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Political lunatics are apparently coming back to town tomorrow. Hurray?
Ahead of that, here's what I got up to, bookwise, over the last seven days.
What I Finished Reading This Week
The Little Manx Nation – Thomas Hall Cain
This book was published in 1891 and is very much an artifact of its time, in ways both good and bad. By Hall Cain’s own admission, “Fact is not my domain.” The author waxes poetic on the Manx landscape and way of life, and tries to make a virtue of what is clearly pervasive and endless, grinding poverty. Ditto for the island’s rapacious and sadistic clergy. A lot of the book is charming, due in no small part to Hall Cain's jovial style.
That said, It’s an odd duck for a book written at the start of the Celtic Revival: Hall Cain is far more enthusiastic about the Island’s Norse than Celtic heritage. He doesn’t speak Manx, the sounds of which he compares to “hard swearing,” and categorically dismisses the idea of learning it. He also categorically dismisses the island’s musical, poetic, and cultural traditions as alternately imports or of no intrinsic worth. The Manx are “a people with few thoughts to express,” with “no literary conscience,” who cannot comprehend “that there is such a thing as imagination.” And so on. (Yet he also claims the island’s history inspired Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.”) All this seems out of whack in retrospect; native speakers survived almost a century beyond Hall Cain’s prediction of their demise, and Gaelg is something of a revival success story today. Similarly, the music, poetry, and folk traditions he dismisses out-of-hand bear a lot of similarities to those discussed in, say, McNeill, and are probably both older and more indigenous than Hall Cain assumes.
Hall Cain is clearly uncomfortable with the church’s mistreatment of the common people, and particularly of women, but still writing during a time when he felt he had to be mincing in his criticism. This is exemplified by the passage on Thomas Wilson, a Manx bishop whose sadistic torture—probably to death—of a severely mentally handicapped woman who somehow mysteriously kept getting pregnant, is stomach churning. (I won’t describe it here, but wow. Wilson was a serial killer in training.) Hall Cain finds Wilson's mistreatment of the woman odious, but still takes pains to reassure readers that Wilson should judged by his intentions, not his actions.
Nope!
Much of Hall Cain's text would not hold up to modern scrutiny today, but I enjoyed it as forerunner to Henry Jenner and F. Marian McNeill's works.
The Strangler Vine – M.J. Carter
The Strangler Vine sync read has concluded! Here is the link to the discussion post for the final five chapters, and here are links to the discussion posts for chapters 1-4, chapters 5-8, and chapters 9-12.
Nobody’s Victim – Carrie Goldberg
Goldberg has helped pioneer approaches by which victims of trolling, online stalking, and sexual coercion, extortion, and fraud can seek protection and restitution through the legal system, and her book makes for gripping and chilling reading, particularly when she lays out the endless ways in which edge lords, sociopaths, and their big tech buddies have taken advantage US laws (epitomized by section 230 of the Communications Decency Act) to have cart blanche in destroying their targets’ lives while financially enriching themselves. It is, in a word, sickening, as is politicians’ indifference to the problem.
Goldberg’s colloquial style might not be to every reader’s taste, but I found it an effective choice for conveying the book’s message to a wide audience whose eyes might have glazed over if presented with drier, more academic language. Moreover, the topic deserves to be treated with unvarnished rage. Goldberg does stumble in presenting the pre-Internet era as a mythical golden age in which women commanded high salaries and called the shots in a coercion-free porn industry that never sexualized their physical or emotional discomfort, or hired them under false pretenses. From this I conclude that Goldberg hadn’t watched much porn before the Internet and doesn’t remember Girls Gone Wild. (Jenna Jameson’s experience does not an industry standard make. Similarly, Goldberg probably should have googled Linda Lovelace before holding up Deep Throat as an example of ethically created, plot-driven porn.) In other words, the Internet exacerbated but did not create the problems Goldberg decries, and it’s odd that she should claim otherwise.
All said, however, Nobody’s Victim is an infuriating and effective call to arms about a major unaddressed problem.
