Dante In The Underworld

he/him | keeper of some house plants and more books | currently reading Othello by William Shakespeare

[plantdad-dante]

A blog concept

So I decided to (re)read every book on my bookshelf and post/scream about it here.

On an unrelated note, I may have finally gone mad.

Maybe I won't delete this side-blog in a panic, this time. Let's see, I guess.

[plantdad-dante]

Book #240 - Satanstango by László Krasznahorkai

(read in German translation; I have written and rewritten this for four (?) weeks now, and I am ready to accept that I will never be truly happy with it)

Not everything I have to read for class is annoying - for example, I like this one. There's something about the style, about the use of very colloquial language set against the long and complex grammatical constructions that are the sentences of this book, and the refusal of paragraphs in every chapter but one, when Irimiás is juxtaposed against the masses....

I liked it. It's also a damn good translation (I think, though I have been backed up on this opinion), which will likely make it extra frustrating that I will now ad-hoc translate and paraphrase my favourite lines from this German translation into English myself.

There is a line (Part 1 Chapter 4, I believe?) about Halics that says he wears his rain coat not as protection from the rain (as it's pretty useless for that after all these years), but as a protection from "inner" rain that "falls continuously from his tired heart and washes his unprotected organs", and oh man, that hurt. The picture of rain-worn organs just kinda fucked me up, Idk. It's such a desolate image, such a long and slow and persistent and unstoppable way to destroy something. Futaki also says at some point that Irimiás' promised paradise will make them "slaves of everlasting elan" and like, wooooo boi, does that feed my reading of Irimiás as a symbol for Western capitalism.

The first concrete proof that this book takes place in "our" world is an old Coca Cola ad poster at the pub. Up until that point, the book could have taken place in a post-apocalypse and/or some strange other-world, on a colony on some far-off planet. But Coca Cola, of all things, locates the desolation in (a literary approximation of) our own reality. Capitalism's promises are old and worn, but they're still there, still remembered, and then Irimiás comes in, comes back, and promises them a better life - until he ends up splitting them up, individualising them, and causes them to give up most of their property, and makes them dependent on employment for their basic needs, including shelter.

Do you see my vision? Because I am currently (for no particular reason, of course, certainly not due to certain upcoming elections hahahahahahahahahahaha), very into post-Wende East German history and I am not quite sure how much I'm just projecting that onto this, but like, it fits so well.

Halics, Kraner and Schmidt are only a few decades away from electing fascists.

[plantdad-dante]

Book #239 - Days Without End by Sebastian Barry

(I started this three times because I kept trying to squeeze reading it into the gaps of my stressful schedule, and this just isn't a book to do that with. it's too poetic to read and understand while under stress. so it took me a bit, as I could only read it in tiny vacation pockets (I've been reading these 300 pages for over three months), but damn, was it worth it in the end)

wow, this hurt. i'm in love.

while being known by science and sociology, and having concrete labels to put on ourselves and understand ourselves with is arguably the most fundamental win we've had in our ongoing fight for equal rights... there is something sublime that i miss without ever having known it about queerness before words.

i refuse to put a label on this narrator. for once, we're going to sit with the ineffable nuance. because what would we gain from cramming this trooper, this mother, into a box that would not fit her grief - neither that which he experienced, even less that which he caused.

my stomach churns as genocidal maniacs like the major walk free, self-righteous, unrepentant, and the grief they themselves may have suffered does not erase the baying for blood, the need to... the need... something. something. cf. Jacob Geller's "Fantasies of Nuremberg"

this book makes you sit with the knowledge that murderers are people and that American soil is tilled with blood. it asks "do you blame them" and the answer is yes, but Thomas(ina) makes it back and you are happy. the violence goes in cycles, and around and around and around and around it goes, leaving grooves in the earth big as canyons.

T.'s pain and grief are Irish, his atrocities American, and her escape from it a futile dream of domesticity that is too soaked in blood to ever know pure contentment. and yet I wish them days without end. days in love and wonder, without hunger, but without forgiveness, too.

because the violence will not leave, even after it left. they lay it to rot, till it into the earth and maybe growing love from this soil is the only way to go. but that is not the same as absolution, and when the wind is right you see that the land will always smell of blood and gun-charred grass.

ask me what I think of this book and I will just hand it to you to read. fuck off, let me cry in peace.

