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What I Finished Reading This Week
Dharma Punx – Noah Levine
I read Levine’s Against the Stream and The Heart of the Revolution about a decade ago, but never got around to reading this, his first book. It’s a memoir of his childhood and early adulthood as a drug-addicted criminal and how he got clean with the help first of Alcoholics Anonymous and then Vipassana Buddhism. As in his later books, Levine’s prose is workmanlike, but in this volume Buddhism takes a backseat to Levine’s retelling of his life story. Overall, it was a pretty good read, with the best meditation instructions I've encountered anywhere (although anyone looking for a book on the intersection of punk rock and Buddhism would be much better served by reading Brad Warner). I appreciated Levine’s honesty even about things that don’t cast him in the best light: he doesn’t try to burnish his childish, destructive mindset prior to getting clean, for instance, or his deeply flawed expectations that eternal bliss and enlightenment would be his just as soon as he traveled to “exotic”—his characterization—Asia. Which is why I found it a bit odd that sex was the one thing Levine seemed to be coy about. Then I learned that in 2018, official investigations bore out at least some of the multiple allegations of rape and sexual misconduct against him, which is probably why the copy of this book that I read had found its way into a Little Free Library. So, yeah.
Deadpool: The Complete Collection vol. 2 – Daniel Way et al.
Way writes an excellent Deadpool: humorous, insane, zany, often triumphing despite himself, and as with the first volume, this book made me laugh out loud more than once. The artists’ depictions of women are decidedly...retrograde...such that I don’t know that I would have paid for this new, but the strength of Way’s writing definitely made it worth acquiring secondhand.
What I Finished Reading At Some Point In The Past Four Months
A Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet – Becky Chambers
This book was not for me. From the copy and reviews I was expecting something along the lines of the Imperial Radch series: immersive worldbuilding and labyrinthine intergalactic politics. What I got instead was fanfiction in which the lightly disguised cast of Firefly enacts various scenarios that illustrate Examples of Proper 21st Century Social Interactions for the Education and Edification of Readers. I agree with what Chambers has to say about how people should treat each other—individually and at a societal level. But the novel's plot and narrative are so thin—and so obviously a secondary consideration compared to the lessons Chambers wants to impart—that I read the book wondering how dense and uninquisitive Chambers thinks her readers are.
For those reasons, the book is also rather boring, because once you know what characters are the focus of any given chapter, you know exactly what the conflict will be and what Important Points said characters will spell out in the earnest heart-to-heart between them at its conclusion. Sheltered, rich, privileged character unexpectedly stays the night at the home of two married men? Here comes the chapter on how families come in all shapes and sizes and love is love regardless of race, gender, or sexual orientation. Sheltered, rich, privileged character clumsily puts the moves on the sex-positive, polyamorous character? Here comes the chapter on negotiating boundaries and consent in sexual relationships. Gentle father figure divulges that he and his people Weren’t Always The Way He Is Now? Here comes the chapter on how war, violence, and colonialism are bad. Collaborative team leader with important insight into recent shocking events gives testimony before the intergalactic leadership? Here comes the chapter on how Governments Do Not Have Citizens’ Best Interests At Heart.
Nor is Chambers' narrative as enlightened as she thinks. One of the book’s most dramatic episodes involves a character forcing an unwanted medical procedure on a second character against their repeated, expressly stated wishes, which the story acknowledges is a bit troubling but hurray! The second character avoided certain death. But here’s the thing: "Sure, the affected individual doesn't want this, but it's For Their Own Good" is the exact same logic used to justify things like conversion therapy or denial of reproductive rights, and I doubt Chambers is gung-ho about those. Then there’s the book's conclusion, in which Collaborative Team Leader urges the intergalactic government to Build The Wall to protect "us" from the scary Other "out there" and...yup, I was pretty much done at that point.
Weirdly, my favorite part of the book was Corbin: a thoroughly unpleasant, misanthropic, arrogant white male, because in contrast to so many, many books, movies, comics, TV shows, you name it in which the thoroughly unpleasant, misanthropic, arrogant (white) male is the guy everyone secretly finds the most sexiest, intriguing, charismatic, and all around bestest, the other characters in Small, Angry Planet roundly dislike Corbin for being thoroughly unpleasant, misanthropic, and arrogant. I found that really refreshing.
