Reading Wednesday
Sep. 10th, 2014 03:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhWhat did you just finish?
Travelers' Tales India: True Stories, edited by James O'Reilly and Larry Habegger. Ugh, okay. So this book wasn't terrible, even though there was yet a third essay from the woman I was complaining about last week, which included this paragraph (literally this is the next sentence after she saw a doctor who told her she only had diarrhea and just needed water and electrolytes):
I wondered -- I wonder still -- why I didn't just let myself die. Not sadly, or for any reason or lack of reason, but simply because I didn't know where to go or what to do. I had no interest whatsoever in living. Indeed, one night when a funeral procession, carrying candles and branches, came walking along the road and out across the river bed, I found myself quite envying the corpse, draped, as it was, on a bier of wood, decorated all around with withered palm fronds that rattled in the wind.
HOW IS ANYONE THIS OBLIVIOUS? Anyway, she then goes on to disdain "novels" and "detective stories" as having "almost nothing to do with the spirit, less to do with literature", because obviously she only reads German literature about someone who pretends to have TB because that's DEEP AND MEANINGFUL.
Okay. Anyway. There were plenty of perfectly nice essays in this book, including ones by Salman Rushdie, Madhur Jaffrey, and William Dalrymple, all of whom I like enough to have read entire books by. It's a bit outdated (apparently it was put together in 1995, which I did not realize before reading it), but plenty of the essays are still applicable. In general, the idea was better than the execution though.
Sold Down the River by Barbara Hambly.It's probably not fair to compare a three hundred-page book to a two-hour movie, but this book is sort of what I wish 12 Years a Slave had been. I feel like the characters are so much more real: complex and diverse and making all sorts of choices. The ending is probably unrealistically happy but, eh, I don't really have a problem with that.
This is the first one in the series where Hannibal starts using amicus meus (it's Latin for "my friend", btw) as Ben's nickname. Which is ADORABLE, and I don't even care if nicknames are dumb and cheesy, I love it so much. Athene for Rose is pretty great too. I just love all of Hannibal's nicknames. I wonder if it's something he came up with in the time in-between the previous book and this one, or if it's specifically something he uses in response to the situation of pretending to be Ben's master. I do love the scene where they use Latin to pass secret messages to each other, despite having eavesdroppers. That sort of thing – people improvising together while in danger, their trust in one another outweighing the strangers watching them – is one of my favorite tropes.
I find the argument between Ben and Livia at the very beginning, which is basically about feelings vs money, to be really heart-breaking. It's easy to sympathize with Ben, because who would want to be in his position, or to do the things he ends up doing? But on the other hand, it's obvious why Livia would feel that the safety of having more money outweighs any sensitivity or reluctance, and what that implies about her background, and the choices she's made... man. It makes me sad.
I really would have liked to have the scene where Ben actually proposes the whole "let's pretend to be master and slave" plan to Hannibal. I suppose it doesn't matter to the plot – obviously Hannibal said yes, that's all we need to know – but I'm fascinated by what the characterization details would have been like: did Ben think of it right away? Did Hannibal agree easily, or did he have to be talked into it? What were they feeling and how did they talk about it? I just want to know everything.
It was the threat every master held over the head of every slave, up and down the eastern coast of the American states and in the new cotton lands of Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia. I’ll sell you down the river. To the cane plantations of Louisiana.
To Hell.
It's a shameful indication of my historical knowledge, I suppose, but before reading this book, I'd never realized that the phrase "sold down the river" referred to a place instead of a direction. You almost never hear about sugar being grown in the US (I don't even know if it's still done at all?); the focus is always on the cotton plantations. I remember watching some Regency movie where one of the characters boycotted sugar because of the use of slave labor, and yeah, the details of how it was grown and harvested are pretty horrifying.
It's kind of an interesting twist to have the victim be someone who basically everyone wants dead, including the detective himself. And I've got no sympathy for Fourchet myself, though Robert's not really any better. That said, the image of the killer sitting and watching, listening, to Fourchet die is one of the absolute creepiest things.
Shaw should come today, he thought.
Then he recalled Hannibal’s extended absence, and his own days of waiting, and his empty stomach clenched with dread.
And if they don’t?
If Shaw was sent out of town on some other duty? Or killed in a tavern brawl?
