R.I.P. VIII Wrap-Up

This year's R.I.P. event is at an end, and although I was not as successful in it as I hoped back in August, I've done the minimum program. I was planning to read the following books:

1. Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs
2. Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake
3. The Mysteries of Udolpho by Anne Radcliffe
4. The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole
5. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving

As you see, I have read four of them, and really enjoyed three (you guess yourself which one is left out :) ). As for The Mysteries of Udolpho, it has turned out to be a very long and tedious book, so I'm not even half-way through yet... If the right mood strikes me, I may finish it by the end of the year, but that's already two months past the event finish line :)

There was also one book I didn't really expect to turn out creepy, as I didn't know what to expect of it at all, but as it's Gaiman, surely enough it turned out to be the creepiest of all :)

    6.  The Ocean At The End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

So I've done Peril the First level, as it requires only 4 books, and I've read five. It was my first time participating, and I really enjoyed it, as it made me pick up books I've put aside for too long, and some of them I really loved!

Looking forward to the next year! :)

The Golden Ass by Lucius Apuleius (Review)

Title: The Golden Ass
Author: Lucius Apuleius
First published: 158
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Rating: ★☆☆☆☆

If you are not a literature major, don't read this book! It's a repulsive mix of Decameron, myths, witch stories and religious preaching. The only beautiful part in The Golden Ass is the story of Cupid and Psyche, which is so unlike everything else, that I suspect Apuleius has stolen it from some earlier source. So if you can, try to find this story separately and enjoy it without its miserable surroundings.

The plot is quite well-known: a curious protagonist Lucius, who is very interested in witchcraft, tries some magic ointment and turns into an ass. He has to live in this form for around a year, and the novel is composed of his misfortunes while serving different masters and various stories he has heard during this year. Goddess Isid finally saves him, and the last part of the book is the glorification of her and her cult. Doesn't sound too bad, eh? But it is! This canvas is filled with violence, repulsive sex (yes, incest and intercourse with animals (I don't remember the correct English name for this and am afraid to google) included), lavatorial humour, and so on... I soooo did not expect this from such a renowned classic. And you don't get any warnings about this anywhere. So now I warn you, and if you are bothered by the above mentioned topics, as I am, avoid this book.

This is a short review, but that's just all I have to say about it :)

In my book:
Disgusting

Here Be Dragons by Sharon Kay Penman (Review)

Title: Here Be Dragons
Author: Sharon Kay Penman
First published: 1985
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Rating: ★★★★☆

I treated myself to this beautiful book while in Vancouver, which has HUGE bookshops, all in English, where I spent hours. I call it a treat because it was ridiculously expensive. Sometimes I think that people who buy "real" paper books must be millionaires. But I just felt like buying a nice book, you know, and I was not disappointed! Recently I have noticed that I feel more invested in the "real" books, either because I choose so well or because I've already paid so much money for this - psychology in action! But I think I would have loved this book in any format.

The list of things I love about Here Be Dragons begins with the title.You know, this is the phrase that was written over unknown territories on old maps. I ADORE old maps, and the cool thing here is that the book is about Wales, and not only was it completely misunderstood by England, they also have a dragon on their flag. Clever, eh? The next cool thing is the setting: the story unfolds between 1183 and 1234 which means it covers the end of Henry Plantagenet's rule, his children's rivalries, the rules of Richard Lionheart and John Lackland and ends with the beginning of Henry III's rule. Rather epic, right? But the story is focused on Wales, where at this time Llywelyn the Great rose to power and more or less united his country against the unceasing England's conquest. While I knew quite a lot about English kings and the situation between England and France at this time, I was completely ignorant about what was happening in Wales. All we got in the textbooks was that the castles were built there at this time as part of the conquest and some beautiful pictures. So the story is really interesting from the historical point of view, especially because it's very well researched and is true to the remaining historical sources.

