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I have finished reading the ARC of The Solitudes that I bought from a secondhand bookseller online (three others have surfaced for sale since, incidentally) and am pleased to find two more minor typographical errors, or rather the same typographical error (viz: “Doctor Dee .” --- an errant, extraneous space between end of sentence and punctuation) in two passages some hundred pages apart.
Pleased because if the only two typo’s had been the more serious ones I caught by chance before the book went to press, it would have been intolerably strange. Fifty-fifty seems like a plausible percentage.
It would be interesting to have a wiki wherein persons could post anonymously the private reasons they have for finding the Ægypt quartet (cycle) so compelling (and if I can ever understand utopyr’s alterations to the largely vacant lostworldsfair.info site, perhaps I could get one started --- I am increasingly impressed by the reasons why people either love Ægypt or downright hate it.
As for the folks on the negative side of that equation, I found I had to stop reading the review by Abigail Nussbaum that John Crowley cites on his crowleycrow LJ. Nussbaum seems to have gotten the book one hundred eighty degrees wrong, or at least on this reading of The Solitudes I found myself delighted with seeing how the cycle’s inevitable conclusion (in its essentials) is laid out in this first novel, along with hints of how the passage time will slip and slide en route to the meeting at the monument atop Mount Randa, an object which appears to have morphed along with everything else during the vast conceptual and physical slippage of 1977-1992 or thereabouts. (If you overlook the premise that during the passage time, things as well as ideas can change swiftly or momentarily or glacially, just as their verbal equivalents do during the writing of a twenty-year novel, you will constantly get stuff wrong in your reading of all four volumes. With that single counter-factual notion, Crowley left himself plenty of options to repair unexpected damage in the sometimes unraveling fabric of his narrative: he loosened the threads in the first place, and told us which ones to hang on to if we didn’t want to be lost altogether.)
I suddenly am immersed in new responsibilities that have taken me away from re-reading Love and Sleep, so it looks like I may have to postpone that for the ARC of the second volume of the cycle as well. I read the reviews of the other three books that appear following Nussbaum's wrongheaded one, and they give me some hope that my basic ability to read a text hasn't gone away completely. (However, I realized yet another complicating factor in my own interpretive abilities, which I may inflict upon my dwindling readership tomorrow...probably mercifully hidden behind an LJ-cut.)
I’ve never read Engine Summer (in spite of having owned Otherwise since its year of publication) nor the explanation of the title of the Snake’s Hands collection of Crowleyan scholarship, so I had no idea that a term already existed for my habitual rhetorical strategy of “a digression that takes on a life of its own.” I disagree with Nussbaum on the nature of the multiply contradictory strands of The Solitudes: They actually set up a fair number of possible plot lines, and the gradual condensation of airy possibility into earthen, sodden, or ashen actuality is part, but only part, of what the cycle is about. They are not unrelated digressions.
Meanwhile the discussion of the brand names and design history of condom packaging in the current post on crowleycrow probably arouses expectations for the novel in progress that will be as beyond fulfillment as those stimulated by The Solitudes.
Pleased because if the only two typo’s had been the more serious ones I caught by chance before the book went to press, it would have been intolerably strange. Fifty-fifty seems like a plausible percentage.
It would be interesting to have a wiki wherein persons could post anonymously the private reasons they have for finding the Ægypt quartet (cycle) so compelling (and if I can ever understand utopyr’s alterations to the largely vacant lostworldsfair.info site, perhaps I could get one started --- I am increasingly impressed by the reasons why people either love Ægypt or downright hate it.
As for the folks on the negative side of that equation, I found I had to stop reading the review by Abigail Nussbaum that John Crowley cites on his crowleycrow LJ. Nussbaum seems to have gotten the book one hundred eighty degrees wrong, or at least on this reading of The Solitudes I found myself delighted with seeing how the cycle’s inevitable conclusion (in its essentials) is laid out in this first novel, along with hints of how the passage time will slip and slide en route to the meeting at the monument atop Mount Randa, an object which appears to have morphed along with everything else during the vast conceptual and physical slippage of 1977-1992 or thereabouts. (If you overlook the premise that during the passage time, things as well as ideas can change swiftly or momentarily or glacially, just as their verbal equivalents do during the writing of a twenty-year novel, you will constantly get stuff wrong in your reading of all four volumes. With that single counter-factual notion, Crowley left himself plenty of options to repair unexpected damage in the sometimes unraveling fabric of his narrative: he loosened the threads in the first place, and told us which ones to hang on to if we didn’t want to be lost altogether.)
I suddenly am immersed in new responsibilities that have taken me away from re-reading Love and Sleep, so it looks like I may have to postpone that for the ARC of the second volume of the cycle as well. I read the reviews of the other three books that appear following Nussbaum's wrongheaded one, and they give me some hope that my basic ability to read a text hasn't gone away completely. (However, I realized yet another complicating factor in my own interpretive abilities, which I may inflict upon my dwindling readership tomorrow...probably mercifully hidden behind an LJ-cut.)
I’ve never read Engine Summer (in spite of having owned Otherwise since its year of publication) nor the explanation of the title of the Snake’s Hands collection of Crowleyan scholarship, so I had no idea that a term already existed for my habitual rhetorical strategy of “a digression that takes on a life of its own.” I disagree with Nussbaum on the nature of the multiply contradictory strands of The Solitudes: They actually set up a fair number of possible plot lines, and the gradual condensation of airy possibility into earthen, sodden, or ashen actuality is part, but only part, of what the cycle is about. They are not unrelated digressions.
Meanwhile the discussion of the brand names and design history of condom packaging in the current post on crowleycrow probably arouses expectations for the novel in progress that will be as beyond fulfillment as those stimulated by The Solitudes.
