The Hunger Games – Chapters 4-6
Three more chapters of The Hunger Games down. Overall, I’m interested, but not compelled yet. Granted, I’m now only six chapters and eighty-five pages in. I’d keep reading even if I weren’t doing these blogs, but I’m not at a point yet where I’m having trouble stopping after three chapters.
Chapter 4
There are worldbuilding things I’m confused about – her mother’s book was written on parchment? They’ve got enough money for a toy wagon and a tv? Although, maybe the tv is state mandated since everyone is required to celebrate and, presumably watch, the Hunger Games?
Haymitch isn’t totally lost to the bottle. I guess it’s a chicken/egg thing – did the District 12 tributes do poorly because their mentor was a drunk or did Haymitch start drinking because the kids kept dying?
Is Peeta devious or just determined? Hmm…
Chapter 5
I love the description of her prep team as multicolored birds. I’ve really only seen images of Effie, but she does look a little like a bird. Or an easter egg.
Ok, the outfit for the chariot scene sounds goofy. I’m not a big unitard person, generally speaking. In Style had several designers do concept sketches before the movie came out. The one here was designed by Christian Cota. It’s very… dominatrix-y. I went and youtubed how they did it in the movie just to see. The film versions come off much more as leather armor, maybe it’s the sort of dragon scale look of the fabric. (As a sidenote, I HATE Katniss’s hair in that scene.)
I find it interesting that holding hands is Cinna’s idea. He seems very different from the usual stylists from his appearance to his ideas. I know he becomes an important figure (because gifs on tumblr are a thing), but I’m very curious about him at this point.
I’m feeling some sympathy or Peeta right now, probably because Katniss is trying so hard to figure out all the angles. I’m want to believe that she’s wrong about Peeta and he really is just a nice guy who wants to live through this.
Chapter 6
The training center is going to be interesting. And I’d love a machine that magically got all the tangles and frizz out of my hair.
Who is the Avox and will she be relevant again later?
The conversation between Peeta and Katniss is interesting. He’s still coming across as sweet and she’s still prickly and suspicious. I know we’re supposed to bond with protagonists, but Katniss is so sharp-edged, that I’m second guessing all of her perceptions.
16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence
The Hunger Games, Chapters 1-3
Obviously, this is going to be spoiler heavy since I’m taking notes on each chapter as I go along.
Chapter 1
Katniss is pretty tough and says the only person she’s sure she loves is her little sister. Ok. So that’s how we’re starting off. I kind of see her point about her mom though; her mom (as far as I can tell so far) abandoned the girls when her husband died, leaving all the responsibility on eleven year old Katniss. There’s something really terrible about parents abdicating responsibility, even when you’re an adult.
The reaping… Well, that’s terrible.
I haven’t seen the movies, but it’s impossible not to have visuals from the previews and adds in my head. Katniss doesn’t really look like Jennifer Lawrence in my head, except in her reaping dress. That one image is stuck. And Effie is definitely Elizabeth Banks. Strangely, I have no idea what the actress playing Prim looks like, so she’s a sort of watercolor of a girl, which is how most characters in books are for me.
Chapter 2
More on Mom. It seems like she sank into a deep depression when her husband died and couldn’t come out of it. Ok. On one level, I agree with Katniss’s rage, but I’ve faced down depression. Not getting out of bed isn’t about not caring. It’s about the weight that’s settled on your chest, crushing the life, and the air, and the hope right out of you. So, I get the mother’s side of things too.
The salute is moving.
Peeta. So, there’s a quiet strength there at first glance. He was brave enough to take a beating for a girl he’d never met, but then never brought it up to her later. Ok, this could be interesting.
Chapter 3
“I know velvet because my mother has a dress with a collar made of the stuff.” – I don’t know why that’s hitting me, but it is.
The mockingjay pin has shown up. I knew it was a thing, but not where it came from. For some reason, I thought it would be introduced much later and by someone older. The history of the mockingjays, while scientifically unlikely, is interesting. I’m curious to see how they develop into something important enough to name book 2 after.
The dinner on the train is almost a slap in the face, isn’t it?
Haymitch… Well, that’s about all to say about him right now.
So, day one, three chapters down. I think I’m going to keep myself to three chapters a day, if only because it’s rather a lot to write everyday otherwise.
