Reading (and viewing) Wednesday
Jan. 8th, 2020 04:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12On Monday the Christmas decorations came down, and the cold which had been threatening since Christmas took hold of me with a vengeance. I've been home sick for the past three days. I did, however, make the best of it: I curled up in a pillow-heaped nest on the couch, and read five books. The first two were solid, but not great, while the second three were fantastic.
The Starless Sea is Erin Morgenstern's first book after her popular and beloved The Night Circus, and it promised great things. However, it left me rather cold. I could see what she was doing (a book about storytelling, and, I think, specifically the storytelling of games, intricately woven with a kind of fairytale quality), and it certainly achieved those aims admirably, but I felt it did so at the expense of any heart. I don't mind the odd book where characters are archetypes wandering around a fairytale landscape of mythical objects and tropes, but there has to be some emotional resonance, a feeling that deaths matter (to both the reader and the characters): something of substance to sink your teeth into. I felt those things were sorely lacking.
Miserere by Theresa Frohock was similarly frustrating, again for reasons of characterisation. I will read pretty much anything whose characters are angels and demons, interacting with humans in some way — but the characters and their relationships have to make me feel something, and make me feel that they are feeling something. This book had a cool set-up (various supernatural worlds, entered by a portal through our own, in which angels and demons were waging an apocalyptic war, with various humans sucked in to fight for one side or another), but it just felt flat. The fact that it made a gesture at including non-Christian religions while shoehorning everything into a very Christian cosmology was another point against it — there's no point in having token Muslims, Jews, Zoroastrians and so on fighting in your supernatural battle if the stakes of that battle are so obviously the Christian afterlife.
Thankfully, I switched to much more enjoyable fare after that: Jade War, Fonda Lee's fantastic sequel to Jade City (wuxia-inspired gangster novel/family saga set in a secondary fantasy world where jade gives people supernatural martial arts abilities), Moon Over Soho (the second of Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London urban fantasy crime novels), and Everything Under (a strange, meandering novel by Daisy Johnson which retells the myth of Oedipus with switched genders, set in riverboats in the waterways around Oxford). These three books have very little in common, but what they do all possess is a really strong sense of place. From Johnson's watery tragedy, playing out in narrow houseboats where hunks of meat and potatoes sizzle on gas stoves, to Aaronovitch's whirlwind tour of West London, and Lee's fantasy reimaginings of Hong Kong and New York (with mouth watering food vividly described), each book succeeds in making its setting come alive, and work to support the story it's telling and the characters who inhabit it.
From books to TV shows: Matthias and I are still going with The Witcher, which I'm finding to be silly and diverting, and managed to watch all of the Steven Moffat/Mark Gatiss Dracula miniseries. The first two episodes were fun, kept afloat by the talents of the two main actors, while the third episode dissolved in a lot of pointless ridiculousness and misogyny. So ... standard Moffat, I guess?
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in_a_peartree closed a couple of days ago, and I got a bunch of really great gifts — fantastic icons, some recipes, some recs for new books, and one ficlet — and my next task will be to go through the icons and decide which ones to start using here on Dreamwidth. And, hopefully, I'll be well enough to go back to work tomorrow.
The Starless Sea is Erin Morgenstern's first book after her popular and beloved The Night Circus, and it promised great things. However, it left me rather cold. I could see what she was doing (a book about storytelling, and, I think, specifically the storytelling of games, intricately woven with a kind of fairytale quality), and it certainly achieved those aims admirably, but I felt it did so at the expense of any heart. I don't mind the odd book where characters are archetypes wandering around a fairytale landscape of mythical objects and tropes, but there has to be some emotional resonance, a feeling that deaths matter (to both the reader and the characters): something of substance to sink your teeth into. I felt those things were sorely lacking.
Miserere by Theresa Frohock was similarly frustrating, again for reasons of characterisation. I will read pretty much anything whose characters are angels and demons, interacting with humans in some way — but the characters and their relationships have to make me feel something, and make me feel that they are feeling something. This book had a cool set-up (various supernatural worlds, entered by a portal through our own, in which angels and demons were waging an apocalyptic war, with various humans sucked in to fight for one side or another), but it just felt flat. The fact that it made a gesture at including non-Christian religions while shoehorning everything into a very Christian cosmology was another point against it — there's no point in having token Muslims, Jews, Zoroastrians and so on fighting in your supernatural battle if the stakes of that battle are so obviously the Christian afterlife.
Thankfully, I switched to much more enjoyable fare after that: Jade War, Fonda Lee's fantastic sequel to Jade City (wuxia-inspired gangster novel/family saga set in a secondary fantasy world where jade gives people supernatural martial arts abilities), Moon Over Soho (the second of Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London urban fantasy crime novels), and Everything Under (a strange, meandering novel by Daisy Johnson which retells the myth of Oedipus with switched genders, set in riverboats in the waterways around Oxford). These three books have very little in common, but what they do all possess is a really strong sense of place. From Johnson's watery tragedy, playing out in narrow houseboats where hunks of meat and potatoes sizzle on gas stoves, to Aaronovitch's whirlwind tour of West London, and Lee's fantasy reimaginings of Hong Kong and New York (with mouth watering food vividly described), each book succeeds in making its setting come alive, and work to support the story it's telling and the characters who inhabit it.
From books to TV shows: Matthias and I are still going with The Witcher, which I'm finding to be silly and diverting, and managed to watch all of the Steven Moffat/Mark Gatiss Dracula miniseries. The first two episodes were fun, kept afloat by the talents of the two main actors, while the third episode dissolved in a lot of pointless ridiculousness and misogyny. So ... standard Moffat, I guess?
in_a_peartree closed a couple of days ago, and I got a bunch of really great gifts — fantastic icons, some recipes, some recs for new books, and one ficlet — and my next task will be to go through the icons and decide which ones to start using here on Dreamwidth. And, hopefully, I'll be well enough to go back to work tomorrow.
no subject
Date: 2020-01-09 07:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-10 03:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-13 11:11 pm (UTC)I hesitate to ask, but what did he do? My predictions before the show came out were: Mina will not be the MVP and Lucy will become a ~sexy dominatrix~.
no subject
Date: 2020-01-14 03:57 pm (UTC)