It's time for a new edition of "Packing for a Reading Retreat," where I
imagine which books I would take with me if I were heading to a reading
retreat, where there would be no distractions and I would be free to do
nothing but read for a week. I might imagine packing two kinds of books:
those that are "New to Me" (books I've never read before) and "Old Favorites" (past
reads I'd like to revisit).
New to Me
Lord Byron's Novel, The Evening Land, John Crowley
I picked up Lord Byron's Novel at a used book sale in the fall, and until I saw it there, both this book and John Crowley himself were completely off my radar. Crowley's novel supposes that Byron finished a novel that was then lost and presents that novel within two frame stories: one of Byron's daughter Ada finding the manuscript and one of the manuscript later being rediscovered. I am intrigued, and it sounds like (from the poking around on the interwebs I've done) that maybe Crowley is someone I ought to know about.
Longbourn, Jo Baker
Longbourn takes as its setting the household of the Bennets from Pride and Prejudice and tells the story of the servants there. To which I say, "Oh, neat!" I love a retelling, and the story of characters who are almost completely invisible (but undeniably there) from P&P is irresistible. While I don't expect Baker to portray the Bennets as nicer towards their servants then they were historically likely to be, I do hope there's no Bennet-bashing, that the book doesn't take as one of its goals to show us that realistically we wouldn't have liked the Bennets so very much.
The Life of Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell
Somehow I managed to go through eleven years of formal study of English literature without knowing much about Elizabeth Gaskell. I'm a bit better acquainted with her now and am very excited to read her biography of Charlotte Bronte, surely a fascinating subject. The idea of a biography written by the subject's friend and contemporary also intrigues me.
Walking Home: A Poet's Journey, Simon Armitage
Poet Simon Armitage walked the Pennine Way, a trail through the Pennine Hills running from the Yorkshire Dales to just over the Scottish Border. Armitage did poetry readings along the way in exchange for room and board, and Walking Home is an account of his journey. I don't see how this could possibly be less than wonderful.
Wednesday, January 1, 2014
Tuesday, December 31, 2013
Twenty-One Books that Shaped Me
I've been ridiculously remiss in these last few months of the year about migrating reviews over here from LibraryThing and even missed out an edition of Packing for a Reading Retreat. I'm working on a Reading Retreat post for tomorrow, but in the meantime, I give you the twenty-one books that have most shaped my life. This post is based on a meme that floated around Facebook and LibraryThing a few weeks back, and is divided into two halves: the eleven books that have most stayed with me (ten positive influences and one negative one) and the ten books with which I did not connect. For each book, I give a brief explanation of why I included it in the list.
Eleven Books that Have Been Important to Me
1.) The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
My dad read LotR (and The Hobbit) to me when I was very small (five or six). It's probably the first mythology of any kind that ever meant anything to me and was certainly my first introduction to "grown-up" fiction in any sense. I have many memories of being read to at a young age (and of having my own books), but the nightly LotR reading probably instilled in me the idea that curling up with a good book is one of the Best Things.
2.) The Little House on the Prairie books, Laura Ingalls Wilder
These were read to me (Mom, this time) so many times and I read them myself so many times that the events within them became a permanent part of my mental furniture.
4.) Kidnapped, Robert Louis Stevenson
Probably the first book that I felt proprietary toward. I loved it, I read it over and over, I carried it around in my pocket, I had parts memorized. When I discovered that a nice hardcover edition on my grandfather's shelves was abridged OMG, I started (but did not complete) a comparative study between the abridged version and the complete text, making notes about how the abridgement altered the meaning of the book. I was about eleven. What a snot I must have been.
5.) Where the Red Fern Grows, Wilson Rawls
This was required reading at some point in middle school (sixth grade? seventh grade?), and I hated it. I could tell it was going somewhere awful, I couldn't escape being taken there with it, it traumatized me, and it made me feel trapped, scared, and depressed. That was the first time a book had ever made me feel that way (and it was one of the few times school ever made me feel that way, too). It may be the only book I have ever truly resented being made to read, and just the thought of the stupid thing still makes me feel a little sick to this day.
6.) Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
Aside from just loving the story (which I did), this one is important because it was probably the first "classic" I read entirely of my own choosing and with no prompting from anyone else. I didn't struggle to read it, but it did require more "work" to get through than most things I read on my own at that age (about fifteen). For a kid who'd been reading way above her grade level for always, discovering that leisure reading could still be fun if it was also challenging was probably really important.
7.) Various Robert Heinlein books, including Time Enough for Love and I Will Fear No Evil
Heinlein gets a lot of flak for the way he wrote women (I don't disagree now that his female characters are problematic), but in my late teens his female characters who were smart and beautiful and unabashedly sexual (not sexy but sexual) were like a revelation to me.
8.) The Art of Fiction, John Gardner
A required text for a creative writing class in undergrad. Forever shaped the way I think about writing, reading, life, and what they're all for.
9.) Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
Romances can have substance! They can be worth reading after you already know who gets together with whom! I have much more complicated feelings (still positive) about P&P now, but that was the revelation then, some time in college.
10.) The Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling
In the summer between the two years of my masters program, I devoured HP 1-5 (all there was at the time). And rediscovered that reading can be pure, unadulterated fun. Thank heavens.
11.) A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
I would sooner give up any other ritual at Christmas (or any other time of year) than I would my annual reading of this brilliant little piece. Puts me in the perfect mood for Christmas, always, and straightens me out with the world and with myself (if necessary). An annual spiritual balm for me since high school.
Ten Books with which I Didn't Connect
1.) The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
I wanted to maneuver Holden Caulfield off a bridge even when I was his age.
2.) The Scarlett Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
Could never work up any sympathy for (or interest in) any of the unlikeable characters mooning around in SL.
3.) Ulysses, James Joyce
What a brilliant writer Joyce was (The Dead, be still my heart). And what an amazing feat Ulysses is. But I could never warm to it. What a wretched reading experience it was (twice).
4.) Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
I always (I've read it at least three times) feel mired down in an impenetrable jungle of unintelligible murky images when I read Heart of Darkness.
5.) The Russians
I have not yet given up! I am determined to read at least one mammoth Russian novel before I die. I've tried Crime and Punishment, Anna Karenina, and Doctor Zhivago. I just can't get into them. I have read some shorter works (The Death of Ivan Ilyich--three times! like Heart of Darkness, it was perpetually assigned to me throughout high school, undergrad, and grad school--Fathers and Sons, The Overcoat, some Chekov).
6.) The Old Curiosity Shop, Charles Dickens
Die faster, Little Nell. Lord.
7.) The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
Like The Scarlett Letter, my chief problem with GoW was that I couldn't muster up any sympathy for the characters. That's a lot of ridin' around in the back of an old truck with the fambly if you don't care a lick for anyone. And don't even get me started on the everlovin' turtle.
8.) The Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis
The allegory drives me nuts, and I just never warmed to the world. I wonder if there's a division between Tolkien and Lewis fans--like if you love Tolkien you're less likely to love Lewis.
9.) Animal Farm, George Orwell
I have heard some people describe this as the only book they had to read for school that they loved. Not me, boy. I found it both disturbing and tedious, which might be the worst combo ever.
10.) Slaughter House Five, Kurt Vonnegut
It's supposed to be funny, right? I don't get it.
Eleven Books that Have Been Important to Me
1.) The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
My dad read LotR (and The Hobbit) to me when I was very small (five or six). It's probably the first mythology of any kind that ever meant anything to me and was certainly my first introduction to "grown-up" fiction in any sense. I have many memories of being read to at a young age (and of having my own books), but the nightly LotR reading probably instilled in me the idea that curling up with a good book is one of the Best Things.
2.) The Little House on the Prairie books, Laura Ingalls Wilder
These were read to me (Mom, this time) so many times and I read them myself so many times that the events within them became a permanent part of my mental furniture.
4.) Kidnapped, Robert Louis Stevenson
Probably the first book that I felt proprietary toward. I loved it, I read it over and over, I carried it around in my pocket, I had parts memorized. When I discovered that a nice hardcover edition on my grandfather's shelves was abridged OMG, I started (but did not complete) a comparative study between the abridged version and the complete text, making notes about how the abridgement altered the meaning of the book. I was about eleven. What a snot I must have been.
5.) Where the Red Fern Grows, Wilson Rawls
This was required reading at some point in middle school (sixth grade? seventh grade?), and I hated it. I could tell it was going somewhere awful, I couldn't escape being taken there with it, it traumatized me, and it made me feel trapped, scared, and depressed. That was the first time a book had ever made me feel that way (and it was one of the few times school ever made me feel that way, too). It may be the only book I have ever truly resented being made to read, and just the thought of the stupid thing still makes me feel a little sick to this day.
6.) Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
Aside from just loving the story (which I did), this one is important because it was probably the first "classic" I read entirely of my own choosing and with no prompting from anyone else. I didn't struggle to read it, but it did require more "work" to get through than most things I read on my own at that age (about fifteen). For a kid who'd been reading way above her grade level for always, discovering that leisure reading could still be fun if it was also challenging was probably really important.
7.) Various Robert Heinlein books, including Time Enough for Love and I Will Fear No Evil
Heinlein gets a lot of flak for the way he wrote women (I don't disagree now that his female characters are problematic), but in my late teens his female characters who were smart and beautiful and unabashedly sexual (not sexy but sexual) were like a revelation to me.
8.) The Art of Fiction, John Gardner
A required text for a creative writing class in undergrad. Forever shaped the way I think about writing, reading, life, and what they're all for.
9.) Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
Romances can have substance! They can be worth reading after you already know who gets together with whom! I have much more complicated feelings (still positive) about P&P now, but that was the revelation then, some time in college.
10.) The Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling
In the summer between the two years of my masters program, I devoured HP 1-5 (all there was at the time). And rediscovered that reading can be pure, unadulterated fun. Thank heavens.
11.) A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
I would sooner give up any other ritual at Christmas (or any other time of year) than I would my annual reading of this brilliant little piece. Puts me in the perfect mood for Christmas, always, and straightens me out with the world and with myself (if necessary). An annual spiritual balm for me since high school.
Ten Books with which I Didn't Connect
1.) The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
I wanted to maneuver Holden Caulfield off a bridge even when I was his age.
2.) The Scarlett Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
Could never work up any sympathy for (or interest in) any of the unlikeable characters mooning around in SL.
3.) Ulysses, James Joyce
What a brilliant writer Joyce was (The Dead, be still my heart). And what an amazing feat Ulysses is. But I could never warm to it. What a wretched reading experience it was (twice).
4.) Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
I always (I've read it at least three times) feel mired down in an impenetrable jungle of unintelligible murky images when I read Heart of Darkness.
5.) The Russians
I have not yet given up! I am determined to read at least one mammoth Russian novel before I die. I've tried Crime and Punishment, Anna Karenina, and Doctor Zhivago. I just can't get into them. I have read some shorter works (The Death of Ivan Ilyich--three times! like Heart of Darkness, it was perpetually assigned to me throughout high school, undergrad, and grad school--Fathers and Sons, The Overcoat, some Chekov).
6.) The Old Curiosity Shop, Charles Dickens
Die faster, Little Nell. Lord.
7.) The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
Like The Scarlett Letter, my chief problem with GoW was that I couldn't muster up any sympathy for the characters. That's a lot of ridin' around in the back of an old truck with the fambly if you don't care a lick for anyone. And don't even get me started on the everlovin' turtle.
8.) The Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis
The allegory drives me nuts, and I just never warmed to the world. I wonder if there's a division between Tolkien and Lewis fans--like if you love Tolkien you're less likely to love Lewis.
9.) Animal Farm, George Orwell
I have heard some people describe this as the only book they had to read for school that they loved. Not me, boy. I found it both disturbing and tedious, which might be the worst combo ever.
10.) Slaughter House Five, Kurt Vonnegut
It's supposed to be funny, right? I don't get it.
Book Review: Farthing, Jo Walton
Farthing posits an alternate history in which Britain negotiates a "Peace with Honour" with Hitler in 1941. By 1949 when the novel takes place, Hitler had overrun Europe, Nazi death camps still operate, the US (where Lindbergh is president) had closed its borders, and antisemitism runs rampant in Britain. The story is told from the point of view of Lucy Kahn, the daughter of a powerful aristocratic family with whom she has fallen out of favor because of her recent marriage to a Jewish banker, and from the point of view of a Scotland Yard detective who is called to Lucy's family's estate to investigate the murder of a political heavy-weight who was staying there for the weekend. The novel works much like a cozy murder mystery, with investigations into the murder forming the backbone of the story. And that format makes this history even more sinister than it already seems at first glance. Because so much of the story reads like a gentle murder story in which nothing too terribly awful will happen, the little details of the way the world works in the alternate history are all the more sharp and shocking and terrifying.
