2017-notes
Ruhlmans Twenty
Notes:
A basic cookbook combining fundamental techniques, some gastronomic science, and some exemplary recipes, Ruhlman’s 20 is a different kind of cookbook in that it’s not about a theme, or an ingredient, or a style. It’s about how to think about cooking, with an emphasis on ““think””. Over and over again, Ruhlman emphasizes that we should see cooking as a process, not simply as a list of ingredients and the steps of combining them.
I liked Ruhlman’s book ““Ratio”” which was helpful in getting me to do some baking. This book is more expansive in its scope, but it had some good advice that I’m going to try in my own kitchen. The main piece of advice was to simply be conscious of what I’m doing at each step of the process of cooking a dish or a meal.
An Other Place
Notes:
This novel was weird, ambiguous, and contains some disturbing imagery. Usually I love that combination, but this one felt kind of off to me.
Newman Riplan does freelance tech support. While on a job in Amsterdam, he meets up with some old friends and they go on a bender–drugs, sex, booze, and general carousing. At the end of it all, his friends, hearing him complain about never having a vacation, put him on a plane to an unknown destination. During the flight, he blacks out while choking, and when he wakes up, he’s …somewhere.
What follows is a surreal and disturbing tour through an alien and bizarre city, filled with strange people, arcane customs, and dangerous monsters. Riplan tries both to fit into this strange new world, and figure out how to escape it, or whether escape is even possible. The whole story has a dreamlike quality from the names of the city’s fantastical workforce (the Alchemist, the Sandmen, etc…) to the manikin-like drones that serve as a workforce, food, and entertainment to the city’s residents, to the menagerie of animals that wander through the streets, sometimes simply passing by, and sometimes out to devour anyone they meet.
I had two big problems with the book. The first is that I felt like the prose, which was written in the first person, felt like a diary, but that style didn’t really fit the strangeness and grotesqueness of the plot. Rooting the action in a single narrator made the wild swings of action, the strange imagery, and the weird settings all feel kind of commonplace and pedestrian, somehow.
The other problem I had was the mythology of the city. To me, the book was a collection of bizarre and disturbing imagery, but without any cohesion. What do the sandmen have to do with the manikins, for example, other than both being magical, strange aspects of a strange place. I don’t need a bow on everything, but it felt a little like the author just sat around thinking of weird setpieces and then strung them together in what the narrator sees.
Having said that, the book is definitely weird, and has some wonderful imagery.
My Best Friends Exorcism
Notes:
A legitimately gripping, creepy, and heartfelt story about friendship, growing up, the moral occult panics of the 1980s, and social class.
Abby and Gretchen are best friends and have been since Gretchen was the only person to show up to Abby’s birthday party in the first grade. They attend an elite prep school in South Carolina (Abby on academic scholarship, as her family is poor and Gretchen from her family’s wealth) and are popular, happy teenagers in the late 1980s. One night while they and their other two friends Margaret and Glee are partying at a beach house, Gretchen disappears, only to re-appear the next morning. What becomes clear over the next few months is that what happened to Gretchen that night was supernatural, terrifying, and would change Abby’s and her relationship forever. Gretchen’s behavior and appearance changes, and Abby is the only one who seems to take the issue seriously. Gradually, Gretchen’s experience unfolds across the entire landscape of their school and their social lives, and is structured by the uneven power of class and gender–Abby’s family’s poverty relative to the social and economic power of Gretchen’s family makes it almost impossible for her to be believed. The whole thing culminates in the titular exorcism that leads the two of them to confront their friendship and figure out who they are and who they want to be.
Grady Hendrix’s last book, Horrorstor, was a ghost story set in an Ikea-like business and designed like an Ikea catalog. This book is a love letter to late 1980s America, and particularly its more conservative manifestations. MBFE is designed like a 1980s VHS horror movie box, and filled with all kinds of well-designed ephemera from the 1980s, particularly stuff related to the drug and occult occult panics that swept the country, brought on by Dungeons and Dragons, heavy metal, and the growth of the idea of conspiratorial satanism. I particularly enjoyed the numerous references to Don Larsen, clearly a stand-in for real-life religious radio evangelist Bob Larsen, famous for conducting on-air exorcisms and stoking the fires of occult panics in the 1980s and 90s. It’s hard to escape comparisons with the 80s nostalgia of ““Stranger Things”” but this book lingers on many of the darker cultural moments of the 1980s–Reagan’s defeat of the air-traffic controller’s union, the tone-deaf ““just say no”” anti-drugs campaign and the panic and ignorance around drugs it produced, and the rise of evangelical conservatism as a cultural force.
The real heart of the story is the deep and powerful friendship between Gretchen and Abby, which is both beautifully narrated through their school years, and dramatically tested by the central events of the story. In some ways, I think that Hendrix didn’t want to let the characters go, and so the story carries on long after its primary 1980s setting. That didn’t really work for me–there were at least a couple of places where I felt like it could’ve ended and would’ve had just as much impact. Still, I couldn’t honestly put it down once I got into the heart of the story, so I shouldn’t complain too much. It really was a beautifully written story of two people’s deep and abiding friendship, set in one of America’s strangest cultural periods, and with some legitimately unsettling, subtle, and creepy moments.
Class Race and Marxism
Notes:
A short but rich collection by one of the great White historians of race. Roediger is famous for his groundbreaking book ““The Wages of Whiteness”” which takes W.E.B. Du Bois’s insights in ““Black Reconstruction”” and recasts the history of labor in the United States as a history of White racial formation. This collection collects more recent essays, most of which are reflective on themes laid out in “Wages…” There are ruminations on why there has been a turn away from analyses of race and class together, and a generous and thoughtful essay on Roediger’s mentor George Rawick. There are also three historical essays that were exceptionally insightful, the first on the relationship between Indigenous removal and enslavement, the second on the relationship between slave management and business management, and the third as a Raymond Williams-esque ‘keyword’ history of the concept of solidarity, and its implications for new kinds of activism.
