People at /r/englishlearning need to stop saying "Song lyrics/poems don't have to be grammatical! Don't try to learn English through songs/poems! People just do whatever, ungrammatically, to fit the rhythm/mood/rhyme scheme!"
This may be true, I guess, but funnily enough it's never true when people say it. At least half the time, the quoted text isn't even archaic or nonstandard!
That said, I do like reading (most of the) comments in that subreddit. There's always something! ( Cut for appropriateness )
"It's set in a time when things were hard for black people in America" - a line which so flabbergasted me that I don't think I ever figured out what to say.
But this one may have topped it!
"The story is about a black girl, somewhere between 8 and 16 years old, from a black family."
...I'm dying to ask why they think they need to specify that this girl is the same race as everybody else in her family, when that's usually how this works. There's no indication in the rest of the post that we might have reason to think she's not.
What Moves The Dead: Another T. Kingfisher novel, and, wow, it’s a good thing I didn’t start with this one. DNF halfway through. I figured out the twist pretty quickly, double-checked on Wikipedia that I was right, and wasn’t gripped enough by the characters to enjoy the process of “listening to them bumble around for a couple more hours failing to figure it out.”
Future game plan: stick with her fantasy works, skip the horror.
The Queue, by Basma Abdel Aziz: Bought this on Audible years ago, and didn’t remember not liking it. So I downloaded it when I tried out Libation, and gave it a re-listen.
Definitely worth it. Reminds me of 1984, in that it’s a near-future dystopia run by a government that is as totalitarian as it is surreal. At the same time, it’s set in Unnamed Middle Eastern/Muslim City (the author is from Cairo), so it all plays out in a way that’s culturally-specific to that part of the world.
Cool and enriching to see which parts are different. Depressing to see that certain things are the same. The POV residents have a range of perspectives and life experiences, but they’ve all been more-or-less frogboiled into accepting an untenable situation as Just How Things Work. One guy spends the whole book actively dying, but he was injured during the Disgraceful Events that nobody will talk about directly, and his friends/loved ones/doctors keep running into “of course the government will authorize him to get life-saving surgery…just as soon as you have all the proper paperwork.” The titular Queue is all the citizens lined up to get their paperwork. It hasn’t moved for a month now. But it’s going to start soon! Somewhere between the MOASS and the Rapture, probably!
Also, there’s a character named Yehia, which I assume is the same name as Yehya Badr with a slightly different Anglicization. So that was entertaining.
Mogworld, by Yahtzee Croshaw: Checked this out based on how much I liked Will Save The Galaxy For Food, and it did not disappoint.
Starts as a fantasy story about a necromancer overlord’s reign of terror through his undead hordes, but from the POV of Jim, a beleaguered zombie who just wants to die (again) (for good, this time). Then it develops into a parody of fantasy-adventure video-game mechanics. Then you start to see the chat logs between the game developers. Then Jim starts to see the chat logs between the game developers…
It’s like if Terry Pratchett wrote Guilded Age. It’s full of absolutely incredible turns of phrase. (One that I had to stop and write down: a group of supernatural beings is described as “heading off to deliver unwanted resurrections, like a flock of poorly-briefed storks.”)
There’s a character type you see sometimes, where the male protagonist has the support of a devoted female hanger-on, who he finds grating and annoying and never appreciates…but he keeps her around because she does useful things for him. She conveniently never notices his disdain, so she keeps giving him endless support for zero care/support/respect in return. (Misa from Death Note is…a deconstruction of this trope? A commentary, at least.)
Mogworld pulls a twist on this that I’ve never seen before. Undead bodies don’t heal, so Meryl is the local expert in sewing them back together. When the plot drags Jim off on a solo adventure, Meryl follows, conveniently dedicating herself to repairing all the dramatic injuries he gets along the way. But, the reason is: Jim is the only other zombie from Meryl’s home country…and Meryl is a huge [their country] supremacist! So there’s something Jim can legitimately resent about her, he’s not just being an entitled sexist. (They both do a bit of learning and growing as the story goes on, too.)
One warning: the R-slur gets thrown around a bunch. It’s a book that deals with video-gamer culture and was published in 2010, so this isn’t hugely unrealistic…but the writing mostly doesn’t have other slurs/profanity outside of that, so it was kind of a jumpscare.
