Easily Distracted by Shiny Things

I don't think you're supposed to be in a happy mood all day on the last day at a job at a workplace you like, with no immediate prospect of future work. But... it was a good day. The new receptionist is sweet and will fit in well, a number of people say they'll genuinely miss me.

I also have to admit I have some plans for trying to sort out a few things at home (things still occupying too much of my study that aren't mine) and maybe pull out a clay project or twa, as I'm behind in doing so. And of course to get more writing done - Not that I haven't made some progress, but it tends to be smaller and slower than it ought. And also arching more.

And when I got home, the package with the new Heather Dale was on the stairs. Technically, it's not a new album per se, as it's a collection of virtually all her Arthurian songs (barring Holly Ivy and Yew, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, rearranged into the rough order in which they happen, and in completely new arrangements. So far, some of these are not that terribly different (As I Am and Culhwch and Olwen), some are wildly so (Mordred's Lullaby, which is ALSO very unlike the stripped-down-to-solo-voice way she's performed it at the last concerts I saw. It's heavily layered again, but with new and different sound). but it makes me happy, because even the not terribly different, at least at first hearing, are still fresh enough to force a new listen to what it's about.

After the last three book gripes, I just read two pretty decent books in a row - the second of Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson books, the Sea of Monsters, which does indeed make for a better adventure, more for the girls to do, and the beginnings of a cure for the "Ugly and heavy and therefore evil" vibe you get off a character in the first book - she kicks butt in this one.

And Elizabeth Bear's By the Mountain Bound which is - well, it's a tragedy, in the literal sense. I can see very well why she chose to publish these in the order she did, because this was heartwrenching and terrible and I don't think I'd have had the courage to pick up All the Windwracked Stars second, for all it takes place a significant time later - by immortal standards. I rejoiced in the writing and the story, but oh, that wasn't easy to read through. There were moments where it was equally unbearable to read on and to stop.

So far these have beaten out the Stratford Man books (Ink and Steel and Hell And Earth) as my favourites of Bears.

I think this is meant to be a fun romp, mindless chick-lit* crossed with urban fantasy, with all the usual tropes - nice everygirl doing a makeover of her life, the sassy best friend with a bad love life, the hot gay friend with the fashion sense, quirky flaky maternal figures, the pursuit of the wrong guy whilst leaning obliviously on Mr. Right, and prodigious use of baked goods, ice cream, and fruity alcoholic mix as consolation and bonding.

It was - light, easy to read, quick to barrel through. And I'll grant it some points for not having a phantom income -- though the solution for where to live on a reduced income is absurd in the extreme (Most libraries don't have a convenient historic building in their back, especially not one that is dirty from years of neglect but lacks of problems with plumbing, outdated electricity, leaking roof, etc.), it *does* technically free up enough other money (No rental fees or power/water bills) to not make me blink too hard at the little spending she does.

Two problems.

1) I don't live in the same universe as this book.

This shouldn't be a problem. I'd rather most protagonists not be me, not be like me, and I like it when some of them don't live in the same philosophical universe as me. Sort of the point, right?

Except. This book is written with the clear assumption that of course the reader is just like this woman, if not in the exact details, than in shared culture. This is supposed to be an every-white-middle-class-North-American-woman. And I am all of the above.

The problem is that the tropes it invokes for everywoman are taken from other chick-lit, or from Sex and the City, without consideration of their reality, or people who aren't just like every other white chick-lit heroine. They feel like they're assembled from a checklist, not from actual people. It has the same feel as those people who try to write a new Magic Quest Trilogy based on reading Terry Brooks and watching the Lord of the Rings movies, without researching medieval England (never mind thinking of the possibility of basing it on some other culture or geography than some feudalesque cod-medieval place), or reading widely enough to get the idea there might be other things happening in fantasy, without considering why they need to be looking for a Magic Doodad to defeat the Dark Lord and his mindless faceless horde.

I think the only decision the main character makes in the entire book that I agree with is to stick with a job she likes in spite of a terrible pay cut, especially with alternate housing offered.

