ThunderPeel2001

Books, books, books...

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Think the best book I've read this year is Mrs. Dalloway. Dull as it is brilliant, maddening, wonderful, mundane, stupendous, obsessed with minute turns of thought and feeling, the prose slipping away unless read aloud. It takes longer to read than a book that size usually would. 

 

Mitchell is truly wonderful at writing characters and that's what I enjoyed most in this book. His downfall, I think, is the need to bolt on what feel like superfluous fantasy subplots to his novels. 

Curious whether you find the subplots being fantastical troubling. Do you just find the supernatural distracting, unnecessary, juvenile, etc? Or is it the way Mitchell applies them you dislike?

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Overall I am not a fan of fantastical stories, especially when the description of those fantasy elements overpower other interesting parts of the story. That's what happens in Jacob de Zoet; the book begins as this very measured story of a man with specific beliefs, and then it devolves into baby murder and drinking blood to stay youthful. Those parts are completely incongruous and including the latter diminishes the weight of the former. I was willing to ignore what I see as bad parts of Jacob de Zoet, but the connection that Mitchell forces between that book and the events of The Bone Clocks makes it that much harder for me.

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Hmm, I guess it's just a difference in taste then. I quite enjoy fantastical stories and think Mitchell does a good job of weaving fantasy and reality. In fact, I'd argue that the main theme of his books, at least the ones I've read, is that the seemingly overblown fantastical elements do not diminish the importance of the everyday. To take The Bone Clocks as an example

the war between Horology and the Anchorites doesn't diminish the importance of Holly's anger at her mother in part one, or the fear of losing Aoife in part three, or Crispin's murder in part four. There's a reason that the book ends where it does: the point is that, yes, there might be a centuries old war being immortals being fought, but everybody else still has to go on living, making mistakes, feeling love and anger and pain. To put it another way: by the end of part one, Holly's mad at her mother for not understanding her, mad at Vinny and Stella for betraying her, mad at herself for her role in Jacko's disappearance and mad at the world for letting it all happen. To us as reader's, certain of these angers may seem more important - teenage rebellion against authority seems somewhat petty in the face of a lost child - but Holly feels all of them. None diminishes the other.

 

Likewise, there's a reason that Thousand Autumns ends on Jacob, not Enomoto and that Cloud Atlas ends on Ewing, not Zackry. The bad and the good, the important and the petty, the fantastical and the mundane: they all exist together, and given that each person is limited to their own perspective, it's the lived experience of events that matters, regardless of the events going on around them.

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I take your point, but there are plenty things in life that are fantastical without having to inject immortals or magic. Made up fantasy, especially when it is put next to the real world, always falls flat for me.

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I take your point, but there are plenty things in life that are fantastical without having to inject immortals or magic. Made up fantasy, especially when it is put next to the real world, always falls flat for me.

 

I don't mean to put words in your mouth, but for me, what fell flat was not exactly the inclusion of magic, but the inclusion of magic as ridiculous and unambiguous as baby-killing and blood-drinking. If it had been something more animist, in keeping with Japan's cultural and religious history, rather than trading on the silly but still real blood taboo, it wouldn't have felt so disruptive to me. Maybe it was Mitchell's intention to make the supernatural element so out of place, but it didn't entirely work for me, either.

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Overall I am not a fan of fantastical stories, especially when the description of those fantasy elements overpower other interesting parts of the story. 

Do you find that fantasy reflects sides of humanity which don't interest you (for example, on African-American identity as espoused by Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon), or is it because the trope itself bores you? I'm sitting here suspecting it's because you can't intellectually justify fantastical tropes (even ones based on myth).

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Many fantasy tropes can't intellectual justify themselves. What does a race of immortals who literally kill children to stay young forever tell me about humanity except that cartoonish evil is cartoonish. Myth, magical realism, and other styles of writing can be extremely powerful and moving, but writers can go overboard and rely on those tropes to the point where it feels like a cop out and a way to avoid saying something meaningful. There are plenty of books that I've read that have used fantastical elements well (Toni Morrison is definitely one of them), but I think David Mitchell is increasingly letting his fantasy obscure the actual interesting parts of his writing.

