some books i read lately (june edition)
The Master of Go: "what if a nobel prize winner in literature wrote hikaru no go?"
...is what i hoped this book would be. instead it was a fairly anodyne and trite New Japan Versus Old Japan Meditation On Modernity, I Mean, Recounting Of A Go Match.
it's a little hard to tell, in translation, with the author's sparse prose style, what effect he was aiming for. because i think he meant for us to pity and revere this Wizened Old Grandmaster, and find his challenger a little bit too upstart and boorish, and we would weep for the death of Old Japan just as we weep for the Grandmaster, or something.
and yet, the effect it had on me, was: i liked the young challenger, immediately and enormously. i liked him because he was a family man, because he had kids, because he taught his daughters to play Go, because he spoke so fondly of his wife. the narrator implies that this is unusual for a Go master, that the Grandmaster's total focus is incompatible with family life, blah blah-and i wanted to roll my eyes. i think being engaged and full with life enhances most endeavors, and even if it doesn't, who cares? i'd rather happy young fathers playing Go than tired statues, and the upstart does win in the end.
the aristocratic undertones, the deference to tradition, the repeated mentions of the fact that one simply did not just Challenge Grandmasters back in the day, that usually there was no expectation the Grandmaster defend his title, everyone was just supposed to defer to him as The Best because "that's how it's always been"-argh, i wanted to rip my hair out. i know, i know, i'm reading all this with a modern western eye! but i am a modern western person.
it was amusing to find out, in the introduction, that apparently Yukio Mishima and Kawabata were good friends. it seems nuts at first, when you compare Kawabata's careful sparseness to Mishima's swashbuckling in-your-face style-but they were both snobby aristocrats, in their own ways.
Jacques the Fatalist and His Master: i read this solely because Ada Palmer references it in the opening to TLTL. (did i mention that TLTL is very good?)
and what a fuckin' treat it wound up being.
helicorpion, i suspect it may rather be to your taste in particular?
the whole schtick is that, this is a postmodern novel before the novel was even a fully-established form, and whimsy is its central register. the narrator talks to you, the reader, at length, and frequently, to snark about his characters, and the universe, and the act of reading at all.
for instance, he snarks about That ER Drama Trope Of Graphic Surgical Operations:
"Now you're not, I hear you say, going to brandish lancets under our noses, slice into living flesh, let blood flow freely, viz., show us a surgical operation? Think about it: would that be in good taste? Oh very well, let's skip the operation-but at least you will allow Jacques to say to his Master, as he in fact did: 'Ah, sir! It's an excruciating business, having a shattered knee put back together again!'"
in another instance, he snarks at you, directly:
"That's because he was human.
Human and passionate, like you, Reader. Human and curious, like you, REader. Human and always asking questions, like you, REader. Human and a damned nuisance, just like you, REader.
And why did he ask questions?
Good question! He asked questions to learn adn to quibble, like you, Reader.
and so on and so on.
The "plot" is thin, and mostly seems a mixture of Quixote-esque travel-adventure-whimsies, and other characters telling of their own travel-adventure-whimsies, and silly occurrences and dick-jokes abound. It is so cleverly and happily done that it would be an accomplishment even if that were all it were.
But what struck me were the occasional moments of humanity, and despair, and sorrow-usually brief, and usually brought on by something comic in nature, but sometimes Jacques wails in despair at the futility of Being (he is a bit of a philosopher, after all), and sometimes his master loses track of him and despairs at the sudden lack of his companion-and for some reason all the absurdity around it makes you feel these moments all the more, and makes you sigh with releif when they are reunited, or comfort is granted, and so on and so forth. No wonder, then, at the sweet little quotation from it Palmer featured in the opening of her book:
Ah, my poor Jacques! You are a philosopher. But don't worry; I'll protect you.
Crucible of Gold: Feathered dragons!! Feathered dragons!!
