What Are You Reading Wednesday
Jan. 9th, 2013 04:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rushthatspeaksWhat I have been up to: we have had houseguests continuously since December 20th, except the three days when Ruth and I went to Montreal for New Year's, which was lovely and relaxing. Since New Year's large chunks of Sassafrass have been in town, and we have been doing intensive rehearsal of the Norse show (coming soon to Balticon 47, this Memorial Day weekend, in which Thrud is the Filk GoH and the rest of us are Featured Filkers as amazingly you cannot make seventeen people Guest of Honor). In case anyone wondered, staging an opera is difficult.
Also I had some email difficulties, which turned out to be an attempt at hacking my email, making Google lock the account down. Have regained access but not yet managed to go over my computer for malware because Sassafrass.
As stress relief I wrote a fanfic novella, which because my brain does this sort of thing to me turned out to be the direct sequel to somebody else's fic in a really, really obvious way, so I have sent it off to her to see if she minds. Or, as Ruth put it, I managed to find a way to get a possible rejection slip on fanfiction I WIN. *facepalm* Note: this does not work as stress relief.
So what I have been reading: More Work for the Undertaker, Margery Allingham.
This is the thirteenth of Margery Allingham's Albert Campion novels, which are Golden Age detective fiction set contemporaneously to when they were written, beginning in the late nineteen-twenties. I have now gotten to just post-WWII. I don't know why these are not better known, I really don't.
Albert Campion, the series detective, starts in the first book as an obvious Lord Peter Wimsey knockoff intended to be a side character, but then walks forward, takes over the entire book, and propels the entire series. He's in an interesting position for a series detective because he never outright joins the police and he has serious and genuine ties to both the underworld and the aristocracy, which means that nobody but nobody trusts him unequivocally. The world around him is fascinating, too, because as far as I can tell Allingham simply wrote the books in precisely the same gently SF-nal AU in which Stella Gibbons set Cold Comfort Farm. People use airplanes very differently than they did in real life, for instance. But, unlike the Gibbons (or for that matter Sayers) the world-historical continues on as it really did, so that we get a real view of the difference between the way people thought about detective stories and the gently SF-nal in the twenties and the very late forties, as the world moves on and Campion grows up.
Plus, each novel is an attempt at a completely different kind of mystery, which Allingham will go back to later if she feels she muffed it but otherwise not repeat. So we have only one cozy country-house, only one locked-room, one high-finance-skulduggery, and so on. This means you are not reading the same book over and over, and that despite being thirteen books in I have not yet gotten to the one everyone says is her best.
As far as the attitudes of the time, Allingham is mostly very much better at women than anyone but Sayers, and about what you'd expect in terms of race and class, i.e. Oh God but not noticeably worse than her contemporaries. Except book ten. Don't read book ten. It is a grotesque anomaly of All The Sexism Suddenly, and in a way where I am pretty sure Allingham didn't even actually mean it but felt it necessary for the specific type of mystery she was trying in that installment, because it comes out of nowhere and never gets remotely that bad again. But when I say sexism, I mean that what I was mentally comparing it to was C.S. Lewis's 'The Shoddy Lands', which is ridiculous in a series where what I have been comparing everything else to is Sayers. Just don't. Fortunately book ten is completely irrelevant to the overarching plot of the series so may be avoided without the fear of missing anything.
Book thirteen, the one I'm halfway through, is a postwar crumbling-eccentric-penniless-aristocracy-hold-dark-secrets mystery, and I am enjoying the heck out of it.
What I read last:
The first book I read this year was Samuel R. Delany's The Mad Man, in Montreal, because Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders was the best novel I read last year and I recognized a symbol in that from the four pages of The Mad Man I had read about five years ago before running away. I wanted to see what that symbol meant in the older novel to deepen my understanding of the new one.
