The Sacred and the Profane (March Reading)

I finished the second... section? Book? ...of Victor Hugo's Les Miserables (1862), continuing to switch between the Brick and the Gutenberg translation as appropriate. Hugo is not writing in the 20th century novel format, he is expounding his feelings in narrative format. So one reads ( about dolls, and femininity, and convents, and other things too. Note that all the quotes are from the Gutenberg translation. )

When the "who needs an editor" conversation comes 'round again, I'm throwing Les Miserables into the ring for Hugo. There's these moments, like the burial of Mother Crucifixion, which are awesome, and these pithy bits about the soul of France buried in "Waterloo", but much of this is obscured by Hugo's fundamental indifference to narrative momentum (my interpretation).

After heroic slogging through Waterloo and the convent, I got bogged down early in the third book and set aside the Brick for a reread that would free up a few brain cells. Well, that was the intent.

I reread The Golden Compass (Philip Pullman) (1995) and it was everything I remembered: breakneck action, plucky protagonist, mind-blowing worldbuilding, stunning cliffhanger. The Golden Compass establishes a world with several interesting deviations from ours - daemons, long-lived witches, the monolithic church, the Svalbard bears' high and inhuman intelligence, Dust, the alethiometer - that each contribute to the sudden yet inevitable climatic twist. The Subtle Knife (1997), second in the "His Dark Materials" trilogy, isn't as good: it tries to introduce a host of new characters on top of the first set, with their own attendant sub-plots. Not all of them are well-introducted, and several of them make the reader want to brain Pullman with his own sense of irony. It's not delicious, it's over-salted. Less than 50 pages into The Amber Spyglass (2000) I really wanted a completely different novel, one with about 10 less protagonists. It's okay to tell your "war against Heaven" story from one or two PoVs with the occasional omniscient breakout! In fact, it would evade a lot of problems with the unending enticements of infinite worlds, and the Mother Hangup, and that thing where the Roger thread almost entirely drops out in the second novel and comes back in a half-hearted way in the last book! Not to mention the siren call of the Great Man theory of history in a thematic muddle with the Kingdom of Heaven / Republic of Heaven / Other Republic of Heaven conflict. Also, the witches were awesome in the first novel and sorf of sidelined in the second and third novels, this makes me very sad.

So, His Dark Materials: starts with a bang, gets tripped up in its own themes. I'm still working through The Amber Spyglass, we'll see if I make it through, or do a "good bits" skim.

Continuing the theme of worldbuilding as a strength, Stray Souls (Kate Griffin) (2012) continues to rock the London of her Matthew Swift series, but will be a hard sell for people who aren't familiar with those novels. The protagonist, Sharon Li, barista and addict of self-help books, starts a facebook group and meetup for people with magical "problems" after she starts walking through walls, and gets sucked into solving one of Greater London's latest magical crises. The story's a little too wrapped up in whether Swift is going to pull strings offscene or have a more significant role (spoiler: he does). In this story, I am less concerned about what Swift and the angels are getting up to, because this is supposed to be about Sharon and her Magical Anonymous group. So that was less than awesome. I don't know if I'm parsing something more in the horror genre with urban fantasy sensibilities, or what, but some parts of the novel didn't mix well with over-lunch reading. On the plus side, I liked Sharon, and I like the ongoing theme of city living as grimy and smelly and buying on credit because you have no money, with clean well-kept offices being the exception and often tangled up in some eldritch horror. There's a sequel coming out this year; if Sharon is going to cross paths with the Midnight Mayor, I am pining for Sharon and Penny to hang out. Shaman and apprentice urban sorceress, what could possibly go wrong?

Numbers game: 3 total finished. 1 new, 2 reread; 3 fiction. Les Miz and The Amber Spyglass in process.