2024 read #155: And Chaos Died by Joanna Russ.

And Chaos Died by Joanna Russ

189 pages

Published 1970

Read from December 18 to December 20

Rating: 2-ish out of 5

This book is a strange, often off-putting experiment of a sophomore novel. What opens as a fairly standard space opera gets filtered through the literary affectations of the New Wave. The text revolves from impression to impression with all the logic of an acid trip. An old man eating plums in the moonlight leaps into somersaults at the lightest touch, flames at his heels. Russ’s prose is sweeping and ambitious, but even after I’ve read the whole thing, I’m still not sure whether it was supposed to make sense or not, or if it was meant as a suite of vibes.

I momentarily got excited when Russ revealed that main character Jai Vedh is gay — rarity of rarities in 1970 sci-fi! — but then on page 23 he muses, “I wish I knew what it feels like to be a man who loves a woman,” and by page 51 he’s dream-fucking one of the women from a putative “lost colony.” Later, “homosex” is lumped in with the “exports” of a decadent, sickly dystopia, while Jai ruts through various heterosexual encounters, many of dubious consent. All of which is in keeping with the mores of this era, but it feels like a particular letdown. (You mean to tell me this is the same Russ who would later publish We Who Are About to…?) There are also some deeply uncomfortable passages that I assume (or rather, that I hope) are a feminist critique of the pedophilia at the root of patriarchal heterosexuality.

If you persevere through Chaos’ deliberate opacity and its unfortunately antique construction of sexuality and gender, it turns out to be just another Social Statement sci-fi novel making a contrast between the “natural,” vaguely Taoist society of the colony’s outer space telepaths, and the polluted, listless, technocratic dystopia of future Earth. The book’s main effect was to make me wish I were rereading The Dispossessed instead. Every now and then, though, Russ turned a phrase that made me concede it was worth reading:

Evne, like a woman of salt, fled into the walls in metal crystalhood, where he followed her, turned into a bee (all eyes), a fountain (all mouth), wrapped herself around her own bones inside out, spread herself one molecule thick along all the lines in the ship: the two of them, pulsing miles across, breathing with the lungs of incurious strangers, seeing through other eyes, petrifying in flashes, pursuing each other in the shapes of walls, floors, volumes of contained air. He followed her.

2024 #144: Black No More by George S. Schuyler.

Black No More: Being an Account of the Strange and Wonderful Workings of Science in the Land of the Free, A.D. 1933-1940 by George S. Schuyler

Introduction by Danzy Senna

195 pages

Published 1931

Read from November 27 to November 29

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Black No More is science-fictional satire of race written by a onetime Black socialist and full-time misanthrope, who in later years would become a member of the John Birch Society. If, from that trajectory, you guessed that Black No More’s ideology would be a bit of a mess, you’d be right. Schuyler eagerly lampoons Black and white targets, esteemed Black leaders and Atlanta Klan wives alike; everyone is in it for the con.

When Schuyler’s jabs land, they land hard. His depiction of the Givens family, and their newly founded Knights of Nordica, could be a snapshot of Trumpists today, reminding us how deep into history our contemporary problems run. There’s also some depressingly evergreen material on how capitalists use “race consciousness” to strip away class consciousness from the workers. But then Schuyler will turn around and spend far more pages mocking Black liberationists as grifters, all of them happy to profit from white violence and maintain the status quo.

One gets the sense that the suburban white boys who loved to quote the Dave Chapelle Show would adore this book. Which is unfortunate, because in many ways it’s an important read to this day. I never knew, for example, how the modern Republican policy of “attract businesses with low taxes and minimal regulations, putting the burden of taxation on an impoverished working class” dates back to the postbellum South. The continuity (or rather, the long stagnation) of racist white thinking is both astonishing and depressing. 

2024 read #112: A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder by James De Mille.

A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder by James De Mille

Illustrated by Gilbert Gaul

291 pages

Published 1888

Read from September 14 to September 16

Rating: 1 out of 5

Published posthumously, perhaps a decade or two after it was written, this is a Victorian social satire dressed in a guise of antipodean adventure. It’s chiefly notable as an early example of a prehistoric lost world novel, written long before the publication of Doyle’s own The Lost World.