TL;DR: I read it, it mostly failed to land for me, and I'm unlikely to read the subsequent volumes.
The Northern Fiddler – Alan Feldman & Eamonn O’Doherty
The Northern Fiddler was written in 1979, when anthropologists and amateur folklorists “rediscovered” Irish traditional music, and boy is it dated. Feldman and O’Doherty spend most of the first half of the book rhapsodizing about some “magical and mythic past”—their words—when Irish music was somehow purer, worthier, and more genuine than in the present. They wring their hands over the morality of recording players who suffered “years of musical isolation,” in which they “never developed the capacity for self dissection and information retrieval” and are thus too fragile to process the camera or tape recorder.
What Feldman and O’Doherty never actually do, however, is bother to ask the musicians what they feel about being recorded; instead, they put pages of words into their subjects' mouths about how psychically damaging the experience “must” be for them.
A recording of John Doherty, one of the book's main subjects, clearly experiencing some psychic damage.
It’s an oddly dismissive way for the authors to treat individuals they claim to respect. And for all they lionize Irish music's (quasi-mythical) past, I prefer the realities of the Irish music present, which includes such features as female musicians, electricity, hospitals, and food security.
Things improve when Feldman and O’Doherty lay off the fantasizing and amateur philosophizing and let the musicians speak for themselves (turns out they weren’t too fragile to be recorded playing or speaking about their experiences!); the transcriptions of their reminiscences and reflections on their lives and music are fascinating indeed. They also provide an intriguing look into the development of Donegal and Tyrone fiddle music, particularly its cross pollination with Scottish styles and repertoires. And there are all sorts of other interesting tidbits as well—that step dancing was improvisation and competitive, that solo players played one tune until the dancers were finished (probably a reason why variation and ornamentation are so important), that many fiddlers played on instruments made of tin and not wood; how make your own set of uilleann pipes out of elderwood.
The book’s other major feature is the copious numbers of hand-transcribed tunes collected from the players. It is really fun to see which of these have become 20th century standard session tunes and which have fallen into obscurity, and even the now-standard ones aren’t necessarily in standard settings in this volume. Well over half the tunes are “Untitled Reel,” “Untitled Jig,” “Untitled Slip Jig,” “Untitled Highland,” and it’s fun to go through those as well, and see what they’re known as today.
TL;DR: read it for the tons of obscure tunes and the interviews with the subjects, but skip Feldman and O'Doherty's contributions
Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch – Rivka Galchen
In Germany in 1614, a town magistrate and two villagers accuse a widow of witchcraft. They’re drunk and disregard proper legal procedure for lodging the accusation. Although the widow is illiterate, she’s no fool and neither is her youngest son, who also happens to be Johannes Kepler. So she—or rather her male guardian—countersues for slander. The slander case mysteriously disappears into a bureaucratic black hole. The case against her accelerates by the day as more and more accusers emerge.
I’ve repeatedly seen this novel described as “comic.” Galchen does an excellent job of showing (blessedly showing) how gossip, superstition, resentment, institutional misogyny, and a desire to believe that someone must have caused life’s arbitrary miseries led to the European witch hunts, but I wouldn’t call that humorous. I liked, but didn’t love, this novel, largely because the devices Galchen uses to tell it—multiple POV switches, legal documents, and recorded testimonies—disagree with me, but also because the protagonist—although delightfully intelligent and opinionated—was at times a little too sanguine about her situation. If she’s ever frightened as the prospects for exoneration dwindle, Galchen does not show—or even tell—readers about it. Ditto for any feelings of genuine anger (versus cantankerous irritation) the protagonist may feel toward her accusers. Maybe this is meant to be unreliable narration, but it’s a little too opaque. Absent indications that the protagonist struggled in any way with even a hint of these logical reactions, I found myself reacting to her situation as I would to a nonfiction recounting.
Which isn’t to say this is a bad novel. While it didn’t grip me as viscerally as other fictional interpretations of the witch hunts, Galchen’s subtle depictions of place, period attitudes and mores, and the societal and interpersonal factors that led to the Widow Kepler’s ordeals are very well done indeed.
