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adrian_turtleLast (*mumble*), I went to Michigan for my brother's wedding. (When I started writing this, it was "last week," but now it's fast approaching "last month," and I am finally just going to post it even though it isn't really done and never will be done, so I will be able to post about other stuff.) I'm happy about the marriage. I'm glad to see my (newly extended) family so happy. But, in the unlikely event anyone in charge of such things is reading this, let me register my strong preference for elopements.
On this trip, I only had to spend one day preparing for the wedding in my mother's house. After that, we were supposed to go to the hotel where the wedding would be held, to be near all the out-of-town guests (and away from the clutter), surrounding ourselves with a joyous frenzy of wedding preparations for 3 solid days. Some people regard such frenzies as joyous, or so I am given to understand. As it worked out, my mother drove back and forth between the wedding hotel and the house, searching for critical wedding-preparation material that had been lost in the household clutter. This gave me time to read.
I also found some of the wedding guests happy to talk about books. (My mother's interests aren't the only ones that run in the family, thank goodness.) I could bring a paperback to most of the events that involved bridesmaids sitting around waiting in heavily decorated groups (other than the wedding itself, obviously.) It occurred to me, on talking with assorted cousins, and bridesmaids, and friends and relatives of my parents, that there are an awful lot of Haddassah chapters with book clubs. I went so far as to wish _Farthing_ had been published, so I could point them to it. I talked to people who belong to several such organizations in different places, and they all seem to be looking for thoughtful, interesting, books with Jewish Themes that inexperienced readers can recognize while standing on one foot and drinking herbal tea. And Feminist Themes for equally inexperienced readers to recognize while standing on the other foot. But not always the SAME handful of themes. The experience didn't approach Worldcon, obviously,...but it was better than cornering wedding guests to try to tell them about that damn albatross.
So, what did I read? I re-read Kay's _Lord of Emperors_, having re-read _Sailing to Sarantium_ on the plane. Then I found Nevil Shute's _So Disdained_ buried among my father's old books, and grabbed it when my mother wasn't looking. It's re-reading, technically, but I don't think I understood it very well the first time through. (When I was in high school? Middle school? I certainly didn't remember much of it.) I also read _The Lost Steersman_, which finally worked its way to the top of my to-read pile, after I read the first two Kirstein books this winter, and found it at Boskone. This weekend turned out to be the *perfect* time for me to go back to that way of thinking. And it went beautifully with _So Disdained_. I finished off the weekend with Ruth Rendell's _A Sight For Sore Eyes_, lest the sentimental synergy of the Kirstein and the Shute overwhelm me.
Spoilers. No, really. Spoilers. I like re-reading at least as much as the first read, so I blow endings out of the water with spoilers. If that doesn't bother you, go ahead ...
The house, the neighborhood, the city, where I grew up tend to push my nostalgia buttons particularly hard, because I see them so rarely. When I was in high school, the honors english class attempted to be a general "humanities" class, covering the history of art and architecture in europe. I spent staggering amounts of time sitting in a dark classroom, peering at flickering slides in hope of some clue that I could figure out what was going on. My visual processing ability has always been severely limited. Look at slides? Draw pictures of them so I can recognize them during exams? With migraines during most of the prep time? With the slides moving fast enough during exams that I can miss one entirely a timeslip? Yeah, right. The whole first week of that class, I thought it was some kind of joke I wasn't getting. They couldn't possibly be serious. It seemed like the only worthwhile part of that class was the text study, the only things that stayed with me after the exam, much less years later. (We did Milton. *squirm* The teacher turned down the lights and read the good bits from Paradise Lost during a thunderstorm...but I digress.)
The first time I read the Sarantine Mosaic, I was just reading it for plot. I appreciated the historical detail (and I was shocked by the big change - Justinian is not supposed to die then! but I wasn't paying all that much attention to the mosaics themselves. It was a major plot point that Crispin loved his work, but I wasn't *seeing* the details because it was too visual for me. I suspect my initial understanding of the story would have been similar if it were a story about a playwright or a composer or a designer of bridges. The details about how to make mosaic did penetrate my brain, thanks to the word "tesserae," and the familiar term "tesseract."
On this reading, I was very aware of how Crispin sees everything. I don't just mean that as a figure of speech, the way I usually use "sees." This time through, I was actually connecting Crispin's perceptions to mosaics, old memories of mosaics I didn't know were in my head. It was really quite a remarkable experience for me. It's very strange that any pictures of mosaic should stick with me at all, but the Justinian and Theodora ones in Ravenna popped into my head just as I first saw them, blurry photographs projected on a screen, complete with my grotesque attempts to copy them down, and the rude comments of my classmates.
