troisoiseaux

I've read a book by China Miéville every year for the last three, and each one has been wildly different, jumping from urban fantasy to historical non-fiction to sci-fi. Looped back around to urban fantasy this year with The City & the City, which has similar bones to Kraken, although the magic is— subtler? The City & the City is a police procedural set in two overlapping cities: literally, two cities, or rather city-states - Besźel and Ul Qoma - that "grosstopically" occupy the same physical space, with the residents of each carefully "unseeing" any people, places, or things from the other city that they encounter while walking through their own, or risk the wrath of a nigh-supernatural force called the Breach. I was super into the world-building in this one, but I ultimately found it kind of a let-down.

Read Cold Sassy Tree by Olive Ann Burns, which reminded me of To Kill A Mockingbird, although it's set in 1900s Georgia rather than 1930s Alabama, the protagonist is a 14-year-old boy, and the central drama - protagonist Will's recently-widowed grandfather's elopement with a woman half his age, scandalizing their small town - is personal rather than political, which is to say, the similarities are mostly the general "coming-of-age story set in the early 20th century American South" vibes. I liked it! It's a bit of a soap opera, plot-wise, but the characters are well-developed, and I liked how how Will's narration conveys more to the audience than he himself understands.

Finally, I signed up for the Dracula Daily substack and have been reading those updates as they show up in my email! My buddy Jonathan is having the weirdest business trip.

- Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls, a retelling of the Iliad focused on Breseis and the other captive women living in the Greek army's camp in the last years of the Trojan war. It's primarily told through Briseis's perspective but as the story progresses, her narration is interspersed with chapters from Achilles' (and Patroclus', once or twice) POV, in third instead of first person. Interesting to compare characterizations to other retellings. The dialogue was modern, slangy, and distinctly British, which was initially jarring but ultimately worked.

- Anne Carson's An Oresteia, a translation of Aeschylus' Agamemnon, Sophocles' Elektra, and Euripides' Orestes. This was different in both translation and source material from the production of the Oresteia I saw last year - which was adapted from Aeschylus' trilogy - but it was same basic myth, so it felt more or less familiar* until I got to Euripides' Orestes, at which point things went wildly off the rails.** I really liked her Kassandra - who also has a cameo at the end of The Silence of the Girls - and Elektra, at least in Sophocles' play. (Euripides' was super weird.)

( Footnotes )

- A Murder Is Announced by Agatha Christie, which was a very charming Miss Marple mystery involving a full half-dozen elderly women in different roles. As usual, I completely failed to figure out whodunnit, although I did predict one half of a red herring/plot twist and honestly, that's better than my success rate for some of her other novels. It also contains what is in retrospect one of the most genuinely chilling moments in Christie's work: ( Read more... )

- October, a history of Russia's tumultuous 1917, by China Miéville— who, it turns out, has a PhD in international relations from the London School of Economics as well as writing fantasy novels! Overall it was a mostly engaging narrative that occasionally felt like digging through concrete with my fingernails, generally in direct correlation to how many different parties, committees, and/or -isms (defencism, statism, Leninism, Kamenevism, etc.) were involved in a given sentence. This was only partially Miéville’s fault - the man cannot be blamed for the inherent chaos of the Russian revolution - but what IS his fault is a tendency towards artistically, needlessly obscure language. (One could even call it grandiloquent, or orotund.) I'm very glad I read this as an e-book and could just tap a word to find its definition, because if I'd had to stop at LEAST every other page to look up what "splenetic" or "perspicacious" (or gallimaufry, sybaritism, glossolalic, desiderata, jacquerie, or coterminous) meant, I would have lost my mind.