Seed to Harvest – Octavia Butler

I finally read the Octavia Butlers that I grabbed on a whim at the Big Bad Wolf Sale. I finished Fledgling and moved on to Seed to Harvest. I was actually surprised at how much I liked her writing. For one thing, it’s simple and clear; and for another, the concepts she uses aren’t particularly complicated (as you can see, I am an easy reader. I am the Harley Davidson of readers).

 

Like me, but with less American flag and more pages.

For example, Fledgling starts off a lot like Tanith Lee’s Birthgrave, with an immortal of unknown power or origin awakening from a slumber. Except that unlike Birthgrave, Fledgling did not suck. More on that in another post.

Seed to Harvest is actually a compilation of Butler’s Patternmaster series – Wild Seed, Mind of My Mind, Clay’s Ark and Patternmaster. The first two explored the concept of breeding superpowered humans, and the struggle between the long-lived Doro (the guy who breeds everyone) and the women who are his match – the first he finds in some random place in Africa, the last is the final and most successful result of his breeding programme.

Like this, only psychic.

Clay’s Ark introduced an extremely virulent alien disease that results in those who survive it having children that are sphinx-like (I still have difficulty imagining them. Surprisingly I couldn’t find any DeviantArt fanwork of them). Clay’s Ark was pretty brutal with rape, torture and violence, but it fell in with the sort of post-apoc and pre-apoc (must be the first book I read that turned out to be both) setting.

Essentially, those three books were great. They laid down a myth, drew it out and introduced an adversary for the superhumans (who are now all psychics). They were novel ideas. My problem is with the final book, Patternmaster.

There is nothing new about Patternmaster. No new ideas, no new situations. If you had told me that Butler had taken a year-long vacation to Romania and had asked her 16 year-old niece who was a fan of pretty bad fantasy to ghost-write Patternmaster, I would have believed you. I would have been relieved to have believed you. Because Patternmaster sucks.

After building up to the superhumans with psychic abilities being led by the one great psychic who holds the pattern (slavery? or greater good?), and the introduction of the creepy-intelligent-animal Clayark creatures, Patternmaster is an afterthought to complete the cycle.

The story is that Clayark’s have attacked the Patternmaster, Rayal. As he lays dying, his son Coransee (not to be confused with the beer) tries to consolidate his power and either kill or control his only competition for the Pattern – his younger brother, Teray.

Not Coransee

This book is Teray’s monomyth. And Teray is an asshole.

That is the main problem of the story (aside from the sudden departure from good storytelling). Teray is supposed to be better than his slightly power-crazy older brother. We don’t ever see how he is better.

Yeah, he doesn’t place psychic geas’ on his underlings. BECAUSE HE DOESN’T HAVE UNDERLINGS. Yeah he doesn’t misuse his power as a Housemaster to steal people’s wives. BECAUSE HE AIN’T A HOUSEMASTER. Yeah he doesn’t treat people, especially women, like shit and expect them to obey him…oh wait. HE DOES.

So at the end when Rayal tells Teray that he is worthy of holding the Pattern because 1. Rayal was waiting for him and 2. His brother wasn’t ‘good enough’, you’re just like WAIT A MINUTE. I WANT TO VOTE HIM OFF THE ISLAND.

Some people like Teray.

Why was Rayal waiting for him? Before the idea of becoming Patternmaster took ahold of Mr Beer, he was a good Housemaster. In fact, before this, Rayal himself had killed all his siblings (except the one he married) to ensure that he would get the Pattern. Mr Beer was just doing what was expected of him. It sounds like the only thing he did wrong was wanting the Pattern. Which was expected of him.

????????

At the end, Rayal gives some wishy washy excuse about Teray’s healing powers making him a more suitable Patternmaster. That’s just a fluke of luck. He didn’t EARN his healing power. He didn’t WORK HARD for it. In fact, unlike Mr Beer or Amber the badass healer who for some reason follows Teray around, Teray doesn’t seem to have made an effort for anything beyond thinking about himself.

