Reading Record 6

 Okay, so I have now finished this month's book for the book club I am in:  Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne.

Hmm.

How do I put this?

This situation is a weird one, both simple and complex at the same time.  I've watched three different adaptations of this book over the years:  the movie starring David Niven, the TV miniseries starring Pierce Brosnan and the TV miniseries starting David Tennant.  I don't really remember much about the movie (except that their Passpartout was Spanish and so they sidetracked to Spain so he could take part in a bullfight 🤢🤮 (and that the female lead was Shirley MacLaine instead of someone, you know, Indian)), but I've seen the earlier miniseries many times (it was actually released on DVD, and I have a copy, ya see) and have always enjoyed it, despite some inherent problems.  But after watching the newer miniseries, which had abandoned the majority of the plot in favor of a new one, I was like "okay, time to see what the real thing was like, 'cause what the heck even was this I just watched?"

And so at that time I bought a copy of the book.  A hardback Penguin Classics edition, with a modern translation, an introduction, and even end notes.  At the time I bought it, I sat down to read it, and decided I might as well read the introduction, since it could hardly spoil the plot for me, since I already knew the plot!  I wasn't very far into the introduction before it got to mentioning that Verne had (later in life) made an enemy of Emile Zola by joining a right-wing anti-Dreyfus organization.

And that was when I said "nope!" and put the book back on the shelf.

It would have stayed there if the book club hadn't decided to make it the book for May.

Fortunately, the author's anti-Semitism didn't have many opportunities to show up in the course of the novel.

Unfortunately, the author's general racism, misogyny, classism, and conviction that everyone is inferior to the French were all on nearly constant display.

It's like, "if you hate everyone outside France, why would you even write a book about traveling around the world?!"

Ugh.  But reading it really put in context and made me appreciate the series with David Tennant:  clearly, what happened was that someone decided they wanted to tell the story without any of the unpleasant baggage of the original.  So they looked at its core essence, added some racial and gender diversity (while actually addressing same, rather than just pretending it was normal for the period), stuck in some drama (because everything seems to require drama these days), and discarded all the racism, classism, misogyny, and nationality-based stereotypes...only to realize that there wasn't really much of anything left once they had tossed out the unacceptable aspects of the story.  Hence, most of the miniseries was invented out of whole cloth.

I get it now, and I appreciate it a lot more.  I think I'd like to rewatch it, in fact, only I have no idea how I watched it in the first place (maybe it was run on PBS and someone recorded it?) or if it's available on any streaming platform available to me.  (I think the answer to the latter is "no," unfortunately...)

...and I seem to be talking more about adaptations than the book... 😅

Well, may as well continue that.  🤣  If we're talking an actual adaptation of the plot of the novel, the Brosnan miniseries is probably the best it will ever get.  Sure, it dropped in a bunch of real people inappropriately (and shifted the timing back a year so they would have to cross Paris during the Commune de Paris), but it kept most of the story intact, and in some places the dialogue was so close that it was basically quoted right out of the novel (accounting for different translations, anyway).  More importantly, it did away with most of the racism (sadly not quite all), misogyny and classism, and added some commentary on British foreign policy in the Victorian era.

Particularly noteworthy is a pair of incidents in the US section of the story.  In the novel, Fogg and co witness a "political rally" in San Francisco that turns into a massive brawl (for literally no reason, esp. considering the position under dispute was "justice of the peace") and causes a grudge between Fogg and a hulking brute of a colonel.  In the Brosnan miniseries, while they are in San Francisco, they end up going to eat at a place with a ballroom, and Fogg agrees to share a dance with Aoda; her great beauty attracts the attention of Jesse James, who tries to cut in, and swears revenge on Fogg when he won't cooperate.  Later on, Fogg meets the antagonistic figure again on the train headed east:  in the book, because the colonel is also a passenger, and in the miniseries, because James is robbing the train.  They decide to have a duel on the moving train in both versions, and in both cases it's interrupted by an attack on the train by...hmm.  In the book they're specified as Sioux, whereas I think the miniseries was vague about what tribe of Native Americans they were supposed to represent.  In any case, it's what comes next that is where the miniseries really improved on the situation.  I was horrified by the novel's version of the attack on the train, which had dozens of the attackers slain, many by being run over by the train itself, and had Aoda shooting them down heartlessly with the guns Passpartout had bought in San Francisco.  In the miniseries, Aoda had hidden all those guns (aside from the pistol Fogg was using for his aborted duel) so that they would not have "the blood of Indians" on their hands.  Passpartout thinks she is confusing "India Indians" and "American Indians" and she retorts that she thinks they have been shot at quite enough already, likens their situation to the situation her own people face at home against the British invaders occupying India, and concludes that "I do not blame the Indian for defending his home."  It was a great speech, and a great moment, especially since Fogg, on hearing it, agrees with her that they should seek a non-violent way out of the predicament.

