troisoiseaux

I've been on a "nonfiction audiobooks read by their authors" kick, starting with John Green's Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection, which weaves together a scattered history of tuberculosis (both in the sense of how the disease has been understood and treated, and how it has shaped history) and the personal story of a teenage TB patient in Sierra Leone who Green befriended. Next listened to How to Be Perfect: The Correct Moral Answer to Every Question by Mike Schur (creator of The Good Place), a chatty, funny crash course in moral philosophy featuring cameos from pretty much the entire cast of The Good Place, e.g., to read quoted text or pose hypothetical questions. Both books were interesting and well-narrated; I liked how Schur solved the "footnotes in an audiobook" problem by having a little DING! sound before and after the aside that would be a footnote in the print version.

Read Tragedy at Law by Cyril Hare, a 1942 mystery novel set against a backdrop of the intricate rituals of the British legal system, which I discovered via sovay's 100 Books meme. Fantastic book; the setting and characters are wonderfully sketched - this is very much of the "novel with a mystery in it" school (as opposed to A Mystery Novel) - and I liked Hare's narrative voice, particularly how he slipped in "hindsight is 20/20" asides in a way that, say, told you something about a character, rather than feeling like either a clumsy signpost for A Clue or nyah nyah I know something you, the reader, don't. From my post-book googling, I found a contemporary review comparing this to Sayers in general and to Murder Must Advertise in particular, and I totally see it:

The publishers compare the book to Murder Must Advertise, but, for a wonder, they err in understatement. Though the style is less brilliant, the narrative is as smooth, vivid and sustained as that of Miss Sayers’ most famous work, and superior in finish. I can never forget or forgive the garish interludes in Murder Must Advertise that presage Lord Peter’s dégringolande into the limbo of a schoolmarm’s daydream. The two books are alike in the use made of special knowledge, and in the self-confidence and fluency produced by describing personal experiences. Miss Sayers showed us the human mechanism behind the façade of a modern advertising agency. Mr. Hare takes us behind the scenes of Justice, introducing us to the entourage of Sir William Barber, a High Court Judge on circuit. This round of Assizes seems to resemble more than anything the tour of a repertory company. ... There is an excellent plot in Tragedy at Law, but it is unfortunately impossible even to outline for fear of betraying its secret subtlety. The characters are so real as to be almost alarming. [x]

Read The Last Knight of Camelot: The Chronicles of Sir Kay by Cherith Baldry (or as I have been calling it, Woobie Kay Whumpfest 2: Electric Woobaloo), a collection of short stories of Baldry following her bliss of Putting Kay In A Situation Where He Is Unappreciated - Maligned, Even - But Actually Kay Is The Best, It's Everyone Else That Sucks. I truly cannot emphasize enough how pretty much every story follows a pattern of Arthur/someone/everyone else being dismissive or outright cruel to Kay (accusing him of treason is a popular choice) --> Kay makes a bold and ill-advised vow (and/or a choice that is the best and most logical course of action but not honorable) and storms off to fulfill it, usually followed by Gareth and/or Gawain (who Love Kay So, So Much Even Though No One Else Can See How Great He Is) --> Kay is successful but, alas, still Unappreciated and Misunderstood, and he's so so brave about it.

In my review of Exiled from Camelot (aka Woobie Kay Whumpfest the first), I had noted the ""everyone's kind of in love with each other, in varying combinations and gradients of interpretable-as-non-platonic" flavor of the capital-L Loyalty among Arthur and his knights. Kay loves Arthur, Gawain, and Guinevere; Gawain loves Arthur and Kay; Gareth loves Kay ..." and, in the comments,

I just kind of tossed all the different variations together in the post, but if I had to break it up into different types of "love":
- Purely platonic: Kay <--> Arthur
- Admiration-crush: Kay --> Guenevere; Gareth --> Kay
- Please kiss: Kay/Gawain

I revise my theory. Baldry's Kay is 1000% in unrequited romantic love with Arthur, and I'm like 98% sure this is on purpose, although there is technically enough plausible deniability - he's just Really Really Devoted to Arthur! Platonically! - that I can't be totally sure about the last 2%. Maybe she just... accidentally wrote some straight-up romance novels passages?

( Exhibit A )

tl;dr this is 30 years' (1994-2024) worth of Cherith Baldry's self-indulgent blorbo whumpfic and I love that for her.

Recently read

Read The Short Reign of Pippin IV by John Steinbeck, a 1957 satire in which France decides to give the whole monarchy thing another shot and crowns an amateur astronomer descended from Charlemagne, who really does not want to be a king.

Read The Mighty Red, Louise Erdrich's latest; it's a novel of small-town high drama, set in a farming community in North Dakota during the 2008 recession. There are teenage love triangles, ill-advised weddings, questionable career plans, local tragedies, book clubs as the court of public opinion, and a heist.