Sadly, instead of dinosaurs, Manuscript’s primary focus is its clumsy satire, depicting a topsy-turvy land where Victorian mores are turned on their head. Poverty is esteemed! People compete to give their riches away! Death is joyously sought after! Darkness is embraced and light is shunned! To be cannibalized is an honor! Women can do things!

It’s never a question of whether an old adventure novel will be horribly racist, but of how horribly racist. A Strange Manuscript is pretty damn racist. Maybe not The Land that Time Forgot levels of racist, but still bad. Our narrator dwells at length on the horror and revulsion he feels upon meeting some brown people in Antarctica. He flees from them, and finds himself among the Kosekin, a vaguely Mesopotamian civilization at the South Pole. Yet even there, in the midst of bird-drawn carriages, tree-fern-lined streets, and majestic pyramids, he’s magnetized by a random white girl he meets in a cave. De Mille proceeds to heap up vile Victorian antisemitism in his profile of the Kosekin.

As for the prehistoric aspect of De Mille’s lost world — the sole reason I read this antiquated volume — it’s incidental at best, a mere curiosity to add flavor to the setting. (To be fair, when this book was written, even scientists weren’t acquainted with many dinosaurs, and even those were fragmentary beasts, poorly understood.) There are a couple ceremonial saurian hunts, one at sea, one on land, which serve only to demonstrate the Kosekin’s eagerness to die.

There is a cool scene where our hero rides on a giant pterodactyl under the light of the aurora australis, which, while it doesn’t erase any of the book’s bigotry, at least makes for a memorable moment. Manuscript has long since been in the public domain, so maybe James Gurney could repurpose the scene for another Dinotopia book.

2024 read #43: Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott.

Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbott

Introduction by Banesh Hoffman 

91 pages

Published 1884

Read April 11

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

If you're like me, you spent much time in your formative years in used bookstores. Should you have happened to browse the science fiction and fantasy shelves at any point in the 1990s, perchance alphabetically, you would have encountered Flatland in abundance. I never went to high school (or took any other classes where this book might have been assigned), so I always assumed it was from the 1970s, a contemporary of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It seemed, at least from the jacket summary, to fit that same cultural ethos, a cheeky genre-crossing commentary on social mores. I never felt any real pull to read Flatland until I was skimming lists of brief classic reads and learned that it was from the 1880s.

I was better off uninterested.

Math fantasy has maintained a modest but persistent seat at the fantasy table, most notably in my experience R.A. Lafferty’s “Narrow Valley” and Rudy Rucker’s “Inside Out,” both of which I happened to read and review here. I don't know if any math fantasy stories predate Flatland, but it is perhaps the most famous example.

Abbott employs his world of geometrical hierarchy to satirize the ranks of Victorian society. The Flatlanders — or at least their circular aristocracy — perceive polygons and circles as the most intelligent and noble shapes, and encourage a eugenics program to turn the “barbarous” masses of narrow triangles into equilateral triangles, and thence into “superior” shapes. Women, meanwhile, are considered simply straight lines: lacking a dimension, devoid of intelligence, a deadly danger to the men around them. Abbott pursues this vicious satire so acutely (heh) that he had to include a preface to the second printing, hinting that perhaps the satire had been misread as mere women-hating.

I’ll be honest: Without the preface, and without access to Wikipedia, I probably would have made the same mistake. One is reminded of those white dudes in the 1980s who were so keen to portray the gritty realities of racism that they sprinkled racial violence and the N-word throughout their stories.

Beyond this satire of social perceptions, there isn’t much depth (heh) to Flatland. Where Gulliver’s Travels also manages to tell a strange and memorable adventure tale, Flatland pretty much exhausts Abbott’s geometric satire with chapter after chapter of social mores in the first half of the book, then contrasts Flatland to Lineland and Spaceland in the second half, by way of dialogues in geometry.