Overall, in fact, beyond all the racism and classism, my biggest complaint about the book is how thoroughly and utterly Fogg refused to grow or change even the slightest bit despite his lengthy travels!  Admittedly, being inflexible is part of his core character, but...ugh.  In the novel, Aoda is forced to propose to him, and only after she does so does he spontaneously claim to love her, despite never showing the slightest interest!  At least in the Brosnan miniseries, he shows a slight but growing distraction, and has a long, passionate (for him) speech to propose to her, which included summing up himself by pointing to the clock on the mantel and saying that he and it are essentially one and the same, only he had failed the crucial test of a clock by failing to be punctual when it counted.  I had always assumed that speech was straight out of the novel, but nope!  No self-reflection or introspection for the novel's version of Fogg!  Argh!  So freaking frustrating to read!

But let's talk about the widow Aoda for a moment.  I don't recall anything about her from the Niven version, so we'll set that one aside (with the parenthetical reminder "Shirley MacLaine") and look at the other three versions.

Novel:  a beautiful young woman who was forced to marry an elderly rajah, and is now about to be burned alive on his pyre following his death; this is described as being normal for Hindu culture despite the British trying to put a stop to it.  She had an English education and is especially pale; the text outright says that she is basically European in every way, despite being Indian.  We're told she didn't want to marry the rajah and had tried to escape, but are given no details.  She is basically a passive observer for the rest of the trip, girlishly overwhelmed by "gratitude" that somehow morphs into more than that despite her rescuer's total lack of a personality.  (It would honestly make much more sense for her to fall for Passpartout, since he is more lively, likable, and the one who actually physically rescued her.)  She displays great loyalty to Fogg and very little else in the way of a character.

Brosnan miniseries:  a beautiful young woman who was forced to marry an elderly rajah, and is now about to be burned alive on his pyre following his death; the description of this practice in the miniseries makes it sound like something that was only sometimes practiced even before the British outlawed it.  She clearly still has an English education, but her Indian-ness is embraced; she continues to wear saris the whole time (unlike in the book where she is immediately put in European clothing) and she speaks out against British imperialism on a few occasions.  (She is much more pale than the average Indian, because she's played by a Singaporean actress rather than an Indian one, but...at least she's not white? 😅🤷🏻‍♀️)  She narrates to Fogg the tale of one of her attempts to escape from the rajah, by diving into the river in the middle of the night and swimming across its rapid current only to find guards waiting for her on the far bank.  She has a strong will and saves Fogg's life when they are improbably brought to the Forbidden City (that sequence is one of the biggest problems with the miniseries after that of Aoda's rescue), and shows determination to prevent further violence against the oppressed Native Americans.  Her mutual attraction to Fogg is showed with about as much realism as you can expect from TV in the 1990s.

Tennant miniseries:  a matriarch preparing for the wedding of her daughter (as I recall; I only saw it the once, a few years ago).  She hosts Fogg and his group briefly, then they leave and she stays behind with her family.  She had good chemistry with Tennant's Fogg, but they're from different worlds.  She is a woman of wealth, influence and intellect, with no need to rely on a European man for anything.  (And as I recall she was indeed played by an Indian woman.  Or at least one of Indian ancestry, anyway.)  A very brief role, but one that is 100% an improvement over what was in the novel!

...

I had something else I wanted to say...

...what was it...?

