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Review 5: The Korean Myths: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, and Legends

One of the assorted books I grabbed during my feeding frenzy in the library's What's New section the other day.

What do I know about Korea? Next to nothing. What connection do I have to Korea? Next to none. North Korea is the one I was sincerely worried might kill us all in 2017 (🎵2017...you are a fever dream I...did not want to have again🎵), and where the occasional member of a tour group...goes away. South Korea is the one where my friend went one time, where I've heard a lot of music, TV, and film is coming from, and, at least a few years ago, was a real up-and-comer in the beauty community, with the popularity of its products and routines steadily increasing in prominence and accessibility and starting to rival traditional luxury skincare producers like Japan and Hungary. During my glamourous era (2018-ish to 2020-ish), I even tried a few K-beauty products, as they're called, for myself, even though I had too much of a history of my face being shiny for all the wrong reasons for the glass skin trend to appeal much to me; the porcelain doll look is perhaps a little out of fashion, but I'm used to it and it suits me, so I'll stick with that. Some of the products I tried were good stuff, though. Now that my complete and total lack of any meaningful knowledge of or connection to Korean history and culture are well-established, on to the book about Korean history and culture.

I enjoy reading books about mythology generally, especially if I can get hold of one I don't already know anything about, but I'll be the first to admit that such books have...issues. Either they try to boil down mythologies into a series of coherent narratives (which is difficult at best and generally produces a somewhat dishonest picture of what were, after all, traditions from living cultures, developed over long, long periods of time and from many, many points of view), or they are more or less encyclopedias, in which case reading them straight through is not unlike reading a choose-your-own-adventure novel straight through: chaotic and kaleidoscopic, so that none of the bits are linked directly together at all and one only slowly starts to pull together any sort of narratives from the text. That can be fun in its own way, which is the reason I do it sometimes, but it's a difficult way to learn about a totally new mythology. This book, to my pleasant surprise, didn't really fall into either of those traps. It is titled "The Korean Myths," but it is really a short introduction to the history, religion, and culture of Korea, which includes traditional stories and how their role in society has evolved. This format doesn't allow for a great deal of depth on any subject, but as far as I can tell, it could be a good jumping-off point into deeper research on the subject, if one was so inclined.

A few passages I marked for some reason, and whatever I can think of to say about them now:

Another Korean Shamanic ritual is the talchum, or mask dance. There are many individual versions of the mask dance across Korea, but generally they involve shamans donning masks designed to represent social archetypes or spirits, such as 'the general,' 'the bride,' or 'the syphilitic monk.' (62)

I think I marked this one down originally on the grounds of "...that last archetype seems a bit more specific than the ones before it, doesn't it?" Presumably, this is more to do with me being a westerner and raised as a Protestant than it actually being unusual. I found the section on Shamanism quite interesting. It seems it is a living religion even in the present day, and that it has traditionally provided

"a way for the oppressed, such as transgender people and gay or lesbian people to express themselves and their communities. The life of a shaman has historically allowed women - who may otherwise have been outcast due to being widowed or having abusive husbands - to earn money and support themselves and their families...Shamanic rituals also allow for play, and for ridiculing the people traditionally in power in Korean society" (62)

Overall, the book's dealings with gender were especially new information to me. I'd learned in school that Confucian ideals were part of strict enforcement of oppressive gender roles in traditional Asian societies, which the book acknowledges, and that was pretty much it. Learning about the female shamanic tradition in most of Korea and the mirroring tradition of male shamans in Jeju Island added nuance to the situation. Of course, it's also definitely noted that every other major religion or dominant strain of philosophy has tried to suppress these traditions at one point or another, but they seem to have remained remarkably resilient even into the present based on this text*.

The last line I excerpted there, about play and ridiculing the people traditionally in power in Korean society, mirrored another theme that ran throughout the book, which was the value placed upon cleverness and trickery as traits. It seems to me, based upon my current knowledge, that there's a lot to be read into a culture's view on those things. From what I've read, the ancient Greeks also considered it perfectly admirable to be the cleverest and even most under-handed person in the room, but that it was for very different reasons. The book here presents Korean mythology's focus on cleverness as a reflection of the peninsula's history of both a very strictly-ordered society and of a lot of outside oppression that attempted, without success, to suppress and even eradicate native Korean culture multiple times. In Greece, it seems to have been more a matter of the culture's interest in individual excellence - Odysseus became a villain in the Roman and Elizabethan writers' hands, but the fact he was the best at what he did was more important to his original culture than whether or not this or that action was ethical. The competitiveness between city-states drove the Greeks to some great cultural accomplishments, but also played a pivotal role in their downfall, when each state's preoccupation with itself made it impossible for them to form a stable enough alliance when larger outside forces threatened them all. The Romans were more focused on the collective, and this allowed the creation of an enormous and surprisingly modern, in some ways, empire, but culturally, the general perception is that Romans made history, but their culture was just a cheap rip-off of Greece's. It was actually more complex than that, but the fact remains that we do seems to have trouble discerning what, if any, original myths the civilizations native to the Italian peninsula might have had before Rome, as those that survive were generally so well-conflated with their nearest Greek equivalents. The Villain Odysseus was, I think, particularly pronounced in Elizabethan drama, once the Renaissance had gotten well underway and knowledge of the Greek stories had made its way as far north as Britain, and that interests me because of something I read last year, which was a book about the practice of dissimulation in European cultures in and after the Renaissance. Apparently, it was completely expected that you would have your private, individual thoughts and opinions, but also just as completely expected that you would adhere carefully to the social consensus on what to actually say, and openness was not considered a virtue. This makes it interesting that the supreme trickster himself, the master of dissimulation, was not viewed with favor - reflective, perhaps, of the buildup of tensions which eventually led to the reactionary cultural backlashes seen in the rise of Puritanism and witch hysteria and the like, though I don't have enough information to be sure that idea could float. Just something to consider looking further into sometime, along with looking into what traditional Spanish culture has to say about this - because one thing Korea, Greece, and Italy all share is their peninsular nature, and recognizable humans existed when Britain was still a peninsula instead of an island, if I remember my reading about prehistoric Britain from last January correctly. Italy became the great fractured state of the Renaissance after Rome; the British Isles started out as a patchwork of tiny kingdoms before eventually unifying into the center of one of history's Major Empires. Korea and Greece, however, retained, to different degrees, the tendency to split up into smaller units more often than not, but also to have a much larger impact on broader culture than their sizes would suggest. My history education was lacking in many respects, but I was taught that the great imperial states that formed the prototypes for modern superpowers were Rome, France, Spain/Portugal, and England, so now I need to brush up on and go further into Spanish history sometime.

