I just finished "Up Tight" by Molly Parkin, I sort of regretted not having bought it when it was in the shops (was that the '80s?), but it turned out not that great, there were rude bits but they were very quick.
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I just finished "Up Tight" by Molly Parkin, I sort of regretted not having bought it when it was in the shops (was that the '80s?), but it turned out not that great, there were rude bits but they were very quick.
Its certainly a varied book. The first chunk is a reasonably straight forward sea adventure, but then once they get rescued from the shipwreck it shifts to an exploration narrative. And then there's the last portion, which is something utterly different, sort of psychological adventure science fiction?
I can definitely see how it would have influenced Melville, the extreme attention to nautical detail for instance, but also the apparent malevolence of the color white.
Which also strongly puts me in mind of some of Tanith Lee's more outre works, which were often themed around colors. The Secret Books of Paradys for instance, which are very Poe-ish in their phantasmagorical morbidness, and their gothically mad characters.
Anyway, well worth a read, it's pretty easy going. Though, obviously, it's Poe, so lots of awful things happen.
It is, by the way, also a major inspiration on Lovecraft's Mountains of Madness, another antarctic adventure with excessive attention to detail.
That's actually why I picked it up in the first place. I have had the word "tekeli-li" stuck in the back of my brain since reading At the Mountains of Madness back in college, and after my traditional Halloween reread of The Raven, I was paging throughmany a quaint and curious volume of forgotten loremy complete Edgar Allen Poe, I decided to give it a whirl.
Now I'm finishing up Taliesin, which is slow but mostly enjoyable. Also going through a collection of English romantic poetry, which to my classically warped brain is pretty much what poetry is supposed to be. Which I suppose is an issue for modern poets, because you ain't gonna do better than Shelley easily, but that's their problem.
So I just rewatched Master & Commander, again, and I think I want to start reading the Aubrey/Maturin books. I've heard nothing but good things.
Thanksgiving with the fiancé's family, which is deeply, deeply boring. This calls for new books. Or in this case, old books.
The Tsar's Last Armada an extremely readable history of the absolutely insane voyage of the Russian 2nd Pacific Squadron in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5. For those unawares of this utterly bonkers episode, the Russian 2nd Pacific Squadron set sail from the Baltic, and was obliterated at the Battle of Tsushima off the coast of Japan, whence they arrived via sailing all the way around Africa. Highlights of this voyage of the damned include almost starting a war with Great Britain, phantom Japanese torpedo boats everywhere, a lot of snakes, and general misery.
Aurian, which is one of my favorite things, a mass market paperback 1990s fantasy written by a woman. These are just fun, and in some sense are to me the final evolution of the fantasy novel as its own thing, before it soaked up loads of influence from romance and YA and YA paranormal romance and George RR Martin bent the entire trajectory of more literary fantasy with A Game of Thrones. First hundred pages are quite solid.
I'm only about a quarter of the way through, but it's proving to be an excellent book; well written, with a good eye for the various alarmingly messed up personalities that make early 20th century European politics such a powder keg, and with a tone of understated absurdity that keeps the thing from coming off as a farce. Highly recommended, unless you are looking for either a rivet counting technical history, or a lot of insight into the Japanese perspective. As the author doesn't read Japanese, but does read Russian, it's very much Russia focused, even in the background leading up to the war.
I've read through book six, the series can be both really good and not so much at the same time, mostly depending upon a single factor: are the character at sea or not. O'Brian was an absolute genius at handling the naval side of affairs, but the social side of their lives and the complexity of life for these characters in their times is rather more muddled. Aubrey in particular suffers as a character on land. It's not for nothing that the movie adaptation completely avoids all land-based adventures by the pair (island stopovers don't count, they're still connected to the ship).
That caveat granted, the series starts very strong. I devoured the first four books in a grand hurry and only slowed down thereafter and probably will go back to the books at some point. Definitely worth a look.
