Corruptions of Power

Okay, was this going to be a spinoff of the Ancillary Justice post in which I discuss the idea of power, and the huge imposing problem with the whole YA dystopian fiction genre being that it's all about overthrowing things and not about what you establish in its place?  I feel like it's a huge subject on which I have only very obvious things to say, but it's one of many topics where I feel like there's a big, complicated issue in the real world that you can't wrap up neatly and so fiction almost never looks at head on: namely, what it means for the good guys to win when it comes to ruling the world.

Let's back off a second and talk about K.J. Parker's novella Purple and Black, which I also read earlier this week.  I discovered K.J. Parker very recently thanks to Jenny, and I am completely hooked.  But where Blue and Gold was clever with a whisper of melancholy, Purple and Black appeared to be clever but just ended up being flat-out tragic.  I don't know how I would have felt if the cover hadn't called out how sad it was, because it just looked clever until you get to the end, and then it's like a knife in the gut.

Without giving too much away, the theme of this novel is whether it's true that power should always be given only to people who would much rather be doing pretty much anything else.  One character talks about how the temptation to use power when it's given to you is so good, so pure--you have it in your hands to make things better--not in a bad-guy totalitarian way, but in a practical, hands-on way.  So you start to try it, and then before you know it, you are a part of the machine, and the machine is always the machine--full of cogs that grind and grind.

The story is pretty fun--a newly crowned emperor who never expected to inherit has no one to trust, so he enlists his old college friends in important offices of state. The book consists of letters between Nico, the emperor, and his friend Philo, whom he's sent to handle insurgents and border raids on the edge of the kingdom.  Philo has zero knowledge of the military, but he has a copy of The Art of War and a sound head on his shoulders.  Official correspondence is accompanied by personal letters between the two friends, and they are both very likeable and thoughtful.  It's fun watching Philo become a strategist.  It's heartening to watch Nico try to make the world better.

But the moral complexity in this story leaves me thinking about Breq from Ancillary Justice, and how she can deal with Anaander Mianaai--whether she can trust even the "good" Anaander, or whether "bringing down" the Radch is a thing that can even be conceptualized.  I mean, looking within the story you can see that going to the interior of the Radch, past the empire to the home planet, is going to be the endgame of the series.  (I'm not allowed to read Ancillary Sword till the book club finishes the first book). 

But I'm thinking more abstract: what does a post-revolution government look like?  Does it always look like the Reign of Terror or the Ayatollah's Islamic Republic?  Can you replace an entire government without destroying everything it's built and killing a bunch of people?  Is the replacement government ever going to be anything but a new kind of despot?

This carries me back, though, to the play I saw this weekend, That Hopey, Changey Thing, which was about a family dinner party on election night.  I'm not quite sure what the play was about (it's part of a cycle and I suspect it'll come together a little bit when I see the next one), but one of the things that was going on was that a room full of Democrats were, one by one and with varying levels of reluctance, that they were disheartened that the Democratic party was so much less pure than their ideals.  That Obama didn't live up to all his promises, and that pundits were really mean to Sarah Palin and that darn it, they're just another big political party, not the grassroots folks I want them to be.

The surprise and chagrin that these characters were feeling kind of shocked me, and it's partly because of the dynamic I'm talking about here--power corrupts.  Being a political party means fighting, it means being partisan, it means that they're trying to, essentially, rule the world.  Is there some level on which a guy trying to rule the world is ever, ever going to be trustworthy?  I mean, I believe Democrats are better than Republicans because their party platform is based around taking care of people, not systems, and giving people freedoms, not taking them away.  But that doesn't make a politician anything except a politician.

This is why Naboo elected a teenaged Natalie Portman to run the planet.  It seems like a bad idea, but really, is it any worse than any other political system?  And it makes me wonder what kind of government Leia and Luke and Han have set up since they brought down the Empire.

Sorry, this was barely a book review.  I think I'm just worried about the world.  Or maybe the Radch; I sometimes have trouble telling them apart.

Ancillary Justice: Amazing

I posted about Ancillary Justice when I was halfway through, and now I've finished it and I have to wait like two whole weeks for book club, and I'm worried I'll forget how insanely wonderful it was.  Like, I kept having to put it down because I was getting too worked up.

Since this is a second half review, there will be spoilers at the end, but I'll do the non-spoilery part first.

In my first post, I talked about the gender-free Radch and how it left me stewing about how my expectations of a scene were colored by my trying to determine who was male and who was female.  In the second half of the book, I had the opposite experience--I ceased to notice the gender, and was able to read all the "her"s as a given.  It literally didn't matter to me. There were definitely some characters I was reading as male and some as female, but it was completely secondary.  It's amazing how easy it was to slip into this, and it made me want to change English pronouns.

Another non-spoiler: I found the idea of fate as being very interesting.  Breq doesn't really seem to buy into it much.  But the Radchaai take coincidence very seriously, and I feel like the book does, too.  At a minimum, the fact that Seivarden was on the planet of Nict, of all places.  It's a coincidence that almost wouldn't hold up if it hadn't happened at the beginning of the book, where it's not clear how big a deal that moment is.

Okay, here come the spoilers.

This is for those of you who have read the book, which should be everyone, because it's AMAZING.

Here we go.

I want to talk about Seivarden, and the changes in her character.  Her story arc is a traditional rock-bottom one, from a somewhat obnoxious person dealt a hard blow, through addiction, to a deep humility and open-mindedness, but without losing the tenor of obnoxiousness that makes her herself.  This ties in so nicely with how we come to understand Breq as an individual consciousness, vs. part of Justice of Toren or One Esk. 

Speaking of which, do you think Breq is One Esk, or One Esk Nineteen?  I feel like she's clearly not Justice of Toren, not exactly, and that's stated pretty clearly by Anaander Mianaai when she talks about ignoring the notion that One Esk might have favorites.

Speaking of Anaander, does anyone else wonder what she is?  There are AIs, with many bodies, and there are people, with one body, and there is Anaander, who has many bodies but is not considered an AI.  Or maybe she is?  But if so, why is she so different--why is she in control, why are other AIs "it"s?  She does come around to treating Breq as a person very quickly upon meeting her.  Could Anaander be an AI herself?  

Also, how do you feel about how the story ends?  I really appreciate that the idea of siding with one Anaander, even the "good" one, does not in any way assure Breq.  The kindest dictator is still a dictator.  But then, the idea of ending a bad government is always easier to get behind than trying to imagine and implement a good government. 

This is an issue that's come up twice for me this weekend--once in a play I saw on Saturday at Stoneham Theatre, That Hopey, Changey Thing, and once in a novella I read, K.J. Parker's Purple and Black.  This is something I find very hard to think about, especially since revolution is such a great dramatic topic for fiction.

But sadly, I have to go to bed.  More when I review the Parker book.  Let me say again, though--Ancillary Justice is amazing and thrilling and so readable and I can't wait to read Ancillary Sword!

What We Talk About When We Talk About Buffy

When I talk about Buffy, I always need to start by talking about how I don't want to talk about why I want to talk about Buffy.  Which is to say, I have this on-again, off-again obsession that is probably actually pretty unhealthy, and really is more like on-again, in-hibernation.  Ahem.

