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.
Friday, September 21, 2018
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.
Sunday, April 29, 2018
2018 read #12: Slan by A. E. van Vogt.
Slan by A. E. van Vogt
255 pages
Published 1946 (originally serialized 1940)
Read from April 18 to April 29
Rating: 1.5 out of 5
A classic of the Astounding-curated "Golden Age" of science fiction, Slan (according to the blurb on the back cover of this reprint edition) "was considered the single most important SF novel" throughout the 1940s and 1950s. Read now, it's something of an absurd relic, approximately on the same level of storytelling, character depth, and prose quality as a contemporary pulp movie serial, the kind that get riffed on MST3K. The tale begins with a slan (a mutant superhuman with psychic powers and superstrength) mother artlessly dumping exposition on the reader, reminding her young son of what they are, what their powers are, and what risks they run among hostile humanity. "As you well know" exposition is a sure way to turn me off a novel, and Slan is packed full of it, ranging from conversations between veteran secret police agents to long-winded expository orders broadcast on the radio. It's all so stiff and awkward that the only way I could persevere through the first few pages was for my reading voice to adopt a vintage radio announcer's Mid-Atlantic cadence.
The plot is pure B-movie grade, stuffed with disintegration rays and super x-rays and the marvelous power of the atom. The first two-thirds of the novel devotes nearly equal time to two viewpoint characters: a rugged, effortlessly competent slan inventor-hero, and a sheltered, usually helpless, occasionally crafty slan damsel in distress. If you don't mind spoilers for a seventy year old book, the two cross paths at last, falling immediately in love thanks to their psychic communication abilities... only for the woman (who, again, has occupied half the foregoing pages just to get to this point) to end up fridged just as immediately, in order to further the man's character development. She gets brought back later thanks to some silly pseudo-science, but not until the very last page. It's rather cringe-inducing, on top of the garbage prose and the other absurd pulp twists of the narrative. Showing an interesting kinship with his contemporary author, Robert Heinlein, van Vogt dips his narrative toe into incest and polygamy, too. Something must have been going around in the Astounding air.
255 pages
Published 1946 (originally serialized 1940)
Read from April 18 to April 29
Rating: 1.5 out of 5
A classic of the Astounding-curated "Golden Age" of science fiction, Slan (according to the blurb on the back cover of this reprint edition) "was considered the single most important SF novel" throughout the 1940s and 1950s. Read now, it's something of an absurd relic, approximately on the same level of storytelling, character depth, and prose quality as a contemporary pulp movie serial, the kind that get riffed on MST3K. The tale begins with a slan (a mutant superhuman with psychic powers and superstrength) mother artlessly dumping exposition on the reader, reminding her young son of what they are, what their powers are, and what risks they run among hostile humanity. "As you well know" exposition is a sure way to turn me off a novel, and Slan is packed full of it, ranging from conversations between veteran secret police agents to long-winded expository orders broadcast on the radio. It's all so stiff and awkward that the only way I could persevere through the first few pages was for my reading voice to adopt a vintage radio announcer's Mid-Atlantic cadence.
The plot is pure B-movie grade, stuffed with disintegration rays and super x-rays and the marvelous power of the atom. The first two-thirds of the novel devotes nearly equal time to two viewpoint characters: a rugged, effortlessly competent slan inventor-hero, and a sheltered, usually helpless, occasionally crafty slan damsel in distress. If you don't mind spoilers for a seventy year old book, the two cross paths at last, falling immediately in love thanks to their psychic communication abilities... only for the woman (who, again, has occupied half the foregoing pages just to get to this point) to end up fridged just as immediately, in order to further the man's character development. She gets brought back later thanks to some silly pseudo-science, but not until the very last page. It's rather cringe-inducing, on top of the garbage prose and the other absurd pulp twists of the narrative. Showing an interesting kinship with his contemporary author, Robert Heinlein, van Vogt dips his narrative toe into incest and polygamy, too. Something must have been going around in the Astounding air.
Monday, April 23, 2018
2018 read #11: Walking with Spring by Earl V. Shaffer.