Finished The Company of Death and it really is entirely disappointing. 200+ pages of setup - explaining the world, introducing characters, more introducing the world, detailing character backstories, inciting event - followed by under 100 pages of everyone getting ready for a road trip to save the world, driving for one stop, a very mediocre battle against a horde of zombies and then it just ends with a "to be continued". That book went directly into the donation bin, there's really nothing noteworthy about it.
Gotta go dig for something better in the to read pile, perhaps from an author I already like. Last few books were disappointing.
Finished up Leviathan Wakes over the weekend, and that was a wild ride right up to the end of the book. Foreshadows some of the twists rather cleverly, some I picked up on, others I didn't. With how constant the threat of danger is to the main characters, after about the 2/3rds point you kind of stop worrying about their survival. The breakneck pace of things helps mitigate this some at least. Rather looking forward to the next in the series, just wishing I hadn't put it on my gift wish list for Christmas XD
With all the talk in here about R.A. Salvatore still writing Drizzt novels, figured out which was the last I read (The Two Swords), and started in on The Orc King. It's been an interesting mix of nostalgia and new, all the characters and places are familiar, but what they're up to is new. Rather like coming back to a half watched TV show years later. Seems there's..... wow, another 19 books after this one. Looks like I won't be running out of things to read anytime soon.
That series is a lot of fun, I really need to pick it back up and finish the last couple books.
There are a ton of them for sure. I don't think I've read past The Two Swords, though I did reread that trilogy a couple years ago. I thought it held up surprisingly well, and I very much like it ending on the ambiguous note of Obould actually half-winning. He fails to destroy Mithril Hall, but he wins his kingdom, and recognition of his kingdom. I'm still not sure I've seen another fantasy novel do something quite like that for a race like orcs.Quote:
With all the talk in here about R.A. Salvatore still writing Drizzt novels, figured out which was the last I read (The Two Swords), and started in on The Orc King. It's been an interesting mix of nostalgia and new, all the characters and places are familiar, but what they're up to is new. Rather like coming back to a half watched TV show years later. Seems there's..... wow, another 19 books after this one. Looks like I won't be running out of things to read anytime soon.
Finished The Tzar's Last Armada last night, staying up too damn late in the process. This was an excellent book, albeit slightly mistitled, as it covers not just the voyage of the 2nd Pacific Squadron, but the history leading up to war, and the Battle of Tsushima itself.
Because it is entirely from the Russian perspective, it takes on an atmosphere I've not really encountered in history much before. Simply put, it's the story of people trying extremely hard, doing something entirely remarkable, and in the end utterly failing. It isn't played for comedy, or tedious moralizing, it's just left as a story of people - really of the Russian admiral, Rozhestvensky - doing everything possible and coming up disastrously, inevitably, short. I found myself dreading the actual battle, because it's such a catastrophe, and in America we just don't tell the stories where the plucky underdog gets obliterated. Not without some justification about how they did it wrong, or were bad, or anything else to throw up a fence between good normal people like us and people who lose.
Highly recommend this one. It might just surpass Pursuit as my favorite naval history.
I finally got around to reading Ann Leckie's Translation State (that Eldan talked about a while back). I felt like it started soooooooo slow (the world-building was nice, but the plot felt like it could've progressed faster), but after half the book or so I got quite into it. Overall, I'd rank it below the original Imperial Radch triology but above Provenance (all of whom take place in the same setting as Translation State).
Hm. Really. What did you like about it? Because thinking back, there's very little about the book that I actively liked. Didn't like most of what it does with the translators, either.
Also, so I'm not constantly just complaining in this thread, this weekend I pulled Pamela Dean's Tam Lin from the Too Read Stack. A retelling of a Scottish Fairie Ballad set in a 1970's American college instead. Not very fantastical so far (or not at all), but I enjoy the prose rather a lot, plus half the characters are English majors and spend a lot of time talking about books, which I also enjoy. They also make jokes about Biology majors, which I also enjoy (as a biologist).
