Tuesday, September 29, 2015

2015 read #56: Dawn by Octavia E. Butler.

Dawn by Octavia E. Butler
249 pages
Published 1987
Read from September 26 to September 29
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

I kept delaying this one because it begins my final trilogy of Octavia E. Butler novels. Once I finish Adulthood Rites and Imago sometime next month, I'll only have the short story collection Bloodchild, and then I'll have read every book Butler ever wrote. (Aside from Survivor, which apparently so dissatisfied Butler that she kept it out of print, and now costs $90 used on Amazon.) Which is a sad milestone I'd like to put off if I could. But it's also kind of silly to avoid reading a major chunk of an author's career out of sentimental reasons. So here we are.

My thoughts on Dawn are ambiguous and conflicting, as I'm sure Butler intended. I was repulsed less by the ostensible body horror of aliens manipulating one's brain chemistry and genotype, which sounded pretty cool if I'm being honest (I don't have a single "Keep my humanity intact!" bone in my body), but the iffy way Butler portrays how the aliens ignore verbal consent. There are two scenes of near-rape between human survivors, which are unequivocally presented as Bad Things people should not do to one another. But when the ooloi step in with their neural manipulators and sensory organs and override verbal refusals because human characters' bodies say something else, in literal "I know what you really want" interactions, I'm not sure how to interpret the scenes, or for that matter how Butler intended the scenes to be read. I'm pretty sure some measure of discomfort is intended, with the two attempted sexual assaults a consciously placed point of comparison, but unlike human-on-human dominance and aggression, it feels like the manipulations of the Oankali are meant to be seen as both good and bad, neither wholly positive nor entirely negative.

The rest of the book is quite good, as far as alien contact scenarios go -- in other words, this is far from my favorite subgenre (which is why, of all Butler's novels, I'm reading these last), but Butler makes it interesting and somewhat fresh.

Saturday, September 26, 2015

2015 read #55: Briar Rose by Jane Yolen.

Briar Rose by Jane Yolen
190 pages
Published 1992
Read September 26
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

I was unduly proud of myself when I sussed out a connection between this series of "Adult Fantasy" novels (The Fairy Tale Series, created by Terri Windling) and the annual anthology collection begun in 1988 by Windling and her frequent editorial collaborator, Ellen Datlow. The connection isn't that hard to discern; in addition to the direction of Windling, the series (or at least this installment) features the cover art of Thomas Canty, perhaps the artist of late '80s/early '90s Romantic fantasy covers, and has an introduction by Windling, who earnestly (and rather quaintly, from the perspective of fantasy-rich 2015, when seemingly every cable network is pushing its own adult fantasy "prestige" series) makes a case for fairy tales as a mature and adult and grown-up and not at all childish medium. The clincher was the inclusion of a bibliography of "recommended reading," listing not only the other titles in this series (which, naturally, I jotted down in my to-read list) but also chapbooks and original anthologies and works of non-fiction dealing with the lore of faery. That was so in-line with the Datlow-Windling Year's Best Fantasy methodology that I could almost imagine that this series was a direct editorial off-shoot or progeny of that anthology, despite not having read the intervening volumes of the collection.

As for Briar Rose as a book, I found it amply competent, though as with C. J. Koch's The Doubleman, praised to Fairyland and back in one of the interminable introductions to the 1988 anthology, I personally wouldn't classify it as a work of fantasy. Instead Briar Rose is literary fiction borrowing imagery from the fairy tale of "Sleeping Beauty" as a sort of scaffolding for a tale of the Holocaust and of incorporating its unspeakable horrors into modern memory and understanding of the past. Regrettably, I've read little that touches upon the Holocaust (a deficit I aim to remedy), so I can't compare Briar Rose to any other attempt to make sense of it through fiction. The most I can say is that it was a good effort that worked well for the most part, without overthrowing my heart with literary brilliance.

2015 read #54: Earth Abides by George R. Stewart.