There's also a certain amount of action by the protagonist where she fails to look more closely at the world she's in, think about things, make connections. She fails consistently to ask questions. (At least it's consistent.) She's not quite TSTL**, but for a research librarian, she fails to research an astonishing number of things. She finds a room of magic books, *accidentally* wakes up a familiar, and then kind of hides from the books and fails to ask a lot of questions about how it all works. She doesn't even Google. She inquires even less deeply of her intended paramour (Not asking his relation to the woman she sees with him is Just ridiculous, especially when she does ask a couple of more vaguely probing questions. That she's seen successfully researching grant applications just makes all the times she doesn't ask things she should, or read further, just stand out more. The thing with this is, while there are plenty of people who don't ask questions they ought for many reasons to ask (Actually, everyone has individual blind spots they refuse to think about, often about things central to their life), and so maybe gives her more in literal common with other chick-lit protagonists and with a probable subset of readers, it makes her LESS sympathetic. People like it when a character they're meant to sympathize with is clever and observant.

(There's also a whole side of all this unconsidered following of tropes, and unthinking unquestioning protagonist that brings up the idea of Privilege, of how most people who have Privilege don't even see it. Because yup, this is a book of Privilege. See problem # 2.)

Oh, and virtually every guy in the book who isn't either the Gay Buddy or Mr. Right cheats. Almost every relationship past a disastrous first date is broken up by the guy cheating. There is NO other motivation for things not working out. Again, not my universe.

2) Her familiar.

The familiar she wakes up at first comes in the shape of a black cat, but, in spite of maintaining a tendency to purr, a deep fondness for canned tuna and an inclination to try and eat her pet fish, quickly takes the shape of a gorgeous gay man with perfect fashion sense and a desire to give her a makeover. He's very quickly welcomed into the otherwise all-girl circle of people commiserating over bad boyfriends, and joins in Mojito nights. Aside from one nod that he's one of the two not-cheating decent guys around, he's one of the girls.

The flagrantly gay buddy is another common chick-lit trope, and I roll my eyes hard at how badly stereotypical poor Neko is. As probably my second-favourite character of the lot after the grandmother (in spite of rather than because of his stereotypical features) he deserved better than to be a girl in guy drag.

But let me repeat this. A gay man is her FAMILIAR. The beast who channels her magic. And only the roughly one-in-twenty-nine chance that she summons him on a full moon means he can even leave the vicinity of the magic books. Oh, and he belongs to whomever owns the magic books. However they treat him.

What the Fuck I don't even.

And there's a real question of whether this is mitigated or made worse by the fact that the protagonist did it by accident and didn't ask a lot about the consequences.

Just...


* Not all chick-lit is mindless, so this is NOT a redundancy. And I say this as someone who isn't much of a fan of the genre in its unadulterated form.

** Too Stupid To Live, and it says something about Romance and Chick-lit that this is one of the common terms.

I met Violette Malan at WFC in Calgary, during the Todd Lockwood presentation. (He did the cover of this book. Which I think is decent but not exciting high fantasy -- except for Cassandra's highly un-high-fantasy-like expression, which I lurve, and her jeans, which are barely noticeable. I give Lockwood this, too: everything in it is actually from the book.) She seemed a pretty cool person. This tends to up my chances of reading a book by an author (This was also true of Carol Berg, for example). I also read good reviews of her later work, which also helped. So I decided to try ehr first book, since she'd given me a signed copy of the cover (I seem to recall Lockwood also signed it. It's hiding somewhere, alas, so I can't check.)

This book is in some ways a no-one-counts-the-rivets-on-moving-train book. That is to say, there are several problems with it, but once it got going, I read through it, and only noticed two of the issues as I read, though they're big ones. The others I thought about afterwards. or let pass.

The gist of the story is: Max Ravenhill thinks he's a normal history professor. Cassandra, who's been protecting him over centuries (previously as his lover, and now mostly at a distance) knows he's basically an elven prince, exiled for losing a war. Enemies have decided to either kill him or end his exile early, or imprison him until it ends so he's convenient to hand. So he ends up back in Faerie before he has any inkling who his real self was, scrambling to survive.

As I said, once it gets moving, it goes fast. Malan has a fairly deft hand about doling out information through action and incluing, or at reasonable, "Let's sit down and talk this out" moments, and not telling us things until they need to be told. she's pretty good at drawing characters with motivations and hopes that make sense, and at letting them seize on wrongheaded ideas. For all the time in this that people end up having to explain things (and the backstory is deep and layered, as are some of the bits of worldbuilding), it's surprising how few things are overexplained. I particularly liked the slow development of the idea where the Wild Hunt came from. Some of the dialogue is a bit forced, and some emotions are projected at the reader rather than felt, but these seem to be lapses in skill; underneath, and at heart, Malan is very good at trusting her readers. She also brought it to a pretty good conclusion, tying enough of a knot to satisfy, and fulfilling some of the not-expected but-inevitable hopes. This being her first book, and not a flawless one, nailing the landing is actually damn important; that, more than dialogue or other writing things, leads me to trust future books by her a lot more (And I have a more recent one in the queue).

