2015 read #19: Voyage of the Basilisk by Marie Brennan.

Voyage of the Basilisk: A Memoir by Lady Trent by Marie Brennan
348 pages
Published 2015
Read from April 15 to April 21
Rating: ★★½ out of 5

Another entry in Brennan's competent (but not revolutionary) series of speculative natural history adventures. The formula -- our heroine, Isabella Camherst, the future Lady Trent, frets at home before launching on an expedition to study dragons, has globe-trotting adventures, meets (thinly disguised) cultures without the Victorian burden of racial chauvinism, unwittingly gets mixed up in her nation's diplomatic efforts, and saves the day with some rash (and dragon-related) act of heroism -- is still winsome, but growing stale after a third volume. As a card-carrying liberal and degree-carrying anthropologist, I haven't tired of the fantasy of various cultures meeting each other as diplomatic equals rather than exterminating each other with pathogens and prejudice, but Basilisk is weaker than the previous two volumes on a structural level.

The new characters (with the exception of Suhail) are scarcely sketched in even by pulp adventure standards; the de facto antagonists, stand-ins for the Ming Dynasty, aren't given any kind of human face, remaining anonymous guards and bureaucrats. Instead, much of the book is a loosely connected travel narrative, in which Lady Trent faces problems of logistics, dengue fever, shipwreck, native customs, and a rather abrupt decision to reenact the sandworm-riding scenes of Dune with a sea serpent. This last decision precipitates her onto the forbidden island where she gets another clue in the mystery of the vanished Draconian race (which, honestly, doesn't hold much interest for me, as they're still a generic vanished fantasy race at this point), stumbles upon the Yelang (a.k.a. Ming) soldiers hiding out on the forbidden island, steals their dragonbone airship, and eventually rides a sea serpent into battle. It's all good fun, old fashioned adventure tidily swept clean of unpleasant racism and historical ugliness, but also kind of silly.

2015 read #18: The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot by Robert Macfarlane.

The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot by Robert Macfarlane
374 pages
Published 2012
Read from March 30 to April 15
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

There was an unconformity (in the geological sense) between this book and me, or between what the author intended to write and what I hoped and expected to read. I was beguiled by Macfarlane's The Wild Places, so easily and thoroughly charmed by his style and perspective that I prematurely forecast that Macfarlane would "quickly become one of my favorite authors." The mismatch may well be on my end -- circumstances have forced me to read this book in snatches of stolen time, rarely more than fifteen or twenty pages in a go, and with prose this consciously elliptical (there's even a glossary elucidating the more niche terminology Macfarlane employs), and a thematic through-line this all-encompassing and attenuated, it's likely my attention was too scattershot and flighty to appreciate what Macfarlane was going for here.

The blame is not wholly mine, however: some rests with the publishers, or whomever composed the jacket flap copy: "In this exquisitely written book, an immediate bestseller in England, Robert Macfarlane sets off from his Cambridge home to follow the ancient tracks, holloways, drove roads and sea paths that form part of a vast network of routes that crisscross the British landscape and its waters, connecting them to the continents beyond." I tend to avoid jacket flap copy, and that first sentence is admittedly all I read. But I could be excused for expecting a book about, well, Robert Macfarlane setting off on ancient tracks, holloways, drove roads, and sea paths crisscrossing Britain, a text exactly in line with my recent interest (inspired by The Wild Places as well as the books of Roger Deakin) in British rights of way and tramping culture. Macfarlane does set off on one such tramp early in the book, along the Icknield Way, but the actual thematic through-line is a quasi-biography of a certain poet, Edward Thomas, as well as a thesis on how memory, personality, and identity relate to environments and the experience of walking -- in his paraphrase of Thomas' lines of thought,

...self -- not as something rooted in place and growing steadily over time, but as a shifting set of properties variously supplemented and depleted by our passage through the world. Landscape and nature are not simply there to be gazed at; no, they press hard upon and into our bodies and minds, complexly affect our moods, our sensibilities. They riddle us in two ways -- both perplexing and perforating us.

It's all interesting enough when Macfarlane warms to these themes, but I don't think I forgave him for deviating from the path I'd expected to follow, and even his most evocative nature-writing felt lost on me.

Whether it was my own sense of disconnect, or whether this was indeed a lesser effort than The Wild Places, I didn't feel Macfarlane's prose was at the same level he produced for his debut work. His similes, while still bracingly original, often felt more strained than natural, and at times I couldn't quite suss out his meaning, especially when he left the ground for displays of philosophical scintillation. And this is a minor point, but I felt there's something disingenuous about a writer going off to Sichuan because he "couldn't think of anything I'd rather do" in one chapter, then in the next sneering about "trust funds." I'm sure it's great to be able to globe-trot on a whim while writing your next book, but having access to that kind of lucre should, as a rule, make it harder for you to offer "Trust fund kids, am I right?" comments.

