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dolorosa_12This day of transition from daylight saving to standard time is my favourite of the year: I'm a morning person, I tend to wake up early, and I like waking to sunlight. The extra hour is always much appreciated as well. This time around, it meant that Matthias and I were up and off for our walk to Grantchester by about 7.30am, and back home — via the French bakery for a fresh, warm baguette and coffee — at about 8.30am. It was bright, crisp, and clear, and the cows were all gathered in the field closest to the carpark, ready to be moved out of their summer home, as always happens when daylight saving ends.
The rest of the morning was taken up with yoga (a fast flow sequence that was perhaps a bit more ambitious than I felt like, focusing heavily on core strength), a bit of food prep for dinner, cleaning empty fountain pens, and finishing up the final fifteen per cent of the book I'd been reading, Queen of the Conquered by Kacen Callender.
This was a book that was so ambitious and compelling in some regards, and so incredibly frustrating in other areas that I almost feel incapable of reviewing it. It's the first in a fantasy series grappling with the history of slavery and colonialism, particularly in the Caribbean, and it has really interesting things to say about revenge. It's essentially a revenge tragedy, and Callender does a great job of showing what it is to live a life solely motivated by revenge — how it corrupts and poisons everything, how it hollows out a person, and how it causes such a person to justify every injustice they perpetrate as working towards that ultimate end. I applaud Callender also for writing a book whose protagonist is so thoroughly contemptible (there are several things that she — the narrator, Sigourney — does that cross a moral line beyond which I am incapable of finding a character sympathetic) but for whom it is still possible to feel pity.
But at the same time, the book — which is supposedly adult fiction — was dreadfully let down by how closely it stuck to the typical US young adult novel formula. The first person present tense grated — I can see why the former was necessary, given the book was intended to bring its readers into uncomfortable proximity to the mindset of a woman so thoroughly convinced that 'the master's tools will dismantle the master's house', but present tense is almost never warranted, and certainly wasn't here. The obvious Designated Love Interest was unnecessary. And the twist at the end was so obviously telegraphed (it's basically Chekhov's Mind-Reading: if you have a narrator who has supernatural abilities to read people's minds, those responsible for the unsolved string of politically-motivated murders are going to be the people whose minds she refrains from reading out of respect, or dismissal of their importance, and I figured this out after I'd read about a third of the book). And from a structural point of view, it's really poor writing to have this great twist revealed in a huge infodump (secondhand, as the narrator reads someone's mind) for the final fifteen per cent of the book.
In other words, interesting ideas, shame about the execution.
My other recently read books have, with one exception, been a lot more satisfying.
I wouldn't have picked up Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld in ordinary circumstances, but it was discounted on the Kindle a few weeks ago, and out of what I now think was ghoulish curiousity, I gave it a try. The premise of the book is that Hillary Clinton, instead of marrying Bill in the 1970s, left him, and went on to have a glittering political career. It was never going to work for me, for two reasons. The first one is that I am hugely squicked by RPF about living people — it gives me so much secondhand embarassment, although obviously I have no problem with others writing this kind of stuff, it's just not something I'd seek out. And secondly the book was just such obvious wishful thinking — written in the wake of the 2016 US election, it read almost like a kind of self-deception. Sittenfeld's Hillary remains single into her seventies, and while I can accept that such a person would have no difficulty getting elected to political office, it's sadly inconceivable to me that American voters would tolerate an ageing, single, childless woman as their presidential candidate. I don't mind reacting to political disappointment with escapist wallowing, but I find it irritating when the escapism takes the form of idealising US 'democracy' and the US voting public.
The King's Evil and The Last Protector — the remaining two books in Andrew Taylor's Marwood and Lovett Regency era mystery series — were an absolute delight. As with all my favourite historical crime series, I couldn't care less about the actual mysteries: I'm reading these books for the setting, and for the characters. I'm an absolute sucker for stories that throw together two characters whose outlooks, motivations, and default manner of solving problems are at utter odds, and force those characters to grudgingly work together. The two eponymous characters exemplify this: Marwood wants to work within the system, and keeps softheartedly gathering traumatised, dispossessed people into his household to help them (at last count he's now supporting four such strays, and tried to help a fifth), wheras Cat Lovett's solution to all sources of danger and conflict is to stab them with her dagger.
