Dec 22 2014

Carniepunk: Daughter of the Midway, the Mermaid, and the Open Lonely Sea by Seanan McGuire

This was a short story by Seanan McGuire that was part of the Carniepunk anthology released last year (2013). It is, like all of Seanan McGuire’s/Mira Grant’s books, an absolutely delectable piece of writing. I realize that I’m verging on the edge of hyperbole, but truly I have yet to read anything by Seanan McGuire that didn’t please me. She covers such a variety of genres – Science Fiction/Fantasy, including her October Daye series which deals with the Fae in a modern world, to the Incryptid series, which is probably a cryptozoologist’s dream come true and has a gritty urban fantasy setting. Don’t leave the zombies out, though, because she’s written about those as well, in her Newsflesh trilogy. She’s also written about parasites gone awry in her Parasitology series, which I believe is loosely connected to the Newsflesh series.

And, now, here we are, with a short story that combines carnivals and mythical creatures in a beautiful, self-contained little snippet of wonder and curiosity. Ada has lived her entire life with the carnival, traveling across the country to various small towns and learning and loving the carnie life. She has a secret, though, one that she inherited from her mother, and when the carnival decides to stop in her father’s hometown in Alabama, well, things begin to happen. I won’t say more because this is a short story, and to say more would leave nothing for the reader to discover.

This story was perfect on its own. It caught my interest immediately, and I read about each character avidly, waiting to find out what was happening to everyone and how things would turn out. The ending was satisfactory for a short story, but it did leave me wanting more. I would love to see a series about Ada and her carnie family someday.

I highly recommend reading this short story, or even buying the entire anthology if you enjoy carnivals and steampunk and things that go bump in the night.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/12/22/carniepunk-daughter-of-the-midway-the-mermaid-and-the-open-lonely-sea-by-seanan-mcguire/

Dec 20 2014

Horseman (The Hollow #1) by Christopher Golden and Ford Lytle Gilmore

Interesting take on the Sleepy Hollow/Headless Horseman mythology that was undermined by serious plot holes and obvious plot devices. The book is written in a very cinematic manner, and clearly serves as the lead-in to a series, but I spent way too much time being annoyed with Aimee and then with the writers for so obviously shoe-horning the characters into dramatic action scenes instead of letting them develop in a way that felt unforced. Not a piece of YA literature I would recommend to anyone who isn’t looking for a fast, slight read a/o a twist on the traditional Sleepy Hollow tales.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/12/20/horseman-the-hollow-1-by-christopher-golden-and-ford-lytle-gilmore/

Dec 19 2014

Persian Fire by Tom Holland

I have read other books on the Greco-Persian wars, but this was the most readable account I have come across, and the rendering of the battle of Thermopylae was the best I have ever read. The courage and resourcefulness of the Greeks is well documented, but the author also gives the Persians their due, arguing that they were by no means the ignoble barbarians that the Greeks and later western historians have regarded them as. Indeed, if one regards the outcome of wars as manifesting the will of God, one might well wonder why God sided with the pagan, homosexual Greeks against the monotheistic, heterosexual Persians. Persia was a great civilization in its own right, and deserves more respect than jingoistic western scholars have afforded it. Nevertheless, the preservation of Greek freedom and autonomy was undoubtedly a boon to the West, one which we still benefit from today. We Westerners are all the heirs of Thermopylae.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/12/19/persian-fire-by-tom-holland/

Dec 18 2014

Oryx and Crake – Margaret Atwood

Let’s face it, Oryx and Crake is not a book you’d read for the plot. I mean, it’s there, vaguely. Mankind wiped from the world, a new species there to take its place. It is a story of what leads up to the end of man, and what it means to be alive afterwards.

 

I am a post-apocalyptic junkie. I love stories of devastation and chaos, of struggle and despair. And there is enough in Snowman’s story to fulfil that desire for me. He is a man alone, in a world that no longer fits him, that he has a hard time surviving in. But it becomes clear that the world itself has no changed. Instead it is the absence of a society that cushioned and contained them all. Gone are the climate controlled homes, the mass produced food, the image of security.

 

But what the world became was secondary to what the world had been. And this, with my love of deep thought, is where my enjoyment of the book lay. There are questions that Atwood gives a particular version of answer to in this first book of the MaddAddam trilogy.

 

What happens to a world overpopulated with dwindling resources?

  • Is genetically created food substances a solution?
  • Do people become chattel?
  • Is sterilisation and population control the only answer?

What happens when sexual and government violence becomes normalised?

  • Do we always search for a greater thrill?
  • Is violence then entertainment?