If you haven’t read Flatland, I’ll spare you the trouble and give you its best line. Our narrator, a Square, is addressed by a Sphere from Spaceland, who attempts to demonstrate the reality of the third dimension. His conception of the universe attacked, the Square responds:

“Monster,” I shrieked, “be thou juggler, enchanter, dream, or devil, no more will I endure thy mockeries. Either thou or I must perish.”

That’s fully worthy of a Tumblr shitpost.

2023 read #142: Castle Rackrent by Maria Edgeworth.

Castle Rackrent: An Hibernian Tale, Taken from Facts, and from the Manners of the Irish Squires Before the Year 1782 by Maria Edgeworth

90 pages

Published 1800

Read from November 30 to December 1

Rating: 2 out of 5

I read this for one reason: I hadn’t yet read anything from the decade of the 1800s, and this sounded like the least uninteresting book I could find from those years. Plus, it’s short. Maybe someday I’ll take the time to read Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent during the years 1799–1804, but not today.

Rackrent is, for the most part, a delightfully snarky little satire of English colonialism in Ireland, ironically chronicling four heirs of the Rackrent estate, all of them some flavor of predatory English lord on occupied soil: “the drunken Sir Patrick, the litigious Sir Murtagh, the fighting Sir Kit, and the slovenly Sir Condy….” The satire is in a vein that should be familiar to anyone who’s read Early Modern literature:

However, my lady was very charitable in her own way. She had a charity school for poor children, where they were taught to read and write gratis, and where they were kept well to spinning gratis for my lady in return….

Beneath the slyly ingratiating surface, it’s all deliciously pointed.

Someone in the publishing process, however — quite possibly Maria Edgeworth’s father — took it upon themselves to bootlick tender English feelings in an introduction, insisting that English abuses of Ireland spontaneously ceased sometime around 1782, and that everybody is happy and congenial now and that the Irish simply adore their English overlords:

The Editor hopes his readers will observe that these are “tales of other times”: that the manners depicted in the following pages are not those of the present age: the race of the Rackrents has long since been extinct in Ireland; and… are characters which could no more be met with at present in Ireland, than Squire Western or Parson Trulliber in England. There is a time, when individuals can bear to be rallied for their past follies and absurdities, after they have acquired new habits, and a new consciousness. Nations as well as individuals gradually lose attachment to their identity, and the present generation is amused rather than offended by the ridicule that is thrown upon its ancestors.

Endnotes, also appended by this editor, made every effort to satirize the Irish at large for their “laziness,” their funereal lamentations, their litigiousness, drunkenness, not paying their rent on time, and so on. Unsurprising, given the overwhelming fragility of the colonialist ego, which we can observe for ourselves in our own era.

And, sadly, this editor wasn’t Rackrent’s sole letdown. There’s a plotline in which the wastrel Sir Kit marries Jessica, a Jewish heiress, which detours the narrative into some shitty of-the-era antisemitism.

2023 read #127: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre by B. Traven.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre by B. Traven

309 pages

Published 1935

Read from October 31 to November 2

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

I first got it into my head to read this book way back in the first year or so of this blog, when I was checking off all the high school lit classics that had escaped me before. The fact that no library in Suffolk County owned a copy, and the difficulty in tracking down a used copy for a reasonable price, lent it an unearned mystique in my overactive imagination. I conceptualized Treasure as a pulp masterpiece on the same level as The Ox-Bow Incident, an exercise in stoic poetry, of weather-worn men tortured by the social constraints of performative masculinity and the violence it entails.

Having finally found myself a used copy, I find the reality of Treasure deflates all those idle speculations. It’s closer in spirit to The Road to El Dorado than it is to Blood Meridian. It’s a rangy satire of pulp adventure fiction, poking fun at the easy glory and masculine mythology of pulp magazines. It’s also an extended meditation on the acidic grip of greed, both on the minds of individual people and on societies built on capitalism. Perhaps it was some garbled hearsay of this that sketched my imaginary understanding of Treasure.

