Reading: with and without feathers
Mar. 1st, 2023 08:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
radiantfractureBut first, a brief writing update. I made two submissions in one day! I submitted a poem to The Deadlands on the advice of sovay, and another to a friend's project on craft.
My short story "Four Hauntings" is still sitting on read in Submittable -- I guess I'll leave it until I get the actual decline, but I'd like to try it someplace else.
* * * * * *
Finished this week
Ducks, by Kate Beaton
This is comics artist Beaton's graphic memoir about her time working at the oil sands. It's very good – it's Kate Beaton – and it's very bleak. The book is well-crafted. It's sometimes almost an illustrated poem in the way it sets scenes against one another. Occasionally I did wish for a little more sign-posting about how much time was passing or when a new scene had begun. The titular ducks -- maybe you remember the famous story -- are used perfectly.
Ducks is agonizingly good on the forces -- of economics, of misogyny, of small closed communities -- that constrain our actions and our speech against our own well-being and integrity. When the protagonist does speak out, it's not quite cathartic, but it's something. Ducks is generous to those who deserve it, and even to those who don't, and it's still gut-wrenching.
Beaton writes in a few almost-easter-eggs about the origins of her career as a cartoonist; there aren't quite enough of these references to make a full thread, so I think I would have included more of that or less of it -- more, for preference, as it gives the reader hope, at least for her.
Content notes for sexual violence.
Vita Nostra, by Maryna and Serhiy Dyachenko, translated by Julia Meitov Hersey
This is the best book I've read in a very long time.sabotabby called this a perfect book, and I see why: it beautifully fulfills its own concept.
[ETA]I realize that my praise below is oddly peripheral to what's actually great about this book, which is the convergence of craft, style, and subject. I don't really want to spoil any story details, but here is what I wrote tosabotabby the other day, when I was about to finish Vita Nostra:
Now the secondary praise:
I've never seen the pleasures and agonies of learning a new skill, akin to music or mathematics, described so well in an only slightly allegorized way. I identified painfully with the protagonist, Sasha, except that I don't work hard.
Vita Nostra gets called dark academia; I'd call it cosmological1 horror, but maybe that's also what dark academia is.
What is a book you consider quintessential dark academia? The Secret History? Donna Tartt is a very fine writer, and I loved that book, but I liked this more for being more ambitious.
I am fascinated by the authors' control of pacing. As I read, I would reflect that a long slow passage had been allowed to unfold without being rushed, and then realized a tremendous amount had happened in only 25 pages.
The translation seems miraculous in its richness and clarity. There are one or two places where the wording made me wonder about the choices, particularly towards the end, but otherwise this felt seamless. An incredibly absorbing experience. All the stars.
elusis , have you finished this? What did you think?
New Reading
I am excited about having downloadedyhlee 's Brain Games for Blocked Writers (cover by telophase !) -- it is just the kind of thing I like, with a lot of cross-genre and playful prompts, like
(But after all, that question is designed for earlier in the process than I am. That's probably the only real issue.)
Michio Kaku's The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything is, as hoped for, a very light, accessible review of string theory to help prime my ideas for the novel. I'm almost 1/4 through. Having refreshed myself with this, I can go on to something more in-depth if it's called for.
{rf}
1. Specifically cosmological rather than cosmic.
sovay, and another to a friend's project on craft.My short story "Four Hauntings" is still sitting on read in Submittable -- I guess I'll leave it until I get the actual decline, but I'd like to try it someplace else.
* * * * * *
Finished this week
Ducks, by Kate Beaton
This is comics artist Beaton's graphic memoir about her time working at the oil sands. It's very good – it's Kate Beaton – and it's very bleak. The book is well-crafted. It's sometimes almost an illustrated poem in the way it sets scenes against one another. Occasionally I did wish for a little more sign-posting about how much time was passing or when a new scene had begun. The titular ducks -- maybe you remember the famous story -- are used perfectly.
Ducks is agonizingly good on the forces -- of economics, of misogyny, of small closed communities -- that constrain our actions and our speech against our own well-being and integrity. When the protagonist does speak out, it's not quite cathartic, but it's something. Ducks is generous to those who deserve it, and even to those who don't, and it's still gut-wrenching.