[plantdad-dante]

Book #238 - Open Throat by Henry Hoke

(oh I do love an environmental revenge story)

This book made me look up why the fuck the English language can't agree on what to call this animal. (following research report sourced from Wikipedia, never think I'm a professional)

Turns out, it's mainly because they are very wide-spread over all of the Americas and every colonialist, of various empires, who saw one asked a different Native tribe, with a different Native language, what to call them. Combine that with English's tendency to acquire new vocabulary the mugger's way, and you make it into the Guiness World Records for having over 40 different names in one language.

"Puma", which is the name scientists, Latin America and most of Europe (therefore me) go with, is Quechua in origin. "Cougar" is English, via Portugese, via French, but ultimately comes from the Tupi language. Funnily enough, Gaelic also has a similar-ish name for the thing that seems to be coincidental and have no connection to this pox-ridden ancestry (the Scottish Gaelic word is just a general one for a male cat, I guess?) - though "cú" apparently means dog or smth, so who the fuck knows.

A thing that suprised me was that apparently some people call it "panther"??? Which is a different animal, guys. Panthers are black leopards, I thought we all agreed on that. Why- anyway.

"Mountain lion" is a very US-American name, as it sounds like the usual "just name the thing The Thing" thing, a la Rocky Mountains or "[My] Horse [Died Here] Creek", but turns out: they have no relation to lions, nor do they live (exclusively) in the mountains! So what the fuck.

What was I talking about again? Right, a book.

I have never been to L.A. and yet I am sick to death of it. It shouldn't exist, it is a monument to hubris, and one day the Earth is going to open her maw and swallow it whole, be it by fire or earthquake or tsunami or hurricane. Until then, this book was a... a new look at it. Which came as a bit of a surprise, because L.A. should, by all the exhausting accounts of it, be done with, literarily speaking. I wish we would be done with it, how is there still more to say

The puma should have been allowed to kill more people, but then I guess that would have been a different story, and I liked this as it was. A trippy dream of anthropomorphisation, of human detatchment from nature and the commodification of authentic experiences. Also a tragic tale of having to live in a world beyond comprehension that continuously tries to kill you because your sheer existence in its realm is a mistake to be corrected.

I like the title. In combination with the cover, it suggests a mouth, which is open to emit air or sound, or take in air or food. A puma ready to bite and consume, or make a threatening noise (pumas can't roar). As it turns out, the throat is not open through the mouth, it is open through the skin of the man's neck, bleeding, freshly dead. It's not a preambel to an action, it's its consequence.

The harm has already been done.

The only thing to do is live, and die, and act through the consequences. Hot damn.

[plantdad-dante]

Book #237 - Kleider Machen Leute by Gottfried Keller

(English title: Clothes make the man; read in a sort of desperate rebellion against all the stuff I have to read for uni)

It's so funny to me how, purely by aesthetics, the subgenre-Romance girlies would go feral for this. Dark, tall and brooding guy in giant black coat silently falls for pure young woman in light coloured dresses while he keeps a secret from her? There's a scene where she cries in his arms and he wraps her in his coat which is at this point compared to wings? There is a section of the internet that, removed from all context, would make concerning TikToks about this.

Unfortunately, it's the 19th century, it's a literary approximation of the real world, the main character is the guy, and he's actually an okay dude instead of a war criminal. He's just kind of pathetic with a good fashion sense and horrendous amounts of propriety and social anxiety. Poor dude keeps waiting for the right moment to correct people, and then he keeps making plans to extricate himself and somehow pay back everything he was given, and in the end he was ready to die just to get out of it all with his dignity intact....

He's a people pleaser in the worst way. He does not want to inconvenience people, to the point that his ideal exit from the situation erases any impact he made in the first place. Even the death scenario includes Nettchen just forgetting about him in a few years. His sense of propriety idealizes a world in which nothing, nobody, ever has any impact on anything or -one.