This is an eclectic collection, and I have to confess to not being terribly interested in the more reflective essays, but parts of it felt incredibly vibrant and relevant in the age of Black Lives Matter, the current media/political evocation of a downtrodden White Working Class, and increasing understanding of Indigenous rights and sovereignty. "
Binti
Notes:
A short but highly imaginative novel, full of wonderful imagery. Binti has been accepted at the prestigious Oozma University, though she is the first of her people (the Himba, a group ostensibly from Namibia) to have ever been accepted. The Himba are famous for making astrolabes (devices that seem to combine the traditional navigational and astronomical aspects of astrolabes with sophisticated computer and communication technology), but are also suggested to have been persecuted in the past by their neighbors, the Khoush. The Himba are characterized by a number of really fascinating cultural traits, including coating their bodies with a clay and oil mixture called Otjize, and braiding their hair in family-specific patterns.
All of this background travels with Binti on her way to Oozma, but her ship is attacked en route by a group of strange, jellyfish-like aliens called the Meduse. As it unfolds, Binti’s culture and heritage, as well as a chance collection of a strange artifact from her homeland, keep her alive, and intertwine her future with that of the Meduse.
This a short novel, but so incredibly imaginative that every page was a delightful journey. In part because of the shortness, and the (to my eyes) strangeness of the world, there were occasional moments of somewhat clumsy exposition, but overall the story worked so well that I mostly didn’t care. Binti is a complex and interesting character, as are the Meduse, who are both strange in their ways, and also increasingly humanized as the story goes on.
Treating Africa as a fount of fantasy and speculative fiction the way that most writers treat medieval Europe is a really novel and rich effort on Okorafor’s part, and I’m already exciting about grabbing the next book in the series.
Hunger Makes me a Modern Girl
Notes:
“This was a fun and exciting book, especially for someone who loves Sleater-Kinney and American independent music. Plus, Brownstein is an amazing writer. Her prose is rich, lyrical, and propulsive. I read the whole book in two evenings, and her writing, like her music, kept pushing me along until I had to put the book down, or pass out with it on my lap. Plus (and this should be no surprise to anyone who has seen ““Portlandia”") this book is really funny. I must’ve laughed out loud half a dozen times throughout the text.
I think I enjoyed her discussions of how she came to know and love music, or rather, how she grew into being a fan and a seeker of music. That’s certainly something that resonated with me, as someone who has sought out new music from ever more obscure or unusual places for more than 20 years.
So, a great book about loving music and performance, a great book about 1990s American music, and a well-written and engaging biography.”
Austerity Ecology
Notes:
A funny, well-written and rich polemic that argues for an optimistic view of human progress and against a fatalistic and unstoppable modernity. Instead of saying that we have to reduce industry, give up consumer abundance, and make ourselves smaller, Leigh Phillips says that the only way out of our current political-ecological conundrums (including global warming) is to draw on the socialist tradition of consciously re-purposing capitalist industry towards progressive ends of improving the lives of all.
Phillips finds advocates of de-growth on the left and the right, and takes particular aim at the ““back to the land”” movement, which he argues is part of a long tradition of turning away from the potential of human progress and ingenuity to solve grand problems. Phillips argues that we should ““take over the machine, not turn it off”” and collectively use the frankly astonishing powers of industry, machinery, science, and ability to address problems like CO2 rise, clean energy, soil fertility. And Phillips urges a reclamation of the lefts insistence on improvement of human living standards–using science and technology to equitably make things better, rather than assuming that the inevitable outcome of technology is to create more waste and more environmental calamity.
The book is rich and broad, and Phillips knows the scientific literature, particularly on CO2 questions. I really appreciated the call for greater collective action around environmental problems, and his fundamentally optimistic view of human potential.
However, as an anthropologist, I got a bit bent out of shape about his longer historical attempts to argue that humans have always been on a progressive course. His uncritical citation of Pinker’s ““The Better Angels…”” was a big red flag for me, especially since anthropologists have vociferously argued that Pinker cherry-picked his anthropological data in arguing that humans are less violent than they have been historically. Even leaving Pinker aside, Phillips assumptions that pre-state societies are violent and ignorant is ridiculous for anyone who takes even a cursory glance at the archaeological or ethno-historical records of North America, where Indigenous societies actively manipulated their environments to facilitate abundance (with for example controlled burning, complicated agriculture and horticulture systems, and the cultivation of a rich array of medicinal plants), and did so almost exclusively without inter-group violence or substantial, durable inequality. In other words, these are exactly the kinds of societies that Phillips seeks, not ones to run from.
Still, I appreciated Leigh Phillips arguments for democratically planned future that is technologically rich, abundant in energy, tools, and knowledge, and where the results of such planning are greater equality and justice, as well as an environmentally manageable world. "
Disappearance at Devils Rock
Notes:
A bizarre and unsettling book about ghosts, the devil, families, and how much or how little we know about them. It’s also a creepy-as-hell recounting of an impossibly horrific event (the disappearance of a child) that keeps dropping the bottom out from under the reader.
