Friday open thread: ask me anything

[dolorosa_12]

Hello, and welcome to the end of another working week! I hope the first week of February has been kind to you.

This week's Friday open thread is inspired by the snowflake_challenge friending meme: given I've subscribed to a bunch of new people, and a bunch of new people have subscribed to me, I felt it would be nice, rather than doing a new introduction post, to instead offer a space for more general questions. With that in mind, the topic of this week's Friday open thread is: ask me anything! Is there something you'd like to know, or something you'd like me to talk more about?

As a starting point if you have no idea what to ask, my intro post is up-to-date in terms of who I am, my fannish interests, and general approach to Dreamwidth and internet community. My fic is on AO3: Dolorosa. 'the via dolorosa' is the tag I use in posts talking about my day-to-day life, if you want an overview of things that have been happening to me recently (although there are hundreds of these posts, so be warned).

If you don't want to ask me anything, please do feel free to use the comments to tell me something if you feel you'd like me to know about it.

Comments

[svgurl]

What is next on your to-read/to watch list?

[williamsnickers]

This is a good one!

[svgurl]

Thanks! I'm usually so bad at questions lol

[dolorosa_12]

I've made a deliberate decision to tackle my Goodreads to-read list, particularly older books that have lingered on that list for a while (I hate digital clutter, and lingering 'to-read' books on the list feel like digital clutter to me). So next on my list is this book, which I've just picked up from my local library.

The book I am most looking forward to reading, and which I've saved for a while in order to increase my sense of anticipation, is the final (so far) book in Barbara Hambly's Benjamin January mystery series. I started reading this series at the start of the pandemic, and it ended up becoming one of my most intensely loved new-to-me fandoms, and is definitely the most recent thing that I fell fannishly in love with. But as I say I'm not going to start on it straight away, even though I already own it.

Do you have anything on your own to-read/to watch list?

[svgurl]

Nice! Good luck with completing your to-read list!

Would you recommend that series? I am always looking for new mystery books to read.

I got a few things on my list that I got recc'd when I asked for them for a Snowflake challenge and there are some TV shows I've got my eye on, like Only Murders in the Building. I'm terrible at actually watching things though so we'll see. :D

[dolorosa_12]

Only Murders in the Building is great, so I definitely recommend that, especially if you like things that gently poke fun at true crime podcasts and New Yorkers, but from a place of affection.

The Benjamin January series is set in 1830s New Orleans, and the eponymous protagonist is a free black man whose family is part of the French-speaking free black community of the city. A lot of the mysteries he ends up solving hinge on fraught issues of racism, race and slavery in the US south at that time, and he and his family often end up in danger as a result of their ethnicity. So on that level it's dealing with quite heavy subject matter and doesn't shy away from it (or excuse the white characters who inflict it or who enable it due to obliviousness or inaction). On another level, it's a celebration of the tenacity, resourcefulness and survival of the black characters (and black people in the US in that time period more generally), and shows how people were able to carve out spaces of joy, community and success in the margins of a world trying its utmost to deny them these things.

I really love it, because that kind of tension — between injustice and joy in the margins — really works well for me on a storytelling level. But if you feel that that's a bit intense for historical mysteries, you may prefer to give the series a miss.