In "From All False Doctrine," Charlie Boult is a teenage car thief from the mean streets of Toronto, who's in the process of changing his ways and becomes an acolyte at Kit Underhill's church. In the last couple chapters, everyone (including Charlie) witnesses a miraculous event, and then has to deal with "how do we go back to our normal lives after we've just seen this."

"Neither Have I Wings" picks up twenty years later, as World War II is wrapping up in Europe. Charlie is an air force pilot stationed in Yorkshire; the other POV character, Evgenia ("Evvie") is volunteering at a hospital for recovering amputees. But one day, the police come by investigating a murder, and Evgenia is curious about the mystery; meanwhile, Charlie discovers something very strange hidden in the outbuilding, and all of the sudden he's back in the world of demons and miracles...

"From All False Doctrine" was a slow burn with a lot of wrong-genre savvy. "Neither Have I Wings" is brisker, faster-paced, and Charlie's plotline in particular is clearly supernatural from chapter one. Points for "Wings." (The title comes from a folksong called "The Water Is Wide." It's funny because Charlie is an airplane pilot. And angels sometimes have wings. Get it?) Evvie's, however, is a mix of "I've had supernatural visions in my life before so I'm primed to suspect miraculous events even on very weak evidence," and laser-guided amnesia, which leads to more "this is suppposed to be a fantasy book but a lot of it is a comedy of manners."

At first it seems like a legit standalone sequel--for the most part, you don't really need to know what happened with Kit, just that it was a miracle in the midst of Charlie's otherwise-mundane life. But towards the second half, as more characters get introduced and others get re-introduced, I was more appreciative that I'd read "False Doctrine" first, I'm not sure the entire thing would work on its own.

In "False Doctrine," Peachy tells lots of lies about him and Kit avoiding military service in WWI. It turns out that Kit volunteering put Peachy to shame, and he's uncomfortable with this, so he just lies and Kit rolls with it. But when Peachy is confronted by demonic forces, his hero-worship of Kit turns unhealthy--on some level, he wants to be Kit. Charlie takes this kind of hero-worship in a different direction; Kit served in WWI, so he'll serve in WWII. He is admirably honest with himself in a way that Peachy couldn't be. But the gap between the impossible ideal of goodness Kit represents to both of them, and their own flawed selves, is still there. Meanwhile, a completely different character turns out to be lying about almost everything in her life. I can understand a need for secrecy, there is a war going on, but the completely over-the-top frivolous details seem more distracting than helpful. She couldn't possibly have come from the Peverell Peacham school of Blatant Lies...unless...??

This was recced as subverting the friends-to-lovers trope, inasmuch as Charlie and Evvie are friends but don't become each other's lovers. I would caveat that, while their paths cross briefly early on, it takes a long time for them to actually interact with each other as friends. Their plotlines run parallel but don't directly intersect for a while (which makes for some funny moments when I realized how a couple minor characters were related).

Like "False Doctrine," "Wings" is very positive/optimistic about Christianity (specifically Anglo-Catholicism, and here also Greek Orthodoxy) and the power of God's love to overcome human prejudice and fear. "False Doctrine" featured two hetero love stories against the social conventions of 1925. "Wings" is far less heteronormative, and has more emphasis on the terrible things that can be done in the name of religion (including a character who's either the greatest or worst example of nominative determinism, you'll have to keep reading to find out which).

Charlie's plotline might feel a little too sweetness-and-light at times, things are not going to be easy with or without supernatural beings in the mix, and after the author makes a pretty powerful statement about love and commitment, trying to increase the tension by being all "what if it was just a lie" comes off as "Like You Would Really Do It"/"Unfortunate Implications." But in the long run, after some grief and pain, we can infer it's going to be a case of Earn Your Happy Ending.

Evvie's plotline was harder for me to make sense of. I could understand a case of "I know what I'm called to do in life, other people might not understand, but that's okay;" I could also have seen it as "I thought I knew what I was meant to do, but meeting people from different walks of life has opened my mind to different possibilities, and now I see how I might be able to serve God in a different vocation." What we got instead was a late swerve followed by a quick unswerve, and that didn't seem to resolve anything. Fic potential?

This book :handshake: Amina al-Sirafi :handshake: A Master of Djinn
What if we found the mystical artifact King Solomon used to control angels and demons. Solomon is having a moment!

This book is also very much cut from the same mold as "To Say Nothing Of The Dog." Keeping calm and carrying on in the war, aspiring to be cool detectives like Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, criticizing architecture that's trying to look medieval but is actually just Victorian pseudo-medieval...The Anglicans know what they're about.