Finally Reading The Hunger Games
One of the many shameful things I did not confess to you, dear reader, is that in addition to not having finished the Harry Potter series, I have never read The Hunger Games. I know. I know. But, it just never seemed that compelling to me. I mean, I’ve seen Battle Royale, so I’ve got the gist, right?
Even finding out that Susanne Collins went to school here in Birmingham didn’t sway me.
This happens to me sometimes. I’ll miss out on THE NEXT BIG THING early on and then the sheer weight of societal expectation repulses me. I didn’t read The Help, or The Da Vinci Code. I read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo a year or so late and it was ok, but I didn’t continue. I still don’t quite get what all the hype was about. I haven’t read Gone Girl. I did read Twilight, but I read it before it was cool. Also, I got bored waiting for book 3, so I haven’t finished that either. (Apparently, I’m a quitter.)
I get stubborn when too many people tell me I have to read something. It’s one of the best ways to keep me from doing it actually. My mom learned this when she gave me Stranger in a Strange Land when I was ten or so. I got stubborn and didn’t read it for five years. Heinlein is now one of my favorite authors. I’m a little bit like a cat, I think. I have to think things are my own idea.
What all of this is coming around to is this: I have not read The Hunger Games. (Or seen the movies.) Yet.
I am going to read The Hunger Games. And I am going to blog about it because I like doing things on the internet. So, I hope you’ll come along for the ride.
Review: The Sword Edged Blonde
I’ll be honest, I have no clue who the big dude is.
I picked up the first book in the Eddie Lacross series last year at JordanCon and had Alex sign it. He was really, really nice and I was excited to read his books. I already had a copy of The Hum and the Shiver, which I had gotten after listening to it get talked about on the SF Squeecast. But, because I’m me, I hadn’t actually read it by the time I met him at the con. And, honestly, I hadn’t known that Alex would be at the con or I would have read it in preparation for possibly meeting him. But, because conventions are magical things, there was a bookshop in the dealers’ room that was happy to sell me lots of Alex’s books.
I picked up the first two Eddie Lacross books, The Sword-Edged Blonde and Burn Me Deadly because Eddie is a noir-style detective in an epic fantasy-style world. Oh, wait. I love noir detectives in epic fantasy worlds (Low Town anyone? Low Town. Go. Get it. I’ll wait.) And then, I put them on my shelf for very-special-books-that-are-signed-by-the-authors and got distracted, probably by some Aunt Dimity books. And then, over the holidays I saw the first book on Audible and picked it up. (I do that fairly often; buy the audiobook of something I have in hard copy, but haven’t read.)
Eddie is a middle-aged merc who has retired from the heavy lifting of fighting in other people’s wars and set himself up in a small little pit of a town where the people who really need him (or are really desperate) can find and hire him. An elderly official comes to hire him. A princess is missing and there’s a fat reward on the table if Eddie can find her. (Don’t get too attached to this story, it wraps up quickly.) Before he can get back home and deal with the aftermath he gets waylaid by the well dressed fantasy equivalent of a black ops operative with an offer he can’t refuse.
The infant crown prince of a nearby kingdom has been brutally murdered and all indications are that the queen not only murdered her son while his nurse was in the room next door, but cannibalized him as well. The queen has no memory of what happened, the king is distraught, and the kingdom is about to rip itself apart. Normally, Eddie would steer well clear of anything this explosive, but he has a very personal connection with the king that doesn’t allow him to refuse. When he arrives, he discovers that things are even more complicated than he could have imagined.
Eddie is the kind of protagonist I can really get behind; he’s not perfect by any means, but he tries to do the right thing. He’ll find you if that’s what he’s hired to do, but then he makes his own decisions from there. He’s made mistakes and been a bastard and he owns up to that and I can relate to that. The story itself is crafted very well; you care about the characters, especially about Eddie.
The one thing I’ll caution about, although I actually liked it – the world is epic fantasy, but the language is modern and that could come across as odd. The names are things like Eddie, Mike, and Rachel. People use slang. It actually took me a little while to notice this since I was listening to the audio and the narrator was so committed that none of the modernisms came across as odd at all. I finally caught one about a third of the way through the book and suddenly realized that I’d been happily swallowing them for three hours.
So, that being said, I highly recommend it to everyone if you’re interested in adventures, noir detectives, or good stories. This is one of those books that I think would appeal to a wide range of readers (unlike, for example, my tawdry romances). I hope you give it a shot!
