tealin | Entries tagged with book

Maia granted an audience to the Count Bazhevel and Osmin Stano Bazhevin on a cold, bleak afternoon when the clouds were nearly the same colour as Maia's skin. Because the Count Bazhevel had annoyed him with his scheming, Maia chose to receive him in the Untheileian, even though Osmin Bazhevin's status as the dead archduke's fiancée would have permitted him to use the Michen'theileian or even the receiving room of the Alcethemeret. But he hoped dourly that the frigid expanse of the Untheileian would encourage the Count Bazhevel to be brief.

oh my god I don't care I don't care I don't care I don't care I don't care I don't care I don't care I don't CARE I DON'T CARE I DON'T CARE

And that's the exact spot where I gave up.

( Analysis and Problem Solving )

I could go into more detail, and project how my version would play out based on the foundation I laid, but UGH I am so tired of thinking about this – now I've got it out I can finally get back to what I should be doing, ~~rewriting the Gospels~~ grinding out the last batch of colour keys on the never-ending one-person book assembly line ...

Here's an idea:

If the point of what you're writing is bewilderment on being dropped suddenly into a maelstrom of political intrigue and unfamiliar names and faces ...

... why not start the book in a simple, accessible style, focusing on welcoming the reader in, be it through your protagonist's personality or lived experience or emotions; something relatable that the reader can get their teeth into easily ...

AND THEN slam them with the fantasy names and bewildering formalities of the court at the same time as your protagonist, so even if you're not actually much good at communicating their internal life, you can recreate the same feelings in the reader and they can sympathise that way.

In other news, there was a flash of personality for one line on p.65. Either it was an accident, or I know who the author's favourite character is and have a hunch who won't survive to the end. RIP in advance, appropriated Ponder Stibbons.

I stopped doing my book reports in large part because I more or less stopped reading ... This happened about when I cleared my 'easy fiction' stack and moved onto the super dense French philosophy stack, oddly enough. I have dabbled in a little fiction here and there: Hans Christian Andersen's original fairy tales, surprisingly a slog; Light Perpetual, binged in two days and had a hard cry at the end.

Someone has just bought me a novel and sent it with very high recommendations, so I am embarking on reading it, and I thought I'd write down some thoughts while I do so because, frankly, at about 50pp in, that's pretty much the only thing encouraging me to keep reading. The thing is absolutely plastered in raving blurbs, so either there's something I'm not getting or it's a slow burn. I look forward to finding out, she said rhetorically.

For fun, I'm not going to tell you what book it is. Maybe you have read it and can guess. Maybe this will start some interesting conversations about the abstracts of storycraft. Maybe this will drive you absolutely crazy and you will badger me until I tell you. Isn't life exciting?

( Up to p.53 )

As stated in the Darkwood review, I am friends with the author, so that may have coloured my reading slightly. And I read it within 48 hours of finishing the first book, so I can't comment on its standalone qualities, as it was for me essentially a continuation of the same story.

The action is divided between two parties: Gretel Mudd and the witches (and ghost, and spider) of Darkwood, who go North to try to make an alliance with the witches there. These consist of a lady werewolf, a man who can shapeshift into a man-sized raven but has no other intrinsic powers, and the Bear Witch, who lives in a house with three bears and is named Gilde, but is a horrible old woman who has the werewolf and raven man locked in a coercive thrall. Quite a lot of that thread is (relatively) normal, (relatively) well-adjusted adults trying to talk to a selfish, stubborn, passive-aggressive control freak, which might get tedious for some, but is for me what might be called a Recurring Theme so it was perversely intriguing to see it play out on the page.

The other party is Gretel's brother Hansel and her best friend Daisy, who go to the capital city to investigate why Hansel is getting terrifying visions of an attacking hydra. Because the lead Huntsman got offed at the end of Book 1, there is an election being held for a new one. As one would expect, one of the candidates is your typical hard-line populist, promising a tougher crackdown on witches and abominations, to further and indeed intensify the policies of the previous administration, which if anything failed because didn't go far enough – you've heard it before. Hansel and Daisy happen to get caught up with a different candidate, one who sees how radical reform is necessary, and also has a really cute dog. I don't want to spoil too much of this plotline but this is definitely a clear-eyed post-2016 book; seeing current political forces transposed into speculative fiction is uncomfortable, but oh so nourishing, like a rainstorm after a drought.

What I liked best about Such Big Teeth transcends the actual story: it was so much more confident than the first book, and the missteps that made first occasionally awkward had completely disappeared. It was just a joy to sail through from beginning to end. Really my only misgiving was that some of the more intimate* relationships – a couple of which were established (or at least hinted) in the first book but never really developed – felt imposed rather than organic: 'they love each other because I said so' rather than evident in their words and actions. I was glad that one of the ones I'd suspected in Book 1 was brought into the light in Book 2 and was one of the successful ones. I may have been more sensitive to the ones that didn't work as well because of how very very well the blossoming of love was treated in The Crown of Dalemark; looking back on a lot of the YA books I read in my early 20s, this flat-footedness is typical, so maybe not that worth commenting on.

