[books 2010] China Mieville & Travel
Apr. 11th, 2010 08:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
inulro23. The City and The City by China Miéville
This month's bibliogoths selection. It appears I liked it better than everybody else as I got so wrapped up in the psychogeography and the parallels with real-world situations to be bored with the less exciting bits.
It's hard to describe without making it sound a lot less than what it actually is, but at its most basic it's a police procedural set in a world that is very like ours, but not quite. There is nothing supernatural about this different world, just a major feat of herd psychology (the argument in the pub was not over whether such a thing would be possible, but how many generations it would take). Like it or not, we "unsee" things all the time.
I have to admit that the mystery itself isn't that great; usually that sort of thing bugs me but in this case I felt that what he was doing around it was interesting enough to make up for it.
I also got a kick out of the fantasy nuts who got their knickers in a twist because Miéville wrote a detective novel, but I'm petty that way.
24.Life on the Golden Horn by Mary Wortley Montagu
This is very short (119 pages) so I wasn't going to count it, and then I figured, I read a lot of long books, and stuff like this will even things out.
I was in the charity shop one day last year to discover that someone had given away four brand-new volumes of the Penguin Great Journeys series. Sad completist that I am, I will be collecting the lot eventually.
I read this one first, because I should have read it years ago. Wortley Montagu wrote one of the best accounts of the Ottoman empire in the early 18th century, and certainly the only account of Ottomen women. My PhD was on areas very close to this but crashed & burned before I got as far as reading her. This is just a very short series of extracts, but it's quite impressive.
It's an account of her journey across Europe to Constantinople (her husband was briefly ambassador to the Ottoman Empire). She observes a lot, and is at pains to point out that her experience differed enormously from everything she'd read about the region. She's generous enough to allow that customs change over time, but also pretty sure that earlier writers Made Stuff Up. Where the lives of women are concerned, she knows they made stuff up, as they'd never have had the access to the women's bath houses and the harems that she did.
Fascinating stuff, and it's almost tempting to track down a more extended version, though I'd probably need access to a proper academic library for that.
This month's bibliogoths selection. It appears I liked it better than everybody else as I got so wrapped up in the psychogeography and the parallels with real-world situations to be bored with the less exciting bits.
It's hard to describe without making it sound a lot less than what it actually is, but at its most basic it's a police procedural set in a world that is very like ours, but not quite. There is nothing supernatural about this different world, just a major feat of herd psychology (the argument in the pub was not over whether such a thing would be possible, but how many generations it would take). Like it or not, we "unsee" things all the time.
I have to admit that the mystery itself isn't that great; usually that sort of thing bugs me but in this case I felt that what he was doing around it was interesting enough to make up for it.
I also got a kick out of the fantasy nuts who got their knickers in a twist because Miéville wrote a detective novel, but I'm petty that way.
24.Life on the Golden Horn by Mary Wortley Montagu
This is very short (119 pages) so I wasn't going to count it, and then I figured, I read a lot of long books, and stuff like this will even things out.
I was in the charity shop one day last year to discover that someone had given away four brand-new volumes of the Penguin Great Journeys series. Sad completist that I am, I will be collecting the lot eventually.
I read this one first, because I should have read it years ago. Wortley Montagu wrote one of the best accounts of the Ottoman empire in the early 18th century, and certainly the only account of Ottomen women. My PhD was on areas very close to this but crashed & burned before I got as far as reading her. This is just a very short series of extracts, but it's quite impressive.
It's an account of her journey across Europe to Constantinople (her husband was briefly ambassador to the Ottoman Empire). She observes a lot, and is at pains to point out that her experience differed enormously from everything she'd read about the region. She's generous enough to allow that customs change over time, but also pretty sure that earlier writers Made Stuff Up. Where the lives of women are concerned, she knows they made stuff up, as they'd never have had the access to the women's bath houses and the harems that she did.
Fascinating stuff, and it's almost tempting to track down a more extended version, though I'd probably need access to a proper academic library for that.
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[books 2010] China Mieville & Travel
Date: 2010-04-11 08:26 pm (UTC)When's the next date, please, for the bibliogoths?
Re: [books 2010] China Mieville & Travel
Date: 2010-04-11 10:09 pm (UTC)[books 2010] China Mieville & Travel
Date: 2010-04-12 01:37 pm (UTC)Re: [books 2010] China Mieville & Travel
Date: 2010-04-12 02:42 pm (UTC)Re: [books 2010] China Mieville & Travel
Date: 2010-04-12 06:25 pm (UTC)Re: [books 2010] China Mieville & Travel
Date: 2010-04-12 07:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-11 09:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-11 10:47 pm (UTC)