some books i read lately (april edition)
Apr. 18th, 2018 06:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
queenluaoops its been a lil while, here are some books that i have at least a couple sentences' worth of observation on
THE WILL TO BATTLE: wrote about it here. though my ramblings there will make zero sense unless you read the first two books in the series. speaking of which, why haven't you read those yet, for some reason all my friends are getting sick of my pitch for these books and i don't know why, if they'd just read them then i wouldn't have to pitch them all the time, natch
THE HUNDRED THOUSAND KINGDOMS: i was extremely amused to discover, after finishing this book, that it won, in addition to a bunch of fantasy-novel-awards, some kind of romance-novel-award. they were not deceived by the cover art
wait, i just googled something while writing this, and the original working title of the book was literally "the sky-god's lover," i am very lol rn
anyway, yeah. i read this one a while back so some of the details have already gone out of my mind—a surprising amount of it has departed my head, actually, considering that i enjoyed it immensely; i expected it to have more staying power.
but, my two lasting impressions: first, i'm surprised how much Sieh has stuck with me. Nahadoth is obviously the more imposing figure, on-page—dark and brutal and alluringly savage—but there's a tangible, childlike sweetness to Sieh that he manages to retain the whole while, even while the author reveals inch by inch that he's holding things back and deceiving, even while the author reveals inch by inch that despite his tenderness toward Yeine he is thousands of years older and wiser and cleverer than she. a rather different take on the trickster.
and also: Relad was great. i am legitimately bummed about what happened to him in the end. i relate probably too strongly to high-functioning alcoholics
THE PALACE OF LOVE: what a goofy little book.
i meant to do a writeup on its treatment of gender, but life got very busy very fast. basically, the whole plot has a Creepy Teenage Dude Who Got Jilted as its antagonist; said Creepy Teenage Dude got so pissed off about being jilted that he kidnapped all the girls in his high school class and became the ruler of some crazy harem-planet where he resides in the titular Palace of Love.
this sounds like the kind of thing that an overly-on-the-nose feminist writer would publish in Strange Horizons nowadays, but this is a 1960's scifi pulp novella, and so the overall effect it just weird. very knotted and not at all pointed. on the one hand, Vance is obviously trying to say some interesting/progressive-for-the-time stuff about gender here, particularly in the uncomfortable conversations with the Girl from Eridu (who, we suspect, is somehow being manipulated by the villain, and she is, but doesn't know how, and a lot of depth is carried in her tense, nervous, sparse dialogue). on the other hand, there's also weird/uncomfortable gender!... not gender!fails, exactly, but weird moments that are just a touch too male-gaze-y or slut-shame-y for a novel that's trying to wrestle with these sorts of themes, i guess, when you're reading with a modern eye. also our protagonist is like Ultimate Cliched Hard-Nosed Macho Noir Detective which rubs very strangely in this sort of setting, and also there's lots of very interesting thoughts on aesthetics in general that are both independent-of and knotted-up-with the weird feminine-exploitation stuff (i adored that, when Navarth got to the Palace of Love, he was not horrified so much as bored and annoyed; his opinion was that the villain was a terrible person and all that, but, most damningly, the villain just had bad taste—the most profound sin, in Navarth's book).
oh, and it has Navarth. Navarth is the best. he throws the dopest party ever and it's fantastic.
also i really like Vance's writing style in particular, but i haven't got my hands on a copy of the book at the moment, so i cannot excerpt it properly and you'll just have to take my word for it!
AMBERLOUGH: it's funny, the story felt very competently written throughout, but it lacked a certain je ne sais quoi that i wasn't able to put my finger on til the end.
what i ultimately decided was that, for a novel in the "fantasy" category that creates a whole set of nation-states from scratch, it's striking how little that universe is fleshed out, and how little interiority we get into the characters. Amberlough is clearly meant to be not!Berlin, but—i honestly couldn't tell you much about the feel of those streets, the dominant colors, the things that make it Amberlough and not just any damn city with a red-light district.
