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Welp. It's been nonstop sirens since about 11:30 today. In more pleasant matters, here's:
What I Just Finished Reading
Mongolia – Michael Dillon
This is a poorly written book: disorganized, redundant, sloppily composed, and filled with grammatical, typographical, transliteration, and spelling errors. I strongly suspect Dillon signed a contract for a 200-page book; otherwise, it’s hard to explain the existence of these 194 pages of passive-voice, run-on sentences that nonsensically repeat the same bits of—frequently trivial and irrelevant—information, often half a dozen times or more throughout the volume. Get rid of the redundancies and the book would shrink from 194 pages to about 90. Rewrite the remainder in direct, active-voice sentences and you’d have a roughly 65-page manuscript that would actually be worth reading.
To illustrate, here’s a random paragraph from pages 147-148:
Skipping forward to chapter 10, we have:
doesn’t say much that’s useful about the supposed subject of the book. On the other hand, it gets Dillon 423 words closer to his page count goal. Ka-ching!
It’s too bad Bloomsbury Publishing didn’t see fit to give this one a more thorough edit.
The Bass Rock – Evie Wyld
This is an excellent book. (And boy, I’m glad I waited to read it until after the holidays, as it’s also a delightfully creepy gothic and incisive commentary on men’s mistreatment of women through the centuries.)
Wyld’s language is beautiful. I frequently paused to reread and savor individual sentences. Again, it’s also eerie, brilliantly conjuring an atmosphere of creeping dread lurking just out of sight behind the next corner. Forget the holidays; I had to stop reading this one after dark. It’s ingeniously structured as well, and while some of that structure is admittedly entirely stylistic, I enjoyed figuring it out as I went along. The rest is cut for spoilers.
The Bass Rock follows the story of three women: Sarah, accused of witchcraft in medieval Scotland, Ruth who’s moved to Scotland with her new (and unbeknownst to her philandering) husband and his sons following the War, and Viviane, who travels to present-day Scotland to settle her dead father’s estate while navigating a budding friendship with a sex worker and a relationship with a man who may be a boyfriend or just a hookup. The three women’s stories intertwine, although readers will have to suss out how themselves as Wyld thankfully never holds her audience’s hands through this. Several other female characters make appearances in interstitial chapters. All the female characters must navigate men’s attempts to control them; only some are successful. The story is excellent solely on its merit as a story, but it’s also a damning indictment of what society lets men do to women and how women have been complicit in those crimes.
To my mind, the pivotal paragraph comes two-thirds of the way through the book, when Ruth confides her discovery of her husband’s affair to her sister, who says:
Again, Wyld lets the plot speak for itself on these points, and boy is it effective. To be sure, there are a few points where the narrative is a little too neatly resolved, but they did very little to decrease my enjoyment of this damn good book.
What I Am Currently Reading
Mythos – Stephen Fry
I’ve only dipped into the Forward and first chapter so far, but am enjoying it.
The Left-Handed Booksellers of London – Garth Nix
I'm only a few chapters into this one, but so far the creativity and worldbuilding are as good as I've come to expect from Nix.
Secret Agent 666 – Richard Spence
I’m enjoying this book as well, although I find Spence’s style much easier to follow in an audio recording than on paper.
Cul De Sac – Richard Thompson
The best cartoon since Calvin and Hobbes; Thompson was a gem and he is sorely missed.
欲しがりな君と不束な僕 – 直野儚羅 (Hoshigarina Kimi to Futsutsuna Boku – Naona Bohra)
This week, I went back and read the first yomikiri, an over-the-top but cute yarn in which a gaijin sannen-sei tries for another notch in his bedpost with the bartender at a snack bar, only to become smitten himself and heartbroken when he mistakes the man’s siblings for lovers.
片づける 禅の作法 – 枡野俊明 (Katazukeru Zen no Houhou – Makino Shunmyo)
I enjoy Makino's simple, clear prose.