And a part of him whispered—the part of him that distrusted the white man because he was white, that had reacted to yesterday’s panic, yesterday’s wild flight—Or just forgot? Like the child with the hoop in the Place d’Armes, leaving his little black friend to weep.
Don’t think this, January told himself. Don’t do this to yourself. Or don’t do it today, anyway. He’ll come.
They’ll both come.
Ben's loneliness and uncertainty and feelings of abandonment are so hard to read. I want him to get some reassurance so much. Which is basically what the whole end of the book is, but he deserves EVEN MORE. I also want Ben/Hannibal "I thought you were dead!" fic; why has no one written that yet?
Shaw isn't in this book very much, but his dramatic rescue is totally dramatic enough to make up for it. I like this line in particular: Shaw brought up both his rifles like pistols, firing each one-handed—January was amazed he didn’t break his wrists. That whole scene, with explosions and a gun battle and luckily misfiring pistols, is like the end of an action movie. I sort of jokingly call this book "the one where Hannibal's opium addiction saves the day", but it's not really inaccurate.
I guess it's nice that Esteban, a gay character, gets a happy ending, though I don't feel like he deserves it after he let Agamemnon get whipped. Also, you know, all the general terribleness of helping run a slave plantation, but that one was personal.
Man, the last scene. I pretty much never cry at books or movies, but this one makes me choke up every time. It's just absolutely the perfect coda to everything that happened in the book before.
Here are some of my favorite bits and little things I noticed:
He could hear the man’s enraged bray behind him as he crossed the yard and mounted the stairs to his room in the garçonnière, and only when he had shut the door behind him did he start to shake.
He was forty-one years old, he reminded himself—forty-two, he added, as of three weeks ago. Simon Fourchet had no power to hurt him, beyond the crass physical violence such as the scum of the keelboats had practiced. The man was seventy years old and probably couldn’t hurt him much. This is the child who is frightened, he thought, taking three tries to get his new kid gloves off. This is the child in the dreams, who is unable to walk away.
OH BB. :_; Ben really is the best iron woobie.
A tall old man walked past with a basket of pink roses on his head OMG THIS RANDOM INCREDIBLY MINOR BACKGROUND CHARACTER TOTALLY SHOWS UP BOOKS LATER. That is some serious commitment to worldbuilding, Hambly.
For a year he’d lived in pain, after the death of his wife in the cholera. For a year music had been his only refuge.
After that year, there were other refuges in the city as well.[…] A winter of friendship. Of sitting in the markets by the coffee stands with ten cents’ worth of jambalaya bought off a cart and talking with other musicians, or walking Rose home through the foggy evenings and seeing the gold lamplight bloom in windows all along the streets.
Awwww, Ben. I love how deeply, fundamentally important friends and family are to him.
“Now, I don’t know nuthin’ bout your family,” returned January mildly, as they grouped around the two-wheeled rice cart, set up in front of the line of plantation shops just upstream of the mill. “But you so ugly I hear you was five years old ’fore you realized your name wasn’t ‘Damn!’”
Hahahaha, I had completely forgotten that Ben keeps telling 'yo momma' jokes in this book. I adore that aspect of him.
Moths and roaches roared around the torches set into the walls, and the smoke pouring from the furnace beneath the cauldrons burned January’s eyes, and above everything Simon Fourchet presided, a black-coated Satan bellowing at the men who hauled wood, who stirred the kettles, who dipped out the rising scum of impurities or climbed up and down those steps endlessly to feed the chopped billets of cane into the rollers.
Hell, thought January, stumbling on blistered feet, aching, his mind curiously clear. What window had the ancients looked through, to see that Hell would actually be a Louisiana sugar-mill on a November night?
I really like all the Dante imagery and quotes in this book. It's not the first comparison I would have thought of, but it works so well.
“Thomas Brown on the philosophy of the human mind, or this roguish little romp of Saint-Simon’s on the industrial system. I wonder if Madame Hélène reads?”
“How do you feel about Sir Walter Scott?”
Hannibal shuddered. “It may come to that, God forbid. Nulla placere diu nec vivere carmina possunt/Quae scribuntur aquae potoribus. ("no song can give pleasure for long, nor can it last, that is written by drinkers of water", Horace)
I am needlessly amused by Ben and Hannibal being snarky about the pop culture of their day. It's funny to think of books that are considered classics today being trashy when they were new.
"Quashie waits for me in the trees by the levee.”
