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Notes -
So, what are you reading?
I'm trying Donnelly's Atlantis again. I was interested in him from the Shakespeare authorship question, but now I'm wondering if the mythology of Atlantis has any relevance to new world/indigenous issues. If nothing else I have discovered the rather neat new world art of Waldeck, said to be Egyptianized. Backlog is not moving.
I just finished Piranesi on the train, and even though I pirated the book, I'd like a refund. I have only so much time under the sun.
I genuinely do not understand what people see in that soggy lump of seaweed. Like Jesus Christ, at best, I can call it beautiful prose wrapped around a shaggy dog story - a trite allegory about domestic violence if I squint, or take off my glasses.
I do not care about spoiler tags. I think I'm doing people a favor if I spoil the "book".
A man lives in an infinite House of halls and statues. He catalogs the statues. He catalogs the tides. He journals about cataloguing. Around the halfway mark we confirm what any reader with a pulse suspected by page 40: he's a kidnapped academic named Matthew whose memory got shredded by the House, and the smug prick he calls "the Other" is the guy who trapped him there to use him as a research instrument. A policewoman walks in, tells him this, the villain drowns on schedule, and our boy returns to England, where he is gently sad and visits the House sometimes on weekends. Also, this nigga fruity. He's as sweet as a sugar plum, but the only characters getting an action in the story are the seagulls and albatrosses.
You've got a quadrillion pages about statues, and then the ramifications of an entire parallel world are buried under seagull shit without so much as a "huh". Like, you can just go there. You can take pictures and upload them to Wikipedia. You could dump nuclear waste in the place, if nothing else. The poverty of imagination of the characters is rivaled only by that of the author.
I started out knowing nothing about the book. I wish I could return to that idyllic state, but I suspect that I'd just end up in an endless cycle of re-reading it because there are rave reviews written by raving idiots. What a waste - I genuinely enjoyed Johnathan Strange.
These statements seem contradictory. It's been several years since I read Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, but I specifically remember having similar criticisms of that book. (If magicians are so powerful, why has magic been forgotten outside Britain, and why is this book set in a retreading of the Napoleonic Wars rather than in a magician-ruled alternate history?)
It's been a good dozen years since I've read the book. I'm sure the worldbuilding had holes big enough to drive a bus through, but at least there was effort put into something more interesting than "spoopy house with statues and birds and fish and tides." I suspect there's Backrooms fanfic that's higher quality than Piranesi, which is damning to hell and back with faint praise.
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