Friday, January 31, 2014

2014 read #11: Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler.

Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
299 pages
Published 1993
Read from January 23 to January 31
Rating: ★★★★½ out of 5

Extensive (though general) spoilers ahead.

When you live in interesting times, pessimism can seem like prophecy. Every day I try to keep my mind from spiraling into a bottomless depression over the thought of what kind of world my son may have to grow up to face. Climate change, resource exhaustion, erosion of labor power and class solidarity, the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of a laughably small but amply protected elite -- none of it looks like it's going anywhere good. It's likely technological development will supply renewable energy, at least outside of the US; it's also likely population numbers will stabilize within my kid's lifetime, if not mine; eventually some kind of new equilibrium will be reached and people will adapt. But it tightens my throat to think of him having to struggle, or not having luxuries and gadgets and other things most westerners still take for granted, or worse, finding himself a debt slave in some deregulated, privatized libertarian dream come true, i.e. living hell for the vast majority of human beings. Right now the future seems like a race between oligarchic authoritarianism (sold with such delicious irony to voters as "freedom" and "American values") and technological advances that might -- might -- democratize the resource base and lead to a more sustainable society. I've fallen into deep, deep depressions over such thoughts. The only way I've found to stay sane is to emulate the vast majority of Americans and do my best to ignore everything.

Parable of the Sower was a tough book for me, because the dystopian near-future it portrays reads like every one of my worst private fears. Social and economic collapse leading to walled fortress communities, water and food shortages, roving bandits and opportunistic criminals, the government happily selling off infrastructure and services to private exploitation -- none of it feels so far from the present day. President Donner's policies in the book are indistinguishable from the current, mainstream GOP platform, or for that matter from the bluer wing of the Democrats. Butler never stints the brutal details of reality in such a collapsed society. I had to put Parable away several times to take a break and come up for light and air. But its bleakness and brutality, balanced with the gentle humanity of its narrator and the personal scale of the story, give Parable its power. It may be the second most depressing book I can remember reading (after Cormac McCarthy's The Road), but Parable is undeniably brilliant, almost entirely surpassing its genre bounds to merit a place among the classics of English language literature.

The only critical shortcoming in the book, in my opinion, was one of its genre trappings, the role of Lauren Olamina as instigator of a new religion. Earthseed never impressed me much; all it amounts to, seemingly, is a codification of "Adapt to your conditions and try to alter your conditions to suit you." The "Destiny," of course, is close to my own heart, but its presence here felt like an starry-eyed sci-fi nerd intruding upon a grim, all-too-plausible, Cato Institute-directed future. (Additionally, many of the supporting characters were hazily sketched at best, but I'm willing to forgive one of my perennial complaints here because of the overwhelming emotional clout of the book as a whole.)

Thursday, January 30, 2014

2014 read #10: Songs of Earth & Power by Greg Bear.

Songs of Earth & Power by Greg Bear
697 pages
Published 1994 ("substantially rewritten" one-volume edition; comprises The Infinity Concerto, originally published 1984, and The Serpent Mage, originally published 1986)
Read from January 8 to January 30
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

Once upon a time, Greg Bear numbered among my favorite authors. I first discovered him in 1998, when Dinosaur Summer came out and irresistibly caught my eye. (I mean, look at this frigging cover. To this day that's still one of my favorites.) I loved Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, and once I got used to the idea that Dinosaur Summer didn't follow Doyle's established "canon" exactly, I thought an updated and expanded Lost World was the most brilliant and absorbing piece of literature since Raptor Red. It was a time when slapping a dinosaur on the cover pretty much guaranteed that I would whine and wheedle until my father bought me the book, and then reread it obsessively, ignoring how crappy the contents might be. And it was so deep, man, with the main character's father being a neglectful alcoholic and the boy slowly becoming a man! Once I latched onto Bear, though, I no longer needed dinosaurs to sustain my interest in him. As soon as I was on my own, with money to spend, I picked up and burned through The Way series, and adored Moving Mars. By the time it was 2006, however, and I'd gotten to Queen of Angels -- one of those precious "experimental prose" novels that are such a chore to read; this one's gimmick was omission of all commas -- my love had cooled. My copy of Songs of Earth & Power, obtained at some point in the early 2000s, languished in boxes and damp basements all these years, kept in my possession with all the strength of "Eh, I used to like him, maybe I'll read that one day, I dunno."

