Saturday morning meme?

Give me a character and I'll tell you a piece of my personal headcanon.

(Digression: I really hate the term "headcanon".  For years and years it was called "fanon", and that was fine and clever, and then some whippersnapper on Tumblr reinvented the wheel and came up with "headcanon", which, on account of containing "canon" seems to imply a higher level of entitlement than "fanon".  And no matter how much I complain, these damn kids won't get off my lawn!)

(New trends from Tumblr that I also hate:  "X pairing is endgame!"  Not least because it seems to be applied a lot to pairings that have no chance whatsoever of becoming "endgame", ie, Zutara.  And that's coming from someone who quite likes the idea of Katara and Zuko being a thing in old age, and Tenzin's head turning ALL THE COLOURS when he finds out.  But calling it "endgame" implies that they spent the intervening decades waiting for their spouses to drop dead so they could hook up at last.)

(Also not "endgame":  Tenzin/Lin.  When a couple broke up over a decade ago ... and one half is now happily married with an army of children ... and they're only just now back on speaking terms ... that's not a pairing with much future, sorry to say.  Chances that Bryke are gonna canonically break up Tenzin and Pema so Tenzin can get back together with his ex: PRETTY SLIM.)

(I guess that means Pema/Tenzin is endgame?  But now I want to conduct some kind of penance for saying that, so.  Suffice to say, the Tenzin-related tags on Tumblr are ANNOYING and still there is no shirtless Tenzin art because fandom HATES ME PERSONALLY.)

ANYWAY, a bit of a meme to fill out a Saturday that's already looking a bit full!  Here's what else I have planned:

- write minimum 1500 words of novel
- scout journals accessible via public library for research for novel (OH GOD)
- chapter 3 of the Malory Towers reading at the pro blog
- bring in laundry
- tidy room, since I moved furniture on Wednesday and now the Lizcave is CHAOS and this could actually take all day
- (bonus) type up handwritten pages of Detective AU

Books read in July

[Forthcoming novel] - [an author]
Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times and Corruption of Atlantic City - Nelson Johnson
Gifts - Ursula K Le Guin
Worldshaker - Richard Harland
(Unfinished) If Walls Could Talk - Lucy Worsley
Virtuoso - Jessica Martinez
A Storm of Swords: Blood and Gold - George R R Martin
All That I Am - Anna Funder
(Unfinished) Katherine - Anya Seton

Bit of a mixed bag this month! 

Boardwalk Empire started off well, but by the time it got into the modern era it was all a bit, AND THEN THERE WAS GAMBLING.  GAMLING'S SO GREAT, YOU GUYS.  SO GREAT. 

Gifts was one for the book club, and (shamefully) the first Le Guin I ever read.  (I tried Earthsea once, honestly!)  I enjoyed it a lot, although I felt like the structure was a bit meandering.  I shall, at some stage, read the sequels. 

Worldshaker was enjoyable, especially since I picked it up shortly after Someone Whose Name I Forgot declared steampunk a genre for fascists, and this is a YA novel about an essentially marxist revolution in a steampunk world.  Lots of good ideas and characters, but it was quite uneven -- the writing was quite simplistic, and sat awkwardly against the complexity of the situation and the rather shocking violence. 

I don't usually list unfinished books, but I got a fair chunk into If Walls Could Talk and Katherine.  I dropped Walls because, while it was an interesting-enough popular history (about the evolution of the European house, room by room), the author was incredibly irritating.  I could live with her insistence that everyone in the modern age is middle-class and enjoys exactly the same lifestyle as she does, but when she expressed amazement that it took skill as well as brute strength to print William Morris wallpaper, I gave up.

Katherine is a 1950s novel about the life of Katherine Swynford, mistress and later wife of John of Gaunt.  It was one of the very first popular historical romances, and I enjoyed what I read of it very much.  But the print was tiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiny, and giving me a headache.  So I skipped ahead to see the outcomes for all the characters that I liked, and then stopped out of sheer self-preservation.  That was the library's copy, and very old;  apparently there's a new edition out with a foreword by Philippa Gregory that is presumably easier on the eyes.

Virtuoso was a perfectly good YA novel about a violin prodigy who, as she prepares for a competition that will decide her future career options, discovers a terrible secret.  I really liked this a lot, but I would have liked it even more if it had contained more about the main character's rather interesting relationship with her father and his family (who are uninterested in her, the illegitimate daughter of a failed opera singer, until it turns out she's hugely talented) and maybe a bit less about her romance with a rival violinist.  But the stuff about the pressure to succeed, the dependence on beta blockers and anti-anxiety medication, and her fraught relationship with her mother, were all great.

And All That I Am takes the prize for Best Book Last Month, which isn't surprising since it's winning all kinds of awards.  It was quite slow to start off with, and annoyed me in a lot of ways, since large parts of it are basically ERNST TOLLER'S MANPAIN, LET HIM SHOW YOU IT, but it was a fascinating story -- about the left-wing intellectuals of 1920s Germany, the rise of the Nazis and their exile and ultimate betrayal in Britain.  Most of the characters are based on real people, although some names are changed and several characters are composites. 

It's told via two first person narrators:  Toller, in New York in 1939, and Ruth, in Sydney in 2002.  Amazon reviewers seemed to find this profoundly confusing and difficult to follow, on account of how it required the reader to pay attention.  I'm not normally a fan of rotating first POV, but I liked it here.