@e-louise-bates / e-louise-bates.tumblr.com
I will admit that it never occurred to me that I would need to check the history book that claimed to be scholarly to see if it used references and footnotes, because how could a book be a scholarly work on history without such things, BUT NOW I KNOW BETTER.
July Reads
Destiny of the Republic • Candace Millard | nobody touch me I’m still emotional about President Garfield’s young secretary whom he stole from John Powell and who became fiercely loyal and protective of the family and was a great aid during the tragedy and married the eldest daughter. A very well researched and easy to read work of non-fiction about President Garfield’s assassination. I read it in a day. I did think it wasn’t as well structured as it could have been for flow and also maximum effect. But I’d give it four or four and a half stars. Subject material was so overlooked but very interesting
Little Rock Girl 1957 • Shelley Tougas | children’s non fiction about the history of a famous photograph from Little Rock. Not much to say. Informative
The Legend of Sam Miracle • ND Wilson | children’s/YA fiction time travel western. this had vibes and style for daysssssss left an impression on me! However! Felt very short on thematic substance once you looked past the enormous amount of vibes and style. It is part of a trilogy though so I hope maybe it’s just it didn’t get to the thematic substance yet? However. May I once again mention the vibes
A Month of Prayer with St Catherine of Siena • Wyatt North | everyone on occasion needs to take a morning to sit on the front porch step and listen to some good common sense from St Catherine of Siena.
American Saint • Joan Barthel | adult biography of St Elizabeth Seton. Loved the information and it was an enjoyable experience. Every once in a while the author felt compelled to put some snide modern feminist spin on stuff and I got the impression she was using the story as evidence for some modern day argument I’m unaware of but it was infrequent enough it didn’t really bother me.
The Illyrian Adventure • Lloyd Alexander | VESPER HOLLY HIIIIIII these are Victorian/Edwardian era female Indiana Jones in vague countries across the globe that sound real but don’t really exist @imissthembutitwasntadisaster where are you I’ve got a new girl for you come get her
Keeper of the Lost Cities Graphic Novel Pt 1• Shannon Messenger | I think modern fantasy has a tendency to use the exact same four ingredients and create a vast structure with them similar to every other vast structure in modern fantasy and try to make it super complex and world built but because they are the same four ingredients I just Don’t Care. This and Jack Zulu are examples. So I didn’t enjoy the world building but I did still want to find out what happens next. It lacked vibes though I felt.
Death by Disguise • EL Bates | historical fantasy version of Gaudy Night @e-louise-bates don’t leave me hanging! Also tons of points go to the title and cover on this one which I loved
The (Mostly) True Story of Cleopatra’s Needle • Dan Gutman | pretty cool kids’ historical fiction using perspectives of various kids during the construction and transfer of Cleopatra’s needle to America. Fun silly and informative. May possibly fall into the modern perspective in historical context pitfalls at one point but idk enough to tell. I think from the endnotes it might be historically justified though? (Bonus points cause it does have endnote facts!!)
Bold Spirit: Helga Estby’s Forgotten Walk Across Victorian America • Linda Lawrence Hunt | Went looking for Walk Across America and stumbled onto this instead and got distracted. Technically this was roughly Edwardian era more than Victorian and also it was very depressing at the end, but although it was padding the material with repetition in some places, it was a very interesting historical account. I give it like a three stars
I, a total stranger, was thinking of befriending your kid, but before I did, I thought I'd ask you, are they a boring, selfish jerk?
It's fine if they are, I'm just really trying to find quality people to be friends with, so I thought I'd ask you, is your kid a dick?
Wait, don't get offended! How are people supposed to know whether to hang out with your kid if you can't answer a simple question?!
I, a total stranger, was thinking of inviting myself over to your house for dinner.
But before I do, I wanted to ask, is your cooking insipid, greasy and terrible?
Honestly, it's not problem if it is, I'm just trying to focus on eating food that isn't shit.
Oh, come on, don't be so touchy! How is anyone supposed to know whether to eat the food you cook if you won't tell them whether it sucks?
Never bring a knife to a gun fight.
I don't think TVTropes makes people stupider. I DO think it puts easy-to-use descriptions in front of fools who then just warily search for such tropes as they go and decry any media in which they find them as unoriginal - after all, they've already seen these five tropes have been done before!
Novelty is something humans like, but A) the more and more volume of media humanity generates, the harder it is to find even increasingly specific sub-components of a narrative that haven't been written before at least once and everyone needs to accept that, and B) treating novelty as being a mark of quality rather than just that a sign that you've not personally encountered something before is foolish.
Beware - future media you enjoy will have aspects and takes and twists, tropes, that you've enjoyed before.
Rejoice - future media you enjoy will have aspects and takes and twists, tropes, that you've enjoyed before.
Ironically, there is a TV Tropes page specifically about this. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Administrivia/TropesAreTools
tvtropes: "here's some interesting story elements and ways to find others that share them!"
people who read tvtropes without understanding it: "ew, this story has elements in it!"