While I enjoyed Farthing a lot (it's written just wonderfully, and Walton handles her characters, setting, and plot deftly), the book did feel a bit uneven. It eventually becomes clear that things are even a lot worse than they appear in this version of Britain, and the book goes from interestingly sinister to downright chilling in the last few chapters. That move was appropriate, and, indeed, it felt the like the book was building toward it all along. But the transition still seemed a little rushed, and the novel ultimately felt not wholly in balance because of it. I'm also still puzzling over Walton's choice to make so many of her characters here secretly gay. Of the major players (easily a dozen), at least five turn out to be Also Gay, by which I mean they are introduced as having a certain bearing on the story (such as being a major figure in the politics of Britain) and then a while later we find out that they are also gay (or bi) (with the fact of their sexuality rarely having anything to do with the plot). I am always happy to see people who historically have often been elided from fiction better represented on the page, but the way Walton kept sliding this fact in about many of her characters led me to suspect that the fact of their sexuality was going be become very important either thematically or in the plot. And it never did. Curious. Perhaps it will become clear in the second book in the series, which I am excited to read.
This review originally appeared on my LibraryThing account.
While I enjoyed Farthing a lot (it's written just wonderfully, and Walton handles her characters, setting, and plot deftly), the book did feel a bit uneven. It eventually becomes clear that things are even a lot worse than they appear in this version of Britain, and the book goes from interestingly sinister to downright chilling in the last few chapters. That move was appropriate, and, indeed, it felt the like the book was building toward it all along. But the transition still seemed a little rushed, and the novel ultimately felt not wholly in balance because of it. I'm also still puzzling over Walton's choice to make so many of her characters here secretly gay. Of the major players (easily a dozen), at least five turn out to be Also Gay, by which I mean they are introduced as having a certain bearing on the story (such as being a major figure in the politics of Britain) and then a while later we find out that they are also gay (or bi) (with the fact of their sexuality rarely having anything to do with the plot). I am always happy to see people who historically have often been elided from fiction better represented on the page, but the way Walton kept sliding this fact in about many of her characters led me to suspect that the fact of their sexuality was going be become very important either thematically or in the plot. And it never did. Curious. Perhaps it will become clear in the second book in the series, which I am excited to read.
This review originally appeared on my LibraryThing account.
Book Review: Mrs Queen Takes the Train, William Kuhn
What a strange but wonderful little book. Set nowishly, Mrs Queen Takes the Train follows Queen Elizabeth through a day when she's feeling a little down and decides the solution is to visit some of her favorite things (yep, like the song). She starts with a little wander to the Royal Mews but ends up straying further afield to a cheese shop in London that sells to the Palace and then all the way to Edinburgh to visit the decommissioned royal yacht, Britannia. Naturally, this causes a bit of a panic among her staff, who scramble to find her and to keep the news of The Queen's going "walkabout" away from the press. The novel is really the story of her staff (a young woman who works in the Mews, a young man from the cheese shop, a young vet currently serving as her equerry, one of the Palace senior butlers, her dresser, and one of her ladies in waiting) as much as it is the story of The Queen's Day Out. And somehow Kuhn manages to pull it all together and tell a satisfying story, one that does justice to all of his characters.
The novel is not perfect, however. The question (brought up repeatedly) of whether The Queen hasn't gone just a little peculiar is never really resolved. (Though the suggestion that she might be depressed is handled well.) It's clear in the end that The Queen knows what she's about and feels a renewed sense of how she can serve her country through her position, but one never fully understands whether The Queen has come round to her senses or was simply more sensible than everyone else all along. And the failure to answer that question rankles a bit, especially since this is a novel about a real person, still living. Is Kuhn making some sort of statement about The (real) Queen? Is it even possible to read the book without assuming he is, given his subject matter? If he is, what was the statement? If he's not, what does that mean? You write a novel about a sitting monarch, you can't pretend you haven't written a novel about a sitting monarch. What do you mean by it, Will? You can't escape the question by not answering it, dang it. (I had pretty much the same problem with Allan Bennett's wonderful The Uncommon Reader--brilliant novella, but it doesn't fully account for itself, somehow.) So there's that little niggle twitching away the whole time one's reading, and it can't help but detract a bit from the experience. But the novel manages to be lovely anyway, so.
My only other quibble is Kuhn's use of pictures. Every so often, the text includes a black and white reproduction of a real photograph--sometimes of The Queen, sometimes of people she knew or places referenced in the story. Why? I ask you. Why? It doesn't rise to an experiment with form, but neither does it sit comfortably in the tradition of illustrated classics or the like. It seems only to underline the fact that the novel is about a Real Person, which, honestly, who could have missed that?
These complaints aside, this was one fun, engaging, satisfying read. (I can imagine myself just flipping through and rereading some bits just for the joy of returning to them--especially the scenes with Luke, the equerry, who should have his own book.) It will almost surely be in my top five reads for the year. Recommended.
This review originally appeared on my LibraryThing account.
The novel is not perfect, however. The question (brought up repeatedly) of whether The Queen hasn't gone just a little peculiar is never really resolved. (Though the suggestion that she might be depressed is handled well.) It's clear in the end that The Queen knows what she's about and feels a renewed sense of how she can serve her country through her position, but one never fully understands whether The Queen has come round to her senses or was simply more sensible than everyone else all along. And the failure to answer that question rankles a bit, especially since this is a novel about a real person, still living. Is Kuhn making some sort of statement about The (real) Queen? Is it even possible to read the book without assuming he is, given his subject matter? If he is, what was the statement? If he's not, what does that mean? You write a novel about a sitting monarch, you can't pretend you haven't written a novel about a sitting monarch. What do you mean by it, Will? You can't escape the question by not answering it, dang it. (I had pretty much the same problem with Allan Bennett's wonderful The Uncommon Reader--brilliant novella, but it doesn't fully account for itself, somehow.) So there's that little niggle twitching away the whole time one's reading, and it can't help but detract a bit from the experience. But the novel manages to be lovely anyway, so.
My only other quibble is Kuhn's use of pictures. Every so often, the text includes a black and white reproduction of a real photograph--sometimes of The Queen, sometimes of people she knew or places referenced in the story. Why? I ask you. Why? It doesn't rise to an experiment with form, but neither does it sit comfortably in the tradition of illustrated classics or the like. It seems only to underline the fact that the novel is about a Real Person, which, honestly, who could have missed that?
These complaints aside, this was one fun, engaging, satisfying read. (I can imagine myself just flipping through and rereading some bits just for the joy of returning to them--especially the scenes with Luke, the equerry, who should have his own book.) It will almost surely be in my top five reads for the year. Recommended.
This review originally appeared on my LibraryThing account.
Wednesday, October 9, 2013
Book Review: Cocaine Blues, Kerry Greenwood
This first in the Phryne Fisher mystery series takes a little while to
get going but had me pretty well hooked by about a third of the way in.
Phryne grows tired of life in 1920s London, and, when an acquaintance
asks if she wouldn't mind checking up on his daughter in Australia (who
he thinks is being poisoned), Phryne sets sail for the other side of the
world without much notion of coming back. And then she rather lands in
the thick of things.
Phryne is capable and no-nonsense but also great fun. (And sexy, which is an element often somewhat missing in other mysteries of this type, I find. The attitude toward sex reminded me a bit of Mark Gatiss's The Vesuvius Club, actually, though the comparison pretty much stops there.) The mystery was a bit transparent (I had it sorted very quickly and I don't usually figure mysteries out before the end), but that didn't really lessen my enjoyment of the story. The style could maybe be tweaked a bit (it's Wodehousesian, but sometimes with a clang) but any slight missteps there never rose to the level of irritation. I'm looking forward to reading the next one.
This review originally appeared on my LibraryThing account.
Phryne is capable and no-nonsense but also great fun. (And sexy, which is an element often somewhat missing in other mysteries of this type, I find. The attitude toward sex reminded me a bit of Mark Gatiss's The Vesuvius Club, actually, though the comparison pretty much stops there.) The mystery was a bit transparent (I had it sorted very quickly and I don't usually figure mysteries out before the end), but that didn't really lessen my enjoyment of the story. The style could maybe be tweaked a bit (it's Wodehousesian, but sometimes with a clang) but any slight missteps there never rose to the level of irritation. I'm looking forward to reading the next one.
This review originally appeared on my LibraryThing account.
Tuesday, September 17, 2013
Book Review: Daughter of Smoke and Bone, Laini Taylor
Teen paranormal romance with a dash of urban fantasy, this. Generally not really my thing, though I do understand the appeal. Taylor creates a really fascinating paranormal world, an interesting main character, and a decent romance. While I never cared really deeply for the characters, I was completely invested in finding out what was going to happen.
My biggest problem with the story puts me solidly into cranky old lady territory. I am so tired of paranormal romance heroes who are beautiful beyond all imagination and of "destined" romances. Daughter is much, much better about making the relationship complex and real than some other paranormal teen fare (Twilight, I am looking at you). But there's still this tendency to over-romanticize, to make the relationship the only important thing. I know, I know. It's a story, it's a fantasy. And nothing annoys me more than the suggestion that a teenager's (or anyone's) entertainment diet ought consist of nothing but spinachy substantive tales bound to the workings of the real world and better preparing one to face it. Sometimes you just need a custard-filled doughnut-story swathed in chocolate icing with sprinkles on top. But even so, there's something off-putting about this wrapping up of impossible ideals in a supernatural package: Okay, we know there's no such thing as perfect beauty, but, see, the character is an angel, so it's okay. See, we know that a girl shouldn't let her relationship become the only thing that has any meaning for her, but their love is destined, so it's okay. We know that love is more interesting and lasting if it's a choice rather than fate, but their destined romance will bring peace to the world, so it's okay. We know that we can live without the ones we love dearly, but they actually can't because of Supernatural Stuff, so it's okay.
This kind of use of the supernatural as excuse to keep telling all the old "romantic" untruths appears to be a new trope, and I think that's too bad. I don't read enough of this genre to know whether there are books out there that get inside this trope and turn it on its ear. (I hope so. Maybe Taylor's going to do that as she continues on with this series--the characters are flawed enough, the heroine smart enough, the set-up complex enough that I think she certainly could.) There could still be a happy ending. There could still be overwhelming joyful squishy ecstatic love. They could still bring peace to the world. But how much more interesting it would be if, instead of just being irresistibly drawn to one another, they really loved each other, saw each other for what they are, shit and all, and still chose to be together. How much more compelling if they were complete alone and a truly kickass team together. What if the supernatural elements, instead of making it "okay" to slot back into the old stereotypes, opened up whole new worlds and ways of understanding love?
This review originally appeared on my LibraryThing account.
My biggest problem with the story puts me solidly into cranky old lady territory. I am so tired of paranormal romance heroes who are beautiful beyond all imagination and of "destined" romances. Daughter is much, much better about making the relationship complex and real than some other paranormal teen fare (Twilight, I am looking at you). But there's still this tendency to over-romanticize, to make the relationship the only important thing. I know, I know. It's a story, it's a fantasy. And nothing annoys me more than the suggestion that a teenager's (or anyone's) entertainment diet ought consist of nothing but spinachy substantive tales bound to the workings of the real world and better preparing one to face it. Sometimes you just need a custard-filled doughnut-story swathed in chocolate icing with sprinkles on top. But even so, there's something off-putting about this wrapping up of impossible ideals in a supernatural package: Okay, we know there's no such thing as perfect beauty, but, see, the character is an angel, so it's okay. See, we know that a girl shouldn't let her relationship become the only thing that has any meaning for her, but their love is destined, so it's okay. We know that love is more interesting and lasting if it's a choice rather than fate, but their destined romance will bring peace to the world, so it's okay. We know that we can live without the ones we love dearly, but they actually can't because of Supernatural Stuff, so it's okay.
