Not done one of these in a while; acquired a few new titles in the interim, but workload throughout the institution has necessitated the, ah, temporary shelving of outreach activities in the accessions division*. Rather than go back and catch up, we’re just picking up from the present moment.

So: I’ve never actually read The Last Unicorn before, but I was exposed to a pirated VHS copy of the animated movie at a very impressionable age—7, perhaps? It was during the time my family lived in Saudia Arabia, at any rate, and roughly coincident with my encountering Anne McCaffery’s Pern novels—and it became a foundation stone in my personal cosmology as a result. (I might go so far as to argue that it primed me for a post-structural understanding of story long before I ever encountered the notions of narratology). I have no idea how close the book and the movie may be, but I intend to find out… and it’s nice to be able to remunerate Beagle in the process of revisiting a story that was effectively stolen from him.

The Claire North because I was blown away by her Notes from the Burning World—which I still argue is the best work of solarpunk yet produced, despite apparently being completely unrecognised by that scene—and wanted to see what she can do with the remix-a-myth genre. I guess I’m hoping for something in the line of Le Guin’s Lavinia, though that may be an unfairly high bar to set for anyone. We’ll see, I suppose.

[ * Among the many travails of the institution has been the necessity of relocating this and a number of affiliated websites to a new hosting company. This process appears to have been successfully completed as of yesterday; it is hoped that no disruption has been experienced. ]