Oh, right!

I mentioned the Commune de Paris earlier, and I wanted to say a bit more on that.  Paris spent basically the entire year of 1871 under siege.  First by the Prussian Army (though it became the German Army partway through the siege, as the king of Prussia had himself crowned the first Kaiser of Germany at Versailles while his army was still laying siege to Paris in the concluding months of the Franco-Prussian War) and then by the French government during the Commune.  Ludicrously, the French government did more damage during its siege of Paris than the Prussian/German Army did.  When I was taking the last course of my MA in History (the course being on Europe in the 19th century), I was told than Verne actually wrote Around the World in 80 Days as part of an attempt to distract the world from that year-long siege that Paris had suffered.  And sure enough, in the novel, everything in France was so perfect that there was nothing to tell and the story jumped straight from Dover to Suez.  😰

Meanwhile!  In the Brosnan version, as I said, they tried to get through the streets of Paris at the height of the siege (in fact, it looked like the storming of the barricades in any given production of Les Miz), allowing Passpartout to catch a stray bullet, necessitating treatment, which he gets from Louis Pasteur. 😅  And in the Tennant version, it turns out Passpartout's brother was one of the leaders of the Commune, so there's a lot of dramatic fallout of that when they pass through Paris.  It seemed like an odd decision to me at the time, but more realistic than what was in the Brosnan version, since your typical siege would not be bloody warfare all the time, because then everyone would end up dead sooner rather than later.

Anyway.

Uh.  I could probably say a lot more, but I should save some of it for the book club meeting, yeah?  🤣  Anyway, long and the short of it is that I cannot and do not recommend reading the book.  Despite its problems, I still feel like the Brosnan version is worth watching, though, as an adaptation that improves on the original.  The Tennant version is probably worth watching (my memory of it is fuzzy enough at the moment that I dare not be more certain than that) but it's less "adapted from" and more "loosely inspired by."

I wonder if anyone at the book club meeting has played the game?  There's a game called 80 Days, sort of at the junction between interactive fiction and a visual novel.  I've heard good things about it, and I picked up a physical copy of the game for the Nintendo Switch when I saw it at a local used game store a while back, but I've never gotten around to playing it.  I should do that at some point...

Oh!

One last point!

The final twist doesn't work in the book!

You know why?  Because he's studying his book of timetables in the harbor in New York!  That should have informed him that they had crossed the international dateline!  Or rather, the discrepancy between the day he thinks it is and the day on which the steamers are leaving should have clued him in.  (In fact, the steamer he had planned to take apparently left a day early, or they would have caught it on time!  At least in the Brosnan version he isn't shown studying timetables, and we just see him and the others asking around on the New York docks after they miss the ship's departure.  As written in the novel, that extra day just sort of materializes while they're crossing the Atlantic.  It's actually quite broken.)

Reading Record 5

 Okay, finished reading another book, after puttering around for a few days trying to motivate myself to read a short story collection.  (Not sure why I have so much trouble with anthologies now, but I really do...)

Anyway.  The book I read this time is a tiny little volume:  only 174 pages long, and the book itself is small and cute.  This is it, next to a AA battery for a scale comparison:

As you can see, the book is called A Magical Girl Retires by Park Seolyeon.  That cover caught my eye as I was walking through the bookstore, and after reading the description on the back, I couldn't resist.

It's simultaneously a work of fantasy and something almost painfully grounded.  I'm really glad I happened to look over at that shelf to notice it!  😁

Unfortunately, due to when I finished it, I'll have to move on to this month's book club book instead of reading something else of my own choosing next.  (I had planned to start reading it on Sunday, to make sure I finished before June started, but the other books on my to-read shelf will take me longer than two days to read, so... 🤷🏻‍♀️ )

Original language:  Korean

Reading Record 4

 Finished the book of folklore:

Around the Sun:  Stories and Symbols from Across the World by Yoshi Yoshitani

Admittedly, this was a very short book, and a full half of the pages are the author's gorgeous art.  (Which was evidently also released in an accompanying oracle deck (much like an earlier tarot deck and book of folklore by the same artist/author, both of which I have) but if the store had that deck, I didn't see it.  🤷🏻‍♀️)

Anyway, I don't have much to say, overall.  It was a fun, pleasant read, and an excellent palate cleanser after the grim side of the previous book.  The wide selection of cultures and myths was especially appealing, since there were some that I hadn't even heard of, which is exciting; so many of the same dozen or so myths tend to get included in half or more of the "world mythology" books out there, to the point that it becomes tiresome.  But this had myths that are genuinely rarely seen, like one from a pre-Incan Andean culture!  That was particularly exciting to see.

