@letsreadwomen / letsreadwomen.tumblr.com
Spent this week stuffing the local little free libraries!
I went through all my books, read and unread, a massive undertaking that took days. Also sweat and tears. Plus some screaming. Maybe some screeching.
But: ✨️ Over 100 Books Unhauled!!!!! ✨️
i understand the appeal of publishing "fic with the serial numbers filed off" as original work but i also feel like. what makes something a good fic is at odds with what makes something a good original story.
a good fic is in conversation with a source text, it may give a character an interesting role, it may reinterpret or subvert the rules established in the canon universe, whatever. but like. its transformative by nature. whereas original stories - good ones, anyway - have their own internal, non-referrential sense of logic and rules. it can be in conversation with the genre writ large but it has to have internal substance that can stand alone. which fic inherently cant do.
Rewrite a classic fairy tale by telling it backwards. The end is now the beginning.
Once upon a time there was a princess who loved so deeply that her heart was worn constantly on her sleeve. She fell in love with a prince, and the next year, her father allowed them to be wed- he remembered his own wife every day, and wished his daughter to be as happy as he had been.
The day of the wedding came, and the girl walked down the aisle in a dress of gentle silver. The Prince took her hand and smiled, and leant in to kiss her.
For luck, he would later say. A kiss for luck, a smile for joy, a laugh for a happy ending. It was a saying his own family had had for years, but it was a saying that failed him.
For the second his lips touched hers, she fell to the floor with a sigh.
Not dead they healers told the prince. not dead but sleeping, not dead but unable to wake.
The prince- so ashamed, so in fear of his life and hers- stole her away from the castle that night, away from her father and her people, so they would never have to watch her waste away.
He hid her in a forest, in a casket of diamond and ice, and he waited. Waited, for he did not even know where to start. He did not even know if the hope for her waking had a point.
He was there for two days when they found him. Seven short folk, small men with beards and axes in their hands, and harsh smiles on their faces.
We can help you they said to him, the six cackling behind the speaker. But, prince, it will come at a price.
I would pay anything. He vowed. Only later, realising he should have asked what it would be.
The Seven disappeared and left him on his own. Alone, other than the silent not-dead princess at his side.
When they returned there was an eighth with them- an old frail woman with a basket in her hands.
We will wake her she said, pulling out an apple and throwing it in their air but you will never look at her, talk to her again, and she will work in the mines with my dwarves here.
He wanted to say no. But knowing she was alive, even out of reach, was better than sleep and near death.
so yes he said. Help her.
The old woman smiled and picked out a knife, cutting the apple into small parts. One, she handed to the prince, the other, she took over to the casket, and opening it, she placed it on the princess’ lips.
A gasp, a flash of her eyes opening, and the prince knew nothing more.
***
The princess woke in a place she did not know, surrounded by people she did not know. An old woman and short men- and her prince, asleep on the ground.
He is not dead the old woman said only sleeping. But around you, he will never wake. He saved you but cursed you both- and now your life is tied to my mines.
The princess tried to fight, to leave.
But the old woman had magic and she did not, and the dwarves were all she knew for many years. Sometimes as friends, sometimes as enemies, often arguing but always allies, they worked side by sides in the underground mines, looking for fairydust and rubies, magic and gold.
They taught her the songs of work and the songs of marches, and soon she forgot that she had even been a princess.
One evening she was walking back to their home alone, when she heard a noise to her left. She looked, expecting a rabbit, a bird, but out stepped a man with a bow in his hands.
You shouldn’t be out in the woods alone he said to her.
This is my home.
Trees are no home for anyone. She wondered if she should tell him of the many people hidden in the forest, each with no where else to go come with me.
Why?
Because I have a place you can go.
She should have said no- but what was there for her in the trees and the mine? So she took his hand and he led her out into the bright daylight, through winding roads intil they arrived at a castle she did not know.
where are we? she asked.
The Huntsman smiled my home, and the home of my queen.
He led her in through the doors, up to a room where a woman was sat on a throne. The woman stood as she saw the princess, staring at her in wide eyed shock.
You look just like her the queen whispered.
Once, the Huntsman said quietly, seeing the question in the princess’ eyes my queen had a child. A daughter who should have been your age. But she was stolen away by the man my queen loved.