This kind of use of the supernatural as excuse to keep telling all the old "romantic" untruths appears to be a new trope, and I think that's too bad. I don't read enough of this genre to know whether there are books out there that get inside this trope and turn it on its ear. (I hope so. Maybe Taylor's going to do that as she continues on with this series--the characters are flawed enough, the heroine smart enough, the set-up complex enough that I think she certainly could.) There could still be a happy ending. There could still be overwhelming joyful squishy ecstatic love. They could still bring peace to the world. But how much more interesting it would be if, instead of just being irresistibly drawn to one another, they really loved each other, saw each other for what they are, shit and all, and still chose to be together. How much more compelling if they were complete alone and a truly kickass team together. What if the supernatural elements, instead of making it "okay" to slot back into the old stereotypes, opened up whole new worlds and ways of understanding love?
This review originally appeared on my LibraryThing account.
Tuesday, July 16, 2013
Packing for a Reading Retreat: Volume VI
It's time for a new edition of "Packing for a Reading Retreat," where I
imagine which books I would take with me if I were heading to a reading
retreat, where there would be no distractions and I would be free to do
nothing but read for a week. I might imagine packing two kinds of books:
those that are "New to Me" (books I've never read before) and "Old Favorites" (past
reads I'd like to revisit).
New to Me
Beautiful Ruins, Jess Walter
Another one of those books that has snared me with its cover--all that sparkling blue water and those brightly-colored buildings clinging to the rocks as if held there by magic. The back cover promises 1960s Italy, the set of Cleopatra, and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. I'm particularly interested to see how Walter handles the last as I've been in Edinburgh during the Fringe and it is quite unlike anything else I've ever experienced.
In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination, Margaret Atwood
A collection of Atwood's writing on science fiction and speculative fiction. I've never warmed to Atwood, but I am thoroughly convinced that I should not give up on her either. Someday something will click--I'll read just the right book at just the right moment. In any case, I'm intrigued to read what she has to say about SF, partly because I'd like to hear what Atwood has to say about SF and partly because I always want to hear what anyone has to say about SF.
Blackout, Connie Willis
Fifty years in our future, historians are time-travelers. When a group of historians travels to World War II, strange things ensue and it appears that they may be altering history. It's like Willis wrote a book just for me. Love it when that happens.
Cocaine Blues, Kerry Greenwood
The first in the Phryne Fisher mystery series. It's the 1920s and Phryne Fisher is tired of London--so it's off to Melbourne, Australia, where she quickly meets with mysterious goings on. I'm always looking for a good mystery series, and I've heard good things from trusted sources on this one. And, again, the cover! I would almost buy these just for the cover art alone.
New to Me
Beautiful Ruins, Jess Walter
Another one of those books that has snared me with its cover--all that sparkling blue water and those brightly-colored buildings clinging to the rocks as if held there by magic. The back cover promises 1960s Italy, the set of Cleopatra, and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. I'm particularly interested to see how Walter handles the last as I've been in Edinburgh during the Fringe and it is quite unlike anything else I've ever experienced.
In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination, Margaret Atwood
A collection of Atwood's writing on science fiction and speculative fiction. I've never warmed to Atwood, but I am thoroughly convinced that I should not give up on her either. Someday something will click--I'll read just the right book at just the right moment. In any case, I'm intrigued to read what she has to say about SF, partly because I'd like to hear what Atwood has to say about SF and partly because I always want to hear what anyone has to say about SF.
Blackout, Connie Willis
Fifty years in our future, historians are time-travelers. When a group of historians travels to World War II, strange things ensue and it appears that they may be altering history. It's like Willis wrote a book just for me. Love it when that happens.
Cocaine Blues, Kerry Greenwood
The first in the Phryne Fisher mystery series. It's the 1920s and Phryne Fisher is tired of London--so it's off to Melbourne, Australia, where she quickly meets with mysterious goings on. I'm always looking for a good mystery series, and I've heard good things from trusted sources on this one. And, again, the cover! I would almost buy these just for the cover art alone.
Monday, June 3, 2013
Book Review: American Wife
American Wife fictionalizes Laura Bush's life, from childhood through the lame-duck years of her husband's presidency. Laura and George Bush are called Alice and Charlie Blackwell here, though they are quite recognizably the former president and first lady, both through mannerisms and circumstance, especially so in the last quarter of the book, which deals with Alice's experiences as First Lady.
The novel is by far best in the first half, as we follow Alice through a mid-west upbringing and adolescence in the fifties and sixties; her years as a single, independent young woman with a job she enjoys; and her initial romance with Charlie. Alice is extremely compelling in this half of the book--she's intelligent and confident, but with a tendency to keep herself to herself, a fear of exposing herself, of being wholly who she is in front of others. There's nothing doormattish about her, and she doesn't let these insecurities get in her way, but, still, there's that reining in, that holding back. I imagine a lot of smart, capable women who would rather sit at home and read than go to a party would see a lot of themselves in Alice, and Sittenfeld portrays these seemingly contradictory aspects of Alice's personality with a deft and subtle touch.
But then Alice marries boisterous, wealthy, laddish, ambitious-but-aimless Charlie and the life just drops out of the book. Alice becomes a house-wife, though an upper-class one who will never fade away under the drudgery of housework. She still seems pretty content, it's clear that she loves her husband, and she becomes a good mother it their only child--but gone is the strong sense of her as an intellectual, gone is the job she enjoys. We see some marital problems involving Charlie and drink, and Alice has enough backbone to quietly force Charlie to choose between his substance abuse and his family, but even then Alice seems curiously passive, curiously toothless. Charlie gets religion, the aimlessness falls away, and, in a somewhat odd jump forward in the narrative of some twenty years, he becomes president.
The "First Lady Years" section of the book is the least compelling--and the least well-written. Alice tells us much about the difficulties of being in the public eye, of how strange it is to be part of the public face of an administration with which she rarely agrees, of how exasperating it is to hear over and over of the puzzlement of those who don't understand how smart, bookish, liberal Alice Blackwell could possibly love conservative, war-mongering, rights-trampling President Charlie Blackwell. This section ought to be the thematic center of the novel--this ought to be the part where the book becomes whole, where the reason for writing a novel about a still-living real person becomes clear. By the end, we ought to understand more fully Laura Bush or the office of the first lady or even just wifehood (the book's title, lacking an article as it does, seems to be reaching for some claim to a universal statement about American wives).
And the thing is, we don't. Alice stands up for herself again in the end, separating herself briefly from her husband and from her role as First Lady to be just Alice Blackwell, but the moment is just as passive and toothless as her stand against Charlie's drinking is earlier on. Alice--smart, capable, happy Alice--is still subsumed under boisterous, laddish, ambitious Charlie. What have we learned? That people love who they love, and that intellectual or political compatibility doesn't necessarily come into it? No kidding. That smart, independent women often lose part of themselves through their genuine love of louder, more ambitious men? You don't say. Illustrating these facts beautifully and startlingly or giving Alice a convincing, true moment of reclamation of some of her younger independence of self--either of these would have made American Wife into something really satisfying. But instead the novel just wilts when Alice marries Charlie and becomes more and more lifeless and rambling as it goes on.
This review origianlly appeared on my LibraryThing account.
The novel is by far best in the first half, as we follow Alice through a mid-west upbringing and adolescence in the fifties and sixties; her years as a single, independent young woman with a job she enjoys; and her initial romance with Charlie. Alice is extremely compelling in this half of the book--she's intelligent and confident, but with a tendency to keep herself to herself, a fear of exposing herself, of being wholly who she is in front of others. There's nothing doormattish about her, and she doesn't let these insecurities get in her way, but, still, there's that reining in, that holding back. I imagine a lot of smart, capable women who would rather sit at home and read than go to a party would see a lot of themselves in Alice, and Sittenfeld portrays these seemingly contradictory aspects of Alice's personality with a deft and subtle touch.
But then Alice marries boisterous, wealthy, laddish, ambitious-but-aimless Charlie and the life just drops out of the book. Alice becomes a house-wife, though an upper-class one who will never fade away under the drudgery of housework. She still seems pretty content, it's clear that she loves her husband, and she becomes a good mother it their only child--but gone is the strong sense of her as an intellectual, gone is the job she enjoys. We see some marital problems involving Charlie and drink, and Alice has enough backbone to quietly force Charlie to choose between his substance abuse and his family, but even then Alice seems curiously passive, curiously toothless. Charlie gets religion, the aimlessness falls away, and, in a somewhat odd jump forward in the narrative of some twenty years, he becomes president.
The "First Lady Years" section of the book is the least compelling--and the least well-written. Alice tells us much about the difficulties of being in the public eye, of how strange it is to be part of the public face of an administration with which she rarely agrees, of how exasperating it is to hear over and over of the puzzlement of those who don't understand how smart, bookish, liberal Alice Blackwell could possibly love conservative, war-mongering, rights-trampling President Charlie Blackwell. This section ought to be the thematic center of the novel--this ought to be the part where the book becomes whole, where the reason for writing a novel about a still-living real person becomes clear. By the end, we ought to understand more fully Laura Bush or the office of the first lady or even just wifehood (the book's title, lacking an article as it does, seems to be reaching for some claim to a universal statement about American wives).
And the thing is, we don't. Alice stands up for herself again in the end, separating herself briefly from her husband and from her role as First Lady to be just Alice Blackwell, but the moment is just as passive and toothless as her stand against Charlie's drinking is earlier on. Alice--smart, capable, happy Alice--is still subsumed under boisterous, laddish, ambitious Charlie. What have we learned? That people love who they love, and that intellectual or political compatibility doesn't necessarily come into it? No kidding. That smart, independent women often lose part of themselves through their genuine love of louder, more ambitious men? You don't say. Illustrating these facts beautifully and startlingly or giving Alice a convincing, true moment of reclamation of some of her younger independence of self--either of these would have made American Wife into something really satisfying. But instead the novel just wilts when Alice marries Charlie and becomes more and more lifeless and rambling as it goes on.
This review origianlly appeared on my LibraryThing account.
Sunday, May 19, 2013
Movie Review: Star Trek: Into Darkness
Below all those asterisks down there, I'm going to be spoiler-rich, to the point of ruining the movie for anyone who hasn't yet seen it. So here's my one-sentence, spoiler-free assessment for those who wonder if they should drop $10+ on a ticket: Into Darkness is not without flaws and doesn't quite rise to the level of distilled awesome that the 2009 Reboot accomplished, but its engaging plot, heaps of witty dialogue, lovely special effects, nice helping of memorable moments, and near-perfect characterizations of Kirk and Spock make it a worthy sequel, an excellent addition to the Trek franchise, and a must-see in the theater. Go see this movie. (I will mention here that I saw the movie in 2D and so can't comment on whether the 3D is used to good effect or is worth extra monies. I still can't bring myself to pay extra to watch something in 3D, which I have never liked and which gives me a headache. I know, I know. "It's better now." I just can't.)
Okay. Saying it again. The following is rife with spoilers--it's more of a fan-happy analysis than a traditional "Ought I See This?" review. If you haven't seen Into Darkness yet and have any intention of doing so, go away and come back after you've caught the film. Spoilers start after the starfield. You have been warned.
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I was wary of Into Darkness. I loved the 2009 Reboot. Loved. It. I loved the horrible-wonderful opening sequence which wrecked me thoroughly ten minutes in. I loved the casting. I loved the story. I loved the new-but-the-same, slightly edgy characterizations of my beloved Enterprise crew. I loved the dialogue, I loved the banter, I loved the ridiculous humor. I loved the shiny ship interiors and the brewery-like engineering deck. I even loved the stupid lens flares. From the moment the credits rolled, I wanted more-more-more.
But then I started thinking about more. Could they do this again? How much of what was so awesome about the Reboot was its rebooty-ness, was the fact that we were getting to see these characters afresh for the first time ever, was the fun of seeing the Trek universe re-imagined? Would that translate to a sequel? And what of the rumor that started flying that the villain in the sequel would be Khan? Surely that would wreck it, I thought. You can't retell that story with a young cast. The Wrath of Khan is so much a story of middle-age, of reckoning up with your past decisions, of personal obsessive revenge born of past intimate conflict. You can't do that with a twenty-seven-year-old Kirk.
Well, the villain in Into Darkness is Khan (played to psychotic perfection by CumberKhan Smauglock, I mean, Benedict Cumberbatch, who, as far as I can see, can do no wrong), and it works, mostly. It works because they haven't tried to remake The Wrath of Khan--they've simply snipped out Khan's basic situation (scary-ass superhuman cyrogenically frozen and rocketed into space who is super-pissed at how he and his found-family have been treated) and built a whole new story around it. It only mostly works because the ins-and-outs of the plot's backstory are a little murky, but that is not a problem that stems from the inclusion of Khan himself. I leave final judgement on the plot construction until I've seen the movie at least one more time, but after one viewing I've got some questions.