The book opens with the disappearance of 12 year old Tommy, after his two friends Luis and Josh in Borderland State Forest (somewhere in Massachusetts), at a monumental rock formation named ““Split Rock””. A search is mounted by his mother Elizabeth, the local police (in the person of a detective named Allison), and the newspapers. However, right from the start it is clear that all is not as it seems. First, Elizabeth thinks that she sees Tommy in their house late at night…but maybe not exactly the Tommy she remembers. It is also clear that Tommy left a diary which paints his time with Luis and Josh differently than how they are describing it to the police, including a seemingly sinister individual that they all met but did not talk about. Finally, Split rock is home to some colonial-era folklore associated with a deal with the Devil, hence the title. The book gradually reveals a much more dark and violent world than the simple ““disappearance in the woods”” narrative that begins it would suggest.
I loved Tremblay’s “A headful of ghosts”, and this book brought back the things I loved about it. There is a strong focus on the unreliability of memory (and hence, narration), making the reader never perfectly clear about whether they can trust what they’re reading. There’s also an interest in foregrounding the role of trauma and emotional instability in our processing of horrific events, even supernatural ones. This is something Tremblay does extremely well–make clear just how powerful of an impact horrendous events have on our ability to maintain a normal day-to-day function and interactions with others. Finally, there’s an ambiguity about what is actually being experienced–is it some supernatural event (and if so, what kind)? Some kind of trauma-inspired hallucination? Some kind of mass rationalization of collective guilt? Tremblay wisely lets the reader decide what they want to believe–it’s an honest and intelligent approach to horror that amplifies the reader’s feelings of instability.
That’s two for two, Tremblay–keep ‘em coming!”
The Ballad of Black Tom
Notes:
A wonderfully creepy, incisive, and rich riff on HP Lovecraft’s “The Horror at Red Hook” that flips the original story’s casual and vicious racism on it’s head.
Charles Tommy Tester does illicit work to help take care of his aged and disabled father, moving contraband and other secret material around New York city in the 1920s. He also plays guitar, though not very well. A chance encounter with a wealthy White man named Robert Suydam, brings him into the orbit of the dark magic of Old Gods, brought to New York by immigrants seeking a better. Tommy’s experience with racist Whites makes him both skeptical and enthusiastic about Suydam’s offer of knowledge that will overthrow the world. Meanwhile, New York City police detective Thomas Malone is trying to stop Suydam from enacting his dark plan. These two characters collide in a conclusion that both undercuts Lovecraft’s original tale and amplifies it’s power.
I couldn’t put this down. It linked together the violent materializes of racism (particularly police violence and segregation) with Lovecraft’s nihilistic cosmology in really novel and exciting ways. The characters are all complicated and rich (which already makes it a cut above Lovecraft’s wooden depictions), and there’s even a mystical nod to the power of Son House’s majestic a capella blues ““Don’t you mind people grinnin’ in your face””.
More Lovecraft homages like this please!"
Black Light
Notes:
A strange and surrealistic book about growing up in a small town, ancient magic, and punk rock. A teenage girl (Charlotte ““Lit”” Moylan) growing up in the 1970s in the fictional town of Kamensic, New York, gradually discovers that her godfather, the reclusive filmmaker and impresario Axel Kern (a stand-in for Andy Warhol) is at the center of a magical conspiracy that has lasted for millennia. She becomes part of a fight between two opposing groups of magicians, seeking to halt (or hasten) the revival of an ancient God. Along the way, she parties with her friends, and tries to figure out whether the small-town life she’s grown up with is what she really wants for herself.
It was a fun book, and I particularly enjoyed the stunning and strange descriptions of Lit’s visions. It was also a love letter to the strange art and musical world of the 1970s, with which I am more than a little enamored. Parts of it made little sense to me, and I sometimes found myself wondering about Lit’s motivations, both personal and cosmic. Still, it was a fun read, by turns creepy and exhilarating. "
The Age of Selfishness
Notes:
An interesting and clever graphic novel that links Ayn’s Rand’s objectivist “philosophy” with the 2008 financial crisis, and conservative thinking more broadly.
The book is divided in three sections. The first tells the story of Ayn Rand’s life, and is mostly biographical, with occasional forays into how her philosophy paralleled (and more often diverged) from her interactions with others. The second section describes the 2008 financial crisis, largely as a product of the linkage of selfishness, unfettered capitalism, and greed that Rand espoused as good moral outcomes. Along the way, the book explains credit default swaps, derivatives trading, and the systemic nature of the crash. The third section delves into the differences between liberals and conservatives philosophically, and relies on psychological studies as the primary means of distinction between the two. This is where it goes off the rails a bit, in my opinion. There’s no clear mechanism explaining the relationship between conservatism and unfettered capitalism. Indeed, this linkage is a relatively modern phenomenon–19th century conservatives tended to be protectionists who favored strong state controls on markets. Additionally, rooting political differences in psychology essentially posits politics as a zero-sum game. If our political positions are fixed in childhood and relatively unchanging, there’s no point in making convincing political arguments to anyone, and the goal of politics is essentially decreasing the population of people who don’t agree with you and increasing the population of people who do.