Basically Teray’s moments with Teray sound like this: POOR TERAY. LIFE IS SO HARD. OMG MY WIFE THINKS MY HOT BROTHER IS HOT! SHE BETRAYED ME. DESPITE THE FACT THAT I CHOSE TO PUT US IN THIS POSITION. POOR TERAY. SO POWERFUL YET STUCK HERE. DON’T THEY REALISE HOW POWERFUL I AM?? I AM SO POWERFUL!

It’s like listening to a fantasy lit version of James Franco. So, screw you, Teray. You made Patternmaster suck. And you spoiled all of Doro’s efforts. At least Doro was an interesting asshole.

And yet you’re still here, Franco. Making boring-ass movies like Oz and writing condescending reviews about Superman.

I would still suggest reading these books, but maybe stop at Clay’s Ark and pretend Patternmaster was never written (although it defeats the purpose of Clay’s Ark not to have Patternmaster. argghh).

Redshirts – John Scalzi

I haven’t accessed wordpress in so long I forgot my password. Actually that’s not indicative of anything; I’m always losing passwords. But this is the third time for wordpress so it has some sort of achievement award status in my life.

It’s not like I haven’t been reading any terrible books. But since the last review, I had picked up Kelley Armstrong’s Bitten on the strength of goodreads reviews. You know the usual. Strong female lead. Engaging plot. Great writing. And the result was inevitable.

After 16 pages of self pity I put down the book and thought, why do I do this to myself? Why? Seriously, why? The moment I see the words urban fantasy + strong female protagonist, I should know by now that it means self-absorbed little shit of a main character. I do know, I guess I just hope it will be a different kind of little shit, maybe one that is self-aware as well.

And by self-aware, I don’t mean doing shitty things and being aware of them like that gives you a free pass to be a shit. And I would also like these shits to be a little less liked by other characters, because people in real life don’t particularly like little shits, as far as I know.

So I stopped. Classes started, thankfully, so I didn’t have time to think about crappy books.

But now classes are over. And Redshirts fell into my hands. It was actually not too bad. It’s about the redshirts on a spaceship who start noticing that whenever they go on missions with the captain or the science officer or the other dude with a rank, they die in disproportionate numbers. An ode to every single sci fi series except Firefly (because Firefly was above all that. Also they couldn’t afford a larger crew anyway. They couldn’t even afford the actual crew).

SPOILERS

A bunch of redshirts figure out what’s going on (they’re in a TV series) and attempt to fix it (by going back in time).

Now, by that sentence you’d probably think ‘Oh’. Like, Oh, WTF. Which was my reaction when I discovered their plan.

The logic behind the plan: They are in the year 24somethingsomething. They discover that the reason redshirts keep dying on away missions is because they are on a TV show. The TV show is being written in 2012. They decide that they have to go back to 2012 and tell the writers to stop killing of people.

I enjoyed the novel right up to the point where they decided to go back in time as a solution. Then it didn’t make sense. If there was an actual show with actual actors being filmed, then why did this spaceship reality even exist at all?

I thought it would be like some kind of futuristic Mojoverse, where people are tortured for good entertainment. But (in my mind) they aren’t even directly connected to the TV series’ universe.

The logic is that the UU (Scalzi’s version of United Federation of Planets) has a fleet of starships, and it just so happened that some TV writers in 2012 happened to write about one of those starships, thus sucking the universe into an alternate reality. Or perhaps the writers in 2012 created this UU reality by writing about it. Despite the fact that it shouldn’t be affected at all because the entire thing, including people dying, was filmed onset. So what is the point of this alternate reality?

The hand wave is the alternate reality theory. Who knows why they exist? Keep this in mind when you hesitate before crossing the street next time. If you don’t cross, and had you instead chosen to cross, would you have been run over by that impatient asshat in a Vios?

Would you have gone safely across the street to your office, meeting by chance an old acquaintance whom you would have missed by the seconds you took not crossing at first, exchanging numbers, meeting up with her the week later, complaining about your job, she offers to hook you up with her editor, and you are in the job of your dreams four months later.

But you didn’t cross, so that is in an alternate reality. And every time you make a decision, a new branch of reality breaks off from that point. There are a trillion trillion yous, and they are all different.