There's a running joke about "angel wings need to change color to match the liturgical calendar," and like, I am very much part of the niche target audience this was targeted at. And if you think this is very amusing:


then you might be also. ;)



Bingo: Criminals (not a major emphasis but Charlie is an expert car thief), Dreams (and how), Prologues/Epilogues, Self/Indie Published, Romance, Multi-POV (including the prologue/epilogues), Disabled Character (neither of the POVs but a fairly prominent character and several minor ones--they are at a rehabilitation facility.)

This is the first two books of the "Book of the New Sun" quadrology, republished as a single volume.

What I had osmosed about the series: it is highly-regarded in the subgenre of "sufficiently advanced technology," which is a subgenre I like very much; also, there are a lot of Biblical allusions that one should be on the lookout for, potentially even the protagonist being kind of a Christlike figure in some ways.

Are there Biblical allusions? Yes. On one page the narrator, Severian, has a meager meal of loaves and fishes while being told there's no room in the inn; later, someone tells him that he could "become a carpenter or a fisherman."

But it's more than that. In "Piranesi," the narrator namedrops things like types of medicines and a year-numbering system that are too weirdly specific to be "hmm some fantasy world that's similar to ours but different;" the questions aren't so much "what" and "where" as "how" and "why." Something similar is going on here; Severian alludes to a holy woman named Katherine who's associated with being tortured on a wheel and persecuted by a man named Maxentius (okay, I recognize her iconography more from "Doomsday Book" than the actual legend), people read the Biblical story about the death of Moses, like...it can't be just some random expy, it's our world's Mount Nebo. So what's going on?

Wolfe mentions in the "translator's notes" that "I might easily have saved myself a great deal of labor by having recourse to invented terms; in no case have I done so." That is, his "neologisms," and there are many, are all based on real if archaic vocabulary. For example, Sevarian's cloak is a magical substance that's "darker than black"; Wolfe describes this as "fuligin," which was not a word I was familiar with before, but comes from the Italian word for "sooty." Maybe if I'd been reading along on an e-reader I would have been more motivated to look up some of these, but since I was reading a paper version I mostly just nodded along and got the gist of it as "general SF worldbuilding flavor." I'm willing to give Wolfe the benefit of the doubt here that this part was effortful and clever.

In some ways, it's a picaresque; Severian wanders around and meets lots of strange people. In no particular order, we have giant merpeople, duels fought via poisoned plants, time-travelling photosynthesizers, grave robbers, a miraculous relic, underground ape-people, the legend of Theseus and the minotaur, an underground palace, a Borgesian realm of secret passageways and optical illusions hidden inside the underground palace. Sounds cool, right?

Unfortunately, the overall effect is less than the sum of its parts, because Severian himself doesn't seem particularly interested in any of that. Instead, his motivations involve rising through the ranks of the Torturers' Guild, and then, when he gets exiled from the guild, keeping possession of the cool sword his former teacher gave him. And, beyond that...well, his inner monologue is a lot like "Mambo No. 5." A little bit of Thecla in her cell. A little bit of Jolenta, what the hell. A little bit of Agia with her sword. A little bit of Dorcas, thank the Lord... Women are so hot in so many different ways! And as a professional executioner, Severian has plenty of "clients" to practice his "trade" on, if you know what I mean. When he comes of age, he's given the opportunity to leave the guild, but turns it down because he doesn't know what else he'd do with himself. "Not the Messiah but just a naughty boy" is kind of an understatement.

Here's the narrative lampshading Sevarian's ignorance:
I want to be careful here, because identitarian metrics are not (and shouldn't be) the end-all, be-all of a story's quality. There are lots of books and stories that I genuinely enjoy that don't really pass the Bechdel test or have many well-rounded women characters. If I'm reading about Noren trying to defy the Scholars' tyranny, or Mark Watney surviving Mars, or Erasmas angsting about impostor syndrome, then even if the characters aren't demographically similar to me, I can relate to the puzzles they're trying to solve and the discoveries they're making about the world they live in--that's interesting in its own right. Conversely, if we're talking about Messiahs, the biblical Jesus' inner circle was infamously male-skewed--but he also had a mother and Auntie Elizabeth and people like Mary and Martha who he could hang out with as friends, not just objects to perform miracles on! Severian's POV exists at the intersection of "not particularly curious about anything else except weapons and ladies" and "women don't exist as freestanding people, just objects of attraction or violence," and the result is worse than either of the two alone.

