Reading Wednesday
Mar. 23rd, 2016 03:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhWhat did you just finish?
The Coral Strand by Ravinder Randhawa. I feel a bit guilty for what I'm about to say, because I'm sure the author tried very hard, but everything about this book is terrible. The writing (especially the dialogue, in which conversations consist mostly of one non-sequitur after another), the plot (which is incomprehensible at first and then just dumb and unrealistic – I'm trying to avoid spoilers, but a major revelation involves a character having been tortured in a hidden room for fifty years which is just ridiculous), the characters (who generally make no sense and are prone to abrupt shifts in personality), and the themes (which are somehow both pounded like anvils - the book must repeat five hundred times that it's set in 1997, which is EXACTLY 50 years after India's independence, do you get it? 50 YEARS? INDEPENDENCE? - and still meaningless, since I have no idea what the author was trying to say with all this).
Anyway. Sita is a British Indian woman in 1997 (FIFTY YEARS AFTER INDEPENDENCE, IN CASE YOU FORGOT), who had some sort of terrible childhood that she ran away from years ago. The Coral Strand makes you wait a long time before revealing exactly what happened in that childhood, in that weird trope which literary fiction occasionally indulges in, where all the characters know whatever it was that happened, but the reader must piece it together gradually from small clues. I don't actually mind this trope, as long as it's done well, but in a surprising twist, The Coral Strand does not do it well. Sita was raised by Emily and Champa, neither of whom are her mother, and who seem to be in possession of a surprising amount of wealth. Eventually Sita meets Kala, who reveals that FIFTY YEARS AGO their families were dramatically entangled. Unfortunately neither of them knows the whole story, so they must persuade Emily, Champa, and the missing mother to give up the secrets of their past (Such Indian Symbolism 101 names here too: Sita, the goddess betrayed and abandoned in the wilderness; Kala, "black", the downfallen grandson of Gopal the Golden).
But none of this probably would have been so bad if it wasn't for the writing itself. I don't know how to describe exactly what's so bad about it, so here, have a sample:
‘Afraid? No fear. Not me,’ chanting her early morning litany into the tiny mirror that only has space for a fragment of her face – Sita’s daily dose of Dutch courage.
Sita, the woman who used to have two names; the woman who’d cut them in half and burnt her boats. Sita the Ferret was what she used to be: Sita from Champa, Ferret from Emily. She’d joined them up and would murmur them to herself in a jagged symphony: Sita/Ferret-Sita/Ferret. Syllables of the self. Which she’d guillotined! Cut and separated when she ran. Shearing off the Ferret in the house and taking the Sita: normal, well-known, and best of all, anonymous.
Taking the bottle of Old Spice from the shelf, she removes the top and dabs drops onto her clothes, wrists, the base of her neck; breathing in deeply, inhaling the pungent, spicy scents.
THAT IS THE OPENING PAGE. I would have stopped reading right there, if I hadn't agreed to write of review of this dumb book.
Because I had to suffer through this whole thing, have some more. This is Sita and Kala flirting (I suppose? This conversation somehow leads into their having sex eventually) after their first meeting:
‘Um, I wondered, if I asked you, would you have dinner with me?’
She glared at him, ‘If you were to ask me,’ voice sharp and cutting, ‘then I would remind you of the line, “Fain would I fly, but fearest to fall”.’
‘Very Elizabethan,’ he laughed, ‘you can’t get me on that one. “If thou fearest to fall, then fly not at all.’’ Were you as diligent a student as a worker?’
‘Diligence or death. Story of my life.’
A pause. He was gathering himself to say something. ‘I was sorry to hear about the death of your husband.’ Lies that come back to haunt. Hers, not his, had been the first. She’d made it up, trying to tie knots around holes, to give herself a background, so she could fit in, to make them think that she was one of them. Camouflage, a common enough device employed by Asian women living in the West who had to hip-hop between cultures.
‘It was an accident,’ she replied, looking away. Guilt for murder, even as a fiction, and guilt at her falsehoods.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
Dark streets sped by. Lamps shone like lighthouses through the muffled rain. She’d bathed her face in the rain this morning, lifted it and seen the order of her old world turned around.
He broke the silence, startling her and taking their conversation backwards, ‘So you won’t have dinner with me?’
