Favorite Reads 2012
It’s December. Here’s my list of ten favorite reads for the year.
1. The Vagabond – Colette
Rene Neree is a divorced woman in the first decade of the 20th century who has “fallen” from society and become a vaudeville performer. The crux of the book concerns the question of whether she should give up the stage and remarry or reject a comfortable marriage in order to pursue her career. What sweeps you along is less the plot and more just Rene’s character and perceptions as she lives and travels around Europe. You have to love Colette. She’s sharp, perceptive, and funny without being genteel. In the book’s first chapter she calls a man a whore. You have to appreciate that.
2. The Tartar Steppe – Dino Buzzati
Drogo is a newly appointed captain whose first assignment is a remote fort on the border. At first he hates the place but as time goes on he finds himself incapable of living elsewhere. It’s a bit funny and a bit sad. I wrote about this one in a One Book, Four Covers post.
3. Embassytown – China Mieville
Tons have been written about this book. It’s SF set on an alien world where the aliens speak a peculiar language that requires the development of genetically engineered human ambassadors. The main character is not an ambassador but a woman who is a colonist and has entered the alien language as a metaphor.
4. The Strangers in the House – Georges Simenon
I like books about grubby curmudgeons with substance abuse problems who despite these traits or maybe because of them can face certain challenges and succeed over them. Simenon wrote a ton of books. When he’s good he’s very good indeed. Here’s a quote.
5. Riddley Walker – Russell Hoban
Post-apocalyptic wandering around radioactive England written in a crude degraded form of English – what’s not to love? Seriously. This is one of those books that can possibly make you drunk by reading it. The One Book, Four Covers treatment is here.
6. Dark Companion – Jim Nisbet
This book was just loopy. It’s a violently absurd noir novel about the relationship between a deadbeat drug dealer and his level headed Indian-American neighbor. Mayhem ensues. Sort of hard to say more about it than that.
7. Wild Life – Molly Gloss
Wild Life is set in the Pacific Northwest during the early decades of the 20th century and features a feminist single mother of five as its heroine. A child goes missing near one of the lumber camps and the woman sets out to find her despite the stories of a mysterious creature wandering in the woods. This description doesn’t do the story justice. It’s a powerful read. If you want a hint of Gloss’s style read The Grinell Method over here at Strange Horizons.
8. The Story of General Dann and Mara’s Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog – Doris Lessing
This is the sequel to Mara and Dann. It’s not as intense as its predecessor, and mostly focuses on Dann who spends much of the book doing nothing except moping and drugs. As with the Simenon book mentioned above I like books like this. This one also had the added pleasure of being set millennia in the future when much of Europe is covered by ice.
9. Lolly Willowes – Sylvia Townsend Warner
I adored this book. Another early 20th century woman refuses to accept the roles society offers her, and in this case she packs off to the countryside and becomes a witch. Here’s the One Book, Four Covers for it. And here’s a bit more. Warner’s collection of fairy stories for adults The Kingdoms of Elfin is also pretty great.
10. Invisible Cities – Italo Calvino
Friends have been telling me to read this for years now. The frame story involves a young Marco Polo telling Kublai Khan of all the fabulous cities Polo has visited in his travels. The cities are of course fabrications — fantasies and metaphors symbolizing human relationships with others and objects and ideas, and yeah, it’s great.
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And if you’re curious here’s the list from last year.
One Book, Four Covers: Dino Buzzati’s The Tartar Steppe
This is the YA novel for the cynical teen in your life, that teen that has a burgeoning sense of the absurd and the blackly comic. Beyond this book lies Flannery O’Connor, Franz Kafka, and Italo Calvino. Buzzati’s never had a large English language following, and I wonder if there’s something in this book that the American mindset rejects as too cynical on the surface. Granted having taken part in Mussolini’s navy probably doesn’t help.
Above are the covers, half of them Italian. Most of the English versions feature the landscape and a fortress, while the Italian editions all reference the soldier in some wry fashion. The English language copy I read is the rightmost one. It looks like someone applied different photoshop filters to Paolo Coelho’s The Alchemist.
I’ll say flat out I love The Tartar Steppe. It is a great book, though I expect it’s one people either love or hate. I’m not going to talk much about the plot. You can speculate upon that from the covers. I do wish more of Buzzati’s work was available in English, especially his short fantasy fiction, (yes, I’ve seen The Bears March on Sicily book), but that’s my wish with a lot of authors. Only with Buzzati there’s something more to my fascination, since he’s an Italian from the same generation as my grandfather, and they appeared to have shared an affinity for the absurd.
