My Autumn of Silent Escapist Reading

Hi everybody! :) As you've probably noticed, I haven't been in the mood to post for the whole autumn. I've also sucked at commenting and participating in events, and I'm truly sorry for this. I'm not sure what's happening to my reading habits, but my attention span is still very short, and now I shun from classics and big books and often pick books on a whim. I don't like it, as I usually enjoy being organized (and it's a pity I'm not finishing any of my challenges, the year has started so well!), but I can't do anything about it. Also, I'm reading much less now and am much more likely to play a game or watch a movie/series instead. Well, I hope it's just a short period...

Nevertheless, I HAVE been reading and I have missed blogging in the short moments of activeness. So it feels good to finally write a post :)

For starters, I've decided to make a small recap of what I read this autumn in the format of mini-reviews. These are really good books, and most of them are, I guess, unknown to many readers, so let me tell you more about them! :)

Title: Y: The Last Man
Author: Brian K. Vaughan
First published: 2003-2008
Add it: Goodreads, Book Depository
Rating: ★★★★★

This 10-volume comics was October's book of choice for Coursera Fantasy and Sci Fi book club, and I loved it so much! It tells about a sudden epidemic of unknown origin which results in wiping out all the male population on Earth. All except Yorick and his monkey Ampersand. See? How can one NOT love a story with a plot like this? :) Add some great humor, kick-ass characters, amazing plot, beautiful pictures and an oh-so-great finale - and you get Y: The Last Man.

In my book: An awesome, awesome story. Read it.

Title: Spectrum
Author: Sergei Lukyanenko
First published: 2002
Add it: Goodreads
Rating: ★★★★★

This is my favorite Lukyanenko book, and I've read them all! :) It is also a standalone novel rather than a part of the series, which I also appreciate. Unfortunately, it is not translated into English yet, although it is very popular in some European countries. US publishers are just soooo bad at seeing further than the ends of their noses. As nearly every Lukyanenko book, Spectrum features a very likable hero stumble over some mystery of the universe and forced to make difficult decisions. The book is very clever and philosophical and yet packed with action and suspense and great world-building. I'm very glad I've re-read it!

In my book: This novel is like an old friend which, when you meet after a long time apart, never fails to keep you up all night while discussing philosophical problems and drinking wine :)

Title: Hard to Be a God
Author: Arkady Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky
First published: 1964
Add it: Goodreads, Book Depository
Rating: ★★★★☆

Another great Russian Sci-Fi novel, Hard to Be a God is also an old favourite. It tells about a historian from Earth doing research on a "medieval" planet. He poses as a noble and has to observe and cautiously encourage progress without getting too involved and unnaturally changing the course of history. But pretending to be someone else for so long is not easy, and with obtaining more relations it's hard to stay impassive during a shocking twist in the planet's historical course. Re-reading the novel as an adult dimmed my initial impression of it a bit, as the moral became much more obvious. But it's a great book nevertheless!

In my book: Still very relevant and makes you think a lot. And the main character is great.

Title: Night Watch
Author: Sergei Lukyanenko
First published: 1998
Add it: Goodreads, Book Depository
Rating: ★★★★☆

As I've already mentioned, Lukyanenko is great, and luckily this book is translated into English, so it is an introduction to his writing for many readers. Which is a pity, because in my opinion it is not his best book, and the continuation of the series gets worse. I've read three out of (already) six books and don't intend to continue. The first one is still good though, if only a bit simplistic. The idea is that there are magicians between us, and they have two guilds: the Light and the Dark (I know, so obvious!) and they have some kind of a pact which ensures that they don't destroy each other. So it's "battles for souls" mixed with political plots to get round the pact.

In my book: Rather fun if you don't get sick of this whole Light/Dark opposition stuff.

Title: The Last Wish
Author: Andrzej Sapkowski
First published: 1992
Add it: Goodreads, Book Depository
Rating: ★★★★☆

You can already tell this autumn was full of Eastern European fantasy/sci-fi, right? :D Well, here's a super-popular polish fantasy saga, which inspired a computer game, dozens of spin-offs, fanfics, etc. I even have two friends who participated in role-playing games based on The Witcher world. The book is a collection of short stories telling about separate adventures of a Witcher - a guy specifically trained to kill different evil supernatural beings. I loved how Sapkowski took different Slavic fairy tale tropes and turned them into an entertaining and sometimes funny heroic saga.

In my book: An iconic novel, Slavic fantasy at its best. Recommended!

Title: The Master and Margarita
Author: Mikhail Bulgakov
First published: 1967
Add it: Goodreads, Book Depository
Rating: ★★★★★

This is a classic of Russian lit, which is unlike any other book. For most of high school students in Russia this is the only book they like from the school program, even though I bet none of them understand much of it. To tell you the truth I can't say I understood everything even after this re-reading, and I hope I can say that I'm now a more experienced reader then I was in the 11th grade :) Anyway, the novel is a satire about early Soviet era, and is set in Moscow in the 1930s. But it also has a plot line which tells about Pontius Pilate and the two intertwine through Master - a writer with a difficult fate, who wrote a story about ancient Jerusalem. The architecture of the novel, the beautiful language, the characters, the scaring hilarity of the dialogues, the macabre mood of it all - Bulgakov IS the real Master, and I can't possibly over-recommend this book :)

In my book: Just read it, OK? Nothing more that I can say :)

That's it! I have a couple of stand-alone reviews coming (hopefully soon) and I'm thinking about doing some year overview. We'll see if I have time and enthusiasm for that :)

The Thousand and One Nights (Review)

Yeah, Boromir knows what he's talking about :) I've read a full academical edition of One Thousand and One Nights, which is 3624 pages long, around 600 of them comprising the commentary section. The photo below shows how the edition I read looks like in print:

See, it's much more than one book! :) Luckily, it has been scanned and made into an ebook, otherwise I wouldn't be able to get hold of it. Anyway, I'm so proud of myself, that I simply had to boast! Applause, please! :) I started last spring, so it took me a year and a half to finish this, as reading it non-stop is not something you'd want to do. So I read a tale or two each time I finished a book, which made the Nights rather entertaining instead of boring. I have no idea how to write a proper review for such a giant as One Thousand and One Nights, so I'll just write some random thoughts about it in no particular order.