My one comment/complaint comes, unsurprisingly, from the treatment of the one myth in the book that I know really, really well:  the Trojan War.

But it's not the complaint you might expect!  The telling is mostly focused on the events of the Iliad (as you would expect) and the author carefully toed a line where Achilles and Patroclus could be interpreted as friends or lovers, and then in the follow-up page addressed how some ancient authors made them only friends and others made them lovers.  So that was all well and good...but.

But.

But....

I get that the author wanted to keep things pleasant and light. And certain topics are necessarily deeply unpleasant.

But leaving them out when they're central to the story is just sanitizing it.

Because yes, what Agamemnon took away from Achilles was a "possession."  But that "possession" was also a person.  Not mentioning that the Greeks were enslaving the Trojans they captured is not improving the story, it's just casting a blind eye to an aspect of that culture.  It's like hiding one's head in the sand to keep from seeing the ugliness of the world.  (In this case, the ugliness of the distant past, but still.  It's something that happened in Greek myths because it was something that happened in ancient Greek reality.)

😰  I wouldn't be surprised if that decision was actually made by an editor or publisher rather than the author, but it was still frustrating to encounter.  Especially since treating Briseis as if she was an inanimate object is even more dehumanizing than her situation in the original epic.

But aside from that (and a few other aspects of the Trojan War that were elided over to allow the whole tale to fit into a mere handful of pages), all good.  😁

Original language:  English

Reading Record 3

 Finished reading another book.

Lady Tan's Circle of Women by Lisa See.  It was an impulse buy after seeing it on a table full of historical novels at the bookstore.  (Thematically, the other books I was buying at the time were at least one volume of danmei (Chinese gay romance web novels) and a volume of The Apothecary Diaries light novel.  Also a volume of manga, but I don't recall which one.)  However, the book sat on my "to-read" shelf for quite a long time (about a year, probably?) because on retrospect it seemed a bit heavy; I tend to prefer lighter, more escapist reading.

And yeah, heavy is a good word for it.  (And I felt like there ought to have been some kind of warning before we got thrown into the deep end in the first chapter, with the lead's mother dying from a foot-binding-related infection!)

Anyway, the novel is a heavily-researched fiction invented to give a life story to Tan Yunxian, a female doctor in the early Ming Dynasty, who wrote a book about some of the cases she had treated.  All that is actually known about the real person is what she wrote in her book, plus a few names and dates supplied by commentary and introductions to later editions, mostly coming from her brother's descendants.  (And the author of this novel was very up-front about admitting how little is known of the real person in the acknowledgements section of the book.)

The story given to her life in the novel was rather more melodramatic than I typically prefer, to be honest.  This was not, it turns out, the kind of book I normally read.  Especially since the heroine was being oppressed by some of the worst of the institutionalized misogyny that imperial China had to offer, which makes for an intensely frustrating read.  To me, anyway.  Others may react differently.  (It did really highlight just how much the xianxia/wuxia settings of the danmei novels I enjoy so much have bent the setting (or picked eras in which Confucianism hadn't yet so thoroughly ground women into the mud) to reduce the amount of misogyny that their female characters have to suffer under.  (And keep in mind that female characters in danmei novels frequently end up dead!  In MDZS, for example, two strong female characters sacrifice their lives to save the hero, and three more die fighting off an invasion that used his actions as a pretense at justification (they weren't so much protecting the hero as protecting the household's young master, but still!) and...yeah, survival rate for female characters in that novel is astonishingly low.)

Anyway.

What was I saying...?

Hmm.  Nope.  Totally lost my train of thought.

