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lebateleur) wrote2023-07-05 05:45 pm
lebateleur) wrote2023-07-05 05:45 pm
What Am I Reading Wednesday - July 5
For whatever reason, this was a banner week for me in terms of reading books, and acquiring new ones.
What I Finished Reading This Week
Tutor for the Feadόg Stáin – Micháel Ó hAlmhain & Seamus Mac Mathúna
I feel like this is one of the better pennywhistle tutors I’ve encountered, for all that it’s one of the earliest. I very much appreciate its emphasis on learning tunes in chunks, by ear, which is the best way to acquire them if you want to play them with proper lift, phrasing, and ornamentation. That said, I’m not sure how well this tutor would prepare any students with little or no prior familiarity with the instrument or genre to learn anything beyond how to play the tunes presented in the accompanying audio with the proper lift, phrasing, and ornamentation. The authors were obviously limited to how much audio they could fit onto a standard cassette tape, but the written explanations grow sparser the further into the tutorial one progresses, while the complexity of the material increases. The authors also break with standard convention by correlating the names of notes to the finger one raises to sound them, e.g., calling the finger one lifts to produce the note “A,” the “A” finger, versus referring to the lowermost finger on the instrument when playing “A” as the “A” finger. This begs several questions, not least of which being of how one describes the fingering needed to produce the lowest note on the instrument, when all fingers are down. I’m able to shrug these issues off because I already know what I’m doing, but I imagine they would be highly frustrating to beginners. These concerns aside, the playing on the tape is top notch, and there’s something delightful about how unstudied it is compared to today’s highly polished media standards: you can hear people talking in the background, and the instructor regularly clearing spit out of his instrument throughout. So again, while I'm not sure this would be an ideal resource for a complete beginner, it is a good resource, and I'm glad I read it.
Blackheart Knights – Laure Eve
This book’s premise is awesome: King Arthur’s court, except the knights ride motorcycles and fight in televised arena events that determine the outcome of legal disputes. Awesome, right? But Eve fumbles the execution by trying to land a Big Reveal that will be blindingly obvious to any reader who’s even glancingly familiar with the Matter of Britain. Far from building narrative tension, this turns much of the book into a slog as Eve repeatedly hammers home that This Character Has A Big Dangerous Secret And They Aren't Going To Tell You What It Is. Think: Character has “spent her life in preparation for what comes next”, which is “the most dangerous game she has ever played”, for the goal “she has craved since she was eight years old”, that is “the meaning of her hard-edged existence”, which will set her free if she wins and kill her if “anyone finds out what her true intentions are” belaboring of the "mystery." Over and over. In every chapter in which Character appears. And just:
WE ALREADY KNOW!
This is especially frustrating because there’s so much fascinating stuff about this world and the characters who populate it, from the warring state districts of Eve’s (possibly post-apocalyptic) London, to the Sumo-esque stables that train the knights, to the Hunger Games-ish cottage industries of ateliers and fashion houses that get them screen-ready, to this society’s attempts to stamp out hereditary magic and deal with poverty and social inequality through armed combat of champions, to how those systems are open to corruption and abuse, to Eve's razor-edged explorations of how fame and power isolate and corrode as often as they elevate, and, and, and. But instead of being explored for their own sake, these elements exist to pad out the page count until it’s time for the big-revelation-that-isn’t. Other than that, there are some hot sex scenes, there's the arbitrary nonbinary character to boost diversity (apparent because Eve sometimes slips up and refers to them with the pronouns of the male character they're based on), and there's an incredibly effective and affecting scene in the closing chapters that I wish had been the norm and not the outlier for the book.
I realize this review makes me sound like I hated this book and I didn't; it's better written than a good deal of recent Arthurian fiction. I'm just supremely frustrated that Eve sacrificed so much narrative potential to focus on the least intriguing thing about the story, and I wish Blackheart Knights had hit the insanely high mark Eve set with The Graces and The Curses.