Earth Abides by George R. Stewart
312 pages
Published 1949
Read from September 22 to September 25
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

I got to thinking about a pair of contradictory attitudes I hold. On one hand I consciously abhor the sort of self-satisfied sociopathy young males in our culture (and Republican voters of every age and gender) cherish, the Randian delusion that I am an enlightened, important being in the midst of sheep. On the other, I have to admit to being something of a self-satisfied elitist myself: Look at all these ignorant beings around me who never notice the sky or the trees or the rocks underfoot, and have no concept of time and space and the scale of existence. The former aspect of my outlook found Earth Abides' thematic and narrative through-line that not all human beings can think or lead or create rather troublesome. The latter part of me remembered that most people are pretty dull, at least to all outside appearances, and reluctantly agreed that a random pool of survivors from a globally lethal pandemic wouldn't behave all that differently, in all probability, from Stewart's depiction. Perhaps I can resolve my internal conflict, at least in terms of this book, by rejecting all notions of inborn ability rooted on gender and racial constructs and class, and citing sociological and psychological data on how it's the way you were raised that largely determines your abilities and outlook, rather than some icky Randian chosen-one narrative.

The first third or so of this book, which begins with a variant on the proverbial "waking up in an abandoned hospital" device (and possibly invented it for this type of global depopulation narrative, for all I know) and follows our hero Ish through the first days and weeks of discovering the aftermath of the contagion, is good stuff. The wires hanging up the scenery are a bit obvious -- you can tell Stewart really, really wanted to show off his ideas of how each region of the country would appear after 99.999% of humanity got wiped out -- but it worked for me. The ending, a brief coda which sees our now superannuated survivor, "the Last American," observing what his little Tribe has become in the succeeding three generations, is also quite evocative, making me long for a sequel of some sort to explore this future society in greater depth. The stretch in between, however, gets dull and repetitive at times, as our hero spends much of his time in his own head, worrying at problems he thinks no one else around him is intellectually inclined to discuss with him (or capable of grasping, for that matter). The philosophical meat here, whether "man" pushes back more at his surroundings or his surroundings push more against him, is a basic rhetorical question in sociology, and I never felt that Stewart gave his own answer sufficiently well, given how many times it gets chewed in Ish's ruminations.

So, here we have about half of a quite good book, bookending a rather dry and directionless middle. Earth Abides is interesting as one of the earliest examples of the post-apocalyptic narrative -- I only know of After London and Mary Shelley's even older The Last Man coming before this one, though I really should have googled for others before publishing this review. Oh well. I'll google it later and give myself some more things to add to my to-read list.

Tuesday, September 22, 2015

2015 read #53: The Darkest Part of the Forest by Holly Black.

The Darkest Part of the Forest by Holly Black
328 pages
Published 2015
Read from September 18 to September 22
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

Comparing and contrasting books with vaguely similar works I'd reviewed before seems to be my default rhetorical device these days. In that spirit, the obvious parallel to be drawn here, at least in the early chapters, is with the fantasy output of Michael Swanwick. If The Hunger Games is babby's first 1984, then Black's scene-setting, with small-town high school students getting drunk and breaking bottles over the casket of a sleeping faery prince, is like babby's first The Iron Dragon's Daughter, mixed with a soupçon of "The Edge of the World" (reviewed here). Black's fey tourist trap (however literal that might be) lacks the near-Soviet nihilism of Swanwick's milieu, but also feels closer in spirit to the old-time faery lore I love so well, rather than just search-and-replacing modern social ills with magical equivalents (which was one reason The Iron Dragon's Daughter was, for me, an almost-classic, rather than a mindblowing masterpiece, as it possibly should have been).

Once the setting is established, The Darkest Part of the Forest shifts away from that Swanwickian flavor and, to my mind at least, settles into a more conventional YA fantasy mold, albeit a pleasingly progressive sort of YA in which the central protagonist is a girl who likes to kiss lots of different boys, and her brother is matter-of-factly gay, and high school kids drink and curse a lot. (It is implied, unfortunately, that the only reason the girl makes out with lots of boys is her parents' neglect and absentee habits.) The book as a whole is satisfying, full of winsome touches and humor, though the emotional beats lacked punch, I felt, and the action scenes were a bit on the choppy side. The setting was perhaps the most memorable facet of the book, and that, of course, was pretty much just another variation on the modern fantasy interpretation of the Unseelie Court, a very New England-ish spin on the concept that could be compared to the witch-tourism of Blithe Hollow in the movie ParaNorman. If, you know, I were the sort of reviewer to shoehorn random comparisons into my reviews.

