Wednesday, March 30, 2016

2016 read #26: Walking on the Wild Side by Kristi M. Fondren.

Walking on the Wild Side: Long-Distance Hiking on the Appalachian Trail by Kristi M. Fondren
143 pages
Published 2016
Read from March 29 to March 30
Rating: ½ out of 5

This one is a bit of an oddity, both as a book on the Appalachian Trail and within the context of my recent (post-college) reading habits. I found it during one of my periodic searches through the Suffolk County library catalog for new-to-me hiking narratives. Outwardly, Walking on the Wild Side is packaged as if it were yet another trail memoir, with an "outdoorsy" font, a generic title that could apply to just about any AT narrative, and a cover photograph of booted feet propped up in leisurely contemplation of a view. With movie versions of Wild and A Walk in the Woods recently in theaters, I've been expecting a wave of copycat memoirs to peak sometime in the next year or two; I assumed Wild Side was the first to appear, and promptly put in an ILL request.

Imagine my surprise, then, to discover that Wild Side, while no doubt packaged and marketed to capitalize on the copycat wave, is actually a sociological study upon the subculture of long-distance hiking upon the Appalachian Trail, the result of interviews and participant observation. I almost discarded the book upon this discovery, before my own academic instincts reemerged from hibernation (my BA is in anthropology) and I found myself unable to resist that dry, dry thesis prose. It was almost like discovering an old favorite pair of shoes in a closet, and finding them still comfy.

As is often the case with sociological research (and with science in general), Fondren merely takes the time to properly document aspects of the long-distance hiking subculture that were already obvious to anyone who's read the memoirs and watched the YouTube vlogs. Proper documentation is nothing to be sniffed at, and to be fair, Fondren expands upon certain behaviors and places them within a sociological context, which I found illuminating. Academic works tend to err in the direction of scrupulously contextualizing any statement or assertion, which can make for dull or repetitive reading, but it's a useful practice, and in any case, Wild Side was a brief read. What makes it odd is how Rutgers University Press is so evidently trying to market this dry and rather niche study in order to cash in on the current long-distance hiking craze, even going so far as to have various professors awkwardly attempt to provide blurbs for the back cover. ("Upon finishing a chapter, the reader is anxious to move on to the next one," raves Professor Alan Graefe of Penn State.) The trick worked on me, and it worked on Suffolk County, whose libraries (which typically avoid university press type material) have obtained four copies and counting, so I guess I can't fault them. It just seems like an unexpected move for a university press, because it's, well, a trick.

Tuesday, March 29, 2016

2016 read #25: Thames: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd.

Thames: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd
441 pages
Published 2007
Read from February 23 to March 29
Rating: ½ out of 5

At some point I must have mentioned how Ackroyd's London: The Biography was my favorite book that I've never finished. I read about a third of that tome, dazzled and entranced by Ackroyd's signature non-fiction style, a mix of anecdote, legend, trivia, and delightful digression. The density of that style, however, gummed down my attention span; London, even more so than Ackroyd's other historical surveys, is meant for sampling, for after-dinner perusal, a chapter here or there, not so much for consecutive reading. Thames, unsurprisingly, is more of the same, directed by the flow of the titular river rather than the metropolis, but otherwise practically a continuation of the first volume. Along with Albion, London and Thames form a sort of conceptual trilogy or protracted thesis statement, adumbrating on Ackroyd's lifelong theme of genius loci, the connection between place and person, the recurrence of certain events or motifs in particular locations, a persistence of taste or temper or ritual from the Roman or Saxon ages down to the present.

Sometimes, the connections he traces can be a bit of a stretch. Seemingly every few paragraphs, Thames works in some variant on "Perhaps this is the ancient spirit of the river?" or "This might hold the key to much earlier phases of life beside the Thames." Most likely this would not seem so repetitive had I followed a more leisurely, à la carte reading schedule -- or perhaps it would, no matter what, considering that I deliberately took my time with this book, having learned my lesson from London. Some chapters caught my imagination more than others: the various categories of employment along the London riverfront and docks, for instance, were fascinating, certainly more so (to my taste) than the dry list of churches within the vicinity of the river's course. All in all, Thames was a lovely and absorbing read, even if it isn't as inspired a ramble as (what I managed to read of) London.

