Reading Wednesday
May. 25th, 2016 03:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhWhat did you just finish?
Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones. Yes, yes, I know: somehow I made it to adulthood having never actually read this before (I did see the Studio Ghibli movie? But they're different enough that I don't think that counts), or any other book by Jones. Feel free to rec one if you think there's any I should particularly read!
I hardly think I need to summarize this, but just in case: Sophie is the eldest of three children and therefore according to the rules of fairy tales, which she knows very well, nothing interesting or successful will ever happen to her. And so it seems at first: Sophie works in her family hat store, while her younger sisters are given interesting apprenticeships, one to a witch and the other to a baker. And then one day Sophie encounters the Witch of the Waste, who – for no reason Sophie can tell – puts a curse on her that turns her into an old woman and prevents her from telling anyone what happened.
Sophie takes this as an excuse to leave home, and ends up at the residence of the Wizard Howl, the titular moving castle. She has been always told that Howl is heartless and eats young women's souls, but that turns out to be an exaggeration. Sophie makes herself at home as a sort of maid/cleaning lady, and makes friends with the castle's other occupants, Calcifer the fire demon and Howl's apprentice Michael. They travel about, having assorted adventures, until Sophie realizes that Howl is also under a spell cast by the Witch of the Waste, which leads to a magical showdown and, of course, a happy ending for everyone.
(Well, not the Witch, I suppose. But everyone else!)
The real charm of the book is less the plot and more the characters and their interactions. I saw it called "fantasy slice of life" somewhere, and it is very much that; there's a great many pages spent on bacon sandwiches and cleaning supplies and tantrums over hair dying gone wrong, and yet it's all very nice to read and endlessly comfortable. I had been about to say that it was more "middle grade" than I usually read, but on thinking that over, it actually contains some fairly complex ideas. I think it's just that the writing style itself has a childlike quality. I did not see the ending romance coming until it was suddenly there, happening, but it's too sweet to dislike, so I'm on board.
Before We Visit the Goddess by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. A novel of three women from three generations of the same family. In 1950s rural Bengal, Sabitri is a poor but intelligent student, who lucks into a scholarship for college in Kolkata. In 1970s Kolkata, Sabitri's daughter Bela falls in love with a student leader of the Communist Party, and elopes with him to America when his life is threatened. In the late 1990s/early 2000s, Bela's daughter Tara drops out of college after her parents' divorce and goes through a string of years taken up with shitty boyfriends, dead-end jobs, and drugs.
The three timelines are interwoven, with events happening to one woman often reverberating down to have consequences in her daughter's life. In addition to the women themselves, secondary characters appear to occasionally take over the point of view: friends, husbands, employers, and so on. The ending, when revelations from all three generations crash together into one moment, felt a little too easy, but emotional nonetheless – like a Hallmark commercial that makes you cry even while you know it's cheesy.
I've read several other books by Divakaruni before, and I'm generally a fan of her writing, but this one seemed slighter than usual. It was pleasant enough while I was reading it, but now that it's done, I can't think of much to say about it. Ah, well. I suppose it's one of those books that has nothing exactly wrong with it, but doesn't do much good of note either.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
Lords and Ladies by Terry Pratchett. The 14th book of the Discworld series, and we're back to the witches! This time, in the tiny rural kingdom of Lancre, Magrat Garlick is engaged to the king but not quite sure if the life of queen is really for her; Granny Weatherwax is distracted by signs that she's going to die soon (witches know these things, you see); and Nanny Ogg is just generally Nanny. However, the royal wedding plans are interrupted by arrival of elves – not grand Tolkien elves, not tiny flower fairies, but the elves of changelings and Tam Lin and fairy gold: nasty and brutal and utterly untrustworthy.
