Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow
270 pages
Published 1975
Read from August 27 to August 30
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
Someone (I believe it was Jory, the poet) recommended this one to me way back in the final days of my reading Dark Ages, sometime in 2012 or so. In a sense I could see how this novel would appeal to a poet, with its brevity, its laconic, almost clipped sentences, rarely extending beyond a single clause. Doctorow's brisk recitation of the lives of his characters can be vivid and moving, but is just as often more like the bare framework of a lusher novel left unwritten, rushing through weeks of events within a paragraph. Some resemblance to works of actual history is evident here. Nevertheless, the story is satisfying, provided you buy into the plot contrivance of the various characters continually crossing paths over the space of years -- which, really, could be a critique of much fiction.
Doctorow addresses uncomfortable realities of American history -- the horrors of tenement life, the exploitation of labor, institutional suppression of Black people together with their rights and interests -- directly enough, but with a cloying optimism that makes this a veritable textbook of the White liberal worldview: Things were really bad before, but if we all just work together and get along, things will be great in the future! The endcap, with the three children -- towheaded boy of privilege, sloe-eyed Jewish girl elevated from the slums, bastard child of a Black pianist -- living and playing together in Hollywood harmony, is far from subtle. While undoubtedly the Great American Novel of its time, a reassurance that the turmoil and resentments of its own age would soon be overcome by can-do American spirit and tolerance, Ragtime could be just as applicable to White liberal thought right up until the last few years, when the mere existence of a Black president was enough to unearth the (none too shallow) ugliness and disgusting hatred still rotting through the nation, and the justice system remains scarcely less skewed and violent in its racial prejudices than it was during the 1900s. Ragtime's optimism seems as far from the realities of human (more precisely, American) experience as the anarchic idealism of Red Emma Goldman or the occult Egyptomania of J. P. Morgan, as depicted within the novel. But it's a comforting sort of naivete,
Sunday, August 30, 2015
Wednesday, August 26, 2015
2015 read #43: My Journey to Lhasa by Alexandra David-Neel.
My Journey to Lhasa by Alexandra David-Neel
Introduction by Peter Hopkirk
328 pages
Published 1927
Read from August 20 to August 25
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
An adventure tale on the antique model, full of benighted natives (though David-Neel's genial, paternalistic contempt for the rural poor of Tibet seems rooted more in classist assumptions than racial ones -- though she demonstrates those in plenty, as well) and a European slyly making her way across a distant, half-fabulous land. David-Neel embellishes her ostensibly true story (which I have no cause to doubt, at least in its broad outlines, any more than I would doubt any other exotic travel narrative of its time) with hints of Orientalist mysticism, lampshading each event with "Surely I must have been asleep and dreaming when I heard and saw this," clearly intending her readers to wonder if she really might have struggled with ghosts of lamas over cursed daggers, or called down demons upon startled robbers. If the intent was to whet interest in her subsequent volumes on Tibetan mysticism, it worked -- I'm halfway intrigued about it, and have already priced Magic and Mystery in Tibet on Amazon. I would put no more credence into it than I would, say, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's adventures with mediums, and for the same reasons, but it would be an area of folklore almost wholly new to me, and therefore especially tempting.
The first two-thirds or so of David-Neel's narrative is brisk and engaging, but even though the pace didn't appreciably suffer in the latter passages, I found myself losing interest and wishing the book were over with already. Perhaps that, once again, says more about my current attention span than about the relative merits of this work.
Introduction by Peter Hopkirk
328 pages
Published 1927
Read from August 20 to August 25
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
An adventure tale on the antique model, full of benighted natives (though David-Neel's genial, paternalistic contempt for the rural poor of Tibet seems rooted more in classist assumptions than racial ones -- though she demonstrates those in plenty, as well) and a European slyly making her way across a distant, half-fabulous land. David-Neel embellishes her ostensibly true story (which I have no cause to doubt, at least in its broad outlines, any more than I would doubt any other exotic travel narrative of its time) with hints of Orientalist mysticism, lampshading each event with "Surely I must have been asleep and dreaming when I heard and saw this," clearly intending her readers to wonder if she really might have struggled with ghosts of lamas over cursed daggers, or called down demons upon startled robbers. If the intent was to whet interest in her subsequent volumes on Tibetan mysticism, it worked -- I'm halfway intrigued about it, and have already priced Magic and Mystery in Tibet on Amazon. I would put no more credence into it than I would, say, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's adventures with mediums, and for the same reasons, but it would be an area of folklore almost wholly new to me, and therefore especially tempting.
