Thoughts about The Santa Clause 2 after watching it for the first time in a decade

Spoilers, I guess, if you care about that sort of thing

• The premise is silly and unrealistic, even for a Santa Claus movie. Why should Santa be forced to get married in order to be able to remain being Santa Claus? I guess the position is thousands of years old, so it makes sense the contract's author(s) would hold antiquated positions on marriage.
• Who made the Santa Claus contract and its subsequent clauses? Who is hiring Santa? Who established Santa? God? Santa hangs out with Mother Nature, Father Time, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, the Sandman, and Cupid, but it's clear none of them have anything to do with the Santa politics and there is no mention of God.
• Are Mother Nature and Father Time married?
• I'm guessing the contract writer would have been more powerful than all of them, because then couldn't the current Santa Claus rewrite the contract? I guess it's not like the President rewriting or overwriting laws he doesn't like or adding amendments or whatever.
• What does Mrs. Claus do anyway? I always had the vague impression that she just baked cookies for Mr. Claus, maybe cooked all the food for him and all the elves, and occasionally took pictures with children along with Santa. Why is it so important for Santa to be married if that's all she does?
• Does that mean you can get out of being Santa by getting divorced? What if your wife dies? Are you forced to remarry?
• What if Santa's gay? Does he still have to get married? Santa & Mr. Claus? I have no doubt such a contract as antiquarian and matrimonial-minded would be completely heteronormative; that wouldn't even occur to the contract writer. 
• When Scott accidentally killed the original Santa and put on his clothes, he became Santa (the first Santa Clause movie). This is very folklore/fairytale standard, but in light of this movie's new information we know that Santa must have a Mrs. Claus in order to continue, so...
• What happened to the original Mrs. Claus? Did she die at the same time as her husband? Did she also disappear the way the original Santa's body did? 
• Did the original Santa die because he didn't have a wife? Is having a Mrs. Claus insurance against being killed and replaced as Santa?  
• Is Santa Claus immortal, if he is not killed? Santa Claus as immortal has been suggested by all the Santa Claus mythology I have read and seen (that I remember anyway), but nothing of it apart from the Santa Clause movies suggests Santa can be killed. 
• If Santa is immortal, does this mean Mrs. Claus is too?
• If Scott as Santa Claus lives for hundreds of years, what happens to his family? Does his son grow old and die while Scott is forever a portly white-haired man?
• If Santa's family have all grown old and died without him, why is he so jolly? Does being Santa mean you have amnesia? Only knowing all the children's names in the world and whether they are naughty or nice, but not who you used to be?
• I have questions about Bernard, the head elf. 
• All of the elves, while hundreds of years old, remain children on the outside, but Bernard is supposed to be a teen. Why is this? 
• Was he the son of the original Santa, or maybe even of the Santa before him? Does he resent the new Santa(s), who has killed and/or taken on his father's role and whom he has to serve? He is the crankiest elf we see. 
• Bernard is also a clear Jewish stereotype. Why, in a movie about Christmas and its icons?
• Do elves just age very slowly? Like all the elves who look six years old are actually six hundred years old, while Bernard, who we'll graciously say looks 18 years old, is actually 1800 years old? If he's so old, then he must be very wise. Why can't he be Santa then? Is it because he's not jolly enough? Scott is very sarcastic and he still became Santa Claus.
• Why are there no other teen-looking elves? What happened to Bernard's cohort? Do we just not see them in the movies? 
• Was Bernard the First Elf? I don't remember how elves are born or where they come from. How many elves are born at once, and how? How long do elves live? Are they immortal? Is Bernard near death?
• Why did the elves wait so long to tell Santa that he had to get married in order to continue being Santa Claus? Scott became Santa when his son Charlie was about eight years old, according to Wikipedia (I thought he was 6; he seemed so little to me). In The Santa Clause 2 Charlie is in middle school, about 14 years old. Six years have passed, and I'm assuming Scott underwent ample training from the elves. Why weren't all the clauses, including such an important one as the Mrs. clause, included? Is it because they are all written in tiny font on that business card? Why can't they rewrite it as a legible business contract on letter-sized paper? Wouldn't it make sense to have a couple of eagle-eyed legal elves (that one that's in love with the rules anyway, the glasses one, Curtis) get on the magnifying glasses to read the entire thing and make sure there are no surprises? Six years would have been plenty of time to find a wife. 28 days is ridiculous, and the movie makes it seem like a week.
• Why is the grace period for being an unmarried Santa 6 years? Why not 5 or 10 or 1 or 100? What's the hurry, if Santa is immortal (or is he, see above)?
• The first scene shows the North Pole at Elfcon 4-1, because they are afraid of being detected by a passing plane. I was given to understand that Santa's workshop at the North Pole is magical and therefore undetectable by human eyes, at least unbelieving adult ones. What is the truth?
• Wouldn't the pilots, hearing the noise/music, assumed it was from Arctic researchers or Arctic peoples and their equipment/radios?
• I'm just going to say it: Scott should have married the first lady he went on a date with, the Christmas-obsessed singer-songwriter played by Molly Shannon. Literally everything about her shows she would have been the best choice for Mrs. Claus. Yeah, it was pretty weird for her to break into song and dance right there in the restaurant when they were on their date, singing a Christmas-themed version of "Man! I Feel Like a Woman", but come on! That shows both her love of Christmas and her creativity. Both are important for the role of Mrs. Claus.
• Could Scott have liked her and been able to live with her? I don't know. Maybe after he got over the embarrassment of her singing and dancing in the restaurant, possibly. I feel like it's not really a huge deal when women go over the top on the first date, as they're very unlikely to turn out to be serial killers. You can recover from embarrassment. Who is there to embarrass at the North Pole? The elves would all enthusiastically join along. She would have loved it.
• Carol, Charlie's middle school principal, has a great name for Mrs. Claus and clearly loved Christmas as a child, plus she works with children every day. However, she's very strict and it seems that although she probably went into teaching because she liked it and liked kids, she's clearly become embittered and dictatorial. Anyone who is able to intimidate teenagers to such a degree that looking into their cold dark eyes causes them to go straight to third period geography is wrong for the role of Mrs. Claus.
• The movie made it sound that Carol was going to quit her job as principal, I guess because she'd be living at the North Pole with Scott. Does being Mrs. Claus mean you have to give up your own career and dreams? That's messed up. How very 1950s and prior of you, Santa Claus contract.
• There was a vague mention of Carol teaching in or heading the elf school, if there even was such a thing. What need is there for a school? Aren't all the elves only children on the outside? Are elves born and do they die?
• Scott's proposal to Carol was based on the sentiment that although they didn't know each other very well, Carol's known Santa Claus her whole life. YIKES, creepy much? It wasn't even Scott, though; he only became Santa 6 years ago. I guess because he's Santa that makes him trustworthy and kind, is the argument?
• So Carol just had to give up her entire life to be Scott's Mrs. Claus? Did she not have any family? It sounded like she was an only child. Could she bring her stuff from her house with her to the North Pole? What would happen to her house and stuff? Why did she, an unmarried public school principal, have a big house like that? Maybe her parents left it to her?
• Would she really have to spend the whole rest of her life in the North Pole? I don't really see any reason why she couldn't continue being a principal at her school. All schools are off for winter break, anyway, and it's not like Santa has a whole lot to do during the year and Mrs. Claus probably even less. idk.
• How great was the little girl who played Charlie's half sister? Such an adorable little girl, and a great little actress. She looked like a little ginger Olson. I think it's really sweet how she called Scott "Uncle Scott" and how close Scott was with his ex-wife and her new family.
• I'm not even going to go into the whole decoy toy Santa thing, except to say they are clearly tapping into the "sentient computers won't have compassion and will end up harming humans" thing. I think they tried doing too much in this movie.
• A couple of storylines that were started and mostly dropped: Charlie getting on the naughty list (did he get back on the nice list? Wouldn't his mom and stepdad just get him presents anyway?), the reason for Charlie getting on the naughty list in the first place, Charlie's crush on his female friend. Like the first Santa Clause movie, it starts off with Charlie as the main focus and firmly turns into the Scott Movie.
• I leave you with this. Neil Gaiman knows how to do horrifying interpretations.

