#and then getting overly invested in writing fake lyrics for this book to the point that i'm excited to work on it again

[eijiroukiriot]

kirishima “ei-chan” eijirou. age 14. who looks kinda nerdy so you look over at his notes when you don’t get what’s going on in class only to find that he’s been scribbling variations of CRIMSON RIOT CRIMSON RIOT RED RIOT?? RED RIOT CRIMSON RIOT MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE for the last ten minutes. who is panting his guts out and looks pale and clammy but still refuses to stop doing pushups because he’s 50 away from surpassing the record written on the gymnasium whiteboard. who does a speech about why he wants to become a hero for an english presentation and he has notecards but he’s clearly not looking at them and you can’t tell the reason he’s speaking so loud and standing so rigidly is that he practiced his speech all night and is worried about messing it up or if he’s completely adlibbing and just that passionate about this and while he speaks everyone in the room is kind of sharing looks of “there’s no way he’ll get in but he cares so much that it makes me feel bad” only to be proven completely wrong when the test results come in two months later

#hi :( i'm sorry about the lack of posts lately #i have had very little energy and what little i have has been going to novel writing #or like. wishing i was working on a comic instead of my book #and then getting overly invested in writing fake lyrics for this book to the point that i'm excited to work on it again #leaving me without much room for krbk :/ #i do love my boys very very much though and i am still Thinking.... #thinking about their growth #kirishima specifically had like..an entire life before the parts that we saw #and we've only seen a little sliver of his time in middle school #what was he like as a younger kid? was he really shy and timid or more like middle school him trying to be really brave and tough? #did he have friends? did he do well at the sports festivals at his schools growing up? #did he get obligation chocolate and get way too into trying to figure out what to give back on white day? #did he visit his family in the country in the summer and come back to school super tan...what normal childhood things did he do #and how was he known #i guess we're supposed to infer no one really knows him from how ashido's friends react to him #but those bullies knew him as 'guy who talks big but doesn't even have a strong quirk' #so i wonder. what other versions of kirishima did people know #fun to think abt bc it's fun to imagine that he had a full life :) before during and after ua #anyway i hope you guys are also thinking abt kirishima #if you're still reading my tags know ily and hope you have a nice dinner tonight #thoughts

[simonposting]

here are some books I enjoyed in 2019

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe — Benjamin Alire Sáenz

is about a boy (aristotle) meeting a boy (dante), becoming friends, and then wondering why he doesn’t like hearing about him kissing boys at college (spoiler alert: it’s not homophobia (well, maybe a little), it’s the other thing!)

Ari is quite an angry young man, with an almost stream of consciousness narration that I found very compelling — the conclusion felt a little rushed to me, but overall: I loved it.

I read this at the start of the year and didn’t keep detailed enough notes so unfortunately don’t have much else to say. Sorry.

Children of Time — Adrian Tchaikovsky

an ark leaving the destruction of earth behind finds a habitable planet populated with Evolved Spiders

I got this for Alex as a Christmas present and he then suggested I read it and yeah, good choice, me. The spiders’ outlook is Weird and Alien and they really struggle to communicate with humans, even when they do manage to Make Contact, because both sides have very different understandings of what is obvious and therefore doesn’t need stating.

Some of the human ark sections felt a little unnecessary but you need to be invested in both sides of the inevitable confrontation for it to land properly, so fine.

There’s also some great stuff with a woman in stasis and an AI copy of her she left to keep things running for her.

The Magicians — Lev Grossman

Our protagonist discovers he’s a magician and packs off to magical boarding school, and despite this taking at least half the book, the actual plot is when he then discovers Legally Distinct Narnia is real and heads off for a jolly adventure that turns out to be largely horrific and traumatising.

The pacing is all over the place, and there’s the classic gay secondary character who doesn’t get to actually do anything despite ostensibly having a friendship with the protagonist close enough to consider him family (he even sleeps with him at one point, in a threesome with a woman, but the narrative and every character treats it as just the protagonist and woman sleeping together). But! Everything comes together in the end in a very satisfying conclusion which left my thoughts coming back to it for months afterwards.

The sequel is just terrible though.

In Other Lands — Sarah Rees Brennan

Is also about a boy discovering magic is real and heading off to magical boarding school, but this one is in the fairy realm, rather than just hidden Hogwarts style.

