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There are many reasons why you should go and read Drink Up Thy Zider at

hd_career_fair . Here are several of them.

* It contains a Harry so palpably aged into comfort with his own strength that you could distill every Bond actor including David Niven, then Viggo Mortensen, Cary Grant, George Clooney, Daniel Autueil, Gerard Depardieu, and Olivier Martinez into one, and the resulting thespian would still be considered too wussy to play him in the film adaptation.
* Narcissa Malfoy and Pansy who was Parkinson appear and steal a multitude of scenes.
* The summary, notes and warnings alone are worth the price of admission.
* It contains this passage:
Harry snorted. Blaise would always be Blaise. He noticed that his guest was trying not to stare about him with his usual fascinated horror: the Etruscan Room always put Zabini off his stroke, which was precisely what Harry intended.

'What a very odd person Robert Adam was,' said Blaise, as he always did.

Which continues to have me in fits of laughter, and

shiv5468 and

raitala , that should really be all the two of you need.
* It is, without once referring to the BBC drama and indeed, with the very probable complete ignorance of the writer regarding the show, the single best HP-Merlin AU that it is possible to imagine.
* It contains such love for rural England that I could reach up and touch the laburnum, smell the muck on my boots and taste the milk that I left to cool in the stream before heading out on a ride.
* For those whose minds are made up by such things, there are sex scenes of vivid and entertaining detail. And Albus and Scorpius.
* And there is a world of such complexity and detail that I could draw maps and describe the relationships of characters to each other for several generations after a single reading, all of which felt like a wonderful chat with an erudite uncle to learn.

I know that some of you will have it opened in tabs in the background, waiting for time to devote to 40,000 words, and I fully grant you that the style is anything but generic. However, this was in fact one of the easiest reads I have found in fandom. It was like nothing so much as picking up and falling into Swallows and Amazons, as I did at the start of the year. Once you allowed the voice to take you on its journey, there were no bumps or halts, only a fast sail and a steady tiller.

So do make a cuppa, put out a plate of biscuits and turn off the telly for an hour. At the end of it, you will feel the joy of a thoroughly satisfying read. And an appalling desire for a tablespoon of clotted cream dropped into mulled cider.

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That's one rather emphatic rec... I *was* going to sleep early tonight, but apparent no longer :).

... and having read, I don't begrudge the missed sleep at all. Though I suspect I'll need to wqork hard to supress the tendency to peak in very measured sentences, complete with allusionary asides for the next several days :). Many thanks for the rec!.

Don't resist! Do call me while you are not resisting!

Hurrah! I knew you would feel similarly about it. PLU, you know ;-)

*adores*

No, seriously, thank you so much for that rec. It's not an easy fic for the usual H/D shipper (Also, if I may say that in small and brackets, age of readership may play a factor, too., but so so worth it. I'm going to print it out on nice paper and make myself a Christmas present of it. Because that story wants to be read from real paper.

* And there is a world of such complexity and detail that I could draw maps and describe the relationships of characters to each other for several generations after a single reading, all of which felt like a wonderful chat with an erudite uncle to learn.
Could have never put it like that, but exactly. Yes.

I agree! Paper is an excellent idea!

I hope I will understand the fic. I don't get a lot of the references in the warning and I am ashamed *bows head in misery* and I'm waiting to see how the readers feel about it :)

A good rec from you is always a good sign *bookmarks*

Don't be ashamed! Do what I do whenever Umberto Eco starts leaping into more languages than I can cope with and read for story not references. As it happens, most of the references are explained within the story as it moves along, so a lack of an education steeped in agriculture and Arthurian legend is not the drawback it may at first seem!

And then if you're left with any pressing questions: spontaneous fandom book club!

However, this was in fact one of the easiest reads I have found in fandom.

While I adore the story, I wouldn't consider it an easy read for many HP fans. Perhaps it's because I'm not British (and haven't read much English literature lately), but I didn't get many of the references. Therefore, it took a while for the story to begin to flow for me.

It was absolutely worth the time and effort spent getting to that point, but I can see how some might read a paragraph or two and then put it aside.

This is true, I think that the easiness needs to be seen in conjunction with the Swallows and Amazons reference. If you made it through Ransome, you will make it through this. Sort of the way that anyone who has read Catcher in the Rye is mentally set up for A Confederacy of Dunces.

From my glimpse into the first few 1000 words (and I can say first few thousands with this one) It's a very well written fic, certainly one of the best of the fest.

It's also very...English?
The feeling that I'm missing something crucial stays with me and never leaves.

