Legend of the Seeker: A Bunch of Hot People Having Exciting Adventures That Involve Magic

Legend of the Seeker the TV show is based on a terrible series of books by Terry Goodkind. I mean, I picked up the series thinking "All right, this probably isn't going to be very good," and it was WORSE THAN MY LOW EXPECTATIONS.

However. A tv series was made and aired a few years ago on ABC and I watched the first few episodes and went OMG THIS IS THE BEST BUT ALSO THE WORST BUT ALSO THE BEST.

Basically, Legend of the Seeker is the prettiest. The writing's cliché, the acting's so-so, and its special effects are those of fair to middling sci-fi/fantasy, BUT. The Pretty cannot be ignored.

And the clichés are kind of comforting. Like in the pilot, one of the characters not only says "Who are you to decide a man's destiny?", but also "Prophecy be damned!" So you can predict most of what people are going to say (ex: when the hero tries to interfere and save the girl in the pilot, the villain says something along the lines of "Get out of my way, boy!"), which essentially means you don't have to focus on things like "the script", but can just sort of stare at the very attractive actors they cast and the place in which they filmed (New Zealand).

The central character is this young guy who didn't know he was totally special and awesome, but one day gets told he IS, and he has to save the world, and it's basically Harry Potter, Darkness Is Rising and Everything Else Ever.

But I really, really don't care. Because I just look at the two leads, giggle kind of stupidly and say "YOU'RE SO PRETTY." (by the way, the pilot really does kind of suck, but the show swiftly improves, so POWER THROUGH and get to prettiness and Hitherto Unknown Levels of Unresolved Sexual Tension)

So the pilot opens, and you see galloping horses. Not surprising for a medieval-type show. Then there are pretty dresses. *ears perk up* Then there's long hair, bows and arrows and the heroine it turns out is like 5'10. Oh hi BEST SHOW EVER.

Then THIS happens:

"Heyyyyy Craig Horner"

That is the SECOND SCENE. I applaud the people at ABC for not trying to make "art" or "say something", but instead giving us a horse chase involving kickass women, followed by a hot guy chopping wood. I am so on board with this show that I have named myself the skipper.

So Richard (Hot Guy) is super-special, and his protector is Hot Girl (Kahlan -- "Kay-len") who's the lady in white above, and because they're both MEGA-HOT but they can't be together because of MAGIC, there's awesome tension ALL THE TIME, and also there's this old wizard guy who travels with him and continually prevents them from having sexytimes even though they both REALLY want to because they're both soooo attractive. Oh, and one of the main reasons the old wizard guy's preventing them is because Kahlan will steal Richard's soul if they do it.

"How YOU doin'?"

It's only two seasons. It was filmed in New Zealand, so in addition to its pretty, pretty people it has gorgeous background shots. Oh yeah, and this kind of thing happens all the time, because ABC just doesn't even try to mask what this show's about:

Ah, the first of many shots of Kahlan Cleavage

Oh yeah, also DARKEN RAHL. Who is the villain and also dresses like a modern magician a lot of the time. Lots of vests with no shirt under them. Also there's the Mord Sith, who're basically villainous BDSM ladies. And I have not even SCRATCHED. THE SURFACE. So much greatness. Watch this. Then we'll all chat about how amazing Kahlan's hair is. Yes. Excellent.

Hamilton: "Had I read Sterne more and Voltaire less, I should have known the world was wide enough for Hamilton and me."

I FINISHED IT. THE ONLY ACTUAL IMPORTANT DEADLINE FOR THE READALONG AND I DID IT. The sense of accomplishment, it is as rich as I had expected. Because this was not only a two month readalong, but a grueling two month readalong. I acknowledge this! But who wanted to be reading this book for three months? I thought not. I have read ALMOST NOTHING ELSE this year, but I'm going to openly declare that it was worth it. Why?

1) The immense length of this ostensible biography actually led to it being an overview of early American history, making me feel like for the first time I have some real notion of how our country was formed

2) Politics were as screwed from the very beginning of America as they are now. Everything's not about to collapse. It's all going to be fine. 

3) I don't like Aaron Burr, but him saying "my friend Hamilton, whom I shot" is pretty funny.

4) Also, Burr's heart described as "stuffed with cinders raked from the fires of hell" is maybe a bit strong.

5) "His spirit is in heaven and his form in the earth and I am nowhere any part of him is."

You know the best thing of the Hamilton cast recording? When you're done sobbing over Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story, you can press play again and everyone lives again.

Thanks for doing this readalong, guys. I know it was hard. But we learned so much! And if you haven't finished yet, I BELIEVE IN YOU.

Hamilton: The Almost-Final Hamiltoning

Let's imagine an alternate universe, a simpler one, perhaps, where instead of coming home and watching old Simpsons episodes while eating chocolate-covered frozen bananas, I read Hamilton, the book whose readalong I'm leading. Wouldn't that be something.

But no, it's Simpsons and frozen bananas all the way down the line for me, so what I have to give unto you all this week, OUR PENULTIMATE WEEK, is a lovely linkup situation so I can read your all's posts on this book that everyone will feel highly gratified to have finished so that we may continue with our reading lives.

