(no subject)
All booklogging, all the time! No spoilers on anything, but cut for length.
After the surreality that was The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, I dove way, way back into my comfort zone with a reread of Jane Austen's Persuasion. I blame all you guys who keep talking about the film, which I also have a total craving to rewatc. This remains, upon re-perusal, one of my favorite Austen books. (It's never going to beat Northanger Abbey in my heart, though. HENRY TILNEY!) Anne is a lot less flawed than many of Austen's other heroines - although her unhappiness is predicated on her own decision, she remains convinced to the end that she was right to make it, and in other ways she really is fairly saintly - which actually makes her in and of herself slightly less appealing to me, but the gradual development of the relationships in the story is just absolutely gorgeous.
I also reread Lynne Flewelling's The Bone Doll's Twin, which I read many years ago and made a mental note to read the sequels when they came out, and then never got around to it. Seven years later, the sequels are out, but I didn't remember anything about the initial book except that it revolved around genderbending and therefore decided to reread and see if it was worthwhile. The story takes place in a country in which a king has just wrested power from the Rightful Matriarchal Line of Queens and is killing all his female relatives in an attempt to hold power. Some rebellious wizards do some mystical magical stuff on the newborn Rightful Heir to make her appear in all ways physically male until she's come of age; unfortunately, the mystical magical stuff also involves killing her twin brother at birth, who turns into a really pissed-off ghost. The book is nicely creepy much of the time, but - speaking from my point of view as a sort of expert on the Girl Disguised as a Boy Phenomenon - it never explores the really potentially interesting sex-and-gender questions of the premise nearly as much as I want it to. (It also doesn't take the creepiness as far as it could, either.) I do want to read the rest of the series, though, in hopes that it takes the concept further once the main character figures out she's female. And also because (shockingly!) I really like her sidekick.
Arthur Phillips' Angelica, by contrast, goes way into the Interesting Psychological Questions of the ghost story - in fact, they're pretty much the point of the book. The story is told by an unreliable narrator who projects herself into the heads of three other unreliable narrators, in order to recount from various different perspectives the tale of a troubled Victorian mother who believes she's being haunted by a ghost. Um, I gather there was supposed to be a Big Twist at the end, but I pretty much picked up on the way things were going to go from the first section, so maybe I'm just too used to catching Big Twists? I also gather we were supposed to be sympathetic to the mother and then feel our sympathies shift, but mine stayed pretty consistent because I could not stand the mother, so. I think the book was interestingly constructed, and I didn't hate it, but it didn't work for me nearly as well as his earlier novel The Egyptologist, which is much more fun as an Experiment in Unreliable Narration because a.) you're not actually expected to sympathize with the characters and b.) it's basically the Egyptologist version of the Msscribe wank, and how is that not entertaining?
And, in a return to Dead White British Women, I continued my Education in Virginia Woolf by reading Orlando . . . and I kind of loved it. Part of this is undoubtedly because it doesn't take itself seriously at all, and has no qualms about gently mocking Literature, Love, and everything else you know Virginia Woolf cares about. Also the love interest (one of several) is named Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmardine! Hilarity all 'round. Also, on a more relevant note as regards the Virginia Woolf/feminism OTP, there is a lot of interesting consideration of women's roles - what I appreciated most was her discussion of the fact that there is a definite appeal to sitting back and waiting to be rescued and have things done for one, but that it can turn into a trap very quickly. Orlando is, without a doubt, a character who cannot be defined by traditional gender roles, and it's definitely a step over that Great Divide that I saw in her other work. I just wish you didn't actually have to magically switch genders midway through a novel to break out of that . . . Anyways, I would definitely recommend this to Beginners to Woolf who want enjoyable and fantastical reading. With illustrations! (Most of them actually photographs of Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf's real-life lover, which is . . . possibly kind of potentially creepy inasmuch as it blurs the line between fiction and reality. But anyways.)
After the surreality that was The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, I dove way, way back into my comfort zone with a reread of Jane Austen's Persuasion. I blame all you guys who keep talking about the film, which I also have a total craving to rewatc. This remains, upon re-perusal, one of my favorite Austen books. (It's never going to beat Northanger Abbey in my heart, though. HENRY TILNEY!) Anne is a lot less flawed than many of Austen's other heroines - although her unhappiness is predicated on her own decision, she remains convinced to the end that she was right to make it, and in other ways she really is fairly saintly - which actually makes her in and of herself slightly less appealing to me, but the gradual development of the relationships in the story is just absolutely gorgeous.
I also reread Lynne Flewelling's The Bone Doll's Twin, which I read many years ago and made a mental note to read the sequels when they came out, and then never got around to it. Seven years later, the sequels are out, but I didn't remember anything about the initial book except that it revolved around genderbending and therefore decided to reread and see if it was worthwhile. The story takes place in a country in which a king has just wrested power from the Rightful Matriarchal Line of Queens and is killing all his female relatives in an attempt to hold power. Some rebellious wizards do some mystical magical stuff on the newborn Rightful Heir to make her appear in all ways physically male until she's come of age; unfortunately, the mystical magical stuff also involves killing her twin brother at birth, who turns into a really pissed-off ghost. The book is nicely creepy much of the time, but - speaking from my point of view as a sort of expert on the Girl Disguised as a Boy Phenomenon - it never explores the really potentially interesting sex-and-gender questions of the premise nearly as much as I want it to. (It also doesn't take the creepiness as far as it could, either.) I do want to read the rest of the series, though, in hopes that it takes the concept further once the main character figures out she's female. And also because (shockingly!) I really like her sidekick.
Arthur Phillips' Angelica, by contrast, goes way into the Interesting Psychological Questions of the ghost story - in fact, they're pretty much the point of the book. The story is told by an unreliable narrator who projects herself into the heads of three other unreliable narrators, in order to recount from various different perspectives the tale of a troubled Victorian mother who believes she's being haunted by a ghost. Um, I gather there was supposed to be a Big Twist at the end, but I pretty much picked up on the way things were going to go from the first section, so maybe I'm just too used to catching Big Twists? I also gather we were supposed to be sympathetic to the mother and then feel our sympathies shift, but mine stayed pretty consistent because I could not stand the mother, so. I think the book was interestingly constructed, and I didn't hate it, but it didn't work for me nearly as well as his earlier novel The Egyptologist, which is much more fun as an Experiment in Unreliable Narration because a.) you're not actually expected to sympathize with the characters and b.) it's basically the Egyptologist version of the Msscribe wank, and how is that not entertaining?
And, in a return to Dead White British Women, I continued my Education in Virginia Woolf by reading Orlando . . . and I kind of loved it. Part of this is undoubtedly because it doesn't take itself seriously at all, and has no qualms about gently mocking Literature, Love, and everything else you know Virginia Woolf cares about. Also the love interest (one of several) is named Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmardine! Hilarity all 'round. Also, on a more relevant note as regards the Virginia Woolf/feminism OTP, there is a lot of interesting consideration of women's roles - what I appreciated most was her discussion of the fact that there is a definite appeal to sitting back and waiting to be rescued and have things done for one, but that it can turn into a trap very quickly. Orlando is, without a doubt, a character who cannot be defined by traditional gender roles, and it's definitely a step over that Great Divide that I saw in her other work. I just wish you didn't actually have to magically switch genders midway through a novel to break out of that . . . Anyways, I would definitely recommend this to Beginners to Woolf who want enjoyable and fantastical reading. With illustrations! (Most of them actually photographs of Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf's real-life lover, which is . . . possibly kind of potentially creepy inasmuch as it blurs the line between fiction and reality. But anyways.)