carbonel

Fire and Hemlock, Diana Wynne Jones. Reread of a book I read many times in my teens and early twenties, but this was my first time reading it in quite a while. It is still a very good book, though I don't love it as unreservedly as I did when I was a teenager. (Also it is the source of my username :-)) Things I noticed in this readthrough: I find Tom's "heroic driving" far more alarming now that I actually know how to drive a car. I'm also thinking about how things look from Seb's point of view, which I didn't before because he comes across as such an unlikeable character. I was wondering if the detail that he's a fan of Michael Moorcock is supposed to suggest that he's a Moorcock protagonist seen from the most unflattering viewpoint, but as, thanks to this book, I have never had any desired to read Moorcock, I can't say. (That said, Seb actually has decent taste in rock music! I find the Doors' Riders on the Storm to be evocative of the same themes as Fire and Hemlock, and wonder if it was an influence.)

The Fair-Haired Eckbert, Puss in Boots, The Midsummer Night by Ludwig Tieck, in English translation by various translators, available on Wikisource. I've for a while entertained the extremely aspirational idea of writing historical fantasy about the Mendelssohn siblings, and as part of that project I've been reading fantasy/fairy tales by German Romantic authors whose poems Fanny and Felix put to music. (A previous installment of this was Eichendorff's The Marble Statue, which I never wrote up.) The Fair-Haired Eckbert is one of these, and generally worked for me as a weird fairy tale, despite over-the-top plot twists and being the sort of tragedy where the characters alwasy make the worst possible decisions. But the main thing I got from it was from looking at the song part in German, and learning the excellent word Waldeinsamkeit.

Puss in Boots was recommended by a friend on Discord, after I mentioned reading Tieck: it is a comedy-satirical meta-theatrical adaptation of the fairy tale, published in 1797 but not staged until 1844 (I can see why -- it seems like a hard play to stage! but I think it will be fun to do as a group readaloud.) Tieck is just much more enjoyable when he's not taking himself too seriously.

The Midsummer Night, or Shakespeare and the Fairies is 16-year-old Tieck's Midsummer Night's Dream fanfiction, which he was prevailed to publish late in life, and is pretty good for that. (I wish I knew more about the Mary C. Rumsey who translated it.)

Homer's Daughter, Robert Graves. cahn's Odyssey read reminded me of this book, which I enjoyed when I was younger; and while I should in fact reread the Odyssey, I was visiting my family and looking for a paper book to pick up, so I started this; the premise is that our protagonist is a young Sicilian princess who is going to go on to write the Odyssey, basing certain parts on her own life. I'm liking it as much as I remembered it (especially once I got past the info-dumpy prologue), and enjoying how many details of women's work it weaves in to the events of the story. (I know now that Graves shouldn't be taken seriously as a scholar of ancient mythology, but it still makes for interesting worldbuilding and story.)