This book is about the terrifying ordeal of being perceived, being perceived wrong, and the sheer, desperate anxiety of being responsible for a - any - lasting change. It's also about expectations and the theatre of class (literally, in the inn scene) and how the theatre is so ingrained into society that breaking its conventions and rules will draw the irrational ire of all classes, regardless of intention, or awareness, or lack of actual harm done.

The book is too afraid to acknowledge its logical conclusion, which is: Smash the class system and its rule book, it's all dumb anyway. And instead it lands on: Stop judging people for failing society's dress code. Which is kind of like revolution. But also really not.

Don't worry, Mr Keller. I saw your Marxism.

[plantdad-dante]

Book #236 - My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk

(read in English translation for a, for the most part, quite irritating seminar. which might explain my feelings on it.)

So... it's complicated. On the one hand, I can sort of see the critical acclaim. On the other hand, I was bored, disgusted, and generally didn't feel immersed until, like, the 80% mark (though that last one might be my fault, I did read a decent chunk of this on an active construction site).

I hate Kara ("Black"). Fuck him, I wish he died.

Shekure's perspective was so fucking weird. The way I read her character was that she married very young in order to secure an affluent future for herself with an okay-ish husband by the standards of her society. She got two kids out of it and loves them a lot, and she genuinely enjoys being a mother. However, her husband disappears and her life begins to crumble, and she eventually flees back to her father's house in order to escape the threat of sexual violence and economic hardship. When her much older cousin, who left after making moves on her when she was a child, comes back and enquires after her, she at first panics, but then decides to scope him out and eventually marry him so that she, again, can be sure of her status and her and her children's safety.

The constant male attention she has been getting since childhood has clearly left a deep psychological impact on her, in that she deludes herself into loving both Kara and Hasan, who both also inspire deep fear within her. She is clearly unable to process her emotions properly and infantilizes Kara in a bid to make a life with him seem more bearable, as motherly love is the only form of love she thinks herself capable of. The cognitive dissonance that this relativation of their age gap and shared history, plus her physical attraction to him, causes leads eventually to her breakdown that brings her back into the house of her in-laws, as she yearns for the comparatively easy safety of her first marriage.

The only two women she is in regular contact with are Esther and Hayriye, the latter of which she hates for being a slave and dismisses as a gold digger for regularly getting assaulted by Shekure's father. Esther, on the other hand, could have had the potential of being an actual female confidant, if her one solution to all women's problems wasn't to get them married as fast as possible.

In the end, Shekure, prideful and classist as she might be, never had a chance within the restrictive society she was born into and was doomed to marry her obssessive (would-be) stalker cousin and delude herself into being content with it.

.... now, why did I say her perspective was weird, this sound like quite a well-told, if sort of dark and disturbing, arc. Simple. The constant feeling that the book was fighting me on that interpretation. I feel like I got to this reading through a series of brawls with this book and that is not the way I like to read. Take this as a very charitable, though likely unintended reading of the character and then please give me the grace of never having to think about this book again.

Couldn't it have just been about that DarkAcademia-esque plot, 1590s Ottoman Empire edition, aka the murder mystery part. If it had leaned into that maybe the last chapter could have been something else, something that wouldn't have made me fucking nauseous.

[plantdad-dante]

Book #235 - The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman

(full disclosure: I expected this to be end-to-end bad)

... which I know is an unfair thing to think. Which, in turn, is why I read it at all. Every book (at least every one that I've spent money on) deserves its chance to earn its space on my shelf. Despite my expectations, I was ready to be positively surprised.

And it...... hm. It's hard? Weirdly? I don't actually know?

I wish it was better. I think. It's so creative and promising, and yet the writing... It could have been good! The premise and the magic system are so full of thematic potential! There is so much that could have been done with this, and yet....

Let me put it this way: The writing itself is shit, but literally everything around it promises so much fun and has such huge potential for themes that I can totally see how this could be a series which strings along a fanbase that's 100% sure that the next installment will finally fullfill their dreams of narrative quality and more/bigger queer representation. You know, BBC Sherlock style.