Of course, all of the above are thoughts formed as I read and typed, so there are doubtless inaccuracies and misconceptions that wouldn't be there if I was presenting a thesis. This is even more likely in light of how little I know, just in general, about Eastern history. Just some notes on what to maybe look into some other time, when I don't have fourteen library books on different topics out and after I've also done a lot more reading on Korea.

A final note: Princess Bari. I would totally read an epic fantasy which used that myth as one of its templates.

"Karma means 'action,' and the process of karma is a complex causal chain of actions and their consequences that continue into subsequent incarnations. While the burden of karma is avoided in Hinduism by following one's dharma - the social and spiritual duties specific to one's caste and station in life - Buddhism rejects the caste system and introduces the idea of a universal Dharma that applies to all individuals equally. A key concept of Buddhism is dukka, a Sanskrit word usually translated as 'suffering.' This is the idea that suffering is inherent to all life - to every being in the universe...the Four Noble Truths are presented as a rhetorically coherent argument: there is suffering, suffering has an origin, there is an end to suffering, and the way to end suffering is by following the Eightfold Path." (80)

I feel like much of this wasn't entirely new information to me, but that I originally learned it in an even more boiled-down form in about seventh grade, when we focused on world history and cultures in Social Studies, and...that was pretty much it. I definitely did not learn the next bit in the text, which is that Buddhism has deities. The idea of suffering as the inherent condition explains, perhaps, some of why Korean media is currently enjoying a surge in global popularity: it's a theory that's easy to believe in, in present times. I'd say it's a theme of my own writing, even, except for how my characters usually lack access to any way out other than to cease existing altogether. Yeah, my work's...cheerful like that.

"Korea has a complicated relationship with the supernatural. The societal norm in Neo-Confucian Korean culture was to suppress 'superstitious' beliefs, in accordance with the thinking of Neo-Confucianism's founding philosophers. However, when there were issues on an individual scale, the first thing a family would do is consult the local shaman. James Scarth Gale, one of the first missionaries to translate Korean literature and folk tales into English, noted that Koreans - particularly scholars, who were his closest contacts - were hesitant to discuss supernatural matters in public, but held strong beliefs in them privately...the tension between rejecting and embracing the supernatural persists in Korea today." (105)

This resonated with me, I suppose because it reminds me a bit of something familiar. The tension is much less that what's presented here, but I was also brought up in such a culture. The South holds outwardly to a view...broadly along general American lines, a view close-ish to the Enlightenment, but we all grow up on different fare at home from grandparents and great-aunts and such. Ghost stories and rigid superstitions (New Year's Day is a particular one - you must eat peas and collards to ensure you'll have money in the coming year, and you must not wash clothes that day, because if you do, you're washing out a relative and someone in your family will die - everyone says they don't believe it and are just being safe rather than sorry, of course, as if it were a joke, and families as dysfunctional as mine even make dark jokes along the lines of "now, if I could decide which relative I was washin' out of the family, that might be a different story...", but everyone goes to a lot of pains to remind everyone else that New Year's is coming, is all I'm saying) and tales of inexplicable events...the big ghost tours you see, Charleston and Savannah and the like, or the endless books on [State] ghosts you can find tucked away in odd corners of any Cracker Barrel restaurant, those are, let's be honest, at least 90% a tourist attraction; they stop only thisfar this side of a grift because I assume the people purchasing the tours and books also know it's all just for entertainment. If y'all want to give us your money, we'll roll you around some streets in a horse-drawn buggy at night and tell some spooky stories without complaint. Heck, we even occasionally participate in such things ourselves while vacationing in the Old Cities. I imagine people up in Lovecraft Country or Hawthorneland do something similar. It's a bit of harmless fun for everyone. However, I know people who genuinely will not set foot in cemeteries after dark, because they are really afraid of ghosts. My mother has always said she doesn't understand that view...not because she doesn't believe it's possible, but because if she went up there and saw Pawpaw and Daddy and my uncle Hugh and a few of our cousins who are all buried in the same cemetery were sitting around playing poker and looking like they did when they weren't sick and getting along, she can't imagine why she'd be frightened of them instead of glad to see 'em again (bah, I've made myself cry just writing that sentence). We still observe the birthdays of the dead, and take them gifts of a sort by changing out their flowers regularly through the year. It's a Christmas tradition on my mother's side of the family for the women whose fathers have died to slip out of the Christmas Eve get-together after dark, where we put lighted Christmas trees on the graves and also literally someone buys a beer just so we can tip it out for 'em, even though none of us drink the nasty stuff. I'm a pretty rational person, but my grandmother (whose only childhood medical treatment came from an herb granny) has repeatedly told such a vivid tale of seeing someone faith-healed from paralysis when she was a girl (scaring her half to death at the time, as she was fourteen and just keeping the babies of the prayer group out of the way) that it's hard for me to completely disbelieve in such things, no matter how much I know about placebo effects and psychology and how weird the nervous system is or even how many people are, er, just plain overt, proven con artists. If you ever go to a hotel in the U.S., you'll probably find a Bible in the drawer of the nightstand in your room; those are put there by the Gideons, an organization who, as part of their fundraising efforts, come as guest preachers to churches and tell all sorts of wild tales of what sound like borderline magic in their oddly stereotypical missionary efforts in the traditional places, all swearing they are true, and people eat it up to this day.

