a Christmas reading list.

I'm glad Christmas lasts for eleven more days after the day itself, mostly because I'm never very excited about before the day. This is mostly because I'm a student. It's very difficult to be jolly when you've got three papers and a presentation and a test and all your exams to deal with. No one has ever been put into a festive mood by the theme of corpse mutilation in Herodotus, especially as the deadline draws in. At the beginning of December I've already begun to keep strange hours; when I write by hand I do it in a random combination of the Greek and Roman alphabets. Every day closer to Christmas is a day closer to having to prove I understand Foucault, and can read Latin, and besides that I have grading to finish. Karl Barth and Roland Barthes have both physically manifested in my apartment. If there's ever a time of year I'm in favor of quiet, preparation, and repentance—not to mention looking forward to the end of all things—it's the weeks leading up to finals. Even after finals I'll have to clean for break, and pack—

This year I channeled the stress into being "person who's extremely concerned about proper Advent observance," which is a very specific person to be. For a while I even held to the insufferable position that no carols but "Veni Veni Emmanuel" and "Come Thou Long-Expected Jesus" were appropriate until the 25th. It's all part of growing up and turning into your dad. You develop a taste for oatmeal and Peter Paul & Mary, you start voluntarily reading Tolstoy, and you become obsessed with the church calendar. Of course I always get much more relaxed about the whole thing once I get home and put on the Mediæval Bæbes, and especially once I get started on my Christmas reading, which (because it's mixed up with all the other reading I'm always doing) stretches through all the twelve days. I reread the same few things most years, and you can probably guess most of them if I tell you straightaway that Christmas always puts me in a medieval mood.

The Pearl Poet, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Which Dad and I read aloud. In original text, not in translation. We read it because it's set at Christmas; it's the story of how the Green Knight came to Arthur's Christmas dinner to challenge one of the knights to a beheading contest. This is exactly what Arthurian legend is meant to be like. The magic is alien and whimsical, and Gawain is a pure and courageous hero overcome by nothing other than his own ruinous weakness, and nobody ever recognizes their own relatives or bothers to find out what anyone's name is. I always forget just how brilliant this poem is, and just how long and dull the descriptions of hunting and armor are, but mostly I forget how funny it is. Not just funny because of the different conventions, deliberately funny, clever. There's one stanza early on, the long one quoted at the beginning of this post, which is the first description of the Green Knight. The narrator explains that everyone is amazed to see him, and that he's very tall, and very hot, and then right at the end, almost in passing, we get the note that also he's all over green. It's brilliant comic timing, and I always cackle to come to it. The whole thing's like that, always turning in on itself, right till the end turns back on the beginning.

The Wakefield Master, The Second Shepherd's Play. The which is also anonymous medieval verse, and the which we also read aloud, but at least on the face of it it's infinitely less high-minded. It's about the shepherds who attend the Nativity, who here are ordinary English shepherds, moaning constantly about the weather and their wives. There's sheep-stealing, and jokes about cannibalism. There's tennis balls. It's slapstick. But it's not only wonderful because of the cannibalism and the tennis, it's wonderful because like a lot of medieval work it's really believes in the Incarnation. The angel bursts in right as the shepherds are debating what to do about Mak the sheep thief; Christ's born into this whole solid and ridiculous world. When it begins to be about Christ it starts being much more solemn, but it's not a cheap whiplash thing, and it's not sentimental. It's only the natural response when something happens that's quite different from anything else.

W.H. Auden, For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio. Exactly the same thing as the Shepherd's Play, the Christmas story made contemporary and immediate, but for the 1940s instead of the fifteenth-century. And not so funny. This is a long poem, and it's designed for reading aloud although we don't and never have. It's very dense and melancholy and high-church; I've always thought of it as a festive answer to Eliot's Four Quartets. It's also got two long prose sections, which are my favorite bits: "The Meditation of Simeon" and Herod's complaint in "The Massacre of the Innocents." Herod's speech really is a complaint, a sort of sustained whinge against the absurdity of the whole situation: "O dear, why couldn't the wretched infant be born somewhere else? Why can't people be sensible? I don't want to be horrid. Why can't they see that the notion of a finite God is absurd?" Auden's theme is that absurdity of Incarnation, the hard fact that even now "Nothing can save us that is possible." Really the only thing I don't like about For the Time Being is that I can't read it if I'm planning on doing any of my own writing anytime soon. Auden (in this mode, at least) does so exactly the writing I want to do, and does it so well, that he makes me feel almost unbearably small.

