![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
phantomtomatoI have a long catch-up post this month, as I was traveling across the January to February transition! I spent a month in Tokyo then, and though I didn’t expect to read very much during the trip, I ended up fitting in a couple of books (and a couple of duds).
A Room Above A Shop by Anthony Shapland
This debut novel tells a story about two unnamed Welsh men, called M and B, who fall in love during the 1980s. The book focuses on their experience of staying closeted and hiding their relationship from the others in their small Welsh town. Outwardly, they take the appearance of a shop owner and his live-in apprentice. Shapland’s prose is sparse and atmospheric, which along with the indirect way of addressing characters and glancing, in-the-know references to Welsh history, make for an extremely stylized read which has been recognized with awards and in reviews. It’s a short, quick book, and so I would recommend it broadly—not because I think it’s generally palatable, but because it’s an easy dose to take.
Keeping in mind that it’s a debut, I found myself a bit torn in my ultimate opinion. The intentional obfuscation of detail and identity is bold and sometimes unconvincing. To take a specific example, unlike the book, we are asked to believe that B looks young enough, and there is an age gap, to be M’s son. Also, that they’ve been together for multiple years. And yet M is only about 32 years old towards the end of the book, if you use the oblique clues to calculate his age, which begs belief—until a very late reference that M and B have been together for just 3 years, so B might only be around 20, and I suppose it all just fits together. See, I think that writing this out more plainly—“M and B meet for the first time when M is 30 and B is 18. M looks prematurely old, and B quite young. In their first year together, they do this. In their second year…”—creates a sort of honesty, a reference point for the ground truth of this fiction. I’m not suggesting that all stories must be transparent and legible, but rather that this story was not, and the lack of clarity doesn’t serve a narrative function, but seems instead an accident of style. Would this story be less affecting for having a specific date in the beginning, not the end? For giving a character’s age range plainly? I don’t think so, and I think that in this case, the style dampens the substance.
But, with that critique said, there’s a lot to like in this. For one, this is very Welsh, and though it’s all obfuscated, it’s built very much on a foundation of recent Welsh history. I caught the mention of the Aberfan disaster and had to stop and reflect—on what that context meant to the characters, to the community they exist in. That feels worth celebrating, in new literature. Also, despite the arms-length stylization of the characters, I was extremely affected by the climax of the novel. Though I don’t think that the style worked for me, it ultimately wasn’t an impossible barrier, and I came to care about what happened to M and B.
The book reminded me a lot of Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, which I read in 2024 around the end of December but didn’t review here. Shapland is not Carson, but maybe it’s that he’s not yet Carson—and that’s a niche I want to keep existing, something that feels like a necessary part of a healthy literary ecosystem. I hope that Shapland continues to refine his approach and reaches that tricky balance of characterization and sparseness, so that we continue the tradition of queer poetic novels. It’s a format that speaks to a particular feeling, an indelible part of queerness, and I can appreciate that without being the audience for it.
The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis
The Rules of Attraction starts midsentence. I knew this, but forgot, and flipped back and forth in my eBook to confirm that I hadn’t skipped a page. Later, reading Wikipedia, I learned that many readers over the years have also treated this as a mistake in the printing—a shared experience. The book continues chaotically from there.
We primarily follow three characters, though a large cast gets one-off POV chapters. Paul Denton is a mostly-closeted gay senior at Camden College who comes from a wealthy Chicago family. He’s in love with Sean Bateman (yes, brother of Patrick from American Psycho), a Camden sophomore who is pretending to be poor though his family is rich. Sean, in turn, is in love with Lauren Hynde, a Camden senior whose fall term is mostly spent thinking about her female friends and her ex-boyfriend, Victor, though she may be a little in love with Paul, too. They spend a late-1980s fall semester at fictional Camden and in real New Hampshire getting drunk and high, and fucking practically everyone.
