What I'm Reading: May books

[melannen]

rachelmanija is encouraging people to book-blog more in June, and I’d already planning to do some catchup (especially since I’ve actually been reading a lot the last couple weeks! No idea if it’ll last or if my brain will turn again, but might as well try to bottle the light while I can.)

Mine are probably going to be less “reviews” then “rambling about stuff in the books I’d like to talk about more".

Also I just hit my Goodreads reading goal again. I set it really low this year, and have been doubling it every time I hit it so now I’m committed to 96 books for the year.

So here’s part 1 of stuff I read in May: things that were not comics!

The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie

This is a story set in a fantasy world where gods are creatures that are very present in the world and have very specific rules and natures. It’s a story told by a god, about some of the affairs of gods, although there are humans in it. It’s very good, I like it a lot, if it’s the sort of thing you’d like you will probably like it a lot, and if it’s not, you’ll nope out fast, and either way you probably already know. So I’m not going to talk much about the plot and setting and so on.

But it is famously told in first-person-to-second-person POV - “I am telling you” - and I found myself thinking about it in comparison to the other long work I know in that POV, which is, of course, Homestuck.

I found it disconcerting early on, in Raven Tower moreso than Homestuck ever was, not because of the grammar particularly, but because it’s used so adeptly that it actually started feeling very invasive - here is this “I” who is talking about how they’re obsessed with “You” and have been paying very close attention to all of your movements and now feels the need to retell your own story to you. It’s creepy as hell, and I think that’s the intent, and as you learn the characters better and why “I” has the POV it does, it stops feeling quite as creepy. And then it gets super-creepy all over again.

Homestuck of course is playing on the form of text-based video games, especially in the beginning, and I think that’s why I didn’t feel as much like a stalker there, because “I am a creepy puppetmaster” is just a premise you accept and then overlook in games. By the time you find out there’s a lot more going on with the POV than just a player directing a character sprite, it’s all become much more complicated than that, and then it gets more complicated over again.

It’s interesting to see how Raven Tower used the POV in a much more straightforward narrative and medium (although not all that straightforward, and compare it to Justice of Toren’s POV in Ancillary Justice which is similarly all-knowing but with a very different way of looking at what it sees.)

The main other thing I noted to comment on was how weirdly disconcerted I was by the fact that the prehistoric past of this world had trilobites and all sorts of other things that made it very clear that it and Earth shared a geologic history almost exactly. Which I guess makes sense; it ended up with humans and horses and mosquitoes and barley and so on, so it would be reasonable that its evolutionary timeline was not wildly divergent even if stuff started diverging rapidly once humans started talking to gods. But it’s just weird to think of a secondary fantasy world having had trilobites. I’m going to have to take a while to figure out how I feel about that. I’ve been to other fantasy world that had what were probably ammonite fossils, but they were at least fudging enough not to call them ammonites outright.

Also. Can we talk about the map? That map was TERRIBLE. And yeah, I did get a geography degree partly so I would be better able to figure out what was wrong with fantasy maps, so I am maybe a little more critical than most, but that map was actively misleading and as far as I can tell served no purpose in the book.



Like, any map is going to be made for a purpose - sometimes it’s to demonstrate the extent of your geographical knowledge; sometimes it’s to systematize your view of the area where you live; sometimes it’s as a practical tool for getting around; etc. Sometimes it’s apparently just because somebody thought a big fantasy novel needed a map even if it’s a useless one, which seems to be the case here?

It definitely wasn’t an Iradeni/Vashtai map that shows the important parts of the world as relevant to them, because a map like that would a) very clearly show the territory of Iraden on both sides of the forest, instead of the misleading labels on the book’s map, and b) show some of the places around the Shoulder Sea that all of this trade that’s apparently so important is coming from, to show off all the area it controls, instead of giving the impression that it’s a trading port that has nobody to trade with. It’s not about what’s important to the book’s characters either, because it doesn’t have most of those places. It’s not a navigation aid because it doesn’t even have the road through the forest marked, much less anything that would actually be useful for getting around in boats, and it sure as hell isn’t showing off anybody’s knowledge of geography, because it’s infuriatingly vague about literally everything, and that kind of map is full of detail even if it’s completely imaginary detail. And yet the drawing work on the forests and the mountains is far too elaborate for it to be some kind of rough notes.

