What Have I Been Reading Lately?
Hmm... Some of the highlights:
Band of Gypsys by Gwyneth Jones.
So here I am, back in the modern world, after seven years in fairyland. Traffic fumes, cable tv, air travel, internet connections, swimming pools, movies - and everything that happened to us in those strange days vanishes like a dream... I think it was a dream. My boyfriend was never the king of England. The European Crisis was a global-economic-meltdown sideshow. My father didn't rip Sage to pieces, on the beach at Drumbeg...
I'd written a fairly long description of the series, and why I liked it, but then realised that it was all Spoiler, so I deleted it. So I'll just write this: Like John Varley's Titan books, it mixes utter lunacy with a very grim and gritty attitude on the part of the characters, who are human, and flawed, and ultimately good people, that makes it all very real. Even as something else incredibly weird and horrible happens... I have become addicted to the series. Give it a go. Not for skim-reading: you'll lose track.
**
Speaking of John Varley, I recently read his Titan trilogy backwards. This makes more sense than it sounds - I'd never read Book Three, Demon, and spotted it on my flatmate's bookshelf. Then I remembered how much I'd liked Wizard, so re-read that, and decided to go for Titan while I was at it. It was rather strange seeing the backwards progression of Gaea's personality, to see Cirocco who, in the last two books is made out of horseshoes and nails, act somewhat diffident in the first one. This is another set of books for environmental lunacy mixed with very sane people. Strange. Sad to see what happened to Eugene, and then read about his beginnings...
**
The Book of Werewolves by Sabine Baring-Gould, otherwise known for composing Onward, Christian Soldiers. This is basically a collection of folklore and textual evidence about that beastie beloved of horror writers. There is some philology and excursion into African were-hyenas and the thematic link between lycanthropy and people who just taste human flesh and become insane for another bite. It's pretty good - lots of very gruesome stories, told in a scholarly way. Some of his conclusions make a lot of sense, too. I have been perusing it for scholarly reasons, not a taste for the macabre, as I am mining it for content for a roleplaying prop. Well, okay, maybe a bit of macabre somewhere.
**
Finally, A Case of Conscience, by James Blish. Again, I raided my flatmate's shelves, and this is a good 'un. So, we've got a four-man team who have just surveyed a planet (this is in the future; space travel is well established), and they are discussing what their recommendation to their superiors will be. Two want to brutally exploit it for its mineral resources. One hates the idea because a) the natives are naturally wonderful people and b) mining on the scale the others want is unworkable (well, mostly a), but he was using b) to talk them down). The last is a Jesuit priest, who thinks about things very carefully, but from premises rather different from my own. It was fascinating following his reasoning. I don't agree with what he did, though. There's still quite a lot of the book to go, though, so maybe I'll change my mind. I can't tell you more for fear of spoiling it, just: The natives were naturally wonderful people, and that bothered the priest a great deal.
Band of Gypsys by Gwyneth Jones.
So here I am, back in the modern world, after seven years in fairyland. Traffic fumes, cable tv, air travel, internet connections, swimming pools, movies - and everything that happened to us in those strange days vanishes like a dream... I think it was a dream. My boyfriend was never the king of England. The European Crisis was a global-economic-meltdown sideshow. My father didn't rip Sage to pieces, on the beach at Drumbeg...
I'd written a fairly long description of the series, and why I liked it, but then realised that it was all Spoiler, so I deleted it. So I'll just write this: Like John Varley's Titan books, it mixes utter lunacy with a very grim and gritty attitude on the part of the characters, who are human, and flawed, and ultimately good people, that makes it all very real. Even as something else incredibly weird and horrible happens... I have become addicted to the series. Give it a go. Not for skim-reading: you'll lose track.
**
Speaking of John Varley, I recently read his Titan trilogy backwards. This makes more sense than it sounds - I'd never read Book Three, Demon, and spotted it on my flatmate's bookshelf. Then I remembered how much I'd liked Wizard, so re-read that, and decided to go for Titan while I was at it. It was rather strange seeing the backwards progression of Gaea's personality, to see Cirocco who, in the last two books is made out of horseshoes and nails, act somewhat diffident in the first one. This is another set of books for environmental lunacy mixed with very sane people. Strange. Sad to see what happened to Eugene, and then read about his beginnings...
**
The Book of Werewolves by Sabine Baring-Gould, otherwise known for composing Onward, Christian Soldiers. This is basically a collection of folklore and textual evidence about that beastie beloved of horror writers. There is some philology and excursion into African were-hyenas and the thematic link between lycanthropy and people who just taste human flesh and become insane for another bite. It's pretty good - lots of very gruesome stories, told in a scholarly way. Some of his conclusions make a lot of sense, too. I have been perusing it for scholarly reasons, not a taste for the macabre, as I am mining it for content for a roleplaying prop. Well, okay, maybe a bit of macabre somewhere.
**
Finally, A Case of Conscience, by James Blish. Again, I raided my flatmate's shelves, and this is a good 'un. So, we've got a four-man team who have just surveyed a planet (this is in the future; space travel is well established), and they are discussing what their recommendation to their superiors will be. Two want to brutally exploit it for its mineral resources. One hates the idea because a) the natives are naturally wonderful people and b) mining on the scale the others want is unworkable (well, mostly a), but he was using b) to talk them down). The last is a Jesuit priest, who thinks about things very carefully, but from premises rather different from my own. It was fascinating following his reasoning. I don't agree with what he did, though. There's still quite a lot of the book to go, though, so maybe I'll change my mind. I can't tell you more for fear of spoiling it, just: The natives were naturally wonderful people, and that bothered the priest a great deal.
posted by theamazingcatherine | 9:40 pm
1 Comments:
John Varley is pretty much my favourite author ever, apart from his most recent couple of tiles anyway.
"The John Varley Reader" came out recently which is a collection of his best short work and has lots of biographical notes between - highly recommended.
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