Reading Wednesday
Mar. 17th, 2021 08:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
troisoiseauxRead A Conspiracy of Kings, the fourth book in Megan Whalen Turner's Queen's Thief series. The narrator was initially at somewhat of a disadvantage by not being Costis, but I warmed up to him quickly. The theme of what one has to give up as an individual in order to be a king was surprisingly heart-wrenching. I loved the significance of when the narrative referred to characters by their royal names (Sounis, Attolis) vs. by their real ones— sometimes in the same exchange, as they let their masks slip and/or had to switch back into king mode.
Read Lavinia by Ursula K. LeGuin, about the character from Virgil's Aeneid, in the vein of Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad or Madeline Miller's Circe or Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls. It's the most meta example of this niche I've encountered, except maybe for Atwood's— Virgil appears to a teenaged Lavinia as something that's half a ghost, half T.H. White's time-wonky Merlin, while dying some hundred years in her future; Lavinia-as-narrator is aware of being Virgil's creation, but Le Guin breathes such life into her and such detail into her world that it's easy to forget.
Read Lavinia by Ursula K. LeGuin, about the character from Virgil's Aeneid, in the vein of Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad or Madeline Miller's Circe or Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls. It's the most meta example of this niche I've encountered, except maybe for Atwood's— Virgil appears to a teenaged Lavinia as something that's half a ghost, half T.H. White's time-wonky Merlin, while dying some hundred years in her future; Lavinia-as-narrator is aware of being Virgil's creation, but Le Guin breathes such life into her and such detail into her world that it's easy to forget.
