![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Reading Tuesday is a thing now, I guess
Sep. 10th, 2019 09:39 pmFinished Tam Lin by Pamela Dean! It was utterly charming, and I adored Janet. I especially appreciated her as a POV character because she actually shared her observations instead of just dropping hints that she’d found a clue or deduced something and not elaborating on what that clue or deduction is until it comes time to prove one’s great cleverness at the end. (...am I still mad about Anthony Horowitz’s The Word Is Murder? Yes.) Molly was a close second, though, and even if she hadn’t already been, she endeared herself to me forever when ( spoilers )
My favorite part, which will be a surprise to absolutely nobody, has to be when Janet and friends went to see Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. I need a theater company near me to put on that double feature immediately, please.
I do have one (1) nit to pick, which is that the ending feels rather rushed— like, out of 21 chapters, most of the actual plot of Tam Lin happens in the space of the last two or three. I appreciated having those other 18-19 chapters to get to know and love the characters, and the other couple of mysteries Dean threw in, but it’s precisely because of all that character development that I wish we’d gotten more time to emotionally explore that. I also don’t remember Janet’s ability to save Tam Lin being contingent on being pregnant with his child, rather than merely a circumstantial/motivating factor, and I wasn’t thrilled with the implications of that, especially since she’d just spent the entire book talking about reproductive rights.
The author’s note, in which Dean explains her thinking behind writing a ’70s college AU of Tam Lin, reminded me of the theory about how, say, Twilight would make much more sense if they were in college rather than high school, because everyone is so weird in college anyway that a supernatural being probably wouldn’t stick out that badly. Honestly, the most unrealistic part is not the ghosts or fairies but the fact Janet had the same group of friends since freshman year. *ba dum shh*
Otherwise, the theme of this past week’s reading choices seem to be childhood nostalgia and road trips, namely:
- The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster, which was a childhood favorite and is, in retrospect, probably to blame for my love of puns and wordplay. Holds up as well at 22 as 12 (actually, I was 7 or 8 when I first read it, but that has less of a ring to it) and in some cases (like the demons of Ignorance) probably more so. It’s filled with weird, clever imagery that’s stuck with me for years - the orchestra that played the sunrise; the way Milo was able to sneak a sound out of the Soundkeeper’s fortress by shutting an unspoken word up in his mouth; jumping to Conclusions - but this time around, I had a new appreciation for the way Juster sets the scene for the quiet, ordinary moments between Milo’s grand and silly adventures, with observations on how the light plays off of things or the feel of the bends in the road. On the other hand, I couldn’t help but notice how the dialogue read like a list of synonyms for ‘said’, or if anyone did say anything, they did so adverb-ly. It was rather like re-watching Labyrinth as a teenager and noticing certain, ah, sartorial quirks that didn’t register in the more innocent time of childhood: it doesn’t ruin the experience, but you can’t un-notice it.
Speaking of noticing things, I found a few puns I'd never caught before (short Shrift, oh my GOD, how did I never NOTICE) but I still, for the life of me, can’t figure out why the boy who grows down instead of up and sees through things is called Alec Bings. Is there some pun I'm not getting? Is it the one name in the story that isn't a pun, solely to drive people crazy trying to figure out a pun that isn't there???
- The Hobbit, by good old J.R.R. It’s been a while since I read it— not quite so long as The Phantom Tollbooth, although as it turns out, my memory of it was actually hazier, despite having seen the three-part movie adaption a few years ago and the rather unforgettable distinction of it being the first book I ever read in which my favorite character(s) died.* Favorite part so far was Beorn the were-bear, both for the humor of the dwarves coming in two by two as Gandalf was like “and then the ten/twelve/fourteen of us—” and Beorn was like “uh, but I only count eight/ten/twelve of you?” like some sort of clown car gag, and for the appeal of living in the middle of the woods with magic animals and a honey farm and being able to TURN INTO A BEAR.