If The Secret History captures a certain academic truth about the selective liberal arts college experience in the USA, then Rules of Attraction captures a similar truth for the social or party scene therein. This is a college novel not concerned with academics, but neither are its characters. The claustrophobic environment of a small college creates the backdrop for Sean to remark that in a room of 15 people, he’s fucked three of them. The Liberal Arts philosophy is necessary to enable these characters, with the specificity of their cultural positioning, their attitudes towards queerness, their constant references to the Talking Heads.
I love how the Talking Heads serve as a grounding touchstone in this novel. I, also, define the SLAC life by universal love for the Talking Heads. And entirely unintentionally, that reference makes this book both nonspecific but distinct—the characters constantly refer to “the latest Talking Heads album.” The band released albums for only a decade, from the late seventies to the late eighties, but they released a lot of them. The characters could mean any of their albums from 1985, 1986, or 1988, really, as the latest one, and be entirely consistent. It works perfectly with the hazy drug-addled narration to create a filmy, indistinct sense of time, but also to establish this story, and this type of character, so firmly as a comment on the 1980s. Ellis couldn’t have known; the book was published in 1987, and the Talking Heads’ final album post-dates it. To him, during the writing, the band must have seemed eternal, and new albums ever-forthcoming; to a modern reader, this locks the novel in its specific time.
I think that’s a great way to understand what this book is. It’s pretentious, culturally specific, and grotesque; the appeal is marveling at all of that and the style with which Ellis writes it. I love it as a companion piece to The Secret History, as Ellis and Tartt were classmates and friends (catch his references to her then-unpiblished manuscript), and I love it as a later inheritor of the SLAC student culture, albeit not one who went to cocaine and ecstasy parties. And Bret Easton Ellis really is a hell of an author, pulling off so many distinct and voicey POVs, and keeping you interested even when the characters are all deeply flawed and unpleasant. I had a great time reading this.
The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham
This was my third Maugham, a choice made by happenstance once I realized that I would have many 20-30 minute rides on the Tokyo Metro with not much to do but read or think. The Painted Veil was on my phone, short, and I’d forgotten any summary of it. Let me attempt one now: Kitty Fane is an Englishwoman displaced to Tching-Yen (fictional Hong Kong) by her marriage to Walter Fane, a bacteriologist working under the colonial government. She is unhappy in her marriage, which she chose because of the impending date of her younger sister’s own to a wealthier man, and in the two years since her move she’s begun an affair with the older, handsome Assistant Colonial Secretary, Charlie Townsend. Walter discovers this affair, and the aftermath of this discovery is the meat of the book, in which the Fanes face a cholera epidemic and Kitty, now disillusioned with Charlie and in a remote outpost with more limited company, completes a transition from frivolity to self-actualization.
Maugham writes interesting women. Even in Of Human Bondage, a bildungsroman for a male lead, Mildred dominates the page (to my regret). Kitty, here, does the same. The book functions almost as one of those villain POV retellings—Kitty being the vain older sister or romantic rival who is ultimately bested for the best match by Cinderella or Elizabeth Bennet, and whose poorer and unhappy marriage we are allowed to sneer at. Certainly, Kitty begins the novel as a shallow, unlikeable society wife with delusions of grandeur. This makes her transformation pretty incredible, and Maugham really sells it! Watching Kitty go from fearful self-pity at the discovery of her affair, through bemused acquaintance with an ugly British commissioner and some French nuns during the Fanes’ self-imposed exile to a rural Chinese village, to rising to meet the occasion as a widow and expectant mother, is a compelling journey. I only just wish I hadn’t liked Walter.
