Beyond Selidor

After yesterday's post, Matthias and I ended up taking advantage of the sunshine to do a new walk — a huge loop that took us along the river in the other direction, and back through town. The whole thing was about 4km, and we saw cows by the cathedral, and a hedgehog wandering along the road (it was an empty road, and went into the undergrowth shortly after I took the photo).

This morning I've been doing meal prep for next week, while listening to old Massive Attack albums and just marvelling at how incredibly good it is. I want to just submerge myself in the lyrics for days.

Here's today's book meme prompt:

25. A book that answered a question you never asked

( My answer )

( The other days )

Last night, this popped up on my Livejournal friends page, via Jo Walton, whose book Among Others is reviewed there. It's a review by Ursula Le Guin of several books, and it's a good example of the rather rocky relationship I have with Le Guin: I love her books, and yet I find her a frustratingly wrong reviewer and critic. 'Wrong' might be too strong a word; 'wrong in her approach' is perhaps better. So she writes things like this:

Since publishers are feeling terribly unsafe these days, and since YA is a big, solid market, and fantasy is a big, solid part of it, publishers feel safe publishing fantasy as YA. And so writers of fantasy may find they’re expected to have kid protagonists and discouraged from writing about adults. Harry whatshisname and the teenie werewolves and the young gladiators have locked the fantasy/YA combo tight, at least for now. Retro macho “epics” of war-and-violence with nominally adult protagonists may escape the YA label, as they reach teen-agers through tie-ins, games, movies.

It's pretty obvious which books she means, and while I have no problem with her disliking Harry Potter, Twilight, The Hunger Games or A Song of Ice and Fire, and while I also feel genre boundaries can be somewhat arbitrary and an impediment to reading, and that adults can get things out of books with child protagonists and children can get things out of books with adult protagonists, the things they are getting are different. There is a fundamental difference in how you read a book as a child, and how you read it as an adult. (For a good example, I read Wuthering Heights when I was 14 and again when I was 22 and it was as if I had read two different books.) You have to take into account all these things, like how a person sees the world and his or her place in it, because they do have an effect on your perception of, and reaction to, a particular story. I do think there are some books which have a more powerful effect if you read them at a certain age. (I feel, for example, that ages 12-16, which is what I was when I read the His Dark Materials trilogy, was exactly the right age range to be for that particular story. Victor Kelleher's books, on the other hand, while ostensibly aimed at teenagers, seem to me all the more powerful when read with adult eyes.) And some authors are better than others at capturing the way teenagers think, the way they see the world, the things they dream about and fear. Yes, the YA label is a marketing decision, but sometimes genre distinctions are meaningful. The important thing is to work out what you like, and ignore the genre labels when you need to.

One author who seems to me to be particularly in touch with the feelings and thoughts of her teenage self is Foz Meadows. I really like this interview she did with Tansy Rayner Roberts.

[M]y own experiences as a teenager make me somewhat less than neutral on the subject of both school and the ever-present love triangle. I find it incredibly difficult, if not outright impossible, to write about high school as a background event rather than politically, as an institution to be challenged or subverted, because of the amount of effort I expended as a student arguing against curricula, grading, subject structure, the allocation of resources, conformity and scare tactics. Similarly, and while I have no objection to other people enjoying them, I have a pathological skepticism of romanticised love triangles, because as a teenager, I was in a love triangle – and believe me, the experience was anything but romantic. The combination of unrequited love angst and profound frustration at the institutional mechanics of education left me severely depressed, routinely insomniac (my last year of school, I survived on an average of four to six hours sleep a night, six days a week), flirting with self harm and regularly contemplating suicide. Somehow, I managed to get through it, but it’s not an experience I’d wish on anyone – and as a consequence, I don’t think I’m capable of writing about school, or love triangles, or especially the two in combination, in any sort of neutral or romantic way.

Finally, There Is No Alternative has written a good post about the perils of criticising A Song of Ice and Fire online. It was in response to an article by Laurie Penny on the series, but I've observed it happening several other times, and it always follows a similar pattern. As TINA writes,

Sadly, I have not yet seen any refutation of Laurie’s points which doesn’t itself indulge in the fundamental attribution error of considering her understanding “superficial”, rather than the brevity of her piece to require superficiality, or which doesn’t simply set up straw women to tilt at, claiming that Laurie wanted to watch “Sweden with wizards“, rather than maybe considering whether it might be possible to address those themes with just a little less triggering rape culture and normative violence. Pointing out that these things are still damaging of themselves is not the same as calling for censorship.

I say this as someone who actually reads and enjoys the ASoIaF books: nothing should be free of criticism. It's hard when people criticise your favourite things, because it feels like they are criticising you, personally. But saying that there is a lot of (gratuitous) rape in ASoIaF is not the same as accusing its fans of being rapists, and saying that when you take away the backstabbing and intrigue, the story is basically the standard swords-and-sorcery epic about the need for a just ruler is not the same as saying its fans are simplistic or conservative. ASoIaF fans need to stop reacting as if someone's taken away their favourite toys every time the series is criticised online.

It's odd when you return from an internet-free weekend to find out that Epic Drama of Epicness has been unfolding online. But that's what happened with the latest round of Amazon vs the Publishers/Authors/Readers/People Who Are Dubious About the Kindle.

I'm not really sure of my opinion about the matter, and I think there's blame on both sides, but I'll let you all make up your own minds with a series of posts by John Scalzi about the fight between Amazon and Macmillan over the price of ebooks. As usual, half the good stuff takes place in the comments of the posts. Scalzi is as erudite as ever, summing up the situation (as he sees it) with wit and knowledge. Charles Stross sums up matters as he sees it, while Tobias Buckell gives us his take. Of course, the Tor editors are all over it. Scott Westerfeld's take on the matter contains the hilarious observation that Amazon should've known that 'when cutting off publishers, don’t start with the one that has the most science fiction writers. We will blog you dead!' I couldn't agree more!

[ETA: I knew that Hal Duncan wouldn't disappoint.]

And now for something completely different! Jo Walton's written some great posts on the first three Earthsea books, A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan and The Farthest Shore. She (and her commenters) make some really interesting points about Le Guin's fabulous series. I, for one, have been saying for years that Le Guin's work is cold; she's not a comforting or consoling writer, and yet somehow that's a far greater consolation than a more 'cozy' book might be. Earthsea never talks down to its readers, and as the series progresses, you can see Le Guin seriously engaging with, reflecting on and realising the limitations of her own philosophy. She saw the flaws in her own books (especially in regard to feminism) and corrected them accordingly. It's a brave author who can do that!

Okay, over and out!