Our heroes, Dobbs and Curtin, are two American men weathering the Great Depression and failing to make a quick buck down in Mexico. In the current parlance, the two of them share a single brain cell. The first section of the book follows their job-hunting misadventures in the oil fields and the jungles — bumming pesos, getting scammed by bosses, hiding in a tree from a beast that turns out to be a burro. Bold adventure this is not. Hell, after introducing Dobbs in the first two pages, the book spends the next ten pages delineating the shittiness of a particular flophouse. Atmospheric digressions seem to make up about half the book.

In the end, of course, there’s betrayal and murder, the descent into paranoia, but the characters stumble into it the way they’ve stumbled into everything else, through the power of suggestion and self-delusion. 

2023 read #115: Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen.

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

Afterword by Elizabeth Hardwick

221 pages

Published 1818

Read from October 9 to October 10

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

I’ve barely read anything in the romantic classics vein. My experience begins and ends with Jane Eyre. It was just last month that I learned what “sensibility” meant in the context of Sense and Sensibility. So naturally I should begin with a satirical send-up of the genre, right?

Right from the start, the narrative voice is delightful, commiserating over young Catherine’s disadvantages as a Gothic heroine: her mother is alive; her neighborhood lacks a suitable rakish heir or mysterious foundling to court her; her carriage arrives at Bath safely without any upsets or dramatic robberies. The first young gentleman she meets exclaims over her failure to keep a journal, and goes on at length about quality muslin. But Catherine soon has her hands full with arcane social protocols, competing suitors, manipulative friends, and tangled knots of social pressures and civilities, afflictions enough for any tear-drenched heroine.

The central conceit, of course, is that Catherine filters the prosaic afflictions and limitations of her bourgeois life through the expectations of a Gothic novel. Existing as a woman in this era (or any other era) is full of horrors all on its own, so for the most part, it works. Courtesy masks the deepest cruelty; truth is delivered only through irony; money and title override everything. Much is made of the young woman’s choice to refuse, only for social pressures to remove her ability to choose. There are times when the banal detestability of the Thorpes makes the narrative drag. Honestly, when Henry Tilney gets into his “Oh, you silly women” speeches, he’s just as bad — even before the narrative brings us to the titular Abbey and the scheming general.

Like every other book of its time, Abbey brims with the bigotry and mores of its culture, which makes it impossible to enjoy wholeheartedly, even with Austen’s wry commentary.

2023 read #36: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, February 1986.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, February 1986 issue (70:2)

Edited by Edward L. Ferman

162 pages

Published 1986

Read April 14

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

After the dismal September 1989 and December 1989 issues, I have every right to feel dubious about another Ferman-era F&SF. But I went on a small collecting spree over the winter, and this issue, with its lecherous but amazingly pulp cover art of Maureen Birnbaum exiting the subway with a barbarian sword, just needed to be read. It isn't my oldest issue (that would be January 1986), but this one promises to be memorable, for better or for worse.

"Maureen Birnbaum at the Earth's Core (as told to Bitsy Spiegelman)" by George Alec Effinger. Between that all-time-great title and the spectacular cover art, I figured this one would go one of two ways: either it would be the most horrendously dated, casually bigoted thing I'd ever read, or it would be the most delightfully bawdy satirical pulp frolic. It turned out somewhere in between. Maureen Birnbaum herself emerges as a private-school preppy, a daughter of society wealth from Long Island, rather than the scrappy street-wise Brooklynite I had pictured. She doesn’t even get a good stab in with her barbarian sword. Overall, a product of its time that largely squanders its potential, but still an amusing bauble. B-

