The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt by Toby Wilkinson
509 pages
Published 2010
Read from October 2 to October 19
Rating: 3 out of 5
An incident early in this book illustrates the dangers of focusing your history tome on the deeds and concerns of kings rather than on the people whose labor actually does the hard business of creating history. Mere pages after briefly acknowledging the sheer misery and life-crushing demands of being a serf in ancient Egypt—squeezed between laboring for the monuments of the elite and having to pay the king rent for the very land they farm—Wilkinson adopts a rhetorical posture rooting for the god-kings during a period of weakened authority and social turmoil: "What the state needed was another strong leader in the mold of Narmer, someone with the charisma, strength, and determination to rebuild the edifice of power before all was lost.... Ancient Egyptian civilization may never have progressed beyond its formative stage, may never have developed its distinctive pyramids, temples, and tombs, had it not been for [Khasekhem,] the last ruler of the Second Dynasty...." Khasekhem committed his land and his people to three millennia of forced labor and brutal autocracy, but hey, at least he saved the pyramids, guys!
To his credit, Wilkinson peppers his kingly narrative with scenes from the lives of the commonfolk, on those rare occasions when those scenes are preserved—usually whenever someone works their way up from the lower ranks into the inner circle of the pharaohs, maybe once a Dynasty or so. But these interludes barely intrude upon the lists of kings and temples, priests and generals, the privileged figureheads whose deeds and misdeeds comprise the bulk of Wilkinson's narrative. It is hard to give voice to the voiceless masses of history; only specialists in social history even seem inclined to try.
For what it sets out to do, The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt is interesting, readable, and informative. The popular concept of ancient Egypt, I discovered, mixes and matches themes and decorations from nearly three thousand years of history—the sacred cat and crocodile mummies alongside Tutankhamen, buried together in the pyramid of Khufu. It's reminiscent of the joke from Futurama when a historical reenactor portraying Ghandi says, "Let's disco dance, Hammurabi!" The bigger picture of slow growth and morphing of religious and physical culture over those millennia, responding to influxes from or expansion into Nubia, the Levant, and Libya, was a fascinating topic that Wilkinson explored at length (though usually framed by the god-state cult of pharaohnic rule).
As with so many other ambitious history tomes, this is a worthy read, though one that lacked much in the way of social history outside the halls of power.
Friday, October 19, 2018
Monday, October 8, 2018
2018 read #21: The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman.
The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman
331 pages
Published 2016
Read from October 7 to October 8
Rating: 3 out of 5
A rollicking but lightweight fantasy adventure seemingly conceived, designed, and executed with an eye to maximum nerd satisfaction. A secret Library existing outside of space and time opens a myriad of doors onto worlds throughout the multiverse, sending operatives out to obtain and spirit away unique works of fiction for preservation within its vast halls, its true purpose only hinted at. Eager Librarians (obsessed with books, just like YOU!) adventurously track down volumes, facing a whole Monster Manual's worth of gargoyles, hellhounds, vampires, werewolves, Fae, dragons, and zeppelins in order bring back even a single precious tome, protected and aided by their command over the linguistic underpinnings of reality itself. The main hero is snarky, her protégé is handsome and good at spin-kicks, and the plot does that thing where every chapter ends with a fresh new complication. Inevitably, there are multiple jokes about prescriptive grammar rules. It's fan-pleasing pulp in its most elemental form, and it's pretty good at achieving its modest aims.
