A meditative cycle of points of view in a Southern Gothic style? Not my usual fare. But the mute Mr. Singer, who stands at the center without getting to pour out his heart like people keep doing to him, fascinates. The souls around him read what they want into him, and they are haunting and beautiful even when they’re wrong. It’s emotionally difficult but absolutely worth the cost of admission.
Tag: books
Top Ten Favorite Books, #9: Notes from Underground
Top Ten Favorite Books, #9: Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky
“I am a sick man, I am a spiteful man.” It rolls off the tongue like a Tale of Two Cities (It was the best of times, it was the worst of times) if Dickens weren’t being paid by the word. The neurotic narrator, prone to hyperbole and outbursts of bitterness, is weirdly relatable. I’m not sure who did the translation I own, but “There I stood, crushed and annihilated” is a byword in this household.
Top Ten Favorite Books, #10: This is How You Lose the Time War
Top Ten Favorite Books, #10: This is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Maxwell Gladstone
Here’s where I confirm that I love a good epistolary novel. (I just finished Dracula in real time based on the dated documents; it was great.)
Letters are a communication medium unlike any other: the physicality of a slip of paper or cardboard, the fact that the writer will not see the reader, the additional element in this story of placing the letter where it will be seen, one tense sci-fi mission to another.
I enjoy the fact that the technology of time-traveling history-tweaking agents isn’t really the focus of the story. It’s interesting and thought out, but not the point. The focus is two people finding each other and holding onto that link. The writing is beautiful, playful, thought-provoking, characterization purely through what the writers choose to disclose to one another. It’s gorgeous.
Watership Down
Bunnies are happy and twee,
Or so it was vouchsafed to me.
Some leadership primer
From kits to old-timers?
It’s dark! Ew, that’s blood! Stop the spree!
Jane Eyre
A gal with rules axiomatic,
A guy with a flair so dramatic:
He’ll offer a ring
To the sweet little thing,
But the crazy’s not just in the attic.
Top Ten Favorite Fictional Characters, #2: Sir Lancelot
Top Ten Favorite Fictional Characters,#2: Sir Lancelot, The Once and Future King
The Once and Future King is one of those books that gives me something new in every phase of my life. Through it all, I have adored the Ill-Made Knight, the one who loathes himself and tries so hard to rise above it, who has impulses toward cruelty and swears never to let himself descend to it, who became the best knight and was cursed to uphold it, who did just two things wrong, and one made a son better than him and the other unmade his world. White makes him feel so real in his fractured beauty.
As the book notes, a dishonorable man might have just gone away with Gwenever, cut the knot that led to their ruin. Over time I’ve come to regard the Arthurian love triangle as a little bit tawdry, ignoble. But I understand, through the book, why it happened, and why he only ever loved three people (I allow for God) and together they ruined everything.
The Lord of the Rings
Long poems and songs tend to lurk
In JRR’s body of work.
The epic, the lay:
If he wrote today,
The editor might go berserk.