There are a couple places where the book uses Latin to represent what, to the characters, is an ancient language. The caveat here is that the translations are slightly "wrong." For example, Sevarian's cool sword which he spends a lot of time chasing around is "Terminus Est," which he translates as "This Is The Line Of Division." It's more literally an allusion to "It is finished" (what Jesus says on the cross, get it????) Earlier, there's a quote about "Lux dei vitae viam monstrat," translated as "The beam of the New Sun lights the way of life." Are we saying that the New Sun is "dei," God? Is it a literal sun in the sky, like the Mother Star is in Noren's world? Is it some alien fusion technology that will replace the old sun? Who knows? Certainly not Severian, that is for darn sure.

Again, this is only half of the overall series, so it's possible things are be more cohesive in parts 3 and 4; however, the things I've osmosed since then seem to indicate that it's a lot more of the "picaresque vibing but not a lot of plot." I understand that for those who enjoy that kind of thing, putting together the background clues about what's going on even though Severian doesn't know or care might be fun (see: the pacing of "Steerswoman"). However, I'm worried it might be more like "Piranesi," which I didn't care enough about to pursue past the free sample in the Hugo packet.

Bingo: First in a series; "Claw of the Conciliator" would be an Alliterative title; lots of underground settings, including the imperial House Absolute and the cave of the ape-people; lots of weird and magical dreams; side character with a disability (the blind librarian)--there's also Jonas, who seems at first to have a prosthetic hand, but the reveal of what's going on with him is interesting and clever; hints of Eldritch Abominations (the alien monster beings living in the ocean whom the mermaids serve?); reference materials (the "translator's notes"); previous readalong.

Found this one via a Yuletide promo post and it seemed RTMI. And, parts of it are, but parts of it are not. This is tricky to review in part because it's tricky to categorize. Because it was advertised as a fantasy, I'm primed to read between the lines and look for supernatural happenings, but the characters don't know that they're in that genre, from their perspective it's a meet-cute or an academic detective story for a long time.

Premise: in 1920s Toronto, a pair of best friends meet another pair of best friends on a beach. Elsa Nordqvist is starting her masters' in classics; Harriet Spencer is a flirty, lighthearted undergrad; Peverell "Peachy" Peacham is an effervescent musician who can't hold a real job, and Christopher "Kit" Underhill is quiet but wise. When Harriet and Peachy meet, sparks immediately fly; Elsa and Kit are also quietly drawn to each other, but mostly interested in setting up the Harriet/Peachy romance. Elsa is talkative about her research, her childhood on a farm in Saskatchewan, and her attitude of healthy skepticism. Only when they're going their separate ways does she realize that Kit...is actually an Anglo-Catholic priest. Oops. Awkwardness ensues.

Elsa and her advisor are researching a manuscript called the Bibliotheka Orphika, which purports to be a collection of ancient Greek texts from a cult built around the mystic worship of Orpheus, who has to descend to the underworld to rescue his Eurydice; according to the Bibliotheka, the pure soul needs to descend to the metaphorical otherworld to unlock its spiritual powers and overcome the base world of matter. Elsa doesn't really believe in any of this stuff, but is intrigued enough by it as an academic exercise to research its provenance.

So there's a lot of "what would you do if you could overcome the world of base matter? Would you want to become someone else? How?" that has different resonances in 1925 versus 2014 (when it was written) versus today. Elsa admires her advisor because he represents her ideal of an independent scholar, unbeholden to worldly concerns.
Kit and Peachy's conversation on the subject was pretty interesting; they interpret the "soul is good and pure, matter is base and evil" philosophy in the context of the Gnostics, an early Christian sect that the Gospel of John was written in response to.


Bingo: Probably using it for Angels and Demons. Could also count for Mundane Jobs and Self/Indie Published.

In college I saw the Berlioz opera version of "Faust" as a first-year, and read a translation of Goethe's poem as a senior. Neither one made much of an impression on me. But I recently read an interesting essay about this Soviet-era satire, and it's a perfect fit for two bingo squares, so here we are. Classics appreciation time!

M&M consists of three-ish interwoven narratives. The first concerns the visit of Satan (he goes by the name "Woland," which is apparently a Faust allusion I didn't remember) and his posse to 1930s Moscow. The gang makes trouble, handing out ten-ruble bills that disappear or turn to embarrassing foreign currency, but even the literal forces of darkness are no match for the resolutely materialistic Soviet regime trying, and failing, to explain away all the strangeness. The second is about the titular characters; "the Master" is a novelist who has faced intense criticism for trying to write a novel about Pontius Pilate, and his lover, Margarita, who fiercely believes in him. (Margarita is the cognate to Marguerite/Gretchen in Faust.) And the third is the story-within-a-story about Pilate, as told in turns by Woland and the Master. In some ways it's a suitable-for-Soviet-print, "historical" version of the Passion story without any of that dangerous supernatural stuff, but it's plenty weird in its own right.

