Reading reading

I haven't had anyone over in a long time, from a combination of passionate asociality and shame about the state of the shed. The state is somewhat better, though it still begs a lot of work -- I had a swipe at the bathtub before inlandsea dropped by, but I did not attempt the tiles.

State of the kitchen was not improved by my various attempts to make a graham cracker crust. I'd been trying to make meringue and that was disastrous (though I did invent caulking.) Two goes at the crust seemed to do it. I fear I have lost my baking mojo.

Working from home, though, is brilliant -- my own breezy shed instead of the airless office or even the pleasant, but remote, school library. I feel oddly more rooted.

Mind you, that's day one.

The esteemed papersky has a new book out. I remembered that I admired the prose of Among Others, so I put a hold on the impending copy of the new one at the library. I thought I'd read another while I'm waiting, so I am halfway through Tooth and Claw, and then via LiveJournal archives I am following the process of writing this same book while I read it. This is both pleasurable and melancholy -- the entries are so fresh, but it was a long time ago now.

Tooth and Claw is blurbed as Anthony Trollope but enacted by dragons, and it delightfully is that. To me, one of its strengths is that it also reads like a caustic 18th century satire in the mode of Swift or Johnson or Pope. Or someone even loopier -- Sterne, say. Because human institutions and dynamics have to be translated into dragon behaviours that make sense both within the fictional world and as analogies for human structures, the new structures can't help but become allegorical.

So, for example, the male dragons have claws and the female dragons have hands, and the male dragons are held in dragon culture to be superior for this, because they can fight. Yet a hand is good for ten thousand things, and a set of claws for many fewer. The bond of class servitude is literalized as the physical binding of servant dragons' wings, and there are also the lesser and ambiguous bonds of clergymen -- that's brilliant stuff. The lordly consumption of farmers' nestlings has to make you think of A Modest Proposal -- but also of the mad parallelisms of Tristram Shandy.

This is the top book of a stack I'm reading down through in layers, like my own performance of Cloud Atlas (and making this connection made me thing of how cleverly Cloud Atlas mirrors the act of reading multiple books at once, the way you find interconnections even when they aren't intentional.)

{rf}