See, Walter dies of cholera about two-thirds through. His death is implied to be self-inflicted, as he never recovered from his broken heart after Kitty’s infidelity. It’s not his story, and with Kitty unable to love him, he needed to go. But he was so interesting! Walter was a good man—he had his dark spell at the end, but what’s striking about his character is that he doesn’t match the vain/shallow woman he married. He, in fact, knew this about her and loved her and loved her company anyway. At one point he reveals that he was delighted just by the effort to amuse her and make her happy, and he took joy from each of her occasional smiles for him. This was something I haven’t seen before: the smart, awkward man who marries a very different woman, fully comprehending those differences and their shortcomings, and welcoming of them. The affair breaks Walter, and yet I hoped for some recovery for him—an eventual acceptance of divorce, maybe. So although Walter’s death means freedom and escape from China for Kitty, it was devastating to me.
With that out of the way, this is a good book, and it’s as easy to get into as Cakes and Ale, with the caveat that it does include period-typical racism against minor Chinese characters. (The book is really not interested in colonialism; it uses the colony as a setting for society drama, with higher stakes than back in England.) If Maugham is an author on your hit list, this is a great candidate. Charlie Townsend makes for a memorable villain and temptation. I read this blind, whereas some expectation-setting would have oriented me around Kitty. Then again, I wouldn’t have read this for Kitty, so it worked out in the end.
Two DNFs:
K2: Life and Death on the World’s Most Dangerous Mountain by Ed Viesturs with David Roberts
Ed Viesturs is an American mountaineer famous for climbing all fourteen mountains taller than 8000m, and in this book he takes on K2, the second tallest of those after Everest. He explores the history of climbing on K2 through the stories of a half-dozen notable expeditions on the mountain, looking at the challenges, failures, and mistakes in each of those years. Viesturs refrains from defining success as a complete ascent of the mountain, though of course that figures—he takes the more interesting approach of discussing teamwork, technique, and technical feats by the climbers. Though somewhat jargon-y, it’s still easy to follow the action in the book, and between Viesturs’ appreciation for the emotions of mountaineering and Roberts’ presumable editing and writing contributions, the book flew by.
Sometimes, though, when reading nonfiction, a subject is so interesting that I’m willing to forgive the foibles of the author. This kind of expertise is rare; Ed Viesturs was in a singular place to be able to offer it. That unfortunately gives him free rein to air his judgments, for better and worse.
This book was written following a disastrous 2008 climbing season on K2, during which 11 climbers died. The international press had their day with the story, and Viesturs clearly wanted to respond from an in-community perspective. He opens by breaking down the circumstances of each of these deaths, explaining what choices were made and what alternatives exist—and this is genuinely gripping stuff, which remains true as he expands to more stories in later chapters. But here, early, he explains where he sees himself in the landscape of mountaineer-writers, which span from entirely close-lipped about interpersonal tensions to highly gossipy. He thinks himself broadly on the more conservative end. He is not. And, to be clear, some willingness to criticize is necessary to the premise of discussing mistakes or questionable choices, even in a framework of varied risk tolerances. This is good. What’s less good are moments like this:
This particular remark appears early in the introduction of the 1986 climbing cast, a year also plagued by many deaths, including those of both Rouse and Wolf. It’s part of an early pattern, established when he talks about Chantal Mauduit who summited K2 in the same year that he did, 1992. Viesturs isn’t universally saying that women are bad at mountaineering, but he is preoccupied with their sexual relationships. I’ve no doubt that there was in-community gossip about Wolf and Rouse, but it would have been 23 years old by the time of this book’s publication, and so probably not a necessary component of the story. If it was, there are less salacious ways to introduce the reader to it. In his own telling, both Wolf and Rouse seem to have been fundamentally qualified for the climb, so why muddy the more interesting discussion of how top mountaineers fail with this speculation about an affair?
The men involved come in for less criticism and spectacle, generally. Chantal Mauduit, as mentioned, is a great example. Her ascent in 1992 ends with the necessity of a rescue by Viesturs and others, as she attains the summit in a state of exhaustion and cannot make it down again on her own, which puts both her and her rescuers in danger. This is one of the most fascinating questions raised in the book: what is an acceptable cost of an ascent? With the huge danger posed by rescue efforts, something Viesturs hammers repeatedly, when does personal risk tolerance trip over into a choice bigger than one person? And what are the moral obligations of other climbers to help those in need, given the risks? Under what circumstances does that change? Chantal Mauduit’s ascent is a great backdrop for all of these—it’s fine for a selfish or risky climber to be a woman, if she happens to be. I care less that she was sexy and might have flirted with some men at K2 that year, maybe including Viesturs, which he takes pains to tell us twice.