Anyway. I had a problem with this books solution because I couldn’t understand the mechanics behind the alternate realities. Not the books fault, but may not be some people’s cup of tea.

I haven’t mentioned any characters individually because they’re all basically one person. There’s Dahl and Duvall, and Hester and Hanson. But it doesn’t matter because the snappy dialogue could have come from any of them. There are no physical descriptions anyway, which is still okay. But they aren’t any character differentiation either, so it’s basically Andy Dahl (POV character) talking to himself.

I liked the codas at the end though.

If you want some creepy alternate-reality madness, try Ubik by Philip K Dick. I wanted so badly to throw that book into a wall of metal traps, and I think that feeling should be shared.

The Night Circus – Erin Morgenstern

The Night Circus was disappointing. It was not as deliciously atrocious as I had hoped it would be. Even worse, after the awkward first quarter it was an interesting read.

IKR??

I assumed this book would be like A Discovery of Witches, but with magicians thanks to the back-cover blurb. By ‘like A Discovery of Witches’ I meant populated with Mary Sues and Marty Stus who are never wrong and are always so full of fantastical brilliant potential despite doing stupid things and being, in general, quite stupid. The blurb was all ‘fierce competition’ and ‘the feats of magic gain fantastical new heights’ and ‘tumbling headfirst into love’ and the Night Circus was shopped out as ‘a mesmerising love story’.

Boy was that blurb wrong. Don’t even bother with the blurb with this book. Going in with no expectations is the best way to not hate it. Expectations spoil a lot of things, like books, marriage and porridge.

The Good: Many reviewers sang praises about Morgenstern’s (M) descriptive prose, but the strength of the book is really the entire cast of characters. While you are led to believe that Marco and Celia are the main characters, by no means are they the most important or the most interesting. Like a good circus, extraordinary people populate it: Tsukiko the mysterious contortionist, the oracular ginger twins, the billionaire circus owner who is slowly losing his mind.

What Tsukiko looks like in my mind

The Night Circus is a central presence around which these characters weave their stories, and it’s a pretty good backdrop once M stops hardselling it (and as long as you skip the weird one-page chapters that describe different parts of the circus in the most pretentious way possible). Eventually it’s revealed how important the circus actually is, which was a lot better excuse than ‘it’s just so awesome’ to dedicate so much prose to it.

Another nice thing is how people’s actions impact other people. Unlike a lot of books where the main character/s seem to live in a vacuum devoid of repercussions or common sense, TNC is pretty mellow about painting some of their characters as arses or pitiful without getting all soap opera about it. If anything, some of the book was a little too subtle. And by subtle I mean boring.

The Bad: 1. The Descriptions. I know that M aims to be the most descriptive descriptor around, but she just goes on and on and on. And I feel like the pages don’t actually explain anything, because at the end of it I can’t even describe a single tent in the night circus, and I assure you it’s not from lack of her trying to describe it to me. It’s a talent to explain a lot without giving any actual information. This would normally not be a big deal, but this book is something like 75 % descriptions. I want you to go into your corner and think about that before you pick up TNC.

2. The vagueness. I still have no idea why anything happened. I have no idea why some characters died, I have no idea what was going on. It all just happened at such a measured (read: slow) pace that I couldn’t even be bothered to try and find out why. Yeah, it happened. Okay. And then? Okay. Things happened again. Not sure why. Okay? I was okay with it I guess. But thinking about it now makes my brain itch. I mean why did certain characters die? Was it the magic? Was it Marco and Celia’s mentors? Was it the circus? Was it Fate? What? WHAT??

3. Isobel. While I don’t have a problem with Marco being an asshole, since assholes are a type of people that actually exist, I still think that Isobel should have snapped and stabbed him in the face. Not relevant but I needed to say it. Not that I advocate stabbing. It would just have been about the most dramatic thing that happened in the book. SO exciting. I’m going to pretend it happened. The book just got marginally better!

