"One can never have too many books."
Jan. 6th, 2007 05:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eye_of_a_catStill ill. Curse it.
I don't have the dedication needed for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
50bookchallenge - plus, it looks like they're getting a bit swamped by the Spotlight anyway - but what I do have is a lot of books and a tendency to ramble, so. I'm going to try out a New Year's LJ Resolution at writing something about every non-work book I read over the year. Let's see if I can make it until March.
Starting at the 23rd of December, then:
Terry Pratchett, Night Watch and Thud!
I've read both of these multiple times before, but I was ill and when you're ill you want a comfortable armchair and a mug of hot blackcurrant and Sam Vimes, okay? Besides, they're just as good the fourth time round.
Something weird I've noticed with discussions about Pratchett (by which I mean casual ones that happen to arrive there, rather than ones that begin and end intra-fandom) is that Discworld fans end up doing more evangelising to newbies than they do talking to each other. You can easily get half an hour out of the conversation after someone asks which one's the best book to start with, but the fan-fan conversations always seem to end up as short-lived mutual squeeing with a lot of Granny Weatherwax quotes. This has to be the sign of a strong, healthly fandom: everyone likes helping the newbies, there's not much Back In My Day posturing about the earlier stuff vs. the later stuff, and we all think Granny Weatherwax is amazing. (Although, newbies: the best book to start with is Guards! Guards!. Ignore everyone else, and trust me.)
With that said, I do have one, single, tiny, not-judging-the-series-by-it-honest problem with the later Discworld books, and it includes Sam Vimes and Granny Weatherwax. Discworld's got better since it got bigger and more detailed, and especially since Pratchett got more comfortable stamping around its landscape (the first two Rincewind books and Equal Rites have a very new-shoes feel to them), but with that there came moments when Pratchett seemed a bit too fond of his most-loved characters, and books spent a long time spiralling through someone's internal monologue before bursting out with a Very Profound Point to make about morality, reality, or both. Thief of Time lost me a hundred pages in, Maskerade about fifty, and it's always stronger with the Witches and Watch books. I like Granny and Vimes as much as the next fan, and I love the internal workings of their minds; I just don't want the whole book taking place inside there.
Night Watch is my favourite of the more recent books, and it's my own milestone for when the internal monologues started getting under control again. We get Vimes's lengthy thoughts on revolutions and bravery and the nature of existence, but they're reasonable enough thoughts on revolutions and bravery and the nature of existence, and you don't feel too much like the world's been put on Pause while he goes though them. It's also unsanitised on a level that illustrates Pratchett's thoughts on 'funny' not being the opposite of 'serious' very well: Nobby Nobbs, small, smelly and oozing, the only copper in the city who needs to carry a signed letter proving that he's human, petty-cash-thieving comic relief, is also the boy whose father used to break his arms and who'd 'cried all the tears a body was capable of making some time ago.' Discworld's always had serious conversations about philosophy and ethics, but this kind of serious - or, rather, this kind of serious sharpened to this kind of point - turns up first here.
Thud! starts off skating dangerously close to being the kind of current-events satire that less involved newspaper reviewers always assume Pratchett's writing. Multicultural tension fanned by the religious fanatics noted for wearing head-to-toe black robes with only a slit for the eyes? Right, then... but it skates away gracefully enough to remind us that Discworld isn't a paper facade for satirical stageshows, even when the didactic internal monologues start sounding otherwise. Discworld works because of its details, because the construction of Ankh-Morpork isn't about how funny it would be if all the fantasy races stayed around for the Industrial Revolution but about exactly how that would work on every practical and political level imaginable. Everyone knows dwarfs wear axes, so... would young city dwarfs wear excessive amounts of shiny bladed weapons and call it 'clang'? And how would they feel about their connection to the traditional dwarfish ways? And how would religious and cultural fanaticism translate to dwarfs, anyway? (Answer: In terms of staying below ground as a moral issue, and thinking humans are a bad dream.) Oh, and one of them's called Bashful Bashfulsson. It's still funny, but it's not one-dimensionally funny; even when Pratchett starts letting his characters speak for him, he loves his world too much to lose it in making a point about something or somewhere else.