331 pages
Published 2016
Read from October 7 to October 8
Rating: 3 out of 5
A rollicking but lightweight fantasy adventure seemingly conceived, designed, and executed with an eye to maximum nerd satisfaction. A secret Library existing outside of space and time opens a myriad of doors onto worlds throughout the multiverse, sending operatives out to obtain and spirit away unique works of fiction for preservation within its vast halls, its true purpose only hinted at. Eager Librarians (obsessed with books, just like YOU!) adventurously track down volumes, facing a whole Monster Manual's worth of gargoyles, hellhounds, vampires, werewolves, Fae, dragons, and zeppelins in order bring back even a single precious tome, protected and aided by their command over the linguistic underpinnings of reality itself. The main hero is snarky, her protégé is handsome and good at spin-kicks, and the plot does that thing where every chapter ends with a fresh new complication. Inevitably, there are multiple jokes about prescriptive grammar rules. It's fan-pleasing pulp in its most elemental form, and it's pretty good at achieving its modest aims.
Sunday, October 7, 2018
2018 read #20: Beneath the Sugar Sky by Seanan McGuire.
Beneath the Sugar Sky by Seanan McGuire
175 pages
Published 2017
Read from October 6 to October 7
Rating: 3 out of 5
CN: weight image issues, mention of eating disorders.
I wanted to like this book a lot more than I did. A sequel to McGuire's Every Heart a Doorway, returning to the Home for Wayward Children in the aftermath of events I won't spoil from that book, Sugar Sky brought back Kade, one of my favorite minor characters in the series, and introduced Cora, who had the potential to be a new favorite. Cora is a fat and athletic teen girl, traumatized by incessant bullying and societal disdain, who had found her ideal world through a doorway, a world where she was a heroic mermaid, a skillful swimmer well-insulated against the chill of the ocean. She could have been a lovely milestone for representation of fat, heroic girls. But ironically, existing as one viewpoint character among several in a brief volume, her inner life is reduced and squeezed into two dimensions. Her mental monologue dwells on being fat, on bullying, on pressure to lose weight, on eating disorders (and how lucky she was to avoid them), and on her athleticism in the swimming pool. Her entire character, while heroic and capable, is largely defined by her fatness, her entire existence used as a didactic tool by the author.
As a fat athlete myself, I was pumped when she used her knowledge of how she was perceived by others to her advantage in order defeat an evil queen, yet I also felt a tingle of tokenism, that this character was only there to be a representative and to teach a social lesson. This impression spilled out onto the other characters, including Kade, a transboy largely defined by how he was kicked out of his ideal world after discovering that he wasn't a girl, or Christopher, a Latinx boy who found his home in a Day of the Dead-themed universe of skeleton people and sugar skulls. Social lessons and didacticism are an important aspect of fiction, especially fantasy directed at the younger set; I'd rather read these characters a thousand times over than even one more generic Straight White Male Savior narrative. But it opens up complicated questions of representation vs tokenism, and who has the right to tell other people's stories in the first place.
Anyone I'd want to spend any time around would feel that fiction needs better representation, and feel even more strongly that fiction needs a broader, more diverse array of contributors. The most radical assessment is that over-represented social categories (say, straight white dudes) should voluntarily stop seeking publication, permitting under-represented demographics the opportunity to finally have a louder voice in the crowded marketplace. It's the logical extension of the argument that "The best thing an ally can do is shut up and yield the floor." I have no logical counter-argument to this, other than a sense that excluding voices to prioritize others is how we got in this mess in the first place, and it doesn't sit right with me. (The fact that I'm white and have both straight-passing and cis-passing privilege certainly feeds into my gut feeling here; I've wanted to be a published author since I was a kid, and it would be inconvenient if my political outlook was the final obstacle that meant I never got a book in print.) Less radical ideas include doing your research, creating characters with a rich inner life that involves more than "Wow, I sure am a fat teen girl!", and having members of the relevant communities read your output before you call it a day (after being fairly compensated for their time and labor, of course).
Ironically, as someone who is neither a fat teen girl, nor a transboy from Oklahoma, nor a Mexican American boy with a magic flute given to him by the Skeleton Princess, I'm not in any position to judge whether McGuire did a good job at representing these demographics in her fiction. My feeling is that these books in the Wayward Children series are just too damn short to offer both didactic social commentary and fully realized characterizations. If Cora had been permitted to have more going on in her mind than "I'm a powerful athlete but I'm fat and people only ever see me as fat," I (as a fellow "fatty-fatty-fat-fat" person) would have been more satisfied with her. I can only imagine that people of Mexican ancestry, or transboys, would feel similarly about Christopher and Kade.
