Tragic Misadventures of a Literati.
More exciting news from the backwaters. I have a list of points I'd love to post a little ramble on, but I'm a bit tired and a lot lazy, so I'll just hit a few items of interest for today.
This past weekend, I just finished up the second installment of Lynn Flewelling's Nightrunner series, so I thought I'd post a mini-review for Luck In the Shadows and Stalking Darkness. First off - if you haven't read the books, you really ought to look into them. Gwendol, my literary genious friend, brought Nightrunner to my attention months ago, but I was not able to obtain the first volume until a recent visit to Borders. It's not our most local bookstore, but I'd been purchasing The Arabian Nights for school, and B&N can never be counted on when one is looking for a book of any value. In any event, Flewelling's work is not the easiest to locate, so you may have to do a bit of digging. I assure you, however, that the pay-off is well worth the effort.
Be forewarned, Luck In the Shadows is not the most grammatically correct piece of published material. Depending on what type of stickler you are, if you are a stickler, the clumsily edited pages could be either a field day or a travesty - in my case, both. While it's one of my guilty pleasures to scan published work for errors, it brings me great disappointment to witness the inexcusable effort (or lack thereof) of the editors. My favorite was something about "harnessing" the horses, typed as "harrassing", which added up to complete hilarity in context.
Now, with attention to the story itself, I would not place the book at the epitome of originality in the way of fantasy. The plot involves a lowly protagonist with the "wrong place, wrong time makes way for unlikely hero" scenario (Alec), a grandfather-style mentor (Nysander), a prophecy of epic proportions, and a villain set upon creating the Weapon of Ultimate and Unspeakable Evil. However, the story follows a fairly believable pace alongside characters you grow to love, with an appetizing splash of the macabre less common in most adventure fantasy. Also, the unresolved sexual tension between main characters Alec and Seregil seizes and drags to the point of unbearable, and stays that way for quite awhile. Just a heads up. The relationship isn't the only plot device that drags, though. Our protagonists spend quite a bit of time running in circles with the same thieving jobs, riding back and forth betwixt Rhiminee and Watermeade, and droning on and on about various political movements throughout the two volumes.
I suspect that at this point, you're wondering, "Why should I even read this, then?" Time to sing some praises, I suppose. In spite of these deficiencies, Flewelling's narration cultivates a wonderful voice with which the reader can identify. The stereotypes, instead of seeming cheesy and overdone, become a comfortable old armchair to settle back upon with nostalgic love. The characters are a delight, the politics make sense (once you learn to ignore the lengthy descriptions of royal lineage and to zero in on the Plenimaran struggle), and it just becomes a swift and enjoyable read as you enter the story. It does help that, by the middle of Stalking Darkness, the reader is dying for some romantic action between Alec and Seregil. If you haven't read the books yet, imagine the crackchild of Howl (Howl's Moving Castle), Sirius Black (Harry Potter), and Vanyel Ashkevron (Magic's Pawn) pining to hook up with Raenef (Demon Diary).
On an unrelated note, I've also been perusing my copy of The Essential Tales and Poems of Edgar Allen Poe. After puzzling over what the hell was happening in the film The House of Usher, finally reading Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher has left me with nothing but further perplexity. While I realize now that the movie has almost nothing to do with the short story, I'm still wondering WHAT that movie was about. Twincest? Rape? Failed abortion? Mutant ninjas? We'll never know. The Fall of the House of Usher was well enough on its own, though. I was expecting something more to come of "the very remarkable fact, that the stem of the Usher race, all time-honored as it was, had put forth, at no period, any enduring branch." Well, fine. There was also the whole scandal with the sister, which made little sense to me. I won't even touch upon the house cracking down the middle at the end. In spite of this mess, I am thoroughly impressed with Poe's use of the English language.... Each word seems carefully crafted to uphold the grey and sterile mood, each line a poem within itself. Nineteenth-century literature, in this way, is truly a delight to me. Poe, Dickens, and Wilde, I believe, are all masters of the craft. While each manages to keep to their own style, they apply language with such wit as has never been seen since. Nowadays, readers expect dialogues and descriptions to be handed off by the most direct means possible, with little pause for the art in the consonance, the mood, the implications of each word.
This is not to say I have no love for other styles of writing. Haruki Murakami is a wonderful creator in the straightforward simplicity of his lines, the unadulterated realism without need for flowery decor, the subtle application of symbolism. The point is, the art of language is too often mistaken for a tool or a trade. When people attempt to use words for self-expression, they dole out letters without regard for their subtler nuances. Two words may be synonymous, but I assure you, only one is appropriate for the atmosphere you seek to establish and the context in which you intend to place it.
With this in mind, I consider it a rape of all artistic language and an insult upon our literary predecessors that trash like Twilight can attain the levels of popularity that it is, while better manuscripts are left to the gutter without a publisher's slightest consideration. A tragedy, if there ever was one, but I won't waste anymore words on that topic.