Walking with Spring: The First Thru-Hike of the Appalachian Trail by Earl V. Shaffer
154 pages
Published 1983
Read from April 18 to April 23
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
It's been a while since I read a hiking narrative; the last one I completed was apparently in March 2016. Part of the reason for that is I've already read most of the ones currently in print. While you would expect the success of Wild to have cleared the way for a spate of copycat publications, I haven't seen any new ones in a while, at least none available through my library system. Maybe the more recent "classes" of thru-hikers have been concentrating their efforts on YouTube and Instagram, rather than dead tree publication.
As overexposed and overloved as all the big trails have become, there's a bit of a culture shock in reading early accounts of the AT. Shaffer's famous (and occasionally contested) 1948 thru-hike took him along a trail essentially abandoned, whole sections of it gobbled up by timber sales or lost to the broader dislocations of the war years. The conservation ethos as a whole was a different beast back then, with officers appointed by forest districts to eliminate natural predators. I'd love to see a thoroughly researched history of the co-evolution of the AT and of conservation principles in the American consciousness.
That hypothetical book is, of course, far beyond the scope of what we have here. Shaffer writes of his journey with mechanical descriptiveness, enumerating landmarks and meals and incidents of travel with only slightly more passion than a checklist. It is interesting as a primary document of sorts, but scarcely a classic of the genre.
154 pages
Published 1983
Read from April 18 to April 23
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
It's been a while since I read a hiking narrative; the last one I completed was apparently in March 2016. Part of the reason for that is I've already read most of the ones currently in print. While you would expect the success of Wild to have cleared the way for a spate of copycat publications, I haven't seen any new ones in a while, at least none available through my library system. Maybe the more recent "classes" of thru-hikers have been concentrating their efforts on YouTube and Instagram, rather than dead tree publication.
As overexposed and overloved as all the big trails have become, there's a bit of a culture shock in reading early accounts of the AT. Shaffer's famous (and occasionally contested) 1948 thru-hike took him along a trail essentially abandoned, whole sections of it gobbled up by timber sales or lost to the broader dislocations of the war years. The conservation ethos as a whole was a different beast back then, with officers appointed by forest districts to eliminate natural predators. I'd love to see a thoroughly researched history of the co-evolution of the AT and of conservation principles in the American consciousness.
That hypothetical book is, of course, far beyond the scope of what we have here. Shaffer writes of his journey with mechanical descriptiveness, enumerating landmarks and meals and incidents of travel with only slightly more passion than a checklist. It is interesting as a primary document of sorts, but scarcely a classic of the genre.
Wednesday, April 18, 2018
2018 read #10: A College of Magics by Caroline Stevermer.
A College of Magics by Caroline Stevermer
380 pages
Published 1994
Read from April 9 to April 18
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
A common motif you'll find in my reviews is my perennial search for "lost classics," by which I generally mean pretty good (or even great) fantasy and science fiction books from decades past, books that, for one reason or another, seem to have been forgotten. It has always baffled me how the likes of the Wheel of Time, or the Shannara series, or even the festering garbage pile of the Sword of Truth, could have become, and remained, so popular, becoming almost the default entry-point books for two generations of nerds, when they weren't even that good by the fantasy standards of their time. (Let alone by the standards of today, when fantasy and serious literature overlap so beautifully. Why on Earth would anyone read Wizard's First Rule in 2018? If someone makes a Best Fantasy Novels of All Time list and it isn't 50% books published after 2000, odds are it was written by some grognard who uses "social justice" as a pejorative. Or maybe they just don't like beautiful prose in their fantasy.)
The question of how certain IPs become popular while others languish has always fascinated me; it seems to be an intersection of what promotional effort publishers are willing to invest initially, and a certain tendency in pop culture to conflate bestsellerdom with merit. The default example of this is, of course, the Twilight/Fifty Shades cluster, but the fact that male nerds zero in on these instead of, say, Shannara demonstrates a certain level of misogyny... all of which is getting pretty far from whatever point I was trying to make.
