North Korea, kinky wasps, murders, and dragons
moth2fic's mini reviews (go and read! not only this entry and not only reviews) gave me a thought to try and have some fun too. However, with me being me, don’t expect what I’ll scribble to be mini size. Or sensible. Or proper reviews at all. But if you want some happy-go-lucky babbling on books… :)
I’ll keep at least moth2fic's practice of writing on most recent readings (i.e. last weeks). In my case it means: be warned of a total hotchpotch. Most often I read translations, the easiest and cheapest *coughmeaningfreecough* way to get books I want, but here I’ll be using the original titles. And I’ll add the covers of ‘my’ editions, just for my pathological picturephilia. :)
Barbara Demick, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea
One of these things which are fascinating for their theme, regardless of the style. Not that the style is bad in this case, not at all. The book is a thoughtful and thought-inciting report. It would be interesting to see how does it work for different readers, depending on their country of origin. For who would it be unbelievable? Unimaginable? Surprising? Inexplicable? Familiar? Obvious?
Sometimes you can meet people whose countries don’t know or don’t remember totalitarianisms, telling ‘Oh my, that’s terrible, but why do they agree for all that? Why don’t / didn’t they rebel against that?’ Questions showing great hearts, but even greater naivety. First of all, 99,9% of discourses on totalitarianisms I've met is based on ‘We against Them’. Demick’s book shows it this way too, but fortunately it also helps to see that problem is more complicated. Where do ‘We’ end, and where do ‘They’ begin? Where the border is? ‘They’ aren’t invaders from Mars, and ‘We’ aren’t heroic-minded fictional characters, and the all situation is no one’s intentional plan ("I’ll be Lord of Evil in my own Mordor, mwahahaa!!!"), but the sum of doings of people trying to survive next days. Perhaps one of things (which seems to escape many people’s comprehension) essential to understand totalitarianism is that it’s a great, overwhelming lie and pretence. And explaining it as ‘They lie to Us’ would be a simplification. In fact it’s: They lie to Us; We lie to other of Us; We lie to Them; We pretend that We believe the lies; We are afraid to tell the lies are lies; They aren’t sure whether We lie and how much; They prefer to not see lies; We are desperately eager to believe the lies are the truth, and so on, and so on. The book shows it - I don’t know if clearly enough, but still - it shows that people can just earnestly believe in what they hear through all their life, and in fact non-believing is a rare achievement. Apart from descriptions of the cultural shock experienced by North Korean fugitives, the most interesting are descriptions of their internal changes, being often shocks too. In the book, there’s a very apt comparison of this process to religious person’s coming to atheism, sort of shedding a lifelong veil off one’s mind. A good parallel, cause many fugitives from totalitarianisms points at how the systems work in the religious-like way. No wonder they are so… attractive? Exactly. Imagine a totalitarian state as a sect-like thing, and you’ve got it.
*looks up* Geez, I sound like a some overconfident, puffed-up expert. It’s just that I’ve seen too many people being clearly in need of explanation which even a non-expert could offer. This book would be quite useful for them, just for start.
Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene
The author says: “I suppose most scientists - most authors - have one piece of work of which they would say: it doesn’t matter if you never read anything else of mine, please at least read this. For me, it is The Extended Phenotype”. I’d say: yes, if you’re a scientist. So far, the only Dawkins’ book that was rather boring for me. I felt like thrown into the middle of a dispute on not so interesting for me technical details and moot points. Usually I love details in everything, but somehow there was little of things which riveted my attention. Still, such books always are unrivalled in bringing thoughts like: we, humans, can teach Mum Nature nothing about sexual kinks. It will take me some time to forget the vision of wasps copulating on a heap of paralysed spiders... *twitch*
Agatha Christie, The Mystery of the Blue Train
I don’t know why I like Christie’s books. Or rather: one book is enough to decide that you want more, but you need a lot of them to decide why. There’s nothing special in her style - and most often it’s author’s style what matters for me - but after some time, this style becomes an advantage, and more precisely its conciseness. Most often I don’t like what is called ‘transparent style’, but here it works good enough for me. But what I do like, is her very subtle yet sharp humour, flashing in tiny details, making you smirk. The closest comparison of what I mean would be Austen’s Northanger Abbey, I think. I like also Christie’s characters, but in somewhat limited way - they’re likeable in the course of reading, and immediately slipping away afterwards. Actually, as far as I’m concerned, the same can be said about her whole books. For me, they read like chocolate - once they’re ‘eaten’ they don’t bother my head, I just take another one.
