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.
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Date: Sep. 24th, 2014 10:10 am (UTC)