Alanna: The First Adventure (Song of the Lioness Book One) by Tamora Pierce
241 pages
Published 1983
Read from October 4 to October 6
Rating: 2 out of 5
I forget what drew my attention to this book. Someone mentioned it as a formative book during their childhood, but was it a friend? Some random person writing online? It was just a couple weeks ago, but who knows!
This is a book that shows its age. Its simplistic plot, derivative setting, and generic characters place it firmly in the late '70s and early '80s kids' fantasy tradition. Most dated of all is its second generation feminism. The titular main character is a girl in a feudal society, the scrappy daughter of a petty nobleman; she switches places with her twin brother in order to receive the training of a knight-to-be. She finds joy and fulfillment in masculine-coded activities—learning tactics and battle history, practicing the sword and discipline—and hates the fact that she was born a "silly" girl. She is sternly admonished by wise authority figures that the gods made her a girl, and she can no more change that than anything else about herself, but that being a girl and staying true to herself are both worthy endeavors. The message is clear: Feminine-coded things are silly, but a girl who likes masculine-coded things is special and kicks ass and is a worthy heroine, just so long as she always remembers the fact that she's a girl and doesn't blur her own understanding of her gender.
As with other YA books of its time, Alanna was perhaps best enjoyed by its intended audience around the time it was written. I'm sure it would have made a powerful impression on me had I read it in, say, 1991 rather than 2018. As it is, it's the sort of antique relic of early YA feminism that reminds us of how far social norms have come—and also, most depressingly, how far our society could slip back in these reactionary years.
Saturday, October 6, 2018
Wednesday, October 3, 2018
2018 read #18: Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanan McGuire.
Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanan McGuire
188 pages
Published 2017
Read from October 1 to October 3
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
McGuire's Every Heart a Doorway was one of my favorite recent fantasy reads, a too-brief book that stuck with me far longer than have many weightier tomes. It was set in a boarding school for girls (it is almost always girls) who had gone through magical doorways into fantasy worlds, then couldn't adjust back to mundane reality after their return. In my review I wrote, "The characters here were a delight—I wanted to learn everything about their worlds, their doorways, their stories." And lucky for us, McGuire went on to begin a series of prequels detailing the backstories and adventures of some of those very characters that I so loved.
I don't know why it's taken me well over a year to get around to reading Sticks and Bones, the first of these prequels. The character Jack had been one of my especial favorites in Doorway, and here was a tale of Jack and her sister Jill and the Gothic horror world they had grown to love and call their true home. Sometimes you pick up a book and the time isn't right for it. Sometimes you only read twenty-five books in two years because a con artist leveraged the fascistic underbelly of your country's political landscape to become an illegitimate president and it's all you can do sometimes to get out of bed in the morning anymore. Be that as it may, I've finally read Sticks and Bones, and it is delightful.
Well, mostly. The characterizations here (especially of Jill and Jack's parents) seem more suited to a fairy tale than a modern fantasy novel, little more than plot devices given names and mannerisms, but in a book like this, I suppose that's okay. I felt more let down by the denouement of a certain romantic subplot. I suppose it's something of a spoiler to confirm that the romantic subplot ends exactly the way one might expect in a Gothic tragedy, but the expectations of that trope are rooted in "fridging the female love interest to further the main character's plot," and in this particular instance also repeat the all-too-common (and problematic) practice of never letting the gay couple survive happily to the end of the book. It's hard to update the conventions of an old genre without unpacking some of that baggage, and Sticks and Bones might be just a tad too slender to address it as fully as it deserved.
188 pages
Published 2017
Read from October 1 to October 3
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
McGuire's Every Heart a Doorway was one of my favorite recent fantasy reads, a too-brief book that stuck with me far longer than have many weightier tomes. It was set in a boarding school for girls (it is almost always girls) who had gone through magical doorways into fantasy worlds, then couldn't adjust back to mundane reality after their return. In my review I wrote, "The characters here were a delight—I wanted to learn everything about their worlds, their doorways, their stories." And lucky for us, McGuire went on to begin a series of prequels detailing the backstories and adventures of some of those very characters that I so loved.
