Holy shit...a Wednesday reading post??
Nov. 25th, 2020 09:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
missroseroseBeen a while since I did one of these! *goes to check how long* Cripes. The last one I did while closing on my house and prepping for coaching yoga teacher training, two and a half years ago. Obviously I've been reading since then, but the bulk of it has been fanfiction, and further, most of it short stories written for easy gratification. (Not that I'm knocking easy gratification! But a 3500-word story about a captive Dean Winchester watching an evil version of himself and Castiel have sex is...entertaining, certainly, but maybe not in a way that lends itself to a lot of deeper analysis.)
(Well, other than perhaps a judicious use of the "this better not awaken anything in me" meme. Ahem.)
That said! I've read a lot of fanfiction over the past few years, and plan to continue doing so. I think I'm going to add a Fanfiction Spotlight slot to the Wednesday Book Club format. Chances are there'll have been something I've read in any given week that feels like it deserves attention.
What I've recently finished reading
The Starless Sea, by Erin Morgenstern. I'd previously read The Night Circus on a long-ass plane flight, and it turned out to be almost the perfect book for it—pure escapism so heavily drenched in dreamy poetic atmosphere that I could sink into it like a hot bath, and forget for much of the six-hour flight time that I was crammed into a tiny coach seat. Sea is definitely in that same vein, but this time around I found the thinness and uncertainty of the plot to be rather more frustrating, in a way that overpowered the richness of the atmosphere. There was still plenty there to enjoy, including a portal fantasy to any bibliophile's world of pure wish-fulfillment, and some meditations on love and change, and one quote in particular on the nature of love that's stuck with me...but I don't think the whole thing hangs together as well as it promised, at the start. And while (as a fellow author) I completely understand that things change as you write them, when you reach a point in a story where it feels like the author has as little idea as you do what happens next, I find it a little demoralizing.
Morpho Eugenia, by A.S. Byatt. Now that I think about it, this novella makes for an interesting comparison to Sea, because it's similarly atmospheric, albeit less in the dreamy-imaginative-lovers-and-poets vein than the neo-Victorian highly-organized-and-tightly-laced-household-full-of-dark-undercurrents style. It also does absolutely nothing surprising, plot-wise; it's 180 pages long and I think I'd identified most of the major themes and guessed the major arcs/big plot reveal by page fifteen. That's not necessarily a fault in and of itself—there's something comforting about a story that does exactly what you expect, and it does a good job threading the needle of ladling on the foreshadowing without (quite) hitting you over the head with what's going on. But frankly, the narrative stumbles somewhat in its slavish devotion to form.
As an example: our protagonist is an entolomologist and atheist, penniless in the wake of a shipwreck that robbed him of his specimens and research, who finds himself living on the largesse of a wealthy family whose patriarch has an interest in natural philosophy. So there are, of course, extensive passages on the nature and habits of various insects (meant to be excerpts from his work), on the potential space for the existence of God in natural selection (meant to be arguments from the patriarch), and even an extensive semi-allegorical insectoid fairy tale (written by another character entirely), which...certainly is all in keeping with the Victorian style, but none of which really feels particularly necessary to the story, here in this age where encyclopedias are a thing and anyone reading a neo-Victorian novella probably has at least a passing familiarity with the Deist arguments being held in the wake of Darwin's publication of On the Origin of Species. Some cynical part of me wonders if Byatt was trying to write a whole novel, only to discover that the main thrust of her story was nowhere near substantial enough to support one, and even with all the padding she only managed to reach novella length.
What I'm currently reading
Technically I haven't started it, but The Conjugial Angel is the other Byatt novella in the collection I picked up, so I'm probably going to power through that just so I won't feel guilty about tossing the book on the "to be donated" pile. If it's anything like Morpho Eugenia, I expect to feel thoroughly "meh" about it, but hey! Maybe I'll be surprised!
What I plan to read next
I have two specific recommended-by-friends books in my queue. The first is Aleksander Solzhenitsyn's One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich, which I'm rather looking forward to despite my somewhat uneven relationship with Russian literature. It was recommended to me by an honest-to-God Russian Literature major, and the bits and pieces of Solzhenitsyn I've encountered in the wild make me suspect I'll find his perspective interesting. And even if I end up hating it, well...it's short.
The second is Margo Lanagan's book Tender Morsels, which I know very little about other than it's a dark fairy tale. But it was recommended by a friend who's become quite dear to me, and the theme of it (the jacket cover promises an Edenic tale of three women turned out of their personal Heaven and having to deal with the harsh realities of the outside world) certainly feels appropriate to 2020.
Fanfiction Spotlight
I was particularly taken with the premise of zoemathemata's Supernatural/Supernatural RPF story "Folie a Deux". Sam and Dean Winchester are held captive in Lofty Pines Mental Institution for unknown reasons, slowly being brainwashed into thinking that they're two run-of-the-mill dudes named Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki...or are Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki two men suffering from the delusion that they're supernatural-creature hunter brothers named Sam and Dean Winchester? And if they're brothers, how do they square that with the fact that they can't seem to keep their hands off each other...?
It's a clever idea, with the sort of meta-analytical flavor that's very in keeping with the show itself, and zoemathemata makes full use of the opportunity to break down the many inconsistencies and flaws that any long-running serialized story accumulates but that we, the audience, overlook for the sake of the Plot of the Week. My one complaint about it is that it ends too soon—the most immediate plot threads are resolved but there's a distinct sense that this is the beginning rather than the ending. The author says in the comments that they didn't continue it in part because they couldn't decide which was the reality—and I totally get not wanting to spend months or years writing a novel-length fic out of what's supposed to be a quick bit of fun—but there's just so much you could do with this idea. Even without picking sides, it could be a Total Recall-style ambiguously-themed case fic, or a "Frame of Mind"-esque dark psychological thriller, or any number of other options...what can I say? I have a weakness for unreliable narrators.