Connie Willis, Doomsday Book. Well, look, mainly this one's harrowing, but it's set at Christmas, and it's a comfortable read if only because Willis writes prose that you can just melt into. She's not just compulsively readable, she's compulsively rereadable, which is rarer. This one's science fiction, about Oxford historian-in-training Kivrin Engle, being sent from 2164 to 1348, the plague year. At Christmas! And Christmas isn't just window-dressing, the whole book is concerned with issues of theology and Incarnation. A lot of that happens in Kivrin's relationship with her advisor, Dunworthy. Kivrin isn't straightforwardly a Christ figure, but the theme of sending a loved child to go and be helpless in a place of great danger has some unavoidable theological overtones. Especially at this time of year. But it's not just that, it's that Willis is very good on Christmas generally. There's some real gems in her Christmas collection Miracle, although that one's missing my favorite, her first-contact novella "All Seated on the Ground." But none of those talk about the Slaughter of the Innocents nearly as much as Doomsday Book does, and it is to their detriment.

In that same science-fictional vein I've often read Terry Pratchett's Hogfather at Christmas—the tl;dr is that it's a fantasy novel about Death taking over Santa Claus's job—but this year I didn't think of it in time to get a library copy out, and it's just as well. It's an excellent book, but I've found that this year, part and parcel with becoming Insufferable About Advent, I've had little to no interest in secularized approaches to Christmas. (Outside, that is, of watching the Doctor Who Christmas special and complaining about the dreadful theology of the Doctor Who Christmas special. We get it, you think the Doctor's Jesus. He's still really not.) Hogfather's got a lot to say about the (UK) cultural trappings of Christmas, mall Santas and the Little Match Girl, and a lot to say about storytelling and the imagination, but a book so indifferent to the religious festival doesn't have much to say to me.

Speaking of Doctor Who, the book I feel more inclined to turn to is the Doctor Who novel Timewyrm Revelation, by Paul Cornell. I'm not proud of my bizarre Doctor Who novel habit, but this really is a better book than anything with the word "Timewyrm" in the title has any right to be. It's set at Christmas, mostly in a church, and only a bit on the moon, and a lot in the Seventh Doctor's head. Of course you oughtn't to read it if you are the sort of well-adjusted person whose interest is not immediately pricked by the phrase "journey into the mind of the Seventh Doctor." You'd be better off reading Cornell's Christmassy Lost Child of Lychford (the sequel to his Witches of Lychford, but they're both so short there's nothing to stop you reading them both), or his short story "The Ghosts of Christmas." For myself I'm also thinking of rereading Dorothy Sayers' play cycle The Man Born to Be King. Which is suitable for Christmas in the same way Handel's Messiah is—i.e. it's not, it's for Easter—but I read it for the first time at Christmas, and the Epiphany play is marvelous and, anyway, it's not as though you can have Christmas without Easter. Or would wish to. Merry Christmas.

brief bookblog & linkblog.

Over the last couple of years I've gone through several very frustrating times—which I like to attribute to schoolwork but which actually have much more to do with ill health—during which I've been more or less unable to read prose at length. I can always read short fiction and listen to audiobooks, and I can generally cope by playing text-adventure games, inasmuch as that counts as reading (watch this space for the long-delayed posts on 80 Days and Open Sorcery), but the inability to sit down with a novel is a painful thing. I seem to be finally coming out of one of those periods now, having this past week finished in the space of two days two awesome new books.

One of them was My Favorite Thing is Monsters, by Emil Ferris, which just came out this February. It's a big, weird comic about growing up in Chicago in the late sixties, presented as the spiral-bound notebook/sketchbook/diary of narrator Karen Reyes. Karen wants to be a monster and draws herself as a wolfgirl; I loved the ins and outs of that obsession, and the horror comic covers that signaled the chapter breaks. I loved even more the scenes set in the Art Institute, especially the sequence when Karen's older brother Diego is teaching her how to look. Like a lot of the books I like best, it makes me want to write academic analysis; unfortunately the second volume is yet to be released, and until then there's a lot left unresolved.

