copperfyre | Reading

Finished The Mother's Recompense by Edith Wharton, a 1925 novel about a woman who reunites with her now-adult daughter after having left her husband and losing custody when her daughter was a toddler, only to find out that - and, as this information comes out halfway through the novel but is revealed in the second or third line of the blurb, depending on which one you read, I don't feel like it is technically a spoiler* - her daughter is now engaged to her (the mother's) ex-lover, and handles this very badly. I spent most of it wanting to shake the characters (mostly the mom, Kate, and her ex, Chris**) while screaming PLEASE COMMUNICATE, although, in this case, honest communication definitely would blow up at least two relationships.

( ... )

* I knew the "twist" going in, from the plot description, but I have no idea whether someone reading this when it was originally published would have been similarly forewarned, so I was curious about what the original author intent/audience expectation was— was it supposed to be a shocking twist, or was the emphasis on the dramatic irony of expectation leading up to it? I can't tell from the construction of the narrative alone - there are definitely hints, and red herrings, and then the fairly obvious clue that literally no other youngish man besides Chris is ever introduced - but it probably works either way.

** Honestly kind of a surprise to read an Edith Wharton novel where everyone has names like Kate and Chris rather than, e.g., Newland and Undine.

osprey_archer

It has been some time since I’ve given a hobby update! In the months since my previous post, you will be glad to know that I’ve kept cross-stitching.

In fact, I’ve been enjoying cross-stitching so much that I’ve finally managed to set up a morning tea routine: get up around 6:30, make tea, put one (1) chocolate-covered hobnob on my favorite little plate, and then cross-stitch till 7:15 when it’s time to get ready for work. Life is so much better when I get up in time for a gentle on-ramp to the morning, and yet until now I haven’t been able to convince myself to actually get out of bed in time.

I finished my Halloween cross-stitch in time for Halloween (want to find a better frame for it though), stitched a tremendously round little red Christmas bird as a break (amazing how fast you can cross stitch when the whole thing is just one color!), and am now working on a little Victorian Christmas tree which is for my ornament exchange with my friend Caitlin.

This little Christmas tree is WAY more involved than I expected, so I probably won’t finish my little cornucopia in time for Thanksgiving. But I have acquired the cornucopia pattern and will at any rate have it ready for NEXT year.

Other patterns on deck:

The absolutely adorable Puss in Boots from Veronique Enginger’s book of fairy tale cross stitch.

A Tiffany window inspired pattern of birds and bamboo and flowers from a book of Art Nouveau cross stitch. (I have the floss for this one but have been momentarily stymied in finding the right color fabric.)

And I’ve promised

troisoiseaux a Nevermore, garnished with ravens…

I’m also taking a two-part embroidery class. On Monday I started my jellyfish, and next Monday I will hopefully finish the jellyfish. The backing fabric is a dark navy blue so the tentacles are pink floss, and the top is going to be gold and turquoise and dark royal blue beads.

Book projects: since the previous post, I finished the Newbery project, and then just this weekend finished the Postcard Book project! (Jules Verne was the last Famous Author postcard from the set.) Which means that I COULD start the E. M. Forster readthrough...

But I’ve decided to hold off until after Christmas, because I just had a brilliant idea for a Christmas project: a picture book Advent calendar! I have MANY Christmas picture books on my list this year, so I’ll get them from the library, wrap them up in brown paper (or newspaper or whatever paper I have available), and then select a surprise book each night to read.

I probably won’t end up posting about most of them because I often don’t have a lot to say about picture books. Although maybe a weekly round-up with a line or two about each book?

At the moment I’m actually a bit short of books (I thought the list was AMPLY long, but some of the books are only available in the archives etc.), so I may have to poke around to find a few more. We shall see!

And of course I AM planning some December archive visits to enjoy those Christmas books! In fact, I believe I can schedule an archive visit next week (not for Christmas books of course; a firm believer in saving Christmas season till after Thanksgiving), as registration is at long last winding up. Perhaps it’s time to begin A. A. Milne’s The Princess and the Apple Tree.

kalinara posting in

i_read_what

Slight delay on Cast of Corbies, but it should be up tomorrow.

landingtree

Dark Reflections, by Samuel Delany.

Realist novel about the life of someone with many of Delany's own marked identity traits - black gay writer in New York before and after Stonewall - who is deeply unlike Delany in various ways, most notably: his writing career remains largely unrecognised, and he is ill at ease with his own sexuality. Interesting project, kind of makes me want to go off and compare Delany's favourite writers with the ones Andrew, the protagonist, likes - not going to be a favourite of mine but I like being inside Delany's writing.

