Reading Wednesday, 11/20/13
These days I get so little reading done that I never get to play with this meme, but since I have actual answers right now, this week I can!
What are you currently reading?
I'm rereading L.M. Montgomery's The Blue Castle for the first time in many, many years. It's my second-favorite Montgomery, after Jane of Lantern Hill. I read The Blue Castle at least a few times when I was younger, so I'm in that position where the writing and specific moments are incredibly familiar, but I can't remember many specifics of the plot, only broad strokes.
Where I am, the story is just revving up properly. We've had the explanation of our heroine's dire and dour living conditions (her disagreeable extended family and the degree to which her life is pointlessly micromanaged while she herself is ignored and dismissed), and a Thing Has Happened, and Valancy--said heroine--has chosen to start living her life for herself. It's quite wonderful, and wow, Montgomery has a knack for illustrating all of Valancy's family in quick, evocative turns of phrase.
Side note: Valancy has one of the most unfortunate and entirely-unrelated-to-her-name nicknames I've ever come across. She's spent her whole life being addressed and referred to as "Doss", and she has just a few pages ago announced that she won't be answering to that anymore, thank you very much. I feel strongly enough about names and people being called what they want to be called that I think it's applause-worthy. *g*
Reading it has been taking a while because of wrisomifu (which is funny, because The Blue Castle is such a quick read, but I've barely made a dent in it).
wildpear and I have been talking about it a fair bit, though; she's a huge Montgomery fan, so she knows a lot of details around the writing of the books that I don't. Apparently The Blue Castle is (one of?) the only books Montgomery wrote for an older audience, and it's one of the last novels she wrote.
What did you recently finish reading?
The last book I read was Mira Grant's Parasite (the first book of the Parasitology duology, with Symbiont coming out next year), at the very end of October. I've been putting off posting about it because I wanted to let it percolate a bit, and hopefully go back and read it again; I suspect that, like the Newsflesh books, it'll hold up well to rereading.
(The book trailers are appropriately creepy, for the record.)
It will surprise no one that I have more to say about this than about anything else in this post (and I'm drawing a bit on things I've said to people in email and on other posts). Parasite was a bit of a test for me: Would I like it to roughly the same degree I like the books Seanan writes under her own name? Or would I like it significantly more, thus establishing that I prefer her Mira Grant work to her Seanan McGuire work? Parasites, as I've said a dozen times on Dreamwidth alone, are not remotely my thing; then again, neither are zombies. [/UNDERSTATEMENT]
Verdict: I really enjoyed it, but I didn't love it remotely as much as I love Newsflesh--which is fine. I'm not sure my heart is up to loving something new that intensely. I liked Sal, the POV character (like most of Seanan's work, Parasite is in first-person), quite a lot, but the Newsflesh characters overall are still my favorites of Seanan's, and after them, I'd have to say I like the InCryptid characters most. (Verity! And oh, Sarah--!) I found Sal took a lot longer to bond with at all, as she's--understandably in her circumstances, I think--much more reactive than proactive in a lot of (maybe most) situations. She's not searching for something like Georgia and Shaun are, and she doesn't have an ingrained purpose to fulfill or push back against like Verity (who does both of those things simultaneously). And while Sal isn't proactive and doesn't have much control over many things in her life (which she chafes against), I still find her less frustrating than Toby Daye. I'm really fond of Toby, especially as her series goes on (good thing, since there are so many more books to come, contracts willing), but some of her tendencies drive me up the wall no matter how understandable they are.
But that said, Parasite is sticking in my head in a way InCryptid doesn't so far, and it has the same...I'm going to call it the equivalent of "mouthfeel" as Newsflesh does for me, in that sense. I'm not in love, I'm not feeling fannish, but it's still lingering a couple weeks on.
The big thing that comes up in every spoilery discussion I've seen is the fact that Sal is a tapeworm. Essentially everyone picks up on that fairly early in the book, with mixed results; several people have expressed frustration/disappointment that the Big Reveal at the end was so obvious. I started suspecting somewhere in the first 50-odd pages, and became about 95% sure around page 60; the shadow of doubt was because of Seanan's knack for turning things upside down and not going where you expect, whether it's handled as a cliffhanger or game-changer at the end of a book or not.
When I was done reading, I wasn't positive that Sal's nature was supposed to be so obvious to us, but I figured it had to be, since Seanan's perfectly capable of laying a trail of clues without highlighting them. The main reason I want to reread fairly soon is to see how things read when I know for sure that Sal is a parasite and that Seanan intended for us to pick up on it--which she hasn't explicitly confirmed anywhere that I've seen, but at this point I'm very sure it's the case.
