mrissa | Books read, early October

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Books read, early October

This is the fortnight when I officially got back my nonfiction reading ability. Hurrah. I can't actually swear to whether I have regained my old nonfiction reading ability or whether I have learned how to do it under current circumstances. Still and all: useful and welcome.

Ross Bernstein, More...Frozen Memories: Celebrating a Century of Minnesota Hockey and The Code: The Unwritten Rules of Fighting and Retaliation in the NHL. So. Um. Bernstein did extensive interviews for these books, and I think they were the right interviews, at least for The Code. He also reprinted long passages from the interviews, which was a good choice. Unfortunately, he didn't seem to understand the difference between a colloquial voice and bad writing. (Search on "You see," Bernstein. Delete all of them. You don't need them. You certainly don't need them in every other paragraph. Also, "an interesting thing happened: [interesting thing]" is almost never necessary or useful. If it's not interesting before you write that, it's not interesting after, and if it is interesting, you've just weighed down the interesting thing unnecessarily.)

Also, wow, holy unexamined gender assumptions, Batman! It's one thing to quote a hockey player as saying, "You don't want your teammates to think you're a pussy," if that is in fact what he said. It is quite another thing to write the same sentence in authorial voice. Most of the male hockey players Bernstein interviewed were a great deal less sexist than he was, probably because they didn't think of women's hockey as a cute little afterthought to be treated as an appendix in the last chapter of a book on Minnesota hockey. He is the kind of jerk who never ever fails to refer to a women's team as "the Lady Gophers" or "the Lady Bulldogs" and never ever thinks to refer to "men's hockey," because for him men's hockey is real hockey and women's hockey might as well be ringette. (%&$^#@!!! ringette. I had a fierce antipathy towards ringette the minute I heard of it. It sounds like a church basement pasta salad with lots of mayonnaise and overcooked-but-now-cold peas and is in no way a substitute for hockey. You know why? Because women don't need a substitute for hockey. Because women can play hockey. Go figure.)

And this looked to me like a major failing in The Code: he didn't even bother to say, "Hey, there are stricter rules about fighting just across the road here, let's see how it's changed the game." Because it just didn't occur to him that that might count as real hockey. It also didn't occur to him that there might be more than one way to handle something "like a man." Self-awareness/self-examination: not a curse Bernstein lives with on a daily basis.

(You want to handle something like a man, dude? Look your little girl in the eyes and explain to her why you're willing, in the early 21st century and as the father of a young daughter for Pete's sake, to use "little girl" with some frequency as a synonym for "coward." Go ahead and give that a shot, big man. Or stop using it that way. You're proud enough of your kid to list her on your jacket copy; be proud enough of her to treat her and others like her with some basic decency.)

I don't want anybody thinking that I disliked these books because I'm anti-fighting in hockey, because I'm not. I just think Bernstein did a terrible job constructing his argument. He's one of those people who can't accurately state his opponents' position, and you keep thinking, "Oh, Lordy, will somebody get this guy off my side? Before people think this is the best we can do for logic and evidence?"

(This guy lives in Eagan. Now I'm probably going to run into him at El Loro. That's how the world works: you never see somebody until you call them incompetent on the internet, and then you can't go get an enchilada without running into them.)

Anne de Courcy, Diana Mosley: Mitford Beauty, British Fascist, Hitler's Angel and The Viceroy's Daughters: the Lives of the Curzon Sisters. These were, for the most part, extremely well-done and interesting. I ended up with a great deal of sympathy for Jessica Mitford, which might end up evaporating if I find out more about her, because I have a great many friends who had appalling upbringings and who ran into sibling hostility over their appalling upbringings. And when two of your sisters -- not one but two, one might be a fluke -- wound up bosom chums with Adolf Hitler, I'd say the odds are pretty good that you had an appalling upbringing. The thing about talking about the Mosley book while I was reading it is that I kept feeling the need to specify, actual Hitler, not rhetorical device Hitler, not bad internet argument Hitler, not like oh m'Gawd my parents are such fascists for giving me a midnight curfew it's like living with Hitler. No. Hitler. Aaaaaaagh.

