salinea | Entries tagged with a: ursula leguin

Read a handful of Yuletide fics. Especially enjoyed those three:

An Autumn Dire (The Last Unicorn)

https://archiveofourown.org/works/52333504/chapters/132390526

And so the unicorn left her forest for the second time.

The writing is beautiful and it feels like it really addresses the themes from the book.

Some Things That No One Teaches You (The Left Hand of Darkness)

https://archiveofourown.org/works/52498021

When I woke that morning, it was with the bone deep surety that kemmer was upon me.

A skillful might-have-been with very delicate writing.

In the Wet Dark (Tokyo Babylon)

https://archiveofourown.org/collections/yuletide2023/works/52255429

Subaru is comforted by Seishirou after a difficult case, and an unexpected kiss becomes more.

A well written piece of smut with very interesting PoV work on Seishirou.

Most of those are Yuletide fics; but perhaps not all. So yeah I finally finished reading all the Yuletide fics I meant to read this year - four months late! - but on the plus I'm pretty sure it's the first year I actually manage doing that instead of letting the last fics trail into forgettingness.

( norse mythology, marvel comics, the administration, death gate, book of the raksura, cyteen, amber, left hand of darkness, lion in winter, princess tutu, mad men,vorkosigan, revolutionary girl utena, dc comics )

Crossposts: http://etrangere.livejournal.com/438478.html

I've been reading a little bit more. Woot!

Wheel of the Infinite by Martha Wells
( Read more... )

The Day Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko
( Read more... )

Powers by Ursula K Leguin
( Read more... )

Old Tin Sorrow by Glen Cook
( Read more... )

Deliverer by CJ Cherryh
( Read more... )

Current Mood: okay
Current Music: Gotan Project - La del Ruso

( The Last Wish by Andrzej Sapkowski )

( Gifts by Ursula Leguin )

( The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon )

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: Bebop & Cigala - Niebla del Riachuelo

I'm lazy and didn't really summarize any of them...

( Black Man aka Th1rt3n by Richard Morgan )

( Dust by Elisabeth Bear )

( The Dreaming Tree by CJ Cherryh )

( The Beginning Place by Ursula K Leguin )

( Black Ships by Jo Graham )

( Claudius the God by Robert Graves )

( Kushiel's Mercy by Jacqueline Carey )

Next time, I'll have to do the reviews right after I finish the books, not wait a month and a half in some cases, it makes for sucky reviews... >_>;;

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Jean-Jacques Burnel - Waltz (waltz in blue)

So many books I must review before the new year ^_^;;

( The Book of the Jhereg and the Book of Taltos )

( Fortress of Ice )

( Voices )

( Avaryan cycle )

Bookish meme stolen from

generalblossom

Books read during the year not counting re-reads & borrowed books & manga & comic books

( Read more... )

Current Mood: cynical
Current Music: Bjork

My cousin's gone home yesterday. Bye, bye Yael.

I took her to see the Rocky Horror Picture Show saturday night before, we had much fun and had to run to catch the last subway afterwhile.

We watched the Last Unicorn together, on Sunday, which she liked. I was strange watching it in the english version. I think I actually like the Unicorn's voice better in the french dub heh.

The night before I had dreamed that my sister had killed herself. I was on the computer answering all her internet friends messages to tell them the new. My parents didn't even look like they were upset. It was the most terrifying dream I ever had. I was so relieved when I woke up and realized it had only been a dream.

Read Changing Plane by Leguin, which was almost more like a Jack Vance than a Leguin, but was very sweet and nice to read. Especially the short story about the Immortals.

All the delivery service supposed to bring me furnitures unfailingly run into troubles and fail to deliver it for the one half-day during which I'm waiting for them. It's starting to feel like a very unfunny running joke. Someday, mayhaps, I'll get my fridge and be able to move in. I dare not hope for my couch yet.

Much love to all of you and good wishes. I know I don't post a lot currently, but I do read, and I think of you.

Current Mood: melancholy
Current Music: Amelie Poulain soundtrack

From Ursula Leguin's website http://trashotron.com/agony/columns/2004/12-15-04.htm

Most of the characters in my fantasy and far-future sf books are not white. They're mixed, they're rainbow. In my first big sf novel, The Left Hand of Darkness, the only person from Earth is a black man and everybody else in the book is Inuit (or Tibetan) brown. In my first fantasy novels (the ones the miniseries is "based on"), A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan, everybody's brown or copper-red or black, except the Kargish people in the East and their descendants in the Archipelago, who are white, with fair or dark hair. Tenar is a Karg, a brunette white person. Ged is an Archipelagan, a redbrown man. Vetch, from the East Reach, is black.

This color scheme was conscious and deliberate from the start. I didn't see why everybody in sf had to be a honky named Bob or Joe or Bill. I didn't see why everybody in heroic fantasy had to be white (and all the leading women had "violet eyes"). I didn't even believe it. Whites are a minority on Earth now -- why wouldn't they still be either a minority, or just swallowed up in the larger colored gene pool, in the future?

The fantasy tradition I was writing in came from North Europe, which is why it was about white people. I'm white, but not European. My people could be any color I liked, and I like red and brown and black. I was a little wily about my color scheme. I figured some white kids (the books were published for "young adults") might not identify easily straight off with a brown kid, so I kind of eased the information about skin color in by degrees -- hoping that the reader would get "into Ged's skin," and only then discover it wasn't a white one.

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Overall, I definitly agree. In SF it is not always so grevious, but I always had the feeling that in fantasy there was an overabundance of european influenced societies (especially celtic, of course) compared to anything else. You sometimes have the token oriental-spunned world, mostly Japanese, and the Arabian Nights series (Tanith Lee's Tale of the Flat Earth and Weis&Hickman's Rose of the Prophet springs to my mind), but otherwise tales with emphatically non-white characters shine by their absence. I love celtic mythologies as much as anyone else, but it was good that there was one famous, critically acclaimed story where most of the protagonists were emphatically described as black, or dark-skinned. That was Earthsea. Apparently this mini-serie sucks for many other reasons, but that's the one thing that extremely annoys me about it.

Comments ?

Current Mood: aggravated
Current Music: Dead Can Dance