It’s all just bits and pieces, playing catchup.
The weather was so beautiful today–low sixties, sunny, clear blue skies and just a little wind. We ended up spending a lot of the day outdoors, walking around. And we spotted our first Van Leeuwen truck of the season! Spring is finally here.
The afternoon’s walking-around itinerary included a wine store, Vine Wines, where Kyle MacLachlan was pouring wine this afternoon. Actually Kyle MacLachlan! He’s part-owner of Pursued By a Bear, a Washington State winery. And I think he likes being a winemaker, because he seemed to be having a great time.
And in other “sixteen-year-old me would never have believed this” news, Matt and I went to an event at Word last week with Michael Ian Black. He’s just published a memoir, and he read a little bit from it–he also did a section from the memoir on This American Life recently, and it was really good. And he brought us cake! Really good chocolate cake that a friend of his made for the reading. (No pudding, though.) And it wasn’t just a reading–he was being interviewed, sort of, by Meghan McCain. (To quote Matt: “Every generation gets the Frost/Nixon it deserves.”) Apparently the two of them went on an RV trip across America and wrote a book about it. Meghan McCain is not a great interviewer, but she set up Michael Ian Black for a few great jokes about John and Cindy McCain, and she was absolutely charming when she talked about having a major life crisis after seeing Yakov Smirnoff’s cabaret show in Branson, Missouri. (The book, America, You Sexy Bitch, will be out sometime this summer. And! Unexpected familiar face at the event–I hadn’t realized that Barry Goldblatt, agent to many of my writer friends, is also Michael Ian Black’s agent.)
I started a new quilt last weekend–this insane strip-pieced scrap-quilt madness–and have gotten weirdly obsessive about it. The back bedroom is now covered in little strips and blocks and shredded remnants of fabric. I have also discovered that my sewing machine, like everything else in my life, works much better when it’s not deathly humid in the apartment. Sewing in the summer is an ordeal of constantly snapping thread and dislocating bobbins. Sewing any other time of year, I remember why I like doing this stuff in the first place.
Also, people, learn from my mistakes. If you make mashed potatoes with dinner, clean the pot that night. It doesn’t matter how tired you are. Clean the pot, because there’s a chance that you’ll go out for dinner with a friend the next night and not have a chance to clean it then, and then if you’re dead exhausted the following day and still don’t clean it, you will be creating a toxic mess in your household, and no one wants that. Do not let leftover mashed potatoes sit around. (Also, if the mashed potatoes were made with blue potatoes, which taste awesome and also turn purple when cooked, be prepared. When you do clean up the leftovers, it will look like fairies and unicorns vomited in your trashcan.)
I’m also behind on everything else in my life. I owe email to everyone, some of it time-sensitive, some of it just sadly overdue. I’ll be sorting out the WisCon academic programming submissions next weekend, probably, and getting notifications out during the following week. I keep forgetting to sign up for regular programming, but I will be at WisCon, and hopefully will get to see people? I don’t even know who’s going. I’ll miss all of the Friday night festivities, though, because I can’t leave New York until Friday evening.
I’m not going to do reviews/writeups for the rest of the January books, because to be honest, I went down a comfort-reading rabbit hole and stayed there for the beginning of February. The rest of the January list consists of two things: more of those stupid JD Robb mysteries that I’m still working my way through, and very-familiar romance favorites that will, I’m sure, reappear in the reading list before too long. So to recap, here’s the whole January list.