And no, it hasn't escaped me that this is the sixth book in a row to receive a mildly positive, I-liked-it-but-won't-commit-to-loving it grade of three and a half stars. It's all arbitrary anyway.

Friday, September 18, 2015

2015 read #52: The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller.

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
378 pages
Published 2012
Read from September 17 to September 18
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

The obvious point of comparison here, in my (limited) reading experience, is Maria McCann's excellent As Meat Loves Salt, another historical romance with a gay couple at its heart. McCann's masterwork is more ambitious, couched in marvelously fluent prose suggestive of (but not overwhelmed by) the English usage of its time, its narrator a tragic and violent antihero who nonetheless remains sympathetic throughout most of his self-destructive arc. Miller's debut is "safe" in comparison, built around one of the classical romances of antiquity (regardless of how Homer may have intended their relationship to be understood), and her narrator Patroclus, though caught in a love doomed by fate and prophecy as well as Achilles' tragic nature, is himself a model of a sympathetic romantic lead, made an outsider by upbringing and circumstance but fundamentally a relatable reader proxy. Miller's prose never quite reaches the exquisite heartbreak pitch of McCann at her best, but is satisfyingly sensuous and moving as needed. Certain episodes can feel less than fully fleshed out; Miller breezes through the instruction of Chiron as if it were a brief woodsy idyll rather than suggesting the ancient strangeness of Chiron's existence and identity, and while she attempts to portray Thetis as an uncanny, other-than-human being, none of the mythological elements really clicked for me, spoiled as I am by a wealth of excellent otherworldly fantasy. Nonetheless, this was a novel of above-average competence, even if it doesn't quite aspire to (or reach) the heights of my rather arbitrary point of comparison.

Thursday, September 17, 2015

2015 read #51: The Faithful Executioner by Joel F. Harrington.

The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century by Joel F. Harrington
256 pages
Published 2013
Read from September 15 to September 17
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

The understandable (but nonetheless frustrating) tendency among historians and other social scientists is to tease out any number of speculations and possible interpretations from thin skeins of evidence. Naturally, we want to build up as full a picture as possible from the primary sources at hand, but this almost guarantees that the resulting narrative will say more about our own (or at least the author's) values and cultural assumptions than it does about the worldview of the historical subject. Harrington stresses the "empathy" and "disgust" alternately discernible in the laconic, otherwise impersonal journal of Meister Frantz Schmidt, executioner for the city of Nuremburg in the sixteenth century, emotional responses Harrington uses to shore up his depiction of Schmidt as a man obsessed with honor (personal and familial) and social status. But Harrington surmises Schmidt's visceral reactions based on the number of words and amount of detail Schmidt devotes in his journal to each of the punishments he notates, e.g. Schmidt was appalled by breaches of the social contract in cases wherein servants rob their masters or destitute women kill their newborns. This is perhaps not wholly inaccurate, but as far as interpretive methodologies go, it seems especially flimsy, and Harrington's "honor and shame" storyline is rather simplistic. Hitching the interpretive narrative to one conceptual through-line is common enough, in academic works ranging from doctoral dissertations to popular paperback histories, but it is less than satisfying.

The Faithful Executioner makes up for its lack of nuance (which, admittedly, is largely concomitant with the lack of primary sources) by examining several fascinating and extremely underrepresented topics: the life and aspirations of common people, the activities and words of the underclass, and (let's be honest) the salacious details of long ago crime. Harrington's prose is dry but readable. I would have appreciated something like an appendix translating Schmidt's writings without Harrington's selective quotation, which perhaps could have bolstered what I felt were Harrington's more tenuous claims of Schmidt's perceptions and reactions (or perhaps not).

