LookingLand

i've read a lot of books this summer (some of which have been surprisingly fun like last week's Brief Honors: a Romance of the Great Dividable, which was a morality tale about the evil of big corporations ~ written in 1877!). as i have been reading this summer, i have thought it would be fun to share some of these books in more depth (i wish i had journaled more about Montmorency because those books are so much fun and the plots are so twisty). so i thought i would like to blog a book in august ~ just for fun, give a blow-by-blow of my impressions for each chapter. i can't decide which book to choose and since i am no longer a paying lj peep, i cannot make the pretty poll thing, but feel free to express yourself in the comments if you have an opinion.


these are the candidates on the docket:

The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters by Dalquist ~ at 725 pages this is quite the tome, but less daunting than Stephenson's Baroque Cycle (which i am still mulling through). also, i love the chapter format (had to send away to Ireland for it special). It's a fantasy adventure, but what if it sucks and then i will spend all my energy quibbling? that isn't a good thing. or i might challenge myself to not quibble, which would be fabulous.

Loveless by Azarrello ~ okay, it's a graphic novel, but it has twenty four parts, so it would be substantial enough to report on, i think. grim western, mature themes, probably lots to enjoy and/or criticize, and it's not as huge an investment as a "real" novel.

Oh Please Read Something New out of Your Vast S. Weir Mitchell Collection! ~ because i still have a handful of books i have been saving and you know how i love to go on about this guy's work, complete with side stories on obscure post-Civil War minutiae. of the books of his that i haven't read i would probably choose John Sherwood, When All the Woods are Green, or In War Time. I'm leaning toward In War Time because it opens with an army hospital post-Gettysburg and i am a ghoul for that sort of thing.

or, if none of these ideas seem fun to you, feel free to suggest something completely different ~ on the understanding that i rarely actually read book recommendations because my tastes are entirely too flaky. so if you want to increase the chances that i might actually look at something you suggest, just make sure the plot doesn't rely on telephones, cars, or understanding the least bit about the 21st century ~ because all of that might be too much of a challenge to my enfeebled antiquarian brain.

my idea is to read this book in August and just do a periodic update on its progress in an impressionistic sort of way (not necessarily a blow by blow, though spoilers would definitely be included, so consider that).

by the way i do have three other books on my reading list this summer, which i will probably be taking with me on vacation at the end of the month (so they aren't good blogging prospects, i don't think, it being hard to blog on the beach): The Birth House by ami mcKay, The Count of Monte Cristo by Dumas, and The Year of Jublio by howard bahr.

opinions, oh flist of mine?

: D

i love the smell of update day in the morning!

today's "page" is maybe sorta goofy-looking. no, i didn't get lazy and skip drawing a whole bunch of the conversation. i'm trying to find a reasonable way to mix and match the narrative with the sequentials. it's not entirely working yet, but i'll figger it out. meanwhile, Collie sure can go on! i never realized how chatty this scene was. on the page it seems entirely reasonable for a conversation, but having to draw it feels interminable. definitely something to consider moving forward because i do love dialogue and my characters do seem to run off at the mouth a lot ~ to the detriment of forward action.

: o p

in reading: i got ron hansen's new book (eagerly awaited), Exiles, through innerliberry loan and started reading it last night. it's about gerard manley hopkins (s.j.) and his writing of the "Wreck of the Deutschland". i'm only on chapter two, but i have to say, having absolutely adored hansen's Mariette in Ecstasy, i'm a little baffled and disappointed by this one so far. it feels so stiff and lumbering by comparison to his earlier work. like he's really laboring with the subject matter. some passages feel over-explained and others have no context whatsoever. and it's clear that he's pulled a lot of hopkins's dialogue from his writing (because no one actually talks this way).

i get the sense that hansen wasn't all that comfortable with the subject matter or felt he might do a disservice to hopkins (the book is framed with disclaimers, etc.). i'm hoping he eases up on the clutch as he gets more comfortable with the material. right now i'm mostly reading it because it's an interesting study of a 19th century seminary (which is no reason to read something!).



