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a humble and unpretentious demeanor
Nov. 29th, 2023 12:02 amI’ve been dithering over posting, or mostly just too busy/disorganized to take the time, since getting home from my trip over a month ago; here is a tacked-together five-things-ish post to cover the bases.
To Shape a Dragon’s Breath, Moniquill Blackgoose: fantasy novel narrated by Anequs, an Indigenous girl from an island off a continent being rapidly colonized, who…I don’t want to say Impresses a baby dragon but that’s basically what it is? She talks her way into attending the mainland Academy for what the colonizers call dragoneers, where she encounters, not surprisingly, a lot of prejudice about her background and her gender both; she also makes some good friends, falls in love a couple of times, discovers a talent for blending the colonizers’ academic takes on magic/science with elements of her own culture, and makes it through her first year intact. I enjoyed it for the worldbuilding (including Anequs’ brother, a budding steampunk engineer, and his colleagues) as well as Anequs’ stalwart selfhood, and for the way, on the whole, the author tries hard to avoid creating a cast of flat good vs bad characters sorted by ethnicity, to show a range of people with different prejudices, positive and negative, based on their own varied experiences and personalities. (One quibble is that, except for one or two moments, the dragons feel like plot devices rather than characters in their own right; maybe in future books as Anequs’ dragon grows up?) (It’s invidious to compare this with R.F. Kuang’s Babel, since the only thing they really have in common is being school/college stories told from a minority perspective, but for me at least, it does some of the same things better, in that the author cares about her characters and their relationships and sees some hope therein.)
Quartet, Leah Broad: group biography of four 20th-century British women composers, Ethel Smyth, Rebecca Clarke, Dorothy Howell, and Doreen Carwithen. Very well-written and well-researched; I can sort of see why she chose the four-person format but I’m not sure it works entirely. Howell and Carwithen, who had less prominent careers and about whom less is known, seem like supplements to the other two, and Ethel Smyth’s far-out Ethel Smyth-ness tends to unbalance the book a bit (not the author’s fault, I think Smyth just did this to every context she ever appeared in, and for that matter kudos to the author for getting that across). I was most interested in Rebecca Clarke, including her work as a violist; not totally grabbed by her Viola Sonata, but I should go back and listen again.
A Life of One’s Own, Joanna Biggs: short essays on eight women writers melded with the author’s own personal-essay musings. Picked it up because I liked her previous book, a very short UK version of Working, and it didn’t disappoint, although I think it might not be satisfying for anyone who specializes in any of the writers mentioned. The essay on George Eliot reminds me that I really should read Middlemarch, especially having encountered my own version of Dorothea and Casaubon in Yuriko’s life. “I used to want desperately to be a ‘proper critic’…[but now] I want to know what it’s like to be someone else.” The author loves Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, making me want to go back and reread it for the first time since high school, when I remember loving it also. On Toni Morrison: “Her attitude toward [non-Black readers] was: sure, you can come in, but these books are not for you,” and yeah, Morrison isn’t writing to make white people understand, is she? She has that effect in passing but it’s not what her point is. (Disappointed that this book focuses on Beloved and barely touches on Jazz, which is my favorite.) “Much of [Morrison’s] teaching was reminding her students that you do not destroy what you’ve written by working over it, you discover, rather, what you are writing in the process of rewriting.”
The Country-House Burglar, Michael Gilbert: This is cheating, it’s not a new book at all, it was published in 1955 and I purloined it from my mother’s bookshelves. The amount of books she has, she can spare it /guilty. I like Michael Gilbert’s mysteries and this one, unusually, has a female POV character, Liz Artside, a middle-aged widow with a fine bass singing voice, a difficult son, and a general air about her of having wandered in from a Peter Dickinson mystery instead. The whole thing is very entertaining even apart from Liz, especially the way her son Tim goes from annoying to endearing as we get more of his POV (although I think Sue should wait ten years to marry him…).