TV Tropes can be a fascinating tool, because it discusses tropes bottom-up: here's a trope, here's stories that do that. You can see examples of that trope done well and done badly. Here's a brief history/context of that trope. It's something completely different from how I was taught to examine tropes at school or even during uni years, when you usually do it top-down: here's a story, what kind of tropes does it use?
Except that now, between this and Cinema Sins, people are starting to complain that stories have tropes in them, which is exactly like complaining that your paper is made of plant matter, or your coffee was made using coffee beans.
They also complain -- and I can say this as an Old Person -- about you as a writer using tropes on stories you wrote decades ago where you were the first person to tell that story and the first person to use that trope. If Tolkien was still alive they'd be writing to him huffily about every element of Lord of the Rings and explaining why it was No Longer Original.
(via @neil-gaiman)
Thank you for voting!
• somehow managed to establish himself as a respectable, staid hobbit by the time he was fifty, despite being both a grandson of Bullroarer Took and the Shire champion of pretty much every aiming-game known to hobbitkind
• had an in-depth debate on pleasantries with a random guy passing by in the street, who turned out to be GANDALF
• collapsed in front of his own fire shaking and muttering “struck by lightning” over and over again in response to hearing about dragons and danger
• mind you, this was after he screamed loud enough to startle a roomful of Dwarves
• signed up for a dangerous quest completely outside of his league out of spite
• when told to scout out a mysterious light, saw some trolls, and instead of reporting back with the information, decided to PICK THE TROLLS POCKET
• arrived in Rivendell for the first time and said it “smelled like elves”
• upon meeting a strange creature that visibly wanted to eat him, he decided to play a riddle game with him- and guessed pretty much every one, and made up his own riddles, afraid and alone, that not only were good and full of linguistic puns, but actually stumped the other guy- AND THEN CHEATED AND WON WITH A QUESTION
• showed mercy to said strange creature who wanted to kill him, and was now standing between him and freedom
• eavesdropped on the dwarves arguing over whether to try to save him, then popped up casually smack in the middle of them just as they were debating
• somehow managed to sleep like a log at the really really high eyrie full of wild predators
• found himself in a bad situation, said eff it, and turned around and antagonized and fought off an insane amount of man eating spiders, like enough of them that fifty was a small portion, by singing at them with incredibly complex and punny insulting songs composed on the spot, while simultaneously slaying them in multitudes despite having zero combat training. Seriously, we don’t discuss enough how epic the spider scene is.
• broke a company of dwarves out of the very secure prison of the Elvenking by inventing white water rafting with barrels
• charmed his way out of being eaten by a dragon
• stole the frickin Arkenstone from the guys who employed him, one of whom was a king
• took part in an epic battle, only to be knocked out in the first ten minutes and miss the entire thing
• was named elf-friend by the guy who’s prisoners he sprung
• wrote his own autobiography, complete with all the narrative recognition of his own heroics
• spent 60 years writing said autobiography
• taught his lower class neighbor’s kid how to read
• taught his nephew Elvish- not only Sindarin, but Quenya too
• spent decades telling his cousins his own story as fairy tales, complete with character impressions accurate enough that one of them was able to fool a servant of the Enemy with a second hand impression
• used the One Ring of Power to hide from his neighbors
• planned an elaborate feast with multiple social faux pas to mess with his neighbors, complete with a purposefully bewildering speech and culminating in him vanishing into thin air in front of everyone
• left his cousins and neighbors very unsubtle passive aggressive gifts in his will
• settled into Rivendell, randomly befriended the heir to the throne of like half of Middle Earth, and apparently spent his time writing very personal poems about his hosts and reciting them to crowds of elves
• after being invited to a Council of basically every major kingdom in the continent, spent a quarter of the time reciting vague poems about his friends, a quarter of the time telling anyone who would listen about his heroic past, and half the time interrupting to ask when lunch would be
• volunteered to bring the ring to Mordor
• became one of only four or five mortals in history to live in Valinor
Seriously, Bilbo Baggins may well be the most chaotic, insane person in the entire legendarium, and that includes the likes of people like Finrod “bit a werewolf to death to save the life of guy who he just met and gave up his kingdom for” Felagund.
Kinda funny how I actually enjoyed cataloging when I was working in a library, but now that I'm taking a class on cataloging my brain has started shutting down at the very mention of the word ...
these are very wise (and very real) words. believe me.
Tested out my developing Readers' Advisory skills by trying to come up with some good titles for my mom to read, and let me tell you, nothing in my class so far has given me good tips on, "books for people who used to be able to relax and now can't."
However, I did manage to come up with a short list, so hopefully SOMETHING on there will be just right!
Middle names are such a bizarre concept. Almost everyone you meet has a given name and a family name, but also a secret third name that we all know is there but basically never acknowledge. Like I could go my whole life knowing you as Bobert Smithington and then get smacked upside the head one day finding out you were also secretly a Marvin and I just have to accept that
Me: I should write something
me : … or I could spent 78 hours straight making a miniature library with a working LED chandelier
Pics!