Good question. I thought the plot was pretty interesting, at least once the characters met up and the pace picked up and while I didn't quite like everything about the translators, I did like a lot of it and I felt it gave them some more depth than just being weird and mysterious. Some of the characters – and especially their interactions – were rather interesting, too.
All in all, certainly not a perfect book but well worth reading, I thought.
The book onslaught continues. The current book set is:
HMS Tiger at Bay, by Victor Hayward. Hayward was an enlisted sailor (specifically a loader for the #3 Starboard 6in gun) on the titular ship throughout her WW 1 career which is what this memoir covers. This marks the second memoir I've read from Tiger, the other being Years of Endurance, by the ship's chief medical officer. Having both the officer and enlisted viewpoint for the same ship at the same time is a fantastic opportunity, and oh boy does being a normal sailor sound astonishingly and entrancingly awful, in ways that histories tend to gloss over.
There's one fascinating discrepancy between the two texts. Years of Endurance records an instance early in the war when Tiger was at substantial risk of being attacked by French destroyers at night because the signal book could not be located. This book comments on what I assume must be the same event, but claims it was an unnamed British cruiser. As I don't have a full copy of Tiger's deck log, can hardly read the few pages I have reproductions* of, and I'm not sure if the original still exists or even records what truly happened, I'll probably never know. But I would love to.
*I'm bad at cursive, and the penmanship of 110 years ago is challenging.
Still reading Aurian, by Maggie Furey. It's 600 pages, that takes a while. This is a prime exemplar of solidly B tier 1990s fantasy. Particularly notable is how terrible things seem to slide off of the protagonist onto the increasingly brutalized and/or dead supporting cast. So sure she might be shipwrecked, but she's saved by magical whales who tell her all about her special destiny and decide to let her use the powerful weapons of destiny they don't let anyone use because she's just so pure hearted they know she won't mususe them. Then she's temporarily enslaved and forced to fight to the death as a gladiator in the arena, but she immediately wins, gets rescued, and makes a magical giant cat friend because the final enemy is a giant cat that of course she talks it into liking her because obviously she can telepathically speak to animals. Her traveling companions meanwhile are super-dooper enslaved as disposable manual labor and haram girl, respectively.
So it's that sort of book. Still hasn't hit Sarah Douglass levels of WTF. Her first series featured an emergency backup love interest whose entire destined cosmic purpose was to be the side piece that the hero liked just enough for the dark lord to think that she was the hero's true love, but not actually be his true love so the hero could let the dark lord kill her.
I read a few books in that series about twenty years ago – I think I've still got them sitting on my shelves somewhere. Have you got up to the bit where the anthropomorphic personification of Death shows up? Even back then, when my standards for fantasy were really low and I was willing to read pretty much anything, I remember thinking that it was the lamest portrayal of Death that I'd ever seen. There's one point where he gets annoyed at the protagonist because she's demanding that he return her dead lover to life or something, except instead of just telling her to get lost like a proper Hades-type should do, he kind of goes along with it in a resentful passive-aggressive sort of way but then gets his revenge a few pages later by pushing her into a well or something when she's leaning out to look into it and is really close to overbalancing.
. . . and if you're wondering why the embodiment of Death would need to push someone into a well . . . yeah, good question.
Nope, no anthropomorphisms of death yet, though that sounds both super lame and entirely on brand for this sort of overly self-indulgent nineties cheese*. I've got magic cat friends, magic whale friends, normal wolf friends, getting saved for freebies by the king of the Faerie, sorry, the book spells it "Phaerie" and the absolute tidal wave of misery that runs off of our teflon coated heroine and onto anybody within ten feet of her.
*i.e. why A Game of Thrones is actually a game-changing fantasy. Killing off Eddard at the end is pretty much the antithesis of a lot of the increasingly saggy nineties longform fantasy.