It’s a really interesting book, and after the two DNFs above and with a 10 hour flight home to get through, I’m glad that I had it sitting on my phone to read. I do wish it were less judgmental of women particularly but also of other climbers in some smaller ways. But I learned a ton, and I appreciate the thoughtfulness of the attention to the individual circumstances of each ascent attempt, each climber, and each challenge. Ed Viesturs definitely thinks that his way is the right way, but he gives you the tools to think about each problem for yourself, and I appreciated that.
A Room Above A Shop by Anthony Shapland
This debut novel tells a story about two unnamed Welsh men, called M and B, who fall in love during the 1980s. The book focuses on their experience of staying closeted and hiding their relationship from the others in their small Welsh town. Outwardly, they take the appearance of a shop owner and his live-in apprentice. Shapland’s prose is sparse and atmospheric, which along with the indirect way of addressing characters and glancing, in-the-know references to Welsh history, make for an extremely stylized read which has been recognized with awards and in reviews. It’s a short, quick book, and so I would recommend it broadly—not because I think it’s generally palatable, but because it’s an easy dose to take.
Keeping in mind that it’s a debut, I found myself a bit torn in my ultimate opinion. The intentional obfuscation of detail and identity is bold and sometimes unconvincing. To take a specific example, unlike the book, we are asked to believe that B looks young enough, and there is an age gap, to be M’s son. Also, that they’ve been together for multiple years. And yet M is only about 32 years old towards the end of the book, if you use the oblique clues to calculate his age, which begs belief—until a very late reference that M and B have been together for just 3 years, so B might only be around 20, and I suppose it all just fits together. See, I think that writing this out more plainly—“M and B meet for the first time when M is 30 and B is 18. M looks prematurely old, and B quite young. In their first year together, they do this. In their second year…”—creates a sort of honesty, a reference point for the ground truth of this fiction. I’m not suggesting that all stories must be transparent and legible, but rather that this story was not, and the lack of clarity doesn’t serve a narrative function, but seems instead an accident of style. Would this story be less affecting for having a specific date in the beginning, not the end? For giving a character’s age range plainly? I don’t think so, and I think that in this case, the style dampens the substance.
But, with that critique said, there’s a lot to like in this. For one, this is very Welsh, and though it’s all obfuscated, it’s built very much on a foundation of recent Welsh history. I caught the mention of the Aberfan disaster and had to stop and reflect—on what that context meant to the characters, to the community they exist in. That feels worth celebrating, in new literature. Also, despite the arms-length stylization of the characters, I was extremely affected by the climax of the novel. Though I don’t think that the style worked for me, it ultimately wasn’t an impossible barrier, and I came to care about what happened to M and B.
The book reminded me a lot of Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, which I read in 2024 around the end of December but didn’t review here. Shapland is not Carson, but maybe it’s that he’s not yet Carson—and that’s a niche I want to keep existing, something that feels like a necessary part of a healthy literary ecosystem. I hope that Shapland continues to refine his approach and reaches that tricky balance of characterization and sparseness, so that we continue the tradition of queer poetic novels. It’s a format that speaks to a particular feeling, an indelible part of queerness, and I can appreciate that without being the audience for it.
The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis
The Rules of Attraction starts midsentence. I knew this, but forgot, and flipped back and forth in my eBook to confirm that I hadn’t skipped a page. Later, reading Wikipedia, I learned that many readers over the years have also treated this as a mistake in the printing—a shared experience. The book continues chaotically from there.