To comfort you, thought January, knowing you come to him from another man’s bed. Shakespeare, and Marvell, and all the other poets had missed that one, when they’d written about the nature of love.
Ohhhh, I just love this.
And a violin case.
January’s breath stopped in his lungs.
Hannibal. Hannibal had been here.
His blistered hands stiff and cold, he tore the little black casket out of the earth. Inside, the battered Stradivarius was wrapped in its customary cocoon of faded silk scarves, with a hideout bottle of opium.
Damn them. Moving almost automatically he cached the instrument in the rough rafters of the shed, and bent to digging again. Damn them to Hell. He worked fast, illogically, as if his friend had been interred alive and he could somehow save him by finding him quickly. [...] I will see them hanged, he thought. Robert and Marie-Noël. Whoever did this …
I love the scene where Ben thinks Hannibal is dead. And it happens twice! I'm resisting the urge to quote every bit of Ben angsting over Hannibal being (not really) dead, but I COULD. It's all so great.
In any case neither the Deerslayer nor the Knight of the Oak had ever been chained with his feet above his head, a position in which it was difficult to do anything except hope that the beautiful Indian maiden (or Saracen girl) whose eyes he’d met for an unforgettable moment during capture would hurry up and steal down those dungeon stairs....
I can never decide if Ben is actually comparing Hannibal to a romantic heroine in this paragraph. On the one hand, that seems too over the top. On the other hand, who else could Ben except to show up right then? And he's careful to pick characters who would have stereotypically black eyes, which is always the feature of Hannibal's he is most poetic about. (Also, neither Ivanhoe nor the Deerslayer are ever actually into an Indian maiden or Saracen girl, respectively, because I bothered to look this up.)
(And the link to the FFA discussion thread, which should still be going for an hour or two.)
What are you currently reading?
Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh. I've been meaning to read this book for ages, but I suppose procrastinating might have worked out for me, because the last book in the trilogy is finally supposed to be out soon. A novel about the build-up to the Opium Wars, focusing on a single ship and its crew, which includes Indians of various regions, classes, and castes; an evangelical British dude; a French woman in disguise; and a black American.
Light Thickens by Ngaio Marsh. A mystery set in a theater, which I am mostly reading in the hope of stealing ideas for a fic. I've never read anything by the author before, though she's fairly well-known; I was pretty surprised to realize that she's a white woman, because that was definitely not the assumption I'd made from her name.
Travelers' Tales India: True Stories, edited by James O'Reilly and Larry Habegger. Ugh, okay. So this book wasn't terrible, even though there was yet a third essay from the woman I was complaining about last week, which included this paragraph (literally this is the next sentence after she saw a doctor who told her she only had diarrhea and just needed water and electrolytes):
I wondered -- I wonder still -- why I didn't just let myself die. Not sadly, or for any reason or lack of reason, but simply because I didn't know where to go or what to do. I had no interest whatsoever in living. Indeed, one night when a funeral procession, carrying candles and branches, came walking along the road and out across the river bed, I found myself quite envying the corpse, draped, as it was, on a bier of wood, decorated all around with withered palm fronds that rattled in the wind.
HOW IS ANYONE THIS OBLIVIOUS? Anyway, she then goes on to disdain "novels" and "detective stories" as having "almost nothing to do with the spirit, less to do with literature", because obviously she only reads German literature about someone who pretends to have TB because that's DEEP AND MEANINGFUL.
Okay. Anyway. There were plenty of perfectly nice essays in this book, including ones by Salman Rushdie, Madhur Jaffrey, and William Dalrymple, all of whom I like enough to have read entire books by. It's a bit outdated (apparently it was put together in 1995, which I did not realize before reading it), but plenty of the essays are still applicable. In general, the idea was better than the execution though.
Sold Down the River by Barbara Hambly.
This is the first one in the series where Hannibal starts using amicus meus (it's Latin for "my friend", btw) as Ben's nickname. Which is ADORABLE, and I don't even care if nicknames are dumb and cheesy, I love it so much. Athene for Rose is pretty great too. I just love all of Hannibal's nicknames. I wonder if it's something he came up with in the time in-between the previous book and this one, or if it's specifically something he uses in response to the situation of pretending to be Ben's master. I do love the scene where they use Latin to pass secret messages to each other, despite having eavesdroppers. That sort of thing – people improvising together while in danger, their trust in one another outweighing the strangers watching them – is one of my favorite tropes.