Serpentine is Philip Pullman's new novella, and acts as a bridge of sorts between the His Dark Materials and Book of Dust trilogies. Lyra is a teenager, and back in the North to help out on an archaeological dig, and it was wonderful to be back in that part of Pullman's alternative universe, returning to all those formative parts of Lyra's childhood and viewing them with her adult eyes. But the conflict of this novella is more internal, planting the seeds that grow into full scale self-destruction in The Secret Commonwealth. (I have a lot of problems with The Secret Commonwealth, and with the direction Pullman is taking his characters in the new trilogy in general, but now is not the time to air them; the novella on its own is fine.)
The final book in this current roundup is Iona Datt Sharma's delightful m/m romance novella, Division Bells. It's got everything I've come to expect in their fiction: characters who are highly competent in their very specific areas, a hopeful and uplifting outlook, and a generosity of spirit. Anything I could say about the book has already been said so much better byskygiants, but suffice it to say that I loved it, and found it exactly the perfect way to start my weekend, sitting curled up in my wing chair with a cup of coffee on a Saturday morning. It's like a glimmer of light between clouds.
The rest of the weekend has been spent signing up for Yuletide, poking around the letters app (I now have a list of six potential requests I want to treat, and the only thing that's stopping me from starting is that I like to write my assignment first before committing to any treats), and trying to hunt down an elusive book which unfortunately has (to the best of my memory) an extremely generic name.
My obsession with fiction set in Al-Andalus (either when it was experiencing its glittering golden age, or in its dying days and collapse), particularly when the point-of-view characters are religious minorities, was kindled way back in my undergrad days, when my Jewish History/Religion/Culture lecturer assigned us an excerpt of a historical novel set in that period (alongside the typical academic books and journal articles). I'd always meant to track down this book, but its name eludes me, and while a lot of Googling by both Matthias and me yesterday unearthed an entire library of historical fiction books covering similar ground (now all added to my to read list), I still cannot find the book in question. Now my only hope is that all my photocopied course notes are still sitting in my old room in my mum's flat in Sydney, so that whenever international travel is possible again, I can go through said notes and find the reference to the book I'm seeking. At least I've got an interesting looking set of other books to read at some point in the future!
In the time it's taken me to write this post, the sun has completely disappeared. Any lingering hint of summer has definitely well and truly vanished!
The rest of the morning was taken up with yoga (a fast flow sequence that was perhaps a bit more ambitious than I felt like, focusing heavily on core strength), a bit of food prep for dinner, cleaning empty fountain pens, and finishing up the final fifteen per cent of the book I'd been reading, Queen of the Conquered by Kacen Callender.
This was a book that was so ambitious and compelling in some regards, and so incredibly frustrating in other areas that I almost feel incapable of reviewing it. It's the first in a fantasy series grappling with the history of slavery and colonialism, particularly in the Caribbean, and it has really interesting things to say about revenge. It's essentially a revenge tragedy, and Callender does a great job of showing what it is to live a life solely motivated by revenge — how it corrupts and poisons everything, how it hollows out a person, and how it causes such a person to justify every injustice they perpetrate as working towards that ultimate end. I applaud Callender also for writing a book whose protagonist is so thoroughly contemptible (there are several things that she — the narrator, Sigourney — does that cross a moral line beyond which I am incapable of finding a character sympathetic) but for whom it is still possible to feel pity.
But at the same time, the book — which is supposedly adult fiction — was dreadfully let down by how closely it stuck to the typical US young adult novel formula. The first person present tense grated — I can see why the former was necessary, given the book was intended to bring its readers into uncomfortable proximity to the mindset of a woman so thoroughly convinced that 'the master's tools will dismantle the master's house', but present tense is almost never warranted, and certainly wasn't here. The obvious Designated Love Interest was unnecessary. And the twist at the end was so obviously telegraphed (it's basically Chekhov's Mind-Reading: if you have a narrator who has supernatural abilities to read people's minds, those responsible for the unsolved string of politically-motivated murders are going to be the people whose minds she refrains from reading out of respect, or dismissal of their importance, and I figured this out after I'd read about a third of the book). And from a structural point of view, it's really poor writing to have this great twist revealed in a huge infodump (secondhand, as the narrator reads someone's mind) for the final fifteen per cent of the book.
In other words, interesting ideas, shame about the execution.
My other recently read books have, with one exception, been a lot more satisfying.