Russian novels are often stereotyped as "everyone has names like 'Mikhail Alexandrovich Berlioz,' and sometimes he's 'Mikhail Alexandrovich,' sometimes he's 'Berlioz,' sometimes he's 'Misha,' depending on who's talking." I don't think that this is a problem, because a lot of the characters aren't so much names as archetypes or roles: "the financial director of the theater," "the overworked landlord." Even if you don't remember who's who, you can figure it out by the vibes.

Even if it's not laugh-out-loud funny, there are plenty of moments of dry humor, particularly as regards one of the devilish companions, a cat named Behemoth (who sometimes appears as a man with a catlike face).
Ivan, the witness of this account, later summarizes these events to the Master, who is amused by this part of the story. Clearly he has good taste. There's also a living chessboard, much like Harry Potter, where Behemoth and Woland play chess. (Behemoth tries to cheat by getting his king and bishop to switch places.)
There's also humor to be found in the absurdities of Soviet life. When a famous writer dies violently, everyone is desperate to apply for his apartment, because the housing shortage is so terrible. Too relatable. :/ 

Bingo: Perfect fit for "Literary Fantasy" and "Angels and Demons." Could probably be considered for "Myths and Retellings" (the Easter story and Faust), and "Title with a Title"?

(Yeah it's another Christianity-themed bingo pick, there will probably be more where this came from, sorry if this is not your thing.)

A few months ago I was having a heavy conversation with a board game friend in which, among other things, I despaired of my possibilities for "real friendship," whatever that means. (This is not the same person from Debrief, but similar vibes.) Basically, there are lots of people I can enjoy spending time with, because we have similar hobbies and those hobbies are more fun together. But there are very few people where I feel like I would be okay with them dumping their emotions on me. By the principle of fairness/reciprocity, there are very few people where I feel like I would be okay dumping my feelings on them! Now, it's possible, even likely, that different people bring different strengths and weaknesses to a relationship, and it might sometimes be okay to show friendship in one way and receive it in another...but for someone like me, there's still a lot of anxiety about what counts as "fair" on those terms.

My friend's response, in part, was to bring up "The Great Divorce," and the philosophy that where you wind up in life isn't the result of one consequential turning point but rather many small turning points that add up. Maybe sometimes relationships are like that too--ones that succeed aren't the result of grand gestures, but lots of small cases of deliberate effort into trying to make them work?

Anyway, I'd heard of the book before but hadn't actually read it, so it went on the list, and fortunately it fits a couple different bingo squares so here we are! :P

"The Great Divorce" is told by a narrator who sort of kind of is "Lewis himself," who finds himself in a gray and grungy town and gets on a bus with some of the other locals, which drops them off in a sunny and pleasant forest. There, among other things, he meets his (or at least the RL Lewis') hero, George MacDonald, and spends a lot of time asking him questions and following around and hugging him when things get scary. So I was very glad to have started the Divine Comedy readalong before this, because it's very similar to the Dante & Virgil vibes. In fact, Lewis makes the parallel explicit: "I tried to tell how a certain frosty afternoon at Leatherhead Station when I first bought a copy of Phantastes (being then about sixteen years old) had been to me what the first sight of Beatrice had been to Dante: Here begins the New Life."

Lewis, unlike Dante, does not have people staring at him and going "...why are you here, you're not even dead," nor does he spend as much time talking smack about people from his city or awkwardly being translated into weird-scanning Longfellow lines of iambic pentameter. Points for Lewis.

The overall conceit is that people from the Gray Town have the appearance of Ghosts, and the people who live in the green place are Bright Spirits, and each of the Ghosts is met with a Spirit who tells them how great everything is and how all wounds of the past are forgiven, and they are allowed and encouraged to stay. The Ghosts, however, find the green place uncomfortable at first (walking on grass hurts because everything is "too" solid!), and most of them, rather than adapt, prefer the familiarity of the Gray Town. You get where this is going.

Several of the ghosts and their rationalizations for refusing the invitation were very well-drawn. Early on we meet an Intelligent Episcopalian ghost who is way, way too familiar as the progressive liberal sort who cares so much about being the right sort of open-minded chap that he's drifted away from, you know, actual faith:

Content note: lots of religion.

