(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .



The Language of the Night: Prepping for Gideon and Harrow and Nona [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags']

Date: 2022-12-12

In three weeks, beginning on January 2, 2023, we’ll start the group read of Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Tomb series, beginning with Gideon the Ninth.

If you haven’t read it yet, you will be confused. It’s fine. Stick with it. Personally I found the beginning the hardest part, not least because it’s grim. What Gideon goes through in the first three chapters is horrific. She is well and truly stuck, and you’ll hate it almost as much as she does.

It’s also tough because Muir tosses you as a reader into very deep water with a blindfold. You have no idea how to orient, or what to orient on. Stick with it and, like Gideon, you’ll get unstuck.

The question I’m facing in preparing for this feast is exactly how we want to eat this elephant. Therefore, I have questions.

Who’s read the books already, and who’s going to be reading them as we go? It matters because I want to know how spoilery we’re going to be from the get-go. If we go with a spoiler-lite approach, at the end we’ll do a quick retrospective to pick out connections you might not have made already, before we move on to Harrow the Ninth and then Nona the Ninth. There are five acts in the book, so — five weeks with Gideon? If we need to move slower we can, because these are not small or easy books. Indeed, a friend who knows his lit recently told me that he thought Finnegan’s Wake was easier. But I think we can manage the pace. In fact, I’ll be hustling to keep up with you.

Whether you plan to read for the first time or it’s a re-read, you’ll want to line up a copy of each book, so place your reservations accordingly. Used copies are already floating around on the internet, because not everyone gets Muir’s mix of profundity and meme-celebration, not to mention all the snark and bad jokes. As with all hardbacks, getting them retail is not cheap. I do, however, think that this is a series worth making the investment in. If you have an e-reader, it’s a bit cheaper. I have both e-reader and hard copies, but I have not yet listened to the audio books. After all, I’m not a monster.

Unless you have objections, I’ll put together the essential starter kit for making sense of the Ninth House and subsequent events: character names and relationships, characteristics of the different Houses, some of Muir’s own commentary about characters and themes.

One of the things I especially like about Muir’s approach is that she mashes up the “magical school competition” from everything from Harry Potter to Lev Grossman’s The Magicians to Naomi Novik’s The Scholomance series with a classic country manor murder mystery. The focus starts narrow: the Ninth House, Gideon’s perspective.

It doesn’t stay there. Eventually the story will span 10,000 years and billions of light-years. But Muir widens the lens relatively slowly and judiciously. And it’s not the only mashup we’ll see. These books are both wicked smart and extremely deep.

If you’re a reader who likes things explained to you, you will very much not like these books. Muir has said that, with the publication of Alecto sometime next year, everything a careful reader needs to solve the entire puzzle will be there. There are things that’ll puzzle you (there’s a lot here that puzzles me, and I’ve read all the books at least 2-3 times, depending). Together we’ll work it out. With references that run from fan fiction and Mean Girls to Greek mythology and the King James Bible, there will be a lot to cover.

Please let me know what you’re thinking. This is both challenging and fun, and I want it to be at least as much fun for you as it will be for me. And I plan to have a blast.

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/12/12/2141512/-The-Language-of-the-Night-Prepping-for-Gideon-and-Harrow-and-Nona

Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/