Oh well.

Anyway, luckily I have a nice, light book of folklore to follow this up with.

It will hopefully be a soothing balm.

Original language:  English

Reading Record DNF

 Since I'm keeping track now, I'll also record things I dropped.

Which may sound awful or something, but...I couldn't keep going.

I won't name the book/author, since that would be like publicly shaming them, but I will say that it's something that had been sitting on my shelf waiting for me to read it for years.  And that it was something I had backed on Kickstarter back in the days when I was far less cynical than I am now.  😰

The plot and setting seemed interesting, though their Victorian England didn't entirely feel properly Victorian.  Not that there were many direct anachronisms; it was more the tone, the sense, of the setting that felt too modern.

That's not why I decided to give up on it, though.  It was all the problems that a professional editor would have fixed.

When it was just the rather samey sentence structure, the overly dense description of fairly minute physical details surrounding the lead (while not describing his emotional reactions all that strongly), some missing commas, and the occasional missing indentation at the start of a paragraph, that was livable.  Nothing worth quitting a book over.

Then I got further in, and reached conversations, especially ones between multiple people...

Five or six lines of dialog, from three or four different characters...

...all in the same paragraph.

Not just once, either.

It happened repeatedly.

It was like the author thought paragraphs had to be a certain length to be allowed to exist.

Reading it was frankly excruciating.  I just couldn't keep going.

I know that is a risk you run when you read something self-published, but...ugh.  Clearly, I've been spoiled by the Eternal Library series, which are well-written and edited despite being Kickstarted.

Anyway, I am gonna switch now to something that was actually published by an actual publisher and sold in bookstores.  There should be no way it will have any of the problems this other thing had!

Original language:  English (if it had been some other language, then at least the author would have had an excuse!)

Reading Record 2

     So, I finished reading something else today.

    The something else in question being Lady Molly of Scotland Yard by Baroness Orczy.  (The author of The Scarlet Pimpernel.)

    It's a book of short stories, though, so I've been reading it on and off in between other books since, like, March, I think?  (In book club, after we read The Seven Dials Mystery, we were all talking about how public domain mystery novels might make good choices to adapt into visual novels, so I went out looking for ones that I could see if I wanted to adapt them.  And I thought a short story collection by a woman and featuring a female detective might be a good idea, but...)

    In short, what I can say about this book is:  avoid.

    Excessive classism at every turn, combined with racism, internalized misogyny, and that bizarre phenomenon you encounter in some older works where perceived "national character" is treated with racism-like prejudice.  (It might be called "pseudo-racism," perhaps?  I've heard the term,  but never been quite sure what it referred to, precisely.)  Admittedly, I expected a certain amount of classism going in, what with the author being a baroness and all, but I hadn't expected it to be as egregious as it was:  people of lower classes were invariably described as filthy, stupid, lazy or some combination of the three, sometimes presenting those characteristics as a purposeful repudiation of propriety.

    On top of all that, in the final story, which I can only assume was being serialized slowly and the author failing to check back on what she had already written, the title character was being romantically pursued by her own half-brother.  Neither she nor the narrator (her former maid and now best friend, who always described Lady Molly as "the woman I love best" and yet it was hard to interpret it as anything sapphic that might have salvaged the work) seemed to recall that this dude's mother was the same woman who was Lady Molly's mother.  Made my skin crawl.  Though the whole book did that already, of course.

    All in all, it was like a full course on how not to write.  (The mysteries weren't even very good!  Lady Molly either jumped to conclusions based on intuition alone, or came to logical conclusions based on large amounts of information not presented to the reader.  And in one case the police were literally incompetent:  they failed to ask such basic information of the witnesses as the height and body type of the killer they had seen!  Additionally, multiple cases were described as among the most "dastardly" ever seen, when the victim was merely poisoned or bludgeoned.  It's like, "lady, have you forgotten about Jack the Ripper?"  How can you call a simple murder "the most dastardly" when there was a guy who was slicing women to pieces in alleyways?  (And these stories were written around 1901-1904, so it's not like there's any chronological excuse!))

    Honestly, I think I only finished reading it because I kept hoping that it would get better.  Only to have it get worse instead.