Girl, Wash Your Face – Rachel Hollis
There was a time when you couldn’t set foot in a bookstore, drug store, or big box store without seeing this book. I got the impression that the author was an Internet famous, probably Christian, decidedly rah-rah mommy blogger. Nothing I’d go out of my way to read, but when it showed up in a Little Free Library, I took the plunge. I liked it much more than I thought I would. It starts out predictably, which is to say, bad. Hollis is indeed an Internet famous, Christian, decidedly rah-rah mommy blogger. She spends the first third of the book reassuring readers that she’s just like you and me—sleep deprived and frazzled from juggling work demands while caring for her loving but doofy husband and kids. Just like you and me, she has to defuse tantrums and schedule doctors appointments. Just like you and me, that ill-timed kitchen disaster almost kept her from slipping into her bespoke designer gown and getting to the Academy Awards on time.
Oh, wait—you mean not everyone slips into bespoke designer gowns and goes to the Academy Awards as part of their day-to-day? Well, I'll be! It’s a disingenuous transition designed to make readers compare their humdrum lives to Hollis’s glamorous existence. (Because what better way to alleviate the resulting dissatisfaction than with a self-care purchase or two from the Hollis-brand line of lifestyle products!)
To be fair, the book never directly urges as much, but it’s pretty evident between the lines. But when Hollis starts talking—honestly and seriously—about legitimate challenges she’s faced (with weight, with substance abuse, with mental illness, and prejudice, and sexism, and impostor syndrome) the book is actually very good. Hollis’s approach basically boils down to what in a Buddhist context would be called mindfulness and right action. Here, she frames these concepts in either secular or lightly Christian terms, but the principles themselves are valid no matter what you dress them up as, and Hollis explains them clearly and engagingly. Some of the gilt seems to have recently worn off of Hollis’s overarching media empire, but taken on its own merits (and nothing else) Girl, Wash Your Face is a solid book and one I may actually reread at some point.
M, King’s Bodyguard – Niall Leonard
This was a serviceable beach read mystery. It is loosely based on a historical person: William Melville, an Irish peasant who became the first head of Britain's secret service. The novel opens as Melville and his German counterpart must foil an assassination attempt at Victoria’s funeral.
There are no author’s notes and precious little about said assassination attempt on Wikipedia, and judging from the number of close calls, daring escapes, explosions, and horse-drawn taxi chases through gaslit London alleys, I assume Leonard made most of the novel up from whole cloth. His Melville hits all the Manly ManTM beats: he’s a family man-slash-ladies man, a man with a moral compass who’s willing to lie, bash in heads, or threaten innocents for the greater good. That is, an ideal (at least for a certain subset of readers) versus a fully realized character. Steinhauer, his German counterpart, is even more of a cipher: his narrative role largely consists of smiling cryptically or explaining historical elements and spelling out the reasons for Melville’s actions for readers’ benefit. The scene setting is good genre fun: flickering gas lamps, creeping fog, and squalid tenements for days. The dialogue is always pedestrian and occasionally jarring: Melville tells us that “it was way past midnight when I reached my front door”; that a villain “actually giggled” when he confronted the protagonist; another “actually shrieked” when wounded, and so on. Maybe this is how rural Irishmen-cum-London-policemen spoke English in 1901, but it strikes my ear as straight out of a 21st century high school cafeteria.
If you’re looking for a historical mystery rooted in period setting, dialogue, and backstory, this is not the novel for you. But if you’re looking for “James Bond thriller in late-Victorian Era Theme Park” it’s worth the read.
The Silver Bough vol. 2 – F. Marian McNeill
This volume covers the festivals between Candlemas (early February) and Harvest Home (late August). In contrast to volume 3, which covers the period from Halloween on, many of the observances McNeill catalogs here—Valentine’s Day, Easter, etc.—are relatively modern. That said, the chapter on Beltaine is fairly robust, and there are some other gems as well. Apparently wild carrots played a major role in Scottish religious and folk rites from the pre-Christian era to the early 20th century. Who knew?
What I Am Currently Reading
Star Mother – Charlie Holmberg
I’m a little over 50 percent of the way through. Like many of Holmberg’s recent offerings it started out strong but petered out by the 30 percent mark.
The Master of Blacktower – Barbara Michaels
Stretching this one out, because I immediately want to restart it when I’ve finished, and I’ve read it so many times that less and less of it fades from memory between each reread.
Isolde – Rosalind Miles
Plugging away. The juxtaposition between excellent narrative description and tin-eared bodice ripper dialogue is not working very well for me.
Manx Fairy Tales – Sophia Morrison
This is thoroughly delightful.
