july bookblog.

PART ONE: BOOKS FINISHED.

Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Discussed here. 

Jo Walton, Necessity. Discussed here.

Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven. A gorgeous and immaculately plotted novel, set before, during, and (mostly) after a civilization-ending flu epidemic. It's about healing, the connections between people, and the necessity of art. For all that it's an apocalypse story it never feels bleak—it's gentler, more melancholy than despairing. It's a very hopeful book.

Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales. I am ultimately going to write a proper blog post about this. You can't expect me to sum this up in a single paragraph. However, my Chaucer blogging up to this point can be found here and here and here and here. There is more to come.

Ken Liu, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories. I've been meaning to read this essentially since it came out, since all the reviews were so good and it's got such attractive cover art, and I finally gave in and bought it when Amazon was offering it for 1.99 a few weeks back. It's a mix of fantasy and science fiction, and it's so good. This is a best-of rather than a themed collection, but Liu has some definite preoccupations—parent-child relationships, intergenerational friendships, storytelling as an act of love and heroism. It's an intensely life-affirming collection, and the prose is delicious. Some favorites: "State Change" is delightfully clever, "The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species" reads like neo-Calvino and I'd adore to write a paper on it, and "An Advanced Readers' Picture Book of Comparative Cognition" made me cry. Other great ones are "The Regular," "Mono No Aware," and "All the Flavors"—but really truly there aren't any duds here.

Chaucer, The Book of the Duchess. It's no Parliament of Fowls.

Diana Wynne Jones, Dark Lord of Derkholm. A re-read. This is from the same sequence as The Tough Guide to Fantasyland and Year of the Griffin. I read the other two first, and they're more to my tastes—Tough Guide is funnier, and Griffin is an academic fantasy, which has always been one of my favorite subgenres—so Derkholm came as a disappointment and I've never rated it very highly. Re-reading it after several years I was much more impressed. It's still not one of my very favorite books of hers—how could it be when there's Witch Week and Fire and Hemlock and Howl's Moving Castle?—but it's very good indeed.

Margo Lanagan, Tender Morsels. What a good book. I know, I'm late to the party—but what a good book. It's a retelling of the Grimms' fairy tale "Snow White and Rose Red," which was always one of my favorites. It's oddly structured and sometimes a bit confusing, but it's good for all that and I'd recommend it if you liked Kristen Cashore's Bitterblue; this is another woman-centered YA fantasy novel about trauma. (I know, I know, I really need to read Deerskin soon.) (Content warning for rape.)

Lauren F. Winner, Real Sex: The Naked Truth About Chastity. I read Real Sex less because I was interested in it and more from a desire to finish all of Winner’s oeuvre; I'd already read all her others (well, except her dissertation). This one is worth reading, but it’s definitely an early work and I think her weakest book. (Rough ranking: Still, Wearing God, Girl Meets God, Mudhouse Sabbath, Real Sex.) I think you can also fairly criticize her for offering so much marriage advice in a book largely written before her marriage.

Rob Bell, How To Be Here. I was feeling insecure about how few books I've been finishing lately compared to how many I've been starting, so I went back and finished this one—I read most of it back when it came out. In many ways it's fairly standard Rob Bell; I don't think there's that much here that I haven't heard him say elsewhere. That doesn't mean it's not good, though. I'm a Rob Bell fan and I like some of the points he makes here, especially about the Sabbath. I have misgivings about his framing of that particular issue, but those misgivings are to be saved for the long essay about Sabbath-keeping. Which will happen! Eventually! Sometime before the last Lammas.