She does spend rather too long hiding the identity of one on-screen character (Calling him by his title in one place and by his name in another), which led to a bit of eye-rolling after the fact.

So. As to the two bigger gripes.

The racial one is the one I noticed as I went.

i can't recall the exact details of the relation between the Shadowlands (IE, us) and Faerie, but that it's pretty loudly stated that if Faerie falls, so do the Shadowlands. In other words they're more prime, more important.

But this Faerie, while distinctly NOT the Celtic realm of legend, draws mostly on that (or other European ideas as to nature sprites etc.), and doesn't even include token suggestions of other cultural otherworlds, or that "we see water-sprites in this story that seem pretty much like naiads, but there are others more like those of other cutlures elsewhere". There are nods to other cultural sources in the early scenes where they're still in the Shadowlands (Specifically, Toronto), but they vanish quickly.

There are three races of the Riders, or human-like Faerie; Sunward, Moonward and Starward. Who are, respectively, redheads, black-haired (But pale-skinned or at most Latino - at least, one Rider has a Hispanic name, but we don't see him), and blondes. All Caucasian.

There's a strong feeling in this that, if this is the more important world, why is it so narrow in scope and culture? The culture of the Riders has depth and interest, but it's ONE culture. The Naturals (nature sprites etc.) and Solitaries (the main one of whom we meet is a troll, but basically any non-human or nature like denizen of Faerie) don't get nearly as much depth; part of this is time and space in the book, part of it is point-of-view, since the only one of the main characters who'd know them that well is Max, who's either amnesiac or quite busy. And part of it is that the Riders are currently the powerful culture in Faerie.

And part of it is that, as often happens, the primary world *is* a monoculture, without half the depth or complexity of ours. It's claustrophobically small.

There are ways to play this; for instance, making the main motivation a fight to save or destroy *this* country in its small corner of the world, leaving room to hint that the other stories are out there, somewhere. But this is one of those, "We need to save this whole world - and if we don't, Earth dies too" versions of Faerie. That size of stake can't be supported by this size of world.

This also leads to language, and the many problems with it.

First, the invented language suffers from Random Fantasy Apostrophes. This is okay; we really only use three words from the entire language, and they're three without an exact English equivalent. Another mark for the worldbuilding, that she needed three invented words to cover concepts intrinsic to the culture she does examine; one could be passably substituted with "magic", but that carries a cultural baggage that isn't wanted or quite right. Another is almost "Clan" but again, needed to be free of the assumptions we make based on the English word.

But second, and significantly worse, the problem that I chewed on as I was reading (To be fair it occurred to me between reading sessions, not while reading, but then it haunted me a bit): Malan establishes that Faerie has its language. She establishes some other things about the language and what it sounds like. She creates the absolutely ridiculous notion that the language cannot be written down (after coming up with spellings, however awkward and apostrophized, for three of them... this is the one language thing that made for an eye-roll while reading, but it's mentioned in one early scene then never toyed with again).

Yet when they end up in Faerie, everybody speaks English. Max, who has NO memory of his original life (Or several previous fabricated lives, to boot), including details at least as essential as language, and who has to be taught the words mentioned above, and what Faerie call themselves, never once has problems understanding anyone who speaks to him in Faerie. It isn't even handwaved away with some form of Doctor Who Tardis effect, or magic language-translator. It looks, mostly, like it either didn't occur to Malan at all, or like she decided the reader wouldn't care.

Just people who, except for three special words, seem to talk English.

Argh. I'm not sure I'd be more willing to let this slide even if a major part of the scenes I've been working on in the Apocalyptic thing weren't ABOUT trying to figure out how to work across a language barrier (and learn a language), even when a universal translator of sorts is right there in your hand. Language is so essential; we make some core assumptions based on the language we're speaking. Languages have words for concepts other languages didn't even consider. Malan clearly knows this, based on the three words of Faerie language we do learn. So how did she let this pass? Frankly, I'd have taken a handwavium "here's a spell of translation", even though I disagree that such a thing could exist without some problems and bugs, or even "Max forgot everything about being a Rider except the language". Because it would signal that it occurred to her, and that she didn't want to explore it just now, didn't have room for that and the story she wanted to tell. I'm fine with a writer saying, "I can't fit this in the book, sorry. I have 309 pages and I need to cram in all this worldbuilding plus an action adventure."