(compare this against, say, the Rivers of London book i wrote about before—which is also a fantasy-noir-mystery thing, and while that one was less page-turner-y, God i loved the way that author described his London. each time we traveled to a new neighborhood i felt like i could envision exactly which of my friends would live there; i felt like i could reach out and touch it.)
and the interiority thing—idk, the protagonist we spend the most time was kind of a selfish idiot, which is kind of the point, but he's not even interestingly selfish, and he gets outmaneuvered at every damn turn. his lover turns out to be the brilliant one, and i would've definitely been on board for more of the lover, but—nope. we don't get to see the smart people being smart, just dumb dude being dumb. alas!
...i'm really not the target audience for this, though. this was clearly written by someone who really, really loves cabaret and flappers and bohemia and all that. as for me: idk, moulin rouge and rent were good fun but i wasn't like, falling over myself fawning over them, the way a lot of my friends did. similarly, i'm never going to be that into giant robots, despite my general penchant for anime. but apparently i'm doomed to lose my shit over every Final Fantasy-flavored universe regardless of its actual quality (hi, FFXV!). i am honest enough with myself to confess that there is nothing inherently superior about laser-sword-dilapidated-Americana as a setting, relative to giant robots and cabaret shows, it's just my jam for some weird reason. are there rules to this. can someone explain them to me
THE BOOK OF DUST: hey, you remember The Golden Compass? that was a great book.
reading this Golden Compass prequel was a very weird experience; i remember adoring the His Dark Materials trilogy as a kiddo, but I'm notoriously bad at remembering plot details for books i read >1 year ago, so my memory was like:
* that knife was cool
* that atheliometer thingy was also cool
* armored bears were badass
* ms coulter was a bitch
* the last book laid it on a bit thick with the killing-God-fuck-Catholicism stuff
* i vaguely recall the second book was my favorite
* daemons are great
* lyra's a badass
* i really liked the weird sentient tree-wheel-people in The Amber Spyglass
etc
but that collection of memories, i think, tells you what Pullman's real strengths are: the dude's at his best when he's messing around with really cool new fantasy items, fantastic concepts, etc.
so in comes Le Belle Sauvauge, which starts quite slowly—though admittedly i remember it taking me two tries to really get into The Golden Compass, so i remember that one starting slowly as well—and there's not much fantasy-esque going on during the first half. the bits with Dr. Rolf, who studies an atheliometer, are the best, but mostly it's just some 11-year-old kid hanging out at an inn, having brief interactions with various characters who are Cameos From The Original Trilogy (Coulter shows up, but only briefly, and she doesn't even do anything deliciously evil!), and the author tries hard to make us care about the vague and uninspiring force of evil that is the Magisterium, etc
once the good bits finally start in earnest, there's a slightly more fantastical flair to things, but nothing with the excitement and originality and verve of the original books.
Pullman's a solid stylist in a YA-ish-flavored way, so it wasn't like, insultingly awful or anything, but overall, yeah, I would've rather have just reread the original trilogy. (or Lyra's Oxford—that one's basically a glorified short story, but if you haven't peeked at that one, I really liked it!)
THE LIBRARY AT MOUNT CHAR: now here's a nifty little page-turner.
the pitch is, "twelve orphan kids are raised by god to learn gods' powers, except god is a dick, also god's been out of town for a loooong time now and the kids are starting to get antsy."
super-fun and imaginative, and while not especially deep, who cares? i had a good time. also: it pulls a final fantasy viii in the best possible way. (i love that ffviii's plot is sufficiently bizarre that this bit of information does not at all tell you which part, exactly, i am referring to. but if you've played the game, and then read this book, then You'll Know It When You See It.)
