monstersandmagicians

[monstersandmagicians]

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You know, it’s important to have tragic blorbos sometimes because hey, maybe you had a bad day, maybe your job sucks so fucking much. But do you know who had a worse day? Blorbo bleebus, who’s doomed by the narrative

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Vampire that’s dirt poor, doesn’t have a sprawling manor or vast riches accumulated by interest. Can’t afford those black leather boots they really want. Travels as a bat to save money not cuz they like it.

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The combination of 'unnervingly flawless self-control' with 'occasional tendency to engage in reckless, dangerous, and borderline self-destructive or death-seeking behaviour' in a character is SUCH catnip to me

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I don't know what paddington is doing on that list, but it made me think of the time someone drew a picture of the queen with paddington after she died, and we had scores of people losing their minds at the idea that paddington bear wasn't the same kind of communist as them

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do you ever read scifi or fantasy in french? i am trying to read more sff that was originally published not in english but it's not easy to find 💀

I do! It’s not my favourite genre but one of my friends loves it so I read a bunch of SFF books every year ahead of her birthday to try and find a gift for her. I’m glad I do this because it’s allowed me to discover N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy which was amazing, and I don’t know if I would have picked it up otherwise!

Here are some French-language authors I’ve read or plan to read (unfortunately English translations are few and far between :( I bolded the names for which I found English translations—if you read in another language you can check out the non-bolded authors, there are often translations available in other languages long before English ones)

When it comes to classics you've got Pierre Boulle (Planet of the Apes of course; also Garden on the Moon, which is (deservedly imo) less known), Jacques Spitz (La Guerre des mouches—it was translated but not into English), René Barjavel (The Ice People, Ravage, Future Times Three—I read them a long time ago but I remember them as very sexist even by French classic standards), Bernard Lenteric (La nuit des enfants rois), Alain Damasio (La Horde du Contrevent—maybe too recent to be a classic but it’s everywhere. I was surprised to find no English translation!), Bernard Werber (I feel like he rehashes the same 3 ideas again and again but some of his earlier stuff was fun), Alexandre Arnoux (Le règne du bonheur), Jules Verne of course, Stefan Wul (Oms en série which was adapted into the film La Planète sauvage—Fantastic Planet in English. I like the film better!) And some I haven’t read: Georges-Jean Arnaud, Serge Brussolo (I liked his Peggy Sue series when I was in middle school but it spooked me so much I haven’t dared to pick up any of his SFF for adults, like Les semeurs d’abîmes), Élisabeth Vonarburg.

Newer authors: Estelle Faye (L’arpenteuse de rêves, Un éclat de givre—I tend to like her worldbuilding more than her plots); Sandrine Collette (The Forests—if you count speculative fiction as SFF) (I didn’t like it at all personally but others might), Jean-Philippe Jaworski (I really liked Janua Vera; didn't like Gagner la guerre but it was mainly because I have a low tolerance for rape scenes in fantasy books) (he’s about to be translated into English according to his editor), Stéphane Beauverger (Le déchronologue)

More authors I haven't yet read: Pierre Pevel (The Cardinal's Blades—I've been told it's "17th century Paris with dragons"), Romain Lucazeau (Latium), Laurent Genefort (Lum’en), Christian Charrière (La forêt d’Iscambe), Roland Wagner (La saison de la sorcière), Aurélie Wellenstein (Mers Mortes—I love the synopsis for this one), Magali Villeneuve (La dernière Terre, trilogy)

