McKillip, Patricia A. - Winter Rose

I read this before, freshman year of college, and I am rather bemused by how little of it I remember. I also remember reading through it and being mostly confused about what was happening through a vast majority of it, and most likely missing the major climactic moments.

That said, I've never been that much of a Patricia McKillip fan because I've always felt I could never quite submerge myself in her books.

I don't know what's changed in the past four years (or even recently, because I had the same feeling about The Cygnet and the Firebird), but I loved this book. Fell in complete and total love with the language, with Rois' blackbird hair and wood eyes, with a world in which water is a doorway, wild horses ride in the wind, light can reveal or conceal, and roses can bloom and catch fire in the middle of the deepest winter.

For some reason, the narrative voice (Rois') reminded me a great deal of Beauty's in McKinley's Beauty, and Laurel reminded me a bit of both Hope and Grace. I get the same feeling from both books, of a pleasant countryside where people live and work and the strange events that take place just out of reach of that place. Of course, Winter Rose's is much more threatening and otherworldly.

Now starting the Riddle-Master trilogy, which I could never get into in high school. It's very strange, as though suddenly the McKillip translation switch in my head has suddenly turned on. I wonder if a reread of Cygnet and Firebird will have the same effect.

(no subject)

Sitting in the internet lounge thing of a Honda dealership, in which my poor car is being maintenanced. I have hit 6000 miles. In three more months, I will have lived in CA for a year.

A year -- it hardly feels so long!

I've been reading everyone's replies to the food post with great interest, and now I want to dig up some sort of cultural history of food. Better yet, since the boy is going to dinner with some business school friend, I am going to see if I can bully them into eating Afghan or something Middle Eastern, because reading everyone's comments is making me very hungry!

Aliera's Chinese poetry post has led me to find Chinese Poems, which is a cool and nifty site because it has simplified and traditional characters, along with pinyin, along with a word by word transliteration and a final translation. My Chinese is horrible, but the poems just sound wrong in English -- the rhythm and the rhyme is missing, and for Tang poetry in particular, which is rather sonnet-like in terms of strictness, it's very disconcerting to hear it in free form verse!

In general I've never been that big of a fan of poetry, with the exception of ee cummings and sonnets. And Yeats. And maybe TS Eliot if I read enough. Oh dear. I take that back. Anyhow, I adore Chinese poetry, even back in the bad old days of Chinese class and being laughed at for horrible pronunciation. First, poetry is a lot easier to memorize than Confucian analects or various classical essays. And we memorized so much stuff -- I had to memorize even more because my Chinese was so bad I couldn't think of definitions to phrases on my own. So I memorized the phrases and the definitions word for word. For one class back in eighth grade (seventh grade level Chinese), we memorized the entirety of Bai Juyi's Pi Pa Xing (maybe three pages, front and back?). I still remember the first four lines, and a scattered couplet or two in the middle.

( Cut for much blathering on Chinese poetry )

This blathering has been brought to you by Honda, who is still working on my car...

Angel 5x18 Origin

( Spoilers (none for promo) )