The only thing I can come up with in-world as an explanation of that map is that it’s one the Southern traders bought of a Tel swindler who swore to them it would tell them everything they needed to know about the lands north of the Hills, and was lying. But tbh they seemed too smart to fall for such a very bad swindle. It would at least explain why 1/3 of Iradeni territory is marked as Tel territory.

And okay, maybe it’s just me that would like fantasy maps to be drawn with some thought to how they work in-world, but even as just a help for the reader, it’s a really bad map. Like, so bad that I almost didn’t read the books because I was afraid any book with a map that bad would have worldbuilding that would just make me angry. (The worldbuilding is much better than the map. I’m pretty sure whoever drew the map didn’t read the book, and didn’t send it to the author for checking, either.)

5/5 stars for the book, -2/5 stars for the map.

The fanwork I wish existed for this book: I want so much more about the gods and the relationships between the gods. Especially the Myriad, because the Myriad is the greatest. I would love the Myriad’s POV on Strength and Patience. Or what the Myriad was doing after Strength and Patience was captured. But I would also love something where the Raven and the Silent were actually alive and got to talk; it was interesting that the main “antagonist” of the book was absent for the entire book; I would love to see the Raven in the period after he trapped himself. Or really anything about gods’ relationships with each other from the POV of anyone but Strength and Patience. It’s SO INTERESTING and we got to see so little of it.

Also I listened to the Lingthusiasm episode on evidential grammar that talked a lot about this book before I read it (worth a listen if you like the book and/or linguistic worldbuilding) so I was actually paying a lot of attention to the evidential language use in the book. Which both made me a) want to get back to working on my Gallifreyan conlang that uses evidentials and a version of aspect that relates “fixedness” of an event, and no chronological tense at all, and also b) made me notice how careless the gods are with I-statements - they will be very careful to cage statements about other people (especially gods) with wishy-washy evidentials, but then say the equivalent of, i.e., “I was always stubborn as hell” without seeming to think twice about the accuracy of their self-knowledge, which is interesting especially in terms of developments later in the book.

An Elderly Lady Is Up To No Good by Helene Tursten

I picked this up when it crossed the desk at work because the title was intriguing, I am always looking for more spinster role models, I’ve liked what little Scandinavian noir I’ve read, and also it was short. It’s a collection of short stories about an elderly lady who murders people who annoy her and gets away with it because nobody suspects the elderly lady of cold-blooded murder.

I got my spinster role model! In her 90s, never dated or married or had kids, never really regretted those things, 100% living her best life in a way she wouldn’t be able to if she had, that was all good, I was ready to cheer on her murder all the way. But I feel like the author never really figured out who she was or why she was doing what she was doing? Like, a couple of the murders were completely justified and proactive and I was there for it. And then one of them seemed to just be to demonstrate that she is murdering people who don’t deserve it because she’s a psychopath and she can, and then one of them seemed to set her up as confused and delusional, and one of them maybe she was having a flashback? And like, I’d buy any of those if you sold me on them, I would maybe even buy “what a weird string of coincidences that just happen to all end in murders of completely different types all by the same person” if it was played for comedy, but it felt more like the writer thought that the conceit of “strange old lady who murders people” was all the character work she needed to do, and when she did elaborate, it was on the “strange” rather that the “murder”. And I think she was supposed to be very smart about hiding her tracks, but she got inexplicably sloppy in some of them. And it didn’t help that the stories were inexplicably anthologized in neither chronological nor publication order, and I couldn’t figure out why; it was confusing and didn’t help with any character building that was supposed to happen between the stories. (Unless they scrambled it on purpose to disguise how incoherent the characterizations were between stories.)

And the book also can’t seem to decide if she’s a single old lady who’s happy with her life and also murders people, or if she’s murderous because her whole life has been lonely and it twisted her, or if she’s both murderous and lonely because she’s always been psychopathic, and it was a problem.

3/5 stars, perfectly pleasant airport read I guess, no desire to ever read again.

Fanwork I wish already existed for this: I would like to read what I hoped it was going to be, the reverse Miss Marple stories about the old lady who knows everyone and everything and goes around killing people who she thinks deserve it just because nobody will suspect her, and therefore she’s the one who can do it. (You can make her either an antihero vigilante who really is killing people who deserve it or make it super dark and she’s just a serial killer who kills because she can and then convinces herself in was deserved, or in between, I don’t care, but pick one. Or even go full Cabot Cove where she also plays detective on her own murders, if you want to get really complicated.)

