booknook | Booknook Friending Meme

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Booknook Friending Meme

Hello, hello!

booknook is tossing its hat in the ring for

3weeks4dreamwidth in the form of a friending meme :D

Copy and paste the text from the little box below into a new comment on this post. Feel free to remove the questions that aren't relevant for you! (If you want to fill this out in a post somewhere else, you're welcome do so, simply credit

booknook :D)

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Name: ambyr
Pronouns: any
Age Group: about to turn 40
Dealbreaker(s): Uh, people who want to argue that audiobooks don't count as "reading," I guess.

I Recently Finished Reading: Lyorn, by Steven Brust. Can't believe this series might actually conclude in my lifetime! The endgame finally feels in sight.
A Book I Want to Reread: I just picked up an illustrated copy of The Last Unicorn, which I don't think I've read since I was a teenager, and I'm excited to revisit it.
Some Published Titles From My To Be Read List: Alaya Dawn Johnson's The Library of Broken Worlds, Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, Kij Johnson's The Fox Woman, Eileen Power's Medieval People, Sylvia Townsend Warner's Summer Will Show, Robert Jackson Bennett's Foundryside.
A Book Not-Yet-Published I'm Excited About: I'm not sure at this point that it's ever coming out after years of delayed release dates, but I'm intrigued by the idea of Rahawa Haile's Appalachian Trail memoir In Open Country.
Related Book News I've Got My Eye On: Arete Edition's Lud-in-the-Mist is going to be lovely when it finally happens; just look at this art!

My All-Time Favorite Book(s): Michelle West's The Broken Crown, Guy Gavriel Kay's The Lions of Al-Rassan, Rosemary Sutcliff's The Lantern Bearers, Patricia A. McKillip's The Changeling Sea, C.J. Cherryh's Cyteen, Diane Duane's The Door into Fire
My Favorite Book Genre(s): Fantasy, science fiction, urban planning, history
A Book I Recommend in My Favorite Genre(s): Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Cities was a really good legal history that tilted my understanding of how we got into our current mess. The two The Future Is Female! volumes of 1930s-1970s short science fiction stories that Library of America put out are a nicely arranged overview; I wish for better footnotes, but the selection choices are solid.
A Book I Don't Recommend in My Favorite Genre(s): Look, I'm glad I read all 800+ pages of The High Cost of Free Parking because it is absolutely foundational in the field, but you can just take my word (or many other peoples' words!) that it's exhaustively researched and read a two-page summary. Also, John Crowley's Little, Big is Crowley at his worst when it comes to writing women, and I regret reading it.
A Genre I'm Interested in Trying Out: I'm trying to read more poetry. I'm not very good at it.

Link to My Reading Log: ambyr on Goodreads

Books/Genres I'm Interested in Discussing/Chatting About: With Lyorn fresh in my mind, other people's thoughts on Dragaera would be particularly interesting right now, but any of the above is welcome! (I do feel I should warn people that my DW is currently 90% animated Star Wars by volume, but it's usually All Books All The Time and will probably go back to that sooner rather than later.)

"Rebecca" is a great book, definitely worth reading! I hope you'll like it :)

I'm making my way to it by a backwards path; I love Sleep No More, which is based on Macbeth and Rebecca the movie, so I watched the movie, and now I figure it's finally time to go back to the source! Maybe I'll burn this candle for ambiance while I read.

I am so validated by your Little, Big comment. I tried that years ago and got such bad vibes that I only made it maybe 30 pages, and have never felt the least interest in picking it up again.

Also we seem to have a lot of the same tastes, so I've friended you. :)

Welcome aboard! I'm pretty sure I've seen you around.

I am looking forward to your eventual thoughts on Foundryside, which I was conflicted about. (Also looking forward to your thoughts on Rebecca.)

Also, I stand ready to poach any new-to-me Dragaera fans you lure out of the woodwork, lol

Oh dear. Is that a disrecommendation? (I have very conflicted feelings about the Divine Cities books, which I gave up on after book two.)

