More fanfiction!

May15 by Rebecca

So I recently discovered that Naomi Novik (author of the Temeraire series) presented to congress about the importance of the fair use exemption, to foster creativity. Go her!

Since I was at work when I discovered this, I read the written testimony rather than watched the video, and narrowly avoided bouncing around like a crazy woman.

Anyway… it made me want to post another set of fanfic recommendations.

After my last fanfic post of massively-long stories, I’m back to recommending some short fun fics:

Infinite Use
by Elizabeth Hoot

Fandom: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Summary: I’ve always wondered what exactly went on when Lady Catherine told Darcy about her meeting with Elizabeth. There are a lot of versions of that scene, but none hit quite right. Mostly, they took a serious approach to a scene I’d always imagined as absolutely hysterical. So, with no further ado…

Why I like it: It cracks me up. Just, she really highlights the ludicrous nature of the situation. In a romance with all the serious emotional development and fraught revelations of Pride & Prejudice, this story looks at one of the off-screen scenes and shows just how hilarious it must have been. Hee.

Beautiful Ideas
by metisket

Fandom: BBC’s Sherlock.

Summary: Mike knew what would happen if he introduced John Watson to Sherlock Holmes. He knew exactly what would happen, and he did it anyway.

Why I like it: First, because it’s wonderful. More specifically, though, it takes a minor character who essentially fulfills a plot point and then never appears again and makes him a full character. That is always a wonderful thing. Even more wonderful, though, is the character, who is shown to be wickedly funny and well aware of what he’s doing.

Because Superman Is Not Evil
by Brown Betty

Fandom: Superman with a bit of Batman

No summary, but the first line is: Clark spent, perhaps, seventeen minutes when he was fourteen thinking super hearing was a cool power.

Why I like it: For those of us who are not big Superman fans, one of the primary reasons is that Superman comes across as just too perfect and good and serious in his virtue and it just not particularly sympathetic. This take on Superman, though, makes me grin. He’s still a good and virtuous person, but he’s still a person. And possibly he has his own issues with his reputation for virtue.

A Good Fight
by togina

Fandom: Marvel movies/comic books. Mostly Captain America and Avengers.

Summary: “You remember that pub in London?” Steve went on, and Tony thought that someone should have made a note in the SSR records on Captain America. Something like, ‘Subject is a brawler. Do not, under any circumstances, take him to a bar unless you’re carrying brass knuckles and possibly an RPG.’

Why I like it: This highlights a side of Captain America that is often ignored. He tends to be shown as straight-laced and obedient to authority, with a side order of naive farmboy thrown in, even though his actual backstory has him growing up poor but scrappy, in very urban Brooklyn, during the Great Depression and Prohibition. His first military action (to save Bucky) was completely rogue action on his part. He was (and is) scrappy as anything. Sure, he has a strong moral compass, but that just meant he got into more fights than he might otherwise. This is a celebration of the good guy, Steve Rogers, who also just likes to brawl sometimes.

Warning: It’s a sad state of affairs that I need to warn about a homosexual relationship, but such it is. While there’s nothing too graphic in this story, Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes are most definitely in a relationship. (In addition, while being gay was illegal at the time of their youth, it wasn’t exactly uncommon, and they actually grew up in pretty much the center of gay Brooklyn. I would say it’s extremely unlikely that wasn’t intentional by the original creators.)

Hyperbole and a Half

Jan12 by Anna

By Allie Brosh

I received the Hyperbole and a Half book for Christmas and it was awesome! I tried to portion it out so it would last longer, but was only able to stretch it out over four days. A lot of her fans say this, but author Allie Brosh seems to live, at least part of the time, inside my head.

If you’ve never heard of Allie Brosh or Hyperbole and a Half, the book is a selection of stories, both new and from her blog by the same name, which you have to go visit right now. You should read my two favorite stories, which are also in the book, “The Simple Dog” and “The Party.” And read Wolves, too, because that one is also really funny. Oh, and Sneaky Hate Spriral is great. Basically, just start at the top and read until you hit the end. And buy the book, especially to read “Motivation,” one of the new stories, because I’ve been quoting it all week: “I don’t want to do anything more than I don’t want to hate myself.”

