Book Recommendations, Since (Some of You) Asked

[dr_pretentious]

Here are two novels I didn't expect to love and a how-to book I'm embarrassed to be indebted to as profoundly as I am.

Recommendation the First:

Lud-in-the-Mist, Hope Mirrlees

I don't usually buy a second copy to lend out to friends, but I intend to press this book on everyone I know.

I tracked this one down after I saw Jo Walton remark (on Making Light?) that Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell seemed to her to be the heir to a lost branch of the fantasy tradition, and now I really see what Walton meant. Mirrlees's fairy otherworld is creepy in ways that are still fresh, despite all the traffic fairyland has had since 1926, when the book was first published. All the characters are flawed and wonderful, with an extra order of flawed on the side.

Sometime that isn't right now, I'll say stuff about what Lud-in-the-Mist borrows from Mirrlees's housemate (companion? wife? mother figure?--it's not clear from the front matter what their relationship was when they ceased to be student and teacher), the classical scholar Jane Ellen Harrison. My dissertation's chock full of Harrison, since she was also a big influence on the poet I was writing about.

Why should anybody care about Harrison? Because everything you know, or think you know, about women's mysteries comes from her work. Everything.

You can take the girl out of academia, but you can't take the academia out of the girl.


Recommendation the Second:

Kalpa Imperial, Angelica Gorodischer (Ursula K. LeGuin, trans.)

Okay, now I see why Small Beer Press is such a big deal. I love this book for the same reason I love the Lemony Snicket books: it breaks all the alleged rules of good writing, and all the rules of salable writing, flagrantly, and it triumphs anyway, on its own terms, with a big screw-you attitude. This has got to be the least commercial volume of fantasy I've read...ever. Who else but Small Beer was going to touch it? So thank the gods for Small Beer.


If Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino light up any of the pleasure centers in your brain, you'll like Kalpa Imperial. If they don't, not. Borges's Dreamtigers swept me away, back in my teens, and Calvino's Invisible Cities is still one my ten favorite books of all time, though I'd never want to write like either of those guys do. About Kalpa Imperial--I think I would never write a book this chilly, this determined to keep most of its characters at arms length, this swift to drop characters just when they've started to do something, this loaded with exposition, etc. It even indulges (a little bit, in just one of the stories) in a display of postmodern theoretical pyrotechnics. I thought grad school had used up all the patience I was ever going to have in this lifetime for postmodern literary theory. This is not the book I long for. And yet, and yet, every page was a pleasure, an absolutely elemental pleasure. How does she do it?


Recommendation the Third:

Best Dressed, Suzy Gershman

What the hell is a fashion how-to book doing on a list of recommendations alongside Mirrlees and Gorodischer?

And well you might ask.


One of my friends from the anthropology department turned me onto Gershman when I was first trying to build a teaching wardrobe. I'm under five feet tall, and the semester I taught night classes, many of my students were older than my parents. I needed a wardrobe that would get my class to shut up and listen for long enough to find out that I actually knew my shit, but the process of learning my shit had rendered me so geeky, I had no clue about clothing. Inasmuch as I have any clue now, I stole it from Gershman.

Don't think of her as a fashion maven; think of her as a garb geek. A geek like us, just in a different fandom.

Do not be alarmed by the clothes she's pictured in on the cover. She will not advise you to look like that, I promise.

If you get nothing else out of this book, you will at last understand how that particular pricetag ended up on that particular garment, which is useful no matter what kind of thing you want to wear.


Someday maybe I'll tell the story of the research expedition to the Mall of Three Furriers with my trusty companions, the Oklahoman anthropologist and the brilliant former fashion designer with massive post-stroke brain damage. But not today.

Comments

[vgnwtch.livejournal.com]

Why should anybody care about Harrison? Because everything you know, or think you know, about women's mysteries comes from her work. Everything.

You mustn't tease us like this! Powells have several of her books, so now I suppose I have to read all of them to know what you're saying. Life is hard...

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

If you get the Prolegomena, the Epilegomena, and Themis, that'll hold you for a year, because they're Long and Dense, and you'll want to take breaks and intersperse them with totally different kinds of things. Thank goodness for my unnaturally long attention span! The dissertation made it necessary to read them all straight through, every page, back to back, at the fastest speed I could maintain that still allowed for note-taking and long-term retention--and I wouldn't recommend doing it that way to anybody. As a professor of mine once said about the necessity of reading Wings of the Dove in a single week in order to make the syllabus work, it was like chugging a bottle of Bailey's Irish Cream. (Now there's a simile I wouldn't want to verify empirically!)

Harrison doesn't work just on women's mysteries, and she doesn't say everything that we might say now, but she marked the old trails for us at a time when nobody else was doing it.