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Which is about books
Dec. 28th, 2019 09:55 pm...and which was mostly written a month ago. Really I should just post these things as I go, shouldn't I, only I get to the point where I have not written up my thoughts about a book in a way that really explains them, and have begun to forget the things about the book which would let me do so, and then I get stuck, and then I go to my mother's house and write a diary-entry-post sort of thing in a notebook, which has no reason not to keep getting longer, and then I realise that I have to post my book post first because there is not no worthwhile thinking in it...
Also I have just discovered that my current sash windowsill, unlike my last, can be sat on with no particular danger of falling three storeys, and spent a while looking at the evening light, which partly explains and is partly explained by my current mood. (I had just spent another few minutes doing that and pleasurably failing to come up with a good description of the way in which the clouds were beautiful, when coming back in I knocked this laptop off my bed, and the battery out of it. So dangers remain. Thank you for still being alive, laptop. I realise that at the age of seven it is difficult, and that I am not helping).
The Outskirter's Secret, by Rosemary Kirstein.
Even better than the first one. It's the kind of book whose invented culture is complicated enough to make me notice that I live in one too. I went up to a water fountain on campus to refill my drink bottle and thought about how freighted with oddness that simple description is. Such a long interesting conversation could be had with a steerswoman about campuses and water fountains -- I like it when s.f. does that. And also when it makes me laugh with delight in one chapter, and laugh and cry in the next, at people taking actions based in their culture which would have meant nothing to me in chapter one. I do not want to give spoilers for the other things I like about the book. Everything is so nifty. Thinking back to a conversation I had years and years ago with someone about fantasy travelogues to equal Tolkien's -- this is now a book I'd name, although it's a very different kind of travelogue. And it isn't often that being surprised by turns of plot and working them out in advance are equally satisfying. I did some of each, and they were, and I have just written a long email to leaflemming in which I try to work out the possibility space of [redacted]. And I am trying to put off book three at least two days, which will be difficult. [Note: I put it off less than four hours. Now I have read all of them, and it will probably be years before I get to read Rowan's next bit of thinking. The Outskirter's Secret is my favourite, but that is really not a criticism of the two after. ]
When I wrote it this bit of the post was to be locked to prevent a certain grandmother being forewarned about part of a Christmas gift, but Christmas has gone by, so Jan, I hope you enjoy them too!
A Desert in Bohemia, by Jill Paton Walsh.
I like this, but not as much as A Knowledge of Angels, the other book of hers I'd read. They both have elegant, clear prose, casual erudition, realism heightened toward fable, settings which never existed but are nearly possible, and an interest in moral philosophy. But A Knowledge of Angels is very well-balanced on the core of what it's about, and I think A Desert in Bohemia is off more to the side. The moral philosophy, here, is about the possibility of individual moral choice, when the choices presented to any given person are governed by amoral chance. The setting is a European nation faced the Second World War, followed by a Communist revolution, running down the generations of a family variously in exile and not. [And that is where my thoughts got cloudy and I stopped writing them out, but I think my lesser liking for the book comes down to my being more interested in the possibilities of Communist successes than in the aristocrats who, here, are genuinely wronged by its failures.]
The Invisibles, by Grant Morrison.
While reading volume three of this, late at night and quite tired, some odd-looking new characters turned up, and I said to myself, 'Oh, these are the ones who were on that vase in my tutorial on the origins of drama last week, the one about which the tutor said, 'Well, if this isn't depicting early drama then we don't know what the hell it is depicting.' It took me a moment to realise that only the contents of a comic can be part of its plot, even when the comic is by Grant Morrison.
And then in a bus on the way into town a few days later I looked down a sidestreet I seldom notice, to see another double-decker bus going the other way, and I thought, 'Oh, there's myself at an earlier point in time,' and then, 'Dammit, Grant Morrison would be very happy about this and I don't want to give him the satisfaction.' I generally enjoy being put into altered states of consciousness by books, but when a self-described chaos magician claims to have has written a series of comics as an efficacious hypersigil simulating alien abduction, and then I dislike many things about the series, well, humph.
The series has little truck with character, or as far as I can see (despite what Grant Morrison writes in the epilogue) many bits of human experience I've ever had. A lot of its structure exists to purely to support its own complexity. The author insert character is a super-assassin, and there are characters I thought could have done with more character besides 'is badass, has associated paradox, wants to sleep with super-assassin'. Each team member has a role defined by one of the four elements, and at one point they exchange them to maintain versatility, but after the exchange I couldn't tell the difference, either because there was no difference or because Grant Morrison is quite willing to make things subliminal.
But in the end I would not say I dislike the series. I would say 'Based on previous reading I had not thought Grant Morrison could get more so, and look at that, he did.' When I came out of the film society screening of Last Year at Marienbad and was about to mark the little rate-out-of-five slip they give you, I thought, 'I will mark this as five stars because I'm not going to mark it as one star and 'rating not applicable' isn't one of the options.' Last Year At Marienbad... very successfully exists. I feel that, less intensely, with The Invisibles. Probably it's the shared metafictionality that does it.
The fact that I finished and enjoyed The Invisibles and am likely to reread it, and what I wrote about Black Oxen, and the [then-]recent Dreamwidth discussions of Gideon the Ninth and people's preferences for tone in books, lead me to think that I am quite susceptible to authorial self-indulgence as long as a) it is done at a high level of craft and b) characters occasionally turn around and comment on it to each other. This is a comic about a secret conspiracy of vigilante heroes facing a world-constricting conspiracy of conformist dark gods which may or may not in fact be the same conspiracy, in which the heroes are at one point attacked with a psychic weapon which causes them to uncontrollably critique the role of the vigilante hero in conformist systems. I can pretty much decide whether I'm going to be charmed by that on any given day, and hey, why not?