2015 read #17: Going Postal by Terry Pratchett.

Going Postal by Terry Pratchett
377 pages
Published 2004
Read from March 23 to April 2
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

I suspect I don't have the proper sense of humor to appreciate Pratchett. In this volume, he expands his idiom from tickling laffs out of fantasy cliches to tackling overt social commentary on contemporary foibles, but the gags (aside from some mild wordplay that wrung a few smiles from my stony exterior) felt stale and warmed-over, almost but not quite as banal as "What is the deal with airplane food?" Surprisingly, at some point I found myself actually invested in our absurd conman antihero and his postal dilemma, my sympathies no doubt stimulated by my own anti-privatization, pro-social worldview, as well as the sort of prophetic-in-hindsight storyline recalling all too painfully the 2008 crash and its inescapable aftermath -- yet another illustration at how freaking obvious (and, shock of shocks, perhaps even avoidable) the implications of late stage capitalism were, even before the collapse. However it happened, I was more interested in Moist's plans and escapades than in the humor of the situation.

I can see why Pratchett is regarded so fondly by so many -- several of my friends adore him -- but I think I should have gotten into him at a younger age in order to appreciate him fully.

2015 read #16: The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells.*

The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells*
149 pages
Published 1897
Read from March 27 to March 28
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

I hadn't set out to reread The Invisible Man. Yesterday's mail delivered a copy of After London by Richard Jefferies, a postapocalyptic novel published at the precocious date of 1885; flipping through it, I found what I feel to be a contender for the most dynamic opening hook from any pre-1900 "scientific romance":

The old men say their fathers told them that soon after the fields were left to themselves a change began to be visible. It became green everywhere in the first spring, after London ended, so that all the country looked alike.

The only contemporary opening hook that can compete, I think, is from Wells' The War of the Worlds. I can't decide which opening is stronger, in part because the effectiveness of The War of the Worlds has been blunted by familiarity -- I've read the book at least a couple dozen times. But I got to checking out the opening lines of other early sci-fi books for comparison, and before I knew it, I found myself absorbed in reading The Invisible Man on Project Gutenberg. It was one of my favorite books as a young teen, in part because Wells' narration is so immediate and modern. Recalling the book in recent years, I have asserted that The Invisible Man can be seen in retrospect as the first modern technothriller -- Michael Crichton's trademark journalistic narration is anticipated here, and the tension of Kemp keeping Griffin distracted by drawing out his story from him while the constabulary arrives is still effective, all these years (and rereadings) later. The climactic chase through Port Burdock is less effective than I recalled, and I picked up on way more of the period's endemic prejudice and race theory than I caught as a teen, but the book as a whole is still superb -- as can be seen by how I got so hooked that I read the whole thing on my phone almost without meaning to.

2015 read #15: Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy by Karen Abbott.

Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War by Karen Abbott
436 pages
Published 2014
Read from March 18 to March 22
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

Historical biography is a different animal than capital-H History, a clade intermediate between history and historical fiction. Both history and historical biography have their worth and their points of interest. History (or at least history the way I like it) reports on its own uncertainties and the contradictions between sources, underlining when an interpretation is speculative or a historical source potentially unreliable -- not all historians are meticulous on this point, but the good ones are. Historical biography, on the other hand, goes all-in for scene-setting and detail, drawing sights and smells from various sources, inferring thoughts and states of mind from correspondence and subsequent memoirs when available, frequently approaching the narrative as an experiential third-person-limited point of view. Abbott refers to her "characters" in the acknowledgements, and in general is obviously trying to tell stories to their best effect. Historical biographies, the good ones, can be fully scrupulous about primary sources -- unlike certain chauvinist reviewers, I see no reason to suspect that Abbott faked details or indulged in "women's magazine" frippery, whatever the hell that might even mean in this context. But it is definitely a distinct genre of historical writing, with its own style and its own storytelling expectations.

That's all very broad and open-ended, of course. Basically I'm writing down whatever thoughts occur to me, because I'm too distracted to write a review engaging directly with the book's content in any meaningful way. Not that engaging with content is a habit of mine in this space, but it's more acute these days, for Life Reasons that I won't get into here.

More broad commentary: The American Civil War is fascinating in a dispiriting way, because it never really went away, as any number of bumper stickers and totally-not-racist Tea Party rallies will show you. Likewise, I'm always fascinated by the women who get left out of history books (which is to say, basically all of them), and their various means of asserting agency and articulating with their society. Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy exhibits a good (if small) sample of these stories, or "characters" if you will, each with distinct motives and methods of operation. It's a good (if preliminary) look into a part of history wholly unfamiliar to me, which is all I can ask for.

2015 read #14: The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane.