Now, why am I telling you all this, friends? 'Cause y'all are most of my contacts with the outside world. Not many people will admit to a lingering bit of belief in that sort of thing today, just in general, but in private...y'all, I read Scientific American every month and have never been exactly shy about admitting how little connection I feel to the local culture and regularly make my whole family sincerely worry that I'm going to Hell for asking too many questions, and yet there's still some stubborn little corner of my mind that can never feel one hundred percent certain there's no such thing as miracles and folk magic. This does my OCD about as much good as you'd probably suspect, but that's...a different story. Point is...it's just interesting to me, how many points of commonality there can be between what we'd initially think of as very, very different cultures. It's the same with jade - this book mentions the Korean and Chinese beliefs associated with it, which happen to be pretty similar to those held by ancient Mesoamerican societies, on a completely different continent and with an ocean in between them. We get the same ideas, here or there, over and over again, and they linger no matter how sophisticated or advanced-beyond-others we might tell ourselves we are. This is one reason why racism is stupid as well as wrong...but that's also a different story. This is all just an observation.

The next section of the book is mostly about actual myth-stories and magical creatures and whatnot, so I'll spare you all my notes on those and go on to the notes about the modern Koreas at the end of the book. Let's start off on a very merry topic, North Korean propaganda!

"One comic in particular, the 186-page Great General Mighty Wing (1994), stands out...Mighty Wing is precisely the sort of thing Kim Jong-un, the current leader, would have read as a preteen, and its embedded slogans reveal the sort of brainwashing he would have experienced at that age" (181)

For one thing...wow, apparently I'm a lot closer in age to Kim Jong-un than I thought I was? I was a year away from learning to read in 1994, so he's definitely a good bit my senior, but apparently was not an adult at that time. Well, Ericksson did say middle age begins at 35, and I'm getting awful close to that. This all is so much yammer about nothing, though, compared to the other thought I had about this passage, which is how the world might just be what it is because we expected our villains to be smart.

The Star Wars prequels were released in my childhood, and, like most children watching them, I hadn't the slightest inkling how political they really were - and I was a pretty bright kid who was trying to follow the plot and joined in with the adults in finding Jar-Jar annoying! As an adult, though...they reflect, I think, the same basic assumption that made it surprising to me that the book would posit that Kim Jong-un was as much a victim of brainwashing as anyone else in North Korea. See, in my head, if I was going to set up a dictatorship based in a cult around me and my family, it only seems natural to me that I would want to make sure that me and my heirs didn't get too high on our own propaganda supply. If you believe it yourself, after all, you automatically have a lesser degree of control over it than you would otherwise, plus you're going to make stupid decisions by default if you think you are really that special. Palpatine, in his younger years at least, is a villain who makes sense to me: he's completely cold-blooded, brilliant, manipulating other people's emotions until they hand him so much power that they end up unable to take it back. He and Christopher Lee Count Dooku never believed in their respective sides of the war at all; it was all a game to them, they were always on the same side, which was their own side. Palpatine fell when he got arrogant: when he started to assume he was a living god, and that of course it would never occur to Vader to turn on him. He knew, good and well, that the final steps of his plan only played out as smoothly as they did because he was able to spin this mentally unstable person around like a top by exploiting his obsessive attachment to one woman. Why, exactly, did he think it was a good idea to try electrocuting that woman's son in front of the guy? On one hand, he could have reasoned that Vader might have happily latched onto the notion that Luke and Leia killed Padme by being born...despite the twenty-odd years he'd spent up to that point obsessed with the idea that he'd personally killed her and his own child...and how Vader had clearly reacted to the idea that Anakin Skywalker's son had survived, and how that kid is the closest thing to Padme he can ever get again, given that there's no reason why her consciousness would have survived becoming one with the Force and therefore no afterlife with her to look forward to, and how he'd literally just been talking about how, now that he knew Luke was a twin, he'd be just as happy to have his daughter ruling beside him as his son....