So the point isn't a big surprise. It's that Sal is an unreliable narrator who doesn't put some of the pieces together and subconsciously refuses to connect an awful lot of dots--and fair enough! She's just spent her entire conscious life learning humanity from the ground up, being carefully guided away from any thought that she might be anything but. She has family. She has a boyfriend. She has a human life. Small wonder she's in denial as long as possible, and I agree with a couple of Twitter friends who noted in email that Parasite is largely an exploration of identity and what it means to be human. [See also: my suspicion that Seanan's interest in that theme--she's explored it elsewhere--is a large part of why Haven clicks with her.]
Other things (many lifted from things I've said in conversation, so I have my thoughts in one place):
--I really liked Nathan, especially at the end. I was a bit worried that the "my girlfriend isn't human" thing would be more of an issue. (I would have understood if it was, but I would've been sad.)
--I wonder if the carnivorous plants things will turn out to be meaningful? I liked it quite a bit.
--I'm curious about Adam. He just wants to be brothers with Nathan--! (Okay, no, I doubt that's remotely all he wants. But still.)
--Relatedly: Nathan seems rational and honest enough that if he's accepting that the woman he's sleeping with is actually a parasite, I'd like to think he'll adjust to the idea of the parasite who actually shares some DNA with him being family. I'll be sad if he doesn't!
--I loved Beverley (the dog). I'm glad she got through the book in one piece and cared for. I also just generally liked that animals were fine with Sal, just not with tapeworms actively taking people over.
--I hated the trick Sal's dad and sister pulled on her, pretending he was sick in order to get information from her, and I hate how her parents kept her confined with no information and refused to talk to her and then her dad got snarly because she hadn't shared what she knew. No. Fuck that noise. I mostly don't mind her family, but just NO.
--Things that did take me by surprise: that Sherman was a parasite as well, and the connection between Nathan and Dr. Cale.
--Don't Go Out Alone was fantastic. I kept wishing that so many of the excerpts from it didn't split between pages, because I kept flipping back and forth to hear the rhyming properly in my head.
--I expected the book to make me feel more squeamish. I don't do well with slimy sorts of things, or invertebrates in general, or medical stuff...but I was fine all the way through.
For further discussion on Parasite, the open discussion thread is here on Seanan's LJ, and I enjoyed
kass' post, as well as the one
kouredios wrote. For a very different perspective,
dira (who wrote what is probably my single favorite Newsflesh fic) absolutely hated it.
One thing I enjoyed when reading reviews of the book was how many opened with my exact starting-point feelings. For my own reference, the beginnings of two reviews:
The Nocturnal Library review starts with "The first thing you need to know about Parasite is that it is not Feed. If you expect the emotional impact of Seanan McGuire’s debut as Mira Grant, you will be sorely disappointed. Feed is a once-in-a-lifetime kind of book and it’s unlikely that Seanan will ever repeat it. / The second thing you need to know about Parasite is that it’s brilliant nevertheless."
At Cuddlebuggery, Meg opened with "I was incredibly nervous about reading Parasite. Not because it was a supremely creepy subject matter (anything having to do with the inner workings of the human body makes my palms sweat) but because I love Mira Grant’s previous work so, so very much, if this book was anything short of amazing I was going to go cry myself to sleep in a gallon of ice cream.
I’m pleased to report that while not as unbelievably fantastic as Feed, (take this with a grain of salt, if we’ve ever talked at all you may have noticed that I am a huge, unapologetic Newsflesh trilogy fangirl and I strongly recommend starting there if you want to get an idea of the damage Mira Grant can do with your nervous system) Parasite was an intense, horrifying look at where society’s quest to tinker with everything we can get our hands on could lead".
*****
I also read the first Captain Marvel graphic novel, which I really liked. My fondness for Carol Danvers comes almost entirely via Tumblr; in the period when I was reading Marvel comics regularly, I never read anything Avengers-related unless it was tying in to the X-Men lineup, so my entire experience with Carol was through Rogue having her powers and memories (and her personality periodically taking over).
The "In Pursuit of Flight" storyline felt comfortably self-contained, and I loved Carol's offhand take on just about everything: time travel, alien artifacts, etc. I mean, those things are old hat for basically all superheroes, but a lot of them at least make/made some nod in the direction of it being freaky. Carol's just like, "Oh, must be Tuesday. Point me at a bad guy."
I have the second volume out of the library, and am looking forward to it. ^_^
What do you think you'll read next?
Seanan's Velveteen vs. The Multiverse, and the new volume of Yotsuba&!, which came out yesterday. Yotsuba&! comes out in English with depressing infrequency (it's running fairly close behind the Japanese release). It's the only manga series I collect where I read each new volume ASAP. (Sad, given how much manga I collect; the to-read stacks are terrifying.)
I also have the Hyperbole and a Half book, and am hoping to read that soon. And after that there are library books...always library books.