I always feel like I should have more to say about the Temeraire books than I do, but alas, that's about all I got, except to perhaps add: I've been deliberately working through this series slowly, not because I dislike them, but because I like them so much that I know they will offset the bitter taste of any bad book I have the misfortune of reading. They are all splendid adventures & it's such a treat to return to these same characters over and over again.
The Trial: Meh. I wish I had more to say than just "meh," but. Meh.
Conflict is Not Abuse: When I read the introduction to this book, I was bizarrely delighted. I was delighted despite being super-uncomfortable at times-or because of that, probably. I was reading it initially because the thesis seemed so edgelord-y relative to the left, and yet was written by a Card-Carrying Leftist (the author's known for, among other things, LGBTQ activism stretching back since before the AIDS epidemic)-so I suspected she may be able to handle "hey here's why some big leftist tactics backfire" in an appropriately nuanced way.
A couple of the big ideas:
* Systemizing responses to conflict gives more power to the state, and the state is really bad at handling power responsibly.
For instance, exhortations to "believe women" unilaterally is probably not great, given that (1) if it in fact successfully propagates through your group (even if it doesn't propagate through all of society), you have now given bad actors a unilateral weapon that they know will work every time, and (2) historically bad actors have, in fact, used it this way against lower-class groups (e.g., white women using invented claims of lustfulness to lynch black men, etc etc). See also: calling the police is almost always a way to unnecessarily escalate a situation and bring violence into it, often with tragic consequences; try just talking to each other ffs.
There are bad actors everywhere and you have to handle shit on a case-by-case basis.
* People avoid actually addressing conflict because it's uncomfortable; yet the desire to always be comfortable in a world of humans with competing desires is entitled.
I'll confess this one is... bold, and something I've turned over in my mind a lot. People naturally want to be comfortable, just as they seek out food and shelter, and convincing people to not freak out about crime in their neighborhood seems just as futile as,well, convincing people to not seek food and shelter.
But what if we could? What if we could convince NIMBYs that they're kind of being assholes for not wanting homeless shelters near them? and so on.
She has a few angles on the ways in which we avoid conflict, some obviously valid, some a little weird. She describes meeting someone interesting, trading phone numbers, only to have them ghost her-and she's left wondering why the other person couldn't say "hi, I thought I was interested but turns out I'm not," or "I'm feeling conflicted about my feelings for you so I'm backing off," or whatever.
Again-there's rules for "getting the hint" for a reason, and it is so much easier to ghost someone than to tell them honestly that they were creepy, or you're just busy, or whatever. But again-what if we could? What if we all felt comfortable being frank? Oh, I know why we aren't-I've been screamed at by my share of dudes, simply for trying to politely tell them I wasn't interested. I don't blame anyone for trying to avoid that uncomfortableness. But-I've never felt in actual physical danger from such a thing; so is there something a little valorous about at least trying to make the world a bit more of an honest place?
It's a very odd framing. I think I ultimately don't agree with her; the social norms and rules around "max two texts after the first date" or whatever work for very human reasons. But it's interesting to think about, in an almost "what would a science-fiction world with totally different social norms look like" sort of way.
* She is really big on not cutting people out of your life with no reason / explanation / way to reconcile, and really big on face-to-face communication.
Both of these seem like pretty dumb positions at first glance. I have a right to have, or not have, anyone in my life that I so choose, thank you very much. And I do think she'd agree in cases of actual abuse (in general, if you read this book thinking she's talking about Actual Abuse, you're going to be rightly angry the whole time; what she's more interested in is e.g. cases where two people are acting shitty to each other and need a way to move past it, without necessarily assigning blame).
