(no subject)

[solitary_summer]

50bookchallenge:

#21: Roswitha Gost, Die Geschichte des Harems

Picked up at work; focusing on the Ottoman empire, informative, unsensationalist.

#22: D. Ellmauer - H. Embacher - A. Lichtblau (Hrsg.), Geduldet, geschmäht und vertrieben: Salzburger Juden erzählen

#23: Horst Klengel, König Hammurapi und der Alltag Babylons

Interesting; turned out to be good preparation for Jospeh and His Brothers, even if I didn't read it with that in mind.

#24: Douglas Preston - Lincoln Child, Relic

Trash, obviously, but sometimes you need that kind of thing at the beginning of a holiday, sitting on the balcony in the sun... and what can I say, I just can't resist the combination of museum, academia and brain-eating monsters from South-American jungles.

#25&26: Thomas Mann, Joseph und seine Brüder

I'll admit I had some reservations because of the biblical subject (my lingering anti-religious prejudice is sometimes hard to over-come), and the first 100, 150 pages were a little hard to get through, but then, without really noticing when or how, I fell utterly in love. How did he do it, that even knowing the story and its outcome it is at times almost a page-turner, one still wants to know what happens next... It's not even that I exactly sympathised with Joseph or any other character, rather it's the book itself, the sheer scope of it, the humanism, the humour, the lovely style, richness, layers and layers of theology and mythology entwined ... the way he weaves his concept about repetition and variation of certain leitmotifs in the human mind throughout the novel, off-handedly hinting at Christ as one more natural and necessary variation of the complex relationship between god and man, of the theme of a god killed and resurrected...

I don't even know how many hints and connections I may have missed because of my sketchy theological and philosophical knowledge (and lack of an annotated edition); like, while it's never spelled out, the phrasing makes it obvious that Mut-em-enet, trying to bewitch Joseph so that she'll have at least his body, if not his soul - "Tot und verschlossen werden mir deine Augen sein in unsrer Umarmung, und nur dein schwellender Mund, allerdings wird mein sein" - is Salome's predecessor, is Salome, in the eternal repetition of things.

#27 - 29: Jeanne Cavelos, Casting Shadows; Summoning Light; Invoking Darkness (Babylon 5: The Passing of the Techno-Mages, I, II & III)

Readable, occasionally even good.

Certainly better than K. Drennan's dreadfully bland To Dream In the City Of Sorrows, this much at least can be said. It has a decent plot (though credit for that may partly go to MJS himself, as he is credited for the 'outline' the novels are based on), some B5-worthy twists and revelations, gritty realism leading to a rather high body-count, philosophy, nice touches of world-building, and some memorable characters. There is background information one appreciates - Z'ha'dum, the Shadow technology - and there are even a few really good, touching scenes (Anna, taken out of the Shadow ship, being trained for her meeting with Sheridan, where she captures very well just how no longer even remotely human this Anna is; Elric's death)

However, the books' greatest weakness is their style. Perhaps it's wrong to expect literary quality from a tie-in novel, but still... for large stretches it grates badly. She tends to use short, simple sentences, for effect and emphasis, one presumes, but it just doesn't work out, because she horribly over-uses them and ends up sounding simply awkward. The other extremely annoying thing are her endless repetitions. Once she's found a word or a phrase she latches on to it and repeats it ad bloody nauseam, often enough verbatim over and over again, throughout all three books: physical descriptions, characters' thoughts; ideas that are important to her are not stated once, or twice, but twenty times over. One has to wonder whether she believes her readers have no attention span, memory or intelligence whatsoever. Add to this that books 2 & 3 often not-so-subtly sum up what happened in the earlier volumes, and a lot of information is given which anyone who's seen the B5 series is already familiar with... the occasional urge to hurl the book (any of them) across the room in sheer exasperation becomes understandable, I think.

#30: Thomas Mann, Tagebücher 1918-1921

(I kind of rushed through this one, the political rants didn't interest me all that much and I wanted to get to the 'Joseph' diaries...)