Things I had to learn in school that I thought I wouldn't need to know in the real world but surprisingly turned out to be useful

• Typing on the numeric keypad (the numbers keys on the rightmost side of a full keyboard) for data entry
• Typing without looking at my hands (not surprised at this, but I was so annoyed at our teacher for making us do this)
• the Pythagorean theorem, for calculating the size of/amount of space needed for furniture
• "To increase the surface area", the blanket answer given to us by my high school biology teacher for what we should put for the answer to any quiz/exam question we didn't know, since that is the answer to just about anything

Villette by Charlotte Bronte

*spoilers*

I love Jane Eyre, so I expected to love Villette too. I think I do? It's just that it was more depressing, without a clearly happy ending, and somehow an even more slow-moving plot. I took a break in the middle of it and kind of forgot things that happened, because the narrator will just casually mention things that turn out to be important later, but by the time that happens you'll have forgotten it. Also, p. much all the French parts are untranslated, which is supremely unhelpful if you don't read/speak French. Thank God for the Google Translate app, which has the real-time text-translator. In the app, you just point your camera to the page and it will translate a block of text for you. I was able to get the gist of what was being said thanks to that, the few dozen words I know of French, and my knowledge of Italian and Spanish. I really wish the edition I'd bought simply because of Mallory Ortberg's introduction had footnotes with what they were saying in English, or even endnotes. It's like that in Jane Eyre, but there's wayyyyy more French in Villette due to its setting. I really do not get the reasoning behind not having translations for the French parts. It drives me nuts.

Bronte's heroines are simultaneously unnecessarily dramatic and irritatingly passive, and are in a way rather identifiable if you're a shy emotionally stunted bookish introvert like me. Lucy is forever looking for private places to read letters or walk by herself, yet she almost goes insane because everyone left the school over break and she was almost entirely alone. She contemplates converting to Catholicism because she's so desperate for kindness and companionship, but she also hides away her feelings from everyone, including the reader. Lucy is surprisingly assertive in some things (sailing to France by herself without knowing a soul there in the hopes she'll find employment, taking charge of her first class by shoving the most troublesome student in the coal closet and locking her in, playing a male rake character in the school play) yet annoyingly passive in others (quietly taking M. Emanuel's criticism and bullying when they're just coworkers and he doesn't have any right to be treating her that way, being like "lol classic Mme. Beck" whenever her boss spies on her and not-so-secretly rifles through her stuff). Perhaps Lucy doesn't mind Mme. Beck spying on her because she's so used to being invisible and overlooked that she likes being paid attention to. That might also explain why she lets M. Emanuel harangue her like he does.

The author's love for brooding hunx rears its head in the final love interest. When it comes to M. Emanuel (also called M. Paul, which really confused me until almost at the end his entire name is given, Paul Something Something Emanuel), the first two-thirds of the book are spent showing us what a petty tyrant he is towards everyone, especially Lucy, then the last third of the book is spent telling us what a great guy he is and how desperate he is for Lucy's friendship and affection just as she's desperate for affection from the world at large. It's rather bipolar. If a man treats you like that, bossing you around and constantly berating you then turning around to act all remorseful and nice, you should not be in a relationship with him. That's abusive behavior.

Another typical aspect of the Bronte heroine, always dressing as plain, boring and gloomy as possible, is mostly continued, as Lucy is godmother-pressured into wearing a pink (!) dress with black lace. Jealous because Lucy was with her guy friend from childhood, M. Paul starts raging at her about how shallow, frivolous and worldly she is with her scarlet dress. ??? Like have you even met her? It does turn into bantering kinda at the end, with both of them like tsundere teasing each other, but I still don't buy it. I need to read Charlotte Bronte's other books, but it's interesting to me that both her plain heroines have two love interests: an age-appropriate handsome boring guy who's good on paper, and an older not handsome dark brooding/raging weirdo, and the latter is the one she always chooses (by default in Lucy's case, but still).

tl;dr I did like this book. Wikipedia says it's really more about Lucy's psychological state than about the plot, which is accurate. It's definitely worth reading if you like Jane Eyre, although don't expect it to be the exact same. It's slower, more depressing, and less Gothic (although there is a bit there). 4/5

The Frenemy's Beauty Survey

The Frenemy is an awesome blogger. She did this fun survey a while back and I've wanted to do this for a while.

1) What are the 5 products you would take with you on a desert island?
SUNSCREEN in SPF 90+ (although I read anything above SPF 30 or so is basically the same as 30) in a huge Costco-sized container, chapstick (I use chapstick for lip balm the way everyone uses Kleenex to mean facial tissue) with sunscreen as well, black kohl chubby eyeliner pencil to outline my eyes to avoid glare a la the Egyptians (and also feel like a badass goddess), coconut oil (multiple uses), and Garnier Fructis leave-in conditioner. Can you tell I'm worried about sunburn? #theunbearablewhitenessofbeing
2) What are the 3 products you would splurge on if somebody gave you a giant gift card to Sephora?
This Benefit eyeliner, since I've heard it's good and I love doing winged eyeliner, a Really Good Red lipcolor, and either a really good eyebrow pencil or Benefit Lollitint
3) What’s the beauty product you are most afraid of using?
False eyelashes. I refuse.

4) What’s the lipstick that makes you feel the most powerful?
I don't know about feeling powerful. I think red lipstick looks really good on me, but I'm always paranoid it's coming off or smearing.
5) What’s your everyday makeup routine?
Aveeno sunscreen SPF 60 on my nose (and ears if I'm wearing my hair up and am going to be in the sun), hella old CoverGirl pressed powder I bought when I was like 18 for mattifying and shine, blush (either the pink CG I think or the peach Physician's Formula my sister gave me b/c it made her break out), eyebrow kit from e.l.f. to fill in brows, eye makeup. That can be a swipe of eyeliner, eyeshadow stick, full eyeshadow contouring, or winged eyeliner, etc. I usually save mascara (a sample of this one in black or CG naturalluxe in black-brown) for church and special occasions. Lipgloss or -stick or balm. Neutrogena concealer if I'm wearing contacts. The face stuff varies less than the eye or lip makeup.
6) Top 3 drugstore finds you cannot live without?
I buy almost everything at the drugstore, so I can't choose three. I'd say probably my e.l.f. studio makeup brushes. OH WAIT MY e.l.f. MAKEUP REMOVER PEN. Q-tips (knockoff) and cotton rounds.
7) Top 3 higher end finds that were actually worth the splurge?
I like never splurge on anything. I use coupons for the drugstore products I buy. I think my mom was the one who bought this, but I really like Cetaphil face cleanser. My mom and sister and I used to get Clinique Dramatically Different Moisturizing Lotion or Gel and I looooooved them. I may buy it again now that I have money. I also have this Clinique lipstick (Color Surge Bare Brilliance in 22 Pink Beach) that I love that's probably discontinued, but if they have it when I'm out of the tube I have I'll buy it again.
8) What’s your nighttime skincare routine?
Hahaha so bad for someone as old as I am. Half the time I just sleep with everything on. If I'm being good I use a makeup remover wipe, rinse with water, use this gr8 dollar store knockoff toner that is basically the exact same thing as Clinique's Clarifying Lotion 2 to wipe extra gunk off with a cotton round, and moisturize with Equate baby lotion. If I'm being medium, I wipe eyeliner off with a tissue. I also have eye makeup remover I got when my visiting cousin left it behind; I use it to take off my eye makeup with a cotton round (usually just if I was wearing liquid eyeliner and/or concealer). When I'm at my parents' I use Simple eye makeup remover pads (sample) and Cetaphil face cleanser, which is pretty good. Lately I've had dry patches around my mouth and I've been using coconut oil on them.
9) Products you keep buying even though you have too many?
Lipgloss, eyeshadow sticks, nail polish. Usually these are from the dollar store or e.l.f. products so they don't put too big of a dent in my pocket