Everything above applies to The Mystery of the Blue Train too. It starts in a way suggesting another spy piece (I don’t like these ones at Christie’s; so far They Came to Baghdad was the only book of her where I longed for THE END AT LAST!!! Ugh…), and to the end the all thread of *le gasp!* jewels and masked aristocrats was rather annoying for me. Fortunately, later it becomes more psychological, and the closer to the end, the more of crime is in what is supposed to be a crime story, indeed. Alas, SPOILER ALERT it was one of these cases when I don’t like the solution very much. Just cause what I said about likeable characters applies here too… Come on, I don’t buy it! If I was more inclined to write fics, I’d rewrite it gladly, cause Mirelle not only fits the murderer’s place fine, but I wanted her there, long before the half of the book, grr... Not to mention I feel unsatisfied in the department of pairings, and isn’t it the first-rate reason to write a fix fic? :) END OF SPOILER ALERT
Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styles
The novel is of the sort I like from this author the most, a whodunnit with a closed ring of suspects, and so many deceptive and changing solutions that you are wary of believing in the last one… But take it as just my minor sarcasm, in general I enjoyed it. One of things I admire at Agatha Christie is the steady, more or less, level of her works in the course of time. One can recognize a novel’s age more from the setting’s details than from the overall quality.
Funny that most of elements calculated for oh-so-glamour-effect - silk masks, exotic and temperamental femmes fatales, charming comtes in black cloaks - today is just hilarious kitsch, maybe lovely old kitsch at the best, and what really works in this place is everything what was just plain, everyday and boring in the time of writing of Christie’s novels - pharmacies stacked with glass and clay jars, and washstands in bedrooms. Do you also still feel the twentieth century as a part of the present day? Books like these show that it isn’t anymore, that it’s history, and even not so recent history. An odd feeling…
Another funny thing, have you noticed that usually ‘the closed ring’ doesn’t include servants? Not: ‘excluded after consideration’, but ‘never taken into consideration’. Servants in ‘high life’ crime stories are/were just a sort of talking houseware, playing the role of witnesses at the best, but suspects are always and only Messrs & Mesdames. The point is that authors don’t/didn’t even see that it needs some explanation. Well, in their days it didn’t… I wonder, what if some author would recognize it as a fine literary opportunity, and write a story where all ‘proper’ suspects turn out innocent, and a maid is the murderer? What the reaction of readers in old times would be? Would it be judged as a good using of ‘the least suspicious person’ rule, or an exceeding of all rules?
And yet another one, SPOILER ALERT every time when I’m given an oh-so-cunning culprit who leads the Police down the garden path giving them too-obvious clues, knowing they won’t believe them and won’t touch the oh-so-obvious suspect, that is the culprit himself, and that they won’t see the hidden agenda… every time I roll my eyes. The real Police would never reach the trap, cause they would happily grab these too-obvious-clues, and the culprit would be behind bars before he’d manage to tell ‘But…!’ Um, I’ve just offended the real Police, haven’t I? :} *sweats a bit* END OF SPOILER ALERT
By the way, I always wonder at how willing things are in leaving clues, especially fabrics. How often do you happen to tear off bits of your clothes at everything around? Not just a stocking ladder, but a shred of a sleeve in a door hinge, a bunch of threads at a splinter in a balustrade… Maybe old-time fabrics had more loose weave and weaker yarn, but this motif is overused in modern crime stories too. Thoughtless parroting of the classic trick? :)
Naomi Novik, His Majesty’s Dragon
Hm. How to put it delicately yet frankly… Not the most brilliant thing I’ve ever read, but I can say I enjoyed it, more or less.