So, as with my Dalemark reviews, here I'm going to say 'forgive whatever difficulties you find with the first because it's worth it to get to the second' – Darkwood is much less of a slog than The Spellcoats, but Such Big Teeth is both a rollicking story and a valuable observation of politics and difficult humans (who so often go together ...) that I'm tempted to call it an important read.

*rather than romantic, because they include Mudd family relationships as well as pairings

Having finished Dalemark, my next bit of catch-up reading was to add to the 'books by friends' pile. I had actually met Gabby Hutchinson Crouch through a friend back when I was living in London. We became Twitter friends several months later, and even though I've never seen her in person since, she's one of my online besties. So when she published her first book last year, a fractured fairy tale with a satirical bent, I felt rather guilty that I didn't have mental or temporal space to tackle it, being at the time more than taken up with juggling my own book and preparations for my Antarctic trip. This year, things have settled down, and given my YA fantasy groove and the imminence of Book 2 in the trilogy, it seemed the ideal moment to step into Darkwood.

The setup is as follows: Hansel and Gretel Mudd live in the village of Nearby, in the land of Myrsina, which thirteen years ago saw the deposition of its monarchy by the Huntsmen, a sort of grassroots vigilante group dedicated to rooting out witches and other abominations, the list of which gets added to regularly. Girls Doing Maths is on the list, which is bad news for Gretel, who has a keen scientific mind. One manifestation of this is a defence system to protect the village from creatures of Darkwood, a wild place just across the river where witches and magical beings have fled to escape persecution. Well, one thing leads to another and Gretel ends up fleeing to the Darkwood herself, where – surprise! – the witches are rather lovely (well, two of them are, anyway) and even the talking spider is nothing to be afraid of (Bin Men, on the other hand, are).

Overall it's the sort of witty, well-observed, and creative storytelling one would expect from a writer who regularly provides material for Radio 4 topical comedy. Working in animation I have seen my fair share of fresh takes on fairy tales, but this book is full of genuinely unexpected re-imaginings and I cannot tell you how refreshing it was to be surprised. It's not just the fairy tales that feel fresh, though: the moral universe is updated from the one I remember from my childhood, where the maverick has to strike out on their own from a society that doesn't appreciate them (Gretel's family and village all love and support her) and where understanding the other's point of view will solve everyone's problems. It is a world where a harsh and reactionary minority are laughed off until they slip into power and set up a system to keep them there. The commentary on the present day slips in under the radar for most of the book, but sometimes comes right out and practically breaks the fourth wall. Stories are how we programme the consciences of the young; this is a timely and desperately needed update to the operating system, given how the world has changed since the 1990s.

The benefits of a radio comedy background are strong characters, excellent dialogue, snappy pacing, and, of course, a fair few laughs. The weak point of Darkwood, in my opinion, might be the fault of sketch-writing as well: there is a sort of orchestration one has to impose on a long-format narrative to give it shape and help the reader feel the ups and downs. In a macro sense Darkwood does this just fine – the narrative structure and character arcs are solid – but a few levels down, it's a little shaky in what I am tempted to call 'cinematography'. Not that it is lacking in visual presentation, but rather the sort of thing that makes or breaks a film in the editing suite: the rhythm of the shots, the placement of focus and POV, the perceptual experience of the viewer as the film flows by. (This is almost completely different from the literary sense of 'editing,' which is why I don't want to use that word, even though that's really what I mean.) There were a number of times I missed something important because it had not been 'shot' clearly enough to pick it up without thinking. Luckily it was re-established well enough that I didn't need to go back and find it, but I stumbled a bit when it happened. It's the sort of thing you don't really notice in writing until it doesn't quite work right, and to be honest is something I've never thought of before, so in that respect was kind of appreciated! It's certainly not something that would impede anyone's enjoyment of the book, only something that I am particularly attuned to on my constant quest to understand storycraft.

Minor craftsmanship nitpicking aside, it is definitely a book that I would give to an 8-14 year old in my life, if not to my own friends, especially the ones who have embarked on parenthood, as it would make very good bedtime reading and invite some productive discussion. If it's any sign of how I enjoyed it, I had pre-ordered the second volume and was annoyed that it hadn't arrived in time to start right after I finished the first. Luckily it did turn up within 48 hours so I wasn't bereft too long, and it turned out to be better than the first, so worth the wait!

Last in the Dalemark Quartet is The Crown of Dalemark. There's an interesting fact about this series that was always front of my mind when reading the last book: the first three were written in the 1970s, each two years apart. The Spellcoats did not end in anything like a definitive way, and, being a prequel, left the threads of the previous two hanging – all the North/South business, turbulent Earls, destinies of the two main characters, all waiting to be resolved. The Crown of Dalemark was finally published fifteen years later, in 1993. Imagine being a teenage fan of the first three and being so excited to find out how she was going to wrap it all up (especially after the weird tangent of The Spellcoats) and not getting to find out until you were married with kids! I, a cynic, would expect whatever came out to be something of a letdown, but while reading this I kept thinking, 'Dang, this would have been worth the wait.' I did not wait fifteen years – the book was sitting there waiting for me – so I cannot guess if the fans' reactions were the same, but as far as payoffs go, it certainly delivers.

