Livre d'Or

Recently read: The fifth season by NK Jemisin. (c) NK Jemisin 2015; Pub Orbit 2016; ISBN 978-0-356-50819-1

This s swept all the awards a couple of years ago, and I already enjoyed Jemisin's debut, The hundred thousand kingdoms. Then fivemack gave me this as a seder present earlier in the year, so I'd been meaning to read it for a while.

And I started it around when I was moving and then didn't have any time for reading for several months. Then I had to go to our other campus for work (Chelmsford is not that far away at all as the crow flies, but a pig to get to by public transport), so I had several hours of train journey to get into it. And when I got home I just ignored the world until I'd finished it, because I was absolutely absorbed. Basically it's one of the most brilliant books I've read in a while, and I can quite see why everybody was raving about it. It's also absolutely horrific, about the most upsetting book I've ever managed to complete.

The fifth season opens with a little child being beaten to death, and gets steadily worse and grimmer from there on. There are hugely vivid descriptions of just about every kind of abuse and cruelty and torture invented by humans, plus a few more made up to rely on magic. It's hard to explain what about it made me not only keep going all the way through to the end, but devour it eagerly.

The writing is very, very good. The worldbuilding is just breathtaking; I think this is about the most original fantasy I've ever read. I really wanted to find out more and more background detail, even though I knew it was going to be illustrated through cruelty and misery. I think in part I'm more willing to deal with grimdark from women of colour than white men. Like Alice Walker or Keri Hulme or Octavia Butler, I felt that Jemisin was inviting the reader to empathize with the suffering of her characters, rather than offering a cheap emotional thrill. Normally I'm particularly against grimdark in speculative settings; why make up an entire world just so you can think up new types of misery, when there's quite enough suffering in this reality? But tFS feels like a profoundly moral book and not gratuitous; it is no more an allegory for colonialism and slavery than LotR is an allegory of WW1, but like Tolkien it's shaped by real history. It's something like that cartoon about the goblin who insists on making a big, black, heavy bomb instead of a pretty floating balloon, and the idea is that it can rescue someone who is too far down in a pit to be elevated by pretty things.

And I cared so much about the characters, I really wanted to follow their stories even when I knew there was nothing to look forward to beyond a brief respite to make the tragedy even more painful. The story does the genre thing I find somewhat annoying, of jumping about between three apparently unconnected viewpoints and only gradually revealing how they form one coherent story. And even within those it jumps about in time.

For the first third or so I wanted to read Damaya and was disappointed whenever the viewpoint shifted to Essun or Syenite. The more so because Essun's sections are for some inexplicable reason told in the second person. I don't see the point of that at all; maybe Jemisin felt she needed additional supports to get the average SF reader to empathize with a middle-aged woman who would be Black / African-American if she were in our world. But that goes against the way I read; I don't really project myself onto characters, I'm always present in the story as a reader, I imagine myself relating to the characters, not being them. So the second person thing was a constant itch. But as it became apparent just how the Essun and Syenite threads were necessary for the Damaya threads, I became invested in them.

Aside from all those, it's just really, really compelling storytelling. When I got to the end I simultaneously wanted to wipe everything I'd just read from my mind, and very nearly picked up the sequel straight away without a break. I honestly don't know if I recommend it or not; if there's anything at all you find triggering (other than mundane objects that happen to be associated with trauma) your triggers are probably in this.

Currently reading: I'm sort of a bit dipping into a couple of very contrasting things:

The secrets of enduring love by Meg John Barker and Jacqui Gabb.

I really liked the idea of a relationship guide based on actual empirical evidence, and also one that doesn't assume everybody is heterosexual and monogamous by default while throwing in a few exceptions for the sake of diversity. I'm also a fan of Barker's writing and thinking about sexuality and relationships already.

I think this isn't going to work for me as a self-help book, or teach me how to make my relationships last, which is a bit disappointing, but on the other hand I didn't have high expectations that the book would be able to do that. What I'm enjoying about it is that it looks at how people actually behave in relationships, and describes things in a morally neutral way. There's very little in the way of a moral stance about what a 'good' relationship should look like, either in terms of its constitution (mono or open or poly or gender combinations or whatever), or in terms of what the people involved actually do. Some people have very intertwined lives, some are mutually independent. Living together, co-parenting etc are just one option among many, not inherently more real.

The one place I've found where authorial opinions seem to bleed through is that the authors appear to disapprove somewhat of maintenance sex, having sex more as a deliberate choice to keep the relationship going than out of pure mutual lust. Which is interesting because other authors I've read who look at evidence rather than heterosexist assumptions seem to be quite pro maintenance sex.

Anyway, I am mostly enjoying being nosy and reading about other people's lives! The people seem real and vivid to me, partly because they're well written, and partly because the book is diverse and doesn't just hew to lazy stereotypes based on gender.

Paradise lost by John Milton

This feels like one of those books anglophones ought to read at some point in their life. cjwatson lent it to me, and I've been reading random pages and just getting my head into the very dense poetry. I haven't yet found the courage to sit down and read it in order from the beginning.

Up next: I would really appreciate some recommendations for something thoroughly cheerful to contrast with the Jemisin. There are a couple of books on my to-read list but I wasn't sure they'd be upbeat enough to get over tFS. Like, ghoti_mhic_uait passed on to me A thousand splendid suns by Khaled Hosseni, which I do want to read, but I'm not quite in the mood for life under the Taliban.