2016 read #24: Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny.

Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny
257 pages
Published 1967
Read from March 25 to March 28
Rating: ½ out of 5

Cultural appropriation has been on my mind a lot in recent years. Well before J. K. Rowling stuck her foot in it with some apparently ill-considered worldbuilding generalizations on Pottermore (I haven't read the story in question, but there was quite the kerfuffle over it), I was wrangling with complicated questions about power, privilege, exploitation, and my own half-unconscious neo-colonialist assumptions. I'm a white American of largely English, French, and Irish extraction, atheist now but raised more or less within a Protestant context, and as a writer as well as a reader, I've become deathly bored of pseudo-medieval fantasy extracted from an idealized or folkloric conception of Western Europe. Chinese folklore or Malaysian stories or Yoruban theology -- that's what stokes my imagination. But I'm socially aware enough not to rush in and incorporate these intellectual and conceptual systems into my silly fantasy adventures, not without a lot of leftist hand-wringing and concern.

On one hand, I want to say that (respectful!) cultural interaction and intermingling can only be a good thing. On the other hand, I recognize that it's very easy for me to say that, having been born into such a culturally privileged demographic. On the other other hand, the implication (more common, I suspect, among internet radicals and freshman college activists than elsewhere) that everyone should keep their heads down and stick within their own assigned cultural and socioeconomic categories sounds an awful lot like a textbook example of horseshoe theory. On the other other other hand, there's a long history of unquestionable cultural appropriation within genre literature (as well as within everything else), and it can be as insidious as it is pernicious. On the other other other other hand, another issue that's been on my mind a lot is representation -- I want to populate my novels and stories with a diverse and inclusive cast from every background, so that I'm not merely cranking out bland white fantasy protagonists like it's still the 1980s. But if my characters have, say, a fantasy-Korean vibe to them, where is the line between respectfully drawing inspiration, and obliviously appropriating and distorting another's culture? Even with the best intentions, the line can be tricky to find, subjective and constantly in motion. I mean, as an upper-lower-class person with a history of extreme poverty and homelessness, I certainly wouldn't want a one-percenter writing my life story, let alone making money off of it. There are no easy answers.

Multiple opposing theses could be written, I suspect, about cultural appropriation and Lord of Light. Lest I seem to be divorcing the novel from its historical context, I would peg it as a countercultural novel from a time when mystical Orientalism was hip and sitars were beginning to seduce their way into rock 'n' roll. On the whole, I would guess that Zelazny's intention was essentially to ride that zeitgeist, to profit from something trendy, and, on a more basic level, to tell a pretty cool story. At a couple points, the text specifically states that Buddhism is "true" within the universe of the story, which has to count as a positive. (An aside: One chapter of Lord of Light was published as a standalone short story, "Death and the Executioner," which I read and reviewed here. I have to say that "Rild is the real Buddha" makes so much more sense here, in context, than it did in that selection.)

Nevertheless, many of the uglier assumptions of the time show through. First of all, there's the matter of all the "gods" (the crew of a colonizing spaceship, who kept all the advanced technology for themselves while leaving the passengers, and their own descendants, to live in an agrarian feudal society for millennia) in their original bodies all seem to have been white Europeans, while the passengers all seem to have been dark-skinned subcontinental Indians. The ship, it turns out, was named Star of India, implying that this star-colony expedition was drawn from the subcontinent but piloted and crewed by Europeans. Deliberate social commentary on Zelazny's part? Or an oblivious artifact of the times? Without knowledge of his personal politics and sympathies, which a cursory glance at his Wikipedia page did not provide me with, it would be hard to judge. But I'm just raising that point for hypothetical thesis writers. It's late, and I usually don't (okay, never) put in that much effort into these reviews. And while Buddhism is "true" in-narrative, Zelazny's portrayal of classical Hinduism is rather less positive.

