![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Life is a trashfire, I'm not caught up, but I I did read The Birthday of the World and Other Stories back in January (January!!) 2020, then wrote 90% of a review, and then stalled out because ... reasons? for love of the thing? So for finishing that at least we will call this batch a win.
Title: Catherine House
Author: Elisabeth Thomas
Published: Custom House, 2020
Rating: 3.5 of 5
Page Count: 320
Total Page Count: 351,315
Text Number: 1270
Read Because: this review, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: An exclusive, unusual college promises graduates success if only they will give three years of their lives to the school, uninterrupted by any contract with the outside world. I've been having a great run of dark takes on the magical school genre which link bad pedagogy to the questionable ethics of magic systems and magical institutions, and I hope to read a dozen more because it's a delightful trope. (I suppose this is a branch of dark academia? Maybe trends are good for something!)
Of an enjoyable lot, this is the one that sticks with me least after the fact. The atmosphere and momentum are fantastic: mournful, intense, insular, and mysterious, it has a soft emotional register but the intensity of a thriller. But the reveals can't hold up—they're not that shocking and don't offer much worldbuilding, and the protagonist stands in a weird place on the fringes of indoctrination, attracted and repelled in a rhythm that reflects plot reveals and thematic beats more than organic characterization. Vita Nostra really sticks the landing, A Deadly Education has meatier worldbuilding; Catherine House has an absorbing, stylized tension, which is fun—but lacks payoff.
Title: First Love: A Gothic Tale
Author: Joyce Carol Oates
Illustrator: Barry Moser
Published: Ecco, 1996
Rating: 3.5 of 5
Page Count: 90
Total Page Count: 351,405
Text Number: 1271
Read Because: personal enjoyment, hardback borrowed from the Wilsonville Public Library
Review: A young girl's introduction to her reclusive, religious cousin is the beginning of a hidden relationship. This has a rich atmosphere, fevered with summer heat and the southern gothic. The stylized voice lands somewhere between genre and literary, and it alternates between a claustrophobic second person and a distant, sardonic third person. It leans into its liminal space to interrogate what's "real" in the relationship, how it appears, is depicted, is conceptualized: a transforming snake and inverted power dynamic; incestuous sexual abuse. I find that the way Oates applies literary flair to horror tropes can have the same hollowness of other literary crossovers; this certainly can feel like it replaces style for substance. But this doesn't overextend and it's sticking with me better than I expected. (Except the illustrations, which don't add much.)
Title: The Birthday of the World and Other Stories (Hainish Cycle Book 9)
Author: Ursula K. Le Guin
Published: HarperCollins, 2009 (2002)
Rating: 5 of 5
Page Count: 360
Total Page Count: 351,765
Text Number: 1272
Read Because: reading the series, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County library
Review: Eight short works, largely set within the vast Hainish universe. It's rare to see such a consistently successful short story collection—there are no duds, and five of the eight are particularly good, which is a remarkable ratio. The vignettes in "The Matter of Seggri" bring a necessary, multifaceted view to an erstwhile monoculture. "Unchosen Love" and "Mountain Ways" are both set on the planet O and explore the complexity of four-partner marriages—meaty worldbuilding, emotionally satisfying, and hardcore id-fic. "Old Music and the Slave Women" is also printed in Five Ways to Forgiveness and I loved it there and here—it's harrowing and indelible. Paradises Lost is a novella set on a generation ship, and while I'd argue that it isn't as unique as Le Guin expresses in her introduction, it's a smart and solid approach to a trope that I adore. The stories are concentrated and satisfying, balanced against highly speculative worldbuilding. I think I may like it more than the Hainish novels themselves.
But what really makes this collection special is that stories frequently focus on people and relationships which complicate the rules. Take the stories set on O, where the reader learns the taboos that govern four-way marriages via characters whose desires violate those same taboos. It introduces compelling tension, and it's the answer to every monoculture or otherwise artificially uniform, structured speculative society—including those in Le Guin's own work. It can never go far enough, and I particularly wish that the gender binary weren't a reoccurring assumption in her work and/or that Le Guin had returned Gethen as The Left Hand of Darkness grew dated. But the delight of reading the entire Hainish bibliography (a collection of books always in conversation with themselves, contradicting, expanding, building a universe of diverse humanity) is watching Le Guin's worldbuilding speculation grow increasingly diverse as her worldview grew more diverse. She never stagnated. I wish she'd given us another dozen books, another hundred, to see how far she could go—but what we have is incredible.
