I like big books, and I cannot lie

I read two great big, complicated books and my post-covid, late-stage capitalism addled brain didn't fail me.

Byatt, A. S.- Possession

Pullman, Phillip- The Rose Field

I read Possession many, many years ago, when the film came out, sometime around 2002. I liked it very much then, but it is a hard book. I was a year or two out of college, so I would have thought that right after studying library science and English for years, I'd be at my peak of reading comprehension, but I must have kept on learning something over the years. This reading was even better. The book moves from the past to the (then) present, from poetry to narrative to excerpts of scholarly works, and I understood it all so much better. I believe I skipped over some of the longer poetry last time.

There are two stories: in the first, in the early 90s, I believe, there are two scholars studying two Victorian English poets. When one of them finds a possible connection between the poets they are studying, they begin to work together to learn more. One of the poets was so well known that it is a mystery how there was a poet acquaintance that no one knew about. The second story is about the two poets. The reader gets their story as the scholars figure it out, finding letters, journal entries, and putting together clues from their poems.

I loved this book so much. I got more from it this time. I love re-reading, but this might be the longest I've gone between readings. I'd wanted to read this again for awhile, but my library doesn't have a copy in print or otherwise, and then I happened across one when I was on a bookstore crawl last fall. I snapped it up, and I am going to keep this copy forever.

I'd like to see the movie again, too.

I did check out a book by this author, Medusa's Ankles, that I didn't do so well with. It's a book of short stories. I read three or four of them and one novella, "The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye," which was the basis for the very weird and interesting movie, Three Thousand Years of Longing.

Interestingly, the novel mentions a place called Boggle's Hole, and a podcast of nature sounds (Radio Lento) that I follow had two episodes set there, so you can actually listen to Boggle's Hole! https://radiolento.wordpress.com/ I was so excited when they came up. Also, I looked A. S. Byatt up on the podcast app, and there are whole audiobooks of hers available to listen too.

The Rose Field is the third book in a trilogy which has a prequel and two sequels to another trilogy. So don't read it unless you're all caught up on the His Dark Materials trilogy and in the first two of The Book of Dust trilogy. I'm not going to summarize them because there will be a ton of info online, and I've written about them before myself.

Also, don't watch the (very good) series from HBO that came out a few years ago in lieu of reading the books. Read the books, then watch.

I was really looking forward to The Rose Field. The last book left off on a bit of a cliffhanger. Then, when I got it, I found I couldn't remember a few of the characters. I usually re-read books in sets like this before the new one, but these are all really long. Anyway, I managed.

The whole of the two series get pretty philosophical (what are souls, what is consciousness, what if I could be friends with a talking polar bear), and this book is trying to answer many questions. I kind of felt like the last third fell short, but it's well worth a read. If you liked reading about daemons and enjoyed Lyra's adventures, you'll probably like it.

I did get a bit sick of how everyone who meets Lyra thinks she's incredible. Is there no one who can meet this child without falling in love with her? And I didn't care for this book's new creature, and the end felt rushed. But there were some cool parts. I will almost certainly read the whole trilogy over again sometime.

The important thing is that I read these two giant books. I did it! I didn't ever consider DNFing either of them! I can still read!

The bookshop links are affiliate links, but you can always grab the isbn and take it elsewhere. Check out bookshop.org if you haven't, though.