The story starts a few months after the second book ends, with its protagonist, the revolutionary. He has been taken in by one of the northern Earls, who is not a million times better than the southern ones, and what's more, is feeling threatened by a sort of Joan-of-Arc figure who's claiming the throne that will unify the country and take power away from the feuding earldoms. So, being on the edgy side, this lad is sent off to assassinate her. As you do. On the way he meets up with the musician from the first book, and, accidentally, his target, who is really charming and gives him more than the usual misgivings about murder. So far, so rolling along like you'd expect a YA fantasy to unwind.

BUT THEN.

If you've read Howl's Moving Castle and not just seen the film, you will remember The Twist. You know, the one that's like, 'how could you make this into a movie and leave out The Twist, The Twist is what it is all about': that twist. There's one of those here. I do not want to spoil it, obviously, but that makes reviewing the book really hard because it happens about 1/4 of the way in, instead of 1/4 from the end as in Howl. It is really cool. It will make you go '??!?' and then 'wow, OK' and then the plot really gets going. But it largely revolves around The Twist, so I can't talk about it.

Instead, I can say that for all the series seems to take a bizarre left turn with The Spellcoats, it is very important that it went there, because The Crown of Dalemark relies heavily on the worldbuilding that happened in the previous book – and also there are some little references that will make you smile if you've just read it, but that's a treat on the side. Anyway, if Crown had to carry all that worldbuilding on its own, it would be topheavy with awkward exposition. It still has so much exposition of its own that there were times I felt like I'd been plunged amongst native speakers a month after I'd started learning a language, but they were later in the book and just comprehensible enough that I was only slowed down a little, not thrown. So, if you were tempted to skip The Spellcoats, or develop a yen to skip it fifty pages in, I must advise you to stick with it and see it through, because it is definitely a prerequisite for Crown and Crown is definitely worth your while. It might help, also, if you read the series straight through instead of taking a couple years off between the first and last two books, as names and places will be fresher in your memory. But even with my gap, I enjoyed Crown very much.

Part of this was down to a particular feature of The Twist enabling the author to bring the lived experience of the world more vividly to life than if she were telling it as if taken for granted. Fantasy of this ilk tends to be very rose-tinted about pre-industrial society and everyday life, but that is not a problem here. As in previous books, there's also no flinching from the yuckiness of war and, indeed, politics; e.g. when someone is murdered, it's not just a plot device, there's a body left over which will start to rot if not dealt with in time. it is both a ripping yarn, and a self-reflective ripping yarn that consciously contradicts the easiness of ripping yarns. And that is worth reading, too.

The icing on the cake is a surprisingly convincing love story. As stated above I am an old cynic, and I have never been much attracted to romance in literature, largely for personal reasons but probably a little because it's usually undertaken for plot reasons and doesn't actually feel romantic. One exception to this was Going Postal, where the illogical certainty of attraction was surprisingly well executed. The Crown of Dalemark does it too – it's not what the story is about, but it is not an unwelcome or extraneous subplot either, just a minor thread in the tapestry that grows in prominence until it pays off jubilantly at the end. (So much I can't give away!)

So yes: grossly underappreciated YA fantasy, extremely cheap used copies are available online; buy them and read them and then donate them to your local library or school so that others can share the joy. We will all be happier people.

Before I go into this book in particular, a little background on the Dalemark series:

'Dalemark' is the name of a land which, in the first two books, is controlled by a patchwork of Earls and split into North and South – the South being rather authoritarian and the North touted as 'free' – and there is tension between the two though not outright war, however much the South may be building itself up to such a thing. Northerners and Southerners also differ in appearance, enough that someone can tell at first glance whether you're Northern or Southern, though this isn't played up overmuch. It is, as per fantasy tropes, a vaguely medieval, vaguely British country (though placenames often follow Scandinavian patterns), with subtle but effective magic – in the first book, there is a magical instrument, and in the second, some entities like minor gods which are commemorated in folk ritual but actually turn up towards the end, to everyone's surprise. In the first book, the musician who owns the magical instrument makes an adventurous escape to the North overland; in the second, an Angry Young Man joins a secret insurrection plotting in a port town that is definitely not King's Lynn, then has to flee North by boat via an enchanted archipelago that is definitely not Lindisfarne. They are light and fun yarns with a savoury folkish feel to the magic, but they don't shy away from the darker side of politics, either – they are clearly written by someone who has read a lot of history, and been through a war herself.

The Spellcoats is the third in the series. While the first two are freestanding stories they share enough references to show they are taking place at roughly the same time; The Spellcoats however feels very different and, aside from being in approximately the same country, has no apparent connection to the other two. There is a war going on here, too, of sorts – settlers arriving from over the sea, who claim the land as their ancestral home, while the people already living there would really rather they not.

The story follows one family as they are driven out of their village and drift down the flooded river which has always been the centre of their lives, meeting a band of these settlers, discovering who the real villain is, then going back and confronting the evil. The gods and magic play a bigger role in this book, at first in the role of idols which the family carry with them, and later in person; the quantity of magic was a little high for my preference, but it's handled in such an otherworldly way that it kind of slips under the skin instead of dazzling you. A clearer way of describing that aspect may be thus: by about 2/3 through, I began to get rather resentful that Miyazaki had adapted Howl's Moving Castle instead of The Spellcoats, because this felt like SUCH a Miyazaki movie. A little dreamlike, more than a little weird, and a strong political statement about shades of grey.

