Tag / books

by Sixer

Lang Wae Gangged

I dinna ken it a’, but I kenned enouch to gang on with.

I think that would make a pretty tombstone for most people, “I didn’t understand everything, but I understood enough to get along.” I read George MacDonald’s Malcolm over my winter break (and skimmed through the wretched sequel), and then of course had to write poems and think in meter for the next 24 hours because reading such lovely prosery, and thinking about the ebb and flow of words – which is unavoidable when most of the dialogue is in Scots – does put my mind in a fidget. Of course, all the beautiful nature was also a bit intoxicating. It has been an unbroken silence of gray here for the past few days, with only a breath of muted rain late one evening. The same day on repeat.

I’m conflicted about MacDonald (at least his fiction. I love his allegories), but I am not conflicted about loving Malcolm. The first line stole my heart. Miss Horn and her vociferous thanksgiving over being made with no feelings! She is naturally my favorite character, followed by the ocean, the sky, and then Duncan. But of course the book is not about her, it’s about somebody else. I don’t dislike Malcolm (only vicariously, in the sequel, but this Malcom can’t be blamed for that). Malcolm is fine when you’re in the book, but when you’re out of it he can’t come with you. He is like faerie gold that dissapears in the morning, or like that first snowflake that you carefully carry home only to find it’s already melted once you’ve arrived. The ocean and the sky are more real than he is, I can dream of going to find them. But there never was and never will be a Malcolm in this world. I like the narrator better, because I can argue with him. I dearly love to argue, and the narrator is so opinionated I’m sure he would oblige me. I feel that we would get along, whereas Malcolm and Graham would find me a poor companion: Too impatient to watch the dawn for hours. Or to sit and work out the Eculid in the original Greek. To prosaic to find resolution in an abstraction.

I love the absurdity of the uneveness of the past. Our minds even things out so much, they’re always supprised to find dips and peaks in reality. We want to find things better or worse and so do, when often they are only rearranged. We think about the oppurtuinty for education now, and imagine there was little of it available before. But sometimes reading old books it seems that it’s always been an uneven mixed bag. Here’s a fishing village with a school master who knows greek and latin (duh. Doesn’t every college educated man?), so naturally anyone with a desire to learn a little more than the basics will, between catching herring and mending nets, pick up those languages too. Oh, but let us not talk about education. The word is so dual in my mouth it makes my head swim, and so hard and cold it makes my teeth ache.

And let’s not talk about poetics either. The way colors can be all cast up together in a paragraph, bunched up tightly to fit, to describe a single night sky. Certainly, lets not talk about the soul-poetic, for that would leave me out of my depth. I’m afraid I have a hard time believing in it, and must go on faith that it does exist in some people. It’s much easier to talk about a book’s internal inconsistencies than about it ecstasies, just like I suppose it’s easier to point out someone is wearing mismatched socks than to put into words the effect of their outfit on the whole.

I think that’s the genius of the poetic mind. They can take the soul of a thing and put it in flat, ink-printed (only, I read it on my ipad) words, where it’s preserved until it enters someone’s brain and is there rehydrated, in a sense. I suppose that means there must be some extra soul in the reader for the soul of the original to come out right. A sunset is after all only a sunset. But a moment is a thing with history and context and feeling and meaning, and the poet has to put the one in the other, and then trust the reader is able to unpack and assemble it.

by Sixer

Mists and Memories

What does hope mean to you? I ask this question after re-reading the Mistborn trilogy. Well, I say “read” but I mostly skimmed the first book. Skipping swaths of dialogue, whole chapters, jumping from paragraph to paragraph through (painfully violent) fight scenes. It was the book closest to me, that’s why I had picked it up. And it was interesting after all, so I kept at it. But, honestly, I wasn’t really paying attention until I started the second book.

I don’t think I have ever been so amazed at my ability to forget.

Now might be a good time to mention that there are going to be major spoilers, so if you are the kind of person who enjoys how the story unfolds you ought to stop reading here (and, really, Sanderson’s story is so well crafted from beginning to end that it’s a shame to not try to solve the mystery yourself as you read it. There are places that made me stop and wonder, “did he retroactively make that decision?” What an intricate attention to seemingly decorative but ultimately plot-vital detail).

