End of the World As We Know It Wednesday
Feb. 6th, 2019 11:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
evelyn_bWhat I Technically Haven't Finished Reading
I started The Power of the Dead with all good intentions, but about a hundred pages in, a strange thing happened. A chunk of about 40 pages was duplicated, in place of the chunk that was supposed to be there. So instead of pages 129-160, pages 97-128 repeat themselves and then the book resumes with Page 160. I went on reading anyway, thinking that when I went to the library on Tuesday I would get another edition of the book and read the missing chapter. But in the meantime I finished the book, and by the time Tuesday rolled around I was so annoyed with Phillip Maddison and his author that I didn't feel like doubling back. So I've finished reading it in one sense and not in another.
Phil's parents are still the best and most memorable characters in this novel sequence, and it was moving, in a hopeless sort of way, to see how Phil and his dad - who really was unrelentingly awful to Phil, his sisters, and his mother - mellow toward one another. Phil wants to arrange it so that his father can live in the country when he retires, away from the ruined landscape of the suburbs which is like an insulting costume-party caricature of the country. They have a nice talk about it, and even though they don't really understand each other and never will, they understand this one thing, and it's enough to get by on, at least for a short visit.
Apart from it being just generally all over the place in much the same way as The Innocent Moon, there is a lot of business in which Phil wrestles with his lust for a young secretary and his guilty dissatisfaction with his wife Lucy, with narrative asides about the secretary's desperate love hunger and need for a father figure. It feels far too much like H.W. trying to explain a real-life affair at unwelcome length, which is exactly what it is.
There is also the occasional passing reference to International Finance, but most of these are so clunky that it feels like they are being shoved into the dialogue out of a sense of obligation.
Next: The Phoenix Generation, a title that bodes probably about as well as you think it does. The back cover copy tells me this is the one where Phil Meets the Reichsparteitag. I can't wait?
What I Really Did Finish
I was planning to give away Things to Do With Your Apple Computer after I finished it, but found I couldn't. It's just too charming. I've already shared it with two separate social groups. BE PREPARED to have it imposed on you if you ever meet me in real life. Did you know that one of MANY magazines available for Apple enthusiasts in 1983 was called inCider? YES IT WAS. The Apple predilection for mixing up lowercase and title caps in wacky FUTURISTIC ways has been with us from the beginning. Other magazines in the market: NIBBLE (alluding both to "bits and bytes" and what you can do if you have a bunch of apple slices in front of you) and the comparatively straightforward Apple Orchard. I also learned that dial-up modems in 1983 1) existed, and 2) were really expensive! If you wanted to check your stock prices or scroll through the digital news during off hours, you could do it for $5.75-$7.75 an hour, but if you wanted to do anything during office hours, the price jumps to $20.75 an hour.
Also, Elsie's Girlhood.
This book is batshit insane. Horace Dinsmore will return to the subject of his daughter's lips being unpolluted several times during the course of it. Elsie will go from twelve to fifteen to eighteen to twenty-one with zero corresponding change in dialogue style, behavior, or outlook on life. The guy whose lips did not pollute Elsie's pure lips is an unscrupulous gambler hoping to marry her for her money. He sizes her up right away and decides to present himself as a reformed sinner who needs her love to stay on the straight and narrow, and of course Elsie eats it up. There is a wonderfully melodramatic series of coincidences by which Elsie's dad's best friend Travilla recognizes the falsely reformed real sinner from "a gambling hell" and the f.r.r.s. claims he has an identical cousin who looks just like him but isn't as reformed (Elsie eats this up, too). Her dad comes to get her (she has been visiting an aunt, but ELSIE OBVIOUSLY CAN'T BE LEFT ALONE) and makes her wear a veil so she can't even look at the man as they ride out of town. So she sits under the veil and weeps, crushed between her irresistible love for the first smooth-talking rando who comes sniffing around her money and her immovable obedience to her beloved Daddy Dinsmore.
There is a nice bit early on where Elsie is given, and happily loses herself in, an earlier Victorian weeper, The Wide, Wide World. It's nice when an author acknowledges her roots. Elsie herself is a clear spiritual foremother of Twilight's Bella Swan, a hopeless case who constantly has to be rescued from herself by imperious men with strong jaws.
What I'm Reading Now
The Tombs of Atuan is a nicely creepy story about a High Priestess who is really too young to be a High Priestess, just as A Wizard of Earthsea was about a wizard who was too young to be a wizard. Well, everyone's got to start somewhere.