Aspects, John M. Ford: The first book of a proposed fantasy series, published posthumously. John M. Ford can be hit or miss for me but I enjoyed this one, and am very sorry there’ll be no more, since in many ways the book is mostly setting the scene for events to come. I have to say, if his estate ever decides to hand it over to someone else to continue, my vote would go to L.D. Inman of the Ryswyck series, because for some reason it struck me very similarly—the austere worldbuilding, the vaguely post-war feel [post- a war in text, I mean, not our war], the friendly dueling, the religious background notes, the author’s passions coming through, Longlight very much a Speir in some ways… . I liked the different dialects, and the food, and the trains of course! (Also kind of in conversation with Yamaguchi Akira’s paintings, in terms of trains?) The naming conventions annoyed me—either use “English” words or non-English words but don’t mix the two together so awkwardly, and if you’ve got a major city with major-city bureaucracy, you need to have last names or patronymics/matronymics or SOMETHING to keep people straight, although I guess they manage in Indonesia—and the male lead I did not find especially interesting, unfortunately, the more so because all the other characters think he’s so special. Oh well. Was sorry not to see more of Brook, instant face-casting as Zhao Xinci, or rather Wang Weihua. I liked Silvern and Edaire a lot, and Alecti, who in two short scenes has infinitely more chemistry with Longlight than Varic does in the whole book…oh well.
For the Zhu Yilong fans, I’ve discovered another of our number in a funny place: some idle googling led me to the Acknowledgments section of a scholarly work on international relations, in which, along with her colleagues and her family, the author thanks “Mr Zhu Yilong, an esteemed actor from China, who…epitomises hard work and a zest for life, …maintaining a humble and unpretentious demeanour, and remaining steadfast in pursuing his dreams, a quality that I deeply admire” and quite a bit more in that vein. For some reason I am totally charmed by this straightforward fannishness in an entirely un-fannish context, good for the scholar in question!
Quick music link: Thad Jones’ 61st and Richard, once heard on site at the Vanguard, where it made me cry a little—there’s something about it that sounds like “yeah, things have been hard, but it’s gonna be okay” to me, who knows why. (Also discovered that the Vanguard jazz band’s long-standing first alto sax player, Dick Oatts, shares my birthday. I can remember him when my father used to take me there in my teens, when he had plentiful black hair, and now what hair he’s got left is all white, but he still plays, and smiles, like an angel.)
Photos: A few mostly autumn-themed pictures from my trip back to the States last month (for some reason I always feel odd about revealing my hometown on here in an unlocked post, so if you happen to recognize the city, please leave it nameless).
Be safe and well.
New (to me) books: Blackgoose, Broad, Biggs, Gilbert, Ford
To Shape a Dragon’s Breath, Moniquill Blackgoose: fantasy novel narrated by Anequs, an Indigenous girl from an island off a continent being rapidly colonized, who…I don’t want to say Impresses a baby dragon but that’s basically what it is? She talks her way into attending the mainland Academy for what the colonizers call dragoneers, where she encounters, not surprisingly, a lot of prejudice about her background and her gender both; she also makes some good friends, falls in love a couple of times, discovers a talent for blending the colonizers’ academic takes on magic/science with elements of her own culture, and makes it through her first year intact. I enjoyed it for the worldbuilding (including Anequs’ brother, a budding steampunk engineer, and his colleagues) as well as Anequs’ stalwart selfhood, and for the way, on the whole, the author tries hard to avoid creating a cast of flat good vs bad characters sorted by ethnicity, to show a range of people with different prejudices, positive and negative, based on their own varied experiences and personalities. (One quibble is that, except for one or two moments, the dragons feel like plot devices rather than characters in their own right; maybe in future books as Anequs’ dragon grows up?) (It’s invidious to compare this with R.F. Kuang’s Babel, since the only thing they really have in common is being school/college stories told from a minority perspective, but for me at least, it does some of the same things better, in that the author cares about her characters and their relationships and sees some hope therein.)
Quartet, Leah Broad: group biography of four 20th-century British women composers, Ethel Smyth, Rebecca Clarke, Dorothy Howell, and Doreen Carwithen. Very well-written and well-researched; I can sort of see why she chose the four-person format but I’m not sure it works entirely. Howell and Carwithen, who had less prominent careers and about whom less is known, seem like supplements to the other two, and Ethel Smyth’s far-out Ethel Smyth-ness tends to unbalance the book a bit (not the author’s fault, I think Smyth just did this to every context she ever appeared in, and for that matter kudos to the author for getting that across). I was most interested in Rebecca Clarke, including her work as a violist; not totally grabbed by her Viola Sonata, but I should go back and listen again.