 

But I digress. Memory. I had forgotten so much. The ONLY thing I remembered of the second book was . . . . well, actually, nothing. Not one thing. Marsh – I distinctly had the impression that he sacrificed himself in book one. So I was completely puzzled when he, you know, was still alive at the end of that book. I remember really liking him, and yet I had managed to block out two books worth of his actions. And the kandra. I had forgotten literally everything about them. I mean, I knew what they could do, but I didn’t remember anything else. The Kolosses too, it didn’t even occur to me to ask how they were made when they were introduced in book two. I knew Vin and Elend would gain control of them and be uncomfortable about it . . . . but I had (probably on purpose, because it really is too wretched to fully realize) forgotten how they were made. And the siege – you know, the thing that takes up two-thirds of the third book? – completely new to me. I remembered who the final hero of the ages was, but nothing about the final battle. I had even somehow managed to be surprised when it became obvious what Ruin was looking for and why. In fact, when you look at the hundreds of things that happen in the last two books, the only four that I really remembered was the infallibility of metal, the earring, the purpose behind the mists (only, for some reason I thought they had affected Elend? And that the discovery of the purpose had been almost immediate?), and Elend and Vin crashing a ball. That last one I remember so vividly I assumed it happened a lot. And, because I didn’t remember anything about Elend being king (much less emperor), I thought it happened in book 2.

All of these things point to only one explanation: I must have stayed up late reading these books, and I must have, in my desire to Find Out What Happened Next, skimmed pretty badly. I didn’t think I did that (at such scale) with unknown books but how else do you account for such a vast lack of recollection?

Of course, there is another theory too, and that is that I was dissatisfied with the ending and so forgot everything else in disgust. Well, yes, I have been known to do such things for far less provocation. For one thing, the book’s concept of godhood is bizarre – which is actually my main point in writing this. But, probably more to the heart, it killed off its main couple at the end. Tragic.

Reading it this second time, braced as it were for the inevitable (ha! I did remember that much!), their deaths didn’t bother me. Their world was, after all dying, and if they didn’t die in saving the world they would have died, and everyone one else with them, in loosing it. And also, they knew they had won when they died, which is quite a lot, and the whole second and third books actually, when you look at them together, had been specifically cultivating them to feel their lives were not their own to live anyway. So that’s all good then. Not that I approve of people killing off their characters willy-nilly, but I’ll concede that these deaths made sense both for realism and the narrative.

 

And, looking at it as a chance to sandbox – and after all, what else is fiction really for? –  the god thing is fascinating. Actually, it was book two when it became fascinating, book two and its cult of the Survivor. And that, ultimately, is what made me keep reading, to see what faith would mean in this universe. Because, for a depressingly significant percentage of books two and three, the only hope offered is the hope of surviving. That’s it. The characters’ goal was literally “everyone not dying.” Not in the sense of saving everyone, but in the sense of at least saving someone. And it made me think, almost instantly, of something I’d read in a book recently. The author said that, when you looked at what some people believed, all it boiled down to really was surviving. They were only living for life – success, health, happiness, contentment. Even when talking in general of people focused on love and service, even just talking about regular people, so many of us on this planet live our lives as if this is all there is. We’re just trying to get by, as the saying goes. And you can really see, pretty quickly, how this kind of thinking can corrupt even the most well-intentioned of people. There is no pay-off for being altruistic, especially if the world is ending. It is what causes Vin to overthrow Elend’s carefully crafted dreams of the perfect legal system, and what leads Elend to lay siege on a more or less innocent city. Because when your only hope is to survive, when survival itself becomes your goal, you no longer have the option of failure. The option of being the better person, of turning the check, of dying for your principles. Death is the only evil, and you must stave it off at all costs to win.

In this sense, it is perfectly fitting that when Elend finally realized his hope is not in survival but in renewal – in new life – he was able to choose the right way instead of the necessary way. And too, when Vin fully understood that Ruin was afraid, and that his fear indicated he could be, not just survived, but defeated, she took her life-risking gamble. And won, by loosing. In effect, she chose too die, chose to not survive, so that the earth could be a place of life and not death.

 That still seems a bit depressing, really. Sweet, but still . . . . very, very final. But then that is the other oddity that bugged me. The other side of the “just survive” mantra: the finality of death. Not one of the religions mentioned in the trilogy, and there were a few, were known for their afterlives. For a hope that existed beyond death. There was no Hell, no Heaven. No, what, nirvana? This just seems statistically unlikely. Oh sure, someone raised the possibility of ghosts at some point, so certainly there must have been superstitions about the soul, but the only “ghosts” we Readers see are phonys or illusions. This rather puts a damper on the whole dying thing. For all the deaths that occur throughout the books, the only person who we see struggling with the Death of the Soul question actually becomes an atheist because of it.

