I’m hopping around between a number of different books at the moment, both because that’s my usual state for fun reading and because I’m trying to finish 3 different library books before the start of the summer field season. So here are a few scattered thoughts that have occurred to me as I go.
I just (finally) finished my re-read of A Wizard of Earthsea, and listened to the Shelved by Genre episode on the second half. I’m definitely more in line with Austin’s thinking on a lot of aspects of the book; also thinking – as I kind of always am on some level – of parallels and echoes between Earthsea and Sofia Samatar’s Olondria duology. Perhaps more on that in the coming months as I continue through Earthsea and perhaps also re-read Samatar…
Apropos of Earthsea and its maritime orientation, attention to weather and wave, is the fact that I’m reading Henry Miller’s The Colossus of Maroussi and preparing for another summer of Mediterranean island time. I find Miller by turns grating and poetic; he has a nice little passage about a boat captain he meets in Athens that put me in the nautical frame of mind (as it were).
On another Earthsea related note, I’m reading Sabriel at the moment, and was intrigued by some of the parallels between how Le Guin represents the afterlife and Ged’s effort to travel there vis-à-vis how Sabriel goes about the same; both involve willpower to remain alive and a coldness, a leaching, that occurs to the physical body. Garth Nix’s rendition is rather more structured, with the various Numbered Gates, but there’s still something of one in the other.
Two of the library books I’m reading are short story collections: Theodora Goss’ Letters from an Imaginary Country and Amal El-Mohtar’s Seasons of Glass and Iron. From the latter, this morning I read “The Green Book” and “Madeleine.” The latter deliberately (and openly) recalls Proust’s madeleine with its protagonist’s name; with the meditation on time and memory I was also reminded of the quotation “the past is a foreign country” – apparently from the British writer Leslie Poles Hartley – and the resonance of that with the title of Goss’ collection. And then from that collection I read “The Mad Scientist’s Daughter,” interesting (maybe especially to me at this moment) for its incorporation of Goss’ doctoral research as well as the way it presents the characters who would later go on to populate her Athena Club trilogy. One particularly intriguing difference was the inclusion in the short story of Helen Raymond, a character wholly absent from the trilogy. Helen is from Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan, which I think I heard about on a somewhat recent episode of Just King Things (or maybe Shelved by Genre??); the name literally wouldn’t have registered even two months ago. Funny how those things work.