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acequeenking) wrote2020-06-28 09:52 pm
acequeenking) wrote2020-06-28 09:52 pm
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Media Diary: March-April-May-What Month is it again?
Okay, I have not done well on keeping to this. There are various excuses as to why -- works been heavy, time has been short, I've falling back into my shell, most unhappily --but it is now June 28th, and I am going to post the gigantic amount of not-very-much stuff I've consumed over the last few days, and post June's later because frankly this is long enough as it is all its own and I can't imagine anyone would read it besides me (but that's fine, of course). Will post June's much shorter list at-some-point, hopefully before I combine a bunch of months together, and try to do more personal posts/actively be active instead of just disappearing again. At least combining these three months under quarantine seems appropriate since it basically feels like March 31st over and over again, if unseasonably warm now.
What I Read/Am Reading:
Lovely War by Julie Berry: This is a rather neat conceit - It's a Greek-Mythology tinged YA novel (and classicism, it seems, is coming in again, and I could not be happier for it), interspersed with World War II. This borrows the story of Hephaestus making the golden net to ensnare Ares and Aphrodite and catch them red-handed in their affair; it moves this event to sometime during World War II, where poor Hephaestus plays a porter to dupe the aforementioned couple only to trap them when their guard is down.
There are a few areas where she flexes their otherworldliness - I particularly enjoyed Hades, when he is summoned, showing up as a priest and everyone else asking him if this induces any religious quandaries in him. Hades shrugs this off, basically claims that death is death, and he is happy to help his people come to him with "prepared" souls as the opposite is "messy" and boasts that he can take to being a Christian Priest or Jewish Rabbi as easily as he can be himself. I enjoyed this moment a lot - it's bizarre, but it feels true to the character, and I like how his reasons for doing it are very much based on his experience of the world more than the human one. Hades, for the most part, is the sole god to get such otherworldly moments, with some of it taking place in his realm. Being a Hades fan, I'll not complain.
For the most part, really, the gods do feel well-drawn to their folkloric characterizations: Apollo is charming, Ares is loud and brash, Hades is aloof and spiritual, Aphrodite flirts like it's going out of style, and Hephaestus is awkward but well-meaning, and Berry utilizes his tendency to be the family "peacekeeper" really well here. The relationship between Aphrodite and Hephaestus is suitably thorny at the start, but ends up surprisingly sweet - you do get the sense of how those two work together. You don't really see that with the other gods - Hades and Persephone are mentioned being together, but Hades also mentions playing a monk "for a year" (forsaking Persephone time?) and the other spouses/significant others aren't mentioned. This is in some small ways disappointing - I would have loved to see Apollo or Ares mentions their human lovers, especially given that such really would have been a good way to add queer representation to the novel. Queer people basically don't exist here, which annoys me when you have a canon that has queer characters; I understand why the human relationships are all heterosexual given the time-frame, but its disappointing that the gods are also held to those same standards when the source material def does not hew to such. For the most part I think Berry does well by mythology, but there are a couple things she adds about their lives that made me stop and think a minute, such as when she mentions that all the men are fathers. Certainly Apollo and Ares are, but Hephaestus and Hades are very rarely given children in mythology, and I am really curious just what Berry thinks happened there.
Overall, I really enjoyed it despite the flaws, especially how the stories wind together and the Gods get snippy little commentary over it all. It has a few points I wish were better adapted, but I had a lot of fun with the novel! (3.75/5 stars)
Conviction by Denise Mina: This is a book that I enjoyed, but I also read in like two days and now barely remember. It's one of those books meant to be read in an hour or two, that if you give more room, it ceases to make more sense. It's one of those books that, in other years, I'd probably read on a plane, train, or other sort of "in-the-liminal-space-between-spaces" sort of place. It is a mystery novel, and a very easy read. The plot is simple: Anna is a survivor of an assault, who has had to do extreme things to remake her life post-assault, not the least of which is to take on a whole new identity. From a tough as balls survivor, she's now become a soccer-mum, with two kids and a high-paid corporate lawyer husband. On what should have been the worst day of her second life (she finds out her husband is having an affair, with her best friend, and best friend is pregnant, with his child), Anna listens to a podcast about a ship that went down in the ocean and her blood runs cold when she realizes that the man who is suspected of scuttling the ship with his entire family abroad was an old friend/acquaintance. She gets obsessed with the podcast, and decides to look into the murder.
When her ex-best friend's husband (who just HAPPENS to be an internationally famous rock star battling anorexia), events spiral and the two wind up on a globe-trotting quest (well, Europe-trotting) to find the real killer while not processing their feelings about best friend and husband.
For the first half of the book, Mina keeps the suspense up well, despite the outlandish premise. I did feel for Anna being cheated on, and the idea of her being so betrayed by her best friend is particularly rotten. I did believe she'd go deep into murder podcasts because when you are in deep pain, sometimes you want to see bleak media. I believe even that her friend's husband would come over to see how she was doing. I can almost believe leaving a rock-star for a lawyer. But the problem comes kinda early -- somehow Anna is in danger due to her past life, and as soon as a photo of her starts trending on the internet, people start trying to kill her. When you find out why she's been in fear for her life, it kinda stretches credulity. So does Finn's rock star lifestyle, though I enjoyed that they do show him fighting both with anorexia and the public perception of him being a recovering anorexic. I am very thankful that the book does not force a romance on Finn and Anna, who scream Rebound but thankfully manage to avoid it. I also enjoy that the heroes are well-written as not particularly gifted in any arts that might prove useful to mystery-solving; they have the realistic skills of a famous musician (which opens some doors) and a stubborn, blue-collar housefrau.
By the second half, though, things fall apart. The main villain, when revealed, is not very realistic, and her motives are downright cartoonish. I kept wondering if she was in love with the other character who is set up to be a villain (who (plays?) dumb as to the motives); the novel goes with the bold choice of giving her zero (zero!) reason to do so whatsoever, leaving her screeching only that she was trying to protect the set-up villain. Very weak. It also deeply stretches credulity that at one point an adult woman (30's-40's) is mistaken to a teenager at points. It also deeply bothered me that the affair between the two main character's spouses was basically swept under the rug, with them getting a hero-turn in the second half of the novel: it smacked false that Anna would forgive them that quickly. I really hate how it basically comes out as "haha,our relationship wasn't the best, so it's okay". Like. What?? It's a massive betrayal, and it's Not Okay because Finn has anorexia and Anna has emotional issues. It really has a bit of that "it's okay to cheat on someone if they're not perfect" vibe and like - just get a divorce first, man. Do the right thing. That she could get over that pain in FIVE DAYS to forgive and be like "well, [best-ex] will be a better mother anyway, she's not damaged, like me" just made me want to SCREAM. Very gross. NPR's review that this is a "master of mystery" is certainly not based on this book, but rather other books the author has written, I suspect.
This made the NPR best novels list but I really don't understand why, and I am beginning to think the list is not a good one for me. I've found a few books I really loved out of it (Scribe being a big one) but for the most part I seem to have "alright" to "meh" reactions. Also, the title for this is TERRIBLE and I literally know nothing about what Conviction has to do with this premise. It's a decent airplane book but...also, who's going on a plane these days? (2/5)
Orange World and Other Stories by Karen Russell: Karen Russell is one of those writers who I think you either deeply love or find very frustrating. Russel is a master of coming up with some really outlandish premises and writing them as realistically as possible. I LOVED her previous short story collection, Vampires in the Lemon Grove, especially it's title story where Clyde and Magreb, two ancient vampires, contemplate how their relationship strains when one of them wants to change their ways, and the other doesn't. There are times I still think about this story, along with two others in the collection: Prove Up (a young boy in a western tale goes through a strange otherworldly landscape, trying to get a window to his neighbor, and he might meet Death itself along the way) and The Barn at the End of Our Term (the US presidents are reincarnated into horses in a barn, and Russell makes fun with the full existential horror of this situation). Russell tends to paint a sketch with all the wrinkles in, but she doesn't tend to really supply endings that are anything but open-ended: some people think she's an incredibly frustrating writer due to that, but I like that there's room to live in in the endings of her stories. If you were frustrated with her for those shortcomings in the past, you will hate this. If you enjoy Russell's previous works, you will likely like this.
If you've not read her before, I think it depends on how much tolerance you have for very mundane actions taken in very bizarre worlds. If that mix isn't for you, this is going to frustrate you. I don't think this was as strong as Vampires in the Lemon Grove - there's a couple stories here I just hated -- but it's quite a good mix, with most of the stories continuing to nail the weirdness of mundane life in underwater Miami, how a woman becomes a tree, and falling in love with a woman who has been dead for 5,000 years at first glance, and other such tales. (4/5)
My Favorite Stories:
* Black Corfu: This tends to be most people's least favorite story in this collection, judging by Goodreads. These people are wrong. Black Corfu is sometimes confusing, absolutely polarizing, but always haunting; it is the story of a moorish (aka "mixed") doctor living on Corfu. Unable to attain a proper position in his homeland due to his dark skin, he becomes a doctor of the dead. In the world of Black Corfu, people and animals must have their tendons cut -- otherwise, once they are killed, they will rise again, zombies scuttling over the landscape. When the Doctor receives an unimpressive (white, noble) apprentice, he's sharp with his tongue. The apprentice retaliates by unleashing rumors, and what spills out after is absolutely tense and horrific. The doctor is resolute he did not make a mistake; his apprentice is resolute that he did, and the thing is: the doctor's sanity is so shakey, from the first page on, that we're not ever quite sure.
The doctor's underworld surgery center is so awfully macabre, and by the time that we enter that chamber for the last time for the final, horrifying act - ugh. The ending of this stayed with me a while; I instantly reread it because it honestly surprised me. It's a beautiful, haunting world and I would love to see a whole novel on the concept of a world where death is more transformation than permanent, and where zombies are so normalized that not even a child is surprised by an undead seagull.
* The Prospectors: Two girls run away from home together and make a living by stealing little trinkets from the rich, a sort of two-person robin hood team. While on their way to a fancy dress party for the opening of a new lodge, they make the wrong turn and wind up in a cabin full of men who died during a cave-in on the previous attempt to make said lodge. What really makes this special is the rules for how ghosts work in this universe, which is spooky; the way the girls interact with the ghosts and how the ghosts seem stuck in time yet not -- and always otherworldly -- is SO good. Short but sweet and I loved the ending.
* The Gondoliers: This is another one I deeply loved. Three sisters live in underwater Florida (in what I believe was formerly Miami) working as gondoliers from parts of the state that are still above-ground. All three have mutated into having the power of singing to echo-locate, in some very cool siren imagery. One day, as the youngest girl is heading back to the cave she shares with her sisters, an old man asks her to take him out further than most go. Despite the risk, the girl agrees, and the two share a somewhat dangerous journey to the epicenter of the city.
It's really a lovely elegy for a world so dramatically changed by global warming. I was fascinated by the relationship between the girl and the old man as they share the uneasy boat ride - herself, a creature of a new world, and himself a man permanently caught in mourning the past. I particularly loved this relationship, along with the relationship between the three sisters, which is sometimes fraught with tension, but is always loving.
My Least Favorite:
* Bog Girl: I didn't really like this one, the story of a teenager who stumbles on a bog girl working a construction job after school and falls head over heels in love with her while his family members struggle with the strange relationship. This wasn't horrible - it was short - but it wasn't that funny, and in ways it was crushing: the way the bog girl is treated, as an object, shows how much women in general are viewed as an object. And while I get that it was somewhat the point (the bog girl becomes a popular girl in school-based entirely on the boy who "wants" her!) the only thing I somewhat enjoyed about it was the ending, which resolves in literally the most teenage fashion of all.
* Madame Bovary's Greyhound: I've never read Flaubert's Madame Bovary and this is one of those stories that I don't think makes much sense without understanding the source material. It's mostly -- judging by google -- a summary of a couple scenes from the novel, but from the point of the view of the dog. Kinda pointless, and long, and rather boring.
