Jan 04 2018

Taking Stock of 2017

This was a good year for reading. No household relocations, no major changes on the job front, no international incidents. That adds up to a longer list of books (somewhat eclectically defined) read than any year since I began keeping these lists.

Voting for the Hugo award drove a lot of my reading in the middle of the year. It definitely increased the amount of what I read, and this list does not include all the works in various categories — fanzine, graphic story — that I read as part of making my choices. My choices were interestingly at odds with other voters. I would have given the award to N.K. Jemisin for her short story, rather than for The Obelisk Gate. The novella I liked best placed fifth in voting, while the novelette I liked best was the one that won. The other voters shared my enthusiasm for Words Are My Matter by Ursula K. Le Guin. All in all, being a Hugo voter was a rewarding experience, quite apart from the great joy that was the Worldcon itself. I hope to do it again in 2019 for Dublin, an Irish Worldcon.

Hugo reading was just part of a good year for authors who are new to me, although it brought several to my attention: Yoon Ha Lee, Becky Chambers, Kai Ashante Wilson, Kij Johnson, Victor LaValle. Beyond the Hugo finalists, authors whose work was new to me and left me wanting more include Ben H. Winters and Andrey Platonov.

Communist legacies turned up in a fair amount of this year’s reading, architecturally with Landscapes of Communism and Soviet Bus Stops, directly with Lenin on the Train, Conversations with Stalin, The Last Man in Russia and Revolutionary Russia, fictionally in The Foundation Pit, and as part of the big picture in Postwar, The Ottoman Endgame, and Germany: Memories of a Nation.

This year past, I read four books in German, eight graphic works, ten Discworld books, one Shakespeare play, and three books in translation (one from Russian, one from Polish, and one from Serbo-Croatian). I am fairly certain that I read I, Robot many years ago, so I re-read one book in 2017. (ETA: Whoops, I have read Macbeth numerous times. I just overlooked it in the list when I put this overview together. So that makes two.)

The non-fiction book I am most likely to read again is We Were Eight Years in Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates. The non-fiction book with the most passages flagged for the review I am still working on is What Happened by Hillary Rodham Clinton, even if it is missing two words from its title. The fiction that has stayed with me the most includes Underground Airlines, The Foundation Pit, and A Taste of Honey. At least two of those three are about terribly repressive societies. Sign of the times?

Best book expressing a view about brass instruments goes to A Devil to Play by Jasper Rees. Best cover belongs to Lenin on the Train. Best scene whose outcome you already know is the one with the crossbow and the apple in Wilhelm Tell. Best geeking out on an obscure topic has to be China Among Equals. Best book with the word “fifth” in the title was The Fifth Elephant, although the best Discworld book was The Truth, even though the best single scene in a Discworld book was very likely the opening of Carpe Jugulum, with Granny Weatherwax called in to assist a midwife at an emergency birth.

Full list, roughly in order read, is under the fold with links to my reviews and other writing about the authors here at Frumious.

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Jan 03 2018

The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett

What a lovely start! In The Wee Free Men, the thirtieth Discworld book and the second explicitly marked as intended for young adults, Terry Pratchett introduces Tiffany Aching, a young witch who would go on to feature in four more novels, including Pratchett’s last. Likewise, he introduces a new setting, a rural area known as the Chalk. It’s sparsely settled by shepherds and a few farmers.

At the beginning, Tiffany naturally does not know that she’s a witch. She knows she’s been left to look after her baby brother again. She doesn’t know that Miss Perspicacia Tick, a wandering witch and misfortune-teller (“Ordinary fortune-tellers tell you what you want to happen; witches tell you what’s going to happen whether you want it to or not. Strangely enough, witches tend to be more accurate but less popular.” (p. 2) So Miss Tick tells misfortunes.) has seen two of the main problems already and is watching Tiffany to see how she fits. The first is that there is a “definite ripple in the walls of the world. Very worrying. There’s probably another world making contact. That’s never good.” (p. 2) It’s a common Discworld danger, and long-time readers know that trouble is not far away. Miss Tick can sense that there’s another witch near the incursion, but “You can’t grow a good witch on chalk. The stuff’s barely harder than clay. You need good hard rock to grow a witch.” (p. 2)

