some books i read lately (december edition)
Autobiography of Red: I was compelled to pick this one up because some snippet from the sequel was posted to Tumblr, and I really liked the snippet, and if I wanted to read that one I needed to read the first book, so...
What I did not realize was how ridiculously compelling the premise was. Apparently, Stesichorus is some ancient Greek poet who's been relatively underserved in terms of: scholarship about him, surviving poetry fragments, and so on. ("He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for any poet," the author, Carson, tells us in the introduction.) The author opens with some loosely translated bits of Stesichorus's surviving poetry, then follows up with a novel-length narrative poem sort-of-based on the original, but also reimagining it all as a gay three-way romance in 1970sish Argentina.
This delighted me because, in my wild youth* I attempted to do something rather similar. The Mirage and Visions expansions of Magic: the Gathering have always been my favorite, for the sheer amount of energy and flavor in the set. The artwork is gloriously uneven, but dominated by bright painterly styles that are so unlike the bland WoWified art that dominates the game these days. The setting was revealed in what bits of flavor text I could cobble together between the cards-this was before the internet, and I never even heard of the Duelist magazine, but I was so enchanted by the snippets of the "Love Song and Night and Day," spread out over a dozen cards, that I clambered to collect them all and piece them together in order. (I was thrilled to discover, over a decade later, that the full poem is now shared online.) I knew all the nations of Jamuraa by heart: sagely Femeref, sly Suq'ata, fierce Zhalfir, ah!
But this continent never got a proper story, or a proper novel, or anything beyond the little scraps I could get on the cards. In a nostalgic fit, years later, I decided that I would write the damn story-but of course, in the process of writing it, it slowly transmogrified into a hybrid fanfic-origfic thing, as I changed and discarded and inserted characters to fit my vision for what Jamuraa should be, and as I threw in my own bits of worldbuilding. I quit at some point because I didn't know what this story was, and though I loved it, it didn't fit anywhere.
Carson-the author of Red-was smarter than I. She knicked some old Greek stuff so that she could be derivative as she liked.
So, yeah, she's basically doing the classy version of my college-sophomore Magic the Gathering fanfiction, is what I'm saying. I adored the premise.
The actual execution of the book was good but not mind-blowing. I was worried it'd be overly pretentious-I mean, doing a long narrative poem in the 21st century is kind of inescapably pretentious-but Carson has a light touch, and I could ignore the more overwrought bits.
There is a lot that's really atmospheric in the novel-poem, and a lot of really locally-evocative imagery-I'm still dreaming about how the "red world, and its corresponding red breezes, went on-Geryon did not." (More beautiful in context of course.) The ambiguity of Geryon's "monstrousness" is tantalizing-the very first line we read is "Geryon was a monster everything about him was red," and we know he's based on an actual Greek monster. But we also know (from the translated fragments) that the Greek monster had a pet dog, and Herakles clubs that dog to death (yes he literally kicks the puppy), and Geryon also has a gentle herd of red cattle, and he lives all alone.
And the Geryon in the poem-his feeling of "monstrousness" feels real and tangible, even if you're not sure whether it's from literal wings and red skin and fangs, or if it's just because being a quiet artsy teenager feels so very similar-isolated, not fitting in anywhere, monstrous.
Alas, the story didn't go anywhere in particular or pay off in a big way. It was hard to feel let down by that, exactly-the tale had a meandering, andante gait from the beginning-but if it had gone somewhere more I'd probably be rambling about how amazing it was, rather than saying it had some lovely evocative stuff going on, and that it's a good read if you're into that sort of thing.
Honestly the only narrative poetry I remember gripping me in its entire is Gilgamesh. Maybe I'm just not cut out for the post-Stein world.
* okay i was in my 20s but whatever
H is for Hawk: I was predisposed to adore this no matter what. It's a memoir by a huge honking falconry nerd, who wants to tell you all about falconry and its history and also T. H. White and the natural history of England and really beautiful language, and if any of these interest you, please just go buy the damn thing, you'll dig it.
