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Supposedly Recent Reading
Mar. 26th, 2019 12:08 pm...although actually I wrote most of this a month ago but then a bunch of unexpected part-time work turned up and things became busy. If I try to keep it current by writing up books at the rate I'm read them this will end up twenty pages long and still unposted, since my reading-brain has few demands on it just now and my writing-brain has many. So:
The Bone People, by Keri Hulme.
I really liked this. I wasn't sure at first I would. The author's note took what I thought was an oddly persnickety line about how odd the book's shape was and how good that it had escaped damage at the hands of its editors. (That seemed less unnecessary when I looked up how long it had taken to get published). The other reason I didn't start out liking this book is that its very beginning is its end, the place its three central characters get to with each other, which relies for its effectiveness on the weight of what hadn't yet happened, and I did not find its vagueness beautiful. Most of the rest of the book, I find very beautiful, very exact. A lot of New Zealand landscape, and fishing, food-gathering. (I read oddly little that's actually set here).
It's the story of three people whose patterns of unhappiness have been too strong for them to break, until they run into each other.
( Spoilers, although you may well have heard them as they are pretty much the premise )
This is a book in which religion and fantasy hover, without it being apparent how much they're going to enter the story, or with what weight. It feels pleasantly out-of-genre, the way it makes the fantasy elements unpredictable, in the same way that a retelling of Hamlet can reintroduce the question of whether Hamlet's uncle is guilty or not.
The Dragons of Babel, by Michael Swanwick.
Read in the middle of The Bone People, which is one of those books I put down and picked up again. This is set in industrial Faery. I thought the first three chapters were an amazingly well-done balance between the industrial and the Faery, with references to the tradition the book's sitting in weaving happily in and out of a plot that kept moving faster than I expected, and a dragon of terrible, plausible malevolence. And then the protagonist arrives in Babel, which is also New York City, and I stopped and went, “What? They have Mcdonalds in Faery?” and my suspension of disbelief went out the window. Especially given my memory of The Iron Dragon's Daughter, which is set in the same world (at least approximately), and which I remember as having established very different boundaries between the worlds. I'm not sure any of this would bother me at all on a second reading, because it's a good New York, a good Babel, and next time I won't be jarred out of my seat by both of those being the same. It isn't as though it's trying for naturalism and failing. It's a patchwork, in which one of E.R. Eddison's enamelled, gemstone-studded descriptive passages turns up as part of a tourist brochure describing a New York train station, which maybe used to look like that once, before it got so much traffic through...
Swanwick loves con artists, and pulls some good conjuring tricks here, but I stayed off-kilter, without the feeling of underlying solidity I got in the first chapters. Feeding into that is the quality some of the characters have of seeming to feature solely as components in the Hero's progress, and Swanwick knows that's what they are and doesn't care, or expect me to. Mostly I don't, but sometimes... He's so good at not saying something twice when once will do, but I feel as though sometimes he says a thing no times when I'd have liked him to say it once. When I saw on his blog that he diagrammed each chapter with lines for each character's trajectory I went, “That completely fits. Some of those characters felt like lines.”
There's one, Alcyone, who's very Hero's Object Of Desire, and I find that about half successful. I mean, she clearly has a story, which isn't ultimately going to involve the Hero, and she is also an elf, following norms which aren't human; so, all well and good. But I was not comfortable with the extent to which she was subsidiary, and followed the required plot beats of being in love with him, at least for the duration. Her details and her trajectory seemed to be saying opposite things. Again, that might change on a reread. (This is another transport-afflicted reading experience, in that I finished reading it three hours into a supposedly two-hour bus ride. Probably doesn't help).
(Tangent to that: a while ago I read Mary Gentle's Rats and Gargoyles. One of its female characters, White Crow, is extremely competent and extremely sexual and ardently desired by one of its young male characters. And because Gentle kept almost entirely out of the characters' heads, I was reading that as male-gazey, assuming that at some point young male character would be granted White Crow as a reward for having been a good protagonist. I was reading 'Keeping entirely out of White Crow's head' as 'The contents of White Crow's head are not relevant on this point', having not put together quite how equal-opportunity the lack of interiority in the book was being. And in the end they sleep together because they desire each other, and then White Crow efficiently conveys to him the idea that lust is not the same thing as wanting to marry someone and goes off with the person she is, in fact, married to. I must read more Mary Gentle sometime. That book was a very odd experience, I though I wasn't liking it or caring about it, and portions of it have dropped out of my head pretty much entire, but other portions have stuck ever since and I wouldn't want to lose them).
The Obelisk Gate by N.K. Jemisin.