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It's likely I totally misread it, but I thought the ritual stuff wasn't real, in that the Abbot wasn't really hundreds of years old, and nobody actually got immortality. I thought it was another facet of the aspect of the story that was breaking Japan out of it's isolationist, and sort of medieval outlook. 

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I will say that the fantastical stuff in Thousand Autumns falls flatter than it does in The Bone Clocks, mainly because it feels more out of place in the former, whereas it's pretty central to the plot of the latter. To put it another way, I can see Thousand Autumns being improved by the removal of that stuff (and Cloud Atlas working without literal reincarnation) but I don't think removing the fantasy elements in The Bone Clocks would have improved the book. Although, as I mentioned before, I think it would have helped had he not spelled out so clearly what was going on.

 

Also, feelthedarkness, that was my reading of Thousand Autumns too. However, The Bone Clocks makes is clear that Mitchell's intention (at least now, maybe not in 2010) was much more literal.

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I feel like I should be reading Terry Pratchet's Snuff currently but I'm feeling pressured to power through the Dark Heresy 2 Rulebook so I can run my campaign on time.

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Many fantasy tropes can't intellectual justify themselves. What does a race of immortals who literally kill children to stay young forever tell me about humanity except that cartoonish evil is cartoonish. Myth, magical realism, and other styles of writing can be extremely powerful and moving, but writers can go overboard and rely on those tropes to the point where it feels like a cop out and a way to avoid saying something meaningful. There are plenty of books that I've read that have used fantastical elements well (Toni Morrison is definitely one of them), but I think David Mitchell is increasingly letting his fantasy obscure the actual interesting parts of his writing.

The old eating the new so the old continues living seems like an apt analogy for a lot of things in the modern world. It doesn't take a huge stretch of the imagination to land at possible candidates, but I haven't read the book and therefore do not know.

 

I feel like you're dismissive of them because they're fantastical and therefore juvenile, though. I know you and I interpret things pretty differently, which is why I'm pursuing this argument.

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The old eating the new so the old continues living seems like an apt analogy for a lot of things in the modern world. It doesn't take a huge stretch of the imagination to land at possible candidates, but I haven't read the book and therefore do not know.

I feel like you're dismissive of them because they're fantastical and therefore juvenile, though. I know you and I interpret things pretty differently, which is why I'm pursuing this argument.

This is a shot in the dark but I think after a point the way someone chooses to portray such a dynamic can be described as 'dumb' as in "there are better more considered ways to show this off".

Maybe this can reduce to "this is too childish" but I like to think that not everything childish has to be super blunt or poorly thought out.

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I will say that the fantastical stuff in Thousand Autumns falls flatter than it does in The Bone Clocks, mainly because it feels more out of place in the former, whereas it's pretty central to the plot of the latter. To put it another way, I can see Thousand Autumns being improved by the removal of that stuff (and Cloud Atlas working without literal reincarnation) but I don't think removing the fantasy elements in The Bone Clocks would have improved the book. Although, as I mentioned before, I think it would have helped had he not spelled out so clearly what was going on.

 

The cult stuff did not work for me at all and, in a way, I wish it had been removed or replaced with something more interesting, especially because the Jacob de Zoet parts were so brilliant. Oh well, at least the ritual wasn't real...

 

Also, feelthedarkness, that was my reading of Thousand Autumns too. However, The Bone Clocks makes is clear that Mitchell's intention (at least now, maybe not in 2010) was much more literal.

 

Hngghh....*

 

 

* This does not really change my opinion on the The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. I think it is a fantastic book, despite the poor middle part. It was a I-don't-know-if-I'm-ready-for-The-Bone-Clocks sort of "Hngghh".

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I feel like you're dismissive of them because they're fantastical and therefore juvenile, though. I know you and I interpret things pretty differently, which is why I'm pursuing this argument.

I think you may be misinterpreting Argobot's comment.

I don't think she being dismissive because a novel has fantastical content in, but how that fantastical content is sometimes used as a crutch or a cope-put to "enhance" a novel when it's not needed; and, I have to agree with her.

