Hello my scrumptious delights! Did you miss my links round-up last time, when I did not do one? I did! But here I am again with a new one.
Edan Lepucki thinks about whether character likeability is beside the point, at The Millions. And I kept thinking about how nobody liked Harriet Vane when Strong Poison came out. I know about this from Dorothy Sayers’s letters. Readers wrote to her in droves begging her not to marry Peter to that dreadful woman. BACK OFF, people of the 1930s. Harriet Vane is one of my favorite characters in all of literature.
Kiese Laymon reflects on the kind of freedom his Vassar College ID gives him.
I’m slightly late in linking to this, but here is Alyssa Rosenberg on good manners as a solution for a lot of racist/sexist behavior. I couldn’t agree with this more. “Your behavior is shitty” induces nothing but defensiveness. “Your behavior does not fit with social norms” induces, in general, embarrassment and apology. Thanks, peer pressure! I knew you had to be good for something!
The smashing Liz Burns on the gender policing inherent in the pushback against “princess” toys for girls.
Tasha Robinson on strong female characters.
This made me cry. I am not sure why this, in particular; it’s not new information, and it’s the same sort of story I’ve been reading all week under the #AlivewhileBlack hashtag. But this one made me cry.
Joyous news: The wonderful Tor.com has a new column on comics and speculative fiction from the Levant. YAY. The only way this could be better would be if it were a daily column that came out with new recommendations every single day.
Further proof of Tor.com’s wonderfulness can be found in their current Heralds of Valdemar reread. The Arrows books have more policy talk than you remembered:
Kris’s description of the tax system is also useful anyone trying to understand how the Valdemaran government maintains pro-Herald cultural hegemony. Valdemar doesn’t have a state religion—in this case, tax breaks are the opiate of the masses. I have concerns about the impacts of these policies on Valdemar’s other spending priorities. It’s fortunate that defense of Valdemar’s northern border is handled by Vanyel’s ghost. He’s budget-friendly.
I’ve been saying that one of the things I admired about Mockingjay (a book I otherwise did not love) was Suzanne Collins’s depiction of the mental problems Katniss’s trauma would have created in her. Cause yup. Here’s some further discussion of that.
This has been a ghastly fortnight for news. A ghastly month. I am tired of the news. I’m ready for there to be news that focuses exclusively on puppies and how really truly swell they are. If the news doesn’t get better before the end of the year, I promise that my next links round-up will include at least one photograph of my dog wearing some sort of Christmas decoration.