Tiffany turns out to be right at the border where the other world — and more to the point something with long skinny arms, “a thin face with long sharp teeth, huge round eyes and dripping green hair like waterweed” (p. 5) — is trying to come through to the Chalk. She scoops up her baby brother just in time and dashes away, not so much scared as mortally offended that a monster would turn up in her river. Back home, she pages through her grandmother’s old book of fairy tales until she finds a description of what she has just seen. Tiffany then grabs an iron skillet, a bag of sweets as bait for her brother, her brother as bait for the monster, and returns to the river to sort things out.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/01/03/the-wee-free-men-by-terry-pratchett/

Jan 02 2018

Mission Child by Maureen F. McHugh

Mission Child begins on the other side of the Prime Directive. The first-person narrator, Janna, is a member of a renndeer-herding clan on a world that isn’t Earth but that was colonized by humans at some point in the unspecified past. Settlement took place long enough ago that an indigent species has been re-engineered to be domesticated and to provide sustenance to the humans who herd them. Janna’s people are settled, and live in an appropriate-technology mission. The situation read to me a bit like Peace Corps among the reindeer people. The clans live from their herds and from hunting, plus a bit of gathering the indigenous plants that can provide nutrition to humans. It’s a hard life, made hard by life in the world’s arctic zone, and harder still by what their fellow humans will do. Two technologies that are present among the reindeer people are alcohol and guns. Those two, plus a surfeit of testosterone and no small amount of greed, arrogance and stupidity lead to the first, defining, catastrophe of the book.

McHugh shows readers what warfare among the nomads looks like, and it’s brutal. Her portrayal is by no means gratuitous, but it is unsparing, and as hard as the northern winter is cold.

Janna survives, but on her long trek out of the tundra and taiga she decides that appearing to be a man is safer, so she becomes Jan, and it is as Jan that she spends the middle of the book as a kinless foreigner at the margins of the teeming cities of the industrializing south. This part of the book reminded me very much of Peter Hessler’s portrayals of reform-era China, with Janna as a Uighur or Mongolian, trying to find a place in the city, discovering some of her own people on the margins, adapting to new ways and holding on to other parts of her upbringing. Her childhood at the mission also marks her as separate, even among the other nomads who have come to the city, and even more separate from the second-generation people who have grown up in the city but are still marked as foreign by the dominant culture. There are also wonderful illustrations of how something that looks like shiftlessness to job-holding city people is the fulfillment of solemn obligations when seen from the former nomad’s point of view. There are also clear-eyed portrayals of how structural conditions — impossibly long commutes, dependence on frayed networks of social support — can keep people excluded and on the margins, quite apart from conscious discrimination.

Later, Jan finds herself still further south, where her appearance marks her as even more exotic, which combined with continued presentation as male (and her background gives her the size and strength to make it convincing) leads her into manual work and being hired as an occasional guard. She suspects that the merchant who hires her wants the mystique of someone who looks like her more than the actual muscle and rifle that she provides, but in due course she is also called on to fight. The repercussions of that fight form the last third of the novel, one that brings her full circle into questions of appropriate technology for this world, and the legacy of her formative years as a mission child.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/01/02/mission-child-by-maureen-f-mchugh/

