I’ve got my coffee, my bullet journal, and a whole bunch of words to say about some books I read.
(This waffle is also available on my website if you ever have need to delve into the dusty archives.)
CJ Ackerley: T S Eliot: ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’ and ‘The Waste Land’*
Published 2007
Do you also need to study and write an exam question on TS Eliot’s The Waste Land? Well then, you’re in luck, because this short book details Eliot’s life up to writing ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’, and how the writing and reception of that poem led to the delightful(?) modernist weirdness that is The Waste Land, and then extensive exploration (and attempted explanation) of what the hell is happening in this poem.
If you’re not familiar with The Waste Land, or if it’s been a while, I highly recommend spending 25 minutes of your life listening to Alec Guinness perform it.
2 stars: you will never need to read this
Brandon Sanderson: Tress of the Emerald Sea*
Published 2023
The first novel to come out of the biggest Kickstarter of all time (so far), Tress of the Emerald Sea is the tale of Glorf (better known by her nickname, Tress) who grows up in a desolate backwater trading island imaginatively named The Rock, nestled in a sea full of water-activated energy spores. Tress likes it at home but is nevertheless forced into the Quest when she falls in love with the duke’s son Charlie; the duke whisks Charlie away off the Rock to find him a Proper Marriage, but Charlie manages to avoid wedlock by getting captured by the Sorceress. Obviously, Tress must leave the Rock to rescue Charlie, and so we have a bildungsroman in which Tress becomes a pirate, wields a kind-of-magic to control the spores (consistent with the wider Cosmere universe), tricks a dragon, and rescues her love.
Yeah, it’s very clearly Young Adult.
My problem was not the YA, it was the tone. Tress is narrated by Hoid, an immortal Worldhopper who pops up everywhere in the Cosmere (including this story, so there’s a metanarrative happening too). He’s clearly lived long enough that he covers his despair with a general glibness most of time, and he tells this story with that same superficial lightheartedness. Sanderson definitely intended this whimsical vibe - he was aiming for The Princess Bride (a book I couldn’t DNF fast enough).
The entire style is overtly playful and aiming for constant humour, and I just found it distracting. I do not enjoy fun.
2.75 stars. I’ll still buy a physical version for my library.
George Bernard Shaw: Pygmalion
Published 1914, revised 1941
A brief re-read, also in preparation for English exams. If you’re interested in my longer thoughts, they’re in 2022 reads part 12:
The exam question, if you're interested, was along the lines of 'Does George Bernard Shaw present gender and class divisions as surmountable in Pygmalion' (short answer: 'no', longer answer: a thousand words of 'no').
3.5 stars, again.
T. Kingfisher: Nettle & Bone*
Published 2022
Marra, aged 30, leaves the convent she’s spent half her life in to embark on a quest to save her sister from her abusive husband. The stakes are higher than that, obviously. Marra is a princess-in-waiting, her sister’s marriage forged an alliance with a powerful neighbouring kingdom, her royal brother-in-law was previously married to Marra’s eldest sister who’d died in an accident (or was it?). It’s a grim world where the opening has Marra forging a dog from the bones of dead dogs, in a landscape of cannibals. Building Bonedog is the second of three impossible tasks set by a dust-wife (a woman who can speak to the dead), in order for Marra to gain a weapon to use against her abusive brother-in-law.
And yet this story is cosy AF: found family, self-discovery, some slow-burn romance, and a demon chicken. Fairy tale tropes abound: the three impossible tasks are only the beginning.
I had so much fun with this story and these characters, and I would love to see more of the world, of the mages, of the Goblin Market. There’s plenty to explore.
4 stars. Grimcosy!
Alan Garner: Treacle Walker*
Published 2021
In the depths of the pandemic, I read the Kindle sample of an interesting novel, but I didn’t end up buying it immediately. When said novel came up in a Kindle Daily Deal a few years later, obviously I grabbed it. It had been a while since the sample, though, so I started afresh. And very quickly I realised I had no memory of this place.
Anyway, yeah, it was not the same book, and now I had no idea what I was reading, how long it was, or even what genre I was supposed to be in. Cool.
Treacle Walker is the story of Joe, a young man with a dodgy eye who lives alone. After trading with a rag-and-bone man he ends up with some curious magical artefacts, including a stone that prevents (certain?) people crossing his threshold, and a mostly-empty jar of ointment which, when inadvertently rubbed into Joe’s dodgy eye, gives him sight into a magical parallel world.
Sounds good, right? Certainly, it’s an effective setup into an adventure between both worlds where Joe is the go-between and has to stop the Whatever from Happening, rollicking good times through to the end.
Except Joe doesn’t understand what’s happening. He doesn’t get why he can see an endless swamp with a mysterious naked inhabitant with one eye, and the regular old swamp with the other. He follows the rag-and-bone man’s instructions on how to use the stone to create magical barrier in his home, but doesn’t understand that a barrier is now in place. Eventually, Joe needs to use both sights and the barrier to stop the Whatever from Happening, but still doesn’t appear to comprehend how he has done it? It’s a frustrating read.
I took myself off to the Internet to ask professional readers what the point of Treacle Walker was, not having found it in the usual fashion, and all I got was synopses like the one I just gave you. This book (novella? It’s only 131 pages) was nominated for the Booker Prize in 2022 and The Guardian gave it a Best Fiction nod in 2021. And I’m convinced the accolades are because critics didn’t find the point either, so decided it must therefore be Very Clever.
Anyway, if you do read it, let me know what it’s about. kthx.
2.5 stars. Um, what?
Lois McMaster Bujold: Shards of Honor*
Published 1986
Meet-cute but on an uninhabited planet where her science crew is destroyed by his military faction. Stranded together, Cordelia Naismith and Aral Vorkosigan spend all of five minutes crossing the countryside to his secret military base with her brain-injured ensign, battling native fauna, eating scrounged salad dressing, and falling in love.
Time passes, they get married, the end.
I realise I have extensively waffled on already, so if you want my full rant about romance tropes you’ll have to watch the video. The TL;DR is that I often cannot suspend my disbelief to the point required for romance to work, and absolutely could not here. McMaster Bujold is aware of the improbability of it all, though: Cordelia’s family, friends and colleagues voice exactly the same concerns I had about both the speed of the romance and Cordelia’s wilful overlooking of all the red flags. As a reader this brought me joy and vindication: I am not alone in these observations and feelpinions.
There’s some really sketchy attempted rape here, and (even more gross) plenty of excuses made to explain away the off-screen torture and sexual violence, and to rehabilitate the rapist. Otherwise, if you’re into romance and happy endings with some plot substance in between, there’s sixteen books in the Vorkosigan Saga space opera (of which this is the first, as well as being a debut novel).
3 stars. I shan’t be reading further.
And, here is the 2023 reads part 2 video:
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