What I'm Reading Next
I picked up T.J. Kingfisher’s The Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking, because why not, for 99 cents, and two iffy-looking freebies from our everything store overlords.
これで以上です。
What I Just Finished Reading
Mongolia – Michael Dillon
This is a poorly written book: disorganized, redundant, sloppily composed, and filled with grammatical, typographical, transliteration, and spelling errors. I strongly suspect Dillon signed a contract for a 200-page book; otherwise, it’s hard to explain the existence of these 194 pages of passive-voice, run-on sentences that nonsensically repeat the same bits of—frequently trivial and irrelevant—information, often half a dozen times or more throughout the volume. Get rid of the redundancies and the book would shrink from 194 pages to about 90. Rewrite the remainder in direct, active-voice sentences and you’d have a roughly 65-page manuscript that would actually be worth reading.
To illustrate, here’s a random paragraph from pages 147-148:
Ulaanbaatar in the early twenty-first century is far more prosperous than it was in 1999, the final year before the democratic revolution. That prosperity, however, is unevenly distributed. The centre of the city, around Sukhbaatar Square appears well developed and well planned, incorporating most of the buildings that were constructed in the ‘Soviet satellite’ era with modern high-rise architecture and dominated by the ultra-modern Blue Sky Tower and Hotel (as will be elaborated on in Chapter 10). It was completed in 2009 and stands just to the south of Ulaanbaatar Square next to the former Lenin Club which had been built in 1929 as part of a programme to train cadres who would transmit modern ‘socialist and international culture’ – of the Russian variety – to Mongolia. The Blue Sky Tower, which was the tallest building in the city until the record was taken by newer hotels, is a useful landmark which can be seen from many of the outlying districts. In addition to the hotel it provides office and residential accommodation for the wealthiest clients and is marketed as the epitome of exclusive luxury living. Its construction has been tied to the evolution of Mongolia’s new political system. The building work started in 2006 but was temporarily brought to a standstill after political wrangling when the Democratic Party lost the disputed 2008 general election.
Skipping forward to chapter 10, we have:
Soviet-inspired buildings are not all dull blocks of the 1950s but, since the Mongolian democratic revolution of 1990-91, Ulaanbaatar has consciously abandoned this style and has embraced new architectural models, often from the West but also drawing on modern designs from its Asian neighbours. The most dramatic is the Blue Sky Tower which provides offices, luxury flats and hotel accommodation with 200 rooms and 12 suites. It was designed in cooperation with a South Korean company and was completed in 2009: with 25 stories and at 105 metres high it was the tallest building in the capital, until even taller hotels appeared during the construction boom that began in 2007. The Blue Sky building towers over central Ulaanbaatar and dominates the skyline when viewed from many different parts of the city It is made of steel and glass in a distinctive shape that is reminiscent of a sail or a fin: the name reflects its curtain wall of blue glass. The colour is supposed to remind Mongols of the characteristic clear blue skies of which they are so proud, but there is nothing typically Mongolian about the shape of the building. If it is a symbol of anything, it is of the international elite and their Mongolian partners.To summarize, the second passage:
- Duplicates the content of the first,
- a mere thirty-six pages later,
- while being fifteen words shorter than the passage it purports to “elaborate” on,
- probably paraphrases marketing materials (Two-hundred rooms and 12 suites? Oh my!), and
doesn’t say much that’s useful about the supposed subject of the book. On the other hand, it gets Dillon 423 words closer to his page count goal. Ka-ching!
It’s too bad Bloomsbury Publishing didn’t see fit to give this one a more thorough edit.
The Bass Rock – Evie Wyld
This is an excellent book. (And boy, I’m glad I waited to read it until after the holidays, as it’s also a delightfully creepy gothic and incisive commentary on men’s mistreatment of women through the centuries.)
