Oracne's Brain Radio

Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent by Judi Dench and Brendan O'Hea grew out of a series of interviews O'Hea intended for archival purposes, about Dench's memories of all her Shakespeare roles. After her grandson overhead them talking, the idea arose to turn their talks into a book, which was a great idea. I enjoyed reading this so very much I didn't want it to end, and now I've realized I should probably find a production of Cymbeline and watch it, as well as the rest of the Henry plays. This is a chatty book (since it originated as actual chatting between old friends) that also is supremely informative about how this particular actor interpreted her parts, and her philosophy on the art of acting, and what she learned from her various mentors. I loved that she would sometimes say she wished she'd play a certain part differently if she did it now. There's also a fair few anecdotes about productions and working with different directors and actors. If you're into theatre, or into Shakespeare, or just interested in an entertaining person talking, definitely check this out.

They're Gonna Give You Hell by unlimitedInk is an epic Mandalorian farce that also has some important found family and leadership themes. Shortly after dropping off Grogu with Luke Skywalker, Din Djarin missed him painfully and goes to mope around Tatooine. I'm not sure how much to spoil of this, but I'll just say a swathe of different Mandalorian sects become involved in trying to figure out who will lead them and where they will go, a couple of unexpected sentiences are revealed, more than one Armourer shows up, and Boba Fett is grumpy. If you are a Bo Katan fan, don't read this one.

Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair by tigriswolf is a very sweet Winter Soldier story; shortly after freeing himself from Hydra, he encounters an asthmatic child who's run away from abuse and immediately becomes protective, which leads to him slowly recovering himself and learning to be a person again, while putting the child first. He and his adoptive daughter make their own family and make a home; only then is able to bring Steve Rogers back into his lift.

Dark Side of the Moon by imogenbynight is a Supernatural AU in which Dean Winchester and Castiel Novak are astronauts. Dean, an engineer, is on the moon when an unthinkable tragedy happens and he needs rescue; Castiel is part of the rescue crew. Aside from being able to travel back and forth to the moon without orbital constraints, this is a somewhat realistic space story, with some spooky parts in the middle.

An Ever-Fixed Mark by AMarguerite is an epic Soulmark AU of Pride and Prejudice in which Elizabeth Bennet's soulmark reads "Fitzwilliam." And she marries Colonel Fitzwilliam, who in this story is terrific, but fair warning, he dies of a wound, and then, slowly, Elizabeth comes to realize she a second happy marriage might be possible. I enjoyed this a lot and did I mention it's epic? Buckle up, it's a long ride in a bumpy carriage with lots of intriguing meta examination of Soulmarks and the various ways they could be interpreted.

The Unspeakable Mind: Stories of Trauma and Healing from the Frontlines of PTSD Science by Shaili Jain was published in 2019, so it's pre-pandemic. It's a well-organized overview with short chapters on the causes, types, and treatments for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, written by a specialist in that field. I found it very useful for its overview of recent research and new types of therapies. A particularly good section focused on the Partition of 1947 (in which members of the author's family were killed) and the effects of its knock-on trauma that are still felt today.

My September #TBRChallenge Book was Black Maestro: The Epic Life of an American Legend by Joe Drape; I also read and wrote about Wink: The Incredible Life and Epic Journey of Jimmy Winkfield by Ed Hotaling in the same post.

Also, the Kindle edition of Exile by Lisa Bradley is om sale currently for $5.99 - that's my October TBR Challenge book.

