some books i read lately (april edition)
didn't read as much as i wanted to these past two months. alas. here's what i did manage to read:
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (part 1 of 4)
I found a book club that's planning to read War and Peace together this year, to keep each other motivated, and also to keep it manageable (reading War and Peace in four parts is easier than swallowing the whole book at once).
I hopped onboard, because I figured I would never read these damn epic Russian novels any other way. I am surprised & delighted to report, however, that so far it's really... fun? Light? Extremely accessible?
Listen, all I knew about War and Peace going in was that it was famous, and that it was enormous. That predisposes me to think it's going to be Great Literature, and it'll be full of Ponderous Discourse and all that shit. Like, I read The Glass Bead Game as a kid, right, I get that sort of thing even though I don't read it very often.
But! it turns out War and Peace was published in a serialized format during its day, and it turns out soap operas weren't a thing back then, so here it is. I am so delighted by this, y'all.
Like, I went downstairs for a snack while I was blazing through the first 200 or so pages, and a housemate asked me what was happening in the book, and I was delighted that I could report, "Well, Pierre just got totally smashed at a frat party where these dudes fuckin rode an actual live bear around because Fraternity Shenanigans, and Pierre's family found out via the subsequent arrest record and got so pissed they banished him to Moscow, which for our purposes sounds kinda like Tacoma, and I think Pierre's mom is about to pull some CRAZY AMAZING CONNIVING SHIT to cheat Pierre into getting a massive inheritance but he's too clueless to realize it's happening, and also there's bad shit coming for the Natasha/Boris ship, I can tell..."
Amazing. Amazing! I'm really liking it so far & will report back here as I get through the rest. (We read through after the Battle of Austerlitz, for our first meeting.)
Silently and Very Fast by Catherynne Valente
holy shit, i actually cried at section seven, way to creep my patron saint into your story you glorious bastard
anyway i really should've read this story before ever attempting to write a dream sequence, ever, because Ms. Valente just fucking nails it, over and over and over.
i've been reading a lot of Ms. Valente's stuff lately (more on that later, whenever i get around to writing some short story reviews), and i have some mixed feelings about her but mostly i really like her shit. my chief quibble would be, she leans too hard into the poet-side of her when writing prose, and she can end up with clusters of sentences that are dazzling but signify nothing, or just end up leaving you plain confused about what's going on in the story, because she's too busy showing off.
but. as a show-off at heart, as a bit of a poet, i like that sort of thing, a bit. you just have to know how to use it.
this story, i think, knows how to use it. this story is told in a mythlike manner because it is a creation myth; the story is inherently confusing because the mind of an AI is going to be fundamentally alien and thus you're less worried about the confusing bits; this story is able to luxuriate in its strange dreamworld because it nails the concrete real-world details so well.
also, the fact that a large part of the story takes place on a weird little house on the Shiretoko Peninsula plays into my biases hard, but also that mansion is still haunting my mind weeks after i read the story-i want to go there even though i know it doesn't (can't!) exist. wistful sigh.
(aside: this one's a novella, not a novel, and you can read the whole thing free here if you're curious about it)
Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo
You will enjoy this book exactly as much as you are excited by the following phrase: "Ocean's Eleven meets Final Fantasy."
And if you are a person of taste, you are very excited right now. This sucker knocks out so many of my favorite dumb heist and/or JRPG tropes. You've got the chicka who, at the wizened age of seventeen, is already a decorated and battle-hardened soldier. You've got the bad-boy protagonist and the sees-through-his-shit female lead, who are definitely actually into each other despite their denials of this fact. You have a fuckin' cool-as-heck campy intro scene for each member of the heist team where you get to see 'em doin' whatever tropey bullshit their Thing is. And there's magic! and stuff! and things!
It was glorious: a little dumb but also quite clever when it mattered. The writing's a little "YA-ish" in parts (and if I knew how to define that term, believe me, I would) but it was still a great romp. Goddamn I love the whole damn heist genre.