Night Watch is the better of the two, with the necessities of time-travel stopping the plot from being shouldered out of the way by Life According To Vimes. Thud! loses that focus for a while, maybe from being (and it seems like blasphemy even to type this) too much about Vimes when the city's other voices, when the rest of the city might have something to say. Still, it's a testament to Pratchett's amazing worldbuilding that thirty books into the series, the biggest problem is that we don't get to see enough of it.
Lionel Shriver, We Need To Talk About Kevin
The first book I've ever read that comes with its own list of suggested questions for reading groups. My edition dates from after it won the Orange Prize in 2005, and its subject matter - reflections on motherhood from the perspective of the mother of a fifteen-year-old murderer, a boy who shot seven teenagers and two adults at his school - is the kind of thought-provoking that makes for good discussion material. Still, there's something odd about having the discussion mapped out for you, however gently, and there's something even more odd about the mechanics of a teenage nightmare coming in a form that reminds you of schools-edition books itself.
I started off disliking this one due to a narrative voice that speaks beautifully but still sounds off-key. The novel's written in the form of a series of letters from Eva, the boy's mother, to her absent husband, and her writing just doesn't seem right in that context. Take this, from the first page:
But since we've been separated, I may most miss coming home to deliver the narrative curiosities of my day, the way a cat might lay mice at your feet: the small, humble offerings that couples proffer after foraging in separate backyards [...] [N]o one wants to hear stories from abroad, really, and I could detect from your telltale politeness that you privately preferred anecdotal trinkets from closer to home: an eccentric encounter with a toll collector on the George Washington Bridge, say.
Beautifully written, but hands up anyone who really talks like that themselves.
Without giving too much away to anyone who's not read it yet and wants to, Eva's voice does make more sense later on, both in terms of her situation and her personality. You could make some good points about the style that way: Eva, who built her life on writing travel guides for tourists, can't engage with the direct emotional reality of her own world without dressing it up in costume. On the other hand, everyone but me seems to love the writing style, so maybe I'm the one missing something.
As for the book's central question - who's responsible for Kevin? - I'm not sure, and not sure either whether that's in an interesting narrative-ambiguity-and-unreliable-narrators way or in a confusing, contradicted one. Yes, Kevin seems to be a little too horrific to be real, but that in itself doesn't make Eva an unreliable narrator (as opposed to, say, Kevin being a sociopath, or all the characters being badly written - not something I'd conclude, but as much of an explanation as deliberate ambiguity). Kevin as a toddler learning to speak: "Kevin, do you want a cookie?" "I hate cookies." "Kevin, will you talk to Daddy when he comes home?" "Not if I don feew wike it." Oh, come on. And yet, the suggestions that Eva is responsible, in part, for creating the monster Kevin becomes, are still there. When he's ill at ten years old and wants his mother to read to him, she realises his anger is a mask for sadness, something that would make sense for a child completely disinterested in his environment from babyhood. His carefully-picked victims were chosen because they deeply loved something, whatever that something was. He keeps a picture of his mother with him in juvenile detention. Eva doesn't piece these together into a narrative that could challenge the Kevin's-a-sociopath one, but maybe Eva can't.
Niccolo Ammaniti, I'm Not Scared
Rural Italian loss-of-innocence in the late 1970s. Or not, maybe, because a fundamental point of the story is that childhood innocence never exists even as a mirage; the group of children at the story's centre aren't friends so much as a group of people tied together by age, and so there's no sense of the fierce and temporary loyalty of, say, Stephen King's The Body. (Also, I was reading this at the same time as Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, making for two books that take very different approaches to writing from a child's point of view.) What it does capture perfectly is the way children interpret the world around them. The conversations between Michele and Filippo, the two children at the centre of the novel, are frustrating because while you know that so much hinges on them, what's important to the children isn't what's important to the adult reader. The ending, in which you're seeing through Michele's eyes as clearly as through his father's, gets this just right.
The writing's gorgeous, the kind of prose that reads like the novel's summer heatwave, but overall it didn't bowl me over as hard as it did the reviewers. I can appreciate why Ammaniti has the reputation that he does (and, on a less intellectual note, have you seen the author picture at the back? My), but my appreciation's on a very objective level with this one. It would be a great book to teach, though, and I'll remember it next time we come to work out the set texts for our first-years.
