sophia_sol | Entries tagged with book theme: famous/classic

Lud-in-the-Mist is a fantasy novel published in the 1920's, well before the modern genre of fantasy was really established. It's so interesting to read a fantasy novel from that time before Tolkien dropped like a meteor into the genre landscape, affecting everything from thereafter; everything post-tolkien was either written with inspiration from Tolkien, or in reaction against how much everything was written with inspiration from Tolkien, I feel like. But this one is doing its own thing, but in a way that feels to me maturely developed, as if it came out of a long tradition of fantasy novels just like it, even though it definitely didn't.

I've previously heard Lud-in-the-Mist being praised as a perfect gem of a novel, but although I enjoyed it, I would definitely not go that far. I've also heard it be called things like sweet, and lovely, which led me to certain expectations of the tone of the book which ended up to be rather inaccurate!

The novel takes place in a prosaic town in a vaguely British-feeling secondary world, in the country of Dorimare. The town is close, however, to a boundary with Faerie, and fairy fruit keeps getting smuggled in, with great effect on those who eat of it. The book opens slowly, with an exploration of the setting and context of the story, which I found very interesting, but eventually the major characters and plot are introduced. The long and short of it is: how to keep the fairy influence out of their town?

The book is very good at setting and place and atmosphere, at creating a sense of the liminal space between Faerie and Dorimare. The characters all feel fairly realistic and believable also. But I just couldn't bring myself to care much about most of the major characters, which was a real problem! They're mostly fairly unpleasant people, but I don't think that's what was keeping me at a distance. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which I think is a book very much in the tradition of Lud-in-the-Mist, is also a novel about a collection of mostly-unpleasant characters, but I find all of them compelling. I'm not sure what JS&MN is doing differently on it than LitM!

Anyway I'm glad I read it, and I would love to read more books like it...but preferably with characters I like better lol.

I read this as Frankenstein Weekly, a book club email list that was set up after the popularity of Dracula Daily last year. I'm glad, because I’ve been meaning to read this book for years but never got round to it, and having it show up in my inbox by chapter was very convenient.

And certainly the book is an interesting read. But one I enjoyed more as a historical artifact than as a novel to my tastes, honestly.

I genuinely enjoyed the part from the Creature’s pov; he was sympathetic, even if he made bad choices in the end. But the vast majority of the narrative is from Frankenstein's pov and I find him just irritating tbh. He has no drive to take responsibility for his actions ever, and not even in an interesting way! And yet Walton is entirely admiring of Frankenstein, and Frankenstein seems to be presented to the reader as a guy you’re supposed to sympathize with.

BUT. Despite all the pro-Frankenstein content, the Creature gets the last word in the book, in the end! I love that.

It strikes me that in the context this book was written, when sff didn’t exist as a genre yet, expecting the reader to sympathize with a monstrous and unnatural being was likely a big ask, and so what the book is doing is trying to show that even when people with many admirable virtues hate a being they see as a monster, that monster can still have virtues of its own and a reasonable perspective worth listening to, and shouldn’t be shunned without question. Which, hey, a moral that continues to be relevant!

Look, there's another queer Great Gatsby novel, obviously I had to give it a try! This one's premise is: what if Nick and Gatsby were trans men and also explicitly textually into each other, plus Nick and Daisy are Latinx. And like, yeah, sure, I'm in!

Unfortunately, though I think the book is successful at what it's doing, it turned out to not work for me personally on several different levels. It's a good, readable, thoughtful, queer book with coherent themes and sympathetic yet imperfect characters doing their best, which should be my jam. And just about every criticism I'm able to come up with, there are reasonable reasons the choices were made, and I can understand and sometimes even appreciate those choices! And yet as a whole I was left dissatisfied.

( Read more... )

So like. As I said. My issues with this book are me problems, and I can imagine a different reader experiencing this as a five-star book, where for me it's solidly 3 stars and not a bit more.

So I'm nil out of 2 so far on queer Gatsby retellings that work for me. But if/when I hear about another one, though, I will return, ever-hopeful that maybe the next one will be the one that works for me!

I've seen this recommended many times, and this is the year! I was expecting A Room of One's Own to be a straightforward book-length essay arguing about the ways a culture of misogyny has gotten in the way of women's writing and the things women need to be successful writers, but it's got a much more interesting structure and approach than that. Woolf uses the conceit of telling the story of a particular (fictional) day in the life of a woman and the things she experienced and thought about over the course of that day, in order to both straightforwardly argue points like I expected but also to just, like, put forward the realities of women's experiences for the reader to ponder upon and draw their own conclusions.

