The weekend went swimmingly

[heliopausa]

Literature!  Theatre!  Music!  and a swimming pool!!  It was a brilliant, brilliant weekend.  Oh, and on Friday night, a spectacular and silent lightning storm.  amazing!

The theatre wasn't really on the weekend - it was on Thursday night, but near enough, near enough - and it was terrific.  Sombre in places, and theatre-of-ideas in places (difficult, because I don't have enough language to follow the debates) and romance in places (pah, humbug!) and obligatory funny bits in places (ummm) but still - exciting production, and I loved the sets and the acting, and the ideas, very much.

The lightning storm - how far away does lightning have to be, to be completely silent?  It was amazing and beautiful, a huge storm around a whole quarter of the sky.

I started, and read most of, The Just City - which I'm enjoying, though not without niggles; it feels a bit two-bob-each-way between a novel and a fable, as if in all fairness (because it's a fable,a thought experiment) one shouldn't fret too much about characters or history or finicky pedantic points. (Not every number, Apollo!  You mean every number up to twelve!)  But it's fun watching the experiment work out (doomed to fail! - at least, it seems to me that it has been, but I see there's sequels, which suggests the experiment doesn't end in this volume, anyway) - and in general it's very enjoyable, and a huge step up from Hild. (I bought them both in the same bookshop swoop, last March.)  It reminds me of how Martin Gardner used to wrap up his mathematical/logic problems in very appealing and amusing mini-stories. 

The music was - still is - the Sydney Piano Competition, available via internet for a limited number of days - I think it's four weeks from when they were broadcast.  Here's the first set of three finalists, in the 19th/20th Century concerto section, playing Saint-Saens (an odd choice for competition playing), Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev.   So there were swathes of music throughout the weekend.

and swimming for hours!  This is a rare treat, and the opportunity was not wasted, not for a minute, in this hot weather!  I say, swimming, but a good bit of the time - nearly all the time - was also just splashing about, or standing chatting in the watery shade.  ahhhhh...  :)

So, all up, a great weekend.  :)

Comments

[transposable_element]

I also liked The Just City, with reservations; I also felt like it wasn't sure whether it wanted to be a fable/thought experiment or a psychologically realistic novel. Unfortunately, the sequel infuriated me (can tell you briefly why, if you don't mind spoilers); I only finished it as a hate read. I read the third (and final) book because I was hoping that it might redeem the series, but it introduced a number of new, poorly-realized characters and dilemmas, and it was full of red herrings, and it resolved various hanging issues perfunctorily, and it was generally unsatisfying. So I recommend stopping with The Just City. My husband is a big fan of Jo Walton's and also knows her slightly online, so I felt a little obligated to give the last book a fair chance, so to speak.

Theater, music, and swimming sounds gorgeous!

[heliopausa]

Well, it certainly wasn't psychologically* realistic, - and I think philosophically it was cheating all the way. She sets up straw men (if athene can be called such) - it's not very impressive, then, that she knocks them down so easily. (Nor that she brings out such bludgeons to do it - how to show wrongness? oh, here's an idea - rape! i.e. the frequency with which the author threw in a rape to show wrongness didn't impress me.)
(and as SF/fantasy, very deficient in world-building - slapdash.)
Interestingly, a friend over on LJ had the opposite reaction to yours, and found the second book more enjoyable than the first. (She also is an online friend of Jo Walton, which has kept me pretty restrained in my criticisms.) I wonder what it is in the second book which sparks such different reactions? But no, I'll avoid major spoilers, though I think it's unlikely that I'll have access to the book before late this year, so my reaction will have to hang fire till then anyway. :(
One thing, though - does Maia (or anyone) overtly and seriously question the infanticide? That was so nearly left unexamined - it recurred as a minor cause for qualm in the final debates, but that was all.
Minor question: did anyone swat Socrates? (joke!)

*Simmea had an interesting psychology which could be real, I guess - zestful in formal person-to-person argument, but oddly incurious or holding back from pressing a point at other times. I suppose it's folly to comment on the psychology of gods, so Pytheas will have to be given a pass, but Ethel/Maia was flatly unbelievable, as a character and as an educated and travelled woman of the 1860s. ("Possibly I could write books. I was hazily aware that some women did support themselves in that way." -oh come, on!)

[transposable_element]

Well, by psychological realism, I don't mean that the characters are necessarily believable, but that they are depicted as having psychological motivations for their behavior, rather than simply acting according to type, as in fables or fairy tales. Simmea is my favorite of the narrators, but she's in many ways hard to believe.

I don't think the issue of infanticide is mentioned again. Childbirth was one of the places where I could not sustain my willing suspension of disbelief: over a thousand young women all giving birth around the same time, attended by one doctor and a bunch of untrained midwives, many of whom had never given birth or even seen a birth before, and not even a mention of maternal death or serious complications? Even with the Workers, the whole physical set-up is ridiculous (and even moreso in the second book).

There were a lot of things that I thought the more modern Masters, at least, should have questioned more, especially the issue of sexual consent and the Festivals of Hera. (As an aside, there's no way that, in a community of 300 people, the rift between Maia and Ikaros would have gone unnoticed or unremarked. Ficino remains close to both of them, but seems never to have asked either of them about it. There would have been rumors, especially if Klio kept her promise about warning the other women discreetly.)

Rape. Yeah. Well, I can tell you that there are no more directly-depicted rapes in the rest of the series, so that's something. But in fact one of my main frustrations with the second book is that I think it completely screws up the subject of rape, revenge, and forgiveness. Utterly.

But it is weirdly addictive. I don't remember another series that I finished with such haste and so little enjoyment.

[heliopausa]

I thought the Workers were another part of the unevenness of the book - they seemed at first like a sidestep to allow the thought-experiment aspect to proceed (ie part of the whole don't-bother-about-the-detail-this-is-a-fable), but then swung right away from that into SF. I did like the image of the streets paved with Socratic dialogues very much, though. (Hhmmm... I'm thinking now that it was that image which triggered the author to put in the whole sentience/slavery section.) But once it took the SF turn, the weakness of the worldbuilding and the characters stood out drastically - what tasks did the Workers actually do, once the city was built? what did the Children designated as Iron do at that stage, besides herding goats (and childcare? was that an Iron responsibility?)

It's not just the reader's unanswered questions - as you point out, the characters are weirdly incurious about all sorts of things. (Like which baby came from which parents, for starters - or why, after the concealed infanticides, the number of babies didn't match the number of births. You'd think at least Simmea would have noticed, with her penchant for statistics.)

and I agree with you to about their odd docility re: lack of sexual choice (as well as in so much more) - and also about the chanciness of the Ikaros/Maia/Klio business. There would surely have been rumours and resentment and probably huge rifts.

You say: "completely screws up the subject of rape, revenge, and forgiveness." Interesting - the author does attempt those then? Not so much revenge, which is horribly easy to write/attempt, but to work out how forgiveness happens - that's intriguing! (even if screwed up.)