Now, this may sound like a positive review. And it is, because I have finished the book. But boy oh boy did I have a hard time with it. For one thing, it is written in first person by one of the family, and she is very internal-monologuey, in a strange style that somehow renders the internal monologue distancing rather than intimate. On top of this, the conceit is that she is writing this in the pattern she is weaving; having done a tiny bit of weaving myself I cannot imagine a textile-based writing system inviting anything but the sparsest prose, but that is definitely not what we get here. It might not have been so annoying if so much of the book hadn't been given over to worldbuilding, which made this small but significant logic gap glare. I fact, I can't say I really enjoyed the book until the last fifty pages or so: it's not my sort of fantasy, there seemed to be too many characters occupying the same tier of importance, and none of them grabbed me enough to care what happened to them.

But then I finished it, and then finished the series, and weirdly it's The Spellcoats that has stuck with me most. It's the least entertaining book but the one I would most like to see made into a movie. Its dreamlike tone and powerful imagery give it an almost mystic feeling. While it excited almost no emotions in me, narratively, the narrator's strong emotional connection to her landscape did communicate. I am all about character being the most important thing in a story, but here I thought it got in the way – the world and the weird can stand on their own. Was the whole book saved by its awesome closing image? Was it the 'scholar's note' at the end, from a historian in 'modern' Dalemark, about the discovery of the cloth that told the story? Was it just a book I couldn't appreciate in parts but could as a whole? I don't know. I keep trying to figure it out. Maybe that's part of its magic.

Anyway, if you read it, listen to Johnny Flynn's 'The Water' after you finish, and let me know if you think it could have been written for anything other than The Spellcoats.

Watch on YouTube

When I moved here, freed from the cognitively draining hypervigilance and with my whole day to myself, I intended to crack on with some esoteric theology books I've been holding on to and want to read before I let go. The brain was not so quick to bounce back, however, and while it's better now, I still don't have the concentration necessary to unpack some rather dense philosophising, so instead I've been tackling something more at my level: YA fantasy.

My sister has always been a big fan of Diana Wynne Jones, and while I appreciate her as a writer and storycrafter for sure, her work has never seized me the same way as, say, Terry Pratchett's. Said sister did impress upon me, with admirable patience, how much I needed to read the Dalemark Quartet, and a couple of years ago I did finally read the first two, which were indeed good. But then life blew up and I didn't have much reading time, so I didn't get around to the next until just now. In her oeuvre, they are really underappreciated books – I like them better than the Chrestomanci series, for example – so for what it's worth I thought I would write some reviews and maybe boost their profile a little.

For the last ten years, the bulk of my personal library – a collection I am always trying to keep to a minimum on account of nomadic tendencies – has fallen into three main categories: Polar, Art, and Narrative Fiction I Want On Hand. To my surprise a new section has begun to rival the others in size: Books By People I Know. I am now catching up with a series written by a Twitter friend who has done a lot of comedy writing for Radio 4 and created the Portentous Perils podcast (good times, look it up). The first book in the Darkwood series came out last year, when I was too preoccupied to read much of anything; the second has just been released, which prompted me to make up for lost time. I finished the first book yesterday, only an hour after the second plopped in through the letterbox, so that will be my lunchtime reading today.

Everyday life has settled into a semi-routine of gardening and drawing, and compared to previously there isn't much to write about plague-blog-wise, so I will do some little writeups on these books instead. I used to do reviews all the time – more as an exercise in analysis for my own sake, than thinking anyone cared what I thought about things – so it'll be fun to put those very old shoes on again. Maybe you might find the books interesting and pick them up, too.

I've been sick this week. It's the third cold in as many months, which is very frustrating, but what can you do? Turns out the answer is sleep. I have slept for about four days. I guess I needed it.

When I came home with a bad cold last year, I discovered the tremendous practical use of television: It is sufficiently interesting to keep me in bed doing nothing, i.e. resting, without requiring as much cognitive effort as reading, which is often beyond my decongestant-fogged brain. Last year I imbibed The Terror; this year I indulged the opportunity to catch up on the BBC's new rendition of the first part of Philip Pullman's trilogy His Dark Materials.

I remember when the first book came out. It was at the crest of the wave of post-Harry Potter YA Fantasy. I listened to the audiobook back in those days when I had a tape deck at my desk but not a computer. It wasn't notably satisfying and left me a bit hollow, but was a fun dark adventure that kept me on task, and was better than a lot of the YA fantasy audiobooks I was listening to around that time. Eventually I consumed the other two in the series, but the last one put me off. Pullman was the YA Fantasy representative of the secular humanist cabal making a lot of noise post-9/11 (Richard Dawkins being the loudest) and his books were blatantly trying to be the anti-Narnia for a new, enlightened, Godless generation. This was fine as a premise for the series, but by the third book he had managed to get more evangelical than C.S. Lewis ever was. The preachiness of the last book rather soured my taste for the whole series and I didn't read (or listen to) it again.