Surprisingly I think I appreciated it most for its natural history angles-you learn just a tremendous amount about how people have related to the land in England over the centuries, what sort of habitats goshawks live in, what happened to them, why they're coming back, where undetonated bombs may still lie, why "night walking" was a Big Deal Hobby in the early 1900s, such that by the end you feel as though you know, not just the little patch of land where she's been flying her falcon, but a great many landscapes, all the things that land has ever been, and the land around it.
It's really a beautiful book. I'm looking back and I gave it four stars on Goodreads and now I'm puzzling over why I didn't give it five. I think maybe it drug a bit at the very last stretch but, hell, you can skim if it comes to that.
That Quail, Robert: Just a quick fun read that I stole from my parents' bookshelf. True story of some family raising an abandoned baby quail, which apparently was enough to make you nationally famous in the 1960s. (The days before Youtube!)
The most interesting bit was a throwaway line: the author talked about how interesting/funny it is that there's specialty dog/cat food these days, and how different that is from when she grew up. She mentioned that there seemed to be a "changing attitude" wrt pets, and you used to just keep a dog/cat around the farm because they were useful or whatnot, but you didn't get overly sentimental about them, and now they've become like real family members and all that.
I wonder how universal or how accurate her description of this cultural change is. Certainly I could see it in my grandfather's generation vs my dad's generation-grandpa just had no compunction about kicking an annoying dog out of the way, because damn it then the mutt will learn to get out of the way, and my grandfather was in fact raised on a farm. And my parents, when visiting Seattle, have pointed out that people here dote on their dogs to an almost excessive degree, relative to their experience; e.g. a brewery that doesn't allow dogs is a cause for a temper tantrum here.
All the Crooked Saints: I'm still scratching my head over how uneven Stiefvater is as a writer. The Scorpio Races & The Dream Thieves were fabulous, the rest of the Raven Cycle was fine-to-good, Shiver and Sinner just did not do it for me, at all, and now we have this, which rests somewhere in the middle of all those. It's not bad. The universe is imaginative and fun, and I did appreciate Beatriz on a personal level, seeing as I got yelled at a lot as a kid for being "unfeeling"/"robotic"/"tactless"/whatever (read: not openly emotive enough, and also being female while doing that), and here is a young lady who is presented as Bad At Emoting, but in a positive light, hot damn. Outside of that, though, there's just not that much story here, and the story that is here is all pretty trite and predictable. I mean, the story's structured around One Big Honking Metaphor, so I guess that's a pretty common risk when you have One Big Honking Metaphor. But then, I am an adult reading YA; maybe this would come across less trite to the actual target audience :P
Wizard of the Pigeons: Fun bit of urban fantasy. I bought it because Seattle and urban fantasy and pigeons so, y'know, of course I thought it was neat. It felt slight as I was reading it but I've found myself puzzling over it more than I expected, after putting it down-there's an ending I didn't entirely grok, and a sort of intense Vietnam War backstory/metaphor thing going on. If you dig this sort of thing you may dig this.
The Dispossessed: So here's one of the Le Guin novels I'd never quite gotten to.
Fun story: a friend recently complained bitterly to me, after I recommended A Wizard of Earthsea to her, saying she hated it, and the book had no characters. "But Ged? And Vetch??" I cried. And she argued that those characters didn't have real personalities, and she counted it up, and Ged and Vetch only say X words to each other the whole book, and so on.
Admittedly this is a friend who recommended The Name of the Wind to me so I think we were always doomed to like extremely different things in literature, so, I guess we're square now :P
Anyway, I kept her criticism in mind while reading The Dispossessed, and I get where she's coming from. Le Guin's characters do not have heaps of witty dialogue, you could not pick them up out of a comic book lineup, and the plot is not driven by them making dramatic decisions so much as larger social/cultural trends. So there's not really strong characters here, but there's humans, and that's what works for me-let me explain.