The other book isn't only new, it's not even out yet: it comes out this coming week. A few weeks back I won an ARC of Weave a Circle Round, by debut author Kari Maaren, from a Tor.com giveaway, and this weekend I finally managed to read it. It's very, very good. It isn't from Tor's YA line, but it's about teenagers, and (partly because the protagonist, Freddy Duchamp, is only fourteen) it reads less like an adult novel or modern YA than like really good children's fiction. Early reviews have been comparing it to Diana Wynne Jones, which is more or less right (the way Maaren plays with memory reminded me a lot of Fire and Hemlock in particular). It's fun and absorbing, all about stories and time travel and growing up. The thing it's most like is Pamela Dean's novel Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary. That's a frustrating comparison to have to make, because almost nobody's read Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary, but I can't think of a better pairing. They're both YA-ish fantasy about time travel and strange neighbors and difficult siblings; they're both deeply interested in poetry and folklore, and they both pay a close and careful attention to the mundane worlds of the characters. I think of JGR as a darker and more frightening book, and the central thematic concerns are different, but even so I want to read them side-by-side. I'm glad people are still writing books like this.

At the moment I'm reading A Stranger in Olondria, by Sofia Samatar, a gorgeous and worldbuilding-dense fantasy novel that reminds me of what I love about Calvino, and I'm also reading Winter Tide, by Ruthanna Emrys. Winter Tide is one of those revisionist takes on Lovecraft that we get so many of now, and although Lovecraft-qua-Lovecraft isn't all that interesting to me it's a genre I tend to enjoy. This one is a continuation of the short story "A Litany of Earth," which I've loved for years, and I think anybody who likes that story will like the novel too. I'd also point the curious to this interview with Emrys, from the podcast Cooking the Books, which interviews sf/f authors about food. The page at the link includes a recipe for honeyed saltcakes, which the characters in Winter Tide eat. I mention it here so as to note that I've already made the recipe twice. They're very good crumbled into oatmeal.

A handful of other links. I hardly ever play games that aren't text-adventures, but after reading this review I immediately bought and played Yorkshire Gubbins, a really good game that I'll probably write about eventually. This video is unaccountably hysterical to me. This article on sandwiches is unaccountably fascinating. This profile of a Japanese roboticist is accountably fascinating, as is a charming short story in Uncanny about a robot writing fanfiction. I'm sure everyone's already read about Emily Wilson's translation of the Odyssey, but I haven't stopped being excited about it. And this is a very good essay about one of my favorite comics, which I link as much for my benefit (so I don't lose the link) as for yours.

book review: john green, turtles all the way down.

[content note: incoherence, mental illness, minimal spoilers, bad Star Wars shipping opinions]

Not to be all, like, "having fun isn't hard when you've got a library card," about it all, but it does definitely pay to get your hold requests in early, because I've already read John Green's new book, and it's only been out for about five minutes, and I didn't pay a penny for it.

It's his best book to date. It's got a lot of Star Wars in it.

You know how sometimes you can watch something turn into a period piece? I went to see the movie of The Fault in Our Stars back when it was in theatres, and I remember thinking, this is the most 2014 movie ever; this movie will be dated in five minutes. This movie was dated yesterday. It isn't/wasn't a criticism, just a description. Green's new book, Turtles All the Way Down, feels always-already dated in a really similar way, even though I can't put my finger on exactly why. It's not the most 2017 book ever, because it's set in the United States and nobody talks about politics, but it is very 2017. I mean, I say "nobody talks about politics," but it is a book entirely about existential dread, so what do I know. The best friend character, Daisy, writes Rey/Chewbacca fanfiction, which is a very up-to-the-minute sentence. I have consulted a friend who is in Star Wars fandom and she says this isn't a ship people ship, ever, at all, and I think it's quite canny of Green to choose a pairing that won't get him implicated in fandom shipping drama.

I think what I'm trying to react to with all this is that all of his books are of their moments, in a way that's sort of expected of contemporary YA, but this is his first book since 2012, and so the effect is that his novel-world has skipped ahead nearly six years without missing a beat. It's disorienting, especially since in the interim I mostly stopped keeping up with what he was doing. The last time he published a book, the characters in it were older than I was, and now the protagonists of the new book look like kids to me. I don't really read YA anymore. What's big in YA these days? The Raven Cycle was big. Maggie Stiefvater's sentences aren't as pretty as she thinks they are, but talking trees are cool.