But social shunning, e.g. telling all your friends "don't hang out with Becky anymore she's a shitbag," is a pretty heavy hammer, and does cause real actual pain. Schulman is far from the first feminist to comment on this phenomenon. I'm reminded a bit of a friend, who once commented that he thought the right has always respected the power of the arts/literature/movies/etc in a way that leftists don't. The usual lefty response to e.g. conservatives censoring LGBTQ literature, is to roll their eyes and say, "Please, your kid isn't going to turn gay just because they read about two women kissing." But conservatives know better. They know the stories we tell ourselves ultimately shape our lives, our outlooks, and all that. So they ban books. Similarly, leftist discourse on Twitter tends to jeer when someone feels ganged-up on: "If you didn't want the whole internet to hate you, you shouldn't have said that one dumb thing on that one mailing list!" But anyone willing to take two steps back realizes: that is actually a terrifying power to hold. And to an extent it's more terrifyingly awful the more you identify with a particular group-Sean Hannity doesn't give a shit if liberals hate him, because liberals have been hating him for years and years, but if all my lefty tech friends suddenly disown me, then I no longer have friends, regardless of whether that's actual good or just or proportional or whatever.
The "face-to-face communication required" thing is a bit fuddy-duddy-ish, but the examples she gives are actually pretty compelling/persuasive-verbal communication isn't perfect, but it's way easier to tell if someone's e.g. saying a nasty thing because they're bitter, or upset, or being sarcastic, etc, versus actually saying a nasty thing, and that can keep the conversation from escalating to a nasty place.
It made me think about friends I communicate with primarily online, and I think what makes those relationships "work" is: (1) both parties are highly adept at online communication to begin with (if you always write like you're writing a five-paragraph-essay, or can't manage more than 30 WPM, then it's just a bad medium for us, sorry), and (2) willing to over-expound, to some extent-heavy use of emoji, frequent clarifications, caveating statements with lots of explanatory causes, "I don't mean X or Y, I mean Z," etc-basically using a lot of tools to make up for the lack of tone / facial expression.
And (3), which exists in a lot of places, is-some other reason we need to be in regular online contact, or else often find ourselves in online contact. I was talking to an open-source-maintainer friend, who's started mending a friendship with another open-source-maintainer friend-I asked him what helped him get past the Shit That Went Down, and he said, "Well, we had to work together. I've always known how to work with people online even if I hate them." Which meant to some extent they had to remain in dialogue with each other. And over time they were able to forgive each other, in a way that would've been impossible if he'd just hit the mute button and moved on with his life.
And I do think he's glad to have his friend back. It shows in his eyes.
I've felt weird or guilty or wrong for seeking reconciliation in the past, and it's empowering to see a framework that encourages this, that sees this as an act of radical goodness.
* I think the two most fundamental questions of her framework is: how do you determine the difference between resistance and attack, between conflict and abuse, especially in the corner cases? and how do you actually encourage [humans, groups, nations] to overcome the (probably-primal) desire to be comfortable and actually engage in confrontation? And unfortunately she doesn't really dig into those fundamental questions as much as I'd like; thus, the book loses a lot of steam after the first couple chapters. The chapter on HIV criminalization in Canada is fascinating and excellent; it's very clear that this is her area of expertise. The chapter on "here's how different schools of psychoanalysis/religion/thought/etc frame conflict/abuse" is useless. The last chapter is literally her just copy-pasting a Facebook argument? What??
tl;dr read for the opening chapter & the chapter where she describes social worker training in NYC & the chapter on HIV criminalization; you can probably skip the rest.
The Fifth Season: nk jemisin knows how to spin a really solid readable fun story.
that sounds like faint praise when i say it, "readable," but i'm fumbling to come up with the more accurate term-her stories are never suspenseful, exactly, not in the cliffhanger-at-the-end-of-every-chapter way, or the oh-god-how-will-they-get-out-of-THIS-one sort of way. but you do want to know what happens next-you just want to do it at a steady clip, rather than a bullrush; it would be a shame to miss all the scenery along the way.
and the scenery is lovely; the universe she's etched here is impressively vast. i was spoiler'd for the "twist" but do not think that dampened my enjoyment whatsoever. her prose had this same quality in The Hundred Thousand Kindgoms, too-everything steady and flowing and strong without being over-the-top-and i'd like to figure out how she does it.