p.s. i really need new avatars. this having only 6 to choose from is for the tweets.

i've doing a lot of reading, but not reporting on it as of recent. i'm currently sort of muddling through thomas nelson page's Red Rock, which is interesting, but a long narrative with too many characters (i'm having a hard time keeping track of them all). i've also been reading fits and futz from various nonfiction books, but nothing substantial worth reporting (mostly retread). nevertheless, i have these two books to offer for the 50bookchallenge:

no. 6 ~ First Blood by david morrell. i've always been curious about what the original source material for the film was like. now i need be curious no more. i have to say i was mostly disappointed. somehow the movie improved on an interesting story that ends sorta eh. the book is oddly superficial. the motivations are scant, the violence is over the top. in the book, john rambo kills everybody (including teasle). in the film he kills nobody (though his actions do lead to a single death). in the book, trautman knows who he is, but they never worked together. in the film, they're like father and son. in the book, rambo gets it in the end (by trautman's hand, no less!). in the movie, rambo is redeemed. the book is a really bleak, nihilist take on the pointlessness of human existance and the desperate failure of people to connect.

i like the movie. now i have always liked the movie. i respect it now even more.

no. 7. ~ The Douglas Diary by Henry Kyd Douglas. this is Douglas's school diary (from Franklin and Marshall College, 1856-1858). i came across it by accident while looking for his war memoir and i am glad i did. it's a nice little book (beautifully printed!) with a good detail of life in a pennsylvania college town before the war (Lancaster). he mostly writes about "idling" a lot, oversleeping, not doing his homework, and stealing test questions by elaborate means (is there no honor?). Douglas and i would not have got along if he'd been in my high school. he seems a snooty, self-important little dork (a reputation that followed him as Jackson's youngest staff officer).

of historical note: it's speculated that Douglas was the idiot who lost Lee's order (for the invasion of Maryland) and possibly cost the Confederacy that campaign. there's no hard proof, but he was shortly thereafter sacked by Jackson and sent packing (the two evidently had a rather serious falling out, though Douglas would deny it later). most of his contemporaries called him a confabulator at best, a rank liar at worst. it's hard to know what to believe.

Douglas and J. F. Hartranft became friends during the war despite being from opposite sides of the Mason-Dixon (Douglas was an ingratiating, charismatic little rebel booger, for certain ~ and Hartranft seemed to be easily taken by charmers and toadies). the circumstances under which they met was certainly ineresting ~ Hartranft captured him. let it be testament to Hartrant's marshamallowy sentiment that even as captor, he couldn't help striking up a friendship with the boy-officer who had attended his own alma mater in Lancaster. anyway, the friendship turned out to be life-long (with Douglas reaping the benefits of Hartrant's influence). Douglas delivered an address at Hartranft's memorial unveiling in 1899 (which makes me all kinds of sad, though i can't exactly explain why).

Douglas was in prison for breaking parole at the time of the conspiracy trial ~ he was arrested for wearing a uniform hat (edit: i mean coat ~ in itself a hilarious story). he was brought in to corroborate the testimony presented by one of a number of government "plants" (probably in exchange for his release), but once on the stand denied ever seeing the man and contradicted everything the man had said. this infuriated the commission, he went back to prison, and his testimony was for all intents and purposes stricken from the record. it's impossible to know what in the world he was playing at in all of this. my sense of it was that he enjoyed the power he wielded and wanted to make fools of the commission (which he did). he was that sort of person (i.e. a punk). in this way i find him an interesting study, but i still don't like him, though kudos (where duly due) for him for thumbing his nose at the military trial. and i am still endeared to him for admiring Hartranft as he did, even under the worst circumstances.
h. k. douglas about the time of his writing of the diary.
okay, he was just a kid, but i still think
he was a conceited little miscreant.