Did he always use a circuitous route? ‘You haven’t asked me. Remember!’
‘Couldn’t take the risk of a rejection.’
He was looking straight ahead, as a good driver should, so she couldn’t examine his face and see where that lie of a line was coming from. ‘You’re so funny. Funny I forgot to laugh,’ using the sarcasm picked up from her landlady’s daughters. But theirs didn’t contain the bitter undertone of hers. He probably didn’t know what the word ‘rejection,’ meant. ‘But if you had asked, conditional tense, then the answer would have been, past future tense, “no”.’
‘Excellent,’ he said, grinning at the look on her face, ‘present tense.’
‘So glad you’re pleased. That’s the sod-off tense.’
‘Next time, you ask me.’
‘Sure. You play safe. I take the risks. Does Poonum know about your extra-curricular activities?’
‘What extra-curricular activities?’ he asked. Quite true. He hadn’t made a single improper suggestion. Then he pulled over, stopped and turned off the engine. She shifted in her seat towards the door. ‘I haven’t made any promises to Poonum.’
NO ONE TALKS LIKE THAT. IT DOESN'T EVEN MAKE SENSE.
In summation: don't read this book, it sucks, and not even in the way that leads to amusing negative reviews.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin. In the land of the Stillness, geological disruptions are common: earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, mudslides, the venting of poisonous gases, etc. Such disasters can range from small scale (in the real world, think 1816, "the year without a summer", when a volcano in Indonesia dropped temperatures worldwide, causing a famine in Europe) to massive (think of the event that killed off the dinosaurs). These periods are called "Fifth Seasons": Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall; Death is the fifth, and master of all. Much of the culture of humans in the Stillness involves preparing for potential Fifth Seasons and being ready to survive through one.
However, there are also people – called "orogenes" – who have evolved the natural ability to quell such disasters. You'd think they'd be popular, but if you can stop an earthquake you can also start one. Imagine an orogene losing control in an instant of fear or anger or self-defense, and levelling a city of thousands. So, yeah, not popular. In fact, most of them are lynched as children when they first accidentally reveal their abilities. The one group of orogenes that survives is at The Fulcrum, where they're harshly trained to use their abilities for the good of all.
The Fifth Season is divided into the story of three women. The first is Damaya, a young girl who has just discovered that she's an orogene, and who is abandoned by her family and taken to the Fulcrum to be raised. Next is Syenite, a fully trained and powerful orogene who thinks she's working on a routine project until everything goes to shit and she slowly discovers that the Fulcrum is even more evil than she already realized. Given that Syenite's story starts out with her being ordered to have a child with a man she's never before met, just so that the Fulcrum can have another child to train, it gets into dark territory very quickly. Finally there's Essun, an orogene who's been living in hiding, with no one in her small town suspecting that she's anything other than a normal human. Her story starts with discovering that her two-year old son has just been beaten to death by her husband – presumably because he realized that the child was an orogene – and that both husband and her eight-year-old daughter are missing. Simultaneously a huge earthquake occurs, setting off a new Fifth Season which seems likely to last for centuries at least. Although at first these there stories seem entirely separate, they connect in an unusual way late in the book – I loved how they came together, but I suspect some readers might find it an unfair twist, so I mention it as a potential problem.
I haven't been that much of a fan of the previous Jemisin books I read, but this one is AMAZING. It's dark, yes, but there are moments of humor and light (including a literal pirate threesome which of course I was so into, and if anyone wants to write me endless S/A/I fanfic I will love it). The worldbuilding is complex and fascinating; one of the things I particularly liked was how swear words reflected the setting. Instead of "shit" or "fuck", characters say things like "rusting" and "earthfires" and "flake". It's a very neat use of language. I really love the hints of what might happen next (why is Syenite special? is the Stillness a future Earth? what's up with the obelisks?), and I want to read the next book NOW omg. I can't believe it's not supposed to be out until August. Highly recommended, even if Jemisin isn't your favorite author.
What are you currently reading?
The End of Karma: Hope and Fury Among India's Young by Somini Sengupta. Someday I will catch up with my NetGalley queue. But not yet.