The brevity of the book also contributes to how undercooked it can seem. To hopelessly mix the metaphor, the authorial scaffolding is far too obvious; the main band of characters spend far too much time asking questions whose sole purpose is to let McGuire dole out some backstory or world-building. Brevity has been a frustration of mine since the beginning of the series. Every Heart a Doorway probably would have been one of my favorite fantasy novels of the last few years had it only been double the length, whereas Beneath the Sugar Sky could have used a few more drafts as well as some space to let its characters breathe and be more than the author's teachable moments.
175 pages
Published 2017
Read from October 6 to October 7
Rating: 3 out of 5
CN: weight image issues, mention of eating disorders.
I wanted to like this book a lot more than I did. A sequel to McGuire's Every Heart a Doorway, returning to the Home for Wayward Children in the aftermath of events I won't spoil from that book, Sugar Sky brought back Kade, one of my favorite minor characters in the series, and introduced Cora, who had the potential to be a new favorite. Cora is a fat and athletic teen girl, traumatized by incessant bullying and societal disdain, who had found her ideal world through a doorway, a world where she was a heroic mermaid, a skillful swimmer well-insulated against the chill of the ocean. She could have been a lovely milestone for representation of fat, heroic girls. But ironically, existing as one viewpoint character among several in a brief volume, her inner life is reduced and squeezed into two dimensions. Her mental monologue dwells on being fat, on bullying, on pressure to lose weight, on eating disorders (and how lucky she was to avoid them), and on her athleticism in the swimming pool. Her entire character, while heroic and capable, is largely defined by her fatness, her entire existence used as a didactic tool by the author.
As a fat athlete myself, I was pumped when she used her knowledge of how she was perceived by others to her advantage in order defeat an evil queen, yet I also felt a tingle of tokenism, that this character was only there to be a representative and to teach a social lesson. This impression spilled out onto the other characters, including Kade, a transboy largely defined by how he was kicked out of his ideal world after discovering that he wasn't a girl, or Christopher, a Latinx boy who found his home in a Day of the Dead-themed universe of skeleton people and sugar skulls. Social lessons and didacticism are an important aspect of fiction, especially fantasy directed at the younger set; I'd rather read these characters a thousand times over than even one more generic Straight White Male Savior narrative. But it opens up complicated questions of representation vs tokenism, and who has the right to tell other people's stories in the first place.
Anyone I'd want to spend any time around would feel that fiction needs better representation, and feel even more strongly that fiction needs a broader, more diverse array of contributors. The most radical assessment is that over-represented social categories (say, straight white dudes) should voluntarily stop seeking publication, permitting under-represented demographics the opportunity to finally have a louder voice in the crowded marketplace. It's the logical extension of the argument that "The best thing an ally can do is shut up and yield the floor." I have no logical counter-argument to this, other than a sense that excluding voices to prioritize others is how we got in this mess in the first place, and it doesn't sit right with me. (The fact that I'm white and have both straight-passing and cis-passing privilege certainly feeds into my gut feeling here; I've wanted to be a published author since I was a kid, and it would be inconvenient if my political outlook was the final obstacle that meant I never got a book in print.) Less radical ideas include doing your research, creating characters with a rich inner life that involves more than "Wow, I sure am a fat teen girl!", and having members of the relevant communities read your output before you call it a day (after being fairly compensated for their time and labor, of course).