Patrons are People by Sarah Leslie Wallace and Minneapolis Public Library

This is a guide to being a good librarian, published by the Minnesota Public Library and the ALA. I saw it on Awful Library Books and the illustrations looked adorable, plus I was interested in seeing if all the thinkpieces about how much libraries have changed were really true, so when I saw I could get the early 1950s edition through local ILL I went for it.

It was fun! And very little has changed - fewer reference questions, more computer help, it sounds like it balances out pretty much. Librarians still aren’t about shushing people and are still, in theory at least, about providing a public space for everyone. Self-checkout is still apparently too much of a puzzle for 90% of patrons to figure out on their own (yes, apparently they had self-check in the early 50s!) The customer service advice is pretty much exactly the same. People still expect you to literally do their entire projects for them. The customer service advice is, reassuringly, still all stuff that seems like common sense and courtesy to me. Most of the difference is about the fact that the library it was written for is a large central library with lots of staff and separate departments and special collections, but that wasn’t the case for most libraries even in the 1950s, based on the introduction that points it out.

You can definitely tell it was written under approval of the higher-ups, because that apparently also has never changed, but some of the illustrations are mildly subversive of the text in those parts, even.

5/5, would recommend all my co-workers read it.

Also, the illustrations are indeed adorable. I want a “Model Librarian” mood theme. Luckily it’s up on Hathi Trust as a free ebook, if other people want to also learn the Way of the Model Librarian!

Comments

[ambyr]

If you're looking for post topics, I would happily read one about your favorite fantasy maps. (Mine are the ones in Turner's Thick as Thieves, because after four books with no maps we finally get not one but two maps! ...of the same region ...drawn in-universe by different characters with very different agendas ...with irreconcilably conflicting geography. Because no narrator in the history of this series has ever been reliable, so why should the cartographers be any better?)

[melannen]

Hmm. That would be tough! Mostly because I haven't been reading a lot of the kinds of fantasy novels that come with maps lately, and partly because the good ones stick in my mind a lot better.

There's also a difference between "the map is fine as a description of the story, the worldbuilding is geographically improbable" and "it's a bad map."

There's also the problem where ones that are almost perfect maps (like, the LotR maps by Tolkien) can bother me more than worse ones, because the little problems with the geographic logic stick out more.

(I grew up in a room wallpapered with geographic maps, so I can kind of get a worldless sense of "that geography is out-of-key" the way people trained to perfect pitch can with music; it took college to be able to articulate specific things that made it seem wrong.)

I think my favorite tend to be the ones like the original Hundred Acre Wood map in Winnie-the-Pooh, where there's no attempt to do anything than an in-character diagram of where the characters went and what they saw there. They don't have the kind of pretense at accuracy that would make geographic impossibilities stand out, and tend to work as in-universe artifacts better than the ones that just seem to be trying to be "Generic fantasy map" (the Raven Tower one didn't even seem to be the right millennium, seeing it went "generic medieval" but the setting felt early Iron Age.)

A map as dictated by the god of Iraden could have been super interesting, but instead...that.

The Turner ones sound great though! Someday I'll read that book.

[dragoness_e]

Most of the people who nitpick Tolkien's maps turn out to be less knowledgeable about geography than they thought they were. The key to those maps is to notice that they get less detailed in the areas that Bilbo and Frodo knew very little about. They are, essentially, from Bilbo's map collection (remember how fond he was of maps?), and he left vast swaths of terrain blank. That blank doesn't mean it's flat plains; it means our hobbits just didn't know what was there.

[melannen]

Yeah, my problems with the LoTR map are more things like the shapes of the mountain ranges are really, really unlikely, and some of the rivers would need really convoluted geological backstory to flow the way do.

But honestly they are in the top percentile of fantasy maps, and of course if you go deep enough in the lore there *is* convoluted backstory for most of it. That's one that mostly just bugs me in an uncanny valley way where it's so close to exactly right; IDK if it would be possible for a map in that style to be better unless it was cheating and copying Earth.

[dragoness_e]

I was amused to read in Tolkien's letters that some third party apparently annoyed him with the "Mordor's mountains are unrealistic, mountains don't meet at right angles" thing, and the professor grumbled that the person was ignorant of geography, because there are ranges in the Alps that meet just like that. I have also seen people point out that the Carpathian Mountains in Romania do weird shit like that, too.