The general idea is crazy enough to promise fun, and besides I like dragons. And after all I was just curious, my most often reason when I pick new readings. Alas, the style seemed rather disappointing in the first flipping, and the impression was confirmed in reading. However, it was at least partially the guilt of the translation, which turned out poor, though not as poor as some others. In this case it was mostly the matter of some clumsy wordings here and there. Also this impression (for the translation’s quality) was confirmed after checking the original. For example, I had wondered why there’s no mention about guessing of hatchlings’ sex, though it seems to matter in naming and later. So you can imagine I was quite angry, discovering that the translator just omitted the line about the dragonet’s ‘masculine voice’.
As for the book itself, beyond the matter of style, for me it feels definitely ‘fantasy’ not ‘historical’, and dragons have nothing to do with this opinion. What has, is the general impression of the characters and setting. For me it reads as a modern thing in old-fashioned decorations scattered here and there, somewhere in the far background. Admittedly, it should be noticed that the author put attention to the risk of ‘modern mentality in the old world’, and every so often there is pointed that the said characters and the main setting of the novel are very untypical for this universe, alienated and even frowned by the ‘proper society’. Still, I wasn’t really convinced…
As far as I like the idea of a dragon world, I’m somewhat doubtful for the realization. Seems as if they existed in this universe only in the military way. No civil transportation, no lap-dragon races for ladies and kings, no sport races for hunting and racings, no working races for industry and agronomy, no dragon venom and dragon blood in medicine (no matter if it’d work or not; bet that people always think it does ;), no tents and boots of dragon leather, no necklaces of eggshell shards in gold, no umbrellas with dragon bone stretchers and ships with dragon bone rigging… (The argument ‘but they’re intelligent creatures, not animals’ doesn’t exactly work. First, there’s plenty of mentions on wild dragons; second, they are deemed animals - breeding and crossing of races, harnessing directly after hatching, eggs trade, and so on.) What I’m trying to tell is that putting dragons (or whatever) into a world means for this world more than just adding a roaring and carnivorous Air Force to it. At least this is my entirely unprofessional in world-making opinion. And speaking of carnivorous, I wondered through most of the book, how a country can afford a military force eating herds of cattle daily, and actually how the planet’s ecosystem can manage it. I don’t insist it must be a world-making fail, there can be many ways to explain it (more dragons being breed in the wartime, any war is costly; less wild dragons than domesticated ones, also nothing new under the sun; growing of the dragons population as a new phenomenon in the world’s history, and so on). Fortunately, most of this doubts is attended in the last chapters, with the explanation that wild dragons are smaller and have more reptile-like habits, eating once in a few weeks. Another thing making me wonder was: why young dragons seem almost adult, just smaller? No learning of speech, just speaking immediately. No first tries of flight and awkward bumping on noses, just immediate flying. No child-like silliness, just an almost ready-made creature, like something what has reincarnated and still remembers the previous life. In a word: no hatchling, just a small thing, which more grows than develops. I decided to judge this in the favour of the author too, since it looks quite the reptilian way of coming to the world, though rather uncommon for very intelligent creatures.
