Fourteen months of books

[shewhomust]

While we were away on holiday, I reached the end of the A4 notebook in which I write my book diary: time to index it, and start another. It appears that since the end of July 2006, I have diaried (which should be synonymous with "I have read", but is not; there is a backlog):

Joan Aiken: The Witch of Clatteringshaws
Florin Andreescu, Mihai Ogrinji, Anda Raicu: Bucovina / The Romanian Village Eternity
Richard Aronowitz: Five Amber Beads

Carla Banks: The Forest of Souls / Strangers
L. Frank Baum: The Wizard of Oz
Bob Beagrie: Endeavour
Elizabeth Bear: Blood and Iron / Carnival /The Chains that You Refuse
(with Sarah Monette) A Companion to Wolves
Alison Bechdel: Fun House
Brian Bolland: Bolland Strips
Chaz Brenchley: A Cold Coming / Desdaemona / River of the World / Rotten Row
(as editor) Phantoms at the Phil: The Second Proceedings
Jan Harold Brunvand: Casa Frumoasa: The House Beautiful in Rural Romania
John Burns, Robbie Morrison, Steve Yeowell: Nikolai Dante: Tsar Wars
Charles Butler: Timon's Tide

Arthur Calder-Marshall: The Fair to Middling
Eddie Campbell: The Fate of the Artist
Mike Carey, Glen Fabry: Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere
Ann Cleeves: Another Man's Poison / The Crow Trap / Hidden Depths / Telling Tales
Kevin Crossley-Holland: King of the Middle March
John Crowley: Beasts

Nellie Dale, Walter Crane: The Dale Readers, Book II
Pamela Dean: Tam Lin
Peter Dickinson: The Green Gene

Martin Edwards (editor): ID: Crimes of Identity

Brian Fies: Mom's Cancer
Anne Fine: Bill's New Frock / Jamie and Angus Together

Neil Gaiman: Neverwhere
Neil Gaiman, John Romita: Eternals
Neil Gaiman, Dave McKean: Mirrormask
Andy Goldsworthy: Parkland / Wood 98

Brian Hitch, Mark Millar, Andrew Currie: The Ultimates 1: Super-Human / The Ultimates: Homeland / Security / Gods and Monsters

Tove Jansson: Comet in Moominland / The Exploits of Moominpappa / Finn Family Moomintroll / Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip / Moominland Midwinter /Moominsummer Madness / Tales from Moominvalley
Michael Jecks: The Death Ship of Dartmouth / The Malice of Unnatural Death
Diana Wynne Jones: The Pinhoe Egg
Gwyneth Jones: The Hidden Ones
Stephen Jones, (editor): Shadows over Innsmouth

Nikolai Nikolaevich Karazin: Cranes Flying South (PS 38)

Valerie Laws: Quantum Sheep
Lugo Laszlo Lugosi: Zsido Budapest Jewish

Marisa Acoccella Marchetto: Cancer Vixen
Robert Mayer: Superfolks
Andrew Martin: The Necropolis Railway
Val McDermid: The Grave Tattoo
Juliet E. McKenna: The Thief's Gamble
Medieval Murderers: House of Shadows
Stephen Mellor: Down Among the Yla
Farah Mendlesohn: DWJ: Children's Literature and The Fantastic Tradition / (as editor) Glorifying Terrorism
Peter Milligan, Chris Bachalo, Brendan McCarthy: Shade: American Scream (v. )
Mil Millington: Love and Other Near-Death Experiences
Sarah Monette: The Virtu
Grant Morrison: Seven Soldiers / Seaguy
Craig Murray: Murder in Samarkand

Barbara Nadel: Belshazzar's Daughter

Simon Palmer: Saltaire: a picture story book
Elizabet Peters: Crocodile on the Sandbank / The Deeds of the Disturber
Ellen Phethean: Wall
Ed Piskov, Alex Saviuk, Robert Tinnell: The Feast of the Seven Fishes
Terry Pratchett: Thud! / Wintersmith

Sheila Quigley: Bad Moon Rising / Every Breath You Take / Living on a Prayer / Run for Home

Gordon Ramsey: Humble Pie
Ian Rankin: Set in Darkness
Danuta Reah: Bleak Water

Marjane Satrapi: Persepolis 1
Joann Sfar: Vampire Loves
Sean Steward: Firecracker
L.A.G. Strong: Mr Sheridan’s Umbrella (PS 45)

Bryan Talbot: Alice in Sunderland

Serena Valentino, Crab Scrambly: Nightmares & Fairy Tales: 1140 Rue Royale
Rina Valero: Delights of Jerusalem
Ursula Vernon: Black Dogs: Part One - The House Of Diamond / Digger: Volume Two
Sue Vickerman: Shag

Liz Williams: Banner of Souls / Nine Layers of Sky / Snake Agent
Douglas Wolk: Reading Comics
Brian Wood, Becky Cloonan: Demo

Links to reviews or more peripheral comments, here or elsewhere.

Comments

[vschanoes.livejournal.com]

Wow, I admire you for doing this. It's the sort of thing that if I want to do, but never will, at least unless I'm struck by lightning and suddenly become a better, organized person.