The Project Gutenberg Reader
A while back my kindle broke and my books didn’t transfer automatically to the replacement one and phone calls to the service center in Ireland were required. Whatever enthusiasm I had for e-books and Amazon pretty much dwindled at that time, and now I generally stick to downloading free stuff off of Project Gutenberg, which is great, because Gutenberg has so much weird random classic stuff on it. Like the other day I was reading Greek and Roman Ghost Stories by Lacy Collison Morley and was on the chapter about necromancy when my 4th graders arrived and began causing a ruckus and … well, let’s just say they’ll get theirs the little ankle-biters.
But I wanted to give a shout out to the Project Gutenberg Project, a great website sifting through the depths at Project Gutenberg. They’re definitely worth checking out.
One Book, Four Covers: Roald Dahl’s Book of Ghost Stories
How about that crow cover? That’s pretty nice.
I found a used copy of this at What the Book in Seoul. It was published in the 1980s but the most recent story in it is an Aickman from the 1960s. The majority are from the 1920s, but all are from the 20th century.
In his introduction Dahl talks about the ghost story as a world tradition and the sheer wealth of source material available. This didn’t prevent him from putting together a mostly British table of contents. In fact my biggest complaint against this book is that it’s irritatingly British. Everyone is prim and proper and ducking into corner shops in search of bric-a-brac. Dahl also talks about how bad most authors’ ghost stories are. Even the big name folks’ stories are atrocious. He feels the same when it comes to children’s books too. People think they can write one easily, when the results are quite different.
There is a logic to Dahl’s selections and if you’ve ever read one of his stories you’ll see a kinship between them and his selections here. Most of them have zinger endings of the morbid sort.
Another little chestnut from the introduction is that Dahl records his surprise at how well women write ghost stories. After making a few wince-worthy generalizations, he applauds women as horror writers. They were so good he feared that the whole book would be nothing but women authors. But in the end the men roused themselves and prevailed, thirteen testicle-endowed individuals to eleven uterus-bearers.
Imagine if it had been otherwise. The horror!
The Other Side of McMedieval Feudalism, or The Use of Mythic Distance in Malory’s “Le Morte D’Arthur”
So that fascinating thing I hinted at about the setting in my last post about Le Morte D’Arthur – it’s totally generic McEurope, but instead of this being a design flaw, it’s a design feature.
Actually calling it McEurope is too specific. It’s more McMedieval Feudalism seen from the top without ever looking down. It’s an aristocracy divorced from all other social classes with an endless supply of weapons and armor to fight with. You have to at least enjoy that stuff as aesthetic trappings without any attendant realism. Only once does someone go to town and see a craftsperson to get a thing fixed. That’s your realism. Peasants hardly ever appear in it, and knights apparently have nothing better to do than stand all day beside bridges challenging whomever happens to walk by. “None shall pass”, etc.
What locales there are all blend together. Bridges, cloisters, and wells with maidens (or knights) weeping beside them lend some decoration to the otherwise indistinguishable setting. There are castles, and outside every castle is a forest. Inside the forest adventures happen.
But I said this is a feature rather than a flaw. What makes it fascinating is how quickly bright sanitized McMedieval Feudalism can become weird foreboding mythic id-laden fairyland. The one rule is when you go into the forest stuff happens to you. That stuff can be the frat-house jousting (with accompanying sides of homoeroticism and misogyny), or something a lot weirder and subconsciously ripe. It’s no surprise that “the forest” gets transformed into “the wasteland” during the Grail Quest.
What to make of this? On one hand the setting is so bland and divorced from reality as to be nonsensical. On the other hand that blandness has an advantage when telling a story and playing with archetypes, especially because the bland is divided in half, a mundane world and its fantastic reflection, and the archetypes are never quite certain when the one will shift into the other. Not just this, but any deviation from the uniform setting stands out.
So it’s okay to be bland as long as it’s a conscious choice. Use it to your advantage. Dive deep and swim in the dark waters waiting beneath the bland’s placid surface. Find those pearls waiting down there along with those toothsome beasts. What you find might be wonderful or it might be ugly, but it won’t be bland. That’s for certain.
Your Guide to Le Morte D’Arthur
First thing you need to know is Monty Python totally nailed it. Read the book, then watch the Black Knight “None shall pass!” scene, and you’ll agree. They nail it.
Second thing, all the knights are jackholes especially Gawain. (An arguable exception is Galahad, but he’s basically Jesus. Okay. There’s a few others who aren’t so bad, but it’s like five guys out of a thousand.)
Third thing, Malory didn’t invent any of this stuff. He edited oral traditions, pieced together narratives, and slathered on a layer of romanticized 14th century Christian chivalry to make the pre-Christian folk heroes palatable to his audience. He also wrote it in jail for a rather impressive laundry list of violent crimes, so when the knights behave terribly you have to figure old Tom knew what he was talking about .
The book’s divided into eight “tales”.
