#raven tower

[esseastri]

A new Satisfying Object has joined my bookshelves! THE RAVEN TOWER was one of my favorite books of the year in 2019, and if you have not read it, I cannot recommend it enough. Fantasy Hamlet from the point of view of a god who is also a rock. Read it, you will not regret it!!! Anyway, I had a ton of fun including design elements from the endpages of the hardcover into my new fancy binding. Might be my favorite re-bind I have done so far.

#nicole does art #i makes stuff #bookbinding #raven tower #ann leckie

[she-commands-me-and-i-obey]

The Strength and Patience of the Hill: I AM THE SUSTAINER OF IRADEN!

Also the Strength and Patience of the Hill: I ain’t gonna sustain tho, lol

#raven tower #the raven tower

[benedictusantonius]

[2023|005] The Raven Tower (2010) written by Ann Leckie

+ Bonus Involuntary Book Club:

#ann leckie #the raven tower #raven tower #books2023 #involuntary book club #the raven #the myriad #the strength and patience of the hill

[pretensesoup]

Queer books, day 17/30

Hamlet with a trans main character and Ophelia lives and the ghost is a god who is a rock. What's not to like?

This is actually a very effective use of second person narration. Pay attention, I probably won't say that again. (Or I will, I don't know. I'm pretty easy.)

There's a lot of palace intrigue here, which isn't exactly my thing, but Ann Leckie is always an interesting read, and this is no exception. She thinks very hard about place and language in a really great way. 10/10, go read it.

#ann leckie #raven tower #thirty days of books #queer fiction #lgbtq fiction #pride #book review

[minutia-r]

for the multifandom poetry fest, for the prompt: parent watching their child grow up and all the complicated feelings that comes with that

I was your mother, as much as anyone. There is no other woman who would claim you as a son. Child silent as the wood, but not as wise, Your father never could do wrong in your eyes. So I remained behind, while you grew up and left, Coming home to find what you called your birthright’s theft. You fool! You don’t know the choice we faced. To watch our fates unspool, and all of us disgraced. I did what I thought best, and that’s no lie. O child of my breast, why do you want to die?

#raven tower #multifandom poetry fest #minutia's fic

[outlawroute]

The Raven Tower

by Ann Leckie 1/5

This book was nominated and voted in for the book club I run. We will meet to discuss it as a group in a week, so I wanted to get my initial and solo opinions down before then. I don't think I would have picked this book up on my own if I had been introduced to it any other way. Sci-fi is probably my favorite genre; fantasy is probably one of my least- people think if you love one you gotta at least like the other.

The Raven Tower is told in alternating first and second person. Our narrator is the Ancient god, The Strength and Patience of the Hill aka a big, solid, grey, rock… The god alternates between their own history as well as recounting the present day role of Eolo, the right-hand aid to Mawat, a prince seeking to overthrow his usurper uncle and regain his place as the servant of a local god. Our narrator is monotone and like almost all omniscient characters, written with absolutely no soul or empathy. Our main character, Eolo, is unfortunately boring. And the rest of the characters are one dimensional- fitting classic tropes- greedy, bad, selfish, etc. If we don't care for any of the characters then the reader should care for the place itself, Iraden? But it's also underdeveloped and I found that I didn't care about its inevitable destruction caused by the stupid decisions of most of our unlikeable characters.

I don't agree with Leckie's decision to write the book in alternating first and second person. I believe Eolo's storyline would have been much more compelling if we could hear his internal monologue. Then we'd have insight to the connections between characters, his clever thinking, and perspective of a trans man in this universe. But instead, his storyline is told by a rock god. And as for the God's first person narrative, I found most of his history boring and unimportant to the overall plot until maybe the last couple writings.

The entire story is slow, with little development for the first 280 pages of a 400 page book. By the time the book picks up, I didn't care and it was too little too late. The ending was unfulfilling and anti-climactic.

For 2024, I decided to allow myself to quit books. This would have been the first book I'd have quit at around 230 pages. I only pushed through so I could rate the book low during our book club discussion instead of having to record DNF.

I'd recommend this book to those who believe fantasy can do no wrong. Otherwise, it's a lackluster slow paced book with little payoff.