I will do a complete read through soon.
Though instead of a cuppa, it will be a hot chocolate and peppermint milanos.

Ooooooohh! Fangirls over peppermint milanos. *wants*

Um. Sorry, Brammers. There are no peppermint milanos in Germany. And not the orange ones, either.

Mmmmmmm ... hot chocolate ...

Yes, it is very English, and it may be that there is a layer of connection made with the story that requires at the very least a passing fondness for hedgerows and/or hedgehogs, but if you accept that as just being the mood of the story and do not fight for every reference, most are self-explaining as the story moves on and it just means that everything reveals itself to the reader as though they were Draco in his quest for learning, so it works out well!

I thought it was delightful British (hugs it tightly just for that fact) and very, very original. I'm not too sure I'd declare it an easy read, but it was a highly entertaining and very fascinating one. And I was the first to comment. ;-)

You were, and I was thrilled to see you! I sometimes beta stories that I know will not find it wholly easy to find the audience they deserve, but when I saw your comment there, it was like seeing a favourite niece come home with a very nice young person of the gender of her choice after a wholly appropriate evening out ;-)

Blushes and dips a curtsey. :-)

I read it yesterday and LOVED it! Such an amazing story!

I agree!

*opens a tab*

Seriously, I just open tabs. I have no time for reading, but I keep opening them...

:)

And yeah for web/vid chat! We should figure that out sometime! Hee!!

I have it working! If you have a gmail address, their chat program has a Skypey/video thingy (MARVEL AT MY TECH SPEAK!!), so you can just click on it to load, install it, restart, and then you can video message anyone on your list who also has a video camera in their chat icon.

That said, I have no idea how much bandwidth it chews up, and may experience a nasty surprise later this month ;-)

You know, based on this, I'm going to try again. But I have a confession to make; I started this fic, and it defeated me. I could tell that it was special, that I should be reading it because there was so much there, and yet I've also never read anything that made me feel quite so much as if there was a punch line that everyone else knew, while I'd been unable to decipher the joke in the first place. Nor had I ever felt the gap in my education quite so keenly as when I was reading it. Someone once commented that my writing was flawed with 'crass Americanisms'; this fic made me feel that while we may, in theory, have a common language, we actually don't speak the same language at all. But I will persevere, Brammers, because I cannot imagine you reccing something so whole-heartedly that did not deserve to be read thoroughly.

You've just described me reading Foucault's Pendulum, which I picked up intending to read every word in and translating the ones that were in languages I did not understand. But, of course, I was studying, and performing, and living, and I put it down convinced I was a complete thickie.

And then I remembered an essay I had read that Umberto Eco had written, in which he talked about the fact that every text, every story, is always personal because we all bring different things to it. So even though I was missing a significant amount of his symbology, I was bringing my own and reading it in ways he couldn't.

I think the same thing applies to this story. The author and I have big crossovers and big differences in our personal experiences and outlooks, but a very shared language. And you're absolutely right that some of that is as non-accessible to non-English people (and, indeed, to English people who never leave the city) as asides about middle-German golems were to me.

But I think the same trick works. There is enough humour and story there -- that does not require shared reference points -- to carry the reader through if you are prepared to take the leap of faith into not needing everything to be clear. By the end of the story, you may well still be baffled on a few points, but they won't matter. (I never did really understand the whole significance of the golems, you know. I should probably re-read that now, I have more reference points 20 years later;-)

And as to the person who criticised you in that way, they are a banana. There are Americanisms in your work, but they are never crass and they are not off-putting. They are simply the result of the author writing like the (very talented) author.

I have just realised that my writing has become increasingly Australian every year I spend here. Sentences keep shortening, sarcasm increasing and contraction abuse is rampant. If you see me saying crikey, please stage an intervention.

Struth, mate, if them kids over in the U.S. can't understand Julia Gillard, then I reckon Ozlang is done for anyways.

They can't understand me, and I still have my South-east English accent!

I love you SO much for this rec. The amount of utter joy reading it is giving me cannot adequately be expressed. (And yes, I'm still reading and not quite finished; I started it during my lunch hour and was rudely interrupted by work, alas.)

I adore it for its deep and abiding Britishness and you know, it's one of those fics/novels that makes me ache deep down inside to live in England. The Motherland's calling my genes home... :) And it's hitting all my political fic kinks as well. GAH. *hearts*

I may be intending to find the author after reveals and fangirl her liek woah.

I am so thrilled! The author and I agree on about 15 things politically, but his or her writing comes from the personal side, on which there is sufficient common ground and charm to make a friendship possible.

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