bloodygranuaile | Entries tagged with folklore and fairy tales

A friend of mine is going to Iceland this summer so I decided to read the book my mom got me when she went to Iceland a few years back: Icelandic Folk and Fairy Tales, which is, as titled, a collection of Icelandic folk and fairy tales. Most of them are very short, some only a few paragraphs long. Most of them are funny. There are many ways in which they remind me of the Irish folk and fairy tale collections I’ve read, although this one has fewer fairies and more trolls and, surprisingly, wizards. This is a short book but ended up taking me almost a week to get through because I couldn’t read for more than about 5 pages at once in the heat, but it was in that case nice to have real short things to read and also to think about cold places like Iceland.

Some books have been sitting on my to-read shelf for so long I can no longer remember when or how they got there. One of these books is Charles Squire’s Celtic Myth and Legend, which I apparently got long enough ago that I either didn’t notice or was at least sort of interested in “New Age”/pagan revival stuff rather than history/folklore studies. The back cover labels it “New Age/Mythology” and the introduction is by one Sirona Knight, a neopagan author of books with titles like “Faery Magick.” I could probably find a bunch of her books around town but I’m frankly no longer as interested in reading them as I was back in the day. Anyway, the intro to this text is a bit incongruous to the rest of it, burbling happily about how great it is that modern people are rediscovering Celtic mythology as a serious spiritual practice and blithely assuring us that recent scholarship has shown anything nasty ever said about it (especially the big wickerwork statues full of human sacrifices) to be the work of the pernicious Romans and Christians. From this there’s a sort of emotional smash cut to the extremely British, extremely Victorian opinions of Mr. Charles Squire, writing in 1905, dutifully ranking every last thing he can find to rank into “higher” and “lower, “primitive” and “civilized,” “degraded” and “advanced”; comparing Celtic antiquity to Greek at every turn; and confidently breaking down every supposed historical claim about ancient Britain and Ireland to show that it’s just myth, except the nasty ones (like the big wickerwork statues full of human sacrifices). It is, at least by Victorian standards, strictly a work of serious, secular scholarship. Knight’s intro and Squire’s own intro are two such different flavors of editorializing that I’m rather amazed they were allowed into the same book.

Anyway, I have a high tolerance for smug Victorian writing, so that didn’t really stop me from enjoying both the peek into the state of early 1900’s scholarship into Celtic myth, nor from enjoying the myths themselves. The book is split into roughly two parts: the first part gives us a study/overview of the ancient myths of Ireland and the Gaels; the second gives us the myths of the Brythonic Celts, aka the Welsh, both as they relate to the Gaelic myths (many of them seem to be basically the same gods and stories with slightly different names), and how they eventually grew into the legend of Arthur, undoubtedly one of the most influential legends/bodies of storytelling in the British literary tradition.

This seems to be as good a primer as any, if you are a particular type of reader who doesn’t need a primer on “reading Victorian scholarship” but does need a primer on Celtic mythology, which is… maybe not too many people these days, but it works for me. It’s not a compilation of tales put together short-story-anthology style, the way a lot of my Baby’s First Mythology books were that I read when I was a kid, but a dense 400 pages of names, place-names, context, legacies, and whatnot, mapping out the relationships between different stories more than telling them. That said, you get a good overview of the major player and there are a select handful of ripping good tales in there that you’ll learn the basic storylines of–the legends of Cuchulainn, and of Fionn Mac Coul, and of Diarmad and Grainne, and of Deirdre and Naoise and King Conchobar, and of Balor and his eye of death, and a bunch of other tales of the Tuatha De Danann and the beings who came both before and after them. I’m not great at remembering any of the gods’ names but that’ll change if I read more on the subject. The chapters on the Welsh were a little harder because I really can’t remember any of the Welsh names, but I remember the stories were fun, and the genealogy of the tales of Arthur was fascinating if only because of how much it deviates from the Arthuriana I’m most familiar with, most of which is already a generation or two downstream of Tennsyons’ Idylls of the King or Malory’s Morte Darthur, which I have never read. It’s a long way from ancient Wales to BBC’s Merlin or even T.H. White’s The Once And Future King. I received a book of the real olde-skool Welsh versions of the legends when I was in fourth grade, and the Welsh threw me so badly I didn’t get around to actually reading it until 2011.

Anyway, I can’t necessarily recommend this book to anybody as the most approachable intro to Celtic mythology, but I’m certainly really glad I read it, outdated as it is! I’m looking forward to reading more weird Victorian takes on ancient Irish literature from the Irish Literary Revival period. I’ve got a bunch of that weirdo Yeats sitting on my shelf.

After last year’s adventures in reading Capital Volume 1, which was very serious and dense and which broke down to still reading like 100 pages a month, I decided to take it easy with my yearlong read for 2023 and started working my way through a nice fancy-looking copy of Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales, the sort with gold-edged pages and a ribbon and whatnot.

Most of these stories are very short, some no more than a few sentences, and even the longest barely clock in at like ten pages. The book is not divided into sections or anything but the stories are clearly clustered by theme or version, so we kick off with a few different tellings of The Frog Prince, and then there are no more Frog Princes for the rest of the volume. I thought this was great because it made it easy to compare versions side-by-side, although from a strictly “reading for pleasure” perspective it gets a bit repetitive. You can tell the stories are all from in and around Germany because like 90% of the human characters with names are named Hans. Most of the characters don’t have names, though, being instead named by their station in life or species or something, thus saving us from too many Hanses. Some of the stories are structured like what we think of as normal fairy tale stories, with a beginning and a middle and an end that all follow from each other, and others are essentially just wild claims of random things happening. Some are religious or maybe sort of have a moral if you squint, and others do not have any discernible lessons or even themes. It’s a fascinating grab bag of talking animals, clever tailors, beautiful princesses, and whatnot. Overall I’m glad I read it despite the uneven quality of the actual content.

Lord knows how many years ago I acquired two books, titled simply Witches and Werewolves, that were about exactly what they sound like and were part of the same little series of slim black hardbacks that also contained a third book, Vampires. Though the third of these was obviously the most relevant to my interests, it nonetheless sat on my Amazon wish list for several years without my actually buying it. This is largely because, while the books are incredibly cute and fun and look great sitting on my occult shelf, they are not particularly good.