The first two-thirds or so of David-Neel's narrative is brisk and engaging, but even though the pace didn't appreciably suffer in the latter passages, I found myself losing interest and wishing the book were over with already. Perhaps that, once again, says more about my current attention span than about the relative merits of this work.
Wednesday, August 19, 2015
2015 read #42: Beauty by Robin McKinley.
Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty & the Beast by Robin McKinley
247 pages
Published 1978
Read from August 10 to August 19
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
Considering how long ago this book was published, and that it was Robin McKinley's first published novel, it isn't surprising that Beauty feels somewhat shallow and lacking compared to the other books of hers I've read. The Beauty and the Beast is one of the less thematically rich and engaging fairy tales, or at least one with a subtext harder to square with the feminist angles McKinley would pursue in her later work. After all, it's all about a virtuous girl choosing to redeem a man with the power of her love -- the tale that could describe any number of situations of abuse and gaslighting. McKinley's elaboration of the tale is breezy and pleasant enough in the early chapters, but once Beauty meets the Beast, I found myself bored and my interest nearly gone.
247 pages
Published 1978
Read from August 10 to August 19
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
Considering how long ago this book was published, and that it was Robin McKinley's first published novel, it isn't surprising that Beauty feels somewhat shallow and lacking compared to the other books of hers I've read. The Beauty and the Beast is one of the less thematically rich and engaging fairy tales, or at least one with a subtext harder to square with the feminist angles McKinley would pursue in her later work. After all, it's all about a virtuous girl choosing to redeem a man with the power of her love -- the tale that could describe any number of situations of abuse and gaslighting. McKinley's elaboration of the tale is breezy and pleasant enough in the early chapters, but once Beauty meets the Beast, I found myself bored and my interest nearly gone.
Monday, August 10, 2015
2015 read #41: Travels with Charley in Search of America by John Steinbeck.
Travels with Charley in Search of America by John Steinbeck
214 pages
Published 1962
Read from August 9 to August 10
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
Only my second exposure to Steinbeck, Travels is my first brush with his non-fiction. I read Of Mice and Men close to a decade ago, and recall little of substance from it. I was impressed by Steinbeck's Twainian wit and amused by his multi-page panegyric to the wonder, the promise, the optimism of the mobile home park. (There's a bit of retrofuturism you won't see revived, though Steinbeck's mobile home utopia lives on in the current fad for "off the grid" bubble homes.) Steinbeck's observations of segregationist "Cheerladies" is one of the horrors of the too-recent past, sanitized in favor of pictures of the bravery of the Black children escorted into school, that wider culture has been content to ignore and forget, and which go a long way toward explaining the sad reality of our present.
I'm still digesting this brief but vivid work; I lack the critical breadth of experience and fount of words to pick it apart in detail. Sufficient to say that I would readily consider Travels one of the better books I've read this year.
214 pages
Published 1962
Read from August 9 to August 10
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
Only my second exposure to Steinbeck, Travels is my first brush with his non-fiction. I read Of Mice and Men close to a decade ago, and recall little of substance from it. I was impressed by Steinbeck's Twainian wit and amused by his multi-page panegyric to the wonder, the promise, the optimism of the mobile home park. (There's a bit of retrofuturism you won't see revived, though Steinbeck's mobile home utopia lives on in the current fad for "off the grid" bubble homes.) Steinbeck's observations of segregationist "Cheerladies" is one of the horrors of the too-recent past, sanitized in favor of pictures of the bravery of the Black children escorted into school, that wider culture has been content to ignore and forget, and which go a long way toward explaining the sad reality of our present.
I'm still digesting this brief but vivid work; I lack the critical breadth of experience and fount of words to pick it apart in detail. Sufficient to say that I would readily consider Travels one of the better books I've read this year.
Sunday, August 9, 2015
2015 read #40: Doll Bones by Holly Black.
Doll Bones by Holly Black
247 pages
Published 2013
Read from August 7 to August 9
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
My brother and I didn't so much tell each other stories as come up with characters and bounce them off each other in improv comedy skits. I would go on to use the characters -- toned down versions, largely stripped of their adolescent-boy vulgarity and sexual depravity, but still recognizable -- in my earliest writings. Our characters began life as GI Joes: my main character Doug was the Freefall doll, while Randy's protagonist George was derived from Mainframe. The characters emerged in the process of playing a sort of graph-paper baseball with our dolls, then evolved over time, incorporating elements of slapstick cartoons and ultra-violence and Classical mythology until the former baseball superstars were immortal gods wielding whimsical, lecherous tyranny over their demesne. Writing stories down was my thing, begun when I was 9 or 10 years old, when Randy and I decided to transcribe one of our skits as it played out; he gave up after a page, while I (for example) cast my "sequel" to Jurassic Park with appropriate substitutions from our pantheon, years before I learned that fan-fiction was a thing. But whenever I doubted the central relationship in this book, in which the three 12 year old protagonists act out a protracted storytelling "game" with dolls and cardboard boxes standing in for pirates and queens and temples, I only had to remind myself how I got into the writing business -- and to recall that my brother, four years older than I, was still play-acting with our GI Joe dolls when I began writing out my stories.