Original language:  English, as far as I know

IWSG: I want to make a "May" pun but I can't think of a good one

 

    Yet another post without a decent title.  :<

    Well.  Anyway.  I don't have anything to say about this month's suggested question, so...

    Hmm.

    I have to admit that I kind of feel like I'm spinning my wheels a bit lately.  My "top priority" is still supposed to be the Atalanta and Ariadne series, since I've been working on getting it released since 2021.  (And I wrote the first drafts of all seven novels back in 2014!)  But that is sort of...both frustrating and slow?

    I'm currently working on the next draft of book four, but as soon as I finish it, I have to go back in and fix up book two.  I did, at least, get version 2.0 of the first book released during the past month!  That was a big milestone, as I made some epic upgrades to the text, as well as changing the engine the interactive version was released in.  Ooh, actually, I can share a sample of the upgraded text!  Here's the old version, as released in TWINE:

(Comparison is just the two paragraphs from "The interior of the cave" onward.)

    And here's the new version, which is in Ren'py:

    Not all of the text was changed that radically, but...yeah, it was a pretty drastic change.  I don't know if the second and third books will get that much alteration (and they won't get more than a text change in the interactive versions, since they're already in Ren'py), but...I still want to get those changes made.  In between working on drafts of book four.  It's exciting to be able to point to something like this and be like "my style has improved so much in the past five years!" but it's also depressing to think I released something that badly written, plus the new version is still only mid at best, and it's generally a draining process having to do this.  So...yeah, it leaves me in a weird place mentally, I guess?

    In other news(?), in between releasing version 2.0 of the first book and getting to work on the next draft of book four, I told myself I could have one fun little fanfic project.  All my standing ideas for fanfics were guaranteed to be long, though, so I had to come up with a new one that I hoped would be short.  (It ended up being somewhere in the neighborhood of 45k, so...not really short, but at least it's well under 100k?)  I wanted to experiment to see if I was capable of writing a murder mystery, since I've read a few of them lately.  (I joined a Discord book club, and the first book we read was The Seven Dials Mystery by Agatha Christie (and then during the book club meeting, people who had looked into it talked about just how garbage the Netflix adaptation was, including changing who the killer was!), and on learning that the heroine, Bundle, had been introduced in an earlier book, I hunted up a copy of it and read that, too!)

    So, I ended up trying my hand at a murder mystery fanfic.  Naturally using the cast of Mo Dao Zu Shi (Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, aka The Untamed in its live-action adaptation)) for the story, because I've been obsessed for years now.  😅  (Ugh, these Windows 11 emoji are so ugly! 😭  Eew, especially that one...)

    Anyway, it's not really much of a murder mystery, I fear.  Especially not for anyone who knows the fandom, because there's pretty much only three possible suspects, since most of the cast would never commit a murder unless they're acting direly out of character.  But I think my story's biggest problem as a murder mystery is that everyone the investigating character talks to is being honest.  Usually, suspects lie even when they're not the murderer.  (Don't they?)  But again, that's partially a limitation of the fanfic situation, since most of those characters are typically honest.  I did, at least, manage to get a lot of inconsistencies between different characters describing the same events, since their perspectives are different and their opinions alter how they think of things, but...

    Well, for a first attempt, it's at least decent?  I'll certainly be posting it on AO3 eventually (there's a lot of other fics waiting their turn to be edited and released first, though, so it'll take a while), in any case.

    Sometime, I'd like to write a more proper mystery, though.  (Maybe not a murder one?)  Either something original (in which case it'd probably be a visual novel) or something with a fandom that's a little more flexible so there would actually be some genuine mystery to it.  (Because really, "was it Jin Guangyao, Su Minshan or Xue Yang who murdered Jin Zixun?" is not much of a mystery...though I guess not making Su Minshan the killer would at least surprise people a little?)

    ...hmm.

    Disjointed as always.

    *sigh*

    Maybe I can chalk that up to the pain-killers I'm on because of the dental surgery I went through a few days ago.  (My cheek is still swollen, and it hurts to touch it!  It sucks so bad!)