primeideal (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
primeideal) wrote2024-04-28 05:12 pm
primeideal) wrote2024-04-28 05:12 pm
Entry tags:
Book miscellanea (or, books I'm not reviewing)
AKA more of "things I expect to get around to posting and then never do," but I just found a friending meme in a book discussion community that brought up a couple of these thoughts, so I should probably post them here.
1. In August I read "If on a winter's night a traveler" and mentioned that I'd gotten the recommendation from "Once Upon a Prime" (Sarah Hart). It was extremely meta but also extremely male-gazey. A few months later, I read "Hopscotch"/"Rayuela" by Julio Cortázar, recommended in the same place. This book has a "choose your own adventure" structure--you can read the chapters in order to get a two-part story set first in Paris, then Buenos Aires; or you can follow a zigzag path around the book that includes "supplemental" material at the end. You will notice that I did not review it at the time. That is because I had nothing good to say about it.
The bar for "be less male-gazey than 'If on a winter's night a traveler'" was set on the floor. Cortázar dug down into the basement and the parking garage to go way, way under the bar. "Hopscotch" is for people who think the characters in "La bohème" were too practical and well-adjusted and that we needed artsy-fartsy Parisians with their heads deeper in the clouds. It's "Men Do, Women Are" the whole time. The protagonists' hero is an author who's trying to "destroy" literature by writing a novel that can be read in any order, in order to frustrate passive/stupid/"female" readers who want everything simple. We get it, you're edgy and deconstructive things. The Oulipo did it better! Borges did it better! Calvino did it better without doing it actually well! There were a couple funny chapters near the "end" (in the zigzag order) but it was not nearly worth the 500 page journey.
Bonus content from the three-sentence ficathon.
2. I will probably not review a book if any review I could write would risk falling into Kafkatrap territory. What do I mean when I say "Kafkatrap"?
Let's say a woman writes a novel whose thesis is "men are garbage, even when they mean well, all they do is ruin things." Let's say another woman is reviewing this novel. Her review might lean in the direction of "yeah, the author is right, men are garbage!" Or, it could lean towards "no, this is an unfair generalization, men are not garbage in general." And in either case, hopefully she engages with the case the book makes and points out how it succeeds or fails. Either way, a third-party reader could reasonably read the review and see how it supports whichever side the reviewer comes down on, whether or not they agree.
Now let's say a man has been assigned to review that same novel. Again, his review is likely to boil down to either "yes, men are garbage" or "no, men are not garbage." In the first case, this will be interpreted as evidence in favor of the author's original thesis: "men are garbage, it's so self-evidently clear even a man can admit it!" In the second case, however, this will also be interpreted as evidence in favor of the original thesis: "the fact that this man is unable to accept his garbageness is, in fact, a demonstration of his garbageness." But if agreeing with the author is evidence for the author's claim, and disagreeing with the author is also evidence for the author's claim, then there was no point in the review in the first place. The claim is unfalsifiable, at least by a man!
3. I read "The Ministry for the Future" by Kim Stanley Robinson in/around November 2022. Robinson is a writer of a trilogy about Mars, which I have not read, but which inspired some of the worldbuilding in the boardgame "Terraforming Mars," which is great. So for that alone, I will give him props.
Some of the book is not really written in a traditionally novelistic style. It's more thought experiments with nonfiction prose, infodumping technological and/or economic alternatives to the dominant system right now, or "conversations" among people sitting in a room. Like this. Who don't have. Or need. Quotation marks. Or individual names. Or separation of thought. Because it's not about actions of a single person that matter. It's the zeitgeist. Collective change. Is necessary. To escape. Our crisis.
This writing style. Doesn't really. Work for me. But. If that. Were the worst part. Of the book. I'd probably. Have written a full-length review. At the time. Anyway. Because you can critique it.
The prose/narrative/character/more traditional chapters. In the book. Are worse. Than that. But. I can't. Do justice. To how bad. It was. Please see. Point two.