It's fascinating, it's compellingly written, it's extremely more-ish. It's full of both things where I'm like "YEAH YOU'RE SO RIGHT, BRING IT" and things where I desperately want to argue with Woolf, but like, argue (affectionate). And I'm pretty confident that's what she was going for, tbh!! An invigorating read, and now I want to read more things by Woolf.

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.

I've read the Odyssey once before, over a decade ago, in the Fagles translation. And I really enjoyed it! Then when I heard about the Wilson translation, and the kinds of things she was doing, I was very curious and interested to see how different it would be.

Turns out the two translations have VERY different feels. The Fagles is far wordier and more consciously poetic sounding to the English ear, the Wilson is more plainspoken and direct. I don't know what the experience is like of reading it in Homeric Greek so I don't know which better captures the feel of the original, and trying to google for information on the homeric style gets me a lot of not-very-trustworthy sources saying very different things. But I do appreciate that the Wilson starts with a note on translation choices, so you understand what she's trying to do and her thoughts about her approach as compared to other ways it has been done. The Fagles says nothing about its translation. And because of Wilson's explanation I knew what to look for and appreciate in her version!

I had a very different experience reading the two translations as well, but that could just as easily be the changes in me in the decade between so it's not exactly a rigorous comparison, lol. The first time I read the Odyssey I was newly graduated from university, had a recent concussion, and was on an extremely long flight across half the globe; this time I'm living a settled life in my thirties. Also when I first read it I honestly had very little idea what to expect, because the things I thought I knew about it from popular culture don't actually closely reflect the actual experience of reading the work itself, so I found it constantly surprising.

So the first time I read it, in the Fagles, I engaged with it mostly just as fun story to feel fannish about. And I found it lots of fun! This time, with the Wilson, I read it more as a piece of insight into the culture and values of a very different time and place; plenty interesting, but a bit less fun. Is that me, is that the translation, is that both? Who knows.

So I guess I don't have a lot useful to say about comparative translations here, unfortunately! At any rate, the Odyssey is definitely a poem worth reading, and I'm glad I came back to it, and I'm glad I got some of Wilson's perspective on it too.

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!

This book has been on my mind for a while to give a try to, since

genarti said she thought I might enjoy it, and then Dracula Daily happened to tumblr and I signed up for it. And then a few days into it I was like "actually I don't like the slow route, I need to read this all at once" so then I did! A fascinating experience. I liked it a lot more than Carmilla, which I read relatively recently and found enormously boring. Dracula has more interest in developing characters, and in having a plot, and so forth, so despite Dracula being far longer, I found it the easier read of the two. (I'm still sad about Carmilla not being as appealing to me as I wanted it to be!)

Dracula is one of those books that's had a perhaps outsized impact on popular culture. A lot of vampire tropes started here! But living in a culture having been shaped by Dracula, it's amazing to see in the original how very long it takes to get to the vampire reveal, since vampires weren't a known staple of the supernatural genre. You'd never hold off the "he's a vampire" so long in a modern vampire book!

Due to the pop culture pervasiveness, one thinks one knows what to expect from the book even before having read it. And....one would be wrong. Or at least I was! I've never actually directly consumed any Dracula adaptations before, and it turns out I knew basically nothing about any of the plot or the characters.

( Read more... )

This is, famously, one of the earliest works of vampire fiction, and one with strong f/f overtones. The ur literature of predatory lesbian vampires! It's a short work, novella-length, and a quick read. And, unfortunately, I found it kinda boring.

The thing is, the main draw this work uses to compel the reader forward is the ~mystery~ of what's going on. Characters are flat, plot relatively nonexistent, and not much success in creating a tone of creepiness. And I already know the answer to the mystery, so there's not much else!

I was also disappointed in the lesbian aspect. Yes, Carmilla's very obviously into Laura, and Laura into her, but from the very beginning and then throughout, Laura finds Carmilla off-putting as well as attractive. I personally think it would have been more interesting if Laura had just been 100% into Carmilla; it would provide more space for her to have complicated emotions after she discovers the truth about Carmilla, instead of being able to console herself that she knew all along that something was wrong.

Also it's definitely doing a "lesbian desire is dangerous and wrong" thing, which like, unsurprising for its era but I was still hoping it would be able to subvert that a LITTLE somehow!

But ALSO it's doing all this from the plausibly deniable distance of "oh this is what intense romantic friendships are like, that's a perfectly normal thing for girls to do" so you don't get like, any kind of acknowledgement of what's going on.