In the novel, there's a scene where Shavek runs into a friend from high school. It's not even one of his closest friends from high school, but Shavek is strangely overjoyed to see him, because Shavek's been all alone in this weird huge city for the past year-and-change, and he's been cloistered in this ivory tower doing all this grand physics research and he should feel so honored, but his research advisor is a dick, and he's bad at social, so he doesn't talk to anyone ever, so thank God he's stumbled someone, anyone, he can talk to. So they hang out for a day, and they shoot the shit, and they go back to his dorm and babble into the night, and at some point around 1am Shavek finally blurts out, "I've been thinking about killing myself."
And the friend basically says: of course you are; being a grad student sucks. (Ahaha. Academia never changes.)
The thing is, that moment felt so incredibly tangible to me; I didn't know all the infinite quirks of Shavek's study habits or internal monologues or what not, but I knew that moment and it was very real to me. I've been the friend in that conversation; I've been Shavek. Not always the same content, but-the dizzy rush of running into someone after a long time, imagining all your previously-neutral interactions as rosy and bright, the slipping and saying too much because you have to say to someone-Le Guin works with a light touch. That's all I needed. And that's all I get.
So yeah, I find I don't really need characters in Le Guin's novels, in the sense of, "really strong personalities that drive the plot." I just need to know that these people are human, and for them to act human. And they are, and they do.
(Another moment like that, that I'm remembering in passing, in a much more character-driven novel: in The Raven King, there's a sparsely-yet-vividly described scene that describes what happens when they're all up late at a party. And it hits all the realest and most sentimental party beats-the high-pitched drunken babbling, and the weirdly tender moment when you're in a corner with someone else trying to clean up some of these damn red solo cups because you two won't be that kind of guest, and near the very end there's just this pleasantly-charged atmosphere of togetherness that makes trashing all the furniture worth it. If I had the book handy I'd quote the passage. Because rendering this sort of thing, so succinctly, so elegantly, is a skill I envy. Probably not as much as the ability to render a city well, and accurately, but, yeah, I'm keeping an ear out for it.)
Other random thing in The Dispossessed: they seem to rely on a computer system to distribute a lot of things in fair/rational fashion, in a way that pricks the hairs on one's neck if you've been reading all about BigDataMachineLearningDataScienceBuzzwordBuzzword lately. I'm now curious what Le Guin's modern thoughts on this are. She hints, vaguely, that this system is co-opted/short-circuited by people in ways that lead to unfair bias-kinda the opposite of our modern concern. She has a similar system, if I recall correctly, in her novel ("novel") Always Coming Home-oh look, Google turned it up right away-the City of Mind. In that book, Le Guin describes a different sort of utopia, one more tribalistic in nature, and the City of Mind is the mysteriously-self-sustaining, benevolent answer to any sort of "wouldn't this need high technology" questions you may have about the utopia-sort of sidestepping the question of any issues with it at all. I don't think you could get away with that sort of thing in modern scifi without being called hopelessly naive.
Also the subtitle "an ambiguous utopia" is perfect; this was not the black-and-white utopian book I was expecting. Le Guin takes great care to show the constraints that make the anarchist-moon-society even possible (population, environmental/economic factors, etc), shows how the colony has drifted from its founding ideals into some unfortunate modes of failure (that are, still, refreshingly different from e.g. capitalist modes of failure), and while the place still seems very lovely and probably-preferable you're left puzzling hard over how it would work, if it could work, what parts it would take to make which pieces work.
Midnight Riot: Good clean fun. The narrator's delightfully snarky in an actual laugh-out-loud funny way, and if you're into any of fantasy novels, mystery novels, or Extreme Britishness (think Doctor Who) you'll find it a fun ride. I think what I liked best was how obvious it is that the author is a Londoner and he loves loves loves his city and knows it well. Every neighborhood is rendered with keen, attentive detail and I wanted to go visit all of them.
