Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
336 pages
Published 2014
Read from December 19 to December 21
Rating: 4 out of 5
It's strange to read about apocalypses when you're living through one. The climate is changing, the obscenely rich hold all the power, right-wing authoritarianism is triumphant around the globe. Species and ecosystems are dying everywhere. The oceans are acid, whole continents are burning. The apocalypse is no longer science fiction. Novels about it feel all too real, more like "ripped from the headlines" current events than entertainment. Yet it almost seems quaint, during the slow collapse of capitalism and the slow apocalypse of carbon dioxide, to read about civilization falling due to a sudden, sweeping pandemic.
The Georgia Flu that kills most of humanity in Station Eleven feels like a throwback to Captain Tripps. At first not much seems to distinguish Mandel's pandemic die-off from the one in The Stand, aside from the salient fact that Mandel is a better writer than Stephen King and can construct a riveting story without resorting to Magical Black Folk plot devices. But as Station Eleven slips with precision between time periods—the final night before the collapse, its immediate aftermath, twenty years afterward, the years before it—the story Mandel wants to tell sketches a much different, much odder shape.
Station Eleven uses a population bottleneck event to examine ideas of fame and immortality, about art and what is worth remembering, about the stories that speak to us and the stories we shape with others. It took a while for me to understand where Mandel was going when she interrupted the tense adventures of the post-apocalyptic Traveling Symphony to depict in detail the (somewhat cliched) tabloid love life of an Old Hollywood-style Leading Man, a character type already anachronistic in 2014. But Mandel's strengths as a storyteller gave me confidence that she would tie it all together in a satisfactory way. My one complaint, funny enough, is the opposite of what one might say about a Stephen King tome: there are too few characters, even in the pre-pandemic years, making it feel like the entire post-apocalyptic world revolves around one tabloid-staple actor who died the night of the collapse, one artist who at one point was his wife, and another ex-wife with whom the actor had a son. And while the non-linear structure was accomplished beautifully, I felt that certain stories within the timeline—particularly that of Kirsten and the Traveling Symphony, twenty years after the Flu—weren't given enough space and didn't add up to much. But stylistically and emotionally, Station Eleven is a gorgeous work that tells the sort of tales not usually associated with the apocalypse.
Tuesday, December 24, 2019
Sunday, November 24, 2019
2019 read #21: Resurrection of the Wild by Deborah Fleming.
Resurrection of the Wild: Meditations on Ohio's Natural Landscape by Deborah Fleming
182 pages
Published 2019
Read from November 19 to November 24
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
With a title like that, I expected this book to focus on a subject dear to my heart: the restoration and rewilding of landscapes and waterscapes. It turned out to be a series of essays, some published as long ago as 2000, all of them only vaguely connected by the book's subtitle. The overall theme is not rewilding so much as attempts to create a sustainable relationship between human beings and the natural world we dwell in. There are pocket biographies of John Chapman ("Johnny Appleseed") and sustainable farming innovator Louis Bromfield; there's an examination of how problematic and coercive Amish communities can be, followed without apparent irony by a wistful account of a young family building a counterculture homestead in the 1970s. Like a Midwestern answer to Roger Deakin's descriptions of Walnut Tree Farm, Fleming devotes a chapter to humble-bragging about the history and bucolic charms of her own farm, Wedding Pines.
Much of the rest of the book examines just how thoroughly factory farms, subdivision developments, strip mining, and horizontal fracking have destroyed the land, the soil, the water, the air, the landscape, human health, the natural world, and the future. "I did not think the human race worth saving," she remarks during a tangent about the missionaries who barge onto her farm. Far from resurrection, the impression Fleming leaves is one of defeat and erosion—the loss of our liberties to the wealthy few who keep county commissioners and state agencies in their pockets, a feeling of futility as urban sprawl devours more and more of the land. I've grown to appreciate and love the natural world of Ohio during these ten months of living here, which makes this book all the more depressing.
182 pages
Published 2019
Read from November 19 to November 24
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
With a title like that, I expected this book to focus on a subject dear to my heart: the restoration and rewilding of landscapes and waterscapes. It turned out to be a series of essays, some published as long ago as 2000, all of them only vaguely connected by the book's subtitle. The overall theme is not rewilding so much as attempts to create a sustainable relationship between human beings and the natural world we dwell in. There are pocket biographies of John Chapman ("Johnny Appleseed") and sustainable farming innovator Louis Bromfield; there's an examination of how problematic and coercive Amish communities can be, followed without apparent irony by a wistful account of a young family building a counterculture homestead in the 1970s. Like a Midwestern answer to Roger Deakin's descriptions of Walnut Tree Farm, Fleming devotes a chapter to humble-bragging about the history and bucolic charms of her own farm, Wedding Pines.
Much of the rest of the book examines just how thoroughly factory farms, subdivision developments, strip mining, and horizontal fracking have destroyed the land, the soil, the water, the air, the landscape, human health, the natural world, and the future. "I did not think the human race worth saving," she remarks during a tangent about the missionaries who barge onto her farm. Far from resurrection, the impression Fleming leaves is one of defeat and erosion—the loss of our liberties to the wealthy few who keep county commissioners and state agencies in their pockets, a feeling of futility as urban sprawl devours more and more of the land. I've grown to appreciate and love the natural world of Ohio during these ten months of living here, which makes this book all the more depressing.
Tuesday, November 19, 2019
2019 read #20: Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata.
Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata
Translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori
163 pages
Published 2016 (English translation published 2018)
Read from November 18 to November 19
Rating: 4 out of 5
Alternately hilarious and infuriating, Convenience Store Woman examines the dysfunctions and dissociations of late capitalist society from the viewpoint of someone who feels happiest as an efficient cog within the machinery of a convenience store. Keiko Furukura has never been able to process social cues or understand people's expectations. Work at a convenience store provides her with a literal manual of how to behave and perform her duties, instructions she adheres to with gusto. Social expectations pressure Keiko: Date! Quit your go-nowhere job and pursue a career! Marry and raise a family! Happy in the convenience store, satisfied with a role she understands, Keiko wonders if she should be doing more to conform to the social role others seem to expect of her, that of a "human woman" instead of a reliable convenience store worker—concerns that reach a desperate level just as she crosses paths with a petulant, sniveling manbaby of an InCel.
Shiraha whines about how society hasn't changed since the Stone Age, how the best hunters still get the prettiest girls, how the village will chase you out if you don't conform—and how men have it so much worse than women. He is one of the most infuriating characters I can remember from any of my recent reads, so vividly realized that I wanted to wring his neck every time I turned the page.
Shiraha serves as a sort of warped mirror to Keiko's own inability to satisfy the social expectations of those around her. Keiko has no trouble seeing Shiraha's bullshit for what it is, for the most part, but sees bits of truth in his tantrums. My own reading is that both characters are reacting to the malaise of capitalist culture in different ways, neither one of them understanding the structural dysfunctions underlying their respective inability to "fit in." While Shiraha becomes a self-pitying grifter who bewails his constant victimhood, Keiko realizes of her own sister, "She's far happier thinking her sister is normal, even if she has a lot of problems, than she is having an abnormal sister for whom everything is fine."
Convenience Store Woman is a brief and breezy little novel that packs in so much insight into modern human life within its short length.
Translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori
163 pages
Published 2016 (English translation published 2018)
Read from November 18 to November 19
Rating: 4 out of 5
Alternately hilarious and infuriating, Convenience Store Woman examines the dysfunctions and dissociations of late capitalist society from the viewpoint of someone who feels happiest as an efficient cog within the machinery of a convenience store. Keiko Furukura has never been able to process social cues or understand people's expectations. Work at a convenience store provides her with a literal manual of how to behave and perform her duties, instructions she adheres to with gusto. Social expectations pressure Keiko: Date! Quit your go-nowhere job and pursue a career! Marry and raise a family! Happy in the convenience store, satisfied with a role she understands, Keiko wonders if she should be doing more to conform to the social role others seem to expect of her, that of a "human woman" instead of a reliable convenience store worker—concerns that reach a desperate level just as she crosses paths with a petulant, sniveling manbaby of an InCel.
Shiraha whines about how society hasn't changed since the Stone Age, how the best hunters still get the prettiest girls, how the village will chase you out if you don't conform—and how men have it so much worse than women. He is one of the most infuriating characters I can remember from any of my recent reads, so vividly realized that I wanted to wring his neck every time I turned the page.
Shiraha serves as a sort of warped mirror to Keiko's own inability to satisfy the social expectations of those around her. Keiko has no trouble seeing Shiraha's bullshit for what it is, for the most part, but sees bits of truth in his tantrums. My own reading is that both characters are reacting to the malaise of capitalist culture in different ways, neither one of them understanding the structural dysfunctions underlying their respective inability to "fit in." While Shiraha becomes a self-pitying grifter who bewails his constant victimhood, Keiko realizes of her own sister, "She's far happier thinking her sister is normal, even if she has a lot of problems, than she is having an abnormal sister for whom everything is fine."
Convenience Store Woman is a brief and breezy little novel that packs in so much insight into modern human life within its short length.
Monday, November 18, 2019
2019 read #19: The Last of the Wine by Mary Renault.
The Last of the Wine by Mary Renault
447 pages
Published 1956
Read from September 14 to September 18
Rating: 4 out of 5
As a kid, first reading my older brother's social studies textbook and then branching out into history books scavenged from wholesaler warehouse sales, I idolized Athens. I felt proud of their democracy, even though I had absolutely no connection to it. I felt prouder still when, in summaries of the Peloponnesian War, Athens made temporary headway against those Spartan louts; I felt corresponding grief when Athens' fortunes turned.
Western Europeans have loved to claim cultural continuity with Rome ever since the Dark Ages, and with ancient Greece ever since the Renaissance. This is a long-standing cultural myth. There is no neat progression of one culture feeding into another, no diffusion of cultural "light" from one cradle of civilization to another. Western Europe was always a cultural backwater, and the only continuity is what they appropriated for themselves after discovering classic Greek writings when they fought against Greece's true cultural heirs (at least in terms of mathematics and philosophy) during the Crusades. America's Founding Fathers certainly bought into this myth, adding further legends of America's inheritance from republican Rome and democratic Athens. Perhaps that's why I championed that middle-school textbook version of Athens as a kid; printed around the end of the Cold War, my brother's textbook no doubt laid the propaganda on thick.
As an adult, I've developed a better understanding of just how ghastly and horrible republican Rome and democratic Athens were, and how they truly presaged the ghastly and horrible first two centuries of the American experiment. Athenian men discoursed on the meanings of freedom, human goodness, and good government, all while owning slaves, invading and genociding rival city-states for economic gain, and regarding women and children as essentially livestock, subject to the whims of their male heads of household. It's hard, really, to tell any difference between them and the framers of the Constitution. To this day, maintained as propaganda for America's forever-wars in Southwest Asia, we cling to this myth of Greece (read: conservative White Europeans and Americans) as a bastion of liberty and personal freedom fighting for survival against the despotism of "the East" (read: Islam, Jews, brown people, homosexuals—somehow all conflated into an all-encompassing Other that HATES OUR FREEDOMS). If you see a decal of a Corinthian helmet on someone's car, odds are they're a white supremacist on some level, someone who embraced the symbology of 300 as it metastasized throughout right-wing America.
The Last of the Wine was one of the first books mentioned when I asked for recommendations after getting my library card in 2012. (I forget who suggested it—it was over seven years ago, somehow.) Though published in 1956, it explores this tension between the high-minded ideals of Athenian philosophy and the ugly reality of its cultural norms. It tells a beautiful love story between two men who are drawn into the philosophical circle around Sokrates, while demonstrating that the cultural celebration of male love (as in many martial, patriarchal societies) was built upon a foundation of utterly nauseating, literally dehumanizing misogyny. Its two noble heroes become staunch democrats and fight against tyrants and oligarchs for almost a decade, yet their philosophical high-mindedness is only possible thanks to their vast privilege of wealth, status, and gender affording them leisure and education. One could write a library of dissertations dissecting the intersectionality of these characters and Renault's vividly realized Attica. The parallels between Sokrates' Athens and the conservative myth of America, whether intended by the author or not, were impossible to ignore.