Ironically, as someone who is neither a fat teen girl, nor a transboy from Oklahoma, nor a Mexican American boy with a magic flute given to him by the Skeleton Princess, I'm not in any position to judge whether McGuire did a good job at representing these demographics in her fiction. My feeling is that these books in the Wayward Children series are just too damn short to offer both didactic social commentary and fully realized characterizations. If Cora had been permitted to have more going on in her mind than "I'm a powerful athlete but I'm fat and people only ever see me as fat," I (as a fellow "fatty-fatty-fat-fat" person) would have been more satisfied with her. I can only imagine that people of Mexican ancestry, or transboys, would feel similarly about Christopher and Kade.
The brevity of the book also contributes to how undercooked it can seem. To hopelessly mix the metaphor, the authorial scaffolding is far too obvious; the main band of characters spend far too much time asking questions whose sole purpose is to let McGuire dole out some backstory or world-building. Brevity has been a frustration of mine since the beginning of the series. Every Heart a Doorway probably would have been one of my favorite fantasy novels of the last few years had it only been double the length, whereas Beneath the Sugar Sky could have used a few more drafts as well as some space to let its characters breathe and be more than the author's teachable moments.
Saturday, October 6, 2018
2018 read #19: Alanna: The First Adventure by Tamora Pierce.
Alanna: The First Adventure (Song of the Lioness Book One) by Tamora Pierce
241 pages
Published 1983
Read from October 4 to October 6
Rating: 2 out of 5
I forget what drew my attention to this book. Someone mentioned it as a formative book during their childhood, but was it a friend? Some random person writing online? It was just a couple weeks ago, but who knows!
This is a book that shows its age. Its simplistic plot, derivative setting, and generic characters place it firmly in the late '70s and early '80s kids' fantasy tradition. Most dated of all is its second generation feminism. The titular main character is a girl in a feudal society, the scrappy daughter of a petty nobleman; she switches places with her twin brother in order to receive the training of a knight-to-be. She finds joy and fulfillment in masculine-coded activities—learning tactics and battle history, practicing the sword and discipline—and hates the fact that she was born a "silly" girl. She is sternly admonished by wise authority figures that the gods made her a girl, and she can no more change that than anything else about herself, but that being a girl and staying true to herself are both worthy endeavors. The message is clear: Feminine-coded things are silly, but a girl who likes masculine-coded things is special and kicks ass and is a worthy heroine, just so long as she always remembers the fact that she's a girl and doesn't blur her own understanding of her gender.
As with other YA books of its time, Alanna was perhaps best enjoyed by its intended audience around the time it was written. I'm sure it would have made a powerful impression on me had I read it in, say, 1991 rather than 2018. As it is, it's the sort of antique relic of early YA feminism that reminds us of how far social norms have come—and also, most depressingly, how far our society could slip back in these reactionary years.
241 pages
Published 1983
Read from October 4 to October 6
Rating: 2 out of 5
I forget what drew my attention to this book. Someone mentioned it as a formative book during their childhood, but was it a friend? Some random person writing online? It was just a couple weeks ago, but who knows!
This is a book that shows its age. Its simplistic plot, derivative setting, and generic characters place it firmly in the late '70s and early '80s kids' fantasy tradition. Most dated of all is its second generation feminism. The titular main character is a girl in a feudal society, the scrappy daughter of a petty nobleman; she switches places with her twin brother in order to receive the training of a knight-to-be. She finds joy and fulfillment in masculine-coded activities—learning tactics and battle history, practicing the sword and discipline—and hates the fact that she was born a "silly" girl. She is sternly admonished by wise authority figures that the gods made her a girl, and she can no more change that than anything else about herself, but that being a girl and staying true to herself are both worthy endeavors. The message is clear: Feminine-coded things are silly, but a girl who likes masculine-coded things is special and kicks ass and is a worthy heroine, just so long as she always remembers the fact that she's a girl and doesn't blur her own understanding of her gender.
As with other YA books of its time, Alanna was perhaps best enjoyed by its intended audience around the time it was written. I'm sure it would have made a powerful impression on me had I read it in, say, 1991 rather than 2018. As it is, it's the sort of antique relic of early YA feminism that reminds us of how far social norms have come—and also, most depressingly, how far our society could slip back in these reactionary years.
