Tenth Post!

[hoisinsauce]

I TAKE IT BACK, GO BACK TO FUCKING THE HOUSE!

(https://secretfanspace.dreamwidth.org/2511.html?thread=3560655#cmt3560655)

Welcome back! Chat fandom, weird internet stuff, creative work, games, books, anything! Meme listens, and sometimes even replies!

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Comments

Books

[(Anonymous)]

Things you read!

Re: Books - Whatcha reading?

[(Anonymous)]

What's meme reading atm?

Re: Books - Whatcha reading?

[(Anonymous)]

Read House of Fire and Magic, Sherrilyn Kenyon's new series about angsty dragons and angsty unicorns who spend most of their time being angsty humans and having extremely vanilla human sex. I've been thinking about doing a write-up of it for danspace, but I've given up. It's just not good enough to actually talk about and not bad enough to lampoon.

Will hopefully return in November for the next installment in me reading mediocre paranormal romance novels and being shocked that they are, in fact, mediocre.

Re: Books

[(Anonymous)]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWNXqwMtPbk

Accurate description of the Wheel of Time series.

Re: Books - Fourth Wing (Rebecca Yarros)

[(Anonymous)]

Reading this for my obligatory international flight trashfire, and I can't stop laughing every time the male lead calls the main character 'Violence' as a nickname.

Re: Books - Fourth Wing (Rebecca Yarros)

[(Anonymous)]

Finished reading Fourth Wing and then, as I have an insatiable appetite for garbage, read the sequel Iron Flame because why not.

Not a single original thought in this series, that's for sure. The plot is snappy, but only because it solely exists to check off items on a top 10 enemies-to-lovers tropes listicle. The second book somehow manages to character assassinate all the characters despite them having paper-thin characterization to begin with. The dragons have more personality than the main love interest.

But at least there's dragons.

Re: Books

[(Anonymous)]

Grandmother bought me a Jilly Cooper (well, I suspect she regifted it), feels like a glimpse into an alien world, wtf is this shit... 0_0

Re: Books

[(Anonymous)]

I was also confused by the characters' weirdly low salaries, but finally realised it was because book's set some 40 years ago, oops.

Re: Books - Rivals (Jilly Cooper)

[(Anonymous)]

I'm still trying to inch my way through this thing. Currently some 200 pages in? It's still 700 damn pages, argh. Goes much like this:

"My job is so hard," moaned the housekeeper.

"I know something else that gets hard," said Rupert Campbell-Black. All the women giggled. He was so witty and his oiled body was so attractive.

*I want him,* thought Cameron Cook, in her ballbusting jacket with the shoulderpads. Behind them, Tony Baddingham glared over his wife's shoulder, seeing his mistress gaze adoringly on the attractive, oiled body of Campbell-Black. On the other side of the room, from behind a Christmas tree some students had jokily decked in condoms, Sarah Stratton was also glaring, also at Rupert. How dare he ignore her! But she couldn't say anything because her husband was right there, as bloody always. They all sat down, and she had to settle for scowling in silence as Rupert fingered her under the table. She was lucky that, on her other side, her husband was too sulky to contemplate doing the same.

"This blancmange is wonderfully soft!" said Monica Baddigham, wishing she could be listening to the opera instead.

"But I'm wonderfully hard," said Campbell Black, and all the women gasped again at his wit and erudition, soaking their chairs with raw lust.


I don't understand how this thing is 700 pages; it's just this man going "hur hur hur my dick hur hur" and occasionally sexually assaulting a teenager. I get the impression the book is going to marry him to the teenager. He's 37.

Re: Books

[(Anonymous)]

My book club read North Woods by Daniel Mason. It's billed as describing the "lives of those who inhabit [a single house in the woods of New England] across the centuries".

I liked some turns of phrase and the depiction of seasons and nature, but overall the book was more violent and more horny than expected. I'm reminded why I avoid male authors. At least this time half of the horniness involved insects, which was (unpleasantly) weird.

The first half was better than the second half, which became more self-referential while simultaneously assuming its readers would be too dumb to get any references unless they were spelled out in grating detail. I'd recommend it to people interested in history and ghost stories.

Now to see what the other book club members thought of it.

Re: Books

[(Anonymous)]

> interested in history and

I too am interested in the void where good writing out to be.

