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Wednesday Reading Meme
Dec. 11th, 2013 08:17 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Rosemary Sutcliff’s Dawn Wind. I really liked it! I worried vaguely beforehand that it might be just as depressing as The Lantern-Bearers, as both of them involve heroes enslaved by Saxons, but Owain hates the world considerably less than Aquila and is therefore less draggingly miserable to read about.
(Of course, it helps that Owain sells himself into slavery by choice, more or less, to save his friend Regina when she’s ill. It’s not a free choice, but it’s still more of a choice than having his home burned down, being tied to a tree, and then kidnapped, as Aquila was.)
Oh, and I liked Regina an awful lot! She’s a study in contrasts, hardened by her life but with flashes of kindness as well. I think what I find particularly appealing is that her hardness is genuine, not merely a defensive protection for a soft squashy heart: she tried to kill her old caretaker, who used to beat her. But her softness, as in her love for birds, is genuine too.
On a more macro level, one of the things I find fascinating about Sutcliff’s work is the sense of the sweep of history in it. Tribes and states and empires never just are in her work, they are always in a process of becoming. Either they are rising and replacing the empires that have come before, or decaying and being replaced in their turn.
What I’m Reading Now
Delia Sherman’s The Freedom Maze, about Sophie, a bookish white girl in 1960s Louisiana who, under the influence of too many Edward Eager novels, asks an uncanny creature to send her back in time. She winds up on her family’s plantation in the 1860s, where she gets mistaken for one of their relation Robert’s bastard slave children.
I suspect things are going to start going very badly for Sophie once her many-great ancestors realize that this is not so, but so far she’s coping with her situation by trying to convince herself that this is a perfectly acceptable adventure, if perhaps rockier than she anticipated. Oh, Sophie. :( This is going to end in brutal disillusionment and I feel bad for her in advance.
Before I started the book I felt trepidation about the potential anviliciousness of the message - I mean, just look at that premise - but so far the book has lived up to the laudatory review that convinced me to read it. Sophie’s characterization is a great triumph. She loves books and exploring and is a little awkward, is in short very easy to sympathize with - but at the same time, she’s imbued with the racism of her surroundings.
It’s not a virulent racism: it’s subtle and insidious enough that merely meeting black people on a level of equality is not enough to blow her tiny mind. Given how thoughtfully she’s been portrayed so far, I feel cautiously hopeful that the book will avoid anviliciousness.
Also I’m reading Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin. I’m reading this before bedtime, which means I’m getting through it rather slowly. But it’s also going well: it’s a book with a lot of book talk in it, which is always fun, and Dean has a gift for creating a sense of place and atmosphere at Blackstock College.
And it’s interesting just how different the college experience was, even just twenty years ago. I don’t mean only the lack of computers (although that does catch me up), but Janet’s comment on her anthropology professor: “Nor did it seem that he communed with the dead - the dates on all the books except one showed that the authors were either still alive or but recently dead.”
I think there is more of an assumption, now, that new books are better than old.
What I Plan to Read Next
I have a whole slew of Sutcliff books on hold from the university library, having just realized that this is my last chance to get at them. I’m particularly looking forward to reading The Mark of the Horse Lord.
Rosemary Sutcliff’s Dawn Wind. I really liked it! I worried vaguely beforehand that it might be just as depressing as The Lantern-Bearers, as both of them involve heroes enslaved by Saxons, but Owain hates the world considerably less than Aquila and is therefore less draggingly miserable to read about.
(Of course, it helps that Owain sells himself into slavery by choice, more or less, to save his friend Regina when she’s ill. It’s not a free choice, but it’s still more of a choice than having his home burned down, being tied to a tree, and then kidnapped, as Aquila was.)
Oh, and I liked Regina an awful lot! She’s a study in contrasts, hardened by her life but with flashes of kindness as well. I think what I find particularly appealing is that her hardness is genuine, not merely a defensive protection for a soft squashy heart: she tried to kill her old caretaker, who used to beat her. But her softness, as in her love for birds, is genuine too.
On a more macro level, one of the things I find fascinating about Sutcliff’s work is the sense of the sweep of history in it. Tribes and states and empires never just are in her work, they are always in a process of becoming. Either they are rising and replacing the empires that have come before, or decaying and being replaced in their turn.
What I’m Reading Now
Delia Sherman’s The Freedom Maze, about Sophie, a bookish white girl in 1960s Louisiana who, under the influence of too many Edward Eager novels, asks an uncanny creature to send her back in time. She winds up on her family’s plantation in the 1860s, where she gets mistaken for one of their relation Robert’s bastard slave children.
I suspect things are going to start going very badly for Sophie once her many-great ancestors realize that this is not so, but so far she’s coping with her situation by trying to convince herself that this is a perfectly acceptable adventure, if perhaps rockier than she anticipated. Oh, Sophie. :( This is going to end in brutal disillusionment and I feel bad for her in advance.
Before I started the book I felt trepidation about the potential anviliciousness of the message - I mean, just look at that premise - but so far the book has lived up to the laudatory review that convinced me to read it. Sophie’s characterization is a great triumph. She loves books and exploring and is a little awkward, is in short very easy to sympathize with - but at the same time, she’s imbued with the racism of her surroundings.
It’s not a virulent racism: it’s subtle and insidious enough that merely meeting black people on a level of equality is not enough to blow her tiny mind. Given how thoughtfully she’s been portrayed so far, I feel cautiously hopeful that the book will avoid anviliciousness.
Also I’m reading Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin. I’m reading this before bedtime, which means I’m getting through it rather slowly. But it’s also going well: it’s a book with a lot of book talk in it, which is always fun, and Dean has a gift for creating a sense of place and atmosphere at Blackstock College.
And it’s interesting just how different the college experience was, even just twenty years ago. I don’t mean only the lack of computers (although that does catch me up), but Janet’s comment on her anthropology professor: “Nor did it seem that he communed with the dead - the dates on all the books except one showed that the authors were either still alive or but recently dead.”
I think there is more of an assumption, now, that new books are better than old.
What I Plan to Read Next
I have a whole slew of Sutcliff books on hold from the university library, having just realized that this is my last chance to get at them. I’m particularly looking forward to reading The Mark of the Horse Lord.
