Book Round-Up: Where Did the Time Go Edition

It's been a hell of a month.

Murder by the Book: Mysteries for Bibliophiles: another collection of short stories published by the British Library Crime Classics, by authors well-known and forgotten. The stories were, for the most part, enjoyable. Some of the weaker ones highlight a problem with mystery short stories -- it takes a writer of great skill to create a satisfactory tale given there is little space for characterization and motive.

Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu: I absolutely loved this brilliant take on race relations. It's written in screenplay form, about Generic Asian Man who hopes his stint on the procedural show "Black and White" (get it?) will allow him to become Kung Fu Guy, movie star. It's bitingly satirical but also moving as it addresses the immigration history of Asians (and how they are never considered Americans no matter how long they have been here) and, most touchingly, the role of parenthood.

The Annotated Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien, annotated by Douglas A. Anderson: my paperback copy having long since fallen apart, I treated myself to this handsome book with the aforementioned annotations, essays on the creation and publication of The Hobbit, and oodles of illustrations by Tolkien himself and the illustrators of different translations.

Dreams Underfoot by Charles de Lint: I first read these short stories back in college? Law school? De Lint is considered a master of the urban fantasy subgenre; this first anthology shows the the development of his fictional city Newford (maybe Canadian, maybe American, maybe coastal, maybe not) and the various fairy denizens who are only rarely noticed by human residents. I had forgotten that some of these tales are straight up horror. I had not forgotten that de Lint has a chip on his shoulder about anyone one who lives a conventional life. Still, they are fun to read.

North Woods by Daniel Mason: another novel I loved. Taking place in western Massachusetts (where I grew up), it follows the history of a house originally built by a Puritan couple fleeing persecution and all the people who subsequently stay in that house, however briefly. Those people are all considered outsiders by society (some deservedly, most not), and Mason writes movingly about the peace they find in the house and its surrounding woods. It's fascinating to compare this to Richard McGuire's Here, which has the same concept but tells it in comic form.

In a Hole in the Ground there lived a Hobbit

It was the summer of the hobbit.

I convinced my youngest to read The Hobbit this summer (he loved it, except for a couple of "boring" chapters). That inspired me to buy a hardcover version of the annotated edition (not for my son to read, though; he's hard on books). It's a great version -- lots of notes on the creation and publication of the novel, plus numerous illustrations from Tolkien himself and dozens of other artists.

Coincidentally, Aimee Ray of Little Dear issued for her September Patreon pattern a trio of doors to make, including a hobbit door. So of course I made it:

I've built up quite the collection of small Tolkien crafts.

Jewelry Round-Up: I-Keep-Forgetting-to-Post Edition

I participated in a bead swap way back in March (I swear I'll do that post some day), and the very first thing I made was a cute pair of earrings with lilac-colored flowers:

Cheap but colorful beads from Michael's + silver charms that had been languishing = an easy, fun necklace:

I'm such a dork I bought not one but two Middle Earth-themed candles. The second, by North Ave Candles, was their Shire Sweetgrass candle with a cute little mushroom charm. I made a bracelet with it:

(The first candle had The One Ring in it. My 10-year-old is mad I didn't give it to him, but it fits my fingers, not his!)

I love, love, love the fringe charm earrings I made from Susan LeGuyader's pattern in the spring issue of Belle Armoire Jewelry:

The "popcorn padre" beads at Beadshop.com have been calling to me. I finally succumbed and bought them, then made the shop's Tahoe wrap bracelet: 

I originally paired these silver charms with burnt umber beads; pretty, but I never wore them. Turquoise chips and ruby beads are much more my style:

Shell necklaces are in. I happened to have a shell with a hole right where it should be (a lucky beachcombing find), so I cleaned it to remove calcification, rubbed some mineral oil in it to bring back some color, and edged it with gold paint. Brass beads from who-knows-where completed the look:

Book Round-Up

 A Darker Shade of Magic by V.E. Schwab: A month later, I'm still not sure how I feel about this novel, the first in a series (that can stand alone). There was a lot I liked about this book, including the concept of four Londons with differing levels of magic. And there was a little I didn't like at all, such as Lila's not-like-other-girls status and the unrelenting cruelty of White London. But either way, Schwab is a compelling writer. And I'm adding this to my imaginary shelf of alternate Londons.

The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien: I read this first in high school, dipped in and out of it over the years, and finally settled down for a reread in January. To my surprise, it wasn't as challenging as I remembered (all that reading over the last 30+ years has paid off!), and the stories were still as melancholy and beautiful as I remember. Anyone who thinks Tolkien only writes simplistic, black-and-white stories with happy endings needs to read about Feanor.