The Coral Strand by Ravinder Randhawa. I feel a bit guilty for what I'm about to say, because I'm sure the author tried very hard, but everything about this book is terrible. The writing (especially the dialogue, in which conversations consist mostly of one non-sequitur after another), the plot (which is incomprehensible at first and then just dumb and unrealistic – I'm trying to avoid spoilers, but a major revelation involves a character having been tortured in a hidden room for fifty years which is just ridiculous), the characters (who generally make no sense and are prone to abrupt shifts in personality), and the themes (which are somehow both pounded like anvils - the book must repeat five hundred times that it's set in 1997, which is EXACTLY 50 years after India's independence, do you get it? 50 YEARS? INDEPENDENCE? - and still meaningless, since I have no idea what the author was trying to say with all this).
Anyway. Sita is a British Indian woman in 1997 (FIFTY YEARS AFTER INDEPENDENCE, IN CASE YOU FORGOT), who had some sort of terrible childhood that she ran away from years ago. The Coral Strand makes you wait a long time before revealing exactly what happened in that childhood, in that weird trope which literary fiction occasionally indulges in, where all the characters know whatever it was that happened, but the reader must piece it together gradually from small clues. I don't actually mind this trope, as long as it's done well, but in a surprising twist, The Coral Strand does not do it well. Sita was raised by Emily and Champa, neither of whom are her mother, and who seem to be in possession of a surprising amount of wealth. Eventually Sita meets Kala, who reveals that FIFTY YEARS AGO their families were dramatically entangled. Unfortunately neither of them knows the whole story, so they must persuade Emily, Champa, and the missing mother to give up the secrets of their past (Such Indian Symbolism 101 names here too: Sita, the goddess betrayed and abandoned in the wilderness; Kala, "black", the downfallen grandson of Gopal the Golden).
But none of this probably would have been so bad if it wasn't for the writing itself. I don't know how to describe exactly what's so bad about it, so here, have a sample:
‘Afraid? No fear. Not me,’ chanting her early morning litany into the tiny mirror that only has space for a fragment of her face – Sita’s daily dose of Dutch courage.
Sita, the woman who used to have two names; the woman who’d cut them in half and burnt her boats. Sita the Ferret was what she used to be: Sita from Champa, Ferret from Emily. She’d joined them up and would murmur them to herself in a jagged symphony: Sita/Ferret-Sita/Ferret. Syllables of the self. Which she’d guillotined! Cut and separated when she ran. Shearing off the Ferret in the house and taking the Sita: normal, well-known, and best of all, anonymous.
Taking the bottle of Old Spice from the shelf, she removes the top and dabs drops onto her clothes, wrists, the base of her neck; breathing in deeply, inhaling the pungent, spicy scents.
THAT IS THE OPENING PAGE. I would have stopped reading right there, if I hadn't agreed to write of review of this dumb book.
Because I had to suffer through this whole thing, have some more. This is Sita and Kala flirting (I suppose? This conversation somehow leads into their having sex eventually) after their first meeting:
‘Um, I wondered, if I asked you, would you have dinner with me?’
She glared at him, ‘If you were to ask me,’ voice sharp and cutting, ‘then I would remind you of the line, “Fain would I fly, but fearest to fall”.’
‘Very Elizabethan,’ he laughed, ‘you can’t get me on that one. “If thou fearest to fall, then fly not at all.’’ Were you as diligent a student as a worker?’
‘Diligence or death. Story of my life.’
A pause. He was gathering himself to say something. ‘I was sorry to hear about the death of your husband.’ Lies that come back to haunt. Hers, not his, had been the first. She’d made it up, trying to tie knots around holes, to give herself a background, so she could fit in, to make them think that she was one of them. Camouflage, a common enough device employed by Asian women living in the West who had to hip-hop between cultures.
‘It was an accident,’ she replied, looking away. Guilt for murder, even as a fiction, and guilt at her falsehoods.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
Dark streets sped by. Lamps shone like lighthouses through the muffled rain. She’d bathed her face in the rain this morning, lifted it and seen the order of her old world turned around.
He broke the silence, startling her and taking their conversation backwards, ‘So you won’t have dinner with me?’
Did he always use a circuitous route? ‘You haven’t asked me. Remember!’
‘Couldn’t take the risk of a rejection.’
