stuff i read 26 january 2020

[tabacoychanel]

LOTR Reread: Appendix A: Annals of the Kings and the Rulers: I don’t know why fifteen-year-old me skipped the appendices but it would have signficantly augmented my enjoyment if I hadn’t. I’m starting with them this time and it’s the best decision I ever made in my life (why was I not apprised that like 25% of the Peter Jackson films are stitched from the appendices). Tolkien is clearly not here to tell a story in the conventional sense, because what kind of storyteller worth his salt would have shoved all that Sauruman foreshadowing, the juicy Denethor backstory, the Aragorn/Arwen courtship into the appendix??? Tolkien gives zero fucks if everybody, even walk-on cameo characters, has four different names and important locations are routinely renamed something else and this causes confusion & consternation in his readers. Because what Tolkien does care about is creating a lived-in world. Nuggets of info that stuck with me: The echoes of Pelennor Field in the founding of the Mark (which the Steward of Gondor granted to Eorl the Young to requite the late, unlooked for charge that saved Gondor’s hide), the divine origins of the breed of horses that spawned Gandalf’s Shadowfax, why they call it Helms Deep. Can you tell I’m a Rohan loyalist lmao. Amidst the babel of names that I defy anyone to keep track of one begins to discern a pattern, a self-perpetuating cycle of vengeance, an ancestor who didn’t receive his due, an insult that demands an answer, and round and round it goes. Catelyn Stark was right, and Ellaria Sand was right: Where does it end? Wow what happened to the Númenorians really brought home to me that LOTR is a story about the ordeal of exile. Kate Nepvu shares her thoughts on Tor.com and my sentiments are in line with hers, re: Appendix A was presented suboptimally and I would’ve preferred a combined A & B especially since I’m approaching this material for the first time and haven’t heard 90% of these names before. As for the other appendices … I glanced at them cursorily, and if someone as smart as Kate didn’t get much out of an exhaustive “Baggins of Hobbiton” family tree I sure as hell wasn’t going to.

Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (2002) The consensus seems to be it works better as an immigrant narrative than as an intersex or transgender narrative. I’m not saying “he’s a TERF throw him in the dungeon with JK Rowling” i’m saying parts of this book haven’t aged well (the gender essentialism). When I was fifteen I bounced off it bc I didn’t vibe with the narrative voice but now? The only way I could be having a better time is if I was high on cough syrup. I still think Cal’s voice is overly precious but I can recognize the authentic sentiments he’s trying to convey: every few pages a line hits me like a freight train.The humor lies in the incongruence between the high subject matter and the low register in which the tale is told. Using as his frame the kind of intergenerational family saga that’s gone out of vogue, Eugenides has given us a (partial, but not less true) history of the American twentieth century. And that’s the part that has aged well. It’s not a radical take, but it’s much more critical of the status quo than I expected (Lefty’s surreal experience at his short-lived factory job stood out to me for the ferocity with which it took the worker’s side over capital’s side; also the Detroit riots as “Second American Revolution” holy smokes). Cal doesn’t have a dating history; what he does have is a family history. I found the final third of the book tough going bc “identity” takes center stage while “family” fades into the background—look, if I’m going to read a book steeped in teenage angst I expect you to do me the basic courtesy of taking the subject matter seriously! This is where Eugenides’s playful tone tells against him (alas, it worked so beautifully in the first half). The ending was perfect and poetic and I cried but I wish I didn’t have to wade through 200 pages of “the trials of puberty” to get there. I think it’s pretty inarguable Cal did not so much discover his gender identity at age fourteen as discover that being a girl sucked in every possible way, and found the first available exit strategy. Can’t blame the kid.