One of Zelazny's perennial motifs was mythology from around the world. I think humanity's great religious texts and myths are arguably the bedrock of almost all literature, and so might be considered a sort of free-use IP for everyone around the world, exempt from concerns of cultural appropriation. But again, I'm of a privileged demographic, and I'm atheist, so who am I to make that call? It made my twenty-first century liberal heart bleed a little, the way Zelazny portrayed the gods of classical Hinduism, but it was in service to a broader point of class exploitation and the use of religion as control over the (literally) low-caste masses. One might even argue that a bunch of interstellar white dudes taking control over an ancient religious system to exploit Indian peasants is the entire point that Zelazny is aiming for here. In which case the modern concern over cultural appropriation, had it existed fifty years ago, might have had a stifling or obfuscating effect on potentially quite interesting social commentary. Not that I really think treating people with respect stifles creativity or social commentary, as the "political correctness is a scourge and must be stopped!" crowd would like to pretend, but approaching Lord of Light as deliberate social commentary gives me a lot to think about.

Less ambiguous is an essentially du jour treatment of transgender identity. Unsurprising, but ugly.

Friday, March 25, 2016

2016 read #23: People of the Talisman by Leigh Brackett.

People of the Talisman by Leigh Brackett
126 pages
Published 1964 (wholly revised and expanded version of original novella, Black Amazon of Mars, published 1951)
Read March 24
Rating: ½ out of 5

Spoilers for the end, if you can have spoilers for a half-century-old sci-fi novella.

A second Eric John Stark adventure, recycling much the same Old Mars pulp formula of The Secret of Sinharat, with the addition of a ruthless female warlord with world-conquering ambitions, as well as the final remnants of an ancient alien race driven to nihilism and recreational murder through sheer cultural senescence. The latter is a logical enough endpoint of the pervasive soft Objectivism of mid-century sci-fi and sword-and-sorcery, which recurs in the common motif of populations turned weak, soft, or twisted through coddling, centralized authority, and lack of manly challenge. Logical endpoint or not, I must say I did not expect the story to end with an alien carnival of murder and mutilation through a city made of blades -- and anything that jolts one of these stories out of their pulp predictability is fine by me, even if the basis of the twist is something I find utterly ridiculous. The female warlord, furthermore, is an archetype I never would have expected to encounter in a tale of such early vintage. My experience of pulp fantasy has been filtered largely through the "particular enthusiasms" of Lin Carter and his Year's Best Fantasy anthologies of the late '70s, and what few women appeared in those testosterone-addled relics were evil queens, conniving sorceresses, and innocent yet pliable damsels with wardrobe malfunctions. A competent woman warrior who almost gets the better of our hero, and ends the book never defeated or symbolically "put in her place" by him, was a small but unlooked-for pleasure.

Speaking of archaic gender norms: Wikipedia has extensive write-ups of Talisman as well as Sinharat, comprised largely of chapter-by-chapter comparisons between the two 1964 novellas and their earlier pulp-magazine prototypes. Amid all those words devoted to cataloguing textual changes between the two versions, there's exactly one line opining that the "murderously insane aliens" of the final twist might be evidence of an assertion that the 1964 fix-up of Talisman might be the work of Brackett's husband, Edmond Hamilton. Wikipedia goes into no further detail, so my first impression is that the "Hamilton expanded the stories" conspiracy theory is just a bizarre jab at a female author, motivated by garden variety misogyny.

Wednesday, March 23, 2016

2016 read #22: The Secret of Sinharat by Leigh Brackett.

The Secret of Sinharat by Leigh Brackett
94 pages
Published 1964 (modified version of original novella, Queen of the Martian Catacombs, published 1949)
Read March 23
Rating: ½ out of 5

A desert realm of barbarians, warlike tribes, and ancient, evil sorcery. Vast ruins, choking sandstorms, conniving queens, blue-eyed beefcake, ripped shirts, and necromantic relics from a long-gone age. And all of it set in the dust and dry seabeds of Old Mars. It rarely gets much pulpier than this. And yet I enjoyed The Secret of Sinharat substantially more than another of Brackett's sword-and-sorcery-in-space adventures, The Sword of Rhiannon. Our laconic hero here, despite his penchant for casual sexual assault, is far more interesting than his counterpart in Rhiannon, thanks largely to a somewhat Tarzan-esque backstory of growing up an orphan Terran boy in the canyons of Mercury, and his white-savior rage when less scrupulous Terrans arrive to exploit various "savage" natives. In fact, Eric John Stark's Mercurial boyhood and Venusian exploits would have made for a more interesting book by far -- but even limited to brief background sketches, they provide a touch of depth for the otherwise stock barbarian archetype. Despite its pulpy shallowness and the usual misogyny of its time, both only to be expected in a book from the old Ace Doubles line, this qualifies as a minor success of sword-swingin' adventure.