Herbs for the Mediaeval Household – Margaret Freeman
Published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, my copy is one of the 3,000 printed for the second edition. It is, first of all, a very pleasing object to hold: thick, textured paper; wide margins, gorgeous blackletter typesetting, and printed in high-quality red and black ink that hasn’t faded a whit in 67 years. The text is also a delight, filled with quotations from 14th through 1717 century English, French, and German herbals that strike my 21st century ear as wonderfully whimsical and earnest. It’s also refreshing in that Freeman provides this information without much editorial comment, save for the occasional “these uses are not recognized today.” It’s a far cry from herbals published in the ‘80s and beyond, with their myriad caveats and warnings about everything from skin sensitivities to. Most of the herbs and their previous and current uses were familiar to me, but I still enjoyed reading them, especially alongside the woodcut illustrations.
Guided Tarot – Stefanie Caponi
This is very much a paint-by-numbers “modern” guide to reading Tarot, by which I mean that it offers some basic readings for each card with no discussion of why those meanings belong to said cards in the first place. They’re generally on the mark; however, Caponi’s interpretations are very zeitgeisty in their insistent unwillingness to acknowledge that anything inherently uncomfortable or unpleasant can exist in the word. Rather, everything is an opportunity for self-actualization, self-care, or growth. This makes for some real honkers, such as when Caponi describes the Ten of Swords as a “card of new beginnings.” And, sure, your house burning to the ground with your entire family in it is a “new beginning” if looked at from a certain angle, but no one in that situation is going to be looking at it from that angle. So, yeah. If you're new to Tarot you could do far worse than this book as resource to learn the basic meanings of the cards, but it doesn’t really offer much more than what you’d get in a Little White Book.
The Qabalistic Tarot – Robert Wang
This is hands down the best volume on the Qabalistic underpinnings of the modern occult Tarot. Wang’s text is remarkably approachable without sacrificing complexity, depth, or nuance. Moreover; he uses standard academic language as opposed to what I think of as the “standard ceremonial magician affectation” of, say, Lon Milo DuQuette’s Understanding Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot (which I still recommend reading in conjunction with this book for a comprehensive understanding why Tarot cards are interpreted as they are). That said, The Qabalistic Tarot isn’t entirely without faults. It’s sloppily edited: we’re talking not just misspellings or typographical errors, but the incorrect use of words and in some cases entire Tarot cards being omitted from the text. And while he’s far from the only author to do so, Wang is very much of the male/active, female/passive mindset that drives me up the wall. (And if that correspondence makes sense to you, let me ask you this: Between a wet dream and childbirth, which would you say is active, and which is passive?) Anyway. If you want to know what’s going on under the hood of Tarot as a system, you’re going to need to read this book.
蟲師 9 – 漆原 友紀 (Mushishi vol. 9 – Urushihara Yuki)
This volume is very much in keeping with the eight that preceded it. So if yomikiri about the mushi of the week are your thing, there’s more of that here. If you wish there were just a little bit more plot continuity, well, this book does have a one-off where we get a brief glimpse into Ginko’s past, but that’s about it. The chapters Nokoribeni and Aomu Mizu rank among my favorites in the entire series, but oh, the latter will crush you.
蟲師 10 – 漆原 友紀 (Mushishi vol. 10 – Urushihara Yuki)
This final volume, again, is very much of a piece with the preceding nine. I really dug the final two chapters—Suzu no Shizuku—largely because the art and storyline reminded me of Sugiura Shiho’s Silver Diamond, which it’s about time I read again. So, yeah. The lack of overarching plot is frustrating, but the art is stellar and Urushihara is second to none in his ability to capture the atmosphere of pre-modern Japanese creepiness on the page.
What I Still Need To Review: Queer City – Peter Ackroyd
Yup, still haven't written this.
What I Am Currently Reading
Keeper of Enchanted Rooms – Charlie Holmberg
I'm just getting back into this one after wrapping up so many other books this past week.
What I’m Reading Next
This week I acquired Lara Elena Donnelly’s Base Notes, Margaret Freeman's Herbs for the Mediaeval Household, Charlie Holmberg’s The Hanging City, Jacqueline O’Mahony’s Sing, Wild Bird, Sing, Alexis Schaitkin’s Elsewhere, Rebecca Stott’s Dark Earth, Cathy Yardley’s Role Playing, and 11 nonfiction/current events books I'm too lazy to list out here.