And non-French, non-anglo SFF authors: Maryam Petrosyan (my review of the Gray House last year was that I understood maybe 1/3 of it but I liked it anyway!), Hao Jingfang (haven’t read her yet), Arkady & Boris Strugatsky (idem), Jaroslav Melnik (I’ve read Espace lointain (originally Далекий простір) but didn’t like it much), Andreas Eschbach (The Carpet Makers), Walter Moers (I read The City of Dreaming Books back when I was still learning German and found it very charming), Liu Cixin (I loved The Three-Body Problem but The Dark Forest was so sexist it made me not want to pick up the third volume), Lola Robles (El informe Monteverde, translated as Memoirs of an Interstellar Linguist), Elaine Vilar Madruga (Fragmentos de la Tierra Rota), Tatiana Tolstaya (The Slynx), Karin Tidbeck (Amatka), Emmi Itäranta (Memory of Water, The Moonday Letters), Angélica Gorodischer (I’ve read Kalpa Imperial and found it only so-so but it always takes me a while to warm up to characters or a setting so I struggle with short story collections. I’ll still give Trafalgar a try) Also my favourite fantasy book as a kid was Michael Ende’s Neverending Story, I was obsessed with it. I re-read it in the original German a few years ago and it was still great.

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I think it’s good to incorporate a healthy amount of Yearning when it comes to the seasonality of foods. like the novelty of a peach or a pint of blueberries disappears when you can have them in the dead of winter, and with it the novelty of the seasons just as a whole. you also become less aware of what is in season around you and how many different ways you can experiment with what’s available. I do not enjoy living in a vacuum of convenience when it means there’s nothing to look forward to anymore! 

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"rn I feel like reading about someone's quiet daily life, maybe a diary or letters, set in a place or context I don't know much about, without turmoil or tragedy" oh! do you have any recommendations for books like this?

This is one of my favourite types of books! Here are 30(ish) recs...

May Sarton's The House by the Sea or Plant Dreaming Deep

Gyrðir Elíasson's Suðurglugginn / La fenêtre au sud (not translated into English unfortunately!), also Bergsveinn Birgisson's Landslag er aldrei asnalegt / Du temps qu'il fait (exists in German too)

Gretel Ehrlich's The Solace of Open Spaces, which iirc was originally written as journal entries and letters before being adapted into a book

Kenneth White's House of Tides: Letters from Brittany and Other Lands of the West

Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book

The Diary of a Provincial Lady, E. M. Delafield

Growing Up with the Impressionists: The Diary of Julie Manet

Elizabeth and Her German Garden by Elizabeth von Arnim (do not read if you don't like flowers)

The Road Through Miyama by Leila Philip (I've mentioned it before, it feels like this gif)

The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, I keep recommending this one but it's so nice and I love snails

Epicurean Simplicity, Stephanie Mills

The Light in the Dark: A winter journal by Horatio Clare

The Letters of Rachel Henning

The letters of Tove Jansson, also The Summer Book and Fair Play

The diary of Sylvia Townsend Warner—here's an entry where she describes some big cats at the zoo. "Frank and forthcoming, flirtatious carnivores, [...] guttersnipishly loveable"

The Letters of Rachel Carson & Dorothy Freeman were very sweet and a little bit gay. I mostly remember from this long book I read years ago that Rachel Carson once described herself as "retiring into her shell like a periwinkle at low tide" and once apologised to Dorothy because she had run out of apple-themed stationery.

Jane Austen's letters (quoting the synopsis, "Wiser than her critics, who were disappointed that her correspondence dwelt on gossip and the minutiae of everyday living, Austen understood the importance of "Little Matters," of the emotional and material details of individual lives shared with friends and family")

Madame de Sévigné's letters because obviously, and from the same time period, the letters of the Princess Palatine, Louis XIV's sister-in-law. I read them a long time ago and mostly I remember that I enjoyed her priorities. There's a letter where she complains that she hasn't received the sausages she was promised, and then in the next paragraph, mentions the plot to assassinate the King of England and also, the Tartars are walking on Vienna currently.

