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Angels and Insects by A.S. Byatt // Cat People (1942) // The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan

#angels and insects #angels and insects novel #morpho eugenia #cat people 1942 #the cement garden #the cement garden novel #web weaving #on sexuality

okay this is the best book ever. writing a book about insects AND incest is already a choice but now she made that pun too. a.s. byatt i respect you so much

#angels and insects #morpho eugenia #a.s. byatt #gothic incest

Wednesday Reading Meme: Atmospheria Edition

Hello, tumblr! I used to post these over on Dreamwidth, but for the past two and a half years, I’ve been reading almost exclusively fanfiction, with only occasional forays into book-land. I’ve thought occasionally about writing about the fic I was reading, but frankly, most of it was short-ish works intended for easy gratification. (Not that I'm knocking easy gratification! But a 3500-word story about a captive Dean Winchester watching an evil version of himself and Castiel have sex is...entertaining, certainly, just maybe not in a way that lends itself to a lot of deeper analysis.) (Well, other than perhaps a judicious use of the "this better not awaken anything in me" meme. Ahem.) That said! I've read a lot of fanfiction over the past few years, and plan to continue. So I think I'm going to add a Fanfiction Spotlight slot to the Wednesday Reading Meme format. Chances are there'll have been something I've read in any given week that feels like it deserves attention. And in the meantime, I’ve been reading Actual Paper Books lately, largely as a way to wean myself of the doomscrolling habit...and since I’m low-key boycotting Goodreads these days, I figure I’ll try writing about them here.

So without further ado...

What I've recently finished reading The Starless Sea, by Erin Morgenstern. I'd previously read The Night Circus on a long-ass plane flight, and it turned out to be almost the perfect book for it—pure escapism so heavily drenched in dreamy poetic atmosphere that I could sink into it like a hot bath, and forget for much of the six-hour flight time that I was crammed into a tiny coach seat. Sea is definitely in that same vein, but this time around I found the thinness and uncertainty of the plot to be rather more frustrating, in a way that overpowered the richness of the atmosphere. There was still plenty there to enjoy, including a portal fantasy to any bibliophile's world of pure wish-fulfillment, and some meditations on love and change, and one quote in particular on the nature of love that's stuck with me...but I don't think the whole thing hangs together as well as it promised, at the start. And while (as a fellow author) I completely understand that things change as you write them, when you reach a point in a story where it feels like the author has as little idea as you do what happens next, I find it a little demoralizing. Morpho Eugenia, by A.S. Byatt. Now that I think about it, this novella makes for an interesting comparison to Sea, because it's similarly atmospheric, albeit less in the dreamy-imaginative-lovers-and-poets vein than the neo-Victorian highly-organized-and-tightly-laced-household-full-of-dark-undercurrents style. It also does absolutely nothing surprising, plot-wise; it's 180 pages long and I think I'd identified most of the major themes and guessed the major arcs/big plot reveal by page fifteen. That's not necessarily a fault in and of itself—there's something comforting about a story that does exactly what you expect, and it does a good job threading the needle of ladling on the foreshadowing without (quite) hitting you over the head with what's going on. But frankly, the narrative stumbles somewhat in its slavish devotion to form. As an example: our protagonist is an entolomologist and atheist, penniless in the wake of a shipwreck that robbed him of his specimens and research, who finds himself living on the largesse of a wealthy family whose patriarch has an interest in natural philosophy. So there are, of course, extensive passages on the nature and habits of various insects (meant to be excerpts from his work), on the potential space for the existence of God in natural selection (meant to be arguments from the patriarch), and even an extensive semi-allegorical insectoid fairy tale (written by another character entirely), which...certainly is all in keeping with the Victorian style, but none of which really feels particularly necessary to the story, here in this age where encyclopedias are a thing and anyone reading a neo-Victorian novella probably has at least a passing familiarity with the Deist arguments being held in the wake of Darwin's publication of On the Origin of Species. Some cynical part of me wonders if Byatt was trying to write a whole novel, only to discover that the main thrust of her story was nowhere near substantial enough to support one, and even with all the padding she only managed to reach novella length. What I'm currently reading Technically I haven't started it, but The Conjugial Angel is the other Byatt novella in the collection I picked up, so I'm probably going to power through that just so I won't feel guilty about tossing the book on the "to be donated" pile. If it's anything like Morpho Eugenia, I expect to feel thoroughly "meh" about it, but hey! Maybe I'll be surprised! What I plan to read next I have two specific recommended-by-friends books in my queue. The first is Aleksander Solzhenitsyn's One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich, which I'm rather looking forward to despite my somewhat uneven relationship with Russian literature. It was recommended to me by @coffeeandchemicals, and the bits and pieces of Solzhenitsyn I've encountered in the wild make me suspect I'll find his perspective interesting. And even if I end up hating it, well...it's short. The second is Margo Lanagan's book Tender Morsels, which I know very little about other than it's a dark fairy tale. But it was sent by @introvertia, who's become quite dear to me, and the theme of it (the jacket cover promises an Edenic tale of three women turned out of their personal Heaven and having to deal with the harsh realities of the outside world) certainly feels appropriate to 2020. Fanfiction Spotlight I was particularly taken with the premise of @zoemathemata's Supernatural/Supernatural RPF story "Folie a Deux". Sam and Dean Winchester are held captive in Lofty Pines Mental Institution for unknown reasons, slowly being brainwashed into thinking that they're two run-of-the-mill dudes named Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki...or are Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki two men suffering from the delusion that they're supernatural-creature hunter brothers named Sam and Dean Winchester? And if they're brothers, how do they square that with the fact that they can't seem to keep their hands off each other...? It's a clever idea, with the sort of meta-analytical flavor that's very in keeping with the show itself, and zoemathemata makes full use of the opportunity to break down the many inconsistencies and flaws that any long-running serialized story accumulates but that we, the audience, overlook for the sake of the Plot of the Week. My one personal complaint about it is that it ends too soon—the most immediate plot threads are resolved but there's a distinct sense that this is the beginning rather than the ending. The author says in the comments that they didn't continue it in part because they couldn't decide which was the reality—and I totally get not wanting to spend months or years writing a novel-length fic out of what's supposed to be a quick bit of fun—but there's just so much you could do with this idea. Even without picking sides, it could be a Total Recall-style ambiguously-themed case fic, or a "Frame of Mind"-esque dark psychological thriller, or any number of other options...