As a huge fan and voracious reader of Weird fiction, Fabulism, Magical Realism, and the like, I enjoy that content when it works best: illuminating the exteriors and interiors of the characters and the world around them. I'm also okay with those contents just being there an... I don't know. This is something I think over in my head a lot because I do believe that having fantastical content in your novel doesn't weaken it or make it less literary. But at the same time, we have authors like a Mitchell who overuses it or uses it when it's not needed and I feel like it adds to the stigma of having such content in your novel.

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At the risk of repeating myself, I don't think that Mitchell overuses the fantastical, at least not in The Bone Clocks. Where I think he runs into problems is in over-explaining the fantastical, which is an entirely different issue.

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I think you may be misinterpreting Argobot's comment.

I don't think she being dismissive because a novel has fantastical content in, but how that fantastical content is sometimes used as a crutch or a cope-put to "enhance" a novel when it's not needed; and, I have to agree with her.

 

Right, but then the question becomes whether these elements are problematic because they're misapplied tropes, or because they're fantastical and inherently broken in Argobot's eyes. Mind, I've yet to read The Bone Clocks (and suspect it's still a few years down the line), but I'm curious.

 

Background to this whole thing: if you measure your intelligence by your books (and I'm not sure if Argobot does), you're more likely (I've found) to be dismissive of things traditionally, well, dismissed. I'm just trying to figure-out how Argobot comprehends her literature, as she seems rather well-read.

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Also, if anyone wants a pretty, long poem that ends with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer but still somehow remains pretty, try The Conference of the Birds. I recommend a strong tea and a rainy window. Maybe a hint of melancholy. But choose your own poison and enjoy.

 

I'm also reading some Ghassan Kanafani in Arabic. Not sure how well it translates, but Returning to Haifa is beautiful and quite a bit sad. I'm a bit biased, but there you go. The only English translation I can find is here. (Though the title is better translated as "A Return to Haifa".)

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Think the best book I've read this year is Mrs. Dalloway. Dull as it is brilliant, maddening, wonderful, mundane, stupendous, obsessed with minute turns of thought and feeling, the prose slipping away unless read aloud. It takes longer to read than a book that size usually would. 

 

Curious whether you find the subplots being fantastical troubling. Do you just find the supernatural distracting, unnecessary, juvenile, etc? Or is it the way Mitchell applies them you dislike?

 

Read it recently along with the lightouse and it is potentially out of my favorite books. The BBC4 show in our time did an episode about it that is worth checking out.

 

Finally got round to reading Jonna Russ the female man. In the final page Russ is talking to the book and saying that one day when its no longer seen as something special but as something quaint cause there will be equality between the sexes it should be happy not sad it's seen as out of touch with the times. Reading that was pretty depressing when it was published in 1975 and you read it in 2014.

 

Also like Wolf Russ does alot of having characters talking and it taking a couple of sentences for you to figure out who is talking (particularly when the 4 female leads are version of each other from different realities).

 

I read these above books and a sci-fi book called the dragon never sleeps in the same month and I found it really odd that all 4 had chapters which are a paragraph or less in length. The Dragon never sleeps also a  really good take on Roman empire in space particulary if you are interested in the changes that occured in the empire leading up to the fall of the western half.

 

Also reading about Russ she got alot of shit for her reviews and whenever I see a thread about games reviews I think I am going to post her replies to the various complaints she got :

 

  • Don't shove your politics into your reviews. Just review the books. "I will," Russ said, "when authors keep politics out of their books."
  • You don't prove what you say; you just assert it. "There is no way to "prove" anything in aesthetic or moral matters."
  • Then your opinion is purely subjective. "I might be subjective, but not arbitrary. It is based on a critic's whole education."
  • Everyone's entitled to his [sic] own opinion. "Writing is a craft too, and it can be judged. And some opinions are worth a good deal more than others."
  • I knew it. You're a snob. "Science fiction is a small world that often doesn't look outside of its own bounds.
  • You're vitriolic too. "The only way to relieve oneself of the pain that has to be endured by reading every line is to express one'sopinions vividly, precisely, and compactly."

