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Good morning! Chicago is currently cloudy, twenty-two degrees, and under a winter storm watch, with five to nine inches of snow expected...and I am luxuriating in a sunny bedroom in Bisbee, with a high of 68 degrees and a visit with several delightful friends expected throughout the day. Totally worth the two-hour delay for de-icing that our plane experienced on Sunday; Brian and I seem to have timed our escape just about perfectly.
What I've just finished reading
Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal, by Christopher Moore. This one sort of fizzled out by the end, which saddens me somewhat; it had so much potential and I enjoyed a lot of its pointed satirization of various religions and philosophies. I think it suffered somewhat from the proscription of the ending; we know how the end of the story goes, and while Biff's desperate plan and eventual descent into grief and anger was understandable and even touching given his devotion to Joshua, there wasn't really much interesting there. What's especially frustrating is that there was some real potential here. There's a moment where he takes revenge against Judas that could've been a really chewy dramatic action-hero-gone-bad moment, but it's just related kind of matter-of-factly and without acknowledging any of the emotions that must've played into it. I can't tell if Moore was just running out of enthusiasm for the narrative, or if he was afraid that directly portraying Biff's very human and fallible emotions would drain the venom from the earlier, more removed, more satirical sections, but it was really a missed opportunity. As was the red herring of the paralytic poison (established early in the story) - Biff's desperate plan of dosing Joshua with the poison and 'burying' him only to bring him to life with the antidote would certainly have had some satirical bite, but it feels like Moore loses his nerve, instead allowing Joshua to follow the path we're all familiar with from Sunday school.
Also, in the afterword, I discovered partly why the Hindu section felt so Western-centric - Moore cites his primary research source as Joseph Campbell's writings about the Kali worshippers. Well...all right then. I get that the Thuggee death cults were a real thing, but it saddens me that so many American stories focus on them due to their sensationalistic aspects, and completely ignore the many, many other facets of a highly complex and fascinating religion.
What I'm currently reading
Provenance, by Ann Leckie. I'm listening to this as an audiobook, and I'm kind of thinking that in the future I should really stick to reading Leckie - not that her work doesn't stand up as an audiobook! But part of what I love about her work is how she's so masterful at the worldbuilding-in-passing; there's little to no infodumping, you're just expected to sort of pick things up from context (and she's extremely careful to provide just enough context). I hadn't realized it until I started listening to this story, but often in reading her Ancillary books I would stop for a moment when I stumbled across some new piece of information, both to admire the clever way she delivered it and to file it away in my mental index; with an audiobook, I find myself swimming in a stream of context I'm having to process much faster. I feel like I'm keeping afloat, though, and (at about halfway through) I'm entertained as heck to realize that this is basically a carefully-worldbuilt, space-opera version of Charley's Aunt. The identity-swap farce will never die!
Moscow But Dreaming, by Ekaterina Sedia. The title feels more and more appropriate the more of these stories I read; many of them feel like they function on dream-logic, either lacking a clear arc, or beginning or ending in odd-seeming places. But they're surprisingly effective on an emotional level; also much like dreams, they're clearly most interested in exploring the protagonists' desires, transmuted through prisms of culture and environment. It's a different sort of fiction, but makes for excellent bedtime reading.
What I plan to read next
I have The Master and Margarita on my Kindle!
What I've just finished reading
Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal, by Christopher Moore. This one sort of fizzled out by the end, which saddens me somewhat; it had so much potential and I enjoyed a lot of its pointed satirization of various religions and philosophies. I think it suffered somewhat from the proscription of the ending; we know how the end of the story goes, and while Biff's desperate plan and eventual descent into grief and anger was understandable and even touching given his devotion to Joshua, there wasn't really much interesting there. What's especially frustrating is that there was some real potential here. There's a moment where he takes revenge against Judas that could've been a really chewy dramatic action-hero-gone-bad moment, but it's just related kind of matter-of-factly and without acknowledging any of the emotions that must've played into it. I can't tell if Moore was just running out of enthusiasm for the narrative, or if he was afraid that directly portraying Biff's very human and fallible emotions would drain the venom from the earlier, more removed, more satirical sections, but it was really a missed opportunity. As was the red herring of the paralytic poison (established early in the story) - Biff's desperate plan of dosing Joshua with the poison and 'burying' him only to bring him to life with the antidote would certainly have had some satirical bite, but it feels like Moore loses his nerve, instead allowing Joshua to follow the path we're all familiar with from Sunday school.
Also, in the afterword, I discovered partly why the Hindu section felt so Western-centric - Moore cites his primary research source as Joseph Campbell's writings about the Kali worshippers. Well...all right then. I get that the Thuggee death cults were a real thing, but it saddens me that so many American stories focus on them due to their sensationalistic aspects, and completely ignore the many, many other facets of a highly complex and fascinating religion.
What I'm currently reading
Provenance, by Ann Leckie. I'm listening to this as an audiobook, and I'm kind of thinking that in the future I should really stick to reading Leckie - not that her work doesn't stand up as an audiobook! But part of what I love about her work is how she's so masterful at the worldbuilding-in-passing; there's little to no infodumping, you're just expected to sort of pick things up from context (and she's extremely careful to provide just enough context). I hadn't realized it until I started listening to this story, but often in reading her Ancillary books I would stop for a moment when I stumbled across some new piece of information, both to admire the clever way she delivered it and to file it away in my mental index; with an audiobook, I find myself swimming in a stream of context I'm having to process much faster. I feel like I'm keeping afloat, though, and (at about halfway through) I'm entertained as heck to realize that this is basically a carefully-worldbuilt, space-opera version of Charley's Aunt. The identity-swap farce will never die!
Moscow But Dreaming, by Ekaterina Sedia. The title feels more and more appropriate the more of these stories I read; many of them feel like they function on dream-logic, either lacking a clear arc, or beginning or ending in odd-seeming places. But they're surprisingly effective on an emotional level; also much like dreams, they're clearly most interested in exploring the protagonists' desires, transmuted through prisms of culture and environment. It's a different sort of fiction, but makes for excellent bedtime reading.
What I plan to read next
I have The Master and Margarita on my Kindle!