Over the last year or two, I've entered a new phase, where any book set in some kind of folklore-derived "Faery" is bound to interest me. I'm pickier now than I was in my dinosaur novel mania, and I can afford to be -- there are bafflingly few dinosaur novels out there, whereas Faery and its outgrowths are perennially popular. Pawing through the basement a few months back, organizing my unread backlog, I found Songs. A cover blurb from Analog claims, "A vision of Faery that may owe a bit to a wish to do it right." That was enough for me; I added Song to my immediate to-read queue, which inevitably sat there the rest of the year.

Bear is not a poetic writer. His descriptions are mechanical, stuck in clunky sci-fi mode, as with this pretty much random sample:
Michael awoke and saw a silvery band crossing the pre-dawn sky. He rubbed his eyes and looked up again. A mother-of-pearl ribbon of light stretched from  horizon to horizon at an angle of about thirty degrees. It had moon-like mottlings, and in fact could have been a severely elongated moon.
Which makes it all the more awkward that Michael, our hero figure, pretends to poetry. Whenever Bear has Michael write something, it is graceless and insipid. Even in the late '90s, when I started reading "How to Write Sci-Fi" guidebooks, there were admonishments not to trot out the worn-out cliche of music-as-magic or poetry-as-magic. I haven't read much music-as-magic fiction myself, so the basic concept still felt fresh to me, but by the time (spoiler?) Mozart and Mahler get rescued from Faery and crank out a world-bridging ditty straight off the lace cuffs, it begins to get a little silly. And while I liked Michael as a protagonist, his emotional entanglements felt flat and unconvincing, neutered by Bear's prose and one-dimensional characterization of the various love interests.

I did like aspects of this book; the sequence with Lin Piao Tai, a "spryggla" condemned to wield magic over only things that are yellow, was fun and imaginative, though like all of Michael's conflicts, it resolved easily and obviously. Songs isn't a bad book per se, but it felt pretty damn average.

Monday, January 27, 2014

2014 read #9: Beyond the Wall by Edward Abbey.

Beyond the Wall by Edward Abbey
210 pages
Published 1984
Read from January 25 to January 26
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

Is it possible to feel nostalgic for an era's better qualities, while acknowledging how horrible and bigoted and disgusting it was in its other aspects? Well, if hipsters can idealize the 1920s, I can take the eccentric position that, except for the systematic racism, sexism, homophobia, exploitation, fears of nuclear war, and destructive engineering and environmental policies, I miss certain aspects of the 1950s and 1960s.

Only a couple of aspects, actually. One is the sense of optimism in scientific progress. It was that era's ill-considered boosting of "progress" that destroyed the credibility of scientific progress in the first place -- it only takes a few Aswan Dams or destroyed forests to suggest that, hey, maybe "taming" the natural world is an outmoded worldview and that we as a species have achieved enormous power without the sense of perspective and consequences to know when to limit its use, and in the mid-twentieth century, we built a lot of Aswan Dams and denuded many many countries. Imagine how much better off we'd be today if cultural attitudes had shifted toward conservation instead of exploitation, if there'd been general awareness of how readily fish stocks could be depleted and how vital biodiversity is to sustainable resource extraction -- if, in other words, the heroic scientist figure of the Johnny Quest era used that globe-trotting optimism to further preservation and sustainability rather than profit and immediate returns.

The other thing I miss about the mid-century is one Abbey communicates with exceptional clarity: being able to find and explore hidden places, before dams and tourists and park service blacktop could ruin them. Chapters like "How It Was," depicting the weekend trips Abbey and his college buddies would take into the Glen Canyon and Escalante country, tooling his truck up forgotten tracks in magical green and red canyons, manipulate me with the force of two decades of daydreams. Again, Abbey and friends' cavalier attitude toward these jaunts would have been unsustainable in the long run -- tooling around canyons in pickups now leads to eroded trails, petrochemicals in the water, ugly fire rings, cans and other trash scattered deep in the backcountry, precisely because so many people have discovered it. Maybe Abbey was relatively responsible back then, but the hordes who came after him certainly are not. The problem with hidden places is that they never stay hidden. Exploring hidden places hastens the process of overcrowding and overrunning. All the same, reading accounts like "How It Was" make me wistful, as well as angry that such places can be destroyed so much more efficiently by monstrosities like the Glen Canyon Dam.