1) Contrary to what many people (probably after reading some adapted edition) think, these tales are NOT for children. There's a lot of sex descriptions (including some really perverse things), cheesy and weird euphemisms, rudeness and violence, Muslim propaganda and war scenes. These are tales for adults, and adults who are not easily shocked.

2) Ali-Baba and Aladdin tales are NOT in the collection. They are "orphan" tales and made it to the book somewhere on the long way from Asia to Europe the text has travelled. Sindbad however IS in the collection, and his journeys are as numerous and adventurous as I had imagined them.

3) Tales is the most important thing in the world of One Thousand and One Nights. By telling a suitable story you can convince somebody of something, save somebody's life, pay for something and bring the bounty of the Sultan on you and your family. There are tales inside tales inside tales in this collection, and it's easy to get lost in all this complexity.

4) There's a lot of poetry in the stories, sometimes even too much. Some stories even look like they were devised only as a frame for poetry. The verses are difficult to understand and relate to, probably because we now read them from a page and not hear a harem beauty singing them while accompanying herself on a lute.

5) The ideal of a man in the book is very feminine. They cry and faint all the time, get compared with a moon, have soft skin and thin waist, use perfume, etc. One of the favourite plot devices in the stories is dressing a man as a woman or a woman as a man, and nobody notices!

Source

7) The tales share much with the European canon. Most of them are essential marriage plots and feature journeys, coming of age, weathering difficulties and different kinds of magic creatures and devices. Women, however, not always play a passive role and sometimes apply their cunning to get what they want. I have an impression that women had all the power in the Arabian Nights world, and just let the men think they are in charge. Not surprising, considering the stories are told by a woman! :)

6) There are different types of the stories. First, I would distinguish shortish fables. They are usually a night long and feature animals. Sounds familiar, right? I usually fail to get the moral though, because they thought so differently. Second type is the stories about lower people who make their way to fortune through guile and Allah's favour. The third one is heroic stories, featuring princes and kings, that usually tell either of vast conquests and political issues or are moralistic and show how a ruler can and can't behave. Although there are a lot of repetitive elements in the collection, each story a bit different, so it's difficult to have a definitive classification.

7) Religion is very important in the book. It is a reason for conflict and friendship, luck and misery... well, for everything. The characters believe that Allah governs their lives and display the most unbearable fatalism I've ever seen in literature :) It seems that at that time Islam was competing with idolatry and Christianity, so violence against the representatives of both is very frequent.

Well, these are some general thoughts about this huge story collection. Of course, there's much more to say, but this post is already too big and I'm afraid not very exciting for those who haven't read the tales or are not going to read them someday :) Was reading them worth it? Well, yes. This is the kind of book which has influenced TONS of media around the world, and getting to know the primary source is always interesting. But I can't help wishing it was shorter and less repetitive. So if you are not like me and reading an adapted and shortened version doesn't drive you crazy, this may actually be a good thing to do :)

By my favourite Bilibin

Mabinogion and Welsh Mythology

Title: Mabinogion
Author: Anonymous
First published: 1410
Add it: Goodreads, The Book Depository

Mabinogion is a collection of several (13 in my edition) prose stories from different medieval Welsh manuscripts. It was first published in London in 1879 by Lady Charlotte Guest, and this translation, although censured, first sparkled public interest in Welsh mythology. I read a translation into Russian from medieval Welsh by Erlichman, with a lot of comments on translation, the origin of names and the roles of some characters in the oral tradition. I'm glad I chose this edition, because without the comments it would be rather difficult to understand several things and enjoy the book so much.

All the stories are divided into several sub-collections in accordance with their style. The first part, the "Four Branches of Mabinogi" itself, was the most exciting for me, as it comtains the oldest and the best preserved myths. They are concerned mainly with the sacred history and geography of Wales, as they tell how heroes/gods taught people different crafts, explain why some places are called as they are and so on. What is the most valuable about these stories is that somehow they nearly evaded monastic and Norman corrections and additions, and therefore show Welsh oral tradition in its purity.

Later collections demonstrate the origin of Arthirian legends. He appeared in the nation's fantasies as a protector from all the invaders from the continent. In the first tales he doesn't have his Camelot or the round table and is not called an emperor. He is just a traditional Welsh hero. But the further the story in the book, the more familiar traits we see. Some argue that the last tales were even borrowed from Chrétien de Troyes because of so much chivalry. Church's influence is also obvious, as proper weddings and Christian holidays appear in the stories. This process of adapting the old myths to the new "fashion" is very interesting to observe, but it is also a bit sad that such a vast narrative tradition was sacrificed to the new literary standards.

The book was also quite entertaining for me as a fantasy lover, as the names of the places and people were heavily borrowed by Tolkien and all the Arthurian writers. With such a vast influence on the literary tradition, Mabinogion is an important read for those who are always interested in the origins of things.