Dec 30 2017

Rich People Problems (Crazy Rich Asians #3) by Kevin Kwan

The third book in the series felt like the weakest, and tho Kevin Kwan tried to make a point about how the old guard are mostly a bunch of racist elitists who are insecure because they inherited everything instead of making their own fortunes, I really felt like that one scene was just a ham-handed insertion into a book surprisingly short on social commentary. I did appreciate Astrid’s realization about the ways in which her parents had raised her to be fearful but, to be quite frank, the book felt too much like a rejection of Asian manners for a more flash Western ethos, and that didn’t sit well with me. Consider the juxtaposition of her speech to Charlie on the subject with having sex on a public beach. I have nothing against public displays of affection/sexuality but the people having sex should both be aware of it, ffs. Rachel and Nick were as irritating as always — yes, it is annoying how Asian parents pressure you to have children, and yes, it is absurd the lengths that they’ll go to in order to pressure you, but that doesn’t mean you have to behave like a jackass in return. It is possible to thwart one’s parents’ plans for you without causing a scene and/or severing ties with them (I’ve done it, goodness knows, as have innumerable Austen heroines.) It is possible to be independent and kind all at once, and I wish that was the contrast Mr Kwan had chosen instead of having our “heroes” just be assholes to their parents.

Anyway, I was very happy for Kitty and Peik Lin, and honestly believe that Kitty’s growth throughout the series has been one of the strongest things these books have going for them. And while I was happy for Oliver, I think a little more growth/poverty would have suited him, as well. Also, Mr Kwan knows that not all Malay women, royal or otherwise, wear a head covering, right? Threads were wrapped up neatly even if, I dunno, I felt like the Astrid-Charlie thing got really weak towards the end and I don’t even know how to explain it. I think that, as with Nick and Rachel, their (or Mr Kwan’s) idea of Asian rebellion was to wind up being Western middle class. Which is very disappointing because a) that’s boringly cliched, and b) it’s possible to break the shackles of tradition without disrespecting the perfectly good ideals, a/o simply “aping the West”, to use a phrase that was done to death by critics of such when I was growing up. This could have been a lot better and wiser, like the works of fellow Singaporean Ovidia Yu, or the more overtly Austen-inspired Moni Mohsin. As it is, Rich People Problems is the perfectly respectable, conventional, dull finish to a series that started out full of satirical, witty promise. Worth reading for Kitty, and to see who inherits Tyersall Park, but not much else.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/12/30/rich-people-problems-crazy-rich-asians-3-by-kevin-kwan/

Dec 26 2017

China Rich Girlfriend (Crazy Rich Asians, #2) by Kevin Kwan

I think the thing I found most infuriating about this book was how it was taken as a matter of course that everyone would be so incredibly disrespectful of their parents. I mean, I’m not terribly close to my own parents and have gone my quietly rebellious way from what they had in mind for me, but I’ve never been as horrifyingly rude and confrontational as over half the “kids” (really 20- to 30-somethings) in China Rich Girlfriend. Sure, parents can be overbearing and unreasonable, but that doesn’t justify any of the spoiled brat behavior on display in this novel. And, of course, the insufferable Rachel and Nick go along with any and all of it so long as it doesn’t directly impact their own lives. Oh, because of course, Rachel and Nick are just as bad.

God, I hate those two. Nick was just boring in Crazy Rich Asians, but in this second book of the series, he’s become obnoxious, too. And it kills me how everyone pretends that Nick wasn’t aware of how “badly” Rachel was being treated in Singapore: barring the dead fish incident (and even then, Sophie was at hand to help!) she was treated pretty damn nicely till Nick announced that he wanted to marry her (and then he was around and reacting when his mom and grandma were unkind, so wtf. And Francesca’s announcement? Was just Rachel being a fucking baby.) Just because people weren’t falling all over themselves to be friendly to the American doesn’t mean they were cruel to her.

She does get a little better in this book but ugh, I was really rooting for her to exit the series permanently. Fortunately, we spend a good chunk of the novel with the wonderful Astrid and the terrific duo of Kitty and Corinna. It’s quite impressive how Kevin Kwan “rehabilitates” Kitty from the opportunist of CRA to the woman trying hard to fit in here in CRG (tho never fear, Kitty doesn’t lose any of her scheming pluck.) I freaking loved her partnership with Corinna, especially in the scene where they were discussing what to do about Gisele. And oh my darling Astrid and Charlie! I love/ship them SO HARD. I knew at the end of CRA that Astrid ought to leave Michael exactly because of what happens here in CRG: men who tie up their ego in money will never be healthy and happy no matter how much or little money they have.