My curiosity was piqued by the new TV adaptation, which aired shortly after I left for my Antarctic adventure. I was pleased to find it was still available on the iPlayer when I got back to the UK, so I watched it between naps as I tried to sleep off this cold. It has been probably fifteen years since I was familiar with the books, so I cannot comment as to the faithfulness of the adaptation, but it held on to what little I remember both in storyline and atmosphere, and it was a thoroughly admirable production on all fronts even if the approach to polar architecture broke my suspension of disbelief. Despite the excellent performances and wonderfully executed production, though, I was still left with that empty feeling – it was a grand adventure, but nothing much stayed with me, and in marked contrast to The Terror, even in my susceptible state I didn't much care about any of the characters. Why was such an obstensibly philosophical story so devoid of lasting impact?

It seems to have percolated a bit in my sleep since finishing it, and I woke this morning feeling like I'd figured something out.

In order to understand what I'm getting at, you need to be at least passingly familiar with the premise and basic storyline of The Northern Lights, first book in the His Dark Materials trilogy:

( A Story Rundown with Necessary Spoilers )

( And so, what I think is missing ... )

So once again I find I have been spoiled by Terry Pratchett, who is much better both at storytelling and proselytising for secular humanism, in part because he knows how to show, not tell, and abstains from lecturing the reader. Pullman can't even make the defence that he's writing for children, because one of Pratchett's best deconstructions of organised religion is the Bromeliad trilogy, which is openly aimed at younger readers. The sneaky thing about Terry Pratchett is that, in the midst of tearing down codified belief systems, he nevertheless provides worldly wisdom and teaches the reader how to be a better person, something Philip Pullman leaves hanging. Will there ever be a high-value TV miniseries adaptation of a Pratchett book, that takes itself as seriously as His Dark Materials? There have been a few attempts, but the essence tends to get lost in translation. Someday, maybe. We can but hope.

I'm reading The Little Flowers of St Francis, a nearly contemporary memoir of anecdotes about Francis of Assisi and the early days of his monastic order, and

There are an awful lot of monks who go spend the night in the woods in pairs to, er, 'talk about God', just sayin' (hey, God is love, man)
I have seen lots of depictions of St Francis but none of them told me the stigmata actually had nails in them?!
Friar Juniper is basically Arthur Shappey – or perhaps more accurately Father Dougal – but either way it's funny to see that character trope go all the way back to the 13th century.

It's interesting, though ... it's a medieval Italian document translated into Victorian English and yet it still manages to sound incredibly fresh and conversational, with tenses switching to the historic present when the writer gets excited and personalities coming through the fog of time. Interesting also to see how religious and cultural values have and haven't changed since that time ... For all that the Franciscans get conflated with hippies (and there is plenty to back that up) there are moments where, say, a monk is deathly ill and wants pigs' foot to eat, so his brother monk goes off into the woods with a knife and just cuts off a pig's foot and cooks it for him, which is absolutely unthinkable nowadays.

It's also interesting just how much was happening concurrently in the 13th century – St Francis and St Dominic, who founded two of the most prominent religious orders, were contemporaries and actually met each other. Because of the music I have always jokingly called the 13th Century 'the rockingest century' but I'm starting to wonder if it actually was, at least until the 19th.

And now, an entry for the gallery of deeply inappropriate title graphics:

I don't remember when I first heard the radio dramatisation of The Idiot, but I know it was before I went to work at Disney, because it made me laugh when people there called anything mildly unpleasant "dark." No, no, this is dark. It takes a really brutal turn at the end, but there's plenty of the darkness of the human soul right from the beginning.

I only know Tolstoy and Dostoevsky from dramatisations of their work, but if that's anything to go by, I prefer the latter: Tolstoy is a great observer of people, but Dostoevsky sees through them. In doing so, he makes the genre of 19th-century drawing-room drama – which I tend to find petty and tiresome – into an indictment of that whole world, and thereby much more satisfying.

But what do I know, I've never read the books.

Once upon a time I had an idea to do an art book of "failed adaptations" – Disney-style concept art for hilariously un-Disney properties – where I could learn different styles and apply them to such inappropriate* stories as Lord of the Flies and Fahrenheit 451. When my dreams of working in vis dev died a wholly justifiable death, there didn't seem much point for the exercise, but I still think about it sometimes.
*I still think these would make great animated films; they are "inappropriate" only for the general public's disagreement with that idea. There's no reason animation has to be just for kids!

It's funny, now that I'm doing my former "playtime" (drawing polar explorers) for a """job""", I have to remind myself to play occasionally – there's book stuff I need to be doing, but if I don't have a bit of fun every now and again, even a job as fun and rewarding as that will start to wear heavy.

Current Location: so far away from Hollywood omg

To my great bafflement, it has taken this long for Golden Hill to be released in the US – a multi-award winning highly readable romp through colonial New York, you’d think it’d be obvious, but there you go.

Anyway, here is the main character, Mr. Smith – I roughed these out last year when I read the book, but have only just made them as pretty as I’d like.