Title: Catherine House
Author: Elisabeth Thomas
Published: Custom House, 2020
Rating: 3.5 of 5
Page Count: 320
Total Page Count: 351,315
Text Number: 1270
Read Because: this review, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: An exclusive, unusual college promises graduates success if only they will give three years of their lives to the school, uninterrupted by any contract with the outside world. I've been having a great run of dark takes on the magical school genre which link bad pedagogy to the questionable ethics of magic systems and magical institutions, and I hope to read a dozen more because it's a delightful trope. (I suppose this is a branch of dark academia? Maybe trends are good for something!)
Of an enjoyable lot, this is the one that sticks with me least after the fact. The atmosphere and momentum are fantastic: mournful, intense, insular, and mysterious, it has a soft emotional register but the intensity of a thriller. But the reveals can't hold up—they're not that shocking and don't offer much worldbuilding, and the protagonist stands in a weird place on the fringes of indoctrination, attracted and repelled in a rhythm that reflects plot reveals and thematic beats more than organic characterization. Vita Nostra really sticks the landing, A Deadly Education has meatier worldbuilding; Catherine House has an absorbing, stylized tension, which is fun—but lacks payoff.
Title: First Love: A Gothic Tale
Author: Joyce Carol Oates
Illustrator: Barry Moser
Published: Ecco, 1996
Rating: 3.5 of 5
Page Count: 90
Total Page Count: 351,405
Text Number: 1271
Read Because: personal enjoyment, hardback borrowed from the Wilsonville Public Library
Review: A young girl's introduction to her reclusive, religious cousin is the beginning of a hidden relationship. This has a rich atmosphere, fevered with summer heat and the southern gothic. The stylized voice lands somewhere between genre and literary, and it alternates between a claustrophobic second person and a distant, sardonic third person. It leans into its liminal space to interrogate what's "real" in the relationship, how it appears, is depicted, is conceptualized: a transforming snake and inverted power dynamic; incestuous sexual abuse. I find that the way Oates applies literary flair to horror tropes can have the same hollowness of other literary crossovers; this certainly can feel like it replaces style for substance. But this doesn't overextend and it's sticking with me better than I expected. (Except the illustrations, which don't add much.)
Title: The Birthday of the World and Other Stories (Hainish Cycle Book 9)
Author: Ursula K. Le Guin
Published: HarperCollins, 2009 (2002)
Rating: 5 of 5
Page Count: 360
Total Page Count: 351,765
Text Number: 1272
Read Because: reading the series, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County library
Review: Eight short works, largely set within the vast Hainish universe. It's rare to see such a consistently successful short story collection—there are no duds, and five of the eight are particularly good, which is a remarkable ratio. The vignettes in "The Matter of Seggri" bring a necessary, multifaceted view to an erstwhile monoculture. "Unchosen Love" and "Mountain Ways" are both set on the planet O and explore the complexity of four-partner marriages—meaty worldbuilding, emotionally satisfying, and hardcore id-fic. "Old Music and the Slave Women" is also printed in Five Ways to Forgiveness and I loved it there and here—it's harrowing and indelible. Paradises Lost is a novella set on a generation ship, and while I'd argue that it isn't as unique as Le Guin expresses in her introduction, it's a smart and solid approach to a trope that I adore. The stories are concentrated and satisfying, balanced against highly speculative worldbuilding. I think I may like it more than the Hainish novels themselves.
But what really makes this collection special is that stories frequently focus on people and relationships which complicate the rules. Take the stories set on O, where the reader learns the taboos that govern four-way marriages via characters whose desires violate those same taboos. It introduces compelling tension, and it's the answer to every monoculture or otherwise artificially uniform, structured speculative society—including those in Le Guin's own work. It can never go far enough, and I particularly wish that the gender binary weren't a reoccurring assumption in her work and/or that Le Guin had returned Gethen as The Left Hand of Darkness grew dated. But the delight of reading the entire Hainish bibliography (a collection of books always in conversation with themselves, contradicting, expanding, building a universe of diverse humanity) is watching Le Guin's worldbuilding speculation grow increasingly diverse as her worldview grew more diverse. She never stagnated. I wish she'd given us another dozen books, another hundred, to see how far she could go—but what we have is incredible.