What particularly stood out to be this time (though it's hardly unique to this book) is the sheer number of themes and ideas Pratchett can weave into a single narrative. Here we have: a parody of Midsummer Night's Dream, thoughts about folklore and elves (of course), beekeeping, parallel universes, crop circles, stone circles, magnetism, the problems and power of romanticism, why humans like cats, the cost of being the very best at something, and probably several more that I missed.
I keep having to fight my first impression of Pratchett as an easy read – and he is very readable! But it's like Picasso reverting to line-drawings. You really have to know what you're doing before you can get back to basics.And on that note, words I had to look up in a book I must have already read a dozen times:
Castors: each of a set of small wheels, free to swivel in any direction, fixed to the legs or base of a heavy piece of furniture so that it can be moved easily. (So that's what those things are called!)
Chicane: an artificial narrowing or turn on a road or auto-racing course.
Ablation: the loss of surface material from a spacecraft or meteorite through evaporation or melting caused by friction with the atmosphere.
I love this book, from I ATE'NT DEAD and Only one queen in a hive! Slash! Stab! and The price for being the best is always…having to be the best and Nanny waving a bag of sweets to interrupt Granny and Diamanda's 'who's the best witch' competition, and the utterly horrifying nature of Pratchett's elves. He's the best at conveying terror through indirectness:
It was still alive. Elves were skilled at leaving things alive, often for weeks.
And just so you know, I am STRONGLY RESISTING quoting the entire final confrontation with the elf Queen. But it's tempting!
What are you currently reading?
Theoretically, I am reading This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War by Samanth Subramanian, another NetGalley book.
Practically, I am reading World Ain't Ready, a Les Mis High School AU with fake-dating. It is 185k long. You guys, that is longer than The Fellowship of the Ring. It also holds the record for being the first fic I've bothered to load onto my ereader (I usually keep the fic on my computer and the books offline, but now I've broken the barrier). It seems nice so far! But I'm only on chapter 3.
Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones. Yes, yes, I know: somehow I made it to adulthood having never actually read this before (I did see the Studio Ghibli movie? But they're different enough that I don't think that counts), or any other book by Jones. Feel free to rec one if you think there's any I should particularly read!
I hardly think I need to summarize this, but just in case: Sophie is the eldest of three children and therefore according to the rules of fairy tales, which she knows very well, nothing interesting or successful will ever happen to her. And so it seems at first: Sophie works in her family hat store, while her younger sisters are given interesting apprenticeships, one to a witch and the other to a baker. And then one day Sophie encounters the Witch of the Waste, who – for no reason Sophie can tell – puts a curse on her that turns her into an old woman and prevents her from telling anyone what happened.
Sophie takes this as an excuse to leave home, and ends up at the residence of the Wizard Howl, the titular moving castle. She has been always told that Howl is heartless and eats young women's souls, but that turns out to be an exaggeration. Sophie makes herself at home as a sort of maid/cleaning lady, and makes friends with the castle's other occupants, Calcifer the fire demon and Howl's apprentice Michael. They travel about, having assorted adventures, until Sophie realizes that Howl is also under a spell cast by the Witch of the Waste, which leads to a magical showdown and, of course, a happy ending for everyone.
(Well, not the Witch, I suppose. But everyone else!)
The real charm of the book is less the plot and more the characters and their interactions. I saw it called "fantasy slice of life" somewhere, and it is very much that; there's a great many pages spent on bacon sandwiches and cleaning supplies and tantrums over hair dying gone wrong, and yet it's all very nice to read and endlessly comfortable. I had been about to say that it was more "middle grade" than I usually read, but on thinking that over, it actually contains some fairly complex ideas. I think it's just that the writing style itself has a childlike quality. I did not see the ending romance coming until it was suddenly there, happening, but it's too sweet to dislike, so I'm on board.
