troisoiseaux

Finished One Man's Meat by E.B. White, a collection of essays from 1938-1943 that I had originally been drawn to by the humorous tone of the one I encountered in the wild (on spending so much time thinking about all the things you need to do today that suddenly it's 4 pm and you haven't done any of them— a mood!) and turned out to have more heft than I'd expected, emotionally - or philosophically? - speaking. (The period it covers, which I didn't know at that first encounter, would be a clue.) Maybe "heft" isn't quite the right word, either: even at its most serious— which is probably the essay tearing Anne Lindbergh's The Wave of the Future to shreds over her stance of "totalitarianism: just lie down and take it"— his writing has this mix of firm conviction and general bemusement that's like... charming in the way that Columbo is charming...? I don't know; it's a good book and I'm glad I read it.

Read Susan, Linda, Nina & Cokie: The Extraordinary Story of the Founding Mothers of NPR by Lisa Napoli, which is what it says on the tin.

Read River Mumma by Zalika Reid-Benta, a fast-paced urban fantasy rooted in Jamaican folklore and set in Toronto.

Read The Happy Couple by Naoise Dolan, about an angsty millennial couple in Dublin heading towards their ill-advised wedding day. I tried reading this when it came out last year but found the lightly ironic tone too grating to get far— I guess I just had to be (and finally was) in the right mood for it?

Listened to an audiobook of The Last Smile in Sunder City, written and read by Luke Arnold, better known for playing John Silver on Black Sails— which is 100% why I gave this book a shot and was, I will confess, pleasantly surprised to discover that it was actually... good? It's an urban fantasy detective novel set in a once-magical world whose source of magic has disappeared: still populated by elves, ogres, wizards, werewolves, vampires, etc., but now elves/vampires are no longer immortal, wizards can't do magic, werewolves are caught in half-transformation, and some forms of life died out entirely. The world-building was clever, the main character's tragic backstory unfolded in interesting ways, and overall, it ended up being a lot darker than I'd expected, but interestingly so.

I think this worked better for me as an audiobook than if I'd actually read-read it. It turns out that Luke Arnold is great at Doing Voices, and I particularly liked the use of different accents for different species— off the top of my head, American accents for non-magical humans (including first-person POV character Fetch Phillips, a hard-drinking private investigator with a broken heart and a guilty conscience), plummy English accents for wizards, Cockney(?) ogres, a cyclops bartender with a thick Scottish brogue, and a dragonborn/lizardfolk-type detective with a subtly hissing lisp.

Read Slow Horses by Mick Herron, in which an office of disgraced MI5 agents sentenced to desk jobs for various screw-ups finds itself at the center of a conspiracy with geopolitical implications— and at least one life more immediately at stake. Fast-paced and funny! My biggest takeaway is that Herron likes playing with audience expectations, and like, phrasing things to suggest he means one thing and then it turns out to mean something else; I thought this was done cleverly the first time - ( spoilers ) - but grew slightly wearing once he was pulling a bait-and-switch every other paragraph. (Insert that one Pacific Rim meme here.)

Finished Ben Macintyre's A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal and just... WOW. Honestly, the wildly incompetent intelligence agency of John le Carré's The Looking Glass War makes a lot more sense now.

( Read more... )

I recently hit a bit of a book slump, so I ended up reading a couple of plays instead: Osamu Dazai's A New Hamlet (1941) and Thornton Wilder's Our Town (1938). (Although, technically, I think A New Hamlet is a novel written in the form of a script...? But if it waddles and quacks, at what point is it no longer a duck?)

A New Hamlet was... interesting? It is, as the title suggests, an adaptation of Hamlet, although "remix" might be a more apt description. The first couple of scenes are more or less a direct "modern" translation of Hamlet's Act I, Scene 2 and 3— I pulled up the original online, for a line-by-line comparison— although, actually, it's twice translated: from its original Shakespearean English to mid-20th century Japanese, and then from Japanese to English circa the 2010s. (Owen Cooney's translation is an interesting blend of sounding natural as contemporary English, having a certain cadence(?) where it's more obvious that it was translated from a different language, and - mostly in Ophelia's case - intentionally anachronistic, even Shakespearean, phrasing.)