Wednesday, October 3, 2018
2018 read #18: Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanan McGuire.
Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanan McGuire
188 pages
Published 2017
Read from October 1 to October 3
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
McGuire's Every Heart a Doorway was one of my favorite recent fantasy reads, a too-brief book that stuck with me far longer than have many weightier tomes. It was set in a boarding school for girls (it is almost always girls) who had gone through magical doorways into fantasy worlds, then couldn't adjust back to mundane reality after their return. In my review I wrote, "The characters here were a delight—I wanted to learn everything about their worlds, their doorways, their stories." And lucky for us, McGuire went on to begin a series of prequels detailing the backstories and adventures of some of those very characters that I so loved.
I don't know why it's taken me well over a year to get around to reading Sticks and Bones, the first of these prequels. The character Jack had been one of my especial favorites in Doorway, and here was a tale of Jack and her sister Jill and the Gothic horror world they had grown to love and call their true home. Sometimes you pick up a book and the time isn't right for it. Sometimes you only read twenty-five books in two years because a con artist leveraged the fascistic underbelly of your country's political landscape to become an illegitimate president and it's all you can do sometimes to get out of bed in the morning anymore. Be that as it may, I've finally read Sticks and Bones, and it is delightful.
Well, mostly. The characterizations here (especially of Jill and Jack's parents) seem more suited to a fairy tale than a modern fantasy novel, little more than plot devices given names and mannerisms, but in a book like this, I suppose that's okay. I felt more let down by the denouement of a certain romantic subplot. I suppose it's something of a spoiler to confirm that the romantic subplot ends exactly the way one might expect in a Gothic tragedy, but the expectations of that trope are rooted in "fridging the female love interest to further the main character's plot," and in this particular instance also repeat the all-too-common (and problematic) practice of never letting the gay couple survive happily to the end of the book. It's hard to update the conventions of an old genre without unpacking some of that baggage, and Sticks and Bones might be just a tad too slender to address it as fully as it deserved.
188 pages
Published 2017
Read from October 1 to October 3
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
McGuire's Every Heart a Doorway was one of my favorite recent fantasy reads, a too-brief book that stuck with me far longer than have many weightier tomes. It was set in a boarding school for girls (it is almost always girls) who had gone through magical doorways into fantasy worlds, then couldn't adjust back to mundane reality after their return. In my review I wrote, "The characters here were a delight—I wanted to learn everything about their worlds, their doorways, their stories." And lucky for us, McGuire went on to begin a series of prequels detailing the backstories and adventures of some of those very characters that I so loved.
I don't know why it's taken me well over a year to get around to reading Sticks and Bones, the first of these prequels. The character Jack had been one of my especial favorites in Doorway, and here was a tale of Jack and her sister Jill and the Gothic horror world they had grown to love and call their true home. Sometimes you pick up a book and the time isn't right for it. Sometimes you only read twenty-five books in two years because a con artist leveraged the fascistic underbelly of your country's political landscape to become an illegitimate president and it's all you can do sometimes to get out of bed in the morning anymore. Be that as it may, I've finally read Sticks and Bones, and it is delightful.
Well, mostly. The characterizations here (especially of Jill and Jack's parents) seem more suited to a fairy tale than a modern fantasy novel, little more than plot devices given names and mannerisms, but in a book like this, I suppose that's okay. I felt more let down by the denouement of a certain romantic subplot. I suppose it's something of a spoiler to confirm that the romantic subplot ends exactly the way one might expect in a Gothic tragedy, but the expectations of that trope are rooted in "fridging the female love interest to further the main character's plot," and in this particular instance also repeat the all-too-common (and problematic) practice of never letting the gay couple survive happily to the end of the book. It's hard to update the conventions of an old genre without unpacking some of that baggage, and Sticks and Bones might be just a tad too slender to address it as fully as it deserved.