2016 read #21: On the Beaten Path by Robert Alden Rubin.

On the Beaten Path: An Appalachian Pilgrimage by Robert Alden Rubin
238 pages
Published 2000
Read from March 22 to March 23
Rating: ½ out of 5

It's easy to pick out a proverbial A-list of long-hike narratives: Cheryl Strayed's Wild, Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods -- both big bestsellers, both turned into movies, both with general audience appeal (Strayed's Oprah-ready story of climbing up from rock bottom, Bryson's Brysonesque humor) and noticeable cultural impact. It helps that there are, to my knowledge, only two such books. Separating the B-list from the C-list is more subjective, a matter of taste as much as a calculus of publishing house cachet, promotional effort, copies sold, and so on. I'd say Almost Somewhere, I Promise Not to Suffer, and The Cactus Eaters are securely on the B-list, at least demonstrating an effort toward general readership, while The Wild Birds' Song and AWOL on the Appalachian Trail are confirmed C-listers, doggedly niche, making no pretense at telling a broader, relatable life story beyond "There's this trail and I wanted to hike it."

I made up this categorization system on the spot for this review in order to have a new angle to discuss yet another hiking book: On the Beaten Path, put out by some no-name press (currently a subsidiary of Globe-Pequot, pumping out the likes of Hemingway's Guns and Mark Twain for Cat Lovers), with no driving personal narrative beyond "I was depressed and didn't like my job, so I quit to hike the AT," slots comfortably within the C-listers. Hypothetically, its author could have the makings of a better or bolder writer than other C-listers, but the problem is, he knows it -- and he seems to think he's a better writer than he actually is, to boot. (Not a hiking pun. Okay, maybe it is.) I almost quit Path in the first chapter, where Rubin goes on at length (that length: two entire pages of text) about the origins of his trail name, Rhymin' Worm, which originated as a gimmick account on a poetry message board -- a fact which still seems to impress Rubin with its cleverness. Perhaps I'm more blasé about such wonders than were the wide-eyed poets and netizens of the late '90s. Regardless, I don't think anybody, then or now, on or off the trail, needed samples of the Rhymin' Worm's doggerel "Ballad."

I came even closer to pitching the damn thing aside early in chapter two, when I encountered the line, "Who is this intrepid Rhymin' Worm of ours?" That's just pure canned corn right there. At that point, huffing at the page, reaching the end in this Rhymin' Worm's company seemed as out of my reach as the summit of Katahdin seems to an office-soft hiker on the Springer approach trail. Couldn't I just quietly stuff it into the library's return slot and await my next ILL'd hiking narrative?

Yet, countering that impulse: it's spring now, and I'm restless, eager for the woods and the rocks and all the momentary marvels of hiking. I've watched all the competently produced hiking videos on YouTube, and alas, I'm starting to run out of unread thru-hike books as well (or at least those contained in the Suffolk County library system). I resolved to tough out even the most tedious trudge through Rubin's supposed cleverness. Maybe there would be little rewards along the way, peeks at fiddleheads and the clean smell of damp leaves. Maybe it would all be worthwhile.

