shanaqui's reviews
1148 reviews

Volume six of A Gentle Noble's Vacation Recommendation is a delight in which we actually get to see a bit more of the King and even Lizel's father! As do Gil and Eleven, because the King manages to make a portal to talk directly to Lizel.

Aaand after that, he feels a bit freer to travel and there's a trip to the hot springs, among other things, in which he and Eleven practically melt and have to be carried off by Gil like two sacks of spuds, it's great.

There's nothing earthshaking happening in these books, it really is just Lizel amusing himself while he waits to go home. I love it.

Volume five of A Gentle Noble's Vacation Recommendation features Eleven properly joining the party, wooo! We also see a bit more of Viscount Ray -- and watch Lizel shamelessly manipulating matters to get what he wants.

I'm still deeply amused by people insisting this series isn't a romance, because it really comes across like protesting too much when you have Eleven leaning across to cup and gently stroke Lizel's cheek while asking to stay at his side. Like sure, this isn't a kissing book, but Gil and Eleven (and plenty of others) are deeply drawn to Lizel, and it ends up coming across as preeeetty weird to keep insisting "no homo".

I mean, maybe lots of people platonically gently stroke non-family members' hair/cheeks and beg to stay at their side, but it's pretty romance-coded, let's be honest about this now.

Lunar, edited by Matthew Shindell, is a heck of a chunky book that I was lucky enough to borrow (and immediately decided my mother, a lunar nerd, needed to have). It's full of geological charts of the moon, with commentary on each quadrant, punctuated by short essays on a range of lunar topics -- the moon in silent film, the moon in fiction, women and the space programme, ancient Egypt and their understanding of the moon, and so on. There are various images included of relevant stuff like posters for movies about the moon, artefacts, etc.

I'm pretty sure I didn't absorb half of it, and I'll have to get another look at it at some point, especially because I'm very slow to parse visual information and I'm positive I missed things.

I suspect it's most of interest to the real space nerds, given the expense, but if you get a chance to look through it, you should take a look just to wonder at what we've achieved.

I think maybe I'm just fundamentally not that into short romances where I don't see the characters being fully built up outside the sex. There are things which are positive about it, but. Not for me.

The problem with Michael Waters' The Other Olympians, for me, was that it necessitates a fair bit of context around the history of the modern Olympics, the people involved in it, and the beginning of women's sports. I'm not terribly interested in sports history per se, so mileage will vary on this, and I did appreciate Waters' clear laying out of the sequence of events. It's deeply relevant to the question, after all, because one of the issues about women's sport in the first place was the worry that it would make women unfeminine, or even turn them into men.

I'm also not a huge fan of history about WWII -- I think it's important, don't get me wrong, but it's not a topic that has ever really held my imagination. And of course that context was important too.

What I did really love, though, was the introduction to athletes like Zdeněk Koubek and Mark Weston, their careers and how they conceived of their identities. Michael Waters is careful to try to talk about them in ways that are respectful, but it's difficult to be sure how they would have identified now (e.g. with the greater ability to form communities, the potential to have identified as intersex or non-binary, and simply language change). He always refers to them as men, and uses the preferred form of their names (i.e. for Koubek it's the masculine form, not "Koubková"), though where sources are quoted, he uses the original wording where necessary.

It's really chilling how things have turned out, when you read about the initial acceptance of Koubek and Waters. They were accepted as men pretty easily in social terms, and their papers were changed for them, etc. There was always some hostility, of course, but the general tone set (at least according to Waters' work) was positive, supportive even.

And then, of course, Nazism, and the introduction of sex testing in sport. It wasn't just the Nazis, to be fair: Avery Brundage was also mad about women's sports in general because he didn't find female athletes attractive, and was especially keen to weed out the most inattractive ones. But Nazism provided significant pressure to do this, and it's been accepted ever since.