4. I've been holding off on discussion of another recent read because I thought it would come up for a "two canons, one description" game on anonmeme chat, but anonmemes are also wretched hives of scums and villainy, so. Let's play. Name two canons that feature:
-Setting is New Zealand but definitely not the present-day.
-not a traditional body-swap trope but definitely body-swap adjacent trope vibes.
-a lot of elaborate planet-based symbolism.
Canon one is The Locked Tomb series (of which I've only read the first book but have osmosed plenty). Canon two is "The Luminaries," by Eleanor Catton, which is also a "Once Upon a Prime" rec! It's very Oulipian in the way it's divided into twelve chapters, each half the length of the previous (so the last chapter is ~drabble length, and the first one comprises half the book). There are a bunch of characters patterned after the astrological planets and zodiac signs.
By and large, this structure worked for me--some reviews I saw were like, "it's too distant/not enough character emotion because of the weird structure," but I'm here for that. It's "litficcy" in the sense that the last few (very short) chapters don't really move the plot forward, it's just prose, but the overall gimmick is good enough to make up for that.
There's a lot of "blind men with the elephant putting the pieces together" stuff, so there's also a lot of summary infodumping, which is good. Some of that infodumping is also misleading--there are magical realism aspects, but you kind of have to read between the lines for those. So there's an amusing courtroom scene at the end where the characters are trying to present a plausible version of events, at the cost of the implausible truth.
Zero out of twelve of the zodiac characters are women, yet it still winds up being the least male-gazey of the three "Prime" recs...
5. Tangential to 4, but if you're a copypasta math spammer from anonmeme, come say hi in namespace? I can't promise to understand weird set theory conjectures but I'm, like, a couple degrees of separation from some of the set theory people who get namedropped ;)
6. Someday I might work up the nerve to surreptitiously signal-boost an anthology I'm involved with in other-name-space, but today is not that day haha
1. In August I read "If on a winter's night a traveler" and mentioned that I'd gotten the recommendation from "Once Upon a Prime" (Sarah Hart). It was extremely meta but also extremely male-gazey. A few months later, I read "Hopscotch"/"Rayuela" by Julio Cortázar, recommended in the same place. This book has a "choose your own adventure" structure--you can read the chapters in order to get a two-part story set first in Paris, then Buenos Aires; or you can follow a zigzag path around the book that includes "supplemental" material at the end. You will notice that I did not review it at the time. That is because I had nothing good to say about it.
The bar for "be less male-gazey than 'If on a winter's night a traveler'" was set on the floor. Cortázar dug down into the basement and the parking garage to go way, way under the bar. "Hopscotch" is for people who think the characters in "La bohème" were too practical and well-adjusted and that we needed artsy-fartsy Parisians with their heads deeper in the clouds. It's "Men Do, Women Are" the whole time. The protagonists' hero is an author who's trying to "destroy" literature by writing a novel that can be read in any order, in order to frustrate passive/stupid/"female" readers who want everything simple. We get it, you're edgy and deconstructive things. The Oulipo did it better! Borges did it better! Calvino did it better without doing it actually well! There were a couple funny chapters near the "end" (in the zigzag order) but it was not nearly worth the 500 page journey.
Bonus content from the three-sentence ficathon.
2. I will probably not review a book if any review I could write would risk falling into Kafkatrap territory. What do I mean when I say "Kafkatrap"?
Let's say a woman writes a novel whose thesis is "men are garbage, even when they mean well, all they do is ruin things." Let's say another woman is reviewing this novel. Her review might lean in the direction of "yeah, the author is right, men are garbage!" Or, it could lean towards "no, this is an unfair generalization, men are not garbage in general." And in either case, hopefully she engages with the case the book makes and points out how it succeeds or fails. Either way, a third-party reader could reasonably read the review and see how it supports whichever side the reviewer comes down on, whether or not they agree.
