cattytrona's reviews
283 reviews

an odd, mildly over-stuffed volume. not my favourite beowulf translation - tolkien renders it so densely that you have to really concentrate on a clause-by-clause level, which meant i kept losing track of what i'd just read, finding myself cut off on an island sentence. which makes it difficult to follow the plot. i also don't care for the fact it's rendered like prose: i missed line breaks.
i actually found the commentary much pleasanter to read, although some of tolkien's key areas of interest (linguistics and historical record) aren't mine. i liked his sellic song and lays a lot more - beowulf explicitly as fairytale? sign me up! could have done without most of christopher tolkien's editorialising notes.
hard to speak on any of the single components in detail, because, as i implied, the book has a lot of other stuff in it.

have, i think, run into the same issues both times i've come to a passage to india, which is that what i'm tensed for as the ending in fact happens two thirds of the way through, and then there's more. which means that when the end does actually come, i'm a little fatigued and estranged. i think there's something artful in that - imperialism doesn't end with one triumph, there's something of the apathetic putting-up-with of fielding, the presence for new blood (perpetuation) but a refusal to engage with its ideas, so old ways and old failures persevere - but that kind of appreciation only comes in hindsight. otherwise, gorgeously, smartly written. i think the commentary on women is interesting. insightful as a british perspective on india. i would have to read more to say more; would that i better remembered my undergraduate lectures.

le carré is an incredible stylist. i would read him write about anything, but this is a good subject: thrilling, varied, not something i’ve read much of. the case chases itself across south east asia, and it’s a really interesting window into the withering and replacement of colonial control  there, would pair well with the quiet american, which le carré consciously calls back to. slow and dense, but never not exciting too.

good stories. love the way they scale up and out - reminded me of the hair carpet-weavers, a book which really has stuck with me because of its structure. asimov is such a clear, articulate and focused writer.
something fun about reading asimov is that i feel like his books are always massively misrepresented culturally, so that i’m never sure what to expect, i think because they’re read by science students who don’t have the vocab or context for what books can do. someone told me this was sort of essays. it’s not! these are short stories through and through. at least two of them are explicitly mysteries, of the golden age variety. i think that’s actually the main thing which the 3 laws lets asimov do, as a storyteller: set up rules of the case which have to be broken or thought around by the insightful, specialised mystery solvers. they’ve perhaps got more to do with christie than, say, herbert. 

fun but feels supplementary somehow, even though it does fit with the rest of the series: if it had come out at the time, it would have been a reasonable addition to the trilogy; it can’t bear the weight of a decade of expectation.

i would rate the stories/parts in the same order they come: the first really effectively creeped me out, a great, strange scary fragment; the second is ok, a bit long, felt some of the same apathy i had with Authority, although having read a few spy novels since, i could better appreciate what it was doing; third felt rushed, and blurred behind the narration

ebbed and flowed, and i was ready for it to end when it did (like, i knew what it was doing; thankfully, it’s short) but i thought the prose was affirmingly careful and illustrative, and some moments floated profoundly to the surface. it feels like a book that packs a lot in, and it doesn’t all have to work, because something different would resonate in a different moment.

a sweet, moral, christian tale, which also satisfied my need for gossip and scandal on a couple of levels. firstly, the romance is extremely cute and i liked being confided in about it. secondly, it’s extremely interesting to get all the insider scoop on the real lives of governesses: there’s something of reality tv in the career focus on the lives behind the lives of the rich, and the boy moms, multi-man romantic scheming, bad behaviour, performative performances are all still familiar tropes. also, i thought ‘reformed rakes make the best husbands’ came from mills and boons style romance novels, but here it is.

i rather liked agnes too. somewhat a good girl, but wry, perspective and judgy too. her isolation is a real moment of insight from this book on this period, and i love how she/anne notice the footmen. she was a nice person to spend a deeply arduous train journey with, a non-frustrating, balanced presence. 

slightly too dense to be a good fairytale, and slightly too blithe to feel really emotionally satisfying in the end, but passes through some good stuff on the way. there’s some gorgeous descriptions of housing and trains and instantly imaginable characters. and i was completely blown away by the Governor Pyncheon chapter. its use of second person, its commitment to it, and the appearances of the ghosts, are so effective in what they do, and so aesthetically and vividly distinct that i thought of films: i was  reminded of the sudden, memorable distinctions which a changed in visual language can create (the black and white parts of Dune Part 2, the reality/expectation segment of 500 Days of Summer, the brief court sequence in Dial M For Murder); i can’t think of another book section so striking that it caused me to recourse to visuals like this did (for instance, the story within a story here, which does have a distinct style to it, did not inspire anything like that). so that was great.

quick, likeable crimeish novel. ends very quickly. enjoyed the lagos setting, and wish there was even more of the city’s geography visible. 

i think if you care about writing/writing (verb/noun) today, you need to be reading proulx. doesn’t matter if you think you’re interested in the subject or not: the ability with which she shapes her stories at every level of focus is nuts. one of a few really doing it.

in some ways, a completely atypical book, with its huge scope,  utterly clear, labyrinthine structure, and fundamental thematic point: this is about wood, the woods, the world. however, also reminded me how much i like historical novels, because it has so much of what makes the best of them great: bursts with history, detail, sprawl, complicated family relations, business dealings, insane deaths. in many ways, in fact, this is just a reeling off of ways to die in the wild, but the flip side of that is a lot of lives are lived first.

am fascinated with the emergence, growth, of familiarity throughout the novel: known place names, in-text repetitions (like the promethean appearance of fires as a major risk part way through) create a world which becomes increasingly familiar, whilst clearly emerging in sequence with what came before; saying, these pasts are today’s inheritance, they are not separate, alien, they bleed directly into their future which is our past and present. there is so much wood around me right now. what is to be done?