After that, ( the plot is different. )

Our Town is technically a re-read; I'd studied it in 9th grade English, but to be honest, it hadn't left a particularly strong impression on me at the time.* What made it interesting, this time, was that the edition I borrowed had a bunch of "bonus content" about the play's history, inspirations (surprisingly, classical Greek and Chinese theater?), and Wilder's writing process, including changes that were made between drafts— e.g., in an early draft, young George Gibbs had political ambitions, but this was cut for not being in line with Wilder's goal of "an allegorical representation of all life." There was also apparently some behind-the-scenes drama between Wilder and Our Town's original director, Jed Harris; a list of changes Wilder demanded to Harris' direction boiled down to "stop changing the lines" and "everyone's acting should be like 60% less weepily sentimental."

( Footnote )

Read 8 Lives of a Century-Old Trickster by Mirinae Lee, a novel in interconnected short stories. When a nursing home employee who helps residents write their own obituaries asks her usual prompt - "Which three words would you use to sum up your life?" - one elderly woman, a North Korean defector, replies with seven: "Slave. Escape-artist. Murderer. Terrorist. Spy. Lover. And mother." The seven* short stories that follow trace a life lived under many names— the name forced on her as a victim of sexual trafficking by the Japanese army during WWII; the name she stole, when she returned to Pyongyang, to slip into the life left behind by a friend who didn't make it out of their shared ordeal; the name she gave when she turned herself in as a spy and took when she started a new life in South Korea— amidst the turbulence of 20th century Korean history.

I haven't mentioned it for fear of jinxing myself,** but I've been making slowish but steady progress through Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's In The First Circle since mid-December; I'm 30% through. Set in 1949, mostly in a sharashka— a Soviet prison camp for academics, engineers, etc., where the prisoners' forced labor is engaged in scientific research and development— outside of Moscow, it's (so far) more atmospheric and philosophical than plot-heavy, each chapter dwelling on the POV of different characters: the sharashka's prisoners and guards; high-level Soviet officials— including, in a couple of bitingly ironic chapters, Stalin— and low-level bureaucratic cogs. It's compelling stuff! It is a bit of a struggle to keep all of the characters straight— both due to quantity, and because there are a lot of similar-looking names— but so far this hasn't caused any actual problems.

( Footnotes )

I started watching Reign of Terror on the strength of this Tumblr post - describing it as, among other things, "the plot is that Robespierre's Death Note has gone missing" - before realizing, ten minutes in, that sovay had recommended this movie a couple of years ago under its alternate title, The Black Book. (Honestly, I should have made the connection just from the descriptions of this movie's Saint-Just as, respectively, "nightmarishly butch" and "unusually heterosexual.")

Whatever its title, it's a wildly historically inaccurate reimagining of the 48 hours leading up to the coup d'état of 9 Thermidor as a beat-perfect spy noir, complete with a secret agent for its hero and a femme fatale and sadistic villains galore. (Arnold Moss as Fouché— head of Robespierre's secret police, champion lurker and deliverer of darkly funny quips, and an agenda unto himself— is absolutely the highlight of the movie.) Every single actor has the most American accent I've ever heard. I have no idea how it works but it does; pretty much every individual aspect of the film is objectively bonkers, but the sum of its parts is unironically the best time I've had watching a movie in ages.

Read I Have Some Questions For You by Rebecca Makkai: I had thought I knew what to expect from this novel, with its premise of "podcaster returns to teach at the New England boarding school where her classmate was murdered during their senior year," but it surprised me by being much more complicated and interesting than I'd expected. I liked the narrative devices it used— addressing the first-person narration to a "you" whose identity and role in the story becomes gradually clear; the running thread, in the background, of an ongoing #MeToo-era news story that is never identified specifically, or rather, is identified as all of the news stories— and I liked the overall plot, which was more of a "coming to terms with one's coming-of-age, decades later" story than a campus murder mystery. (Although the campus murder mystery is there, too.)

Read Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, which also was not what I expected, although in this case it's not my own snobbery to blame, but the fact that the friend who recommended this to me did not follow up her "it's great!" with, say, "but devastating!" and I was therefore completely blindsided by the third-act ( MAJOR SPOILER. ) It is a good book, though: both a compelling read and a well-constructed one.