The Clocktaur War by T. Kingfisher: This duology about a small group of ordinary people -- naive scholar, allergy-prone forger, traumatized paladin, and cynical assassin -- sent on an impossible task to put an end to unstoppable war machines was so much fun. Kingfisher has a knack for putting ordinary people in deadly situations without losing sight of her characters' humanity or sense of the ridiculous. She is rapidly becoming one of my favorite writers.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

I've been fascinated by Arthurian Legends since I was a girl, so much so that I took a class in the literature in college, covering everything from Geoffrey of Monmouth's pseudo-history to modern versions by T.H. White and Marion Zimmer Bradley. I especially loved the stories surrounding the Holy Grail, and I wrote my final paper about the Grail elements in T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (my professor's initial response: "You're very brave to tackle Eliot.").  But somehow, I never read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

The release of the movie The Green Knight forced me to correct that; as always, I prefer to read the book first. So I picked up Tolkien's translation of the poem, in an edition that includes Tolkien's lecture on it and his translations of two other poems likely by the same poet.

It's an excellent translation. The original was written in a dialect of Middle English different enough from both Chaucer's English (the poet probably knew him) and modern that a translation is necessary, but Tolkien kept to the poetic style the author used: alliterative verse, where each line is divided in two but linked by the initial sounds of stressed words. As I read the story, I often found myself reading some of it aloud.

The story itself is about the contest the mysterious Green Knight challenges Gawain to: Gawain is to wield the strongest blow he can with the Knight's axe, but in return he much allow the Knight to do the same a year later. Gawain chops his head off, but the Knight just picks it up and goes on his way, reminding Gawain of his agreement. After spending most of the year ignoring it, he finally sets out to meet his obligation before eventually stopping at the castle of a lord near the meeting place. Paradoxically, this part is the most dangerous, as both the lord and his lady play games with Gawain to test him.

It also forms the heart of the story, as Tolkien explains in his lecture. Gawain is being tested on three levels -- the game (with its rules) he plays with the lord, the obligations of courtly love the lady demands, and Christian morality. Watching Gawain navigate the three until he finally must choose one to honor above the others is fascinating.

From what I've read, the movie is not a typical action/adventure-type fantasy; I'm hopeful, then, that it will reflect the moral and philosophical struggles of the text.

1 Year of Stitches: Week 19

That's Telperion next to the Elvish script.

1 Year of Stitches: Week 18

1 Year of Stitches: Week 8

Because I am a big dork, I embroidered my name in Tolkien's Elvish script, and his Dwarven runes (Moria-style).  Then Linear B.  Then the dancing men from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock stories, and St. Thomas More's script from Utopia, and Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Telperion

The White Tree:

The design itself is specifically the White Tree of Gondor, but I did not use a black background and I did not add the stars and crown.  I did use rayon floss to give it a lovely shimmer, as if the tree were glowing.

Before rinsing off the embroidery stabilizer:

I kind of like the nimbus it gives the tree branches; I bet I could get the same effect with netting on a future project.

Book Round-Up

Goddess of Spring by P.C. Cast: This romance novel is a riff on the Persephone myth. Through a series of events, Lina, a middle-aged bakery owner, exchanges bodies with Persephone and agrees to bring the touch of a goddess to Hades. This was a pretty good re-telling of the myth -- Cast makes Hades, known as a dour god (unusual for the Greek gods in general), into a very attractive hero. Lina is smart and capable and mature, a refreshing change from the typical twenty-something heroine. The happy ending is unconventional but plausible (well, as plausible as one can expect in a world where the Greek gods are real). And Cast deliberately recast (heh) the myth in a feminist manner, getting rid of the (in)famous rape in the process. (In a comment on a Smart Bitches thread, Cast states that her research indicated the rape was not part of the original myth; I can't confirm this, except to say that this aspect of the story was not known in Homer's time.) Cast has written other books in the "Goddess" series -- the one below, plus ones based on the Undine and Beauty and the Beast stories, both of which I intend to check out.

Goddess of Light by P.C. Cast: This is the sequel of sorts to Goddess of Spring, and I did not like it nearly as much. For one thing it is set in Las Vegas, which holds no appeal to me. For another, Apollo is kind of a jerk -- there are several scenes where he is downright bullying to service people. I think we are supposed to find it romantic, a sign of how passionate and concerned he is for the protagonist, Pamela, but . . . no. Nor did I like the use of the antagonist, Bacchus. I found it odd that Cast chose the Roman version of this god when all other gods were the Greek counterparts, and while Dionysus is a natural foil for Apollo, chaos to his order, Bacchus here was not chaotic or wild, just gluttonous and petty and mustache-twirlingly evil. (And fat. Cast made a big deal of how disgusting he was.) On a more abstract level, I had a bit of trouble with the idea of the Greek/Roman gods being real (which I was able to overlook in the first book, because I enjoyed it so much, but still). Not surprisingly, God-with-a-capital-G (let alone the J-word) is not mentioned in the books, but neither is this some sort of alternate America where Judaism and Christianity do not exist. There are several off-hand references to a Christian understanding of prayer, much is made of how Hades is not like the Christian Hell, and in this book we learn modern dead people do not go to Hades at all. I was therefore left with a number of questions about the theology of the books (as dorky as that sounds, and yes, I am the type who over-analyzes romance novels). Nonetheless, the book was pretty well written, and again Cast came up with an unconventional yet plausible happy ending.