What, exactly, was Admiral Marcus up to? Was he simply trying to start a war with the Klingons? Why? What have the Klingon's done to anyone? We get a little speech from Marcus about how they've been menacing about, but we haven't actually seen any of that. Wouldn't the Romulans have been a better choice for that, given the events of the Reboot? It would be unfair, since Nero was not acting on behalf of the Romulans and was from the future anyway, but the movie trys to set Marcus up as the dude who over-responds to acts of terroism and loses sight of his own values in the process. Wouldn't that work better if we had direct knowledge of the things he was reacting to? And what part were Khan and company meant to play in his plot against the Klingons? At one point I thought when Kirk shot the torpedoes carrying Khan's people at Kronos Marcus meant for the Khanites to wreck so much havoc on the Klingons that the Klingons would no longer be a threat. But later it appeared that he just meant it to be a provoking act that could not be traced to Starfleet and that would force the Klingons to react, thus sparking the war Marcus wanted while making it look like the Klingons actually started it. This seems the most likely, but I still don't have the grasp on what Marcus wanted and why he wanted it that I think we need for the plot to sit square with the audience. There was very little sense, either, of the rest of Starfleet (and Federation?) leadership dragging its feet about responding to the Klingon threat and of Marcus reacting to that. Surely his little temper tantrum wasn't happening in a political vacuum?
And about that temper tantrum. It takes the form of a massive base on Jupiter where he's building a gigantic, purely militaristic vessel (in violation of Starfleet's stated mission--exploration and peacekeeping). Are we supposed to understand that this is a secret? Or that people know about it but don't know what it really is? I don't buy that you can hide a massive secret base in the Sol System in Trek-universe--there's too much coming and going (and sensors). So, is there wide-spread corruption in Starfleet? If not, how is Marcus accomplishing the building of this base and this ship? Who are all those other people on his ship? Where are the repercussions when Kirk and company get back to Earth? Where are the questions, the inquiries, the paranoia? "Thanks for ferreting out that rogue admiral, his giant secret base, hugenormous warship, and network of lackeys, Jimmy. No wuckies here, so take our flagship and disappear into deep space for five years while we just cross our fingers there aren't more wackadoodles with big ol' ships who might try to start a war." Really? And Kirk just takes his coveted five-year mission and gets the hell out without stopping to try to tie up the Marcus loose ends or sort out if Section 31 is real, what it's about, or if it's a threat? Again, I need to see the movie again--perhaps these things are more clear than they appear on the first viewing, but this is the kind of stuff that makes me say the movie isn't quite as good as the Reboot was, or as good as it could have been.
But, for the most part, I really didn't care that much about those plot wobbles--they certainly didn't detract from my enjoyment of the movie as it was unfolding--because it turns out they can do it again. The fun of the Reboot, the witty dialogue, the humor, and the spot-on characterizations--it's all here again in Into Darkness and is every bit as good. I will quibble that Bones was muttering around the edges of Kirk and Spock's tight-knit command structure and friendship a bit more than he ought to be, but the character arcs here were all Kirk-and-Spock, so I'll be forgiving on that one, especially since Bones did have some great lines despite not being as much a part of the classic triumvirate dynamic as he was in The Original Series. I'll further quibble that some characters (Uhura, Chekov) were given things to do for the sake of setting up humorous situations or moments of character interactions rather than because there was any internal logic suggesting they ought to take on those roles. (The Chief Engineer quits so you put your teenaged navigator into his role? What, there aren't, like, forty guys down in engineering who have seniority, higher rank, and more experience than Chekov, even if he is a genius and has been shadowing Scotty? Come on.) While these moments did kind of irritate me in the moment, they also didn't really detract from my overall enjoyment of the film. When you get the humor, the banter, and the characters as right as they did, I'm willing to forgive a lot of these kinds of little infelicities.
And now for the bit that made the movie for me: Kirk and Spock and their friendship. J.J. Abrams et al. get Spock and they get Kirk-and-Spock. Spock's story is about his struggle to be true to both his Vulcan and his Human sides, and that struggle almost always plays out in his interactions with his friends. How do you be a friend to a human, for whom friendship inherently entails emotional availability, while remaining true to unemotional Vulcan ways? If you are not just one or the other but both is it right to allow one half to take over? Or is the denial of the other half an unhealthy betrayal of who you really are? The exploration of this struggle in TOS was always about Spock's relationship with Kirk (though other characters--Bones, for one--played a large part in it as well), and I love (love) how they have made this struggle part of the story arc for Into Darkness and kept it about Kirk and Spock even while keeping Uhura in the mix as Spock's girlfriend. Spock's failure truly to understand why Kirk saved his life at the volcano even though it violated their most important rule, his failure to understand why it's important to feel even negative emotions, and his subsequent epiphany about friendship and what it means were brilliantly portrayed and are classic, classic Trek themes. All the points ever for making this emotional discovery a major part of the story arc for Into Darkness and all the more points for the astonishing, surprising, brilliant, magnificent reversal of the unforgettable, quintessential Wrath of Khan scene where Spock declares his friendship for Kirk in his last moments after sacrificing himself to save the ship. All my hats off to everyone involved in the crafting of this movie for figuring out not only how to get an homage to this moment that everybody knows into this movie but also how to make it a the-same-but-different emotional climax of this movie on its own terms. Spock admitting that he's completely failing to keep himself from feeling as Jim dies? I can't even. Just. *flails* (As an aside here: it's very interesting to me that Spock gets to this moment so much earlier in this rebooted universe than he did in the original universe. Remember all the times Spock wasn't as good a friend as he should have been in TOS? ("The City on the Edge of Forever," anyone?) Or kind of stumbled around trying something that maybe wasn't the best move? ("Requiem for Methuselah" comes to mind.) What is it going to mean for Spock that he's had this moment so much earlier and as an epiphany rather than through a slow realization over many years? Will he be happier? Will he never get to a point where he wants to try Kohlinar? Will he springboard off this moment into a relationship with Uhura that really, really works? Will they have a passel of little Spuhuras? Is Kirk going to have a little David with Carol Marcus and name Spock godfather? Oh, the possibilites are endless. More films, please. Or a TV show with this cast? A girl can dream.)
In addition to loving the hell out of the character development there, Into Darkness gets bonus points from me for three reasons. First, letting Uhura be badass. She's still not as badass as the dudes running around the Enterprise (she's not jumping into volcanoes or sacrificing herself for the ship), but she stands up for herself, calls Kirk out for underutilizing her skills as an officer, and faces down a band of angry Klingons on her onesies--and she can do all this because she's smart and capable, not because she's pretty or because she's in a relationship with the first officer or because she's friends with the captain. Smart and capable. And as much as I can't get fully behind sending her down into the fray when Spock was fighting Khan (because tactically she is not the best choice), it's still another chance to see her take on a traditionally male action (unflinching, repeated violence in a military setting) without any quibbling about whether she can do it. And that is cool. Second, showing us men who embody traditional maleness (they are protective, aggressive, good leaders, skilled fighters, and demonstrate (apparent) sexual prowess) and who also weep unabashedly, unashamedly, and without comment. The scene where Pike died was especially brilliant--Kirk doesn't just grit his teeth, clench his fists, and go off hell-bent on revenge. He weeps. And it is not a failing, not a moment where he just couldn't keep it together, not an excusable lapse because the cause was sufficient. It's just a natural reaction to his loss. More of this kind of portrayal of masculinity, please. Thank you. Third, for being an action movie whose kickass action hero (Spock) is played by an openly gay actor. We need to see this just as we need to see openly gay male athletes in major sports. Slowly, slowly, we may be inching toward the vision of inclusion, equality, and respect Roddenberry tried to show us. Carry on, Trek. Carry on.
Okay. Saying it again. The following is rife with spoilers--it's more of a fan-happy analysis than a traditional "Ought I See This?" review. If you haven't seen Into Darkness yet and have any intention of doing so, go away and come back after you've caught the film. Spoilers start after the starfield. You have been warned.
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I was wary of Into Darkness. I loved the 2009 Reboot. Loved. It. I loved the horrible-wonderful opening sequence which wrecked me thoroughly ten minutes in. I loved the casting. I loved the story. I loved the new-but-the-same, slightly edgy characterizations of my beloved Enterprise crew. I loved the dialogue, I loved the banter, I loved the ridiculous humor. I loved the shiny ship interiors and the brewery-like engineering deck. I even loved the stupid lens flares. From the moment the credits rolled, I wanted more-more-more.
But then I started thinking about more. Could they do this again? How much of what was so awesome about the Reboot was its rebooty-ness, was the fact that we were getting to see these characters afresh for the first time ever, was the fun of seeing the Trek universe re-imagined? Would that translate to a sequel? And what of the rumor that started flying that the villain in the sequel would be Khan? Surely that would wreck it, I thought. You can't retell that story with a young cast. The Wrath of Khan is so much a story of middle-age, of reckoning up with your past decisions, of personal obsessive revenge born of past intimate conflict. You can't do that with a twenty-seven-year-old Kirk.
Well, the villain in Into Darkness is Khan (played to psychotic perfection by CumberKhan Smauglock, I mean, Benedict Cumberbatch, who, as far as I can see, can do no wrong), and it works, mostly. It works because they haven't tried to remake The Wrath of Khan--they've simply snipped out Khan's basic situation (scary-ass superhuman cyrogenically frozen and rocketed into space who is super-pissed at how he and his found-family have been treated) and built a whole new story around it. It only mostly works because the ins-and-outs of the plot's backstory are a little murky, but that is not a problem that stems from the inclusion of Khan himself. I leave final judgement on the plot construction until I've seen the movie at least one more time, but after one viewing I've got some questions.
What, exactly, was Admiral Marcus up to? Was he simply trying to start a war with the Klingons? Why? What have the Klingon's done to anyone? We get a little speech from Marcus about how they've been menacing about, but we haven't actually seen any of that. Wouldn't the Romulans have been a better choice for that, given the events of the Reboot? It would be unfair, since Nero was not acting on behalf of the Romulans and was from the future anyway, but the movie trys to set Marcus up as the dude who over-responds to acts of terroism and loses sight of his own values in the process. Wouldn't that work better if we had direct knowledge of the things he was reacting to? And what part were Khan and company meant to play in his plot against the Klingons? At one point I thought when Kirk shot the torpedoes carrying Khan's people at Kronos Marcus meant for the Khanites to wreck so much havoc on the Klingons that the Klingons would no longer be a threat. But later it appeared that he just meant it to be a provoking act that could not be traced to Starfleet and that would force the Klingons to react, thus sparking the war Marcus wanted while making it look like the Klingons actually started it. This seems the most likely, but I still don't have the grasp on what Marcus wanted and why he wanted it that I think we need for the plot to sit square with the audience. There was very little sense, either, of the rest of Starfleet (and Federation?) leadership dragging its feet about responding to the Klingon threat and of Marcus reacting to that. Surely his little temper tantrum wasn't happening in a political vacuum?
And about that temper tantrum. It takes the form of a massive base on Jupiter where he's building a gigantic, purely militaristic vessel (in violation of Starfleet's stated mission--exploration and peacekeeping). Are we supposed to understand that this is a secret? Or that people know about it but don't know what it really is? I don't buy that you can hide a massive secret base in the Sol System in Trek-universe--there's too much coming and going (and sensors). So, is there wide-spread corruption in Starfleet? If not, how is Marcus accomplishing the building of this base and this ship? Who are all those other people on his ship? Where are the repercussions when Kirk and company get back to Earth? Where are the questions, the inquiries, the paranoia? "Thanks for ferreting out that rogue admiral, his giant secret base, hugenormous warship, and network of lackeys, Jimmy. No wuckies here, so take our flagship and disappear into deep space for five years while we just cross our fingers there aren't more wackadoodles with big ol' ships who might try to start a war." Really? And Kirk just takes his coveted five-year mission and gets the hell out without stopping to try to tie up the Marcus loose ends or sort out if Section 31 is real, what it's about, or if it's a threat? Again, I need to see the movie again--perhaps these things are more clear than they appear on the first viewing, but this is the kind of stuff that makes me say the movie isn't quite as good as the Reboot was, or as good as it could have been.
