The Land of Nowhere

Catching up on the last month's reading, so this will be some quick takes.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll, art by Tove Jansson. Christmas present. Alice is still in Wonderland, and I'd seen Tove Jansson's illustrations before, but good to reread and re-look at. Maybe NYRB classics can do The Hunting of the Snark with Jansson's illustrations next? (Though it looks like there's already an edition of that in print. And now I'm sad that she never illustrated Through the Looking Glass.)

The Iliad, Homer, Emily Wilson. I'm glad to have actually read this in its entirety, though I read a large portion of it the night before the e-book was due to be returned, so maybe haven't fully processed it. Some sections felt like excessive action scenes, but things really picked up and the language in the translation felt lyrical after Achilles learns of Patroclus's death. Things I was not expecting included the incredibly detailed description of Achilles's new shield (srsly, can I just hang out with Hephaestus and his robots in the workshop?) and the detailed blow-by-blow of what went down in Patroclus's funeral games.

King John, Shakespeare. Readaloud (but I was sick and had a bad sore throat, so I was mostly just listening). Second time I've done this play, on the one hand it has some really good bits, particularly act 4, but also it is just structurally kind of weird. It also seems like the sort of play that would benefit from a director's interpretation rather than just a cold reading. Also, despite having done the play before I was wondering halfway through "wait, who's going to succeed King John?", and kept wondering it until suddenly his son was introduced out of nowhere for the final scenes (admittedly Henry was 9 when his father died, though the play ages him up).

Oathbringer, Brandon Sanderson. I have made it to the exciting climax! I will probably just get back to reading this. :-D

Henry VI, Part I, William Shakespeare (and possible coauthors). This does in some ways feel more like Marlowe than other Shakespeare plays do -- I see why he's hypothesized to be one of the coauthors. But even though it may not be 100% Shakespeare, it is still a fun play -- Talbot is great. And though he's not the main focus of the play, OMG Henry VI is a boy king in way over his head, as will only become more apparent in the sequels. And Joan of Arc gets to be an interesting character even though the play is clearly pro-English propaganda and I am not on board with the Act V character assassination. Looking forward to the next two parts of this one!

Network Effect, Martha Wells. Reread. Only made a bit of progress on this in the past week, distracted by other stuff. Still yay Murderbot, will report more on this later on.

Hold on To Love/The Dragonfly Years, Mollie Hunter. Reread. So anytime anyone mentions Mollie Hunter on DW, I jump in to rave about her autobiographical novel A Sound of Chariots. That book -- about grief, and being a poet, and growing up poor in rural Scotland surrounded by WWI vets, is really good and I recommend it! (It is very out of print, but available on OpenLibrary.) This is the sequel to that book, and covers our protagonist from ages 15-18 while she is working in a flower shop in Edinburgh and writing in her spare time, all during the build-up to and start of WWII. And the evocation of Edinburgh and that time period is great! On the whole, though, the story is definitely of the type that mrissa calls "too much boyfriend, not enough roller derby" -- I originally read this book as a teenager with the title Hold on to Love, and only just learned that other editions use the title The Dragonfly Years, which is a better title, but really Hold on to Love is actually a better title in terms of reflecting the story, which is focused on the romance arc -- which has some sweet moments, but is generally pretty cliched.

(Content notes: depiction of racism (mostly toward Indigenous Highland Travellers) and anti-Semitism. The blatantly racist characters are portrayed as unsympathetic and our protagonist is shown as trying to be better than them, but it's still a story where it feels like the characters from marginalized groups mostly are there to support the protagonist's arc. Also there's a character who the protagonist thinks of as "Fat Liz", but I didn't notice any specific fatphobia in how she was portrayed, and she is shown to have her strengths. But really you should be reading A Sound of Chariots, not this.)