The Electric State by Simon Stålenhag
141 pages
Published 2017
Read December 4
Rating: 4 out of 5
I hadn't known anything about Stålenhag's work aside from a vague impression formed by the covers of his books. I had a general idea that he painted vivid scenes of everyday life in bucolic settings juxtaposed with vast science-fictional machinery and mechanical horrors, but I thought his books were more or less themed coffee table works, full of artwork that would tell its story essentially without commentary. I haven't had the opportunity to handle his other two books yet, but The Electric State is very much not a wordless coffee table book.
The gruesome tale of civilization collapsing as its denizens escape into a virtual reality wouldn't be anything special on its own. Stålenhag's haunting and heartbreaking paintings, however, elevate the pedestrian cyberpunk tale of stillbirths and a nascent hive-mind in search of its organic god. Likewise, the context the words give to the paintings enhances them, filling the images with sounds and thoughts and tension. It is an effective storytelling combination, and it left me eager to seek out Stålenhag's other works.
Tuesday, December 4, 2018
Wednesday, November 21, 2018
2018 read #23: The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin.
The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin
468 pages
Published 2015
Read from November 6 to November 21
Rating: 3 out of 5 (see edit below)
As with other books that open N. K. Jemisin series, the beginning of The Fifth Season is overstuffed with worldbuilding, throwing the reader in at the deep end and overwhelming them with fantasy terminology and all the strange rules for how things work in this setting. I don't know whether The Fifth Season was more confusing than usual or if my attention span continues not to be what it used to be, but I had a hard time parsing enough about what was going on to care all that much about the characters or their end-of-the-world predicament, at least in the early going. Once the story stabilized and I got my bearings, the story itself became more grim and "shocking" than I would like, featuring murdered children and lobotomized children and children murdered so that they wouldn't be lobotomized.
468 pages
Published 2015
Read from November 6 to November 21
Rating: 3 out of 5 (see edit below)
As with other books that open N. K. Jemisin series, the beginning of The Fifth Season is overstuffed with worldbuilding, throwing the reader in at the deep end and overwhelming them with fantasy terminology and all the strange rules for how things work in this setting. I don't know whether The Fifth Season was more confusing than usual or if my attention span continues not to be what it used to be, but I had a hard time parsing enough about what was going on to care all that much about the characters or their end-of-the-world predicament, at least in the early going. Once the story stabilized and I got my bearings, the story itself became more grim and "shocking" than I would like, featuring murdered children and lobotomized children and children murdered so that they wouldn't be lobotomized.
(Edit: I happened to reread this review in 2023. I don't usually go back and edit my reviews, but I need to state for the record that the above paragraph demonstrates spectacularly bad reading comprehension on the part of my 2018 self. The shocking cruelty is one of the points of the book. As my privileged ass would only understand much later, this series was in large part an allegory for how the stolen labor and lives of enslaved African people was used to build and sustain the United States and the rest of the colonizing world. I want to go back and reread these books sometime. As it is, I'm guessing this book deserved something closer to 4 out of 5, had I actually understood Jemisin's point here.)
That said, it's a Jemisin novel, and for the most part, I enjoyed it. She builds fascinating settings, and her exploration of human (and not-quite-human) suffering and injustice in the face of environmental catastrophe is all too relevant.
That said, it's a Jemisin novel, and for the most part, I enjoyed it. She builds fascinating settings, and her exploration of human (and not-quite-human) suffering and injustice in the face of environmental catastrophe is all too relevant.
Friday, October 19, 2018
2018 read #22: The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt by Toby Wilkinson.
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.
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.
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.
Friday, September 21, 2018
2018 read #16: Mesopotamia by Gwendolyn Leick.
Mesopotamia: The Invention of the City by Gwendolyn Leick
315 pages
Published 2001
Read from September 10 to September 21
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
As a youngster, I had been enthralled by all the most ancient "civilizations," as they were defined by my brother's 6th grade social studies textbook: Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, the Yellow River Valley. Egypt was the easiest to learn more about, which led me into a period of Egyptomania up until my tween years, but this was strictly because Egypt is far more ingrained in our pop history than any of the other river valley agricultural regions. The only other place young Rick discovered "information" relating to the Indus Valley, for example, was in a book about the Bermuda Triangle, and to this day I have only read one book that covered ancient China in any detail (and what a disappointing read it was). As Leick herself puts it in her preface, of the ancient civilizations, "Only Egypt, which is for us almost entirely defined by its morbid obsession with life after death, has continued to fascinate the public.... The Mesopotamian peoples... with their less spectacular art and crumbling mudbrick ruins, have no comparable place in the public imagination."
Which is an outright shame. My undergraduate career almost steered me into a future amid the pre-urban agricultural milieu of the Neolithic period, thanks to a research paper on the site of Tell Sabi Abyad, and to this day I feel an urge to tell each and every person I know how freakin' cool it is that town-dwelling people, supplied only with stone tools, had an advanced administrative system based on stamp-seals and counting tokens, long before the development of metallurgy or written language. The lack of popular interest in the ancient history and prehistory of Southwest Asia baffles me. This is where so many plant crops and animals were domesticated! This is where (so far as we know) people started living in substantial, permanent towns! The modern world, for better or for worse (and there's a lot to be said for both extremes), would not exist without the cultures of the Fertile Crescent. Yet your proverbial Patty and Joe just wanna gawk at mummies.
Even my undergrad years didn't teach me much about historical (as opposed to prehistoric) Mesopotamia. Leick's Mesopotamia fills a vital gap in my education; I only wish it were longer, more vividly written, and better supplied with charts, tables, plans, and illustrations. Leick spends a lot of time describing ancient floorplans when a sketch map would convey it far more clearly. That's more the fault of the publisher, however, and the amount of labor and ink they were willing to pay for; Mesopotamia, alas, remains a niche interest in America, even after nearly two decades of direct colonial occupation of the region.
One thing I was amazed to learn: The earliest cities qua cities in Mesopotamia, as represented in Leick's chronological organizational scheme by Eridu, were far more egalitarian, even democratic, than pop history had ever told me. Women and men held positions in society far more equal than they would hold over the ensuing 5500 years of urban civilization. There was little differentiation visible arising from wealth inequality, either. In Leick's telling, the idea of a city began as a cooperative, mutualist affair—something none of my cultural anthropology courses touched on, with their tidy narrative that agriculture correlates with emerging disparities in wealth and gender. The inequalities we associate with, well, all of written history crept in gradually, but Eridu, at least, sounds wonderful—an example that should be known throughout the urban societies of today..
Mesopotamia is an important and revelatory history, not just of the Land Between the Rivers but of the emerging concept of the city itself as a social body. I'd love for a fully updated edition of it to come out, double the length, offering a more sweeping panorama of its vast subject (and, naturally, supplied with way more tables and floorplans). In its present form, it left me wanting far more.
315 pages
Published 2001
Read from September 10 to September 21
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
As a youngster, I had been enthralled by all the most ancient "civilizations," as they were defined by my brother's 6th grade social studies textbook: Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, the Yellow River Valley. Egypt was the easiest to learn more about, which led me into a period of Egyptomania up until my tween years, but this was strictly because Egypt is far more ingrained in our pop history than any of the other river valley agricultural regions. The only other place young Rick discovered "information" relating to the Indus Valley, for example, was in a book about the Bermuda Triangle, and to this day I have only read one book that covered ancient China in any detail (and what a disappointing read it was). As Leick herself puts it in her preface, of the ancient civilizations, "Only Egypt, which is for us almost entirely defined by its morbid obsession with life after death, has continued to fascinate the public.... The Mesopotamian peoples... with their less spectacular art and crumbling mudbrick ruins, have no comparable place in the public imagination."
Which is an outright shame. My undergraduate career almost steered me into a future amid the pre-urban agricultural milieu of the Neolithic period, thanks to a research paper on the site of Tell Sabi Abyad, and to this day I feel an urge to tell each and every person I know how freakin' cool it is that town-dwelling people, supplied only with stone tools, had an advanced administrative system based on stamp-seals and counting tokens, long before the development of metallurgy or written language. The lack of popular interest in the ancient history and prehistory of Southwest Asia baffles me. This is where so many plant crops and animals were domesticated! This is where (so far as we know) people started living in substantial, permanent towns! The modern world, for better or for worse (and there's a lot to be said for both extremes), would not exist without the cultures of the Fertile Crescent. Yet your proverbial Patty and Joe just wanna gawk at mummies.
Even my undergrad years didn't teach me much about historical (as opposed to prehistoric) Mesopotamia. Leick's Mesopotamia fills a vital gap in my education; I only wish it were longer, more vividly written, and better supplied with charts, tables, plans, and illustrations. Leick spends a lot of time describing ancient floorplans when a sketch map would convey it far more clearly. That's more the fault of the publisher, however, and the amount of labor and ink they were willing to pay for; Mesopotamia, alas, remains a niche interest in America, even after nearly two decades of direct colonial occupation of the region.
One thing I was amazed to learn: The earliest cities qua cities in Mesopotamia, as represented in Leick's chronological organizational scheme by Eridu, were far more egalitarian, even democratic, than pop history had ever told me. Women and men held positions in society far more equal than they would hold over the ensuing 5500 years of urban civilization. There was little differentiation visible arising from wealth inequality, either. In Leick's telling, the idea of a city began as a cooperative, mutualist affair—something none of my cultural anthropology courses touched on, with their tidy narrative that agriculture correlates with emerging disparities in wealth and gender. The inequalities we associate with, well, all of written history crept in gradually, but Eridu, at least, sounds wonderful—an example that should be known throughout the urban societies of today..
Mesopotamia is an important and revelatory history, not just of the Land Between the Rivers but of the emerging concept of the city itself as a social body. I'd love for a fully updated edition of it to come out, double the length, offering a more sweeping panorama of its vast subject (and, naturally, supplied with way more tables and floorplans). In its present form, it left me wanting far more.
Monday, September 10, 2018
2018 read #15: A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki.
A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
421 pages
Published 2013
Read from August 5 to September 10
Rating: 4 out of 5
A brilliant novel of heartbreaking immediacy and intensity, A Tale for the Time Being stumbles somewhat at the end, losing its emotional resonance in a morass of corny pop science.