Read Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century by Kim Fu, a very good short story collection I picked up after seeing a post describe Fu's stories as the kind "that doesn't answer any questions or provide you with any sort of guidance— just walks in and rearranges your photographs so they're slightly off-kilter, leaves you with that destabilization." [x]

Currently reading

Reading Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams - the new Facebook tell-all - because I love non-fiction about dysfunctional Silicon Valley companies, and HOO BOY. She opens her memoir with the time she nearly died in a childhood shark attack and it isn't even in the top five most gobsmacking moments so far.

To read next

Contemplating what to choose as my next Long Classic™ Audiobook, having finished Moby Dick; I feel like I should give Bleak House another shot, since I thoroughly stalled out on my attempt to actually read it (last... November?), but I'm open to suggestions.

Re-read The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights by John Steinbeck, which I read a couple of years before I really got onto my Arthuriana kick and have been meaning to re-read since. The first five of the total seven stories/chapters are more or less a straightforward translation of Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, and I found myself more surprised than I should have been by how much it Smacked Of Gender— all broad sweeping statements about "the inborn craft of maidens" and "inborn helplessness of men" and "the detachment of ladies for other ladies" in the place of any individual characterization for, e.g., Nyneve (Nimue). My Arthurian reading of the past five years has skewed towards women authors and/or recent adaptations with intentionally 21st century attitudes, which might be why this felt so jarring?? On the other hand, this might technically have more women per page than most... what I guess I'd call character-focused(?) retellings, since a knight apparently could not throw a stone in the Arthurian Britain of Malory-by-way-of-Steinbeck without hitting a damsel, often accompanied by several of her friends, who would provide a random quest or otherwise notable encounter; I kept thinking of a post I saw... somewhere... about how often the "damsels in distress" of Arthurian legend show up to demand violence be done on their behalf.

On the third hand, my favorite story/chapter - "Gawain, Ewain, and Marhalt", which as pointed out by Christopher Paolini's foreword is the point where Steinbeck starts to mix things up, inventing scenes and "delv{ing} into the characters' thoughts and feelings in a way Malory never did" - flips the first point delightfully on its head. The titular three knights encounter a trio of ladies, who bestow the quest of each picking a lady to go off and adventure with for one (1) year— ( ... )

The other stand-out is "The Noble Tale of Sir Lancelot of the Lake", which reminded me a lot of T.H. White, although maybe the comparison is inevitable. (Side note: I feel like positive depictions of Lancelot have kind of fallen out of fashion, retelling-wise?) Steinbeck's Lancelot is ascetic, alternately insightful and bewildered by other people, uncomfortable with the extent of his fame; the doomed Arthur-Guinevere-Lancelot love triangle hangs lightly but inescapably over this story and pays off with one of the most deliciously *drags hands down my face screaming* takes on it I've read.

Also interesting to (re-)discover that I had highlighted a couple of quotes back in 2018: ( ... )

Read Bohemians of the Latin Quarter by Henri Murger, the 1851 novel in short stories/vignettes that was the basis for the opera La Bohème and, by extension, Jonathan Larson's RENT. Very charming! Interesting to see what made it through the game of telephone of multiple adaptations— for one thing, the candle-based meet-cute of Roger and Mimi in RENT (and, per Wikipedia, Rodolfo and Mimi in Puccini's opera) is actually from Murger's one stand-alone story about a different couple, who did not make it into either adaptation, rather than the original Rodolphe and Mimi? This was also a fun read on its own merit, as a fondly humorous portrait of a particular time and place and subculture; there was a passing joke in the first chapter I found particularly funny - one character asking someone to "com{e} every morning to tell {him} the day of the week and month, the quarter of the moon, the weather it is going to be, and the form of government we are under" - because, yeah, that last part would be an open question in 1840s France!

In Moby Dick updates: SQUEEZE SQUEEZE SQUEEZE. I enjoyed the foray into WHALE LAW in chapters 89-90, including the tangent on WHALE LAW (i.e., the principle of "fast fish vs. loose fish" or, tl;dr, "finders keepers") as a metaphor for colonialism, although since it was the 1850s this metaphor seemed to be on the side of colonialism? (There was a line about how "at last will Mexico be {a colony} to the United States"— oh, Herman, buddy, no.) Anyway! At this point I'm kind of rooting for Stubb to get eaten by a whale.

