Recent Reading
Aug. 19th, 2022 07:12 pmI always find holidays good for reading! I've just been up at my mother's, where some thought had gone into making sure we had a four for five hundred, and there was a new pig, and the nights were so cold I became a person who likes hot water bottles for the first time.
A Dissolving Ghost, by Margaret Mahy.
This is an essay collection which I was very pleased to happen on in a bookshop a year or so ago, I didn't know she had one. Mahy's voice – and it was her speaking voice, many of these were given as talks or interviews – is delightful, suggesting strongly that she would have been fun to have tea with. I convinced my mother to read this book by laughing out loud every few pages, and someone would ask why and I'd read out the paragraph. Mahy has read widely, is sparkling, pragmatic though not exempt from accidentally setting her car on fire, generally excited by the world; she ends a talk called 'Beginnings and Endings' with T.S. Eliot, but begins it by starting to plan the talk and immediately having to pause to clean up the house in a hurry so that when her housekeeper arrives to do the cleaning she won't seem to be living in a pigsty.
I think the tipping point for my mother asking to read the book may have been when I read out Mahy's description of Kate McCosh Clark's The Cradle Ship, in which a pair of twins ask their grandmother where babies come from, and she tells them not to ask because it's rude, but they ask their mother anyway, and so she transforms into a fairy and takes them off to board the Cradle Ship to Babyland, where the rules of nature can be safely explained under her wise guidance – her husband coming along so that he can recite poetry if they end up needing some.
That's from a survey of NZ children's fiction in the early 20th century; others of the seven essays here are about Mahy's thoughts on truth in fiction, her early life, and her writing process, how she wants to appeal to the child like herself who reveled in elaborations and adult nods and winks, without excluding the child who doesn't. (She refused to cut the bit in The Pirates' Mixed-up Voyage where a parrot talks about determinism, but restructured another book completely so as to reduce its dependence on pi).
The New Animals, by Pip Adam
I need to hurry off to boardgaming now, so don't have time to write properly about this book. It's the first thing in ages that's sunk me down all the way into it and I emerge in a peculiarly altered state and go walking barefoot in the rain. Set in Auckland. Protagonist Carla is a hairdresser for a fashion company run by a trio of entitled men who think they're disrupting the industry but are mainly just disrupting the lives of all their employees. Everything is prosaic and falling to pieces a little. Carla has a dog she's incredibly cruel to; the dog has become a problem too large to be faced square-on – the book skips around between streams of consciousness – one of the fashion company men has an interior monologue consisting so completely of positive self-talk that it becomes clear almost at once he's incredibly anxious about how everything's going – Carla's best friend is no longer her best friend and neither of them know what to do about it – nothing's been the same since Carla got back...
Where did Carla get back from? Why will no one talk directly about where Carla got back from? It doesn't seem to have been overseas. In all the friendly, entangled, vexed life they're having, as Carla, Elodie the bright makeup artist whose verve nobody else can quite understand, Sharona who does most of the work which her bosses in theory should be doing, Duey who is a better hairdresser than Carla and has kept her life stable at some personal cost, go about the business of making a stupid job work, where Carla went to is a looming question, and the title of the book is always in play: how literal is this going to end up being? What exactly has happened?
Underscore: do not read this book if you don't want to read about cruel treatment of dogs. I highly recommend it otherwise, I am going off to find her other novel soonest.
And now I am late for boardgames and must hurtle, but another good thing about being back from holidays (I'm not quite going off to get Pip Adam's other novel soonest) is that I can resume Sherwood Smith/![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sartorias's A Sword Named Truth, which I'm very much liking but which was too large to take on the plane, and I had to pause at a tense point close to the end, with many young monarchs in danger or poised to do unwise things.
A Dissolving Ghost, by Margaret Mahy.
This is an essay collection which I was very pleased to happen on in a bookshop a year or so ago, I didn't know she had one. Mahy's voice – and it was her speaking voice, many of these were given as talks or interviews – is delightful, suggesting strongly that she would have been fun to have tea with. I convinced my mother to read this book by laughing out loud every few pages, and someone would ask why and I'd read out the paragraph. Mahy has read widely, is sparkling, pragmatic though not exempt from accidentally setting her car on fire, generally excited by the world; she ends a talk called 'Beginnings and Endings' with T.S. Eliot, but begins it by starting to plan the talk and immediately having to pause to clean up the house in a hurry so that when her housekeeper arrives to do the cleaning she won't seem to be living in a pigsty.
I think the tipping point for my mother asking to read the book may have been when I read out Mahy's description of Kate McCosh Clark's The Cradle Ship, in which a pair of twins ask their grandmother where babies come from, and she tells them not to ask because it's rude, but they ask their mother anyway, and so she transforms into a fairy and takes them off to board the Cradle Ship to Babyland, where the rules of nature can be safely explained under her wise guidance – her husband coming along so that he can recite poetry if they end up needing some.
That's from a survey of NZ children's fiction in the early 20th century; others of the seven essays here are about Mahy's thoughts on truth in fiction, her early life, and her writing process, how she wants to appeal to the child like herself who reveled in elaborations and adult nods and winks, without excluding the child who doesn't. (She refused to cut the bit in The Pirates' Mixed-up Voyage where a parrot talks about determinism, but restructured another book completely so as to reduce its dependence on pi).
The New Animals, by Pip Adam
I need to hurry off to boardgaming now, so don't have time to write properly about this book. It's the first thing in ages that's sunk me down all the way into it and I emerge in a peculiarly altered state and go walking barefoot in the rain. Set in Auckland. Protagonist Carla is a hairdresser for a fashion company run by a trio of entitled men who think they're disrupting the industry but are mainly just disrupting the lives of all their employees. Everything is prosaic and falling to pieces a little. Carla has a dog she's incredibly cruel to; the dog has become a problem too large to be faced square-on – the book skips around between streams of consciousness – one of the fashion company men has an interior monologue consisting so completely of positive self-talk that it becomes clear almost at once he's incredibly anxious about how everything's going – Carla's best friend is no longer her best friend and neither of them know what to do about it – nothing's been the same since Carla got back...
Where did Carla get back from? Why will no one talk directly about where Carla got back from? It doesn't seem to have been overseas. In all the friendly, entangled, vexed life they're having, as Carla, Elodie the bright makeup artist whose verve nobody else can quite understand, Sharona who does most of the work which her bosses in theory should be doing, Duey who is a better hairdresser than Carla and has kept her life stable at some personal cost, go about the business of making a stupid job work, where Carla went to is a looming question, and the title of the book is always in play: how literal is this going to end up being? What exactly has happened?
Underscore: do not read this book if you don't want to read about cruel treatment of dogs. I highly recommend it otherwise, I am going off to find her other novel soonest.
And now I am late for boardgames and must hurtle, but another good thing about being back from holidays (I'm not quite going off to get Pip Adam's other novel soonest) is that I can resume Sherwood Smith/
sartorias's A Sword Named Truth, which I'm very much liking but which was too large to take on the plane, and I had to pause at a tense point close to the end, with many young monarchs in danger or poised to do unwise things.