Ozeki explores a plethora of fascinating themes: the tandem act of creation between author and reader; memory and time; Zen Buddhism and the transience of being; guilt and heroism; the cruelty of human beings in war as well as in junior high. A vaguely climatepunk atmosphere of living on the edge of things hangs over the chapters from the viewpoint of Ruth, a middle-aged writer who has lost her voice in the woodsy silence of the Pacific Rim. Far more moving are the chapters told from the perspective of Nao, a cynical and suicidal schoolgirl in Japan who writes the memoir of her "last days on earth" with a voice of brittle forced cheer. The two are joined by Ruth's discovery of Nao's book, mysteriously washed up on the beach with a bundle of letters, a diary written in French, and a kamikaze pilot's vintage watch.
The narrative is delightfully rich and complex, moving across time and perspectives from World War II to the aftermath of the Tōhoku tsunami. Ruth's chapters could verge on the self-indulgent, as authorial self-inserts usually do, but Nao's pained navigation of cultural dislocation, bullying, exploitation, and multiple generations of suicidal ideation was stunning in its affective power.
Like far too many literary authors, however, Ozeki was not content to let the mysteries of her tale remain shrouded in the fog of time, and dredged up one of the hokiest, most over-used clichés of science-fiction to "explain" what never needed to be explained. I'm talking about quantum mechanics and the many-worlds hypothesis. I remember getting one of my short stories rejected by a magazine in 1999, when I was 16 years old, because quantum mechanics and many-worlds were such hoary old-hat—fourteen years before the publication of Time Being. Perhaps like her namesake in this novel, Ruth became unmoored in her current reality and fetched up in an alternate universe where quantum multiplicity isn't the corniest plot device in the world. The ending thus set in motion by Schrödinger shenanigans felt unearned, not squaring with the emotional truth of Nao's story.
That isn't enough to ruin what is otherwise a magnificent and moving work.
421 pages
Published 2013
Read from August 5 to September 10
Rating: 4 out of 5
A brilliant novel of heartbreaking immediacy and intensity, A Tale for the Time Being stumbles somewhat at the end, losing its emotional resonance in a morass of corny pop science.
Ozeki explores a plethora of fascinating themes: the tandem act of creation between author and reader; memory and time; Zen Buddhism and the transience of being; guilt and heroism; the cruelty of human beings in war as well as in junior high. A vaguely climatepunk atmosphere of living on the edge of things hangs over the chapters from the viewpoint of Ruth, a middle-aged writer who has lost her voice in the woodsy silence of the Pacific Rim. Far more moving are the chapters told from the perspective of Nao, a cynical and suicidal schoolgirl in Japan who writes the memoir of her "last days on earth" with a voice of brittle forced cheer. The two are joined by Ruth's discovery of Nao's book, mysteriously washed up on the beach with a bundle of letters, a diary written in French, and a kamikaze pilot's vintage watch.
The narrative is delightfully rich and complex, moving across time and perspectives from World War II to the aftermath of the Tōhoku tsunami. Ruth's chapters could verge on the self-indulgent, as authorial self-inserts usually do, but Nao's pained navigation of cultural dislocation, bullying, exploitation, and multiple generations of suicidal ideation was stunning in its affective power.
Like far too many literary authors, however, Ozeki was not content to let the mysteries of her tale remain shrouded in the fog of time, and dredged up one of the hokiest, most over-used clichés of science-fiction to "explain" what never needed to be explained. I'm talking about quantum mechanics and the many-worlds hypothesis. I remember getting one of my short stories rejected by a magazine in 1999, when I was 16 years old, because quantum mechanics and many-worlds were such hoary old-hat—fourteen years before the publication of Time Being. Perhaps like her namesake in this novel, Ruth became unmoored in her current reality and fetched up in an alternate universe where quantum multiplicity isn't the corniest plot device in the world. The ending thus set in motion by Schrödinger shenanigans felt unearned, not squaring with the emotional truth of Nao's story.
That isn't enough to ruin what is otherwise a magnificent and moving work.
Tuesday, September 4, 2018
2018 read #14: From the Forest by Sara Maitland.
From the Forest: A Search for the Hidden Roots of Our Fairy Tales by Sara Maitland
354 pages
Published 2012
Read from August 5 to September 4
Rating: 3 out of 5
Once again I've let a few months go by without reading much of anything. When I began this book I was brimming with enthusiasm, finishing the first half within a couple days, but somewhere along the way my interest drained away, leaving the rest of the book something of a dry trudge. Anyone expecting a modern classic of British nature writing, along the lines of H is for Hawk, Wildwood, or The Wild Places, will be disappointed. Maitland's writing lacks the poetry of Macdonald's, Deakin's, and Macfarlane's, and From the Forest seems to have been edited in haste; lines repeat themselves paragraphs later, seemingly less for emphasis than for want of a polished draft.
Maitland's guiding thesis -- that the fairy tales we know arose from an ancient tradition of storytelling in the great Northern European forests, and reflect the mores and concerns of forest-dwelling life -- is flimsy. Successive chapters don't build up the thesis so much as repeat it in different contexts. One underlying flaw in her argument is the fact that, as a British author, she is writing about British forests yet using German folktales to illustrate her "forest culture" arguments. Traditional British folktales were largely lost before they could be recorded, but Maitland justifies using the Brothers Grimm by positing a sweeping pan-Germanic cultural continuity that includes Anglo-Saxon peoples, even though mainland Germanic and Anglo-Germanic cultures diverged some thirteen centuries ago. She treats the cultural contexts of the Grimm stories as interchangeable with the forest yeomanry of England, despite vastly different histories, modes of government, traditions, and notions of labor.
The perils of this sort of thinking become apparent when Maitland decries a culture in which young British children grow up without "blackberry" and "conker" in their Oxford Junior Dictionaries: "The child of the Oxford Junior Dictionary is an urban, deracinated technocrat, not so much multicultural as de-cultured." One can see what she was getting at, but coming as it does in a book embracing a myth of pan-Germanic cultural identity, it feels a bit iffy. Robert Macfarlane made the same point far more elegantly (and at greater length) in his Landmarks.
Maitland's retellings of the fairy tales themselves leave much to be desired. They are grim and gritty in the worst tradition of the 1990s. Seemingly every male point-of-view character, for instance, thinks of a female character as "that bitch." Her excursions into English and Scottish woodlands, on the other hand, are often interesting, segueing thematically into bygone aspects of life in the forests -- hunting, coppicing, mining, leisure -- and how they are practiced (or not) in modern times. I would have preferred a more focused book that explored the cultural histories and uses of supposedly "wild" British forests, perhaps with fairy tales relegated to their own chapter.
354 pages
Published 2012
Read from August 5 to September 4
Rating: 3 out of 5
Once again I've let a few months go by without reading much of anything. When I began this book I was brimming with enthusiasm, finishing the first half within a couple days, but somewhere along the way my interest drained away, leaving the rest of the book something of a dry trudge. Anyone expecting a modern classic of British nature writing, along the lines of H is for Hawk, Wildwood, or The Wild Places, will be disappointed. Maitland's writing lacks the poetry of Macdonald's, Deakin's, and Macfarlane's, and From the Forest seems to have been edited in haste; lines repeat themselves paragraphs later, seemingly less for emphasis than for want of a polished draft.
Maitland's guiding thesis -- that the fairy tales we know arose from an ancient tradition of storytelling in the great Northern European forests, and reflect the mores and concerns of forest-dwelling life -- is flimsy. Successive chapters don't build up the thesis so much as repeat it in different contexts. One underlying flaw in her argument is the fact that, as a British author, she is writing about British forests yet using German folktales to illustrate her "forest culture" arguments. Traditional British folktales were largely lost before they could be recorded, but Maitland justifies using the Brothers Grimm by positing a sweeping pan-Germanic cultural continuity that includes Anglo-Saxon peoples, even though mainland Germanic and Anglo-Germanic cultures diverged some thirteen centuries ago. She treats the cultural contexts of the Grimm stories as interchangeable with the forest yeomanry of England, despite vastly different histories, modes of government, traditions, and notions of labor.
The perils of this sort of thinking become apparent when Maitland decries a culture in which young British children grow up without "blackberry" and "conker" in their Oxford Junior Dictionaries: "The child of the Oxford Junior Dictionary is an urban, deracinated technocrat, not so much multicultural as de-cultured." One can see what she was getting at, but coming as it does in a book embracing a myth of pan-Germanic cultural identity, it feels a bit iffy. Robert Macfarlane made the same point far more elegantly (and at greater length) in his Landmarks.
Maitland's retellings of the fairy tales themselves leave much to be desired. They are grim and gritty in the worst tradition of the 1990s. Seemingly every male point-of-view character, for instance, thinks of a female character as "that bitch." Her excursions into English and Scottish woodlands, on the other hand, are often interesting, segueing thematically into bygone aspects of life in the forests -- hunting, coppicing, mining, leisure -- and how they are practiced (or not) in modern times. I would have preferred a more focused book that explored the cultural histories and uses of supposedly "wild" British forests, perhaps with fairy tales relegated to their own chapter.
Friday, June 15, 2018
2018 read #13: Queer City by Peter Ackroyd.
Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day by Peter Ackroyd
233 pages
Published 2018
Read from May 29 to June 15
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
A topic that is equal parts important and neglected by mainstream history, queer history seems like a compelling fit for the wide-ranging research and anecdotal panache of Peter Ackroyd. Many passages in Queer City are packed with all the rich details you'd expect from Ackroyd, but all too often, he runs up against the same constraints that pushed Sapphistries in the direction of abandoning primary documentation altogether in favor of imagination: the sheer, sad lack of documentation of gay love and sex through most of history. After a certain point, Queer City becomes a sort of arrest register for all the men with the ill fortune to be swept up in official persecutions over the centuries. This in itself serves as a window into queer history, as bigotry and homophobic policy congealed into their familiar forms. But these sections of the book expose one of Ackroyd's stylistic weaknesses. He has a keen eye for detail and revealing quotation, but is lacking somewhat in synthesis and shaping a larger picture, often leaving that up to the reader. Nonetheless, Queer City is an essential read, at turns amusing and horrifying.
