cyphomandra (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
cyphomandra) wrote2006-10-29 10:32 pm
cyphomandra) wrote2006-10-29 10:32 pm
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A failed attempt at concision (concise-ness?)
There are times when I am just overwhelmingly dim. I finally, today, worked out that the nifty, round bookshop with the unusual shelving system (books grouped by theme, fiction and nonfiction alike - Harry Potter under Revenge, for example, and a series of fascinating books involving polar exploration) a friend of mine took me to in Oxford last year was the QI bookshop, connected with the QI TV show hosted by Stephen Fry that I have watched and enjoyed hugely, also in the UK. Anyway. A tiny moment of delayed epiphany.
I'm behind on books, partly because I end up writing too much about each one. So, focussing on the short and pithy:
This is a re-read, one of the few books I have with me that's made it through three countries and isn't in storage somewhere. Cathy, an orphan in a not uncaring but unimaginative orphanage in Birmingham, has a flash of memory while reading Wordsworth (I think it's Intimations of Immortality) that causes her to run away in search of the place she remembers, a place she feels she belongs to. This is part of a series that Fidra Books (http://www.fidrabooks.com/) is reprinting, and they're good books too, about recognisably real, independent, children. Landscape - primarily the Scottish Highlands - are also a deep part of these books. I picked this series up when I was fairly small and was fascinated by the illustrations, which are silhouette figures in lightly sketched landscapes. I subsequently borrowed the idea for a story I wrote for a creative writing assignment, when my need for illustrations ran headlong into my lack of ability to drawing faces.
I've come across a number of recommendations for his earlier Kirith Kirin, but it's acquired the sort of semi-obscure cult status that makes it expensive to buy without being more sure of whether I'll like it. This is the same world, or worlds - delegates from an advanced future society (the Hormling) go through a gate into what they see as a more primitive world, which turns out to be more powerful and more dangerous than they expected. It's gorgeously written and the worlds are well-thought through, but not enough really happens to make this work for me. The main character, Jedda, spends an awful lot of time being a witness to events (or audience for events long gone) rather than a participant, and it feels like I've arrived well after all the action (or, when Jedda jumps back in time, well before). There's a brilliant, vivid scene right at the ending that will stay with me, but I needed this earlier, and I needed more engagement in the world, rather than just admiration. It is admirable, very much so, but that's not enough as it stands for me.
I'm not sure if a sequel is intended. It hasn't helped me make the decision about Kirith Kirin; I still want to read it, but I'm concerned that I won't like it. I may try and track down some of his mainstream works and see if, relieved from the need to explain his worlds, he can carry me along with plot. I'm also still not sure about the title. Yes, it's about what each culture considers "ordinary", which is anything but to the other, but there's also a court functionary with the same title, and I wasn't sure how significant they were supposed to be.
I've read a number of 30s-60s learning-to-be-a-nurse books, part of a broader drive towards modelling careers for girls, and acceptable behaviour in the workplace. Earlier than this a job is unusual for the sort of girls who would have been reading, and although women working certainly occur, there isn't the widespread acceptability of the need to do so (I read Charlotte Bronte's Villette earlier this year, a brilliant book about many things, but one of them is the difficulties of single women making a living in a world where they are heartily disapproved of for doing so); later, and the possibilities open out, expanding. The career novel for children now seems to have largely burnt itself out, except in the narrow paths of artist (musician, dancer, actor), sporting professional or "celebrity", where fame is its own reward.
Anyway. This, for a book published in the mid-50s, is fairly blunt about the realities of nursing - bedpans, sexual harrassment (not called that!) by male patients, a mother of eight who fails to call for help when her premature baby is born (stillborn?) until after it is dead, because she cannot bear the sheer grinding effort and responsibility of another live child, the interplay between poverty and health - and manages to be also cheerful (camaraderie and the desire to serve) and cliched (naturally, she ends up with one of the young interns, a man who has helpfully structured her moral growth along the way by asking searching and incisive questions at appropriate points).
