lebateleur | What Am I Reading Wednesday

Wildfire smoke returns, and we have in no way received much of the rain--let alone any of the thunderstorms--the weatherpeople have been so direly forecasting (grumbles this pluviophile). Work is no less busy but has improved immeasurably in some important ways; RL outside of work is also pleasingly busy.

What I Finished Reading This Week

The Thorns Remain – JJA Harrow
This book is good when judged against many recent YA fantasy offerings but could have been so much more if the author had tried just a bit harder. Set in a depopulated Highland village in 1919, the story kicks off when the adolescent protagonist and her friends inadvertently dance with a fae lord and his host one night, and all but she are abducted.

The good:

The novel takes place in the post-WWI, mid-influenza epidemic year of 1919, an underutilized time period for this genre.
Several characters have fluid gender identities and/or sexual orientations, and not one of them agonizes over this fact.
The protagonist’s relationship with the primary antagonist breaks some of the most obnoxious genre conventions.
Sickness and death are real threats in this novel: not everyone will make a full recovery, let alone miraculously return from the dead.
The protagonist's family relationships--among and between parents and siblings--are uniformly loving. No paint-by-numbers intra-familial drama in service of creating easy narrative tension to be seen here.
The brownie is delightful, as is (what we see) of the glaistig.
Harrow pulls off a couple of neat plot twists in the final fourth of the book.

The bad:

Oh my god, the inconsistent characterization, of protagonist and secondary characters both. It's like Harrow can't remember what she wrote two pages prior.
The book is set in 1919. The dialogue is straight out of 2022.
The plot depends on the protagonist’s credulity-stretching ignorance of basic aspects of Scottish culture (A 19-year-old living two days’ ride from Aberdeen in 1919 having no idea what Beltane is? F.M. MacNeill would like a word with you.)
In fact, the plot frequently hinges on highly contrived situations.
Harrow’s overuse of laundry as a shorthand for drudgery. You can’t go a dozen pages for much of the book without a description of the protagonist doing laundry. Under twenty people live in the protagonist’s village and half a dozen of them are trapped in a fairy mound for much of the book; how much laundry can they fucking generate?
Harrow’s repeated use of “traipsing” when I think she means “trudging.”
Harrow makes sloppy errors with the non-gender fluid characters’ pronouns throughout the entire book.
Harrow tries, but does not capture the eeriness and creeping menace of the fae; nor do her fae feel uniquely Scottish.
The “riddles” posed by Harrow’s fae are actually just clues.

But probably my biggest issue with the book is that for a good 80 percent of the story, the protagonist falls into the standard fantasy heroine trap of passively reacting while the antagonist’s actions drive the plot. So yeah, while it's good in comparison to the current YA fantasy standard, when judged against its own merits, it's so-so.

English, Welsh, Scottish & Irish Fiddle Tunes – Robin Williamson
This one was published in 1976, and like Williamson’s The Penny Whistle Book, I find it absolutely charming. Williamson’s text is just so unstudied compared to that of modern tune books, or those that even include any introduction or background on the tunes the contain, which is not many of them. For any given entry, he might talk about the tune’s presumed composer, its provenance, historical events behind the tune’s name or who he learned it from. Other entries see him talking about his musical career, his childhood in Scotland, his marriage, poetry, or then-current theories on pre-Christian British social structures or religion. Many are some combination of all these things. For instance, accompanied by an Albrecht Dürer-esque line drawing captioned An Irish Feast, we find the entry for Crowley’s Reels:

Michael Coleman was born in 1891, near Ballymote, in county Sligo. He settled in New York in 1917, where he recorded a number of 78’s. Many regard him as a master of the Sligo style. He played very fast with a dazzling variety of ornament.

The tune here gives a simplified indication of the way he plays it. There is a recording of this on a record which bears Coleman’s name, issued by Ace of Hearts Records, AH56 mono. The recording, a reproduction of an old 78, is marred, as on so many of Coleman’s recordings, by the accompaniment of an entirely fatuous piano player who refuses to change chords in the right places and remains in major when the tune turns minor. Coleman died in Manhattan in 1945.

I love everything about this, from Williamson’s unabashed fanboying of Coleman’s playing, to his bitchy trashing of the pianist (I, too, have no use for piano backing in Irish traditional music) to his whiplash swerve from factual accounting to commentary back to dispassionate narration of biographical detail.

The selection of tunes in this volume is lovely, as is Williamson's choice to include inscriptions of melodic variations for many tunes, something I wish more tunebooks would do. I also very much like that Williamson includes offerings from throughout the British Isles (and even a stray American tune or two), versus the more recent preference for collecting only tunes from a specific country or even subnational region. I recognize a fair number of the Scottish entries as things my dad’s pipe band played. And then there's Williamson’s five paragraph introduction to Christmas Day I’Da Mornin', which starts off with a history of the Shetland Islands, summarizes some unique Shetland Christmas rituals with pagan origins, and then continues:

Fiddle-playing has been an important part of Shetland culture for centuries, and the tune here is a listening tune from the Island of Unst. Tom Anderson, the great Shetland collector and fiddler, collected it from John Stickle of Unst, whose ancestor Friedemann Stickle, famous as a fiddler in the eighteenth century, may possibly have composed it. Friedemann would play this tune every year on Christmas morning in the hall of his laird, the Laird of Muness. …

There is a recording of this tune on “The Boys of the Lough Second Album”, Trailer LE 32092, stereo. It is played there by Aly Bain who is a brilliant young fiddler from the Shetlands himself. The tune should go gently and thoughtfully.

Williamson was writing in 1976. Twenty years later, I would learn almost precisely the same setting as Williamson's transcription of the tune from a different Boys of the Lough album, and four or so years after that I’d go on to see the brilliant Aly Bain play it live. Very cool stuff indeed.

What I Still Need To Review: Queer City – Peter Ackroyd
I will get around to this eventually.

What I Am Currently Reading

Guided Tarot – Stefanie Capoli
I’ve made it through the Major Arcana and started in on the Minors.

What I’m Reading Next

This week I acquired Herbs for the Mediaeval Household by Margaret Freeman.

これで以上です。

What Am I Reading Wednesday - June 28