The Postal Challenge
Let me start by saying at that the Month of Letters Challenge starts on Saturday! This is a challenge, a movement if you will, started by Mary Robinette Kowal in an effort to get us to slow down, and take a little extra time with our communication. Here is what it’s all about:
I have a simple challenge for you.
- In the month of February, mail at least one item through the post every day it runs. Write a postcard, a letter, send a picture, or a cutting from a newspaper, or a fabric swatch.
- Write back to everyone who writes to you. This can count as one of your mailed items.
All you are committing to is to mail 23 items. Why 23? There are four Sundays and one US holiday. In fact, you might send more than 23 items. You might develop a correspondence that extends beyond the month.
Write love letters, thank yous, or simply notes to say that you miss an old friend. Let yourself step away from the urgency of modern life and write for an audience of one. You might enjoy going to the mail box again.
I participated last year and was very happy. I made some new friends and got to exchange lots of letters, which I love doing anyway. Then, while perusing the forums for possible correspondents, I came across mention of the Postal Challenge. Here is the intro from Melanie’s website:
What is the Challenge?
The key is to read and review books with a postal theme. These can be non-fiction on the subject of letter writing, collections of real letters, or epistolary fiction of any era. Be creative! Review each one and link back to the challenge — there will be quarterly roundup posts for you to link reviews and posts to as you create them.
The challenge runs from January 1st, 2014 to December 31st, 2014. You can sign up ANY TIME throughout the year.
Any books chosen can overlap with any other challenge, and rereads are allowed. Just remember to review them somewhere online in order for them to count toward the challenge. Lists don’t have to be made in advance, though feel free to share your choices and inspire other readers if you wish! I always think that making lists is half the fun 🙂
So, since that sounds awesome, I’m going to sign up at the Air Mail Express level. That means that I’m committing to reading and reviewing twelve postal themed AND sending more snail mail. Which isn’t a problem between the Month of Letters challenge and my general desire to support the USPS.
Here are a few books I know I want to read:
Here is the publisher’s blurb:
After the Ninth Duke of Rutland, one of the wealthiest men in Britain, died alone in a cramped room in the servants’ quarters of Belvoir Castle on April 21, 1940, his son and heir ordered the room, which contained the Rutland family archives, sealed. Sixty years later, Catherine Bailey became the first historian given access. What she discovered was a mystery: The Duke had painstakingly erased three periods of his life from all family records—but why? As Bailey uncovers the answers, she also provides an intimate portrait of the very top of British society in the turbulent days leading up to World War I.
Publisher’s Blurb:
In To the Letter, Garfield traces the fascinating history of letter writing from the love letter and the business letter to the chain letter and the letter of recommendation. He provides a tender critique of early letter-writing manuals and analyzes celebrated correspondence from Erasmus to Princess Diana. He also considers the role that letters have played as a literary device from Shakespeare to the epistolary novel, all the rage in the eighteenth century and alive and well today with bestsellers like The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. At a time when the decline of letter writing appears to be irreversible, Garfield is the perfect candidate to inspire bibliophiles to put pen to paper and create a form of expression, emotion, and tactile delight we may clasp to our heart.”
I’ll definitely get some novels in there too. It’s about time for me to do a re-read of Sorcery and Cecelia, which would be totally applicable. Do any of you have suggestions for me?
What to Read #10 – Beasts of Burden
Motorists couldn’t make it up the steep grade of I-20 east just east of Brompton causing a bottleneck of vehicles at the foot of the hill. This scene was common through Alabama today with travelers stranded in the storm. (Joe Songer/jsonger@al.com)
Before we talk about the amazing graphic novel I’m recommending today, I’d like to take a moment to talk about the snowpocalypse. I live in Birmingham, AL. We don’t typically get much snow. And today we were supposed to get a light dusting while areas in the southern part of the state were supposed to get hammered. So most of our road crews and equipment were dispatched to those regions to be ready. Yeah… it didn’t work out like they thought.
So, we’ve had roads closed, numerous accidents, stranded motorists, and tons and tons of people who have had to abandon their cars and walk, usually with a child or to meet a child at school. And yes, that all happened over less than 2″ of snow. But when you’ve got 2″ of snow and ice with no salt, sand, or plows, it’s a pretty big deal. So please, if you’re in an affected area, stay safe! Help where you can, and take a minute to throw a snowball or make a snow angel. And if you’re not in an affected area… just remember to be kind. Jokes will be funny in a few days when everyone’s home safe. Thanks.
