![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Amazing lightening storms last night gave way to a consistently overcast, oft rainy day: my absolute favorite weather.
The Book of Atrix Wolfe ・ The Book of Spells ・ Breathe ・ Burnt Sugar ・ The Colour of Magic ・ Experience the Mystery of Tarot ・Girl, Wash Your Face ・ Gold Diggers ・ The Light Fantastic ・ How to Build a Girl ・ How to Make a Bird ・ The Inspired Houseplant ・ The Kingdoms ・ The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet ・ Magic for Liars ・ The Silver Bough vol. 2 ・ Thick as Thieves ・ A Thousand Ships ・ The Westing Game ・ The Witness for the Dead ・ Yearning for the Sea
What I Finished Reading This Week
Children of Blood and Bone – Tomi Adeyemi
After undergoing the sledgehammer to the psyche that was the experience of reading The Changeling, I needed the literary equivalent of empty calories. I’m happy to say that Children of Blood and Bone is a bag of Doritos. Or rather, it’s the novelization of a nonexistent kid’s cartoon or Shounen Jump series, and choosing to approach it as such made all the difference. If I had gone into this thing looking for what I want out of a novel, the inconsistencies in characterization, worldbuilding, and internal logic would have driven me batfuck. Instead, I strapped in for bombast and primary colors, and the novel delivered both marvelously.
Surprisingly, what did bother about this book was that, with a little effort, it could have delivered them much better. But for whatever reason, the publisher printed, bound, and sold this first draft as though it were a finished novel. And Children of Blood and Bone is obviously a first draft.
Adeyemi created an intriguing pre-modern West African-influenced world, with magic and Yoruban incantations complete with tonal diacritics, but peopled it with characters who think and speak in "kilometers" and "viruses" and "you guys" and other jarringly inapt terms. And it gets so much worse:
"Its acidic smell burns to a vicious sting, raging as my vision darkens."
"The crowd laughs and smiles through the hills, white hair braided, dreaded, and flowing."
"A hushed hysteria erupts through the crowd, questions mounting as it spreads."
"Tzain ignores me, forcing his cloak down as if it too kissed his sister."
"As if it had kissed his sister."
"I run away from the window and look out the iron door as a mangled scream rings from the floor above me." Did you mean "ceiling?" Fire and metal and disease wage war, ravishing an endless stream of soldiers." Did you mean "ravaging?"
"Humph." Tzain grins. "I can think of a lot of better ways to spend a night with a girl locked in a tent."
How do you lock someone in a tent?
"I bite the inside of my cheek and chew. He’s faster than the average guard. Deadlier than the typical prince."
Smarter than the av-er-age bear!
Wisecracks "incite" smiles when they should "elicit" them. People are “paralyzed in place.” Any character armed with a sword will, without fail, use it to stab an enemy "in the thigh." This is Adeyemi getting ideas down onto the page. Finished, fit-to-be-published prose it ain't.
And it gets worse.
Here's two sworn enemies engaged mortal combat: "Once again, our weapons collide with a piercing clink."
"clink"
Here's a character heroically self-immolating to save his companions from capture and death: "'Agh!' Kwame’s cries of agony rise above all else as he turns the night red."
"Agh!"
But nothing tops the reaction of Inan, who's just witnessed his father carving a racial slur into the back of his enemy-to-lover in the bowls of a "fortress" that "towers over the city's horizon like an iron palace, casting its shadow through the night": “I crash into the nearest washroom and slam the door. Somehow, I latch the lock. … I grip the porcelain sink’s rim with shaking hands.”
In other words. The despotic rulers of this pre-modern magical fantasy kingdom had the forethought to put in a bathroom? In the torchlit torture dungeon? With a porcelain sink and thus, presumably, plumbing? In the torchlit torture dungeon? And, per Inan: “nearest washroom.” So there’s more than one? In the torchlit torture dungeon???
Children of Blood and Bone had the potential to deliver big time on its tropey YA fantasy/romance promise. I wish someone had bothered to give it a final read-through before publication.