“The Metaphysical Gun” by Wayne Wightman. The editorial introduction promises this story “delves into the future pornography industry, mind control, and a man’s beliefs in how things should work in a crumbling world…” If that isn’t just the least appetizing string of descriptors for a mid-1980s story — cishet-normative masculinity as unrestrained id, Mad Max but make it non-consensual smut. It also happens to be the longest story in this issue by several pages, wallowing in grotesque misery and exploitation solely for its own sake. There are mumbles of “what does it mean to be human,” of course — some pretense that the misery porn is in service to some higher insight — but that was de rigueur during this era of sci-fi, and didn’t make it special. This could be touted as a primitive example of crustpunk, I suppose, but for me, this novelette wasn’t worth the newsprint it was printed on. Look away now if you don’t want to be subjected to a sample: “We wouldn’t want her to go to Snuff City, would we? Not with a set of knockers like that. It would be a terrible waste.” F

“Memories of Gwynneth” by Jennifer Black. A nearly affectless tale of implanted memories (and the experience of someone else’s love) on the rustic planet Cymru. It’s All Creatures Great and Small meets the Trill from Star Trek, which could be promising, but it’s told in flat prose that doesn’t leave much of an impression and stirs zero emotional response. Something about the vagueness of Black’s bio makes me suspect she’s some other author under a pseudonym, most likely a hetero man based on how our narrator Jilly is driven by the memories of the late Gwynneth’s old boyfriends, but “Jennifer Black fantasy author” isn’t especially productive to google. D-

“We Call Them Flowers” by Lynn Marron. This one reads like pure soap opera, full of tearful “if you really loved me, Adam” scenes of heteronormativity, but set among socialites on the moon and centered on illegal cosmetic implants that may or may not be alien parasites: “flowers” grafted into our heroine’s nervous system. It could be a good story, but it isn’t. Marron’s otherwise unremarkable prose is peppered with implausible future-slang; nouveau riche has somehow transmogrified into “nouveau creditpersons.” It’s a lot, and not all that much of it is worthwhile. Meh use of a solid title. D-

“Me and My Shadow” by Larry Eisenberg. Tepid send-up of midcentury “great minds in labcoats” sci-fi. It even has that hoary old chestnut, “You’ve been reading too many science fiction stories.” Something about psychological modeling and projecting a 3D simulacrum of the person under assessment— a simulacrum that then proves to be better at their job than the original person. Insubstantial and forgettable. D

CW for the next entry: mention of real life childhood SA.

“The Wandering Lute” by Marion Zimmer Bradley. It wouldn’t be a 1980s genre magazine without at least one notorious child molester, would it? I skimmed through this novelette because I hate giving my time to sex offenders. Outside of that context, it’s fine, I guess? Standard magic and minstrel stuff, several installments deep into a fantasy serial (or so it would seem). Our protagonist is Lythande, the Pilgrim Adept of the Blue Star, a mercenary-magician who also happens to be a bard. This is the kind of tale that likes to repeat whenever the Blue Star shines, burns, and prickles on Lythande’s brow. MZB carefully avoids Lythande’s pronouns for most of the story, setting up the shocking reveal that Lythande is a woman. (Genre fiction was unbelievably dire before 2000 or so.) But that’s enough words for this child molester. Begone forever, MZB. F

“Lo, How an Oak E’er Blooming” by Suzette Haden Elgin. The run of stories that came after “Maureen Birnbaum” have bummed me the fuck out. Will this one be any better? It features an amazing title, and the conceit — a feminist, exhausted from trying to get non-feminist women to listen to her, inadvertently causes a miracle — is interesting. The narration is of that facile “and the reporters and the clergymen came” variety, though, a just-so story. It holds any meaningful engagement at arm’s-length, which (I felt) hampered my enjoyment. It works well enough as social commentary: the clergymen spurned by Willow Severty’s atheism, the experts soon mull using a nuclear warhead to destroy the miraculously blooming feminist oak, but instead the men in power decide to tell the press that the tree is releasing carcinogens, and is a result of evil witchcraft. And so on. All in all, especially in contrast with everything that came before, I’d say it deserves at least a C+

“Observations on Sirenian Singing” by Jerrie W. Hurd. Mostly adequate space opera piece, using that term a bit more literally than usual. A human linguist gets interrogated about her report regarding the unique singing language of the newly discovered Sirenians. The galactic federation desires the rare minerals on Sirenia, but first contact has been delayed because of the Sirenians’ singing and its effect on the multispecies study teams. The denouement offers few surprises to anyone who read the title (telepathy and the musical communication of emotion both play a role), but this piece is fine regardless. Maybe a C