Yeah, real smart move, there, Sheev. You knew that Vader had no motives for living except to kill anything that threatened his attachments. You have that fun feeling-sensing ability, so you have to know that any efforts you made to convince him that killing the brat would avenge Padme or something were not working. You'd seen Anakin come close to killing you before, even, when he first found out what you really were - and you'd just betrayed him, which in Anakin-land is the worst thing anyone can do and which is the idea you used on multiple levels to turn him against Obi-Wan, by telling Luke to promote himself to apprentice by killing Vader the same way Vader had promoted himself by killing Dooku, so long before. What did you think was going to happen, dude? Answer: you didn't, because you'd given in to the megalomania, started believing in yourself too much and thinking too little, and, accordingly, you promptly got murdered. Sic semper lost-his-edge tyrannus.

Then, though, we get to the real world. We get a dangerous populist in power, here in the States - and he's a probably-half-insane, not-that-bright-to-begin-with buffoon who seems to actually believe in his own hype, at least on some level. Evil was supposed to be smart while it persisted - to have a mind of metal and wheels, to borrow a description from Tolkien - and to fall when it got emotional, because Good Emotional may lose to a brilliant schemer, but never to a Bad Emotional. It's much of the philosophical basis of traditional American anti-intellectualism (which...don't get me started on that subject)...and it seems that it isn't how things are actually working out. The sound and fury of tales told by an idiot ended up signifying far too much. Last time, 2016, I assumed McConnell and Pence had engineered the whole thing and would keep their grotesque frontman on a short leash - assumed they were the Palpatines who I really needed to look out for, the ones who'd 'save' us from their patsy when the moment was right in order to become beloved wielders of far too much power after they got all their use out of that surly overgrown infant and discarded him. I was dead wrong about that. And now I am presented with the idea that another Nuclear Idiot might also believe in his own hype...

...y'know, I didn't really need any sound sleep for the next couple decades at least, sleep was always kinda overrated anyway, the only dreams I've ever been able to remember were nightmares before I had this disturbing thought in my head, so I'm not really losing anything here, am I....

"K-pop groups like Blackpink and BTS are directly responsible for the phenomenon of 'Koreaboos' - devoted fans who immerse themselves in Korean language and culture in order to be closer to their idols. The term 'idol'...is appropriate for the famous K-pop celebrities because they are not only objects of worship, but also, in a sense, false gods. An idol adored by fans is a carefully constructed and managed persona into which a production company has invested millions of dollars over the course of their rigorous contract, which may be for up to thirteen years. Everything about Korean pop idols, from their weight to their fashionable wardrobes, immaculate complexions and virtuous personalities, is monitored and controlled in order to encourage the creation of parasocial relationships, ultimately a source of revenue" (214)

A tiny, tiny part of me is just amused to see the term 'Koreaboo' in a real, completely serious book. More of me, having already gotten into a quite serious mood by this point...

This shouldn't be surprising, really. We've always known this. Judy Garland and Shirley Temple were treated horrifically; the waves of child stars and children of mommy vloggers who are coming of age are letting us know that it's not just highly trained industry professionals who do this kind of thing. Anything and anyone that seems too perfect, is. Why do we have this impulse to believe otherwise - to believe in the mask? The...year before last, I think, I was reading a book titled Dissimulation and the Culture of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe (Jon R. Snyder), which was about how, in the Early Modern period, everyone (at least in the kinds of circles we have extensive written records about; I doubt the same is so of Average Joe Early Moderner) assumed that everyone else was always carefully arranging their public presentation to meet clearly-outlined social expectations, and that your private thoughts and feelings were your own; naturalness was not seen as a virtue, but as rude, boorish behavior. I realized, as I read this book, where I'd gone wrong when figuring out how to mask neurodivergence as a girl: I based my tactics mainly on ideas drawn from fantasy novels based on the Early Modern Period, and thought dissimulation was what everyone was always doing currently as well. This obviously has combined poorly with the current culture of fake openness. It's why I've been so baffled by the amount of buffoonery in politics, and how people think this is "being honest" and not just, well, rude, boorish behavior. I don't really have a conclusion for this, unless I'm allowed to make a joke about "bring masking back for the neurotypicals again!"; again, think of this entry as me sitting down with you and a cup of tea, just talking as I go along.

"The myth that beauty and virtue go together is already perpetuated by classic folk tales and literature...and further amplified by an underlying cultural belief in physiognomy - certain facial proportions and shapes are said to reveal character traits like intelligence, honesty, loyalty, and compassion, but when such standards are then combined with Western media ideals, the result can be a face whose appearance is unnatural and perhaps even uncanny. In fact, the 'ideal' Korean face is now the 'egg-shaped' face, which ironically resonates with the terrifying figure of the egg ghost [a monster which appears to be a woman weeping from the back, but when a man tries to comfort her, she turns around to reveal she has no face at all]" (216)

This is sad. Hell is empty, and all the devils are here - we made them out of ourselves.

