And you looked so good, sleepy smiling
Aug. 9th, 2020 03:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12It is baking — or at least, with three consecutive days of more than 30-degree heat, the UK equivalent. Sleeping has been difficult, and tasks requiring a great deal of brainpower have been even more so.
Thankfully, it is the weekend, and other than repotting a herb seedling into the larger container garden outside, and hanging out laundry to sit limply in the still heat, I haven't had much to do that's required any exertion. We did make it out to Grantchester this morning (leaving the house before 8am), when the temperature was still only 16 degrees or so, but other than that I've barely left the wing chair, drinking iced coffee, eating frozen grapes, and reading.
My reading so far has consisted of:
By the Book: Prose and Cons, by Amanda Sellet. This is a YA novel which interweaves the tropes of classic literature and American high school romcoms (a pairing which works very well, given how many of the best films in the latter genre are modern — or at least 1990s — retellings of stories from the former), with a bookish heroine trying to navigate the treacherous waters of high school politics. It is very, very silly, but if you accept the premise, the tropeyness is fun, as is spotting all the literary allusions.
Good Man Friday, the twelfth book in Barbara Hambley's Benjamin January mystery series. This one sees Ben (along with his sister Dominique, Dominique's lover Henri, and Henri's wife Chloë) journey to Washington D.C. to track down Chloë's missing relative, and I enjoyed it a lot. Dominque and Chloë are among my favourite side characters in the series, and I love any situation in which the pair of them are thrown together, and the way they employ their two very different skill sets to solve problems. I always enjoy books in the series which go outside the regular New Orleans setting and shed new light on other corners of the world.
The Chosen, by Veronica Roth. I've never read any of Roth's previous YA novels, and I acquired this one as Matthias noticed it was available cheaply for the Kindle and bought it (we have a shared Kindle library). There is a kernel of an interesting idea here: the teenage 'chosen ones' of various non-existent YA dystopias/fantasy novels survive whatever battles they were forced to win, and, fifteen years later they're in their thirties, traumatised and wondering what to do with the ordinary lives they did not expect to be living. The book is an attempt to interrogate the way such fantasy settings — and the adult/mentor figures within them — turn their heroes into child soldiers at best, weapons at worst, and what that might do to a person. (Indeed it is, I suppose, an attempt to critique exactly the kind of massively popular YA dystopias that Roth herself was so commercially successfuly at churning out.) The problem is that this kernel of an idea is buried in a lot of turgid, formulaic plot and flat characterisation — the author is not equal to the task she has set herself.
Thankfully, the last book I read, Thorn, by Intisar Khanani, was a massive improvement. This is a retelling of The Goose Girl — quite dark, even by fairytale standards — done exquisitely. I am a sucker for a good fairytale retelling, and this is one of the best I've ever read. Some of the more negative reviews I've seen criticise the book for its narrator's passivity — but this passivity makes sense because what she actually is is a survivor of a childhood of abuse and trauma, compounded by the fact that this abuse is minimised, denied, or she is blamed for it. I thought this element was really well written. I realise this makes it sound quite a grim book, but it also has moments of whimsy, kindness, and that kind of luminous, clear fairytale goodness that cannot be crushed, no matter the cruelties and injustices that are piled on it. I absolutely adore stories about characters who fight back against viciousness not with violence or intrigue, but in smaller, quieter ways — carving out spaces of community, compassion, and generosity in the margins, out of sight of those doing the violence. This is definitely one of my favourite books of the year so far, and I will probably write a longer review on my reviews blog at a later point. When the weather is cooler, maybe. One thing I would say is that if my gushing words about this book have made you intrigued, there are certain content warnings that I would probably want to let you know (if you know the original fairytale, you will know what I mean, but if not, and if you have any concerns in this area, ask me in the comments).
The paperback of Thorn also included a short story set in the same world, 'The Bone Knife', which read like a long-forgotten folktale, with familiar beats of mysterious supernatural guests, a humble family showing cautious hospitality, and dangerous bargains with fairies. I loved it!
That's it, in terms of reading for this weekend. I'm going to try to find a very slow, gentle yoga class to do, check out the latest segment of the Lore Olympus webcomic (just released today), and try to avoid melting!
