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What I've Finished Reading

Henry Williamson is a frustrating writer. You knew that already, so have a cut! )

I also finished Elsie Disnmore, which I was somehow expecting to have more of a climax. Is it in the next book that Elsie converts her father by almost dying? This one is full of horrifying Horaceisms, but eventually settles into a warm pool of syrup when I was expecting a final crisis. Horace Dinsmore is the devil in human form and should not be allowed to talk to children unsupervised, let alone make up a lot of dietary restrictions for them and forbid them to sit on the floor because it looks sloppy. He's just nuts. Where did he get his ideas about total obedience? (Oh, right, he tells us: England, where they know better than to let children eat jam on toast before the age of 10). Poor Elsie fits right into the canon of isolated outsiders in children's lit, whether the rest of them like it or not.


What I'm Reading Now

Disowned by my father— I had never been close to him and often fantasized that my real father was one of the early American astronauts, and that I had been conceived by semen ripened in outer space, a messianic figure born into my mother's womb from a pregnant universe— I began an erratic and increasingly steep slalom. Rejected would-be mercenary pilot, failed Jesuit novice, unpublished writer of pornography (I spent many excited weekends dialling deserted offices all over London and dictating extraordinary sexual fantasies into their answering machines, to be typed out for amazed executives by their unsuspecting secretaries)— yet for all these failures I had a tenacious faith in in myself, a messiah as yet without a message who would one day assemble a unique idenitity out of this defective jigsaw.


Moving right along in 99 Novels - not chronologically for now but based on what I already have on my shelves— The Unlimited Dream Company (by J. G. Ballard) has to be read to be believed. I've already recommended it to two people, and I'm only on Page 21.

I'm also enjoying An Experiement in Criticism by C.S. Lewis, which might just as well be called A Treasury of C.S. Lewisisms.

What I Plan to Read Next

Here's where I need some advice. Should I stick to the 99 Novels theme with A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul (acquired by accident of the the library's adopt-a-book shelf), read a SciFi Dudebro Classic (Neuromancer by William Gibson), or read Faust, a tale in RHYME by my gifted new friend from the past, J.W. Goethe?
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What I've Finished Reading

Every time I think the Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight has finally mercifully abandoned the politics angle and settled down to a nice relaxing round of farming and moping, Phil throws in another soppy Hitler aside, just so you don't forget whose book you're reading. So about a third of the way through Lucifer Before Sunrise, as the introduction to a sweeping description of literal floods in England, we get "The great spring-tide of human movement that was Adolf Hitler's heart and brain striving to create unity in a fragmentated continent seemed at last to have lapped itself to stillness: the moment when a scarce perceptive tremor passes through the immense sheet of water that is a tidal flow; when silently, almost stealthily, it begins to lapse." That is a reasonably representative example of HW's writing style in general and the sort of tone he wants to take about his totally well-meaning fallen angel Hitler in particular. He might have done all right in the nineteenth century, writing great-man nonsense about Napoleon - at least, present-day readers would be willing to cut him more slack about it. I'm not convinced that he would have felt any more at home back then than he does in 1943 or 1967.

Near the end of the book, Phil's penchant for excessive and inappropriate Hitler quoting is brought in as evidence for his wife Lucy's divorce suit. I laughed, I cried. Mostly I laughed. The divorce is a blessing in disguise because it allows Phil to give up trying to build a functioning farm for his family to inherit and go live in a cottage and try to write an important novel about "the age" and how hard farming is, like he's always wanted.


What I'm Reading Now

The world of books is wide and also includes Lillian Jackson Braun's The Cat Who Had 14 Tales, which is 14 short, light stories about cats solving mysteries by being cats, as well as killing a few people here and there for great cat justice. I never finished the one Lillian Jackson Braun cat mystery I tried to read (several years ago) because I disliked the human POV guy too intensely and couldn't handle all his conversations eventually being about cats. The stories here worked much better for me: either they're told from the POV of a cat or they're short anecdotes about memorable cats, so there's no suffocating feeling of cats and cat jokes being forced into normally cat-free situations in order to provide a cat connection on every page. This collection was published in 1988, but about half the stories in it were first printed in the 1960s, so as well as being light-hearted fun it's also a small catalog of changing attitudes in cat ownership. (There is also a fantastically stupid joke about cat yuppies).

