Are you Asterion?
Apr. 27th, 2021 03:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12There was a nice surprise in the mail today: a postcard from st_aurafina! Thank you so much! I always love getting mail that isn't bank statements and junk mail, so this was a wonderful start to the day.
I've fallen down a complete Shadow and Bone hole — the source material is silly, the Netflix show is ... compentently put together, for the most part, but everyone seems like they're having so much fun that their enthusiasm is infectious. (The actors are just such a delight on social media!) And I love that the fandom seems to have revived itself — I keep waking up to a scattering of kudos on all my Six of Crows fics each day, which certainly suggests the show is leading people to read through everything on AO3.
So, onwards to today's book meme prompt:
27. A book you love but cannot recommend
This is another one of those days where I answer not with a single book, but rather the works of an author. The author in question is Australian epic fantasy writer Sara Douglass. For those of you not familiar with her books, some context might be required.
Douglass is viewed as singlehandledly kickstarting the profitability of epic fantasy in Australia — her books were so successful by local standards that publishers in the 1990s (a period when Australia had a booming local publishing industry) leapt on the bandwagon, and many, many doorstopper series of epic fantasy by women were published. (Douglass is also responsible for the fact that Australian epic fantasy at the time was dominated by women authors writing books about female characters.)
The other thing to note about Douglass is that she grew up wanting to be an academic historian, but she grew up in a time when women of her class mainly only went to university if they were going to be nurses or teachers — indeed in interviews she spoke many times about this, saying her family was only prepared to countenance her going to uni if she followed one of these career paths. So she ended up working as a nurse, with a deep sense of bitterness and wasted opportunity about it. Her anger about this state of affairs (and all the pain and blood she witnessed working in healthcare) finds expression in a lot of her books — there's a level of violence and gore that was uncommon in the other female-authored epic fantasy of the time.
The final thing to be aware of in regard to Douglass's books is that her first trilogy involved a love triangle between her (frankly unbelievably annoying) male protagonist, and the two women vying for his affections: Douglass's clear favourite (who gets the guy in the end), who she clearly viewed as an Awesome Strong Female Character Who Takes No Shit From Anyone™, and the woman who gets pregnant to the protagonist after a one-night stand, and wanders around through the remainder of the trilogy pining for him, and suffering huge amounts of abuse and violence at the hands of the antagonist. Unfortunately for Douglass, most of the readers of the book massively preferred the second woman, and apparantly annoyed her immensely by constantly asking questions about this character in interviews/author events and expressing the view that they hoped she ended up with the protagonist in the end. Douglass — who held some rather regressive views — seemed to feel that this character was something of a wet blanket who should have tried to escape her circumstances rather than suffer prettily.
In case it's not obvious, I don't particularly care for this first trilogy, and I think Douglass was being absurd about her readers' response to the various characters. I dread to think what she would have been like in these days of social media, where readers have quick and immediate access to creators! Her response in her later books was ridiculously over the top.
The thought process seems to have been: you identified with and stanned a character who was a passive abuse victim? Fine, I'll give you abuse victims!
Her later books are just absurdly over the top — endless women falling in love with their abusers, most of whom have the power of life and death over them, extreme power imbalances in relationships, etc. There's even a common thread of her heroines being hurt in ways that hurt their wombs, which I've always assumed was Douglass's past experiences as a nurse in gynaecological wards — and her resentment about being forced into a career in nursing — coming through in her fiction. She wrote in a lot of anger, and it comes through in her writing.
I wouldn't necessarily say I 'love' her books — I read them all when I was at my most angsty, aged 18-21 or so, and they were hugely important and formative to me at the time. I suppose they probably gave me my taste for stories where the 'romantic' relationships are dark and messed up, with huge power imbalances, although these days I prefer this kind of thing explored with a bit more subtlety. But I do admire Douglass's commitment to going absurdly over-the-top in this regard, and writing with such obvious grouchy bitterness about the kind of fiction she perceived her readers to enjoy. She's sadly no longer with us, but I remember going to get one of her books signed at a Sydney bookshop (the bookshop itself is also sadly no longer with us), and she was as prickly and curmudgeonly as her writing would suggest.
I think you can probably see from everything I've written why I would be hesitant to recommend these books!