I care about the Steerswomen books because I love the information economy, and the way Rowan approaches problems. The worldbuilding isn't bad. But that's not what I dream about. What really caught my interest was the Steerswomen's lifestyle, with Rowan as their ideal (more or less), and Mira and Janus as various kinds of failure. And the plot? Rowan is investigating matters of earthshaking importance, but the plot really does not excite me. The world will end, or not. Cities will be devoured by demons, or not. Wizards will come out of hiding and help people, or not. *shrug* What grabbed me were questions of how thoughtful people think, when they start from knowing nothing, or knowing stuff that turned out to be wrong. What really grabbed me turned out to be basic questions of loyalty. (Though the guard spell that could only be broken by a sailor or by a steerswoman in traditional dress was deeply, deeply, cool.)
For some reason, _On the Beach_ is much better known than Nevil Shute's other books. I found that _Trustee from the Toolroom_, _Legacy_, and _Checkerboard_ touched me much more deeply. Maybe it's because I read them first, and didn't get around to _On the Beach_ until many years later. But I think it has more to do with the scope. Shute is very good at writing about individuals whose efforts to take care of themselves or their families end up (through accidents of time/place/war) being significant to much larger groups. _So Disdained_ tries to be about spies and airplanes and high adventure. I got bored with that part of it about a third of the way through. Fortunately, it didn't matter very much. Most of my interest in the book was bound up in Maurice discovering loyalty -- to Mollie, to England, to Peter, to his employeer. At the beginning, before the beginning of the book, when he took the job, he had no significant ties, being free as a proverbial bird (presuming the proverbial bird has neither nest nor mate.) Then, after some unintentionally hilarious episodes, including Peter's attempt to fly over unfamiliar territory, not taking a traveler's phrasebook, a first-aid kit, or money/sweets/tobacco for bribes, but only plenty of brandy to deal with emergencies. And so the question is asked and answered, what connects a person to community, to family, to home? In the clumsy context of _So Disdained_, it's simple: when Maurice loves his wife in England and wants to protect her, that means loyalty to England. That's enough for him. But it can't be enough in the Steerswomen's world, where principle trump people. Or at least they seem to, halfway through the story.
On this trip, I only had to spend one day preparing for the wedding in my mother's house. After that, we were supposed to go to the hotel where the wedding would be held, to be near all the out-of-town guests (and away from the clutter), surrounding ourselves with a joyous frenzy of wedding preparations for 3 solid days. Some people regard such frenzies as joyous, or so I am given to understand. As it worked out, my mother drove back and forth between the wedding hotel and the house, searching for critical wedding-preparation material that had been lost in the household clutter. This gave me time to read.
I also found some of the wedding guests happy to talk about books. (My mother's interests aren't the only ones that run in the family, thank goodness.) I could bring a paperback to most of the events that involved bridesmaids sitting around waiting in heavily decorated groups (other than the wedding itself, obviously.) It occurred to me, on talking with assorted cousins, and bridesmaids, and friends and relatives of my parents, that there are an awful lot of Haddassah chapters with book clubs. I went so far as to wish _Farthing_ had been published, so I could point them to it. I talked to people who belong to several such organizations in different places, and they all seem to be looking for thoughtful, interesting, books with Jewish Themes that inexperienced readers can recognize while standing on one foot and drinking herbal tea. And Feminist Themes for equally inexperienced readers to recognize while standing on the other foot. But not always the SAME handful of themes. The experience didn't approach Worldcon, obviously,...but it was better than cornering wedding guests to try to tell them about that damn albatross.
So, what did I read? I re-read Kay's _Lord of Emperors_, having re-read _Sailing to Sarantium_ on the plane. Then I found Nevil Shute's _So Disdained_ buried among my father's old books, and grabbed it when my mother wasn't looking. It's re-reading, technically, but I don't think I understood it very well the first time through. (When I was in high school? Middle school? I certainly didn't remember much of it.) I also read _The Lost Steersman_, which finally worked its way to the top of my to-read pile, after I read the first two Kirstein books this winter, and found it at Boskone. This weekend turned out to be the *perfect* time for me to go back to that way of thinking. And it went beautifully with _So Disdained_. I finished off the weekend with Ruth Rendell's _A Sight For Sore Eyes_, lest the sentimental synergy of the Kirstein and the Shute overwhelm me.