Monday, October 1, 2018
2018 read #17: The Age of the Horse by Susanna Forrest.
The Age of the Horse: An Equine Journey Through Human History by Susanna Forrest
370 pages
Published 2016
Read from September 22 to October 1
Rating: 4 out of 5
I think it's fair to say that this book taught me to love horses. Or at least to better understand those people who do love horses. I'd always viewed horses and horse people with lower-class skepticism, narrowing my eyes and making (possibly) unfair assumptions about anyone with the monetary resources to maintain an equine hobby. Through Forrest's sensitive, discerning prose and wide-ranging horse's-eye-view of our commensal history, I grew fond of the horse's profound empathy and heartbroken over my species' millennia of mistreatment and abuse of these sensitive animals. I feel no desire to enter a life of subsistence farming alongside a plowhorse, myself, but while reading Age of the Horse, I found myself wishing that we could democratize (which really means to socialize and to redistribute) access to horses. Not the sort of access that amounts to sticking your kid on a pony at a petting zoo, nor even the therapeutic post-traumatic riding covered in the final chapter, but something longer term, a richer emotional bond of patience and mutual benefit.
Oh well. An idle dream, like so much else that would do good in this world.
Most likely it was due to my own lack of reading practice these last two years, but at times I felt that Forrest's exquisitely turned phrases could get in the way of actually conveying her meaning. I often had to stop and reread sentences and grew only fuzzier each time I did so. Again, that's probably because my brain has gotten so slack of late. I also felt that the chapter exploring the horse's position in Chinese history strayed a bit in the direction of exoticism and otherizing, with its emphasis on the obscenely rich main beneficiaries of modern China's totalitarian capitalism and their obscene displays of wealth. (Why did the chapter on the superrich also have to be the chapter on China? I'm sure our own domestic superrich have their own baffling, alien quirks to quietly anthropologize.) Aside from that, Age of the Horse is simply lovely, full of the same gentle empathy that we could all stand to learn from Forrest's horses.
370 pages
Published 2016
Read from September 22 to October 1
Rating: 4 out of 5
I think it's fair to say that this book taught me to love horses. Or at least to better understand those people who do love horses. I'd always viewed horses and horse people with lower-class skepticism, narrowing my eyes and making (possibly) unfair assumptions about anyone with the monetary resources to maintain an equine hobby. Through Forrest's sensitive, discerning prose and wide-ranging horse's-eye-view of our commensal history, I grew fond of the horse's profound empathy and heartbroken over my species' millennia of mistreatment and abuse of these sensitive animals. I feel no desire to enter a life of subsistence farming alongside a plowhorse, myself, but while reading Age of the Horse, I found myself wishing that we could democratize (which really means to socialize and to redistribute) access to horses. Not the sort of access that amounts to sticking your kid on a pony at a petting zoo, nor even the therapeutic post-traumatic riding covered in the final chapter, but something longer term, a richer emotional bond of patience and mutual benefit.
Oh well. An idle dream, like so much else that would do good in this world.
Most likely it was due to my own lack of reading practice these last two years, but at times I felt that Forrest's exquisitely turned phrases could get in the way of actually conveying her meaning. I often had to stop and reread sentences and grew only fuzzier each time I did so. Again, that's probably because my brain has gotten so slack of late. I also felt that the chapter exploring the horse's position in Chinese history strayed a bit in the direction of exoticism and otherizing, with its emphasis on the obscenely rich main beneficiaries of modern China's totalitarian capitalism and their obscene displays of wealth. (Why did the chapter on the superrich also have to be the chapter on China? I'm sure our own domestic superrich have their own baffling, alien quirks to quietly anthropologize.) Aside from that, Age of the Horse is simply lovely, full of the same gentle empathy that we could all stand to learn from Forrest's horses.
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