2013 read #113: The Classical World by Robin Lane Fox.

The Classical World: An Epic History from Homer to Hadrian by Robin Lane Fox
581 pages
Published 2006
Read from August 1 to August 28
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

In the back of this book I still keep its receipt. (My whole adult life I've tended to use receipts as handy bookmarks.) Together with The Muslim Discovery of Europe and a typo-riddled history of the Mongols, I bought The Classical World in paperback on January 16, 2010 from the Borders store that used to be by the mall. It was the last of my major book "splurges," the financially reckless buying sprees that had loaded my bookcases and trimmed down my bank balances since my ancient army days. In the glory days, I would spend $150 or more on books any time I stepped into a Borders or a Barnes & Noble, stockpiling titles that, all too often, I never actually got around to reading. The last time we moved, I must have gotten rid of at least a hundred pounds of books, most of them unread. The same impulse operates, albeit rather more frugally, every time I step into a library.

So I've had The Ancient World on my hands for over three and a half years. By my standards that isn't a particularly long waiting period; I still have to read The Mists of Avalon and Dhalgren, which I bought around the same time in early 2002. But I think keeping books around for such a long wait makes them that much more disappointing when they don't blow me away when I finally do read them. (I started reading The Mists of Avalon almost two months ago, and I'm barely a hundred pages in; at this point I doubt I'll bother to finish it this year.) The Ancient World is okay, but for far too much of its length it's a highly compressed "kings and wars" history, focused on a rather limited motif of "freedom," "justice," and "luxury" -- three concepts mostly reserved for the most privileged minorities in society, then and now. The breezy, abbreviated presentation can seem flippantly unconcerned with anyone who doesn't meet each culture's standards of freedom and justice: women and slaves in democratic Athens, pretty much anyone who isn't a rich aristocratic head of household in republican Rome. I'm reasonably certain this is an artifact of brevity rather than sympathy, but even so, I would expect better from such a recent book.

The Roman sections were rather more expansive, indulging in a few slice-of-life chapters. I also learned quite a bit, even in this compressed form, about the days of republican Rome. For one thing, the name of today's Cato Institute is hilariously apt, given the Catos' destruction of even modest legislative gains for the lower classes, and their overriding drive to keep the senatorial class's privileges and freedoms intact at everyone else's expense.

2013 read #112: A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle.

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
203 pages
Published 1962
Read August 27
Rating: ★★½ out of 5

I had been thinking this book would probably have been a lot better if I'd read it as a kid -- all the cliches and obvious plot twists and "saved by the power of love" crap probably would have felt fresher way back then. But then again, there was also all this Christian mumbo-jumbo toward the end. A little bit of religious treacle is okay from time to time, like if the characters believe in a god or whatever and want to mention that occasionally, but this crossed the line into evangelization, I felt. Or maybe this was more or less commonplace for a book published in 1962. In the first couple chapters I'd been mildly impressed by how progressive the characters seemed for such an ancient date, what with the Scout-esque heroine and her scientist mother, but almost immediately the book swerved into feeling dated (all the young characters valuating their mothers based on personal beauty, the bald Communism vs. Christian "freedom" allegory, etc.). I don't know how much my opinion was soured by the religious stuff and how much of it was a result of the trite resolution.

2013 read #111: The Island of the Colorblind, and Cycad Island by Oliver Sacks.

The Island of the Colorblind, and Cycad Island by Oliver Sacks
263 pages
Published 1996
Read August 25
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

Ellen Meloy's The Anthropology of Turquoise brought this book to my attention, mentioning the achromatopsic islanders of Pingelap in passing as representative of a whole other type of society, a scotopic existence flourishing in the to us "unreliable" light of dawn, dusk, and moon. Meloy exaggerated a bit, if I remember correctly -- I certainly came away from Turquoise with the impression that "entire villages" functioned in the half light of crepuscular times. Right from the start, Sacks establishes that no more than 10-15% of the islanders are achromatopsic, still a remarkable population, but nothing like the "Wellsian" fantasy implicit in the title, a fantasy Sacks freely (and winsomely) confesses to harboring before his journey to Pingelap.