Waters rightly points out that half the problem is the premise that "men" and "women" are two entirely discrete and unchangeable categories. This is ridiculous, and testing in sport serves to highlight that: people who have never doubted their sex discover, on an international stage, that they are intersex. The illusion falls apart: it turns out that sex characteristics can vary wildly from person to person, and people can live whole lives without realising that actually they have three chromosomes, or XY chromosomes despite appearing to be totally female, etc. Sex testing falls down as a concept when you can barely define exactly what you're testing and what the results should mean: is a person with XY chromosomes who looks "like a woman", has female genitalia and menstruates actually a man, because they have XY chromosomes? That's what people who want to define sex based on chromosomes seem to believe, but it doesn't really make sense: that person may never know they have XY chromosomes, and live a life fully experienced as a woman!

Sadly, some people will never be convinced. But if you're interested in the topic, it's worth reading a little of the history. 

Crimson Snow is one of the British Library Crime Classic collections themed around mysteries set at Christmas. The back copy says the theme is "stories set in winter", but I think all of them featured Christmas specifically in some way. 

There's a fun range here, and I think it was one of the earlier ones, since they had a Margery Allingham one to include as well. They range around a bit in tone, with "The Carol Singers" feeling particularly dark and unpleasant (an old woman is victimised by carol singers who tie her up, covering her mouth with sticking plaster, ultimately leading to her death). 

I've read a bunch of these collections, but I think this was one of the better ones. Or maybe I've just had a bit of a break from the format since last Christmas!

Eunnie's If You'll Have Me is a really sweet book with cute character designs and a fairly simple story. Momo and PG meet at college: PG's known for seducing every pretty girl she meets, while Momo's never had a girlfriend. Inevitably, they meet, and PG starts to pay a lot of attention to Momo -- going to events with her, comforting her when she has a bad day, replacing the charm on her bag when she loses it, etc.

Inevitably, they eventually kiss... and inevitably, their pasts get in the way. Momo's afraid that no one will ever be interested in her because she's not special, while PG's been burned in the past by someone she loved assuming she was just messing around with them as well (because she didn't speak up and say how she was feeling).

They each hurt each other in the traditional misunderstanding, and get back together in the traditional reconciliation; it's not groundbreaking, but it's cute, and I really like the character designs. Momo's insecurity is well portrayed, as is PG's sadness about not being seen for who she is. It's a pretty quick read, and doesn't bog down too much around the misunderstanding.

Really quite creepy. Appropriative and racist, of course.

Akumi Agitogi's My Happy Marriage basically begins as a Cinderella-type story: since her parents' arranged marriage ended with her mother's death, and her lack of magic powers was revealed, Miyo has become a servant in her own home, abused by her mother and sisters. It becomes convenient for her father to marry her off, so she's sent to Kiyoka Kudou as a potential bride. Living with him, she slowly begins to wish she could stay, while knowing she's not really a suitable bride.

Her shyness and anxiety is pretty well-done, as is Kiyoka's slow realisation that he's becoming fond of her -- his coldness at first is revealed to be shyness, lack of understanding of how to handle other people (or at least women), and tiredness of being forced to play the marriage game. I think the pace is a little quick, but it's lovely to see them both come out of their shells, and I did believe in Miyo's quick attachment to one of the few people to ever treat her kindly.

The fantasy backdrop is interesting too, with gifts running in families which help to combat Grotesqueries, creatures made of human fears and superstitions. Kiyoka is a high-ranking soldier who handles Grotesqueries, and the hereditary nature of the powers provide some political/social motivation to Miyo's family and other interested parties. 

I'm interested to see where it goes, particularly as I think it's being hinted that Miyo does have some kind of gift.

In the fourth volume of A Gentle Noble's Vacation Recommendation, the bandit plot continues, and the red-haired adventurer who has been interested in joining them before gets a bit more serious, introducing himself as Eleven. His antics give us a more serious side of Lizel -- seriously, don't get on his bad side -- which is intriguing. It's my understanding that the light novel makes it clear that Lizel's actively manipulating people around him, which is implied several times in the manga, but perhaps less explicit: this time makes it pretty clear.

The Gil/Lizel vibes take slightly more of a back seat to Lizel/Eleven vibes, but there's still a sense that Gil is the only one Lizel considers an equal, the only one he allows to see all sides of him. 

It's more and more obvious that there are barely any women in the series, which is a bit eyebrow-raising, but I still love the art and the dynamic between Gil and Lizel.