Wednesdayish Reading
Jun. 2nd, 2022 01:17 pmBecause it's still Wednesday elsewhere!
Currently reading: Early Japanese Railways, by Dan Free? Maybe? I only got a quarter of the way through this before attending a book club about it, and I haven't decided whether I'm still reading it for its own sake or not. In 1904, Japanese student Kashima Shosuke sent a report to a London railway magazine, hoped to share knowledge about his nation's railways. It was never published. Eighty years later Dan Free bought the sole copy of the report from another railway enthusiast, and was interested enough in it that his poking around for additional information accidentally turned into the decades-long process of writing this book.
The result has the mixture of upsides and downsides you'd expect from that: Free is endearingly passionate and thorough within his ambit, which does not include the Japanese language. All sources here are English-language even in passages which cry out for Japanese accounts, which is lots of them. All the characters the first three chapters imbue with personality are British or American. What was it like to ride the first railway in Japan? Here's what an English tourist thought.
This is in fact the first history of Japan I've read, so it's useful for that; the illustrations are great; I'm prepared to be interested in fine-grained engineering details and the author going on for half a page about how ugly a particular British train is despite it just looking, to me, like a train; but I think I'm probably shelving this and reading a different history of Japan and then coming back to insert the train detail afterwards? As![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ambyr said in book club, this will be a great resource to help an enthusiastic train historian who reads Japanese come along later and write a better one.
Just finished:
The Last Days of New Paris by China Mieville.
1941: something explodes in Paris, and Surrealist art comes to threatening and marvelous life all across the city. It is entirely unsafe for the inhabitants, but opposed and preferable to the occult forces of the Nazi occupation, which crawl right up out of Hell.
I always like Mieville's sentences, and come to this with not much acquaintance with the details of Surrealism but a lot of interest and affection towards its general goals, thanks torushthatspeaks telling me about them. Really liked this.
Climbers by M. John Harrison.
I think M. John Harrison is the only writer I have an actual love-hate relationship with. Usually if I hate something I don't even finish reading it; the first time I read Light, I hated it, and then a few months later I wanted to read it again. The large brick bus depot near where I live, with the huge windowless wall facing onto the winding path going to the school, got enchanted when I read The Course of the Heart and then went for a walk there, and it's only starting to subside back to normal now. I didn't even think I liked The Course of the Heart all that much.
At first he felt to me like one of those entirely gloomy British writers (I keep this in my head as a reference category fromleaflemming, despite having avoided all the writers leaflemming put in it because he warned me that they worked out to polish and nothingness. Who was one, now? Julian Barnes?) It felt to me like for every possible good thing someone could do, he'd be there, saying, "But in the end it doesn't really work out, does it? It isn't that simple, is it? Maybe it doesn't have a point after all?" But he has the most exact turns of phrase, and puts joy in here and there, too much to imagine that he doesn't know it's there or thinks it isn't valid.
Sometimes I find I've arbitrarily paired writers in my head: I have Harrison and John M. Ford together as dark and bright faces. As well as some names, they share extreme intelligence and a tendency to leave a large chunk of the book concealed: they both trust you to work it out. I'm not that intelligent as I go, I have to do it by re-reading and thinking back over things afterwards, which means I read their books and don't initially know what happened. In Climbers, I was following the car motif and the way people kept on being locked out of houses, but then they lost me, so all I really know is that a man went rock-climbing for a while, and it didn't bring him all he wanted it to, but maybe it didn't have to, maybe he's going to be okay anyway. I find this the easiest of Harrison's to read yet, maybe because I've built up a tolerance, maybe because the activity of climbing anchors the book, is a solid real thing the characters are doing, never exposited upon, described just enough for a non-climber to know what it is.
His characters seldom understand what afflicts them or what they want; often, they get it, but don't know how. I've read an interview with him where he says that a good way to write is to look at a genre and do whatever it seems to be afraid of. When I read him there's this sense of letting a workman into my head with a funny smile and a large wrench and a belt full of tiny pliers with different-shaped heads. I'm not quite sure what he's going to do in there, and at any moment I may decide he's a crank and kick him out: after all, the pipes still leak and this is the sixth time I've had him in. But when I brought that up he stared at me for a minute, chewing his lip, and said, "Well what do you want them to do? What do you want them to do?" I couldn't think what to say.