I don't know why it's taken me well over a year to get around to reading Sticks and Bones, the first of these prequels. The character Jack had been one of my especial favorites in Doorway, and here was a tale of Jack and her sister Jill and the Gothic horror world they had grown to love and call their true home. Sometimes you pick up a book and the time isn't right for it. Sometimes you only read twenty-five books in two years because a con artist leveraged the fascistic underbelly of your country's political landscape to become an illegitimate president and it's all you can do sometimes to get out of bed in the morning anymore. Be that as it may, I've finally read Sticks and Bones, and it is delightful.
Well, mostly. The characterizations here (especially of Jill and Jack's parents) seem more suited to a fairy tale than a modern fantasy novel, little more than plot devices given names and mannerisms, but in a book like this, I suppose that's okay. I felt more let down by the denouement of a certain romantic subplot. I suppose it's something of a spoiler to confirm that the romantic subplot ends exactly the way one might expect in a Gothic tragedy, but the expectations of that trope are rooted in "fridging the female love interest to further the main character's plot," and in this particular instance also repeat the all-too-common (and problematic) practice of never letting the gay couple survive happily to the end of the book. It's hard to update the conventions of an old genre without unpacking some of that baggage, and Sticks and Bones might be just a tad too slender to address it as fully as it deserved.
Monday, October 1, 2018
2018 read #17: The Age of the Horse by Susanna Forrest.
The Age of the Horse: An Equine Journey Through Human History by Susanna Forrest
370 pages
Published 2016
Read from September 22 to October 1
Rating: 4 out of 5
I think it's fair to say that this book taught me to love horses. Or at least to better understand those people who do love horses. I'd always viewed horses and horse people with lower-class skepticism, narrowing my eyes and making (possibly) unfair assumptions about anyone with the monetary resources to maintain an equine hobby. Through Forrest's sensitive, discerning prose and wide-ranging horse's-eye-view of our commensal history, I grew fond of the horse's profound empathy and heartbroken over my species' millennia of mistreatment and abuse of these sensitive animals. I feel no desire to enter a life of subsistence farming alongside a plowhorse, myself, but while reading Age of the Horse, I found myself wishing that we could democratize (which really means to socialize and to redistribute) access to horses. Not the sort of access that amounts to sticking your kid on a pony at a petting zoo, nor even the therapeutic post-traumatic riding covered in the final chapter, but something longer term, a richer emotional bond of patience and mutual benefit.
Oh well. An idle dream, like so much else that would do good in this world.
Most likely it was due to my own lack of reading practice these last two years, but at times I felt that Forrest's exquisitely turned phrases could get in the way of actually conveying her meaning. I often had to stop and reread sentences and grew only fuzzier each time I did so. Again, that's probably because my brain has gotten so slack of late. I also felt that the chapter exploring the horse's position in Chinese history strayed a bit in the direction of exoticism and otherizing, with its emphasis on the obscenely rich main beneficiaries of modern China's totalitarian capitalism and their obscene displays of wealth. (Why did the chapter on the superrich also have to be the chapter on China? I'm sure our own domestic superrich have their own baffling, alien quirks to quietly anthropologize.) Aside from that, Age of the Horse is simply lovely, full of the same gentle empathy that we could all stand to learn from Forrest's horses.
