Reading Wednesday

[sabotabby]

Just finished: The Meaning Wars and Poe's Outlaws by Michelle Patricia Browne. #4 and #5 in the omnibus. #4 is the Shit Gets Real novella; #5 is a beach episode, where the characters take a breather, sort through their shit, and commit themselves to joining the revolution in Indus, a disenfranchised colony. I described this elsewhere as queer found family space opera with rad dinosaur aliens, reeducation camps for governesses, a creepy as fuck religious cult, and some excellent pew pew pew. The final episode of Poe's Outlaws, where our heroes navigate a swamp in order to rescue the rebel leader, is a prime example of what works for me about this series—while it's substantially more hopeful than one would expect for dystopian fiction, it's mired in some gritty, grounded reality that turns what was heretofore the lightest instalment of the series into gripping suspense.

Currently reading: A Jade's Trick by Michelle Patricia Browne. This is the last one. There's a high price on the heads of Patience and Sarah, with every bounty hunter nearby gunning for them, and look, all you need to know about this is that there's a space pirate union, and if you are the kind of person who reads "space pirate union" and goes "YES," you will enjoy this a lot.

Crow Winter by Karen McBride. No progress on this one this week.

Moby Dick by Herman Melville. In case you're wondering how Ishmael's mental health is going, he's tattooed the measurements of a whale's skeleton on his right arm. No art or adaptation ever created for this book, before Tumblr got ahold of it, has done its level of bonkers justice. I mean also it's just beautiful. But bonkers.

Comments

[ioplokon]

How do you like reading all of a series in a row/omnibus vs more spread out?

[sabotabby]

I prefer it, as I have godawful short-term memory and this allowed me to apparently be the only reader to make certain connections and feel very clever about it. They're all really short. The only thing is that it makes my reading list look weird.

[blogcutter]

Re: A Jade's Trick: Are the Patience and Sarah in this story essentially the same characters as in the Isabel Miller classic lesbian historical romance?

[sabotabby]

IMMA ASK I've never heard of that!

[sabotabby]

Complete coincidence but now she's going to read it.

[contrarywise]

That was exactly what I thought!

[rinue]

When I try to think of other books like Moby Dick, and why I enjoy them, I wind up thinking of things like Roy Orbison in Clingfilm. It's not a way anybody ever talked to me about the book, and was something I only discovered by reading the book. I mean, chapters about sitting on other people's butts and why this is more comfortable than chairs? Chapters about whale art that is bad and inaccurate versus whale drawings that are inaccurate but still enjoyable?

Sure, Ahab's an interesting character, but that's not the majority of what's going on at any given time.

[sabotabby]

YES THIS

People told me it was this Great Classic and deeply meaningful and symbolic and all that. They did not tell me it was an off-the-wall, bonkers, surreal masterpiece of wtfery. You read classics because they are good for you, and I'm old and have little time to do things that are good for me. No one in 40-odd years told me that it was fun.

[greylock]

...he's tattooed the measurements of a whale's skeleton on his right arm

I mean... this book just brings the crazy. I'm quite enjoying hearing about the highlights.

[sabotabby]

It's wild.

[greylock]

I've long heard of Ulysses and Pilgrim's Progress and Cloud Atlas as "crazy" literature (and they may be), but I've always known Moby Dick as "approachable lit", the stuff of comics and cartons and TV movies, but I had no idea how wild it was until this past year - or how sanitised what I knew of it was.

[sabotabby]

I've only read Ulysses and it also doesn't get enough credit for being funny. Not very approachable, though.

[greylock]

I've never been interested in "Lit lit", and what I do know of Ulysses(?) is second hand through Ray Bradbury's Irish era.

But, the superior Ulysses is Ulysses 31.

[sabotabby]

I doubt it's better than Joyce's, which is no exaggeration a masterpiece.

[greylock]

Well, it has a space ship, blue people, and a robot (called No-No), so... I think it must be better.
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev1aBt-_Zs4)

YMMV.
(I'm neither going to read Joyce nor see every episode of U31).