missroserose | Return of the return of the Wednesday reading meme?

So it turns out that trying to read when I’m on a writing bender is...actually fairly hard? It’s almost like working on a story between six and fourteen hours a day doesn’t leave me much time for...well, much of anything. But that fic is done, and holiday stuff is pretty much finished, so here we go again! We’ll see how long I last this time.

What I’ve just finished reading

Tender Morsels, by Margo Lanigan. I’ve been thinking a lot about story structure lately, in part because it’s something I’ve been aiming to have more of in my work, so this was a fascinating read in part because it didn’t follow a traditional structure at all. Or, really, you could almost argue that it’s the reverse of a traditional structure—where in a Hero’s Journey-style story you have the inciting incident that sends the main character out into the world to be forever changed, here you have a victimized teenage girl responding to further trauma by literally withdrawing into her safe, comfortable fantasy world and staying there for decades while she raises her two daughters. I appreciated that the story largely treated this choice with empathy; while she’s upbraided by one character later on for her selfishness in not allowing her daughters to experience the real world until they’re grown, most of the others are thoroughly understanding—and the price she pays ends up being a quiet and personal one rather than the Epic Potentially World-Ending Catastrophe that most Western storytelling would demand. There’s a lot to chew over in this story, about the effects of trauma, and culture, and how to make existing as a disempowered person bearable.

If I had one complaint about it it’d probably be that the story treats the “real” world’s brutally patriarchal culture as an inevitability, something that can’t be fought directly, but only undermined covertly, through magic and other hidden means. I guess I have just enough of my mother’s crusader tendencies to want to say “forget that, we can do better”...but power dynamics are forever a tricky thing to alter, and from the perspective of the main characters, there’s really not that much they can do; it’s something of a triumph even to learn to exist within it.

What I’m currently reading

Gideon the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir. I’m almost through the audiobook, and hoo boy have I been enjoying it. The author and the narrator both are doing a bang-up job in helping my brain keep the large ensemble cast straight—every character has a distinct personality and voice, and the ways they bounce off each other are eminently believable. Gideon, with her irreverent attitude and occasional brilliance, and Harrowhawk, with her continual brilliance and equivalent insufferability, continue to be one of my favorite fictional pairings; even once they start to trust each other somewhat, their chemistry is just phenomenal. The worldbuliding I’m a little fuzzier on, but the characters are so propulsive that I’ve been more than willing to just go with it. And given that they’re basically acolytes of a mysterious and claustrophobic religious order that requires absolute faith from its adherents, to a degree it works that the origins are mysterious, even if I occasionally find myself wondering about practicalities like “okay, so, who exactly maintains the shuttles? And the atmosphere processors? And grows the food? And who’re they fighting in this mysterious war that’s only occasionally mentioned...?“ I’ll be interested to see if she expands on that in the further books.

What I plan to read next

To be honest, I have no idea. I may well just pick up something from one of the piles of books around my house—God knows I have enough of them, haha.

Fanfiction Spotlight

This week I want to point out Solus, Soulless, Solace by Blake (@newleafover on tumblr). I’ve often thought that the soulless version of Sam we meet in Season 6 of Supernatural is one of those opportunities practically tailor-made for fanfic—the direction they took him in the show worked fine, but there’s just so much potential for exploration there, especially with Sam’s internality. What does the world look like, to a human being without a soul? How does his inability to feel emotion change how he relates to his loved ones, and especially to the one person his life revolves around? And without the ability to love, what is it that keeps him so tied to Dean?

Blake uses the opportunity to present an unrelentingly crystalline portrait of trauma-induced functional depression, where habit and careful consideration carries you through most of the motions of your life but you’re acutely aware that your usual breadth and depth of emotional experience is just—gone. Further, they write it in second person, unusual for a non-reader-insert fic but powerful in that it strips away that layer of insulation. And damn if it isn’t 100% effective. I happened to come across it after a week that had involved more than a little emotional heavy lifting; reading it was like going outside during a sunny eighteen-degree day when all my muscles were sore. It felt therapeutic, if only in the sense of “oh, right, this is why I’m doing all this painful internal work, so I don’t end up here again.”