Sabriel

Garth Nix's Sabriel is a YA fantasy novel; it came to me highly recommended so I will summarize reasons why, reading it in 2020 as certainly an adult, I did not like it and don't recommend it. I don't mean to cast aspersions on youthful readers who enjoyed the book, but it has... issues.

Nominally, it is about a teenage girl who has magical gifts that allow her to enter the realm of Death and, variously, make things more permanently dead or bring them sort-of back to life. That's all you need to know.

The book is going through puberty SO HARD RIGHT NOW

This is my conclusion based on the nails-on-blackboard effect of unwelcome pubescent interjections into the otherwise adventure- and magic-based narrative.

We learn that because "there was minimal sex education" and "None of Sabriel's friends had reached puberty before her, so in fear and desperation she had entered Death" (17%) which seems a pretty dire thing to do in lieu of, I don't know, borrowing a book from the library or walking in to town and asking some responsible-looking adults about it. This is a truly horrible fantasy-world characterization of sex education, general education, learning, curiosity, puberty, and how serious necromantic magic is. Every single time that she enters Death it is given the stakes that she might die ("For Sabriel to enter Death seemed madness, temping fate." 66%), so I HOPE there is literally any other recourse to getting information about puberty.

The descriptions of the glaringly obvious romantic interest start with him being discovered, fully nude. The circumcision status of his penis is described; my personal reading notes say "this had better be significant later". (NARRATOR: It was not.) Later we get to hear about how his thighs are so muscled that he cannot put on pants. Even later we are treated to a gratuitous description of his rippling abs --- under his clothes --- during a fight scene.

Then for the rest of the book we just hear about people getting "flushed" and, occasionally, kissing each other on the forehead or sneakily intertwining pinkies to hold hands. It's as if the narration wants to be erotic, but is constrained by the imagination of a not-particularly-well-read 10-year-old. (They do kiss at least one time in order to COUNTERACT THE MOST POWERFUL DEATH-MAGIC THAT EXISTS IN THE WORLD; one teenage kiss is apparently sufficient, suggesting that the true magic is horniness.)

Everyone is constantly running, and extremely exhausted, but somehow manages to run even harder than before

This did not work to heighten the stakes any of the times it was used. It did heighten my irritation. After discovering previously-unbelievable athletic depth after the last handful of times that they were so-exhausted-they-could-run-no-further, why would I now feel any tension at the mention that they are so-exhausted-they-could-run-no-further? If anything, it just alerted me that they would, in fact, be required to run a bit further, because: drama.

Forced bathing scenes

At least twice, we have to read meticulously-detailed descriptions of scenes where Sabriel is forcibly stripped and bathed. This was uncomfortable and served no purpose except to repeatedly detail that it happened --- we don't even get any internal monologue or self-reflection to justify it. Yikes.

Unpalatable writing style

• Every single character was blindingly Obviously Significant to the Plot.
• The bad guy's name is a good guy's name, reversed --- oh, wow, it turns out they are the same person after hundreds of years of sinister magic!
• Sabriel has read the obviously significant Book of the Dead but can't remember pages from it except under duress in situations where suddenly magically remembering a page of a book would solve the problem; this is true even though she is literally carrying the book with her for most of the adventure.
• Putting earrings into already-pierced ears is an action that is described as causing bloody smears all over the ear-region (personal reading note: "not how earrings work").
• The characters, even those whose inner thoughts we got to hear, were extremely boring and flat, with no actual personality. First impressions and stereotypes were 100% accurate.
• There were two consecutive chapters where characters had to narrative-dump the entire plan of Team Evil Kill Everything And Live In Zombieland AND the entire plan to countermand it by Team Good, Chaste, and Hand-Holding. This despite the fact that the entire plot had been signposted SO HARD in every other clue and revelation for the entire book. Youthful readers are smart and I felt condescended-to on behalf of literate preteens everywhere.

At one point during some completely unjustified anger at the father she has literally spent 70% of the book questing to rescue, we read "He hardly seemed to notice her, except as a repository for numerous revelations and as an agent to deal with [Bad Guy]." (73%) My personal notes read: "I feel same." It was just not possible to start caring about any of the characters, or the stakes, or even whether it was an interesting set-up.

Maybe YA books are not for me

To be clear, I abandoned this book with maybe 10% left so I cannot tell you if it has an incredible conclusion that makes it all worthwhile. (The Wikipedia plot summary indicates: it does not. She's not allowed to die for narrative reasons!?!? Argh.)

Also, though: the world is teetering in such a fragile way... the destruction of ancient magical contracts is described as releasing so much uncontrollable magic that everyone will die and Zombies Will Rule Forever. So it's not clear how the ancient magical contracts got established in the first place, since the baseline level of magic is constant. This is the most charitable review I could give this book: the worldbuilding made no sense (and everything else about it was terrible, shallow, and bad). The conclusion seems to be: follow the rules that adults give you, do the work they assign, don't ask questions, don't think independently, don't make any choices, and despite getting stellar grades at expensive boarding school, you will still be atrociously bad at everything, but: shrug. You get to take baths and sometimes hold hands with a boy!