Just another musing here on culture, this time on a difference in culture. Growing up, I was taught that it was borderline disrespectful to go out looking like you were showing your 'natural' face; the current no-makeup makeup trend was a complete no-go, since carefully doing one's hair and make-up and dressing up to go in public was a sign that you were the Right Sort, a woman who respected herself and others. I still refer to putting on make-up as "putting my face on" - I feel dramatically more confident when I have substantially altered my face's appearance, emphasizing the good points (eyebrow pencils and mascara are wonderful products, and I'll stand on that one; I have good eyebrows and eyelashes naturally, but they're almost completely transparent unless I apply cosmetics) and downplaying the ones I dislike and making some things visibly artificial (come for my eyeliner and lipstick, see what happens). My behavior changes without me even thinking about it. It's sort of horrifying, though, to think of having plastic surgery to make me always look like I had my face on - if I always look like I'm in public, when am I supposed to be in private? How would I survive in a world where there was no such thing as private, where life really had to be lived as though one was in the public eye at all times? Is that what we're headed for, and if so, will we figure out it ain't gonna work before we drive ourselves completely mad?

"It is not certain whether Bandi is an individual or a group of writers, but the layers of symbolism contained int he pseudonym attest to the fact that Bandi is a highly trained and talented writer who has also carefully studied the mechanics of propaganda. On its surface, bandi is a colloquial term for a firefly. But the first syllable, ban, means 'half,' and it results in many thematically relevant words with ban as a prefix. Bandi sounds similar to bando...meaning 'belt,' which may symbolize not only the DMZ that divides the peninsula in half but also a leather belt used to beat people. Bando also means 'halfway' and 'peninsula.' Bandi also sounds like bandae...which means 'the opposite' or 'to oppose, signifying a denouncement of the state as well as recalling the beginning of the phrase bandeusi...which means 'right away', 'directly' and 'without fail.' One of the unexpected readings of the first syllable comes from [a Chinese character] which means 'food' or 'to eat,' resonating with the theme of starvation during the great famine of the mid-1990s. This intense layering of meanings is characteristic of a poetic writer, but also suggests the possibility that Bandi's identity was created by the dialogue of more than one individual. The layered meanings in the pseudonym are also a clue that Bandi's prose and poetry contain a similar dense encoding of meanings, used to reveal the oppression of the very state that trained him" (221)

There are two recurring themes throughout the book when it comes to Korean culture on the whole. One is syncretism, deliberate melding of different elements from different places and times to create an adaptable, living whole. Another is how layered the Korean language apparently is and how this shows up in its literature. As someone who loves playing with words in that way, I'm now extremely tempted to go read some Korean literature, even though goodness knows I'm probably not capable of learning enough Korean to do so and therefore wouldn't get to enjoy the effect anyway. I still admire the technique, though.

"A unified Korean peninsula could also potentially destabilize relationships between the global superpowers. What if a unified democratic Korea, with political pressure from factions maintaining the current interests of the North, were to shift its allegiance from the United States to China, creating a major blow to US security in the Pacific Rim?" (226)

Again, just something sad. They're inescapable at this point, but I have often wondered if we wouldn't all be better off if there were no global superpowers, no massive unwieldy states trying to force uniformity and cohesion onto too many distinct groups or trying to use independent states as puppets and proxy actors. I was, though, born into the world of the superpowers, so what do I know? I can only imagine a world without them, and who am I to say my imagination would come to the correct conclusions? Much of this now extremely long post keeps coming back to all the ways it hasn't been before.

*I include the 'based on this text' because I haven't read any other sources to confirm it yet. My guess is the book is accurate enough, but if I've learned one thing in all my readings in history and comparative religion and mythology, it's that the only way to getting an even vaguely clear view in this sort of area involves reading closer to twenty sources than to one source.

#bookblr #books #books and reading #reading #2025 reads #book review #mythology and folklore #korean mythology #south korea #north korea #star wars reference #macbeth reference #american politics #this got long #musings #ramblings

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callireads · 7 months ago

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Went to the library today and, for the first time in over a year, checked out books.

This is an unusual state of affairs, but then, last year was an unusual year. In December of 2023, my grandmother fell and broke her hip. This meant surgery, which, as is quite common, sent her into a mental decline. This has made the past year…more than a little unpleasant. I’m the only person in the family who my grandmother consistently recognizes and the only one with a work-from-home job, so I ended up becoming, for all intents and purposes, her caretaker, which has meant a year of being almost entirely secluded at home, unable to leave without informing various other people and putting them to inconvenience. Not that I ever went out much, anyway, but although I’ve never been a nun or an inmate in a correctional facility, I think I’ve gained a pretty good idea of the difference between entering a monastery and going to prison. Either way, you sleep in a cell, but the fact that it’s a choice for the monastic makes all the difference.

Things haven’t changed, but I’m more used to it, now. So when, on my weekly “day off,” I walked into the Big Library today, I looked at new arrivals like old times and dragged a few of them home with me!

The Feet of Clay review is still forthcoming, of course, along with these. I wasn’t joking when I said in the intro post that I meander back and forth between subjects, lol.

#bookblr #books #books and reading #reading #2025 reads #books & libraries #public libraries

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callireads · 7 months ago

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Review 4: The Beginner's Guide to Runes

Like I said in the pinned post: I'm a writer, and my reading habits are...eclectic. Besides a running interest in the history of magic, I specifically set out to learn as much as I could about Norse mythology about two years ago, as part of some worldbuilding I was doing in a fanfic. Since I always acquire more resources than I can really get through before my brain plays traitor and wanders off to do something else, though, I found this unread in the back of the queue of my Kindle Unlimited books and decided, "eh, might as well - I definitely don't have time to read another paper book this month, but I can squeeze in another e-book and at least end on a round number."

