evelyn_b

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What I've Finished Reading

Like Clifford Chatterly's blameless motor-chair, Lady Chatterly's Lover did the best it could. My patience got tested by all the back-to-the-land business and the general swallowing-up of the last eighty pages in The Mellors Method of Manhood: A Free Course in Comprehensive Mellorology With Oliver Mellors, but I was glad I read it just the same. Mellors, who has to bear the symbolic burden of being a Real Man in a world of emasculated abstractions with skinny legs, seriously suffers from it as a character: he enters the book as living flesh only to dissolve by the end into a cloud of words. Connie is sympathetically drawn and less garrulous and all-knowing, and fares a little better overall. Mellors' wife Bertha never gets to be a character in the first place. In the end, though, I think my feelings were a little less mixed than osprey_archer's. I liked this book, for its cranky, awkward earnestness and for its beautifully observed portraits of brooding hens and spring plants (even if Lawrence's irritating habit of tacking the word "female" all over every descriptive noun spoils it a little) and for Connie, who is a good character until Mellors starts in talking and forgets she's still there. It's because Connie is so believably discontented that I don't buy the alleged happy ending for a minute. Is it even supposed to be a happy ending? I can't tell. But that's all right, I think. Any story can have a happy ending if you cut it off in time, and sometimes even if you skip ahead five years and reduce Connie's messy second divorce to a two-sentence summary and a wry, sad smile.

The Dispossessed was slower going than The Left Hand of Darkness - it's a little more nakedly a novel of ideas, with many, many long conversations about social organization among the post-revolutionary anarchist settlers of Anarres and between Anarresti physicist Shevek and his hosts on the archist, "propertarian" planet Urras - but I liked it once I got used to it. The sections set on Urras are full of fish-out-of water scenes: Shevek goes shopping, Shevek meets an otter, Shevek gets drunk for the first time, Shevek asks where all the women scientists are and gets a lot of confusing Space Sixties double-entendres in reply. Eventually a plot breaks out, but mostly it's a worldbuilding story (and a story about worldbuilding).

Oh! and I finished listening to Burnt Offerings by Laurell K. Hamilton. I couldn't really tell you what happened, except that Anita is Very Important to inter-were politics and there was a lot of non- and dubiously-consensual sex and maybe someone getting set on fire? But the narrator did a great job with Anita's brattiness and the douchey and/or goofily accented voices of her coworkers/harem, and it passed the time effectively while I was moving things around. I tried another audiobook, The Hand of Oberon by Roger Zelazny, with much less success; I couldn't follow it at all and gave up within about ten minutes.

What I'm Reading Now

I've just begun Scenes from Provincial Life and so far, it's just as low-key as its title suggests, except that the young narrator and his friends keep casually wondering if they should leave England for America ahead of the Nazis. In the meantime, the narrator has a job at a school where he gets criticized for not expressing more disapproval of the boys' bad language. He's seeing a woman named Myrtle, and wondering if there's a good way to bring her along on the escape-to-America plan without having to marry her. It's February 1939 and who knows what the world will look like in a year? Right now, it's a lot of tea shops and dismal news on the radio, and buttering different kinds of bread and trying to think clearly about a future to big and close to see, plus some beautifully petty and confusing awkwardness over whether Tom's boyfriend and the narrator's girlfriend are allowed to meet each other at their shared weekend sex cottage.

What I Plan to Read Next

Guards! Guards! is here at last! And I'll probably finish To Say Nothing of the Dog this week, also. The next book club selection is the Foundation trilogy by Isaac Asimov, which I've read before and probably won't start until I have to go out of town -- it's one of those bag-of-chips books that are good for reading on airplanes.

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What I've Finished Reading

Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett. Death is fired for imprudently developing a personality, and his functions are put on hold until a suitable replacement can be found. This naturally leads to a lot of confusion and mess, but for a little while Death is able to enjoy his new job as a farm laborer and his new friends down at the pub. Children and wizards can see his true form, but it doesn't cause as much trouble as you might expect.



"I can tell because of the bones." <3 I enjoyed this book almost as much as Mort. Every scene involving Death settling in to village life was pure gold, and the rest was a mix of good, great, not-so-great, and amazing, with a little confusion and some clunkiness scattered in for good measure. Will Death save the day? Do you even have to ask? I'm delighted with Terry Pratchett for making the Grim Reaper such an unexpectedly (and hilariously) sympathetic protagonist.

What I'm Reading Now

Time of Hope has the strongest start of any C. P. Snow book yet! Or maybe I just like stories about kids having to deal with their parents' problems. Lewis Eliot is the narrator we've had all along, with the same transparent style. The different threads are beginning to meet each other here: we've got George Passant, who was the central figure of Strangers and Brothers, and another reference to Roy's youthful infatuation with Jack and the scandal it causes when his parents find out.

I liked the scene when Lewis' father takes him to a cricket match, the first sports game they have gone to together, in order to break the news that he is about to file for bankruptcy. As Mr. Eliot watches the players, he begins to daydream about a new career:

( I was not sure of the facts, but I knew that somehow the answer would please my father )

Lady Chatterly's Lover is chattering along. I'm a little bored with the endless references to "the bitch-goddess, Success" and her hapless hound-prostitute-acolytes. I get it! Success is a bitch-goddess! This imagery is theoretically pungent but strangely unspecific. The multiple significant glares of Mellors the Gamekeeper are also boring - in both senses, I guess. But I'm a sucker for earnest early twentieth-century cocktail-party sex talk, and LCL is almost nothing but. DID YOU KNOW that our civilization is about to fall into a bottomless chasm of malaise? Did you know that when that happens, the only bridge across the chasm will be the phallus? It's true! Or, maybe not true in a strict sense, but you have to admit it sounded pretty smart for a second there! Or if not smart, exactly, at least mildly titillating, and isn't that what this broken-backed eunuch of a country needs? No offence, Clifford :(.

Also, real men and real women are in alarmingly short supply in these rootless times! What makes men and women real? No one knows for sure, but it's clear what real men and women don't do: they don't lounge around in the Chatterlys' drawing room quipping about sex taxonomy over brandy like these jokers.

I thought Connie's experience with the needy playwright Michaelis and his humiliating criticism of her was very well drawn, and maybe a good metonomy for Connie's sense of betrayal and confusion in general - not just by sex, but by all the ideals of adulthood that seem to have dissolved at close range, like walking into a cloud. Connie has finally hired a nurse for Clifford and started taking long walks in her free time, which means that D. H. Lawrence has the chance to do some of that seasonal description he's good at.

What I Plan to Read Next

The further adventures of Death? And when I finish Time of Hope I'll be up to 1950 in my 99 Novels chronology, which means Scenes from Provincial Life by William Cooper and The Disenchanted by Budd Sculberg, two books I know nothing about!