I liked the Mosley book better than the Curzon one; it was better focused, and it addressed more of the questions that interested me about the subjects. But I'd recommend both, and I'll keep an eye out for other de Courcy volumes used, since that's all my library has and they don't seem to be in print.

Sarah Dessen, That Summer. Everything's More Complicated, is the short version of this, and the things you think you know about the people you love don't necessarily entitle you to run their lives. It was pretty good, but Dessen has definitely grown into herself and her voice since writing this book.

One of the things I find interesting about these books is that Dessen inclines so much towards younger sister narrators. I guess I find it interesting in part because it's so much the opposite of my own inclinations -- so many of my friends are oldests and onlies that the experience of being a teen looking at the former-peer sibling who now has an adult life is not one I've really even thought about much. It's such a different dynamic from mine/ours.

Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World. Set in Japan immediately after the war, with an old man trying to come to grips with his part in pre-war and wartime Japanese militarism. A lot between the lines. Good stuff, but not as good as The Remains of the Day.

Jay Lake, Mainspring. It is not Jay's fault that I picked this up when I had had it up to here with young male characters who were disconnected from everybody in the entire world. Sometimes that's an okay thing in a book, if it's done well; right now it's not a very okay thing for me. I also had some Noble Savage issues later on in the book, and that combination of things interfered with me enjoying the worldbuilding and adventure plot quite as much as I would have liked.

Robin McKinley, Chalice. Lots and lots of honey. I mean that literally: honey. From bees. Lots of it. Not every book she writes can be The Blue Sword, and this...wasn't. It was readable. It was fine. There was beekeeping. Not wowed, not disgusted.

Naomi Novik, Victory of Eagles. This one was okay, too. I liked having dragons doing some different things. I liked Temeraire starting to understand some more of human consequences, as well as humans maybe coming a bit closer to understanding what the dragons are on about. I had fun with this.

Rebecca Pawel, The Summer Snow. This is a sequel, and the previous one was set in the middle of the Spanish Civil War. I was sort of hoping that this would continue that in the context of WWII, but no, it's definitely a postwar book. I had to readjust to get interested in that. I also think that Pawel has been fairly scrupulously honest about portraying her Fascist main character as human without giving him too many modern/anti-Fascist virtues, without showing him as some kind of victim.

Ruth Rendell, Death Notes and Speaker of Mandarin. Two more in the Inspector Wexford series. I was a little concerned when SoM opened with a badly phoneticized Chinese accent, but that character did not stick around for the whole book, and also there was a Chinese character shown speaking completely standard English, so that improved after the first page. And I was pleased with the ending.

Kate Ross, Whom the Gods Love. The third Julian Kestrel book, no less fun than the first two, if a bit problematic for me in part of its ending. I'm looking forward to the fourth.

Oliver Sacks, Oaxaca Journal. This was an incredibly quick read. Its lack of focus might have gotten tedious at more length, but that didn't happen here: it was just a quick journal of a fern-finding expedition to Mexico, in Sacks's easy prose.

Vendela Vida, Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name. Um. If not for the setting (Saamemaa/Lappland), I would have given up on this book right away. But I kept thinking, "Maybe this is the 'lame person discovers that lack of lameness has to come from herself and not from sponging interestingness off the people around her' plot." It wasn't. The book ended, and the heroine was still a total boring loser with no meaningful interior life to speak of. You know the people who think that being an interesting person comes from having checked enough items off a list? "Gone to Finland...discovered secrets of long-lost parentage...stayed in exotic hotel...brief flirtation with mysterious stranger...okay, good deal, now I'm interesting!" No. No you're not. Bleh.

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Ringette!

That is the new thing I learned today. And it's not even noon.

Wow, it's the first positive thing ever related to ringette!

Does that mean you get to go home and go back to bed if you want?

Yes, yes it does!

I like these rules.

That's how the world works: you never see somebody until you call them incompetent on the internet, and then you can't go get an enchilada without running into them.