“The Road King” by Russell Griffin. Closing out this highly mixed and mostly mediocre issue with a silly and excessively long “the EPA crushed free enterprise and those commies banned the automobile!” piece. Hawthorne, a model-semitruck enthusiast with big Divorced Dad energy, gets recruited into an underground network of internal combustion renegades, all of them fetishists of the “good old days” of freeways, capitalism, and CB radio. Hell, forget Hawthorne — this whole story reeks of Divorced Dad energy. Imagine Demolition Man with McMartinis and tractor-trailers instead of Taco Bell and simulation sex. Goofy-ass reactionary bullshit, or a fine parody of it? Who knows. Who cares. D-

2023 read #30: Orlando by Virginia Woolf.

Orlando: A Biography by Virginia Woolf

334 pages

Published 1928

Read from March 14 to March 19

Rating: 3 out of 5

The current moment has seen the fascist movement manufacturing genocidal outrage toward trans and other queer people just living their lives. Part of this astroturfed sentiment has involved programming rightwing tools on the internet to parrot "No one ever thought about gender before the last five years!" It doesn't count for much as a protest against the vast crush of fascism afflicting my nation, but as a tiny fuck-you I decided to finally read Orlando.

My partner R introduced me to the 1992 film starring Tilda Swinton, which is fantastic and -- if I'm being honest -- superior to the book. It took me a while to vibe with the book. It has an antique feel I wasn't expecting from modernist lit, though that is part of its literary satire. Woolf toys with mores of gender and sexuality, equally in her own time and in the various eras that Orlando is said to live through. But there's a further element of satire against literature, the literary canon, the English custom of elevating men of "genius" into said canon. If you go into Orlando expecting sexy genderfluid adventures in piracy, you'd be much better off with some modern queer YA.

Much of Orlando hasn't aged well, particularly its casual 1920s racism. There are some delightfully dry lampoons of sex and gender conventions, but they're buried in much more expansive satires of literary worthies and the romance of poetry. Nonetheless, it's edifying to see a writer in the 1920s with a more sophisticated understanding of sex and gender -- and the very different definitions of each -- than present-day reactionaries could ever hope to achieve. Let's all hope that the modern fascists' attempt to speed-run the 1930s will end in their full humiliating defeat, and quickly.

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.

2016 read #72: Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed.

Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed
218 pages
Published 1972
Read from September 11 to September 21
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

For such a brief, determinedly postmodern book, Mumbo Jumbo is thick with things to unpack. First, and most obvious these days, is the fact that it's 2016 and our society seems to have made little, if any, progress on the issues of race and culture satirized here. We still have a corrupt good ol' boy police culture; we still carry forward a colonialist mentality; the supremacy of "Western civilization" is a never-questioned article of faith for a staggering percentage of the population (a belief which supports a substantial corner of the publishing market, and even shows up to this day in how college art history courses are demarcated); we still have irrational hatred, bigotry, and basket upon basket of deplorables. But these are obvious points.

This is the sort of book that makes me wish I were better at commentary and dissection, at analysis in general. One topic (out of many) that stuck with me during my read of this book was the role of the cultural critic in keeping anything counter to the accepted narrative from entering the public (i.e. White, middle class, self-appointed "real American") awareness. This is deftly lampooned with a selection of juicy blurb quotes on the back jacket ("Propaganda," "Cute," "...such gratuitous viciousness is not called for," "This is diarrhea of the typewriter," from the likes of The New York Times, Kirkus, and The Journal of Black Poetry), and used directly several times within the text, barbed with quotation marks: "so read the 'illiterate' 'contradictory' 'scrawls,' product of 'a tormented mind'...." And more pointedly: "1st they intimidate the intellectuals by condemning work arising out of their own experience as being 1-dimensional, enraged, non-objective, preoccupied with hate and not universal, universal being a word co-opted by the Catholic Church when the Atonists took over Rome, as a way of measuring every 1 by their ideals." You can hear a young author's personal axe against the grindstone while still recognizing the sad social truth within the satire. To this day, conservative types (generally White, cis, hetero, Christian men) enjoy wielding "Calm down, you're too emotional" to shut down any debates -- all while ranting, unprompted, about the social ills brought about by "political correctness" and "millennials" and "people who don't want to work."

