Books read, May 2023
Jun. 1st, 2023 06:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
swan_towerFor a month in which I spent the first few weeks convinced I wouldn't read many books, this list sure wound up long. Though it's somewhat artificially inflated by five graphic novels, which don't take much time to read.
The Market of 100 Fortunes My own work, read for editing, doesn't count.
The Séance, John Harwood. Victorian-set mystery of the sort where you start out with forty pages of the narrator's life story, whereupon she receives a packet from a solicitor that contains his narrative, which encloses two other documents by another character . . . I found parts of this more satisfying than others. One twist in particular was quite pleasing, but on the other hand the title was a borderline red herring: while spiritualism keeps cropping up in the narrative, it doesn't tie in as strongly with the rest of the plot as I expected it to, and in fact there are no séances at all after page thirty-five (the one that's planned late in the book gets forestalled by other events). So it was an interesting read, but not quite an amazing one.
How Fiction Works, James Wood. I'm at the point in my life as a writer where I'm generally uninterested in normal craft books -- not because there's anything wrong with them, but because I feel like I've had deeper and more insightful conversations with fellow authors. I am, however, occasionally interested in books that go beyond the basics and really dig into the fine-grained questions of how we make stories go.
This . . . is ultimately not that book. I think Wood has some useful things to say on the very specific level of language and technique, like when he gets into the way description can meld different temporal streams (putting the static and the habitual and the one-off moment right next to each other in a paragraph), or the merits of switching registers of diction for effect. But it's a bit jaw-dropping to name your book How Fiction Works and then dismiss plot as "essentially juvenile," with no further discussion. This is not a book about how fiction works; it is a history of how the modern novel developed its techniques of language and interiority -- you will hear a lot about Flaubert -- finally arriving at high modern and post-modern literary fiction and how those books work. (Sort of: his discussion of characterization is very full of nuggets of telling detail, but almost completely lacking in diachronic analysis of character as a thing that might, y'know, persist and develop over time.) Genre fiction gets mentioned largely to be sneered at as mired in convention and therefore apparently incapable of saying anything powerful and moving. If you mentally retitle this book "History and Selected Aesthetic Techniques of Literary Fiction," then read it with that lens in place, there's utility here, but it absolutely will not answer the question of how fiction works.
Once and Future, Vol. 1: The King Is Undead, Kieron Gillen, ill. Dan Mora, colored by Tamra Bonvillain. I was a little dubious of this graphic novel at first, since my husband pitched it to me as "an Arthurian horror story." So far, though, I'd class it more as deconstructionist dark fantasy: it leans on the idea of Arthur "fighting the invaders" to spin an interpretation where white nationalists are trying to bring about his return so that he'll ethnically cleanse Britain. Opposing this are a retired monster-hunting grandma and her grandson who knew nothing about this stuff until it started blowing up in his face. There's a lot of meta in here about stories, with the supernatural being able to get at you more the more you know about it, and people being able to embody certain stories because of the shape their life has taken, which is the kind of thing I adore. And apart from some blood and gore and Arthur being, y'know, a horrifying racist skeleton-thing, it's not hitting me very much as horror. Which is good for me, since that's not a genre I much enjoy.
Art-wise, I quite like it; Mora does a great job with some of the facial expressions, though there were a few places where I found the actions scenes a touch difficult to follow. Per my husband's request, I will be buying the rest of the series!
Foul Days, Genoveva Dimova. This won't be out until 2024, I think, as it's a book I was sent for blurbing purposes by an author I know through the Codex Writers' Group.
It straddles a couple of different flavors of fantasy, with its Slavic-based folkloric concept (the city of Chernograd is menaced by monsters every year during the "Foul Days," the twelve days in which the new year has been born but not yet baptized), quasi-historical setting (the vibe here is roughly early-to-mid-twentieth century, as the neighboring/surrounding city of Belograd has "horseless carriages," though this does not appear to be pegged to the real world), and urban fantasy vibe (with the tensions between walled-off but magic-filled Chelograd vs. free but relatively magic-poor Belograd, and smugglers profiting off the trade between the two). Since these are all flavors I am interested in, I asked if I could be sent an ARC, and the only reason it took me three whole days to read through it is because I was really busy on the second day.
The protagonist, a witch named Kosara, has a whole closet full of skeletons -- almost literally, since the ghost of her dead sister haunts an upstairs bedroom. She's also scarred in body and mind by the time she spent as the "bride" of the Zmey, the Tsar of the Monsters, who won't leave her alone even after her escape from his palace. When a bad gamble at cards costs Kosara her shadow, and her magic powers along with it, she winds up enmeshed in a world of smuggling, magic, and insurrection. This book resolves its central conflict, but there are trailing threads leading on toward the second book of the duology, of the "your solution may have created new problems" variety. That being another flavor I am interested in, I'm looking forward to the sequel!
Roses & Rot, Kat Howard. A Tam Lin-ish story, though not straightforwardly Tam Lin (for starters, the heroine is not trying to rescue the guy she loves), and it read a bit oddly to me that the protagonist is deeply interested in faerie folklore but apparently neither of the ballads "Tam Lin" or "Thomas the Rhymer" exist in this version of reality. (There's even a character who apparently makes up the plot of "Thomas the Rhymer" for something she's working on).
I feel very much like I can see the fingerprints of Pamela Dean's Tam Lin all over this, replacing college with an artists' colony and roommates with housemates. There's even a passing reference to the protagonist, Imogen, having briefly considered studying Classics instead of becoming a writer when a female professor recited the opening of the Iliad in ancient Greek -- and, unrelated to that novel, I do wonder if the mention of a book by "Ellen Sherman" is a nod to Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman. Could all be coincidence, and I don't want to overstate the resemblance -- this is definitely its own novel, not a rehash of Dean's -- but it certainly chimed.
