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landingtree19/03/2023
I finished Reservoir 13 today, and I like it very much. We don't learn what happened to the missing girl – as is signaled by the walk some characters go on up to Reservoir Thirteen midway through the book, a walk described as trailing off unsatisfyingly. We do learn enough about several of the town's men to think that if they killed her, it would be coherent – which is perhaps scarier than learning about a single perpetrator. And I learned – with a tingle down my spine – that the book I had been reading was thirteen chapters long, which is thirteen years, which is the lifespan the girl who vanished is known to have had. The book is substantial enough that that's what I thought: I just read the lifetime someone got.
I don't know what reading it again would be like, given how many characters I sometimes forgot about or confused with each other, and how many bits of nature description did and didn't chime thematically: perhaps next time I will perceive the poetic intent of the badgers on page 58, whereas this time I just thought 'oh, hello badgers, nice to see you again' and perceived the poetic intent of the starlings on page 59. Lots of it is funny: i.e. the parish council meetings. Jokes have expansive room to develop or not.
There's a book I loved as a child called The Great Green Mouse Disaster, in which each double-page spread is the same cross-section of the same hotel, with characters moving about between pages, lots of little stories in what they're doing, and all the stories crashing into one another as from page to page you watch a tide of green mice escaping the travelling entertainer's basket and running all over the place. Reservoir 13 has somewhat similar pleasures.
20/03/2023
A tired day. Read a few stories from The Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales. Slight they seemed, though fun, from both Sylvia Townsend Warner (Bluebeard) and Tanith Lee (that format where the princess sets the prince tasks).
M. John Harrison co-wrote a series of fantasy novels about cats? Okay then. Other author Jane Johnson, I remember some of hers from when I was a child.
I finished Reservoir 13 today, and I like it very much. We don't learn what happened to the missing girl – as is signaled by the walk some characters go on up to Reservoir Thirteen midway through the book, a walk described as trailing off unsatisfyingly. We do learn enough about several of the town's men to think that if they killed her, it would be coherent – which is perhaps scarier than learning about a single perpetrator. And I learned – with a tingle down my spine – that the book I had been reading was thirteen chapters long, which is thirteen years, which is the lifespan the girl who vanished is known to have had. The book is substantial enough that that's what I thought: I just read the lifetime someone got.
I don't know what reading it again would be like, given how many characters I sometimes forgot about or confused with each other, and how many bits of nature description did and didn't chime thematically: perhaps next time I will perceive the poetic intent of the badgers on page 58, whereas this time I just thought 'oh, hello badgers, nice to see you again' and perceived the poetic intent of the starlings on page 59. Lots of it is funny: i.e. the parish council meetings. Jokes have expansive room to develop or not.
There's a book I loved as a child called The Great Green Mouse Disaster, in which each double-page spread is the same cross-section of the same hotel, with characters moving about between pages, lots of little stories in what they're doing, and all the stories crashing into one another as from page to page you watch a tide of green mice escaping the travelling entertainer's basket and running all over the place. Reservoir 13 has somewhat similar pleasures.
20/03/2023
A tired day. Read a few stories from The Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales. Slight they seemed, though fun, from both Sylvia Townsend Warner (Bluebeard) and Tanith Lee (that format where the princess sets the prince tasks).
M. John Harrison co-wrote a series of fantasy novels about cats? Okay then. Other author Jane Johnson, I remember some of hers from when I was a child.