There are things to nitpick in Tolkien--forests grow back after being lumbered off a thousand years ago unless you let the goats graze there, so unless rainfall patterns shifted drastically, most of Eriador should have been old growth forest outside of the Shire, Rivendell, and Bree, or covered with herds of aurochs and European bison (grazers who will prevent a forest from growing). And the rainfall couldn't have shifted enough to make it plains-dry, or the Shire wouldn't be prosperous farmland capable of raising tobacco. (Tobacco is not a desert plant).

[landofnowhere]

Thick as Thieves has maps?!?! I listened to it on audiobook, so I completely missed this, will have to check out.

[ambyr]

Yesss. One was released as a promo print, so it's easy to find online; for the other one, I think you'll need the book.

[melannen]

Okay, my main Irrelevant Gripe with that one is that the lettering on the map itself was vary obviously all done in a computer graphics program. Which stands out especially since it looks like the mountains were all hand-drawn. I see that a lot on modern fantasy maps and I don't really get why - hand-lettering a map is not that much harder than doing it on the computer (Possibly less time-consuming, because you don't have to be as finicky about curves and things) and it helps the pre-modern look so much! Maps were hand-lettered well into the printing press era, so it's super anachronistic. (It looks like they even used a font for the handwriting on that one...)

[author_by_night]

Ooh, good find! I may to try this one. :) Mine might also be less reviews and more ranting.

[melannen]

I'm sure mine will be!

[rachelmanija]

And the book also can’t seem to decide if she’s a single old lady who’s happy with her life and also murders people, or if she’s murderous because her whole life has been lonely and it twisted her, or if she’s both murderous and lonely because she’s always been psychopathic, and it was a problem.

That is indeed a problem!

[melannen]

If it was outsider POV, or even super-unreliable narrator, it might've worked, but it really came off as close third, just incoherent characterization.

I suspect these were all written for separate magazines/anthologies over many years and her ideas changed as she wrote them, and they were never meant to be read all in a go - I think any individual story would have been consistent in itself.

[marginaliana]

An Elderly Lady sounds brilliant, I'm going to check it out.

[melannen]

It was pretty fun! And I think it would read a lot better one story at a time, dipping in and out, than straight through.

[kore]

It sounds scarily appealing to me.

[stellar_dust]

[melannen]

Are you asking for a critique? :p

I like that they made Ermine Street/Deer Street the Kingsroad.

[stellar_dust]

Just pointing out one of my favorite fantasy maps :D :D

There's a LOTR one too, with helpful directions from the shire to mordor (choose walking, by orc, or via the express eagle).

[stellar_dust]

https://brilliantmaps.com/frodo-google-maps/

[melannen]

I was wondering if they were supposed to be google maps!

They both have the problem that they are too good - presumably they were done by actual cartographers who couldn't force themselves to drop to Google's level. They both have way too much information on them - the Westeros one would have maybe 1/5 as many place names and no water labelled except the Narrow Sea.

The Frodo one is a little closer in terms of number of placenames, but it labels all the rivers! If Frodo had been using Google Maps he would have made it all the way to Osgiliath without knowing the name of a single rive. And it labels mountain ranges! What is this sorcery.

[stellar_dust]

Well, both of them also suffer from not being interactive -- these might represent data for several different zoom levels all displayed on the same map, so if it was really done using google's API you'd be seeing less stuff at full zoom.

There is an interactive Westeros map which is sort of cool (and not entirely unlike the much cooler Saga Map), but the background and text are just a picture, so there isn't much zoom and the labels don't scale. (Also I really feel like if you're going to advertise that you've made Google Westeros you should commit to google's map style.)

[melannen]

Yeah, but Google is crappy at labelling rivers no matter what zoom you're at ):

[skygiants]

I am deeply charmed by the Shame of the Model Librarian!

[melannen]

She is very emotive, and has helped feel more comfortable with my own strong emotions.

[kore]

OMG, the librarian book is amazing.

I totally need to read the Leckie book, BUT I also have vertigo brain. AUGH.

[melannen]

I spent months reading basically nothing and then two books a day for the last two weeks, brains are weird. (I'd had the Leckie ready to go since at least February...)

[pedanther]

As an aside, do you know about the Fantasy Cartography Youtube channel?

[melannen]

I don't, but it looks really interesting!