January 2012 Books:
- Grim Tides, T.A. Pratt
- Kraken, China Mieville
- Unclaimed, Courtney Milan
- Total Immersion, Allegra Goodman
- Kaaterskill Falls, Allegra Goodman
- Glory in Death, JD Robb
- Embassytown, China Mieville
- 1493, Charles Mann
- Rapture in Death, JD Robb
- Mine Til Midnight, Lisa Kleypas
- Seduce Me at Sunrise, Lisa Kleypas
- Tempt Me at Twilight, Lisa Kleypas
- Married by Morning, Lisa Kleypas
- Love in the Afternoon, Lisa Kleypas
- Ceremony in Death, JD Robb
Okay, I lied, I do have one or two things to say about the Lisa Kleypas romances in there. They’re historicals, Victorian-era, following the siblings in the eccentric Hathaway family. The oldest sister has been mother-henning the family ever since their parents died, the youngest sister takes in stray animals and carries them in her dress pockets, another sister is hopelessly in love with the Gypsy orphan the family adopted many years ago, and the only brother among the siblings has been a suicidal alcoholic ever since his fiancee died of scarlet fever. Oh, and none of them are any good at polite society, because their parents were scatterbrained academics who taught them a lot about Shakespeare, chemistry, and international politics, but never taught them how to make idle chit-chat. And then a series of improbable deaths and inheritances turns the brother into minor nobility who inherits a large (and falling-apart) country estate along with his new title. It’s a lot of screwball comedy, with some dashes of social commentary and the occasional ghost story. I definitely recommend them.
January 2012, #8: 1493, by Charles Mann
I am having an extraordinary amount of difficulty writing about this book.
Part of the problem is that my expectations were too high. This is a followup to 1491–the first book looked at the Americas before Columbus, and this one looks at the Columbian Exchange and how it affected global societies. If you haven’t read it, you really should. 1491 was a book that changed my life. I mean, that’s a little bit of an exaggeration, but not as much as you might think. 1491 was a book that changed the way I think about the practice of history, and given that I’m, y’know, a historian, that’s a big deal.
1493 is a good book, but it’s no 1491. There are whole sections of the book that feel a lot like research detours–while researching the book, Charles Mann learned a lot about malaria, so now we’re all going to learn a lot about malaria. Or potatoes. Or loess soil. (Which is not to say that potatoes can’t be interesting! I learned a lot of awesome and fascinating things about potatoes from this book. They’re the closest thing we know to a nutritionally complete food, in that they contain just about every type of vitamin or nutrient the human body requires, although you have to eat a whole damn lot of them to get a sufficient amount of any of them. The potato varieties in South America apparently defy taxonomical classification, because they’re so widely crossbred. And there are some types of potatoes, still commonly eaten in some areas of South America, that are actually poisonous and will kill you if you eat them plain, but are perfectly safe to eat if you dip them in clay first. So, according to Mann, there are still markets in Peru that will sell you a bowl of steamed potato with a bowl of dipping clay. There, now you too have learned interesting things about potatoes. They’re way more interesting than I thought they were! But still not as interesting as Mann thinks they are.)
So yeah, there were whole sections of the book where I found my attention drifting, because it was like, yes, more potato, I get it. Yes, more malaria, I get it.
But it’s still not a bad book. As an updated look at the Columbian Exchange, it’s actually a pretty great book, and Mann makes a very compelling case that there are deeper global connections even in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries than most people appreciate. He has a lot of beautiful case studies of global impacts of trade and immigration, including a really great description of the Chinatown district in colonial Mexico City, which, who knew?
He’s also doing some unusual environmental history. I make fun of the malaria enthusiasm, but I shouldn’t, because that was actually my favorite part of the book. He builds a case (which he admits is speculative) that the introduction of malaria to the New World was one of the primary factors that shaped colonial history. The case includes some correlations between the geographic range of one particular type of malaria-carrying mosquito and the historical spread of African slavery in the new world. (The argument runs, in part, that British colonists only move from imported British farm labor to imported African labor in places where malaria is prevalent. In northern colonies, the British laborers are good enough to get the work done, but in the malaria zone the British colonists are weakened by disease, so they bring in a population that already carries malaria immunities. According to this section of the book, the line between the malaria-friendly regions and the malaria-hostile regions falls roughly at the same latitude as the Mason-Dixon line.) It’s a speculative argument, and a few people I’ve tried explaining it to have all come away feeling that it has potential correlation/causation confusion, but in the book it’s totally convincing.
