Reading Wednesday 3/10
Oct. 3rd, 2018 07:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livRecently read
Bring up the bodies by Hilary Mantel. (c) Tertius Enterprises 2012, Pub 2012 Fourth Estate, ISBN 978-000747735-7 All systems red by Martha Wells. (c) Martha Wells 2017 , Pub 2017 Tor.com, ISBN 978-0-7653-9752-2 The wonderful O by James Thurber. (c) The Estate of James Thurber 1958, published Puffin Books 1974, ISBN 0-1403-0180-1
I read Bring up the bodies almost entirely because I was so impressed with the first half of the pair, Wolf Hall. And it's not a bad book, but I just wasn't as excited by it. It's basically a book about Anne Boleyn and her execution, and I got the impression that Mantel just doesn't like Boleyn very much. Or perhaps her viewpoint character, Thomas Cromwell, doesn't like Boleyn. The book portrays him reluctantly going along with Henry VIII's demands to get out of his now unwanted marriage by arranging for the accusation, trial and execution of Boleyn. He looks back on the legal and diplomatic efforts he went through just a few years before to arrange the annulment of Henry's first marriage to Katherine of Aragon.
I think a lot of why I didn't get very much into the book is that I didn't particularly want Cromwell to succeed. In WH I was really rooting for him, a commoner, rising to a position of influence in the Tudor court. Mantel gives enough realism to Anne's downfall that it seems a pretty horrible thing, and while the narrative is somewhat sympathetic to Henry, his position is not particularly morally admirable. Mantel's version of the king comes across as quite well-meaning, having a somewhat understandable desire to be married to a woman he actually has a rapport with rather than making a political alliance. It's kind of hard to be fully sympathetic when he's pursuing political ends as the king of England, and indeed conflating his own personal wishes with the good of the country and the Church. So the first book is a fun and exciting Bildungsroman about the young Cromwell achieving great things, but the second is framed more like a horror novel. Since the events are historically true it's obviously completely inevitable that it's going to end with Anne's death, and there's just a sense of things going inexorably worse and worse for her, from her graphically described miscarriage to the famous beheading scene.
There are some great moments. In spite of retelling a very famous episode of history, Mantel managed to introduce genuine tension about whether Anne would manage to produce a male heir, and whether Henry would survive his jousting injury. There are some lovely bits about Cromwell's home life as an ageing, though politically powerful, widower, and his interaction with his apprentices and protégés. Interestingly both Cromwell and Henry are portrayed as genuinely liking women, as people as well as sex objects, though in a way that doesn't seem anachronistically feminist, and when the chips are down they both always prioritize male concerns.
Overall it's a really depressing book. Cromwell frets about growing older and knowing that in spite of being unimaginably rich his position is precarious because he has no family. Henry frets about growing older and producing an heir and vaguely wanting to be a good Christian but not if it's actually inconvenient for him. Katherine dies of cancer, miserably and in exile. Jane Seymour, portrayed as a somewhat naive and extremely virginal young woman, is more or less manipulated into a courtship with the king, and again, because it's real history, you know that the marriage on the horizon isn't a happy ending because she'll die in childbirth.
Everybody has been telling me to read All systems red and they were absolutely right. It's a thoroughly delightful book. I had read so many reviews saying that Murderbot is surprisingly endearing for someone with murder in its name, that I did not realize at all that the novella is a thriller with lots of action, about a team of explorers under attack on a dangerous unexplored planet. There is, in fact, quite a lot of murder and other violence. The book hit lots of my chosen family buttons just right, and I really liked the ending even if I wasn't completely surprised by the twist.
Incidentally I borrowedjack's Kindle to read this, since sharing e-books is still annoyingly hard. And even though the tech is much better than my old Nook, I found reading on it a quite unpleasant experience, so I'm confirmed in my decision not to get a Kindle.
The Wonderful O is because we were talking about how it's entirely unlike the similarly named The story of O, and I was reminded how fond I am of it. So I read it tocjwatson, and it is a completely lovely book, with lots of genuinely funny word play.
