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labingiAfter many years of English Ph.D. withdrawals, I am moving back toward being a more regular reader. Indeed, I often wish that anime I like existed in novel format because I'd love to reread bits when I just don't want to re-view whole episodes. My reading forays recently have included Billy Budd, Holes, and bits of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, which I'll briefly discuss below the cut. Spoilers for anyone who hasn't read 'em.
Billy Budd
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louderandlouder was right that the language is hard. It's amusingly hard. One wonders what was going through Melville's head that made him feel it was a good idea to write in such unnecessarily paragraph-long periodic sentences. I remember loving the language of Moby Dick in a way I didn't in Billy Budd, maybe because Moby Dick is comparatively dialogue heavy and what sticks in my head is the poetry of the dialogue.
As to the story, I think I spoiled myself. I went into the book with pretty high expectations and a general knowledge of the trajectory of the story. I had expected more character/relationship development, and this hope got fairly quashed. As far as I can see, the characters are almost allegories. This isn't bad; it's just not what I picked up the book for. On the other hand, I knew from early on that poor, innocent Billy was going to be executed in the name of fair administration of naval law. Knowing that probably robbed the story of most of its impact.
It's a good discussion of the politics of military discipline and wartime "justice," and--as one critic in my enhanced edition noted--a powerful critique of the death penalty. Its strongest feature, for me, was its close integration of naval history with the fictional story. The cultural milieu of a severe, recent mutiny is a good backdrop for an overzealous enforcement of the law. I did not find the characters compelling, except Vere, and didn't see enough of him to become very engaged.
Holes
Holes is a juvenile lit book about a boy, Stanley, who gets sent to correctional camp after being wrongly accused of stealing. The camp is corrupt and abusive, and Stanley soon gets entangled in a plot to discover buried treasure, which (coincidentally) belonged to an ancestor of his.
Coincidence in this book is beyond Dickensian. The tightness of the plotting, the interconnection of most everyone and everything is more fairytale and realism, and this story is probably best understood as a modern fairytale with a dash of psychological realism. It's skillfully crafted. It makes a valid point well: that good deeds will be rewarded (and bad deeds punished).
It makes this point with a fairytale exactness that is really my only complaint. Specifically, the happy ending is too happy. It's not enough that our characters end up good people, behaving well, with friends and having been rescued from the evil camp with valuable lessons learned. No, they must be millionaires finding long lost relatives and having their inventions advertised on TV. That was over the top for my taste. It lacked the nuance and psychological power of the much more believable "happy middle" of Stanley and Zero escaping to the mountains and subsisting on mud and onions. I buy completely that this experience erased the old worries, taught them new strengths, and stripped them down to primal joy. It was very well written; after that, the ending was an anticlimax. It would have been hard for it not to be.
Of course, it should be said I'm not the target audience.
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell
This long fantasy novel posits that magic exists and is undergoing a resurgence in England around the time of the Napoleonic Wars. Its tone has been likened to Jane Austen's, and certainly one of the book's signal strengths is its ability to invoke c. 1810 with tremendous verisimilitude. Strange and Norrell are our two chief magicians: Norrell a crusty, middle-aged academic and Strange a sociable fellow and a bit of dilettante (until he finds that magic is his calling). This is a good basis for a story, hence my buying it.
I didn't finish it and probably won't. This says as much about me as the book: I'm a notorious book dropper. I got about a third in, reading much faster than is my wont and flat-out skimming some parts. I found the story not bad but not worth the investment required by its length. If I'm going to read a book of 800 or so (large) pages, I really need to be in love with it, i.e. I need to be in love with its characters and their lives, and I found nothing to grip onto here. Norrell I found unlikeable. He's so emotionally flat there's almost nothing in him to relate to. He's meant to be this way; he's written well, but when one of your two main characters is written to have no emotional resonance to speak of, that's a problem for generating emotional resonance. Jonathan can't carry the weight for him. He's a decently interesting character, and I really liked the portrayal of his marriage as genuinely loving yet realistic and nuanced in its annoyances and distances. But at heart, he's a low-key sort of person. This is fine, but again, when the emotional height of the story is defined by "low key," there's not a lot to generate catharsis, and that's what I read for.
If the book had been, say, 200 pages long (and I rather suspect it could have been), I would likely have finished it and considered it enjoyable and worth my while. But to me, it does not sustain many hundreds of pages. I say that not having read all of it. I skimmed ahead enough to know something of the emotional dimensions that get explored, and there's some good stuff and doubtless much I didn't catch in my skimming, but after a couple of hundred pages, I have other things I'd rather do than keep waiting for the payoff.
