Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I’ve Finished Reading

I finished this year’s Newbery winner, The Girl Who Drank the Moon, which on paper sounds like exactly the sort of thing I should have like - there’s a dash of dystopia and a bit of magic and a little natural history and a very small dragon - but the thing glueing it all together was soppy sentimentality (did you know love is what makes the world go ‘round? Unless of course it’s hope!) and I just wasn’t feeling it.

However, I often prefer the Newbery Honor books to the winners themselves, so I’m excited about reading those over the course of the year.

Progress on the Unread Book Club: I finished Robin McKinley’s A Knot in the Grain, which I remained lukewarm about until the final story, which I quite liked. The first four stories in the collection take place in vaguely fairy-talish fantasy worlds, whereas the final story takes place in the real world, with just a subtle dollop of magic - chocolate sauce on the ice cream of the story, as it were.

And I felt a pleasant frisson of identification with the heroine, Annabelle, who copes with the stress of having her parents move her to a new town by rereading all her old fantasy favorites from childhood. This is exactly the sort of vaguely counterproductive thing I would have done had my parents uprooted me when I was sixteen. And I, like Annabelle, would absolutely have decided that a fellow teenager was worth befriending upon learning that one of her favorite books was The Borrowers.

What I’m Reading Now

I started Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno, on the grounds that I liked his Alice in Wonderland, only to swiftly discover that this is emphatically the wrong reason to read Sylvie and Bruno. The introduction informs me that Carroll labored for decades to ensure Sylvie and Bruno was not much like Alice at all; it attempts mightily to insist that this was all for the best and not an artistic failure at all, but I am not so sure.

What I Plan to Read Next

Mockingjay!

And the library is not going to get me The Origins of Totalitarianism swiftly enough for it to serve for my March reading challenge (“a book over 600 pages”), so I was going to fall back on Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, but then I realized that I have the final Obernewtyn book sitting there staring at me right on my shelf and it’s over a thousand pages long and I really need to read that, so. Sorry, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. I will read you someday!

Comments

[roseneko.livejournal.com]

I read Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell some years back, and what I recall about it most was that it felt extremely...indulgent. Like, the author wasn't necessarily so interested in telling a story as she was spending time in this alternate-England, with these characters, and imagining various historical figures and how they would have related to said characters, and writing in the tone of a book of the time (which in places works marvelously well and in others just feels ridiculously twee), and creating a sense of atmosphere. So I suspect how much you enjoy it will align strongly with how much all of that appeals to you. I enjoyed the worldbuilding and the atmosphere a lot, but without a strong plot thread or much in the way of three-dimensional characters to inhabit it, it felt more like a kid showing off their very fancy dollhouse than an actual story.

That said, I'm watching the series now and I think it may be stronger - so far it feels like they've done a good job maintaining the atmosphere and setpiece scenes whilst excavating and refocusing on the plot. We'll see, though - I'm only a few episodes in.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

It sounds like The Night Circus, except with 19th century England and more famous people instead of a magical circus. I did like The Night Circus, although it must be said that it was much shorter and also I listened to it as an audiobook, which I think made it easier to ignore the lack of plot and the flatness of many of the characters and just float along on the river of imagery.

[roseneko.livejournal.com]

That's precisely the comparison I usually make. :) I read The Night Circus on a plane, and that was probably an ideal place, since I didn't have much else to do and the beautiful images were a nice distraction from the cramped conditions. I read JS&MN back when I was underemployed and had a lot of spare time, or else I don't think I would ever have finished it. These days, something needs to be pretty compelling/fun for me to actually sit down and read it, which is probably why so much of what I read is gay romance...short and sweet. Heavier stuff I tend to listen to in audiobook form while commuting, or just procrastinate. Which is probably partly why my TBR shelf is so huge, heh.

[evelyn-b.livejournal.com]

I think I'm just going to have to accept that while it sounds vaguely interesting, I'm not actually going to get around to reading Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell this decade.

Not so Catching Fire! I got another library copy today, so I will be able to catch up with the adventures of President Snow soon! I tried to pay the fee for the one I lost but they wouldn't let me because it wasn't due yet. :(

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Yay Catching Fire! I hope you enjoys the further misadventures of President Snow. I wish we knew how he rose to the presidency: inheritance? High-level court intrigues? Whatever it was, it didn't give him much of a flair for actual governance.

[evelyn-b.livejournal.com]

Yeah, on the one hand I'm feeling some impatience with his massively unsubtle ways and on the other, despite what the Society might want to maintain, you don't really need a flair for governance to kill people by the truckload.

(I do wonder how he got his present position, though. Apparently he's been around for at least 25 years, because he presided over the previous Quarter Quell - though it might be a president-for-life thing and it might just be that "President Snow" is an inherited title and all the President Snows are just surgically altered to look like one another - for all we know he could have been four different people since the start of The Hunger Games).

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

The Society has long philosophical discussions about the criteria for good dictatorship. Is it mere body count? Size of lands conquered and/or governed? Length of dynasty?

No one agrees. But they all agree that being deposed is a sign of failure, and President Snow is clearly riding the fail train right out of the station.

I think it's most likely that President has simply become an inherited title in Panem, buuuut it's also possible that President Snow battled his fellow members of the ruling council for it, like the Politburo. We will probably never know.

[ladyherenya]

I had that reaction to "A Knot in the Grain", too. I remember it much more vividly than anything else in that collection.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Yes. The others feel - all the same, comparatively. The content of the stories is quite different, but the style is the same for each one, and then it shifts abruptly for "A Knot in the Grain."