Are all of these layers of historical interest? Absolutely! But that was about the only level on which I cared about this stuff, because the relationship as portrayed just didn't interest me.

On another note: the book makes ZERO effort to explain the older woman who travels with Carmilla to help ingratiate her with her prey! I do actually want to know what was up with her! Tell me more!

This book probably does hold more interest for people who unlike me are actually into vampire stories, as it gives an introduction to the earliest forms of the genre. (Caitlin Doughty of Ask A Mortician apparently loves it, which is on brand for her!) But me, I wasn't particularly drawn in by the experience. Oh well, at least it's short enough that it didn't take me much time!

Rebecca is a justifiably famous book! Extremely compelling, very more-ish, and with all sorts of interesting complexity going on.

Going into this book for the first time, I actually already knew pretty much what to expect, because I'm familiar with a musical version of Rebecca. Not that I've ever watched the musical! But there's a euro musical about her, and there's a demo album translating that musical into english -- with, and this is key, bits of narration between the songs telling the listener what's happening. So I already knew all the major emotional beats, the characters, and what to expect out of the plot. Because I've listened to that demo a LOT.

And actually the most surprising thing about reading the book was how unsurprising it was? I expected the musical to have taken more liberties with the text! But in fact it hews remarkably close.

The two things the musical does differently:
( both are spoilers I think )

Something that gets lost in the transition to musical from novel is the tenor of the protagonist's narration. She is constantly getting carried away with her imaginings of the future or the past or someone else's internal life, to the degree that she seems almost to live more in her imagined version of the world than in reality. I loved this, and how much it added to both a) the constant feeling of foreboding in the novel, and b) the sense of how young and naive and powerless she is.

She's a fascinating character to see through the eyes of; you're encouraged, as the reader, to get drawn into her point of view, to be on her side, to want what she wants, because she seems like just about the only non-sinister thing in the entire book! (well okay, Mrs Van Hopper doesn't seem sinister, just banal and unpleasant)

( more spoilers )

So yes it turns out the protagonist is a horrible person too, just like most other people in the book, and it's great. And you still care about her!

The other important thing in the book, beyond the protagonist and her narrative perspective on things, is Rebecca and Mrs Danvers being evil lesbians. Because they ARE and it's DELICIOUS.

Actually this is something thing that I think the musical does even better than the book, though the book also does a great job. But musicals are MADE for letting someone take the stage in proper dramatic-evil-lesbian fashion, and Mrs Danvers DELIVERS. Mrs Danvers is all "did u kno Rebecca is a beautiful immortal with magic powers who scorns men, and she loves me very much and would never leave me, and I WILL use this information to bully you to death via song." Amazing.

The song that singlehandedly got me interested in Rebecca back in the day, though, was the Hungarian version of Maxim's confession song, because the actor playing Maxim is just great. (Bereczki Zoltán! He's also great as Mercutio in Rómeó és Júlia, among other things.) There used to be a copy of it on youtube with English subtitles, but at this point unsubtitled Hungarian is your only option, if you want to watch the song.

And if you want to listen to the whole English demo version.......I don't know where to find it online anymore, but uh, I'd be willing to share!!

Besides Evil Lesbians, the other thing I think the musical does better than the book is feeling like it has an ending. The ending of the book is REALLY abrupt. The ability of a musical to do a reprise of a song from the beginning of the story means that it can end in the same place as the book but deliberately point you to think about how the ending ties into the beginning thematically, whereas the book just left me feeling adrift.

Anyway the last thing I have to say about this book is that since becoming interested in birding I have been paying entirely too much attention to what birds authors do and don't mention in their books, and this book has just enough birds to know that du Maurier knows birds exist, but few enough birds that I doubt du Maurier knows anything at all about birds. (There are: blackbirds singing in a flowered valley, one mention of an imagined owl at a dramatic moment, occasional pigeons, and lots and lots of gulls. Did you know gulls are the ONLY kind of bird you get by the sea.)

(the other book that annoyed me recently bird-wise is a reread of The Raven Tower, which contains: ravens and gulls. Did you know gulls are the only kind of bird you get by the sea!!)

The Great Gatsby entered public domain this year, and of course there are immediately people doing things with it, because it is enormously famous. The Chosen and the Beautiful is a retelling of the novel from the character Jordan Baker's perspective, with bonus magic, and also Jordan is bisexual and Vietnamese.