The Magian Tarok – Stephen E. Flowers
I’ll write more about this one on a Tarot Tuesday. Here I will say only that this book is in keeping with the long tradition of Tarot scholarship, in that it presents a cohesive but factually spurious rediscovery of the cards' "true" historical origins and meanings.
Mythos – Stephen Fry
I needed something that paid attention to the craft of writing after Children of Blood and Bone, but still wasn’t ready for a novel-length narrative after The Changeling, and this fit the bill perfectly. In Mythos, Fry attempts to retell the Greek myths from the creation of the universe up to the age of heroes in something like a unified timeline, and largely succeeds. His love of the subject matter is obvious, and he treats the stories with respect, but also a healthy dose of humor (and I loved the footnotes illustrating how the stories continue to influence arts, science, and culture in the present day). None of the individual stories Fry retells is longer than five or six pages (of albeit size 6 font), broken into subsections of a page or so. These retellings aren’t entirely without fault; I found myself wishing Fry had hewed a little less closely to the original cultural attitudes that equate female goodness with “beauty,” lack of ambition, and “shutting the fuck up,” and sexual predation with, well, joviality. But such are the inherent shortfalls of the subject matter. Mythos is a beautifully illustrated, engaging retelling of the myths, probably my favorite handling of such in short story form.
The Changeling – Joy Williams
Oh my god, this is a good book. The writing is stellar. The tension is incredible. Williams can make a sun-drenched summer afternoon foreboding. The plot kept me double- and triple-guessing everything I thought was going on. I inhaled this in a day and a half, and spent twice as many recovering. On one level, The Changeling is the story of a troubled woman with a troubled past in a troubled marriage, trying to resolve issues of motherhood and personal agency.
It's also a creepy gothic: a weird extended family in a rambling, ramshackle mansion on a private island, orphans, ominous ancestors exerting influence on the current inhabitants from beyond the grave, slaughterhouses, creepy, precociously intelligent children.
It's a biting social commentary on how '70s culture norms entrap and destroy women. It's a clinical dissection of how substance abuse and mental illness feed off each other.
It's a mystery, right down to the text itself: were all those typos starting on page 100: the lack of capitalization, the misspellings, the weird omission of the letter 'f' intentional? And if so, what are they meant to signify?I’d love to get my hands on another edition of the book to find out.
It's very much the literary progenitor of Sue Rainsford’s excellent Follow Me To Ground, every bit as creepy and thought provoking, and definitely something I will read again.
蟲師 6 – 漆原 友紀 (Mushishi vol. 6 – Urushihara Yuki)
Excellent rainy day reading.
What I Finished Reading At Some Point In The Past Four Months
Magic for Liars – Sarah Gailey
Magic for Liars opens with alcoholic, down-on-her-luck PI Ivy Gamble being offered a job she can’t refuse: conduct an independent investigation of a murder at a school for magical teenagers. Oh, and the magical sister Ivy’s resented since childhood is now a professor there.
Some parts of the book worked very well for me, but others fell flat. Gailey’s depictions of alcoholism, familial dysfunction, and sibling rivalry and resentment, and the way these can cripple a person long into adulthood were exceedingly well done, as was that of Ivy and her sister’s stumbling attempts at reconciliation. Gailey has a good eye for adolescent social hierarchies. I also really enjoyed the meet cute subplot, and meet cute is Not My Thing. The red herrings are more convincing than in many other mysteries.
That said, it’s pretty obvious who the murderer is, to a degree that makes the adults running this magical school look alarmingly inept. That said mage school, possessed of its own Auror-esque investigative service, would choose an alcoholic, smallfry gumshoe specializing in infidelity cases to solve a magical murder, requires more suspension of disbelief than I could muster. Ivy’s attempts at subterfuge are hamhanded at best. The denouement is unrealistic. Gailey's riff on the "chosen one" plotline was great until she fumbled it right before the touchdown. And ultimately, Magic for Liars is a long road to slog alongside these characters only for them to learn little, if nothing, by its end.
What I Am Currently Reading
Selin Ascends – Josiah Bancroft
Making a push to finish this one.