As I read this past week, I found myself coming to a feeling of almost total detachment from politics today. Everything always feels so urgent, and if this person gets elected, then this horrible thing will happen, but if this person gets elected, then this other horrible thing will happen. Well, Hamilton and Jefferson were both convinced if the other one got power, everything would go to hell. Both of them got power, and whatever, things seem fine. Reading this in an election year makes it all seem even more relevant than otherwise. Good job making your musical popular right now, Lin-Manuel Miranda.

Link-up below!

Frances Willard's immense sadness

FRANCES WILLARD. You got your shit together on such a massive scale later in life, and you led the first international women's organization and you helped refugees and you were responsible for so many social programs, but when you were 20! You were such a tormented young lady.

Only feeling romantic love for women must have been so ridiculously confusing in 1860, and to have your best friend in the whole world who you were secretly in TOTAL CRAZY LOVE WITH be engaged to your brother must have been so incredibly painful and perplexing. You're supposed to be happy! She'll be in your life forever! But instead you're just jealous and angry and you feel like something's wrong with you and people are calling you abnormal and your brother's pulling you off to the side to tell you to cut it out and omg. 

20 year old Frances kills me, which is probably why I read that year more than any of the others in her online journals. She's engaged to a man named Charles Fowler after knowing him for a month. She very quickly realizes that what she feels for him isn't at all what she feels for her best friend Mary. Mary's engaged to Frances's brother Oliver, and everyone in this foursome is upset. The fact that Frances eventually broke her engagement to Charles speaks to me of her immense courage and inability to live a lie. She struggled with that decision. Her family told her not to do it. And she did it anyway.

Given that she kept her journals her whole life and made notes on them later, I'm astonished she didn't excise these passages. Frances Willard, you were just a kickass person:

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ours is such a Love as no two women ever had for each other, before. It is wild & passionate, deep & all-pervading. It is "abnormal." it is impossible, let him never so generous (the underscored pronoun having, this time, two applications) for this to be other than a painful& almost intolerable subject of thought. We cannot be together. Fate & circumstance decree it. O how hard it is, My Darling! my cherished, blessed, idolized Mary! It touches me-it lacerates my heart in its tenderest spot. (God forgive me-& not God only!-that this is so, though I have prayed & agonized & taught myself as best I could to have it-as you say it is with you-at least that way.) It stirs up the very depths of my nature. You are wound in with my heart of hearts. 

Can I help it? Is it wrong? Will God damn me for it? Did he send this Friendship which I thought my choicest Blessing only to poison it & turn it to a curse? What can I do? What must I do? I get no light-no answer. How I wrong the truth of my heart. (Whether it be a right truth or not.) Tonight when we turned listlessly & indifferently from each other ! I could have called you every dear, sacred name our language yields; I could have pressed you to my heart that used to be so proud & calm but aches & moans so steadily now; I could have kissed your lips & forehead a thousand times in one & looked into your beautiful, forgiving, regretful eyes till the tears stood in my own-& I would not.

It is for your sake-for theirs-for justice. O God! it hurts me so! You love me & it pains you, I am sure. I worship you, & it takes all the joy out of my Life. You have God left & Oliver. I have the keen belief that God is angry, that I am very wicked- that Charlie & I are estranged. How I wrong him! Who would think that I appreciated his nobleness & generosity-forgiving, forgetting, suffering. I would help it, if I could. I will try.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

OMG. How can that not kill, every time you read it? To see her at 20, writing all that out by hand, saying about this girl. "I worship you, & it takes all the joy out of my Life." How confusing, how terrible, how absolutely soul-castigating that time must have been for her. And who was she supposed to turn to? She was living in rural Illinois in the 1860s. The only support she had was from her mother, who while wonderful, was also among those who told her to keep her engagement to Charles Fowler.

Willard at 32, twelve years after the above quote

There can be nothing but gratitude for those great figures who allow the parts of themselves that are most flawed and most conflicted and most human to see the light of day, an act which can do nothing but inspire the rest of humanity and make them see that they can achieve as much as those who went before them.

Books. They're Pretty Great.

Let's talk about books.

Last Sunday, I was reading bits of various things I'm in the middle of, and all of a sudden the sole thought that came into my head was "Shit, I love books." If I might quote from The Thirteenth Tale, which is quite enjoyable, if not the best book ever, and you all should read it because it says lovely things like this:

People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in the ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic.

Look at that. Hot damn. I'm one of those people who gets all weepy in church when the service says "With believers in every time and place," because then you think back on HUMANITY and how we are LINKED and it is just great. 

Books are astounding, because Jane Austen can sit at her little desk in 1811 and write things down, and they can make teenage girls irate or all swoony in 2016. Jonathan Swift thought up Gulliver over 200 years ago and we're still talking about him. I can debate with someone about whether or not it's important to read Dickens's Barnaby Rudge (it's not), and we can argue the words and thoughts of this man who hasn't walked the earth since 1870, but because he wrote those words and thoughts down, part of his brain and spirit remain.