* The Tornado Auction: This seems to be most people's favorite story but I hated this one. I got stuck on this one and it took me forever to get past it. An old man who has been selfish all his life and obsessed with raising tornadoes in a world where the weather is manufactured, cashes out his savings, and buys a tornado after his daughters and wife have moved away/died. If you liked the main character this might have been moving, but what I got out of it was a selfish man being selfish, continuing to raise tornados after one of them nearly killed his daughter, and I could get why his kids weren't fond of him tbh. By the time I got to the ending, I was only relieved that it was finally over.
I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution by Emily Nussbaum: Bleh. I like Emily Nussbaum when I hear her on NPR and her column in the NYT - she's an articulate critic - but this has all the problems these sorts of collections usually do:
1) Because this is a compilation of Nussbaum's critical essays she has written to this point, there's a lot of years of material to cover. As a result, quite a bit of the articles are on older TV shows, and most of them have been critically done to death already. There's articles in here about Breaking Bad, the Sopranos, the Wire, and other shows about ugly middle-aged men having ugly middle-aged crises (and the odd woman: Sex in the City gets an article, too). There's not a lot of "new ground" covered, in part because these were taken from when those shows (and these opinions about them) were fresh. There's not a lot of new essays here, and not a lot on newer shows.
2) What doesn't fall into the above tends to be fawning celebrity profiles. These were the hardest chapters for me to read: I just don't care that much about how someone's home life changes how they write, how they talk. I've never really been interested in actors beyond their performances, and in writers even less beyond their words. (Which is not to say that their actions can't render their works differently!) But...40 pages of how someone in LA handles traffic, or writing-at-home while having kids? Meh.
3) There's not really any thorough-line of these works. It is just an anthology of columns that Nussbaum has had printed in the NYT, from Buffy: the Vampire Slayer to Black-ish. I think it could have been stronger if she had sharpened this to a topical book of essays: what the twenty-year obsession with baby boomers gone bad says about our culture (or: the road traveled between the Sopranos to Breaking Bad), what the nichification of Netflix et all says about culture going forward, strong heroines from the 90s until now -- all covered in some sort of way, but not quite at a level that makes any cognizant whole. Sharp writer, but the material mostly being reprinted renders the book rather meh. Skip it and catch up with her column instead. (3.5/5)
Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino: A book on two best-of-2019 lists, and a book I didn't like very much. This book is meant, I think, to be about how the internet influences our modern lifestyle, particularly social media, according to the introduction, but Jia Tolentino:
a) only really focuses on this on a few of the essays in the book, with far more of them being at best nebulously attached to the topic or not at all (one chapter focuses on the Rolling Stone investigation into Jia's alma mater that turns out to be proven false; another is about Jia's several attempts in the early 00s to embrace barre and other fitness regimes). It's hard to even argue these fall into the looser theme of "self-delusion" that this book's subtitles itself as an examination thereof, as they are not so much about Jia's thoughts about how women are forced into, say, fitness extremes, or how women might be tempted to rage against the machine with false rape claims (Jia, no), but just Jia going, "Huh! Wow! Fitness, and women, that's a gendered thing, am I right?" or "Huh! Wow! Who knew, there's one case where there was a false rape claim, good thing, cause for a minute I was uncomfortable with being associated as being an alumni of a Campus that had a rape on it!"
b) Jia doesn't consider at all how the internet has changed through time, and spends most of the book discussing the internet either as "90s Geocities websites" and "social media, as defined by Twitter/Insta/Reddit/etc" and doesn't really critically engage with web 1.0 beyond a mention of having an embarrassing Angelfire page (which, who doesn't). The internet is a bigger place than this and self-delusion does not end at the self. Why not chapters about the self-delusion of chasing the freelancer dream, which quickly leads to constant underbidding the value of work? Changing sexual mores and the accompanying changes in how women view themselves due to these social pressures that are often propagated through some form of mass media? The alt-right echo chamber, or the self-made echo chamber of Reddit? WeWork, Phishing, Tinder catfishing, Kari Farrell, Sarah Phillips, Elizabeth Holmes?
c) Jia doesn't say anything particularly new, or particularly interesting. This is full of the sort of thing you often find on the internet or any women's magazine: exercise and wedding angst, mixed with really pat and often insipid feminism. I particularly hated her article about how she hated adult heroines in novels because "they weren't happy" and she didn't want to be Jo after she married the professor, she wanted to be Harriet the Spy which is freshman level criticism at best and really far off from her supposed main thesis. Jia has a real bad case of "Not like those OTHER girls" often, none so overt as when she compares herself to Hope Hicks:
She never critically engages with the fact that she and Hicks basically grew up informed by the same social mores, in the same geographical area even at points; no, by the grace of God she went to Virginia and Hope went to Texas and there the difference lies! Mindbogglingly simple-minded criticism that doesn't discuss AT ALL that the mores we grow up with are often something shared across states, across countries, across the world, even. There is often racism and sexism on both right-wing and left-wing as well; it is a social ill that is sticky. (But, obviously, in the age of Trump, both are more strongly associated with the right, particularly now, and I will concede the left in America is certainly the lesser of the two evils, and I am glad of it, but it's definitely not just a right-wing problem and acting like one side of politics is evil and one side is sunshine and rainbows is very simplistic; at best, one is evil and the other is well-intentioned-but-also-often-just-as-in-favor-of-the--status-quo.)
Often Jia shows off her privilege, too: you see her going to private schools, expensive fitness classes, international travel. While this is obviously part of her life and thus should be in the book if she judges it relevant, it really just highlights her class, which is a strong undercurrent that's never discussed in the book: Jia gets into all the ivies but rebels and goes to UVA instead; Jia gets an apartment in New York and angsts about going to expensive barre classes that she can't afford (but can, of course, afford a New York apartment, all by herself, at 22, as a writer, uuuh huh); Jia goes to the Peace Corps for a year and hates being there and comes home early because she's sad. (There's also a mention that her host father kisses her on the lips when she does not want him to -- but it's not treated as a primary reason for leaving, while her angsting about wanting to be back in the states with her boyfriend is repeatedly mentioned as a motivating factor. Jia gives more pages over to her wistful sighing over a wedding magazine as her sole outlet of western culture than she gives to this non-consensual kiss.)
I don't think Jia has ever considered, been, or seen a poor person; her entire tooth-grating chapter on marriage that basically boils down to "But Why Do Women Want to Get Married Tho, Like, I Don't Get It" completely ignores the fact that for poorer women, marriage is pretty much the only way to be able to afford living long-term with someone in a house/in an apt with a joint income, and a guarantee to be supported for any children made in the marriage -- it's a vital part of the social contract, and so mind-shatteringly simple that watching Jia angst that she's not like the OTHER girls because she LOVES her man but doesn't, like, want to give up her FREEDOM basically set my teeth on edge.
And that's the problem with this book, really: Jia talks like she understands all female experiences, that there is one unified female experience, or, perhaps, one unified female experience per race. But in reality, while race certainly plays a large part in life experiences, it is not the universal factor: there is no universal factor, and if you had identical quintuplets who were raised apart, in vastly different socio-economic circumstances, with vastly different cultural backgrounds, in vastly different places, then they would probably be more different than alike. Jia acts like she knows everything, but Jia is my age, and Jia has given all the deep thought in this book of a Buzzfeed quizlet. It is also extremely tediously written, in over-wrought, academic prose, with enough quotations to choke any freshman essay...and yet, really, it reads like a freshman essay. The quotes aren't challenged much and are all cherry-picked to agree with Jia, and Jia relies on just a few sources and quotes them too often. Jia thinks enough for a glib, pat, don't-rock-the-boat newspaper column, but as a book, the key take-aways like "women are oppresed by the patriarchy" and "racism is endemic" and " True but not really deep thoughts at this point, you know?
This was listed on on the NPR "Best Books" list as not only an outstanding book of essays but "a guidebook for dealing with an Internet gone wild": NYT's Notable 100 books of 2019 calls this a collection that includes "essays that combine probing social analysis with wry personal anecdote about the “feverish, electric, unlivable hell” of the web." It is neither of those things. It is Buzzfeed level thoughts as regurgitated by a New Yorker writer which was somehow good enough to get on both the NPR Notables and the NYT's notables. I suppose it's a good book about the risks of the modern-day internet if you've been in a coma since roughly 1996, I guess? (Though, funnily, the one good essay in this book, about "A Rape on Campus" (the Rolling Stone piece about a rape that turns out to have all the common pitfalls of a modern rape case -- doesn't deal with the internet at all, even though it could easily have been tied forward to the allegations that have followed Trump and Biden or even into #me too). Really teeth-numbingly bad and I'm surprised I finished it. (0.5/5)
Wilder Girls by Rory Power: This was a fun YA romp! A private school of girls on an Island slowly mutate, becoming more and more inhuman. The pleasant surprise to me was just how queer the book is; two of the characters are pretty obviously pining for one another, and on an island where there is no expectation of ever being let off, there's all sorts of background pair-ups between girls. This has some really strong plotting, and I finished it in about a day.
There's a great tension from the start. All of the girls are mutants to some degree or another, and some of the girls mutate past their capability to survive it. There's very clearly a conspiracy with the teachers, along with the usual schoolgirl tensions between girls who vie for teacher's affection and good marks. There's a V-tension between the three main characters, Hetty and Blyatt and Reese, that bubbles just under the surface. There are only two teachers, and far too many girls, and far too few supplies, and things get bleak fast.
The way that their society has tumbled down and rebuilt itself is notable -- the girls' classes shift away from English and Math to gun-toting and spotting, militarizing in the face of a fast and terrible calamity. One of the protagonists' best friends, Byatt, becomes ill and is taken away, and her other best friend, Reese, (in that awkward v where both are best friends but seemingly without much in common beyond the shared friend) teams up with the protagonist (Hetty) to try to find the missing friend. And obviously, later, they find out all is not what it seems and there are secrets on the island and everything you'd expect.
I really enjoyed the relationship between the three women, particularly the two who are investigating the disappearance of the third. I feel like Rory Power does hit the tension inherent in school relationships well, how the girls at friends, yes, but in some ways, they are rivals, too. Byatt's plot is interesting, but I was much more interested in the chapters where they had a will they or won't they romance building up between Reese and Hetty than in her hospital life and the odd romance with a boy in the navy medical clinic (though the ending of that is really worth it). Unfortunately, even though I was delighted to see a queer romance in this book, this book follows the trend where the queer romance is very tame -- being YA I was assuming it would probably not involve sex, but this is so chaste that there's about one itsy-bitsy kiss and that's about it.
There's something about this trend that bothers me in fiction - it feels very much like having your cake and eating it too, when you make the romance so small that ripping out a page would just make them the best-est of friends. If the main romance in this book was a het romance, I can't help but feel like there would be a lot more focus on it, and while I don't want to see two teenagers bone down in a book (as an adult), I really wish these girls got to eat least kiss a little bit more. They're teenagers! Still, the dynamic is nice, and I did enjoy the romance. This trend is just a bit of sand trapped between my toes.
I think where this book started to suffer for me beyond that was in the last third. The book is well-plotted but you'll never find the answers to half the questions that the book asks -- and the ending, I think, ruined what poignancy it could have had when one character who fairly obviously SHOULD have passed away gets the ole' switcheroo, haha, I should have died but REALLY I'M ALIVE. The ending is super abrupt and very obviously will continue on to a sequel - judging by the cover to this book (which is GORGEOUS), they've invested in this trilogy, and I'm used to books doing that. But it would be nice if this one had literally resolved more than one of the twenty-something plot threads it dangled, including whether the main characters make it through their predicament, even on a small scale. Stillm it wasn't a bad book, and I greatly enjoyed it. If I remember it by the time the next book comes out, I'd read the sequel. (My notes for improvement, if Rory Powers wants them: make it....gayer.) 3.5/5.
