aggh (but mostly books)
Sep. 13th, 2014 06:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silverflight8It's been a brutal week (highlights: I auditioned people for the first time! All the volunteering and such started up again! etc) and I began developing a cold and then I think I gave myself food poisoning yesterday, which was miserable. I feel much better today though and I'm very grateful, because the coming week is going to be even busier. I am sorry about the meme post, I swear I'm composing my comments...slowly.
In other news, I did finish two major novels: Les Miserables and The Dispossessed1, both of which I feel unable to review properly. Immediate impressions in this entry for now.
OK first, LM: It has taken me an entire year to read this. By my phone app's statistics, I've put in 30+ hours--I'd read the book when I arrived early and had a few minutes, and as you can tell from my sporadic book reviews I've read many many books in the meantime.
I wish Hugo ended the novel slightly earlier: make Marius understand, reconcile them all, and then end the novel with Valjean having a happily ever after with their household. (Secondary wish: Marius realizing that Thénardier was trying to loot his father's corpse; alternatively Thénardier getting a proper comeuppance, possibly an extended one after all the extortion and child abuse and I'm working myself up just thinking about it.) And while I'm wishing for rainbows I'd also liked to have given every awful person around Fantine a horrible case of guilt and doomed them to awful lives so they could understand, and at least given her some peace before she died. She had to suffer that much and died with that kind of news?
Ranked in terms of how much I liked the digressions, least to most: WATERLOO, Les Amis (all the many diversions around them), whether or not revolutions are justified etc, convent, sewers. I really quite liked the convent and sewer parts; nearly quit during the Waterloo bits though.
I don't like les Amis. Their popularity in the wider fandom after the movie has kind of not helped. (Maybe the 2012 movie had good writing or charismatic actors for those? I found the story around Valjean, Javert, Fantine and Cosette much more compelling, either way.) I'm divided on the enormous amounts of philosophy and justification that Hugo talked about, regarding violence in revolutions, whether it was okay to progress in the name of the future utopia but trample on people in the meantime. Both the stuff delivered via narrator and the ones delivered by interminably long speeches--I realize that the novel is not meant to be taken realistically and therefore speeches can stretch out like that, but man if I were in a pub listening to iirc Grantaire speak like that I would have stopped paying attention within the first minute. But the part with them telling the barricade's men to leave if they have children was unexpectedly moving.
MABEUF ;____;
Gillenormand thank everything oh my god he's all right, I practically exploded at the part when Marius 'returned' and I was all set to celebrate their reconciliation and Gillenormand went off entirely on the wrong track and it just made everything worse. I was so afraid that Gillenormand would die of combined shock and grief when Marius shows up half dead and like, thank you Hugo for your restraint, I'm glad you saw fit to let him have a happy.
Hey, what happened to the two little boys whom Madame Thénardier kicked out?
Marius, you utter prat.
I don't know why it took me so long to get around to reading LeGuin again. I read the Earthsea cycle early enough that it's one of my Childhood Formative Novels and have heard about The Left Hand of Darkness, The Gift, The Dispossessed, and so on for literal years and never moved to pick them up. I should have.
So much work was put into thinking out Anarres, how the Odonian's past would have affected how they set up the colony, how Anarres itself changes how people can behave (eg how Urras is better adapted for humans and has much better soil and sunlight and climate). I really don't know if it's possible to throw off that kind of accumulated history, but entirely removing oneself and community to the moon and then never talking to parent earth for a hundred years seems like a possible way. But as the novel gradually reveals, it doesn't quite help; institutions and government that the first settlers tried so hard to eliminate systematically (and via deeply-rooted institutions, not just in thought and belief) are creeping back in the necessary institutions like the PDC.
I still am not sure if an anarchy can really exist with a) such a large community (both community and large being operative terms) and b) in a place where most people are subsisting on the land even when all resources are pooled. I will say right now that I probably land politically right of socialist, but mostly it's the practical, "how can I undertake large projects or a public good without some sort of organizing system" that bugs me. I think LeGuin addresses that with the PDC and the way that work is posted. I wonder if the instances of people skipping work are a percentage low enough that it doesn't affect their ability to carry out large projects?
I didn't even pick up on the politics on Urras, even though until page 300 exactly in my copy I had been wondering on and off whether Urras = Earth and Anarres = our moon. Well, apparently not. I'm a bit sad that in this universe that Earth is a shattered wreck after what we did to it, only saved at the end by the Hainish.
Speaking of Hainish, I looked up the book after I read it to see if it's part of a series and it looks like the answer is yes, but it's not set on Anarres or about Shevek, boo :(
Shevek himself was delightful.
Another thought that occurs to me is that I might put up a character-hating post. I love most characters, and attempt to excuse too many of them of everything, but there are some excellently hateable characters that I really cannot stand. And when I say hateable I mean the sort of characters along the lines of Angel Clare, John Thorpe, George Wickham from the Lizzie Bennett Diaries, madame and monsieur Thénardier, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, Mr and Mrs John Dashwood, etc. Sometimes I read novels and feel positively deranged.