Well, having recently moved into my tiny little witch cottage here in Spookytown, I decided it was well past time to shell out the five dollars or whatever to fill out the series so that it would look nice and complete on my now-much-fancier occult shelf.

Much like Witches and Werewolves, Nigel Suckling’s Vampires is fun and cute but not particularly good. It contains a scattershot bunch of Vampire Facts divvied up roughly into old myths/folklore, historical figures around whom vampire legends have grown, and literary vampires. By this point in my life, I already know most of the stories and persons referenced in here, often in greater depth from some other, less shoddy publication (the exception here is Countess Bathory; I’ve never read a real book on her). However, it’s still quite an enjoyable little read, with black-and-white illustrations and lots of nice red accents on the page (the paragraphs are separated by tiny little red bat icons. Darling!). I can’t get mad about the shallowness of the research since I don’t think the book is meant to be taken too seriously in the first place; the verso across from the title page contains the epigraph “Any book without a mistake in it has had too much money spent on it” (from the publisher Sir William Collins, founder of what would eventually become HarperCollins).

Probably the most useful thing about the book, as with so many other gifty little primer type books, is the recommendation list of movies and books. I’ve read almost all of the classic literary books mentioned but I still have some to catch up on in terms of vampire scholarship (I will read In Search of Dracula one day, I swear…), and I’ve seen fewer of the movies than I realized. Maybe I’ll fix that this spooky season.

I first read Angela Carter’s classic short story collection The Bloody Chamber my freshman year in college, and I have been intending to reread it… well, pretty much ever since then, but especially since I went to see Kelly Link give a talk about it at Harvard Book Store to celebrate the release of the 75th anniversary edition (more properly the 75th birthday edition; the book was first published in 1979; it was Carter herself who would have been turning 75). The 75th anniversary/birthday edition is also very pretty, much nicer than the battered 1990 edition I had in college. It has nevertheless been sitting untouched on my shelf for a while until Gillian and I decided that we should have a special Halloween edition of the BSpec book club, where we would read The Bloody Chamber and follow it up with a viewing of The Company of Wolves.

Though the book is short I tried to read it slowly, or at least as slowly as I can ever read things, taking at least a short break between each story to enjoy its particular flavor before jumping into the next one. This was occasionally challenging as some of the stories are only two or three pages long; I was also sometimes reading them while other people in the room were watching Premier League soccer highlights at top volume. Nevertheless, it was an experience, and I think I did get more out of it reading it a second time--and as an older, hopefully somewhat wiser person--than I did at 18.

Though the tones of each story vary, overall the collection has a very strong lush Gothic vibe; certain words crop up multiple times--amniotic, tintinnabulation, corruption--that make the whole thing earthy in a way that I feel like a lot of other authors shoot for and wind up at sticky instead. Some bits of it are funny; most of it is creepy. My personal favorites are the modern (for the time) retelling of Bluebeard, the titular story, which as far as I am concerned is about how rich people are sociopaths, and the classic vampire story The Lady of the House of Love, which is just the kind of slow-moving, falling-down, purplish-ly written story that you feel you ought to read aloud to somebody else at Halloween.

Overall, excellent reading for spooky season or any season at all.

In my attempt to catch up on fiction books I'd been meaning to read for ages, I finally checked out Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver from the library. This is not quite a sequel to her book Uprooted, but it seems to be considered a sort of companion novel, given that they're both fairy tale retellings, and they both feature awesome female leads that get paired with shitty male leads whomst get reformed to being less shitty. Which, frankly, is a thing that sort of annoyed me in Uprooted, although I understand the fantasy. In Spinning Silver it happens twice, with two different shitty male characters, both of whom are kings that the heroine marries several hundred pages before the romance begins. It's a hook, although it's a little odd having it happen twice in one story. At least Wanda gets to just move into a magic fairy house and raise goats.

But I probably shouldn't start at the end, should I?

Spinning Silver is actually a really solid entry in the genre of fairy-tale-based novels with clever heroines, a genre that has been one of my lifelong faves since I was a wee 'un reading Ella Enchanted and Dealing with Dragons and assorted '90s girlnerd fare. This one is different than the abovementioned titles, partly because it is longer and more complex and generally aimed at a slightly older audience, but also because it's got Jews, instead of everybody being vaguely Catholic-with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off, as happens in a lot of books that take place in fictionalized versions of medieval Europe. This one takes place in a country called Lithvas, which I assume is based off Lithuania, although I don't know anything about Lithuania so it read like "Russia but small" to me (which, maybe Lithuania is like Russia but small? I have no idea). Lithvas is being slowly encroached upon by a kingdom of ice fairies called the Staryk, who steal gold and only come out in the winter. The winters are getting harder and longer, because everything is about climate change.

Our first heroine is Miryam, the daughter of a poor moneylender. The moneylender is poor because he is too soft-hearted to be an asshole about collecting on the debts people owe him, because it is impossible to be both a capitalist and a good person and ah fuck here I go again. Capitalism doesn't even exist yet in this damn book, it's clearly deep in the feudal era. Anyway, Miryam gets tired of being virtuously poor and starving because her dad is too nice to do his job, so she goes out and does it instead, and she's good at it, which upsets her mother because her mother doesn't like watching her teenage daughter become a hardhearted miser, which is understandable. Miryam also unintentionally does a good turn by one of her neighbors, Wanda, by bargaining that Wanda will pay off her father's debt by working in Miryam's house for four years, which actually gives Wanda a bit of a reprieve from the domestic violence her father doles out.

The plot really kicks off when Miryam gets good enough at the whole moneylending thing that she brags that she can turn silver into gold, which by the laws of fairy tales summons the Staryk to dump silver on her and demand that she do exactly that. This kicks off our other main plotline, which involves the Staryk silver Miryam has to trade getting turned into magical jewelry that gets gifted to Irina, the less-than-beautiful daughter of a very important Duke, who is some small bit Staryk herself. The magic jewelry allows her father to marry her off to the tsar, who is under the control of a fire demon, and successfully trading the Staryk silver for enough gold gets Miryam unwillingly married off to the Staryk king, and thus we have our two douchebag monarch romantic leads, one of fire and one of ice. It's all very neat.

