Booklogging

[luzula]

I have not had much brainspace for reading lately, but this is what I've read since I last made a book post:

The Dazzle of Day, by Molly Gloss

I really liked this. It's a generation ship story, where a group of Quakers leave environmentally ravaged Earth in the hope of finding a new planet, and for the main part of the story they're investigating a planet they found and trying to decide whether to settle it. It's reminiscent of Le Guin, so if you like her you will likely enjoy this. What the story does really well is to portray daily life and community on the spaceship in a realistic way: people are caught up in their own concerns, so that their relationship troubles might be forefront in their mind rather than the question of the future of the colony, and people gossip about their neighbors in between debating policy. This is probably the furthest you could get from a Heinlein boy's-adventure-type SF story--there's no lone hero, but rather a large cast of characters involved who each see only a small part of what's going on. The cast is very diverse: men and women, various racial backgrounds, young and old people, disabled characters, queer characters (or one, at least), and there's no splitting of labor along gender lines at all. I also liked the thought given to the ecosystem on the spaceship, and I found their decision-making procedures fascinating. Oh, and you might want to know that there's a suicide and a rape in the book (unconnected to each other).

I did have some suspension-of-disbelief issues. For one, the use of sunsails to completely drive the ship, taking only a few hundred years to another solar system. That is completely unrealistic--sunsails are a really slooooow method of propulsion. To be fair, I should not throw stones here given that I used sunsails in a similar way in a story recently, although at least I also had an additional drive and carefully did not specify the time taken to reach another solar system. I do really love the imagery in how the sunsails are written in the book, though. But anyway, my more serious suspension-of-disbelief issue is the biology of the planet they settle on. With no comment, the lifeforms there are called reptiles and birds, etc. I could accept this if they just meant that they were similar to Earthly lifeforms, but there's no sign of this? And there doesn't seem to be any issue with Earthly lifeforms blending in with the native ones? I mean, they'd have a completely different biochemistry, or if they didn't, the colonists ought to be really really surprised. I could accept this if the book were unrealistic swashbuckling space opera or something, but given the care it takes with the ship ecosystem, it seems a little strange.

But anyway, I totally recommend this book!

The Fellowship of the Ring, by J. R. R. Tolkien

It's been years and years since I read this book, and I have never read it in English (though I've read the various histories of Middle-Earth in English). The first Swedish translation (there's since been a second one, which I haven't read) is notorious for not really sticking to the text, and in one infamous pronoun error, it ascribes the defeat of the leader of the Nazgûl to Merry rather than Éowyn. Also, the English-sounding names are made Swedish-sounding, so that, for example, it's Fylke rather than Shire, and Bagger rather than Baggins. I don't know what the new translation did there, actually?

So this is a mixture of the nostalgic and the new, I guess. I did not set out to read it critically--I just wanted to enjoy it. And I did! I do like Tolkien's language and the way his most affecting lines are often quite spare, with no adjectives and adverbs. Although that said, I feel he could have at least halved the number of times he uses "silver" and "gold" while in Lothlórien (although yes, okay, I get that he is probably referring back to Laurelin and Telperion). I was kind of annoyed by how my reading is colored by having watched the movies. I mean, I don't remember how I conceived of the characters before that, but I don't necessarily want to be seeing Elijah Wood when picturing Frodo.

I did feel a lot of nostalgia, because I imprinted on these books very early, but I can't entirely un-notice the unquestioned feudal social system and the almost total lack of women. Pretty sure I had no thought of that as a kid, but as an adult, well. But yes, I still love these books. ♥

Comments

[bghost.livejournal.com]

I know what you mean about rereading LotR and seeing 'movie stars' instead of your original vision - and it is annoying. I do remember the exact moment I realised there were barely any women in it though, and it upset me so deeply I couldn't finish my reread. (I was sixteen, at a coffee shop with my mother, celebrating my first menses.)

[luzula]

I don't even remember my original vision of the characters! But then, I am not terribly visual in the first place, so I might only have had a vague image of them.

Ha, someone should write the completely genderswapped LotR. *g*