In spirit golden
May. 2nd, 2022 02:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12Today is a public holiday in the UK, and I'm relaxing at home, after starting the day with a glorious 1km swim in the pool, with the sun streaming through the huge windows and dancing on the water. It's been a weekend of lovely things.
I finished one book: The Midnight Bargain by CL Polk.
This is a secondary world, Regency(-without-empires-and-colonisation)-inspired fantasy in which magic exists, and in which the frothy social whirlwind of upper class courtship rituals has an undercurrent of horror and danger for the women concerned: women with magical abilities are highly sought after, but marriage with require them to wear a collar that blocks their magical abilities. There's a lot of iddiness here: Regency aesthetics, a plucky heroine torn between duty to her family and following her own desires, terrifyingly rigid gender roles that cause a monstrous imbalance of power between men and women, and a romance forced to overcome various supposedly insurmountable obstacles. Some of these things align with my own id, some don't, and my 5-star rating of the book on Goodreads probably reflects my own satisfaction with the story rather than being an objective judgement of the book's quality. Those of you who find aggressively heterosexual romance plots offputting will probably find the book offputting (there are female characters who don't want to get married, but this is always due to a desire for an independent life or the ability to continue to have access to their magical powers, rather than because they're not attracted to men, or because they're actually trans, or for similar reasons) — for me this wassn't an issue but I felt it worth noting. The book also did an absolutely stellar job in depicting the subtle cruelty of emotional abuse, but when I look at how this particular abusive relationship was resolved, I wonder if this was intentional on Polk's part or not.
My critical remarks at the end of this summary possibly make it sound as if I didn't think much of the book — far from it. I found it excellent, and enjoyed it from start to finish, but I think there were a couple of serious areas of weakness that I was able to ignore because the story hit me in several corners of the id.
*
Matthias and I watched two films over the weekend: Nightmare Alley (a stylish noir film set in 1940s America in which a con man gets conned, and indeed cons himself; it's told with Guillermo del Toro's characteristic sympathy for monsters, although I would have preferred pretty much anyone other than Bradley Cooper in the main role, as I really don't rate him as an actor), and The Worst Person in the World (a Norwegian film of a very specific contemporary fiction subgenre: the existential difficulties of being a directionless middle-class person living in a city and navigating one's romantic life; think things like the fiction of Nick Hornby, although in this case the protagonist is a thirty-year-old Norwegian woman and the humour is more muted).
*
I don't write fic in megafandoms, or even in mildly popular fandoms — basically all my fic is for Yuletide-eligible fandoms-of-one. For this reason, it's always delightful to me when I get a flurry of kudos on all the fic I've written in individual fandoms — such as the notifications I got this week that two separate people had left kudos for all my Sunshine (McKinley) fic. I always want to befriend those people, because they clearly engage with fic in a similar way to me: read a book, feel intense fannish feelings about the book, and then go and read every single work in the tiny handful of fic that exists in that specific book's fandom. It's delightful!
*
I'm trying to figure out what I want to do for the remaining few hours before Matthias gets home. I'm not in the mood to start another book, I've stalled on TV watching, and I have no intention of using a day of annual leave to do housework. I'll probably end up doing some yoga, although at the moment the prospect of leaving my wing chair is not very appealling!
I finished one book: The Midnight Bargain by CL Polk.
This is a secondary world, Regency(-without-empires-and-colonisation)-inspired fantasy in which magic exists, and in which the frothy social whirlwind of upper class courtship rituals has an undercurrent of horror and danger for the women concerned: women with magical abilities are highly sought after, but marriage with require them to wear a collar that blocks their magical abilities. There's a lot of iddiness here: Regency aesthetics, a plucky heroine torn between duty to her family and following her own desires, terrifyingly rigid gender roles that cause a monstrous imbalance of power between men and women, and a romance forced to overcome various supposedly insurmountable obstacles. Some of these things align with my own id, some don't, and my 5-star rating of the book on Goodreads probably reflects my own satisfaction with the story rather than being an objective judgement of the book's quality. Those of you who find aggressively heterosexual romance plots offputting will probably find the book offputting (there are female characters who don't want to get married, but this is always due to a desire for an independent life or the ability to continue to have access to their magical powers, rather than because they're not attracted to men, or because they're actually trans, or for similar reasons) — for me this wassn't an issue but I felt it worth noting. The book also did an absolutely stellar job in depicting the subtle cruelty of emotional abuse, but when I look at how this particular abusive relationship was resolved, I wonder if this was intentional on Polk's part or not.
My critical remarks at the end of this summary possibly make it sound as if I didn't think much of the book — far from it. I found it excellent, and enjoyed it from start to finish, but I think there were a couple of serious areas of weakness that I was able to ignore because the story hit me in several corners of the id.
Matthias and I watched two films over the weekend: Nightmare Alley (a stylish noir film set in 1940s America in which a con man gets conned, and indeed cons himself; it's told with Guillermo del Toro's characteristic sympathy for monsters, although I would have preferred pretty much anyone other than Bradley Cooper in the main role, as I really don't rate him as an actor), and The Worst Person in the World (a Norwegian film of a very specific contemporary fiction subgenre: the existential difficulties of being a directionless middle-class person living in a city and navigating one's romantic life; think things like the fiction of Nick Hornby, although in this case the protagonist is a thirty-year-old Norwegian woman and the humour is more muted).
I don't write fic in megafandoms, or even in mildly popular fandoms — basically all my fic is for Yuletide-eligible fandoms-of-one. For this reason, it's always delightful to me when I get a flurry of kudos on all the fic I've written in individual fandoms — such as the notifications I got this week that two separate people had left kudos for all my Sunshine (McKinley) fic. I always want to befriend those people, because they clearly engage with fic in a similar way to me: read a book, feel intense fannish feelings about the book, and then go and read every single work in the tiny handful of fic that exists in that specific book's fandom. It's delightful!
I'm trying to figure out what I want to do for the remaining few hours before Matthias gets home. I'm not in the mood to start another book, I've stalled on TV watching, and I have no intention of using a day of annual leave to do housework. I'll probably end up doing some yoga, although at the moment the prospect of leaving my wing chair is not very appealling!