The flipside of the popularity equation -- why certain books that are demonstrably better than the Jordans, Goodkinds, and Salvatores never become bestsellers and are ultimately lost to the pulp pile -- is closer to what I'm investigating here. I have a certain fondness for the underdog, and an admitted tendency toward "Oh, you hadn't heard of that one?" hipsterdom. Few book-reading experiences satisfy me as much as getting my hands on some forgotten fantasy novel from the 1980s or 1990s and discovering that it's pretty darn good. War for the Oaks is my default example, but I could also single out Wizard of the Pigeons, Sideshow, Pavane, Thomas the Rhymer, and really, anything at all by Ellen Kushner. (Where is my Swordspoint HBO series?)
Joining this august company is A College of Magics. Unlike Swordspoint and War for the Oaks, which you might find on internet best-of lists if you dig deep enough, I'd never even heard of College until I was browsing a local library and noticed the distinctive '90s Tor font on the spine. (Caroline Stevermer, on the other hand, has appeared in my reviews before; she co-wrote "The Vital Importance of the Superficial," one of my favorite stories in Queen Victoria's Book of Spells.) It is, for its first third or so, a tale of a magical finishing school, where young ladies from all over Europe are educated in deportment, classical literature, and the Balance of the Spheres in a coastal stronghold inspired by Mont Saint-Michel. There is a blond, aristocratic bully who uses her magic to torment the hero; a wise, intimidating, ultimately compassionate headmistress dressed in green robes; an adjoining town where the students sneak out for pastries; and banter exchanged among a core group of friends in a commonroom. Leaving aside the most obvious point of comparison, the only clue that College is NOT a young adult novel from the last ten years is the fact that every character in the book is white and straight.
Also dating the book: A scene in which our hero, held captive, is kissed against her will by a weaselly and manipulative resistance leader -- and decides that she "likes" the kiss, despite her own personal revulsion toward him. The '90s were a time when authors demonstrated their feminist bona fides with sex positivity at all costs; the importance of consent as a basic concept has only recently infiltrated fantasy fiction.
Our hero Faris speeds through her magical education at Greenlaw, covering three years in 126 pages. Which is a pity, as that section was thoroughly charming. What follows, according to a jacket blurb summary, is "a Grand Tour of an imaginary Europe," if a Grand Tour of an imaginary Europe consists of a Paris hotel room, a train ride, and political machinations in some vaguely sketched nation-states. The broader setting (outside of the lovely expanses of Greenlaw) is so hazily defined that it wasn't until the gang raced around Paris in a motorcar that I realized the setting was 1908, rather than the Regency period.
The political machinations were the weakest part of the story, I think. Fantasy politics requires investment in character, and Faris stands alone as the one semi-developed character in the book. Her unfailingly helpful companion Jane is fun, her bodyguard and inevitable love interest Tyrian is just another iteration of stoic competence; between the two of them, Faris never seems to be in real danger. Even her wicked uncle Brinker strains to make enough of an impression to become hateable. In some ways, it's not that hard to figure out why College appears on no best-of lists.
Nonetheless, despite all these flaws, I just can't help but be charmed by this book. Greenlaw ranks nearly equal to Hogwarts on the list of homey magical schools, and the magical wardens of the Earth were an interesting fantasy concept, rendered memorably. The climax, when Faris must undo the magical error of her grandmother, is a bit wobbly, yet has a taste of Studio Ghibli in its vivid imagery of lions and crystal stairways. This is a world I would love to see explored more thoroughly, and Faris was an agreeable companion for the brief Grand Tour we received.
380 pages
Published 1994
Read from April 9 to April 18
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
A common motif you'll find in my reviews is my perennial search for "lost classics," by which I generally mean pretty good (or even great) fantasy and science fiction books from decades past, books that, for one reason or another, seem to have been forgotten. It has always baffled me how the likes of the Wheel of Time, or the Shannara series, or even the festering garbage pile of the Sword of Truth, could have become, and remained, so popular, becoming almost the default entry-point books for two generations of nerds, when they weren't even that good by the fantasy standards of their time. (Let alone by the standards of today, when fantasy and serious literature overlap so beautifully. Why on Earth would anyone read Wizard's First Rule in 2018? If someone makes a Best Fantasy Novels of All Time list and it isn't 50% books published after 2000, odds are it was written by some grognard who uses "social justice" as a pejorative. Or maybe they just don't like beautiful prose in their fantasy.)