(also, okay, i cried a bit reading the ending. while sitting in a $7 gyro place. as one does. the gyro-place-staff were very supportive.)
I Capture the Castle: lately i've been endeavoring a bit to read Books That My Favorite Authors Have Favorited. this is always a mixed endeavor-i discovered long ago that, while i love e.g. Usrula Le Guin, only rarely are her loves my loves. i can almost always see why a Favorite Author indeed loved Their Favorite Book-in the Le Guin case, she favors very ponderous, slow, thoughtful writers. and indeed her writing is slow and ponderous-but she wound up writing in a genre that had some demands on pacing, and thus Le Guin generally reads "a bit slow and thoughtful, but definitely moving along," whereas her beloved Dickens is "ugh slow slow slow i'm falling asleep kill me."
anyway, i picked this up on a whim, since it was on the Goodreads shelf of, hm, Stiefvater if i remember correctly-yep, her. and i can see the influence there-Stiefvater's stuff is always rather fundamentally Austen-ish Romance With Modern And Slightly Supernatural Attire, and this is indeed Austen-ish Romance With Modern Attire-
-but i wound up loving it more than i could've imagined, and think it quite exceeds most (maybe all?) of Steifvater's work.
it's a bit hard to put a finger on why that's the case-mostly the narrator is just very charismatic, and manages to make the most ordinary happenings in the castle seem brimming with life and drama. which is good, since the romance bit falls flat in several ways (though takes some really striking twists in others), but who cares because i could read her describing her invented midsummer rites like ten more times and not get bored.
there is something a bit fun and subversive about the structure of the book-it was published in the 1940s, and is set between the two World Wars-so it's too late for Austenian or Victorian-era romance, even though they live in a wonderfully romantic old castle, and also the leading edge of modernity. perhaps her father and stepmother can posture at nobility, but young Cassandra understands quite frankly that they are very poor.
well, in sweep the two dashing gentlemen next door, and-there is a romance, and it seems Austenlike on the surface-but things go subtly awry, in ways that can only happen in a modern novel. we do have a stepmother in the picture already, after all. and yet the whole thing seems more romantic for this-a swan song to a dying time.
but no, i think what i liked best was the narrator's interestedness.
see, here's the thing. the trope in the YA books i read as a kiddo was, the narrator was always so much smarter than everyone around them, and different from everyone else, and slightly outcast, but was totally going to own those jocks one day, yada yada.
this isn't even a bad trope per se-lots of nerdy kids need that sort of thing-but i remember always feeling faintly alienated, because though i knew i was pretty bright, that seemed far from the most important thing about me, and far from the most important thing about my friends. i wanted to understand people, even if i was different from a lot of them, and there were plenty of people around, even if my chemistry teacher was a dingbat.
later, in college, i would meet stereotypical bright kids who felt so immensely Wronged by their schools, their home communities-and while some of them were indeed Wronged, some were merely throwing temper tantrums because their boarding-school was only the second-best, or their academic team was so mediocre it only made it to nationals sometimes, and yada yada, and i felt a mixture of jealousy (my high school was far worse than theirs; i was so behind on my chemistry and physics) and confusion (you're at a super fancy college now, right? why are you still angry at your high school? couldn't you do what i did-ignore the bullshit, think about and learn what you want? goodness knows administrations tend to leave the good test-takers alone).
well. here's a book written from the point of view of a bright young girl, fabulously intelligent, who's bound to become a famous author-but she doesn't have an ego about it, and she finds everyone around her endlessly fascinating; she points all her brainpower outwards, and her feelings too, and brings to life this little corner of the countryside despite barely having the money for any kind of education at all. i related to this-i loved people, i still love people, always i've wanted to know them better-and her attitude inspired me.
like: a good deal of the last act is her simply marveling that her brother is a different & better person than she'd previously imagined, more interesting and fun to talk to and have adventures with than she'd ever previously imagined.
that's one of the finest pleasures i know in life: being surprised by books, or people, that are better than we could've first imagined. and it's captured splendidly here.