Speaking of queer rep... Irene is bi, and yet her past with that female catburgler is wrapped up in vague shame and slander, while in the present she is primarily attracted to her male coworkers. That's it for actual representation, but missed potential includes: Vale is close enough to that cop dude that my personal headcanon involves them shagging, Kai also seems interested in Vale despite being definitely signposted as Irene's love interest, and Bradamant would have had overt sexual tension with Irene if she were a man (and the book was just a little more willing to lean into moral greyscales).

Honestly, this book felt like one of those second-rate Fantasy TV shows for teens that run on cabel and that somehow have five seasons despite the fact that no one you know watches it. The premise and world-building are unique and creative, but the execution just isn't strong or capable enough to carry it to a place where it would be actually good without qualification.

I can't believe I'm saying this. But take the creativity and world-building and ambitions of this book... and combine it with the writing style of The Atlas Six. Because I think, in certain, admittedly quite weird, ways... these books want to be each other. And I think that if they were, if we let them try, if they merged together in just the right way... we'd have an actual banger.

As it stands, I can feel my curiosity gnawing at the bars of its cage, but I won't give in. I won't continue this series. Series like this, that promise more than they can give, will always leave me disappointed, and that way madness lies. But, yk. I'm keeping this one. So that's something.

[plantdad-dante]

Book #234 - Heated Rivalry by Rachel Reid

(hello fandom, just passing through, please don't eat me)

I originally planned to read The Long Game right after, but honestly I tried and realized that I completely fucking didn't want to.

I think the show and its reception plus now the book might have done it. Shane and Ilya are now like Sabrina Carpenter songs, to me. They're great, awesome even, easily digestible good vibes... I like them (most in video form, because let's not kid ourselves - the show is better and Sabrina's music videos slap), but watching/listening to them - or worse, discourse about them - makes me want to bash my head in with a fence post.

I've reached overplay with a fucking romance story.

And I do acknowledge that that's a huge thing, that something like that can even happen now (getting overexposed to a gay love story because it is just that popular with the mainstream). When I think about that properly, I do feel awed and happy and hopeful.

Most of the time, though, I wish we could move on and talk about literally anything else again.

That being said, I still liked the book. I think. Honestly, I can't really tell, because most of it was just the show, replaying in my head as I read. I don't feel equipped to judge this book on its own merrits... which is probably for the better, anyway, because I did kinda get the vibe that, had I read this without the show's existence, I would've thought it "fine" at best and then forgot about it.

But as it stands... It was great. I had fun. It's Sabrina Carpenter to me.

[plantdad-dante]

Book #233 - A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

(omg, I hate this book. I hate it I hate it I hate it, couldn't it at least have been interesting)

What a waste of time. What a waste of brain space. What an emotionally manipulative, thematically toxic wasteland of empty prose.

I take this book's messaging and themes as an insult. Like, excuse me? Really? Seriously? It's your friends' job to keep your traumatized ass from hurting himself? But also some people are too broken to be helped anyway and their suicide is inevitable no matter what? (Fuck you.) It's good actually to have your significant other be the one entire lynchpin of your will to live and to have them be your load-bearing emotional support all day every day? (Fuck you.) Because therapy is out of the question, therapy is suspect because it... tries to help you? And actually your doctor isn't doing malpractice when they don't have you committed for severe self-harming behaviour? And anti-depressants, yes, did actually kinda help, but... (hang on, why did he stop taking them?)? (Fuck. You.) Also, friends and family and a lucrative job just happen to you and severe trauma plus a physical disability are no obstacles to becoming filthy rich from literally nothing? In this economy?

Bullshit. Fuck you. Miserable piece of shit, Demon Core of mental health, I wish my principles allowed me to burn this.

I have never been as disappointed with a book as this. And not only disappointed in an "I expected it to be better" kind of way, but also just... in it's existence at all. I'm disappointed in this book for not being... fuck good, if it was at least passable, if it had any redeeming qualities whatsoever, I might not hate it as much, but this??