 

Never mind all that stuff. Just tell me what I'd enjoy reading. "Bless you, what makes you think I know?"

 

Just finished city of stairs. This review sums up my thoughts on this pretty interesting fantasy novel dealing with colonialism, oppression, religion and history. Reminds me of The city and the city and parts of Steven Erikson's Malazan series.

 

I haven't read the bone clocks but I have read alot about it and I am going to throw this arictle on it being a work of anti-fantasy and a review from a SF&F site I read into the mix

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I'm not sure if this is the appropriate place or it I should tag this as NSFW:

 

tumblr_lyxyc80Ob41qlosqzo1_r1_500.jpg

 

So.... pretty. These Barnes and Noble Leatherbound Classics make me wish I lived in the US or that my country had one of these stores....

 

:wub:

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Um.... my country finally has Kindle Unlimited, I'm pretty sure I'm going to stop my CrunchyRoll subscription and get this instead.

 

Does anybody have it or recommends it? 

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Finished reading Ancillary Justice yesterday. This has probably been discussed already.

Ann Leckie delivered a phenomenal debut - that has already been recognized by numerous prestigious awards, so I am piling on - that plays with gender and language without being overbearing? I have not yet read any criticisms online, so I don't know how it has been received by people who know more about these things than I do.

Finally, there is a Science Fiction novel that is equally interested in portraying Artificial Intelligence and personality fragmentation together with imperial colonialism, political maneuvering and social hierarchies.

 

Suffice it to say that this is a book about a colossal starship AI, whose ship is destroyed and who finds herself with only a single human body . . . but it might be enough to enact revenge. I think that's a pretty good premise and executed rather masterfully for a debut novel.

Apparently, it's a trilogy, too, so yay?! Maybe?!

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Finished reading Ancillary Justice yesterday. This has probably been discussed already.

Ann Leckie delivered a phenomenal debut - that has already been recognized by numerous prestigious awards, so I am piling on - that plays with gender and language without being overbearing? I have not yet read any criticisms online, so I don't know how it has been received by people who know more about these things than I do.

Finally, there is a Science Fiction novel that is equally interested in portraying Artificial Intelligence and personality fragmentation together with imperial colonialism, political maneuvering and social hierarchies.

 

Suffice it to say that this is a book about a colossal starship AI, whose ship is destroyed and who finds herself with only a single human body . . . but it might be enough to enact revenge. I think that's a pretty good premise and executed rather masterfully for a debut novel.

Apparently, it's a trilogy, too, so yay?! Maybe?!

 

Thanks for reminding me I have that book and should get round to reading it. The second book (Ancillary Sword) came out this year and got pretty good reviews. Meant to be like CJ Cherryh Downbelow station/ Foreigners series which I really liked.

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First finish of the year is The Bone Clocks, but I hesitate to resurrect the discussion above. Let me speak of a different theme altogether:

 

that last chapter, set as it is in Mitchell's near-future collapse of civilization, was such a punch to the gut. I think I'm just susceptible to the idea that in my lifetime there'll be this steep decline. It happened to some degree in Cloud Atlas, but here it's so pronounced as a thing that happens within the span of a single life (Holly's). I don't think it'll happen the way Mitchell describes it, by the way, because I think there's a way deeper sense of community and sharing within us than just the outer layer. Our decline, if it comes, will either be spectacularly sudden and definitive, or really, really slow.

 

And I also read Thousand Autumns as not being fantastical at all. The mid section in the mountain monastery was jarring from a storytelling perspective (completely losing focus on Jacob and Dejima), but I never got the feeling the cult was anything more than an insane superstition (indeed not befitting Japanese spirituality). The Bone Clocks does retcon the story a little, which I didn't mind. I'm curious if Mitchell had thought all of that out when he wrote it.

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My guess is that he had vague ideas about it, but that The Bone Clocks solidified them. As for the ending chapter

I think that it's really important to consider when thinking about the supernatural stuff. The thing that ultimately fucks over humanity is not some great supernatural battle, but ourselves. I think about it in the same terms as I think about Cloud Atlas ending on Ewing, not Zachry. Mitchell chooses how his books end very carefully.

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