Things In Jars – Jess Kidd
In terms of narrative elements, Things In Jars is full of stuff I should like: independent female protagonists and antagonists facing off in a seedy Victorian London that’s home to a lot of atmosphere and some supernatural elements. The problem is in the execution. Stylistically, Kidd’s prose is all over the place, and she never manages to get the novel’s disparate pieces to play well with each other. You can tell she was shooting for “whimsical” with “quirky and memorable” characters, but what she ends up with is affectation and characters that tick predictable boxes: e.g., fiery redhead, adorable orphaned waif, and so on.
I’d guess the book was written in chunks, because there are abrupt stylistic shifts throughout. At the novel’s start, Kidd favors alliteration :
Kidd mostly jettisons the alliteration about a tenth of the way through the novel and the awkward possessives at the 14 percent mark in favor of much more straightforward prose...until the novel’s midpoint, when she decides that frequent sentence fragments are the way to go. The perspective abruptly shifts to the 2nd person at the 87 percent mark—for slightly over a page—and then returns to third person. The story elements seesaw jarringly between twee cutesiness and body horror in a way that never quite gels. In fact, that description holds true for the entire novel. I recommend giving this one a miss.
What I Am Currently Reading
The Silver Bough vol. 2 – F. Marian McNeill
This week, I read the chapter on Easter and will return to the book ahead of April Fool’s Day.
Gideon The Ninth – Tamsyn Muir
This book is quickly growing on me. Although I feel the writing could be much tighter, I am very much digging the worldbuilding and the challenge of trying to figure out what’s going on.
What I'm Reading Next
This week I acquired Emily King’s Wings of Fury, A.K. Larkwood’s The Unspoken Name (courtesy of Tor), and Nicholas Williams’ Desky Kernowek.
これで以上です。
Ahead of that, here's what I got up to, bookwise, over the last seven days.
What I Finished Reading This Week
The Little Manx Nation – Thomas Hall Cain
This book was published in 1891 and is very much an artifact of its time, in ways both good and bad. By Hall Cain’s own admission, “Fact is not my domain.” The author waxes poetic on the Manx landscape and way of life, and tries to make a virtue of what is clearly pervasive and endless, grinding poverty. Ditto for the island’s rapacious and sadistic clergy. A lot of the book is charming, due in no small part to Hall Cain's jovial style.
That said, It’s an odd duck for a book written at the start of the Celtic Revival: Hall Cain is far more enthusiastic about the Island’s Norse than Celtic heritage. He doesn’t speak Manx, the sounds of which he compares to “hard swearing,” and categorically dismisses the idea of learning it. He also categorically dismisses the island’s musical, poetic, and cultural traditions as alternately imports or of no intrinsic worth. The Manx are “a people with few thoughts to express,” with “no literary conscience,” who cannot comprehend “that there is such a thing as imagination.” And so on. (Yet he also claims the island’s history inspired Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.”) All this seems out of whack in retrospect; native speakers survived almost a century beyond Hall Cain’s prediction of their demise, and Gaelg is something of a revival success story today. Similarly, the music, poetry, and folk traditions he dismisses out-of-hand bear a lot of similarities to those discussed in, say, McNeill, and are probably both older and more indigenous than Hall Cain assumes.
Hall Cain is clearly uncomfortable with the church’s mistreatment of the common people, and particularly of women, but still writing during a time when he felt he had to be mincing in his criticism. This is exemplified by the passage on Thomas Wilson, a Manx bishop whose sadistic torture—probably to death—of a severely mentally handicapped woman who somehow mysteriously kept getting pregnant, is stomach churning. (I won’t describe it here, but wow. Wilson was a serial killer in training.) Hall Cain finds Wilson's mistreatment of the woman odious, but still takes pains to reassure readers that Wilson should judged by his intentions, not his actions.
Nope!
Much of Hall Cain's text would not hold up to modern scrutiny today, but I enjoyed it as forerunner to Henry Jenner and F. Marian McNeill's works.
The Strangler Vine – M.J. Carter
The Strangler Vine sync read has concluded! Here is the link to the discussion post for the final five chapters, and here are links to the discussion posts for chapters 1-4, chapters 5-8, and chapters 9-12.