I'm enjoying A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami - a breezy, mildly wacky, very mildly trippy semi-adventure that bears its wackiness with lightness and aplomb. There's this guy, Our Narrator; he works in advertising. He's a regular guy, but life isn't regular; life is bizarre, so what's a regular guy to do? That's about the shape of things so far. There is a woman with preternaturally beautiful ears; there is a chauffeur with a direct phone line to God; there is ill-advised architecture and city planning against nature, and a mysterious sheep who is very important to the fabric of reality for some reason. These elements collide gently, like bubbles in a screen saver, except it's 1989 and screen savers may not have been invented yet. It reminds me a little of my memories of Tom Robbins before I made the mistake of rereading Tom Robbins.
What I Plan to Read Next
More Williamson, more Leguin. Probably something else.
ETA: What am I saying, of course screen savers have totally been invented.
I really need to stop procrastinating by checking up on the history of different inventions. :|
I started The Power of the Dead with all good intentions, but about a hundred pages in, a strange thing happened. A chunk of about 40 pages was duplicated, in place of the chunk that was supposed to be there. So instead of pages 129-160, pages 97-128 repeat themselves and then the book resumes with Page 160. I went on reading anyway, thinking that when I went to the library on Tuesday I would get another edition of the book and read the missing chapter. But in the meantime I finished the book, and by the time Tuesday rolled around I was so annoyed with Phillip Maddison and his author that I didn't feel like doubling back. So I've finished reading it in one sense and not in another.
Phil's parents are still the best and most memorable characters in this novel sequence, and it was moving, in a hopeless sort of way, to see how Phil and his dad - who really was unrelentingly awful to Phil, his sisters, and his mother - mellow toward one another. Phil wants to arrange it so that his father can live in the country when he retires, away from the ruined landscape of the suburbs which is like an insulting costume-party caricature of the country. They have a nice talk about it, and even though they don't really understand each other and never will, they understand this one thing, and it's enough to get by on, at least for a short visit.
Apart from it being just generally all over the place in much the same way as The Innocent Moon, there is a lot of business in which Phil wrestles with his lust for a young secretary and his guilty dissatisfaction with his wife Lucy, with narrative asides about the secretary's desperate love hunger and need for a father figure. It feels far too much like H.W. trying to explain a real-life affair at unwelcome length, which is exactly what it is.
There is also the occasional passing reference to International Finance, but most of these are so clunky that it feels like they are being shoved into the dialogue out of a sense of obligation.
Next: The Phoenix Generation, a title that bodes probably about as well as you think it does. The back cover copy tells me this is the one where Phil Meets the Reichsparteitag. I can't wait?
What I Really Did Finish
I was planning to give away Things to Do With Your Apple Computer after I finished it, but found I couldn't. It's just too charming. I've already shared it with two separate social groups. BE PREPARED to have it imposed on you if you ever meet me in real life. Did you know that one of MANY magazines available for Apple enthusiasts in 1983 was called inCider? YES IT WAS. The Apple predilection for mixing up lowercase and title caps in wacky FUTURISTIC ways has been with us from the beginning. Other magazines in the market: NIBBLE (alluding both to "bits and bytes" and what you can do if you have a bunch of apple slices in front of you) and the comparatively straightforward Apple Orchard. I also learned that dial-up modems in 1983 1) existed, and 2) were really expensive! If you wanted to check your stock prices or scroll through the digital news during off hours, you could do it for $5.75-$7.75 an hour, but if you wanted to do anything during office hours, the price jumps to $20.75 an hour.
Also, Elsie's Girlhood.
Then as if a sudden thought had struck him, "Elsie, have you ever allowed him to touch your lips?" he asked almost sternly.
"No, papa, not even my cheek. I would not while we were not engaged, and that could not be without your consent."
"I am truly thankful for that!" he exclaimed in a tone of relief; "to know that he had-- that these sweet lips had been polluted by contact with his-- would be worse to me than the loss of half my fortune." And lifting her face as he spoke, he pressed his own to them again and again.
This book is batshit insane. Horace Dinsmore will return to the subject of his daughter's lips being unpolluted several times during the course of it. Elsie will go from twelve to fifteen to eighteen to twenty-one with zero corresponding change in dialogue style, behavior, or outlook on life. The guy whose lips did not pollute Elsie's pure lips is an unscrupulous gambler hoping to marry her for her money. He sizes her up right away and decides to present himself as a reformed sinner who needs her love to stay on the straight and narrow, and of course Elsie eats it up. There is a wonderfully melodramatic series of coincidences by which Elsie's dad's best friend Travilla recognizes the falsely reformed real sinner from "a gambling hell" and the f.r.r.s. claims he has an identical cousin who looks just like him but isn't as reformed (Elsie eats this up, too). Her dad comes to get her (she has been visiting an aunt, but ELSIE OBVIOUSLY CAN'T BE LEFT ALONE) and makes her wear a veil so she can't even look at the man as they ride out of town. So she sits under the veil and weeps, crushed between her irresistible love for the first smooth-talking rando who comes sniffing around her money and her immovable obedience to her beloved Daddy Dinsmore.
