oneiriad | Some books of april

Jean M. Auel
The Land of Painted Caves
Well, I started reading Clan of the Cave Bear when I was around ten or twelve - the nostalgia factor was pretty much ruling my choice in reading material here. Unfortunately, boring - mostly we get an unillustrated tour of a lot of cave paintings and loads of new people getting to be surprised at the horses and the wolf... repetitive. Boring. And I have definitely not semi-analyzed the bloody story by comparing Ayla to Eve, offering the forbidden fruit of knowledge (of reproduction and the taming of wild beasts) to otherwise happy non-monogamous equal-leaning-towards-matriarchal society, causing a fall from grace leading to jealousy, patriarchy and civilization. I have not. It's trash literature, brain, stop thinking that sort of stuff about it - we are just bored and vaguely annoyed at the kind-of-character-assassination of Jondalar and still think she should have quit after book 3. Yes.

Gail Carriger
Soulless
Oh, this was fun - werewolves and vampires and steampunk, oh my. And attack parasols. Maybe not any great work of art, but a nicely relaxing and entertaining bit of reading. Is looking forward to reading the next in the series.

Karsten Madsen
Nannas drøm (Nanna's dream)
A regretfully short comic book album retelling the story of Balder's death, mostly by way of Saxo - where Balder dies at the hands of his brother as they fight over Nanna. Loki is in this, playing a part, but while he does get to be a villain, if you ask me, so is Balder, when you look at how he acts - and the whole thing is actually very like the old Greek tragedies, where the very actions taken to prevent something, are the ones eventually leading them to occur. Apart from that, it's certainly a very nice comic - pastel fantasy, with the gods rendered very not realistically - Balder and Høder are incarnations of light and darkness, Thor is giant (with the rock in his forehead! Nobody ever remembers that.), Frigg is elf-like, Odin is quite literally an eye in the sky and Loki - ugly, troll-like tentacle monster with nipple piercings. I kid you not. In fact, I have proof:

I'm considering beginning to collect the fictional versions of Loki that keep cropping up - I mean, he comes in so many shapes and sizes - alien, supervillain, archangel, yaoi uke, tentacle-monster - quite appropriate for quite possibly the finest shapeshifter out there, actually. Maybe. Or maybe make a series of posts about the many faces of Loki, starting with the Snaptun stone - only, there are so very many I haven't gotten my greedy hands on yet...

George R.R. Martin
A Storm of Swords
Oh Tyrion. Seriosly, I have nothing else - oh Tyrion.

Julian May
Intervention
My problem with this novel is that the psychics in it - the operants - they don't actually practice what they preach. And quite frankly, I'd like a little more realistic public reaction to the fact that there are apparently people who can - oh, I dunno, make you do things with their mind against their will. The good guys aren't exactly nice - or particularly good. Not really. And the fact that they keep claiming to just be like everybody else with an added talent is kind of gainsaid by their private eugenics programs etc. Just saying...

Total number of books and comics read this month: 21
Currently reading: Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson: Leviathan