#for a second i was like what if i reread Conrad's fate

[wondereads]

Personal Review (06/27/21)

The Chronicles of Chrestomanci by Diana Wynne Jones

Why am I reviewing this book?

Once again, some childhood favorites. These books are good for all ages, and I think something light-hearted is good after The Poppy War. This one will be a full series review like my one for The Sisters Grimm.

Want something short and sweet? Check out my tiktok

Charmed Life 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

In the first book, Eric "Cat" Chant and his sister, Gwendolen, a talented witch, are taken in by a powerful magician known only as Chrestomanci. This one is pretty good; there's a subtle build-up that I love. Things very gradually start to reveal themselves. Cat is an interesting character because he not a very good hero due to his apathy and cowardice, but he develops quite a bit. Unfortunately, it is a bit slow in the middle, and I think the first and second book should be switched in because while Charmed Life is a good one, it can get confusing.

The Nine Lives of Christopher Chant 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

I think this one should've been the first, even if it would be a little bit of a spoiler about Chrstomanci's character. Christopher Chant explores places he calls the Almost Anywheres in his dreams and starts to use this ability to help his uncle's business, but there's something more to his magic. I love Christopher, and I think the constant mistrust and manipulation around him plays wonderfully into his disdain for authority figures. Tacroy and the Goddess are also absolutely wonderful supporting characters that have their own motivations and development alongside Christopher. The descriptions of the different worlds, the explanation of how the series work, and even Christopher's magic lessons are so interesting, which is why I think this book would better serve as the first one.

The Magicians of Caprona 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Tonino and Paolo Montana, two brothers, are a part of the most esteemed magic house is Caprona, Italy, except for the vile Casa Petrocchi. The rivalry between the two houses has endured for decades, but that may need to change as war brews, spells weaken, and a mysterious enchanter causes trouble. Imagine Romeo and Juliet but everyone has magic and it's about their younger siblings who have so much more common sense. That's this book. There isn't much of the actual Chrestomanci in this one, but I do really like Tonino and Angelica, and there are some parts that are amazingly suspenseful. Also, it's a good lesson on hate for the sake of hate and how it is made not born.

Witch Week 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

In a world where witches are still burned at the stake, someone in Class 6B at a boarding school is accused of being a witch. While this is a pretty good book, it's probably my least favorite of the six simply because it's so miserable for a good majority. It's actually very clever and intricate, but it probably has the least reread value for me just because their world seems so depressing and hopeless that it infects me. Still, the characters are all very interesting, especially because they're all sixth graders that act remarkably like sixth graders as in they would prefer to get revenge on bullies and escape school than save the world.

Conrad's Fate 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Conrad Tesdinic is sent to the grand Stallery Mansion in order to kill someone he ought to have in his past life to avoid a fate ending in death. I sometimes wonder about Diana Wynne Jones' home life because so many of her uncles and mothers and aunts and whatnot are always so manipulative and horrible. The idea of 'pulling possibilities' is so interesting, and it was great to have Christopher there. If you read The Lives of Christopher Chant before this one the first part of the book is quite funny when Conrad doesn't know who Christopher is. I definitely liked this one even if the family relationships were terribly complicated.

The Pinhoe Egg 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

I think this one is my favorite. Marianne Pinhoe and Cat Chant meet through odd circumstances and deal with a mad witch matriarch, a mysterious egg, and multiple frustrating spells. I love Cat and Marianne, and if you read Charmed Life before this one it's so pleasant to see how Cat has developed and learned. This one has a special place in my heart because it was the only one in my elementary school library, but it's also just an interesting, compelling story with lots of good worldbuilding around witchcraft.

Overall 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

If you're going to read these books, you must be prepared to be frustrated. There's something about Jones' writing where the characters actually figure out what's going on quite early on, it's just that figuring out why it's happening and how to stop takes quite a while and some ingenious thinking. I love the magic system (which I am not ashamed to admit has influenced my own writing quite a bit), and I wish there were some reference books, like there are for Harry Potter, about the different worlds. These books are aimed at younger audiences, and the main characters are usually 10-13 years old, but any age can read these and be entertained. I would recommend this series for people who enjoy fantasy, Harry Potter, and books that are only loosely connected.

[readingbooksinisrael]

Mid-Year Book Freakout Tag 2020 📚

Thanks for tagging me @therefugeofbooks. June never seems like the middle of the year for me, yet here we are, almost exactly halfway through June.