233 pages
Published 2018
Read from May 29 to June 15
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
A topic that is equal parts important and neglected by mainstream history, queer history seems like a compelling fit for the wide-ranging research and anecdotal panache of Peter Ackroyd. Many passages in Queer City are packed with all the rich details you'd expect from Ackroyd, but all too often, he runs up against the same constraints that pushed Sapphistries in the direction of abandoning primary documentation altogether in favor of imagination: the sheer, sad lack of documentation of gay love and sex through most of history. After a certain point, Queer City becomes a sort of arrest register for all the men with the ill fortune to be swept up in official persecutions over the centuries. This in itself serves as a window into queer history, as bigotry and homophobic policy congealed into their familiar forms. But these sections of the book expose one of Ackroyd's stylistic weaknesses. He has a keen eye for detail and revealing quotation, but is lacking somewhat in synthesis and shaping a larger picture, often leaving that up to the reader. Nonetheless, Queer City is an essential read, at turns amusing and horrifying.
Sunday, April 29, 2018
2018 read #12: Slan by A. E. van Vogt.
Slan by A. E. van Vogt
255 pages
Published 1946 (originally serialized 1940)
Read from April 18 to April 29
Rating: 1.5 out of 5
A classic of the Astounding-curated "Golden Age" of science fiction, Slan (according to the blurb on the back cover of this reprint edition) "was considered the single most important SF novel" throughout the 1940s and 1950s. Read now, it's something of an absurd relic, approximately on the same level of storytelling, character depth, and prose quality as a contemporary pulp movie serial, the kind that get riffed on MST3K. The tale begins with a slan (a mutant superhuman with psychic powers and superstrength) mother artlessly dumping exposition on the reader, reminding her young son of what they are, what their powers are, and what risks they run among hostile humanity. "As you well know" exposition is a sure way to turn me off a novel, and Slan is packed full of it, ranging from conversations between veteran secret police agents to long-winded expository orders broadcast on the radio. It's all so stiff and awkward that the only way I could persevere through the first few pages was for my reading voice to adopt a vintage radio announcer's Mid-Atlantic cadence.
The plot is pure B-movie grade, stuffed with disintegration rays and super x-rays and the marvelous power of the atom. The first two-thirds of the novel devotes nearly equal time to two viewpoint characters: a rugged, effortlessly competent slan inventor-hero, and a sheltered, usually helpless, occasionally crafty slan damsel in distress. If you don't mind spoilers for a seventy year old book, the two cross paths at last, falling immediately in love thanks to their psychic communication abilities... only for the woman (who, again, has occupied half the foregoing pages just to get to this point) to end up fridged just as immediately, in order to further the man's character development. She gets brought back later thanks to some silly pseudo-science, but not until the very last page. It's rather cringe-inducing, on top of the garbage prose and the other absurd pulp twists of the narrative. Showing an interesting kinship with his contemporary author, Robert Heinlein, van Vogt dips his narrative toe into incest and polygamy, too. Something must have been going around in the Astounding air.
255 pages
Published 1946 (originally serialized 1940)
Read from April 18 to April 29
Rating: 1.5 out of 5
A classic of the Astounding-curated "Golden Age" of science fiction, Slan (according to the blurb on the back cover of this reprint edition) "was considered the single most important SF novel" throughout the 1940s and 1950s. Read now, it's something of an absurd relic, approximately on the same level of storytelling, character depth, and prose quality as a contemporary pulp movie serial, the kind that get riffed on MST3K. The tale begins with a slan (a mutant superhuman with psychic powers and superstrength) mother artlessly dumping exposition on the reader, reminding her young son of what they are, what their powers are, and what risks they run among hostile humanity. "As you well know" exposition is a sure way to turn me off a novel, and Slan is packed full of it, ranging from conversations between veteran secret police agents to long-winded expository orders broadcast on the radio. It's all so stiff and awkward that the only way I could persevere through the first few pages was for my reading voice to adopt a vintage radio announcer's Mid-Atlantic cadence.
The plot is pure B-movie grade, stuffed with disintegration rays and super x-rays and the marvelous power of the atom. The first two-thirds of the novel devotes nearly equal time to two viewpoint characters: a rugged, effortlessly competent slan inventor-hero, and a sheltered, usually helpless, occasionally crafty slan damsel in distress. If you don't mind spoilers for a seventy year old book, the two cross paths at last, falling immediately in love thanks to their psychic communication abilities... only for the woman (who, again, has occupied half the foregoing pages just to get to this point) to end up fridged just as immediately, in order to further the man's character development. She gets brought back later thanks to some silly pseudo-science, but not until the very last page. It's rather cringe-inducing, on top of the garbage prose and the other absurd pulp twists of the narrative. Showing an interesting kinship with his contemporary author, Robert Heinlein, van Vogt dips his narrative toe into incest and polygamy, too. Something must have been going around in the Astounding air.
Monday, April 23, 2018
2018 read #11: Walking with Spring by Earl V. Shaffer.
Walking with Spring: The First Thru-Hike of the Appalachian Trail by Earl V. Shaffer
154 pages
Published 1983
Read from April 18 to April 23
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
It's been a while since I read a hiking narrative; the last one I completed was apparently in March 2016. Part of the reason for that is I've already read most of the ones currently in print. While you would expect the success of Wild to have cleared the way for a spate of copycat publications, I haven't seen any new ones in a while, at least none available through my library system. Maybe the more recent "classes" of thru-hikers have been concentrating their efforts on YouTube and Instagram, rather than dead tree publication.
As overexposed and overloved as all the big trails have become, there's a bit of a culture shock in reading early accounts of the AT. Shaffer's famous (and occasionally contested) 1948 thru-hike took him along a trail essentially abandoned, whole sections of it gobbled up by timber sales or lost to the broader dislocations of the war years. The conservation ethos as a whole was a different beast back then, with officers appointed by forest districts to eliminate natural predators. I'd love to see a thoroughly researched history of the co-evolution of the AT and of conservation principles in the American consciousness.
That hypothetical book is, of course, far beyond the scope of what we have here. Shaffer writes of his journey with mechanical descriptiveness, enumerating landmarks and meals and incidents of travel with only slightly more passion than a checklist. It is interesting as a primary document of sorts, but scarcely a classic of the genre.
154 pages
Published 1983
Read from April 18 to April 23
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
It's been a while since I read a hiking narrative; the last one I completed was apparently in March 2016. Part of the reason for that is I've already read most of the ones currently in print. While you would expect the success of Wild to have cleared the way for a spate of copycat publications, I haven't seen any new ones in a while, at least none available through my library system. Maybe the more recent "classes" of thru-hikers have been concentrating their efforts on YouTube and Instagram, rather than dead tree publication.
As overexposed and overloved as all the big trails have become, there's a bit of a culture shock in reading early accounts of the AT. Shaffer's famous (and occasionally contested) 1948 thru-hike took him along a trail essentially abandoned, whole sections of it gobbled up by timber sales or lost to the broader dislocations of the war years. The conservation ethos as a whole was a different beast back then, with officers appointed by forest districts to eliminate natural predators. I'd love to see a thoroughly researched history of the co-evolution of the AT and of conservation principles in the American consciousness.
That hypothetical book is, of course, far beyond the scope of what we have here. Shaffer writes of his journey with mechanical descriptiveness, enumerating landmarks and meals and incidents of travel with only slightly more passion than a checklist. It is interesting as a primary document of sorts, but scarcely a classic of the genre.
Wednesday, April 18, 2018
2018 read #10: A College of Magics by Caroline Stevermer.
A College of Magics by Caroline Stevermer
380 pages
Published 1994
Read from April 9 to April 18
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
A common motif you'll find in my reviews is my perennial search for "lost classics," by which I generally mean pretty good (or even great) fantasy and science fiction books from decades past, books that, for one reason or another, seem to have been forgotten. It has always baffled me how the likes of the Wheel of Time, or the Shannara series, or even the festering garbage pile of the Sword of Truth, could have become, and remained, so popular, becoming almost the default entry-point books for two generations of nerds, when they weren't even that good by the fantasy standards of their time. (Let alone by the standards of today, when fantasy and serious literature overlap so beautifully. Why on Earth would anyone read Wizard's First Rule in 2018? If someone makes a Best Fantasy Novels of All Time list and it isn't 50% books published after 2000, odds are it was written by some grognard who uses "social justice" as a pejorative. Or maybe they just don't like beautiful prose in their fantasy.)
The question of how certain IPs become popular while others languish has always fascinated me; it seems to be an intersection of what promotional effort publishers are willing to invest initially, and a certain tendency in pop culture to conflate bestsellerdom with merit. The default example of this is, of course, the Twilight/Fifty Shades cluster, but the fact that male nerds zero in on these instead of, say, Shannara demonstrates a certain level of misogyny... all of which is getting pretty far from whatever point I was trying to make.
The flipside of the popularity equation -- why certain books that are demonstrably better than the Jordans, Goodkinds, and Salvatores never become bestsellers and are ultimately lost to the pulp pile -- is closer to what I'm investigating here. I have a certain fondness for the underdog, and an admitted tendency toward "Oh, you hadn't heard of that one?" hipsterdom. Few book-reading experiences satisfy me as much as getting my hands on some forgotten fantasy novel from the 1980s or 1990s and discovering that it's pretty darn good. War for the Oaks is my default example, but I could also single out Wizard of the Pigeons, Sideshow, Pavane, Thomas the Rhymer, and really, anything at all by Ellen Kushner. (Where is my Swordspoint HBO series?)
