A Fan's Playground

Once again, time to give a try to an excessively-long 19th century novel! I was genuinely unsure, going into this one, whether I would like it or not, but I DO like a) stories about ships and b) people enthusiastically sharing facts about the natural world, so I figured I would at least give it a try.

I was pretty dubious by about 150 pages in; I was just finding myself so bored! But I figured I would at least wait it out until the book actually took us to sea, because that might change things.

And it did!

It turns out that the key is that the first 150 pages seem like they're trying to be an ordinary sort of narrative but are just bad at that, but by the time you get to sea and are just constantly inundated by Whale Facts and Whale Opinions, it settles more into what kind of book it actually is, and then I can vibe with it.

The thing about this book is that it is....hm. Expansive. In all ways. Its sentences are expansive, its vocabulary is expansive, its overall length is expansive (obviously), and it expands every moment it can into further ruminating about whales; and the whales it discusses are also, of course, expansive.

I think it's mirroring what the author sees as the monumental nature of whales, thus creating a book as monumental as its subject. And you know what, I think it kind of works! It's weird; it's a deeply weird book, not quite like any other book I've read, but once you get into the right mindset and allow the Discourse Upon Whales to flow over you, I think it really does do a great job of capturing the feel it's going for.

One aspect of this is that the characters within the book don't ever feel quite like specific individual people to me, but more like representatives of archetypes, to allow them to better fit into the monumental nature of the work. This isn't what I usually am interested in in character-work, but again, it works for what this book is doing.

There are plenty of specifics one can discuss about the book (Ishmael/Queequeg: GAY. Melville's whale facts: not always actually factual. Captain Ahab: really bad at being a captain. etc.) but what I was most strongly left with when I finished the book wasn't any of the details of the book, but the overall vibe.

Though I was also surprised by how much the reading of this book made me actually feel so agonizingly bad for all these murdered whales, given that the book is, overall, firmly pro-whaling.

Anyway. I doubt I am likely to reread the book again in the future, but I AM glad I gave it a go! Definitely an interesting piece of literature.

Omg this is so funny it's like an Andy Weir novel except the Exciting Cutting-Edge Science Things it's about are....electricity, the mysteries of ocean life, and the classification of species. Because those were new and exciting at the time Verne was writing! I get easily bored with the kinds of modern scifi novels that have merely a vague trapping of plot and character from which to hang lengthy scientific exposition, but when it's from over 150 years ago, the vibes are entirely changed, and I am here for it, lol. I mean, it's still boring and I still skimmed over a not-insignificant amount of the lists of sea creatures and their classification, but I am charmed by it instead of irritated by it?

Anyway, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is from the perspective of a gentleman scientist who is on a mission to help kill an enormous and destructive sea monster, but that monster turns out to instead be a technologically advanced submarine, and the pov character, along with his trusty servant Conseil, and also the harpooner Ned Land who struck the submarine, are captured by the captain of the submarine and are told they will never be allowed to leave again, so that the secrets of captain and ship will not be revealed.

Then the rest of the book is rapturous descriptions of scientific marvels as they travel around the world -- the 20,000 leagues of the title is the distance they travel around the globe, for the record, not the depth beneath the ocean they reach, which was a surprise to me as that's not how I'd interpreted the title.

Throughout, there are hints given of Captain Nemo's tragic past that has led him to reject the world of land-dwellers entirely and desire some sort of unspecified revenge for the unspecified tragedies of his past. But it's a noble revenge and a noble rejection by a thoroughly admirable scientific man, of course.

There are many very funny elements to the book that are definitely not intended as funny, mostly due to incongruity which my modern perspective discerns. Like the way the book is simultaneously like, "oh no it's bad to hunt the black whales, the cruel whale industry is soon going to wipe them out, what a tragedy; BUT those mean nasty sperm whales deserve to die in a complete massacre." Or some of the particularly outlandish scientific errors that the author didn't know enough to avoid. (The bends? What are the bends? We don't know her.) Or the way it sometimes feels the need to make it clear how COOL and VALUABLE an experience is by talking about how much money something they see would be worth if it was sold, despite the otherwise prevalent viewpoint that the important thing is the scientific knowledge gained. The narrative just can't help itself about making it clear that it's also CAPITALISTICALLY worthwhile to engage in scientific discovery.

Be ready for some racism if you read this book; it's about educated white Victorian-era men being world travellers so of course there are "savages" encountered at one point and other stuff like that. Unfortunate, since this is ostensibly a book about people who have entirely cut themselves off from the world of the people on land, and it STILL managed to insert this stuff.