The art is cartoonish, funny, and ironic, and the writing is clear and lucid. All in all, an interesting use of sequential art to work through one of our great modern dilemmas (unfettered capitalism and the inequality it engenders) and an important thinker in that dilemma (Ayn Rand) but not great for working out what to do about it. "
Why Americans Hate Welfare
Notes:
A now-classic study of American attitudes towards anti-poverty policy that strikingly reinforces the notion that racism is crucial to understanding American life. Martin Gilens is a political scientist of distinction who draws together a wide array of opinion data, as well as statistical analysis thereof, to support his assertion that, though Americans in general are both supportive of government efforts to help the poor and are willing to pay higher taxes to do so, they overwhelmingly reject doing so using the most effective methods of direct cash payments, generally known as welfare (the programs themselves were originally called Aid to Dependent Children, and are now called Temporary Assistance to Needy Families). Gilens explanation for this contradiction of generosity and revulsion at programs that provide it centers around a belief that Americans see welfare recipients as members of the ““undeserving poor”"–lazy, shiftless people who refuse to work. Gilens skillfully analyzes the data on welfare and race to show that, for most Americans, ““undeserving”” means Black. Charting the historical stereotypes of Black laziness from their birth in the resistence and work slowdowns by Black folks that characterized plantation slavery, up through the justifications of the Jim Crow era of segregation, Gilens finds striking continuities between how Americans have viewed Black people with Americans view poor people, despite the fact the overwhelming majority of both poor people and people on welfare are White.
There are a number of now famous examples of cognitive dissonance to be found in this book. Most Americans dramatically overestimate how many Black people are welfare recipients. Depictions of Black people in negative media stories about welfare grew dramatically in the 1960s, despite a continued majority of welfare recipients being White. Both Conservative and Liberal politicians are far out of step with public opinion on both the extent and the amount that the government should spend feeding, housing, and educating poor people. These kinds of disjunctures pepper the entire book, and make clear that American opinion on poverty is both generally nuanced and also rut through with racial animus.
I found myself asking some questions of the book, even as I was learning a great deal from it. Gilens makes much use of the concept of stereotypes. But critical studies of racism, particularly more materialist ones, have focused on how stereotypes are sense-making mechanisms for interpreting political and economic structures in society. The whole concept of race was itself invented as a kind of justification for the brutality of chattel slavery. Thus, Gilens points to the media as a kind of antagonist in his story of why Americans hate welfare, but there is a broader story of why America creates and maintains White Supremacist color-lines, and rhetorical devices like ““the undeserving poor”” in the first place. These are not aberrant manifestations of an improper or crude stereotype, but a fundamental symbolic organization and justification of American power.
It is also not clear to me that the same trends in polling would continue to the present day. Gilens was writing at a time when the neoliberal consensus on state welfare was only just coming to fruition. We are now standing in the world it has wrought in its wake, some twenty years after Gilens conducted this research. A whole generation of people have been raised with the notion that the government cannot or should not help them as a moral logic guiding their lives, and as a lived reality. What stereotypes might they moblize to justify this world?
All in all, a striking and powerful study, from which I will certainly draw in the future, both as evidence for a stronger effort to combat poverty, and a foil for why such a fight has thus far been a stalemate.
The Secret of Ventriloquism
Notes:
A really spectacular and creepy collection of interconnected short horror stories. Padgett is writing in the tradition of Thomas Ligotti (and is also the editor of Vastarien, a scholarly journal devoted to serious consideration of Ligotti’s work), and like Ligotti, uses mundane things to signify the horrific, the impossible, and the unknowable. Padgett’s main metaphor throughout these stories is ventriloquism–the trick of making a seemingly inanimate thing speak–and the centerpiece is ““20 Simple Steps to Ventriloquism””, which begins as a how-to guide to throw ones voice and operate a puppet, but slowly reveals itself as an entrypoint into a broader mythology.
More broadly, as the stories progress, it becomes clear that there is a whole not immediately visible in the sum of the parts. Padgett combines this mythology about puppets with a number of interesting setpieces–a series of dreams that gradually overtake reality, a mill town plagued by a reoccurring thick fog that those it consumes, an airplane crash that is both remembered and forgotten, the secret knowledge possessed by the homeless, and more.
All in all a great collection that is terrifying, wondrous, and speaks to the author’s commitment to the craft of horror.”
Mapping the Interior
Notes:
A short, strange ghost story that manages to treat Indigenous lifeways seriously, rather than using them as a ““primitive”” prop.
Junior lives with his mom and brother Dino in a modular home (he’s careful to distinguish it from a trailer) off the reservation where he grew up, and where his family came from. He misses and wonders about his dad, who had died in rather mysterious circumstances when Junior was little. And then he sees him, out of the corner of his eye, in the hallway, and he looks …different. What follows is a story about family,tradition, love, and Fancydancing, with a little time travel and vampirism thrown in.
It’s never clear what reservation Junior and co are from, but if you’ve visited one or lived there, you’ll recognize some of the descriptive passages. And the characters are rich and interesting, especially Dino, whose mental disability is treated honestly, but never masking his obvious humanity. The evocations of Fancydancing are beautiful without being exotic, and are used skillfully to articulate the complex relationship between culture, spirituality, and community.
Plus, it’s creepy and thrilling as hell, both in the supernatural sections and in the parts about the violence and chaos that people bring to each other.
I was inspired to buy this by Debbie Reese (@debreese) ’s Jun 21st Twitter thread (https://twitter.com/debreese/status/877517440724480000) repping Native authors. Steven Graham Jones, who is a member of the Blackfeet Nation, was on the list, and I’m glad that I found his work, which I’m going to dive into as much as possible!"
Starve
Notes:
Cool idea, uneven execution. Gavin Cruickshank, a celebrity chef (clearly modeled on people like Anthony Bourdain) disappears for many years, living in a drunken, drug filled haze in the far east. When he is finally found, he is forced to be a contestant on the show that made him famous, where chefs compete to impress both an opulently rich elite and an increasingly impoverished 99%, in a world hurtling towards environmental and economic collapse. Along the way he’s got to deal with the hatred of his ex-wife, the growing respect of his daughter, and the betrayal of his former best-friend and fellow chef.
