The Terror of Knowing

So yesterday didn’t go quite as well as I’d hoped and I have job seeker-y things to do this afternoon but hopefully I can hurry home from those, lock myself away in my room, and get to reading!

Updates:
11am – read for a little while in bed this morning – laziness enables reading haha – so I’m up to page 74. I’m still not sure how I’m liking Remains of the Day but I’m not quite sure what I expected of it anyway. Still, early days yet.

3pm – did all of the things I needed to do outside of the house and took some time to enter both the book challenges for today

6pm – up to page 119 of The Remains of the Day, the story has gotten a little more interesting now that it’s got going, but now it feels like a mix between Downton Abbey and The Moonstone – that could just be that those are the most apt knowledge I have of that kind of ‘grand house’ as Darlington Hall seems to be! I even made a little video with my thoughts so far.

Overall – slightly more pleased with my reading progress today but I’m ashamed that I’m at the end of day 2 and only on page 139 of my first book :/

Challenges:

Book Spine Poetry @ My Little Pocketbooks

The bad beginning of
my cousin Rachel 
was a study in scarlet,
unfinished tales of 
one day in the
brave new world 
she saw through the looking glass.

OTP @ Infinite Ink

I have a lot of OTPs, I am a shipper at heart and frequently want to squish characters to multiple partners at the same time (the Les Misérables fandom is the worst for encouraging this), so I thought I’d talk about what I think might have been my very first OTP in a book.

When I was in primary school I was obsessed with the Stravaganza series by Mary Hoffman – I wrote reviews on the first trilogy of books (City of Masks, City of Stars, and City of Flowers), I did fan art, even met the author at a reading event. I can’t deny that a lot of why I loved these books was because of two particular pairings – Arianna Gasparini and Lucien ‘Luciano Crinamorte’, and Rodolfo Rossi (Arianna’s biological father and Lucien’s mentor) and the Duchessa, Silvia Bellini (Arianna’s secret biological mother). In the city of Masks, called Bellezza (and modelled after Renaissance Venice) Silvia is a beloved and beautiful ruler who often attracts the machinations of her rivals, the di Chimici family (based on the Medicis), whether that’s through assassination attempts or attempts to marry her off to one of their own. Rumours about the Duchessa’s advisor and Senator, Rodolfo, someone she championed through his university studies, being her secret lover are abound. Everyone in the society pretty much accepts that they are close, perhaps too close, and I must admit I’ve never shipped anyone as hard as I did Silvia and Rodolfo.

Despite this being a teen book, a lot of the plot is intrigued-based and there’s an awful lot of (sexual) politics tied to the Duchessa herself, primarily because she’s a sole female ruler who isn’t married yet known for using her sexuality as her power, commanding the devotion of her very handsome mandoliers (gondoliers) and inspiring loyalty in her people. As an 11-year old I was hooked on this city, with a tricky political climate where flattery or deception could mean life or death, and to me the Duchessa and Rodolfo, and their story, embody this climate perfectly – that is why they were my very first OTP.