Liebster Award!

Sarah sort-of tagged me back for the Liebster award, after I tagged her, except she didn’t tag me, but you could say she technically did. (Yes I’m confusing.) Her questions were great! I wanted to answer them. That is all.

Anyway, I had a lot of fun with this, and that’s what matters.

The Rules

Acknowledge the blogger(s) who nominated you. (Thank you, Sarah!)

Answer the 11 questions you’ve been asked. (That’s why I’m here, after all)

Give 11 random facts about yourself. (…Fine.)

Nominate 11 bloggers and notify them that they’ve been nominated. (I’m not tagging anyone this time!)

Give your nominees 11 questions to answer. (Again, nope!)

1. What is your dearest possession?

I–

I guess I could answer something like my books, maybe my computer (or my dolls that I still kind of love despite the fact that I’m like a thousand years old or something heh heh), but I don’t know. I feel like I don’t…I don’t need them? I love them, but all I need to keep myself happy is myself. I’m not a minimalist at all, though, and will absolutely buy some random stupid thing if I feel like it just because it looks cute. I guess I have a complicated relationship with my possessions.

2. What is a book (that you’ve read all the way through) that you consider simply Not Worth Reading?

Now this one is easier to answer! I wrote two excessively long reviews on both The Cruel Prince and Muse of Nightmares, precisely with this sentiment. But I’m going to go on about them a little more!

Jude and Cardan’s relationship is basically just fetishized abuse. I, personally? I do not find it cute. At all. I’ve liked some glorified abusive relationships (IN FICTION) before, but there was something about Jude and Cardan that was just…joyless. It’s not really that they love each other and are incapable of showing it in healthy ways, they just hate each other but also find each other hot. There’s a big difference between the two for me, but unfortunately, YA tends to go for the second one a lot.

Then Muse of Nightmares was just a mess. There were a lot of problems I had that I went into in my review, but let me just say this now. I swear to God, if someone ever saw the nightmares I have because of anxiety and decided there was some kind of darkness in me based off of that, I would–I don’t know. Yell at them. Curse their name. Turn them into a swan and enchant them to wander the earth until they learn the value of empathy.

Actually, I wouldn’t do any of that. I would just swear a vow of undying hatred that they would never know about and then I would complain loudly to my family as soon as they were gone. Because #ConflictManagement! (I’m terrible.)

Also, the gay characters just felt kind of…fetishized, I guess?

Anyway, this got longer than I expected it too. I like talking about things I hate.

3. What is a book you adore that you also realize is Not For Most?

Ooh, I love this question! It’s a little hard to say, because a lot of books have at least something in them that isn’t for everybody. So, while the real answer is probably some Problematic ™ Classic that I can’t think of right now, I’m going to answer The Hollow Kingdom. The horror elements in that book are SO good, and the characters are incredibly well-developed. I love the book. I grew up reading it. But it also features a captor/captive romance (like Beauty and the Beast or Persephone and Hades), and while a lot of people do like that kind of thing or at least don’t mind it, a lot of people also hate it. So maybe it’s not that it ‘isn’t for most,’ but I do realize it isn’t for everybody.

4. Would you prefer the earth to be flat?

No. Even though C.S. Lewis did a nice job of selling it aesthetically, spheres are much more pleasing. I just love circular things, okay? They’re just. So beautiful.

Now, there are historical theories that I do wish were true. Aether! Alchemy! Especially alchemy. Alchemy is incredibly cool.

5. Do you prefer pencil or pen for writing?

If you asked me to write a story with a pen, I would LITERALLY DIE. Have you seen my typos?

I’m fine with writing notes with a pen, though.

6. What’s an out-of-your-comfort-zone book that you unexpectedly loved?

I guess Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation was my first time reading an Adult book that wasn’t over fifty years old, so I’ll count that. It was also my first time reading BL, so it was definitely a new genre for me and I didn’t really know what to expect.

I love this book so much! The characterization is really something else, and the relationship between the two heroes is so sweet. 😭 They really love each other so much. And I actually relate to Wei Wuxian a ton. Also, Wuxian and Lan Zhan just have so MUCH chemistry?? I swear they have to be one of the best romantic couples I’ve ever read.

7. If you could live in any time period in any country (by which I do mean you’d be stuck there), which?

Hmm, this is a hard one. They all have their drawbacks. I love the Joseon dynasty (a pretty broad time period, I know), because the clothes and art are so beautiful (and possibly because I have watched way too many dramas, lol). I also like 1920s England and America. And also the Regency period, because even though I’m not sure if I’d fit into the society, I still love the aesthetics!

