Wednesday, February 26, 2014

2014 read #21: Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation by Judith Mackrell.

Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation by Judith Mackrell
444 pages
Published 2013
Read from February 16 to February 26
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

Ordinarily I begin to lose interest in history around AD 1750, but there are intervals here and there when cultural and circumstantial elements unite to entice me. It's no surprise that the 1920s are one such period, an interbellum decade of experimentation and loosened parameters that invited sexual and gender upheaval, and the sort of fashionable pretense of intellectualism that's been popular with wealthy urban youth ever since. Flappers approaches the decade through the biographies of six women -- Josephine Baker, Tallulah Bankhead, Diana Cooper, Nancy Cunard, Zelda Fitzgerald, Tamara de Lempicka -- who, in Mackrell's words, illustrate the new sense of "self-determination" and "recklessness," "created by a spirit of emancipation that had been fermenting since the beginning of the century" as well as the "social derailment" of the First World War. Mackrell's analysis tends toward the just-so story, lifelong tendencies fomented, pop psychology style, by particular deprivations or experiences in childhood. But she tells an outstanding story, her prose understated and absorbing, and while cramming six biographies into one volume may make for superficiality, the end result is a fascinating read.

Sunday, February 23, 2014

2014 read #20: Tudors by Peter Ackroyd.

Tudors: The History of England from Henry VIII to Elizabeth I by Peter Ackroyd
471 pages
Published 2012
Read from February 20 to February 23
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

I've been waiting to get my hands on this book since I got to the end of Ackroyd's Foundation last April. My library finally got a copy in November, but then it was immediately checked out and disappeared for two months; it was due December 26 but never reappeared on the shelf all through January, until the computer system mysteriously changed the due date to February 18. I'm at the library almost daily, of course, so when -- sweet manna from heaven -- it finally did show up again, I snatched it up at once.

All that waiting for what turns out to be a straightforward and unremarkable history of Important People. What has always drawn me to Ackroyd's history is his ravenous intake of strange, colorful anecdotes from the small people of England, the odd court transcript or eye-catching bit of commentary that pries open however tiny a glimpse into ordinary lives. A couple years ago I found his London: A Biography almost impenetrable with the depth of fascinating details he had gathered in the strange warrens and blind alleys of his signature city, and ever since then I've thought of this ear for the weird and the usually omitted bits of history to be Ackroyd's thing. The almost total absence of such joyfully obscure civic minutiae turned Tudors into a drily competent list of the expected beats of the time period. Not what I was hoping for at all.

Which is not to say that reading it wasn't a pleasure. I've yet to be wholly disappointed by Ackroyd. No matter what, you can depend on him to glean some grisly details of heretic bonfires at the very least. And it's interesting to see Elizabeth I portrayed by a less than worshipful historian. Ackroyd highlights her tendency to prevaricate and make excuses and delays to avoid forcing a delicate issue, something I can't recall reading in any other English history, which as a rule prefer to dwell on the juicy drama of her early reign and the Golden Age of her mature years.

2014 read #19: The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin.

The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin
175 pages
Published 1971
Read from February 20 to February 23
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

Wikipedia's brief summary of the book -- top-billing "a character whose dreams alter reality" -- muted my interest in it last year, when I was going through my Read All the Le Guins phase. Psychics and their sci-fi potential have never grabbed me. The overabundance of psionic powers is one of the sillier markers of New Wave SF. But this month, references to Lathe seemed to have popped up everywhere. Well, in two places: the epigraph and thematic content of Among Others, and in a random social media interaction I had where an acquaintance praised Le Guin's description of love as a thing that must be made. There was nothing for it but to request a copy and catch up with everyone else.

Lathe is pretty good, but I couldn't shake the sense that it was Le Guin's attempt at a technothriller. The characters of Heather and Haber, especially, seemed like the sort of broadly two-dimensional figures a Crichton or a Koontz would employ; Haber's technobabble infodumps seemed more suited to an early Crichton novel than a Le Guin. But it's a damn good technothriller, handled with far more delicacy and insight than the standard airport novelist can muster. Most critics draw perhaps more apt comparisons to Dick, but the general conceit of a character who can change reality aside, I don't see it. The philosophical stuff about positivism against pseudo-Taoist acceptance was a bit of a yawn for me; I'm past the age where that would make much of an impression on me.

Thursday, February 20, 2014

2014 read #18: Among Others by Jo Walton.

Among Others by Jo Walton
302 pages
Published 2010
Read from February 17 to February 20
Rating: ★★★★½ out of 5

Spoilers ahead.

