#veliseraptor

5. odysseus in the underworld, book 11.

did you know that you can't embrace a ghost even if you try three times? even if the ghost is your mother?

4. nausicaa discovers a disreputable vagrant, book 6.

the odysseus-nausicaa interactions are so special to me. she's my brave little princess and he's so delicate with her. the fuckin, tree at delos metaphor. what is this man thinking. i hope nausicaa is happy!!!

this quote is from book 8 but i'm including it anyway:

3. athena meets odysseus in ithaca, book 13.

athena obscures from odysseus that he's back in his own land, so that she can be the one to tell him, and then she lets him lie about his identity for a full page before she reveals herself.

this is also the conversation where she says "this is why i like you; anyone normal would have gone home to see his wife and children by now!" they are Cronies. she Can Make Him Worse.

2. odysseus strings the bow, book 21.

many parts of the bow contest i love, including penelope retrieving the bow from the storeroom and pausing to weep over it, and telling the suitors she will always remember this house, even in her dreams. but the moment he does the deed after everyone else has failed... hghkgh the narrative tension. Complete With Sound Effects.

the riddle of the olive tree bed, book 23.

i've written about the reunion at some length and still have more to say.

I like how this basically describes my own experience with this story :')

I technically have this truly terrible powerpoint explanation but a slightly more concise version:

TCP (not its real name) is set in a nebulously ancient* low fantasy world and follows two main POV characters, Jisel and Callebero, in the immediate aftermath of Callebero being assassinated without a clear successor and with fingers pointing directly at Jisel (caveats apply).

Callebero's the ruler of the nascent empire of Arradine and has been in a nebulous legal zone for his entire rule on account of being named the heir by his mom, the previous ruler, but also acceding to the throne when he was a literal child; he's a couple of months away from his official "coming of age" (21st bday) and taking over full responsibilities of leadership without his regency council when he and his companion cavalry are ambushed on their way home. All the knights are killed and Callebero and Sirion (bff of Callebero + Jisel and mutual pining crush of Callebero + commander of the cavalry) are presumed dead but their bodies missing.

Jisel, on the other hand, is the daughter of the man who killed Callebero's mom** and the former princess of Arradine's long-time rival nation (Capall) who, through a series of unfortunate and rather profoundly teenaged decisions, wound up moving to Arradine 5 yr earlier and being ~mysteriously~ (from the court's POV) favored by Callebero ever since. (Callebero's POV is mostly: my bestie is so cool and i love her)

The not-really-a-twist twist is that Callebero isn't dead (to his chagrin) and instead gets rescued/imprisoned in the court of Jisel's big brother, the exiled crown prince of Capall. This doesn't really solve much and, in Callebero's opinion, actively makes most things worse.

Jisel's side of the story (at least for the first half of the book) is largely focused on her trying to navigate and triage the growing civil crisis in Arradine due to Callebero's death and her own role within it, and Callebero's side is largely focused on him failing his entire family's legacy and being abandoned by the gods. as u do

*As a child, I just sort of bounced between like "Alexander the Great era" and "Roman Empire" with 0 consideration for the like. many centuries. between those two points

But first, cut to me scrolling through my file directories, looking for what chunky book I wouldn't mind owning another copy of. I've had my mind on Song Lan lately, so here we are, If Living Can Be This, by veliseraptor! I love this setting so, so much, once I settled on it, I wanted to use some of my fancy cloth for it. The color shift here is hard to photograph, but the dark colors felt thematic (which is how I chose the endpapers too), and the warm browns felt like they helped evoke both the shabbiness and gradually building cozy domesticity of the coffin house. And the gold in the endpapers also pleased me in a hee hee hoo hoo symbolism way. So I had a great time with this, even if it took me forever to finish the last step, and I love it a lot!

a quick list of ones I've enjoyed recently that I can remember!

Knock-knock. Made by the same people who made Pathologic, it centers on the Lodger, a weirdo who lives alone in the woods and does their best to maintain their house and record the world around them. But things are changing and going missing, nights begin to blur together, and it quickly becomes difficult to distinguish reality from nightmares. Excellent to play in a dimly lit room and give yourself anxiety, great 'woods creeping in' horror vibes.

