[books] laughing at myself somewhat
Feb. 6th, 2025 10:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaberettThis morning I finished reading Tales From Out There: The Barkley Marathons, The World's Toughest Trail Race, by Frozen Ed Furtaw. This recounts the history of, well, the Barkley Marathons, from its inception up to prep for the 2010 race, from the perspective of the first person to complete the course, in the third year it was held. (Whereupon Gary Cantrell/lazarus lake made it harder, as he subsequently has every time someone actually manages to demonstrate that the current instantiation isn't actually impossible.) Last year's race got a fair bit of news coverage, especially in the UK, because Jasmin Paris was the first woman to complete all five loops of the post-1995ish course. There was also coverage here on Dreamwidth, courtesy of rydra_wong, who has been attempting to lure people into this particular extreme sports fandom since well before March 2024, but this time round I actually had the brain to engage! ... only to discover that at that point, for some reason, Furtaw's book (which I turned to once I'd watched documentaries etc, was Rather More Expensive Than Usual on the second-hand market), so I resigned myself to Getting It Later.
Which I duly did! And then on Friday last week I finally finished the non-fiction I'd been slogging through and turned, with glee, to Reading More About The Barkley. I am not sure this is a document that I would recommend unless you are either Interested In The Barkley or interested in a very particular style of Nerd Storytelling? But I enjoyed myself a lot.
Next on my list was the new Craft Wars book by Max Gladstone, Wicked Problems. (I think I have not talked about the Craft Sequence much recently, but after bouncing hard off the first chapter of Three Parts Dead on my first attempt, I wound up loving it enough that I worked out a plausible volcano-associated rock for An Important Piece Of Jewelry featured in Full Fathom Five and then scouring Etsy for an appropriately shaped bead.) I had not even (despite having bought it more or less the week it came out, as I recall) managed to get as far as putting it onto my ereader, so that was step one, and while I was at it I merrily transferred several of the other books that have been lurking in my calibre library but hadn't actually made it across to The Device, and then I settled in to read.
... and was confused and somewhat apprehensive to find that it opened thus (not actually spoilers for Wicked Problems):
The room she ushers him into smells of stale cigarettes and air freshener. The decor is ’80s mil-spec Holiday Inn. Dark-green carpet, striped armchairs, a smoked-glass table, a print of two F-15s trailing vapour set high in a gilded frame. The scream of their engines outside has been softened in here to a dark, low-frequency roar.
While it is not set in our world, I think I can safely say without particular spoilers that one of the technically-I-suppose geographical features of the Craft universe is a Rift In Reality. So it was not... totally out of the question? that Gladstone might have chosen to have do this unsettling and alarming dislocation? Like, it's a hell of a first paragraph to find oneself in media res, but it's Extremely Evocative and for all that I was mildly alarmed and thinking, approximately, but I don't WANT a cat I want a CHEESECAKE, I love the Craft Sequence enough to keep going and see what the fuck he was doing with this.
By the end of chapter three I was a bit "... ooooookay this is... not... structured the way I would anticipate him structuring doing this kind of thing" and yet (rydra_wong, vass, I hope you at least started cackling several paragraphs ago) it was not until partway through CHAPTER SEVEN that I FINALLY went "no, seriously, WHAT GIVES" and actually double-checked the title.
... so anyway that's how I realised that I had gone from The Barkley (lured by rydra_wong) into Prophet, also VERY MUCH rydra's fault, courtesy of tapping on a different title to the one I'd intended, because I'd just added a bunch of new books to the ereader and eink still doesn't refresh all that fast.
(My reading plans have been thoroughly derailed. I am now committed. I might shriek in comments as I go along.)
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Date: 2025-02-06 10:52 pm (UTC)... those sure are some sentences, wow, I am going to GO THE FUCK TO SLEEP instead of trying to fix them
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Date: 2025-02-07 01:35 am (UTC)Also oh fuck you I think I ran out of library access to the Gladstone books after book 2 and then forgot to grab 'em off Kobo or anything and dammit dammit dammit my tbr just grew three sizes today.
(no subject)
Date: 2025-02-07 04:47 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-02-07 09:26 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-02-07 07:23 am (UTC)OMG. I am so sorry you got a cat instead of a cheesecake, and I hope it does not impair your enjoyment of Prophet that you had your brain set for a completely different book!
P.S. Please do shriek in comments if you feel so inclined, it brings me joy when people do that!
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Date: 2025-02-07 12:02 pm (UTC)I WAS ENJOYING IT ENOUGH ANYWAY TO KEEP GOING it's just it now makes significantly more sense!!!
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Date: 2025-02-07 02:58 pm (UTC)I WAS MOST OF THE WAY TO SLEEP WHEN I SUDDENLY REALISED THERE WAS ONLY ONE AUNT
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Date: 2025-02-07 03:31 pm (UTC)(I mean yes, the aunt in chapter 7 is Sasha from chapter 2 and 5, if that's what the realization was.)