Beasts of Burden: Animal Rites is a super fantastic graphic novel. The protagonists are a motley group of dogs (and one cat) who live in Burden Hill, which is kind of a New England version of Night Vale. Things look nice on the outside, but unearthly terrors seethe under the facade of picket fences and farm houses. However, the humans of Burden Hill seem oblivious to this. It is up to the intrepid band of animals to solve mysteries, stop murders, and generally take care of business. Sometimes at great personal cost.
I’ll be straight with you. This book will make you cry. At least once. Unless you don’t have a soul, but that’s a whole separate issue. Jill Thompson’s paintings are beautiful and Even Dorkin’s scripts are haunting. The series 
came about, apparently, when Dorkin was asked to write something for a horror anthology and decided to do a twist on the haunted house. He wrote, instead, about a haunted dog house. Now, I love a good talking animal as much, if not more, than the next person (Oberon from the Iron Druid series being a personal favorite right now), but these animals are something special. They’re a team and they’re adorable, which means it works so much better than just a motley collection of personality types should.
Please do yourself a favor and pick this book up. (There are a few more Beasts of Burden stories that didn’t make it into this collection. Of particular note, is a BoB crossover with Hellboy. It’s heartbreaking in all the best ways.
My 2014 Event Schedule
I go to lots of events throughout the year and some, though not all of them, connect to books in some way. At the very least, I’m likely to talk about them here, so I thought I’d give you a quick rundown of my events for 2014.
AnachroCon – February 14-16 in Atlanta, GA
AnachroCon is basically about history and geekdom. Steampunk, alternate history, historical reenacting, time travel… It’s all fair game. I’m going mostly for the costuming and fabrication panels. I’m hoping to have a Regency costume finished, but if not, I’ve got plenty of steampunk costumes I can wear. I’m especially fond of my doctor’s costume.
Photo from the author’s website
JordanCon – April 11-13 in Roswell, GA
JordanCon is a celebration of all things Robert Jordan. The Guest of Honor this year is Patrick Rothfuss, which is pretty exciting. Of course, Brandon Sanderson attends along with artist Larry Elmore. I attended my first JordanCon last year when the guest of honor was Seanan McGuire, who you may have noticed, I’m a fan of. I very sneakily got myself into their art show, so I could pretend that I wasn’t just going to fangirl. I fangirled anyway. But I also gave away some cool Rithmatist swag, so it was totally (semi)professional.
Magic City Art Connection – April 25-27 in Birmingham, AL
MCAC is one of the larger art shows here in Birmingham. This will be my third year as an attending artist selling my jewelry. Last year was difficult because I lost my voice on the second day of the show, but I’m hoping for great things this year. This will be the 31st year for the show, and I’m really excited about it. Hopefully, this year I can get someone to work my booth for a while so I can go visit the other artists. There are always amazing things to see there.
Alabama Phoenix Festival – May 30 – June 1 in Birmingham, AL
This is a great sci-fi convention. This will be APF’s third year and my third year as a vendor. I love this convention! It’s small, but growing. They’ve just moved from a conference center into the Sheraton Birmingham Hotel this year, which is exciting. Here’s a fantastic video from last year’s APF:
Disney Princess Leia and Steampunk Slave Leia take a moment together
DragonCon – August 29 – September 1 in Atlanta, GA
DragonCon is probably the biggest convention in the south and one of the biggest cosplay conventions in the country. I go every year and I’ve posted about it several times. It completely takes over the downtown Atlanta area for a weekend. Which is especially interesting because the Chick-fil-A Kickoff Game is also in Atlanta. The same weekend. Thousands of geeks meet thousands of SEC football fans. It gets a little weird sometimes.
Then there are the costumes… I love the costuming at DragonCon. I usually try to have a different costume for every day I’m there. I cheated this year and recycled one of them because my sewing machine broke. But I’m still pretty proud of my Steampunk Slave Leia costume. I put that together in a week.
Past highlights from DragonCon include meeting Dan Wells and Jonathan Maberry.