370 pages
Published 2016
Read from September 22 to October 1
Rating: 4 out of 5
I think it's fair to say that this book taught me to love horses. Or at least to better understand those people who do love horses. I'd always viewed horses and horse people with lower-class skepticism, narrowing my eyes and making (possibly) unfair assumptions about anyone with the monetary resources to maintain an equine hobby. Through Forrest's sensitive, discerning prose and wide-ranging horse's-eye-view of our commensal history, I grew fond of the horse's profound empathy and heartbroken over my species' millennia of mistreatment and abuse of these sensitive animals. I feel no desire to enter a life of subsistence farming alongside a plowhorse, myself, but while reading Age of the Horse, I found myself wishing that we could democratize (which really means to socialize and to redistribute) access to horses. Not the sort of access that amounts to sticking your kid on a pony at a petting zoo, nor even the therapeutic post-traumatic riding covered in the final chapter, but something longer term, a richer emotional bond of patience and mutual benefit.
Oh well. An idle dream, like so much else that would do good in this world.
Most likely it was due to my own lack of reading practice these last two years, but at times I felt that Forrest's exquisitely turned phrases could get in the way of actually conveying her meaning. I often had to stop and reread sentences and grew only fuzzier each time I did so. Again, that's probably because my brain has gotten so slack of late. I also felt that the chapter exploring the horse's position in Chinese history strayed a bit in the direction of exoticism and otherizing, with its emphasis on the obscenely rich main beneficiaries of modern China's totalitarian capitalism and their obscene displays of wealth. (Why did the chapter on the superrich also have to be the chapter on China? I'm sure our own domestic superrich have their own baffling, alien quirks to quietly anthropologize.) Aside from that, Age of the Horse is simply lovely, full of the same gentle empathy that we could all stand to learn from Forrest's horses.
Friday, September 21, 2018
2018 read #16: Mesopotamia by Gwendolyn Leick.
Mesopotamia: The Invention of the City by Gwendolyn Leick
315 pages
Published 2001
Read from September 10 to September 21
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
As a youngster, I had been enthralled by all the most ancient "civilizations," as they were defined by my brother's 6th grade social studies textbook: Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, the Yellow River Valley. Egypt was the easiest to learn more about, which led me into a period of Egyptomania up until my tween years, but this was strictly because Egypt is far more ingrained in our pop history than any of the other river valley agricultural regions. The only other place young Rick discovered "information" relating to the Indus Valley, for example, was in a book about the Bermuda Triangle, and to this day I have only read one book that covered ancient China in any detail (and what a disappointing read it was). As Leick herself puts it in her preface, of the ancient civilizations, "Only Egypt, which is for us almost entirely defined by its morbid obsession with life after death, has continued to fascinate the public.... The Mesopotamian peoples... with their less spectacular art and crumbling mudbrick ruins, have no comparable place in the public imagination."
Which is an outright shame. My undergraduate career almost steered me into a future amid the pre-urban agricultural milieu of the Neolithic period, thanks to a research paper on the site of Tell Sabi Abyad, and to this day I feel an urge to tell each and every person I know how freakin' cool it is that town-dwelling people, supplied only with stone tools, had an advanced administrative system based on stamp-seals and counting tokens, long before the development of metallurgy or written language. The lack of popular interest in the ancient history and prehistory of Southwest Asia baffles me. This is where so many plant crops and animals were domesticated! This is where (so far as we know) people started living in substantial, permanent towns! The modern world, for better or for worse (and there's a lot to be said for both extremes), would not exist without the cultures of the Fertile Crescent. Yet your proverbial Patty and Joe just wanna gawk at mummies.
Even my undergrad years didn't teach me much about historical (as opposed to prehistoric) Mesopotamia. Leick's Mesopotamia fills a vital gap in my education; I only wish it were longer, more vividly written, and better supplied with charts, tables, plans, and illustrations. Leick spends a lot of time describing ancient floorplans when a sketch map would convey it far more clearly. That's more the fault of the publisher, however, and the amount of labor and ink they were willing to pay for; Mesopotamia, alas, remains a niche interest in America, even after nearly two decades of direct colonial occupation of the region.