Lady of the Beasts – Buffie Johnson
Early days.
Politics in China – William Joseph (ed.)
Early days.
Outlawed – Anna North
Well written when I pick it up, but this novel feels like something I should read on a hot, relentlessly sunny summer day.
What I’m Reading Next
This week I picked up a copy of Politics in China.
これで以上です。
What I Finished Reading This Week
Children of Blood and Bone – Tomi Adeyemi
After undergoing the sledgehammer to the psyche that was the experience of reading The Changeling, I needed the literary equivalent of empty calories. I’m happy to say that Children of Blood and Bone is a bag of Doritos. Or rather, it’s the novelization of a nonexistent kid’s cartoon or Shounen Jump series, and choosing to approach it as such made all the difference. If I had gone into this thing looking for what I want out of a novel, the inconsistencies in characterization, worldbuilding, and internal logic would have driven me batfuck. Instead, I strapped in for bombast and primary colors, and the novel delivered both marvelously.
Surprisingly, what did bother about this book was that, with a little effort, it could have delivered them much better. But for whatever reason, the publisher printed, bound, and sold this first draft as though it were a finished novel. And Children of Blood and Bone is obviously a first draft.
Adeyemi created an intriguing pre-modern West African-influenced world, with magic and Yoruban incantations complete with tonal diacritics, but peopled it with characters who think and speak in "kilometers" and "viruses" and "you guys" and other jarringly inapt terms. And it gets so much worse:
"Its acidic smell burns to a vicious sting, raging as my vision darkens."
"The crowd laughs and smiles through the hills, white hair braided, dreaded, and flowing."
"A hushed hysteria erupts through the crowd, questions mounting as it spreads."
"Tzain ignores me, forcing his cloak down as if it too kissed his sister."
"As if it had kissed his sister."
"I run away from the window and look out the iron door as a mangled scream rings from the floor above me." Did you mean "ceiling?" Fire and metal and disease wage war, ravishing an endless stream of soldiers." Did you mean "ravaging?"
"Humph." Tzain grins. "I can think of a lot of better ways to spend a night with a girl locked in a tent."
How do you lock someone in a tent?
"I bite the inside of my cheek and chew. He’s faster than the average guard. Deadlier than the typical prince."
Smarter than the av-er-age bear!
Wisecracks "incite" smiles when they should "elicit" them. People are “paralyzed in place.” Any character armed with a sword will, without fail, use it to stab an enemy "in the thigh." This is Adeyemi getting ideas down onto the page. Finished, fit-to-be-published prose it ain't.
And it gets worse.
Here's two sworn enemies engaged mortal combat: "Once again, our weapons collide with a piercing clink."
"clink"
Here's a character heroically self-immolating to save his companions from capture and death: "'Agh!' Kwame’s cries of agony rise above all else as he turns the night red."
"Agh!"
But nothing tops the reaction of Inan, who's just witnessed his father carving a racial slur into the back of his enemy-to-lover in the bowls of a "fortress" that "towers over the city's horizon like an iron palace, casting its shadow through the night": “I crash into the nearest washroom and slam the door. Somehow, I latch the lock. … I grip the porcelain sink’s rim with shaking hands.”
In other words. The despotic rulers of this pre-modern magical fantasy kingdom had the forethought to put in a bathroom? In the torchlit torture dungeon? With a porcelain sink and thus, presumably, plumbing? In the torchlit torture dungeon? And, per Inan: “nearest washroom.” So there’s more than one? In the torchlit torture dungeon???
Children of Blood and Bone had the potential to deliver big time on its tropey YA fantasy/romance promise. I wish someone had bothered to give it a final read-through before publication.
The Magian Tarok – Stephen E. Flowers
I’ll write more about this one on a Tarot Tuesday. Here I will say only that this book is in keeping with the long tradition of Tarot scholarship, in that it presents a cohesive but factually spurious rediscovery of the cards' "true" historical origins and meanings.