What I did not realize was how ridiculously compelling the premise was. Apparently, Stesichorus is some ancient Greek poet who's been relatively underserved in terms of: scholarship about him, surviving poetry fragments, and so on. ("He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for any poet," the author, Carson, tells us in the introduction.) The author opens with some loosely translated bits of Stesichorus's surviving poetry, then follows up with a novel-length narrative poem sort-of-based on the original, but also reimagining it all as a gay three-way romance in 1970sish Argentina.
This delighted me because, in my wild youth* I attempted to do something rather similar. The Mirage and Visions expansions of Magic: the Gathering have always been my favorite, for the sheer amount of energy and flavor in the set. The artwork is gloriously uneven, but dominated by bright painterly styles that are so unlike the bland WoWified art that dominates the game these days. The setting was revealed in what bits of flavor text I could cobble together between the cards-this was before the internet, and I never even heard of the Duelist magazine, but I was so enchanted by the snippets of the "Love Song and Night and Day," spread out over a dozen cards, that I clambered to collect them all and piece them together in order. (I was thrilled to discover, over a decade later, that the full poem is now shared online.) I knew all the nations of Jamuraa by heart: sagely Femeref, sly Suq'ata, fierce Zhalfir, ah!
But this continent never got a proper story, or a proper novel, or anything beyond the little scraps I could get on the cards. In a nostalgic fit, years later, I decided that I would write the damn story-but of course, in the process of writing it, it slowly transmogrified into a hybrid fanfic-origfic thing, as I changed and discarded and inserted characters to fit my vision for what Jamuraa should be, and as I threw in my own bits of worldbuilding. I quit at some point because I didn't know what this story was, and though I loved it, it didn't fit anywhere.
Carson-the author of Red-was smarter than I. She knicked some old Greek stuff so that she could be derivative as she liked.
So, yeah, she's basically doing the classy version of my college-sophomore Magic the Gathering fanfiction, is what I'm saying. I adored the premise.
The actual execution of the book was good but not mind-blowing. I was worried it'd be overly pretentious-I mean, doing a long narrative poem in the 21st century is kind of inescapably pretentious-but Carson has a light touch, and I could ignore the more overwrought bits.
There is a lot that's really atmospheric in the novel-poem, and a lot of really locally-evocative imagery-I'm still dreaming about how the "red world, and its corresponding red breezes, went on-Geryon did not." (More beautiful in context of course.) The ambiguity of Geryon's "monstrousness" is tantalizing-the very first line we read is "Geryon was a monster everything about him was red," and we know he's based on an actual Greek monster. But we also know (from the translated fragments) that the Greek monster had a pet dog, and Herakles clubs that dog to death (yes he literally kicks the puppy), and Geryon also has a gentle herd of red cattle, and he lives all alone.
And the Geryon in the poem-his feeling of "monstrousness" feels real and tangible, even if you're not sure whether it's from literal wings and red skin and fangs, or if it's just because being a quiet artsy teenager feels so very similar-isolated, not fitting in anywhere, monstrous.
Alas, the story didn't go anywhere in particular or pay off in a big way. It was hard to feel let down by that, exactly-the tale had a meandering, andante gait from the beginning-but if it had gone somewhere more I'd probably be rambling about how amazing it was, rather than saying it had some lovely evocative stuff going on, and that it's a good read if you're into that sort of thing.
Honestly the only narrative poetry I remember gripping me in its entire is Gilgamesh. Maybe I'm just not cut out for the post-Stein world.
* okay i was in my 20s but whatever
H is for Hawk: I was predisposed to adore this no matter what. It's a memoir by a huge honking falconry nerd, who wants to tell you all about falconry and its history and also T. H. White and the natural history of England and really beautiful language, and if any of these interest you, please just go buy the damn thing, you'll dig it.