The rest of this book, unfortunately, is Abbey being just a little bit too Abbey-like. His misanthropy only soured and sharpened in his years of fame, until in some cases it's hard to tell his misanthropy from outright bigotry. (Blaming native peoples for squalor and alcoholism seems like a classic case of boosting the bootstraps myth, and is definitely a case of the privileged imagining a slew of "choices" not so plausible in the affected communities themselves.) After a while, late-stage Abbey becomes a tiresome companion. His descriptions of natural environments, as always, are superb, evocative and delightful. And I'm happy that such passages constitute the bulk of this essay collection. But when he comes down from the desert hills, I don't really feel like sticking around with him.

Saturday, January 25, 2014

2014 read #8: Almost Somewhere: Twenty-Eight Days on the John Muir Trail by Suzanne Roberts.

Almost Somewhere: Twenty-Eight Days on the John Muir Trail by Suzanne Roberts
265 pages
Published 2012
Read from January 23 to January 25
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

Brief mention of eating disorders and sexual assault, themes addressed at length in the book.

The back cover copy of Almost Somewhere ends with the stinger, "...not just the whimsical coming-of-age story of a young woman ill-prepared for a month in the mountains but also the reflection of a distinctly feminine view of nature." Even though I crave more hiking narratives and had thought I'd depleted my library's stock of them, I almost put the book back right there.

I don't like the word feminine. I don't like the word masculine. They imply intrinsic, incontrovertible gender values or "truths" that I don't have time for. If people want to be feminine or masculine (according to whatever cultural norms they attach to those terms), that's their own business. I'm all about people being whatever gender, mix of genders, or lack of genders they wish to be. Unlike everyone else on the internet these days, I don't like the proliferation of labels that sprouted up with third-wave feminism, possibly because my privilege as a heterosexual, cis-sexual male makes me undervalue the importance of labels and identity; whether it's a privileged mindset or not, I like the label "person" or "people," or if necessary "cultural norms of femininity" or "cultural norms of masculinity." (I do, apparently, value the proliferation of exact, pedantic terminology that sprouted with postmodern scholarship.) Labeling whatever distinct view of nature Roberts transmits as "feminine" promises an awkward fit with my reading sensibilities.

There are, obviously, many things women (primarily) must be concerned with in the wilderness. Rape culture and its nasty surface scum of predatory males can slosh up everywhere. Body image and its pathological outcomes -- anorexia, bulimia -- doesn't get left behind at the trailhead. There are more hygiene products to pack in and pack out. Social expectations and judgments against "girls" in the woods are entrenched and shitty, though possibly a little less obnoxious now than when Roberts hiked in 1993. And there are obvious ways the "classic" wilderness ethic, as promulgated and shared by men such as Muir and Abbey, is exclusionary, masculist in its very inception. I understand the need for female narratives and perspectives in what, originally, was pretty much a boys' club.

Beyond the social and physical realities of "femininity" in western society, however, I do not see how Roberts' view of nature is distinct or feminine. She cites her inability to "leave" her body to experience the divine transfiguration of Muir in the Sierra. Well, neither have I -- Muir was a holy prophet, his writings an inspiration rather than an instruction manual, transmitting an ideology rather than a reality. She dwells on the unromantic stuff, knee pain and digging catholes and bumming food and Advil off other hikers when they ran out -- but the reality is, hiking is unromantic. In the moment, it is all knee pain and poor planning and struggle. It's only afterwards, on the drive home perhaps, or on lazy days when basecamping, that this sport feels closer to the radiance of Muir.