I had the most fun with this when Cruikshank was wandering around this future dystopian world and making food. I had less fun when he was arguing with his wife and winning over his daughter, both of whom felt pretty one-dimensional and purposeless. Giving him his own contest reality show to win provides a nice momentum to the story, but honestly, I feel like there’s a more interesting comic to be made where Cruickshank walks the decaying earth, making and talking about food, and using it as a vantage point to think about inequality.
Gun Machine
Notes:
A fun, strange police procedural lain atop an Indigenous landscape. Detective John Tallow’s partner was shot by a deranged man in an apartment building in New York City. When Tallow investigates the adjacent apartment from which the man procured his gun, he finds an elaborate, ritualistic room filled with other guns, all of which have been used in unsolved murders through for the last 20 years. From there, Tallow and his two eccentric colleagues in the Crime Scene Unit (think CSI) try to figure out who kept these guns, and how to stop him.
The book is in some ways a kind of psychogeography of New York, with a particular focus on the Lenape Indigenous landscape that the City and its colonial fore-bearers covered up. At the same time, Tallow’s frequent driving companion is the police radio, and there are numerous scenes where he hears of ludicrious, disgusting, horrifying and saddening crimes being committed in the City he calls home.
The major characters, particularly Bat and Scarly (the two CSU techs) are fun and interesting, although Tallow is a bit of a cipher. Even the villain, a man seemingly living between two times and two cultures, is more filled in than Tallow. The major character in this book is New York City itself–a shining construct of colonial violence that bleeds down into the violence of the present.
Perhaps in the interest of keeping his cards close to his chest, Warren Ellis dumps a lot of exposition and explanation at the end, and that makes the book feel kind of abrupt. Still, this was a lot of fun, and its rare to see a book that treats New York as both a gritty setting for modern crime and a city built on (and still on) Indigenous land and Indigenous lifeways.
Wylding Hall
Notes:
A clever and creepy ghost story about 70s british folk rock, medieval folklore, and the weirdness of the English countryside.
The structure of the book is an oral history of a fictional British folk rock band called Windhollow Faire and the making of their now famous second album ““Wylding Hall””, as told by the remaining band members and other associated folks decades later. The story starts with a tragedy, and as a result of this, the band heads an English manor house called Wylding Hall to record. There are bizarre omens images that pop up around the house–dead birds, rooms full of old and strange books, unexplained sounds, and eventually a mysterious woman in white, later immortalized on the album cover, and whose appearance heralds another tragedy, and the end of the band.
I thought the concept was brilliant. The ““musical oral history”” is a now-popular genre, and is really well mined here for good ghost story staples–unreliable narrators, partial vantage points, and personal confrontation with terror. Plus, I appreciate the ambiguity of Wylding Hall–there’s no grand explanation that ties the whole thing together, and we as readers are given free reign to speculate on what actually happened at Wylding Hall in the early 1970s.
Best Served Cold
Notes:
A dark, unflinching book about revenge and its consequences. Abercrombie’s “First Law Trilogy” was a sprawling epic involving a quest for an ancient weapon, the political machinations of empires and barbarians, and the inability of people to change themselves and their worlds in any great way. It had a billion characters, all of them morally corrupt or broken in some way.
Best Served Cold is a revenge story, centered around Monza Mercatto, the general of the mercenary guild known as the Thousand Swords. She has been working for Duke Orso of the city-state of Talins, who has been trying to conquer the other eight cities in the “league of Eight” and crown himself king of Styria. Expecting to be rewarded for her victories, Orso betrays Monza and her brother, killing him and throwing her off a cliff. She survives, broken and scarred, but with a thirst for vengeance against the Duke and the people who helped him betray her. The rest of the book follows her as she gathers a crew to help her with her bloody business. This crew includes a Northman trying to make a better life in Styria, a master poisoner/assassin, a disgraced former general of the Thousand swords, and an unusual ex-convict with an obsession for numbers.
Abercrombie’s great strength is the brutal poetry with which he describes bodies in motion, whether they are fighting, being tortured, or making love. His descriptions of fight scenes are electric and propulsive, and in the best tradition of people like Robert E. Howard. But he combines this electricity of movement with often powerful meditations on the consequences of violence. This was certainly the case in ““The First Law”” and is amplified in Best Served Cold. Abercrombie is often brutal to even his most sympathetic characters, and no one comes out unscathed, let alone satisfied.
All in all, a vicious and unsparing book set in a rich and vibrant world, with a story that, though told many times before, managed to grab onto me and pull me along effortlessly. "
Worked to the Bone
Notes:
A profound, thoughtful, and wide-ranging historical and anthropological study of how one region (western Kentucky) has been organized for the production of wealth for a very few, and the impoverishment and division (particularly along racial lines) of the many. Such a regional analysis allows her a vantage point to view American history as a power struggle between wealthy elites and the rest of us. Buck uses a metaphor of plumbing (““the drainage system”") to elaborate upon how wealth is funneled from the labor of poor people to wealthy elites. Along the way, she argues that ideology and culture are used to organize a racial division that maintains a ““reserve army”” to keep wages low, and prevent cross-racial and cross-class alliances that would topple the drainage system.
The book begins with the expropriation and genocide of Native people in what is now called Kentucky in the 17th century, and ends with the ““welfare reform”” of the Clinton-Gingrich 1990s. Along the way, Buck highlights how elites have sought to secure legal, economic, and political priveleges for middle class people and poor whites as a ““sugar-coated bargain”” to secure the drainage system. Likewise, she valiantly documents moments at which cross-racial and cross-class alliances have mobilized and secured moments of greater equality, if only temporarily. I found her insights about the relationship between nativism and wealth production particularly insightful, relevant, and terrifying to our current situation.