It was actually a perfect gift for me because although I’m a big fan of hers, I’d mostly stopped reading her blog for the last year, for a reason that shames me a little. She stopped posting for several months, during which I checked back regularly, but when she came back, she discussed how she was recovering from a serious bout of depression, and I couldn’t bring myself to read about that, and I got too anxious to check back in afterwards. So, basically, I’m pretty much as unsupportive as can be, and was seriously ashamed of myself, but luckily her book actually addressed her own coming-to-terms with her selfishness and egotism, so once again, I felt very like she was talking from my own head.

—Anna

Fanfiction Selection

Jan7 by Rebecca

The last month (or two, or three) has been somewhat frenetic for me, and I haven’t really had the energy or focus to read full books. However, I couldn’t not be reading something, and what I’ve been reading is fanfiction. I’ve introduced the genre before, so I thought I’d take a moment to recommend a few more short fanfics.

Friends Across Borders
by MueraRashaye

To understand these stories, you need to be familiar with Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar universe.

Summary: Two long-time enemy nations can’t become meaningful allies overnight. Stories from the lives of a border-guard Herald and Sunpriest, from their first meeting to the end, and insights into just how Karse and Valdemar were able to turn around their relationship so fast.

Warning: This is a series rather than a single story. The first three stories are complete, but the forth one is still a work in progress. Each of the first three stories can absolutely stand on their own, though, so if you won’t want to take a chance on a half-completed story, it’s okay to just not start the fourth story until it’s been completed.

Why I like it: This takes a part of my childhood and makes it a tad bit more realistic, but without ever tarnishing the joy of the original. The main characters are both a delight and their mutual bewilderment regarding their developing friendship is a joy to behold. Also, one sign of a good series, in my opinion, is that the individual stories can stand on their own. So you don’t have to commit to reading the whole series to enjoy just the first story: Enemy, It’s Cold Outside.

Monster
by Laura JV (jacquez)

To understand this story, you need to be familiar with the character of Methos from Highlander and Sesame Street in general.

Summary: “Someone new moved in, Chris, next door to Gordon! Come meet him with Elmo.”

Why I like it: This is super short but it’s sort of like a John Donne poem in its own way. Without ever directly saying anything, it plays with the different meanings of the word “monster.” And, let me reiterate: it’s a Highlander/Sesame Street crossover. 😀

The Whole Truth (So Help Me God)
by Metisket

To understand this, you should be at least passingly familiar with the new Teen Wolf tv show. Although, actually, I read and enjoyed it without ever watching the show, just knowing the basic premise.

Summary: And this is a Stiles character study, so there you go. It’s multiple POV and set around “Night School.” Mostly because it will never stop being hilarious to me that Stiles punched Jackson viciously in the face and the only person who was remotely surprised was Allison. XD WHAT WERE YOU LIKE AS A CHILD, STILES?

Why I like it: First, I have to admit that I don’t watch Teen Wolf, I just really like the fandom. Fan authors can, and often are, much better than, say, MTV script writers. My pleasure in this fandom comes, in large part, from how the character of Stiles is treated, and this is just a concentrated look at how hilariously fascinating Stiles is and why the other characters wince when they have to deal with him. I wouldn’t necessarily want to be around him, but I sure like reading about him. It just makes me laugh.

A Perpendicular Expression
by leupagus

To understand what’s going on here, you should know the tv show Person of Interest.

Summary: Pissing Finch off never actually ends well; usually it ends like this, with John scaring the shit out of her at two in the morning.

Why I like it: There’s a certain joy in reading about super-competent people who just fail at being reasonable human beings. And Joss Carter is hilarious as she has to put up with them and explain basic social behaviors like not stalking your friends.

Kissable Fanatic, Unhinged Minim Artists
by Basingstoke

This fic is set in the X-Men universe, although the X-Men characters appear only briefly. If you are aware at all of the character Toad, in Magneto’s Brotherhood of Mutants, you know enough to read this.