28. A book you adore that people are surprised by
29. A book that led you home
30. A book you detest that people are surprised by
st_aurafina! Thank you so much! I always love getting mail that isn't bank statements and junk mail, so this was a wonderful start to the day.I've fallen down a complete Shadow and Bone hole — the source material is silly, the Netflix show is ... compentently put together, for the most part, but everyone seems like they're having so much fun that their enthusiasm is infectious. (The actors are just such a delight on social media!) And I love that the fandom seems to have revived itself — I keep waking up to a scattering of kudos on all my Six of Crows fics each day, which certainly suggests the show is leading people to read through everything on AO3.
So, onwards to today's book meme prompt:
27. A book you love but cannot recommend
This is another one of those days where I answer not with a single book, but rather the works of an author. The author in question is Australian epic fantasy writer Sara Douglass. For those of you not familiar with her books, some context might be required.
Douglass is viewed as singlehandledly kickstarting the profitability of epic fantasy in Australia — her books were so successful by local standards that publishers in the 1990s (a period when Australia had a booming local publishing industry) leapt on the bandwagon, and many, many doorstopper series of epic fantasy by women were published. (Douglass is also responsible for the fact that Australian epic fantasy at the time was dominated by women authors writing books about female characters.)
The other thing to note about Douglass is that she grew up wanting to be an academic historian, but she grew up in a time when women of her class mainly only went to university if they were going to be nurses or teachers — indeed in interviews she spoke many times about this, saying her family was only prepared to countenance her going to uni if she followed one of these career paths. So she ended up working as a nurse, with a deep sense of bitterness and wasted opportunity about it. Her anger about this state of affairs (and all the pain and blood she witnessed working in healthcare) finds expression in a lot of her books — there's a level of violence and gore that was uncommon in the other female-authored epic fantasy of the time.
The final thing to be aware of in regard to Douglass's books is that her first trilogy involved a love triangle between her (frankly unbelievably annoying) male protagonist, and the two women vying for his affections: Douglass's clear favourite (who gets the guy in the end), who she clearly viewed as an Awesome Strong Female Character Who Takes No Shit From Anyone™, and the woman who gets pregnant to the protagonist after a one-night stand, and wanders around through the remainder of the trilogy pining for him, and suffering huge amounts of abuse and violence at the hands of the antagonist. Unfortunately for Douglass, most of the readers of the book massively preferred the second woman, and apparantly annoyed her immensely by constantly asking questions about this character in interviews/author events and expressing the view that they hoped she ended up with the protagonist in the end. Douglass — who held some rather regressive views — seemed to feel that this character was something of a wet blanket who should have tried to escape her circumstances rather than suffer prettily.
In case it's not obvious, I don't particularly care for this first trilogy, and I think Douglass was being absurd about her readers' response to the various characters. I dread to think what she would have been like in these days of social media, where readers have quick and immediate access to creators! Her response in her later books was ridiculously over the top.
The thought process seems to have been: you identified with and stanned a character who was a passive abuse victim? Fine, I'll give you abuse victims!
Her later books are just absurdly over the top — endless women falling in love with their abusers, most of whom have the power of life and death over them, extreme power imbalances in relationships, etc. There's even a common thread of her heroines being hurt in ways that hurt their wombs, which I've always assumed was Douglass's past experiences as a nurse in gynaecological wards — and her resentment about being forced into a career in nursing — coming through in her fiction. She wrote in a lot of anger, and it comes through in her writing.
I wouldn't necessarily say I 'love' her books — I read them all when I was at my most angsty, aged 18-21 or so, and they were hugely important and formative to me at the time. I suppose they probably gave me my taste for stories where the 'romantic' relationships are dark and messed up, with huge power imbalances, although these days I prefer this kind of thing explored with a bit more subtlety. But I do admire Douglass's commitment to going absurdly over-the-top in this regard, and writing with such obvious grouchy bitterness about the kind of fiction she perceived her readers to enjoy. She's sadly no longer with us, but I remember going to get one of her books signed at a Sydney bookshop (the bookshop itself is also sadly no longer with us), and she was as prickly and curmudgeonly as her writing would suggest.
I think you can probably see from everything I've written why I would be hesitant to recommend these books!
28. A book you adore that people are surprised by
29. A book that led you home
30. A book you detest that people are surprised by