...is what i hoped this book would be. instead it was a fairly anodyne and trite New Japan Versus Old Japan Meditation On Modernity, I Mean, Recounting Of A Go Match.
it's a little hard to tell, in translation, with the author's sparse prose style, what effect he was aiming for. because i think he meant for us to pity and revere this Wizened Old Grandmaster, and find his challenger a little bit too upstart and boorish, and we would weep for the death of Old Japan just as we weep for the Grandmaster, or something.
and yet, the effect it had on me, was: i liked the young challenger, immediately and enormously. i liked him because he was a family man, because he had kids, because he taught his daughters to play Go, because he spoke so fondly of his wife. the narrator implies that this is unusual for a Go master, that the Grandmaster's total focus is incompatible with family life, blah blah-and i wanted to roll my eyes. i think being engaged and full with life enhances most endeavors, and even if it doesn't, who cares? i'd rather happy young fathers playing Go than tired statues, and the upstart does win in the end.
the aristocratic undertones, the deference to tradition, the repeated mentions of the fact that one simply did not just Challenge Grandmasters back in the day, that usually there was no expectation the Grandmaster defend his title, everyone was just supposed to defer to him as The Best because "that's how it's always been"-argh, i wanted to rip my hair out. i know, i know, i'm reading all this with a modern western eye! but i am a modern western person.
it was amusing to find out, in the introduction, that apparently Yukio Mishima and Kawabata were good friends. it seems nuts at first, when you compare Kawabata's careful sparseness to Mishima's swashbuckling in-your-face style-but they were both snobby aristocrats, in their own ways.
Jacques the Fatalist and His Master: i read this solely because Ada Palmer references it in the opening to TLTL. (did i mention that TLTL is very good?)
and what a fuckin' treat it wound up being.
helicorpion, i suspect it may rather be to your taste in particular?
the whole schtick is that, this is a postmodern novel before the novel was even a fully-established form, and whimsy is its central register. the narrator talks to you, the reader, at length, and frequently, to snark about his characters, and the universe, and the act of reading at all.
for instance, he snarks about That ER Drama Trope Of Graphic Surgical Operations:
"Now you're not, I hear you say, going to brandish lancets under our noses, slice into living flesh, let blood flow freely, viz., show us a surgical operation? Think about it: would that be in good taste? Oh very well, let's skip the operation-but at least you will allow Jacques to say to his Master, as he in fact did: 'Ah, sir! It's an excruciating business, having a shattered knee put back together again!'"
in another instance, he snarks at you, directly:
"That's because he was human.
Human and passionate, like you, Reader. Human and curious, like you, REader. Human and always asking questions, like you, REader. Human and a damned nuisance, just like you, REader.
And why did he ask questions?
Good question! He asked questions to learn adn to quibble, like you, Reader.
and so on and so on.
The "plot" is thin, and mostly seems a mixture of Quixote-esque travel-adventure-whimsies, and other characters telling of their own travel-adventure-whimsies, and silly occurrences and dick-jokes abound. It is so cleverly and happily done that it would be an accomplishment even if that were all it were.
But what struck me were the occasional moments of humanity, and despair, and sorrow-usually brief, and usually brought on by something comic in nature, but sometimes Jacques wails in despair at the futility of Being (he is a bit of a philosopher, after all), and sometimes his master loses track of him and despairs at the sudden lack of his companion-and for some reason all the absurdity around it makes you feel these moments all the more, and makes you sigh with releif when they are reunited, or comfort is granted, and so on and so forth. No wonder, then, at the sweet little quotation from it Palmer featured in the opening of her book:
Ah, my poor Jacques! You are a philosopher. But don't worry; I'll protect you.
Crucible of Gold: Feathered dragons!! Feathered dragons!!