And somehow this book is exactly that. I don't know what I was expecting but.... it fits so tidily into exactly what the premise would imply, and I think I thought that Vo would go somewhere interestingly unexpected with it?

But it is in fact a straightforward retelling of the events of the original, following remarkably close, including all of the expected scenes. Oh, it's definitely a more enjoyable book to me than the original, extremely queer and much more interested in complexities of identity and where people come from. But it is still at its heart a retelling of The Great Gatsby, updated.

The addition of magic and demons doesn't do much for me either tbh. It seems to be added solely to highlight the themes that were/are already present in the story -- and it doesn't strike me that it actually adds much of anything? Those themes were already clearly legible without it!

Idk, I guess my overall issue with the book is that it seems to have been written from a place of love for the original canon. Yes it's criticising the original in some ways, but it comes across to me like criticising a thing you love. And I emphatically do not love The Great Gatsby!

Is this book good at doing the thing it's doing? Absolutely! But it's not quite the thing I hoped it would be doing.

Recently I attempted to read Middlemarch, one of those 19th century novels that I always kind of figured that one day I would read and enjoy, as it seems the kind of 19th century novel that's entirely up my alley.

However! Turns out I gave up on it by 20% of the way in. Not because it's a bad book, but because....I just wasn't enjoying myself.

Here's the thing. The author, George Eliot, is evidently a clear-minded person with great powers to observe and depict the fullness of the complexities and foibles of humans. In the parts of the books I read, there were conversations that struck me as being impressively reflective of reality. But Eliot doesn't seem to like people. I don't need characters in books to all be paragons or something, but if the author can't give me reason to want to care about people in all their flaws, then what's the point in hanging out with her characters for 800 pages?

I think Middlemarch is very probably a brilliant book, and also, no thank you, I'm not going to bother reading the rest of it.

I never would have thought to nominate a translation of Beowulf for the Best Related Work hugo award, so to all the galaxy-brained folks out there who did: THANK YOU. It means I actually got around to prioritizing reading this book, which I might not otherwise have done for years! And it's SO GOOD.

Maria Dahvana Headley is the translator of this latest version, and as she says in her introduction, it's not meant to be the One True Translation, it's one among MANY; and that perspective, I think, gives a translator more freedom to do interesting things with a translation, because you don't have the burden of trying to capture e v e r y t h i n g about the original work in your translation (which is impossible). And Headley is definitely doing interesting things with it it!!

My immediate and overwhelming reaction to reading the poem as translated by Headley is that it is delicious. It's satisfying! Delightful! Fun to say! Feels good in the mouth! It is a GOOD POEM. I love the wild swings between archaic and modern, formal and informal, all in the same line, the same phrase. And the way the words fit together, with random pieces of alliteration or internal rhyme or just words that work with each other, and all with a great sense of timing, it's just great. Delicious!

Here's an example from within the opening section:

The war-band flew a golden flag over their main man;
the salt sea saluted him, so too the storms,
and Scyld’s soldiers got drunk instead of crying.
They mourned the way men do. No man knows,
not me, not you, who hauled Scyld’s hoard to shore,
but the poor are plentiful, and somebody got lucky.

Are there occasional word/phrase choices that threw me a bit? Yeah, sure, not every single thing worked perfectly for me, but when you're deliberately aiming at audacious, you're going to have some occasional misses.

The last time I read Beowulf was at least a dozen years ago, the verse translation by Seamus Heaney, and I remember being fascinated and amazed by it at the time, and even memorized the first few pages of it with the intention of eventually memorizing the whole thing (....I know!).

But mostly I was fascinated by looking through the poem to see the worldview of a very different culture than mine, rather than fascinated by the poem/translation as a quality work of art worth appreciating for itself. And that fascinatingly different worldview is still present no matter the translation.

Heaney's poetry was perfectly good. But Headley's speaks to me far more!!

If you want a bigger taste of what this translation's like, you can read an excerpt on tor dot com. The whole thing's like that!

Ever since I heard about the new Little Women movie that was coming out I was very excited about it, because it looked like it was going to do interesting things with the adaptation.

So I decided I needed to reread the book in preparation for going to see it, since it's been a few years since I've read it. I grew up on Little Women and its sequels and love them all dearly (in full recognition of their various imperfections), but my memory is not good and I wanted to be sure that I would be able to catch what the movie was doing with respect with its choices about what to maintain/alter/remove in its adaptation.

Little Women the book is a challenging one to make a movie of, because it's so long and so many things happen in it, without there really being a single overarching plot that it can be distilled down to because it's so episodic, and I think the movie made a lot of great choices in how to make that jump from page to screen.