I'm also reacting to the fact that none of his earlier books had characters interacting with real popcultural objects quite like this. In The Fault in Our Stars they mostly interacted with fictional cultural objects, and in Looking for Alaska their cultural engagement was mostly with, I don't know, García Márquez. Millay. In Paper Towns everybody talked a whole lot about Walt Whitman. I don't remember about An Abundance of Katherines, because it's not a very memorable book. All I mean to say is that a lengthy argument about the personhood of Chewbacca sounds like a John Green thing to have, but not necessarily a John Green thing to write. It's a thematically resonant argument, though, because what this book is mostly about is what makes a person a person.

So the protagonist, Aza Holmes, has OCD, and a lot of her intrusive thoughts revolve around anxieties about her personhood—she's obsessed with her gut biome, the idea that there's more bacteria in her than there is her in her; she worries about her meds because she hates the idea of having to take a pill to change herself to become herself; she thinks of herself occasionally as possessed and occasionally as a fictional character, which is much less meta than it sounds. And then there's the damage that any mental illness can do to a person's sense of self. Most of us these days tend to think of our thoughtlife as the locus of our identity, but if your thoughts are awful and uncontrollable and other, what do to the youness of you? Is there a self that's more fundamental than what happens in your brain? If you believe in the soul, like I do, you think there is—but not everyone does, and even if you do believe in the soul, what does a soul look like? How do you find it? (It does occur to me that if my friends had that conversation about whether Chewbacca counts as a person it would immediately turn into a conversation about whether Chewbacca has a soul, whether Christ died for Wookiees, and whether the Wookiees are even fallen beings, or are they like the hrossa. Nobody in this book mentions the hrossa, which is normal, but nobody really mentions the soul either, which is interesting.)

The central plot is a semi-detective story, about attempting to find information about a missing billionaire, but that's not where the real interest of the book lies. I don't want to make it seem that the central plot is unimportant, and I don't want to make it seem as though I didn't like it, but if you were to ask me what this book is about I would think of OCD first and billionaires second. It's a book about being a teenager living with a chronic mental illness. Green is really good at describing intrusive thoughts; the scenes where Aza gets caught up in her spirals are incredibly intense and affecting, and while Green is still not an amazing prose stylist there's a few lines from those passages that have stuck with me. What I like about this book, right, is that it's a book about OCD without being a Book About OCD in the sense of being didactic or issue-driven. I like that she's already medicated and in therapy when the book begins, so it's not one of those stories about a character discovering that she's mentally ill but instead a story about a character learning more about what her mental illness means in her life. It's an upsetting book—there's some places near the end where I almost cried—but not bleak or manipulative. It's positively optimistic.

My biggest objection to this book also has to do with Star Wars. I am very consistent. The problem is: everybody in this book has a hobby that carries them throughout the story. Daisy has the Rey/Chewbacca thing, their male best friend/Daisy's love interest is an artist, and Aza's love interest stargazes and writes poetry. It's jarring that Aza has no interests of this kind of her own, and that I still have no idea what she would be doing left to herself. Does she read? Does she watch TV? We really don't know. Possibly it's meant to reflect the fact that her mental illness has taken over her life to the extent that she has little time, energy, or focus to spend on anything else—which makes perfect sense as far as it goes, but which also makes it even stranger that nobody comments on the disparity. If it's a choice on Green's part, it's a choice that for all the world looks like an error. It also makes some conversations late in the book ring a little false. Daisy accuses Aza of focusing on her own problems to the exclusion of listening to what other people want to talk about, but because essentially all their conversations that haven't been about the detective plot have been about Daisy's interests, the idea that their conversations always focus on Aza... is really not borne out by the evidence. They talk about Star Wars a lot, and it's a subject on which Aza seems to move between disinterest and active distaste. (And it's actively bizarre to me that the narrative treats Aza's failure to read Daisy's fanfiction as a genuine failure to be a good friend.)

