lightreads

Caliban's War by James S.A. Corey

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Second verse, same as the first –intrasolar medium-future scifi heavy on the politics with occasional alien goo monster horror set pieces. It even introduced a new character whose arc depends entirely on his pain over the fact that a girl he cares about is missing. That being necessary to replace the nearly identical plotline from the first book that was resolved, you understand. At least take 2 was way less psychosexually creepy.

Basically, it's another summer blockbuster. Splashy, surprisingly good writing, but there's a slickness to it, a photogenic quality to everyone's pain, such that nothing seems more than skin deep. And the putative hero's self-righteous angst wankings are still as interesting as watching mold grow, but hey, that comes with the territory.

I'm being pretty snide over a book that I actually enjoyed. I did enjoy it. But let's not fool ourselves: I read this at the audio version of speedreader rates in careless jolts of attention, and it doesn't really deserve anything more than that from me.

Oh, except for the sections on the kickass lady Martian marine and the even kickasser grandma who is also a UN bureaucrat and how they save the solar system. I paid way more attention to those sections, and if the book had been 100% them, we would be having a completely different conversation right now, let me tell you.




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The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


The proper first book. Putting The Magician's Nephew first was just . . . incorrect.

I definitely read this multiple times as a child. Then again, my access to books was extremely limited, so when I could actually get some age appropriate reading (and fantasy!) in Braille or audio, you bet I read it. And keep in mind all my books were borrowed – I would have a selection of maybe 10 for weeks or months on end, so I just read whatever I had in rotation over and over again. I'm remembering all this, because I definitely read LWW, and it was ostensibly fantasy about a magical world, but I didn't love it. And even then I thought that was strange.

Now, I can start to see why. Religious narrative and fantasy literature can converge in a similar place. It's the because problem. The it just is problem. It's Edmund, the Judas of this story, being quite rational if you think about it and asking his siblings how they know who to trust. They've walked through a wardrobe and into a war for political power – how do they know they should trust Aslan and not the Witch? His siblings, of course, and the narrator, and all the weight of this book reply that you just know because you hear Aslan's name and you know. Just . . . because. Between the reason and the knowing is . . . um. Well, it's faith, actually.

I'm trying to get at something about religious narrative and fantasy narrative, about how the times I find fantasy narrative unsatisfying, I think it's because the fantasy is relying on the fantasy magic version of faith in a savior. You just know how to defeat the evil. You just pick up the sword and you can slay the wolf (oi, Lewis, really?). But then again, I think religious faith at its best is probably far more complex than that. I wouldn't know. But I would think so.

And, but then again I think that is too simplistic, because sometimes the sensawunda I can access through fantasy genuinely is a kind of faith. Faith in the world built for me, in the righteousness of its protagonist or the majesty of its magic. A story says to me just because, because this is how the story goes, and I believe it, and I have this complex, textured emotional response that is at its very best, not to put too fine a point on it, transcendant. Which is to say that religious faith and . . . fantasy faith are both intense, extraordinary emotional responses to stories.

And yet, Lewis's massive emo feels about the crucifixion kind of embarrassment squicked me. Like dude, really, put that away. It was kind of like watching someone be brought to tears over their tabletop D&D game with the massively complex rules that he has spent hours explaining to you, but, uh, awkward. You just don't give a shit.

Anyway. I'm not really getting this out. But I guess part of what I'm saying is that Narnia is a religious narrative with the trappings of fantasy literature. And I find the ways they intersect pretty interesting for thinking about fantasy. Particularly since my response to Narnia is so tepid, and I don't think you can lay all of that at the door of atheism.




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Talker by Amy Lane

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


M/M romance. Our "hero" "tries" to tell his best friend that he wants him, but he never actually, uh, uses his words. So he figures hey, the problem here is that the bestie is just refusing to notice him, and the bestie was recently raped and is really "fragile," okay, so the thing to do – he has a plan, you guys – the thing to do is to manipulate events so he and the bestie are in a sexual situation but the bestie doesn't know who he is until after there are orgasms.

This being a romance, this is fed to us as romantic instead of, you know, creepy and awful.

…

DO. NOT. WANT.




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The Magician's Nephew by C.S. Lewis

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Yikes. I was feeling like another childhood nostalgia reread adventure, though I should confess up front that I was never more than lukewarm on Narnia even as a wee thing. But I was pretty excited about it until the collection I grabbed put this book first. It was written sixth, but is chronologically the beginning, telling as it does the story of the creation of Narnia.

And look, I never got all bent out of shape about the Christian allegory the way a lot of my peers apparently did. It is what it is, even in this late volume where it frankly swallows much of the story.