It did not, however, fully win me over. I think part of the problem is the spin on the premise: although I have made a lifelong commitment to being a writer, I simply don't have the kind of burning need to make ~immortal art~ that would make me say "why yes, I want to go live in Faerie for seven years and suffer everything that will happen to me there so that when I come out, I will make art everybody remembers a hundred years from now." (I'm with the character here who serves as the countervailing voice, asking whether it's worth it and whether you wouldn't just wonder forever if it's not you who's the success, it's the Fae.) But its numinousness also kept slipping past me: while there's some beautiful description, I never experienced the pull I think the story needed to achieve for its premise, and bits of the plot that I wanted to feel as inevitable as gravity instead felt awkwardly positioned. I was also very disappointed when the plot pulled the trigger on Chekhov's Traumatic Memory gun and no bullet was fired; the near-recreation of a horrible moment passed without comment. But that isn't to say it was all disappointing -- I wouldn't have kept reading if it were. The most powerful part of this is definitely the relationship between the heroine and her sister, and their painful shared history with one lulu of an abusive mother. That part hit with force, even when the rest of it didn't.
The Lady’s Guide to Death and Deception, Katherine Cowley. By this point in the month I had bounced off nearly as many novels as I'd finished, so I decided to go with the third book in a series I was enjoying, as a more reliable bet.
All three of the installments have leaned on murder mysteries as a key part of their plots, but in this one the balance felt tipped very toward mystery over espionage. (Not a bad thing; just an observation.) The action moves to Brussels, where everyone is very concerned about Napoleon's escape from Elba, and this time Lydia is the Bennett sister onstage with Mary, thanks to Wickham's army commission -- their marriage has gone exactly as badly as you might imagine. Mary herself is a lot more self-assured here, without losing the habits of thought that make me suspect we're meant to read her as neurodivergent. Romance also moves to the forefront, which isn't surprising for what I suspect is the conclusion of the series (there's a nod in the direction of possible future adventures, but this would also make a perfectly cromulent ending point). I think I didn't enjoy this one quite as much as the previous two, but not for any particular reason I can put my finger on, other than possibly just personal taste.
The Collected Poems of A.E. Housman. There's a "Note on the Text" from one John Carter, who may or may not be the person who pulled together A Shropshire Lad, Last Poems, More Poems, and the assorted works here grouped as "Additional Poems," along with some brief bits of translation. Apart from that one-page intro and like three footnotes, this edition has no commentary or context on the works.
I've enjoyed enough of Housman's poetry in the past that I decided I might as well go ahead and get a print edition and read the whole set. I'll admit, though, I have mixed feelings about the contents of More Poems and the "Additional Poems": the reason Housman's second collection was called Last Poems was because he was done, and we only have the subsequent ones because his brother published them after Housman's death. I appreciate having them, and at the same time I wonder if it isn't disrespectful to put them out like that, against his wishes in life.
Anyway, reading them en masse -- albeit over a period of about two weeks . . . there is definitely an overall sense of "Al, are you okay?" (No, he was not okay.) Whole lotta death in here, which I knew going in, but it's really inescapable when you go through all his works. I'm not too surprised that I found my hit rate declining once I got to More Poems, though I can't tell what percentage of that is Housman's style changing over time, what percentage is him not having polished these works in the same way as the ones that got published, and what percentage is him not publishing them because he didn't think they were as good. (A few, I rather assume he didn't publish because they wave the "by the way, he was attracted to men" flag a little too obviously for the times.) Some of them still have good turns of phrase, though. And when Housman's at his best, he hits a mode I love, where a writer achieves an epic feeling with very simple, un-epic language. I've been extremely fond of "Terence, this is stupid stuff" since I read it in high school, but these days I think it's the line "Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale" that stays with me the most.
An Arrow to the Moon, Emily X.R. Pan, narr. Natalie Naudus, Shawn K. Jain, David Shih. An unconventional YA fantasy; among other things, there are eight viewpoint characters here. The protagonists, Luna Chang and Hunter Yee, naturally occupy the bulk of the story, but all four of their respective parents, Hunter's younger brother, and the villain of the tale also get perspective. I could have done without the villain's bits, as I did not find him terribly interesting, but there was a fair bit of backstory you never would have gotten without that.
The whole narrative has kind of a pointillistic quality. Many of the chapters are extremely brief -- like, maybe 5-10 minutes to narrate; I'm guessing 1-2K words in print) -- or even shorter than that, and they don't reach any particular resolution so much as just stop when the material at hand is done. A goodly chunk of the narrative is driven by the sins of the parental past, which is another unusual touch for YA. I'd characterize the overall tone as fairly literary, especially since the supernatural elements tend to be understated and taken in stride: the characters marvel at them, but more in a "oooh, that's weird" kind of way rather than sparking shock or much curiosity.
On the whole I liked it, but I have to admit the ending fell down for me. This is (obviously) based on the Chinese myth of Chang'e and Hou Yi, but the climax of the novel makes a very abrupt leap from understated literary fantasy to full-throttle mythology, and the shift kinda lost me -- in large part because I feel like it meant the story cheesed out on its emotional consequences. (ROT13'd for spoilers) V fhfcrpg gur rfgenatrzrag sebz gur cneragf jnf zrnag gb nyvrangr Uhagre naq Yhan rabhtu gung vg jnf bxnl sbe gurz gb yrnir gurve snzvyvrf oruvaq jvgubhg jneavat, ohg gur zbzrag gurl erzrzorerq gurl jrer zlgubybtvpny orvatf, gurl vafgnagyl ybfg gur tebhaqrq ernyvgl bs gur uhznaf gurl'q orra. Gurl zbhearq, ohg va n qvfgnag, zlguvp jnl, abg n jnl gung svg jvgu gurve cevbe punenpgrevmngvba. Naq gura, va beqre gb qbqtr yrnivat sbhe cneragf ubeevoyl tevrs-fgevpxra, rirelobql whfg hc naq sbetrgf Uhagre naq Yhan -- nyy rkprcg sbe Pbql, jub nccneragyl unf gb tevrir sbe uvf orybirq ryqre oebgure jura abobql ryfr erzrzoref ur rira *unq* bar. Naq zrnajuvyr, gur cneragf jvyy arire unir gb qrny jvgu gur snyybhg sebz gurve zvfgnxrf.