Currently reading: How to be both by Ali Smith. I'd been looking forward to this for ages because I really loved Girl meets boy, and I bought it new when it came out and then was never quite in the mood for it. So far I'm finding it very impressive, but also quite hard going. It's kind of balanced on the edge between prose and poetry, which is something that Smith handles well, and it's about a teenaged girl coping with the sudden death of her mother. Some absolutely pitch-perfect observations of both characters and situations, but it still somehow feels a bit more like work than leisure reading. Also it's set in Cambridge and there's a lovely description of the sculpture at the end of the DNA path:
I read Bring up the bodies almost entirely because I was so impressed with the first half of the pair, Wolf Hall. And it's not a bad book, but I just wasn't as excited by it. It's basically a book about Anne Boleyn and her execution, and I got the impression that Mantel just doesn't like Boleyn very much. Or perhaps her viewpoint character, Thomas Cromwell, doesn't like Boleyn. The book portrays him reluctantly going along with Henry VIII's demands to get out of his now unwanted marriage by arranging for the accusation, trial and execution of Boleyn. He looks back on the legal and diplomatic efforts he went through just a few years before to arrange the annulment of Henry's first marriage to Katherine of Aragon.
I think a lot of why I didn't get very much into the book is that I didn't particularly want Cromwell to succeed. In WH I was really rooting for him, a commoner, rising to a position of influence in the Tudor court. Mantel gives enough realism to Anne's downfall that it seems a pretty horrible thing, and while the narrative is somewhat sympathetic to Henry, his position is not particularly morally admirable. Mantel's version of the king comes across as quite well-meaning, having a somewhat understandable desire to be married to a woman he actually has a rapport with rather than making a political alliance. It's kind of hard to be fully sympathetic when he's pursuing political ends as the king of England, and indeed conflating his own personal wishes with the good of the country and the Church. So the first book is a fun and exciting Bildungsroman about the young Cromwell achieving great things, but the second is framed more like a horror novel. Since the events are historically true it's obviously completely inevitable that it's going to end with Anne's death, and there's just a sense of things going inexorably worse and worse for her, from her graphically described miscarriage to the famous beheading scene.
There are some great moments. In spite of retelling a very famous episode of history, Mantel managed to introduce genuine tension about whether Anne would manage to produce a male heir, and whether Henry would survive his jousting injury. There are some lovely bits about Cromwell's home life as an ageing, though politically powerful, widower, and his interaction with his apprentices and protégés. Interestingly both Cromwell and Henry are portrayed as genuinely liking women, as people as well as sex objects, though in a way that doesn't seem anachronistically feminist, and when the chips are down they both always prioritize male concerns.
Overall it's a really depressing book. Cromwell frets about growing older and knowing that in spite of being unimaginably rich his position is precarious because he has no family. Henry frets about growing older and producing an heir and vaguely wanting to be a good Christian but not if it's actually inconvenient for him. Katherine dies of cancer, miserably and in exile. Jane Seymour, portrayed as a somewhat naive and extremely virginal young woman, is more or less manipulated into a courtship with the king, and again, because it's real history, you know that the marriage on the horizon isn't a happy ending because she'll die in childbirth.
Everybody has been telling me to read All systems red and they were absolutely right. It's a thoroughly delightful book. I had read so many reviews saying that Murderbot is surprisingly endearing for someone with murder in its name, that I did not realize at all that the novella is a thriller with lots of action, about a team of explorers under attack on a dangerous unexplored planet. There is, in fact, quite a lot of murder and other violence. The book hit lots of my chosen family buttons just right, and I really liked the ending even if I wasn't completely surprised by the twist.
Incidentally I borrowed
jack's Kindle to read this, since sharing e-books is still annoyingly hard. And even though the tech is much better than my old Nook, I found reading on it a quite unpleasant experience, so I'm confirmed in my decision not to get a Kindle. The Wonderful O is because we were talking about how it's entirely unlike the similarly named The story of O, and I was reminded how fond I am of it. So I read it to
cjwatson, and it is a completely lovely book, with lots of genuinely funny word play.Currently reading: How to be both by Ali Smith. I'd been looking forward to this for ages because I really loved Girl meets boy, and I bought it new when it came out and then was never quite in the mood for it. So far I'm finding it very impressive, but also quite hard going. It's kind of balanced on the edge between prose and poetry, which is something that Smith handles well, and it's about a teenaged girl coping with the sudden death of her mother. Some absolutely pitch-perfect observations of both characters and situations, but it still somehow feels a bit more like work than leisure reading. Also it's set in Cambridge and there's a lovely description of the sculpture at the end of the DNA path:
It resembled a joyful bedspring or a bespoke ladder. It was like a kind of shout, if a shout to the sky could be said to look like something. It looked like the opposite of history [...] What if history, instead, was that shout, that upward spring, that staircase-ladder thing, and everybody was just used to calling something quite different the word history?Up next: Honestly not sure, I don't really have anything queued at the moment, and I think How to be both is going to be slow going. Something where nobody dies, I think.
