bloodygranuaile | Entries tagged with meme

In preparation for Nona I read Harrow the Ninth for the third time. This time I tried to read it more slowly, even though my reading-slowly-on-purpose skills have somewhat deteriorated over the years. I don’t think I’m quite clever enough to have figured out who’s in the last section, but I will only live in ignorance for another week or so. (I don’t usually try to guess twists, I just want to see how they happen, but I’ve been wondering Who Is Nona for like a year now so I tried to pay attention.)

Even knowing the big reveals, this was still a tricksy little hobbit of a book. Only part of this is due to the protagonist being possibly-insane-possibly-haunted-definitely-unwell; the rest is due to much of the rest of the cast also being possibly insane, haunted, dead, and various other things (and definitely unwell). God continues to be just some guy, and extremely cringe to boot. I can’t wait for the next book.

I had intended to do this in January immediately after my reread of Gideon the Ninth but then life and book clubs got in the way, so it was only this weekend that I finally reread Harrow the Ninth, the second book in Tamsyn Muir’s certifiably insane and gothically delicious Locked Tomb trilogy. Notable occurrences upon second read, especially so soon after rereading Gideon, include “I understood what was going on a lot better,” “I caught more hilarious references that had apparently passed me by the first time,” and “OK now it’s actually quite clear what’s going on, I can’t believe I was so confused the first time, did I read this in a coma or something,” although the more likely culprit is just that my close-reading skills have atrophied in the 10 years since I’ve been in school from doing only business writing where the actual task at hand is to just find the simplest big-picture points to distill out of a page of writing. But in novels, it turns out sometimes the details are important!

Anyway, while most of this book is a lot darker and more fucked up than the first one, especially in the beginning, there were still several moments where I couldn’t help actually laughing out loud, a thing that rarely happens for me when I’m reading, and which especially hadn’t been happening this week, when I hit one of those walls where I got tired of doing responsible shit and just dropped all my coping mechanisms and opted to go ahead and be miserable for a bit. It was also frankly sort of soothing to read about people having a way worse time than I’m having and not necessarily powering through it like emotionally unbreakable protagging machines.

Because Harrow is a tiny nerd, this book did not inspire me to do between-chapter workouts as much as Gideon did, although I did manage to roll off the couch and make myself do 15 minutes of yoga about halfway through it, which is more than I’d managed all week. Neither did it inspire me to make soup.

In an act of supreme generosity, my friends, whomst I have been most shamefully blowing off pretty much since lockdown began because I can only handle so many Zoom calls and also my ability to people has worn away, kept me in the rotation for the now rather battered ARC of Tamsyn Muir’s Harrow the Ninth, the sequel to my new favorite novel in the history of absolutely ever, Gideon the Ninth. I have been having severe trouble focusing on fiction during this pandemicpocalypse but if anything was going to get me to actually pay attention to a fiction, it would be the dysfunctional goth lesbian space nuns of Drearburh, repressed nerd necromancer Harrowhark Nonagesimus and her dumb jock cavalier Gideon Nav.

I was a little disappointed but, given the ending of the last one, not entirely surprised that Gideon is not there for most of the first *mumblemumble* of the book, but it’s OK because we spend that time getting to know Harrow a bit better, and Harrow is also a hilarious character, if in a bitchier and more antisocial sort of way than Gideon, which is perfectly fine with me. The book is not written from Harrow’s point of view, although we certainly get inside her head a lot; rather, the book alternates between third person omniscient and second person, where an unnamed narrator is explaining to Harrow all the shit she’s gotten up to in the months before the Emperor’s murder. That’s not a spoiler; it’s how time is marked in the chapter titles.