I wanted to like this book. I thought I had read a promising short story or two by Holly Black, but I must have gotten her mixed up with the likes of Margo Lanagan or Kelly Link; I can't find a single reference to Black in my archived reviews, and I certainly wouldn't have encountered her before I began this reading project. But even without that to recommend her, the conceit of Doll Bones sounded nicely creepy, and the travails of adolescence and finding your friendships changed is always a productive mine for YA fantasy. Unfortunately, Doll Bones failed to distinguish itself on either front, neither especially creepy nor memorable and affecting. It goes through the motions, what with the big accusatory scene in which friendships are questioned right as the quest reaches its breaking point, doing its thing efficiently but without much impact. Plus there's the implausibility of three kids stealing a sailboat in broad daylight and noodling it down the Ohio River. I dunno, for a book revolving around a possibly-haunted doll possibly made from a little girl's bones, that just struck me as too far-fetched.
247 pages
Published 2013
Read from August 7 to August 9
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
My brother and I didn't so much tell each other stories as come up with characters and bounce them off each other in improv comedy skits. I would go on to use the characters -- toned down versions, largely stripped of their adolescent-boy vulgarity and sexual depravity, but still recognizable -- in my earliest writings. Our characters began life as GI Joes: my main character Doug was the Freefall doll, while Randy's protagonist George was derived from Mainframe. The characters emerged in the process of playing a sort of graph-paper baseball with our dolls, then evolved over time, incorporating elements of slapstick cartoons and ultra-violence and Classical mythology until the former baseball superstars were immortal gods wielding whimsical, lecherous tyranny over their demesne. Writing stories down was my thing, begun when I was 9 or 10 years old, when Randy and I decided to transcribe one of our skits as it played out; he gave up after a page, while I (for example) cast my "sequel" to Jurassic Park with appropriate substitutions from our pantheon, years before I learned that fan-fiction was a thing. But whenever I doubted the central relationship in this book, in which the three 12 year old protagonists act out a protracted storytelling "game" with dolls and cardboard boxes standing in for pirates and queens and temples, I only had to remind myself how I got into the writing business -- and to recall that my brother, four years older than I, was still play-acting with our GI Joe dolls when I began writing out my stories.
I wanted to like this book. I thought I had read a promising short story or two by Holly Black, but I must have gotten her mixed up with the likes of Margo Lanagan or Kelly Link; I can't find a single reference to Black in my archived reviews, and I certainly wouldn't have encountered her before I began this reading project. But even without that to recommend her, the conceit of Doll Bones sounded nicely creepy, and the travails of adolescence and finding your friendships changed is always a productive mine for YA fantasy. Unfortunately, Doll Bones failed to distinguish itself on either front, neither especially creepy nor memorable and affecting. It goes through the motions, what with the big accusatory scene in which friendships are questioned right as the quest reaches its breaking point, doing its thing efficiently but without much impact. Plus there's the implausibility of three kids stealing a sailboat in broad daylight and noodling it down the Ohio River. I dunno, for a book revolving around a possibly-haunted doll possibly made from a little girl's bones, that just struck me as too far-fetched.
Friday, August 7, 2015
2015 read #39: After London by Richard Jefferies.
After London, or Wild England by Richard Jefferies
312 pages
Published 1885
Read from August 4 to August 7
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
"The old men say their fathers told them that soon after the fields were left to themselves a change began to be visible. It became green everywhere in the first spring, after London ended, so that all the country looked alike." That ranks up there among the very best opening "hooks" in Victorian speculative fiction -- perhaps not quite equal to The War of the Worlds, but without a doubt powerful and intriguing. The moment I read it I knew I wanted to know everything that followed.
Unforunately, H.G. Wells was ahead of his time in terms of structuring scientific romances and integrating story with imaginative ideas. Jefferies spends his first five chapters laying out the geography and anthropology of his changed England, guided perhaps by the model of Classical historians. His hero is introduced in a sound sleep while our omniscient future-historian narrator describes all the furnishings in his room. Jefferies squanders the novelty of his setting on a sort of medieval romance, most reminiscent to me of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The White Company, though Jefferies uses his setup to emphasise the squalor and tyranny of feudal society. Despite adherence to the race theory of his time, Jefferies advances a clearly anti-aristocratic message, hinting at how little separates the disparities of class and wealth in Victorian times from the barbarous, autocratic warlordism and debt slavery of his post-collapse England.