So, mixed bag. Pleasant, but disappointing in the end.
As for the audiobook, I liked all the narrators, but I did not like the volume issues around Natalie Naudus. Her average level is noticeably lower than the others' -- to the point where I often had to adjust the volume between chapters -- but then sometimes, especially on angry dialogue, she would spike up to the point where my setting was too high. I liked her narration, which often had a gentle, wistful quality, but dropping so whispery-soft created some problems.
Once and Future, Vol. 2: Old English, Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora, Tamra Bonvillain. The rest of the series arrived! In this installment, Beowulf and Grendel get added to the "narratives come to life" mix, while Arthur is a more sporadic presence and Merlin starts manipulating things. The action continues to be somewhat muddy in its choreography and staging, but the characters are great, and I'm very curious to see what other stories will end up playing a role. (The entire series is only five collected volumes, so this will not be the kind of long-running work where everything and the kitchen sink gets tossed in eventually.)
Under Alien Skies: A Sightseer’s Guide to the Universe, Philip Plait. Nonfiction of a different sort than I normally read. The core concept here is to describe what you would see if you physically visited different parts of the solar system: what you'd experience walking around on the Moon, or Mars, or an asteroid (can't walk really there since it'll probably break apart under your feet), or Saturn (can't really walk there due to a lack of solid ground), or Pluto, or -- moving into the back half of the book -- places outside our solar system, like a planet orbiting a red dwarf, or two suns, or in a globular cluster, or a nebula, or approaching a black hole.
It isn't just about what you see, though. Plait is here to teach you astronomy at the same time, so you'll learn about tholins, and star formation, and gravitational lensing. All quite readably delivered, though I'll admit a few of the more technical bits made my eyes start to cross (or maybe I was just sleepy when I read those). I now have the ambition to set a story on a world in an S-type orbit in a binary star system, just because I could.
The Tale of Princess Fatima, Warrior Woman: The Arabic Epic of Dhat al-Himma, trans. Melanie Magidow. This is quite brief, largely because Magidow chose to translate a very small fraction of the whole epic -- eleven out of four hundred forty-five episodes, apparently. It sounds like the Sirat al-amīa Dhāt al-Himma is one of those texts where you spend a good chunk of time getting stories about the central character's ancestors before she ever shows up on the scene, and then some large percentage of it continues on with her son, so I can understand abridging it for the Anglophone audience. But I do wish Magidow had translated just a bit more.
I'll admit, I also question some of her choices a little. Magidow says outright in "A Note on the Translation" that she's rendered it very much in her own style, "sensitive to the patriarchal and dominant strains in the omniscient narrator that would lose contemporary readers," and well as "downplay the religious phraseology, by removing a few culturally specific references that distract from the plot and characters [...] I have thus tailored it to a broad audience reading in English in a contemporary, pluralistic context," and "remove gratuitous descriptions of violence [...] [with] fewer words to describe decapitation." On the one hand, Folklorist Me agrees with her that this is a text which oral narrators would routinely tailor to their audiences, so she isn't doing anything that's out of line with tradition in that regard. On the other hand, I feel like I'm getting a bowdlerized version, carefully made palatable to my assumed desires instead of giving me a genuine look at the story as it was written down. And since I'm not sure there's any other version of this in English except for small selections translated in the academic articles Magidow cites in her footnotes, I don't really have an alternative. I'm glad to have this version, since it's an interesting read if you like ancient epics and such, but I wish it were not quite what it is.
The Fox’s Tower and Other Tales, Yoon Ha Lee. (Disclosure: the author is a friend.) A short collection of flash stories in a generally folkloric vein -- some more like fairy tales, some more like fables, all with a modern, literary sensibility. It has a bit of the Italo Calvino/Invisible Cities vibe, where the poetic oddity of an idea is the point all on its own, rather than needing to conform to the narrative expectations of a longer work. I found it was best to read this one in small doses; my goal-oriented tendencies looked at how short it was and though "I can polish that off in an afternoon!" only to find that was dulling the effect. Much better to just meander through a few stories, wander away, wander back.
Strike the Zither, Joan He, narr. Nancy Wu. Another unconventional YA fantasy (which to be perfectly honest, is the only sort of YA I'm interested in at the moment, having kind of burned out for now on the more conventional sort). Its difference is due in significant part to being based on Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which ain't exactly built on modern YA lines -- and there's a distinct Six of Crows feel here, where if you edited the ages of a few characters to be in their twenties instead of their teens, you'd never notice the difference. I think Wu's voice added to that effect, too, since there's a kind of "I've seen some shit" cast to the narration which is very at odds with a too-young protagonist.
With all of that prefatory discussion out of the way: I really liked this one! My knowledge of the source material is entirely osmotic -- I've never read Romance of the Three Kingdoms, though I really should someday -- but I was able to recognize both some of the touchstones, and some of the places where the novel departs from the source. (One of them is, um. Really obvious.) Thanks to the departures, I suspect this has something to offer even to people who know R3K really well, because it's not just retreading that plot in a fantasy world with a bunch of characters gender-flipped. For someone like me, the story works just fine without deep familiarity, and I liked the dynamics between the characters and their ideals.
This book is the first half of a duology, which is becoming an increasingly common structure these days; I very much look forward to the second part (Strike the Gong) next year.
Once and Future, Vol. 3: The Parliament of Magpies, Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora, Tamra Bonvillain. Midpoint of the series, as it's a five-volume tale. Quite a few good bits here, bringing some welcome depth to certain characters; Bridgette had a moment of softness, Rose had a moment of protagginess, and a certain character who goes by many names had a moment of humanizing backstory. The ending was definitely not what I expected -- and depended to some extent on a transitive daisy-chain of metaphorical associations that I'm not entirely sure held up -- but at least the person responsible for that particular clusterfuck paid a very high price for it soon after. I am glad we have the other two volumes right here, waiting for me.