But I don't need a fully colorblind society to enjoy this book. This sounds seriously awkward and weird, but between this book and Sacks' Oaxaca Journal, I feel as if I would really enjoy being this guy's friend. His scarcely buried desire to be a Victorian polymath and naturalist, his lack of natural social graces, his charmingly frank admission of romantic notions nurtured by Wells and Conan Doyle, his love of ancient plants and his "profound sense of being at home" in cycad forests and other glimpses of deep time -- I think he and I would get along, in some possibly creepy fanboy dimension. I've never felt that about an author before. While you may rest assured I won't be hiding in the ferns outside his house any time soon, I do feel that reading his books -- especially the more rambly books where he mingles ancient botany with all the neuroscience -- is a terrific treat.

Incidentally, I hate books with endnotes I actually have to read. I love all the extra information, but I hate having to flip between two parts of a book and maintaining two bookmarks as I go. This is exactly the reason footnotes were invented.

2013 read #110: The Anvil of the World by Kage Baker.

The Anvil of the World by Kage Baker
350 pages
Published 2003
Read from August 23 to August 25
Rating: ★★ out of 5

What a disappointment. Some spoilers ahead.

For the first one hundred pages, I loved this book. It was a fast, wonderfully entertaining read, with an interesting world and appealing characters deftly sketched. I couldn't wait to see where this engrossing adventure would lead. But right around the hundred page mark, lots of things happened: the main character's mysterious past turned out to be a huge yawn (a fantasy novel assassin, boooooooring), the engrossing adventure ended abruptly, and I learned this book was a trilogy of loosely connected but mostly independent novellas, not a big story that was going anywhere in particular. And so the entire book just fell apart. What really sank it for me was the abrupt tonal shift with the end of the first novella. In retrospect the breezy and fun adventure of the first hundred pages exhibited some warning signs -- the repeated and ineffectual assassination attempts and perfectly flung throwing knives were getting a bit silly and tiresome and genre-aware by the third repetition. But once the characters all settled down and opened a restaurant together, it got way too fucking Piers Anthony for my tastes. Baker adopted Anthony's insipid "Aren't we just so clever and naughty, kids?" tone wholesale. In the second novella, "I know you are but what am I?" is an arcane magical formula of tremendous power, for fuck's sake. After I read that, only sunk cost fallacy kept me going to the end.

Promising beginning squandered on stupid silly precious frolics. Baker can definitely write when she isn't wasting her time with that Piers Anthony pablum, but even that just led to tonal whiplash. Genocide and broad juvenile "We sure are in a fantasy novel!" chuckleheadedness just don't mix well. Don't try it.

2013 read #109: When Asia Was the World by Stewart Gordon.

When Asia Was the World: Traveling Merchants, Scholars, Warriors, and Monks Who Created the "Riches of the East" by Stewart Gordon
193 pages
Published 2008
Read August 21
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

International travel narratives in the medieval world are one of my super-specific historical interests. The Silk Road-Indian Ocean trading sphere during that same time period is another. This book samples a bit of both; if it were longer and lingered in fuller detail, if it provided more historical context and went into long asides to flesh out the lands and cultures along the way, I would have no reason not to love it with all my heart. Alas, Gordon adopts a brisk tone and breezes through a mere nine narratives of travel, alluding to but otherwise ignoring tantalizing other narratives and documents I certainly would like to see explored. The nine stories are selected with an eye to a broad diversity of experiences and perspectives, which somewhat ameliorates the lack of depth. Overall this feels like a morsel when I wanted a feast.

2013 read #108: Ancient China: From Beginnings to the Empire by Jacques Gernet.

Ancient China: From Beginnings to the Empire by Jacques Gernet
Translated by Raymond Rudorff
135 pages
Published 1964; English translation published 1968
Read from August 19 to August 20
Rating: ★★ out of 5

Okay, so I only checked out this book because a) I'm running out of history texts I want to read, and b) I can't seem to find any good Chinese history books that focus on the interesting stuff. Every Chinese history book at my library is about Mao or the Long March or "the making of modern China." Boring, boring, boring. At least the time frame of this little book matches what I would consider more interesting.

