June/Translation State Paperback
Hello! It’s June, and in my neck of the woods it’s warm and humid and time for tea outdoors!
The bread, by the way, is King Arthur Flour’s No Knead Everything Bagel Bread, which is very simple to make and super delicious. I sent the uneaten half of the loaf home with one of my guests and it did not survive the night.
Translation State is available in paperback! So if that’s a thing you were waiting for, wait no longer!
I want to talk, briefly, about how emotions are conveyed in writing. Those of us who have been reading for a long time often have the experience of just falling into a book or story and just…feeling it. This is something that takes a good deal of practice to do—practice that we mostly aren’t conscious of. We just…read a lot.
And so sometimes we pick up a text that doesn’t invite us in that way. And it’s easy to say it’s the fault of the text, because we’re experienced readers and so many other texts have just sucked us in. But the ease of reading that practice has given us deceives us here. Words on the page don’t just “naturally” convey experiences or emotion. Over years, over centuries, different communities and lineages of writers have built up different conventions for conveying experiences and emotions, and as readers we have become practiced at interpreting them, or at least the conventions of the genres or writers we read the most. We’ve become so practiced it seems like something natural, just how the universe is, that these words have these effects.
But it isn’t. It’s convention. And as I said, there are different sets of conventions, so when we read work by a writer whose own training and reading experience was with a different set of conventions—sometimes only slightly different!—the work can seem dry or flat. Not because we’re bad readers—we’re very good readers! But because our own reading histories and training haven’t given us the practice reading these particular ways of conveying emotion.
It’s something to think about.
What I’ve been reading!
The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman
This is just really really good. You may not know that I was bitten by the Arthurian bug in high school—Mary Stewart did it—and as a result I plunged headlong into the world of medieval Arthurian lit and modern adaptations. I became very, very picky about adaptations. This one is excellent!
Sidenote, Lev is coming to St Louis on the tour for this book and I’ll be in conversation with him about it at the St Louis County Library on July 21.
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Death in the Spires by K.J. Charles
I’ve enjoyed a lot of Charles’ romances. I feel like Death in the Spires is a level-up moment even from those, one of the best things of hers I’ve read.
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Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Yeah, this isn’t a new release or anything. Likely you were given this to read in school (probably an excerpt or an abridged version), and chances are, like me, you recoiled at it and were happy to have the teacher move on to something else. All that exposition about whale anatomy! Tedium!
Then, well out of school, I tried reading the whole thing. With the aid of a glass of wine and the idea that, if this were a science fiction novel, all those chapters about whales and whaling would make perfect sense, I enjoyed it a lot and even found it incredibly beautiful in places. I picked it up again recently, and yes, it is a beautiful book and deserves its classic status. It’s a lot of work to read, though.
Still playing Palia! Though No Man’s Sky dropped an expedition recently and I really do want to play through that.
Palia’s recent update included a multi-player card game called Hotpot. It’s basically a version of gin rummy. I enjoyed it enough that I wondered why I never thought to look for card games I can play on my steam deck. A quick google suggested that after I eat the mushrooms in my back yard and put glue on my pizza, I should consider Slay the Spire, which I had heard of but did not know was basically cards. I’ve been enjoying it so far!
That’s all for this month! Fitness Coach Vanburen would like me to remind you all to Do A Fitness every day. Walking or any kind of moving around is A Fitness. Sniffing things is A Fitness! Also eating delicious treats. That is the best Fitness.
Take care!
Ann