Anyway, I felt this book wasn’t quite as strong as CRA due mostly to less Eleanor, and I think this book also drew less societal parallels and spent more time on gossipy set pieces. It was also irritating that people in the Rachel-Nick orbit were considered good or bad only in relation to that dreary duo. Honestly, Carlton and Colette are just as bad as each other, but Carlton gets a pass because he’s nicer to Rachel than Colette is? What the fucking ever.

I’m sure Book 3 will have more Astrid and Kitty (yay!) but I’m hoping for more Peik Lin than just the cameo she had in this book. If Rachel and Nick would just kindly fuck off in the last book, it would be perfect, tho I’m not holding my breath. Kudos to Mr Kwan for making me feel so personally invested in these people, even as I wish he were capable of writing as well as he aspires to. I know he means for Rachel to be sympathetic, but his writing of her is so intensely wooden that it’s hard to do anything but suppress a groan and an eye roll during her scenes. She’s not funny or charming or nice or anything but the most boringly middle-class Asian person I’ve read of in recent memory, and a terrible construct to hang a book series off of.

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Dec 25 2017

Edgedancer (The Stormlight Archive #2.5) by Brandon Sanderson

Hahaha, one of the other reviews of this I read said something along the lines of Lift being like DeeDee from Dexter’s Laboratory and I was all “yassss, I love her!” which prolly wasn’t the other reviewer’s intent but he sounds boring anyway.

So! If you are bothered by exuberant protagonists whose primary concern is usually filling their bellies, then you may not like this novella, but I found Lift to be a hilarious and charming reminder of my own pubescent years (excepting her mulish insistence on illiteracy, tho I was sympathetic to her desire to not grow up and have to accept the burdens of maturity.) It was a surprisingly great meditation on what it’s like to be a girl at that age, not wanting to give up the joys of childhood but knowing that your body will betray you to adulthood anyway, and the too-real but under-discussed fear of how girls so easily lose control of their autonomy in the face of society’s expectations of womanhood. I’m not surprised that Brandon Sanderson wrote such a terrific feminist novella but I continue to be in awe of his powers of empathy and expression. The compassion Lift shows, particularly on the rooftop, made me weep: I could never be that good a person, but she and Mr Sanderson make me think I could one day try.

I don’t know how well this novella reads on its own but you should all be reading all his books anyway. Edgedancer is a crucial part of the Stormlight Archives and I daresay that certain parts of Oathbringer (Book 3 of the series) will make little sense unless you read this first. Oh! One thing that did make me go hmm was the fact that Yeddaw exists in its present state and NO ONE thought to link its structure to the Shattered Plains before Shallan? An unusual misstep in an otherwise very well-thought-out cosmology.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/12/25/edgedancer-the-stormlight-archive-2-5-by-brandon-sanderson/

Dec 25 2017

Season’s Greetings

A little light reading.

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Dec 23 2017

Crazy Rich Asians (Crazy Rich Asians #1) by Kevin Kwan

I really liked this book, with one huge exception, which I’ll get to in a minute. It’s a very accurate depiction of life among the jetset in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong, which I grew up lifestyle-adjacent to as an upper middle-class kid in Malaysia. Much has been written about how South and Southeast Asia have become the epicenter of Georgian-era, Austen-esque marriage plots in real life due to their structures of economies, class and morals, and Crazy Rich Asians continues in the tradition of exposing this fascinating lifestyle. Kevin Kwan nails the society to the wall, parading out perfect approximations of real-life people and taking the reader on an evocative and eerily accurate tour of their environs and lifestyles. He does all this with wit and style, making for a thoroughly entertaining read. Yes, it occasionally drags when he’s busy piling on brand name after brand name (and his Malay is definitely off) but overall the book is quite well-written, especially when it comes to Astrid and Charlie. I love Charlie so much, and I can’t wait to see Harry Shum Jr play him in the upcoming movie.