That's a good thing to learn. Now, when there are people I want to run into, I'll just make an LJ post calling them incompetent.

Or maybe not. Hmm. (voice sings in the back of my head: "I think I'd better think it out again!")

Well, you'll see me at Convivial, so you don't need to tell the world about my incompetence at fundraising for homeless lemurs.

OK. *grin*

Put on By Cunning. I can't believe I just spent five minutes googling that rather than walking into the other room and checking the bookshelves, but I did. Not Death Notes. Put on by Cunning. Same book.

The Wexford books get better from then on, I think. I kind of like The Speaker of Mandarin. Or maybe it's that that's the point where I started reading them when they came out and I didn't have a backlog of them to catch up on, so I got one a year or whatever and I appreciated them more that way.

Also, yay Anne de Courcy, my unpaid unknowing research assistant! She has a new book out on Lord Snowdon, which I'm hoping some library I belong to will buy for me, or otherwise holding out for the paperback.

It may be foolish of me to ask, but is there any particular reason for hockey to remain segragated?

Hockey isn't wholly segregated;

lotusice plays hockey with men.

On the other hand, when you are going at top speeds on ice in a walled-in space, having the women's team being shorter and lighter on the average turns out to matter to injury potentials.

Also, the US has a law about equal access, Title 9, that often means gender-segregated teams were what got promoted. There are all sorts of stories of girls playing incognito in younger leagues before there were girls' leagues, and that generally went fine, at least at the ages when there wasn't as much average size differential.

Oh, Put on by Cunning is a much, much better title. Probably they thought American readers couldn't handle a Hamlet reference.

P.

I'm very fond of Speaker of Mandarin, but yes, that first bit made me go, "Whoa, Ruth Rendell, what were you thinking?"

P.

My first reaction was, "You read too much Arthur Ransome as a child," but so did I, and I don't write dialog like that!

Nor do I name my characters Titty. You really have to have a good sense of what to keep and what to throw away, from a childhood Ransome addiction.

I actually found it interesting, reading Missee Lee and also Jack London's Cruise of the Snark, which has an interesting discussion about the pidgins used in South Pacific islands vs mainland Asia, *after* I had started to learn a bit about Mandarin. My Mandarin-speaking colleagues would not pronounce Oxford's rival school as 'Camblidge' but a lot of the language's structure really is reflected in both the mistakes people make and in the pidgins that come from it.

(My friends here say "he" when they mean "she" all the time - Mandarin uses "ta" for both and also for "it". I haven't yet been able to test my theory that they won't make that mistake in writing, because Mandarin does have separate characters when "she" or "it" is specifically intended.)

Re: ringette

Then there's field hockey, which in high school wasn't so much a women's substitute for hockey as it was the closest thing we could get to interscholastic hockey in Phys. Ed. without having access to summer rinks (There were floor hockey and foot hockey too, but the former was only inter-mural and the latter was just informal.). Judging from the bruises that the Blues came back from games with, it wasn't something that one could say was devoid of a certain amount of violence, though I doubt that the taunts and unexamined gender assumptions could be said to parallel the ones above. I don't think that prepending "the Lady" to a team name is a usage that I'm familiar with.

being a teen looking at the former-peer sibling who now has an adult life has some similarities to having older friends in high school who go off to university, finish their degrees, start work and get married before you've graduated, while staying close. I have seen that happen regardlesse of actual siblinghood.

Um...I know floor hockey and field hockey (hockey what is played on a floor or a field, got it), but what is foot hockey?

Anyway, for awhile having girls' teams for any school was such a thing that any co-ed school that had teams had "the [mascots]" and "the Lady [mascots]."

This led to my high school having the Lady Rams. "Sheep," I said quite loudly. "Lady Rams are called sheep." Ah, high school. But that gendered convention was patchy by the time I was in high school.

I don't know. I had older friends in high school, and an older cousin with whom I was (and am) close, but it really seems like there are some pretty big differences between how it was between Kari and me and how it was between Kari and her sister Mary. As an only child, I am extremely leery of things that are labeled similar to sibling relationships, because many of them are not, they're friendships, and that's okay.