One thing I was amazed to learn: The earliest cities qua cities in Mesopotamia, as represented in Leick's chronological organizational scheme by Eridu, were far more egalitarian, even democratic, than pop history had ever told me. Women and men held positions in society far more equal than they would hold over the ensuing 5500 years of urban civilization. There was little differentiation visible arising from wealth inequality, either. In Leick's telling, the idea of a city began as a cooperative, mutualist affair—something none of my cultural anthropology courses touched on, with their tidy narrative that agriculture correlates with emerging disparities in wealth and gender. The inequalities we associate with, well, all of written history crept in gradually, but Eridu, at least, sounds wonderful—an example that should be known throughout the urban societies of today..
Mesopotamia is an important and revelatory history, not just of the Land Between the Rivers but of the emerging concept of the city itself as a social body. I'd love for a fully updated edition of it to come out, double the length, offering a more sweeping panorama of its vast subject (and, naturally, supplied with way more tables and floorplans). In its present form, it left me wanting far more.
315 pages
Published 2001
Read from September 10 to September 21
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
As a youngster, I had been enthralled by all the most ancient "civilizations," as they were defined by my brother's 6th grade social studies textbook: Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, the Yellow River Valley. Egypt was the easiest to learn more about, which led me into a period of Egyptomania up until my tween years, but this was strictly because Egypt is far more ingrained in our pop history than any of the other river valley agricultural regions. The only other place young Rick discovered "information" relating to the Indus Valley, for example, was in a book about the Bermuda Triangle, and to this day I have only read one book that covered ancient China in any detail (and what a disappointing read it was). As Leick herself puts it in her preface, of the ancient civilizations, "Only Egypt, which is for us almost entirely defined by its morbid obsession with life after death, has continued to fascinate the public.... The Mesopotamian peoples... with their less spectacular art and crumbling mudbrick ruins, have no comparable place in the public imagination."
Which is an outright shame. My undergraduate career almost steered me into a future amid the pre-urban agricultural milieu of the Neolithic period, thanks to a research paper on the site of Tell Sabi Abyad, and to this day I feel an urge to tell each and every person I know how freakin' cool it is that town-dwelling people, supplied only with stone tools, had an advanced administrative system based on stamp-seals and counting tokens, long before the development of metallurgy or written language. The lack of popular interest in the ancient history and prehistory of Southwest Asia baffles me. This is where so many plant crops and animals were domesticated! This is where (so far as we know) people started living in substantial, permanent towns! The modern world, for better or for worse (and there's a lot to be said for both extremes), would not exist without the cultures of the Fertile Crescent. Yet your proverbial Patty and Joe just wanna gawk at mummies.
Even my undergrad years didn't teach me much about historical (as opposed to prehistoric) Mesopotamia. Leick's Mesopotamia fills a vital gap in my education; I only wish it were longer, more vividly written, and better supplied with charts, tables, plans, and illustrations. Leick spends a lot of time describing ancient floorplans when a sketch map would convey it far more clearly. That's more the fault of the publisher, however, and the amount of labor and ink they were willing to pay for; Mesopotamia, alas, remains a niche interest in America, even after nearly two decades of direct colonial occupation of the region.
One thing I was amazed to learn: The earliest cities qua cities in Mesopotamia, as represented in Leick's chronological organizational scheme by Eridu, were far more egalitarian, even democratic, than pop history had ever told me. Women and men held positions in society far more equal than they would hold over the ensuing 5500 years of urban civilization. There was little differentiation visible arising from wealth inequality, either. In Leick's telling, the idea of a city began as a cooperative, mutualist affair—something none of my cultural anthropology courses touched on, with their tidy narrative that agriculture correlates with emerging disparities in wealth and gender. The inequalities we associate with, well, all of written history crept in gradually, but Eridu, at least, sounds wonderful—an example that should be known throughout the urban societies of today..
Mesopotamia is an important and revelatory history, not just of the Land Between the Rivers but of the emerging concept of the city itself as a social body. I'd love for a fully updated edition of it to come out, double the length, offering a more sweeping panorama of its vast subject (and, naturally, supplied with way more tables and floorplans). In its present form, it left me wanting far more.