All that said, I adore this book. The story is poignantly told, rich with eroticism and devotion, bitter with jealousy and generation upon generation of trauma. I started reading it after all this time after seeing it name-checked in Jo Walton's Among Others (which I partially reread recently, after encouraging my partner to read it); fittingly, The Last of the Wine stirred my deeply buried urge to write. The sweep of its historical setting, the antique dialogue nonetheless sparkling with personality and cadence, the interplay of love and war—it all made me want to write fantasy stories, and helped me to understand why so much fantasy fiction before the 1980s (and continuing on to today, if The Priory of the Orange Tree is any indication) seemed to borrow so much from the trappings of historical fiction. In brief: I want to write something that captures the feel of this book, without having to do all that labor-intensive research first.
447 pages
Published 1956
Read from September 14 to September 18
Rating: 4 out of 5
As a kid, first reading my older brother's social studies textbook and then branching out into history books scavenged from wholesaler warehouse sales, I idolized Athens. I felt proud of their democracy, even though I had absolutely no connection to it. I felt prouder still when, in summaries of the Peloponnesian War, Athens made temporary headway against those Spartan louts; I felt corresponding grief when Athens' fortunes turned.
Western Europeans have loved to claim cultural continuity with Rome ever since the Dark Ages, and with ancient Greece ever since the Renaissance. This is a long-standing cultural myth. There is no neat progression of one culture feeding into another, no diffusion of cultural "light" from one cradle of civilization to another. Western Europe was always a cultural backwater, and the only continuity is what they appropriated for themselves after discovering classic Greek writings when they fought against Greece's true cultural heirs (at least in terms of mathematics and philosophy) during the Crusades. America's Founding Fathers certainly bought into this myth, adding further legends of America's inheritance from republican Rome and democratic Athens. Perhaps that's why I championed that middle-school textbook version of Athens as a kid; printed around the end of the Cold War, my brother's textbook no doubt laid the propaganda on thick.
As an adult, I've developed a better understanding of just how ghastly and horrible republican Rome and democratic Athens were, and how they truly presaged the ghastly and horrible first two centuries of the American experiment. Athenian men discoursed on the meanings of freedom, human goodness, and good government, all while owning slaves, invading and genociding rival city-states for economic gain, and regarding women and children as essentially livestock, subject to the whims of their male heads of household. It's hard, really, to tell any difference between them and the framers of the Constitution. To this day, maintained as propaganda for America's forever-wars in Southwest Asia, we cling to this myth of Greece (read: conservative White Europeans and Americans) as a bastion of liberty and personal freedom fighting for survival against the despotism of "the East" (read: Islam, Jews, brown people, homosexuals—somehow all conflated into an all-encompassing Other that HATES OUR FREEDOMS). If you see a decal of a Corinthian helmet on someone's car, odds are they're a white supremacist on some level, someone who embraced the symbology of 300 as it metastasized throughout right-wing America.
The Last of the Wine was one of the first books mentioned when I asked for recommendations after getting my library card in 2012. (I forget who suggested it—it was over seven years ago, somehow.) Though published in 1956, it explores this tension between the high-minded ideals of Athenian philosophy and the ugly reality of its cultural norms. It tells a beautiful love story between two men who are drawn into the philosophical circle around Sokrates, while demonstrating that the cultural celebration of male love (as in many martial, patriarchal societies) was built upon a foundation of utterly nauseating, literally dehumanizing misogyny. Its two noble heroes become staunch democrats and fight against tyrants and oligarchs for almost a decade, yet their philosophical high-mindedness is only possible thanks to their vast privilege of wealth, status, and gender affording them leisure and education. One could write a library of dissertations dissecting the intersectionality of these characters and Renault's vividly realized Attica. The parallels between Sokrates' Athens and the conservative myth of America, whether intended by the author or not, were impossible to ignore.
All that said, I adore this book. The story is poignantly told, rich with eroticism and devotion, bitter with jealousy and generation upon generation of trauma. I started reading it after all this time after seeing it name-checked in Jo Walton's Among Others (which I partially reread recently, after encouraging my partner to read it); fittingly, The Last of the Wine stirred my deeply buried urge to write. The sweep of its historical setting, the antique dialogue nonetheless sparkling with personality and cadence, the interplay of love and war—it all made me want to write fantasy stories, and helped me to understand why so much fantasy fiction before the 1980s (and continuing on to today, if The Priory of the Orange Tree is any indication) seemed to borrow so much from the trappings of historical fiction. In brief: I want to write something that captures the feel of this book, without having to do all that labor-intensive research first.
Wednesday, November 13, 2019
2019 read #18: A Particular Kind of Black Man by Tope Folarin.
A Particular Kind of Black Man by Tope Folarin
262 pages
Published 2019
Read from November 1 to November 13
Rating: 4 out of 5
This book was an emotionally draining read, but not for the reasons I expected. Going into it blind, without having read the jacket summary, I envisioned a brutal tearjerker about racism in America and the violence of the police state, assuming (in my white liberal ignorance) that every Black story in 2019 would be akin to The Hate U Give. Instead, while racism in America very much played a role in the tale, A Particular Kind of Black Man dealt with themes of family and identity, of mental illness and heredity, of coping with loss by editing the past—all things painfully personal and relatable for me.
It says something about my own internalized racism, absorbed from my upbringing and still visible even in my attempts to become a decent person, that I wasn't prepared to relate so strongly to a Nigerian American's fictional narrative. That's an embarrassing fact to have to admit to. I grew up with a schizophrenic parent; I was abandoned by my own mother at a young age; I've sabotaged relationships through my own insecurity. Turning each page was a challenge because of how deeply I cringed at Tunde's social self-destruction. I knew his story all too well; I didn't want to see it happen again, no matter how fictionalized.
I feel embarrassed for expecting a thunderous rebuke of state violence instead of a narrative with its own fully realized ends. I feel ashamed of how little Black fiction I've read. Owning up to it is one step forward, I hope: reading more is another.
262 pages
Published 2019
Read from November 1 to November 13
Rating: 4 out of 5
This book was an emotionally draining read, but not for the reasons I expected. Going into it blind, without having read the jacket summary, I envisioned a brutal tearjerker about racism in America and the violence of the police state, assuming (in my white liberal ignorance) that every Black story in 2019 would be akin to The Hate U Give. Instead, while racism in America very much played a role in the tale, A Particular Kind of Black Man dealt with themes of family and identity, of mental illness and heredity, of coping with loss by editing the past—all things painfully personal and relatable for me.
It says something about my own internalized racism, absorbed from my upbringing and still visible even in my attempts to become a decent person, that I wasn't prepared to relate so strongly to a Nigerian American's fictional narrative. That's an embarrassing fact to have to admit to. I grew up with a schizophrenic parent; I was abandoned by my own mother at a young age; I've sabotaged relationships through my own insecurity. Turning each page was a challenge because of how deeply I cringed at Tunde's social self-destruction. I knew his story all too well; I didn't want to see it happen again, no matter how fictionalized.
I feel embarrassed for expecting a thunderous rebuke of state violence instead of a narrative with its own fully realized ends. I feel ashamed of how little Black fiction I've read. Owning up to it is one step forward, I hope: reading more is another.
Friday, October 11, 2019
2019 read #17: The Quick by Lauren Owen.
The Quick by Lauren Owen
526 pages
Published 2014
Read from October 6 to October 11
Rating: 4 out of 5
Short stories have broken my heart within an efficiency of pages—James Tiptree, Jr.'s "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever" (reviewed here) comes to mind. The Quick, however, might be the very first novel to have me bawling my eyes out within the first ten pages.
I've been wanting to read this book essentially since it came out; I found it on the new books shelf at my former local library and was immediately taken with its cover. This month, I've been feeling an urge to read horror, something I say every October, but this time I'm finally acting on it to some extent. The Quick seemed like the perfect place to begin.
In a Late Victorian London populated with enough vampires to round out several competing factions, bloodshed and grisly deaths can be found in spades, yet The Quick seems less interested in being chilling than in finding the tragedy woven throughout. It never again quite broke my heart with the same intensity it did in the beginning (though the last chapter came close), but sadness pervaded the novel like fog. It is a total bummer of a novel—but a beautiful bummer that earns every heartbreak.
526 pages
Published 2014
Read from October 6 to October 11
Rating: 4 out of 5
Short stories have broken my heart within an efficiency of pages—James Tiptree, Jr.'s "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever" (reviewed here) comes to mind. The Quick, however, might be the very first novel to have me bawling my eyes out within the first ten pages.
I've been wanting to read this book essentially since it came out; I found it on the new books shelf at my former local library and was immediately taken with its cover. This month, I've been feeling an urge to read horror, something I say every October, but this time I'm finally acting on it to some extent. The Quick seemed like the perfect place to begin.
In a Late Victorian London populated with enough vampires to round out several competing factions, bloodshed and grisly deaths can be found in spades, yet The Quick seems less interested in being chilling than in finding the tragedy woven throughout. It never again quite broke my heart with the same intensity it did in the beginning (though the last chapter came close), but sadness pervaded the novel like fog. It is a total bummer of a novel—but a beautiful bummer that earns every heartbreak.
Sunday, October 6, 2019
2019 read #16: My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Otessa Moshfegh.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Otessa Moshfegh
289 pages
Published 2018
Read from September 29 to October 6
Rating: 3 out of 5
Can I recognize the quality of this book's prose, its emotional lucidity, and its narrative structure, while admitting that nothing about its characters or scenario appealed to me in any way?
When my partner MacKenzie recommended this book to me, I wondered how a book-length narrative could be sustained by the conceit of "someone with unacknowledged clinical depression tries to sleep for an entire year." Moshfegh's text is masterfully structured, establishing and expanding upon the concept by exploring how the "year of rest and relaxation" affected each aspect of the narrator's life, how she kept herself fed, how she sourced her sedatives, how she arrived at the desire for a year-long sleeping reset of her life in the first place. The pragmatic and emotional foundations of the narrator's "project" having been laid over the first third of the story as a sort of prologue, the middle depicts a single week or so around New Year's, the midpoint of the titular year of rest, as a new (fictional) drug causes her to have disconcerting blackouts and venture out from her sleeping bubble and quickly begin to spiral out of control.
The dry, detached quality of Moshfegh's prose provides an emotional scalpel that cuts uncomfortably deep, a descriptive inventory of a mental state in slow-motion collapse. There are also illuminating asides about the money- and fashion-driven fads of the high art world—insights that are likely routine in this sort of cynical, darkly humorous social satire, but felt fresh to me.
No doubt it seemed new to me because, frankly, I don't often read this sort of thing. I have an aversion to this sort of novel, the kind centered on a privileged and emotionally disconnected child of wealth who craters hard into drug abuse and self-absorption. Had, say, Bret Easton Ellis (or any number of interchangeable lit darling dudes) written this, I wouldn't even have cracked the cover. "I have too much money and my mom never loved me!" falls flat for me, never having had money or a mother. The narrator's dry inventory of her life includes numerous unadorned descriptions of her own appalling thoughts and prejudices, further alienating my sympathies.
Yeah, I know unappealing narrators are supposed to be artsy and au courant, but that's also another faddish affectation; there's absolutely nothing more refined or significant about enjoying stories about shitty people, and there's nothing wrong with preferring narrators who aren't awful.
I did find myself tearing up toward the end, as—spoiler warning!—a regimen of keeping herself drugged out for the final five months finally leads to the desired outcome, and the narrator finds herself softened and receptive and aware of the world around her at last. But then the last page has to go and become absolutely, preposterously silly, shoehorning on some tacky attempt to find grace and meaning in the fall of the Twin Towers. That last page ends a worthwhile and (to me, personally) challenging read on such a hack note. My year (and My Year) would have been improved had that been left on the editing room floor.
289 pages
Published 2018
Read from September 29 to October 6
Rating: 3 out of 5
Can I recognize the quality of this book's prose, its emotional lucidity, and its narrative structure, while admitting that nothing about its characters or scenario appealed to me in any way?
When my partner MacKenzie recommended this book to me, I wondered how a book-length narrative could be sustained by the conceit of "someone with unacknowledged clinical depression tries to sleep for an entire year." Moshfegh's text is masterfully structured, establishing and expanding upon the concept by exploring how the "year of rest and relaxation" affected each aspect of the narrator's life, how she kept herself fed, how she sourced her sedatives, how she arrived at the desire for a year-long sleeping reset of her life in the first place. The pragmatic and emotional foundations of the narrator's "project" having been laid over the first third of the story as a sort of prologue, the middle depicts a single week or so around New Year's, the midpoint of the titular year of rest, as a new (fictional) drug causes her to have disconcerting blackouts and venture out from her sleeping bubble and quickly begin to spiral out of control.