Anyway, let's not get into how I'm way too attached to this universe, and let's talk a little about the beginning of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 10. 

One thing I will say, each season of the comics has been very different.  Eight was okay right up until it went off the rails with the worst ending ever.  Nine was a little confusing, to be honest, but I liked pretty much everything it was doing--the tension around magic being gone, Giles being gone, Willow's distraction, Buffy's lack of focus.  The personal stuff felt very true to the Buffy I know, and I felt like it brought just the right amount of over-the-top-ness--unlike eight, they took advantage of the comics medium to make things big and impressive without causing our favorite characters to get lost in this strange, unfamiliar world.  It stayed focused on the people, even when they were saving the world.

Let's talk about art, though. I wish I could remember where I saw a blog post lately about whether you'd quit a comic over art; I will say that once I'm in, I'm in, but I won't even set foot inside if the art isn't to my liking.  In the same way that I won't read a book that's one long paragraph, even if it's beautiful and moving--form matters, and if I'm uncomfortable trying to consume the story, I'm not going to be able to enjoy it. 

The art in eight and nine was in a style I liked a lot, and most of the characters were recognizable--except for Buffy.  She looked more like Sarah Michelle Gellar from season one of the TV show; she did not have the look of the mature SMG, which meant she didn't look like Buffy.  It's like she was some alternate version of how young Buffy might have grown up.  It was getting annoying. 

This time out, they've switched things up, and the team that used to do Angel & Faith is now doing BtVS.  I don't like the art style as well--it's a bit more cartoony--but I do like that Buffy looks a bit more like I expect her to.  I feel like I'm able to match the character I imagine to the one I'm seeing.  So that's something.

Anyway, all this is to bring us back to volume 1 of this new season and my many feelings.  I'm conflicted.  I loved it and found it incredibly satisfying, but for those same reasons, it felt a little inauthentic.  It was funny--really funny, with lots of inside jokes and fast-talking quips, to the point where maybe it was a little too funny, a little too upbeat and casual.  I don't mind upbeat--it's the beginning of the season, I'm sure things will get miserable soon--but it could be seen as pandering.  I don't know--I LOVE the in-jokes, but catering to my fangirl is not a healthy way to conduct business.

That's really what's going on all over the place.  Buffy and Willow have a lovely girl-bonding moment, talking about guys and being together as a team again.  Buffy complains about her love life to Spike, who brushes her off, which is some great setup material.  Hell, Buffy and Spike are hanging out, partners in patrolling again.  Everyone's a family, close, talking, sharing things, happy. This is wonderful!  It's what you want!  It's what the fanfiction has been writing for years. 

Except it's not what the story is.  Think about it--from the beginning, if you look at Buffy as being about friendship, about bonding, even though that's true, most of it takes place in the spaces between the closeness.  For every movie night, there's a secret being withheld.  For every girl talk convo, one person's heart is breaking a little.  This is a story about being set apart from the people you love most, and how we're all kind of alone, even when we're on a team; in the best of moments, it's about how we can all work as a team, even though we're all really alone.

But there's no loneliness here.  There's casual intimacy, friendship, easy bonding.  It's like the Scooby gang as the cast of Friends, sitting in each other's laps instead of reaching across the divides between each other.

Here's the thing, though; I'm not complaining.  I cannot tell you how satisfying it was to see Dawn and Xander uncomfortable but trying to talk about it, Buffy and Willow not only being close but talking about how close they are, Spike swing Buffy off the back of that truck, and the big battlefield reunion.  The new characters--Billy, Anaheed--still promise to be around, but we've got the band back together.  Do you know just how much I wanted to get the band back together? 

So I am grateful, and hungry for more. I have what I want, and I'm going to glut myself on it.  But I can't help thinking that it's not quite what I expected, and wondering where it's going next.  I suppose, if Joss Whedon is still involved, even if only at the top level, I don't have to worry about things staying too happy for too long.  Probably they're setting me up for someone important to get killed.

Probably I could live with that

Things I Never Thought I'd Like This Much: Celebrity Autobiography

I've read my share of these--Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?, Bossypants, Yes, Please!--and I usually find them mildly amusing, but not quite interesting enough to write about.  I mean, they're usually comedians, and they usually had pretty standard childhoods, and through drive plus skill plus luck, they end up famous, but really, they're just like everyone else.  And, while they're funny, they're mostly not prose writers (they are mostly TV writers, because apparently that's what I read), and so while the books are funny, they're meant for delivery.  This is why I mostly listen to them as audiobooks.

There's never quite enough personal connection, never quite enough dirt.  These are people writing books because it's a good career move--they're funny, people will buy it, it'll boost their visibility.  Which is fine, but it also means that they're not actually doing it because they have something to say about their lives; they're doing it because they want to talk about something, and the material available to them is their lives.  And because people are curious.  But you also don't want to alienate people, so you get the best stories about other stars, and you hear how warm and gracious and funny everyone is.

Now, having listed all these things out, I can tell you why Neil Patrick Harris's Choose Your Own Autobiography is the best celebrity autobiography I've read. 

1) His childhood gets interesting really fast.  He was in a movie with Whoopi Goldberg when he was like 14.  Also Doogie Howser.  His adolescence contains some good anecdotes that are unlike the ones my friends have to tell.

2) I won't say he's not afraid to talk trash, because he only dishes dirt on a few people, none of them A-listers.  But he does have some stories of exactly the People magazine level of trash that you want to hear--the child actor club scene in the early '90s, when Shannen Doherty was terrorizing drunk club kids and Scott Caan was in some kind of gang.  He drops enough bits about bad directors, uncomfortable sitcom sets, and Dustin Diamond to make it more salacious than a lot of people.

3) His personal story of coming out, both to himself and to the world, is really touching and honest.  Again, it's not like he delves into deep psychological territory, but he talks about the false starts, about why it was hard and what he struggled with, and he's quite vulnerable and honest about these things.  This is the kind of story I like to read even if I don't already like the guy who's telling it.

4) He just seems adorable.  He loves magic and Disney and the Muppets.  When he talks about going to Disney World, he seems honestly as excited by it as Mike gets.  And the fact that he gets the star treatment there (of course)--he's humble and grateful and cheerful about it.  That's a hard tone to capture, believe me.

5) Finally, and I hate to say this, I think he's partly able to be more open about all these things because he's a dude.  It feels like a feminist betrayal to like this book more than the ones I listed above because of this: it's less bridge-burny for a guy to be honest about these things, to tell the behind-the-scenes dirty stuff, than it is for a woman to do this.  Which gives him the freedom to give me this book that I really love.

Oh, and this doesn't need a number, but the man can write.  I'm laughing out loud, reading passages out to people.  He's witty, verbally adept, and an efficient storyteller.  This book is so damned funny.

So a shout out to my best girl, Brenda--thank you SO MUCH!  This was the best spontaneous, for-no-reason gift I've ever gotten.  It's so perfect!

Opportunity: Get Books!

You probably want this Humble Bundle from Subterranean Press, which I know because I do.  Did.  I bought it. 

If you don't know the deal with the Humble Bundle, it's basically a deal where you get a whole batch of stuff on a pay-what-you-want basis.  If you pay more than the average, you get a whole bunch more books. 

