Reading Wednesday

[sabotabby]

Just finished: Five Points On an Invisible Line by Su J Sokol. I don't have a lot to add since I'd almost finished it last week, but the final setpiece, a massive, multi-tactic demonstration, is really well done. 

Currently reading: Written On the Dark by Guy Gavriel Kay. Time to start Aurora Awards reading. TBH I started one of the best novels—won't say which one—and found it very much unparsable in the way that some secondary world fantasy is just too much for me, so I moved on to this one. I'm around halfway through and the jury's still out.

This one is set in Fantasy Medieval France and follows a tavern poet who's recruited by the local provost to help him solve the murder of a duke who is running the country, since his brother, the king, suffers from an undisclosed madness. Great concept, cool characters, the setting is a breath of fresh air, and I cannot argue that Kay is a superb prose stylist.

And yet I almost always bounce off his work. There's a certain Tolkienesque narrative distance that I think works for Tolkien but feels peculiarly pre-modern. Objectively, I respect this as a deliberately alienating technique, but it means that I don't bond with it in quite the same way, and takes a tremendous feat of writing elsewhere to make me love it. It's entirely possible that this will hit that and I'm giving it a chance but so far I'm feeling that I like what he's doing but don't feel emotionally invested.

Comments

[magid]

I happen to like a lot of Guy Gavriel Kay’s work, but I can see how it’s definitely not a style for everyone. The novel I think is least typical of his style is Ysabel, if you feel like giving him another chance.

[sabotabby]

I'm giving him a chance with this! It has enough to recommend it that it's at least worth finishing.

[greylock]

I bounced off GGK in the '90s.

I can't remember why (and, my age), but I do intend to revist him.
(For no reason, there is an ICK).

[sovay]

And yet I almost always bounce off his work.

I bounced incredibly off Kay until Sailing to Sarantium (1998) and Lord of Emperors (2000) and then went right back to bouncing off him. The Byzantine remix may just have been that compelling to me. At last re-read I still enjoyed it.

[sabotabby]

Yeah, I wanted to read that 'cause I like Byzantine things. But never got around to it.

[yarrowkat]

i found Kay while i was in high school, and unapologetically fell in love with the Fionavar Tapestry - his earliest and, to my current eye, least mature work. now i can't really handle the whole "love triangle that could be solved by ONE CONVERSATION" plotline, let alone all the moping and "WOE ETERNAL TRAGEDY" about it, which means i can't really return to those books. alas. probably i shouldn't re-read things i loved at age 16, as a general principle.

i really enjoy a lot of the rest of his early work though, in including Song for Arbonne & Tigana. however. sometime in the last decade or so, after The Last Light of the Sun, his editors stopped editing him. or so it appears. he is allowed to just interject all these lengthy mansplaining faux-philosophical paragraphs informing the reader how they should feel about the characters & text instead of actually telling the story. and it really, really works against him. i always pick up his books eventually, but these days, i find myself waiting until I can get a used paperback instead of the new hardcover, and i am afflicted by an enduring disappointment about his entire arc as a writer.

[sabotabby]

Aww, that sucks. I started reading Tigana and something put me off it, but I can't remember what.

[lcohen]

i recall loving the byzantium books mentioned above and so i asked friends to choose between three kay books for me to take on a trip, and they picked "tigana." which was really well done, but so so so sad that i haven't given his books another shot. my ears perk up whenever i hear about his stuff, though.

[sabotabby]

He's kind of the Big Canadian Fantasy Novelist though like. We have others now.

[smhwpf]

I know what you mean.. I really enjoyed it, but the whole grand sweep of history thing can take away from the tension of the story and the investment in the characters.

I would second Ysabel as one that's rather different in style, and that really works. I agree with the commenter above about the lack of editing in recent decades. Some of them still hit I think, especially the Balkans/Mediterranean ones recently, others not so much.

I think I rated WOTD fairly well up the list, and definitely worth reading, but I can see what you mean about the emotional investment.

[sabotabby]

Like. It's good. I'm enjoying it and appreciating what it's doing. But I'm not bonding with it, the way I, say, bond with Adrian Tchaikovsky's Tyrant Philosophers series, which is doing a similar thing with a similar distancing mechanism, and I can't pinpoint why.