Spoilers. No, really. Spoilers. I like re-reading at least as much as the first read, so I blow endings out of the water with spoilers. If that doesn't bother you, go ahead ...
The house, the neighborhood, the city, where I grew up tend to push my nostalgia buttons particularly hard, because I see them so rarely. When I was in high school, the honors english class attempted to be a general "humanities" class, covering the history of art and architecture in europe. I spent staggering amounts of time sitting in a dark classroom, peering at flickering slides in hope of some clue that I could figure out what was going on. My visual processing ability has always been severely limited. Look at slides? Draw pictures of them so I can recognize them during exams? With migraines during most of the prep time? With the slides moving fast enough during exams that I can miss one entirely a timeslip? Yeah, right. The whole first week of that class, I thought it was some kind of joke I wasn't getting. They couldn't possibly be serious. It seemed like the only worthwhile part of that class was the text study, the only things that stayed with me after the exam, much less years later. (We did Milton. *squirm* The teacher turned down the lights and read the good bits from Paradise Lost during a thunderstorm...but I digress.)
The first time I read the Sarantine Mosaic, I was just reading it for plot. I appreciated the historical detail (and I was shocked by the big change - Justinian is not supposed to die then! but I wasn't paying all that much attention to the mosaics themselves. It was a major plot point that Crispin loved his work, but I wasn't *seeing* the details because it was too visual for me. I suspect my initial understanding of the story would have been similar if it were a story about a playwright or a composer or a designer of bridges. The details about how to make mosaic did penetrate my brain, thanks to the word "tesserae," and the familiar term "tesseract."
On this reading, I was very aware of how Crispin sees everything. I don't just mean that as a figure of speech, the way I usually use "sees." This time through, I was actually connecting Crispin's perceptions to mosaics, old memories of mosaics I didn't know were in my head. It was really quite a remarkable experience for me. It's very strange that any pictures of mosaic should stick with me at all, but the Justinian and Theodora ones in Ravenna popped into my head just as I first saw them, blurry photographs projected on a screen, complete with my grotesque attempts to copy them down, and the rude comments of my classmates.
I care about the Steerswomen books because I love the information economy, and the way Rowan approaches problems. The worldbuilding isn't bad. But that's not what I dream about. What really caught my interest was the Steerswomen's lifestyle, with Rowan as their ideal (more or less), and Mira and Janus as various kinds of failure. And the plot? Rowan is investigating matters of earthshaking importance, but the plot really does not excite me. The world will end, or not. Cities will be devoured by demons, or not. Wizards will come out of hiding and help people, or not. *shrug* What grabbed me were questions of how thoughtful people think, when they start from knowing nothing, or knowing stuff that turned out to be wrong. What really grabbed me turned out to be basic questions of loyalty. (Though the guard spell that could only be broken by a sailor or by a steerswoman in traditional dress was deeply, deeply, cool.)
For some reason, _On the Beach_ is much better known than Nevil Shute's other books. I found that _Trustee from the Toolroom_, _Legacy_, and _Checkerboard_ touched me much more deeply. Maybe it's because I read them first, and didn't get around to _On the Beach_ until many years later. But I think it has more to do with the scope. Shute is very good at writing about individuals whose efforts to take care of themselves or their families end up (through accidents of time/place/war) being significant to much larger groups. _So Disdained_ tries to be about spies and airplanes and high adventure. I got bored with that part of it about a third of the way through. Fortunately, it didn't matter very much. Most of my interest in the book was bound up in Maurice discovering loyalty -- to Mollie, to England, to Peter, to his employeer. At the beginning, before the beginning of the book, when he took the job, he had no significant ties, being free as a proverbial bird (presuming the proverbial bird has neither nest nor mate.) Then, after some unintentionally hilarious episodes, including Peter's attempt to fly over unfamiliar territory, not taking a traveler's phrasebook, a first-aid kit, or money/sweets/tobacco for bribes, but only plenty of brandy to deal with emergencies. And so the question is asked and answered, what connects a person to community, to family, to home? In the clumsy context of _So Disdained_, it's simple: when Maurice loves his wife in England and wants to protect her, that means loyalty to England. That's enough for him. But it can't be enough in the Steerswomen's world, where principle trump people. Or at least they seem to, halfway through the story.
