Between the idea and the reality

I had to do a reading sprint over Christmas vacation to reach my reading goal for 2025, but I did manage to reach it! I did so much more reading last year than I have since, well, since I can remember actually. It was a great success, but I did end up picking short and easy books over longer, more difficult ones. Not in itself a bad thing, but I do want to read some of the bricks I have on my shelf too, as well as the books in Japanese and other languages. So that's a loose goal I have this year.

My final books for the year were A Christmas Carol (yes, it's a novella, but it is in fact a pretty little book on my shelf too so I say it counts, and I make the rules), The Dark is Rising, and An Immense World. All were very good, though the last one was my favourite of the three. It made me want to read more about the subject, and if I find the time I will have a look through the extensive reference section.

I first learned of The Dark is Rising when searching for Dark Rise stuff, and I put it on my reading list when I realised its influential position in English children's literature of the fantasy genre. Since the action in the book happens over Christmas, I figured Christmas vacation was a good time to read it. I liked it, but not quite enough to pick up the other books in the series I think. There was a fairytale and dream-like quality to the story that was nice. It didn't go much into the central conflict between light and dark and I didn't feel any need for it to do so either, I just — very predictably — found myself wanting to know more about the antagonists. In any case, I can see echoes of the book in Dark Rise, and in Harry Potter. Very unsubtly so, in the latter case, haha.

Catching up on Malevolent made me want for more, so I've started reading Lovecraft and The King in Yellow again. I've already read some of both, but only finished some of Lovecraft's stories and half the short stories in The King in Yellow. I'm hoping to finish the latter at least.

Lovecraft is as much of a mixed bag as I remember, with some very nice and poetic phrasings and interesting concepts, some not so interesting stories, and some serious racism and xenophobia that crops up here and there in varying prominence. I still haven't read anything by him I liked as much as At the Mountains of Madness. The Shoggoths are keeping their place as my favourite Lovecraftian creatures for now.

The King in Yellow is as good as I remembered it to be.

I'm doing a reread of Dark Rise and Dark Heir for meta and fanfic purposes, and while I sure don't have the patience to make a post for every chapter, I noticed some fun things in the prologue that I thought I'd put on here.

The prologue is from James's point of view, and we see Marcus the Steward from his perspective as James taunts him. Some things hit differently after having read the second book. One of them is James and Marcus's relationship, knowing that James used to follow him around as a kid and that Marcus was still arguing against the other Stewards for James's sake. It adds another layer to their interaction.

We can also see Marcus as a parallel to Anharion:

"All those vows. You've never really lived at all. Don't you wish you'd been with a woman? Or a man."

This sounds exactly like something Sarcean could have said to Anharion, now that we know more of them from Dark Heir. Did they once have a scene like this, with Anharion the fallen and defeated knight, still retaining his nobility and righteousness even when beaten and in chains? Or is it James speaking to his past self? Then we get this:

"Beg me, then. Beg me on your knees to kill you. Do it."
James hadn't thought Marcus would do it, but of course he did—he probably loved it, on his knees in an act of martyring self-sacrifice. Marcus was a Steward, had spent his life keeping vows and following rules, believing in words like noble and true and good.

We don't know what happened with Anharion during and after the war yet, but this is really feeding some of my pet theories. But I'll go into that in another post, once I'm done with my reread. For now, I'll end this by noting the sad irony of James's taunt in the first quote when Marcus was captured after spending a final night at an inn with his shield-mate, not really keeping to their vows.

I have a goal of reading 30 books this year and I've read 16 so far, so I'm doing alright as far as progress goes. It's been nice to finally get through some of my many unread books. Most have been sitting unread on my shelves for years. Many of them are big and/or not the easiest to read, so there's usually a reason they've remained unread. Those books take longer to get through too, which is slowing my progress down. I need to pick up my pace if I want to be able to reread books with good conscience any time soon. Still, I'm happy I've really gotten back into reading.

The latest book I finished was a poem book by Mary Oliver. It's my first time reading a book of poems, which was a very different experience. I'm still not sure what the best way of doing it is; I wanted to take more time to sit with each poem but that would take forever. In any case, I picked that book because it contains my favorite poem "Wild Geese" and because I like the evocative descriptions of nature that Mary Oliver's poems often contain.

Now I'm reading SPQR by Mary Beard, which is very good and informative, but also so big! There's so much information! I will know so much more about the Roman empire after finishing it and I can only hope some of it sticks. I'm also hoping it will give me ideas for my original writing, what with all the conflicts and the gradual development of civilization. I would also like to read a similar history of ancient China at some point to compare and contrast.

I've had "And then there were none" on my shelf for ten years after someone gave me their old copy and I finally got around to reading it this week. It was the first book I'd read by Agatha Christie, so all the time while reading it I kept going "This is just like watching some classic British murder mystery", except obviously it's the other way around, those shows are all based on her books. I did not truly grasp how important Agatha Christie was to the genre before reading a book by her.

Anyway, it was an entertaining read, though obviously some parts have aged poorly. I definitely want to read some more of her books. I do like a good murder mystery.