OK, it's now way past my bedtime and I can't talk about The Dispossessed enough but I have to post this, I've got four entries in progress and I refuse to add to that number.
1Wikipedia informs me that one of the translated titles of Les Misérables into English that never stuck was actually "The Dispossessed" which is a cute coincidence.
In other news, I did finish two major novels: Les Miserables and The Dispossessed1, both of which I feel unable to review properly. Immediate impressions in this entry for now.
OK first, LM: It has taken me an entire year to read this. By my phone app's statistics, I've put in 30+ hours--I'd read the book when I arrived early and had a few minutes, and as you can tell from my sporadic book reviews I've read many many books in the meantime.
I wish Hugo ended the novel slightly earlier: make Marius understand, reconcile them all, and then end the novel with Valjean having a happily ever after with their household. (Secondary wish: Marius realizing that Thénardier was trying to loot his father's corpse; alternatively Thénardier getting a proper comeuppance, possibly an extended one after all the extortion and child abuse and I'm working myself up just thinking about it.) And while I'm wishing for rainbows I'd also liked to have given every awful person around Fantine a horrible case of guilt and doomed them to awful lives so they could understand, and at least given her some peace before she died. She had to suffer that much and died with that kind of news?
Ranked in terms of how much I liked the digressions, least to most: WATERLOO, Les Amis (all the many diversions around them), whether or not revolutions are justified etc, convent, sewers. I really quite liked the convent and sewer parts; nearly quit during the Waterloo bits though.
I don't like les Amis. Their popularity in the wider fandom after the movie has kind of not helped. (Maybe the 2012 movie had good writing or charismatic actors for those? I found the story around Valjean, Javert, Fantine and Cosette much more compelling, either way.) I'm divided on the enormous amounts of philosophy and justification that Hugo talked about, regarding violence in revolutions, whether it was okay to progress in the name of the future utopia but trample on people in the meantime. Both the stuff delivered via narrator and the ones delivered by interminably long speeches--I realize that the novel is not meant to be taken realistically and therefore speeches can stretch out like that, but man if I were in a pub listening to iirc Grantaire speak like that I would have stopped paying attention within the first minute. But the part with them telling the barricade's men to leave if they have children was unexpectedly moving.
MABEUF ;____;
Gillenormand thank everything oh my god he's all right, I practically exploded at the part when Marius 'returned' and I was all set to celebrate their reconciliation and Gillenormand went off entirely on the wrong track and it just made everything worse. I was so afraid that Gillenormand would die of combined shock and grief when Marius shows up half dead and like, thank you Hugo for your restraint, I'm glad you saw fit to let him have a happy.
Hey, what happened to the two little boys whom Madame Thénardier kicked out?
Marius, you utter prat.
I don't know why it took me so long to get around to reading LeGuin again. I read the Earthsea cycle early enough that it's one of my Childhood Formative Novels and have heard about The Left Hand of Darkness, The Gift, The Dispossessed, and so on for literal years and never moved to pick them up. I should have.
So much work was put into thinking out Anarres, how the Odonian's past would have affected how they set up the colony, how Anarres itself changes how people can behave (eg how Urras is better adapted for humans and has much better soil and sunlight and climate). I really don't know if it's possible to throw off that kind of accumulated history, but entirely removing oneself and community to the moon and then never talking to parent earth for a hundred years seems like a possible way. But as the novel gradually reveals, it doesn't quite help; institutions and government that the first settlers tried so hard to eliminate systematically (and via deeply-rooted institutions, not just in thought and belief) are creeping back in the necessary institutions like the PDC.
I still am not sure if an anarchy can really exist with a) such a large community (both community and large being operative terms) and b) in a place where most people are subsisting on the land even when all resources are pooled. I will say right now that I probably land politically right of socialist, but mostly it's the practical, "how can I undertake large projects or a public good without some sort of organizing system" that bugs me. I think LeGuin addresses that with the PDC and the way that work is posted. I wonder if the instances of people skipping work are a percentage low enough that it doesn't affect their ability to carry out large projects?
I didn't even pick up on the politics on Urras, even though until page 300 exactly in my copy I had been wondering on and off whether Urras = Earth and Anarres = our moon. Well, apparently not. I'm a bit sad that in this universe that Earth is a shattered wreck after what we did to it, only saved at the end by the Hainish.
Speaking of Hainish, I looked up the book after I read it to see if it's part of a series and it looks like the answer is yes, but it's not set on Anarres or about Shevek, boo :(
Shevek himself was delightful.