Thankfully, it is the weekend, and other than repotting a herb seedling into the larger container garden outside, and hanging out laundry to sit limply in the still heat, I haven't had much to do that's required any exertion. We did make it out to Grantchester this morning (leaving the house before 8am), when the temperature was still only 16 degrees or so, but other than that I've barely left the wing chair, drinking iced coffee, eating frozen grapes, and reading.
My reading so far has consisted of:
By the Book: Prose and Cons, by Amanda Sellet. This is a YA novel which interweaves the tropes of classic literature and American high school romcoms (a pairing which works very well, given how many of the best films in the latter genre are modern — or at least 1990s — retellings of stories from the former), with a bookish heroine trying to navigate the treacherous waters of high school politics. It is very, very silly, but if you accept the premise, the tropeyness is fun, as is spotting all the literary allusions.
Good Man Friday, the twelfth book in Barbara Hambley's Benjamin January mystery series. This one sees Ben (along with his sister Dominique, Dominique's lover Henri, and Henri's wife Chloë) journey to Washington D.C. to track down Chloë's missing relative, and I enjoyed it a lot. Dominque and Chloë are among my favourite side characters in the series, and I love any situation in which the pair of them are thrown together, and the way they employ their two very different skill sets to solve problems. I always enjoy books in the series which go outside the regular New Orleans setting and shed new light on other corners of the world.
The Chosen, by Veronica Roth. I've never read any of Roth's previous YA novels, and I acquired this one as Matthias noticed it was available cheaply for the Kindle and bought it (we have a shared Kindle library). There is a kernel of an interesting idea here: the teenage 'chosen ones' of various non-existent YA dystopias/fantasy novels survive whatever battles they were forced to win, and, fifteen years later they're in their thirties, traumatised and wondering what to do with the ordinary lives they did not expect to be living. The book is an attempt to interrogate the way such fantasy settings — and the adult/mentor figures within them — turn their heroes into child soldiers at best, weapons at worst, and what that might do to a person. (Indeed it is, I suppose, an attempt to critique exactly the kind of massively popular YA dystopias that Roth herself was so commercially successfuly at churning out.) The problem is that this kernel of an idea is buried in a lot of turgid, formulaic plot and flat characterisation — the author is not equal to the task she has set herself.
Thankfully, the last book I read, Thorn, by Intisar Khanani, was a massive improvement. This is a retelling of The Goose Girl — quite dark, even by fairytale standards — done exquisitely. I am a sucker for a good fairytale retelling, and this is one of the best I've ever read. Some of the more negative reviews I've seen criticise the book for its narrator's passivity — but this passivity makes sense because what she actually is is a survivor of a childhood of abuse and trauma, compounded by the fact that this abuse is minimised, denied, or she is blamed for it. I thought this element was really well written. I realise this makes it sound quite a grim book, but it also has moments of whimsy, kindness, and that kind of luminous, clear fairytale goodness that cannot be crushed, no matter the cruelties and injustices that are piled on it. I absolutely adore stories about characters who fight back against viciousness not with violence or intrigue, but in smaller, quieter ways — carving out spaces of community, compassion, and generosity in the margins, out of sight of those doing the violence. This is definitely one of my favourite books of the year so far, and I will probably write a longer review on my reviews blog at a later point. When the weather is cooler, maybe. One thing I would say is that if my gushing words about this book have made you intrigued, there are certain content warnings that I would probably want to let you know (if you know the original fairytale, you will know what I mean, but if not, and if you have any concerns in this area, ask me in the comments).
The paperback of Thorn also included a short story set in the same world, 'The Bone Knife', which read like a long-forgotten folktale, with familiar beats of mysterious supernatural guests, a humble family showing cautious hospitality, and dangerous bargains with fairies. I loved it!
That's it, in terms of reading for this weekend. I'm going to try to find a very slow, gentle yoga class to do, check out the latest segment of the Lore Olympus webcomic (just released today), and try to avoid melting!
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Date: 2020-08-09 05:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-09 06:12 pm (UTC)Re: Roth, dangit, Divergent is ALMOST an interesting critique of other dystopia ideas (I genuinely connected to the first book) but i think she said everything she had to say in book 1 and then. . .kept going in a way that subsequently ruined everything interesting about the first book. Maybe she'll figure out how to write a good one one day, there are definitely ideas there.