But, for the most part, I really didn't care that much about those plot wobbles--they certainly didn't detract from my enjoyment of the movie as it was unfolding--because it turns out they can do it again. The fun of the Reboot, the witty dialogue, the humor, and the spot-on characterizations--it's all here again in Into Darkness and is every bit as good. I will quibble that Bones was muttering around the edges of Kirk and Spock's tight-knit command structure and friendship a bit more than he ought to be, but the character arcs here were all Kirk-and-Spock, so I'll be forgiving on that one, especially since Bones did have some great lines despite not being as much a part of the classic triumvirate dynamic as he was in The Original Series. I'll further quibble that some characters (Uhura, Chekov) were given things to do for the sake of setting up humorous situations or moments of character interactions rather than because there was any internal logic suggesting they ought to take on those roles. (The Chief Engineer quits so you put your teenaged navigator into his role? What, there aren't, like, forty guys down in engineering who have seniority, higher rank, and more experience than Chekov, even if he is a genius and has been shadowing Scotty? Come on.) While these moments did kind of irritate me in the moment, they also didn't really detract from my overall enjoyment of the film. When you get the humor, the banter, and the characters as right as they did, I'm willing to forgive a lot of these kinds of little infelicities.
And now for the bit that made the movie for me: Kirk and Spock and their friendship. J.J. Abrams et al. get Spock and they get Kirk-and-Spock. Spock's story is about his struggle to be true to both his Vulcan and his Human sides, and that struggle almost always plays out in his interactions with his friends. How do you be a friend to a human, for whom friendship inherently entails emotional availability, while remaining true to unemotional Vulcan ways? If you are not just one or the other but both is it right to allow one half to take over? Or is the denial of the other half an unhealthy betrayal of who you really are? The exploration of this struggle in TOS was always about Spock's relationship with Kirk (though other characters--Bones, for one--played a large part in it as well), and I love (love) how they have made this struggle part of the story arc for Into Darkness and kept it about Kirk and Spock even while keeping Uhura in the mix as Spock's girlfriend. Spock's failure truly to understand why Kirk saved his life at the volcano even though it violated their most important rule, his failure to understand why it's important to feel even negative emotions, and his subsequent epiphany about friendship and what it means were brilliantly portrayed and are classic, classic Trek themes. All the points ever for making this emotional discovery a major part of the story arc for Into Darkness and all the more points for the astonishing, surprising, brilliant, magnificent reversal of the unforgettable, quintessential Wrath of Khan scene where Spock declares his friendship for Kirk in his last moments after sacrificing himself to save the ship. All my hats off to everyone involved in the crafting of this movie for figuring out not only how to get an homage to this moment that everybody knows into this movie but also how to make it a the-same-but-different emotional climax of this movie on its own terms. Spock admitting that he's completely failing to keep himself from feeling as Jim dies? I can't even. Just. *flails* (As an aside here: it's very interesting to me that Spock gets to this moment so much earlier in this rebooted universe than he did in the original universe. Remember all the times Spock wasn't as good a friend as he should have been in TOS? ("The City on the Edge of Forever," anyone?) Or kind of stumbled around trying something that maybe wasn't the best move? ("Requiem for Methuselah" comes to mind.) What is it going to mean for Spock that he's had this moment so much earlier and as an epiphany rather than through a slow realization over many years? Will he be happier? Will he never get to a point where he wants to try Kohlinar? Will he springboard off this moment into a relationship with Uhura that really, really works? Will they have a passel of little Spuhuras? Is Kirk going to have a little David with Carol Marcus and name Spock godfather? Oh, the possibilites are endless. More films, please. Or a TV show with this cast? A girl can dream.)
In addition to loving the hell out of the character development there, Into Darkness gets bonus points from me for three reasons. First, letting Uhura be badass. She's still not as badass as the dudes running around the Enterprise (she's not jumping into volcanoes or sacrificing herself for the ship), but she stands up for herself, calls Kirk out for underutilizing her skills as an officer, and faces down a band of angry Klingons on her onesies--and she can do all this because she's smart and capable, not because she's pretty or because she's in a relationship with the first officer or because she's friends with the captain. Smart and capable. And as much as I can't get fully behind sending her down into the fray when Spock was fighting Khan (because tactically she is not the best choice), it's still another chance to see her take on a traditionally male action (unflinching, repeated violence in a military setting) without any quibbling about whether she can do it. And that is cool. Second, showing us men who embody traditional maleness (they are protective, aggressive, good leaders, skilled fighters, and demonstrate (apparent) sexual prowess) and who also weep unabashedly, unashamedly, and without comment. The scene where Pike died was especially brilliant--Kirk doesn't just grit his teeth, clench his fists, and go off hell-bent on revenge. He weeps. And it is not a failing, not a moment where he just couldn't keep it together, not an excusable lapse because the cause was sufficient. It's just a natural reaction to his loss. More of this kind of portrayal of masculinity, please. Thank you. Third, for being an action movie whose kickass action hero (Spock) is played by an openly gay actor. We need to see this just as we need to see openly gay male athletes in major sports. Slowly, slowly, we may be inching toward the vision of inclusion, equality, and respect Roddenberry tried to show us. Carry on, Trek. Carry on.
Sunday, April 7, 2013
Packing for a Reading Retreat: Round-Up
I realized as I was doing the latest "Packing for Reading Retreat" that I've been doing these posts for a year. I thought it would be fun to do a round-up post listing all of the books mentioned in "Packing" over the last twelve months and, since I don't always review the ones I've read here at the blog, to provide links to reviews of the ones I have read. Onwards!
New to Me
The Mirage--Read, Review
The Flight of Gemma Hardy--Read, Review
Buddenbrooks
The Song of Achilles--Read, Mini Review
The Cove
Widdershins
Cloud Atlas--Read, Review
Canda--Abandoned, Tiny Review
The Time In Between
tiny, beautiful things--Read, Mini Review
Seraphina
Les Misérables
On the Map
Old Favorites
The Lord of the Rings--Reread Fellowship, Previous Review
The Sound of Summer Voices
Rebecca
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Jane Eyre
The Little House on the Praire books--Reread first three, Review Big Woods, Prairie, Plum Creek
Just in Case
Pride and Prejudice--Reread, Mini Review
The Mists of Avalon
Kidnapped
Editions of Packing for a Reading Retreat
Volume V
Volume IV
Volume III
Volume II
Volume I
New to Me
The Mirage--Read, Review
The Flight of Gemma Hardy--Read, Review
Buddenbrooks
The Song of Achilles--Read, Mini Review
The Cove
Widdershins
Cloud Atlas--Read, Review
Canda--Abandoned, Tiny Review
The Time In Between
tiny, beautiful things--Read, Mini Review
Seraphina
Les Misérables
On the Map
Old Favorites
The Lord of the Rings--Reread Fellowship, Previous Review
The Sound of Summer Voices
Rebecca
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Jane Eyre
The Little House on the Praire books--Reread first three, Review Big Woods, Prairie, Plum Creek
Just in Case
Pride and Prejudice--Reread, Mini Review
The Mists of Avalon
Kidnapped
Editions of Packing for a Reading Retreat
Volume V
Volume IV
Volume III
Volume II
Volume I
Packing for a Reading Retreat: Volume V
It's time for a new edition of "Packing for a Reading Retreat," where I
imagine which books I would take with me if I were heading to a reading
retreat, where there would be no distractions and I would be free to do
nothing but read for a week. I might imagine packing two kinds of books:
those that are "New to Me" (books I've never read before) and "Old Favorites" (past
reads I'd like to revisit).
New to Me
The Bone People, Keri Hulme
The Bone People is not exactly new to me. I read about two-thirds of it during a Spring Break during PhD school about five years ago. And I loved every sentence of this Booker-winning novel from New Zealand. The novel begins with Kerewin Holmes, a New Zealander of part Maori and part European descent, who lives a life of content isolation until a strangely silent child and his foster father wander into her life. What follows is a sometimes dark, sometimes funny character study of these three and their interactions. The novel was a casualty of graduate school--a not-for-school book which I was enjoying but eventually abandoned because of the demands of school--and I've been meaning to return to it ever since, to start at the beginning, love every sentence all over again, and finally get to the end.
How to Cook a Wolf, MFK Fisher
MFK Fisher writes these nifty little essays which appear to be about food and recipes but which are really about life. (Well. And the food.) They are some of the best examples of what the essay--the writing form which attempts--can do, where it can go, and what it can discover in the process of its unfolding. How to Cook a Wolf was written during World War II, and was meant to encourage people during the shortages. I recently read Fisher's Consider the Oyster, and I'm excited to carry on to Wolf.
Tin Toys Trilogy, Ursula Holden
Tin Toys Trilogy takes place in Ireland in the 30s and 40s and follows three sisters as they grow up and deal with various tragedies of life. The trilogy is being reprinted by Virago Modern Classics, and is said to be an excellent exploration of childhood. I'd never heard of Holden before I came across the news that Virago was reprinting her, and there seems to be a general opinion that her work should be more well-known and may be on the verge of a renaissance.
The Birth of Venus, Sarah Dunant
I often find myself itching for some good historical fiction, set in pre-1800s Europe with a female central character. No, really. I do. And I can never seem to find something that will scratch that itch and be written well enough that I won't stick a pencil in my eye and be historically accurate. I have a notion that there's more of this out there than I know about, but those that come to my attention generally seem to fail at either not-pencil-in-the eye writing or accuracy. I have high hopes that Dunant's work will fit the bill, and scurried home with three of hers from yesterday's local Library Book Sale.
Previous Editions of Packing for a Reading Retreat
Volume IV
Volume III
Volume II
Volume I
New to Me
The Bone People, Keri Hulme
The Bone People is not exactly new to me. I read about two-thirds of it during a Spring Break during PhD school about five years ago. And I loved every sentence of this Booker-winning novel from New Zealand. The novel begins with Kerewin Holmes, a New Zealander of part Maori and part European descent, who lives a life of content isolation until a strangely silent child and his foster father wander into her life. What follows is a sometimes dark, sometimes funny character study of these three and their interactions. The novel was a casualty of graduate school--a not-for-school book which I was enjoying but eventually abandoned because of the demands of school--and I've been meaning to return to it ever since, to start at the beginning, love every sentence all over again, and finally get to the end.
How to Cook a Wolf, MFK Fisher
MFK Fisher writes these nifty little essays which appear to be about food and recipes but which are really about life. (Well. And the food.) They are some of the best examples of what the essay--the writing form which attempts--can do, where it can go, and what it can discover in the process of its unfolding. How to Cook a Wolf was written during World War II, and was meant to encourage people during the shortages. I recently read Fisher's Consider the Oyster, and I'm excited to carry on to Wolf.
Tin Toys Trilogy, Ursula Holden
Tin Toys Trilogy takes place in Ireland in the 30s and 40s and follows three sisters as they grow up and deal with various tragedies of life. The trilogy is being reprinted by Virago Modern Classics, and is said to be an excellent exploration of childhood. I'd never heard of Holden before I came across the news that Virago was reprinting her, and there seems to be a general opinion that her work should be more well-known and may be on the verge of a renaissance.
The Birth of Venus, Sarah Dunant
I often find myself itching for some good historical fiction, set in pre-1800s Europe with a female central character. No, really. I do. And I can never seem to find something that will scratch that itch and be written well enough that I won't stick a pencil in my eye and be historically accurate. I have a notion that there's more of this out there than I know about, but those that come to my attention generally seem to fail at either not-pencil-in-the eye writing or accuracy. I have high hopes that Dunant's work will fit the bill, and scurried home with three of hers from yesterday's local Library Book Sale.
Previous Editions of Packing for a Reading Retreat
Volume IV
Volume III
Volume II
Volume I
Friday, January 11, 2013
Packing for a Reading Retreat: Volume IV
It's time for a new edition of "Packing for a Reading Retreat," where I
imagine which books I would take with me if I were heading to a reading
retreat, where there would be no distractions and I would be free to do
nothing but read for a week. My imagined packing can fall into one of three categories:
"New to Me," for books I've never read before; "Old Favorites," for past
reads I'd like to revisit; and "Just in Case," for one book that can
always be counted on to save me if one of the other selections turns out
to be a dud. As the volumes of "Packing" pile up, I may share more "New to Me" choices and allow "Old Favorites" and "Just in Case" to appear only when a book which fits either category leaps out at me and demands to be recognized.