last night we took a break from work to go downtown to a Borders that is closing and is having a 40% off sale. unfortunately there were no books i desperately wanted (it was getting picked clean since the sale started saturday). but i did get a copy of Far Away, So Close, which i had been wanting, so that's cool. anyone who doesn't know Wim Wenders's work needs to go out and get some. immediately.



one of my favorite scenes in Wings of Desire
(which is the "prequel" to Far Away, So Close) is this one
in which the angel Cassiel listens to the interior
monologues of various people in an immense library.
absolutely gorgeous.
meanwhile, i am loosely doing the 50bookchallenge again this year, i guess. i think i mentioned somwhere earlier that i wanted to focus on fiction, and especially fiction in the era/genre i work in, so i am off to a good start in that regard. catching up on the year's books:

no. 1 ~ Wicked Water by McKinley Kantor. this is a pretty straight-up genre western which made it somewhat disappointing. well-written and page-turner paced, it nevertheless had that sort of fluffy quality that meant i never really cared about any of the characters. i also think, after following the hired killer and the bimbo chanteuse through the first two thirds of the book only to switch over in the end to some new sheriff's pov (Roscoe, no less!), was jarring and somewhat of a cheat. the revelation of the killer's ocd about running water was also pretty lame. a couple of great scenes and otherwise really great writing made this worth while (at least it was mercifully short).

no. 2 ~ Among the Camps by Thomas Nelson Page. here's another one of those writers someone never told me about. i picked up his stuff in the garbage basement at half price books and while it's definitely victorian and rather saccharine, it's right up my alley. this book in particular was a series of short stories about towns under occupation during the war. at least one of them (a Christmas story, no less, called "A Captured Santa Claus") is noteworthy (and might make a great short film). another one about an annoyingly cute girl and her kitten turned out to be really wonderful (shades of Mikhail Sholokhov's "The Colt", but with a happy ending). i'm looking forward to trying on one of Page's novels next go-round.

no. 3 ~ The Judas Field by Howard Bahr. it took me what seems forever to finish this book. not because it was bad, but because it was so good i didn't want it to end and i feared it would end badly. i'm still iffy about the conclusion because i think the way the events unfolded could have (maybe should have) been done differently for it to have been really satisfying. i won't say more because i don't want to spoil it and i Strongly recommend this book to anyone with even a middling interest in this genre (Civil War/Reconstruction). i would also not hesitate to recommend this to people who don't know diddly about it.

Bahr's mostly seamless storytelling is amazing in its "wholeness" without bogging down in the exasperating detail that usually drives me around the bend in books about this era. it's also mostly restrained about the violence (oh, there's violence a-plenty, but he doesn't get so gratuitous that you feel like the book is just an endless excuse to talk about people's heads exploding). finally, one scene in which Cass Wakefield is visited by a priest whose church he has insulted (a scene of note in its own right) is worth the whole read. it's rare i find something that i feel is "startling and beautiful" in a book, and this qualifies: it's subtle and human and poignant (and i don't use that word ever lightly).

while the epilogue does feel a bit long-winded after all that needs to be said has been said, i can't fault Bahr's indulgence too much ~ the rest of the story is pretty spectacular. two thumbs up and despite my grousing about the ending, i wouldn't hesitate to put this on my list of top Civil War fiction written in our own time. easily.

lots of work to do this week. the gears are still spinning in my head around projects. had a long weekend of frustrations, but i am slowly getting the horse back into the paddock for another attempt.
: D

hot cocoa and grilled cheese for breakfast. i guess, after an interminable summer and only the briefest of autumns, winter is finally here. we had a nice heavy snowfall yesterday and today it's blue and silent. alaska looks better and better all the time. i have my last weekend class (ever) today. the campus is gorgeous in the snow. i wanted to share this picture of the duck pond so you could see it. i didn't take the picture, but that's what it looks like right now.


