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Classic and Timeless
Nov. 12th, 2019 10:23 amLet's get the easy one out of the way first. A few weeks ago, my brother invited me to a recording of the Radio 4 show, Natalie Haynes Stands Up For The Classics. Due to logistical issues, we didn't get to go, though, so I was delighted when he sent me the first four seasons on Audible for my birthday. In each 27 minute episode, Natalie picks a figure from the ancient world (usually Greek or Roman) and talks about their life and work, with appropriate guests to add extra information. The double meaning of the title is that she used to be a stand-up comedian, and approaches her subjects in a usually quite light-hearted way. The show is really fun, and I enjoyed listening to it as a break from my usual thriller/YA audio selections.
There was some iffy suicide humour in the first few episodes, but I generally found all of them both amusing and educational. My favourite was the Cicero episode, in which Natalie presented him as the forerunner of courtroom dramas and then got really annoyed at Shakespeare for not giving Cicero a big enough role in Julius Caesar. I also loved the way Professor Llewellyn Morgan's Welsh accent only came out when he was quoting in Latin - very lovely!
So, fun and informative, and I'd love to see the live recording if another opportunity presents itself.
Yesterday, I finished reading The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern, which I have been eagerly awaiting since I found out about its upcoming publication, back in January. I haven't been waiting for a second Erin Morgenstern book as long as most people, since I only read The Night Circus for the first time in January 2017 (it was originally published in 2012), but it has become one of my all-time favourite books, so expectations were high. And, don't get me wrong - The Starless Sea is an amazing book. But I had some difficulty reading it and I'm now having difficulty collating my thoughts.
At the most basic level, it's about a grad student named Zachary who discovers a secret underground world that's sort-of a library but also so much more, and gets embroiled in a conflict between two factions with very different ideas about how it should be run/protected/preserved.
But it's far from a simple narrative. It starts in quite a distancing way, with three short chapters that have no named characters and seem completely disconnected from on another, before we finally meet Zachary and the story proper (as it seems) actually begins.
It's all very meta, with overtones of If On A Winter's Night A Traveller by Italo Calvino, and a lot of in-story discussion of the way stories work and how people interact with them. Some of the characters want to be in a book, others already are, and there's a lot of switching between the 'active present' of the narrative and chapters of the books that are found and read by those who don't yet know they're in a story.
There are a lot of references to other real-life fictional worlds (if you know what I mean), most of which involve characters discovering magical realms that are hidden from the 'real' world - eg Harry Potter, Narnia, The Magicians, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Calvin & Hobbes - which seemed a bit on the nose to me in places.
As I was expecting from Erin Morgenstern, the world-building and descriptive writing is wonderful. There's not a huge amount of forward motion in terms of plot, at least until the second half, but I was very happy wandering around with Zachary and just looking at everything. And I love the idea of a library where the books are automatically in whatever language you need them to be in, and where the text is clear and crisp, even if you've lost your glasses.
But something kept me from really falling into the world of the book, and I weirdly found it impossible to read it for more than about half an hour at a time. There's a hell of a lot to take in and, while I love the fables and snippets from the books-within-books and how they all eventually connect together, I found it hard to keep all the details of the different threads in my mind, in order to be able to fully recognise the significance of later links and references.
I didn't initially find it as emotionally involving as The Night Circus, but I certainly wanted to persevere to find out how it all came together - and it had me in tears by the very end. It's gloriously meta, impressively constructed, and leaves an amazing sense of a vast and intricate world that exists far outside the bounds of the story being told.
I think what I really need to do is read it again...
There was some iffy suicide humour in the first few episodes, but I generally found all of them both amusing and educational. My favourite was the Cicero episode, in which Natalie presented him as the forerunner of courtroom dramas and then got really annoyed at Shakespeare for not giving Cicero a big enough role in Julius Caesar. I also loved the way Professor Llewellyn Morgan's Welsh accent only came out when he was quoting in Latin - very lovely!
So, fun and informative, and I'd love to see the live recording if another opportunity presents itself.
Yesterday, I finished reading The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern, which I have been eagerly awaiting since I found out about its upcoming publication, back in January. I haven't been waiting for a second Erin Morgenstern book as long as most people, since I only read The Night Circus for the first time in January 2017 (it was originally published in 2012), but it has become one of my all-time favourite books, so expectations were high. And, don't get me wrong - The Starless Sea is an amazing book. But I had some difficulty reading it and I'm now having difficulty collating my thoughts.
At the most basic level, it's about a grad student named Zachary who discovers a secret underground world that's sort-of a library but also so much more, and gets embroiled in a conflict between two factions with very different ideas about how it should be run/protected/preserved.
But it's far from a simple narrative. It starts in quite a distancing way, with three short chapters that have no named characters and seem completely disconnected from on another, before we finally meet Zachary and the story proper (as it seems) actually begins.
It's all very meta, with overtones of If On A Winter's Night A Traveller by Italo Calvino, and a lot of in-story discussion of the way stories work and how people interact with them. Some of the characters want to be in a book, others already are, and there's a lot of switching between the 'active present' of the narrative and chapters of the books that are found and read by those who don't yet know they're in a story.
There are a lot of references to other real-life fictional worlds (if you know what I mean), most of which involve characters discovering magical realms that are hidden from the 'real' world - eg Harry Potter, Narnia, The Magicians, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Calvin & Hobbes - which seemed a bit on the nose to me in places.
As I was expecting from Erin Morgenstern, the world-building and descriptive writing is wonderful. There's not a huge amount of forward motion in terms of plot, at least until the second half, but I was very happy wandering around with Zachary and just looking at everything. And I love the idea of a library where the books are automatically in whatever language you need them to be in, and where the text is clear and crisp, even if you've lost your glasses.
But something kept me from really falling into the world of the book, and I weirdly found it impossible to read it for more than about half an hour at a time. There's a hell of a lot to take in and, while I love the fables and snippets from the books-within-books and how they all eventually connect together, I found it hard to keep all the details of the different threads in my mind, in order to be able to fully recognise the significance of later links and references.
I didn't initially find it as emotionally involving as The Night Circus, but I certainly wanted to persevere to find out how it all came together - and it had me in tears by the very end. It's gloriously meta, impressively constructed, and leaves an amazing sense of a vast and intricate world that exists far outside the bounds of the story being told.
I think what I really need to do is read it again...