The book is about exactly what it says on the tin: it's an introduction to the elder futhark and some of the ways it was/is, apparently, used. My intention was to read about this from a purely scholarly perspective, but it didn't take long before I got to the part of the book where Mr. Simonds claimed to be a psychic medium, and it wasn't long after that that it became clear than he actually believes in this stuff - intrinsic power in runes, the legitimacy of the use of runes for divination, magic, Odin, the lot. I must, in good conscience, confess up front: I do not believe in psychic mediums, magic, Odin, or the lot. However, I also don't think it's really my place to disrespect someone else's religion or claim that they don't really believe in it or anything like that, so we'll leave that discussion at that.

Now that I've made such a shockingly bold and utterly original statement (/sarcasm), I'll note that the book was well laid-out and fairly well-written and entertaining, using stories from mythology and stories made up by the author to illustrate what it was talking about. Note to self, if I ever get writing properly again, I should probably revisit this when I inevitably wander my way into doing more worldbuilding.

#2025 reads #ongoing research projects #norse resources #short review #note to self #it was for a book

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callireads · 7 months ago

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Review 3: Men At Arms

I briefly strayed into the world of memoir, but now I'm back to comedic fantasy and the Ankh-Morpork City Watch. Specifically, the second book in the City Watch collection, Men At Arms.

This one isn't one of the ones I've reread until the copy fell apart, but I did remember a fair bit about it. Hard to forget the bit where Cuddy realizes that there is a logic to the way trolls name numbers, or where Everything That Comes After Calculus almost got solved in the Pork Futures Warehouse, or the moment the entire Assassins Guild realized, simultaneously, that Detritus could be a very important person indeed - one of the relatively few times Discworld has actually made me cry. This is the one where Vimes falls off the wagon and attempts to embed his badge into his hand, resulting in the reveal that he had, apparently for some time, been dedicating half his pay to being the closest thing Watch widows and orphans got to a pension - that one didn't make me cry, but I felt like it. There's a running bit about how someone who could shove a sword into a stone sounds like a better kingship candidate than someone who just pulls said sword out again, and how Carrot ends up doing both* in an almost blink-and-you-miss-it moment, about the same time we get Vimes' memorable reflection on the subject of how evil people gloat. And, of course, this book contains stuff like the Flamethrower Incident and perhaps the best pun, or play on words, in the entire series: that is, that one made by Death about how Bjorn Hammerhock believes in reincarnation and will therefore eventually be bjorn again.

Yes, bjorn again. Of all the jokes I could have remembered, it was that one. What can I say, Death has an odd sort of charm sometimes.**

More seriously, I didn't remember that this was the (very subtle) beginning of the...sub-plot? theme? something literary, anyway, about what the Vimes will later dub "the Party People" and "the people who shape opinions into knives", which creeps through the Watch series as a whole. I'm from the United States and, worse yet, specifically from an area about as red as Dorothy's slippers, so a few scenes cut a little sharper now than I imagine they did when I was nineteen and politically illiterate:

"You know," Vimes shook his head, "you know, that's what's so damn annoying, isn't it? The way they can be so incapable of rational thought and so bloody shrewd at the same time." (Pratchett 106)

And I probably never related to Vimes on a personal level so much as during this exchange, which was about the scene on page 106 and the rather unintelligent, bigoted, rich, powerful individual who prompted the observation:

"I was watching you," she said. "You were being very rude, Sam." "I was trying not to be." "Lord Eorle is a very old friend." "Is he?" "Well, I've known him a long time. I can't stand the man, actually. But you were making him look foolish." "He was making himself look foolish. I was merely helping." (Pratchett 109)

My mother's less mild-mannered about it than Sybil when I do that kind of thing around her friends/distant relatives/etc., but...sometimes, you just have to help those who won't stop helping themselves, and sometimes it's even harder than usual to bring oneself to not lend that helping hand, because of just how unlikable a specific case is, y'know? But above it all, there's the grim reality, which occupies far too much of my thoughts these days:

"There were people who'd steal money from people. Fair enough. That was just theft. But there were people who, with one easy word, would steal the humanity from people. That was something else." (Pratchett 116-117)

It's a surprisingly important, thought-provoking book, once you read it with at least some level of awareness of the world around you.

*He also established his ability to stick a sword through and remove a sword from Dr. Cruces at the same time; it seemed to be the main purpose of the exercise from his point of view, but was of less narrative importance than the stone bit, as nobody had included "running through the head of the Assassin's Guild" in the kingship candidate requirements list.

**Death of the Disc, that is, not actual death. In real life, little-d death just makes me angry, but Death of the Disc is someone I might not even mind being escorted to the afterlife by, as long as I got one of his usually-unintentionally-amusing one-liners on my way out.

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callireads · 7 months ago

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Review 2: The House of My Mother

I don't usually read books by famous people for a variety of reasons, but - I'm not fully sure why - I made an exception for this one.