I always feel like I should have more to say about the Temeraire books than I do, but alas, that's about all I got, except to perhaps add: I've been deliberately working through this series slowly, not because I dislike them, but because I like them so much that I know they will offset the bitter taste of any bad book I have the misfortune of reading. They are all splendid adventures & it's such a treat to return to these same characters over and over again.
The Trial: Meh. I wish I had more to say than just "meh," but. Meh.
Conflict is Not Abuse: When I read the introduction to this book, I was bizarrely delighted. I was delighted despite being super-uncomfortable at times-or because of that, probably. I was reading it initially because the thesis seemed so edgelord-y relative to the left, and yet was written by a Card-Carrying Leftist (the author's known for, among other things, LGBTQ activism stretching back since before the AIDS epidemic)-so I suspected she may be able to handle "hey here's why some big leftist tactics backfire" in an appropriately nuanced way.
A couple of the big ideas:
* Systemizing responses to conflict gives more power to the state, and the state is really bad at handling power responsibly.
For instance, exhortations to "believe women" unilaterally is probably not great, given that (1) if it in fact successfully propagates through your group (even if it doesn't propagate through all of society), you have now given bad actors a unilateral weapon that they know will work every time, and (2) historically bad actors have, in fact, used it this way against lower-class groups (e.g., white women using invented claims of lustfulness to lynch black men, etc etc). See also: calling the police is almost always a way to unnecessarily escalate a situation and bring violence into it, often with tragic consequences; try just talking to each other ffs.
There are bad actors everywhere and you have to handle shit on a case-by-case basis.
* People avoid actually addressing conflict because it's uncomfortable; yet the desire to always be comfortable in a world of humans with competing desires is entitled.
I'll confess this one is... bold, and something I've turned over in my mind a lot. People naturally want to be comfortable, just as they seek out food and shelter, and convincing people to not freak out about crime in their neighborhood seems just as futile as,well, convincing people to not seek food and shelter.
But what if we could? What if we could convince NIMBYs that they're kind of being assholes for not wanting homeless shelters near them? and so on.
She has a few angles on the ways in which we avoid conflict, some obviously valid, some a little weird. She describes meeting someone interesting, trading phone numbers, only to have them ghost her-and she's left wondering why the other person couldn't say "hi, I thought I was interested but turns out I'm not," or "I'm feeling conflicted about my feelings for you so I'm backing off," or whatever.
Again-there's rules for "getting the hint" for a reason, and it is so much easier to ghost someone than to tell them honestly that they were creepy, or you're just busy, or whatever. But again-what if we could? What if we all felt comfortable being frank? Oh, I know why we aren't-I've been screamed at by my share of dudes, simply for trying to politely tell them I wasn't interested. I don't blame anyone for trying to avoid that uncomfortableness. But-I've never felt in actual physical danger from such a thing; so is there something a little valorous about at least trying to make the world a bit more of an honest place?
It's a very odd framing. I think I ultimately don't agree with her; the social norms and rules around "max two texts after the first date" or whatever work for very human reasons. But it's interesting to think about, in an almost "what would a science-fiction world with totally different social norms look like" sort of way.
* She is really big on not cutting people out of your life with no reason / explanation / way to reconcile, and really big on face-to-face communication.
Both of these seem like pretty dumb positions at first glance. I have a right to have, or not have, anyone in my life that I so choose, thank you very much. And I do think she'd agree in cases of actual abuse (in general, if you read this book thinking she's talking about Actual Abuse, you're going to be rightly angry the whole time; what she's more interested in is e.g. cases where two people are acting shitty to each other and need a way to move past it, without necessarily assigning blame).