We primarily follow three characters, though a large cast gets one-off POV chapters. Paul Denton is a mostly-closeted gay senior at Camden College who comes from a wealthy Chicago family. He’s in love with Sean Bateman (yes, brother of Patrick from American Psycho), a Camden sophomore who is pretending to be poor though his family is rich. Sean, in turn, is in love with Lauren Hynde, a Camden senior whose fall term is mostly spent thinking about her female friends and her ex-boyfriend, Victor, though she may be a little in love with Paul, too. They spend a late-1980s fall semester at fictional Camden and in real New Hampshire getting drunk and high, and fucking practically everyone.
If The Secret History captures a certain academic truth about the selective liberal arts college experience in the USA, then Rules of Attraction captures a similar truth for the social or party scene therein. This is a college novel not concerned with academics, but neither are its characters. The claustrophobic environment of a small college creates the backdrop for Sean to remark that in a room of 15 people, he’s fucked three of them. The Liberal Arts philosophy is necessary to enable these characters, with the specificity of their cultural positioning, their attitudes towards queerness, their constant references to the Talking Heads.
I love how the Talking Heads serve as a grounding touchstone in this novel. I, also, define the SLAC life by universal love for the Talking Heads. And entirely unintentionally, that reference makes this book both nonspecific but distinct—the characters constantly refer to “the latest Talking Heads album.” The band released albums for only a decade, from the late seventies to the late eighties, but they released a lot of them. The characters could mean any of their albums from 1985, 1986, or 1988, really, as the latest one, and be entirely consistent. It works perfectly with the hazy drug-addled narration to create a filmy, indistinct sense of time, but also to establish this story, and this type of character, so firmly as a comment on the 1980s. Ellis couldn’t have known; the book was published in 1987, and the Talking Heads’ final album post-dates it. To him, during the writing, the band must have seemed eternal, and new albums ever-forthcoming; to a modern reader, this locks the novel in its specific time.
I think that’s a great way to understand what this book is. It’s pretentious, culturally specific, and grotesque; the appeal is marveling at all of that and the style with which Ellis writes it. I love it as a companion piece to The Secret History, as Ellis and Tartt were classmates and friends (catch his references to her then-unpiblished manuscript), and I love it as a later inheritor of the SLAC student culture, albeit not one who went to cocaine and ecstasy parties. And Bret Easton Ellis really is a hell of an author, pulling off so many distinct and voicey POVs, and keeping you interested even when the characters are all deeply flawed and unpleasant. I had a great time reading this.
The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham
This was my third Maugham, a choice made by happenstance once I realized that I would have many 20-30 minute rides on the Tokyo Metro with not much to do but read or think. The Painted Veil was on my phone, short, and I’d forgotten any summary of it. Let me attempt one now: Kitty Fane is an Englishwoman displaced to Tching-Yen (fictional Hong Kong) by her marriage to Walter Fane, a bacteriologist working under the colonial government. She is unhappy in her marriage, which she chose because of the impending date of her younger sister’s own to a wealthier man, and in the two years since her move she’s begun an affair with the older, handsome Assistant Colonial Secretary, Charlie Townsend. Walter discovers this affair, and the aftermath of this discovery is the meat of the book, in which the Fanes face a cholera epidemic and Kitty, now disillusioned with Charlie and in a remote outpost with more limited company, completes a transition from frivolity to self-actualization.
Maugham writes interesting women. Even in Of Human Bondage, a bildungsroman for a male lead, Mildred dominates the page (to my regret). Kitty, here, does the same. The book functions almost as one of those villain POV retellings—Kitty being the vain older sister or romantic rival who is ultimately bested for the best match by Cinderella or Elizabeth Bennet, and whose poorer and unhappy marriage we are allowed to sneer at. Certainly, Kitty begins the novel as a shallow, unlikeable society wife with delusions of grandeur. This makes her transformation pretty incredible, and Maugham really sells it! Watching Kitty go from fearful self-pity at the discovery of her affair, through bemused acquaintance with an ugly British commissioner and some French nuns during the Fanes’ self-imposed exile to a rural Chinese village, to rising to meet the occasion as a widow and expectant mother, is a compelling journey. I only just wish I hadn’t liked Walter.