これで以上です。
What I Finished Reading This Week
Tutor for the Feadόg Stáin – Micháel Ó hAlmhain & Seamus Mac Mathúna
I feel like this is one of the better pennywhistle tutors I’ve encountered, for all that it’s one of the earliest. I very much appreciate its emphasis on learning tunes in chunks, by ear, which is the best way to acquire them if you want to play them with proper lift, phrasing, and ornamentation. That said, I’m not sure how well this tutor would prepare any students with little or no prior familiarity with the instrument or genre to learn anything beyond how to play the tunes presented in the accompanying audio with the proper lift, phrasing, and ornamentation. The authors were obviously limited to how much audio they could fit onto a standard cassette tape, but the written explanations grow sparser the further into the tutorial one progresses, while the complexity of the material increases. The authors also break with standard convention by correlating the names of notes to the finger one raises to sound them, e.g., calling the finger one lifts to produce the note “A,” the “A” finger, versus referring to the lowermost finger on the instrument when playing “A” as the “A” finger. This begs several questions, not least of which being of how one describes the fingering needed to produce the lowest note on the instrument, when all fingers are down. I’m able to shrug these issues off because I already know what I’m doing, but I imagine they would be highly frustrating to beginners. These concerns aside, the playing on the tape is top notch, and there’s something delightful about how unstudied it is compared to today’s highly polished media standards: you can hear people talking in the background, and the instructor regularly clearing spit out of his instrument throughout. So again, while I'm not sure this would be an ideal resource for a complete beginner, it is a good resource, and I'm glad I read it.
Blackheart Knights – Laure Eve
This book’s premise is awesome: King Arthur’s court, except the knights ride motorcycles and fight in televised arena events that determine the outcome of legal disputes. Awesome, right? But Eve fumbles the execution by trying to land a Big Reveal that will be blindingly obvious to any reader who’s even glancingly familiar with the Matter of Britain. Far from building narrative tension, this turns much of the book into a slog as Eve repeatedly hammers home that This Character Has A Big Dangerous Secret And They Aren't Going To Tell You What It Is. Think: Character has “spent her life in preparation for what comes next”, which is “the most dangerous game she has ever played”, for the goal “she has craved since she was eight years old”, that is “the meaning of her hard-edged existence”, which will set her free if she wins and kill her if “anyone finds out what her true intentions are” belaboring of the "mystery." Over and over. In every chapter in which Character appears. And just:
This is especially frustrating because there’s so much fascinating stuff about this world and the characters who populate it, from the warring state districts of Eve’s (possibly post-apocalyptic) London, to the Sumo-esque stables that train the knights, to the Hunger Games-ish cottage industries of ateliers and fashion houses that get them screen-ready, to this society’s attempts to stamp out hereditary magic and deal with poverty and social inequality through armed combat of champions, to how those systems are open to corruption and abuse, to Eve's razor-edged explorations of how fame and power isolate and corrode as often as they elevate, and, and, and. But instead of being explored for their own sake, these elements exist to pad out the page count until it’s time for the big-revelation-that-isn’t. Other than that, there are some hot sex scenes, there's the arbitrary nonbinary character to boost diversity (apparent because Eve sometimes slips up and refers to them with the pronouns of the male character they're based on), and there's an incredibly effective and affecting scene in the closing chapters that I wish had been the norm and not the outlier for the book.
I realize this review makes me sound like I hated this book and I didn't; it's better written than a good deal of recent Arthurian fiction. I'm just supremely frustrated that Eve sacrificed so much narrative potential to focus on the least intriguing thing about the story, and I wish Blackheart Knights had hit the insanely high mark Eve set with The Graces and The Curses.
Herbs for the Mediaeval Household – Margaret Freeman
Published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, my copy is one of the 3,000 printed for the second edition. It is, first of all, a very pleasing object to hold: thick, textured paper; wide margins, gorgeous blackletter typesetting, and printed in high-quality red and black ink that hasn’t faded a whit in 67 years. The text is also a delight, filled with quotations from 14th through 1717 century English, French, and German herbals that strike my 21st century ear as wonderfully whimsical and earnest. It’s also refreshing in that Freeman provides this information without much editorial comment, save for the occasional “these uses are not recognized today.” It’s a far cry from herbals published in the ‘80s and beyond, with their myriad caveats and warnings about everything from skin sensitivities to. Most of the herbs and their previous and current uses were familiar to me, but I still enjoyed reading them, especially alongside the woodcut illustrations.