Speaking of the upcoming movie reminds me of my main problem with this book. Apparently, the studio floated the idea of having the ostensible heroine, Rachel, be a white girl instead of a Chinese-American. After reading this book, I honestly don’t think that was as offensive a suggestion as it is without context, since Rachel is such a basic bitch that it doesn’t even matter to the text if she’s Asian. Honestly, if I could trade her at Dave Chappelle’s Racial Draft, I totally would. Aside from her racial heritage meaning incredibly little to her (which, honestly, is the least of her problems,) she is AWFUL. She refuses to date Asian men on “principle” before meeting Nick; she admits that she doesn’t relate to most Asians, American or otherwise; she’s condescending to new people (seriously, I cringed at her responses to Araminta’s friendliness when they were first introduced); she’ll dump a guy over an ex-girlfriend from half his life ago; she says the shittiest things to the mom that she’s supposedly super close to: she’s such an asshole that we keep being told is “charming” and capable of adapting to new situations, when she’s clearly not. I agree that Nick should have told her beforehand that his family is really, really wealthy and private but I can understand why his upbringing made that really hard to do. What I can’t understand is why I’m supposed to like this nothing heroine who is a collection of attributes entirely devoid of being an interesting, much less charming, personality. I don’t understand why Nick likes her, and I don’t understand why Peik Lin is so kind to her (Peik Lin is also one of my favorite characters and I’m rather glad Mr Kwan did not turn her into a rival.) I can certainly understand why Eleanor dislikes her tho!

Anyway, I’m waiting on the sequels from the library and hoping that either Rachel gets better fast or that we’re spared more of her whining mediocrity. I want more Astrid and Charlie and Peik Lin and Oliver and Fiona and, quite frankly, Eleanor and Su Yin (I’m also interested in seeing how far Araminta will go with her newfound dislike of Astrid.) I’d be perfectly happy for Rachel and Nick to ride off into the sunset together so I don’t have to read about her any more, as long as I can keep reading about the rest of the actually interesting characters and settings and food (because also this book is literary food porn at its best.)

Oh! And for people not from the area who say Henry Golding shouldn’t play Nick because he’s not actually Chinese, you can go fuck yourselves. He’s an Asian guy indigenous to the region who’s lived most of his life there and you fuckers don’t understand how culture is as important as race when it comes to being a Singaporean or Malaysian. I am as proud to be American as I am proud to be Malaysian but I really hate it when morons from either side pontificate on shit they know nothing about. It is far, far more offensive to a SEAsian for some person not from the region to play a native than for a local to play a person of another local race. I understand that it’s different in the West and that’s fine, just don’t force your cultural sensibilities on others under the pretense of moral outrage: it’s a worse look than the book’s Shaw women’s tackiness.

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Dec 22 2017

Wrapping Up

Time for some short takes, to mostly clear the desk for the coming year.

The Inexplicables by Cherie Priest. In the fourth of her five Clockwork Century novels, Priest takes a stab at telling her story mostly from the point of view of an unsympathetic narrator. Rector Sherman is an addict, hooked on the “sap,” a distillation of the strange gas that has blighted frontier Seattle and turns people who breathe too much of it into zombies. Priest also hints, as she did in Ganymede, that the same fate awaits people who take sap for too long. The action of the book turns on two developments behind the wall that has contained the gas and turned Seattle into a strange half-alive place, with monsters above ground, human settlement below, and zeppelins shuttling in and out with their illicit cargo. First, criminals from elsewhere have heard of the demise of Seattle’s previous kingpin and are trying to move in on the territory. Second, a new kind of monster has appeared on the streets, bigger and more fearsome than the zombies. Priest brings the action, even if I figured out the mystery well in advance. I also liked the artistic stretch of telling this kind of story through a character who’s basically a jerk. It’s not easy to pull off, and she does it well.

