ritaxis: (Default)
ritaxis ([personal profile] ritaxis) wrote2017-09-28 01:49 pm
Entry tags:

so I've been reading things

 I've had a hard time reading books for a few years, more even than I've admitted to (complained about). I have attributed it to mind scatter from all the various One Damned Thing After Another and also widowhood. Maybe so because suddenly I can read again so long as the thing I'm reading doesn't annoy me too much.

For example, my friend Israel lent me Albion's Seed by David Fischer  (you can read a summary and more positive review of it here) and I can't get into its nine hundred pages of argument that American culture  and politics are almost exclusively descended from four waves of English migration. Despite its length and copious documentation, the actual assertions about culture, psychology, politics, etc. feel unsupported to me. I felt like some asshole had cornered me at a party and was booming along about their nutcase theory. Even though the book has a fat bibliography and a lot of material from primary sources. I don't know why it felt that way to me, but I can't finish it right now. I occasionally browse it for story bits, but it's joyless work.

I picked up The Tree Climber's Guide  by Jack Cooke at the San Francisco Friends of the Public Library's book sale and I can't read it either. Again, it's the theoretics that defeats me.  This book should be right up my alley. It's about the trees of London, as a class and as individuals, meant for people who want to enjoy them to the fullest, including climbing up into them. But it's ruined for me with his uninformed pronouncements on human evolution and nearly spiritualistic approach to everything. I can handle a certain amount of spirituality in a nature book, just not this much. But I still have it in my bathroom waiting for me to give it a fourth chance. After all, it's still a book about urban trees.

Another book I couldn't read was an old Charles deLint, The Little Country. I had the usual deLint trouble where his writing hits an uncanny valley of almost being exactly what I want but somehow tweer than I want even though if I try to catalog the things that make it twee I don't find them--it should be "gritty" almost. Except in this case the things that are supposed to make it gritty include a thing I do not tolerate, which is a fancy, "let's get into the twisted mind of a sociopathic serial killer who likes to torture people" element. I think most people like it better than I do.

So what have I finished? Alif the Unseen by G. Willow WIlson. I went looking to see if there was tumblr discourse about this because there's an aspect of this that I thought the kiddies would go wild for--this book is set inside a not-quite Egyptian world and the author is an American convert to Islam. But she seems to have escaped the discourse treatment. I think the book works. There's a very nice self-insertion element--a character is an American convert living in the nameless City (which seems to be a neighbor of the Emirates). But it's well handled, and she's not the main character or even the main character's girlfriend or his other relationship either. Every character has many layers and you can't waves their short description around and think you've told their story. You need the whole book for that. The story is sort of like North by Northwest in that the protagonist is being pursued by evil forces beyond his ken (that is, the secret police) before he even knows why (he thinks he knows why, but he's wrong). The McGuffin is delicious--it's not a spoiler to say that while at first Alif thinks it's a program he's written, it turns out to be a book. And there's djinns in it and they are not what you think they are. No, not that either. 

I also read The Goose Girl by Shannon Hale. I have mixed feelings about this book. It has some things I hate, which I'll get to, but first let me tell you that Hale can write suspense to the point where you want to claw something to shreds. And it has something I love: worker solidarity, though it's a little shallow in that their solidarity is all about elevating a blond queen over their brown selves. Yep, that's there. You can see why: the story has every goddamned element from a particular version of the fairy tale--no worries, there's lots of suspense for you even if you know the fairy tale and think you know how it's going to work out, so if you care about those things know that you're not going to be ripped-off in the dimension of discovery. But there's problems in the world-building that bug me a lot. One, all the people from the goose girl/princess's country are pale and blond while right next door all the people are dark. Two, these countries are next door to each other and share some history somewhere so that their speech is completely mutually comprehensible--the only difference is an accent so mild that it never interferes with comprehension--and yet they are utterly isolated from each other by geography: it takes months to ride from one country's center of population to the other, over nearly-impassable mountains with only one usable pass, and the royal families have never met each other in generations. The only communication between them in the normal course of things is a small handful of trading caravans that apparently never gossip about one country to the other. Excuse me, but I've met real-world languages that diverged farther than that in a shorter time when they had daily contact. There were details about animal husbandry, clothing production, and cooking that felt not quite fully  researched and developed, but I always feel this way except when reading Heather Rose Jones's books honestly, so I don't hold it against this book. Besides, there's other details that are really really nice.

Right now I'm reading Nova Swing by M.John  Harrison and I can tell you I kind of like the poetic language but not the fact that all the characters speak in the same register and I'm truly creeped out by the way all the female characters seem like simulacrums (some of them are supposed to be such, but not all). I'm glad it's short: I think I will enjoy it by the time it's done, instead of hating it as I might if it was long and kept on doing what it's doing.

So I've spent my time for updating and I'll write about my health (mostly great, with Another Big Honking Deal probably cooking itself up in my lungs) and other stuff at another time.
pameladean: (Default)

[personal profile] pameladean 2017-09-29 03:03 am (UTC)(link)
I didn't finish The Little Country either, though it should have been just my kind of thing. But I am so very tired of serial killers. They are a nearly unique combination of horrible and so very very very boring. I like Charles de Lint as a person very much, and I remember how Moonheart knocked my entire little cohort of aspiring writers sideways when it was first published, but I could NOT get along with The Little Country.

