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hawkwing_lbNow that I have the previous post off my chest...
Books 2010: 110-111
110. Cherie Priest, Dreadnought.
Set in the same continuity as Boneshaker, and startlingly different. When nurse Mercy Lynch learns that her estranged father has fallen ill, she sets out to travel across the American continent to see him, through an alt-hist steampunk nightmare of the American Civil War. Now with extra added zombies!
I liked this book a lot, though not as much as I wanted to. Jarringly, Priest - while remaining in Lynch's point of view - sometimes jumps from referring to Lynch as "Mercy" to calling her "the nurse." Not very very often, but often enough to jolt me out of the reading experience. The battle and travel and details of the setting are convincing to me, but because of its structure, the book feels a little off-balance in terms of tension and resolution. And the climactic zombie encounter did not satisfy me sufficiently, as it appeared to end too quickly. I think I was hoping for a book as claustrophic as Boneshaker and got a completely different experience. It's probably not helped by my ambivalent attitude towards people who set out to reconcile with their estranged fathers.
(Personally, I might visit mine if he bothered to tell me he was dying? But only in order to have the satisfaction of telling him to his face that he was a complete and utter shit. And possibly making sure it hurt. Issues. I have them.)
Anyway. It's a good book. And I really liked the battle scenes and Mercy's encounters with other travellers. The black lady with the restaurant franchise, the boy with the club foot, Miss Theodora Clay. They stand out.
non-fiction
111. Robin Mitchell-Boyask, Plague and the Athenian Imagination: Drama, history and the cult of Asclepius, Cambridge, 2008.
I don't have the chops to discuss whether or not this book works. It looks in very technical detail at the fifth century BC tragedies (with a title like that, I was hoping for a diachronic survey, but alas no) which use a nosological vocabulary, and relates them both to the plague at Athens recounted in Thucydides (probably striking first in 430 BC) and to the construction of the Asklepion on the south slope of the acropolis, directly behind the theatre of Dionysos (c. 420 BC).
Table of Contents.
Most useful from my perspective is probably chapter three, "The language of disease in tragedy," which itemises the uses of loimos, plague, and nosos, sickness, in tragic drama. Loimos appears to be a much more fraught word than nosos, which is useful to know. Also useful is the discussion of Euripides' Heracles in chapter eight, which points out that at the end of that play, Theseus tells Heracles he is no longer Heracles, "because he is ill." Which is a statement which bears much thinking about, as an articulation of the effect of illness on the self.
Anyway.
Books 2010: 110-111
110. Cherie Priest, Dreadnought.
Set in the same continuity as Boneshaker, and startlingly different. When nurse Mercy Lynch learns that her estranged father has fallen ill, she sets out to travel across the American continent to see him, through an alt-hist steampunk nightmare of the American Civil War. Now with extra added zombies!
I liked this book a lot, though not as much as I wanted to. Jarringly, Priest - while remaining in Lynch's point of view - sometimes jumps from referring to Lynch as "Mercy" to calling her "the nurse." Not very very often, but often enough to jolt me out of the reading experience. The battle and travel and details of the setting are convincing to me, but because of its structure, the book feels a little off-balance in terms of tension and resolution. And the climactic zombie encounter did not satisfy me sufficiently, as it appeared to end too quickly. I think I was hoping for a book as claustrophic as Boneshaker and got a completely different experience. It's probably not helped by my ambivalent attitude towards people who set out to reconcile with their estranged fathers.
(Personally, I might visit mine if he bothered to tell me he was dying? But only in order to have the satisfaction of telling him to his face that he was a complete and utter shit. And possibly making sure it hurt. Issues. I have them.)
Anyway. It's a good book. And I really liked the battle scenes and Mercy's encounters with other travellers. The black lady with the restaurant franchise, the boy with the club foot, Miss Theodora Clay. They stand out.
non-fiction
111. Robin Mitchell-Boyask, Plague and the Athenian Imagination: Drama, history and the cult of Asclepius, Cambridge, 2008.
I don't have the chops to discuss whether or not this book works. It looks in very technical detail at the fifth century BC tragedies (with a title like that, I was hoping for a diachronic survey, but alas no) which use a nosological vocabulary, and relates them both to the plague at Athens recounted in Thucydides (probably striking first in 430 BC) and to the construction of the Asklepion on the south slope of the acropolis, directly behind the theatre of Dionysos (c. 420 BC).
Table of Contents.
Most useful from my perspective is probably chapter three, "The language of disease in tragedy," which itemises the uses of loimos, plague, and nosos, sickness, in tragic drama. Loimos appears to be a much more fraught word than nosos, which is useful to know. Also useful is the discussion of Euripides' Heracles in chapter eight, which points out that at the end of that play, Theseus tells Heracles he is no longer Heracles, "because he is ill." Which is a statement which bears much thinking about, as an articulation of the effect of illness on the self.
Anyway.