A Life of One’s Own, Joanna Biggs: short essays on eight women writers melded with the author’s own personal-essay musings. Picked it up because I liked her previous book, a very short UK version of Working, and it didn’t disappoint, although I think it might not be satisfying for anyone who specializes in any of the writers mentioned. The essay on George Eliot reminds me that I really should read Middlemarch, especially having encountered my own version of Dorothea and Casaubon in Yuriko’s life. “I used to want desperately to be a ‘proper critic’…[but now] I want to know what it’s like to be someone else.” The author loves Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, making me want to go back and reread it for the first time since high school, when I remember loving it also. On Toni Morrison: “Her attitude toward [non-Black readers] was: sure, you can come in, but these books are not for you,” and yeah, Morrison isn’t writing to make white people understand, is she? She has that effect in passing but it’s not what her point is. (Disappointed that this book focuses on Beloved and barely touches on Jazz, which is my favorite.) “Much of [Morrison’s] teaching was reminding her students that you do not destroy what you’ve written by working over it, you discover, rather, what you are writing in the process of rewriting.”
The Country-House Burglar, Michael Gilbert: This is cheating, it’s not a new book at all, it was published in 1955 and I purloined it from my mother’s bookshelves. The amount of books she has, she can spare it /guilty. I like Michael Gilbert’s mysteries and this one, unusually, has a female POV character, Liz Artside, a middle-aged widow with a fine bass singing voice, a difficult son, and a general air about her of having wandered in from a Peter Dickinson mystery instead. The whole thing is very entertaining even apart from Liz, especially the way her son Tim goes from annoying to endearing as we get more of his POV (although I think Sue should wait ten years to marry him…).
Aspects, John M. Ford: The first book of a proposed fantasy series, published posthumously. John M. Ford can be hit or miss for me but I enjoyed this one, and am very sorry there’ll be no more, since in many ways the book is mostly setting the scene for events to come. I have to say, if his estate ever decides to hand it over to someone else to continue, my vote would go to L.D. Inman of the Ryswyck series, because for some reason it struck me very similarly—the austere worldbuilding, the vaguely post-war feel [post- a war in text, I mean, not our war], the friendly dueling, the religious background notes, the author’s passions coming through, Longlight very much a Speir in some ways… . I liked the different dialects, and the food, and the trains of course! (Also kind of in conversation with Yamaguchi Akira’s paintings, in terms of trains?) The naming conventions annoyed me—either use “English” words or non-English words but don’t mix the two together so awkwardly, and if you’ve got a major city with major-city bureaucracy, you need to have last names or patronymics/matronymics or SOMETHING to keep people straight, although I guess they manage in Indonesia—and the male lead I did not find especially interesting, unfortunately, the more so because all the other characters think he’s so special. Oh well. Was sorry not to see more of Brook, instant face-casting as Zhao Xinci, or rather Wang Weihua. I liked Silvern and Edaire a lot, and Alecti, who in two short scenes has infinitely more chemistry with Longlight than Varic does in the whole book…oh well.
For the Zhu Yilong fans, I’ve discovered another of our number in a funny place: some idle googling led me to the Acknowledgments section of a scholarly work on international relations, in which, along with her colleagues and her family, the author thanks “Mr Zhu Yilong, an esteemed actor from China, who…epitomises hard work and a zest for life, …maintaining a humble and unpretentious demeanour, and remaining steadfast in pursuing his dreams, a quality that I deeply admire” and quite a bit more in that vein. For some reason I am totally charmed by this straightforward fannishness in an entirely un-fannish context, good for the scholar in question!
Quick music link: Thad Jones’ 61st and Richard, once heard on site at the Vanguard, where it made me cry a little—there’s something about it that sounds like “yeah, things have been hard, but it’s gonna be okay” to me, who knows why. (Also discovered that the Vanguard jazz band’s long-standing first alto sax player, Dick Oatts, shares my birthday. I can remember him when my father used to take me there in my teens, when he had plentiful black hair, and now what hair he’s got left is all white, but he still plays, and smiles, like an angel.)
Photos: A few mostly autumn-themed pictures from my trip back to the States last month (for some reason I always feel odd about revealing my hometown on here in an unlocked post, so if you happen to recognize the city, please leave it nameless).
Be safe and well.