There is a nice bit early on where Elsie is given, and happily loses herself in, an earlier Victorian weeper, The Wide, Wide World. It's nice when an author acknowledges her roots. Elsie herself is a clear spiritual foremother of Twilight's Bella Swan, a hopeless case who constantly has to be rescued from herself by imperious men with strong jaws.
What I'm Reading Now
The Tombs of Atuan is a nicely creepy story about a High Priestess who is really too young to be a High Priestess, just as A Wizard of Earthsea was about a wizard who was too young to be a wizard. Well, everyone's got to start somewhere.
I'm enjoying A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami - a breezy, mildly wacky, very mildly trippy semi-adventure that bears its wackiness with lightness and aplomb. There's this guy, Our Narrator; he works in advertising. He's a regular guy, but life isn't regular; life is bizarre, so what's a regular guy to do? That's about the shape of things so far. There is a woman with preternaturally beautiful ears; there is a chauffeur with a direct phone line to God; there is ill-advised architecture and city planning against nature, and a mysterious sheep who is very important to the fabric of reality for some reason. These elements collide gently, like bubbles in a screen saver, except it's 1989 and screen savers may not have been invented yet. It reminds me a little of my memories of Tom Robbins before I made the mistake of rereading Tom Robbins.
What I Plan to Read Next
More Williamson, more Leguin. Probably something else.
ETA: What am I saying, of course screen savers have totally been invented.
I really need to stop procrastinating by checking up on the history of different inventions. :|
no subject
Date: 2019-02-07 09:19 am (UTC)I think this is fair. If life makes a concerted effort to save you from characters/authors who are annoying you, who are you to argue? And anyway, it's still not as much cheating as Mr Burgess putting whole series on his 100 Best Novels List in the first place!
Good luck with the next. That sounds scary, frankly!
Understandably you need to keep the Apple book. *nods*
no subject
Date: 2019-02-07 04:59 pm (UTC)I can't blame Burgess too much because it really is a continuous narrative that just happens to be ridiculously long and come out in parts. . . Here in the later books you really start to see the length pay off in some ways - and also some ways in which a little editing might have helped.
Thank you for the luck. I'll need it! :|
no subject
Date: 2019-02-07 11:42 pm (UTC)But her near-death causes her father to be born again and then they never do battle about whether it's okay to sing secular songs on the Sabbath again, which is probably good for Elsie but slightly disappointing for me as a reader, sitting there wanting more tempests in teacups.
I will never get over the fact that Elsie has to literally hear her paramour saying that he's an unreformed gambler who is only marrying her for her money before she'll believe it. ELSIE WHY.
no subject
Date: 2019-02-08 01:19 am (UTC)'s id relaxes its unspeakable Medusian coils intohandles the marriage.I will never get over the fact that Elsie has to literally hear her paramour saying that he's an unreformed gambler who is only marrying her for her money before she'll believe it.
I KNOW I KNOW and it's not even the first spectacular coincidence to do with the Unreformed Gambler! (the first being when Mr. Travilla just happens to be passing through Cinci and just happens to show up at the Gambling Hell in time to see his friend's son popping a pistol into his mouth, JUST IN TIME to slap it away and save him from suicide!!! oh and also for the U.G.'s countenance to be burned into his memory. It couldn't have been some other random grifter Travilla's son's friend lost all his money to).
And you know, Elsie's just riding by on a public street while the U.G. is laying out his plan, so he has to be BELLOWING that expository dialogue at his slatternly companion in order for Elsie to hear every highly specific word. I love it.
no subject
Date: 2019-02-08 02:29 am (UTC)There's also a scene where Elsie gets in trouble for releasing a hummingbird that her father had trapped under a bell jar to asphyxiate for his bird collection. I feel that FInley stumbled on a metaphor for Elsie's life so astoundingly blatant that any other author would have been like "Is this too much?", but she just failed to notice and skated right on to the next scene where Elsie gets in trouble for being too good for this world.
Well look, what is even the POINT of having a slatternly companion if you can't shout out your evil plans to her in the public street just in case your saintly fiancee happens to be passing? Also I love how they happen to pass at JUST EXACTLY THE RIGHT MINUTE for Elsie to hear the whole thing.