I’m honestly not even really sure where to start reviewing because the structure of Harrow is deliberately confusing; it’s one of those jigsaw-puzzle-like books where you keep reading in part due to the tantalizing possibility of getting to the part where you understand what’s going on. I personally love this sort of thing; the narrative tension it provides is much more my style than, say, romantic or sexual tension, of which this book also has a good deal of but mostly just for seasoning; it doesn’t really constitute a subplot and it doesn’t ever do anything so boring and conventional as get resolved. Harrow is a deeply prudish character (which, relatable) in addition to literally being a nun so all instances of sexual tension (in many cases it’s not even attraction, just tension, due to everybody being very tense) are wrapped in several layers of distaste, either from Harrow (who hates everybody and describes them all in very unattractive terms) or from everybody else (Harrow is horrendously in love with A CORPSE, literally a dead body, who is referred to throughout the book explicitly as “the Body”). For a book whose back cover text reads “The necromancers are back, and they’re gayer than ever,” not very much actually happens on that front, except at one very drunk dinner party that Harrow flees as soon as she’s allowed to. This is not a complaint; if anything, this is perhaps the only book series I’ve ever read that rings true to my real-life experience, where everyone is queer but I have absolutely no idea what, if anything, anyone is up to at any particular time because it has nothing to do with me and at this point most people don’t even try to talk to me about it, both because I am also a deeply prudish character and because there is always other stuff to do instead, although at least in my case it usually doesn’t involve reanimated skeletons. (On the other hand, a lack of nonbinary characters is beginning to be something that significantly messes with my suspension of disbelief, and if I have one request for Alecto it would be that.) Anyway, I love a book that forgoes the obligatory romantic subplot in favor of just a lot of people avoiding dealing with their very complex feelings and blowing things up instead.

I meant to be dithering about structure there but ended up dithering about feelings, but I’m going to keep it, because I think that’s actually why the book is the way it is. It mirrors the stuff that is going on in Harrow’s brain, which is extremely messed up, due to lots of traumatic shit happening but also for magical reasons. Harrow’s general personality is already geared toward a pretty hardcore, disordered sort of asceticism--foregoing sleep to hyperfocus on studying, unable to bear the stimulation of food or drink (with one very memorable exception), uncomfortable being seen in any way other than completely covered, including her face (also relatable, although I just wear a full face of people makeup every day and not skull makeup, because I am a coward)--and there are times where she just Harrows herself into total dysfunction and you don’t find out about it until later. It’s fantastic. One downside is that it seems to have kicked up something ascetic and Catholic deep in my psyche and I have been in a weird mood since Sunday, but that’s probably also quarantine-related.

While Harrow is not quite as much of sentient pile of memes as Gideon, she still has her moments, as does...well, everyone else. In fact, two out of the three jokes that made me nearly throw the book off the balcony were made by God, the King Undying, whose real name is apparently John. One of the main features of this installation of necromantic nonsense is the appearance of a lot of high-ranking religious figures, as Harrow and Ianthe Tridentarius have ascended (or mostly ascended) to Lyctorhood, putting them in the legendary ranks themselves if they can survive more than a few months. Most of the book’s action takes place trapped in God’s enormous, eclectically decorated safe house/space station, and the only people around Harrow and Ianthe are God and three of the ancient and terrifying Lyctors, all of whom are just absolute bastards. Augustine, the Saint of Patience, is my favorite, because his entire personality consists of using flippancy as a coping mechanism. Mercymorn, the Saint of Joy, is also a delightful character, in that she is a hypercritical, waspish bitch who really wants nothing more than for Harrow to die already and get out of her hair. Ortus mostly just keeps trying to murder Harrow, which makes for some very gory action scenes, so no complaints from me.