Roberts not-so-subtly projects an image of the "man" in the woods -- a risk-taking braggart, a posturing ape, oblivious to things like thunderstorms above treeline. With the exception of some friendly, vivacious German hikers they meet on their last night (and there always have to be friendly, vivacious Germans in our American trail narratives), all men in Roberts' world are solitude-seeking, peak-conquering, phallocentric macho dickheads. After having a panic attack on a log bridge and needing to be helped off by her friend, Roberts offers a sweeping statement: "Certainly, no man would have allowed his friend to rescue him off that log, yet I wasn't a man, and trying to act like one wasn't going to get me anywhere." Certainly, she says, condemning all men everywhere to Tim the Tool-Man Taylor stupidity. Her big conclusion -- that the distinctly feminine view of nature incorporates community and "the journey" rather than the destination -- is both cliche and exclusionary for no discernible purpose. As a man, I can safely say I would ask my friends for help, with a quickness. I have turned around short of my "destination," and still enjoyed myself. And I can also say that my favorite moments on hikes involve tip-toeing through fern glades, the book-smell of damp beech leaves, watching bees fondle flowers, all this journey stuff Roberts' yoga instructor told her was "feminine." Trying to force a gender identity on the universal experiences of hiking seems, well, regressive.

I wish this reductive "Men Are from Mountain Summits, Women Are from Lovely Little Forested Lakes" crap weren't so pervasive in Roberts' writing, because otherwise I quite enjoyed Almost Somewhere. Describing a much shorter trip than Cheryl Strayed or David Brill, Roberts has the luxury of presenting a daily diary of experiences and impressions, detailing flowers and climbs and views, something this poor, snowbound East Coaster very much appreciated.

(Edit: Rereading this in 2023, I would first like to acknowledge that, yes, hello, I am and have always been genderfluid and nonbinary even when I didn't have the words for it, and also that I wrote a lot of unnecessary words up there that can be summed up as "I don't like gender-essentialist feminism and, in fact, don't think it's especially feminist at all.")

Thursday, January 23, 2014

2014 read #7: Huntress by Malinda Lo.

Huntress by Malinda Lo
372 pages
Published 2011
Read from January 20 to January 22
Rating: ★★ out of 5

Lo's main strength as a writer, if I may judge from a grand total of two books, is her ability to generate an unusual amount of goodwill for her characters. The characters themselves are pleasantly bland, unremarkable in every way; I can't seem to discern any technical means Lo uses to manipulate her readers, managing to make me feel like following her leads around. Perhaps she's skilled with the art of the reader proxy, the blank hero with ample open space for the reader to slip herself inside. Certainly there was no other reason I felt like completing this book. The worldbuilding was generic, achieving the rare feat of making the human culture rather more interesting than the dull fairyland where folk drink coffee, eat cheese, and pack "miraculously" cheese-flavored crackers for travel -- Cheez-Its as lembas bread? The central conflict is a cliche. The writing quality sank below what I would expect for a genre romance aimed at young adults -- that is to say, still worlds better than the likes of Twilight, but falling far short of what Lo herself offered in Ash. Without exaggeration, the prose read like something I would have produced as a teen, clunky and mechanical, descriptive without grace or flow.

Sunday, January 19, 2014

2014 read #6: The Folded World by Catherynne M. Valente.

The Folded World: A Dirge for Prester John Volume Two by Catherynne M. Valente
252 pages
Published 2011
Read from January 17 to January 19
Rating:  ★★★★½ out of 5

Of the two, I would rate The Habitation of the Blessed a peg higher. With the exception of John Mandeville, one of the most delightfully unreliable narrators I've ever encountered, the narration of The Folded World seemed to lack spark. It was a neat trick to have a younger Hagia write down later events here, and an older Hagia write down earlier events in the first book, but Anglitora, even though she serves as a voice-over-the-shoulder arguing, commenting, and commiserating with the tale as it is written, never coheres as a distinct character. Vyala, the White Lion, as a substitute mother writing the tale of her charge's upbringing, never engages or bespells anything like Imtithal in the first book. Speaking of Imtithal and her charges -- and this might be a pretty big spoiler if you choose to read these books, so skip to the next paragraph if you wish -- there's kind of a blatant chronological error between the two volumes. In short, Imtithal's book on the tales she tells the three children is centuries, maybe a millennium old -- everyone in Pentexore grew up with the book, wishing Imtithal were their "butterfly" -- yet it ends mentioning "Houd, who died in Jerusalem." The Folded World has Houd dying in front of people who grew up reading the book in which he died. The nonlinear structure, winding in and around itself like a wild vine, is one of the delights of this series, which makes this slip-up (and I do insist it is a slip-up, and not a deliberate paradox or prophecy, because if it's meant as the latter, it doesn't work) all the more noticeable.

