Measureless Oceans of Wednesday
Feb. 23rd, 2022 09:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
evelyn_bWhat I've Finished Reading
By the end I was just about all on board for A Deepness in the Sky, whose moving parts pick up steam at different rates but evenually come together in an almost-totally-satisfying way (I was not pleased with the gruesome fate of one of its resident villans, for example, but I guess if you play mass-enslavement games, sometimes you win morally uncomfortable prizes) and by the end even had me telling most of the humans apart most of the time. Pham Trinli's plot in particular, which had me zoning out a little in the first half or two-thirds, has a better payoff than I was expecting. And then there is the best payoff of all: meeting the spiders! Luckily they are large enough for the humans to squish their way, somewhat uncomfortably, into most of their structures. Everyone knows it's going to be a hard problem, and then it's a little worse than expected because 1) hearing spidertalk translated by brain-altered human translators is very different from seeing them and their mandible gestures up close, and 2) of course no one in Spiderworld thought to build any human-accessible staircases. The spiders find humans weirdly endearing, we learn, in spite of their unsettling worminess, because human eyes, like the eyes of baby spiders, only face one way.
Vinge's aliens are rarely any better than we are at things like peaceful coexistence and not immediately turning new technologies into weapons, but somehow it's nice to have the company.
I accidentally read Gwen Kirby's short story collection Shit Cassandra Saw all at once after dinner on Monday, and maybe if I'd read it in a different way I would have a different idea of its range. The overwhelming impression created by these short stories - in spite of Cassandra's usual problems in the title story, and in spite of the odd death and dismemberment and some dark nights and a lot of persistent tiredness - is of everything being more or less ok. There were so many stories where I found myself thinking, Oh no, I hope this doesn't go anywhere grisly and defeating, after which, to my mild surprise and equally mild relief, it didn't. Most of these characters will be all right, even if they cheat on their spouses in front of disapproving ghosts or cut up all their clothes in a fit of self-loathing after watching too many episodes of a chirpy home-minimalism show. This is a fairly refreshing takeaway from a short story collection, even if it only made me laugh about 1/20th as much as I had been led to expect.
What I'm Reading Now
I am happy to report that within only a few pages of my previous Reading Wednesday, The Corrections got really good. This is mainly due to the appearance on the scene of Chip Lambert, thirty-nine-year-old son of Enid and Alfred and one of litfic's great fuckups. Chip got involved and subsequently obsessed with a messy thrifted-polyester-wearing undergraduate who is only a little less magnificently awful than the undergraduate lust interest in Dubin's Lives, and now, surprise surprise, he is going to get fired from his teaching job. Here is a representative description of Chip's recent Christmas-related failures in the light of his more general failure not to shoot his own life in the face at every opportunity.
A summary of breast-related notes from Chip's regrettably breast-haunted screenplay gave me the first real laugh of the book, and after that I was feeling much better disposed toward all of its sentences and everyone in it. As an incurable sap, I feel like Franzen is a little too mean sometimes - especially to Enid - but at least he's good at it.
What I Plan to Read Next
I have some books to read, but also some previously-finished books to catch up on posting about in the next few weeks.
By the end I was just about all on board for A Deepness in the Sky, whose moving parts pick up steam at different rates but evenually come together in an almost-totally-satisfying way (I was not pleased with the gruesome fate of one of its resident villans, for example, but I guess if you play mass-enslavement games, sometimes you win morally uncomfortable prizes) and by the end even had me telling most of the humans apart most of the time. Pham Trinli's plot in particular, which had me zoning out a little in the first half or two-thirds, has a better payoff than I was expecting. And then there is the best payoff of all: meeting the spiders! Luckily they are large enough for the humans to squish their way, somewhat uncomfortably, into most of their structures. Everyone knows it's going to be a hard problem, and then it's a little worse than expected because 1) hearing spidertalk translated by brain-altered human translators is very different from seeing them and their mandible gestures up close, and 2) of course no one in Spiderworld thought to build any human-accessible staircases. The spiders find humans weirdly endearing, we learn, in spite of their unsettling worminess, because human eyes, like the eyes of baby spiders, only face one way.
