tag:dreamwidth.org,2010-06-10:523395
silver
silver
silver
2023-02-24T17:38:05Z
tag:dreamwidth.org,2010-06-10:523395:207027
The Wolf Hunt & Passenger to Frankfurt
2023-02-22T04:35:25Z
2023-02-24T17:38:05Z
public
0
The Wolf Hunt - Gillian Bradshaw<br /><br />A retelling of the Marie de France lai of Bisclavret (werewolf story). I absolutely loved this novel. 10/10. Enjoyment through the roof. I love Bradshaw in general - her Arthuriana is my favourite version - I've basically liked all the books I've read of hers, and this one is no exception. <br /><br />The novel opens with Marie, a young heiress at a convent, being told her brother has died and that she needs to leave because the inheritance will fall to her next. Owing to the often complicated ties of personal loyalty that structured medieval life, and her personal feelings about breaking her word, she successfully escapes her escort of knights on their way to deliver her to a rival duke, and walks into the forest. In the forest she stumbles across a spring and a wolf napping there, which she scares off with a stick; she's then attacked by outlaws and rescued by Tiarnan, who is nearby. The outlaw and Tiarnan converse in Breton, which Marie doesn't understand at the time, but he uses the word "bisclavret", which turns out to be crucial later. <br /><br />The plot is quite complicated - Tiarnan is one of Duke Hoel's favoured subjects, and although he is soon blissfully married to Eline, she convinces him to tell her his secret (vanishing for days into the forest). When he tells her he turns into a wolf, she is violently repulsed. She rejects the idea of annulment suggested by the only other person who knows Tiarnan's secret, a hermit, and asks her other previous suitor to steal the clothes and indefinable thing that Tiarnan leaves under a rock when he transforms, which traps him in the wolf form. <br /><br />Marie's role is woven in well, as is Tiher, who is the cousin of Eline's other suitor Alain. The wolf, having been hunted and brought to bay, unable to outrun or escape the many relays of dogs and hunters, in desperation licks Duke Hoel's boot, and is taken alive as his pet. The account of the wolf's perspective both during and before the hunt are honestly a little harrowing. Tiarnan's consciousness isn't fully subsumed into the wolf, and the wolf is hungry, cold, and afraid. On top of all that is the human's fear, anger at his betrayal. Eline successfully petitions the king of France to be allowed to remarry immediately, and is reluctantly granted Tiarnan's manor and permission to marry. Although Tiarnan is loved by his dependents, they don't recognize him; Eline and Alain, on the other hand, do, and they try their best to kill him. <br /><br />One ting I have always enjoy about Gillian Bradshaw's novels is her characterization. Without being mushy, a lot of them have noble personalities, often willing to do the right thing no matter what - and this works particularly well considering its basis in the medieval lay and the way art of this time was so centered around chivalry. Tiarnan tries to do the right thing, of course, but so does Marie. Although her escape attempt is eventually unsuccessful and she's recaptured, her quick thinking and ability to think ahead as soon as her first solution fails endeared me immediately. Her declaration at the gate as well as to Duke Hoel, upon being presented, is maybe a little foolhardy - I can certainly see the scene playing out differently, especially since Marie's only leverage is her noble standing, which isn't much when having a heiress as your ward presents such excellent opportunities. Even Eline, who is probably the most cruel, is portrayed sympathetically when it comes to her real revulsion to the wolf reveal - she feels unclean. I think her deliberate cruelty to trap him in wolf form, kill him, and have his estate as her spoils does push her firmly into an antagonist role. Alain is cruel too, but foolish. I also enjoyed a lot of the medieval life woven into this - Alain has a conversation with Duke Hoel, who is his lord, where Hoel advises him strongly to not be stupid: have a Breton speaker not a French bailiff, especially since the French one is already acquiring a reputation for cruelty and stealing; to not raise rents immediately upon inheriting a manor from a beloved former lord, despite what Alain says about rents on his father's land elsewhere being higher, etc. Alain, being a dolt, decides his