This is definitely not a history I was taught in high school, but I find it miles more useful for the understanding of the world I’m in.
The Forever War
Notes:
An epic science fiction story that makes clear that extended military campaigns are as much about boredom as they are about action. This is a classic of military science fiction, and I can see why–it combines epic space battles, the problems (and possibilities) of near-lightspeed travel, broad and rich speculations of humanity’s future, and interesting and complicated characters.
The story is a fairly straightforward description of a millenia-long military campaign between human beings and mysterious creatures called the Taurans, from another galaxy. The long distances of the campaign bring up the problems of relativity–the main characters travel at near lightspeeds very quickly and over long distances, but for the rest of humanity on earth, time passes at a normal rate. Thus, even fast military battles are not settled for centuries. Likewise, the main character, William Mandella, manages to experience a millennia-long campaign in just a decade or so.
Haldeman drew on his experiences in Vietnam to write this novel, and he highlights the boredom, and ultimate futility of trans-national (or planetary) war. The characters that Mandella meets along different points in the campaign are interesting and rich, in their own ways. And the book was masterfully written and paced–I was really captivated by it.
Destiny Disrupted
The history I grew up learning centers Europe and its antecedents, and sidelines the rich, complex and lively 1500 year history of the Muslim world. This book provides a readable, engaging counter-narrative that has made painfully clear to me how partial and ineffective a purely Euro-centric history is, and how, despite my broad reading in history, archaeology, and politics, I understand very little about the dynamics of the last two millennia.
I’m going to read it again, and take notes on the many historical figures, events, and broad processes that Ansary outlines, if only to cement my understanding. The book also left me begging some questions about the relationship between Islamic ideas and social relations of the communities that took them up (particularly around trade, and also around gender, and to a lesser extent around different kinds of political authority) that I wanted addressed, but perhaps a second reading will help clear that up. In any case, the prose was conversational and clear–so a second read will be no problem.
So, if you’re coming from a western/Euro-American perspective and want a rich, readable primer on Islam, this is a great place to start. I’m not enough of an expert to evaluate this book against other works, but I certainly got a lot out of it.
Anyas Ghost
Notes:
A wonderful graphic novel that mixes the supernatural with anxieties about immigration, growing up, and responsibility.
Anya is trying to make her way through High school in New England –smoking the occasional elicit cigarette, pining over boys, and chafing against her mother’s attention and her younger brother’s naivete. Her added complication to this already difficult problem is that she emigrated from Russia when she was younger, and has worked hard to blend in despite an accent, and a never-ending stream of hand-me-down clothes.
All of this changes when she uncovers a ghost named Emily after falling down a deep well. Emily follows Anya out of the well, and begins to help her with school work and social life, but as the story moves on, it is clear that not everything with Emily is as it seems, and that Emily may want more of Anya than Anya needs of her.
The art, though cartoonish, wonderfully fits the youthful and expressive quality of the story and characters. Anya is a rich and complicated person, as are most of the rest of the supporting cast of family, friends, and classmates who populate the book. And ultimately, it’s a story about change and growth, and the different paths that come to people who can or can’t deal with adversity.
The Supernatural Enhancements
Notes:
A mixed narrative, espistolary ““ghost”” story about dreams, and the strange network of relationships that bind wildly different people together.
The story is about two people, ““A.”” and Niamh, who move into a house that A. inherits from a distant relative who committed suicide. Once there, they begin experiencing strange phenomena, and exploring the bizarre interests of this relative as they try to figure out why he killed himself. This ultimately leads them into the history of the house, the family, and a kind of secret society to which they belonged. To document the phenomena they’re experiencing, they purchase a great deal of surveillance equipment, including audio recorders, video cameras, and other devices, and the narrative jumps between formal prose, character diary entries, excerpts from fictional books, and seeming ““transcripts”” from those surveillance devices.
The story was interesting, and more complex than the ““spooky noises and shadows in a house”” setup, but the ending left me scratching my head a bit. And though I initially found that I liked the different ““texts””, by the end of the book, the jumping between video transcripts, formal prose, and other narrative forms got a little old. A good, quick read, but nothing I’m likely to pick up again.”
Four Futures
Notes:
Taking as a given that capitalism as it currently exists is not sustainable, Frase examines four possible futures that might emerge, given the configuration of social, political, and ecological life that we are experiencing. Those futures are communism, rentism, socialism, and exterminism. They form a kind of box grid, with axes being related to ecological and political possibility (scarcity vs. abundance, and hierarchy vs. egalitarianism). Thus, communism would be a society of abundance and egalitarianism, rentism would consist of abundance and hierarchy, socialism would consist of scarcity and egalitarianism, and exterminism would be a world of scarcity and hierarchy. Frase is not prescriptive or teleological, but rather is trying to use the circumstances of the world we are currently in (being rife with ecological disaster and increasing automation of production) as a way to think through the possibilities of the world we might be thrown into, or to make for ourselves.
The book is written in a straightforward, readable style that puts it a cut above most dense, leftist political theorizing. It’s short, and uses lots of concrete examples and descriptions of technologies, ecological processes, and historical moments to make its case. I am a little less certain of the demise of capitalism (the standard joke is that Marxists have accurately predicted seven of the last two economic collapses), but the book offers an interesting typology of possibility, and makes a compelling case that the future is ours to choose.
The Dispossessed
Notes:
A smart and sensitive portrayal of a utopia, but without rose-colored glasses, or the freezing of the social dynamics that created the utopia in the first place.
