2014 read #39: The Future Eaters by Tim Flannery.

The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australasian Lands and People by Tim Flannery
407 pages
Published 1994
Read from April 28 to April 30
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

One would never guess from the current pitiful state of popular science, but the past two or three decades have been an extraordinary golden age of scientific discovery, theory, and interpretation. Every field from physics to biology to paleontology to archaeology has exploded with new approaches and new raw data, vastly building upon or wholly overturning old concepts and understandings. If there weren't so much else to worry about in the world (staggering economic inequality, social apathy and stagnation, regression from egalitarian aspirations, the decay of democratic institutions, the reemergence of all-powerful oligarchies, loss of interest in real sustainability in favor of fashionable sops to status and suburban ego), it would be a great time to be alive, if only because we're finding out so goddamn much about the universe and our beautiful, life-filled little pocket of it.

Which makes reading 20 year old science books a little bit like blowing the soil off the lid of a time capsule. The speculations are so quaint, the optimism so... depressing. For the casual-yet-engaged reader, there's also the awareness that practically any information in a book like this could well be superseded by more recent research or reinterpretation.

Much of this book's human ecology talk is drawn wholesale from Guns, Germs, and Steel, with Flannery adding grand speculations of his own, built upon if-we-assumes and then-logically-it-musts and an overriding belief in reductionist interpretations of behavior. More interesting to me are Flannery's accounts of primordial biogeography in Australasia and the various reconstructed effects of human incursion, but even those chapters left me wondering whether reanalysis or new archaeological sites might have obsoleted all the information he presents. I dreaded Flannery's windup for the inevitable "What can we do now to create a sustainable future for these lands?" pitch, knowing nothing at all of any substance had been done before all pretense of informed democracy had died over the last two decades.

I found myself wishing for an updated, fully revised tome addressing much the same information, but alas, the '90s were a more hospitable age for such publications. It's unlikely anything like this would get published in today's dismal popular science climate.

2014 read #38: Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination by Peter Ackroyd.

Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination by Peter Ackroyd
468 pages
Published 2002
Read from March 5 to April 26
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

Albion's encyclopedic density recalls Ackroyd's London: The Biography, which I adored but just couldn't get through back in 2012. It is a rich but occasionally unfulfilling stew of anecdote, historical adumbration, and cameo, breezing through quite interesting asides but returning again and again to themes which grow tiresome not a hundred pages in. Albion is a sustained argument for a sort of national character or genius loci, born of place rather than race; not a chapter goes by without ticking through a rosary of Ackroyd's characterizations of the English taste or temper, which he relates nebulously (mostly by means of repetition) to Anglo-Saxon or occasionally Celtic originals. We learn that the English have a taste for surface ornamentation at the expense of internal grandeur, which Ackroyd relates to everything from Celtic knotwork to Perpindicular Gothic architecture to the English detective novel. We learn of the English "embarrassment" or reticence, seen in everything from the wry self-effacement of authors to the screened-in structure of the hidden English garden. We get told again and again of the English (or rather Londonish) taste for variety in emotional effects and spectacle, rather than lingering examination of any one mode of feeling. Ackroyd's disinclination (and presumed inability) to offer explanations for why such a stereotypical "placist" temper could persist over at least a millennium and a half leaves Albion a collection of moods and curiosities rich in superficial detail but lacking inner substance. Likely it's meant that way.

Another thing that Albion taught me is that I have read pathetically little of the classic English literary canon. I gotta start with Chaucer and Langland and work my way forward, one of these years.

2014 read #37: The Giver by Lois Lowry.

The Giver by Lois Lowry
180 pages
Published 1993
Read from April 21 to April 22
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

This book works better as allegory than as a story. I can't help it, I can't stop nitpicking stuff like the plausibility of an allegorical society in a junior fantasy novel. A system in which the burden of all memory, emotion, and sensory input is techno-magically implanted into the brain of a single 12 year old would collapse within the first generation or two; there's just no way it could extend "back and back and back," I'm sorry. There was also the odd and antiquated notion that folks with "pale" eyes are somehow special. But whatever. As far as kids' books go, this one does what it sets out to do and works on most levels. The ending was abrupt and I'm still not clear on exactly how (spoilers) Jonas' geographical departure from the community would psychically flood them with memories, an area where both the story and the allegory seemed to get a bit shaky. But mostly it was a good read.