This past weekend, I just finished up the second installment of Lynn Flewelling's Nightrunner series, so I thought I'd post a mini-review for Luck In the Shadows and Stalking Darkness. First off - if you haven't read the books, you really ought to look into them. Gwendol, my literary genious friend, brought Nightrunner to my attention months ago, but I was not able to obtain the first volume until a recent visit to Borders. It's not our most local bookstore, but I'd been purchasing The Arabian Nights for school, and B&N can never be counted on when one is looking for a book of any value. In any event, Flewelling's work is not the easiest to locate, so you may have to do a bit of digging. I assure you, however, that the pay-off is well worth the effort.
Be forewarned, Luck In the Shadows is not the most grammatically correct piece of published material. Depending on what type of stickler you are, if you are a stickler, the clumsily edited pages could be either a field day or a travesty - in my case, both. While it's one of my guilty pleasures to scan published work for errors, it brings me great disappointment to witness the inexcusable effort (or lack thereof) of the editors. My favorite was something about "harnessing" the horses, typed as "harrassing", which added up to complete hilarity in context.
Now, with attention to the story itself, I would not place the book at the epitome of originality in the way of fantasy. The plot involves a lowly protagonist with the "wrong place, wrong time makes way for unlikely hero" scenario (Alec), a grandfather-style mentor (Nysander), a prophecy of epic proportions, and a villain set upon creating the Weapon of Ultimate and Unspeakable Evil. However, the story follows a fairly believable pace alongside characters you grow to love, with an appetizing splash of the macabre less common in most adventure fantasy. Also, the unresolved sexual tension between main characters Alec and Seregil seizes and drags to the point of unbearable, and stays that way for quite awhile. Just a heads up. The relationship isn't the only plot device that drags, though. Our protagonists spend quite a bit of time running in circles with the same thieving jobs, riding back and forth betwixt Rhiminee and Watermeade, and droning on and on about various political movements throughout the two volumes.
I suspect that at this point, you're wondering, "Why should I even read this, then?" Time to sing some praises, I suppose. In spite of these deficiencies, Flewelling's narration cultivates a wonderful voice with which the reader can identify. The stereotypes, instead of seeming cheesy and overdone, become a comfortable old armchair to settle back upon with nostalgic love. The characters are a delight, the politics make sense (once you learn to ignore the lengthy descriptions of royal lineage and to zero in on the Plenimaran struggle), and it just becomes a swift and enjoyable read as you enter the story. It does help that, by the middle of Stalking Darkness, the reader is dying for some romantic action between Alec and Seregil. If you haven't read the books yet, imagine the crackchild of Howl (Howl's Moving Castle), Sirius Black (Harry Potter), and Vanyel Ashkevron (Magic's Pawn) pining to hook up with Raenef (Demon Diary).
On an unrelated note, I've also been perusing my copy of The Essential Tales and Poems of Edgar Allen Poe. After puzzling over what the hell was happening in the film The House of Usher, finally reading Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher has left me with nothing but further perplexity. While I realize now that the movie has almost nothing to do with the short story, I'm still wondering WHAT that movie was about. Twincest? Rape? Failed abortion? Mutant ninjas? We'll never know. The Fall of the House of Usher was well enough on its own, though. I was expecting something more to come of "the very remarkable fact, that the stem of the Usher race, all time-honored as it was, had put forth, at no period, any enduring branch." Well, fine. There was also the whole scandal with the sister, which made little sense to me. I won't even touch upon the house cracking down the middle at the end. In spite of this mess, I am thoroughly impressed with Poe's use of the English language.... Each word seems carefully crafted to uphold the grey and sterile mood, each line a poem within itself. Nineteenth-century literature, in this way, is truly a delight to me. Poe, Dickens, and Wilde, I believe, are all masters of the craft. While each manages to keep to their own style, they apply language with such wit as has never been seen since. Nowadays, readers expect dialogues and descriptions to be handed off by the most direct means possible, with little pause for the art in the consonance, the mood, the implications of each word.
This is not to say I have no love for other styles of writing. Haruki Murakami is a wonderful creator in the straightforward simplicity of his lines, the unadulterated realism without need for flowery decor, the subtle application of symbolism. The point is, the art of language is too often mistaken for a tool or a trade. When people attempt to use words for self-expression, they dole out letters without regard for their subtler nuances. Two words may be synonymous, but I assure you, only one is appropriate for the atmosphere you seek to establish and the context in which you intend to place it.
With this in mind, I consider it a rape of all artistic language and an insult upon our literary predecessors that trash like Twilight can attain the levels of popularity that it is, while better manuscripts are left to the gutter without a publisher's slightest consideration. A tragedy, if there ever was one, but I won't waste anymore words on that topic.