1. Best book you’ve read so far in 2020:

Oh, man. Only one? Well, I reread Spinning Silver/Naomi Novik. And I read for the first time Dread Nation/Justina Ireland (I really need to get to the sequel).

2. Best sequel you’ve read so far in 2020: 

Forest of Secrets/Erin Hunter. I’m maybe still just on a high from having just read it, but I really enjoyed Cinderpaw and Yellowheart’s relationship and as individuals and, of course, the final battle.

3. New release you haven’t read yet: 

Rick/Alex Gino (I loved George, but I’m unsure about this one)

Clap When You Land/Elizabeth Acevedo (I heard about this one from Colby Sharp’s youtube channel and it seemed good even if I’m hesitant about it being in verse)

Devolution/Max Brooks (I really liked World War Z and I was so excited for this one I pre-ordered it from my library. I have it out now, but I don’t know how soon I’ll be able to get to it.)

4. Most anticipated release for the second half of the year: 

Contrary to what it seems above I don’t really pay attention to releases so the only one I have noted at all is Lycanthropy and Other Chronic Illnesses/Kristen O’Neal. This sounds really funny, plus my life this year has been taken up in doctor’s appointments so relatable too.

5. Biggest disappointment: 

Conrad’s Fate/Diana Wynne Jones. It had a plot point that was xenophobic. I think I also like her Hebrew translator’s style better than hers.

6. Biggest surprise: 

Jacob Have I Loved/Katherine Paterson. I read Bridge to Terabathis too young, but finally decided to give Katherine Paterson another chance, But the thing is not only that-if you had told me the plot or impressed on me the style of writing before I read it I would’ve thought I wouldn’t enjoy it at all, but I really did.

7. Favorite new author (debut or new to you): 

I wish I had some that I read more than one thing by them but here are a few that I hope to read some more by: Justina Ireland, Patrick Quentin, Erik Larson, Julie Fogliano, Connie Willis, C.L. Polk, Lindsay Lackey, (Cece Bell)

8. Newest fictional crush/newest favorite character: 

Dr. Mary Ahrens from Doomsday Book/Connie Willis. She’s so amazing. Also, she experienced a plague when she was 19 in 2020 (this book was published in 1992).

9. Book that made you cry: 

The Departure/K.A. Applegate, though it was a mix of physical disgust and actual emotion.

10. Book that made you happy: 

I reread quite a bit of James Herriot, which is always a good choice (though not all of the stories are happy).

11. Favorite book to film adaptation you saw this year: 

I saw exactly two moves this year so does Frozen 2 count?

12. Most beautiful book you’ve bought or received this year so far: 

Again, that’s only two, which makes it Chrestomanci, Volume 3.

13. Book you need to read by the end of the year: 

Uh, quite a lot, but also nothing. I want to read but I’m not stressing it so I don’t need to.

Tagging: @beem-of-the-books @anassarhenisch @zarinaa113 @cinnasbooks and @janeandthehivequeen

[antiquery]

the other day kit, camille and i were having a discussion on twitter about the bacchae that eventually swung toward nietzsche by way of lovecraft, and long story short cam dug up this essay, which is someone’s university of stockholm ma thesis about the randolph carter stories (which, huge mood, but i digress), and it got me thinking about narrative necessity. let me explain.

so the problem karlson is addressing is, namely, why carter, uniquely of lovecraft’s protagonists, brushes up against the strange and otherworldly time and time again, and still gets a happy ending. that doesn’t happen in any other stories, for obvious reasons— for lovecraft everything outside the human purview is soul-shattering, so incomprehensible that even partial knowledge of it breaks us. why? because, if it is so fundamentally not meant for us, it is a marker of our own cosmic insignificance (excellent essay on this in the context of plato and classical philosophy). it is a proof of the fact that we are less epicurean atoms and void and more one single atom, infinitesimally small, and therefore our existence is meaningless. to understand, really and truly, such meaninglessness— that’s what it means to go mad. that’s what madness is, a comprehension of the truth. (it’s all very modernist; last year i wrote a mock conference paper on the correlations between lovecraft’s external, universal nihilism and joseph conrad’s internal, civilizational treatment of the same philosophy.)