UPROOTED: rollicking good time. her description of the feel of the magic system was delectable. also i think i want "fulmia" tattooed on my arm; every time she cast it i got the chills
TO THE LIGHTHOUSE: what a strange little book.
i, uh, accidentally blathered about it endlessly already. but i have a couple more things to say about it, outside of the Chrono Cross comparisons:
(1) the first section of the novel, i think, can be described as thus:
have you ever had a really nice weekend chilling in a cabin, or on a beach, with some friends and family, and then tried to tell someone else about it?
it is such a boring story to relate. "the beach was really nice and it was nice to see everyone." that's about as interesting as "see dick and jane run." telling the story doesn't capture the warmth of it—how cozy it was, how very much you loved the people there, especially in that moment when everyone was pitching in to help set the table for dinner, and so on and so forth.
the usual way you try to spice the story up is by shoving in more plot. you tell some charming anecdote. so-and-so managed to flip over the boat while he was trying to tie it up to shore, or whatnot.
but the charming anecdote, no matter how charming it is, doesn't get at the whole of the experience. how do you get at that?
Woolf's answer seems to be: spend as much time possible in the heads of every person there, so you can see how they see themselves, how they see each other, how they see themselves being seen, and on and on until it's built up this strange humming verve of thoughts that accumulate to something much more like the warmth of those few hours. thus Woolf tries to describe just one warm and lovely family gathering, in as much thought-detail as possible, sifting from character to character until, by the section's final dinner scene, you feel the warmth of all their bodies and thoughts in an almost uncomfortably intimate way.
the effect is ultimately charming, though i think it only gets there via Woolf's very beautiful, almost-poetic, almost-too-poetic prose. her use of motif, in particular, struck me—she'll put in these images and references carelessly at first, just little bits of detail—but bring them back again, and again, and each time it's beautiful and striking and lends some new resonance to the scene that wasn't there before.
that's got to be it, because the plot is nothing to speak of, and honestly, the characters aren't much better. the level of introspection we see is dizzying, and ends up making them all seem a touch self-absorbed, or perhaps makes you wonder how much of the author's own thoughts are being imposed on them—but they do have really patterns, real personalities, and yet while you're so deep in the thick of it, it can border on the incomprehensible—ultimately (as i mentioned in the Chrono Cross comparison), it leaves you feeling that you both know them intimately, and that it is impossible to ever know any of them, essay. the effect is very strange and i'm still not sure how i feel about it.
overall it left me not wanting to write a Woolf novel myself—i like plot and characters, as it turns out—but it did make me want to steal a few of her tricks.
(2) the directness of the meandery sad-artist thoughts often rang a little melodramatic even to my ear, which surprised me quite a bit. it is hard to get me to call something too melodramatic, but uh, if you have a literal artist brooding over a canvas for pages and pages about how far removed they are from everyone and everyone and nothing they make will last and yammer yammer—god, yeah, that'll do it.
i mean, it wasn't awful, but it verged on the kind of melodramatic i tend to expect on Tumblr, or in—well, idk, in Sylvia Plath, who as far as i can tell is a darling with Sad Teenagers but is rather less respected by Serious Literary Academics. and yet Woolf is extremely respected by Serious Snooty Literary Academics, which i think mostly goes to show that Serious Snooty Literary Academics have approximately the same biases as Sad Teenagers, but they gravitate toward works that bury it under Objectively Good Prose so that they can maintain the illusion that they are completely Serious and Snooty or whatever.
(and, to be fair, her sentences really are fantastic, so there's that.)
(3) wrt stealing tricks, in particular:
something that has always pained me, a very small bit, very privately, is this: as a non-visual artist i was never going to be able to create something as immediate and delectable as the splash of color on Chrono Cross's canvases, the feel of that world. novels have tremendous power but not in that particular sort of way.
or so i thought. i'm still not sure if what's Woolf's doing is quite like the feeling of those isles in Chrono Cross, but it's so very close that it gave me pause. what she is doing with language is so different and arresting and i have got to play with it some myself to find out where it can go, what can be done with it.
in particular i just want to swallow the beautiful description of that house in the "Time Passes" section; so much movement and loneliness and loveliness in so few pages. i could leave the rest behind, honestly, so long as i've got that.