The Merlin Conspiracy, by Diana Wynne Jones.

Every so often over the years I’ve remembered that there is one Diana Wynne Jones novel I never read (not counting The Changeover.) I’m not sure why I didn’t get around to it, except for a vague sense of lack of hype. But it does mean that now I’ve had the treat of reading one last Jones novel as an adult whose plot I did not know! Also not a favourite but I enjoyed it a lot and made guesses about the plot that were totally wrong (see under the cut.)

It never occurred to me that this book might be a thriller, and it mostly isn’t, but I did think the early sequence in the magic security detail of a prince attending a cricket match, combined with the appearance of super-badass Romanov, was the book waving at other ‘The proper noun common noun’ titles.)

It feels weird to be reading this last, like putting a puzzle piece into a jigsaw without having known there was a piece missing. Partly this is listening to Eight Days of Diana Wynne Jones (and I read this now partly so as to have thought about it well in advance of the podcast getting to it), partly it's having read all the other late DWJ: it feels close to Year of the Griffin, having a dyslexic character whose magic is backwards, and a broader point to make about how a particular system of education in wizard’s magic gives access to only a tiny blinkered subset of magic's real possibilities - and also they're both structured around a sequence of striking people showing up. The book starts out in the retinue of the King of Blest (very nearly Britain), which constantly travels the country to maintain its magics. And in fact it is a book about touring Blest to maintain its magics, although not quite in the way the retinue is supposed to.

( Spoilers )

Peregrine: Primus by Avram Davidson.

Read this, preferably aloud, for wit and flowing language and classics jokes. Do not read it for plot or character or women doing things. It is a pure picaresque, pleased with its own prose style (and with some reason to be.) I found two-thirds of this book boring, was delighted by the middle third mainly because that was the bit I read aloud to myself and was in the mood for, and on the balance of all this, am selling my copy, having kept it around unread for more than ten years because Michael Swanwick put it on a list of recommendations.

Currently reading:

I'm halfway through the sweet collection of letters between a group of booksellers and an overseas customer who they become friends with, 84 Charing Cross Road. It is very short and I will finish it this week.

I am also halfway through The Power Broker, the Robert Moses biography, but that is a very different halfway through! I will probably post about it at more length at some point, it is very good, but I've got to the point where I need to take a break, because Robert Moses was in many ways not a wonderful force in the world to begin with but I think I'm at the pivot-point where the last of his redeeming features evaporate, and I need to take a deep breath first. (For a big chunk of the book, he is very good at getting things done, in situations where things desperately need to get done. But now he has reached the point where he's too powerful for anyone to stop him and also too busy to check whether the things he's doing are actually good; but of course they're good! He's the one doing them! Gosh I hate Robert Moses.) For several weeks I have been responding to almost entirely unrelated bits of conversation with, "This reminds me of something I learned about Robert Moses, a man I hate," so like I said, deep breath.

sunnymodffa posting in

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osprey_archer

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

It took me some time, but I’ve finished Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea! I read the translation by Mendor T. Brunetti, which comes with an afterword which talks a bit about the history of Verne translations. Apparently the first guy who translated Verne into English didn’t understand a lot of the science, and either mistranslated or straight up cut it out, which gave Verne a very poor reputation among American science fiction fans for years until someone finally went back to the original French and said “Now wait a minute.” So the Brunetti translation is a corrective.

We also do NOT find out the specifics of Captain Nemo’s tragic backstory, although the afterword kindly explains that there were two different versions, one that Verne’s publisher axed for political reasons and one that was eventually published in The Mysterious Island.

( spoilers )

Tons of undersea details all the way through to the end, and a very interesting glimpse of 19th century science. Nemo and co. visit the South Pole by sailing the Nautilus under the ice shelf and then popping up in the polar sea, which reflects the popular scientific theory of the day.

What I’m Reading Now

Daphne Du Maurier’s The Winding Stair: Francis Bacon, His Rise and Fall. This is the sequel to Du Maurier’s Golden Lads, a biography of the Bacon brothers which mostly focuses on Francis’s older brother Anthony the sickly spymaster. I found Golden Lads a bit of a slog (Anthony just spends so much time ill in bed), but The Winding Stair is zipping right along! Bacon has just befriended the king’s new favorite George Villiers, who seems a great improvement on the last favorite who awkwardly has just been found guilty of poisoning someone with an arsenic enema.