Monday, September 10, 2018
2018 read #15: A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki.
A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
421 pages
Published 2013
Read from August 5 to September 10
Rating: 4 out of 5
A brilliant novel of heartbreaking immediacy and intensity, A Tale for the Time Being stumbles somewhat at the end, losing its emotional resonance in a morass of corny pop science.
Ozeki explores a plethora of fascinating themes: the tandem act of creation between author and reader; memory and time; Zen Buddhism and the transience of being; guilt and heroism; the cruelty of human beings in war as well as in junior high. A vaguely climatepunk atmosphere of living on the edge of things hangs over the chapters from the viewpoint of Ruth, a middle-aged writer who has lost her voice in the woodsy silence of the Pacific Rim. Far more moving are the chapters told from the perspective of Nao, a cynical and suicidal schoolgirl in Japan who writes the memoir of her "last days on earth" with a voice of brittle forced cheer. The two are joined by Ruth's discovery of Nao's book, mysteriously washed up on the beach with a bundle of letters, a diary written in French, and a kamikaze pilot's vintage watch.
The narrative is delightfully rich and complex, moving across time and perspectives from World War II to the aftermath of the Tōhoku tsunami. Ruth's chapters could verge on the self-indulgent, as authorial self-inserts usually do, but Nao's pained navigation of cultural dislocation, bullying, exploitation, and multiple generations of suicidal ideation was stunning in its affective power.
Like far too many literary authors, however, Ozeki was not content to let the mysteries of her tale remain shrouded in the fog of time, and dredged up one of the hokiest, most over-used clichés of science-fiction to "explain" what never needed to be explained. I'm talking about quantum mechanics and the many-worlds hypothesis. I remember getting one of my short stories rejected by a magazine in 1999, when I was 16 years old, because quantum mechanics and many-worlds were such hoary old-hat—fourteen years before the publication of Time Being. Perhaps like her namesake in this novel, Ruth became unmoored in her current reality and fetched up in an alternate universe where quantum multiplicity isn't the corniest plot device in the world. The ending thus set in motion by Schrödinger shenanigans felt unearned, not squaring with the emotional truth of Nao's story.
That isn't enough to ruin what is otherwise a magnificent and moving work.
421 pages
Published 2013
Read from August 5 to September 10
Rating: 4 out of 5
A brilliant novel of heartbreaking immediacy and intensity, A Tale for the Time Being stumbles somewhat at the end, losing its emotional resonance in a morass of corny pop science.
Ozeki explores a plethora of fascinating themes: the tandem act of creation between author and reader; memory and time; Zen Buddhism and the transience of being; guilt and heroism; the cruelty of human beings in war as well as in junior high. A vaguely climatepunk atmosphere of living on the edge of things hangs over the chapters from the viewpoint of Ruth, a middle-aged writer who has lost her voice in the woodsy silence of the Pacific Rim. Far more moving are the chapters told from the perspective of Nao, a cynical and suicidal schoolgirl in Japan who writes the memoir of her "last days on earth" with a voice of brittle forced cheer. The two are joined by Ruth's discovery of Nao's book, mysteriously washed up on the beach with a bundle of letters, a diary written in French, and a kamikaze pilot's vintage watch.
The narrative is delightfully rich and complex, moving across time and perspectives from World War II to the aftermath of the Tōhoku tsunami. Ruth's chapters could verge on the self-indulgent, as authorial self-inserts usually do, but Nao's pained navigation of cultural dislocation, bullying, exploitation, and multiple generations of suicidal ideation was stunning in its affective power.