Originally posted at http://umadoshi.dreamwidth.org/475173.html. Comment here if you like, or comment there using OpenID. Comments at DW:
What are you currently reading?
I'm rereading L.M. Montgomery's The Blue Castle for the first time in many, many years. It's my second-favorite Montgomery, after Jane of Lantern Hill. I read The Blue Castle at least a few times when I was younger, so I'm in that position where the writing and specific moments are incredibly familiar, but I can't remember many specifics of the plot, only broad strokes.
Where I am, the story is just revving up properly. We've had the explanation of our heroine's dire and dour living conditions (her disagreeable extended family and the degree to which her life is pointlessly micromanaged while she herself is ignored and dismissed), and a Thing Has Happened, and Valancy--said heroine--has chosen to start living her life for herself. It's quite wonderful, and wow, Montgomery has a knack for illustrating all of Valancy's family in quick, evocative turns of phrase.
Side note: Valancy has one of the most unfortunate and entirely-unrelated-to-her-name nicknames I've ever come across. She's spent her whole life being addressed and referred to as "Doss", and she has just a few pages ago announced that she won't be answering to that anymore, thank you very much. I feel strongly enough about names and people being called what they want to be called that I think it's applause-worthy. *g*
Reading it has been taking a while because of wrisomifu (which is funny, because The Blue Castle is such a quick read, but I've barely made a dent in it).
wildpear and I have been talking about it a fair bit, though; she's a huge Montgomery fan, so she knows a lot of details around the writing of the books that I don't. Apparently The Blue Castle is (one of?) the only books Montgomery wrote for an older audience, and it's one of the last novels she wrote.
What did you recently finish reading?
The last book I read was Mira Grant's Parasite (the first book of the Parasitology duology, with Symbiont coming out next year), at the very end of October. I've been putting off posting about it because I wanted to let it percolate a bit, and hopefully go back and read it again; I suspect that, like the Newsflesh books, it'll hold up well to rereading.
(The book trailers are appropriately creepy, for the record.)
It will surprise no one that I have more to say about this than about anything else in this post (and I'm drawing a bit on things I've said to people in email and on other posts). Parasite was a bit of a test for me: Would I like it to roughly the same degree I like the books Seanan writes under her own name? Or would I like it significantly more, thus establishing that I prefer her Mira Grant work to her Seanan McGuire work? Parasites, as I've said a dozen times on Dreamwidth alone, are not remotely my thing; then again, neither are zombies. [/UNDERSTATEMENT]
Verdict: I really enjoyed it, but I didn't love it remotely as much as I love Newsflesh--which is fine. I'm not sure my heart is up to loving something new that intensely. I liked Sal, the POV character (like most of Seanan's work, Parasite is in first-person), quite a lot, but the Newsflesh characters overall are still my favorites of Seanan's, and after them, I'd have to say I like the InCryptid characters most. (Verity! And oh, Sarah--!) I found Sal took a lot longer to bond with at all, as she's--understandably in her circumstances, I think--much more reactive than proactive in a lot of (maybe most) situations. She's not searching for something like Georgia and Shaun are, and she doesn't have an ingrained purpose to fulfill or push back against like Verity (who does both of those things simultaneously). And while Sal isn't proactive and doesn't have much control over many things in her life (which she chafes against), I still find her less frustrating than Toby Daye. I'm really fond of Toby, especially as her series goes on (good thing, since there are so many more books to come, contracts willing), but some of her tendencies drive me up the wall no matter how understandable they are.
But that said, Parasite is sticking in my head in a way InCryptid doesn't so far, and it has the same...I'm going to call it the equivalent of "mouthfeel" as Newsflesh does for me, in that sense. I'm not in love, I'm not feeling fannish, but it's still lingering a couple weeks on.
The big thing that comes up in every spoilery discussion I've seen is the fact that Sal is a tapeworm. Essentially everyone picks up on that fairly early in the book, with mixed results; several people have expressed frustration/disappointment that the Big Reveal at the end was so obvious. I started suspecting somewhere in the first 50-odd pages, and became about 95% sure around page 60; the shadow of doubt was because of Seanan's knack for turning things upside down and not going where you expect, whether it's handled as a cliffhanger or game-changer at the end of a book or not.
When I was done reading, I wasn't positive that Sal's nature was supposed to be so obvious to us, but I figured it had to be, since Seanan's perfectly capable of laying a trail of clues without highlighting them. The main reason I want to reread fairly soon is to see how things read when I know for sure that Sal is a parasite and that Seanan intended for us to pick up on it--which she hasn't explicitly confirmed anywhere that I've seen, but at this point I'm very sure it's the case.