The dry, detached quality of Moshfegh's prose provides an emotional scalpel that cuts uncomfortably deep, a descriptive inventory of a mental state in slow-motion collapse. There are also illuminating asides about the money- and fashion-driven fads of the high art world—insights that are likely routine in this sort of cynical, darkly humorous social satire, but felt fresh to me.
No doubt it seemed new to me because, frankly, I don't often read this sort of thing. I have an aversion to this sort of novel, the kind centered on a privileged and emotionally disconnected child of wealth who craters hard into drug abuse and self-absorption. Had, say, Bret Easton Ellis (or any number of interchangeable lit darling dudes) written this, I wouldn't even have cracked the cover. "I have too much money and my mom never loved me!" falls flat for me, never having had money or a mother. The narrator's dry inventory of her life includes numerous unadorned descriptions of her own appalling thoughts and prejudices, further alienating my sympathies.
Yeah, I know unappealing narrators are supposed to be artsy and au courant, but that's also another faddish affectation; there's absolutely nothing more refined or significant about enjoying stories about shitty people, and there's nothing wrong with preferring narrators who aren't awful.
I did find myself tearing up toward the end, as—spoiler warning!—a regimen of keeping herself drugged out for the final five months finally leads to the desired outcome, and the narrator finds herself softened and receptive and aware of the world around her at last. But then the last page has to go and become absolutely, preposterously silly, shoehorning on some tacky attempt to find grace and meaning in the fall of the Twin Towers. That last page ends a worthwhile and (to me, personally) challenging read on such a hack note. My year (and My Year) would have been improved had that been left on the editing room floor.
Sunday, September 29, 2019
2019 read #15: Underland by Robert Macfarlane.
Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane
429 pages
Published 2019
Read from September 24 to September 28
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
I've long placed Macfarlane in the company of Helen Macdonald, Rebecca Solnit, Ellen Meloy, and Roger Deakin, practitioners of the English language's most affecting and gorgeous nature writing in recent years. He has his moments of transcendence here, whether expounding upon the philosophical weight of the geologic past or the disorienting new realities of climate change, plastic pollution, and nuclear waste disposal. Despite that, I feel this isn't Macfarlane's best effort.
Underland flourishes when Macfarlane makes connections between disparate concepts, forming a coherent and powerful teleology of meaning for those of us adrift in the Anthropocene, such as when the "atomic priesthood" conceptualized by Thomas Sebeok, tasked with relaying warnings of nuclear waste into the far future using folklore and myth, disconcertingly mirrors the warnings in the Kalevala concerning a deeply buried cache of powerful spells and objects, which can only be approached while armored in copper and iron, and must never be loosed upon the surface world.
Oddly, Macfarlane's writing was at its worst when simply describing the scenery. Here he adopts a terse prose, clipped of its subject and flattened into present tense, a mechanical printout of sensory information without anyone to experience it. Perhaps this was a conscious choice reflecting the solastalgia of a world falling apart in our hands. Regardless of intent, it became repetitive and didn't match the fluent, beautiful nature writing Macfarlane has displayed in the past.
429 pages
Published 2019
Read from September 24 to September 28
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
I've long placed Macfarlane in the company of Helen Macdonald, Rebecca Solnit, Ellen Meloy, and Roger Deakin, practitioners of the English language's most affecting and gorgeous nature writing in recent years. He has his moments of transcendence here, whether expounding upon the philosophical weight of the geologic past or the disorienting new realities of climate change, plastic pollution, and nuclear waste disposal. Despite that, I feel this isn't Macfarlane's best effort.
Underland flourishes when Macfarlane makes connections between disparate concepts, forming a coherent and powerful teleology of meaning for those of us adrift in the Anthropocene, such as when the "atomic priesthood" conceptualized by Thomas Sebeok, tasked with relaying warnings of nuclear waste into the far future using folklore and myth, disconcertingly mirrors the warnings in the Kalevala concerning a deeply buried cache of powerful spells and objects, which can only be approached while armored in copper and iron, and must never be loosed upon the surface world.
Oddly, Macfarlane's writing was at its worst when simply describing the scenery. Here he adopts a terse prose, clipped of its subject and flattened into present tense, a mechanical printout of sensory information without anyone to experience it. Perhaps this was a conscious choice reflecting the solastalgia of a world falling apart in our hands. Regardless of intent, it became repetitive and didn't match the fluent, beautiful nature writing Macfarlane has displayed in the past.
Monday, September 23, 2019
2019 read #14: Circe by Madeline Miller.
Circe by Madeline Miller
394 pages
Published 2018
Read from September 21 to September 23
Rating: 4 out of 5
Women, throughout the history of the written word, have been relegated to roles as helpmeets, trophies, obstacles, cheerleaders, and convenient plot devices. The few famous literary characters who were women tended to appear as chapters in the narratives of men. The mythological figure of Circe exists almost entirely as an appendage to Odysseus: initially a powerful and dangerous foil for him to overcome, subsequently conquered by his supreme manhood and serving a domestic role for him and his crew. In texts where her existence doesn't revolve around Odysseus, Circe is depicted (more or less literally) as a maneater, a manifestation of female libido and power who transforms her male "victims" into swine.
It's satisfying to read a modern novel based on Circe's legends that, for a good chunk of its length, refuses to center Odysseus as the upright pillar of her story. Miller's treatment explores age-old topics like godhood and mortality and the capricious cruelty of the divine, centering Circe herself as a belittled outcast in a divine household where nymphs are treated merely as bargaining chips and as playthings. She is the focus of her own story—an obvious choice rendered significant by the overwhelming numbers of male storytellers (and readers) who would be baffled by it to this day.
I grew up with the safely sanitized versions of the classical Mediterranean myths we all absorbed. Odysseus was my favorite as a child. A hero who used his brains far more than his brawn sailed directly into my nerdy, shrimpy little heart. I put myself in his sandals when I read a bowdlerized and abridged version of The Odyssey, right up until the end, when I also identified with Telemachus and viewed Odysseus as the esteemable and good father figure I lacked. The chapters in Miller's novel when Odysseus arrives on Aiaia, the romance he shares with the wary and cynical witch Circe has become, felt nice, cozy, fulfilling. All of which made Miller's subsequent deconstruction of that little domestic interlude all the more powerful and eye-opening.
394 pages
Published 2018
Read from September 21 to September 23
Rating: 4 out of 5
Women, throughout the history of the written word, have been relegated to roles as helpmeets, trophies, obstacles, cheerleaders, and convenient plot devices. The few famous literary characters who were women tended to appear as chapters in the narratives of men. The mythological figure of Circe exists almost entirely as an appendage to Odysseus: initially a powerful and dangerous foil for him to overcome, subsequently conquered by his supreme manhood and serving a domestic role for him and his crew. In texts where her existence doesn't revolve around Odysseus, Circe is depicted (more or less literally) as a maneater, a manifestation of female libido and power who transforms her male "victims" into swine.
It's satisfying to read a modern novel based on Circe's legends that, for a good chunk of its length, refuses to center Odysseus as the upright pillar of her story. Miller's treatment explores age-old topics like godhood and mortality and the capricious cruelty of the divine, centering Circe herself as a belittled outcast in a divine household where nymphs are treated merely as bargaining chips and as playthings. She is the focus of her own story—an obvious choice rendered significant by the overwhelming numbers of male storytellers (and readers) who would be baffled by it to this day.
I grew up with the safely sanitized versions of the classical Mediterranean myths we all absorbed. Odysseus was my favorite as a child. A hero who used his brains far more than his brawn sailed directly into my nerdy, shrimpy little heart. I put myself in his sandals when I read a bowdlerized and abridged version of The Odyssey, right up until the end, when I also identified with Telemachus and viewed Odysseus as the esteemable and good father figure I lacked. The chapters in Miller's novel when Odysseus arrives on Aiaia, the romance he shares with the wary and cynical witch Circe has become, felt nice, cozy, fulfilling. All of which made Miller's subsequent deconstruction of that little domestic interlude all the more powerful and eye-opening.
Friday, September 20, 2019
2019 read #13: The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon.
The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon
831 pages
Published 2019
Read from September 5 to September 20
Rating: 2 out of 5
This is one of those exceptionally rare occasions in which a standalone epic fantasy novel the size of a cat would have been improved had it been split into a trilogy and padded out with an extra hundred or two hundred pages of worldbuilding and introspection.
Some spoilers ahead.
The first half of this book is great. It has many of the flaws common to epic fantasy—too many coincidental meetings and overheard conversations driving the plot forward, too many feasts where every dish gets listed, too many repetitions of the word "trencher"—but big things start happening a hundred pages in, and for a while, the accelerating pace and the appealing characters are enough to grip your interest and keep you going. Around the halfway point, though, the book begins to feel a bit undercooked. A major climax occurs with the thwarting of a palace coup, and as the dust settles, the narrative sputters out, losing much of its momentum. It feels like a logical place to end the first book of a trilogy: falling action after a climax, wrapping up some loose ends, setting the scene for the next book. Coming as it does in the middle of a single volume, however, it just feels like sloppy pacing—a feeling compounded by how everything after that point feels rushed and only half-finished.
In the aftermath of the attempted coup, a viewpoint character who has completed his first character arc is randomly given the responsibility of interviewing suspects among the nobility (presumably because he has nothing better to do), just so that there can be a couple dramatic prison cell monologues. As soon as those are wrapped up, the viewpoint character gets taken off the case and sent on to his next plot function, never really regaining agency as anything other than a plot device.
The book's strict reliance on the same four viewpoint characters forces similar detours and epic journeys upon each of them. All four crisscross the world in a period of just a few pages; the result feels more like the outline of the second novel in a series than an actual narrative. People we've followed from the very beginning just happen to meet at the ends of the earth, or just happen to be on hand at exactly the right time to witness tertiary characters duke it out, literally half a world away from where they started.
A semi-legendary character teased from the setting's ancient past appears, gains an intriguing layer of nuance in a memorable scene, and then does a ridiculous heel turn that never coheres into something that makes sense. Her "Everything you thought you knew was a lie!" gambit never pays off or affects the plot in any way, and then she dies like a chump.
Worst of all, almost every main character gets a fake-out death scene just to manipulate your emotions. Hell, some characters get two. It all feels like a mess of clumsy plotting, hurrying you along to the preordained set-piece battle between the forces of good and evil. With the rushed pacing, the repeated cliffhanger "death scenes" that get walked back in the next chapter, and the lack of space for the characters to breathe, each new setback the characters face becomes an annoyance for the reader rather than a source of dramatic tension. Like, we know so-and-so will get dramatically reunited with her dragon, and we know the magic MacGuffin sword will do what it's supposed to do in the end, so if you aren't going to bother giving us more than plot checkpoints for half the book, and you're giving us fake death scenes instead of character development, why bother slowing things down with extra steps? Just get to the end already.
So, contrary to all the laws of nature and book criticism, I have to say that stretching this tome into three would have fixed many of its issues. Build up the characters' setbacks organically. Let them experience doubt and growth beyond the plateau they all reach at the halfway mark. Maintain the excellent balance of character beats and plot movement from the first half of the story by giving the rest of it space to take root and spread its crown.
831 pages
Published 2019
Read from September 5 to September 20
Rating: 2 out of 5
This is one of those exceptionally rare occasions in which a standalone epic fantasy novel the size of a cat would have been improved had it been split into a trilogy and padded out with an extra hundred or two hundred pages of worldbuilding and introspection.
Some spoilers ahead.
The first half of this book is great. It has many of the flaws common to epic fantasy—too many coincidental meetings and overheard conversations driving the plot forward, too many feasts where every dish gets listed, too many repetitions of the word "trencher"—but big things start happening a hundred pages in, and for a while, the accelerating pace and the appealing characters are enough to grip your interest and keep you going. Around the halfway point, though, the book begins to feel a bit undercooked. A major climax occurs with the thwarting of a palace coup, and as the dust settles, the narrative sputters out, losing much of its momentum. It feels like a logical place to end the first book of a trilogy: falling action after a climax, wrapping up some loose ends, setting the scene for the next book. Coming as it does in the middle of a single volume, however, it just feels like sloppy pacing—a feeling compounded by how everything after that point feels rushed and only half-finished.
In the aftermath of the attempted coup, a viewpoint character who has completed his first character arc is randomly given the responsibility of interviewing suspects among the nobility (presumably because he has nothing better to do), just so that there can be a couple dramatic prison cell monologues. As soon as those are wrapped up, the viewpoint character gets taken off the case and sent on to his next plot function, never really regaining agency as anything other than a plot device.
