Wednesday - ah, yes, reading

[oursin]

What I read

Well, I think I've exhausted the Hugo voting packets as regards novella, novelette and short stories, and some were really good, and some were okay, and some were pretty terrible to the point of my going Y O Y is this even on the ballot.

Read because somebody mentioned it entirely in passing but in a context that intrigued me: Helen Beauclerk, The Green Lacquer Pavilion (1926). Which is really kind of strange. It starts out in the early 1700s and I think the Hanoverian dynasty has just taken over (i.e. as I recall someone mentions His rather than Her Majesty), at a country house party. And then it becomes a portal fantasy with our characters somehow whirled through a chinoiserie screen into an orientalist fantasyland. And boy does it cover a range of exoticised/orientalist trope settings (with added pirates), from chinoiserie to vaguely Arabian Nights to cannibal island.

It's beautifully written if you like rather mannered and artificial but I couldn't quite see the point. Nobody is the honky saviour (in fact anything even approaching that pushes things in a pearshaped direction) and we don't really feel that the various characters have Learnt a Valuable Lesson, or that it represents by externalising into fantasy an inner state (cf Naomi Mitchison, Beyond This Limit).

Kameron Hurley, We Have Always Fought and Ana Mardol, Deconstructing Narnia.

And then I read another J D Robb, Witness in Death - this is the Agatha Christie (referred to throughout as Dame Christie, aaaargh) tribute one, presumably.

On the go

Still plodding on with The People but think I may slightly have exhausted my appetite for social history for the moment.

Also Falconer's Lure still ongoing for group read.

Recovering from a migraine and having finished the Robb and not being able to find the next installment without more effort than I felt like, was not sure what I felt like reading - one of those states of reader anomie - picked up Ngaio Marsh's A Clutch of Constables (1968) but even with Troy in the foreground it did not appeal to me (eccentric, to put in mildly, spinster introduced very early on), and eventually lighted on Pamela Frankau, The Willow Cabin (1949) (re-read) which somehow just hit the right spot.

I've also started Women Destroy Science Fiction which should keep me going, on and off, for quite a while, because there's a lot of it.

Up next

Am in the slightly annoying situation whereby there are several new things I would like to read, but which I would not be surprised if I were to have to read anyway for reiteration of Sekkrit Projekt, so am holding off.

Comments

[wychwood]

Did you hear about the "sad puppy slate"? Larry Correia and some friends pushed a set of "conservative" SFF for the Hugos this year, and at least some of my "oh dear no" stories are a result of that.

[oursin]

Oh yes, those, but there was one by somebody who is not, I think, on that slate, which I thought was awful for a lot of reasons.