![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
What I Just Finished Reading
The Binding – Bridget Collins
Collins starts with a fantastic premise: a world in which books are filled with the actual memories of human beings, transferred from their minds to the written page by artisans known as binders. Collins does a fabulous job of fleshing out the implications: how a binding can be a mercy for someone who would otherwise be crushed by the weight of traumatic memories. How undergoing too many of them can hollow a person out until there's almost nothing left. How the ability creates tension between those who practice it as an art and those who are out to make a quick buck. How the procedure lets those with the money and influence to buy it facilitate their own comfort by exploiting the less fortunate. How the procedure interacts with the misogyny and homophobia of Collins’ pseudo-Victorian world. How it enflames the superstitious and religiously fanatic. Imagine a world where politicians could simply—and completely—erase every memory of a political misstep, not matter how trivial. Collins has, and she does it very well indeed.
And yet.
And yet, she chooses to focus not on this, but on a wholly pedestrian YA love story that strives to tick off a list of the genre’s worst tropes: an emotionally distant and outwardly caustic (and yes, of course, rich) love interest who Secretly Cares Too Much. With a substance abuse problem (because he secretly Cares Too Much). And an abusive father and status-obsessed mother. The love interest's enemies-to-lovers relationship with the protagonist is facilitated by his implausible and (frankly distasteful) pretend courtship of the protagonist’s immature, flighty sister. Whose emotional betrayal at the hands of her brother and the love interest the plot complete fails to examine (because, hey, what a downer, amirite?).
Other female characters fare little better. We have a series of women whose societal exploitation is convincingly depicted, but who end up: dead (possibly at the hands of her son), killing the child born of her father’s rape and then losing her mind, starving and prostituted on the streets, and committing very graphic suicide after months of rape and forced memory removal at her employer's hands. The two women who avoid these fates are both wooed under false pretenses and then opportunistically abandoned by the love interest.
All of this in service of the romance between the two protagonists. I know that’s the aspect of story on which Collins wanted to focus, but surely she could have enabled it through other means than the misery of so many female characters?
There are other missed opportunities—a rich backstory of religious persecution of binders, the tension between binders who are healers and artisans and those who engage in the commercialized production of memories for mass consumption, society’s deeply rooted abhorrence of novels (counterfeit memories!), and more, that the plot frustratingly hints at but ignores in favor of the uninspiring romance.
And there are parts that just fall flat for all Collin’s beautiful descriptive prose, such when the protagonist “hadn’t realized I’d loved [a character] till that moment,” when up to that point I’d considered their interactions a masterfully poignant depiction of two lonely human beings failing to connect.
And yet.
And yet, I ended up liking—or rather, not disliking—this book far more than the majority of YA novels I’ve read recently, for reasons I can’t entirely explain, even having mulled them over for the past two days. I’ve been angrier at books I’ve borrowed from the library, and I paid cover price for this one. Maybe it’s Collins’ talent for evocative scene setting. Maybe it’s the internal consistency of her characters’ emotions and motivations. I really have no clue, but there you have it.
What I Am Currently Reading
Witches Of America – Bridget Collins
This week’s chapters outline Gerard Gardner and Raymond Buckland’s invention of modern Paganism in the fifties and sixties. They’re also exactly what I’m looking for in my popular nonfiction reads: clearly written in snappy, intelligent prose, with doses of humor as warranted. This one is shaping up to be a recommend.
Desdemona and the Deep – C.S.E. Cooney
I picked this novel up on a whim at the library expecting not to like it very much. But as it turns out, Desdemona and the Deep is exactly the novel I’ve been looking for these past few weeks. Our titular character is the spoiled dilettante daughter of a Rockefeller-esque industrialist who, having chanced upon the knowledge that her father has done something unspeakably awful, sets out into the realms of faerie to make it right. In a blind taste test, I would have sworn that this had to have been written by Martin Millar. It’s that good, and fast shaping up to be one of the best things I’ve read this year.
The Ninefox Gambit – Yoon Ha Lee
Chapters three and four this week. The plot thickens for our hero.
What I'm Reading Next
No book purchases this week, but I did acquire Zen Cho’s Sorcerer to the Crown from the library.
これで以上です。
The Binding – Bridget Collins
Collins starts with a fantastic premise: a world in which books are filled with the actual memories of human beings, transferred from their minds to the written page by artisans known as binders. Collins does a fabulous job of fleshing out the implications: how a binding can be a mercy for someone who would otherwise be crushed by the weight of traumatic memories. How undergoing too many of them can hollow a person out until there's almost nothing left. How the ability creates tension between those who practice it as an art and those who are out to make a quick buck. How the procedure lets those with the money and influence to buy it facilitate their own comfort by exploiting the less fortunate. How the procedure interacts with the misogyny and homophobia of Collins’ pseudo-Victorian world. How it enflames the superstitious and religiously fanatic. Imagine a world where politicians could simply—and completely—erase every memory of a political misstep, not matter how trivial. Collins has, and she does it very well indeed.