There’s another Ortus, who was a minor entertaining character in the first book but is back as a much more substantial and extremely entertaining character in this one. He has one personality trait, which is being a Poetry Guy, which could have been annoying if the book treated this as being in any way deep or admirable, but mostly the book treats it as being entirely insufferable, which is good and correct. Honestly, if you are in any way a cranky or judgmental person, there’s just too much shit in this series that is so immensely satisfying. At one point someone is eulogized with a line like “She never said an unkind word, unless it was extremely funny,” which is certainly not a good description of me but is definitely a good description of some of the people I count as the kindest and most generous-hearted folks in my life, because anyone that can’t at make a decent mean joke when it’s warranted just isn’t going to be someone who stays in my life very long. These books are definitely for people who need to make that caveat even for the nicest people we know. Harrow is basically the triple-distilled form of my worst, most impatient self when I am trying to do shit and people are in my way (a thing that I’m struggling with a lot during quarantine especially) and I, at least, find reading her to be extremely indulgent in ways that probably don’t say flattering things about me.

The proper publication date for this book is August 4, which I am setting as now the date by which I need to konmari my book collection, so I can reward myself by buying hard copies of both Gideon and Harrow and rereading them and also just keeping them on the shelf where they can spark dumb, dysfunctional goth jock joy every time I see them.

Occasionally people will talk about a book and it won't catch my interest too much because they are leaving out a key piece of information, and then when I get that key piece of information, the thing shoots up a million spots on my To Be Read list.

Such a book was Tamsyn Muir's Gideon the Ninth. A bunch of friends had discussed it, fairly positively, as being about lesbian necromancers in space, which is certainly a hook. But it took a promotional email from Tor with a link to an article titled Gideon's Guide to Getting Galactic Swole: An Epic Tale of Skele-Flex Trashbaggery for me to realize that the book is ALSO about a big obnoxious jock lady with big obnoxious biceps and an internal monologue in a register that can only be described as Extremely Online. Given that the internet doesn't exist in the necromantic space empire Gideon lives in, it's quite a feat for her to be as Extremely Online as she is.

Gideon Nav is a big dumb redheaded meathead of an orphan who lives in the Ninth House of a creepy and extremely Goth necromantic space empire. The Ninth House is the creepiest and Gothiest of all the houses, of which there are, predictably, nine. The Ninth House is basically a weird religious colony that occupies a big crack in a planet that is definitely not based on Pluto. Gideon hates living in the Ninth House's Isengardian fortress of Drearburh, and everyone in the Ninth House hates her right back, although possibly not in that order. The only other person Gideon's age in Drearburh is the Reverend Daughter of the House, Harrowhark Nonagesimus, who is Gideon's opposite in every way--tiny, dark-haired, a gifted necromancer, basically not a dumbass at all, deliberately and cunningly cruel, and completely lacking in anything resembling muscle. She is, however, also a lesbian, although not nearly as easily distracted as Gideon is. Of course, they hate each other's guts.

However, due to a series of events in varying levels of deliberateness, Gideon winds up being the only person even remotely suitable to serve as Harrowhark's cavalier when she is summoned off-planet to compete to become a Lyctor, which is basically a sort of immortal knight-saint to the Undying Emperor. Necromancers absolutely must be paired with cavaliers, because they always have been, and necros and cavs ascend to Lyctorhood in pairs as well. So either they will both become immortal or neither of them will. Then most of the book takes place on the planet of the First House, which isn't really a proper House--the First House is technically the Emperor (I think?) but he's not allowed on the First House's planet, which basically exists as a big, ancient, crumbling, but much-warmer-than-Drearburh temple complex. The challengers--i.e., the necro and cav pairs from the Second through Eighth houses--basically have to hang out there with three priests and a bunch of reanimated skeleton servants until they figure out how to become Lyctors. From there, stuff starts going wrong.