I despise the "Is the narrator delusional or not?" cliche. To me, it's every bit as hokey and overused as "It was all a dream," except all sorts of writers still use the ambiguously sane narrator all the time, while "It was all a dream" is so universally ridiculed that it hardly ever shows up outside of jokes about creative writing courses, so in practical terms I hate "Is the narrator crazy or not?" more. I approve of unreliable narrators, and narrators that are unambiguously deranged can be delightful (as in many Peter Ackroyd murder stories, especially Hawksmoor), but playing it for ambiguity raises my hackles. It seems unlikely that yet another story employing that voice will say anything new or interesting.

Or so I believed until I found this book. For roughly the middle third of the narrator's diary, Walton subtly raises doubts about whether Mori's experiences with fairies and magic, her story of defeating her evil mother but losing her twin sister in the process, is what actually happened, or whether Mori has grown up with a worldview skewed by her mother's belief in "witchcraft" and Mori's own obsession with science fiction and fantasy, and is merely interpreting terrible events as they make sense to her. And instead of cheapening the story or lessening my interest, I found myself growing anxious for Mori's well-being, worried with each new "attack" of her mother's magic that Mori was, indeed, delusional. I found my heart breaking for her.

When I was 15 (the narrator's age), I didn't have the benefit of an exhaustive familiarity with quality post-New Wave SF. I grew up reading crap like Crichton, with only a handful of better (but dated) stories by Verne and Wells and Doyle to show me the way. I didn't touch Vonnegut until I was almost 18, and here at 31 I have yet to read a Delany novel. So my SF vocabulary was (and remains) severely stunted. Nonetheless, I related to Mori's worldview with an almost painful intensity. I didn't believe in fairies or magic, but UFOs and little gray aliens filled the gap nicely. When Mori has a series of night terror episodes with her mother malevolently floating above her bed, working evil magic at the poor girl, I got chills both because I had been in that situation (with aliens) and because I realized she could very well be so mentally broken and devastated from the loss of her sister (as well as her mother's nasty style of upbringing) that she had invented this whole mythology of fairy and magic in order to make sense of a cruel world, kind of like I had done with my abductions. Her paranoia about her father's sisters working magic on her (through trying to get her ears pierced, no less) was brilliantly written, as well, and more than anything convinced me that Mori was deranged by grief and her upbringing. It was almost (almost) disappointing when Mori got her new beau to see the fairies, and the ambivalent nature of her sanity kind of fizzled into a non-issue, story-wise.

Mori's narration is the warm, fragile heart driving this book's unexpectedly powerful impact. Echoing the gist of the blurb quotes, I can't think of another writer who so delicately and precisely captures the confusion and seriousness of an SF-steeped adolescence. It's that seriousness with which Mori takes the world and her SF that is easy to forget once adolescence is behind us. When her pathetic and confused father drunkenly tries to paw her up in a hotel room, Mori pushes him off but later expresses confusion in terms of Heinlein -- "I know from Time Enough for Love, which is very explicit on that, that incest isn't inherently wrong" -- in a way that made me want to take her aside and tell her, "Oh, no, you don't understand, Heinlein was a lecherous old creep, and this is very, very wrong." I felt that urge to talk to this fictional(ish) character because I had been there, or at least in that neighborhood -- in the sense of having taken a sci-fi social philosophy very seriously, not in the sense of rationalizing molestation because of Heinlein, thankfully. The same thing happened with her typical nerdish fantasy about wanting a "karass" to belong to. With my more limited and crappier exposure to SF, I called the urge "wanting a pack," as in Raptor Red, but I knew that adolescent nerd need all the same.

I should also mention, while I have space, how much I loved the fact that Among Others is a "Scouring of the Shire" type of story, taking place the year after Mori and her sister had their climactic, fatal bid to stop their evil mother's plot to control the world with magic. It's a brilliant way to construct a novel, in a novel with much brilliance to rave about.

As with all fictionalized memoirs, I can't stop wondering where the memoir ends and the fiction begins. This book is basically what I wanted to do with my own childhood, except with fairies instead of claustrophobic spaceships and cold, unfeeling space. Obviously there was no real magic, no real fairies, but much of this book's emotional weight draws from a real, beating heart close to the story's surface.

Again echoing the cover blurbs, if you grew up a lonely nerd, surrounded and consoled by genre fiction, you must read this book.

Monday, February 17, 2014

2014 read #17: The Trial of Elizabeth Cree by Peter Ackroyd.

