A few lovely things

Hello, nerds and nerdettes!

If you are anything like me, you enjoy poking around on the Internet reading random things in the hopes that you will find things that will make you laugh, cry, or start rooting around in the depths of your bedroom trying to find that old book on Egyptian hieroglyphs that you got halfway through in high school. (Sadly for me, I am pretty sure it is in my other bedroom. But not my other other bedroom, at least.)

Anyway, while I was proofing a Brit Lit project at work, I ran an excerpt from G. K. Chesterton's All Things Considered; specifically the excerpt The Fallacy of Success. It is a beautiful takedown of cheesy self-help "success" books. While it was written many decades ago, I found it still quite relevant, as cheesy self-help success books are, sadly, still alive and well as a genre. You can read it at Project Gutenberg, here: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11505/11505-h/11505-h.htm#THE_FALLACY_OF_SUCCESS

If you know me at all, or have been reading this blog much at all, you will know that there is one genre I have even less respect for than self-help success books, and that is the "genre" of "literary fiction," or at least the concept that "literary fiction" gets to be its own "genre" now, while pretending not to be. It appears I am not the only person to find this stupid! Caitlin Flanagan recently linked to an Atlantic article from about ten years ago on precisely this subject, which explains in hilariously excruciating detail why I will never, ever read a Cormac McCarthy novel. You can read it here: A Reader's Manifesto

And, as for things that make me go rummaging about my room looking for textbooks on dead languages, David Peterson has written a touching (for word nerds) meditation on the growth and current status of language creation: On Conlanging. I could possibly barely qualify at the edges of "being" a conlanger--in high school, I did try my hand at language creation as part of a group project with the particular bunch of odd people I was hanging out with at that point. Unfortunately, all my notes on it have since disappeared. I also spent a fair amount of time attempting to speak both varieties of Elvish (I preferred Sindarin, which was unfortunate, as Quenya was better developed and had much more extensive study resources available). However, that was back when I had the sort of spare time that could support my having hobbies that required thought and effort. (In addition to studying French, Spanish, and German in high school, I learned a decent amount of Sindarin, an almost-working knowledge of Ancient Egyptian, and amassed large stacks of textbooks on various other languages, although never did much with them. In college I had to translate poetry out of Anglo-Saxon but never learned enough that I didn't have to have a grammar and a dictionary with me, but it was fun anyway.) At any rate, I do still adore linguistics and kind of regret not having had the opportunity to do a second major in it, but that's what I get for going to a small school.

Cons, curses, and New Jersey

So, way back when in April, I read White Cat, the first book in Holly Black's Curse Workers series. In October, I bought the second book, Red Glove, at the Boston Book Festival and got it signed (*cue fangirly squeeing*). And this week, I actually got around to reading the damn thing!

It only takes so long because I am drowning in awesome books, not because there is anything less than totally great about this book that would justify me having put it off for so long.

In this one, Lila, who used to be a cat in the last book, is now not a cat, so Cassel can stop feeling guilty about thinking he'd killed her, and go back to his lifelong habit of having a mopey intimidated crush on her and feeling inferior. Except he can't! Because Cassel's mother, who, while not actually in any particular crime family, is a criminal of the "magically seduce old guys and take all their money" sort, decided to do Cassel what she probably honestly thinks is a big fat favor, and magicked Lila to be hopelessly in love with him. Cassel, being a con man and a sometimes assassin but not a rapist, is Not Okay with this and goes off to be angry and mopey and run his private school's illegal gambling operations and live off of coffee, as he does. But his plans to get distracted by screwed-up family bullshit and fail French and physics are further complicated when Lila enrolls at Wallingford until the curse wears off because being away from him was making her physically ill. So there's that going on.

This isn't even entirely the main plot, because the main plot involves Cassel being unwillingly recruited by some douchebaggy Feds to try and figure out who killed his brother Philip, and some other dudes,but it was actually Cassel who killed the other dudes, although he's not about to tell the Feds that. Cassel's mother and his older brother Barron, who may or may not eventually figure out that Cassel forged a whole bunch of his memories back in the first book, pop up now and again to throw whatever wrenches into Cassel's plans Holly Black can possibly think up. Also, there's some political stuff going on about mandatory testing for curse workers, which provides many additional excuses for Cassel to get arrested, beat up, thrown around, dirty, unfed for days at a time, and generally put through the wringer. Then he drinks a lot of coffee and cons some people, and hates on himself, and it is all very dark and broody and sexy, but in a much more action-packed way than you find in a lot of dark broody sexy teen novels.

It is kind of odd to read in that the book is first-person POV from Cassel, and Cassel (a) hates himself (b) is too busy with issues of life and death and mafias and getting beat up to think overmuch about his appearance other than "am I covered in blood today" and (c) apparently sleeps like once a week and lives off of coffee and vodka, but at the same time you get the feeling of the author behind the book being all like "CASSEL'S A HOTTIE, LOOKIT THAT HOTTIE CON PEOPLE, PUT HIM IN A LEATHER JACKET AND A SHINY BLACK BENZ RIGHT NOW". But it all works, I think.

The last one is supposedly going to be called Black Heart, although for April Fool's last year she announced that they would be changing it to Green Money, which I think could make a pretty hilarious companion piece.