Summer Book List (August Reading)
Sep. 28th, 2009 10:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aseIt's almost October, I should probably post my August books. I am particularly motivated to do so tonight because I learned it is Banned Books Week. I'm tempted to do a Banned Books Readathon and donate funds to a civil liberties or book-related charity. Unfortunately, tonight's nonfiction selection is neither banned nor particularly likely to be. Apparently atypical genetic inheritance isn't salacious enough to get the citizenry up in arms.
Ella Enchanted (Gail Carson Levine): Cinderella retelling. Ella is cursed with perfect obedience at birth. That's probably my definition of Hell right there. The story is about how she struggles with this and eventually overcomes it by will and love, but the mechanics of "obedience" are the clever bit and the part I want to poke at: Ella must obey the letter, but she's not an automaton: tell Ella to clean the silver, and she has to, but unless you say otherwise she can scratch it all up after getting the tarnish off. That's kind of subversive and interesting. The story itself is a borderline children's / YA book, and has a very simple plot that I was less interested in.
The Plague (Alfred Camus): Oran, Algeria, is hit with bubonic plague. I read this in translation, and was distracted by my unfamiliarity with French: there was something in the grammar of the translation that made me wonder if the translator was emulating French grammar, or trying to retain some spirit of the original that evaporates in translation, out of context. I do not think "abstraction" in English renders the same meaning it does in French, or perhaps I would be baffled in both languages.
The wiki article says the themes concern destiny, but it seemed to me the novel was more focused on the isolation of experience: three people in a room are three people alone, yearning to be with others so they can connect, but incapable of perfect knowledge of another.
I was tremendously distracted by the lack of female characters, and Rambert's attitude toward his unnamed wife. Characters pined for their absent women, but didn't even mention their names, or particular characteristics they longed for. I found it very notable of a certain time and attitude.
Dark Mirror (Diane Duane): The Enterprise-D is sucked into the evil "mirror" universe sometimes known as "the one where Spock has a beard and everyone is, like, pirates or something."
What I always forget about mirror-verse stories is that there was only one before Deep Space Nine went a little nuts with the concept. Seriously, no TNG ep with an accident with an alien artifact? The fascination with roads not taken, the dark side of man, etc, is pretty consistent in Trek canon, and was explored in other ways, I guess, but - nothing? This is standard Duane tie-in: it bends toward her other work, and isn't afraid to innovate a bit. Being unconstrained by TV budgeting, Duane is generally quite enthusiastic about going beyond the "bipedal, bumps on forehead" sort of aliens. Personally I could have done without the dolphin OC, but that had a lot to do with name-dropping the Song of the Twelve from the Wizards books, which stuck out to my eye. Duane is pretty good at nifty additions to a world, but not always very smooth at integrating the infodumps into the narrative. In a leisurely story this is fine - sometimes the infodumps are the point! I can give examples from other novels! - but when your basic premise is "we've been sucked into an alternate timeline where everyone is evil with bells on" anything that does not immediately advance one's exploration of this premise is distracting.
Incomplete, The Innocents Abroad (Mark Twain / Samuel Clemens): Americans tour Europe by boat. I had to put this down because I couldn't distinguish Twain's satire from Clemens's obnoxious and genuine 19th century perspectives.
Latitude (Dava Sobel): Short, entertaining story focusing mostly on the 18th century British strugge with an essential navigation question: "how far out to sea is my ship?" North/South is apparently a relatively easy problem to solve, since one can reference the equator, but longitude is a completely arbitrary thing. I was distracted by the descriptions of the lunar and clock methods of finding latitude as "the clock of the heavens" and "the clock of the sea", because really, isn't that beautiful language? I'd recommend this for beach or bus reading any day.
A House Like a Lotus (Madeleine L'Engle): Polly O'Keefe is 16 and struggling with feet of clay. I read this sometime in my teens, and found I'd forgotten most of the parts with Zachary Gray and all of the Cyprus part of the novel. What stayed with me were Polly's frustrations with her peer group and difficulties seeing Max as both a flawed person and a worthy human being. So half the themes stuck, and maybe I absorbed more L'Engle in my teens than I previously thought? This is an encouraging thing: I can think of worse ways to learn about morality than by handing a teenager select novels from my teenage reading list and suggesting she derive a moral code from first principles. (Though it might be a chicken/egg thing. But I digress!)
A House Like a Lotus is wonderful for a teenage girl, because it's about Polly learning new perspectives on the people in her life: her mother, her english teacher, her mentor, her sorta-it's-complicated (Remy, not Zachary). I have to wonder how the reviews looked when this was published in '84; Polly's mentor is in a committed lesbian relationship, but she also makes unwanted sexual advances while drunk and in pain, and I literally can't imagine how that would have played in the media of the time. But what made this special for me really was Polly seeing familiar people from new perspectives, and growing from both good and bad experiences. Sometimes you have to backslide to friendly favorites to go forward.