This message doesn't gel particularly well with Jefferies' nascent environmentalism, which contrasts the woodsy idyll of the early scene-setting chapters with the poisonous effluvia of decaying London. Perhaps the thematic link between "nature good, city bad" and "humans in the depopulated countryside will revert to barbarism and feudal slavery" is simple misanthropy. Jefferies lavishes his depopulated England with glowing descriptions of fish and fowl and verdant forests; the human marauders intruding upon these Edenic scenes bring their own low-minded violence and despotism with them.
After London's primary appeal is the novelty of its precociously postapocalyptic setting. The story, prose, and characters are uninspired, at best, and Jefferies' social and environmental messages are somewhat muddled, perhaps even superficially contradictory. As a historical curiosity, it's certainly worth a read. But it never lives up to the evocative hook of its opening lines.
312 pages
Published 1885
Read from August 4 to August 7
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
"The old men say their fathers told them that soon after the fields were left to themselves a change began to be visible. It became green everywhere in the first spring, after London ended, so that all the country looked alike." That ranks up there among the very best opening "hooks" in Victorian speculative fiction -- perhaps not quite equal to The War of the Worlds, but without a doubt powerful and intriguing. The moment I read it I knew I wanted to know everything that followed.
Unforunately, H.G. Wells was ahead of his time in terms of structuring scientific romances and integrating story with imaginative ideas. Jefferies spends his first five chapters laying out the geography and anthropology of his changed England, guided perhaps by the model of Classical historians. His hero is introduced in a sound sleep while our omniscient future-historian narrator describes all the furnishings in his room. Jefferies squanders the novelty of his setting on a sort of medieval romance, most reminiscent to me of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The White Company, though Jefferies uses his setup to emphasise the squalor and tyranny of feudal society. Despite adherence to the race theory of his time, Jefferies advances a clearly anti-aristocratic message, hinting at how little separates the disparities of class and wealth in Victorian times from the barbarous, autocratic warlordism and debt slavery of his post-collapse England.
This message doesn't gel particularly well with Jefferies' nascent environmentalism, which contrasts the woodsy idyll of the early scene-setting chapters with the poisonous effluvia of decaying London. Perhaps the thematic link between "nature good, city bad" and "humans in the depopulated countryside will revert to barbarism and feudal slavery" is simple misanthropy. Jefferies lavishes his depopulated England with glowing descriptions of fish and fowl and verdant forests; the human marauders intruding upon these Edenic scenes bring their own low-minded violence and despotism with them.
After London's primary appeal is the novelty of its precociously postapocalyptic setting. The story, prose, and characters are uninspired, at best, and Jefferies' social and environmental messages are somewhat muddled, perhaps even superficially contradictory. As a historical curiosity, it's certainly worth a read. But it never lives up to the evocative hook of its opening lines.
Tuesday, August 4, 2015
2015 read #38: The Philosopher Kings by Jo Walton.
The Philosopher Kings by Jo Walton
348 pages
Published 2015
Read from July 26 to August 4
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
About two-thirds of the way through The Philosopher Kings, a single paragraph tantalizes with a glimpse at a better, more interesting novel. The god Apollo (one of the narrators, incarnated in human form as a lad named Pythias and abducted to the Just City when he was 10) reminisces about a time when he met his brother Dionysios at a nightclub in the last days of Weimar Berlin. "He was dressed in black leather, topped off with a leopardskin scarf"; they danced together to "Summertime," "cheek to cheek, in that crowded little underground room on the desperate edge of destruction, amid the smoke that was like, and not like, the smoke of sacrifice...." I've always wanted an urban fantasy novel or series set in Weimar Berlin. I had never known, until I read that paragraph, that the book I wanted to read would be about the Classical Olympian gods mingling with humanity in the cabarets and attempting "to save as many as we could, in the teeth of Fate and Necessity." It was only a single paragraph, but it left me profoundly disappointed that I could never get that novel now, having seen its premise thrown away on a flashback, spent in a single paragraph. Though if Jo Walton ever wanted to expand the paragraph into a daring YA series, I would probably never complain about her books again.