own judgement is better, and having a weakness for new things and also afraid of Tiarnan's ghost, decides to plunge himself into debt buying horses, clothes, furniture, and so on. To do so, he doubles the price at the mill, and forbids his serfs to go elsewhere to grind grain. Alain's foolishness and unsteadiness - he runs off to try to reason with Eline and literally abandons his actual job of escorting Marie - is initially papered over because his cousin Tiher is there to steady and make excuses for him. As the novel progresses, Tiher - not handsome like Alain, but rueful and reasonably clever - rises in the Duke's estimation, and Hoel plans to grant him land as soon as he can. <br /><br />==<br /><br />Passenger to Frankfurt - Agatha Christie<br /><br />I hadn't realized this was a thriller instead of a mystery when I picked it up. I've read so many Christie mysteries and they're always great, and I can't say the same of this. It was published in 1970, so very recently, and starts in the Frankfurt airport. Sir Stafford Nye agrees to swap places with a strange woman who says she needs to get to England under a different identity, otherwise she'll be killed. He drinks the drugged glass willingly and after waking up, proceeds with his journey back to England, saying his passport is stolen. He is then dragged into some kind of secret agent plot alongside the strange woman, Renata Zerkowski/Mary Ann. This is where I had trouble. It's all about this world driven by conspiracy, where random movements of armaments, jewels, money, etc are all directed by this big worldwide organization. The youth are rising and are committing mass violence, backed by this shadowy organization headed by Big Charlotte. There's this insane storyline of Hitler not being dead, swapping places with a mental patient who believe he's Hitler; that he had a son in South America and now the son is the golden youth Siegfried, a gifted orator and in peak physical condition, the icon of the movement. It culminates in this climax where - after Stafford Nye's old great-aunt tells this Admiral about a scientist who was able to invent a drug to induce benevolence in people - the scientist and a bunch of governmental ministers assemble and try to convince the scientist to reconstruct his drug work. Lord Altamount is shot and this motivates the scientist to retrieve his supposedly destroyed notes, and work on them again. The novel ends with an epilogue where Stafford Nye marries the strange woman. I honestly didn't even realize this was the end of the book. The next page was headed Murder at the Vicarage (me, brain sluggishly firing: "isn't that the Miss Marple story Agatha Christie wrote? Is this some weird 4th wall break?") and as I paged further on I realized the rest of the ebook was just the endpapers with advertisements for her other books. Baffling. I went back and re-read the last two chapters. I guess Benvo, the drug, was successfully created and distributed, which created "permanent benevolence", a permanent change in people to whom the drug was administered, which stopped the riots. The young Siegfried is being invited to an English church to work as an organist. <br /><br />What. <br /><br />1970 is pretty near the end of Christie's career - Passenger to Frankfurt is her 40th novel, which is a huge accomplishment. So some slipping is honestly fair enough, she would have been 80 by then. I think it was conceived with an eye to the youth counterculture movement, but it's just so weird and detached. Most of the danger is conveyed via governmental ministers or (presumably) MI5/6 officers talking about unrest, which isn't exactly scary. Also, I had a hard time keeping all the names and employment straight. I'm really not looking for hard-hitting or grittiness in Agatha Christie, absolutely the opposite, but this was really muddled. It also indulges in what I think is the stupidest part of all conspiracy theories - the presumption that the shadowy leaders are actually competent. When I look at the broad-daylight operations of legitimate entities, who are able to recruit freely, audit, apply for legal/political help, etc, and see how many errors and problems they run into...imagine trying to do that secretly and perfectly. You are talking about organizations numbering in the thousands to do logistics alone, and perfect cooperation, perfect execution and secrecy, etc. But her next novel is Nemesis, which is actually quite good - it's a continuation of A Caribbean Mystery (itself quite good). I don't think I want to read any more of Christie's thrillers.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=silverflight8&ditemid=207027" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> comments
