Just Cranky Or

[mrissa]

I don't know. Maybe the cold is just making me cranky. But I put down Ursula LeGuin's Changing Planes a minute ago, and I don't think I'm going to pick it up again. At least, not any time soon.

It's another Whimsical Book of Settings. You know the type: "twenty travel guide stories from fantastical lands/cities/worlds/planes/whojobbies." How many people have to write these things before we just stop buying them? Get another conceit for a book! Preferably, get a damn plot, some characters, something in addition to a setting! Enough! There was nothing wrong with the individual vignettes themselves, but there's only so much of that kind of book one can read before all the whimsical settings start to gnaw on one's last nerve.

Or at least on my last nerve.

I sat through An Earthly Knight earlier in the day, a totally undistinguished book with YATLSS. (Yet Another Tam Lin Story Syndrome -- and I'm afflicted with this disease myself, in spades, but this was a straight-up telling of the ballad, set in medieval Scotland. Who cares about that? I can sing the ballad myself if I want to hear the straight-up medieval-Scotland version, and it doesn't take me 250 pages to sing it.) (Well, if I could sing anything, I could sing it. I want my voice back! But never mind that for the moment.)

And I sat through The Velvet Room, a children's book set on a California fruit farm during the Depression. Doesn't that prove my readerly fortitude?

Oh, probably not. Probably I'm unnecessarily cranky due to all the stupid coughing. Anyway, there's nothing to make me finish the LeGuin, so I'm going to read an Iain Pears mystery, which guarantees me a plot of some kind, and I'm going to eat some ice cream, possibly with cloudberries for angelsuppa if I'm feeling really decadent and sick. So there.

(Minneapolitans: have you had cloudberries? Molte? Hjorton? Lakka or suomuurain? Multebaer? All synonyms for the same stuff. If not, let me know, and you can have them at my house. But not tonight.)

Comments

[wintersweet.livejournal.com]

Odd--I heard "cloudberries" for the first time today.

I don't think they could possibly taste as good as the name immediately made me imagine them, though.

(It was on some modern Scandinavian cooking show on PBS.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I couldn't tell you how good they tasted in your imagination. But they taste pretty good here. They also taste like my tenth birthday in a jar, though, so that's probably worth a fair bit.

[wintersweet.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Maybe they have 'em in Solvang. (http://www.viamagazine.com/top_stories/articles/Solvang04.asp)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

They have 'em at Ikea if you want 'em in the Bay Area.

[wintersweet.livejournal.com]

Ooh.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I kept thinking I would've enjoyed each story more if I had read it on its own, not in a collection where it had an unhappy similarity to all the other stories.

Exactly. And if I'd never encountered this kind of collection before, it might not have jumped out at me as strongly.

I think one of the big problems was that in a book with plot and characters, if it's kind of mediocre, I will usually still finish to see what happens or to spend more time with those people. Or in a short story collection, I can skip ahead to the next story. But it appeared that skipping ahead to the next story would bring more of the same, and I had nothing attaching me to the current story, so...bye.

[sdn.livejournal.com]

gosh, i hope you like my books.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Oh, most of them so far, as long as you mean the ones you've edited and not some secret stash you've written under a different name.

You don't seem to be big on Dead Gay Teens, Plotless Wonders, or It's For Your Own Good, My Child. Which are some pretty big recent buttons to push, so.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

I first had molte in 1986, on my first visit to Norway. Do Scandinavian stores around Mpls sell it?

B

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

You can get preserves at Ingebretsen's or (now) at Ikea. Ingebretsen's charges more for theirs, I think, but until Ikea opened, that was the choice you had, so far as I know. And it still may be worth it if you don't want to wrestle Ikea crowds for a $2-3 difference.

I haven't checked out a lot of other Scandia shops, but the ones I've looked at have not featured them prominently where they have my berries.

[songwind.livejournal.com]

What is "molte" etc?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

All synonyms for cloudberries in different Scando languages plus Finnish.

They're little golden seeded berries, related to raspberries but tasting not at all the same. If you haven't had them under any of those names, you probably haven't had them at all. They're lovely. For non-vegans, I like them best in angelsuppa, that is, with cream or ice cream. They're also nice with poor knights (which is roughly the same thing as French toast). I haven't tried to figure out how to serve them to vegans yet, but I'll bet there's something good to be done with them.

[songwind.livejournal.com]

sounds almost like golden raspberries, which we grow outside our back door :)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Related but not the same.

We will feed them to you and yours when I get well, if you want to give them a go.

[merriehaskell.livejournal.com]

(Yet Another Tam Lin Story Syndrome -- and I'm afflicted with this disease myself, in spades, but this was a straight-up telling of the ballad, set in medieval Scotland. Who cares about that? I can sing the ballad myself if I want to hear the straight-up medieval-Scotland version, and it doesn't take me 250 pages to sing it.)

This is how I felt about Dennis L. McKiernan's Once upon a Winters Night. If there's going to be a retelling of "East of the Sun, West of the Moon"--which is my favorite fairy tale--it needs to be a *re*telling, not just a telling with a few tragically underbuilt fairy-political elements and a completely insipid take on the love story.