Outside of a Dog: Brust, Steven, and Emma Bull: Freedom and Necessity [personal] post-wedding post

Martin Wisse

Martin Wisse wrote on June 4, 2002 at 9:21 AM:

Yeah!

Congratulations to you both and may you have a long and happy marriage ahead of you --you know you'll stay together when you stop worrying about which books are yours and which are his....

Kate

Kate wrote on June 4, 2002 at 3:02 PM:

Thanks very much, and we're already planning to merge the collections, once we have space to get all my books out of boxes and see what we actually *have*...

Kylee Peterson

Kylee Peterson wrote on June 4, 2002 at 4:45 PM:

Congratulations from a random person off the street.

I read Freedom and Necessity for the first time last year -- I had somehow gotten the idea that it would be boring, foolish as that is given the authors -- and I noticed that all of the romances I enjoy in novels have the "honor is important" theme. I wish I could read Komarr without knowing the characters at all to see what I would think of it there.

Kate

Kate wrote on June 4, 2002 at 8:34 PM:

Hey, thanks. Hmm, honor as a theme in romances--besides Bujold & F&N, I'm not even sure what else would qualify. What do you have in mind?

Kate

Kate wrote on June 5, 2002 at 2:10 PM:

I'm not entirely sure that's honor, rather than self-preservation. But perhaps.

Martin Wisse

Martin Wisse wrote on June 5, 2002 at 2:53 PM:

The Lord Peter/Harriet Vane romance perhaps?

Katxena

Katxena wrote on June 5, 2002 at 4:17 PM:

Happy news! What a lovely quote. I seem to remember that you've read Ex Libris -- but I don't see it in your index. The essay in there about marrying book collections is very funny, and for me proved prophetic.

Sue

Sue wrote on June 5, 2002 at 6:12 PM:

Congratulations! I too was going to mention the Ex Libris essay, but I see I've been beaten to it...

Kate

Kate wrote on June 5, 2002 at 7:53 PM:

Thanks, guys.

And, heh--Chad read Ex Libris, not I, though I may read that bit.

I suppose I'm just too much of a certain kind of practical (or cheap) to be happy with the idea of buying two copies of the same book. We're going to keep the hard-to-find stuff, probably, and I'm not giving up my beloved used editions of Fionavar with the original cover art (the poster of The Darkest Road's cover currently hangs over the computer), but other than stuff like that... Also, we tend to treat the physical volumes in similar ways, which helps a lot.

We definitely realize that it's a very tangible expression of this whole commitment thing, though.

Kylee Peterson

Kylee Peterson wrote on June 5, 2002 at 7:54 PM:

I'm not sure that honor is so different from self-preservation. It's the defense of a particular part of oneself, the part with easily eroded principles and the belief that the right thing is worth doing. So it's not too surprising that I was thinking partly of Wimsey and Vane.

The most recent thing I read that dealt with the issue was Kushiel's Dart, and I wasn't satisfied with it. It is prejudiced of me, but when someone's faced with a choice that's impossible to resolve without some kind of loss, I really prefer that they choose against romance-genre cliche. Discussing this without spoilers, even though they're spoilers that seemed obviously foreordained to me, is getting difficult, sorry. Anyway, a good point was made later about the character's choice being the most true that could have been made, but it was still a bit sour for me.

Kate

Kate wrote on June 5, 2002 at 8:12 PM:

Kylee--Hmmm. I can sort of see what you mean about honor and self-preservation, but all the same, Harriet's dilemma seems far more basic to me than that: absorption of the complete self, rather than some actions that aren't consistent with one's principles.

But all the same I like the Sayers for the same reason I like F&N, the reason I quoted that bit: I hate the idea that love is a free pass or a good reason for, or necessarily results in, abandonment of the self.

(I'm planning to pass on the Kushiel books, as I suspect that they would go down the wrong way.)