Selected Stories of Lu Hsun trans. Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang
I read this for research, primarily, but the stories themselves were reasonably solid as literary works in-and-of-themselves. Lu Hsun was a leftist activist and writer in early 1900s China, and while his stories are not explicitly or obviously political, he saw writing itself as a political act. (Apparently he was inspired to become a writer while in medical school in Japan-he saw a photo where a Japanese soldier was about to behead a Chinese man, and a group of Chinese people had gathered around to watch, apathetic to the man's plight. Hsun then decided literature was the real cure China needed for their spiritual illness / apathy, not Western medicine.) Thus, Hsun's short stories are nearly all tragedies, and they focus on the plight of the poor and the underclass and so on. "A Madman's Diary" was probably my favorite, just for the creepy psychological horror aspects, but wow the stories with the theme of "Chinese 'traditional' medicine is a scam preying on the life savings of people who are already extremely poor" are all brutal. "Village Opera" was such a beautiful little portrait of town life and served as a nice contrast to his bleaker stories, and "The Misanthrope," I thought, was a really wonderfully delicate and nuanced portrait of what it's like to feel just outside of things, just on the edge of things.
I do wish it were more heavily footnoted; I think I missed a lot of cultural context on these stories. And perhaps the most fascinating bit of the whole book was the introduction-the translators wrote about Lu Hsun's life with, uh, suspiciously charged language (e.g. they attribute the strength of his later stories to his having "correct politics", e.g. becoming more lefty). This combined with other weirdly-propoganda-y phrases throughout the introduction prompted me to look up the date of the translation-1960-and the background of the translators (they seemed to chug along translating books for years and years without incident, then then the Cultural Revolution happened, and now apparently the couple's autobiography is banned in China, jeez), and uh, wow, that is a whole mess of worms there. And I've got a lot more research to do...
Ten Billion Days and One Hundred Billion Nights by Ryu Mitsuse
So let's be real: this tweet is what convinced me to go pick up this book posthaste: "I'm reading a Japanese SF novel from 1967. It spent 200pgs as a Bulgakov-by-way-of-Clarke meditation on religion, deep time, and death. Then Jesus of Nazareth and Siddhartha Gautama had a superpowered cyborg mecha battle in the ruins of 3909 Tokyo."
I mean. What a pitch.
So, obviously, I knew going in that this was going to be Extremely Anime, but I don't think I was prepared for how much it was going to remind me of JRPGs in general, and especially Chrono Cross*.
I mean. The book literally opens with a pages-long, vivid description of the primordial ocean, alluding to what the ocean represents for Life In General-that's very Chrono Cross-y already. It does a crazy amount of infodumping in the last act, while the characters are in the ruins of some once-very-technologically-advanced civilization-again, that's very Chrono Cross-y, and I got Dinopolis and Dead Sea vibes all over that. And the way so much of the book's dialogue steers towards the vaguely philosophical, in a way that feels stilted but is clearly an aesthetic choice because they do it everywhere-that's also very Chrono Cross. (I found it striking, when I started a replay of the game recently, how many of the random villagers you talk to SURE SEEM to have very existential feelings.)
So does this all work as a book? Eh, kind of? The plot is pretty hard to follow, which leads you to think the plot must be something of an afterthought, a framework for developing these meditations on The Heat Death Of The Universe. But those meditations themselves are both bleak and rather cyclical, which doesn't lend itself to super-engaging reading. (One starts to appreciate why Nietzsche relied so much on humor when presenting his own bleak, cyclical little philosophies.)
The chapter where Jesus is introduced is fascinatingly strange (Jesus is framed as a madman and as a prophet of death, in a way that feels viscerally strange if you were raised in Stereotypical American Sunday School or whatever), but overall I thought this book was more interesting than it was actually gripping or good. C'est la vie.
I would be curious for how influential / widely read this novel was within Japan itself-apparently the creator of Ghost in the Shell was a big fan (he wrote an afterword for the edition I read).
