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It's time for the continuing adventures of Liz and her reading list! These are the books I read in February 2009. (Click on the cuts for summaries and reactions. I reserve the right to spoil all hell out of any book if spoilery bits are what I feel like talking about.)
WARNING: I have been very long-winded this month! Probably I should have taken my blather about Narnia and made a separate meta post, but I am too lazy to peel out and organize my thoughts, so you get them all muddled in with the summaries, more or less as they occurred to me.
New: 1
---Circumference: Eratosthenes and the Ancient Quest to Measure the Globe, Nicholas Nicastro (nonfiction: this might better be called "The Life and Times of Eratosthenes: with a particular focus on his geodesy and geography, other people's attempts at the same, and what came of those measurements a couple thousand years later." It is, in other words, a rather scattered book. *grin* But it's fascinating subject matter, and while Nicastro is not very good at explaining math or surveying, he gets most of his points across reasonably well. My main problem with the book is the way he attempts to be faux-topical and make digs at George W. Bush. I cannot stand that sort of thing, even if I happen to agree with the sentiments; it's horribly out of place in anything other than a book about modern politics and society!
[Note: I lent this book to my dad, who agrees that it's both interesting and badly organized. He points out that Nicastro has failed to explain how Eratosthenes came up with his estimate of the distance between the earth and the sun; this is a fair point, and I wish he had included the geometry behind that. My dad also complains that Nicastro has confused Roger and Francis Bacon, but I confuse them myself, so I care less about that issue.])
Old: 8
---The Northern Crusades, Eric Christiansen (nonfiction: a history of the conversion and conquest of northeastern Europe, and what happened to Finland, Prussia, and Livonia after the waning of the crusading cultural pattern. I read Christiansen's revised 1997 edition, which is, apparently, noticeably different from the original 1980 version; scholarship has unearthed new information, and various events and ideas have been reinterpreted.
I find history very soothing to read while I am ill, especially history I've previously read, so I don't have to concentrate quite so hard to keep the names, dates, and geography straight. I like the cool, logical laying-out of what happened, and speculations as to why thing went the way they did; it's a nice break from the breakneck narrative tension that's taken over a lot of the genre fiction I otherwise read.)
---The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, C. S. Lewis (fantasy: the first Chronicle of Narnia. [Note: I do not care what anyone says. The books should be read in publication order, not 'chronological' order; otherwise you're getting the development of the secondary world all out of order, and The Magician's Nephew is a terrible introductory book since Lewis keeps making side references to the previous books.] Anyway, in this book the four Pevensie siblings -- Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy -- are sent to the country during the London Blitz, and discover a magical country inside an old wardrobe. They are quickly co-opted into a war between Jadis, the White Witch who has cast a spell of eternal winter over the land of Narnia, and Aslan, the lion-god who is the rightful ruler of the land and has returned to oppose her.
This book has all kinds of oddness if you think about it too hard, or bring in information about the Narnian world that Lewis only developed several books later. For example, how do Peter and Edmund learn to fight effectively so quickly? How do four children govern a country, and what became of the remnants of Jadis's army? How did Narnians get food with no growing season? How did Mr. Beaver dam a frozen river? Is Mr. Tumnus meant to personally remember the days before Jadis or not, and, if he is, just how long do fauns live? Where did Aslan's army get its training and supplies? What is the social and political organization of Narnia meant to be, anyway? Where were the human inhabitants of Archenland during the long winter, and why did none of them try to claim Narnia's throne based on their descent from Frank and Helen? Was Cair Paravel the seat of the old Narnian royalty, and, if so, why did it have four thrones when the previous rulers were monarchs, not tetrarchs? And so on.
But despite the flimsy world-building, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a wonderful wish-fulfillment adventure story, and Jadis is a glorious villain.)
---Prince Caspian, C. S. Lewis (fantasy: the second Chronicle of Narnia, in which the Pevensies are called back to their old kingdom, only to discover that over a thousand years have passed there and they must help Prince Caspian defeat his uncle and restore the rightful balance of Narnia. This book is structurally rather odd, since a good portion of it is told in flashback. Also, I never got a real sense of Telmarine Narnia as a functioning country, nor any idea how Caspian would go about integrating the two societies he's now king of. But the idea of ancient legendary monarchs returning to save their kingdom is always a strong one.)
