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The Wednesday is Too Much With Us
Crossposted from Livejournal
What I've Finished Reading
The Cricket on the Hearth is an incredibly sappy novella by Charles Dickens about Angels of the Home. There is a Scrooge-like character who has a last-minute change of heart no clear reason, and a saintly blind girl with a saintly father, and a charming awkward guy who is too nice for the Iago trick that Not Quite Scrooge tries to pull on him, and sentimental apostrophes for days. It's sort of a Complete Idiot's Guide to Why People Don't Like Dickens. I didn't hate it, but I'm not going to go around recommending it to anyone, either.
Hold Me had some irritants. Maybe just because I had prior personal experience of the phrase "asking for cookies" (meaning: expecting to be praised for what ought to be expected, like washing own dishes or apologizing for being a dick) being first introduced as a useful concept and immediately run into the ground, I found it maybe unreasonably jarring when Maria and Jay (in their serious-flirtation epistolary personae, following a particularly vicious bout of real-time hate-flirtation) have a tremendously earnest two-page discussion about "cookies" including the line, "I know what cookies are. I didn't think you did."
Which, if I were one of those non-lazy bloggers, could be the start of an interesting discussion about verisimilitude and its discontents. Why shouldn't fictional people talk in worn-out cliches? Real people do it all the time! But I want my rom-com nerds to be ahead of the curve, damn it! Or at least to occupy a slightly alternate universe where the dialogue is better.
There are some noticeable errors in this book: narrative repetitions that are the textual equivalent of the Three-Handed Cover, and one of the POV chapters is mislabeled. There's also what seems to be (based on very little evidence, but I'm working on it) a romance novel convention of having the main dude inject a lot of random swears into his internal monologue so that you will remember that this is A Totally Real Guy Having Private Guy Thoughts, Not Just Some Sanitized Fantasy Man. I don't have any general problem with profanity in a narrative, so I don't know why this particular trick bugs me so much, but it does! I'd almost rather have the colorless interior sugar castles of Stealth Christian Romance.
Anyway, nitpicks aside, I enjoyed this book. The dialogue is a lot of fun most of the time. There is an occasional feeling that the author is trying to teach us a valuable lesson - Milan states in an afterword that she was inspired to write this book because a science professor made a sexist remark one time - but mostly the lesson is "nerd flirtation is fun to read" and on that subject I am always happy to be refreshed. I even got to like Jay a little better, mostly because I'm a sucker for the old impostor syndrome.
Plus, I finally got a new copy of Catching Fire so I could finish it. (I did not find the one I lost). Katniss gets sent back to the arena, because how else are you going to follow up a book about traumatized gladiator teens, other than by making them go back and do the same thing they just did? It reminds me of the sequels to the book Hatchet, where after Brian gets rescued from the Canadian wilderness, some TV network asshole shows up and asks him to go back For Science. This time it's a Tournament of Champions, pitting past victors against each other, which gives Katniss and Peeta (who should be named Cinnamonrohl) the chance to meet and ally with adults of all ages. Can they break the game if they work together? Will the cost be too terrible to live with? The answers are yes and yes.
I like the repulsive President Snow with his sickly scented roses and blood on his breath, even though he is not great at being a dictator and his propaganda skills are laughable. Then again, people don't become dictators from a love of the craft and painfully idiotic propaganda isn't necessarily any less effective than the clever and insidious kind. If anything it's worse because you think you're seeing through it.
What I Didn't Read Because It Was a Movie
I don't know if there's much point in trying to talk about going to see I Am Not Your Negro, a film made from the notes for James Baldwin's unfinished book about three murdered civil rights leaders, in the middle of reading Collins' slick and earnest music-video fantasy of rebellion. This is another job better suited to the non-lazy. So I'll just be glib and tell you the pettiest thing that made me angry, which was hearing the FBI's ungrammatical report on James Baldwin dropped in like a grubby rock among all of Baldwin's terribly lucid and careful sentences.
What I'm Reading Now
Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins. Rebellion is breaking out all over Panem, District 12 has been destroyed (because dividing your country into single-industry production zones and then bombing them into oblivion is a great strategy) and Katniss is holed up in the secret off-the-radar District 13, a former nuclear power and tech-development center that the government (also VERY CLEVERLY) allowed to break away from Panem in exchange for pretending to be destroyed. Katniss is being groomed to lead the resistance, which involves a lot of TV crews and costume design. I don't love her new high-tech superhero bow-and-arrow set, and the fact that District 13 just happens to be the ex-R&D capital of Panem is just a little too convenient for me. It's not a coincidence, it's how they managed to strike the very damaging bargain with the Capitol in the first place, by threatening all-out nuclear war - but it's still SO EXTREMELY CONVENIENT that it's exhausting somehow.
