Hi y'all,
- I'm reading Shadow and Claw by Gene Wolfe right now. I went in purposefully blind, excited to dive into another fantasy series. So far it's an odd experience - I'm a little less than halfway through and I still can't figure out what kind of book it is. It almost feels like Wolfe was deliberately subverting the hero's journey that these genre books usually run on, and then he combines that with a dash of unreliable narrator and the sense that the whole story is blurred around its edges. The prose is some of the most beautiful and most dense I've read recently. He uses invented and archaic terms constantly, with no explanation, to the point that there's a dictionary you can buy to help - Lexicon Urthus by Michael Andre-Driussi. None of that is a complaint, and I think everything above is actually a recommendation. But I can't help wondering if I started the right book at the wrong time. I'm three weeks into having a baby and focused reading time isn't what it was four weeks ago. This books isn't always easy sailing at midnight after a diaper change.
- Speaking of babies, here’s a recommendation to stop one crying. The song “Misty Mountains”, the one the dwarves sing in The Hobbit, works. I heard this months ago on a fantasy football podcast of all places and filed it away until I had the prerequisite equipment for testing - read: one baby who does on occasion cry and need to be calmed. The song is slow, baritone, melodic, and there’s a deep humming section that does something I can’t explain. But it does seem to soothe and intrigue our little sample size of one.
- Like I mentioned a few weeks ago, my personal summer of Steinbeck turned out to be accidentally well timed, because the Netflix version of East of Eden landed this month. We're a few episodes in and I'm really enjoying it. I was skeptical about shooting one of the definitive American novels in New Zealand, and I've been won over: the locations are just wrong enough, and undeniably beautiful enough, that they tell you up front this is a performance rather than the thing itself. That buys the show permission to stretch and cut and smoosh a very long book into seven episodes. The acting is also wonderful. I'd give it a go.
- The music rec this week is "That's The Girl" by Water From Your Eyes (Spotify, Apple). There's something small and intimate about this one that I like a lot. I can't imagine it played live to a room of more than fifty people - which isn't a knock on it, it just feels like exposing it too far and too wide would ruin it somehow. Or maybe I'm a little sleep deprived. Either way I think it's a great track and it's been added to the playlist. Worth noting that half of Water From Your Eyes is Nate Amos, who also records as This is Lorelei, who I recommended to you back in September. The man is having a run.
Joey
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