Ha Jin's The Bridegroom (2000) Book Review

In "The Bridegroom," Ha Jin seems more interested in writing stories about circumstances than about people. Almost all of the short stories collected in his 2000 book are concerned with lower and middle class folk living in China, struggling against greater, sometimes conflicting, forces: communism and capitalism, encroaching western values and small town prejudices, societal pressures and familial obligations, and an overarching bureaucracy trying to stabilize and control a vast population in a country in transition. The stories explore life within this paradoxical environment, and are much more preoccupied with introducing and stepping through the injustices and dilemmas facing the characters than the characters themselves; they are powerless to effect the unfolding situations imposed upon them, and develop little more nuance beyond "worried businessman" and "foreign-educated woman". This lends a universality of sorts, and the stories do well in presenting different tableaus, even if the stories tend to beat somewhat repetitious drums. As a pounding critique of life in China it may work, but the futility that permeates all the stories leads to a sameness, and at some point all of the senselessness starts bleeding out, such that it's hard not to redirect some of it onto the stories themselves. 

Thoughts on A Feast For Crows by George RR Martin

I finished A Feast For Crows by George RR Martin a couple days ago, after burning through A Storm of Swords and A Clash of Kings. Grew interested in the Song of Ice and Fire series after watching HBO's Game of Thrones. AFFC seems to be the least liked of all the books, and I can sort of see why, although I didn't hate it that much; part of that might be because I didn't have to wait six years for the next one! A Dance of Dragons comes out on the 12^th, and I'm looking forward to it. [Spoilers ahead] The problem with AFFC, I think, is just the characters author George RR Martin focused on. With Asha, Cersei, Brienne, and even Arianne, there's just an overload of the whole “woman in a man's world” theme. It's sort of repetitive. 

We see a lot of world building by Martin in this book, as we see various viewpoints of characters located in Dorne, the Iron Islands, and Oldtown, and an expansion of their various and unique societies and religions in those locations. That's fine, although I didn't quite get to the point where I fell in love with any of the characters we hopscotched briefly into the heads of. We are introduced to a lot of characters, but not all of them did much of note, and it remains to be seen what is done with the likes of Aeron and Garin and Erik Anvil-Breaker in subsequent books. As it is, it feels like all the happenings under the Kraken banner could've been summed up in much the same way they were in A Storm of Swords, in a little news report given to Cersei. In fact, I actually would've been more interested in seeing Asha's reaction to the news of his father's death in a Storm of Swords, more than seeing everyone telling her she can't be ruler while she stubbornly refuses to accept that.

Brienne, unfortunately, just isn't that deep of a character, even though she shows up a lot here. She has no idea where to look for Sansa, and never really picks up the trail of either sister. We explore her past a bit, none of it particularly revelatory, and yeah, there was always a chance she'd bump into Catalyn, there seemed like there was a higher chance of that happening than her finding either Stark sister. She's Ned without a purpose but with a constant reiteration of her sex and her looks, and if you're not doing anything interesting and you're not an inherently entertaining character then you're not going to make for very interesting chapters, especially if you're annoying. A Clash of Kings suffered through that in part, especially in the first half: Jon and Dany hadn't really established themselves yet, and it was seemed pretty obvious Martin was just stretching their journeys out, a sort of “well, it's probably time for another Jon chapter, but he can't do anything important yet, so let's just dive into his head for a bit.” In A Storm of Swords, of course, both characters really get to shine. 

Back to AFFC: Cersei acts insane and paranoid, and we know that many of her conspiracy theories are false because we know how Tyrion really escaped, and we also have Jaime to call her a fool just to drive the point home; we already can't root for her because she's quite frankly one of the closest things to an antagonist the series has right now, and we can't even enjoy her political maneuverings because it's pretty evident that she's doing things wrong. Maybe I could've enjoyed her chapter more if her failings didn't have giant neon arrows pointing to them, and I could've patted myself on the back for figuring out how paranoid and foolish Cersei was being. Instead we have Jaime, who mostly mopes around during the beginning and points out how stupid Cersei is being in the most unproductive manner possible (just talk to Cersei! Or do something); once he gets out of King's Landing he becomes the most interesting part of the book. With so much world building, and so little purpose for these POV characters or actual events happening in the book, the big problem in a Feast of Crows is: there aren't any “fun” chapters anymore.

