bloodygranuaile

This year I decided to reread The Silmarillion! I have not read it in about… twenty years. Jesus, that makes me feel old. Anyway, I decided to break it up into chunks and read a bit each month for the first 6 months of the year. This meant reading about 60-odd pages each month, which is plenty for a book this dense.

I must admit that my first thought is indeed “Oh wow, this book is very dense.” I remember having a difficult time with it when I first read it in ninth grade–so many names! Such archaic language! So little dialogue!--but I am older and wiser now and have a whole English degree under my belt, so I figured it was largely an issue of it being Above My Reading Level when I was 15.

Alas, no, this really is a very dense and busy book. It’s actually four books, of which the Valaquenta (or Quenta Silmarillion) is the biggest one, and it covers many hundreds or possibly a few thousands of years and several generations of Elf shenanigans. Everyone has five names and is given a full genealogy of people who also have five names. All the places have five names too. In keeping with the Anglo-Saxon tradition of which Tolkien was a scholar, families frequently repeated name elements instead of having family names, so you get whole families whose names all start with Fin- or Ea- or El- or whatever. It is! So! Much!

That said, the language, while often hard to follow, has a grave and archaic regality to it, thus fitting the type of story it is exactly. And the stories, once you can get past the language and its reliance on abstractions (the thing I find most difficult as a modern reader, honestly–I’m not only used to much more concrete writing, but in many sectors of my life, that type of thing is a huge red flag for bullshit), are great–epic tales of fighting dragons and stealing gems and exploring the world, with doomed love and giant spiders and all sorts of extremely cool shit that other fantasy authors have been ripping off lo these past fifty years. We get the tale of Feanor’s bad decisions and his unfortunate family; the heroic exploits of Beren and Luthien; a short version of the Tale of Turin Turambar; and many other individual episodes that would probably each bear up a whole movie trilogy if someone with a huge budget and a sense of restraint could wrestle the rights away from the Tolkien Estate, which I’m kind of glad they won’t actually. This is not cinematic writing so you’d have to make up a whole bunch of new material and that would then annoy Tolkien purists, probably including me. But there’s a great sense of vastness here, a really impressive feeling that you’re looking at merely a sliver of a whole world long gone, and there’s something incredibly compelling about that.

Given that I have only read this book once, but in the intervening twenty years I have listened to Blind Guardian’s album Nightfall in Middle-Earth approximately infinity times, one experience I kept having was sudden tiny bursts of familiarity. I’d be reading these long dense pages trying to remember what I had read on the previous page, and suddenly a sentence or a turn of phrase would jump off the page and bonk me in the teenage nostalgia part of my brain, and I’d know exactly where in the album we were. Then I would have the relevant song stuck in my head for a bit.

Anyway, now that I’ve finished the book, I… kind of want to immediately go back and reread it again? There’s just so much going on in it that I didn’t retain; I need to do it again and maybe find a study guide this time.

Sometime when I wasn’t looking, another Craft book came out. This one is called Dead Country and it promises to be the beginning of the Craft Wars series. It’s a lot shorter than Ruin of Angels, clocking in at just under 250 pages. Therefore, I was able to devour the entire thing in less than one weekend.

After the big, planes-spanning drama of Ruin of Angels, this one seemed–at least at first–much more limited in scope. We’re back with our series-starting protagonist Tara Abernathy, now going home to the desert farming community of Edgemont to attend her father’s funeral. Tara had never particularly fit in well in this rinky-dink village on the edge of the Badlands, even before they chased her out of town with pitchforks for witchcraft, and it doesn’t get any less uncomfortable when she shows back up in her fancy suit with her body covered in glyphs.

Tara’s plan to get in, attend the funeral, and get out is foiled by an attack from the Raiders, whose black magic curse is somehow different than it used to be–threaded through with some sort of white fibrous substance that seems to lend it extra vitality and malevolence. Tara ends up staying to help save Edgemont and take down the Raiders; to do so she has to communicate with the other people in the town in order to build wards that define and protect the town as understood by its inhabitants. There’s all kinds of heartwarming character growth and also some sick-ass wizard battles. And behind it all is the threat of bigger, even more fucked-up things than the old God Wards–big spidery things among the stars, and the possibility of the creation of a god born of Craft. It’s definitely a setup to the bigger arc that I assume the Craft Wars series will follow, and it’s definitely an engaging one! I will for sure be reading Wicked Problems when it releases in April.

It was time to reread H. A. Clarke’s The Scapegracers so that I could remember what happened now that the sequel is out, and also for reasons relating to my particular book shelving system. The second time around, this book is still quite a vibe. Very character-driven, very gay. The plot is fun enough to hang the story on and I do want to know what happens next, although mostly I am reading the sequel because I want more Sideways and more Mr. Scratch. It’s definitely more YA than I’m used to reading these days but it’s still quite good. My one major criticism is that Sideways needs to do her laundry and soon; the cool disheveled thing stops being cool real fast when you become the smelly kid.