Nobody’s Victim – Carrie Goldberg
Goldberg has helped pioneer approaches by which victims of trolling, online stalking, and sexual coercion, extortion, and fraud can seek protection and restitution through the legal system, and her book makes for gripping and chilling reading, particularly when she lays out the endless ways in which edge lords, sociopaths, and their big tech buddies have taken advantage US laws (epitomized by section 230 of the Communications Decency Act) to have cart blanche in destroying their targets’ lives while financially enriching themselves. It is, in a word, sickening, as is politicians’ indifference to the problem.
Goldberg’s colloquial style might not be to every reader’s taste, but I found it an effective choice for conveying the book’s message to a wide audience whose eyes might have glazed over if presented with drier, more academic language. Moreover, the topic deserves to be treated with unvarnished rage. Goldberg does stumble in presenting the pre-Internet era as a mythical golden age in which women commanded high salaries and called the shots in a coercion-free porn industry that never sexualized their physical or emotional discomfort, or hired them under false pretenses. From this I conclude that Goldberg hadn’t watched much porn before the Internet and doesn’t remember Girls Gone Wild. (Jenna Jameson’s experience does not an industry standard make. Similarly, Goldberg probably should have googled Linda Lovelace before holding up Deep Throat as an example of ethically created, plot-driven porn.) In other words, the Internet exacerbated but did not create the problems Goldberg decries, and it’s odd that she should claim otherwise.
All said, however, Nobody’s Victim is an infuriating and effective call to arms about a major unaddressed problem.
Things In Jars – Jess Kidd
In terms of narrative elements, Things In Jars is full of stuff I should like: independent female protagonists and antagonists facing off in a seedy Victorian London that’s home to a lot of atmosphere and some supernatural elements. The problem is in the execution. Stylistically, Kidd’s prose is all over the place, and she never manages to get the novel’s disparate pieces to play well with each other. You can tell she was shooting for “whimsical” with “quirky and memorable” characters, but what she ends up with is affectation and characters that tick predictable boxes: e.g., fiery redhead, adorable orphaned waif, and so on.
I’d guess the book was written in chunks, because there are abrupt stylistic shifts throughout. At the novel’s start, Kidd favors alliteration :
Follow the fulsome fumes from the tanners and the reek from the brewery, butterscotch rotten, drifting across Seven Dials. Keep on past the mothballs at the cheap tailor's and turn left at the singed silk of the maddened hatter. Just beyond you'll detect the unwashed crotch of the overworked prostitute and the Christian sweat of the charwoman. On every inhale a shifting scale of onions and scalded milk, chrysanthemums and spiced apple, broiled meat and wet straw, and the sudden stench of the Thames as the wind changes direction and blows up the knotted backstreets.and awkward possessive constructions: the protagonist’s pipe is “short of stem and small of bole so that the nose of a hag may overhang and keep the rain off the tobacco.” Her love interest is “massive of chest and biceps, strong shouldered and thick necked,” largely “deficient of clothing” aside from “a hat that has known better days, dented of body, misshapen of rim, and transparent,” and has “a nose that hasn’t gone unbroken.” Other characters are “clean of garb but not of mouth” and “strong and square of body and delicate of wrist and neck, with long deft pickpocket’s fingers.”
Kidd mostly jettisons the alliteration about a tenth of the way through the novel and the awkward possessives at the 14 percent mark in favor of much more straightforward prose...until the novel’s midpoint, when she decides that frequent sentence fragments are the way to go. The perspective abruptly shifts to the 2nd person at the 87 percent mark—for slightly over a page—and then returns to third person. The story elements seesaw jarringly between twee cutesiness and body horror in a way that never quite gels. In fact, that description holds true for the entire novel. I recommend giving this one a miss.
What I Am Currently Reading
The Silver Bough vol. 2 – F. Marian McNeill
This week, I read the chapter on Easter and will return to the book ahead of April Fool’s Day.
Gideon The Ninth – Tamsyn Muir
This book is quickly growing on me. Although I feel the writing could be much tighter, I am very much digging the worldbuilding and the challenge of trying to figure out what’s going on.
What I'm Reading Next
This week I acquired Emily King’s Wings of Fury, A.K. Larkwood’s The Unspoken Name (courtesy of Tor), and Nicholas Williams’ Desky Kernowek.
これで以上です。
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