The Ugly: What is up with the timeline? WHAT IS THAT ABOUT??? Is it 1902 or 1903? 1185 or 1886? September or October? I am not a fan of mixing up timelines, mostly because I am easily confused and partly because I couldn’t be bothered to flip back a chapter and check. Also I only realised there even were dates after I was halfway through the book. I can’t say it made much of a difference anyway. The writing is clear enough that I could follow it without memorising a bunch of useless numbers.

I ask myself, is this confusion really necessary?

I neither hated nor loved TNC. Most of the book was pretty decent, and I’m pretty sure that M’s next book will clear up the issue of descriptive mess that just gets in the way of storytelling. If she does, then there is hope for all of us.

Cheerful recommendation: Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrel. More dense though, and if you’re the LOTR indices-reading type you’ll enjoy it.

Beneath My Hands – Leonard Cohen

 

Beneath my hands
your small breasts
are the upturned bellies
of breathing fallen sparrows.

Wherever you move
I hear the sounds of closing wings
of falling wings.

I am speechless
because you have fallen beside me
because your eyelashes
are the spines of tiny fragile animals.

I dread the time
when your mouth
begins to call me hunter.

When you call me close
to tell me
your body is not beautiful
I want to summon
the eyes and hidden mouths
of stone and light and water
to testify against you.

I want them
to surrender before you
the trembling rhyme of your face
from their deep caskets.

When you call me close
to tell me
your body is not beautiful
I want my body and my hands
to be pools
for your looking and laughing.

Birthgrave – Tanith Lee

I have read 50+ pages of The Night Circus, and you know what happened? Nothing. Nothing is what happened. The 50 pages were dedicated solely to describing what I assume will be the two main characters, Marco and Celia, who will eventually (I hope) have an epic duel and fall epically in love. In great detail. Lots of detail. At one point she describes how fashionable one random female character is for almost an entire page. Like. I get that the lady is fashionable. I got it when you said she had an impeccable sense of style. There was no need to say ‘sense of style’ again, or ‘fiend for aesthetics’ or ‘eye for fashion’ or ‘magician with clothing’ all within 200 words because I absolutely got it the first time. And, on an unrelated note, the image of her wearing rubies around her throat evoking the impression of a slit throat sounds really familiar. I’m sure I read it somewhere, except in that case the woman actually did get her throat slit or something. Hopefully the same fate does not befall Super Fashionable Madame.

Morgenstern so loves detail that she breaks up the narrative into small chapter-things just to describe the amazingness of the Night Circus or Marco or Celia. EVERYTHING ASSOCIATED WITH THE NIGHT CIRCUS IS AMAZING OKAY?? IT’S GOSHDARNED MAGICAL AND MYSTERIOUS AND MAGICAL AND SHIT. And Celia and Marco are, like, lonely, tortured souls. SO lonely. Life is SO HARD. Okay? Okay. I can’t wait to continue reading about these special snowflakes (but then, if writers did not write about special snowflakes, what would they write about, right? I am being unfair to Morgenstern, and not just because her surname is cooler than mine).

OH GOD!! I’m so sorry, adorable kitty! Snowflakes are the best in the world!

I read Birthgrave after Sabina Kane. I read somewhere that Tanith Lee was considered groundbreaking and also feminist. As in, her books had feminist elements in it. So I was like, WELL, how bad can a book that is actually concerned about its female lead character be, right? Finally I can read a book by an intelligent writer and the main character won’t be a total custard pudding (I couldn’t find a satisfactory synonym for disappointing in the thesaurus, so custard pudding it is). Right?

So. Wrong. I cannot even begin because it was the most awkward book I have ever read. The main character is a nameless woman from a race of gods or superhumans or something that has been killed of by another god. Or superhuman. She is allowed to live for some reason, she’s marked by this person/god/whatever and it seems she has some sort of superpowers. I forgot what they were because I didn’t really want to remember anything about this book. So she goes off into the world all by her lonesome and proceeds to hook up with every single abusive victimiser that crosses her path. Every single one. Even though I’m pretty sure she could have used her superpowers to get rid of them. Or she could have used her common sense and just avoided them. So basically I was reading a book about a mysterious, powerful woman who gave in to cruel, crude men (usually after they rape her/attempt to rape her/attempt to kill her) over and over again. It was sick.