10) Eyeshadow colors you gravitate towards? If you could only keep one eyeshadow palette, which one would you keep?
Browns (because they make my blueish eyes pop) and purples (my favorite color). I like grays a lot too. I don't really have palettes, just maybe duos and trios. Oh, I do have one mini travel palette in a fake metallic pewter snakeskin case. It has a purple trio (eggplant and two shades of lilac) in one side and a quad of sheer golden, brown, sheer silver, and sheer teal in the other. I use it a lot. It was a gift.
11)What’s the one makeup brush in your collection that you would keep if you had to get rid of the rest?
My e.l.f. blush brush, probably. It's a struggle deciding between that and my smudge and contour eyeshadow brushes (also e.l.f.).
12) What’s the one product you hate putting on?
I kind of suck at putting everything on. Stuff doesn't blend right, mascara clumps and gets on the wrong places, etc.

13) Best makeup tip you love telling other people about?
I can't think of one.

14) Is there a product you started using recently that you can’t believe you didn’t use before?
Brow filler. After my e.l.f. kit is done I think I'll splurge for something a Sephora girl pushes on me. The e.l.f. kit is ok, although the gel color is too dark and the brow powder is too light and reddish. My mom has an Anastasia Beverly Hills brow gel wand (like mascara), but the eyebrow hairs are not what I need to be darker. There are gaps in my brows where the hairs refuse to grow in/over and I need them filled in. I look like Groucho Marx's granddaughter rather than Frida Kahlo with this kit. I've only just started doing it, so I'm sure I'll get the hang of it.

15) Best Beauty Advice?
Do what you want and what works for you. Take care of your skin.

Flash book reviews: October

There was an ebook I read in October that I'm not going to share the title of because it was stupid, but it annoyed me that the Mexican American protagonist was said to have "two middle names" which turned out to be just her full name, including both parents' surnames, which is the Spanish naming custom. I don't remember exactly what the protagonist's name was anymore, but I'll use Maria Elena Garcia Romero as an example. The author/characters were trying to pass this off as Maria (again, not her name but I don't remember what it was) having two middle names, Elena and Garcia, even though that is NOT how the naming thing works in Hispanic cultures. Both surnames are considered just that, surnames. AND, they said that the surnames were her mother's first and her father's second. That is not how it works either!!!!! You always put the father's surname first and then the mother's. UGH. Authors, do your research before writing stuff about people from cultures that are not yours. This annoyed me a lot.

Graveyard Shift by Angela Roquet, early-mid October (free Nook ebook)
This book is about a Reaper (Grim is their boss) whose job is transporting souls to the proper afterlife and making sure demons don't get them. She's drawn into a larger political scheme that threatens the very fabric of Limbo and has to juggle that plus dating an angel. This is the first in a series so it didn't have a resolved ending. There is a lot of exposition, basically tons of world-building through explanation. None of the characters really stood out to me much. I thought it was interesting how all the different mythological and religious characters from various cultures coexisted in Limbo (I don't think that's the actual name but I don't remember what it was and I'm too lazy to look it up). I also thought it sucked that the protagonist and her friends went through the same stuff as ordinary human people: a job that can be a drag, having to pay overpriced rent, etc. This author's definitely read Pratchett and Gaiman but isn't them. I can read any amount of fantasy but when it involves angels I get uneasy. I kind of want to know what happens next but I doubt I'll go out of my way to get the other books. Maybe if I come across them in the library or their ebooks become free. 3.9/5

The Shadow and the Rose by Amanda DeWees. October 12 (free Nook ebook)
This book is based on Tam Lin (one of the few fairytales I haven't read) and is the first of a series. An ordinary girl falls in love with a hot dude who is in thrall of a powerful gorgeous woman and has to save him. I had high hopes for this one (I love books where the girl saves the guy as well as fairytale retellings) but it fell flat. The characters all were cardboard cutouts and I was mad at myself for not figuring out what the villainess was before being told, despite it being pretty obvious in hindsight. There was a bizarre plot point that just made it too much for me. I do want to read the others, kinda. 3.9/5

The Ink Readers by Thomas Holdeveult. October 12 (free Nook ebook)
This is a short story/novella set in a Thailand village about wishes. There's a wish festival and the villagers have different wishes that all end up coming true in some way, although not in the way the wishers expected. The writing was lyrical and humorous, but ultimately I am skeptical of white authors writing about cultures not their own. I feel like it might be a little dodgy race/cultural appropriation-wise, and I hated that a child in the book died (and this somehow answered his wish? His murderers got their comeuppance at least). There was some crude stuff too. 3.9/5

Until I Found You by Victoria Bylin. mid-late October (free Nook ebook)
Christian romance set in SoCal. The heroine is a graphic designer who has to take care of her grandmother who's had a stroke. On her way there she gets into a dramatic car accident and is saved by a hot newly Christian magazine editor and like many other books the heroine has to Learn To Trust and Open Her Heart To Both Love And Jesus etc. etc. Also the endangered California condors are a theme throughout (they mate for life!). Here is a bulleted list of all the things I found problematic, typically from a feminist standpoint:

• super wimpy and damsel in distress-y heroine, always crying and needing to be saved by the hero
•  Bad thing happens, heroine cries and the hero saves/helps her, rinse and repeat. It's like that was the only thing the author knew to do to move the plot along and create conflict.
• all-too-common work vs. family choice that women so often have to make, made to be about her faith and relationship with the guy. Like choosing to continue as a famous rich celebrity's graphic designer for her spa ads would have been the unChristian thing to do and then the guy wouldn't have been able to be with her because of her worldiness? choosing self?, which is bogus. The core choice by itself is already hard enough without adding that.
• Seriously, the famous celebrity and the hero squared off on a virtual battle over the heroine's soul. I'm not kidding. The celebrity was all "I'm going to make her my successor and the daughter I never had and I won't let YOU get in the way!" and her plastic surgeries and focus on youth and multiple failed marriages are harped on a lot. This book takes a really weird and regressive view of Women With Ambition.
• guy's one night stand (before he became a Christian, of course) painted as abandonment to the resulting baby he didn't even know about, because he just slept with the woman and didn't make a commitment. O...kay? They took precautions against getting pregnant which didn't work, but the woman didn't tell him she was pregnant. She obviously didn't want him in the picture and only hit him up for financial help for all the medical bills and funeral costs after the baby died. That's really sad but it doesn't really mean he Abandoned the baby. It wasn't his fault. 
• grandmother's anecdotes about not being able to have children and her resulting grief and emotional estrangement from her husband painted as her being Selfish and Self-Centered and A Bad Wife As Well As A Bad Christian. Her husband, instead of trying to comfort her in her grief, was all "is that all I am to you, just someone who can give you a baby?" Once she repented and "served her husband with her body" EW EW EW EW EW, she eventually got the baby she so craved. 
• The baby grew up and got married and had the protagonist and died tragically young along with his wife, so clearly no one in this story is allowed to have nice things. Lotta death in this book. Body count: the grandfather (past), the heroine's parents (past), the hero's baby (past). P. unnecessary imo

3/5

Science Fiction & Fantasy class essays: Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness & Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland

Gender and Science Fiction

Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland both deal with alternately gendered societies, but in different ways. Herland is a country that has been peopled only with women for hundreds of years; the women become pregnant independently, through asexual reproduction. The Left Hand of Darkness takes place in Winter, where everyone is genderless, except during their mating periods when one individual becomes male and one individual becomes female in order to reproduce. These lands are seen as very strange by the protagonists, who are men from our society/world.