The author, Shari Franke, is the eldest of six children, and her parents used to run a successful family YouTube channel. I never saw said channel a day in my life, because that's not my type of content, so my first exposure to these people happened when Ms. Franke's mother was arrested for aggravated child abuse in 2023 and the story swept across both YouTube and the mainstream media, making it rather difficult for a while to not hear of them all. One hears of a lot of people when one is terminally on YouTube, though, so I was surprised - even considering that the case touches on a number of issues that I have strong and occasionally perhaps somewhat controversial views about - by how much the story stuck with me, and by the impulse which inspired me last week to buy the ebook of Ms. Franke's memoir, albeit still without especially high expectations.

If I'd had higher expectations, though, I expect they might well have been met. I read the book, around 300 pages, in one sitting, between ten in the morning and 1pm, and was crying almost the entire way through.

On one hand, it was inevitable that the story should be moving, considering the subject matter, but I was surprised by how easy I found it to identify with the author-narrator. I'm functionally an only child, she has five siblings. She's a member of the LDS church, I'm not (though I do have friends who are). A number of her extended family members are also YouTubers, my family would probably rather eat the contents of the cat-box than broadcast even a curated overview our lives to others. And so on and so forth. It all stacked in a way that made me expect I'd have very little in common with her. But, as it turns out, I do know what it's like to be bookish and introverted and baffled by where all the conflicting expectations people have of you are even coming from. I know about how complicated family can be, how hard it is to realize that you love people who aren't doing right by you, or to come to the possibly worse realization that you don't love certain people even though it's been ingrained in you since birth that you should. And I know all about developing and going through depression and, although it was less clear whether she was ever diagnosed with this formally or not, probably with a specific manifestation of OCD - and that one was particularly surprising. After essentially never seeing anything mainstream that even acknowledged the existence of it (though to be fair, I haven't exactly been looking), it was a bit startling to see a public figure suddenly talking about scrupulosity* and clearly knowing what they were talking about. It felt weirdly validating, which feels like a wrong thing to say about anything from someone else's child abuse memoir, but it did.

Ms. Franke thanks a writing partner in the acknowledgments at the end, but despite my tendency to assume "famous person's name is on the cover of a book = famous person probably hasn't even read the thing, never mind contributed to it," I do find it plausible to think that she might have contributed significantly to the composition of the text. The handling of the...day-to-day experience of depression and anxiety disorders, I suppose you could say, had the ring of authenticity, at least to my ear. The prose itself was also good, but not great, and had a sense of an emerging but not-quite-developed voice - it felt like a gifted college student's writing, for the most part. I also felt that the religious angles were handled surprisingly well - there was no attempt to convert the reader, but also no attempt to sweep the impact of Ms. Franke's faith on her life under the rug, and although not a lot of detail was included and it was never allowed to interfere with the flow of the narrative, there were enough explanations of things specific to the LDS experience to make those portions of the text comprehensible to someone (ie, me) with very little knowledge of the church. This is a balancing act I've not seen a lot of memoirs and biographies pull off, so that was nice to see. I also felt it was both tasteful and smart of Ms. Franke to stick pretty strictly to her own story, refusing to try to tell the stories of her siblings and leaving the option for whether or not those stories will ever be told up to each of them.

In summary: if you're just looking for sensational details of the events of 2023, this isn't the book for you, because it isn't about that. It’s also not a tale of someone who ends up with all the Correct thoughts and feelings about a number of issues. If you're interested in subjects like the experience of religious/psychological abuse, religion and mental health in current times, what it's like to love your family and also know that it's highly dysfunctional, or the growing debate over the ethics of family vlogging**, though, then it may well be worth your time to check out the preview pages and see if you want to keep going after them. Far, far from the worst impulse purchase I've ever made, anyway.

*with scrupulosity, the anxious thoughts that form the 'obsessive' bit of "obsessive-compulsive disorder" revolve in large part around excessive concerns related to religion. Constant anxiety about sinning, attempts to thought police oneself, compulsive performance of religious activities/acts your brain convinces itself can placate a god, etc.

**Ms. Franke's official position on the issue, as she informed part of the Utah state legislature not long ago, is that there is no such thing as truly ethical family vlogging, but it's worth noting that she doesn't condemn her two aunts who are also family vloggers...and who were also, for a time, the only biological relatives she had who would even acknowledge her existence after her mother disowned her. Probably helps, too, that, to the best of my knowledge, neither of them has ever come within a hair's breadth of literally torturing any of her own children to death. The issue of family vlogging is...probably not a subject you should join in the conversation about if you aren't prepared to deal with both outright horrors and with a lot more situations which are far more nuanced and far less straightforward than that. It's kind of like that with all dysfunctional family things, really.

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callireads · 7 months ago

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Review 1: Guards, Guards!

I first read this book in my second year of undergrad, somewhere in 2009 or 2010. I was severely depressed, nineteen, from the United States, nearly a cultural illiterate, and almost a complete science illiterate at the time, and I made the faux pas of reading all of the books in publication order, essentially just because I knew I wasn't supposed to. In light of all that, I am...amazed I even kept going to the end of the series, really, much less ever looked back at the Discworld again....

I did finish the series and look back upon some entries quite fondly, though. Guards, Guards! did not make the cut for that list; I didn't react to most of it that much at all, I didn't read it again, and it was one of the books where, by the beginning of this year, I retained only a confused jumble of images. Two of my favorite Discworld novels, however, are Night Watch and Thud!, which are at the end of the City Watch 'sub-series', so I decided to give the first book in the sequence another go and see if I could figure out how we got from Point A to Point B, and if the plot was really as disjointed as my vague impression of anything beyond the two (2) scenes I knew for sure I remembered from it.