8. What historical character do you want to see in a novel, that you haven’t?

Ooh, I really like this. I assume this is asking about retellings of historical figures, and not my dream Historical Fiction novel?

I’d love a novel about Wu Zetian. She was an empress during the Tang dynasty, and the first empress to rule the empire in her own right! She is kind of a controversial figure because she was accused of certain stuff that she…probably didn’t do? I don’t know a whole lot about her, I’ve only read a couple articles and her Wikipedia page, but she sounds REALLY cool and I’d love a historical retelling!

Uh…and also Boudicca. The Celts were (are) very cool and Boudicca is a wonderful woman who fought against a corrupt imperial force that was in the process of subjugating the local people. My only fear is that someone would make it tacky. Sometimes ancient Celtic cultures get portrayed as this angelic, pure, and wonderful matriarchal culture that got wiped out by an evuuul patriarchal society, or else they get portrayed as uncivilised and brutish. Or both at the same time, for extra annoyance! Also, the Romans were horrible a lot of times and conquering did not bring out the best in them, so maybe don’t glorify them so much. Rome did a lot of good things, to be sure, but they also did a lot of bad. (Random Mists of Avalon hate coming through, but fun fact! The druids in England were wiped out by the Roman pagans, not Christians! There is legitimate religious persecution Christians took part in, but that was not it and maybe creating historical conflict that didn’t exist low-key annoys me!) But anyway, getting off of that tangent, I think you could tell a really interesting story about Boudicca.

Also, you may have guessed this from my smol rant, but I personally am very…ambivalent on Rome. I love the Byzantine Empire, though. It definitely had MAJOR flaws, but I find it amazing anyway.

And, on that note, Empress Theodora!! She’s so amazing, you guys. She started out as a (15 year-old! 🤢) prostitute, and then she married the future emperor, and the rest was history! Literally. Look her up!

(Also, some historian from her time period wrote some absolutely perverted account about her that was–probably, from what I know?–very biased, and then my history book just put an excerpt from that down and portrayed it as probably true. Gah I hate sexism in history books that doesn’t come from the actual people from the time period. Leave sexism in the 500s, guys! Anyway, /rant)

9. WWI or WWII?

OH GOD WORLD WAR ONE PLEASE BUT BOTH WERE TERRIBLE AND SCREWED EVERYONE UP SO BAD. World War II was basically everyone competing to dig themselves so deep they’d be tens of thousands of miles below the Mariana Trench by the time it was over.

Anyway, I don’t want to share a time period with Nazis (*sobs in 2020*).

Also, on a much lighter note, Edwardian dresses are just…beautiful? I love the silhouettes and the colors and everything!

10. If you were a pirate captain, what would you name your ship?

Easy. The USS Enterprise. I’ve never felt more of a closet nerd than this moment, I’m sorry, I grew up on Star Trek okay

11. What’s the first fictional character you remember relating to as a child?

Hmm. It’s honestly a little hard to say. It’s probably one of the characters in the media I consume when I was eleven to twelve. It might have been Loki (I’m sorry). It might have been over-dramatic and very loud Tamaki–or it possibly could have been Haruhi? Or it might have been Gu Yong-Ha. I know Gu Yong-Ha was the first kind of life-changing character I came across. He taught me that you can be feminine and love fashion and still be super cool and wily and fun. Which is good, because I had just entered into my ~not like other girls~ phase, and thank God he kept me from becoming that insufferable person.

So, uh…Does anyone want eleven random facts about myself?!

1. ‘Historically accurate’ Arthuriana bugs me. I’m used to the story in a High Medieval setting, and the retellings are never actually historically accurate anyway, because the stories they adapt it from are completely ahistorical (and also because there is a LOT people Just Don’t Know about the time period, including whether or not Arthur actually existed). It’s not like there’s anything wrong with ‘historically accurate’ retellings, but they aren’t usually my cup of tea (I say, as if I regularly read Arthurian retellings in the first place).
2. We have four baby geese! Their names are Nimue, Emu, Zebu, and Minnow. Emu keeps biting her friends.
3. Hans from Frozen deserved better. Also, that twist made no sense. Yes, I’m still complaining about it years later.
4. I don’t tend to read a lot of retellings anymore, and that makes me sad.
5. I have been trying to find history books and articles and something, anything about medieval Egypt, and I just…cannot find anything. I hate it when this happens to me. Wikipedia always fails me in my darkest hour
6. I also would love to learn more about medieval Scotland, but I don’t know where to start. (rec me your favorite documentaries and history books, if you want!)
7. I am extremely pretentious, but I’m sure you’ve never noticed
8. I never know anything about grammar or what you’re supposed to do with English. Sometimes I read my mangled documents I wrote late at night and marvel.
9. I just finished The Untamed and now I’m on a show hangover. IT WAS SO GOOD YOU GUYS (and yes, that was the screen adaptation of Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, in case you didn’t know). I’m currently trying to write a review, but getting my thoughts in order is hard.
10. I tend to think of a lot of things as overrated, and yes, I am exactly as horrid as I sound
11. Mulan is my favorite Disney movie.

