A further thought on The Far Pavilions as I continue with it (still enjoyable, but I’ve slowed down a bit). I find that M.M. Kaye has a particular besetting vice, for a writer: she is over-given to musing to the reader along the lines of “if [whichever character] had known / realised… [whatever], they would / would not have done [whatever]: following the course of action which they did, ended up having bad consequences for them.” I understand that the general view on this practice, is that it’s bad and lazy writing: the author should write skilfully so as to allow the reader – if said reader has the necessary wit – to infer this stuff for themself; not to beat the reader over the head with it, club-fashion. This isn’t a very big deal for me as regards overall pleasure in the book; but it’s become a mild annoyance.
If Kipling is racist, I personally find his racism less offensive than in some who display that trait: it appears to me that he essentially likes his main characters, even if he portrays them condescendingly, as “lesser” specimens of humanity – his soldier trio are, after all, lowly privates in the army, without the advantages of education / polished upbringing. I’m with you on the “painful dialect”, though. Am not in the main fond of writing with “funny spellings” to indicate non-standard English modes of speech – find it distracting. With two of the “Soldiers Three”, it’s not a huge annoyance for me – one of them is, anyway, a man of few words – just doesn’t say much to annoy. The speech of Mulvaney, the Irish guy, drives me round the bend, though – almost to throw-book-violently-across-room point – and he’s a garrulous individual, so there’s a lot of it !
Finally finished American Gods. It took a while, mostly because I would read a couple chapters and then take a week or two off. I liked it, but the, I guess, first ending? felt a little anti-climactic somehow.
Not sure what I’ll read next. Something lighter and easy to breeze through.
Just finished reading Genrenauts, which I found to be fun (despite some drastic editing errors in the first few chapters). Nice little romp in which an organization on sort-of an ‘Earth Prime’ travels to different dimensions that are run by the tropes and expectations of various fiction types (they do a western world, a romance-novel world, a police procedural world, a sci-fi world, and a fantasy world) in order to make sure ‘problems’ that go against trope or theme get fixed. It’s a fun little read.
Currently I’m reading Hawkmoon, as I got it for ‘just one penny’! It’s a nice bit of sword-and-sorcery-and-tech in a post apocalyptic world. Not the best writing, but a fun little adventure in Moorcock’s Eternal Champion series.
And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Necropolis. Just read it again. Hard-boiled detective work in 1940’s Chicago where the undead have their own little ghetto. (note: I will mention that I wrote the thing, so I’m a little biased about it. )
Try the Prince of Thorns series. Same type of vibe with an antihero you love to hate.
Right now, I’m halfway through the last book of the Atlantis Gene trilogy. Suppose human evolution was enhanced by advanced human aliens, because reasons, until General Human Alien shows up and decides to create a global army to fight bad thing that destroyed Alien Homeworld…but there’s no explanation of what EXACTLY bad thing is.
There’s an interesting mix of sci-fi, history, and batshit insane characters. It hasn’t quite connected for me, but it’s got enough of a hook that I just want to finish the damn thing.
Even worse is when you’re sure they’re mocking the character for pronouncing something some way, but when you sound it out it sounds exactly like the way you and everyone you know pronounces it. So then you can’t tell if he’s mocking your speech or if he means you to pronounce the phonetic spelling some other way that you can’t figure out!
I’m trying to remember the example is Charles Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit that drove me crazy.
Maybe the “all” is just a “filler” word on the author’s part (I know that present-day orthodoxy, anyway, is pro-terse precision and anti-“fillers”) – and his actual drift is, "one shouldn’t call any natives ‘niggers’ ".
I’m a big fan of George MacDonald Fraser’s Harry Flashman, and tend to drag him in ubiquitously: per the “Flashman” novels, HF seems to delight in referring to all peoples on earth who are not Caucasian; Oriental; or Native American; as “niggers”. I feel that this is part of Flashy’s “shtick” of acting a part of being even nastier than he truly is, and expressing himself as offensively as he can contrive – per his narrative in the books, in actual fact he’s relatively un-racist; and takes people – whatever their race – as he finds them. Being a misanthrope, he perceives most people as fools and / or knaves; but the minority whom he respects, or finds redeeming traits in, are of all races – “not white” does not for him necessarily mean “inferior”.
Mulvaney is truly a grade-A pain. There’s one story – something to do with elephants IIRC – for which Kipling makes Mulvaney his narrator / mouthpiece for the whole tale. I struggled through a couple of pages, and then baled out.
As far as Kipling goes, he was still a product of his times. It would not be sensible to hold him to the social standards of today. That would be not unlike taking George Washington off the dollar bill because he was a slave owner.
As for Fraser and Flashman, Fraser was clearly showing the average thinking of the day. I would find it very odd if Flashman, knowing him as well as I do, were suddenly to espouse a 21st-century social point of view. I will point out though that in at least one book, he was very proud of Britain having abolished slavery.
Can I ask, which one? I can only recall – with him playing the habitual cynical-and-perverse card to the max – his observing that taking slaves from Africa (as reluctantly participated in by him) wasn’t nice; but that overall British obsession about that particular evil (particularly on the part of religious zealots, who pissed him off big-time) – and with the slave trade having anyway ceased to be particularly profitable for Britain – obscured and distracted from the as-bad, or worse, evil of heartless industrial exploitation back home, of the British poor.
Flash for Freedom!, in which Flashman is himself sold into slavery and assisted by a young Congressman Abe Lincoln. I recall a tear of pride running down his cheek at being told the esteem Britain was held in certain quarters because they had abolished slavery.
Just finished the Dodge City book. It was very informative about the various characters of the wild west: the Earps, the Mastersons, Holiday and many others. It’s not particularly linear, as it delves into the biographies of a lot of people, but it’s a good read. The author really tried hard to sift out truth from myth. Even without all that, it’s apparent that the cow towns of the late 1800s were pretty wild. Bat Masterson’s life, in particular, was very interesting.
Next up is My Life as an Indian: The Story of a Red Woman and a White Man in the Lodges of the Blackfeet, written in 1907 by James Willard Shultz. $.99 on Kindle.
Maybe I should re-read. I’d forgotten that which you cite, from FFF ! – I recall chiefly, that Flashy is “shitting bricks” because Lincoln is insisting on – and taking measures to back it up – his appearing and testifying at the official enquiry in New Orleans, at which if he does so; his having taken part in an illegal slaving voyage will come to light, thus causing his coming under the full rigour of the law – this re him and “his own skin”, by far his greatest concern. Perhaps he is indeed not such a total swine, as he gleefully paints himself as.
Hi, my name is Kris and I have the attention span of a grasshopper… so I started The Mystery of the Pirate’s Ghost by Elizabeth Honness, one of my favorite ever children’s mysteries, because something in The Bilbao Looking Glass, possibly the setting, made me think of it and then there was no getting rid of the need to read.
On the upside I am about 5 books ahead on my Goodreads challenge!
Finished Jack Gantos’ Dead End in Norvelt. Not bad. I’m curious about how much of it’s real, since it’s about a kid named Jack Gantos, and the author grew up in Norvelt.
Started Words on the Move: Why English Won’t–and Can’t–Sit Still (Like, Literally), by John McWhorter.
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