One of the things I realized about a third of the way through the book that made everything ten times more hilarious was the realization that if this were a normal adventure book about a competition between different feudal houses, it would definitely have had a different House as its viewpoint. One of the ones that dressed sort of normal, at least. Probably the Fourth House, whose challengers were both teens, if it were a YA book. But the Ninth House would be the mysterious fan favorites--the weirdest, most distant House, with a lot of mystery surrounding them, both of its representatives aloof and inscrutable, wearing black robes and skull makeup and skulking in and out of scenes without talking to anyone. Harrowhark forbids Gideon from talking to anyone, so everyone else thinks she's taken a vow of silence because she's a creepy shadow cultist penitent, and are therefore spared from Gideon's walking-pile-of-memes thought processes until much later in the book, where they are (unsurprisingly, but hilariously) floored to hear how she actually talks. Just the contrast between the Ninth House's aesthetic and Gideon and Harrow's actual personalities makes me want to see this book adapted for TV; it would be the absolute funniest shit ever.

Even not filmed, it's still pretty funny shit. I made the mistake of reading it on the T a lot this weekend because I had to take the T a lot, and I was having the hardest time not absolutely losing it in public every time some absolutely idiotic meme got snuck in in a way that somehow made perfect sense, or whenever Gideon dramatically put on her sunglasses over her skull face paint or busted up the tone of some courtly dialogue by calling somebody an assmunch.

Another thing I liked about this book is that there is not very much romance! None of the romance that there is is robust or explicit enough to constitute a romantic plotline. There is a lot of Gideon being easily distracted and telling very bad suggestive jokes, and there is some unresolved but very tense tension in and among Gideon and Harrow's incredibly fucked-up lifelong loathing of each other, but nobody actually wastes any time on fluffy stuff because they are all very busy fighting epic bone constructs and getting completely covered in gore repeatedly and in the grossest ways Tamsyn Muir can think of (which are pretty gross; I am quite impressed).

So, in short: Goth stuff, ultraviolence, jokes, skellingtons, upsettingly large biceps, and no wholesome fluffy shit. This one definitely falls under the "It's like it was written just for me!" category.

So, back when I last whined about the state of my healths (I have multiple healths... spiritual, ecumenical... grammatical) on the Internet, we learned that I was having chest pains and shortness of breath and that, after going to the dentist and some clinic on the Friday, I drove through Boston (cos I'm nuts) to get X-rays on the Saturday. Verdict: my lungs were not imploding or anything serious like that. They were just inflamed, and I should sit around and do nothing and not put any stress on them until it goes away. Since it hasn't 100% gone away, I haven't been to the gym in two weeks, which is having a serious influence on the state of my current healths. I have spent the past two weeks going through Claudia's Stages of Exercise Withdrawal, which go as thus: 1) Feel stiff, 2) feel like eating (and then eat) "comfort" foods such as pizza and mac'n'cheese, 3) feel fat and lazy (and still stiff), 4) have trouble sleeping. Today we hit Stage 5) ability to eat deteriorates. Usually this stage manifests as lack of appetite; this is the good way. Today the bad way happened, which is when I eat a normal-sized meal and my body goes "WHAT THE HELL DID YOU EAT A WHOLE MEAL FOR, YOU'RE NOT DOING ANYTHING WITH THAT ENERGY" and tries to convince me that I would feel better if I threw it back up. I did not do this, but I did go home from work early and I think I am going to take a shower and a nap and just drink orange juice for the rest of the day.

Also, today I squished a gigantic bug at work, this thing was at least four inches long and two inches wide not counting the scary jumbo shrimp antennae; it crawled out of my desk before nine o'clock (which is SUPER rude) and I screamed like a girl in a 1950s movie, but then I killed it with my eminently sensible shoes, so I came out looking okay. I think it may have been a cockroach of some sort, but my expertise with bugs is basically limited as follows:

DOES THIS LOOK LIKE A WASP? Yes/No
If NO --> Kill it
If YES --> Make someone else kill it

Also also:

see more Lolcats and funny pictures, and check out our Socially Awkward Penguin lolz!

Two things I sees much of lately, predominantly from highly educated people, many of whom are writers:

Fracking is when rich companies come and pummel the shale in the ground near your house to extract oil, and it sets your drinking water on fire.
Frakking is what you say when you're mad at some Cylons.
So when the oil companies come and make your drinking water inflammable and you're so mad you think they must be Cylons, you say "Frakking fracking! Those assholes fracked our shale and it frakked up our water supply!"