THE WILL TO BATTLE: wrote about it here. though my ramblings there will make zero sense unless you read the first two books in the series. speaking of which, why haven't you read those yet, for some reason all my friends are getting sick of my pitch for these books and i don't know why, if they'd just read them then i wouldn't have to pitch them all the time, natch
THE HUNDRED THOUSAND KINGDOMS: i was extremely amused to discover, after finishing this book, that it won, in addition to a bunch of fantasy-novel-awards, some kind of romance-novel-award. they were not deceived by the cover art
wait, i just googled something while writing this, and the original working title of the book was literally "the sky-god's lover," i am very lol rn
anyway, yeah. i read this one a while back so some of the details have already gone out of my mind—a surprising amount of it has departed my head, actually, considering that i enjoyed it immensely; i expected it to have more staying power.
but, my two lasting impressions: first, i'm surprised how much Sieh has stuck with me. Nahadoth is obviously the more imposing figure, on-page—dark and brutal and alluringly savage—but there's a tangible, childlike sweetness to Sieh that he manages to retain the whole while, even while the author reveals inch by inch that he's holding things back and deceiving, even while the author reveals inch by inch that despite his tenderness toward Yeine he is thousands of years older and wiser and cleverer than she. a rather different take on the trickster.
and also: Relad was great. i am legitimately bummed about what happened to him in the end. i relate probably too strongly to high-functioning alcoholics
THE PALACE OF LOVE: what a goofy little book.
i meant to do a writeup on its treatment of gender, but life got very busy very fast. basically, the whole plot has a Creepy Teenage Dude Who Got Jilted as its antagonist; said Creepy Teenage Dude got so pissed off about being jilted that he kidnapped all the girls in his high school class and became the ruler of some crazy harem-planet where he resides in the titular Palace of Love.
this sounds like the kind of thing that an overly-on-the-nose feminist writer would publish in Strange Horizons nowadays, but this is a 1960's scifi pulp novella, and so the overall effect it just weird. very knotted and not at all pointed. on the one hand, Vance is obviously trying to say some interesting/progressive-for-the-time stuff about gender here, particularly in the uncomfortable conversations with the Girl from Eridu (who, we suspect, is somehow being manipulated by the villain, and she is, but doesn't know how, and a lot of depth is carried in her tense, nervous, sparse dialogue). on the other hand, there's also weird/uncomfortable gender!... not gender!fails, exactly, but weird moments that are just a touch too male-gaze-y or slut-shame-y for a novel that's trying to wrestle with these sorts of themes, i guess, when you're reading with a modern eye. also our protagonist is like Ultimate Cliched Hard-Nosed Macho Noir Detective which rubs very strangely in this sort of setting, and also there's lots of very interesting thoughts on aesthetics in general that are both independent-of and knotted-up-with the weird feminine-exploitation stuff (i adored that, when Navarth got to the Palace of Love, he was not horrified so much as bored and annoyed; his opinion was that the villain was a terrible person and all that, but, most damningly, the villain just had bad taste—the most profound sin, in Navarth's book).
oh, and it has Navarth. Navarth is the best. he throws the dopest party ever and it's fantastic.
also i really like Vance's writing style in particular, but i haven't got my hands on a copy of the book at the moment, so i cannot excerpt it properly and you'll just have to take my word for it!
AMBERLOUGH: it's funny, the story felt very competently written throughout, but it lacked a certain je ne sais quoi that i wasn't able to put my finger on til the end.
what i ultimately decided was that, for a novel in the "fantasy" category that creates a whole set of nation-states from scratch, it's striking how little that universe is fleshed out, and how little interiority we get into the characters. Amberlough is clearly meant to be not!Berlin, but—i honestly couldn't tell you much about the feel of those streets, the dominant colors, the things that make it Amberlough and not just any damn city with a red-light district.
