2015 read #28: On the Beach by Nevil Shute.

On the Beach by Nevil Shute
279 pages
Published 1957
Read from June 19 to June 24
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

Expertly mixing tragedy with tangents of utter boredom, this classic of nuclear fallout makes human extinction a banal, inexorable process of fly fishing, auto racing, brandy drinking, and garden improvements. The quotidian details make for an insidious apocalypse, but also tend to pad out an otherwise affecting novel.

2015 read #27: Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell.

Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell
438 pages
Published 2013
Read from June 5 to June 19
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

At what point this year will I learn to quit when I'm just not feelin' a particular book? At this rate I doubt I'll be able to finish even sixty books by the end of the year. A sad state of affairs.

Fangirl was all right, really. The problem was my inability to get invested in anything lately that doesn't immediately grab my interest. The first fifty or so pages were off-putting because, frankly, the central character reminded me too much of me when I was 18. Representation in fiction is vital, but Cath represented 18 year old Rick a little too well. That paralyzing social avoidance and panic is not something I wish to revisit. Even when the viewpoint character had begun to adjust, I found my interest in her growing love affair outstripped by my concern about her grades and her writing assignment. Hardly the stuff of a swooning romance, not at all as well-observed and deeply-felt as the central relationship in Rowell's Eleanor & Park.

I did enjoy the snippets from Rowell's fictional Harry Potter pastiche, as well as Cath's fanfic of the same -- I especially liked the fact that both were written in subtly but noticeably different voices.

2015 read #26: Magnificat by Julian May.

Magnificat by Julian May
431 pages
Published 1996
Read from May 25 to June 3
Rating: ★★ out of 5

The concept of a science fiction trilogy exploring the personal and political lead-up to a galactic conflict, rather than the conflict itself, is an intriguing one. Goodness knows there are enough stories of space battles and interplanetary conflict, both romanticizing and deconstructing the concept and practice of war; a story that traces root causes instead could be a bold and illuminating new angle. Once I was reconciled to the fact that May's trilogy about a Galactic Rebellion would dawdle along with dinner parties and sex with disembodied brains, and devote at most a chapter to the actual conflict, I could have been mollified by this perspective -- but only if the groundwork for the rebellion had not been so thoroughly ridiculous.

I don't like the SF crutch of "evil" characters. When there must needs be hostilities and bloodshed, I would much prefer that the antagonists reached their respective positions legitimately, through the workings of character and circumstance and ideology. Marc Remillard, "Angel of the Abyss" and paramount-metapsychic leader of the Rebellion, arrives at his position not through flaws in his character or a sincere conviction of humanity's need for "freedom" from alien oversight, but because a devil, more or less, had been whispering in his ear while he slept. Our two good guys, meanwhile, after getting built up during their two respective titular volumes, get shuffled off to the sidelines until they're shoved into place for the denouement. That devalues the central conflict from a confrontation of character with tangible stakes to an author-directed deus ex machina to get the pieces where they need to be (for a resolution we've known since the third book of the Saga of Pliocene Exile, published thirteen years previously). It is also, in psychological terms, facile and unsatisfying.

For approximately one entire page (slightly less than that, but I'm being generous), Magnificat hints at the sort of story I wanted all along, summarizing the coadunate reactions of the various Milieu species to the human Rebellion. I like the universe May has set up, for the most part; I wish we had spent less time regurgitating the same back-and-forth on Teilhardian unanimization (and far less time on factory-grown metapsychic embryos corrupted in utero by mustache-twirling evil), and more time in the company of the delightful Poltroyans and the intimidating but kindly Krondaku. The only things I'll miss about May's Galactic Milieu are her aliens. I think back fondly to the Saga of Pliocene Exile, but almost all of my nostalgia there is likewise bound up with the setting.

As Diamond Mask and Jack the Bodiless admonished in the climax, I persevered. And now I'm done. Thank the All in all.

2015 read #25: Diamond Mask by Julian May.

Diamond Mask by Julian May
461 pages
Published 1994
Read from May 15 to May 23
Rating: ★★½ out of 5

Milieu baaaabiiies
We make our dreams come truuue
Milieu baaaabiiies
Teilhard's Omega Point too!

Yeah, I dunno. The second book in the Galactic Milieu Trilogy inches us closer, in years, to the start of the Galactic Rebellion, but yet again dawdles about showing us scenes from the childhood of its titular paramount metapsychic operant, as well as a protracted psycho killer plotline that has not transmuted into interesting in between volumes. May's narrator, Uncle Rogi, promised that Diamond Mask would track down the metapsychic killers Fury and Hydra in this volume, but alas, actually resolving this plotline did not seem to be May's intention. We were promised that we would actually see the Galactic Rebellion in the final volume of the series devoted to the Galactic Rebellion, but with the psycho killers still on the loose, I don't hold out much hope for nuanced character-based conflict and scenes of spectacular space opera.