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Date: 2025-02-07 05:05 pm (UTC)Yup! I was sleepy and focusing on making it work with a whole other canon and apparently had zero spare processing power XD
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Date: 2025-02-07 05:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-02-07 04:07 pm (UTC)What is going on with their reality is not that a Rift has opened into the Craft world, but it's still pretty weird. And New Weird.
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Date: 2025-02-07 05:06 pm (UTC)YES. EXACTLY. IT MORE OR LESS DID ACTUALLY WORK IT WAS JUST A WILD LEFT TURN???
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Date: 2025-02-10 08:40 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-02-10 09:50 pm (UTC)Like! I was willing to believe Gladstone might be able to pull it off in a way I cared about! The Weird Building At The Interdimensional Hole In The Universe is a whole thing!
... I also have a vague sense I might have read someone doing something like this and OH FUCK ME IT WAS NARNIA
IT WAS NARNIA WE ARE THINKING ABOUT NARNIA
(no subject)
Date: 2025-02-09 07:13 pm (UTC)Update: partway through chapter 59, have dangled at two other groupchats (including the person who dragged me into HotE)
(no subject)
Date: 2025-02-09 08:20 pm (UTC)I see you are inhaling at speed! This book will do that; it seems like a lot of us hit a tipping point and then just unhinge our jaws and SWALLOW the rest of the book.
Yay for dangling it at more people! I think there are so many people in fandom who would inhale it likewise.
(no subject)
Date: 2025-02-08 09:15 pm (UTC)I have been INHALING IT (having paused briefly to cackle at the Cambridge college) but I have just got to THE EXPLICIT RAO KEEPS ASSUMING INCORRECT GENDERS OF IMPORTANT-TO-ADAM PEOPLE PARALLEL and I had to come and yell about it to an audience immediately
(no subject)
Date: 2025-02-08 09:59 pm (UTC)\o/\o/\o/
Yes, all the class details and Oxbridge stuff (and how those shape people even if it's in how loudly they will insist it's all AWFUL) are so impeccably observed.
but I have just got to THE EXPLICIT RAO KEEPS ASSUMING INCORRECT GENDERS OF IMPORTANT-TO-ADAM PEOPLE PARALLEL and I had to come and yell about it to an audience immediately
Look, Rao is just very, very bad at re-assessing the things he thinks he knows to be true about people, seeing as it's a thing he's never had to do before in his entire life. *g*
(no subject)
Date: 2025-02-09 09:00 am (UTC)In terms of class background -- I am a Londoner born in exactly the same year as Rao, and basically if he'd been AFAB I think I would probably have gone to school with him. So I have been writhing around in glee at the detailing. I was trying to explain to
(no subject)
Date: 2025-02-09 07:57 pm (UTC)XD XD XD HURRAH
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Date: 2025-02-11 09:15 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-02-09 02:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-02-09 07:20 pm (UTC)JUST MET THE DOG*
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Date: 2025-02-09 08:16 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-02-09 08:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-02-09 09:43 pm (UTC)I shit you not a significant amount of The Frogging Of The Glove is because I'm not really sufficiently in practice to actually be reading new book while cabling...
(I did put it down altogether for the section where I needed to keep track of different things happening every two, three and four rows...)
(no subject)
Date: 2025-02-10 12:25 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-02-10 01:50 pm (UTC)DOG(?)
DOG[citation needed]
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Date: 2025-02-10 03:26 pm (UTC)S C R E A M I N G
I HAVE GOT TO THE (RETURN OF THE) TAGS AND I KEEP HAVING TO PAUSE TO STARE AT A WALL WHILE EXPERIENCING EMOTIONS
(no subject)
Date: 2025-02-10 03:30 pm (UTC)THAT WILL HAPPEN, YES
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Date: 2025-02-10 03:45 pm (UTC)IT DOES THAT A LOT!!!
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Date: 2025-02-10 04:16 pm (UTC)HE BOUGHT A BOTTLE BUT THAT'S NOT HOW PERFUME WORKS
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Date: 2025-02-10 04:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-02-10 04:40 pm (UTC)MMHMMMMMMMM
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Date: 2025-02-10 04:40 pm (UTC)... so so SO many feelings good GRIEF I am having a small cry and then I will go and read all SIX HUNDRED ODD COMMENTS on your post (and the others in The Series)
(no subject)
Date: 2025-02-10 04:51 pm (UTC)NOW YOU SEE WHY I HAVE BEEN UNGLUED ABOUT THIS BOOK FOR OVER A YEAR
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Date: 2025-02-10 05:00 pm (UTC)INDEED I DO
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Date: 2025-02-10 05:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-02-11 02:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-02-12 05:26 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-02-12 11:35 pm (UTC)I'M SO DELIGHTED BY IT IT'S SO RIDICULOUS