I wouldn't have liked the story so much if it was purely historical, but it is also a very good romance. The main heroine is Joanna, an illegitimate daughter of John Lackland, who was married to Llewelyn as part of the treaty with Wales. It was horrible for her to go to another country with different language, where everybody saw her as a foe. And she was only 14 then! She loved her father and she came to love her husband, but needless to say the treaty between them didn't live long. Torn between the two men she loved, she played an important role as an ambassador of peace between England and Wales and her entreaties to her father not once saved quite some Welsh lives, including her husband's. She, John and Llevelyn are all very interesting and well-developed characters, and I was really involved in their relationships. There are some rather graphic scenes of Joanna and Llewelyn's private life that I found rather indecent and out of place, but that really didn't bother me that much. I guess this was done for certain public that needs to know EXACTLY how well they got on sometimes :) Well, that doesn't include me! However, this is just a fly in the ointment.

The description of everyday life (mostly Norman everyday life, of course) was not romanticized at all, which I also liked very much. The realities were very harsh back then, with horrible medicine, childbirth and life conditions. All this is shown very well in the book. What never fails to shock me most, although it's a well-known fact, is the disposal of women as part of treaties and alliances, no matter what age they are. It was a usual thing to marry off a daughter at twelve and expect a husband to consummate the marriage immediately. Of course, some men were kind enough to wait, but they were in minority. Moreover, married life in itself was very harsh for women. When in Wales, Joanna was surprised at finding out that, unlike in England and France, a wife could divorce or request compensation if she found her husband unfair to her (shock!!) and that husbands were not accustomed to beating their wives (unheard of!). So, well, welsh women were rather lucky, but that was certainly an exception.

In my book:
It is a very engaging historical fiction and romance, so I would definitely recommend it to anybody who is interested in either of the genres. It will keep you up late at night, I promise :)

Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut (Review)

Title: Cat's Cradle
Author: Kurt Vonnegut
First published: 1963
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Rating: ★★☆☆☆

I don't seem to be very lucky in this autumn's book choices. But it's mainly my own fault. Take Cat's Cradle: Slaughterhouse Five might have given me the idea of how little I would enjoy another Vonnegut's book, but I resisted my own intuition and succumbed to public opinion, which praises this book as the most wonderful piece of writing ever. Result - frustration.

I don't want to say that there's nothing appealing in this book. I gave it 2 stars for some really interesting ideas. Like religion which admits that it is lies or "ice-nine" (although there are some technical problems with this). These ideas are very powerful, but I totally hate the way they were integrated into the narrative, if it can be called narrative in the first place. The plot line, the characters, the dialogues - all is ridiculous and hard to comprehend, let alone get connected to. The style also adds to the picture, making the book even more irritating for me. Vonnegut apparently wants to be funny, but although I see the places where he takes pains to joke, they totally fail to get me. There's also quite a few "philosophical thoughts" packed in the novel, which are rather obtrusive and sometimes weird.

In my book:
Maybe that's I that is a problem in our relationship, not Vonnegut, but we clearly don't get on very well. Sorry, Kurt!

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving (Review)

Title: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
Author: Washington Irving
First published: 1820
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Rating: ★★★★★

All of you native English speakers probably don't need any plot summary of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, because, as I've heard, it's included in nearly every school program. Even for me the story felt very familiar, although I don't remember actually reading it. I guess it's already in the domain of collective unconscious. What I consciously knew about it, however, is just that it had a headless specter in it. So, naturally, I expected it to be this normal creepy ghost story. What I didn't expect at all is that it would be so funny!

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is not in the least about something paranormal, it instead deals with people's beliefs and superstitions and how they influence their everyday lives. Nothing assuredly unnatural actually happens, but in a small village like Sleepy Hollow, superstitions flower in uneducated minds of people to such extent that they explain many things with ghosts, and it's not surprising that they tend to start seeing them :)

The main character, Ichabod, is a school teacher, but he can't be called particularly enlightened. He enjoys sitting in front of a hearth with older ladies and share ghost stories, and when he is alone he imagines supernatural things all around him. But that doesn't prevent him from having a practical mind, and so he enters an open competition for the hand of a rich farmer's daughter with the village's most reckless youth Brom Bones. It would be stupid of Bones not to use Ichabod's inclination to superstitions to his own benefit, and Bones is not stupid :)