But I do get bent out of shape by just how Conservative this book is. Stop laughing. Thematically, this book is about how evil consists centrally in believing that there are rules in the world, but that they do not apply to oneself. Digory's Uncle believes this – he's a genius, therefore he is not bound by morality – and the Witch believes this – she just doesn't give a fuck. And Digory's central act in this book is to be the inadvertent author of great and spreading evil by way of – you guessed it -- ignoring explicit strictures.

So rules are good, and following them is good, everyone got that? Okay, so then we get to the creation (I keep wanting to write 'founding,' but, uh . . . no) of Narnia. A pristine world born from nothing. But born with defaults. Rules, if you will. Software pre-installed. And it is really telling stuff about Lewis and his world. Like 'male creatures are invited by the creator to attend councils of state, female creatures are not.' And 'the natural state for a female creature and a male creature is marriage.' And here's a biggie – 'there is a natural hierarchy in which certain types of creatures are superior to other types by virtue of anointment by the creator, and the superior types must rule.'

It is what it is. He was what he was. And oh man, how much do I wish they hadn't put this book first.




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God's War by Kameron Hurley

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Bounty hunter and occasional gene pirate takes a job that puts her squarely in the middle of the centuries-long internecine religious war.

Interesting as hell, but also frustrating and unsatisfying. It would be too obvious to call this gritty, so I'll go the extra mile and explain that I kept asking questions of the world building like okay, seriously, you've been massacring your populations for a hundred years at the front, and yet both societies are still built around sending bodies out to fight? Bodies from where? And then Hurley told me where the new population growth comes from in a nearly casual aside, and I went . . . oh, swallowed hard, and moved on. This is a bloody, awful world, vividly drawn, and pretty close to fascinating.

Unfortunately, the character work was done with a much heavier hand, and I found myself impatient with a lot of it. Also with the gender politics – this is one of those worlds where women are far more likely to survive than men, so you have most of the problems of the patriarchy but in reverse, plus a few extra. That aspect, like much of the work regarding the religious conflict itself, felt like pieces of machinery put carefully together and then not connected up to anything else. I don't know, I wanted more out of it than I got.

Basically, it's a debut, and it interested and annoyed me in shifting proportions. I felt much more cheerful about it when I realized that I don't really want to read the next two books in this trilogy. But I really do want to read Hurley's sixth or seventh book, somewhere around there, because she's got something here and I really want to know what it's going to grow up to be.




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The Name of the Star by Maureen Johnson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


American teenager goes to British boarding school, gets involved in the hunt for a supernatural Jack the Ripper copycat.

I made some assumptions based on the text, so I was feeling condescendingly pat pat about this book, all, aw, it's your debut, how nice. And then I googled the author, realized this is actually her ninth, and went . . . oh. Oh dear. Whatever, it's not terrible, I've just seen all of this before, and I've definitely seen it all done better.

But the thing I actually wanted to say was that this story takes place in a strange alternate universe that looks exactly like ours in every respect, but in which Harry Potter was never written. Nothing else could explain the pathological lack of references from our narrator as she, you know, attends British boarding school and learns about a magical world. Even on the Doylian level, Johnson feels it necessary to explain to us what school prefects are, as if there's a single American reading this book who hasn't picked that up. It was so glaring and bizarre a choice, and so patently ducking engagement with the still dominant magical British boarding school story, that it overshadowed nearly everything else for me. I dig texts that engage with other texts, so you can see how I didn't respect this choice.




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Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing by Neal Stephenson

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Neal Stephenson existed to me entirely through his novels before, since he doesn't have any of the modern authorial infrastructure – no twitter, no blog, no Goodreads, etc. And apparently I had come to a number of conclusions about him based entirely on his books, which is one of those things we like to pretend we don't do, but, I mean, come on. I figured this out when I was trudging through the opening salvos of this book and thought, ug, what a fucking asshole, with a complete lack of surprise. So I ran an informal poll of some of my friends who have also read and greatly enjoyed his books (all women, come to think of it) along the not at all respondent-biasing lines of "Neal Stephenson, gut check, asshole or not asshole?" and got 100% "asshole" back without hesitation. Yeah. We all do it. It's just funny when we come to the same conclusion.

Anyway, this was really rocky. I dug the fiction, because even when he's writing about stuff I'm tired of hearing about (monetary systems) he's just so damn snappy and hilarious. And the (excerpts?) from the long piece on the fiendishly mad engineering endeavor of laying transoceanic cables were fascinating.