That said...

The ending of this book devastates. It strokes languid fingers -- the most skilled fingers, a writer's fingers, a liar's fingers, subtle fingers -- around the hard slippery knot of pain we all protect with our hearts, and then it twists and unravels that knot until the old bitter pain oozes out. The strength of Valente's writing, I think, is that underneath her occasional mawkish wallowings, her sentimentalist streak a mile deep, her tendency to get lost and maunder indefinitely along a limited set of themes and imagery, underneath it all is a beautiful, bruised, fragile yet brawny compassion and understanding of what it means to be human. Maybe this is my total unabashed fan-crush showing through, but I cannot read her better books without feeling that she gets it, she knows what it is to be human, to be loved, to need love, to hunger and crave and spoil things and kick dirt and shove and break and bite just to be noticed. Maybe this is a particularly white, Western, privileged vantage, but I grew up in a goddamn car and she still speaks right to my heart and, on her better days, plays my amygdala like a theremin.

These two books are what I wish the Fairyland books were like. The Fairyland series seems shoddy and slapdash now, a bunch of folklore thrown together for the sake of whimsy and showing off, without the heart and cohesion and bloody dirty lustful pain and mystery she tends here. I think of the next installment of the Fairyland series with preemptive, pre-publication disappointment.

I only wish I could write a fraction as powerfully as Valente, is all I'm saying.

Friday, January 17, 2014

2014 read #5: The Habitation of the Blessed by Catherynne M. Valente.

The Habitation of the Blessed: A Dirge for Prester John Volume One by Catherynne M. Valente
270 pages
Published 2010
Read from January 14 to January 17
Rating:  ★★★★½ out of 5

Valente is the fantasy writer I aspire to be: prolific, in command of baroque, lush, lyrical prose, inspired by the odder and less-visited corners of history and centuries of folklore. She is easily one of my favorite authors of all time, possibly because her writing meshes so well with my own idiosyncrasies. I can't seem to win any converts to her writing, so maybe it really is just me.

This book, regardless of that, is astoundingly good.

Grotesque, erotic, soaked in the strange beauty of medieval Christian mysticism, luxuriously and voluptuously written, the tale of how Prester John (a figure of importance in medieval European folklore, if you aren't as obsessed with these things as I am) came to the "three Indies" intertwines four narratives, one by the 17th century monk transcribing them amid his own crises of faith and memory, three grown as fruits from a book-tree. Metafictional themes of books and storytelling, perhaps inevitably, inform and interlace all four narratives, but Valente's prose elevates such standard dime-store genre fare into delicate morsels of beauty:
I reminded myself: when a book lies unopened, it might contain anything in the world, anything imaginable. It therefore, in that pregnant moment before opening, contains everything. Every possibility, both perfect and putrid. Surely such mysteries are the most enticing things You grant us in this mortal mere—the fruit in the garden, too, was like this. Unknown, and therefore infinite. Eve and her mate swallowed eternity, every possible things, and made the world between them.
I feel something similar every time I take a book home, though I certainly never had the wherewithal to describe it so wonderfully.

I flirted with giving Habitation an unheard-of perfect five stars, but after sleeping on it, I decided to see whether the next volume, The Folded World, can bring everything to a satisfactory close. Some nagging presumption of disappointment makes me uneasy about The Folded World; I almost want to leave it unopened, full of possibility.

Tuesday, January 14, 2014

2014 read #4: Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe.

