landingtree

The meme that’s been going round! I went with ‘Books which influenced me most or made the strongest impressions’ rather than ‘favourites’; although those categories overlap a lot, there are plenty of books here I don’t like anymore. (The Orson Scott Card collection and the Dr Seuss are there because they are the two books I read as a child that gave me new behavior-modifying fears that lasted more than six months each). Series and writers mostly represented by single books.

Here’s the list. How many have you read?

Cycling round Miramar singing to myself, I did not notice I was learning the words to 'Bread and Roses' on Labour Day - I'd forgotten what day it was til evening, since my work is closed on Mondays anyway. But happy Labour Day!

~

Read Shadows, by E.H. Gombrich: very slight survey written to accompany an art exhibition about shadows selected by the author from the collection of London's National Gallery. Probably the most interesting fact in it is that he didn't find much to choose from, shadows being a bit of a disfavoured subject; he quotes Leonardo (keen student of light and shadow in life) specifying that the sun ought to be obscured by a fine mist in painting to avoid the need to paint hard-edged shadows, as these are generally disapproved of.

Other random detail: the difficulty of tracing a shadow, since one's own shadow gets in the way, solved by casting a sitter's shadow onto a translucent screen and tracing from the other side.

~

I am one-quarter less wise, and it wasn't as painful as I expected, and now that tooth won't do its yearly advance-and-retreat maneuver.

~

Other reading: bits and pieces. Some Robert Aickman stories, which I rather like though I have yet to experience him as The Acknowledged Master Of Strange Tales. (The first one I chose by chance to read my flatmate was far too long, and had a structure where you know for its entire length there's a ghost in the phone and then the story tries to go, "And then, by god, they discovered that there had been a ghost in the phone!" Though even that one is interesting from the point of view of how differently phones used to work).

I have started an audiobook of War and Peace, the Anthony Briggs translation, which seems very good. I was expecting it to be slow to catch my attention, but there's such an eye in it for humans doing human-like things that I keep on wanting to remark whenever anyone around the house says anything, 'Ah, that's like what this character in War and Peace did' to an extent that would become annoying if I didn't stop myself. It is helpful not having to interact with the book as a giant brick. (The only time I ever picked it up off a shelf, thinking 'I have read books that long', I discovered the absolutely tiny print, and put it right back again). Also I am helped by having listened to the Revolutions podcast and so being at least that informed about Napoleon, and also by having been to a production of Dave Malloy's Natasha, Pierre, & the Great Comet of 1812, an adaptation of a small section, which I didn't end up liking that much but which is helpful now in getting the characters straight. (I couldn't keep from reading the character of Pierre in the musical as 'Dave Malloy has some thoughts about Dave Malloy', though I went in expecting that due to reports I'd seen on Dreamwidth. I like Pierre much more as a book character so far).

Also reading Gene Wolfe's Book of Days, which has one short story per American holiday. Many are slight or just plain perplexing (I assume some of them are jokes I don't get), but come to think of it I did read the Labour Day one recently, 'Forlesen', one of those satires of a businessman's working life that I feel like I've read before but this is a good one.

The No-show, by Beth O'Leary

Romance novel in which one man stands three women up for dates on the same day, one in the morning, one in the afternoon, and one in the evening. And then the book follows these three women in their lives and in their relationships with the man. They are a tree surgeon, a retail worker who left her old life at a law firm for Reasons To Be Explored, and a life coach, each with their own small well-realised cast of side characters. And the man is absolutely sweet, too good to be true - evidently, since he isn't telling the three women about each other. The book presents a tension between the dickishness of his behavior, the non-dickishness of his vibe, and the fact that, well, he's the romantic lead, isn't he? Or is he? But for which romance?

I can see finding the way it all checks out annoying - I did for a bit, but came round on it.


The Rest Of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness.

The chapter titles of this YA novel describe the adventures of teen protagonists that you might find in a Buffy-esque TV show - i.e. Chapter the First, in which the Messenger of the Immortals arrives in a surprising shape, looking for a permanent Vessel; and after being chased by her through the woods, indie kid Finn meets his final fate.