(Well, other than perhaps a judicious use of the "this better not awaken anything in me" meme. Ahem.)
That said! I've read a lot of fanfiction over the past few years, and plan to continue doing so. I think I'm going to add a Fanfiction Spotlight slot to the Wednesday Book Club format. Chances are there'll have been something I've read in any given week that feels like it deserves attention.
What I've recently finished reading
The Starless Sea, by Erin Morgenstern. I'd previously read The Night Circus on a long-ass plane flight, and it turned out to be almost the perfect book for it—pure escapism so heavily drenched in dreamy poetic atmosphere that I could sink into it like a hot bath, and forget for much of the six-hour flight time that I was crammed into a tiny coach seat. Sea is definitely in that same vein, but this time around I found the thinness and uncertainty of the plot to be rather more frustrating, in a way that overpowered the richness of the atmosphere. There was still plenty there to enjoy, including a portal fantasy to any bibliophile's world of pure wish-fulfillment, and some meditations on love and change, and one quote in particular on the nature of love that's stuck with me...but I don't think the whole thing hangs together as well as it promised, at the start. And while (as a fellow author) I completely understand that things change as you write them, when you reach a point in a story where it feels like the author has as little idea as you do what happens next, I find it a little demoralizing.
Morpho Eugenia, by A.S. Byatt. Now that I think about it, this novella makes for an interesting comparison to Sea, because it's similarly atmospheric, albeit less in the dreamy-imaginative-lovers-and-poets vein than the neo-Victorian highly-organized-and-tightly-laced-household-full-of-dark-undercurrents style. It also does absolutely nothing surprising, plot-wise; it's 180 pages long and I think I'd identified most of the major themes and guessed the major arcs/big plot reveal by page fifteen. That's not necessarily a fault in and of itself—there's something comforting about a story that does exactly what you expect, and it does a good job threading the needle of ladling on the foreshadowing without (quite) hitting you over the head with what's going on. But frankly, the narrative stumbles somewhat in its slavish devotion to form.
As an example: our protagonist is an entolomologist and atheist, penniless in the wake of a shipwreck that robbed him of his specimens and research, who finds himself living on the largesse of a wealthy family whose patriarch has an interest in natural philosophy. So there are, of course, extensive passages on the nature and habits of various insects (meant to be excerpts from his work), on the potential space for the existence of God in natural selection (meant to be arguments from the patriarch), and even an extensive semi-allegorical insectoid fairy tale (written by another character entirely), which...certainly is all in keeping with the Victorian style, but none of which really feels particularly necessary to the story, here in this age where encyclopedias are a thing and anyone reading a neo-Victorian novella probably has at least a passing familiarity with the Deist arguments being held in the wake of Darwin's publication of On the Origin of Species. Some cynical part of me wonders if Byatt was trying to write a whole novel, only to discover that the main thrust of her story was nowhere near substantial enough to support one, and even with all the padding she only managed to reach novella length.
What I'm currently reading
Technically I haven't started it, but The Conjugial Angel is the other Byatt novella in the collection I picked up, so I'm probably going to power through that just so I won't feel guilty about tossing the book on the "to be donated" pile. If it's anything like Morpho Eugenia, I expect to feel thoroughly "meh" about it, but hey! Maybe I'll be surprised!
What I plan to read next
I have two specific recommended-by-friends books in my queue. The first is Aleksander Solzhenitsyn's One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich, which I'm rather looking forward to despite my somewhat uneven relationship with Russian literature. It was recommended to me by an honest-to-God Russian Literature major, and the bits and pieces of Solzhenitsyn I've encountered in the wild make me suspect I'll find his perspective interesting. And even if I end up hating it, well...it's short.
The second is Margo Lanagan's book Tender Morsels, which I know very little about other than it's a dark fairy tale. But it was recommended by a friend who's become quite dear to me, and the theme of it (the jacket cover promises an Edenic tale of three women turned out of their personal Heaven and having to deal with the harsh realities of the outside world) certainly feels appropriate to 2020.
Fanfiction Spotlight
I was particularly taken with the premise of zoemathemata's Supernatural/Supernatural RPF story "Folie a Deux". Sam and Dean Winchester are held captive in Lofty Pines Mental Institution for unknown reasons, slowly being brainwashed into thinking that they're two run-of-the-mill dudes named Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki...or are Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki two men suffering from the delusion that they're supernatural-creature hunter brothers named Sam and Dean Winchester? And if they're brothers, how do they square that with the fact that they can't seem to keep their hands off each other...?
It's a clever idea, with the sort of meta-analytical flavor that's very in keeping with the show itself, and zoemathemata makes full use of the opportunity to break down the many inconsistencies and flaws that any long-running serialized story accumulates but that we, the audience, overlook for the sake of the Plot of the Week. My one complaint about it is that it ends too soon—the most immediate plot threads are resolved but there's a distinct sense that this is the beginning rather than the ending. The author says in the comments that they didn't continue it in part because they couldn't decide which was the reality—and I totally get not wanting to spend months or years writing a novel-length fic out of what's supposed to be a quick bit of fun—but there's just so much you could do with this idea. Even without picking sides, it could be a Total Recall-style ambiguously-themed case fic, or a "Frame of Mind"-esque dark psychological thriller, or any number of other options...what can I say? I have a weakness for unreliable narrators.