Strange Horizons did a little book club about it a while back, in which people far cleverer than I chat about the book, so go there for more thoughts if you're still curious.
No Hard Feelings by Liz Fosslien and Mollie West Duffy
Did not finish.
So we've all seen Business Books lying around, right? They usually feature dreadfully uninspiring cover art, have some sort of forced pithy saying for a title, and serve as a vehicle for bundling up dubious pop psychology and bogus MBA case studies.
I have read precisely one of these books before, ever, and that was under something like duress. See, at work, I once had to go to a seminar for Crucial Conversations, and we all got a free copy of the book, and listening to the seminar-person talking was worse than reading the damn thing, so I wound up just reading the book while the seminar-person yammered on.
And it wasn't an awful book, but I found myself vaguely bemused by it-it seemed like Basic Communication 101. Didn't everyone have an Aggressively Social mother growing up, to drill you hard on the fine art of How To State Your Opinion Without Sounding Like An Ass, and How To Come Up With A Good Compromise, and so on?
I mean, empirically the answer to this question is no, most people really suck at communication. Maybe these books actually help some people with that. If so, kudos, but as for me, I was just pissed off that the used bookstore wouldn't even take my copy of Crucial Conversations, because they already had too many. (Who is buying all these damn copies??)
Anyway.
This is all to say, I should've known I wouldn't like this book, because it's a damn Business Book, but now that I work for The Man, I tend to see Business Books come up with disturbing frequency, and sometimes people I really like recommend them, and in particular an engineer I really admire said this book was the bomb dot com and I was like, wow, they are so technically brilliant, I should read this book.
So once again, I am faced with a book that is not awful. But it's really just a bundle of pop psych tips and MBA studies that you've probably already skimmed in some form or another while interneting. The presentation is really cute, too. But around ninety pages in, I was so bored, and then I realized these books are never gonna work for me, and luckily I got this shit from the library so I can just return it instead of begging a used bookseller to take this thing away from me.
I am not very good at Business Books.
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (part 1 of 4)
I found a book club that's planning to read War and Peace together this year, to keep each other motivated, and also to keep it manageable (reading War and Peace in four parts is easier than swallowing the whole book at once).
I hopped onboard, because I figured I would never read these damn epic Russian novels any other way. I am surprised & delighted to report, however, that so far it's really... fun? Light? Extremely accessible?
Listen, all I knew about War and Peace going in was that it was famous, and that it was enormous. That predisposes me to think it's going to be Great Literature, and it'll be full of Ponderous Discourse and all that shit. Like, I read The Glass Bead Game as a kid, right, I get that sort of thing even though I don't read it very often.
But! it turns out War and Peace was published in a serialized format during its day, and it turns out soap operas weren't a thing back then, so here it is. I am so delighted by this, y'all.
Like, I went downstairs for a snack while I was blazing through the first 200 or so pages, and a housemate asked me what was happening in the book, and I was delighted that I could report, "Well, Pierre just got totally smashed at a frat party where these dudes fuckin rode an actual live bear around because Fraternity Shenanigans, and Pierre's family found out via the subsequent arrest record and got so pissed they banished him to Moscow, which for our purposes sounds kinda like Tacoma, and I think Pierre's mom is about to pull some CRAZY AMAZING CONNIVING SHIT to cheat Pierre into getting a massive inheritance but he's too clueless to realize it's happening, and also there's bad shit coming for the Natasha/Boris ship, I can tell..."
Amazing. Amazing! I'm really liking it so far & will report back here as I get through the rest. (We read through after the Battle of Austerlitz, for our first meeting.)