Usually around this time of year I manage to read about 1,000 pages between Christmas and New Year’s, but this year I spent a bunch of that time playing games, so the first book of 2023 is Brandon Sanderson’s Shadows of Self, the second book in the Wax and Wayne series, which seems to be his only series where the books are regularly around 300-400 pages instead of 1,000.

In this one, the short version of the problem is that a mysterious killer named Bleeder is stoking the entirely justifiable grievances of the industrializing populace to foment the most destructively disruptive forms of civil unrest she can think of–and our intrepid heroes have to stretch their imaginations to match hers, because she’s got grievances that wouldn’t even occur to normal people. The cops keep trending toward defaulting toward mass repression despite everyone being aware that the rioting masses are, politically, entirely correct. Marasi has officially become a constable right now–basically the EA to the new head of her octant’s division–and is dealing with office politics. Wax mostly shoots things magnificently, sasses God, and has existential breakdowns. Wayne continues to be very funny. Steris is still my favorite character. This is a very plot-driven crime thriller type of book so it’s hard to talk much about anything without major spoilers, but let’s just say that, for all the obvious similarities to early industrial America, a world where religious stuff is unambiguously real and the cops are not the immediate descendants of runaway slave patrols means that some things go down a little differently than they would in real life. (Also, you know, magic.) However it is still quite fun and twisty and sets up the next book very effectively.

Completing my journey through Earthsea, I read Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Other Wind, the final installment of what she apparently liked to call the Earthsea Trilogies.

This is a weird one–not that the others were particularly normal–which gets deep into the root of the relationship between humans, magic, dragons, and death. It brings together all our old favorite characters and a couple of new ones on a strange little quest to make restitution for the ancient betrayal of the agreement between men and dragons that was made when they split into two species. This quest is precipitated when the spirits in the land of the dead, a gloomy grey place that Ged and Lebannen visited in book 4, start channeling their desire to be free through the dreams of a kind widowed village sorcerer of medium magical talents. In this one, our motley crew of heroes–minus Ged, who stays home to keep house–has to reconcile the differences between the mythology of the people of the Archipelago, dragon mythology, and Kargish mythology in order to figure out what they must do, after which doing it is taxing (and costly) but nevertheless the easy part.

Our old standby characters–namely Ged and Tenar–have gone past middle-aged and are now squarely elders, and our former child and adolescent heroes have now grown up into youngish adults, but nevertheless adults. They have all learned things over the course of their previous adventures and do a lot of thinking and talking about what they have–and have not–figured out about life and death and society. It’s a very philosophical book, as most of Le Guin’s are. However it is also pleasingly filled with dragons and ghosts and sea voyages and wizards, and even some cute animal companions, a staple of fantasy writing that Le Guin doesn’t often employ.

Overall this was definitely the thematic final stand the series needed, even if it wasn’t a final climactic battle or any of the things you’d expect. Knocking over a wall seems pretty in keeping with Le Guin’s general philosophy and politics, though.

In preparation for Nona I read Harrow the Ninth for the third time. This time I tried to read it more slowly, even though my reading-slowly-on-purpose skills have somewhat deteriorated over the years. I don’t think I’m quite clever enough to have figured out who’s in the last section, but I will only live in ignorance for another week or so. (I don’t usually try to guess twists, I just want to see how they happen, but I’ve been wondering Who Is Nona for like a year now so I tried to pay attention.)

Even knowing the big reveals, this was still a tricksy little hobbit of a book. Only part of this is due to the protagonist being possibly-insane-possibly-haunted-definitely-unwell; the rest is due to much of the rest of the cast also being possibly insane, haunted, dead, and various other things (and definitely unwell). God continues to be just some guy, and extremely cringe to boot. I can’t wait for the next book.

It is almost time for Nona the Ninth and, in the interest of being minimally confused (unlike when I first read Harrow), I figured that meant it was time for a reread of Gideon the Ninth (and hopefully I’ll be able to fit in Harrow the Ninth sometime in the next two weeks as well).

While I continue to largely enjoy this book because it is pitched directly at me personally in a manner that makes me want to bang my spoon on the table and chant “One of us, one of us,” I also am genuinely hooked on wanting to know what the goddamn deal is in this Catholic-but-worse-because-God-is-just-some-douchebag Empire. Rereading definitely let me pick up on things I’d missed or just sort of blown past in earlier reads. Rereading also lets me gain a deeper appreciation for just how fucked up everyone in this series is, which is always fun.

Am I gonna reread this series every year? I will at least until it’s all published.