StoryGraph Link

#booklr #book recommendation #fantasy #ann leckie #raven tower

[puppetmaster13u]

Prompt 76

Tim has no idea whether to laugh or cry. Bruce sends him away from Gotham to stay safe from Red Hood, yet who is standing there, in the Titan Tower, but the man himself. And if he was attacking or something then fine, he could deal with it. But no, the man is standing there, in the kitchen, cooking like it’s an everyday thing. Like sure he’s cooking angrily and Tim swears he can see some sort of eye glow in the helmet, but it’s not like he’s actually threatening any of them?? The literal crime lord has been hissing about them not having any food and being out of medical supplies and who decided to leave a bunch of teens alone to take care of themselves. Which. Rude, he’s been taking care of himself for years, and both Raven and Beast Boy have too! What type of scheme is this?!

Jason was going to go through with his attack on the Tower, he really was. But seriously, they didn’t even have any medical supplies, their cupboards were practically empty of food, and they didn’t even have any cleaning supplies. For fuck’s sake he’d gotten in so easily and it was a giant tower shaped like a T- everyone knew where it was! Honestly it’s not his fault the pit rage went from being pissed to the literal child- which uh, huh he’ll have to freak out about that later- to raging about how he took better care of the alley kids than the heroes were taking care of their kids so guess whose going to have to fucking step up! 

#Jason: Damn you live like this #dc #dcu #prompts #jason is the angriest mother hen ever #No he doesn't know how the fuck he's coparenting with the pit rage #but he is- so fine #i hope you know that the titans are standing in the doorway or sitting awkwardly at the table with no idea who tf RH is #Tim is the only one who knows who tf he is since he's from Gotham and a bat lol #The next time someone attacks the tower they gonna get bullets to the knees and the most feral WTF IS THAT ever #if you wanna make it dcxdp maybe halfa jason #or at least hella liminal #i mean tim is from gotham; raven is half demon; beast boy is literally already ecto green; cyborg has alien tech fused with him #Jason & the pit: Wtf these are literal infants where are their guardians >:U #dcxdp #dpxdc

[pogchampsthings]

Check out my latest online store Raven Tower on Orcashop!!

#orcashop #Raven Tower #online store #online shop #amazon #etsy

[bet-on-me-13]

Starfire is a Halfa

So! We all know Starfire's backstory right? She was the princess of Tameran, sold off as a Slave by her sister, and experimented on giving her Energy Based Powers before she escaped to Earth and joined the Teen Titans.

What you didn't know, is that the Experiments were using a very specific Substance. Ectoplasm.

The Experiments done on Starfire turned her into a Halfa, the 3rd Natural Born Halfa in existence. Not that she knew anything about that, the records of the Aliens who Experimented on her were destroyed when the Ship crashed on Earth, so she didn't know the true origin of her Powers.

All this time she has been using her powers through her Mortal Body, never discovering her Transformed Ghost State even years after the Experiments. She has no idea that she is limiting herself, that she has a whole catalog of Powers that have never seen the Light of Day.

But Raven has noticed something. Her recent Divination Spells have detected the presence of a Powerful Ghost somewhere in the Tower, and she needs to find it.

#Dpxdc #Dp x dc #Dcxdp #Dc x dp #Danny Phantom #Dc #Dcu #Starfire is a Halfa #She is completely unaware of this #Blackfire is too after replicating the Experiments but she is actually aware of her full scope of powers #Raven was just testing out some divination spells on a whim and detected an Infinite Realms Ghost in Titans Tower #She needs to find it #She tracks it to Starfires room and decides that Star must have been possessed recently #Meanwhile in the Infinite Realms: #Danny: WHAT DO MEAN THERES ANOTHER HALFA?! #Ellie: New Sister!