He was looking straight ahead, as a good driver should, so she couldn’t examine his face and see where that lie of a line was coming from. ‘You’re so funny. Funny I forgot to laugh,’ using the sarcasm picked up from her landlady’s daughters. But theirs didn’t contain the bitter undertone of hers. He probably didn’t know what the word ‘rejection,’ meant. ‘But if you had asked, conditional tense, then the answer would have been, past future tense, “no”.’
‘Excellent,’ he said, grinning at the look on her face, ‘present tense.’
‘So glad you’re pleased. That’s the sod-off tense.’
‘Next time, you ask me.’
‘Sure. You play safe. I take the risks. Does Poonum know about your extra-curricular activities?’
‘What extra-curricular activities?’ he asked. Quite true. He hadn’t made a single improper suggestion. Then he pulled over, stopped and turned off the engine. She shifted in her seat towards the door. ‘I haven’t made any promises to Poonum.’
NO ONE TALKS LIKE THAT. IT DOESN'T EVEN MAKE SENSE.
In summation: don't read this book, it sucks, and not even in the way that leads to amusing negative reviews.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin. In the land of the Stillness, geological disruptions are common: earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, mudslides, the venting of poisonous gases, etc. Such disasters can range from small scale (in the real world, think 1816, "the year without a summer", when a volcano in Indonesia dropped temperatures worldwide, causing a famine in Europe) to massive (think of the event that killed off the dinosaurs). These periods are called "Fifth Seasons": Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall; Death is the fifth, and master of all. Much of the culture of humans in the Stillness involves preparing for potential Fifth Seasons and being ready to survive through one.
However, there are also people – called "orogenes" – who have evolved the natural ability to quell such disasters. You'd think they'd be popular, but if you can stop an earthquake you can also start one. Imagine an orogene losing control in an instant of fear or anger or self-defense, and levelling a city of thousands. So, yeah, not popular. In fact, most of them are lynched as children when they first accidentally reveal their abilities. The one group of orogenes that survives is at The Fulcrum, where they're harshly trained to use their abilities for the good of all.
The Fifth Season is divided into the story of three women. The first is Damaya, a young girl who has just discovered that she's an orogene, and who is abandoned by her family and taken to the Fulcrum to be raised. Next is Syenite, a fully trained and powerful orogene who thinks she's working on a routine project until everything goes to shit and she slowly discovers that the Fulcrum is even more evil than she already realized. Given that Syenite's story starts out with her being ordered to have a child with a man she's never before met, just so that the Fulcrum can have another child to train, it gets into dark territory very quickly. Finally there's Essun, an orogene who's been living in hiding, with no one in her small town suspecting that she's anything other than a normal human. Her story starts with discovering that her two-year old son has just been beaten to death by her husband – presumably because he realized that the child was an orogene – and that both husband and her eight-year-old daughter are missing. Simultaneously a huge earthquake occurs, setting off a new Fifth Season which seems likely to last for centuries at least. Although at first these there stories seem entirely separate, they connect in an unusual way late in the book – I loved how they came together, but I suspect some readers might find it an unfair twist, so I mention it as a potential problem.
I haven't been that much of a fan of the previous Jemisin books I read, but this one is AMAZING. It's dark, yes, but there are moments of humor and light (including a literal pirate threesome which of course I was so into, and if anyone wants to write me endless S/A/I fanfic I will love it). The worldbuilding is complex and fascinating; one of the things I particularly liked was how swear words reflected the setting. Instead of "shit" or "fuck", characters say things like "rusting" and "earthfires" and "flake". It's a very neat use of language. I really love the hints of what might happen next (why is Syenite special? is the Stillness a future Earth? what's up with the obelisks?), and I want to read the next book NOW omg. I can't believe it's not supposed to be out until August. Highly recommended, even if Jemisin isn't your favorite author.
What are you currently reading?
The End of Karma: Hope and Fury Among India's Young by Somini Sengupta. Someday I will catch up with my NetGalley queue. But not yet.
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Date: 2016-03-23 09:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-25 01:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-23 11:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-24 01:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-24 12:47 am (UTC)I love second person! Especially to express grief and dislocation! Enough that I am actually tempted to try another N. K. Jemisin book (I couldn't get into The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms for love or money).
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Date: 2016-03-25 01:14 am (UTC)I would recommend giving this one a try. I pretty much hated The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, and yet loved Fifth Season.
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Date: 2016-03-24 06:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-25 01:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-25 10:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-26 12:48 am (UTC)