Note those publication dates, though. We can't stop here; this is processualist country. If you don't know, processualism was a school of archaeological thought priggishly focused on reductive, materialist explanations and a rather tiresome insistence on rational actors and logical positivism. Don't get me wrong, my professional inclinations still lean toward material factors; the mutual interrelationships of humans and ecology interest me a great deal. If I ever got back into archaeology on a professional, publishing basis, my research questions would draw almost entirely from how human groups and animal populations affected one another in prehistory, and my approaches would be dense with graphs and statistics. But positivist archaeology, and rational actor theory and reductive explanations, are freaking ridiculous. Humans are never rational, and fitting human behavior onto simple cause and effect arrows is hopeless.

This book was a surreal experience after years of reading more postmodern and human-scale histories. I haven't read anything this aggressively reductive since, well, archaeological theory class, when we did our two weeks of processualists. The text is riddled with sweeping causal statements like "From the very beginning, the discovery of alloys must have led to a specialization of [social] functions." "Must have," "doubtless," "many proofs show" -- such definitive statements far outnumber more qualified assertions, even when the claim is based solely on armchair reasoning.

Outmoded theoretical grounds aside, I found myself profoundly disappointed by the lack of substantive supporting information throughout this book -- you know, the stuff that actually makes history interesting. For sheer terseness, this volume even beats that Byzantium book I found so disappointing earlier this year. At least that book named some major figures. Of course, this time period is almost entirely legendary in later Chinese writing, but it would be nice if Gernet had bothered to supply evidence or bases for his reductive conclusions, without endnotes referring back to primary sources in French. As it is, I feel I barely learned anything from this book, which is the true shame of it.

2013 read #107: The Anthropology of Turquoise by Ellen Meloy.

The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit by Ellen Meloy
324 pages
Published 2002
Read from August 16 to August 19
Rating: ★★★★½ out of 5

When you haven't read many books of a particular mold, the few that you do read inevitably suggest similarities between each other. Drawing comparisons between this book and Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost are unavoidable. Both collections mingle astoundingly articulate personal essays with digressions on art and the natural and human history of the American Southwest. Both sets of essays ramble over vast conceptual territories but remain loosely (sometimes very loosely) held together by the themes in their respective titles. Both spend an extravagant amount of time dwelling on the color blue (half of Solnit's book consists of ruminations on the theme "The Blue of Distance," while the entirety of Meloy's text relates, however indirectly, to the tints between blue and green). Of the two authors, I think Solnit writes the more concise, gorgeous prose, whereas Meloy conveys richer and rawer emotion, funnier, more heartbreaking, and at times more infuriating than anything in A Field Guide.

This is the sort of book you can't rush your way through, but it isn't a book that permits you to put it down for long, either. I feel inarticulate and dense after reading it, despairing of words to convey how Meloy's immense yet delicate imagery absorbed and abraded me. It wore me out, in a good way, leaving me both drained and replete, wrung out and refreshed. In a way I'm glad to be rid of it. Books this good can be parasitic, taking life from you while bending your will to their impulses. Perhaps I'm being dramatic. I liked this book, though.

2013 read #106: The Secret City by Carol Emshwiller.

The Secret City by Carol Emshwiller
209 pages
Published 2007
Read from August 15 to August 16
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

I like to talk as if I'm familiar with the history and development of speculative fiction, but of course I'm not, really. I read a few books and a couple Wikipedia articles, and I carry on as if that gives me the right to write about movements and genre fashions and milestones. But when you quiz me on it, it becomes obvious I really don't know much of anything.

I picked up this book because it was slender and looked like a quick read, something that might help me pad out my numbers, which have been suffering lately. It wasn't until I read the blurb material (halfway through reading the book last night) that I learned, in the words of the author bio, that Emshwiller was "a key figure in science fiction's New Wave movement" -- a movement I certainly love to blather on about, as if I knew anything about it. Oh well, bit by bit I'm eroding my ignorance. Now if only I'd wait until after I knew some things before I talked about them.