[ilovemesomevincentprice]

Vincent Price/Edgar Allan Poe/Roger Corman movie collaboration (1960-1964)

#vincent price #roger corman #horror #icons #the pit and the pendulum #the fall of the house of usher #house of usher #tomb of ligeia #edgar allan poe #the Raven #the haunted palace #the masque of the red death #tower of london #tales of terror #old horror movies #vintage #movie #actor #handsome #gif #gifs made by me #gif set #my gifs

[lemonboyjosten]

palmetto state university | the foxhole court

(psu was based on the architecture of clemson university and gods ain’t it pretty)

#aftg #all for the game #palmetto state foxes #palmetto state university #andrew minyard #neil josten #andreil #the foxhole court #gay #lgbtq #the kings men #the raven king #tfc #trk #tkm #nora sakavic #fox tower #psu #psu foxes

[scribefindegil]

Losing my mind over how well Ann Leckie does material culture. So much of her worldbuilding is deeply grounded in the realities of material and labor needs and how those shape the setting. It's so prominent in the Radch books: the evil space empire is obsessed with tea, so they annex planets with the right conditions to grow it and replace all the native agriculture with tea plantations and staff them with transportees from their other conquered worlds. And in a sense that seems so obvious that it's almost silly to write it out; like, yeah, that's how imperialism works. But the difference here is how much focus the books afford it: it's not just worldbuilding for worldbuilding's sake; there's a multi-book plotline about the field workers striking for better conditions! But most Radchaai characters would never think about this: tea is just something you buy, the work of its production several levels of abstraction away from you, so you don't have to consider where it came from and whose labor went into making it.

And I just read The Raven Tower and I cannot stop thinking about how it views divine magic as just another kind of abstracted labor. This is one of my favorite sentences, from near the beginning:

"A man sat on the bench between them, wearing all white--white shirt, white leggings, white cloak, the sort and amount of perfect unstained white that can be achieved only by a god's intervention, or else the labor of dozens of servants with no other work than bleaching and laundering."

You read it, and at first it seems like a clear distinction: you can do this with endless, laborious human work, or you can do it with magic. But as the book goes on you realize that magic in this setting doesn't actually make things less laborious. Gods can do things that humans can't, but they're still required to draw on equivalent power. If you can't grow food, a god can provide, but they need to exert the energy that would otherwise have gone into germination and photosynthesis and threshing. If your divine protection against disease expires, you can accomplish the equivalent by continuously straining and boiling your water. If you want your clothes to remain perfectly white, you can get the labor from servants or you can get it from a god, but it's labor either way and the cost will have to be paid.

#it's good worldbuilding brent!!!! #imperial radch #the raven tower

[toushindai]

do you think the strength and patience of the hill would let me. climb it

#would I have to make an offering first? I could do that #the raven tower #ann leckie

[coquelicoq]

as a huge unreliable narrator enjoyer i love the fact that the raven tower is narrated by someone who cannot lie. so the narration is not unreliable, and any kind of uncertainty is always couched in "here is a story i have heard" or "i imagine", but it scratches the same itch as unreliable narration because the evidentiality of the narration is still so central, just in the opposite way. stories that don't care about where the narrator is getting their information or what biases are present in the way that information is shared with us are on one end of a spectrum, and stories that do care about those things are on the other end, and the raven tower is firmly situated alongside the unreliably narrated stories even though the whole point is that the narrator is as motivated as it is possible to be to never say something that is untrue. and it's fascinating to see how ann leckie manages to build suspense and subvert expectations without really at any point deliberately misleading the reader. every time i reread one of her books, the bouncing of the dvd screensaver in my brain gets a little more frenetic. how does she do what she does. ann leckie what is your secret.

#this post is spoiler-free btw. the narrator is very upfront about the fact that it can't lie and says this very early in the story #i'm only like 40% through my reread and i don't remember any details of what happens but i'm already losing it #and the fact that it's first-person second-person narration...completely undivorceable from the conceit of the book #might write a different post about that but probably only after i finish rereading #i finally got my sister to agree to read it and she's like 'i read the first fifteen pages! i like the style' #and i'm barely restraining myself from being like girl please read another fifty pages and get back to me #if you are not frothing at the mouth by page 100 then your money back. guaranteed. #my sister loves semantics like the linguistic subfield of semantics so i've been begging her to read this for so many years... #like i KNOW she will love it when that stuff starts becoming apparent. which is remarkably early in the book #hrrrrhughghrhrrgh i want to talk about it so bad #the raven tower #ann leckie #my posts #unreliable narrators #or not!!! actually!!! #storytelling #semantics

[titan-fanatic]

After rewatching this episode in honor of its 20th anniversary I can confirm that the future is just as if not even more abysmal than this episode portrayed it to be

#also it's really emotional. I teared up at some parts #teen titans #how long is forever #starfire #cyborg #beast boy #raven #robin #like theres this specific shot of the old battered tower 20 years into the future and it hit hard for me

[terapsina]

#2 for the book worm ask game!

