Dust and Spores

The Female Quixote / Charlotte Lennox
London : Penguin Books, 2006
Originally published: 1752
liii, 465 p.

Beautiful and independent, Arabella has been brought up in rural seclusion by her widowed father. Devoted to reading French romances, the sheltered young woman imagines all sorts of misadventures that can befall a heroine such as herself. As she makes forays into fashionable society in Bath and London, many scrapes and mortifications ensue -- all men seem like predators wishing to ravish her, she mistakes a cross-dressing prostitute for a distressed gentlewoman, and she risks her life by throwing herself into the Thames to avoid a potential seducer. Can Arabella be cured of her romantic delusions An immediate success when it first appeared in 1752, The Female Quixote is a wonderfully high-spirited parody in the style of Cervantes, and a telling and comic depiction of eighteenth-century English society.

Wow, I read this approximately infinity days ago and totally forgot to say anything about it, which is surprising because it took me over a month to finish because it gets a bit long and slightly repetitive. The plot is outlined above, and it progresses exactly how you'd expect an 18th-century romance about a girl like this would progress.

As I say, it's long and predictable. But honestly, it's excusable because a) there are parts that are genuinely funny, and b) the protagonist Arabella is just so darn likeable! Especially if you've read any French romances or even something like the Heptameron, you can understand how she can take the outdated women's mindset so seriously, and I found myself sympathizing with her despite her tiresome repetition of her strange sensibilities.

The book has problems, though. If you don't know the vast body of literature from which Arabella samples, you may find yourself skimming entire sections of synopsis. It's not so bad, though. Also, the ending feels very rushed. She has one conversation with one new character and VOILA LA SALADE, she is cured of her ridiculousness. They say it's because Lennox had enough material for X number of volumes, but not enough to have X+1 volumes, so she wrapped things up quickly. It's easy to overlook, though. Since the plot itself is so implausible, the ending, in my opinion, doesn't need to be too complex. The ending isn't the point of a book like this anyway, it's more to showcase silly situations that comment on the society at the time.

All in all: cute, but I'd suggest not making it your first foray into the world of 18th-century literature.

Gossip Girl / Cecily von Ziegesar
New York : Poppy, 2002
Gossip Girl series, bk. 1
199 p.

Enter the scandalous world of Gossip Girl -- a world inhabited by the city's most fabulous crowd; a world of jealousy, betrayal, and naughty pictures on the sides of buses.

Dudes, I read this book and I don't even know why. Wait yes, I know exactly why. What I don't know is why I read it through to the end.

Take Gossip Girl, the TV show. Remove all the characters' personality traits until they are down to one each. Make them somehow shallower. Remove all actual knowledge of fashion and culture and just namedrop major names. Stir, shake, give Jenny Humphrey a huge rack, and you get this book.

An inspiration for the show in name and setting only, these are really not worth bothering with as an adult fan.

Hosted by Bermuda Onion, the point of this meme is to share all the new words you came across this week. Yay!

Ok I haven't slept in two nights so let's get this over with. I read two or three books in a row that provided no words whatsoever, so I was glad to start a book today that gave me three in the first 30 pages.

These are from Spring Snow by Yukio Mishima.

cenotaph -- a tomb or a monument erected in honor of a person or group of persons whose remains are elsewhere

It had been composed with an artist's eye for structure: it really made it seem as if the thousands of soldiers who were present were arranged deliberately, like figures in a painting, to focus the entire attention of the viewer on the tall cenotaph of unpainted wood in their midst.

pellucid -- two definitions here: reflecting light evenly from all surfaces ; easy to understand

And the drop of ink spread, dull and gray, clouding everything in his heart that had been pellucid only a moment ago.

I think both definitions apply, but one is more metaphor pellucidness.

tonsure -- the practice of some religious sects of cutting the hair from the scalp of clerics, devotees, or holy people as a symbol of their renunciation of worldly fashion

After her ritual tonsuring, she declined to accept one of the benefices reserved for imperial princesses, deciding instead to found a new temple, one whose nuns would devote themselves to study of the scriptures.

Teaser Tuesday time again, hosted by MizB. How it works is you grab the book you're reading, open to a page, and pick a juicy two-sentence teaser. No spoilers, obviously.

