Reading Round-up

Having said I’d blog more I’ve not done much at all, sorry about that. So I figure a little reading round-up wouldn’t go astray.

I finally got through Clash of Kings – that’s Game of Thrones Season 2 for TV folks – and I’m looking forward to A Storm of Daggers. I also decided not to watch season 2 of the show; I watched season one and enjoyed it but it lacks some of the depth, the story is shifting away from the book and … I don’t need to see that stuff.

Finishing it opened the way for me to read Neil Gaiman’s latest, The Ocean at the End of the Lane. It really dragged me in and was a charming tale; I don’t think it’s a match for his other novels but it’s still an addictive read with some great characters and ideas.

And finishing that, which didn’t take long, meant I could finally read Shine Light, the third book in Marianne de Pierre’s Night Creatures trilogy. It took me a couple of chapters to get back into the world but once there the story moved along at a good pace. I thought I knew what was happening, then bang, something shifted dramatically and kept me interested. The ending seemed somewhat sudden in a way but with time I see it’s the right way.

Actually, before those two I finished reading another YA fantasy, Crewel by Gennifer Ablin. I was lured to this book by a moment of serendipity. I was doing NaNoWriMo and I read one of the pep talks, which was by Ablin; and I found it pepped me quite successfully. I switched tabs to Twitter after reading it and someone tweeted their review of Crewel. It seemed to me to be a sign, so I tracked it down on Angus & Robertson and bought the ebook.

Unfortunately, when I went to read it on my reader I found passages went missing between pages. It turns out that why A&R uses the epub file format, it formats the books specifically for the Kobo, which handles the whole reading experience differently to my Sony. So the only way I could read it was on my computer, using the A&R program. Which was okay but not something I’m keen to do often.

Anyway, while very YA at times and occasionally a little rough around the edges, Crewel is a truly fascinating story. It’s a dystopia with a difference as the world of the story, Arras , is wound by Spinsters – women with an ability to see the threads of reality and to manipulate them on special looms. It’s a great concept and the intrigues we’re drawn into make it well worth reading.

Speaking of ebooks, I’ve recently read the classic fantasy novel The King of Elfland’s Daughter by Lord Dunsany, a poetic tale of mundane meets faery, and Tim Powers’ The Anubis Gates, an interesting mix of magic and time-travel set, mostly, in 19th century London , with a detour to Egypt . Now I’m working my way through Emperor of Dreams, a huge collection of short stories by Clark Ashton Smith; brilliant. I’ll likely have more to say on them later.

For now, I think that’s your lot.

Keep dreaming.

Random Thesis Musing No 1

In her essay, On Ghosts, Mary Shelley laments the way the world is changing to a more rational, more understood and more linear place. The way the sun is known to be a star filled with gas as opposed to a mysterious orb that might be the chariot of a god, for instance. In this she neatly summarises a general feeling within the Romantic movement and with the Gothics in particular – that the new ways following the various revolutions at the end of the 18th century were potentially robbing us of our sense of wonder; hence the romanticising of the past and the insistence (at times) in the existence of the supernatural.

As progress has not slowed since that time it is little wonder these feelings have lingered and the rebellious medievalist spirit of the Gothics has continued in many forms of storytelling as well. But while mad monks, ghosts, mouldering castles and star-crossed lovers gave escape from the modernising of the world, Shelly went further and commented on the very progress she lamented in her essay.
In Frankenstein she inverts the supernatural threat by having the devils and monsters made by humans overstepping their mortal bounds as opposed to things beyond our mortal ken. In so doing she of course established an archetype and moved us closer to a genre which would become science fiction. Taking the novel with On Ghosts and her other major work, The Last Man, however we see a different tradition arise.

Shelley gives us a world we think we understand but do not. Her works threaten us with destruction because of this assumed knowledge and the failure to understand the greater mystery.

Taking this view, a new tradition can be seen to have risen from Shelley, one of a shrinking, rationalised world left at the mercy of the forgotten things, or inversely, the tragic lingering of the old ways against the rise of the new. The first half of this is best represented in HP Lovecraft’s Cthulu and Dream Quest stories, while the latter is seen in Michael Moorcock’s Elric saga. More recently, Tim Powers’ The Anubis Gates and Neil Gaiman’s American Gods combine both sides of the tradition.