Wait I found it:

R.C. Sherriff's The Fortnight in September (quoting the author, "I wanted to write about simple, uncomplicated people doing normal things")

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith

Pond, Claire-Louise Bennett

Rules for Visiting, Jessica Francis Kane

The following aren't or aren't yet available in English, though some have already been translated in 5-6 languages:

ツバキ文具店 / La papeterie Tsubaki by ito Ogawa

半島へ / La péninsule aux 24 saisons by Mayumi Inaba

Giù la piazza non c'è nessuno, Dolores Prato (for a slightly more conceptual take on the "someone's everyday life" theme—I remember it as quite Proustian in its meticulousness, a bit like Nous les filles by Marie Rouanet which is much shorter and more lighthearted but shows the same extreme attention to childhood details)

Journal d'un homme heureux, Philippe Delerm, my favourite thing about this book is that the goodreads commenter who gave it the lowest rating complained that Delerm misidentified a wine as a grenache when actually it's a cabernet sauvignon. Important review!

Un automne à Kyôto, Corinne Atlan (I find her writing style so lovely)

oh and 西の魔女が死んだ / L’été de la sorcière by Kaho Nashiki —such a little Ghibli film of a book. There's a goodreads review that points out that Japanese slice-of-life films and books have "a certain way of describing small, everyday actions in a soothing, flawless manner that can either wear you out, or make you look at the world with a temporary glaze of calm contentment and introspective understanding [...]"

I'd be happy to get recommendations in this 'genre' as well :)

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I found a library that looks like it could be Oxford’s sister hidden right in my town. I practically started crying walking in. So much beauty and books.

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« Over time, every reader accrues a kind of sedimentary layer of insights and impressions; he also establishes a vast hoard of very particular recollections. Of scenes, images, and seemingly irrelevant bric-a-brac. As often as not, these are fragments retained for whatever reason from books otherwise forgotten. It is almost as if the ultimate point of certain reading has been the survival of some odd trace. Again, as in life, so in art. Just as most of what happens to us dissolves, becomes part of an inner compost known in generalized terms—"my high school years,“ “boot camp,” and so on—so most of what we have read loses definition and becomes a blurry wash. Against this unfeatured backdrop emerge the distinct survivals, the details that for one reason or another we recall. They are not always, or even often, the key elements of the work. We preserve them illogically, savoring their perverse irrelevance, in the same way that we recall the cheap plastic lanyard worn by our grade school gym teacher or the face of the man who ran the hamburger stand. Why this and not that? Who can say? […] 

With each retrieval I not only re-experience something of the flavor of the book, the dense reality it enfolds, but I also recover, if only fleetingly, the original circumstance of my reading—a train ride, a favorite chair in an old apartment, the atmosphere of a long, disconsolate summer. Works of imagination bleed together with the world they extrapolate from. […] There [they] hibernate, a cluster of stray images, forgotten incitements and conversational asides, a mass of shadow wrapping itself around the thoughts and gestures of the self. » — Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies

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I saw an astronaut walking on the side of the road today, which is the kind of thing my brain will placidly accept at first, only to go "Wait, an astronaut" a minute later once I'm done with my previous train of thought. By then I felt like it might be too late to stop my car, but I ended up stopping anyway because I didn't want to spend the rest of the afternoon wondering.

I waited for the astronaut to catch up with me since they were going in my direction, but they didn't. Eventually I got out of the car and retraced my steps, and after a bend in the road when I saw no one walking towards me I decided the visitor must have gone back to their spacecraft and I would never get an explanation for this—and then in the distance I caught a glimpse of the white space suit disappearing into the forest.

I managed to catch up with them and they turned out to be a distant neighbour of mine (let's call her M.), and what looked like a space suit when I was driving by was a beekeeper's outfit! (Sorry for the pointless suspense but I was taking you on the same little journey my brain went through.) M. was tickled when she learnt that I mistook her for an astronaut—she told me she'd borrowed her husband's too-big shoes which made her drag her feet, hence why she looked like she was having trouble readjusting to Earth's gravity.

Then she said that one of her hives had swarmed, and she was pretty sure she knew where the swarm was. I had no idea how swarming worked so as we walked in the woods she explained that when a hive becomes too crowded, the queen will get replaced by a new one, and the old queen will leave along with half of the bees. After this split, the swarm will cluster somewhere nearby and wait while scout bees fly away in search of a new hive location. "That's when you have to catch them—if you can find the swarm. But here it is!"