tag:dreamwidth.org,2010-06-10:523395:178713
The Wolf Hunt: Gillian Bradshaw
2017-02-13T05:50:04Z
2017-02-13T05:50:04Z
my old Norton recordings
awake
public
0
Uh, I've just discovered that Blofeld's garden of death exists. <a href="https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2017/02/12/englands-poison-garden-an-ode-to-death-by-greenery.html">It is a garden at Alnwick Castle</a> instead of in Japan, but nevertheless. I...would go visit that garden, actually. But the fact that they've had to put a bench in one part of the garden since people sometimes pass out from the smell of one of the flowers is slightly alarming.<br /><br /><img src="http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/silverflight8/21883370/101606/101606_original.jpg" alt="book cover of The Wolf Hunt" style="float:left" /> Anyway! I read <em>The Wolf Hunt</em>, by Gillian Bradshaw. It's based on Bisclavret, one of the twelve famous lays by Marie de France - it's a poem about a man who turns into a werewolf, and he's treacherously betrayed by his wife and trapped in wolf form. <br /><br /><span class="cut-wrapper"><span style="display: none;" id="span-cuttag___1" class="cuttag"></span><b class="cut-open">( </b><b class="cut-text"><a href="https://silverflight8.dreamwidth.org/178713.html#cutid1">Review under the cut. Spoiler: I loved it</a></b><b class="cut-close"> )</b></span><div style="display: none;" id="div-cuttag___1" aria-live="assertive"></div>bo<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=silverflight8&ditemid=178713" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> comments
tag:dreamwidth.org,2010-06-10:523395:170711
The Sand Reckoner: Gillian Bradshaw
2015-10-02T03:57:04Z
2015-10-02T03:57:04Z
Mowgli's Road - Marina and the Diamonds
cold
public
8
I read <em>The Sand-Reckoner</em> the other day (the one by Gillian Bradshaw, not the one by Archimedes) and now I have all these <em>feelings</em> about Archimedes and Syracuse and Hieron.<br /><br />The novel's about Archimedes as he returns from his studies at Alexandria - it begins with him coming home to a city on the verge of war, his father dying, and a sick sense that coming home will mean he must close off the part of him that lives and breathes mathematics, and do work he hates to support his family. Archimedes comes to the attention of Hieron, the king of Syracuse, as an outstanding and remarkable engineer - outstanding because he can devise new, original, and effective machines that work well from the very outset, because he can derive the basic principles from mathematics. With Archimedes is Marcus, his Italian slave, who looks after his absent-minded master despite conflicting loyalties. Marcus denies being Roman - the affiliation is dangerous - and Archimedes is too * and doesn't think it useful to press.<br /><br />Like <em>Island of Ghosts</em>, which is about troops of Sarmatians - having been sent west as part of their treaty with Rome - settling into Roman Britain, this book is similarly more internal and character-driven. Which isn't to say there isn't external conflict; the book is set during the first Punic Wars (paging <span style='white-space: nowrap;'><a href='http://dhampyresa.livejournal.com/profile'><img src='https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif' alt='[livejournal.com profile] ' style='vertical-align: text-bottom; border: 0; padding-right: 1px;' width='17' height='17'/></a><a href='http://dhampyresa.livejournal.com/'><b>dhampyresa</b></a></span> - though it's not really about Rome or Carthage so IDK if you're interested?) and Syracuse is caught between the two. Hieron is trying to avoid having to fight either or both of them at once, but needs siege engines to prevent either from eating his city. But he recognizes that Archimedes is brilliant - and also not an engineer by choice, merely to support his family; he knows Archimedes loved Alexandria and the Museum and Library there, and wrestles with how or if he can keep Archimedes in the service of his beloved city.<br /><br /><span class="cut-wrapper"><span style="display: none;" id="span-cuttag___1" class="cuttag"></span><b class="cut-open">( </b><b class="cut-text"><a href="https://silverflight8.dreamwidth.org/170711.html#cutid1">More discussion with spoilers</a></b><b class="cut-close"> )</b></span><div style="display: none;" id="div-cuttag___1" aria-live="assertive"></div><br /><br />Generally very recommended! I love Bradshaw's writing, the characters are all great and well-drawn (with human, sympathetic motivations), and is set in Classical antiquity if that's a selling point, though it doesn't rely on you knowing anything about it.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=silverflight8&ditemid=170711" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> comments