Two planets in the same distant solar system–Annares and Urras–are populated by humans, at approximately contemporary levels of technology. Where Urras is like Earth–lush and ecologically bountiful but full of warring nation-states and vast extremes of inequality, Annares is more desolate, but populated by a group of people who rebelled on Urras and set up a communist utopia based on anarchist principles. The two worlds have limited contact, aside from a semi-regular trading ship that transports agreed-upon beneficial goods.
The story centers around Shevek, a physicist from Annares who, for reasons not made clear until later, is dissatisfied with the state of the communist society in which he lives. Against the wishes of many people, he leaves Annares and visits Urras, where he is embraced for both his scientific achievements and for what he represents–the first Annaresti to return. The rest of the story chronicles his time on Urras, while also jumping back to his childhood and describing how he came to his decision to leave.
Beautifully and thoughtfully written, expertly paced, and with a rich and engaging world, ““The Dispossessed”” gave me a lot to think about, in its treatment of anarchism as a living philosophy, its views of humanity as a product of both individual will and collective structure, and its rich contemplation of time and history, and how both can be cyclical even as they move inexorably forward. I couldn’t put it down.
Victorias Madmen
Notes:
A readable, accessible account of Victorian England, told from the vantage point of the eccentrics and outsiders who constituted a great part of its social and historical momentum. Clive Bloom posits the Victorian Age as one where tensions between progress and nostalgia produced a kind of social psychosis, in the form of Revolution and Alienation. The overall theme of the book is that what we think of as bounded historical ages tend to be made up not of social and cultural unity, but of contradictory and clashing forces and processes.
The book is mostly chronological, starting with Victoria’s ascension to the Throne and Ending in the interwar period. It focuses around people, rather than events. Some of them I knew (Oscar Wilde, Aleister Crowley, Pyotr Kropotkin, Arthur Conan Doyle), while others were little or not known to me. Some of that may be from being an American and not having a strong sense of 19th century English history, but there were clearly other characters that have been largely forgotten by most people (the section on religious zealots and ““messiahs”” was full of interesting and forgotten cranks).
There were some sections (particularly the chapter on Wilde) where I felt like I was missing something, or should have had more of a background to understand what Bloom was trying to say. And the selection of characters was particularly eclectic–it was sometimes hard to know why some characters were chosen or highlighted and others not.
Still, overall an enjoyable book if you’re interested in 19th century England.
Tomie
Notes:
I quite enjoyed Uzumaki, Junji Ito’s strange and terrifying epic of a town infested with and ultimately consumed by spirals. It was weird, and beautifully rendered, and even translated into English, beautifully written. Tomie is as strange and gorgeous, but I was so bothered by its implications that I can’t recommend it as emphatically.
This story focuses on a girl, named Tomie, who entrances any man that she meets and ultimately works them into such a frenzy that they kill her and dismember her. However, she also is seemingly immortal, and each fragment of her thus produced grows into a new version of her. There isn’t even really an overarching story (as there is in Uzumaki). Rather, its told as a series of vignettes. The story jumps around between a wide variety of characters who intersect with Tomie. Most go mad, or die, or meet an otherwise sticky end. Tomie likewise is not really a character herself; when she does speak, it’s to selfishly demand expensive gifts or to ridicule those around her as unattractive, stupid, or worthless.
And here we get to the problem of the book–I feel like this is a male fever dream about violence against women. Here the titular character is inescapably beautiful, petulant, and demanding of attention…and it is these qualities that lead men to sadistically murder her and chop her up. A woman who embodies the worst sexist stereotypes forces men to do violence to her (and to others, in some cases). Men who beat women, or rape them, or otherwise abuse them, frequently draw on such stereotypes as justifications. Maybe Ito thought he was writing a satire–certainly there are comedic elements in the story, as when (in one vignette) a group of men are so entranced by Tomie that they pile on to what they think is her body and carve each other up in a fight over her while she escapes with another man. But for this book to be a satire, someone would need to question the stereotypical idea that women’s behavior is the cause of their own violation. And no one does that anywhere in the book. If Ito is assuming his readers should already have dispelled that idea from their head, he is likewise assuming that the cultural pool of stereotypes from which he drew Tomie is not pernicious and broadly embraced. And I don’t think he’s right.
I can’t knock Ito’s talent–the art and story are rich and compelling as with Uzumaki. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was just an excuse to show women being dismembered because they deserved it.
Scowler
Notes:
“A vicious and brutal book about families, and how the past is always chasing the present. I’m not even sure that I liked it, but it was definitely gripping.
Ry is 18, and living with his mother, Jo Beth, and his sister Sarah in their farmhouse in some unstated rural part of America. Nine years earlier, Ry’s sadistic father Marvin was sent to prison for abusing Jo Beth and nearly killing Ry when he tried to stop it. Ry drew on the help of three of his favorite childhood toys to help him escape and ultimately subdue his father.
A meteor shower looms over the whole story (each chapter starts with the time until the collision), and sets in motion another confrontation between Ry and his father, and the return (perhaps in Ry’s head, perhaps animated by some alien force) of his childhood toys as aids.
Unlike most stories about a smart child and a violent father, this isn’t a book about brains triumphing over brawn. Indeed, the book points to a darker outcome–that the only way to defeat violence is with greater violence, and that children will always take on even the worst aspects of their parents. Their only hope is to channel those aspects to better ends.
This was a hard read, as a parent, and particularly one who is trying to live in a non-violent household. Additionally, the book was over-the-top violent (on par with the “Saw” movies, imho), and I found myself wondering, as others have, how this was classed as a young-adult book.
