And I've finally finished Sholokov's The Don Flows Home To The Sea. It's... big, for one thing, and it's only the second half of the Tikhii Don epic (the first part being Quiet Flows the Don). It's a book with a heavy, painful realism to it, but one that perhaps finds that clashing now and again with the author's wish to write a tragedy. Covering the cossack revolts and Russian civil war from 1919 to 1921 roughly, its protagonist, Gregor Melekhov, is a well-off cossack who ends up fighting for insurgents, whites, reds, and bandits; there's a lot of battle drama and cossacks sabring people to death, though the focus of the novel is on the complex web of character interactions as members of the cossack village of Tatarsk end up fighting for different sides and dealing with war. It probably contains considerably more vodka than the book I mentioned in my previous post.
Next bit has spoilers:
Through the course of the book, the war takes an increasing toll on Gregor's family (indeed they just about all die). The tension between an adventure epic and a slice-of-life story is present throughout, though in most of the book the moves between grand narrative and its impacts on the Melekhov household make this sustainable - it gets harder later on as the cast of characters in Tatarsk is heavily winnowed down. It's all shot through with beautiful observational scene-setting, though sometimes in a depth that might be difficult to catch onto for those unused to the steppe landscape. The large-scale and small-scale are linked together well through most of the book - the lack of maps is actually a problem, though, as it frequently makes it tricky to envisage the spaces in which Gregor is operating.
The whole book, being pinned in realism, gets no effective climax: from the grand scope of the White retreat and Gregor's eventual switch to the Reds, the final parts of the book increasingly zoom in on his smaller interactions after demobilisation and into inglorious bandit companies. It's a peculiar narrative trick to slowly extinguish the protagonist's hopes but in a way that feels oddly small and undramatic. Whilst in the middle of the book Gregor's wife got a long and dramatic death scene, his lover Aksinia gets extinguished very suddenly despite being perhaps the book's most important female character, and just a few pages thereafter Gregor's daughter is 'killed off' in the book's final conversation, her death merely a five word report that isn't dwelt on at all in the text. I wasn't sure, in light of that, whether leaving Gregor alive and with future uncertainties entirely ignored at the end felt like an appropriate closure or simply a shrug of an ending.
Since my muscles have been playing up today and I couldn't do all the word processing I had planned, I also read right through If Only They Could Talk, which is the first book by James Herriot (actually a pseud but I've forgotten the guy's real name) about his career as a vet. It's a very nice read; funny in a gentle and very British way, good for observations on Yorkshire and its people, and on animals too. Not necessarily a book for the squeamish, since it spares little when it comes to shoving the accidentally passed uterus of a cow back into its body and similar things like that. It's the first book I've read in 2019 that does not include significant quantities of vodka.
There are a few things I dislike, particularly Sapowski's writing about women: he uses sexual violence too cheaply in my view as a "hey the world is horrible" establishing frame that handles it rather clumsily.
Get used to it, the main plotline behind the series does a lot of this as it essentially revolves around a bunch of different people wanting to abduct and rape a child because she has a magical womb or something. Oh and then there's a random creepy dude in a different world/dimension that wants to rape her too because why wouldn't that be a thing.
I remember really enjoying the first book of short stories, finding the second one a little so-so and enjoying the series enough to reading all of the books but absolutely detesting the whole thing by the time I'd finished. There's definitely too much grimdark "people are the real monsters and everything sucks" energy to it for my taste to start with, and then it really really really drives that home , it feels like an "anti-fantasy" with the anti turned up to 11.
Oh and for some reason he decided to write the final book with a weird framing device that hasn't been used at all before and shoehorn in Arthurian imagery and themes into a story in which they really don't fit imo, which I found very jarring and hard to read. I wish I'd just given up at that point.
I know it's a very popular series but I absolutely do not recommend it, especially if you're not in the mood for depressing grimdark bollocks atm. But people are allowed to like things even I despise them and wish they didn't exist I suppose.
Edit:
Also the final book introduces new characters that you're meant to care about but personally I never felt any emotional investment in them, or any connection to them and the way they influenced the narrative just felt very contrived and boring to me. One was obviously just included to be a new big bad antagonist but I didn't care, the other was introduced to be a sympathetic character we would like and really its a real spoiler
feel bad for when they died
Edit Edit:
In more positive news I finished reading Wheel of Time a while ago, I absolutely friggen loved it and even though I didn't particularly enjoy Sanderson's writing style I think he did a fantastic job of finishing the story after Jordan died. I loved that even though there was a lot of very, very dark stuff within these books it wasn't dark in tone and didn't focus on the horrahh, and it had so much light and hope to balance it out and had such a beautiful cathartic ending. I genuinely want to re-read it again already. But I'll have patience.