So, I don’t know. 1493 is, in the end, a well-written and accessible history of post-Columbus globalization, and I can definitely recommend it to anyone who’s interested in that kind of thing. (As long as you don’t mind long potato detours.) It’s just, you know. It’s not a game-changer. It’s just a good book.
Someday I will remember, ahead of time, that February is always a lost month. Short days, grim weather, and mountains of grading all month long, February is always a lost month. I’m back now, though, or starting back.
January 2012, #7: Embassytown, by China Mieville
Avice Benner Cho grew up in Embassytown, a backwater colonial outpost that survives on the fringes of the embassy to an alien culture. Like most kids from fringe backwater outposts, Avice desperately wants out; unlike most kids, she gets out, becoming an immerser, one of the rare people who has the ability to guide spaceships through the weird interdimensional spaces that they use for transit. As an adult, though, she returns to Embassytown, mostly to show off the quaint cultural heritage to her linguist spouse. Her husband is as desperate to visit Embassytown as she was to leave, mostly because the aliens the embassy serves, the Ariekei, speak a wholly unique form of language–they can only speak truth, and they can only understand the speech of sentient entities.
The book hangs on the language question, and in kind of fascinating ways. Avice herself has a special status among the Ariekei because she’s a simile. The Ariekei can only speak truth, but they’ve developed ways of constructing more abstract comparisons. If a person, such as Avice, does a thing that they want to use as a simile, then they can refer to her and thus refer to the abstraction of the simile. The similes don’t always make sense to non-Ariekei; Avice’s simile is that she was the girl who was hurt in an abandoned building and then ate the food that was given to her. Another simile is the boy who swims every month with fishes, and he does in fact go every month to a specially constructed fishpond and swim, in order to maintain the truth of his simile. A small group of the Ariekei want to stretch the similes, to find shades of meaning and thus create multiple types of meaning in the same linguistic grouping; they’re connected to a group of Ariekei who want to learn to lie, and both groups find the effort physically exhausting and sometimes painful. It’s a weird little concept that grows in importance as the book goes on, and turns into an interesting examination of the idea that lying is, to some extent, an act of control over language.
I’ve been feeling burnt out on reading actual science fiction lately, but this was a breath of fresh air–this is the kind of intellectual weirdness that made me fall in love with SF in the first place. And the whole book hangs together a lot more than some of the other Mieville–I enjoyed the chaotic mess of Kraken, but this book wasn’t messy at all, and stronger for it. There are turning points in the narrative, places where what you think you understood about Embassytown and the Ariekei turn out to have been tiny corners of the whole, places where you suddenly realize that the plot has moved out from underneath you and run away down an unexpected alley, places where the whole book sort of changes shape. But all of those turning points feel very natural–surprising, but organic, if that makes sense. (There’s a place where the whole narration is given over to a several-page discourse on the relationship between signifier and signified, and even that somehow feels organic rather than awkwardly infodumpy.)
I still don’t know how to not feel awkward while writing about books I’ve read (you reviewer people, how do you do this?) but, uh, loved this one.
Having just caught up on the last two episodes of Project Runway, I’m coming back my theory that Michael Costello has a mobbed-up uncle somewhere.
About a year and a half ago, we published a story at Strange Horizons called “The Bright and Shining Parasites of Guiyu“. (Part One, Part Two.) It’s still one of my favorites–I know, I know, not supposed to have favorites, editorial mamas love all their children equally, but whatever, I really love this story. Wannabe b-boys from Jiangxi take IT jobs in Guiyu, hoping to earn enough money to go to Beijing and become hip-hop stars, but the IT jobs are really jobs picking through mountains of technology waste, and then things get weirder (and worse) from there.