Like far too many literary authors, however, Ozeki was not content to let the mysteries of her tale remain shrouded in the fog of time, and dredged up one of the hokiest, most over-used clichés of science-fiction to "explain" what never needed to be explained. I'm talking about quantum mechanics and the many-worlds hypothesis. I remember getting one of my short stories rejected by a magazine in 1999, when I was 16 years old, because quantum mechanics and many-worlds were such hoary old-hat—fourteen years before the publication of Time Being. Perhaps like her namesake in this novel, Ruth became unmoored in her current reality and fetched up in an alternate universe where quantum multiplicity isn't the corniest plot device in the world. The ending thus set in motion by Schrödinger shenanigans felt unearned, not squaring with the emotional truth of Nao's story.
That isn't enough to ruin what is otherwise a magnificent and moving work.
Tuesday, September 4, 2018
2018 read #14: From the Forest by Sara Maitland.
From the Forest: A Search for the Hidden Roots of Our Fairy Tales by Sara Maitland
354 pages
Published 2012
Read from August 5 to September 4
Rating: 3 out of 5
Once again I've let a few months go by without reading much of anything. When I began this book I was brimming with enthusiasm, finishing the first half within a couple days, but somewhere along the way my interest drained away, leaving the rest of the book something of a dry trudge. Anyone expecting a modern classic of British nature writing, along the lines of H is for Hawk, Wildwood, or The Wild Places, will be disappointed. Maitland's writing lacks the poetry of Macdonald's, Deakin's, and Macfarlane's, and From the Forest seems to have been edited in haste; lines repeat themselves paragraphs later, seemingly less for emphasis than for want of a polished draft.
Maitland's guiding thesis -- that the fairy tales we know arose from an ancient tradition of storytelling in the great Northern European forests, and reflect the mores and concerns of forest-dwelling life -- is flimsy. Successive chapters don't build up the thesis so much as repeat it in different contexts. One underlying flaw in her argument is the fact that, as a British author, she is writing about British forests yet using German folktales to illustrate her "forest culture" arguments. Traditional British folktales were largely lost before they could be recorded, but Maitland justifies using the Brothers Grimm by positing a sweeping pan-Germanic cultural continuity that includes Anglo-Saxon peoples, even though mainland Germanic and Anglo-Germanic cultures diverged some thirteen centuries ago. She treats the cultural contexts of the Grimm stories as interchangeable with the forest yeomanry of England, despite vastly different histories, modes of government, traditions, and notions of labor.
The perils of this sort of thinking become apparent when Maitland decries a culture in which young British children grow up without "blackberry" and "conker" in their Oxford Junior Dictionaries: "The child of the Oxford Junior Dictionary is an urban, deracinated technocrat, not so much multicultural as de-cultured." One can see what she was getting at, but coming as it does in a book embracing a myth of pan-Germanic cultural identity, it feels a bit iffy. Robert Macfarlane made the same point far more elegantly (and at greater length) in his Landmarks.
Maitland's retellings of the fairy tales themselves leave much to be desired. They are grim and gritty in the worst tradition of the 1990s. Seemingly every male point-of-view character, for instance, thinks of a female character as "that bitch." Her excursions into English and Scottish woodlands, on the other hand, are often interesting, segueing thematically into bygone aspects of life in the forests -- hunting, coppicing, mining, leisure -- and how they are practiced (or not) in modern times. I would have preferred a more focused book that explored the cultural histories and uses of supposedly "wild" British forests, perhaps with fairy tales relegated to their own chapter.
354 pages
Published 2012
Read from August 5 to September 4
Rating: 3 out of 5
Once again I've let a few months go by without reading much of anything. When I began this book I was brimming with enthusiasm, finishing the first half within a couple days, but somewhere along the way my interest drained away, leaving the rest of the book something of a dry trudge. Anyone expecting a modern classic of British nature writing, along the lines of H is for Hawk, Wildwood, or The Wild Places, will be disappointed. Maitland's writing lacks the poetry of Macdonald's, Deakin's, and Macfarlane's, and From the Forest seems to have been edited in haste; lines repeat themselves paragraphs later, seemingly less for emphasis than for want of a polished draft.