On a textual (rather than metatextual) level, I was fascinated by Reed's depiction of history as a clash of rival secret societies going all the way back to Osiris, the original funky brother, and Set, the first wallflower, spiteful over his own inability to bust a move. It is, naturally, as 1970s as you could possibly imagine. There are ancient aliens and oneness with Nature, revisionist archaeology of the "everything goes back to Egypt" school, prehistoric Black universities in Arabia -- all things nowadays relegated to basic cable conspiracy shows (and, well, bestselling books too, I suppose), but in the hands of a writer as talented and vigorous as Reed, it becomes a heady mix.

2016 read #2: Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down by Ishmael Reed.

Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down by Ishmael Reed
177 pages
Published 1969
Read from January 3 to January 4
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

A postmodern sockdolager of the Black Arts movement, an aggressively far-out horse opera and "Hoo-Doo Western," complete with genre-aware characters and a villainous turn by the neo-social realist gang. The racial deconstructionism here remains as biting and relevant as it was almost fifty years ago. The gender and sexual attitudes that no doubt provided much of the humor upon its publication have not remained so fresh. Apparently portraying military leaders and politicians as simpering homosexuals in drag was something of A Thing in late '60s social parody (though, admittedly, my only other experience with this comes from Monty Python, so I'm hardly the most knowledgeable commentator here). Similarly, clouds of casual misogyny choke out most of the few female characters in the book. The one exception is the too-brief appearance of Zozo Labrique, "charter member of the American Hoo-Doo Church," in the opening chapter; the rest of the women here, so far as I could tell, are portrayed as nymphomaniacs, whores, and petulant nags. Not at all different from more "mainstream" (White male) fiction written at the time, which makes it interesting how a particular social arts movement can so boldly attack the assumptions of the status quo in one direction, and fall in with "mainstream" assumptions in other areas.

2014 read #78: The Female Man by Joanna Russ.

The Female Man by Joanna Russ
215 pages
Published 1975
Read from August 5 to August 12
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

The only way I can grok this book, it seems, is to think of it in terms of '70s-style avant garde film. Not that I'm an expert on that domain --  Zardoz (if it can be counted as avant garde, and not merely trying-hard-to-be-cult) and Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain are pretty much the extent of my exposure. But The Female Man shares much with The Holy Mountain: the burlesque on gender in different societies, the satirical exaggeration of social arenas such as the military and housewifery, the broad allegory, the non-linear structure, the metafictional incorporation of the auteur within the work, the occasional lack of actually making sense in any way.

Unlike The Holy Mountain, The Female Man additionally lacks much in the way of what I could recognize as a plot; what little there is could more aptly be described as a situation. A man-killing assassin (from a world in the multiverse where Manland and Womanland are locked in perpetual war) gathers together her equivalents from other worlds in the multiverse, whose stories and attitudes are used to amplify the arguments of second-generation feminism. As with all materials from second-generation feminism, women of color are mostly invisible, and transgender folks are depicted with what I feel is distaste verging on scorn, positing “transsexualism” as an aberrant identity forced into being by the needs of militant masculinity and a phobia of "true homosexuality."

The Female Man is best where Russ waxes angriest. Her extended rants, dripping with sarcasm and venom, hit with a hundred blows, most often on the mark. Where the story pauses to develop a half-assed science-fictiony framework for the parallel worlds and the different depictions of (white) womanhood is where it sags. I derived some amusement from the idea that a second-gen feminist would have to resort to alternate universes to present the role of enculturation and expectations on otherwise identical women, as opposed to noticing the experiences of women from different racial categories or levels of affluence or anything of that nature. Intersectionality, at this stage of ideological development, seemingly only referred to intersections of the multiverses.

