bloodygranuaile

I got a very, very pretty set of Jane Austen books for Christmas and determined it was finally time to move on to the second in publication order, one of the most popular and beloved romances of all time: Pride and Prejudice. I have read this at least three times, and have seen the movie adaptation many times indeed, and have even watched the BBC miniseries once despite my longstanding resentment against its having introduced the notion that Mr. Darcy wanders around in wet shirts into popular culture.

Anyway. It turns out that some parts of this book are as familiar to me as my own hands, which are the parts that got adopted pretty faithfully into the 2005 movie, and also the opening lines, of course. Other parts I had plain forgotten, most of which is just amusingly bitchy dialogue that did not make the cut among all the other bitchy dialogue when adaptations were made.

What is there really left to say about Pride and Prejudice? There are two main camps of Austen fans, which most likely have more overlap than I would like to admit: Ones who are in it for the romance, and ones who are in it for the comedy. I am firmly in the comedy camp. I get the theory that the romantic fantasy is about not having to fix a man, but telling him to go fix himself if he knows what’s good for him and actually does it, and I get why this would appeal to women who are interested in men and who have fantasies about men that navigate all sorts of stupid gender dynamics. (For me, the only remotely attractive Austen hero is Henry Tilney, who represents the fantasy of What If A Heterosexual Guy Was Nonetheless Just Fun And Normal About Stuff.)

The comedy is great. Basically everybody in this book is a little bit insane in one way or another, and most of the conflict comes from these different ways of being insane bouncing off each other. Even the very nice chill people end up in conflict due to being too nice and chill and therefore unable to navigate the dysfunctions of the people around them. An understanding of the societal norms and laws that the characters are trying to navigate will certainly help you understand, for example, why it’s out of the question for any of these dumb bitches to get jobs, but many of the core themes explored are quite timeless, like “how awkward it is when your best friend gets together with someone you can’t stand” and “being embarrassed by your family in front of someone you’d rather look good in front of.” Austen is truly a master of character work, and it is this character work that elevates what is basically a story about a bunch of repressed wealthy English people refusing to communicate about their feelings into one of the greatest love stories ever told, one that even a hard-hearted curmudgeon like me can get so pulled into that I stay up too late reading.

For Christmas I got a beautiful set of hardback Jane Austen books. I intend to read them in publication order, and to that end first reread Sense and Sensibility. I had read this before but not for a very long time, I think in college or possibly even high school, and I know I’ve seen the movie but that was also many many years ago.

As her debut novel, this is not Austen at her peak, but it still hits all the classic Austen hallmarks–open talk about money, dryly witty but very mean descriptions of basically all the secondary characters, genteelly prospect-less heroines, problems that would be solved quicker if British people were ever allowed to talk about their feelings, general domestic shenanigans, and at least one person getting gravely ill or injured as a key plot point.

Our main heroine here is Elinor Dashwood, an extremely no-nonsense and scrupulously polite young woman with formidable emotional self-control, especially for a nineteen-year-old. She does most of the sense-having in the Dashwood household, as her mother and sisters are both much more emotionally expressive and inclined toward the romantic. The ne plus ultra of emotional sensitivity is the middle daughter, Marianne Dashwood, a seventeen-year-old who seems determined to embody every stereotype about over-emotional teenage girls that currently exists, although I don’t have much of an idea about how prevalent those stereotypes were in the 1810s or if it’s just Marianne.

The final romances in this one seem a little underdeveloped compared to her later works, but overall that’s OK, because the friendships–both real and the ones that are developed under polite duress and therefore sort of faked, like the one between Elinor and Lucy Steele–take center stage in a way I really enjoy. Colonel Brandon’s friendship with Elinor, which causes several people to think those two should get engaged, is a really lovely and rare example of a strong, selfless cross-sex friendship between two people who are both in love with other people and are able to become really good platonic friends without anything getting weird. The relationship between the girls and Mrs. Jennings, who is vulgar and frequently misreads situations but who does turn out to be a truly good-hearted and reliable person, is also great, and frequently very funny.

When Austen’s books were first published people were really scandalized about how economic they were, and while I think that is very funny because in a society where women weren’t allowed to have jobs, of course economics would be a critical consideration for marriage. But this upset people anyway. I love it, not just because it’s a more realistic way for the characters to talk–honestly, some of them are so blunt about it that I find myself thinking Austen may be laying it on a little thick–but it’s also very funny, because clearly some of these characters are telling themselves the same self-flattering but ludicrously un-self-aware things that the scandalized reviewers were.

Anyway, after many convoluted disappointments and scheming and general domestic shenanigans, Elinor and Marianne both end up happily and comfortably married, and then a movie was made about it with a truly excellent cast, which I should maybe rewatch.