Tuesday, September 15, 2015

2015 read #50: The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
213 pages
Published 1999
Read September 15
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

If Jo Walton's Among Others is as close to a narrative of my own teen years as I've ever encountered in fiction (albeit seen through a genre filter), The Perks of Being a Wallflower is pretty much an examination of what I might have been like had I actually gone to high school. The correspondence between teenage me and epistolary narrator Charlie isn't as exact as it was between me and Walton's narrator Mori -- if anything, Charlie was far more outgoing, socially skilled, and eager for new experiences than I was at his age. You might say I would have been more of a wallflower than Charlie. I certainly wouldn't have tried LSD at a party, I have never been tempted to smoke cigarettes, and at 32 years old, I've yet to try weed (though I have no firm personal policy against it). But I related to Charlie's social confusion and tendency to observe from the side of things, and to sacrifice his own desires out of some misguided idea of friendship.

I liked how Charlie's prose style improved somewhat after his initial "letters," though I might ask if it improved enough, realistically speaking, given that he was taking an intensive English class and writing regularly (letters and essays both) for a year. But that's a small quibble. I was left somewhat unsatisfied by how on-the-nose some of the plot twists and psychological revelations were (multiple characters have internalized various mental pathologies as a result of childhood molestation), but this is a YA book from the tail end of the '90s, so that's to be expected, really. I do want to take the time to praise Chbosky for even talking about molestation (not to mention condemning rape, emphasizing consent, and normalizing homosexuality) in a YA book from the '90s. It wasn't that long ago, but in terms of sexual identity and acceptance, 1999 may as well have been in another millennium. (Not my best witticism, sorry about that. I haven't been sleeping well in recent weeks.)

2015 read #49: Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria by Noo Saro-Wiwa.

Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria by Noo Saro-Wiwa
311 pages
Published 2012
Read from September 10 to September 14
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

I know next to nothing about Nigeria. I know of Shell Oil's corruption and the pollution in the Niger Delta. I have a simplistic notion of Delta natives struggling against an all-powerful international corporation to save their homes, their livelihoods, and their health. I have an even sketchier picture of a long series of corrupt presidents and dictators and military coups going back to independence from the UK. Before the British, all I have to go on is a series of barely remembered masks and statues and bronzes seen in the Met, all blurred together under a mental "West African" label. In short, I know much more about Nigeria than most White Americans do, but my store of knowledge has never inched above pathetic.

Looking for Transwonderland is a hybrid between the memoir of a woman raised in England revisiting Nigeria many years after the political murder of her activist father, and a comic tourist narrative of the frustrations and hidden charms of traveling the country. For the most part, Saro-Wiwa tends to avoid digging deep into the economic and political complexities of Nigeria, offering a general gloss on its system of profiteering and kickbacks, opportunities and potential lost to greed and cronyism, but I feel like I only gleaned about an article's worth of geopolitical and humanitarian insight from this entire volume. The tourism sections were interesting in their own right, and introduced me to locations and historical events that I enjoyed reading up on via Wikipedia. But never having read much in this genre (and that mostly limited to the internet), I don't have anything to compare it to, and not much to say about it.

Thursday, September 10, 2015

2015 read #48: The Martian by Andy Weir.

The Martian by Andy Weir
369 pages
Published 2014 (originally published as an ebook 2011)
Read from September 9 to September 10
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

I will say this for The Martian: I haven't been this hooked on turning pages since All Clear by Connie Willis, way back in January. Actually, considering that I read 369 pages in a matter of ten hours, this may be my fastest reading pace of the year so far (which, admittedly, isn't saying much -- it's been a bad year for my reading pace). Easy readability is not the same as high literature, however. Weir's narrative voice for his stranded astronaut's logs (and occasional verbal recordings, which mysteriously possess the same cadence and sentence structure the character uses in writing, which must make him a bore at parties) is the snarky geek voice familiar from a thousand tech and science blogs, which no doubt contributes to the internet's seemingly universal esteem for this book. Unfortunately, the astronaut's log gets interrupted by boilerplate scenes of technicians discovering problems and administrators holding meeting after meeting in conference rooms, scenes which felt wholly out of place, more suited for a Crichton-esque airport thriller. Perhaps those interruptions were added to "polish" Weir's self-published manuscript for the Big Time? They certainly felt tacked on, as did all the faceless technician and bureaucrat characters that fill out the scenes.

Nevertheless, what Weir produced here is an excellent example of its type, and I'm eager to see how thoroughly Matt Damon botches the central role in the movie version next month.

Wednesday, September 9, 2015

2015 read #47: Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury.

Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury
184 pages
Published 1957
Read from September 5 to September 9
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

When better to read a book of summer heats and magic and an idyll of small town childhood than in the grip of a September heatwave? I'm afraid I have nothing inspired to say in response to this "fixup" (as they used to call them in the science fiction industry) of short stories and vignettes, but when has a lack of anything interesting to say stood in the way of my reviews before? There's the obvious critique that Bradbury's idealized Midwest town is as white as its late summer skies, that this is a book of privileged upbringing and miraculous grandmothers and grand old houses, but depicting a monomyth of American childhood is sort of Bradbury's thing, and as one-dimensional as that depiction might be, he excels at it. The prose could be a type specimen of the adjective Bradburyesque, dripping with sensory juices and glints of brilliance. I was a little disappointed by how little of the fantastic made its way into these pages, but heck, that's as silly a critique as I ever put down on this blog.

Friday, September 4, 2015

2015 read #46: H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald.

H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
285 pages
Published 2014
Read from September 2 to September 4
Rating: ★★★★½ out of 5

There's something about the commingling of exquisitely perceptive nature writing with a raw, emotional, viscerally depicted memoir of personal grief and loss that sinks right into the quiet silt and calcified fossils in my heart. The most obvious parallel for this book is, of course, Wild by Cheryl Strayed: like Strayed, Macdonald is crushed under her grief for the loss of a parent and eventually immerses herself in a particular sense of wildness in order to reorder her life and fill the void. But Macdonald's prose is sensitive and keen in ways Strayed's good but not brilliant wording could never be, recalling Macdonald's peers in modern English nature prose-poetry, such as Robert Macfarlane and the late Roger Deakin. Macfarlane's grief at the passing of Deakin, in fact, makes his The Wild Places something of an exact analog. Macdonald, however, avoids the philosophical abstractions of Macfarlane and the contented noodling of Deakin to craft her own direct, incisive language of hurt and literal bewilderment. I have to go all the way back to the brilliance of Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost to find a proper comparison: another near-perfect examination of loss and landscape.

Macdonald additionally interweaves a fascinating portrayal of T. H. White, most pertinently the author of The Goshawk, whose psychological profile provides both parallels and contrasts for Macdonald's own emotional burdens. Her psychosexual analysis of White is possibly too pat -- White's bumbling mistreatment of his beloved Gos probably doesn't tie in quite so directly with White's childhood abuse and suppressed desires -- but Macdonald makes of it fascinating reading.

Wednesday, September 2, 2015

2015 read #45: Cannery Row by John Steinbeck.

Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
196 pages
Published 1945
Read from August 30 to September 2
Rating: out of 5

Having absorbed a vague idea of Steinbeck as a champion of the proletariat, I had invented a picture in my head of what Cannery Row would be, a sort of fishified follow-up to The Jungle, furnished with my own details of cannery thugs suppressing a movement to unionize and crooked California cops cracking heads among the Dustbowl spillover from the Central Valley. The actual Cannery Row, a humorous and low-key character study of genial vagrants, eccentrics, and casual wife-beaters living and drinking in the low-rent lots abutting the canneries, wasn't at all what I had imagined, but having read Travels with Charley, I can't say I was especially taken off-guard. I now have a general sense of what I might call the Steinbeckian mode, a wry Californian slant on the eccentric character sketch, also observable in the (much later, of course) below-poverty-line vignettes in Silver Jews songs. I appreciate any author who can furnish me with an eponymous adjective, especially when she or he gives a name to something I enjoy.

Planting Cannery Row firmly into its time period is a through-line of "woman-hating" (in the early twentieth century sense), a thesis examined by comparing the blissful bachelor life of Mack and his boys with the penultimate chapter, which depicts a gopher growing fat and happy in a choice burrowing spot on Cannery Row, but finding only trouble when he goes out to seek a mate, and finally abandoning his idyllic spot and risking traps in order to secure female companionship. That, too, seems Steinbeckian, to judge from Steinbeck's depictions of his final marriage in Travels ("She was a real woman, which meant that she was attracted to real men" -- a paraphrase). The most fascinating character by far, Doc adds the complication of love lost to this theme, perhaps the contrast of a subtler, more educated, more introverted mind approaching the problem of what constitutes happiness in life.