The plot to beat back the Staryk and defeat the tsar's fire demon is sufficiently complicated to not be too obvious, and wraps up satisfyingly well, making this an excellent distracting quarantine read. There are quite a lot of viewpoint characters--in addition to the three female leads (Miryam, Wanda, and Irina), we get snippets from Tsar Mirnatius, Irina's old nanny Magreta, and Wanda's younger brother Stepon. They are all reasonably well differentiated, although Mirnatius definitely sticks out a bit; he sounds more modern, probably because he is the only character who is an irony-poisoned sarcastic asshole. (He's fun.) I didn't read the whole thing in one day the way I did Uprooted, but that's largely because I was distracted with having a bunch of actual stuff to do; if I thought I could have gotten away with putting my phone down I probably could have easily just ripped through it in six or eight hours.

I only bought one book in Nova Scotia, which is pretty disciplined for me. The book in question was Witchcraft: Tales, Beliefs, and Superstitions from the Maritimes by Clary Croft, which I bought at a museum gift shop in a historic house in Dartmouth, because that's how I do things (it was not, as far as we were told, a witch's house).

This book is not by Helen Creighton, who is apparently the No. 1 Canadian folklorist and the person whose books I should be buying, but Mr. Croft is her student and Witchcraft quotes her stuff extensively, so now I've got more reading material should I decided I need to learn all the Canadian folklore, which I will get right on after learning all the folklore from a bunch of other countries too.

The book is short and contains a lot of short tales about random supposed witchings in and around Nova Scotia, PEI, and New Brunswick. Most of the stories are from the 19th century or the earlier 20th century, but some legends go back much longer. People familiar with witch beliefs from any of the six main cultures that settled in the Maritimes or with Native American shamanistic beliefs will see some familiar stuff in the tales collected. A lot of reported instances of witchcraft have to do with people being suspected of hexing their neighbor's cows and other livestock, though mostly cows. Other stories are about people getting mysteriously sick, for a value of "mysteriously" that probably means "We hadn't invented good medical practices yet." Many of the ways of breaking spells fall into a couple of themes, some of which were pretty familiar to me—Bible-related stuff such as quotes or using the physical book as a protective talisman; blocking windows or doors with brooms or iron bars, burning stuff—but other types of cursebreaking that popped up over and over again I hadn't heard of before. Putting needles and pins into things was a big one; Maritime anti-witchcraft lore also seems to have a bit of a thing about using bottles of urine (sometimes from the bewitched human and sometimes from bewitched cows/horses/etc.; on some occasions, from the suspected witch). A widely held belief seems to be that when someone does a counter-spell to break a spell or out a witch, the witch will try to borrow or beg something from the person casting the counter-spell; if the witch is given what they ask for, the charm will be broken.

A good number of the stories involve witches who are men; this is not enormously unusual, but it seemed to me like this collection had a higher proportion of male witches than one usually hears about.

Overall the book was an interesting look into a bunch of folklore I didn't know anything about, which is just what I wanted from it; it also seems like the kind of thing that will be fun to mine for writing ideas, which is a nice bonus.

I started reading Elizabeth Bear's One-Eyed Jack: A Novel of the Promethean Age a little over a year ago, in the bathtub at Mohegan Sun.

It has taken me so long to finish the book not because it wasn't good, but because I have only read it in the bath — sometimes at casinos but also sometimes not, otherwise it would have taken me even longer, especially considering the last casino I stayed at only had a shower. My copy is now very water damaged.

Anyway. I had picked One-Eyed Jack for my casino bath reading because it's about the spirit of Las Vegas fighting to keep his city from being annexed by the spirit of Los Angeles, so it seemed topical.

There are actually two spirits (or genii) of Las Vegas: the One-Eyed Jack, who has one normal eye and one magical eye he keeps hidden under an eyepatch; and the Suicide King, otherwise known as Stewart, who seems to have a magical ability to kill himself and then resurrect again. Jackie and Stewart are boyfriends in addition to sharing the job of genius of Las Vegas. This seems like it would break a lot of workplace regulations but it looks like being a magical symbol isn’t a very well-regulated field considering all the other stuff that goes down in this book.

Jackie and Stewart eventually form a coalition with several interesting characters, including two ghosts of different John Henrys, some "media ghosts" of unnamed TV spies, and vampire Elvis (though this vampire Elvis is very different from the vampire Elvis of the Sookie Stackhouse books). The antagonists include Angel (the genius of Los Angeles, in the form of a young ingénue), a character known only as “the assassin,” a Promethean Mage, and the ghost of Bugsy Siegel.

I was a bit confused about who precisely all these people were, since I am not much up on my ‘60s TV spies — nor on my Las Vegas history, really, although I do at least know who Bugsy Siegel is. But once I got used to identifying the spies by their descriptors instead of names, it was all easy enough to follow.

The book takes place mostly in 2002, and as is usually the case, I still find it a bit jarring to realize how long ago the mid-2000s were and how much it really was a different era — it makes me feel old — but it’s impossible to miss because stuff in Vegas changes so fast that, even without ever having been there, I know a bunch of the properties mentioned in the book have since shut down and new ones opened; also, Jackie wears black leather cargo pants because he is terribly cool, and it’s become hard to remember that there was a time when cargo pants really were cool and not just a shorthand for sartorial laziness. Other bits of the book take place in 1964, because that’s when all the media ghosts come from. The time travel isn’t flashy; it just sort of happens—there’s enough ghosts in the story already that visiting the ghost of 1964 isn’t that big a deal.

Since this is a spy story I don’t want to talk too much about the plot but suffice to say that, in keeping with the general theme, it, like a game of poker, features long stretches of quietly waiting and thinking about things (I don’t believe poker is ever boring) interspersed with moments of high drama that vastly change the dynamics at the table. (Poor Angel spends the first three-quarters of the book chipping up relentlessly only to spew off her entire stack in one dumb play. Been there done that; it’s awful.) All the disparate threads and meticulously solved riddles finally come together near the end to put a fast-paced and deceptively simple end to the conspiracy.

One of the unifying principles of how magic works in this book is that it relies very heavily on symbolism and stories and beliefs, reminding me a lot of Discworld if the Discworld books were about twelve thousand percent more serious. Genre savviness is important for our heroes to figure out what is going on. Gaming-related symbolism abounds, which is fitting, because gaming-related symbolism abounds in English writing anyway, only this time it’s all looked at a lot more closely than usual.

