Wednesday Reading Meme
Jul. 9th, 2014 11:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Jo Walton’s My Real Children, which I found thoroughly underwhelming. What am I missing? Everyone else in the universe clearly loved this book, but I felt that it spent far too much time reciting events that happened rather than showing them to us. Yes, it covers a large time span, but the earlier chapters showed specific scenes that encapsulated that part of Patricia's life rather than just reciting events, so I don't see why the later chapters couldn't do the same.
But possibly it just wasn't the book for me, because I didn’t get the point of having two different timelines that split off with Patricia’s decision to marry or not marry Mark. That this decision would have a huge effect on her personal life seems painfully obvious and not worth hanging a book on; that it would create such hugely different worlds on the macro scale seems inexplicable, and saying “butterfly effect!” feels like a handwave rather than an explanation.
I also didn't think much of the ending.
At the end of the book, Patricia decides that the fact that she can remember two such different life stories means that she can somehow choose between them: she can either pick the blissful personal life in the world that went to hell in a handbasket (three nuclear wars and counting by the end of the book!), or she can pick the more difficult but still ultimately fulfilling life in the world that achieved nuclear disarmament and legalized gay marriage by the early eighties.
What kind of choice is that? What kind of monster seriously considers choosing personal bliss with the full knowledge that this choice dooms millions - hundreds of millions - of people to die from nuclear bombs and the resulting cancers and environmental degradation? Especially given that she doesn’t even get a bad life if she makes the other choice! A more difficult life, but still ultimately a productive one with a lot of happy moments.
What I’m Reading Now
Pamela Dean’s The Dubious Hills, which I have mixed feelings about. Dean's writing is lovely as always, but I'm not sure about the world-building. So the conceit of the book is that in the Dubious Hills, there's only one person in a community who knows a thing: there's one person who knows pain, one who knows character, one who knows teaching, one who knows death...
And everyone else only knows what that one person tells them about pain - so our heroine Arry, who knows pain, often greets people by telling them "You have a headache," because unless she tells them they just won't know.
And somehow this mechanism has prevented war for decades. I'm having a hard time following the train of reasoning behind this. If only one person actually understands pain (and one other person understands death), wouldn't that make it easier for everyone else to go make wars?
I'm about halfway through the book, so possibly everything will yet become clear.
What I Plan to Read Next
Peaches, by Jodi Lynn Anderson. I’ve been meaning to read this for...going on a decade now. It looks like The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants gone southern (admittedly, the fact that the author of Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants blurbed it probably contributes to this impression), so hopefully I will like it!
Jo Walton’s My Real Children, which I found thoroughly underwhelming. What am I missing? Everyone else in the universe clearly loved this book, but I felt that it spent far too much time reciting events that happened rather than showing them to us. Yes, it covers a large time span, but the earlier chapters showed specific scenes that encapsulated that part of Patricia's life rather than just reciting events, so I don't see why the later chapters couldn't do the same.
But possibly it just wasn't the book for me, because I didn’t get the point of having two different timelines that split off with Patricia’s decision to marry or not marry Mark. That this decision would have a huge effect on her personal life seems painfully obvious and not worth hanging a book on; that it would create such hugely different worlds on the macro scale seems inexplicable, and saying “butterfly effect!” feels like a handwave rather than an explanation.
I also didn't think much of the ending.
At the end of the book, Patricia decides that the fact that she can remember two such different life stories means that she can somehow choose between them: she can either pick the blissful personal life in the world that went to hell in a handbasket (three nuclear wars and counting by the end of the book!), or she can pick the more difficult but still ultimately fulfilling life in the world that achieved nuclear disarmament and legalized gay marriage by the early eighties.
What kind of choice is that? What kind of monster seriously considers choosing personal bliss with the full knowledge that this choice dooms millions - hundreds of millions - of people to die from nuclear bombs and the resulting cancers and environmental degradation? Especially given that she doesn’t even get a bad life if she makes the other choice! A more difficult life, but still ultimately a productive one with a lot of happy moments.
What I’m Reading Now
Pamela Dean’s The Dubious Hills, which I have mixed feelings about. Dean's writing is lovely as always, but I'm not sure about the world-building. So the conceit of the book is that in the Dubious Hills, there's only one person in a community who knows a thing: there's one person who knows pain, one who knows character, one who knows teaching, one who knows death...
And everyone else only knows what that one person tells them about pain - so our heroine Arry, who knows pain, often greets people by telling them "You have a headache," because unless she tells them they just won't know.
And somehow this mechanism has prevented war for decades. I'm having a hard time following the train of reasoning behind this. If only one person actually understands pain (and one other person understands death), wouldn't that make it easier for everyone else to go make wars?
I'm about halfway through the book, so possibly everything will yet become clear.
What I Plan to Read Next
Peaches, by Jodi Lynn Anderson. I’ve been meaning to read this for...going on a decade now. It looks like The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants gone southern (admittedly, the fact that the author of Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants blurbed it probably contributes to this impression), so hopefully I will like it!
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Date: 2014-07-09 03:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-07-09 04:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-07-10 07:31 am (UTC)I love The Dubious Hills for the language and atmosphere and the utter conviction of the bizarro concept. Have you gotten to the blushful Hippocrene yet?
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Date: 2014-07-10 03:34 pm (UTC)1) I would like to have those blushful Hippocrene pancakes, because they sound amazing; and
2) I am kind of impressed that she went there with the five-year-olds plotting Halver's death by drugged Hippocrene (even if Arry ultimately didn't let them go through it with it). It seems that if they had, they would have ended up outside the spell of the Dubious Hills anyway (as Arry and her little brother and sister did), so I suppose even then Halver would have won, in a sense.
I have the sense - both in The Dubious Hills and Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary - that there is something deep and thematic going on that I'm just not seeing. It feels like it all means something, but what?