I don't have the dedication needed for
50bookchallenge - plus, it looks like they're getting a bit swamped by the Spotlight anyway - but what I do have is a lot of books and a tendency to ramble, so. I'm going to try out a New Year's LJ Resolution at writing something about every non-work book I read over the year. Let's see if I can make it until March.Starting at the 23rd of December, then:
Terry Pratchett, Night Watch and Thud!
I've read both of these multiple times before, but I was ill and when you're ill you want a comfortable armchair and a mug of hot blackcurrant and Sam Vimes, okay? Besides, they're just as good the fourth time round.
Something weird I've noticed with discussions about Pratchett (by which I mean casual ones that happen to arrive there, rather than ones that begin and end intra-fandom) is that Discworld fans end up doing more evangelising to newbies than they do talking to each other. You can easily get half an hour out of the conversation after someone asks which one's the best book to start with, but the fan-fan conversations always seem to end up as short-lived mutual squeeing with a lot of Granny Weatherwax quotes. This has to be the sign of a strong, healthly fandom: everyone likes helping the newbies, there's not much Back In My Day posturing about the earlier stuff vs. the later stuff, and we all think Granny Weatherwax is amazing. (Although, newbies: the best book to start with is Guards! Guards!. Ignore everyone else, and trust me.)
With that said, I do have one, single, tiny, not-judging-the-series-by-it-honest problem with the later Discworld books, and it includes Sam Vimes and Granny Weatherwax. Discworld's got better since it got bigger and more detailed, and especially since Pratchett got more comfortable stamping around its landscape (the first two Rincewind books and Equal Rites have a very new-shoes feel to them), but with that there came moments when Pratchett seemed a bit too fond of his most-loved characters, and books spent a long time spiralling through someone's internal monologue before bursting out with a Very Profound Point to make about morality, reality, or both. Thief of Time lost me a hundred pages in, Maskerade about fifty, and it's always stronger with the Witches and Watch books. I like Granny and Vimes as much as the next fan, and I love the internal workings of their minds; I just don't want the whole book taking place inside there.
Night Watch is my favourite of the more recent books, and it's my own milestone for when the internal monologues started getting under control again. We get Vimes's lengthy thoughts on revolutions and bravery and the nature of existence, but they're reasonable enough thoughts on revolutions and bravery and the nature of existence, and you don't feel too much like the world's been put on Pause while he goes though them. It's also unsanitised on a level that illustrates Pratchett's thoughts on 'funny' not being the opposite of 'serious' very well: Nobby Nobbs, small, smelly and oozing, the only copper in the city who needs to carry a signed letter proving that he's human, petty-cash-thieving comic relief, is also the boy whose father used to break his arms and who'd 'cried all the tears a body was capable of making some time ago.' Discworld's always had serious conversations about philosophy and ethics, but this kind of serious - or, rather, this kind of serious sharpened to this kind of point - turns up first here.
Thud! starts off skating dangerously close to being the kind of current-events satire that less involved newspaper reviewers always assume Pratchett's writing. Multicultural tension fanned by the religious fanatics noted for wearing head-to-toe black robes with only a slit for the eyes? Right, then... but it skates away gracefully enough to remind us that Discworld isn't a paper facade for satirical stageshows, even when the didactic internal monologues start sounding otherwise. Discworld works because of its details, because the construction of Ankh-Morpork isn't about how funny it would be if all the fantasy races stayed around for the Industrial Revolution but about exactly how that would work on every practical and political level imaginable. Everyone knows dwarfs wear axes, so... would young city dwarfs wear excessive amounts of shiny bladed weapons and call it 'clang'? And how would they feel about their connection to the traditional dwarfish ways? And how would religious and cultural fanaticism translate to dwarfs, anyway? (Answer: In terms of staying below ground as a moral issue, and thinking humans are a bad dream.) Oh, and one of them's called Bashful Bashfulsson. It's still funny, but it's not one-dimensionally funny; even when Pratchett starts letting his characters speak for him, he loves his world too much to lose it in making a point about something or somewhere else.