The question of how certain IPs become popular while others languish has always fascinated me; it seems to be an intersection of what promotional effort publishers are willing to invest initially, and a certain tendency in pop culture to conflate bestsellerdom with merit. The default example of this is, of course, the Twilight/Fifty Shades cluster, but the fact that male nerds zero in on these instead of, say, Shannara demonstrates a certain level of misogyny... all of which is getting pretty far from whatever point I was trying to make.
The flipside of the popularity equation -- why certain books that are demonstrably better than the Jordans, Goodkinds, and Salvatores never become bestsellers and are ultimately lost to the pulp pile -- is closer to what I'm investigating here. I have a certain fondness for the underdog, and an admitted tendency toward "Oh, you hadn't heard of that one?" hipsterdom. Few book-reading experiences satisfy me as much as getting my hands on some forgotten fantasy novel from the 1980s or 1990s and discovering that it's pretty darn good. War for the Oaks is my default example, but I could also single out Wizard of the Pigeons, Sideshow, Pavane, Thomas the Rhymer, and really, anything at all by Ellen Kushner. (Where is my Swordspoint HBO series?)
Joining this august company is A College of Magics. Unlike Swordspoint and War for the Oaks, which you might find on internet best-of lists if you dig deep enough, I'd never even heard of College until I was browsing a local library and noticed the distinctive '90s Tor font on the spine. (Caroline Stevermer, on the other hand, has appeared in my reviews before; she co-wrote "The Vital Importance of the Superficial," one of my favorite stories in Queen Victoria's Book of Spells.) It is, for its first third or so, a tale of a magical finishing school, where young ladies from all over Europe are educated in deportment, classical literature, and the Balance of the Spheres in a coastal stronghold inspired by Mont Saint-Michel. There is a blond, aristocratic bully who uses her magic to torment the hero; a wise, intimidating, ultimately compassionate headmistress dressed in green robes; an adjoining town where the students sneak out for pastries; and banter exchanged among a core group of friends in a commonroom. Leaving aside the most obvious point of comparison, the only clue that College is NOT a young adult novel from the last ten years is the fact that every character in the book is white and straight.
Also dating the book: A scene in which our hero, held captive, is kissed against her will by a weaselly and manipulative resistance leader -- and decides that she "likes" the kiss, despite her own personal revulsion toward him. The '90s were a time when authors demonstrated their feminist bona fides with sex positivity at all costs; the importance of consent as a basic concept has only recently infiltrated fantasy fiction.
Our hero Faris speeds through her magical education at Greenlaw, covering three years in 126 pages. Which is a pity, as that section was thoroughly charming. What follows, according to a jacket blurb summary, is "a Grand Tour of an imaginary Europe," if a Grand Tour of an imaginary Europe consists of a Paris hotel room, a train ride, and political machinations in some vaguely sketched nation-states. The broader setting (outside of the lovely expanses of Greenlaw) is so hazily defined that it wasn't until the gang raced around Paris in a motorcar that I realized the setting was 1908, rather than the Regency period.
The political machinations were the weakest part of the story, I think. Fantasy politics requires investment in character, and Faris stands alone as the one semi-developed character in the book. Her unfailingly helpful companion Jane is fun, her bodyguard and inevitable love interest Tyrian is just another iteration of stoic competence; between the two of them, Faris never seems to be in real danger. Even her wicked uncle Brinker strains to make enough of an impression to become hateable. In some ways, it's not that hard to figure out why College appears on no best-of lists.
Nonetheless, despite all these flaws, I just can't help but be charmed by this book. Greenlaw ranks nearly equal to Hogwarts on the list of homey magical schools, and the magical wardens of the Earth were an interesting fantasy concept, rendered memorably. The climax, when Faris must undo the magical error of her grandmother, is a bit wobbly, yet has a taste of Studio Ghibli in its vivid imagery of lions and crystal stairways. This is a world I would love to see explored more thoroughly, and Faris was an agreeable companion for the brief Grand Tour we received.
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