---The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C. S. Lewis (fantasy: the third Chronicle of Narnia, in which Lucy, Edmund, and their cousin Eustace join Caspian on his voyage to the easternmost edge of the world. I like this book because Lewis takes all the ridiculous imaginary geography people have dreamed up for our earth over the centuries, and creates a world in which the fantastical lands and seas are real. It's rather episodic, of necessity, and much less plot-driven than the other books in the series -- more of a milieu story than anything else. Aslan pulls his deus ex machina act a couple times more than necessary, but since this book isn't about solving a great crisis, I don't mind the gimmickry so much here as I do in The Horse and His Boy.)
---The Silver Chair, C. S. Lewis (fantasy: the fourth Chronicle of Narnia, in which Eustace and his new friend Jill are sent by Aslan to find and rescue the lost prince Rilian, Caspian's son, who has been held captive in the Underworld for ten years. This book is more dreary and realistic than the first three, and Lewis puts in some effort to characterize Jill and Eustace instead of leaving them archetypal, like Peter. I like that Eustace and Jill have genuine arguments, and that they screw up because they're young and tired, not because great mystical forces are out to get them.
On a more tangential note, The Silver Chair contains an interesting passage in which the Lady of the Green Kirtle attempts to enchant Jill, Eustace, Puddleglum, and Rilian so they stop believing in the Overland. It's intended as a religious allegory -- to imply the existence of God, by analogy with the sun -- but Puddleglum's defiant pledge can also be read as a defense of fantasy literature, which is how I always understood it. It's kind of funny to reread the story with both interpretations in mind.
This is the bit I mean, with a touch of creative paragraphing to make it more readable: "One word, Ma'am," he said, coming back from the fire; limping, because of the pain. "One word. All you've been saying is quite right, I shouldn't wonder. I'm a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won't deny any of what you said. But there's one thing more to be said, even so.
"Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things -- trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that's a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We're just babies making up a game, if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That's why I'm going to stand by the play world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia.
"So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we're leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that's small loss if the world's as dull a place as you say."
You see? I have tried to live my life by that idea: that even though the world is prosaic and cruel and often senseless, one still has an obligation to try to be honorable, honest, just, fair, and so on. That a bright and shining dream is worth diamonds, even if it is only a dream, so long as it inspires you to live better. That a play-world can lick the real world hollow, and so long as that doesn't cause you to turn to despair, but rather to work to improve the real world until it shines as brightly as your imagination, that's fine and more than fine.
And yet. The passage was written as a Christian allegory. It works as a Christian allegory. It just happens to work my way, too, well enough that I spent years thinking my interpretation was the only true one because I never noticed the Christian version at all. Isn't it odd how there's often so much more in stories than authors mean to put there?)
---The Horse and His Boy, C. S. Lewis (fantasy: the fifth Chronicle of Narnia, which tells a story set entirely within the last chapter of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, during the Golden Age of Narnia. Shasta, a Calormene fisherman's adopted son, meets a Talking Horse named Bree and they jointly decide to flee north to Narnia. Along the way they meet Aravis Tarkheena and her companion, the Horse Hwin. They also become entangled in a brewing war between Calormen and Narnia, whose root cause is Calormen's expansionist tendencies and whose immediate trigger is Prince Rabadash's desire to marry Queen Susan.
I have mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, I am very fond of Aravis, Shasta, Hwin, and even Bree, and I like that we get some world-building that situates Narnia in a semi-realistic political context, as opposed to the magical islands in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, or the northern wilderness in The Silver Chair. On the other hand, the book has serious problems when it comes to the depiction of Calormen, a country whose two main characteristics are a rather ugly stereotypical, despotic and 'exotic' Arab culture and a pagan religion that is treated as both false and cruel. Also, there is far too much use of Aslan as a deus ex machina. The story would work just as well, if not better, if the nameless knight rowed to shore on his own, if Aravis and Shasta fell in together because of real wild animals, if Shasta were comforted by a stray dog among the Tombs, and if Shasta managed to cross the pass the way Eustace managed to climb down into the dragon's valley: by sheer luck. Aslan is really only needed to drive the horses the last mile to the Hermit's house, and to turn Rabadash into a donkey.)
---The Magician's Nephew, C. S. Lewis (fantasy: the sixth Chronicle of Narnia, which is chiefly backstory. It explains how, during a few very interesting days in the childhood of Digory Kirke and his friend Polly Plummer, Aslan created Narnia, how Jadis ended up in that world, and how the wardrobe came to be a passage between worlds. I love some of the world-building here, especially the glimpses we get of Charn. There are a lot of potential stories lurking around the edges of this book.
One interesting thing about the Chronicles of Narnia is the way each volume is, in some ways, a different type of book. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a wish-fulfillment adventure. Prince Caspian is sort of a King Arthur story. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is a meandering, episodic exercise in fantastic geography. The Silver Chair is almost a proper novel, with character flaws driving the plot. The Horse and His Boy is a rollicking swashbuckler. The Last Battle is a theological treatise on the powerlessness of humanity before God. And The Magician's Nephew is an almost fluffy children's story along the lines of E. Nesbit and Edward Eager.