I’ve read the series straight through, all twenty finished novels plus the unfinished 21, and I’ve reread most of them once or twice at least. The series is brilliant, and really comes into its own in the later volumes, when O’Brian develops their home and family lives, including Jack’s children and Stephen’s daughter (as well as Sally and Emily). Their respective wives, Sophie and Diana, have complex natures and arcs of their own, and it’s on land that some of the nuances in Jack and Stephen’s long friendship are most fully explored.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mechalich
I've read through book six, the series can be both really good and not so much at the same time, mostly depending upon a single factor: [is] the character at sea or not. O'Brian was an absolute genius at handling the naval side of affairs, but the social side of their lives and the complexity of life for these characters in their times is rather more muddled.
As for the movie, the dialogue itself hints at the reason they don’t go haring off ashore, which is that they don’t have the time. The movie combines a long sea chase and a journey into the Pacific (from two different books) and it simply doesn’t have the time to work in a visit to Ashgrove Cottage, much less the Basque country.
In some instances this is deliberate; he’s the classic naval officer who’s brilliant by sea and hopeless by land. In his excellent book Looking for a Ship, John McPhee describes a modern real-life example, a merchant captain who’s a brilliant celestial navigator—but in a car, he’s lost as soon as he pulls out of his driveway. Sea officers like that still exist; I had one in my family. O’Brian knew well of what he wrote.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mechalich
Aubrey in particular suffers as a character on land.
Well, I've probably finished every book I'm going to finish this year. Had several real bangers, and also a strong contender for worst thing I'll read in the 2020s.
So you know what that means.
Time for some arbitrary end of year awards!
Most Unsurprisingly Good Book — War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
I already talked about this one in the thread back when I was reading it, and tbh I don't know if there's much anyone can say about War and Peace that hasn't already been said somewhere else, but to be brief: yes, it's that good.
I know it's very long but if you can handle those sprawling fantasy series you all talk about, you can manage this amount of words. Yes, granted there's a lot of characters and quite a few of them have very similar names but it's not that hard once you settle-in to it. Plus there's a part where a couple of the characters get in trouble because they got drunk and tied a police officer to a literal, actual bear and threw them in the river, so, y'know, it's not 'all dour gloom all the time'.
Most Pleasant Surprise — Skyward Inn by Aliya Whiteley
Prior to picking this up I had never heard of Aliya Whiteley. By the time I put it down I knew I'd have to start diving into her entire bibliography.
This is the kind of Sci-Fi book that feels like it's going to be one day talked about in a 'they just don't make them like this anymore' positive terms. Not now, obviously because it came out in 2021; not that many people are writing like this at the moment.
Which is a shame, because this was an absolute delight. It's interesting, intelligent, and it's not afraid to get just wonderfully, unashamedly, weird. PKD really going-off weird. Mid-90s-to-mid-2000s anime finalé weird. Exquisitly done idea-focussed dreamsculpting that manages to feel both wide-reaching and intimate at the same time.
Best Reread — Lives of the Monster Dogs by Kirsten Bakis
Monster Dogs is one of that rare breed (no pun intended) of books that improves the second time around — and it's not at all bad the first time. Not so much because of having missed things but because, even in spite of everything in it, the first time around you might still be expecting it to be building to a conventional ending. Which it isn't. That would be too conventional for Monster Dogs, and Bakis was not interested in being conventional. Down to releasing this as her debut novel in 1997 and then not writing another piece of fiction for nearly 20 years.
There's really not much quite like Monster Dogs. Even in terms of genre it's difficult to pin down. It's somewhere in the SF wheelhouse, and it's set in the future (the distant year of 2010) about the products of Mad Science so it's possibly sci-fi, but that tells you nothing about it. This is a book that freely alternates into styles of personal correspondance; a teenage dog-person's diary written like a 17th century Bible verse, and the script of a short opera. Bakis pulls all of this off without a hitch, and transitions between them so cleanly you'd almost not notice how strange it is. It is just a fascinating, unique piece of fiction.
