a Sunday reading post: ebooks edition

[alchimie]

I am a little bit sick, I think; tired even after two nights of very good sleep, and some discomfort in my throat and a little congestion. Nothing large, but it makes me glad to have a domestic Sunday ahead of doing laundry (oh so much laundry) and playing with the children and at least for this moment writing here -- and tomorrow is a school holiday so I do not need to rush too much to have things primed for the week, there is more time to spread it out.

Recently Finished

I am reading slightly less fanfic at the moment, mostly because I have so many other books to read, some of which are on paper and from libraries and thus insistent upon my time and attention. I am also working on the ToB shortlist; the one I have finished thus far -- So Lucky by Nicola Griffith -- did not excite me much, which was something of a surprise as I am passionately fond of Hild and have liked her other books... although now that I am settled to think on it, I think that aside from Hild I have often admired her work rather than loved it, and this book felt much the same. It is well put together and interesting and I fully believe that OwnVoices books are incredibly important in our world, but I just did not love the book; it did not surprise or excite me.

Binti: Home and Binti: The Night Masquerade by Nnedi Okorafor -- I enjoyed these, especially Home as it focused on new places and relationships and discoveries, and less upon the action-adventure plotline. The shape of these books was very strange to me; nothing happened at the time I expected it to, and in the third especially I could not figure out why Binti was not doing particular things; for instance, ( why does she never go look for her family's bodies? It was obvious for me as a reader that they must still be alive, since she never went to check, and this rather eroded the power of the second half of the book. I am curious to read more Okorafor and see if these structural/pacing things are in all of her books, part of her way as a writer, or just something about these in particular.


On the Go

I am always reading a dozen at once, so this is just a selection.

First, for the ToB, I am reading Census by Jesse Ball, which I expected to hate and am instead provisionally loving. It is dream-like and obscure and perhaps allegorical, a man who is ill, his son with Down syndrome, they are heading out from a centre (what centre?) to take a census (for some sort of state/community, but exactly what is vague) and it is the story of the journey, interleaving with memories of the past, and I think the journey/census is a thing of many layered meanings, but it is not clear for me yet. This is the sort of book which may end up being marvelous and may end up bitterly disappointing, and I am too early in it to even guess which.

Also for the ToB I am a little ways into The Parking Lot Attendant (Nafkote Tamirat) and The House of Broken Angels (Luis Alberto Urrea) -- the first of these is about an Ethiopian girl and her father and I think some sort of cult? separatist community? they have become involved with, and the second is a story of a large Mexican-American family in San Diego. I am not in love with either, although the first is more my sort of thing, but I am interested enough that I am continuing with both for now.

The attentive reader may note that I am rather vague on what is happening in all of these books; one of the things that I love about the ToB is that it is available as just a list with titles and that is how I read them, without in most cases knowing anything about the book at all -- So Lucky was an exception, since I was familiar with the author and the genesis of the work both. But the rest I am just picking up and reading and figuring out what they are a page at a time, and it is one of my most favourite ways to read, without any expectation or knowledge, just the words on the page.

However, books come to me in many ways, and so there are books I am reading with a good idea of at least the outlines of what I am getting into -- specifically, I have been inspired by all this new community I am finding on Dreamwidth to prioritise the speculative fiction that has been accumulating in my ebook collection. So I am reading The Exile Waiting by Vonda McIntyre, fascinating so far, and slowly going through yhlee's collection of flashfiction, The Fox's Tower and Other Tales. And...

Upcoming

I have several more books by fellow DW users queued up, such as graydon's The March North and Forget the Sleepless Shore by sovay. It is wonderful to be excited by spec-fic again after a long time of feeling like there was not much in the genre for me.

I am considering doing individual posts on some of these books as I finish them, and also on some of the books I finished over the vacation that I have not mentioned here, but it is also a little bit daunting, since I think I would need to organise my thoughts better than I usually do when I just ramble from thing to thing.

