William Gibson: Count Zero (Sprawl Trilogy 2). Sequel to Neuromancer. The plot is somehow too simple and too complicated at the same time, but I don’t really mind because the characters (one elite mercenary, one disgraced art dealer, one suburban kid in way over his head) are just as lost as I am, wandering around a complex lived-in world full of wonderful subplots and supporting cast. Top-notch classic cyberpunk with corporate espionage and simulated virtual realities and weird AI gods.
William Gibson: Mona Lisa Overdrive (Sprawl Trilogy 3). Concludes the trilogy with yet more cyberpunk shenanigans and yet more hapless humans (world-famous influencer, yakuza heiress, traumatised reclusive artist, penniless teenage addict), caught up in the inscrutable machinations of all-powerful international corporations and rogue AI. Probably my favourite in the trilogy, because of the drop-dead gorgeous writing, the humour, the massive amounts of idiosyncratic weirdies populating the plot, and the return of an older, wiser Molly Millions. Gibson is not great at writing women, but here he made a concerted effort, and as a result, we have three very distinct female POV characters, all of whom I love but especially Mona herself.
Doris Lessing: Shikasta (Canopus in Argos 1) I’ve seen this book brought up as an example of what happens when a literary author decides to write sci-fi without a solid grounding in the genre’s conventions and possibilities. And that’s kind of true, but it’s only a small part of why this book is so weird. Lessing was already weird, her literary books were already doing weird things to pacing and structure. This novel is like… a novella about the fall of a prehistorical civilisation, then a few tales reinterpreting the events of the Old Testament, then a long compilation of very short stories, most of them brief fictionalised biographies of individual people in 20th century Britain, then a first-person novella about three siblings in a dystopian near-future, then an epistolary novelette about some teenagers doing a mock trial against the whole of Europe, which runs into another epistolary story about preparing for nuclear annihilation, these disparate pieces glued together by a framing device that involves aliens who observe and try to influence human history. Weird inconsistent book, but the good parts are extremely good. Some of the best short stories I’ve read in my life pretending to be a novel.
Andrea Dworkin: Right Wing Women. This is a feminist nonfiction classic for a reason. Easy to read, hard to forget. Yes, a fair bit of it is hastily written analyses of specific 1970s questions and conflicts, but the rest of it is painfully applicable even today. It’s a stark statement about how much of our society is built on facilitating marital rape, and how many women make the rational choice to accept and shore up that system in order to avoid even worse violence.
JRR Tolkien: The Hobbit. (German practice reread.) Everybody knows what the Hobbit is, it’s still good on reread although very much an episodic children’s book that swerves into a tragic war story at the very last minute. It sure has a lot of vocabulary that I didn't have before, most of it related to trees.
Jo Walton: Among Others. I loved the premise, loved the semi-autobiographical perspective of a teenage Welsh SFF-fan in the 1970s, I absolutely loved the low-key and hard-to-interpret fairy magic. But the book itself didn’t work for me, the writing didn’t work for me, too much of it felt like inert padding between the few fragile pieces of plot, and the constant name-dropping of 1970ies SFF titles didn’t give me a real connection to the character or a real sense of the historical fandom, instead I felt like I was reading a version of Ready Player One for people who actually read.
Revenge of the Sith. A double tragedy. A tragedy because if the characters made slightly different choices they could have had a happy ending, and a meta-tragedy because if the filmmakers made slightly different choices they could have made a good tragedy, as opposed to a frustrating muddle. Key parts of the plot are cribbed from Dune: Messiah and applied without context. Padme is written so atrociously badly it loops around and becomes a bold feminist statement on how a relationship can turn you into a shell of your former self.
Clone Wars Season 1. The dialogue and the moral lessons are written for eight-year-olds, the setting and the war story plots are written for fifty-year-old dads, it is dumb and doesn’t mesh well. There are some flashes of something almost interesting, and I’m told that that there’s more of that in later seasons.
A More Civilized Age Podcast, Season 1. Four people with varying levels of knowledge about Star War watch and discuss a star war. It’s funny, it’s smart, sometimes they yell at the show for being dumb and bad, sometimes they give it incredible amounts of grace and basically invent the secret good version of it, it’s fun.
Ariane Mnouchkine & Théatre du Soleil: Ici sont les dragons. A play about 1917: I expected either the bloody yet justified glory of the revolution, or the justified yet bloody execution of the tsar. Instead I mostly got endless political discussions between various revolutionary factions in various rooms. This play said: the original sin of the Russian Revolution wasn’t killing the tsar, and it wasn’t even killing the tsar’s children, all that hardly matters now: the original sin of the Russian Revolution was killing the emperor and then choosing to remain an Empire. Suppressing non-bolshevik revolutionary parties, even fellow socialists, and deciding not to let Ukraine go, Lenin let the Russian Empire survive, and it survived Socialism and the fall of Socialism and survives today. A dark bitter weird play in five languages with subtitles, metafictional digressions, long quotes from memoirs and history books, and historical figures portrayed by actors in rubber face masks of Lenin, Stalin and so on, yes really, it was a hard watch, except for a gorgeous five-minute farce about Lenin in his pyjamas.
Exhibitions (I got to go to Paris last month)
Louvre: Revoir Cimabue. Religious art from the 13th century, when some people had already started painting interesting, differentiated faces, but everyone was still indicating holiness by drowning the painting in golf leaf. Strange arched features, hooded eyes and green-tinged skin in a sea of gold, altarpieces just shining with divinity. Works by Cimabue and also all of his contemporaries and precursors and students because not even the Louvre has enough Cimabues to fill a small room.
Pompidou: Suzanne Valadon. May be my new favourite artist. She started modelling for painters as a teenager, she features in works by Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec and a dozen other great Parisian painters at the turn of the century. She learned painting from being painted, and started making her own work, first drawings, then eventually oil paintings. Her work is idiosyncratic and meanly realistic but also warm. Her portraits and her nudes are all wonderfully mundane. She was one of the first women to paint not only female but also male nudes, from life. (But the Salon of Independents made her add a strategic leaf or they wouldn’t exhibit it. No! Let her paint cock!) My absolute favourite painting from her was also centred at the exhibition, because look at it, The Blue Room is just perfect, she doesn’t give a shit, she’s in her pyjamas.
But I also loved Lady with Little Dog, partly because of the little dog, partly because of the colours of the drape, partly because the androgyny of the model.