Now let's say a man has been assigned to review that same novel. Again, his review is likely to boil down to either "yes, men are garbage" or "no, men are not garbage." In the first case, this will be interpreted as evidence in favor of the author's original thesis: "men are garbage, it's so self-evidently clear even a man can admit it!" In the second case, however, this will also be interpreted as evidence in favor of the original thesis: "the fact that this man is unable to accept his garbageness is, in fact, a demonstration of his garbageness." But if agreeing with the author is evidence for the author's claim, and disagreeing with the author is also evidence for the author's claim, then there was no point in the review in the first place. The claim is unfalsifiable, at least by a man!
3. I read "The Ministry for the Future" by Kim Stanley Robinson in/around November 2022. Robinson is a writer of a trilogy about Mars, which I have not read, but which inspired some of the worldbuilding in the boardgame "Terraforming Mars," which is great. So for that alone, I will give him props.
Some of the book is not really written in a traditionally novelistic style. It's more thought experiments with nonfiction prose, infodumping technological and/or economic alternatives to the dominant system right now, or "conversations" among people sitting in a room. Like this. Who don't have. Or need. Quotation marks. Or individual names. Or separation of thought. Because it's not about actions of a single person that matter. It's the zeitgeist. Collective change. Is necessary. To escape. Our crisis.
This writing style. Doesn't really. Work for me. But. If that. Were the worst part. Of the book. I'd probably. Have written a full-length review. At the time. Anyway. Because you can critique it.
The prose/narrative/character/more traditional chapters. In the book. Are worse. Than that. But. I can't. Do justice. To how bad. It was. Please see. Point two.
4. I've been holding off on discussion of another recent read because I thought it would come up for a "two canons, one description" game on anonmeme chat, but anonmemes are also wretched hives of scums and villainy, so. Let's play. Name two canons that feature:
-Setting is New Zealand but definitely not the present-day.
-not a traditional body-swap trope but definitely body-swap adjacent trope vibes.
-a lot of elaborate planet-based symbolism.
Canon one is The Locked Tomb series (of which I've only read the first book but have osmosed plenty). Canon two is "The Luminaries," by Eleanor Catton, which is also a "Once Upon a Prime" rec! It's very Oulipian in the way it's divided into twelve chapters, each half the length of the previous (so the last chapter is ~drabble length, and the first one comprises half the book). There are a bunch of characters patterned after the astrological planets and zodiac signs.
By and large, this structure worked for me--some reviews I saw were like, "it's too distant/not enough character emotion because of the weird structure," but I'm here for that. It's "litficcy" in the sense that the last few (very short) chapters don't really move the plot forward, it's just prose, but the overall gimmick is good enough to make up for that.
There's a lot of "blind men with the elephant putting the pieces together" stuff, so there's also a lot of summary infodumping, which is good. Some of that infodumping is also misleading--there are magical realism aspects, but you kind of have to read between the lines for those. So there's an amusing courtroom scene at the end where the characters are trying to present a plausible version of events, at the cost of the implausible truth.
Zero out of twelve of the zodiac characters are women, yet it still winds up being the least male-gazey of the three "Prime" recs...
5. Tangential to 4, but if you're a copypasta math spammer from anonmeme, come say hi in namespace? I can't promise to understand weird set theory conjectures but I'm, like, a couple degrees of separation from some of the set theory people who get namedropped ;)
6. Someday I might work up the nerve to surreptitiously signal-boost an anthology I'm involved with in other-name-space, but today is not that day haha
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As I mentioned on the book friending meme, I picked up Hopscotch back in the day because a (male :P) friend had been blown away by it, and I knew my father was also a Cortazar fan. But while I did not get very far in my own read, "Borges did it better" was kind of my main takeaway from that attempt.
Kim Stanley Robinson is another author I've bounced off, and I think it's to do with his prose, yeah. There's just something so... whatever the opposite of "engrossing" is in how he write? In a subjective way, of course, but for me. I attempted the Mast Trilogy at a time when I very rarely DNF'd books and just couldn't make it very far, and on years when I'm doing Hugo Awards homework reading, I've had the hardest time getting through even the self-imposed limit of 50 pages for a novel when it comes to KSR. It's kind of too bad, because reading the Wikipedia entries for his books, he has some interesting premises, and I respect thorough worldbuilding. I just apparently really cannot handle it written like this.
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