more reading
Oct. 15th, 2004 10:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7I told you, I don't just read a book, I go on a binge.
So, yesterday afternoon (ALL OF IT) I spent reading Alice Borchardt's The Dragon Queen, which was yet another retelling of the Arthur myth.
Somebody read Mists of Avalon and wanted to do one better, thinking that she didn't slam the Romans and the Saxons enough (for the love of GOD, the Saxons WEREN'T THAT BAD). (This is the tale of Guinevere's childhood and rearing.) So now Guinivere (by the way, she spells it at will in the book, from Gwynwyvar to Gwiniver to Guynifar etc-- every time she writes it down it's different, but I tell you I don't understand the French-influenced spellings because she sets this in an emphatically pre-Norman Britain) is raised by wolves and Celtic mystics, and is the daughter of a descendant of Queen Boudicca of the Icenii (who the Romans slaughtered a thousand years ago, and whose survivors then mysteriously moved to Ireland, so go figure) and a man of the Sidhe, which they don't really get into.
Somebody also read Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising series, and thought that her random interludes in alternate dimensions weren't obscure enough and had to do one better. While Will and Bran (in Cooper's tales) were transported to a land that had been claimed by the sea a thousand years ago to defeat an animated unicorn skeleton and a flying may tree and a spinning wheel to retrieve a famous sword (all explained beforehand in a rhyme, so the otherwise incredible experience was at least coherent) Guinevere is randomly transported without warning to Bronze Age Britain, where she is set by the Mother Goddess to kill a dinosaur, while meanwhile Arthur is transported to an inexplicable island and tortured by Merlin and Igraine by being pursued relentlessly by a slow-moving, um, tornado of, um, tortured souls, which he must spend all day out-walking while finding food and shelter and protected by inexplicable skulls whose meaning he later finds out but I, as the reader, couldn't fathom. OK.
I just... You know, I have studied Celtic literature extensively and almost all of her references except the exceedingly poor cribs from the Tain were WAY over my head. I have studied Irish, Welsh, and Scottish mythology and literature extensively, and had no idea what she could possibly be referring to. I haven't studied Arthur that much because what we have of him is essentially French and I never really liked the French very much (also, the Victorians absolutely savaged the myth and have made it totally lame), so maybe that's where she's getting all this shit, but...
A dinosaur?
In the Bronze Age?
Please. Give us a CHANCE to figure out what the fuck is going on.
And at the end of the book? Arthur and Guinivere haven't even met as adults.
So, I have two choices.
1) Reread the book and Google every name she drops that I don't get, so I can figure out what the fuck she's trying to refer to.
2) Assume she made the whole thing up and abandon the project.
The thing that probably makes me the most hostile is that I used to write like this myself, when I was 14, and I got over it. I figured out that referring to really obscure things and not explaining it wasn't actually cool, and determined that giving my characters bizarre magical experiences that I didn't then explain at all didn't actually advance the plot as much as one would think it would.
There were some cool moments, don't get me wrong. I liked the characterization of Arthur as above all, a survivor; his strange air of detachment underlaid with grim desperation is somewhat vivid. But a lot of other characterizations were superficial. I just... couldn't really... I don't know. I may give a shot at re-reading some of it. It's tremendously imaginative. But parts...
OK, she's got a character who is a survivor of a civilisation that remembers emigrating to Britain on foot via land-bridge as the global sea-levels rose at the end of the Ice Age.
I am sorry, oral legends do not survive coherently for fifteen THOUSAND years. That's not feasible.
So the characters were preachy about overarching historical themes that they wouldn't know about.
Sort of reminiscent of Mists of Avalon.
And maybe I should here mention that I tried to read Mists of Avalon and it is one of about three books in my entire life that I put down, closed, returned to the library without finishing. I've read some real crap, but it was too much for me. I just couldn't.
So, yesterday afternoon (ALL OF IT) I spent reading Alice Borchardt's The Dragon Queen, which was yet another retelling of the Arthur myth.