Afrofuturism by Ylasha Womack: I've loved Afrofuturism ever since I read the Parable of the Sower series, but I was little bummed when I started reading this series of essays going over various themes in Afrofuturism. It's not because it's badly written; it's not. It's because the introduction sets this inspirational, optimistic tone, written early in Barack Obama's second term, when we weren't aware of just how racist the United States was, when the alt-right seemed like a lunatic fringe that would never have power, when there was not a pandemic that was disproportionately affecting African-American and minority neighborhoods, when the police weren't showing off just how little the US has moved on since the civil rights movement. It is not the author's fault to be optimistic; no doubt there are books from 1910 that look forward to the future, too, not knowing that pandemics, world war, and a major economic collapse were all coming up within the decade. So I will admit, the lack of fun I had with this book, the punch of this book in my veins, that was mostly due to the coronavirus when I breezed through this in March.
This book is a series of essays exploring Afrofuturism, by afro-futurists. Most of the essays are interesting on a personal level, noting how Science Fiction has been a particularly strong part of African diaspora escapism; where can one go, when one has been propelled so far from home, but to the stars? Most of the essays are lovely, personal, and trace a diverse cast's answers to the question of what Afro-Futurism means to them and how it informs their works.
Unfortunately, if I had one criticism, it is that many of the people name-check the same artists in the past, and while it's not a bad thing, per se, it means thisbook feels less "deep dive" and more "introduction". Most people interested in Afrofuturism have heard of Sun Ra; most have heard of Parliament. Most will have read Butler. The opinions of the various contributors are varied as hell -- but that naturally means that some are better than others, some more in-depth. Some essays show how ultimately positive influences (the "alien" presence often credited on the history channel in the building of the pyramids and other such landmarks) often come from rather racist cultural beliefs (the belief that they must be "aliens" who were responsible for constructing them because western "explorers" didn't think that the Egyptians were advanced enough to have done it). Most of the essays are well written, though a couple of the pieces have some errors that make one blink a bit (one makes the rather bonkers assertion that Napoleon burned down the library of Alexandria; it was burned by Julius Caesar ).
If you already have a basic understanding of Afrofuturism, you won't find much new here. This is a pretty basic overview. But the essays chosen are well-written for the most part, and I think this would make a good primer in addition to the texts that it references if you were looking to construct a class on this topic. I think my strongest takeaway from this was the idea that for African-Americans -- and many other peoples affected by the African diaspora -- the past is marked with so much tragedy that it limits the amounts of stories that can be told, and the only place with a more diverse option for narratives is to mine the future, instead of the past.
I sort of wish I'd read this during a different time, and a different place; there is nothing wrong with the book, but all the optimism of 2012-2013 did make my stomach churn at points, knowing with the clarity of hindsight what was coming up in their future. That made this a slightly more difficult read. I'd like to hope that these authors are still optimistic, but given how much my own optimism has fallen since 2013, I'm quite afraid of finding out. (4/5)
Ninth House by Leigh Barduro: I really enjoyed this book, but feel almost a little bit guilty for doing so. It really reminds me of the Historian, another book I loved that took folklore and history on a topic and mish-mashed them into a fine powder. This is a book born of privilege, a little bit pretentious: it is the well-tred story of a girl from the wrong sides of the tracks and a boy from the right side; it's an alternate history story of one of two institutions that have dominated the American collegiate landscape for a long time. It's Harry Potter escapist fiction for adults complete with Hogwart's house-esque "houses" come-social clubs that specialize in different forms of magic. It's a book that is 500 pages, but probably could have been 300, because for at least 200 pages not a lot is happening. It is not, in any way, a perfect book.
And yet, reader, I loved about seventy percent of this.
Look, let's get the criticisms out early: This book does not reinvent any wheels. This reads like a Yale undergrad fell in love with her campus and wanted to spend a few extra semesters writing a book about it. This is exactly the sort of book where there'll be a movie or a Netflix tv show in a couple of years, and I'm not sure you'd miss a lot of the main plot if you saw it on the screen rather than read it as a novel. It's a book that will be profoundly polarizing because so much of it works on the world-building, and so much of that world-building has some sort of dark-and-yucky themes underneath. Sexual assault being a big one, this has so much sexual assault in it, from the past to the present, to the point I'd strongly suggest not reading this if that is at all a trigger because there's at least three instances of it, like so much, including a couple of pages of a graphic rape scene, but on the other hand, I also think you absolutely would see the sort of abuses of magic and drugs that lead to these things: one of the major plot points is the distribution of a magical drug that makes its user very responsive to suggestion, and well...yeah, I can absolutely see privileged yalies using that to get young women to do sexual favors for them.
But.
If you can get past that - and I'm awaare that's a big ask - what this book nails REALLY WELL is the world-building. The houses of magic, and how they're built, are things of beauty; I love all the mythology references (the cleverest if admittedly also most obvious being Lethe, the house protagonists Alex and Darlington serve; they're the magical watch-dogs but part of their job is also to sweep such scandals under the rug, hence the invocation of the river of both absolution and oblivion), I love how the magic works, which is just this close to science but not quite. I love in particular the lore concerning ghosts, which forms the largest part of the book: don't look too much at them, or you'll form a relationship with them. Form a relationship with a ghost, and bad things happen - not least of which involves possession.
The book also really hits the relationship between its two lead characters well. Darlington, the more staid-and-proper Yale boy, is not so much repressed as careless, so hopelessly in love with magic that his jealousy over Alex's easier pull of magic forms a major impediment to their relationship. Alex, both from a poor background and a tragic one, is a Sephardi freshman who is more than a little comfortable with cutting corners -- because she wants to take advantage of her yale education, and her Lethe duties keep her from being able to keep up with her schoolwork easily. I love how the difference in their backgrounds -- Alex is Sephardi-hispanic, Darlington is white; Darlington is upper class, Alex was the only child of a single mother who veered between middle class and lower class depending on the year -- become part of how they form their relationship. It's particularly well done because while they grow closer, there's a moment that makes the defining difference between them very clear, and that moment is well done. It's hard to write the growing-together-but-then-the-weak-spot-is-exposed well, and it really is done well here.
And yet.
The one thing that really stuck in my craw about this book was the ending. It's set up pretty obviously to be a series, and as a result only two of the major plot threads are solved. The big-bad reveal seems simultaneously too fast and yet exhaustively slow; I'd pegged it from the first meeting between the two characters, but I thought that the tie-up on the main conflict was a little too neat and prim, and everything else wasn't neat and prim enough. I was irked that the trauma it would inflict to one of the major characters who was attached to [Big Bad] is literally never explored; that character simply ceases to exist after the Climax. I was annoyed also by the big bad's rather one-note characterization; in a book that is so feminist as fuck for most of it, you'd think there would be some exploration of [redacted] on [redacted] violence -- and yet this side goes unexplored.
Overall it felt quite a bit like she was running out of time on writing the book, and had to find a stopping point. The bland villains may make this a harder read as a series goes forward. That said, I enjoyed this quite a bit, to the point that I'm absolutely going to read the next book. But like Temeraire, this might be a series where I inhale the first couple of books and wind up wondering what, exactly, I enjoyed so much in the first place. (3.75/5)
The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher: I really love Ursula Vernon's works, so I wanted to read one of her T. Kingfisher novels. This is a rustic horror story: a young woman goes to clean out her deceased grandmother's hoarder home, loveable red-bone coonhound in tow, and finds not just hordes and hordes of garbage, but so much more: a manuscript by her deceased step-grandfather, a creepy town full of gold-old boys, deer effigies, and stones that stay in the mind however much you don't quite want them to. It is not particularly "hard" horror: there aren't any jump scares, and the horror is more in what isn't said instead of what is, if that makes sense: it's about the questions that aren't answered. The tone here is surprisingly light, but when you think about the underpinnings of how the mythology of the world works, it becomes more disturbing.
The mythos here is more H.P. Lovecraft than anything else (and is evidently a homage to, or perhaps sequel to, "The White People" by Arthur Machen) and the change in climate from dreary England to sunny South agrees with this book, for the most part. I was particularly into the very love-craftian manner that shows how the effigies are constructed: thinking about one of the main characters means thinking about just what went into those effigies, and just what her life living in such a space with such must have been. The use of the mythos surrounding bloodlines, and how a mystical bloodline gets diluted by too much mixture of human blood feels uncomfortable (and certainly VERY up Lovecraft's alley), but I deeply loved the very abandoned underworld (not the Greek one, just an underground world) where most of the inhabitants have died out. This is somewhat what I mean by the horror being more in what isn't on the page, rather than what is: the empty, abandoned city is horrible itself, even if the narrator cracks jokes trying to escape it in her forays into the dark underside of the natural world.
The narrator is a bit of a wise-cracker, and this does tend to make the horror feel a little less...for lack of a better word, horrible. This makes sense for the character, who we're introduced to early on using humor as a way to deflect from things that bother her in life: her father's health, her mother's death, her complicated relationship with her grandmother and step-grandfather (and angsting over how step-grandfather is a bit awkward, for what is the relationship there, beyond nothing at all?). I listened to this as an audiobook and the narrator for this is quite good at the role, sounding weary and uncomfortable as she cracks each and every joke. This honestly makes sense in the book -- but I do think, paradoxically, it makes the book one that is a bit too soft for most people looking for horror. Because I am a big weenie who none-the-less loves haunted house stories, it didn't really bother me; it might bother you if you're more seasoned than I am.
I listened to this with my mother during our evening walks together, and I have to say the humor honestly made the walks more entertaining, and worked well as a book to listen to when one is off on an evening run, particularly when this is one's main in-person social event of the day. It's light horror, but honestly, when real life is closer to 28 days than you like, sometimes light horror is all you need.(4/5)
What I Wrote/am Writing: I wrote very little through March and April only to remember, vaguely, that a friend of mine had mentioned using 4thewords to spur her in writing long ago, and now I am hoked on it. I wrote maybe 40k between March and April, and then according to 4thewords have written about 100k in May, so I might have a chance of finishing my difficult GTWO pledge after all.
Things I've written:
* WNSO, always more WNSO, that might be the most involved, iddy fic I ever write.
* A sequel to this fic, in which Hades, Eurydice, Persephone, and Demeter are all Disasters in their own way.
- This fic for Hurt Comfort Exchange, in which Hades accidentally kinda-sorta gives away his soul - whoops.
* Restarted working on Rhea, after a long struggle. Now Almost done!
I decided to start a novel for Campwrimo and I'm sure that'll end well. (IT won't.)
What I Watched/Am Writing: Watchmen: I am late to this HBO series, as is my wont, but I really enjoyed it even if it made me feel ultimately a little uneasy. Watchman picks up after the comic (not the movie) twenty years down the line, and tells a story that's deeply connected to the original story but ultimately it's own thing. Overall, I enjoyed it when I watched it in march. But I am not sure I want to re-watch it, because I feel like in ways it hits too-close to modern life, and I'm not sure that the very police-focused viewpoint in watchman really would be quite so easy to deal with today. Because it is very authority-friendly as a story: the plot is all about violence and the police: specifically one woman's violence, and the brutality inflicted on her ancestors by police, and the brutality she inflicts upon others.
There's a very big slice of might-makes-right in this, and on one hand, I do think Watchmen deals with that to some extent: the race riots in Tulsa are shown to be horrific, unfair, and abjectly and objectively racist. There's a heavy legacy associated not only with those riots, but also the early vigilantes (the Hooded Justice, in particular) are shaped by race. There are a couple of characters who are revealed to be white supremacists who are perfectly capable of having a conversation, even a friendship, with black people; snakes in grass.
There are groups that show how virulent white nationalism is, what a multi-sided octopus, and it does not hesitate to use them as terrorists. There are black people who cannot forgive nor forget the transgressions that were forced upon them, and it spends a fair amount of time talking about that rage. There's a fair amount of exploration of what it means to be the law and order, and how much that entails cracking a few skulls. There's even a little bit about colonizers creating their own form of hell, and the brutality colonizers are willing to inflict upon indigenous groups, if you squint at Adrian's incredible brutality of his servants.
But there's always an uncomfortable veneer to the heroes in this.
Returning characters Adrian, Laurie, and Jon are not really in any better place than we left them in Watchmen, and all are willing to crack a few eggs. Laurie's first scene involves shooting a man trying to stop a bank robbery in a vigilante superhero sting operation; Jon is absent as any deist's God, but frequently invoked in the hearts and minds of many. Adrian mows down his own people, and some on the other side for good measure, retaining his unique balancing act on the line between anti-hero and villain that he walked in Watchmen.