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Date: 2020-08-09 07:10 pm (UTC)Good Man Friday is next on my to-read list! I'm so glad to hear it's got lots of good Minou and Chloe scenes since I also adore them!
I agree with you that the plot of The Chosen sounds fascinating and I wish a better writer had written it!
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Date: 2020-08-09 10:55 pm (UTC)Tell me more about how Thorn reinvents the fairytale it's based on?
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Date: 2020-08-10 08:35 am (UTC)Yes. Three days over 30 degrees. How the body adjusts to different climates!
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Date: 2020-08-10 12:30 pm (UTC)I really enjoyed it, and I hope you do too!
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Date: 2020-08-10 12:32 pm (UTC)I still haven't read Divergent, and don't particularly want to, but I can well imagine that the series started out with one strong book, and then got expanded into a poorly thought out trilogy. Certainly with The Chosen Ones there was a good idea, but it was buried beneath a whole lot of rubbish.
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Date: 2020-08-10 12:37 pm (UTC)I loved Good Man Friday, and I think you will enjoy the scenes with Minou and Chloë.
The Chosen was my first book by Veronica Roth, and it's certainly not inspiring me to try others... I'm sure there are other authors who have explored similar ideas, though — she can't be the first person to recognise that the 'chosen' heroes of YA fiction are basically child soldiers. I suppose Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicls sort of inches towards this idea, in a much more satisfying way. I'm still bitter that show got cancelled!
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Date: 2020-08-10 12:39 pm (UTC)Three days over 30 degrees. How the body adjusts to different climates!
Indeed. I genuinely don't know if I'm going to be able to stomach being in Australia in summer ever again. The last time I went back it was April, and even then I found Sydney almost unbearably hot. It's bizarre how quickly the body adapts.
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Date: 2020-08-10 12:43 pm (UTC)(I also think I read Butler's 'Talent' books shortly after Divergent which was the point where I was like 'no more play dystopias for a while.'
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Date: 2020-08-10 12:49 pm (UTC)I wouldn't really say Thorn reinvents the fairytale — it stick pretty close to the arc of the original sotry. What it does is flesh that story out — fairytale characters don't tend to have any emotional/psychological reasons for doing the things they do, they just do them because that's what the story requires (or because they are generically 'good' or 'bad') — but Thorn ascribes motives and personalities which explain the choices characters make. And so the heroine is happy to make a political marriage to a stranger because her family are abusive and she sees the marriage as a way to escape the abuse, the servant (or rather aristocratic lady in waiting) who tricks everyone into thinking she is really the princess does so because the princess ruined her life several years back, and so on. There's also an added strand about the impossibility of the poor and dispossessed residents of the kingdom getting any form of justice from the authorities, and turning to their own networks of thieves and criminals to dispense justice instead (and generally about the nobility/royalty being so removed from the people they rule that they are incapable of addressing their concernes), and another strand about intergenerational trauma, and the degree to which people are responsible for the injustices perpetuated by their ancestors. But I wouldn't say that any of that reinvents the fairytale — just bulks it out.
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Date: 2020-08-10 12:54 pm (UTC)Yep, totally fair. I always found the (mainly American) YA dystopias of the 2000s so unbelievably tame in comparison to the Australian equivalents with which I grew up (none of which came close to Butler). If nothing else, the latter do not tend to end with people overthrowing whatever flimsily constructed dictatorship that oppresses them: at best, the characters have to learn to accommodate and live within the dystopian setting.
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Date: 2020-08-10 12:57 pm (UTC)I'm interested in what the Australian dystopias that influenced you were . . .even if I'm not likely to revisit that genre soon, would be good to have in my back pocket when i creep back to being fascinated by that canon.
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Date: 2020-08-10 01:29 pm (UTC)The big Australian dystopias for me were:
Victor Kelleher's Taronga (a stand alone novel set in a post-apocalyptic Australia, the protagonist has developed telepathic powers and can communicate with animals; pretty much every Australian of my generation was taught this novel at some point during high school English class)
Kelleher's loosely linked trilogy Parkland, Earthsong and Fire Dancer. The three are a bit complicated to summarise so I have linked to blog posts I wrote about each nearly a decade ago.