As long as that’s not a dealbreaker, definitely give this one a read.
"Along the journey she discovers that her and her family were never actually slaves at all but the original royal family and the original slaves usurped the throne and took over due to constantly being oppressed and treated unfairly."
I really want to ask this person if they understand how the concepts of "slavery" and "royalty" work. This girl was definitely a slave because she was enslaved, you can be a slave and also be from a royal family since both these concepts are societal concepts, the word "usurp" suggests that this revolution was invalid and bad, and by the way, if she was born as part of the royal family she's probably lucky she wasn't killed, except that then the book would've been very short and grim, with no happy ending. Well, no happy ending for her, all the happy endings for the people who killed her family and secured their freedom.
(Somebody suggested this may be The Claidi Journals, which is what I was thinking.)
And our protagonist is taking a sojourn with his hot, wealthy boss to Kinky Fantasy Island, and wow, it really *is* a nice place - the hotel room has privacy glass!
The protagonist and the commenters are not as turned on by this as I am, but let me be clear: I'd absolutely fuck a dude if I had a chance to flip the switch on his privacy glass. Hell, I'd listen to him mansplain about privacy glass at me first.
(I'm strongly tempted to say so in a comment, but would that be a weird sort of comment to leave?)
She was inordinately pleased to have been born on the anniversary of the Armistice, not that it kept her country from being invaded again when she was a young woman.
My pipe fix needs retooling. I'm not thrilled, but also not surprised. I need to start putting aside cash every week to get it repaired properly, but for now I'll buy more plumber's putty.
In other news, I have to do all of my laundry - boo! - and my new glasses are working nicely now that I'm used to them. I'm in the stage of owning glasses where I vow I'll be super careful not to let gunk build up between the frames and the lenses. We'll see how long that lasts! Wish me luck!
Crow school is basic and short as a rule— just the rudiments of quid pro crow for most students. Then each lives out his unenlightened span, adding his bit of blight to the collected history of pushing out the sweeter species; briefly swaggering the swagger of his aggravating ancestors down my street. And every time I like him when we meet.
I love that Tyrunt knows Charm. Lil man will chew up all your furniture, knock over your antique lamp, and eat you out of your house and home and then he goes 'i'm baby :3' and you forgive him immediately.
Except I think that my pupil distance was 56 instead of 55, and also the bridge seems a bit flimsy. That, I don't like, but it may be my amorphous anxiety talking.
In other news, Moonpie has completely scratched and licked up her nipples and now they're bleeding and infected, and apparently the vet prefers to do a blood test at this age, but as the blood test is $400 we declined. (E asked if I thought they judged us for that, lol, sweetie, I always think everybody judges me for everything, but that's not a rational mindset, so no, upon reflection I don't think that. We're hardly the only family to make petcare decisions based on affordability, and even if they do judge us, great, they can pay for this bloodwork themselves.) Also, NYC now mandates a new vaccine for cats and dogs. They can mandate what they like, but they can't make people follow that law. However, after the vet explained that this disease spreads pretty easily and now is spreading to humans, in whom it can cause kidney and/or liver failure, I decided, reluctantly, to make vaxxing the cats a priority. Which means full vet appointments for each one and new rabies shots as well. It's not going to be a quick process, is what I'm saying. (And we still need to replace those water heaters before they break!)
It was a penny more than the old ones, so there's that. (But I paid for super expedited shipping, so actually it's like $40 more.)
They're green. I'm not so sure about this, but there will be NO MORE TAKE-BACKS. I triple checked that they weren't safety glasses with the things on the side, which would've been great if I was in a field where I needed those but, as it is, was unwearable, and they're the exact same measurement as my old glasses, I checked that as well.
I liked it, but that was because I liked laughing at how stupidly oblivious the protagonist was to his not-rival's extraordinarily obvious crush on him. And also because I like most things I read.
But then, here I was, 20 minutes from the finish line, our two dudes are about to finally resolve all their deep-seated personal issues that have kept them apart - and my coworkers start a loud conversation right next to me and they will not shut up. I did, eventually, have to ask them to please stop for half an hour so I could finish my book.
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conuly
