My favorite book this year and other stuff
I just finished reading Time's Child by Rebecca Ore and I am still partly in love with a couple of the characters. The main character is a woman from Renaissance Italy who was partnered with a mercenary artillerist. One of the secondary main characters is a young man from Viking Age Norway. They are brought to 24th century Pennsylvania by academics with a time machine. Eventually, cross-time political machinations ensue.
Bennedetta, the Italian woman, is one of the best female characters I've encountered in a long time. She is tenacious and smart and doesn't back down in the face of bullshit. She gets to drive a lot of the plot forward (moreso in the first part of the book, the later parts focus a bit more on Ivar, the viking) and she is portrayed as compassionate, but sharp and pragmatic.
Ivar... well, I'll admit I just love Ivar because he's Norse. He gets a free pass, just for that. But also, the author doesn't do the typical Northern Barbarian things with him. He is not particularly gullible, or credulous, he does not drink mead all the time or worry a lot about his manliness. He was snatched out of his native time during the period when Norway was being united by force by Harald Fairhair and I kept wanting to look for the names of the people from his flashback scenes in my Sagas of the Icelanders book. Egil Skallgrimson was mentioned. Bjork was also mentioned.
Because of having too many hobbies for my free time there were a couple weeks between my reading the first half of the book and reading the second. It seemed like there ws a big change in feel between the two halves, but I don't know if that was mostly because of my lag or not.
I've been poking around the 'net at M*A*S*H fanfic lately, and it's kind of a weird feeling. I've pretty much watched the show for most of my life, so a lot of my experience with it is from a time when I was too young to get what was going on. I could tell that Burns and Winchester deserved the teasing they got, Houlihan was all kind of uptight, Hawkeye, Trapper, and BJ were fun guys that you were supposed to like, and war is bad, m'kay, but the subtleties were beyond me.
Reading the M*A*S*H fanfiction feels kind of like the pop-culture fandom equivalent of when you start to figure out that your parents are three-dimensional people who have all this stuff going on in their lives that you never even noticed.
I had a boatload of angst about my birthday last month (that is, angst was had in September and B-Day was had in October) and decided to channel it into making a bunch of preemie hats to donate to a local neo-natal ward. At first I was making one every day and a half, but then I slowed down to try and teach myself Scandinavian two-stranded knitting and slowed waaaay down. Now it's two months from when I started and I've got 12 hats made. I want to have something close to thirty before the year ends. Or I'll stop when the baby yarn runs out.
Bennedetta, the Italian woman, is one of the best female characters I've encountered in a long time. She is tenacious and smart and doesn't back down in the face of bullshit. She gets to drive a lot of the plot forward (moreso in the first part of the book, the later parts focus a bit more on Ivar, the viking) and she is portrayed as compassionate, but sharp and pragmatic.
Ivar... well, I'll admit I just love Ivar because he's Norse. He gets a free pass, just for that. But also, the author doesn't do the typical Northern Barbarian things with him. He is not particularly gullible, or credulous, he does not drink mead all the time or worry a lot about his manliness. He was snatched out of his native time during the period when Norway was being united by force by Harald Fairhair and I kept wanting to look for the names of the people from his flashback scenes in my Sagas of the Icelanders book. Egil Skallgrimson was mentioned. Bjork was also mentioned.
Because of having too many hobbies for my free time there were a couple weeks between my reading the first half of the book and reading the second. It seemed like there ws a big change in feel between the two halves, but I don't know if that was mostly because of my lag or not.
I've been poking around the 'net at M*A*S*H fanfic lately, and it's kind of a weird feeling. I've pretty much watched the show for most of my life, so a lot of my experience with it is from a time when I was too young to get what was going on. I could tell that Burns and Winchester deserved the teasing they got, Houlihan was all kind of uptight, Hawkeye, Trapper, and BJ were fun guys that you were supposed to like, and war is bad, m'kay, but the subtleties were beyond me.
Reading the M*A*S*H fanfiction feels kind of like the pop-culture fandom equivalent of when you start to figure out that your parents are three-dimensional people who have all this stuff going on in their lives that you never even noticed.
I had a boatload of angst about my birthday last month (that is, angst was had in September and B-Day was had in October) and decided to channel it into making a bunch of preemie hats to donate to a local neo-natal ward. At first I was making one every day and a half, but then I slowed down to try and teach myself Scandinavian two-stranded knitting and slowed waaaay down. Now it's two months from when I started and I've got 12 hats made. I want to have something close to thirty before the year ends. Or I'll stop when the baby yarn runs out.