I wrote all this at around five in the morning. I’m sure you couldn’t tell 💀 I have a feeling there are typos, but I didn’t look too hard. This was incredibly fun, though, and I enjoyed ranting about stuff I know nothing about (isn’t that what this whole blog is for?). Tell me your favorite historical period in the comments!

Goodbye, 2019 (I didn’t think I would miss you, but I guess I kind of do)

I refuse to believe it’s 2020. I feel like, in some part of my brain, it’s still 1215 and we’re still talking about the Magna Carta and King Arthur and whatever it was we all talked about in 1215, I don’t know. But anyway, I decided to write a yearly recap of 2019 or somesuch. God knows why, because no one could be less interested in what I did this year than I am.

Or is that true? It’s true that, as of the past two months, things have been looking up. I’ve been writing far more. I’ve been (astonishingly) learning lots of things. I’ve found books I love, and have been, in general, interacting with my life more. It figures that I only start liking the year once it’s almost over.

Life

Nah, I don’t really want to talk about this.

Okay, I turned eighteen this year! And I also did decently on my SATs. That’s…Is that all I did? I feel like I spent most of this year in hiding.

But hey, I started a blog! That’s something.

Reading

You know, sometimes I see people say, ‘so, I’ve hit such a massive reading slump lately. I’ve only read 5401 books this month,’ and I’m just…No! You people are doing fine, don’t beat yourselves up over it! Sometimes I only read two books a year!

Shockingly, I did not only read two books this year. Let’s see if I can get these in order (I may miss some):

This one was very good. This book is so delightfully quirky while still getting quite dark in places, and can I say that dark fantasy that doesn’t take itself too seriously is my favorite thing? I also loved the bi rep so, so much, and it came at a time when I needed it, too. I’ll admit I was a bit scared when I (accidentally) read a spoiler about Adam and Ronan, because I just couldn’t see how they would work well together? But Adam got a lot of character development in this book, and I actually like him now, and something about Ronan and him really do just click. I will admit that I do think their relationship could have been built up over the previous two books, but it still works.

And also like…the plot was good and whatever other boring stuff you want me to talk about, but we all know I’m really here for the ships.

I will say one thing, though: More could have and should have been done with Gwenllian. You can’t just drop a magical character from the 14th century there in your story and then leave her to her own devices.

Eh. The Raven King was okay, and the writing was still gorgeous as usual. But I can’t help but feel like the ending was pretty anticlimactic. I remember feeling, right after I finished it, that I wish the author had written a historical fantasy about Glendower instead. I don’t know why. (I guess it is kind of an unfair complaint to say, ‘I liked this book, but I wish the author had written a completely different book in a different genre.’) I think the history behind all the worldbuilding was the really, really fascinating thing about all this, and it’s the part of the story that is consistently underplayed.

Also, did Ronan…Did Ronan really make a racist joke behind his Asian friend’s back, or did I misread that? And Blue, who gets so up-in-arms about other stuff, was willing to just laugh it off? I hope I misread that. (I don’t have a copy on hand right now, so I can’t say for sure. It did jump out at me when I was reading it, though. I know someone else mentioned it too, so I assume I didn’t misinterpret because tired or something.) I mean, it’s definitely not unrealistic for a white boy from the south, but it is a bit…disappointing.

Yeah. It was an okay book. Definitely not perfect. I still love the other three books, though.

This was just a three star read. Maybe a two? I don’t know. It wasn’t the worst book ever, but I didn’t love it at all. I liked parts of it (the setting, a couple of the characters, how alchemy was portrayed), and I hated other parts (the fact that most of the cast was underdeveloped, among other things). I wrote a review of this, which was actually my very first book review? I’m unreasonably proud of the post, considering it’s terrible, but the review still does make me laugh, so that’s good.

On the bright side, I did write some fanfic for this, and the book got me to look up some stuff about chemistry and alchemy, so that’s excellent. Did you know that the science of chemistry actually comes out of alchemy? Darn it, now I wish I’d actually learned some more chemistry. I want to be an alchemist, too.