* Trying to think if this is actually true? I think the key words here is favorite character— Little Women and Charlotte’s Web wouldn’t count because my favorite characters were not Beth and Charlotte but Jo and Templeton, respectively. I thiiiiink I may have discovered the Harry Potter and Percy Jackson series, in which secondary characters I was particularly fond of started dropping dead left and right, shortly after reading The Hobbit, which is why I have that particular memory; I rather suspected it of opening the floodgates, or dooming me to fall in love with characters that were themselves doomed.
My favorite part, which will be a surprise to absolutely nobody, has to be when Janet and friends went to see Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. I need a theater company near me to put on that double feature immediately, please.
I do have one (1) nit to pick, which is that the ending feels rather rushed— like, out of 21 chapters, most of the actual plot of Tam Lin happens in the space of the last two or three. I appreciated having those other 18-19 chapters to get to know and love the characters, and the other couple of mysteries Dean threw in, but it’s precisely because of all that character development that I wish we’d gotten more time to emotionally explore that. I also don’t remember Janet’s ability to save Tam Lin being contingent on being pregnant with his child, rather than merely a circumstantial/motivating factor, and I wasn’t thrilled with the implications of that, especially since she’d just spent the entire book talking about reproductive rights.
The author’s note, in which Dean explains her thinking behind writing a ’70s college AU of Tam Lin, reminded me of the theory about how, say, Twilight would make much more sense if they were in college rather than high school, because everyone is so weird in college anyway that a supernatural being probably wouldn’t stick out that badly. Honestly, the most unrealistic part is not the ghosts or fairies but the fact Janet had the same group of friends since freshman year. *ba dum shh*
Otherwise, the theme of this past week’s reading choices seem to be childhood nostalgia and road trips, namely:
- The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster, which was a childhood favorite and is, in retrospect, probably to blame for my love of puns and wordplay. Holds up as well at 22 as 12 (actually, I was 7 or 8 when I first read it, but that has less of a ring to it) and in some cases (like the demons of Ignorance) probably more so. It’s filled with weird, clever imagery that’s stuck with me for years - the orchestra that played the sunrise; the way Milo was able to sneak a sound out of the Soundkeeper’s fortress by shutting an unspoken word up in his mouth; jumping to Conclusions - but this time around, I had a new appreciation for the way Juster sets the scene for the quiet, ordinary moments between Milo’s grand and silly adventures, with observations on how the light plays off of things or the feel of the bends in the road. On the other hand, I couldn’t help but notice how the dialogue read like a list of synonyms for ‘said’, or if anyone did say anything, they did so adverb-ly. It was rather like re-watching Labyrinth as a teenager and noticing certain, ah, sartorial quirks that didn’t register in the more innocent time of childhood: it doesn’t ruin the experience, but you can’t un-notice it.
Speaking of noticing things, I found a few puns I'd never caught before (short Shrift, oh my GOD, how did I never NOTICE) but I still, for the life of me, can’t figure out why the boy who grows down instead of up and sees through things is called Alec Bings. Is there some pun I'm not getting? Is it the one name in the story that isn't a pun, solely to drive people crazy trying to figure out a pun that isn't there???
- The Hobbit, by good old J.R.R. It’s been a while since I read it— not quite so long as The Phantom Tollbooth, although as it turns out, my memory of it was actually hazier, despite having seen the three-part movie adaption a few years ago and the rather unforgettable distinction of it being the first book I ever read in which my favorite character(s) died.* Favorite part so far was Beorn the were-bear, both for the humor of the dwarves coming in two by two as Gandalf was like “and then the ten/twelve/fourteen of us—” and Beorn was like “uh, but I only count eight/ten/twelve of you?” like some sort of clown car gag, and for the appeal of living in the middle of the woods with magic animals and a honey farm and being able to TURN INTO A BEAR.
* Trying to think if this is actually true? I think the key words here is favorite character— Little Women and Charlotte’s Web wouldn’t count because my favorite characters were not Beth and Charlotte but Jo and Templeton, respectively. I thiiiiink I may have discovered the Harry Potter and Percy Jackson series, in which secondary characters I was particularly fond of started dropping dead left and right, shortly after reading The Hobbit, which is why I have that particular memory; I rather suspected it of opening the floodgates, or dooming me to fall in love with characters that were themselves doomed.