I happen to like that type of story quite a lot, but I'm glad the whole series isn't written in that style. I don't think it would have worked with the subject matter of the other books.)
---The Last Battle, C. S. Lewis (fantasy: the seventh Chronicle of Narnia, in which King Tirian discovers that Narnia has been betrayed from within and covertly invaded by Calormen, and is sent help in the form of Eustace and Jill. They fail to save the country, and Aslan decides it's time to end the world.
I strongly dislike this book. There are some good parts -- I quite like the scenes with Tirian, Jill, and Eustace all on their own, for example; the bits of Narnian history that Jewel tells Jill are lovely; and the end of the world is effective as a dramatization of apocalyptic myth -- but I despise the message that there's no way to effectively resist evil, so you must simply trust in God and hope things will be fixed after everyone is dead. That theme starts in the first chapter when Puzzle fails to stand up to Shift; continues through Tirian, Eustace, and Jill's hopeless attempts to rally an effective attack against the Calormenes or to expose Shift's sacrilegious deceptions; and finishes when Aslan, instead of stepping in to save the day, essentially shrugs and says, "I'm tired of Narnia; game over. I'm taking my favorites and going home, so nyah to you!"
Also, I loathe the implication that it's somehow a good thing that the Pevensies died young instead of living long and good lives in England. I particularly dislike that in relation to the scene in The Horse and His Boy where Aravis, talking about her attempt to commit suicide, says that while you live, there's always hope of good fortune, but all the dead are dead alike. I would like to add that while you live, you always have the chance to do good, but once you're dead, you're useless. [Except for Caspian, but shush, let's not go there. Besides, even he only got five minutes, and not in his own world.])
February Total: 9 books (plus several magazines, a few newspapers, and a ridiculous amount of fanfiction)
Year to Date: 14 books (4 new, 10 old)
WARNING: I have been very long-winded this month! Probably I should have taken my blather about Narnia and made a separate meta post, but I am too lazy to peel out and organize my thoughts, so you get them all muddled in with the summaries, more or less as they occurred to me.
New: 1
---Circumference: Eratosthenes and the Ancient Quest to Measure the Globe, Nicholas Nicastro (nonfiction: this might better be called "The Life and Times of Eratosthenes: with a particular focus on his geodesy and geography, other people's attempts at the same, and what came of those measurements a couple thousand years later." It is, in other words, a rather scattered book. *grin* But it's fascinating subject matter, and while Nicastro is not very good at explaining math or surveying, he gets most of his points across reasonably well. My main problem with the book is the way he attempts to be faux-topical and make digs at George W. Bush. I cannot stand that sort of thing, even if I happen to agree with the sentiments; it's horribly out of place in anything other than a book about modern politics and society!
[Note: I lent this book to my dad, who agrees that it's both interesting and badly organized. He points out that Nicastro has failed to explain how Eratosthenes came up with his estimate of the distance between the earth and the sun; this is a fair point, and I wish he had included the geometry behind that. My dad also complains that Nicastro has confused Roger and Francis Bacon, but I confuse them myself, so I care less about that issue.])
Old: 8
---The Northern Crusades, Eric Christiansen (nonfiction: a history of the conversion and conquest of northeastern Europe, and what happened to Finland, Prussia, and Livonia after the waning of the crusading cultural pattern. I read Christiansen's revised 1997 edition, which is, apparently, noticeably different from the original 1980 version; scholarship has unearthed new information, and various events and ideas have been reinterpreted.
I find history very soothing to read while I am ill, especially history I've previously read, so I don't have to concentrate quite so hard to keep the names, dates, and geography straight. I like the cool, logical laying-out of what happened, and speculations as to why thing went the way they did; it's a nice break from the breakneck narrative tension that's taken over a lot of the genre fiction I otherwise read.)
---The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, C. S. Lewis (fantasy: the first Chronicle of Narnia. [Note: I do not care what anyone says. The books should be read in publication order, not 'chronological' order; otherwise you're getting the development of the secondary world all out of order, and The Magician's Nephew is a terrible introductory book since Lewis keeps making side references to the previous books.] Anyway, in this book the four Pevensie siblings -- Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy -- are sent to the country during the London Blitz, and discover a magical country inside an old wardrobe. They are quickly co-opted into a war between Jadis, the White Witch who has cast a spell of eternal winter over the land of Narnia, and Aslan, the lion-god who is the rightful ruler of the land and has returned to oppose her.