The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane
330 pages
Published 2007
Read from March 16 to March 18
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

It was Roger Deakin who inspired my interest in books of eccentric (and, seemingly, ineluctably British) adventures in the proverbial backyard. His Waterlog documented his project to swim throughout the British Isles, "dipping into ponds and estuaries, lochs and ocean littoral, trout streams, fens, abandoned moats, canals, flooded quarries, harbors, industrial rivers, hidden becks, a cave, even heated swimming pools," as I put it in that review, while his Wildwood lingered in coppices and took delight in nuts and berries and sunbeams. Knowing nothing of Robert Macfarlane when Amazon recommended this book to me, I seized upon The Wild Places to fill a hunger for domestic exploration that had been maturing ever since I finished Waterlog, a craving Three Men on a Boat and Three Men on the Bummel had failed to assuage. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Macfarlane and Deakin had become good friends in the last years of Deakin's life, and much of The Wild Places is imbued with Deakin's presence, his actions directly on the page or his example and inspiration like a warm light through eyelids. I only "know" Deakin through his own two books, and now through Macfarlane's depiction, but the chapters dealing with Deakin's death and Macfarlane's mourning have left me glum and heavy all day today.

Less eccentric, perhaps, than Deakin's quest in Waterlog, Macfarlane's project here is to discover any remnants of wildness left on the long-inhabited, recently-monocultured British archipelago. Beginning with the obvious wildernesses of the remote north, Macfarlane works his way toward more populated areas and a more intimate conception of what wildness might mean, finding (with Deakin) the wild in the limestone gryke microenvironments of the Burren and the forgotten holloways of the chalklands. Macfarlane's narration is also more conventional than what I recall of Deakin's sumptuous digressions, sticking close to his theme with beautiful but efficient prose, making for a faster but, perhaps, less beguiling and lingering read. Macfarlane's text also carries an undercurrent of melancholy, never approaching the gentle delight of Deakin's abbreviated career.

If his other books are like this one (and I've already ordered one more from ILL and one from Amazon), though, I can already tell Macfarlane will quickly become one of my favorite authors.

2015 read #13: The Boy Who Lost Fairyland by Catherynne M. Valente.

The Boy Who Lost Fairyland by Catherynne M. Valente
235 pages
Published 2015
Read from March 13 to March 16
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

A book-length narrative detour that, as far as I can tell, serves no real purpose to the ongoing story of September, the girl who did quite a lot of things in and around Fairyland. We enter the story with the early childhood of Hawthorn, an ordinary troll boy, shortly before he gets swapped as a Changeling with Thomas Rood, a baby in Chicago. After a rough start, as if Valente herself wasn't quite convinced the series would go in this direction on its own momentum, the book finally gains some traction with some precious scenes of Hawthorn (now Thomas the Un-Normal) attempting to understand mid-century American toddlerhood and grade school from a Fairyland-ish perspective, and meeting with a Fetch or matchstick girl also left behind in a Changeling exchange. This is relatively unexplored territory, as unexplored as any corner of faery lore can be these days, so for a while I was engrossed with a sense of possibility and newness -- there was no telling where the story might go! Alas, even this portion of the tale feels weightless, lacking a certain depth or enthusiasm that Valente ordinarily brings to her work.

The Boy Who Lost Fairyland feels to me like little more than a protracted bout of writer's block nosing head-first into a publisher's deadline.

About halfway through the book, Hawthorn and Tamburlaine and their magically animated friends get kidnapped into Fairyland by a baseball that had been a troll king all along. Not that long ago, I found Valente's Fairyland "charming" and "whimsical" and "fuckin' precious" (from my review of "The Girl Who Ruled Fairyland, For a Little While," anthologized here). The first two books of this series maintained a nice balance of "Grim and Whimsy" (as I put it here), though even by book two I was noticing a creeping tendency for the narrative voice to shift into "Aunty Cathy tells a spooky yarn before bedtime." That finds full flower here, with a heap of Whimsy and a dearth of Grim, which wouldn't be so bad if Valente's heretofore reliable inventive fancy were also at its peak. The outlines of a creative, whimsical story are there -- the aforementioned baseball-troll-king, the matchstick girl designed to destroy but channeling her impulses into creativity, Blunderbuss the yarn wombat -- but for me, at least, the spark feels damped. Valente's descriptions of Fairyland, formerly evocative, have been stripped down to constant reminders of how edible everything looks. Far from fuckin' precious, the net effect is merely a case of the munchies.

And in the end, despite populating a book-length side trip with a whole new collection of characters, Hawthorn and his friends have essentially no effect that I can discern upon the situation of September and the balance of Fairyland. Two hundred pages of buildup and this new gang blunders into contact with September and her pals through sheer happenstance, have a game of brownie backgammon, and then Aubergine the Dodo peeks out over September's shoulder to admit that she's had a deus ex machina in the form of a dodo egg this whole time -- and it's not at all clear how, exactly, the actions of our new band of heroes prompted this belated (and flimsy) resolution. There's enough residual charm to carry the novel, but we seem to be reaching the Land of Diminishing Returns with this series.