Barack is President Obama's first name.
A barracks is a dormitory for the military.
Barrack is not a real goddamn word, although Wikipedia tells me it is the name of a video game.

The first one is quite forgivable, particularly if you are not a BSG geek and do not realize that there are two definitions of "fra(c/k)king", but I figured I'd clear it up for anyone who wants to know. Now, the second one kind of makes me bang my head against my desk in frustration, just a little bit, and I beg anyone and everyone who ever wants to mention Barack Obama in writing again to STOP DOING THIS.

Off to take that shower and nap now.

I had the bestest set of dreams last night and I'm already forgetting them, noooooo.

The first one was not so much a fun dream as one with a really awesome story (I think?) and I wish I could remember enough of it to hammer it out of weird dream-structure and into some sort of story, and also see if it's actually as awesome as I thought it was. It took place in some sort of oddly overdeveloped dystopian future (Brave New World style); the main features that I remember were that the only available foods were dessert foods because all food was only owned by one company, which from their name, which I don't quite remember anymore, used to be Cold Stone Creamery until they bought out every other food production company ever. Oddly enough I don't think this had anything to do with national public health issues or the obesity crisis or whatever; I think it was all marketing--you could get all the nutrients and stuff from any other kind of food from only eating dessert, because the marketers found out that Americans really like dessert, so they marketed EVERYTHING into dessert. At some point I was upset about this (I actually do not want to eat dessert foods all day!) and I was also cranky about something else that I can' remember what it was but was apparently very taboo to complain about, or something, I've totally lost that part of the dream by now, but it ended up with my family and myself basically pissing off everybody and having to run away and hide. We were additionally disliked because we were immigrants; you could tell because we had three children. (I think my subconscious has been reading too many development economics textbooks at work.) (I think I was even whiter in my dream than I am IRL, because I distinctly remember being blonde, but the Americans in my head were really xenophobic.) Also there were no noncommercial spaces--there were basically just malls and hotels. People didn't have homes, they just stayed in hotels that were in the malls, all the time.

My second dream was less story-ish but was fun, since it involved going to a lot of Blind Guardian concerts. I was part of the press and for some reason this meant that I had to change my clothes for every single concert, because there were always specific t-shirts and stuff that the people in charge wanted me to wear. Most of them were uncomfortable and looked terrible on me, but mostly I was just concerned that endlessly changing my clothes was distracting me from preparing for the interviews I was supposed to be taking. Make of that what you will.

I also swear to God I had dreams about the short story I am trying to rewrite. We will see if that affects my actual rewriting of it in any way. Maybe next week, I can have some freaking dreams about Tess and what the hell is supposed to happen between getting out of Faerie and getting to the capitol.

This be my motto self right now.

Current Mood: awake
Current Music: Blind Guardian, "The New Order"

'Cos it's my favorite time of year again--the American Library Association's 27th Banned Books Week.

Bold 'em if you've read 'em!