A Single Thread by Marie Bostwick: Bostwick has started a series centered around a quilt shop in Connecticut and a group of women who form a modern quilting circle. As you would expect, the women face all the standard problems -- cancer, divorce, betrayal, familial estrangement, career problems, and so on. Bostwick's skill, however, keeps the story engaging, perhaps because the characters are a little more self-aware than is usual in this type of fiction. Bostwick does make a couple of odd narrative decisions: although the story centers around four women, it is told from the first-person perspective of two, not all or just one; why? And several passages in the novel indicate that the two narrators are speaking or writing directly to someone; who? Otherwise, the book was well-written and enjoyable.

The Mouse Guard comics by David Petersen: Petersen has created an unusual comic universe -- a society of mice who survive in the wilderness despite being surrounded by predators. Fall 1152 is about a rebellion against the Mouse Guard, a group who keep other mice as safe as they can; Winter 1152 deals with the aftermath of he rebellion and a harsh winter. Although the plots at times were a little thin, the world is rich and deep -- there is a history (including a war against weasels and an alliance with hares) that we only get snippets of, there are mousish poems and proverbs, and there is even a list of the quotidian professions of mouse commoners. The artwork, sized to fit onto square pages, depicts mice that are both adorable and deadly serious. I look forward to the next installments.

J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century by Tom Shippey: Over-the-top title aside, this is a great book of literary criticism by Shippey. I read it a decade ago and then lent it to Beadmom, where it sat neglected on a book shelf until I reclaimed it last month (like me, Beadmom has more books than time to read). I've now re-read it, and it was just as enjoyable the first time around. Shippey devotes each chapter to a major work of Tolkien's while tying it to a particular theme -- myth, the nature of evil, and so on. Sometimes he overstates his case, but it is clear he knows both Tolkien and his writings very well, which gives him a lot of insight into the works. He also does a close reading of the texts, paying special attention to particular words Tolkien used and even invented (not surprising, given that Shippey, like Tolkien, was a linguist at Oxford). I love language, particularly etymologies, so this is right up my alley.

Although Shippey quotes them, it is nonetheless hard to believe there are people who think the Lord of the Rings et al. is trivial and simplistic. I get not liking the books, but if you think they are just inconsequential little stories, you clearly weren't paying attention.

Good and Evil and the Lord of the Rings

Earlier this week Salon.com ran a review of a Russian novel, The Last Ringbearer by Kirill Yeskov, that purports to re-tell the story of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings from Mordor's perspective (there is no official English translation yet). In general, I think reimaginings can be interesting, but this one does not appeal to me. For one thing, I love the source material too much to enjoy a book that completely subverts everything that was good and beautiful in the original. For another, it sounds awfully similar to Noam Chomsky's and Howard Zinn's unused commentary for the DVD release of The Fellowship of the Ring, which was a big old satire of certain trends in scholarship that are worthy but can be taken too far, especially if used for their own sake and not to discover something true.

Two things that surprised me, however (although it should not have), were the way this re-telling has been praised for subverting LOTR's "overly simplistic morality," and the assumption that it is a story for kids, specifically teenage boys (something Yeskov himself thinks). Others go farther and praise The Last Ringbearer for correcting the unrealistic, fantastical, "unscientific" LOTR.

There's a lot going on here, and I am not sure I can address it all coherently. For one thing, to suggest that LOTR is juvenile fiction, on par with the Narnia books or The Wizard of Oz or the Harry Potter books (all of which I love), is bizarre. LOTR is a very dense book with a lot going on, not just a sword and sorcery story. Tolkien incorporated a great deal of scholarship and philosophy into the books, and while people can certainly read it on just the top level, a magical adventure story, that does not prevent it from being read on deeper levels. I first read the series in sixth grade, and I have re-read it countless times over the years, always getting something from it. There is stuff in here about good and evil, love, self-sacrifice, restraint, power, corruption, environmentalism, progress . . . I could go on and on.