I wouldn't have picked up Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld in ordinary circumstances, but it was discounted on the Kindle a few weeks ago, and out of what I now think was ghoulish curiousity, I gave it a try. The premise of the book is that Hillary Clinton, instead of marrying Bill in the 1970s, left him, and went on to have a glittering political career. It was never going to work for me, for two reasons. The first one is that I am hugely squicked by RPF about living people — it gives me so much secondhand embarassment, although obviously I have no problem with others writing this kind of stuff, it's just not something I'd seek out. And secondly the book was just such obvious wishful thinking — written in the wake of the 2016 US election, it read almost like a kind of self-deception. Sittenfeld's Hillary remains single into her seventies, and while I can accept that such a person would have no difficulty getting elected to political office, it's sadly inconceivable to me that American voters would tolerate an ageing, single, childless woman as their presidential candidate. I don't mind reacting to political disappointment with escapist wallowing, but I find it irritating when the escapism takes the form of idealising US 'democracy' and the US voting public.
The King's Evil and The Last Protector — the remaining two books in Andrew Taylor's Marwood and Lovett Regency era mystery series — were an absolute delight. As with all my favourite historical crime series, I couldn't care less about the actual mysteries: I'm reading these books for the setting, and for the characters. I'm an absolute sucker for stories that throw together two characters whose outlooks, motivations, and default manner of solving problems are at utter odds, and force those characters to grudgingly work together. The two eponymous characters exemplify this: Marwood wants to work within the system, and keeps softheartedly gathering traumatised, dispossessed people into his household to help them (at last count he's now supporting four such strays, and tried to help a fifth), wheras Cat Lovett's solution to all sources of danger and conflict is to stab them with her dagger.
Serpentine is Philip Pullman's new novella, and acts as a bridge of sorts between the His Dark Materials and Book of Dust trilogies. Lyra is a teenager, and back in the North to help out on an archaeological dig, and it was wonderful to be back in that part of Pullman's alternative universe, returning to all those formative parts of Lyra's childhood and viewing them with her adult eyes. But the conflict of this novella is more internal, planting the seeds that grow into full scale self-destruction in The Secret Commonwealth. (I have a lot of problems with The Secret Commonwealth, and with the direction Pullman is taking his characters in the new trilogy in general, but now is not the time to air them; the novella on its own is fine.)
The final book in this current roundup is Iona Datt Sharma's delightful m/m romance novella, Division Bells. It's got everything I've come to expect in their fiction: characters who are highly competent in their very specific areas, a hopeful and uplifting outlook, and a generosity of spirit. Anything I could say about the book has already been said so much better by
skygiants, but suffice it to say that I loved it, and found it exactly the perfect way to start my weekend, sitting curled up in my wing chair with a cup of coffee on a Saturday morning. It's like a glimmer of light between clouds.The rest of the weekend has been spent signing up for Yuletide, poking around the letters app (I now have a list of six potential requests I want to treat, and the only thing that's stopping me from starting is that I like to write my assignment first before committing to any treats), and trying to hunt down an elusive book which unfortunately has (to the best of my memory) an extremely generic name.
My obsession with fiction set in Al-Andalus (either when it was experiencing its glittering golden age, or in its dying days and collapse), particularly when the point-of-view characters are religious minorities, was kindled way back in my undergrad days, when my Jewish History/Religion/Culture lecturer assigned us an excerpt of a historical novel set in that period (alongside the typical academic books and journal articles). I'd always meant to track down this book, but its name eludes me, and while a lot of Googling by both Matthias and me yesterday unearthed an entire library of historical fiction books covering similar ground (now all added to my to read list), I still cannot find the book in question. Now my only hope is that all my photocopied course notes are still sitting in my old room in my mum's flat in Sydney, so that whenever international travel is possible again, I can go through said notes and find the reference to the book I'm seeking. At least I've got an interesting looking set of other books to read at some point in the future!
In the time it's taken me to write this post, the sun has completely disappeared. Any lingering hint of summer has definitely well and truly vanished!
no subject
Date: 2020-10-25 03:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-10-25 04:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-10-25 04:58 pm (UTC)I don't think she's flawless by any means, but it made no sense that Hillary would still be that brittle and guarded in her public life if she hadn't married Bill and therefore hadn't been targeted by Republicans ever since like 1980. She still might've become a Senator, but I think it's much more likely she would have become a law school professor, a judge and even possibly a Supreme Court Justice.
