And sometimes the universe just gives you a present, like finding Ali Smith's Girl Meets Boy (2007) at Raven Used Books, where ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fleurdelis28 and I were browsing this afternoon. It's one of the Canongate Myths, the third I've read and right now the one that makes me sheerly happiest—I'm still not convinced of the need for a straight-up evil corporation in a novel as playful and dancingly genderqueer as this one, but it's retelling Iphis and Ianthe in present-day Inverness and I have no difficulty believing in Robin and Anthea at all.
( What sort of story's that? )
This is a myth I care about; I wrote it a poem in 2006 and hardly anyone does anything with it. (Seriously, I cannot think of another novelist; and someone must have beaten me to the poem, but I don't know who.) The best of this book is as erudite and funny, shape-changing, and sexy as Robin and Anthea in bed like Odysseus and Penelope reunited, telling themselves to one another, telling stories. When I opened it at random in the store to see whether it could actually live up to its premise, I got a sex scene and a discussion of Greek pronunciation in Scottish English and I knew I had a winner. The worst of it leans too hard on the monolithic laddishness of the water-bottling corporation where Anthea's stressedly eager-to-please sister Imogen has been working her way up through the ranks as an advertising consultant and the only upside to Anthea's brief, disastrous employment was meeting Robin, first glimpsed spray-painting protest graffiti all over Pure's front gates in calligraphy handwriting and full Highland dress ("She was the most beautiful boy I had ever seen in my life"); it's not a revelation like Anthea's love for Robin that global monopolies are a bad thing, or that narratives can be used to silence and reduce as well as liberate and transform. Note, however, that I'm still fizzing about the book hours later—I don't think this slight conventionality hurt it very much. Did I mention the uncredited cameo by Orpheus?
And it doesn't hurt that I got to hang out with Fleur-de-Lis, whom I hadn't seen since the Fourth of July. And eat a lamb saag roll-up at Chutney's in the Garage, which we discovered while nebulously debating dinner. And get rained on, which was rather a constant of the day. I am still awake, but I do not have a migraine. I like when I have days that don't suck. In short, yay.
fleurdelis28 and I were browsing this afternoon. It's one of the Canongate Myths, the third I've read and right now the one that makes me sheerly happiest—I'm still not convinced of the need for a straight-up evil corporation in a novel as playful and dancingly genderqueer as this one, but it's retelling Iphis and Ianthe in present-day Inverness and I have no difficulty believing in Robin and Anthea at all.( What sort of story's that? )
This is a myth I care about; I wrote it a poem in 2006 and hardly anyone does anything with it. (Seriously, I cannot think of another novelist; and someone must have beaten me to the poem, but I don't know who.) The best of this book is as erudite and funny, shape-changing, and sexy as Robin and Anthea in bed like Odysseus and Penelope reunited, telling themselves to one another, telling stories. When I opened it at random in the store to see whether it could actually live up to its premise, I got a sex scene and a discussion of Greek pronunciation in Scottish English and I knew I had a winner. The worst of it leans too hard on the monolithic laddishness of the water-bottling corporation where Anthea's stressedly eager-to-please sister Imogen has been working her way up through the ranks as an advertising consultant and the only upside to Anthea's brief, disastrous employment was meeting Robin, first glimpsed spray-painting protest graffiti all over Pure's front gates in calligraphy handwriting and full Highland dress ("She was the most beautiful boy I had ever seen in my life"); it's not a revelation like Anthea's love for Robin that global monopolies are a bad thing, or that narratives can be used to silence and reduce as well as liberate and transform. Note, however, that I'm still fizzing about the book hours later—I don't think this slight conventionality hurt it very much. Did I mention the uncredited cameo by Orpheus?
And it doesn't hurt that I got to hang out with Fleur-de-Lis, whom I hadn't seen since the Fourth of July. And eat a lamb saag roll-up at Chutney's in the Garage, which we discovered while nebulously debating dinner. And get rained on, which was rather a constant of the day. I am still awake, but I do not have a migraine. I like when I have days that don't suck. In short, yay.
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