I find the argument between Ben and Livia at the very beginning, which is basically about feelings vs money, to be really heart-breaking. It's easy to sympathize with Ben, because who would want to be in his position, or to do the things he ends up doing? But on the other hand, it's obvious why Livia would feel that the safety of having more money outweighs any sensitivity or reluctance, and what that implies about her background, and the choices she's made... man. It makes me sad.
I really would have liked to have the scene where Ben actually proposes the whole "let's pretend to be master and slave" plan to Hannibal. I suppose it doesn't matter to the plot – obviously Hannibal said yes, that's all we need to know – but I'm fascinated by what the characterization details would have been like: did Ben think of it right away? Did Hannibal agree easily, or did he have to be talked into it? What were they feeling and how did they talk about it? I just want to know everything.
It was the threat every master held over the head of every slave, up and down the eastern coast of the American states and in the new cotton lands of Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia. I’ll sell you down the river. To the cane plantations of Louisiana.
To Hell.
It's a shameful indication of my historical knowledge, I suppose, but before reading this book, I'd never realized that the phrase "sold down the river" referred to a place instead of a direction. You almost never hear about sugar being grown in the US (I don't even know if it's still done at all?); the focus is always on the cotton plantations. I remember watching some Regency movie where one of the characters boycotted sugar because of the use of slave labor, and yeah, the details of how it was grown and harvested are pretty horrifying.
It's kind of an interesting twist to have the victim be someone who basically everyone wants dead, including the detective himself. And I've got no sympathy for Fourchet myself, though Robert's not really any better. That said, the image of the killer sitting and watching, listening, to Fourchet die is one of the absolute creepiest things.
Shaw should come today, he thought.
Then he recalled Hannibal’s extended absence, and his own days of waiting, and his empty stomach clenched with dread.
And if they don’t?
If Shaw was sent out of town on some other duty? Or killed in a tavern brawl?
And a part of him whispered—the part of him that distrusted the white man because he was white, that had reacted to yesterday’s panic, yesterday’s wild flight—Or just forgot? Like the child with the hoop in the Place d’Armes, leaving his little black friend to weep.
Don’t think this, January told himself. Don’t do this to yourself. Or don’t do it today, anyway. He’ll come.
They’ll both come.
Ben's loneliness and uncertainty and feelings of abandonment are so hard to read. I want him to get some reassurance so much. Which is basically what the whole end of the book is, but he deserves EVEN MORE. I also want Ben/Hannibal "I thought you were dead!" fic; why has no one written that yet?
Shaw isn't in this book very much, but his dramatic rescue is totally dramatic enough to make up for it. I like this line in particular: Shaw brought up both his rifles like pistols, firing each one-handed—January was amazed he didn’t break his wrists. That whole scene, with explosions and a gun battle and luckily misfiring pistols, is like the end of an action movie. I sort of jokingly call this book "the one where Hannibal's opium addiction saves the day", but it's not really inaccurate.
I guess it's nice that Esteban, a gay character, gets a happy ending, though I don't feel like he deserves it after he let Agamemnon get whipped. Also, you know, all the general terribleness of helping run a slave plantation, but that one was personal.
Man, the last scene. I pretty much never cry at books or movies, but this one makes me choke up every time. It's just absolutely the perfect coda to everything that happened in the book before.
Here are some of my favorite bits and little things I noticed:
He could hear the man’s enraged bray behind him as he crossed the yard and mounted the stairs to his room in the garçonnière, and only when he had shut the door behind him did he start to shake.
He was forty-one years old, he reminded himself—forty-two, he added, as of three weeks ago. Simon Fourchet had no power to hurt him, beyond the crass physical violence such as the scum of the keelboats had practiced. The man was seventy years old and probably couldn’t hurt him much. This is the child who is frightened, he thought, taking three tries to get his new kid gloves off. This is the child in the dreams, who is unable to walk away.
OH BB. :_; Ben really is the best iron woobie.
A tall old man walked past with a basket of pink roses on his head OMG THIS RANDOM INCREDIBLY MINOR BACKGROUND CHARACTER TOTALLY SHOWS UP BOOKS LATER. That is some serious commitment to worldbuilding, Hambly.
For a year he’d lived in pain, after the death of his wife in the cholera. For a year music had been his only refuge.
