stuff i read 16 June 2021
Jun. 16th, 2021 10:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tabacoychanelK.D. Edwards, The Last Sun (2020) (The Tarot Sequence #1) Well, hamsterwoman sent this rec my way with the caveat “but the exiled scion and his soulbonded bodyguard (the two of whom accidentally adopt a traumatized teenager together!!) are not the endgame ship” and she was right. Why they were not the endgame ship is a head-scratcher to me. Otherwise this was a fast, fun romp with plenty of unique worldbuilding grace notes.
Holly Black, Black Heart (2012) (Curseworkers #3) The fuck was that ending? I mean, the way Cassel resolved his loyalties between his fam + the feds was SUPER satisfying, but i’m not sure why all the stuff with rando classmate blackmailing the dean of students was in there? Sam getting shot??? Barron dating Daneca I can actually kind of see, but that subplot needed to be fleshed out more. I was rooting harder for Cassel/Lila in this book than in the previous two (a low bar, I know, but it didn’t hurt that the sex scene nailed the yearning) and the moment when he thought she was gonna shoot him but she shot the FBI agent instead? Attagirl. I still wanna know what happened to the Resurrection Diamond though??? Holly can we have a prequel spinoff about this family doing heists.
Benjamin Rosenbaum, “All Those Guardians of Order and Clarity, None of Them Can Abide a Free Witch” (Lightspeed, Jul 2020) The plot was fine but what grabbed me was the distinctiveness of the narrative voice. The setting is reminiscent of Firefly in terms of being an Asian fusion!western (only considerably less Orientalist). It’s whet my appetite sufficiently I’m looking forward to his forthcoming novel The Unraveling
K.J. Parker, Devices and Desires (2005) (Engineer Trilogy #1) “You seem to have a remarkable grasp of human nature.” “I use the tools and materials available to me. If I can’t use steel, I have to use flesh instead.” The jacket copy had me believing it was a Count of Monte revenge story—but the more I read the less sympathy I had for Ziani Vaatzes, the engineer who is expelled from the Perpetual Republic for … doing heresy ig (they call it “improving on specification”). Vaatzes is sooooo smart that all his plans all come to fruition, which annoyed me because there was a boar hunt where I thought he’d messed up but it turns out getting himself gored by an angry boar was also part of The Plan. I then realized that Vaatzes is meant to be unsympathetic. The novel opens not with Vaatzes but with Valens. Valens is the heir to one of the many petty dukedoms that border the Republic. The Republic is light-years ahead of its neighbors economically, technologically, and militarily; much of the novel’s plot concerns how Vaatzes (who was head engineer of the ordnance factory) goes into exile and teaches the barbarians to build scorpions (the big set-piece at the end is a siege). But that’s just the plot. The actual point of the novel is that humans are much messier than machines. In that vein the character I cared most for was Miel Ducas, the aristocrat torn between his duty and his heart. I just want to end this with a representative quote and a big shoutout to KJ Parker’s research chops—sounds like she swallowed an entire library of books on medieval siege warfare:
The Republic is a vast and complex machine, powered by constitution and specification, with hundred of thousands of human cogs, gears, spindles, shafts, beams, arms, pawls, hands, keys, axles, cotters, manifolds, bearings, sears, pins, latches, flies, pistons, links, quills, leads, screws, drums and escapements, each performing in turn its specific operation.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah (2013) What is authenticity and how do we express it within the stifling straitjacket of modern life? Adichie as an author is incredibly impatient with incurious people, fake people. Appropriately for a book about race & immigration in the Obama era, it takes as its central metaphor the problem of black women’s hair. The first half of the novel keeps circling back to this primal scene of Ifemelu at this shady hair salon, and it’s poignant and hilarious and sad. It hit me how straight hair is the unmarked category the way “white/male/hetero” is the unmarked category. Every single decision an African woman makes about her hair, whether to wear it “natural” or “relaxed” or what kind of weave to get, is fraught with meaning. There’s NO WAY to opt-out of this decision matrix. When Ifemelu’s hair started literally falling out from relaxers I was like AAAA! This book read at times