book post: Red, White, and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston

So: a thing I intensely love about soap opera and romcom plots is just how gleefully they will play fast & loose with every rule of plausibility and verisimilitude for the sake of a fun goddamned time. I’m reminded of the ridiculousness of Gossip Girl and The O.C., in particular. Gossip Girl gave us a pretentious, moneyed, private high school, and after a couple seasons everyone just happened to simultaneously decide to attend NYU—what the hell? Shouldn’t they be drifting off to like 8 different Ivy Leagues or whatever?

We, the audience, accept this, because look, we know this thin layer of pretense is what’s necessary for a good time—because of course we don’t want to watch the Gossip Girl crew all scatter to different colleges and grow apart, we want the drama. It’s not unlike the “rule of cool” you see in tabletop RPGs—if your idea is cool enough, you can always break the rules.

Red, White and Royal Blue takes this to 11.

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okay yes I might’ve read this because someone said “this is basically a Claude/Lorenz fanfic” and wow they were NOT WRONG

book post: Manga in Theory and Practice by Hirohiko Araki

Short little “how to write” guide by a famous shonen manga author/artist. I picked it up because I’d previously threatened to do a breakdown of The Shonen Formula TM, and I was hoping this dude had done my work for me.

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book post: Rac[e]ing to the Right by George S. Schuyler (ed Jeffrey B. Leak)

This is an extremely random book selection, I know. I can explain.

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tl;dr fun collection of essays from a reliably witty and incisive dude—obviously i didn’t agree with all of them (that’d be kind of impossible, given the span of viewpoints it covers!), but definitely interesting as a historical document

book post: The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson

I read this book all the way back at in May—a long enough time that, usually, I’ve forgotten the book almost entirely, except for whatever notes I took down.

And yet I touch this book and I’m overwhelmed with how it felt: a plot that drove along like hoofbeats or heartbeats, steady yet powerful and very alive, hyperfocused on this quiet, tense, weird little conflict, in a quiet town someplace very far north and very far away from everywhere else.

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