Weekend Report
Shawn arrived home safely on Friday night. The only thing that went awry while she was away was that I totally forgot to go pick up our very last CSA box. I blame MEA or whatever reason it was that we didn't have school. I managed to remember that it was Thursday in terms of recycling, but we were picking up Donte for the sleepover right about when I should have been collecting the box.
And it had spinach in it too. sigh.
We spent much of Saturday recovering/decompressing from the sleepover/business trip. I had a gig at the Roseville Public Library at 3:00 pm, which was a dud. They were having me speak in the middle of their "Harvest Festival" which included things that were a lot more awesome than me, like henna tattooing, storytime, etc. Plus, they put me in a very forbidding white room. Two people came. I talked to them anyway, and somewhere near the end of the hour four other people trickled in. We'd already devolved into talking about famous people we'd met, and I was telling my story of crashing Neil Gaiman's Guy Fawkes party (and how I peed in the same stall as Ursula K. LeGuin at WisCON.) If we were at a science fiction convention, we would have retired to the bar almost right away. :-)
But, the library was beautiful and the librarians were awesome. I so don't blame them -- or even the patrons for their disinterst. There was just too much other cool stuff going on at the same time. I mean, for God(dess)'s sake, they had a Wii in the teen scene room on a widescreen. If it were me, that's where I'd have been hanging out too!
Sunday, we celebrated full moon (which was actually Friday night) and then I spent the day cooking a chicken for my nephew Jonathan. I made some very odd, but ultimately sort of tasty coleslaw of the rutabega and turnip that were left over from the previous CSA box. It was strange, but it had a nice tang that I ended up enjoying. My mashed potatoes were so creamy they almost seemed fake, you know? My bread was perfect too, so, all round it was excellent food and even better company -- though I wasn't terribly focused for some reason. I think it might have been the rainy weather and the slowness of the weekend. Also, I spent a lot of my day reading and that can turn me rather introspectively quiet.
I finished up GRACLING by Katlin Cashore. Normally, I'm not a fan of BFFWMs (Big, Fat Fantasies with Maps,) but this YA was extremely compelling. Our heroine, Katsa, lives in a world where people like my mother (born with two different colored eyes) are graced -- they have some kind of superpower. Katsa has one blue, one green eye and her grace is killing. She's being used as a tool by her uncle, the king, and meets her match one day when she runs into Po, a foreign prince graced with fighting.
Or so it seems.
This book is new enough that I don't want to spoil it, so I won't tell you much more other than things are wonderfully complicated -- in a way that made me depressed that I hadn't thought of this idea first, you know?
At first I had a hard time relating to Katsa, but I eventually got used to Cashore's storytelling style, which reminded me of what I've read of Eleanor Arason's unfinished YA (the bonus of being in Wyrdsmiths.) Also, having just read HUNGER GAMES triology, I kept expecting something REALLY AWFUL to happen, and I was estaticlly relieved when it didn't. That might make it sound like nothing happens in this story, but that's not true. The story isn't typical hanging-on-the-edge-of-my-seat kind of exciting, but I was entirely engaged in the characters and what was happening in a way I haven't been in a long time. So I enthusiastically recommend it to anyone who hasn't picked it up yet.
Also, and this is perhaps a weird comment, but I think I liked GRACLING because Katsa might be a courtly lady in a fantasy world, but all the things that bug me about fantasies bugged Katsa too. The court politics (while there and part of the story) were uninteresting to her. She found women's place in society wrong and unjust (and she eventually does something about it.) She's determined to remain unmarried and childless in a way you don't usually find in such an incredibly romantic story in a pastoral fantasy, you know? I found that utterly awesome. Plus, she's very obviously straight, but she cuts her hair like a boy and ocassionally passes as a boy in society. She extraordinarily butch, and I like that because as a teen I would have adored having this role model to consider among all the other character's lives I was "trying on" as part of my coming out process.
In fact, she's kind of who I was in high school before I realized that I didn't thrill to men quite the way I did to women. (For those who don't know, I like boys. I dated boys all though high school and into my first few months of college.) Anyway, Katsa is very admirable throughout. She's the kind of heroine that I often complain about not seeing enough of -- a tough woman who is still complicatedly human in her relationships, etc. She ends up having a child to protect (one of my bugaboos particularly of strong women in film) but their relationship ends up being richly complicated as well.
