{"id":3277,"date":"2024-08-30T18:25:26","date_gmt":"2024-08-31T02:25:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=3277"},"modified":"2024-08-30T18:25:26","modified_gmt":"2024-08-31T02:25:26","slug":"review-an-absolutely-remarkable-thing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=3277","title":{"rendered":"Review: An Absolutely Remarkable Thing"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>I&#8217;m interested in how writers bringing culture of the day into stories to create verisimilitude can wind up distancing readers from the work as time goes by.  When I recently read <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=3274\">The Turn of the Screw<\/a><\/em> there were several times that the characters left things unsaid that remained unknown to me because I&#8217;m not reading in late 18th Century England.  I still got something out of <em>Screw<\/em>, but I wasn&#8217;t creeped out the way I was when I read <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/BBC\/mouldering98.html#m98-n\">The Church of Dead Girls<\/a><\/em>.  It&#8217;s been years since I read that and I still get chills.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I bring that up because Hank Green is very much setting <em>An Absolutely Remarkable Thing<\/em> in the world of late 2010&#8217;s internet fame.  I can imagine it being steeped enough in that time to become opaque to readers in time.  I hope not.  For all immersion in the era, I think Green has a lot to say about fame and communities that form around arcane interests that is independent of mechanism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He also creates a set of characters that I believe.  While it&#8217;s tempting to try to make characters here stereotypes or symbols, these all feel unique.  He does one of my favorite tricks a good writer can pull off: he writes a character who I think is wrong or crazy, but who I like, who I believe,  and who I&#8217;m rooting for.  Even knowing that it&#8217;s probably not going to end well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I like his writing, and he brings the rhythms of the language of the time to life very well.  In the same way I like to imagine that people in the 30&#8217;s and 40&#8217;s spoke like Raymond Chandler characters, I hope people believe we talked this way in the future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Strongly Recommended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m interested in how writers bringing culture of the day into stories to create verisimilitude can wind up distancing readers from the work as time goes by. When I recently read The Turn of the Screw there were several times that the characters left things unsaid that remained unknown to me because I&#8217;m not reading [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3277","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3277","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3277"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3277\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3278,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3277\/revisions\/3278"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}