The reason I wanted it was because two books that I had already decided to purchase were on there: a collection of the short works of KJ Parker, Academic Exercises, and a collection called The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox, by Barry Hughart.  I haven't read either one, but I've just fallen for KJ Parker after Jenny's recommendation, and Aarti highly recommends Barry Hughart.

There's also a bunch of other fantasy and sci fi material--novellas, collections, books, and even a collection of John Scalzi's blog posts.  I'm interested in about three-quarters of the contents, but just the two I linked to here were worth what I paid, by far.

What are you waiting for?

Halfway Post: Ancillary Justice

There is so much going on here, I can't wait till the end to write about it.

I mean, I always hate waiting till the end, and I think in some ways that's a failure on my part because it demonstrates a reluctance to engage my critical facilities in deconstructing the work I've just completed.  But let's be honest: when I write a review after I've finished the book, I end up writing about the book; if I write it while I'm reading, I write about my reaction to the book, which I fully admit is what I want to write about, so I guess that works out okay.

Anyway, reading this one for my NEWEST book club, which is at work, and it's so much fun to read something everyone around me is reading and talk about it.  Although it's also crazymaking when you're both talking about how shocked you are, and you have to hedge, like, I'm at the part on the bridge.  Are you there yet?  Oh, I'm way past there!

On the subject of work book club, I will have more to say, but on the subject of Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice, let's dive in.

First (and this will be interesting in a book club setting, especially a new one), this is the kind of science fiction that non-scifi readers are talking about when they say they don't know how to read scifi.  This is a book that starts out deep in complicated world-building and lets you sort out what's going on, and you will be a good 20% of the way through the book (sorry, I don't do page numbers anymore) before you get your feet under you.  It's okay, it's still a fun ride, but if you don't trust the author to carry you through, it can cause serious floundering.  People who don't know how to read for clues about things like technology, social order, and alien life forms are going to get lost fairly easily; this is not for beginners.

Second, because it's obvious and very talked-about: the gender thing.  I feel like there are so many layers to my reaction to this.  First, from a strictly theoretical point of view, I love it. It takes all these cultural assumption--a lot of which you don't even know you have--and turns them on their heads.  You see, the Radch (the race of the ruling empire) has no gender.  It's not perfectly clear (yet), but it's implied that they have sexes, but their language lacks gender.  The narrator, being a native speaker, uses "she" for everyone, except in conversation, where she struggles to identify genders correctly.

Beneath the cool level of challenging the reader's assumption and adding to the flavor of this alien world (and mind), you get the layer on which it affects the narrative, which is also fascinating.  Because not all the characters we encounter are from genderless cultures, and so there are sometimes things going on below the surface that our first person narrator might not be fully grasping, and that we get to sort out.

Besides which, there's the level on which it challenges you within the narrative, which is tied up with the ways it challenges your notions of how you think about gender yourself.  At first, I found myself parsing every scene carefully to see if I was able to tell the gender of the people Breq was encountering.  This character has a beard: male.  This other person referred to that kid as a girl.  But the very act of doing this makes you examine why you're doing it--does it matter whether Seivarden is male or female?  She's an officer in the Radch, kind of obnoxious, completely helpless, whatever, but does maleness matter, especially if her own culture says it doesn't?

Well, but then you get an interaction where she's advising a cousin who's new to the military about social standing and romantic relationships, and it just feels very different if you cast her as male vs. female.  And when Lt. Awn has a romantic interlude, it crosses your mind to wonder what gender means to these two people.  And when Awn--young, thoughtful, and liberal-minded--is having an interaction with an older, I-think-male religious leader in an occupied city, I can't help but feel that the complicated power plays that are going on in that scene get more complicated when you add the religious leader's read of Awn's gender, whether it's male or female.  Watching myself watch these interactions was fascinating.

I feel like this is what I've heard most about regarding this book, and it's complicated and fascinating--but it's such a small part of things.  It's just there, perfectly crafted and running right through the narrative with a thousand other complicated things.

Good lord, like slavery and bodily autonomy.  You see, once there was a ship called the Justice of Toren, which had its own artificial intelligence, and which was embodied not only in the physical ship itself, but in its ancillaries--individual bodies that had once been people, but whom, for one reason or another, had been killed or taken or destroyed, and whose bodies are now--let's call it reanimated, though that's not quite right--for the use of the ship.

Justice of Toren is a troop ship, and most of the troops she carries are human (well, Radch).  But each deck of the ship--each century of troops--has a set of servant bodies.  So the first portion we meet is One Esk, whose mind is part of Justice of Toren's mind, but is also its own.  And this character--One Esk, or Justice of Toren, or whatever you call it--is this amazing character who is artificially intelligent, obedient, and only exists to serve, but has her own sense of morality, of humor, of self.  It's so complicated, and so beautiful.

I think what I love most about Breq--the identity our narrator has taken and the easiest name to use--is that she's so kind and generous with everyone, even when they're kind of awful, even when she's angry or frustrated or horrified.  She's got this pragmatism coupled with what seems like a deeply settled optimism, and an unflagging sense of herself that lets her be patient with those around her, whether they deserve it or not.

Are you confused yet?  Would it turn you upside down if I say that the narrative jumps between times--primarily two, but with little bits of other memories thrown in for fun?  Should I start talking about colonialism, or slavery, or how the lieutenants treat her?  Should I talk about body ownership, or loyalty based on affection vs. duty?

And I'd like to point out, NONE of this is the plot.  I mean, I'm talking JUST about the world building here; I haven't even started in on the ideas of power and status and imperialism and...and...and...

This book is dense.  And amazing.  And I'm only halfway through.  I am having an absolute blast here--all the amazing reviews I've read have been totally right.

These Walls

I thought I had never heard of Nova Ren Suma before I got The Walls Around Us from Netgalley.  Turns out I actually acquired her Imaginary Girls ages ago, but (as with so, so, SO many other books) hadn't actually read it yet.  Bump another one to the top of the list, I guess; I very much feel like I need to read more.

This is not a book that hits you over the head with its elaborate complexities or fancy gimmicks.  After you settle into the two alternating stories, you might think it was straightforward.  It's the kind of craftsmanship that sneaks up on you, under your radar.  My thoughts on the book have been stewing in the days since I finished it, and they feel richer for it. 

On the topmost layer, we have two stories, two point of view characters.  One is a wealthy high school senior who is a successful ballet dancer, headed for Julliard.  She's preparing for her final show at her old school, thinking about absent friends.  The other is an inmate at a correctional facility for violent teenage girls. We meet her on the night that the locks malfunction and the doors open and the girls find themselves suddenly, mysteriously loose.  Two very different situations, different characters.  Both--competitive ballerina, teenaged inmate--fascinating worlds to enter in their own right.

Soon, we find the connection; the ballerina is Vee, whose best friend, Ori, has been sent to prison.  We learn bits about how this happen over the course of the book, mostly from Vee, almost in spite of herself.  She is a master compartmentalizer.

In the prison, much of the story seems to be told in the first person plural, although we do have only one narrator--Amber, who has been inside for ages and watches everything with a kind of detachment.  But she speaks sometimes of herself--her crime, her separation from the other girls--and sometimes for all the girls--"us," the forty two inmates as a chorus of what it is like to be powerless, to be hopeless, to be without freedom. 