There are a few such moments: gazing at Comet Hale-Bopp above the summits of Georgia, the colorful rise of spring, a rainy night in a Vermont barn. But even after the worst of his cornball flourishes have been spent, Rubin is an unpleasant hiking companion. He exudes judgy negativity in a way I've never seen in a published first-person adventure story. Even Bill Bryson turned his signature misanthropy into something funny. Rubin indulges in bare-all psychological confessionism, but unlike Cheryl Strayed, the wounds he exhibits really aren't that interesting. He portrays himself as alternately seething and moping his way up the Appalachian spine -- and as a bigot on top of everything else. After hiking companionably for some distance with a trail buddy, Rubin suddenly has qualms about continuing on with him after learning the man is gay. He fumes for days (and pages of manuscript) after finding a bible burnt in a shelter. Rubin seldom stints a negative word about anyone else he encounters, except for one fellow sad middle-aged man with a dusting of literary pretension. Imagine that.

I suppose Path could be taken as an antidote to the golly-gee positivity of so much other trail literature, a warning of the psychological toil, the trudgery typically glossed over in other books with a few anecdotes of heavy packs and snoring companions. That, however, doesn't make it more of a joy to read.

Tuesday, March 22, 2016

2016 read #20: Uprooted by Naomi Novik.

Uprooted by Naomi Novik
440 pages
Published 2015
Read from March 17 to March 22
Rating: ★★out of 5

A nearly perfect balance of fantastical whimsy and horror, gliding smoothly from the mishaps of a clumsy, bewildered sorcerer's apprentice to the deep, alien strangeness of the ancient Wood in the European imagination. Initially I was inclined to be dismissive of the meet-cute cliches and usual convenient awakening of magic precisely when it was needed; I even had a few lines prepared about how tiresome I found the gendered differences in magic use, with the central woman's power flowing instinctively like a river while the male wizard's magic moved more like clockwork gears, all rigid and rational, before another witch was finally brought in to demonstrate that this was indeed a difference in schools of use, and not another gendered fantasy binary. But that, and all my other quibbles with the early going, were washed away in the strangeness and beauty and mythopoeic depth of Novik's magic and the Wood. Actions have consequences; people die, and leave behind grief; easy victories turn out to be mere preludes and false assurances before a tighter twist of the screw. Yet the tale never sinks into the grim-and-gritty morass of, say, a Martin novel. Again, a lovely balance -- one rarely so well-realized in genre fiction, at least in my reading experience.

Thursday, March 17, 2016

2016 read #19: The Broken Kingdoms by N. K. Jemisin.

The Broken Kingdoms by N. K. Jemisin
398 pages
Published 2010
Read from March 13 to March 17
Rating: ★★out of 5

After finishing the first book of the Inheritance Trilogy, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, I was eager to continue -- or at least "optimistic" about continuing -- into the next part of the series. As sometimes happens, however, other books got in the way, and only now have I gotten around to the second title. The first half or so of The Broken Kingdoms was a pleasant surprise, obviating my concerns about what would drive the further narrative of Yeine, now one of the Three central gods of the cosmos, by introducing a wholly new narrator with her own role in the continuing saga. It didn't even bother me that much that Broken Kingdoms introduced a very similar plot twist (the narrator who believed she was merely an unimportant mortal from a backwater kingdom secretly possesses vast powers, only now unlocked!) at almost the same moment in the story (roughly one hundred pages in) as Hundred Thousand did. Jemisin is skilled at creating appealing everywoman narrators and making you care about them, and even if the narrative device used by Oree here wasn't as compelling as Yeine's in Hundred Thousand, the cityscape of newly magical Shadow at the root of the worldtree more than made up for it -- at first.

Then, about the halfway point, Broken hits a skid with an extended "You probably wondered why I brought you here, Mr. Bond" info-dump from vaguely defined villains, and never fully recovers. Largely, I blame the villains, which are as archetypal and sketched-in as the scheming royal family in Hundred Thousand, but sadly lacking in verve or memorable presence. The Big Bad here, who seeks to kill off the gods and (briefly) appears to Oree as a god whose essence is mortality, has a name that's an anagram of Death -- that's the level we're operating at here.

There's still plenty to like in this series, and I'm looking forward to the final volume, same as before. The minor "godlings" are an entertaining lot, and I'm excited to see more of them, now that (spoilers) they've been released from the city of Shadow. But Broken doesn't quite live up to its own potential.

Sunday, March 13, 2016

2016 read #18: Walking Home: A Poet's Journey by Simon Armitage.