more like an anthropological survey than a novel—it was good it just didn’t feel that gripping. I had previously read Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, which is about the Biafran civil war where Americanah is about Nigerian expats in the US & UK, and that earlier novel shattered me while this one merely gave me lots of food for thought. There are so many sharp observations about how race works in both Nigeria and the USA, but Adichie’s central preoccupation seemed to be “damn I hope the world doesn’t dissolve into a ribbon of ironic nothingness and empty signifiers.” To take a tertiary character we meet towards the end of the novel for example, Doris’s besetting sin isn’t her snobbery its that she doesn’t sincerely care about even one (1) real thing. She’s a poseur. Ok but this book is funny as hell: “Her mother asked, ‘Is he a Christian?’ ‘No. He is a devil-worshipper.’ ‘Blood of Jesus!’ her mother shrieked. ‘Mummy, yes, he is a Christian,’ she said.” “‘Why were you waiting outside during mass?’ ‘All the bridesmaids had to wait outside because our dresses were indecent.’” And this on the appeal of blogging really got me: “Posting on the website was like giving testimony in church; the echoing roar of approval revived her.”
Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House (1959) A group of misfits gather to conduct Very Scientific Experiments in a hella haunted house. I can’t tell if they’re undergoing the messy but #relatable process of working out their interpersonal beef, or genuinely want to tear each other's entrails out?? Does what happens to Eleanor at the end happen because Eleanor is crazy, or the house made Eleanor crazy? Eleanor is such an unreliable narrator! This book isn’t body horror, it’s topographical horror—there’s a nameless ghastliness that inhabits not only the house but the text. 100% on-brand for Shirley Jackson.
Neal Shusterman, Thunderhead (Arc of a Scythe #2) (2018) Neal Shusterman sure knows how to end a book with a bang. I don’t think I breathed for the final 1/3 of this.
hp | Chaos is Come Again by Ashby & TheaterSM (Snape/Hermione, 334k) The OG Marriage Law fic!!! Hoo boy this story threw me for a loop. Multiple loops. I don’t even ship this pairing. I stumbled on this 300k fic from two thousand and fucking four on account of a Rec Center rec. I found it exceedingly dry to start. I dipped in and out of it over the course of a few months, and I kept wondering: Am I even supposed to be rooting for these two, either individually or as a romantic pairing? Hermione and Snape get hitched as part of a plan to foil a Ministry of Magic masterplot to Do Eugenics In Britain. But they’re both sooooo unlikeable! Snape especially is so OOC he’s unrecognizable. What compelled me to keep going was the way it depicted two adults who were bad at the “communication” aspect of their personal relationships; who were highly competent at their respective jobs but who were forced to tangle with various convoluted bureaucracies. That struggle really resonated. By the time I got to the Othello quote from which the fic takes its title—about 5 pages from the end—I did not want it to be over. It’s a very satisfying fic, even if it’s not a romantically satisfying fic (and it is quite dry! I don’t withdraw that criticism! it has enough heart to make up for it, is all).
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (1981) Philosophers choose their words with extreme care; this makes their syntax clunky, but wards off even the minutest ambiguity. So, Alisdair MacIntyre wrote a book about ethics. It’s a book that’s been reprinted (checks copyright page) FIVE TIMES since it came out forty years ago. In it, he calls out the modern (i.e., post-Enlightenment) practice of ethics as essentially hollow. This is because with liberal individualism on the ascendant we’ve spent the past 300 years worrying about what “the right thing” is for an individual moral actor to do. This, according to MacIntyre, is standing the question on its head. You as an individual have no clear way of weighing competing moral claims. You have to first define what a human life is for:
I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’ … What the good life is for a fifth-century Athenian general will not be the same as what it was for a medieval nun or a 17th-century farmer…we all approach our circumstances as bearers of a particular social identity. I am someone’s son or daughter, someone else’s cousin or uncle; I am a citizen of this or that city, a member of this or that guild of profession; I belong to this clan, that tribe, this nation.