Silently and Very Fast by Catherynne Valente
holy shit, i actually cried at section seven, way to creep my patron saint into your story you glorious bastard
anyway i really should've read this story before ever attempting to write a dream sequence, ever, because Ms. Valente just fucking nails it, over and over and over.
i've been reading a lot of Ms. Valente's stuff lately (more on that later, whenever i get around to writing some short story reviews), and i have some mixed feelings about her but mostly i really like her shit. my chief quibble would be, she leans too hard into the poet-side of her when writing prose, and she can end up with clusters of sentences that are dazzling but signify nothing, or just end up leaving you plain confused about what's going on in the story, because she's too busy showing off.
but. as a show-off at heart, as a bit of a poet, i like that sort of thing, a bit. you just have to know how to use it.
this story, i think, knows how to use it. this story is told in a mythlike manner because it is a creation myth; the story is inherently confusing because the mind of an AI is going to be fundamentally alien and thus you're less worried about the confusing bits; this story is able to luxuriate in its strange dreamworld because it nails the concrete real-world details so well.
also, the fact that a large part of the story takes place on a weird little house on the Shiretoko Peninsula plays into my biases hard, but also that mansion is still haunting my mind weeks after i read the story-i want to go there even though i know it doesn't (can't!) exist. wistful sigh.
(aside: this one's a novella, not a novel, and you can read the whole thing free here if you're curious about it)
Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo
You will enjoy this book exactly as much as you are excited by the following phrase: "Ocean's Eleven meets Final Fantasy."
And if you are a person of taste, you are very excited right now. This sucker knocks out so many of my favorite dumb heist and/or JRPG tropes. You've got the chicka who, at the wizened age of seventeen, is already a decorated and battle-hardened soldier. You've got the bad-boy protagonist and the sees-through-his-shit female lead, who are definitely actually into each other despite their denials of this fact. You have a fuckin' cool-as-heck campy intro scene for each member of the heist team where you get to see 'em doin' whatever tropey bullshit their Thing is. And there's magic! and stuff! and things!
It was glorious: a little dumb but also quite clever when it mattered. The writing's a little "YA-ish" in parts (and if I knew how to define that term, believe me, I would) but it was still a great romp. Goddamn I love the whole damn heist genre.
Selected Stories of Lu Hsun trans. Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang
I read this for research, primarily, but the stories themselves were reasonably solid as literary works in-and-of-themselves. Lu Hsun was a leftist activist and writer in early 1900s China, and while his stories are not explicitly or obviously political, he saw writing itself as a political act. (Apparently he was inspired to become a writer while in medical school in Japan-he saw a photo where a Japanese soldier was about to behead a Chinese man, and a group of Chinese people had gathered around to watch, apathetic to the man's plight. Hsun then decided literature was the real cure China needed for their spiritual illness / apathy, not Western medicine.) Thus, Hsun's short stories are nearly all tragedies, and they focus on the plight of the poor and the underclass and so on. "A Madman's Diary" was probably my favorite, just for the creepy psychological horror aspects, but wow the stories with the theme of "Chinese 'traditional' medicine is a scam preying on the life savings of people who are already extremely poor" are all brutal. "Village Opera" was such a beautiful little portrait of town life and served as a nice contrast to his bleaker stories, and "The Misanthrope," I thought, was a really wonderfully delicate and nuanced portrait of what it's like to feel just outside of things, just on the edge of things.
I do wish it were more heavily footnoted; I think I missed a lot of cultural context on these stories. And perhaps the most fascinating bit of the whole book was the introduction-the translators wrote about Lu Hsun's life with, uh, suspiciously charged language (e.g. they attribute the strength of his later stories to his having "correct politics", e.g. becoming more lefty). This combined with other weirdly-propoganda-y phrases throughout the introduction prompted me to look up the date of the translation-1960-and the background of the translators (they seemed to chug along translating books for years and years without incident, then then the Cultural Revolution happened, and now apparently the couple's autobiography is banned in China, jeez), and uh, wow, that is a whole mess of worms there. And I've got a lot more research to do...