I wasn't expecting quite so many bees!! I'm pretty scared of all flying creatures so allow me to pat myself on the back for what came next—I thought I was about to learn how to catch a swarm from a prudent distance, but M. asked if I could give her a hand, seeing as her husband was supposed to be here to help but clearly wasn't.

The first step of catching a swarm was spraying the bees with sugar water, and I was glad not to be asked to help with that, as it seemed like something that could make bees angry. ("On the contrary, it makes them less agitated!" I was told, but that remained to be seen.) Step 2 was pulling on a rope tied to the tree branch in order to lower the swarm into the new hive, and that was the job I was recruited for. The rope was long enough that I could stand several metres away to pull on it, but my role in this swarm-catching business was still all too clear to any angry bee looking for someone to blame.

I remembered reading that bees can sense the electric field of flowers, so I thought there was no way they wouldn't sense the staticky nervousness coming from the rope-puller, but thankfully they completely ignored me.

M. was offering one fun fact about bees after the other, in a very relaxed voice, which was very interesting and very soothing for both me and the bees. She said this particular colony was very sweet ("some bee colonies are meaner than others?" "yes of course"), and that swarming usually happens a bit earlier in the year "but it's been raining so much lately, the bees had to postpone all their activities, just like us" and also "swarming involves quite a bit of planning ahead of time; for example worker bees have to put the queen on a diet so she won't be too fat to fly. Did you know that?" I did not!

Unfortunately our first attempt to catch the swarm failed. The bees entered the hive, had a quick look around their new home, then left in disgust and formed a thick, angry, buzzing cloud over our heads, while I tried to think nothing but bee-loving thoughts to make my electric field harmless and friendly.

Then one after the other all the bees returned to the exact same spot on the branch where we'd first found them. ("Because it smells like the queen" said M.) We examined the near-empty hive and found that a mouse had made a nest in there! She was no longer here but the traces of her passage were evident (some of the comb was very nibbled.)

As we were removing the supplies brought in by the mouse (sticks, hay), M.'s husband joined us and he had brought a spray bottle containing some sort of bee-attracting liquid (pheromones?) (I didn't have a close look at the bottle because I made sure to stay far away from the bee-attracting liquid, while he sprayed it inside the hive.)

He had also brought a white sheet which he spread under the tree, explaining that the bees will want to get away from the bright surface and look for darkness, thus hopefully getting inside the box. Another thing I learnt is that once the queen enters the hive, the nearest worker bees will spread the message by turning round and fluttering their wings to send a chemical signal in specific directions, which will be picked up by other bees farther away; at strategic intervals some bees will light the beacons of Gondor turn round and fan their wings to relay this scent-message until the entire colony is informed of the queen's new location.

We were more successful the second time around! This time the bees who went in didn't immediately get out again to return to their branch. Well I say "we" but I didn't volunteer to pull on the rope again, so I can't claim any role in this victory. But my personal victory was that I stood quite a bit nearer this time so I could watch everything closely, and I felt more intrigued than nervous. Bees were constantly zipping past me but it had become clear that my electric field was pure and they bore me no ill will. I was always fond of bees from afar and happy to see them do their thing in flowers in the spring, but today's adventure got me interested in their daily life as well, so I think I'll read some books about bees this summer!

I was reading last month about the morality of termite colonies (Maeterlinck's La vie des termites) and I had a feeling this man must have written some poetic stuff about bees as well—and he did. Here's a translated excerpt from his book "La vie des abeilles" :)

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Pls give recommendations for Odd books 🙏

Here we go, a list of literary oddity :) This post contains majestic spheres, alien taxonomies, cruel subway polytheism, a fourth-dimensional cat, disturbing earthworms, infinite space football, existential mussel terror, a Parisian absurdist time loop, and a picture of a telegraph-pole-man-cheetah. I'm not exactly recommending these books, in the sense that I won't take any complaints if you find them more odd than good, and some of them transcend the concepts of good and bad anyway.