The authors of both these books were women, which is unsurprising considering how in-depth and concerned with gender and its role in our and the alternate societies both stories are. In contrast, male SF writers such as Burroughs and Bradbury have written SF stories where the male themes of exploration and colonization/domination take place on Mars, a newer Wilder West. Many men who wrote SF have used the genre as a way to satirize their cultures or human nature, but they have not dealt with gender anywhere near as much as these two authors have. But then, men don't really have to deal with gender the way women do.

Broadly, female SF writers use SF as a way to imagine a differently cultured world, a different society, where gender does not shape the people, their destinies and their culture the way it does in our world or society. They want to explore worlds where gender is a non-issue: Gilman because there are no men and as such only one gender with nothing to contrast with, and Le Guin because no one has a gender and everyone is the same. To me, these books earn their science fiction status not because they take place on other planets (only Le Guin's does), but because they deal with the soft sciences: sociology and psychology.

Science Fiction & Fantasy class essays: Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles

Science fiction and fantasy stories are always placed together, and with good reason. Fantasy uses magic and myth to explain or drive its stories along, while science fiction uses science. To me, fantasy is dreaming about the past, back when things were shadowy, mysterious, holy, when there were any number of gods and spirits and fey folk. Science fiction is dreaming about the future, when technology makes all kinds of things possible and the limit has blasted past the sky. However, science fiction is sometimes only fantasy with a light dusting of science, mythology set in space. Stories like The Martian Chronicles blur the line between the two and act as a sort of transition.

Ray Bradbury posits in his introduction to The Martian Chronicles that his stories are "pure myth", which lends to them staying power: "If it had been practical technologically efficient science fiction, it would have long since fallen to rust by the road. But since it is a self-separating fable, even the most deeply rooted physicists at Cal-Tech accept breathing the fraudulent oxygen atmosphere I have loosed on Mars. [...] Myth, seen in mirrors, incapable of being touched, stays on."

In "And the Moon Be Still As Bright", Spender says of the Martians, "They blended religion and art and science because, at base, science is no more than an investigation of a miracle we can never explain, and art is an interpretation of that miracle." Stories are literature and literature is art. No matter the setting, we tell ourselves and each other stories, reaching toward the miracle, trying to explain it and capture it and understand it better. Within that miracle lies the key to who we are.

Science Fiction & Fantasy class essays: A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

While reading A Princess of Mars I kept thinking, is John Carter a Gary Stu? A Gary Stu (or Marty Stu) is "an annoyingly 'perfect' male fanfiction character"[1] who is unbelievably great at everything and loved by everyone in the story. Wikipedia links this trope to that of the competent man, "a stock character who can do anything perfectly, or at least exhibits a very wide range of abilities and knowledge"[2].

John Carter already has fighting and wilderness survival skills as a Civil War veteran and prospector, but once he inexplicably finds himself on Mars, he becomes almost a superhero. Mars' lesser gravity means he can leap huge distances in a single bound, and his strength is also magnified to this extreme, enabling him to overpower and even kill at one blow huge Martians three times his height and weight. He rises up in the Thark ranks ridiculously fast. He's also a genius; it takes him less than a week to learn the Martian language, and while he can read everyone's thoughts telepathically, they cannot read his.  Obviously he and the titular princess fall in love and marry. Most interestingly, John claims not to remember anything before the age of thirty, and that he is ageless as well as immortal.

What keeps John from fully being a 'competent man' trope is that there are explanations given for most of his skills. One could argue that the term Gary Stu doesn't apply to John either since there is no evidence that Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote him as a self-insert character, but the Barsoom series are based on the writings of the astronomer Percival Lowell [3], so in a sense those (and all science fiction) are fanfiction about science. Such perfect characters seem to speak to a universal longing to be better than we are, to have the strength and skills to face an obstacle-filled life and come out on top.

1. nscangal. (June 27, 2005). "Marty-Stu." The Urban Dictionary. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Marty-Stu

2. "Competent man." (last modified April 30, 2015). Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competent_man

3. "A Princess of Mars." (last modified May 1, 2015). Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Princess_of_Mars

Science Fiction & Fantasy class essays: H.G. Wells

Science as the Enabler of Evil

It is interesting to read the stories from when science was new and unknown. These authors during the early modern era seem to have seen science as a marvel, a new magic, something fearful and fascinating. The level of new discoveries and scientific possibilities was the highest since the Enlightenment, and because it was so new it was feared due to uncertainty and unfamiliarity.

Since the dawn of time, stories have been filled with people who had some fatal flaw that brought about their destruction, but science and advanced knowledge drive the stakes higher. The bigger they are, the harder they fall. There is more to lose, and more evil to be wrought due to this increased knowledge.

In The Island of Doctor Moreau and The Invisible Man, as in Frankenstein and some of Hawthorne and Poe's stories, science is a medium by which men who wish to further their and the world's knowledge and make a difference end up becoming obsessed. This obsession corrupts them and leads to their downfall, and they end up unleashing some new horror into the world instead of improving it. Science is then seen as a medium by which man's hubris may more fantastically, horribly and more speedily lead to their ruination.

We saw this first from Shelley's Frankenstein, but Wells especially seems to suggest that science can do away with our empathy and compassion. Dr. Moreau cares only for the advancement of knowledge that his vivisection experiments bring him; he doesn't care one whit about the pain he inflicts upon the poor animals and the ethical questions raised by his experiments. Likewise, Gibson's invisibility from his experiments gives him an advantage over others, and thus he becomes more and more violent and selfish as his story goes on. Wells et al. seem to suggest that science accelerates our natural selfishness and willingness to hurt others.

I don't think I mentioned this before, but these class essays were written in one go the night before the due date (as I'm sure you can tell). They could have benefited from some editing and reflection, but self-editing has never been my strong point and I was always too tired from work. After uploading her or his essay to Coursera, each student then had to grade three or four other students' essays. I had the harshest criticism of probably my entire academic career from this essay. One of the students who graded my essay hated it, reviled my writing and actually accused me of not having done ANY of the readings for the class. It was like the written equivalent of Donald Duck's tantrums. It was so irate and over the top that I went straight past hurt and offended and landed squarely on amused. Coursera lamely won't let me see anything I've done in that class since it ended, otherwise I would share the original feedback with you. 