(ask game)

2. Favorite fantasy book(s).

(Eeeeexcellent, I do love fantasy books. Though how I'm gonna narrow it to only a few I've got no idea. Okay. I'm going to remove the very obvious choices like Lord of the Rings (though it is one of my faves)).

---

Monstrous Regiment. I love the entire Discworld series (especially The Witches) but I've also got a huge soft spot in my heart for Terry Pratchett's take on 'a girl dresses like a boy to go to war' (and thinks of everything except some spare socks in- erm... the right place). Along with Polly, the squad consists of a vampire, a troll, an Igor, a religious fanatic and two very, very close "friends" (and yes, the official summary put the friends in quotes too). And everyone has their own secret.

I love basically everything about this book and I can't tell you guys any of it because it would spoil all the fun.

The Goblin Emperor. This one's a story filled with light. Maia the half goblin son of the elven Emperor was never supposed to take the throne (or to ever even be at court. because racism). And then everyone ahead of him dies in a single "accident" and suddenly he's the new Emperor. Maia is a good person, and a kind one, and despite everything that gets thrown at him he keeps hold of that understanding of right and wrong and refuses to bend.

(I have to mention that the language of the writing is kinda hard to get into in the beginning, and the characters's have very complicated and long names, but once you get into it it really did enhance the story for me).

Good Omens. An Angel and a Demon try to stop the apocalypse and instead lose the Antichrist. I've loved that book for like a decade now and if I don't put it on a list of my faves that list would be a lie.

The King of Attolia. Third in The Queen's Thief series and my favorite one out of all of them. I've always enjoyed Outsider POV in fics. And here is a book that just... proves why. We've got Eugenides and Irene, the Thief and the Queen, and we know them from the two previous books. And adore them. But the story isn't from their POV, it's from the POV of Costis, a Queen's guard who's suddenly gotten assigned to the King. The useless, weak, undeserving king that as far as Costis is concerned doesn't deserve to even kiss the Queen's boots. And it's hilarious to read the story from the eyes of someone who knows so much less than us. And so satisfying, as he begins to understand.

(I recommend the whole series and am personally glad to have read them in the published order but Megan Whalen Turner has stated that she wrote them in a way that allows you to jump in at any point you want).

The Raven Tower. The story is from the viewpoint of a sentient, omniscient rock whose name is Strength and Patience of the Hill and it is the GREATEST THING EVER. The gods are real and must be very careful with their words, because if they speak a lie the reality will alter to make that lie the truth but if the lie is bigger than the power of the god... well. Inspired by Hamlet.

(the book also has a trans man as the main character; the other main character? The sentient rock is the narrator but the largest part of the story focuses on Eolo).

A Natural History of Dragons. The first book from The Memoirs of Lady Trent (and honestly it would probably be more honest to say that every single book from this series fits the category of fave but I'm putting up the first here because this isn't a series where you should skip ahead). The book focuses on the life of Isabella as narrated by her older self. This is the story how a Scirland lady bucked all tradition and became a world renowned expert on the Natural History of Dragons.

(this series has a piece of my heart and always will).

---

(and finally, here's some more of my favorite fantasy books that I also adore and would totally ramble about but I got tired of typing).

#monstrous regiment #the goblin emperor #good omens #the king of attolia #the raven tower #a natural history of dragons #discworld #terry pratchett #katherine addison #neil gaiman #the queen's thief #megan whalen turner #ann leckie #the memoirs of lady trent #marie brennan #fantasy books #book rec #book recs #book asks #ask game #ask meme #answers #tinynavajo #terapsina rambles #terapsina's book rambles