And yet, despite this perfectly finite notion of the soul that is built up in all three books, the trilogy ends with a note from the new god stating that Vin and Elend are perfectly happy where they are, and, hey, that guy who died in book one says “good job.” So . . . . there apparently is an afterlife after all? But, and I’m going off on a particularly unstable limb here, I suspect it’s not one run by the same forces that created the world. It’s not the kind of thing Ruin could have sanctioned (being eternal preservation, as it were) nor, if it was under Preservation’s power, would there have been much of a point in saving the world. If this afterlife were Preservation’s domain, than he should have let Ruin have the world and taken all the souls to said “better place.”

But even more fundamentally, Ruin and Preservation were part of the world – not just active gods, but physically integrated as well –  and so how could they have made a place separate from it? No, there must be some other power who controls this place, a place none of the other religions mentioned because its existence was beyond the scope, the jurisdiction, of the world’s creators. Perhaps a force higher than Preservation and Ruin, one with different goals and a different nature. This would be an exciting story to read! After all, we still do not know if Preservation and Ruin were originally one. Nor do we know who (or how) they had previously possessed (that they were possessing other people is obvious in that, when they “died” they left behind human corpses). I can see these two being attributes of a greater power, shaved off and set loose. Evolving over time and association – with each other and with their own creation – personalities and desires distinct from their original abstract natures. How does this change the way we view their war? The suffering of their people?

 

But going back to hope: I’m in the middle of writing another post, about what actually decides me on a book, and it’s obvious when discussing Sanderson what is most precious to me is his complete inability to accept despair. Feel it, see, it, taste it: yes. But accept it? Never. Even if his world isn’t set up in a way that seems to encourage hope, humility, or sacrifice, his characters embody it anyway. This is most beautifully (and dramatically) illustrated in the bridge runner portions of his The Way of Kings novel, but you can clearly see it here too. After all, isn’t his idea of trust, freely given, as the best basis for all relationships, and therefore societies, defiantly reliant on hope? Of expecting, even assuming, the best out of people even if people don’t always show you their best? It’s not surprising that I ate Mistborn up the first time I read it, or that I found it still engaging all these years later. Hope is a story I will never tire of hearing.

 

 

by Sixer

Ghosts of Mists and Shadow

Another victim of “I’ll edit it tomorrow,” this has been waiting to go out for a month now. I’m backdating the posted date to protect the canon.

It has been grey and damp all day, the sky persisting in the exact same shade of dullness so that it has been impossible to tell what time it is. It has felt like 11am since 8 this morning, and up until 6pm still felt that way. Perhaps I can blame my obsessive bout of reading on that, though of course we know I need no excuse. I just finished a historical fiction novel – no, not that kind of historical fiction. Or perhaps it would be better just to admit that all fictions are, in one way or another, romances? But this book wasn’t romantic in the true-love sense. Maybe in a gloomy, doomed-ideal sense it could be called romantic, but if you read it for love you’d be entirely disappointed. The history bits, however, are excellent. Not so much a novel as a collection of short stories, it covers the life and fortunes (or misfortunes) of a specific family, in a specific building, from around 530 AD to 1975. And yet, format aside, it was thoroughly a novel: there was a wholeness to the book that made you want to see how the story ended. The author knew her craft well. Even though her characters had very little time on stage, they all seemed round, full people. The time period made sense, and the characters made sense both in the context of their time (as related by the author) and in the larger story of their family.

Naturally this is my first complaint: the people were too realistic. There were nice, thoughtful ones among them, but on the whole they were a proud self-centered lot. Understandable but not admirable. And the ones who cared about something besides themselves were often the worst. Greed is one thing, but all the children ignored in favor of a favorite child? Truly scary. In fact, as often as it showed its face, love was never portrayed as a panacea for human woes or weaknesses. It had strengths of its own but, in all its aspects, seemed always to end in more misery. The marriages of reason and cultural expectations were more likely to prosper and give, if not happiness, at least satisfaction than any of the love-matches. Not that even content couples were happy – I don’t think anyone in the whole 1700 years of family history could be said to have been happy for more than 15 years at a time. Inevitably their first 15 years. But maybe that was the books point – resilience is breed out of a commitment to, not happiness, but survival. The characters compromise the future for both reasons, but compromises for happiness in the world of the book were rarely rewarded. So, though the book ends on a happy note, there is no happily ever after in the minds of the reader. We know that tragedy is going to strike again, shattering the illusion. And the fact that we can survive through it, to live the struggle and disappointment all over again, is hardly a glowing recommendation for the future.

