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akujunkanAnd skipping over week (which I hope to post sometime tomorrow), we find ourselves at #35.
I spent the majority of last week reading Japanese novels and manga, so I only have two books for you in English this week.
1) The Children Of Hurin - JRR Tolkien
A lot of the material in this book is available already in somewhat different or less developed form, so Hurin is definitely a book for the hardcore fans. It's well written and surprisingly fluid considering the fact that it was cobbled together from various notes and unfinished manuscripts. Alan Lee's illustrations are also lovely and do much to add to the book's atmosphere. Unfortunately, the narrative style is much closer to that of The Silmarillion than The Lord Of The Rings or The Hobbit, which at times left me wondering why I was spending my time with Hurin instead of the bona fide chronicles that inspired Tolkien, especially given the fact that The Children Of Hurin is essentially a soap opera for the D&D set.
2) Tehanu - Ursala K. LeGuin
I'll admit up front that I am not a very big fan of LeGuin's Earthsea series. True, she quite refreshingly flouted the unwritten racial codes of the fantasy genre, but she also left the unwritten "women are evil, man-hating temptresses or weaklings in need of protection" convention untouched, to the severe detriment of the series as a whole. Tehanu, written some two decades after the "last" Earthsea book, seeks to correct this problem--and partially succeeds. It's nice to see LeGuin confronting some of implications of her earlier unenlightened depictions of female characters, but her realisations in this regard are ultimately ironic given the fact that the women in Tehanu remain marginalized, threatened emotional providers while the active, salvic role is once again bestowed upon the series' male hero (and, one suspects, LeGuin's Mary Sue). Tehanu is an odd contradiction of a book that takes a good, hard look at what the standard fantasy genre treatment of women would really mean for that gender, but chooses in the end to back down and maintain, not change it.
SBS: One-hundred and fifteen books, but with several knocked off of the manga and shosetsu lists in compensation.
That will be all.
I spent the majority of last week reading Japanese novels and manga, so I only have two books for you in English this week.
1) The Children Of Hurin - JRR Tolkien
A lot of the material in this book is available already in somewhat different or less developed form, so Hurin is definitely a book for the hardcore fans. It's well written and surprisingly fluid considering the fact that it was cobbled together from various notes and unfinished manuscripts. Alan Lee's illustrations are also lovely and do much to add to the book's atmosphere. Unfortunately, the narrative style is much closer to that of The Silmarillion than The Lord Of The Rings or The Hobbit, which at times left me wondering why I was spending my time with Hurin instead of the bona fide chronicles that inspired Tolkien, especially given the fact that The Children Of Hurin is essentially a soap opera for the D&D set.
2) Tehanu - Ursala K. LeGuin
I'll admit up front that I am not a very big fan of LeGuin's Earthsea series. True, she quite refreshingly flouted the unwritten racial codes of the fantasy genre, but she also left the unwritten "women are evil, man-hating temptresses or weaklings in need of protection" convention untouched, to the severe detriment of the series as a whole. Tehanu, written some two decades after the "last" Earthsea book, seeks to correct this problem--and partially succeeds. It's nice to see LeGuin confronting some of implications of her earlier unenlightened depictions of female characters, but her realisations in this regard are ultimately ironic given the fact that the women in Tehanu remain marginalized, threatened emotional providers while the active, salvic role is once again bestowed upon the series' male hero (and, one suspects, LeGuin's Mary Sue). Tehanu is an odd contradiction of a book that takes a good, hard look at what the standard fantasy genre treatment of women would really mean for that gender, but chooses in the end to back down and maintain, not change it.
SBS: One-hundred and fifteen books, but with several knocked off of the manga and shosetsu lists in compensation.
That will be all.