The last little language twitch I had was with names: the faerie names for one another are literal poetic things - Dreamer of Time, for instance, or Truthsheart. Okay, kind of goofy, but she plays it straight until you can believe in it, she'd not the first fantasy writer to have such names about, and yes, some human cultures named people after attributes or events.

EXCEPT that they also come in two forms, with related but different meanings. So Cassandra is Both Sword of Truth and Truthsheart, Max is both Dancer at Dawn and Dawntreader. This sudden multiplicity of meaning also irked me. I could understand rearranging the grammar, but the meaning as well? Rrgh.

And yet... I do look forward to reading books written later in her career, with more mastery. To see if she ever does address these gaps. Malan has something that makes you keep reading.

I kinda broke some of my resolution about what books and CDs I was allowed to buy.

On receiving yet another notification from Amazon that the Jim Moray album I ordered BOXING DAY is still not available*, I finally just wandered about online until I found an honest MP3 seller and bought it that way. I thought it would mean losing the bonus track; apparently not. They attached it to the last song per standard (I wonder if you'd get the secret bonus track on Sweet England, which is the only case I know of of having a genuinely *hidden* track. Not curious enough to download an album I own, though.) It's as good as the songs I'd listened to online suggested; I was intentionally not listening to several so I'd have something to discover.

Along with 4 other songs of his (from singles, etc).

And two June Tabor Albums (One I used to own on a cassette that was destroyed, one I never had), plus two singles.

And a handful of tracks from:
Nightwish - the bonus tracks on newer versions of albums I already own, grr. I only wish they'd *had* While your Lips are Still Red under any name.
Spiers and Boden, since Jon Boden's new solo album is seriously fabulous, if a bit apocalyptic, and those who made it say Bellowhead rocked the folk fest
Rose Kemp: Maddy Prior's daughter, and not remotely of the same musical style.

The punchline, for me at least, is I'd refused to order it from one of the companies in the UK that would mail it out to me, because if I did, I'd want to order other British folk albums I'm having trouble getting here. And I wasn't supposed to.

It's funny; it didn't feel like cheating. Because MP3s aren't *really* like buying the album. I seem to have imprinted on the physical thing being necessary. Even though I paid. Even though they all play just fine on the MP3 player.

I also pushed the used book limits, picking up two books on pure trade-in that weren't on the list (McHugh's China Mountain Zhang, which would have been on that list if I'd thought of it at the time, for one), but there, no money traded hands. That involves cheating less, and spending less - but it feels even more like breaking the resolution than paying for MP3s.

It makes me wonder how much of it is all about the physical object, and why *should* I treasure the physical thing so much? Desire to possess the physical object feels more greedy than simply wanting the song or the story available to appreciate and peruse.


*This actually isn't a total surprise. The main distributor who got albums in to Canada from the UK went belly up, and a lot of others are scrambling still to pick up the pieces. Jim Moray himself apparently had a different distributor problem. But. If I ask at a store, they say no, they can't order it in. Amazon had it listed as effectively available when I ordered it, and for at least two months after. I'm of the opinion that anything I ask them to order from the UK that's remotely as obscure will no doubt end up the same.

Weirdness: Last Time I was trying to hack words out of Bird of Dusk, I was doing so just after having read something that struck me as managing to move at a rapid-fire clip, include significant character details and relationships, and not be written in stripped bare prose. (I think it was Holly Black). And be short.

This time, I'm doing so after having been reading a book written by someone who loves lingering over all the personal interactions and fine detail (Usually to her benefit, more to the point, though in this particular book, there was a 125-page section I think should have been 75 pages, or 100 at the most).

And I've been wondering why it feels harder to edit down even as it feels rightly necessary.

So that's one reason I'm not reading book three of her series right away. The other is that I started the Pratchett/Stewart/Cohen Science Of Discworld book (As mom suggested the story portions also help make a bit more sense of things in Unseen Academicals, and, as for the alternating chapters, science = cool even in this light a touch.)

I'm alive.

New job is busy.

Twelfth Night went fantastically well, but for some minor bumps (Part of feast got delayed due to the mini-siege-weapon competition running long. Things like that.) The site tokens I made got much good comment; Colin took pictures, and I may post. In the archery competition, I accidentally shot our Baron in the head. (Well, the version of him printed on the target). Then I got made archery captain. I should really give that the telling it deserves. Another time, maybe?