Ten Billion Days and One Hundred Billion Nights by Ryu Mitsuse
So let's be real: this tweet is what convinced me to go pick up this book posthaste: "I'm reading a Japanese SF novel from 1967. It spent 200pgs as a Bulgakov-by-way-of-Clarke meditation on religion, deep time, and death. Then Jesus of Nazareth and Siddhartha Gautama had a superpowered cyborg mecha battle in the ruins of 3909 Tokyo."
I mean. What a pitch.
So, obviously, I knew going in that this was going to be Extremely Anime, but I don't think I was prepared for how much it was going to remind me of JRPGs in general, and especially Chrono Cross*.
I mean. The book literally opens with a pages-long, vivid description of the primordial ocean, alluding to what the ocean represents for Life In General-that's very Chrono Cross-y already. It does a crazy amount of infodumping in the last act, while the characters are in the ruins of some once-very-technologically-advanced civilization-again, that's very Chrono Cross-y, and I got Dinopolis and Dead Sea vibes all over that. And the way so much of the book's dialogue steers towards the vaguely philosophical, in a way that feels stilted but is clearly an aesthetic choice because they do it everywhere-that's also very Chrono Cross. (I found it striking, when I started a replay of the game recently, how many of the random villagers you talk to SURE SEEM to have very existential feelings.)
So does this all work as a book? Eh, kind of? The plot is pretty hard to follow, which leads you to think the plot must be something of an afterthought, a framework for developing these meditations on The Heat Death Of The Universe. But those meditations themselves are both bleak and rather cyclical, which doesn't lend itself to super-engaging reading. (One starts to appreciate why Nietzsche relied so much on humor when presenting his own bleak, cyclical little philosophies.)
The chapter where Jesus is introduced is fascinatingly strange (Jesus is framed as a madman and as a prophet of death, in a way that feels viscerally strange if you were raised in Stereotypical American Sunday School or whatever), but overall I thought this book was more interesting than it was actually gripping or good. C'est la vie.
I would be curious for how influential / widely read this novel was within Japan itself-apparently the creator of Ghost in the Shell was a big fan (he wrote an afterword for the edition I read).
Strange Horizons did a little book club about it a while back, in which people far cleverer than I chat about the book, so go there for more thoughts if you're still curious.
No Hard Feelings by Liz Fosslien and Mollie West Duffy
Did not finish.
So we've all seen Business Books lying around, right? They usually feature dreadfully uninspiring cover art, have some sort of forced pithy saying for a title, and serve as a vehicle for bundling up dubious pop psychology and bogus MBA case studies.
I have read precisely one of these books before, ever, and that was under something like duress. See, at work, I once had to go to a seminar for Crucial Conversations, and we all got a free copy of the book, and listening to the seminar-person talking was worse than reading the damn thing, so I wound up just reading the book while the seminar-person yammered on.
And it wasn't an awful book, but I found myself vaguely bemused by it-it seemed like Basic Communication 101. Didn't everyone have an Aggressively Social mother growing up, to drill you hard on the fine art of How To State Your Opinion Without Sounding Like An Ass, and How To Come Up With A Good Compromise, and so on?
I mean, empirically the answer to this question is no, most people really suck at communication. Maybe these books actually help some people with that. If so, kudos, but as for me, I was just pissed off that the used bookstore wouldn't even take my copy of Crucial Conversations, because they already had too many. (Who is buying all these damn copies??)
Anyway.
This is all to say, I should've known I wouldn't like this book, because it's a damn Business Book, but now that I work for The Man, I tend to see Business Books come up with disturbing frequency, and sometimes people I really like recommend them, and in particular an engineer I really admire said this book was the bomb dot com and I was like, wow, they are so technically brilliant, I should read this book.
So once again, I am faced with a book that is not awful. But it's really just a bundle of pop psych tips and MBA studies that you've probably already skimmed in some form or another while interneting. The presentation is really cute, too. But around ninety pages in, I was so bored, and then I realized these books are never gonna work for me, and luckily I got this shit from the library so I can just return it instead of begging a used bookseller to take this thing away from me.
I am not very good at Business Books.