Walking Home: A Poet's Journey by Simon Armitage
289 pages
Published 2013 (British edition published 2012)
Read from March 12 to March 13
Rating: ★★out of 5

From the glowing, sylvan, almost mythological optimism of Roger Deakin, and the more measured, philosophical cadences of Robert Macfarlane -- not to mention the golden light and luminous rains of my trip to Ireland, seven years ago and still my only venture off this continent -- I've become something of an Anglophile, in the sense that I've developed a long distance love affair with this idealized conception of England, and the British Isles generally. The subtitle of the British edition of this book, Travels with a Troubadour on the Pennine Way, would have hooked me in and gotten me reading it a lot sooner than its watered-down American sobriquet. Poets or troubadours make no difference to me; it's the bit about tramping the Pennine Way that would have reeled me in.

In that sense, it's interesting that Walking Home is the first book in my reading history that depicts something less than an idealized experience, both of hiking a long-distance path and of the ostensibly "wild" places of the English countryside. Where Deakin finds tranquil immersion in the unlikeliest fens and urban waterways, and Macfarlane finds pockets of the wild in every hedgerow, Armitage acknowledges the intrusion of the modern into the remotest moors. Towers and radar domes and farms turned junkyards are the mileposts of his walk, drenching somewhat my immediate reaction of "I simply must hike the Pennine Way someday!" Armitage's walk is measured by poetry readings, and his perception of the world picks up people and human concerns; the journey is essentially the spine of his book, while the pages crowd with personalities and nightly counts of donations at the door. You can just sense that heath and moor and rock and fog is not where Armitage, given his druthers, would rather be. Which makes this something of a unique narrative in my experience, approaching it as I do with the canons of hiking books and English nature writing as my compass points.

I'm no judge of poetry, so I can't rate the occasional poem Armitage includes. They didn't do much for me, for the most part. And his prose, while certainly adequate, doesn't have the warmth and beauty of Deakin's or Macfarlane's or Helen Macdonald's -- perhaps because he isn't so clearly infatuated with the scenes he depicts. The anecdotes and asides are funny, but the book as a whole has a middling feel, almost a sense of a big project planned in advance and then completed with flagging enthusiasm, much like Armitage's hike itself.

Saturday, March 12, 2016

2016 read #17: A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar.

A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar
300 pages
Published 2013
Read from February 29 to March 12
Rating: ★★½ out of 5

Another month, another two-week gap in my reading schedule. This one began pardonably enough: another family health crisis and its concamitant worries, then a weekend trip, then a couple days that felt like the middle of May and left me distracted and lovelorn with thoughts of hiking, which made it impossible to sit still for long. Okay, so those excuses get progressively less convincing as the time period elapsed, but there was an additional culprit: A Stranger in Olondria itself.

I never feel so inadequate as a writer as when I sit down to articulate what I found so oxidizing, so chemically reactive, so insinuating in a book of unusual power. I see the blurbs on the covers and know that other writers have no shortage of words to convey how an exquisite book affects them, works its way into and through them, suggesting perhaps terms of praise and wonder in its passage. I don't want to recycle the thoughts and phrases of review writers, however apt they may be. Karen Joy Fowler snagged "Mesmerizing" right there on the front cover, Library Journal locked down "rich" and "strange," others snapped up "haunting" and "elegant" and "lavish." I suppose I'm free to toss in "An aching wonder of words, a lust all the more vivid for its propriety and slow insinuation, a knife of flowers and nearly unbearable moonlight, painless up until you find your heartstrings sweetly severed." But none of that feels quite right. A book, an excellent book, is a difficult beast to speak for. Oftentimes, I find I can only let it be, and observe it as best as I can. A book this dense, this laden and perfumed with imagery and ideas, a forest of mythology and a map of undiscovered heartache, sets its own pace. My ideal 100-150 pages a day pace can't survive a book like this. I'll start strong, my eyes a downhill race down the page, but then a scene or a myth recounted will force the book down, glaze my eyes over to give me room to think, to dwell, to rearrange. Olondria is a thoughtful, measured book, archaic and overgrown by design, piercingly current in its emotional momentum. I, at least, found myself unable to rush it.