stuff i read 20 january 2020
Jan. 20th, 2020 11:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tabacoychanelRosemary Sutcliffe, The Eagle of the Ninth (1954) (Roman Britain #1) Soft like merino wool and twice as comfy. At the moment I’m reading a bunch of books that are clearly the products of the authors’ unfiltered id, and by contrast this book is polished to a mirror shine. I wish I’d read it when I was a kid—I can certainly see why it has such a cult following (meretricula lent me her copy but failed to warn me that one-half of otp gifts the other a WOLFHOUND??? smh). It’s interesting to me that the Call to Adventure happens, by my reckoning, at the halfway mark; one would expect it to occur earlier. But this is not an adventure novel, though it is classified that way for genre-sorting purposes, and though Marcus appears to be having the time of his LIFE hamming it up as Demetrius of Alexandria. This is a story about the importance of keeping faith and the steep costs of doing so. It’s not in any way experimental or subversive. It’s just men of honor who find themselves on different sides of an arbitrary line in the sand. By the time we got to the denouement I knew how Marcus would choose, not just because Sutcliffe had leveraged the whole weight of the narrative behind that choice, but because I remembered the way Uncle Aquilus had chosen. I remembered Cradoc and Guern: they had all chosen to keep faith, whatever that meant in their circumstances. All those callbacks were very present in my mind. Anyway Rosemary Sutcliffe’s greatest literary contribution is imo proving the “I purchased this gladiator for my personal slave & now we’re in LOVE” setup can actually work. I’ve seen it done poorly (The Winner’s Curse ugh ugh ugh) and today is the blessed day when I finally saw it done right.
Leigh Bardugo, Ninth House (2019) (Alex Stern #1) Some kids get admitted to Ivies because they’re piano prodigies or Olympic medalists. Alex Stern gets into Yale because she can see dead people. Yale, it turns out, is lousy with occult societies. Alex is recruited by the Ethics Review Committee of these occult societies, Lethe House, which is supposed to keep the other eight houses in line. The lesson here is, never EVER tie the purse strings of the auditors to the largesse of the folks they’re supposed to be monitoring. “Murder mystery” was 100% the correct format for this story because the identity of the victim—a townie not a student, a druggie, a nobody—forces us to ask pointed questions about which lives matter and which are worthless & disposable. Alex herself, a hard-edged survivor who knows how to craft the perfectly calibrated lie for every mark, used to belong to the disposable multitude. Yale is her second chance. Bardugo (a Yale English undergraduate) gets to have her cake and eat it too—she has OPINIONS on the literary canon and she’s not shy about sharing them; at the same time she can have Alex’s high-school-dropout ass google any obscure authors/texts to clue in those of us who are less well read. Despite being very dark Ninth House fulfills the promise of Hogwarts and every other secret world coexisting behind ours like a palimpsest—there’s a sense of wonder when you’re first initiated into its mysteries (the disillusionment comes after) . Magic is rooted in specific places, and Alex is an uncommonly rootless person (her admission to Yale was presaged by the murder of the only living person she gave a single straw for). Darlington, her co-protagonist, is a character who has struck his roots deep here—just how deep we don’t find out until we learn about his grandpa in a flashback sequence that wrecked me emotionally. The other scene that gutted me was the video of Mercy under the influence of the date-rape drug. Those are the two threads unraveled by the murder investigation: (1) unremitting low-level violence against women is scary precisely because you never know when it’ll escalate into homicide and (2) the primacy of place as a kind of magical focusing crystal. I think this book was twice as long as it needed to be and Bardugo definitely over-researched it (I promise you Leigh, nobody is here for historically accurate tidbits about 19th century New England) to the point where the details were not informing the narrative, the narrative was fashioned to accommodate the details. It was not, thank god, an unbearable slog like Shadow and Bone. It was compulsively readable like King of Scars, but I won’t be rereading it like Six of Crows.
