Aeneid

I'm doggedly making my way through book IV of the Aeneid.  Dido has succumbed to a madness that sees Aeneas as an enemy because he's ready to leave her, though she considers the two of them married.  She tells her sister Anna to call Aeneas back, and I thought that these lines are very effective.  They read very directly and powerfully, and one can see why this story more than the rest of the Aeneid has captured the imagination of later writers.

Also, Vergil's playing with the ictus against the meter works really well here -- it's never really stood out for me as a technique as much up till now.

Tevye Stories, Cursor's Fury, Pretty Monsters, Aeneid

I recently read all of Sholem Aleichem's "Tevye the Milkman" stories, and I gotta admit that I didn't think they were so fantastic.  I liked them well enough, I suppose, but that was as far as it went.  One always hears that Yiddish is hard to translate, so maybe that's the problem...

I just finished listening to Jim Butcher's Cursor's Fury, third in his Codex Alera.  Just like in his Harry Dresden books, he managed to pull me in, despite a repetitive style (characters are constantly arching eyebrows, something I don't see a real-life person do once in a year.  Characters call each other by names like "Aleran" or "Calderan" after knowing them for more than 5 years -- this would be like my calling my friends "Kansas-guy" or "Chicagoan").  He knows how to keep the pot boiling enough that it distracts from his stylistic infelicities.

Kelly Link's Pretty Monsters, on the other hand, is all about style.  She's incredibly adroit, writing in a high fantasy mode in one story, horror in another, and so on.  I've written before about how she writes about characters who are on the periphery of the story.  Here, most of the stories are like that as well -- one that I particularly liked was an alien contact story that stops just before the aliens actually make contact.  She also has a more traditional story about wizards that didn't really impress me the same way.  Overall, it's a top-notch collection, even though two of the stories were also in Magic for Beginners.

I've begun book II of the Aeneid, which talks about the Trojan horse being brought into Troy.

Aeneid

Finished book I.  Phew!  Easier than Homer, mostly because the grammar's more regular, but still difficult...

20th Century Ghosts, Ghosts of Belfast, Aeneid

I had a whole list of reasons why I didn't like Ghosts of Belfast, even though the writing is great on a technical level.  But life's just too short.  I'd rather write about books that I like, or at least made me think more.  (Maybe I'd like Ghosts more I were Irish)

Joe Hill's 20th Century Ghosts, for instance, was a book that I liked and that made me think.  Hill's known mostly as a horror writer, and this collection made me wonder how he came by that reputation.  No more than half of these stories fall into the straight-forward horror genre, and they're not all the best ones.  I'm not going to do a blow-by-blow of the stories, but a few that really stood out were

• "Pop Art" is about an inflatable balloon boy.  Very straightforward for such an outre premise, this was a great exploration of friendship and alienation
• "My Father's Mask" was the most surreal story in the collection.  Very disquieting, even as it's hard to say precisely what it was about.  The outline isn't hard to understand, but the details seem just out of reach, as if we could understand them with just a little more insight...
• "Voluntary Commital" is a kind of horror story I usually find annoying, where you never find out what the scary thing is or whether there even is one.  But it was very effective here

In other news, I've run across a great explanation of how Vergil plays with the rhythms of Latin stresses  against the longs and shorts of the Greek dactylic hexameter, and I've been inspired to start reading the Aeneid again.  It's a great experience, showing how important the auditory aspect is to Roman poetry.