New to Me
tiny beautiful things: Advice on love and life from Dear Sugar, Cheryl Strayed
If you don't know about Dear Sugar and The Rumpus, you ought. The Rumpus is an online magazine with reviews, essays, interviews and so on--often about and by people you want to hear from and likely won't anywhere else. And Dear Sugar is their advice column. And tiny beautiful things is a collection of those columns. This ain't Dear Abby I'm talking about with one or two paragraphs of advice anyone with a brain and more than a decade or two of living behind them could give you (not that Dear Abby isn't usually right on the money); Sugar's responses are full-blown personal essays in response to her reader's questions, which themselves are often longer than an entire typical newspaper advice column and and are frequently heartrending. Dear Sugar is less advice about what to do about something and more an invitation to contemplate what it means to be human and to discover how to be better at it. This one is at the very top of my "to-read" pile.
Seraphina, Rachel Hartman
Dragons! Seraphina is a young adult novel about human/dragon conflict wherein the dragons are sentient and eminently rational. Hartman cited Vulcans and a desire really to explore what a society based on individual rationality above all else would look like as part of her inspiration. She also reportedly listened to Italian polyphony and Breton bagpipe rock while she was writing. If she can put together a sentence, this basically cannot fail to be awesome, right?
Les Misérables, Victor Hugo
Doorstop-reads don't scare me off, exactly, but I'm often not in the mood to read them--usually because I have so many things I want to read now, now, now that I have a hard time committing so much reading time to one thing. But lately I find myself aspiring to a lot of chunkster reads all at once. Anna Karenina, The Forsyte Saga, War and Peace. And Les Mis calls to me more than any other. I'm not sure why (this notion predates the release of the recent movie, which I haven't seen. Actually, I've never seen any interpretation of the book.). Epic storytelling, tragic heroes, historical bits--all up my street. Or maybe it's just winter.
On the Map: A Mind-Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks, Simon Garfield
Oh, how I do love maps! World maps, fantasy maps, topography maps, ancient maps. I can just stare at a good one for yonks. So here's a book for me. On the Map talks history of maps and map-making, how maps shape our understanding of the world, maps in popular culture. I suspect this will be a book anyone with a map in her hall of the surrounding country "with all her favourite walks marked on it in red ink" will find fascinating.
Previous Editions of Packing for a Reading Retreat:
Volume III
Volume II
Volume I
New to Me
tiny beautiful things: Advice on love and life from Dear Sugar, Cheryl Strayed
If you don't know about Dear Sugar and The Rumpus, you ought. The Rumpus is an online magazine with reviews, essays, interviews and so on--often about and by people you want to hear from and likely won't anywhere else. And Dear Sugar is their advice column. And tiny beautiful things is a collection of those columns. This ain't Dear Abby I'm talking about with one or two paragraphs of advice anyone with a brain and more than a decade or two of living behind them could give you (not that Dear Abby isn't usually right on the money); Sugar's responses are full-blown personal essays in response to her reader's questions, which themselves are often longer than an entire typical newspaper advice column and and are frequently heartrending. Dear Sugar is less advice about what to do about something and more an invitation to contemplate what it means to be human and to discover how to be better at it. This one is at the very top of my "to-read" pile.
Seraphina, Rachel Hartman
Dragons! Seraphina is a young adult novel about human/dragon conflict wherein the dragons are sentient and eminently rational. Hartman cited Vulcans and a desire really to explore what a society based on individual rationality above all else would look like as part of her inspiration. She also reportedly listened to Italian polyphony and Breton bagpipe rock while she was writing. If she can put together a sentence, this basically cannot fail to be awesome, right?
Les Misérables, Victor Hugo
Doorstop-reads don't scare me off, exactly, but I'm often not in the mood to read them--usually because I have so many things I want to read now, now, now that I have a hard time committing so much reading time to one thing. But lately I find myself aspiring to a lot of chunkster reads all at once. Anna Karenina, The Forsyte Saga, War and Peace. And Les Mis calls to me more than any other. I'm not sure why (this notion predates the release of the recent movie, which I haven't seen. Actually, I've never seen any interpretation of the book.). Epic storytelling, tragic heroes, historical bits--all up my street. Or maybe it's just winter.
On the Map: A Mind-Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks, Simon Garfield
Oh, how I do love maps! World maps, fantasy maps, topography maps, ancient maps. I can just stare at a good one for yonks. So here's a book for me. On the Map talks history of maps and map-making, how maps shape our understanding of the world, maps in popular culture. I suspect this will be a book anyone with a map in her hall of the surrounding country "with all her favourite walks marked on it in red ink" will find fascinating.
Previous Editions of Packing for a Reading Retreat:
Volume III
Volume II
Volume I
Wednesday, December 5, 2012
On Heirs and History
I am not yet tired of hearing about the pregnancy of the Duchess of Cambridge, but I am
tired of hearing people moan about how they don't want to hear about
it. It's been only two days, and I am already blisteringly weary of
dismissals of the news: "Who cares?" and "Just another celebrity
pregnancy media frenzy." Sorry. Tisn't.
I will grant that many are far too wrapped up in the lives of celebrities, and the hysteria some Brits show over the Royals can sometimes seem over-the-top and bewildering. I hope (probably in vain) that the Duke and Duchess can live out her pregnancy in some kind of normalcy (and in health--that the Duchess has been hospitalized for hyperemesis gravidarum is a cause for some concern), but there is no escaping the fact that she, her unborn child, and her husband are walking history. That is a future monarch she is carrying there, and questions of the wisdom and feasibility of the continuation of a monarchy in Great Britain aside (that's a topic for another time), the pending birth of a future monarch is a big deal.
Not as big a deal as it would have been four, or even one, hundred years ago, but a big deal still. Whatever one's opinion about the royal family, there is no denying that who they are and what they do is considered to be top news by millions: it is estimated that some 300 million people watched Prince William and Catherine Middleton's wedding in April 2011, 1.2 million people lined the royal pageant route on Queen Elizabeth's Diamond Jubilee and 14.7 million watched the Diamond Jubilee Concert in June 2012, and 10 million people a year in Britain alone have tuned into the Queen's annual Christmas Speech in recent years).* The members of the House of Windsor fascinate their subjects (even while they and the royal system which they embody may infuriate some of their subjects as well), and, if interviews with some of those who come out to line The Mall during celebrations such as Royal Weddings and Jubilees are any indication, their service to the Commonwealth engenders loyalty, admiration, and gratitude in many. That being the case, the birth of a child who will change the line of succession and thus change the future face of the British monarchy is certainly newsworthy.
But what is infinitely more compelling to me, what has me excited to hear about this pregnancy, is the sense of history that comes with this news. So much of Britain's history rests on who sat on the throne and who could or could not produce a legitimate successor, and while the political ramifications of not producing an heir are less dire now than they have been in Britain's past, the event of Prince William's marriage and Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge's, subsequent pregnancy connects us to that past. I have always thought that the British seem to be more aware of their history during their day-to day lives than we are--a result, perhaps, of having a national figure who is a living, breathing link to hundreds of years of royal and political history. The royal family we see today--Queen Elizabeth, Prince Charles, Prince William, and, of course, all the rest of the Queen's children and grandchildren--are a result and a reminder of hundreds of years of history. The current Queen's father gave a rousing speech at the start of WWII that helped unite a country under threat; her uncle was at the heart of a scandal that tested the relationship between the monarch and parliament; her grandfather ruled during WWI, her great-grandfather had a period named after him (Edwardian), her great-great grandmother, too (you might have heard of it). When we watch The King's Speech and get swept up in the story of that man's life and the history he lived, is it not marvelous to realize that the dignified woman we see celebrating sixty years on the throne is his daughter? Or to think, when we see that episode of Doctor Who with Queen Victoria that plays on the history of her family, that that story (in more realistic terms, perhaps) is still being told?
Millions of people the world over can do this, too, can trace their ancestry back hundreds of years, can point to the historical events their families influenced or were a part of. And history, after all, is made up not just of the names and deeds everyone knows but of the names and deeds no one knows. But the children of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge will be the next step in a part of history that we can see, and that is just mind-bendingly brilliant. To think that these children will be the direct descendents of people who stare at us out of black and white plates in our history books; to realize that the past isn't dead, that, in fact, it walks about, living, breathing, falling in love, having children; to be reminded of this is simply grand.
And we Americans, who are so unfailingly interested in trying to pull the beliefs and attitudes of our founding fathers into the present, who are fascinated by the complex histories of our own important ruling familes (the Adamses, the Kennedys, the Bushes), and who have a history of the family Bible with its carefully filled out family tree at the center, should have no trouble at all understanding why the impending birth of the great-great-great-great-great grandchild of a figure of such national and international historical import would be breaking news.
*The population of Britain in 2010 was ~62 million, meaning about 16% of the population watched the Queen's Christmas Speech. By contrast, about 37.8 million people watched President Obama's 2011 State of the Union Speech, or about 12% of the US population. These comparisons are not strictly one-to-one (I don't mean to equate the President of the USA's State of the Union Address and the Queen's Christmas Speech; they do not serve the same function), but the point that people care about the royals is adequately made, I think.
**Also, a nod to Jane Murray's The Kings and Queens of England, which is always my go-to for sorting who-came-after-who and who-was-who's-father.
I will grant that many are far too wrapped up in the lives of celebrities, and the hysteria some Brits show over the Royals can sometimes seem over-the-top and bewildering. I hope (probably in vain) that the Duke and Duchess can live out her pregnancy in some kind of normalcy (and in health--that the Duchess has been hospitalized for hyperemesis gravidarum is a cause for some concern), but there is no escaping the fact that she, her unborn child, and her husband are walking history. That is a future monarch she is carrying there, and questions of the wisdom and feasibility of the continuation of a monarchy in Great Britain aside (that's a topic for another time), the pending birth of a future monarch is a big deal.
Not as big a deal as it would have been four, or even one, hundred years ago, but a big deal still. Whatever one's opinion about the royal family, there is no denying that who they are and what they do is considered to be top news by millions: it is estimated that some 300 million people watched Prince William and Catherine Middleton's wedding in April 2011, 1.2 million people lined the royal pageant route on Queen Elizabeth's Diamond Jubilee and 14.7 million watched the Diamond Jubilee Concert in June 2012, and 10 million people a year in Britain alone have tuned into the Queen's annual Christmas Speech in recent years).* The members of the House of Windsor fascinate their subjects (even while they and the royal system which they embody may infuriate some of their subjects as well), and, if interviews with some of those who come out to line The Mall during celebrations such as Royal Weddings and Jubilees are any indication, their service to the Commonwealth engenders loyalty, admiration, and gratitude in many. That being the case, the birth of a child who will change the line of succession and thus change the future face of the British monarchy is certainly newsworthy.
But what is infinitely more compelling to me, what has me excited to hear about this pregnancy, is the sense of history that comes with this news. So much of Britain's history rests on who sat on the throne and who could or could not produce a legitimate successor, and while the political ramifications of not producing an heir are less dire now than they have been in Britain's past, the event of Prince William's marriage and Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge's, subsequent pregnancy connects us to that past. I have always thought that the British seem to be more aware of their history during their day-to day lives than we are--a result, perhaps, of having a national figure who is a living, breathing link to hundreds of years of royal and political history. The royal family we see today--Queen Elizabeth, Prince Charles, Prince William, and, of course, all the rest of the Queen's children and grandchildren--are a result and a reminder of hundreds of years of history. The current Queen's father gave a rousing speech at the start of WWII that helped unite a country under threat; her uncle was at the heart of a scandal that tested the relationship between the monarch and parliament; her grandfather ruled during WWI, her great-grandfather had a period named after him (Edwardian), her great-great grandmother, too (you might have heard of it). When we watch The King's Speech and get swept up in the story of that man's life and the history he lived, is it not marvelous to realize that the dignified woman we see celebrating sixty years on the throne is his daughter? Or to think, when we see that episode of Doctor Who with Queen Victoria that plays on the history of her family, that that story (in more realistic terms, perhaps) is still being told?
Millions of people the world over can do this, too, can trace their ancestry back hundreds of years, can point to the historical events their families influenced or were a part of. And history, after all, is made up not just of the names and deeds everyone knows but of the names and deeds no one knows. But the children of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge will be the next step in a part of history that we can see, and that is just mind-bendingly brilliant. To think that these children will be the direct descendents of people who stare at us out of black and white plates in our history books; to realize that the past isn't dead, that, in fact, it walks about, living, breathing, falling in love, having children; to be reminded of this is simply grand.
And we Americans, who are so unfailingly interested in trying to pull the beliefs and attitudes of our founding fathers into the present, who are fascinated by the complex histories of our own important ruling familes (the Adamses, the Kennedys, the Bushes), and who have a history of the family Bible with its carefully filled out family tree at the center, should have no trouble at all understanding why the impending birth of the great-great-great-great-great grandchild of a figure of such national and international historical import would be breaking news.
