Gideon the Ninth/Harrow the Ninth
Sep. 22nd, 2020 05:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vulgarweedI am so ridiculously in love with these books - and the writing style is like, 80% of it. The first read-through of Gideon the Ninth, I had only a superficial understanding of what was happening, but I just kept going way too fast because the language was so beautiful and compelling and musical and MORBIDLY FUNNY.
(Seriously, this style is absolute catnip to me)
(Anyway, spoilers, won't spoil how absolutely wonderfully the shock reveals landed in my mind on my first read.)
Reading Harrow The Ninth? Off-putting for the first two-thirds but when the penny of the payoff dropped, it was SO SO SO worth it, and I'm glad I leech-blocked Twitter for two days to avoid spoilers. You can only ever read a great book for the first time ONCE.
Now on my second re-read of both, and I'm even more delighted than I was before.
I feel like these are books I will want to keep re-reading far into the future, because this world is just so fascinating.
(Seriously, this style is absolute catnip to me)
(Anyway, spoilers, won't spoil how absolutely wonderfully the shock reveals landed in my mind on my first read.)
Reading Harrow The Ninth? Off-putting for the first two-thirds but when the penny of the payoff dropped, it was SO SO SO worth it, and I'm glad I leech-blocked Twitter for two days to avoid spoilers. You can only ever read a great book for the first time ONCE.
Now on my second re-read of both, and I'm even more delighted than I was before.
I feel like these are books I will want to keep re-reading far into the future, because this world is just so fascinating.
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Date: 2020-09-24 05:05 pm (UTC)I feel so WEIRDLY about these books because they were objecively really hard for me to read, in a way I don't usually enjoy, but I feel drawn to... understanding them and also to the fic, in the same way I felt drawn to Hannibal fic when I finished the show, which was a very specific and distinct feeling of "oh no, this thing is too smart for me. I'm not smart enough to make anything even adjacent to it. Guess I gotta try!" Because on one hand-- I don't even know where fic would GO? Like-- are Gideon and Harrow alive? If they're dead, what does that even mean? If they're alive, how many physical bodies do they have between them, on a scale from 0 to 2, and what physical infrastructure exists for them to inhabit their bodies on? I have no idea! And I kind of doubt that I'm going to go back through the books with flowcharts and Solve The Mystery so that I can write emotional fallout in whatever space the books are asymptotically hinting might exist, but... I still want to write about emotional fallout!
Also, I just feel really... "impressed" sounds condescending somehow, but taken with te structure of them, the fact that you can apparently make books do that, and I want to know how it's done. Because with Gideon I felt like... by the end, I could kind of see the scaffolding of the book, in a way that didn't quite ruin the book for me but was noticeable. But with Harrow, I could feel that the scaffolding was infinitely more complex, but it wasn't nakedly visible by the end, everything that needed to be hung with story and emotion was, and so... in a way I feel like Harrow was actually the more accomplished book, despite being actively irritating for a large portion of its runtime. I want to learn how to do that!
(Getting an invite to "the" Locked Tomb discord is apparently a task at least requiring the consumption and absorption of at least one human soul, but I think I've found someone on reddit who's put me on some sort of, um, waiting list?)