It's also subtly classist in a way where it's not even aware enough to notice that it has any opinions about class, but just these little hints Ned Land and Conseil are not the pov character's peers and thus not really company the way Captain Nemo can be. And Ned Land and Conseil are both just entirely composed of a one-note stereotype each, with no dimension. I mean, don't get me wrong, I enjoyed both of them! But the treatment of their characters as compared to Nemo is obvious. (It's also very funny that the narrative keeps on referring to Ned by the epithet "the Canadian" as if that's the most important thing about him!)

When I reached the end of the book though, I was outraged to discover that we DON'T ACTUALLY GET TO LEARN ANY OF CAPTAIN NEMO'S SECRETS. We learn that his family is all dead, and that he wanted revenge against a particular ship, but that is the extent of the information we learn. No further details about any of the rest of the context that was alluded to exist. And NOTHING about why the rest of his crew also chose to abandon the world to live in the submarine full-time, or about where the language they all speak with each other originated, or what the crew think of these additional passengers who Nemo took on board, or any other context about any of the actually interesting plot elements. No, it was far more important to dedicate page time to fish lists.

Anyway now I want fanfic because surely SOMEONE out there has taken it upon themselves to write more about the characters Verne created!

Oh boy. Really not sure what to think about this one. There are many things about it that are brilliantly done, and up to halfway through the book I was absolutely in love with the book and the things it was doing. It's a historical fiction involving alternate history and time travel, and the way Pulley introduces this alternate world to the reader is beautifully done, and then the narrative kept on going to wilder and weirder places than I was expecting and I was loving every minute of it, and loving everything about these sad broken people who had been traumatized by war and by slavery. (and it does SUCH a good job of making it clear how horrible naval battles really were, instead of glorifying them the way historical fiction often seems to!) I especially loved the horrible painful sibling bond between Agatha and Kite, the way they've immeasurably hurt each other even though they love each other, or even because they love each other.

However. The emotional weight given to various aspects of the narrative seemed off to me, in places, and it meant that the second half of the book just started feeling more and more wrong to me. ( cut for spoilers )

Frances Hardinge is VERY GOOD at simultaneously making me very invested in her books and also very worried about what the heck's going to happen next. I love her writing so much but it's hard work to get through every book of hers I read, but I WANT to read them because they're so brilliant! It is a struggle being a wuss like me.

The other problem with Hardinge is that it's hard to just quickly and succinctly summarize her books because there's a lot going on. And like, it all goes together beautifully and makes perfect sense in the reading of it, but how do I give you a couple-sentence introduction?

Deeplight is about an orphan kid named Hark who's kind of a small time criminal, and whose best friend Jelt keeps egging him on to do more dangerous things. When Hark's captured by the authorities, he's indentured to a scientist experimenting with what you can do with the remains of all the dead gods who died several decades earlier. Now he's acting as a spy in a household of aging priests from the days when priests were still relevant, so the scientist can learn secrets about the gods! And Jelt won't leave him alone either!

Some of the other things Deeplight is about:

• what does it mean to be a friend to someone when they're not a good friend to you?


• a culture with a large contingent of deaf people, where knowing sign is normalized


• what makes a god a god, and do they deserve adulation just for being one?


• an all-glass submarine called the Screaming Sea Butterfly which does, in fact, travel by screaming very loudly, it's horrible and I love it


• the trolley problem, on a very large scale


• what is the core of a person's identity, and can it change? (and should it change?)


• lovecraftian monsters of the deep


• the importance of providing chances for young people on the wrong side of the law to get an education and better opportunities in life

I'm also fascinated by how the impending threat of colonialism is something that Deeplight ISN'T really about; the Myriad (the archipelago of islands where all this is taking place) is definitely under threat by the Continents, but the Myriddens mostly have other things on their minds and our main characters DEFINITELY have other things on their minds so that's just....left. As a throwaway detail, of a thing to worry about happening after the end of the book. THANKS HARDINGE.

I also love the way, like usual, none of Hardinge's characters are what you could call unambiguously good people (or, for that matter, unambiguously bad people). And yet they're so believable and understandable and compellingly morally-complicated!

I found Hark and Jelt's friendship really hard to read about. Very believable, in an agonizing kind of way. Jelt has certain ideas of what loyalty means, and he's become used to manipulating Hark into doing whatever Jelt wants. And Hark can recognize that the dynamics aren't great and he keeps on WANTING to tell Jelt no, but keeps getting sucked back in by the way Jelt's so good at controlling the narrative in their conversations. One of the things that becomes clear in the book is that Hark having power through the telling of stories is something that's important to his identity, so it's really interesting how with Jelt he never can.