It tries to do something with the very militaristic society, but I’m not sure it ever actually reaches a point (protagonist pushes for more diplomacy with other races and I guess succeeds but the results all kind of occur “off-screen” so don’t feel hugely meaningful), and likewise with the matriarchally sexist elfs (which doesn’t land because where the humans are patriarchally sexist, they have female warriors and leaders, who are important in the narrative even — the elfs have no male warriors or leaders, and also are notably more puritanical, so it doesn’t mirror well?). And the protagonist is constantly spectacularly annoying.

But it’s gay, so.

Carrie — Stephen King

I don’t need to tell you what Carrie’s about, right?

So, going into Carrie I already knew what the climax was, and I wondered if this would negatively affect my enjoyment of it. Turns out I shouldn’t have worried because it switches between the narrative as it happens, and journals/interviews/articles/etc. written about the events afterwards — “one of her surviving classmates” is mentioned very early on, so the fact that something terrible happens is somewhat of a foregone conclusion. Perhaps knowing exactly what does have an impact, but it’s unavoidable at this point really.

Also turns out the musical lifts a lot of very specific wording from the book to use in the songs, which is nice.

Meddling Kids — Edgar Cantero

when they were teens, four kids and their dog solved a mystery where a haunting was being faked by an unscrupulous property developer. now, three adults and the original dog’s grandchild have returned because maybe there was something else involved after all.

Obviously riffing off scooby doo (though none of the characters perfectly directly align) but with some Actual Supernatural Stuff — in tone I was expecting a sinister underlying mystery, where it’s actually a bit more just straight up fighting lake monsters (etc.), but it’s a good concept. The main obstacle in their re-investigation is their own reluctance to re-examine the traumatic experiences of their youth.

Some of the dialogue is written in script format? (But not all of it), which I got used to but I never understood why this choice was made.

Is also gay. Nice.

For the Time Being — Ruth Ozeki

is about a Japanese schoolgirl writing a journal about her life, and also about a Canadian woman who is reading said journal after it washes up on the coast.

I like reading books in which someone else reads a book, turns out. There are footnotes in the journal, often just explaining/translating specific Japanese terms, in context clearly put there by the woman reading it. She gets overly invested in reading this journal, to the point her husband has to gently point out that it was written years ago, you can’t find her to urgently help. 

I was never 100% certain whether the journal was a true story or not, even setting aside any of the supernatural hints.

Ash Princess — Laura Sebastian

is about a princess of a magical kingdom that was invaded when she was child, who then grew up a captive in her own palace. now she’s going to seduce the prince in order to murder him and throw the occupiers into civil war

Quirky fantasy courtly intrigue. Has some good stuff about how the occupiers treat her culture (she hates that her people’s style of clothing is ‘back in fashion’ now), and about her best friend nonetheless being one of the occupiers, and how she barely actually remembers her own religion really. Goes back and forth on whether she can trust the prince or not.

Doesn’t really conclude though, just sets up for the next book, which I get, but always kind of hate.

Wayward Son — Rainbow Rowell

The sequel to Carry On, which I adore.

Opens with an epilogue, because, our magical chosen one accomplished what he was magically chosen to do last book! The end! But then life goes on. He is probably depressed, and his relationship is not going super well, so let’s go road trip across America.

It’s a tiny bit ‘second book of a trilogy’, and the Road Trip thing feels a bit ‘and then we went to X place and Y happened and then we moved on’ leading to a slightly less overall cohesive narrative? But I still love the writing and characters and there’s some wonderful playing with how the magic system works (words have power from repetition, so spells are all expressions/quotes/lyrics — this means trying to cast British idioms doesn’t work in America).

Ultimately I enjoyed it but I think Carry On stands fine on its own and I don’t really feel that this actually adds much.

I also read several Discworld books — Terry Pratchett

I read the colour of magic years ago and utterly loathed it, so never bothered reading anymore. Turns out they get better! I should have listened! I’m going through roughly in order but skipping ones I can’t be bothered with. things like Pyramids (“all our gods have become literally real and now there’s three of them in the sky physically fighting over the sun”) and Moving Pictures (“we started making movies and accidentally started altering reality a bit, whoops”) are very much my taste.

Here’s to more good books in 2020

Thanks for reading xoxo