By the way, whoever (Gayle Marquez?) made drawings for ‘Sir Edward Howe’s sketchbook’, rather hadn’t read the book, grr…
I know, I’m caviling at technical details, not sparing a word for characters and such. I’m afraid it’s just that I have not much to say about them, at least more than ‘Er… well, they were nice’. Not really really believable, not very ‘alive’, yet still nice. Probably I’m too fastidious…
I stress, it’s the first book’s impression, and applies only to the first book. Or rather, I don’t know whether it applies to the all series as well. We’ll see. Because, all in all, it’s quite possible that I’ll read more, especially that it reads very quickly. And this tells more than all my caviling, cause usually I don’t waste time for things I really disliked… Though, to tell the truth, I’m not sure why I’m going to read more. Maybe for curiosity again? :)
Your thoughts welcomed as always! :)
I’ll keep at least moth2fic's practice of writing on most recent readings (i.e. last weeks). In my case it means: be warned of a total hotchpotch. Most often I read translations, the easiest and cheapest *coughmeaningfreecough* way to get books I want, but here I’ll be using the original titles. And I’ll add the covers of ‘my’ editions, just for my pathological picturephilia. :)
Barbara Demick, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea
One of these things which are fascinating for their theme, regardless of the style. Not that the style is bad in this case, not at all. The book is a thoughtful and thought-inciting report. It would be interesting to see how does it work for different readers, depending on their country of origin. For who would it be unbelievable? Unimaginable? Surprising? Inexplicable? Familiar? Obvious?
Sometimes you can meet people whose countries don’t know or don’t remember totalitarianisms, telling ‘Oh my, that’s terrible, but why do they agree for all that? Why don’t / didn’t they rebel against that?’ Questions showing great hearts, but even greater naivety. First of all, 99,9% of discourses on totalitarianisms I've met is based on ‘We against Them’. Demick’s book shows it this way too, but fortunately it also helps to see that problem is more complicated. Where do ‘We’ end, and where do ‘They’ begin? Where the border is? ‘They’ aren’t invaders from Mars, and ‘We’ aren’t heroic-minded fictional characters, and the all situation is no one’s intentional plan ("I’ll be Lord of Evil in my own Mordor, mwahahaa!!!"), but the sum of doings of people trying to survive next days. Perhaps one of things (which seems to escape many people’s comprehension) essential to understand totalitarianism is that it’s a great, overwhelming lie and pretence. And explaining it as ‘They lie to Us’ would be a simplification. In fact it’s: They lie to Us; We lie to other of Us; We lie to Them; We pretend that We believe the lies; We are afraid to tell the lies are lies; They aren’t sure whether We lie and how much; They prefer to not see lies; We are desperately eager to believe the lies are the truth, and so on, and so on. The book shows it - I don’t know if clearly enough, but still - it shows that people can just earnestly believe in what they hear through all their life, and in fact non-believing is a rare achievement. Apart from descriptions of the cultural shock experienced by North Korean fugitives, the most interesting are descriptions of their internal changes, being often shocks too. In the book, there’s a very apt comparison of this process to religious person’s coming to atheism, sort of shedding a lifelong veil off one’s mind. A good parallel, cause many fugitives from totalitarianisms points at how the systems work in the religious-like way. No wonder they are so… attractive? Exactly. Imagine a totalitarian state as a sect-like thing, and you’ve got it.
*looks up* Geez, I sound like a some overconfident, puffed-up expert. It’s just that I’ve seen too many people being clearly in need of explanation which even a non-expert could offer. This book would be quite useful for them, just for start.
Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene
The author says: “I suppose most scientists - most authors - have one piece of work of which they would say: it doesn’t matter if you never read anything else of mine, please at least read this. For me, it is The Extended Phenotype”. I’d say: yes, if you’re a scientist. So far, the only Dawkins’ book that was rather boring for me. I felt like thrown into the middle of a dispute on not so interesting for me technical details and moot points. Usually I love details in everything, but somehow there was little of things which riveted my attention. Still, such books always are unrivalled in bringing thoughts like: we, humans, can teach Mum Nature nothing about sexual kinks. It will take me some time to forget the vision of wasps copulating on a heap of paralysed spiders... *twitch*
Agatha Christie, The Mystery of the Blue Train
I don’t know why I like Christie’s books. Or rather: one book is enough to decide that you want more, but you need a lot of them to decide why. There’s nothing special in her style - and most often it’s author’s style what matters for me - but after some time, this style becomes an advantage, and more precisely its conciseness. Most often I don’t like what is called ‘transparent style’, but here it works good enough for me. But what I do like, is her very subtle yet sharp humour, flashing in tiny details, making you smirk. The closest comparison of what I mean would be Austen’s Northanger Abbey, I think. I like also Christie’s characters, but in somewhat limited way - they’re likeable in the course of reading, and immediately slipping away afterwards. Actually, as far as I’m concerned, the same can be said about her whole books. For me, they read like chocolate - once they’re ‘eaten’ they don’t bother my head, I just take another one.
