Wednesday Reading Meme (44. China Dolls)
Dec. 3rd, 2014 08:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Lisa See’s China Dolls, which I didn’t much like, sadly. Many of See’s books (possibly all of See’s books? It might not be a major theme in Peony in Love) feature loving but difficult relationships between women: May and Pearl in Shanghai Girls, Lily and Snow Flower in Snow Flower and the Secret Fan. She’s clearly going for this dynamic again in China Dolls, but unfortunately the balance is tipped so far in the direction of “difficult” that it’s hard to see why they bother with each other.
Also, the book relied far too heavily on the fact that one of the narrators wasn’t telling the readers the truth, which is a device I find irritating unless there’s a really good excuse for it. The narrator is telling the story to her interrogators and therefore not telling it straight? Fine. The narrator is suffering from partial amnesia but telling us the truth as she knows it? Fine. The narrator is leaving out huge gaps of information because it’s convenient for the author? UGH.
It also means that the big reveal near the end falls completely flat, because there’s been this big betrayal and the character who made it trots out all these reasons for it. But we haven’t heard any of these reasons in her sections of narration, so it feels like she’s making it up to manipulate the others. We’re not supposed to think she’s lying to her friends and is actually a psychopath who gets her rocks off by pitting people against each other, but that’s the reading that makes the most sense.
What I’m Reading Now
Paula Byrne’s Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead, which might be summarized “Maybe interwar Britain really was as gay as Jo Walton portrayed it in Farthing? I thought that making literally every single male character except the heroine’s father either gay or bisexual (and probably the father was just hiding his true proclivities from his daughter) had to be overstating things. AND YET.”
I’m much more interested in interwar Britain than Evelyn Waugh himself, but the book is good on both counts - although so far Byrne hasn’t convinced me of her thesis that Waugh wasn’t a snob; so far her main defense seems to be that he was, like, a hipster snob, being snobbish ironically. Okay then.
I’m also reading A. S. Byatt’s Possession, which is a mystery about literary and historical research. Why is this not an entire genre? I for once would read the hell out of it.
What I Plan to Read Next
I’ve been thinking about doing a Harry Potter reread. I read the first three books about five billion times when they first came out, but I haven’t reread any of it for years, because I found the later books progressively more disappointing. But now I feel a hankering to give it another go.
Lisa See’s China Dolls, which I didn’t much like, sadly. Many of See’s books (possibly all of See’s books? It might not be a major theme in Peony in Love) feature loving but difficult relationships between women: May and Pearl in Shanghai Girls, Lily and Snow Flower in Snow Flower and the Secret Fan. She’s clearly going for this dynamic again in China Dolls, but unfortunately the balance is tipped so far in the direction of “difficult” that it’s hard to see why they bother with each other.
Also, the book relied far too heavily on the fact that one of the narrators wasn’t telling the readers the truth, which is a device I find irritating unless there’s a really good excuse for it. The narrator is telling the story to her interrogators and therefore not telling it straight? Fine. The narrator is suffering from partial amnesia but telling us the truth as she knows it? Fine. The narrator is leaving out huge gaps of information because it’s convenient for the author? UGH.
It also means that the big reveal near the end falls completely flat, because there’s been this big betrayal and the character who made it trots out all these reasons for it. But we haven’t heard any of these reasons in her sections of narration, so it feels like she’s making it up to manipulate the others. We’re not supposed to think she’s lying to her friends and is actually a psychopath who gets her rocks off by pitting people against each other, but that’s the reading that makes the most sense.
What I’m Reading Now
Paula Byrne’s Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead, which might be summarized “Maybe interwar Britain really was as gay as Jo Walton portrayed it in Farthing? I thought that making literally every single male character except the heroine’s father either gay or bisexual (and probably the father was just hiding his true proclivities from his daughter) had to be overstating things. AND YET.”
I’m much more interested in interwar Britain than Evelyn Waugh himself, but the book is good on both counts - although so far Byrne hasn’t convinced me of her thesis that Waugh wasn’t a snob; so far her main defense seems to be that he was, like, a hipster snob, being snobbish ironically. Okay then.
I’m also reading A. S. Byatt’s Possession, which is a mystery about literary and historical research. Why is this not an entire genre? I for once would read the hell out of it.
What I Plan to Read Next
I’ve been thinking about doing a Harry Potter reread. I read the first three books about five billion times when they first came out, but I haven’t reread any of it for years, because I found the later books progressively more disappointing. But now I feel a hankering to give it another go.
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no subject
Date: 2014-12-03 02:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-12-03 09:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-12-03 09:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-12-03 03:50 pm (UTC)I am always here for a Harry Potter re-read. Always.
ETA I am not as familiar with Evelyn Waugh as I should be, but how is being an ironic hipster snob less snobby that being a snob in earnest, if no one but the most careful biographer can tell the difference?
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Date: 2014-12-03 08:23 pm (UTC)Snob has ceased to look like a word now.
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Date: 2014-12-03 05:12 pm (UTC)Harry Potter re-read is just a thing to do before the holidays, imo. It is endlessly comforting and entertaining. Like seeing a good friend after a long time.
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Date: 2014-12-03 09:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-12-03 06:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-12-03 09:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-12-03 09:37 pm (UTC)Evelyn Waugh was one of my picks. While I would never claim I can see through his eyes, I do believe that he was a snob from the gitgo--you can see it in his diary during his teen years, and on. He had one voice for his upper crust friends, and another for the rest of the world. It was desperately important to him to be taken as better born than he was.
Brideshead is (imo) an interesting, complex work. It's admirable in many ways, and revealing in others . . . and it's interesting to note in reviews, private letters, diaries, etc that many of his upper class pals found it embarrassing.
For some really interesting contrasts, read his diary and then his memoir about his school years in A Little Learning. Some of his most beautiful writing in it, but here is a man who utterly reinvented himself, to great cost in more ways than mere money.
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Date: 2014-12-04 04:19 am (UTC)Oh, HP re-read! I'm intrigued. :)
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Date: 2014-12-04 11:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-12-04 01:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-12-04 11:14 pm (UTC)