tag:dreamwidth.org,2010-06-10:523395:162262
Gillian Bradshaw: Island of Ghosts (plus reading)
2014-12-01T06:24:58Z
2014-12-01T06:38:58Z
I can hear someone snoring like a train in this building
mellow
public
4
<img src="http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/silverflight8/21883370/95536/95536_original.jpg" alt="cover of Island of Ghosts, simple picture of Roman cavalryman on rearing horse" style="margin:10px;" align="left" /><br /><em>Island of Ghosts</em>, Gillian Bradshaw<br /><br />I swapped ebooks with <span style='white-space: nowrap;'><a href='http://weekend.livejournal.com/profile'><img src='https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif' alt='[livejournal.com profile] ' style='vertical-align: text-bottom; border: 0; padding-right: 1px;' width='17' height='17'/></a><a href='http://weekend.livejournal.com/'><b>weekend</b></a></span>, who very kindly sent me a copy of Island of Ghosts. (We were talking about Gillian Bradshaw's Arthurian books, which are <em>Hawk of May</em>, <em>Kingdom of Summer</em>, and <em>In Winter's Shadow</em>. All of you should read these books! They are my favourite retellings of the Arthurian mythology. More historical and less fantasy, and they follow Sir Gawain, and completely heartbreaking by the end.)<br /><br /><em>Island of Ghosts</em> is about three companies of defeated Sarmatians who are marched to Britain to form part of the Roman forces in the second century AD. The protagonist, Ariantes, is the scepter-holder of his company who struggles to make his new life in northern Britain. <br /><br />A lot of his struggle is that all of them, the men he commands--and his peers, Gatalan and Arshak, both nobility--deeply distrust and feel contemptuous towards the Romans. Their customs are almost completely alien to each other. The Romans see the Sarmatians as barbarians, citing their custom of cutting and keeping enemies' scalps, their nomadic civilization, the various acts of war. The Sarmatians, who are now minorities in this new land, are unwilling to assimilate, afraid of losing their identities. The Sarmatians don't like the bread that are the Romans' staples; they refuse to sleep in the barracks indoors; they are all cavalry, no infantry at all, and value their horses enormously; they do not share a religion; they are horrified with the Romans' custom of burning their dead, believing it to destroy the soul. The novel begins with the Sarmatians nearly mutinying when they are told they have to go to Britain by ship: they are convinced the Romans are tricking them and that there is no land beyond the water, and they've been marched there to be killed.<br /><br /><span class="cut-wrapper"><span style="display: none;" id="span-cuttag___1" class="cuttag"></span><b class="cut-open">( </b><b class="cut-text"><a href="https://silverflight8.dreamwidth.org/162262.html#cutid1">Review</a></b><b class="cut-close"> )</b></span><div style="display: none;" id="div-cuttag___1" aria-live="assertive"></div><br /><br />Final verdict: do recommend! 8/10<br /><br />NOTE: My classics history is very poor. (I'm really only good for medieval history, I'm afraid.) I think I have missed a lot regarding all the ranks (eg: how do legates and tribunes differ?) Clearly more reading is in order.