You-
I’m not her the princess said- but she had never known her mother. Only her father and an empty throne at his side.
No. the queen said, her tone one of disbelief. But I am in need of an heir, and you in need of care. Stay here a while, and let us see.
- - -
If you enjoyed reading this, please consider buying me a coffee to keep me awake and writing! Thank you
i’ll talk trash about D&D 3/3.5 all day long but i gotta say the core book cover aesthetic fucked so hard. everyone got hyper burned out on this kind of thing 20 years ago because everybody did it all at once for a while but look, get over here and gaze with new and forgiving eyes.
3rd ed went “oh wouldn’t it be sick if we made them look like fantasy books?”
and 3.5 fucking doubled down.
do you not wish to crack open a fucking tome, boy?
do you not wish to gaze upon my magical spells?
they were so filled with fantasy and wonderment that the nostalgia reprint premium edition in 2012 was like oh shit we dreamed too big we gotta reduce the whimsy so nobody knows we were cringe in middle school.
I think my favourite of this series was the expanded psionics handbook
It was the fact that the book itself WAS A BRAIN implying that rather than pages, stowed away on this wizard’s shelf was some rectangular chunk of delightfully sculpted plasticine greymatter that if you could only unlock your telepathic potential could show you the strange knowledge contained within it. Then there was the crystals, and the little ring stowed away on the back cover!
It seemed like something out of the overly indulgent practical effects of a late 80s fantasy movie, with a bit of 90s weirdness thrown in.
hold on a second man…
@insect-p0sitivity tags peer approved
“I feel very strongly that if historical romance can give women a happy ending, it can give queer people a happy ending. M/f historical romance doesn’t tie itself in knots over the likelihood of the rake having syphilis, the terrible dentistry, the lice, the prolapsed uterus after multiple pregnancies, the prospect of death in childbed, or the horrifying legal discrimination against married women. We don’t close the book on the wedding scene reflecting that the heroine can now be legally raped, has just lost all her property to her husband…and would be vanishingly unlikely to obtain a divorce. Historical romance readers aren’t stupid; we know this stuff, but we choose to believe our heroine will be one of the lucky ones. And I don’t see why we can’t extend that happy glow to other stories, too. If women’s lives don’t have to be blighted by social oppression in romance, neither do those of people of color or queer people. Moreover, human nature doesn’t change. A lot of what we read about LGBT people in history is appalling because the records we have are the legal documents, the newspaper reports, the accounts of people who were victimized. We don’t generally have the hidden stories of the people who lived under the radar…. But we know…people we’d now call gay, bi, trans have always existed and [that] as a matter of statistics plenty of them must have lived and died without ever coming to the law’s attention. Which is not to hand-wave the horrors of the past but only to say that horror isn’t the only story, and it’s not an acceptable reason to deny marginalized people their happy-ever-after.”
— KJ Charles (Library Journal interview) (via bookgeekgrrl)
People don’t become inured to what they are shown–if that’s the right way to describe what happens–because of the quantity of images dumped on them. It is passivity that dulls feeling. The state described as apathy, moral or emotional anesthesia, are full of feelings; the feelings are rage and frustration. But if we consider what emotions would be desirable, it seems too simple to elect sympathy. The imaginary proximity to the suffering inflicted on others that is granted by images suggests a link between the faraway sufferers–seen close-up on the television screen–and the privileged viewer that is simply untrue, that is yet one more mystification of our real relations to power. So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence. To what extent, it can be (for all our good intentions) an impertinent–if not an inappropriate–response. To set aside the sympathy we extend to others beset by war and murderous politics for a reflection on how our privileges are located on the same map as their suffering, and may–in ways we might prefer not to imagine–be linked to their suffering, as the wealth of some may imply the destitution of others, is a task for which the painful, stirring images supply only an initial spark.
–Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
The most relatable Little Women moments
Meg:
* Margaret and John have two kids named… Margaret and John. Iconic. No notes.
