![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Everything's Over The Top
Jun. 13th, 2005 08:31 pmI finished reading Even The Stones by Marie Jakober a few days ago. It took me a day or two longer, perhaps, than it should have, but it was only fitfully engaging. More often it was almost wearying. It's a book that is trying much too hard to make a point. The protagonist is a queen, the only daughter of the king of a mountainous kingdom, who is stolen away by a foreign prince and who makes her way home. This sounds like the whole plot of the book, on the back at least, but now she has to fight not only the prince's brother who makes war on her, but she has to struggle for recognition from her own ministers and supposed allies. All but a few men in the book, you see, are convinced that women are incapable of doing anything so strenuous as thinking or running a country. There is a man named Shadrak, a quite able general, who is a freed slave, and who is of course looked on with almost the same disregard by everyone except the queen.
I'm sure this is quite realistic, in that most of the nobility really did treat women and undesirables as second-class citizens, but it is, as I said, wearying. It does turn out well in the end, luckily, though even then nobody thinks it will really last. If it's meant to be any comment on modern society, though, then I guess I have to say that things are nowhere near that bad any longer, even if they're not an ideal egalitarian utopia. Maybe it's a comment on modern fantasy, by showing more plausible attitudes, but otherwise it's practically Kevillist propaganda. Oh, well, at least it was better than the even more dreary The Black Chalice, which had a thoroughly distastefully self-righteous narrator. I have no idea what the title means, by the way, if it's a quote from something or other(not one of the several quotes that appear in the book, that I could find).
I also read Hitchhiker, the Douglas Adams biography, and mostly found it depressing. From The Salmon of Doubt, from Douglas's own writing, I got the impression of a quick-minded man far removed from the impression I'd always gotten from his novels. But now I've swung back again. He seemed to have made a cock-up of so many things in his life--the whole "Starship Titanic" debacle, for instance--and then died too young. Of course, I shouldn't talk, perhaps, because quite frankly sometimes I think that I'd need to be locked into a room with a word processor to get any serious writing done. (NaNoWriMo first drafts aside.) Also, the biographer punctures a lot of Douglas's well-embellished stories with the more probable reality beneath them, and that's never fun.
After the Jakober, I was in for something more light-hearted, so I grabbed Pippi Longstocking from the shelf. I realize that this is technically a children's book, but it's a children's book I don't recall if I ever read, so I wanted to read it before I read it to Simon(or Simon read it to himself). It is quite funny, if perhaps not appropriate for this generation's children. It's aimed at the free-spirit generation, not the well-behaved generation we're supposed to be bringing up, with Tootle as their cautionary tale of what happens to trains who get off the tracks.
Now I have started Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, which in its physical dimensions reminds me of nothing else so much as Stephen King's unabridged hardcover of The Stand. Because that was a title descriptive of its properties as furniture--you could use it as a stand and put things on it to get them off the floor. It contains fewer pages than House of Chains, but it noticeably thicker. It barely fits in my backpack(with my clipboards, lunch, CDs and tapes, at least), and it's frankly uncomfortable to read. Maybe I should've waited for the paperback.
I'm sure this is quite realistic, in that most of the nobility really did treat women and undesirables as second-class citizens, but it is, as I said, wearying. It does turn out well in the end, luckily, though even then nobody thinks it will really last. If it's meant to be any comment on modern society, though, then I guess I have to say that things are nowhere near that bad any longer, even if they're not an ideal egalitarian utopia. Maybe it's a comment on modern fantasy, by showing more plausible attitudes, but otherwise it's practically Kevillist propaganda. Oh, well, at least it was better than the even more dreary The Black Chalice, which had a thoroughly distastefully self-righteous narrator. I have no idea what the title means, by the way, if it's a quote from something or other(not one of the several quotes that appear in the book, that I could find).
I also read Hitchhiker, the Douglas Adams biography, and mostly found it depressing. From The Salmon of Doubt, from Douglas's own writing, I got the impression of a quick-minded man far removed from the impression I'd always gotten from his novels. But now I've swung back again. He seemed to have made a cock-up of so many things in his life--the whole "Starship Titanic" debacle, for instance--and then died too young. Of course, I shouldn't talk, perhaps, because quite frankly sometimes I think that I'd need to be locked into a room with a word processor to get any serious writing done. (NaNoWriMo first drafts aside.) Also, the biographer punctures a lot of Douglas's well-embellished stories with the more probable reality beneath them, and that's never fun.
After the Jakober, I was in for something more light-hearted, so I grabbed Pippi Longstocking from the shelf. I realize that this is technically a children's book, but it's a children's book I don't recall if I ever read, so I wanted to read it before I read it to Simon(or Simon read it to himself). It is quite funny, if perhaps not appropriate for this generation's children. It's aimed at the free-spirit generation, not the well-behaved generation we're supposed to be bringing up, with Tootle as their cautionary tale of what happens to trains who get off the tracks.
Now I have started Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, which in its physical dimensions reminds me of nothing else so much as Stephen King's unabridged hardcover of The Stand. Because that was a title descriptive of its properties as furniture--you could use it as a stand and put things on it to get them off the floor. It contains fewer pages than House of Chains, but it noticeably thicker. It barely fits in my backpack(with my clipboards, lunch, CDs and tapes, at least), and it's frankly uncomfortable to read. Maybe I should've waited for the paperback.
