Some Staying at Home Reading Recs
Mar. 16th, 2020 09:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rhysianaAs Twitter has noted, now is the time for us GenXers/Xennials to shine, bringing forth our latchkey childhood skills of entertaining ourselves for hours on end! I am, in fact, so good at this, I'd already structured my life fairly ideally for the event of a social-distancing pandemic. Since M and I both work from home now anyway, nothing in our routine has changed except the cancelling of various outside appointments. Finally, I have a reason to live my best life.
That said, the news of the outside world is stressful, and as much as I'd like to say I'm using this time to write... I am not. My brain is very clearly in creative hibernation mode lately, and this only seems to have made it worse, so instead I will recommend other people's creative endeavors.
Long Fics
Naughty Hookers (Swathed in Wool) (series) 161,859 words in total - Technically a Teen Wolf AU, but so thoroughly AU that no canon background is required. If you like found family, craft stores, and people dealing with trauma and grief through pragmatic nerdy love and acceptance, then I cannot recommend this enough. I have recommended it before, and I likely will again, because this 'verse is my favorite comfort read, and I think I've read it through six times now. Bonus: Best ace rep I think I've ever read.
One of the Crazy Ones (series) 207,115 words in total - I just opened this to reread because I recently did a rewatch of Almost Human, this time actually taking the time to manually put all the episodes in their intended airing order (what Fox did to this show was a travesty of truly epic proportions), and this fic is the only thing that makes me feel better about the show ending the way it did, because this gives them the ending they deserved. Case fic with romance and also android "what makes a person a person" politics. Everything by this author is amazing. Not as easy to jump into without having seen the show, but hey, there's only one season, so it's not like it would take long to watch.
Switch (series) 230,867 words in total - You all know this one, right? The ultimate Star Trek: AOS Kirk/McCoy opus? My god, does this one put the slow in slow burn. And the way it really explores Kirk's background, lets us really roll around in the angst underlying his supposed impulsiveness.
Books
If you're looking for things that feel extremely close to home right now, there's Mira Grant's Newsflesh series, which, yes, has zombies, but I really don't think of them as zombie books because they are pandemic books. I'm currently wavering on doing a reread, because I keep thinking about them constantly, but also they might just freak me out extra. I was reading their companion book Feedback on my recent trip to Atlanta, and that was surreal enough even before all the social distancing and isolation stuff started.
I also recently caught up on Claire O'Dell's Janet Watson Chronicles, also known in my mind as Intersectionality Holmes, so if you're looking for Black queer Southern gender-flipped Holmes and Watson living in DC after a near-future second American Civil War, well, these are the books for you. Very good, might make you even angrier about politics than you already were.
If you're looking for a series to dive into, I recommend Seanan McGuire's InCryptid books, because I just finished the latest one, and loved it thoroughly. Books full of both glitter and deep ideas, in the finest urban fantasy tradition.
If you want something long and weird and wonderful, but also standalone, I recommend Max Gladstone's Empress of Forever, which I actually read last summer, but still think about all the time. What genre is it? Uh... well, as I said on Twitter at the time, I don't think Max Gladstone is capable of writing in one genre at a time, but it's got a near-future tech mogul and then space pirates and technology that might as well be magic and an intentional Journey to the West story arc.
I also read Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire at around the same time and now the two books are inextricably linked in my mind as amazing, wonderful, absorbing space adventures, though that one is much more about politics. Did you like The Expanse and/or CJ Cherryh's Foreigner series? Then you'll like this.
Oh, related but slightly less deep, I just finished Jessie Mihalik's Polaris Rising. Still lots of space politics and espionage, but with more of the feel of a romance, as the heroine is on the run from an arranged political marriage when she discovers there's more to her would-be groom's insistence that they marry than your average alliance. As the fourth of five children, she's actually a trained industrial spy, so she falls back on those skills to figure out what's going on. (Her love interest does verge a bit on the alphahole stereotype, though, so if that's a particular pet peeve, this might not be the best choice.)
I'm still working my way slowly through Marie Brennan's Turning Darkness Into Light, which is no reflection on how good the book is other than that I want to savor it, but also it's written in letters and diary entries and translation fragments with notes by the translators back and forth to each other, which is academic ephemera that I both love and can't read too much of all in one sitting because it gets a little too close to my own grad school days. Anyway, if you've been looking for an excuse to read the Memoirs of Lady Trent series, this is its follow-up volume, starring Lady Trent's granddaughter, and who doesn't love dragons and not-actually-Victorian explorers? (Secondary world, posits a society built on a Jewish rather than Christian analog, delightful worldbuilding.)
Crafts
To circle back around to the first fic I recommended, at one point the craft store-owning character mentions that Dimensions makes good cross-stitch kits, and it reminded me that not everything I do has to be a grand project of personal expression, so what I've been doing lately has been concentrating on finishing up several cross-stitch projects I had 98% finished except for the beads, so I can take them to get framed when it seems reasonable to go out again, and I also have a kumihimo beaded necklace kit that I plan to make my mother for her birthday. (Which is in just 10 days, so I really need to get on that.) I think right now is a great time for easy, "silly" little projects that don't take too much mental effort.
