Arbie's Unoriginally Titled Book Blog

So the King's only daughter married a commoner instead of doing as her father wished and taking own step brother. The Queen and courtiers support her but all lie to the King about it. Her husband and step-brother have a sword fight before her husband goes to Rome in exile. Also, her two brothers were mysteriously abducted when they were infants and have never been heard of since and...that's enough for one scene!

Blistering Barnacles! He's finished his work on Cirripedia!

Hmmm. There's something suspicious about Estrel.

Biggest "mini-figure" I've ever built. Maybe Wonder Woman should stab Ares in his toes?

Scrolling back in time for a brief review:

Probably the most conventional SF adventure tale Le Guin ever wrote and yet it shows glimmers of the concerns that would become trade-mark Le Guin themes; clash of cultures, reconciliation of differences, anthropology. Surprisingly violent.

OK, I caved in and skipped over the remaining reprints from Wodwo - I found them fairly tedious and unrewarding last time round. That leaves just the final story, Head, which so far is a story about white hunters disrespecting Slott Indians, their beliefs and forest home.

The Folio edition of Lear represents the results of adaptation from the Quarto version, in response to performance, according to the editors, and is printed separately and in full. Overall it is shorter and the cuts had the effect of making Lear's descent into madness less convincing to me.

Cymbeline, next. Beginning to feel finishing line fever but there's still three whole plays to go!

Widsith: The opening of a muuuuch longer work. Readers of tales set down from oral tradition will recognise: Genealogies, references to now obscure heroes, exhortations to be generous to travelling bards who will spread your fame.

Made me want to read a translation of the full work, or to start that crazy project to teach myself Anglo-Saxon.

The amusing tale of how, whilst in the grip of beetle collecting mania, Darwin put one example between his teeth so he could grab another, only to have the first squirt acid down his throat...

The Voyage of the Beagle has several crazy tales of similar ilk about the life of a natural history student collecting specimens.

Deadfall: Half childhood memory, half old-fashioned ghost story.

O'Kelly's Angel: Youthful, amusing satire on all things religious. (Hughes was simultaneously very superstitious and opposed to Christianity - probably all religion.)

Snow: An apparent corpse wandering around for months in a perpetual blizzard, determined to find an escape. WUT???? Probably symbolic of something I don't understand...

Oh noes! Cordelia and Lear have been captured!

So far a fairly high density of really worthwhile stuff.

Darwin decries Lamark's views on the origin of species. I wonder what he would have thought about the current view that Lamarkian inheritance actually occurs in rare, limited circumstances? (Noone is claiming it is a dominant mechanism for speciation, mind.)

6 out of 9 stories were first published in Wodwo, which I've read. The most memorable of those was Rain Horse.

In Act 4 everything gets very complicated, very fast, with betrayals, deaths and changes of heart. We also see a brief return to the kind of sadistic cruelty not seen in a Shakespeare play since Titus Andronicus.

The one I poem came across by Dickinson that prompted me to get this collection was a nature poem - a theme so far entirely absent!