(compare this against, say, the Rivers of London book i wrote about before—which is also a fantasy-noir-mystery thing, and while that one was less page-turner-y, God i loved the way that author described his London. each time we traveled to a new neighborhood i felt like i could envision exactly which of my friends would live there; i felt like i could reach out and touch it.)
and the interiority thing—idk, the protagonist we spend the most time was kind of a selfish idiot, which is kind of the point, but he's not even interestingly selfish, and he gets outmaneuvered at every damn turn. his lover turns out to be the brilliant one, and i would've definitely been on board for more of the lover, but—nope. we don't get to see the smart people being smart, just dumb dude being dumb. alas!
...i'm really not the target audience for this, though. this was clearly written by someone who really, really loves cabaret and flappers and bohemia and all that. as for me: idk, moulin rouge and rent were good fun but i wasn't like, falling over myself fawning over them, the way a lot of my friends did. similarly, i'm never going to be that into giant robots, despite my general penchant for anime. but apparently i'm doomed to lose my shit over every Final Fantasy-flavored universe regardless of its actual quality (hi, FFXV!). i am honest enough with myself to confess that there is nothing inherently superior about laser-sword-dilapidated-Americana as a setting, relative to giant robots and cabaret shows, it's just my jam for some weird reason. are there rules to this. can someone explain them to me
THE BOOK OF DUST: hey, you remember The Golden Compass? that was a great book.
reading this Golden Compass prequel was a very weird experience; i remember adoring the His Dark Materials trilogy as a kiddo, but I'm notoriously bad at remembering plot details for books i read >1 year ago, so my memory was like:
* that knife was cool
* that atheliometer thingy was also cool
* armored bears were badass
* ms coulter was a bitch
* the last book laid it on a bit thick with the killing-God-fuck-Catholicism stuff
* i vaguely recall the second book was my favorite
* daemons are great
* lyra's a badass
* i really liked the weird sentient tree-wheel-people in The Amber Spyglass
etc
but that collection of memories, i think, tells you what Pullman's real strengths are: the dude's at his best when he's messing around with really cool new fantasy items, fantastic concepts, etc.
so in comes Le Belle Sauvauge, which starts quite slowly—though admittedly i remember it taking me two tries to really get into The Golden Compass, so i remember that one starting slowly as well—and there's not much fantasy-esque going on during the first half. the bits with Dr. Rolf, who studies an atheliometer, are the best, but mostly it's just some 11-year-old kid hanging out at an inn, having brief interactions with various characters who are Cameos From The Original Trilogy (Coulter shows up, but only briefly, and she doesn't even do anything deliciously evil!), and the author tries hard to make us care about the vague and uninspiring force of evil that is the Magisterium, etc
once the good bits finally start in earnest, there's a slightly more fantastical flair to things, but nothing with the excitement and originality and verve of the original books.
Pullman's a solid stylist in a YA-ish-flavored way, so it wasn't like, insultingly awful or anything, but overall, yeah, I would've rather have just reread the original trilogy. (or Lyra's Oxford—that one's basically a glorified short story, but if you haven't peeked at that one, I really liked it!)
THE LIBRARY AT MOUNT CHAR: now here's a nifty little page-turner.
the pitch is, "twelve orphan kids are raised by god to learn gods' powers, except god is a dick, also god's been out of town for a loooong time now and the kids are starting to get antsy."
super-fun and imaginative, and while not especially deep, who cares? i had a good time. also: it pulls a final fantasy viii in the best possible way. (i love that ffviii's plot is sufficiently bizarre that this bit of information does not at all tell you which part, exactly, i am referring to. but if you've played the game, and then read this book, then You'll Know It When You See It.)
