Shoebox of Dreams Kept Under My Bed
18 Jan 2026 03:02 pm![[personal profile]](/makepkg/implementing-https-www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
glindaSpeaking of making a good start on some new year’s resolutions, I thought I’d break myself easy with the re-read/re-watch project with something fairly short.
I was, for reasons, re-reading a bunch of raven’s fic the other night and came across and re-read their Piranesi fic from yuletide (I think?) a few years back. It reminded me how much I enjoyed the book and made me want to re-read it. In a remarkably sensible move, given that I was just sitting at my computer reading fic and chilling to classical music, I got up and grabbed it from the shelf, sat back down and started reading it, planning just to read the first chapter before bed to get me started on the project. I read half the book that night and the rest of it the following morning. (I pretty much only didn’t just stay up stupid late because I got uncomfortable in my desk chair and in getting up to decant to the sofa realised the time and reluctantly made the sensible choice to go to bed.
Piranesi is quite a divisive book I find, with people loving it dearly or being left entirely cold by it. (I have some sympathy for this, Clarke’s first book was incredibly popular and I absolutely could not get into it.) There’s a dreamy quality to the book, I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it reminded me of - it makes me want to go back and re-read Starless Sea, but I think I’m going to go with Morgenstern’s other book The Night Circus - until I was flicking back to check a character name and spotted the quote from The Magician’s Nephew - my favourite of the Narnia books - and was like, ah yes of course, once you know what you’re looking for you can see the footsteps of Narnia in the snow. (I suspect this book is wrestling with Narnia no less than His Dark Materials is, just from a completely different perspective.) I can be a bit hit and miss with unreliable narrators but I came to love Piranesi/Matthew, partly because I feel that he’s not lying to us intentionally, he’s essentially in a fugue state brought on by the House, and while he may occasionally be lying to himself, he largely believes what he’s telling us to be true. (Arne-Sayles may have been correct about pre-House Matthew being ‘an arrogant little shit’ but well, he’s one to talk.) And beyond that, once he realises that he’s wrong or has been deceived about stuff, he’s open about that and his mixed feelings about the discoveries
I read the book the first time at this time of year too, and it feels very much a wintery book for me, something to read when the skies are grey and dull - there’s a fairly ominous looking haar hanging over Inverness today - for being warm indoors when it’s cold outside. There’s something bleakly beautiful about the world of the House and the book itself that suits it to this kind of weather, a kind of wind-scoured experience, like January itself, bleak yet hopeful.
I was, for reasons, re-reading a bunch of raven’s fic the other night and came across and re-read their Piranesi fic from yuletide (I think?) a few years back. It reminded me how much I enjoyed the book and made me want to re-read it. In a remarkably sensible move, given that I was just sitting at my computer reading fic and chilling to classical music, I got up and grabbed it from the shelf, sat back down and started reading it, planning just to read the first chapter before bed to get me started on the project. I read half the book that night and the rest of it the following morning. (I pretty much only didn’t just stay up stupid late because I got uncomfortable in my desk chair and in getting up to decant to the sofa realised the time and reluctantly made the sensible choice to go to bed.
Piranesi is quite a divisive book I find, with people loving it dearly or being left entirely cold by it. (I have some sympathy for this, Clarke’s first book was incredibly popular and I absolutely could not get into it.) There’s a dreamy quality to the book, I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it reminded me of - it makes me want to go back and re-read Starless Sea, but I think I’m going to go with Morgenstern’s other book The Night Circus - until I was flicking back to check a character name and spotted the quote from The Magician’s Nephew - my favourite of the Narnia books - and was like, ah yes of course, once you know what you’re looking for you can see the footsteps of Narnia in the snow. (I suspect this book is wrestling with Narnia no less than His Dark Materials is, just from a completely different perspective.) I can be a bit hit and miss with unreliable narrators but I came to love Piranesi/Matthew, partly because I feel that he’s not lying to us intentionally, he’s essentially in a fugue state brought on by the House, and while he may occasionally be lying to himself, he largely believes what he’s telling us to be true. (Arne-Sayles may have been correct about pre-House Matthew being ‘an arrogant little shit’ but well, he’s one to talk.) And beyond that, once he realises that he’s wrong or has been deceived about stuff, he’s open about that and his mixed feelings about the discoveries
I read the book the first time at this time of year too, and it feels very much a wintery book for me, something to read when the skies are grey and dull - there’s a fairly ominous looking haar hanging over Inverness today - for being warm indoors when it’s cold outside. There’s something bleakly beautiful about the world of the House and the book itself that suits it to this kind of weather, a kind of wind-scoured experience, like January itself, bleak yet hopeful.