Re: Books - A Court of Thorns and Roses (Sarah J. Maas)

[(Anonymous)]

Well, I threatened to do it and I did. I read ACOTAR.

Like Fourth Wing, there is not a single original thought in this book. We are introduced in media res to our protagonist, Feyre, who is Katniss Everdeen crossed with Cinderella. All good heroines need a fatal flaw, and since Bella Swan's already claimed being clumsy, she's illiterate. When she's not being sassy quippy fierce artistic, she mostly spends her time angsting over her inability to master basic phonics.

From there, the story morphs into a retelling of the Ballad of Tam Lin, featuring a love interest who is creatively named Tamlin. Of course, the book pulls a bait-and-switch on us by introducing some dude named Rhysand halfway through the book, and obviously he's the real love interest because the first line of his introduction is how he's the hottest man Feyre's ever seen.

The only redeemable character in this shitshow is probably Nesta, Feyre's not-evil not-stepsister, probably because she doesn't get enough screentime for me to dislike her. Girl gets about three lines and all off them are used to be entirely done with Feyre's bullshit.

Got another flight after this, so I'll see how far I get in the second book before I give up for good.

Re: Books - A Court of Thorns and Roses (Sarah J. Maas)

[(Anonymous)]

Finished book two. Feyre has inexplicably become the Avatar, master of all four seven elements, Mr. Tamlin's personality has inexplicably done a perfect 180 solely for romantic drama, and Mr. Rhysand has inexplicably formed a mating bond with Feyre, because omegaverse is doing its best to vore every other romance trope.

We are also introduced to Mr. Rhysand's friends. There's Cassian, whose entire personality is people making jokes about his dick size. There's Azriel, who broods broodily in a corner. There's Mor, who is a woman. Together, they have enough personality to make up one while side character. I am so bored.

Re: Books - Blood of Hercules (Jasmine Mas)

[(Anonymous)]

I've had a really bad day at work, and I'm going to self-medicate with garbage.

> Content Warning
> This is a TRUE enemies to lovers Hercules retelling with a twist. The book is full of suffering, violence, sarcasm, and gallows humor. It's a slow burn and the villains will get the girl in the end.
> Sometimes becoming a hero hurts - a lot.
> Beware.

We haven't even started yet and I'm already seeing why Goodreads called this 'My Immortal, but with Greek mythology.'

Re: Books - Blood of Hercules (Jasmine Mas)

[(Anonymous)]

We start off with a quick world-building rundown - Earth is ruled by a hundred immortal Spartans, who founded the famously Greek Roman Empire. They are divided into the Olympians, who exist, and the Cthonians, who are sexy and evil. Centuries ago, the Cthonians lost the obligatory civil war, and have now been drafted into service to defend humanity against the obligatory monster apocalypse.

They're also really bad at having procreative sex, which is why they're now required by law to get married at the tender age of 26. I'm sure this will be relevant later.

Anyways.

In Chapter 1, we meet our heroine, Alexis Hert. She lives in the famously Greek state of Montana. Her dad, who subsists entirely on a diet of bleach, tied her to a rock and left her to die. Her first thought?

What would Emmy Noether and Carl Gauss do in this situation?

Make friends with an invisible snake named Nyx and acquire a government-assigned little brother named Charlie, apparently. Of course, literally two pages later her parents tell her to kill Charlie. There's a fight. The Olympian police officers who show up are really rude to her.

'Stay still,' the male medic snapped as he squeezed my cheeks and dabbed at my left eye.
He's probably never taken math above calculus. Carl Gauss would never speak to me like this.

Apocalypse monsters inexplicably kill Alexis's mom, and she frames her dad for the murder. This gives her more time to write Emmy Noether and Carl Gauss fanfiction, apparently.

The girl in the mirror looked calm. Covered in cuts, with eerie mismatched eyes, she was intimidating. Powerful. To her right, the emergency phone hung untouched on the wall.
'Who is she? I must know her name,' Carl Gauss would say if he saw her walking down the street in Brunswick, Germany. 'That girl will be my prodigy!'
I smiled.
My abusers were gone.
I was free.

Not all that familiar with German mathematician canon - is Gauss IC in this scene?

