you brought it on yourself miss twiddle

Dear Yuletider,

Thank you so much for writing for me! I'm requesting a mix of tiny-to-non-existent to fairly-established small fandoms, and I will love anything you write for any of them.

( General Likes and DNWs )

Okay, onto the specifics! I'm requesting 4 fandoms this year:

( Shira Calpurnia - Matthew Farrer )


( Imperial Radch - Ann Leckie )


( Alpennia - Heather Rose Jones )

( Queen's Thief - Megan Whalen Turner )

So I'm playing in this volunteer "baroque" orchestra, part of the First Family of Alternative Classical Music in the Valley Productions (father conducts, mother sings, 8-year-old son composes, plays the violin, is hyperactively precocious). The orchestra is mostly local music teachers, plus a few retired symphony players. Very retired, I might add. I may have a grand-daughterly crush on the principal violist, who is probably about 90 and a bit hard of hearing, and who always contests dynamic instructions, and then plays loud all the time anyway. He's also adorable.

Anyway, the awkward thing is that we're playing a Haydn aria (this one) and our singer (the conductor's wife, naturally) isn't quite up to it. She sounds good in some places, but a lot of the passage work is not terrible clean, and the high sustained notes have that "soprano imitating a cat" sound. I shouldn't snark, but...

In other news, from this interview with Meghan Whalen Turner (PAGE CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR CONSPIRACY OF KINGS) is this interesting quote about influential books:

It's a toss-up between Dogsbody by Diana Wynne Jones, which a friend gave me when I was 16 (he thought he was loaning it to me, but I never gave it back) and The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, which I read as a freshman in college. Without Diana, I might not have been published. Without Thucydides, I don't know what I'd be writing.

I always have assumed Herodotus, mostly because of the obvious plot borrowing, but also because of the importance of oracles and religious ceremonies, and the inset stories. It may be because I have so much trouble getting my mind around Thucydides as a whole that I feel like this information has to change how I am seeing these books. But I am probably overthinking.

I was good and woke up early to call my adviser's friend on the east coast with whom to talk about graduate schools (it was useful). As a reward, I am going to write about probably the best thing that has happened this spring, namely, the fact that Megan Whalen Turner has published a new novel.

I will say, before cutting for spoilers, that I didn't like this one quite as much as I liked the others, perhaps because I found the main character less compelling than Eugenides or Costis. But it did all of the good things that MWTs books: intricate plotting (both kinds), meaningful issues of responsibility/government/personal desires, good characters, good stupid characters, wonderful intervention of religion, interesting narrative issues...and lots of fodder for classics geekery, of course!

( Read more... )