#wednesday reading #erin morgenstern #a.s. byatt #aleksandr solzhenitsyn #margo lanagan #zoemathemata #the sunless sea #morpho eugenia #one day in the life of ivan denisovich #tender morsels #folie a deux #books #supernatural #fic rec

Due to Matty Crompton's fable about fairies in the story Morpho Eugenia by A.S. Byatt, it is now my favorite book. Despite it's adult topics.

I don't know what about the transformation in the story tickled my fancy so much but holy heck was it good.

Miss muffet as a fairy? Brilliant. Love Mistress Mouffet.

Perceive this intro of Mistress Mouffet, it sounds to me as if she were morphing into a humanoid shape somewhat "Two shiny black shoes arrived, with a little skip, and above them someone long and thin and black—a four-limbed creature, which resolved itself into a human shape, female, with a long black skirt and a white bonnet, shading a little white face with large hornrimmed glasses on a sharp nose. She was wrapped in a long, silvery cloak."(A.S. Byatt)

This is the quote that dragged me into this story. Even though I had to read it for one of my classes, this quote made sure I would not get bored. The amount of anthropomorphism that surrounded the book prior to this only emphasized this paragraph. Part of me reading this wishes to draw out the character described here just due to how eloquently it is written. I hope to let other transformation enthusiasts know about this novel, and to emphasize that in this fable of fiction within fiction there is even more transformation shown off. How much must I emphasize how interesting the second half of this book truly is so that others will seek it out? If only to read the transformations or better yet to read the story as a whole!

I hope my use of this quotation is correct in way of fair use, for I am trying my best while containing the excitement that this scene dragged into me!