* Sprained her ankle wearing impractical shoes cause they just looked too good not to
* Had a emotional meltdown while attempting to make jam from scratch
Jo:
* Literally leaves the state instead of talking about her feelings
* Feminist™️
* Threatened to murder a man for hurting her sister (Amy’s teacher)
Beth:
* Never leaves the house
* Her only friends are her cats
* Obsessed with fictional characters dolls
Amy:
* “I want to be great or nothing”
* Constantly misuses and mispronounces words and doesn’t give a fuck when people try to correct her
* Wrote a whole ass will at age 12
Laurie:
* Pitifully watches the March family from his window wishing he could join them
* Falls in love with someone only after she says “I despise you”
* Writes an opera with himself as the main character
NO ONE knows how to use thou/thee/thy/thine and i need to see that change if ur going to keep making “talking like a medieval peasant” jokes. /lh
They play the same roles as I/me/my/mine. In modern english, we use “you” for both the subject and the direct object/object of preposition/etc, so it’s difficult to compare “thou” to “you”.
So the trick is this: if you are trying to turn something Olde, first turn every “you” into first-person and then replace it like so:
“I” → “thou”
“Me” → “thee”
“My” → “thy”
“Mine” → “thine”
Let’s suppose we had the sentences “You have a cow. He gave it to you. It is your cow. The cow is yours”.
We could first imagine it in the first person-
“I have a cow. He gave it to me. It is my cow. The cow is mine”.
And then replace it-
“Thou hast a cow. He gave it to thee. It is thy cow. The cow is thine.”
This is perfect and the only thing missing is that when “thy” comes before a vowel it’s replaced by “thine”, i.e. “thy nose” but “thine eyes.” English used to do this with my and mine too (and still does with a and an).
The second person singular verb ending is -(e)st. In the present tense, it works more or less like the third person singular ending, -s:
The -(e)st ending is only added to one word in a compound verb. This is where a lot of people make mistakes:
NOT
If you’re not sure, try saying it in the third person and replacing the -(e)st with -s:
In general, if there’s one auxiliary, it takes the -(e)st ending) and the main verb does not. If there are multiple auxiliaries, only one of them takes -(e)st:
You can reduce the full -est ending to -st in poetry, if you need to drop a syllable:
In some common words–mostly auxiliary verbs, or what you might have learned as “helping verbs”–the ending is always reduced:
Sometimes this reduction takes the last consonant of the stem with it:
Or reduces the -st down to -t:
However! UNLIKE the third-person singular -s, the second person -(e)st is ALSO added to PAST TENSE words, either to the past stem in strong (irregular) verbs or AFTER THE -ed in weak (regular) verbs:
This is different from the third person!
It’s not wrong to add -(e)st to a long Latinate verb in the past tense, but it’s unusual; it’s much more common to use a helping verb instead:
And a couple last things:
1.) Third-person -(e)th is mostly equivalent to and interchangeable with third-person -s:
HOWEVER! Third-person -(e)th, unlike -s but like -(e)st, can, sometimes, go on STRONG past-tense verbs:
This never happens with weak verbs:
And even with strong verbs, from Early Modern (e.g., Shakespearean) English onward, it’s quite rare. But you will see it from time to time.
2.) In contemporary Modern English, we invert the order of subjects and auxiliary verbs in questions:
If there’s no auxiliary, we add one–do–and invert that:
In Early Modern English, this process was optional, and mostly used for emphasis; all verbs could be and were moved to the front of the sentence in questions:
Do-support was also optional for negatives:
3.) Imperative verbs never take endings:
4.) Singular ‘you’–that is, calling a singular person by a plural pronoun–arose as a politeness marker; and ‘thou’ fell out of use because it eventually came to be seen as impolite in almost all contexts. In general, once singular ‘you’ comes into use, it is used for addressing
‘Thou’ is used for
It is safer to ‘you’ someone who doesn’t necessarily warrant ‘you’ than to ‘thou’ someone who does.
5.) And finally, that ‘ye’? That’s the nominative form of you–the one that’s equivalent to ‘I’ or ‘we.’