Diamond Mask is a minuscule improvement over Jack the Bodiless by virtue of moving much of the action off Earth and onto colorful exoplanets -- no more in utero discussions of divinity and incarnation while Bigfeet peep in the window of a Canadian manger, thankfully. But the need for a good chunk of these scenes never becomes clear. The Family Ghost may insist that Dorothea needs to grow up on the "Scottish" planet Caledonia, but all we see is her getting dropped off, meeting some broad caricatures, and then her leaving again a few years later. I think that it's May who "needed" Dorothea to grow up on Caledonia, because she had this nice nifty planet she wanted to describe in detail. Worldbuilding as substitute for character development.

Character development does not seem to be May's strength in general. Her villains are motivated by pop psychology: forgotten childhood molestation gives rise to a murderously unsubtle "Fury," while the future leader of the Rebellion only reaches that point because he was tempted by a proverbial devil on his shoulder. I may be grading this too generously. But at least it held my interest somewhat better than Jack, and best of all, I'm only one additional volume away from finishing this series once and for all. Maybe the next one will have some kind of payoff.

2015 read #24: Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell.

Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell
328 pages
Published 2013
Read from May 13 to May 15
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

Why do people read trash when things so much better are available?

Well, I shouldn't talk; I've persevered through my share of hack sci-fi for no better reason than it had dinosaurs on the cover. What I mean is, why do people enjoy trash, why do they seek it out and devour it and make multibillion-dollar multimedia empires out of vampires hanging out in high schools, when books like Eleanor & Park exist?

Rainbow Rowell is doing all right for herself. I may not have heard of her, or of this book, before Monday, but she has some successful novels out there, and at least one movie deal. It's not as if I've ever paid attention to the contemporary YA scene -- there could be all kinds of books this excellent, and I wouldn't know about them until someone recommended them, or until they made some kind of "top banned books of the year" list. But that's the thing, isn't it? Why is this level of quiet, emotionally acute brilliance seemingly unknown outside its genre boundaries? Why does this lack crossover status, when every half-literate suburban mom who hadn't touched a book since high school knows about Twilight and its imitators?

Or maybe I'm just especially ignorant about books outside of my narrow province. Also possible.

I wonder, though: What is the intended audience for YA fiction, really? Do high school kids actually know about books like this? Or is it all college students, librarians, teachers, and people on Tumblr? It almost feels like this book was written, in Eleanor's apt description of Romeo and Juliet, for people who want to remember being young and in love. I had a hard time picturing actual teenagers connecting to it -- but I'm probably underestimating teenagers. I know I liked to read as a teen, and I couldn't have been the only one. But this book felt like it was written just as much for a wistful, nostalgic adult audience as a teenage one. Not that I'm complaining.

2015 read #23: Jack the Bodiless by Julian May.

Jack the Bodiless by Julian May
464 pages
Published 1991
Read from May 2 to May 13
Rating: ★★ out of 5

Contains spoilers for the Saga of Pliocene Exile (1, 2, 3, 4) and Intervention.

Expectation: Jack the Bodiless is the first volume in a trilogy depicting humanity's Metapsychic Rebellion against the power and dominion of the Galactic Milieu, a saga of space war and psychokinetic conflict hinted at in May's Saga of Pliocene Exile. May sketched the happy and prosperous Milieu after the resolution of the Rebellion in the early pages of The Many-Colored Land, and introduced the Remillards and "the Adversary," Marc Remillard, in the final two volumes, so before we even begin this new trilogy, we know the resolution of the major plot threads (Saint Jack the Bodiless saves Galactic Unity but gives his life in the process; Marc Remillard and his inner circle go into Pliocene exile, where "the Adversary" is eventually redeemed, and in a fit of starry-eyed idealism, psychically projects himself into a neighboring galaxy, where five million years later he will emerge as Atoning Unifex, the "Family Ghost" of the Remillards who nudges events into their "necessary" course). But May surprised me in Intervention with her ability to keep me invested in a story whose major beats I already know, even in spite of an unnecessary and uninteresting subplot about psychotic psychic serial killers. So I went into Jack the Bodiless expecting a rousing tale of conflict and idealism and massively overpowered psychic titans battling across the arm of the galaxy.

Reality: Jack the Bodiless pretty much blows.

The first sign of trouble comes with the sketchy political and gendered implications of the opening plot. During the Saga, I noticed May's tendency to assign her female characters subservient or supportive roles: as I noted in my review of The Adversary, "[A]fter all the troubling gender politics in the previous volumes, perhaps it's no surprise that the central conflict is resolved when a powerful female protagonist finally, contentedly relinquishes control and assumes a subsidiary role to a more powerful male." The first 300 pages of Jack the Bodiless depict a woman, irrationally driven to save her dying marriage, becoming pregnant in defiance of a Galactic statute designed to weed harmful alleles out of the human breeding pool. That could be read as a defense of reproductive self-determination -- except Teresa becomes essentially passive after getting pregnant, and her 13 year old son Marc is the one who organizes and effects her escape from Milieu justice. Her unborn fetus is of course Jack, the super-psychic galactic savior, and he and Teresa have in utero dialogues about Christianity and the necessity for a loving creator god to become incarnate and push humanity toward a Teilhardian Omega Point. Plenty of sci-fi books have taken Tielhard and the Omega Point for inspiration, but May might be the first in my experience to explicitly declare Christianity "true" in her story universe.