This describes what is happening at the same time as the chapters. What happens in the chapters is mostly something else entirely: the lives of an unrelated group of teenagers living realist-ish teen-novel lives at the same school, having normal, well-rendered problems like OCD and parents. Except that Buffy is happening in the next clique over, and it always has been. Something opened a Hellmouth under the gym when your parents were teens - they don't talk about it much. Who knows what it was. But every so often the big story is a bit too close to your own small story for comfort.

You have to do it well to sell the premise of 'The cool tropes you like to see? This book is about not-those, about the negative space of those,' and this does. Also I just really like the structural conceit, and it plots and characterises economically.


The No-show is in conversation with romance novels - its structure means you know from the start that it can't exactly play the genre straight - while being one. Another book I read slightly longer ago, Kelly Link's The Book of Love, is in conversation with romance novels (and contains a significant romance novelist) while not being one - and The Rest Of Us Just Live Here has a lot of teen romance running through it, but is very specifically not ending on anything like settledness or permanence, while The No-show - well, it has something to say about interpersonal settledness and permanence, anyway. As someone who's read very little in the romance genre, these an interesting three to have in my head at the same time!

Next I'm reading Alexis Hall's Confounding Oaths, a regency romance narrated by Puck.

I went to the orchestra with my flatmates tonight. In the last while, my experience of music has changed in small but expansive ways, so I'm noting it down. (This might be Jack's Psychology Hour part one of two, since this morning I wrote a whole lot of notes about my experience of coming up with stories, and then I went to the concert and had some vivid ideas to put in stories: music has a lot to do with narrative for me, though this post's about the bit that doesn't). My context for classical music is background knowledge and comfort; not what I think of as a lot of front-of-mind knowledge, but I was taken to classical concerts all my childhood, and it was most of the music that played in my houses back then.

The first half of the concert was Leonie Holmes' I watched a shadow, which has been blotted out of my mind by the pieces that followed it except for the image of a giant shivering bronze object stranger than, but similar to, an egg; and then Strauss's Don Quixote, which I loved. By the start of the second half of the concert I was tired, and then it was Tchaikovsky's fifth symphony. At first it seemed to consist of big, simple sections – not exactly shallow, but interested in making surfaces, much less roiling with textures than the pieces in the first half. Like bits of the Sydney Opera House, or the side of an apple. Even the roiling bits were sort of the minimum necessary roil, like a step down into a muddy ditch and a step up again.

I thought I might have used up all my caring-about-music for the evening (these concerts seem long! It's like they serve you a feast, give you fifteen minutes, and then sit you down at a second feast). But taking off my glasses and pressing my hands to my eyes created an area of deeper darkness, which was a stage on which the music could happen. Not visually. I often see images while listening to music, but I wasn't seeing anything at that point. But the darkness and the combination of posture-change and things accompanying it made a place from which I was getting the exhilaration the music seemed to want. I straightened up and the music was distanced again (though still perfectly fine); I pressed my fingers to my eyes and the emotions came back. Then after a while this stopped being relevant and I sat in a different way.

I couldn't have remembered it all, but this kind of thing was going on throughout the evening.

Twice in the past, I've had what I think of as gestalt experiences of movies and music while in not-entirely-legal altered states. What's new to me, as of this year or maybe last year, is that the music can alter my state in the same way. It isn't consistent (today was a weird, high-energy day, and it's not like chocolate and caffeine aren't substances) but it's happened three times now, enough that I know it doesn't take any very specific alignment of circumstances. What I mean by gestalt is that I'll have experiences like taking a sip of sweet/sour wine at a point when that seems appropriate to the music, and that'll be part of how I'm experiencing the music: it worked fine, in this case, but it would've been even more appropriate to have a still sweeter drink like a fruit juice. I get these experiences of analogy between different senses. Since I'm a human listening from a too-small chair rather than a shapeshifter listening from a large couch, it's generally a sort of compromise, with some movements relegated to the mind: I know when I'd have flung my hands directly forward if that wouldn't've whacked someone in the head. But I do the smallest possible dances with the tension in my hands. Position of eyebrows. Posture. Also the passing thought about whether my flatmate's having a good time or if it interests them or worsens their experience that my finger is tapping.