Re: Books - Blood of Hercules (Jasmine Mas)

[(Anonymous)]

Chapter 3 starts with an eight-year timeskip. Alexis and Charlie are now homeless orphans, so Alexis goes to high school because that's what a girl's gotta do if she's going to support her little brother with the money she'll get from proving the Riemann hypothesis.

Unfortunately, her classmates don't care about math - they only want to talk about penises and polyamory. Alexis, of course, has more important things on her mind.

I couldn't have cared less.
Carl Gauss, aka aggressive celibacy, was the only one for me.

Alexis is propositioned for sex by some guy she tutors in math. Unfortunately, she remembers that he thought zero wasn't a real number and is instantly turned off. As the socially well-adjusted individual she is, she immediately flees the scene so she can think really hard about the Riemann hypothesis.

Somewhere in the afterlife, Carl Gauss waited for me (I was delusional).

Since she's 19, she's required to take the SAT, except it's Spartan and not Scholastic. Somehow this reveals that she's got undisclosed Spartan heritage, which means she's whisked away into the magic immortal equivalent of the Hunger Games. She kills no one, does nothing, and somehow survives the exam. Gauss isn't even mentioned once, which seriously limits my interest in this section of the novel.

Is this what the foreword meant by the 'villains will get the girl'? Will poor Carl Gauss have his prodigy stolen away from him by sexy and evil Spartans? How will one dead German mathematician compete against literal gods who own billion-dollar defense companies and engage in fujobaiting for high school students?

Re: Books - Blood of Hercules (Jasmine Mas)

[(Anonymous)]

Well, here we are again. I did a little background research and apparently the author got her start self-publishing het omegaverse, which explains A Lot, actually.

We left off at the descriptively-named Initiation Massacre, where all the 19-year-old Spartan kids gather together to kill each other. Fifty kids walk in, ten of them leave. Alexis is the only girl because this is, after all, a reverse harem and we aren't allowed to have female characters who aren't straight out of Mean Girls.

If you survive that, you're then assigned a mentor and tossed into The Crucible, where more things try to kill you. You know, I thought their population crisis thing was because they were really bad at having sex. Evidently the sex is fine. They're just really bad at keeping their kids alive.

It was strange hearing Latin spoken aloud. The fact that the words were spoken out of order made my head pound as I struggled to translate them.

Of course, we get a few motivational speeches before throwing the kids into the wringer. My Latin 3 teacher would be so disappointed in Alexis! I remember him walking into class on the first day of school and spouting off an entire lecture in spoken Latin while we stared at him like he was speaking another language.

We're also introduced to Hades, who is presiding over this murderfest.

If he was a musical melody, he'd be the Locrian mode - the darkest musical scale played on the piano.

I forgot that there's this whole thing where Alexis isn't just into Carl Gauss - she's also into music. Not in a Mozart/Salieri fanfiction way, though. More that whenever there's an action scene, we're subjected to 'classical music (delusion) filled the darkness' narration where each line is punctuated by incomprehensible musical direction. It's like she's got her own cello-wielding TIM following her around, playing anime songs.

Like, here's the scene where her mother dies:

The orchestra played their final act.
Fists banged against the door, a desperate man pleaded brokenly, and my hands trembled harder.
The door rattled.
The dying screamed.
Haunting classical music played.
There was an awful gurgling noise, then... silence. The only sound was Father sobbing brokenly.
The musicians put down their instruments and bowed.

I can feel my own writing skills regressing just typing this out. Wake me up when the author remembers she doesn't have to start a new paragraph after every period.

Re: Books - Blood of Hercules (Jasmine Mas)

[(Anonymous)]

Might've had five beers over the weekend and polished off the rest of this book, which is probably the required number of beers to actually survive reading this but not the right number of beers to write anything coherent about it. Please beer with me while I try to sort it out.

Anyways, Alexis survives the Initiation Massacre with a little help from her new buddy Drex Chen, who exists solely to ensure that I, personally, feel represented. Thanks, Mr. Chen. You will never be important again.

This means that she's assigned a mentor. Since she's a special snowflake, she gets assigned two mentors - Achilles and Patroclus. As their names suggest, they are Absolutely Normal about each other. They have their names tattooed on each other. Achilles has a muzzle (?) that only Patroclus has a key to (?). Considering Charlie, the little brother that Alexis has completely forgotten about at this point, also doesn't talk, I'm starting to think I've stumbled upon one of the author's kinks.