What unfolds in both stories is not only what happened, but the characters that made this possible--mean girls, selfishness disguised as friendship, the danger of both hoping and failing to hope.  Vee visits the prison grounds for the first time since Ori was sent away; Amber meets Ori when she comes to the prison.  It's the delicate construction of these characters, who are complicated and vulnerable and very flawed, that really lifts this novel.

I've put in some effort not to spoil things here; there are several reveals, some of which were very clear to me from early on, some of which I found surprising.  None of them, though, was a big page-turner moment.  In fact, this book contained two of my favorite things you can put into a book: an understandable and believable look inside the head of someone who treats other people badly, and twists that reveal themselves to the reader gradually, by directing your suspicions and controlling your understanding until you realize you've known for a while what the author has finally told you.

I don't know that this is a book for everyone--it's not fast or flashy, at all.  But if you go in for character studies and creepy, saddish, atmospheric stories, highly recommended.

Truth Bomb: Anne's House of Dreams

I read so much this week, but I also went to the Smithsonian and took care of a kindergartener with a stomach virus, so I didn't have much time to blog.  There will be SO MUCH catching up this week.

I'm going to start with the easy post, though, which is mostly a reblog: Anne's House of Dreams. 

I think I've come to the end of my recent Anne Shirley reread; I only just barely managed to read Anne of Ingleside one time (on my honeymoon, how gloomy is that), and it's all about being old, and how the Anne we loved and her whimsical past are things of childhood meant to be packed away.  We're supposed to warm to the new generation of imaginative adventures that her children are having, but since Anne spends the first chapter of the book chuckling condescendingly at her childhood self, I'd rather leave her alone with her matronly woes, thank you very much.


But here we have the culmination of Anne and Gilbert's relationship, which of course we've all been waiting for.  Unlike so many romantic payoffs, we get a whole book of our lovers being married and happy together!  Yay!  Except there's so little of it.  I think this is the book where I most noticed the tell-not-show thing that Montgomery does, because there are long walks and long talks that are hardly described; I am told the impression they leave but not of their substance. 

Anne and Gil are comradely, but she spends a weird amount of time fishing for compliments, and there's very little sense of partnership here.  I almost didn't realize what was missing until the end when they're discussing the need for a bigger house, and Anne is lamenting leaving their beloved but tiny starter home--she knows it's necessary, but makes Gilbert talk her into it.  I mean, I've done that, but there's no sense that they're making a decision together, and it just made me realize that they don't appear to be in anything together.

I went looking for opinions on this subject, and I came across this blogger's feelings of betrayal at how Anne's writing abilities are so thoroughly blown off in this book.  And she makes great points, both about how much I hated that, and about how Anne as a True Writer is not as present in the text as you might think.  (Of course, for that Montgomery has given us Emily, so we're all set with that.)

I want to respond to her post (which is a few years old so I'm doing it here instead of there) that there's a broader dismissal of Anne's intellectual life that upsets me here.  When Gilbert and Captain Jim have long discussions about philosophy and important matters, Anne sometimes listens and sometimes goes for a walk on the beach.  WHAT?!?  She lives outside of town, so she's not even really involved in the goings-on of the community--basically, as I said in my last post, she goes from running a large high school to running a small house and teasing Gilbert into telling her how pretty she is. 

What it comes down to, I think, is that Montgomery has much better insight into the internal lives of children than adults.  Maybe it's a constraint of the genre--she couldn't talk about the complexities of the things Anne really might be feeling.  She couldn't talk about the limitations of being a housewife, of how it was anything but rewarding; she had to dance around pregnancy, and only relate the parts of Anne's experience of miscarriage that would be appropriate for a young child almost 100 years ago to hear.  That doesn't leave you with much depth.  Whatever grown-up Anne is thinking, Montgomery didn't--or couldn't--put it in the book.

I'm going to believe that.  I'm going to choose to think that Anne became an adult the same way I did--by dribs and drabs, and half-faking it, and still confused and frustrated and inspired, though less impulsive and moody.  I like this imaginary Anne better. 

And I'll let you know if I end up diving too deep into the world of AoGG fan fic. 

Sweet Sugar

TL;DR - Cheryl Strayed is amazing.

I read Wild recently, and I loved it, and I can't wait to see the movie.  This brought me around to wanting to read Tiny Beautiful Things, which is a compilation of advice from her Dear Sugar column at the Rumpus.  I read the column when it was active, and I liked it but didn't love it.  Her advice is very internal, very much about encouraging people to be their best selves.  It felt vague and mushy to me; wasn't my favorite.

But after Wild blew me away, I decided I needed to go back to her advice. And it was well worth it; I don't know if I'm more mature emotionally or as a reader or if it's just having it all in one place, but this was such an amazing compilation. 

I love advice.  I love both the problems (drama!) and the solutions (tidy wrap-up!).  This is not advice that pays off in helping you to envision the end of each story by giving the asker a map of how to behave and others' likely responses.  This is more like what I'm looking for at this point in my life--advice on how to be a good person.  It's about how to take the messiness that is living and focus it, channel it toward something that is good and meaningful to you. 

Honestly, I don't know if I'm going to be a different person after this, but reading these essays, I believe I can.  Which is a really wonderful feeling. 

Cheryl Strayed, all the way. 

On Not Reading

Lately I've been doing this thing where, instead of reading books, I spend time online fiddling with book sites.  I go to the library and put something on reserve; I add something to Goodreads and read a review and look at a few top ten lists for the year.  I'm thinking about reading a lot more than I'm actually reading. 

I think it's overstimulation; my list of things I absolutely want to be reading right now is so long that I can't even approach it; it's like the time I literally walked in circles around my dorm room, getting distracted by one task every time I reached for another.  I put my hand on my laundry bag and spotted my textbook out of the corner of my eye, realized that was more urgent and picked it up, only to notice that there were dirty dishes underneath it, which is way too gross and should be taken care of before I sit down to do anything as committed as studying, but taking the dishes to the sink I walked past the object I had borrowed from someone up the hall and promised to return right away, shoot, better grab that, and I'll get the laundry in the washer while I'm out, except the textbook....

I think that's why I've been rereading; it keeps me from having to commit.  Every book I want to read is one that I really need to read. I've been putting off reading Raven Boys for years for no reason; I have an advance copy of Shadow Scale, which I've been DYING for since I read Seraphina two years ago.  There is a new Jo Walton on my kindle!  I just claimed Fool as my favorite book but haven't read the sequel!  There are a dozen other books and situations on this list.  My head is swimming.

And so I'm not reading.  I'm looking at the pile and feeling overwhelmed.  But no more.  Right now--right now--I'm going to open something up and just go.  I'll let you know what it turns out to be.

Anne of All the Things

I've been rereading the later Anne of Green Gables books; after the Christmas movie marathon, I realized I wanted to go back to Anne's big romances in Anne of the Island. Then I got swept along into Anne of Windy Poplars, and now I've been caught up in Anne's House of Dreams. Haven't read any of these books in years, and it's very interesting to come back to them, especially after watching the movie, floating in on memories of favorite bits.

The Island I loved as much as I remembered and expected to, mostly because, to me, it's all about Gilbert's friendship/love.  I think Anne's five proposals are delightful.  Ruby Gillis's goodbye is heartbreaking.  Patty's place is loveable, especially Aunt Jamesina.

