potentialities

I've been making an effort to participate in the Hannibal livetweeting experience, since supposedly they factor it into the ratings somehow and it's probably not worse than nothing. Well, last night I replied to one of BryanFuller's tweets and today he replied to me!

( Behold, the screencap! Mild spoilers for Hannibal 3x07 Digestivo )

Whoops, I just realized that it is Wednesday. It's been a long day, okay?

What I've been reading

I reread Clutch of Constables, which was the first Troy book in some time and made me so happy because I love Troy to pieces. The little framing bits where Alleyn is actually teaching the case to his pupils are also delightful. The setup is actually quite similar to Singing in the Shrouds—trying out a different sort of murderer, in this case a professional thief, and once again putting everyone on a boat to mimic the typical scenario with a limited set of suspects who all interact with each other—but much more enjoyable, because Troy.

I reread When in Rome, which has Alleyn thinking to himself that he's sounding like Sherlock Holmes and then doing a very Holmesian thing: ( spoilers ) This book also contains the most amazing scenes of Alleyn trying to persuade various drugs-takers that he would like to take some drugs. They are so unconvinced by him. It is hilarious.

I read Dissecting Hannibal Lecter: Essays on the Novels of Thomas Harris, and was pleasantly surprised by the essays therein, all of which were reasonably interesting and thoughtful. It's funny, though, because Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs are legitimately significant texts that partook of and contributed to a zeitgeist, whereas Hannibal and Hannibal Rising (i.e. the woobie cannibal duology) are…not. They're more like Hannibal Lecter fic, which people only read because they're already in the Hannibal Lecter fandom, and as in the rest of Hannibal fandom the response to the woobie cannibal duology among the writers in this collection is decidedly mixed.

What I've been reading

I read Hannibal Rising, even though everyone recommends against it. It completes the woobification of Hannibal that was begun in the novel of that name, but as my AO3 browsing history clearly demonstrates, I don't necessarily have a problem like that. The downside is that, like Hannibal, it balances "things I secretly like best" with "things that are too OTT ridic even for me". You just kind of have to go with it if you want to read the Woobie Cannibal duology.

I reread Scales of Justice, returning to my Ngaio Marsh reread of last summer. This book wasn't a particular favorite and I don't think I had ever reread it; upon doing so, I noticed that it plays more unfairly than usual, with a lot of "Alleyn explained how he thought the murder was done and everyone nodded sagely"-type narration.

I read Jenny Han's new book, To All the Boys I've Loved Before. It contains, like the Summer trilogy, a love triangle where two of the parties are siblings, although this time it's the protagonist and her older sister—who, incidentally, leaves to study at St. Andrews, my study abroad alma mater! It also contains a really fun version of one of my favorite tropes, the fake relationship, and I'm not even disappointed that, like seemingly all books need to be these days, it is part of a trilogy and doesn't have the strongest volume completion.

I caught up on the latest several story arcs of The Unwritten, which I liked, although I really wasn't a fan of the Fables crossover.

What I've been reading

I read Monster, a book I really thought I would like, and I liked the idea of it a lot, but the execution wasn't really doing it for me. But then a friend of mine said that she used to teach an eighth-grade language arts unit with it where they acted out the trial and such and I thought it was actually better suited for something like that than just reading it.

I read Everybody Sees the Ants, which is not as good as A. S. King's other YA books that I have read, but is still quite good. I'm kind of not a fan of ( mild spoiler for something that is established early on ), though, even though I have no problem with the ants.

I read My Year of Meats, Ruth Ozeki's debut book, and while it is not a ♥perfect♥ book like A Tale for the Time Being, it is an enjoyable one.

I read Inside and Other Short Fiction: Japanese Women by Japanese Women, which is a nice collection of short stories all originally published in Japanese and translated into English for the first time here.

