Where Were You When the World Began Wednesday

[evelyn_b]

What I've Finished Reading

The Clan of the Cave Bear ends with a cliffhanger and a sample chapter from Jean M. Auel's latest, but I'm not biting. I don't regret the time I spend reading it, but I also don't know when I've been this disappointed in a novel for not being the long short story it was clearly meant to be. I definitely can't handle another 500 pages. There's a scene toward the end where Ayla and her guardian Creb drink a narcotic ritual beverage and share a vision of the far future - one in which Creb's people diminish and die and Ayla's overrun the world and make it strange. It's an ambitious piece of writing that ought to be a major turning point in the book, but isn't. Why isn't it? Because our disembodied National Geographic narrator has been following us around this whole time, reminding us every 50 pages that the Clan are doomed, using phrases like "evolutionary dead end" that are totally inappropriate to the setting and the mindset of the characters. By the time the news breaks into the story itself, it's been stale for days. It didn't do us any good to hear it all those other times, and now the big cool prehistoric sci-fi moment is spoiled. Oh, well.

What I Gave Up on Almost Immediately

The Raven Boys is pretty emphatically not my thing. I told myself I was going to give it a hundred pages before I took it back to the free book exchange, but I barely made it to 75. It has a good opening line ("It was freezing in the churchyard, even before the dead arrived.") but unfortunately there's a prologue in its way, and the rest of it was nothing but a chore. I hope whoever finds it in the free box next has better luck enjoying it.

What I'm Reading Now

The Maias by José Maria de Eça de Queiroz.

This is a large novel about Carlos da Maia, a wealthy young doctor who is doomed to sleep with his sister (I know this because the frontispiece told me right away, and now it's impossible not to see the pieces being put in place). But doom doesn't hang heavily on Carlos yet, unless it's the doom of never getting anything done - he's just come down from Coimbra to set up a consulting room and a laboratory, where he's going to dole out medical expertise while he works on a monumental history of the past and future of medicine - but his boudoir-like consulting room furniture doesn't excite respect, and the workmen are taking forever with the laboratory building, and his friends keep making fun of him and dragging him off to the Drones Club South to fling themselves on couches and wail about their mistresses. Meanwhile, his friend Ega (whom I'm pretty sure is a self-mocking self-insert of Eça de Queiroz, even though I don't know anything about Eça de Queiroz) is supposed to be turning his brilliant idea for a book into an actual book, and finding it considerably harder than either talking about the idea or buying and wearing eccentric clothes:

It was to be a prose epic, he declared, and would describe through a series of symbolic episodes the history of the great periods of the World and of Humanity. It was entitled Memoirs of an Atom, and was autobiographical in form. In the first chapter this atom (Ega's Atom, as it was called in all earnestness at Coimbra) was still roaming amid the cloudiness of the primitive nebulae [. . .] After that, as it voyaged through continual transformations of substance, Ega's atom entered the primitive structure of the orang-outang, the father of humanity, and later it lived on the lips of Plato. [. . .] Finding itself at last on the point of Ega's pen, and weary of its journey through Being, it rested as it wrote its Memoirs

It's pretty charming. I don't know what the eventual incest is going to do to the charm, but I'm enjoying it so far.

Also Shirley by Charlotte Bronte - another sponsored post! That will go up at some point soon, if not this weekend, then shortly after.

What I Plan to Read Next

The Ladies of Missalonghi!

Comments

[osprey_archer]

EEEEE I hope you like The Ladies of Missalonghi! And also Shirley, although Shirley IMO is a novel that inspires more complex feelings than just "liking." Although I did like parts of it very much; I don't want to give the impression it's a slog.

It's sad to hear that Auel was hoist on the petard of her own penchant for infodumps. If only you'd left out all that "evolutionary dead end" stuff, Auel! You could've had a great prophecy scene! (How does Creb feel about seeing his people die out?)

I have never tried to read Raven Boys, because although it is possible I would love it like its fans love it, it's probably more likely I would have your reaction and why waste the time. And there doesn't seem to be any possibility for an in-between reaction: it's either total love or OH GOD NO.

[evelyn_b]

I hope so, too! :D

Creb's feelings are complicated. I mean, there's what you know and then there's what you can do about it. I know the seas are rising, but I've still got bills to pay, you know? The in-character response to the vision is some of the best writing in the book, or at least the most interesting. He's overwhelmed by the revelation, but it doesn't change a whole lot, because it's not really possible for him to explain it to anyone else (in part because of the weird racial-memory-instinct thing Auel is doing, but also just because really long spans of time are hard to think about) and does it really matter? In one sense it does but in another, what are you going to do about it? Just give up? It could be another twenty thousand years before you go extinct, and in the meantime there are all these babies to take care of. Babies don't give a fuck if their species is doomed; they're hungry now. So he gets a twist in his gut and a pang in his heart, and some mixed feelings about Ayla (whom he loves as a daughter) and what she represents for his people, whom he also loves, but he doesn't call a meeting about it, because how is that meeting going to go well? He knows it can't; all his turmoil is for the benefit of the reader.

It made me really regret what the book could have been (I think this regret is making me a little unfair to what it actually is). All Auel had to do was go back and delete the 300 out-of-nowhere narrator musings about "evolutionary dead ends" after she'd figured out how to write the same idea from within her characters' POV. But no.

I had my doubts about The Raven Boys from the start, but I was expecting it to be at least stupid in a fun way, like Detergent Divergent, with its hilariously shallow worldbuilding and pouty teen dystopia problems. I wasn't prepared for how much of a slog it would actually be to read. I like a good bad book now and then but this one gave me nothing to hang on to. Oh, well.