But there were definitely some things that I noticed this time around that were interesting.  Phil Gordon, the conceited chatterbox, is really kind of irritating.  I didn't mind her as a character so much, and she speaks some important words of truth at least once in the book, but I absolutely don't understand what Anne sees in her--she's so full of herself and judgmental of others.

Also, a lot of the details about college are glossed right over--there's a lot of telling instead of showing.  The "showing" is always in the conversations between the girls, and with non-school related people, especially older ladies.  But every scene with Roy is one of telling, as is the whirl of social functions and the intensity of classes.  We don't even get a glimpse, just a summary of clubs, football games, dances, and evenings with friends.  Only the homely moments are painted.  If I didn't know better, I'd say this is a book about the university experience by someone who never had one; perhaps Lucy Maud Montgomery just didn't have the gay, delightful experience she imagined for Anne.

Windy Poplars (I don't know why they've got 12-year-old Anne in front of Green Gables on that cover) was full of delightful anecdotes, but my favorite parts were all about people besides Anne.  At the beginning of the book, the whole town is set against her (because she got a job that the ruling family wanted to go to one of their own), but she mops that up very quickly and the rest of the book quickly becomes the Anne Is Amazing Show.  Everyone loves her, every school child considers her a mentor, every young person confides their woes in her, and she goes around making matches between every pair of people she can.  It's kind of exhausting, and the format--letters to Gilbert interspersed with third-person chapters--makes it even more noticeable, as Montgomery's love of Anne starts to get conflated with Anne's own thoughts.

The other notable thing about this book is that it's absolutely full of pairs of old ladies living together.  The widows at Windy Poplars, the two sisters of Maplehurst, the grandmother and the Woman who live with Elizabeth.  Pairs of widows and spinsters abound here. I don't suppose it means anything; it's just an observation.

Finally, the House of Dreams, which I'm smack in the middle of.  Once again, I love the town and the secondary characters best.  Captain Jim is delightful, but I feel like I hardly know Gilbert at all.  He and Anne are described as taking long rambling walks and talking for hours, but we get so little of this, I can't really picture the shape of their marriage, which is really disappointing. 

And I can't help but imagine that coming out of three years as principal of a large school and Most Popular Young Woman in Summerside must make keeping house in lonely (if beautiful) Four Points Harbor seem kind of slow.  Gilbert's at work all day and Anne's in the kitchen?  I don't know that she's doing any writing or anything, and it makes me kind of sad.

There's such a sweet nostalgia in reading these again, and I've been trying to fill in the gaps of the day to day life of Anne and Gilbert with my imagination, but I'm not quite getting there.  It's sad, really. 

And I can promise that I won't reread Anne of Ingleside.  It took me decades to get around to that one, and I never got over the fact that Anne had all those kids but never took in an orphan.  The settled, staid Anne bears so little resemblance to the young charmer she was that I hardly knew her.  I suppose that's what growing up used to mean; very glad I never tried it myself.

Favorite Book

If you ask what my favorite book is, I usually roll my eyes.  How can a person answer that?  How do you compare Pride and Prejudice with Going Postal?  Is it the book I want to reread most often (The Dreadful Future of Blossom Culp), or the one I think is most technically mind-blowing (Asterios Polyp), or the one that makes me think the most (The Sparrow)?

At some point in the past 20 years, I would have listed any of these books as my favorite, along with Clan of the Cave Bear, Shining Through, The Nun's Story, Cloud Atlas, and The Color of Light. I still enjoy all of these books, and at one time or another have loved them for a wide range of reasons.  But I just finished rereading Christopher Moore's Fool, and I think that if you made me pick today, my drop-dead, desert-island choice would be Pocket, Drool, Kent, Cordelia, mad King Lear, and the ghost (there's always a bloody ghost).

My original review was short and didn't say much besides how worried I'd been that I wouldn't like it. It's a crazy book, a fast-moving romp, full of vivid, disgusting imagery (mostly involving the genitalia of animals), wild coincidence, and lots of dirty sex.  I could see an argument to be made about there not being enough female characters, though I disagree--given the source material the women get their parts, and each one--from Shanker Mary the laundress to Bubble the cook to Rosemary the witch--is a separate character with an internal life, and if men spend a lot of time ogling them, they react differently and have their own feelings about it. 

Even Regan and Goneril are very different nasty pieces of work.  This read through, I was able to follow the action a little more carefully, and it was interesting to notice how much of the unpleasantness Pocket actually puts in motion himself, and how his motivations start and change.  There is a "sex scene" (the sex is offscreen) that could be problematic--probably is--but given the context, it didn't bother me at all.

Anyway, I'm trying to acknowledge the problems and holes (things like coincidences contrived by ghosts and witches, and motivations that change without changing the action) to acknowledge that it's probably not perfect, but I didn't notice that while I was reading it.  I loved Pocket's Vorkosigan-like ability to have a plan ready and to talk anyone into anything.  I loved his affection and protection of Drool, and Cordelia, and the Anchoress.  I loved that a lot of people have a lot of sex and that it's treated so lightly.  I loved Kent's loyalty.

And I think the part of this book that had me thinking, that gave it a real core that got at something interesting, was Lear himself.  Because not enough stories face up to ugly contradictions in a way that I find emotionally satisfying, and I feel like this one does.  I don't honestly remember how much of the detail of Lear's character--the backstory from his reign--come from the original Shakespeare and how much Moore looked up and how much he fabricated.  But Lear is simultaneously a great king who led his country well; a traitorous jerk who killed people for his political ends; a jealous, power-hungry despot who destroyed lives on out of pique or on a whim; a loving father who would wants his daughters' happiness above anything at all; a protective lord to Pocket himself. 

Pocket has to face all these Lears at once and to reconcile them.  He's lucky time and William Shakespeare made most of the decisions for him.

And the end!  Let's just say that a traditional tragedy is perhaps over-tragic, and that what it really needs is a happy ending.  Best. Ending. Ever.

So: if you ask me this week what my favorite book is, I have an answer for you.  Huh; how about that?

Webcomic in Print

I read a few webcomics, not a ton.  Some of them lend themselves more to publication in print than others.  There are sets of strips that remind me of hours I spent flipping through Calvin and Hobbes and Bloom County as a kid--for this, I go to Kate Beaton or xkcd.  There are ongoing stories, graphic-novel-style; I follow a few of these online--Gunnerkrigg Court, Blindsprings.  Some of them might lend themselves to book form--I actually find that the density of spreading the pages out over days can get a bit confusing; I can't follow half of Blindspring because so much is hinted at.

Anyway, I had never heard of Katie Cook's Gronk: A Monster's Story before I saw the ARC listed on Netgalley, but when I saw the cover I had to read it.  Gronk is an adorable monster who hates living in the deep, dark, monstery woods, so she comes out to live with geek girl Dale and her cat, Kitty, and her dog, Harli.  Gronk loves cupcakes and nerd culture.  She's adorable.

Her comics are adorable, too. I read them to my six-year-old, and although he required some explanations, and missed out on my delight over Dale's geeky T-shirt collection, he was quite fond of them.  I personally love the big, sweet dog, Harli.  These are charming little comic strips.

