reading

[silverflight8]

I finished The Eagle of the Ninth, The Sky is Falling, and Looking at the Moon (latter two by Kit Pearson) today.

I liked all three--well, I've read the Pearson ones before, when I was a kid, and um this time The Sky is Falling made me cry--twice. It didn't do that before! (I never used to cry at books, and I want to go back to that.) I liked the Eagle of the Ninth but it was a bit weird reading it, because I've read so much about the fandom around it and the opinions of people shipping it and I have never aggressively not-shipped anything. Not Marcus/Esca, not Marcus/Cottia, just nothing. I am really disappointed that the next book in the 'series' is actually not about Marcus and Escus and Cottia and Uncle Aquila :(

I really enjoyed the parts where they were in Caledonia. It was an interesting inversion of viewpoints--I've read a lot from the British point of view (Celts? IDK, in sub-Roman Britain, the people native to Britain) and those books of course make efforts to immerse you in that culture, make it the normal baseline. It was strange to be seeing things from the Roman view, where everything is quite alien to Marcus, on his first ever journey to Britain at all. The countryside almost becomes its own character, especially in the end when they are being pursued from all sides. At one point I really was not sure that they would make it back with the Eagle--even knowing it was a children's novel. I could see them chucking the Eagle into the bog and then Sutcliff talking about how they had neutralized the threat a rogue Eagle represented, how it was necessary.

Lots of fun turns of phrase, but it was published in 1956 and what was effortless and transparently not-any-time-prose then is evident to me as something published fifty years ago. I still like it though.

The next two novels are the first two books in a series by Kit Pearson, about evacuated children from England sent to Canada. I read them years ago and I do remember what happens in the third book which is probably partly why I cried. Their parents die and Gavin doesn't remember them much and it's horribly heartwrenching. They do stand up very well though. I sympathized with Norah just as much as I did then. I am not sure I can take the last book.

One reason I am reading so much is that it's a holiday (fireworks yesterday too! So great) but it's mostly because it's so hot and humid. See, I don't have air conditioning at my place, and my computer becomes a furnace when it's running. But my e-reader doesn't! So I spend time lying in front of the fan reading, because I can't take the heat and humidity.

Comments

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

I liked the movie too - I actually saw the movie first - and it does change the dynamic a lot, but not more slashy, necessarily. It plays up the power imbalance much more. And no Cottia, alas! Though yeah, she's too young for me to ship too, if I think about it. I have to sort of mentally add on several years as a sort of "historical/cultural adjustment".