Books read, late November

[mrissa]

Christmas shopping thought: how important the difference between "personal" and "personalized" can be!

Lois McMaster Bujold, The Sharing Knife: Passage. I like rivers. I like riverboats. I like Lois. Romance fantasy I don't so much like. So it's taken me awhile to get to this book, and...well, I can tell she does a good job with what she's doing, and there were some interesting parts to it. But it's still not really my thing. On the other hand, I'll still read the last one in the series.

Michael H. Kater, Hitler Youth. I was hoping that this would trace more the effects of Hitler Youth membership in the ultimate fates of its more avid members: once they were adults and out of the direct influence of Hitler Youth, how did they regard it? How did it affect them? This was not that book. This was about Hitler Youth before and during WWII, period and full stop. Not bad for that, but it felt rather incomplete to me.

Geoffrey Parrinder, African Mythology. This was fairly simplistic, and certainly racist in spots. It is, however, what my library had on sub-Saharan African mythology, and I would really like to avoid complete ignorance of huge regions of world culture if at all possible. But as an example: in the mid-1960s when Parrinder wrote this book, it was apparently considered completely acceptable to say that South Africa is peopled by white folks of European descent and therefore not of interest. Oh yah. That was all that was in South Africa at the time. Just white folks. Riiiiight.

Eliot Pattison, The Skull Mantra. I am interested in how people construct evidence and proof under a totalitarian government. This one's set in Tibet. I'm probably not interested enough to read the rest of the series, though.

Daniel Pinkwater, The Artsy Smartsy Club. Children's book, for those of you who don't know Pinkwater. It was...not so much with the plot. It seemed to be substantially constructed to give kids who were interested in art tips on how they could get better at it, with a congenial set of fictional children, adults, dogs, and chickens as teachers. It was quite good for that sort of book. (I think maybe Robin would like some Pinkwater, and I'm trying to figure out which.)

Ruth Rendell, Road Rage, Harm Done, and The Babes in the Wood. Have you ever noticed that when I get towards the end of a long mystery series, I tend to want to read them closer together? Yah. Me too.

William Sleator, House of Stairs. YA SF/psychological horror. The premise of it did not make much sense to me, or rather, I didn't believe that what was revealed as the ultimate purpose of the experiment would be even slightly successful. I also...hmm. I feel like one of the dangers in writing an essentially dystopian book is letting one's own kind off the hook too easily. Without directly spoiling it, I will say that the people who come off the best in this are the people who are "our kind" for most of Sleator's geeky young audience, and the ones who don't are very definitely "them" rather than "us." And on the one hand, it's good to see and reinforce positive traits in one's own subcultures, and presumably one picks those subcultures because they do have what one views as positive traits. But on the other hand, I have the strong suspicion that if there was some kind of totalitarian control system, I would not find all the opposition to it congenial personalities who would be invited to my parties in ordinary circumstances. People surprise you. In this book, they really don't.

Barbara Vine, The Blood Doctor. This was my first Barbara Vine novel, as opposed to Ruth Rendell novels, of which I've read plenty. Same person, different pen names. This one was a lot quieter than the Rendells, tenser, somehow both more and less violent. Differently violent? Well, something like that. Anyway, it had hemophilia and changes in the House of Lords and a trip to Switzerland, and it was good. Once I started reading it, I wanted to keep reading it, even through very worthy interruptions related to having a happy family Thanksgiving.

E.T.C. Warner, Myths and Legends of China. Apparently it was my fortnight for totally racist mythology books. This one came with a warning label, though: not only did porphyrin and dlandon tell me in advance that it had some interesting stuff but you had to go past the first chapter, but it was written in 1922, which changes one's expectations a bit. Willingness to ascribe libidinousness and sloth to Chinese people in general, possibly as a result of their smaller-than-white-people brains: ack. Hurried assurances that this doesn't mean they're as primitive as more barbaric (read: darker skinned) people: double ack. Just plain alarming. Lots of pre-Communist era mythology and folk practice detail, though, once he was done with the hideous racism and racialism. Still, I'd only recommend this one to people who are really dedicated and have strong stomachs for that sort of thing.