Joining this august company is A College of Magics. Unlike Swordspoint and War for the Oaks, which you might find on internet best-of lists if you dig deep enough, I'd never even heard of College until I was browsing a local library and noticed the distinctive '90s Tor font on the spine. (Caroline Stevermer, on the other hand, has appeared in my reviews before; she co-wrote "The Vital Importance of the Superficial," one of my favorite stories in Queen Victoria's Book of Spells.) It is, for its first third or so, a tale of a magical finishing school, where young ladies from all over Europe are educated in deportment, classical literature, and the Balance of the Spheres in a coastal stronghold inspired by Mont Saint-Michel. There is a blond, aristocratic bully who uses her magic to torment the hero; a wise, intimidating, ultimately compassionate headmistress dressed in green robes; an adjoining town where the students sneak out for pastries; and banter exchanged among a core group of friends in a commonroom. Leaving aside the most obvious point of comparison, the only clue that College is NOT a young adult novel from the last ten years is the fact that every character in the book is white and straight.
Also dating the book: A scene in which our hero, held captive, is kissed against her will by a weaselly and manipulative resistance leader -- and decides that she "likes" the kiss, despite her own personal revulsion toward him. The '90s were a time when authors demonstrated their feminist bona fides with sex positivity at all costs; the importance of consent as a basic concept has only recently infiltrated fantasy fiction.
Our hero Faris speeds through her magical education at Greenlaw, covering three years in 126 pages. Which is a pity, as that section was thoroughly charming. What follows, according to a jacket blurb summary, is "a Grand Tour of an imaginary Europe," if a Grand Tour of an imaginary Europe consists of a Paris hotel room, a train ride, and political machinations in some vaguely sketched nation-states. The broader setting (outside of the lovely expanses of Greenlaw) is so hazily defined that it wasn't until the gang raced around Paris in a motorcar that I realized the setting was 1908, rather than the Regency period.
The political machinations were the weakest part of the story, I think. Fantasy politics requires investment in character, and Faris stands alone as the one semi-developed character in the book. Her unfailingly helpful companion Jane is fun, her bodyguard and inevitable love interest Tyrian is just another iteration of stoic competence; between the two of them, Faris never seems to be in real danger. Even her wicked uncle Brinker strains to make enough of an impression to become hateable. In some ways, it's not that hard to figure out why College appears on no best-of lists.
Nonetheless, despite all these flaws, I just can't help but be charmed by this book. Greenlaw ranks nearly equal to Hogwarts on the list of homey magical schools, and the magical wardens of the Earth were an interesting fantasy concept, rendered memorably. The climax, when Faris must undo the magical error of her grandmother, is a bit wobbly, yet has a taste of Studio Ghibli in its vivid imagery of lions and crystal stairways. This is a world I would love to see explored more thoroughly, and Faris was an agreeable companion for the brief Grand Tour we received.
380 pages
Published 1994
Read from April 9 to April 18
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
A common motif you'll find in my reviews is my perennial search for "lost classics," by which I generally mean pretty good (or even great) fantasy and science fiction books from decades past, books that, for one reason or another, seem to have been forgotten. It has always baffled me how the likes of the Wheel of Time, or the Shannara series, or even the festering garbage pile of the Sword of Truth, could have become, and remained, so popular, becoming almost the default entry-point books for two generations of nerds, when they weren't even that good by the fantasy standards of their time. (Let alone by the standards of today, when fantasy and serious literature overlap so beautifully. Why on Earth would anyone read Wizard's First Rule in 2018? If someone makes a Best Fantasy Novels of All Time list and it isn't 50% books published after 2000, odds are it was written by some grognard who uses "social justice" as a pejorative. Or maybe they just don't like beautiful prose in their fantasy.)
The question of how certain IPs become popular while others languish has always fascinated me; it seems to be an intersection of what promotional effort publishers are willing to invest initially, and a certain tendency in pop culture to conflate bestsellerdom with merit. The default example of this is, of course, the Twilight/Fifty Shades cluster, but the fact that male nerds zero in on these instead of, say, Shannara demonstrates a certain level of misogyny... all of which is getting pretty far from whatever point I was trying to make.
The flipside of the popularity equation -- why certain books that are demonstrably better than the Jordans, Goodkinds, and Salvatores never become bestsellers and are ultimately lost to the pulp pile -- is closer to what I'm investigating here. I have a certain fondness for the underdog, and an admitted tendency toward "Oh, you hadn't heard of that one?" hipsterdom. Few book-reading experiences satisfy me as much as getting my hands on some forgotten fantasy novel from the 1980s or 1990s and discovering that it's pretty darn good. War for the Oaks is my default example, but I could also single out Wizard of the Pigeons, Sideshow, Pavane, Thomas the Rhymer, and really, anything at all by Ellen Kushner. (Where is my Swordspoint HBO series?)
Joining this august company is A College of Magics. Unlike Swordspoint and War for the Oaks, which you might find on internet best-of lists if you dig deep enough, I'd never even heard of College until I was browsing a local library and noticed the distinctive '90s Tor font on the spine. (Caroline Stevermer, on the other hand, has appeared in my reviews before; she co-wrote "The Vital Importance of the Superficial," one of my favorite stories in Queen Victoria's Book of Spells.) It is, for its first third or so, a tale of a magical finishing school, where young ladies from all over Europe are educated in deportment, classical literature, and the Balance of the Spheres in a coastal stronghold inspired by Mont Saint-Michel. There is a blond, aristocratic bully who uses her magic to torment the hero; a wise, intimidating, ultimately compassionate headmistress dressed in green robes; an adjoining town where the students sneak out for pastries; and banter exchanged among a core group of friends in a commonroom. Leaving aside the most obvious point of comparison, the only clue that College is NOT a young adult novel from the last ten years is the fact that every character in the book is white and straight.
Also dating the book: A scene in which our hero, held captive, is kissed against her will by a weaselly and manipulative resistance leader -- and decides that she "likes" the kiss, despite her own personal revulsion toward him. The '90s were a time when authors demonstrated their feminist bona fides with sex positivity at all costs; the importance of consent as a basic concept has only recently infiltrated fantasy fiction.
Our hero Faris speeds through her magical education at Greenlaw, covering three years in 126 pages. Which is a pity, as that section was thoroughly charming. What follows, according to a jacket blurb summary, is "a Grand Tour of an imaginary Europe," if a Grand Tour of an imaginary Europe consists of a Paris hotel room, a train ride, and political machinations in some vaguely sketched nation-states. The broader setting (outside of the lovely expanses of Greenlaw) is so hazily defined that it wasn't until the gang raced around Paris in a motorcar that I realized the setting was 1908, rather than the Regency period.
The political machinations were the weakest part of the story, I think. Fantasy politics requires investment in character, and Faris stands alone as the one semi-developed character in the book. Her unfailingly helpful companion Jane is fun, her bodyguard and inevitable love interest Tyrian is just another iteration of stoic competence; between the two of them, Faris never seems to be in real danger. Even her wicked uncle Brinker strains to make enough of an impression to become hateable. In some ways, it's not that hard to figure out why College appears on no best-of lists.
Nonetheless, despite all these flaws, I just can't help but be charmed by this book. Greenlaw ranks nearly equal to Hogwarts on the list of homey magical schools, and the magical wardens of the Earth were an interesting fantasy concept, rendered memorably. The climax, when Faris must undo the magical error of her grandmother, is a bit wobbly, yet has a taste of Studio Ghibli in its vivid imagery of lions and crystal stairways. This is a world I would love to see explored more thoroughly, and Faris was an agreeable companion for the brief Grand Tour we received.
Tuesday, April 3, 2018
2018 read #9: The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton.
The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare by G. K. Chesterton
Introduction by Kingsley Amis
186 pages
Published 1908
Read from March 24 to April 3
Rating: 3 out of 5
I honestly don't know how to approach this book. I rarely make pretensions to actual literary criticism, relying more on a metric of whether I liked a book or not, mixed with rambles of doubtful relevancy. But this is one of those meaningful, allegorical novels that (spoilers!), despite the "it was all a dream" ending alluded to in the subtitle, demands some level of critical analysis just to unpack its authorial meaning. The politics of the novel are distasteful: heteronormative family, religion, and "duty" are, at least in the eyes of our viewpoint character, the building blocks of any "free" society, whereas radical progressivism (including such modernist fancies as philosophy, feminism, and vegetarianism) is posited as the antithesis of "sane." Yet the depiction of the anarchist menace (however quaint that sounds now) carries with it some insights that still seem startlingly perceptive today:
Some substantial spoilers ahead.
I thought myself clever when I deduced, not even a third of the way through the book, that the "Council of Anarchists" (each named for a day of the week) were all police detectives recruited by the monstrous Sunday for some subtle scheme. The days of the week all fell in line with my guess, sure enough. What I did not anticipate was the whole thing taking a hard left turn into biblical symbolism and allegory, as the days of the week all returned to Sunday's feasting table during a fantastic masquerade, each day representing their respective associations from Genesis, with Sunday himself the embodiment of the vast "peace of God." There was something (borrowed from the Christ myth) about the forces of creation, or the archangels, or the "guards of Law," or whatever it was that the days were supposed to represent, experiencing "suffering" in order to fully understand, and thereby counter, the modernist complaints against society. It was a heady scene, one with much to unpack, and an especially bizarre way to cap what amounts to a comic spy caper or surreal detective novel.
And then, true to the subtitle, it turns out to have all been a dream.
Introduction by Kingsley Amis
186 pages
Published 1908
Read from March 24 to April 3
Rating: 3 out of 5
I honestly don't know how to approach this book. I rarely make pretensions to actual literary criticism, relying more on a metric of whether I liked a book or not, mixed with rambles of doubtful relevancy. But this is one of those meaningful, allegorical novels that (spoilers!), despite the "it was all a dream" ending alluded to in the subtitle, demands some level of critical analysis just to unpack its authorial meaning. The politics of the novel are distasteful: heteronormative family, religion, and "duty" are, at least in the eyes of our viewpoint character, the building blocks of any "free" society, whereas radical progressivism (including such modernist fancies as philosophy, feminism, and vegetarianism) is posited as the antithesis of "sane." Yet the depiction of the anarchist menace (however quaint that sounds now) carries with it some insights that still seem startlingly perceptive today:
"Mere mobs!" repeated his new friend with a snort of scorn. "So you talk about mobs and the working classes as if they were the question [source of concern]. You've got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from the poor. Why should it? The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always been objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats are always anarchists, as you can see from the barons' war."The true menace of Trumpism, one might say, would lie in the coup scored by the rich in getting the (white) working classes to embrace and worship a particularly kleptocratic form of anarchism that undermines the very government the working classes rely upon. Chesterton's insight here has current resonance, even though one gets the impression that the nebulous "aristocrats" he has in mind align more with the 21st century fantasies of George Soros using his wealth to suborn family, religion, and duty, rather than the actual oligarchic catastrophe sweeping the planet.