Pride and Prejudice is next! I am much more familiar with that story, as it’s one of the only two Austen novels that I have read more than three times, so I don’t think I will be as surprised as I was in this one (I genuinely did find myself wondering what happened next, or how our heroines were going to get out of this one, because I couldn’t remember how the plot went), but it should be enjoyable all the same.

Today I finished reading two years’ worth of insane emails from my buddy Ishmael! That’s right, reading Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick over the course of a semester back in college wasn’t slow enough for me, so I have been reading Whale Weekly, an email newsletter that delivers the text of the book stretched out over the course of the whole two-year journey of the Pequod.

In the past fifteen years since I last read this book I’ve considered myself to have a very love-hate relationship with it, and also with whales and whaling, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve had to admit to myself that even the “hate” part of the love-hate relationship is fun. Reading this book again, and reading it in such a format as irregularly delivered emails, has really brought home how true that is. Email is a very weird format for a book such as this and one that is not particularly kind to the long-winded, lyrical, old-fashioned writing. I did occasionally end up skimming some emails because it’s just really hard to read emails that are long walls of text with huge unbroken paragraphs full of incredibly long sentences written in outdated Quaker dialect with lots of thees and thous. There are reasons you’re supposed to write emails using bullet points and white space and stuff. For a good number of the emails, my main emotional reaction was that I ought to buy a nice fancy hardback copy of the book again so I could read it far away from any modern attention-splintering machines and maybe it’d be easier to focus.

Structurally, this book makes some interesting choices, and not just the chapters devoted to incorrect whale facts, which is the sort of thing nineteenth-century audiences were fine with because they didn’t have Google or whaling museums to learn whale facts (correct or otherwise) from. The beginning of the book sets up Ishmael and Queequeg’s relationship in a way that makes you think it’s going to be an emotional throughline that takes up substantial page space throughout the book; instead, it fades very much into the background as the voyage goes on, with Queequeg popping up in a couple of key chapters regarding his illness and the crafting of the coffin-life-buoy but otherwise yielding most of the page space to Ahab, Stubb, Starbuck, Flask, and Pip. In the final showdown with the whale, we don’t even see Queequeg die–it’s Tashtego who, out of the “pagan harpooneers,” is dramatically illustrated as the last man visible when the ship goes down. It’s honestly a little disorienting sometimes, and also Queequeg is a great character (period-typical racial cringe aside) so it’s a bummer when he disappears from the action.

That said it must be admitted that none of the weird shit in this book, so matter how hard it may be to follow at times or how much it doesn’t fit the expected beats of a nautical adventure, or even how much period-typical racial cringe there is or how incorrect the whale facts are, make this any less of a masterpiece. It’s postmodern before postmodernism existed. It’s about God and fate and nature and hubris, and most of what it says about those things is contradictory. Three different people are having three very different mental breakdowns all at the same time. It has more Biblical imagery than you can shake a stick at but a conspicuous lack of a Jesus figure, which is refreshing in Western literature. If I recall correctly most of the Biblical references are pretty Old Testament, especially the names. Not as many Johns and Pauls as you usually get; in addition to our famous Ishmael and Ahab, there’s an Elijah and a ship called the Rachel. I guess the Old Testament vibe makes sense given where the story ends up.

Getting to the end of this has re-sparked some of my (occasionally reluctant) interest in whaling and whaling disasters. My mental list of Age of Sail related books I want to read is expanding and I am distressed that I cannot read like half a dozen of these books simultaneously while also going on another field trip to New Bedford and also checking out the Moby-Dick exhibit at the PEM. Well, I should be able to squeeze in time to go to the PEM at least; maybe next weekend.

It’s a long weekend and that means I had time to sit around and reread Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Sword, the second book in the Imperial Radch trilogy. In this one, the cast of characters expands dramatically, as our lone wolf AI heroine Breq gets put in charge of a ship, Mercy of Kalr, which is a little awkward given that Breq used to be a ship. On orders from one of the factions of Anaander Mianaai, Fleet Captain Breq goes to Athoek System–which consists mostly of the tea-growing planet Athoek and the associated Athoek Station–to secure it, and Lieutenant Awn’s sister, from the depredations of the civil war that’s broken out. Having been given a big pile of resources–military authority, the house name Mianaai, a ship, officers, a crew, and a bunch of access codes–Breq descends upon Athoek Station and starts aggressively inserting herself into a fixing everyone’s problems, to the great consternation of the people who liked it when those other people had problems. A lot of station politics happen, sometimes violently, and new factions come into play–or, more often, are uncovered as having already been in play. The lieutenants all have personal problems, two of them with each other. It’s all very fun.