See, Walter dies of cholera about two-thirds through. His death is implied to be self-inflicted, as he never recovered from his broken heart after Kitty’s infidelity. It’s not his story, and with Kitty unable to love him, he needed to go. But he was so interesting! Walter was a good man—he had his dark spell at the end, but what’s striking about his character is that he doesn’t match the vain/shallow woman he married. He, in fact, knew this about her and loved her and loved her company anyway. At one point he reveals that he was delighted just by the effort to amuse her and make her happy, and he took joy from each of her occasional smiles for him. This was something I haven’t seen before: the smart, awkward man who marries a very different woman, fully comprehending those differences and their shortcomings, and welcoming of them. The affair breaks Walter, and yet I hoped for some recovery for him—an eventual acceptance of divorce, maybe. So although Walter’s death means freedom and escape from China for Kitty, it was devastating to me.
With that out of the way, this is a good book, and it’s as easy to get into as Cakes and Ale, with the caveat that it does include period-typical racism against minor Chinese characters. (The book is really not interested in colonialism; it uses the colony as a setting for society drama, with higher stakes than back in England.) If Maugham is an author on your hit list, this is a great candidate. Charlie Townsend makes for a memorable villain and temptation. I read this blind, whereas some expectation-setting would have oriented me around Kitty. Then again, I wouldn’t have read this for Kitty, so it worked out in the end.
Two DNFs:
- Providence by Craig Willse A professor at a small liberal arts college in Ohio (modeled significantly after my own undergrad!) becomes obsessed with a mysterious and dangerous student. Willse writes a convincing and funny take on the elite rural midwestern SLAC, and an unconvincing take on why an English professor with a tenure-track appointment would ruin life and career for a nineteen year old boy.
- George Passant by C. P. Snow Small-town politicking in exurban 1920s England. The opening incident is a fascinatingly direct tale of homosexual attraction ruining a man’s reputation, but after that Snow’s writing loses focus, and his blank-slate narrator fails to persuade me to attend to any of the actors in this slow-moving drama.
K2: Life and Death on the World’s Most Dangerous Mountain by Ed Viesturs with David Roberts
Ed Viesturs is an American mountaineer famous for climbing all fourteen mountains taller than 8000m, and in this book he takes on K2, the second tallest of those after Everest. He explores the history of climbing on K2 through the stories of a half-dozen notable expeditions on the mountain, looking at the challenges, failures, and mistakes in each of those years. Viesturs refrains from defining success as a complete ascent of the mountain, though of course that figures—he takes the more interesting approach of discussing teamwork, technique, and technical feats by the climbers. Though somewhat jargon-y, it’s still easy to follow the action in the book, and between Viesturs’ appreciation for the emotions of mountaineering and Roberts’ presumable editing and writing contributions, the book flew by.
Sometimes, though, when reading nonfiction, a subject is so interesting that I’m willing to forgive the foibles of the author. This kind of expertise is rare; Ed Viesturs was in a singular place to be able to offer it. That unfortunately gives him free rein to air his judgments, for better and worse.
This book was written following a disastrous 2008 climbing season on K2, during which 11 climbers died. The international press had their day with the story, and Viesturs clearly wanted to respond from an in-community perspective. He opens by breaking down the circumstances of each of these deaths, explaining what choices were made and what alternatives exist—and this is genuinely gripping stuff, which remains true as he expands to more stories in later chapters. But here, early, he explains where he sees himself in the landscape of mountaineer-writers, which span from entirely close-lipped about interpersonal tensions to highly gossipy. He thinks himself broadly on the more conservative end. He is not. And, to be clear, some willingness to criticize is necessary to the premise of discussing mistakes or questionable choices, even in a framework of varied risk tolerances. This is good. What’s less good are moments like this:
Whether [Al] Rouse and Dobroslawa Wolf (known as Mrufka, Polish for “ant”) had started having an affair is pretty much irrelevant.
