Things I read during Yuletide Season this year

[cahn]

(A more conventional reveal post here.)

-Reread A Deadly Education and The Last Graduate and had many many deep conversations with sprocket about how a magical school would feel/think, chronology, all the parts where Novik did or maybe did not think about where she was going in TLG when writing ADE, El as a massively unreliable narrator not just as regards her own feelings but also as regards actual canon historical events and dates and numbers thereof, etc.

-Did the deep dive into reading The Waste Land, which I'd of course read before but never taken the deep dive with. You guys, there's nothing like trying to do pastiche to make one realize that a canon author is a freaking genius. And also Eliot is a total troll, those footnotes, omg. (I am convinced he would absolutely positively put a rickroll in his poetry if he were writing today.)

I bought the edition by Helen Vendler because a) I recognized the name b) it had better footnotes (not just Eliot's) than the other paperback editions in the bookstore c) it was a very small paperback and I could carry it around with me everywhere, which I did for the last two months.

-Reread a bunch of rheinsberg posts, especially Katte's last letter, the Puncta.

-Reread a few chapters of 1 and 2 Kings, and also this interesting article casting Ahab and Jezebel as the victims of Bad Publicity, which I am super taking with a Very Large grain of salt (now that I know to mistrust pop historical articles basically Always) but which is still fascinating to think about.

-Read the Atlas Obscura article about Cannibal Ants in a Polish Bunker (which I had actually read before but had completely forgotten I had read) which is super creepy and super fascinating and with a happy ending, except that when I was telling D about it, he was like, "wait, you mean they set the cannibal ants LOOSE ON THE WORLD??" which, uh, hadn't been my takeaway.

Comments

[hamsterwoman]

I have not made my way into the S's yet, so I haven't read the Scholomance fic, but I need to tell you here as well that your "The Waste Land" pastiche is amazing, and one of my favorite things to have found in Yuletide over the years, rickroll, Latin, impressively obscure Yuletide-nominated fandoms and all :D

Also, amused that the author of this work of genius is already on my flist, as it saves me the trouble of having to friend them after reveals as a kindred spirit, LOL :D

[cahn]

:DDDDDD I can't tell you how happy both this comment and the one you left on it are making me :D <3 (Although the Latin is not at all my doing, it being something I Do Not Know About, it is me emailing mildred_of_midgard and being all "please help me with Latin and provide me with an appropriate Latin tag!")

(also I love your icon!)

[mildred_of_midgard]

That was fun!

[cahn]

:D I am glad! It was fun for me too :)

[hamsterwoman]

:D

(The icon was from a batch of poetry icons I made some years ago, and one of the few that actually came out looking the way I liked. My friend and I happened to read "The Waste Land" around the same time -- don't recall if we both got it at school (different schools, but maybe they happened to be in sync) or how that came about -- and we were both haunted by that line/passage, so it's the thing I associate with the poem most strongly.)

[cahn]

Oh, that's a neat story! And a very cool icon. I really like that line too, although I guess it didn't make it into the pastiche :)