1973: Rock at the Crossroads by Andrew Grant Jackson is popular nonfiction ostensibly about how the popular music of 1973 (with a bit of 1972 and 1974 overlap) reflected and interacted with mostly American current events, including the end of the Vietnam War and Watergate. There is some of that social history I was hoping for, but I felt a lot of the wordcount was extraneous. The book is jammed with anecdotes about musicians' drug habits, unwise relationships, and infidelity that I found tiresome and repetitive fairly quickly, as well as depressing. As the book wore on, I felt a single interesting point about, say, songs written about Nixon's dishonesty, would go into a somewhat relevant anecdote about a musician and then spiral down a black hole of other anecdotes that let the topic wander off somewhere else. By the end, I was questioning the relevance of many of the anecdotes; Joni Mitchell's boyfriends were not the ones writing her songs. Perhaps these rabbit holes were the intent, and those were the transitions. By the last half of the book, I was already tired. Good things: the author included women artists (which seems obvious but doesn't always happen), and though the title refers to Rock, he also included Reggae, R&B, Outlaw Country, and the dawn of hiphop.

Sisters of the Forsaken Stars by Lina Rather built on the conflicts established in the first novella. It left the Nuns in Space ready to spring off into a new chapter, which I am totally ready for.

Yale Needs Women: How the First Group of Girls Rewrote the Rules of an Ivy League Giant by Anne Gardiner Perkins is splendid. It's intersectional and informative. The author did substantial research as well as interviewing several people; the slow progress of Yale going fully coed is shown through the experiences of the students she interviewed, discussions among the administration, and enough information about what was going on in the rest of the country and at other colleges and universities to put everything into context. The book begins with 1969. I thought she did a particularly excellent job tying these specific events into the early days of "second wave" feminism and showing how feminist aims were sometimes aided by other civil rights movements of the time, and sometimes treated as though they were completely separate. For example, the president of Yale at the time had been forward-looking in recruiting more Black, Jewish, and working class male students, but could not seem to comprehend how admitting women could similarly be a benefit to the university.

A Promise of Spring by Mary Balogh is one of her Regency romances; this author is known for pushing the envelope of that sub-genre by having sex be a part of the story. While not being particularly explicit, she doesn't skip or gloss over when the characters have sex, or how they're having it, and how that changes as their relationship changes. This author wrote a prostitute heroine, and another who was a paid mistress, and a number of marriages of convenience. Grace Howard had a youthful fling with her first love that resulted in a son, who later drowned as a child. The first love refused to marry her and in fact married someone else, for money. Grace ends up keeping house for her youngest brother, a rector, until he dies unexpectedly. Her brother's best friend, Peregrine, then asks her to marry him. Perry is not sure he's in love with her, but he admires her a great deal; meanwhile, Grace considers herself dead inside. Slowly, Perry brings her back to life and love again, and helps her to reconnect with her remaining family. Unfortunately for me, there's also a large chunk of plot devoted to Alphahole First Love, whose rich wife died in childbirth, and who now wants to seduce Grace away from Perry. I found him tiresome, and the amount of inner turmoil devoted to dealing with him excessive. I did, however, like that the resolution of the problem involved Perry allowing Grace to make her own decision, and Grace then mustering up her courage to do so and get closure.

The Ruthless Lady's Guide to Wizardry by C. M. Waggoner is a delightful secondary world fantasy with bonus cross-class lesbian romance and found family. Dellaria, a fire witch, scrabbles and scrapes for rent money while also trying to take care of her mother, who had her as a teenager and is now an addict. Delly's whole life changes when she takes a job guarding a rich woman, and meets other women with magic, including Winn, a half-troll who is large, jolly, and very rich. The first chapter felt a little slow to me, but once Delly meets the others, it was off to the races. I loved little worldbuilding touches like the West Lesicourt dialect that Delly, her mother, and her friend Elo speak together, or the way same-gender romance was not an issue but cross-class romance could be problematic. It was a lot of fun. Content warning for an upsetting death midway through, in the course of a murder attempt; it's upsetting for the characters as well, in a way I found realistic.

Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong is truly excellent and I highly recommend it. It's about Hong's Asian American experience in both general and particular, told through her life as a poet. I made particular note of how racism affects the writer and their writing, as well as reader experiences of that writing. Publishers treated the ethnic story as the “single story,” which Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie defines as follows: “Create a single story, show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.” And Much of Lahiri’s fiction complies with the MFA orthodoxy of show, don’t tell, which allows the reader to step into the character’s pain without having to, as Susan Sontag writes, locate their own privilege “on the same map” as the character’s suffering...Because the character’s inner thoughts are evacuated, the reader can get behind the cockpit of the character’s consciousness and cinematically see what the character sees without being disturbed by incessant editorializing....Innocence is, as Bernstein writes, not just an “absence of knowledge” but “an active state of repelling knowledge,” embroiled in the statement, “Well, I don’t see race” where I eclipses the seeing. Innocence is both a privilege and a cognitive handicap, a sheltered unknowingness that, once protracted into adulthood, hardens into entitlement.

Miss Moriarty, I Presume? (The Lady Sherlock Series Book 6) by Sherry Thomas continues the Moriarty plotline, easily guessed from the title, but has some interesting complications worked in, showing the complex machinations of those living in his orbit as well as Charlotte Holmes' and Mrs. Watson's efforts to protect themselves and their loved ones. It's a fairly torturous plot this time, that surprised me a couple of times. I'm ready for the next one in the series!

Return of the Thief by Megan Whalen Turner had the feel of an epic ending to the entire series, complete with epic, overwhelming battles, tragedy and betrayal and redemption, and the feeling that All is Lost until All Isn't Lost. I read it on a day off, and was thus able to immerse in the familiar world made unfamiliar with a new first-person narrator, Pheris Erondites.

It Takes Two to Tumble: Seducing the Sedgwicks by Cat Sebastian is a goodhearted, sweet romance between Philip Dacre, a widowed British naval captain, and the vicar of the small English village, Benedict Sedgwick. I think the time setting is the Regency, but am not sure. The plot owes a bit to The Sound of Music in that Captain Dacre's three children have run wild since his wife's death, while he was away at sea. The vicar ends up semi-looking after them; having grown up with a negligent poet for a father, he prizes order but also understands the children. Initial dislike leads to, surprise!, desire and love. At some point previously, I read the second book in this series, A Gentleman Never Keeps Score, and belatedly recognized some of the characters.

Art from the First World War by Richard Slocombe mainly made me want to see the actual paintings reproduced within, as I am sure I was missing many details. I had seen an exhibit of World War One art at the Smithsonian with natlyn in 2018, I think, but this book had some artists I had not seen before. It was a pleasant afternoon's reading and viewing.

This week, I read Making Comics by Lynda Barry, author of "Ernie Pook's Comeek," which I used to read every week in our free local weekly print newspaper. Remember those? Free weekly newspapers?

Barry also teaches comics, and importantly, her students are not necessarily artists; she points out that a lot of us mostly or entirely stop drawing in childhood, which definitely describes me. Barry talks a lot about drawing in the moment, and she often feels that drawings are "alive" even when the artist is not satisfied with their work. I found her approach very heartening.

This book collects exercises she uses in class. Though I didn't actually follow along with all the exercises on this reading, I did do some drawing in a nice notepad shaped like an elephant, using some of her methodology. It was fun. I am pleased with the results, and will keep drawing for a while.

Hello students, meet Professor Skeletor. Be on time, don’t miss class, and turn off your phones. No time for introductions, we start drawing right away. The goal is more rock, less talk, and we communicate only through images.

For more than five years the cartoonist Lynda Barry has been an associate professor in the University of Wisconsin–Madison art department and at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, teaching students from all majors, both graduate and undergraduate, how to make comics, how to be creative, how to not think. There is no academic lecture in this classroom. Doodling is enthusiastically encouraged.

Making Comics is the follow-up to Barry's bestselling Syllabus, and this time she shares all her comics-making exercises. In a new hand-drawn syllabus detailing her creative curriculum, Barry has students drawing themselves as monsters and superheroes, convincing students who think they can’t draw that they can, and, most important, encouraging them to understand that a daily journal can be anything so long as it is hand drawn.

Barry teaches all students and believes everyone and anyone can be creative. At the core of Making Comics is her certainty that creativity is vital to processing the world around us.