Science Fiction & Fantasy class essays: Dracula by Bram Stoker

That Dracula has heavy religious, especially Christian, influences throughout the story is obvious. The crucifixes, Holy Wafers, funeral prayers for the dead, etc., all act as weapons against the vampire and his powers of evil. The life-giving blood the men selflessly give Lucy in order to try to save her is the opposite of the awful “baptism of blood” Count Dracula forces upon Mina in order to damn her. Dracula and the vampire wives are four, an unlucky number associated with death in Chinese culture, while our group of heroes number seven, a holy and/or lucky number in Western culture. Even some of the characters’ names are significant: “YAHWEH has given” (Jonathan), “will/desire to protect” (Wilhelmina), “light” (Lucy), “YAHWEH is gracious” (John), while Arthur and Abraham are important literary and biblical heroes, respectively. The group fights Dracula not just because of the suffering of the women they love, but because they feel a moral obligation to stop him. To be a vampire or to succumb to one means that one will be damned and cut off from salvation. Dracula is a deeply religious book, which seems strange since it is also a horror and fantasy book, but such contradictions are common in Christianity: one must die to live, Jesus is both man and God, etc. Van Helsing’s discouraged words after their protections for Lucy keep being thwarted echo 2 Corinthians 4:8-9 (“We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.”). Suffering and helplessness in the face of the enemy are common themes in Christianity, but since the protagonists trust in God and do all they can to do what’s right, they succeed.

Science Fiction & Fantasy class essays: Grimm's Fairy Tales

I took an online class on Coursera, Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World. Each week we read a different book or some short stories and had to write a short essay. This is the one I wrote after reading Children's and Household Tales, a translation of Grimm's Fairy Tales into English by Lucy Crane with illustrations by Walter Crane. The above link isn't the online version I read but I can't find it because the class is over and I can't access any resources :(
I did okay with this one; I don't remember my classmates giving me too much criticism.

“The Three Spinsters” and “Rumpelstiltskin”

“The Three Spinsters” is a tale much like the better-known “Rumpelstiltskin”. Three women with unusually large body parts (those used most often in spinning) take the place of the eponymous gnome, and they simply spin flax quickly, rather than spinning it into gold. They save the girl twice: from having to spin three rooms’ worth of flax, and from ever having to spin again. The spinsters meet a happier end than Rumpelstiltskin; they are fêted at the new princess’ table as her cherished relations. It struck me how female-centric this version of the surrogate spinner(s) is: the girl’s mother lets her go with the queen who offers her son to the girl (rather than the other way around!) as a prize for spinning the flax which the spinsters save her from. This is a marked contrast to “Rumpelstiltskin”’s sole girl being at the mercy of men--father, king, messenger, and Rumpelstiltskin. The only male in “The Three Spinsters” is the prince-prize the girl marries, who is rude and impertinent, controlled by his mother and duped by his wife and the spinsters. This female-centeredness makes sense, as the story revolves around spinning flax, traditionally a woman’s job (especially unmarried women, hence the modern definition of spinster). The “Spinsters” women are portrayed as softer and more moral than the “Rumpelstiltskin” men: the mother lies from embarrassment rather than pride, and the queen is more merciful, as she doesn’t get angry when no thread is spun after three days and doesn’t threaten the girl with death if she fails her task. The spinsters ask only to be honored as family, rather than for jewelry or the firstborn child. In the end, the mother is freed from her lazy daughter, the queen gets spun thread, the spinsters get honored, and the girl gets her prince and out of spinning forever. Might the moral of the story be that everybody wins when women run the show?

More flash book reviews--science fiction & fantasy class

The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells (July 8)
A mad doctor moves to an island where he can practice turning animals as human as possible through vivisection without society's censure/interference. This was pretty bananas. I felt bad for the animals and didn't like the narrator either. 3.5/5
I also read most of The Invisible Man but didn't finish it (I've read it before). The theme of Victorian sci fi seems to be "science men are the worst".

A Princess of Mars by Edward Rice Burroughs (July 18)
A sci fi action movie adaptation was made of this a while back, John Carter, and it did not do well. I didn't watch it, but I read a review/article about it where the person (was it Roger Ebert?) said that that was because it felt too "done", too same old same old. A hero ends up in a new land, fights the natives and comes out on top, is lauded as their leader and gets the native princess. Last of the Mohicans, Dances with Wolves, Avatar, etc. But, the writer pointed out, this is because A Princess of Mars was first and influenced all these stories that came after it. It is the first story in this vein, and we are too used to it now. So I read this for my class, and it was entertaining. I can see why it was so popular; ERB knew how to spin a tale (he wrote Tarzan too). John Carter is hilariously perfect at everything, a total Gary Stu. 3.9/5

Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (July 18)
A trio of male dumdums with varying levels of sexism (benevolent, most dissuadable by reason, and Trump Status) find a country that has been populated entirely by women for centuries. The women reproduce asexually and have bred and engineered everything to be as perfect and useful as possible. The main thought I had while reading this book is I WANT TO GO TO THERE. That, and SEXISM RUINS EVERYTHING. Herland is such a utopia and I firmly believe that it reflects how a country run and populated entirely by women would be. I cannot believe I'd never heard of this book before this class! The story ends abruptly with one dude staying in Herland with his wife (benevolent sexism dude) and the others going back to America (reasonable dude with his wife and Trump Status dude because he was exiled forever for Trumping his now-ex wife). There are sequels and I must read them. 4.9/5

The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury (July 24)
Myth and frontier exploration/colonization wrapped up in a Martian sci fi veneer. Lovely but sad and angry-making due to the colonization of Mars by humans. Wonderful book. This was my first Bradbury (shocking, I know). 4.5/5

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin (late July-early August)
You know how Herland was so great because it showed how good a women-only country would be where men couldn't mess things up? Well, TLHOD approaches the male problem by doing away with gender altogether. No one on the planet of Winter has a sex or gender, only during their mating seasons (they can take either male or female form). An Earth man is on Winter to try to convince the planet to join the space federation of other planets, but there's a lot of cultural barriers to overcome. It honestly made me wish we didn't have genders on this planet either, since we're so liable to exploit and mistreat them and see one as better or more worthy than the other. Lots of fascinating Tao influence as well. I have to read her other books too. Can you believe this is the first LeGuin I've read? 4.8/5

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow (August 9)
Continuing a theme, my first Doctorow. This is actually free on his website as a PDF, which I did not know when I borrowed it from my library. Supersmart hacking teens, terrorism on American soil and the subsequent national fear and stripping away of liberties, government surveillance and oppression, protests and rebellion in response. Good but hit too close to home, as someone who was old enough to remember 9/11 and the period following. 4/5

I wrote short essays for these for my classes and will share them, one by one.