2014 read #36: The Natural History of Unicorns by Chris Lavers.

The Natural History of Unicorns by Chris Lavers
246 pages
Published 2009
Read from April 18 to April 19
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

This is a slight but pleasant excursion into classical natural history, attempting to pin down the identity of -- or at least the collective inspiration for -- millennia of unicorn myths in Greek, Muslim, and Western folklore. Lavers tends to overreach himself in an attempt to pull together every possible candidate, at one point listing every species from narwhal to walrus to fossil wooly mammoth and wooly rhino to hornbill as sources for the "khutu" branch of unicorn folklore, and even surmises a heretofore unknown relict population of Asian musk oxen, before squeezing into deep mythology to pull up every instance of a city woman used to lure a wild man out of the forests. Still, The Natural History of Unicorns was a cute little book and an easy read.

2014 read #35: Beauty by Sheri S. Tepper.

Beauty by Sheri S. Tepper
412 pages
Published 1991
Read from April 9 to April 17
Rating: ★★½ out of 5

I don't know why I keep coming back to Tepper. Sideshow retroactively made her Arbai Trilogy seem much more tolerable than it was, which led to me pasting practically her entire bibliography into my to-read list. The Gate to Women's Country was a disappointment, but I expected better from Beauty: it's a fantasy novel, "drawing from the wellspring of much-loved, well-remembered fairy tales," which is kind of my thing, and it won a Locus award! And for the first 40 or 50 pages, I loved it. The narrator was a naive but peppery young medieval-fantasy heroine with colorfully dour aunts and a winsomely loquacious narrative voice. I confidently expected a light but entertaining read, something I could breeze through in a couple days and set down satisfied.

But then (spoilers, if you care) some no-shit time travelers appear just as the more overt fairy tale portion of Beauty's tale snaps into place, filming a documentary on the loss of magic from the world, and abduct Beauty into the 21st century. There Tepper constructs a rote, absurd (intentionally so?) dystopia dominated by "Fidipur," a corruption (phonetically and ideologically) of "Feed the Poor," which houses humanity in tiny cubicles to save space for algal nutrition vats. No one goes hungry, thanks to the algal wafers allotted to everyone, but beauty (get it yet?) is gone from the world; there is even a heartfelt documentary on the uprooting and consumption of the globe's final radish. Naturally one of Beauty's abductors is a psychopath -- a psycho killer rapist being pretty much required by law in fiction of the '80s and '90s. And naturally Fidipur maintains a fleet of time machines charged with just enough technobabble and plot convenience to get Beauty and her disaffected abductors into the scarcely less dystopian world of 1991.

I think I find myself at cross-purposes with Tepper whenever I read her. The book I want to read based on the description is (with the exception of Sideshow) not the book Tepper decided to write. In this period of her career she was an Ideas Writer, using genre as a scaffold for big, clumsy, ultimately unsupportable analogies and commentaries on society, which collapse the story under awkward weight. I think Tepper's basic conceit -- that Sleeping Beauty is, well, beauty, and must sleep through these latter ages of the world in order to outlive them -- is workable. But all this crap about Fidipur and 1991 and psycho killers as agents of literal personified evil was, well, crap. There was zero purpose to any of it except for Beauty (the character) to tut and cluck and be Tepper's mouthpiece, soapboxing about the evils of patriarchal religion, "fetus worship," environmental degradation, horror writers, and her kids-on-my-lawn distaste for popular culture circa 1991. I even agree with her opinions on those first three evils, but the whole book is such a naked rant against the author's pet peeves that it becomes hard to take it seriously. Why a supposedly feminist author would have a woman from the literal middle ages recoil from America's treatment of women in 1991, for instance, escapes understanding. Someone took the m'lady romantic crap a little too seriously.

As a document of socially engaged genre fiction in the early '90s, Beauty is interesting. Some passages set in Faery or Beauty's sanitized 1400s were engrossing enough to offset -- a little -- the terrible time travel and psycho killer material. As a work of fiction, however, it may have put me off Tepper for a while.

No matter -- there are plenty of other authors I've longed to check out.

2014 read #34: Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids by Kenzaburo Ōe.

Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids by Kenzaburo Ōe
Translated by Paul St. John Mackintosh and Maki Sugiyama
189 pages
Published 1958 (English translation published 1995)
Read from March 29 to April 8
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

My most vivid impression of this novel is the uncommon, uncomfortable carnality of the narrator's physical sensations. I can't speculate whether this level of bodily detail -- pubescent erections like "asparagus stalks," tender explorations of anuses, spittle flying whenever a character speaks or reacts -- is a feature of literary fiction (I haven't read much), Japanese fiction (I've read basically none), or something pertaining specifically to Ōe's themes of dehumanization, of rutting and grubbing somatic beings cut loose by a wartime society lacking human empathy or compassion. It makes for vivid, visceral reading, but the vast majority of fiction I've read before now is too, well, polite (in the literal sense) to touch such matters.

The book itself, or rather I should say the plot, is straightforward and simply constructed, but the physical impressions of the narration are both the focus and the strength, I think, of the story. To substitute cliche for critical thought, I will say Nip the Buds explored a dark crevice of human experience totally unfamiliar to me. Powerful and absorbing stuff.

2014 read #33: Dying Inside by Robert Silverberg.

Dying Inside by Robert Silverberg
302 pages
Published 1972
Read from April 4 to April 7
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

White male writers of the '60s and '70s (and '80s, for that matter, and many would argue they never ceased) tried way too hard when they attempted to portray the thoughts and perspectives of women and Blacks and homosexuals. Female characters in their hands are always thinking of conception and ovulation and menstruation; Black men are always angry and wanting a chance to knock Whitey down, and fall naturally into jive talk in their inner monologues. A writer like Dick, in my experience, avoids this problem by making all his POV characters straight white men, but Silverberg's tale of a mindreader whose powers are fading in the turbulent '70s can't exactly skirt the issue. I didn't exist during the era, of course; my generation seems to have a misplaced proxy nostalgia for the decade, ignoring the fact that it was kind of a shitty time thanks in large part to the still-raw social upheavals and the bitter distrust each social group had for all the others. I don't know how anyone thought back then, not really. But the misguided earnestness of White male writers does not seem like it would be an accurate measure of what everyone else was really up to.

A climactic scene in which (spoilers) David Selig gets jumped and beaten by a Black basketball squad, in particular, seems like the sort of thing dreamed up by paranoid Whites having to navigate a new social order, rather than a thing that would actually happen. Again, I never lived through those times, but I have a suspicion that Black-on-White violence has always been shouted from the rooftops while hardly ever occurring on the streets, a fear fermented by the image of a servile class finally starting to assert itself. Parallels to White America's hysterical reaction to a half-Black president in the current decade are obvious enough to be redundant. Whitey never let go of his memories of domination, sadly.

Like The Lathe of Heaven, Dying Inside was talked up by Jo Walton's narrator in Among Others. And overall Dying is an excellent novel, a moving (and unusual-for-its-genre) character study on aging and the deterioration of the self, themes I find particularly relatable these days. Its confused and problematic racial overtones are hard to ignore, however. I feel like I should find some contemporary Black fiction as a chaser (not to mention my need to read Black fiction for its own sake).

2014 read #32: The Last Cheater's Waltz by Ellen Meloy.

The Last Cheater's Waltz: Beauty and Violence in the Desert Southwest by Ellen Meloy
226 pages
Published 1999
Read from March 29 to April 2
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

The "cheater" here is Meloy's "lover," the slickrock terrain of southeastern Utah, a land she feels she knows intimately until its history of uranium mining and its contributions to nuclear proliferation spin her out into a malaise of soul and geography. Although often repeated, this spiritual crisis never feels real to me -- likely because I was eight years old when the USSR split, and never felt the dread of nuclear annihilation except in childish mimicry. The central thesis -- linking the mathematical violence of the nuclear age with the desert geography she thought she knew so well -- is interesting and unique, but Meloy seems content to merely link the concepts, and doesn't develop them beyond descriptions of her own nausea and amorphous dread. Meloy's prose is, as usual, evocative and sinuous, approaching description from unexpected but brilliantly idiosyncratic angles, but the weakness (as I perceived it) of the central thesis reduces the book's punch.