Some substantial spoilers ahead.
I thought myself clever when I deduced, not even a third of the way through the book, that the "Council of Anarchists" (each named for a day of the week) were all police detectives recruited by the monstrous Sunday for some subtle scheme. The days of the week all fell in line with my guess, sure enough. What I did not anticipate was the whole thing taking a hard left turn into biblical symbolism and allegory, as the days of the week all returned to Sunday's feasting table during a fantastic masquerade, each day representing their respective associations from Genesis, with Sunday himself the embodiment of the vast "peace of God." There was something (borrowed from the Christ myth) about the forces of creation, or the archangels, or the "guards of Law," or whatever it was that the days were supposed to represent, experiencing "suffering" in order to fully understand, and thereby counter, the modernist complaints against society. It was a heady scene, one with much to unpack, and an especially bizarre way to cap what amounts to a comic spy caper or surreal detective novel.
And then, true to the subtitle, it turns out to have all been a dream.
Saturday, March 24, 2018
2018 read #8: The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas.
The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
449 pages
Published 2017
Read from March 21 to March 23
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
One unsettling realization I've had over the last couple years is the likelihood that, if I had been born black, I wouldn't be alive today. On at least two occasions in my teens, off the top of my head, police drew guns on me. The first was when my father and I were in rural Idaho one snowy night. Like many other paranoid people, my father had a police scanner, which he purchased in hopes of keeping tabs on the vast governmental conspiracy to harass him. (When the airwaves were conspicuously silent in this regard, he shifted the goalposts: They used frequencies unavailable to commercial scanners, and then later They used the internet.) This one night, we overhead a police dispatcher relaying an exact description of my father's station wagon, advising all units to be alert for it, as it was used in an armed robbery of a jewelry store. Within minutes, despite the remoteness of the road, we were pulled over by a swarm of cops and ordered, rather violently, to exit the vehicle with hands in the air. The second occasion was when my father and I, homeless, spent an ill-considered night in a city park. Uneasy and unable to sleep despite my exhaustion, I dimly became aware of lights and voices approaching. Soon enough, a patrol car arrived, and I was ordered to show my hands and not move. These were scary situations for a white boy; had I been black, I can all too easily imagine how events could have taken a far bloodier turn. And that's not even getting into the desperate two days I spent hitchhiking in order to finally get away from my father when I was 18.
White Americans, for the most part, are wholly insulated from the realities of being black in this country. Most of them, in fact, violently resist even the slightest attempt at education -- just witness the vitriol flung at "social justice warriors" and the very concept of privilege. Or, for that matter, witness the Electoral College appointment of Donald J. Trump. Books like White Rage should be required reading in high schools and colleges, yet instead white parents get fragile and violent should their precious Aryan snowflakes be exposed to the idea of privilege in public school. Social change takes generations, but it can be hard to stay optimistic for the future when such a substantial cohort of enraged white authoritarians have essentially taken over government at all levels, despite being a minority of voters.
I'm hardly exempt from the general white tendency toward ignorance. My own social justice awakening, such as it is, has been a gradual climb from soft, toothless Democratic Party liberalism. As recently as 2005, I wrote pieces on my blog about how affirmative action just wasn't fair, and how what society should be striving for was equality. It's cringe-inducing to recall, but it's important to remind myself that I will never truly be a "perfect" ally; I'll always have a lot of growing to do. I mean, even now, I scarcely know (on a personal level) more than a handful of people of color.
Many words have been written about the power and grace of The Hate U Give. Thomas' elegant and absorbing prose and excellent story are worthy in and of themselves, and might perhaps get lost in the importance of the book's didacticism and its message. As for those latter two attributes, Hate should join White Rage on must-read lists around the nation, a narrative illustration of the litany of horrors given in the latter book. All of us, not just the reactive right, need to seek out the stories and realities of the black experience. I'm just getting started, but luckily these two books have been a great place to begin.
449 pages
Published 2017
Read from March 21 to March 23
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
One unsettling realization I've had over the last couple years is the likelihood that, if I had been born black, I wouldn't be alive today. On at least two occasions in my teens, off the top of my head, police drew guns on me. The first was when my father and I were in rural Idaho one snowy night. Like many other paranoid people, my father had a police scanner, which he purchased in hopes of keeping tabs on the vast governmental conspiracy to harass him. (When the airwaves were conspicuously silent in this regard, he shifted the goalposts: They used frequencies unavailable to commercial scanners, and then later They used the internet.) This one night, we overhead a police dispatcher relaying an exact description of my father's station wagon, advising all units to be alert for it, as it was used in an armed robbery of a jewelry store. Within minutes, despite the remoteness of the road, we were pulled over by a swarm of cops and ordered, rather violently, to exit the vehicle with hands in the air. The second occasion was when my father and I, homeless, spent an ill-considered night in a city park. Uneasy and unable to sleep despite my exhaustion, I dimly became aware of lights and voices approaching. Soon enough, a patrol car arrived, and I was ordered to show my hands and not move. These were scary situations for a white boy; had I been black, I can all too easily imagine how events could have taken a far bloodier turn. And that's not even getting into the desperate two days I spent hitchhiking in order to finally get away from my father when I was 18.
White Americans, for the most part, are wholly insulated from the realities of being black in this country. Most of them, in fact, violently resist even the slightest attempt at education -- just witness the vitriol flung at "social justice warriors" and the very concept of privilege. Or, for that matter, witness the Electoral College appointment of Donald J. Trump. Books like White Rage should be required reading in high schools and colleges, yet instead white parents get fragile and violent should their precious Aryan snowflakes be exposed to the idea of privilege in public school. Social change takes generations, but it can be hard to stay optimistic for the future when such a substantial cohort of enraged white authoritarians have essentially taken over government at all levels, despite being a minority of voters.
I'm hardly exempt from the general white tendency toward ignorance. My own social justice awakening, such as it is, has been a gradual climb from soft, toothless Democratic Party liberalism. As recently as 2005, I wrote pieces on my blog about how affirmative action just wasn't fair, and how what society should be striving for was equality. It's cringe-inducing to recall, but it's important to remind myself that I will never truly be a "perfect" ally; I'll always have a lot of growing to do. I mean, even now, I scarcely know (on a personal level) more than a handful of people of color.
Many words have been written about the power and grace of The Hate U Give. Thomas' elegant and absorbing prose and excellent story are worthy in and of themselves, and might perhaps get lost in the importance of the book's didacticism and its message. As for those latter two attributes, Hate should join White Rage on must-read lists around the nation, a narrative illustration of the litany of horrors given in the latter book. All of us, not just the reactive right, need to seek out the stories and realities of the black experience. I'm just getting started, but luckily these two books have been a great place to begin.
Thursday, March 8, 2018
2018 read #7: The King of Elfland's Daughter by Lord Dunsany.
The King of Elfland's Daughter by Lord Dunsany
242 pages
Published 1924
Read from February 22 to March 7
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
This book had been on my must-read list for a number of years. Early modern fantasy often gets overlooked, as if the genre sprang fully formed from the pen of Tolkien in 1937, but I've always been drawn to origins and primordial stages of evolution. As a would-be fantasist myself, there's an appeal to discovering lost phyla from the genre's early diversification, before the success of Tolkien encouraged so many imitators. Of course, there are any number of good reasons for why only the crunchiest of nerdlings discuss the likes of Lord Dunsany, as I was doomed to discover here.
Lord Dunsany was primarily a short story writer, and it shows in the episodic chapters, strings of vignettes connected by repetitive and unnecessary padding. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I claim that a good editor could salvage an excellent story from this book by trimming about 80% of its bulk. My favorite passages deal with the moor-witch Ziroonderel, whether relating how she casts a stupendous sword that unites the magic of runes with the science of meteorite metal, or having her give a climactic speech that delivers the book's thesis statement: "And you that sought for magic in your youth but desire it not in your age, know that there is a blindness of spirit which comes from age, more black than the blindness of eye, making a darkness about you across which nothing may be seen, or felt, or known, or in any way apprehended." It is a generational truism that any younger demographic might apply to their elders, but which feels especially apropos when a generation that congratulated itself for decades about Woodstock votes in a fascist.
Ziroonderel is the most interesting part of the book, but the rest of it wouldn't be so bad... if, again, one could trim it down to about fifty pages. Because fifty pages is pretty much all the story there is. The rest repeats, with minor variations, motifs of getting to, leaving, and wishing to return to Elfland, or longing to return to Earth once there; the second half of the novel bogs down in an endless cycle of unicorn hunting, which my Beagle-nurtured sentiments found almost obscene. Dunsany attempts to emulate heroic poetry in his prose, but his attempts pretty much amount to repeating a few set phrases every few paragraphs. I would not be surprised if an analysis revealed that "the fields we know" comprised no less than 10% of the total word count. It's no wine-dark sea, let's say that much.
In the end, I'm glad I struggled through Elfland. A few rare moments of genuine magic shone through the dross of Dunsany's aimless wanderings in search of an editor. But I'm gonna have to put off any attempt to read MacDonald's Phantastes for a while. I'm gonna need to read some books from the age of efficient storytelling, first.
242 pages
Published 1924
Read from February 22 to March 7
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
This book had been on my must-read list for a number of years. Early modern fantasy often gets overlooked, as if the genre sprang fully formed from the pen of Tolkien in 1937, but I've always been drawn to origins and primordial stages of evolution. As a would-be fantasist myself, there's an appeal to discovering lost phyla from the genre's early diversification, before the success of Tolkien encouraged so many imitators. Of course, there are any number of good reasons for why only the crunchiest of nerdlings discuss the likes of Lord Dunsany, as I was doomed to discover here.