Nina Allan, The Dollmaker (2019) “A court dwarf wouldn’t count as a lover though—he barely even counted as a person.” “Time was a device invented by humans to keep themselves sane.” I read Nina Allan’s The Race a few years ago and it has HAUNTED me despite my inability to grok what she was doing, or indeed what was happening. I had the same experience with The Dollmaker, only this time I managed to overanalyze less and enjoy it more. Nina Allan has the unsettling gift of the obverse-Guillermo-del-Toro: instead of making the monstrous familiar she makes the familiar monstrous. I went back over the book in my head after I was done to confirm that there were minimal speculative or supernatural elements. And yet you feel the cold edge of the uncanny in the shape of the very sentences. The Dollmaker is about a dollmaker, and about repressed & lonely misfits generally, but what it really is is an experiment in the form of the novel. The sheer recursivity of it is gobsmacking, stories within stories like nesting dolls, and what are the recurring archetypes? Conniving dwarves, persecuted homosexuals, unfaithful one-eyed queens, uneven friendships and imbalanced relationships. I’ve never seen anyone integrate nesting stories to such devastating effect except maybe Juliet Marillier, who has the advantage of working explicitly in the fairy-tale-retelling tradition. What Nina Allan is doing is much closer to Ted “i will fuck you up without you even noticing” Chiang. At the end of the day I still couldn’t tell you what the book was about but I know two things: (1) Allan is a short story writer who is only lately learning to be a novelist, and it shows. (2) Allan has the courage to portray cruel people with grotesque desires who don’t apologize for who they were, and I esteem her forever for that.

Comments

[hamsterwoman]

because what kind of storyteller worth his salt would have shoved all that Sauruman foreshadowing, the juicy Denethor backstory, the Aragorn/Arwen courtship into the appendix???

Hahah, yeah. Because I liked Saruman a lot (I'm weird, OK), and cared a whole lot about anything to do with Boromir, I devoured the appendices (I mean, the Aragorn/Arwen stuff less, but it was there), and consequently don't even remember that it's not part of the book "proper".

Also, when I was a pretentious 16-year-old, I posited that people who wrote fiction were divided into Writers (who cared about HOW the story was told, the prose and the artistry with Oscar Wilde as my ur-example)) and Authors (the "sub-creators", the world-builders, for whom the book was just the most expedient way of capturing the world they'd made and sharing it with other people (guess who)). While I no longer believe in this dichotomy, I do think there's something of a continuum and Tolkien is on a kind of extreme end of it. Which doesn't mean that he can't tell a good story (I think he does just fine in The Hobbit), and his prose is often very lovely, but that's not the POINT of the larger Middle-Earth mythology, as you say.

a self-perpetuating cycle of vengeance, an ancestor who didn’t receive his due, an insult that demands an answer

That's like the lather-rinse-repeat of the entire Silmarillion :P

[tabacoychanel]

I don't think it's weird that you like Sauruman at all! He's a twisty motherfucker but he's not boring.

consequently don't even remember that it's not part of the book "proper"
i think this was the desired effect, and the actual effect on most hardcore lotr fans! alas that 15 year old me was not one of them lol

While I no longer believe in this dichotomy, I do think there's something of a continuum and Tolkien is on a kind of extreme end of it
Tolkien is an OBVIOUS example of someone who tilts toward one end of the scale, and yeah the Hobbit was like...reading a completely different author tbh. It was like what he was after was not at all the same thing he was after with LOTR. he was actually trying to ENTERTAIN. But I emphatically do not think you should give up your prose-worldbuilding dichotomy just because it's not the most useful tool for comparing every text--I imagine it actually is the appropriate lens for examining some texts. Like, ok. Looking at extreme examples here: Brandon Sanderson. There's almost no merit to this man's work on a word level, or even a sentence or paragraph level. But I read like 1000k of Sanderson in a month, so the good stuff must be occurring on a longer wavelength than that. And he has many weaknesses but I don't think worldbuilding is one of them. Sanderson must be what some Tolkien antis wrongly imagine Tolkien to be: all worldbuilding and no storytelling. Whereas in actuality Tolkien can, as you point out, turn a phrase when he feels like it. I never got the jarring feeling that Tolkien was bad at poetry, either, the way you did with A Memory Called Empire.