What I Plan to Read Next

My Unread Bookshelf book for this month is Gene Stratton Porter’s The Harvester. Every GSP book I’ve read has been absolutely deranged, so I’m excited to see where this book will take me.

selenak

The short version: visually gorgeous (I expected no less from del Torro), well acted, but alas, it reminds me of nothing as much as a certain type of fanfiction - grovelfic, in lack of a better term - I used to find annoying back in the Highlander days, aka the ones where not only Cassandra is the true villalin but Methos was the fluffiest Horseman of the Apocalypse ever and Duncan profoundly apologizes. I mean, it's not that extreme, because Victor is something of an narcissistic jerk in the novel (though not only), and the Creature, who is my favourite character in it anyway, is very much the product of unearned abuse before he starts dealing out death and horror, but good lord. What Del Torro did in his version is really the type of fanfic that absolves the favored woobie (or do we say blorbo these days?) from any wrongdoing whatsoever, thereby unintentionally taking something crucial from what makes the character away, and shoves it upon the unfavourite. And that's before we get to "hat is the geography of this story anyway?" and "why got spoiler engaged to spoiler in the first place?" Mind you, if I had never ever read the novel, I suspect I might have loved the film, beccause as I said - terrific looks and good acting - but as it is, I have to consider the adaptation aspect, and here I have to say Penny Dreadful remains uncontested champion for best rendition of both the Creature (Caliban, just that there is no misunderstanding) and Victor Frankenstein in both their flaws and virtues and (Mary) Shelleyan themes. Runner up isn't this one, but the Branagh movie, which, yes, Kenneth Branagh in his slightly megalomaniac self indulgent Coppola phase, and he softens Victor's characterisation a bit (though not to the degree Del Torro softens the Creature's), but still, of all the adaptations I've seen, it probably sticks the most to the actual novel. (While Penny Dreadful's versions of the Creature and Frankenstein stick most the the spirit and characterisation.) (James Whale's two Frankenstein movies are their own artistic creations which while founding the pop culture idea of both the scientist and the creature are really their own independent things, sharing little but names and not even those at pars.)

( The spoilery version wonders whether everyone is telelporting at different plot points )

In conclusion: maybe do an original script the next time, del Torro? I really wonder whether the crazy geography and all the other technical issues would have mattered to me if I hadn't been comparing book and film, or whether I would allowed myself being swept away by the spectacle, and the characters as presented in the movie. But I do suspect some of the characterisation questions would still have remained.

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Location: Munich

sholio

Fixits will continue until morale improves.

To Your Health (Babylon 5, 4500 wds)
The dinner party on Minbar in 5x21: Objects At Rest goes a little differently. Canon-divergent AU.

snickfic

A lot of meh here.

Crash (1996). A man and his wife get involved in the car crash fetish scene. I really don't think "erotic thriller" is adequate preparation for this movie, but then again I'm not sure what is. I recently saw this described as "a series of sex scenes separated by car crashes," and that's about right.

I liked:
- The completely normalized polyamory. This married couple get off on fucking other people and telling each other about it, good for them.
- That it was a lot gayer than I expected, especially for 1996. Both m/m and f/f scenes (even if the latter felt a bit out of nowhere).

I was disappointed by:
- James Spader. THIS is James Spader? This is the guy everyone is low-key obssessed with? This gormless Zach Gilford lookalike?
- How we open with the wife, but the husband gets all the development, and she just gets pulled along in his wake. She seems to enjoy it, but I wanted to see her take some initiative, too.
- Somehow I'd osmosed that there was like car-related body mod stuff, like Cronenberg's version of Tetsuo: The Iron Man. The one gal with the leg brace was not really sufficient for my tastes.

--

Predator: Badlands (2025). A Yautja runt goes on a quest to kill an unkillable monster to avenge(?) his brother's death at his father's hands, and ends up teaming up with a Weyland-Yutani synth (Elle Fanning) with no legs.

This is by the same guy who directed Prey, Dan Trachtenberg. The writing felt more obvious and more cobbled-together than that movie, probably because it was trying to do more. I got tired of people stating the same obvious story beat multiple times.

I think this is the first time the Yautja have been humanized to nearly this degree, right? I've only seen Prey and the AvP movies, so I may be missing some lore. I'm not sure what I needed from a race of big game hunters was daddy issues, but otoh murderous patriarchy does go hand in hand with the big game hunting, I guess. IDK, I wanted the Yautja in general and our specimen in particular to be weirder.