T. Kingfisher, The Twisted Ones (2019) “Hills aren’t like trees. They don’t subside in winter and come back in spring.” Unless, of course, they’re faerie hills. Our narrator, Mouse, is an freelance editor who inherits a haunted house. There are monsters in the woods. This is a fucking terrifying story but it’s also the funniest thing I’ve read in ages—I fell right away for Mouse’s voice, her dry wit, her carefully varied syntax, her dog. I too am the owner of a dumb-as-rocks dog who once ran off for an afternoon to play with somebody’s cows, and we were at our wit’s end; I cannot imagine how Mouse must have felt when hers was taken by faeries. By the time that happened I’d been screaming at her for a hundred pages to cut her losses and run. The irony is, a core component of Mouse’s identity is that her job is “to know the shape of stories and help other people hammer them into place,” and yet she doesn’t recognize the genre of this creepy found manuscript that lands in her lap? Y’all, it’s horror. Maybe you’d call it folk horror. Maybe Mouse knows this, and allows curiosity to overcome caution. “You could walk away from the rest… but it’s killing you to think there’s a weird book hidden somewhere and you might not get to read it.” Friends, this is a cautionary tale of how being too Ravenclaw can get you killed. Mouse is saved, ultimately, by the stubborn intervention of her Hufflepuff friend who insists on tagging along, because the takeaway here is “don’t let your neighbors get et by monsters alone.”
I enjoyed this book! I’ve been meaning to tackle T. Kingfisher for awhile, and I think a big factor in my enjoyment is that it’s not a dense book. In the beginning Mouse drifts between reading Regency romances and reading her found manuscript, and I think that’s a very telling parallel: Regency romances aren’t particularly dense either (this is why I object to shelving Austen in that genre: are you kidding me? Jane Austen? there’s sixteen subtexts to unpack per sentence, minimum). I read The Twisted Ones in 1.5 sittings, wrote this review in the remaining 0.5 sitting, and now I’m off to work.
Sarah Waters, Fingersmith (2002) Sue is born into a den of thieves in Victorian London and this is her big break, a job so lucrative it will set her up for life. It’s “area con woman gets played” but the stress is on the manner in which she gets played. The best way I can think of to explain the structure of this book is “inverse Inception”—imagine you’ve built a nesting doll of dream architectures, and you start at the deepest layer. With each successive revelation your world explodes and you keep being awoken into the next layer, until finally you surface into reality. Now Inception was a very stylish film while Fingersmith is the furthest thing from stylish. It’s above all a story about the unsexy business of waiting on other people, about how the absence of autonomy is a slow poison that will kill you as surely as a bullet. You need a bit of patience to unlock the ponderous narrative. (Once you do, however, you get not one but two subversions of the “lady impersonated by her maid” trope!!) I don’t think it’s a book I’d have enjoyed 5-10 years ago, but now that I’ve ripened into a bitter old hag I start vibrating at the frequency of glass when a book asks questions like: For a woman, what is authentic desire and what is forgery? Where is the line between feeling safe and feeling trapped? I’ve heard many glowing reports of Sarah Waters and they have all, if anything, undersold her. It’s hard to imagine how she could possibly top this.
SPOILERIFIC thoughts: This may be the best novel ever written. Jk jk Persuasion is the best novel ever written but this is a strong contender for second place. When a random prison guard mentioned offhand that both of Mrs Sucksby's daughters came to visit her on death row I started straight-up weeping. This book isn't just wlw, it centers the female relationships as the most important relationships--the core trio of Sue-Maud-Mrs Sucksby, yes, but also Dainty who is the only person to stand by Sue in the runup to the murder trial. I kept wondering during Part II how Maud was going to break into the sanitarium to rescue Sue and then it ends up Sue rescues HERSELF (and Maud too) using the skills that Mrs Sucksby taught her, skills that the "real" Miss Lilly would never have possessed. It chills me to think that if Maud had been the one locked up in a madhouse she may never have gotten out. There's no overlap between Maud's skillset and Sue's skillset--the scenes of Sue being made to sit with a chalkboard when she can barely write her own name were so painful--and yet neither of their skillsets avails them when it comes to escaping the straitjacket of patriarchy. That scene when Sue, Maud, and Mrs Sucksby stab Richard to death and it's unclear who delivered the killing blow? Freighted with a truckload of symbolic significance, isn't it.