Interestingly, it finishes with both characters heading off to war - it's set in the US, in the forties - which is not exactly the standard happy ending. It also means that this is pre-antibiotic medicine, always a shock to the system in those moments when you realise how helpless people were then against infection. One of the main character's class mates is admitted with infection following a self-induced abortion (there is no moral judgment in the text about this, it's mentioned as plainly as that) and dies, slowly, over the next few days. It could be pneumonia, or appendicitis, or meningitis; if antibacterial resistance keeps spreading, aided by imbecilic decisions like using broadspectrum antibiotics in animal feed, as "growth promoters", it could be us, for everything.
I'm behind on books, partly because I end up writing too much about each one. So, focussing on the short and pithy:
This is a re-read, one of the few books I have with me that's made it through three countries and isn't in storage somewhere. Cathy, an orphan in a not uncaring but unimaginative orphanage in Birmingham, has a flash of memory while reading Wordsworth (I think it's Intimations of Immortality) that causes her to run away in search of the place she remembers, a place she feels she belongs to. This is part of a series that Fidra Books (http://www.fidrabooks.com/) is reprinting, and they're good books too, about recognisably real, independent, children. Landscape - primarily the Scottish Highlands - are also a deep part of these books. I picked this series up when I was fairly small and was fascinated by the illustrations, which are silhouette figures in lightly sketched landscapes. I subsequently borrowed the idea for a story I wrote for a creative writing assignment, when my need for illustrations ran headlong into my lack of ability to drawing faces.
I've come across a number of recommendations for his earlier Kirith Kirin, but it's acquired the sort of semi-obscure cult status that makes it expensive to buy without being more sure of whether I'll like it. This is the same world, or worlds - delegates from an advanced future society (the Hormling) go through a gate into what they see as a more primitive world, which turns out to be more powerful and more dangerous than they expected. It's gorgeously written and the worlds are well-thought through, but not enough really happens to make this work for me. The main character, Jedda, spends an awful lot of time being a witness to events (or audience for events long gone) rather than a participant, and it feels like I've arrived well after all the action (or, when Jedda jumps back in time, well before). There's a brilliant, vivid scene right at the ending that will stay with me, but I needed this earlier, and I needed more engagement in the world, rather than just admiration. It is admirable, very much so, but that's not enough as it stands for me.
I'm not sure if a sequel is intended. It hasn't helped me make the decision about Kirith Kirin; I still want to read it, but I'm concerned that I won't like it. I may try and track down some of his mainstream works and see if, relieved from the need to explain his worlds, he can carry me along with plot. I'm also still not sure about the title. Yes, it's about what each culture considers "ordinary", which is anything but to the other, but there's also a court functionary with the same title, and I wasn't sure how significant they were supposed to be.
I've read a number of 30s-60s learning-to-be-a-nurse books, part of a broader drive towards modelling careers for girls, and acceptable behaviour in the workplace. Earlier than this a job is unusual for the sort of girls who would have been reading, and although women working certainly occur, there isn't the widespread acceptability of the need to do so (I read Charlotte Bronte's Villette earlier this year, a brilliant book about many things, but one of them is the difficulties of single women making a living in a world where they are heartily disapproved of for doing so); later, and the possibilities open out, expanding. The career novel for children now seems to have largely burnt itself out, except in the narrow paths of artist (musician, dancer, actor), sporting professional or "celebrity", where fame is its own reward.
Anyway. This, for a book published in the mid-50s, is fairly blunt about the realities of nursing - bedpans, sexual harrassment (not called that!) by male patients, a mother of eight who fails to call for help when her premature baby is born (stillborn?) until after it is dead, because she cannot bear the sheer grinding effort and responsibility of another live child, the interplay between poverty and health - and manages to be also cheerful (camaraderie and the desire to serve) and cliched (naturally, she ends up with one of the young interns, a man who has helpfully structured her moral growth along the way by asking searching and incisive questions at appropriate points).
Interestingly, it finishes with both characters heading off to war - it's set in the US, in the forties - which is not exactly the standard happy ending. It also means that this is pre-antibiotic medicine, always a shock to the system in those moments when you realise how helpless people were then against infection. One of the main character's class mates is admitted with infection following a self-induced abortion (there is no moral judgment in the text about this, it's mentioned as plainly as that) and dies, slowly, over the next few days. It could be pneumonia, or appendicitis, or meningitis; if antibacterial resistance keeps spreading, aided by imbecilic decisions like using broadspectrum antibiotics in animal feed, as "growth promoters", it could be us, for everything.