[oracne]

I read Jean Auel in high school and wish I hadn't. Not my thing.

[evelyn_b]

It's a lot of book to wade through for something that's not your thing! For myself, I didn't regret reading any of it (except maybe the prolonged rape section, if I'd been in a slightly worse mood) but I can see that. It's definitely got some idiosyncrasies. Though I can also see why it's popular - I would absolutely read another caveman book by a different author. By Auel, probably not.

[thisbluespirit]

I had heard Auel wasn't great; it seems my info was not wrong!

I also don't know when I've been this disappointed in a novel for not being the long short story it was clearly meant to be.

Ouch!

I don't know what the eventual incest is going to do to the charm, but I'm enjoying it so far.

It does seem likely to be at least a hitch in the proceedings... Oh, well, can't have everything, right?

I hope you enjoy Shirley! It was never quite as easy, nor did I eat it up as much as Villette and Jane Eyre, but it's still Charlotte Bronte and also the image of her fictionalising her sisters even as they die in front of her... (I was a teenager. I read CB for the FEELS, and that's how you get them in Shirley, unlike the other two, where it;s all in the text. At least, as far as I recall, which is v unreliable.)

[evelyn_b]

To be fair, though, the long short story it should have been is really good. A classic! Maybe not the most amazing prose of all time, but it more than makes up for it with its inventiveness and audacity. It's just that there are all these other pages in the way.

and also the image of her fictionalising her sisters even as they die in front of her

Oh! I don't know anything about the writing of Shirley, but that is very intriguing.

[thisbluespirit]

Oh, sorry! I kind of always assume that anyone even vaguely literary knows the Bronte story, but that is rather a Brit-centric assumption, I belatedly realise. But I think the bit I mention is in Charlotte's introduction to the story, so not really spoilery or anything.


It's just that there are all these other pages in the way.

And the arrows keep coming... ;-)

[evelyn_b]

It's probably not that Brit-centric, I think I'm just not quite literary. I have this book (that I picked up along with Shirley), a Charlotte Bronte Centennial from 1916, and it struck me, just reading the opening remarks, what a tremendous amount of Bronte mythology I've managed to miss, despite reading Jane Eyre a whole bunch of times as a kid and considering it one of my favorite books. I knew that the Brontes had a brother called Bramwell, that they lived in the country and wrote stories with each other, that Anne and Emily died young and that Charlotte is a little overly apologetic about Emily in her intro to Wuthering Heights - but this about fictionalizing her sisters in Shirley is totally unknown to me.

And my edition of Shirley doesn't have an introduction! But I don't think it's a spoiler in any case, just something interesting to keep in mind.

[thisbluespirit]

No, there isn't an introduction by Charlotte to Shirley in mine, either. I think I was amalgamating the introduction to Wuthering Heights, where she writes about Emily and Anne's deaths with letters about her difficulty in writing Shirley interrupted by their illnesses and deaths. (She at first found it impossible to write, then found it an escape from reality, but certainly some aspects of Anne found their way into Caroline and of Emily into Shirley. My teenaged mind probably supplied extra tragedy and melodrama.)

There are lots of biographies and novels about the Brontes, mostly collectively, some individually. They all died young - their elderly father Patrick outlived all of them; Charlotte dying in 1855, still not yet 40.

Charlotte had a lot of reason to be defensive about both Emily and Anne! People had assumed that a) they were all men, because their books were shocking, probably immoral and certainly unfeminine, and that b) they were all "Currer Bell" who, following Jane Eyre was trying to swindle the public by publishing their previous and lesser works (Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey). People also criticised Anne's Tenant of Wildfell Hall for its immoral subject. They were all pretty angry about it at the time, and then, of course, the other two had died by that point. Elizabeth Gaskell was similarly defensive in her Life of Charlotte Bronte, against the accusations Charlotte had faced about her own morals in writing JE, Shirley, and Villette. If you wrote masculine books, you had to be dodgy! (I have a lot of sympathy for them getting up in arms about it, even if their defences are baffling in a later century when the accusations have vanished & don't see the need for modern writers then to get critical of them for it. If someone was bad-mouthing my sisters and friend, I would get defensive, too!)

[ladyherenya]

I really liked The Raven Boys but can see how it could easily not be someone's thing.


I've been meaning to read Shirley for years - I own a copy and started it once, but was promptly distracted by other things. I feel like a bad Bronte fan whenever I remember it.

[evelyn_b]

I am the worst Bronte fan, so I'm just going to assume neither of us has to feel bad about it! Shirley is very interesting so far, but I can definitely understand it being easy to get distracted from; there are a lot of moving parts here in the beginning and a lot of uncertain connections between them.

The Raven Boys seems to be a very mileage-variable experience.

[brigdh]

I keep thinking about reading The Raven Boys because its fandom looks like fun, but every time someone who's taste I trust reads it, they have extremely negative opinions, and I put it off a little further. Why do none of my favorite books have big tumblr fandoms! D:

[evelyn_b]

It can feel a little sad to watch the fans having fun from across the virtual cafeteria, knowing you could join them if only you could start caring about that thing you don't care about. :(
Sometimes when I don't like a book, I worry that I'm missing out because of poor reading comprehension, but with The Raven Boys I feel unusually confident about dropping it back in the free books bin and forgetting about it.

If you're still feeling tempted, just read the first two chapters! They're short with a big YA typeface so it won't take much time, and if you're going to be bored out of your skull for the rest of the book it should be apparent right away.