Locked Tomb

[crowtoes]

So about 2wks ago I read Gideon the Ninth, all in one sitting, staying up till 4am to finish. Thursday my library request for Harrow the Ninth came through and this morning I finished it, this time at 2 am. i cried. i giggled a little, though not as much as in the first book. I had conflicted feelings. I had PASSIONATE shippy feelings - like holy fuck, I NEED Gideon and Harrow to kiss. i am more than a little in love?

as i read i stuck some thoughts and incoherent shrieking in twitter drafts but I was too absorbed, and my wrists have been too busted recently, to do a detailed liveblog. But here are some things, mostly about book2:


-more than once i found myself thinking that teenage!me wouldve loved this. i still love it now (humor! magic! body horror! F/F UST! loyalty kink! utterly batshit worldbuilding!) but wow, bb me wouldve been full-on obsessed

-In Gideon I wouldve said that Harrow was my favorite character, with Camilla coming in second and Gideon third, but I missed Gideon so unexpectedly much in Harrow and was so, so happy when she finally appeared that I think I need to revise this opinion and say she's my favorite. I still love Cam and Harrow! But GIDEONNNNNNNNN. her irreverence and grit are apparently the spark that brings everything from 'good, enjoyable' to 'YES GOOD, EXCELLENT' for me

-i really appreciate the number and variety of female characters in these books, and i especially appreciate the fact that a high percentage of them are total steaming assholes. i felt extremely catered to, lol

-the Gideon-Harrow-Ianthe-frostytomblady love (""""love"""") polygon was so much fun! the loyalty/desperation between Gideon and Harrow was like...yes, thank you, i would read a thousand pages of this and ask for more. and the scene with gideon and ianthe and their mutual hatred expressed through threats and terrible jokes was maybe my favorite in the book - i kept swinging from laughter at their verbal sparring to blinking away tears because of the way Gideon was talking about Harrow.

-seriously this is so fucking ridiculously romantic holy shit:



-i believe in my heart that Ianthe is also a sisterfucker

-THE BARISTA AU MADE ME SHRIEK

-as long as im posting quotes this one was also so, so, so so so so good:


-i'm interested to see more of God's morality system and dark secrets, and whatever weirdness is between him and Alecto, in the third book.

-there were a few deaths in book1 that made me satisfied (silas. i mean silas. and cytherea.) but in book2 all the deaths just made me kind of sad (except Wake I guess, but even she gets some measure of sympathy from me since I do not trust God further than Harrow could throw him). I was surprised to even find myself a bit sad for Cytherea. Mercymorn and Augustine's deaths (assuming Augustine is dead) especially made me twinge - they werent crushing like Magnus' or the teens' deaths in book one, but the way that the final showdown played out, and the fact that in both cases it happened with extreme violence yet little fanfare, made them very effective. mercymorn asking god if he loved her cavalier... ;-;

-Camilla!!!!!!! Palamedes!!!!!!!

-i didn't enjoy Harrow quite as much as Gideon but the moment Harrow fed her own marrow to everyone and messily demolished Ortus Gideon I started having a lot of fun again, and then the following amputation/regrowth scene with Ianthe happened and I was a very happy camper indeed. the bits with the sleeper stumbled a little IMO (though I loved seeing Magnus and Abigail again, and it was interesting to see the personalities of people who died before we could get a good picture of their character in Gideon) and I had to reread some of the more opaque stuff in the first half a couple times because it was hard to focus without any clue of what was going on, but overall I really enjoyed it and I need book 3 to be in my eyeballs right now.

-tangentially, reading these has made me want to reread perdido street station, since that's the last time a book really knocked my socks off with the sheer weirdness and coolness of the worldbuilding, but i think the sexual assault in it would bother me more these days than it did on first read.

-i have more thoughts but my wrists remain busted so this is it for now

i have so many things to type T_T iddybang fic is due in a couple weeks and i still need to type up detailed Saranzanmai Feelings...also I'm a bit angy that I typed up a bunch of thoughts about some Nathan Ballingrud stories I was reading a month (or two?) ago and then my computer crashed and I lost it all so it was essentially a waste of time

I hope there's good stuff on ao3 *_*