It's not a disrecommendation (although I reread my write-up and I guess I was even more conflicted/negative than I remembered, lol), but I did not continue with the series (I did at least finish book 1, which I did not do with Divine Cities). There's stuff about Foundryside I really enjoyed -- there's some neat magical worldbuilding (although other aspects of worldbuilding bugged me a bunch), and I liked a couple of characters, and thought one twist was interesting in principle at least. Weirdly, the thing that bugged me the most was how dialogue was written -- specifically, it reminded me of someone trying to do Brustian Vlad-and-Loiosh mental banter but with whatever makes it work in Brust missing XD

But, hah, and I'd completely forgotten this, one of my random remarks on this book was "[X and Y], early on, gave me a Varrick and Zhu Li (from Legend of Korra) vibe, although this wore off after a while". So, you know, that's now two unrelated things I'm curious to see if you'll also be reminded of :)

Well, Zhu Li is my fave, so that is a selling point. . .

Hehe, I thought I remembered that right :) (The character who reminded me of Zhu Li in this is someone I liked throughout the book)

>>I'm trying to read more poetry. I'm not very good at it.<<

Poetry exists in many styles and not everyone likes what may be readily available. Haiku is usually easy to grasp because it's brief and deals with nature. Narrative poetry tells a story. Form poetry has a structure you can learn to follow; I'm a fan of repeating-interlocking forms myself. But a lot of the modern stuff is deliberately opaque.

If you want some to explore, I've got a huge archive of mine under the Poem tag, available for anyone to read free. Form Poem is a subsection of that. The Serial Poetry page has narrative poems that fit together. If you're not sure how to approach poetry, see Books Written and check the supporting materials -- there are discussion questions and such.

Want to watch poetry being made live? Drop by the Poetry Fishbowl. Next up will be Tuesday, May 7 with a theme of "Protopia" (a place that gradually gets better). The crosstalk among the audience can get really fun.

Your books sound interesting (and I've also read a few already)! Why did you pick up The High Cost of Free Parking actually?

I run an urban planning book club (originally in-person, now on Discord, it's been going for eight years now), and it's a really foundational work for urbanist theory and transportation design. It's twenty years old at this point, and its theories are widely accepted in the field, but at the time it came out it was absolutely upending conventional wisdom, so the author felt he really had to prove his point: by repeating himself, and repeating himself, and repeating himself with case study after case study after cast study and statistical analysis after statistical analysis. Thus: 800 pages, which now that it's become orthodoxy is a bit puzzling. Like, you read it today and go, okay, Shoup, I get your point, you're right and you can stop writing now fifty pages in. But that wasn't the environment he was writing in/for.

I just picked up an illustrated copy of The Last Unicorn, which I don't think I've read since I was a teenager, and I'm excited to revisit it.
Oooh, I haven't read that one in years but I remember that I loved it - in a strange, sad way, you know?

Ohhhh The Last Unicorn! Yes, I totally should reread that as well...one day. I think I last read it in my very early 20s.

I think I picked up RJB's Foundryside and then put it down because I was missing some sort of prequel(? something with Glass?). I did read his City of Stairs trilogy and liked City of Stairs quite a lot but didn't warm to the sequels, so for me he's a bit of a mixed bad as an author. I want to like his stuff but at least with Foundryside I got confused.

i've got to add my vote to the Rebecca rec wagon, i've read enough Du Maurier that I am fairly confident this is her at the peak of her powers

I'm going to go ahead an friend you as I have heard so many cool things about you from Anna over the years! I'm a few pages from being done with Dzur rn, my Dragaera jounrey has kinda stalled (last Dragaera book i finished was iirc 2 years ago) but i think I have the distinction of being the only person Anna knows who's ever said Teckla is her FAVORITE haha

Teckla is great! Can't go wrong with Teckla.

Welcome aboard.

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