About this book. It wasn't as poetic as all the sales pitch propaganda led me to believe, but the prose was quietly confident, telling the simple story with winsome directness. The story was meat and potatoes sci-fi, but sometimes that's nothing to sniff at. A modest success all around. Now I'm intrigued at the thought of tracking down Emshwiller's "key" older works.

2013 read #105: First Light by Peter Ackroyd.

First Light by Peter Ackroyd
328 pages
Published 1989
Read from August 12 to August 15
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

There are reasons why I try to avoid contaminating my expectations by reading plot summaries on jacket flaps. For one thing, occasionally quite substantial spoilers get tossed off right there in the jacket blurb, most recently and egregiously observed with The Magician King. For another, sometimes the blurb is just plain wrong, most often describing a much more interesting story than what we actually get. First Light is a prime example of this second tendency. Here's the very first sentence of the jacket flap sales pitch: "Peter Ackroyd's brilliant new novel -- a major best seller in Britain -- begins with an ominous coincidence: the reappearance of the ancient night sky during the excavation of an astronomically aligned neolithic grave in Dorset." You can imagine how an image like that would intrigue someone like me. As soon as I read that I knew I had to get my hands on this book and hoard it until I had the chaance to settle in and savor it properly. And naturally none of that ancient night sky business is so much as hinted at anywhere in the book itsef.

Oh, sure, there's a pervasive and ongoing motif of light, stars, and time, of stardust and cyclical beginnings and endings, an artfully and expertly rendered motif that is one of this book's main charms. But I can't deny that part of me remains disappointed that I didn't get to read Peter Ackroyd's take on a full dechronization fantasy. Skilled literary authors going into genre can produce some amazing works, exploiting the possibilities of the impossible far more effectively than the hacks who normaly inhabit genre shelves, and I was certainly hoping for something like that here. Instead it's just one more among many tens of thousands of "middle class prfessionals being unhappy" novels out there, of the sort that put me to sleep if I'm not careful.

To Ackroyd's credit, he is indeed skilled at descriptiom and character depiction. His characters are exquisitely rendered and distinct in ways I can only envy. That doesn't mean I necessarily cared about any of them, though. There was a curious lack of emotional impact here, perhaps fomented by a host of 1980s storytelling cliches (schizophrenia, the uncertainty principle, the cult-like extended rural "family" protecting its secrets, easy pseudo-scientific philosophical frippery). I don't know enough about literature of the period to be able to judge whether stereotyped-but-sympathetic portrayals of homosexual characters were progressive in mainstream fiction at the time, or had already become common.

2013 read #104: Zia by Scott O'Dell.

Zia by Scott O'Dell
179 pages
Published 1976
Read from August 12 to August 13
Rating: ★★ out of 5

Man, I need some new juvenile fiction authors to follow. I like to bulk up my reading totals with quick, easy fantasy and historical fiction whenever I can't seem to make any headway with more sophisticated material, which seems to be all the time lately. But I've gone through all but the dregs of Gaiman, and this O'Dell guy, to be quite honest, has never really cut it. His writing is flat, mechanical, lacking even rudimentary emotional resonance. I keep coming back to him because I love the setting of his historical narratives in coastal California and along the Gulf of California, but with each passing book that's becoming less of a draw.

I picked out Zia because I assumed, naturally, that it was a prequel or sequel tracing the adventures of Zia from The King's Fifth. That wasn't my favorite book but I felt the character had potential for an interesting story. Instead, Zia follows a series of disconnected events in the life of the niece of the heroine from Island of the Blue Dolphins, who just happens to be named Zia, I guess because O'Dell super duper liked the name. This Zia lacks real agency, seeming to realize on some level that she's an auxiliary figure in a more popular character's story. Her choices are motivated solely by rumors of her aunt's life. She leaves her hunter-gatherer existence so that she might live on a mission nearer to where her aunt is supposed to live. She leaves the mission again after her aunt comes to the mission and dies of homesickness. The end.

