The Nonsensical Ravings of a Lunatic Mind

Oh hey, I meant to write this all up last week. Well. It's more interesting this week.

What are you reading now?

The Count of Monte Cristo, translated by Robin Buss. Someone, presumably on Mastodon, recommended this translation specifically a few years ago, and I made a note of that but not of why. An internet search reveals that it's the only translation of the complete book; all others are working from an abridgement bowdlerization from 1846.

It's great, of course. The Three Musketeers is Dumas's most famous novel, but I would bet money that there have been more adaptations and retellings of Monte Cristo. It's a universal story. Heck, The Crow is a Monte Cristo retelling.

I read it once in the late nineties and enjoyed it. Sometime in childhood I read the chapter detailing Edmond's escape from the Chateau d'If, where he disguises himself as the dead abbé to get the jailers to carry him outside. I froze in delicious terror at the absolutely chilling line "The sea is the graveyard of the Chateau d'If." Unclear why I didn't seek out the rest of the book at the time, when that one chapter was so great.

What did you just finish reading?

Emily Tesh's latest, The Incandescent, about a teacher at a contemporary Magic School. It's spectacular. It's not quite as vehement as Naomi Novik's Scholomance trilogy but it still gets in some solid criticism of The System, and I think the worldbuilding hangs together a bit better than Scholomance's. It shares with Scholomance a feeling that the latter third is suddenly very different, but in Incandescent that's more obvious and with a very very good reason. Highly recommended. I suspect I shall reread soonish so I can figure out whether I think it all hangs together metaphorically as well as ... whatever the opposite of metaphorically is, in-the-world-of-the-book.

(I have a theory, which is by no means an original theory, that if a writer does not consciously direct her themes and metaphors they will tend to reinforce the prevailing social order of the time she is writing in, which may or not be a desired result.)

Before that, Elizabeth Bear's Lotus Kingdoms trilogy. These are ... fine? The characters are great (I don't entirely believe Chaeri's heel-turn but that might just be me), the first book has a lot of moving everyone into position but once they're there the trilogy does not drag. I think this just caught me at a moment when I am spectacularly disinterested in powerful people complaining about how stressful it is to be powerful, and there is a lot of that. But: if you're looking for some colourful secondary-world fantasy, these are absolutely that, and excellent examples of it.

What do you think you'll read next?

I'm nine chapters into the 117 of Monte Cristo. "Next" seems like a very long ways away. Having said that, I'm carrying around a paperback of Morgan Locke (Laura Jo Mixon)'s 2011 shoulda-been-award-winning SF novel Up Against It in case my devices fail me, so hopefully not that but maybe.