What are you reading?

[Spritelady]

Somehow it's almost the end of May and I haven't yet posted a reading update!

My goal this year is to read 78 books and so far I've read 35, so I think I'm more or less on track.

My most recent completed read was a duology that's doing the rounds in romantasy circles: it's the first two books in the Crowns of Nyaxia series, the first being The Serpent and the Wings of Night and the second being The Ashes and the Star-Cursed King.
I enjoyed this, it had a lot of the classic tropes of romantasy books at the moment but was nevertheless entertaining and I liked the characters. I don't think it will ever win any prizes for deep literature, but I was happy just to be entertained by my books.

I also recently finished the second trilogy in the Robin Hobbs series, The Liveship Traders trilogy. I absolutely love these books and I can't believe they aren't more widely known. I think her characters are incredibly well written, the plot is intriguing and, as with the first trilogy, I was so impressed at how the various story strands were brought together in the final book.

I've bought the next trilogy in this series, which returns to the setting and characters of the first trilogy, so I'll get to those once I've worked my way through Throne of Glass (I really am on a romantasy kick lately...)

[The Seamstress]

That's cool!

I set myself a 50 books goal like last year, but so far I've only read four, currently reading the fifth, so I don't know if that's going to work...

Two of the four books were by Veo Corva, The Old Goat and the Alien and Books and Bone, and I enjoyed them very much. If you haven't read them yet, highly recommend!

Also read book 2 in the Aggie Morton Mystery Queen series, which was okay, but I liked the first one better tbh.

Now I'm reading Die vierte Wand ("The fourth Wall" - don't know if it has been translated to English, couldn't find anything), which is a German children's book. It's about a young girl living with her family in a house no one ever leaves or enters, everything is the same each day, they eat from empty plates and their books have empty pages etc. Then one day there's a mysterious package in the hallway addressed to the girl, and it's a book with actual words in it. Girl begins to read and starts questioning things, then decides she wants to go outside and see the world, climbs out of an open window, and lands back in her room, but now the house is different... It's quite intriguing so far. I have to admit, after reading almost exclusively in English the past several years it's kinda weird going back to German XD But I want to balance it more!

[Jubal]

My goal remains a book a month because that's sadly more realistic than any of the loftier ambitions of you good folks! I do like both Old Goat and Books and Bone, the latter is probably my favourite of V's books. I've still not read their newest book, I should do sometime.

Meanwhile I have read books 4 and 5 of my goal, namely Journey to the Centre of the Earth and 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, both by Jules Verne, as they're SF classics I'd not read previously.

They're quite an interesting pair partly in how the narrative differs from modern books. There's not a lot of character arc in either, and the focus is very much on a character documenting a fascinating situation as a sort of "what if this cool thing were the case" rather than the sort of story that has a particular adventure structure and climax. There's also a big focus on retained mystery - there are aspects of either book that never do get resolved, because the objective of the main characters is largely to get out alive as opposed to accomplishing some greater goal.

The science-fictional elements are also interesting in that there are some things that we much more know to be wrong that are presented as largely theoretical in the books: Journey to the Centre of the Earth probably feels much more fantastical to modern eyes than it did when it was written, because we know you can't do some of that stuff and we know how e.g. continental drift works.

Modern texts also, I think, have often dropped a lot of day-to-day slice of life stuff in adventure fiction. Up to the mid C20th and even including e.g. Tolkien, there's often quite a lot of time spent in texts on survival, food, and perils like the dark or thirst. I feel like there's a lot less of that in modern fantasy, certainly a lot less of that presented as a practical survival challenge rather than to indicate tests of will or endurance.

Of the two, I think 20,000 Leagues has the better setting and characters - the political and personal nature of Captain Nemo's existence gives him a sort of presence and poignancy as sympathetic antagonist and there's no equivalent in Journey. I was interested to realise how much Journey has influenced some later things like, notably, the Fallen London setting which I always most associate with Kubla Khan but clearly has resonances with Verne too especially regarding the idea of having much more of an ecosystem of prehistoric animals below the earth.

Not sure what I'll read next or, more worryingly, when I'll next have time to read. But crossed fingers...

[Rob_Haines]

I've recently been on a short story kick, assisted by InkFoundry, who are creating a searchable index of short stories by category and theme.