Meanwhile, Peeta is being held at the Capitol and brought out for occasional public interviews. He begs Katniss to call for a cease-fire, warns her that she's being used, and warns District 13 of an impending attack. He's right about the attack. Is he right about other things, too? Does Katniss know who she's really working for? I'd hate to think this whole rebellion thing is just a giant FBI fake-out, but honestly it might annoy me less than District 13 just happening to have a lot of high-tech weaponry lying around unconfiscated and apparently unobserved by the Capitol.
I complain, but really I'm enjoying the heck out of these books, not just as a vehicle for complaining about shoddy dictatorial practices. Katniss is a genuinely flawed, genuinely strong protagonist, and Collins is sharp and unsentimental about trauma, hope, and guilt.
This book (by Dodie Smith, author of The Hundred and One Dalmatians!) is off to a great start. Seventeen-year-old Cassandra lives in a falling-apart castle with her stepmother, her sister, and her dad, a depressed writer who no longer writes anything. She's started a diary because she wants practice writing well and writing the truth. It's difficult! But she is going to do her best.
And still Marmion! It's interesting. My lingering prior impression of Scott was based on trying to read him as a kid and getting bored out of my mind two pages in, but that was prose. In poetry he's fun, fluid, a little didactic, fast-moving and melodramatic - and colorful! I feel I understand L. M. Montgomery a little better just reading it. Some knights kidnap some women and fight each other, there is a fake ghost, sunsets make everything red, and along they way they sing a few ballads. The poetry is a kind of poetry I think we don't get much any more. It's not "bad poetry" by any means, it's workmanlike poetry - genuinely musical, not prose chopped into lines, but also not ever in the least bit startling or sublime, which is itself kind of a remarkable feat for a poem two hundred pages long. In all that time you would expect something beautiful to happen just by accident.
What I Plan to Read Next
Hold Me satisfies the Romance portion of my reading challenge, but wordsofastoryand lost_spook gave me so many recs that I couldn't pick just one, so I have some others waiting for me: True Pretenses, Cotillion, and one more by Milan. Next on Mount TBR is Sargasso of Space by Andre Norton. I've never read Andre Norton, but she is an incredibly prolific SFF author that I've been meaning to try for a while.
Also future-reading Cotillion by Georgette Heyer, which I have been informed is not a romance in the strict sense, but a comedy of manners with a very pink cover.
What I've Finished Reading
The Cricket on the Hearth is an incredibly sappy novella by Charles Dickens about Angels of the Home. There is a Scrooge-like character who has a last-minute change of heart no clear reason, and a saintly blind girl with a saintly father, and a charming awkward guy who is too nice for the Iago trick that Not Quite Scrooge tries to pull on him, and sentimental apostrophes for days. It's sort of a Complete Idiot's Guide to Why People Don't Like Dickens. I didn't hate it, but I'm not going to go around recommending it to anyone, either.
Hold Me had some irritants. Maybe just because I had prior personal experience of the phrase "asking for cookies" (meaning: expecting to be praised for what ought to be expected, like washing own dishes or apologizing for being a dick) being first introduced as a useful concept and immediately run into the ground, I found it maybe unreasonably jarring when Maria and Jay (in their serious-flirtation epistolary personae, following a particularly vicious bout of real-time hate-flirtation) have a tremendously earnest two-page discussion about "cookies" including the line, "I know what cookies are. I didn't think you did."
Which, if I were one of those non-lazy bloggers, could be the start of an interesting discussion about verisimilitude and its discontents. Why shouldn't fictional people talk in worn-out cliches? Real people do it all the time! But I want my rom-com nerds to be ahead of the curve, damn it! Or at least to occupy a slightly alternate universe where the dialogue is better.
There are some noticeable errors in this book: narrative repetitions that are the textual equivalent of the Three-Handed Cover, and one of the POV chapters is mislabeled. There's also what seems to be (based on very little evidence, but I'm working on it) a romance novel convention of having the main dude inject a lot of random swears into his internal monologue so that you will remember that this is A Totally Real Guy Having Private Guy Thoughts, Not Just Some Sanitized Fantasy Man. I don't have any general problem with profanity in a narrative, so I don't know why this particular trick bugs me so much, but it does! I'd almost rather have the colorless interior sugar castles of Stealth Christian Romance.
Anyway, nitpicks aside, I enjoyed this book. The dialogue is a lot of fun most of the time. There is an occasional feeling that the author is trying to teach us a valuable lesson - Milan states in an afterword that she was inspired to write this book because a science professor made a sexist remark one time - but mostly the lesson is "nerd flirtation is fun to read" and on that subject I am always happy to be refreshed. I even got to like Jay a little better, mostly because I'm a sucker for the old impostor syndrome.