Surprisingly I think I appreciated it most for its natural history angles-you learn just a tremendous amount about how people have related to the land in England over the centuries, what sort of habitats goshawks live in, what happened to them, why they're coming back, where undetonated bombs may still lie, why "night walking" was a Big Deal Hobby in the early 1900s, such that by the end you feel as though you know, not just the little patch of land where she's been flying her falcon, but a great many landscapes, all the things that land has ever been, and the land around it.
It's really a beautiful book. I'm looking back and I gave it four stars on Goodreads and now I'm puzzling over why I didn't give it five. I think maybe it drug a bit at the very last stretch but, hell, you can skim if it comes to that.
That Quail, Robert: Just a quick fun read that I stole from my parents' bookshelf. True story of some family raising an abandoned baby quail, which apparently was enough to make you nationally famous in the 1960s. (The days before Youtube!)
The most interesting bit was a throwaway line: the author talked about how interesting/funny it is that there's specialty dog/cat food these days, and how different that is from when she grew up. She mentioned that there seemed to be a "changing attitude" wrt pets, and you used to just keep a dog/cat around the farm because they were useful or whatnot, but you didn't get overly sentimental about them, and now they've become like real family members and all that.
I wonder how universal or how accurate her description of this cultural change is. Certainly I could see it in my grandfather's generation vs my dad's generation-grandpa just had no compunction about kicking an annoying dog out of the way, because damn it then the mutt will learn to get out of the way, and my grandfather was in fact raised on a farm. And my parents, when visiting Seattle, have pointed out that people here dote on their dogs to an almost excessive degree, relative to their experience; e.g. a brewery that doesn't allow dogs is a cause for a temper tantrum here.
All the Crooked Saints: I'm still scratching my head over how uneven Stiefvater is as a writer. The Scorpio Races & The Dream Thieves were fabulous, the rest of the Raven Cycle was fine-to-good, Shiver and Sinner just did not do it for me, at all, and now we have this, which rests somewhere in the middle of all those. It's not bad. The universe is imaginative and fun, and I did appreciate Beatriz on a personal level, seeing as I got yelled at a lot as a kid for being "unfeeling"/"robotic"/"tactless"/whatever (read: not openly emotive enough, and also being female while doing that), and here is a young lady who is presented as Bad At Emoting, but in a positive light, hot damn. Outside of that, though, there's just not that much story here, and the story that is here is all pretty trite and predictable. I mean, the story's structured around One Big Honking Metaphor, so I guess that's a pretty common risk when you have One Big Honking Metaphor. But then, I am an adult reading YA; maybe this would come across less trite to the actual target audience :P
Wizard of the Pigeons: Fun bit of urban fantasy. I bought it because Seattle and urban fantasy and pigeons so, y'know, of course I thought it was neat. It felt slight as I was reading it but I've found myself puzzling over it more than I expected, after putting it down-there's an ending I didn't entirely grok, and a sort of intense Vietnam War backstory/metaphor thing going on. If you dig this sort of thing you may dig this.
The Dispossessed: So here's one of the Le Guin novels I'd never quite gotten to.
Fun story: a friend recently complained bitterly to me, after I recommended A Wizard of Earthsea to her, saying she hated it, and the book had no characters. "But Ged? And Vetch??" I cried. And she argued that those characters didn't have real personalities, and she counted it up, and Ged and Vetch only say X words to each other the whole book, and so on.
Admittedly this is a friend who recommended The Name of the Wind to me so I think we were always doomed to like extremely different things in literature, so, I guess we're square now :P
Anyway, I kept her criticism in mind while reading The Dispossessed, and I get where she's coming from. Le Guin's characters do not have heaps of witty dialogue, you could not pick them up out of a comic book lineup, and the plot is not driven by them making dramatic decisions so much as larger social/cultural trends. So there's not really strong characters here, but there's humans, and that's what works for me-let me explain.