<br /><br />--<br /><br />According to my kobo e-reader, which I have been using since mid-March, I have logged a total time of 389 hours and completed 53 novels on it. I'm a bit stunned. The kobo counts books as finished when you read cover to absolute end and does not count re-reads, halfway through, marked as read, etc titles. I'm sure the actual number of hours is a little smaller (sometimes I left it on while charging) but not by more than 10 hours. That's a lot of time I've spent reading, considering everything, and also there were the months of May/June when I was abroad and didn't bring it at all. I...yeah. You know what probably took up the most time? <em>Les Misérables</em>. God, there were so many hours burned on that book. <br /><br />Also interesting are sometimes the page statistics. I'm currently reading <em>Fragments du Passé</em> which is a Dear Canada book from the perspective of a Holocaust survivor: they're books for young girls published by Scholastic. They're epistolary novels which are set in different points in Canada's history. When I was in elementary and junior high school I read a lot of them--there was that traumatizing one about the filles-du-roi (see, her husband dies of this poisoned mushroom and she screams and raves before accepting he's dead, and then she has to survive the Maritime winter by herself--terrifying, have you seen what the weather is like in the Maritimes?, she barely makes it--AND give birth by herself in the spring) and there's one about the Spanish influenza which introduced me to the prayer "if I should die before I wake" (atheist household so I never encountered this; I still think this is a horrifying prayer to teach kids), the one about immigration to the Prairies, the one about the Loyalists, the one about the War of 1812, I think I read the Plains of Abraham one too, probably more I'm forgetting. I grew out of them but man, I read a lot of them...they cover a lot of geographical ground and time and probably taught me more Canadian history than I ever learned in class. Anyway, I saw this one in the ebook library of the public library and decided to try one. My French isn't strong enough to take on the books I really want to read--they're just too long--so I decided to pick up this one. See: fondness for this series. Anyway, what I was <em>going</em> to say before I went on this long tangent--someday I should really put together a post about the Dear Canada books--is that usually the pages per minute count is 5-8 pages per minute, but it's all the way down to 1 on these. I only just realized Terry is not, in fact, a boy, twelve pages in. I don't know how I missed that.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=silverflight8&ditemid=162262" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> comments
tag:dreamwidth.org,2010-06-10:523395:159495
reread spree
2014-08-08T02:57:33Z
2014-12-01T06:31:18Z
tired
public
0
I'm apparently on a re-read kick, and I have too many to review in the same way I did Mistborn (words! words everywhere!) so here's a quick thing:<br /><br /><strong>The Sky is Falling, Looking at the Moon</strong> and <strong>The Lights Go On Again</strong> by Kit Pearson <br /><br />The novels are about Norah and Gavin, two siblings who are sent to Canada as war guests as the Blitz ramps up in England. I'm struggling to think of a good descriptor of the books that involve plot, but the core of the books is really the emotional journeys that Norah and Gavin go through. They move into the house of Florence Ogilvie and Norah immediately has personality conflicts with Aunt Florence. <br /><br />One thing I think Pearson did really well was portray unusual grief/emotions. Norah is young but she's twelve or so, and she doesn't want to leave England. She's angry with her parents for sending them away, afraid for them, ashamed of running away, angry she's being put in charge of her younger brother, resentful that he can't help being afraid and distressed himself. She's not happy with being put with the Ogilvies and she's not fitting into her new school. It's an ugly combination of emotions that nevertheless feels really honest. <br /><br />There's also Gavin in <em>The Lights Go On Again</em> <span class="cut-wrapper"><span style="display: none;" id="span-cuttag___1" class="cuttag"></span><b class="cut-open">( </b><b class="cut-text"><a href="https://silverflight8.dreamwidth.org/159495.html#cutid1">Major spoilers</a></b><b class="cut-close"> )</b></span><div style="display: none;" id="div-cuttag___1" aria-live="assertive"></div>It gets resolved and I love their grandfather, but I thought that his anger mixed with guilt towards him and Norah, too, was really honest. <br /><br />Also I learned that Pearson is gay! That is pretty cool. I read her books when I was a kid and never looked at author bios (nor do I think they would have mentioned it). She's also from Alberta! <br /><br /><strong>The Secrets of the Jedi</strong> by Jude Watson<br /><br />Ahh, yes, my Star Wars obsession. When I say I love Star Wars what I actually mean is "the Prequel EU books" and Jude Watson is at least 50% responsible for this. I think the only post-RotJ books I've read is Zahn's Thrawn trilogy (which is really good, I get why people keep trying to sneak it into yuletide).