Plus, I finally got a new copy of Catching Fire so I could finish it. (I did not find the one I lost). Katniss gets sent back to the arena, because how else are you going to follow up a book about traumatized gladiator teens, other than by making them go back and do the same thing they just did? It reminds me of the sequels to the book Hatchet, where after Brian gets rescued from the Canadian wilderness, some TV network asshole shows up and asks him to go back For Science. This time it's a Tournament of Champions, pitting past victors against each other, which gives Katniss and Peeta (who should be named Cinnamonrohl) the chance to meet and ally with adults of all ages. Can they break the game if they work together? Will the cost be too terrible to live with? The answers are yes and yes.
I like the repulsive President Snow with his sickly scented roses and blood on his breath, even though he is not great at being a dictator and his propaganda skills are laughable. Then again, people don't become dictators from a love of the craft and painfully idiotic propaganda isn't necessarily any less effective than the clever and insidious kind. If anything it's worse because you think you're seeing through it.
What I Didn't Read Because It Was a Movie
I don't know if there's much point in trying to talk about going to see I Am Not Your Negro, a film made from the notes for James Baldwin's unfinished book about three murdered civil rights leaders, in the middle of reading Collins' slick and earnest music-video fantasy of rebellion. This is another job better suited to the non-lazy. So I'll just be glib and tell you the pettiest thing that made me angry, which was hearing the FBI's ungrammatical report on James Baldwin dropped in like a grubby rock among all of Baldwin's terribly lucid and careful sentences.
What I'm Reading Now
Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins. Rebellion is breaking out all over Panem, District 12 has been destroyed (because dividing your country into single-industry production zones and then bombing them into oblivion is a great strategy) and Katniss is holed up in the secret off-the-radar District 13, a former nuclear power and tech-development center that the government (also VERY CLEVERLY) allowed to break away from Panem in exchange for pretending to be destroyed. Katniss is being groomed to lead the resistance, which involves a lot of TV crews and costume design. I don't love her new high-tech superhero bow-and-arrow set, and the fact that District 13 just happens to be the ex-R&D capital of Panem is just a little too convenient for me. It's not a coincidence, it's how they managed to strike the very damaging bargain with the Capitol in the first place, by threatening all-out nuclear war - but it's still SO EXTREMELY CONVENIENT that it's exhausting somehow.
Meanwhile, Peeta is being held at the Capitol and brought out for occasional public interviews. He begs Katniss to call for a cease-fire, warns her that she's being used, and warns District 13 of an impending attack. He's right about the attack. Is he right about other things, too? Does Katniss know who she's really working for? I'd hate to think this whole rebellion thing is just a giant FBI fake-out, but honestly it might annoy me less than District 13 just happening to have a lot of high-tech weaponry lying around unconfiscated and apparently unobserved by the Capitol.
I complain, but really I'm enjoying the heck out of these books, not just as a vehicle for complaining about shoddy dictatorial practices. Katniss is a genuinely flawed, genuinely strong protagonist, and Collins is sharp and unsentimental about trauma, hope, and guilt.
Rose said: "I should have thought it was well worth while to have a little trouble in order to earn some real money."
"Then you have the trouble, dear," said Topaz.
This must have been very annoying to Rose, considering that she never has the slightest chance of that sort of trouble. She suddenly flung her head back dramatically and said:
"I'm perfectly willing to. It may interest you both to know that for some time now, I've been considering selling myself. If necessary, I shall go on the streets."
I told her she couldn't go on the streets in the depths of Suffolk.
"But if Topaz will kindly lend me the fare to London and give me a few hints --"
Topaz said she had never been on the streets and rather regretted it, "because one must sink to the depths in order to rise to the heights," which is the kind of Topazism it requires much affection to tolerate.
This book (by Dodie Smith, author of The Hundred and One Dalmatians!) is off to a great start. Seventeen-year-old Cassandra lives in a falling-apart castle with her stepmother, her sister, and her dad, a depressed writer who no longer writes anything. She's started a diary because she wants practice writing well and writing the truth. It's difficult! But she is going to do her best.
And still Marmion! It's interesting. My lingering prior impression of Scott was based on trying to read him as a kid and getting bored out of my mind two pages in, but that was prose. In poetry he's fun, fluid, a little didactic, fast-moving and melodramatic - and colorful! I feel I understand L. M. Montgomery a little better just reading it. Some knights kidnap some women and fight each other, there is a fake ghost, sunsets make everything red, and along they way they sing a few ballads. The poetry is a kind of poetry I think we don't get much any more. It's not "bad poetry" by any means, it's workmanlike poetry - genuinely musical, not prose chopped into lines, but also not ever in the least bit startling or sublime, which is itself kind of a remarkable feat for a poem two hundred pages long. In all that time you would expect something beautiful to happen just by accident.
What I Plan to Read Next
Hold Me satisfies the Romance portion of my reading challenge, but wordsofastory
Also future-reading Cotillion by Georgette Heyer, which I have been informed is not a romance in the strict sense, but a comedy of manners with a very pink cover.