Of the new characters, of which there are many, most are no less bloodied: Angela beats up and abducts a man to get information on a terrorist organization; her boss authorizes the use of deadly force over the death of one police officer; her colleagues, Red Scare and Looking Glass, beat the hell out of some protestors in Nixonville on the thin premise of extracting information (in reality, mostly to let off steam). Lady Trieu, my favorite of the new characters, uses threats of violence to help her to get what she wants when asking nicely doesn't work.
There's a lot of points where Watchmen is uncomfortable. White supremacy is shown with all its warts here, in all the forms it comes in: the nice-ish politicians, the venerated police, the vigilantes, the protestors, the vile feelings a white man has for his mixed-race child. I wish that it had dwelt a little bit more on that at points - it's in a hurry to move past the rot of the racists, and doesn't waste time to explain the rot that could make a man hold a klan hood as something to be proud of in this day and age. Nor is it explained why, entirely, a politician would agree to become part of such a society.
Part of this is the tight running time. The finale is so plot-packed I wish that it had, in fact, been two episodes, in order to breathe. I wish that the finale had not made virtually all but one of the women in it a damsel in distress at points. I wish we had gotten more answers about a last-minute rescue and less cartoonish battle lines drawn between "good guy" cops and "bad guy" extremists in a series that so often highlights the roles that vigilantes play.
But it is a short series, and a wild wide, and I do not regret spending time with it.
I particularly did love the relationships between characters, especially Laurie; Laurie and Angela and their uncomfortable tet-a-tet, two survivors of the same old bullshit who share more than just their judiciary aims. (I do with the relationship between them -- and between the one person in their pasts/presents they have in common -- was dealt with more. But I'm happy that this does not dwindle down to petty cat-fighting, as so many other series have, so perhaps less is more.)
Of the new ones, I loved Looking Glass, who fights the good fight for so long over a threat that traumatized him as a young teenager, only to find out that the monsters aren't entirely real and hell is truly other people. His team-up with Laurie (always my favorite foil in this series, it must be said) was particularly interesting and I would love to see more of them. My absolutely favorite new character though, is the Lady Herself, Lady Trieu. Trieu is the nu-Adrien, a godlike tech wizard who is both malevolent and charming in equal turn. I wish she, too, had had more time in the finale -- we see so much of her being mysterious and alluring, and I wish we would have gotten a bit more information on just what she was planning on doing with the goal she was seeking. Instead, we see her clumsily prevented from the full realization of her goals by a Deus-ex-squidina that felt slightly cheap.
Violence begets violence begets violence. In a month where police brutality has never been more on my mind, it makes the idea of re-watching Watchmen an uncomfortable enough prospect. Still, I'm glad to have seen it, and if we lived in a society where media got more of a deep dive, I'd love to see some more essays that go through the uncomfortable relationship between the main characters. (This series <a href="https://www.vulture.com/tv/watchmen/">of essays</a> strikes me as essentially Good Thoughts.) I would watch a second season, if there was one. If not, I feel like this tells a good story all its own. (4/5 when I was watching it, but I think it might go down on a re-watch.)
This June, I've been tearing through Rome, but I'm saving that for the June entry. Why? Because it's June 21st, and this thing is a monster, and I'm already afraid of how long it is.
I also managed to watch a couple movies this month! I got access to MUBI through a Scribd subscription and opted to try out this series, which seems to have a bunch of interesting Indies/under-seen movies. The idea of having a 30 day library to scroll through is interesting to me, especially since it takes out some of the overwhelming nature of other streaming services. I still didn't watch many, but I managed to watch two in (yikes) three months:
Gabrielle: Interesting French film based on the (English) story "The Return" by Joseph Conrad. An older man who married late in life is devastated when, five years after his marriage, his bride runs off and leaving him a note that concludes that her crime is "terrible and mad, but it is also terrible and right. Forgive me." He is stunned by this and completely overcome, mourning her like he has been shot.The problem, of course, is that she comes back hours later.
The couple tries to keep their relationship going after the assault on the fundamental trust of the relationship; he tries to demand details, and she demurs, then spits them in his face. She is a wreck to the servants, who don't understand how Gabrielle (the wife) can be so miserable when her husband, while plain, treats her fairly well and is not cruel to her (and the class subtext is highlighted here: not only in the servants boggling over a wife throwing away their high position to run off with a middle-class schlub, but the husband's disgust when his wife's lover is revealed to be a man he considers quite below himself, ethnically and financially). The husband, Jean, is absolutely frustrated: not only because Gabrielle has betrayed him with someone in their circle,but also because Gabrielle has always refused to have any sexual intimacy with him, so the cuckoldry rings even more true.
It's absolutely devastating to watch these two break apart, from rage to sorrow and back again. This movie has probably the least sexy sex scene I have ever seen, and every talk of love in this is more elegy than inspiring. Hard to watch. I put this on my list because I thought it might be good #inspo for the not-so-happy sides of the longfic I'm writing, only to find out that...yeah, with the current world, I'm not into writing the darker sides of life. But what this does, this does well, and if you want an unhappy love affair to wretch you apart, this will accomplish it and you might wind up thanking it for the privilege. (4.5/5)
Southland Tales: This is a strange movie. Made in 2008, this is the follow-up to Donie Darko. In many ways, it’s a prescient take on the post-Bush republican presidency: everything online (and off) goes into a big machine, and nothing in reality matters so much as image. When a pornstar has an extramarital affair with a buff actor (who happens to be married to the daughter of a government big wig), they unwittingly unleash the apocalypse in a strange, multi-layered tale.
It's a weird story. It's a dystopia imagined in the hubris of the Bush administration: In its views on society, this is an interesting movie. It opens with 9/11, and a set of follow-up attacks, with the answer of what will happen to America. Some of it feels almost prescient ("Pay her what she wants, daddy! We have to make it go away!" wails the president's daughter when she finds out there's a pornographic tape with evidence of her husband's affair), and in other ways, it feels almost quaint: the idea of republicans being less racist and more "law and order" (and boy do we know now that the latter there is often enough a veil for the former -- should have known it then, but...), the pornographer-come-proto-influencer's talk show, where the personalities take questions from fans and offer pat feminist opinions in a slick, pornography-friendly show.
This latter one only seems quaint because it doesn't involve the pornographer hawking tummy tee.
In...every other possible way? It's a disaster. Straight up disaster. It's one of those stories where you really never quite know what's going on, and it happens mostly in dream logic. Donnie Darko, the previous movie by this director, toyed with the same sort of non-traditional structure. But while that worked, this has a far more sprawling cast, with far less explanation.
The main story is tied up in three acts -- the actor, played by the Rock, who has amnesia and winds up having a truly gasoline-lit affair with a porn star (played by Sarah Michelle Geller), whose seduction is a political power move done by democrat challengers to the USA's throne (and quaint, isn't it, the idea that the democrats would be the side paying porn stars). Another act of the story focuses about the porn star, and her career, and her desire to have a legitimate, non-pornographic career. The third plot-strand deals with dildo-fashioning lesbian punk anarchists, who try to set up a false flag operation where two improv actors are murdered by cops in hopes of turning public sympathy to the leftist plot (and, again, the idea of false-flag operations is both disturbingly prescient and also almost but not quite there; they correctly pinpoint the outrage button that dominates modern American influence, but not the alt-right that introduced these conspiracy theories-cum-real events such as the infamous Massacre at Bowling Green) and the Good Old Boy Iraq-war veteran-cum-cop who is forced to comply with their demands.
That three-protagonist split would have maybe been a good idea if they really ever went anywhere interesting with it, but they don't. There's thousands of cutaways to barely related characters: one local man who joins the cop winds up with his own sub-plot where he helps crack open an ATM, buys a rocket launcher, and dies; the anti-man, anti-republican lesbian biker liberation league, which gets scads and scads of time plotting for every one of their terrorist actions, only to wind up all dying in similar ways; a lot of time is also spent on the porn-stars manager, who is either a Machiavelli shooting for the political saboteur, or else a clueless nonce who gets lucky; and perhaps most egregious of all, the movie's narrator, Justin Timberlake quoting other, better works reminding you you could have been watching literally anything else, or George Wallace being a scientist who may or may not be a con-man. There's probably a good story somewhere in here, but it's absolutely muddled to the point that the story is complete garbage.
The only part that reminds interesting is, basically, how they saw what society might be at this point, from the viewpoint of 2003/4 America. Very little of that social landscape is explored, though; for example, there's just about no thought about feminism, where you have a porn star talk show as its mainstream face and a dildo-fashioning feminist liberation network as its fringe -- but there's very little examination of what that super-sexual format means to the people involved, or how none of these supposedly radical feminist groups can be divorced from something that is as often victimizing of women as the sex industry. There's a lot of potential criticism of the government,but the movie never really dives into whether the government is wrong for it's oppressive spying. This movie seems to portray the republican side as often hypocrites, but generally interested in maintaining peace along with the status quo, and while I was alive in the early 00's and remember this common sentiment, it's a very strange one to revisit. How far we have backslid in 2020.
There are some appealing scenes here: one three-person dance-tango, at the end of the movie, is a particularly good one -- but this was overall both overly long and shoddily explained, and thus pretty bad. (1/5 stars)
What Theater Shows I Went to See:
Pretty much nothing due to ongoing events. Shows I would have seen but were cancelled/postponed:
What the Constitution Means to Me
Six
My Fair Lady
Jesus Christ Superstar
Hundred Days
Next to Normal
What I Played/am Playing:
Not a lot! I've been really busy on the weekends, and I've only played a little bit as far as videogames. I've divided my time thusly:
Fire Emblem Heroes (Mobile): Look, this is a stupid game. But this is a short little mobile game, and it's very easy to just play a game or two while I'm waiting for people to join on conference calls, and that's what I've been using it for: those little hum-drum fifteen-minute points where you happen to be waiting in line, waiting at work, etc. It's even more pay-to-win than it used to be, and I'm reading a point where I'm not very useful. But the gatcha RNG is fun and frustrating, and I like the characters, so I spent a few minutes a day hoping for a new Tharja so I can combine her with my Tharja and have a slightly more super Tharja, only to wind up getting 600 Stahls instead. Only free to play so actual progress will basically never happen, and I know this, and yet I play it from time to time anyway. (3/5, with one point each fun gameplay, free characters from time to time, and mostly art and minus two points for being rather limited in what you can do if you don't pay for it.)
Judgment: Fun, but I haven't made a lot of non-sub story progress. I'm still in Chapter 3. Still running down sub-quest for the most part. Hoping I will finish this before yuletide so I can use it as a yuletide fandom, as there's so many characters in this that I'd really love to see explored more. But it's also going to be a game I might need to youtube through the plot, because I keep going months between plot bits and trying to remember what's going on and why Yagami and Kaito haven't kissed yet. (4/5 thus far, with 1 point taken off thus far for my own demerit of having a shitty memory.)
Dishonored 2: I finally crawled my way to level 2 (!) only to discover I accidentally have to restart because I inched into an area and missed that two guards shoved a citizen through a magical light-frying-thing and then all my auto-saves were over it and I never knew it existed and even though I love this game and its Aesthetic now I have to restart because there is, somehow, blood on Emily's hands. Sigh. I'm debating saying screw it, and just saying that I'll get clean hands on a social media run, but it's Real Frustrating that someone ELSE's actions make a death my character's fault. (4/5, with the minus one being the savior complex scoring, and the 4 for Emily/Meagan who I love and, also, would like to kiss one another at some point.)
What I Read/Am Reading:
Lovely War by Julie Berry: This is a rather neat conceit - It's a Greek-Mythology tinged YA novel (and classicism, it seems, is coming in again, and I could not be happier for it), interspersed with World War II. This borrows the story of Hephaestus making the golden net to ensnare Ares and Aphrodite and catch them red-handed in their affair; it moves this event to sometime during World War II, where poor Hephaestus plays a porter to dupe the aforementioned couple only to trap them when their guard is down.