• The Other City, Michal Ajvaz. It's all like this:

• Contes du demi-sommeil, Marcel Béalu ('Half-asleep tales') —is the book that prompted my post about stories that have no ambition or justification beyond being odd. I'm sad that it hasn't been translated :( One of the tales is about a strange opaline sphere that rolls on the road. It doesn't accelerate when the road becomes a steep slope but continues rolling majestically. At one point it floats away towards the sky. Someone wonders if it was the moon. Someone else says authoritatively "It was an angel's egg." Everyone is reassured by this explanation. The whole thing feels exactly like remembering a dream you had. There is also a man who reads too much and whose body atrophies so only his head is left and his wife puts it in an egg cup for better stability.

• Leonora Carrington— The Skeleton's Holiday, or maybe the Hearing Trumpet. I've read them so long ago but I think the latter is the one with the old ladies and nuns? There's also a guy who was murdered in his bath by a still-life painter because he said there was a carrot in one of his paintings, but it might not have been a carrot? It's hard to remember details from this book without feeling like I might be making them up. Bonus Leonora Carrington painting which kind of feels like a short story:

• The Codex Seraphinianus, of course. I wish there were more bizarre encyclopaedias out there.

Also I love this review:

• Sleep Has His House, Anna Kavan —I really liked the way this book used language; making life feel like a fever dream even more than in Samanta Schweblin's Fever Dream (which I really liked too.)

The eye is checking a record of silence, space; a nightmare, every horror of this world in its frigid and blank neutrality. The actual scope of its orbit depends on the individual concept of desolation, but approximate symbols are suggested in long roving perspectives of ocean, black swelled, in slow undulation, each whaleback swell plated in armour-hard brilliance with the moonlight clanking along it . . .

• The second half of Michael Ende's Neverending Story, where things get stranger! I remember the hand-shaped castle with eyes and the city of amnesiac former emperors and the miserable ugly worms who cry all the time out of shame then create beautiful architecture with their tears...

• The Gray House, Mariam Petrosyan. This is the one I had in mind when I talked about a 'museum of the strange, but one you wouldn't want to be trapped in after closing time'. Another book that made me feel uncomfortable in a similar (good) way was Edward Carey's Observatory Mansions, the protagonist of which is a man who curates an odd private museum and can't stand the sight of his own hands.

• Oh, speaking of uncomfortable, and hands—He Digs A Hole, by Danger Slater. To me this book was in the more-odd-than-good category but I liked its refusal to have a coherent philosophical meaning. It's about a man who can't sleep so he goes to his garden shed and saws off his hands and replaces them with gardening tools. Then he starts digging a hole. And then it gets weird. (Read at your own discretion if you have a worm phobia; there's some body horror featuring sexually aggressive earthworms. And then it gets disturbing.)

• 17776 — Someone sent me an ask a few years back to recommend this online multimedia narrative to me and I really enjoyed it! Here's the summary, borrowed from the wiki page: Set in the distant future in which all humans have become immortal and infertile, the series follows three sapient space probes that watch humanity play an evolved form of American football in which games can be played for millennia over distances of thousands of miles. The work explores themes of consciousness, hope, despair, and why humans play sports.

• Saint-Glinglin, Raymond Queneau —the author admitted that this book presents some "internal discontinuities." I didn't like it much but I respect the talent it takes to write a novel where everything feels like a random digression, including the key suspenseful scene that matters to the plot. The one digression I loved had to do with the way the narrator is existentially horrified by various sea creatures. It's like he dreads them so much he can't help but think about them when he should be telling a story.

The oyster... This gob of phlegm, this brutal way of refusing the outside world, this absolute isolation, and this disease: the pearl... If I conceptualise them even a little, my terror starts anew. The mussel is even more significant than the oyster and even more immediately admissible in the domain of terror. Let us indeed consider that this little sticky mass whose collective stupidity haunts our piers, consider that it is alive in the same way as a cow. Because there are no degrees in life. There is no more or less. The whole of life is present in every animal. To think that the mussel, that the mussel has, not a conscience, but a certain way of transcending itself: here I am once again plunged into abysses of anxiety and insecurity.