Any time you’re using ‘thou’ for the singular, the second person plural– ‘y’all’– declines like this:
I don’t know who needs to hear this but it’s okay for writing to be a HOBBY that you do because you enjoy, and that you don’t want to do when you’re not enjoying it. No one’s up in the business of knitters telling them they have to be willing to SUFFER and SWEAT or they’ll NEVER FINISH THAT SWEATER and they can’t expect good things to come to them. I don’t know why our current culture around writing is so intense, but I’m here to support your casual, relaxing writing habit. If people can glue pompoms together or knit a scarf or watch hours of streaming shows with their spare time there’s absolutely no reason writers can’t waste time writing just for pleasure, without any expectation that they’re going to Achieve something Amazing and Important or make a bunch of money or whatever.
i finished king of attolia lmao
Well, I was going to wait to buy the beautiful British versions of these books, but they all aren’t going to be out until late 2024, and Book Outlet had five of them for $4 or less so here we are
Alright scroll past if you don't want spoilers for Queen's Thief book 3, King of Attolia, because I'm back on my bs with memes about it to keep from yelling
Y'all weren't kidding about the Best Boy Costis, huh? We stan a hotheaded ride-or-die himbo with more heart than sense.
He doesn't get paid enough for this.
Or THIS
Speaking of the newlyweds....
Was I misreading that scene? Or was that man propositioning her on the dance floor and she had to leave to cool down because she was this close to jumping his bones in front of everyone?
Honestly the juxtaposition between how everyone assumes they must hate each other and how they are in private is hysterical to me. He loves his hot girlboss wife so much.
Alas, it comes with Responsibilities.
Can we get an F in the chat for the man who didn't think this through past "hng love"
Loved the dynamics we got once he started accepting the necessity of it tho.
My mans may be king now, but he's still first and foremost A Problem.
And of course the moments when the gloves came off
Homeboy's an absolutely unhinged murder machine waiting to blow and it's both terrifying and so satisfying.
I have more, but this is long already and i worked hard on the ones I really want y'all to see, so stay tuned for part 2 lol
The fastest I've ever read a book was 3 days and that was a short lil classic back in High School because I was procrastinating writing a paper.
In the last 48 hours I have consumed two novels in their entirety and I think I'm gonna hurl if the third doesn't get returned to the library immediately so I can pick it up
I'm positively FERAL at the moment, nobody look at me or touch me unless you have all the art of the first two Queen's Thief books to fling at me from a safe distance because I'm GOING to bite someone's fingers off about this series
The real test is this. Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling, “Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,’ or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally, we shall insist on seeing everything–God and our friends and ourselves included–as bad, and not able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.
- C. S. Lewis
I hate the “Thoreau’s mom did his laundry” criticism so much, it drives me crazy.
Henry Thoreau did not go to Walden Pond because he thought it would be a fun adventure. He went into the woods because he was deeply depressed and burnt out. He was running from the horror of his brother and best friend recently dying in his arms, and the haunting memory of causing the Fairhaven Bay fire. His friend Ellery Channing literally gave him the ultimatum of either taking some time off to write and think, or else be institutionalized.
I think Thoreau’s mother saw her depressed son choosing to retreat into a small cabin in the woods, and was worried about him. Of course she did his laundry - just as Ralph Waldo Emerson probably brought him firewood and bread. These were not chores of obligation to support a “great” man, but services of love to help their deeply depressed 28yo son and friend.
And if you ask me, there’s a lesson in that - to “suck out the marrow of life” and “live deliberately,” one must also accept help offered from the people in your life who love you. There is no true transcendentalism or individualism without love and friendship behind it.
I tried to let this go past without comment, but it's stayed with me throughout the day. And the more I thought about it, the more it bothered me.
Not for the positive sentiment that serving others can be a positive thing - precisely because no one was ever saying it couldn't be - but for how badly it mangles what it purports to be responding to.
No one ever said that the men who were only able to produce art because of other people labouring for them had had no pain or done nothing good. And no one ever said that those who supported them were always resentful and unwilling.
The point is that when people who weren't men had great tragedies and great powers of creativity, they were not supported to go off into the wilderness and explore their creative impulses and philosophies to their greatest depths.
And then we are compared to those works. And those works often PRESENT philosophies in which great works can be achieved on their own. This post is so... dishonest about what is being argued for.
Some of y'all haven't read A Room of One's Own, and it shows.
Shakespeare had great tragedies in his life, such as the death of his son Hamnet, and those obviously inform his work. But what, Virginia Woolf asks us, of Shakespeare's sister?
What would have become of the middle class woman with Shakespeare's upbringing and talent? She certainly would have been laughed out of the theatre.