Flash book reviews because I am super behind

Cruel Beauty by Rosamund Hodge (May 10)
Til We Have Faces meets Pandora's Box meets Howl's Moving Castle meets Rose Daughter. I LOVED THIS WOW. 4/5

The Distant Hours by Kate Morton (May 31-June 6)
Thrift store purchase because it had a pretty cover. Gothic novel told through flashbacks, journal entries, letters, etc. set in WWII and present day (1990s). Well-written, atmospheric mystery. Initially sucked me in but in the end I sort of hated it due to the difficult, controlling, messed up family situation and unnecessary deaths. No one in this book gets to have nice things. 3.9/5

Dracula by Bram Stoker (mid June)
I read this for the fantasy & science fiction class I enrolled in from Coursera. I know it's a classic, and upon reading it I can see why, but I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. It's surprisingly religious and Mina is pretty awesome, despite how Perfect Victorian Woman she is. 4/5

Nimona by Noelle Stevenson (June 17)
I've been following Noelle Stevenson on Tumblr for years now. This was originally a webcomic, and I had read all but the last chapter or so since I got busy with school and work. It's a sort of steampunk (not Victorian or much steam, just knights who fight with mechanical lances and mad scientists researching magic) graphic novel about a "villain" and his mysterious sidekick trying to overthrow an oppressive government. This was wonderful and I enjoyed it. The feels. 4/5

Here There Be Unicorns by Jane Yolen (June)
This was such a favorite of mine growing up. I used to read it from our public library all the time. I had some credit in my Amazon account so I bought this. It's such a weird experience rereading a book you loved as a child and haven't read since then. It's always much shorter and less impactful, less substantial, in a way. You're a different person who has learned and grown a lot since then so it doesn't affect you like it used to. Still, I have a lot of love for this book. I was kind of amazed that  I loved it that much as a kid, since the stories/poems are pretty advanced and open-ended/vague rather than having happy, tidy endings, and I was a lot less used to sad, philosophical stories back than than I am now. 4/5

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (late June)
I guess I see why this is a classic, as this is the first science fiction novel (written by a teenage girl, so take that, sexist nerd bros who think SF is only for guys), but I kind of hated this. Victor is an idiot, tons of unnecessary deaths, and no one is allowed to have nice things. Just misery. Also, I downloaded a random free ebook from the Nook store because I was feeling too lazy to connect my Nook ereader to my laptop in order to download the version supplied by the instructor of my SF/F class and it had the worst formatting I'd ever seen. Whole paragraphs, pages, were jumbles of letters with symbols. Terrible. 3.5/5

Women in nineteenth-century literature

How good how kind how pure how lovely
How dead how very very dead

Jane by April Lindner

Read in early May. *Heavy spoilers*
This book is a modern-day retelling of Jane Eyre, which is one of my favorite books. I'd read about it on some YA blog a while back and made a mental note of it, but I didn't actually get this book until I came across it almost by accident in my favorite thrift store. While it is updated, it stays really close to the book. Recently orphaned Jane drops out of college to work as the nanny for a rock star's daughter. She's hired because she doesn't care about celebrities, but of course she falls in love with Nico the rock star blah blah wife in the attic, you know how it goes. The setting is the US East coast, and everyone who was English is now American, while the 'foreigners' are still p. much the same nationalities. The author said that she was struggling to figure out how to update the class differences (huge in the 19th century, not so much now) until she hit on the fame/celebrity thing.
I initially thought it was weird that this Jane was recently orphaned and had siblings she was estranged from (so she couldn't rely on them when her parents died), but Lindner actually combined Jane's dead parents with her abusive aunt's family, which really makes sense. Jane's brother is the abusive boy cousin, and her sister steps in for the prettier and cossetted yet selfish girl cousins. Her cold and neglectful mother who definitely favors her older two siblings over her and lets her know it all the time is basically the same person as the aunt (like if Lucille Bluth weren't funny at all), while her kind but emotionally distant and always steamrolled by his wife father is the dead uncle. It makes sense to combine the two families in this way, and it kind of makes it more heartrending since it is her own immediate family and not some semi-distant relatives who are obsessed with class and look down on her for living on their charity like in the original. It's worse, and her parents dying kind of keep Jane from being able to resolve these issues with them. The part of the book where Jane goes back to nurse her dying aunt and forgives her is turned into Jane going to visit her sister since her brother's crashing at her place after his ex-girlfriend (whom he also abused) kicks him out, and the sister wants him gone. Jane is able to get some closure re: his being a total psychopathic abuser, but it's not this touching "I forgive you!" stuff, but it makes sense that it wouldn't be. I wish he'd died in a bar brawl or whatever like the cousin in the original too; I didn't really feel like he got a comeuppance or what he deserved. We just saw that he's a pathetic awful mess and will always be that way since all his problems are his own fault and he refuses to see that.
Helen Burns is sidelined as her college roommate and former best friend that moves to Idaho or some such and doesn't really talk to her anymore, which kinda makes sense since pretty much everyone sees the meat of the story being in the Jane x Rochester dynamic, which it is, but her relationship with Helen is one of the most important in her life because it's pretty much the first person to show her real, unconditional love she didn't have to earn. No mention of the favorite teacher, either, from what I remembered. Adele is p. much the same as well. Her mom was a French pop star who took her toddler daughter to nightclubs all the time. Poor thing. I wish they'd let Adele keep her French; as a bilingual kid, keeping my native tongue is so important to me. There's like no French in this book.
The Rivers siblings become the St. John siblings (heh), and they are all pretty much the same. The boy is written like he might have like Aspergers or at least be intensely focused on things like Sherlock from the BBC show, and the sibling dynamic between them all is the same as well ("our brother's a genius with a heart for the poor!!" stop enabling him, sisters). The thing where St. John is attracted to a rich nice girl but refuses to consider dating her because mission work is there too; the only twist is that he doesn't want to get together with her and go with him not because she's so frail she'll probably die of tropical diseases, but because her dad owns some pharmaceutical company and he distrusts where her real loyalties lie. The ridiculously illogical pragmatism is the same. The mission field is in Haiti instead of India, which makes sense, and Jane practices French with him. The "Jane study Hindi with me instead of German" thing is replaced by volunteering at a soup kitchen. The creepy "Jane come be a missionary with me but we have to get married" thing is still there too but it makes even less sense than in the original since no one raises an eyebrow at girls and boys traveling together anymore; St. John's just like "we may as well be a couple since we have the same passions and we'll be working together all the time so it will probably happen anyway, who cares about attraction or chemistry" and it's somehow creepier in modernity.
Nico/Rochester's nonsense is unsurprisingly way creepier and controlling than in the original; what kind of grown-ass fortysomething man playing all these games to manipulate an inexperienced nineteen year old girl, as I kept yelling throughout the book. The playful banter/we're arguing because\but we're in love thing where Jane really just has him in the palm of her hand (I think Mallory referred to this as "topping from the bottom" [sorry, direct quote] but she may have been talking about Pamela instead) is really sadly lost. Apart from her quietly but firmly not letting herself be showered with gifts and jetsetted around the world like a typical rockstar's girlfriend, there's none of that dynamic that makes their relationship be swoony or aspirational at all (not that you should aspire to this kind of relationship omfg please don't). You know what I mean? She has like 1/4th the power she has in the original, so it loses a lot of the fun. The awed gratitude is still there, but the exultation "finally somebody loves me" is not. The "we are mental and spiritual equals, solemates" thing is mostly gone.
The Blanche Ingram character is the same, except she is an Annie Leibovitz type. I don't have much to say about her. That weird racist brownface g*psy thing that Rochester does just turns into a girlfriend of Nico's bandmate's reading Jane's tarot cards, which is less exciting and it's not like Nico had her rig their results. Nico's bandmates (he's a rock star, remember) all have girlfriends who are like models and stuff, and they are nice to and befriend Jane, which I liked.
Bertha is like a Brazilian socialite/model/Nico's wife that Nico got hooked on drugs and he feels guilty since it triggered her schizophrenia which keeps her murderous and violent and she refuses/will only pretend to take her medication and that's why he keeps her locked up in the attic. Nico's "DO YOU KNOW HOW AWFUL THOSE PLACES ARE, JANE???" when she reasonably asks him why he doesn't put Bertha in a mental institution where they actually have the facilities and teams of trained mental health professionals to deal with murderous schizophrenics instead of a perpetually drunk caregiver since this is unnecessarily endangering him, his staff, and HIS FIVE-YEAR OLD DAUGHTER, SERIOUSLY, loses a ton of weight since they don't chain crazies to the wall in damp, rat-infested basements or see mental illness as paramount to being a criminal (much) anymore. The mental illness thing isn't treated much better in the modern version than it is in the nineteenth century version; it's just updated with drugs and modern names.
Jane leaves Nico because he constantly lied to her when she gave him ample chances to tell her the truth, not because she's afraid she'll throw away her morals and live with him in sin as his mistress. This change makes sense since that's not the immoral, life-ruining thing it used to be seen as. I would have been interested to see how Jane's faith was updated and handled. I've always found it interesting that Jane, despite being religiously bullied by fundamentalist extremists at a girls' home, still developed a spiritual life that was important to her, in large part due to the important relationships she built up with her best friend and favorite teacher, both spiritual, loving people. Since both of those relationships were excised from the modern retelling, it makes sense that Jane's spirituality was too.
Here is the thing that bothered me most: you know after Thornfield Hall being set on fire and Rochester being maimed/blinded trying to save Bertha who jumps off the building and dies, then when Jane learns about this she immediately goes back to him? Well, instead of being penitent and repenting of his asshattish behavior, Nico is all "YOU LEFT ME JANE!!! HOW COULD YOU!!! I WAS IN AGONY WORRYING ABOUT YOU!!!" and Jane is all ":((( that was so wrong of me I'm so sorry my love!" PUKE. F that S. SHE LEFT HIM BECAUSE HE LIED TO AND MANIPULATED HER! THAT'S ON HIM! As Peggy says in Agent Carter, "You don't get to use my reaction to your behaviour as an excuse for your behaviour!" Nico/Rochester does not see the error of his ways or realize that what happened was because of him and his behavior and repent. He does not become humbled, only embittered. He doesn't go through this mental and behavioral change and develop a character and becomes the kind of man Jane deserves. This is the book/relationship's main redeeming quality. I am disappointed in this book because it's the most important part and it did not happen.
OH, ALSO, some mysterious relative does not die and leave Jane with a fortune of her own, which is the most important thing, relationships aside, that happens to Jane in the book. This is undoubtedly because then she'd have to share it with her awful siblings, but at the very least the worthless stocks her parents left her could have suddenly started increasing in value. I mean in the modern retelling Jane sleeps with Nico/Rochester, but she doesn't become rich and she doesn't discover she has nice family relations and no one gets the comeuppance/character change they deserve/need, so what's the point?