The author of the story, Grady Hendrix recently posted on his blog about some issues he has with “The Bright and Shining Parasites of Guiyu”. The post is titled “Regretting Guiyu” and it’s worth a read. Grady’s concern is that he’s shortchanged the political aspects of his story–that he stopped short of showing how Americans, himself included, are deeply implicated in the horrible conditions that exist in places like Guiyu. His scary dystopian science-fiction scenario isn’t the future, it’s the present, and it’s a present that all of us in the over-technologized West have a part in shaping. I’m not sure that I agree with his critique of the story–I don’t at all think that it shies away from the ugly politics, although he’s right that it doesn’t specifically extend the supply chain out to American consumers. But I’m really glad to see him asking this kind of question.
To quote Grady: “When science fiction writers tell stories about generation ships, and moon bases, and rockets I always want to know: who built them? Was it a union shop? Because we have always journeyed into the future on a highway made of slaves.” I think we only strengthen ourselves, and our literature, if we stop hiding from that truth.
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As a side note: Grady Hendrix is also the author of ”Messengers from the Stars Will Come to Help Us Overcome The Obstacles That Hold Us Back From Achieving Our True Potential,” which I think puts him squarely in contention for the “For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky” Prize for Awesome Long Titles. (Other contenders include, of course, “A Journal of Certain Events of Scientific Interest from the First Survey Voyage of the Southern Waters by HMS Ocelot, As Observed by Professor Thaddeus Boswell, DPhil, MSc” by Helen Keeble.
January 2012, #6: Glory in Death, by J.D. Robb.
You know, I can’t swear to it, but I think part of the recent delay in updating (which has put me more than a week behind on the reading log, again) is because I didn’t want to admit that I was re-reading the In Death series.
J.D. Robb is Nora Roberts, a romance author so prolific and so popular that she has practically transcended the romance industry and become her own genre category. I enjoy most of her romances–not all of them, especially not when she’s off on some weird mystical kick, but for the most part they’re good solid contemporary romances. The books she publishes under the J.D. Robb name aren’t category romance, they’re more like futuristic police procedurals, with a strong romance element, I guess. I’ve been reading them, kind of half-heartedly, for years, and when I finished reading the most recent one in the series, I found myself wondering if I was imagining that the series had changed a lot over the years. Specifically, I remembered the earlier books in the series being more obviously sci-fi tinged, but the more recent ones feel like they’re downplaying the futuristic-y stuff. The BPL has a lot of them as ebooks, so I went back to the beginning and started working my way through.
This is a lot of writing, so far, for a book that I didn’t really want to admit I was reading.
Glory in Death is the second book in the series, and true to my memory, the sci-fi futuristic elements are a lot more prominent in this book than in the more recent ones. They’re talking all the damn time about orbital platforms and off-planet settlements, for instance. It’s a stupid fluffy candy of a book–like, if I consider reading most romance novels the literary equivalent of eating chocolate, this is more like eating Twizzlers, if that makes sense. It’s fine while you’re doing it, and afterwards you realize that you basically just stuffed your face with cherry-flavored plastic. Chocolate is at least a good solid guilty pleasure, this is just passing time. Of course, I’m still going to read the next one once it comes in at the library, because I’m stupid that way.
January 2012, #4 and #5: Total Immersion and Kaaterskill Falls, by Allegra Goodman.
A lot of the books I’m reading right now are coming from the Brooklyn Public Library, which is driving my reading list towards a kind of eclecticism I might not get otherwise. Case in point: while browsing the new releases in the BPL digital collection, I saw that they’d just acquired a whole lot of stuff by Allegra Goodman. I really liked Intuition, so I put myself on the list for some of her others, not really knowing anything about them. It turns out that these two books (Total Immersion and Kaaterskill Falls) are very much like each other, and very much unlike Intuition. (I don’t mean that I didn’t like them, though. But maybe not as much as I liked Intuition.) Kaaterskill Falls is a novel, set in an Orthodox community in the late 1970s; Total Immersion is a collection of loosely linked short stories, primarily about Orthodox Jews living in either Oxford or Hawai’i. A few of the characters, mostly minor ones, from Kaaterskill Falls show up in Total Immersion,but at later points in their lives.