What I’m Reading Next
I have exercised good self-control for two weeks running, and not acquired any additional books.
What I Still Have Left To Review
これで以上です。
Dharma Punx – Noah Levine
I read Levine’s Against the Stream and The Heart of the Revolution about a decade ago, but never got around to reading this, his first book. It’s a memoir of his childhood and early adulthood as a drug-addicted criminal and how he got clean with the help first of Alcoholics Anonymous and then Vipassana Buddhism. As in his later books, Levine’s prose is workmanlike, but in this volume Buddhism takes a backseat to Levine’s retelling of his life story. Overall, it was a pretty good read, with the best meditation instructions I've encountered anywhere (although anyone looking for a book on the intersection of punk rock and Buddhism would be much better served by reading Brad Warner). I appreciated Levine’s honesty even about things that don’t cast him in the best light: he doesn’t try to burnish his childish, destructive mindset prior to getting clean, for instance, or his deeply flawed expectations that eternal bliss and enlightenment would be his just as soon as he traveled to “exotic”—his characterization—Asia. Which is why I found it a bit odd that sex was the one thing Levine seemed to be coy about. Then I learned that in 2018, official investigations bore out at least some of the multiple allegations of rape and sexual misconduct against him, which is probably why the copy of this book that I read had found its way into a Little Free Library. So, yeah.
Deadpool: The Complete Collection vol. 2 – Daniel Way et al.
Way writes an excellent Deadpool: humorous, insane, zany, often triumphing despite himself, and as with the first volume, this book made me laugh out loud more than once. The artists’ depictions of women are decidedly...retrograde...such that I don’t know that I would have paid for this new, but the strength of Way’s writing definitely made it worth acquiring secondhand.
What I Finished Reading At Some Point In The Past Four Months
A Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet – Becky Chambers
This book was not for me. From the copy and reviews I was expecting something along the lines of the Imperial Radch series: immersive worldbuilding and labyrinthine intergalactic politics. What I got instead was fanfiction in which the lightly disguised cast of Firefly enacts various scenarios that illustrate Examples of Proper 21st Century Social Interactions for the Education and Edification of Readers. I agree with what Chambers has to say about how people should treat each other—individually and at a societal level. But the novel's plot and narrative are so thin—and so obviously a secondary consideration compared to the lessons Chambers wants to impart—that I read the book wondering how dense and uninquisitive Chambers thinks her readers are.
For those reasons, the book is also rather boring, because once you know what characters are the focus of any given chapter, you know exactly what the conflict will be and what Important Points said characters will spell out in the earnest heart-to-heart between them at its conclusion. Sheltered, rich, privileged character unexpectedly stays the night at the home of two married men? Here comes the chapter on how families come in all shapes and sizes and love is love regardless of race, gender, or sexual orientation. Sheltered, rich, privileged character clumsily puts the moves on the sex-positive, polyamorous character? Here comes the chapter on negotiating boundaries and consent in sexual relationships. Gentle father figure divulges that he and his people Weren’t Always The Way He Is Now? Here comes the chapter on how war, violence, and colonialism are bad. Collaborative team leader with important insight into recent shocking events gives testimony before the intergalactic leadership? Here comes the chapter on how Governments Do Not Have Citizens’ Best Interests At Heart.
Nor is Chambers' narrative as enlightened as she thinks. One of the book’s most dramatic episodes involves a character forcing an unwanted medical procedure on a second character against their repeated, expressly stated wishes, which the story acknowledges is a bit troubling but hurray! The second character avoided certain death. But here’s the thing: "Sure, the affected individual doesn't want this, but it's For Their Own Good" is the exact same logic used to justify things like conversion therapy or denial of reproductive rights, and I doubt Chambers is gung-ho about those. Then there’s the book's conclusion, in which Collaborative Team Leader urges the intergalactic government to Build The Wall to protect "us" from the scary Other "out there" and...yup, I was pretty much done at that point.
Weirdly, my favorite part of the book was Corbin: a thoroughly unpleasant, misanthropic, arrogant white male, because in contrast to so many, many books, movies, comics, TV shows, you name it in which the thoroughly unpleasant, misanthropic, arrogant (white) male is the guy everyone secretly finds the most sexiest, intriguing, charismatic, and all around bestest, the other characters in Small, Angry Planet roundly dislike Corbin for being thoroughly unpleasant, misanthropic, and arrogant. I found that really refreshing.
