Episode 15

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Here are the contents of the podcast if you’d like to skip around:

Starting at 1:31 – We talk about award season! What do we think is the value of book awards, and what new book awards would we like to institute, if we had a whole bunch of money and time?

Starting at 17:09 – We discuss Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries, a book described variously by podcast participants as “Wilkie-Collins-ish”, “structurally brilliant”, and “so cool”. You will notice that Julia and Whiskey Jenny are much much more deliberate and careful readers than I am, but this is not news.

At 38:30 – Here are our choices for the songs that would be on an EP of The Luminaries. My choice is the Decemberists’ song “Down by the Water”, and Julia’s choices are “Hey Hey What Can I Do” or “Going to California” by Led Zeppelin. She also pulled up, I swear to God, a Cantonese opera for us to listen to.

Starting at 40:01 – The game is New Zealand or Not New Zealand, and there are many things to learn here. Here is the video of Stephen Fry meeting a kakapo, the world’s only flightless parrot.

Starting at 52:38 – I answer a piece of listener mail about how to best appreciate Elizabeth Peters, an author I truly love.

Starting at 53:48 – I give my recommendation for next time, Esi Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues.

Starting at 54:58 – Closing remarks and outro.

Credits
Producer: Captain Hammer
Photo credit: The Illustrious Annalee
Song is by Jeff MacDougall and comes from here.

The post Reading the End Bookcast, Ep.15: Awards Season, The Luminaries, and New Zealand or Not New Zealand appeared first on Reading the End.

The Rehearsal is about a girls’ school rocked by a teacher-student sex scandal, and a theatre school that makes the scandal the center of its end-of-year production. Characters use the shocking events to explore their own lives and to understand how grown-ups relate to each other.

As the title of the book implies, it’s a story about rehearsing: rehearsing a play, rehearsing sexuality, rehearsing in various roles for the sort of person you’re going to become. Over the first half of the book, you see the girls’ school students rehearsing different ways to frame the scandal in their lives, and in the second half, you see the theater students rehearsing how to frame it on a stage. The book sets up a number of quite elegant parallels and gets at something quite fundamental about adolescence: that thing that you are always doing of trying on personas to see if they’ll fit you, assuming you can discard them if they don’t, but then sometimes discovering you’re stuck with something you’ve tried because it’s all anyone can see of you now. This is done exceptionally well.

The Rehearsal is one of those books I admire but do not love. Eleanor Catton brilliantly portrays what she sets out to portray, the aforementioned trying-things-on aspect of adolescence. But there are a lot of things at the book that came off very contrived. Much of the dialogue was stilted and strange, and even when it was in the mouth of strange, stilted characters, it felt too fake even to be viable as words that someone fake would say.

The problem isn’t that people don’t talk that way, although they don’t; it’s that most of the characters spend most of their time talking like normal people. When someone starts talking out loud to someone else about notes burning into them like acid holes, it’s jarring that their interlocutor doesn’t say, “You talk weird, ya weirdo”. Do whatever you want with dialogue but either make it consistent or hang a lampshade on its inconsistency. Characters I wanted to believe in would say things like notes burn into them like acid holes, and abruptly they would feel like paper dolls instead of people. I wanted the characters to have an emotional foundation, but all they seemed to have was more and more personas to try on. No there there, as they say.

To steal a phrase from Simon (though he used it about Helen Oyeyemi and was — forgive me — totally wrong), too experimental for her boots!

Other reviews are here.

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