They also run a billion-dollar weapons company (?) with the other two Chthonic boys, Kharon and Augustus, because even in a semi-apocalyptic magic school story, we still can't escape tyrant CEO tropes.

Excuse me? A marriage law at twenty-six? I'd be a child bride.

We have very different definitions of 'child,' apparently. There's some drama about the marriage law because the Chthonic kids aren't allowed to marry each other, which they're really unhappy about. On the other hand, they would be allowed to all marry the same person, as long as that person isn't a known Chthonic kid. Huh! I sure wonder where this is going!

Anyways, after the Initiation Massacre comes The Crucible.

All Sparta is divided by one mental test, one of which paranoia inhabits, sleep deprivation another, and starvation the third.

Hey, I recognize this! Omnia Gallia in tres partes divisa est. One of the few texts I still remember from 2.5 years of Latin class. The one thing I'll give this author is that she seems at least as qualified to quote Latin as I am.

I'd never been a bird girl.
It was just - no one could prove birds weren't spying on us.
Also, why were they always flying around? Where were they going? What were they doing? Why were they always singing? Suspicious.
Morning chirps echoed through the windows, and my eyes widened. They've got us surrounded.

Alexis does not react well to learning that she's going to get an animal familiar, and that it's most likely going to be a bird.

Sadly, the opportunity to join the Spartans giving fellatio - and not competing to literal death - did not present itself.

Pretty sure this would be more interesting than a death game. I'm saddened as well.

'This is not a simple math class where normal boring math has no object permanence. Every number and symbol we use will be tied to a real-life ethics problem.'

To prepare for The Crucible, Alexis goes to math class. Carl Gauss is inescapable.

I actually wish we'd gotten more details about this because I simply do not understand how they've 'improved' math. Practical applications, I understand. But ethics? What kind of ethics problems are they doing here? Is it like - 'Two trains, 100 miles apart, are approaching each other. One of them is moving at 60mph; the other is moving at 40mph. Carl Gauss is tied to the train tracks at the midpoint. Which train do you derail first?'

Re: Books - Blood of Hercules (Jasmine Mas)

[(Anonymous)]

Alright, we've met Patroclus and Achilles. Now it's time to complete the set and meet Kharon and Augustus, Alexis's professors at Spartan Murder College and also her government-assigned love interests.

So cute. He's a raccoon mother.

Remember how I said all the Spartans get animal familiars? Augustus has a raccoon named Poco, who perches on his shoulder and rubs his little paw-hands in Augustus's Cruella de Vil hair. This is a metaphor for how this book is trash and we, the readers, are simply dumpster-diving raccoons.

Augustus looked worried.
I made a whale sound.
He did not make one back. This is why I don't talk to people. They never understand me.

As you can see, their first meeting is going great. Alexis pretty much spends her entire time at Murder College in a weird haze of conspiracy theories - she simply cannot stop going off about how birds are evil - and whining about how much school sucks, which is a little disappointing. I wanted more math philosophy, okay?

He can't know I spent the last meditation imagining Carl Gauss whispering sweet nothings to me while he proved the existence of algebra... right?
What if he's reading my mind right now? What if he's going to kill me for picturing Carl Gauss naked? What if he knows I'm imagining him in a dress because he's a raccoon mother?

Like, how do you even prove the existence of algebra? Do they also teach you to prove the existence of the scientific method, or of the five-paragraph essay? The world-building in this story is absolutely nuts and I need to know more about it.

Re: Books - Blood of Hercules (Jasmine Mas)

[(Anonymous)]

Well, here we go again.

It was official: I was not living a good life.
God, is this because of that one M-rated Carl Gauss fanfic I wrote? Please forgive me. I knew it was wrong when I was writing it, but I couldn't stop myself.

Alexis, as usual, is not having a good time at Murder College. Her classmates are bullying her for being a female with daddy issues, her professors are trying to get her to call them Daddy, and she's got a stalker leaving her gift boxes with the gouged-out eyes of every man who looks at her funny.

'Carl Gauss would never treat me like this,' I whispered miserably. 'What happened to nice men who love math and treating a woman right?'
Nyx scoffed. 'They died out because they were pathetic and embarrassing losers. No woman wants a nerd.'
'I do,' I said.
'No - you just think you do,' Nyx hissed. 'What you want is a real man who wants to slaughter for you.'