Rainbow Rowell, Eleanor & Park. I was underwhelmed with both Fangirl and Carry On (throughout Carry On I couldn't shake the feeling that nobody needs to read knock-off Harry Potter fanfiction from St. Martin's Press when there's a superabundance of the real thing on the internet), but I'd heard such good things about Eleanor & Park that I decided to give it a try. Apparently third time's the charm. I don't read very many straightforward romances, but this one was a delight, very sweet and believable. What no one had told me is that the characters read Watchmen. I swear, the whole world is conspiring to make me feel guilty for not having read Watchmen yet. It's really dated now probably! I howl to the whistling winter winds. I don't even like superheroes except for Ms. Marvel! Anyway I already read From Hell, isn't that enough for you? And the whistling winter winds reply, It won a Hugo award before the comics category was even introduced and anyway you love From Hell, you thought it was a masterwork, that should just make you more excited about reading Watchmen. The winter winds may not be as unkind as man's ingratitude, but they're still plenty unkind.

Joan Aiken, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. This is a children's classic that I somehow managed to miss reading. It's delightful, all plucky orphans and evil head teachers and secret passageways. It's been a while since I read a proper children's book, and it made me realize that my reading diet these days doesn't have nearly enough plucky orphans in it. I would have loved this if I'd read it in elementary school, and as it was I liked it a lot. The edition I read had a gorgeous Gorey cover, too, which put me in just the right mood.

Brian K. Vaughn & Fiona Staples, Saga: Volume Six. I mean, it's Saga. It's one of like two/three current comics that I keep up with, and if you want a fast-paced space opera comic about family, it continues to be the go-to. Volume six is the most recent trade paperback, and if I have a complaint about it it's that it's been several months since I read volume five and I had a bit of trouble getting back up to speed and remembering where we left off. I'm sort of looking forward to when this series is all over and collected and I can marathon it, like my periodic Sandman marathons. Even at this stage it's a blast though, and there's not a single plotline or character that doesn't interest me.

Elisabeth Tova Bailey, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating. Lovely and meditative, half memoir and half natural history. While Bailey was bedbound with a mysterious virus, a friend brought her a potted violet with a woodland snail in the pot. This book is about her illness and her time spent watching the snail, one might almost be moved to say becoming friends with it, and it's just really really wonderful.

Delia Sherman, The Freedom Maze. The review I read of this said that it was YA, but it isn’t at all—it’s a children’s book, and it’s a very good one. The obvious thing to do is compare it to Octavia Butler's Kindred, but I’m not sure that the comparison is either accurate or useful, though this is a time travel novel about slavery. If you've only got world enough and time for one time travel novel about slavery, it probably ought to be the Butler, but that's not to say that Sherman's book isn't worth reading. It stars thirteen-year-old Sophie, a white girl from Louisiana in the early 1960s. She makes a badly-thought out wish and is sent back in time to the eve of the Civil War, where her ancestors take her for a light-skinned slave. Sophie begins by doing what's expected of her to avoid detection, but by the time she's returned to her proper time her memories have changed so that she really does believe she is who everyone says she is. It's a very short novel, and a genuinely moving one.

C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed. It reads like C.S. Lewis stylistically and in that I recognize his ways of thinking, and not at all like Lewis in that nothing else of his is so... personal, I suppose, not even Surprised by Joy. It's more or less exactly the book you'd expect him to write, which is not even a little bit a critique.

PART TWO: THE STATS.

Sixteen books by eleven women and six men. (Which comes to seventeen because I'm counting Fiona Staples, the illustrator of Saga, as an author.) One comic, four books of nonfiction, two MG, three YA, two Chaucer, the rest adult sci-fi/fantasy. Ten that I and family own, the rest from various libraries. Seven paper, eight digital.

PART THREE: EVERYTHING ELSE.

I'm not doing a complete list this month of what I started and abandoned, because it's depressing. I tried and failed to read The Man in the High Castle, and I made it a few chapters into Life After Life before I got bored of it. I read most of The Odyssey, and I'm planning to finish it in the next few days. I've also been re-reading Frog & Toad books, which has been more or less where my mind is lately, and I'm working on Troilus and Criseyde. The last thing I started before the end of the month was Naomi Novik's Uprooted.