I didn’t at all see how this was feminist. Was the point supposed to be that even a powerful woman has to operate within the system of male patriarchy, and so must submit? Or was it more like Sucker Punch ‘feminism’, which was not empowering at all, but instead left a bitter aftertaste when you thought about sexual exploitation being sold as empowerment? Birthgrave felt more Sucker Punch than Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

This poster by Alex Pardee is the only representation of Sucker Punch that doesn’t make me want to punch the screen. 

According to some reviews, Birthgrave is a feminist work because the woman survives all of these men to become some kind of awesome sorceress type. I don’t know if that actually happened because I didn’t finish the book. I don’t actually care if she became the most amazing sorceress ever in the entire world, I felt the constant abuse of her vulnerability (which I can only see as something she allowed happen) was unnecessary and it didn’t do anything for the character except to make me think that even in the fantasy world you have women like Rihanna. Spoiler: Anyway, it seems it was a good call for me not to have read the ending because apparently UFOs show up and save the day. Yes ladies out there, get yourself into as many abusive relationships that are never your fault at all for enabling them, and right at the end you’ll get saved by aliens. Isn’t that what we’ve always wanted?

Cheerful recommendation: I can’t believe I’m saying this, but after reading Birthgrave I would actually recommend Polgara by David Eddings. Or Sabriel by Garth Nix. A book with a proper heroine and less horrific circumstances. 

ps. I am aware of how flippant and sexist Eddings is with his female characters. I recommended Polgara because I am trying to say that I think Birthgrave is even worse than that.

Circuses and Quokkas

 I have spotted my next victim: The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. I picked it up at the university library where it was situated beside the books of the Twilight series (foreshadowing?). When I saw it, and read the words ‘epic romance’ I knew it had to be the next horrible fantasy book I read. And the first four pages didn’t disappoint. While not horrible (A Discovery of Witches started out awesomely, btw), it was uneven and there was a smattering of trying-too-hard and Mary Sueness already visible (I am afraid that if I ever do write a book, those will be some of the failings). 

I will be very perversely disappointed if this book turns out to be a good read. Meanwhile, I am as happy as a quokka.

 

Quokkas are really happy

The Sabina Kane Series

Writing about good authors is so boring. Re-reading my post about Eugenides is so boring. Of course Eugenides is a good writer. Nobody cares if I think he’s a good writer. There’s actually nothing to discuss, unless we get into it academically. Complaining about shitty writers who disappoint me at every turn is way more fun.

Now, my choice to torture myself by reading the second part of Deborah Harkness’ witch thing series turned out to be a bust. I was unable to read past the part where Matthew’s brain takes leave of his body, and he becomes stupider than usual. You must admit that as heroes go, he is a dumbass. He has no idea what’s going on and why he does things, and then he tells the whole, still-burn-people-at-the-stake world that his wife is a witch. Matthew has special snowflake syndrome. He thinks he’s special because he married a witch and nothing can hurt them because of their specialness. And that is exactly how Harkness intends for it to be. If you have read the book, TELL ME THAT’S NOT TRUE EH? EHHH?

Noooo! I’m too special for this!!!

Reading Shadow of whatever left me positively devastated at the state of urban fantasy. Like. How come everything sucked? Why is stupidity celebrated? Lack of plot encouraged? Personalitiless characters glorified? Surely there is a writer out there who can write DECENT urban fantasy without pissing me off. With this goal in mind, off I went to goodreads.com to check out the highest rated urban fantasy whose synopsis didn’t sound like rubbish.

Which brought  me to Jaye Wells and the Sabina Kane series. Now, all of the books in this series have a 4-star or higher rating on goodreads (but then the 50 shades books also have a 4-star rating, so I don’t think goodreads is reliable. And after reading Wells, I can assure you that it is not reliable at all. At. All.). I happily downloaded ALL OF THE BOOKS. ALL OF THEM. And I read ALL OF THEM. Now that I think about it, I must have been infected with some compulsive disease that wears off after you have completed a herculean task that accomplishes nothing.

ALL OF THEM.