Zia's lack of agency leads to a scattershot story that feels singularly nonessential. The book is dull, directionless, and has no emotional punch, but it's that unnecessary sequel feeling that really diminishes it below my already low standards for an O'Dell novel.

2013 read #103: Killing with the Edge of the Moon by A. A. Attanasio.

Killing with the Edge of the Moon by A. A. Attanasio
153 pages
Published 2005
Read from August 10 to August 11
Rating: ★½ out of 5

My only previous exposure to Attanasio's work was The Last Legends of Earth, a full-blooded and flamboyant novel in the best '80s post-New Wave style, and one of my favorite novels of all time. I liked it so much that I was startled to learn earlier this year that it was the fourth book in a tetrad. Immediately I began looking for copies of Radix, the first volume in the series, but it's out of print and can't be had for love or money. (Okay, so it can be had for a lot of money, some $60 for a used copy on eBay, but I don't want to read it that badly.) The other two books in the series can be obtained via inter-library loan, but now that I know which book is first, I'm a bit of a stickler for making sure I read them in order.

What I loved best about Last Legends was Attanasio's confident, luxuriant command of language. The rococo four-dimensional storyline contributed a great deal to my regard, but Attanasio's vocabulary stands out in my memory: the guy seemed to know the perfect word to fit each need, which, all those years and many many books ago, impressed me very much.

Imagine, then, my disappointment with Edge of the Moon. It's rendered in the tuneless, artless prose of an amateur who thinks a whole lot of himself and his talent. The words fall like cans of corn from a ripped shopping bag. Here's a random sample: "She carefully disengaged from his embrace, stood, and looked around at her sunny surroundings." Clumsy, adjective-thickened scene setting -- letting the audience see the wires and artifice, as it were. I've read worse prose, sure. Most fantasy and sci-fi is probably just as bad, if not more so. But I expected so much better from this guy.

The story itself is reheated faery fare -- usually something I'm into, but this lacks the magic, no pun intended. Slapping your fairies into leather jackets and motorcycles and updating their repertoire to include "speed-metal" raves does not make them more interesting; on the contrary, it makes them seem more dated and clichéd than if you had used the classic lore uncut. "The Girl Who Ruled Fairyland, For a Little While" this ain't. There's also a fleeting hint of old weird Americana in the early goings, but it evaporates as soon as it appears, more's the pity. Honestly it feels like Attanasio said to himself, "Hey, that urban fantasy romance stuff is pretty popular right now, I bet I could dash one off and make a little fortune" -- and then failed to even make the romantic element particularly interesting. All in all there isn't much to rejoice in, here. Unless you count the fact that I only wasted my time with a novella, rather than a full-strength book.

Incidentally, my library has an awful lot of these mediocre yet overpriced small-press SF novellas. I'm guessing libraries are the only entities that get suckered into ordering these things; no one else, I hope, paid $27.95 for this damn book. But still, it's odd how many of these things are on the shelves, considering how many classics and staple titles are absent.

2013 read #102: Prospero Regained by L. Jagi Lamplighter.

Prospero Regained by L. Jagi Lamplighter
476 pages
Published 2011
Read from July 29 to August 9
Rating: ★★ out of 5

You ever reach the last book in a trilogy and discover that the author slammed into an unforgiving wall of series fatigue? Or maybe realized you no longer remember what was so entertaining about the story in the first place?