I'm not sure they make a book, though.  A lot of them are one-panel gags--not slapstick, but funny or aw-shucks cute.  That's the kind of thing that reads better in a one-shot, right?  Where you're coming to it, getting your moment of zen, and then moving on with your day, rather than going from one moment of zen to the next till you're glutted with zen.

I read these with my son, who's 6.  He liked it, made me keep reading even when he didn't get all the references (he doesn't know Harry Potter yet), and loved the kitties.  Maybe, if I'd read it on my own, I would have dipped in and out in a way that was more conducive to enjoying it as it is.  Then again, since it was an ebook, it's not like I would have treated it like a coffee table book to dip into and out of. 

I've bookmarked Gronk, and I'm going to read every one from now on, so whether the book was the best introduction or not, it got me hooked.  I suppose that speaks highly of it!  Katie Cook, I like your taste in books.  And monsters.

Station Eleven: Better Than The Stand

I put that up front, because the basic outline of the end of the world in Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven is very close to Stephen King's The Stand: a supercharged flu virus sweeps the world and kills 99.9% of the population in a few weeks.  There's almost nothing else in common between the books, except possibly a fascinating attention to the detail of what it's like to be a survivor; still, it was enough for me to think that Station Eleven reads very much like Mandel read The Stand and asked, "why would you mess up this lovely story about humanity with some trumped up notions of good and evil?"

In fact, the notion that there is a Greater Purpose is exactly the opposite of what this book is about.  It's about how connections, explanations, and causation is not the same as meaning, purpose, or reason.  "Everything happens for a reason," says one character, coming across as vaguely New Agey.  When another character says the same thing 20 years later in a different world, it's ominous, and the heavier implications of that statement are much more clear.

It's a hard story to summarize, because it follows several characters in several time periods.  The lynchpin is Arthur Leander, a famous movie star with a preteen son, three ex-wives, and the role of King Lear in a new production. He dies in the first scene, not a victim of the flu, but of a standard heart attack.  It's tempting to map out how all the characters are related to him, but the truth is that it's both complicatedly interconnected and not particularly neatly tied up: Jeevan, a member of the audience who tries to save Arthur's life, used to be a paparazzo in LA and once took a picture of Arthur's first wife, Miranda.  Miranda was an artist who wrote a series of comic books that Arthur gave to a little girl in the play, Kristen.  Kristen survives the plague and, many years later, is an actress with a traveling symphony.  Clark was one of Arthur's oldest friends, but they drifted apart when they became famous.  Their stories intertwine, and the threads cross between the world before and the world after. 

The two stories that thread through this are Arthur's life, in the past, and an encounter between the Symphony and a town controlled by a dangerous religious zealot.  They are very different stories--the life of a man from a small town who becomes a movie star and a tense post-apocalyptic piece.  They are tied by the characters, but also by the notion that all stories are tied together somehow, that the threads that hold the world together are not big, important cords, but rather fine, delicate weaving, so interconnected that the tiny threads make strong cloth.  At least, that's what I think.

The other thing that I think this book is about is the question of whether to go forward or backward.  I'm going to get to this in my last discussion question below (really just a bulleted list of points; so much easier than having to segue between them!) but I think it's one of the core themes of the story and I want to bring it up.  This book is very much about the past versus the future, in some very complicated ways.

Okay, let's get to this.

1) Let's get this out of the way: the epidemiology here is sketchy, right?  If you look at the speed of infection and the speed of death, even with a 100% infection rate and a 100% mortality rate, it kills too fast to spread like this, right?  I mean, maybe that first plane could take out all of Toronto, but nobody sick makes it to the little backwater towns where no one's even passed through this month who's been on a plane.  So that's a little sketchy.  Which brings us to:

2) The loss of the infrastructure is what really brings us down.  How off-the-grid can you REALLY live?  Especially unexpectedly in the winter?  It definitely seems like things would stabilize eventually, but it makes you think about the supply chain for every single little thing around us.

3) There is a difference between a scarce-resource apocalypse and a resource-rich apocalypse.  Essentially, in some stories, most people die but the world remains--survivors have the leftovers and the same natural resources that were available 1,000 years ago.  In the other, the world has been ravaged, or civilization breaks down without killing most of the population, and suddenly supply and demand are off.  Very different end of the world books.

4) This makes for a fairly peaceful end of the world here, which I find kind of beautiful.  Life is not easy--there's little medicine, people die very easily--but starvation isn't the big killer.  By the time the canned food runs out, most people have figured out that they need a garden and to hunt.  People can be cautious instead of afraid.  I love this opportunity to glimpse this best side of humanity.

5) There is some discussion in the book of the right way to raise children in such a world; do you teach them about the past, and all the wonders they can't even comprehend?  Or do you let that die, teaching them only about the world around them?  The answer to this one seems obvious to me, but I think the emotional baggage of the past would play a bigger role when facing the question in reality.

6) Moments in the book that broke my heart or moved me or that I want to talk about: the house Kristen and August go into, where the parents are dead in their bed and the child dead in its own; the moment when Kristen realizes that she's about to die and everything becomes okay; Clark and Arthur going out to dinner; the museum.  No spoilers; just discuss.

7) What do you make of Miranda?  Kris didn't like her at all; I found her intriguing.  She was not someone I related to, but someone I recognized; wholly turned inward, with only the most tenuous connections outside herself.  Because it's what the world dictates, she follows those, and so she ends up in her relationship, in her job, married.  But her art, her story, is the only thing that's real to her.  She's unlike all the other viewpoint characters, though, and she breaks the pattern of who's included.  What do you think is the reason?  Does it have to do with her comics?

8) Don't you want to read her comics?  It sounds amazing, and beautiful, and complicated.  Maybe too heavyhanded a metaphor, but this ties back to the question of weather connection implies meaning: it's a similar story, but not a similar ending.

9) The big question in the story-within-the-story is about whether to go forward, into a dangerous and precarious unknown, or to try to go back to something that is ruined, and to make a life in those ruins.  I think this ties directly into all the different tensions in the story--the zealots, the question of how to raise the children.  Do you want to move forward, or do you want to move back?  Moving back isn't literally possible, of course, but clinging to the memories, living on them or against them, allows them to dictate your future. 

This post is ridiculously long, and I want to go on and on about that point--about how I think that concealing the past from the children is, counterintuitively, about clinging to he past.  Holding the past as history lets you move forward with hope and intent; hiding it as a secret makes it present and dangerous, keeps you living with it.  About how Arthur's life is all about moving forward--from his small hometown, out of college into acting, through three marriages.  About Miranda's forward motion in life, and how she brings what matters with her.  Clark and the Museum; the symphony and Shakespeare.  The zealots and the belief that the old world had to die for the new one to be born. 

It's silly to apologize; this post is no more a jumble than most of my posts.  But this book was amazing--I would never have believed it would work, and here it is, lovely and perfect, full of people doing the best they can--even the villains.  The more I think about it, the more I love it.  You should absolutely read it.

Monday's Lies

When I read Jamie Mason's first book, Three Graves Full, my response was wow, this is going to be a great writer; I can't wait to read what she does next.  I was SO excited to see her next book, Monday's Lie, when it showed up at Netgalley.  And while it wasn't quite the masterpiece I was hoping for, I'm watching her get better and better, and it's a really fun ride.

The pieces of this book are great. Our protagonist and narrator, Dee, was raised with her brother by a single mom, who was amazing.  She was a spy, and she taught her kids to be mini-Sherlock-Holmeses--observing everything, deducing everything.  She was smart and wise and loving, but her life was messy, and Dee has moved as far away from it as possible by marrying the most conventional man she could find.  She is determinedly normal.

There are sort of three converging parts of the story: flashbacks to Dee's childhood, including stories of her mother's adventures; the story of her marriage to Patrick and the normal, normal, normal life she's been working on; and the present moment, where she's driving somewhere to meet someone for we know not what till the climax of the book.

And here Jamie Mason does the same thing she did last time--she takes what is essentially one huge, ripping good scene, and builds a novel around the backstory of that scene.  Now, the backstory is great, but it's clearly backstory, even when it's shown instead of told.  Everything converges on the "present" moment, and the most detail and energy is put into it, but it's not the most compelling part of the story.

Her mother, Annette, is the most compelling part of the story.  I'm not an expert, and I have to assume Mason did her research, but the spy stuff seems really sketchy to me.  She's a single mom whose kids know she's a spy, but aren't supposed to tell the neighbors?  I mean, how is that secure?  She lives at home for months at a time and then goes off for days or weeks on missions, okay, but then there are also people coming to their house in the middle of the night doing shady business?  Is that how spying works?  It seems pretty unconvincing.

But Annette, with her sharp charm and cool wit, really makes the story.  Dee's life revolves around her--her mysteries, her lessons, her absences, her warmth--long after she's gone.  Dee's marriage is a direct reaction to her unconventional upbringing, and the cracks in her marriage show how, in trying to give her children something more than others have, Annette may have deprived them of basic lessons that most people take for granted.

I love a book about uncovering deception, about spying and poking around and figuring out what's really going on with people who are ostensibly being honest with you.  And that story was fine here.  But the place where this book succeeds is in being a book about mothers and daughters, and in that place it's excellent.  Keep 'em coming, Jamie Mason.

Returned!

I've been on vacation.  And book club is this week.  And I will have many things to say.

Right now, though, I have only a moment to say that my two favorite Anne of Green Gables books are Anne of the Island and Anne of Windy Poplars, I think, and that I'm rereading them and glad to do it. They make a very soothing break from the end-of-the-world story that is the excellent Station Eleven, which you might not want to read on an airplane.

Look for more later this week!

WORST ENDING EVER

I am so sorry to have to write this review. I wish I'd written it two days ago, when I was only 80% of the way through War of the Wives, by Tamar Cohen.  I had a lot of interesting things to say about this novel, the story of two women who find out, after the death of Simon Busfield, that they were both married to him.

It's a salacious setup, and I was looking forward to something very trashy, but what I got was actually kind of a thoughtful character study.  Told in alternating points of view by two very different characters, I felt like it was a much better portrait of Selina, who is older--posh, poised, superficial, and maybe rather shallow.  Lottie, who is flaky, artsy, and kind of a mess, seems to only half-matter; the rest of the time, she's there to show how Selina looks to the outside world.

Both women are pretty irritating in their own ways--I liked Lottie better from the beginning, just because she seemed more human and empathetic, but I think that made Selina more interesting to follow.  As she watches her life fall apart, we get to watch her both figure out what parts of her life actually mean something to her and which she just allowed to happen to her.  We also get her discover the internal lives of everyone she's been casually judging for so long.  It's really an interesting and worthwhile story, if a bit British with the aggressively superficial pretense of everything being fine in the face of a complete mess.

There's also a sort of subplot with a bit of mystery--shady business deals Simon may have been involved in, details about how he died, whether someone is threatening the families.  There's a lot of tension among the kids, which, again, is interesting to read about, if frustrating to watch Lottie fumble everything.

So, 95%, even 97% of a good book.  And then, literally in the last ten pages, A BUNCH OF RANDOM STUFF HAPPENS.  Like, someone turns out to be a murderer, which you find out through the recitation of a stereotypical Bad Guy Monologue.  While there is appropriate setup of this character being sketchy (just the right amount; the setup is well done), it's like the book had to be ended very suddenly.  Oh, plus, it turns out there are TWO crazy people who don't seem crazy until the very last minute--the VERY last. 

So then, we get the scary confrontation scenes, the bad guy announcing their evil to the narrator, who is trapped in a small room with them and scared.  And then....cut to the epilogue, which takes place five months later.  Everything has sorted itself out, and the characters have a bunch of expository conversations revealing what's happened in the past few months, and then the book ends. 

I cannot express the sputtering outrage that I felt at the ending--it was poorly planned, poorly constructed, poorly executed, poorly timed, poorly paced.  The last 10 pages are flawed in every conceivable way.  I don't think I've ever read a book that needed 40 more pages before, but here it is. 

Now is the part where I explain that I got a free copy of this from Netgalley for review.  I hope I don't have to say that it's an honest review.  I don't write many horrible reviews of advance copies, because I don't finish them when I don't enjoy them.  But I enjoyed this one quite a bit. 

Except.

Sigh.  Well, now I'm turning to L.M. Montgomery for consolation; a reread of Anne of the Island and Anne of Windy Poplars is in order, as a palate cleanser.  Not a bigamist or murderer to be had in the Maritimes, no sirree.

King Again

I'm not going to go on too long.  I know you've heard it before.  You've even heard before how you've heard it before.  But I can't read a Stephen King book without saying it again and again--get an editor, man!  I mean, if only because this short story (which is how it's billed) is 240 pages long.

So the book is called A Good Marriage, and there's nothing new here.  As always, the premise is interesting--a 40-something woman goes digging in her husband's workbench for batteries while he's out of town and discovers the driver's license of a woman who's on the news as a missing person.  That's almost all I know; it's pretty early on. 

Now, I've thought a lot about what I'd do in her situation, and I have to say, no offense to my wonderful husband, but I'd call the cops.  I mean, either he did it--which, I wouldn't believe that, but if it's true, you want that out of the way--or he didn't, in which case someone else put it there.  Someone's been in your house.  Seriously, ladydude, you need the police.

But I suspect this is going to turn into a mano-a-wife face off kind of thing, which would be more interesting if the only thing isolating her with the killer wasn't the fact that she's not going to the police.

All of this is guesswork so far, of course, and the fact that my guesswork and expectations are so annoying says a lot about how I feel about Stephen King at this point in my life. 

But what I really feel is Jesus man, you need to learn some new writerly tricks.  Because I'm so tired of the random catchphrase that someone remembers at an inopportune moment that then keeps flashing through their head at odd, punctuating junctures.  I'm very tired of how, in trying to make his characters normal, he makes them seem boring, as though the inner lives of the people around us were as pedestrian as their outsides appear.  Or maybe more to the point, I'm annoyed with how his women always have this non-person feeling to them, this uncomplicatedness, whether they're being heroic or victimy.

I don't know why I still pick these up.  I blame The Stand, which was amazing, even if it had every single one of his problems, from Madonna/whore female characters to catchphrases to bloat.  Or, heck, maybe I'd hate that if I read it now; maybe I've outgrown him.  Either way, next time I reach for one of these, someone please stop me and hand me something by Sarah Waters, or Aliette de Bodard, or even Joe Hill.  Anything, really.  Thank you.