I didn’t really connect with Total Immersion. When I was about halfway through it, I mentioned to Matt that I sometimes have trouble with literary short fiction, because I’ll finish a story and feel unsatisfied, kind of like, what was the point? He suggested that I’m reading too fast and not paying enough attention to the writing, and he might be right. It’s a different mode of reading. You don’t read stories like this for plot, and when they’re about character, it’s more like a portrait than a movie, I think. (The first story in the collection, “Onionskin”, is entirely in the form of a letter, a woman writing to her former religion professor about what led her to take his class, why it wasn’t what she was looking for, and how she’s trying to find what she’s looking for. And I thought it was brilliantly done, a little window into a life, with a great voice. That’s kind of what I mean by a portrait.)
The Hawai’i stories in Total Immersion were the most compelling to me–they felt like the ones where Goodman was at her best, language-wise. Too many of the other stories, all of the Oxford stories, lean too much on academic politics. (Although I did like the academic in one of the first stories who was fighting the same rivals at shul and in his tiny corner of literary analysis.) And the last story in the collection, “The Closet”, the writing is just beautiful all the way through, and transcendent in places.
Kaaterskill Falls had different strengths–it’s about a particular Orthodox community, a separatist sect called the Kirshners that seems similar to the Satmar or Lubavitchers. There are a lot of characters moving through this novel, but the one that I loved most was Elizabeth, the young mother of five who’s struggling to find a balance between the joy she finds in her community and the restlessness she feels under its restrictions. She gives her daughters two names:
“To their friends they’re just the Shulman girls, five rattled off in a row: Chani, Malki, Ruchel, Sorah, and Brocha. But Elizabeth gave them other names, and she repeats them to herself: Annette and Margot, Rowena, Sabrina, and Bernice. These are her daughters’ real names; the ones on their birth certificates; extraordinary and graceful–princesses and dancers. It’s true, of course, the nickname Malki by itself means “queen,” and Sorah means “princess.” But those are words the children drag around the house. There must be twenty Sorahs at the Kirshner school. Elizabeth wanted something remarkable and elegant–beyond the usual expectations. She didn’t name her daughters to be rattled off. She named them to have imagination.”
At one point in the book, someone says to Elizabeth that she can do anything–this is America, after all, you can do whatever you damn well please. But this one isn’t escapist reading, you know? Elizabeth can’t do whatever she damn well pleases, and if she did, the cost would kill her. And as the book goes on, the restrictions hurt a little more, and she starts to see that her daughters will have the same life as her–they’ll have the same love and support and community and tradition, and they’ll have the same restricted horizons and confined lives. She sees that, and she lives through it, because that’s what you do.
There’s more to the book than Elizabeth, but she was the heart of it, for me. (Although I do secretly hope for another book someday, about her daughter Chani, who develops a private passion for Israel even though the Kirshners are strictly anti-Zionist. Here:
Chani has two real talents: memorizing Tanach and hiking. She has a prodigious memory for scripture, although the memorization does not come easily to her. She picks through the text doggedly, inching her way through hard passages. Like her father she learns slowly and meticulously. And once she has learned a passage, though it might take weeks, she knows it unshakably. She’s won the elementary girls’ Bible contest three times. At home in the city she has three pairs of candlesticks on the bookcase in her room, her trophies. Chani is even better at hiking. Fast and surefooted. Cecil says she’s an intuitive hiker and a first-rate rockhound. She’s found samples of nearly every kind of quartz: rose quartz, smoky quartz, white, brown, pale lavender. When she was nine, she made it to the top of Cole Mountain. Only she and Cecil and her father made it up that far.
Those are her favorite things–memorizing scripture and hiking on Cole Mountain. Each has its season: the Bible contest in January with the radiators hissing in the classroom, the hiking in the summer on leafy trails, ribbon trail markers tagging the trees. But it seems to Chani, when she thinks about Israel, that it is all scripture and hiking, with no separation between the two. She pedals her bike up to Kendall Falls and she pictures Israel, where all the trees are markers, and the geneaologies themselves are trails. Covenants are places; mountains stand as quotations from the prophets.