There aren't enough hours in the day. Even with getting to write at least a few minutes each lunch hour. Those few minutes have been adding up, though. But I'm *not* at dance practice right now, and I dislike feeling too tired and having to pick and choose between activities.

Yup. I know these symptoms. I'm working full time.

Oh, wah. I get to make money!

Some of which I spent this week. The damage:

Bruce Springsteen - Magic
Criminal Minds Season 1
Eve's Bayou
The Prestige (The movie not the book)
Laurie R. King - The Art of Detection

After which, I reminded myself I only have this job to June, and thus should be saving money up, not using it, and so paid off my credit card for the month (And am considering, not cutting it up, but putting it away with my passport for use only when travelling, or aiding and abetting a friend of mine if she should wish to make more online purchases.) And am trying to convince myself to Not Buy Stuff. After all, I'm in the library at least part of the week.
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Minister Faust - From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain

I was slow in picking this up in spite of quite liking the Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad. The premise - psychiatrist to superheroes writes a self-help book - just didn't interest me. And it took a while to hook me, because, as humourous as are the truly dreadful similes Dr. Eva Brain-Silverman uses throughout, the first impression of the superheroes she's studying is pretty much that they're all impossible to like. I mostly persisted because I was actually intrigued by the scene he read at World Fantasy (The first solo talk with Iron Lass/Hnossi Icegaard).

Of course, Dr. Brain is a textbook case herself - of unreliable narrator. And like Coyote Kings..., The funny bits, which do show up, are the shiny cool things to drag one into what is, in the end, a truly dark story; of willful blindness aiding and abetting willful destruction, or people buying into their own stories (especially Dr. Brain. Or maybe not. I kept wondering, afterward, if she wrote what she wrote as the only way to get the truth out. Or if she really WAS just as unaware of what she had written as she seemed). Of whether the good guys win, or the winners write history, or there are no good guys, just people with all their fuck-ups pushed forward.

Tomson Highway - Kiss of the Fur Queen

I know Tomson Highway through his plays from the 90's (The Rez Sisters and Dry Lips Oughta Move To Kapuskasing), but even though he's been a name in Canadian and Cree literature for well over a decade, Kiss of the Fur Queen is his first novel.

Short version; it's good.

Longer: It's the story of Champion/Jeremiah Okimasis and his brother Gabriel (Who has a Cree name that, unlike Jeremiah's, goes mostly unused even before he leaves his family), two Cree from Northern Manitoba who end up going through the abuses of the Residential School system, which was intended to deliberately wipe out their language and culture. Both end up divorced from where they came from in different ways; Jeremiah clings to his parents' Roman Catholic church in spite of its abuses, and in spite of his own rapidly failing belief, and looks on fancy-dancing and drumming as terrible and pagan, while Gabriel turns to the Native American Church, but also travels further and further away from home, and doesn't want to go back north, and can't fit in. Both grow to excel at arts from white culture - Jeremiah as a concert pianist and a writer, Gabriel in ballet - which they ultimately turn back into expressions of their own culture, of northern subarctic landscapes, particularly under the encouragement of the Fur Queen, a trickster figure who slips in and out of their lives.

Which sounds a downer, and even though it does feature funerals and tragedies, and the painful realities of both the northern reserve and the urban life, it's a weirdly upbeat book, with a surprising number of light moments (Gabriel's first experience of shopping in Polo Park mall), and even the bad ones made bittersweet by odd funny details (Jeremiah and almost every one of his altercations with Amanda Clear Sky, the Ojibway girl who tries to drag him will-he or nill-he back into pride in his ancestry.) the language sometimes goes almost hallucinatory; some of this is rooted in a culture for which spiritual events are not nearly so divorced from the everyday, so Christmas ornaments singing along with a cassette is hinted as commonplace or at least not to be blinked at, and some is just a looping pleasure in language. Big events and small details are thoroughly mixed, and a lot happens - so much so that sometimes major turning points are painted in a blink-and-you-miss-it paragraph.

First, a review:

Anishnaabe World, by Roger Spielmann (Illustrated by Perry McLeod-Shabogesic and Tim Steven)

( Read more... )
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The library trip actually netted a slightly different set of borrowed books than planned, so my list of to-read books is tweaked slightly.

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( Twenty Books )