The book's strict reliance on the same four viewpoint characters forces similar detours and epic journeys upon each of them. All four crisscross the world in a period of just a few pages; the result feels more like the outline of the second novel in a series than an actual narrative. People we've followed from the very beginning just happen to meet at the ends of the earth, or just happen to be on hand at exactly the right time to witness tertiary characters duke it out, literally half a world away from where they started.
A semi-legendary character teased from the setting's ancient past appears, gains an intriguing layer of nuance in a memorable scene, and then does a ridiculous heel turn that never coheres into something that makes sense. Her "Everything you thought you knew was a lie!" gambit never pays off or affects the plot in any way, and then she dies like a chump.
Worst of all, almost every main character gets a fake-out death scene just to manipulate your emotions. Hell, some characters get two. It all feels like a mess of clumsy plotting, hurrying you along to the preordained set-piece battle between the forces of good and evil. With the rushed pacing, the repeated cliffhanger "death scenes" that get walked back in the next chapter, and the lack of space for the characters to breathe, each new setback the characters face becomes an annoyance for the reader rather than a source of dramatic tension. Like, we know so-and-so will get dramatically reunited with her dragon, and we know the magic MacGuffin sword will do what it's supposed to do in the end, so if you aren't going to bother giving us more than plot checkpoints for half the book, and you're giving us fake death scenes instead of character development, why bother slowing things down with extra steps? Just get to the end already.
So, contrary to all the laws of nature and book criticism, I have to say that stretching this tome into three would have fixed many of its issues. Build up the characters' setbacks organically. Let them experience doubt and growth beyond the plateau they all reach at the halfway mark. Maintain the excellent balance of character beats and plot movement from the first half of the story by giving the rest of it space to take root and spread its crown.
Friday, August 16, 2019
2019 read #12: Rain: A Natural and Cultural History by Cynthia Barnett.
Rain: A Natural and Cultural History by Cynthia Barnett
295 pages
Published 2015
Read from August 8 to August 16
Rating: 3 out of 5
Did I really just go three months without finishing a book, again? Damn.
After making a bit of progress getting myself back into the reading habit this past winter, I find that my attention span and motivation have foundered once again. Time to gather myself up and make another go at it, from scratch.
Non-fiction often seems easier to read when I get into this book lapses. There isn't the requirement to invest emotional energy into characters and their intimate tragedies. On the other hand, the rewards from non-fiction -- especially this sort of journalistic pop natural history that provides a sweeping but shallow overview of a large topic -- are more meager than those found in a well-written novel.
I found Rain to be a straightforwardly enjoyable example of its type, though it left me unsatisfied, as such surface-level reportage tends to be. I want something more substantial than a few illustrative anecdotes; I don't feel like I really learned anything. But Rain was a nice way to break my recent reading drought, pun entirely intended.
295 pages
Published 2015
Read from August 8 to August 16
Rating: 3 out of 5
Did I really just go three months without finishing a book, again? Damn.
After making a bit of progress getting myself back into the reading habit this past winter, I find that my attention span and motivation have foundered once again. Time to gather myself up and make another go at it, from scratch.
Non-fiction often seems easier to read when I get into this book lapses. There isn't the requirement to invest emotional energy into characters and their intimate tragedies. On the other hand, the rewards from non-fiction -- especially this sort of journalistic pop natural history that provides a sweeping but shallow overview of a large topic -- are more meager than those found in a well-written novel.
I found Rain to be a straightforwardly enjoyable example of its type, though it left me unsatisfied, as such surface-level reportage tends to be. I want something more substantial than a few illustrative anecdotes; I don't feel like I really learned anything. But Rain was a nice way to break my recent reading drought, pun entirely intended.
Thursday, May 23, 2019
2019 read #11: The Stone Sky by N. K. Jemisin.
The Stone Sky by N. K. Jemisin
400 pages
Published 2017
Read from March 27 to May 23
Rating: 3 out of 5
As soon as I finished The Obelisk Gate, the second book in Jemisin's Broken Earth Trilogy, I wrote in my review, "I'm excited to complete the trilogy." I had read Obelisk Gate swiftly, finishing it at a pace reminiscent of how I used to read books before events we all know and deplore. The same day I posted Obelisk's review, I started reading The Stone Sky. But something was different, and the final book of the trilogy just didn't sustain my interest the way the middle volume had done.
I think the difference was something as simple as a couple new viewpoint characters. I grew to enjoy and appreciate the several-millennia-back flashbacks to Houwha/Hoa's past, but at first those chapters threw me out of the flow of the books. It's one thing to introduce a new viewpoint and more backstory in the middle of a trilogy; in the last book, though, it feels like the story wasn't quite working out as intended and the plot needed some belated course-correction, even if that isn't the case. The addition of Nassun's perspective felt more organic to the narrative, bringing with it—spoilers!—the perspective of systematic oppression and violence against a minority group can lead to the temptation to just wipe everything away, perhaps by slamming the Moon into the Earth. But as a reader, I can't say that Nassun's chapters were my favorites.
All that aside, I did enjoy this book, and I appreciated how the different story threads and perspectives all came together in the end. The odd narrative structure that had been such a prominent feature since the very beginning of the trilogy in The Fifth Season finally clicked into place—we finally know why the narrator was telling Essun her own story, and it fit in perfectly with everything we knew.
400 pages
Published 2017
Read from March 27 to May 23
Rating: 3 out of 5
As soon as I finished The Obelisk Gate, the second book in Jemisin's Broken Earth Trilogy, I wrote in my review, "I'm excited to complete the trilogy." I had read Obelisk Gate swiftly, finishing it at a pace reminiscent of how I used to read books before events we all know and deplore. The same day I posted Obelisk's review, I started reading The Stone Sky. But something was different, and the final book of the trilogy just didn't sustain my interest the way the middle volume had done.
I think the difference was something as simple as a couple new viewpoint characters. I grew to enjoy and appreciate the several-millennia-back flashbacks to Houwha/Hoa's past, but at first those chapters threw me out of the flow of the books. It's one thing to introduce a new viewpoint and more backstory in the middle of a trilogy; in the last book, though, it feels like the story wasn't quite working out as intended and the plot needed some belated course-correction, even if that isn't the case. The addition of Nassun's perspective felt more organic to the narrative, bringing with it—spoilers!—the perspective of systematic oppression and violence against a minority group can lead to the temptation to just wipe everything away, perhaps by slamming the Moon into the Earth. But as a reader, I can't say that Nassun's chapters were my favorites.
All that aside, I did enjoy this book, and I appreciated how the different story threads and perspectives all came together in the end. The odd narrative structure that had been such a prominent feature since the very beginning of the trilogy in The Fifth Season finally clicked into place—we finally know why the narrator was telling Essun her own story, and it fit in perfectly with everything we knew.
Saturday, May 18, 2019
2019 read #10: Player's Handbook (Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition).
Player's Handbook (Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition) by Wizards of the Coast LLC
312 pages
Published 2014
Read from April 29 to May 18
Rating: n/a
I continue my glacially slow read-through of the core rulebooks of the current edition of Dungeons & Dragons. This one consists of the nitty-gritty rules and counterrules and exceptions and specifics of play, which made for especially dull reading at times. (There's a reason I've never read these books cover to cover before, even though I've been playing the game since 2016.)
These rulebooks are in desperate need of a quick-reference guide. The Player's Handbook gestures toward this with an appendix detailing "conditions" that your character might be subject to during the game (such as blinded, paralyzed, or knocked prone), but fails at completing even this modest goal; the rules for how to get up from the prone condition aren't in the appendix, but in the section on movement during combat, a hundred pages earlier. When I started DMing my own campaign a couple years ago, I tried typing up my own cheat-sheet of important rules, but it wound up an unwieldy twenty pages or so, and I guessed wrong about what the most important rules and exceptions would be. (Most arguments and deliberate "misunderstandings" of the rules revolve around race and class features in the game. Kind of like in real life, I suppose.)
Fifth edition D&D was my first tabletop game, and I'll always be fond of it and eager to play. The rulebooks could benefit from better organization, though.
312 pages
Published 2014
Read from April 29 to May 18
Rating: n/a
I continue my glacially slow read-through of the core rulebooks of the current edition of Dungeons & Dragons. This one consists of the nitty-gritty rules and counterrules and exceptions and specifics of play, which made for especially dull reading at times. (There's a reason I've never read these books cover to cover before, even though I've been playing the game since 2016.)
These rulebooks are in desperate need of a quick-reference guide. The Player's Handbook gestures toward this with an appendix detailing "conditions" that your character might be subject to during the game (such as blinded, paralyzed, or knocked prone), but fails at completing even this modest goal; the rules for how to get up from the prone condition aren't in the appendix, but in the section on movement during combat, a hundred pages earlier. When I started DMing my own campaign a couple years ago, I tried typing up my own cheat-sheet of important rules, but it wound up an unwieldy twenty pages or so, and I guessed wrong about what the most important rules and exceptions would be. (Most arguments and deliberate "misunderstandings" of the rules revolve around race and class features in the game. Kind of like in real life, I suppose.)
Fifth edition D&D was my first tabletop game, and I'll always be fond of it and eager to play. The rulebooks could benefit from better organization, though.
Monday, April 29, 2019
2019 read #9: Dungeon Master's Guide (Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition).
Dungeon Master's Guide (Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition) by Wizards of the Coast LLC
320 pages
Published 2014
Read from April 19 to April 29
Rating: n/a
I've been in another reading lull. I began several books but haven't finished anything since March. I've also been craving D&D, which I haven't played since January. At some point it occurred to me that I'd never actually read the game's core rule books cover to cover, and once I started, I discovered that reading the DM Guide helped me feel like I was part of a game again, even as it left me hankering to play more strongly than before.
To review this as a book, I suppose I'd need to be more conversant with game rulebooks and their comparative merits. Fifth edition D&D certainly has its flaws and shortcomings (social interaction and exploration, supposedly two of the three central pillars of gameplay, aren't given much in the way of specific quantifiable rules; martial character classes peak early and are left to clean up in the shadow of magic-users quickly becoming as powerful as gods), but I enjoy it all the same. I've never played any other tabletop game to compare it to, but I enjoy the rich history and lore lurking within the experience of the game. It has charm and replayability that sleeker, less clunky rulesets seem to lack—though again, I don't have any experiences to compare and contrast with it.
During my read-through of the DMG, I was surprised by how few rules are actually in this book. The bulk of its pages are devoted to worldbuilding advice, tips on handling players and running the game smoothly, and random tables meant to inspire creativity. You could 100% play this edition of D&D without picking up the DMG. As long as you have the Player's Handbook and a nice assortment of monsters, you have all the rules you truly need. That said, I'm a worldbuilder at heart, and I enjoyed those sections of the DMG.
320 pages
Published 2014
Read from April 19 to April 29
Rating: n/a
I've been in another reading lull. I began several books but haven't finished anything since March. I've also been craving D&D, which I haven't played since January. At some point it occurred to me that I'd never actually read the game's core rule books cover to cover, and once I started, I discovered that reading the DM Guide helped me feel like I was part of a game again, even as it left me hankering to play more strongly than before.
To review this as a book, I suppose I'd need to be more conversant with game rulebooks and their comparative merits. Fifth edition D&D certainly has its flaws and shortcomings (social interaction and exploration, supposedly two of the three central pillars of gameplay, aren't given much in the way of specific quantifiable rules; martial character classes peak early and are left to clean up in the shadow of magic-users quickly becoming as powerful as gods), but I enjoy it all the same. I've never played any other tabletop game to compare it to, but I enjoy the rich history and lore lurking within the experience of the game. It has charm and replayability that sleeker, less clunky rulesets seem to lack—though again, I don't have any experiences to compare and contrast with it.
During my read-through of the DMG, I was surprised by how few rules are actually in this book. The bulk of its pages are devoted to worldbuilding advice, tips on handling players and running the game smoothly, and random tables meant to inspire creativity. You could 100% play this edition of D&D without picking up the DMG. As long as you have the Player's Handbook and a nice assortment of monsters, you have all the rules you truly need. That said, I'm a worldbuilder at heart, and I enjoyed those sections of the DMG.
Wednesday, March 27, 2019
2019 read #8: The Obelisk Gate by N. K. Jemisin.