Maitland's guiding thesis -- that the fairy tales we know arose from an ancient tradition of storytelling in the great Northern European forests, and reflect the mores and concerns of forest-dwelling life -- is flimsy. Successive chapters don't build up the thesis so much as repeat it in different contexts. One underlying flaw in her argument is the fact that, as a British author, she is writing about British forests yet using German folktales to illustrate her "forest culture" arguments. Traditional British folktales were largely lost before they could be recorded, but Maitland justifies using the Brothers Grimm by positing a sweeping pan-Germanic cultural continuity that includes Anglo-Saxon peoples, even though mainland Germanic and Anglo-Germanic cultures diverged some thirteen centuries ago. She treats the cultural contexts of the Grimm stories as interchangeable with the forest yeomanry of England, despite vastly different histories, modes of government, traditions, and notions of labor.
The perils of this sort of thinking become apparent when Maitland decries a culture in which young British children grow up without "blackberry" and "conker" in their Oxford Junior Dictionaries: "The child of the Oxford Junior Dictionary is an urban, deracinated technocrat, not so much multicultural as de-cultured." One can see what she was getting at, but coming as it does in a book embracing a myth of pan-Germanic cultural identity, it feels a bit iffy. Robert Macfarlane made the same point far more elegantly (and at greater length) in his Landmarks.
Maitland's retellings of the fairy tales themselves leave much to be desired. They are grim and gritty in the worst tradition of the 1990s. Seemingly every male point-of-view character, for instance, thinks of a female character as "that bitch." Her excursions into English and Scottish woodlands, on the other hand, are often interesting, segueing thematically into bygone aspects of life in the forests -- hunting, coppicing, mining, leisure -- and how they are practiced (or not) in modern times. I would have preferred a more focused book that explored the cultural histories and uses of supposedly "wild" British forests, perhaps with fairy tales relegated to their own chapter.
Friday, June 15, 2018
2018 read #13: Queer City by Peter Ackroyd.
Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day by Peter Ackroyd
233 pages
Published 2018
Read from May 29 to June 15
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
A topic that is equal parts important and neglected by mainstream history, queer history seems like a compelling fit for the wide-ranging research and anecdotal panache of Peter Ackroyd. Many passages in Queer City are packed with all the rich details you'd expect from Ackroyd, but all too often, he runs up against the same constraints that pushed Sapphistries in the direction of abandoning primary documentation altogether in favor of imagination: the sheer, sad lack of documentation of gay love and sex through most of history. After a certain point, Queer City becomes a sort of arrest register for all the men with the ill fortune to be swept up in official persecutions over the centuries. This in itself serves as a window into queer history, as bigotry and homophobic policy congealed into their familiar forms. But these sections of the book expose one of Ackroyd's stylistic weaknesses. He has a keen eye for detail and revealing quotation, but is lacking somewhat in synthesis and shaping a larger picture, often leaving that up to the reader. Nonetheless, Queer City is an essential read, at turns amusing and horrifying.
233 pages
Published 2018
Read from May 29 to June 15
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
A topic that is equal parts important and neglected by mainstream history, queer history seems like a compelling fit for the wide-ranging research and anecdotal panache of Peter Ackroyd. Many passages in Queer City are packed with all the rich details you'd expect from Ackroyd, but all too often, he runs up against the same constraints that pushed Sapphistries in the direction of abandoning primary documentation altogether in favor of imagination: the sheer, sad lack of documentation of gay love and sex through most of history. After a certain point, Queer City becomes a sort of arrest register for all the men with the ill fortune to be swept up in official persecutions over the centuries. This in itself serves as a window into queer history, as bigotry and homophobic policy congealed into their familiar forms. But these sections of the book expose one of Ackroyd's stylistic weaknesses. He has a keen eye for detail and revealing quotation, but is lacking somewhat in synthesis and shaping a larger picture, often leaving that up to the reader. Nonetheless, Queer City is an essential read, at turns amusing and horrifying.
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