TL;DR: I read it, it mostly failed to land for me, and I'm unlikely to read the subsequent volumes.
The Northern Fiddler – Alan Feldman & Eamonn O’Doherty
The Northern Fiddler was written in 1979, when anthropologists and amateur folklorists “rediscovered” Irish traditional music, and boy is it dated. Feldman and O’Doherty spend most of the first half of the book rhapsodizing about some “magical and mythic past”—their words—when Irish music was somehow purer, worthier, and more genuine than in the present. They wring their hands over the morality of recording players who suffered “years of musical isolation,” in which they “never developed the capacity for self dissection and information retrieval” and are thus too fragile to process the camera or tape recorder.
What Feldman and O’Doherty never actually do, however, is bother to ask the musicians what they feel about being recorded; instead, they put pages of words into their subjects' mouths about how psychically damaging the experience “must” be for them.
A recording of John Doherty, one of the book's main subjects, clearly experiencing some psychic damage.
It’s an oddly dismissive way for the authors to treat individuals they claim to respect. And for all they lionize Irish music's (quasi-mythical) past, I prefer the realities of the Irish music present, which includes such features as female musicians, electricity, hospitals, and food security.
Things improve when Feldman and O’Doherty lay off the fantasizing and amateur philosophizing and let the musicians speak for themselves (turns out they weren’t too fragile to be recorded playing or speaking about their experiences!); the transcriptions of their reminiscences and reflections on their lives and music are fascinating indeed. They also provide an intriguing look into the development of Donegal and Tyrone fiddle music, particularly its cross pollination with Scottish styles and repertoires. And there are all sorts of other interesting tidbits as well—that step dancing was improvisation and competitive, that solo players played one tune until the dancers were finished (probably a reason why variation and ornamentation are so important), that many fiddlers played on instruments made of tin and not wood; how make your own set of uilleann pipes out of elderwood.
The book’s other major feature is the copious numbers of hand-transcribed tunes collected from the players. It is really fun to see which of these have become 20th century standard session tunes and which have fallen into obscurity, and even the now-standard ones aren’t necessarily in standard settings in this volume. Well over half the tunes are “Untitled Reel,” “Untitled Jig,” “Untitled Slip Jig,” “Untitled Highland,” and it’s fun to go through those as well, and see what they’re known as today.
TL;DR: read it for the tons of obscure tunes and the interviews with the subjects, but skip Feldman and O'Doherty's contributions
Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch – Rivka Galchen
In Germany in 1614, a town magistrate and two villagers accuse a widow of witchcraft. They’re drunk and disregard proper legal procedure for lodging the accusation. Although the widow is illiterate, she’s no fool and neither is her youngest son, who also happens to be Johannes Kepler. So she—or rather her male guardian—countersues for slander. The slander case mysteriously disappears into a bureaucratic black hole. The case against her accelerates by the day as more and more accusers emerge.
I’ve repeatedly seen this novel described as “comic.” Galchen does an excellent job of showing (blessedly showing) how gossip, superstition, resentment, institutional misogyny, and a desire to believe that someone must have caused life’s arbitrary miseries led to the European witch hunts, but I wouldn’t call that humorous. I liked, but didn’t love, this novel, largely because the devices Galchen uses to tell it—multiple POV switches, legal documents, and recorded testimonies—disagree with me, but also because the protagonist—although delightfully intelligent and opinionated—was at times a little too sanguine about her situation. If she’s ever frightened as the prospects for exoneration dwindle, Galchen does not show—or even tell—readers about it. Ditto for any feelings of genuine anger (versus cantankerous irritation) the protagonist may feel toward her accusers. Maybe this is meant to be unreliable narration, but it’s a little too opaque. Absent indications that the protagonist struggled in any way with even a hint of these logical reactions, I found myself reacting to her situation as I would to a nonfiction recounting.
Which isn’t to say this is a bad novel. While it didn’t grip me as viscerally as other fictional interpretations of the witch hunts, Galchen’s subtle depictions of place, period attitudes and mores, and the societal and interpersonal factors that led to the Widow Kepler’s ordeals are very well done indeed.