Bakis' second ever novel is slated to release this coming February. I have no idea what to expect from it, but I am looking forward to finding out.
Author Already Won A Nobel Prize But This Is My List So I'm Putting It Here Anyway— One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Márquez
As with War and Peace, I don't really know if there's much I really need to say about this. It's One Hundred Years of Solitude, it's very good. Sorry I can't say anything controversial about it.
I suppose if I were forced to choose I would still probably take Autumn of the Patriach over it, but happily no one is forcing me to choose. Hooray! More good books for me!
Kicking Myself That I Didn't Get Around To This One Sooner — Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti by Genevieve Valentine
I've been aware of Valentine for few years now, from some of her short stories. Which were good, to the point of routinely overshadowing most of whatever other stories that hers were collected with, but for some reason I did not actually get around to reading Mechanique until this.
Mechanique was published in 2010, for reference.
As the more astute readers among you might have inferred, it did not disappoint.
Yeah, the core plot doesn't particularly standout, but then that's not really the point of the book (more astute readers may have noticed a pattern emerging in this list). From her short stories I would have described Valentine is a 'fiction-as-artform' writer and that's clearly been a thing with her for a while. Mechanique's ensamble cast are drawn with enough motifs to fill a circus managerie, with with prose that leaps through chronology and tense to reflect both the changes in viewpoint character and that character's mental state (1st-, 2nd-, and 3rd-person narration are all present in different sections).
There are no pages of exposition, the world is something you glimpse the edges of, and it's more than happy to embrace the subjectivity and ambiguity that comes with writing. It's a book that feels like it enjoys being a book, in as much as an inanimate object can 'enjoy' anything.
It also managed to get at least one of the more 'none of that 'literature' malarky' members of one of my reading groups to get an understanding of character motif and symbolism, so there's that too :smalltongue:
I'm Sorry You Had A Bad Time In English Class But This Really Is Good — The Catcher In The Rye by J. D. Salinger
Look, I get it. I've encountered Americans on the internet too. I've heard all the remarks about it.
It doesn't matter. None if it makes Catcher any less of a moving, sad, intimate book. An all-around Beautifully realised depiciton of a troubled teenage going through an emotional breakdown in a time and place that probably wouldn't have been able to help even if he'd known how to ask for it.
and for the bonus round:
Most Unexpectedly Not Bad Book — Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by Jon Berendt
Went into this really not expecting much, True Crime having a bit of a rep, but Berendt turns-out to be a pretty decent writer. The killing itself, and subsequent murder tirals, don't end-up featuring all that strongly, being mostly tucked-away towards the last sections. For most of the book, it's an entertaining tour of Savanah's quirky population of well-to-do racists, homophobes, racist homophobes and The Lady Chablis — a Black trans drag performer living in the American Deep South in the 1980s.
It's not really something I'd be likely to read again, but it was entertaining enough, plus I felt I should probably include some non-fiction and this was the main 'not-bad' choice that could probably be discussed under the board rules (which do kind of rule-out works of political philosophy).
Also, some props to Berendt in that he writes about The Lady Chablis with the sort of human respect that isn't even standard practice among journalists now, nevermind in the 20th century.
Hall of Shame Inductee — Swashbucklers by Dan Hanks
A while back in the thread, there was some discussion about how a 'bad' book might still be preferable to a 'boring/bland' book. There may well be some merit to that, but there was an important unspoken detail that is important to remember: those options are not mutually exclusive.
Swashbucklers is a dead-end attempt to cash-in on the 80s nostalgia-bait trend that's already been so thoroughly milked, that its only option is to be derivative of derivatives (mostly Stranger Things and the more recent It film adaptation). In terms of pandering, it has largely dispensed with the pretense altogether and the '80s kids on supernatural adventures' are now middle-aged adults in the 2020s, who relentlessly talk how much harder it is to not be kids in the 80s since they now have to deal with things like back pain, jobs and adult responsibilities. This is not the set-up to a moral.
