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rocky41_7 posting in

Now that I don’t have a commute, I really had to create time to finish my latest audiobook, but it was worth it. Today I finished Welcome to Night Vale: A Novel, the first book put out by the team behind the Welcome to Night Vale fiction podcast and set in the same universe (as is likely apparent by the title). This book was written by Jeffrey Cranor and Joseph Fink.

First, I don’t believe you need familiarity with the podcast to enjoy the novel. Nor do you need to read the novel if you’re a podcast listener; it builds on what listeners may know, but also centers incredibly peripheral characters from the show (local PTA mom Diane Crayton and pawn shop owner Jackie Fierro), so if you’re a podcast only fan, you’re not missing any crucial story information by forgoing the book. If you’re not a listener of the podcast, I think as long as you go in understanding that the core of Night Vale is the absurd and the surreal, you’ll be okay.

This was a fun book! I was curious to see how the Night Vale Presents team would manage a longform story in the world of Night Vale (podcast episodes are about 25 minutes and almost always self-contained), and I think they did a solid job! The book can be a bit slow, especially in the beginning; the drip of information it feeds you about the mysteries at the center of the story is indeed a drip. But it wasn’t so slow I found it tiresome, and the typical Night Vale weirdness and eccentricity kept me listening even where I wasn’t sure where this story was going (if anywhere).

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marycatelli posting in

books

Kill the Villainess, Vol. 3 by Haegi

Spoilers for the first two volumes ahead.

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rocky41_7 posting in

books

Today I finished book #11 on the "Women in Translation" rec list: Concerning My Daughter by Kim Hye-Jin, translated from Korean by Jamie Chang. This book is about an a widow in her mid-70s who ends up sharing a home with her adult daughter and her daughter's partner. Her contentious relationship with her daughter pits her long-held beliefs and societal viewpoints against her love for her child; simultaneously, she struggles in her job caring for an elderly dementia patient in a nursing home.

The protagonist is a person who values, above all, keeping your head down and doing what's expected of you. She does not believe in standing out; she does not believe in involving yourself in other people's problems; perhaps for these reasons, she believes the only people you can ever count on are family. This is how she's lived her whole life, and she believes it was for the best. However, this mindset puts her directly in conflict with her daughter, a lesbian activist who is fighting for equal employment treatment for queer professors and teachers in the South Korean educational system.

When her daughter, Green, runs out of money to pay rent after a quarrel with the university where she was lecturing, the protagonist allows Green and her partner Lane to move in, despite their fractious relationship.

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marycatelli posting in

books

The Proving Trail by Louis L'Amour

The young narrator of this tale leaves his job herding cattle to find his father, and learns that his father was murdered after a night of successful gambling.

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marycatelli posting in

books

Sanders' Union Fourth Reader by Charles Walton Sanders

Despite the titles, this is more recent than his New Fourth Reader. It repeats three or four readings from the earlier works, not all of them from the fourth reader.

Interesting nowadays chiefly for the views of edifying works and science of the time.

marycatelli posting in

books

To Tame a Land by Louis L'Amour

You can do a lot of things in Westerns. This one is a bildungsroman.

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marycatelli posting in

books

The School Reader. Third Book: Containing Progressive Lessons in Reading, Exercises in Articulation and Inflection, Definitions, by Charles Walton Sanders

The third book is still focused on reading. Very few of the pieces come with bylines. Still, it's taking on the aspect of the later readers, with the focus on good readings, edifying and instruction.

May be chiefly of interest in view of what they selected in the era.

labingi posting in

books

This is the first self-published book I have ever read a good chunk of without realizing it was self-published. [EDIT: This is not a dig at self-published writing. I am self-published and hope my books are roughly comparable to traditional in quality, but it is a mountain to climb to do all the traditional publisher work yourself on your own dime, so I'm impressed when a work does it, and I want to uplift that it's possible.] The book is as well written as a number of recent traditionally published books; it’s well edited, proofread, designed, nice cover art. It looks professional.

But in retrospect, it had to be self-published because it’s a Silmarillion fan fic with the names changed, and a traditional publisher wouldn’t take it for fear of being sued. (Not really spoilery: this is clear quite early.) Its premise (I’ll just render this in Tolkien terms) is one of the exiled Noldor returns to the Undying Lands after dying (?) in Middle-earth. That’s a fantastic premise for a fic! With some alterations, it’s a great premise for an original story. That’s why I bought it! I don’t think it fully exploits this premise, though. It’s a goldmine for psychological and philosophical development, and it has fairly little of either, in my opinion.