The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin. Some of George Orr’s dreams come true. Not in any trivial sense, but in the sense of the whole of reality reshaping itself around his effective dreams. When he was younger, an aunt stayed too long at George’s house. He dreamed that she had died in a car accident, and woke up into a world in which she had been buried six months previously, after a crash, and had never come to visit. Only George remembers the previous reality, and that only dimly sometimes. Fearing his power, trying to suppress his dreams, and losing his sanity, George goes to a psychiatrist who specializes in dream and sleep. The doctor has no such fears and no scruples. He uses hypnosis to steer George’s dreams, and he uses George’s power to reshape the world, alleviating overpopulation, eliminating racism, and more. Dystopias ensue. In its approach to sleep research, drugs, and mental health The Lathe of Heaven is a very 1970s book. Overpopulation as a major concern is also very much of the era in which it was written. On the other hand, the considerations of unlimited power, of human relationships, of what makes a good world are perennial questions, and the situation that Le Guin has set up lets her cut directly to the heart of these matters.

The Woman Who Walked in Sunshine by Alexander McCall Smith. In this tale of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, Mma Ramotswe is persuaded to take a holiday. She takes a few days away from her office, but like many founders and owners of a small business she finds it difficult to believe that things can go well in her absence. Events appear to bear out her worries, as one of the staff comes to her in confidence, saying that the acting director has saddled him with responsibility but not the means to undertake his appointed tasks. Of such seemingly small things are these lovely books made, populated with characters that readers cherish, enmeshed in the natural conflicts of being human in a complicated world. Some appearances are deceiving, while others are not but the characters do not wish to see what is plainly in front of them. Some characters make mistakes, and they may or may not learn from them, as depends on their nature. I love the warmth of these books, and while I suspect that a parody of them would be hilarious, I cannot bring myself to be cynical about them. I have two more to go before I am fully caught up, but I suspect that Smith may write another before then, and that is perfectly fine with me.

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Dec 16 2017

The Frangipani Tree Mystery (Crown Colony #1) by Ovidia Yu

So, full disclaimer, Ovidia Yu sent me this herself as we’ve developed a quite friendly professional relationship. I super love her Aunty Lee mystery series, feeling it’s gone from strength to strength as the series progresses, so I was quite thrilled to receive the first in Ms Yu’s new series. The setting is terrific — I am always partial to books that do justice to the region I come from, and Ms Yu writes about Singapore with both skill and love — and Su Lin is a wonderful heroine. The mystery is also well done: I suspected but wasn’t sure of the identity of the murderer till the very end.

But. I don’t know why the writing bothered me so much. I know Ms Yu is an excellent writer (please, everyone, read Meddling And Murder, which is one of the best books to come out of Singapore ever) so I don’t know how to explain how weirdly underwritten The Frangipani Tree Mystery felt in parts. It didn’t flow well at all, and while I liked Su Lin, I didn’t feel immersed in her experiences at any point in the book. Given how immediately sympathetic I found her, this was a very strange position to find myself in. There are parts of the book that are very good, usually having to do with Su Lin’s family or her interactions with other locals, but most of the scenes with white people felt stilted and unnatural (also, poorly edited. Most glaringly, how did Dee-dee know Su Lin’s name at the beginning?) Which reminds me of the (few) weaknesses of Ms Yu’s debut mystery, Aunty Lee’s Delights, and leads me to wonder whether TFTM reads so oddly because the white people are inescapable in it, and perhaps Ms Yu is uncomfortable in her fictionalization of them (tho again that wasn’t so much a problem in Aunty Lee’s Chilled Revenge, so I don’t even know.)

Anyway, I’m very eager to see where we go next with this series because so much about it is promising, and I know Ms Yu can deliver. If you just want to immerse yourself in a historical mystery tho, in a time and place that isn’t often (if ever?) covered by the genre, this isn’t a bad book for it. I just know Ms Yu can write better than this quite entertaining, if somewhat stilted, novel.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/12/16/the-frangipani-tree-mystery-crown-colony-1-by-ovidia-yu/