And yet.
And yet, she chooses to focus not on this, but on a wholly pedestrian YA love story that strives to tick off a list of the genre’s worst tropes: an emotionally distant and outwardly caustic (and yes, of course, rich) love interest who Secretly Cares Too Much. With a substance abuse problem (because he secretly Cares Too Much). And an abusive father and status-obsessed mother. The love interest's enemies-to-lovers relationship with the protagonist is facilitated by his implausible and (frankly distasteful) pretend courtship of the protagonist’s immature, flighty sister. Whose emotional betrayal at the hands of her brother and the love interest the plot complete fails to examine (because, hey, what a downer, amirite?).
Other female characters fare little better. We have a series of women whose societal exploitation is convincingly depicted, but who end up: dead (possibly at the hands of her son), killing the child born of her father’s rape and then losing her mind, starving and prostituted on the streets, and committing very graphic suicide after months of rape and forced memory removal at her employer's hands. The two women who avoid these fates are both wooed under false pretenses and then opportunistically abandoned by the love interest.
All of this in service of the romance between the two protagonists. I know that’s the aspect of story on which Collins wanted to focus, but surely she could have enabled it through other means than the misery of so many female characters?
There are other missed opportunities—a rich backstory of religious persecution of binders, the tension between binders who are healers and artisans and those who engage in the commercialized production of memories for mass consumption, society’s deeply rooted abhorrence of novels (counterfeit memories!), and more, that the plot frustratingly hints at but ignores in favor of the uninspiring romance.
And there are parts that just fall flat for all Collin’s beautiful descriptive prose, such when the protagonist “hadn’t realized I’d loved [a character] till that moment,” when up to that point I’d considered their interactions a masterfully poignant depiction of two lonely human beings failing to connect.
And yet.
And yet, I ended up liking—or rather, not disliking—this book far more than the majority of YA novels I’ve read recently, for reasons I can’t entirely explain, even having mulled them over for the past two days. I’ve been angrier at books I’ve borrowed from the library, and I paid cover price for this one. Maybe it’s Collins’ talent for evocative scene setting. Maybe it’s the internal consistency of her characters’ emotions and motivations. I really have no clue, but there you have it.
What I Am Currently Reading
Witches Of America – Bridget Collins
This week’s chapters outline Gerard Gardner and Raymond Buckland’s invention of modern Paganism in the fifties and sixties. They’re also exactly what I’m looking for in my popular nonfiction reads: clearly written in snappy, intelligent prose, with doses of humor as warranted. This one is shaping up to be a recommend.
Desdemona and the Deep – C.S.E. Cooney
I picked this novel up on a whim at the library expecting not to like it very much. But as it turns out, Desdemona and the Deep is exactly the novel I’ve been looking for these past few weeks. Our titular character is the spoiled dilettante daughter of a Rockefeller-esque industrialist who, having chanced upon the knowledge that her father has done something unspeakably awful, sets out into the realms of faerie to make it right. In a blind taste test, I would have sworn that this had to have been written by Martin Millar. It’s that good, and fast shaping up to be one of the best things I’ve read this year.
The Ninefox Gambit – Yoon Ha Lee
Chapters three and four this week. The plot thickens for our hero.
What I'm Reading Next
No book purchases this week, but I did acquire Zen Cho’s Sorcerer to the Crown from the library.
これで以上です。
Tags:
From:
no subject
Also, I look forward to your opinions on Machineries of Empire, which I am ashamed to say I haven't gotten through yet because for some reason I just have a really hard time even parsing what's happening half the time. Lee's particular brand of magitech is just like water off a duck's back to my brain despite how much I love his other stuff (Winterstrike </ 3). Maybe yours will be the impetus I need to actually get through <i>Ninefox Gambit soon.
From:
no subject
They are my favorite used bookstore in the world, and miles ahead of Amazon when it comes to the used or unusual books I buy. And I hope you like Desdemona when you check it out. It definitely hit all the right notes for me.
I have to admit to only having read the first Machineries book, although I'm going to try to move on to the others this time around. I don't spend too much time trying to unravel world mechanics the first time I read a novel, which I think helped me with Ninefox because I sort of picked it up by osmosis as I went along. My understanding of the magitech (to the extent that I have one) is that it's powered by citizens' agreeing on common astronomical/astrological and mathematical standards, e.g. a weapon that functions when everyone orders their life around a seven day week will malfunction if people start to shift to a ten day week. But again, I wasn't trying to delve too deeply into it, so I could be wildly off base. :)
And wow, I had not realized Winterstrike was Lee's...