Mythos – Stephen Fry
I needed something that paid attention to the craft of writing after Children of Blood and Bone, but still wasn’t ready for a novel-length narrative after The Changeling, and this fit the bill perfectly. In Mythos, Fry attempts to retell the Greek myths from the creation of the universe up to the age of heroes in something like a unified timeline, and largely succeeds. His love of the subject matter is obvious, and he treats the stories with respect, but also a healthy dose of humor (and I loved the footnotes illustrating how the stories continue to influence arts, science, and culture in the present day). None of the individual stories Fry retells is longer than five or six pages (of albeit size 6 font), broken into subsections of a page or so. These retellings aren’t entirely without fault; I found myself wishing Fry had hewed a little less closely to the original cultural attitudes that equate female goodness with “beauty,” lack of ambition, and “shutting the fuck up,” and sexual predation with, well, joviality. But such are the inherent shortfalls of the subject matter. Mythos is a beautifully illustrated, engaging retelling of the myths, probably my favorite handling of such in short story form.
The Changeling – Joy Williams
Oh my god, this is a good book. The writing is stellar. The tension is incredible. Williams can make a sun-drenched summer afternoon foreboding. The plot kept me double- and triple-guessing everything I thought was going on. I inhaled this in a day and a half, and spent twice as many recovering. On one level, The Changeling is the story of a troubled woman with a troubled past in a troubled marriage, trying to resolve issues of motherhood and personal agency.
It's also a creepy gothic: a weird extended family in a rambling, ramshackle mansion on a private island, orphans, ominous ancestors exerting influence on the current inhabitants from beyond the grave, slaughterhouses, creepy, precociously intelligent children.
It's a biting social commentary on how '70s culture norms entrap and destroy women. It's a clinical dissection of how substance abuse and mental illness feed off each other.
It's a mystery, right down to the text itself: were all those typos starting on page 100: the lack of capitalization, the misspellings, the weird omission of the letter 'f' intentional? And if so, what are they meant to signify?I’d love to get my hands on another edition of the book to find out.
It's very much the literary progenitor of Sue Rainsford’s excellent Follow Me To Ground, every bit as creepy and thought provoking, and definitely something I will read again.
蟲師 6 – 漆原 友紀 (Mushishi vol. 6 – Urushihara Yuki)
Excellent rainy day reading.
What I Finished Reading At Some Point In The Past Four Months
Magic for Liars – Sarah Gailey
Magic for Liars opens with alcoholic, down-on-her-luck PI Ivy Gamble being offered a job she can’t refuse: conduct an independent investigation of a murder at a school for magical teenagers. Oh, and the magical sister Ivy’s resented since childhood is now a professor there.
Some parts of the book worked very well for me, but others fell flat. Gailey’s depictions of alcoholism, familial dysfunction, and sibling rivalry and resentment, and the way these can cripple a person long into adulthood were exceedingly well done, as was that of Ivy and her sister’s stumbling attempts at reconciliation. Gailey has a good eye for adolescent social hierarchies. I also really enjoyed the meet cute subplot, and meet cute is Not My Thing. The red herrings are more convincing than in many other mysteries.
That said, it’s pretty obvious who the murderer is, to a degree that makes the adults running this magical school look alarmingly inept. That said mage school, possessed of its own Auror-esque investigative service, would choose an alcoholic, smallfry gumshoe specializing in infidelity cases to solve a magical murder, requires more suspension of disbelief than I could muster. Ivy’s attempts at subterfuge are hamhanded at best. The denouement is unrealistic. Gailey's riff on the "chosen one" plotline was great until she fumbled it right before the touchdown. And ultimately, Magic for Liars is a long road to slog alongside these characters only for them to learn little, if nothing, by its end.
What I Am Currently Reading
Selin Ascends – Josiah Bancroft
Making a push to finish this one.
Lady of the Beasts – Buffie Johnson
Early days.
Politics in China – William Joseph (ed.)
Early days.
Outlawed – Anna North
Well written when I pick it up, but this novel feels like something I should read on a hot, relentlessly sunny summer day.
What I’m Reading Next
This week I picked up a copy of Politics in China.
これで以上です。