Aphrodite asks for a trial, and Hephaestus is all too glad to grant her one. She invites two other gods to serve as witnesses for her testimony: Apollo and Hades. The reason for those two in particular becomes obvious as she begins to give her testimony, which turns out to be a story of two intertwined couples during the first world war: an English soldier and his bride (James, a young man of Good Character, and Hazel, a pianist with dreams of going to the conservatory) and an international romance (Aubrey, an African-American musician, and Collette, a Belgian survivor of a German assault that killed virtually everyone in her town - including her first love and her family).
The first love story starts off a bit pat (boy meets girl at dance, boy loses heart, boy soldier has to leave within a week, girl pines, boy pines) - but it gets more complicated as the story goes along: James becomes a crack-shot sniper, and Hazel is kicked out of a Red Cross program, and both acquire scars, both mental and physical. The second romance, of course, by virtue of what it is, stars off thornier, and becomes more so when Aubrey is essentially forced to leave the French camp he met Collette in, and racism throws up sorrow in their path. I like how much of the racism in the book is portrayed realistically; that is, it's not outright mwa-ha-ha-ha evil, but the slow, seeping evil of assumptions like well a colored soldier wouldn't write to a white woman, he must have got the name wrong and the strange looks from supposedly supportive parties who just want thinks to go easier. It's morally thorny for what is essentially a YA romance; on the downside, of course, its also rather bleak for what it is.
There are a few areas where she flexes their otherworldliness - I particularly enjoyed Hades, when he is summoned, showing up as a priest and everyone else asking him if this induces any religious quandaries in him. Hades shrugs this off, basically claims that death is death, and he is happy to help his people come to him with "prepared" souls as the opposite is "messy" and boasts that he can take to being a Christian Priest or Jewish Rabbi as easily as he can be himself. I enjoyed this moment a lot - it's bizarre, but it feels true to the character, and I like how his reasons for doing it are very much based on his experience of the world more than the human one. Hades, for the most part, is the sole god to get such otherworldly moments, with some of it taking place in his realm. Being a Hades fan, I'll not complain.
For the most part, really, the gods do feel well-drawn to their folkloric characterizations: Apollo is charming, Ares is loud and brash, Hades is aloof and spiritual, Aphrodite flirts like it's going out of style, and Hephaestus is awkward but well-meaning, and Berry utilizes his tendency to be the family "peacekeeper" really well here. The relationship between Aphrodite and Hephaestus is suitably thorny at the start, but ends up surprisingly sweet - you do get the sense of how those two work together. You don't really see that with the other gods - Hades and Persephone are mentioned being together, but Hades also mentions playing a monk "for a year" (forsaking Persephone time?) and the other spouses/significant others aren't mentioned. This is in some small ways disappointing - I would have loved to see Apollo or Ares mentions their human lovers, especially given that such really would have been a good way to add queer representation to the novel. Queer people basically don't exist here, which annoys me when you have a canon that has queer characters; I understand why the human relationships are all heterosexual given the time-frame, but its disappointing that the gods are also held to those same standards when the source material def does not hew to such. For the most part I think Berry does well by mythology, but there are a couple things she adds about their lives that made me stop and think a minute, such as when she mentions that all the men are fathers. Certainly Apollo and Ares are, but Hephaestus and Hades are very rarely given children in mythology, and I am really curious just what Berry thinks happened there.
Overall, I really enjoyed it despite the flaws, especially how the stories wind together and the Gods get snippy little commentary over it all. It has a few points I wish were better adapted, but I had a lot of fun with the novel! (3.75/5 stars)
Conviction by Denise Mina: This is a book that I enjoyed, but I also read in like two days and now barely remember. It's one of those books meant to be read in an hour or two, that if you give more room, it ceases to make more sense. It's one of those books that, in other years, I'd probably read on a plane, train, or other sort of "in-the-liminal-space-between-spaces" sort of place. It is a mystery novel, and a very easy read. The plot is simple: Anna is a survivor of an assault, who has had to do extreme things to remake her life post-assault, not the least of which is to take on a whole new identity. From a tough as balls survivor, she's now become a soccer-mum, with two kids and a high-paid corporate lawyer husband. On what should have been the worst day of her second life (she finds out her husband is having an affair, with her best friend, and best friend is pregnant, with his child), Anna listens to a podcast about a ship that went down in the ocean and her blood runs cold when she realizes that the man who is suspected of scuttling the ship with his entire family abroad was an old friend/acquaintance. She gets obsessed with the podcast, and decides to look into the murder.
When her ex-best friend's husband (who just HAPPENS to be an internationally famous rock star battling anorexia), events spiral and the two wind up on a globe-trotting quest (well, Europe-trotting) to find the real killer while not processing their feelings about best friend and husband.
For the first half of the book, Mina keeps the suspense up well, despite the outlandish premise. I did feel for Anna being cheated on, and the idea of her being so betrayed by her best friend is particularly rotten. I did believe she'd go deep into murder podcasts because when you are in deep pain, sometimes you want to see bleak media. I believe even that her friend's husband would come over to see how she was doing. I can almost believe leaving a rock-star for a lawyer. But the problem comes kinda early -- somehow Anna is in danger due to her past life, and as soon as a photo of her starts trending on the internet, people start trying to kill her. When you find out why she's been in fear for her life, it kinda stretches credulity. So does Finn's rock star lifestyle, though I enjoyed that they do show him fighting both with anorexia and the public perception of him being a recovering anorexic. I am very thankful that the book does not force a romance on Finn and Anna, who scream Rebound but thankfully manage to avoid it. I also enjoy that the heroes are well-written as not particularly gifted in any arts that might prove useful to mystery-solving; they have the realistic skills of a famous musician (which opens some doors) and a stubborn, blue-collar housefrau.
By the second half, though, things fall apart. The main villain, when revealed, is not very realistic, and her motives are downright cartoonish. I kept wondering if she was in love with the other character who is set up to be a villain (who (plays?) dumb as to the motives); the novel goes with the bold choice of giving her zero (zero!) reason to do so whatsoever, leaving her screeching only that she was trying to protect the set-up villain. Very weak. It also deeply stretches credulity that at one point an adult woman (30's-40's) is mistaken to a teenager at points. It also deeply bothered me that the affair between the two main character's spouses was basically swept under the rug, with them getting a hero-turn in the second half of the novel: it smacked false that Anna would forgive them that quickly. I really hate how it basically comes out as "haha,our relationship wasn't the best, so it's okay". Like. What?? It's a massive betrayal, and it's Not Okay because Finn has anorexia and Anna has emotional issues. It really has a bit of that "it's okay to cheat on someone if they're not perfect" vibe and like - just get a divorce first, man. Do the right thing. That she could get over that pain in FIVE DAYS to forgive and be like "well, [best-ex] will be a better mother anyway, she's not damaged, like me" just made me want to SCREAM. Very gross. NPR's review that this is a "master of mystery" is certainly not based on this book, but rather other books the author has written, I suspect.
This made the NPR best novels list but I really don't understand why, and I am beginning to think the list is not a good one for me. I've found a few books I really loved out of it (Scribe being a big one) but for the most part I seem to have "alright" to "meh" reactions. Also, the title for this is TERRIBLE and I literally know nothing about what Conviction has to do with this premise. It's a decent airplane book but...also, who's going on a plane these days? (2/5)
Orange World and Other Stories by Karen Russell: Karen Russell is one of those writers who I think you either deeply love or find very frustrating. Russel is a master of coming up with some really outlandish premises and writing them as realistically as possible. I LOVED her previous short story collection, Vampires in the Lemon Grove, especially it's title story where Clyde and Magreb, two ancient vampires, contemplate how their relationship strains when one of them wants to change their ways, and the other doesn't. There are times I still think about this story, along with two others in the collection: Prove Up (a young boy in a western tale goes through a strange otherworldly landscape, trying to get a window to his neighbor, and he might meet Death itself along the way) and The Barn at the End of Our Term (the US presidents are reincarnated into horses in a barn, and Russell makes fun with the full existential horror of this situation). Russell tends to paint a sketch with all the wrinkles in, but she doesn't tend to really supply endings that are anything but open-ended: some people think she's an incredibly frustrating writer due to that, but I like that there's room to live in in the endings of her stories. If you were frustrated with her for those shortcomings in the past, you will hate this. If you enjoy Russell's previous works, you will likely like this.
If you've not read her before, I think it depends on how much tolerance you have for very mundane actions taken in very bizarre worlds. If that mix isn't for you, this is going to frustrate you. I don't think this was as strong as Vampires in the Lemon Grove - there's a couple stories here I just hated -- but it's quite a good mix, with most of the stories continuing to nail the weirdness of mundane life in underwater Miami, how a woman becomes a tree, and falling in love with a woman who has been dead for 5,000 years at first glance, and other such tales. (4/5)
My Favorite Stories:
* Black Corfu: This tends to be most people's least favorite story in this collection, judging by Goodreads. These people are wrong. Black Corfu is sometimes confusing, absolutely polarizing, but always haunting; it is the story of a moorish (aka "mixed") doctor living on Corfu. Unable to attain a proper position in his homeland due to his dark skin, he becomes a doctor of the dead. In the world of Black Corfu, people and animals must have their tendons cut -- otherwise, once they are killed, they will rise again, zombies scuttling over the landscape. When the Doctor receives an unimpressive (white, noble) apprentice, he's sharp with his tongue. The apprentice retaliates by unleashing rumors, and what spills out after is absolutely tense and horrific. The doctor is resolute he did not make a mistake; his apprentice is resolute that he did, and the thing is: the doctor's sanity is so shakey, from the first page on, that we're not ever quite sure.
The doctor's underworld surgery center is so awfully macabre, and by the time that we enter that chamber for the last time for the final, horrifying act - ugh. The ending of this stayed with me a while; I instantly reread it because it honestly surprised me. It's a beautiful, haunting world and I would love to see a whole novel on the concept of a world where death is more transformation than permanent, and where zombies are so normalized that not even a child is surprised by an undead seagull.
* The Prospectors: Two girls run away from home together and make a living by stealing little trinkets from the rich, a sort of two-person robin hood team. While on their way to a fancy dress party for the opening of a new lodge, they make the wrong turn and wind up in a cabin full of men who died during a cave-in on the previous attempt to make said lodge. What really makes this special is the rules for how ghosts work in this universe, which is spooky; the way the girls interact with the ghosts and how the ghosts seem stuck in time yet not -- and always otherworldly -- is SO good. Short but sweet and I loved the ending.
* The Gondoliers: This is another one I deeply loved. Three sisters live in underwater Florida (in what I believe was formerly Miami) working as gondoliers from parts of the state that are still above-ground. All three have mutated into having the power of singing to echo-locate, in some very cool siren imagery. One day, as the youngest girl is heading back to the cave she shares with her sisters, an old man asks her to take him out further than most go. Despite the risk, the girl agrees, and the two share a somewhat dangerous journey to the epicenter of the city.
It's really a lovely elegy for a world so dramatically changed by global warming. I was fascinated by the relationship between the girl and the old man as they share the uneasy boat ride - herself, a creature of a new world, and himself a man permanently caught in mourning the past. I particularly loved this relationship, along with the relationship between the three sisters, which is sometimes fraught with tension, but is always loving.
My Least Favorite:
* Bog Girl: I didn't really like this one, the story of a teenager who stumbles on a bog girl working a construction job after school and falls head over heels in love with her while his family members struggle with the strange relationship. This wasn't horrible - it was short - but it wasn't that funny, and in ways it was crushing: the way the bog girl is treated, as an object, shows how much women in general are viewed as an object. And while I get that it was somewhat the point (the bog girl becomes a popular girl in school-based entirely on the boy who "wants" her!) the only thing I somewhat enjoyed about it was the ending, which resolves in literally the most teenage fashion of all.
* Madame Bovary's Greyhound: I've never read Flaubert's Madame Bovary and this is one of those stories that I don't think makes much sense without understanding the source material. It's mostly -- judging by google -- a summary of a couple scenes from the novel, but from the point of the view of the dog. Kinda pointless, and long, and rather boring.