Guided Tarot – Stefanie Caponi
This is very much a paint-by-numbers “modern” guide to reading Tarot, by which I mean that it offers some basic readings for each card with no discussion of why those meanings belong to said cards in the first place. They’re generally on the mark; however, Caponi’s interpretations are very zeitgeisty in their insistent unwillingness to acknowledge that anything inherently uncomfortable or unpleasant can exist in the word. Rather, everything is an opportunity for self-actualization, self-care, or growth. This makes for some real honkers, such as when Caponi describes the Ten of Swords as a “card of new beginnings.” And, sure, your house burning to the ground with your entire family in it is a “new beginning” if looked at from a certain angle, but no one in that situation is going to be looking at it from that angle. So, yeah. If you're new to Tarot you could do far worse than this book as resource to learn the basic meanings of the cards, but it doesn’t really offer much more than what you’d get in a Little White Book.
The Qabalistic Tarot – Robert Wang
This is hands down the best volume on the Qabalistic underpinnings of the modern occult Tarot. Wang’s text is remarkably approachable without sacrificing complexity, depth, or nuance. Moreover; he uses standard academic language as opposed to what I think of as the “standard ceremonial magician affectation” of, say, Lon Milo DuQuette’s Understanding Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot (which I still recommend reading in conjunction with this book for a comprehensive understanding why Tarot cards are interpreted as they are). That said, The Qabalistic Tarot isn’t entirely without faults. It’s sloppily edited: we’re talking not just misspellings or typographical errors, but the incorrect use of words and in some cases entire Tarot cards being omitted from the text. And while he’s far from the only author to do so, Wang is very much of the male/active, female/passive mindset that drives me up the wall. (And if that correspondence makes sense to you, let me ask you this: Between a wet dream and childbirth, which would you say is active, and which is passive?) Anyway. If you want to know what’s going on under the hood of Tarot as a system, you’re going to need to read this book.
蟲師 9 – 漆原 友紀 (Mushishi vol. 9 – Urushihara Yuki)
This volume is very much in keeping with the eight that preceded it. So if yomikiri about the mushi of the week are your thing, there’s more of that here. If you wish there were just a little bit more plot continuity, well, this book does have a one-off where we get a brief glimpse into Ginko’s past, but that’s about it. The chapters Nokoribeni and Aomu Mizu rank among my favorites in the entire series, but oh, the latter will crush you.
蟲師 10 – 漆原 友紀 (Mushishi vol. 10 – Urushihara Yuki)
This final volume, again, is very much of a piece with the preceding nine. I really dug the final two chapters—Suzu no Shizuku—largely because the art and storyline reminded me of Sugiura Shiho’s Silver Diamond, which it’s about time I read again. So, yeah. The lack of overarching plot is frustrating, but the art is stellar and Urushihara is second to none in his ability to capture the atmosphere of pre-modern Japanese creepiness on the page.
What I Still Need To Review: Queer City – Peter Ackroyd
Yup, still haven't written this.
What I Am Currently Reading
Keeper of Enchanted Rooms – Charlie Holmberg
I'm just getting back into this one after wrapping up so many other books this past week.
What I’m Reading Next
This week I acquired Lara Elena Donnelly’s Base Notes, Margaret Freeman's Herbs for the Mediaeval Household, Charlie Holmberg’s The Hanging City, Jacqueline O’Mahony’s Sing, Wild Bird, Sing, Alexis Schaitkin’s Elsewhere, Rebecca Stott’s Dark Earth, Cathy Yardley’s Role Playing, and 11 nonfiction/current events books I'm too lazy to list out here.
これで以上です。
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Blackheart Knights is going right on my list anyway.
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Herbs for a Mediaeval Household sounds awesome. Not only for the subject matter but there is just something about a well-printed and bound book that is just so lovely to hold.
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