(That said, I also just ordered a tripod for my camera to see if I can set up a Twitch stream to teach beginner temari, just in case people are interested in learning a new craft. Given how long it's going to take to get here, though, that probably won't happen until next weekend at the earliest.)
That said, the news of the outside world is stressful, and as much as I'd like to say I'm using this time to write... I am not. My brain is very clearly in creative hibernation mode lately, and this only seems to have made it worse, so instead I will recommend other people's creative endeavors.
Long Fics
Naughty Hookers (Swathed in Wool) (series) 161,859 words in total - Technically a Teen Wolf AU, but so thoroughly AU that no canon background is required. If you like found family, craft stores, and people dealing with trauma and grief through pragmatic nerdy love and acceptance, then I cannot recommend this enough. I have recommended it before, and I likely will again, because this 'verse is my favorite comfort read, and I think I've read it through six times now. Bonus: Best ace rep I think I've ever read.
One of the Crazy Ones (series) 207,115 words in total - I just opened this to reread because I recently did a rewatch of Almost Human, this time actually taking the time to manually put all the episodes in their intended airing order (what Fox did to this show was a travesty of truly epic proportions), and this fic is the only thing that makes me feel better about the show ending the way it did, because this gives them the ending they deserved. Case fic with romance and also android "what makes a person a person" politics. Everything by this author is amazing. Not as easy to jump into without having seen the show, but hey, there's only one season, so it's not like it would take long to watch.
Switch (series) 230,867 words in total - You all know this one, right? The ultimate Star Trek: AOS Kirk/McCoy opus? My god, does this one put the slow in slow burn. And the way it really explores Kirk's background, lets us really roll around in the angst underlying his supposed impulsiveness.
Books
If you're looking for things that feel extremely close to home right now, there's Mira Grant's Newsflesh series, which, yes, has zombies, but I really don't think of them as zombie books because they are pandemic books. I'm currently wavering on doing a reread, because I keep thinking about them constantly, but also they might just freak me out extra. I was reading their companion book Feedback on my recent trip to Atlanta, and that was surreal enough even before all the social distancing and isolation stuff started.
I also recently caught up on Claire O'Dell's Janet Watson Chronicles, also known in my mind as Intersectionality Holmes, so if you're looking for Black queer Southern gender-flipped Holmes and Watson living in DC after a near-future second American Civil War, well, these are the books for you. Very good, might make you even angrier about politics than you already were.
If you're looking for a series to dive into, I recommend Seanan McGuire's InCryptid books, because I just finished the latest one, and loved it thoroughly. Books full of both glitter and deep ideas, in the finest urban fantasy tradition.
If you want something long and weird and wonderful, but also standalone, I recommend Max Gladstone's Empress of Forever, which I actually read last summer, but still think about all the time. What genre is it? Uh... well, as I said on Twitter at the time, I don't think Max Gladstone is capable of writing in one genre at a time, but it's got a near-future tech mogul and then space pirates and technology that might as well be magic and an intentional Journey to the West story arc.
I also read Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire at around the same time and now the two books are inextricably linked in my mind as amazing, wonderful, absorbing space adventures, though that one is much more about politics. Did you like The Expanse and/or CJ Cherryh's Foreigner series? Then you'll like this.
Oh, related but slightly less deep, I just finished Jessie Mihalik's Polaris Rising. Still lots of space politics and espionage, but with more of the feel of a romance, as the heroine is on the run from an arranged political marriage when she discovers there's more to her would-be groom's insistence that they marry than your average alliance. As the fourth of five children, she's actually a trained industrial spy, so she falls back on those skills to figure out what's going on. (Her love interest does verge a bit on the alphahole stereotype, though, so if that's a particular pet peeve, this might not be the best choice.)
I'm still working my way slowly through Marie Brennan's Turning Darkness Into Light, which is no reflection on how good the book is other than that I want to savor it, but also it's written in letters and diary entries and translation fragments with notes by the translators back and forth to each other, which is academic ephemera that I both love and can't read too much of all in one sitting because it gets a little too close to my own grad school days. Anyway, if you've been looking for an excuse to read the Memoirs of Lady Trent series, this is its follow-up volume, starring Lady Trent's granddaughter, and who doesn't love dragons and not-actually-Victorian explorers? (Secondary world, posits a society built on a Jewish rather than Christian analog, delightful worldbuilding.)
Crafts
To circle back around to the first fic I recommended, at one point the craft store-owning character mentions that Dimensions makes good cross-stitch kits, and it reminded me that not everything I do has to be a grand project of personal expression, so what I've been doing lately has been concentrating on finishing up several cross-stitch projects I had 98% finished except for the beads, so I can take them to get framed when it seems reasonable to go out again, and I also have a kumihimo beaded necklace kit that I plan to make my mother for her birthday. (Which is in just 10 days, so I really need to get on that.) I think right now is a great time for easy, "silly" little projects that don't take too much mental effort.
(That said, I also just ordered a tripod for my camera to see if I can set up a Twitch stream to teach beginner temari, just in case people are interested in learning a new craft. Given how long it's going to take to get here, though, that probably won't happen until next weekend at the earliest.)