* The Tornado Auction: This seems to be most people's favorite story but I hated this one. I got stuck on this one and it took me forever to get past it. An old man who has been selfish all his life and obsessed with raising tornadoes in a world where the weather is manufactured, cashes out his savings, and buys a tornado after his daughters and wife have moved away/died. If you liked the main character this might have been moving, but what I got out of it was a selfish man being selfish, continuing to raise tornados after one of them nearly killed his daughter, and I could get why his kids weren't fond of him tbh. By the time I got to the ending, I was only relieved that it was finally over.
I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution by Emily Nussbaum: Bleh. I like Emily Nussbaum when I hear her on NPR and her column in the NYT - she's an articulate critic - but this has all the problems these sorts of collections usually do:
1) Because this is a compilation of Nussbaum's critical essays she has written to this point, there's a lot of years of material to cover. As a result, quite a bit of the articles are on older TV shows, and most of them have been critically done to death already. There's articles in here about Breaking Bad, the Sopranos, the Wire, and other shows about ugly middle-aged men having ugly middle-aged crises (and the odd woman: Sex in the City gets an article, too). There's not a lot of "new ground" covered, in part because these were taken from when those shows (and these opinions about them) were fresh. There's not a lot of new essays here, and not a lot on newer shows.
2) What doesn't fall into the above tends to be fawning celebrity profiles. These were the hardest chapters for me to read: I just don't care that much about how someone's home life changes how they write, how they talk. I've never really been interested in actors beyond their performances, and in writers even less beyond their words. (Which is not to say that their actions can't render their works differently!) But...40 pages of how someone in LA handles traffic, or writing-at-home while having kids? Meh.
3) There's not really any thorough-line of these works. It is just an anthology of columns that Nussbaum has had printed in the NYT, from Buffy: the Vampire Slayer to Black-ish. I think it could have been stronger if she had sharpened this to a topical book of essays: what the twenty-year obsession with baby boomers gone bad says about our culture (or: the road traveled between the Sopranos to Breaking Bad), what the nichification of Netflix et all says about culture going forward, strong heroines from the 90s until now -- all covered in some sort of way, but not quite at a level that makes any cognizant whole. Sharp writer, but the material mostly being reprinted renders the book rather meh. Skip it and catch up with her column instead. (3.5/5)
Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino: A book on two best-of-2019 lists, and a book I didn't like very much. This book is meant, I think, to be about how the internet influences our modern lifestyle, particularly social media, according to the introduction, but Jia Tolentino:
a) only really focuses on this on a few of the essays in the book, with far more of them being at best nebulously attached to the topic or not at all (one chapter focuses on the Rolling Stone investigation into Jia's alma mater that turns out to be proven false; another is about Jia's several attempts in the early 00s to embrace barre and other fitness regimes). It's hard to even argue these fall into the looser theme of "self-delusion" that this book's subtitles itself as an examination thereof, as they are not so much about Jia's thoughts about how women are forced into, say, fitness extremes, or how women might be tempted to rage against the machine with false rape claims (Jia, no), but just Jia going, "Huh! Wow! Fitness, and women, that's a gendered thing, am I right?" or "Huh! Wow! Who knew, there's one case where there was a false rape claim, good thing, cause for a minute I was uncomfortable with being associated as being an alumni of a Campus that had a rape on it!"
b) Jia doesn't consider at all how the internet has changed through time, and spends most of the book discussing the internet either as "90s Geocities websites" and "social media, as defined by Twitter/Insta/Reddit/etc" and doesn't really critically engage with web 1.0 beyond a mention of having an embarrassing Angelfire page (which, who doesn't). The internet is a bigger place than this and self-delusion does not end at the self. Why not chapters about the self-delusion of chasing the freelancer dream, which quickly leads to constant underbidding the value of work? Changing sexual mores and the accompanying changes in how women view themselves due to these social pressures that are often propagated through some form of mass media? The alt-right echo chamber, or the self-made echo chamber of Reddit? WeWork, Phishing, Tinder catfishing, Kari Farrell, Sarah Phillips, Elizabeth Holmes?
c) Jia doesn't say anything particularly new, or particularly interesting. This is full of the sort of thing you often find on the internet or any women's magazine: exercise and wedding angst, mixed with really pat and often insipid feminism. I particularly hated her article about how she hated adult heroines in novels because "they weren't happy" and she didn't want to be Jo after she married the professor, she wanted to be Harriet the Spy which is freshman level criticism at best and really far off from her supposed main thesis. Jia has a real bad case of "Not like those OTHER girls" often, none so overt as when she compares herself to Hope Hicks:
"Women are shaped by patriarchy: my own professional instincts are different because I grew up in Texas, in the evangelical church, on a cheer-leading squad, in the Greek system." My approach to power has been altered by the early power structures I knew. Hicks worked as a model while growing up in a bedroom-community Connecticut; she attended Southern Methodist University, a private school outside Dallas with an incredibly wealthy and conservative population; she became a loyal, daughterly aide to an open misogynist. She seems to have been shaped by a deep, true, essential level by conservative gender politics, and she has consistently acted on this..."
She never critically engages with the fact that she and Hicks basically grew up informed by the same social mores, in the same geographical area even at points; no, by the grace of God she went to Virginia and Hope went to Texas and there the difference lies! Mindbogglingly simple-minded criticism that doesn't discuss AT ALL that the mores we grow up with are often something shared across states, across countries, across the world, even. There is often racism and sexism on both right-wing and left-wing as well; it is a social ill that is sticky. (But, obviously, in the age of Trump, both are more strongly associated with the right, particularly now, and I will concede the left in America is certainly the lesser of the two evils, and I am glad of it, but it's definitely not just a right-wing problem and acting like one side of politics is evil and one side is sunshine and rainbows is very simplistic; at best, one is evil and the other is well-intentioned-but-also-often-just-as-in-favor-of-the--status-quo.)
Often Jia shows off her privilege, too: you see her going to private schools, expensive fitness classes, international travel. While this is obviously part of her life and thus should be in the book if she judges it relevant, it really just highlights her class, which is a strong undercurrent that's never discussed in the book: Jia gets into all the ivies but rebels and goes to UVA instead; Jia gets an apartment in New York and angsts about going to expensive barre classes that she can't afford (but can, of course, afford a New York apartment, all by herself, at 22, as a writer, uuuh huh); Jia goes to the Peace Corps for a year and hates being there and comes home early because she's sad. (There's also a mention that her host father kisses her on the lips when she does not want him to -- but it's not treated as a primary reason for leaving, while her angsting about wanting to be back in the states with her boyfriend is repeatedly mentioned as a motivating factor. Jia gives more pages over to her wistful sighing over a wedding magazine as her sole outlet of western culture than she gives to this non-consensual kiss.)
I don't think Jia has ever considered, been, or seen a poor person; her entire tooth-grating chapter on marriage that basically boils down to "But Why Do Women Want to Get Married Tho, Like, I Don't Get It" completely ignores the fact that for poorer women, marriage is pretty much the only way to be able to afford living long-term with someone in a house/in an apt with a joint income, and a guarantee to be supported for any children made in the marriage -- it's a vital part of the social contract, and so mind-shatteringly simple that watching Jia angst that she's not like the OTHER girls because she LOVES her man but doesn't, like, want to give up her FREEDOM basically set my teeth on edge.
And that's the problem with this book, really: Jia talks like she understands all female experiences, that there is one unified female experience, or, perhaps, one unified female experience per race. But in reality, while race certainly plays a large part in life experiences, it is not the universal factor: there is no universal factor, and if you had identical quintuplets who were raised apart, in vastly different socio-economic circumstances, with vastly different cultural backgrounds, in vastly different places, then they would probably be more different than alike. Jia acts like she knows everything, but Jia is my age, and Jia has given all the deep thought in this book of a Buzzfeed quizlet. It is also extremely tediously written, in over-wrought, academic prose, with enough quotations to choke any freshman essay...and yet, really, it reads like a freshman essay. The quotes aren't challenged much and are all cherry-picked to agree with Jia, and Jia relies on just a few sources and quotes them too often. Jia thinks enough for a glib, pat, don't-rock-the-boat newspaper column, but as a book, the key take-aways like "women are oppresed by the patriarchy" and "racism is endemic" and " True but not really deep thoughts at this point, you know?
This was listed on on the NPR "Best Books" list as not only an outstanding book of essays but "a guidebook for dealing with an Internet gone wild": NYT's Notable 100 books of 2019 calls this a collection that includes "essays that combine probing social analysis with wry personal anecdote about the “feverish, electric, unlivable hell” of the web." It is neither of those things. It is Buzzfeed level thoughts as regurgitated by a New Yorker writer which was somehow good enough to get on both the NPR Notables and the NYT's notables. I suppose it's a good book about the risks of the modern-day internet if you've been in a coma since roughly 1996, I guess? (Though, funnily, the one good essay in this book, about "A Rape on Campus" (the Rolling Stone piece about a rape that turns out to have all the common pitfalls of a modern rape case -- doesn't deal with the internet at all, even though it could easily have been tied forward to the allegations that have followed Trump and Biden or even into #me too). Really teeth-numbingly bad and I'm surprised I finished it. (0.5/5)
Wilder Girls by Rory Power: This was a fun YA romp! A private school of girls on an Island slowly mutate, becoming more and more inhuman. The pleasant surprise to me was just how queer the book is; two of the characters are pretty obviously pining for one another, and on an island where there is no expectation of ever being let off, there's all sorts of background pair-ups between girls. This has some really strong plotting, and I finished it in about a day.
There's a great tension from the start. All of the girls are mutants to some degree or another, and some of the girls mutate past their capability to survive it. There's very clearly a conspiracy with the teachers, along with the usual schoolgirl tensions between girls who vie for teacher's affection and good marks. There's a V-tension between the three main characters, Hetty and Blyatt and Reese, that bubbles just under the surface. There are only two teachers, and far too many girls, and far too few supplies, and things get bleak fast.
The way that their society has tumbled down and rebuilt itself is notable -- the girls' classes shift away from English and Math to gun-toting and spotting, militarizing in the face of a fast and terrible calamity. One of the protagonists' best friends, Byatt, becomes ill and is taken away, and her other best friend, Reese, (in that awkward v where both are best friends but seemingly without much in common beyond the shared friend) teams up with the protagonist (Hetty) to try to find the missing friend. And obviously, later, they find out all is not what it seems and there are secrets on the island and everything you'd expect.
I really enjoyed the relationship between the three women, particularly the two who are investigating the disappearance of the third. I feel like Rory Power does hit the tension inherent in school relationships well, how the girls at friends, yes, but in some ways, they are rivals, too. Byatt's plot is interesting, but I was much more interested in the chapters where they had a will they or won't they romance building up between Reese and Hetty than in her hospital life and the odd romance with a boy in the navy medical clinic (though the ending of that is really worth it). Unfortunately, even though I was delighted to see a queer romance in this book, this book follows the trend where the queer romance is very tame -- being YA I was assuming it would probably not involve sex, but this is so chaste that there's about one itsy-bitsy kiss and that's about it.
There's something about this trend that bothers me in fiction - it feels very much like having your cake and eating it too, when you make the romance so small that ripping out a page would just make them the best-est of friends. If the main romance in this book was a het romance, I can't help but feel like there would be a lot more focus on it, and while I don't want to see two teenagers bone down in a book (as an adult), I really wish these girls got to eat least kiss a little bit more. They're teenagers! Still, the dynamic is nice, and I did enjoy the romance. This trend is just a bit of sand trapped between my toes.
I think where this book started to suffer for me beyond that was in the last third. The book is well-plotted but you'll never find the answers to half the questions that the book asks -- and the ending, I think, ruined what poignancy it could have had when one character who fairly obviously SHOULD have passed away gets the ole' switcheroo, haha, I should have died but REALLY I'M ALIVE. The ending is super abrupt and very obviously will continue on to a sequel - judging by the cover to this book (which is GORGEOUS), they've invested in this trilogy, and I'm used to books doing that. But it would be nice if this one had literally resolved more than one of the twenty-something plot threads it dangled, including whether the main characters make it through their predicament, even on a small scale. Stillm it wasn't a bad book, and I greatly enjoyed it. If I remember it by the time the next book comes out, I'd read the sequel. (My notes for improvement, if Rory Powers wants them: make it....gayer.) 3.5/5.