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
213 pages
Published 1959
Read from January 12 to January 14
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

Achebe's prose is direct, clear, disarmingly simple -- qualities that elevate his work to incisive beauty. But that simplicity can lessen the emotional weight of the stories he tells here. As I read Things Fall Apart I marveled at Achebe's expertise and economy in structuring the events and vignettes of Okonkwo's life and society to build a much larger whole, but in the last third or so of the book especially, the simplicity of the prose and the economy of design created a Cliff's Notes effect, leaving me intrigued but unsatisfied. The ending itself is powerful, and I'm tempted to bump this up to four stars, but with classics I tend to downgrade to correct any "Well, it's taught in high school so it must be good" veneration, and the ratings don't really matter anyway, so whatever.

Wednesday, January 8, 2014

2014 read #3: Raven's Exile: A Season on the Green River by Ellen Meloy.

Raven's Exile: A Season on the Green River by Ellen Meloy
256 pages
Published 1994
Read from January 6 to January 8
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

Books on the canyon Southwest -- particularly beautiful, lovingly worded books -- beleaguer me with longing, a deep-channeled homesickness, equal parts wistful joy, frustrated anger, and heartbreak. I've seen little redrock country in person. Half a morning in the upper ledges of the Grand Canyon as a teen, a couple afternoons flitting through Arches and Moab in air-conditioned trucks supplied by Utah's state government. I've always felt at home in the Southwest, though, my imagination drawn there with the memory of years spent on I-40 through the cliffs near Gallup or the vanilla-spiced ponderosa plateaux around Flagstaff. And the canyonlands are like the Southwest concentrated, its spiritual-geographic essence condensed and bitten deep into the very topography.

Descriptions of redrock imbue the wistful joy, the interplay of light and stone, water and life. Histories of exploitation and despoilation supply the frustration and anger, the thought of mossy grottoes and evolutionary specialization inundated beneath cold slack water and the detritus of houseboating vacationers. Something less tangible informs the heartbreak, a confusion of might-have-beens and alternative pathways and dreams never realized.

Naturally, I adore books like this. I loved Meloy's The Anthropology of Turquoise, a more wide-ranging and unfocused but more brilliantly written collection of essays; this book is but an hors d'oeuvre by comparison, intimating some of the themes, imagery, and specific anecdotes of Turquoise without as much fading-years fatalism or descriptive urgency. That book was driven by a need to make you see and feel and understand, before the chance to describe these things faded away. This book is more a rumination on early middle age. Something similar can be said of the times when each book was written, Raven's Exile in the cautious but still optimistic '90s, Turquoise after many more battles had been lost, many more hopes dismantled and sold away.

Monday, January 6, 2014

2014 read #2: The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter.

The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter
403 pages
Published 2010
Read from January 2 to January 6
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

Like most white leftists, I want everyone to get along. What racial prejudices I absorbed from my white trash upbringing, I make every effort to contain and reject; my anthropological training inclines me to think of "race" as a damaging social construct long overdue for the scrap pile, while simultaneously informing me that it just isn't that simple. Centuries of economic, social, and "scientific" separation and marginalization aren't overcome in a single generation, and as depressing as it sounds, it's really only been less than a generation since Americans (as a generalized society) began making discernable progress toward overcoming "race."

Which makes books like this extremely valuable, and disturbing in their implications. Irvin Painter presents her exhaustively researched history of the evolution of the concept of American "whiteness" in erudite, mildly sarcastic, eminently readable prose, doing a superhuman job at presenting the lies, bigotry, and disgusting peccadilloes of "race theorists" in a restrained manner. I could never manage such restraint; this sort of thing makes me too angry. Demonstrating just how flimsy and hypocritical the roots of race ideology have been, it just makes me angrier to think how prevalent -- how overwhelming -- such bullshit is throughout society today.

I heartily recommend this book, and I've added Irvin Painter's Creating Black Americans (which perhaps I should have read first, except I've owned this one for years) to my to-read list.

Thursday, January 2, 2014

2014 read #1: Ash by Malinda Lo.

Ash by Malinda Lo
264 pages
Published 2009
Read from January 1 to January 2
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

The first half or so of this book was thoroughly unremarkable, a straightforward retelling of Cinderella that seemed to add little to the story but standard-issue Irish-type fairyfolk. The prose was lusher than you usually find in the young adult section, but nothing especially noteworthy. But the second half surprised me with an absorbing, tender romance, and the ending -- while a bit too tidy -- was super sweet and made me happy.