As of the end of July 2016, I've read 135 books since January. I'll see you next month with another pile!

poetry friday: general prologue, remixed.

When I was thinking through what to share this Friday, I realized that I had several pretty great options. This week I discovered Edna St. Vincent Millay's elegant heartbreaker "Spring"—which will definitely come up here again—and Denise Levertov's "The Secret"—which made me cry tears of poetry. But my best discovery was last night, when I came across some work by a poet I'd never heard of: Patience Agbabi. She's a British poet who does among other things lots of spoken word and slam, and her most recent book—2014's Telling Tales—was a contemporary rewrite of The Canterbury Tales.

If you've been reading this blog with any care, you might have picked up that I've been reading Chaucer's original. It was a project for this summer, reading it (them?) aloud with my dad in Middle English. I'd read a few of the tales in English classes, but I wanted the full experience. See, I loved what I'd read of the Tales, and now that I've read more of them I can say even more confidently that I love them with my whole heart, from the Man of Law’s Tale, which I would describe as only moderately racist, to the Squire's Tale which features a robot horse, to the interminable Tale of Melibee, which is short on plot but long on quotations from Ecclesiasticus. It’s also long on feminism, sort of. (“Feminism, sort of”: the Geoffrey Chaucer story.) And we're nearly finished: we're partway through the last Tale, the Parson's, which is a long prose sermon and if I'm honest a bit of a chore.

And so when I came across Agbabi's revision of the General Prologue, I was delighted. It's funny and fast, intricate and reference-dense while also being completely modern, true to Chaucer's chaotic vernacular beauty while still being accessible to people who aren't terrible terrible nerds. You can watch her perform it here—embedding is disabled, but I recommend going over there and checking it out—and below you'll find the text, nabbed from Poetry International Rotterdam. Try reading it out loud to yourself, even, 'cos it's as fun to read aloud as Chaucer is.

I haven't read the book yet, obviously, but I very much want to. Research has also turned up the fact that my main girl Alisoun is reimagined as a Nigerian, Mrs. Alice Ebi Bafa—you can read that here. If you already knew about this and you didn't tell me, you're fired.

When my April showers me with kisses
I could make her my missus or my mistress
but I’m happily hitched—sorry home girls—
said my vows to the sound of the Bow Bells
yet her breath is as fresh as the west wind,
when I breathe her, I know we’re predestined
to make music; my muse, she inspires me,
though my mind’s overtaxed, April fires me,
how she pierces my heart to the fond root
till I bleed sweet cherry blossom en route
to our bliss trip; there’s days she goes off me,
April loves me not; April loves me
with a passion, dear doctor, I’m wordsick
and I got the itch like I’m allergic
but it could be my shirt’s on the cheap side;
serenade overnight with my peeps wide,
nothing like her, liqueur, an elixir,
overproof that she serves as my sick cure,
she’s as strong as a ram, she is Aries,
see my jaw-dropping jeans, she could wear these,
see my jaw dropping neat Anglo-Saxon,
I got ink in my veins more than Caxton
and it flows hand to mouth, here’s a mouthfeast
verbal feats from the streets of the South-East
but my April, she blooms every shire’s end,
fit or vint, rich or skint, she inspires them
from the grime to the clean-cut iambic,
rime royale, rant or rap, get your slam kick
on this Routemaster bus: get cerebral
Tabard Inn to Canterbury Cathedral,
poet pilgrims competing for free picks,
Chaucer Tales, track by track, here’s the remix
from below-the-belt base to the topnotch;
I won’t stop all the clocks with a stopwatch
when the tales overrun, run offensive,
or run clean out of steam, they’re authentic
cos we’re keeping it real, reminisce this:
Chaucer's Tales were an unfinished business.
May the best poet lose, as the saying goes.
May the best poet muse be mainstaying those
on the stage, on the page, on their subject:
me and April, we’re The Rhyming Couplet
I’m The Host for tonight, Harry Bailey,
if I’m tongue-tied, April will bail me,
I’m MC but the M is for mistress
when my April shows me what a kiss is . . .