But social shunning, e.g. telling all your friends "don't hang out with Becky anymore she's a shitbag," is a pretty heavy hammer, and does cause real actual pain. Schulman is far from the first feminist to comment on this phenomenon. I'm reminded a bit of a friend, who once commented that he thought the right has always respected the power of the arts/literature/movies/etc in a way that leftists don't. The usual lefty response to e.g. conservatives censoring LGBTQ literature, is to roll their eyes and say, "Please, your kid isn't going to turn gay just because they read about two women kissing." But conservatives know better. They know the stories we tell ourselves ultimately shape our lives, our outlooks, and all that. So they ban books. Similarly, leftist discourse on Twitter tends to jeer when someone feels ganged-up on: "If you didn't want the whole internet to hate you, you shouldn't have said that one dumb thing on that one mailing list!" But anyone willing to take two steps back realizes: that is actually a terrifying power to hold. And to an extent it's more terrifyingly awful the more you identify with a particular group-Sean Hannity doesn't give a shit if liberals hate him, because liberals have been hating him for years and years, but if all my lefty tech friends suddenly disown me, then I no longer have friends, regardless of whether that's actual good or just or proportional or whatever.
The "face-to-face communication required" thing is a bit fuddy-duddy-ish, but the examples she gives are actually pretty compelling/persuasive-verbal communication isn't perfect, but it's way easier to tell if someone's e.g. saying a nasty thing because they're bitter, or upset, or being sarcastic, etc, versus actually saying a nasty thing, and that can keep the conversation from escalating to a nasty place.
It made me think about friends I communicate with primarily online, and I think what makes those relationships "work" is: (1) both parties are highly adept at online communication to begin with (if you always write like you're writing a five-paragraph-essay, or can't manage more than 30 WPM, then it's just a bad medium for us, sorry), and (2) willing to over-expound, to some extent-heavy use of emoji, frequent clarifications, caveating statements with lots of explanatory causes, "I don't mean X or Y, I mean Z," etc-basically using a lot of tools to make up for the lack of tone / facial expression.
And (3), which exists in a lot of places, is-some other reason we need to be in regular online contact, or else often find ourselves in online contact. I was talking to an open-source-maintainer friend, who's started mending a friendship with another open-source-maintainer friend-I asked him what helped him get past the Shit That Went Down, and he said, "Well, we had to work together. I've always known how to work with people online even if I hate them." Which meant to some extent they had to remain in dialogue with each other. And over time they were able to forgive each other, in a way that would've been impossible if he'd just hit the mute button and moved on with his life.
And I do think he's glad to have his friend back. It shows in his eyes.
I've felt weird or guilty or wrong for seeking reconciliation in the past, and it's empowering to see a framework that encourages this, that sees this as an act of radical goodness.
* I think the two most fundamental questions of her framework is: how do you determine the difference between resistance and attack, between conflict and abuse, especially in the corner cases? and how do you actually encourage [humans, groups, nations] to overcome the (probably-primal) desire to be comfortable and actually engage in confrontation? And unfortunately she doesn't really dig into those fundamental questions as much as I'd like; thus, the book loses a lot of steam after the first couple chapters. The chapter on HIV criminalization in Canada is fascinating and excellent; it's very clear that this is her area of expertise. The chapter on "here's how different schools of psychoanalysis/religion/thought/etc frame conflict/abuse" is useless. The last chapter is literally her just copy-pasting a Facebook argument? What??
tl;dr read for the opening chapter & the chapter where she describes social worker training in NYC & the chapter on HIV criminalization; you can probably skip the rest.
The Fifth Season: nk jemisin knows how to spin a really solid readable fun story.
that sounds like faint praise when i say it, "readable," but i'm fumbling to come up with the more accurate term-her stories are never suspenseful, exactly, not in the cliffhanger-at-the-end-of-every-chapter way, or the oh-god-how-will-they-get-out-of-THIS-one sort of way. but you do want to know what happens next-you just want to do it at a steady clip, rather than a bullrush; it would be a shame to miss all the scenery along the way.
and the scenery is lovely; the universe she's etched here is impressively vast. i was spoiler'd for the "twist" but do not think that dampened my enjoyment whatsoever. her prose had this same quality in The Hundred Thousand Kindgoms, too-everything steady and flowing and strong without being over-the-top-and i'd like to figure out how she does it.
(also, okay, i cried a bit reading the ending. while sitting in a $7 gyro place. as one does. the gyro-place-staff were very supportive.)