The Trial of Elizabeth Cree: A Novel of the Limehouse Murders by Peter Ackroyd
261 pages
Published 1994
Read from February 16 to February 17
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

Peter Ackroyd's writing, marvelous though it can be, is often rutted in one particular métier. The man is a brilliant factotum of London history and trivia, particularly the more grisly and sensational turns, and his novels and nofiction work alike return to the same well of remarkable coincidences and geographical peculiarities of the Great Wen, and the odd connections that can be drawn between personages and events. The Trial of Elizabeth Cree centers on one of the more memorable of these coincidences, the two mass murders committed seventy years apart in the same dwelling on Ratcliffe Highway.

Elizabeth Cree is an interesting protagonist, especially after the ending (one of the rare twist endings that both caught me by surprise and worked for me on a dramatic level). Ackroyd's need to drag in those historical connections between events and people, however, led to less fully realized chapters from the perspectives of Dan Leno, George Gissing, and Karl Marx. Marx especially seems dragged in for no real dramatic reason, merely as a prop for Ackroyd to demonstrate another one of his beloved historical conjunctions. Nonetheless, I had no real complaints about these inclusions, accepting them as the inevitable texture of an Ackroyd novel.

Sunday, February 16, 2014

2014 read #16: Thomas the Rhymer by Ellen Kushner.

Thomas the Rhymer by Ellen Kushner
249 pages
Published 1990
Read from February 14 to February 16
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

One of the few bits of worthwhile advice I remember from all those "How to Write" books I devoured as a teen is: Choose your narrator wisely. As with Sherlock Holmes, whose stories would be dull fare without the human perspective of Watson (demonstrated by the two stories narrated by Holmes, which are terrible), in many instances the hero's tale is best told not by the hero, but by those around him. (I use "him" because both Holmes and Thomas the Rhymer fall under the pronoun.) This book is divided into five sections: two before Thomas' abduction by the Queen of Elfland, told by an old couple who came to care for him during his rakish youth; the longest tale by far, told by Thomas himself of his time in Fairyland; and two after his return, again by people who love him. The four chapters written from bystanders' perspectives are superb, rich with gentle pathos and kind humanity, sketching a multifaceted, imperfect, but generous-hearted Thomas and the sometimes hearty, sometimes tragic path he cut across their lives. The middle half of the book, however, narrated by Thomas, feels bland and impersonal by contrast, a winsome enough fairy narrative on its own, but less memorable and graceful than the supposedly clumsy words of those around him.

Friday, February 14, 2014

2014 read #15: Luka and the Fire of Life by Salman Rushdie.

Luka and the Fire of Life by Salman Rushdie
218 pages
Published 2010
Read from February 12 to February 14
Rating: ★★ out of 5

Well now, this was a huge let-down. A painfully unhip attempt to connect with those video gamin', cyberspace chattin' kids these days, Luka lacks much of the sense of playfulness that made Haroun and the Sea of Stories so winsome, and forces a basic Prometheus myth into an embarrassing and silly console quest with save points and extra lives and annoying chatterbox companions. I wanted to like it, but even Rushdie's wordplay was channeled into allegories that rubbed me the wrong way (e.g. the Respecto-Rats, the unoriginal strawman of "political correctness run amok!"). Maybe this would be more enjoyable if I were a kid and couldn't see every plot point a hundred miles away (or wouldn't care if I did), but I'll be blunt and say Rushdie was coasting entirely on his reputation here. If any journeyman children's book author scribbled this out, no one would have paid it any mind, and it would have sank into out of print obscurity by now.

Thursday, February 13, 2014

2014 read #14: Atlantic by Simon Winchester.

Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories by Simon Winchester
459 pages
Published 2010
Read from February 8 to February 13
Rating: ★★ out of 5

I've pretty much exhausted my library's stock of history and science books. If I were interested in, say, dieting or Hitler or right-skewed current events commentary, I'd be set for years to come, but I'm not, and I've dredged the shelves clean of anything that does interest me. I can ILL all sorts of things if I like, or at least I could if they'd fix the ordering system, but nothing beats taking the time to browse shelves and find titles you'd never have thought to look for. Once I get my own library card, I plan to venture afield to Suffolk's other libraries and browse their collections every couple weekends, but for now I'm stuck with whatever I haven't read already here.

Atlantic seemed promising, a nice thick book tucked away in our rather dismal science section. I assumed it would be a mix of natural history and human history, though the subtitle should have warned me that the book had no place in Dewey's 500 range. Aside from a brief prologue on the opening of Pangaea, and the de rigueur chapter on global warning, Atlantic was entirely human history. And Winchester approached it from a determinedly Euro- and American-centric perspective. The Atlantic slave trade is, to use considerable understatement, a rather important portion of the Columbian Exchange, which is probably the single most important development in the last few thousand years of human history. (Only agriculture, pastoralism, and urbanization may be said to approach it in importance.) Thus the Atlantic slave trade should have an enormous role in a book on the history of the Atlantic. Yet Winchester devotes all of thirteen pages to the topic, of which two pages are given over to a "mirror image" anecdote about a white American sold into African slavery (because the one time a white dude experiences it, it's worth exploring in detail). Winchester writes as if he is fair-minded and objective, but has a sneaky way of choosing his words to praise the "sophistication" and acumen of Europeans while dismissing, say, Native Americans as "artless."