We know that. Not just because of the remarks made by men of the time that a woman acting would be like a dog standing on its hind legs. But also because we can see the few, very few examples of women DID manage to write at the time, and how hard it was for them
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, with all the privileges that brings, was a philosopher and writer. She wrote the first science fiction novel. And she wrote plays. And she was ridiculed for it, and men tried to bury her existence. Despite a very supportive husband, she was widely regarded with derision as the Mad Duchess. While I wouldn't say her plays are remotely as good as Shakespeare, it's not as though she had the advantage of friendship with Kit Marlow. To be a playwright in Shakespeare's time was a collaborative effort, bouncing ideas and lines off your actors and other writers. We can see in the folios how much the plays changed from performance to performance. They weren' static. That was a novel concept just starting to be introduced by the printing press. But who collaborated with Margaret? Who batted frenzied ideas around with the Duchess?
Not Shakespeare's peers. And likely not many of her own class either.
Or try Aemelia Lanyer on for size. First woman poet to be published in the English language and her poems BLAZE with talent and pain and power.
But it was only possible because she had a female patron who supported her work, and they were both cut adrift in an inheritance dispute. You can hear it when you read The Description of Cookeham - the country house in which she and her patron briefly lived and for a while, she was free to write as men were. But it's a poem of loss.
Because they lost Cookeham. Because there is never the same financial security, and thus peace and room to work unburdened, as there is for men.
And no it's not the case that all men have it perfect and easy, but a fuck of a lot more of them have mothers or wives or sisters who will support them as they pour out their pain into the pages than there are fathers or husbands, or brothers who will do the same for a woman or non-binary person.
Woolf notes that you can see it in the cracks of the work women write. A moment in Jane Eyre where Jane thinks longingly of all she might do if she were free like a man that Woolf sees as flawed because it is not the character speaking, but the author, pouring out her pain.
Because women were always forced to write AROUND their duties, often in fear of getting caught. They could never polish freely to the same extent as men. Even Jane Austen had no study to retreat to, but would cover her pages with embroidery to hide them when she was interrupted by visitors.
It's not merely ignorant but insulting to be told that in critiquing the circumstances in which men wrote, partly supported by the labour of women, we are in some sense dismissing THOSE WOMEN. That in acknowledging that labour we are disparaging it.
This is some trad wife bullshit.
NO.
Noting that the labour of women that supported the great works of men has gone unrecognised is NOT to dismiss that labour. Nor is it invalid to critique a man who wrote ruggedly individualistic works while quietly supported by a woman, just because he had also supported others and suffered grief. That argument DOES NOT scan.
A person - anyone - needs a room of their own and a place of safety in which to write to fully explore their creative ideas.
As I lay in bed too sick to either work or write I feel this more strongly than ever.
Privilege is multifaceted, and it has never denied that those with one privilege may suffer in other ways, nor that they can do good works and support others. The critique of privilege is DOUBLY important when this is so, because those people STILL benefit from the STRUCTURES that support them over and above those who suffer the same tragedies without that support.
When Shakespeare is thrown into depression by the loss of his son he is still held up in all the myriad ways that a comfortably well-off, educated, middle-class white man in Elizabethan England can be. When Aemelia and her patron are set adrift because she and her patron are of the wrong gender, they have no one to turn to. No salvation. And we have far fewer poems by Lanyer than we do by Shakespeare, for all that many speculate she is the dark lady of his sonnets (I know, there are other speculations, but she is one).
With all the wealth and prestige of a Duchess, Cavendish's plays were only performed at home. It's not that she wasn't known in the theatrical world - it's said that when Cavendish went to the theatre to watch a play, everyone else in the audience was there to watch Cavendish, because of her eccentric reputation, but she could never be one of the Lord's Men. She could never see her works performed at the Globe. Never drink Kit Marlow under the bench.
Massive structural machines were (and still are) in play to see that it is far easier for men to have what they need in order to think and create handed to them.
THAT is the critique. THAT is the point.
Not that no one should ever support their loved ones while they write. For the most part, that's the only way for creatives to get started in having a career as opposed to a hobby.
The point is that it is MASSIVELY more common for women to quietly support men without recognition while they go off and write books that ignore the existence of women than it is for women or non-binary people to be supported by their loved ones to go off and do something creative.
It's always worth checking, when you're hot and angry that someone is beating down on your fave, that YOU are in fact beating up a real opponent, and not a straw person.