I Capture the Castle: lately i've been endeavoring a bit to read Books That My Favorite Authors Have Favorited. this is always a mixed endeavor-i discovered long ago that, while i love e.g. Usrula Le Guin, only rarely are her loves my loves. i can almost always see why a Favorite Author indeed loved Their Favorite Book-in the Le Guin case, she favors very ponderous, slow, thoughtful writers. and indeed her writing is slow and ponderous-but she wound up writing in a genre that had some demands on pacing, and thus Le Guin generally reads "a bit slow and thoughtful, but definitely moving along," whereas her beloved Dickens is "ugh slow slow slow i'm falling asleep kill me."
anyway, i picked this up on a whim, since it was on the Goodreads shelf of, hm, Stiefvater if i remember correctly-yep, her. and i can see the influence there-Stiefvater's stuff is always rather fundamentally Austen-ish Romance With Modern And Slightly Supernatural Attire, and this is indeed Austen-ish Romance With Modern Attire-
-but i wound up loving it more than i could've imagined, and think it quite exceeds most (maybe all?) of Steifvater's work.
it's a bit hard to put a finger on why that's the case-mostly the narrator is just very charismatic, and manages to make the most ordinary happenings in the castle seem brimming with life and drama. which is good, since the romance bit falls flat in several ways (though takes some really striking twists in others), but who cares because i could read her describing her invented midsummer rites like ten more times and not get bored.
there is something a bit fun and subversive about the structure of the book-it was published in the 1940s, and is set between the two World Wars-so it's too late for Austenian or Victorian-era romance, even though they live in a wonderfully romantic old castle, and also the leading edge of modernity. perhaps her father and stepmother can posture at nobility, but young Cassandra understands quite frankly that they are very poor.
well, in sweep the two dashing gentlemen next door, and-there is a romance, and it seems Austenlike on the surface-but things go subtly awry, in ways that can only happen in a modern novel. we do have a stepmother in the picture already, after all. and yet the whole thing seems more romantic for this-a swan song to a dying time.
but no, i think what i liked best was the narrator's interestedness.
see, here's the thing. the trope in the YA books i read as a kiddo was, the narrator was always so much smarter than everyone around them, and different from everyone else, and slightly outcast, but was totally going to own those jocks one day, yada yada.
this isn't even a bad trope per se-lots of nerdy kids need that sort of thing-but i remember always feeling faintly alienated, because though i knew i was pretty bright, that seemed far from the most important thing about me, and far from the most important thing about my friends. i wanted to understand people, even if i was different from a lot of them, and there were plenty of people around, even if my chemistry teacher was a dingbat.
later, in college, i would meet stereotypical bright kids who felt so immensely Wronged by their schools, their home communities-and while some of them were indeed Wronged, some were merely throwing temper tantrums because their boarding-school was only the second-best, or their academic team was so mediocre it only made it to nationals sometimes, and yada yada, and i felt a mixture of jealousy (my high school was far worse than theirs; i was so behind on my chemistry and physics) and confusion (you're at a super fancy college now, right? why are you still angry at your high school? couldn't you do what i did-ignore the bullshit, think about and learn what you want? goodness knows administrations tend to leave the good test-takers alone).
well. here's a book written from the point of view of a bright young girl, fabulously intelligent, who's bound to become a famous author-but she doesn't have an ego about it, and she finds everyone around her endlessly fascinating; she points all her brainpower outwards, and her feelings too, and brings to life this little corner of the countryside despite barely having the money for any kind of education at all. i related to this-i loved people, i still love people, always i've wanted to know them better-and her attitude inspired me.
like: a good deal of the last act is her simply marveling that her brother is a different & better person than she'd previously imagined, more interesting and fun to talk to and have adventures with than she'd ever previously imagined.
that's one of the finest pleasures i know in life: being surprised by books, or people, that are better than we could've first imagined. and it's captured splendidly here.