skygiants | (no subject)

Part of the idea in doing an Epic Diana Wynne Jones Roundup was to get a little bit of my DWJ love out of my system so I could talk about other things!

That, uh, kind of backfired, as what it mostly ended up doing was made me want to reread a whole bunch of DWJ books I hadn't read in a while. THIS WAS IN NO WAY A PREDICTABLE OUTCOME shut up. Anyway, I reread Eight Days of Luke last week, which is one of the ones I did not remember very well and which a lot of people commented to tell me I was Not Doing Justice To because I did not remember it very well. Of course they were right! Shockingly I have rediscovered that Eight Days of Luke is amazing. Here are some things I had forgotten about it that I really liked:

- how much David and Luke's friendship feels like a real friendship. They hang out together and crack each other up and have good times! You can tell that they really like each other. (I also loved the scene when they go shopping with Astrid and get bored together, because that was me SO MANY TIMES when I was a kid getting dragged around to department stores by my mom.)

- Astrid! I love that you get to see how Astrid's unpleasantness is formed by her circumstances, and how her feelings about Ronald and her life are always just kind of hinted at so you can fill in the gaps for yourself. And I like how you know that she and David are sometimes going to get screaming mad at each other, and she's going to have difficult days and he's going to have difficult days, but that's normal, not the awfulness that they've been living with.

- the idea that you can care about someone and want to help them even if they've done horrible things - that maybe it puts you technically on the 'wrong side', but that's not necessarily going to change the way you feel about them. This is an important idea to me.

- I really like DWJ's Norse mythology! I like her twisty Odin and her jovial Freys and furious Brunhilde, and how they're all genuinely scary and how she doesn't spell out exactly what's coming but you know it's on the horizon, and I love the way she dos Valhalla kind of a lot. And I really like that there's no implication that David is going to lose all connection to Luke and that world when the story's over, but rather you get the feeling that he's entwined with it all now, for better or for worse, and Luke will go on absently accidentally doing terrible things and David will go on trying to talk him out of it.

I still think David is not the most distinguishable of DWJ's boy-protagonists - but on the other hand, I like that he is not a Super Special Lonely Child and is perfectly capable of interacting normally with other kids. Also this is one of the ones where the ending kind of comes at you in a rush without giving you much time to digest it. But if you like stories where myths are interwoven into the modern world . . . like all of DWJ's takes on a trope, seriously, this is one of the best examples out there.

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So i just finished my first DWJ - Howl's Moving Castle - and I absolutely adored it. I'm going to have to pick up the sequel immediately. What is the next thing of her's I should pick up?

:D :D :D :D I'M GLAD YOU ASKED! *manic grin*

*deeeeeeeeeeep breath*

Okay, so if you liked Howl's Moving Castle, the thing that's probably closest to that in terms of adorably cranky OTPs and wacky magical hijinks is Deep Secret, which involves mages and ghosts and curses and computers and galactic empires and happens to take place at a sci-fi convention. (It is amazing, there is a scene where a wounded centaur is caught in an elevator, and everyone is just like "AWESOME COSTUME. *_*") Maree and Rupert are adorable - he thinks she is whiny and self-pitying, she thinks he is a tremendous buttoned-up prat, and together they save several worlds!

If you want more parody of fantasy conventions, you probably want to go with Dark Lord of Derkholm, which is the one where tourists come through and make everyone in fantasyland run around to create an Authentic Experience for them. Basically it is DWJ mocking everything you see in Epic Fantasy, and it is AMAZING and hilarious.

If you want hilarious fake Shakespeare, go with The Magicians of Caprona - it's a good introduction to the Chrestomanci series, and it's an adorable take on Romeo and Juliet, with warring Italian magician families who get into EPIC FOOD FIGHTS on the streets of Caprona and tragically separated lovers who are actually the most sane that I have ever seen a pair of tragically separated lovers, ever. Also extremely intelligent cats, also hilarious family wackiness, also super-creepy Punch and Judy!

Ummm maybe I should stop for now, but let me know if you need more recs and I will be MORE THAN HAPPY to provide. :D

Yay! Those all sound fantastic - especially The Magicians of Caprona. I'm a sucker for a Shakespeare parody :)

If you read it let me know what you think! :D (Also, I forgot to say, I am so glad you liked Howl's Moving Castle. Sophie is one of my favorite heroines EVER. So cranky! So weed-killing!)

Heee! I love how she's just like, okay, I'm old! I'm gonna have fun with this! And proceeds to poke people with her stick and clean everything :)

Yes! It's so awesome! I really, really like how being old isn't a bad thing for Sophie - how it's actually totally liberating to get in touch with her inner grouch. More books should embrace the awesomeness of old people!

I recently re-read Eight Days of Luke too, and it really is awesome. I particularly love cranky Astrid, for some reason. :-) I think the only thing that irks me about that book is that Mr. Chew has two hands. (While with The Game I was all "What have you done to my Mercury?" May be a tad too attached to classical gods, me.)

Astrid is so awesome! I mean, I am ridiculously attached to DWJ's cranky ladies anyways (Awful! Helen! Hildy!) but I especially liked Astrid because you could see so clearly how she gets to be the way she is.

Ah, but! In the little note at the end, DWJ points out that you only ever see one of Mr. Chew's hands mentioned at one time! Uh, I would not have noticed that at all if she had not pointed it out. But I think she is trying to imply that one of his hands is illusory, like Wednesday's other eye?

(Hee! I was a little that way in The Game, too. Well, half that, and half cracking up at 'Mercer', since I know someone who's been writing a contemporary Mercury using just that name!)

Huh. My edition doesn't seem to have a note at the end. What else does it say?

*goes to check*

Okay, so officially it's an Afterword, and it pretty much spells out all the mythology in the story. About Tew, it says: "The main thing that is known is that Tew has lost (or will lose - time is strange where gods are concerned) his arm trying to chain the monstrous wolf Fenri. Alert readers will have noticed that David's attention is generally just fixed on one of Mr. Chew's arms. Gods are good at hiding their attributes." Then it has the Wedding/Woden section, which gives the general background and points out that "he used to ride an eight-legged white horse, which naturally appears nowadays as a white car, driven by one of his daughters, the Valkyries." She doesn't say much on Thor and the Freys, just that Thor was god of thunder and a popular god and Frey and Freya were gods of sex and fertility.

Then she gives the Loki story, spells out that Loki's crime was the attack on Baldur and that the red-haired girl is Loki's wife, and that Loki and Woden will be on opposite sides in the final battle, and moves onto the pool hall being Valhalla. ("There is a Wallsey in England - an industrial suburb of Birmingham. It has so little in common with Valhalla that I invented Wallsey Island instead.") And then finally she gives the Siegfried/Brunhilda story in brief and ends by sort of implying that Brunhilda is going to bring about the final battle.

Okay, then, I grudgingly accept her explanation. *g* (And is Tew the Anglicized name for Tyr? Oh boy, I thought I'd gotten used to all the weird spelling differences, but that one was new to me.)