Wednesday reading — fanfic crossover
Sep. 25th, 2013 05:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mayhapWhat I've been reading
I finished The Garden of Priapus: Sexuality and Aggression in Roman Humor, which was awesome.
I read Eleanor and Park, and I liked it although I didn't love it, though not for any particular reason. I liked the sense of place and time. (Incidentally, how soon can we start writing historical fiction set in the 90s? Because I feel like I could get really nostalgic about small collections of mislabeled .mp3s painstakingly downloaded off Napster over 56k modems when no one was expecting a phone call.)
I read Fangirl, which I specifically liked parts of and thought other parts could have been handled differently and/or better. I thought the fannish bits were mostly handled really well, especially the snippets of fake fic that are interspersed with snippets of the fake Simon Snow books, which I find very plausible, and a good text-within-a-text is difficult to pull off, so props. My main quibbles were wanting to see more—it's hard to buy Cath's repeated assertions that online friends are real when only Cath and her twin get so much as screennames, for one thing, and I really wanted some follow-up on the throwaway bit about how she started reading F/F when she stopped reading her M/M OTP while she was finishing her own fic. As for the "real" plot, well…I think it might have worked better if it had been set while the girls were still in high school instead of freshman year in college, although I think YA novels about college students are a thing that should, theoretically, exist. I hated the half-assed romantic triangle—especially the part where she brings back the essentially-forgotten writing partner dude for an unnecessary little coda about how he will never be a writer, or in fact succeed at anything, because Cath isn't interested in him anymore. And even though I kinda dug Levi as a character, his insta-devotion to Cath is just too implausible and under-sold for me to even enjoy it as wish fulfillment.
I read Midshipman's Hope, which…well, Jo Walton flailed about it for a thousand words and didn't really get any farther than "I like these books even though they are, in many ways, not very good". My library doesn't have the other books in the series, though, so I'm not sure I will end up reading any of them.
I read Untold, and seriously, next to nothing happened in it as the Stupid Plot ground to a halt so that everyone had plenty of time to snark at or make out with each other and I really don't see why these books had to be a trilogy at all.
I read All Over Creation, which is very similar in set-up to My Year of Meats, but not as distinctive or good. And of course neither one is as excellent as A Tale for the Time Being, but then what is?
I finished The Garden of Priapus: Sexuality and Aggression in Roman Humor, which was awesome.
I read Eleanor and Park, and I liked it although I didn't love it, though not for any particular reason. I liked the sense of place and time. (Incidentally, how soon can we start writing historical fiction set in the 90s? Because I feel like I could get really nostalgic about small collections of mislabeled .mp3s painstakingly downloaded off Napster over 56k modems when no one was expecting a phone call.)
I read Fangirl, which I specifically liked parts of and thought other parts could have been handled differently and/or better. I thought the fannish bits were mostly handled really well, especially the snippets of fake fic that are interspersed with snippets of the fake Simon Snow books, which I find very plausible, and a good text-within-a-text is difficult to pull off, so props. My main quibbles were wanting to see more—it's hard to buy Cath's repeated assertions that online friends are real when only Cath and her twin get so much as screennames, for one thing, and I really wanted some follow-up on the throwaway bit about how she started reading F/F when she stopped reading her M/M OTP while she was finishing her own fic. As for the "real" plot, well…I think it might have worked better if it had been set while the girls were still in high school instead of freshman year in college, although I think YA novels about college students are a thing that should, theoretically, exist. I hated the half-assed romantic triangle—especially the part where she brings back the essentially-forgotten writing partner dude for an unnecessary little coda about how he will never be a writer, or in fact succeed at anything, because Cath isn't interested in him anymore. And even though I kinda dug Levi as a character, his insta-devotion to Cath is just too implausible and under-sold for me to even enjoy it as wish fulfillment.
I read Midshipman's Hope, which…well, Jo Walton flailed about it for a thousand words and didn't really get any farther than "I like these books even though they are, in many ways, not very good". My library doesn't have the other books in the series, though, so I'm not sure I will end up reading any of them.
I read Untold, and seriously, next to nothing happened in it as the Stupid Plot ground to a halt so that everyone had plenty of time to snark at or make out with each other and I really don't see why these books had to be a trilogy at all.
I read All Over Creation, which is very similar in set-up to My Year of Meats, but not as distinctive or good. And of course neither one is as excellent as A Tale for the Time Being, but then what is?