So much for the 'boring', as for the 'bad', in terms of prose quality I found myself wondering more than once if this was a rough first draft manuscript that had someone been sent to the printers by mistake. Which it isn't, in fact it has two credited editors, and that just makes it worse. I have read self-published vanity projects with prose that flowed better than this. There are teenagers writing dramatised Warhammer battle reports who've made more of an effort at scene pacing. Or at least wouldn't put an entire unrelated paragraph in-between a set-up and a punchline. They could absolutely write better action scenes.
This is a book where a high percentage of the chapters begin with one character recapping the events of the immediately preceding chapter, and these aren't long chapters. I'm pretty sure that in at least one instance this recap was being given to another character who was also there for those events.
What I'm trying to emphasise that this is not 'funny bad', this is 'tedious bad'. It is 300 pages that feel like slogging through 3,000. There aren't easy 'point and laugh' sentences you can pull out here, you won't get ironic enjoyment out of it.
That's not to say there's a shortage of specific details worth criticising, but if I were to do that, I would putting-in more effort than this book warrants. And I already spent too much of that reading it.
That's it, that's the end of the list.
Yeah, I'm gonna have to still dispute this. I never had a bad time in English class, and I always hated Holden Caufield. He comes across as a character written by a man who has never met a teenager and certainly doesn't understand how they think, likely because he lacks any amount of basic empathy (as evidenced by the way he treated his family). The only thing I ever felt reading Catcher was annoyance, and the only thought it left in me long term was a seething rage that bubbles up inside whenver I hear the word "phony".
Great books are often presented in unappealing ways in English class, for sure. But Catcher is simply an unappealing book. It's about the vague emotional torment of a character I never identified with even as an angsty, abused teen. Which may have been the issue, really. As someone with what I felt were real problems at the time, Holden's incoherent whining was pretty well primed to piss me off to no end. Holden's problems are all self-inflicted and stem from the root problem that he's a dumbass and a slacker, at least one of the two he could fix if he wasn't so up his own ass about everything.
Edit: I think the other thing that gets me, and always got me, is the abject GALL this little ****stain has to be handed so many prime opportunities on a silver platter and just piss them away because he actually has to work just a little bit for them. This guy was set up for success his entire life so far. And no just the boring kind of success; no he has the opportunities and potential connections to do ANYTHING HE WANTS with his life, and just throws it all away because "school isn't fun", and then runs away from the consequences of his own actions. You know how many people I know in my life who would've strangled this worthless waste of air for a crumb of the potential opportunities he has handed to him? And there were even more of them in the time period the book is set.
Just the very IDEA I'm supposed to sympathize and identify with this privileged ******* kid ****ing up his own life while I and most of the people I knew at the time were struggling to just get by is and was sickening. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH I hate this book.
I envy those of you who can 1) remember what you read this year and 2) write about them so entertainingly.
Over the past few months I made my way through a few books from the Twisted Tales (Disney-Hyperion) young adult novel series. Bought a couple of them a few years back, left them on a high shelf for when my daughter was old enough not to find them too scary (and had actually seen the relevant media) and kind of forgot why I was still keeping them or whether I'd even read them all the way through. This year I nabbed two more second-hand, and the kid naturally got into them. I was thinking some of the themes might be a bit too mature for her - the one I looked at mentioned magical torture - so I decided to read through to check.
As Old As Time by Liz Braswell, the one with the magical torture, turned out to handle it in a reasonably kid-appropriate way - emphasis on magic and power imbalance, not so much on gore. Not much worse than my daughter had already been reading in other kid series. Story itself was a decent re-imagining of Beauty and the Beast. Themes of ostracism and social capital were turned up to "young-adult", magical racism allegory etc. Fairly straightforward stuff and a nice twist with enough references to the Disney movie to be bemusing.
