January 2023 Reading Thread

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I finished Adrian Tchaikovsky's Ogres. It too me a while to get into, but it ended up being a very good read.

Now on to Jo Zebedee's "Into a Blood Red Sky".

Into a Blood Red Sky.jpg
 
I finished a second reading -- after almost 50 years! -- of Peake's Gormenghast and then read Heinlein's Farmer in the Sky. Other than maybe Red Planet, I skipped all the Heinlein juveniles when I was one myself, but have read two or three of them in the past few years and enjoyed them.

Then I read Hamlet again. I've thought of King Lear as a thought experiment (What was it like to be British before Christianity arrived?), and now I'm thinking about this play also as a thought experiment: Supposing a ghost did appear and demand vengeance to be taken, what then?

But I think we can do a thought experiment of our own with this play. Suppose the play was not called Hamlet but was called The Tragedy of Claudius King of Denmark.

So you have the story of a man who has violated hospitality, committed regicide, committed what could be counted incest -- already before the play begins. Then he commits various forms of treachery to keep the throne he usurped (e.g. sending Hamlet to England, with sealed orders that Hamlet is to be killed on the spot upon arrival).

Claudius's wickedness is so great as to evoke national calamity. The apparition of the ghost shows how dreadful is the situation for Denmark, just as apparitions do in Julius Caesar: as Claudius has profoundly violated right order, so now even the right boundary between the living and the dead is weakened and broached. As sinners generally do, Claudius thought he could manage the consequences of his wrong actions, in his case through hypocrisy, lying, and the exercise of earthly power, but he has set loose consequences he never dreamed of; he's set loose hell (or purgatory, anyway) itself. Within a short time after his murder of his brother and his marriage to the widow, Claudius finds life to be a matter of constant anxiety right up till his death.

In Claudius, Hamlet is the play's antagonist. He has been a well-liked and well-behaved young man, a good student with a romantic interest in a young woman who, unfortunately, is not a good match for him socially. If this play were about Hamlet, we would expect a lot more development of this problem, but the play is primarily about Claudius and the disaster he has unleashed upon his kingdom. Eventually it leads where it must, not only in his death and that of his paramour and his antagonist nephew, but in the kingdom's loss, as it is to become subordinated to Norway (in the person of Fortinbras).
 
I've started reading through the second volume of Ursula Le Guin's Hainish Novels and Stories. The first one is her short novel The Word For World Is Forest, which I thought was very good and manage to pack a lot of ideas and world-building into about 100 pages. I thought the Athshans were fascinating, particularly Selver and the internal conflict he feels over having to do what he feels he has to do to preserve his home. To begin with, I did feel that the main antagonist Captain Davidson was maybe a bit of a caricature in his villainy but I think it makes sense thematically to have him as the equivalent and in some ways the opposite of Selver.

In the introduction (written in 2010) Le Guin mentions that many people had commented to her on how an unnamed 'recent blockbuster' had many similarities to the book, but she felt that she was glad there was no connection since it had completely reversed the morale premise of the story and suggested violence was a good solution. I do not think she would have liked Avatar 2 any better.
 
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Currently Dean Koontz suspense novel.
2020. Titled DEVOTED.

Any reccomendations for Robert Bloch and/ or PG WODEHOUSE?
 
Dave Vicks said:
Any reccomendations for Robert Bloch and/ or PG WODEHOUSE?
Click to expand...

I'd go for a short story collection by Bloch. He was okay at novels -- a reread of PSYCHO brought me to appreciate it more than my first read -- but like most of his generation of genre writers, he learned to write at shorter lengths and I think that's where he showed his greatest strength. THE EARLY FEARS is a compilation of his first two collections from Arkham House. There are gems in the first collection like "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper" but the second collection is composed of stories written after he shed his Lovecraft influence and came into his own. THE SKULL OF THE MARQUIS DE SADE and COLD CHILLS are also good collections if you can find them.
 
Gareth Knight "The Magical World of the Inklings"
Disappointing. I'd hoped for something similar to Humphrey Carpenter's work on the same subject. This is basically four essays on Lewis (95 pages), Tolkien (42 pages), Williams (56 pages), Barfield (34 pages) that involve large scale precis of their works and little reference to the interplay between the individuals. For me, the section on Tolkien is particularly uninteresting, involving a recapitulation of the creation myths of the Silmarillion and then a suggested "Mystery Drama" for a number of participants.
Perhaps one positive - I realised how sketchy my memories are of the Narnia stories and this will probably prompt a re-read. in the next year or two.
 
The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen.

Hard to judge. It kept me reading, but large parts were skimmable, and at the end I wasn't really sure what I'd got from it. I found the non-naturalistic dialogue a problem: it read like someone's earliest attempts at fiction. But there is something genuinely interesting at its core, and I think it probably benefited from the strange, fragmented structure.
 
Finished: H2O: A Biography of Water by Philip Ball (science book)
Last week finished: Penric's Fox, Mira's Last Dance and The Prisoner of Limnos by Lois McMaster Bujold.
Also listened to the third installment of Junkyard Cats (Junkyard War) by Faith Hunter.
Busy with Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (will take a while), which is pleasantly not stuffy or long winded.
Still plodding through The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett (I'm failing to see the excitement about this book, it's turgid! - still haven't got to cathedral building and I'm already on pg 428)
 
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