This post's theme word is verbigerate (v intr), "to obsessively repeat meaningless words and phrases." The word "charter" is verbigerated so often that it quickly reached semantic satiation.

Piranesi

Susanna Clarke's Piranesi is a novel in the form of a series of journal entries; the character who is writing is, by turns, unreliable, forgetful, and unclear. But because the novel would truly suffer from continuous vague recollections, he also has perfect memory for dialog and for visual descriptions of scenery and surroundings. Does this seem contradictory? Yes, but lucky for us, it doesn't matter because nothing in this book particularly matters.

The novel takes place inside a giant House --- a truly enormous House --- a possibly endless House, consisting of a series of marble-lined, colonnaded halls, vestibules, staircases, and passages. While the narrator uses the word "House", readers and other incidental characters come to understand the series of rooms as a labyrinth: not connected in any predictable way, challenging to navigate, and full of distracting detail. There is no obvious entry or exit point, though the action is centered around a vestibule (also the origin point whence the narrator indexes all other rooms). The narrator is vague on details that seem significant (how does he remember navigation directions perfectly when others get so easily lost?) and incredibly specific on details that no one else cares about (how many daily-use goods will he fashion from "fish leather", where is the best room to go bird-watching from, what is the Platonic Ideal Good Action for him to take in any situation). He confusingly both denies the existence of a world outside the building AND knows lots of words that refer to things that exist in our world, but not in the House.

This sounds mysterious, and it is. Clarke is a good writer and this book has many excellent moments --- e.g. the wink to the reader on p. 60,

I realised that the search for the Knowledge had encouraged us to think of the House as if it were a sort of riddle to be unravelled, a text to be interpreted, and that if we ever discover the Knowledge, then it will be as if the Value has been wrested from the House and all that remains will be mere scenery.

This was unfortunately prescient, as the cleverness of presenting the core labyrinth/mysteri as "a text to be interpreted" was excellent, but indeed once the puzzle's answer was revealed, it was not very satisfying to consider the continuation of any part of the story or setting.

The cover blurbs portray the book as a sparkling gem of prose, an all-absorbing world full of beauty that will irresistibly entice the reader, and a fascinating puzzle. I found the book to be well-written, but describing things as irresistibly beautiful and actually invoking the impression that they are beautiful are two different things. The book does a lot of telling (repeatedly, "The Beauty of the House is immeasurable") and not a lot of showing; mostly we come to understand, gradually, that the narrator's seeming-unreliability all has completely predictable causes, and actually that everything he reports is true. All mysteries are solved, every single clue that I noted was tied up neatly in the most obvious conclusion, there were zero twists and few reveals, no characters had any subterfuge or depth. Everyone was exactly as they seemed on the surface.

And finally, my observation of several books I've read recently: I get the impression that the book's conclusion was written under duress, with the publisher demanding "just finish the book and turn it in!", and not given any time to develop into something interesting or satisfying. The book definitely ends, and that is what can be said about it: in the last page there is a feeble grasp at Greater Meaning which falls completely flat and ends the book on a gaspingly sour note.

My recommendation: if you want an atmospheric book about a mysterious, endless house, read Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast. If you want a book told by an unreliable narrator, then I strongly recommend Tamsyn Muir's recent release Harrow the Ninth (and its preceding book, Gideon the Ninth). If you want a book that explores, in a fun novelistic way, the boundaries of human knowledge and the notion that modern scientific rationality has cut us off from access to certain domains of knowledge and maybe even certain actions and physically real spaces, then I recommend Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland's The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. (which also includes an improvised modern Viking saga!). And if you want an excellent book written by Susanna Clarke, read Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.

This post's theme word is heterography (n), "a spelling different from the one currently in use." The vaguely timeless ambience would have been more interesting with heterography.

Quote board, fall 2020

Inexplicably, people keep talking around me and my brain keeps latching on to the strange ways they arrange words and ideas.

K: "96% of your quarantine room capacity is available."
Z: "Book now and save!"

(assorted chorus of voices): "Did you get the spoiler for the back to cut down on air resistance? can it pop wheelies? how much does that keyboard bench?"

K: "You're getting feature requests from a feral cat?"
Z: "Yeah."

Z: "But your parents aren't there, right? As far as raucous house parties go, feeding your dog bacon to get her to like you is, like... fine."

Z: "Our hot take is that you need to just lubricate the freshmen so they have snail trails and can't actually get close to each other, they just slide off... we want to make McGill Walk into a slip'n'slide."

K: "I'm not a colonizer."
F: "It's widely regarded as a mistake."

