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Book Chain, weeks 12 & 13
#17: Read a book with a title that starts with the same letter as the last name of the previous book's author.
First attempt: Jirel of Joiry by C.L. Moore, a collection of sword & sorcery stories that were first published in Weird Tales in the 1930s alongside the likes of Conan the Barbarian, but have the historical distinction of being written by a woman and having a female protagonist. (The first story has one of those openings where it spends a couple of pages describing a heroic armoured figure before the helmet comes off and everyone, presumably including the original readers, is surprised she's a woman.)
I don't much go in for 1930s weird tales to begin with, and in hindsight I'm not sure why I assumed I'd like these better just because there were more women involved. I gave up after reading three stories, each a catalogue of imaginatively unusual events experienced by a protagonist we barely get to know as a person, so that even when the events aren't just being arbitrarily odd (or conveniently Indescribable) there's not much emotional heft. Most of the time, she's off having solo adventures in uncanny spaces, so her on-page interactions with other human beings are brief and don't give much sense of emotional connection even when it's a human with whom she has an existing relationship (by which I mean colleagues and underlings; she doesn't appear to have any family or friends). Her most defined relationship and wellspring of emotion involves a guy she loathes and yet can't stop thinking about, which is a bit that people are still doing in Strong Female Character stories to this day and which I've always found off-putting. I would have given up after the first story except that the second story was a direct sequel and I wanted to see where it took things; after the second story I was willing to try a third, but at the end of the third the pendulum had come to rest at "I don't care what happens next".
Second attempt: John Brown: Queen Victoria's Highland Servant by Raymond Lamont-Brown. For a book that purports to be about John Brown, there's not a lot of John Brown in it; at least in the early chapters, it's more of an account of Queen Victoria's visits to Scotland and sometimes John Brown is also there. To some extent, that's expectable given that most of the remaining records about Brown are related to his activities in Victoria's service, and granting that the question of his relationship with Victoria can't be answered without knowing about her as well, but it did feel like the author was more interested in recounting her activities in minute detail than in talking about him. Perhaps the balance is redressed later in the book, but I ran out of patience to stick around and find out.
Third attempt, for the sake of moving things along, was Chris Van Allsburg's Jumanji, which is a lot shorter and less complicated than the movie it inspired, but still fun. I appreciated the turn it took at the end.
#18: Read a book in the same genre as the previous book.
Taking the genre as "short, plentifully illustrated children's book featuring animals", I opted for The Animals Noah Forgot by the Australian poet Banjo Paterson, which also counts for the June prompt in the Buzzword challenge (a word in the title related to remembering or forgetting). This is a collection of poetry about animals from the 1930s, which starts off with portraits of native wildlife like wombats and koalas (which are invariably "native bears", presumably for ease of rhyme and scansion); toward the end, the poems tend in a more domesticated direction, and include things like the tale of a misbehaving dog ("told in doggerel verse") and a rather Kipling-esque piece about mule-drivers in the Great War. Illustrations throughout by Norman Lindsay, who wrote and illustrated The Magic Pudding (among other things that the audience for children's poetry wouldn't be exposed to).
First attempt: Jirel of Joiry by C.L. Moore, a collection of sword & sorcery stories that were first published in Weird Tales in the 1930s alongside the likes of Conan the Barbarian, but have the historical distinction of being written by a woman and having a female protagonist. (The first story has one of those openings where it spends a couple of pages describing a heroic armoured figure before the helmet comes off and everyone, presumably including the original readers, is surprised she's a woman.)
I don't much go in for 1930s weird tales to begin with, and in hindsight I'm not sure why I assumed I'd like these better just because there were more women involved. I gave up after reading three stories, each a catalogue of imaginatively unusual events experienced by a protagonist we barely get to know as a person, so that even when the events aren't just being arbitrarily odd (or conveniently Indescribable) there's not much emotional heft. Most of the time, she's off having solo adventures in uncanny spaces, so her on-page interactions with other human beings are brief and don't give much sense of emotional connection even when it's a human with whom she has an existing relationship (by which I mean colleagues and underlings; she doesn't appear to have any family or friends). Her most defined relationship and wellspring of emotion involves a guy she loathes and yet can't stop thinking about, which is a bit that people are still doing in Strong Female Character stories to this day and which I've always found off-putting. I would have given up after the first story except that the second story was a direct sequel and I wanted to see where it took things; after the second story I was willing to try a third, but at the end of the third the pendulum had come to rest at "I don't care what happens next".
Second attempt: John Brown: Queen Victoria's Highland Servant by Raymond Lamont-Brown. For a book that purports to be about John Brown, there's not a lot of John Brown in it; at least in the early chapters, it's more of an account of Queen Victoria's visits to Scotland and sometimes John Brown is also there. To some extent, that's expectable given that most of the remaining records about Brown are related to his activities in Victoria's service, and granting that the question of his relationship with Victoria can't be answered without knowing about her as well, but it did feel like the author was more interested in recounting her activities in minute detail than in talking about him. Perhaps the balance is redressed later in the book, but I ran out of patience to stick around and find out.
Third attempt, for the sake of moving things along, was Chris Van Allsburg's Jumanji, which is a lot shorter and less complicated than the movie it inspired, but still fun. I appreciated the turn it took at the end.
#18: Read a book in the same genre as the previous book.
Taking the genre as "short, plentifully illustrated children's book featuring animals", I opted for The Animals Noah Forgot by the Australian poet Banjo Paterson, which also counts for the June prompt in the Buzzword challenge (a word in the title related to remembering or forgetting). This is a collection of poetry about animals from the 1930s, which starts off with portraits of native wildlife like wombats and koalas (which are invariably "native bears", presumably for ease of rhyme and scansion); toward the end, the poems tend in a more domesticated direction, and include things like the tale of a misbehaving dog ("told in doggerel verse") and a rather Kipling-esque piece about mule-drivers in the Great War. Illustrations throughout by Norman Lindsay, who wrote and illustrated The Magic Pudding (among other things that the audience for children's poetry wouldn't be exposed to).