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Reading ALL THE WEDNESDAYS, Part 2
Feb. 22nd, 2013 11:06 pmIn addition to the books glanced at in my last post, I have read:
Lindsay Clarke, The Chymical Wedding. This came from my tea group. Um. It's skillfully enough written, and I liked the incidental details and some of the characters. I nearly put it down at least three times. Unlike my experience with Carol Berg's Transformation, which I was glad I had stuck with, I'm not sure I wouldn't have been better off just quitting with this one. It has two parallel story lines, one set in the late 1990's and the other in 1848. Both sets of characters are looking for the same thing, and both are studying the central texts of alchemy. One of the modern characters -- a poet, for all love, who should know better -- explains that if the alchemists had just explained what they were about in clear terms, the wrong people would pervert their work; whereas if they went on and on endlessly obfuscating and writing boring, terrible prose, only people who really cared would penetrate (word used advisedly) the secrets of the universe. Later in the book, Louisa, one of the 1848 characters whom I became fond of, is thinking about her research and the conclusions to be drawn from it, and though I was passionately interested in her quest and her story, I found myself actually nodding off. Louisa's thoughts had partaken too much of the nature of her research.
There's a lot of gender essentialism in this book; some of it is undercut by events, but the importance of heterosexual sex is underlined in a way that only became more annoying as the book went on. The endings of both stories come to melodramatic climaxes (sorry) and then, oddly, fizzle out; the great promises and deeds and discoveries fade away, without any impression that I could see that that might be the point.
I was probably really the wrong audience for this one.
In stark contrast, I read Sherwood Smith's Coronets and Steel and Revenant Eve. I read them in the wrong order, which was immediately apparent from the "our story so far" passages candidly provided by the narrator of the second book. But I had misplaced Coronets and Steel, so I just went on reading.
I always have a bit of an initial struggle with Sherwood's viewpoints, whatever they are in a given work. It's not that she is doing anything wrong, but that our brains work so differently that I have to feel my way for a bit until I get used to what's happening. In Revenant Eve, she's doing a curious and fascinating thing. Kim is the narrator, but she's supernaturally stuck in the position of an observer. The story, until near the end, is happening to another girl in the early nineteenth century, who travels from the Caribbean to Napoleonic France and then into a country that doesn't exist in our universe in eastern Europe. Kim can't even see what is happening unless Aurelie, the girl in history, is paying attention to it. The only thing she can do is to try to win Aurelie's trust, and to decide how much she should reveal about what is going to happen in the near future. You can tell that she's ordinarily a very active person. She is skilled in ballet and fencing. Her modern language and ideas entwine and contrast with Aurelie's more formal and antiquated ones. The story is complicated and richly detailed, with dashes of humor. I enjoyed it enormously.
I have said that Kim is an active person, but I had no idea how active until I read Coronets and Steel. Do not kidnap Kim. She will jump out of or down from anything, however fast-moving or high, to thwart you, and she has a biting sense of humor. "The Ransom of Red Chief" is nothing by comparison. This is a less complicated, faster-paced, and lighter book, but it isn't just fluff. Kim's character sees to that.
I think that's all until I manage to hit an actual Wednesday again.
Pamela
Lindsay Clarke, The Chymical Wedding. This came from my tea group. Um. It's skillfully enough written, and I liked the incidental details and some of the characters. I nearly put it down at least three times. Unlike my experience with Carol Berg's Transformation, which I was glad I had stuck with, I'm not sure I wouldn't have been better off just quitting with this one. It has two parallel story lines, one set in the late 1990's and the other in 1848. Both sets of characters are looking for the same thing, and both are studying the central texts of alchemy. One of the modern characters -- a poet, for all love, who should know better -- explains that if the alchemists had just explained what they were about in clear terms, the wrong people would pervert their work; whereas if they went on and on endlessly obfuscating and writing boring, terrible prose, only people who really cared would penetrate (word used advisedly) the secrets of the universe. Later in the book, Louisa, one of the 1848 characters whom I became fond of, is thinking about her research and the conclusions to be drawn from it, and though I was passionately interested in her quest and her story, I found myself actually nodding off. Louisa's thoughts had partaken too much of the nature of her research.
There's a lot of gender essentialism in this book; some of it is undercut by events, but the importance of heterosexual sex is underlined in a way that only became more annoying as the book went on. The endings of both stories come to melodramatic climaxes (sorry) and then, oddly, fizzle out; the great promises and deeds and discoveries fade away, without any impression that I could see that that might be the point.
I was probably really the wrong audience for this one.
In stark contrast, I read Sherwood Smith's Coronets and Steel and Revenant Eve. I read them in the wrong order, which was immediately apparent from the "our story so far" passages candidly provided by the narrator of the second book. But I had misplaced Coronets and Steel, so I just went on reading.
I always have a bit of an initial struggle with Sherwood's viewpoints, whatever they are in a given work. It's not that she is doing anything wrong, but that our brains work so differently that I have to feel my way for a bit until I get used to what's happening. In Revenant Eve, she's doing a curious and fascinating thing. Kim is the narrator, but she's supernaturally stuck in the position of an observer. The story, until near the end, is happening to another girl in the early nineteenth century, who travels from the Caribbean to Napoleonic France and then into a country that doesn't exist in our universe in eastern Europe. Kim can't even see what is happening unless Aurelie, the girl in history, is paying attention to it. The only thing she can do is to try to win Aurelie's trust, and to decide how much she should reveal about what is going to happen in the near future. You can tell that she's ordinarily a very active person. She is skilled in ballet and fencing. Her modern language and ideas entwine and contrast with Aurelie's more formal and antiquated ones. The story is complicated and richly detailed, with dashes of humor. I enjoyed it enormously.
I have said that Kim is an active person, but I had no idea how active until I read Coronets and Steel. Do not kidnap Kim. She will jump out of or down from anything, however fast-moving or high, to thwart you, and she has a biting sense of humor. "The Ransom of Red Chief" is nothing by comparison. This is a less complicated, faster-paced, and lighter book, but it isn't just fluff. Kim's character sees to that.
I think that's all until I manage to hit an actual Wednesday again.
Pamela