Freeport High School, home of the Pretzels.

Apparently, pretzels are male, for we had the Lady Pretzels.

Everything is male by default, didn't you know? They might as well have called the men's sports the Real Rams/Pretzels/etc.

Well, and field hockey uses a ball and the shorter curve ended sticks with only one ball contacting side, with the very different stick-handling technique that goes with it. And the co-ed kilts for seriousness.

Foot hockey has some resemblance to soccer, in that you're kicking an object around, often a tennis ball, but a crushed soda can is also a common (and more puck shaped) one, on concrete or asphalt rather than grass, possession and out of bounds go like hockey i.e.: fighting for the puck around the boards and behind the 'net' rather than going out and throwing in unless it analogously went over the 'boards', in which case you'd have a face off. In practice, boards end up being the walls if you're in a gym or hallway, or a fence, if often on only two sides, if you're in a playground.

Huh. Okay. And *hee*. It may also have been that the sports weren't the more important competitive team things at my school and The Ontario Classics Conference, or Reach (for the Top) would have been kind of weird with mascots and gendering. Even within sports the things where people were collectively representing the school but operating more as individuals, though still called the [school name] [sport] team things like the UTS swim team, for example, had greater prominence than say rugby (and yes, we had enough girls interested in rugby for a team - we didn't have one, but we could have), so there was less reason to call them the [blanks]. And gendering would have looked off what with the way that they went to the same meets and all. One still had "How'd the boys do?" and "How'd the girls do?", but one had to be specific in either direction. For that matter, all the teams were "The Blues", so talking about them tended to first go to what competition before what gender.

re: friends vs. siblings

True, they are mostly possessed of big differences. The ranges of what sibling relationships can be and what friendship relationships can, do have overlap though, and that aspect of them where the one left behind goes "they're way the heck out there now", when one's connection is sustained by something other than common routine, or place in life, seemed to be one that could. Wouldn't in all cases, but I'm pretty big on particularity of experience for purposes of drawing connections. As such, they're often less usefully predictive generalizations and more "Well this is a possible how and why for that situation that fits the observed data. ...that I'm not insisting on". Perhaps I'd make more sense if I'd read the Sarah Dessen and was responding more directly to it.

Of course you had enough girls interested in rugby for a team. I'm always amazed that boys play rugby. I tend to think of it as a girls' sport. (But then, several of my female friends in college played rugby, and only one of my male friends.)

The de Courcy book intrigues me. Will have to see if our tiny local library has it. Am envious that you live in the land of Real Libraries.

And Real Interlibrary Loan, if I was really determined about it.

Okay, I admit, I was a big fan of ringette in high school (also known as "Ringo" to my grade for reasons unknown), but mainly because my team and I spent all of our effort trying to find loopholes in the rules as explained to us by our gym teacher, and then exploiting them mercilessly. For example, she said that two people on the same team could not have their stick in the ring at the same time; however, she did not expressly state that all *five* of your team members could not gather in a protective circle around with all five sticks in the centre of the ring, and then shuffle down the length of the entire gym to score in slow-motion. She hadn't mentioned anything about not using the sticks like chopsticks to carry the ring and catapult it into the net. Etc.

Who said gym couldn't be creative?

I thought the point of ringette was that you had to pass across the blue lines. Although in a gym without blue lines this might be difficult.

Oh, sure; but the way it ended up being played, ringette had little point other than to entertain us for an hour before English class.

I never did, but some of my gym teachers seemed to have attempted to take that position.

i read The Code, baseball version, written by (i think) the same guy. he didn't get into gender stuff, but boy, did it need some proofing in a huge way, and some pagination help too. widows and orphans all over the place. weird type insets. etc.

And did you know that "reeks" and "wreaks" are interchangeable?

SIGH.

You may enjoy Escapement, the sequel to Mainspring, much more. The protagonist is a young female genius (along the order of Newton or Einstein) who has had it up to there with male entitlement.

That's useful to know, thanks.

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Books read, early October

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