I really like that MacIntyre grounds ethical inquiry in the particular rather than the universal. History and context inform our moral reasoning; this should be an uncontroversial observation. MacIntyre argues that Aristotle’s teleological philosophy was, unlike his natural science, not actually bunk, and when we (moderns) discarded the former along with the latter that was a mistake. After all “teleology” just means people are motivated by an ultimate goal or cause of some kind. That goal is to live a good life. This is why MacIntyre talks about the “unity of the virtues”—because you can’t look at “loyalty” or “industriousness” in insolation, divorced from the social context in which these qualities help or hinder individuals who possess them.
One section towards the end that struck a particular chord with me was MacIntyre’s take on two 20th century philosophical giants, John Rawls and Robert Nozick. Rawls (of “the veil of ignorance” fame) is broadly of the left and Nozick of the libertarian right. But in both Nozick’s and Rawls’s accounts, individuals are primary and society secondary—society is apparently composed of a bunch of shipwrecked strangers who have to formulate rules to govern themselves! In the real world, our social bonds precede our selfhood. And that is MacIntyre’s central insight.
John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974) (George Smiley #5) A year ago George Smiley was maneuvered into taking an abrupt early retirement from the British intelligence agency to which he has given his life. Now he is called up again for one final mission: to flush out a mole because in the espionage trade you’re less worried about the other side’s duplicity and more about your own. My biggest takeaway was: You can write about British imperialism without acting as some sort of booster for British imperialism. Hell, I wouldn’t even say this book is anti-imperialist but at least it interrogates imperialism instead of just assuming/ignoring it: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori is a sentiment upon which much derision is justly heaped. This book has ABSOLUTELY NO RIGHT to be as achingly beautiful as it is; it’s a spy novel ffs, it throws you right in the deep end with paragraph upon paragraph of trade jargon. And yet it manages to marry the crisis of plot and character, and to make sitting in a room sifting through dusty documents the most riveting activity in the world. Three-quarters of the book is Smiley traipsing around the country calling on witnesses and letting their testimonials unspool mostly without interruption. There’s mountains of irrelevant asides, and yet the tension was so high I thought I was gonna fall out of my seat. The saving grace of this novel is that it starts and ends with Jim. Jim isn’t the main character—Smiley isn’t even the main character, I’d say Bill is the mc if anyone is—but Jim’s journey is the emotional core of it. John le Carré is a fucking MASTER and I cannot wait to read more of his work.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and the Markets (2004) This was an easy, breezy, chatty book that was written off-the-cuff and with a great deal of enjoyment (his attitude to footnotes is ‘fuck footnotes’). Taleb is a day trader and a philosopher who clearly finds one of those roles (the latter) way more rewarding than the other. This isn’t a book about probability—it’s a book about how the human brain is inured to making accurate probabilistic assessments. We were not built to separate the signal from the noise, we were built to identify patterns even when there aren’t any. And there’s no cutting our emotions out of the decision-making loop because newsflash: we need our emotions to function, otherwise we’d be stymied by the most basic optimization problems (“should i get out of bed today”). What I like about Taleb is that he’s upfront about his biases. On twitter he has a reputation as an iconoclast who takes it on the chin from “both sides,” and while I would quibble with that characterization—I think he thinks there’s no such thing as society, just a collection of individuals on a desert island—I really like him because he’s open to reexamining his own priors, which is more than I can say of 9 out to 10 people I know.