(I didn't wear a mask during this concert. I think of myself as very lax about this, drifting with the majority. I don't know if I'd manage a whole symphony concert with any effective mask I've yet tried; the experience would become 'mask mask mask mask.' I think I could do half of one okay though).

The fundamental difference between concert music now and a few years ago for me – which I think is a result of doing partly meditation-based therapy throughout 2022 – seems to be a practiced acceptance of whatever's going on, a widening of the tolerances of what the experience can include. Right at the start of the concert those tolerances are narrow because I haven't sunk into it yet. In the middle of the concert, I can fold things like coughing or even a phone going off three rows back into the experience, just like I can fold in a sip of wine: maybe not ideal, but a working compromise. This is in contrast with the exclusive kind of focus, i.e. the way, as a child, I used to fall so deeply into reading that someone could say my name right next to me three times and I wouldn't hear. I don't know when I lost that capacity, but I like this new one and I hope it sticks around.

Does this relate to your experiences of music? I really like it, and it gives me an "Oh, this is why the institution of concerts exists!" feeling, but I'm not sure what's going on in the other heads in the audience. Certainly my three flatmates, though we all seemed to have a lovely time in each others' company, seemed to experience the music in a milder way and do not report any shivering bronze objects stranger than eggs.

I read the first story in this book and thought, 'I don't see why I'd read another one', and then I read the second story and thought, 'Well certainly I'll want to space them out', and now two days later I've read them all.

My aunt A used to be visited by cousin B whenever he was in town for a conference. He received no invitation, and gave no warning; he would arrive in the early afternoon, and would not leave until five hours later once he had been served dinner. None of the usual hints that it was time to go worked. Having figured out the schedule of his conferences, my aunt A began buying the lowest-quality mince from the butcher, and serving it to the whole family on toast on the nights of cousin B's visits, without sauce or salt. After a few of these meals, the visits ceased.

Imagine whole lives that are like that all the time, and you'll have these short stories. Except often more R-rated, (I assume those anecdotes happen in my family too, I just haven't heard them), and with sharp class distinctions (I have no information on the financial position of Cousin B except for what's implied by 'in town for a conference'). This book of stories abridges human life, seldom feeling like parody by addition, but paring off most of the stuff that make it feel sensible while it's underway. There's not a lot of closure here. Stories may end with change or resolution, but they may just end at the point when the water is clear enough that you can see the sunken object from all angles. There's a lot of humour in them, and cruelty, and contempt, and... not kindness really, but some of the possible ways things can go well when you see humans in the round.

There are lines and moments when it falls over the line of believability for me and I think: this isn't humans anymore, the acid-pitted glass I'm looking through is now doing too much work. If there's one thing I find particularly hard to read, it's the contempt felt by the various narrators and protagonists - contempt for people's appearance, intelligence, weight, poverty, wealth. I sometimes thought, 'Yes, I get it, this is too much.' Though often the person the contempt is directed at is the narrator's mirror, only the narrator can't notice: an irony I didn't get tired of.

There are three stories here about men experiencing love at first sight, and the bizarre, cruel, threatening, and/or simply oblivious things they do in response. By the third one I was thinking 'How many of these will there be?' but that story seemed to know I was thinking it, and went off in a different direction.

There is a story in this book where a young man (who has an eating disorder) and his beloved uncle (who has a colostomy bag) eat cakes together, and the complete matter-of-factness with which they then go and deal with their mirrored digestive problems before getting on with the rest of their morning came across to me as both funny and touching. I trust these stories to do that. YMMV.

This is a short story, but I read it in its own volume with afterword. I went in expecting a great feminist horror story, and it is one, and still worked given the expectation. I found it anger-producing but not unbearable (I think in a past year I picked it up and read the first few pages and went 'Not today'.)