What Once Was Mine also by Liz Braswell, I originally felt was on a similar level. I went in wondering if the parental controlling/abuse themes were going to be distressing (personal trigger) but they were handled mainly by getting into Rapunzel's head, which worked decently, with some decent new elements that balanced it out.
Let It Go (sorry! Apparently also published as Conceal, Don't Feel in the rest of the world) by Jen Calonita was the least interesting of the four, and reminded me why I had originally only bought the Liz Braswell ones. I think it just wasn't as intricate, or maybe it seemed like the focus was more on fitting the whole plot of the movie in, rather than the characters? Although the Tangled one actually had a framing story and two new subplots and still felt well-paced, at about the same length, so I think it's just that Liz Braswell is the better author. I have vague memories of seeing one by Elizabeth Lim in the shop and being unimpressed enough to skip buying it.
Last one was Once Upon a Dream which I initially couldn't find in the house, as my daughter had stashed it somewhere. And then I found a rave review of it ... in my Facebook posting history. Apparently I had highly recommended it way back then, and then completely forgotten. I still think I probably only read a few pages at the time, because the rest was completely new when I got to re-reading it. Worth it though. Quite young-adulty in terms of teenage angst - both romantic and existential - but well justified as an extension of the Disney plot.
I guess I need to look for more Lis Braswell. And check out Aliya Whiteley, apparently - thanks :)
While I didn't have to read it for school, I mostly remember finding Catcher in the Rye rather boring, though to be fair I was probably too young (about twelve or so, I think?) to either appreciate or properly dislike it.
One book I did kinda hate after having to read it (though it was while studying comparative literature at university, so having to read books was definitely my own choice :smallwink:) was Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. It's not a very thick book, but it took me like three weeks to finish due to having the purplest prose I've ever had the unfortunate experience of encountering. Though that is admittedly more about my personal taste than anything objective about the book, if I remember correctly half my class thought it was brilliant while the other half hated it.
As I suck at both rating things and remembering what I've read, I'm not even going to try to rank what I've read this year. I will say that while it probably wasn't the most entertaining book I've read, Translation State (discussed earlier in the thread) is probably the most memorable book I read in 2023.
My current reads are out-loud.
The Frog Princess by ED Baker. My daughter loves them, has listened to this series almost nightly for more than a year. I am now reading it aloud to the whole family... at first it was just her, then we ran into a short chapter, and she wanted more... and the Spoose hollered from our bedroom that he wanted more, too.
And, at night, I'm also reading the Spoose Wild Magic by Tamora Pierce. He loves her, and we listened to the Protector of the Small series on a big drive a while back, I grabbed this to read at night.
I have gotten into the habit of keeping a written list of things I've read, so I am cheating a bit. I am also in two reading so I am using some 'old material' in the list post too.
A few of the list includes were reading club books. Including Swashbucklers, which is the reason why I read all of it instead of bailing-out before the halfway mark — which it turned-out everyone else in the reading group had done :smalltongue:
Yeah. One other thing about Skyward Inn is that it's under 300 pages long, so it's not even a big time investment.Quote:
I guess I need to look for more Lis Braswell. And check out Aliya Whiteley, apparently - thanks :)
I actually like Woolf a lot as an author, but if she's not your speed then, yeah, her stuff really isn't going to be a lot of fun for you.
Okay, that's entirely your prerogative. Taste's subjective, after all.
Not going to go into a big internet fight about it since, as I said, I've seen that sort of take a lot and also because you already didn't get to enjoy it so from my perspective you're already suffering enough1 :smalltongue:
I will touch on one thing though, because I think it ties-in to why I called the award what I did:
He's 'pissing them away' because he had a nervous breakdown after his kid brother died and never actually recovered from it. The framing device of the novel is that Holden is narrating all of this after-the-fact from what is heavily implied to be a mental institution.Quote:
I think the other thing that gets me, and always got me, is the abject GALL this little ****stain has to be handed so many prime opportunities on a silver platter and just piss them away because he actually has to work just a little bit for them.