Beaton writes in a few almost-easter-eggs about the origins of her career as a cartoonist; there aren't quite enough of these references to make a full thread, so I think I would have included more of that or less of it -- more, for preference, as it gives the reader hope, at least for her.
Content notes for sexual violence.
Vita Nostra, by Maryna and Serhiy Dyachenko, translated by Julia Meitov Hersey
This is the best book I've read in a very long time.
sabotabby called this a perfect book, and I see why: it beautifully fulfills its own concept.[ETA]I realize that my praise below is oddly peripheral to what's actually great about this book, which is the convergence of craft, style, and subject. I don't really want to spoil any story details, but here is what I wrote to
sabotabby the other day, when I was about to finish Vita Nostra:This book is a spell. It is the thing it talks about, which in this instance is not a sane or possible thing for it to be.
Now the secondary praise:
I've never seen the pleasures and agonies of learning a new skill, akin to music or mathematics, described so well in an only slightly allegorized way. I identified painfully with the protagonist, Sasha, except that I don't work hard.
Vita Nostra gets called dark academia; I'd call it cosmological1 horror, but maybe that's also what dark academia is.
What is a book you consider quintessential dark academia? The Secret History? Donna Tartt is a very fine writer, and I loved that book, but I liked this more for being more ambitious.
I am fascinated by the authors' control of pacing. As I read, I would reflect that a long slow passage had been allowed to unfold without being rushed, and then realized a tremendous amount had happened in only 25 pages.
The translation seems miraculous in its richness and clarity. There are one or two places where the wording made me wonder about the choices, particularly towards the end, but otherwise this felt seamless. An incredibly absorbing experience. All the stars.
elusis , have you finished this? What did you think?New Reading
I am excited about having downloaded
yhlee 's Brain Games for Blocked Writers (cover by telophase !) -- it is just the kind of thing I like, with a lot of cross-genre and playful prompts, like"write a video game vision statement for your novel/story" (#8).
-- I find this much more congenial than the other craft book I've been reading, which in contrast offers prompts like"As your hero, write for five minutes, beginning with 'you would never know this by looking at me, but'"
-- Which I understand, even appreciate, the purpose for, but which also immediately stumps me because (and I know this is precious) it seems so counter to the way my characters think, feel, and speak about themselves. I would first have to imagine a situation in which one of them felt called on to make such a strange declaration.(But after all, that question is designed for earlier in the process than I am. That's probably the only real issue.)
Michio Kaku's The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything is, as hoped for, a very light, accessible review of string theory to help prime my ideas for the novel. I'm almost 1/4 through. Having refreshed myself with this, I can go on to something more in-depth if it's called for.
{rf}
1. Specifically cosmological rather than cosmic.
no subject
Date: 2023-03-01 07:56 pm (UTC)Mazel tov! Fingers crossed!
I am glad Ducks is so good, although I am not sure I would be up for it at this second.
I have never had any idea how to define dark academia despite being occasionally told that I dress like it.
no subject
Date: 2023-03-02 02:32 am (UTC)I found it pretty tough. Again, excellent. Just rough -- mostly the generational and gendered costs of capitalism in resource extraction economies like Canada's. [ETA] but the lived human experience of that cost, not the theory or the stats.
no subject
Date: 2023-03-01 09:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-03-02 02:32 am (UTC)It's definitely on my favorite list now too.
Do you know of anything else, you know, like that? It leaves me hungry to read.
no subject
Date: 2023-03-04 10:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-03-04 11:17 pm (UTC)Oo what about that?
I've bounced off The Magicians a couple of times, though I know people who love it.
no subject
Date: 2023-03-05 07:28 am (UTC)One Soviet-era book that obviously must have been an influence on Vita Nostra, although the tone is very different: Monday Begins on Saturday by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky.
no subject
Date: 2023-03-01 10:38 pm (UTC)ISN'T VITA NOSTRA SO GOOD LIKE ISN'T IT THE ACTUAL BEST????
(and do you see why your comment was funny now?)
