#pamela dean
Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin! it’s a gorgeous lovesong to everything literature promises and affords; the joy, the consolation, the instruction, the thrill of intellectual discovery. Reading it I want to turn to Shakespeare, Keats, Pope, and Johnson, to the classic sff and noir Janet loves; to drink down the same bounteous delight and pleasure they offer her.
Mostly, though, I love that this is a story about a college where the entire Classics department - students and faculty both - are strange and glamorous inhabitants of Faerie; where the department’s two most prominent professors are gay women; where their tools of seduction are words and knowledge; where what tempts Janet into the faeries’ orbit is the sound of Homer in the original Greek.
Hello my little goblins! I’ve been radio silent for a bit because I just moved and moving is hectic and stressful, but now I’m back! I’ll be doing a countdown to Halloween in October, and I might start early. This is also your semi-annual reminder that ANYONE CAN SUBMIT A REVIEW!
To hold you over until I get a real review done, here are some books I’ve read recently and LOVED TO BITS that you should read.
- The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch (swashbuckling con men in an awesome fantasy world, lots of diversity, and they call themselves the Gentlemen Bastards WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT)
- Illusions of Fate by Kiersten White (excellent YA with a POC woman protag and some great discussions of discrimination and race, plus a fun magic system and a good love story)
- Thomas the Rhymer by Ellen Kushner (a little dated at this point, but a really lovely retelling of the traditional Thomas the Rhymer story. A good read in conjunction with…)
- Tam Lin by Pamela Dean (a fun retelling of Tam Lin set in the ‘70s in a private liberal arts college loosely based on Carleton.)
Okay bookworms! Time to read a little more of I, Asimov before conking out like the victim of one of Hermione's stupefys.
Cheerio, and happy reading!
Rosie