1. The Tale of King Arthur.
You have to read this. It has Merlin, Excalibur, and Arthur’s rise to power. In the first ten pages eight hundred named characters show up. Stuff happens and the jousting is still interesting.
2. The Tale of King Arthur And The Emperor Lucius.
This is great. Arthur unites England and marches on Rome. Rome has giants in its army. Much of it reads like a ten year old freeform rambling a D&D game. “You walk into the room and there are two hundred giants there. Roll for initiative.”
3. The Tale of Sir Launcelot Du Lake.
I have no memory of what this was about. I suspect it was dull, because Launcelot is dull except during the quest for the Holy Grail, when he’s basically having a bad acid trip.
An aside, throughout the book there’s a very keen ranking system of knights that’s reminiscent of a baseball fan’s fixation on batting averages, only it’s jousts and sword-fights being counted. So a knight shows up and everyone says, “It’s Sir Hoppinscotch. He’s the 36th bestest knight in the realm. Let’s see how he does in the left-handed face-smash head-kebob event.”
4. The Tale of Sir Gareth.
This book is fun. Gareth is Gawain the Jackhole’s half-brother, but he’s cool and not at all like Gawain. (Gawain kills their mom when he busts in on her and her lover even though dad’s been dead for years.) Gareth’s like the third best knight in Camelot, depending on if Sir Lameface is dead or not. He has adventures and they are interesting.
5. The Tale of Sir Tristram of Lyoness.
By now it’s all knight-errantry and jousting with the occasional interesting bit like La Cote Male Tayle or Sir Palomides trip to the Red City. It’s 200 pages that read like 800 pages each of them nearly identical and looking like this:
”One morning Sir Launcelot left the castle and rode into the forest. Soon he came upon a well where a maiden was weeping. She said, “Oh good knight can you protect me from the knight who is chasing me?” Sir Launcelot said “Yuppers” and rode off to meet the knight and did so by the bridge where they jousted and both were knocked from their horses. They then fought with swords for so long that the blood ran from their armor and soaked the ground. Finally Launcelot said: “Who are you knight that is so strong?” The knight removed his helmet and it turned out to be Sir Tristram, and the two embraced and shared kisses for they had long pledged loyalty to each other, at which time the maiden appeared and Tristam chopped off her head because she was a sorceress.”
It’s wretched. The big thing is Sir Palomides is in love with Iseult the Fair and it makes him a complete jackhole.
6. The Tale of the Sangreal.
This is awesome Pagan-Christian Mystic hallucinogenic weirdness. Loopy stuff as if the knights of the Round Table got lost in a stoner-metal album. I suspect Malory was mining a tradition here well beyond his usual — and the only way he could make sense of it was basically having Galahad be Jesus, which kind of sucks deus ex machina and all that, but the whole thing is so weird that you just have to go with it. Or read the Mabigboingboingoinen to get the pure stuff.
7. The Book of Sir Launcelot and Queen Gwynevere.
Launcelot’s been schtupping the Queen. (Like you didn’t know.) Arthur finds out. Mayhem ensues.
8. Le Morte D’Arthur.
Arthur dies. It’s the name of the book. Everybody else dies too, or goes away and becomes a hermit/nun.
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There’s actually some fascinating setting stuff here that I’ll probably get into next time.
One Book Four Covers: Vermilion Sands by J.G. Ballard
How about those covers, eh?
I dig the ones at either end, although the left one fits the book better. That one on the right, though? Gosh. I totally want to read that book.
For folks who don’t want to Google, Vermilion Sands is a fictitious resort at some undetermined time in the near future populated by the bored, artistic, insane, and/or wealthy. Ballard said his inspiration was Palm Springs, but I always imagine a Mediterranean locale. It’s also one of those books you’re either going to love or hate. If you’re a Ballard fan you won’t really mind that every story is more or less the same featuring nearly identical characters and plots. If you’re not a Ballard fan then I’m sure that will bother you — but only if you try to tackle the book head-on. If you were to approach each story on its own, you’d probably have better luck.
How To Read
Back in the good old bad old days I worked with a guy who would take summers off to go work in Alaska as a hunting guide. He’d return in the fall with an assortment of wilderness stories. One of them was about when the other guides and he all got stuck for a week in the back country waiting for the plane to pick them up. They ended up having to trek miles to another pick up site and wait for the plane there. On the way one of the guys dropped his book in the river and wound up with nothing to read.
For a week they were stuck in tents waiting out the rain and waiting for this plane to show up, and the guy had nothing to read. So he started reading the ingredients listed on the soup cans. Over and over again. By the end of the week he had memorized them and could rattle them off in a litany. Chicken noodle. Minestrone. Whatever they had.
That’s how to read.
Desperately. Obsessively. Like your life depended on it.
Yesterweird 