Everything above applies to The Mystery of the Blue Train too. It starts in a way suggesting another spy piece (I don’t like these ones at Christie’s; so far They Came to Baghdad was the only book of her where I longed for THE END AT LAST!!! Ugh…), and to the end the all thread of *le gasp!* jewels and masked aristocrats was rather annoying for me. Fortunately, later it becomes more psychological, and the closer to the end, the more of crime is in what is supposed to be a crime story, indeed. Alas, SPOILER ALERT it was one of these cases when I don’t like the solution very much. Just cause what I said about likeable characters applies here too… Come on, I don’t buy it! If I was more inclined to write fics, I’d rewrite it gladly, cause Mirelle not only fits the murderer’s place fine, but I wanted her there, long before the half of the book, grr... Not to mention I feel unsatisfied in the department of pairings, and isn’t it the first-rate reason to write a fix fic? :) END OF SPOILER ALERT
Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styles
The novel is of the sort I like from this author the most, a whodunnit with a closed ring of suspects, and so many deceptive and changing solutions that you are wary of believing in the last one… But take it as just my minor sarcasm, in general I enjoyed it. One of things I admire at Agatha Christie is the steady, more or less, level of her works in the course of time. One can recognize a novel’s age more from the setting’s details than from the overall quality.
Funny that most of elements calculated for oh-so-glamour-effect - silk masks, exotic and temperamental femmes fatales, charming comtes in black cloaks - today is just hilarious kitsch, maybe lovely old kitsch at the best, and what really works in this place is everything what was just plain, everyday and boring in the time of writing of Christie’s novels - pharmacies stacked with glass and clay jars, and washstands in bedrooms. Do you also still feel the twentieth century as a part of the present day? Books like these show that it isn’t anymore, that it’s history, and even not so recent history. An odd feeling…
Another funny thing, have you noticed that usually ‘the closed ring’ doesn’t include servants? Not: ‘excluded after consideration’, but ‘never taken into consideration’. Servants in ‘high life’ crime stories are/were just a sort of talking houseware, playing the role of witnesses at the best, but suspects are always and only Messrs & Mesdames. The point is that authors don’t/didn’t even see that it needs some explanation. Well, in their days it didn’t… I wonder, what if some author would recognize it as a fine literary opportunity, and write a story where all ‘proper’ suspects turn out innocent, and a maid is the murderer? What the reaction of readers in old times would be? Would it be judged as a good using of ‘the least suspicious person’ rule, or an exceeding of all rules?
And yet another one, SPOILER ALERT every time when I’m given an oh-so-cunning culprit who leads the Police down the garden path giving them too-obvious clues, knowing they won’t believe them and won’t touch the oh-so-obvious suspect, that is the culprit himself, and that they won’t see the hidden agenda… every time I roll my eyes. The real Police would never reach the trap, cause they would happily grab these too-obvious-clues, and the culprit would be behind bars before he’d manage to tell ‘But…!’ Um, I’ve just offended the real Police, haven’t I? :} *sweats a bit* END OF SPOILER ALERT
By the way, I always wonder at how willing things are in leaving clues, especially fabrics. How often do you happen to tear off bits of your clothes at everything around? Not just a stocking ladder, but a shred of a sleeve in a door hinge, a bunch of threads at a splinter in a balustrade… Maybe old-time fabrics had more loose weave and weaker yarn, but this motif is overused in modern crime stories too. Thoughtless parroting of the classic trick? :)
Naomi Novik, His Majesty’s Dragon
Hm. How to put it delicately yet frankly… Not the most brilliant thing I’ve ever read, but I can say I enjoyed it, more or less.