Kaikeyi, Vaishnavi Patel. My knowledge of the Ramayana is much sketchier than my knowledge of the Mahabharata, as the only version I've ever read is William Buck's heavily abridged rendition, and that was twenty years ago. So I'm very grateful to Patel for including her Author's Note at the front that goes into some of the variant traditions of the narrative around South and Southeast Asia, as well as noting a couple of the key places where she diverges outright from the source material, though I'm sure there are still any number of nuances I failed to pick up on account of not knowing the original story well enough. (They're not at all necessary to enjoy the novel, but I'm the kind of person who likes spotting those kinds of things.)
This is, at its core, a feminist retelling that focuses on the titular Kaikeyi and why she uses the boons her husband granted her to exile Rama for ten years and install her own son, Bharata, as the king of Kosala. But on its way to that destination, it fills in a lot of gaps about Kaikeyi's own childhood and her life as a queen in Kosala -- and, this being a fantasy novel, it adds in a form of magic that allows Kaikeyi to see the bonds between people and use those bonds to influence them.
What I found most interesting is that the book left me with a lot of moral questions, not many moral answers. The narrative presents it as disturbing that Rama, due to his divine nature, apparently exercises a form of brainwashing on those around him . . . but Kaikeyi very consciously uses her magic to affect other people's thoughts and decisions, which the character at least appears to think is mostly fine. (She occasionally pushes it too far, and over time she learns to depend on its active form much less, but there's no point at which she really questions whether the magic itself is unethical.) I'm also really uncertain -- not in a bad way -- how to feel about the role the gods play here, especially around the issue of gender inequality and how much it's divinely ordained vs. merely divinely ignored. Despite the novel's tragic trajectory in the last act, it manages to end on a more uplifting note; there is, however, an unresolved feeling, as the novel concludes before Rama returns from his exile, before Sita suffers the indignities she faces in some versions of the story, etc. Whatever gender reforms Kaikeyi has managed to achieve, they may not last once Rama is on the throne.
Once and Future, Vol. 4: Monarchies in the U.K., Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora, Tamra Bonvillain. Things having gone to hell in a handbasket in the last volume, here we explore the handbasket and its fiery environs. I'm a little unsure how to feel about Bridgette's assertion that "there are no good stories" -- grotesque enemies and the occasional gory battle aside, that line may be the first point at which I feel like this series truly came across to me as horror, since the nihilism of that view is pretty striking. It might be true within the setting, where stories are basically forces that want to either take over or annihilate everything in their path. But there's also one volume to go, and Bridgette is not what you'd call an objective commentator, so the ending may also undercut that particular statement. We'll see!
Meanwhile, the multiplicity of certain tales has reared its head in a satisfying manner, and somebody finally called out the fact that Duncan, despite being an academic, seems wildly unfamiliar with half the stories they're dealing with. "Strictly modernist. Twentieth century. I know all the classical references in The Waste Land, but only that they are references." That explains a great deal . . .
The Dragon Waiting, John M. Ford. I have finally read a Mike Ford novel! Chose this one on a friend's recommendation, and yes, it is chewy historical fantasy of the variety I enjoy. I respectfully disagree with Scott Lynch's judgment in his introduction that this book is not like O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels or Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles, which he says are (in a very memorable phrase) "seemingly drafted on the theory that tossing the reader into deep water and holding them beneath it with a few hundred pounds of lead is an expedient way of encouraging them to grow gills;" to me this book shares a fair bit with the Lymond Chronicles, in its tendency to put its pieces on the table and then leave assembly as an exercise for the reader. Which, to be clear, isn't a bad thing; like Lynch, I enjoy both of the above-named series. But it does mean there are parts of this I'm sure I missed, and I feel like I would benefit from improving my familiarity with the Wars of the Roses and associated European history before re-reading, so I don't have to put it down quite so often as I lunge for Wikipedia.
Once and Future, Vol. 5: The Wasteland, Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora, Tamra Bonvillain. Conclusion of the series, and I like how it ended. Once again, several characters got some really good moments here -- and not necessarily the same characters, either, though Mary's ending and Rose's new role were both really nicely done. But Merlin's account of his origin (or more precisely, the trap he's caught himself and his king in) was touching, and I legit got choked up at Lancelot's key moment: "How does my story end?" Though there's no overt statement countering Bridgette's view that there are no good stories, I do think the narrative itself counters that. And there are some great lines along the way, too -- from this volume, I particularly enjoyed both "Dying from being shot would be actively insulting. I should be eaten by a dragon, god damn it" and "Etymology is the hero we needed all along."
(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/YnDE3E)
The Séance, John Harwood. Victorian-set mystery of the sort where you start out with forty pages of the narrator's life story, whereupon she receives a packet from a solicitor that contains his narrative, which encloses two other documents by another character . . . I found parts of this more satisfying than others. One twist in particular was quite pleasing, but on the other hand the title was a borderline red herring: while spiritualism keeps cropping up in the narrative, it doesn't tie in as strongly with the rest of the plot as I expected it to, and in fact there are no séances at all after page thirty-five (the one that's planned late in the book gets forestalled by other events). So it was an interesting read, but not quite an amazing one.
How Fiction Works, James Wood. I'm at the point in my life as a writer where I'm generally uninterested in normal craft books -- not because there's anything wrong with them, but because I feel like I've had deeper and more insightful conversations with fellow authors. I am, however, occasionally interested in books that go beyond the basics and really dig into the fine-grained questions of how we make stories go.