Anyway I am deeply confused about the whole dark academia thing, because it seems to be part things like this, which I think really gets to the root of the anxiety and madness and desperation that a crumbling institution provokes in students forced into brutal competition with each other, and some of it is very twee aesthetic kids acting out Snape/Hermoine fanfictions in tweed. I do like the tweed aesthetic but one of these is obviously worth paying attention to.
no subject
Date: 2023-03-02 02:30 am (UTC)TBH I go into pretty much all reading hoping the book ends like that.
no subject
Date: 2023-03-02 12:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-03-05 03:56 am (UTC)Also this is sort of what I thought university would be like.
no subject
Date: 2023-03-05 02:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-03-02 02:37 am (UTC)YES.
It's like a Nobel-prize-winning author's tour de force autoficiton about being melancholy in cafés after the war crossed with the angel Metatron's divine speech
no subject
Date: 2023-03-02 07:41 am (UTC)I just finished it two nights ago. I had that thing (which happens in both Kindle and print editions) where, because there's a chapter from some other work tacked on as a preview, you think you have a bunch of book left to go and suddenly it ends and you feel like you've reached the end of a set of stairs without realizing it and you get that jarring shock up your leg when you hit the ground sooner than you expected.
That aside, I was incredibly impressed with how the book made me really feel as if I was working as hard to understand it as Sasha was working to understand her lessons, but with just enough comprehension peeking through to keep me hooked. I didn't read whole passages so much as kind of absorb the impression of them because it was clear to me that trying to read for word-by-word meaning would be about as effective as Sasha trying to find a pattern in the endless paragraphs of "random" letters. What I needed to do was to just let my gaze take in big blocks of text at once, and get a subjective, emotional impression, even if I had to sometimes back up and move through sections several times in this way.
I struggled to keep up and I struggled to put it down. I spent a number of nights awake from about 430-530 or 6am, reading.
I had even stranger dreams than usual while reading it, with themes like "miniature models of extremely strange houses for sale at a glamorous auction spread all up and down the spiral staircase of a strange tower, and if I don't compete to get something good, everyone else will get the good ones," and "completing more of the tasks set for us by the king and queen than anyone else in my (group? tribe? cohort?) but because one of the tasks I succeeded at was cursed, being knocked back to absolute beginner/hopeful/scrub status, stripped of all my outward identity markers, and forced to decide whether I would start all over or just walk away, and meanwhile everyone watching this happen to me refuses to help or support me in any way though they all act very sympathetic." Plenty of my own shit caught up in there, but noticeably different than my usual, and certainly influenced by feelings about the book.
The translation was surprisingly good for all that, though by the end of the book the repetitive use of "Mom" for the mother as if it were her proper name started to grate on me for some reason.
I don't know why anyone would compare it to HP as it has literally nothing in common with those books other than being set at a magical school and having a viewpoint character who is new to the school. "The Magicians" is a better comparison, but I have forcibly ejected the first book from my mind in favor of the TV series which I vastly prefer.
It feels like a terrible cliche to call it "The Magicians as if written by Tolstoy or Dostoyevski" because those are the only two Russian novelists I know, and I can't even tell you how their styles are similar or different, so I suppose it's not only a cliche but a lazy cliche at that. But that's how I think of it.
no subject
Date: 2023-03-05 04:35 am (UTC)Yes! This (and the ensuing highly quotable paragraph) is a wonderful description of exactly what I loved about Vita Nostra -- it both described and enacted what it was about, which is hard enough in a poem, let alone a novel.
And it's not insufferable like /Infinite Jest/!
This is what I'm always secretly hoping any book will do -- fulfill its concept as completely as possible, not just narratively but formally.
*Ideally it will also transcend its material form and turn into a phosphorescent phoenix in my hands. Or at least get really meta. (This one stays within its own reality-envelope, but I'm not mad about it.)
I'm jealous of your dreams! I don't think mine got any wilder.
no subject
Date: 2023-04-03 05:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-03-04 08:49 pm (UTC)I was astonished by "Vita Nostra", it's fantastic -- imaginative, immersive, so clever. I read another book by those authors and sadly it wasn't up to the same standard.
no subject
Date: 2023-03-05 03:53 am (UTC)Yeah, I mean -- what could measure up?
What was the other book?
no subject
Date: 2023-03-05 09:00 pm (UTC)While I was reminding myself of the title, I discovered that there will be a sequel to Vita Nostra published very soon -- Assassin of Reality. I am cautiously excited!