Wyld’s language is beautiful. I frequently paused to reread and savor individual sentences. Again, it’s also eerie, brilliantly conjuring an atmosphere of creeping dread lurking just out of sight behind the next corner. Forget the holidays; I had to stop reading this one after dark. It’s ingeniously structured as well, and while some of that structure is admittedly entirely stylistic, I enjoyed figuring it out as I went along. The rest is cut for spoilers.
The Bass Rock follows the story of three women: Sarah, accused of witchcraft in medieval Scotland, Ruth who’s moved to Scotland with her new (and unbeknownst to her philandering) husband and his sons following the War, and Viviane, who travels to present-day Scotland to settle her dead father’s estate while navigating a budding friendship with a sex worker and a relationship with a man who may be a boyfriend or just a hookup. The three women’s stories intertwine, although readers will have to suss out how themselves as Wyld thankfully never holds her audience’s hands through this. Several other female characters make appearances in interstitial chapters. All the female characters must navigate men’s attempts to control them; only some are successful. The story is excellent solely on its merit as a story, but it’s also a damning indictment of what society lets men do to women and how women have been complicit in those crimes.
To my mind, the pivotal paragraph comes two-thirds of the way through the book, when Ruth confides her discovery of her husband’s affair to her sister, who says:
Darling Puss, men just are, that’s the truth of it. They are made differently, they want different things. And in order to be able to enjoy your life there are certain things that one has to accept. It’s not being deluded, I won’t have that—it’s seeing things for what they really are, and not buggering on until eventually the penny drops and you find yourself living a very fruitful life partly with them but partly with yourself.The genius of this book is that it shows how far things have come, from when “seeing things for what they are” meant fighting other women tooth and nail for the male protection without which you could be raped or killed, to a world where men gaslighting and beating their spouses for not ignoring their infidelity or institutional sexual predation is just “what things are,” to a present in which society has begun—however reluctantly—to acknowledge individual rights to bodily, sexual, and societal autonomy.
Again, Wyld lets the plot speak for itself on these points, and boy is it effective. To be sure, there are a few points where the narrative is a little too neatly resolved, but they did very little to decrease my enjoyment of this damn good book.
What I Am Currently Reading
Mythos – Stephen Fry
I’ve only dipped into the Forward and first chapter so far, but am enjoying it.
The Left-Handed Booksellers of London – Garth Nix
I'm only a few chapters into this one, but so far the creativity and worldbuilding are as good as I've come to expect from Nix.
Secret Agent 666 – Richard Spence
I’m enjoying this book as well, although I find Spence’s style much easier to follow in an audio recording than on paper.
Cul De Sac – Richard Thompson
The best cartoon since Calvin and Hobbes; Thompson was a gem and he is sorely missed.
欲しがりな君と不束な僕 – 直野儚羅 (Hoshigarina Kimi to Futsutsuna Boku – Naona Bohra)
This week, I went back and read the first yomikiri, an over-the-top but cute yarn in which a gaijin sannen-sei tries for another notch in his bedpost with the bartender at a snack bar, only to become smitten himself and heartbroken when he mistakes the man’s siblings for lovers.
片づける 禅の作法 – 枡野俊明 (Katazukeru Zen no Houhou – Makino Shunmyo)
I enjoy Makino's simple, clear prose.
What I'm Reading Next
I picked up T.J. Kingfisher’s The Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking, because why not, for 99 cents, and two iffy-looking freebies from our everything store overlords.
これで以上です。
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If only someone could have possibly seen it coming.From:
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What an absolute farce, and I am gobsmacked by the number of talking heads who said no one could have seen this coming. Really? The only thing that surprised me was twitter finally, finally putting a ban (albeit temporary) on dipshit's account.
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Everyone could have seen it coming because the rioters were pretty clear about what they meant to do in the days and weeks ahead of the 6th.As for social media temporarily blocking (only) trump's account after the riot occurred and they raked in advertising revenue and data from users? What bravery, taking such an unpopular and principled stand.