This book has all kinds of oddness if you think about it too hard, or bring in information about the Narnian world that Lewis only developed several books later. For example, how do Peter and Edmund learn to fight effectively so quickly? How do four children govern a country, and what became of the remnants of Jadis's army? How did Narnians get food with no growing season? How did Mr. Beaver dam a frozen river? Is Mr. Tumnus meant to personally remember the days before Jadis or not, and, if he is, just how long do fauns live? Where did Aslan's army get its training and supplies? What is the social and political organization of Narnia meant to be, anyway? Where were the human inhabitants of Archenland during the long winter, and why did none of them try to claim Narnia's throne based on their descent from Frank and Helen? Was Cair Paravel the seat of the old Narnian royalty, and, if so, why did it have four thrones when the previous rulers were monarchs, not tetrarchs? And so on.
But despite the flimsy world-building, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a wonderful wish-fulfillment adventure story, and Jadis is a glorious villain.)
---Prince Caspian, C. S. Lewis (fantasy: the second Chronicle of Narnia, in which the Pevensies are called back to their old kingdom, only to discover that over a thousand years have passed there and they must help Prince Caspian defeat his uncle and restore the rightful balance of Narnia. This book is structurally rather odd, since a good portion of it is told in flashback. Also, I never got a real sense of Telmarine Narnia as a functioning country, nor any idea how Caspian would go about integrating the two societies he's now king of. But the idea of ancient legendary monarchs returning to save their kingdom is always a strong one.)
---The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C. S. Lewis (fantasy: the third Chronicle of Narnia, in which Lucy, Edmund, and their cousin Eustace join Caspian on his voyage to the easternmost edge of the world. I like this book because Lewis takes all the ridiculous imaginary geography people have dreamed up for our earth over the centuries, and creates a world in which the fantastical lands and seas are real. It's rather episodic, of necessity, and much less plot-driven than the other books in the series -- more of a milieu story than anything else. Aslan pulls his deus ex machina act a couple times more than necessary, but since this book isn't about solving a great crisis, I don't mind the gimmickry so much here as I do in The Horse and His Boy.)
---The Silver Chair, C. S. Lewis (fantasy: the fourth Chronicle of Narnia, in which Eustace and his new friend Jill are sent by Aslan to find and rescue the lost prince Rilian, Caspian's son, who has been held captive in the Underworld for ten years. This book is more dreary and realistic than the first three, and Lewis puts in some effort to characterize Jill and Eustace instead of leaving them archetypal, like Peter. I like that Eustace and Jill have genuine arguments, and that they screw up because they're young and tired, not because great mystical forces are out to get them.
On a more tangential note, The Silver Chair contains an interesting passage in which the Lady of the Green Kirtle attempts to enchant Jill, Eustace, Puddleglum, and Rilian so they stop believing in the Overland. It's intended as a religious allegory -- to imply the existence of God, by analogy with the sun -- but Puddleglum's defiant pledge can also be read as a defense of fantasy literature, which is how I always understood it. It's kind of funny to reread the story with both interpretations in mind.
This is the bit I mean, with a touch of creative paragraphing to make it more readable: "One word, Ma'am," he said, coming back from the fire; limping, because of the pain. "One word. All you've been saying is quite right, I shouldn't wonder. I'm a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won't deny any of what you said. But there's one thing more to be said, even so.
"Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things -- trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that's a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We're just babies making up a game, if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That's why I'm going to stand by the play world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia.
"So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we're leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that's small loss if the world's as dull a place as you say."
You see? I have tried to live my life by that idea: that even though the world is prosaic and cruel and often senseless, one still has an obligation to try to be honorable, honest, just, fair, and so on. That a bright and shining dream is worth diamonds, even if it is only a dream, so long as it inspires you to live better. That a play-world can lick the real world hollow, and so long as that doesn't cause you to turn to despair, but rather to work to improve the real world until it shines as brightly as your imagination, that's fine and more than fine.
And yet. The passage was written as a Christian allegory. It works as a Christian allegory. It just happens to work my way, too, well enough that I spent years thinking my interpretation was the only true one because I never noticed the Christian version at all. Isn't it odd how there's often so much more in stories than authors mean to put there?)
---The Horse and His Boy, C. S. Lewis (fantasy: the fifth Chronicle of Narnia, which tells a story set entirely within the last chapter of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, during the Golden Age of Narnia. Shasta, a Calormene fisherman's adopted son, meets a Talking Horse named Bree and they jointly decide to flee north to Narnia. Along the way they meet Aravis Tarkheena and her companion, the Horse Hwin. They also become entangled in a brewing war between Calormen and Narnia, whose root cause is Calormen's expansionist tendencies and whose immediate trigger is Prince Rabadash's desire to marry Queen Susan.