It does have a great original addition in the idea of a male and female elf who are well-matched “professional/vocational” rivals to such a degree they can be almost interchanged with each other. That concept may be the story’s strongest, and again, I felt it wasn’t fully exploited.

But some of my discontents are discontents with the source material (The Silmarillion): 1) the style is, for my taste, too expository—too much “telling,” not enough “showing”; 2) I just don’t get the concept of the Undying Lands on any deep level, because my cosmology is very different from Tolkien’s. Goddard is, I think, trying to follow Tolkien here, and part of my difficulty suspending disbelief may come from my just not getting it. I give her marks, on the whole, for showing respect for Tolkien’s work and not altering his Elves in any bizarre ways.

One the whole, I find the book conceptually fascinating but not developed deeply enough to fully engage me.

Spoilery review at my DW.

marycatelli posting in

books

Ghost in the Tombs by Jonathan Moeller

Caina's 32nd book. Spoilers ahead for the earlier ones.

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marycatelli posting in

books

Sanders' young ladies' reader : embracing a comprehensive course of instruction in the principles of rhetorical reading : with a choice collection of exercises in reading, both in prose and poetry, for the use of the higher female seminaries, as also, the higher classes in female schools generally by Charles W. Sanders

A selection of prose and poetry intended for elocution classes. Interesting, nowadays, chiefly for the selections choosing. With an eye to variety, the preface assures us, because they are intended for the young.

This one is, unlike the fourth and fifth readers, aimed specifically at girls. Which means a couple on the education of women and the necessity of its being for their whole lives, and not the flurry of society to win their husbands, and more female characters in the stories. It has a couple of selections that overlap with those readers.

rocky41_7 posting in

books

Today I wrapped up Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer, a horror/sci-fi novel with fantastical (?) elements about a biologist exploring a very unsettling landscape.

There are no names given in this book—the narrator and protagonist is simply "the Biologist," and she refers to her other three teammates by their job titles as well. Locations outside of the place they're exploring—Area X—are not given either, but the world is implied to be much the same as our own, with Area X a troubling and relatively recent anomaly. A private company hires the Biologist and her colleagues to venture into this strange place and take notes. They are the 12^th such expedition.

I appreciate that much of the horror in Annihilation isn't in-your-face: it's the slow build of things that are just off. This quiet and subtle approach means that when something extreme happens, it feels extreme. The Biologist and her colleagues know that Area X is dangerous before they venture in, but even so, they are unprepared for how and to what degree. VanderMeer's portrayal of how trust frays among relative strangers under these conditions felt realistic.

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rocky41_7 posting in

books

"There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, the idea of a boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing more important than that wall."

I knew this book was going to hit hard from the opening paragraph above, and it did not disappoint. I've enjoyed Ursula Le Guin's work before--The Left Hand of Darkness is one of my favorite books—and I absolutely see why The Dispossessed is considered one of her crowning pieces. The setting for this book is a planet and its moon—Urras, the planet, is a lush world not dissimilar from Earth, which is home to several capitalist countries and at least one socialist country; and Anarres, the moon, which is a dusty, resource-scanty place home to a society of anarchists who fled from Urras just under two hundred years ago. The core of the novel concerns Shevek, a theoretical physicist from Anarres who chooses to relocate to Urras.

Le Guin captures truly great sci-fi because this work is so imbued with curiosity. Le Guin is asking questions at the heart of any great sci-fi work: What defines humanity? What can we achieve, and how is it done, and what does that mean for society? What is society? What does it mean to be alone? What does it mean to be part of a whole? To me, sci-fi can't be truly sci-fi without a measure of philosophy, and The Dispossessed has this in droves.

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Recent Reading: Welcome to Night Vale

Kill the Villainess, Vol. 3

Recent Reading: Concerning My Daughter

The Proving Trail

Sanders' Union Fourth Reader

To Tame a Land

The School Reader. Third Book

The Bone Harp by Victoria Goddard Review

Ghost in the Tombs

Sanders' young ladies' reader

Recent Reading: Annihilation

Recent Reading: The Dispossessed

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December 2010

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