Lord Dunsany was primarily a short story writer, and it shows in the episodic chapters, strings of vignettes connected by repetitive and unnecessary padding. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I claim that a good editor could salvage an excellent story from this book by trimming about 80% of its bulk. My favorite passages deal with the moor-witch Ziroonderel, whether relating how she casts a stupendous sword that unites the magic of runes with the science of meteorite metal, or having her give a climactic speech that delivers the book's thesis statement: "And you that sought for magic in your youth but desire it not in your age, know that there is a blindness of spirit which comes from age, more black than the blindness of eye, making a darkness about you across which nothing may be seen, or felt, or known, or in any way apprehended." It is a generational truism that any younger demographic might apply to their elders, but which feels especially apropos when a generation that congratulated itself for decades about Woodstock votes in a fascist.
Ziroonderel is the most interesting part of the book, but the rest of it wouldn't be so bad... if, again, one could trim it down to about fifty pages. Because fifty pages is pretty much all the story there is. The rest repeats, with minor variations, motifs of getting to, leaving, and wishing to return to Elfland, or longing to return to Earth once there; the second half of the novel bogs down in an endless cycle of unicorn hunting, which my Beagle-nurtured sentiments found almost obscene. Dunsany attempts to emulate heroic poetry in his prose, but his attempts pretty much amount to repeating a few set phrases every few paragraphs. I would not be surprised if an analysis revealed that "the fields we know" comprised no less than 10% of the total word count. It's no wine-dark sea, let's say that much.
In the end, I'm glad I struggled through Elfland. A few rare moments of genuine magic shone through the dross of Dunsany's aimless wanderings in search of an editor. But I'm gonna have to put off any attempt to read MacDonald's Phantastes for a while. I'm gonna need to read some books from the age of efficient storytelling, first.
Wednesday, February 21, 2018
2018 read #6: White Rage by Carol Anderson.
White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide by Carol Anderson
166 pages
Published 2016
Read from February 9 to February 21
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
When I was young, one excuse my father scraped up for keeping my brother and I out of public school was a never-defined bogeyman named "busing." The way he spoke of this dread thing made me fear it like a punishment, though to me it sounded a lot like riding the bus downtown with my Grandma, which left me confused -- because what could me more fun than riding the bus downtown with my Grandma? I only learned what busing was much later, by which time I had mostly forgotten the venom in my father's voice and how determined he had been to avoid it.
I never went to public school for more than a few months. Not a few months at a time -- a few months total, out of my entire childhood. Busing was only one excuse. The fact was, my father was delusional and paranoid to the point where he could not function, and me living in a car traveling aimlessly across the country with him was merely an incidental side effect.
Fast forward to 2018, when the entire country is paralyzed and unable to function thanks to the delusions and paranoia of somewhat less than half of the electorate. The America I had glimpsed with my father inside gun shows and Oklahoma gun shops -- what back then seemed like a fringe, with its Deep State conspiracies, toxic hatred and masculinity, military rations, survivalist manuals, and monolithic Whiteness -- now parades openly under the light of a thousand tiki torches, its pathetic sociopathy given a physical shape in an orange would-be dictator whose whinging insecurities are applauded as manly resolve. Despite my upbringing, despite seeing the fetid roots of Trumpism with my own eyes way back in the early '90s, I had been completely floored by ascent of White populism. How could an obvious fascist, with all the charisma and legitimacy of a toy from a Crackerjack box, have swept into power? What happened to the vaguely comforting soft-liberal platitudes of acceptance and progress I had absorbed from cartoons and PBS as a kid, then so scorned from my rarefied Social Democratic perch in my 30s? Growing up in a car, absorbing a picture of American sociology from '90s kiddie pop culture, had sheltered me, hidden the ugly realities of American Whiteness from me until the paranoid gun show crowd suddenly ran every branch of government, and the America I believed I had known turned out to be a Saturday morning fiction.
White Rage is required reading for any of us who entered the Age of Trump with a sheltered, privileged perspective on race. One by one, Anderson picks apart the pleasant myths of Civil Rights progress to show the pale termites destroying the substance behind the façade. Every step of the way, from dismantling Reconstruction to destroying public schooling rather than desegregating, from suppressing the Black vote with poll taxes and literacy tests to suppressing the Black vote with voter ID requirements and gerrymandering, and all the insidious and rarely-questioned "everybody knows" myths of American public policy, Anderson presents a methodical picture of White America's inability to tolerate Black American success and advancement. Each chapter is an emotionally exhausting survey of the evils that systemic, deep-rooted anti-Black racism has perpetrated, climaxing with the triumph of the Southern Strategy, the Nixon-Reagan Supreme Court, and the simultaneous release of crack into the inner city and the criminalization of Blackness under the "War on Drugs." It is horrifying, appalling, enraging. And it makes me despair for any true progress in a post-Trump America.
As with many books about conservation or biodiversity, Anderson closes with a hopeful epilogue musing on the possibility of positive change, if only enough of us would unite to repudiate White rage and build a truly free and inclusive future. And as with all those books about saving the environment, the hopefulness of that epilogue (written and published before the 2016 election) is in a sense more depressing than the litany of horrors that went before it. Right now, at least, it doesn't feel like much will change. Trumpism and anti-Black fascism have been political forces throughout White America from the very beginning; the facile belief that "all of that was in the past," which informed so much of my worldview in the '90s and '00s, was in fact part and parcel of the sociopolitical effort to reframe and minimize the Civil Rights struggle. Maybe things will get better in a generation (assuming some insecure fascist dictator doesn't push a button, on either side of the Pacific), but right now, it's hard to see how.
And that in itself is another vital dose of insight from this book.
166 pages
Published 2016
Read from February 9 to February 21
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
When I was young, one excuse my father scraped up for keeping my brother and I out of public school was a never-defined bogeyman named "busing." The way he spoke of this dread thing made me fear it like a punishment, though to me it sounded a lot like riding the bus downtown with my Grandma, which left me confused -- because what could me more fun than riding the bus downtown with my Grandma? I only learned what busing was much later, by which time I had mostly forgotten the venom in my father's voice and how determined he had been to avoid it.
I never went to public school for more than a few months. Not a few months at a time -- a few months total, out of my entire childhood. Busing was only one excuse. The fact was, my father was delusional and paranoid to the point where he could not function, and me living in a car traveling aimlessly across the country with him was merely an incidental side effect.
Fast forward to 2018, when the entire country is paralyzed and unable to function thanks to the delusions and paranoia of somewhat less than half of the electorate. The America I had glimpsed with my father inside gun shows and Oklahoma gun shops -- what back then seemed like a fringe, with its Deep State conspiracies, toxic hatred and masculinity, military rations, survivalist manuals, and monolithic Whiteness -- now parades openly under the light of a thousand tiki torches, its pathetic sociopathy given a physical shape in an orange would-be dictator whose whinging insecurities are applauded as manly resolve. Despite my upbringing, despite seeing the fetid roots of Trumpism with my own eyes way back in the early '90s, I had been completely floored by ascent of White populism. How could an obvious fascist, with all the charisma and legitimacy of a toy from a Crackerjack box, have swept into power? What happened to the vaguely comforting soft-liberal platitudes of acceptance and progress I had absorbed from cartoons and PBS as a kid, then so scorned from my rarefied Social Democratic perch in my 30s? Growing up in a car, absorbing a picture of American sociology from '90s kiddie pop culture, had sheltered me, hidden the ugly realities of American Whiteness from me until the paranoid gun show crowd suddenly ran every branch of government, and the America I believed I had known turned out to be a Saturday morning fiction.
White Rage is required reading for any of us who entered the Age of Trump with a sheltered, privileged perspective on race. One by one, Anderson picks apart the pleasant myths of Civil Rights progress to show the pale termites destroying the substance behind the façade. Every step of the way, from dismantling Reconstruction to destroying public schooling rather than desegregating, from suppressing the Black vote with poll taxes and literacy tests to suppressing the Black vote with voter ID requirements and gerrymandering, and all the insidious and rarely-questioned "everybody knows" myths of American public policy, Anderson presents a methodical picture of White America's inability to tolerate Black American success and advancement. Each chapter is an emotionally exhausting survey of the evils that systemic, deep-rooted anti-Black racism has perpetrated, climaxing with the triumph of the Southern Strategy, the Nixon-Reagan Supreme Court, and the simultaneous release of crack into the inner city and the criminalization of Blackness under the "War on Drugs." It is horrifying, appalling, enraging. And it makes me despair for any true progress in a post-Trump America.
As with many books about conservation or biodiversity, Anderson closes with a hopeful epilogue musing on the possibility of positive change, if only enough of us would unite to repudiate White rage and build a truly free and inclusive future. And as with all those books about saving the environment, the hopefulness of that epilogue (written and published before the 2016 election) is in a sense more depressing than the litany of horrors that went before it. Right now, at least, it doesn't feel like much will change. Trumpism and anti-Black fascism have been political forces throughout White America from the very beginning; the facile belief that "all of that was in the past," which informed so much of my worldview in the '90s and '00s, was in fact part and parcel of the sociopolitical effort to reframe and minimize the Civil Rights struggle. Maybe things will get better in a generation (assuming some insecure fascist dictator doesn't push a button, on either side of the Pacific), but right now, it's hard to see how.
And that in itself is another vital dose of insight from this book.
Friday, February 9, 2018
2018 read #5: Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones.
Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones
342 pages
Published 1985
Read from February 1 to February 9
Rating: 4 out of 5
In subject matter, Fire and Hemlock fits with the trends of its time, when urban fairy tales like Emma Bull's War for the Oaks, and modern retellings of old fairy ballads like Charles de Lint's Jack the Giant-Killer, helped reinvent urban fantasy. Yet the comparison I kept coming back to as I read it is an urban fantasy from another era entirely: Jo Walton's Among Others. Which is not to say that Fire and Hemlock is ahead of its time. Wynne Jones repeatedly and appallingly has her adolescent protagonist Polly worry about her weight, even having her muse about starving herself to look thinner for an older male admirer; Polly is subjected to casual harassment from nearly every man in her life, ranging from her mother's new boyfriend to the bookie on the street corner; she mentally takes responsibility for "tempting" them all with her charms. The lechery of the men, and Polly's feelings of provoking their behavior through her temptations, is given scarcely any commentary in-text -- rendering it to all appearances normalized. Especially when you consider that this is (based on its publication history more than anything else) a work of juvenile fiction, it makes for some cringe-inducing reading in the #MeToo era.
