Jan. 25th, 2011

fic rec

Jan. 25th, 2011 01:38 pm
lotesse: (sarcasm!)
The Birthright, by Bekah. This is a long Pride and Prejudice class-reversal au that's really almost deliciously hyper-romantic. Darcy and Wickham with their positions swapped - so Wickham is the eligible young bachelor and Darcy has the living at Kympton that canon!Wickham chose not to take. Very much Austen as crossed with Eliot - lots of loving descriptions of strong masculine bodies at work, but still fundamentally hopeful of the possibility of true heterosexual love.
lotesse: (books_colouredbook)
We bought books today! Well, used ones - but I like those best. Shiny hardcover copies of The History of Middle Earth volumes 3 and 5 for me, which I only had in increasingly battered paperback, and a copy of my very own of Anne McClintock's Imperial Leather, and I Am Spock for The Boy, who is silly.

One of the reasons why I've been staying out of the e-book piracy debate is that I so rarely buy new things. I haven't bought clothes new in a shop - except bras, and one pair of jeans a year - in ages. Everything in my life's Goodwill or handmedowned, and it's been that way as far back as I can remember. My mama discovered thrifting as a steelworker's kid in the 1970s, and the family's never been the same since.

In terms of books, what little I buy comes to me used. Coursework books come in from Amazon every semester, it's true - but I also rely heavily on the privileged access to libraries I've got. The Uni library is immense, with interlibrary loan and student e-book access to back it up. I can get any book I want, pretty much, and my checkout limit's ridiculously high. I've got a decent public library for my kidlit fix if I don't want to be seen with YA. I have downloaded illegal e-books before, but only because it's too damn cold to get up off my ass and drive down to the Uni library and pay for parking - and also because I really like having fulltext search as a feature!

The ethics of borrowing and secondhanding are interesting - on the one hand, thrifting gives me an really nice out from the culpability of participating in unethical labor systems. But on the other I'm still wearing clothes, and those clothes were still, I'm sure, made under appalling labor conditions, so it's not really an out so much as a dodge. I'm not giving money directly to Target or Wallmart or Forever21, but neither am I radically bucking the system.

But with my books - either I'm paying for access via tuition and service to the University, but it really just feels like I'm part of a system with a fairly arbitrary reading perk. Which I don't particularly deserve, and which many other people more than deserve access to. If I didn't have that access, I've no idea what I would do, or how I'd square my finances and my reading habit. I do know that in the 18 years I lived before Napster, I bought a grand total of four cds: Loreena McKennit, Britney Spears, and the soundtracks to The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers. Apart from that, I listened to the radio - because it wasn't perfect, but it was free.

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