This is the second in a series of posts about books I’ve read in 2024. Some of them are book club books, most of them not. Being in a book club has been helpful for me in widening my reading a little, but getting into the habit is something I’d attribute more to just pushing gently until the habit came back somewhat. The other issue is time, and I’m taking steps with work to moderate (i.e. eliminate) time spent grading work as much as possible, so hopefully I’ll be able to keep it up once the semester starts in March.
Neil Gaiman’s Odd and the Frost Giants is a short YA (?) book illustrated rather wonderfully by Chris Riddell. The art is really very nice. I borrowed it with the intention of reading it to our son, but he wasn’t interested, so I just read it alone. I would hazard a guess and say Gaiman wrote it during or after writing Norse Mythology, since it’s very much drawing on that subject matter, but I could be wrong. The story is fine. I’m not really into Gaiman’s stuff that much, but I enjoyed it as a brief diversion… but I did really like the illustration.
For me, Homer’s The Iliad was a slog despite Robert Fagles’ careful and lively translation, but I was determined to finish it, and I finally did late one night this month. I’ve had this book since before I left Canada—indeed, since before I left Saskatoon!—and I think I’d intended to read it right after I read The Odyssey, back in 2000 or 2001, but instead, it took me until now. Well, now means I started reading it back in late fall 2023 and only finished it in early February. I agree with critics about why the book is worth reading and studying: the relatively neutral stance on the war, as well as the historical details and attitudes revealed, and even the literary decisions made along the way—they’re all fascinating. Yet for me it was still mostly a slog through litanies of horrible deaths—often tracked by the proximity of the wound to the victim’s nipple—and ships and battles. Which shouldn’t surprise us, it is a war story, but personally the bits I liked most involved the gods and their squabbling. I was surprised at not loving this, since I really enjoyed the Odyssey when I read it back in Montreal. I’m still happy to have read it, and I get why it’s important, but some part of me wonders whether the rest of this series of epics was more like this, or more like the Odyssey. Maybe there’s a reason those other epics didn’t survive, if they dragged as much as this one did for me? I think Robert Fagles probably did a very good job translating the text, and cannot blame him—or maybe even Homer—for how I feel about it.
Underneath the Oversea by Marc Laidlaw was my first audiobook of 2024, and I really enjoyed it. I already knew Gorlen and Spar vaguely, from a few stories I managed to catch in magazines over the years, and it seems they’ve come a long way: they share a family, and a groveof songtrees, and, well, to say more would be spoiley, though the title gives away the main event of the book: one day, the ocean shifts locations, moving overhead and leaving the sea bed empty for reasons almost nobody understands. Almost nobody, except the antagonist, who reminds me of the absurd and sociopathic arch-mages in Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth—which is saying something, since I’ve only read the first few stories of that cycle—but this novel has stuff I feel you’d probably never encounter in a Vance novel. My favorite minor character was Sir Pet, an animate bird doll of some eventual importance to the proceedings, and his owner Aiku, the child of Gorlen and his wife Plenth… and, in some way, the child of the gargoyle Spar as well. Disclosure: Marc is a friend, and he suggested I listen to this first before cueing up Volume 1 of the series, which I will be listening to next.
I’ve heard a lot about George Saunders over the years, but it took my book club selecting it as our next read for me to pick up something and give it a try. Tenth of December begins with a long, gushing review of Saunders the man and his work, which makes me feel a little bad for not enjoying it as much as I gather I’m supposed to. There’s something about Saunders’ work that reminds me of Wes Anderson and the whole “new sincerity” school—which, I’m afraid, has always struck me as rather an odd name for the school, since so much of the work coming from it feels deeply insincere to me. Saunders strikes me as being good at what he does, I suppose, and very accessible in a lot of ways, but it’s very much not for me. Or at least this is what I was thinking when I read the first story in the collection, “Victory Lap.” The rest of the stories varied in how much they interested me: “Escape from Spider Head” is probably the popular standout of the book, while some of the other, shorter stories were more forgettable. The title story appealed most to me, though. One thing that came up in the discussion was how so many of Saunders’ stories reminded me of stories by other authors who I think did it better: Ray Vukcevich, Guy Vanderhaeghe, and Eileen Gunn all crossed my mind. I think the main different between those authors is that they don’t lean so hard on whimsy, and feel to me like they have more tangible things to say. Or maybe I’m unfairly biased personally by my brushes with some dedicated imitators of Saunders whom I’ve known. In any case, Saunders’s work does not seem to be my kind of stuff, and I’m frankly just a bit puzzled why so many praise his writing so highly. My reaction wasn’t so bad that I would read something else by him, but neither am I in any hurry to do it.
Cinnabar by Edward Bryant is a book I’ve signed out of the library at work a number of times over the years, but never gotten around to reading until now. James Davis Nicoll’s review includes summaries and a good overview, so I’ll just note that the book is very very 1970s. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but you knowing it on the way in is helpful because the way certain things are handled is very much of the time. (It’s a pretty dystopic setting, for a sexually liberated future dream-powered polis with simulacrum humans and animals running around, and a lot of considerations that would be de rigueur today never seemed to have crossed Bryant’s mind.) It was a quick read, though, and interesting as an historical curio. I think I’m the only person who’s ever read this particular copy: there’s an index card in the back that’s blank, an borrower slip glued onto the page before that which is also blank, and anyone who’d read it later would have discovered the book coming apart in their hands like I did.