The Writing Excuses Crew (sans Dan) at the Hugo’s. Photo from Wesley Chu’s website – http://www.chuforthought.com/im-a-guest-on-writing-excuses/
The Out of Excuses Writing Retreat – September 29 – October 5 in Chattanooga, TN
I can’t even express how excited I am about this. The team from the Writing Excuses podcast (Brandon Sanderson, Mary Robinette Kowal, Dan Wells, and Howard Tayler) are doing their second week-long writing retreat! And I got in! I participated in one of Mary’s short story classes back in November and it was incredibly helpful. I’m so looking forward to spending an entire week with some great writers, and, of course, the authors running the retreat.
Mary is doing another workshop called Writing the Other in June, which sounds amazing. Two people from my writing group are going to that. I couldn’t swing the timing this year, but I sincerely hope she offers it again next year. The instructors she’s working with on that one are David Anthony Durham, K. Tempest Bradford, Mary Robinette Kowal, Nisi Shawl, and Cynthia Ward. It’s going to be so cool!
(Also, if the necklace Mary is wearing looks familiar, it’s because it’s the same one from further up the page next to the Magic City entry. I made it. It is one of the coolest things ever that she wore it. At the HUGO’S!)
World Fantasy Awards
Photo from Tartarus Press – http://tartaruspress.blogspot.com/2012/08/world-fantasy-awards-2012_13.html
World Fantasy Convention – November 6 – 8 in Arlington, VA
Ok, this one… This is a big deal to me. This will be my first major professional convention. This is a small event (relatively speaking. I think the attendance will equal or exceed my college’s total enrollment) and fairly intimate. The World Fantasy Awards will be given out. It’s going to be amazing. I’m hoping to manage a ticket to the banquet as well, but we’ll see. Everyone can come to the awards ceremony, so I’ll get to see that regardless.
There’s an art show, which I’ll be applying to when the jury opens in May. There’s also a WWI Retrospective, which I’m very much looking forward to.
So, that’s my schedule. Are any of you going to exciting events this year?
Author Intro: C.A. Belmond
It’s no particular surprise to know that I do, unfortunately, judge books by their covers. Give me a beautiful cover and I will try so very, very hard to love your book. On the other hand, give me a bland cover and I may pass it by unless I have a compelling reason to seek it out.
Shades of Milk & Honey is a perfect example of that. I sort of vaguely meant to read it because it looked Jane Austen-y and had a great title, but I never quite got around to actually picking it up and finding out what the bloody book was about. Then Glamour in Glass came out and the cover caught my attention at once. When I discovered that it was a second book I darted over to the shelf and grabbed Shades of Milk & Honey, which I read in a day and a half. My lackluster response to the cover kept me from a book that I love just because it didn’t look… exciting I guess. Still very much something I would read, but not something I had to read RIGHT NOW, if that makes sense.
Titles are another place where you can snag me immediately or lose me pretty completely. Sorcery & Cecelia: or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot… how am I not going to pick that up? Or, Flora Segunda: Being the Magickal Mishaps of a Girl of Spirit, Her Glass-Gazing Sidekick, Two Ominous Butlers (One Blue), a House with Eleven Thousand Rooms, and a Red Dog? That’s like catnip to me.
So, when I encountered a book with the title, A Rather Lovely Inheritance, which had a charming antique car on its cover I took it home. And was very glad that I did.
C.A. Belmond‘s books all center around Penelope Nichols (and yes, her parents call her Penny. And yes, she has red hair, “like a new penny”). Penny is an art historian who makes her living doing research and set design for made-for-tv historical movies; the sort of thing we had before we had Downton Abbey. Light on the accuracy, but heavy on the period setting and the romance. It’s a good job and Penny is good at it.
Her mother is a well known children’s book author who made her name writing about a Nancy Drew-like character named… Penny Nickles. The real Penny has been trying to get away from the girl detective image ever since.
That is, until her Great-Aunt Penelope passes away and leaves Penny a minor bequest. Penny’s inheritance includes Penelope’s beautiful antique car, which somehow seems to hold a mystery.
Penelope’s estate is further complicated by the fact that there is an English will and a French will, necessitating a trip to the French Riviera in the company of Penny’s solicitor cousin, Jeremy. The two cousins were once childhood friends, but time and the onset of adulthood have created distance between them.
Penny just wants to get the inheritance straightened out so she can go back to her life, but all is apparently not what it seems. Other family members seem terribly interested in Penny’s inheritance, and it isn’t long before Penny and Jeremy realize that to straighten things out in the present they are going to have to solve the mysteries left in Aunt Penelope’s past.