2013 read #152: Wizard of the Crow by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o.

Wizard of the Crow by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
A translation from the Gĩkũyũ by the author
768 pages
Published 2006
Read from December 20 to December 31
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

I've had this book checked out from the library for almost a third of 2013. I first took it out sometime in September, renewed it, returned it only to check it out again, renewed it, returned it, checked it out again a few days later. I wanted to read it, but other books kept distracting me, and especially since October, my reading pace has slowed considerably, making it harder to squeeze such a huge tome (the biggest book I read all year!) in between the others.

I don't know why it took so long for me to finish it once I started. It's a bitterly hilarious satire, sweeping together painful and depressing views of neocolonial economics and globalism, racism and corruption, exploitation and "traditional" wife-beating, the IMF and a "Global Bank" all too happy to award loans to a dictator so long as his nation is politically stable enough to crush the poor and working class under the terms of repayment, told in an allegorical magical-realist mode. Like with all satires, its characters have a tendency to feel like cartoons, and the faux-documentary narration creates an additional level of emotional distance, which wasn't to my taste, but this is the sort of story more people on the "receiving" end of global capital -- which means basically all of us in the West -- need to read.

2013 read #136: Pym by Mat Johnson.

Pym by Mat Johnson
323 pages
Published 2009
Read from October 25 to October 27
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

"I really only read The Narrative [of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket] as homework before I read Pym by Mat Johnson. The cover and blurb of that book have intrigued me for months. I even had it checked out for a while earlier this year, but elected to hold off on it until I had the chance to read Poe's original novel." So I wrote in my review of Poe's Narrative, which I read way back in June.

I'm coming to face how very little -- how shamefully little, how appallingly little -- African American literature I have read. One book by Octavia E. Butler, which I really liked; one book by Nnedi Okorafor, which I really wanted to like. I almost bought Ellison's Invisible Man half a dozen times between my late teens and the day I got a library card last year. And... that's it, as far as I can remember. The one history I own by a Black historian is titled The History of White People. I am the worst kind of lip-service liberal, never poking my head out of my fantasy fiction comfort zone, clinging to my humanities degree as evidence of not-wholly-debased intentions without making substantive effort to inform myself of other perspectives.

What struck me most powerfully about this book, qua a book, is the mixing and mingling of what I would ordinarily classify as incongruent styles. Dry, bitterly hilarious social satire rubs elbows with the "low" humor of pratfalls and the prominence of Little Debbie snack cakes as a central plot point. Pointed social commentary commingles with the structure and plot of a Crichton-esque airport adventure novel. It resists easy compartmentalization. Given how little I've explored African American literary and critical perspectives, it's best that I don't try to impose any kind of labeling anyway, beyond affirming that I think Pym is pretty damn funny.

2013 read #90: Candide, or Optimism by Voltaire.

Candide, or Optimism by Voltaire
166 pages
Published 1759
Read July 11
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

I love cynical, bleakly funny works written in the faux-naive voice of Enlightenment satire. Not that I've read many, mind you, but Gulliver's Travels -- once I was old enough to seek out and somewhat digest the unexpurgated version -- was an early favorite, and Candide turns out to be pretty darn good too. At least, the "actual" Candide was satisfyingly acerbic. My edition also had a "Part II," which according to Wikipedia is variously attributed to Thorel de Campigneulles or Henri Joseph Du Laurens. That extra bit of fan-fiction, the authenticity of which is never questioned in my copy, was noticeably inferior, blunting the edge of Voltaire's nasty hilarity and introducing an anti-Enlightenment message in the person of Zenoida, which even as I was reading it felt at odds with Voltaire's attitude in "Part I." I can't entirely despise the non-canon fan service, as the chapter "Candide Meditates Suicide" was one of the funniest portions of the entire book, but on the whole "Part II" was still an odd interlude that diminished the overall effect of the novella.