Recently I started a book I picked up randomly because it was pretty, and it turned out to be (so far) an impressive work by a talented new author. The book is grotesque and disturbing. It's called Scorch Atlas by Blake Butler.

I'd put a finger to my forehead and say, MOMMY, and my child, taller than me, went: PAWOOO PAWEEEE!
Stubborn, like his father, with the straight white teeth to match.
The things I knew he'd never be.

The Summer of the Ubume / Natsuhiko Kyogoku
Ubume no natsu. English
New York : Vertical, 2009
Originally published: 1994
Translated by Alexander O. Smith with Elye J. Alexander
320 p.

A bizarre set of mysteries have befallen the Kuonji household. Kyoko Kuonji is said to be with child for the last twenty months, and her husband Makio disappeared a few months prior to her pregnancy. The odd circumstances have left the family with no one to turn to for help, until a freelance writer asks his exorcist friends to take on the case. The catch -- the exorcist does not believe in ghosts. To Akihiko "Kyogokudo" Chuzenji, the supernatural is as much metaphysical and mental as it is unearthly.

Initially, I picked up this book because it was a Japanese book marked "Mystery/Horror" on the back, so I thought it'd be a cool ghost story with Japanese spirits. And it was to some extent, but not at all the way I expected. There are a lot of good things to say about the novel, but it also has its faults and a certain first-novel roughness.

According to the text before the novel begins, in Japanese folklore when a pregnant woman dies before giving birth, it might give rise to an ubume, the spirit of a woman drenched in blood from the waist down trying to find someone to take her baby. I'd never heard of this before, but it has a lot of great story potential. Then the novel started, and it was about a man who spends lots of time with a sort of friend/mentor/eccentric and their involvement with the case of a man who disappeared from a locked room and the wife he left behind who is said to be 20 months pregnant and unable to give birth.

The eccentric man I mentioned is the driving force of the plot. He is the one who knows about spirits, psychology, and pretty much anything you could want to know, and he pieces together all the clues and solves the mysteries in very long passages of exposition. This book is very talky, and the conversations mostly consist of this character fielding opinions from other characters and telling them why he's right and they're wrong.

That's where this book kind of falters. The character is very obviously spouting the philosophy of the author, like the author had a lot of ideas he wanted to express, so he built a sort of skeleton story around them and used it to illustrate his points. But he makes no bones about it: the author's name is Kyogoku, and the charater who acts as his voice is named Kyogokudo.

But the mystery is definitely intriguing, especially because the opinions of Kyogokudo are so complex and seemingly contradictory. He talks of spirits and works as an exorcist, but he doesn't believe in ghosts. BUT he'll concede that ghosts and curses exist as far as other people believe in them. It's very confusing at first, and the theory he lays out has many holes, but the contradictions work because they leave the reader wondering the whole time whether the story will end with the mundane or the fantastic coming out ahead. The very flaws in the author's worldview give the book a lot of drive, which I don't think was intended.

Either way, since it's a mystery, I can't say much more about the plot. Some parts of the conclusion are extremely far-fetched, but it still makes for interesting reading. If you can suspend your disbelief and prepare yourself for a bit of talky psychological prosthelytizing, you'll probably find this book intriguing. If anything, the authors extensive knowledge of Japanese folklore is impressive, and you'll learn some neat things along the way.

Roald Dahl's Book of Ghost Stories.
New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984
Originally published: 1983
235 p.

Who better to investigate the literary spirit world than the supreme connoisseur of the unexpected, Roald Dahl? Of the many permutations of the macabre, Dahl was always especially fascinated by the classic ghost story. For this superbly disquieting collection, he selected fourteen of his favorite tales by such authors as E. F. Benson, Rosemary Timperley, and Edith Wharton.

Let me start out by saying that this is a fantastic collection of ghost stories. I was very impressed with his selections. The story is that Roald Dahl and some other dudes wanted to create a TV miniseries of ghost stories, so he read hundreds upon hundreds of the things, many of which were crap, and selected his very favorites. The miniseries never happened, so years later he compiled this book.

It starts with a really great introduction by Dahl talking about his experience exploring the genre and some of the things he learned. Definitely not one of those introductions you should skip over. Then come the stories.

There are too many for me to go through all of them, and I even have too many favorite for me to list them all without this going on and on, so I'm going to go the opposite route and keep it very short.

Basically what I enjoy about these stories is something that Dahl points out in the introduction, which is that in most of the best ghost stories, you never actually see the ghost. That's definitely true in most (not all) of these. As a result, while the ghosts are very often disturbing and creepy, the most haunting characters are the living, not the dead. One of the shortest and best stories in this is called "The Telephone" in which a man desperately makes phone calls to the ghost of his dead wife. It's told from the his new partner's perspective, so there's still this distance from the spirit, and the story is primarily about the man.

So not all the ghosts in this story are malevolent. A couple are bent on revenge, but there are also the ghosts of friendly children, lost loves, and a couple of Obvious Metaphor ghosts in the mix. The stories are mostly from the turn of the 20th century through the 1950's, so they've all got a sort of classic feel to them. This is definitely a collection worth owning and one I'll come back to.

The Murders in the Rue Morgue and Other Stories / Edgar Allan Poe.
Köln : Könemann, 1995
310 p.

The portrait painted by an artist robs his sitter of her life. A jester dwarf takes terrible revengo on the king and his court. The Red Death stalks the chambers of Prince Prospero. The razor-edged pendulum swings lower towards a prisoner of the Inquisition. And Montresor takes Fortunato to a dank Roman cellarage, to taste an Amontillado...

Ten of Edgar Allan Poe's great tales of horror, jeopardy and death, and the four classic tales with which he created a new genre, the detective story: 'The Gold-Bug', 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue', 'The Mystery of Marie Rogêt' and 'The Purloined Letter'.

Ok, so everybody knows who Edgar Allan Poe is, everybody thinks of him as that quintessential creepy author, and everybody can recite the opening lines to that poem from the Simpsons Halloween special. So believe me when I say that it is with great trepidation that I make the following statement:

Wow, guys, I really don't care at all for this dude's short stories.

I'll start at the beginning. The desire to read his short stories was first planted when I was in college taking a course called Opera on the U.S. Stage Since 1950. We watched this crappy old VHS copy of a very cool opera called "Ligeia", which was based on Poe's story of the same name. I loved the opera primarily for the story, which I found to be one of the smartest, most creepy and haunting stories I'd ever known.

So when I came across this collection in a used bookstore with "Ligeia" in it, it was a no-brainer. I finally read it this month, and that was definitely my favorite story of the bunch for all the same reasons I liked the opera.

Of the other stories, I also enjoyed "The Pit and the Pendulum" and "Hop-Frog" quite a bit. And to a lesser extent, "The Cask of Amontillado". The other ones just didn't do it for me. I divided them into two camps: "The Creepy" and "Those Mystery Ones".

The Creepy bunch bothered me because, yes, I understand that Poe was touching on some deep psychological ideas, but that's really all he did... touch on them. These are things that have since been taken and expanded upon such that the original ideas presented so tersely here do not really hold up. And people talk about recurring themes in these stories, one of which is the death and rebirth of a beautiful woman. The stories "Morella", "Ligeia", "Berenice", and "Eleonora" all fit this, but it's not just a recurring theme. It's a recurring plot. I felt like he was telling the same story over and over with minor variation. "Really? She was pretty? How pretty? Wow, that's pretty. Oh, she died? Crap. Don't worry, she'll be back. See, here come her teeth now!"

Those Mystery Ones I had a lot less tolerance for, perhaps because they were at the end of the collection. Spoiler alert, by the way, I'm about to give away the ending to one. Basically Poe would set up a murder mystery and then solve it. I understand that these are sort of proto-mystery stories, but they were so dryly presented. First the scene, then the facts quoted from false newspaper articles and then the solution. Here's the spoiler: The murders in the Rue Morgue were committed by an angry monkey. REALLY, Eddy? A monkey? The best part of these mysteries is how they can be solved in mundane ways. It's like reading a 400-page locked-room mystery novel to have the last page say "MAGIC IS REAL IT WAS SNAPE!"

But I get it. I see why these stories have lasted so long and the impact they've had on gothic and detective fiction. Really. I just don't see them as something I'd ever pick up again with the exception of the ones I mentioned liking.