Doldrums

[flemmings]

Have been earwormed all week by Steeleye Span's King Henry. Earworms usually have one line at least that relates to my current situation. This doesn't. But I was chuffed to learn that there actually is a Scots ballad that forms the basis for SS' version, but that the ballad has no music attached, so the composer borrowed one. Not that it sounds like Bonaparte's Retreat to me at all.

I managed to finish Ruth Rendell's The Speaker of Mandarin and that's it. Ordinarily I'd just go read more Rendell, but that's summer lassitude talking. None of my genre books inspires me with the desire to read; I reaĺly need cooler weather for those doorstoppers. So I had the bright idea of trying something Completely Different. I have a number of my mother's books, ganked from the home library thirty years ago: mostly stuff I thought I might want to read sometime in my old age etc. Well, old age is on me, so let's try something mainstream. In this case, Elizabeth Bowen's The Hotel. And it starts very nicely with a bunch of tween war expats summering in, I assume, the south of France. It could be the lead-in to an Agatha Christie mystery. But then it goes on and on, and no one is murdered, and I can't keep the various Mrses and Misses straight, and it becomes as much a chore as the genre works.

So I fall back on a Front Lawn Library Ian Rankin, which is probably not going to cheer me up, given past Rankins, but oh well. Yes, I know I should just forge on with Hamabe no Kafka, because when everything reads the same, Murakami's utterly mundane Japanese at least has the virtue of language practice. But I only have patience for a few pages at a time of that.

Roll on September...

Comments

[kore]

Oooh I love Elizabeth Bowen. I haven't read that one tho.

[flemmings]

I think it's her first, which may be why it's not doing anything for me.

[heliopausa.livejournal.com]

It's a terrific song - one of their best. I'm narked, though, that the story is described as "Beauty and the Beast, with genders reversed" - I would think that Beauty and the Beast should be described as "The Loathly Lady, with genders reversed".

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

But Disney never made a cartoon of The Loathly Lady! How could anyone know what you meant? Yeah, the LL predates B&tB, but the medium, it is all. (to say nothing of the subtext: beastly men can be good, beastly women not, and anyway it's a woman's job to save the man from the consequences of his bad behaviour, not the man's to free a woman from am unearned curse. Patriarchy, I tell you.)

[cesmith.livejournal.com]

I recently started Murakami's 1Q84 and I am enjoying it a lot. One of the things I like about his writing is that there are never too many characters and they all interconnect in some way, at some time. Makes it easier for this old brain to remember who is who and I love the pace of his stories too. Some days I hate putting my Kindle down to do something else.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

1Q84 was a fascinating read in Japanese. But I had to finish it in English because I Needed To Know, and then I zoomed through it too quickly. It was probably a good translation, but language scrim made the Japanese feel much more eerie and resonant. Or maybe the second half really is a lot more mundane than the inexplicable first and that climb down the iron ladder.

[cesmith.livejournal.com]

I honestly can't say if the translation is good or not but it has an unusual, descriptive and lyrical flow that most English authors do not have. I am only about half way through and it feels like everything is falling apart and remaking itself at the same time. I was excited to see how many of his books the Public Library carries in digital form. And yes, it started out so intensely that it was hard to settle into the story at first.

[cerberusia.livejournal.com]

King Henry is an absolute cracker of theirs - though, to be fair, I'll listen to anything Steeleye does. I saw them live a few months ago and they've still got It, though at 70-odd Maddy Prior's top notes aren't really there any more, alas. I've been earwormed with their Lord Randall for two days.

I've read absolutely no Murakami at all, despite having forayed into Yasunari Kawabata and Natsume Soseki. Any idea of where to start with his oeuvre?

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Lord, they're still going? Colour me impressed.

Murakami's an odd duck. He reads to me, in both Japanese and English, as quite watercolour, helped by his habit of referencing American culture items all over the place. Because I prefer genre to mainstream, I like his weird oeuvres like Kafka on the Shore and Hardboiled Wonderland, where the unlikely action dominates the prose. But the earlier works are shorter and more accessible, like Hear the Wind Sing. If you survived Kawabata, Murakami's attitude to women won't bother you, but it grates on me a touch when it's the main theme of the book.