Afrofuturism by Ylasha Womack: I've loved Afrofuturism ever since I read the Parable of the Sower series, but I was little bummed when I started reading this series of essays going over various themes in Afrofuturism. It's not because it's badly written; it's not. It's because the introduction sets this inspirational, optimistic tone, written early in Barack Obama's second term, when we weren't aware of just how racist the United States was, when the alt-right seemed like a lunatic fringe that would never have power, when there was not a pandemic that was disproportionately affecting African-American and minority neighborhoods, when the police weren't showing off just how little the US has moved on since the civil rights movement. It is not the author's fault to be optimistic; no doubt there are books from 1910 that look forward to the future, too, not knowing that pandemics, world war, and a major economic collapse were all coming up within the decade. So I will admit, the lack of fun I had with this book, the punch of this book in my veins, that was mostly due to the coronavirus when I breezed through this in March.
This book is a series of essays exploring Afrofuturism, by afro-futurists. Most of the essays are interesting on a personal level, noting how Science Fiction has been a particularly strong part of African diaspora escapism; where can one go, when one has been propelled so far from home, but to the stars? Most of the essays are lovely, personal, and trace a diverse cast's answers to the question of what Afro-Futurism means to them and how it informs their works.
Unfortunately, if I had one criticism, it is that many of the people name-check the same artists in the past, and while it's not a bad thing, per se, it means thisbook feels less "deep dive" and more "introduction". Most people interested in Afrofuturism have heard of Sun Ra; most have heard of Parliament. Most will have read Butler. The opinions of the various contributors are varied as hell -- but that naturally means that some are better than others, some more in-depth. Some essays show how ultimately positive influences (the "alien" presence often credited on the history channel in the building of the pyramids and other such landmarks) often come from rather racist cultural beliefs (the belief that they must be "aliens" who were responsible for constructing them because western "explorers" didn't think that the Egyptians were advanced enough to have done it). Most of the essays are well written, though a couple of the pieces have some errors that make one blink a bit (one makes the rather bonkers assertion that Napoleon burned down the library of Alexandria; it was burned by Julius Caesar ).
If you already have a basic understanding of Afrofuturism, you won't find much new here. This is a pretty basic overview. But the essays chosen are well-written for the most part, and I think this would make a good primer in addition to the texts that it references if you were looking to construct a class on this topic. I think my strongest takeaway from this was the idea that for African-Americans -- and many other peoples affected by the African diaspora -- the past is marked with so much tragedy that it limits the amounts of stories that can be told, and the only place with a more diverse option for narratives is to mine the future, instead of the past.
I sort of wish I'd read this during a different time, and a different place; there is nothing wrong with the book, but all the optimism of 2012-2013 did make my stomach churn at points, knowing with the clarity of hindsight what was coming up in their future. That made this a slightly more difficult read. I'd like to hope that these authors are still optimistic, but given how much my own optimism has fallen since 2013, I'm quite afraid of finding out. (4/5)
Ninth House by Leigh Barduro: I really enjoyed this book, but feel almost a little bit guilty for doing so. It really reminds me of the Historian, another book I loved that took folklore and history on a topic and mish-mashed them into a fine powder. This is a book born of privilege, a little bit pretentious: it is the well-tred story of a girl from the wrong sides of the tracks and a boy from the right side; it's an alternate history story of one of two institutions that have dominated the American collegiate landscape for a long time. It's Harry Potter escapist fiction for adults complete with Hogwart's house-esque "houses" come-social clubs that specialize in different forms of magic. It's a book that is 500 pages, but probably could have been 300, because for at least 200 pages not a lot is happening. It is not, in any way, a perfect book.
And yet, reader, I loved about seventy percent of this.
Look, let's get the criticisms out early: This book does not reinvent any wheels. This reads like a Yale undergrad fell in love with her campus and wanted to spend a few extra semesters writing a book about it. This is exactly the sort of book where there'll be a movie or a Netflix tv show in a couple of years, and I'm not sure you'd miss a lot of the main plot if you saw it on the screen rather than read it as a novel. It's a book that will be profoundly polarizing because so much of it works on the world-building, and so much of that world-building has some sort of dark-and-yucky themes underneath. Sexual assault being a big one, this has so much sexual assault in it, from the past to the present, to the point I'd strongly suggest not reading this if that is at all a trigger because there's at least three instances of it, like so much, including a couple of pages of a graphic rape scene, but on the other hand, I also think you absolutely would see the sort of abuses of magic and drugs that lead to these things: one of the major plot points is the distribution of a magical drug that makes its user very responsive to suggestion, and well...yeah, I can absolutely see privileged yalies using that to get young women to do sexual favors for them.
But.
If you can get past that - and I'm awaare that's a big ask - what this book nails REALLY WELL is the world-building. The houses of magic, and how they're built, are things of beauty; I love all the mythology references (the cleverest if admittedly also most obvious being Lethe, the house protagonists Alex and Darlington serve; they're the magical watch-dogs but part of their job is also to sweep such scandals under the rug, hence the invocation of the river of both absolution and oblivion), I love how the magic works, which is just this close to science but not quite. I love in particular the lore concerning ghosts, which forms the largest part of the book: don't look too much at them, or you'll form a relationship with them. Form a relationship with a ghost, and bad things happen - not least of which involves possession.
The book also really hits the relationship between its two lead characters well. Darlington, the more staid-and-proper Yale boy, is not so much repressed as careless, so hopelessly in love with magic that his jealousy over Alex's easier pull of magic forms a major impediment to their relationship. Alex, both from a poor background and a tragic one, is a Sephardi freshman who is more than a little comfortable with cutting corners -- because she wants to take advantage of her yale education, and her Lethe duties keep her from being able to keep up with her schoolwork easily. I love how the difference in their backgrounds -- Alex is Sephardi-hispanic, Darlington is white; Darlington is upper class, Alex was the only child of a single mother who veered between middle class and lower class depending on the year -- become part of how they form their relationship. It's particularly well done because while they grow closer, there's a moment that makes the defining difference between them very clear, and that moment is well done. It's hard to write the growing-together-but-then-the-weak-spot-is-exposed well, and it really is done well here.
And yet.
The one thing that really stuck in my craw about this book was the ending. It's set up pretty obviously to be a series, and as a result only two of the major plot threads are solved. The big-bad reveal seems simultaneously too fast and yet exhaustively slow; I'd pegged it from the first meeting between the two characters, but I thought that the tie-up on the main conflict was a little too neat and prim, and everything else wasn't neat and prim enough. I was irked that the trauma it would inflict to one of the major characters who was attached to [Big Bad] is literally never explored; that character simply ceases to exist after the Climax. I was annoyed also by the big bad's rather one-note characterization; in a book that is so feminist as fuck for most of it, you'd think there would be some exploration of [redacted] on [redacted] violence -- and yet this side goes unexplored.
Overall it felt quite a bit like she was running out of time on writing the book, and had to find a stopping point. The bland villains may make this a harder read as a series goes forward. That said, I enjoyed this quite a bit, to the point that I'm absolutely going to read the next book. But like Temeraire, this might be a series where I inhale the first couple of books and wind up wondering what, exactly, I enjoyed so much in the first place. (3.75/5)
The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher: I really love Ursula Vernon's works, so I wanted to read one of her T. Kingfisher novels. This is a rustic horror story: a young woman goes to clean out her deceased grandmother's hoarder home, loveable red-bone coonhound in tow, and finds not just hordes and hordes of garbage, but so much more: a manuscript by her deceased step-grandfather, a creepy town full of gold-old boys, deer effigies, and stones that stay in the mind however much you don't quite want them to. It is not particularly "hard" horror: there aren't any jump scares, and the horror is more in what isn't said instead of what is, if that makes sense: it's about the questions that aren't answered. The tone here is surprisingly light, but when you think about the underpinnings of how the mythology of the world works, it becomes more disturbing.
The mythos here is more H.P. Lovecraft than anything else (and is evidently a homage to, or perhaps sequel to, "The White People" by Arthur Machen) and the change in climate from dreary England to sunny South agrees with this book, for the most part. I was particularly into the very love-craftian manner that shows how the effigies are constructed: thinking about one of the main characters means thinking about just what went into those effigies, and just what her life living in such a space with such must have been. The use of the mythos surrounding bloodlines, and how a mystical bloodline gets diluted by too much mixture of human blood feels uncomfortable (and certainly VERY up Lovecraft's alley), but I deeply loved the very abandoned underworld (not the Greek one, just an underground world) where most of the inhabitants have died out. This is somewhat what I mean by the horror being more in what isn't on the page, rather than what is: the empty, abandoned city is horrible itself, even if the narrator cracks jokes trying to escape it in her forays into the dark underside of the natural world.
The narrator is a bit of a wise-cracker, and this does tend to make the horror feel a little less...for lack of a better word, horrible. This makes sense for the character, who we're introduced to early on using humor as a way to deflect from things that bother her in life: her father's health, her mother's death, her complicated relationship with her grandmother and step-grandfather (and angsting over how step-grandfather is a bit awkward, for what is the relationship there, beyond nothing at all?). I listened to this as an audiobook and the narrator for this is quite good at the role, sounding weary and uncomfortable as she cracks each and every joke. This honestly makes sense in the book -- but I do think, paradoxically, it makes the book one that is a bit too soft for most people looking for horror. Because I am a big weenie who none-the-less loves haunted house stories, it didn't really bother me; it might bother you if you're more seasoned than I am.
I listened to this with my mother during our evening walks together, and I have to say the humor honestly made the walks more entertaining, and worked well as a book to listen to when one is off on an evening run, particularly when this is one's main in-person social event of the day. It's light horror, but honestly, when real life is closer to 28 days than you like, sometimes light horror is all you need.(4/5)
What I Wrote/am Writing: I wrote very little through March and April only to remember, vaguely, that a friend of mine had mentioned using 4thewords to spur her in writing long ago, and now I am hoked on it. I wrote maybe 40k between March and April, and then according to 4thewords have written about 100k in May, so I might have a chance of finishing my difficult GTWO pledge after all.
Things I've written:
* WNSO, always more WNSO, that might be the most involved, iddy fic I ever write.
* A sequel to this fic, in which Hades, Eurydice, Persephone, and Demeter are all Disasters in their own way.
- This fic for Hurt Comfort Exchange, in which Hades accidentally kinda-sorta gives away his soul - whoops.
* Restarted working on Rhea, after a long struggle. Now Almost done!
I decided to start a novel for Campwrimo and I'm sure that'll end well. (IT won't.)
What I Watched/Am Writing: Watchmen: I am late to this HBO series, as is my wont, but I really enjoyed it even if it made me feel ultimately a little uneasy. Watchman picks up after the comic (not the movie) twenty years down the line, and tells a story that's deeply connected to the original story but ultimately it's own thing. Overall, I enjoyed it when I watched it in march. But I am not sure I want to re-watch it, because I feel like in ways it hits too-close to modern life, and I'm not sure that the very police-focused viewpoint in watchman really would be quite so easy to deal with today. Because it is very authority-friendly as a story: the plot is all about violence and the police: specifically one woman's violence, and the brutality inflicted on her ancestors by police, and the brutality she inflicts upon others.
There's a very big slice of might-makes-right in this, and on one hand, I do think Watchmen deals with that to some extent: the race riots in Tulsa are shown to be horrific, unfair, and abjectly and objectively racist. There's a heavy legacy associated not only with those riots, but also the early vigilantes (the Hooded Justice, in particular) are shaped by race. There are a couple of characters who are revealed to be white supremacists who are perfectly capable of having a conversation, even a friendship, with black people; snakes in grass.
There are groups that show how virulent white nationalism is, what a multi-sided octopus, and it does not hesitate to use them as terrorists. There are black people who cannot forgive nor forget the transgressions that were forced upon them, and it spends a fair amount of time talking about that rage. There's a fair amount of exploration of what it means to be the law and order, and how much that entails cracking a few skulls. There's even a little bit about colonizers creating their own form of hell, and the brutality colonizers are willing to inflict upon indigenous groups, if you squint at Adrian's incredible brutality of his servants.