I read Hannibal, which I was thinking about skipping because I had this impression that everyone hates it, but it kinda ended up being my favorite Hannibal book even though it simultaneously contains some of my least favorite parts. Like, this is the first book that even has Hannibal out and about being his fabulous Cannibal Sue self, which is what I'm here for, to be honest, so I don't actually care so much that Mason Verger is the most ridiculously over-the-top hatable of the one-off killers, who were never a huge draw for me in the first place, or that I don't totally recognize Thomas Harris's version of the late 90s, a time period I was actually somewhat aware of, or that the ending is actually some cracktastic dubcon pairing fic that may have been written during a sugar high ~*~PLZ R/R AND EAT THE FLAMERS~*~ No, let's talk about what is really important in this book: the accuracy of its treament of Dante.

I was actually pretty impressed with how the Dante stuff was handled. Both of the times that Lecter actually talks about Dante, he makes pertinent observations and backs them with appropriate citations. Now, in keeping with his status as the Mary Sue of this book, the other characters are disproportionately agog at a stunning brilliance that he hasn't actually displayed. Dante is like Italy's Shakespeare, only more so, in that everyone studies the entire Divine Comedy for three years in high school. (Public service annoucement to anyone who was assigned just the Inferno: don't stop there, you're missing all the best parts!) Quoting the fabulous heart-eating poem from the Vita Nuova is yes, a perfectly adequate indicator that Lecter actually knows his Dante shit and a great secret cannibal joke, but it's not some kind of ridiculously obscure text that only Dante wizards know and which obviously means that they must hire him immediately on account of how jaw-droppingly brilliant he is.

Similarly, the lecture he gives as part of his job interview process isn't bad at all—he makes the perfectly reasonable observation that even though Pier delle Vigne is stuck in a suicide tree while Judas Iscariot is lounging further down in the masticating jaws of three-headed Satan, they have a lot in common because one of them betrayed his Lord for money and the other was accused of betraying an emperor for money and both of them responded by committing suicide by hanging, although the fact that Dante put delle Vigne with the suicides and not the betrayers, who are lower, implies that he believed in his innocence, which Hannibal kind of glosses over because it doesn't fit with his thesis. Also, it is 100% accurate that even when someone is otherwise lecturing on Dante in tranlation, they will end up quoting passages in Italian to demonstrate how Dante repeates certain sounds in certain passages to create sound effects, and the groaning and hissing of the trees of the suicides are a superb example of this.

Of course, what makes the Lecter lecture so brilliant is, again, a very clever double entendre where he's actually saying to Pazzi, I know what you've done and you're going to die shortly and this is how, but he's not actually applying for a combined curator/murderer position, so no one who's evaluating his performance is aware of this secret difficulty level. Unfortunately, because if this were actually a combined curator/murderer position Hannibal would, in fact, be the single most qualified candidate and could stay in Florence, murder-curating forever and it would be awesome. At least, to me.

I really don't think that I'm reading Hannibal Rising, though, because no one seems to have anything good to say about that one.

What I'm reading now

Still reading this biography of Marcus Aurelius, which is highly entertaining. Did you know that young Marcus had a certain rhetoric tutor, Marcus Cornelius Fronto, whose correspondence with him happens to survive even though he wasn't actually one of Marcus's favorite intellectual or philosophical influences or anything, and they both devote a lot of words in those letters to playing a rhetorically-sophisticated game of "I love you more"/"No, I love you more"? The fact that it doesn't appear that they actually liked each other much at all is what makes it so hilarious.

What I'm reading next

New Temeraire book! :D

[Cross-posted from my email by request.]

I had a cold last week and so somehow I ended up watching all 13 episodes of the new NBC Hannibal show.¹ Some conclusions I came to:

• Mads Mikkelsen continues to be really gorgeous when he's evil, especially when he is also wardrobed in the world's best suits.
  
  
• Hugh Dancy suffers incredibly prettily. Also his name is really fun to say. Dancy Dancy Dancy.
  
  
• Hannibal is a terrible person, obviously, but he gives the best hugs.
  
  
• Also the food on this show looks so good that I would probably eat it even if I knew that it was people. And, I mean, I'm not saying they all had it coming, but some of them were definitely rude and they should have made better life choices.

¹In retrospect, this is the other reason I didn't finish very many books in that week.