Earlier on in the series, Arya and Tyrion were the really fun to read POVs: they were purposeful, driven, energetic. They were going somewhere, at least. Tyrion seemed to enjoy the political gamesmanship, and Arya was likeable, and was always moving, and we couldn't wait for her to get to wherever it was she was going. In a Storm of Swords, Tyrion is a bit more of a downer, but Jaime took up the slack a bit. He's pretty bitter, and has a bit of an identity crisis here though.

Who else? Samwell is just seasick, just a chess piece that needs to be moved across the sea. Arya and Sansa don't get a lot of chapters, and both are stuck in pattern holding mode. Arya's going through some sort of spiritual journey/training, but is finally at the point where we aren't sure where her character wants to go next. The most obvious destination for her, of course, is the Wall, to Jon Snow, but she doesn't seem to want to go. I was hoping for a bit more from the Samwell/Arya meeting, but nope, nothing there (yet).

Sansa, like she's been doing all along, does very little other than evoke a tiny bit of sympathy from the readers. She's accepted her role as Littlefinger's daughter, which was pretty similar to her role as Joffrey's queen-to-be, too, and she works hard to keep a smile on her face, and that's about it. I wonder if the book might've worked a bit better if we'd seen the Vale from the POV of Littlefinger instead. Sansa adds little insight into the occurences around her, and we'd see a bit less of Robert-babysitting. Littlefinger is one of the few characters left who still seems completely in control, who holds power, who is purpose-driven, and who actually enjoys what he's doing, and I think he might've balanced out the book a bit in terms of tone. With Robb gone, the POV characters might be stretched a bit thin. ADWD contains most of the stronger characters, so hopefully that book will be even better (really, I still found AFFC readable enough. I don't regret reading it, at least, which some people apparently did).

Bookmarks

     I used to have very few websites in my Bookmarks folder. Sites tended to either be visited daily, or just once, and I remembered the urls of the ones I frequented and simply typed them in. Then there was this Livejournal (yeah, I know) that gave tips about writing fantasy fiction. I had no interest in the fantasy genre, but the tips tended to center on characterization and setting and believability and stuff like that, and it was a good read. Then I stopped visiting that site for a while, and when I wanted to visit it again, I couldn’t remember the address. It took a good couple Google searches to relocate it, and then into my bookmarks folder it went. And I started bookmarking more stuff habitually. Today my bookmarks sprawl, downwards, outwards in folders, some sorted into categories (school, work, inspiration, music), some not. Books you read one at a time, so maybe you only need one bookmark, and it's static, the text never changes. I don't use physical bookmarks; when I stop reading, I try to mentally store the page number, then when I continue I flip through until the text stops being familiar. With websites, the content is dynamic, and scattered, and non-linear; a book you can point and say, yesterday I read chapters 3 to 6 and right now I'm up to page 227, but it's not so easy to retrace the reading you do in your daily internet surfing.

     People used to write articles about the corrupting influence of television, about a generation raised on passive and mindless and violent entertainment, instead of good solid parenting. Now that the internet has replaced TV as the dominant western entertainment medium for many, the passivity issue has been dropped, and now it’s an issue of how far down the rabbit hole your kids are. What types of sites are they’re seeing without YOUR knowledge? What influences are they getting? It’s harder to tell than it used to be, unregulated by daily timeslots. Just think about how many sites you can visit in 30 minutes, how many TVtropes or Wikipedia or Reddit or Snopes articles you can read through! The internet is making us consume more in terms of sheer text than ever before, but the text is spread out across different sources, some of it perhaps misspelled, some of it perhaps less meaningful. But I would think that the amount of text which we consume every single day far surpasses that of which was common if we were living a century earlier, even if much of it is less sorted, less organized, and less utilitarian. However else the internet may or may not fragment us, it certainly fragments our influences. We used to be able to look to a bookshelf for our inspiration and our knowledge, but now the internet is fulfilling that role more and more. Now, the amount of text that makes up just the URLs of the websites we visit each day might exceed the text we read from books. So that’s why I started bookmarking both sites I visited frequently, and also sites I found interesting or informative. It’s also why I started writing down the titles of the books I read.

     On the internet, our identities are boiled down to a profile page: a collection of interests, hobbies, favourite quotes, and the connections we have with other people. But that’s also sort of how we define ourselves: a collection of hopes and fears, the adjectives with which we try to embody, the different identities we align ourselves with, the people we know, where we are, where we want to be, and where we were. It’s important that we place markers to commemorate how we got to where we are, because that’s how we understand ourselves.

     Now I think I'm gonna reorganize my bookmarks.