One of the things I hate about urban fantasy heroines is that many of them evolve. Evolution is fine, mutants did it and so should magical heroines. But every single one of the heroines so far have gone from Toad-level powers to Scarlet Witch reality-obliterating abilities (if they don’t start out with Scarlet Witch powers on the reveal). It’s disgusting. What’s the point of reading about a heroine who can just wipe dangers out with the snap of her fingers – but the whole book is about how she doesn’t because she’s so goddamned stupid (CASE IN POINT – Harkness’ Diana).

So. Sabina Kane. It started out pretty interesting. There’s the setup of duality in Kane: witch/vampire, killer/friend, right/wrong. The potential for an interesting character is there. Basically Kane is a half witch half vampire (with purple eyes? right? because this is the sort of character you came up with when you were 15 and watched too much Buffy and Fushigi Yuugi) who works as an assassin for the vampire queens. She’s actually related to one of them, but because she’s tainted with witch blood, she is unworthy of a noble education, thus killing people is her job. There’s a dynamic between Kane’s feelings of inferiority, her desire to be accepted and the way she’s treated by the other vampires. Or at least there could be, if anyone other than her grandmother (one of the queens) treated her shittily.

Like this.

Or this. 

She finds out things are not as they seem with the vampires, discovers she has a twin sister and then goes on some godawful pointless quest to save the world. There are two main things I didn’t understand at all about this series. Spoilers ahead. Not that it would reduce the enjoyment of these confused books if you read them.

1. THE TONE. I believe the tone of these books got hit by a bus and then run over by Optimus Prime. Because it starts out serious and dark, with Kane killing someone she claims is her friend, and the whole muddy relationship with the vampires, parental issues etc. And then Giggles the demon makes an appearance, and the whole tone is shot. Everything becomes a joke. You don’t know whether to take this series seriously or not. And it goes on like this the whole time. People die, Kane is sad, some slapstick humour is introduced. The absolute worst was the final story arc, where some fellow who is supposed to destroy the world pretty much ruins Kane’s life and kills her father (and sister I think. Not sure) is revealed to  be some pathetic jilted lover to be made fun of. LOL. He’s so lame and stalker-y, like that guy you went out with once and then wasn’t interested in, but then he kept emailing and calling you and sending you poetry?? LOLOL. Guess what? It’s not funny!! Fuck you Jaye Wells. Fuck you for raising my hopes and then shitting on them with your lousily-paced slapstick humour.

2. THE MARY SUES. Yes, there is more than one Mary Sue. Can you believe that? Kane and her twinnny twin twin. They turn into goddesses at the end. You can’t get more Mary Sue than that. But in true uneven Wells fashion, she can’t decide that after they defeat the big bad (who was more like lame and snivelly) whether they are still as powerful, so Kane is happy just taking some title on the vampire council or whatever. Gimme a break. You use goddesshood as a Deus Ex Machina, and you can’t even  be bothered to follow through with the implications of having a goddess among the unwashed supernatural masses? Like hell she would just sit on some damned council and let people continue to disrespect and ignore her like before. Like hell the other, less powerful characters would allow that.

Oh, and I just thought of 3. DISTURBING UNDERTONES OF SEXUAL IMPRISONMENT. That’s just a dramatic heading because I didn’t want to outright type HOMOPHOBIA. Basically there’s this lesbian werewolf who has hooked up with a vampire girl. Her father is the leader of some pack and keeps insisting that she get married off to some other pack dude. I actually thought that Kane would do something about it, or it wouldn’t be a serious issue (considering the tone of the book) but what happens is the werewolf girl gets married off and Kane gets invited to the public mating/marriage ceremony. Where they turn into wolves and mate onstage. And Kane actually sees the werewolf girl try to run away from her mate, and then she turns away and all she can hear is her despairing howls. Basically the girl is forced into marriage and then raped by her husband. Onstage. And Kane’s reaction? OH, TOO BAD. Can’t do nothing about it. And later on in the last book (I think), she finds out that the werewolf girl and her mate have a child, and she’s like, AW SHUCKS, I GUESS EVERYTHING TURNED OUT FINE.

