What Am I Reading Wednesday - January 28

[lebateleur]

Inhospitable commuting conditions have kept me home the last few days. (Fun fact: the city counts any road as plowed that 1) a city vehicle has driven down, or 2) has less than two inches of snow on it...which may explain why a truly perplexing number of people have tried to drive—and ended up marooned—on so many of them.) If nothing else, it's been a great boon to my page count totals.

What I Finished Reading This Week

Mannaz – Malene Sølvsten
The final volume in the Whisper of Ravens series, after Ansuz and Fehu. These books are by no means Literature, but they are a great deal of fun. Although they are original fiction, they have the vibe of a really excellent fanfic epic, if that makes sense. There are definite strengths and weaknesses to the story itself, but by this point in the trilogy I was just along for the ride and enjoying myself despite whatever happened.

As with the first two books, Sølvsten excels at setting up cliffhanger endings that make you want to read "just one more chapter" until somehow you're 100 pages past where you'd intended to stop for the day. She incorporates a pretty clever plot point involving Celtic and Norse deities. Better yet, she sets up a big reveal at the novel's halfway point that is absolutely detectable if you're reading carefully, but that the protagonist fails to figure out for convincingly rational reasons. Consequently, I spent a good part of the last 300, on the edge of my seat and reading through my fingers, watching the protagonist dig herself deeper into hole she doesn't even realize is there. It is, again, great fun.

As for weaknesses, a degree of protagonist informed attributes persists (e.g., Anna is skilled at hand-to-hand combat except in situations where she isn't); Sølvsten inexplicably ignores some major characters from previous volumes (Mads, where were you?); and Anna's decisions sometimes depend on who she's spoken to last. But at the end of the day, this novel—and the entire trilogy—were entertaining reads and ones that I will return to again.

Freya the Deer – Meg Richman
This book is very well written. It will frustrate—if not anger—many readers with its almost complete refusal to pull punches, but will also probably frustrate the remainder of its readers by easing backing from the few punches it does pull at absolutely critical moments.

What it does well:

• There's no moralizing (or even handwringing) to be found about women's sexuality here.
• Richman's nuanced, uncompromising portrayal of Freya's autism. This is not "neurodivergence" i.e., just an informed attribute, or conflation of feeling socially awkward with fundamental mental difference, or something that's "solved" with the right romantic partner or found family. Freya is differently made from most of the people around her.
  
• That fundamental difference just is: sometimes it helps Freya, sometimes it hurts her; she is not always aware that it's doing one or the other, and even when she knows or suspects, she doesn't necessarily know why.
  
• Richman's characters—even the secondary and tertiary ones—are generally complex and well-rounded. These are real human beings with opinions, motivations, virtues, and flaws that don't fall into easily defined (or easy to stomach) categories.
  
• The same goes for novel's approach to the complexity and messiness of human existence. Good and bad can exist in the same person, institution, or event, and by and large Richman avoids railroading the reader into intellectual straitjackets or moralizing about any of it. It doesn't shy away from asking uncomfortable questions and refuses to provide facile answers, even at the risk of upseting or alienating readers who'd rather be comforted with easy, packaged solutions.
  
• Richman can evoke a three-dimensional scene, interpersonal interaction, emotion, or psychological state with an absolute economy of words.

Where it fumbles

• The book is mostly, but not entirely, narrated from Freya's third-person POV, leading to periodic jarring POV, linguistic, or tonal shifts, sometimes within a single paragraph.
  
• Richman is weirdly incapable of correctly conjugating a certain verb.
  
• Richman at times uses Freya's neurodivergence as a narrative crutch to give Freya unearned, nearly saintlike wisdom.
  
• Despite grappling with a host of difficult socio-economic, religious, cultural, racial, and moral questions, Richman doesn't touch the financial, racial, and status privileges that underpin Freya's existence throughout the novel, and that make its final fifth possible; indeed, she doesn't get within miles of them.
  
• The novel's sole African American character is ultimately not a character but a "character"—a plot device that Richman uses to set up the climax for the other two (white) protagonists and then discards without apology or afterthought once he's served that purpose. This is gross in any book, but in a book like Freya the Deer, which so often refuses to take the lazy, facile way forward, it's inexcusable.
  
• After spending nearly 200 pages raising and refusing to shy away from the complex moral quandaries that arise just from being alive, Richman uses a Sudden Tragic Character Death(TM) to avoid having to write her way through the fallout and aftereffects of the situations her characters find themselves in (i.e., that Richman herself put them in and apparently didn't want to write her way out of.)
  
  TL;DR—This book is not perfect, but it does things that many other authors are not talented or courageous enough to attempt, let alone succeed at, and frequently does them very, very well.
  
  
  What I Am Currently Reading
  
  The Dog Stars – Peter Heller
  So far, this is The Road, if that novel were written by a far less precious and pretentious author who—unlike McCarthy—is not a child rapist.
  
  The Stations of the Sun - Ronald Hutton
  I read the chapter on Imbolc this week.
  
  The Bone Chests - Cat Jarman
  With about 100 pages left to go I can confidently say that this is a well-written book about a subject that does not interest me.
  
  The Disabled Tyrant's Beloved Pet Fish vol. 1 – Xue Shan Fei Hu
  Is the premise silly? Yes. Does the author know this? Yes. Is the book great fun for precisely these reasons? Yes. I'm currently a third of the way through and will probably pick this up as my next main-focus read.
  
  
  What I’m Reading Next
  
  I acquired no new books this week.
  
  
  これで以上です。