readercon

The Beasties liftcord is doing a successive run of Jane Austen readalongs, so I skipped ahead in my plan to reread them all in publication order to participate in the one for my favorite Austen, the niche and generally least-loved Northanger Abbey.

Northanger Abbey is about a nice but fairly ordinary young girl named Catherine Morland, who is neither particularly smart, pretty, nor industrious, but is very sweet and a bit naive. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the story ends up destroying some of that naivete via having a plot happen to Catherine, and put her general integrity and good-naturedness to the test. Appropriately for a heroine she does find a moral spine re: treating people nicely, thus establishing it as an actual principle and character trait. The book starts off with a whole chapter about how un-heroinely she is compared to the elegant flowers that populate popular novels of the time, really getting in on the sort of hashtag-relatable thing that would eventually become more popular. It’s not as concise as the opening line of P&P but it’s still one of my favorite book opening chapters.

Naive, good-natured Catherine’s coming-of-age plotline kicks off when she accompanies a kindhearted but shallow family friend to Bath, thus leaving her large boisterous family for the first time. After an isolated beginning, Catherine makes some friends in Bath–a vivacious young woman named Isabella, whose brother is friends with Catherine’s older brother, which they find out when both young men also appear in Bath; and Eleanor and Henry Tilney, a brother-and-sister pair whose father is a general. Henry is a clergyman with a good-naturedly teasing sense of humor and no fear of reading “girly” novels; Eleanor is a quiet, sweet type who isn’t ordinarily that shy but goes back into her shell whenever her overbearing father is around.

The first sign of trouble in paradise (i.e. Bath, which Austen apparently hated) is when some scheduling conflicts break out between these two groups of friends, by which we mean every time Catherine makes plans with the Tilneys, the Thorpes show up at Catherine’s house to be like “get in loser we’re going shopping” and simply do not accept “I already have plans with other people and it’d be rude AF for them to show up and I’ve just fucked off somewhere else” as a sufficient excuse. This, tragically for Catherine, turns out to be just the earliest signs of something dreadfully morally deficient in the Thorpe family’s character, although not in any sort of dark and murdery way like happens in the kind of novels Catherine and Isabella like to read, and which Jim Thorpe also likes to read but pretends he doesn’t because he’s a sexist boor.

Even more tragically for Catherine, the drama with the Thorpes is basically the subplot, or at least the starter plot that foreshadows the main plot. For there is also drama with the Tilneys! And Catherine would rather die than have drama with the Tilneys. At first, Catherine is over the moon when she is invited to visit Eleanor and stay at their home in Northanger Abbey, which is, as you can probably guess from the name, a former abbey. As a gothic novel girlie, Catherine loves this, but also ends up letting her imagination run away with her a bit, which is very funny for the reader and occasionally mortifying to Catherine. Similarly to the first plot, the Tilney’s overbearing father is eventually revealed to be a huge dick, but in a much more prosaic way than happens in the types of books Catherine reads. Henry Tilney, as befits a romantic hero, ultimately defies his father and travels all the way to Shropshire to propose to Catherine, and the story ends on a happy note with Catherine, who has by now had her fill of abbeys, settling into the modern but charming parsonage with her nice, normal, supportive, funny guy who is not at all broody or tormented.

As befits a Jane Austen novel, the social commentary on this one is biting, focusing mainly on how being money-grubbing gossips causes people to mistreat each other, with a couple of digs on letting your imagination run away with you and the perils of only being able to talk about fashion. Also, while I’m more familiar with bad nineteenth-century fiction, I’ve read a couple of the kinds of eighteenth-century gothics Austen is sending up here–particularly The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Monk, which are name-dropped–to appreciate many, if not all, of the jokes she’s making.

At any rate, I think this book is an underrated classic and I love it to bits and I wish all overly excitable horror girlies an equally happy ending (even if it looks very different; I know British male clergymen are not for everybody, especially not me).

bloodygranuaile

It’s almost the end of July and I just got around to reading this month’s Vorkosigan Saga book, which somewhat unusually does not involve any Vorkosigans. Falling Free takes place 200 years before the events of Shards of Honor, which I think was still during the Time of Isolation on Barrayar. It was, however, a generative time for hot new Galactic technology in the rest of the known universe, including the recent development of the still hideously expensive uterine replicator, which enabled the development of the secretive human genetic engineering experiment that was the creation of quaddies.

Our protagonist and pleasingly-somewhat-unlikely hero in this one is Leo Graf, an engineer, and specifically a welding instructor with a specialization in safety inspections. He is sort of like an earlier version of the auditor who is a systems failure analyst whose name escapes me at the moment. He is brought in to train some of the oldest quaddies—who are now barely twenty—and while he is deeply uneasy at the entire labor arrangement going on here (i.e. “it’s not slavery because they’re totally a different species”), especially given that the asshole boss is one of his former asshole students, at first he keeps his opinions to himself and resolves to just teach the quaddies about welding safety as best he can. This becomes increasingly impossible as the corporate fuckery intensifies, with asshole boss unwittingly instigating all sorts of interpersonal drama (over the objections of the well-intentioned but useless psychological specialist, whose only move appears to be begging other people to be reasonable), looming financial problems for the company, and the prospect of artificial gravity tech that could make the quaddies obsolete before they were even launched. Graf, a longtime company man, has to make a decision about how much good he can do from inside the system and when it’s time to go rogue and get the quaddies out from under their corporate masters’ thumbs—and by the time Graf and the quaddies swing into action, so does everyone else.