I actually did pick up the second book at the library, and so far it’s way worse than the first one. My plan is to power through on the sheer force of my own salt so I can write a review, but I may DNF it.

In case you’re wondering, the English title is Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation

So, objectively, this is a terrible book. Or, more accurately, there are very large peaks and dips in the quality. The plotting is excellent, and it can actually get very suspenseful and creepy sometimes. The romance is freaking cringey. Like, it’s probably a Shatter Me on the levels of books that I like, as in, this got a LOT of emotions out of me at five in the morning, but is it good? Would I read it again? Nah.

But this is also the first book I’ve ever read with a bi main character. And I know it’s kind of stupid to look for representation in a Boy’s Love novel, from everything I’ve heard about the genre, but–I don’t think it was terrible? It wasn’t the best ever, but I don’t think it was terrible. And the characters honestly seem to love each other and have a lot of chemistry and they don’t die at the end. So I think that was what caused my unreasonably happy reaction over this book.

(Note that I am not averse to queer main characters dying at the end, as long as it’s because they’re going up against the evil empire and there was no way out of that alive, and not because one character dies of AIDS and the other jumps off a cliff because something something homophobia. Just like…don’t make it tacky. But it’s still incredibly nice when queer characters don’t die.)

I will say that I think the denouement is the weakest part of the book. Sex scenes are nearly impossible to get right, and kinky sex scenes are not really my preferred thing to read–no shame to you if you like them, of course (I should note that I skimmed the sex scene hard after about a quarter of the way through it, so I can’t tell you much about the quality, except…it is difficult to make a sex scene appealing to me and this wasn’t any different). And I also skimmed through a couple of the post-credits short stories and it seemed like they were kinda shit, so I didn’t read them ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ But I’m reviewing the novel here, not the short stories.

I also honestly cannot tell you if any parts of this novel were problematic, because I read this at five in the morning and my brain can not tell what’s problematic and what isn’t at five in the morning. Sorry.

Overall, I liked the book, but I’m not sure I’d read it again, just in case those happy memories were a lie.

A really excellent book overall, but I won’t say much here because I actually wrote a review and have yet to post it.

I LOVE THIS BOOK. Easily my favorite book of 2019. I do plan on writing a review, but just in case I don’t get it up, read this for demon butlers, stubborn librarians, and absentminded sorcerers. And also, the story has a Howl’s Moving Castle feel, and it’s just really amazing in general. Go read it.

I think that was all the fiction I read this year? I could have read more and forgotten, but I don’t know.

Writing

I barely wrote anything at the start of the year, but I’m starting to get back into the flow of things. I’ve actually started writing fanfiction, which I used to never write, and so far it’s really fun. I also put four short stories onto my blog! I was going to link them in this post, but then I realized I have a little page with their links up there at the top of this website. So you can check them out if you want to.

In case you were wondering about my opinion on them, which you probably weren’t, I think ‘Bran and the Bear’ and ‘The Skeleton Harp’ are the best written, technically speaking, but ‘Sepideh and the Jinni’ and ‘The King and the Courtier’ are my personal favorites. My opinion could change completely by next week.

I also finally learned how to actually plot things this year, I think. And I think my writing may be beginning to hold together better? Hopefully? Anyway, I love writing, and even though it tried to the best of its ability, 2019 did not get to change that.

Blogging

Obviously, I started a blog. I also posted some things on the blog, and I can’t really pick a favorite or even list my top favorites because I’m just that self-absorbed and like all of them, but I liked all my fairy tale and fairy tale-related stuff and also I reread my Cruel Prince review every time I want a laugh.

When I started this blog, I expected to consistently cringe over my posts a month after I put them out, but I actually don’t? It feels kind of nice to put my most badly-written self out on the internet. I mean, sure, my first couple of posts are objectively cringy, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ And some of them aren’t as bad as I thought they would be. I thought my post on Mordred and Guinevere’s relationship was terrible when I first put it out, but when I reread it a couple months ago, I didn’t think it was too bad. (Now, I could be completely delusional on this matter.) (Also, man did I used to overuse italics.)

I was thinking about listing my favorite bloggers like El did (with permission to take her idea, of course), but then I realized I’d have to list literally everyone I follow, so maybe not. You’re all great, seriously.

Anyway, screw it, despite the hard stuff, it has been a great year, and I’m so happy to make it to the end of it with you guys. Thank you for supporting me this year, and happy New Year!