This . . . is ultimately not that book. I think Wood has some useful things to say on the very specific level of language and technique, like when he gets into the way description can meld different temporal streams (putting the static and the habitual and the one-off moment right next to each other in a paragraph), or the merits of switching registers of diction for effect. But it's a bit jaw-dropping to name your book How Fiction Works and then dismiss plot as "essentially juvenile," with no further discussion. This is not a book about how fiction works; it is a history of how the modern novel developed its techniques of language and interiority -- you will hear a lot about Flaubert -- finally arriving at high modern and post-modern literary fiction and how those books work. (Sort of: his discussion of characterization is very full of nuggets of telling detail, but almost completely lacking in diachronic analysis of character as a thing that might, y'know, persist and develop over time.) Genre fiction gets mentioned largely to be sneered at as mired in convention and therefore apparently incapable of saying anything powerful and moving. If you mentally retitle this book "History and Selected Aesthetic Techniques of Literary Fiction," then read it with that lens in place, there's utility here, but it absolutely will not answer the question of how fiction works.
Once and Future, Vol. 1: The King Is Undead, Kieron Gillen, ill. Dan Mora, colored by Tamra Bonvillain. I was a little dubious of this graphic novel at first, since my husband pitched it to me as "an Arthurian horror story." So far, though, I'd class it more as deconstructionist dark fantasy: it leans on the idea of Arthur "fighting the invaders" to spin an interpretation where white nationalists are trying to bring about his return so that he'll ethnically cleanse Britain. Opposing this are a retired monster-hunting grandma and her grandson who knew nothing about this stuff until it started blowing up in his face. There's a lot of meta in here about stories, with the supernatural being able to get at you more the more you know about it, and people being able to embody certain stories because of the shape their life has taken, which is the kind of thing I adore. And apart from some blood and gore and Arthur being, y'know, a horrifying racist skeleton-thing, it's not hitting me very much as horror. Which is good for me, since that's not a genre I much enjoy.
Art-wise, I quite like it; Mora does a great job with some of the facial expressions, though there were a few places where I found the actions scenes a touch difficult to follow. Per my husband's request, I will be buying the rest of the series!
Foul Days, Genoveva Dimova. This won't be out until 2024, I think, as it's a book I was sent for blurbing purposes by an author I know through the Codex Writers' Group.
It straddles a couple of different flavors of fantasy, with its Slavic-based folkloric concept (the city of Chernograd is menaced by monsters every year during the "Foul Days," the twelve days in which the new year has been born but not yet baptized), quasi-historical setting (the vibe here is roughly early-to-mid-twentieth century, as the neighboring/surrounding city of Belograd has "horseless carriages," though this does not appear to be pegged to the real world), and urban fantasy vibe (with the tensions between walled-off but magic-filled Chelograd vs. free but relatively magic-poor Belograd, and smugglers profiting off the trade between the two). Since these are all flavors I am interested in, I asked if I could be sent an ARC, and the only reason it took me three whole days to read through it is because I was really busy on the second day.
The protagonist, a witch named Kosara, has a whole closet full of skeletons -- almost literally, since the ghost of her dead sister haunts an upstairs bedroom. She's also scarred in body and mind by the time she spent as the "bride" of the Zmey, the Tsar of the Monsters, who won't leave her alone even after her escape from his palace. When a bad gamble at cards costs Kosara her shadow, and her magic powers along with it, she winds up enmeshed in a world of smuggling, magic, and insurrection. This book resolves its central conflict, but there are trailing threads leading on toward the second book of the duology, of the "your solution may have created new problems" variety. That being another flavor I am interested in, I'm looking forward to the sequel!
Roses & Rot, Kat Howard. A Tam Lin-ish story, though not straightforwardly Tam Lin (for starters, the heroine is not trying to rescue the guy she loves), and it read a bit oddly to me that the protagonist is deeply interested in faerie folklore but apparently neither of the ballads "Tam Lin" or "Thomas the Rhymer" exist in this version of reality. (There's even a character who apparently makes up the plot of "Thomas the Rhymer" for something she's working on).
I feel very much like I can see the fingerprints of Pamela Dean's Tam Lin all over this, replacing college with an artists' colony and roommates with housemates. There's even a passing reference to the protagonist, Imogen, having briefly considered studying Classics instead of becoming a writer when a female professor recited the opening of the Iliad in ancient Greek -- and, unrelated to that novel, I do wonder if the mention of a book by "Ellen Sherman" is a nod to Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman. Could all be coincidence, and I don't want to overstate the resemblance -- this is definitely its own novel, not a rehash of Dean's -- but it certainly chimed.
It did not, however, fully win me over. I think part of the problem is the spin on the premise: although I have made a lifelong commitment to being a writer, I simply don't have the kind of burning need to make ~immortal art~ that would make me say "why yes, I want to go live in Faerie for seven years and suffer everything that will happen to me there so that when I come out, I will make art everybody remembers a hundred years from now." (I'm with the character here who serves as the countervailing voice, asking whether it's worth it and whether you wouldn't just wonder forever if it's not you who's the success, it's the Fae.) But its numinousness also kept slipping past me: while there's some beautiful description, I never experienced the pull I think the story needed to achieve for its premise, and bits of the plot that I wanted to feel as inevitable as gravity instead felt awkwardly positioned. I was also very disappointed when the plot pulled the trigger on Chekhov's Traumatic Memory gun and no bullet was fired; the near-recreation of a horrible moment passed without comment. But that isn't to say it was all disappointing -- I wouldn't have kept reading if it were. The most powerful part of this is definitely the relationship between the heroine and her sister, and their painful shared history with one lulu of an abusive mother. That part hit with force, even when the rest of it didn't.
The Lady’s Guide to Death and Deception, Katherine Cowley. By this point in the month I had bounced off nearly as many novels as I'd finished, so I decided to go with the third book in a series I was enjoying, as a more reliable bet.