Finished Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood, in which a middle-aged, atheist environmentalist leaves behind her life and failing marriage to join a convent in rural Australia— so, shades of a contemporary In This House of Brede, although unlike Godden's Philippa Talbot, Wood's unnamed narrator doesn't become a nun, she just kind of... moves in with them? This was shortlisted for the Booker Prize last year, and I can see why; in a way, it reminds me of Samantha Harvey's Orbital, the book that actually won. The plot threads are deceptively simple to summarize - the convent suffers from plague of mice; the remains of a former sister are returned to the convent for burial, accompanied by a famous activist nun who the narrator had bullied when they went to school together; the narrator meditates on grief, regret, and forgiveness - but weave together into a novel that's going to stick in my head for a while. (For one thing, the plotline about the mice feels like a straight-up horror story.)

Read Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou, a satire that feels like a game of absurd-plot-point chicken until the moment it slips into sincerity and then just as quickly blazes past, onto the next bonkers twist. What starts out with the garden-variety academic angst of a Taiwanese-American grad student at the end of her rope over her PhD dissertation about the work of a celebrated Chinese-American poet she didn't particularly want to study in the first place escalates quickly into: ( spoilers for the entire plot )

Read The Wicked Day by Mary Stewart, at osprey_archer's recommendation, because I love a woobie/sympathetic Mordred. It turns out that it's possible for me to find a retelling to be a little too sympathetic to Mordred, though— in something of the Cherith Baldry "Kay can do nothing wrong" vein (although not nearly as bonkers), everything hinges on maybe just one too many Tragic Coincidences...? I did enjoy this, overall; it was interesting to see Stewart's variations on the details of Arthurian legend, and her very Fantasy Adventure Coming-of-Age Novel take on Mordred, who starts out believing himself to be a fisherman's son and gets not one but two "you're the illegitimate son of royalty!" reveals and apparently holds the singular brain cell in the Orkney clan.

Finished The Terror and while my overall takeaway from this book is that at least the AMC adaptation was very good, I will say that Dan Simmons was really cooking in the last third, when character after character hit their breaking point after the crew abandoned their ice-stranded ships to march towards the smallest possible chance of rescue and everyone was dying of scurvy: ( ... )

Read The World Only Spins Forward by Isaac Butler and Dan Kois, an oral history of Tony Kushner's Angels in America which chestnut_pod recommended after I'd posted about watching the 2017 National Theatre production, and now I want to go back and rewatch it with the new context from this book, especially the development/thought process behind scenes as they ended up in the final version of the play, and the chapters made up of different actors who have played the same roles talking about the characters. REALLY good book, both in content and in how the snippets of interviews (and articles, etc.) were woven together into a coherent whole— occasionally in ways that were very funny (e.g., "interrupting" a quote from Kushner about how he guesses Louis is the character most like him with quotes from multiple other people going "yeah 100% Louis is Tony") and sweet (e.g., when a quote from the OG Prior, Stephen Spinella, about wanting to play Roy Cohn "someday" was followed by an article announcing that he'd been cast as Cohn in the 2018 Berkeley Rep production). The reoccurring theme of way that audiences have reacted to the show in different cultural moments - there's a quote from Kushner describing how it felt like a "rock concert" when they performed both Millennium and Perestroika the day after Clinton was elected; this book was published in 2018, so there were a lot of quotes from the 2017-18 revival's cast about how things hit differently given both U.S. and British politics - itself was just, oof, reading it in this particular cultural moment.

In Moby Dick updates: I'm about 45% through; I switched audiobook versions since there was some sort of recurring glitch with the first one that seemed to be an issue with the recording itself rather than with Spotify. Particularly enjoyed the most recent chapter (Ch. 54) for the dramatic second-hand tale of near-mutiny and also the surprise reference to Mackinac Island. (Yes, Melville, the Great Lakes ARE basically an ocean, thank you so much for noticing!)

Read Sister Deborah by Scholastique Mukasonga, a short novel in which a young girl, Ikirezi, in 1930s Rwanda is healed by a Black American "prophetess" who has become a local cult figure, preaching the coming of a Black, female messiah; two decades later, Ikirezi - now an anthropologist at Howard University - investigates the life story of the mysterious Sister Deborah she had encountered as a child. ( ... )

Approximately 30% into Moby Dick, which is actually... really fun??? WHO KNEW. The fact I'm listening to this as an audiobook is definitely what (finally!) made it click for me. Ishmael is a mess and I love him. Currently at the "facts(?) about whales" interlude. (Although we've moved on to albino animals in general, I guess?) I'm also reading The Terror by Dan Simmons - historical fiction about the doomed Franklin expedition with a supernatural twist; my weirdly specific reading niche this year is shaping up to be "people having a bad time on boats" - which is interesting to read alongside Moby Dick because, on one hand, the scene with Sir John Franklin's shipboard sermon on the story of Jonah gave me a sense of deju vu, after Father Mapple's; on the other, one of Melville's Whale Facts was that whales can teleport "the Nor' West Passage, so long a problem to man, was never a problem to the whale."

( Read more... )