Reading Wednesday
Mar. 25th, 2020 03:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabby This really does mess with one's sense of time.
Just finished: [redacted]: This is a book I'm working on. It's a draft with some of the edits still in, but you'll really like it. :) I didn't need to read the whole thing to design the cover but I wanted to.
Sovereign by April Daniels: I possibly liked this even more than the first one, Dreadnought. Danny takes on an evil billionaire neoreactionary/libertarian supervillain and the TERF who's made an unholy allegiance with him, while dealing with her awkwardly budding relationship with Calamity, her cowgirl-themed friend from the first book. It is sweet and action-packed and funny, with the usual caveats that it goes to some dark places. There's a bit of the YA tendency to pause the narrative to explain things to the reader, "hey kids! A TERF is a Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist.") but it's quite restrained compared to much Serious Issues YA, and largely confined to terms that the average young reader might not know.
Currently reading: The Decameron by Giovanni Boccacci. I must say that once I got past the archaic language, I really started to enjoy this. To the point where it's almost comfort reading in a way? Because whatever, the Black Death was much worse than COVID-19 but people still survived and civilization didn't crumble, and in many ways civilization came out ahead. Obviously not for the people who died. Which is really my concern right now.
But I digress, because that's not really what the stories in it are about. It's a bunch of young people telling stories to distract each other from the fact that they just escaped the Plague, so naturally most of the stories are about sex. And because this medieval Italy, a lot of the stories are about religion. There's a lot of intersection between those two themes.
One of the more surprising elements of it is how modern it feels. There's a lot of stories along the lines of one of my favourites so far: A guy gets a job landscaping at a convent, all the nuns are young and really hot, he has sex with all of them, the abbess finds out, he bangs the abbess so much that she tires him out to the point where he can't get his gardening done, and they all make arrangements so that he can continue to sleep with all of them on a more reasonable schedule for everyone, he fathers a lot of children over the years, but everyone is cool with it because they need more monks. That's the sort of story that gets confined to niche publishing these days, but I guess medieval Italians were much more laid back about poly. The women tend to be portrayed as just as witty and thirsty (or just as shitty, depending on the story) as the men. There's some values dissonance—sex under false pretences being played for laughs—but not nearly as much as one would think.
Just finished: [redacted]: This is a book I'm working on. It's a draft with some of the edits still in, but you'll really like it. :) I didn't need to read the whole thing to design the cover but I wanted to.
Sovereign by April Daniels: I possibly liked this even more than the first one, Dreadnought. Danny takes on an evil billionaire neoreactionary/libertarian supervillain and the TERF who's made an unholy allegiance with him, while dealing with her awkwardly budding relationship with Calamity, her cowgirl-themed friend from the first book. It is sweet and action-packed and funny, with the usual caveats that it goes to some dark places. There's a bit of the YA tendency to pause the narrative to explain things to the reader, "hey kids! A TERF is a Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist.") but it's quite restrained compared to much Serious Issues YA, and largely confined to terms that the average young reader might not know.
Currently reading: The Decameron by Giovanni Boccacci. I must say that once I got past the archaic language, I really started to enjoy this. To the point where it's almost comfort reading in a way? Because whatever, the Black Death was much worse than COVID-19 but people still survived and civilization didn't crumble, and in many ways civilization came out ahead. Obviously not for the people who died. Which is really my concern right now.
But I digress, because that's not really what the stories in it are about. It's a bunch of young people telling stories to distract each other from the fact that they just escaped the Plague, so naturally most of the stories are about sex. And because this medieval Italy, a lot of the stories are about religion. There's a lot of intersection between those two themes.
One of the more surprising elements of it is how modern it feels. There's a lot of stories along the lines of one of my favourites so far: A guy gets a job landscaping at a convent, all the nuns are young and really hot, he has sex with all of them, the abbess finds out, he bangs the abbess so much that she tires him out to the point where he can't get his gardening done, and they all make arrangements so that he can continue to sleep with all of them on a more reasonable schedule for everyone, he fathers a lot of children over the years, but everyone is cool with it because they need more monks. That's the sort of story that gets confined to niche publishing these days, but I guess medieval Italians were much more laid back about poly. The women tend to be portrayed as just as witty and thirsty (or just as shitty, depending on the story) as the men. There's some values dissonance—sex under false pretences being played for laughs—but not nearly as much as one would think.
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Date: 2020-03-25 08:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-25 09:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-25 09:46 pm (UTC)Back in college and I unfortunately don't remember.
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Date: 2020-03-25 09:52 pm (UTC)I really liked the first one though so I'll probably pick it up again. Apparently the writer is already working on a third and final book.
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Date: 2020-03-25 09:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-25 10:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-25 11:35 pm (UTC)