So where you dichotomy probably doesn't apply is someone like Ted Chiang, whose prose and worldbuilding are one and the same thing because he polishes each and every word until they shine like jewels. With Chiang I can't distinguish the HOW from the WHAT, is what I'm saying.

actually, sexual reproduction for books sounds even better, because then you could get interesting crossbreeds
lmao now I'm imagining us as the caretakers at the breeding grounds at Pen Y Fan, quietly encouraging dragons books to mate, and along comes this firebrand and uh oh he's preaching revolution

[hamsterwoman]

I never got the jarring feeling that Tolkien was bad at poetry, either, the way you did with A Memory Called Empire.

Nod -- Tolkien's poetry is the real thing, but then, he spent a signifcant portion of his adult life studying and teaching epic verse, an then making up a canon from scratch. In fact, when I was complaining about the poetry in AMCE to K/Best Chat, one of the things I said was, "if you're going to write poetry from a secondary world culture, you have two options, one of which is to start by making up the language and origin myths, etc. like Tolkien did". Of course, few people have the patience for that approach :P

so the good stuff must be occurring on a longer wavelength than that

I absolutely adore this phrasing! (god, I've missed talking books with you in the intervening years ♥)

It's funny, because Sanderson is one of these suuuuper weird cases where I would expect him to work for me, and he just really, really doesn't. I bounce hard off Elantris, but figure it was because it was a debut and my expectations had been raised by a blurb comparing it to ASOIAF or something. I tried one of his children's books that the rodents liked, and the humour was not winning me over. I finally tried Mistborn, and I did at least finish that, an even enjoy parts of it, but it frustrated me when I expected it to delight. Or, well, would've expected it to delight if I hadn't already been half-convinced that Sanderson is Not For Me.

You know, I've never looked at it from the Four Doors perspective, and it might be illuminating. I even like some of his characters (e.g. Kelsier), and I guess he has cool Plots? I'm a Plot-last reader, though, so I don't care about that. I agree that Language is a weak spot for him for sure, but that seldom DIScourages me from a book (unless dialogue is terrible, and his is not). I think that if the Setting had grabbed me, like I'd been hoping it would, it could've been a book/series I liked. But there's something about the "physics" of his allomancy that just oesn't make sense to me, that feels "wrong" to my intuition for worldbuilding (in a way that Kingkiller Chronicles feels very right). I think if I loved enough characters or was enjoying the language, that might've been enough to carry me along despite the mixed Setting feelings, but nothing was pulling sufficiently in favor to overcome that.

With Chiang I can't distinguish the HOW from the WHAT, is what I'm saying.

Yes. Which is something I associate with POETRY, come to think of it, which I appreciate (or don't) in a very different way from normal fiction.

breeding grounds at Pen Y Fan, quietly encouraging dragons books to mate, and along comes this firebrand and uh oh he's preaching revolution

Possibly it's just been a long day, but this mental image is totally cracking me up XD

(Also, d'oh! Happy New Year! and I hope all your loved ones in China are OK and staying healthy <3)

[tabacoychanel]

I hope all your loved ones in China are OK and staying healthy
yes, thank you! my aunt and uncle actually went ahead and went on vacation??? i could hear the multiple "???!!" in my dad's tone even though he was texting me, he was like wtf is wrong with my sister but honestly i don't see what staying home would have accomplished other than fearmongering. they're as far away from the outbreak as the UK is from Italy, basically

Which is something I associate with POETRY
YES exactly!! one of my favorite soccer commentators once described a match as "like watching trigonometry solve itself" and that's Ted Chiang to a tee

absolutely adore this phrasing! (god, I've missed talking books with you in the intervening years ♥
ok first of all it's your phrasing you were talking about Seanan McGuire i think! i just appropriated it because I thought it was very evocative. second of all, AWWWWWWWW SAME