Sequel to The Fifth Season. I didn't like this one as much. For one thing, it covers less ground, and for another, it's a book spent waiting for things to happen. But that wouldn't matter, those would be positives, if I cared about the people as much as I had in the first book, because this book is mostly built around a single community and its stability or instability. I don't care as much, and I'm not sure why. The most intense positive relationships in the first book aren't reproduced here, maybe? In the wider plot, there's a bit of a collapse of the depth and complexity of time, a feeling that many disparate things are one story where I thought they were going to be several, along with a feeling that all the characters who need to be powerful are gaining power suspiciously quickly so the third book can work. While at the same time the main character isn't learning certain worldbuilding details as fast as she perfectly well could if not for the need to have the book be longer than a hundred pages.
( Small spoilers )
I don't know. I have the feeling that I'm thinking out things which could have caused me not to like it as much, instead of identifying what did.
Spinning Silver, by Naomi Novik.
I need to stop using 'This book made me cry' as an index of anything, because until about two years ago it was vanishingly rare but now it seems to happen about once a month. Nevertheless, this book made me cry. (In this case, at someone making a decision on the basis of the Torah. Also at someone independently inventing a method of knitting. And at a child learning for the first time that some adults are capable of becoming angry without ceasing to be kind... This was a generally emotion-producing book). It's a version of Rumplestiltskin, in which Miryem, daughter of a money-lender, practices her craft so well that she attracts the attention of somebody with a supernatural interest in converting silver into gold. It has a very lived-in world – including the bit of it lived in by elves, and the elves and their contractual magic are of a thoroughly satisfying kind - and the world is thickened as it goes along by a lot of characterful first-person narrators, a community of perspectives. The transitions between them aren't signalled by chapter-headings or anything, it's just obvious in each segment who is speaking. (When I started to get confused and have to double back to work it out, I knew I'd stayed up too late reading. Not that I stopped. Something important hadn't happened yet).
( Some spoilers )
And since I wrote most of that, I have read the first two of Megan Whalen Turner’s Queen’s Thief books, in one day each, and the third one is in my bag now. I read half of the first one when it came out, and then got bored and stopped. Now I like the first book, though I can see why I did stop, absent any other information. It has well-defined characters on a well-defined journey through an ancient-Mediterranean-ish world, horse-riding and foodstuffs, better and worse places to sleep, things going right, things going wrong, somebody telling a story and somebody else saying, “You missed a bit, here’s how my grandmother used to tell it,” people grating against each other and learning to respect one another more or less in the process, and the slow discovery of what they're all off to steal and why. But by its nature, quite a few of its emotional possibilities are blocked off by sticking so close to that one trip across country. The sequel has a much higher vantage point on the characters and the world, and it’s a good world, and they are extremely good characters.
The Bone People, by Keri Hulme.
I really liked this. I wasn't sure at first I would. The author's note took what I thought was an oddly persnickety line about how odd the book's shape was and how good that it had escaped damage at the hands of its editors. (That seemed less unnecessary when I looked up how long it had taken to get published). The other reason I didn't start out liking this book is that its very beginning is its end, the place its three central characters get to with each other, which relies for its effectiveness on the weight of what hadn't yet happened, and I did not find its vagueness beautiful. Most of the rest of the book, I find very beautiful, very exact. A lot of New Zealand landscape, and fishing, food-gathering. (I read oddly little that's actually set here).
It's the story of three people whose patterns of unhappiness have been too strong for them to break, until they run into each other.
( Spoilers, although you may well have heard them as they are pretty much the premise )
This is a book in which religion and fantasy hover, without it being apparent how much they're going to enter the story, or with what weight. It feels pleasantly out-of-genre, the way it makes the fantasy elements unpredictable, in the same way that a retelling of Hamlet can reintroduce the question of whether Hamlet's uncle is guilty or not.
The Dragons of Babel, by Michael Swanwick.
Read in the middle of The Bone People, which is one of those books I put down and picked up again. This is set in industrial Faery. I thought the first three chapters were an amazingly well-done balance between the industrial and the Faery, with references to the tradition the book's sitting in weaving happily in and out of a plot that kept moving faster than I expected, and a dragon of terrible, plausible malevolence. And then the protagonist arrives in Babel, which is also New York City, and I stopped and went, “What? They have Mcdonalds in Faery?” and my suspension of disbelief went out the window. Especially given my memory of The Iron Dragon's Daughter, which is set in the same world (at least approximately), and which I remember as having established very different boundaries between the worlds. I'm not sure any of this would bother me at all on a second reading, because it's a good New York, a good Babel, and next time I won't be jarred out of my seat by both of those being the same. It isn't as though it's trying for naturalism and failing. It's a patchwork, in which one of E.R. Eddison's enamelled, gemstone-studded descriptive passages turns up as part of a tourist brochure describing a New York train station, which maybe used to look like that once, before it got so much traffic through...