It's not just that the story is just gratuitously hurtful to read (calling it the "Demon Core of mental health" isn't even joking - it truly feels like exposing yourself to psychological radiation). It's not just that its themes are some of the most irresponsible shit I've ever seen put into the literary world (if any of these descriptors make you want to read the book, this is your sign to talk that impulse through with a therapist).

It's that it's boring. It's that the narration, the prose, the dialogue (which is not distinguishable from the prose for no good stylistic reason because would it surpise you to learn that this book is also not that well written) is walking round-and-around in a witless circle that only ever pretends to be deep. It's a two-dimensional horror-fest of human suffering, irregularly interrupted by architecture porn or lists of school friend names or inane conversations that are exactly as dull as these richer-than-the-gods people's day-to-day might have you expect.

I might just glue my copy shut, see if that gives me catharsis.

And don't even get me started on specifics. We'd be here til fucking Christmas.

[plantdad-dante]

Book #232 - Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree

(didn't expect lesbians. very happy to find out that there were, indeed, lesbians.)

When I talked to friends about this book, I think I compared reading it a lot to my experience of playing Stardew Valley? Which is to say, I am enjoying myself with something utterly unbingable which I nevertheless have to finish relatively quickly before I get too bored with it.

Cozy things have a tendency to not work on me. At some point I always get bored, which then makes me annoyed with myself because I do enjoy these things, they are nice and harmless and how dare my brain be bored now! And then these effects tend to get amplified the longer I stick with a particular thing, and then at some point I get too bored and stop.

So reading this had a certain element of forcing myself to read it to it. Which on the one hand amplified the annoyance, on the other it was made quite easier by the book I was reading parallel to it (more on that in my next post).

I don't even have complaints or anything, none of this is critique, I just... can't handle cozy. Especially when it isn't offset by something gratuitously grotesque (which is something I enjoy reading even less, so that's not even a solution).

It was nice. It was novel. If it was a point-and-click adventure I would return to it after probably getting too bored two thirds through and abandoning it for months to years. But it was nice.

[plantdad-dante]

Book #231 - The Importance Of Being Earnest and Other Plays by Oscar Wilde

(not prompted by the National Theatre production coming to YouTube for a week, just a very lucky coincidence for me.)

Lady Windermere's Fan: I don't know how or why, but I found the cast of this one adorable. I loved every single one of these idiots. Also, there is something so delightful and giddy about unrevealed secrets. So many soap operas would be so much better if people just got away with a little more harmless secret keeping.

Salome: The kind of dark, twisted, low-key blasphemous decadence that makes me fascinated with Jesus Christ Superstar. I would love to see this live.

A Woman Of No Importance: Honestly, I have trouble remembering this one. It kinda managed to be a slightly worse version of all the others (except Salome) at once? Good title drop, though, especially the inversion at the end.

An Ideal Husband: I didn't quite understand what this one was on about, but the political scandal was a nice change from high society/family drama. It made the intrigue and the subterfuge more interesting, and away from the talks about gender roles (which confused the fuck out of me), there is an interesting view on the world and responsibility and image and morality in here.

The Importance of Being Earnest: Fucking hilarious. Situational comedy of the highest order and I loved it to pieces, even before I watched the NT production. Loved it so much, in fact, that it took me a full day to notice that the conclusion means that Earnest means to marry his first cousin now. And the play just acts like that revelation solves all the problems, and then the curtain falls, instead of "Algernon and Jack/Earnest are actually brothers by blood" being the first sensible argument against that marriage that I've heard all play. Although.... making a bunch of petty (and) financial arguments against a marriage and then not consider cousin-incest a problem is very High Society Victorian, I guess, so that tracks after all. Bang on the money, great satire. Carry on.

[plantdad-dante]

Book #230 - Perfect On Paper by Sophie Gonzales

(I should have read this right when I bought it. Which, illustrating the entire point of this blog, was five whole years ago.)

I dunno, maybe right back when it came out I could have still vibed with this? There is a subsection of specifically queer YA romance that has a point to make, some kind of wisdom to preach to its teen audience about queerness, and when you're solidly in your twenties and immersed in too much (i.e. any) discourse, that wisdom falls on ears that have heard it 200 times before. You know?