I have mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, I am very fond of Aravis, Shasta, Hwin, and even Bree, and I like that we get some world-building that situates Narnia in a semi-realistic political context, as opposed to the magical islands in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, or the northern wilderness in The Silver Chair. On the other hand, the book has serious problems when it comes to the depiction of Calormen, a country whose two main characteristics are a rather ugly stereotypical, despotic and 'exotic' Arab culture and a pagan religion that is treated as both false and cruel. Also, there is far too much use of Aslan as a deus ex machina. The story would work just as well, if not better, if the nameless knight rowed to shore on his own, if Aravis and Shasta fell in together because of real wild animals, if Shasta were comforted by a stray dog among the Tombs, and if Shasta managed to cross the pass the way Eustace managed to climb down into the dragon's valley: by sheer luck. Aslan is really only needed to drive the horses the last mile to the Hermit's house, and to turn Rabadash into a donkey.)
---The Magician's Nephew, C. S. Lewis (fantasy: the sixth Chronicle of Narnia, which is chiefly backstory. It explains how, during a few very interesting days in the childhood of Digory Kirke and his friend Polly Plummer, Aslan created Narnia, how Jadis ended up in that world, and how the wardrobe came to be a passage between worlds. I love some of the world-building here, especially the glimpses we get of Charn. There are a lot of potential stories lurking around the edges of this book.
One interesting thing about the Chronicles of Narnia is the way each volume is, in some ways, a different type of book. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a wish-fulfillment adventure. Prince Caspian is sort of a King Arthur story. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is a meandering, episodic exercise in fantastic geography. The Silver Chair is almost a proper novel, with character flaws driving the plot. The Horse and His Boy is a rollicking swashbuckler. The Last Battle is a theological treatise on the powerlessness of humanity before God. And The Magician's Nephew is an almost fluffy children's story along the lines of E. Nesbit and Edward Eager.
I happen to like that type of story quite a lot, but I'm glad the whole series isn't written in that style. I don't think it would have worked with the subject matter of the other books.)
---The Last Battle, C. S. Lewis (fantasy: the seventh Chronicle of Narnia, in which King Tirian discovers that Narnia has been betrayed from within and covertly invaded by Calormen, and is sent help in the form of Eustace and Jill. They fail to save the country, and Aslan decides it's time to end the world.
I strongly dislike this book. There are some good parts -- I quite like the scenes with Tirian, Jill, and Eustace all on their own, for example; the bits of Narnian history that Jewel tells Jill are lovely; and the end of the world is effective as a dramatization of apocalyptic myth -- but I despise the message that there's no way to effectively resist evil, so you must simply trust in God and hope things will be fixed after everyone is dead. That theme starts in the first chapter when Puzzle fails to stand up to Shift; continues through Tirian, Eustace, and Jill's hopeless attempts to rally an effective attack against the Calormenes or to expose Shift's sacrilegious deceptions; and finishes when Aslan, instead of stepping in to save the day, essentially shrugs and says, "I'm tired of Narnia; game over. I'm taking my favorites and going home, so nyah to you!"
Also, I loathe the implication that it's somehow a good thing that the Pevensies died young instead of living long and good lives in England. I particularly dislike that in relation to the scene in The Horse and His Boy where Aravis, talking about her attempt to commit suicide, says that while you live, there's always hope of good fortune, but all the dead are dead alike. I would like to add that while you live, you always have the chance to do good, but once you're dead, you're useless. [Except for Caspian, but shush, let's not go there. Besides, even he only got five minutes, and not in his own world.])
February Total: 9 books (plus several magazines, a few newspapers, and a ridiculous amount of fanfiction)
Year to Date: 14 books (4 new, 10 old)
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-04 12:57 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-04 05:34 am (UTC)(The fandoms I read in tend not to be the ones I write in. Partly this is because I am still working on WIPs from several fandoms back, and partly it's because an awful lot of my fic is written as a combination of meta and problem-solving, wherein I am trying to argue with canon or bring out an aspect I think is often overlooked, and by the time I get that far into the nuts and bolts of any source, I've often lost my ability to squee over and get absorbed in other people's fanfic based on that source.)
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-04 02:43 pm (UTC)Have you considered listing you favorites in a rec post? I, for one, am very curious about what you've been reading, even though I only know two of the fandoms you've listed.
(You convinced me to watch Merlin, btw. I agree with you that it's very cute.)