The roundup is here, and here's one of my own Chaucer remixes.

writing update.

Music: Songs for As You Like It, the RSC & Laura Marling.

Tea (pictured): Hot Cinnamon Sunset, with milk and honey.

Word count: 3030.

&

Recently I've been writing in the living room, at my father's desk, working on the theory that more work gets done when I'm not in the same room as my bed. And, glory be, I've been making real progress. No, I'm not going to talk (much) here about the project, not at this stage anyway. I'm of the mind that it's possible to jinx a story by writing about it instead of using your energy to just write it. But I will say that it's a short story, it's about Greek mythology, and it's coming along better than anything I've written in ages.

In lieu of prose to share, here's a few literary limericks.

(I know. I spoil you.)

There was a cartoonist called Ware
Who set to all houseguests a dare:
"When you've finished my Corrigan
You'll have the floor again!
Till then it is I who'll declare."

A fellow called Mr. McCloud
Said, "Please dispel this great crowd.
When they've all gone away
I'll draw comics all day,
But with them here I'm terribly cowed."

There once was a Dansker called Søren
Whose reflections were frightfully borin'.
Though I'm reading his work
I still think he's a jerk—
It's just that the rain outside's pourin'.

A lively young person of Porlock,
Suspected of being a warlock,
Replied, “Nonsense, sir!
Such allure I abjure;
I can’t even open this door lock.”

There was a stout carl, one Geoff,
Who wrote poetry up till his death.
But then in his bed
A thought came to his head
And he wrote a prose retraction wherein he sought the mercy of God and repudiated all his vain and worldly verses, repenting of his sinful writing and begging Mary and the saints for grace.

&

Note 1: "Gershon Legman, who compiled the largest and most scholarly anthology, held that the true limerick as a folk form is always obscene, and cites similar opinions by Arnold Bennett and George Bernard Shaw,^[6] describing the clean limerick as a "periodic fad and object of magazine contests, rarely rising above mediocrity". From a folkloric point of view, the form is essentially transgressive; violation of taboo is part of its function." The Wikipedia page on limericks is a veritable garden of delights, though as far as I'm concerned the real point of limericks is showing off your rhyming chops. (And your rhythmic chops, to a lesser extent.)

Note 2: I am in fact exceedingly fond of Kierkegaard.

Note 3: Wendy Cope is the master of the limerick. Please enjoy also the OEDILF (Omnificent English Dictionary in Limerick Form).

poetry friday: on the radio + words to adam.

Thys ys how yt doth werke
Thou art yonge til thou art nat
Thou lovest til thou do nat
Thou triest til thou kanst nat

Thou laughest til thou crye
Thou cryest til thou laughe
And everichon moot breathen
Until hire dyinge breathe

Nay, thys ys how yt werketh
Thou peerst ynside thyself
Thou takst the thinges that thee liken
And tryest to like the thinges ytaak

And thanne takest the love thou hast ymaad
And place yt ynto sum
Sum oon elses herte
Pumpinge sum oon elses bloode

And stridinge arm yn arme
Thou prayst yt take no harme
Yet even yf yt doth
Thou shalt but do yt al agayne

And on the radyo
Thou herest 'Novembir Rayne'
The solo ys prettye longe
But lo: the swete refrayne

Ye listen to yt twyce
For the DJ ys asleepe

Thys hath been Geoffrey Chauceres adaptacioun of 'On the Radyo' by Regine de Spektor

— @LeVostreGC (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8)

Well, someone needed to put it all in one place. It's too good not to share, so this is me preserving the tradition. I've come to the conclusion that there's two ways to achieve immortality in poetry if you're not a great poet yourself: you can get them to fall madly in love with you and pine for years, or you can annoy them so much that they write a bit of immortal verse about how annoying you are. We can't all be Beatrice di Folco Portinari; some of us are Adam Pinkhurst. Or, to put it a very slightly nother way, some of us are muses and some of us are copyists. I have no illusions about my prospects.

