Books about journeys
Aug. 16th, 2020 04:24 pmFor some reason, I spent most of the first half of today feeling jittery and unfocused, which led to most of the morning disappearing in a blur of idle scrolling through social media, and watching random Youtube videos. This afternoon, however, I perked up enough for some reading.
One of the books I read was Voyage, by Adèle Geras. Over the years, I've been slowly buying up secondhand copies of the out-of-print books that I borrowed repeatedly from the public library and reread hundreds of times as a child. Voyage is one such book. It probably tells you all you need to know about me as a ten-year-old that one of my most reread books was a work of historical fiction following the mainly Jewish passengers on a ship bound for the United States in the first decade of the twentieth century. I've read quite a few interviews with children's authors who say it is now impossible to convince publishers to buy children's historical fiction books, and I think this is really tragic. This genre of fiction was probably my favourite when I was growing up, and although a lot of the books I read have probably dated badly, they certainly kindled a love of history that has remained throughout my life.
Voyage itself held up well. It's a very slender book — just over 130 pages long — and reading it feels like walking through an art gallery, stopping before detailed portraits of each individual character. In the few weeks the characters are on board the boat, they experience the full range of human experience — from births, to deaths, and the kindling of new relationships and engagements. Geras is really good at letting a few sentences leave a powerful impression, and in the hundred or so pages, we get a vivid picture of life on board the ship, and the hopes, fears and dreams of all the migrants. If anyone is tempted to read the book, I should probably mention a content note: given the context, it goes without saying that most of the characters are fleeing really horrific antisemitic violence.
I'm now about two-thirds of the way through Mary Robinette Kowal's second Lady Astronauts book, in which an international group of astronauts in the 1960s is undertaking the first mission to Mars. (The premise of the series is that an asteroid hitting Earth in the 1950s accelerated climate change, and therefore the space programme.) I enjoyed the same things about this book that I liked in the first: the focus on the daily grind of unflashy, unglamorous work (everything from maths to laundry and cleaning toilets) necessary to ensure the mission runs smoothly. The same things that irritated me about the first book irritated me here: the non-American characters feel like rather superficial caricatures, and the protagonist has to be almost debilitatingly clueless and unperceptive about other people's motives, feelings, and the reasoning behind their actions. Still, it's a fairly light and fast-moving book, so I imagine I'll finish it quickly.
And now, a meme that has been doing the rounds of my circle. I last saw![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
misbegotten answering its questions.
( Answers behind the cut; in one answer I refer to the pandemic )
One of the books I read was Voyage, by Adèle Geras. Over the years, I've been slowly buying up secondhand copies of the out-of-print books that I borrowed repeatedly from the public library and reread hundreds of times as a child. Voyage is one such book. It probably tells you all you need to know about me as a ten-year-old that one of my most reread books was a work of historical fiction following the mainly Jewish passengers on a ship bound for the United States in the first decade of the twentieth century. I've read quite a few interviews with children's authors who say it is now impossible to convince publishers to buy children's historical fiction books, and I think this is really tragic. This genre of fiction was probably my favourite when I was growing up, and although a lot of the books I read have probably dated badly, they certainly kindled a love of history that has remained throughout my life.
Voyage itself held up well. It's a very slender book — just over 130 pages long — and reading it feels like walking through an art gallery, stopping before detailed portraits of each individual character. In the few weeks the characters are on board the boat, they experience the full range of human experience — from births, to deaths, and the kindling of new relationships and engagements. Geras is really good at letting a few sentences leave a powerful impression, and in the hundred or so pages, we get a vivid picture of life on board the ship, and the hopes, fears and dreams of all the migrants. If anyone is tempted to read the book, I should probably mention a content note: given the context, it goes without saying that most of the characters are fleeing really horrific antisemitic violence.
I'm now about two-thirds of the way through Mary Robinette Kowal's second Lady Astronauts book, in which an international group of astronauts in the 1960s is undertaking the first mission to Mars. (The premise of the series is that an asteroid hitting Earth in the 1950s accelerated climate change, and therefore the space programme.) I enjoyed the same things about this book that I liked in the first: the focus on the daily grind of unflashy, unglamorous work (everything from maths to laundry and cleaning toilets) necessary to ensure the mission runs smoothly. The same things that irritated me about the first book irritated me here: the non-American characters feel like rather superficial caricatures, and the protagonist has to be almost debilitatingly clueless and unperceptive about other people's motives, feelings, and the reasoning behind their actions. Still, it's a fairly light and fast-moving book, so I imagine I'll finish it quickly.
And now, a meme that has been doing the rounds of my circle. I last saw
misbegotten answering its questions.( Answers behind the cut; in one answer I refer to the pandemic )