I enjoyed the first two books of this series as adequately serviceable popcorn fantasy, hardly perfect or even all that good on a technical level, but entertaining. But oh my goodness did all that go off the rails in this installment. It took me over a week to slog through the first hundred pages. The quality of Lamplighter's writing, never especially high, plummeted from page one, as if she and her editor had a deadline stating them in the face after months of procrastination. The cast of characters, never especially nuanced or fleshed out, was uniformly reduced to a single characteristic gesture or tic apiece, endlessly repeated, often many times on the same page. One character repeats the same exact gesture five or six times within the space of a page. This abrupt downturn in quality revealed the other weaknesses of the story: the repetitive "everything you thought you knew was wrong!" twists, the blatant foreshadowing that every character is somehow oblivious to, the fact that not much of anything has moved the plot along since the end of the first book, the tepid and unconvincing urban fantasy romance subplot, the glaring lack of tension or sense of actual stakes, despite (or because of) the frequent repetitions of all these puzzles and what's supposed to be at stake. I mean, Lamplighter set most of a big fantasy tome in a modern version of Dante's Hell, and found a way to make that setting boring. This book's got issues.

The going finally became smoother by page 200 or so (or maybe I just wanted to get it over with at that point and stopped reading with a mental red pen), but even then there remained systematic issues that troubled me. If I hoped to read an entire series set in a Christian mysticism fantasy universe without at least one seemingly sincere rebuke of abortion and sexual liberation, I was sorely disappointed. Sadly, I leave this series with a few pleasant memories outweighed by a lot of disappointment.

2013 read #101: Coraline by Neil Gaiman.

Coraline by Neil Gaiman
162 pages
Published 2002
Read August 9
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

I totally had no idea this had been a book before the movie! I dig the film, so this had few surprises, but it was a welcome antidote to the dull, poorly written crap I've been slogging through all week.

2013 read #100: The Other Wind: A New Earthsea Novel by Ursula K. Le Guin.

The Other Wind: A New Earthsea Novel by Ursula K. Le Guin
246 pages
Published 2001
Read from July 30 to August 1
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

One hundred books! When I first contemplated this project late last year, I expected that even fifty books in one year would be a tremendous undertaking. I hadn't read more than a couple dozen books each year since 2007 or so, and before then I had rarely managed to read as many as fifty titles in one year after 1996, when I managed to squeeze 186 reads into eleven months (most of them repeated reads of the same handful of easy sci-fi novels). During my initial flush of accomplishment in early January, after completing Memory by Linda Nagata in a mere three days, I went so far as to allow myself to imagine a full hundred books this year. And here we are already, just a day after seven months into the year.

Some general spoilers ahead.

I intended to finish this yesterday; I'm a big proponent of neat milestones that match up with neat dates. Unfortunately, I just haven't been feelin' the readin' this past month. First there was a vacation, then I was sick half of July, then there were computer troubles, then I got bored with what I was reading and decided to blow the dust off some video games I hadn't touched in over a year. The Other Wind contributed to this feeling of anhedonia. It isn't a bad read, but it's the fifth installment in a series that doesn't seem to have been planned much at all in advance. When fantasy series keep puttering along like that, there seem to be only two directions to go: outward, finding bigger and badder baddies our heroes must vanquish, or inward, into the underlying workings of the fantasy cosmos. Earthsea has been all about the latter strategy. Sometimes it's hard to care about the inner workings of a make-believe universe, you know? The Tombs of Atuan and Tehanu were better because I cared about the characters, but The Farthest Shore was just dull. In places, The Other Wind felt like a retread of Shore, which did nothing to earn my approbation (or my undivided attention). Oh hey, it's that weird apathetic afterlife these guys have, and once again it's having an effect on the world of the living, now where have I read that before? Making "the dry land" into a nasty, unplanned penalty for the hubris of sorcery didn't help much, because again, sorcerers overreaching and hoping to live forever was a central part of Shore. It did have the awkward effect of turning the magic of the fun, lighthearted young reader fantasy A Wizard of Earthsea into a terrible, cold, desolate limbo of souls unable to properly die, which would be heavy stuff if I were the type of person to really get invested in fantasy cosmology. We get it. Wanting power for the sake of power and desiring immortality are Bad Things. There's no need to write this whole book just to recapitulate the lesson of Shore.

Does Wind offer anything, beyond mere thematics, that justifies its existence? I guess. It's an all right book, really. The ending was rather unexpectedly moving. But I think I need a break from this series. Which is good timing; there's only the short story compilation left to read.