ergo, even to brush up against the supernatural is to gain a fragment of that understanding, however small, and correspondingly to skirt along the edge of madness. lovecraft’s protagonists who experience this kind of thing, who come into contact with the other, they’re never the same— either they die horrible deaths, or they go entirely insane, or they live out the rest of their lives haunted, like marlow in heart of darkness or lockwood in wuthering heights, eternally set apart from the rest of humanity by the burden of the truth they know as a result of their experiences. 

but the thing is— excluding “through the gates of the silver key” on account of its status as work originated by another author & therefore closer to the derleth contributions than anything else (e. hoffman price you can publish your dream cycle fanfiction on ao3 like the rest of us schmucks)— randolph carter, lovecraft’s most frequently recurring human character, the person in the mythos who has brushes with the supernatural more frequently than anyone else— is the exception to that rule. he doesn’t go mad, he’s not killed, he— well, it wouldn’t be quite correct to say he isn’t set apart from the rest of society, but it isn’t in that specific, quintessentially gothic way. the worst that ultimately happens to him is that he has to suffer through a couple decades of ennui, and that’s due to his removal from contact with the supernatural, rather than the inverse. and! not only does he not suffer from his contact with the outside in the way every single one of lovecraft’s other protagonists does, he actively benefits from it! the dreamlands are a profoundly beautiful and wondrous place, an escape from the dull mundanity of the waking world; the silver key proves the ultimate solution to his ennui, though it produces the sort of time distortion lovecraft will later consider as a source of horror in stories like “the shadow out of time.” ruthanna emrys, in her write-up of the story for tor’s lovecraft reread series, calls the story (and, by extension, carter’s arc as a whole) “the flip side of cosmic horror,” and she’s right. here, the scales of fear and wonder tip to the latter side in a way they do precious few times in lovecraft; here, we see the supernatural as a source of awe and enlightenment, as an almost voltairean embrace of the vastness of the cosmos not as a thing to be feared, but as a thing to wonder at, and even be joyful of. 

(it’s a very enlightenment idea, this sense of the illumination of the infinite, but that’s a subject for another time.)

the question we have to ask, then, is why? why does it make sense for there to be an exception to the rule of truth-as-madness that permeates lovecraft’s work; why, in a universe that everyone characterizes— that lovecraft himself characterizes— as vast and cold and despairingly empty, soul-crushingly apathetic; why there, of all places, do we find this astronomically improbable happy ending? why should randolph carter get to become king of a dream-city, why should he get to wonder wholeheartedly at a cosmos that we’ve been told over and over again should instill fear and dread? (a secondary question: why him specifically?) why? where did the formula go wrong? what are we missing?

to be entirely honest, i don’t know. i don’t think most critics do, and the thesis that inspired this post doesn’t really seem sure of itself either. it’s not, i don’t think, about carter himself; as much as i like him (and i do like him a great deal) lovecraft was never very good with characters and carter is a protagonist off of the same basic template of most of his peers who find themselves with far worse fates: white male upper-class new-englander gentleman-scholar of financial means, a predilection for the occult, and a profound lack of genre savvy. (this type of protagonist didn’t originate with lovecraft, to be sure, but it’s the one he wrote almost exclusively.) in horror fiction, these are a dime-a-dozen. master dreamer though he is, it’s nothing— nothing specific about carter the character, that demands a happy ending. no, i think it’s something else, and i find myself coming back over and over again to this terry pratchett quote, from a slip of the keyboard:

Why does the third of the three brothers, who shares his food with the old woman in the wood, go on to become king of the country? Why does James Bond manage to disarm the nuclear bomb a few seconds before it goes off rather than, as it were, a few seconds afterwards? Because a universe where that did not happen would be a dark and hostile place. Let there be goblin hordes, let there be terrible environmental threats, let there be giant mutated slugs if you really must, but let there also be hope. It may be a grim, thin hope, an Arthurian sword at sunset, but let us know that we do not live in vain.

lovecraft’s universe is— it is dark and hostile, immensely so. it is a place of ultimate chaos and despair and horror, wherein we are insignificant and meaningless. it is all of those things, profoundly. it is the most unlikely place in the world in which to find a happy ending. 

but we do.