What did you think of Alice in Sunderland. On the one hand, I thought it was beautiful. On the other hand...it was too clear to me that Talbot really didn't know much about Dodgson and Alice, because on every page he would make an assertion that simply wasn't true, and that drove me up the wall. Also, I thought he got rather carried away with ihs conspiracy theories.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Not so much organised (I did mention that backlog, didn't I?) as obsessive.

As for Alice, I love it as a wonderful over-the-top outpouring of enthusiasm, for its baroque richness and its physical beauty. I love the way every detail is woven into the fabric; does this mean that I see conspiracy theories as a plus rather than a minus? I don't remember conspiracy theories as such, other than a slight northern feeling that those intellectuals in Oxford want to appropriate everything for themselves.

On the other hand, I know far less than Bryan does about Charles Dodgson, so any errors just went straight past me: what sort of thing are we talking about?

response 1 (cut in half for length)

[vschanoes.livejournal.com]

Re: errors, there's sort of too many to count, but here's a few examples. At one point he claims that the fact that Alice's mother burned all of the letters Dodgson sent to her was "made up" by a biographer. Not true. Alice herself said so in an essay she wrote later in life. He claims that the idea that Dodgson preferred the company of children is a myth that came up after his death, and finds one quotation to support this idea. But again, that's just not true. His contemporaries remarked upon his enjoyment of the company of little girls, and in order to cherry pick that one quotation, Talbot ignored the bloody reams of other quotations to the contrary. All this sort of thing stems from the fact that, judging from his bibliography, he relied almost entirely upon Karoline Leach's In the Shadow of the Dreamchild which has very little standing among Carrollians, and for reasons that are unclear, never consulted any of the works by Morton Cohen, who is probably the single most important and knowledgable living Carroll scholar. At a certain point he claims that Leach was the only biographer who consulted Carroll's diaries--again, this is simply not true, as a look at Cohen's biography of Carroll would have told him. These are just the few examples I remember off the top of my head; whie I was reading the book, almost every other page would jar me with a claim that made me sit up and say "That's not true," which made it hard to enjoy the book, or, I think, more importantly, be confident that what he was claiming about things I know nothing about was true.

I took his point re: northern feelings of being slighted, but he belabored the issue so much that it became a conspiracy theory. There's a bit at the end when he says "his diaries for the crucial four-year period before the boat trip, much of which time he spends in Sunderland, mysteriously vanish sometimes after 1900. At this time they are in the possession of the Oxford-educated Collingwoold and the Carroll family. Is this an attempt to edit Wonderland's Sunderland roots out of the Oxford myth?"

(I'm going to leave aside my opinion that such a question just doesn't make any sense! Dodgson lived most of his live in Oxford! Alice grew up there! There's no need to edit anything for Oxford to retain pride of place.)

response 2

[vschanoes.livejournal.com]

Ah, bloody hell, the thing posted in response to your post rathe than your comment. I'm sorry!

First of all, given Talbot's factual errors, I'm not convinced that this is an accurate representation of what happened, but if it is, I think it far more likely that simple human incompetence rather a conspiracy is to blame. People lose things. People spill water on things. Rain comes in through the attic and destroys books. Books catch on fire. All of that seems far more likely to me than "an attempt to edit Wonderland's Sunderland roots out of the Oxford myth." There's also some bit where he gestures grandly to an underground tunnel in the Sunderland beach and says "Can there by any doubt that Carroll was thinking of this tunnel when he wrote of the rabbit-hole as a way to Wonderland?" And all I could think was "Well, yes. Underground tunnels aren't exactly unique to Sunderland, and they're not exactly unique to Alice, either."

I also really resented what seemed to me to be a willful blindness to the way storytelling works, all the more bizarre because he is a story-teller. He spends a lot of time arguing agains the contention that Dodgson told Alice the story of Wonderland on a boat-trip, noting that he used ideas from stories he'd told for years earlier, that there's a lot in Wonderland that isn't in the earlier Adventures Underground, etc. Well, yes. That's how story-telling works. But nobody has ever claimed that Dodgson word-for-word recited the novel of Wonderland to Alice on that afternoon. The fact is that he told the story that became Wonderland to Alice on that afternoon, and I don't understand Talbot's issue with that. I tell stories to my girls, and sometimes I think of the ideas a week or so before I see them and file them away in my head to remember when I tell them, and sometimes I re-use the same motif from story to story, and when I sit down to write them out, I will no doubt change and add and subtract stuff. But none of that changes the fact that when I told "Monkey goes to Ballet Class" to Poli and Dasha, it was indeed the first time I had told the story and that I made it up as I went along.

Huh. I hadn't meant to write such a novel. I just feel very strongly about this, because I think the book is so very beautiful but that's in tension with the fact that a good deal of what he's saying just isn't true.

[samarcand.livejournal.com]

Oooh! I'm in the list! That makes me feel all... authorly...

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Well, the unpublished works in the list make me feel very smug...

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Thank you for answering my question in such detail - don't apologise, I did ask!

And I can see why these things bother you: I enjoyed the partisan nature of the argument, and - without knowing the scholarly background - took a number of assertions with a pinch of salt. On the other hand, you know, not everyone is a storyteller, and there is a general sort of myth that the whole story emerged perfect from nowhere one sunny afternoon in Oxford...