Definitely fallen in too deep

I don't have a reading goal for this year, but funnily enough I'm ahead of last year's book in a week pace. I'm still planning on reading some longer books so we'll see where I'll be at the end of the year. On the other hand I suspect I'll be reading less fic than I did last year, because I finished the backlog I had, and at least for now I'm just keeping an eye on new ones.

Recently I finished N. K. Jemisin's short story collection How Long 'til Black Future Month? I read the Broken Earth trilogy last year, and it put her as one of those writers whose books I'll pretty much automatically read. This was such a delight all around, so many worlds built effectively, and the topics characteristically bold. 

I also got up to speed with Monstress comic by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda. I got the first few issues as a gift when they were new, but never got to reading them until now. After I started, I had to read all the way up to date. The world building is so fascinating and the themes depicted beautifully and honestly. The art too is very gorgeous and nothing else is quite like it.

I tend to read at least two books at a time, one ebook to be read on phone during commute and otherwise away from home, and one printed book at home. Currently the ebook is Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, maybe I'll get through the rest of Austen this year. At home I'm continuing my Harry Potter reread with the Prisoner of Azkaban. It's my favorite in the series from previous experience, so it'll be interesting to see if this will change. I'll probably finish it over the weekend.

Next on my pile is Night Watch, which'll be interesting to get my hands on. When I began my Discworld project, the two books I could have named were it and Going Postal, they were the ones I most heard people talking of. I really enjoy the City Watch books in general, so I've high hopes for this one.

Today I woke up to the cat standing on my sternum, which wasn't so fun (he's not a small cat), and when I suggested he move he stood on my boob instead which was not an improvement:D

Anyway, it's been nice to have him, even when I have slept less because his nighttime walkabouts. He'll go back home to my sister sometime next week, unless something unexpected happens and there's still stuff that needs to be done in her new apartment.

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We are having a proper winter in southern Finland this year, which I like much better than the last few years when we barely had any snow, and what we had lasted only days at a time. It's so much lighter and prettier now, and temperatures below freezing are much easier to dress for than the just above zero and raining.

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My first book of the year was to read Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell again, I'd read it once before several years ago. I like a lot about that book, especially the world building and style (which is probably divisive, for me the meandering works with this story), but there are also things that annoy me about it. For one, it's impossible to disregard that it preaches one thing and practices other; a fairly significant theme in the book is that you should respect the agency of women and people of color, and yet all the characters that actually have any agency are white men.

Moving on, I'm doing research for the HP story I'm hopefully going to finally write, which means rereading all the HP books. I'm in the middle of the Chamber of Secrets right now, it's been years since I last read them (I revisited the series as a whole fairly soon after the Deathly Hallows was released, but not since), and it's curious to see what I retain and what I've forgotten. The plot is familiar, but many details come as a surprise, same with the style somewhat.

I did remember everyone was mad at people more than I was really comfortable with, but the reasons seem more ludicrous than I remembered, and the scale of people's reactions completely blown out of proportion sometimes. Not to mention that every single adult in Harry's life is letting him down by leaving him at Dursleys, which I thought even before this reread, it just strikes me very strongly again. On the good side, the things I enjoyed before I very much still do, the richness of the magical world, and the potentials in it, as well as the compelling characters, which were the reasons that called me to write for the fandom in the first place. It's all still there, and reading the books is strengthening my resolve to write the post-war fic.

I read again Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red, which is extremely beautiful and yet another example of how she always knows exactly which words to use and how the turns of phrase work. It reminded me of how the first time I read it I had this short exchange with myself in my head. I thought, "It feels like fanfic," to which the pedantic part of myself replied, "Technically it is a fanfic."

In fact, it is a multilayered fanfic. It is about Geryon, the the monster Heracles killed during his tenth labour. The poet Stesichorus wrote a song telling the story from the point of view of Geryon, which has only partly survived, and it is the version on which Carson's poem is based on (she calls it a novel in verse, which is as good a description as any). As an added twist, the story is set in modern time, and there are musings on Stesichorus and even a whimsical interview taking the place of prologue and epilogue.

If we say fanfic is something based on previously existing media, this book definitely is a fanfic, as are a lot of other things as well, but it wasn't quite what I was thinking when I had that exchange inside my head. Here's where we come to the genre of fanfic. Of course, fanfic comes in many genres, depending on both the source material and the whims of the creator, but there's also a common core that applies to at least a large swathe of it.

It's not that uncommon to hear people say they like reading fic more than books, and it's not about being attached to particular characters and wanting more, it's probably more due to the qualities that fanfic has that we find less often in published books (they're not obviously completely absent, but rarer anyway). There's of course the diversity in every sense of the word; the kinds of characters there are and their relationships, as well as the topics of the stories. There's also the focus in the stories, it often rests on things and qualities that in published books are treated as superfluous, cluttering up the plot, and hence usually cut away. What's insignificant in the original story is often important in fic, and when one grows to like stories like these, transitioning to traditionally published books can be harsh. One can grow to like both styles, or one can dwell in fic, we're in a happy place where there's a lot of it easily accessible.

Coming back to Autobiography of Red, it is a published book, but it very much has the fanfic core. It transforms the original story both in time and in content, in it Geryon and Heracles are lovers in a dysfunctional and fragmentary relationship. In addition its focus is on Geryon rather than on the progression of the events, and there are passages discussing details that do not move the plot forward, but show us him as he grows and struggles. So it's not fanfic only in the most technical sense of being based on something else, but also due to its focus and atmosphere, and it feels like the motives of writing were much the same as we all have when we take our favorite characters and stories and strip them down and build them up again, into something else, into something that says the things we needed the story to say.

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This was book number 51 of the year, so one to go until my goal. I'll definitely reach it, it's just a matter of choosing a suitably slim one.