To its credit, it was masterfully paced and poetically written–it had a kind of “southern gothic” feel to it, with lots of flowery descriptions of wild nature, and doomed and tragic characters trying to make their way out of their tragedy. I’m just not sure that the message of the book is one I agree with, and or that the grotesque means of delivering that message were necessary to get it across. "
Dreamland
Notes:
An astonishing and rich tour through the ecology of pain in the late 20th and early 21st century.
Quinones tells two parallel stories in this book–the story of how Oxycontin was vastly over-prescribed, and seen as a panacea for pain management, and the story of how black tar heroin spread to much of rural, and post-industrial America. Both are stories about the triumph of smart, streamlined business models, and both are stories of the ways in which pain is a signifier of broader social ills, not just individual injury.
It’s an amazing story that brings together a small village in Mexico, medicaid and social assistance policy, doctors and medical researchers, Wal-mart (the chapter on Wal-mart was particularly stunning and strange), de-industrial and suburban America, pharmaceutical marketing, and many other actors and groups. In this sense, it reminded me of ““The Wire”” with its insistence on richly documenting the lives of people along the drug trade.
Quinones gives equal time to addicts, dealers, health professionals, law enforcement, and survivors, and the book is unsparing in its description of the impact of addiction. At the same time, it paints a human face on the men and boys from Mexico who work the black tar heroin trade in the US, most of whom are working class, and see the non-violent, low stress job of selling heroin as a means of gaining social stability for themselves and their families.
It also makes clear that the broader landscape of pain management is not divorceable from the ravages of untrammeled capitalism. The communities most impacted by addiction were deindustrial, or post-industrial towns. Wal-Mart played a significant role in the pain economy because it was both the primary source for goods in many towns, and also faceless enough that theft and grifting were easy to do. Likewise, Oxycontin’s wide distribution was a triumph of de-regulation, creative (and ultimately fraudulent) marketing, and neoliberal business models.
Honestly, I couldn’t put it down. It’s a book about America in the 21st century–shocked by unregulated capitalism, increasingly atomized and isolated, and where the old institutions of social and cultural order had failed. And yet, the book ends with some promising developments–community activism and discussion around addiction, and a shift in some local drug policy towards treatment rather than jail.
Mutual Aid
Notes:
If you know leftist politics, you’ve probably heard of Pyotr Kropotkin–the 19th century Russian noble who became a raging, righteous anarchist. He was also a scientist, and a rich and deep reader of biology, history, anthropology, and numerous other fields.
The basis of this book is an attempt to find what Kropotkin called ““the principle of mutual aid”” in a wide variety of historical and biological circumstances. This is the idea that species, as well as social groups, use cooperation and mutual support as survival mechanisms, even as individuals within such groups may default to competition. Kropotkin begins by surveying animal species that internally rely on cooperation as a mechanism of survival in difficult or dangerous environments. From there, he moves to anthropology, positing that it was humanity’s sense of mutual aid that allowed it to survive in eastern Africa, and spread throughout the world in the pleistocene and holocene epochs. He follows this principle of mutual aid through European history, examining medieval village life, urban guilds, and industrial unionization efforts.
What I liked most about this book is that it stands against the idea that cooperation, communism, and mutualism have to be created out of whole cloth (this is the basis of some Marxist thinking–e.g. socialism will only occur after a mobilized proletarian revolution). What Kropotkin argued persuasively is that there are cooperative, communist tendencies operating every day, and that such tendencies have existed for millions of years, and have been fundamentally necessary to the survival and happiness of individuals and groups throughout that long span of time. Such tendencies exist alongside more selfish, competitive, or coercive tendencies. Kropotkin never denied this, but writing, as he was, in the age of social darwinism, he felt it important to emphasize the significant role that Mutual Aid and communism have played in human and biological history. "
Pretty Deadly 2
Notes:
I liked but didn’t love the first volume of Pretty Deadly, a graphic novel by Kelly Sue DeConnick and Emma Rios, with a complicated mythology about death and the afterlife, set in the ““Old West”” of the United States. I was trying to follow the story, which is both non-linear, and deliberately cryptic and ambiguous. But reading volume 2 I’ve realized that I love it, and that I just need to read it differently.
What has sold me are Emma Rios’s stunning layouts and gorgeous pencils, which are as abstract and rich as anything ever printed in US and European comics. The closest analogue I can find would be John Totleben and Stephen Bissette’s more artistically adventurous designs on Swamp Thing, but Rios is in a whole class by herself. I found myself lingering on whole pages, following lines and shapes without caring about the story as much. Then I would go and read the dialog and it all fit in place. Now I need to go back and re-read volume one and get my head on straight.
Really, really brilliant. "
Bedbugs
Notes:
A taught, creepy thriller about family, madness, urban life, and pest control.
Susan, Alex, and their daughter Emma move into an astonishingly cheap, gorgeous apartment in Brooklyn, New York. It seems too good to be true…and perhaps it is, as right from the move-in, things seem off. There are strange noises emanating from somewhere inside the building, an odd handyman who just stands outside the building at night, and tantalizing clues that the previous tenants met some horrible end. When Susan starts to see things that no one else seems to see, she chocks it up to the incredible stress of the move, but it’s not clear whether there is something menacing lurking under the facade of this perfect apartment, or if Susan is simply going crazy.
The story is reminiscent of the great psychological thrillers of the 70s–Polanski’s ““the Tenant”” especially–in that the previous residents become the ghosts of the current resident, metaphorically or literally. Plus, it’s also clear that the dynamics of the family play a strong role in how they interpret the strange phenomena they are experiencing. When the bugs finally do arrive, it’s not clear whether they are real, or a psychological manifestation of Susan’s growing distance from Alex, or something even more sinister, related to the history of the house, and the potential of violence lurking under its mundane exterior.