The story's narrator is being encouraged by her husband to remain, for her health, in a room she dislikes, doing nothing; a room with curious furnishings, and even more curious wallpaper. There's a great efficiency of implication throughout. "John laughs at me, of course," writes the narrator on the first page, "but one expects that in marriage." This is about when I started going 'aaaaaaaaa' internally, and I did not stop until some time after the end.

...

The odd thing about the afterword, which fills in details of Gilman's own life (she herself was treated by the psychiatrist she names in the novel, for a depression he diagnosed as stemming from her work, but which abated noticeably in the absence of her husband), is that it doesn't talk at all about ghosts. Whereas by the story's second paragraph, the narrator is joking about whether she's in a haunted house, and I'm very much inclined to think she is.

I did this a disservice by rereading only the second half of it. This is because, on a dreary day, I let the tail wag the dog and listened to a podcast episode about the first two stories in the book before rereading it, so I will wait a bit longer before I read 'Finder' again.

This leaves me having read three stories. Spoilers follow!

I like 'The Bones of the Earth', without needing it to exist particularly. I like that there is a holy place of the Old Powers of the Earth on Gont. Several of these stories are putting women back into the roots of history, and I like the place of Ard in this story, forgotten by two degrees, yet vital: a woman who taught an old man the magic of the earth, who in turn taught the young man whose more visible work was remembered. It's a 'complicating the origins of something you thought you knew' story which neither bothers me nor seems like a revelation: it fits, I nod and move on.

I like 'On the High Marsh', the animals, the great mountain Andanden. Maybe it's my favourite of the three, but I have least to say about it.

I had forgotten almost everything about 'Dragonfly' and was pleased to reread it. I like everything it sets up. I like the character of Dragonfly, swearing the air blue at the pack of dogs her father keeps (because that's just what's normal to her - and yet as we see in 'The Bones of the Earth', another sign of how she's coming at power orthogonally, since Roke mages must be careful never to swear). She's raised in bleak seclusion, certain she wants to be elsewhere and other than anything her upbringing has shown her, not yet knowing the way but going through the door that opens for her. And I like the character of Ivory, who is that door, a petty, cruel fool and manipulative asshole who you can imagine growing out of it, and who in the course of the story keeps wanting to see Dragonfly as a sexual object and keeps being startled by how that isn't sufficient to anything, not even his own desires.

The story resolves in a way that feels abbreviated, more like a prologue to The Other Wind than its own whole thing, and makes Dragonfly herself feel suddenly more like an enactor of Plot than the person we've been getting to know. The story is about her wanting to find herself out, and the ending is less her discovery and what she learns, than the confirmation of the fact that she shall learn. On the other hand, the Roke bit of the story seems very much like the other hand of 'Finder', which I did not just reread.

I like how this collection continues to ring changes on the rest of Earthsea: the wounded mage and the farmer's widow in 'On the High Marsh', the various Kings (one of them a mineral and one a chicken). At the same time, I have a general sense that Tehanu was the crucial book and these three stories are all a sort of methodical and good working out of revisions already implied. Tehanu ends in a place where great change is coming which is to say that day-to-day life is possible, and 'Dragonfly' ends in a place where great change is still coming, but now it's nearer.

The massive tome of all the Earthsea books is on reserve at the Library so I shall get to The Other Wind before long, and the later short stories that I never read.

This book starts with three giants on a spaceship. They've grown so much since getting on board that they can't move, but are compressed into the spaceship's rooms like people trapped in tiny cupboards. And they have to keep talking to each other, because the spaceship, Audition, is powered by the sound of their voices.

There is room to doubt what I've just said, because the whole first part of the book consists of dialogue. I wondered sometimes if there was really a spaceship, or if these people were talking for some other reason. It's interesting that the book begins this way, since the two other Pip Adam novels I've read begin in mundane life, and only gradually reveal how speculative they are. This book moves the other way to those ones, beginning with a surreal s.f. premise that's mostly explained by the end of page one, and then offering the possibility that some other account of things will undo it: a different dialogue with the mundanity or weirdness of what's going on.