*The population of Britain in 2010 was ~62 million, meaning about 16% of the population watched the Queen's Christmas Speech. By contrast, about 37.8 million people watched President Obama's 2011 State of the Union Speech, or about 12% of the US population. These comparisons are not strictly one-to-one (I don't mean to equate the President of the USA's State of the Union Address and the Queen's Christmas Speech; they do not serve the same function), but the point that people care about the royals is adequately made, I think.
**Also, a nod to Jane Murray's The Kings and Queens of England, which is always my go-to for sorting who-came-after-who and who-was-who's-father.
Thursday, November 29, 2012
Book Review: Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell
A fascinating novel, mostly made so by its intriguing structure and deft handling of many writing styles. Cloud Atlas
consists of six different narratives, each taking place at a different
time in history (and some in the future), dealing with different
characters, and employing different styles and methods of narration. The
novel begins with the narrative furthest back in time (call it
Narrative A), continues with the next narrative in chronological
succession (Narrative B), and keeps going through its several narratives
until it arrives at Narrative F, then works back in time through each
narrative once again. So the structure looks something like this:
ABCDEFEDCBA. Eventually it becomes apparent that there are connections
among these seemingly separate narratives, and Mitchell's skill in
handling this structure becomes increasingly clear as he works his way
back down his narrative ladder (on the EDCBA side, if you will). Working
the hints of connections into the first half of the novel strikes me as
something not overly difficult; backing out through the second half of
the narrative and picking up all those disparate threads to make the
whole create sense and answer questions seems like it must have been
mind-bogglingly difficult. For manipulation of this structure, for
making it work, I give Mitchell all the credit in the world. His
skill at working so well within so many different styles is also
remarkable. He succeeds, as well, in making the reader care about each
of his narratives, about all of his characters, despite wrenching her
away from each narrative just as it is getting really good and asking
her to invest in yet another scenario.
I came away from Cloud Atlas impressed by Mitchell's writing and his ability to reel one into a story and wowed by his handle on structure. But in the end I was never sure what all of that structural whizzbang was for (beyond being an incredible feat in and of itself). I'm not entirely sure what the novel means to say about the interconnectedness of people and events or about our ability (or inability?) to recognize those connections. Without that understanding I was left a bit befuddled. Which is not to say that I think this isn't a book worth reading. I think it is. There's enough here that is satisfying to outweigh that discontent in the end. And the novel avoids feeling like an experiment which succeeds technically but fails to tap into the emotional life of the reader. The novel is an amazing achievement, if not a wholly satisfying one. But absolutely worth the read, even if only to marvel at how Mitchell works that ABCDEFEDCBA structure. Seriously.
This review originally appeared on my LibraryThing account.
I came away from Cloud Atlas impressed by Mitchell's writing and his ability to reel one into a story and wowed by his handle on structure. But in the end I was never sure what all of that structural whizzbang was for (beyond being an incredible feat in and of itself). I'm not entirely sure what the novel means to say about the interconnectedness of people and events or about our ability (or inability?) to recognize those connections. Without that understanding I was left a bit befuddled. Which is not to say that I think this isn't a book worth reading. I think it is. There's enough here that is satisfying to outweigh that discontent in the end. And the novel avoids feeling like an experiment which succeeds technically but fails to tap into the emotional life of the reader. The novel is an amazing achievement, if not a wholly satisfying one. But absolutely worth the read, even if only to marvel at how Mitchell works that ABCDEFEDCBA structure. Seriously.
This review originally appeared on my LibraryThing account.
Thursday, October 18, 2012
Tales from the Library Book Sale
The library I frequented the last time we lived in Roanoke is closed now. The building still stands there, across from the post office, looking sad and empty and alone. I will miss it--its fiction aisles were just the right width apart for proper browsing and none of the books were beyond my (admittedly short) reach. The fiction collection was large enough for one to be assured of finding something good to read but not so big as to be overwhelming. But! There is a new (I think new) library not more than a few extra minutes' drive from our apartment (we are living now in effectively the same place we did before), and it is big without being impersonal and there's wood and lots of seating and many of the librarians from the old closed branch work there now. I was happy to see those same faces again, though I will miss, too, seeing them go about their business in that old branch, which was small enough that it felt (pleasantly) as if the building really were their domain. This new building sort of hovers over everyone; I think the librarians belong to it now, rather than the other way round.
I got a new library card in short order (much easier than getting a new driver's license, as it should be), picked up a volunteer form, and asked for the quick standing tour. New books and DVDs behind you, Children's thataway. Fiction, nonfiction, and quiet study upstairs. Oh, and we're having the last day of our fall book sale down that hallway in the meeting room to your left.
I had seen some notice of that book sale on the website, but thought I had missed it, thought it had ended at the weekend. How serendipitous to have idled out to the library on just this day, on this day when I had planned to do nothing more than laundry (which, incidentally, languishes still). I made my way to the sale, giving myself a stern talking-to as I went. "You will be restrained," I insisted. "Money is a little tight, and, anyway, you couldn't fit more than two or three more books into the apartment, and then only if you get the cats to teach you that thing they do with parallel dimensions." As luck would have it, the sale was "fill a box for $3" on this last day, so the money problem was well in hand, and the books were so well-picked-over after five days of sales that taking home a box-full of books I actually had any interest in would have been a challenge. But I did manage an impressive and exciting haul of five books, all in excellent shape.
The first treasure I found was a near-pristine paperback copy of Island of the Blue Dolphins from the seventies. Not worth anything, I'm sure, but I almost invariably like better the covers of children's and young adult books from around the time I would have been the right age to read them than the covers they put on those same books today. And somehow I've never managed to read Island of the Blue Dolphins, so I considered my book-sale foray a success within minutes of browsing its long tables of collapsing rows of still unwanted tomes. Next I found The Red Tent, which I have almost taken home at full price from book shops several times and of which I am somewhat wary. But people whose opinions I trust have recommended it to me, so I tucked it under my arm along with Island and carried on, figuring if there ever was going to be a time, at $3 a box, now was probably it.
Somewhere about a third of the way through the fiction, a nice-looking elderly gentleman browsing on the other side of the table from me tapped his fore-finger on the spine of a hard cover standing on its edge in the middle of the table. "If you're looking for a good one, that one," he said.
I smiled. It was a Jean M. Auel novel, a Clan of the Cave Bear installment from somewhere in the middle of the series. I have Clan of the Cave Bear, and I've been told that it's best to stop with that one.
"It's a whole series," my new friend said, pulling the book up and handing it to me. "Prehistoric stuff."
"Oh? How interesting," I said, or something similar, as I took the book and pretended to look through its opening pages. I was caught off-guard by the recommendation and couldn't summon the words to express my lack of interest without coming off rude.
He turned away, but just as I was about to return the book to its row, he turned back. I ruffled a few pages, trying to look intrigued. "It's speculative, too. Of course it would have to be, because no one knows what happened in prehistoric times."
Was this a joke? Some kind of religious remark? Or just a statement of fact? I smiled again, and gave a little laugh. "Thanks," I said, probably at the wrong point in the exchange all together. He smiled and nodded, and, this time, really did move on. I scurried away to the nonfiction tables, leaving Clan of the Cave Bear IV behind.
I found there something called The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination, which seems like it can't fail to be right up my street, and a Bill Bryson we somehow managed not to have yet, I'm a Stranger Here Myself. I've peeked into this one already, shortly after I got home, and nearly choked on my afternoon snack laughing at a chapter called "Rules for Living." ("11. Any electronic clock or other timing device on which the time is set by holding down a button and scrolling laboriously through the minutes and hours is illegal. . . . 19. In office buildings and retail premises in which entry is through double doors and one of those doors is locked for no reason, the door must bear a large sign saying: 'This door is locked for no reason.'") And finally, just as I was about to pay for my finds and make tracks (upstairs to see the fiction and nonfiction stacks, where I found, my to my puzzlement, a copy of Dante's The Divine Comedy on the nonfiction shelves), I saw, in a sorry little heap of bedraggled, forlorn-looking nonfic with titles like "The Do-It Yourself Guide to Plumbing" and "Understanding Baby's Diseases Made Easy," a book called The Pencil, written by Henry Petroski, whose The Book on the Bookshelf I read with great delight a year or so back. That someone could be so fascinated by this ingenious little writing utensil to write a whole book about it, and that some other someone could be so impressed by the first someone's enthusiasm to agree to publish the thing, makes me uncommonly happy. And that it sat there, waiting, patiently, amongst such dismal fare, is one of the best arguments for a library book sale I can think of. It is certainly my favorite find of the afternoon.
And so, only five books, and only three dollars spent! Restraint, achieved, I say. But now, where to put them? So far I've had no luck at all convincing the cats to give up the secret to that thing they do with parallel dimensions.
I got a new library card in short order (much easier than getting a new driver's license, as it should be), picked up a volunteer form, and asked for the quick standing tour. New books and DVDs behind you, Children's thataway. Fiction, nonfiction, and quiet study upstairs. Oh, and we're having the last day of our fall book sale down that hallway in the meeting room to your left.
I had seen some notice of that book sale on the website, but thought I had missed it, thought it had ended at the weekend. How serendipitous to have idled out to the library on just this day, on this day when I had planned to do nothing more than laundry (which, incidentally, languishes still). I made my way to the sale, giving myself a stern talking-to as I went. "You will be restrained," I insisted. "Money is a little tight, and, anyway, you couldn't fit more than two or three more books into the apartment, and then only if you get the cats to teach you that thing they do with parallel dimensions." As luck would have it, the sale was "fill a box for $3" on this last day, so the money problem was well in hand, and the books were so well-picked-over after five days of sales that taking home a box-full of books I actually had any interest in would have been a challenge. But I did manage an impressive and exciting haul of five books, all in excellent shape.
The first treasure I found was a near-pristine paperback copy of Island of the Blue Dolphins from the seventies. Not worth anything, I'm sure, but I almost invariably like better the covers of children's and young adult books from around the time I would have been the right age to read them than the covers they put on those same books today. And somehow I've never managed to read Island of the Blue Dolphins, so I considered my book-sale foray a success within minutes of browsing its long tables of collapsing rows of still unwanted tomes. Next I found The Red Tent, which I have almost taken home at full price from book shops several times and of which I am somewhat wary. But people whose opinions I trust have recommended it to me, so I tucked it under my arm along with Island and carried on, figuring if there ever was going to be a time, at $3 a box, now was probably it.
Somewhere about a third of the way through the fiction, a nice-looking elderly gentleman browsing on the other side of the table from me tapped his fore-finger on the spine of a hard cover standing on its edge in the middle of the table. "If you're looking for a good one, that one," he said.
I smiled. It was a Jean M. Auel novel, a Clan of the Cave Bear installment from somewhere in the middle of the series. I have Clan of the Cave Bear, and I've been told that it's best to stop with that one.
"It's a whole series," my new friend said, pulling the book up and handing it to me. "Prehistoric stuff."
"Oh? How interesting," I said, or something similar, as I took the book and pretended to look through its opening pages. I was caught off-guard by the recommendation and couldn't summon the words to express my lack of interest without coming off rude.
He turned away, but just as I was about to return the book to its row, he turned back. I ruffled a few pages, trying to look intrigued. "It's speculative, too. Of course it would have to be, because no one knows what happened in prehistoric times."
Was this a joke? Some kind of religious remark? Or just a statement of fact? I smiled again, and gave a little laugh. "Thanks," I said, probably at the wrong point in the exchange all together. He smiled and nodded, and, this time, really did move on. I scurried away to the nonfiction tables, leaving Clan of the Cave Bear IV behind.
I found there something called The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination, which seems like it can't fail to be right up my street, and a Bill Bryson we somehow managed not to have yet, I'm a Stranger Here Myself. I've peeked into this one already, shortly after I got home, and nearly choked on my afternoon snack laughing at a chapter called "Rules for Living." ("11. Any electronic clock or other timing device on which the time is set by holding down a button and scrolling laboriously through the minutes and hours is illegal. . . . 19. In office buildings and retail premises in which entry is through double doors and one of those doors is locked for no reason, the door must bear a large sign saying: 'This door is locked for no reason.'") And finally, just as I was about to pay for my finds and make tracks (upstairs to see the fiction and nonfiction stacks, where I found, my to my puzzlement, a copy of Dante's The Divine Comedy on the nonfiction shelves), I saw, in a sorry little heap of bedraggled, forlorn-looking nonfic with titles like "The Do-It Yourself Guide to Plumbing" and "Understanding Baby's Diseases Made Easy," a book called The Pencil, written by Henry Petroski, whose The Book on the Bookshelf I read with great delight a year or so back. That someone could be so fascinated by this ingenious little writing utensil to write a whole book about it, and that some other someone could be so impressed by the first someone's enthusiasm to agree to publish the thing, makes me uncommonly happy. And that it sat there, waiting, patiently, amongst such dismal fare, is one of the best arguments for a library book sale I can think of. It is certainly my favorite find of the afternoon.