Like the other Elizabeth Bear books I’ve read, this was pretty weird and I think I’d have to read it again to figure out some of the weird stuff I didn’t get the first time around, but I’m probably not going to because I have at least three unread Elizabeth Bear books on my shelf at the moment. I always like her stuff but it tends to end up taking me a lot longer to get through than I think it’s going to.

I recommend it to anyone who likes metafictional genre-savvy stuff. Pairs well with a Lush bath bomb, a nice hotel room, and an adult beverage.

The last book that I kept on the Kindle app on my phone took me over three years to finish. Because of this, I decided the next book I kept on my phone would be shorter, so I settled on Catherynne M. Valente's novella Six-Gun Snow White.

Six-Gun Snow White did not take me nearly as long to get through, although this was less because it was shorter and more because I kept going back to read it more often. I read it in all the usual places I read on my phone--doctors' offices and on the T and at the pharmacist--but I also read it in bars and in casinos, and occasionally even at home surrounded by my fifteen hundred other books. It was that good.

Obviously from the title, it's a retelling of the Snow White fairy tale. This one takes place in the Wild West, and Snow White is the half-Crow daughter of a robber baron who runs a mining corporation and a Crow woman that he basically bought and threatened into marrying him. Snow White's mother doesn't last long in captivity, and so the girl is raised by a series of well-intentioned house staff for several years and basically allowed to run wild as long as she doesn't demand her father's attention and nobody really important sees her. She learns to shoot and her father gives her a gun with ruby pearls on it, which she names Rose Red. Everything seems fine enough as far as the girl is concerned until Mr. H remarries. It is the new wife, a scion of a respectable Boston family who had some sort of scandal back East, who nicknames the girl Snow White as a racist taunt to go with the terrifying beauty regimen she imposes.

The new Mrs. H., of course, has a mirror, and this, also of course, is where stuff gets weird. This mirror doesn't talk, but it does seem to have a whole backwards alternate reality version of Mrs. H.'s life in it.

This deviation from the basic plot of Snow White isn't the most important or original thing about the novella. Valente's strengths here lie in her lyrical prose and her dreamlike world building and characterization. After establishing Snow White's character, first in isolation and then as the victim of Mrs. H., what feels like the plot of the novel really kicks off after Snow White runs away and she has to deal with all sorts of other people—we see her navigate the world of the workers in the mines, we see her best the huntsman (or in this case, "the dude," which meant something different back then than it does now), and we see her establish herself among a homestead of outlaw women, neatly obliterating the usual dynamic of being taken in by some cute wacky others because they're so nice and replacing it with a story of grim solidarity.

There is no Prince Charming in this story. Or rather, there is, but that's just the name of Snow White's horse. There is a creature called Deer Boy, who might have had a rougher time of it than Snow White even at the hands of Mrs. H.

Though the piece is relatively short, it is, like most of Valente's work, incredibly dense, and I don't mean that in a difficult-to-read law text way, I mean it as a lot of layers of meaning and connections between things that you'll miss if you don't read carefully and explores a lot of issues of class and race and gender and America and belonging and abuse and all that stuff all at once, and also it's fun to just roll around in the lovely gritty sentences and general gunslinginess. Sometimes. This book is a lot less lighthearted than The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland or even most of Speak Easy; it is extremely violent, with fairly explicit depictions of domestic, industrial, and sexual abuse. The language, even with all its metaphors and its occasional joke, doesn't obscure or romanticize any of this; it heightens it. I've seen a couple people asking if this is a children's/YA book or if it's appropriate for second graders and ahaha nope. High tolerance for the sheer unrelenting awfulness of human history is definitely a prerequisite here. For me, this is one of things I like about this as a fairy tale retelling; fairy tales had a long tradition of being gory and violent and full of torture and stuff before they got bowdlerized and Disneyfied in the twentieth century. Other people's mileage, obviously, may vary.

As for me, I enjoy violent terrible history things, and I really, really enjoy Valente's multilayered writing, even if it's way smarter than me and makes me feel like I don't have anything sufficiently intelligent to say about it.

Catherynne M. Valente was the Guest of Honor at this year's Readercon, so, although I was trying to be frugal, I just had to get one of her books -- signed, preferably. I've only read two of her other novels and a few short stories, but that's enough to know that she's an absolutely genius storyteller. Her work varies pretty widely in tone and theme, but it's always dense with allusions and myth and the prose is so gorgeous and vivid it makes you want to read it out loud to somebody.

Speak Easy jumped out at me because of its gorgeous cover, which I know you shouldn't judge a book by, but sometimes I do a bit anyway, because that's how book marketing is supposed to work. The Roaring Twenties party vibe is pretty evident right from the get-go, with the font and the art style depicting a short-haired lady smoking a cigarette in front of a pelican what looks like a busy scene of other partying folk, all framed inside a fancy keyhole like the reader is spying on them. It's a pretty perfect representation of the story inside, which is a lushly written novella about the folks living in the magical Hotel Artemesia, loosely adapted from the fairy tale about the twelve dancing princesses (and also referencing it several times), providing a fictional backstory to the tragic marriage of Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Our main character is the mysterious Zelda Fair, who came to New York to find out what she is good at, and while everyone else thinks she's perfectly excellent at being Zelda, she's not contented with that. Nearly everyone else at the Hotel Artemesia has a role, sometimes many of them, and Zelda's so far seems to be to turn heads and show up at parties and try a different job every week until she finds the right one. She lives in an apartment in the hotel with three other girls: a dancer, a theater critic, and a costume seamstress. Several of the men in the hotel fancy they're going to marry her, and they're all wrong, at least right up until the end.

Much of this book is an ode to partying -- to dancing and drinking and dressing up and doing outrageous things and meeting outrageous people, and generally to the power of letting loose and having a good time. But it's not shallow at all, and it's not so much that beneath all the dancing on tables and wearing shiny dresses there runs a desire to be seen and to be loved and to create and to be good at things, but that it's all intimately bound up with it. Zelda has some pretty important things to say about the joys of talking when she's sitting around in a silver dress in a bathtub full of gin, eavesdropping on the other partygoers. And Frankie Key ruins the last party in "Canada" (spoiler: it's not Canada) the same way he ruins Zelda's life: by being grasping and entitled and ruining what he loves by holding onto it so hard it breaks, because he's controlling like that even though he seemed so nice at the beginning, just wanting to be good at something just like everyone else did, but he couldn't leave well enough alone when he finally descended into the wintery underground forever-party that belonged to the master of the Hotel Artemesia, a cheerfully awful godlike type of being called, among other things, Al.