Comments

[graydon]

It is exceeding dangerous to say "no author would ever", but I have never heard of an author who sets out to mark book reviews like school assignments. (It's horribly plausible for a certain sort of author, granted, but I've still never heard of anyone doing that.)

For my own part, I remain a sneaking fondness for the review that started "I got like, 10% into The Doorstop before deciding I was having a stroke"; that was an ESL reader and The Human Dress, which while it does use consistent stylistic conventions uses a collision of plausibly unfamiliar ones.

Some response is way better than no response, and an immediate response is generally better than a polished response that's been a few rounds through the academic language de-flavouring machine. Nobody's engaged in scholarship about their own writing.

[alchimie]

I do see the point, about school assignments, and I understand it, but also I see other writing about books which I admire which manages to talk a great deal about /the book/ in a way that tells me something about the text itself, and I think my immediate inclination is to write about myself and how the book makes me feel, or what it reminds me of -- which is not a bad thing, but I would like to figure out how to do the other, the writing about the book, without feeling like I am trapped inside terrible memories of elementary school book reports. (I have never been able to summarise well in my life, I always wrote ten pages when two were called for, one was supposed to leave out the unimportant details and how was I supposed to know which ones didn't matter? In adulthood it is clearer, of course, and now I see my daughter struggle with the same and I have both enormous sympathy and some helpful strategies as she learns to navigate it.)

But -- yes, I know, it is just a struggle. I like it that you continue to remind me.

In the interests of some and immediate rather than later and polished, I am enjoying the beginning of The Road North very much, it reminds me of The Black Company in the best possible way -- single-named immmortal dangerous sorcerers are exactly what I like in my fiction -- but the narrator thus far also has a grounding that makes me more glad to be inside their head and curious about their world, rather than that vaguely shrinking distaste Cook's narrators often (deliberately, I'm sure) give me.

[graydon]

Abstracting text is hard. Deciding what's important is a decision, it's not at all inherent in the text. People are expected to learn by doing those book reports, generally, which I think is something of a pedagogical error. (At the very least, the idea that the "what's important" is inherent to the text is widespread and intractable.)

And then you get into the convincing people about your choice of what's important, in writing about the book. That isn't easy either. (I think Le Guin's From Elfland to Poughkeepsie has some splendid examples of this -- no, no, no one cares what happens, look at the word choices in the sentences! -- but saying "write like Ursula K. LeGuin" is not obviously helpful.)

The March North started as an attempt to write the contrapositive of a Black Company novel; then I had to answer "why are these people basically decent?" and there was the Commonweal. (I had to think about the Commonweal. Halt wandered in out of the dark whole and entire.) And certainly, whatever else they are, the Captain was meant to be a practical soul. I'm glad you're finding their head a place you're glad to be.

Cook, as prose stylist, has very few peers in their generation of writers. I'm also sure the layer of "urk" is deliberate.

[alchimie]

I have not read Cook in so long -- I was pointed towards The Black Company during my senior year of high school, and I read with a level of incomprehension about the basic assumptions of the novel that I later found shocking -- for instance I had no idea what mercenaries were, and did not seem to find this a deterrent but just read along merrily anyway, enjoying all the single-named wizards and having no understanding at all as to why anyone was doing anything. When I reread it in my early 20s I was surprised that the book made sense and it was the first time I realised how much the reader brings (or does not bring) that is not in the book itself. But I do not think I have read them since my early 20s, and I see them available to buy as ebooks, so more for the stack... I will read yours first, though, I am already underway, and Halt the elderly grandmother with her knit shawl and enormous sheep-like creature continues to delight.

[graydon]

Books are more or less assembly instructions, and it really matters who does the assembling. No argument from this quarter whatsoever!

One of the later Black Company books uses a first person narrator who is amnesiac and suffering from involuntary perceptual time travel. It works. I am still trying to figure out how it works, but it works.

Hurrah, delighted by Halt!