I have read Treasure Island before and have, in fact, owned a copy of Treasure Island before, but I made the amateurish error of loaning it to somebody back in the day and then never got it back, so on one of my fits of coveting Peebles Classic Library editions I bought another copy on Etsy. I had thought that my prior batch of Peebles Classic Library books included it but apparently I’d been mashing up in my head the three I did have–Robinson Crusoe, also about an island in the Caribbean; 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, also about maritime adventures of dubious legality, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, also by Robert Louis Stevenson, so you can see how I got confused.

Anyway, apart from some deeply cringey period-typical casual racism, the book does hold up. The characters are memorable, the plot is exciting, the sense of Going On An Adventure is palpable. I ripped through the whole thing in one afternoon by the side of the lake and it was 100% what going to the lake is all about. Much of what goes on in this book has since become cliche, because this is the Foundational Text of fictional pirate adventures (it’s almost single-handedly responsible for the extremely ahistorical trope of burying treasure instead of immediately blowing it on booze and floozies), but at the time it was written it wasn’t cliche yet, and you really see why these things have gotten ripped off so many times: here, they really work. A lot of English children’s classics have essentially no value to the modern world except as a cautionary tale about how early you can start teaching children to be hideously racist; this one, on the other hand, has about a half-dozen unfortunate sentences scattered through it and the rest of it falls squarely into the “This is a classic for a reason” category. Reading it made me feel like an adventurous little kid again.

I have spent the last six months once again reading Dracula via email! I didn’t realize I didn’t have to sign up again to do another go-round of Dracula Daily; next year I think I will unsubscribe and follow along in my weird old annotated copy. (I am also being threatened with another round of The Beetle Weekly and that I think I simply could not survive.)

Anyway, Dracula continues to be a great story, about which most pop culture tropes and certainly nearly all film adaptations are a tragedy and a waste. Lucy and Jonathan especially are consistently done dirty. All the humor is stripped, a thing I think is more and more a problem every time I read the book and run across the corn speech, or Dracula’s unseasonable straw hat. Reading this book in small chunks with a bunch of insane Tumblrites is both a lot of fun and really ends up highlighting how a lot of mainstream and even academic Dracula discourse is at least as bonkers and wrong-headed as your average Tumblr-dwelling ball of mental illnesses.

Anyway it’s just. So good. The character work is so good. The horror is so good. It’s got a bunch of fucked-up Victorian English shit but unlike a lot of fucked-up Victorian English lit it’s got so much heart. This one is a classic for a reason.

Last weekend was Readercon! I spent a good chunk of it sitting on the Marriott patio plugging away at the last installment of my Gentlemen Bastards reread, The Republic of Thieves.

This book came out ten years ago, which means it’s been a whole ten years since I read it, which means for like 90% of it I felt like I was reading it for the first time. I remembered it had two storylines, one “present-time” one about an election in Karthain and one flashback one about the teen Bastards joining a theater company. I completely misremembered the ending, except that it was Very Bad for our lead boyos.

Some things have changed in the past ten years that definitely affected my perception of the election-running plot. One is that I got involved in political organizing, rather than just being a very news-houndy hobbyist and telling myself that meant I was Informed, so I had a lot more understanding of what they were doing and sympathy for how much it sucks, even though I don’t do electoral organizing. Another is that I had just recently watched the San Lorenzo episode of Leverage, which was a fun compare-and-contrast (and also made me feel like Locke and Jean were barely rigging this election at all! They were just… running it dirtily!) (this is a bad standard, isn’t it).

Anyway, I don’t have a lot of deep analysis here, not even about the politics of Karthain (I have one joke about Joe Manchin I will refrain from actually making, though). Mostly this book just continues to be a load of fun. It’s got murder and scams and fuckery and a pair of star-crossed lovers who can’t have a normal conversation to save their lives. It has Jean, basically the only character who doesn’t exist to be maximally infuriating to everybody at all times. This is part of the fun.

I have absolutely no idea how Scott Lynch is going to get our boys out of all the trouble they’re in. That’s part of the fun, too.

My girlfriend and I are playing Waterdeep: Dragon Heist (or, more specifically, we’re playing the Alexandrian remix of WDH for Pathfinder 2e with bits of Blades In the Dark thrown in, or something; I’m not the GM), and in preparation for such, I had to learn about spellcasting in Pathfinder and my girlfriend had to read Scott Lynch’s Gentleman Bastards series. I realized it’d been ages since I read it and should probably also get a refresher, if only for shenanigans ideas I might be able to steal, so my spare time in the past few weeks has been largely split between heisting dragons and rereading The Lies of Locke Lamora.

The Lies of Locke Lamora is 700 pages long, a fact which escaped me when I read it for the first time in ebook but which was much harder to ignore in hard copy, and it doesn’t have a dull moment in all 700. It’s one of those violent, nasty, sweary, boozy books that honestly feels a little more tired these days than it did 10 years ago given the post-Game of Thrones hangover many of us fantasy fans are still suffering, but as far as “sweary books that make sure you can smell the beer farts off the page” go, nothing else in it is tired. This is a fast-paced series of increasingly multilayered capers, cons, and conspiracies that isn’t afraid to put its extremely-domain-specific-competence-porn antihero through a series of undignified wringers, from being kicked in the balls to being nearly drowned in a barrel of horse piss. (At one point he is decked in the face “courtesy of Locke Lamora” while disguised as somebody else.)