These gender and ideological issues are exacerbated by the in-universe racial implications of the events of the Saga of Pliocene Exile. At the end of those books, the metapsychic potential of the hominid genepool is augmented and accelerated by cross-breeding with psychic faeries from another galaxy (it's a long story). But those faeries settled Pliocene Europe, and continued mating with "Celtic" humans into the dawn of history, so Western Europeans far surpass the other human "races" in metapsychic development by the time Jack the Bodiless begins. One might even say that Western Europeans, in this story universe, represent a sort of master race of psychic operants. That may have been matter-of-course for sci-fi when The Many-Colored Land was first printed in 1981, but even by 1991 it had to have looked awkward, and here in 2015 it's downright odious.

Plenty of sci-fi books can still be entertaining despite despicable racial and gender ideology -- I mean, that encompasses practically every sci-fi book published before 1980, and most of them afterward. Where Jack the Bodiless truly fails is its lack of entertainment. Like so many genre books from the '80s and '90s, including Intervention, Jack wastes time with a superfluous and shoehorned "psycho killer" plotline. I guess a tale of galactic strife and a clash of metapsychic titans isn't enough to sustain a trilogy, so all that gets shuffled off to the ensuing volumes while the Remillards investigate a psychic serial killer. And once the pointless mystery of the psycho killers (five kids operating in metaconcert, because of course the only thing more '80s and '90s than an extraneous serial killer is a bunch of killer children) is resolved, the four surviving killers go into hiding, and the narrator promises to address their denouement in the next book, so we aren't even finished with this ridiculous nonsense.

Speaking of unresolved plotlines, Teresa and Intervention narrator Rogi Remillard hide from the Galactic authorities during her pregnancy in a Bigfoot preserve in British Columbia. No real reason for it -- just "Hey, have some Bigfeet while this story spins its wheels." Unless this is a long range Chekhov's Bigfoot, to be resolved in some ensuing volume, nothing whatsoever happens with the Bigfoot storyline. They exist as mere set dressing.

There is just enough here -- just barely enough -- to keep me from despising Jack outright, and just barely enough of interest to keep me going into the next book of the trilogy. Perhaps this is merely a series low point, a bunch of dull table-setting that should have taken only a hundred or so pages, sort of like the Saga low point, The Nonborn King. Let's hope Diamond Mask has more momentum and less extraneous garbage -- though if narrator Rogi is to be believed, we won't even get to the Metapsychic Rebellion until the final book of the trilogy.

2015 read #22: The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde by Peter Ackroyd.

The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde by Peter Ackroyd
185 pages
Published 1983
Read from April 25 to May 1
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

"Time is eternal and simultaneous." Such is written on the endsheet of this particular library copy. This approximation of profundity was jotted down in response to a passage late in The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde, in which Ackroyd has his narrator Wilde recount,

'I will tell you a secret,' I said to him. 'I have told you that our age is primitive and terrible. Well, the next age will be primitive also, and then the next, and then the next.'

Dante walks in exile at the same time as Augustine speaks in market place of Tyre, and Samson is led into the air by a boy. There is a picture of a young man in the Louvre -- a prince, I believe, and his eyes are sad. I would like to see that picture again before I die. I would like to return to that past -- to enter another man's heart. In that moment of transition, when I was myself and someone else, of my own time and in another's, the secrets of the universe would stand revealed.

The beauty, and occasionally the frustration, of literary fiction is that few things are spelled out, and each reader fashions their own understanding from the impressions presented. I certainly would not extract some pop science pseudo-physics mysticism from the above passage. Hewing close to the obvious themes, I thought instead of the isolation of the artist and the critic of society, the "primitive" and "terrible" human society which, for all its cosmetic shifts, changes not at all in how it seizes upon and hounds the outsider.

I haven't read much at all of Wilde's actual work -- only The Picture of Dorian Grey, and that was eleven years ago. Ackroyd excels in his pastiche of Wilde's style and quickness with an epigram, as far as I can tell; the first half or so of the book had me giggling with every page. But, as is my common reaction to Ackroyd's recent history digests, I came away from this Testament not feeling I had learned anything much about Wilde as a person. Ackroyd's Wilde returns to themes of masks, of identity, of art and beauty as ideals, and either I'm too dense or my attention was too scattered to appreciate it, because I didn't feel like those themes got developed or elaborated beyond a Cliffs Notes sketch. The ending was affecting, and much of the early going was delightfully wry, but I just didn't click with this read as a whole.