For similar reasons, the charge that LOTR's morality is "overly simplistic" is flat out wrong. It may not be apparent to everyone, but the books were intentionally suffused by Tolkien with Catholic theology, particularly on the nature of good and evil. I think part of the reason this accusation exists is because of a modern tendency, in this country at least, to reject the idea of Evil-with-a-capital-E, of Satan, in favor of a focus on the evil deeds that men do. To a certain modern sensibility, the idea that there is an inhuman, magical creature like Sauron who is pure evil seems childish. It's not, of course; even if you don't believe in anything super- or preter-natural, go read Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas and then tell me that the Catholic theology of good and evil is simplistic.

But even if Sauron is cartoonish in the way that Voldemort is, he is hardly the only representation of evil in the book (just as Voldemort is not in those books, something people tend to overlook when criticizing Rowling). Evil isn't just the actions of demonic powers, it is in the actions of ordinary men and women who commit evil because of human weakness. Nor is it simply just a matter of good versus evil. Frodo, the hero of the books, and an undeniably good person, fails his task -- at the last minute he succumbs to temptation. Gandalf, the "white wizard," has to keep on constant guard that he does not abuse his considerable power and allow it to corrupt him as it corrupted Saruman (who had a chance at redemption despite the tremendous evil he committed, but allows his pettiness and bitterness to rule the end of his days). Boromir, a noble, strong, smart, well-intentioned man, has a weakness that leads him to do a very bad thing; nonetheless he is given a moving act of redemption. Denethor commits great evil despite his desire to keep his kingdom safe and good, because of his pride and despair. Even sniveling, disgusting, corrupt Gollum is shown to have a true humanity and flashes of the innate goodness buried deep within him. This is not the stuff of simplistic fairy tales.

The impression that some critics, including Yeskov, don't fully understand or appreciate LOTR is strengthened by Yeskov's very long, very rambling follow-up article in Salon about why he wrote his book. After a section on the nature and ethical considerations of derivative works (and for the record, unlike some other fans of LOTR, I have no problem with The Last Ringbearer as a concept), Yetsov writes that a fantasy novel in general and LOTR in particular has a medieval black-and-white ethos that forbids moral relativism, and is more appealing to adolescents than adults. There is a lot wrong with this claim. First of all, this is a false dichotomy he has set up. As the examples I listed above show, it is in fact possible to have a notion of absolute good and absolute evil and yet have characters and situations that are "gray" -- after all, humans are flawed creatures. An acknowledgment of the contradictions in human nature, and the ability of a person to commit good, bad, and neutral acts, sometimes all in the same day, is not at all the same thing as moral relativism, which holds that the the terms "good" and "evil" have no universal meaning. Second, there are a number of fantasy books that do, in fact, incorporate moral relativism, or at least a much more elastic view of good and evil. Third, the claim that this fantasy ethos appeals only to adolescents is insulting to both adolescents and adults who are capable of a nuanced understanding of morality and for whom the concept of absolute good and absolute evil is a thoughtful, reasoned part of their faith or beliefs.

There are other, nitpicky misunderstandings of LOTR floating around. In the same article, for example, Yeskov (a scientist) discusses the scientific errors in LOTR, mentioning in particular another critic's focus on the geologically impossible nature of Middle Earth because there is only one continent. My first thought, like a true fangirl, was "No, there are two continents, and maybe more, given that Tolkien deliberately left vague the peoples and lands to the east and south of Middle Earth." Similarly, Yeskov likes to stump Tolkien afficionados by asking what currency was used, his point being that Tolkien's failure to mention any is a significant flaw in the realism of the book. Only, Tolkien does mention it -- the hobbits in one scene pay for beer with silver pennies. That kind of sloppy fact-checking does not incline me to take seriously the critic. Moreover, while I totally understand the impulse of a specialist to correct errors in a work (I could rant for days on the laughably wrong understanding of the legal system most Hollywood writers have), I don't think it is fair to let such errors obscure literary merits (especially since Tolkien was not an earth scientist and plate tectonics were not well-understood then).

My not-at-all-expert opinion is that what is really going on is simply that some people don't like the fantasy genre in general, and LOTR in particular, and therefore get hung up on "realism" issues like money and plate-tectonics and demonic evil. But while there is nothing wrong with not liking a genre, it is a (very common) mistake to assume that what you do not like is no good. Complaining about the realism of a demonic evil presence in a book whose genre is predicated on the existence of such supernatural and preternatural forces is silly. Expecting a professor of linguistics to have a deep understanding of plate tectonics (ahead of his time, no less) is unfair. While a sloppily-researched or poorly-thought-out book should be criticized for that reason, we should not get carried away with realism. Not the least because there is more than one kind of realism: Tolkien may have created an impossible geography and he may have ignored certain realities like money, but he depicted the realities of loss and sacrifice, temptation and free will, quite well.