Unless you’re, like, gay. Or a werewolf. Or both. 

Now do you see the problem with the tone of this series? What am I supposed to take seriously? What do I not? Why is she so flippant about rape and sexuality? She builds up to deaths, and then they become meaningless because the villain is a joke. In fact, if I could describe Wells’ writing in one word, it would be flippant.

I think I have made myself upset thinking about point no 3, so I will stop here. I think Wells has other series’, and I hope that she has fixed the flaws that made Kane so uneven. I’ll probably read them when I’m desperate again.

Cheerful recommendation: Naomi Novik’s addictive Temeraire series.

Awesome Temeraire pic from fuckyeahtemeraire.tumblr.com.

Middlesex

After the horrors of the wedding and 15 page assignments written in two days, I decided to seek refuge in my (pirated but beloved) ebooks. I didn’t have time to download anything new (and I can’t seem to find anything interesting! WHY? Is it me or has there been a reduction in good books lately?), so I read the Jeffrey Eugenides’ that I already had, The Marriage Plot and Middlesex. Eugenides is an awareness writer. Really. His books have a central theme: Bipolar disorder – Marriage Plot, Hermaphroditism – Middlesex, and the story is built on that. I won’t say plot, because I’m not sure if Middlesex had a plot. I haven’t read Virgin Suicides, but Greg did and he says issues of parental control and emotional abuse come up.

Sorry, this was all that came to mind after the last sentence.

So it feels a little bit like you’re reading a well-written brochure for whatever issue Eugenides has taken under his wing. Just a little, because it is well-written, and you don’t mind gathering all this new information while reading about romance and disappointment and just people being people. He tends to meander though, and as I was reading Alexander McCall Smith’s Blue Shoes and Happiness at the same time, it was like meandering squared. My mum hates McCall Smith because she believes that his books are pointless and the heroines are useless. Eugenides’ characters are McCall Smith for my mum then, because things happen and they react to it, but things tend to go off on (interesting) tangents here and there.

On to Middlesex itself. Middlesex is the name of the house where the main character lives for most of his formative years and is also a literal representative of Cal Stephanides himself. The book is basically a historical/genealogical record/story starting from his grandparents, an incestuous relationship within which the seed of middlesex found fertile ground, and it is sporadically interrupted with a few paragraphs of modern day Cal and a lady that catches his eye. It actually reminded me a little of Indian literature, you know, House of Blue Mangoes, A Suitable Boy etc because of the focus on the family story. Not the horrid Amitav Ghosh sort of writing. One day I will write about how much I hated Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide. One day.

While hermaphrodtism is the main focus of the book, there’s also issues of immigrants, racism, war and sexuality. It’s all handled with the same deft, sympathetic hand, and you can imagine being that character and feeling those feelings. I did have a problem understanding the incest at the beginning because it just didn’t make sense to me at all. But it’s done in a way that doesn’t ignore the magnitude of what they are doing, while at the same time presenting it in a matter of fact fashion. ‘Yes, I married my sister, oh god I’m going to have nightmares about it’ sort of thing.

Like this, but in the 1920s. And Greek.

I would get the actual book if I wanted to read Eugenides again though. It didn’t have the proper depth being read on a kindle. It was robbed of some of its old-fashioned weight when translated into digitised format. His works are the kind that need physical form because they’re so dense with life.

Shadow of Blahhhh – Deborah Harkness

Before I Kindled the sequel to Deborah Harkness’ atrocious A Discovery of Witches, I asked myself, Why?

Why would I put myself through that mind-numbing frustration, vacillating between being impressed with descriptive writing and being appalled at the utter stupidity of the so-called romance and the so-called plot. Plot! Hah! My roast vegetable have more plot than this book. Plus the roast vegetables are freaking delicious!

Look at all that delicious plot. 

Why? According to Seth, it is because I enjoy being miserable. He should know, he has to listen to me when I am. Also, that sounds like something my mother would say about me. My brother claims he understands that I have to see this through. I HAVE TO KNOW. Or maybe I am a sadist, like that lady who does chapter by chapter reviews of 50 Shades of Grey. (I have heard a lot of accusations saying this book is un-American despite being set in Boston or whatever, because of tea or prams or whatever, but my main bug in this line is the spelling of Grey. Grey is British spelling; Gray, American. Everytime I see the cover, I mentally correct it to Gray).