Comments

[tanaise.livejournal.com]

Really, there's little places to go wrong with Pinkwater. Is he reading this himself or having it read to him? I can't remember the kids books, other than the Blue Moose stuff but his chapter books will always be among my YA favorites: Lizard Music, Fat Men from Outerspace, and both the Snarkout Boys are classics. I read one of his fairly recent ones--"The Neddiad: How Neddie Took the Train, Went to Hollywood, and Saved Civilization" and it is your typical Daniel Pinkwater novel (and thus: probably more amusing to people who haven't read as many as I have, but none-the-less better than plenty of other books out there.) It is also vaguely younger in feel than the other books, so you might try that one next.).

(also, I am HORRIFIED to notice that there are no Snarkout Boys in print at the moment, except as part of the 5 novels. HORRIFIED. What sort of future is this?)

[elisem.livejournal.com]

Heh. Sleator's House of Stairs. When I was (I think) a junior in high school, I was (much to my surprise) invited to apply for some summer program at Cornell due to my high test scores. (Cornell is about as remote from rural Wisconsin as the face of the Moon is.) One of the requirements for competing for being accepted was to write an essay on a book you read recently. I picked that book, and pretty much took apart, oh, any number of things: the experiment, what I thought the author meant to say about authoritarianism, the relationship of that authoritarianism-construct to the real ones I'd experienced (especially the fundie church).

Didn't get accepted. Still, writing the essay was probably a milestone.

Do you think you'd have felt differently about the book had you read it at, oh, 15?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I believe he's in that combination stage, where he can read to himself but also likes having adults reading to him.

(This icon is so old. I really need a newer picture of us together.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Almost certainly. I would not, for example, have been quite so flatly unconvinced that the specific sort of conditioning described would actually result in effective soldiers/assassins for an evil authoritarian government--at 15, I would have been thoroughly convinced, I think.

One of the bit ends that startles me about House of Stairs is that a YA author was allowed to make the cigarette-smoking character one of the better characters. Most of my experience with YAs was (and continues to be) that that kind of behavior is a lot less widely allowed in major positive characters than casual cruelty or self-centeredness or any of a number of other things.

Which, unfortunately, maps to the things we were taught in school as great big no-nos: for the love of God, do NOT drink alcohol or have sex! But ethnic slurs and making your fellow students' lives hell in other ways, eh, they need to toughen up.

[dancingwriter.livejournal.com]

My son was a huge Pinkwater fan when he was younger. Some favorites were Guys from Space and Aunt Lulu (picture books), The Hoboken Chicken Emergency (chapter book), and Borgel and Yobgorgle: Mystery Monster of Lake Ontario (both available in Pinkwater's 4: Fantastice Novels).

[the_rck]

I've been afraid to read some of the books of folk and fairy tales that I quite liked as a child because I fear running into unexpected ugliness. I used to love a series of books, Tales of a [insert nationality here] Grandmother. The books interspersed every day family life with the main characters' grandmother telling them stories. They were written in the 1930s (I would have guessed earlier based on what I remember of the books).

I remember loving The House of Stairs when I was nine. I don't think I actually understood it particularly well, but I loved it. I suspect that part of my love for it came from feeling that it was disconnected from reality, kind of like a surreal and dark dream, and that that's probably not something that Sleator intended.

[aedifica]

I think the Snarkout Boys books are probably more suited for a teen or preteen reader. Lizard Music and Fat Men from Outer Space sound like good ideas to me, though. And the Flying Moscow book(s) for a slightly younger crowd than the aforementioned. Oh, and Roger's Umbrella! That one's probably more for kids who aren't yet reading to themselves, though.

Anything I say about reading ages should be taken with a grain of salt, though--I don't know any kids who read, so I don't have firsthand experience of what they'd be reading. And I like Pinkwater enough that I still read anything of his, regardless of intended age. tanaise, have you read Chicago Fish, Hoboken Whistle?

[tanaise.livejournal.com]

Yeah, speaking of getting people stuck at a certain age in our head. :)

Hmm. My first instinct wants to be Lizard Music, which while slightly older than him character-wise (10-12 or so, I want to say) is very simply written and probably doable by him, but I don't think that's in print at the moment. The Neddiad is probably good.

And Gordon Korman used to be beloved by me, and I think it was about the right age group, but his new stuff all looks meh. Bring back Bruno and Boots!