Currently working my way through Hillary Mantel's Wolf Hall series in audiobook form, quite enjoyable but also somewhat strange as a narrative, not sure if it's because it doesn't lend itself well to audiobooking or simply because that's how it is, but it's quite hard to get really invested into it. But I am still enjoying it overall and it's actually quite pleasant to have something I can listen to without being superglued to and spending hours hyperfocusing on it and having to turn back the recording if I lose track for a moment because I need to listen to that exact phrase five more times to make sure I'm hearing it properly and processing it.
Edit edit edit:
Remind me to write a proper appraisal of Wheel of Time at some point, I genuinely loved it so so so much and there's so much going on and so many things that feel unique to it and it's definitely one of my favourite series every now, it's probably second only to LoTR and it really is lovely.
Bringing this year's fiction book total to, uh, three, is Greek Myths by Charlotte Higgins. It's a retelling of Greek myths, and mostly a very good one. The idea of weaving and images in cloth being a form of story transmission primarily done by women is used quite interestingly as a framing narrative, with each of the chapters focusing on a single character weaving and then containing a set of other stories that they produce with some interconnected themes around their own core plot (Athene weaves the Titanomachy, Arachne the crimes of the gods, Penelope the homecomings from Troy, and so on).
The writing is good and the framing system is compelling, I'd generally very much recommend it. The very ending (Penelope gets the last chapter) I think didn't feel like the strongest moment, it's a clever ending turn but
having her jadedness at the masculinity of Greek myth be the final moment would have worked better for me with an act of reclamation or of ownership, whereas what Higgins gives Penelope is an act of modernity, where her jadedness becomes a rational, sceptical world-view that feels out of place and is, as we know from the present, often equally tied up with gendered binaries in how we see the world.
In any case I enjoyed this a lot, its inclusion of lots of more minor/less widely known myths was something I thought was really good, and the author has the storyteller's touch which I think one really needs when re-telling mythologies. Generally strong recommendation.
You're absolutely right, it is Season of Storms (though I think from the blurb it is actually a book themed around swords, hence my confusion).
I have meanwhile gotten round to reading The Lady of the Lake. Decisions sure were made in the writing of this book. Rest of post spoilered because I know Spritelady hasn't read it yet:
So, we get into a lot more "Ciri bwips around between universes" stuff, and a bunch of "Weird elf shenanigans" stuff, a whole bunch more weird sexual stuff including with unicorns in it, and a lot of jumping between subplots rather oddly. Ultimately, there is a big ol' confrontation with Vilgefortz, the key villain of the books, and due to a magic amulet that Geralt obtained by giving a random secondary sorceress a very good time he tricks the guy and wins, yay for that (what witcher amulets can and can't do is one of those "this is very relevant and never discussed properly" topics.)
Also, framing narratives are used like they're going out of fashion. In the Tower of the Swallow we had Ciri's discussion with Vysogotha as a single core frame for most of the book, but here we have tons of the damn things in weird nested overlaps, starting with "the whole book is Ciri telling literal Galahad from actual Arthurian romance England what is going on" and not getting much less odd from there. As much as I don't mind catching up with fictional colleagues now and again, being randomly transported into future schools in the Witcherverse to get the starts of lectures on events in the main text wasn't awfully necessary. Even the eponymous Lady of the Lake is yet another framing device character who is more mundane than being the actual Lady of the Lake which is somehow more weird in a book where literal Galahad and actual dimension travelling unicorns are very much present. She has a marginal but important effect on the plot which is tied up about 2/3 of the way through the book with almost no interaction with the characters and plot themselves. Honestly, CDPR going "nope, we're putting the actual Lady of the Lake in, full fey nonsense" was definitely a very sensible change in the games.
The Witcher works its best I think as a relatively twist-folkloric, low-focus setting, and on average gets weaker the bigger things get and the more everything ends up tying back to wide-scale politics, having to lean on scientistic explanations of its magic, etc. The Lady of the Lake is the book that goes biggest, and is consequently kind of the weakest, which is a pity.
Anyhow, time to read some other stuff, still not sure what...