And so, only five books, and only three dollars spent! Restraint, achieved, I say. But now, where to put them? So far I've had no luck at all convincing the cats to give up the secret to that thing they do with parallel dimensions.
Monday, October 15, 2012
Book Review: Little House in the Big Woods and Little House on the Prairie, Laura Ingalls Wilder
Little House in the Big Woods
I recently read a review of the whole series of Little House books on the occasion of their being released in a two-volume set by the Library of America. These books were great favorites of mine as a child, but unlike many other childhood favorites, they have remained hidden away in the attic, unrevisited in my adult years. Reviewer Katherine A. Powers's discussion of the books' descriptions of frontier life and of the darkness inherent in it made me long to read these old favorites again. So I trotted off and snagged a few of them in paperback, my attic dwarf being unwilling to stand on her head and paw through boxes to find my childhood copies (which I once mutilated somewhat cruelly (by folding and crinkling the pages) in an effort to make the books look "old"; attic dwarf, in a slightly different role, was none too pleased with my efforts).
I remember that Little House in the Big Woods was not my favorite of the books (I think that was On the Banks of Plum Creek, but I won't be fully sure until I get to it), but gosh do I remember it well. I anticipated every incident, every illustration, even some turns of phrase. I started leafing ahead to see "How far til the stump that looked like a bear?" or "When do we get to the naughty boy and the bees?" Again, unlike other childhood favorites I have read again when grown up, I have little or no recollection of reading these, which makes me think I read them (or they were read to me) when I was so young that they just sort of became part of my own personal idiomythology (that's not a word, surely; surely it should be?). In any case, they were a delight to read now, and not just for the nostalgia. The prose is very simple, but there's often something poetic about it, and despite the episodic nature of the story (there's no plot beyond detailing how people stayed alive and happy in the big woods of Wisconsin in the 1870s), the book was practically a page-turner for me. Incidents that were mostly just adventures for me when I was a child now are tinged with a darkness that did not occur to me then. When Pa is away and Ma and Laura find a hungry bear inside the barn fence, what if the bear had killed Ma? What happens to a seven-year-old, a five-year-old, and a two-year old in the woods, alone, in winter with no way of contacting anyone? The reality of the thing is more real to me now, I suppose is a good way of putting it, and it engenders a respect for the courage of the people who lived these sorts of lives that just knowing that such a life was hard never could. This was fascinating reading, and I'm already well into the next one--or, the third one, really (I'm skipping Farmer Boy for now)--where I expect I may run headlong into some attitudes about native peoples which is going to challenge my fuzzy delight in rediscovering these books, but we shall see.
Little House on the Prairie
I didn't remember this one nearly as well as Little House in the Big Woods, but many of the incidents (and many of the illustrations) were familiar and welcome. I was struck in Big Woods by the ingenuity and courage of the settlers living on the frontiers in the 1870s; in Prairie I am no less impressed by those qualities, but the circumstances of the Ingalls family in this installment gives me the willies in a way that the realities of living in the Big Woods did not. Surely it is because I have always lived nestled among hills and under trees that the descriptions (and illustrations--maybe even especially the illustrations) of the wide open prairie and the notion of a house just plopped in the middle of all that space quite literally gives me the shivers. Do you know a person who must sit with his back to the wall in a restaurant because that open space behind him is discomfiting? That's how I feel about houses. They ought be backed up against the foot of a mountain or at the least tucked in a clearing with tall trees all around. I'm glad, I guess, that there are people who like that kind of open environment (both Pa and Laura in this book seem to take to the flat openness of the prairie particularly well) as not all of us can live at the foot of mountains--there just aren't enough of them. But I leave them to it.
The constant fear regarding encounters with restive Indians lent a sense of suspense to Prairie which was completely lacking in Big Woods. The fears I had about attitudes toward native peoples in this book were perhaps somewhat overblown. There is certainly othering going on here, and a fair amount of prejudice, but Laura (mostly) seems innocently fascinated by the Indians and Pa (though he definitely carries a nice load of white-settler-entitlement around with him) adopts a live-and-let-live attitude, talking his neighbors down from their fears on more than one occasion. Some passages made me squirm a bit, but keeping in mind the context in which the book was written and the time it recalls, and considering the perhaps more-enlightened-than-typical attitude of Pa, those passages weren't enough to ruin a series of childhood favorites. I would be fascinated, however, to read some articles delving into the portrayal of the native peoples in this book and providing some discussion of the political and historical situation. I'd particularly like to read some opinions on the scene where Laura becomes enchanted by an Indian baby with "hair . . . as black as a crow and its eyes . . . black as a night when no stars shine" and demands that Pa "get (her) that little Indian baby!" as well as on the fact that Pa's sense of morality when it comes to usurping the Indian land seems to stem directly from what the government says is okay. If Washington says the Indian Territory is open to the settlers then he's going to have his land and the Indians can go lump it. If they say not, then he'll move on. That the Indians are obviously living on the land and that they were clearly there first seems not to enter into it for him.
Pa, in fact (and to a somewhat lesser extent, Ma), has become one of the most interesting aspects of these books for me on these rereads. How does he know how to make a life on the prairie anyway? That he should be a competent frontiersman generally can be taken as a given since when we first meet him in Big Woods he's already been making a successful go at that kind of life for several years (at least). But how does he know what the specific dangers of the prairie are? And how to deal with them? As a child, I accepted Pa as the all-knowing performer of crafty miracles and protector of home and family (I knew men like that myself, after all), but as an adult I begin to want to see him as a real person and to question him and to suspect that sometimes his pioneer spirit endangers his family (a number of minor catastrophes in Prairie, which are presented as things from which Pa saves the day, are actually his fault). The question of what children know and what adults know and keep from the children, I think, is a central theme in this book, and one which probably sails right over the head of children readers (except for the few times when it is made explicit as part of the action). I count six instances in Prairie when the whole family is a hair's breadth away from a horrible death, and much of what is interesting to me here (beyond the details of the day-to-day business of staying alive, which is always fascinating) is how these two adults try to--and mostly succeed at--giving their children a happy life which is free from fear and dread.
These reviews originally appeared on my LibraryThing account here and here.
I recently read a review of the whole series of Little House books on the occasion of their being released in a two-volume set by the Library of America. These books were great favorites of mine as a child, but unlike many other childhood favorites, they have remained hidden away in the attic, unrevisited in my adult years. Reviewer Katherine A. Powers's discussion of the books' descriptions of frontier life and of the darkness inherent in it made me long to read these old favorites again. So I trotted off and snagged a few of them in paperback, my attic dwarf being unwilling to stand on her head and paw through boxes to find my childhood copies (which I once mutilated somewhat cruelly (by folding and crinkling the pages) in an effort to make the books look "old"; attic dwarf, in a slightly different role, was none too pleased with my efforts).
I remember that Little House in the Big Woods was not my favorite of the books (I think that was On the Banks of Plum Creek, but I won't be fully sure until I get to it), but gosh do I remember it well. I anticipated every incident, every illustration, even some turns of phrase. I started leafing ahead to see "How far til the stump that looked like a bear?" or "When do we get to the naughty boy and the bees?" Again, unlike other childhood favorites I have read again when grown up, I have little or no recollection of reading these, which makes me think I read them (or they were read to me) when I was so young that they just sort of became part of my own personal idiomythology (that's not a word, surely; surely it should be?). In any case, they were a delight to read now, and not just for the nostalgia. The prose is very simple, but there's often something poetic about it, and despite the episodic nature of the story (there's no plot beyond detailing how people stayed alive and happy in the big woods of Wisconsin in the 1870s), the book was practically a page-turner for me. Incidents that were mostly just adventures for me when I was a child now are tinged with a darkness that did not occur to me then. When Pa is away and Ma and Laura find a hungry bear inside the barn fence, what if the bear had killed Ma? What happens to a seven-year-old, a five-year-old, and a two-year old in the woods, alone, in winter with no way of contacting anyone? The reality of the thing is more real to me now, I suppose is a good way of putting it, and it engenders a respect for the courage of the people who lived these sorts of lives that just knowing that such a life was hard never could. This was fascinating reading, and I'm already well into the next one--or, the third one, really (I'm skipping Farmer Boy for now)--where I expect I may run headlong into some attitudes about native peoples which is going to challenge my fuzzy delight in rediscovering these books, but we shall see.
Little House on the Prairie
I didn't remember this one nearly as well as Little House in the Big Woods, but many of the incidents (and many of the illustrations) were familiar and welcome. I was struck in Big Woods by the ingenuity and courage of the settlers living on the frontiers in the 1870s; in Prairie I am no less impressed by those qualities, but the circumstances of the Ingalls family in this installment gives me the willies in a way that the realities of living in the Big Woods did not. Surely it is because I have always lived nestled among hills and under trees that the descriptions (and illustrations--maybe even especially the illustrations) of the wide open prairie and the notion of a house just plopped in the middle of all that space quite literally gives me the shivers. Do you know a person who must sit with his back to the wall in a restaurant because that open space behind him is discomfiting? That's how I feel about houses. They ought be backed up against the foot of a mountain or at the least tucked in a clearing with tall trees all around. I'm glad, I guess, that there are people who like that kind of open environment (both Pa and Laura in this book seem to take to the flat openness of the prairie particularly well) as not all of us can live at the foot of mountains--there just aren't enough of them. But I leave them to it.
The constant fear regarding encounters with restive Indians lent a sense of suspense to Prairie which was completely lacking in Big Woods. The fears I had about attitudes toward native peoples in this book were perhaps somewhat overblown. There is certainly othering going on here, and a fair amount of prejudice, but Laura (mostly) seems innocently fascinated by the Indians and Pa (though he definitely carries a nice load of white-settler-entitlement around with him) adopts a live-and-let-live attitude, talking his neighbors down from their fears on more than one occasion. Some passages made me squirm a bit, but keeping in mind the context in which the book was written and the time it recalls, and considering the perhaps more-enlightened-than-typical attitude of Pa, those passages weren't enough to ruin a series of childhood favorites. I would be fascinated, however, to read some articles delving into the portrayal of the native peoples in this book and providing some discussion of the political and historical situation. I'd particularly like to read some opinions on the scene where Laura becomes enchanted by an Indian baby with "hair . . . as black as a crow and its eyes . . . black as a night when no stars shine" and demands that Pa "get (her) that little Indian baby!" as well as on the fact that Pa's sense of morality when it comes to usurping the Indian land seems to stem directly from what the government says is okay. If Washington says the Indian Territory is open to the settlers then he's going to have his land and the Indians can go lump it. If they say not, then he'll move on. That the Indians are obviously living on the land and that they were clearly there first seems not to enter into it for him.
Pa, in fact (and to a somewhat lesser extent, Ma), has become one of the most interesting aspects of these books for me on these rereads. How does he know how to make a life on the prairie anyway? That he should be a competent frontiersman generally can be taken as a given since when we first meet him in Big Woods he's already been making a successful go at that kind of life for several years (at least). But how does he know what the specific dangers of the prairie are? And how to deal with them? As a child, I accepted Pa as the all-knowing performer of crafty miracles and protector of home and family (I knew men like that myself, after all), but as an adult I begin to want to see him as a real person and to question him and to suspect that sometimes his pioneer spirit endangers his family (a number of minor catastrophes in Prairie, which are presented as things from which Pa saves the day, are actually his fault). The question of what children know and what adults know and keep from the children, I think, is a central theme in this book, and one which probably sails right over the head of children readers (except for the few times when it is made explicit as part of the action). I count six instances in Prairie when the whole family is a hair's breadth away from a horrible death, and much of what is interesting to me here (beyond the details of the day-to-day business of staying alive, which is always fascinating) is how these two adults try to--and mostly succeed at--giving their children a happy life which is free from fear and dread.
These reviews originally appeared on my LibraryThing account here and here.
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