The Obelisk Gate by N. K. Jemisin
397 pages
Published 2016
Read from March 25 to March 27
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
It's been about four months since I read The Fifth Season, the first book in Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy. So much has happened since I read it—a move to another state, being away from my child—that it feels like a lot more time has passed. You know that feeling when you hop back into an epic fantasy series a long time after you read one volume? I had plenty of that throughout this book, many moments of "Wait, who is this again? Was this guy important? What does this word even mean?"
Despite that, Obelisk drew in and maintained my interest in a way none of the books I began this past month have managed. And I started reading quite a few.
On one hand, the narration style—conversational, sarcastic, full of asides and parentheses and a tendency to over-explain—can become grating and repetitive. I think I have some internalized expectation that a tale this epic in scope and intent should be burdened with "serious" writing. It's an often graphic exploration of a human-caused global mass extinction event, after all, with themes of abuse perpetuating itself and deep trauma causing those affected by it to make bad decisions. Surely (goes my expectation) it deserves haunting prose and a measured pace, perhaps something akin to the early novels of Helen Oyeyemi, nothing like this casual and (dare I say it!) flip attitude. Maybe I should examine that mindset, though. The plodding "epic" narration style has been codified in fantasy by generations of white male Tolkien imitators, and outside of genuine talents like Oyeyemi, it often just sucks. Perhaps it's a good thing to get beyond.
On the other hand, Obelisk was a swift read, far brisker than its length would suggest. I was shocked at how quickly I finished it, given my recent issues in maintaining reading interest and momentum. Backstory and fresh plot developments alike come at a rapid pace. Characters drop their barriers and make mistakes and grow. As a middle volume of a fantasy trilogy, it was superbly satisfying.
The book ends on a bit of an eye-rolling note. Spoilers! The main character's estranged daughter, rapidly becoming her equal in skill, resenting the abuse her mother put her through, becomes the main character's opposite, committed to destroying the world even as her mother becomes committed to saving it—a family drama trope that feels a bit on-the-nose, merely a gender-swap away from the core dynamic of far too many fantasy novels. Regardless, I feel confident that Jemisin can make something interesting out of it. I'm excited to complete the trilogy.
397 pages
Published 2016
Read from March 25 to March 27
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
It's been about four months since I read The Fifth Season, the first book in Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy. So much has happened since I read it—a move to another state, being away from my child—that it feels like a lot more time has passed. You know that feeling when you hop back into an epic fantasy series a long time after you read one volume? I had plenty of that throughout this book, many moments of "Wait, who is this again? Was this guy important? What does this word even mean?"
Despite that, Obelisk drew in and maintained my interest in a way none of the books I began this past month have managed. And I started reading quite a few.
On one hand, the narration style—conversational, sarcastic, full of asides and parentheses and a tendency to over-explain—can become grating and repetitive. I think I have some internalized expectation that a tale this epic in scope and intent should be burdened with "serious" writing. It's an often graphic exploration of a human-caused global mass extinction event, after all, with themes of abuse perpetuating itself and deep trauma causing those affected by it to make bad decisions. Surely (goes my expectation) it deserves haunting prose and a measured pace, perhaps something akin to the early novels of Helen Oyeyemi, nothing like this casual and (dare I say it!) flip attitude. Maybe I should examine that mindset, though. The plodding "epic" narration style has been codified in fantasy by generations of white male Tolkien imitators, and outside of genuine talents like Oyeyemi, it often just sucks. Perhaps it's a good thing to get beyond.
On the other hand, Obelisk was a swift read, far brisker than its length would suggest. I was shocked at how quickly I finished it, given my recent issues in maintaining reading interest and momentum. Backstory and fresh plot developments alike come at a rapid pace. Characters drop their barriers and make mistakes and grow. As a middle volume of a fantasy trilogy, it was superbly satisfying.
The book ends on a bit of an eye-rolling note. Spoilers! The main character's estranged daughter, rapidly becoming her equal in skill, resenting the abuse her mother put her through, becomes the main character's opposite, committed to destroying the world even as her mother becomes committed to saving it—a family drama trope that feels a bit on-the-nose, merely a gender-swap away from the core dynamic of far too many fantasy novels. Regardless, I feel confident that Jemisin can make something interesting out of it. I'm excited to complete the trilogy.
Sunday, March 3, 2019
2019 read #7: Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees.
Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees
319 pages
Published 1926
Read from February 19 to March 3
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
Can books be rebooted? Wait, scratch that question—of course they can be. Reinterpretations of the classics are a mainstay of the publishing field, and some writers (cough, Gregory Maguire, cough) build their entire careers out of chewing up public domain works and regurgitating fan-fiction for mass consumption.
If any book would benefit from a modern reboot, it would be Lud-in-the-Mist. There are glimmers of beautiful strangeness here, a compelling vertigo of life and death and dreams that would be intoxicating in the hands of one of our modern masters of fantasy, such as Helen Oyeyemi, Catherynne M. Valente, or E. Lily Yu. As it exists now, however, Lud is just so obdurately 1926. The central character is a burgher caricature that Verne would have recognized; the narrative swerves and loses momentum updating the reader on the happenings around tertiary characters; the most gorgeous and evocative section of the book, in my opinion, is scarcely longer than a dream sequence. We're supposed to find the main character's stubborn resolve to find his son who has wandered off into Fairyland an admirable example of domestic heroism, yet when the same character's daughter danced off into Fairyland a few chapters before, he barely shrugged, and he only frees her as an afterthought.
There's magic here, though, of one of my favorite varieties: a tale of Fairyland written before Tolkien became the cultural pattern for fantasy for several ensuing decades (much like Lord Dunsany's The King of Elfland's Daughter, from two years previous). I'm intrigued by how Fairyland is linked with the Land of the Dead; both are said to be reached via a walk along the Milky Way, while fairies and the dead alike are known as the Silent People. Master Nathaniel's dream-logic journey into the realm of the Silent People was positively Campbellian, yet felt fresh and compelling.
I would love to see some talented new writer approach an update and deconstruction of Lud, and bring the best of what it has to offer into something more like a readable modern narrative, with characters that are more than caricatures and dramatic flow that doesn't get lost in dead-end backwaters. And also maybe revise its ideological undercurrents. There's a lot to be unpacked from the deliberate parallels between the return of the deposed Duke from Fairyland, bringing with him the return of art and mysteries and commonweal to the stuffy mercantile republic of Lud, and the return of the Stuart monarchy after the Cromwells; while we can all agree that the common folk don't prosper under a government of capitalists, reinvesting in a mystic monarchy is not something my hypothetical reboot would champion.
319 pages
Published 1926
Read from February 19 to March 3
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
Can books be rebooted? Wait, scratch that question—of course they can be. Reinterpretations of the classics are a mainstay of the publishing field, and some writers (cough, Gregory Maguire, cough) build their entire careers out of chewing up public domain works and regurgitating fan-fiction for mass consumption.
If any book would benefit from a modern reboot, it would be Lud-in-the-Mist. There are glimmers of beautiful strangeness here, a compelling vertigo of life and death and dreams that would be intoxicating in the hands of one of our modern masters of fantasy, such as Helen Oyeyemi, Catherynne M. Valente, or E. Lily Yu. As it exists now, however, Lud is just so obdurately 1926. The central character is a burgher caricature that Verne would have recognized; the narrative swerves and loses momentum updating the reader on the happenings around tertiary characters; the most gorgeous and evocative section of the book, in my opinion, is scarcely longer than a dream sequence. We're supposed to find the main character's stubborn resolve to find his son who has wandered off into Fairyland an admirable example of domestic heroism, yet when the same character's daughter danced off into Fairyland a few chapters before, he barely shrugged, and he only frees her as an afterthought.
There's magic here, though, of one of my favorite varieties: a tale of Fairyland written before Tolkien became the cultural pattern for fantasy for several ensuing decades (much like Lord Dunsany's The King of Elfland's Daughter, from two years previous). I'm intrigued by how Fairyland is linked with the Land of the Dead; both are said to be reached via a walk along the Milky Way, while fairies and the dead alike are known as the Silent People. Master Nathaniel's dream-logic journey into the realm of the Silent People was positively Campbellian, yet felt fresh and compelling.
I would love to see some talented new writer approach an update and deconstruction of Lud, and bring the best of what it has to offer into something more like a readable modern narrative, with characters that are more than caricatures and dramatic flow that doesn't get lost in dead-end backwaters. And also maybe revise its ideological undercurrents. There's a lot to be unpacked from the deliberate parallels between the return of the deposed Duke from Fairyland, bringing with him the return of art and mysteries and commonweal to the stuffy mercantile republic of Lud, and the return of the Stuart monarchy after the Cromwells; while we can all agree that the common folk don't prosper under a government of capitalists, reinvesting in a mystic monarchy is not something my hypothetical reboot would champion.
Wednesday, February 27, 2019
2019 read #6: The Wizard and the Warlord by Elizabeth Boyer.
The Wizard and the Warlord by Elizabeth Boyer
279 pages
Published 1983
Read from February 14 to February 27
Rating: 1.5 out of 5
I bought this book at a sad little used book shop that an old man had established in the book-stuffed emptiness of his own home. He only accepted cash, and I only had enough cash for one purchase. It was between this and an old edition of Samuel R. Delany's Babel-17. I chose this one because you can buy Babel-17 pretty much any time you want, but I'd never even heard of this book, so you might as well go with the one you don't know, right?
What a slog this turned out to be.
A generic sword-and-sorcery hack-and-slash centered on an orphaned young man's search for the father he never knew, the best that can be said for The Wizard and the Warlord is its setting, an elven land based on Scandinavia and its folklore. Boyer's Alfar are indistinguishable from her human characters in temperament and behavior, and their realm is pretty much identical to the human realm our Sigurd must leave behind, but I enjoyed the rocky fells, the winters of darkness and the summers of midnight sun, the trolls and three-headed horse-bears.
The rest of the book, by contrast... oof.
Sigurd is perhaps the stupidest character I have ever encountered in a work of fiction. I'm not referring to the myriad cliches surrounding his origin or his quest, though those cringe-inducing enough. I'm referring to his capacity for decision-making and navigating the world around him. Every protagonist in this type of story seemingly must begin in a position of naive ignorance and boneheadedness, but Sigurd is MAGA-hat-wearing levels of stupid. And while other chosen-one lost sons eventually wise up with experience and take a more thoughtful approach to their predicaments, Sigurd doubles and triples down on his bad choices. The first Alfar he meets is so obviously Sigurd's father that I could only read on in wry disbelief as Sigurd swore everlasting enmity against him; the unctuous wizard, by contrast, wins Sigurd's undying trust despite repeatedly betraying him and cursing him with magic and trying to wrest Sigurd's own powers away from him. It isn't until page 260 (out of 279) that Sigurd himself realizes, "It seemed to him as he lay helplessly bleeding to death... that he [Sigurd] had betrayed every person he ought to have trusted and he had allowed his enemies to flatter and deceive him with ridiculous ease."
Yeah, no shit, honey.
Sadly, Sigurd does not helplessly bleed to death, which would have been a suitable fate for him. He gets rescued, and having learned and grown at last, goes off with his true friends to reunite with his father. Along the way our heroes casually commit genocide against the entire population of dark elves for the crimes of one warlord. So yay! Job well done, guys. Way to be a bunch of murderhobos.
Actually, that's a good way to describe this book: Imagine that That Guy in your D&D group (every D&D group has one!) who wants to have a secret, dark, gritty backstory that only the DM knows, and who loudly objects when anyone else in the party does anything silly or fun or enjoyable with their characters, got to write down their character's life story exactly as they imagined it. That's this book.
And apparently there are two other books set in this same world. Life's too short to read more than one book like this, alas.
279 pages
Published 1983
Read from February 14 to February 27
Rating: 1.5 out of 5
I bought this book at a sad little used book shop that an old man had established in the book-stuffed emptiness of his own home. He only accepted cash, and I only had enough cash for one purchase. It was between this and an old edition of Samuel R. Delany's Babel-17. I chose this one because you can buy Babel-17 pretty much any time you want, but I'd never even heard of this book, so you might as well go with the one you don't know, right?
What a slog this turned out to be.
A generic sword-and-sorcery hack-and-slash centered on an orphaned young man's search for the father he never knew, the best that can be said for The Wizard and the Warlord is its setting, an elven land based on Scandinavia and its folklore. Boyer's Alfar are indistinguishable from her human characters in temperament and behavior, and their realm is pretty much identical to the human realm our Sigurd must leave behind, but I enjoyed the rocky fells, the winters of darkness and the summers of midnight sun, the trolls and three-headed horse-bears.
The rest of the book, by contrast... oof.