So the point isn't a big surprise. It's that Sal is an unreliable narrator who doesn't put some of the pieces together and subconsciously refuses to connect an awful lot of dots--and fair enough! She's just spent her entire conscious life learning humanity from the ground up, being carefully guided away from any thought that she might be anything but. She has family. She has a boyfriend. She has a human life. Small wonder she's in denial as long as possible, and I agree with a couple of Twitter friends who noted in email that Parasite is largely an exploration of identity and what it means to be human. [See also: my suspicion that Seanan's interest in that theme--she's explored it elsewhere--is a large part of why Haven clicks with her.]
Other things (many lifted from things I've said in conversation, so I have my thoughts in one place):
--I really liked Nathan, especially at the end. I was a bit worried that the "my girlfriend isn't human" thing would be more of an issue. (I would have understood if it was, but I would've been sad.)
--I wonder if the carnivorous plants things will turn out to be meaningful? I liked it quite a bit.
--I'm curious about Adam. He just wants to be brothers with Nathan--! (Okay, no, I doubt that's remotely all he wants. But still.)
--Relatedly: Nathan seems rational and honest enough that if he's accepting that the woman he's sleeping with is actually a parasite, I'd like to think he'll adjust to the idea of the parasite who actually shares some DNA with him being family. I'll be sad if he doesn't!
--I loved Beverley (the dog). I'm glad she got through the book in one piece and cared for. I also just generally liked that animals were fine with Sal, just not with tapeworms actively taking people over.
--I hated the trick Sal's dad and sister pulled on her, pretending he was sick in order to get information from her, and I hate how her parents kept her confined with no information and refused to talk to her and then her dad got snarly because she hadn't shared what she knew. No. Fuck that noise. I mostly don't mind her family, but just NO.
--Things that did take me by surprise: that Sherman was a parasite as well, and the connection between Nathan and Dr. Cale.
--Don't Go Out Alone was fantastic. I kept wishing that so many of the excerpts from it didn't split between pages, because I kept flipping back and forth to hear the rhyming properly in my head.
--I expected the book to make me feel more squeamish. I don't do well with slimy sorts of things, or invertebrates in general, or medical stuff...but I was fine all the way through.
For further discussion on Parasite, the open discussion thread is here on Seanan's LJ, and I enjoyed
kass' post, as well as the one
kouredios wrote. For a very different perspective,
dira (who wrote what is probably my single favorite Newsflesh fic) absolutely hated it.
One thing I enjoyed when reading reviews of the book was how many opened with my exact starting-point feelings. For my own reference, the beginnings of two reviews:
The Nocturnal Library review starts with "The first thing you need to know about Parasite is that it is not Feed. If you expect the emotional impact of Seanan McGuire’s debut as Mira Grant, you will be sorely disappointed. Feed is a once-in-a-lifetime kind of book and it’s unlikely that Seanan will ever repeat it. / The second thing you need to know about Parasite is that it’s brilliant nevertheless."
At Cuddlebuggery, Meg opened with "I was incredibly nervous about reading Parasite. Not because it was a supremely creepy subject matter (anything having to do with the inner workings of the human body makes my palms sweat) but because I love Mira Grant’s previous work so, so very much, if this book was anything short of amazing I was going to go cry myself to sleep in a gallon of ice cream.
I’m pleased to report that while not as unbelievably fantastic as Feed, (take this with a grain of salt, if we’ve ever talked at all you may have noticed that I am a huge, unapologetic Newsflesh trilogy fangirl and I strongly recommend starting there if you want to get an idea of the damage Mira Grant can do with your nervous system) Parasite was an intense, horrifying look at where society’s quest to tinker with everything we can get our hands on could lead".
*****
I also read the first Captain Marvel graphic novel, which I really liked. My fondness for Carol Danvers comes almost entirely via Tumblr; in the period when I was reading Marvel comics regularly, I never read anything Avengers-related unless it was tying in to the X-Men lineup, so my entire experience with Carol was through Rogue having her powers and memories (and her personality periodically taking over).
The "In Pursuit of Flight" storyline felt comfortably self-contained, and I loved Carol's offhand take on just about everything: time travel, alien artifacts, etc. I mean, those things are old hat for basically all superheroes, but a lot of them at least make/made some nod in the direction of it being freaky. Carol's just like, "Oh, must be Tuesday. Point me at a bad guy."
I have the second volume out of the library, and am looking forward to it. ^_^
What do you think you'll read next?
Seanan's Velveteen vs. The Multiverse, and the new volume of Yotsuba&!, which came out yesterday. Yotsuba&! comes out in English with depressing infrequency (it's running fairly close behind the Japanese release). It's the only manga series I collect where I read each new volume ASAP. (Sad, given how much manga I collect; the to-read stacks are terrifying.)
I also have the Hyperbole and a Half book, and am hoping to read that soon. And after that there are library books...always library books.
Originally posted at http://umadoshi.dreamwidth.org/475173.html. Comment here if you like, or comment there using OpenID. Comments at DW: