Books read, early June

[mrissa]

 

Katherine Addison, The Goblin Emperor. Reread. Gosh I still do really like this. I like the gentleness of it, how the earnest attempts to do things right don't always or even mostly make things easy, the sudden immersion in largely unfamiliar social dynamics. I like seeing the beginnings of the pieces we're later having drawn out in related works. I wanted something I knew I liked a lot, and this was a good choice.

Elizabeth Gaskell, A Dark Night's Work. Kindle. This is not a Gothic per se, but it has a lot of the elements of murder and despair and cover-up and purity/innocence being touched incidentally by sin, and...yeah. I like to read Victorian works cold, and sometimes the result is that I have no idea I'm walking into, "Stop! You cannot hang this man, for he is NOT the murderer! He is merely an accessory to murder, which you think is great and will give a holiday in the country!" (Yeah, that was a spoiler. But there is much better Gaskell for your time.)

Rochelle Hassan, The Buried and the Bound and The Summer Queen. Back in the glory days of livejournal, I included both "interstitial arts" and "stitial arts" in my interest keywords list, and this is why: these two books are firmly in the middle of their contemporary YA fantasy genre, and I am here for it. They're well done, the characters are compellingly drawn, and I had a good time. Are they doing something wildly different for their genre? They sure are not, and they don't have to.

Peter Heather, Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion, AD 300 to 1300. Really lovely book, tracing the spread of Christianity, why and how it went where it did, without resorting to "it was just so darn right, is why." When you look at how accurately Heather maps the spread of Christianity in Scandinavia toward the end of the book (blotches! rather than solid polities!), you will see why I am so happy with his analysis. He also looks at why various things wound up heresies rather than orthodoxies and how things could have gone differently there. Good times.

Sarah Henning, The Lies We Conjure. Discussed elsewhere.

Lawrence A. Herzog, From Aztec to High Tech: Architecture and Landscape Across the Mexico-US Border. Oh what a sad and disappointing book. Poor Herzog, he was talking to us from the '90s, when the shopping mall looked eternal and NAFTA was going to make all borders in North America dissolve. So uh. There's a lot of "uh oh, oh dear, nope" going on here.

Brooke Hindle, The Pursuit of Science in Revolutionary America, 1735-1789. This one is coming to us from the '50s, so it is very...which white men formed which science-related societies at which times. We live in a house where this information might be useful for any number of projects at the drop of a hat, but it is not more expansive than that in its scope, and in general you probably would like something else about this topic/period better. (Was I reading a lot in bed while sick? you bet I was. Did this mean I delved deep in the pile? I sure did.)

Sarah Orne Jewett, Old Friends and New. Kindle. Slice of life short stories about 19th century Maine. Gentle. Notable for me in their use of the verb "to matronize." Let's make matronize happen. (It doesn't mean "the bad kind of to patronize, but done by a woman"! It means "to sponsor fun activities for younger people, to host them," basically.)

Gideon Marcus et al, eds., Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women (1958-1963). My book club read one of the books in this series, and I bought this one with it as it technically comes first. We didn't enjoy that one and won't be doing this one, I don't think; the editorial notes aren't quite as maddening but are still pretty random, and the stories are not as well-filtered as one might hope. There's that line between "I want to read the stories that aren't immensely anthologized" and "oh I see why not." Sigh.

John McPhee, Tabula Rasa Volume 1. This is the stuff McPhee isn't going to get to, his false starts, things that he might have written at length about but won't and how he thought about it while he was getting to that conclusion. It's a very weird book and interesting for me as a professional writer. Don't read it as your first McPhee, though, go read Annals.

Jo Miles, Ravenous State. The triumphant conclusion (gosh I love getting to say that) of its trilogy, and you'll want to read the other two first. Good news, they're available. Each one has a different sibling's perspective, and it took me a minute to get used to Libbi, but I really liked what Jo was doing with point of view in the end, that this sibling really did not see the world the same way as her siblings did and that changed the dynamic a lot. Space opera, evil corporations, grass roots organization, yay.

Samantha Mills, The Wings Upon Her Back. Deprogramming from fascism, now, for mechas! There's more depth to it than that, but also, really, if you don't want to read a book that's that, I don't know what to tell you.

L.M. Montgomery, A Tangled Web. Reread. I remembered liking this as a small child and hadn't revisited it in a while. The weird inclusion of the racial slur on the last page, irrelevant to the entire preceding book, is still jarring; the characters are still reasonably charming, but as I'm spending less time immersed in the dynamics of a giant family, I have less need of books like this that are basically "giant families, amirite?"

Su Fang Ng, Writing About Discovery in the Early Modern East Indies. Kindle. A short monograph about Portuguese and Malaysian writing about the era of early encounters between the two, highlighting some of the ways in which Portuguese travel writing varied from other European writing about early encounters with other cultures. Interesting, brief, would be happy to read more of this kind of compare-and-contrast.

Vaishnavi Patel, Goddess of the River. I really liked Kaikeyi, so I was pretty excited to see another retelling by Patel. I felt like this one was not quite as special--it's interesting but very straightforward, a very linear narrative. Possibly if I was more immersed in the Mahabharata I would feel that it was wildly original in its divergences, but as things stand for this reader at least, it flowed from event to event following the mythic structure more than imposing novel structure upon them. Which didn't make it a bad read, just not as outstanding as the related debut.

O.O. Sangoyomi, Masquerade. Discussed elsewhere.

Evelyn Sharp, The Youngest Girl in the School. Kindle. I'd read Sharp's fantastical/fairy tale writing before. This is a fairly period-standard school story, complete with dramatic injury that draws the distant parent's attention. (Gosh kids in that era fell off things regularly, if this kind of literature is to be believed.) If you like that sort of thing, this sure is a one of those, but it's not particularly outstanding of its kind.

Noel Streatfeild, Skating Shoes. Reread. There was less in this than I remembered. Like--temporally, it just goes less far in the two girls' lives than my brain had filled in as a kid. It is also very very wish fulfillment in the characterization directions. Which ends up being fine, it's not one of the toxic Streatfeilds, but it's not one of the best ones either, it's just sort of there.

Comments

[larryhammer]

I've never heard of A Dark Night's Work, and here I thought I'd read all of Gaskell's fiction. Time to stoke up the ol' author search engine and set that piston to work.

[mrissa]

Gutenberg has it.

[swan_tower]

He also looks at why various things wound up heresies rather than orthodoxies and how things could have gone differently there.

Dammit, why did you have to go and make this Relevant to My Interests.

I liked Kaikeyi reasonably well, but it did bug me a bit that the book did not seem to spend much time considering the ethics of her magic and its misuses. However, I am reasonably immersed in the Mahabharata for a white American, so I will put this new one on my list!

[rachelmanija]

Same!

[profiterole_reads]

I absolutely adore The Buried and the Bound and The Summer Queen. They're part of their genre, but they do it so well, and they have the best m/m! <3

[landofnowhere]

Do you recommend Evelyn Sharp's fantasy/fairy tales? I've read her memoir of Hertha Ayrton, which is good at being the sort of thing that it is, but as it's the only Ayrton biography out there I'm not spoiled for choice. I'm interested in tracking down her autobiography "Unfinished Adventure".

[mrissa]

Hrmm. I don't feel like they're outstanding of their kind either, when it comes right down to it. If you're interested in reading quite a lot of what I'm sort of vaguely gesturing at as "pre-genre fantasy," they're part of that body of work, but if you're not automatically interested in that, they're not particularly interesting in themselves.

[anne]

Is A Tangled Web the one with the ridiculous novelty jug? I got the feeling that the slur was supposed to be the punchline of the whole novel, but fortunately the joke has been lost to history. (Unless the idea was "this ludicrous item was never worth it, please accept this moral lesson.")

[mrissa]

Yeah, I feel more the latter, "this ludicrous item was never worth it but sort your shit anyway."

[davidgillon]

I just re-read The Goblin Emperor too, and followed it up with The Witness for the Dead, as a direct reaction to getting in an argument with a couple of people elseweb arguing nothing good's won a Hugo since 2000. It absolutely confirmed my opinion they aren't objecting to the quality of the prose or the story-telling, they're objecting to the absence of an SWM protagonist.

[conuly]

The protagonist of Goblin Emperor is straight and male, and humans don't seem to exist in that universe so what the hell more can they possibly ask for!?

[davidgillon]

God knows! When I got into the spat I sat and thought back over every Best Novel winner since 2000 that I own, and they all have excellent writing. What's markedly different is many don't have SWM protagonists.

[mrissa]

Okay buuuuut his racial status is absolutely crucial to the plot. It doesn't map onto human races, but it's clear from page one that his brothers who had other racial status were treated differently and prepared more for the throne and that people's perception and treatment of him is racially tinged.

Which I think the people who are Big Mad about considering real demographic social issues in SFF do not want to think about in any context ever.

[conuly]

Yeah, but... how can I say this?

I'm willing to talk to you in good faith because you're not terrible, but when I'm talking about (or god forbid to) those people I'm not gonna give them an inch. Because they are.

[mrissa]

Very fair, there's a huge difference between wanting to discuss that particular theme in good faith and wanting to grump about why it's invalid to have any such considerations in fantasy at all ever.

[mecurtin]

highlighting some of the ways in which Portuguese travel writing varied from other European writing about early encounters with other cultures.
... such as? Sounds like my jam

[mrissa]

The Portuguese at the time were trying to set up trade routes rather than colonies. So rather than being desperate to differentiate themselves from the people they were encountering, they were desperate to find commonality. "Look at how basically like us these people are so it's totally fine to have a close trade relationship!" And this was not necessarily more accurate or less accurate than "Look at how totally different from us these people are" (although there were several pitfalls it dodged for obvious reasons), it was just a very, very different take.

[carbonel]

I loved Skating Shoes for the skating parts (and Harriet!), but the rest was definitely more meh. I also felt sad for Lala, who was born a few decades too early.