Near the beginning he philosophises about what would happen if a man and a lobster were the only two survivors of the apocalypse. The lobster would break the man's toe and the man would say, "We are the only beings that remain on this devastated Earth, lobster! The only living beings in the universe, struggling alone against the universal disaster, don't you want to be allies?" But the lobster would disdainfully walk away towards the ocean, and "the sight of the inflexible and imperturbable lobster pierces the sky of humanity with its unintelligible claws." (I can't overstate how little this has to do with the rest of the book.)

• Autumn in Beijing, Boris Vian —needless to say the story does not take place in autumn nor in Beijing.* To the extent that it can be said to be "about" something, it's about people trying to build a train station in a desert with tracks that lead nowhere. (I just went on goodreads to check the title, and it's actually called Autumn in Peking in English. I also discovered that it was featured in a list of Books I Regret Reading. I liked this book, but I understand.)

(* French writers love doing this—like when Alphonse Allais said about his 1893 book The Squadron's Umbrella "I chose this title because there aren't any umbrellas of any sort in this volume, and the important notion of the squadron, as a unit of the armed forces, is never brought up at all; in these conditions, hesitating would have been pure madness.")

• The Library at Mount Char, Scott Hawkins—I fear this one makes a little too much sense for this list, but you can't say it isn't weird; and I loved it and recommend it any chance I get.

• The Eleven Million Mile High Dancer, Carol Hill —this book was so wacky and made me laugh. I've not yet managed to successfully recommend it to someone; its brand of odd didn't resonate with the people I know who've read it but that's okay. You could say it's about a woman astronaut whose weird cat disappears into the fourth dimension (or the quantum realm?) and she goes to space to save him—but that makes the book sound more straightforward and less messy than it is. Her cat leaves her a note before he disappears:

• The Bald Soprano, Ionesco —fun fact, there's a tiny theatre in the Latin Quarter in Paris where this absurdist play has been staged every night for nearly 70 years, with the exact same set design and costumes and everything, like the actors are stuck in a time loop. They celebrated the 20,000th performance this year! There's an actress who has been playing her character for 40 years and said joining this theatre was like joining a religion. I've been going to see this play as a New Year tradition with my best friend since we were 14, so I love it madly, though I wouldn't say it's good, necessarily—the author said it was about "absolutely nothing, but a superior nothing."

• Statuary Gardens; or Les Mers perdues (apparently not translated) by Jacques Abeille. This man is obsessed with weird statues. Unfortunately I find his writing style rather dull—I feel like he takes strange ideas and makes them feel mundane in a bad way...! But his books still have a nice, quiet, oneiric atmosphere, and images that stayed with me, like a solitary gardener trying to grow stone statues in the depleted soil of a walled garden. Here are some illustrations from the second one:

I'll look into some of the books recommended on my previous post! (and I agree with the people who brought up Cortázar, Borges, and Junji Ito. <3) Some potentially-odd books I have on my to-read list: Clive Barker's Abarat, Goran Petrović's An Atlas Traced by the Sky, Salvador Plascencia's The People of Paper, Jean Ray's Malpertuis; Jan Weiss's The House of a Thousand Floors; Brice Tarvel's Pierre-Fendre.

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It's wild how "women are reading frivolous and immoral novels that are rotting their brains" is such an evergreen moral panic. You'd think we'd have figured this one out by now.

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Clark Ashton Smith, “Ode On Imagination”

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Joanna Karpowicz —„Girl, Map, Cat” Anubis Series [acrylic on canvas, 2024]

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I love when authors slide up to the reader the way I try to approach my donkey with a syringe of tapeworm treatment, apologetic but firm, holding some maths out in plain sight, fingers spread wide, to show they’re not hiding anything, no tricks, no sudden moves, cooing gentle reassurances, all the while expecting the reader's ears to flatten in alarm, nostrils flaring in suspicion, hooves scraping the ground, ready to bolt at the faintest whiff of differential equation...

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