And that doesn't make it bad! I mean, I did find it a bit bland, even outside the obvious life lesson(s), but there are probably bisexual teenagers out there who need to hear some of this, so like. I'm not gonna judge, I just missed my window of being the target audience.

I also found Darcy's inability to read her own love life hilarious, even in scenes that the book probably didn't want me to laugh at. And Brougham's home life came across as a bit cartoonishly shit, like he was living in an episode of trash TV, sort of.

I did like that the book wouldn't let you forget that Ainsley is trans. And never through discrimination! She just... learned to sew so she had clothes that would fit her properly, and at one point had to circle back to their mum's house because she forgot her hormones (most relatable shit ever, ngl.)

I did like "Only Mostly Devestated" better? But I generally tend to like YA books more when I personally relate to the protagonist, and Darcy.... Darcy just kind of annoyed me, a little.

I also tend to dislike most self-help and relationship advice books/columns. Maybe that was it. That might have been it.

[plantdad-dante]

taking notes directly on pdfs may be super practical and easy these days, but sometimes I do miss being able to carve my hatred into a piece of paper with a ball pen. sometimes you need to make the text share in the pain. leave a mark that goes deeper than colour.

[plantdad-dante]

Book #229 - A Botanical Daughter by Noah Medlock

(did I realize the irony of this book and my blog title at any point while reading it? no. no, I didn't, and I feel very stupid.)

............................ I wish I liked it more?

Don't get me wrong, I do like it. Just... not as much as I hoped I would.

Like, it was, especially in the beginning, very amusing. Not outright funny, but... I chuckled. I smiled, amused. It wasn't funny, and it didn't try to be, but I did have fun. In an understated, charmed kind of way. This was a very charming kind of book.

I loved the actual attempt to reconstruct human biological function with plants. I especially loved that it stays an attempt, that there is a blurring line between Gregor's scientific approach and the handwave-y science fiction that actually makes CHLOE move.

Speaking of, I did like Chloe, and Jenny, too (mainly because that little freak fell in love-at-first-side with a mushroom in a petridish), but I lived for Rosalinda. She felt very Wilde-esque, in that she reminded me of his plays. Delightful woman, all 'round. 10/10 Diva. Put her into every queer story ever.

(My dearest Simon. I love you. I'm not sure about that husband of yours, he had some very sketchy moments, but as long as you are happy, I am, too. Smashing taxidermy sounds like a lark, by the way, and it looked very cathartic. Invite me next time.)

Three men dead and I can't find it in myself to be sad about any of them, though Jenny's dad did somewhat confuse me. He was kind of just this wooden plank of a loose end that got tied up by bleeding out, I guess.

Whatever. I liked it (well enough). I don't think I quite understood what it was about ("family" is a bit too vague an answer to that question, I'd like to take away something more concrete) or Gregor's arc in it, but you know what? It was imaginative, it had some wonderful representation, and I don't think I'll fault it for not 100% clicking with me. There were moments that hit, and I'll just take those and... leave the rest to grow wild.

[plantdad-dante]

Book #228 - The Thief's Journal by Jean Genet

(I might be wrong, and I don't quite know how to explain it, but this might just be the horniest book I have ever read.)

What's that meme? "There are about 40 things in the world that are gayer than having gay sex"? By my reconning, Jean Genet has done all of them, with gay sex on top. That entire denial situation with Stilitano going on is just... what the hell man. What the fucking shit.

Anyway, I'm mostly... fascinated? by this book. Genet will say something weird, or off-putting, or disgusting, or salacious, or disquieting, or just generally be horny in the face of danger, and then somehow that thought will meander around and run into some baller line like "In order to understand me, the reader's complicity will be necessary". Or "I am no longer anything, only a pretext", which I have annotated saying 'what the fuck, Jean'.

What struck me right as I answered an exam question on this book is actually the following: Genet writes about robbing queers, hanging out with them and disrespecting them, yet unable to keep his eyes and mind off their business, and about all his fucking "friends". And if I'm not completely wrong, Genet wrote this book during and about a time in which homosexuality (as a concept) had just entered or was about to enter the mainstream vocabulary/understanding.