i have been trying to catch up on my f-list, but i fear i won't, so please let me know if i missed anything huge in my absence (i feel as though i have been gone forever). congratulations to all you NaNo winners and attempters! bravo on many many words! i'm hoping to finish my school stuff this week so i can get back to writing. classes end on the 12th, but i am ready to be done now.

it occurred to me, going through my to-do list that i was hoping to finish a more complete, coherent draft of In the Pursuance of Said Conspiracy by the end of december. i don't know that i will, but i would like to get that pile of mess organized in some fashion to work on it during the holiday break. of course, it's been so long since i touched it, i feel like i am going to have to start all over again to refresh myself with the research. ugh. i knew that would happen. details, man. endless details.

in reading: for the 50bookchallenge:

no. 62 ~ Sin Killer by Larry McMurtry. i read Lonesome Dove nearly twenty years ago (the fact that i can even say this makes me cringe and my paperbackcopy is piss yellow from acidity). i thought i would give another of his books a try. this one is the first in a tetralogy about the Berrybender clan. Tasmin Berrybender is the daughter of a wealthy english lord who takes his family on a wild hunting trek in the west. she can't stand her own clan, so strikes out on her own and falls in with the Sin Killer, a white fella raised by both indians and a preacher, whose mix of holy terror and no-nonsense frontiersmanship is both dangerous and charming. the book is absurd (and meant to be: it's a parody of western mythology of sorts). not sure how much i like it. well enough to want to read the second one, i guess, but i'm not madly in love with it.

i guess it might be obvious that i have fallen out of posting on lj. i expect i will be back to it once the semester is over. i am glad december is finally here. happy Advent to all of my Catholic flisters (and why not all you heathens and heretics as well!). you are all in my happy thoughts.

: D

the weekend is almost here, but that's no relief to my ears since i will be buried in homework during the whole of it. i am trying to visit lj at least once a day and make an update if on nothing else, the reading that i am doing (which may be totally blah to most of you).

i am reading the second book in the Baroque Cycle, King of the Vagabonds and it's not going well 60 pages in. if anyone plans to read it eventually, you might want to just skip these posts because my opinions are hugely subjective and i think you ought to experience it for yourself. also, i'll be posting spoilers upon spoilers.

anyway, so in the second book, stephenson has done 187 annoying writerly things and the only reason i am pressing onward is the hope that eventually we will come back to daniel waterhouse and things might improve. to enumerate the crimes:

1. invented a country from which Eliza comes ~ how convenient now, she doesn't have to conform to any particular mores of 17th century europe and can be just as "modern" as he pleases. yuck. and she's beautiful and clever ~ smarter at Jack's game then he is ~ total dullsville.

2. introduced technical language into the 17th century sphere in a bid to be ~ oh, i don't really know what. i mean, i guess i can see that it's intentional (and that this will later tie in to the whole "systems of the world" thing, but it's annoying when we're been so nicely ensconced in the past until now.

3. Jack and Eliza have now conversed for about 40 pages about their pasts. boring boring awful. not only are both characters these ridiculously rich storytellers (they're all sounding like stephenson now), but he finds the most ridiculous interruptions to cliff-hang their tales. Jack will suddenly say: oh, i don't want to hear anymore ~ just at the most interesting part. oh brother! it literally feels like stephenson was making stuff up as he went along (a lot of it is also repetitious), then he would get tired and stop. and no one ever bothered to edit any of it.

honestly, were it not for my prurient interest in 17th century plagues and disasters, i doubt i would still be reading. i will say, however, that stephsenson as a storyteller is still generally pretty good and i think most people would really love this and love getting away from the political and scientific blithering of the Royal Society which preceded it for 300 pages. it's active and campy and even though they are endlessly talking and walking, it moves well enough. it's just everything i hate about an adventure story; your mileage may vary.