The thing is. The thing is! I grew up with this book, right, so of course there are very specific things that I imprinted hard on emotionally, and a movie that interprets those things differently from me is never going to work 100% for me as a viewer.

Which honestly kind of disappoints me? Because like, a) a lot of ways the movie adapts the book are SO GOOD and I was delighted by these things, and b) the thing I'm maddest about is one that, in isolation, is a narrative choice that would very much make me happy if it was about different characters than the ones I grew up with.

OKAY let's get to the spoilers!

( Read more... )

I've read this book too many times to write a comprehensive review this time. So okay, the thing that struck me most on this reread is how regularly Anne is totally overpowered by her emotions. Honestly, given how often Anne is struck frozen and unable to comprehend what's happening around her because her feelings are in a turmoil, it's astonishing to me that ( cut for small spoiler )

And okay, yes, she's going through some particularly high-emotion stuff during the time period covered by the book, I gather that people who experience romantic attraction can find that their feelings on the subject are very a lot sometimes, but like, even so. Wow, Anne. Find your chill!

(I still love Anne a lot though.)

The other thing is, the narrative spends a lot of time telling the reader that Lady Russell is a good person and a good friend and worth admiring and being close with and all, but.....never actually showcases her actions in such a way as makes me feel like I should care about her one bit. It's to the point where I can't help but feel it might be deliberate, but if so I'm not quite sure what point Austen might be trying to make with this. Idk. Maybe I'm wrong and I'm just Not Appreciating Lady Russell As I Ought, but I still feel totally unmoved by her supposed qualities.

I am approximately the last person in the world to read the Lord of the Rings. But it's finally happening!

I mean, I'm about 95% sure that I read the The Fellowship of the Ring once before when I was a preteen, and there’s maybe a 10% chance that I read The Two Towers at that time as well. But I'm absolutely confident I've never read The Return of the King! Look, it's hard to be sure of anything from when I was a preteen, that was so long ago and I have such a bad memory and I don't think that reading 1 or possibly 2 of these books at that time quite counts.

ANYWAY. It feels weird trying to write a book review of something that basically every person who might have the slightest interest in this kind of thing has already read and had opinions about. But here's my preliminary thoughts! (please ignore the way my tenses are all over the place below: I wrote my thoughts down kind of as I went and then at the end couldn't figure out how to straighten everything out tidily)

BOOK ONE

So after reading The Fellowship of the Ring, I was mainly struck by how very infodumpy this book is. Like. I knew that Tolkien's main interest was creating a language and thus building the world that went with the languages he created, but I don't think I'd ever been aware of how....how obvious that fact is on the page. But the undue degrees of focus on telling you things about the world's history actually ends up doing something interesting which I don't see often in fantasy books, which is to very effectively evoke a specific feeling: a pervading feeling of melancholy with a sense of things that are gone and going. This was really cool and not what I was expecting at all, from what I'd gleaned from all the high fantasy tolkien-esque pastiches I have read over the years.

For Tolkien, the world is the most important character, not any of the people in it, and you can tell from the degree to which he attempts to create interesting characterization and a character arc. The world gets all of it; the people inhabiting that world are pretty one-note.

The most interesting characterization-of-a-person moment in the book was the short scene where Galadriel reacts to Frodo offering her the One Ring. I really liked that scene and found it made me far more interested in Galadriel than any other scenes had successfully made me interested in other characters.

(other than Sam, who I care deeply about throughout and also am very mad about how thoroughly he fulfills the classist stereotype of Faithful Servant, ugh, TOLKIEN.)

Anyway maybe the characterization of people gets better of the course of the trilogy, this is still the introduction and Tolkien's very wordy so maybe he's just taking his time. We shall see!

BOOK TWO

Early into The Two Towers I expressed to a couple people that I was finding myself simultaneously bored and riveted by Lord of the Rings, which is quite an impressive trick for Tolkien to manage both at once. I was assured that this is an extremely normal response to the books.

But the further I went into The Two Towers the more I was just riveted and less bored. Though I never became so compelled that I was tempted to stay up late reading it or anything, so you know, still at least a little boring.

I can’t tell if by this book Tolkien had levelled up in his character writing, or if I’ve just gotten used to how he does things, or if it just took me this long of hanging out with the characters to feel like I connect with them -- but at any rate Tolkien’s characters are working far better for me in this book! Like I care about them a Lot.

