Craft Knife: April Favorites: Cows are More Emotionally Available Than King Charles, and Mary Poppins is an Accurate Portrayal of London

Here's how I've been disassociating from the real world this month!

The Locked Tomb Series

My college student (and, okay, Tiktok...) is my best source of books. She reads like she won't live through the day if she hasn't mown through two fantasy novels, the latest issue of three comic book series, and at least one chapter of a boring non-fiction book about Mongolia. I always act on her book recommendations, even if they don't gel for me right away... as Gideon the Ninth did not.

I started reading Gideon the Ninth, then immediately complained to my kid, "I don't know what's happening."

She was all, "I know. Keep going."

A chapter later, I noted, "I still don't know what's going on, and everything is gross."

She was all, "Yup. don't stop tho."

Sixty-five pages in, I looked up with frantic eyes and exclaimed "I DO NOT KNOW WHAT IS HAPPENING IN THIS BOOK WHY AM I SO OBSESSED OMG GIDEON IS MY FAVORITE PERSON EVER!!!!!!!"

Three books later, I am literally on Tumblr scrolling fan posts and fanart to get my Gideon fix because the next book is not going to be out until at least January, sob!

The Locked Tomb series is something that you just have to go with. It's a particularly great reading experience if you've always considered yourself such a clever girl, because there is no way you're going to understand what is going on half the time... and yet it's still so compelling!

Fortunately, perseverance is rewarded. When I read the second book, Harrow the Ninth, I did not understand what was happening in that book AT ALL, but I finally understood (some) of what had been going on in Gideon the Ninth. And when I read Nona the Ninth, I did not understand that one at all, BUT I figured out most of Gideon and a little more of Harrow.

I cannot WAIT for Alecto the Ninth!

Read this if you want to see an awesome sci-fi/fantasy mash-up, if you've secretly got a quiet little internal Goth/emo vibe going on in your heart, and if you love excellent character development and want to absolutely fall in love with/become obsessed with your favorite characters.

Bonus points if you can get a buddy to read it, too, because all my college student and I do these days is gossip about Ortus and tell each other facts about the social-emotional capacity of cows.

The British Royals

I've loosely followed the British royal family since I was a kid--I woke up SUPER early to watch Princess Diana's wedding from the carpeted floor of my grandparents' house, woke up super early to watch her funeral from the gross old gold velvet couch of my first real apartment, bought my little kids heart-shaped doughnuts in honor of William and Kate's wedding, and casually followed along with the gossip in subsequent years.

My teenager shares my casual interest, so she and I happily made Queen Elizabeth II's death into a WHOLE THING, in which we literally ate snacks while watching her funeral coverage and gossiping. Having teenagers is my favorite thing!

Because I'm really just here for the gossip, I avidly read Spare the second it came through from my Holds queue at the library. Just to put it right out there, I am FIRMLY on team Harry/Meghan. Like, Harry is clearly a big, dumb ginger who rarely gets a turn at the shared brain cell, but on the other hand, I don't think the royal family, other than Princess Diana, actually loved their kids? And Diana's love, let's just be real here, was also a little... problematic, if problematic is really the best word to describe a mother who showers her children with affection and adoration and then fucks off and goes no-contact for months at a time, leaving the kids with a coterie of cold, emotionless adults who see family as a public-facing business. But at least she didn't throw her kids under the bus of public scrutiny in order to make herself look marginally better, which I firmly believe that Charles regularly does.

But seriously, look at what poor little baby Charles had to deal with:

What better way to greet your three-your-old, whom you haven't seen in weeks and whose birthday you missed, than with a warm... shoulder squeeze?

Unfortunately, NOBODY in the family would also read Spare just to humor me and let me have someone to roast the royals with, so instead I listened to the episode on Spare from Celebrity Memoir Book Club and pretended that the hosts and I are best friends:

Nobody will watch The Crown with me, either, so I'm catching up with Season Four on DVD all by myself, and pretending that Season Five doesn't exist yet because I don't have Netflix.

Ooh, maybe my AirBnb luck will hold and our London AirBnb's Smart TV will be logged into someone else's Netflix account! Bootlegging former guests' streaming services is my favorite thing about AirBnb.

On the way home from dropping my kid back at college the other week, I was able to binge the entire run of The Second Elizabethan Age on Spotify:

I did appreciate the overall look at the politics and media of Queen Elizabeth II's reign, but overall it was only okay. If you've got any better podcast recs for coverage of the British Royals (or a Netflix password you're happy to share), please send them my way! You'll find me hanging out on my bed with my teenager and watching Coronation coverage on Youtube--the teenager has already requested homemade Victoria sponge, so we'll be well-provisioned for our vigil.

Trip Planning

I'll post another time about "proper" trip planning--you know, figuring out the itinerary and trying not to blow our budget on hard cider and how to convince teenagers to visit just one more museum without later being smothered by them in your sleep... but obviously, the most important part of planning a big trip is figuring out all the thematically-relevant books and movies and albums to consume!

Academically, since I want to use our England studies and trip as a unit study credit on my teenager's high school transcript, we're currently reading (an abridged version of, because OMG) Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur. I love place-based studies, so I'm eager to talk about the impact of the setting on the scenes of Arthur's birth and death, in particular, as we walk around Tintagel Castle and Glastonbury Tor this summer. I want to compare it to Susan Cooper's unhinged Dark is Rising series, which the older three people in our family unit still talk about after binging the entire series together on a long-ago road trip... but it turns out that that road trip? Oops, it was twelve years ago and for some reason my teenager insists that she doesn't remember a ten-hour audiobook series that she listened to over a two-week period at the age of four. SIGH! If we ever finish listening to the adventures of Lancelot, God's Greatest Idiot, then (even the abridged Le Morte is over nine hours long!), I'm hoping we'll have time to swing through at least the first couple of Dark is Rising books. Perhaps that's what we should do during the second week of our trip when we're driving around the English countryside!

My college student comes home for summer break next week, and I'm currently machinating how I can convince everyone to choose a Jane Austen book as our first family audiobook of the summer--this is actual footage of us in our family free time:

The kids LOVED Pride and Prejudice, so Sense and Sensibility would be the obvious choice, but I kind of want to go in a different direction so they don't pigeonhole Austen. Perhaps Persuasion, even though we won't actually be going to Bath?

For Family Movie Night funsies, here are my contenders so far: