Star’s Reading Blog

I finished Wuthering Heights last night. And I had a long entry about still being unimpressed, but you know what? It gave an incorrect impression of my reaction to the book. It gave the impression that I disliked it and was trying to find something good to say because I feel like I ought to. And that’s not the case. So I’m trying again.

I said earlier, I think, that I didn’t find the younger-Catherine/Linton romance terribly interesting. That’s not quite true. I didn’t find it as compelling as the romance between their parents. It didn’t keep me (figuratively, since this was an audiobook) turning pages, wanting to know what would happen. But I did actually find it an interesting angle on the whole star-crossed lovers bit. OK, you’re the children of feuding fathers. You manage to start up a little affair despite this. What happens next? Are you really so perfect for each other? When such a couple is united in matrimony at last, is it really the blissful ideal situation that a proper romantic story would build up to? The answer, of course, is a flat “no”. Different.

And that really is the thing about this. It’s unexpected. You don’t expect to set up a love triangle and then kill off the woman at the crux of it halfway through the book, but Bronte does just that. You expect a redemption arc for Heathcliff, expect him to become a better man, because he’s the romantic lead, and romantic leads always turn out to be good guys in the end, right? Except he never does, or if he does it’s out of madness and not actual redemption. You know the younger pair will marry from the beginning, of course, because younger-Catherine is introduced as Mrs. Heathcliff, Heathcliff’s daughter-in-law, but you expect it to be a happy marriage for the little time it lasts, especially once they begin their illicit correspondence. And it’s not.

That said, yeah, there are bits I don’t care for. Heathcliff is just a little too much. He has no humanity, not without Catherine haunting him. (If I were inclined to look deeper at this, I suppose I’d wonder if that were maybe the point. Unfortunately, it doesn’t make for very compelling reading even if it is the point.) He’s cruel and callous and single-minded, but in a way that I can’t admire or love to hate as I can with other villains. Romantic hero? No. Monster.

And… Sometimes things are just a little too convenient. The mystery of Heathcliff’s birth would have made great backstory, but it’s ignored. OK, I can live with that; sometimes the backstory isn’t the point. The part where he goes off for several years and comes back rich, though? That needs a little more explaining. I suppose it’s supposed to add to the mystery that is Heathcliff or something, but it just feels contrived to me. The births of the younger Catherine and of Linton are equally abrupt and jarring. We see both of their mothers during pregnancy, but never a word is said about either one being in that condition; the babies are just born, magically, as though from thin air. It gives me the feeling of “oh, right, I need my characters to have babies, here they are!” I suppose that may be a product of the time the story was written, though; this would have been a few years into Queen Victoria’s reign, and I’m uncertain whether that qualifies enough as “Victorian times” to assume that Victorian sensibilities would have prevented the author from mentioning such subjects as pregnancy.

The other thing was that I found the nested narrative somewhat difficult at times. It sometimes became difficult to tell who was telling the story at a given moment, especially if I had to put the book away in mid-flashback and come back to it some time later. I will concede, though, that it’s a unique way of telling the story, and that as long as you could follow it, it worked well. It just got a little cumbersome here and there.

So. There it is. Wuthering Heights. I’ve read it at last. Again, I find myself resorting to the “not my new favorite, may or may not reread, but glad I read it” category. A couple of random bits from the Wikipedia article on the book to finish off this entry:

“Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next novels often mention Heathcliff as the most tragic romantic hero. In Fforde’s book The Well of Lost Plots, it is revealed that all the characters of Wuthering Heights are required to attend group anger management sessions.” Which had me snickering just picturing it. I have got to read those books, too.

And, purely by coincidence: “In Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series, the main character, Bella Swan, is often seen with a battered copy of Wuthering Heights.” I have a vague feeling that I should be wincing in anticipation, but I’m doing my best to reserve judgement on poor Bella until I actually “meet” her.

I’ve been slow on reading lately, still, but I’ve had a few things I’ve wanted to say about the things I’ve read. Thought I’d jump-start the reading journal again. The new theme is one I was working on as a potential candidate for my regular blog, but I thought I’d just leave it here maybe. (It’s mostly pre-made; I just changed a little here and a little there.)

Please excuse the links in the sidebar; I don’t have the updated MyLinkOrder plugin for this version of Wordpress yet, so they’re in alphabetical rather than chronological order.

So. First post after the hiatus, general update, right?

Mansfield Park by Jane Austen is the audiobook I have most recently finished. One of the two of Austen’s novels that I hadn’t read before; the other is Northanger Abbey and I imagine will make its own appearance on my list soon. I am glad to have added to my experience with Austen’s work, but… Mansfield is certainly not my new favorite Austen novel. I spent most of the book wanting Fanny Price to grow a backbone already and realize that there is a difference between “cousin of inferior birth” and “doormat”. Unfortunately, she reminds me in uncomfortable ways of myself in high school; a rare case of identifying with the main character to the extent that such identification does not enhance the reading experience. The ending did surprise me coming from Austen (not even Lydia Bennet went so far as Mariah Bertram does, and Lydia’s conduct was most shocking indeed!), but ultimately felt thrown together and wrapped up in a little too much of a hurry after the long slow build to it. I’m not sorry to have read it, but doubt if I’ll seek it out for a reread.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte is my current audiobook; I’m only a few chapters from the end. Two factors led me to this book. One was that I had enjoyed sister Charlotte’s Jane Eyre and Villette so much that I thought I should branch out to the rest of the family. (And indeed, Anne is next on my list.) The other is that it’s one of those books that nearly everybody but me seems to be familiar with. So I thought I’d read it. I… hrm. I was quite drawn in by the relationship between Catherine the elder and Heathcliff, and found the exploration of it fairly interesting. Then the plot turned and the romantic-relationship focus became Catherine the younger and Linton, and… fizzle. I feel like I should be vastly interested in the psychology (or perhaps psychosis) of Heathcliff’s ultimate revenge on everyone who ever wronged him and his triumph over the world in general. (Or I’m sure that’s how he sees it, anyway.) I’m not. I feel like I’m just waiting for the inevitable end of the story to come. Not waiting in the sense of feeling a sense of anticipation, but just kind of… Are we there yet? Again, I’m not (at this point) necessarily sorry to have read it, if only because it’s a book I feel I ought to be familiar with, but I don’t feel the need at this point to ever read it again either.

Two to Conquer, by Marion Zimmer Bradley, is my current print book. I have been meandering back through the Darkover series off and on for a while now, having always enjoyed it in the past and realized it’s been too long since I’ve read any of it. I find myself oddly disappointed with this one. I don’t like the main character. And that in and of itself is not a fatal flaw, but… I don’t even like reading about him, really. The story in and of itself is interesting, and that’s what keeps me going. But Bard? His attitude toward women is so exaggeratedly misogynistic and possessive that it’s difficult to read him as anything more than a cartoon character most of the time. And, I mean, it’s not that it’s a totally unreasonable attitude for a character to have in that sort of a setting, but it’s just… so overwhelming it’s hard for me, as a modern American woman, to relate at all to it or find it remotely believable. But very little is read without merit; it gives me some things to watch out for in my own writing. Andran is going to be as difficult to characterize, in his own way. And the rest of the book is not without its interesting points anyway. I’ve just read through a passage describing a sacred island at the center of a lake, reachable only with the will of the Goddess and her priestesses and by a boat that will not go there except under the proper conditions, which is eerily reminiscent of another work of Bradley’s, the Avalon of Mists of fame. And Varzil the Good has just finally put in an appearance, so perhaps we’ll get a little more momentum and get past Bard’s tendency to spell women into submitting to his attentions and then claim it wasn’t rape because the woman “wanted” it.

Next up… Jen’s lending me her copy of Twilight (see main blog), and in audiobooks I’ll move on to Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hill.

Since I’m not really doing anything with the reading blog right at the moment, I’m going to “borrow” it for a test environment as I try to revamp the look of my main blog. Things may get a little messy. Be sure to wear your hard hats and steel toes, and beware of flying code.

OK. This blog is getting cut off for the moment. I’m entirely too stressed out and trying to make cuts where I can. Keeping up with the reading journal isn’t much, but it’s another thing on the checklist of “things to do”. So for now… If I have anything to say about what I’m reading I’ll just have to say it in my regular blog.

I doubt much of anyone (other than maybe Sarah Kathryn) is reading it anyway, so hopefully this won’t be too much of a loss.

Cassilde. It was Cassilde, not Callista, and I may have gotten Jeff’s true name wrong, and oh this is embarrassing. I can’t believe I got so confused so easily over critical details from a book I just read. How horribly embarrassing. This is one of those “why do I have a public reading journal again?” moments. *sigh*

Whoops. Big mistake there. And perhaps I remembered wrong, for if this is right (and it is) can Callista have been who Jeff saw, pregnant, killed? Damon isn’t Jeff’s father. Jeff was named for him, truly named Damon Ridenow, but because Damon is his grandfather; Cleindori is Damon’s daughter, though not by Callista or Ellemir. If I’d read on a little more I would have realized that.

Which mean that it’s a generation’s time between this book and Jeff’s early memories in The Bloody Sun, and a daughter not yet conceived grows to womanhood between now and then, so it cannot be Callista, can it? And yet I was sure that was the name. A daughter named for her, perhaps? I wish I could remember, and I’ll forget to check the book itself when I get home and have access to it.

Darkover does not disappoint. It is as grand, as enthralling, as my memory promised. (Though again I stumbled upon bits and pieces of characters I seem to have drawn from, all unaware, in my own writing; reflections of both Damon and Callista show in Alex. Le sigh.)

In The Forbidden Tower, the one thing grating on me a little is the constant “look how alien Andrew is in Darkovan culture!” theme. I have trouble complaining too much, because it’s realistic at least, but at the same time, that note just keeps on getting hit and hit and hit and hit, and after a while it kind of gets to the “yes, I know, can we get on with it?” stage.

Nonetheless, I am still enjoying this book very much. I’m near the end, now, and realizing that the scope of it was not quite what I thought at first and this is not going to tie directly to The Bloody Sun; there, I think Ellemir might have been gone, and possibly Andrew, though I don’t remember for certain. Callista was certainly still around; when his memory is at last freed, Jeff remembers seeing her, heavily pregnant, cut down. Damon I think was either still there or only recently gone; wasn’t it he who turned out to be Jeff’s actual biological father? I’ve only just read it and my memory is already hazy, buried too deeply in an earlier storyline to remember the details clearly. And of course, there, there was Cleindori, Dorilys of Arilinn, who went to the Tower to be trained the old way and discover a new, and threw tradition back in Arilinn’s face by continuing to function as Keeper not only after she was no longer virgin, but after bearing a child. Whee! But surely that can’t all happen between now and the end of the book; there’s too little left, maybe a chapter at most.

The oddest thing about this book is the blurb on the back, which describes four people who find themselves in defiance of Ancient Darkover, with said society uniting to resist what it saw as an unnatural alliance. The thing is, though, that this kind of confrontation only happens in the last chapters of the book; before that, the four in question are mostly focused on undoing Callista’s repressive training and are content to simply think blasphemous thoughts rather than come out and openly defy the authorities.

For the moment… You know that moment when you just feel the weight of the story behind the narration, swinging at you like a heavy hammerblow, everything coming together and presenting itself as one big blaze of glory? I don’t mean the climax of the book here, although the two sometimes coincide. Just a moment where you either want to cheer the characters on, or find yourself sitting stock-still, almost afraid to breathe, because Something Important has just smacked you upside the head. It’s the moment where the soundtrack builds to a crescendo and then goes suddenly silent just at the peak of it.

“And as for myself,” and now he faced Leonie and flung the words, deliberately, straight at her, “I am Keeper, and responsible only to my own conscience.”

And all the hard work Damon’s put in without even realizing it, all the internal struggle he’s gone through, everything comes together, and he faces Leonie Hastur–Leonie Hastur–on equal ground, Keeper to Keeper, and comes into his own.

If only his society would let him, that is, he would. But in the mind’s eye of the reader, Darkovan society be damned, he is a Keeper.

Boom.

Wow. And here I thought this was going to be a short entry.

This FAQ is really interesting and fun to read, not to mention giving some valuable insight for those of us who fancy we might someday have the talent to write novels. Or even just a novel, which would suit me admirably, but that’s another topic. I may have to start reading her blog. There are also some interesting thoughts about other authors’ work scattered here and there, such as:

In Tolkien it’s the strength of Story that seizes me irresistably and bears me away, through all 1000-plus pages of small print. I’m aware, at least some of the time, of his defects: there are no women at all in LOTR, although Galadriel at least has a few lines and Eowyn almost gets to do something (although Merry does it first); everybody speaks Old High Forsoothly, except the hobbits, who incline to Early Public Schoolboy; and there are an awful lot of things that seem to be tall and fair, or as clear as clear water, or that shine like silver, or that are silver and shine like the stars, or that are dusk-silver as water under the stars, or . . . well, if you’ve read Tolkien, you know what I mean. And speaking of fair, there aren’t any non-Anglos in the book either, except on the wrong side.

I don’t know why none of this ruins the story for me. It should. Similar shortcomings have ruined many other books for me.

Exactly. I’m perfectly aware of Tolkien’s flaws too. (McKinley has touched on it with the 1000-plus pages of tiny type, but doesn’t actually list one of the ones I’ve heard most often: too long-winded.) And yet I love Lord of the Rings, despite all its flaws, and roll my eyes at Peter Jackson’s obvious attempts to “fix” some of the flaws in his (actually very good but still off in some places) recent film adaptation. (For example, promoting Arwen and Galadriel to larger roles. Especially Arwen.)

I think one big thing about it, for me, is the sheer scale of the thing. Tolkien didn’t just write a novel. He created a world, complete with people and mythology and languages and everything. And he didn’t just kind of sketch it out, either; this is a rich, detailed world that jumps off the paper at you and lives. And this is what so many of those other books don’t have. They share Tolkien’s flaws, but not his virtues.

As I’ve been reading Beauty to Natalie, I’ve noticed that it bears a striking resemblance to a certain other retelling of the tale, one perhaps more famous: the Disney animated film. They’re nowhere near the exact same story, but there are similarities enough to think that the one must have influenced the other. (My copy of the book even dresses Beauty in a somewhat familiar-looking yellow gown for its cover illustration, IIRC.) I hadn’t the foggiest idea when the book had been published, though, so I googled Robin McKinley to see which came first.

I got sidetracked, of course, by a question in the FAQ at McKinley’s site, particularly the question about movies not being made from her work. The answer itself is quite interesting to read, and enlightening to some extent, but buried within it I unexpectedly ran across this:

Of the rest, well, a lot of my readers seem to think Disney read Beauty before they made their Beauty and the Beast — which is another question I get asked, Did Disney pay me for/acknowledge their debt to Beauty? No. And if I wanted to pursue this, they would say they don’t owe me a thing, and stomp me like a bug, so I’m not pursuing it.

Well. That’s that, then, I suppose. Although personally, I hadn’t thought the two so very similar that Disney should owe McKinley anything, or at least anything monetary; inspiration, not plagarization, was more my train of thought.

Well, I’m done with it. I wasn’t entirely sure how to rate it; it’s better than a three-and-a-half star, but while it’s a good book, it doesn’t enthrall me the way I’d normally like from a four-star. Oh, well.

Pullman has a knack for keeping the reader… off-balance. I don’t mean that the way I’d mean it with some other authors, that you learn to expect the unexpected plot twists. But he doesn’t let you get comfy and all settled into typical expectations, either. In a typical book, Asriel would have turned out to be the good guy in the end. But he doesn’t, he’s as mad and as wicked as Mrs. Coulter in his own way, and Pullman really never pretends otherwise. That Lyra assumes otherwise, and readers may presume they can trust her perception (despite having been shown over and over that Lyra is an accomplished liar and her perceptions are immature and limited), does not change the facts of the matter.

I’d heard that in the end “God” turns out to be some sort of insane angel, and I fear listening to this in audiobook format may have spoiled that for me a little bit. Just reading it, in print, it wouldn’t have clicked; but listening to the audiobook sounds out the names for me. Asriel. Azrael. The archangel of death. I may be jumping to conclusions here, but given Asriel’s actions at the end of the book (where, indeed, Mrs. Coulter almost comes off as the good guy, or at least the sane one) I would be surprised to be wrong. I guess it’s not really a spoiler, it’s there for anyone to see, but as I said it’s something that wouldn’t have clicked if I hadn’t heard the name rather than read it.

After having finished the book, though, I’m a little unclear about how they’re going to pull off the movies without much mention of religion. There isn’t much in this book that would be affected by modifying it to a secular setting… until you get close to the end and realize that the nature of Dust is all tied up in original sin and the Garden of Eden. Hrm.