The lights are working now!
everyone look at my friend's tiny library she's so talented
A federal judge blocked on Monday a bid by Penguin Random House, the biggest book publisher in the United States, to buy one of its main rivals, Simon & Schuster, in a significant victory for the Biden administration, which is trying to expand the boundaries of antitrust enforcement.
The judge, Florence Y. Pan, who heard the case in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, said in an order that the Justice Department had demonstrated that the merger might “substantially” harm competition in the market for U.S. publishing rights to anticipated top-selling books.
The full order laying out Judge Pan’s reasoning is temporarily under seal because it contains confidential information, and will be released later after both parties file redactions.
Penguin Random House and its parent company, Bertelsmann, said in response on Monday that they planned to appeal.
In a statement, Penguin Random House called the decision “an unfortunate setback for readers and authors” and argued that “the Department of Justice’s focus on advances to the world’s best-paid authors instead of consumers or the intense competitiveness in the publishing sector runs contrary to its mission to ensure fair competition.”
The victory is a notable one for the Justice Department. Judges have ruled against several of its previous challenges to corporate deals, including UnitedHealth Group’s purchase of a technology company. In a statement on Monday, the Justice Department hailed the ruling as a win for authors and readers.
“The proposed merger would have reduced competition, decreased author compensation, diminished the breadth, depth, and diversity of our stories and ideas, and ultimately impoverished our democracy,” said Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter of the department’s antitrust division.
The government had a high-profile witness on its side with the author Stephen King, who testified that the merger would be especially harmful to writers who are just starting out, and took a contrary position to his own publisher, Scribner, which is part of Simon & Schuster. On Monday night, Mr. King said in an email interview that he was “delighted with the outcome.”
“Further consolidation would have caused slow but steady damage to writers, readers, independent booksellers, and small publishing companies,” he said. “Publishing should be more focused on cultural growth and literary achievement and less on corporate balance sheets.”
Executives from other major publishing houses, among them the heads of Hachette and HarperCollins, also testified against the deal.
In seeking to block the merger, the government argued that the deal would leave authors with fewer options for getting their work published, lead to lower advances for writers and even cause a reduction in the number and diversity of titles published.
“One entity’s control of almost half of the nation’s anticipated top-selling books threatens competition in multiple ways,” the Justice Department wrote in a post-trial brief. “Authors’ advances would fall — advances that they use to pay their bills and that reflect compensation for their work.”
Another entry in the "ways homeschooling my children has proven unexpectedly beneficial to me" list: I have to write a paper for one of my college classes this week, and instead of panicking because it's been almost TWENTY YEARS since I've written a paper, I am recalling all the lessons I gave my kids on how to structure an essay, and am actually feeling fairly chill about the entire thing.
IEW (Institute for Excellence in Writing) was a pain to teach, but by golly it's paying off now.
Which has sort of been the theme song for both the kids and me in nearly every subject since we stopped homeschooling, frankly.
Finally managed to get the audiobooks for Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner (narrated by Peter Dennis) imported from my old computer (now barely hanging on as the kids' computer for listening to music and typing stories, and no good for anything else) onto my current computer, and thence to my phone, which means at long last, ever since the death of the ancient ipod we used to use for car ride entertainment, we can listen to the Pooh stories in the car again.
My kids are 13 and 14, and they are ecstatic about this, proving that good old Winnie ther Pooh is timeless. Six hour car ride to Omi and Grandpa's house? Bring it on.
Inventing a Cambridge college--a hidden, magical Cambridge college, no less, and one established less than a decade before this story takes place--is fraught with difficulty for this poor American. I barely even understood half of the system when Carl was working on his doctorate there; trying to figure out the details and make them plausible for a general reading audience is even harder. Fellows? Would such a new college have fellows? (Do I have my head wrapped around what makes a fellow a fellow? Not really.) Professors are a no except under specific and extraordinary circumstances, I think I'm correct there, and of course there wouldn't be doctors of magic yet, though eventually the college might aspire to postgraduate degrees.
I do at least grasp the concept of supervisions (thanks to Carl), and there would be some labs and lectures, but, overall, whew. Attempting to research this also has a tendency to leave me just as confused as I was before.
(Also HOW can I have my sleuths interacting with students and staff alike at a meal, when clearly as guests of the college they ought to eat at the high table?)
Is it the ultimate hubris for me, an American who has never attended a UK university, to attempt to not only set a magical murder mystery in a Cambridge college, but to invent said college entirely? Quite likely. Am I going to go ahead and finish this story anyway? Absolutely. Look, I loved living in Cambridge for a year and a half, and would have been happy to stay there the entire three to four years we had planned, and so by heck I am setting this story there, and if one has already alluded to a secret Cambridge college for magicians in a previous story, and one is setting the current story in Cambridge, one is left with no other options but to feature said college.
However, one is also allowed to moan about it a bit as one writes it.