I loved Chani. Allegra Goodman seems to have thoroughly moved on from her writing-about-Jewish-communities phase, so I’m unlikely to ever get my Chani novel, but I’d love it.)
I’m now more than a week behind on these. Go me.
January 2012, #3: Unclaimed, by Courtney Milan.
Kraken was intense, so I switched over to a romance novel for the next book. I read a handful of Courtney Milan books last fall (Unveiled, Proof by Seduction and Trial by Desire) and really enjoyed them–Trial by Desire, in particular, is a cute and novel take on the “they sort of had to get married, now they’ll figure out how to fall in love” romance trope, and Unveiled played with the complications of marriages and inheritances in an interesting way. (They’re all historicals, all set in that loosely-19th-century England that seems like the natural home of historical romances.)
The plot in Unveiled had to do with a young woman whose hateful father and awful brothers have managed to lose the family estate to a very distant relative. She’s supposed to figure out how to trick the distant relative into giving it back, but along the way she falls in love with him, as happens in romance novels. Before she falls in love with him, though, she’s utterly charmed by his utterly charming younger brother Mark, who wins her affection by agreeing with her that life is really unfair for women in their society and teaching her (and the female servants) some serious self-defense so that they can fend off untoward advances.
Mark, unsurprisingly, is the hero of Unclaimed, and he’s still utterly charming. He’s written an academic work on the social value of male chastity that has become a big hit in the popular press, bringing him a lot of public attention. Jessica, a career courtesan looking for a way to finance her retirement, is hired by one of Mark’s political enemies to seduce him and expose him as a fraud. He’s fled to the small town where he and his brothers grew up, hoping to get away from the annoying glare of public attention, so she sets herself up in town, pretending to be a young widow.
What’s fun about this one isn’t so much the way the relationship comes together, but the way Jessica and Mark deal with being together. By the time she’s in a place to ruin his public image, she can’t bring herself to do it, but if she doesn’t get her payment for ruining him, she’ll have to go back to being a courtesan, and she can’t bring herself to do that either. Mark’s built his career on not blaming women for the horrible situations society pushes them into, but his first reaction on learning about Jessica’s situation is to hate her for it. When they sort all of that out, Jessica is extremely hesitant to expose Mark (and his family) to the stigma of her past, even though they all keep insisting that they can fix most of it and live with the rest.
I read romance novels for a few reasons. One reason: they’re good escapist fun. And this one is fabulous escapist fun. Jessica wears really beautiful dresses, and Mark is a (completely ahistorical) feminist dream who (for instance) repeatedly smacks down the villagers for their attempts to slut-shame Jessica over her really beautiful dresses. Another reason: engaging characters and character relationships. This book also hits pretty squarely on that front, and particularly on the family stuff. If I didn’t already know Mark from Unveiled, he might have seemed a little stiff or priggish at the beginning of this book, but he warmed up very fast when he met Jessica, and I felt like the whole book found another gear once his brothers Ash and Smite showed up in the last act.
Courtney Milan seems to be writing historical romances that are gently tweaking the genre. I like historicals a lot better than contemporaries, since there’s so much restraint built into the social systems in the historicals, but a lot of the authors I like best are the ones who are messing around a little bit with those restraints. (Lisa Kleypas does this really well too, in my experience.) Milan’s books mostly center on people who are a little bit outside the heart of Victorian high society–you still get all the trappings of ball gowns and marquesses and estate entailments and risking being compromised in the garden or whatever, but the marquess might have grown up as a factory owner’s son whose mother was an abusive religious zealot, and the garden tryst might be essentially a screwball comedy. They’re not, like, “transcending the genre” or anything pretentious–these are straight-up category romances–but they’re a little askew, and a lot fun. (And I’m totally looking forward to reading Unraveled, where Smite, the third and most difficult Turner brother, gets his love story.)
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