SHUT IN is an excellent dark comedy/horror game exploring depression through a lens of 'there is something horribly wrong with your house that is really obstructing your quest to get some fresh air, also the narrator's an asshole'.

Endacopia is only a demo (though it looks like it got funded on Kickstarter, so fingers crossed we'll see more of it!) but I have to put it on here because I just find it so compelling. Guide a weird little kid in an exploration of his confusing, often hostile environment, with a aesthetic inspired by PC edutainment games.

Growing My Grandpa! (with a shoutout to the other games by this developer, Discover My Body and Water Womb World). A lonely little girl discovers the remnants of a bizarre experiment in her basement, and uses the dubious knowledge she gains to try and resurrect her dead grandpa, through... growing him out of black sludge in a burlap sack. Creepy with the potential to be kind of sweet, in a messed up way.

House. Described on Steam as 'survive the night in a house that's trying to kill you and your family' and yep, that about sums it up. Freaky and hits some good timeloop notes for me.

Mistrick is a tiny little RPG with Witch's House vibes, about a guy who gets out of prison and immediately gets hit by a car, and finds himself trapped in a fantastical pocket dimension with his previously-executed cellmate; he has a slim chance to return to life, and has to work for it while avoiding all the hilariously stupid ways to die. This one's more about the fun environment and extremely enjoyable dynamic between the dudes, but hey, Still Technically Horror.

Don't Toy With Me is a visual novel where you play the observing master of a dollhouse where a china doll named Dahlia lives alone (except for a silent stuffed rabbit). One day, you introduce a new doll to the closed environment. Cue slow burn, uncomfortable horrordrama, doll body horror, etc. Good if you just want a really upsetting time and some pretty art.

a challenge! I've tried to keep this spoiler-free beyond where you've read to, or at least extremely vague

notes

On the one hand, moonlighting as a lightning rod after you've come back from throwing yourself into a fiery abyss is pretty much the definition of intense. On the other hand he is alarmingly calm about so very much of it.

He's only half an angst-lord for the same reason: a weapon isn't forged to feel pain.

Yes you can be the state and also an enemy of the state at the same time

Does Sheng Lingyuan have friends? Good question. It's complicated. More so because being his friend is something of a death sentence.

Yes I ticked sidekick owner for Xuan Ji

How is Sheng 'stormclouds literally gather in his presence, named for the abyss' Lingyuan even remotely inclined towards the 'ray of sunshine' side of things? Here's the thing. He's only awful company if you're a) Xuan Ji, b) any member of his family, or c) in his way

Untouched by history? History sometimes wishes it were untouched by him.

He is neither sadistic for fun nor altruistic for fun but a secret third thing: a weapon forged for a purpose, to whom 'fun' does not apply*

He loses one or two points on the 'scary smart' scale for one very specific reason and that reason... has something to do with bloodplay on a bridge.

He doesn't need 1000 weapons; he is 1000 weapons. As for weapons he'd want... well, there's one, and that's enough to tip the scales on this particular slider.

Pretty much literal enemy of god, or the cosmos, or the natural order of everything, depending how you translate. It's fine.

Given who I am as a person I expected to tick 'more trauma' for every character in this meme but here's the thing. The narrative would reveal some element of Sheng Lingyuan's Trauma, or inflict some fresh new trauma, and every time I'd go 'yikes that's fucked up but it could be more fucked up if--' and the narrative would look at me in patient scorn and then a few chapters later I'd just be sitting there as every terrible implication was explored to its full agonising potential. But fuck, he suffers so beautifully.

3. What were your top five books of the year?

In no particular order, my top 5 were:

Qiang Jin Jiu, T97

Dracula, Bram Stoker

The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas

Mexican Gothic, Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Gemini, Dorothy Dunnett

6. Was there anything you meant to read, but never got to?

Gideon the Ninth has been sat very patiently on my ereader for about a year at this point and I really, really need to get around to it

10. What was your favorite new release of the year?

I feel like saying The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System is probably cheating but technically the official English release was this year! And it was new to me! But also it turns out I haven't actually read anything genuinely released this year

11. What was your favorite book that has been out for a while, but you just now read?

Answered here.

12. Any books that disappointed you?