Sigurd is perhaps the stupidest character I have ever encountered in a work of fiction. I'm not referring to the myriad cliches surrounding his origin or his quest, though those cringe-inducing enough. I'm referring to his capacity for decision-making and navigating the world around him. Every protagonist in this type of story seemingly must begin in a position of naive ignorance and boneheadedness, but Sigurd is MAGA-hat-wearing levels of stupid. And while other chosen-one lost sons eventually wise up with experience and take a more thoughtful approach to their predicaments, Sigurd doubles and triples down on his bad choices. The first Alfar he meets is so obviously Sigurd's father that I could only read on in wry disbelief as Sigurd swore everlasting enmity against him; the unctuous wizard, by contrast, wins Sigurd's undying trust despite repeatedly betraying him and cursing him with magic and trying to wrest Sigurd's own powers away from him. It isn't until page 260 (out of 279) that Sigurd himself realizes, "It seemed to him as he lay helplessly bleeding to death... that he [Sigurd] had betrayed every person he ought to have trusted and he had allowed his enemies to flatter and deceive him with ridiculous ease."
Yeah, no shit, honey.
Sadly, Sigurd does not helplessly bleed to death, which would have been a suitable fate for him. He gets rescued, and having learned and grown at last, goes off with his true friends to reunite with his father. Along the way our heroes casually commit genocide against the entire population of dark elves for the crimes of one warlord. So yay! Job well done, guys. Way to be a bunch of murderhobos.
Actually, that's a good way to describe this book: Imagine that That Guy in your D&D group (every D&D group has one!) who wants to have a secret, dark, gritty backstory that only the DM knows, and who loudly objects when anyone else in the party does anything silly or fun or enjoyable with their characters, got to write down their character's life story exactly as they imagined it. That's this book.
And apparently there are two other books set in this same world. Life's too short to read more than one book like this, alas.
Wednesday, February 13, 2019
2019 read #5: Dunleary by Monica Heath.
Dunleary by Monica Heath
143 pages
Published 1967
Read from February 8 to February 13
Rating: 1 out of 5
The other day I found this in a random thrift store in rural Ohio and picked it up because it sounded like some tawdry, trashy fun. A Gothic romance set on a remote Irish island haunted by a curse, where not even the heroine's husband is what he seems! Romance as a genre is ridiculed and devalued in our culture out of pure misogyny; having internalized that misogyny myself, I've read fewer romance novels than I have mysteries, and I despise mysteries. I've been meaning to remedy that deficit for a while now, and when I found this book, I followed an impulse to begin making up for that lack here and now.
This was a mistake.
Dunleary is a document shaped and fashioned out of misogyny. The lurid curse hinted at on the back cover dooms the women of Inish Laoghaire to "wantonness," which is the 1967 word for "having control over their own sexuality." Our heroine, "Deirdre the virgin" (as her future husband the Count O'Leary insists on calling her), meekly submits to her husband and holds fast to her "virtue," while the "curse" of the island is revealed to be the mad machinations of a "whore" who has been murdering women for decades in her frustrated desire to marry the Count O'Leary's father. On multiple occasions, the Count casually threatens to murder Deirdre with his bare hands if she proves unfaithful—and she goes and marries him anyway. It's a horrifying vision rendered yet more appalling by the realization that substantial numbers of people in our culture still view the world this way.
As a work of fiction, Dunleary feels like reading with training wheels on. Every twist and question and revelation is underlined repeatedly in the text. At one point a character sneers at a born-out-of-wedlock boy that Maeve, the aforementioned "whore" at the center of the web of murder and disgrace, is his mother; on the very next page our narrator Deirdre wonders, "Could Maeve be the boy's mother?" It reminds me a lot of pulp fantasy from the 1970s, or pulp sci-fi from the 1940s.
Next time I try to read some romance, I shall learn from this error and find me some more recent books that aren't so appallingly regressive.
143 pages
Published 1967
Read from February 8 to February 13
Rating: 1 out of 5
The other day I found this in a random thrift store in rural Ohio and picked it up because it sounded like some tawdry, trashy fun. A Gothic romance set on a remote Irish island haunted by a curse, where not even the heroine's husband is what he seems! Romance as a genre is ridiculed and devalued in our culture out of pure misogyny; having internalized that misogyny myself, I've read fewer romance novels than I have mysteries, and I despise mysteries. I've been meaning to remedy that deficit for a while now, and when I found this book, I followed an impulse to begin making up for that lack here and now.
This was a mistake.
Dunleary is a document shaped and fashioned out of misogyny. The lurid curse hinted at on the back cover dooms the women of Inish Laoghaire to "wantonness," which is the 1967 word for "having control over their own sexuality." Our heroine, "Deirdre the virgin" (as her future husband the Count O'Leary insists on calling her), meekly submits to her husband and holds fast to her "virtue," while the "curse" of the island is revealed to be the mad machinations of a "whore" who has been murdering women for decades in her frustrated desire to marry the Count O'Leary's father. On multiple occasions, the Count casually threatens to murder Deirdre with his bare hands if she proves unfaithful—and she goes and marries him anyway. It's a horrifying vision rendered yet more appalling by the realization that substantial numbers of people in our culture still view the world this way.
As a work of fiction, Dunleary feels like reading with training wheels on. Every twist and question and revelation is underlined repeatedly in the text. At one point a character sneers at a born-out-of-wedlock boy that Maeve, the aforementioned "whore" at the center of the web of murder and disgrace, is his mother; on the very next page our narrator Deirdre wonders, "Could Maeve be the boy's mother?" It reminds me a lot of pulp fantasy from the 1970s, or pulp sci-fi from the 1940s.
Next time I try to read some romance, I shall learn from this error and find me some more recent books that aren't so appallingly regressive.
Thursday, February 7, 2019
2019 read #4: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January/February 2019.
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January/February 2019 issue (136:1-2)
Edited by C. C. Finlay
258 pages
Published 2018
Read from January 16 to February 7
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
I'm trying something different here: reviewing an issue of a fiction magazine as if it were a book. I've been collecting speculative fiction magazines for a number of years, all the while intending to read and review their contents here, but through the magic of procrastination and inertia, I just haven't managed to do so before now.
So what prompted me to sit down and start reading my collection? In the last few months I've written a handful of short stories and sent them like beautiful ducklings out into the world, accumulating rejection after rejection from the likes of Asimov's, Clarkesworld, and this very magazine I'm reading today. Getting a story accepted by and published in Fantasy & Science Fiction has been one of my life's goals ever since 1999, when I got a personalized rejection letter from then-editor Gordon Van Gelder for a meandering and not especially interesting novella about a contract architect building a house in the Late Cretaceous. "The time for this sort of thing is past, alas," he wrote, and my teenage ego clung to that "alas." I'd leap to publish this if dinosaur stories still sold magazines like in '93 is how I chose to read that "alas."
Over the intervening years, that imaginary bandaid for a fragile ego has evolved into a genuine appreciation for F&SF as a publication. Its two "Very Best of" anthologies (1, 2) are perhaps my favorite SF short fiction collections; the tales I like best from various yearly anthologies often turn out to be sourced from F&SF. The aesthetic of its fiction—small moments, delicate beauty, character-based storytelling, often a quiet note of melancholy—is what I aspire to in my own work. Getting so many stories rejected by F&SF in such a short period of time these last few months, while not all that surprising, has been a disappointment. I had been so certain that my stories had become worthy of the magazine I loved.
But I hadn't exactly read an issue of the magazine, had I? Anthologies, best-ofs, collections, sure—but no current issues, nothing cover-to-cover fresh off the newsstand. I'm hoping to change that now—and just maybe get a better sense of the storytelling currently sought by F&SF's current editor. It's been quite some time since I read any short SF whatsoever, so reading more stories can only help my craft, regardless.
"To the Beautiful Shining Twilight" by Carrie Vaughn. All in all, I liked this story. The opening hook compacts a wealth of setting and character detail into a brief couple of paragraphs and immediately sets the mood and feel of the entire piece. Once past that opening, however, I felt that the remainder of the story—while charming—was more workmanlike than innovative. The tale of Abby and her former bandmates receiving a visit from a Knight of Faerie, thirty years after they came to the aid of the Queen of Faerie with their music, could have been a product of the 1980s urban fantasy boom; it could easily have been a direct sequel to War for the Oaks. Airen the fae knight was a cardboard standee of an equally dated genre cliche. The theme of "what happens after the adventure" is a rather more modern preoccupation, as exemplified by Among Others and Every Heart a Doorway, but had you told me this story had been published in 1988, I wouldn't have guessed otherwise. I'm a fan of 1980s faerie fantasy, so the lack of originality didn't diminish my enjoyment, but I was a little surprised to find it here.
"The Province of Saints" by Robert Reed. This one, by contrast, seems straight out of 1998. In the near future, a new prescription drug floods the human mind with empathy—which here is framed as the human animal's best tool to manipulate others. A shocking mass death unfolds on the estate of a family of wealthy rural sociopaths. The ensuing mystery investigation Makes a Statement and Makes You Think about the human condition. I think I would have been blown away by this story around the time that I received that personal rejection letter from Gordon Van Gelder. But now, having seen more of the world, I'm far from convinced of the central conceit that empathy is just another way for humans to be selfish; without buying into that idea, the rest of the story falls apart. I'm not a fan of mysteries and murders, so that works against the story as well, at least for me. Robert Reed is an excellent craftsman of short stories, but that's almost a drawback for this particular tale—it feels, well, crafted. The artifice shows.
"Joe Diablo's Farewell" by Andy Duncan. I'm not sure how I feel about this piece, a historical slice-of-life set in 1920s Manhattan served with a garnish of ghost story. The prose quality was only average, and while I appreciated (in principle) the scene where men drawn from the various under-privileged ethnic and racial groups of interwar New York City, dressed like movie Indians for a Broadway premiere, ate chickpeas and talked about how their cultures used chickpeas, it didn't really say anything new. Overall the story felt incomplete, or perhaps pressed and shaped together from scraps of several stories (or fragments of a larger one).
"The City of Lost Desire" by Phyllis Eisenstein. I've loved the stories of Alaric the minstrel since I first encountered him like a sweet, sensitive flower while slogging through the grim mire of Lin Carter's Year's Best Fantasy. In that review I wrote, "This story showed me I've long held an unconscious desire to see high fantasy written for the aesthetic standards of F&SF." Further, reading those Lin Carter compilations, awful as they were, helped cultivate a taste for the style, mood, and rhythms of 1970s-style fantasy serials. This story ably satisfied on both counts. It's comforting to slip into a lived-in setting like Alaric's world, full of references to other adventures that may or may not have made it to print, none of which are required to understand the story at hand but make everything feel larger than one mere novella. It packs in all the rewards of an extensive epic fantasy series with none of the time investment. I enjoyed this entry quite a lot, though I will say that none of the characters aside from Alaric felt developed in any way, and the story itself went on maybe a smidgeon too long.
"The Right Number of Cats" by Jenn Reese. A tame cosmic horror microfic about learning to accept grief. Pretty good.
"Survey" by Adam-Troy Castro. My best guess about this one is that it's a third-rate retread of Ursula K. Le Guin's classic "Those Who Walk Away from Omelas," leaning hard into the shock value but offering little new to say regarding each individual's complicity in the horrors of capitalism. If the moral of the story was not "We're all complicit in the horrors of capitalism," then I'm even more lost. Did not care for this one.
"Blue as Blood" by Leah Cypress. This novelette is my favorite story in the issue so far, but it's hard to put into words why. It's an excellent example of science fiction as an avenue to explore social ideas, to examine prejudice and in-vs.-outgroup behavior from a fictional but relatable angle. "Inscrutable insectoid aliens inspire human prejudice" isn't exactly a new idea, but I loved how the social conflict was between a human girl (who absorbed the aliens' revulsion toward the color blue) and every human around her, parent and peer, which both grounded the story and provided it an extra dimension beyond the stale old trope. An engaging and effective tale.
"The Washer from the Ford" by Sean McMullen. "I should have said something sensitive and caring, but just then I was feeling like the only person on Earth who had the right to be a victim." There's just something so privileged white male about this story, and that sentence encapsulates it quite well. The narrator-hero does high-level IT support and has been cursed to be ignored by everyone around him, so despite his achievements and his PhD, he never gets the success and recognition he deserves: "...you have great talent and achieve a lot but get nowhere." The curse was inflicted upon him at the behest of a "mousy tart" he ignored in his college stud days. In the end, he wins out over the fey being who wants to take back his gift of second sight—fifteen years of involuntary celibacy have given him the fortitude to resist her sexual temptations. I liked this Melbourne-set tale of murders and supernatural bargains and counterbargains just fine—it was competently constructed, and I'm always a sucker for fey urban fantasy—but oh my lord, you couldn't write a story more tailored for the self-pitying middle-aged middle-class privileged white male demographic if you tried. There's so much to unpack here.