This book made an oddly somber companion to the audiobooks I finished last week, Omnilingual and The Curved Blade (which, now that I think of it, was there a blade anywhere in that book?), and that Heyer mystery I read over the weekend – yes, I fell back into mysteries. Military SciFi is neither as well populated nor as easily dipped into. I did read a sci-fi pirate book two weeks ago – kind of Firefly meets Treasure Planet – but even that was more mystery than MSF. Mysteries are, almost by definition, short, one novel affairs, and MSF is generally exactly the opposite.

Of these three books, I suppose Omnilingual was the most fascinating. Cocktail hours! And all those cigarettes, contaminating the dig site! And no computers, no AI to analyze and draw comparisons. So much to think about from such a short story. And yes, the ending made me think of that one Stargate episode . . . . The Curved Blade was . . .  well, it actually felt like it was written by someone who hated all the characters in it. Which is not an uncommon feeling for a whodunit, but this book had a quite poisonous, mocking edge. Possibly attributable in part to the reader, whose reading voice was . . . distinctive. The women were extremely beautiful, and the author seemed disgusted by the fact that none of the men could suspect either of them as a murderess. In sympathy for the author, and in my desire for the equal representation of the sexes in every sphere, I rather wanted it to be them, partners in crime, but alas – the evidence. All in all, the Heyer mystery was probably the best, if you rate books purely by enjoyment. For one thing, it had less death in it than any of the other books (well, okay, Omnilingual didn’t really have deaths, only corpses). But mostly it was enjoyable because Heyer can, and occasionally does, write likable characters. People who aren’t half bad (or, are only half bad) and who actually care for the people around them. People who have nonsensical, natural conversations with each other about nothing much at all. A lemonade of a book. Even an iced lemonade. I enjoyed the inn book but it has left a bad taste in my mouth, as a penny dipped in honey might.  It might be another book or too before I cease to hear its bitter whisperings, for even now it seems to say “don’t live for tomorrow, it will not thank you for the effort.” Luckily, I have quite a number of books in my queue.

by Sixer

Strawberry Fields and Military Sci-Fi

Aldis had freeze dried strawberries in the nut section last time I went in.

I have been curious about freeze-dried fruits, and, more specifically, how they would do in granola for about as long as I’ve been into making granola so naturally I bought a bag, combining a crushed handful of fragrant redness with (shelled) pumpkin seeds, almonds, candied ginger, vanilla extract, and honey syrup.

Conclusion: It does right well in granola, though more because the powder clung to the ginger than becasue the chunks are noticeable. Next time I will add less sugar, but for now the strawberries are pleasantly tart and smell heavenly; when topped with chunks of fresh peaches it is divine.


I’ve since used the strawberries, powdered, as a base for salad dressing and as an addition to candied walnuts. I have a little bit left in the bag . . . . maybe something traditional like scones? I haven’t really had time to think about it: for the last 2.5 day I’ve been slogging through the muggy jungles of Marduk in a 1,000 page crawl of the Empire of Man’s opening half. I’m recuperating while my hold requests for the last two books are fulfilled. I do have three other books on my table, all also courtesy of the library (one on loan from a completely different county, using the Marina system. Magic) but, in all honesty, I don’t think I could read another line right now. Not with enjoyment, anyway.

Part of that is becasue all the books I’m reading are just similar enough to start running together. I’ve been kind of on a military sci-fi kick lately – it’s my new whodunit, I guess. For years I loved reading Agatha Christie and Arthur Doyle during the summer but, now that I’ve read a fair number of those stories and sampled a few others in the genre, I’m rather mystery-ed out. Even with my love of formula, between the literally cookie cutter nature of some mystery books, and the inevitable ruins they makes of the characters’ lives, I’m a bit numb to them. I can get my seasonal dose of scandal from police dramas, thank you.Military sci-fi fits in perfectly to the void thus created. The situations are equally convenient, the characters unimportant, and the plot merely a carriage for death, cunningly achieved. At times authors of either genre will wander into arm chair philosophy; the whodunit focusing on the psychological origins of human evil and the military covering honor and death and what the struggle to live means when that struggle includes being willing to lay down your life for an outside cause.

Not that the characters in military fiction are merely bits of wood for the bullets to hit. However, they do sometimes seem so in comparison to longer epics that don’t make battles their primary focus but instead are full of random character dialogue. The Belgariad comes to mind as the best example of this – the characters are the reason you read the book and, when you are done reading it, you feel you know them inside and out. The Belgariad is such a part of me that it’s difficult to not hold other long, drawn out sagas to the same standard of camaraderie, even when they are obviously in a completely different category. And military fiction is a completely different category than Fantasy or Sci-Fi. Instructional rather than inspirational, Military Fiction is for the quartermaster in all of us. It’s about logistics and order in the midst of lack and chaos. That is what I love about it the most: the orderly, detailed unfolding of battle.