Among Others remains among my favorite fantasy novels, and easily one of my favorite books of all time. That's a weight of expectation for Walton's other books to live up to, for sure, but nonetheless I have been consistently disappointed by how... average Walton's novels have been. The Philosopher Kings, like The Just City before it, is a vehicle for exploring important and topical themes: consent, autonomy, and equal significance in City, free choice in the face of outside forces and people trying to make your life "better" in Kings. And like in City, Kings at times feels like a didactic playlet or Very Special Episode rather than a novel with a cohesive storyline, stopping the flow for assorted characters to debate and discuss the very important lesson of the week. City has the edge over Kings thanks to the strength of its central cast; within four pages, Kings offs one of City's narrators and replaces her with a fifteen year old, Arete, who feels like a refugee from a breezy but entertaining YA series about the half-mortal children of gods. (Never having read the Rick Riordan books, I can't compare the two.) Other new characters are scarcely fleshed out at all; Arete's various half brothers have one character trait apiece, while Kebes, a much more ambiguous character for much of City (at least until he rapes Simmea near the end), becomes a stereotypical fanatic who skins heretics alive in his breakaway republic.
The plot, too, does little and goes nowhere: breakaway cities are stealing art from the Just City and people are dying in the raids, until Apollo/Pythias reaches an epiphany about being human and writes a song that makes everyone cry and make peace forever and ever. There's also a sea voyage so we can meet Kebes and his rival version of utopia, which really serves no purpose beyond padding out the theme of choice, with examples of refugees rescued from the horrors of Bronze Age warfare, only to become near-slaves in Kebes' pseudo-Roman cities and strongly encouraged to convert to his conception of Christianity.
The Philosopher Kings isn't terrible -- there are occasional moments that make the rest worthwhile -- but in terms of structure and character, it's probably my least favorite effort to date by Walton.
348 pages
Published 2015
Read from July 26 to August 4
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
About two-thirds of the way through The Philosopher Kings, a single paragraph tantalizes with a glimpse at a better, more interesting novel. The god Apollo (one of the narrators, incarnated in human form as a lad named Pythias and abducted to the Just City when he was 10) reminisces about a time when he met his brother Dionysios at a nightclub in the last days of Weimar Berlin. "He was dressed in black leather, topped off with a leopardskin scarf"; they danced together to "Summertime," "cheek to cheek, in that crowded little underground room on the desperate edge of destruction, amid the smoke that was like, and not like, the smoke of sacrifice...." I've always wanted an urban fantasy novel or series set in Weimar Berlin. I had never known, until I read that paragraph, that the book I wanted to read would be about the Classical Olympian gods mingling with humanity in the cabarets and attempting "to save as many as we could, in the teeth of Fate and Necessity." It was only a single paragraph, but it left me profoundly disappointed that I could never get that novel now, having seen its premise thrown away on a flashback, spent in a single paragraph. Though if Jo Walton ever wanted to expand the paragraph into a daring YA series, I would probably never complain about her books again.
Among Others remains among my favorite fantasy novels, and easily one of my favorite books of all time. That's a weight of expectation for Walton's other books to live up to, for sure, but nonetheless I have been consistently disappointed by how... average Walton's novels have been. The Philosopher Kings, like The Just City before it, is a vehicle for exploring important and topical themes: consent, autonomy, and equal significance in City, free choice in the face of outside forces and people trying to make your life "better" in Kings. And like in City, Kings at times feels like a didactic playlet or Very Special Episode rather than a novel with a cohesive storyline, stopping the flow for assorted characters to debate and discuss the very important lesson of the week. City has the edge over Kings thanks to the strength of its central cast; within four pages, Kings offs one of City's narrators and replaces her with a fifteen year old, Arete, who feels like a refugee from a breezy but entertaining YA series about the half-mortal children of gods. (Never having read the Rick Riordan books, I can't compare the two.) Other new characters are scarcely fleshed out at all; Arete's various half brothers have one character trait apiece, while Kebes, a much more ambiguous character for much of City (at least until he rapes Simmea near the end), becomes a stereotypical fanatic who skins heretics alive in his breakaway republic.
The plot, too, does little and goes nowhere: breakaway cities are stealing art from the Just City and people are dying in the raids, until Apollo/Pythias reaches an epiphany about being human and writes a song that makes everyone cry and make peace forever and ever. There's also a sea voyage so we can meet Kebes and his rival version of utopia, which really serves no purpose beyond padding out the theme of choice, with examples of refugees rescued from the horrors of Bronze Age warfare, only to become near-slaves in Kebes' pseudo-Roman cities and strongly encouraged to convert to his conception of Christianity.
The Philosopher Kings isn't terrible -- there are occasional moments that make the rest worthwhile -- but in terms of structure and character, it's probably my least favorite effort to date by Walton.
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