Locke is a really fun protagonist; he’s not really a bad guy although obviously he’s not a good one either–an orphaned child with a nearly preternatural gift for thieving raised among criminals in a city where what counts as law-abiding isn’t much better, it’s easy to take Locke’s side as he lies his face off to everybody except his little found family gang in the Elderglass basement of the Temple of Perelandro. This little gang, called the Gentlemen Bastards, exists basically to violate the Secret Peace, a nasty little pact between the nobility and organized crime in which the city’s criminals are allowed to crime as much as they want only on the working and middle classes, and essentially avoid prosecution as long as they leave alone the nobility and the police force–you know, the group with all the fucking money in the first place, and the gang of thugs that’s supposed to be keeping the law. The Gentlemen Bastards take great pride in stealing off the people they’re not supposed to steal from, not out of any altruistic Robin Hood-esque reasons but just because the nobility is where the wealth is, and it’s the greater challenge than sneaking into the second stories of small shopkeepers’ houses. Anyway, the ruling class is a gang and the cops are also a gang.

Locke and his best buddy Jean cause heaps of trouble and get in even more, crossing paths with a variety of upsettingly powerful people who do wind up really exposing the degree to which, despite their excellent con artist skills, the Gentleman Bastards really are just little guys. Can they con their way out of having every powerful faction in Camorr deeply enraged at them? Even if so, at what cost? The answers make exciting reading but admittedly do also make me worried for the fate of my own little rogue thief because I’m not nearly as smart as Scott Lynch and I’ve got to make decisions more or less in real-time, which is hard. (I saw Scott Lynch do a panel about that once and boy is he correct.)

Have I mentioned I love heist fantasy? If not, please know that I love heist fantasy, and this is very good heist fantasy.

I had forgotten how much I liked Network Effect!

Some of it might just be because I really dig the novella length for Murderbot’s wacky escapades, and having one random novel in there sort of sticks out weirdly from a series that is otherwise, so far, all novellas. I almost didn’t want to like it as much as I liked the novellas and I was a little surprised that I had given it five stars on the first read, especially given that I had only given all the novellas four stars. This was in the pre-vaccine part of the pandemic and I guess I wasn’t forming memories super well, lol.

Anyway, I started rereading it before bed and the next thing I knew I’d read the first hundred pages and it was super late. Then I did the same thing the next night. Then I blew off going for a walk on the nicest afternoon of the week to finish it (whoops). This one is riveting. There are so many factions! So much drama! An incredibly angry ART! Creepy mind control space aliens shit! Also more SecUnits, including a second killware version of Murderbot, who, among other shenanigans, increases Murderbot’s ability to waste time arguing with itself by a lot. I had totally forgotten the plot somehow but it was a really fun and action-packed space adventure with lots of twists and things not being as they initially seem and all that good stuff, and I was on tenterhooks the whole time.

Next up: Rogue Protocol, otherwise known as “the one where Murderbot does corporate espionage on GrayCris even though nobody asked it to.” After digging into its own background during the events of Artificial Condition, Murderbot sees a newsburst indicating that a new company has picked up where GrayCris supposedly left off at a terraforming facility that it had abandoned. Rumors were abounding that GrayCris had actually been mining the planet in question for illegal synthetics and not actually terraforming at all, which meant that the company that had bought it was now well positioned to discover if something was off about this “terraforming” facility. This is where Murderbot comes in, sneaking its way onto the facility to look for evidence of GrayCris’ malfeasance, and portraying itself as a secret extra security person when it is discovered.

In this book, Murderbot’s journey of self-discovery is largely helped along by a friendly little bot called Miki, who is basically the human researchers’ pet robot. Murderbot doesn’t want to be a pet robot but is nonetheless subjected to having many emotions about the degree to which Miki and the humans seem to actually care about each other. Murderbot’s journey of corporate malfeasance discovery and data retrieval is also helped along by Miki, who talks the humans into trusting Murderbot for long enough to let it help, and even tries to fight the combat units that GrayCris left behind to cause trouble. The action sequences are thrilling and cinematic and all that stuff you want out of a space opera about cyborgs doing corporate espionage in space. Since this is my second read I know that Murderbot has now basically made the rounds meeting people enough that further books will involve in going “home” in various ways (i.e. running into them again) so I don’t even have to be too critical of the sad lack of ART in this one, especially since ART clearly lives on in spirit under Murderbot’s skin basically all the time.