What I’m reading... Thursday, 12/22

Tumblr was being uncooperative for… some portion of yesterday, okay.

Books: I started a Lord Peter Wimsey reread so I’m currently in the middle of Unnatural Death. And after surveying my entire TBR list of Kindle books to determine if any of them would satisfy the “book over 500 pages” category in the Read Harder challenge, I picked Gambled Away to read next–it’s 600 pages of historical romance novellas in which somebody is won/lost as stakes in a game and currently on sale for 99 cents! (http://ift.tt/2gTmfsg)

Books finished: 

Whose Body? (http://ift.tt/2hvIt0j) &

Clouds of Witness (http://ift.tt/2hvIt0j) by Dorothy L. Sayers

These are both rereads, though I think it’s been ten years since I read the entire series, so I was able to be surprised all over again by a few things (I posted a few favorite shippy bits from Whose Body? (http://ift.tt/2hh1Fme) and I need to type up the neurological explanation of PTSD and triggering that it includes–for something written in a popular detective mystery in 1923 (and therefore not including the words “PTSD” or “triggering”, of course) it was remarkably congruent to modern understanding, which makes me think about what avid reader from the 1940s might still have those ideas rattling around somewhere…

Anyway. Brilliant & highly recommended, of course.

Hold Me (http://ift.tt/2fzFzKn) by Courtney Milan

( You guys heard all about this yesterday. )

Fic: I currently have 10 fic tabs open, 41 things Saved for Later on AO3, and, oh, look, here comes Yuletide… O___O

Fic finished: 

(A sampling of stuff I’ve bookmarked recently–you can see all my bookmarks at http://ift.tt/2bFC4A9)

Where Is Thy Sting? (http://ift.tt/2hgUc6E) This is a WIP on the hydratrashmeme, but it’s up to part 11/? so you get a pretty satisfying chunk of story, and I think it’s pretty accessible to non-trash readers. This is an AU where Steve is found in 1947 and reunited with Peggy–and then, in 1954, Bucky is found as well, already having suffered a significant degree of programming (and significant abuses, including sexual), and Steve and Peggy are there to try to help him recover. The POV is Peggy’s, and I love everything about this perspective and this version of bringing Bucky in from the cold, her relationship with Steve, all of it. <3

Green Ice by Adina (http://ift.tt/2hvIu4n) I don’t think I ever realized that there was an expanded/completed version of the story that first appeared in Yuletide 2006, so I got to cry over Bertie all over again! For those not familiar, this is a Jeeves & Wooster/Lord Peter Wimsey crossover that seeks to reconcile the very different ways two mystery writers in the 1920s addressed the effects of the Great War on their military-aged main characters–Sayers delves into Peter’s trauma, while Wodehouse cheerfully ignores the whole bally thing. Which works as long as it’s allowed to work, and then…

Psychic AU (Hotel Heart & Safe as Houses) by Laughsalot3412 (http://ift.tt/1Ut7Kcj) Leverage OT3 where, as you might guess, psychics are a thing–Hardison is an empath who loves computers because they don’t feel things at him, Parker is a thief who uses her TK to assist her in jumping off of buildings, and Eliot… Eliot has been hurt and needs a team, even if he doesn’t realize it in the beginning. Rated T and there is indeed no actual sexual intimacy (the unexamined aceyness of the relationships is fascinating to me) but it’s tagged “Mind Rape” for Eliot’s pace and also for a lot of things that go on between Eliot and Hardison with dubious consent of the “no go ahead it’s fine, DAMMIT HARDISON I SAID IT’S FINE WHY ARE YOU LOOKING AT ME LIKE THAT” variety from Eliot. SO DELICIOUS. 

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in quite untechnical language

One last bit of Whose Body? that needed to be shared–this comes from quite near the end of the book but, out of context, doesn’t spoil anything: it’s a neurologist speaking to a WWI veteran who has recently suffered a nervous attack, a recurrence of his shell-shock. There’s a long diagnostic interview where they discuss the particular stressors that contributed to the attack and the patient’s history of such attacks, what caused them and what didn’t, and then the doctor proceeds to tell the patient about himself “in quite untechnical language.”

This book was written in 1923, which made it remarkable to me how thorough an explanation of the neurology of triggering and flashbacks it provided–and made available to any reader of mysteries in, say, the 20s-40s, regardless of what treatments were available.

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“Well, now. You know quite well that the strain you put on your nerves during the war has left its mark on you. It has left what I may call old wounds in your brain. Sensations received by your nerve-endings sent messages to your brain, and produced minute physical changes there–changes which we are only beginning to be able to detect, even with our most delicate instruments. These changes in their turn set up sensations; or I should say, more accurately, that sensations are the names we give to these changes of tissue when we perceive them: we call them horror, fear, sense of responsibility and so on.”

“Yes, I follow you.”

“Very well. Now, if you stimulate those damaged places in your brain again, you run the risk of opening up the old wounds. I mean, that if you get nerve-sensations of any kind producing the reactions which we call horror, fear, and sense of responsibility, they may go on to make disturbance right along the old channel, and produce in their turn physical changes which you will call by the names you were accustomed to associate with them–dread of German mines, responsibility for the lives of your men, strained attention and the inability to distinguish small sounds through the overpowering noise of guns.”

“I see.”

“This effect would be increased by extraneous circumstances producing other familiar physical sensations–night, cold or the rattling of heavy traffic, for instance.”

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(The doctor then goes on to recommend avoiding triggers forever rather than a program of careful exposure and desensitization to them, but he has some ulterior motives for that and anyway the patient ultimately does not take his advice.)

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