Swanwick loves con artists, and pulls some good conjuring tricks here, but I stayed off-kilter, without the feeling of underlying solidity I got in the first chapters. Feeding into that is the quality some of the characters have of seeming to feature solely as components in the Hero's progress, and Swanwick knows that's what they are and doesn't care, or expect me to. Mostly I don't, but sometimes... He's so good at not saying something twice when once will do, but I feel as though sometimes he says a thing no times when I'd have liked him to say it once. When I saw on his blog that he diagrammed each chapter with lines for each character's trajectory I went, “That completely fits. Some of those characters felt like lines.”
There's one, Alcyone, who's very Hero's Object Of Desire, and I find that about half successful. I mean, she clearly has a story, which isn't ultimately going to involve the Hero, and she is also an elf, following norms which aren't human; so, all well and good. But I was not comfortable with the extent to which she was subsidiary, and followed the required plot beats of being in love with him, at least for the duration. Her details and her trajectory seemed to be saying opposite things. Again, that might change on a reread. (This is another transport-afflicted reading experience, in that I finished reading it three hours into a supposedly two-hour bus ride. Probably doesn't help).
(Tangent to that: a while ago I read Mary Gentle's Rats and Gargoyles. One of its female characters, White Crow, is extremely competent and extremely sexual and ardently desired by one of its young male characters. And because Gentle kept almost entirely out of the characters' heads, I was reading that as male-gazey, assuming that at some point young male character would be granted White Crow as a reward for having been a good protagonist. I was reading 'Keeping entirely out of White Crow's head' as 'The contents of White Crow's head are not relevant on this point', having not put together quite how equal-opportunity the lack of interiority in the book was being. And in the end they sleep together because they desire each other, and then White Crow efficiently conveys to him the idea that lust is not the same thing as wanting to marry someone and goes off with the person she is, in fact, married to. I must read more Mary Gentle sometime. That book was a very odd experience, I though I wasn't liking it or caring about it, and portions of it have dropped out of my head pretty much entire, but other portions have stuck ever since and I wouldn't want to lose them).
The Obelisk Gate by N.K. Jemisin.
Sequel to The Fifth Season. I didn't like this one as much. For one thing, it covers less ground, and for another, it's a book spent waiting for things to happen. But that wouldn't matter, those would be positives, if I cared about the people as much as I had in the first book, because this book is mostly built around a single community and its stability or instability. I don't care as much, and I'm not sure why. The most intense positive relationships in the first book aren't reproduced here, maybe? In the wider plot, there's a bit of a collapse of the depth and complexity of time, a feeling that many disparate things are one story where I thought they were going to be several, along with a feeling that all the characters who need to be powerful are gaining power suspiciously quickly so the third book can work. While at the same time the main character isn't learning certain worldbuilding details as fast as she perfectly well could if not for the need to have the book be longer than a hundred pages.
( Small spoilers )
I don't know. I have the feeling that I'm thinking out things which could have caused me not to like it as much, instead of identifying what did.
Spinning Silver, by Naomi Novik.
I need to stop using 'This book made me cry' as an index of anything, because until about two years ago it was vanishingly rare but now it seems to happen about once a month. Nevertheless, this book made me cry. (In this case, at someone making a decision on the basis of the Torah. Also at someone independently inventing a method of knitting. And at a child learning for the first time that some adults are capable of becoming angry without ceasing to be kind... This was a generally emotion-producing book). It's a version of Rumplestiltskin, in which Miryem, daughter of a money-lender, practices her craft so well that she attracts the attention of somebody with a supernatural interest in converting silver into gold. It has a very lived-in world – including the bit of it lived in by elves, and the elves and their contractual magic are of a thoroughly satisfying kind - and the world is thickened as it goes along by a lot of characterful first-person narrators, a community of perspectives. The transitions between them aren't signalled by chapter-headings or anything, it's just obvious in each segment who is speaking. (When I started to get confused and have to double back to work it out, I knew I'd stayed up too late reading. Not that I stopped. Something important hadn't happened yet).
( Some spoilers )
And since I wrote most of that, I have read the first two of Megan Whalen Turner’s Queen’s Thief books, in one day each, and the third one is in my bag now. I read half of the first one when it came out, and then got bored and stopped. Now I like the first book, though I can see why I did stop, absent any other information. It has well-defined characters on a well-defined journey through an ancient-Mediterranean-ish world, horse-riding and foodstuffs, better and worse places to sleep, things going right, things going wrong, somebody telling a story and somebody else saying, “You missed a bit, here’s how my grandmother used to tell it,” people grating against each other and learning to respect one another more or less in the process, and the slow discovery of what they're all off to steal and why. But by its nature, quite a few of its emotional possibilities are blocked off by sticking so close to that one trip across country. The sequel has a much higher vantage point on the characters and the world, and it’s a good world, and they are extremely good characters.