All three of the installments have leaned on murder mysteries as a key part of their plots, but in this one the balance felt tipped very toward mystery over espionage. (Not a bad thing; just an observation.) The action moves to Brussels, where everyone is very concerned about Napoleon's escape from Elba, and this time Lydia is the Bennett sister onstage with Mary, thanks to Wickham's army commission -- their marriage has gone exactly as badly as you might imagine. Mary herself is a lot more self-assured here, without losing the habits of thought that make me suspect we're meant to read her as neurodivergent. Romance also moves to the forefront, which isn't surprising for what I suspect is the conclusion of the series (there's a nod in the direction of possible future adventures, but this would also make a perfectly cromulent ending point). I think I didn't enjoy this one quite as much as the previous two, but not for any particular reason I can put my finger on, other than possibly just personal taste.
The Collected Poems of A.E. Housman. There's a "Note on the Text" from one John Carter, who may or may not be the person who pulled together A Shropshire Lad, Last Poems, More Poems, and the assorted works here grouped as "Additional Poems," along with some brief bits of translation. Apart from that one-page intro and like three footnotes, this edition has no commentary or context on the works.
I've enjoyed enough of Housman's poetry in the past that I decided I might as well go ahead and get a print edition and read the whole set. I'll admit, though, I have mixed feelings about the contents of More Poems and the "Additional Poems": the reason Housman's second collection was called Last Poems was because he was done, and we only have the subsequent ones because his brother published them after Housman's death. I appreciate having them, and at the same time I wonder if it isn't disrespectful to put them out like that, against his wishes in life.
Anyway, reading them en masse -- albeit over a period of about two weeks . . . there is definitely an overall sense of "Al, are you okay?" (No, he was not okay.) Whole lotta death in here, which I knew going in, but it's really inescapable when you go through all his works. I'm not too surprised that I found my hit rate declining once I got to More Poems, though I can't tell what percentage of that is Housman's style changing over time, what percentage is him not having polished these works in the same way as the ones that got published, and what percentage is him not publishing them because he didn't think they were as good. (A few, I rather assume he didn't publish because they wave the "by the way, he was attracted to men" flag a little too obviously for the times.) Some of them still have good turns of phrase, though. And when Housman's at his best, he hits a mode I love, where a writer achieves an epic feeling with very simple, un-epic language. I've been extremely fond of "Terence, this is stupid stuff" since I read it in high school, but these days I think it's the line "Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale" that stays with me the most.
An Arrow to the Moon, Emily X.R. Pan, narr. Natalie Naudus, Shawn K. Jain, David Shih. An unconventional YA fantasy; among other things, there are eight viewpoint characters here. The protagonists, Luna Chang and Hunter Yee, naturally occupy the bulk of the story, but all four of their respective parents, Hunter's younger brother, and the villain of the tale also get perspective. I could have done without the villain's bits, as I did not find him terribly interesting, but there was a fair bit of backstory you never would have gotten without that.
The whole narrative has kind of a pointillistic quality. Many of the chapters are extremely brief -- like, maybe 5-10 minutes to narrate; I'm guessing 1-2K words in print) -- or even shorter than that, and they don't reach any particular resolution so much as just stop when the material at hand is done. A goodly chunk of the narrative is driven by the sins of the parental past, which is another unusual touch for YA. I'd characterize the overall tone as fairly literary, especially since the supernatural elements tend to be understated and taken in stride: the characters marvel at them, but more in a "oooh, that's weird" kind of way rather than sparking shock or much curiosity.
On the whole I liked it, but I have to admit the ending fell down for me. This is (obviously) based on the Chinese myth of Chang'e and Hou Yi, but the climax of the novel makes a very abrupt leap from understated literary fantasy to full-throttle mythology, and the shift kinda lost me -- in large part because I feel like it meant the story cheesed out on its emotional consequences. (ROT13'd for spoilers) V fhfcrpg gur rfgenatrzrag sebz gur cneragf jnf zrnag gb nyvrangr Uhagre naq Yhan rabhtu gung vg jnf bxnl sbe gurz gb yrnir gurve snzvyvrf oruvaq jvgubhg jneavat, ohg gur zbzrag gurl erzrzorerq gurl jrer zlgubybtvpny orvatf, gurl vafgnagyl ybfg gur tebhaqrq ernyvgl bs gur uhznaf gurl'q orra. Gurl zbhearq, ohg va n qvfgnag, zlguvp jnl, abg n jnl gung svg jvgu gurve cevbe punenpgrevmngvba. Naq gura, va beqre gb qbqtr yrnivat sbhe cneragf ubeevoyl tevrs-fgevpxra, rirelobql whfg hc naq sbetrgf Uhagre naq Yhan -- nyy rkprcg sbe Pbql, jub nccneragyl unf gb tevrir sbe uvf orybirq ryqre oebgure jura abobql ryfr erzrzoref ur rira *unq* bar. Naq zrnajuvyr, gur cneragf jvyy arire unir gb qrny jvgu gur snyybhg sebz gurve zvfgnxrf.
So, mixed bag. Pleasant, but disappointing in the end.
As for the audiobook, I liked all the narrators, but I did not like the volume issues around Natalie Naudus. Her average level is noticeably lower than the others' -- to the point where I often had to adjust the volume between chapters -- but then sometimes, especially on angry dialogue, she would spike up to the point where my setting was too high. I liked her narration, which often had a gentle, wistful quality, but dropping so whispery-soft created some problems.
Once and Future, Vol. 2: Old English, Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora, Tamra Bonvillain. The rest of the series arrived! In this installment, Beowulf and Grendel get added to the "narratives come to life" mix, while Arthur is a more sporadic presence and Merlin starts manipulating things. The action continues to be somewhat muddy in its choreography and staging, but the characters are great, and I'm very curious to see what other stories will end up playing a role. (The entire series is only five collected volumes, so this will not be the kind of long-running work where everything and the kitchen sink gets tossed in eventually.)
Under Alien Skies: A Sightseer’s Guide to the Universe, Philip Plait. Nonfiction of a different sort than I normally read. The core concept here is to describe what you would see if you physically visited different parts of the solar system: what you'd experience walking around on the Moon, or Mars, or an asteroid (can't walk really there since it'll probably break apart under your feet), or Saturn (can't really walk there due to a lack of solid ground), or Pluto, or -- moving into the back half of the book -- places outside our solar system, like a planet orbiting a red dwarf, or two suns, or in a globular cluster, or a nebula, or approaching a black hole.