However, I eventually enjoyed Thia the synth, who has a kind of anti-Gamora/Nebula relationship with a fellow synth. It passed the Bechdel test, good job! And the movie had some fantastic deadly alien fauna. Just completely bonkers creatures that want to kill you in the most unlikely ways. A+.

--

Die My Love (2025). A woman (Jennifer Lawrence) moves with her husband (Robert Pattinson) to his rural family home, has a baby, and has a mental breakdown.

My impression of this movie from the trailer was that this was maybe about a couple's relationship slowly escalating to bonkers attempted murder. (Pattinson's presence definitely contributed to my impression of it being bonkers.) There was no baby in the trailer I saw, and if there had been I wouldn't have gone to see it. That said, I don't know that it was ABOUT motherhood or post-partum depression or about the marital relationship. Frankly, I cannot confidently say what it was about. The choice of first and last shots suggest it's about the house?

I can't say it's not bonkers, but more in terms of its storytelling choices than its content as such. The timeline is weird and confused, but not in an interesting way. We learn literally nothing about the main character's background until about the 80% mark. (She was orphaned at age 10? Might be good to mention that earlier??)

Some of what we see on screen probably isn't happening. The ending, where she walks naked into a forest fire, I feel almost certainly didn't happen. There's a recurring theme where she prowls around on the ground but also might be pretending to be a horse? Also there's a horse that just wanders around and which they hit with their car at one point? (To be fair, it's not the first movie this year where a thematically significant horse just wanders through now and then. Looking at you, On Swift Horses.)

To be honest, JLaw was the biggest draw of this movie for me, and I did get plenty of her. It's a JLaw showcase, and I also enjoyed Sissy Spacek in a supporting role. But overall, man. I ventured outside my usual genre, and I had regrets!

osprey_archer

I haven’t made a ton of progress on my 2015 book list since I posted it… but I’ve read so many books on my 2016 list that I figured I’d better hurry up and post it before they were all gone. It’s just that so many of the 2016 books are shorter than the remaining books on the 2015 list!

But I’m getting to the long books on the 2016 list now, so that should slow me down.

~~Barbara Cooney - Basket Moon (Mary Lyn Ray)~~

~~Abbie Farwell Brown - The Curious Book of Birds~~ (I read this on Gutenberg on my phone, only near the end Gutenberg suddenly changed how it displayed on the phone so it was really irritating to read. I hope this isn’t permanent, or it’s going to seriously mess with my ability to read more Angela Brazil.)

Hampton Sides - either On Desperate Ground: The Marines at The Reservoir, the Korean War's Greatest Battle or The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook. Has anyone read either?

Margaret Oliphant - still haven’t finished Kirsteen for my 2015 list! But for 2016, Phoebe Jr. or perhaps Salem Chapel?

Gene Stratton Porter - The Harvester

Elizabeth Wein - American Wings: Chicago’s Pioneering Black Aviators and the Race for Equality in the Sky (co-authored with Sherri L. Smith, author of Flygirls, super excited for this one)

~~Dorothy P Lathrop - The Colt from Moon Mountain~~

Enid Bagnold - National Velvet (might need to have an accompanying movie night?)

~~Robert McCloskey - Lentil~~

Ngaio Marsh - Tied Up in Tinsel (saving for the Christmas season)

~~Frances Hodgson Burnett - The Good Wolf~~

Elizabeth Enright - Then There Were Five

~~Katherine Milhous - A Book for Jennifer (Alice Dalgleish)~~

Emile Zola - I’ve read Germinal and Nana. Suggestions for my next foray?

~~D. E. Stevenson - Young Mrs. Savage~~

Sorche Nic Leodhas - Sea-Spell and Moor-Magic: Tales of the Western Isles (also super excited for this one!)

Maud Hart Lovelace - The Trees Kneel at Christmas (saving this for Christmas too obviously)

beatrice_otter

Now that

crossworks authors have been revealed, I can share what I wrote! I wrote a Miss Fisher/Lord Peter crossover!

My first thought was of course that I should do some sort of casefic, but couldn't come up with a case. My second thought was to have Phryne and Mary meet up during the war--Phrynne drove ambulances, Mary was a nurse--but then I realized that that would make major changes to Mary's life, because I could not picture Mary crossing paths with Phryne in any noteworthy way and then living the same aimless post-war life Mary did. I certainly couldn't see her getting involved with either Goyles or Cathcart. And that would be very interesting, but a much longer story than I had the capacity to write. So instead, I had Phryne meet Peter during the war.

