#Tolkien exposé time

[oops-i-tolkiened-again]

It bothers me very much how close Rings of Power gets to being moral and then turns around and eliminates the subtle metaphors Tolkien had with every piece of fiction he ever made.

I do like the show. I do believe it’s improving. I don’t utterly hate the thing, but I realize they’re making stupid lore decisions a lot of the time, and band-aiding a flood with only the slightest lore gratuity later.

Let me watch the show as I will, let me enjoy it as I will, but do not assume I adore the hot messes where hot messes abound. I am both interested in and disappointed in this adaptation. It’s got this weird sense of “we have to keep the morality in here for the nerds, but we don’t actually believe it.” The Legendarium was never about expressing political opinions. It was always about exposing Tolkien’s own moral opinions and imprinting them on the world. Wether that was his take on industrialism, treatment of veterans, or family relations, it was always about his philosophy.

He despised allegory, and at this point ROP is barely scraping along as a weak modern allegory.

[mrs-storm-andrews]

2, 13, 17, 22, 29, 49? :3

2: What are you currently reading? // Cambridge 5 by Hannah Coler. So far, it has been quite interesting, but there's one thing that bugs me. One of the protagonists is a fresh PhD student at Cambridge, but she knows so little about her freaking topic. Don't you need to write some fucking exposé to get accepted into Cambridge or something? Ugghh.. frustrating.

13: Name a book with a really bad movie/tv adaption // Don't get me wrong, I really like The Hobbit by Peter Jackson as a movie trilogy - but I like it only as that: a movie trilogy. I try not to recognise it as a direct adaption of the book by Tolkien, since that would only fuel some dissappointment.

17: If you owned a bookshop what would you call it? // I've answered this before and I can't think of anything better than the answer I gave the first time: Ad Astra Books. I really like that.

22: Pro or anti e-readers? Why? // People who damn ebooks have definitely never considered how much ebooks changed the reading experience of visually impaired people. Of course, nothing beats the feeling and scent of a real book, but reading has become so much more enjoyable for me since I got an ebook reader where I can adjust the seize of the letters to my particular needs. It's such a blessing.

29: How do you sort your shelves? (i.e. by color, author, title etc.) // I tried to sort by colour since it looks so satisfying, but it turned out I hated it in daily usage, since I wasn't able to find any book. So, I just stick to sorting them by genre and within genre by aesthetic measures.

49: When is your favorite time to read? // I'm a devoted audiobook listener and I especially like to listen to them while doing boring chores. A good book makes everything mor enjoyable.

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Bookish asks

[deehollowaywrites]

Turf writing is one of the great formats. In the narrowest definition, it’s given us Maryjean Wall, Joe Hirsch, and of course the inimitable Joe Palmer; in the modern era, race fans enjoy journalism and color from Natalie Voss, David Hill, Teresa Genaro, and John Cherwa. More broadly, racing’s corner of sports nonfiction is home to the likes of Joe Drape, Jim Squires, Lawrence Scanlan, and Linda Carroll.

Why then is there such a dearth of diverse racing fiction?

Dick Francis cornered the crime-novel market in 1962 and rightfully so--his thrillers remain tight, humorous, often moving, and rich with detail. But let’s be real: homeboy was writing about British horse racing, an entirely different animal from the US sport, and even where the two dovetail, they generally differ in the particulars. Any new US fan would do well to read a few Francis titles and murmur in wonder that amateur steeplechasing is, apparently, a thing people do. When Francis died, his son took over the family business and (as is the norm with children trying to magnify or at least capitalize on their parents’ callings; see also Todd McCaffrey, Brian Herbert, and Christopher Tolkien) turned out some weak tea. Notably, he tried to do what his father never had: he wrote about US racing from the perspective of the Francis hero-detective Jeff Hinkley.

Triple Crown is not a good novel, y’all, and least of all a good racing thriller. I read and livetweeted it in unflattering terms last year.

