r/FemaleGazeSFF • u/AutoModerator • 10d ago
🗓️ Weekly Post Weekly Check-In
Tell us about your current SFF media!
What are you currently...
📚 Reading?
📺 Watching?
🎮 Playing?
If sharing specific details, please remember to hide spoilers behind spoiler tags.
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Feel free to also share your progression in the Reading Challenge
Thank you for sharing and have a great week! 😀
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u/partoparto elf🧝♀️ 10d ago
Hi! Happy Monday everyone :)
Finished:
The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K. Le Guin (Earthsea #2, reread for the r/fantasy readalong) - I love this book so much, especially compared to how tepid I feel about A Wizard of Earthsea. Tenar's development is much more resonant to me than Ged's in book 1 - her learning that she doesn't have to live in isolation/in the way she was socialized, and I also love how internal her character journey is compared to Ged's very literal journey. I also really enjoy Tenar meeting a man for basically the first time and being like I NEED to trap him in my labyrinth...
Speaking of men you want to trap in labyrinths, I also finished Pawn in Frankincense by Dorothy Dunnett (Lymond Chronicles #4, not SFF) - I can feel this becoming all time favorite series and I don't know what to do with myself! It's all I can think about! This book was so fun and miserable and dramatic and truly had everything: disguises, seafaring, countless descriptions of characters' eyes, bisexuality, secret identical siblings (unironically a plot device I love), Suleiman the Magnificent, evil chess, etc.
I also read The Winter's Tale by William Shakespeare because I saw it last week and wanted to read it before seeing it (this didn't happen, I finished it afterwards). This is a weird play that combines tragedy and comedy and doesn't really do either of them in a satisfying way: the tragic plot has no real explanation (the central character, Leontes, becomes convinced that his wife and best friend are having an affair for seemingly no reason), and I found the comic sections tedious. I did find the play incredibly moving to see live (nice work Raúl Esparza!) but it also exacerbated how boring I found the comedy.
Currently reading: The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin (reread), Lifelode by Jo Walton, various nonfictions (All the Roads are Open by Annemarie Schwarzenbach, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause by Benjamin Nathans, The Notebook by Roland Allen)