Title: the wings of our frail souls
Author: Beatrice_Otter
Fandoms: Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries (TV)/Lord Peter Wimsey - Dorothy L. Sayers
Written for: sinkauli in

crossworks 2025
Betaed by: Lirelyn
Author's note: Canon has Phryne serving in a French women's ambulance unit during the war. I have changed this to the FANY, the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, which was a British women's volunteer group, because their general approach to the First World War was very similar to Phryne's approach to life in general. The British Army didn't want them, so they went over anyway and convinced the Belgians and the French to let them drive. They seem to have a long tradition of doing whatever the hell they thought needed doing and ignoring or steamrolling men who got in their way.

At AO3. On Squidgeworld. On Pillowfort. On tumblr.

***

It was not, Phryne thought as she steered Josephine through the French countryside, that you could precisely call her job boring. There was a war on, and she was much nearer the front than she told her parents in her infrequent letters home. She was driving an ambulance between the French triage unit and the hospital, avoiding potholes as best she could. The men in the back of her bus moaned or swore at each one she hit. It was important work, one part in the chain that saved as many men as possible from the jaws of death. It was good work, and more meaningful than she'd thought it would be when she'd signed up for the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, desperate for anything that would get her out of London.

It was only that she'd driven this route so often she could do it in her sleep. The only change was the appearance of more potholes and ruts.

Josephine's engine—which had been running roughly—died with a horrible sound.

Phryne swore, fluently and filthily, in French, and popped out to open up Josephine's hood. "Shouldn't have even dared think it was boring." A short bit of poking around confirmed her fears.

( Another FANY ambulance pulled up next to hers—Gertie, by the sound of it. )

troisoiseaux

Finished the Chiwetel Ejiofor-narrated audiobook of Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, and it turns out I had remembered way less of this book than I'd thought?? The parts that had stuck with me were the descriptions of the labyrinthine House and the world within, as the narrator understood it, and more or less the mystery of

( spoilers ahoy. ) Makes a very good audiobook!

Read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a 1962 novella following the titular Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, a political prisoner, through one day of life in a Stalin-era gulag. (Solzhenitsyn himself was a prisoner from 1945 to 1953.) A short but slow read, dense with small, compelling details.

Currently reading The Mother's Recompense by Edith Wharton, a 1925 novel about the return of a prodigal mother to New York and her now-adult daughter after pulling a reverse Ellen Olenska (leaving her husband and moving to Europe) almost two decades earlier. It's interesting how much WWI looms over this book, so far, especially because I associate Wharton so much more with the Gilded Age than the 1920s, which is when most of her novels were actually published.

Have just started Cloistered: My Years as a Nun by Catherine Coldstream, a memoir about joining a strict Carmelite order of contemplative (read: silent) nuns in the north of England as a recently bereaved twenty-something in 1989 and - per the opening scene - literally fleeing into the night to escape it twelve years later.

muccamukk

IDK if this petition will do anything, but here it is (for Canadians), and I've put an explainer, also. I hope there's more protests soon.

Reject Carney's Billionaire Budget.

Migrant Rights Network Response to Budget 2025.

rachelmanija

Poll #33823

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 127

View Respondents

Which of these books would you most like to see reviewed?

View Answers

Red Rising, by Pierce Brown. SF dystopia much beloved by many dudes.
18 (14.2%)

Lone Women, by Victor LaValle. Fantastic cross-genre western/historical/horror/fantasy.
32 (25.2%)

The Lout of Count's Family, by Yu Ryeo-Han. Korean isekai novel.
21 (16.5%)

The Haar, by David Sodergren. Cozy/gory/sweet horror about an old Scottish woman and a sea monster.
27 (21.3%)

The Everlasting, by Alix Harrow. Very unusual Arthurian AU time-travel fantasy.
57 (44.9%)

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, by Stephen Graham Jones. Fantastic historical horror about a Blackfeet vampire.
38 (29.9%)

Best of all Worlds, by Kenneth Oppel. Another absolutely terrible children's survival book, what the hell.
21 (16.5%)

The Age of Miracles, by Karen Thompson Walker. Coming of age at the end of the world; Ray Bradbury vibes but girl-centric.
24 (18.9%)

Surviving the Extremes, by Kenneth Kamler. A doctor for people in extreme climates/situations analyzes their effects on the body.
33 (26.0%)

When the Angels Left the Old Country, by Sacha Lamb. A Jewish demon and angel leave the old country; excellent voice, very Jewish.
52 (40.9%)