The plot seems to get off to a slow and vague start, with a fairly large cast of characters for such a tiny book, but by the time the whole web of drives and desires and attempts at escapism all come together at the end of the story in a deadly, supernatural poker game, it turns out it was all being set up right at the beginning.

I did not know when I picked up this book that the climactic event of the story was going to be a poker game, since I actually read this to take a break from just reading poker books all year, but I was pretty delighted. The game is called Cretaceous Hold'em, which is pretty hilarious to me, and from what I can tell of the gameplay it does seem to be probably a version of five-card draw rather than a hold'em-style game, but that's Al for you. They don't play with chips, instead betting trinkets and personal items that represent bits of their lives. Frankie essentially wins Zelda in the poker game when he wins all her stuff, including her creativity, because in real life F. Scott Fitzgerald basically stole a bunch of Zelda's writing to use in his own novels and then locked her up in a sanatorium.

I do think the absolute best thing about this book is the language, by turns sumptuous and hilarious, and often both. My favorite line in the whole thing is when Frankie is described as not having "the smooth God gave a porcupine," which is something that I will probably find myself using to insult actual people sooner or later. Basically the whole book is like that. If you don't like paying a lot of attention to the actual words on the page you'll probably despise the book, but if you like to roll around in ridiculous '20s slang and steal new ways to insult people from writers smarter and more creative than yourself, like I do, then it's just about the best thing you could read.

The book cost me $40 because it's a signed special edition, number 890 of a run of 1250, with a special flyleaf framing Valente's signature in a purple keyhole so that it doesn't have to go on the title page like when a regular book is signed. It was well worth the $40, as short as it is, because the physical book is a work of art just as much as the words inside.

My only criticism is that it feels vaguely wrong to read it without an adult beverage in hand, and I really just couldn't stand to do that for several days after Readercon, because in real life partying all night leads to hangovers that make you cranky and tired and not want to touch booze again for days, or at least they're starting to with how old I'm getting. But one of these days I'll probably read it again and I'll make sure I have champagne this time, and maybe somebody to read it aloud to.

Aight, so I finished The Raven Boys and then picked up The Dream Thieves immediately that same day, so I might be a tiny bit confused about what goes in which book, because they're all one ongoing story anyway.

This book picks up pretty much right after the last one leaves off. The boys and Blue are still looking for Owen Glendower, although they have made what seems to be progress in the form of the thing that happened as the climax of the previous book. But there is also something weird happening with the corpse road/ley line/whatever you want to call the band of magical energy that Glendower is supposedly buried along: it's starting to flicker in and out like an overloaded circuit.

In other news, Ronan, the fighty Irish boy with emotional issues and a pet baby raven named Chainsaw, is working on his own magical powers: He can take things out of dreams. Chainsaw he took out of a dream, although that was before he started getting the hang of doing it on purpose. Also, somebody beat up Ronan's terrible older brother. Also also, a bunch of people are searching for what they believe is an object that allows people to take stuff out of dreams. Also also also, some dbag at Aglionby named Kavinsky keeps taunting Ronan into street racing and making extremely unclever gay jokes at him. Kavinsky is possibly the most unmitigatedly terrible person out of all the terrible people in this series. His terribleness doesn't even have a point, he's just an overpowered twit.

Meanwhile, Gansey and Adam go to an awkward party at Gansey's house, because his mom is running for Congress. Adam's inability to accept charity and simultaneous desire to break into non-poor society causes problems, as usual, because Adam doesn't understand that rich and powerful people stay rich and powerful because they help each other out a lot. Favors are what people trade in when they either don't have enough money to pay for stuff in money, or when they have too much money for the money to be meaningful. TAKE THE FAVORS. YOU'LL PAY THEM BACK LATER.

Also meanwhile, Blue's mom is dating the hit man that beat up Ronan's terrible brother, and she knows he's a hit man, and it's weirdly adorable? And then the hit man has a weird sort of tragic background/redemption arc about his own terrible older brother. Dysfunctional family secrets abound.

If the first book took a nice floral meandering path to getting the story rolling, by this point, it is rolling pretty fast. The Dream Thieves has its quiet moments and its descriptive passages and its teasing bits of backstory, yes, but for the most part, things have gone and turned into HIGH-OCTANE NIGHTMARE FUEL with someone getting beaten up or murdered or chased around by scary dream monsters with beaks and claws nearly every chapter. Cars blow up. Ronan's non-terrible younger brother gets kidnapped and stuck in the trunk of a Mitsubishi (which later blows up). Probably some other stuff gets blown up too, I don't even remember. Some people die and some other people weren't even alive to start with. Gansey gets covered in bees. This isn't funny because Gansey is very allergic to bees and has already died of bees once already.

This series is quickly moving up my "Did this author write this series just for me?" list, although it is not likely to dislodge the Lynburn Legacy from the top spot. But that is OK. It might get to #2 if it keeps escalating like this. Especially if tarot cards continue to feature in it as heavily as they do.

Current Mood: geeky
Current Music: neighbor's terrible barbecuing playlist

In the latest edition of Failing At Book Clubs, one of the books clubs I'm in read the entirety of Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain series, which all in all is probably about the length of one regular adult novel. Despite being given plenty of lead time, I managed to only read the first book, The Book of Three, and then missed the actual book club because I was sick.

I remember the Chronicles of Prydain very fondly from my childhood but I think I hadn't quite realized how long ago in my childhood I read them since I was very surprised at how quickly things moved along when I started reading. I guess I haven't actually read them since my reading level surpassed a 5th grader's, nor have I read much in the way of other books at quite that level. Middle grade is about as young as I go these days, except for the Victorian classics.

Anyway, the book was still cute and adventuresome for all that, and had that early-medieval British Isles thing going on that I like so much. I'd forgotten that it takes place in basically Wales, not England. I really need to learn more about Wales; it seems an interesting place with a lot of wacky history.

GOOD LORD AM I BEHIND ON MY MARK READS OR WHAT.

Anyway, last weekend I finally caught up on Witches Abroad, which I vaguely remember as being "the Cinderella one." Which it is! But I'd forgotten most of the rest of it.

Like many Discworld books, this one is about stories; like many of the Witches books in particular, it is about fairy tales; but this Witches Discworld book, specifically, is about Disneyfication.