It wasn't. In fact, this book's got a pretty solid plot. All the windows and doors lead pretty much to the correct places, no real spatial anomalies to report. If it were anyone other than the likes of Pratchett writing it, I daresay it might be a little too normal to really work; what the man could do with words and characters does far more to make it worth reading than the storyline does, though there's nothing wrong with the storyline. It's still Pratchett, even still clearly enough Pratchett that I imagine it would be hard to mistake it for anything else, but it's still not quite Pratchett at the peak of his powers; he was still feeling out, I suppose, what exactly this thing he was writing in and about was at the time. So why did I remember it as such a jumble?

A few speculative answers:

I first read it in 2009 or 2010. I have a really good memory for anything written down except numbers, but that's still been a minute.

In reasons for reason 1 - I was severely depressed when I first read it. My brain was running at half-speed on a good day. I don't really remember much about that entire academic year except for the very end of it.

I was nineteen, from the United States, virtually culturally illiterate, and almost completely scientifically illiterate. Reading Pratchett under those conditions is a bit like trying to read Alice in Wonderland or Flatland with no knowledge of math or the finer points of nineteenth century culture; the occasional joke might still make its way through, but mostly, it just seems...weird, and you have no idea why the author did most of the things you see happening in the book. That 'virtually culturally illiterate' bit? Yeah, I didn't even know what noir was when I first read this thing. I had picked up just enough via cultural osmosis that I think I heard more or less the correct music in my head when the camera cuts to that first scene of Vimes attempting to drunkenly monologue about the city, but that was pretty much it.

Besides my shortcomings, there is a certain...je ne sais quoi...there, something that makes it feel just a little extra unreal in a way I'm not sure was intentional....

I really don't know exactly what that thing I don't know what is might be, but it's there. My best guess is that the characters had started, at least in a few cases (inc. Vimes and Vetinari, of course, but also the Librarian and, of all people, sometimes Nobby), becoming more 'grounded' and fleshed out, more like individuals than archetypes, at this point in the Great Pterry's career, and they therefore were a little bit like Carrot's sword: just a touch realer than the rest of their surroundings. The Disc didn't yet feel quite like a real setting, it still felt like only a mirror of worlds instead of like a world in itself, but it was beginning to be populated by real-ish individuals*. I'd need to read a few more of the books from this early part of the series to confirm that suspicion, but it feels like a good hunch. The dedication, too, may lend to a feeling of...confusion; it would lead one to expect a Hero, possibly Carrot, to end up fighting and killing the rest of the City Watch single-handed and with a lot of comedic lampshade hanging, but there we got those too-real other people in the story. You rarely create something like Vimes just to kill him off in the same book, not unless it's one heck of a book, a magnum opus running toward a thousand pages long, not part of a series, and probably French. Pratchett could have done it in a later book, especially a stand-alone, but it would have been really disorienting here. Plus, he's clearly a detective, not the sort of guardsman described in the dedication. One of the early things, too, that happens is the bonding between the Watchmen: the first thing we learn about everyone except Carrot is that they're feeling the loss of a colleague, and it's not long before one gets the feeling they care something about Carrot. We see them collectively have a pet together. It would've, by the climax of the book, been a gut-wrenching tragedy if they ended up filling the role of "evil man's obedient mooks" and got killed as part of Carrot's heroic arc; Pratchett managed to make an endearing character out of Death itself, which is no mean feat, but I don't know if even he could have made that funny. I read once that Pratchett struggled to make Carrot the main character at first, but then Vimes vetoed that idea, along with the idea that he should be a one-dimensional bit character, at which point the story assumed its own momentum. Three separate types of story - the heroic fantasy, the mystery/noir, and the police procedural, to an extent - ended up being mixed together, and didn't quite gel together as the type of satirical look at heroic fantasy tropes that the dedication seemed to indicate that the book was supposed to be. It felt...a bit -ental of some kind - experimental or developmental. The dedication is an interesting bit of writing, but the book might have come out better without it. In my most nitpicky criticism yet, I think I would have swapped the last two scenes with major characters in them, so that we begin with Vimes thinking about the city being a woman and then we end with Vimes thinking of the woman as a city. Just a minor cosmetic adjustment, really.

That said, I enjoyed it very much, now that I was clearer-headed and have read a lot more of TVTropes, and was surprised to find little moments that I remembered from the series generally were part of this book, since I knew they were Discworldisms, but not specifically where from. "Thunder rolled; it rolled a six?" That one's straight from Guards, Guards!, right at the beginning. That Vetinarism about how there are only always ever bad people, but some of them are on different sides, which kind of sums up the philosophical question of the City Watch books? Yep, that was Vetinari's parting wisdom for Vimes at the end of this book. The Librarian's dangerous journey to his own past through L-Space? Ditto, though I can't say for sure if it was introduced here or not, by virtue of see-all-that-above. A lot of scenes had a cinematic clarity to them that I never would have expected based on my decade-old vague memories, and of course there's the bits I did remember, because they're just that iconic. Good book, will read it again.

*I think the Librarian would fit into the category of 'persons,' but probably best to avoid words that can seem too affiliated with the human species.

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