Maybe the benefit of publishers having to be careful about the new stuff they buy will be an increase of reprints? I could give them a list!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I have only read Gordon Korman as an adult, so it's definitely not that I grew out of his stuff, it's that he's gotten worse lately. Alas.

[elisem.livejournal.com]

Oh, good lord yes, to your final paragraph. Eeeeee.

I need to go ponder that some.

[elisem.livejournal.com]

I rather liked it because it seemed like it would be easier than my actual life at the time.

[tanaise.livejournal.com]

I think the Snarkout boys are easily acceptable if Stella or Mike is reading to him. If he's reading by himself, they're probably a bit old (and the Baconburg Horror is a werewolf, which can be scary if you're reading on your own (says the girl who had trouble sleeping for YEARS after the "Something Strange in the Library" werewolf book.)). But god knows, the first time I read James and the Giant Peach to myself at like, age 18, I wondered what the heck my dad had been doing, reading it to me as a kid. Except it had never bothered me when i was little.

I don't know if I've read that specific book, but I have read Fishwhistle, which sounds related--a collection of his essays?

[aedifica]

Chicago Fish, Hoboken Whistle is Fishwhistle plus Chicago Days, Hoboken Nights.

"Sonnye, I vant ye should inwent a fischvhistle. So vhan you blawink deh fisch vhistle, come deh fisch." Hee!

[tanaise.livejournal.com]

I felt the same way about Brave New World!

[kizmet-42.livejournal.com]

I love the Blue Moose books.

[columbina.livejournal.com]

I read all Sleator's stuff as a young teen and, had I had the ability to put it in these few words at the time, I would have even then described him as a Gimmick Writer. I'd skim through his books each time I got one to find out what that book's Gimmick was. Then, if I liked what I saw on the skim, I'd go back and actually read it. I didn't really give any of those books my very full attention - which may be a bad review in itself - so I can't report what I thought of any of the characters and what traits got rewarded/punished; I don't think I ever looked that deeply, and anyway I was (even more so than today) driven mostly by What Happens and didn't care squat about characterization.

I do remember there being a lot of dislikable characters in House of Stairs but I think I wrote that off as being part of the basic point, which was that in such a Skinner-box environment, people turn into monsters. (I think it says something about me at twelve or thirteen that I thought, even then, this was a so-obvious-as-to-be-banal observation.)

However, Sleator was a big influence on me because he told me that one could write books which contained the sort of weird, even pervy ideas that I had going on in MY imagination and actually SELL them. That it could be done. That I would not be, say, laughed off the planet for wanting to write a book about what happens if a three-dimensional being passes briefly through a fourth dimension and comes back with parity reversed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boy_Who_Reversed_Himself).

So, in summary: Not the best writer, useful to me for knowing that You Could Go There. (Just as R.L. Stine is useful to me because he tells me that you can write transformation and mind-control stories for kids and have them escape the witch-hunters.)

As I recall my favorite Sleator from back then (although memory serves me poorly) was Singularity (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_(William_Sleator_novel)). The one that always got all the press was Interstellar Pig (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_Pig), which I felt, again perhaps precociously, was a tired trope and was unimpressed with.

[cloudscudding.livejournal.com]

For sub-Saharan African mythology, what worked best for me was figuring out which tribes I was interested in and then requested anthropology textbooks for them, specifically. I did not find a good overview (in my library).

[hypatia-j.livejournal.com]

Dang, I'd forgotten about him. *Rummages around in wikipedia...* There are three Bruno and Boots books I haven't read! Off to the library.

[seabream.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. Fortunately we went to different schools then. First two, not really a big deal if done in a responsible manner. Latter two, really how would one go about doing either in a responsible manner? (not that I can't think of a few ways one could technically do so, but not what I mean.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Hey, why would it be fortunate that I got stuck with the crappy irresponsible school?

[seabream.livejournal.com]

*short nasal wheeze* You have a point. There is no structural reason for that to be an invalid implication. And it wasn't even one of the ones I'd seen.

I was following the path where having had the first data point established, a reasonable next step would be locating the second one. i.e.: fortunate that the second one wasn't in the same place. Ideally of course, the set of 'crappy and irresponsible' would not overlap with that of 'schools' except insofar as needed to teach people to be neither. :P