finally, and this is just a personal thing: i am not liking the anti-religious bent emerging in the book. while it waffles for and against one or another church (or all of them, perhaps), it's a little heavy-handed in the whole "religion is the enemy of science" (which is lame, though i have to concede that this was more likely true in many circles in the 17th century).

ah well, the picture of the day is something i found browsing for 17th century manuscripts, from an article about the "cult" of the Sacred Heart (to which, i suppose, i am a card-carrying member). i am saving the site here because this is a theme that comes up in my own work. the article is really interesting. good grist for you metaphorists out there.

so this weekend i got this wild hair that i wanted to read dalquist's Glass Books of the Dream Eaters (check out a review here), but then i remembered that i haven't finished reading stephenson's Baroque Cycle. so i sat down with Quicksilver last night and turned a few chapters (it's been a year since i started the thing, so my goal is to finish the first book before 2008 ~ it may be the last thing i read this year ~ or ever. the thing may yet kill me).

but once again i was struck by the intricacy of stephenson's world ~ his writing is so detailed, so specific to the period, and his characters so alive and lively (envy envy envy). and yet, 300 pages later i still can't tell you what the hell this book is about. money and science (but i can get that much from the amazon review). i enjoy his portrayal of isaac newton and the goings-on of the royal society, but a "plot" escapes me and the bouncing back and forth in time hasn't helped clarify anything. well, there are pirates on the horizon, so i am hoping maybe something will happen shortly.



stephenson's original manuscript for the Cycle:
ye gods and golliwogs!
i keep coming back to stephenson, thinking: gee, i could do that. sure. but who on earth would read such a monstrosity? lots of people have braved the Baroque Cycle, but perhaps it's not exactly got the sort of following one might hope.

and why would i, who loves a little book more than anything, write something i would be daunted to read?

: o p

in other reading: i had started mitchell's When all the Woods are Green, but didn't get past the first ten pages. he's not the sort of writer who employs an effective hook. his longer novels take about 30 pages to get going. i did order John Sherwood, Ironmaster (found a first edition for a couple bucks online). i think i have everything i want by mitchell. i wish i had an earlier edition of In War Time, but i have a readable copy at least (it's a hard one to find for a reasonable price). i didn't buy any of his Washington books (maybe i will read them later when all of the ones i have are read). i don't think i have ever faithfully read an entire collection by anyone. not even dickens or dumas. but i have a feeling there are a few of mitchell's i won't read (like Dr. North and his Friends and Circumstances, both of which seem like chatty parlor devils and not to my tastes).

first off, for the 50bookchallenge:

no. 59 ~ The Guillotine Club by s. weir mitchell. this is a sequel of sorts to A Diplomatic Adventure. at first i was impatient with it because it was too much Grenville and Alphonse and not enough Captain Merton, but once Merton arrived on the scene, hilarity ensued. the premise is kind of silly: two secret french "clubs" of opposing politics challenge one another to a duel every year and an unfortunate count who belongs to one club and has been nominated to the other by his crazy uncle has been ordered to challenge and fight himself (unbeknownst to either side that he is, in fact, the same person). machinations abound, but nothing they do manage to get the count off the hook. in the end, naturally, Captain Merton saves the day with some impromptu swashbuckling. it's a clever story ~ even if rather silly. i enjoyed it, of course.

in drawing: i'm struggling with the usual "issues" and am coming to the conclusion that one style is as good as another ~ all have their plusses and minuses, and that regardless of what i do in real media, i end up losing a lot of fidelity after the processing ~ both in terms of texture and nuance as well as just stuff getting obscured by dialogue, etc.

take, for example, the image below. i was finally (after about 8 runs) pleased with how it came out, but reduced and desaturated, it loses a lot of the detail. so i named the file "get used to it" because clearly this is just going to be the way that it goes.