P.
carbonel: Beth wearing hat (Default)

[personal profile] carbonel 2017-09-29 05:21 pm (UTC)(link)
I also didn't finish The Little Country, despite thinking that it really ought to be Just My Thing.

I will recommend, with some trepidation, the two books that I've been recommending to pretty much all and sundry:

A Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet
A Closed and Common Orbit

Both are by Becky Chambers, and both are set in the same universe, but there's no real overlap in characters. I love them because it feels like a diverse well-realized universe, and most of the people (of several species) are essentially decent, even if some of them drive others up a wall.
pameladean: (Default)

[personal profile] pameladean 2017-09-30 04:16 am (UTC)(link)
I've been hearing a lot of very interesting things about those books, plus I really love the titles.

P.
hairmonger: engraving of Brown Leghorns (Default)

[personal profile] hairmonger 2017-09-30 10:18 pm (UTC)(link)
I keep hoping she'll prove to be one of those Really Rapid writers, because I want more!

Mary Anne in Kentucky
pameladean: (Default)

[personal profile] pameladean 2017-09-30 04:20 am (UTC)(link)
Probably. I didn't keep up with his career after some point, but there's certainly enough to choose from.

I enjoyed another one whose title I'm spacing, but I stopped reading three-quarters of the way in because it was all taking so long. And I loved Bleak House. But he has short books too, and short fiction.

P.

I looked it up. It was Trader.
hairmonger: engraving of Brown Leghorns (Default)

[personal profile] hairmonger 2017-09-30 10:17 pm (UTC)(link)
I finished The Little Country, in fact twice, but now you have me wondering why I haven't reread it in...a decade or more?

Mary Anne in Kentucky
hrj: (Default)

[personal profile] hrj 2017-09-29 08:36 pm (UTC)(link)
When I came out of my post-grad-school/post-novel-writing reading slump, I had a number of moments when I wondered if I'd just forgotten how to enjoy books. It felt like I could identify books as well or badly written, but it was hard to tell if I was enjoying reading them. Especially in the case of books that everyone else seemed to be squeeing over.

I do occasionally have my socks knocked off still. But I worry about how infrequently it seems to happen.
hrj: (Default)

[personal profile] hrj 2017-10-01 03:06 am (UTC)(link)
It's mostly that, as a writer, I feel like I need to understand the phenomenon of dynamic sock removal. When a significant subset of readers seems to be reacting in a strongly positive way to a book that I find simply good, how do I know whether it's just hyperbole, if it's something wrong with my taste, or something wrong with my ability to appreciate books? It's important, because I want to figure out how to knock people's socks off. I want to know what it is books do that get that reaction. And if I can't feel it, it's hard to do the analysis.
graydon: (Default)

[personal profile] graydon 2017-10-01 04:22 am (UTC)(link)
Once I started publishing my own writing, fiction stopped being a recreation and starting being a demand for a competence I was ill-equipped to provide. I've stopped reading fiction in consequence. (There are a very few exceptions.)

So far as I am able to tell, dynamic sock removal is so entirely idiosyncratic not merely to the reader but the reader's chance-determined circumstances when they should happen to start reading that there is no honest mechanism. (You -- generic hypothetical you, not specific you, and certainly not me, as I can't -- can make a reader feel smug, and such a reader may well claim their socks departed at great speed, but this is not to my mind the same thing.) I think it's much more a question of being almost too much novelty combining a sufficient consonance with existing understanding in that reader. That's not so much as moving target as a single point undergoing abrupt transformations throughout a darkness of unknowable dimension.
graydon: (Default)

[personal profile] graydon 2017-10-01 07:45 pm (UTC)(link)
I think the knocked-my-socks-off feeling is when something extends an existing understanding in an unexpected way, and in a way that might not work -- there's enough pre-existing conceptual underpinnings to make the understanding happen, but not so much that the understanding feels obvious; it feels like an insight. This can be because the book built the conceptual understanding, but that's tough in non-fiction and very tough indeed in fiction.

That experience is going to be different for every reader, and even with a decision about a specific audience, I don't think it's something that can be reproduced reliably. I also also don't think it's what makes really popular books really popular; those seem to be about confirming the virtue of a particular flavour of feels.

(I think you are correct about Pratchett, and the metaphorical socks remaining cozily on feet.)
hairmonger: engraving of Brown Leghorns (Default)

Albion's Seed

[personal profile] hairmonger 2017-09-30 10:23 pm (UTC)(link)
I came back after reading this post the first time when I had time and brain to reply. I found Albion's Seed utterly fascinating, but that was because his analysis of the different cultures of the colonists explained SO much about the two different strands of culture in my ancestry. However, when I tried to read it again several years later, it was like pushing on a locked door.

Mary Anne in Kentucky
hairmonger: engraving of Brown Leghorns (Default)

Re: Albion's Seed

[personal profile] hairmonger 2017-10-05 05:58 pm (UTC)(link)
Once again waiting for a combination of time and brain to occur, and thinking about it in the meantime. I know the first time, as he described his first two types of colonial culture, I kept having moments of "Oh, that explains that!" and that I found the two types that don't apply to my ancestors considerably less interesting, but still enjoyable.
Then, several years later, I came across it on the library shelf instead of seeking it out after seeing the reviews, and decided to read it again. This time, I was put off by the heaviness of his prose. His ideas were harder to chip out of the surrounding stodge and I gave up rather quickly. I'm not doing a very good job of describing how the two different experiences felt, am I?

Mary Anne in Kentucky