Numbers: 5 total. 4 new, 1 reread; 4 fiction, 1 nonfiction. 1 unfinished.
Ella Enchanted (Gail Carson Levine): Cinderella retelling. Ella is cursed with perfect obedience at birth. That's probably my definition of Hell right there. The story is about how she struggles with this and eventually overcomes it by will and love, but the mechanics of "obedience" are the clever bit and the part I want to poke at: Ella must obey the letter, but she's not an automaton: tell Ella to clean the silver, and she has to, but unless you say otherwise she can scratch it all up after getting the tarnish off. That's kind of subversive and interesting. The story itself is a borderline children's / YA book, and has a very simple plot that I was less interested in.
The Plague (Alfred Camus): Oran, Algeria, is hit with bubonic plague. I read this in translation, and was distracted by my unfamiliarity with French: there was something in the grammar of the translation that made me wonder if the translator was emulating French grammar, or trying to retain some spirit of the original that evaporates in translation, out of context. I do not think "abstraction" in English renders the same meaning it does in French, or perhaps I would be baffled in both languages.
The wiki article says the themes concern destiny, but it seemed to me the novel was more focused on the isolation of experience: three people in a room are three people alone, yearning to be with others so they can connect, but incapable of perfect knowledge of another.
I was tremendously distracted by the lack of female characters, and Rambert's attitude toward his unnamed wife. Characters pined for their absent women, but didn't even mention their names, or particular characteristics they longed for. I found it very notable of a certain time and attitude.
Dark Mirror (Diane Duane): The Enterprise-D is sucked into the evil "mirror" universe sometimes known as "the one where Spock has a beard and everyone is, like, pirates or something."
What I always forget about mirror-verse stories is that there was only one before Deep Space Nine went a little nuts with the concept. Seriously, no TNG ep with an accident with an alien artifact? The fascination with roads not taken, the dark side of man, etc, is pretty consistent in Trek canon, and was explored in other ways, I guess, but - nothing? This is standard Duane tie-in: it bends toward her other work, and isn't afraid to innovate a bit. Being unconstrained by TV budgeting, Duane is generally quite enthusiastic about going beyond the "bipedal, bumps on forehead" sort of aliens. Personally I could have done without the dolphin OC, but that had a lot to do with name-dropping the Song of the Twelve from the Wizards books, which stuck out to my eye. Duane is pretty good at nifty additions to a world, but not always very smooth at integrating the infodumps into the narrative. In a leisurely story this is fine - sometimes the infodumps are the point! I can give examples from other novels! - but when your basic premise is "we've been sucked into an alternate timeline where everyone is evil with bells on" anything that does not immediately advance one's exploration of this premise is distracting.
Incomplete, The Innocents Abroad (Mark Twain / Samuel Clemens): Americans tour Europe by boat. I had to put this down because I couldn't distinguish Twain's satire from Clemens's obnoxious and genuine 19th century perspectives.
Latitude (Dava Sobel): Short, entertaining story focusing mostly on the 18th century British strugge with an essential navigation question: "how far out to sea is my ship?" North/South is apparently a relatively easy problem to solve, since one can reference the equator, but longitude is a completely arbitrary thing. I was distracted by the descriptions of the lunar and clock methods of finding latitude as "the clock of the heavens" and "the clock of the sea", because really, isn't that beautiful language? I'd recommend this for beach or bus reading any day.
A House Like a Lotus (Madeleine L'Engle): Polly O'Keefe is 16 and struggling with feet of clay. I read this sometime in my teens, and found I'd forgotten most of the parts with Zachary Gray and all of the Cyprus part of the novel. What stayed with me were Polly's frustrations with her peer group and difficulties seeing Max as both a flawed person and a worthy human being. So half the themes stuck, and maybe I absorbed more L'Engle in my teens than I previously thought? This is an encouraging thing: I can think of worse ways to learn about morality than by handing a teenager select novels from my teenage reading list and suggesting she derive a moral code from first principles. (Though it might be a chicken/egg thing. But I digress!)
A House Like a Lotus is wonderful for a teenage girl, because it's about Polly learning new perspectives on the people in her life: her mother, her english teacher, her mentor, her sorta-it's-complicated (Remy, not Zachary). I have to wonder how the reviews looked when this was published in '84; Polly's mentor is in a committed lesbian relationship, but she also makes unwanted sexual advances while drunk and in pain, and I literally can't imagine how that would have played in the media of the time. But what made this special for me really was Polly seeing familiar people from new perspectives, and growing from both good and bad experiences. Sometimes you have to backslide to friendly favorites to go forward.
Numbers: 5 total. 4 new, 1 reread; 4 fiction, 1 nonfiction. 1 unfinished.
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Date: 2009-09-29 07:05 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-09-30 01:58 am (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2009-09-30 02:02 am (UTC)