meretricula lent me her copy but failed to warn me that one-half of otp gifts the other a WOLFHOUND??? smh). It’s interesting to me that the Call to Adventure happens, by my reckoning, at the halfway mark; one would expect it to occur earlier. But this is not an adventure novel, though it is classified that way for genre-sorting purposes, and though Marcus appears to be having the time of his LIFE hamming it up as Demetrius of Alexandria. This is a story about the importance of keeping faith and the steep costs of doing so. It’s not in any way experimental or subversive. It’s just men of honor who find themselves on different sides of an arbitrary line in the sand. By the time we got to the denouement I knew how Marcus would choose, not just because Sutcliffe had leveraged the whole weight of the narrative behind that choice, but because I remembered the way Uncle Aquilus had chosen. I remembered Cradoc and Guern: they had all chosen to keep faith, whatever that meant in their circumstances. All those callbacks were very present in my mind. Anyway Rosemary Sutcliffe’s greatest literary contribution is imo proving the “I purchased this gladiator for my personal slave & now we’re in LOVE” setup can actually work. I’ve seen it done poorly (The Winner’s Curse ugh ugh ugh) and today is the blessed day when I finally saw it done right. Leigh Bardugo, Ninth House (2019) (Alex Stern #1) Some kids get admitted to Ivies because they’re piano prodigies or Olympic medalists. Alex Stern gets into Yale because she can see dead people. Yale, it turns out, is lousy with occult societies. Alex is recruited by the Ethics Review Committee of these occult societies, Lethe House, which is supposed to keep the other eight houses in line. The lesson here is, never EVER tie the purse strings of the auditors to the largesse of the folks they’re supposed to be monitoring. “Murder mystery” was 100% the correct format for this story because the identity of the victim—a townie not a student, a druggie, a nobody—forces us to ask pointed questions about which lives matter and which are worthless & disposable. Alex herself, a hard-edged survivor who knows how to craft the perfectly calibrated lie for every mark, used to belong to the disposable multitude. Yale is her second chance. Bardugo (a Yale English undergraduate) gets to have her cake and eat it too—she has OPINIONS on the literary canon and she’s not shy about sharing them; at the same time she can have Alex’s high-school-dropout ass google any obscure authors/texts to clue in those of us who are less well read. Despite being very dark Ninth House fulfills the promise of Hogwarts and every other secret world coexisting behind ours like a palimpsest—there’s a sense of wonder when you’re first initiated into its mysteries (the disillusionment comes after) . Magic is rooted in specific places, and Alex is an uncommonly rootless person (her admission to Yale was presaged by the murder of the only living person she gave a single straw for). Darlington, her co-protagonist, is a character who has struck his roots deep here—just how deep we don’t find out until we learn about his grandpa in a flashback sequence that wrecked me emotionally. The other scene that gutted me was the video of Mercy under the influence of the date-rape drug. Those are the two threads unraveled by the murder investigation: (1) unremitting low-level violence against women is scary precisely because you never know when it’ll escalate into homicide and (2) the primacy of place as a kind of magical focusing crystal. I think this book was twice as long as it needed to be and Bardugo definitely over-researched it (I promise you Leigh, nobody is here for historically accurate tidbits about 19th century New England) to the point where the details were not informing the narrative, the narrative was fashioned to accommodate the details. It was not, thank god, an unbearable slog like Shadow and Bone. It was compulsively readable like King of Scars, but I won’t be rereading it like Six of Crows.