This was overall a very satisfying story about a bunch of nice, obedient, well-trained specialist workers rising up against their corporate overlords and putting their douchebag boss in his place. Some of it was a little unrealistic—like when the psychologist finally does something other than talk—but it’s a nice fantasy certainly to have a character like that eventually do the right thing. The degree to which Van Atta’s absolute interpersonal assholery and lack of managerial skills, emotional regulation, or other remotely redeeming qualities ends up turning the other corporate functionaries against him, to the point where they all end up sandbagging him and therefore their mission just so he can look like an even bigger failure and they’ll never have to deal with him again, is also satisfying narratively if apparently unrealistic—in the real world, even men as wildly unlikeable as Ted Cruz and JD Vance can obtain lackeys and allies on the promise of enacting cruelty upon lesser beings. One could say that was Van Atta’s mistake—he was instead surrounded by paternalistic types who couldn’t deal with the mask-off version of the slavery they were enabling—but it also appears to be squarely a pleasing but unrealistic fantasy that they’d ever find their limits and bother to even use the bureaucracy against him. At any rate, it’s fucking delightful to read.

Though Graf is our main viewpoint character, we also spend some time in the heads of some of the quaddies themselves—mainly Claire and Tony, who are one of the first sets of quaddie parents, and Silver, a bold and strategically minded young quaddie woman who isn’t afraid to do what she has to do to get what she wants, even if it would scandalize the behavioral psychologist. This is sometimes humorous, as when the twenty-year-old quaddies have to deal with gravity for the first time and they do not like it, but it also goes a long way toward establishing that the quaddies are basically regular people, just ones that have been raised in very irregular circumstances. Overall I think this is a strong addition to the Vorkosigan Saga universe even if it doesn’t have any of our faves in it.

feuervogel

Let's see. I've been in this apartment for 2 full weeks now. I've gotten my kitchen mostly unpacked and put away, and today I listed a whole bunch of stuff on ebay classifieds. My clothes are mostly put away, though there are some more that had been stored because they didn't fit or I didn't have space for them, etc., and they're in the queue for the next thing to deal with.

Slightly higher priority is organizing my desk and office stuff, though.

I put my books on my shelves properly on Friday. I originally took them out of the boxes and put them on shelves mostly by size so I could set the shelf heights and get the boxes out of the way. I hate it that books are so many different sizes, so I have one shelf of books that are neither old trade paperback size (I miss that format so much) nor hardback size nor the A6-ish format that's trendy today. Enh. I might reorganize again at some point, but it's fine for now.

I can definitely say that having a large enough desk to meet my needs makes me very happy, as does having a chair with arm rests. After using someone else's setup for the last 4 years, this is so much better.

My goal is to have my apartment free of boxes by next Sunday (a week from today). Then I'll have to go to my storage unit and pick up what's there and sort through THAT, but that's a problem for future me. (Also it can wait until I've dealt with everything I currently already have.)

I need to figure out where I set my box cutter down so I can break down more empty boxes. Our trash/recycling goes into underground ... bins? cisterns? rather than traditional dumpsters, and the access points are basically mailbox-looking things with openings that are about the size of a blue mailbox and act kind of like a book drop. They open outward, and you put your bag or loose cardboard into the space, and then you close it and the bag falls through. Except if your bag is too big, it won't close. And if your cardboard is too wide or long, you can't fit it in. So you have to break your boxes down pretty thoroughly.

There's a coat rack in the entryway, and I've got a box full of bike gear on one of its shelves. I ordered and built a shelf/etagére to go over and around my washing machine, but it was JUST too narrow to fit over it, and I'd already assembled it, so I can't send it back (not without paying more for shipping than it cost). That's up on ebay classifieds, too. I ordered a different one and paid closer attention to the *internal* dimensions of the legs, and it works fine. It's holding my laundry detergent, extra towels, and extra TP. I wanted to get an over-the-door towel rack, but because of the way the door is installed, it won't close with anything over it (the door isn't flat; the outer side of it is a cm or so taller than the inner side of it). So I have suction cups on the tile wall to hold my towels.

I have a lot of things to figure out with the bathroom, not least of which is a mirror, but everything is put away neatly, even if the storage totes they're in are chaotic.

I also need to find a shelving solution for my basement section, which isn't very high priority, but it's moving up the list as I need to find places to store the stuff I'm selling until it gets sold.

But the big splurge I made was a set of Le Creuset cookware. I got 2 ceramic-coated saute pans, though one of them is 1 cm too big for my burner, but hopefully that won't be a huge problem. (The instructions have dire warnings about only using a burner that exactly matches the pan, because it can damage the cookware.) I got 3 enameled pots: 1 saucepan (orange) and 2 pots (1 orange, 1 red). The set of them cost more than my washing machine *with* the 25%-off sale. But I've always wanted Le Creuset, so now I have a set of the basics. I restrained myself from going hog wild with aspirational cookware (they sell a tagine! I don't have a 13x9 baking dish anymore!) because my kitchen is so small and I just plain don't have the space for it.

I might decide to sell my Instant Pot, because I just don't use it. We'll see how it goes when I'm not sharing someone else's kitchen and can just set it up and go. I did enjoy making risotto in it; that was really easy. But I don't have a microwave, so reheating it is a huge pain. I have a much smaller rice cooker, and it /probably/ will work to make risotto on one of its settings. We'll see. (Which reminds me, I want to get the right kind of rice to try making tahdig, because it has a tahdig setting.)

My washer finished, so I have to go deal with that. But I think that's all the big stuff.