So all in all, no love affairs here. I feel a bit guilty that my reviews slant negative. These are all good books, and my negative angle reflects the difficulty of finding books that please me these days. Thus, my still not reading much. I am a picky, picky person.
Billy Budd
louderandlouder was right that the language is hard. It's amusingly hard. One wonders what was going through Melville's head that made him feel it was a good idea to write in such unnecessarily paragraph-long periodic sentences. I remember loving the language of Moby Dick in a way I didn't in Billy Budd, maybe because Moby Dick is comparatively dialogue heavy and what sticks in my head is the poetry of the dialogue.As to the story, I think I spoiled myself. I went into the book with pretty high expectations and a general knowledge of the trajectory of the story. I had expected more character/relationship development, and this hope got fairly quashed. As far as I can see, the characters are almost allegories. This isn't bad; it's just not what I picked up the book for. On the other hand, I knew from early on that poor, innocent Billy was going to be executed in the name of fair administration of naval law. Knowing that probably robbed the story of most of its impact.
It's a good discussion of the politics of military discipline and wartime "justice," and--as one critic in my enhanced edition noted--a powerful critique of the death penalty. Its strongest feature, for me, was its close integration of naval history with the fictional story. The cultural milieu of a severe, recent mutiny is a good backdrop for an overzealous enforcement of the law. I did not find the characters compelling, except Vere, and didn't see enough of him to become very engaged.
Holes
Holes is a juvenile lit book about a boy, Stanley, who gets sent to correctional camp after being wrongly accused of stealing. The camp is corrupt and abusive, and Stanley soon gets entangled in a plot to discover buried treasure, which (coincidentally) belonged to an ancestor of his.
Coincidence in this book is beyond Dickensian. The tightness of the plotting, the interconnection of most everyone and everything is more fairytale and realism, and this story is probably best understood as a modern fairytale with a dash of psychological realism. It's skillfully crafted. It makes a valid point well: that good deeds will be rewarded (and bad deeds punished).
It makes this point with a fairytale exactness that is really my only complaint. Specifically, the happy ending is too happy. It's not enough that our characters end up good people, behaving well, with friends and having been rescued from the evil camp with valuable lessons learned. No, they must be millionaires finding long lost relatives and having their inventions advertised on TV. That was over the top for my taste. It lacked the nuance and psychological power of the much more believable "happy middle" of Stanley and Zero escaping to the mountains and subsisting on mud and onions. I buy completely that this experience erased the old worries, taught them new strengths, and stripped them down to primal joy. It was very well written; after that, the ending was an anticlimax. It would have been hard for it not to be.
Of course, it should be said I'm not the target audience.
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell
This long fantasy novel posits that magic exists and is undergoing a resurgence in England around the time of the Napoleonic Wars. Its tone has been likened to Jane Austen's, and certainly one of the book's signal strengths is its ability to invoke c. 1810 with tremendous verisimilitude. Strange and Norrell are our two chief magicians: Norrell a crusty, middle-aged academic and Strange a sociable fellow and a bit of dilettante (until he finds that magic is his calling). This is a good basis for a story, hence my buying it.
I didn't finish it and probably won't. This says as much about me as the book: I'm a notorious book dropper. I got about a third in, reading much faster than is my wont and flat-out skimming some parts. I found the story not bad but not worth the investment required by its length. If I'm going to read a book of 800 or so (large) pages, I really need to be in love with it, i.e. I need to be in love with its characters and their lives, and I found nothing to grip onto here. Norrell I found unlikeable. He's so emotionally flat there's almost nothing in him to relate to. He's meant to be this way; he's written well, but when one of your two main characters is written to have no emotional resonance to speak of, that's a problem for generating emotional resonance. Jonathan can't carry the weight for him. He's a decently interesting character, and I really liked the portrayal of his marriage as genuinely loving yet realistic and nuanced in its annoyances and distances. But at heart, he's a low-key sort of person. This is fine, but again, when the emotional height of the story is defined by "low key," there's not a lot to generate catharsis, and that's what I read for.
If the book had been, say, 200 pages long (and I rather suspect it could have been), I would likely have finished it and considered it enjoyable and worth my while. But to me, it does not sustain many hundreds of pages. I say that not having read all of it. I skimmed ahead enough to know something of the emotional dimensions that get explored, and there's some good stuff and doubtless much I didn't catch in my skimming, but after a couple of hundred pages, I have other things I'd rather do than keep waiting for the payoff.
So all in all, no love affairs here. I feel a bit guilty that my reviews slant negative. These are all good books, and my negative angle reflects the difficulty of finding books that please me these days. Thus, my still not reading much. I am a picky, picky person.