You can have a pile of books in front of you, and each one will have a different tone and purpose. Because books are so damn variable. And we're never going to be able to read all the ones we want to, but as my Victorian lit professor said in college: it's a much better problem to have too much to read than too little.

#HamAlong: John Adams is the best and Chernow can shut his face

I am especially bummed about being behind in my reading (YES, STILL) because this section talks about John Adams, and John Adams is my dude. So rather than say things like "how bad was 'Creole bastard' in the 1790s really?" and listen to Chernow talk about how terrible John Adams was, I'm going to talk about why I love John Adams.

THE YEAR WAS 1995 and a 5th grade Alice was watching 1776 the musical every day and writing short stories about it for class. John Adams sure was great in that.

THE YEAR WAS 2002 and a high school senior Alice was weirdly not finding any guys in her high school to have a crush on, so she decided she would say she was going to marry John Adams because he was short and talked all the time and argued with everyone and wore ruffled sleeves in a very becoming way.

she also had this picture in her locker

THE YEAR WAS 2010 and a 25-year-old Alice decided that for her golden birthday, she would go to Quincy, Massachusetts and visit all the John Adams spots because sure why wouldn't you do that for your 25th birthday.

The trolley on the National Parks tour

John and Abigail's home, Peacefield

Climbing onto pedestals and hugging statues, to the mortification of my friend

John and Abigail in the crypt of their Unitarian church

Abigail's sofa in the John Quincy Adams Library

Suck it, Chernow

John Adams is peevish and adorable and great. And I will forever owe him a debt of gratitude for being my high school beard. 

LINK-UP BELOW.

Mardi Gras Post!

It's Fat Tuesday! The tradition that echoes down to us from the medieval ages and possibly before, I don't know, I'm not going to Wikipedia for this. But back when people took Lent seemingly much more seriously, today was the last kickass day before Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent, where things involve deprivation and sadness. 

(by the way, my high school judged you if you gave up sugar or something dietary for Lent, because then you were doing it to look better and not for God #ChristianHighSchools)

If you threw your reading responsibilities to the wind, what would you read? What giant and/or trashy novels?

WELL. Personally, if I lived in a time lock like where the Daleks were exiled on Doctor Who and I could just take however long because TIME DOES NOT MOVE, I would read The Last of the Amazons, because my voice teacher keeps telling me I'd love it because it's all ladies and olden times, and to be honest, I would not be averse to reading some damn books about the Amazons.

Crimson Petal and the White. You guys. It's Victorian. It's meta. It's all about this one lady. Unbelievably gorgeous Romola Garai plays her in the film version. How have I not read this yet it's sitting right there on my shelf. Oh man. I want to read that thing. And yet here I am, reading Hamilton like it's my homework (it is) and Mindy Kaling's new book, and Men Explain Things to Me, which, granted, that last one's probably important because Feminism, and Humans Not Being Assholes Someday, but I still want to read meta stuff about a pretty Victorian lady.

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. IS THIS THE GRAVITY'S RAINBOW OF OUR GENERATION? Will it sit unread on our shelves for decades, minus a few smug bastards who finished it? I started this book and I genuinely think it's really good, but I haven't been able to stick with it. BUT. Given the aforementioned time lock situation, I would finish the shit out of that book.

I'd probably read a decent amount of not-great YA lit with an interesting premise. Anything with time travel, anything with monster hunting ladies, anything with insane asylums. Anything with "academy" in the title.

HAPPY MARDI GRAS.

HamAlong: I've lost count of which number we're on

How're you all feeling about Hamilton? Do you like him? While I assume he was likable, since the book keeps saying he was, I've kind of been pissed at him for a while. And this quote of his:

"I pledge myself to you and to every friend of mine that the strictest scrutiny into every part of my conduct, whether as a private citizen or as a public officer, can only serve to establish the perfect purity of it"

left a bad taste in my mouth about him, because sir. You have been having an affair for almost a year, and this is a baldfaced lie that you have said right here.

I mean. Everyone's human. People make mistakes. People do stupid, stupid things, and it doesn't make them "bad" people. But the Reynolds affair just straight-up sucked, which fortunately, after all the "fatal enchantress" etc comments, Chernow admits. Thank you, sir.

A lot of the rest was the Whiskey Tax (boooooo) and the French Revolution. Or rather the French Revolution after the execution of Louis XVI, when everything went bananas. Notre Dame was renamed The Temple of Reason, which, ahahahahahaha. Also, re the French ambassador to the U.S.:

On June 5, Jefferson had to tell Genêt to stop outfitting privateers and dragooning American citizens to serve on them.

That is amazing. "SIR. Stop making our citizens get on your boat."

Lastly for this section, whether for good or ill, the fighting between Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton makes you realize how literally nothing has changed in politics, and it's basically just always been terrible. I think this makes me feel somewhat despairing, actually, but at least when the Founding Fathers are held up as paragons of peace and virtue, now we can be like "O RLY because I have some anonymous newspaper columns from the 1790s that would beg to differ."

We're gonna finish this damn book.