Gone Wild

I really didn't expect to like Wild.  Why?  I used to read Strayed's Dear Sugar column at The Rumpus, and if I thought it was a bit verbose for my taste, I couldn't help but admire the true empathy and compassion of the writer.  She told a lot of personal stories, and she used metaphors with a lot of emotional resonance--something that doesn't usually work with me, but somehow made the same advice that anyone rational would give--you need to leave him; you have to forgive her; you must love yourself--feel much more solid that you'd expect.  She acknowledged how hard a lot of these simple prescriptions are, and she talked a lot about the emotional work involved in following through with them.

But--hiking.  A soul searching journey through the mountains.  I expected this book to be like listening to a bunch of John Denver songs in a row--mostly about being one with the earth, and best done when a little stoned. 

Somehow Reese Witherspoon and Laura Dern talked me into reading the book.  The movie looked a little more whimsical, and Laura Dern's appearance in the ads emphasized the relationship with her mother.  Her mother's death is something Dear Sugar talked about a lot--how losing her mother at the age of 24 completely changed her life, threw her for a loop that led to a lot of self-destructive behavior and eventually a lot of wisdom.  I liked that emphasis in the trailers.

So I picked up Wild, and I'm kind of shocked that I loved it.  First off, Strayed can write.  Look, I really, really hate mushy, spiritual, what-life-really-means insights.  I don't like generalizations about spirituality or Truth or the state of one's mind and emotions.  I like concrete specifics.  And here, Strayed dealt with abstracts through concrete specifics, and also blew the straight-abstract stuff out of the water.

Okay, what do I mean?  (Seriously, you're talking about specifics, Sharon, be specific.)  Okay, most of the actual book is spent on the trail.  It's about the days of putting one foot in front of the other, and much of that time is spent on the small facts of hardship, deprivation, exhaustion, solitude, and unpreparedness.  It's a nitty-gritty how-to, only mostly a how-not-to, since she wasn't as prepared as she could have been.  Much more time is spent on the tangible than on the intangible.

But at the same time, this is definitely about the emotional aspects of the journey.  It is not about beautiful views, and she only communes with a couple of animals.  Her mother is tied through the story with memories, anecdotes, and explanations of what Cheryl herself is thinking about.

There's definitely a metaphorical element to the story; that would be hard to avoid.  From the backpack so heavy she literally couldn't lift it at first to the shoes that are too small no matter how much she insists that they're right, there are clear parallels between the internal and external journey.  Between the detailed descriptions of boredom and stupidity at the beginning and the smooth, clear sailing near the end, the writing style definitely captures the sense of both her physical and emotional journey.  But it doesn't club you over the head.

Essentially, you can't pick apart the hiking story and the emotional journey.  Neither is slave to the other, and both are engrossing and incredibly touching and left me so empathetic to this experience I've never had.  I understand the desire to pitch everything to try to get rid of your ugly baggage.  I'm proud of her for taking on this overwhelming task without being adequately prepared for it.  I know the scrambling sense that if you just try hard enough, you'll be able to hold together the sandcastle that's coming apart in the relentless tide.

And now I kind of want to go hiking.

Gillian Flynn Complete

I have now officially read all three Gillian Flynn novels published so far.  (Doffs cap for applause.)  Thank you, thank you.

Sharp Objects was, I believe, her first novel, and I'll start out by saying that while it's readable and engrossing, it's not as good as her others.  Dark Places is, I think, by far the best, though Gone Girl takes the prize for wildest reveal and messed-uppest characters. 

I feel like I'm starting with the bad news, but really, I guess that's because it's not very bad.  I mean, the fact that her other books were better doesn't make this book anything but good.  As with the others, the hardest part is the sheer unpleasantness that Flynn is so good at--discomfort and ugliness, pathos and awkwardness. 

Camille has escaped the one-horse town of Wind Gap where she grew up miserable, and now she's a journalist in Chicago--if not successful, then at least working.  But now two little girls have been murdered in that tiny town, and Camille has been sent to report on it.  This puts her face to face with high school frienemies, her estranged mother, and a decades-younger sister she barely knows.  Camille's investigation of the murders and her involvement with one of the detectives parallels her growing tension with her family and her inability to hold it together.

Camille is not a healthy person, in about a million ways, but she's a great protagonist.  She's such a mess; she vacillates between going along with whatever she's pointed at and fighting against everyone around her.  She's hurting all the time, but she doesn't complain about it; you can just feel it come off the page in her drinking, in her bad choices, and even in her determined attempts to do her job and solve the murders.

The town is almost unbelievably oppressive, between the dead-end jobs, the horrifying hog-slaughter plant, various gaggles of frenemies, and Camille's bizarre family, who if I had read Faulkner I would probably call Faulknerian. A distant, prim father figure, an ultra-feminine mother who alternates between distant and doting, and a spoiled child who demands to be petted and drinks too much.  It's a strange, ugly story--almost too ugly, and almost too obvious in its ugliness. 

But Camille, who's trying so hard, even when she doesn't know how to do more than get out of bed in the morning, is the right protagonist for this place.  You can see how she came from here, and how in a horrible way she belongs here, but you want her to get out so badly.  Only in this book could I root for Camille.

So, what do I think of Gillian Flynn's third best book?  Mostly it makes me desperately want her next book to come out, because even with its flaws, I want more.  That counts very much as a thumbs up.

Summary Season

It's blog round-up season, where we count out how we did last year and name our favorite books.  And I've been offline for weeks (well, mostly) and have not even started, so you'll have to wait, just like everyone on my Christmas card list, and also sometimes the credit card company when I forget they exist.

So, to get myself back into the swing of things: some fun things I've been enjoying from around the internet lately.  I'll get back on the horse this week with a couple of reviews I've had in my back pocket, and I'll try to do a year in review before 2016.

You know which bloggers kill me, though?  The Book Smugglers.  They bring in all these guest authors to give you their Best Of lists for the year, and now my to-read has grown, like, offensively long, whereas before it was just troublingly long, or maybe just mind-blowingly long.  Their month of Smugglivus posts have buried me in book hunger, but I'll just link give you the one link to their own Year's Best list, because I think it's fairly representative of the feeling of "Yeah, I want to read that....and that...and that....and ALL THE BOOKS!!!" that I get from the internet nowadays.

At Tor.com (what deliciousness isn't?), Ellen Cheeseman-Meyer is doing a reread of the original Heralds of Valdemar trilogy, which (the reread) is a delightful geekout on how simultaneously hokey and satisfying those books are.  One of the entries is called "Valdemaran Public Health and Epidemiology."  Enough said, except that I think I love you, Ellen Cheeseman-Meyer, and I know you live in Eastern Massachusetts so call me, 'kay?

This one almost counts as a mini-review, because I just read Cory Doctorow & Jen Wang's In Real Life, and I have nothing to say except exactly what the Book Smugglers said, every word of it.  With underlining on the "convenient ending" and "white savior" parts of the article.  It was fun to read and the illustrations were absolutely lovely but BLARGH.  (Aarti's brief review also linked back to TBS; I think they dealt with this very comprehensively.)

Oh, there's so much more, but I have to go to work in the morning.  Welcome to 2015, everyone!