Being a fantasy story set in Australia, "Washer" presents a problem related but perpendicular to the one raised by Patricia Wrightson's The Ice Is Coming. Rather than appropriating local Aboriginal folklore, McMullen populates his Melbourne with creatures of European legend, erasing local beliefs altogether.
"Tactical Infantry Bot 37 Dreams of Trochees" by Marie Vibbert. A brutal yet beautiful rumination on how profitability stimulates permanent states of warfare. "War robot learns poetry and refuses to fight again" sounds like some 1960s concept-based sci-fi, but this story is effective, even though it's far from new.
"Fifteen Minutes from Now" by Erin Cashier. Akin to "Survey," this is another all-verbal piece about bloodshed and torture and techno-beaurocrats being cavalier with human lives, this time from a time-travel angle. A bit of a yawn, especially with another story so structurally and thematically similar earlier in this same issue.
"The Fall from Griffin's Peak" by Pip Coen. An amusing, unexpectedly moving, thoroughly enjoyable romp with an archetypal rogue who gets in over her head. Spoilers: I want to recycle the "glue the rogue to the chair" bit for a future D&D campaign. I think it might be tied with "Blue as Blood" as my favorite piece in this issue.
And that's it! While I know that not every story can be a winner, I was somewhat flabbergasted to read so many that just didn't do it for me. Apparently my mental picture of F&SF as the best match for my personal style was mistaken. Or maybe this was just an off issue. Either way, I have stacks of back issues I plan to read in the months and years to come.
Edited by C. C. Finlay
258 pages
Published 2018
Read from January 16 to February 7
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
I'm trying something different here: reviewing an issue of a fiction magazine as if it were a book. I've been collecting speculative fiction magazines for a number of years, all the while intending to read and review their contents here, but through the magic of procrastination and inertia, I just haven't managed to do so before now.
So what prompted me to sit down and start reading my collection? In the last few months I've written a handful of short stories and sent them like beautiful ducklings out into the world, accumulating rejection after rejection from the likes of Asimov's, Clarkesworld, and this very magazine I'm reading today. Getting a story accepted by and published in Fantasy & Science Fiction has been one of my life's goals ever since 1999, when I got a personalized rejection letter from then-editor Gordon Van Gelder for a meandering and not especially interesting novella about a contract architect building a house in the Late Cretaceous. "The time for this sort of thing is past, alas," he wrote, and my teenage ego clung to that "alas." I'd leap to publish this if dinosaur stories still sold magazines like in '93 is how I chose to read that "alas."
Over the intervening years, that imaginary bandaid for a fragile ego has evolved into a genuine appreciation for F&SF as a publication. Its two "Very Best of" anthologies (1, 2) are perhaps my favorite SF short fiction collections; the tales I like best from various yearly anthologies often turn out to be sourced from F&SF. The aesthetic of its fiction—small moments, delicate beauty, character-based storytelling, often a quiet note of melancholy—is what I aspire to in my own work. Getting so many stories rejected by F&SF in such a short period of time these last few months, while not all that surprising, has been a disappointment. I had been so certain that my stories had become worthy of the magazine I loved.
But I hadn't exactly read an issue of the magazine, had I? Anthologies, best-ofs, collections, sure—but no current issues, nothing cover-to-cover fresh off the newsstand. I'm hoping to change that now—and just maybe get a better sense of the storytelling currently sought by F&SF's current editor. It's been quite some time since I read any short SF whatsoever, so reading more stories can only help my craft, regardless.
"To the Beautiful Shining Twilight" by Carrie Vaughn. All in all, I liked this story. The opening hook compacts a wealth of setting and character detail into a brief couple of paragraphs and immediately sets the mood and feel of the entire piece. Once past that opening, however, I felt that the remainder of the story—while charming—was more workmanlike than innovative. The tale of Abby and her former bandmates receiving a visit from a Knight of Faerie, thirty years after they came to the aid of the Queen of Faerie with their music, could have been a product of the 1980s urban fantasy boom; it could easily have been a direct sequel to War for the Oaks. Airen the fae knight was a cardboard standee of an equally dated genre cliche. The theme of "what happens after the adventure" is a rather more modern preoccupation, as exemplified by Among Others and Every Heart a Doorway, but had you told me this story had been published in 1988, I wouldn't have guessed otherwise. I'm a fan of 1980s faerie fantasy, so the lack of originality didn't diminish my enjoyment, but I was a little surprised to find it here.
"The Province of Saints" by Robert Reed. This one, by contrast, seems straight out of 1998. In the near future, a new prescription drug floods the human mind with empathy—which here is framed as the human animal's best tool to manipulate others. A shocking mass death unfolds on the estate of a family of wealthy rural sociopaths. The ensuing mystery investigation Makes a Statement and Makes You Think about the human condition. I think I would have been blown away by this story around the time that I received that personal rejection letter from Gordon Van Gelder. But now, having seen more of the world, I'm far from convinced of the central conceit that empathy is just another way for humans to be selfish; without buying into that idea, the rest of the story falls apart. I'm not a fan of mysteries and murders, so that works against the story as well, at least for me. Robert Reed is an excellent craftsman of short stories, but that's almost a drawback for this particular tale—it feels, well, crafted. The artifice shows.
"Joe Diablo's Farewell" by Andy Duncan. I'm not sure how I feel about this piece, a historical slice-of-life set in 1920s Manhattan served with a garnish of ghost story. The prose quality was only average, and while I appreciated (in principle) the scene where men drawn from the various under-privileged ethnic and racial groups of interwar New York City, dressed like movie Indians for a Broadway premiere, ate chickpeas and talked about how their cultures used chickpeas, it didn't really say anything new. Overall the story felt incomplete, or perhaps pressed and shaped together from scraps of several stories (or fragments of a larger one).
"The City of Lost Desire" by Phyllis Eisenstein. I've loved the stories of Alaric the minstrel since I first encountered him like a sweet, sensitive flower while slogging through the grim mire of Lin Carter's Year's Best Fantasy. In that review I wrote, "This story showed me I've long held an unconscious desire to see high fantasy written for the aesthetic standards of F&SF." Further, reading those Lin Carter compilations, awful as they were, helped cultivate a taste for the style, mood, and rhythms of 1970s-style fantasy serials. This story ably satisfied on both counts. It's comforting to slip into a lived-in setting like Alaric's world, full of references to other adventures that may or may not have made it to print, none of which are required to understand the story at hand but make everything feel larger than one mere novella. It packs in all the rewards of an extensive epic fantasy series with none of the time investment. I enjoyed this entry quite a lot, though I will say that none of the characters aside from Alaric felt developed in any way, and the story itself went on maybe a smidgeon too long.
"The Right Number of Cats" by Jenn Reese. A tame cosmic horror microfic about learning to accept grief. Pretty good.
"Survey" by Adam-Troy Castro. My best guess about this one is that it's a third-rate retread of Ursula K. Le Guin's classic "Those Who Walk Away from Omelas," leaning hard into the shock value but offering little new to say regarding each individual's complicity in the horrors of capitalism. If the moral of the story was not "We're all complicit in the horrors of capitalism," then I'm even more lost. Did not care for this one.
"Blue as Blood" by Leah Cypress. This novelette is my favorite story in the issue so far, but it's hard to put into words why. It's an excellent example of science fiction as an avenue to explore social ideas, to examine prejudice and in-vs.-outgroup behavior from a fictional but relatable angle. "Inscrutable insectoid aliens inspire human prejudice" isn't exactly a new idea, but I loved how the social conflict was between a human girl (who absorbed the aliens' revulsion toward the color blue) and every human around her, parent and peer, which both grounded the story and provided it an extra dimension beyond the stale old trope. An engaging and effective tale.
"The Washer from the Ford" by Sean McMullen. "I should have said something sensitive and caring, but just then I was feeling like the only person on Earth who had the right to be a victim." There's just something so privileged white male about this story, and that sentence encapsulates it quite well. The narrator-hero does high-level IT support and has been cursed to be ignored by everyone around him, so despite his achievements and his PhD, he never gets the success and recognition he deserves: "...you have great talent and achieve a lot but get nowhere." The curse was inflicted upon him at the behest of a "mousy tart" he ignored in his college stud days. In the end, he wins out over the fey being who wants to take back his gift of second sight—fifteen years of involuntary celibacy have given him the fortitude to resist her sexual temptations. I liked this Melbourne-set tale of murders and supernatural bargains and counterbargains just fine—it was competently constructed, and I'm always a sucker for fey urban fantasy—but oh my lord, you couldn't write a story more tailored for the self-pitying middle-aged middle-class privileged white male demographic if you tried. There's so much to unpack here.
Being a fantasy story set in Australia, "Washer" presents a problem related but perpendicular to the one raised by Patricia Wrightson's The Ice Is Coming. Rather than appropriating local Aboriginal folklore, McMullen populates his Melbourne with creatures of European legend, erasing local beliefs altogether.
"Tactical Infantry Bot 37 Dreams of Trochees" by Marie Vibbert. A brutal yet beautiful rumination on how profitability stimulates permanent states of warfare. "War robot learns poetry and refuses to fight again" sounds like some 1960s concept-based sci-fi, but this story is effective, even though it's far from new.
"Fifteen Minutes from Now" by Erin Cashier. Akin to "Survey," this is another all-verbal piece about bloodshed and torture and techno-beaurocrats being cavalier with human lives, this time from a time-travel angle. A bit of a yawn, especially with another story so structurally and thematically similar earlier in this same issue.
"The Fall from Griffin's Peak" by Pip Coen. An amusing, unexpectedly moving, thoroughly enjoyable romp with an archetypal rogue who gets in over her head. Spoilers: I want to recycle the "glue the rogue to the chair" bit for a future D&D campaign. I think it might be tied with "Blue as Blood" as my favorite piece in this issue.
And that's it! While I know that not every story can be a winner, I was somewhat flabbergasted to read so many that just didn't do it for me. Apparently my mental picture of F&SF as the best match for my personal style was mistaken. Or maybe this was just an off issue. Either way, I have stacks of back issues I plan to read in the months and years to come.
Friday, February 1, 2019
2019 read #3: The Ice Is Coming by Patricia Wrightson.
The Ice Is Coming by Patricia Wrightson
196 pages
Published 1977
Read from January 20 to January 31
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
Cultural appropriation is a complicated topic. Writers of privilege should not use the culture, experiences, or heritage of less-privileged groups in order to enrich themselves—that's straightforward enough, as an ideal. But no culture exists in isolation, and a white writer rejecting cultural interchange in order to write some Western European fantasy about a kingdom that has only ever known blue-eyed blonds is going in exactly the wrong direction. The better ideal would be to enjoy cultural exchange only on terms set by the less-privileged group. (A further suggestion, that white and male authors should just shut up and let other folks have the floor for a while, is hard to refute on philosophical grounds, other than a vague sense that silencing an entire group based on their demographics is probably not the best idea in the long run, and is probably something to be avoided.)
On its surface, The Ice Is Coming appears to be an example of cultural appropriation done with every intent of treating those it steals from respectfully. It is told largely from the perspective of Australian Aborigines, or the People; the monsters, heroes, songs, and cultures that enter the story are treated seriously. Especially considering when it was published, Ice seems to be a remarkably forward-thinking novel. When you read deeper, of course, cracks begin to appear. Not a single member of the People is thanked, credited, or acknowledged in the author's note; no indication is given of how Wrightson obtained her information, or who (if anyone) told her it would be okay. Wirrun, the main character, is repeatedly described as "heavy-browed"—exactly the sort of thing that Eurocentric eyes might dwell on, rather than a distinguishing feature a young man of the People might himself fixate upon. Monsters and spirits from a broad geographical transect of eastern Australia are thrown into the narrative as if on a zoo tour, a selection of curiosities to spice up Wirrun's journey before its ultimate confrontation. A random white "Inlander" shows up to help in the climax, much like Martin Freeman's character in Black Panther.
And all the while I was reading it, I kept thinking, "Is a white person really the one to be writing this tale?"
Come to think of it, I don't know of a single Aborigine author. Not one. (Wrightson certainly doesn't list any for her readers to check out.) I need to Google and educate myself; it's a pretty glaring area of ignorance.