It isn't just about what you see, though. Plait is here to teach you astronomy at the same time, so you'll learn about tholins, and star formation, and gravitational lensing. All quite readably delivered, though I'll admit a few of the more technical bits made my eyes start to cross (or maybe I was just sleepy when I read those). I now have the ambition to set a story on a world in an S-type orbit in a binary star system, just because I could.
The Tale of Princess Fatima, Warrior Woman: The Arabic Epic of Dhat al-Himma, trans. Melanie Magidow. This is quite brief, largely because Magidow chose to translate a very small fraction of the whole epic -- eleven out of four hundred forty-five episodes, apparently. It sounds like the Sirat al-amīa Dhāt al-Himma is one of those texts where you spend a good chunk of time getting stories about the central character's ancestors before she ever shows up on the scene, and then some large percentage of it continues on with her son, so I can understand abridging it for the Anglophone audience. But I do wish Magidow had translated just a bit more.
I'll admit, I also question some of her choices a little. Magidow says outright in "A Note on the Translation" that she's rendered it very much in her own style, "sensitive to the patriarchal and dominant strains in the omniscient narrator that would lose contemporary readers," and well as "downplay the religious phraseology, by removing a few culturally specific references that distract from the plot and characters [...] I have thus tailored it to a broad audience reading in English in a contemporary, pluralistic context," and "remove gratuitous descriptions of violence [...] [with] fewer words to describe decapitation." On the one hand, Folklorist Me agrees with her that this is a text which oral narrators would routinely tailor to their audiences, so she isn't doing anything that's out of line with tradition in that regard. On the other hand, I feel like I'm getting a bowdlerized version, carefully made palatable to my assumed desires instead of giving me a genuine look at the story as it was written down. And since I'm not sure there's any other version of this in English except for small selections translated in the academic articles Magidow cites in her footnotes, I don't really have an alternative. I'm glad to have this version, since it's an interesting read if you like ancient epics and such, but I wish it were not quite what it is.
The Fox’s Tower and Other Tales, Yoon Ha Lee. (Disclosure: the author is a friend.) A short collection of flash stories in a generally folkloric vein -- some more like fairy tales, some more like fables, all with a modern, literary sensibility. It has a bit of the Italo Calvino/Invisible Cities vibe, where the poetic oddity of an idea is the point all on its own, rather than needing to conform to the narrative expectations of a longer work. I found it was best to read this one in small doses; my goal-oriented tendencies looked at how short it was and though "I can polish that off in an afternoon!" only to find that was dulling the effect. Much better to just meander through a few stories, wander away, wander back.
Strike the Zither, Joan He, narr. Nancy Wu. Another unconventional YA fantasy (which to be perfectly honest, is the only sort of YA I'm interested in at the moment, having kind of burned out for now on the more conventional sort). Its difference is due in significant part to being based on Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which ain't exactly built on modern YA lines -- and there's a distinct Six of Crows feel here, where if you edited the ages of a few characters to be in their twenties instead of their teens, you'd never notice the difference. I think Wu's voice added to that effect, too, since there's a kind of "I've seen some shit" cast to the narration which is very at odds with a too-young protagonist.
With all of that prefatory discussion out of the way: I really liked this one! My knowledge of the source material is entirely osmotic -- I've never read Romance of the Three Kingdoms, though I really should someday -- but I was able to recognize both some of the touchstones, and some of the places where the novel departs from the source. (One of them is, um. Really obvious.) Thanks to the departures, I suspect this has something to offer even to people who know R3K really well, because it's not just retreading that plot in a fantasy world with a bunch of characters gender-flipped. For someone like me, the story works just fine without deep familiarity, and I liked the dynamics between the characters and their ideals.
This book is the first half of a duology, which is becoming an increasingly common structure these days; I very much look forward to the second part (Strike the Gong) next year.
Once and Future, Vol. 3: The Parliament of Magpies, Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora, Tamra Bonvillain. Midpoint of the series, as it's a five-volume tale. Quite a few good bits here, bringing some welcome depth to certain characters; Bridgette had a moment of softness, Rose had a moment of protagginess, and a certain character who goes by many names had a moment of humanizing backstory. The ending was definitely not what I expected -- and depended to some extent on a transitive daisy-chain of metaphorical associations that I'm not entirely sure held up -- but at least the person responsible for that particular clusterfuck paid a very high price for it soon after. I am glad we have the other two volumes right here, waiting for me.
Kaikeyi, Vaishnavi Patel. My knowledge of the Ramayana is much sketchier than my knowledge of the Mahabharata, as the only version I've ever read is William Buck's heavily abridged rendition, and that was twenty years ago. So I'm very grateful to Patel for including her Author's Note at the front that goes into some of the variant traditions of the narrative around South and Southeast Asia, as well as noting a couple of the key places where she diverges outright from the source material, though I'm sure there are still any number of nuances I failed to pick up on account of not knowing the original story well enough. (They're not at all necessary to enjoy the novel, but I'm the kind of person who likes spotting those kinds of things.)
This is, at its core, a feminist retelling that focuses on the titular Kaikeyi and why she uses the boons her husband granted her to exile Rama for ten years and install her own son, Bharata, as the king of Kosala. But on its way to that destination, it fills in a lot of gaps about Kaikeyi's own childhood and her life as a queen in Kosala -- and, this being a fantasy novel, it adds in a form of magic that allows Kaikeyi to see the bonds between people and use those bonds to influence them.
