many of them--about two out of three--feel that they need to do more? It is possible that the feedback they are leaving is mostly or entirely kudos or other one-click feedback, and they feel they should be writing more comments. (Readers who leave kudos on everything they read are a well-reported phenomenon on AO3; one participant even commented that they "kudos" everything they read.) It is also possible that social norms in fandom dictate that one should always be striving to improve on how much feedback one leaves on stories, and these readers feel that guilty gnawing even though they already are leaving feedback on almost everything they pick up. Here, I can turn to personal experience: I am in the unicorn group myself, leaving feedback on everything I read (in the form of comments) except when I regularly have to skim stories as part of my mod duties on the sites I run. (Sometimes even then I get sucked into a story and comment.) Despite the number of comments I leave, despite the hours of work I do in the fandom each week, I still feel guilty over not commenting on more of those stories skimmed in the course of daily site business. (I also feel guilty for not reading more, period.)

Conclusion

From this data, it is possible to draw a few conclusions:

Most readers of Tolkien fan fiction leave feedback, but most readers leave feedback on a relatively low number of the stories they read.

Self reports of the number of stories a reader feedback on appear to be significantly inflated. This doesn't have to mean that participants wanted to deliberately mislead in their responses--there are a number of reasons why self reports might be inaccurate, discussed above--but it is worth keeping in mind for other items on the survey where self-reported and actual behavior are more difficult to compare.

Authors are significantly more likely than readers-only to leave feedback on a story.

The vast majority of readers express that they want to leave feedback more often on stories they read. This includes the so-called "unicorns": readers who leave feedback on almost everything they read. This suggests, to me, that there is enough social pressure to leave feedback that participants may have felt uncomfortable stating that they felt they were doing enough. If you have an alternate explanation, please share in the comments!

If you have a question you'd like to see data on, please do share! Next time, I will likely look at why readers decide to leave feedback on a story, but if there's a topic or question you're interested in seeing analyzed and discussed in greater depth, let me know!