This same sneaky tendency suffuses Winchester's discussion of climate change. He insists that a large number of impeccable researchers of high reputation uphold both "sides" of the anthropegenic climate change "argument," then goes on to snipe about the "hysteria" of climatologists and loads their "supposed" claims with doubt.

Parts of this book weren't a total wash (ha, ocean pun). Winchester writes competently well, and certain episodes, such as early Phoenician dye trade and the evolution of sailing efficiency in the last decades before steam took over the waves, were intriguing, even if they weren't given as much space as I would like.

Saturday, February 8, 2014

2014 read #13: Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie.

Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie
216 pages
Published 1990
Read February 7
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

Not only is my first experience with Rushdie a children's book, I kinda like Catherynne M. Valente's Fairyland books -- which owe an obvious debt to Sea of Stories -- better. Awkward.

The DNA of Valente's Fairyland seemingly derives from Rushdie's Kahani, with frankly not that much new arising in between. Both are founded on wordplay and the metafictional conceit of the source of stories. Valente throws together every folkloric creature she ever learned about, without much worry over consistency or cohesion, while Rushdie has an obvious point to make about fundamentalism, fanaticism, and how they work to silence and control storytelling. (Hmmm, I wonder why Rushdie would be concerned about that. I wonder why the Chupwala "idol" bears a faint resemblance to the Kaaba. Hmmm....) I'd give Rushdie the edge over Valente when it comes to playful use of language, but Valente's characters tend to be more vivid, and her metafictional digressions more satisfying.

Which is not to suggest that Haroun is inadequate. It's really quite charming, especially in the first half. Once Haroun actually gets to Gup City, though, the Guppees become more annoying than endearing, and the course of Haroun's adventure becomes so predictable I could have guessed it in my sleep.

Thursday, February 6, 2014

2014 read #12: A Journey North by Adrienne Hall.

A Journey North: One Woman's Story of Hiking the Appalachian Trail by Adrienne Hall
209 pages
Published 2000
Read from February 3 to February 6
Rating: ★★ out of 5

When I read a book about hiking a long trail, I don't want to read about a lot of stupid stuff that has nothing to do with hiking a long trail. I don't see why this is a difficult concept for so many writers. Sure, a little bit of backstory and emotional context is acceptable, as long as it doesn't involve eating cremated pieces of your mom or page after page describing how hot your ex-girlfriend's ass was ten years ago. But all these thru-hike writers seem to forget the reason why anyone might want to read their books in the first place, which makes a genre that should be a perfect fit for my interests into one of the most regularly disappointing regions of the Dewey decimal system.

Hall writes with the dexterity of a C-list newsmagazine correspondent, e.g. without much to speak of. Every chapter follows the same outline: a brief trailside scene-setting, a diversion into some broader essay topic (the failed reintroduction of red wolves to the Smokies, air pollution, cell phone towers, stupid and long-debunked myths about universal goddess worship in utopian matriarchal societies in the make-believe past), followed by a quick sketch of trail life and a capper that tries to weave the two topics together. But even the trail narrative itself, the whole point of reading a book like this, was a tiresome slog. Hall's boyfriend/fiancee is a sitcom caricature of A Man: uncommunicative, holds his emotions clasped tight behind his teeth, loves his dog, otherwise mostly a moving lump in hiking boots, while Hall paints herself as little more than an optimistic gal willing to follow her man anywhere, even if she isn't particularly interested in the experience. The other thru-hikers barely get more than a nickname and one trait apiece, if that. The trail itself, a vivid character in every other trail narrative I've read, emerges only as a rocky, flooded, mosquito-infested unpleasantness, set dressing at best to whatever else Hall prefers to talk about at that moment.

As with everything else I read, exposure to more examples of the genre cause me to grade more harshly than I did at first. If I were to read As Far as the Eye Can See today, I doubt I'd give it such a generous grade. But even that book gave a sense of what the Appalachian Trail might actually be like, perhaps because Brill wanted to hike it instead of tagging along with a boyfriend because he wanted to go. Out of all the books that could be written and stories that could be told about the AT, I'm not sure why this one needed to be printed.