(Also it's kind of a trip and a half seeing the attacks that absolutely felled her just pretty much bounce off Biden. Laptop and emails? NYT says nahh, not interested. Do-nothing professional politician? This candidate thinks they DESERVE to be President? Way too centrist, old and white? Boing, boing, boing....) (Of course, that's after four years of the Horror of Trumplandia, but Trump was ALWAYS up front about his horrible ethics or lack thereof and what he wanted to do and McConnell was also always up front about trying to block Obama's administration completely and stuffing the Supreme Court. FFS Trump said he would accept the results of the election "if I win, ha ha!" back in the debates IN 2016. Gosh, it looks like he won't accept the results if he loses in 2020! Who could have possibly predicted this?!)
//rant rant rant, sorry!
no subject
Date: 2020-10-27 05:17 pm (UTC)(As a US citizen* who has two other nationalities, and thus an entire adult life immersed in the political/electoral systems of two other countries, unfortunately I'm pretty confident in saying that the US is not really a democracy. A country whose politicians on one side of politics work so hard to suppress the vote and whose entire electoral strategy is built on preventing their opponents from voting is not a democracy. A country where the entire electoral infrastructure is the responsibility of partisan elected officials, rather than an independent electoral commission staffed with civil servants is not a democracy. The other two countries where I hold citizenship — Australia and the UK — have ghastly right-wing politics as well, and I deplore how their voters vote, but I have no complaints about voter suppression in either place, and generally find their entire electoral infrastructure to be really efficient.
(I know you know this, as do all my American friends, but this fact was brought home most dismally to me today, hence me doing some ranting of my own.)
*I can't remember if I've told you about this, but I am a US citizen by birth because I was born there, but my parents are Australian and British/Australian (they were working in the US for six years, I was born in the fifth of those years) and there are no other Americans in my family, just me by an accident of birth. My parents went back to Australia when I was one year old, and I haven't lived in the US since then. Because there are no other Americans in my family and because I've lived for essentially my entire life in other countries, I don't really think of myself as American, and I find pretty much everything about US politics, society and so on to be completely alien to my experiences.
no subject
Date: 2020-10-28 07:27 pm (UTC)OH MY GOD, FUCKING SERIOUSLY
I mean mother fucking MITCH MCCONNELL addressing his fellow Republican scrotes with "It'll take them a long time to undo this, if ever" -- YOU ARE AN ELECTED REPRESENTATIVE, YOU FUCKING DOUCHEBAG, NOT A GODDAMN MINI-KING
you can't see it right now but I am literally flailing and pointing at my laptop. T is napping so nobody is witnessing it but the cat
I didn't know that about your background! That's really interesting.
no subject
Date: 2020-10-29 10:51 am (UTC)I didn't know that about your background! That's really interesting.
I don't talk about it much because apart from in two areas (voting, and filing tax returns, because US law is so stupid in this regard that it requires non-resident dual citizens to file tax returns, even if they've never lived in the US, never worked in the US, never earned any money in the US, own no property in the US, have no desire ever to return to the US, and do not earn enough money overseas to exceed the threshold that actually requires them to pay taxes on foreign earnings) it basically has no effect on my life. Calling myself an American feels really weird, given I left when I was a baby and have lived since then in places with very different political, social and cultural norms, such that the US equivalents seem extremely foreign to me, and completely alien to my experiences.
no subject
Date: 2020-10-25 09:18 pm (UTC)Your fugitive novel reminded me of one I read... which of course I can't now pin down. Late period, with a woman torn between a man who will become El Cid and a rather well-drawn Al Andalus lifestyle that she is drawn to once she gets past stereotypes. Not the greatest book, but it's leapt rather vividly to mind from your few sentences!
no subject
Date: 2020-10-26 03:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-10-27 05:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-10-26 11:41 am (UTC)That was a good point regarding Queen of the Conquered walking in YA formula. The plot twist was awkwardly delivered and I think should have been earlier in the piece, there was a lot of retreading of the same plot elements again and again.
no subject
Date: 2020-10-27 05:23 pm (UTC)I was disappointed by Queen of the Conquered, because it was so let down by its structural weaknesses. I get the feeling that either the author wasn't equal to the task of turning their ambitious ideas into a well crafted book, or there was editorial interference (in the sense of forcing a more standard YA structure, style and tropes) out of a mistaken assumption that the YA clichés would improve the book's marketability. Either way, I'm not interested in continuing the series.