kadharonon: (Default)
I mean to live-blog re-reading Hexwood months ago, but I never quite got around to it because every time I tried I got bogged down in yelling at Borasus.

HOWEVER. This time around I just threw shitposty comments up on Tumblr, so here's a compilation of those so far:

I continue to just want to shake Borasus! He's so dense!

It's also unclear which time around this is—is Borasus getting the letter the actual earliest thing we see? Or is it one of the Bannus's later re-plays? We get a pretty reasonable timeline of what actions most of the major players take early on in the actual timeline, but I don't know that we ever actually see any of their ORIGINAL actions, because it jumps straight in to the middle of Ann's narrative at the very least, and probably the middle of Hume's.

Gotta love how Hexwood is classified as “a library and reference complex,” but when Sir John goes looking into what it contains he mentions that the other things under Reigner seals are STASS TOMBS, when was the last time you visited a library with cryogenically frozen people in it. (Conversation was had about how you can't check out the frozen people, and I had to eventually admit that yes, Reigner One could probably check out the frozen people if he wanted to.)

“Nobody can possibly blame you.” No, but they can certainly peg you as a toadying social climber and murder you! (Twice. Poor Giraldus gets murdered twice. He might be a toadying social climber, but he probably didn’t deserve to be murdered twice.)

I love this introduction to The Servant as a concept at the end of Borasus's section before we ever get to Mordion as a character, and how it takes quite a while to eventually connect the dots between the two. It’s hinted at in what Mordion tells Ann, of course, but he thinks he’s someone else entirely, so like Ann, we get to meet the person before being reminded again of what he can do.

“This wood,” Yam told him, “is like human memory. It does not need to take events in their correct order. Do you wish to go to an earlier time and start from there?”

FUCK YOU, Yam. You’re the one who doesn’t need to take things in their correct order!

When Ann says that all of the books that Martin gets out of the library are either about dinosaurs or based on role-playing books, I have to wonder what he’s reading, given that it’s probably the early 90s in this book. Since Hexwood came out in 1993, I just have to assume that Ann and Martin are reading Dinotopia (which came out in 92) and Dragonlance novels. Also it’s a lovely little bit of foreshadowing for Martin, given that he’s actually Sigurd, well-known for dragon-slaying.

“Martin’s taste in music matched his love of dinosaurs” WHAT DOES THIS MEAN, DIANA

(I am trying to figure out what it means by building a Martin playlist based on music that would have been around during that time period.)

The quiet horror of “The Slave would be put to death if he tried to escape. One of his fellow slaves had tried it once. The Slave wouldn’t tell Ann quite what had happened to that slave, but she knew he had died of it.” when we later see what happened to Mordion and his siblings… ugh.

Like, you know it has to be bad. And it is! But when you actually read it later on in Mordion’s memories, Cation’s death is just one small horror sandwiched among all the others, with Kessalta’s fate being the worst of them.

When I was flipping forward to see Mordion’s memories, I got reminded that he canonically has seasonal allergies, bless. Someone get this man some Benadryl.


More nattering when I read more book.
 
kadharonon: (Default)
I've been thinking about live-blogging (well, sort of live-blogging) a re-read of Hexwood at some point, so here, might as well just DO it. Make myself keep my brain active.

Here's the copy I'm using, which for some reason is displaying sideways, despite the photo I uploaded not being sideways. I'm not certain what's happening, so we'll just go with it.

A photo of the 1993 hardcover edition of Hexwood by Diana Wynne Jones

It's the 1993 hardcover edition, which is probably the edition I first read, taken out of the library at the tender age of goodness-knows-what. The copy I owned for many years was a later paperback edition, which is now much-loved and -battered, so Ben got me a hardcover off a used book site a few years back for my birthday.

It's one of those books that is often shelved as YA. And while I can SEE why it was shelved as YA—our apparent protagonist, Ann Stavely, is portrayed as solidly in the realm of pre-teen when she's introduced—but it's one of those books where, when I re-read it as an adult, I was somewhat confused about that classification, just because some of the subjects it deals with are HEAVY and maybe not age-appropriate for the 10-something years old I was when I first read it.

It's divided up into 9 parts, and I'm going to try and read one and do some (probably spoiler-heavy) commentary (that I will try and keep below a cut) on a part a day, starting tomorrow!

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