Summary (provided by thefourthvine): Best FF featuring a powerful anti-drug message; namely that if we spend all our time stoned we might fail to notice critical things in our environment, like that one of our friends is actually green.

Warning: This is not family-friendly or work safe, i.e. any sort of filter at all should filter out this story. There’s drugs, profanity, and graphic homosexual sex.

Why I like it: I fought with myself over including this particular story because so far all my recommendations have been intended for a general audience (which is not necessarily common in fandom) and this one is absolutely not. This is, in fact, the first story I’ve recommended that includes a serious warning. (It’s standard policy with fanfiction to include warnings, a policy that is immensely helpful for maintaining some sanity when wandering dark corners of the internet.) However, this story is just too good to not recommend. Basingstoke takes Toad, a character that is treated as a barely 2-dimensional character in the comics, and makes him fully human (as it were). This story makes him real and that is one of the things I really love about fanfiction: that it will take minor characters the original author threw in to take up space and develop those characters into the main characters of their own lives. This story is just really, really good with that.

The Reason I Jump

Dec28 by Anna

By Naoki Higashida

Jon Stewart interviewed the translator for this book, and then continued to rave about this book in subsequent shows, so I figured I’d give it a shot. That the book itself exists is amazing: the thirteen-year-old author with autism answers questions that he frequently hears. It is a fascinating look into a viewpoint that is usually inaccessible, and I imagine it is an immeasurable benefit to those who interact with people with autism. For myself, I found it very interesting—it is a short book, but not a quick read, since I kept putting it down so I could think more about what Higashida was saying—but occasionally a bit repetitive, which makes me sound like the worst person ever, since that is clearly one of the traits of autism. I try to justify my criticism by saying that Higashida is so mature and perceptive that it is easy to forget that he is working with quite a severe handicap.

My only previous insight into autism was the sporadic postings by one of my favorite bloggers, Matthew Baldwin, aka Defective Yeti, on raising his autistic son. He hadn’t posted in several months, so I’d gotten out of the habit of checking, but this book reminded me to check back in, and it turned out he spent all of October posting each day about his son. His love and delight in his son are evident in each post and make the posts such a pleasure to read.

And, finally, while I’m bringing up blogs about interesting parenting situations, I ran across Gender Mom just about a month ago, and have been completely caught up in it ever since. Gender Mom’s five-year-old daughter was born male, but announced she was female at age three, and a year later they decided to raise her female. It is a truly fascinating look at a mother trying her best in fairly new territory.

—Anna

Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman

Nov17 by Rebecca

This is going to be a super brief post, because it’s essentially a single link out to someone else’s article:

I got linked this article some time back, and I have no idea why I didn’t post a link here immediately, but I happened to mention it this afternoon to Anna and she assured me that it needed to go up, pronto. Thus, I give you:

Literary Trysts It Gives Me Great Joy To Think About: Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman
by Mallory Ortberg
the-toast.net
September 17, 2013

Because mine is an evil and a petty mind, suitable more to wallowing in the sordid sexual goings-on of literary giants than in reading their work, I take every opportunity I can to inform people who may not have known that Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde almost certainly had sex in 1882.

You are either the kind of person to whom this matters a great deal, or the kind of person to whom it matters not at all. To the latter I say: yours is the narrow road and the straight, and I extend to you a hearty and fulsome handshake, as well as my sincerest wishes for your continued good health. To the former I say: Want to hear about the time Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde (probably) hooked up??

(For more, click the link that is the whole excerpt, and it will take you to the original article.)

