After a slow start, my reading rhythm finally picked up a little bit in February. These are not reviews, just my impressions about a selection of the books I read this month:
1. Toilers of the Sea, by Victor Hugo
“Dissimulation is an act of violence against yourself. A man hates those to whom he lies.”
The toilers of the sea was similar in this regard. The story concerns a misfit named Gilliat who falls in love with Deruchette, the niece of Mess Lethierry, owner of the island's only steam ship. When his ship is wrecked in a nearby reef, Gilliat fights the sky the sea and its creatures to recover the machine and be worthy of Deruchette´s hand. Be that as it may, nearly half the book goes by, before the story can actually start, and the first 300 pages have little but set up, background and characterization... But it's beautifully written, so I didn't mind.
I will say, however, that this is probably my least favourite book in Hugo's body of work, at least considering the ones I've read so far (Notre Dame de Paris, Les Miserables, The man who laughs, The last Day of a Condemned Man). The tribulations of Gilliat in the reef were infinitely less interesting to me than the relationships between Valjean and Cosette in Les Mis, or Frollo and Quasimodo in Notre Dame de Paris. Actually I was far more entranced by the earliest portions of the book, with the descriptions of Gilliat's background and the "undeserved opprobrium of his neighbours". I enjoyed the use of language, and it only added to my desire to learn French, if for no other reason than to be able to access Mr. Hugo's works in their original form.
"Religion, Society, and Nature! these are the three struggles of man. They constitute at the same time his three needs. He has need of a faith; hence the temple. He must create; hence the city. He must live; hence the plough and the ship. But these three solutions comprise three perpetual conflicts. The mysterious difficulty of life results from all three. Man strives with obstacles under the form of superstition, under the form of prejudice, and under the form of the elements. He is weighed down by a triple kind of fatality or necessity. First there is the fatality of dogmas, then the oppression of human laws, and finally the inexorability of nature. The author has denounced the first of these fatalities in Notre Dame de Paris, the second was fully exemplified in Les miserables, and the third was indicated in Les Travailleurs de la mer. But with all these fatalities there also mingled that inward fatality, the supreme agonizing power, the human heart."
2. Star Trek - Q in Law, by Peter David
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| One small secret? Sometimes I have a blast reenacting scenes from Star Trek episodes with action figures of my Star Trek collection... |
In February I got really into Star Trek Voyager for the first time in a long, long time. Don't get me wrong, I am as big a trekkie as you'll ever find and I love all things Star Trek, but Voyager has always been my least favourite Star Trek show, for a variety of reasons (that is no longer the case). I certainly didn't understand why so many people prefer it to Enterprise for instance, which I always enjoyed a great deal. Re-watching voyager made me want dive into my small Star Trek Library, and since I have hardly any Voyager books, I decided to pick this one up, by Peter David.
This book was funny. I could hear Lwaxana and Q's voices as I read, and there was a plurality od delightful moments, such as Worf protesting that the Enterprise shouldn't be a "catering hall" when they're assigned a mission that involves hosting a wedding, and Captain Picard's embarrassment upon admiting that in a school production of Romeo and Juliet he played Juliet's nurse. I did have a few issues with the plot though... In the best Star Trek episodes, Q's actions, however arbitrary they may seem, always have a purpose. He took the Enterprise several thousand light years into uncharted space, to have Picard confront the Borg and challenge his bold claims of preparedness for the unknown. I Tapestry he pretended the Captain had died to give him a better appreciation for his young self. In this novel though, Q's motivations seemed as simple as to cause chaos, which felt a bit empty in the end. Also, the plot made me realize how many of Lwaxana's stories in TNG focus on her being made a fool of in some fashion or another... I wish that hadn't been the case.
I have an audio book of this novel also, in tape format. Maybe it will feature in my March reading hall.
3. Pygmalion, by George Bernard Shaw
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| Got this little copy in São Paulo, at Livraria Cultura (Av Paulista) after watching to My Fair Lady for the first time... I used to go to that bookshop on Saturday Mornings, for purchases like this... Having lived in a small city for such a long time (where I could only get foreign language books from a small selection in a second hand bookshop), I really value the ability to get books in foreign languages with relative ease, as it happened in SP |
Pygmalion was a mysoginistic sculptor who vouched to remain celibate and detested "the faults beyond measure which nature has given to women", only then to sculpt a woman of ivory whom he found so perfect he could not but fall in love with it. The play by George Bernard Shaw write a XIX century version of this modern myth, by creating a pronunciation professor who helps a common girl from London learn to speak like a lady of the aristocracy, only then to fall in love with his creation. Sort of.
This play was amusing, though I imagine it must be more satisfying to watch it on a stage than read it in a book. Having seen the movie adaptation, though (My fair lady, 1964), I was not prepared at all for the ending. You see, the book doesn't end as one would expect it to, and in many ways, the central point of the story remains an open question. Apparently this play was immensely popular at Shaw's time, and the fans pressured him to give the characters a proper conclusion. Instead of writing another act for the play, though, Shaw wrote a long epilogue/letter telling what happened to each of the characters in the years after the curtain drops, and explaining exactly why certain characters could never be together romantically and why there was nothing but unhappiness in the paths that they chose. The whole thing was a little too passive aggressive, I think, and I have to say, I don't think this excessive realist/pessimistic views have a place in fiction, at least not in the fiction I want to read...
Had this happened in our time, he probably would have simply written a sequel.
4. The Sorrows of Empire, by David Mack
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| The most recent addition to my Star Trek Library |
In the Original Series, the Kirk from our Universe planted the seeds of revolution in the Mirror Spock's mind. He says: "The illogic of waste, Mr. Spock. A waste of lives, potential, resources, time. I submit to you that your Empire is illogical because it cannot endure. I submit that you are illogical to be a willing part of it." Essentially he tries to convince Spock to turn his Universe into something more like our own. After that, we didn't have Mirror Universe stories for a very long time. There were no Mirror episodes in The Next Generation and when it finally made an appearance in Deep Space 9, we learn that Spock's actions caused the fall of the Terran empire and humans are now slaves to the Klingon-Cardassian alliance!
The Sorrows of Empire is an attempt to tell exactly what happened after the first clash between the two Universes, showing Spock's actions and how they led to the inevitable fall of the Empire.
This book was a very enjoyable read. It's written in small chapters, that span a period of several years, with one or two chapters/events per year. Many characters from the Original series make appearances and we see how the events of some episodes unfolded differently in the Mirror Universe. I read reviews with people calling it "fanficky" but I actually enjoyed it, and thought the pace suited this sort of story well...
The one thing I have an issue with was how everything felt a bit contrived. One of the reasons why the reintroduction of the mirror Universe in Deep Space 9 works so well, is because we discover that Kirk's good intentions had disastrous results. Because Spock made a mistake somewhere. In this book, Spock never errs at all. Everything, even the eventual fall of the Empire is meticulously calculated, and I just don't buy... It's like... Like playing chess and being able to see sixty moves ahead... It's not believable because there are so many moves, so many variables, the plan will invariably have to change and have unforeseen consequences. Pretending this isn't so feels... contrived. At lest to me. I would much rather read about Spock making mistakes and coming up with new plans to cope with these mistakes, than read about him making no mistakes at all..
Despite these shortcomings though, I really enjoyed reading it, and I look forward to reading more trek books by this author, and more books set in the mirror universe.
Overall, I am pretty happy with my reading month in February. I hope March is even better, and I plan to continue tackling the books I haven't read from my classics and Star Trek shelves.
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