Winter Solstice, Camelot Station
by John M. Ford [x]

Camelot is served
By a sixteen-track stub terminal done in High Gothick Style,
The tracks covered by a single great barrel-vaulted glass roof framed upon iron,
At once looking back to the Romans and ahead to the Brunels.
Beneath its rotunda, just to the left of the ticket windows,
Is a mosaic floor depicting the Round Table
(Where all knights, regardless of their station of origin
Or class of accommodation, are equal),
And around it murals of knightly deeds in action
(Slaying dragons, righting wrongs, rescuing maidens tied to the tracks).
It is the only terminal, other than Gare d'Avalon in Paris,
To be hung with original tapestries,
And its lavatories rival those at the Great Gate of Kiev Central.
During a peak season such as this, some eighty trains a day pass through,
Five times the frequency at the old Londinium Terminus,
Ten times the number the Druid towermen knew.
(The Official Court Christmas Card this year displays
A crisp black-and-white Charles Clegg photograph from the King's own collection.
Showing a woad-blued hogger at the throttle of "Old XCVII,"
The Fast Mail overnight to Eboracum. Those were the days.)
The first of a line of wagons have arrived,
Spilling footmen and pages in Court livery,
And old thick Kay, stepping down from his Range Rover,
Tricked out in a bush coat from Swaine, Adeney, Brigg,
Leaning on his shooting stick as he marshalls his company,
Instructing the youngest how to behave in the station,
To help mature women that they may encounter,
Report pickpockets, gather up litter,
And of course no true Knight of the Table Round (even in training)
Would do a station porter out of Christmas tips.
He checks his list of arrival times, then his watch
(A moon-phase Breguet, gift from Merlin):
The seneschal is a practical man, who knows trains do run late,
And a stolid one, who sees no reason to be glad about it.
He dispatches pages to posts at the tracks,
Doling out pennies for platform tickets,
Then walks past the station buffet with a dyspeptic snort,
Goes into the bar, checks the time again, orders a pint.
The patrons half turn—it's the fella from Camelot, innit?
And Kay chuckles soft to himself, and the Court buys a round.
He's barely halfway when a page tumbles in,
Seems the knights are arriving, on time after all,
So he tips the glass back (people stare as he guzzles),
Then plonks it down hard with five quid for the barman,
And strides for the doorway (half Falstaff, half Hotspur)
To summon his liveried army of lads.

* * *

( this is a long poem )

Read a couple of contemporary slice-of-life novels: Nevada by Imogen Binnie, about a trans woman who goes on a post-break-up road trip and befriends a small-town stoner who reminds her of her younger self, and in a now-annual re-read, The Sentence by Louise Erdrich, about an Ojibwe bookseller haunted by the ghost of a persistent former customer during the early months of the pandemic.

Read Thinning Blood by Leah Myers, a memoir about her identity as the last person in her family line eligible to be an enrolled member of the Jamestown S'Klallam Tribe and the women she's descended from. Shuffles myth, history, family stories, and personal experience like a deck of cards and deals them out in little vignettes.

Read The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes by Suzanne Collins, a prequel to her Hunger Games trilogy; it was actually really good?? Or at least really compelling. It felt darker than the original books, not least because it's a dystopian novel whose POV character— a young Coriolanus Snow, future dictator and main villain of the Hunger Games books— has fully bought into the ideology of the dystopia he lives in; ( ... )

Read The Fabulist: The Lying, Hustling, Grifting, Stealing, and Very American Legend of George Santos by Mark Chiusano, which is what it says on the tin. I have a certain fascination with audacious public liars— like Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos infamy, or the bizarre spate of white academics pretending to be people of color a while back— so of course I've been following every bonkers twist of the George Santos saga over the past two-ish years.

I'm currently reading Yellowface by R.F. Kuang, which fits in rather neatly with the above; the concept is basically Jean Hanff Korelitz's The Plot (struggling writer steals a book idea/unfinished draft from a deceased student/frenemy and passes it off as their own work) with more satire about cultural appropriation and the publishing industry.

Read The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey, a 1951 mystery novel about a detective who delves into the 15th-century case of the princes in the tower while bed-bound with a broken leg and bored out of his mind. Super interesting book, possibly not for the reasons Tey intended. Her detective's ( conclusion ) is probably best taken with several shakers of salt, but overall, it's quite fascinating as a contemplation of how history gets written and taught and interpreted, and inadvertently meta as said contemplation is filtered through a very specific perspective ("reflect[ing] a dislike and distrust of emotional popular narratives concerning supposed historical injustices," per Wikipedia). It's also interesting, having finally read another Josephine Tey book besides Miss Pym Disposes, to compare the way that assumptions based on appearances play out in both books: ( ... )

Read Mr. Rowl by D.K. Broster, a 1924 historical romance set during the Napoleonic Wars. The plot is delightfully bananas, just an absolute roller coaster of one dramatic misunderstanding after another:

( In which I basically just recount the entire plot of Mr. Rowl )