This is not a huge secret to Catcher but because it's not explicitly told to the reader, it is something that requires a degree of analyitical reading comprehension to be able to fully appreciate. This isn't a dig at you, nor at anyone who didn't like the book, contrary to what a lot of the internet might lead you to think, "I don't get it" isn't a reaction to be ashamed of (nor are getting something and liking something the same thing, it's entirely possible to do either one without the other). The point is: that sort of reading is a skill that has to be learned, beyond basic literacy; not a marker of whether someone's 'smart' or not. Ideally it's the skill English classes teach, but in practice it doesn't always work.
The 'bad time in English class' is what happens teenagers effectively have to make a jump from the literacy equivalent of arithmatic to mathemitics, without even being made aware that this skill jump is happening. Then being given books that are difficult to appreciate without already having that skill and being told they have to then apply this in a specific way or they'll be marked down for it. That is going to be a rough shift to most people — hell, it was a bit of a rough shift for me at first, and my tastes were already leaning in a direction that made leant itself to it — and I've seen a lot of nerds over the years who don't seem to have ever fully gotten past it, a lot of them having just not been able to learn the skill under that set of circumstances.
The 'bad time in English class' isn't "their teacher treated them poorly'" or "they didn't get along with their classmates". It's: "they were given something that they didn't understand — they might not have even understood what it was that they didn't understand — and then graded on it anyway, regardless of if they ever learned or not".
Is it the best term? Probably not, but I've observed this cropping-up so, so, many times in conversations about books I had to start calling it something. Especially in nerd circles, where it underpins so much of the 'nerd anti-illectualism' towards more literary works, and literary criticism in general, you can practically set your watch by it.
Okay, I'm drifting off topic enough now, and if I keep rambling about this anymore I might as well start writing a blog post.
1any fans of Dan Hanks are free to use that line on me. It'd probably be better for your blood pressure than giving me more opportunities to complain :smallwink:
I'm not surprised anytime people hate a classic because they had a miserable time with it in school. English lit classes, especially in my part of the world, are immensely hit-or-miss.
Sure, a good teacher might teach about a literary movement, a writing choice that the author makes, or how the author develops a theme throughout the book. But it's very easy to slip into spending your entire unit on All Quiet On The Western Front just basically learning facts about WWI, or spending a unit on To Kill A Mockingbird learning about racism of the time. It can kind of turn into a pseudo-history or -social studies class if you're not careful.
Of course, books are a reflection of their time and place, and you need to understand the cultural context to understand why the author wrote it that way. But looking back on my education, a lot of lit teachers took the safe route by just...exploring the author's cultural upbringing and the topics they were writing about, rather than actually teaching us how to recognize, analyze, and draw conclusions about the writing's messages. I remember being 17 and being given a test about The Great Gatsby that exclusively asked me about plot-points (and fairly nitpicky ones, at that) and had nothing to do with the content, themes, context, or writing style of the book. It was 100% purely "prove that you read this book." I think a lot of English lit teachers skate by with this sort of thing, which is a shame, because actually teaching your students to understand written communication and storytelling would be a pretty game-changing educational milestone.
Compare this to classes like Algebra or Chemistry, where your ability to teach the fundamental ideas is a lot harder to B.S. -- because if you don't explain principles A, B, and C to your students, they're just going to be completely incapable of doing most of the learning and work required by the class.
While probably less of an issue, I don't think it's completely absent for subjects like that. I suspect at least part of the reason I never got very into math was that a lot of questions about why something worked the way it did was basically answered by "that's just the way it is" which is an answer that has infuriated me ever since I was a kid. I get that I probably wouldn't have been able to grasp most of the answers but some sort of child-friendly simplification would've been plenty. I knew I'd get to the "why" if I studied math long enough, but by the time I had the option I had completely lost interest.