Currently reading: Early Japanese Railways, by Dan Free? Maybe? I only got a quarter of the way through this before attending a book club about it, and I haven't decided whether I'm still reading it for its own sake or not. In 1904, Japanese student Kashima Shosuke sent a report to a London railway magazine, hoped to share knowledge about his nation's railways. It was never published. Eighty years later Dan Free bought the sole copy of the report from another railway enthusiast, and was interested enough in it that his poking around for additional information accidentally turned into the decades-long process of writing this book.
The result has the mixture of upsides and downsides you'd expect from that: Free is endearingly passionate and thorough within his ambit, which does not include the Japanese language. All sources here are English-language even in passages which cry out for Japanese accounts, which is lots of them. All the characters the first three chapters imbue with personality are British or American. What was it like to ride the first railway in Japan? Here's what an English tourist thought.
This is in fact the first history of Japan I've read, so it's useful for that; the illustrations are great; I'm prepared to be interested in fine-grained engineering details and the author going on for half a page about how ugly a particular British train is despite it just looking, to me, like a train; but I think I'm probably shelving this and reading a different history of Japan and then coming back to insert the train detail afterwards? As
ambyr said in book club, this will be a great resource to help an enthusiastic train historian who reads Japanese come along later and write a better one. Just finished:
The Last Days of New Paris by China Mieville.
1941: something explodes in Paris, and Surrealist art comes to threatening and marvelous life all across the city. It is entirely unsafe for the inhabitants, but opposed and preferable to the occult forces of the Nazi occupation, which crawl right up out of Hell.
I always like Mieville's sentences, and come to this with not much acquaintance with the details of Surrealism but a lot of interest and affection towards its general goals, thanks to
rushthatspeaks telling me about them. Really liked this.Climbers by M. John Harrison.
I think M. John Harrison is the only writer I have an actual love-hate relationship with. Usually if I hate something I don't even finish reading it; the first time I read Light, I hated it, and then a few months later I wanted to read it again. The large brick bus depot near where I live, with the huge windowless wall facing onto the winding path going to the school, got enchanted when I read The Course of the Heart and then went for a walk there, and it's only starting to subside back to normal now. I didn't even think I liked The Course of the Heart all that much.
At first he felt to me like one of those entirely gloomy British writers (I keep this in my head as a reference category from
leaflemming, despite having avoided all the writers leaflemming put in it because he warned me that they worked out to polish and nothingness. Who was one, now? Julian Barnes?) It felt to me like for every possible good thing someone could do, he'd be there, saying, "But in the end it doesn't really work out, does it? It isn't that simple, is it? Maybe it doesn't have a point after all?" But he has the most exact turns of phrase, and puts joy in here and there, too much to imagine that he doesn't know it's there or thinks it isn't valid. Sometimes I find I've arbitrarily paired writers in my head: I have Harrison and John M. Ford together as dark and bright faces. As well as some names, they share extreme intelligence and a tendency to leave a large chunk of the book concealed: they both trust you to work it out. I'm not that intelligent as I go, I have to do it by re-reading and thinking back over things afterwards, which means I read their books and don't initially know what happened. In Climbers, I was following the car motif and the way people kept on being locked out of houses, but then they lost me, so all I really know is that a man went rock-climbing for a while, and it didn't bring him all he wanted it to, but maybe it didn't have to, maybe he's going to be okay anyway. I find this the easiest of Harrison's to read yet, maybe because I've built up a tolerance, maybe because the activity of climbing anchors the book, is a solid real thing the characters are doing, never exposited upon, described just enough for a non-climber to know what it is.
His characters seldom understand what afflicts them or what they want; often, they get it, but don't know how. I've read an interview with him where he says that a good way to write is to look at a genre and do whatever it seems to be afraid of. When I read him there's this sense of letting a workman into my head with a funny smile and a large wrench and a belt full of tiny pliers with different-shaped heads. I'm not quite sure what he's going to do in there, and at any moment I may decide he's a crank and kick him out: after all, the pipes still leak and this is the sixth time I've had him in. But when I brought that up he stared at me for a minute, chewing his lip, and said, "Well what do you want them to do? What do you want them to do?" I couldn't think what to say.