Ok so I've never read mistborn and my memory of Elantris is lost to the mists of time, but having read his magnum opus, The Stormlight Archives, recently enough that it's fresh in my mind, and assuming he hasn't changed his stripes: I think Sanderson is a Plot-first writer who looks deceptively like a Setting-first writer at first blush. Which, if true, sorta explains your disappointment in him. It doesn't mean his plotting is seamless--there's SO much bloat--but it does mean that I think he prioritizes keeping the Plot ticking towards whatever big reveal/resolution he's building toward, above anything else. And I gotta give him credit, it works, usually. The big moments had big impact on me. I wouldn't say he's bad at character so much as his characters seem ...one dimensional? Like their relationships have no depth, idk how to explain it.

i saw a shitpost on tumblr that said "if i shelve His Dark Materials and Narnia next to each other will they fight when i’m not looking" and it cracked me up, anthropomorphosizing books is no end of delight

(also in shitposts du jour, have you seen the one "if you ship two professors is it a scholarship" and the next reblog is "he wants the phd" omg i was dyyyyying)

sorry for throwing random amusing memes at you, have a good night!

[hamsterwoman]

I'm glad to hear it and keeping fingers crossed for all your family! Hope your aunt and uncle are able to enjoy themselves, too!

one of my favorite soccer commentators once described a match as "like watching trigonometry solve itself"

That's lovely! (and oh, cause to use my soccer hamster icon and it's not even EuroCup time! :P)

i just appropriated it

No, no, you IMPROVED it, because I was talking about just random wavelengths, but the "longer wavelength" specifically makes so much sense in this case. It also reminds me of, god, now I can't remember who said it and when -- I thought it was Bujold on winning the best series Hugo, but it doesn't seem to be -- that, basically, series are their own things, just like books, it's just that some structures are very large ones. Well, maybe it'll come to me in a flash of inspiration.

Very interesting to hear what you say about Sanderson being a Plot writer -- that would indeed explain why he doesn't work for me but works, say, for K.

And, LOL, I am always happy to have my day brightened by random nerdy memes! The Narnia vs HDM cracked me up (my money's on Pullman, tbh) and

and the next reblog is "he wants the phd"

XDDDDD

[tabacoychanel]

ugh nevermind the virus has been confirmed in 25 provinces i guess i was more optimistic than i ought to have been here is some people who seem to know what they're talking about saying it's already worse than SARS--as in, worse than Sars was in its ~8 month run

basically, series are their own things, just like books, it's just that some structures are very large ones
Ohhhh you know by coincidence I was reading Jo Walton talking about the affordances of really loooong series that are bigger than the sum of their parts--i think she literally refers to the story so woven as a "mythology." Some excerpts that especially resonated with me (and, I expect, with you):

Partly the difference is just a case of having longer to build your spear to drive home your spearpoints. If the reader has lived with the characters for a long time and knows them really well, a line like “Ivan you idiot, what are you doing here?” can bring tears to their eyes. (Bujold’s Memory. Read the other seven books first.) The same goes for Dorothy Dunnett’s Pawn in Frankincense, where I’ve known several people who have read only that book not be knocked over by the events at the end, whereas people who have read from the beginning of the series (it’s book four) reliably are.

I also notice the felicities of connection that I might have missed before. This minor character will become a major character several books later! This antagonist will become a friend, and this friend a traitor. (Cherryh is particularly good at this.) Also, you can really appreciate set-up. Through nine Vlad books, Brust mentions Valabar’s as a wonderful restaurant, but before Dzur we never see it.