Now I hear you saying, But Diana! You were a Weird Horse Girl and we know you read all the horse books! Don’t play like it’s some vast unending desert! Friends, the great horses of literature are, with one obvious exception, British if they’re Thoroughbreds (National Velvet, King of the Wind) or belonging to some other wonderful breed if they’re American (the rest of the Henry ouvre). The great outlier of US Thoroughbred literature is the eponymous middle-grade series created by Joanna Campbell. There was an interesting novel released five or so years ago, Lord of Misrule, that captured the wonders and vagaries of the racetrack. There are the continued successes of Felix-As-Dick Francis and Sasscer Hill, both of whom write thrillers; there’s Bev Pettersen, a Fern Michaels series or two, and a very few other options in romance, where cowboys still reign supreme. One of my favorite young adult novels, The Scorpio Races, is a gorgeous blend of fantasy and hot-blooded racing. The Sport of Kings, released last year, attempted a Great American Novel through the lens of Thoroughbred breeding. Whether it succeeded is a post for another time. Of fiction titles across genre released in recent years, racing personality Jason Beem’s Southbound comes closest to the sugarplum vision dancing in my head. It’s got larger-than-life track characters, plenty of deep-dive industry details, and a gambling addict protagonist, but at core it’s a story of personal crisis and growth.

Overall, though, horse literature and Thoroughbred stories specifically seem aimed at one of two audiences: Weird Horse Girls aged around 12 and gambling men of A Certain Age. Like horses and racing themselves, if you think about it. Publishing seems to have internalized the idea that horses are a thing you love when you’re a kid--most of the long-lasting horse stories are considered to be for children--and then grow out of, and racing belongs to a graying fanbase.

I could wish for a full-throated upswell of racing stories, a Lexington Renaissance if you will, but at the least I wish for the dynamics, peculiarities, and beautiful, strange details of turf writing to cross the divide to fiction. Duel for the Crown, for instance, elucidates the story of Affirmed and Alydar as a metaphor for the state of racing at that time: the tensions between old blood and young upstarts, the war being fought between limestone and bluegrass. Joe Drape’s books are always historical, political, cultural--whether obvious, as with Black Maestro, or subtler, in how American Pharoah is less the story of the first Triple Crown winner since Affirmed and more a roadmap of modern racing. Headless Horsemen reads like a thriller, and I’m likelier to give it a reread than reach for any of the current racetrack thrillers on the strength of Squires�� writing alone. Ride To Win, nominally a highlights reel of great jockeys, acts as style manual, poignant memoir, and understated exposé all in one.

There is no reason for genre fiction, the arenas of crime and romance where it’s easiest to find Thoroughbreds, to be badly written, lazily characterized, poorly conceived, or skimpy on reality. The realities of racing are far more exciting than anything an author could come up with on their own (I say this as someone invested in translating bonkers headlines into fiction). Racing, like every other sport, is an industry that should make for colorful, multicultural, tense drama in fiction--yet the offerings for fans seeking portrayal on the page remain milquetoast and outdated at best.

The reading public often looks askance at genre fans. Romance, crime, sci-fi, and anything else that can committed to mass-market paperback is rarely considered Real Literature. Similarly, in the grand scheme of American sports, horse racing is the spinster aunt you rarely see at family functions. It makes a certain amount of sense that literature about the sport would be corralled off, the way that--in the mode of St. Patrick’s Day, when suddenly everyone is Irish--only on the first weekend in May does the rest of the country pretend like they’ve always been interested. But horse racing is vivid, overtly political, composed not just of hockey-playing owners and celeb chefs but of immigrants with dreams, outsized personalities, hard-ass women, truly ugly history. Two minutes of racing can be run a thousand times over with a different story each time. The sport contains multitudes, the utmost heights and depths of American culture. Its conservatism, real and perceived, is at odds with its reality: the horse wins or it doesn’t, and there is nothing any of us can do about it.