100 MOST FREQUENTLY BANNED OR CHALLENGED BOOKS OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY (2000-2007)
1. Harry Potter (series) - J. K. Rowling
2. Alice (series) - Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
3. The Chocolate War - Robert Cormier
4. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
5. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou
6. Scary Stories - Alvin Schwartz
7. Fallen Angels - Walter Dean Meyers
8. It's Perfectly Normal - Robie Harris
9. And Tango Makes Three - Justin Richardson/Peter Parnell
10. Captain Underpants - Dave Pilkey
11. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
12. The Bluest Eye - Toni Morrison
13. Forever - Judy Blume
14. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
15. The Perks of Being a Wallflower - Stephen Chbosky
16. Killing Mr. Griffin - Lois Duncan
17. Go Ask Alice - Anonymous
18. King and King - Linda de Haan
19. Catcher in the Rye - J. D. Salinger
20. Bridge to Terabithia - Catherine Patterson
21. The Giver - Lois Lowry
22. We All Fall Down - Robert Cormier
23. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
24. Beloved - Toni Morrison
25. The Face on the Milk Carton - Caroline Cooney
26. Snow Falling on Cedars - David Guterson
27. My Brother Sam is Dead - James Lincoln Collier
28. In the Night Kitchen - Maurice Sendak
29. His Dark Materials (series) - Philip Pullman
30. Gossip Girl (series) - Cecily von Ziegesar
31. What My Mother Doesn't Know - Sonya Sones
32. Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging - Louise Rennison
33. It's So Amazing - Robie Harris
34. Arming America - Martin Bellasiles
35. Kaffir Boy - Mark Mathabane
36. Blubber - Judy Blume
37. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
38. Athletic Shorts - Chris Crutcher
39. Bless Me, Ultima - Rudolfo Anaya
40. Life is Funny - E. R. Frank
41. Daughters of Eve - Lois Duncan
42. Crazy Lady - Jane Leslie Conley
43. The Great Gilly Hopkins - Katherine Patterson
44. You Hear Me - Betsy Franco
45. Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut
46. Whale Talk - Chris Crutcher
47. The Adventures of Super Diaper Baby - Dav Pilkey
48. The Facts Speak for Themselves - Brock Cole
49. The Terrorist - Caroline Cooney
50. Mick Harte Was Here - Barbara Park
51. Summer of My German Soldier - Bette Green
52. The Upstairs Room - Joanna Reiss
53. When Dad Killed Mom - Julius Lester
54. Blood and Chocolate - Annette Curtis Klause
55. The Fighting Ground - Avi
56. The Things They Carried - Tim O'Brien
57. Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry - Mildred Taylor
58. Fat Kid Rules the World - K. L. Going
59. The Earth, My Butt, And Other Big Round Things - Carolyn Mackler
60. A Time to Kill - John Grisham
61. Rainbow Boys - Alex Sanchez
62. Olive's Ocean - Kevin Henkes
63. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey
64. A Day No Pigs Would Die - Robert Newton Peck
65. Speak - Laurie Halse Anderson
66. Always Running - Louis Rodriguez
67. Black Boy - Richard Wright
68. Julie of the Wolves - Jean Craighead George
69. Deal With It! - Esther Drill
70. Detour for Emmy - Marilyn Reynolds
71. Draw Me A Star - Eric Carle
72. Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
73. Harris and Me - Gary Paulson
74. Junie B. Jones (series) - Barbara Park
75. So Far From the Bamboo Grove - Yoko Watkins
76. Song of Solomon - Toni Morrison
77. Staying Fat for Sarah Burns - Chris Crutcher
78. The What's Happening To My Body? Book - Lynda Madaras
79. The Boy Who Lost His Face - Louis Sachar
80. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
81. Anastasia Again! - Lois Lowry
82. Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret - Judy Blume
83. Bumps in the Night - Harry Allard
84. Goosebumps (series) - R. L. Stine
85. Shade's Children - Garth Nix
86. Cut - Patricia McCormick
87. Grendel - John Garner
88. The House of Spirits - Isabel Allende
89. I Saw Esau - Iona Opte
90. Ironman - Chris Crutcher
91. The Stupids (series) - Harry Allard
92. Taming the Star Runner - S. E. Hinton
93. Then Again, Maybe I Won't - Judy Blume
94. Tiger Eyes - Judy Blume
95. Like Water for Chocolate - Laura Esquivel
96. Nathan's Run - John Gilstrap
97. Pinkerton, Behave! - Steven Kellog
98. Freaky Friday - Mary Rodgers
99. Halloween ABC - Eve Merriam
100. Heather Has Two Mommies - Leslea Newman

Post this in your own journal. Or in the comments. Or at least post your score in the comments.