YA Book Battles and Sad Holiday Movies

Nov7 by Kinsey

It’s pretty clear that all of us here on Biblio-therapy are big YA fans–we may read and review other things, but we always come back to YA. Which is why we were so excited when Friend of the Blog Hannah pointed out Entertainment Weekly’s “What is the Best Young Novel of All Time” bracket game! You can see the complete bracket here. (And boy, do I love a good bracket–the bracket episode of How I Met Your Mother is one of my favorites. “I was there! Trust me! It’s Dead Baby!”) Voting started Monday so we’ve missed Round 1, which is probably all for the best because there were a few choices that seemed impossible. Anne of Green Gables or The Hobbit? I Capture the Castle or The Catcher in the Rye? Harry Potter or Holes? The Fault in Our Stars or Code Name Verity? I’m not sure what I would have done! (Okay, actually, most of those decisions are pretty easy: Anne, Castle, and Harry. But I am torn on the last one. Verity, I think, but I might have to read them both again before I felt truly comfortable with that decision.)

I’m going to keep an eye on the EW website for a while now, because I am looking forward to voting in the next rounds. But I do have one complaint (aside from the whole how-can-one-possibly-vote-on-art thing): some of these books are not YA. I understand that the lines can be a bit blurry, but in some cases, there is no blur involved. Dune is not and never was a young adult book. The Princess Bride? The House on Mango Street? Not young adult. And Prep? Just because a book is about teenagers does not mean it was written for teenagers. Plus it goes the other way, too–The Invention of Hugo Cabret is a straight-up kids book, and seems overmatched in this field.

EW did get it right by including The Book Thief, though, which is one of my favorite YA books ever. And last week I actually had the opportunity to see the new Book Thief movie (officially opening tomorrow). There are so many good things about the movie–all of the actors are just wonderful, especially Geoffrey Rush and Emily Watson as the main characters adoptive parents. And the whole thing has a beautiful look. But I wish they had been able to use those same people and sets and costumes and make a six-hour miniseries instead of a two-hour movie. The Book Thief is a long, complicated story, and so many things that had so much meaning in the book were brushed by in the movie because there simply wasn’t time. I am not one to get huffy about film adaptations of books–I tend to like seeing how the shift in format is made–but for me the movie had much less impact than the book. But then, the friend I was with who didn’t know the story, and who is not an overly emotional sort, started sobbing about halfway through the movie and never stopped, so maybe I’m a bad judge. There are a lot of lovely things about the movie, so I hope it does well in theaters. And I hope it inspires more people to go read the book, which is truly stunning.

List Challenges and Book Lists

Jul12 by Rebecca

I recently discovered List Challenges, the website. I do like list challenges, especially ones about books. And here are a whole bunch of them:

NPR’s Top 100 Science Fiction & Fantasy Books
(I’ve read 32 of these, and saw a bunch more that I’ve been intending to get around to reading. It really is an excellent list.)

Top 25 Fantasy Books, from IGN
(I’ve read 11 of these.)

101 Best Selling Books of All Time
(I’ve read 27 of these, but more to the point, these books made for a really odd collection. They aren’t themed or anything, just the books that have sold the most copies. Very odd.)

Modern Library 100 Best Novels (Modern Library ran the poll in 1998)
(Urg. Here are the Great Classics, the real, high literature. I’ve only read 6 of these books, and only enjoyed 3 of them. Just, urg. There’s only so much delving into the human condition that I can take and it’s not that much.)

BBC’s The Big Read – Best Loved Novels of All Time
(I’ve read 30 of these and loved most of those.)

The 50 Best Books for Kids (from the National Education Association)
(So I’m not exactly the audience for this list anymore, but I’ve still read 25 out of the 50, and not all of them while I was a kid. These are good ones, and also include books for a range of ages, from picture books for toddlers to young-adult readers.)

The 20 Best Books of the ’00s
(Now, this is just embarrassing, but I’ve only read 1 of these 20. At least I recognize several more?)

NPR’s 100 Best-Ever Teen Novels
(I’ve read 31 of these.)

This website of lists is a major time-sink so I had better tear myself away from it so I can go do something at least moderately productive. But you, dear reader, should definitely go and lose yourself in the various lists. How many of these books have you read?

