blood and iron and coinage

There are, of course, books I dislike or even hate. It’s usually possible to tell that from reading the back or skimming the book, though, so I don’t buy those books. If I get one in some other way, I give it away or, in one case so horrible I’m blocking on its name I throw it out. There are some books I don’t care about at all – either someone gave it to me, or I bought it because the premise looked interesting but then I could never persuade myself to get started on it. With the current move, I need to persuade myself to either give those away or skim it enough to be sure it’s something I want to read someday. In a very few cases I made it all the way through once but will never do it again, and those I should definitely give away.

 The vast majority of my books, reference books excluded, are ones I like OK, and I read and reread those. Those are either going with us on our travels or going into storage, with most of the reference books, to be waiting when we come back.

Then there are the books I fall in love with. That doesn’t mean they’re perfect – I agree with some of the criticisms I’ve seen about the Harry Potter books, for instance, but I love them anyway. But they are the books that touch me and become a part of me. In some cases, like Little Women, I’ve so internalized the books that I don’t need to reread them more than every decade or two. I don’t fall in love with new books as often as I used to; I don’t know whether I’m less easily impressed or if it’s that I’ve already read a lot of the older ones I’m likely to love by now. It’s very rare for me to fall in love with two books in a row, but that’s what’s happened this weekend.

I think what does it for me about Elizabeth Bear’s Blood and Iron is how deeply steeped in folk music it is, and that included both traditional and newer music. Actually “steeped” is the wrong word, because it implies flavored all mixed and mashed together. This is more woven, like a dense tapestry, with shining threads of one thing or another peeping out here and there.  The tiny sly references to Bill Morrissey’s song Birches had me talking to myself. (“She didn’t really mean that, did she?” “But look, there’s another one three pages on.” “But it’s not traditional, and who would refer to that song anyway?” “But it’s Bear, and she actually would be likely to know that song.”) The folk stories are lore are woven in just as deftly, and she weaves threads from a wide variety of traditions without ending up with the messy lack of structure or the Chinese menu approach that’s common to writers trying to mix mythos.

I do have one odd complaint about Blood and Iron, though I’m not sure if it’s a flaw in the book or a mismatch between me and it. The problem is that there are spots I flat don’t understand all through the book: someone’s action has a deeper meaning that I don’t quite get, or two characters reach an unspoken understanding and I have no idea what they’ve agreed on. This may be that kinesthetic thing Bear‘s been writing about – communicating through body movement and posture – because I don’t think that is one of my main communication methods. On the other hand, there are a few places where the characters don’t understand each other, where one misses a cue from another or doesn’t know what the other is about to do until it’s too late, and those I grasped perfectly, like wanting to grab an old-fashioned movie heroine and shout, “The knife is in your stocking!” I think those intentions may have been telegraphed in a way that was perfectly clear to me, in one of the ways I do communicate. At any rate, it didn’t get in the way of my falling in love, and it gives me something I can learn to understand better on later rereadings, so it’s not entirely bad.

I can’t say as much about Jo Walton’s Farthing, because I’m only a quarter of the way into it. I knew I’d like it; an acknowledgement to Dorothy L. Sayers in the beginning is always a good indicator, and I do like the cozy country-house stories. Also, I’d peeped ahead (I usually do, I confess) and knew that the wrenching ending I’d heard about wasn’t likely to be the kind of thing that would ruin it for me. It might be the sort of thing that would expand the book, as Sayers herself does in Gaudy Night, but it wasn’t going to turn it into a whole different sort of book. But where she had me was on page 19; despite being neither Jewish now married to someone Jewish, Walton totally gets it right, about both being culturally Jewish and being intermarried. She sees the risks and the edges and the ragged intersections with the rest of the world, and how it doesn’t matter whether you’re religious or just culturally Jewish, except when it does, and how sometimes you end up defining yourself partly just by what you aren’t. This is all described from the outside, by the Anglican viewpoint character married to a Jewish man, which makes the perception a bit uncannier, or maybe just points out the contagion of prejudice.

It’s funny in a way that a character who has just complained how scatterbrained she is should be able to explain something so delicate so perfectly clearly, but I suppose it’s not the first time characters have been wrong about themselves.

If I thought he’d read it, I would give Rudder the book to read before we move abroad because I don’t think he entirely gets that there really is possible risk in being married to me, and because, unfortunately, I don’t think that the attitudes in Walton’s alternate history are totally impossible to develop here.

As I’ve said, I’m only a little way into the book, but that bit alone was enough to tell me I’ve no disappointment waiting in the rest. Walton herself wrote today, “On the anniversary of September 11th I like to affirm the excellence of Western Civilization, create something, and celebrate the excellence of the internet as a way of reaching friends. ” I’m going to do all three of those by writing her an email today with some of this in it.