<br /><br />Secrets of the Jedi is about Obi-Wan and Siri's relationship. Watson also wrote Jedi Apprentice (about young Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon) and Jedi Quest (about Obi-Wan and Anakin) and The Secrets of the Jedi tie into Jedi Apprentice; this book ties into the Jedi Apprentice series. Obi-Wan and Siri, along with their respective masters, are assigned to escort a talented young boy named Talesan Fry to Coruscant after he discovers the plot of a group of bounty hunters. They're partly successful even though the Padawans get separated from their Masters halfway through, but Tal's parents are killed. Years later, when the galaxy is consumed by the Clone Wars, the Temple is informed that Tal, now a successful businessman, has created a perfect codebreaker and is offering the Republic the first bid. <br /><br />Being Jedi, love is forbidden, and the book has an interesting treatment of it. In one of the Jedi Apprentice books Obi-Wan actually left the Jedi Order once; he felt that the Temple was not helping the civil war on Melida/Daan enough and refused to go back to Coruscant, staying to help. <span class="cut-wrapper"><span style="display: none;" id="span-cuttag___2" class="cuttag"></span><b class="cut-open">( </b><b class="cut-text"><a href="https://silverflight8.dreamwidth.org/159495.html#cutid2">Spoilers for how they handle it</a></b><b class="cut-close"> )</b></span><div style="display: none;" id="div-cuttag___2" aria-live="assertive"></div><br /><br /><strong>Dragon Rider</strong> by Cornelia Funke<br /><br /><span class="cut-wrapper"><span style="display: none;" id="span-cuttag___3" class="cuttag"></span><b class="cut-open">( </b><b class="cut-text"><a href="https://silverflight8.dreamwidth.org/159495.html#cutid3">Dragon Rider</a></b><b class="cut-close"> )</b></span><div style="display: none;" id="div-cuttag___3" aria-live="assertive"></div><br /><br /><strong>Snakecharm</strong> by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes<br /><br /><span class="cut-wrapper"><span style="display: none;" id="span-cuttag___4" class="cuttag"></span><b class="cut-open">( </b><b class="cut-text"><a href="https://silverflight8.dreamwidth.org/159495.html#cutid4">Snakecharm</a></b><b class="cut-close"> )</b></span><div style="display: none;" id="div-cuttag___4" aria-live="assertive"></div><br /><br /><strong>Hawk of May</strong> by Gillian Bradshaw<br /><br /><span class="cut-wrapper"><span style="display: none;" id="span-cuttag___5" class="cuttag"></span><b class="cut-open">( </b><b class="cut-text"><a href="https://silverflight8.dreamwidth.org/159495.html#cutid5">Hawk of May</a></b><b class="cut-close"> )</b></span><div style="display: none;" id="div-cuttag___5" aria-live="assertive"></div><br /><br /><strong>Airborn</strong> and <strong>Skybreaker</strong> by Kenneth Oppel<br /><br /><span class="cut-wrapper"><span style="display: none;" id="span-cuttag___6" class="cuttag"></span><b class="cut-open">( </b><b class="cut-text"><a href="https://silverflight8.dreamwidth.org/159495.html#cutid6">Airborn</a></b><b class="cut-close"> )</b></span><div style="display: none;" id="div-cuttag___6" aria-live="assertive"></div><br /><br /><strong>Among Others</strong><br /><br /><span class="cut-wrapper"><span style="display: none;" id="span-cuttag___8" class="cuttag"></span><b class="cut-open">( </b><b class="cut-text"><a href="https://silverflight8.dreamwidth.org/159495.html#cutid8">Among Others</a></b><b class="cut-close"> )</b></span><div style="display: none;" id="div-cuttag___8" aria-live="assertive"></div><br /><br />--<br /><br />I'm working on <em>Conspiracy of Kings</em> by Turner and enjoying it a lot so far, though I'm having some trouble with the different perspectives. I think I've reread the previous three books altogether too many times already and I understand them really well now, but there is a lot here I'm skimming--the political bits for one. Sophos is growing up though! Awww. <br /><br />This post took long enough that I finished a book while writing it. I wish I was faster!<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=silverflight8&ditemid=159495" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> comments