Another thought that occurs to me is that I might put up a character-hating post. I love most characters, and attempt to excuse too many of them of everything, but there are some excellently hateable characters that I really cannot stand. And when I say hateable I mean the sort of characters along the lines of Angel Clare, John Thorpe, George Wickham from the Lizzie Bennett Diaries, madame and monsieur Thénardier, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, Mr and Mrs John Dashwood, etc. Sometimes I read novels and feel positively deranged.
OK, it's now way past my bedtime and I can't talk about The Dispossessed enough but I have to post this, I've got four entries in progress and I refuse to add to that number.
1Wikipedia informs me that one of the translated titles of Les Misérables into English that never stuck was actually "The Dispossessed" which is a cute coincidence.
no subject
Date: Sep. 14th, 2014 10:15 am (UTC)I love The Dispossessed, without having any coherent thoughts about it. My second favourite Le Guin novel is The Lathe of Heaven, but I like her short stories best (especially in A Fisherman of the Inland Sea, and The Birthday of the World). I also enjoy her critical essays and I think you would too (although some of them in somewhat challenging and mind-expanding ways), especially The Language of the Night, but also perhaps Dancing at the Edge of the World, and The Wave in the Mind.
no subject
Date: Sep. 16th, 2014 04:55 am (UTC)I've read LeGuin's essays before (it was the one about writing style, Poughkeepsie to Elfland iirc) and enjoyed it a lot! I should really look up an collection of her essays--thank you for the recs. I'm really not a short stories kind of person. I've tried and even when they are good and appeal to me, I can only think "it'd be better as a novel! Please expand on this into a nice big novel!"
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Date: Sep. 16th, 2014 09:03 am (UTC)From Elfland to Poughkeepsie is THE famous critical essay, reprinted in Language of the Night. The Dancing at the Edge of the World collection meant more to me but that was probably because I read it at a time when I was ready to get a lot out of it, rather than it being better/best.
Off to the library you go! :-D
no subject
Date: Sep. 20th, 2014 06:20 pm (UTC)On the other hand, since I don't like short stories as much, obviously I don't read them often (or do so only when I have to, like in English class, which isn't great) and so my perception of the medium (? can you define medium based on length? It's not genre...ANYWAY) is obviously not very good re: drawing conclusions about all short stories. But sadly I have a huge backlog of novels, some epub and some physical from the library to read and it's like oh god, if I can even get through my current pile it'd be amazing.
Do you have recs for the essay collections? I tried to look it up in the library and on LeGuin's site, and not much luck (though I did read through her entire FAQ and inadvertently found that she is a nice, thoughtful person so hooray). I will look up Language of the Night & Dancing at the Edge of the World too.
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Date: Sep. 20th, 2014 07:58 pm (UTC)I'll just wait here until you get addicted to the Hainish stories and then I'll wave the shorts temptingly under your nose again. I'm not in any hurry. ;-P
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Date: Sep. 23rd, 2014 10:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Sep. 20th, 2014 08:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Sep. 23rd, 2014 10:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Sep. 24th, 2014 10:10 am (UTC)Seconding!
Date: Sep. 20th, 2014 05:20 pm (UTC)Second, the Hainish novels are interrelated, but so far as I know (I've only read a few of them), they all stand completely independent from one another, so no following favourite characters, for better or for worse.
Re: Seconding!
Date: Sep. 20th, 2014 06:25 pm (UTC)After I read the Dispossessed I went online to check whether it was part of a series (side note: one of the best parts of the internet. No more scrutinizing lists in the front pages of books to check if there are sequels, or hunting around the library.) I was immediately cheered by "Hainish cycle" but Wikipedia broke that bubble pretty fast with 'not really a coherent history'. Wahh, I wanted more about Anarres, hopefully with Takvar and Shevek appearing!
I'm going to read The Left Hand of Darkness as soon as I can get hands on it and have time to read.
Re: Seconding!
Date: Sep. 20th, 2014 07:56 pm (UTC)Re: Seconding!
Date: Sep. 23rd, 2014 10:26 pm (UTC)ahahaha I think we disagreed on Hardy's poetry. Or was that someone else? Nevertheless DOWN WITH HARDY'S POETRY, UP WITH HIS NOVELS!
YESSS the library has a circulating copy of both those collections! (see, there's a spec fic collection within the public library which is absolutely amazing and collects basically everything I dream of reading as far as those genres are concerned, but is understandably yet unfortunately 100% non-circ, and I don't read very well in libraries. Hours limitation, no comfy bed to stretch out on, absurdly ferocious air conditioning in summer/winter, etc.)
no subject
Date: Sep. 14th, 2014 10:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Sep. 15th, 2014 04:39 am (UTC)I think I get more and more rambly as I get more tired so I apologize if this comment has really long sentences that would benefit from a lot more commas.
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Date: Sep. 15th, 2014 01:58 pm (UTC)Not at all! :D
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Date: Sep. 16th, 2014 04:55 am (UTC)