I find characters in the story to be very lively and Irving's kind mockery of them really endearing. I was smiling a lot and sometimes even laughed at the descriptions of Ichabod's courting and then of his misfortunes. There is only one problem with this story: I intended it to count for RIPVIII event, but now that I know it's not scary, I'm not so sure :) But I'm very glad I read it anyway :) 

In my book:
A very well written, funny and entertaining story. Definitely recommended to anybody who hasn't yet had the pleasure of discovering it for himself :)

The Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov (Review)

Title: The Three Sisters
Author: Anton Chekhov
First published: 1900
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Rating: ★★★★☆

I really like Chekhov. He somehow manages to speak about very complicated things without complicating his writing and making it pretentious and pathetic. All his characters are very easily imaginable by the way they speak, and there's no need in descriptions or commentaries whatsoever. And what's most important, you can really believe that that's exactly how people of their position and disposition would speak. Nothing is feigned.

The Three Sisters shows a family of a brother and three sisters living in Russian countryside. They are too educated and refined for their surroundings, and this discrepancy is torturing them. They dream of going back to Moscow, but this is not going to happen, and their accomplishments will be wasted on people who can't appreciate them. I can totally relate to their feelings. Fortunately, I'm now always among my equals in education and intellect, but there were periods in my life when I felt myself as a "f***ing genius", and it was horrible, mainly because I still had to behave civilly towards everybody who annoyed me so much. The sisters' situation becomes even worse when their brilliant brother marries a simple country girl, has two children, forgets his scientific career and becomes a clerk. But they still hope to escape this horrible place, to go to Moscow and to start leading a meaningful life.

There is of course a wonderfully vivid set of supporting characters, most of them representing some aspect of intellectual degradation, and they would have been really funny if the whole situation was not so sad. The Three Sisters is characteristic of Chekhov's style, but I must say I liked The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard more, although we were deconstructing the latter at school, and it usually spoils everything.

In my book:
As all Chekhov's plays, a wonderful piece of drama. Very close to five stars, but not quite there, at least for me.

The Castle of Otranto Non-Review + General Ramblings

I haven't been here for a long time, and, as usual, I apologize. I'm always wondering how people can post every day and not get tired, especially if something is happening offline? As for me, 2 things have been happening which distracted me from blogging:

1) The semester started on Monday! I have 6 subjects, and it's 50/50: half of them are OK, and another half is total crap. Well, at least it's better than the previous winter semester :) First week is always crazy, because you need to get signed for everything you want, and it involves either queuing at the students department or participating in "clicking battles" during online sign-ups. Very nervous, all of this.

2) I had another fit of Heroes of Might and Magic V. This doesn't cease to surprise me, but every half a year of so I spend around a week playing it nearly non-stop. The game is like 2 boyfriends old, but seriously, have you seen how cool it is?

Meanwhile, I have 3 books that I've read and not reviewed, and they are The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, The Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving. I'm going to write a proper review for the last two (and hopefully soon!), but Otranto is not something I'd like to spend much time on, so here is a non-review in just one paragraph:

The Castle of Otranto is a weird book, with no logic, where "gothic" things just happen one after another without any connection. It features enough women in distress, noble gentlemen, rude villains, superstitions, fainting, deaths, lost sons etc... That's pretty much all that can be said about it, and if it was not so short (less than 100 pages) I'm not sure I would have finished it. But if you are in the right sarcastic mood, it can be really funny. Last year Jean posted about it and it made me smile a lot, although I haven't read it then. Now I understand, although sometimes I wish I didn't! :)

I'll finish with a picture that gives you some clue as to what is happening in The Castle of Otranto. See?

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

Things I Have Learned Since I Started Blogging

I've successfully missed my 1st blogging anniversary. Last August I was taking Coursera Fantasy and Science Fiction course, and some amazing discussions were happening on personal blogs, because course forums were sometimes not very friendly. I wanted to be part of it, so I started a blog and began posting miscellaneous things about books we read for the course. I made some friends and I liked it so much that I stayed and here I am a year later still writing stuff about books I read :)

A lot has changed in this year, not only online, but today I was thinking about things I got to know through blogging, and there happens to be a lot!