ETA: I don't think what Sanderson's doing in Stormlight Archives can be compared to Bujold's Vorkosiverse or Cherryh's Union-Alliance or Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles---Sanderson is pretty clearly telling one long story, broken up into manageable chunks to spare the spines of the books. The same way LOTR is one long story. But I like that Walton elucidates how it's harder to do that looooong series-verging-on-mythology thing, because while there may be multiple "entry points" (you yourself suggested several for the Vlad Taltos books in your masterpost) all the novels have to ILLUMINATE each other without being successors to each other. I think it's pretty telling that you started with ACC and Walton herself iirc started wtih Brothers in Arms, and I started with Shards of Honor and we all ended up in the same place ie. stanning Bujold unconditionally

[hamsterwoman]

:((

(Company has imposed a quarantine on anyone returning from China/HK/Singapore -- please work from home for 14 days -- and now anyone who's been in close proximity to someone who has, with "proximity" defined in terms of meters and minutes. I definitely don't remember anything this severe with SARS, or ever...)

On a happier note, thank you for the Walton link! It was, of course, a great read (and it was great to have so many examples I personally appreciate, heh), but especially what she says about books in a series "illuminating" each other -- YES! that!

And I think you are right that this is what makes it possible to start with different entry points and still have a satisfying experience (and also rewards rereads, because twisting the story this way and that throws different portions of it into relief). I think quite possibly this was one of the things that attracted me to the diea of reading Cyteen/Cherryh (because it was definitely reading Walton's essay about that book that put it on my list).

I think it's pretty telling that you started with ACC and Walton herself iirc started wtih Brothers in Arms, and I started with Shards of Honor and we all ended up in the same place ie. stanning Bujold unconditionally

Nod. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. (And neat, I didn't know Walton started in an odd place, too.)

[tabacoychanel]

with "proximity" defined in terms of meters and minutes. I definitely don't remember anything this severe with SARS
holy shit. all 31 provinces now, my dad says

I didn't know Walton started in an odd place
yeah but i don't think she was particularly impressed, says she wasn't "hooked" until she went back and started with Shards--but then she read the rest (of the then-published books) in completely random order?? Jo Walton is a riot

also rewards rereads, because twisting the story this way and that throws different portions of it into relief
!!!!! you know i was thinking about how i haven't recently reread the "Miles Errant" omnibus (Warriors Apprentice + Vor Game) because I'm just not that interested in the Naismith facet of his identity, and I also think Bujold comes down pretty definitively for the Vor side, but I can see if you were a person who started with those books that would cast the entire series in a different light wouldn't it

also i'm up to my eyeballs in old Jo Walton blog posts and this one made me choke: "Some awful things happen in Bujold, but the overall effect of the Vorkosigan books is uplifting. Cherryh can be more like the middle part of Memory going on relentlessly."

other things that happened while i was buried in Jo's archives: Lois herself popped into a thread about "what you should read if you like Vorkosigan saga" and recommended Queen's Thief series (which she's read 3 times!!); other commenters conferred and decided that "LMB" was, in fact, Lois because they recognized her style from other forums lol

[hamsterwoman]

:((

I jumped about in my first round of Vorkosigan reading, too, based on what my library had -- like, I think I left Memory for pretty late in the game, and I'm pretty sure I read Brothers in Arms well after Mirror Dance, and other weird things like that.

but I can see if you were a person who started with those books that would cast the entire series in a different light wouldn't it

Oh, that's an interesting point! I also definitely prefer the Vor side to the Naismith side, but I know LMB has even recommended Warrior's Apprentice as an entry point instead of Shards, so there probably ARE people who start reading in that order!

Cherryh can be more like the middle part of Memory going on relentlessly."

...yay XD

Oh yeah, that's definitely Bujold, or at least sure looks like it! I recognize the "Ta, L" signoff from her goodreads blog.

I'm not surprised she likes the MWT books. And speaking of books LMB likes, I was looking up the Hamster Princess books on goodreads to make sure that there wasn't new canon I needed to absorb for Yuletide, and the top review is... well XD

[tabacoychanel]

I left Memory for pretty late in the game
me too! i couldn't get a hold of it and i was in a tearing hurry so i was clear through CVA by the time i went back to Memory and even knowing the shape of what was coming I was in physical pain

the fact that LMB left a little footnote at the bottom of her review informing us of the way librarians classfiy children's books is just. no end of delight