The "abroad" where the witches go is a city-state called Genua, which seems to be based in part on New Orleans, but which is being sanitized and forced into basically becoming the Magic Kingdom (it also reminds me of the walled city in Shrek). It's really just Magrat who is supposed to go, officially—after all, Desiderata Hollow left the magic wand to her when she died—but obviously Nanny Ogg and Granny Weatherwax aren't going to let Magrat go off and do anything on her own, so all three of them go, with Granny complaining about "forn parts" the whole way.

While Granny is staunchly (and meanly) provincial, Nanny Ogg is a belligerently enthusiastic and clueless tourist, bulldozing her way through Genua with a hodgepodge of incorrect common phrases from a variety of languages, apparently under the impression that "foreign" is a language and she speaks it. It's hilarious, and probably very embarrassing for Magrat. Magrat is, as usual, ineptly well-intentioned, and can't figure out how to do anything with the wand except turn things into pumpkins.

The entity Disneyfying (Disnifying? Disnefying?) Genua is a fairy godmother named Lilith, who uses mirror magic. This Evil Queen trope makes her scary as hell because she can basically always be spying on people; her whole magical system bears more resemblance to George Orwell's Big Brother than anything else: She's always watching, and she can have you disappeared if you don't behave according to the exact code expected of you. Her goal is to provide everyone with a happy ending, whether they like it or not, which on second thought also has weird Communist dictatorship overtones. I think there's some underhandedly political commentary about authoritarian utopianism going on in this book, y'all. I always missed it because I was too busy focusing on the fairy tales aspect and the puns!

The fairy tale tropes are deconstructed mercilessly, especially once you find out more about Lilith. It involves more mirroring, in a way.

While the sanitized/gentrified/Disneyfied aspect of Genua is handled brilliantly, the New Orleans-y stuff underneath falls a bit flat sometimes—Pratchett is clearly very familiar with his fairy tale tropes and the way they differ from messy reality generally, but he's not as familiar with the voodoo stuff he's incorporating as he is with the rural British cultures he draws on in places like the Ramtops, so some of the jokes feel more obvious than I generally expect from Pratchett and some of them are just plain racially awkward. (Lilith's whitewashing of Genua would have been SUCH a powerful layer if it had been handled a bit better!)

Overall, though, it is basically everything you'd expect and want out of a Witches book, and then a little bit more.

Current Mood: hot as heck
Current Location: a heat wave in september
Current Music: none

I picked up Kelly Link’s Magic for Beginners at last year’s Readercon because Readercon always makes me have good intentions to read more short fiction. Then I got it signed at the Monstrous Affections event in October, which gave me even more good intentions to read it. Then I decided to do the Women in Genre Fiction challenge this year, which seems to have finally been the critical mass of good intentions needed to motivate me to actually pick the book up and read it, when the exact thing happened that I was expecting to happen, which is that I began kicking myself for not reading it earlier.

Magic for Beginners is weird. It’s fantasy, but the sort of fantasy that also skirts the borders of literary fiction and of magical realism and of translations of really old stories that sound weird to a modern audience because they use a different kind of story logic than we’re quite used to. There’s nine stories in the compilation and none of them are boring. The collection sort of eases you into the weird by starting off with The Faery Handbag, which uses a lot of traditional elements of well-known fairy tales from a variety of traditions, and weaves it into a new and increasingly unsettling fairy tale. After that, the stories are full of recognizable elements like ghosts and zombies but they don’t work the way you’re used to them working and they’re not in quite the sorts of stories you’re used to seeing them in. The zombies, for example, don’t seem to be taking over the world or spreading or eating people or really causing much mayhem at all—certainly not a zombie apocalypse—they just keep showing up at an all-night convenience store and not buying anything. The real creepy element in that story is the pajamas.

Any one individual story could probably yield several really fun literary criticism papers, even the ones about people’s marriages falling apart. One of the ones about a marriage falling apart is also about a haunted house, although it’s not haunted by ghosts; it’s haunted by bunnies. Another story about a marriage falling apart is an alien invasion story with lots of cloning. I personally prefer The Faery Handbag, and the one about the ghost television show, and—well, any of the ones where the main character is too young to be in a falling-apart marriage. That’s on me as a reader, though. That I did like all nine of the stories no matter how much about marriage they were is a pretty impressive feat of writing by Kelly Link. There’s quite a lot to say about any one of these stories, but I feel like I might have to be in conversation with someone else who’s also read them in order to tease out what it is exactly I have to say. There’s a lot of seemingly random, dreamlike stuff going on in all these pieces that I’m pretty sure are metaphor or analogues or catalysts or something like that for all the issues of regular life, but sometimes it’s hard to figure out what they are. It’s not as obvious as it usually is. Like, the zombies aren’t mindlessly eating everybody in a thinly-veiled metaphor for inescapable consumerism and the insatiable demands of a growth-based capitalist economy. The zombies are the creatures that don’t buy anything at the convenience store. So what are they and what are we supposed to do with them? I’m going to have to think about it.

Current Mood: snow madness

Miss Theodosia Throckmorton is the sort of MG heroine I would have been completely obsessed with had R. L. LaFevers' delightful series been around when I was about ten or eleven. As it is, I'm unashamed to eat this series up with a spoon. I'd read the first two a couple years ago when I temporarily stole them from Asshole Ex's younger sister, and more recently, a friend of mine who works for HMH--after also getting me hooked on LaFevers' His Fair Assassin trilogy--procured me copies of books 3 and 4.

I read Theodosia and the Eyes of Horus all in one day, which was yesterday, when I was suffering a stomach bug that required a billion hours of napping to get over, otherwise it wouldn't have taken the entire day. Despite my having forgotten quite a lot of what happened in the first two books, it was still a fun read, and most of it got explained again enough that I wasn't lost for long.

The basic concept of this series is that Theodosia Throckmorton, the daughter of two Egyptologists who work at the Museum of Legends and Antiquities in London, can sense magic--specifically, curses of the sort that hang around on the ancient artifacts that tend to wind up in antiquities museums. She's also a fair hand at removing them, although occasionally something gets out of hand and we get a book.