I was pleased to find that after eight hundred-odd pages of Delany's pornography in Spiders, I am way more able to deal with it than I was five years ago, so I was able to discover that The Mad Man is a fully-fleshed-out and fascinating novel-- among other things, it's a satire on academia, a detective story, the logical fictional extrapolation of Delany's nonfiction work in Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (or possibly vice versa, I haven't checked the publication dates), and an unusual and fascinating meditation on AIDS. The title comes from the protagonist completely losing all his fear of AIDS, because he has decided that he has rationally and with all the information available to him limited his risk factors as best he can, and either he won't get it or there is no way for him not to get it or he already has it, and in none of those situations is fear a sustainable response. He just doesn't have the emotional capacity to sustain that amount of fear forever. Which as far as society is concerned may make him nuts. There are also other symbols tied in to the title, of course, since this is Delany, but that's the one I thought was unique in fiction as I've seen it.
The book did not quite work for me because Delany is working on the sociological belief that in a position where there are both a gift economy and a money-based economy working with the same materials the money-based economy will fear and attempt to stamp out the gift economy with all the resources at its disposal, and I have first-hand experience that that is not the case. Delany's belief that it is is tied in to the more sensationalist aspects of the book's plot and therefore does not come across with the grounding of lived experience the rest of it has, meaning that this reads to me as an extrapolation which he flat-out got wrong, an unusual experience with Delany. But the rest of the book was a pleasant literary thriller, which I recommend to anyone who is thinking about the evolution of thinking on AIDS, as well as to anyone who can handle the scat porn.
Since finishing that I have quite literally been working too hard and been too scheduled to have time to read more than half an Allingham, which is ludicrous considering I am me and had better stop soon.
What I am planning to read next: No definite plans. Some things on the TBR pile: Zuleika Dobson, Max Beerbohm. Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany. Wisconsin Death Trip. The Viriconium omnibus, M. John Harrison, reread for an essay. The recent Megan Abbott YA. New Engineering, Yoichi Yamamoto. Heart of Thomas, Moto Hagio. Bitter Seeds, Ian Tregillis. I'll probably wind up picking up one of those pretty much at random.
Have my summary of 2012 from 2012 In Review at Strange Horizons, featuring my praise as I said of Delany, of Elizabeth Wein and of Anne Ursu, among others. Have also been too busy to manage to link to this and I am sorry, but it exists now.
Also I had some email difficulties, which turned out to be an attempt at hacking my email, making Google lock the account down. Have regained access but not yet managed to go over my computer for malware because Sassafrass.
As stress relief I wrote a fanfic novella, which because my brain does this sort of thing to me turned out to be the direct sequel to somebody else's fic in a really, really obvious way, so I have sent it off to her to see if she minds. Or, as Ruth put it, I managed to find a way to get a possible rejection slip on fanfiction I WIN. *facepalm* Note: this does not work as stress relief.
So what I have been reading: More Work for the Undertaker, Margery Allingham.
This is the thirteenth of Margery Allingham's Albert Campion novels, which are Golden Age detective fiction set contemporaneously to when they were written, beginning in the late nineteen-twenties. I have now gotten to just post-WWII. I don't know why these are not better known, I really don't.
Albert Campion, the series detective, starts in the first book as an obvious Lord Peter Wimsey knockoff intended to be a side character, but then walks forward, takes over the entire book, and propels the entire series. He's in an interesting position for a series detective because he never outright joins the police and he has serious and genuine ties to both the underworld and the aristocracy, which means that nobody but nobody trusts him unequivocally. The world around him is fascinating, too, because as far as I can tell Allingham simply wrote the books in precisely the same gently SF-nal AU in which Stella Gibbons set Cold Comfort Farm. People use airplanes very differently than they did in real life, for instance. But, unlike the Gibbons (or for that matter Sayers) the world-historical continues on as it really did, so that we get a real view of the difference between the way people thought about detective stories and the gently SF-nal in the twenties and the very late forties, as the world moves on and Campion grows up.
Plus, each novel is an attempt at a completely different kind of mystery, which Allingham will go back to later if she feels she muffed it but otherwise not repeat. So we have only one cozy country-house, only one locked-room, one high-finance-skulduggery, and so on. This means you are not reading the same book over and over, and that despite being thirteen books in I have not yet gotten to the one everyone says is her best.
