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Other books read recently:
Kieron Gillan: Journey into Mystery. This ongoing graphic novel is, as everyone promised it would be, the version that finally made me like a Marvelverse incarnation of Loki. He's actually a mischievous trickster character in this one, I can see where the Sandman comparisons come from, Kieron Gillan is really good at using myths instead of simplifying them, and now I'm only worried the whole thing will end with adult!Loki restored (whom the last time I dipped into the comics I found a dull villain; not with the teenage emo his movieverse counterpart has, but still not nearly as interesting as the reborn kid version here). My favourite renditions of Loki are still: a) Norse myths version, b) Neil Gaiman written versions (i.e. both American Gods and Sandman), c) Dianne Wynne Jones' Eight Days of Luke, but Gillan's Kid!Loki is on a level with the last one.
Elizabeth Wein: Codename: Verity. Labeled as a Young Adult novel for a mysterious reason, because this to me is very much an adult novel, but then I thought that about Wein's The Winter Prince as well. Codename: Verity is about as easy to describe without giving away essential plot points as The Usual Suspects is, but I'll try, for this is a superb book. Set in during WWII, with a passionate friendship between two women as its emotional center, one a spy, one a pilot, and it does very artful things with narration, since as the book starts the spy has been captured by the Gestapo and is literally talking to prolong her life. (Yes, at some point her interrogator, a well-read man, calls her Sheherazade.) Meanwhile, her friend Maddie, the pilot who brought her to France, is still at large, but for how long? As rare as two women instead of two men in the roles this story gives still are in the popular media (frustratingly so), it's even rarer to come across a WWII era story set in France, featuring Nazis, the Resistance, British agents (note that I don't say "English" - our spy is Scottish, and very insistent on this fact) and pilots which doesn't go for the cheap operetta Nazis. Nor, I hasten to add, does the novel prettify the horror of the Third Reich and everyone participating in it. But the two main German characters, our heroine's interrogator and the female translator, Anna Engel, come across as three dimensional, not caricatures, with their own stories, emotions and agendas. It's a well told story in more than one sense and the type to make you cry and laugh and cry at different points, and glad to have read it. Highly recommended.
Fanfic rec:
X-Men:
It's like one of us woke up: a First Class AU that departs from canon in Russia; Shaw is actually there for Charles and Erik to find. But he was expecting them... It's a Charles pov story that uses his telepathy especially well, a great Charles/Erik story that doesn't simplify either of them, it includes Pjotr Rasputin aka Colossus in a very creative way (one of my favourite passages is when trying to win Colossus around makes Charles reflect on Raven and his relationship with her), and there's a good Moira, too. Very well done.
Kieron Gillan: Journey into Mystery. This ongoing graphic novel is, as everyone promised it would be, the version that finally made me like a Marvelverse incarnation of Loki. He's actually a mischievous trickster character in this one, I can see where the Sandman comparisons come from, Kieron Gillan is really good at using myths instead of simplifying them, and now I'm only worried the whole thing will end with adult!Loki restored (whom the last time I dipped into the comics I found a dull villain; not with the teenage emo his movieverse counterpart has, but still not nearly as interesting as the reborn kid version here). My favourite renditions of Loki are still: a) Norse myths version, b) Neil Gaiman written versions (i.e. both American Gods and Sandman), c) Dianne Wynne Jones' Eight Days of Luke, but Gillan's Kid!Loki is on a level with the last one.
Elizabeth Wein: Codename: Verity. Labeled as a Young Adult novel for a mysterious reason, because this to me is very much an adult novel, but then I thought that about Wein's The Winter Prince as well. Codename: Verity is about as easy to describe without giving away essential plot points as The Usual Suspects is, but I'll try, for this is a superb book. Set in during WWII, with a passionate friendship between two women as its emotional center, one a spy, one a pilot, and it does very artful things with narration, since as the book starts the spy has been captured by the Gestapo and is literally talking to prolong her life. (Yes, at some point her interrogator, a well-read man, calls her Sheherazade.) Meanwhile, her friend Maddie, the pilot who brought her to France, is still at large, but for how long? As rare as two women instead of two men in the roles this story gives still are in the popular media (frustratingly so), it's even rarer to come across a WWII era story set in France, featuring Nazis, the Resistance, British agents (note that I don't say "English" - our spy is Scottish, and very insistent on this fact) and pilots which doesn't go for the cheap operetta Nazis. Nor, I hasten to add, does the novel prettify the horror of the Third Reich and everyone participating in it. But the two main German characters, our heroine's interrogator and the female translator, Anna Engel, come across as three dimensional, not caricatures, with their own stories, emotions and agendas. It's a well told story in more than one sense and the type to make you cry and laugh and cry at different points, and glad to have read it. Highly recommended.
Fanfic rec:
X-Men:
It's like one of us woke up: a First Class AU that departs from canon in Russia; Shaw is actually there for Charles and Erik to find. But he was expecting them... It's a Charles pov story that uses his telepathy especially well, a great Charles/Erik story that doesn't simplify either of them, it includes Pjotr Rasputin aka Colossus in a very creative way (one of my favourite passages is when trying to win Colossus around makes Charles reflect on Raven and his relationship with her), and there's a good Moira, too. Very well done.