Do give Golden Hill a shot if you like

fun
peril
interesting characters
meticulous research
very satisfying historical fix-it fic

Mr Smith is superficially similar to Moist von Lipwig, which made it a little difficult for me to get a grip on the book at first, because I couldn't see into his head as clearly as Moist's (whose internal world is what really sells the book, IMO), but boy oh boy that was totally worth it for the sake of saving the reveal for the end – the sort of reveal that makes the re-read at least as satisfying as the first.

I don't know about you, but I find most of my recreational reading these days ends up being very serious news and commentary about how much of a mess we're in. It's nice to get a break like this and lose yourself in another time and place, without being devoid of meaning.

Supplemental material – including a rather comprehensive catalogue of 18th-century slang – can be found on the book’s T umblr.

Someone on Tumblr asked me if I'd listened to the recent radio dramatisation of Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness. I have – the first episode at least – and if you wish to do so you'd better hurry up because it expires tomorrow evening (UK time): Episode 1 / Episode 2

Le Guin's own story is intriguing, what little I know if it, and the trails for the drama sounded interesting; the promotional image was of two people manhauling across a frozen waste, so with that and it being a drama on Radio 4 I was as a moth to the flame.

I think I might have tried reading A Wizard of Earthsea (which has also had a BBC dramatisation) when I was a teenager – I definitely remember trying a few highly recommended fantasy novels at one time and not being able to get into any of them. The memory which stands out most was dropping out after five pages of Dragonriders of Pern when the internal screaming got louder than the words. It's your world's analogue to a year, just call it a year! Why are you capitalising so many random nouns? Most fantasy to me felt like drowning in worldbuilding, a lot to keep track of with nothing to hold onto, no emotional life ring or a foothold on something I knew.

I'm more than twice the age now, have done a lot of reading in the meantime, and have made an effort to try to understand and appreciate the unfamiliar and initially distasteful, so I thought I'd give it another try. Unfortunately the old familiar drowning feeling came right back. I tried to soldier through, appreciating the production and ideas at least, and I think I got all the way to the end, but couldn't make myself go for Episode 2. I'm really sorry.

Of course I had to keep picking at it; I had to figure out why this turned me off so much when it ostensibly has a lot in common with other things I like. An idea I had in college came back to me, that speculative fiction really ought not to be divided into Sci-Fi and Fantasy (the boundary between which is famously subjective) but rather Fantasy With One Foot In Reality (Bipedal Fantasy, for short) and Wholecloth Fantasy, which is an entirely distinct universe with at most a passing nod at our own. Whether it's set in a quasi-medieval Arcadia or a hyperfuturistic space station, a story tends to be either tethered to our own reality or completely free-floating.

All the fantasy I like is Bipedal:
Watership Down is a book about another society, with its own rules, mythology, and vocabulary, but it happens to be made up of ordinary rabbits in ordinary Hampshire (which, admittedly, is a fantasy world to a five-year-old in San Diego) and the familiar pokes through often enough it never feels very foreign.
Redwall is set in another world, but with familiar furniture – it could be the same world as Wind in the Willows, Beatrix Potter, or Disney's Robin Hood – and in the early books at least it is not magical.
Harry Potter is magical, but has one foot planted in our everyday reality; most of the books start at the Dursleys', and Harry comes to the magical world with a relatable Muggle frame of reference. We only start losing the lifeline to our reality when the wizarding world has become a second home, and even that alternate reality plays off what we find ordinary.
The Dark Is Rising is very similar, and while its magical world is less of a riff on the nonmagical one, it keeps one foot in each world much more consistently than Harry Potter does.
Discworld is set in another world, and is magical, but it is plainly our world reflected in a funhouse mirror. Its thematic and satirical aspects are the foot it has in reality, and the characters it uses to illustrate its high-concept side are fully relatable human beings (for a given value of human).
Ray Bradbury's writing also uses its satirical side to ground us in a familiar reality, often the quintessential 1950s suburban ideal or stereotypical mid-century image of The Future.
Fatherland, being Alternate History, depends upon on our knowledge of WWII, but being twenty years down another leg of the Trousers of Time, maintains a certain distance. The power of its ending comes in part from its swinging back around to connect with our reality.

The Left Hand of Darkness' idea of gender-shifting humanoids is fascinating and opens all sort of narrative and philosophic opportunities, but I felt like I got more juice out of the Dwarf Feminism subplot in Discworld, and especially Monstrous Regiment's illustration of 'People are people' – the characters in Left Hand of Darkness seemed to spend more time explaining the implications of gender fluidity and how their society and relationships were structured around it than they did being people. Wouldn't it have been more effective to make us know and love the characters and then find out their species' quirk?

It's personal taste, of course. I know there are lots of people who are over the moon about Le Guin and her ilk, and I can see why if I step far enough back from myself. I wish I had that capacity for falling headlong into Wholecloth Fantasy, but my imagination is, as Professor Trelawney would say, 'hopelessly mundane.' I don't wish to tell them they're wrong, only explain where I'm coming from in a way that makes some systemic sense. Does it?