Before We Visit the Goddess by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. A novel of three women from three generations of the same family. In 1950s rural Bengal, Sabitri is a poor but intelligent student, who lucks into a scholarship for college in Kolkata. In 1970s Kolkata, Sabitri's daughter Bela falls in love with a student leader of the Communist Party, and elopes with him to America when his life is threatened. In the late 1990s/early 2000s, Bela's daughter Tara drops out of college after her parents' divorce and goes through a string of years taken up with shitty boyfriends, dead-end jobs, and drugs.
The three timelines are interwoven, with events happening to one woman often reverberating down to have consequences in her daughter's life. In addition to the women themselves, secondary characters appear to occasionally take over the point of view: friends, husbands, employers, and so on. The ending, when revelations from all three generations crash together into one moment, felt a little too easy, but emotional nonetheless – like a Hallmark commercial that makes you cry even while you know it's cheesy.
I've read several other books by Divakaruni before, and I'm generally a fan of her writing, but this one seemed slighter than usual. It was pleasant enough while I was reading it, but now that it's done, I can't think of much to say about it. Ah, well. I suppose it's one of those books that has nothing exactly wrong with it, but doesn't do much good of note either.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
Lords and Ladies by Terry Pratchett. The 14th book of the Discworld series, and we're back to the witches! This time, in the tiny rural kingdom of Lancre, Magrat Garlick is engaged to the king but not quite sure if the life of queen is really for her; Granny Weatherwax is distracted by signs that she's going to die soon (witches know these things, you see); and Nanny Ogg is just generally Nanny. However, the royal wedding plans are interrupted by arrival of elves – not grand Tolkien elves, not tiny flower fairies, but the elves of changelings and Tam Lin and fairy gold: nasty and brutal and utterly untrustworthy.
What particularly stood out to be this time (though it's hardly unique to this book) is the sheer number of themes and ideas Pratchett can weave into a single narrative. Here we have: a parody of Midsummer Night's Dream, thoughts about folklore and elves (of course), beekeeping, parallel universes, crop circles, stone circles, magnetism, the problems and power of romanticism, why humans like cats, the cost of being the very best at something, and probably several more that I missed.
I keep having to fight my first impression of Pratchett as an easy read – and he is very readable! But it's like Picasso reverting to line-drawings. You really have to know what you're doing before you can get back to basics.And on that note, words I had to look up in a book I must have already read a dozen times:
Castors: each of a set of small wheels, free to swivel in any direction, fixed to the legs or base of a heavy piece of furniture so that it can be moved easily. (So that's what those things are called!)
Chicane: an artificial narrowing or turn on a road or auto-racing course.
Ablation: the loss of surface material from a spacecraft or meteorite through evaporation or melting caused by friction with the atmosphere.
I love this book, from I ATE'NT DEAD and Only one queen in a hive! Slash! Stab! and The price for being the best is always…having to be the best and Nanny waving a bag of sweets to interrupt Granny and Diamanda's 'who's the best witch' competition, and the utterly horrifying nature of Pratchett's elves. He's the best at conveying terror through indirectness:
It was still alive. Elves were skilled at leaving things alive, often for weeks.
And just so you know, I am STRONGLY RESISTING quoting the entire final confrontation with the elf Queen. But it's tempting!
What are you currently reading?
Theoretically, I am reading This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War by Samanth Subramanian, another NetGalley book.
Practically, I am reading World Ain't Ready, a Les Mis High School AU with fake-dating. It is 185k long. You guys, that is longer than The Fellowship of the Ring. It also holds the record for being the first fic I've bothered to load onto my ereader (I usually keep the fic on my computer and the books offline, but now I've broken the barrier). It seems nice so far! But I'm only on chapter 3.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2016-05-25 09:24 pm (UTC)There are other books set in the same world as Howl's Moving Castle, but a lot of readers end up disappointed if they see those books as sequels. There's rather too little of Sophie and Howl for the books to actually feel like sequels.
Yuletide and Fic Corner tend to produce a number of DWJ fics each year. I've even written a couple myself.
no subject
Date: 2016-05-29 02:51 am (UTC)I had heard that about the Howl's Moving Castle sequels, which is indeed disappointing, but now that I know that going in, maybe I would still enjoy them.