In this third installment, Theodosia and her little brother Henry discover an emerald tablet, and it appears that everyone is after it. "Everyone," in this case, includes the Serpents of Chaos, a thoroughly evil secret society; the Black Suns, a mostly just completely batty but also somewhat evil secret society; and Awi Bubu, an Egyptian mesmerist who may be more than he seems. The only people who aren't after the emerald tablet, in fact, is the Chosen Keepers, which is unfortunate for Theodosia as she supposedly works for/with them and they keep blowing her off.

As one would expect, basically all the grownups in the series are oblivious numbskulls, even the nice ones, such as Theodosia's kindly but very career-focused parents. All the same, they are entertaining secondary characters, and some of them are even sympathetic, such as the socially inept Stilton. The younger kids are much more fun, though, especially Theodosia's street urchin friend Sticky Will and all his weirdly-named brothers.

This series strikes an odd middle ground of not overly romanticizing the Victorian era but not really dealing with any of its social issues in much depth either--it's just sort of dropped in there that, for example, Sticky Will's mother is still alive but is barely making ends meet as a laundress and will have to keep laundressing until she drops dead of exhaustion. Upon reflection, I think this is probably appropriate for middle grade, so that the book remains a fun adventure and doesn't turn into an issues book, but the children who read it still shouldn't grow up to be intolerably stupid adults who think the Victorian era was all manners and spiffy hats.

On to book four, while I wait for the second His Fair Assassin book to clear at the library.

In a desperate bid to complete my Goodreads challenge this year (Why oh why did I extend it by 25 books?), I have been looking at the shortest, fastest-looking reads on my TBR shelf, and that means middle-grade. Luckily, because I have excellent taste in middle-grade fiction, this meant I finally got around to reading Niel Gaiman’s Coraline.

I’ve seen the movie, which was pretty awesome—directed by Henry Selick, who is the only stop-motion animation director worth having direct your stop-motion movie—so I mostly knew what the storyline would be, although it’s been a couple of years.

Since this is a Niel Gaiman book, and particularly one of his children’s books, it’s both cute and creepy. Coraline moves into a new flat with her parents, and is bored, feeling that her parents aren’t paying enough attention to her because they’re doing boring grown-up things, like working.
Coraline fancies herself an explorer, so she explores the flat and her upstairs neighbor and her downstairs neighbors and eventually explores her way through a door that opens into brick wall most of the time, and find herself, Alice-style, in a mirror version of her flat populated with alternate versions of her parents and neighbors. Her “other mother” seems quite nice at first, paying her lavish attention, but Coraline realizes something is up when she returns to her real flat and her parents are missing. Coraline and the other mother begin a terrifying game wherein Coraline has to get herself, her parents, and the ghosts of other trapped children out of the alternate universe and into the real world—or she’ll be stuck as the other mother’s pet forever, or at least until the other mother uses up her soul.

This story was simple, whimsical, and creepy all at the same time, with Coraline’s spare, childlike voice directing a close third person narrative that ends up feeling more than a little surrealist. It definitely makes me want to rewatch the movie, since there’s a lot of morbidly whimsical visuals in the book and I can’t remember how they were done. Overall it’s an excellent modern fairy tale, and I think I would have particularly loved it had it been around when I was eight or so.

For some Halloween-y reading, I decided to read a book that I'd picked up over the summer in Maine: True Irish Ghost Stories, by St. John D. Seymour and Harry L. Neligan. It is now, as you can see, nearly December. This is because of NaNoWriMo. The most embarassing thing here is that True Irish Ghost Stories is barely a hundred pages long.

A thing I did not realize at first is that this book is a reprint of a work that was originally published shortly after the turn of last century, when Ireland was still part of the United Kingdom. Once you start reading it, it's wildly obvious, because it's written in such an earnestly Edwardian manner. The book is a collection of short anecdotes, organized into categories, interspersed with a lot of arguments about why they are credible and that the fashionable skepticism about their validity is arrogance, arrogance I tell you. The two men who compiled this were obviously smart and well-educated men, who are actually quite vocal in their defense of the Irish populace from charges of "superstition" (a popular anti-Catholic stereotype), but who are entirely convinced that it makes prudent scientific sense to believe in "psychical phenomena" and stuff. It's really kind of adorable. The stories themselves are sometimes sort of short and weird--like "there was a Mrs. S and she lived in this house and saw a figure, and then her sister came to visit and she saw it too" and nothing else really happens--but some of them are quite imaginative and interesting, particularly the ones that are less generically haunted-housey and get into banshees and the like. The banshee stories are particularly awesome. Most of these stories aren't that scary, although there are one or two that feature images that managed to get weirdly under my skin anyway, but that may be because I am a highly suggestible wimp (a bad trait for a Goth, but oh well).

I'd really only recommend this to people who are particularly interested in weird folklore; the lack of a narrative thread and the pseudo-scientific tangents would probably make it a bit of a dry read for people who prefer reading regularly-structured books.

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: lower allston
Current Music: downstairs neighbors

Finishing out the Enchanted Forest Chronicles, Mark Oshiro, and therefore I, just got through the fourth volume in the series, Talking to Dragons.

Talking to Dragons is the one I read the least frequently when I was younger, and as a result, it is the one I had forgotten the most about. I remembered that it took place several years after the end of Calling on Dragons, and that the main character was Daystar, and something about a fire-witch, and obviously that it wrapped up the whole Wizards Have Imprisoned King Mendanbar plot. I also mostly remembered not liking it as much as the others, probably due to the relative lack of Cimorene.

While there was indeed a sad lack of Cimorene, I found I actually did like the book quite a bit this time around! I cannot help but wonder if some of my change in opinion comes from knowing that this book was actually written before the other three, rather than before. The style is definitely a bit less developed than the other books, particularly the humor—it’s cute and silly and funny but I still feel like it’s a bit less polished than the rest of the series. I’m also really, really super impressed that the references to/summaries of the previous books match up exactly and quite specifically; I guess even if she wrote this book first she had the whole series outlined or something? I mean, I was basically listening with an ear towards seeing if she fucked up, and she didn’t, and I think that’s very impressive because honestly, there’s continuity errors between the first and second Discworld books and they’re just one story.