Of Muppets and Men: The Making of the Muppet Show by Christopher Finch was published in 1981. Because of the publication date, it could not focus on Jim Henson's death in 1990, which I still regard as a tragedy. I have not read a lot about production aspects of one of my all-time favorite television shows, which I watched as a child when it initially aired. This book included a section on the process of making a single episode, from initial music run-throughs and recording to thirty-second advertising spots. It made me appreciate the incredible amount of creativity and labor that went into even seemingly minor aspects of the production, and profiled some of the backstage crew, including the puppet workshop and the writers. I would have liked to read more about building the puppets and sets.

I have read profiles of some of the puppeteers before; I really appreciated that this book had some additional quotidian detail, for instance that Richard Hunt (Scooter, Janice, Statler, Beaker, Sweetums) was the best at operating other people's characters, and frequently did so in impromptu shows for visitors to the set. I still regard Hunt's early death in 1992 as a huge tragedy, as well. Hunt gets his own chapter. Frank Oz (Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, Animal, and Sam the Eagle as well as Bert, Cookie Monster, and Grover), Jerry Nelson (Count von Count, Floyd Pepper, Robin the Frog, Uncle Deadly, Dr. Julius Strangepork) and Dave Goelz (Gonzo the Great, Zoot, Bunsen Honeydew) are also profiled in their own chapters. It was fun seeing the time capsule aspect of biographies that stopped at this one time period.

However, I did not appreciate the unexpected casual sexism scattered throughout. Puppeteer Louise Gold is described as "A volatile redhead with the offstage manner of a latter-day Tallulah Bankhead." What? Why? Kathy Mullen, another puppeteer, gets a more neutral description, but I noted that while Jane Henson was quoted a few times in passing, she was not profiled. Her pivotal role in the Henson company, or even as a puppeteer, was not mentioned at all. In 1981, this would not have been surprising at all, unfortunately. Luckily, it's a small portion of the book.

The most interesting thing about this book is that it's oversized, with plenty of photographs, including of the puppeteers at work, crowded together beneath platforms with their arms above their heads. Despite seeing these pictures, though, what struck me personally is that even when I can see, for instance, Jim Henson's arm coming out of Kermit's body, I still see Kermit's face as that of a sentient being, even in a still photograph. Make of that what you will. It's magic.

At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance--A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power by Danielle L. McGuire is the book I finally started reading on Juneteenth; it had been in my TBR since 2017, so that's not too bad, right? In the interim, I read the excellent Rosa Parks biography by the same author. The title gives you the idea of this book, which traces how black womens' activism surrounding sexual assault was a major part of the civil rights movement as a whole. The overview starts in the 1940s and ends in the 1970s. Highly recommended.

The rest of this week was consumed by My love is a life taker by JoCarthage, an AU of the 2019 Roswell series, which I have not seen. (I haven't seen the older tv version, either.) This is a massive time travel story (over 267K) that slowly turns into a romance and, more broadly, a story of someone emerging from a difficult past of being abused by his family. I most enjoyed the time travel sections, in which the author used real-life experiences in the Middle East, and working with people from that locale, to paint small vivid portraits of times and places. There's violence and sadness and grief, but also comfort. If you like "Bucky recovery" stories, you would probably like this as well. No knowledge of the tv show or of the original novels is required.

AO3 summary: By the time he turned 15, Captain Alex Manes had been to every war zone and unofficial conflict the United States of America was involved in. It wasn't regular practice, or even heard of, for a Colonel to bring his son along on combat missions; the exception was if the child had been identified as Time Aware, able to travel in time along their own timeline using stolen alien technology.

So here Alex Manes was, 28, and ducking bombs, killing who he’s told to. On his way back from a mission, Alex slips into another timestream. It should be impossible. But he can hear a child crying and he heads towards the sound.

This is the story of how Alex saved Michael and Michael saved Alex, with lots of time travel shenanigans and angst.