This particular remark appears early in the introduction of the 1986 climbing cast, a year also plagued by many deaths, including those of both Rouse and Wolf. It’s part of an early pattern, established when he talks about Chantal Mauduit who summited K2 in the same year that he did, 1992. Viesturs isn’t universally saying that women are bad at mountaineering, but he is preoccupied with their sexual relationships. I’ve no doubt that there was in-community gossip about Wolf and Rouse, but it would have been 23 years old by the time of this book’s publication, and so probably not a necessary component of the story. If it was, there are less salacious ways to introduce the reader to it. In his own telling, both Wolf and Rouse seem to have been fundamentally qualified for the climb, so why muddy the more interesting discussion of how top mountaineers fail with this speculation about an affair?
The men involved come in for less criticism and spectacle, generally. Chantal Mauduit, as mentioned, is a great example. Her ascent in 1992 ends with the necessity of a rescue by Viesturs and others, as she attains the summit in a state of exhaustion and cannot make it down again on her own, which puts both her and her rescuers in danger. This is one of the most fascinating questions raised in the book: what is an acceptable cost of an ascent? With the huge danger posed by rescue efforts, something Viesturs hammers repeatedly, when does personal risk tolerance trip over into a choice bigger than one person? And what are the moral obligations of other climbers to help those in need, given the risks? Under what circumstances does that change? Chantal Mauduit’s ascent is a great backdrop for all of these—it’s fine for a selfish or risky climber to be a woman, if she happens to be. I care less that she was sexy and might have flirted with some men at K2 that year, maybe including Viesturs, which he takes pains to tell us twice.
It’s a really interesting book, and after the two DNFs above and with a 10 hour flight home to get through, I’m glad that I had it sitting on my phone to read. I do wish it were less judgmental of women particularly but also of other climbers in some smaller ways. But I learned a ton, and I appreciate the thoughtfulness of the attention to the individual circumstances of each ascent attempt, each climber, and each challenge. Ed Viesturs definitely thinks that his way is the right way, but he gives you the tools to think about each problem for yourself, and I appreciated that.
no subject
Date: 2026-02-28 09:47 am (UTC)The Ed Viesturs book sounds interesting - I read Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer a number of years ago and it set me off on a bit of a phase of reading books about mountain climbing (a thing I have never done and never will do /o\). One I'd recommend, if you fancied more of that sort of thing, is Heinrich Harrer's The White Spider, which is a history of the various attempts to climb the north face of the Eiger - Harrer was in the party who made the first successful ascent by that route.
no subject
Date: 2026-02-28 05:10 pm (UTC)Thank you for the mountaineering book recs! It’s a weirdly compelling genre. I’ve got a couple more long haul flights in my future so I’m downloading The White Spider and Into Thin Air and a few others, just to see what sticks. I think the genre tickles that itch of history, high stakes, and the human condition in just the right way for me.
no subject
Date: 2026-03-01 02:25 pm (UTC)As much fun as using oblique clues to calculate things about the story can be when in fandom, I definitely agree that it's frustrating when a stylistic thing like that seems to be done unnecessarily and get in the way of the story. Oh well, I'll see what I think.
I'm planning to read Ashenden next of Maugham's books because I want to know about the non-plot-relevant secret spy adventures behind Cakes and Ale, but I really like the sound of Kitty Fane, and I think I can understand your feelings about Walter too.
no subject
Date: 2026-03-01 04:19 pm (UTC)Oh, I’m also curious about why you’ll think of the spy novels from Maugham. I’m not usually interested in stuff like that so I keep trying his non-spy novels, with results as above, and maybe the spy novels would be more straightforwardly satisfying. Well, I did love Cakes and Ale. And this was good, too! Just, poor Walter…