1) There are blogs out there that are not about politics/author's misery and loneliness/author's numerous kids or cats. Who would have thought?

2) TBR. YA. NA. BEA. SEO. It took me some time to figure out what all this stuff means. Moreover, I had never had a TBR pile before. How did I choose books? Oh, I don't remember. Somehow.

3) Read-a-thon. Read-a-long. Bloggiesta. Blogoversary. These are more self-explanatory, but they drive my spellchecker crazy.

4) There are such things as young adult, new adult, paranormal, dystopian and many more. The term literary fiction still kills me. Before I thought books were just books. Of course I made distinction between children's and adult books and between Fantasy/Sci-Fi and all the others, but that's pretty much all! If somebody told me he was reading mainly YA paranormal, I wouldn't have understood. Besides, I thought "mystery" meant something paranormal, not detective. My fault.

5) The lists! Soooo many bookish lists I haven't heard of. And the challenges! I've learned that I'm a hopeless addict of both.

6) Twitter and Google pages. Discovered them through one Bloggiesta challenge. I use them only for sharing though.

7) HTML. Blogger compose is sometimes driving me crazy, and then I open some guide and write the bloody HTML code myself. Comparing with different programming languages, it's surprisingly easy.

8) USA people are just more religious than Europeans. So if a blogger mentions God and blessings in his posts, or starts his "about" page with a statement that he's a Christian, this doesn't necessarily mean he's a crazy religious fanatic. In fact, he can be a really nice and interesting person. BTW, Christian fiction is another type of literature that I would have never guessed exists.

9) Homeschooling. I was wondering for some time, and then Jean explained it to me. I thought one can only avoid going to school if he/she has a condition.

10) There are places where seasons change on the 21st of each month. I've seen it on some blog very recently and I still need somebody to explain it to me. Volunteers? :)

11) Book promotion: tours, interviews, even book trailers!! I never thought books needed any promotion at all and was never exposed to any.

12) There are people who are actually interested in your thoughts about a book. My BF is very well read (and no surprise, considering how fast he reads!), but he usually becomes bored when I start talking about books unless we've had some alcohol before :) People at work are too busy to read a lot, my parents wear glasses and so also shun from straining their eyes, and friends are too distracted by the Internet and also don't read enough to make a bookish conversation interesting for me. Knowing that there are people for whom reading is as important as for me makes me feel less a freak :)

I guess there are much more things I learned through blogging, but that's all that came to my mind today. I'm thankful for the blogging experience, and I must also thank everybody around here for enhancing it! Thank you! :)

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (Review)

Title: Brideshead Revisited
Author: Evelyn Waugh
First published: 1945
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Rating: ★★★★★

Waugh is a very clever writer. He can be hilariously funny and in the next moment really heartbreaking. And then both at the same time. Brideshead Revisited is a mourning for pre-war high society life in England, which was swept away by the calamities of the early 1940th. The protagonist, Charles Ryder, who is now an infantry commander, finds his platoon relocated to a big country house, which happens to belong to a family he had a lot of connections with and where he has spent some of the most memorable moments of his life.

The first part of the novel tells about the happier days in Oxford, full of parties, drinking and friendly feelings. Charles gets close with Sebastian Flyte, whose family resides in Brideshead, and so his visits there begin. Sebastian's family can't be called ideal: his mother and his father live separately, children feel oppressed, and all these problems are aggravated with religious discord. Religion is much discussed in the novel, and although I usually don't like plunging into this controversial topic, Waugh made it interesting and avoided preaching. Over time, Charles meets all the members of this curious family and is able to observe how family influence and personal decisions collapse in each of them to form their futures.

Comparing with Decline and Fall, which we read at the University, Brideshead Revisited is much darker and much more philosophical. War has irrevocably changed English society, and this of course has in its turn changed Waugh's writing dramatically. But I think I liked Brideshead even more for its seriousness and melancholy. Its mood is unforgettable, and I really enjoyed it.

In my book:
A true classic of the 20. century British literature. I'm not sure if I can say anything which can surpass this.