Those unpleasant details date the book firmly in its era (or possibly even earlier, to the late 1970s adolescence much of the book describes). Yet much of Fire and Hemlock feels like a prequel to Among Others, which is to my mind quite the au courant post-fantasy. Both novels follow bookish protagonists from the wreckage of broken homes; both devote many pages to the solace of reading books and finding one's own place within their pages, listing formative titles with evident tenderness and reverence. Both books expertly balance their sense of unreality, remaining ambiguous for much of their length about whether anything "fantastic" has actually occurred. Far more so than its urban fantasy contemporaries, Hemlock integrates the fairy story seamlessly with Polly's quotidian adolescence. The Queen of the Fairies appears to be merely a rich, beautiful woman who lives in a mansion, her curses dealt out in phone calls and train stations, their sting found in the barbed words of an abusive parent. The flashy fae of War for the Oaks are largely supplanted by unseen machinations beneath the surface of the everyday world, and Hemlock is all the better for it.
Hemlock is far from perfect; aside from the aforementioned problematic elements, I found that certain chapters ran a bit overlong with at times tedious verisimilitude. (As with other young adult works, I might be less bothered by this if I were within the target demographic.) But I found it absorbing, moving, and at times edge-of-my-seat tense all the same. Definitely among my new favorites.
342 pages
Published 1985
Read from February 1 to February 9
Rating: 4 out of 5
In subject matter, Fire and Hemlock fits with the trends of its time, when urban fairy tales like Emma Bull's War for the Oaks, and modern retellings of old fairy ballads like Charles de Lint's Jack the Giant-Killer, helped reinvent urban fantasy. Yet the comparison I kept coming back to as I read it is an urban fantasy from another era entirely: Jo Walton's Among Others. Which is not to say that Fire and Hemlock is ahead of its time. Wynne Jones repeatedly and appallingly has her adolescent protagonist Polly worry about her weight, even having her muse about starving herself to look thinner for an older male admirer; Polly is subjected to casual harassment from nearly every man in her life, ranging from her mother's new boyfriend to the bookie on the street corner; she mentally takes responsibility for "tempting" them all with her charms. The lechery of the men, and Polly's feelings of provoking their behavior through her temptations, is given scarcely any commentary in-text -- rendering it to all appearances normalized. Especially when you consider that this is (based on its publication history more than anything else) a work of juvenile fiction, it makes for some cringe-inducing reading in the #MeToo era.
Those unpleasant details date the book firmly in its era (or possibly even earlier, to the late 1970s adolescence much of the book describes). Yet much of Fire and Hemlock feels like a prequel to Among Others, which is to my mind quite the au courant post-fantasy. Both novels follow bookish protagonists from the wreckage of broken homes; both devote many pages to the solace of reading books and finding one's own place within their pages, listing formative titles with evident tenderness and reverence. Both books expertly balance their sense of unreality, remaining ambiguous for much of their length about whether anything "fantastic" has actually occurred. Far more so than its urban fantasy contemporaries, Hemlock integrates the fairy story seamlessly with Polly's quotidian adolescence. The Queen of the Fairies appears to be merely a rich, beautiful woman who lives in a mansion, her curses dealt out in phone calls and train stations, their sting found in the barbed words of an abusive parent. The flashy fae of War for the Oaks are largely supplanted by unseen machinations beneath the surface of the everyday world, and Hemlock is all the better for it.
Hemlock is far from perfect; aside from the aforementioned problematic elements, I found that certain chapters ran a bit overlong with at times tedious verisimilitude. (As with other young adult works, I might be less bothered by this if I were within the target demographic.) But I found it absorbing, moving, and at times edge-of-my-seat tense all the same. Definitely among my new favorites.
Thursday, February 1, 2018
2018 read #4: The Face in the Frost by John Bellairs.
The Face in the Frost by John Bellairs
153 pages
Published 1969
Read from January 29 to February 1
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
What I loved about this book was its wonderful atmosphere, which mingled creeping, half-seen, corner-of-your eye horror with charmingly fussy details and an almost children's-book whimsicality. It's a balance that anticipated Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell or, perhaps, the Fairyland books by Catherynne M. Valente. I won't say it's ahead of its time, exactly; one can well imagine it being a contemporary of A Wizard of Earthsea or Lord of Light. But as a work of fantastic fiction, it certainly feels more polished and aesthetically-purposeful than most novels published in the ensuing decade. Or heck, most fantasy novels published to this day.
What I didn't like so much about this book was how the characters themselves seem to have wandered out of a children's fantasy novel. John Bellairs apparently spent most of his career writing young adult works, and while The Face in the Frost is considered "for adults," everything about its central duo, from their names (Prospero and Roger Bacon) to the way they caper about and throw snowballs makes them seem like middle school friends or brothers who are detectives, rather than top-tier wizards who are getting on in years. At one point, Prospero, in mortal peril, having been pursued across half a kingdom by faceless terrors and separated from Roger Bacon, finds himself in a village where nothing feels right, where mirrors seem just a bit off, where the people in the pub keep having the same conversation, and his only response is to shrug and make nothing of it. The scene's payoff is satisfyingly creepy, but if the only way to make it work is to have a cunning wizard overlooking clues that even my D&D players would have picked up on, it just isn't worth it. Frost shows its age in the creaky joints of its storytelling.
153 pages
Published 1969
Read from January 29 to February 1
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
What I loved about this book was its wonderful atmosphere, which mingled creeping, half-seen, corner-of-your eye horror with charmingly fussy details and an almost children's-book whimsicality. It's a balance that anticipated Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell or, perhaps, the Fairyland books by Catherynne M. Valente. I won't say it's ahead of its time, exactly; one can well imagine it being a contemporary of A Wizard of Earthsea or Lord of Light. But as a work of fantastic fiction, it certainly feels more polished and aesthetically-purposeful than most novels published in the ensuing decade. Or heck, most fantasy novels published to this day.
What I didn't like so much about this book was how the characters themselves seem to have wandered out of a children's fantasy novel. John Bellairs apparently spent most of his career writing young adult works, and while The Face in the Frost is considered "for adults," everything about its central duo, from their names (Prospero and Roger Bacon) to the way they caper about and throw snowballs makes them seem like middle school friends or brothers who are detectives, rather than top-tier wizards who are getting on in years. At one point, Prospero, in mortal peril, having been pursued across half a kingdom by faceless terrors and separated from Roger Bacon, finds himself in a village where nothing feels right, where mirrors seem just a bit off, where the people in the pub keep having the same conversation, and his only response is to shrug and make nothing of it. The scene's payoff is satisfyingly creepy, but if the only way to make it work is to have a cunning wizard overlooking clues that even my D&D players would have picked up on, it just isn't worth it. Frost shows its age in the creaky joints of its storytelling.
Monday, January 29, 2018
2018 read #3: Redemption in Indigo by Karen Lord.
Redemption in Indigo by Karen Lord
189 pages
Published 2010
Read from January 20 to January 29
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
Spoilers ahead!
The first half or so of this book is excellent. I love the narration, related by an unseen, often humorous, occasionally defensive storyteller, and the story itself (inspired by a Senegalese folk tale) has charm and heart to spare. But once the indigo-skinned djombi arrives to reclaim his powers of chaos from the wise and dutiful Paama, I felt that the tale went from sweet to a tad bit trite. Paama relearns the meaning of duty from all the afflictions and small graces of humanity that Chance shows her, returning to her gluttonous and self-absorbed husband to take care of him in his final days -- a definition of duty that I, for one, as a survivor of abuse and neglect, find rather distasteful. And Chance, for his part, relearns the value of human beings from his whirlwind tour with Paama, starting the path toward his titular redemption with an anticlimactic revelation that amounts to, "Oh, this one human being is all right, I forgot humans could be all right sometimes." It's all too pat and easy.
Lord's narrator chides people like me at the end. "Paama will be too tepid and mild a heroine for some, they will criticize her for caring for her estranged husband in his last days." Fair enough. Clearly this book and I won't see eye to eye about that, and purposefully so. All the same, I found Redemption in Indigo a warm and enjoyable little read.
189 pages
Published 2010
Read from January 20 to January 29
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
Spoilers ahead!
The first half or so of this book is excellent. I love the narration, related by an unseen, often humorous, occasionally defensive storyteller, and the story itself (inspired by a Senegalese folk tale) has charm and heart to spare. But once the indigo-skinned djombi arrives to reclaim his powers of chaos from the wise and dutiful Paama, I felt that the tale went from sweet to a tad bit trite. Paama relearns the meaning of duty from all the afflictions and small graces of humanity that Chance shows her, returning to her gluttonous and self-absorbed husband to take care of him in his final days -- a definition of duty that I, for one, as a survivor of abuse and neglect, find rather distasteful. And Chance, for his part, relearns the value of human beings from his whirlwind tour with Paama, starting the path toward his titular redemption with an anticlimactic revelation that amounts to, "Oh, this one human being is all right, I forgot humans could be all right sometimes." It's all too pat and easy.
Lord's narrator chides people like me at the end. "Paama will be too tepid and mild a heroine for some, they will criticize her for caring for her estranged husband in his last days." Fair enough. Clearly this book and I won't see eye to eye about that, and purposefully so. All the same, I found Redemption in Indigo a warm and enjoyable little read.
Friday, January 19, 2018
2018 read #2: Summer of Blood by Dan Jones.