Vinge's aliens are rarely any better than we are at things like peaceful coexistence and not immediately turning new technologies into weapons, but somehow it's nice to have the company.
I accidentally read Gwen Kirby's short story collection Shit Cassandra Saw all at once after dinner on Monday, and maybe if I'd read it in a different way I would have a different idea of its range. The overwhelming impression created by these short stories - in spite of Cassandra's usual problems in the title story, and in spite of the odd death and dismemberment and some dark nights and a lot of persistent tiredness - is of everything being more or less ok. There were so many stories where I found myself thinking, Oh no, I hope this doesn't go anywhere grisly and defeating, after which, to my mild surprise and equally mild relief, it didn't. Most of these characters will be all right, even if they cheat on their spouses in front of disapproving ghosts or cut up all their clothes in a fit of self-loathing after watching too many episodes of a chirpy home-minimalism show. This is a fairly refreshing takeaway from a short story collection, even if it only made me laugh about 1/20th as much as I had been led to expect.
What I'm Reading Now
I am happy to report that within only a few pages of my previous Reading Wednesday, The Corrections got really good. This is mainly due to the appearance on the scene of Chip Lambert, thirty-nine-year-old son of Enid and Alfred and one of litfic's great fuckups. Chip got involved and subsequently obsessed with a messy thrifted-polyester-wearing undergraduate who is only a little less magnificently awful than the undergraduate lust interest in Dubin's Lives, and now, surprise surprise, he is going to get fired from his teaching job. Here is a representative description of Chip's recent Christmas-related failures in the light of his more general failure not to shoot his own life in the face at every opportunity.
He'd solved the problem of family Christmas gifts on the last possible mailing day, when, in a great rush, he'd pulled old bargains and remainders off his bookself and wrapped them in aluminum foil and tied them up with red ribbon and refused to imagine how his nine-year-old nephew Caleb, for example, might react to an Oxford annotated edition of Ivanhoe whose main qualificaion as a gift was that it was still in its original shrink wrap. The corners of the books had immediately poked through the aluminum foil, and the foil he'd added to cover up the holes hadn't adhered well. . . which he'd tried to mitigate by plastering each package with the National Abortion Rights Action League holiday stickers that he'd received in his annual membership kit. . .[Three days later] he faced the problem of opening the gifts his family had sent him: two boxes from St. Jude, a padded mailer from Denise, and a box from Gary. He decided that he would open the packages in bed and that the way he would get them up to his bedroom would be to kick them up the stairs. Which proved to be a challenge, because oblong objects had a tendency not to roll up a staircase but to catch on the steps and tumble back down. Also, if the contents of a padded mailer were too light to offer inertial resistance, it was difficult to get any lift when you kicked it. But Chip had had such a frustrating and demoralizing Christmas [trying and failing to contact the undergraduate] that he was now psychically capable neither of breaking the rules of the game he'd invented nor of quitting the game before he'd acheived its object. . . When he punted the box from Gary it exploded in a cloud of white Styrofoam saucers. A bubble-wrapped bottle fell out and rolled down the stairs. It was a bottle of vintage Californian port. Chip carried it up to his bed and worked out a rhythm whereby he swallowed one large mouthful of port for each gift that he succeeded in unwrapping. . . From Gary and his wife, in addition to the port, Chip recevived a clever vacuum-pump system for preserving leftover wine from oxidation, as if leftover wine were a problem Chip had ever had. From Denise, to whom he'd given The Selected Letters of Andre Gide after erasing from the flyleaf the evidence that he'd paid one dollar for this particularly tone-deaf translation, he recieved a beautiful lime-green silk shirt, and from his father a hundred-dollar check with the handwritten instructions that he buy himself something he liked.
A summary of breast-related notes from Chip's regrettably breast-haunted screenplay gave me the first real laugh of the book, and after that I was feeling much better disposed toward all of its sentences and everyone in it. As an incurable sap, I feel like Franzen is a little too mean sometimes - especially to Enid - but at least he's good at it.
What I Plan to Read Next
I have some books to read, but also some previously-finished books to catch up on posting about in the next few weeks.
