I have been trying to read Gideon the Ninth for four months. That may not sound like much, but this book is 100% my jam and I still could not focus on it enough to get it read. Finally, I re-upped my Audible account and got it as an audiobook read by Moira Quirk. I have plowed through it in a couple of days and dear lord it is as fucking fantastic as you all said it was.
Moira Quirk’s narration let me embrace the insanity in a way my brain could not with the written word on a screen. While I had had a very different voice in my head for Gideon, relaxing into the narration let me embrace Harrowhark, Palamedes, Camilla Hecht, and Dulcinea.
No matter what it is I want to focus on, I need something to focus against. Listening while I walked, and cooked and cleaned the house allowed me to let go of trying to figure out what was happening and let the story unfold. Gideon the Ninth needs to be allowed to unfold. It is intricate origami that comes apart and the beauty is not only in the finished product but in watching it come apart and then reassemble.
I don’t read fanfiction, mostly because AO3 terrifies me and a little bit because I’m afraid I will never read a new book again if I go down the rabbit hole of fanfic. I do love fan art though and I have entertained myself looking at the #griddlehark tag on twitter. I will imagine a million different endings than the one that happened, and a million different possibilities for the forthcoming Alecto the Ninth. This is a spoiler for what happens near the end of the book – don’t watch it unless you have read the book.
Boarded out part of the last fight scene from GTN… we do bones, mothef💀cker!!! #GideonTheNinth #TheLockedTomb pic.twitter.com/epi3kum2sD
— vanessa kwan ⚔️ (@nesynn) January 20, 2021
I enjoyed this so much. A big thanks to andtheIToldYouSos, JenK, MsWas, Little Plat, Aqillia, pixifer, Angry Dimples and the million of you who kept reminding me that I wanted to read this book.
WELCOME TO THE CLUB!!!!!! HOORAY!!!!!
Wow, your reasons for not getting into fan fic are similar to mine: productivity would never be the same again. And there are some VERY talented artists doing work based on The Locked Tomb right now
I haven’t seen that tweet/animation before. Thats amazing!
Instead of replying to your comment, I went and looked at more fanart. It just reinforces for me that fanfiction would become my life if I ever started reading it.
I let the art come my way through the Tor instagram…if I sought it out, I’d never stop!
I will be reading this starting 2/1. EXCITE!
P.S.”I don’t read fanfiction, mostly because AO3 terrifies me and a little bit because I’m afraid I will never read a new book again if I go down the rabbit hole of fanfic.”
This is actually a real possibility and you should be afraid. I am currently struggling to pay attention to Dune because I have read about 10 fanfics instead and I would just like to keep doing that.
Right? I already have so many books I want to read that I get anxious about being able to read them all. I would be happier if I could segment off my brain and let different parts enjoy different books and then maybe come together for book chat at the end of the day.
I read on fanfiction.net for a while, and then at some point I drifted away from it and was fanfic free for a number of years until I took the plunge into AO3 sort of mid-2019?
But I will say that I went from reading ~50 books a year pre-2019 to 140/130 in 2019 and 2020, so reading fanfic made me get back into voraciously reading books as well!
It is V. V. addictive though >.<
With having posted my “Total Cat Mojo” review, I can finally start Gideon!
Ok, but please remember to appreciate Ponyo, Sosuke and Wall-E while you read. I have been wanting to get cats again, but with my landlady’s very territorial terrier, it probably wouldn’t be a good idea. Still. I can dream.
ONE OF US
ONE OF US
I totally agree that this book was so very difficult to follow along with, somehow. Like I’m still not entirely sure I could lay out for you where the characters were for most of the book. A few weeks out from reading it, I’m much more down for reading the next one but I still wish it had slightly *better* queer rep!
I do like my books with queer rep to have happy endings, but I generally have to look to romance for that.
It kept getting billed as lesbian necromancers, to a degree that I felt sort of…bait and switched. (Don’t get me wrong, I assume the plot arc will swing back to a happyish ending over three books) (but I was not prepared for where it was going to end, even though normally I would have expected it, because of the reviews)
Moira Quirk’s narration is just SO good. I especially loved the dreadful teenagers and how much they whined. I still haven’t had the brain space to start Harrow the Ninth, but it’s waiting for me.
I’m reading this right now, and I just met the whining teenagers! They made me laugh out loud.
magnusssssssss