A few years ago, when Occupy was doing their thing and their grievances and agenda were in the news, I had this thought:

These are clever, resourceful, idealistic, fit young people in their prime, who evidently don't mind a bit of discomfort to prove a point. If they want to reject the system, why don't they pool their resources, launch a Kickstarter to cover the shortfall, buy some big property somewhere in the back of beyond, and start a self-sufficient cashless community independent of corporations and unfair government?

Then I realised the utopia I was imagining was essentially Redwall.

Before Harry Potter had crested the horizon, Redwall was my obsession. It went beyond an obsession, in fact; at a time when I was a fish miles from water, struggling in an unfriendly school, and otherwise alienated from everyday reality, the Redwall books were my refuge and salvation. I read them over and over, read almost nothing else aside from the books assigned in class, and more or less looked out at the world through Redwall's windows. They gave me somewhere to go that wasn't my own head, and I don't know where I'd be today if I hadn't had that.

Most of my childhood was spent in places that could not have been further, visually, from the verdant pastoral quasi-medieval world described in the books, so when I moved to the UK I decided I needed to reread them, now I've become more familiar with the architecture and biome described. I was also curious to find out how my perspective on them might have changed in the fifteen years or so since I cracked one open. I can't say I was necessarily expecting anything, but it was curious what I noticed ...

( Having just finished 'Redwall' ... )

Sadly the re-reading experience was not as blissful a trip down memory lane as I was kind of hoping it would be ... Redwall itself is a tricky book because the author doesn't really find his groove until a third of the way through, and the worldbuilding that gives the other books in the series such a nice integrity is still a little shaky in this one – it's the only book with any suggestion of a human presence, the relative sizes of the animals are all over the place, and the history of Mossflower Country is a great big unknown. The adventure was grand and it was still pleasingly cinematic (and the set designer has improved a lot since I was 13), but I've been spoiled by an education in screenwriting and more grownup literature that has ideas and stuff in it; Redwall is sweet in its simplicity but it does kind of make me want more out of aspects of the story and characters which are probably not intended for that purpose. I am all in favour of just enjoying a good yarn sometimes so I will let it be, but it did slightly diminish my enjoyment of it on an adult level. But mainly, I think, it's that I don't really need it anymore – I no longer need to hide from the world, in fact I quite enjoy the world I'm living in now, not least because I can get to Mossflower Woods on the Tube.

I have a copy of Mossflower waiting for me, which I'm looking forward to because it's got Martin the Warrior in it and he's a good 'un, but I don't know when I'll get to it because I've got a giant stack of homework that I'm about to get started on ... It'll be good to visit for brain candy on a dark winter night, though. Boy am I ever excited for it to be winter again.

     An officially enforced long weekend
   – prodigious housework
   – mealtimes
   + needing to get off my feet
     Sketchbook time!

My new sketchbook has sort of 'aged' pages, which makes my drawings look so much more legitimate! It also has an unusual relationship with graphite, so I've been doing a lot more ink drawings. I'm used to doing observational sketches in ink, but I've only rarely done characters in anything but pencil, so this was a bit of a stretch ... luckily what I've been doing at work has depended a lot on quick, definite ink strokes, so it didn't come out as badly as I'd thought it would.

And now, a presentation of Dimly-Remembered Description and No Costume Reference Theatre!
1.

1. Miss Pross! (Definitely miss.)
2. Jerry Cruncher (and son) ... I remember in the book his hair is described as 'spiky,' but he lives in the 18th century so he must obviously have hair long enough to tie back, which means my imagination has given him a mullet. Oh, and the bug was printed on the page; please disregard (unless you like it).
3. Lucie Manette (and an abortive attempt at Charles) - in the radio play she gets an actual personality!
4. Madame Defarge ... she ended up much more of a self-portrait than I was intending; eventually I just gave up and went with it. Halloween costume!

Current Location: home (!)
Current Music: Radio Fooooour

When I was in high school, my English classroom was quite near the cafeteria/common area. During the period in which I was in that class, the dance troupe used that space for their rehearsals, so if it was a hot day and we had the door open we would hear their music. In the spring of that year, when the weather had started getting warm again, we were doing the Tale of Two Cities unit, and they were rehearsing a routine to the smash hit of the season, a certain waily love anthem from a popular film that had just come out which involved ice, a ship, and disaster (though mostly, if I recall, interminable love scenes). Thus it came to be that I will forever associate "My Heart Will Go On" not with Dreamy Leo but with Sydney Carton ... and why I do not have as immediate a gag reflex when I hear that song as most people seem to do, because I really rather enjoyed A Tale of Two Cities.

It was with delight that I discovered Radio 4 is running a new radio dramatisation of that book this week – and further delight to find that it was rather good – and yet more delight to find that I didn't have to record it myself as it was available for download completely honestly off their site! And so I share it with you, Radioland; near, far, wherever you are.

A TALE OF TWO CITIES
~Love, Loss, and Redemption in the Time of the French Revolution ~
Starring Carl Prekopp, a Surprise Guest Star in ep. 2, and some other people
I wish I had ~~some~~ any time for drawing, so I could update my high school doodles of the characters ...