What I found most interesting is that the book left me with a lot of moral questions, not many moral answers. The narrative presents it as disturbing that Rama, due to his divine nature, apparently exercises a form of brainwashing on those around him . . . but Kaikeyi very consciously uses her magic to affect other people's thoughts and decisions, which the character at least appears to think is mostly fine. (She occasionally pushes it too far, and over time she learns to depend on its active form much less, but there's no point at which she really questions whether the magic itself is unethical.) I'm also really uncertain -- not in a bad way -- how to feel about the role the gods play here, especially around the issue of gender inequality and how much it's divinely ordained vs. merely divinely ignored. Despite the novel's tragic trajectory in the last act, it manages to end on a more uplifting note; there is, however, an unresolved feeling, as the novel concludes before Rama returns from his exile, before Sita suffers the indignities she faces in some versions of the story, etc. Whatever gender reforms Kaikeyi has managed to achieve, they may not last once Rama is on the throne.
Once and Future, Vol. 4: Monarchies in the U.K., Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora, Tamra Bonvillain. Things having gone to hell in a handbasket in the last volume, here we explore the handbasket and its fiery environs. I'm a little unsure how to feel about Bridgette's assertion that "there are no good stories" -- grotesque enemies and the occasional gory battle aside, that line may be the first point at which I feel like this series truly came across to me as horror, since the nihilism of that view is pretty striking. It might be true within the setting, where stories are basically forces that want to either take over or annihilate everything in their path. But there's also one volume to go, and Bridgette is not what you'd call an objective commentator, so the ending may also undercut that particular statement. We'll see!
Meanwhile, the multiplicity of certain tales has reared its head in a satisfying manner, and somebody finally called out the fact that Duncan, despite being an academic, seems wildly unfamiliar with half the stories they're dealing with. "Strictly modernist. Twentieth century. I know all the classical references in The Waste Land, but only that they are references." That explains a great deal . . .
The Dragon Waiting, John M. Ford. I have finally read a Mike Ford novel! Chose this one on a friend's recommendation, and yes, it is chewy historical fantasy of the variety I enjoy. I respectfully disagree with Scott Lynch's judgment in his introduction that this book is not like O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels or Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles, which he says are (in a very memorable phrase) "seemingly drafted on the theory that tossing the reader into deep water and holding them beneath it with a few hundred pounds of lead is an expedient way of encouraging them to grow gills;" to me this book shares a fair bit with the Lymond Chronicles, in its tendency to put its pieces on the table and then leave assembly as an exercise for the reader. Which, to be clear, isn't a bad thing; like Lynch, I enjoy both of the above-named series. But it does mean there are parts of this I'm sure I missed, and I feel like I would benefit from improving my familiarity with the Wars of the Roses and associated European history before re-reading, so I don't have to put it down quite so often as I lunge for Wikipedia.
Once and Future, Vol. 5: The Wasteland, Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora, Tamra Bonvillain. Conclusion of the series, and I like how it ended. Once again, several characters got some really good moments here -- and not necessarily the same characters, either, though Mary's ending and Rose's new role were both really nicely done. But Merlin's account of his origin (or more precisely, the trap he's caught himself and his king in) was touching, and I legit got choked up at Lancelot's key moment: "How does my story end?" Though there's no overt statement countering Bridgette's view that there are no good stories, I do think the narrative itself counters that. And there are some great lines along the way, too -- from this volume, I particularly enjoyed both "Dying from being shot would be actively insulting. I should be eaten by a dragon, god damn it" and "Etymology is the hero we needed all along."
(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/YnDE3E)
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Date: 2023-06-01 07:59 pm (UTC)Huh. This sounds like a different edition from The Collected Poems of A.E. Housman which I grew up with, which belonged to my grandmother; there's no editor's name and no one-page intro, even. It does have translations, a note on the text, a chronology of the poems, and an index of first lines.
I respectfully disagree with Scott Lynch's judgment in his introduction that this book is not like O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels or Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles, which he says are (in a very memorable phrase) "seemingly drafted on the theory that tossing the reader into deep water and holding them beneath it with a few hundred pounds of lead is an expedient way of encouraging them to grow gills;" to me this book shares a fair bit with the Lymond Chronicles, in its tendency to put its pieces on the table and then leave assembly as an exercise for the reader.
Yeah, my very enjoyable experience of Ford has repeatedly confirmed that not explaining things was kind of his thing.
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Date: 2023-06-01 08:23 pm (UTC)I've read The Dragon Waiting a couple of times now, and I have never actually managed to grok the timeline of the inn murder: I simply take on faith that Ford did (I never knew him well enough to feel right about calling him "Mike"; though I know several people who did) and that if I put forth enough effort, I would be able to, also.
Are both you and OGH aware of Draco Concordans? Well worth checking out, if you are not.
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Date: 2023-06-02 08:04 pm (UTC)I'm glad it's not just me! Partway through, I decided to give up on trying to grasp the specifics and go with the concept. Though I wasn't helped by the cover copy of the Tor Essentials edition, which 1) makes it sound like most of the novel will take place in the snowbound inn and 2) lists "Sforza, the uncanny duke" as one of the four key people trapped there, which . . . unless both I and the compiler of that concordance missed something quite significant, is flat-out not true.
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Date: 2023-06-01 08:17 pm (UTC)High concept pitch summaries would be: WicDiv is live-fast-die-young pop stars mashed up with gods/superheroes; Die is a meditation on how stories in general and role-playing games in particular work, once you're no longer a child.
(Note that when I say I like WicDiv much better, that means that I love it and only quite like Die.)
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Date: 2023-06-02 08:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-06-02 08:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-06-02 10:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-06-02 12:53 pm (UTC)a) did not hear him and was just being nice
b) heard him and did not like Housman
c) heard him and liked Housman just as much as I do and also Al was not okay
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Date: 2023-06-02 08:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-06-02 03:36 pm (UTC)Going back to look at my Goodreads note, I see that I gave it four stars (very rare for me) and said about it: "A dark but compelling read. I really enjoyed it, but I don't know if I'll ever want to reread it."
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Date: 2023-06-02 08:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-06-02 10:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-06-14 12:04 am (UTC)