Girl, Wash Your Face – Rachel Hollis
There was a time when you couldn’t set foot in a bookstore, drug store, or big box store without seeing this book. I got the impression that the author was an Internet famous, probably Christian, decidedly rah-rah mommy blogger. Nothing I’d go out of my way to read, but when it showed up in a Little Free Library, I took the plunge. I liked it much more than I thought I would. It starts out predictably, which is to say, bad. Hollis is indeed an Internet famous, Christian, decidedly rah-rah mommy blogger. She spends the first third of the book reassuring readers that she’s just like you and me—sleep deprived and frazzled from juggling work demands while caring for her loving but doofy husband and kids. Just like you and me, she has to defuse tantrums and schedule doctors appointments. Just like you and me, that ill-timed kitchen disaster almost kept her from slipping into her bespoke designer gown and getting to the Academy Awards on time.
Oh, wait—you mean not everyone slips into bespoke designer gowns and goes to the Academy Awards as part of their day-to-day? Well, I'll be! It’s a disingenuous transition designed to make readers compare their humdrum lives to Hollis’s glamorous existence. (Because what better way to alleviate the resulting dissatisfaction than with a self-care purchase or two from the Hollis-brand line of lifestyle products!)
To be fair, the book never directly urges as much, but it’s pretty evident between the lines. But when Hollis starts talking—honestly and seriously—about legitimate challenges she’s faced (with weight, with substance abuse, with mental illness, and prejudice, and sexism, and impostor syndrome) the book is actually very good. Hollis’s approach basically boils down to what in a Buddhist context would be called mindfulness and right action. Here, she frames these concepts in either secular or lightly Christian terms, but the principles themselves are valid no matter what you dress them up as, and Hollis explains them clearly and engagingly. Some of the gilt seems to have recently worn off of Hollis’s overarching media empire, but taken on its own merits (and nothing else) Girl, Wash Your Face is a solid book and one I may actually reread at some point.
M, King’s Bodyguard – Niall Leonard
This was a serviceable beach read mystery. It is loosely based on a historical person: William Melville, an Irish peasant who became the first head of Britain's secret service. The novel opens as Melville and his German counterpart must foil an assassination attempt at Victoria’s funeral.
There are no author’s notes and precious little about said assassination attempt on Wikipedia, and judging from the number of close calls, daring escapes, explosions, and horse-drawn taxi chases through gaslit London alleys, I assume Leonard made most of the novel up from whole cloth. His Melville hits all the Manly ManTM beats: he’s a family man-slash-ladies man, a man with a moral compass who’s willing to lie, bash in heads, or threaten innocents for the greater good. That is, an ideal (at least for a certain subset of readers) versus a fully realized character. Steinhauer, his German counterpart, is even more of a cipher: his narrative role largely consists of smiling cryptically or explaining historical elements and spelling out the reasons for Melville’s actions for readers’ benefit. The scene setting is good genre fun: flickering gas lamps, creeping fog, and squalid tenements for days. The dialogue is always pedestrian and occasionally jarring: Melville tells us that “it was way past midnight when I reached my front door”; that a villain “actually giggled” when he confronted the protagonist; another “actually shrieked” when wounded, and so on. Maybe this is how rural Irishmen-cum-London-policemen spoke English in 1901, but it strikes my ear as straight out of a 21st century high school cafeteria.
If you’re looking for a historical mystery rooted in period setting, dialogue, and backstory, this is not the novel for you. But if you’re looking for “James Bond thriller in late-Victorian Era Theme Park” it’s worth the read.
The Silver Bough vol. 2 – F. Marian McNeill
This volume covers the festivals between Candlemas (early February) and Harvest Home (late August). In contrast to volume 3, which covers the period from Halloween on, many of the observances McNeill catalogs here—Valentine’s Day, Easter, etc.—are relatively modern. That said, the chapter on Beltaine is fairly robust, and there are some other gems as well. Apparently wild carrots played a major role in Scottish religious and folk rites from the pre-Christian era to the early 20th century. Who knew?
What I Am Currently Reading
Star Mother – Charlie Holmberg
I’m a little over 50 percent of the way through. Like many of Holmberg’s recent offerings it started out strong but petered out by the 30 percent mark.
The Master of Blacktower – Barbara Michaels
Stretching this one out, because I immediately want to restart it when I’ve finished, and I’ve read it so many times that less and less of it fades from memory between each reread.
Isolde – Rosalind Miles
Plugging away. The juxtaposition between excellent narrative description and tin-eared bodice ripper dialogue is not working very well for me.