Kelleher's stand alone novel The Beast of Heaven (two computers have been programmed to debate whether to trigger a nuclear device that will wipe out all life on Earth, and their choice hinges on whether the one can convince the other that human beings are worthy of continuing to exist, or vice versa).
Gillian Rubinstein's novel Galax Arena, in which abandoned children from poorer parts of the world are kidnapped to what they think is a circus arena in outer space, to perform for aliens. In actual fact, they are still on Earth and their performances (dangerous, done without safety equipment, with frequent deaths) are done to generate and harvest the children's adreneline, which is used to artificially prolong the lives of the extremely wealthy. The book is an extremely unsubtle metaphor for the exploitation of the 'third world' by the wealthy inhabitants of more privileged countries.
John Marsden's Tomorrow series, in which a group of teenagers who spent a week camping in the remote bushland return to their rural hometown to find that it was used as the starting point in an invasion of Australia; the teenagers have to flee back to the bush and they decide to become guerrilla fighters. It's never said outright who the invading country is, but it's pretty obvious from context that it is Indonesia, and Marsden later got a lot of criticism for the racism implicit in that framing. Your mileage may vary in this regard — it's pretty clear to me that the series, written in the '90s in direct reaction to what was going on in East Timor at the time (to which Australia did nothing in response), was meant to be a rebuke to Australian complacency, and the attitude that wars were something that happened far away. It was also a rebuke to politicians at the time continuing to cosy up to the US — in the series, politicians assume that the (real-world) alliance with the US means that America will step in and stop the invasion, whereas instead what happens is that America airlifts politicians and the wealthy out of the country and then abandons invaded Australia to its fate, and only New Zealand and Papua New Guinea do anything to help.
There are, as you would imagine, a lot of Australian dystopias that tackle climate change as a subject (so the idea, which I saw someone state recently on a panel of SFF authors/reviewers, that no SFF books of more than 20 years ago tackled climate change is laughable). One series I remember fondly is a quintet of books — aimed at middle grade rather than YA readers — by Jackie French, in which Australia has become so hot that going outside in daytime is impossible, and people have adapted by becoming nocturnal, living more like subsistence farmers. If I remember correctly, this one is very bluntly 'technology/industrial revolution bad' without much nuance.
The Kelleher books are probably my favourites, but Ruth Park's My Sister Sif comes a close second, because it's done so subtly that when you realise it's a dystopia it's absolutely horrifying. What you think you're reading is a science fiction story with themes of family drama, the weight of parental expectation, and tensions between siblings, set against this beautiful backdrop of a fictional Pacific island in which some people have developed the ability to live and breathe underwater. And then, every so often, there will be a throwaway line about tigers being extinct, or the main character's toddler niece/nephew never having seen a butterfly — just left there quietly, like part of the furniture. It's the matter of fact way that these things are revealed that makes them so powerful, and so horrific.
I'm not saying any of these books is particularly groundbreaking, and my deep affection for them is in large part coloured by nostalgia. The only one which I truly think still stands up is My Sister Sif. But none of them let their protagonists off the hook — they're still allowed to be good, brave, principled people, but they are never allowed to keep their hands clean. They live in dystopias, and the muck of that bleeds into their lives and choices, and the narratives do not blame them for that.
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Date: 2020-08-10 01:41 pm (UTC)And thanks for the list! I was familiar with the Marsden books in a vague way but this is a great list to dig into more.
Also 'Parable' is all about climate change, panel, wtf.
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Date: 2020-08-10 02:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-10 03:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-10 05:19 pm (UTC)Ah, I was wondering about The Chosen, but with that review I think I might rather step away from buying that one, so thanks for sharing your opinion!
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Date: 2020-08-11 10:26 am (UTC)I would avoid The Chosen Ones if I were you — it's really not worth it.
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Date: 2020-08-11 01:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-11 03:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-15 09:43 pm (UTC)Alright, off the reading list it flies then.
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Date: 2020-09-17 10:03 pm (UTC)