: o p



that said, i guess i launch on the 28th. which means i need to get drawing!

for the 50bookchallenge:

no. 57 ~ A Soldier's Heart by gary paulsen. coupled with an article from the Journal of Urology (don't ask, i work in a library, i just come across things) about Joshua Chamberlain's pelvic wound, it was a thoroughly demoralizing evening of reading last night. paulsen's book is, hands down, the most depressing Civil War story i have ever read. and get this: near as i can tell, it's geared for pre-teens. the story isn't much and hashes a number of tired stand-bys: kid runs off to enlist, lies about his age to get in, suffers the trials and boredom of warfare, sees things that would raise hair on a billiard ball (one particular description of what happens to horses under cannon fire will stick with me forever now, thank you, gary). the kid is wounded horribly and makes it home, but the final image of the book (gadzooks), is him sitting on the bank, thinking about "pretty things" and checking the condition of a well-oiled .36 he's brought with him to his solitary picnic.

and the final kicker, of course, is that it's based on a real person. i should have known it was going to be pretty harsh. it opens up with a primer on post-traumatic stress-disorder and how there was no treatment for it back in those days. the "soldier's heart" refers to one variation on what ptsd was called back then. the most common clinical term was neurasthenia, which referred to a mysterious debilitating depressive malady with no particular discernible physical origins from which most of the post-war servicemen suffered. which brings us back to Joshua Chamberlain, who also suffered from a "soldier's heart" and was even put out of battle service for a spell to recover after a nervous breakdown following the battle of Gettysburg. he rebounded, but apparently suffered from lingering agony (and a number of surgeries) after being wounded, as well as having intensely dark periods for the rest of his life (like so many men did).

geh. this was a real horrorshow of a little book and a good reminder of just how screwed up people emerged from this war. there was some good stuff the book, extra points for never mentioning hardtack, but overall uneven in the writing (perhaps because it's a tad dumbed down for 10 year-olds). i admit, though, i was irritated by an endnote which says that the carnage at Gettysburg was the bloodiest battle in American history, killing more men in two hours than all the previous wars put together. i believe that distinction belongs to the battle at Antietam (which i previously mentioned in my post of september 17th).



in other news, i am drawing, drawing, drawing, trying to take some risks with my composition choices, though so far they are mostly safe. anyway, it's going well.

: D

schtuff for the 50bookchallenge:

no. 53 ~ The Romance of a Christmas Card by kate douglas wiggin. the premise of this one is rather complicated: one woman has a son who skipped town for adventures. she paints Christmas cards of her friend. her friend has been abandoned with twins by her deadbeat brother. the Christmas cards cause both men to return home again after a lengthy absence. it's a fun Christmas story and i was amused that it included such a profligate brother who knocks up and marries a notoriously wicked woman, then ditches his own babies after she kicks the bucket. those Victorians were so romantic.

no. 54 ~ The Snow Image by nathaniel hawthorne. i think a lot of people find hawthorne heavy-handed and excessively preachy. this little snow story is likewise in that vein, but he's never bothered me (is it just me or does anyone else think hawthorne was hot?). anyway, two children with the ridiculous names Violet and Peony build a girl out of snow who comes to life. their father, a wholly too-practical man with no imagination, thinks the girl is real, insists she come into the house, and she, of course, melts by the hearth. the moral of the story is something about "don't mess with things that you don't understand" or something. it's a strange, sad story.

no. 55 ~ The Comedy of Conscience by s. weir mitchell. this is the 6th of mitchell's books that i have read (i think). this is an odd story about a woman whose purse is picked on a bus by a man with a large wart on his face. in the commission of the crime, the man drops his diamond ring, which turns out to be worth a princely sum. after much scrupling, the woman advertises for the "real" owner to pick up his ring. the press gets wind of the story and bends it all out of proportion (to ridiculous lengths). then the criminal tries to claim the ring, but is thwarted by the woman's friend (and love interest). the most bizarre thing about this story is that the woman, desiring no further notoriety, lets the thief go once he confesses. overall amusing ~ not as good as New Samaria, but entertaining.

Wiggin's book is a nice one:
with lovely illustrations throughout