The basic plot of this book is that Daystar, son of Cimorene and Mendanbar, has no idea who he is, and is therefore very surprised when one day, following a visit by the wizard Antorell, his mother gives him a magic sword and kicks him out of the house in the general direction of the Enchanted Forest. Daystar survives the Enchanted Forest largely by being very polite to everyone and everything. He means a dreadfully impolite but sasstastic fire-witch named Shiara, a small excitable lizard named Suze, Morwen (yay), Telemain (also yay), a silly princess and her doofy knight, and a small, nameless, genderless, slightly whiny adolescent dragon, not necessarily in that order. At one point, Daystar, Shiara, and the dragon are in the Caves of Chance and they all meet an ineptly demanding pile of animated blackberry jelly, which is something I had clean forgotten about right up until they met it and then it all came flooding back to me that I had once thought this thing to be the cutest little monster ever.

`Overall I think it makes a solid conclusion to the series in most ways, but it will probably forever remain the odd one out for me.

I’ve been terribly, terribly exciting to be following along with Mark Reads, even more than usual, since Mark has finally started Terry Pratchett’s Discworld. I have adored the crap out of Discworld since I first discovered it in… um, ninth grade? And there are now forty books in this series. Which means that, while I consider myself a pretty big fan and to have a pretty good grasp of Discworld, since I have spent so much time reading Discworld over so many years, there are actually a ton of things I’ve forgotten and am looking forward to rediscovering, since most of these books I’ve only read once or twice.

We’ve just gotten through the first book in the series, The Colour of Magic, and I am revising my opinion of this book from three stars to four. I didn’t read this book first when I started Discworld, so it struck me as being underdeveloped and episodic—and it is, compared to the later works, when more worldbuilding has been done. However, going through it slowly, pun by glorious pun, rather than ripping through the whole thing in one sentence, both made the episodic nature less obvious, and reminded me how absolutely glorious the puns are, even right at the very beginning. The turtle thing is truly bizarre, and I hadn’t thought to stop to think about quite how much bizarreness is squished even into just its first introduction (THAT BIG BANG PUN), having spent ten years being just like “Yeah it’s on a turtle lol”. Rincewind is never boring, even sans potato obsession. And the Luggage… the Luggage is perfection itself.

Ze plot, for the uniniated: Rincewind, an expert coward and gloriously failed wizard, is hired as translator and guide for Twoflower, the Discworld’s first tourist, an inn-sewer-ants analyst from the mysterious and wealthy Counterweight Continent. Rincewind is also tasked given a stern lecture on inflation by the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork and tasked with making sure this tourism thing doesn’t catch on and that Morporkians don’t all decide to go get gold from the Counterweight Continent. Then there’s fire and fighting and running away, and then dragons and shipwrecks and running away, and basically a ton of absurd wacky hijinks that take them all over the Disc, particularly as they run away. And that is ze plot. Sort of. Plot isn’t really the point; groanworthy but clever puns and making fun of popular eighties fantasy tropes are the point.

Basically, it’s a pretty mediocre Discworld book, but even a mediocre Discworld book is better than most other books.

Calling on Dragons was possibly my favorite one of the Enchanted Forest Chronicles books when I was younger. It’s a little bit darker and a little bit weirder than the other ones, but this is offset by a heightened number of sassy talking animals.

Calling on Dragons is told from the perspective of the witch Morwen, who has been previously established as totally awesome in the first two volumes. While it’s great to hear a story from Morwen’s perspective just because Morwen is awesome, the real treat here is that Morwen is the only human who can understand her cats when they talk. Morwen owns nine cats—none of whom are black—and they are fantastically catlike, filling the whole range of cat personalities from lazy to snobbish to hungry. (Fiddlesticks in particular reminds me of our own lovely dumb cat Khaleesi.)

Morwen is dealing with her usual witchy business—namely, planning a garden show and trying to avoid the whinings of a cranky traditionalist named Arona Michelear Grinogian Vamist who thinks she’s not stereotypical enough—when her cats find a six-foot-tall white rabbit named Killer. Killer is not actually supposed to be six feet tall; he has accidentally gotten enchanted. In investigating Killer’s size issues, Morwen also finds evidence of wizards, who are supposed to be banned from the Enchanted Forest. With the help of the nerdtastic mage Telemain, one of the architects of the spell that is supposed to stop wizards from causing trouble, Morwen reports to King Mendanbar and Queen Cimorene of the Enchanted Forest, where they discover two very important things: one, Queen Cimorene is pregnant, and two, Mendanbar’s magical sword is missing.

You might think Mendanbar would be the most obvious member of the royal household to go a-questing for his sword, since it’s his sword and he’s not pregnant, but this is impossible due to nerdy magic reasons. (Mendanbar is predictably unhappy about this.) So Morwen, Telemain, Cimorene, Killer (who is now a floating blue donkey), Kazul the King of the Dragons, and two of Morwen’s cats go a-questing to get the sword back from the Society of Wizards instead. Killer picks up a few more unfortunate enchantments, we run into a lot of characters that make amusing meta references to other fairy tales (including one Farmer MacDonald), that annoying Vamist dude turns up again, and eventually, after many wacky hijinks and parody/metahumor/deconstruction of fairy tale conventions, the sword is retrieved. Unfortunately, they do not live happily ever after; they are instead mercilessly CLIFFHANGERED and then you have to go read the fourth book.

Rereading this book again as an adult (and being helped along by the perspective of someone who has no idea what’s going on… this person, as usual, being Mark Oshiro, my #1 source of cheating on my annual book challenge and of not passing out from boredom at work), I got to re-appreciate how clever a lot of the jokes are (you know how jokes start to seem more obvious than they are when you’re familiar with them), but also how some of the stuff dealt with in this book is a bit more… heavy? Real-world-y? There are a lot of ways in which this book is a little bit less about fairy tales and more about, like, regular bad people. The first two books were full of the heroes temporarily melting wizards; in this one, Kazul finally loses her patience giving them chances to regroup and starts actually eating them. Up until this point the series had really shied away from characters the reader has met actually dying. Arona Vamist is very much a garden-variety bully, conformist, and authoritarian; he’s not a magical creature in any way, just a busybody using fear, lies, and social pressure to screw innocent people over in the name of abstract ideas like “tradition.” And, of course, there’ s the ending, in which it turns out that it will take years to undo the mess the wizards left them in, rather than everything getting wrapped up in a nice shiny bow at the end of a few weeks. There’s also a strong message of “don’t eat random shit that you don’t know what it is, particularly when people tell you not to eat it.”

On the other hand, there’s also cranky magic mirrors and an always-hungry floating blue donkey who keeps getting insulted by sassy cats, so it’s not like the book is overall much of a downer.