As a work of fiction, Ice falls closer to the 1970s exotic thriller than to the fantasy examples Wrightson cites in her author's note. It has more in common with Jaws or this one thriller I read that had to do with these people stranded in a cave because of an avalanche (I forget the title) than with Earthsea or Middle-earth. Wirrun makes major plot decisions based on newspapers; there are random asides to show how local store owners and tourists are handling the encroaching return of the Ice Age. The reveal of the Eldest Nargun at the end was a nice bit of storytelling magic, but otherwise, Ice is an odd document, ahead of its time in some ways but wholly of its era in terms of narrative conventions.
196 pages
Published 1977
Read from January 20 to January 31
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
Cultural appropriation is a complicated topic. Writers of privilege should not use the culture, experiences, or heritage of less-privileged groups in order to enrich themselves—that's straightforward enough, as an ideal. But no culture exists in isolation, and a white writer rejecting cultural interchange in order to write some Western European fantasy about a kingdom that has only ever known blue-eyed blonds is going in exactly the wrong direction. The better ideal would be to enjoy cultural exchange only on terms set by the less-privileged group. (A further suggestion, that white and male authors should just shut up and let other folks have the floor for a while, is hard to refute on philosophical grounds, other than a vague sense that silencing an entire group based on their demographics is probably not the best idea in the long run, and is probably something to be avoided.)
On its surface, The Ice Is Coming appears to be an example of cultural appropriation done with every intent of treating those it steals from respectfully. It is told largely from the perspective of Australian Aborigines, or the People; the monsters, heroes, songs, and cultures that enter the story are treated seriously. Especially considering when it was published, Ice seems to be a remarkably forward-thinking novel. When you read deeper, of course, cracks begin to appear. Not a single member of the People is thanked, credited, or acknowledged in the author's note; no indication is given of how Wrightson obtained her information, or who (if anyone) told her it would be okay. Wirrun, the main character, is repeatedly described as "heavy-browed"—exactly the sort of thing that Eurocentric eyes might dwell on, rather than a distinguishing feature a young man of the People might himself fixate upon. Monsters and spirits from a broad geographical transect of eastern Australia are thrown into the narrative as if on a zoo tour, a selection of curiosities to spice up Wirrun's journey before its ultimate confrontation. A random white "Inlander" shows up to help in the climax, much like Martin Freeman's character in Black Panther.
And all the while I was reading it, I kept thinking, "Is a white person really the one to be writing this tale?"
Come to think of it, I don't know of a single Aborigine author. Not one. (Wrightson certainly doesn't list any for her readers to check out.) I need to Google and educate myself; it's a pretty glaring area of ignorance.
As a work of fiction, Ice falls closer to the 1970s exotic thriller than to the fantasy examples Wrightson cites in her author's note. It has more in common with Jaws or this one thriller I read that had to do with these people stranded in a cave because of an avalanche (I forget the title) than with Earthsea or Middle-earth. Wirrun makes major plot decisions based on newspapers; there are random asides to show how local store owners and tourists are handling the encroaching return of the Ice Age. The reveal of the Eldest Nargun at the end was a nice bit of storytelling magic, but otherwise, Ice is an odd document, ahead of its time in some ways but wholly of its era in terms of narrative conventions.
Tuesday, January 15, 2019
2019 read #2: Notes from Walnut Tree Farm by Roger Deakin.
Notes from Walnut Tree Farm by Roger Deakin
Edited by Alison Hastie and Terrence Blacker
302 pages
Published 2008
Read from December 28, 2018 to January 15
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
Roger Deakin is one of my all-time favorite authors, though in his lifetime he only published one book (Waterlog) and finished the manuscript for one other (Wildwood). Not long after I read Waterlog, I ordered a copy of Walnut Tree Farm, a collection of Deakin's journal entries from his later years, collated and compiled into a single "year" of entries—natural history observations, musings on pollarding and sustainable uses of common land, mixed together with rather more personal entries on Deakin's boyhood, his loneliness and horniness living alone at the namesake farm, his crabby misanthropy toward suburbanites and women out jogging who don't respond to his hellos.
I held off from reading Notes for all these years, possibly because I didn't want to read the last published words to come from his pen. Having finally read his journals, I'm left with a feeling of knowing a little bit too much about him—that maybe I didn't need my image of Deakin the sensitive and perceptive eccentric who soaked up woods and waters in all the forgotten little nooks of England to be replaced with a more grounded, less ethereal image of a cranky old goat alternating between lustful fantasies and "things will never be as good as they were when I was a boy" conservatism.
Notes is a strange document, a posthumous publication of diaries never intended to be made public. It's full of lovely observations of the natural world around Deakin's farm and the adjoining common, arranged in a seasonal cycle, ending in a lovely and sad moment of shooting stars, which could easily have been purpose-written to serve as a coda for Deakin's life. But in revealing so much of the man behind the words, Notes can only make him appear more human, more fragile and fallible.
Deakin's diaries often dwell on the topic of how people no longer appreciate the natural world and what it has to offer, contrasting the modern suburbanized state with his own idyllic recollections of childhood adventures along creeks and in copses. One might question just how attuned most English folks were to natural cycles of subsistence during Deakin's golden age, but we'll leave that aside. I find myself interested in the conservative roots of conservation. You can catch a whiff of nativism in a lot of these lovely works of English nature writing, this idea that "the old ways are the best" for conserving the health and vitality of the English natural world. "People these days" (meaning urbanized people, technocratic people, often the agents from a central government body, sometimes immigrant populations) just aren't in touch with the real life of the hedgerows and little waterways, just don't understand how to manage land in harmony with the plants and creatures that share it.
I'm reminded of how much our American, Muir-inspired "wilderness" ethos derives from the proto-fascist Rousseau, and erases millennia of Native history and land-use practices with the words "where Man himself is a visitor and does not remain."
It's a troubling ideological heritage for us to unpack. Our species and our culture need to do what we can to ameliorate the massive extinction event we're inflicting upon the world, but we have to do so together—not by excluding "people these days," however they might be coded.
Edited by Alison Hastie and Terrence Blacker
302 pages
Published 2008
Read from December 28, 2018 to January 15
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
Roger Deakin is one of my all-time favorite authors, though in his lifetime he only published one book (Waterlog) and finished the manuscript for one other (Wildwood). Not long after I read Waterlog, I ordered a copy of Walnut Tree Farm, a collection of Deakin's journal entries from his later years, collated and compiled into a single "year" of entries—natural history observations, musings on pollarding and sustainable uses of common land, mixed together with rather more personal entries on Deakin's boyhood, his loneliness and horniness living alone at the namesake farm, his crabby misanthropy toward suburbanites and women out jogging who don't respond to his hellos.
I held off from reading Notes for all these years, possibly because I didn't want to read the last published words to come from his pen. Having finally read his journals, I'm left with a feeling of knowing a little bit too much about him—that maybe I didn't need my image of Deakin the sensitive and perceptive eccentric who soaked up woods and waters in all the forgotten little nooks of England to be replaced with a more grounded, less ethereal image of a cranky old goat alternating between lustful fantasies and "things will never be as good as they were when I was a boy" conservatism.
Notes is a strange document, a posthumous publication of diaries never intended to be made public. It's full of lovely observations of the natural world around Deakin's farm and the adjoining common, arranged in a seasonal cycle, ending in a lovely and sad moment of shooting stars, which could easily have been purpose-written to serve as a coda for Deakin's life. But in revealing so much of the man behind the words, Notes can only make him appear more human, more fragile and fallible.
Deakin's diaries often dwell on the topic of how people no longer appreciate the natural world and what it has to offer, contrasting the modern suburbanized state with his own idyllic recollections of childhood adventures along creeks and in copses. One might question just how attuned most English folks were to natural cycles of subsistence during Deakin's golden age, but we'll leave that aside. I find myself interested in the conservative roots of conservation. You can catch a whiff of nativism in a lot of these lovely works of English nature writing, this idea that "the old ways are the best" for conserving the health and vitality of the English natural world. "People these days" (meaning urbanized people, technocratic people, often the agents from a central government body, sometimes immigrant populations) just aren't in touch with the real life of the hedgerows and little waterways, just don't understand how to manage land in harmony with the plants and creatures that share it.
I'm reminded of how much our American, Muir-inspired "wilderness" ethos derives from the proto-fascist Rousseau, and erases millennia of Native history and land-use practices with the words "where Man himself is a visitor and does not remain."
It's a troubling ideological heritage for us to unpack. Our species and our culture need to do what we can to ameliorate the massive extinction event we're inflicting upon the world, but we have to do so together—not by excluding "people these days," however they might be coded.
Monday, January 14, 2019
2019 read #1: The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey.
The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey
391 pages
Published 2012
Read from January 2 to January 14
Rating: 3 out of 5
When authors approach folklore or other fantastic story elements from a literary perspective, they often show a certain reluctance to get their hands dirty. "Is this fantastic event really happening, or is it all in the mind of the protagonist?" and "Is this event really fantastic, or is there a perfectly mundane explanation?" are two of the most boring and tired cliches one could possibly use—certainly the least interesting questions one could examine with the storytelling tools the fantastic provides, close siblings of "It was all a dream." Yet while "It was all a dream" is rightly derided and nearly extinct outside of the crappier tiers of children's cartoons, these two cliches are seemingly mandatory for any lit fic writer who wants to dip a toe in the vast possibilities fantasy has to offer.
My advice, as an author who has never been published on a professional level and certainly has never been a Pulitzer Prize finalist, is to embrace the fantastic. If you're going to write a novel based on a Russian folktale about a girl made out of snow, don't waste my time spinning major plot threads like "Only the old woman and her husband ever see the snow child, perhaps they are crazy with grief and isolation!" Especially when (spoilers!) such threads never turn into anything and everybody ends up seeing her after all as soon as a young man gets interested in her. Don't weave the beauty and strangeness of folktale magic into the heart of your novel, if you plan to reveal that, well actually, the ethereal snow child is an orphan who's been living in her family's abandoned homestead and this is all perfectly rational and explicable and dull.
Maybe my experiences with other literary works of fantasy have left me impatient with lit authors who hold their noses while they play with the fantastic. It isn't going to sully your perfect Pulitzer-worthy fingers to leave mundane explanations up to the tastes of the reader. Not everything has to be explained. This isn't hard sci-fi, after all.
Aside from that pet peeve, I found this book to be... fine? Adequate, somewhat moving, probably not something I'd nominate for a Pulitzer but pretty good overall. Though I certainly wanted something more magical from it, and that may have affected how I enjoyed it.
391 pages
Published 2012
Read from January 2 to January 14
Rating: 3 out of 5
When authors approach folklore or other fantastic story elements from a literary perspective, they often show a certain reluctance to get their hands dirty. "Is this fantastic event really happening, or is it all in the mind of the protagonist?" and "Is this event really fantastic, or is there a perfectly mundane explanation?" are two of the most boring and tired cliches one could possibly use—certainly the least interesting questions one could examine with the storytelling tools the fantastic provides, close siblings of "It was all a dream." Yet while "It was all a dream" is rightly derided and nearly extinct outside of the crappier tiers of children's cartoons, these two cliches are seemingly mandatory for any lit fic writer who wants to dip a toe in the vast possibilities fantasy has to offer.
My advice, as an author who has never been published on a professional level and certainly has never been a Pulitzer Prize finalist, is to embrace the fantastic. If you're going to write a novel based on a Russian folktale about a girl made out of snow, don't waste my time spinning major plot threads like "Only the old woman and her husband ever see the snow child, perhaps they are crazy with grief and isolation!" Especially when (spoilers!) such threads never turn into anything and everybody ends up seeing her after all as soon as a young man gets interested in her. Don't weave the beauty and strangeness of folktale magic into the heart of your novel, if you plan to reveal that, well actually, the ethereal snow child is an orphan who's been living in her family's abandoned homestead and this is all perfectly rational and explicable and dull.
Maybe my experiences with other literary works of fantasy have left me impatient with lit authors who hold their noses while they play with the fantastic. It isn't going to sully your perfect Pulitzer-worthy fingers to leave mundane explanations up to the tastes of the reader. Not everything has to be explained. This isn't hard sci-fi, after all.
Aside from that pet peeve, I found this book to be... fine? Adequate, somewhat moving, probably not something I'd nominate for a Pulitzer but pretty good overall. Though I certainly wanted something more magical from it, and that may have affected how I enjoyed it.
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