But that is also why it occasionally comes across as, well, flat as a cartographer’s masterpiece. Take the Lost Fleet series, of which I’ve waded through three out of six books. The battles are delicately orchestrated to be daring and dangerous while at the same time letting the characters survive without outright cheating death. They are filled with exhaustively persistent reminders that something ten light-minutes away will take thirty minutes to reach you if you’re going at point one light speed.{{1}} [[1]]Or whatever the actual figures are. I’ll admit, my love for a logical world was not strong enough to figure out how soon two ships would come together if they were five light minutes apart and one was moving at 1.4LS and the other at .9LS. The answer was, invariably, “not as quickly as it takes to tell it.”[[1]] If, by the end of the first book, you are not mentally begging for a good ol’ warp drive you have not been reading it closely enough. The human drama element is there – but it is there becasue that is a part and parcel of war and you couldn’t really have one without the other. As such the characters are sometimes conscripted to speak or act in ways inconsistent to their personality{{2}} [[2]]Assuming they were lucky enough to merit a personality in the first place[[2]] but necessary for the moment, effectively killing off any chance of the audience relating to them. This is good, becasue there are only three categories for named characters in war: the doomed, the enemy, and the hero. All in all, it is a wonderful argument for the chain of command and the military mindset and will make you ponder deeply the complexities of waging war in a vast 3D plain. It will get you thinking, but it’s not going to leave tears streaming down your face.

Of course there are military books that have relatable characters as well – L. E. Modestt’s scholar portfolio in the imager universe comes immediately to mind. But even here it is not all the characters. It couldn’t be – too many people die to keep track or care about all of them. And, let’s be brutally honest, no matter how much people are willing to follow a military leader there is something so tragic about them that it is almost impossible for them not to be somewhat isolated in the midst of their troops. They may know the name and backstory of every soldier, but at the end of the day the knowledge that they are sending these men to their deaths will wall their hearts round with guilt. Truly, MF can be almost as emo as a vampire love story. Which, of course, is just another reason to love it, becasue military fiction reminds us, again, that sometimes the hardest of us are also the softest, that it’s rare to have hate without love, and that numbness can only exist where feeling is possible.

I think it’s the juxtaposition of these two concepts – the obsessive attention to niggling detail and the yearning to serve and protect what you hold dear – that really makes military sci-fi. As a culture, we tend to divide things to their basest elements, putting the brain here and the heart there, but this one genre welds them together with spit, wire, and pure grit. This is the-needs-of-the-many level philosophy, where you must constantly weigh the worth of lives today against the uncertainty of victory tomorrow. In a strange way, it is a place in fiction where the hero will always survive but will never truly win, because every time a life is lost he fails. In a world that continually invites you to fall, how can we not relate to the relentlessly battered warrior, who sees his actions time and time again take the life of friend and innocent alike? Perhaps it is as much for the hope they lend – the encouragement to press on despite our despair –  and not just for the ingenuity of war that we continue to write and read them.

obligatory ending photo

Incongruous Tart

by Sixer

Skipping Ahead

I am sitting here by my window, watching the world awake. No passionate dawns today – just a warm, happy glow slowly intensifying into daytime. I have moved my furniture twice in the last thirty days. I liked where my desk was before, but I realized even though I could see the window from my chair, I couldn’t really see out the window. So I moved it to a better spot. But that threw my bed placement off a bit, ergo the second rearrangement. Now it’s all settled and I love it, which might not be a good thing. See, I’m already thinking ahead to next year and the changes and challenges I want to to take on. One of them is the dreaded Go Out More, so having a perfectly restlful house is going to make it harder. However, it will make my other goals a little easier. I’m still wanting to start sewing, for instance. But mostly, I’m wanting to start reading, and that’s where my planning has focused.

There are all kinds of reading challenges, but the ones that make the most sense to me are those that let me dig into my already overflowing shelves. For this reason I’m joining one of the many TBR (to be read) challenges.

I’m throwing caution to the wind and pledging 24. Mount Blanc. That’s two books a month. I think I’ve been averaging one every three month this year. To make things more interesting, I’m adding the color challenge in as well. Any ideas for a third one? There are lots of challenges out there, but most of them seem geared to a certain genre (mystery, sci-fi, romance, fairytales, etc.) and the books I’m drowning in right now are all non-fiction or plain fiction, so I need something more like the sewing or knitting challenges that people host, which go by theme (reminds you of spring, gifted, plaid . . . . ). Maybe I’ll follow one of those challenges, translated into books? Hmm, could you call Tonybee’s A Study of History foundational?