read His Dark Materials recently and was quite struck … old mate’s tone is definitely almost plodding enough to approach biblical or Miltonian, or perhaps Beatrix Potter, but it mostly just lends gravity to things rather than bogging everything down too much. sobbed a bunch at the end. the characters mostly feel very much like they’re from a storybook rather than real life, except for one or two in particular, but i wasn’t mad about it. along with Evangelion it’s something where i’ll be wondering for a while what kind of person i’d be now if i’d gotten into it while i was a kid
currently chugging through Ancillary Justice and i’ll get back to you. starting to appreciate the constrained narration style as a means of character development
The Golden Compass movie was, despite being 2000’s schlock and not a great adaptation, actually a much better attempt than the dire prestige TV grey morass. Starting with the casting. Sam Eliot just obviously is Scoresby and Nicole Kidman is perfect as a theoretically beautiful but actually terrifying creature
though the 00s movie cutting before the ending of the book was an insane decision and whoever made that choice should never be allowed to work on a creative project again
Well Titus Groan has turned out to be amazing. The prose is just stupendous. The characters are rendered very richly I think too. It’s both awesome at times and funny. And, again, the prose!!! I have been gladdened to discover it is less of a fantasy than I initially thought, and more of a romantic fantasy in the vein of the gothic tradition. More Castle of Otranto than warring kingdoms of magic lineages amid landscapes populated with D&D critters.
I’ve been listening to another audiobook-memoir read by the author. This time, I’m finding maybe too many things in common with the author. The book is Other Rivers by Peter Hessler. He was a Peace Corps volunteer in Chongqing, China during the 90’s. He stayed in touch with many of his students over the decades. He is a journalist and keeps detailed records of correspondence. In 2019, he and his family decided to live in Chengdu. He taught university courses on writing and journalism.
His time there overlaps a little with my own time working at a university. He also talks about sending his children to an elementary school that reminds me of the Montessori school I had taught at before.
It’s a really great exploration of the various outlooks you come across in teens and adults in China.
I’ve also been reading Tristram Shandy but paused at the end of volume 4. I love the formal flourishes and the audaciousness of the bit but I find I am exhausted by trying to keep up with the contextual footnotes in my version. 18th century prose just doesn’t come easy to me and some chapters really go hard into the tangents.
Looking to return after some smaller stories, looks like I have much [too much] to look forward to
My approach to reading it is the same as my approach to reading Ulysses 10 years ago. I accept that there’s a lot I won’t understand, but promise I will still understand enough to enjoy it. I think volume IV is when Tristram Shandy admits that he has promised to write more chapters than he could likely publish. The more he writes, the more he has to write, the more you have to read. There are sometimes two or three pages worth of writing that mostly go over my head, but then I encounter something so brilliant that it’s all worth it.
This is my approach and I will return. Ulysses really took off in the last 5 chapters for me despite chapters 1-4 being generous reading at first. I love the peak Shandy so much I can’t give it up entirely.
The French newspaper Garette de Deux-Ponts. which seems to have had a roving reporter in Naples, reported in 1772 the case of a Neapolitan card player who, maddened by his losses, “suddenly lowered his head to the table and sank his teeth deep into the edge of the wood. The table was overturned, the pinioned madman with it, and his neck broken during the fall. Sobriety suddenly falling on the gaming house after this incident, the justices’ men and the priest were summoned and gave verdict that the gambler’s soul must have been invaded by the devil to have been aroused to such passion, and therefore he died in no state of grace. The priest refused to give the corpse the rites of burial, and it was taken to the sea by scavengers and flung in.”
From “The Illustrated Guide to Gambling” [1964] - Alan Sykes (probably BS )