As far as the attitudes of the time, Allingham is mostly very much better at women than anyone but Sayers, and about what you'd expect in terms of race and class, i.e. Oh God but not noticeably worse than her contemporaries. Except book ten. Don't read book ten. It is a grotesque anomaly of All The Sexism Suddenly, and in a way where I am pretty sure Allingham didn't even actually mean it but felt it necessary for the specific type of mystery she was trying in that installment, because it comes out of nowhere and never gets remotely that bad again. But when I say sexism, I mean that what I was mentally comparing it to was C.S. Lewis's 'The Shoddy Lands', which is ridiculous in a series where what I have been comparing everything else to is Sayers. Just don't. Fortunately book ten is completely irrelevant to the overarching plot of the series so may be avoided without the fear of missing anything.
Book thirteen, the one I'm halfway through, is a postwar crumbling-eccentric-penniless-aristocracy-hold-dark-secrets mystery, and I am enjoying the heck out of it.
What I read last:
The first book I read this year was Samuel R. Delany's The Mad Man, in Montreal, because Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders was the best novel I read last year and I recognized a symbol in that from the four pages of The Mad Man I had read about five years ago before running away. I wanted to see what that symbol meant in the older novel to deepen my understanding of the new one.
I was pleased to find that after eight hundred-odd pages of Delany's pornography in Spiders, I am way more able to deal with it than I was five years ago, so I was able to discover that The Mad Man is a fully-fleshed-out and fascinating novel-- among other things, it's a satire on academia, a detective story, the logical fictional extrapolation of Delany's nonfiction work in Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (or possibly vice versa, I haven't checked the publication dates), and an unusual and fascinating meditation on AIDS. The title comes from the protagonist completely losing all his fear of AIDS, because he has decided that he has rationally and with all the information available to him limited his risk factors as best he can, and either he won't get it or there is no way for him not to get it or he already has it, and in none of those situations is fear a sustainable response. He just doesn't have the emotional capacity to sustain that amount of fear forever. Which as far as society is concerned may make him nuts. There are also other symbols tied in to the title, of course, since this is Delany, but that's the one I thought was unique in fiction as I've seen it.
The book did not quite work for me because Delany is working on the sociological belief that in a position where there are both a gift economy and a money-based economy working with the same materials the money-based economy will fear and attempt to stamp out the gift economy with all the resources at its disposal, and I have first-hand experience that that is not the case. Delany's belief that it is is tied in to the more sensationalist aspects of the book's plot and therefore does not come across with the grounding of lived experience the rest of it has, meaning that this reads to me as an extrapolation which he flat-out got wrong, an unusual experience with Delany. But the rest of the book was a pleasant literary thriller, which I recommend to anyone who is thinking about the evolution of thinking on AIDS, as well as to anyone who can handle the scat porn.
Since finishing that I have quite literally been working too hard and been too scheduled to have time to read more than half an Allingham, which is ludicrous considering I am me and had better stop soon.
What I am planning to read next: No definite plans. Some things on the TBR pile: Zuleika Dobson, Max Beerbohm. Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany. Wisconsin Death Trip. The Viriconium omnibus, M. John Harrison, reread for an essay. The recent Megan Abbott YA. New Engineering, Yoichi Yamamoto. Heart of Thomas, Moto Hagio. Bitter Seeds, Ian Tregillis. I'll probably wind up picking up one of those pretty much at random.
Have my summary of 2012 from 2012 In Review at Strange Horizons, featuring my praise as I said of Delany, of Elizabeth Wein and of Anne Ursu, among others. Have also been too busy to manage to link to this and I am sorry, but it exists now.
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Date: 2013-01-10 06:25 pm (UTC)Yay DHALGREN! When you're done, for comparison, you might also want to read the (much shorter) EMPIRE STAR - they have a similarity in construction. In fact, I should re-read those two together. In my Copious Free Time.