R: "I once realized I was a WASP and was shocked."

F: "When Lenin was young and the revolution was strong, THAT would be the way to take power."

Q: "Stepford wives, if the Stepford wives were democrats."

F: "Sometimes it's a conjunctive AND and sometimes it's a disjunctive AND."

F: "It's the prosperity gospel of tenure lines."

D: "Tiny houses intended for birds: very cute. It is a truth universally acknowledged."

K: "Have you tuned the wheelbarrow?"
L: "I've been trying to hit it with a hammer. I'll post it on YouTube."

F: "I've been appreciative from the beginning. And I'm waiting to receive one more... make it blue to match my eyes."

? (from a 66-person video call): "That is a way not to have a coup: you think you're on private chat but you broadcast to the entire school."

? (on 142-person call): "I look forward to meeting some of you in person one day."

L: "I don't exactly understand the science of Wifi --- I know it's little elves that fly through the air and whisper the voices of other people..."
K,M, and O (simultaneously): "You basically got it."

R: "Static! I only hear it when you're talking."
Z: "That's just my midwestern accent."

L: "In the sewing room --- well, in the third sewing room, ..."

S: "If you don't like my build infrastructure, we can talk about that offline." FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT

Z: "[Q] has been on sabbatical for the past 10 years, so..."
Q: "from future import *"

N: "I have to say, for me, experiencing it on film was sufficient."
Z: "You don't feel the call to the southern pole?"

D: "Some would argue that this 'premium content' is not, in fact, content. But I would argue that it takes time to watch and is unedited."

D (in response to me): "Lila, did you lose your Zoom premium? I'm getting ads." (I did a funny bit!)

Z: "Extend the cat a line of credit. [beat] Step 3, profit."

R: "Stepford wives, if the Stepford wives were democrats."

I: "Is that your foot in front of you?"
N: "That's his face."

C: "Can the system keep the chipmunks out?"
D: "Are the chipmunks committing identity fraud using your credit card?"

N: "I succumbed to the lure of firecrackers in my youth, so I remember the attraction."

F: "I found a way around it."
N: "He naturalized the bayonet."

R: "Plus their proprietary blend of whatever they think almonds taste like."

C (distantly, off-camera): "Ooooh! Ow ow ow!"
N (distantly, off-camera): "I gave birth to three children, it hurt more than this."

F: "That was when the sun didn't rise. That day."

K: "I have a +1 resistance to emotional damage."
F: "I need to activate that."

D: "Our first thought was to go to Denver. But it's far away and on fire."

Z: "I lightly overshopped because I was excited about the squash."

M: "What is the saying?"
A: "More money, more problems."
M: "Oh. My first thought was, more children, more problems."

D: "Here's my backend. Please engineer it to something useful. I wrote... no test cases."

D (on Zoom): "I'm streaming this on Instagram Live right now."

L: "If I misunderstand something, you can be almost sure I didn't misunderstand it."

N: "Congratulations on assembling those Ikea shelves."
Z: "It is what I was raised to do."

U: "I don't know how much we can train people to be nice."

F: "You've solved the dilemma! I'm going to die in a warehouse fire."

K: "If you lose by 5 pants I will be very interested to see how that plays out."

D: "You definitely shouldn't buy a vintage electric blanket."

K: "I like to turn the cereal box off and on again."
L: "On the cereal box, they hide the controls."

Z: "Do I not know my own course number?"

F: "It's not screwed over in the sense that... I could have played better. But I didn't."

L: "Rampantly floating with pubic hairs."

J: "Bread is the bread of life."

D (faintly, with astonishment): "Oh, Mom, you added me to your friends."

D: "It's your turn. Disappointingly, I am prepared to talk you through beating me."

J: "It's about the journey. The slow, inexorable journey."

K: "I can't believe we're moving past 'arbitorium'!"
L: "Arbitrarium!"
M: "Arboretum?"
N: "I got it, clearly: Lab of Ornithology." (<-- this was, unbelievably, correct!)

Z: "I just think --- and I hear myself saying this as it comes out --- when people ask questions they don't think about what they don't know."

K: "How'd you get out of the pentagram?"
F: "It's a demon-backed demon trust."

Z: "It's hard to both get off at the same time. It's also hard to both go down at the same time." (IIRC this was about internet service uptime but WOW)

F: "A mountain of lawyers, in a giant mech suit, as another lawyer. With missiles."

Z: "We're just multiplying matrices by vectors in my course, man, I'm not touching that third rail."

Z: "The other thing --- there are lots of problems bathroom-related --- living with my sister..."

Z: "They came up with 2 major options to save money. One was to demolish the building."

R: "If you decapitate someone, it's rated R."

This post's theme word is heterophemy (n), "the use of a word different from the one intended." It's easy to get on the quote board by accidental heterophemy in earshot of me.