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Date: 2016-05-25 10:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-05-29 02:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-05-27 04:00 pm (UTC)I have also never read Terry Pratchett. Yeah, there are some weird gaps in my reading, mostly to do with Brits.
*I even usually get ishy about high school girls and college-age boys, which is...challenging in our culture.
**The movie Push is a very large exception which kind of proves the rule in that it works largely for its very narratively recognized fucked-upedness, and it's not even the actual canonical romantic pairing, just the one that's clearly the most emotionally significant to the people involved.
no subject
Date: 2016-05-29 02:56 am (UTC)But missing out on Terry Pratchett! :O Is there any reason why? I can at least tell you that there tends to be very little romance, of any sort, in his books.
no subject
Date: 2016-05-29 05:26 am (UTC)I never bounced off Terry Pratchett, I just never picked up any of his work, never had it directly recced to me, and never even ran across write-ups of it that really got into details that caught my attention until after his diagnosis, at which point my to-read list was so long that I just haven't reached a point at which I'm ready to ask which book to start with.
no subject
Date: 2016-05-25 09:30 pm (UTC)Bewitching the Mind: Ensnaring the Senses (http://archiveofourown.org/works/2736686)
What would you recommend more enthusiastically by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni? I've been wanting to read her for a while.
no subject
Date: 2016-05-26 02:40 am (UTC)Thanks for the link! :D I look forward to reading it.
My favorite by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is The Palace of Illusions, which is a retelling of the Mahabharata (one of the two big fundamental Hindu myths), but it's a great introduction to the story even if you know nothing about it. The Mistress of Spices (magic realism set in California, about a woman who owns a spice store and sells cures to her customers) is also pretty good, and I remember liking Arranged Marriages (a collection of short stories), though I don't remember the details of that one.
no subject
Date: 2016-05-26 01:25 am (UTC)Two that come to mind specifically that deal with this transition (kids losing their innocence and shifting their perceptions of adults) are "The Lives of Christopher Chant" and "Drowned Ammet". Both of these are second books in their respective series, but both are completely self-contained and neither requires knowledge of the other books to be read, and both have lovely worldbuilding. I have trouble recommending specific DWJ books because most of them are fun but narratively weak in one way or another (at least they seem so to me) and yet I absolutely adore them, and those are two of my favorites -- in part because of the themes, and in part because each of those books has one of my favorite supporting characters in her whole body of work. (Another thing she's good at: wonderfully memorable characters, even if they only have a few appearances.)
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Date: 2016-05-26 04:00 am (UTC)Also, yes to everything you say about Lords and Ladies! It's my favorite Witches book and one of my favorite Pratchetts, and, just, yes.
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Date: 2016-05-29 03:10 am (UTC)And yes! IT'S SO GOOD. I remembered that I really loved this one, but I was still surprised by how very good it was.
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Date: 2016-05-26 07:05 am (UTC)Lords and Ladies is one of my favourite Pratchetts.
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Date: 2016-05-29 03:04 am (UTC)Same here! It's good. It's very hard for me to chose a favorite – but it's SO GOOD.
no subject
Date: 2016-05-26 06:22 pm (UTC)I don't think I've met any Pratchett witches or elves yet, at least not in any detail, but I am enjoying Guards! Guards! immensely. It's even better than Mort! (maybe).
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Date: 2016-05-29 03:35 am (UTC)Yeah, the witches don't have much crossover with the Death subseries – oddly! You'd think they would be a good match. But I'm glad to hear you're enjoying Guards! Guards! The next book on my own reread is Men at Arms, which is its direct sequel. I'm looking forward to more of the Watch!
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Date: 2016-05-26 10:35 pm (UTC)Well, I'm glad you did, but I knew fuck all about what happened in this book, except that it's very different from the Ghibli movie of the same name.
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