But there's always an uncomfortable veneer to the heroes in this.
Returning characters Adrian, Laurie, and Jon are not really in any better place than we left them in Watchmen, and all are willing to crack a few eggs. Laurie's first scene involves shooting a man trying to stop a bank robbery in a vigilante superhero sting operation; Jon is absent as any deist's God, but frequently invoked in the hearts and minds of many. Adrian mows down his own people, and some on the other side for good measure, retaining his unique balancing act on the line between anti-hero and villain that he walked in Watchmen.
Of the new characters, of which there are many, most are no less bloodied: Angela beats up and abducts a man to get information on a terrorist organization; her boss authorizes the use of deadly force over the death of one police officer; her colleagues, Red Scare and Looking Glass, beat the hell out of some protestors in Nixonville on the thin premise of extracting information (in reality, mostly to let off steam). Lady Trieu, my favorite of the new characters, uses threats of violence to help her to get what she wants when asking nicely doesn't work.
There's a lot of points where Watchmen is uncomfortable. White supremacy is shown with all its warts here, in all the forms it comes in: the nice-ish politicians, the venerated police, the vigilantes, the protestors, the vile feelings a white man has for his mixed-race child. I wish that it had dwelt a little bit more on that at points - it's in a hurry to move past the rot of the racists, and doesn't waste time to explain the rot that could make a man hold a klan hood as something to be proud of in this day and age. Nor is it explained why, entirely, a politician would agree to become part of such a society.
Part of this is the tight running time. The finale is so plot-packed I wish that it had, in fact, been two episodes, in order to breathe. I wish that the finale had not made virtually all but one of the women in it a damsel in distress at points. I wish we had gotten more answers about a last-minute rescue and less cartoonish battle lines drawn between "good guy" cops and "bad guy" extremists in a series that so often highlights the roles that vigilantes play.
But it is a short series, and a wild wide, and I do not regret spending time with it.
I particularly did love the relationships between characters, especially Laurie; Laurie and Angela and their uncomfortable tet-a-tet, two survivors of the same old bullshit who share more than just their judiciary aims. (I do with the relationship between them -- and between the one person in their pasts/presents they have in common -- was dealt with more. But I'm happy that this does not dwindle down to petty cat-fighting, as so many other series have, so perhaps less is more.)
Of the new ones, I loved Looking Glass, who fights the good fight for so long over a threat that traumatized him as a young teenager, only to find out that the monsters aren't entirely real and hell is truly other people. His team-up with Laurie (always my favorite foil in this series, it must be said) was particularly interesting and I would love to see more of them. My absolutely favorite new character though, is the Lady Herself, Lady Trieu. Trieu is the nu-Adrien, a godlike tech wizard who is both malevolent and charming in equal turn. I wish she, too, had had more time in the finale -- we see so much of her being mysterious and alluring, and I wish we would have gotten a bit more information on just what she was planning on doing with the goal she was seeking. Instead, we see her clumsily prevented from the full realization of her goals by a Deus-ex-squidina that felt slightly cheap.
Violence begets violence begets violence. In a month where police brutality has never been more on my mind, it makes the idea of re-watching Watchmen an uncomfortable enough prospect. Still, I'm glad to have seen it, and if we lived in a society where media got more of a deep dive, I'd love to see some more essays that go through the uncomfortable relationship between the main characters. (This series <a href="https://www.vulture.com/tv/watchmen/">of essays</a> strikes me as essentially Good Thoughts.) I would watch a second season, if there was one. If not, I feel like this tells a good story all its own. (4/5 when I was watching it, but I think it might go down on a re-watch.)
This June, I've been tearing through Rome, but I'm saving that for the June entry. Why? Because it's June 21st, and this thing is a monster, and I'm already afraid of how long it is.
I also managed to watch a couple movies this month! I got access to MUBI through a Scribd subscription and opted to try out this series, which seems to have a bunch of interesting Indies/under-seen movies. The idea of having a 30 day library to scroll through is interesting to me, especially since it takes out some of the overwhelming nature of other streaming services. I still didn't watch many, but I managed to watch two in (yikes) three months:
Gabrielle: Interesting French film based on the (English) story "The Return" by Joseph Conrad. An older man who married late in life is devastated when, five years after his marriage, his bride runs off and leaving him a note that concludes that her crime is "terrible and mad, but it is also terrible and right. Forgive me." He is stunned by this and completely overcome, mourning her like he has been shot.The problem, of course, is that she comes back hours later.
The couple tries to keep their relationship going after the assault on the fundamental trust of the relationship; he tries to demand details, and she demurs, then spits them in his face. She is a wreck to the servants, who don't understand how Gabrielle (the wife) can be so miserable when her husband, while plain, treats her fairly well and is not cruel to her (and the class subtext is highlighted here: not only in the servants boggling over a wife throwing away their high position to run off with a middle-class schlub, but the husband's disgust when his wife's lover is revealed to be a man he considers quite below himself, ethnically and financially). The husband, Jean, is absolutely frustrated: not only because Gabrielle has betrayed him with someone in their circle,but also because Gabrielle has always refused to have any sexual intimacy with him, so the cuckoldry rings even more true.
It's absolutely devastating to watch these two break apart, from rage to sorrow and back again. This movie has probably the least sexy sex scene I have ever seen, and every talk of love in this is more elegy than inspiring. Hard to watch. I put this on my list because I thought it might be good #inspo for the not-so-happy sides of the longfic I'm writing, only to find out that...yeah, with the current world, I'm not into writing the darker sides of life. But what this does, this does well, and if you want an unhappy love affair to wretch you apart, this will accomplish it and you might wind up thanking it for the privilege. (4.5/5)
Southland Tales: This is a strange movie. Made in 2008, this is the follow-up to Donie Darko. In many ways, it’s a prescient take on the post-Bush republican presidency: everything online (and off) goes into a big machine, and nothing in reality matters so much as image. When a pornstar has an extramarital affair with a buff actor (who happens to be married to the daughter of a government big wig), they unwittingly unleash the apocalypse in a strange, multi-layered tale.
It's a weird story. It's a dystopia imagined in the hubris of the Bush administration: In its views on society, this is an interesting movie. It opens with 9/11, and a set of follow-up attacks, with the answer of what will happen to America. Some of it feels almost prescient ("Pay her what she wants, daddy! We have to make it go away!" wails the president's daughter when she finds out there's a pornographic tape with evidence of her husband's affair), and in other ways, it feels almost quaint: the idea of republicans being less racist and more "law and order" (and boy do we know now that the latter there is often enough a veil for the former -- should have known it then, but...), the pornographer-come-proto-influencer's talk show, where the personalities take questions from fans and offer pat feminist opinions in a slick, pornography-friendly show.
This latter one only seems quaint because it doesn't involve the pornographer hawking tummy tee.
In...every other possible way? It's a disaster. Straight up disaster. It's one of those stories where you really never quite know what's going on, and it happens mostly in dream logic. Donnie Darko, the previous movie by this director, toyed with the same sort of non-traditional structure. But while that worked, this has a far more sprawling cast, with far less explanation.
The main story is tied up in three acts -- the actor, played by the Rock, who has amnesia and winds up having a truly gasoline-lit affair with a porn star (played by Sarah Michelle Geller), whose seduction is a political power move done by democrat challengers to the USA's throne (and quaint, isn't it, the idea that the democrats would be the side paying porn stars). Another act of the story focuses about the porn star, and her career, and her desire to have a legitimate, non-pornographic career. The third plot-strand deals with dildo-fashioning lesbian punk anarchists, who try to set up a false flag operation where two improv actors are murdered by cops in hopes of turning public sympathy to the leftist plot (and, again, the idea of false-flag operations is both disturbingly prescient and also almost but not quite there; they correctly pinpoint the outrage button that dominates modern American influence, but not the alt-right that introduced these conspiracy theories-cum-real events such as the infamous Massacre at Bowling Green) and the Good Old Boy Iraq-war veteran-cum-cop who is forced to comply with their demands.
That three-protagonist split would have maybe been a good idea if they really ever went anywhere interesting with it, but they don't. There's thousands of cutaways to barely related characters: one local man who joins the cop winds up with his own sub-plot where he helps crack open an ATM, buys a rocket launcher, and dies; the anti-man, anti-republican lesbian biker liberation league, which gets scads and scads of time plotting for every one of their terrorist actions, only to wind up all dying in similar ways; a lot of time is also spent on the porn-stars manager, who is either a Machiavelli shooting for the political saboteur, or else a clueless nonce who gets lucky; and perhaps most egregious of all, the movie's narrator, Justin Timberlake quoting other, better works reminding you you could have been watching literally anything else, or George Wallace being a scientist who may or may not be a con-man. There's probably a good story somewhere in here, but it's absolutely muddled to the point that the story is complete garbage.
The only part that reminds interesting is, basically, how they saw what society might be at this point, from the viewpoint of 2003/4 America. Very little of that social landscape is explored, though; for example, there's just about no thought about feminism, where you have a porn star talk show as its mainstream face and a dildo-fashioning feminist liberation network as its fringe -- but there's very little examination of what that super-sexual format means to the people involved, or how none of these supposedly radical feminist groups can be divorced from something that is as often victimizing of women as the sex industry. There's a lot of potential criticism of the government,but the movie never really dives into whether the government is wrong for it's oppressive spying. This movie seems to portray the republican side as often hypocrites, but generally interested in maintaining peace along with the status quo, and while I was alive in the early 00's and remember this common sentiment, it's a very strange one to revisit. How far we have backslid in 2020.
There are some appealing scenes here: one three-person dance-tango, at the end of the movie, is a particularly good one -- but this was overall both overly long and shoddily explained, and thus pretty bad. (1/5 stars)
What Theater Shows I Went to See:
Pretty much nothing due to ongoing events. Shows I would have seen but were cancelled/postponed:
What the Constitution Means to Me
Six
My Fair Lady
Jesus Christ Superstar
Hundred Days
Next to Normal
What I Played/am Playing:
Not a lot! I've been really busy on the weekends, and I've only played a little bit as far as videogames. I've divided my time thusly:
Fire Emblem Heroes (Mobile): Look, this is a stupid game. But this is a short little mobile game, and it's very easy to just play a game or two while I'm waiting for people to join on conference calls, and that's what I've been using it for: those little hum-drum fifteen-minute points where you happen to be waiting in line, waiting at work, etc. It's even more pay-to-win than it used to be, and I'm reading a point where I'm not very useful. But the gatcha RNG is fun and frustrating, and I like the characters, so I spent a few minutes a day hoping for a new Tharja so I can combine her with my Tharja and have a slightly more super Tharja, only to wind up getting 600 Stahls instead. Only free to play so actual progress will basically never happen, and I know this, and yet I play it from time to time anyway. (3/5, with one point each fun gameplay, free characters from time to time, and mostly art and minus two points for being rather limited in what you can do if you don't pay for it.)
Judgment: Fun, but I haven't made a lot of non-sub story progress. I'm still in Chapter 3. Still running down sub-quest for the most part. Hoping I will finish this before yuletide so I can use it as a yuletide fandom, as there's so many characters in this that I'd really love to see explored more. But it's also going to be a game I might need to youtube through the plot, because I keep going months between plot bits and trying to remember what's going on and why Yagami and Kaito haven't kissed yet. (4/5 thus far, with 1 point taken off thus far for my own demerit of having a shitty memory.)
Dishonored 2: I finally crawled my way to level 2 (!) only to discover I accidentally have to restart because I inched into an area and missed that two guards shoved a citizen through a magical light-frying-thing and then all my auto-saves were over it and I never knew it existed and even though I love this game and its Aesthetic now I have to restart because there is, somehow, blood on Emily's hands. Sigh. I'm debating saying screw it, and just saying that I'll get clean hands on a social media run, but it's Real Frustrating that someone ELSE's actions make a death my character's fault. (4/5, with the minus one being the savior complex scoring, and the 4 for Emily/Meagan who I love and, also, would like to kiss one another at some point.)