Night Watch is the better of the two, with the necessities of time-travel stopping the plot from being shouldered out of the way by Life According To Vimes. Thud! loses that focus for a while, maybe from being (and it seems like blasphemy even to type this) too much about Vimes when the city's other voices, when the rest of the city might have something to say. Still, it's a testament to Pratchett's amazing worldbuilding that thirty books into the series, the biggest problem is that we don't get to see enough of it.
Lionel Shriver, We Need To Talk About Kevin
The first book I've ever read that comes with its own list of suggested questions for reading groups. My edition dates from after it won the Orange Prize in 2005, and its subject matter - reflections on motherhood from the perspective of the mother of a fifteen-year-old murderer, a boy who shot seven teenagers and two adults at his school - is the kind of thought-provoking that makes for good discussion material. Still, there's something odd about having the discussion mapped out for you, however gently, and there's something even more odd about the mechanics of a teenage nightmare coming in a form that reminds you of schools-edition books itself.
I started off disliking this one due to a narrative voice that speaks beautifully but still sounds off-key. The novel's written in the form of a series of letters from Eva, the boy's mother, to her absent husband, and her writing just doesn't seem right in that context. Take this, from the first page:
But since we've been separated, I may most miss coming home to deliver the narrative curiosities of my day, the way a cat might lay mice at your feet: the small, humble offerings that couples proffer after foraging in separate backyards [...] [N]o one wants to hear stories from abroad, really, and I could detect from your telltale politeness that you privately preferred anecdotal trinkets from closer to home: an eccentric encounter with a toll collector on the George Washington Bridge, say.
Beautifully written, but hands up anyone who really talks like that themselves.
Without giving too much away to anyone who's not read it yet and wants to, Eva's voice does make more sense later on, both in terms of her situation and her personality. You could make some good points about the style that way: Eva, who built her life on writing travel guides for tourists, can't engage with the direct emotional reality of her own world without dressing it up in costume. On the other hand, everyone but me seems to love the writing style, so maybe I'm the one missing something.
As for the book's central question - who's responsible for Kevin? - I'm not sure, and not sure either whether that's in an interesting narrative-ambiguity-and-unreliable-narrators way or in a confusing, contradicted one. Yes, Kevin seems to be a little too horrific to be real, but that in itself doesn't make Eva an unreliable narrator (as opposed to, say, Kevin being a sociopath, or all the characters being badly written - not something I'd conclude, but as much of an explanation as deliberate ambiguity). Kevin as a toddler learning to speak: "Kevin, do you want a cookie?" "I hate cookies." "Kevin, will you talk to Daddy when he comes home?" "Not if I don feew wike it." Oh, come on. And yet, the suggestions that Eva is responsible, in part, for creating the monster Kevin becomes, are still there. When he's ill at ten years old and wants his mother to read to him, she realises his anger is a mask for sadness, something that would make sense for a child completely disinterested in his environment from babyhood. His carefully-picked victims were chosen because they deeply loved something, whatever that something was. He keeps a picture of his mother with him in juvenile detention. Eva doesn't piece these together into a narrative that could challenge the Kevin's-a-sociopath one, but maybe Eva can't.
Niccolo Ammaniti, I'm Not Scared
Rural Italian loss-of-innocence in the late 1970s. Or not, maybe, because a fundamental point of the story is that childhood innocence never exists even as a mirage; the group of children at the story's centre aren't friends so much as a group of people tied together by age, and so there's no sense of the fierce and temporary loyalty of, say, Stephen King's The Body. (Also, I was reading this at the same time as Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, making for two books that take very different approaches to writing from a child's point of view.) What it does capture perfectly is the way children interpret the world around them. The conversations between Michele and Filippo, the two children at the centre of the novel, are frustrating because while you know that so much hinges on them, what's important to the children isn't what's important to the adult reader. The ending, in which you're seeing through Michele's eyes as clearly as through his father's, gets this just right.
The writing's gorgeous, the kind of prose that reads like the novel's summer heatwave, but overall it didn't bowl me over as hard as it did the reviewers. I can appreciate why Ammaniti has the reputation that he does (and, on a less intellectual note, have you seen the author picture at the back? My), but my appreciation's on a very objective level with this one. It would be a great book to teach, though, and I'll remember it next time we come to work out the set texts for our first-years.