Anyway, I'm afraid I'll give the whole thing away if I talk too much about it. Maybe if we meet at a science fiction convention -- and you've read it too -- we can put our heads together and really discuss the book.
That'd be fun. See you there.
And it had spinach in it too. sigh.
We spent much of Saturday recovering/decompressing from the sleepover/business trip. I had a gig at the Roseville Public Library at 3:00 pm, which was a dud. They were having me speak in the middle of their "Harvest Festival" which included things that were a lot more awesome than me, like henna tattooing, storytime, etc. Plus, they put me in a very forbidding white room. Two people came. I talked to them anyway, and somewhere near the end of the hour four other people trickled in. We'd already devolved into talking about famous people we'd met, and I was telling my story of crashing Neil Gaiman's Guy Fawkes party (and how I peed in the same stall as Ursula K. LeGuin at WisCON.) If we were at a science fiction convention, we would have retired to the bar almost right away. :-)
But, the library was beautiful and the librarians were awesome. I so don't blame them -- or even the patrons for their disinterst. There was just too much other cool stuff going on at the same time. I mean, for God(dess)'s sake, they had a Wii in the teen scene room on a widescreen. If it were me, that's where I'd have been hanging out too!
Sunday, we celebrated full moon (which was actually Friday night) and then I spent the day cooking a chicken for my nephew Jonathan. I made some very odd, but ultimately sort of tasty coleslaw of the rutabega and turnip that were left over from the previous CSA box. It was strange, but it had a nice tang that I ended up enjoying. My mashed potatoes were so creamy they almost seemed fake, you know? My bread was perfect too, so, all round it was excellent food and even better company -- though I wasn't terribly focused for some reason. I think it might have been the rainy weather and the slowness of the weekend. Also, I spent a lot of my day reading and that can turn me rather introspectively quiet.
I finished up GRACLING by Katlin Cashore. Normally, I'm not a fan of BFFWMs (Big, Fat Fantasies with Maps,) but this YA was extremely compelling. Our heroine, Katsa, lives in a world where people like my mother (born with two different colored eyes) are graced -- they have some kind of superpower. Katsa has one blue, one green eye and her grace is killing. She's being used as a tool by her uncle, the king, and meets her match one day when she runs into Po, a foreign prince graced with fighting.
Or so it seems.
This book is new enough that I don't want to spoil it, so I won't tell you much more other than things are wonderfully complicated -- in a way that made me depressed that I hadn't thought of this idea first, you know?
At first I had a hard time relating to Katsa, but I eventually got used to Cashore's storytelling style, which reminded me of what I've read of Eleanor Arason's unfinished YA (the bonus of being in Wyrdsmiths.) Also, having just read HUNGER GAMES triology, I kept expecting something REALLY AWFUL to happen, and I was estaticlly relieved when it didn't. That might make it sound like nothing happens in this story, but that's not true. The story isn't typical hanging-on-the-edge-of-my-seat kind of exciting, but I was entirely engaged in the characters and what was happening in a way I haven't been in a long time. So I enthusiastically recommend it to anyone who hasn't picked it up yet.
Also, and this is perhaps a weird comment, but I think I liked GRACLING because Katsa might be a courtly lady in a fantasy world, but all the things that bug me about fantasies bugged Katsa too. The court politics (while there and part of the story) were uninteresting to her. She found women's place in society wrong and unjust (and she eventually does something about it.) She's determined to remain unmarried and childless in a way you don't usually find in such an incredibly romantic story in a pastoral fantasy, you know? I found that utterly awesome. Plus, she's very obviously straight, but she cuts her hair like a boy and ocassionally passes as a boy in society. She extraordinarily butch, and I like that because as a teen I would have adored having this role model to consider among all the other character's lives I was "trying on" as part of my coming out process.
In fact, she's kind of who I was in high school before I realized that I didn't thrill to men quite the way I did to women. (For those who don't know, I like boys. I dated boys all though high school and into my first few months of college.) Anyway, Katsa is very admirable throughout. She's the kind of heroine that I often complain about not seeing enough of -- a tough woman who is still complicatedly human in her relationships, etc. She ends up having a child to protect (one of my bugaboos particularly of strong women in film) but their relationship ends up being richly complicated as well.
Anyway, I'm afraid I'll give the whole thing away if I talk too much about it. Maybe if we meet at a science fiction convention -- and you've read it too -- we can put our heads together and really discuss the book.
That'd be fun. See you there.