The world of books also includes the ENORMOUS last volume of Joseph Frank's five-volume Dostoevsky biography and Elsie Disnmore - which I've decided to give another try in book form, now that I've been baptized in the cheesy fire of Elise's Girlhood. It's easy to see why this book attracted so much derision and also why it was such a hit with a subset of young readers. Elsie suffers endlessly from being pretty, which she can't help at all, and talented, which means she is always being crushed between the hideous embarrassment of performing and the unbearable shame of not being able to perform. Her father, Horace, is a ridiculously hapless young monster who keeps willfully misunderstanding Elsie and resenting her for it. Everything is incredibly over the top humiliation and despair, and the whole book is a machine designed to crush Elsie's little world over and over. In the scene I just read, Elsie would really like to hug her father, but he just withdrew his arm and picked up the paper! And just as she's standing there, making up her mind to do it anyway (but terrified of rejection), her bratty same-age aunt Enna skips in and demands a kiss, and Horace is all, "At least one of you actually likes me and isn't afraid of me!" while Elsie just stands there dying of misery. Let's be honest: if this book had been available to me when I was Elsie's age (and if I hadn't grown up with a later generation of Elsie-disdainers writing children's fiction), I would have read it over and over again. It's a sugar-frosted banquet of cruelty.

One of Emma Dunning Banks' shorter recitations sums up the Elsie experience nicely:

The Lesson of Obedience )

What I Plan to Read Next

Amid tidal pools and title drops, the days of Phillip Maddison upon the earth are trickling toward their end. The Gale of the World is the LAST EVER book in the Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight sequence and the book I am about to read next. Will Phil finally begin his Great Work? Will he find the courage to write down all the thoughts that have been howling lyrically through his soul for the past 5800 pages? Will he create an infintely intensifying vortex of ever-more-thinly fictionalized autobiography that DESTROYS CIVILIZATION? Find out next week right here on What the Hell Am I Reading Wednesday!

(but if the last line of The Gale of the World is the first line of The Dark Lantern, there will be no more Reading Wednesdays because I will DIE).
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What 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.

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. :|
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What I've Finished Reading

The C.P. Snow novel cycle ends as it began, with me vaguely liking Last Things, sometimes even to the point of liking it a lot, and then forgetting all about it the second my back was turned. Honestly, I think part of my trouble with the Snowverse is that it's structured much more like a certain kind of TV show than like what I expect from a novel, and deep down I am weirdly picky about how I want my story beats served up. Each novel deals with a different aspect of Snow's twentieth-century culture and politics, with a shifting cast of characters who have more or less of a role to play depending on the focus of the book. When I tried to describe it to my husband, he said, "It sounds like The Wire." And it's probably a little like The Wire with more boardrooms and less overt violence. Probably The Wire is better, but I never got around to finishing The Wire.


What I'm Reading Now

I finished A Wizard of Earthsea and started in on the next book in the giant Earthsea omnibus, The Tombs of Atuan.

Really, this omnibus is beautifully made but far, FAR too gigantic. It's like one of those enormous dictionaries that just sit out on a lectern all day at the library. I keep wanting to read it in bed and being physically unable to do so. I hope Charles Vess does some illustrated paperback singles so I can give them to my niece.

And I decided to tackle Elsie's Girlhood, which has been sitting on my shelves for a long time looking sad. I never managed to finish Elsie Dinsmore, but that was on Project Gutenberg and I get bored reading anything longer than a few pages on a computer screen even when the book is a good book, so I expect this one will be easier. Elsie goes to a spa with her dad, is unhealthily attached to her dad, meets an annoying woman who wants to "make a match of it" with Daddy Dinsmore, is crushed by the horrible possibility, and learns that her dad is actually marrying a totally different woman whom she already knows and likes. That's the first chapter. The proverbial tears have already been flowing freely.

Things to Do With Your Apple Computer is a friendly newcomer's guide to the Apple IIe (and its immediate predecessors, the Apple II and Apple II+). It includes pictures of ordinary people using the Apple IIe to work and relax, including a mind-blowing picture of a family lounging in bed with an Apple IIe - keyboard base, disk drive, and video monitor - perched alongside them on the mattress. My family had an Apple IIe when I was young, but we did not take it to bed with us.

Meanwhile, in the future, Ted Chiang keeps trying to kill me with feelings, and succeeding most of the time. Stories of Your Life and Others is a good collection. There is a story on the premise "What if the builders of the Tower of Babel kept building, and eventually hit the vault of heaven (because this is a science-fiction story as told by Old Testament people) and just started drilling?" and after that it was all over for me. I am now doomed to love Ted Chiang forever even if all his future stories are bad. Luckily, they aren't, and it's one of the better dooms, all things considered.

What I Plan to Read Next

I went to the library and got ALL FIVE BOOKS of the last third of A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight, so we are MAKING THIS HAPPEN.

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