That complaint being laid out—and it is a major complaint: much of the book rests on that relationship—there's still a lot to like here, and I do still think it's Green's best work. It's a John Green book, so it's a very quick read and and there's some credibly bad teenage poetry and James Joyce is brought up more often than strictly necessary. If you're into YA, or you liked his previous novels, I recommend it. I'm glad he's publishing again. Green, not Joyce. Joyce is dead.

the truest moments of human connection it is possible to experience as a university student.

In honor of prospie weekend. I don't believe I have any high school aged readers, but I implore my readers to please send this to any high school students they know; these are the facts the brochures will not tell them, because college brochures are universally useless.

1. That feeling when you bump into someone, and neither of you is at fault, or both of you are, and the two of you apologize in the same breath, as though you're both speaking with one voice. You'll never feel as connected to anyone as you do in those moments.

2. The immense tenderness you feel when you see someone in the dining hall reading a book you love, and say nothing.

3. The camaraderie of the midnight fire alarm, especially in the winter. No one's actually frightened, because everyone knows that all that's actually happened is that a freshman has tried to make popcorn, but everyone is underdressed, and everyone is either furious or resigned. Someone was in the shower, and everyone else is telling the story of the time that one time alarm went off when they were in the shower. There really is true camaraderie in that: solamen miseris socios habuisse doloris, to coin a phrase.

4. The communal joy of the first really warm day—not the first day without coats, I mean the first day when nobody's even wearing sweaters, and you're so thrilled at the sight of strangers' bare arms—people have arms! you'd forgotten!—that you think, Is this what it was like to be Walt Whitman? The answer is yes.

5. One time last semester I was walking to my 8:30 in the rain and an elderly education professor I'd never met shared his umbrella with me, and it was kind of wonderful? I'm not sure how universal this one is, but it was really nice. What a great guy.

6. Night class.

7. Eight AM Greek reading class.

8. It is genuinely possible to experience a great deal of true comradeship working in theatre, but I'm not gonna talk about it. If you've experienced it you know what I'm talking about and if you haven't any description will be obnoxious to you, because theatre people are never more obnoxious than when they're trying to tell you their feelings about the theatre. The thing about artists, right, is that we all believe the medium we work in is the highest form of human creativity, and the thing that makes theatre people different from the rest of us is that they don't bother pretending otherwise. They're not really that much more up themselves than normal artists, but they're infinitely more upfront about it. (I'm... kind of a theatre person? It's Schrödinger-y.)

That is all; those are all the times you will feel human connection in university. You will also read some really good books.

january bookblogging.

1 & 2. Gerald Morris, The Squire's Quest & The Legend of the King. These are MG/YA, from a Gawain-focused Arthuriana series I used to be a fan of when I was younger. These two, which I never got around to (well—I might have read The Squire's Quest; I didn't remember most of it, but there was a gag about the filioque that I thought I recognized) cover the end of the story. The tonal shift from what had been a fairly lighthearted series is a bit awkward in places, but ultimately very well-handled. I especially loved the very end of The Legend of the King.

3. Marie Kondo, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Note from log: "I repudiate it." A strange little book, twee and authoritarian and fundamentally deeply materialistic. Even her sensible tips are delivered in an absolutist tone that makes them hilarious. As everyone says, she's especially bad on the subject of books—the right time to read a book, see, is when you first encounter it, so any book you own that you've not read yet can be got rid of straightaway. She also doesn't believe in re-reading, though she does believe in feeling sorry for your socks.

4–10. C.S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia. Re-reads, obviously. At this point I'm not reading for plot even a little bit, but just to discover all the delightful little details I've forgotten over time. Can you believe that I didn't remember Bism? or Reepicheep losing at chess because he makes all his pieces do the stupid self-sacrificing things he would do in a real battle? et cetera, et cetera. As usual, Dawn Treader is my favorite, Silver Chair is the most effective/successful as a novel, and The Horse and His Boy is much easier to love than to like.

11. David Lodge, Changing Places. I have a documented weakness for campus novels; this one is very funny, very self-aware, and very good.

12. The Lais of Marie de France. This was for a medieval lit class; I am pleased to report that it's really wonderful, and totally mental in that way all the best medieval stuff is. One of them is about a werewolf!

13. Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing. This was for my Literature of the Digital Age class. Goldsmith is a poet who thinks, among other things, that we have so much text now that what we really ought to do now is focus not on rearranging and recontextualizing what we've already got—"context is the new content." Most of my classmates had mixed-to-negative feelings about all this; my final feeling, as expressed to a friend of mine in the class, is that I kind of want to beat Goldsmith up in a parking lot, but just the once, and after that I'll be more or less okay with him. I don't want to pass judgment now beyond the thing about beating him up, but he's always interesting and there's a lot here worth talking about.

14. Lev Grossman, The Magicians. What if Harry Potter, but anhedonic, and also consuming heroic quantities of alcohol? It's all a bit Donna-Tartt-does-J.-K.-Rowling, and while I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to anyone else it worked for me on that score. I really like campus novels. Unfortunately the protagonist is intensely boring (some of the supporting characters are quite good, and I'm powerless to understand why they spend any time with him) and once everyone graduates, which happens a little more than halfway through, things get a lot less interesting. It turns from My Harry Potter Fanfiction, By Me, Lev to My Narnia Fanfiction, By Me, Lev—and Lev Grossman is not great at writing Narnia fanfiction. (There exists a version of this review that consists solely of the sentence "I could write better Narnia fanfiction than that," and in a lot of ways that kind of sums it up.)

15. Emma Donoghue, The Wonder. You know when you've read too many books by men, or one book that's extremely By A Man, and then you open a book by a woman and it's like you can breathe properly again? Coming straight off the back of The Magicians I was pre-disposed to like anything that didn't keep describing its female characters' breasts at me. I was also positively inclined because I'd read Donoghue's last-but-one book before this, Room, a novel about a kidnapping narrated by the victim's five-year-old son. It was very well-regarded, deservedly so; this one's been less talked about, but for my money it's better. I knew straightaway that it wouldn't be as praised generally—it's a historical novel, and it's very unusual. The protagonists here are Anna, an eleven-year-old Irish girl who's inexplicably stopped eating, and Lib, a Nightingale-trained English nurse who has been hired to watch Anna and get to the bottom of what's happening. Donoghue is one of the best in the game at writing child characters, and as such she manages to make Anna both believable and lovable and her story intensely gripping. This book is hard to recommend, because it's very upsetting in ways that are hard to warn for without spoiling the plot, but I loved it.

16. Julie Otsuka, The Buddha in the Attic. A gorgeous, timely little book about Japanese picture brides. It's written all in the second-person plural—I don't believe I've read anything else that uses that technique, but here it's surprisingly immersive and affecting.

odysseus at o'hare.

ὤ μοι ἐγώ, τέων αὖτε βροντῶν ἐς γαϊαν ικάνω;
ἦ ῥ' οἵ γ' ὑβρισταί τε καὶ ἄγριοι οὐδὲ δίκαιοι,
ἦε φιλόξεινοι καί σφιν νόος ἐστὶ θεοθδής;
Odyssey 6.119-21

He clutches papers, wonders, who lives here?
True men like me, the sort who fear the gods?
When I washed up in Scheria, he thinks,
they washed me, fed me—then they asked my name.
But things are different here. They question you,
your place of birth, your business, your last stop.
They do not follow Zeus, the god of guests,
or do his rites of hospitality.

My wife is waiting for me, he says, please—
and others say the same. My husband's here,
my daughter, I have papers—languages
he does not know, for he speaks only Greek,
Homeric Greek at that. He is alone,
and prays this country has some kinder gods.

double dactyls.

Wikipedia.

fig 1: King John.

Higgledy-piggledy
young Philip Faulconbridge,
son of his father he
wasn't at all—
learning his getting was
extracurricular
gave Phil a reason at
last to stand tall.

fig 2: Doctor Faustus.

Higgledy-piggledy
Faustus of Wittenberg
autodidactically
summoned from Hell
one whom the adjective
Mephistophelian
fit like a glove (i.e.
really quite well).

fig 3: Le petit prince.

Higgledy-piggledy
A. Saint-Exupéry,
flyer of planes and a
writer of books,
once drew a picture whose
idiosyncrasies
made it look hat-like and
earned him odd looks.

fig 4: Ninety-Five Theses

Higgledy-piggledy
Martin of Wittenberg
wrote out some theses and
stuck them on high:
reading this treatise most
multisyllabical,
many good Germans bid
Rome a good-bye.