After the first book, Penny and Jeremy decide to set up a business together investigating unusual art historical mysteries. Their very first case involves a missing artifact that might have had ties to Beethoven. The third case takes them to France and a distant branch of Penny’s father’s family. The mystery there centers on a medieval tapestry. The fourth book has to do with proving that a house, once again connected to the family, should have landmark status and thus save it, and the village its adjacent to, from grasping developers looking to put up McMansions.
Penny and Jeremy get to travel enough that the reader gets a mini tour of western Europe while reading. The interaction between the characters is occasionally frustrating, they spend much of the second book not communicating very well, but as that’s a major plot-point I don’t find it nearly as irritating as if it were, say, a side plot in one of my regular romance novels. And, it’s just in the one book, so that’s refreshing; Belmond doesn’t trot out the trope over and over.
These are the quintessential beach-read for me. They’re light and fun, without being empty. They aren’t the literary equivalent of cotton candy, but neither are they a steak. I’d say they’re more along the lines of a chicken salad and fruit plate – there is plenty of opportunity to develop complex flavors, but nothing is overwhelming and it doesn’t sit heavily in your stomach when you’re done.
And now I’m hungry…
A Rather Curious Engagement, A Rather Charming Invitation, and A Rather Remarkable Homecoming are the other books in the series.
Hunting Shadows Review
Charles Todd is one of my favorite authors right now. (Yes, I know it’s actually a mother/son writing team, but that’s complicated to explain, so I’m just going with author.) He writes in the circa WWI period that I’m so dreadfully fond of. The Bess Crawford series is set during the war. Bess is a nurse and the first book opens with the sinking of the Britannic, so the series isn’t pulling any punches. For all that, it’s actually the more hopeful of the two series. Bess is strong, young, and, despite the horrors she witnesses, she still has faith in justice and human decency. Beth solves crimes because she can and because she cannot abide for them to go unsolved.
Ian Rutledge, on the other hand, is a Scotland Yard detective in the 1920’s. He was an officer during the war and has returned home with a severe case of shell shock, which takes the form of a ghost from his past. Hamish MacLeod was Ian’s corporal and best friend on the battlefield until he disobeyed a direct order. Ian had no choice, but to execute. Now, Ian’s guilt has manifested itself as Hamish’s ghost. Although the ghost proves helpful in Rutledge’s cases, often warning him of danger, it is only so that Ian cannot die to escape his guilt. Rutledge investigates because he is driven to. He is altogether a less restful companion than Bess even though she is the one most likely to come under shelling at any moment.
Hunting Shadows is the sixteenth Ian Rutledge mystery (Out January 21 from Harper Collins). A sniper has murdered two men; one at a society wedding outside Ely Cathedral and one at a political rally in a small village nearby. Rutledge is sent with instructions to wrap the case up quickly, but clues are remarkably hard to come by. The only witness to glimpse the murderer describes him as a monster and the local police refuse to credit her story. There is nothing linking the two men; one was career army and the other served the Navy as a civilian consultant in Edinburgh during the war before returning home to take up his law practice.
Ian is sure that the answer must lie with the war some how. A single suspect rises above the others, one who was in love with the wife of the first victim, but there is nothing tying him to the second corpse. Instinct insists that Rutledge delve deeper, but with pressures mounting from Scotland Yard, does he have the time to indulge his feelings, feelings that have betrayed him more than once?
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It was not quite as grim as some of Todd’s books in this series. There was, as usual, plenty of background information on the war, this time focusing on the snipers. Snipers were, apparently, considered sort of dirty among the British ranks. It wasn’t the thing to shoot at someone who didn’t know you were there. The outraged sense of fair play may have been helped along by the fact that the Germans were employing snipers very efficiently.
I am, by no means, a military historian. I do read extensively in the time period, both modern stories set in the circa-WWI era and fiction written in and around the time. I think Wilfred Owen and a trip to the Imperial War Museum in London are to blame for my interest in the period. Well, and the fact that my Mother was obsessed with WWII. I couldn’t be interested in the same thing she was, so I devoted my attention to the preceding war. And I like the fashions.
As an aside, one of my favorite authors, Mary Robinette Kowal, has a WWI book coming out in 2016 (I think), called, for the moment, Ghost Talkers. As she describes it, the spiritualist movement works exactly as advertised so the War Office can get immediate updates from the front. I cannot tell you how excited I am about reading this book. And it kills me a little that I won’t get to for two years.
Medusa's Library 