Another book that I brought up to Maine was Alwyn Hamilton’s Rebel of the Sands, which I admit I did not really expect to like very much. I’ve sort of gone off YA a bit and basically picked up a few this weekend so that I could get them off my TBR shelves, and figured it was a good weekend to read them because my brain is soft and tired and made of cheese, and I was worried that once my head is good and rested I would simply never be able to read them. Also, I was slightly suspicious of a desert-flavored adventure written by a white author, because fantasy writing is full of white people writing exotic desert locales in very cringey ways, starting with Dune and going from there. So, in short, my expectations were not very high going in.

That said, said expectations were nicely surpassed. Clocking in at around 300 pages, it’s a fast-paced, frequently funny, very readable little gunslinging adventure about djinns and overthrowing tyrants and how much it sucks to live in a dying factory town in a militarized society under unaccountable armed occupation, and lots of terrible dudes get the shit beaten out of them. It is neither subtle nor thought-provoking, but it is fun. I liked it maybe slightly better than Vengeance Road but not as much as Gunslinger Girl, but overall I’d say if you liked one or both of those you may like this one too.

For some reason I had thought that Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series was complete after Across the Green Grass Fields, but there was no reason for me to actually think that, and I was pleased to discover that I was wrong, with the publication of Where the Drowned Girls Go. This one is about Cora, the mermaid, who is suffering something somewhere between PTSD and being haunted after her encounter with the Drowned Gods in the Moors, a very different set of underwater shenanigans than her first time through a door, her “own” door to the Trenches.

Cora decides that she can’t get better at Miss Eleanor’s and decides to transfer to the other school for children who have experienced portal fantasies: the Whitethorn Institute, a grimly regimented reform-school type of establishment designed to crush the desire to re-find their doors out of the students.

The grueling conformity of Whitethorn, which is basically a kind of psychological boot camp, actually does wind up helping Cora beat back the influence of the Drowned Gods, but the cost is high. The students are largely miserable and take it out on each other. Cora sticks out due to her size and her blue hair, and the sleep problems she’s been having ever since the Drowned Gods got their tentacles into her psyche don’t mesh well with the brutally rigid schedule and early-morning alarms. She doesn’t make friends.

At least, not until Sumi shows up and, being Sumi, causes chaos.

Like the other Wayward Children books, this volume focuses on a lot of heavy subjects but ultimately winds up being a heartwarming adventure. Fatphobia, bullying, trauma, and attempted suicide are major subjects; the series themes of identity, conformity, choice, and rejection are continued. Eventually the characters learn to work together to get themselves out of their predicament (in this case, the Institute) and be big damn heroes along the way (in this case, by figuring out some terrible secrets about how the Institute is run and staffed) and some of them even become friends. Regan, from Across the Green Grass Fields, makes an appearance and is folded into our main gang of heroes.

According to Goodreads another book is expected next year, and it looks like there are actually supposed to be 10 books in the series. I’m pleased about this since I find this series to be really good comfort reads–they’re short and queer and genre-savvy and full of big feelings and the Power of Friendship and finding out who you really are, and they are a bit sentimental and full of absurd things and could easily be just flat-out cheesy but they’re just smart and dark enough not to be. I could reread the whole series in a weekend.

Lately I have been generally In A Weird Mood so I decided to continue my Arthuriana kick by tackling a book I have been vaguely intending to read for decades, but have been hesitant to pick up for the past 8 years or so: Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon. Bradley has been dead for 20 years and I acquired my copy because a friend was throwing his away, so no money has gone to Bradley (obviously) or whoever is running her estate. It’s hard to get excited about reading a book by someone who committed child abuse, even if they are dead. But The Mists of Avalon was A Really Big Deal in the world of Arthuriana and in fantasy writing generally, and until quite recently it was especially considered a really big deal specifically as a feminist work, and I wanted to see for myself what the big deal was.

And I can see why it was a big deal, because the book is magnificent. It is not fun or uplifting or girl-power-y and I no longer particularly like to go anywhere near the word “empowering,” but I don’t think it’s that in quite the way people tend to use it these days, but it is magnificent. At nearly 900 pages long, with teeny text and written entirely in a ‘80s-understanding-of-formal-Dark-Ages-style, it’s slow going for a fantasy novel by my standards–I can usually zip through 500 pages of fiction in a weekend these days if I don’t have much else to do, so 900 ought to only take three days of reading or so, right?--and it’s incredibly dark and fucked up, full of dubious ‘80s understandings of Dark Ages life and religion.