(Also, incidentally, this series' preoccupations are oddly like my grandfather's. The cultural roots he draws on seem to be under Grant Morrison too).
Also I have just discovered that my current sash windowsill, unlike my last, can be sat on with no particular danger of falling three storeys, and spent a while looking at the evening light, which partly explains and is partly explained by my current mood. (I had just spent another few minutes doing that and pleasurably failing to come up with a good description of the way in which the clouds were beautiful, when coming back in I knocked this laptop off my bed, and the battery out of it. So dangers remain. Thank you for still being alive, laptop. I realise that at the age of seven it is difficult, and that I am not helping).
The Outskirter's Secret, by Rosemary Kirstein.
Even better than the first one. It's the kind of book whose invented culture is complicated enough to make me notice that I live in one too. I went up to a water fountain on campus to refill my drink bottle and thought about how freighted with oddness that simple description is. Such a long interesting conversation could be had with a steerswoman about campuses and water fountains -- I like it when s.f. does that. And also when it makes me laugh with delight in one chapter, and laugh and cry in the next, at people taking actions based in their culture which would have meant nothing to me in chapter one. I do not want to give spoilers for the other things I like about the book. Everything is so nifty. Thinking back to a conversation I had years and years ago with someone about fantasy travelogues to equal Tolkien's -- this is now a book I'd name, although it's a very different kind of travelogue. And it isn't often that being surprised by turns of plot and working them out in advance are equally satisfying. I did some of each, and they were, and I have just written a long email to leaflemming in which I try to work out the possibility space of [redacted]. And I am trying to put off book three at least two days, which will be difficult. [Note: I put it off less than four hours. Now I have read all of them, and it will probably be years before I get to read Rowan's next bit of thinking. The Outskirter's Secret is my favourite, but that is really not a criticism of the two after. ]
When I wrote it this bit of the post was to be locked to prevent a certain grandmother being forewarned about part of a Christmas gift, but Christmas has gone by, so Jan, I hope you enjoy them too!
A Desert in Bohemia, by Jill Paton Walsh.
I like this, but not as much as A Knowledge of Angels, the other book of hers I'd read. They both have elegant, clear prose, casual erudition, realism heightened toward fable, settings which never existed but are nearly possible, and an interest in moral philosophy. But A Knowledge of Angels is very well-balanced on the core of what it's about, and I think A Desert in Bohemia is off more to the side. The moral philosophy, here, is about the possibility of individual moral choice, when the choices presented to any given person are governed by amoral chance. The setting is a European nation faced the Second World War, followed by a Communist revolution, running down the generations of a family variously in exile and not. [And that is where my thoughts got cloudy and I stopped writing them out, but I think my lesser liking for the book comes down to my being more interested in the possibilities of Communist successes than in the aristocrats who, here, are genuinely wronged by its failures.]
The Invisibles, by Grant Morrison.
While reading volume three of this, late at night and quite tired, some odd-looking new characters turned up, and I said to myself, 'Oh, these are the ones who were on that vase in my tutorial on the origins of drama last week, the one about which the tutor said, 'Well, if this isn't depicting early drama then we don't know what the hell it is depicting.' It took me a moment to realise that only the contents of a comic can be part of its plot, even when the comic is by Grant Morrison.
And then in a bus on the way into town a few days later I looked down a sidestreet I seldom notice, to see another double-decker bus going the other way, and I thought, 'Oh, there's myself at an earlier point in time,' and then, 'Dammit, Grant Morrison would be very happy about this and I don't want to give him the satisfaction.' I generally enjoy being put into altered states of consciousness by books, but when a self-described chaos magician claims to have has written a series of comics as an efficacious hypersigil simulating alien abduction, and then I dislike many things about the series, well, humph.
The series has little truck with character, or as far as I can see (despite what Grant Morrison writes in the epilogue) many bits of human experience I've ever had. A lot of its structure exists to purely to support its own complexity. The author insert character is a super-assassin, and there are characters I thought could have done with more character besides 'is badass, has associated paradox, wants to sleep with super-assassin'. Each team member has a role defined by one of the four elements, and at one point they exchange them to maintain versatility, but after the exchange I couldn't tell the difference, either because there was no difference or because Grant Morrison is quite willing to make things subliminal.
But in the end I would not say I dislike the series. I would say 'Based on previous reading I had not thought Grant Morrison could get more so, and look at that, he did.' When I came out of the film society screening of Last Year at Marienbad and was about to mark the little rate-out-of-five slip they give you, I thought, 'I will mark this as five stars because I'm not going to mark it as one star and 'rating not applicable' isn't one of the options.' Last Year At Marienbad... very successfully exists. I feel that, less intensely, with The Invisibles. Probably it's the shared metafictionality that does it.
The fact that I finished and enjoyed The Invisibles and am likely to reread it, and what I wrote about Black Oxen, and the [then-]recent Dreamwidth discussions of Gideon the Ninth and people's preferences for tone in books, lead me to think that I am quite susceptible to authorial self-indulgence as long as a) it is done at a high level of craft and b) characters occasionally turn around and comment on it to each other. This is a comic about a secret conspiracy of vigilante heroes facing a world-constricting conspiracy of conformist dark gods which may or may not in fact be the same conspiracy, in which the heroes are at one point attacked with a psychic weapon which causes them to uncontrollably critique the role of the vigilante hero in conformist systems. I can pretty much decide whether I'm going to be charmed by that on any given day, and hey, why not?
(Also, incidentally, this series' preoccupations are oddly like my grandfather's. The cultural roots he draws on seem to be under Grant Morrison too).