The general idea is crazy enough to promise fun, and besides I like dragons. And after all I was just curious, my most often reason when I pick new readings. Alas, the style seemed rather disappointing in the first flipping, and the impression was confirmed in reading. However, it was at least partially the guilt of the translation, which turned out poor, though not as poor as some others. In this case it was mostly the matter of some clumsy wordings here and there. Also this impression (for the translation’s quality) was confirmed after checking the original. For example, I had wondered why there’s no mention about guessing of hatchlings’ sex, though it seems to matter in naming and later. So you can imagine I was quite angry, discovering that the translator just omitted the line about the dragonet’s ‘masculine voice’.
As for the book itself, beyond the matter of style, for me it feels definitely ‘fantasy’ not ‘historical’, and dragons have nothing to do with this opinion. What has, is the general impression of the characters and setting. For me it reads as a modern thing in old-fashioned decorations scattered here and there, somewhere in the far background. Admittedly, it should be noticed that the author put attention to the risk of ‘modern mentality in the old world’, and every so often there is pointed that the said characters and the main setting of the novel are very untypical for this universe, alienated and even frowned by the ‘proper society’. Still, I wasn’t really convinced…
As far as I like the idea of a dragon world, I’m somewhat doubtful for the realization. Seems as if they existed in this universe only in the military way. No civil transportation, no lap-dragon races for ladies and kings, no sport races for hunting and racings, no working races for industry and agronomy, no dragon venom and dragon blood in medicine (no matter if it’d work or not; bet that people always think it does ;), no tents and boots of dragon leather, no necklaces of eggshell shards in gold, no umbrellas with dragon bone stretchers and ships with dragon bone rigging… (The argument ‘but they’re intelligent creatures, not animals’ doesn’t exactly work. First, there’s plenty of mentions on wild dragons; second, they are deemed animals - breeding and crossing of races, harnessing directly after hatching, eggs trade, and so on.) What I’m trying to tell is that putting dragons (or whatever) into a world means for this world more than just adding a roaring and carnivorous Air Force to it. At least this is my entirely unprofessional in world-making opinion. And speaking of carnivorous, I wondered through most of the book, how a country can afford a military force eating herds of cattle daily, and actually how the planet’s ecosystem can manage it. I don’t insist it must be a world-making fail, there can be many ways to explain it (more dragons being breed in the wartime, any war is costly; less wild dragons than domesticated ones, also nothing new under the sun; growing of the dragons population as a new phenomenon in the world’s history, and so on). Fortunately, most of this doubts is attended in the last chapters, with the explanation that wild dragons are smaller and have more reptile-like habits, eating once in a few weeks. Another thing making me wonder was: why young dragons seem almost adult, just smaller? No learning of speech, just speaking immediately. No first tries of flight and awkward bumping on noses, just immediate flying. No child-like silliness, just an almost ready-made creature, like something what has reincarnated and still remembers the previous life. In a word: no hatchling, just a small thing, which more grows than develops. I decided to judge this in the favour of the author too, since it looks quite the reptilian way of coming to the world, though rather uncommon for very intelligent creatures.
By the way, whoever (Gayle Marquez?) made drawings for ‘Sir Edward Howe’s sketchbook’, rather hadn’t read the book, grr…
I know, I’m caviling at technical details, not sparing a word for characters and such. I’m afraid it’s just that I have not much to say about them, at least more than ‘Er… well, they were nice’. Not really really believable, not very ‘alive’, yet still nice. Probably I’m too fastidious…
I stress, it’s the first book’s impression, and applies only to the first book. Or rather, I don’t know whether it applies to the all series as well. We’ll see. Because, all in all, it’s quite possible that I’ll read more, especially that it reads very quickly. And this tells more than all my caviling, cause usually I don’t waste time for things I really disliked… Though, to tell the truth, I’m not sure why I’m going to read more. Maybe for curiosity again? :)
Your thoughts welcomed as always! :)