T. Kingfisher, The Twisted Ones (2019) “Hills aren’t like trees. They don’t subside in winter and come back in spring.” Unless, of course, they’re faerie hills. Our narrator, Mouse, is an freelance editor who inherits a haunted house. There are monsters in the woods. This is a fucking terrifying story but it’s also the funniest thing I’ve read in ages—I fell right away for Mouse’s voice, her dry wit, her carefully varied syntax, her dog. I too am the owner of a dumb-as-rocks dog who once ran off for an afternoon to play with somebody’s cows, and we were at our wit’s end; I cannot imagine how Mouse must have felt when hers was taken by faeries. By the time that happened I’d been screaming at her for a hundred pages to cut her losses and run. The irony is, a core component of Mouse’s identity is that her job is “to know the shape of stories and help other people hammer them into place,” and yet she doesn’t recognize the genre of this creepy found manuscript that lands in her lap? Y’all, it’s horror. Maybe you’d call it folk horror. Maybe Mouse knows this, and allows curiosity to overcome caution. “You could walk away from the rest… but it’s killing you to think there’s a weird book hidden somewhere and you might not get to read it.” Friends, this is a cautionary tale of how being too Ravenclaw can get you killed. Mouse is saved, ultimately, by the stubborn intervention of her Hufflepuff friend who insists on tagging along, because the takeaway here is “don’t let your neighbors get et by monsters alone.”
I enjoyed this book! I’ve been meaning to tackle T. Kingfisher for awhile, and I think a big factor in my enjoyment is that it’s not a dense book. In the beginning Mouse drifts between reading Regency romances and reading her found manuscript, and I think that’s a very telling parallel: Regency romances aren’t particularly dense either (this is why I object to shelving Austen in that genre: are you kidding me? Jane Austen? there’s sixteen subtexts to unpack per sentence, minimum). I read The Twisted Ones in 1.5 sittings, wrote this review in the remaining 0.5 sitting, and now I’m off to work.
Sarah Waters, Fingersmith (2002) Sue is born into a den of thieves in Victorian London and this is her big break, a job so lucrative it will set her up for life. It’s “area con woman gets played” but the stress is on the manner in which she gets played. The best way I can think of to explain the structure of this book is “inverse Inception”—imagine you’ve built a nesting doll of dream architectures, and you start at the deepest layer. With each successive revelation your world explodes and you keep being awoken into the next layer, until finally you surface into reality. Now Inception was a very stylish film while Fingersmith is the furthest thing from stylish. It’s above all a story about the unsexy business of waiting on other people, about how the absence of autonomy is a slow poison that will kill you as surely as a bullet. You need a bit of patience to unlock the ponderous narrative. (Once you do, however, you get not one but two subversions of the “lady impersonated by her maid” trope!!) I don’t think it’s a book I’d have enjoyed 5-10 years ago, but now that I’ve ripened into a bitter old hag I start vibrating at the frequency of glass when a book asks questions like: For a woman, what is authentic desire and what is forgery? Where is the line between feeling safe and feeling trapped? I’ve heard many glowing reports of Sarah Waters and they have all, if anything, undersold her. It’s hard to imagine how she could possibly top this.
SPOILERIFIC thoughts: This may be the best novel ever written. Jk jk Persuasion is the best novel ever written but this is a strong contender for second place. When a random prison guard mentioned offhand that both of Mrs Sucksby's daughters came to visit her on death row I started straight-up weeping. This book isn't just wlw, it centers the female relationships as the most important relationships--the core trio of Sue-Maud-Mrs Sucksby, yes, but also Dainty who is the only person to stand by Sue in the runup to the murder trial. I kept wondering during Part II how Maud was going to break into the sanitarium to rescue Sue and then it ends up Sue rescues HERSELF (and Maud too) using the skills that Mrs Sucksby taught her, skills that the "real" Miss Lilly would never have possessed. It chills me to think that if Maud had been the one locked up in a madhouse she may never have gotten out. There's no overlap between Maud's skillset and Sue's skillset--the scenes of Sue being made to sit with a chalkboard when she can barely write her own name were so painful--and yet neither of their skillsets avails them when it comes to escaping the straitjacket of patriarchy. That scene when Sue, Maud, and Mrs Sucksby stab Richard to death and it's unclear who delivered the killing blow? Freighted with a truckload of symbolic significance, isn't it.
no subject
Date: 2020-01-21 06:53 pm (UTC)Ninth House clocks in at 450ish pages but it's a pretty easy read i think
no subject
Date: 2020-01-22 08:04 am (UTC)Yep :) (I like the way she writes both for kids and adults, because she doesn't talk down to the kids, and even the adult stories are often, like, grounded in simple things that might work for a younger audience, if that makes sense. Well, not the horror, presumably, but I feel like both sides of her stuff are pretty universal. )