Every dang time.

So far I have gotten to Chapter 4. As you can imagine nothing important has happened, even though they are on the run for their lives basically. Christopher Marlowe makes an appearance. Other people do too, but I had to read Faustus last semester (weird and unimpressive, only because I was expecting something like a play version of Swinburne’s Faustine), and was curious about Marlowe. Of course, Marlowe is in love with Christian. I mean Matthew. Because Matthew is so lovable despite being grumpy, rude and one-dimensional. Also stupid. How stupid? Oh LET ME COUNT THE WAYS.

One of the reasons they go back in time is because the Congregation (the Creature Council, basically) disapproves of marriage/mating between species. Diana and Matthew are threatened and tortured because of it. And also because drama = plot for Harkness. So in modern times, Matthew says the Congregation is not as powerful as it once was, but they still managed to do a lot of harm. So what is the first thing Matthew does when he GOES BACK IN TIME, WHEN THE CONGREGATION IS EVEN MORE POWERFUL?

He fucking tells everyone that Diana is a witch and she is his wife. Every. Bloody. One. His servants, his friends, the bitter guy with an unrequited love for him. And for what purpose? No freaking idea. It doesn’t serve anymore purpose than if he’d just  told them she was his captive, or some girl he’d found or some friend of the family’s that he was now responsible for. Nope. Matthew is SO BRAVE, that’s why he tells every Tom, Dick and Harry that the goddamned witch is his wife. What happens? She gets accused of witchcraft in the village.

In fact, this is unworthy of a full facepalm because it is just too ridiculous.

The other reason they go back in time is because witches of our modern era are weak and   have no mojo to teach SuperPoweredGoddesWitch Diana to get a handle on her powers, and so they need a proper witch from the past to educate Diana. So I assumed that when they chose that specific time to return to, it was because Matthew knew there would be a witch or witches there to teach Diana. Otherwise, what was the point of going all the way back there and putting your friends and family in jeopardy while you took off, right?

This is how I think they feel about their friends and family.

So guess what happens when they get there. Nothing. Nothing happens. Because Matthew not only doesn’t know a single goddamn witch, THEY’VE ALL MOVED AWAY BECAUSE OF HIM. This may have occurred to him while hatching this plan with his mated nitwit Diana, but as you can see, Matthew is not the brightest bulb on display. Instead of some awesome witch, they drag in the village healer so that Diana can show off in front of her so that later she can accuse Diana of being a witch in the marketplace. Oh joy.

See what I mean by frustration? Yet the descriptions of food is just so wonderful, and I can see there’s a talented writer under all that absolute buffoonery.

That’s right Deadpool, a man I would love more if he were not so incomprehensible.

Pratchett and the Leash

After seeing an adorable photo of an obedient, neat looking cat at the end of the leash, I decided that I would once again attempt to leash Pratchett. As I leashed him, a Voice said, Do You Remember What Happened The Last Time You Tried To Leash Him? (It sounded very similar to the Voice that said Do You Remember What Happened The Last Time You Decided To Eat A Whole Bag of Chachos With Braces? [I had a jaw ache for a week, that’s what happened] I ate the bag of Chachos anyway).

The last time I leashed Pratchett, he disappeared under the bed for awhile and the reappeared sans harness. MY CAT IS HARRY HOUDINI!!! Hairy Houdini? And then he sulked the whole day like a right snotty little prince. But he is so cute that it was okay, and I didn’t leash him for awhile. Until I saw that picture.

So now Pratchett is sitting as far away from me as possible, with his little polka dot harness on. I did attempt to walk him, only all those ‘walk’ attempts turned into ‘drag’ or ‘ineffectual tugging’. But he needs some discipline in his life, and since I’m not doing it, I shall let the harness do the job.

Is this a dashing kitty or what? Look at that handsome, disciplined stance. One day Pratchett too will achieve it.