evelyn_b

It's been about a million days since I posted anything, for no really good reason. And the more I didn't post, the more I had to post about and the longer it would take to get caught up. So this is an attempt to catch up a little.

A Few of the Things I've Finished Reading

I picked up a bad cold back at the beginning of October and have spent most of the time since then pathetically stuffy and sick. Luckily, Thomas Mann has written the perfect book for reading in a haze of Ny-Quil and sadness. It's called THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN and it's about a very ordinary, very young man called Hans Castorp who goes to visit his cousin at a sanatorium for tuberculosis sufferers, high in the Alps. It's a weird place with a weird microclimate full of weird people where time seems to run and pool into its own bizarre eddies and swamps, but it's all very interesting and anyway he's going home in three weeks, so he might as well live like the natives do. Except SPOILER: he comes down with TUBERCULOSIS in the first hundred pages and now he has to stay INDEFINITELY. WHOOPS. Soon he's settling in for the winter, being cornered and lectured on his own nature by the local eccentrics, and lusting after a Russian woman who reminds him of a boy he had a crush on at school, whose most distinctive feature, apart from her "slanted" eyes, is distinctively sloppy posture. It's a wild ride. I can't tell for sure if the manic feverish quality is a Thomas Mann Original or the result of my own haziness, but UNLIKE HANS eventually I will recover and maybe then I'll be able to tell you.

There is also The Veiled One by Ruth Rendell, subtitle: Mike Burden Screws It All Up Again. I like Mike Burden because he can't catch a break. This time he catches even less of a break than usual, fixating bullheadedly on the wrong suspect until said suspect snaps, with predictably bad results. A little sillier in its seriousness than I expect Rendell to be, but this might be only because it's been a while since I read her.

I wasn't pleasantly surprised by The Sleep of Reason, exactly, because nothing about C. P. Snow's fiction is productive of surprise. I did enjoy it, though.

There's a Leopold and Loeb-esque murder trial involving George Passant's niece, and which is linked with Lewis' growing anxiety about the fruits of permissiveness in a way that isn't very convincing now, but may have seemed a little more so in 1968.

"It's curious how you talk about 'your generation,'" [Lewis says to his twenty-year-old son, during one of their serious chats]. "We never did."

This made me laugh because I've have the same thought about people ten or fifteen years younger than myself. I didn't know anyone my age who thought, as Lewis' son replies, that "Perhaps it's because we know that we have a difficult job to do." I don't remember ever knowing anyone my age who thought in terms of generational burdens or responsibilities at all, either now or when we were young. I certainly don't think that way, though plenty of people who are older and younger than me seem to. But I don't know if that's a real generation gap, or just a matter of who my friends were when I mostly had friends my own age.


I'm Reading A Few Books Now

. . . but the one I'm really excited about is Gormenghast, the sequel to Titus Groan and just as wonderfully weird: a gorgeously rancid dream-logical microcosmos. It was written, almost certainly painstakingly, by a human being, but it feels like Mervyn Peake put a couple of paragraphs of Arthuriana, a smudged half-page of college-paper satire, and some especially fetid cheese in a bottle and let it all compost together into a splendid mold. It's the best thing I've read in months.

I realized yesterday that my enjoyment is heightened by the fact that I know absolutely nothing about Mervyn Peake, except that he's the weirdo responsible for Gormenghast. There's no biography (but several pen-and-ink drawings by the author) in the mass-market paperback editions I've been reading, and I'd never heard of him before 99 Novels. I think I'd like to keep it this way until I finish the trilogy.


I Also Watch TV Sometimes

I gave up completely on the Westeros books and decided just to watch Game of Thrones instead, where I get more or less the same thing, but with actors of wildly varying talent and a delightful opening credit sequence that sings, "Here comes some TOP-SHELF NERD SHIT, from Sam Tarley's underappreciated brain to YOUR FACE, SUCKERS." Seriously, even when the episode is bad, I feel I've gotten my forty-five minute's worth just from watching the little fortresses whirligig up from the Risk map. We're on Season Three and the writing has started to decay a little; there's a terribly boring torture plot just gnawing up time for no clear reason, they've abandoned the Wall which was my favorite location and social organization, and a whole tier of characters I didn't hate just got stabbed to death - but the parts that are fun to watch are just as fun to watch as before, more or less. Good parts include: almost every scene with the Stark girls (even though the writers/GRRM are still way too committed to punishing Sansa for being a normal non-cynical fourteen-year-old) Jon "Bro" Snow and his two facial expressions, Daenerys "God Mode" Targaryen and her ridiculous harem of loyal retainers, and Joffery Baratheon, a gleefully evil child king who lives to be petty. Last season I would have included Theon Greyjoy, hapless dirtbag pirate prince, on my list of favorites, but he got trapped in the stupid torture plot and who knows if he'll ever get out again.

Every time there's been a new Doctor on Doctor Who, it's taken me four or five episodes to get used to him . . .but not this time. I think my brain pre-emptively primed itself to see continuity rather than discontinuity as a defense against anti-Thirteen whiners - whom I haven't actually encountered in real life, so I don't know why it would bother. The writing seems pretty wobbly at this point, but Jodie Whittaker is quintessentially and inescapably the Doctor (and the mess of a Rosa Parks episode gave me all the dubious American accents I could hope for), so I'm happy.

What I Plan to Read Next

My library didn't have L is for Lawless, but they had the audiobook version, so I thought, "What the hell, I'll try it," and brought it home. I keep forgetting to listen to it, but maybe tomorrow will be the day that I remember.