|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The One Ring Forums:
Off Topic: Off Topic:
just finished Babel, or The Necessity of Violence:
Edit Log
|
|
Annael
Immortal
Mar 26, 4:38pm
Views: 14432
|
|
just finished Babel, or The Necessity of Violence
|
|
|
Wow, that was intense. Clearly R.F. Kuang knows linguistics and history, and we get a heavy dose of both as she constructs an alternate history of British Colonialism. The characters are fully brought to life, as are the settings, and it's a gripping story. She's a very good writer.
I'd recently had a discussion with - or rather, I should say I recently was talked at by - a young East Indian woman who voiced the same themes I saw in this book: that there's no fixing the system from within, we have to tear the whole thing down without regard for who might be hurt on the assumption that something better will arise out of the ashes; and that even well-meaning white people can't be trusted because they are incapable of true compassion; any good thing they might do is actually self-serving, usually to make themselves feel like they are good people. I don't agree with either premise (I'm not sure anyone would pass the test for being utterly without self-interest, for one thing, but then, I am probably just being defensive). I give Kuang props for the chapter in which she gives us the point of view, sympathetically, of the person who turns traitor, and also when she shows us the sympathizers who can't follow through on the ultimate goal; she does indicate that it's not that simple.
I tried reading some of Andrea Penrose's "Wexford and Sloane" detective novels, but had to give up in irritation. I liked her idea of combining a Regency romance with a detective story, but the execution was . . . not great. The mysteries are just not well-plotted; the plot unfolds primarily by people just TELLING Wexford and Sloane what happened. I also continually got hung up on Penrose's weird use of language. I felt like she was trying too hard to use interesting turns of phrase and the results were just clunky. Instead of saying simply that someone's face was in shadow, she says things like "shadows hung from his eyelashes." (WHAT?) She uses verbs as nouns ("a clench of fear tightened her chest") and nouns as verbs ("her hands were tremoring"). I could go on, but suffice it to say, not reading anything else by her.
On the nonfiction side I'm reading John Horgan's Rational Mysticism, which attempts to explore spirituality in a journalistic way by interviewing people have done a lot of research into the field and/or are leading lights in the field, like Huston Smith, Ken Wilber, and a host of scientists who do PET scans on Buddhist nuns, etc. One thing I've gleaned is that mindfulness meditation is very different, physiologically, from other types of meditation or trance-evoking methods; the latter take you OUT of the rational part of the brain while with mindfulness you learn to stay there. I'm just finishing a 6-week course in mindfulness myself so that was interesting.
I am a dreamer of words, of written words.
-- Gaston Bachelard
* * * * * * * * * *
NARF and member of Deplorable Cultus since 1967
(This post was edited by Annael on Mar 26, 4:43pm)
|
|
|
Edit Log:
|
|
Post edited by Annael
(Immortal) on Mar 26, 4:41pm
|
|
Post edited by Annael
(Immortal) on Mar 26, 4:43pm
|
|
|
|