New Development in Publishing

May22 by Anna

I just finished Rainbow Rowell’s Attachments, which Kinsey has already reviewed, so I’m just adding on that I LOVED it, and everyone should go read that, too (right after Good Omens). It was seriously one of those books where I was disappointed that it actually ended because I would have been happy to keep reading it for months.

Anyway, this is not a post about Attachments, much as I loved it. In order to get some more Rainbow Rowell after finishing the book, I immediately went on twitter and followed her, and she is currently talking about a very interesting new event in the literary world: Amazon is buying the rights to tv shows in order to try to monetize the corresponding fanfic.

It is all very new and embryonic, so no one is quite sure how it is going to work, but just that it is certainly going to change things up and it will be quite interesting to see how. Rowell and her followers bring up some very interesting points about what it means to monetize a previously free art form and to normalize a fringe culture (particularly a female-dominated creative outlet into a male-dominated media field).

Rebecca has previously given a basic overview into the world of fanfic here, and wants to think over this new development before commenting (she concurs with Rowell’s tweet, that she has many thoughts but few opinions yet on this news).

Discussing it with Rebecca, though, it occurred to me that this isn’t quite as much a sudden new development as it is being reported. Rowell brings up that every author after Stan Lee that used the character Spiderman was in essence writing fan fiction. Sherlock Holmes works continue to be published long after Conan Doyle’s death. Publishing houses have already started searching out popular fanfic authors for original works, and have even published fanfic pieces, just with changed names. So we keep moving forward at a fairly steady pace, I guess?

—Anna

In Lieu of Books . . . Links

May15 by Kinsey

Last week everything I had on hold at the library came in all at once, and every single book is big and giant and something I desperately want to read (Clockwork Princess! Life After Life! The Interestings!). So right now I’m wishing I could take a few days off work to hibernate with my books. While I make way through my teetering pile of hardback novels, here are a couple of links where you can actually read new content.

I first stumbled across the Bookavore tumblr when someone linked to a series she did on getting organized. That may sound like the dullest thing you could read on the internet, but it was actually fascinating and personal and helpful. Then I realized that the the author, who used to work in a bookstore and is now at a library, is a fantastic source of book recommendations. Maybe it’s a professional requirement, but she reads a much broader range of things than I do, so when I follow her guidance I end up places I never expected. For example, I just finished reading Sum It Up, the autobiography of Pat Summitt, the incredibly successful coach of Tennessee’s women’s basketball team. Does that sounds dull? IT IS NOT. I originally read it because Bookavore said it was really a book on how to manage people, which it is, but also Pat Summit is a kind of superhero. I would highly recommend both Sum It Up and Bookavore.

The second link might be my new favorite thing on the Internet. After a friend and I had a conversation this week about The Great Gatsby, she sent me a link to an article about Zelda Fitzgerald. The article is smart and informative, but also fun, which I think comes across in its title: Zelda Fitzgerald – Just A Total Mess Or What? It’s actually part of a series called Shelved Dolls, which I believe is about misunderstood/ignored women in history, from an online magazine called The Gloss. The other Shelved Dolls articles I read were great too, including this one that is relevant to Biblio-theray: Ayn Rand – I’m Going To Make You Like Her. Now, I’ve not thoroughly vetted The Gloss, so I don’t want to make any blanket claims, but it seems like a smarter, less obnoxious version of Jezebel. Which would be a good thing, because I used to adore Jezebel but don’t read anymore, since at some point it started to feel like getting yelled at about celebrities and the worst kind of sensational news stories. I intend to read more of the Gloss and see if it can fill my need for fun, informational, feminist news source, even if I still don’t like Ayn Rand.

Book Clubs

May5 by Rebecca

ButteryBooks.com

This is a website that provides ideas for book clubs, but with a strong focus on what the menus should be. Including the mixed drinks. It looks super good.

It also provides some interesting discussion questions.

I haven’t actually joined any book clubs, because I always thought that they would be like high school English class (ie, a combination of boring, pretentious, and frustrating.) This bit of prejudice (like most instances of prejudice) came from absolutely no evidence. This website provides a good counter-argument that a book club might be a whole lot of fun.