Like the other books, this takes something that's absolutely a metaphor, and treats it literally beyond the metaphor's requirements: in this case, the experience of being a giant stuck in a spaceship.

Pip Adam's books have been ones I fall under the influence of. After reading The New Animals I went walking in a strangely altered state. I couldn't tell you what exactly had just happened, but I'd been submerged in that book. This one, to go with the water metaphor, feels like it's full of little rips and currents and shallows. Now and again it pulls me under, or pulls me along quick, and then I'm viewing another bit of it from a distance while I crawl over a sandbar. I really like some things it does, and may read it again to see if they all cohere next time, but at the moment I don't feel that they do.

Some possible reasons for this: it's a more complicated book. It's a book which puts the giants in a spaceship ahead of the apple cart, in a way that removes the particular satisfaction I took from the other two: difficult daily life, matter-of-factly described, with some estranging mysterious factor that points beyond it. All that's here, but shuffled. Like the other two, this is a book in dialogue with the question, 'Is this plausible?' and more than the other two I kept on having the reaction, 'No it isn't.' And: this book is didactic. At a talk last year (which I may be misremembering) Pip Adam has talked about her increasing comfort with didacticism, with just taking the point you want to make and putting it in there. I like some extremely didactic books, but in this one I experienced a scattering of lines that landed 'bonk' on my head instead of feeling braided into it. The metaphors are rising close enough to the surface that maybe I like the interviews and articles that go alongside this book better than the book itself. (Also it's the first of the three books that seems to me to contain, and to be partly about, hope of systemic change - I remember my reaction to Everything For Everyone was partly 'Oh how nice a book about systemic change' because I read it after Pip Adam's Nothing To See, which is so much not that).

Under the cut I'll say what some of the metaphors are metaphors for, though don't read the book's jacket copy either if you don't want to know that.


( Read more... )

In danger of becoming overwhelmed by my to-read pile - a state in which I'm constantly reading the first chapters of good books without much joy and then putting them down - I've once again sectioned off eighteen books and decided not to read anything else until I've finished these. This is the kind of exercise I seldom finish but find value in starting. I seem to adjust to the presence of books on my shelf as normal and uninteresting, so just changing the order the books are in gives me the same pleasant "New treasures!" feeling as opening a parcel. (Pakij!)

I am alternating sixths of Crime and Punishment with shorter books, beginning with Tehanu.

This is the first time I've reread any of the second three books of Earthsea. I plan to go on to both the others (which is already an amendment to my eighteen books rule!) because I'm currently listening to the Shelved By Genre podcast, which has got up to this book in their Earthsea-reading.

I remember as a teenager reading these books for the first time, thinking 'What would an Earthsea book look like that wasn't about mages?' This memory now confuses me; I don't know what I then read in Tehanu, because this book now seems to me like Le Guin asking and answering the same question. In some ways it's a book about lacking power. It's not that the first three Earthsea books don't complicate their happy endings, their grand quests; but they are involved with a hope of finally achieving balance, achieving piece, making things right. Tehanu starts with 'But what do we do with things that can't be right, not ever?' It starts with a child whose burns no magic can cure, whose burns were inflicted by cruel men, in the patriarchy that Le Guin put into Earthsea when she reached for some of fantasy's default settings.

I was interested to see she'd written this book after Always Coming Home. That's another book I've never reread, but I recall it being an attempt to feel out the shape of a society almost wholly beyond the ills of our present world, in which patriarchy is remembered in a scary fable told to children. Tehanu is not that story. Tehanu is starting squarely inside patriarchy, with characters feeling their way tentatively toward what might follow it. Some of its thoughts on gender and gendered power seem very limited to me for that reason. At the same time, I like the way it leaves the series turning toward an unanswered question. It's interesting that this was ever billed as The Last Book of Earthsea, given the degree to which it seems to be setting up sequels; I have very few memories of the sequels and am keen to reread them, but in the meantime I rather like to imagine the open sea beyond this book, the sequel-less-ness we might have gotten.