Morgaine, half-sister to King Arthur, is our protagonist but not really our hero; not only do we know she’s going to fail, but the story is predominantly an exploration of her consistently making bad choices that seemed to make sense at the time that mire her deeper and deeper into a self-created landscape of ruin and isolation as she, in short, gets everyone she’s ever loved killed, either accidentally or on purpose. Morgause, Morgaine’s aunt, is a power-hungry schemer, but also seems nice enough in her own way until she sort of wanders down the path of becoming a casual serial murderer as well. The various priestesses of Avalon become increasingly vicious, and brutal plotters against Arthur and anyone else in their way as they–quite understandably–seek to prevent the old religion from being wiped out by the Christian religion and its dedicatedly woman-hating priests.

Most of the Christians also suck, with Queen Gwenhwyfar being one of the worst–also a major viewpoint character, Gwenhwyfar is sometimes sympathetic, but is also a piously self-hating Christian fanatic. Her internal torment and self-hatred about her love for Lancelot does absolutely nothing to make her any less intolerant toward anyone else who fails to live up to the standards of sexual purity that she doesn’t live up to herself; she’s overtly nasty to anyone who follows or even tolerates any aspects of the old religion and constantly pushes Arthur to wage holy war against it; and she’s flatly bigoted against anyone with physical deformities, with apparently no idea whatsoever that this constitutes a character flaw about which she might want to at least try to keep her fucking mouth shut. But I guess when you’re the High Queen of Britain you’re allowed to just constantly insult people’s appearance and everyone around you has to consider you kind and gracious anyway? Idunno, I know the characters in this book are working off different moral codes than me but it really struck me how much all the other female characters sneak around to do evil things but Gwenhwyfar is just openly a huge bitch without provocation on a regular basis, and yet whatever other criticisms the other characters have of her, everyone seems to think she’s nice.

There are two different Merlin characters–”the Merlin of Britain” is a title here, not a name, like the Lady of the Lake–and both are advocates of a sort of “all religions are really one religion anyway” assimilationist path that sounds really tolerant and high-minded if you ignore that a) the Christians are absolutely not going to go for it and b) the practical effects of this sort of acquiescence-masquerading-as-syncretism will fall a lot harder on the women than on the men, and the Merlins, however dedicated to the Goddess they consider themselves, are still men, and can get away with more than the priestesses under Christian rule. The machinations of the Merlins and their attempts to play both sides end up driving a lot of the conflict between the forces of Avalon and the forces of Christianity. Both Merlins are very annoying, but then again, most characters in this book are annoying. It’s not a book you read to personally like anyone.

The sexual content is pretty dark and fucked up too, and it is here that it is hardest to even temporarily put aside in one’s brain that Bradley enabled her husband’s pedophilia. Parts of the book speak eloquently about the injustice of selling off teenage girls in marriage to men much older than them, and how this alienates girls from their own sexuality to the point where some characters are surprised, after many years of marriage, to discover that they have one. Lancelet, the greatest and knightliest of all of Arthur’s great knights, is tortured-ly bisexual and at one point he and Arthur and Gwenhwyfar have a threesome, which I think is supposed to be shocking, although–while I certainly found it a bit surprising that it was included in the book–it is one of the less creepy encounters in the entire 900 pages. Morgaine is nearly as obnoxiously self-serving and hypocritical in her thoughts on sex and religion as the pious adulteress Gwenhwyfar is; she is constantly drawing a distinction between the Goddess-given magical rites of sexuality and mere “animal rutting,” but the distinction doesn’t seem to have any actual criteria other than how she feels about it, and is mostly invoked based on whether or not she wants to be contemptuous about any given encounter. (IMO, Morgaine’s religious snobbery around sexuality–and, frankly, the sacramentalization of sexuality in a lot of these New Agey religions that Bradley was part of and their noble-savage-y understanding of ancient fertility cults–is more of a mirror to the Christian priests’ obsession with sexual purity than she thinks.) Morgaine, frankly, is a great protagonist because she is a fascinating psychological study in being very active and scheming but somehow never taking any responsibility for her own actions, because she is smart enough and philosophical enough to rationalize doing whatever she wants to do and then convincingly tell herself that she had no choice when it turns out badly.

Reading this book was a deeply strange experience. When I was reading it I couldn’t put it down, but frankly, often once I’d put it down I’d hesitate to pick it back up. I wish I’d read it ten years ago before we knew what we know now about its author, so that I could have just read the damn book, instead of also testing my ability to read a book as just the book when the author is a) terrible and b) safely dead. Anyway I think I’m glad I read it, even though I have mixed feelings about having found it to be such a powerful book, and I don’t think I’ll be rereading it anytime soon (or ever).

While there’s more Arthuriana to be read, the last one sitting on my TBR shelf in hard copy right now is an antique-looking edition of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Mort d’Arthur. According to his Wikipedia page Malory might also have been a rapist, but at least it’s unconfirmed that that’s even the right Thomas Malory. I’m getting very tired of learning things about authors.