The Magpie's Nest

Sure, why not, let's bookpost.

Wren Hyde — Beneath a Burning Sky (zine)

Feb 27

A friend we know from Ruth's shapenote singing community wrote a zine about going on long bike tours. It's good! Wren generally puts a lot of energy into thinking about things like the practical exercise of freedom and the purpose of risking yourself on an adventure, and I always value the sense of being gently shaken out of autopilot that I get from talking to (or reading) them.

I don't know of anywhere a random person could obtain this from, but it's worth picking up if you happen to see it around.

Ken Liu — Laozi’s Dao De Jing: A New Translation for a Transformative Time

Mar. 30

(For now I’m putting Liu as the author here rather than Laozi, but I might reconsider at some point. He has a lot of commentary in his own voice interspersed throughout the book (on the Dao, on other Daoist writers, on the theory and practice of translation), so it’s not attempting to be an invisible translation.)

I picked this up because the ebook was on steep sale. My only real prior familiarity with this text was indirect, through the prints it leaves on the surrounding world, and those prints are ambiguous and elusive. Well... the text is also ambiguous and elusive. Even more so than I was expecting, and that’s saying something! Having carefully read it, I do not feel equipped to tell you what I think Daoism is about. Ask me in some later year, maybe.

I’m glad I read this and I expect to return to it. It’s deliberately aggravating and provocative, but in a gentle way. I really had no idea what to think of it right after finishing, but there are one or two ideas in there that have yielded a bit more as I mull them over in the background. (In particular, some paradoxes about the entire concept of “leading.”)

J.-C. Mézières, P. Christin, E. Tranlé — Valerian and Laureline: The Empire of a Thousand Planets and The Land Without Stars (comics)

Apr. 14

This long-running French sci-fi comic series came up in a conversation about The Fifth Element; I hadn't really heard of it, but it's apparently widely influential. The library had a bunch of it, so I checked out a couple volumes.

The art and the environment design in these is fabulous. But I found the stories a bit tedious and slight, and the cartooning (as distinct from the superb draftsmanship and composition) wasn't to my taste, so I don't expect to read much more of it.

This is that style of comic where the panels are lushly and meticulously detailed, but there aren't enough of them to properly control the narrative flow, and so they compensate by cramming a goddamn paragraph of captions above every other panel. My personal name for this phenomenon is "That Prince Valiant Thing," in honor of a baffling Sunday newspaper strip from my childhood that always seemed to have like one panel of dudes staring into space and a half-page of turgid narration in which absolutely nothing ever happened. I'm sure there's people who like this (or at least are better able to tolerate it), but I personally feel that it misses the point of the medium.

Tamsyn Muir — Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower

Apr. 10

I loved this gory inverted fairy tale about a self-made monster.

This novella has an extremely good Shape, and I wish I could define that better for you. I've had an ongoing background ponder running for years about what exactly the novella as a form is good for, and my current (tentative) thinking is that it's either for episodic stories, or for stories where you're trying to draw a very particular geometric structure with the plot (which requires more elbow room than a short, but which will have less success in a longer novel because it's harder for the reader to hold the whole of the shape in their head at once). The failure states for the novella are, of course, "short story that wasn't cut enough" and "novel with insufficient development."