Pros/things I liked about this book, Jane the modern Jane Eyre: 
faithful adaptation that dealt with the different factors in interesting ways
Jane is befriended by Nico's bandmates' model/actress girlfriends, which is nice
Jane and Nico sleep together, if you're into that. I guess it is realistic for our time but I was just like meh

Cons/things I did not like about this adaptation
lol everything outlined above
no comeuppance for those who deserved it
Jane didn't feel as Jane-ish as she should have
relationship dynamic not the same
Jane's spiritual life/outlook, which is an important part of her and the way she sees things, is excised from the book
3.5 out of 5 stars

Book Reviews

Yes Please by Amy Poehler (early March)
Loved this. Loved that she put old pictures in this. Love her. 4/5

Texts From Jane Eyre by Mallory Ortberg (late March)
Mallory is a genius and her website is one of my favorites on all the Internet. These are hilarious. 5/5

Hark! A Vagrant by Kate Beaton (early April)
I'd seen most of the comics since I follow her blog religiously. Love them and her. 5/5

Lunatics by Dave Barry and Alan Zweibel (mid April)
I grew up reading Dave Barry and he shaped my sense of humor. This book (definitely for adults) was pretty funny but not the most memorable or recommended. If you like either of those authors and stories where every mistake and happenstance builds and intersects and the stakes keep getting higher and higher, then you will enjoy this. I found this at the dollar store and don't regret buying it, but I'm going to give it away since I just have so many books and limited shelf space. 3/5

Book reviews: mostly fantasy

I have so many books, you guys. I'm not keeping any of the books below (except for the ebook obvs).

The Secret of Platform 13, by Eva Ibbotson (late February)
This was a cute fantasy story in the vein of Roald Dahl etc. If you've read other books by her then you'd know what to expect (I don't think I have, but the name is familiar to me). The title doesn't have much to do with the story, but I liked it and the characters. I gave it to my dad to give to our local thrift store, but I'm not sure that he has yet. 4 out of 5 stars

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood (March 1. Yes, it took me less than one day to read)
AAAAAAAUUUGHGHHGHGHHHHHHHH
They need to teach this book in schools, alongside Brave New World and 1984. Are they??? Why aren't they??? This is like if the Quiverfull movement took over the US. Everything I'd read about it was like "It's still relevant for our times" but I WASN'T PREPARED FOR HOW RELEVANT IT IS. READ THIS BOOK. ATWOOD IS A GENIUS. 4/5 stars simply because it kind of f*cked me up

Briar Rose by Jane Yolen (March 1) *SOME SPOILERS*
This book is a fairytale retelling (my favorite genre) of Sleeping Beauty obviously, but in the Holocaust. The protagonist realizes that her late beloved grandmother's version of the Sleeping Beauty tale she told her growing up was actually a clue to her mysterious past. Lots of promise since I kind of like mysteries. JY is a giant in the fairytale retelling/fantasy genre so I knew it would be good as well as sad due to the setting, but in the end I didn't really like this. The protagonist is college-aged (19-21, I don't remember) but the way she and the book is written, she feels much younger. And there's a shoehorned romance kind of thing with her boss who is like 35? Nope. Plus, while we established that her grandma was Briar Rose in a concentration camp, we never found out who she really was (amnesia due to the gas from the chambers). 3/5 stars

Warriors #1: Into the Wild by Erin Hunter (first half of March)
This is the first in one of those multibook multiseries for elementary/middle school kids that are basically the only way to write/publish books nowadays. It was a free ebook and I didn't expect to like it as much as I did. It's your basic "everyman kid joins a new clan/army/order/fightclub/whatever and while there's suspicion about this outsider, he's accepted, both grudgingly and not. Then he discovers a political plot or The Truth about what they've been told all their lives or w/e and has to save his new home/people and he's The One" but with cats who live in clans in the forest. The political intrigue was actually pretty great, as was the worldbuilding (I can't believe I'm writing this about a book about wild cats). The made-up vocabulary (these books always have new words and dialects etc.) wasn't that corny at all, from what I remember. I actually want to read the rest of them to find out what happens. They're both familiar and refreshing. Recommended for yo' kids (and you obvs if you roll like me). 4/5 stars

Duolingo errors, part one

I use the Duolingo app for iPad and I love it a lot. In the video I made using the Educreations iPad app, I use some errors in quiz questions as a springboard for discussing Spanish and English, linguistics, grammar, definitions, dialects, vocabulary, and more.

The volume is a bit soft and gets muffled by rustling noises in parts, but this is the first time I've used Educreations and the first time recording a whiteboard video with it. Also, where it sounds like I said "betting" or "bet", I'm actually saying "vetting" or "vet". (Ironically, Mexican Spanish confuses/interchanges the B and V sounds. I've lost my accent decades ago but I have a very soft voice.) My next video will be better.

https://www.educreations.com/lesson/view/duolingo-errors-1/31552682/?s=PA4q7z&ref=app

Book review: The Second Mrs. Giaconda by E.L. Konigsburg

[Spoilers throughout because this is an old story about an older event and I don't care]

E.L. Konigsburg is the author of From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankenweiler (I think that's the title; I'm not bothering to look up the spelling), which I love. I've read a couple of her other books and really like her voice/writing style. I was excited about this one because it's her take on why a thieving apprentice might have been important to Leonardo da Vinci and why LdV might have painted an unknown merchant's second wife when he had all the big names in Italy begging him for a portrait.