After that year, there were other refuges in the city as well.[…] A winter of friendship. Of sitting in the markets by the coffee stands with ten cents’ worth of jambalaya bought off a cart and talking with other musicians, or walking Rose home through the foggy evenings and seeing the gold lamplight bloom in windows all along the streets.
Awwww, Ben. I love how deeply, fundamentally important friends and family are to him.
“Now, I don’t know nuthin’ bout your family,” returned January mildly, as they grouped around the two-wheeled rice cart, set up in front of the line of plantation shops just upstream of the mill. “But you so ugly I hear you was five years old ’fore you realized your name wasn’t ‘Damn!’”
Hahahaha, I had completely forgotten that Ben keeps telling 'yo momma' jokes in this book. I adore that aspect of him.
Moths and roaches roared around the torches set into the walls, and the smoke pouring from the furnace beneath the cauldrons burned January’s eyes, and above everything Simon Fourchet presided, a black-coated Satan bellowing at the men who hauled wood, who stirred the kettles, who dipped out the rising scum of impurities or climbed up and down those steps endlessly to feed the chopped billets of cane into the rollers.
Hell, thought January, stumbling on blistered feet, aching, his mind curiously clear. What window had the ancients looked through, to see that Hell would actually be a Louisiana sugar-mill on a November night?
I really like all the Dante imagery and quotes in this book. It's not the first comparison I would have thought of, but it works so well.
“Thomas Brown on the philosophy of the human mind, or this roguish little romp of Saint-Simon’s on the industrial system. I wonder if Madame Hélène reads?”
“How do you feel about Sir Walter Scott?”
Hannibal shuddered. “It may come to that, God forbid. Nulla placere diu nec vivere carmina possunt/Quae scribuntur aquae potoribus. ("no song can give pleasure for long, nor can it last, that is written by drinkers of water", Horace)
I am needlessly amused by Ben and Hannibal being snarky about the pop culture of their day. It's funny to think of books that are considered classics today being trashy when they were new.
"Quashie waits for me in the trees by the levee.”
To comfort you, thought January, knowing you come to him from another man’s bed. Shakespeare, and Marvell, and all the other poets had missed that one, when they’d written about the nature of love.
Ohhhh, I just love this.
And a violin case.
January’s breath stopped in his lungs.
Hannibal. Hannibal had been here.
His blistered hands stiff and cold, he tore the little black casket out of the earth. Inside, the battered Stradivarius was wrapped in its customary cocoon of faded silk scarves, with a hideout bottle of opium.
Damn them. Moving almost automatically he cached the instrument in the rough rafters of the shed, and bent to digging again. Damn them to Hell. He worked fast, illogically, as if his friend had been interred alive and he could somehow save him by finding him quickly. [...] I will see them hanged, he thought. Robert and Marie-Noël. Whoever did this …
I love the scene where Ben thinks Hannibal is dead. And it happens twice! I'm resisting the urge to quote every bit of Ben angsting over Hannibal being (not really) dead, but I COULD. It's all so great.
In any case neither the Deerslayer nor the Knight of the Oak had ever been chained with his feet above his head, a position in which it was difficult to do anything except hope that the beautiful Indian maiden (or Saracen girl) whose eyes he’d met for an unforgettable moment during capture would hurry up and steal down those dungeon stairs....
I can never decide if Ben is actually comparing Hannibal to a romantic heroine in this paragraph. On the one hand, that seems too over the top. On the other hand, who else could Ben except to show up right then? And he's careful to pick characters who would have stereotypically black eyes, which is always the feature of Hannibal's he is most poetic about. (Also, neither Ivanhoe nor the Deerslayer are ever actually into an Indian maiden or Saracen girl, respectively, because I bothered to look this up.)
(And the link to the FFA discussion thread, which should still be going for an hour or two.)
What are you currently reading?
Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh. I've been meaning to read this book for ages, but I suppose procrastinating might have worked out for me, because the last book in the trilogy is finally supposed to be out soon. A novel about the build-up to the Opium Wars, focusing on a single ship and its crew, which includes Indians of various regions, classes, and castes; an evangelical British dude; a French woman in disguise; and a black American.
Light Thickens by Ngaio Marsh. A mystery set in a theater, which I am mostly reading in the hope of stealing ideas for a fic. I've never read anything by the author before, though she's fairly well-known; I was pretty surprised to realize that she's a white woman, because that was definitely not the assumption I'd made from her name.