So when Genet speaks of his homosexuality, he (as we today) understands it as a fundamental part of himself. Meanwhile, society of the time was yet to make the jump from "grave moral failing" to "born that way". And Genet reacts to this by... well, by not trying to fit himself into this moral framework that was outdating itself in real time, and instead he takes and inverts it. Essentially, he goes "Fuck you. All my immoral (or "immoral") dealings are fundamental parts of me. I'm a thief, I'm a traitor, I'm a homosexual, I'm all the things you deem wrong. And I am glorious for it - being a thief is heroic, actually! - because it stands opposed to you, because standing opposed to you requires true strength."

Towards the beginning, there's a scene where he's arrested and they take a tube of vaseline from him, and he has this whole paragraph. This whole paragraph. About how disgusted the cops are, and how they're laughing and mocking him and they hate him. And he both revels in it, but would also kill everyone in the room just to get that tube of vaseline back, because it connects him to so muchmore than these pigs could ever imagine.

In a way, this book about robbing queer people is a manifesto of pride.

I think I just talked myself into putting this on the top shelf.

[plantdad-dante]

Book #227 - Die Entführung Aus Dem Serail by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

("Did you seriously read an opera for this blog?" yes I did, blaim Reclam (German publisher of classics, don't worry about it))

Actually, I also listened to a recording of it, which was often shortened in the dialogue parts, so having the book actually helped a lot for context and stuff.

This is another one of those edge cases, where I seriously contemplate just classifying a book as poetry and thus making it ineligible for this blog (if I don't have a flaming hot take about it that I feel the need to share), because technically that's the limit I put on myself: non-fiction and poetry do not count as books read for the purposes of this project. Otherwise my head would have probably exploded by now.

But since I'm allowing plays, and this is technically a play (just with music, though the music part obviously required listening to a recording, the book is text only), I feel like it counts. For completeness' sake, then, since Mozart obviously didn't write the libretto: The story of Entführung is by a Christoph Friedrich Bretzner, reworked for Mozart (and Joseph II, king of Austria at the time, who commisioned and financed it, roughly speaking), by a Johann Gottlieb Stephanie d.J. ("the younger", which was a pain to google). None of these names mean anything to me, or you, but since Stephanie didn't credit (didn't need to credit, by the laws of the time, as I understand the introduction to my copy) Bretzner, I'm already doing more than he was.

(btw, the introduction to my copy seems to be quite on the older side (not dated, which annoys me to bits), and it is doing some serious bootlicking for Mozart)

Which brings me to the story itself. Orientalist, misogynistic, need I say more? It's doing the opera thing of spinning the plot like a roulette wheel in the last act, and there's a character just named "the Blonde one" (love her, she's the only one speaking Tacheles), and the main couple spends a whole duett trying to take the fault for their impending doom and singing about how noble it is to die for love.

And then the pasha just lets them go, because he's the bigger man. Hilarious.

[plantdad-dante]

Book #226 - Rivers Of London by Ben Aaronovitch

(I don't know how to express this properly, but it is so obvious that this book is from 2011)

Well-paced, engaging enough to read, good set-up for a detective series (a genre that lives on the possibilities of theoretically infinite installments).

I'll give it that, definitely. It wasn't bad. It wasn't incompetent or anything. It was, especially in its genre, the definition of servicable. It just also.... it's like it threatend to become actually interesting at every turn, and then never did it. Like it would have just had to dig one layer deeper and could have struck gold, but no. It stayed on course for the whole book, and I can't even fault it for that. This book did what it wanted to do, and apparently that included to not be all that interesting to my tastes.

I also kinda don't like Peter. Or at least I don't care for him. I don't like his interactions with women, I don't agree with his stance on policing, I- I don't care. Nightingale is marginally more intriguing, but I doubt that the sequels make him interesting in the way I would like. Same goes for Molly, or Beverly, or any future characters.

Idk, I mean I wouldn't kick the sequels out of bed, but.... eh. Not gonna go out of my way to get them there, either.

Point is, book is fine, just not my cup of Punch. Happy Holidays (whichever ones are left).