we do, because we have to. we do, because we are human, and we very simply cannot abide stories in which there is no hope. stories in which we are told that we do live in vain, stories in which all is black and cold, form and void with no reason, no light— we recoil from those, because we do, to quote terry again, need fantasy to be human. even in the worst timeline! even when we live vulnerable to creatures that would like nothing more than to eat us for lunch, even when we spend our tiny ephemeral lives doing and experiencing awful things— even if humans are mean creatures in both senses of the word,, even when we cannot see the light, even then. even then, it has to be there— if not in the world around us, then in our stories. a universe where randolph carter died at the end of dream quest of unknown kadath or spent the rest of his life stuck in the waking world would be as deeply, unconscionably cruel as the universe in which james bond didn’t manage to disarm the nuclear bomb, or where the third brother wandered in the wood forever.

in my mind, the takeaway from the carter stories (one of many takeaways, really) is this: in the darkest of universes, there is that tiny glimmer of light. it is a grim, thin hope, but it is there, because it has to be. no matter what lovecraft says, no matter what the rule of his cosmos, it is there. and because it is there, we are not bound to horror— we can have a happy ending, we can push past fear and into wonder, we can find that arthurian sword in the most dim and unlikely of places, glowing faintly in the light of the sunset. 

we ought to remember that.

[pallakparadox-blog]

The Paper House by Carlos Maria Dominguez

There is such a book that reading it once isn’t enough. It feels like there is something in the book. Sometimes even after rereading it for thrice or fourth time, we keep coming back to it. Just like a human, a book also possesses a life of its own. Only at certain pages or even the moment we read the first sentence, we are hooked. We deeply fell in love with the book. For me, The Paper House by Carloz Maria Dominquez fell into this category.

The author managed to find his way to narrate the story in such a captivating way that you can’t put it down. I read it in one sit. It’s brilliant for a short book which only consists of 76 pages compiling the story of all kinds of bibliophiles’ dilemma.  ‘Book accompanies me anywhere I go. It became one sort of protection. A shelter in summer. A shield from windy weather. Books are my home’, is an example of one of the phrases in the book which beautifully demonstrate bibliophile’s passion towards his/her books.

As for every avid reader, books are known to change the reader’s mind and lives. This book began with a tragic story of Bluma, a literature lecturer who died in an accident right after turning at the first junction from the bookstore whilst reading the second poems from her new book, the Emily Dickinson’s poem collection. Bluma’s death becomes the beginning of the protagonist’s journey whose name is untold until the end of the book to explore the fascinating world of bibliophiles. A love for books isn’t just a thing, it is a real thing. 

After the incident, the protagonist is said to take over Bluma’s position in her university.  One fine morning, he received a mysterious package which contained a rare edition of La linea de sombre by Joseph Conrad which was addressed to Bluma without a sender’s name and address. Bluma’s handwritten note in the book, it is said the book was meant for someone called Carlos from Uruguay. Following his curiosity, he the protagonist, went back to his hometown to search for Carlos. His search for Carlos met him with a hardcore book lover and seller in Montevideo named Dinaldi which then gave him the hint of Carlos’s whereabouts.

Following this, he met Delgado at his apartment as suggested by Dinaldi. Delgado described Carlos’ house filled with books in every corner from his kitchen to the bathroom. He even gave his car to one of his friends in order to accommodate more books in his garage. He was an avid reader who read or at least tried to read all of his collection. He owned around twenty thousand books. He spent all his life building his own personal library. Unfortunately, Carlos sold his house and moved somewhere in the outskirt of Uruguay.

His displacement was triggered when his index bookshelves got burned, which prevents him from categorizing his whole collection. Even though all the books survived the fire, this incident frustrated him so much and that he decided to move somewhere. By renting a truck, he transferred all his books with him 200kms to a place near the sea, called Rocha. This was when Carlos’ obsession got weird, resulting in him building a hut made out of paper to protect his books. If we look at the beginning of the book, the story mostly lies on the bibliophiles’ restlessness to gain more and more books and even thinking to add more bookshelves to accommodate their existing bursting books. Interestingly enough, the tragedy where Carlos was in, had given him a new worry to figure it out what is the fate of all his books will be? What happens if a disaster were to occur and thousands of books were trapped in Rocha, unused and unread without an owner? By this, the novel ends without a euphoria towards books but, grief. Interesting.

Mengembara ke sebuah kehidupan yang isinya cerita2 tentang kecintaan terhadap buku. Membaca ini seperti menyuguh teh di pagi hari,bukan hanya membuat hatimu berbunga, tapi juga berwarna. Menyegarkan. ~indaq.