Stephen King, The Stand (1978) Stephen King is incisive when it comes to writing individuals but I trust him less when it comes to big-picture macro-level societal stuff (the opposite of how I feel about Kim Stanley Robinson). This is a post-plague apocalyptic showdown between the forces of good and evil, featuring a climax where our heroes literally embark on a forty-day-forty-night vision-quest in the desert. It’s a landmark book. It’s long but not dense—I got away with skimming some of the more ponderous scenes—but he does not pull his punches: every single major character death hit the mark. Larry Underwood and Harold Lauder were the two most interesting characters for me, because they start out in similar places: in the pre-plague world they’re both petty, selfish but not irredeemable people. Nobody’s irredeemable. It’s the choices you make along the way that define you (and that led Harold to the Dark Side and Larry to the Light), and I know that’s the tritest aphorism ever but trust me. Trust Stephen King. He really plays to his strengths in this book, the sense of impending doom was like a fog that settled over my brain and would not release me from its grip.
Leigh Bardugo, Rule of Wolves (2021) (Nikolai Duology #2) I read this book a month ago and I remember literally nothing of note from it. It was pleasant to nip over to Ketterdamn and glimpse Kaz, Jesper and Wylan for five minutes but other than that the only POV i really looked forward to was Nina’s. Nikolai was (understandably!) subdued and lacking his usual acerbic wit and the resultant narrative was dulllll. Do better, Leigh.
Naomi Novik, The Last Graduate (2021) (Scholomance #2) If Book 1 was El vs her classmates and Book 2 is El vs the school, Book 3 is shaping up to be….El vs the world? BRING IT. So I was talking tomeretricula about this book and she said “Naomi didn’t really expand upon her thesis from the first book” and I agree, only I don’t think I’d frame it so negatively. It’s a pretty strong thesis. To wit: Humans were made for cooperation, not competition. What I would fault Naomi for is introducing a spate of new characters instead of building on El’s existing relationships with her girl-gang/ot3. Individually all the new characters are cool. But the story as a whole would’ve benefited from a deeper exploration of those existing relationships (I except Chloe from this criticism—El’s friendship with Chloe is allowed to flourish). Anyway if you thought Book 1 ended on a nail-biter of a cliffhanger you ain’t seen nothing yet.
Seanan McGuire, A Killing Frost (2020) (October Daye #14) Hurray another Simon book! It doesn’t hit quite as hard as the previous Simon book (#11, The Brightest Fell) because the cast has grown so big and unwieldy that everybody from the Luidaeg to Toby’s-childhood-bff’s-daughter has a role to play. My biggest beef with this series is that I have to wade through too much plot to get to the emotionally raw live-wire of a nerve at the heart of it. It’d help if I gave a hoot about the main pairing, which I don’t lol (I don’t care for either Toby or Tybalt individually either). Lord knows how I made it fourteen books in…
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Date: 2021-06-22 01:23 am (UTC)Glad you had fun with The Last Sun -- isn't it super Amber-y in its aesthetic? Having read the two books and the novella and maybe a short story or two, I still don't understand why we need anyone except Brand and Rune, but also I appreciate that the Brand & Rune relationship continues to be the most important one, actual love interest notwithstanding. I figured you'd appreciate the us-against-the-world codependency of those two idiots anyway :)
but i’m not sure why all the stuff with rando classmate blackmailing the dean of students was in there? Sam getting shot???
I don't remember either of those things, which lends credence to your stance that they were pointless and unnecessary. I do think this book resigned me to Cassel/Lila, even though I'm still basically just here for Cassel's dysfunctional family, and maybe Sam and Daneca as Ron and Hermione subversion. Which is all to say, yes, I'd be 100% on board with a prequel spinoff about the Sharpe family doing crime/heists.
Firefly comparison makes me curious to check out the Rosenbaum.
Topograpical horror is such a neat way to characterize a subgenre!
I am also very curious to read The Last Graduate and see how it works for me, especially now that I know not to go in expecting a magic school story.
Also, courtesy of the Hugo voter packet and series nomination, I now have ALLLLLL the Toby Dayes, novels and short stories, in my possession, so I am completely out of excuses for not having read anything since, uh, book 8 apparently? Good lord... XD
It’d help if I gave a hoot about the main pairing, which I don’t lol (I don’t care for either Toby or Tybalt individually either).
That is definitely part of my problem too. Alas.