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Who Tells Your Story Wednesday
Sep. 14th, 2016 04:29 pmArchived from Livejournal
What I've Finished Reading
Wyrd Sisters by Terry Pratchett:
So Terry Pratchett just keeps getting better. Wyrd Sisters is a hilarious and affectionate parody of all things Shakespeare and a pointed meditation on the Ethics of Tudor Propaganda (and magic, and fiction as a species of magic), interrupted at intervals by Nanny Ogg singing an off-color song about the superior natural defenses of the hedgehog. It also might be Pratchett's most successfully character-driven comedy yet? I don't know; that's hard to judge. But the interplay among the three witches, and their genuine friction and friendship with each other, is a potentially inexhaustible well of enjoyment. I wish Wyrd Sisters were a sitcom, or a podcast, so that I could listen to three episodes a day for the rest of my life. Personally, I could have done with fewer jokes about how flat-chested Magrat is, but there's enough here to more than make up for it. There is also a memorable cameo by DEATH, as himself, suffering a rare bout of stage fright. It's always a pleasure to see you again, Death, even under circumstances as meta as these <3. Pratchett has all the chops he needs to pull of the Shakespeare parody: critical, lyrical, and bawdy. This is one of those books that make me fleetingly angry with myself for not reading them twenty years ago, just because I can see what a good friend they would have been to me during that time. But you know how time is. I read it now instead, and that has to be good enough.
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi ( is an ambitious novel )
The Old Man and the Sea ( is exactly what it says on the tin. )
What I'm Reading Now
The True Actor by Jacinto Lucas Pires. Out-of-work actor Americo Abril receives an offer to star in a self-referential art film, and almost as soon as he accepts, a self-referential art film swells up around him and swallows his real (?) life. I spent the first four chapters prickling with impatience at Americo Abril's dull detachment from everyone and everything (and his adultery and low-level alienation from his wife, always a hard sell to start with) but the stranger things get for Americo, the more willing I am to keep reading. I still wish I could like him a little more, though it's not the kind of book where liking the guy is the point. There's probably a little bit of translation syndrome at work here; you get the impression that a lot of these sentences were funnier or livelier in Portuguese.
I'm not supposed to like Henry Mulhaney in The Groves of Academe, either, but somehow it matters in The True Actor and doesn't matter in the least, or is an active good, in Groves. Mulhaney is a beautifully unattractive literature professor who turns a perfectly ordinary non-renewal of his contract into a moral crusade with just a few simple lies. That the brisk ink caricature of a tiny "progressive" college is so instantly familiar to me is all the funnier given that this book came out in 1952 and I didn't start college until the 1990s. An existential question emerges: Is it even possible to write a novel about academia without resorting to caricature? Is academia just a natural caricaturizing process? Anyway, things are off to a promising start here.
What I Plan to Read Next
Witches Abroad or Night Watch -- which one should it be, Pratchett fans? Next up in 99 Novels is Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor. Next on my own shelves: well, that depends on which shelf we're on.
What I've Finished Reading
Wyrd Sisters by Terry Pratchett:
Granny had never had much time for words. They were insubstantial. Now she wished that she had found the time. Words were indeed insubstantial. They were as soft as water, but they were also as powerful as water and now they were rushing over the audience, eroding the levees of veracity, and carrying away the past.
That's us down there, she thought. Everyone knows who we really are, but the things down there are what they'll remember - three gibbering old baggages in pointy hats. All we've ever done, all we've ever been, won't exist anymore.
So Terry Pratchett just keeps getting better. Wyrd Sisters is a hilarious and affectionate parody of all things Shakespeare and a pointed meditation on the Ethics of Tudor Propaganda (and magic, and fiction as a species of magic), interrupted at intervals by Nanny Ogg singing an off-color song about the superior natural defenses of the hedgehog. It also might be Pratchett's most successfully character-driven comedy yet? I don't know; that's hard to judge. But the interplay among the three witches, and their genuine friction and friendship with each other, is a potentially inexhaustible well of enjoyment. I wish Wyrd Sisters were a sitcom, or a podcast, so that I could listen to three episodes a day for the rest of my life. Personally, I could have done with fewer jokes about how flat-chested Magrat is, but there's enough here to more than make up for it. There is also a memorable cameo by DEATH, as himself, suffering a rare bout of stage fright. It's always a pleasure to see you again, Death, even under circumstances as meta as these <3. Pratchett has all the chops he needs to pull of the Shakespeare parody: critical, lyrical, and bawdy. This is one of those books that make me fleetingly angry with myself for not reading them twenty years ago, just because I can see what a good friend they would have been to me during that time. But you know how time is. I read it now instead, and that has to be good enough.
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi ( is an ambitious novel )
The Old Man and the Sea ( is exactly what it says on the tin. )
What I'm Reading Now
The True Actor by Jacinto Lucas Pires. Out-of-work actor Americo Abril receives an offer to star in a self-referential art film, and almost as soon as he accepts, a self-referential art film swells up around him and swallows his real (?) life. I spent the first four chapters prickling with impatience at Americo Abril's dull detachment from everyone and everything (and his adultery and low-level alienation from his wife, always a hard sell to start with) but the stranger things get for Americo, the more willing I am to keep reading. I still wish I could like him a little more, though it's not the kind of book where liking the guy is the point. There's probably a little bit of translation syndrome at work here; you get the impression that a lot of these sentences were funnier or livelier in Portuguese.
I'm not supposed to like Henry Mulhaney in The Groves of Academe, either, but somehow it matters in The True Actor and doesn't matter in the least, or is an active good, in Groves. Mulhaney is a beautifully unattractive literature professor who turns a perfectly ordinary non-renewal of his contract into a moral crusade with just a few simple lies. That the brisk ink caricature of a tiny "progressive" college is so instantly familiar to me is all the funnier given that this book came out in 1952 and I didn't start college until the 1990s. An existential question emerges: Is it even possible to write a novel about academia without resorting to caricature? Is academia just a natural caricaturizing process? Anyway, things are off to a promising start here.
What I Plan to Read Next
Witches Abroad or Night Watch -- which one should it be, Pratchett fans? Next up in 99 Novels is Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor. Next on my own shelves: well, that depends on which shelf we're on.