In the novel, there's a scene where Shavek runs into a friend from high school. It's not even one of his closest friends from high school, but Shavek is strangely overjoyed to see him, because Shavek's been all alone in this weird huge city for the past year-and-change, and he's been cloistered in this ivory tower doing all this grand physics research and he should feel so honored, but his research advisor is a dick, and he's bad at social, so he doesn't talk to anyone ever, so thank God he's stumbled someone, anyone, he can talk to. So they hang out for a day, and they shoot the shit, and they go back to his dorm and babble into the night, and at some point around 1am Shavek finally blurts out, "I've been thinking about killing myself."
And the friend basically says: of course you are; being a grad student sucks. (Ahaha. Academia never changes.)
The thing is, that moment felt so incredibly tangible to me; I didn't know all the infinite quirks of Shavek's study habits or internal monologues or what not, but I knew that moment and it was very real to me. I've been the friend in that conversation; I've been Shavek. Not always the same content, but-the dizzy rush of running into someone after a long time, imagining all your previously-neutral interactions as rosy and bright, the slipping and saying too much because you have to say to someone-Le Guin works with a light touch. That's all I needed. And that's all I get.
So yeah, I find I don't really need characters in Le Guin's novels, in the sense of, "really strong personalities that drive the plot." I just need to know that these people are human, and for them to act human. And they are, and they do.
(Another moment like that, that I'm remembering in passing, in a much more character-driven novel: in The Raven King, there's a sparsely-yet-vividly described scene that describes what happens when they're all up late at a party. And it hits all the realest and most sentimental party beats-the high-pitched drunken babbling, and the weirdly tender moment when you're in a corner with someone else trying to clean up some of these damn red solo cups because you two won't be that kind of guest, and near the very end there's just this pleasantly-charged atmosphere of togetherness that makes trashing all the furniture worth it. If I had the book handy I'd quote the passage. Because rendering this sort of thing, so succinctly, so elegantly, is a skill I envy. Probably not as much as the ability to render a city well, and accurately, but, yeah, I'm keeping an ear out for it.)
Other random thing in The Dispossessed: they seem to rely on a computer system to distribute a lot of things in fair/rational fashion, in a way that pricks the hairs on one's neck if you've been reading all about BigDataMachineLearningDataScienceBuzzwordBuzzword lately. I'm now curious what Le Guin's modern thoughts on this are. She hints, vaguely, that this system is co-opted/short-circuited by people in ways that lead to unfair bias-kinda the opposite of our modern concern. She has a similar system, if I recall correctly, in her novel ("novel") Always Coming Home-oh look, Google turned it up right away-the City of Mind. In that book, Le Guin describes a different sort of utopia, one more tribalistic in nature, and the City of Mind is the mysteriously-self-sustaining, benevolent answer to any sort of "wouldn't this need high technology" questions you may have about the utopia-sort of sidestepping the question of any issues with it at all. I don't think you could get away with that sort of thing in modern scifi without being called hopelessly naive.
Also the subtitle "an ambiguous utopia" is perfect; this was not the black-and-white utopian book I was expecting. Le Guin takes great care to show the constraints that make the anarchist-moon-society even possible (population, environmental/economic factors, etc), shows how the colony has drifted from its founding ideals into some unfortunate modes of failure (that are, still, refreshingly different from e.g. capitalist modes of failure), and while the place still seems very lovely and probably-preferable you're left puzzling hard over how it would work, if it could work, what parts it would take to make which pieces work.
Midnight Riot: Good clean fun. The narrator's delightfully snarky in an actual laugh-out-loud funny way, and if you're into any of fantasy novels, mystery novels, or Extreme Britishness (think Doctor Who) you'll find it a fun ride. I think what I liked best was how obvious it is that the author is a Londoner and he loves loves loves his city and knows it well. Every neighborhood is rendered with keen, attentive detail and I wanted to go visit all of them.