Summer of Blood: England's First Revolution by Dan Jones
217 pages
Published 2009
Read from January 15 to January 19
Rating: 1.5 out of 5
There is a strain of pop history writing that veers toward the facile: indulging in novelistic scenes of what "must have" been going through its protagonists' heads during pivotal moments, without providing any real insight into their characters or motivations that couldn't be gleaned from a wikipedia article, worded in prose with all the art and subtlety of a USA Today article, granulated with recurring stock phrases like "orgy of destruction" and "blistering fury," like so much cheap sugar sprinkled on a prepackaged confection. I remember liking Dan Jones' later, more exhaustive volume, The Plantagenets (though the four-star rating I gave it seems at odds with the rousing adjectives "serviceable" and "competent"), so Summer of Blood was a surprising disappointment. It is nothing more nor less than a bland, forgettable, and sadly shallow recounting of a pivotal moment of British and working peoples' history, one that (inadvertently or not) twists an underclass uprising against systematic wealth inequality into a quaint Middle Ages Tea Party in order to fit an easy, accessible narrative.
One aspect of Summer of Blood that, in retrospect, could have been presaged by a reading of Plantagenets is Jones' creeping ideological slant. In that review I mentioned Jones' "traditional" historical focus, which emphasizes kings and masculine power while brushing aside "queens and female agency in general." Summer of Blood approaches the Peasants' Rebellion of 1381, a major uprising against wealth inequality, the landed classes, and the legal system that allowed the two to flourish, as a proto-libertarian revolt against nebulous phrases like "government intrusion" -- an askew angle Jones, in a preface to the American edition published in 2016, makes particularly queasy by linking it with the spirit of racist faux-populism that gave us Trump that same year: "Even today, there are many Americans who would cheer the English rebels' aims of rolling back government from their everyday lives, shunning oppressive taxation...." Spare me!
Jones' glib "liberty from big government" narration is particularly malaprop when contrasted with the contemporary sources he quotes: Essex villagers were "delighted," in the words of John Gower, "that the day had come when they could help each other in the face of so urgent a necessity" against the landowning aristocrats. That sounds a whole lot like pure socialism to me -- but reducing a complex set of historical world-views to fit my own ideology would put me in the same category as Jones.
It isn't just in the wording that this proto-libertarian slant shows itself. One of the primary aims of the Peasants' Revolt was to dismantle a system of legal serfdom, debt servitude, and debtors' prisons recently enacted as a weapon against the poorer classes. Time and again, the villagers went straight to the prisons whenever they entered a new town and released the captives there; time and again they sought out and burned legal records and memoranda of debt. Jones manages to get these facts right, then concocts from them a "conservative" motivation: "These were the highest badges of a legal system that in rebel eyes preferred contracts and statutes to trusted community tradition, and the rebels plundered the trove with glee." I'm pretty sure that the rebels were not making coordinated attempts to release prisoners and destroy debt records in order to preserve "tradition." I, for one, suspect the medieval underclasses had more ideological sophistication than Jones credits them with in this book.
I don't claim to know Dan Jones' ideological background. Perhaps the supposed ideological bias I scent is the fault of the newspaper-ready clichés Jones uses to get the gist across. "Freedom" has been corrupted by so many libertarian, right-populist, and neoliberal connotations that using it as a glib, anachronistic shorthand for a rebellion's demands might create a false sense of bias in the concerned reader. Regardless, even if it's merely an artifact of making the text more accessible, the lack of nuance in what should be a fascinating history is inexcusable. Any sense of what might have motivated the rebels of 1381 gets lost, along with their way of seeing the world and their social hierarchy, in the easy, ready-made modern clichés of "freedom."
217 pages
Published 2009
Read from January 15 to January 19
Rating: 1.5 out of 5
There is a strain of pop history writing that veers toward the facile: indulging in novelistic scenes of what "must have" been going through its protagonists' heads during pivotal moments, without providing any real insight into their characters or motivations that couldn't be gleaned from a wikipedia article, worded in prose with all the art and subtlety of a USA Today article, granulated with recurring stock phrases like "orgy of destruction" and "blistering fury," like so much cheap sugar sprinkled on a prepackaged confection. I remember liking Dan Jones' later, more exhaustive volume, The Plantagenets (though the four-star rating I gave it seems at odds with the rousing adjectives "serviceable" and "competent"), so Summer of Blood was a surprising disappointment. It is nothing more nor less than a bland, forgettable, and sadly shallow recounting of a pivotal moment of British and working peoples' history, one that (inadvertently or not) twists an underclass uprising against systematic wealth inequality into a quaint Middle Ages Tea Party in order to fit an easy, accessible narrative.
One aspect of Summer of Blood that, in retrospect, could have been presaged by a reading of Plantagenets is Jones' creeping ideological slant. In that review I mentioned Jones' "traditional" historical focus, which emphasizes kings and masculine power while brushing aside "queens and female agency in general." Summer of Blood approaches the Peasants' Rebellion of 1381, a major uprising against wealth inequality, the landed classes, and the legal system that allowed the two to flourish, as a proto-libertarian revolt against nebulous phrases like "government intrusion" -- an askew angle Jones, in a preface to the American edition published in 2016, makes particularly queasy by linking it with the spirit of racist faux-populism that gave us Trump that same year: "Even today, there are many Americans who would cheer the English rebels' aims of rolling back government from their everyday lives, shunning oppressive taxation...." Spare me!
Jones' glib "liberty from big government" narration is particularly malaprop when contrasted with the contemporary sources he quotes: Essex villagers were "delighted," in the words of John Gower, "that the day had come when they could help each other in the face of so urgent a necessity" against the landowning aristocrats. That sounds a whole lot like pure socialism to me -- but reducing a complex set of historical world-views to fit my own ideology would put me in the same category as Jones.
It isn't just in the wording that this proto-libertarian slant shows itself. One of the primary aims of the Peasants' Revolt was to dismantle a system of legal serfdom, debt servitude, and debtors' prisons recently enacted as a weapon against the poorer classes. Time and again, the villagers went straight to the prisons whenever they entered a new town and released the captives there; time and again they sought out and burned legal records and memoranda of debt. Jones manages to get these facts right, then concocts from them a "conservative" motivation: "These were the highest badges of a legal system that in rebel eyes preferred contracts and statutes to trusted community tradition, and the rebels plundered the trove with glee." I'm pretty sure that the rebels were not making coordinated attempts to release prisoners and destroy debt records in order to preserve "tradition." I, for one, suspect the medieval underclasses had more ideological sophistication than Jones credits them with in this book.
I don't claim to know Dan Jones' ideological background. Perhaps the supposed ideological bias I scent is the fault of the newspaper-ready clichés Jones uses to get the gist across. "Freedom" has been corrupted by so many libertarian, right-populist, and neoliberal connotations that using it as a glib, anachronistic shorthand for a rebellion's demands might create a false sense of bias in the concerned reader. Regardless, even if it's merely an artifact of making the text more accessible, the lack of nuance in what should be a fascinating history is inexcusable. Any sense of what might have motivated the rebels of 1381 gets lost, along with their way of seeing the world and their social hierarchy, in the easy, ready-made modern clichés of "freedom."
Monday, January 1, 2018
2018 read #1: Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones.
Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones
329 pages
Published 1986
Read from November 30, 2017 to January 1
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
I've been having such a hard time reading fiction lately. Non-fiction gives me little trouble; I can stay focused and motivated to read even the driest history tome. Yet not even the sprightliest and most engaging fantasy can keep me turning pages these days. When I began this book, I found it to be the most charming YA fantasy I'd ever picked up, bursting with warmth and character. It only added to the charm that Sophie, the viewpoint character, reminded me quite a lot of a particular loved one. Nonetheless, after the first couple days and the first half of the book were behind me, I found my interest lagging. As much as I loved and rooted for Sophie, I just couldn't stay focused on the story. I'd pick it up, read a page or two, and get engrossed in Facebook before I'd even realized I'd put it down again. No doubt that was due to my recent (post-2016 election) reading slump, and how it's led me back into my bad old habits of dicking around online for hours at a time. For whatever reason, fiction seems more affected by my slump than non.
My slack attention span, alas, deteriorated my experience of this book. Not having seen the movie (nor, shamefully, anything by Studio Ghibli), I was surprised to find it was originally a young adult novel by an author I'd never read, yet had been peripherally aware of for some time. Without the movie as a foundation, and leaving the book aside for weeks at a time, I lost track of a number of characters and plotlines, and so found myself awash when they all came flooding back in a roar of twists and revelations in the final chapters. I'd quite forgotten who Fanny was, so her return -- no doubt an important and satisfying emotional beat -- left me scratching my head. I just couldn't follow the series of fake-outs, deceptions, misunderstandings, and suchlike. Entirely my fault, I think; if I'd just read through at a steady pace back in early December, the whole would have felt far more cohesive. I'll just have to see the movie at some point and see if I can make better sense of that.
329 pages
Published 1986
Read from November 30, 2017 to January 1
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
I've been having such a hard time reading fiction lately. Non-fiction gives me little trouble; I can stay focused and motivated to read even the driest history tome. Yet not even the sprightliest and most engaging fantasy can keep me turning pages these days. When I began this book, I found it to be the most charming YA fantasy I'd ever picked up, bursting with warmth and character. It only added to the charm that Sophie, the viewpoint character, reminded me quite a lot of a particular loved one. Nonetheless, after the first couple days and the first half of the book were behind me, I found my interest lagging. As much as I loved and rooted for Sophie, I just couldn't stay focused on the story. I'd pick it up, read a page or two, and get engrossed in Facebook before I'd even realized I'd put it down again. No doubt that was due to my recent (post-2016 election) reading slump, and how it's led me back into my bad old habits of dicking around online for hours at a time. For whatever reason, fiction seems more affected by my slump than non.
My slack attention span, alas, deteriorated my experience of this book. Not having seen the movie (nor, shamefully, anything by Studio Ghibli), I was surprised to find it was originally a young adult novel by an author I'd never read, yet had been peripherally aware of for some time. Without the movie as a foundation, and leaving the book aside for weeks at a time, I lost track of a number of characters and plotlines, and so found myself awash when they all came flooding back in a roar of twists and revelations in the final chapters. I'd quite forgotten who Fanny was, so her return -- no doubt an important and satisfying emotional beat -- left me scratching my head. I just couldn't follow the series of fake-outs, deceptions, misunderstandings, and suchlike. Entirely my fault, I think; if I'd just read through at a steady pace back in early December, the whole would have felt far more cohesive. I'll just have to see the movie at some point and see if I can make better sense of that.
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