Manx Fairy Tales – Sophia Morrison
This is thoroughly delightful.
What I’m Reading Next
I have exercised good self-control for two weeks running, and not acquired any additional books.
What I Still Have Left To Review
The Crone ・ The Kingdoms ・ The Last Graduate ・ Senlin Ascends ・ 最遊記ＲＥＬＯＡＤ ＢＬＡＳＴ (1) ・ 最遊記ＲＥＬＯＡＤ ＢＬＡＳＴ (2) ・ 最遊記ＲＥＬＯＡＤ ＢＬＡＳＴ (3)
これで以上です。
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From:
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Yep -- that was my impression of it as well, which led to the sentiment in the icon. Because I do actually really like the way Chambers' alien worldbuilding works, for the most part -- there's a lot of cool inventive stuff there, and some of the characters are charming when they're not being used to teach moral lessons.
I agree with you on the weirdness of the Ohan conclusion where apparently everything is fine after the nonconsensual medical procedure. It also pissed me off that the morally questionable decision got farmed out to Corbin, the token non-enlightened character in the bunch, which felt like trying to have your cake and eating it too.
I do think book 2 is a lot better in some regards. Positive characters are allowed to have actual flaws, and some developments even surprised me, which this book never did. I also liked book 3. But none of these are Imperial Radch level of plot of intrigue, like, not even in the same neighborhood -- they're just interested in very different things.
From:
no subject
The characters were a bit frustrating, because the ones I found most intriguing (e.g., Pepper, Santoso's lover) were barely explored, while the ones whose traits most annoyed me (humorously spastic! humorously spastic on drugs!) got a lot more page real estate.
It also pissed me off that the morally questionable decision got farmed out to Corbin, the token non-enlightened character in the bunch, which felt like trying to have your cake and eating it too.
YES. YES, ABSOLUTELY THIS. And again, the novel would have been so much more interesting had Chambers been willing to confront that ambiguity. What do you do when there are no good choices? When good people make bad choices? And so on.
Positive characters are allowed to have actual flaws, and some developments even surprised me, which this book never did.
I don't think I'll ever read the sequels as I have so many other books to tackle, but I'm glad Chambers is improving with each volume. I think I found Angry Planet as frustrating as I did in part because the potential was so obviously there, just not fully realized.
From:
no subject
I dug the worldbuilding, just wish there had been more of it and that Chambers had let it stand on its own more.
I'll echo the comment below -- I feel like Chambers is better about letting the worldbuilding stand on its own in the subsequent books, with less authorial moralizing about it. Like, I don't want to give the impression that she is subtle about her views in the other books, but I found it way, WAY less intrusive than in 'Small, Angry Planet', and consequently liked books 2 and 3 a lot more (I felt like 4 was more like book 1, which I found a weird trajectory, but maybe she felt like once the series had won a Hugo, she could go back to doing whatever she wanted...)
because the ones I found most intriguing (e.g., Pepper, Santoso's lover) were barely explored
I will mention that Pepper is one of the main characters of A Close and Common Orbit (book 2), and Ashby's lover is one of the main characters (of a larger ensemble cast) in The Galaxy and the Ground Within (book 4) -- after the first, the books can be read in any order, btw -- I feel like they're all sequels to the first one, but scatter from that point and don't really relate to each other. In case that influences your decision to read or not read more Chambers; I totally get giving up on an author with potential but who furnishes a frustrating reading experience, and have definitely done that myself.
And again, the novel would have been so much more interesting had Chambers been willing to confront that ambiguity. What do you do when there are no good choices? When good people make bad choices? And so on.
Yes... It just felt like she wasn't interested in engaging with that kind of situation, and that felt like a total cop-out. We must have only fluffy good times and sing-alongs for the good characters! Ugh... :/
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
If nothing else, Angry Planet has really made me ponder what it is about the presentation that bothers me, because it is the presentation--her message is totally on point! It really does just seem that I like the message to be evident from the situation, as opposed to explicitly stated by the characters or authorial voice.
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because it is the presentation--her message is totally on point! It really does just seem that I like the message to be evident from the situation, as opposed to explicitly stated by the characters or authorial voice.
I feel this, and I think it's what keeps Chambers from being a favorite of mine because I love the world in which she writes and she is an otherwise good writer!
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From:
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