( Read more... )

Fact: language is changing all the time. That's not good or bad, it just is.

Probably the types of change that are easiest to see on an individual timescale are changes in vocabulary. We make up new nouns/verbs/adjectives, and old ones fall out of fashion. You can "unfriend" someone (a noun, "friend," turned into a verb, "friend"="add as a friend on a social networking platform," which then combined with the existing prefix "un"); we tend to no longer call things "groovy."

On the scale of centuries, though, there are more drastic changes in stuff like pronunciation and syntax. Shakespeare rhymes "proved" and "loved," which means these words probably rhymed five hundred years ago. If you compare Latin to modern Spanish, you can see lots and lots of cognates, but Latin has different case endings for nouns (subject, direct object, indirect object, possessive, being addressed...); Spanish basically has none of this, except for pronouns.

Another fact: language change is from the ground-up. There isn't an authority that dictates "hey everybody, we're going to stop pronouncing 'e' on the ends of words now!" People just gradually change, sometimes one region or one cultural group at a time, and then it slowly spreads.

Especially in English, the role of dictionaries/linguistics scholars in general is to document changes in the language, not tell people how to speak. ("descriptive" versus "prescriptive grammar.") In other languages, there are more prestigious bodies that try to regulate the prestige dialect (the French Academy), but even they don't have the authority to arrest people for slipping in English-influenced slang.

Also a fact: spoken language changes faster than written language. I might say "I'm'a watch the ball game," where the 'a comes from "going to-> gonna -> m'a -> 'a," but I wouldn't write that in a formal document.

Also a fact: especially in this day and age (as opposed to 100 or 500 years ago), there's a lot more opportunity for subcultures to develop their own jargon that's kind of impenetrable, even meaningless, to outsiders.

A lot of my metaphors come from religion, because I'm a religious person, but also know that many of my peers are not. If I say something like "Protestants only recognize baptism and the Eucharist as sacraments; they perform ordination too, but don't consider it a sacrament like Catholics do" out of context, a lot of my friends would be like "...what...those sure are words." Which is fine. If they need to know what I'm talking about, they can get a dictionary.

But just because an authority registers some use of language as accepted within a language community, that doesn't make it any more meaningful than it was before--very likely it was already established among many people. And it doesn't mean that it reflects an objectively verifiable concept! So you can't use it as a weapon to put words in someone else's mouth.

(I have a lot of abstract rants like this, where it's easier to couch them in, say, a religious context than in terms of contemporary hot-button issues.)

My sister graduated from college (yay!) so travelling with my family to visit her. They had a baccalaureate ceremony which was pretty good, including this amazing hymn (set to the melodic/slow part of "Jupiter"). And, staying with my aunt and uncle, who are great.

I just needed the reminder, via my dad, that it's okay to nope out of conversations sometimes, because many of my relatives can get...intense. Like, when they're agreeing with each other, and just doubling down on how hilarious/terrible/whatever something is.

Felt pretty socially drained today when I was out canoeing with them at a lagoon. We're all terrible canoers but that's fine, that's not the point. Just my mom and my aunt going "WE ARE SO AMAZINGLY TERRIBLE, LOL." Just, do you have to be play-by-play and color commentary? It didn't help that we were three to a canoe so if we all row at once it's asymmetric and bad, if I skip I feel like dead weight. Ugh. The canoeing was pretty fun other than that though.

Anyway I have complicated thoughts about my own baccalaureate and...performative outrage and stuff, but I don't know how to put it here. It's all kind of a "wall of text or nothing" with me, so I can't really just go with quick back-and-forths in conversation with "yeah that speaker was weird."

(I also had some academic milestones of my own which I was going to post about, but maybe later. Still on the road.)

Last night was Ash Wednesday (Christian observance that marks the beginning of Lent, lots of penitence/somberness) which meant choir sang at worship and then had a short rehearsal afterwards.

One of the texts that's traditionally read or sung for Ash Wednesday is Psalm 51, which is about confessing sin. The arrangement we sang seemed way too upbeat/peppy for this text/occasion, and some of the other guys were mocking the arrangement's text too.

One of the verses I like is #8 (I think this is from a more singable, less literal translation): Make me hear of joy and gladness, that the body you have broken may rejoice. A prayer to God, but also a sentiment I have felt over the years directed towards people/institutions who seem to be out to break my body and spirit. :(

Anyway, people were really social/chatty/timewasty/not in an Ash Wednesday frame of mind so the rehearsal afterwards was kind of frustrating. (Not that you have to be all somber and repentant, just...stay on task, please, so we can all go home??)