Adam scriveyn, if ever it thee bifalle
Boece or Troylus for to wryten newe,
Under thy long lokkes thou most have the scalle,
But after my makyng thow wryte more trewe;
So ofte adaye I mot thy werk renewe,
It to correcte and eke to rubbe and scrape,
And al is thorugh thy negligence and rape.

(And once more with footnotes.)

In any case I love @LeVostreGC more than most things, and it never ceases to delight me that the musical tastes of the account align so well with my own. (Figure 2.) This is almost certainly my favorite Spektor song. Everichon moot breathen until hire dyinge breathe!



Roundup? Roundup.

"so help me I will turn this entire pilgrimage around": the Harry Bailey story.

no apologies, no explanations, just questionable fanfiction.

Geoff, riding near the back, idly surveys the company. The little groupings that have developed are very interesting; he’s beginning to think he ought to go into travel writing. The Clerk seems to have struck up a friendship with Parson wossname, probably on the basis that they are both enormous frickin nerds. (Geoff is also an enormous frickin nerd, but finds it expedient to keep this under wraps.) The Ploughman—Geoff has been privately thinking of him as Piers—is a timid sort, not much inclined to talk to anyone but his brother; even so he seems content to listen to the Clerk growing very animated about something or other. Aristotle, looks like. Nearby, the Knight is giving his Squire what looks to be a rather different sort of lecture; the kid’s squirming.

Most everyone else is listening to the Cook tell a story. They’re clustered in identifiable patterns—the women ride together, Robin and Oswald are as far apart as they can be and both still hear the Cook, no one wants to get too near the Summoner—but there’s not much conversation happening.

“So,” the Cook’s saying, “Perkin's friend's hot wife. She kept a store, like, for looks? But that’s definitely not how she made her actual living, if you know what I mean.” He leers at no one in particular.

Robin lets out a drunken cheer and nearly falls off his horse. One of the nuns, the one Geoff thinks of as the Other Nun, looks bemused, until Alison murmurs something in her ear and embarrassed comprehension dawns. Alison, for her part, rolls her eyes, then grabs the communal wine bottle from the Pardoner and takes an enormous swig.

Meanwhile Harry Bailey is nearer the back performing a rather half-hearted headcount and steadfastly ignoring the Cook. “Seven-and-twenty, eight-and-twenty. Nine-and-twenty. Yes?”

“You’re forgetting the Priests,” says Geoff, helpfully.

“God's bones,” says Harry. “Okay, shut up everyone. Shut up!” He waits for everyone to grow more or less quiet, and then says, “Has anyone seen the Priests?”

There is a general shaking of heads. “The Nuns ought to know,” says Alison sensibly.

The Nuns do not know. “They’re grown men,” Eglantine says. “We thought they could keep track of themselves. You can’t expect us to always know where they are.”

"Whatever," says the Squire, earning a rather disapproving look from his father. "Dad and I’d notice right away if our Yeoman went missing.”

The Yeoman, it transpires, has in fact gone missing. Also nobody knows what’s happened to the Franklin, and Geoff rather suspects that Harry counted the Monk at least twice.

“And besides that there were definitely more than twenty-nine of us to start with,” the Merchant says mildly, but no one listens to him, even though one might reasonably expect a merchant to be good with numbers. (If one didn’t know about the crippling debt; Geoff knows, but he’s fairly sure no one else does.) It doesn’t help that no one can reliably remember what his name is.

“So help me,” says Harry very loudly, “I will turn this entire pilgrimage around if I have to.”

(and of the hoost's tale was made namoore. it's rather a one-note joke which would collapse if I prolonged it any further, and also I'm working on a real project inspired by the Tales. I understand that manuscript fragments are where it's at anyway?)