An Immense World, by Ed Yong. Outstanding nonfiction about how animals sense the world.
44 (34.6%)

Combat Surgeon: On Iwo Jima with the 27th Marines, by James Vedder. What it says on the box.
15 (11.8%)

Slewfoot, by Brom. Illustrated historical dark fantasy set in early American colonization.
9 (7.1%)

Animals, by Geoff Ryman. Animal zombie horror, at once deeply sad and utterly bonkers.
22 (17.3%)

Anyone read any of these?

osprey_archer

rachelmanija asked about the most peculiar Newberies. This list has a lot of overlap with my post about Nonsense in the Newberys, since nonsense books are by definition usually pretty peculiar, but also they’re peculiar on purpose which perhaps takes away some of the weirdness.

But the Newbery book that most sticks in my mind for sheer and possibly unintentional strangeness is Peggy Horvath’s Everything on a Waffle. I mentioned this book in the Nonsense post as perhaps nonsense-adjacent, but I’ve never made up my mind whether it’s meant to be or not.

It’s tonally very weird. Everything on a Waffle got a Newbery Honor in 2002, which was peak Grim Dead Relative era for the Newberys, and generally speaking these books are mired down with Grim Dead Relative Feelings. The protagonists grieve so hard that there’s no room for anything else in the story.

However, although Everything on a Waffle begins with our heroine losing her parents at sea, there is no Newbery Grieving Process. Our heroine is blithely convinced that her parents have merely been shipwrecked somewhere, and will return in good time, and meanwhile she’s enjoying life in her weird little town. There is, for instance, an award-winning restaurant where everything is served on a waffle, hence the title.

It’s been quite some time since I read the book, but what has stuck with me for years is the way that the heroine just keeps bopping along no matter what happens. It’s not that she’s Pollyanna-ish exactly. It’s more that she’s aware that she’s in some sort of picaresque tale and doesn’t take it too seriously when she comically loses appendages: a finger here, a toe there.

Eventually, social services decides that a competent guardian would do a better job keeping the child in one piece, and our heroine is removed from her kindly but inept relation and taken into care.

But then! Her parents reappear! Our heroine was right all along. They were alive, they have been rescued, and the family is whole again, minus of course a few of the heroine’s fingers and toes.

Simply a strange book! Very peculiar! It isn’t really a nonsense book, because unlike the true nonsense books there’s nothing technically impossible happening. But it all seems so improbable that it has something of that dream-like nonsense book feeling anyway.

sunnymodffa posting in

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muccamukk

Watch on YouTube

kingstoken posting in

fancake

Fandom: Sherlock Holmes (books)
Pairings/Characters: Holmes/Watson
Rating: T
Length: 47,061 words
Creator Links: Flawedamythyst
Theme: Mystery & Suspense, casefic

Summary: Moriarty kidnaps Watson.

Reccer's Notes: Watson is kidnapped by Moriarty. The story cycles between two POVs, Watson's and Holmes'. We follow Holmes as he does everything he can to find Watson, and Watson as he tries his best to survive as a prisoner. I will say Moriarty was actually menacing in this story, not watered down like some portrayals, and there is a lot suspense about if Holmes will be able to rescue Watson in time before something terrible occurs.

Fanwork Links: AO3

mific posting in

fancake

Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Characters/Pairings: John Sheppard, Rodney McKay
Rating: G
Length: 1800
Content Notes: no AO3 warnings apply
Creator Links: Sholio on AO3, Sholio's old SGA website
Themes: Mystery and suspense, Genfic, Ghosts

Summary: It gets bloody creepy here at night.

Reccer's Notes: This is an interesting story about Atlantis remembering her dead, and indeed those still living, in a somewhat troubling way. At first it's unclear how it's happening, but gradually John figures out it's just the city, haunted, and haunting them. Nicely creepy.

Fanwork Links: In Heaven and Earth

muccamukk

from Requiem by Anna Akhmatova
(translated from the Russian by Stanley Kunitz & Max Hayward)

Not under foreign skies
Nor under foreign wings protected -
I shared all this with my own people
There, where misfortune had abandoned us.

Instead of a Preface
In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months waiting in line outside the prison in Leningrad. One day somebody in the crowd identified me. Standing behind me was a woman, with lips blue from the cold, who had, of course, never heard me called by name before. Now she started out of the torpor common to us all and asked me in a whisper (everyone whispered there):
"Can you describe this?"
And I said: "I can."
Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face.