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People who've been following me for a long time may or may not remember that years ago I was working on making my way through the whole Aubrey-Maturin series by Patrick O'Brian. For those unfamiliar: this is a series of 20ish* books following the adventures of a naval captain named Jack Aubrey and his close friend Stephen Maturin, a naturalist and physician who travels with him as ship's surgeon, during the Napoleonic Wars.

I got stuck in my read-through FIVE YEARS AGO because the book I was halfway into (#11) was too stressful to read, and I just........kept on not being able to finish reading it. So finally I was like, you know what, I miss these books, I'm just gonna reread the first one instead.

And gosh, I'd forgotten JUST HOW MUCH I adore Patrick O'Brian's writing. This man is one of my absolute favourite authors and I don't know how he does it, he just writes in a way that is perfectly suited to my tastes: he's funny, and interesting, and has a deft hand for how to create (or defuse) tension, and can bring wonderful characters to life in moments, and is a master hand at implying things for the reader to infer (the whole business with getting that replacement spar in this book! amazing!), and has perfect pacing with which he subtly lays out his jokes, and so much more, I just love these books so much. And it's amazing to see how brilliant O'Brian already was in the very first book of this series.

It felt strange to be back at the beginning of the series again, with Jack Aubrey a young man just recently promoted to his first ever command of a ship, and once again seeing Aubrey and Maturin's hilarious opposite-of-a-meet-cute at the beginning. So much has happened between book 1 and book 11!

I can't say that reading this book was un-stressful though. Unlike when I first read it, I have a deep and longstanding love for the characters involved and so my concerns about what's going to happen to them over the course of the book are that much more intense. Even though I know things more or less work out for the characters in the long run, seeing them go through negative experiences (or anticipating seeing them go through such) is HARD! So I had to do a perhaps-unreasonable amount of pausing the reread for a few days here and there to gain the strength to continue. Not exactly the easy escape from being stuck halfway through #11 I was expecting, whoops. But I got through it in the end and I still adore this book and this series and these characters and everything. WHAT A GOOD.

*the "ish" is because the 21st book was unfinished at the time of the author's death but was published anyways in that incomplete state

The sequel to The Girl From Everywhere, and it is so gooooood! This one focuses on the question of whether it's possible to deliberately change the past using time travel. Also it heavily features a Western myth that I have never heard of before, which is frankly astonishing to me given how much folklore and mythology I have read in my time.

Nix and co travel to the mythical island of Ker-Ys to meet a man who tells Nix he can change the past. As Nix has had her fortune told that she will lose the one she loves to the sea, she's feeling rather desperate to learn if this can be avoided.

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This is Ernest Shackleton's memoir of an expedition he led to Antarctica in the early 20th century. As the book title more or less indicates.

The expedition's intention was that this would be the first complete overland crossing of Antarctica from one side to the other. This was definitely not achieved. The part of the expedition that was planning to do the overland crossing never even made landfall! And yet everyone still got to spend multiple years enduring remarkable hardship in the unforgiving weather of Antarctica with not enough gear. Good times.

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Book #3 in the Swallows & Amazons series, but a significant departure in approach from the previous books: the story that this book tells is a story that the children in the series tell each other about a fictional adventure they have, as opposed to this book being about something that "really" happens in the universe of this series.

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Meh. Written in the 1940's by a man, and the gender dynamics are unfortunately what you'd expect from that origin. Also the plot and characters are not what one might call nuanced. According to the internet, the people who like this book like it for its prose and imagery, not its plot and characters, but I wasn't struck by the prose and imagery myself - I mean, it's fine, but nothing special, and not worth reading the kinda-crap story for, since there's plenty of better books with just as good (and better!) prose/imagery.

Awwww my wee babby Hornblower, he's so CUTE and EARNEST and GREAT. He's all shy and awkward and lonely and prone to some pretty terrible depression and with the worst self-esteem, and he's also very intelligent and capable and oh so honourable, and basically it's the BEST.

This book (and I am going to assume the rest of the series) is, um, rather dramatic and unrealistic, but entirely charming.

I can't help but compare to Patrick O'Brian (OF COURSE, books set during the Napoleonic war centered on a British officer at sea) and like, it's nowhere near as good? But it's a different kind of enjoyable to read. Forester isn't as good at characterization as O'Brian, but who is? And I kept getting lost in Forester's fight scenes, which doesn't happen to me in O'Brian. And Forester doesn't give me those moments of just basking in a perfect turn of phrase or amazing idea, or giggling with delight over something that just happened. But Forester is enjoyable and ridiculous and fun and above all not stressful. I definitely need to read the rest of the series.

Something I appreciate in this book: despite being a book set almost entirely at sea in a male profession, it still managed to have a great (though brief) female character role. Aww Kitty Cobham you're wonderful.