UPROOTED: rollicking good time. her description of the feel of the magic system was delectable. also i think i want "fulmia" tattooed on my arm; every time she cast it i got the chills
TO THE LIGHTHOUSE: what a strange little book.
i, uh, accidentally blathered about it endlessly already. but i have a couple more things to say about it, outside of the Chrono Cross comparisons:
(1) the first section of the novel, i think, can be described as thus:
have you ever had a really nice weekend chilling in a cabin, or on a beach, with some friends and family, and then tried to tell someone else about it?
it is such a boring story to relate. "the beach was really nice and it was nice to see everyone." that's about as interesting as "see dick and jane run." telling the story doesn't capture the warmth of it—how cozy it was, how very much you loved the people there, especially in that moment when everyone was pitching in to help set the table for dinner, and so on and so forth.
the usual way you try to spice the story up is by shoving in more plot. you tell some charming anecdote. so-and-so managed to flip over the boat while he was trying to tie it up to shore, or whatnot.
but the charming anecdote, no matter how charming it is, doesn't get at the whole of the experience. how do you get at that?
Woolf's answer seems to be: spend as much time possible in the heads of every person there, so you can see how they see themselves, how they see each other, how they see themselves being seen, and on and on until it's built up this strange humming verve of thoughts that accumulate to something much more like the warmth of those few hours. thus Woolf tries to describe just one warm and lovely family gathering, in as much thought-detail as possible, sifting from character to character until, by the section's final dinner scene, you feel the warmth of all their bodies and thoughts in an almost uncomfortably intimate way.
the effect is ultimately charming, though i think it only gets there via Woolf's very beautiful, almost-poetic, almost-too-poetic prose. her use of motif, in particular, struck me—she'll put in these images and references carelessly at first, just little bits of detail—but bring them back again, and again, and each time it's beautiful and striking and lends some new resonance to the scene that wasn't there before.
that's got to be it, because the plot is nothing to speak of, and honestly, the characters aren't much better. the level of introspection we see is dizzying, and ends up making them all seem a touch self-absorbed, or perhaps makes you wonder how much of the author's own thoughts are being imposed on them—but they do have really patterns, real personalities, and yet while you're so deep in the thick of it, it can border on the incomprehensible—ultimately (as i mentioned in the Chrono Cross comparison), it leaves you feeling that you both know them intimately, and that it is impossible to ever know any of them, essay. the effect is very strange and i'm still not sure how i feel about it.
overall it left me not wanting to write a Woolf novel myself—i like plot and characters, as it turns out—but it did make me want to steal a few of her tricks.
(2) the directness of the meandery sad-artist thoughts often rang a little melodramatic even to my ear, which surprised me quite a bit. it is hard to get me to call something too melodramatic, but uh, if you have a literal artist brooding over a canvas for pages and pages about how far removed they are from everyone and everyone and nothing they make will last and yammer yammer—god, yeah, that'll do it.
i mean, it wasn't awful, but it verged on the kind of melodramatic i tend to expect on Tumblr, or in—well, idk, in Sylvia Plath, who as far as i can tell is a darling with Sad Teenagers but is rather less respected by Serious Literary Academics. and yet Woolf is extremely respected by Serious Snooty Literary Academics, which i think mostly goes to show that Serious Snooty Literary Academics have approximately the same biases as Sad Teenagers, but they gravitate toward works that bury it under Objectively Good Prose so that they can maintain the illusion that they are completely Serious and Snooty or whatever.
(and, to be fair, her sentences really are fantastic, so there's that.)
(3) wrt stealing tricks, in particular:
something that has always pained me, a very small bit, very privately, is this: as a non-visual artist i was never going to be able to create something as immediate and delectable as the splash of color on Chrono Cross's canvases, the feel of that world. novels have tremendous power but not in that particular sort of way.
or so i thought. i'm still not sure if what's Woolf's doing is quite like the feeling of those isles in Chrono Cross, but it's so very close that it gave me pause. what she is doing with language is so different and arresting and i have got to play with it some myself to find out where it can go, what can be done with it.
in particular i just want to swallow the beautiful description of that house in the "Time Passes" section; so much movement and loneliness and loveliness in so few pages. i could leave the rest behind, honestly, so long as i've got that.