Tolkien also seems to have backed off from the Doom And Decay theme a little here. I mean it’s still present? But it doesn’t feel nearly so all-pervasive as it did in the first book. Perhaps because this book involves more Actually Doing Things on the part of the characters!

I was also surprised by how little of the book Frodo actually appears in, given that I had been under the impression he’s the main character and all. Like the first two thirds of the book don’t have Frodo appear on-page once!

At any rate: a good book, I enjoyed myself, I’m interested to see what-all is gonna happen in the last book. Other than all the spoilers I’m already well aware of because of information I have gleaned from popular culture, ofc.

BOOK THREE

The Return of the King was back to tedious-but-interesting again: pieces of compelling content mixed into pieces of boringness. SIGH. It didn’t help that the first half of this book is particularly focused on war. But even beyond that it was a bit of a slog.

I don’t know why I didn’t enjoy this trilogy more - it does the thing I’ve always said I particularly value in novels, which is really immersive worldbuilding, and yet...the worldbuilding doesn’t particularly compel me here? Like, the world is fine, but I don’t super care about it. You don’t see me rushing off to read the 100+ pages of appendices at the end of Return of the King to sate myself in extra worldbuilding details! I skipped those without a single qualm.

I do care a lot about the characters in this trilogy, BUT AT WHAT COST? (on that note: SAMWISE GAMGEE IS THE ACTUALFAX BEST FOREVER, but also I’m still very mad about the Faithful Servant stereotype ngl) (Mount Doom is the best chapter in all of LotR btw, I was totally captivated for that entire chapter)

Well, I’m glad in the end to have made the effort to get through this Very Culturally Important Fantasy Series. Overall it was a satisfying read; and I do care about it and see its value, but it’s never going to be one of my top favourites.

Back in the days after I'd started keeping a list of all the books I read each year but BEFORE I started posting reviews of them, I kept desultory personal notes (ranging from a single word to quite a few paragraphs) on some of the books. And I always vaguely forget I have, and forget where exactly to find them, and I'd like to just have them on my dw so they're FINDABLE again for me. And also some of you might find these interesting/amusing? (N.B. some of these contain what I would now classify as INCORRECT OPINIONS.)

SO HERE'S THREE YEARS' WORTH OF BOOKS IN ONE POST, OKAY GO.

( expand this cut to see nested cuts listing all the books )

A deeply ridiculous and kind of objectively terrible book but I mostly enjoyed it anyway!

The general plot outline is well known - child brought up feral by apes, first meets other humans as an adult, falls in love.

But there's more going on than that. ( Read more... )

This book is so well known within sff circles, enough that I've read other books that have direct reference to the Eloi and Morlocks! And over the years I'd managed to pick up a reasonably comprehensive plot summary despite having never actually read it. Well, I've read it now. And all I can say is, I'm sure it was ground-breaking at the time it was written, but as someone who has read a lot of sff that's been written in the many years since then, the book no longer reads particularly well. It's written competently enough, but it's mostly just super boring. Which is fine! It WAS something special back then! But it's not up my alley today.

( Read more... )

Crossposts: http://sophia-sol.livejournal.com/248178.html

I reread this book because I recently discovered that Essie and I, based on the different art in our respective childhood editions of this book, had entirely different opinions on what race Becky is. Essie's book pictured Becky as black, and mine pictured Becky as white. So of course I needed to reread to discover whether the text itself gives any indication.

What I discovered is that the book doesn't say anything totally conclusive, but a couple of clues make me think that the author intended her as white.

First: the only time her skin colour is mentioned is a description of her face being red from the effort of not crying. People of many races can get reddened skin, but the effect is more pronounced on paler skin.

Second, and I think this is more telling, when Becky is rhapsodizing about the unknown "Indian gentleman" moving in next door there is a list of three things she hopes about him; two of them are obviously exoticizing (hoping he's a heathen and wears a turban) and the third is that she hopes he is black. To me this says that she sees dark skin as exotic as well, which I think she wouldn't be so likely to do if she herself were dark-skinned.

Finally, the author is clearly of her era when it comes to a lot of her perspectives (eg HELLO ORIENTALISM) and so I really don't think she would have failed to mention Becky's race and probably include some unfortunate stereotypes if she intended her to be anything but white.

But of course death of the author and all that, and I think it would be valid to choose to read Becky as whatever race you choose, despite the all the above, since none of it is 100% conclusive.

Anyways, the book is in general extremely charming and I love it a lot, when I'm not busy being frustrated with its classism and racism and other such things.