Clearly she loves the Italian Renaissance era and finds it fascinating, as this is the second (as far as I know) of her books that deals with a secret behind a beautiful artwork by a teenage mutant ninja turtle  Master from that genre/era. However, I was disappointed in this book. The premise was interesting, and while I feel that the idea that Salai (the aforementioned apprentice) was Leonardo's foil and basically allowed him to be carefree and daring vicariously through him, as well as Salai being in love with the duchess, had a lot of promise, ELK basically did nothing with these ideas. There was a lot of description and scenebuilding, everything that ELK is good at, but there was no plot. No one really had anything to lose (although the duchess dies and it's sad because everyone liked her and she's the sole rounded female character). There were no stakes. No one really changed much at the end of the novel. It just was kind of dissatisfying.

Salai as the protagonist is almost entirely unlikeable. He has no moral scruples whatsoever and is completely baldfaced about it, with no negative repercussions to anything he does. The tone of the book didn't match with Salai's tone and vocabulary, which was weirdly slangy in a 20th century way. Despite the title, the subject of the Mona Lisa literally enters the book about three pages from the end. According to this book, Leonardo painted the portrait of this second wife of a nobody merchant because Salai saw that she was basically who the duchess would have been had she lived, and he talked Leonardo into doing it. Yep. Freaking Salai. I don't hate this book, but I feel annoyed that ELK didn't turn it into what it could have been. This could have been really something. It's like you had all the necessary ingredients to make a really good cake, but instead you have a weird flat boring doughy substance that is edible and not that bad but it makes you mad because you could've had delicious cake! 3/5 stars probably

Makeup review: Maybelline Color Whisper lipstick in "Who Wore It Red-er"

A while back I tried a couple of my best friend's lipsticks, which were the same brand and type but different shades (an explanation if you are confused by these terms). Maybelline's Color Whisper lipsticks are glossy, sheerish shades that are very light and smooth and glide on easily. I tried a nude shade and a peach shade, both of which can look harsh or weird on my skin, but because they were so light and sheer they actually looked really good. I decided to buy my own tube, and opted for "Who Wore It Red-er" (um, Maybelline? The word "redder" exists. Use that. People are going to know you're punning "who wore it better".) since I'm always on the hunt for the perfect red lipstick (the makeup-wearing human condition). This shade was just as smooth and slide-on-y as the others, but it was otherwise disappointing. Who wore it redder? Everyone. Everyone wore it redder, because this lipstick is not red. It is a sort of ambiguous magenta (feel free to use this as a band name, just give me 10% of your band's earnings).  The picture above does have an Instagram filter applied, but it was chosen for increased color accuracy since my cell phone camera is weird and makes things come out both darker and more washed-out than in real life, and it doesn't quite show the correct shade, which is quite vibrant. It's a magenta that looks kind of reddish if you look at it quickly. But it is decidedly not red. Because it is so smooth and slick, I feel like the color kind of slides around on your lips and possibly outside your mouth into Not Lip territory. It is also hard to apply it accurately from the tube; using a lip brush would probably correct that. Since it's so glossy, your lips don't really dry out the way they do with matte lipsticks, but the color kind of feels like it stains your lips, which is strange because initially it feels like you have to apply a lot in order for the color to look even. It takes a lot more wiping to get it all off than you'd think, for a lipstick that's practically a gloss in stick form. Anyway, I give this particular tube 3 out of 5 stars. 

Unsung Hero[in]es: In the Bible, What Did Women Do?

The Seventh-day Adventist Church, among many other Christian denominations, has been going through the issue of whether or not women should be ordained as pastors. There are already women pastors, my aunt among them, but millennia of patriarchal misogyny and male gender bias are hard to shake off. The senior pastor at my church, LLUC, has done a sermon series about some of the women leaders of the Bible in order to see what they and their roles may have to teach us about the topic of women's ordination. I wanted to write down the messages in order to remember them.

1. Deborah: Here Comes the Judge! (sermon video) – Don't limit the way God chooses to work. Don't think that God can or should only work in one specific way.
2. Huldah: Prophet to the King (video) – I think this one is something like, Listen to what God is saying regardless of who He's saying it through. God chooses to speak through whomever He wants. God's message is vital regardless of whoever is saying it, even if it's someone you wouldn't expect.
3. Miriam: In the Leadership Circle (video) – "Unsung heroes can have feet of clay." God can speak or work through flawed people. Just because a person is flawed, doesn't mean that God can't work through them or choose them to be leaders. Moses also made mistakes and was flawed, but people don't point to him and say that men shouldn't be leaders because of him. (I almost fistpumped in church when he said this. I definitely made that "sips tea" face)
4. Esther: Living with the If (video) – This sermon was given by a woman. The story of Esther should be sung and remembered because it shows us how to trust in God despite uncertainty and place our lives in His hands. We need to stand up for what's right despite our fear.
5. Priscilla and Junia: The Apostles' Colleagues – Today's church should look like the early church, with both women and men in its leadership and playing important roles.
6. Next week is Mary: A Woman's Place. Not sure yet which Mary it is.

I have loved this sermon series, not only because of the crumbs of representation for women that there is in the Bible and the way this shines a light on women leaders (even fewer crumbs for them), but because this is one of the ways my quiet, prefers-not-to-ruffle-feathers pastor shows support for women's ordination: by preaching from the Bible, the same place opponents of women's ordination turn to. This is simultaneously an ordinary sermon series on Bible characters and a Scriptures-supported feminist endorsement of women's ordination. I see you and I thank you.

Dragons I have appreciated

Apparently today is Appreciate a Dragon Day. Who am I to let this auspicious holiday go unobserved.

• Smaug (from the book, although I tolerate CumberSmaug). He's awful, but he's badass. Never over using gemstones to make armor for his chest and belly!
• as awful as the books are, Saphira (I don't remember her name exactly), the main dragon in the Eragon books. She's cool.
• Mushu from Mulan, of course. 
• I also liked the Great Stone Dragon a lot and have always sorta felt disappointed that he didn't come to life like Mushu did. And when Mulan sits in/under the statue while it rains???? Most badass seat ever
• I feel like I read at LEAST one book where the girl protagonist (a princess usually) befriended the dragon, turning that trope of dragons vs. princesses on its head. I feel like this happened in the Frog Princess books, among others.
• The Reluctant Dragon by Kenneth Grahame. I love that dude; he's the Ferdinand the Bull of dragons.
• The Ice Dragon by George R.R. Martin. This is actually the only thing by him that I've read, and it is lovely and sad.
• EUSTACE WHEN HE WAS A DRAGON omg I knew I was forgetting someone important
• the image of the red and the white dragons from underground fighting each other in The Once and Future King has always stayed with me, but idk if I appreciate them
• I feel like there are scads of other dragons I've read that I'm not remembering
• the most recent dragon book I've read was called The Dragonwatcher's Guide or something. It's a "nonfiction" scrapbook type book for the newbie dragon scholar. I liked it.
• Toothless from How to Train Your Dragon (the movie, I've never read the book)
• Puff the Magic Dragon feels forever

Ride ten thousand days and nights til age snow white hairs on thee...

(1 , 2)

Do not lose

• que duermes con los angelitos
• colorín colorado, el cuento se ha acabado