Current Mood: retrospective

You never know when you're going to come across something that will expand your artistic toolkit. I never thought, when I picked up a copy of Something Wicked This Way Comes in my senior year of high school, that it would teach me anything about drawing from life, but that was before I read this passage:

Mr Cooger, somewhere behind the eye-slits, went blink-click with his insect-Kodak pupils. The lenses exploded like suns, then burnt chilly and serene again.

He swivelled his glance to Jim. Blink-click. He had Jim flexed, focused, shot, developed, dried, filed away in dark. Blink-click.

... When their faces turned, Mr Cooger inside the nephew went silently blink-click, blink-click ...
Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Chap. 19

The idea of taking a mental snapshot stuck with me, and I tried doing it while doing observational sketches. When you're out in the real world, no one is going to pause for you to draw them, so you have to be pretty good at jotting down a quick impression. I found that it was much easier to get this impression down accurately if I pretended I was a camera (or Mr Cooger) and, when they reached a pose I wanted to capture, blinked – then held that image in my mind, with my eyes closed, transferring it from a passing impression to an image held in my short term memory, and tried to draw it immediately off this mental slide, without looking back up.

It's really hard at first, but I guarantee you the permanence of your mental snapshots will improve with practise. Back when this was the only sort of life drawing I could do, I got to the point where I could hold onto the image long enough to get a pretty decent rough sketch out of it, then would add details using logic and impression as the memory decayed. I'm not nearly so good at it now as I've been spoiled by years of formal life drawing, but I know that if I got in practise again it would come back.

The key is to know what to focus on – the curve of the spine, the relative positions of the limbs, the tilt of the head, rather than details of clothing, facial expression, hairstyle, and so on. What makes the pose that pose? What makes the person that person? Often you're capturing a flavour more than an actual likeness, so what are the most basic things that give that image that particular flavour? These sketches should take no more than one minute to do – thirty seconds is better; less if you can. They are not supposed to be pretty! As long as they capture a gesture, a moment, a personality, or a feeling, they're doing their job.

Aside from being a useful skill in general, this is great for drawing animals, which really don't hold still unless they're sleeping, and also for passing undetected in crowds – if you're constantly looking up and back from your sketchbook, checking your drawing, you might attract attention. As most beginning artists I know are mortified by the idea of drawing in public, this is a good thing to avoid and still get your sketchbook time in!

Current Mood: diligent

The TRINITY of LIFE DRAWING LITERATURE
According to Tealin

Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards
This book will probably teach you more than any other single book how to think about drawing on a fundamental level. Basically, it teaches you how to see. It trains your brain. And as I hope I've demonstrated in at least a few posts, it's all in your brain! The author takes the stance that anyone who can write letters can draw, which includes nearly everyone. There are exercises. They are dull, as exercises are wont to be. DO THEM. You can thank me later.

Atlas of Human Anatomy for the Artist by Stephen Peck
Pretty much everything you need to know about what's going on under the skin, so you can understand what all those bumps mean. Mostly bones and muscle – the digestive system doesn't come into play much when you're life drawing – but super clear, useful diagrams and the like.

Force: Life Drawing for Animators by Mike Mattesi
Once you've learned from Ms Edwards how to put on paper what you see, Mr Mattesi will teach you how to think about what you are drawing and take it to the max. By which I mean make it more dynamic, really get to the core of what's going on in the figure, how to express the rhythms and motion in your lines, capture not just what a pose looks like but how it feels, etc. This book changed not only how I approached life drawing but pretty much all drawing I do, reprogramming the way I draw right down to how I put a line on the page. Cannot recommend highly enough. In fact, I should probably give it another read-through myself ...

Current Mood: diligent
Current Location: home

Less than a week in and I'm already behind!

I promised myself when I started this that I wouldn't make this a general 'how to draw' series ... it is, somewhat, but there are lots of existing 'how to draw' resources out there. It would probably be good to share some of them, eh?

When I was in high school there weren't many animation books out there – I seem to have been at the leading edge of a generation that grew up on Disney's renaissance in the 90s and wanted to become animators, but most of the really helpful books were published after I left school.

The books I relied on most heavily before going to college were: ( My Animation Reading List )

Current Mood: groggy
Current Location: home

Redwall Author Brian Jacques Dies

Dear Mr Jacques,

Thank you for helping me survive middle school. I'm where I am today in part because of you.

I'm sorry I never mailed the fan letter I wrote.
Cheers,

Tealin

Current Mood: moved
Current Location: work

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~ Random Thoughts and Scribblings ~

Entries tagged with book

Rolling Book Report: to p.203, and out

Rolling Book Report: to p.86

The Rolling Book Report, or, Tealin Looks A Gift Horse In The Mouth

Darkwood II: Such Big Teeth

Darkwood

The Crown of Dalemark

The Spellcoats

Book Reports

His Dark Materials, Revisited

St Francis

The Idiot

Golden Hill

Bipedal Fantasy

Socialism, Female Characters in YA, and Redwall

Tale of Two Cities ... doodlins

A Tale of Two Cities

40 Days of Art: The Bradbury Snapshot

40 Days of Art: Life Drawing Books

40 Days of Art: Beginners' Books

Regrets

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December 2023

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