This was last night's read, a fictional research paper on cheese and prognostication, and I could not help but read the entire thing in Jubal's voice:

"The Efficacy of Tyromancy Over Reflective Scrying Methods in Prediction of Upcoming Misfortunes of Divination Colleagues, A Study by Cresivar Ibraxson, Associate Magus, Wintervale University" by Amanda Helms

[Jubal]

Ooh, I wonder if we can/should submit the various stories floating around these forums to that? I guess it depends exactly how they're interpreting the "public domain" requirement given we don't pay people to post here...

And yes, I can see that being a my-voice paper. I wonder if I should do more audio recordings of stories etc.

[Son of the King]

I recently (I say recently, it was at least a few months ago) finished reading the Wayfarers series by Becky Chambers. I don't think I've ever been so disappointed to finish a book series before; I absolutely love the universe they're set in and the kind of hopeful, optimistic vibe of the series (a theme throughout all the books is people doing good things for each other even in the face of an often miserable world) was so uplifting.

The four books in the series are all standalone novels, though with some interlinking character relationships. It's hard to pick which was my favourite; there were aspects of all of them that I loved. Forced to choose I'd probably go with the second book in the series, A Closed and Common Orbit, since it really hits the spot for that "good people helping each other in spite of the world around them" feeling that I enjoyed so much.

[Jubal]

I read another book, no 6 for the year! It was Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, which somehow I'd never read.

The biggest thought I had running through my head was that lot of internet discourse has a whole thing on "oh Frankenstein is the real monster of the story" or "intelligence is knowing that Frankenstein is the human, not the monster: wisdom is knowing that Frankenstein is still the monster" and I do question how many of those people have actually read the book. Not that Frankenstein is entirely un-monstrous: he's an obsessive, hubristic, idiot who acts on whims and fails utterly in his duties of care to his own creation and in basically everything else he does.

But the monster is a monster. He's smart enough to know that what he's doing is wrong, as expressed clearly and repeatedly in his own dialogue. There's never truly a suggestion that the reason for his attacks is because he doesn't appreciate that he's killing innocents or that that's bad. Indeed the monster isn't in any sense intellectually incapable: he's shown to be a quicker learner than humans, and claims to have read and understood quite a wide variety of texts, as well as having indirectly learned through observation a lot about human society. He nonetheless fundamentally fails at the concept, core to morality, that virtue is not virtue when it goes away and turns into murder-rage when your feelings get hurt.

Whilst Frankenstein's lack of moral education and care to the monster is bad, it would make it thereby seem possible, even grimly just given the monster's sufferings, if the monster had taken his revenge out on Victor directly. The four entirely innocent people who die instead are on the other hand, well, entirely innocent: not only did they not author the monster's woes, none of them fail in the repeatedly failed moral test of humanity, that of judging the monster with immediate brutality, because none of them are given a chance to before being murdered.

Frankenstein is, by analogy, an uncaring societal elite. He does not mean direct malice so much as blithely benefiting from a system built to cater to him and still wanting more. But the monster? My take that both the conservative "the monster is an inhuman monster" and modern "Frankenstein is the only real monster" readers will probably hate is that the monster is a monster, and specifically he's an incel. He claims that personal societal rejection, as defined by him, makes his violence towards people who did nothing whatsoever to harm him inevitable. He literally tries to get his problems solved by getting someone to make him a woman. Whilst Victor is an idiot to go back on his word, some of his objections to this plan - unlike the monster he correctly reasons that another reasoning being might not just agree to be the first being's paramour - actually make a lot of sense.

So that's my hot take on this one anyway.

My other notes:

• The ship's captain who provides the framing narrative is an interesting character who I think I'd like to think on more.
• A lot of people are given as M. this that or the other - not sure if this is Mister, Magister, Monsieur, or what? It's not something I recall from other texts of this period but I guess it's a long time since I read anything early C19th.
• People hearing bad news and getting immediate fevers or mental breaks feels like a topos of older literature but I wonder what its basis is or how common such states of being bedridden with mental illness actually were at the time of writing.
• The fact that Frankenstein doesn't request to do an autopsy on William or challenge the direct findings in the murder trial seems weird to modern eyes though I guess such methods weren't really used in law at the time the book was written. But it seems strange that the greatest living expert on anatomy never thinks to ask or point out that the giant hands of an eight foot tall monster would have left a decidedly different impression after strangulation than those of a five foot tall serving girl.