Reading Wednesday
Jul. 22nd, 2020 08:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
troisoiseauxRecently read
Finished Phyllis Ann Karr's Idylls of the Queen, an Arthurian murder mystery, which I absolutely loved. I am a BIG fan of "reluctant allies" as a trope, so I loved the premise of Kay and Mordred working together to solve the mystery of who poisoned one of the Knights of the Round Table and tried to frame Queen Guenevere for it, while trying not to murder each other on their road trip to find Lancelot and/or the Lady of the Lake.
At least in Karr's characterization, they're more alike than they're willing to admit— both acerbic, albeit in their own (frequently clashing) ways, and self-aware about their roles in the Round Table's mythology. Karr's Kay - the story's POV character - gripes, not infrequently, about how sharp words are seen as proof of another knight's wit, while if he had said them, it would have been seen as just boorish, churlish old Kay being a jerk again; Mordred is haunted by the prophecy that he's destined to kill his father, Arthur, and seems to be teetering between whether to self-destruct before he can fulfill the prophecy or to go full "oh, I'm a monster, am I? so be it." I get the feeling Karr has a soft spot for the villains of Arthur's story— Morgana also shows up at one point and directly challenges Kay's perception of her as ~evil~, while HOO BOY is this less flattering to Lancelot (and, to some extent, Arthur) than other takes I've read.
Finished Barkskins by Annie Proulx, which is one of those "generational epic"-type historical fiction novels that seem to be super popular these days. It follows the descendants of two men who arrived in New France as indentured servants in the 1690s, but it is focused as much (maybe even more so) on the impact of these generations on the land as on their individual human lives. The destinies of both families are tied up in the lumber industry— as hard-living and short-lived loggers, as the scions of an ever-expanding timber empire, and eventually, in the 21st century, as conservationists.
It's a fast-paced novel, mostly sketching out its characters' lives and the passage of time in the broadest of strokes, although it spends more time with some characters than others. Most of the novel's ten sections cover roughly a 25- to 30-year time period, overlapping as the narrative moves between the Sels and the Dukes (anglicized from Duquet circa the early 1700s), but the last two sections of the novel cover the whopping time frames of 1844-1960s and 1886-2013, respectively. I kept thinking of the quote from Atonement about writing as miniaturization: "the childhood of a spoiled prince could be framed within half a page, a moonlit dash through sleepy villages was one rhythmically emphatic sentence, falling in love could be achieved with a single word— a glance."
After last week's post, I realized that I had not, in fact, read Agatha Christie's final Tommy & Tuppence novel, Postern of Fate, so I decided to get on that. To be honest, I found it slightly... wobbly? Not well-paced, for one thing. This may be a problem mostly arising from the fact it has two people investigating the same mystery from different angles - they keep circling back and filling the other in on what they've learned through their own line of investigation, which as a reader I found repetitive and slightly disorienting - but ALSO, they kept being like, "ohhh, I don't think we can actually solve this mystery, there can't really be decades-old papers of political import hidden in this house we just bought. Haven't there been a weird amount of bizarre and potentially life-threatening accidents happening lately? Haha what a weird coincidence!" for an annoyingly long time. I don't have a ton of patience for mystery novels that don't embrace what they are; it was especially weird to encounter this problem from Agatha freaking Christie, of all authors.
On a positive note, she clearly got a kick out of narrating the interior monologues of dogs and it's adorable.
Currently reading
Call Down the Hawk, Maggie Stiefvater's follow-up to her Raven Cycle series.
Finished Phyllis Ann Karr's Idylls of the Queen, an Arthurian murder mystery, which I absolutely loved. I am a BIG fan of "reluctant allies" as a trope, so I loved the premise of Kay and Mordred working together to solve the mystery of who poisoned one of the Knights of the Round Table and tried to frame Queen Guenevere for it, while trying not to murder each other on their road trip to find Lancelot and/or the Lady of the Lake.
At least in Karr's characterization, they're more alike than they're willing to admit— both acerbic, albeit in their own (frequently clashing) ways, and self-aware about their roles in the Round Table's mythology. Karr's Kay - the story's POV character - gripes, not infrequently, about how sharp words are seen as proof of another knight's wit, while if he had said them, it would have been seen as just boorish, churlish old Kay being a jerk again; Mordred is haunted by the prophecy that he's destined to kill his father, Arthur, and seems to be teetering between whether to self-destruct before he can fulfill the prophecy or to go full "oh, I'm a monster, am I? so be it." I get the feeling Karr has a soft spot for the villains of Arthur's story— Morgana also shows up at one point and directly challenges Kay's perception of her as ~evil~, while HOO BOY is this less flattering to Lancelot (and, to some extent, Arthur) than other takes I've read.
Finished Barkskins by Annie Proulx, which is one of those "generational epic"-type historical fiction novels that seem to be super popular these days. It follows the descendants of two men who arrived in New France as indentured servants in the 1690s, but it is focused as much (maybe even more so) on the impact of these generations on the land as on their individual human lives. The destinies of both families are tied up in the lumber industry— as hard-living and short-lived loggers, as the scions of an ever-expanding timber empire, and eventually, in the 21st century, as conservationists.
It's a fast-paced novel, mostly sketching out its characters' lives and the passage of time in the broadest of strokes, although it spends more time with some characters than others. Most of the novel's ten sections cover roughly a 25- to 30-year time period, overlapping as the narrative moves between the Sels and the Dukes (anglicized from Duquet circa the early 1700s), but the last two sections of the novel cover the whopping time frames of 1844-1960s and 1886-2013, respectively. I kept thinking of the quote from Atonement about writing as miniaturization: "the childhood of a spoiled prince could be framed within half a page, a moonlit dash through sleepy villages was one rhythmically emphatic sentence, falling in love could be achieved with a single word— a glance."
After last week's post, I realized that I had not, in fact, read Agatha Christie's final Tommy & Tuppence novel, Postern of Fate, so I decided to get on that. To be honest, I found it slightly... wobbly? Not well-paced, for one thing. This may be a problem mostly arising from the fact it has two people investigating the same mystery from different angles - they keep circling back and filling the other in on what they've learned through their own line of investigation, which as a reader I found repetitive and slightly disorienting - but ALSO, they kept being like, "ohhh, I don't think we can actually solve this mystery, there can't really be decades-old papers of political import hidden in this house we just bought. Haven't there been a weird amount of bizarre and potentially life-threatening accidents happening lately? Haha what a weird coincidence!" for an annoyingly long time. I don't have a ton of patience for mystery novels that don't embrace what they are; it was especially weird to encounter this problem from Agatha freaking Christie, of all authors.
On a positive note, she clearly got a kick out of narrating the interior monologues of dogs and it's adorable.
Currently reading
Call Down the Hawk, Maggie Stiefvater's follow-up to her Raven Cycle series.