Somebody read Mists of Avalon and wanted to do one better, thinking that she didn't slam the Romans and the Saxons enough (for the love of GOD, the Saxons WEREN'T THAT BAD). (This is the tale of Guinevere's childhood and rearing.) So now Guinivere (by the way, she spells it at will in the book, from Gwynwyvar to Gwiniver to Guynifar etc-- every time she writes it down it's different, but I tell you I don't understand the French-influenced spellings because she sets this in an emphatically pre-Norman Britain) is raised by wolves and Celtic mystics, and is the daughter of a descendant of Queen Boudicca of the Icenii (who the Romans slaughtered a thousand years ago, and whose survivors then mysteriously moved to Ireland, so go figure) and a man of the Sidhe, which they don't really get into.
Somebody also read Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising series, and thought that her random interludes in alternate dimensions weren't obscure enough and had to do one better. While Will and Bran (in Cooper's tales) were transported to a land that had been claimed by the sea a thousand years ago to defeat an animated unicorn skeleton and a flying may tree and a spinning wheel to retrieve a famous sword (all explained beforehand in a rhyme, so the otherwise incredible experience was at least coherent) Guinevere is randomly transported without warning to Bronze Age Britain, where she is set by the Mother Goddess to kill a dinosaur, while meanwhile Arthur is transported to an inexplicable island and tortured by Merlin and Igraine by being pursued relentlessly by a slow-moving, um, tornado of, um, tortured souls, which he must spend all day out-walking while finding food and shelter and protected by inexplicable skulls whose meaning he later finds out but I, as the reader, couldn't fathom. OK.
I just... You know, I have studied Celtic literature extensively and almost all of her references except the exceedingly poor cribs from the Tain were WAY over my head. I have studied Irish, Welsh, and Scottish mythology and literature extensively, and had no idea what she could possibly be referring to. I haven't studied Arthur that much because what we have of him is essentially French and I never really liked the French very much (also, the Victorians absolutely savaged the myth and have made it totally lame), so maybe that's where she's getting all this shit, but...
A dinosaur?
In the Bronze Age?
Please. Give us a CHANCE to figure out what the fuck is going on.
And at the end of the book? Arthur and Guinivere haven't even met as adults.
So, I have two choices.
1) Reread the book and Google every name she drops that I don't get, so I can figure out what the fuck she's trying to refer to.
2) Assume she made the whole thing up and abandon the project.
The thing that probably makes me the most hostile is that I used to write like this myself, when I was 14, and I got over it. I figured out that referring to really obscure things and not explaining it wasn't actually cool, and determined that giving my characters bizarre magical experiences that I didn't then explain at all didn't actually advance the plot as much as one would think it would.
There were some cool moments, don't get me wrong. I liked the characterization of Arthur as above all, a survivor; his strange air of detachment underlaid with grim desperation is somewhat vivid. But a lot of other characterizations were superficial. I just... couldn't really... I don't know. I may give a shot at re-reading some of it. It's tremendously imaginative. But parts...
OK, she's got a character who is a survivor of a civilisation that remembers emigrating to Britain on foot via land-bridge as the global sea-levels rose at the end of the Ice Age.
I am sorry, oral legends do not survive coherently for fifteen THOUSAND years. That's not feasible.
So the characters were preachy about overarching historical themes that they wouldn't know about.
Sort of reminiscent of Mists of Avalon.
And maybe I should here mention that I tried to read Mists of Avalon and it is one of about three books in my entire life that I put down, closed, returned to the library without finishing. I've read some real crap, but it was too much for me. I just couldn't.
this is from kat
Date: 2004-10-15 04:08 pm (UTC)I never can remember the name of it, which makes it difficult for me to find it and re-read it. But I read it several times in junior high and really liked it then.
In imitation of your song-list, here's the song Trevor and I are singing right not:
I spent my last 10 dollars on birth control and beer...
Re: this is from kat
Date: 2004-10-15 04:19 pm (UTC)>song
Did you really?
Planned Parenthood gave me ten months of birth control for free after charging me $80 for two gynaecologist visits and the first three months of the new kind of birth control. Which is really Not Bad, given how much I used to spend on birth control. (The Pill, without insurance, is $40/month.)
Re: this is from kat
Date: 2004-10-19 03:48 am (UTC)No, not really. Condoms aren't that expensive, particularly in bulk, and I still don't drink. But the song is funny. Maybe you don't know how it goes?
I spent my last $10 on birth control and beer,
my life was so much simpler when I was sober, and queer
But the love of a strong hairy man has turned my head, I fear
and made me spend my last $10 on birth control and beer.
So you see, it was related to the Indigo Girls thing.