Dans of danspace, are you a Dark Fuck Prince appreciator or a Carl Gauss girlie? These are the only two options.

Despite the fact that Alexis has done nothing but whine about how much Murder College sucks and how it's going to kill her, she's actually managed to survive until graduation, which means she's now getting invited to a bunch of (sex) parties. Patroclus gives Achilles an incredibly unsexy blowjob at one of them, allowing the author to check off yet another representation checkbox.

'Why are all the sirens looking at you with horror?' Nyx hissed. 'Did you tell them about your Emmy and Carl fanfic? I told you it makes you weird and unlikable.'

Also, Alexis discovers that her Spartan superpower is being able to talk to non-humans. Her mentors are surprisingly impressed by how useful her superpower is, probably because she can weaponize it by telling people about her kinky Gauss headcanons.

'Perfect,' Helen squealed. 'I'm a genius. Everyone's gonna lose it when they see you.' She clapped. 'Cunt - absolute cunt, served.'
Excuse me? What did she just call me?

We also meet Helen, the last of the Chthonic kids. She's sixteen, incredibly spoiled, and can only communicate in Tiktok memes.

Fluck the flucking world. Life's a biatch like that.
Yes, I was in my emo era.

Same, girl. Same.

Re: Books - Shantaram

[(Anonymous)]

Have had a copy of Shantaram on the shelf for a while: a gift I've been meaning to read at some point. Saw someone on twitter yesterday: "worst book ever, saw someone reading it on the tube and had to fight the urge to slap it out of their hands". Any meme opinions? I'm not intending to read it any time soon, either way. I know nothing about it, really, except that I like the gold lettering on the spine; have either not read or have forgotten the blurb.

(Need to get back on top of my reading, this year! I've spent the last month failing to read as I deck out my fictional character's dreamhouse instead. (He has deer in the grounds!))

Re: Books

[(Anonymous)]

Meme, please shame me into reading. I've read 3 books so far this year, and the best one was JS Mill's autobiography.

Re: Books

[(Anonymous)]

Reading Jeremy Clarkson's book about attempting to be a farmer, and feel like I've stepped into the mirrorworld, because so far this contains some really neat explanations of ecology. I was not expecting keystone species, as explained by Jeremy Clarkson, to be the best explanation I'd ever come across, and yet I reckon a geography teacher could set passages of this in a school setting to teach the topic (so clear and concise!). I did find Top Gear fun to watch as a teenager, and Clarkson-as-a-farmer is inherently ridiculous, so I was expecting the book to be fun to read in general, but was not expecting to get interesting descriptions of failed rewilding efforts in Chile. It's still written in Jeremy Clarkson's voice, so all in all, pretty surreal.

Re: Books

[(Anonymous)]

I just learned that Tom Felton's autobiography is subtitled: "Beyond the Wand". :D

Re: Books - The Black Dress (Deborah Moggach)

[(Anonymous)]

Reading now. Might have suited a readalong, but I've nearly finished; it's not long and I'm trying to read as many books as quickly as possible, this week.

This is an odd book. The premise near the start is that the narrator, a 70 year old woman, misses being in a relationship and wants to find a guy. But, being 70, she's finding all the decent ones are married and only absolute freaks are left. She thinks the only way to get a good one is to find a widower. So she picks up a Little Black Dress, and starts going to strangers' funerals in the hopes of picking up a grieving husband before anyone else can get in there.

It's made me laugh a bit but the narration really feels like the author is phoning it in in places. There's a lot of the first-person narrator going "Did I say this already? I lose track of things, these days; I'm so overwhelmed". You and I both know you couldn't be bothered to read over your previous chapters lol. Some retcons, too. Again, this is not a long book. :')

The best way I can describe the tone is "Woke Lionel Shriver", in softer focus, which is probably going to be hard to imagine, but that's what it is. And the narrator is annoying in ways that a lot of real people are annoying. At one point, she finds out she's dating a man who murdered his ex-wife; she's more upset to learn that he's recently been cheating on HER. I have met women like this lol. I do like that the author has not mistaken her narrator for a great person. :P

Anyway yeah. It started out with a structure and now random things are just kind of happening. Huh. But I'm near the end!