The book feels strangely choppy to me, different chapters taking place in such different modes such that I find myself remembering it as a bundle of different pieces; it's also Le Guin at the height of her powers, writing with efficiency and elegance, such that I find myself remembering it as a whole world. It depends on the minute.

( Spoilery thoughts )

Rider at the Gate, by C. J. Cherryh

When I was halfway through this book I posted on discord:

"It's set on an alien planet where all the animals are overwhelmingly psychic, and humans can only survive by forming telepathic bonds with the native horses. Two things I find really compelling about this are: the image of daily life out in the wilds, constantly being brushed against by the viewpoint of mice observing you from the bushes (and the fear that it might be a large predator spoofing a collection of mice). And, the way it's about emotional regulation. A rider's emotions, if uncontrolled, will pass to their horse, who will broadcast it to other horses and back to their riders, making a feedback loop. This makes life difficult! Especially as one of the main characters is, for perfectly understandable reasons, very bad at it.


That remains basically my summary and sales pitch! More thoughts, having finished:

There was a conversation on that same discord recently about the degree to which people see what they read in the mind's eye. As I may have said here before, I'm in the middle, it depends very much on the book. I kept putting this one down, reading another grabbier novel, and coming back to it; I think the un-grabby part of this book, for me, is the way its descriptions totally fail to evoke images for me. I have no sense of distances, my mental images are restricted very closely to the events described. On a bridge high above a ravine, I see the planks, and I see the dangerous rocks below, but it's as though there's no gap between them. There's peril, but no space. And I have only the haziest sense of what the horses in this book actually look like.

The strengths of this writing, for me, are about the insides of people's heads. A lot of this book is trekking across snow, and it's not the snowy landscape that's vivid, it's the being cold and having a headache and having a splinter through your thumb. Even though I kept putting it down, I became absolutely sure I wanted to finish it once I got to the hundred page mark and there was a scene in which a callow young rider was being criticised/talked down to/taught by an experienced one, and the young rider couldn't stop projecting his dissatisfaction with this out through his horse's mind. Juicy uncomfortable dynamics! There are other emotional/logistical set pieces which are more spoilery to describe but really good.

And there's a great sense of people mucking along through contingency as best they can. I don't think there's a major character in this book who doesn't at some point make a huge mistake. I was trying to come up with a Lord of the Rings comparison, but at first, all the ones I thought of seem to be criticising Tolkien for not doing things he actually does do; it's not that people in LotR don't make significant mistakes, and it's not that people in Cherryh novels don't make heroic and successful efforts. Maybe in a Cherryh novel the Fellowship could succeed. But there's no grace here, as there is in LotR; no special likelihood that anything lies behind human effort.


The Bonobo's Dream, by Rose Mulready.

I hesitate to say much about this short book, because many of its pleasures lie in not quite knowing what world the characters live in. The first time it described somebody cutting a lemon 'with two hisses of air' I thought, that's not really an apt description of a lemon. The second similar description made it clear that something really weird was up with this household's fruit. Re. envisioning what you read, I spent a while in this book not knowing whether to see the characters as humans or bonobos.

The book starts with James; whatever species he may turn out to be, he's a boy who feels pressured by the attention of his parents and mostly wants to sit alone in his room drawing the trees out the window. His father is a famous artist who no longer even cares about the affairs he's having; his mother is lonely and bored and unsettled in her memories. His sister is coming home soon for her birthday. She always brings trouble; but perhaps not usually as much as this.

I bought The Bonobo's Dream from the $5 trolleys where I work, because it had a blurb from Margo Lanagan, and another blurb describing it as 'Aldous Huxley on more mushrooms than usual, or Angela Carter on pixie dust.' I think Angela Carter books themselves are already on at least this much pixie dust, (and I haven't read any Huxley), but I do think it's a less random blurb than a lot of 'this book is Classic X + Classic Y' blurbs are.

I didn't get to the end feeling totally satisfied - I think I wanted it to keep on developing a bit longer than it did, but its shape is quite simple in the end and didn't quite click for me. Still a good one to have read.