But the shorter nonfiction pieces. Save me. In the intro he puts an "I own this" stamp on everything by explaining it's a curated collection, it's the stuff he basically still stands by. So okay. He stands by the reductionist and defensive and obnoxious commentary on geek culture. I could write 500 more words on this, but suffice it to say he uses a lot of "we geeks all know" and "we geeks all feel," type of rhetorical gestures, and I? Yeah, I'm a queer disabled geek and I am really, really not in his "we all." And he stands by the way he never met a criticism rooted in the portrayal of people of color (or the lack thereof) in art that he actually understood and didn't have something snide to say about. And he stands by all the rhetorical us versus them cultural game-playing and the lecturing and the general obnoxiousness laid thick enough to make me want to argue with him when I totally agreed with something he was saying.

So basically I will never ever read his nonfiction again, and on the bizarre chance he ever gets a twitter, I'm blocking it instantly. But the fiction and I will still probably get on like gangbusters.




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Agnes and the Hitman by Jennifer Crusie

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Cranky food columnist collides with hitman while trying to plan a wedding; sparks and flamingos fly.

Fun, zaney. There's no serious internal relationship conflict here, just a shrieking heap of mob enforcers and difficult relatives and frying pans to the head. And flamingos. This book is one half domestic hilarity and one half cartoonishly violent splatterfest, which was a bit odd, I will admit. But having read only two Crusie books, I already know that she is a no-brakes funny lady who has the skill and restraint to spin a ridiculous, so far over the top it's in orbit story like this, and then bring it when it comes to personal insight so subtly that I almost miss it. This time it was Agnes with her anger management and her court-appointed psychiatrist to prove it. And Agnes and her best friend talking to each other like only best friends can, in the middle of all this nonsense and splatterfest, and calmly saying to each other that it's not that they need to kill a man. They just need to know that if they had to, they could. Because they both know that this is the sort of world where it can absolutely happen that they'd have to.

The Bob Mayer sections are not nearly so good, but whatever. Flamingos, cupcakes, making room for angry women, cool.




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The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Exploration out into the wild, uncharted transdimensional earths, where something is stirring.

I wish I could blame Baxter for this, since I came into this already thinking he's a hack. But Pratchett's name is up there too, and even though I'd bet you Baxter was in the driver's seat from about the 20% mark on, when you put your name on the cover of a book, it's yours and you gotta own it.

And this is a pretty bad book to have to own. Oddly paced, anti-climactic, sociologically far-fetched. This particular iteration of multidimensional earths is such a fertile concept, though, that I would have cut it a lot of slack if it hadn't gone for a spectacular ten-seconds-to-buzzer three point shot at ablism on nearly the last page. Like, my jaw actually dropped.

The context – two characters are discussing an unusual community many dimensions away from earth. It is held up as idyllic, the sort of magical place where people who need to seem to collect. And in the context of theorizing that it represents the next stage in sociological evolution, a better kind of world, it is noted with significance that you know who never seems to end up in that community? Violent criminals, and people with disabilities.

Yep. Those dirty awful broken disabled people, gotta leave those behind right next to your rapists in order to make a better world.

Baxter I would expect this from. But Terry Pratchett, what the actual fuck?




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Bear, Otter, and the Kid by T.J. Klune

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


M/M romance. Boy raises his kid brother, hooks up with best friend's older brother, that's about it. Oh, except for one little thing.

You know how some authors can write about closeted people and all their internalized homophobia, and it's interesting and complicated? And then you know how some authors write about closeted people and all their internalized homophobia, and it's just poisonous and awful and incredibly unpleasant to read?

. . . Yeah.

Spending a couple hundred pages in this guy's head while he insisted he wasn't "…like that" made me want to scrub my entire life out, and then go have a lot of self-affirming queer sex as loudly as possible.

Of course the problem isn't really the narrator, or even the writing. The problem is that the book is carrying so much internalized homophobia of its own, it's falling down under it. Like, okay. On two separate occasions in this book different people who have been busily explaining to each other that it's okay for someone to be gay have a serious, not even kidding conversation about what you say to a nine-year-old who asks if a guy is gay. Because, like, do you tell him the truth? But – wait for it – the eventual consensus is that it was okay to tell him the truth because he's pretty mature and he can handle things that send most adults running away screaming.

No. Seriously.

I assume I don't have to unpack the multiple levels of fucked up there, because if I do, I'm gonna need another couple thousand words. Suffice it to say, this whole book thought it was telling a heartwarming story of family and growing self-acceptance, but what it was really doing was perpetuating a lot of notions of queerness as othering and abnormal and, you know, like that.




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