There aren’t answers to these ideas in the book, this isn’t a moral telling. There are no solutions, no heroic journey to enlightenment. What makes it so stark and disturbing to me is how normal it seemed to those living it. How slowly we as a society lose our inhibitions, lose the shock until it becomes blasé.

 

Did I care about Snowman, Crake and Oryx? No not especially. I didn’t even really care what the cataclysm turned out to be, and only had a passing interest in Snowman’s survival in the world afterwards. But what caught and held my attention were the lives of rather mundane people surviving in a world where the harsh desolate reality was viewed as the norm. Snowman, or Jimmy as he was back then was just a regular person, neither a hero or a villain. And it was his averageness that contributed to the normality of the horrible.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/12/18/oryx-and-crake-margaret-atwood/

Dec 18 2014

Odessa by Charles King

What I liked most about Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams is how clearly Charles King tells the early stories of Odessa’s founding. For while there had been a small settlement at the site under khans and Ottomans,

none of the extant written records gives an unambiguous account of long-term settlement [at Odessa’s site]. Other modern cities on or near the Black Sea—the grimy port of Constanta in Romania, the storied Russian naval station at Sevastopol, and the jewel of the Black Sea world, Istanbul—all have ancient pedigrees. Beneath modern concrete and asphalt lie Greek, Roman, and Byzantine ruins. But Odessa has none of this. The site had little to offer beyond a bay open to harsh northeasterly winds. When you see the city from a cruise ship or ferry, you are looking at a recent creation, a place that for two hundred years has both reveled in and regretted the fact that it has no history. p. 25

That last phrase is also as succinct a statement of King’s view of the city’s genius loci as the book has to offer. Given a nearly blank slate, statesmen and entrepreneurs of the late Russian Empire created a city that was free of the burdens of history, one that to greater extent than other Russian cities gave a home to minorities (particularly Jews), and one that was simultaneously an expression of commercial needs (for a port in the region) and an example of what the concentrated power of will and empire could create.
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/12/18/odessa-by-charles-king/

Dec 17 2014

Watership Down by Richard Adams

I’m deeply troubled by the thought that my young adolescent self was not as hard-hearted as I’ve always believed. See, I first read Watership Down while either 11 or 12, on a family vacation, and I remember bawling my eyes out at some point near the end, thereby casting a pall on the rest of the holiday. So when I thought to re-read this, I braced myself for tragedy… only there isn’t any really, or at least none that I can understand as being sufficiently traumatic to myself at that age. Perhaps I hadn’t yet experienced epic drama of its sort before, and was more emotionally invested in the fate of the warren than I was used to feeling with fictional characters. Decades later, I’m a bit disconcerted to find that my memory has served me so poorly, though this book once again reinforces my belief that certain books should be read at a certain point in one’s life. Watership Down is a good, entertaining novel now, but it was a devastatingly excellent one to me as a child.

Oh, and Bigwig is still the greatest.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/12/17/watership-down-by-richard-adams/

Dec 16 2014

A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

I just finished this book, and now I am almost speechless. I laughed out loud through the first half of it, which now seems irreverent and almost blasphemous considering the way it turned out, but about halfway through it I perceived that it was heading toward some kind of mysterious and profound resolution, and after that it stopped being funny and became heart-wrenching. This book is an extraordinary creation that in its own homespun way tackles some of the deepest issues of existence, without ever descending into ponderousness or pretentiousness. There is, of course, a strong dose of the author’s liberal politics sprinkled throughout, but the author, or at least the narrator, has the good taste not to take himself too seriously, and the contempt he pours on the self-righteousness of the ’60’s antiwar movement is obviously sincere and unfeigned. But this book is so much more than merely political; it is one of the most profound expressions of spirituality I have ever read. This is undoubtedly the opus magnus of one of the most gifted novelists of our time.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/12/16/a-prayer-for-owen-meany-by-john-irving/

Dec 16 2014

The Days of Anna Madrigal by Armistead Maupin

Anna Madrigal

In this ninth Tales of the City novel, The Days of Anna Madrigal, Armistead Maupin is content to show his characters being themselves. That’s no mean feat, for it requires creating characters who are both believable and interesting in themselves, and sustaining it over one or several books. Many authors do not appear to have the confidence to allow their characters to develop in a way that appears natural. I even thought that Maupin was one such author — in the middle books of the set, the characters‘ personal histories and interrelationships go from mildly Baroque to floridly rococo — but in the last two, he has simplified his sprawling cast (even as a new generation has come on stage), and concentrated on characters who are at the heart of the long work.

First was Mary Ann Singleton, the original Midwestern girl whose tales of moving to San Francisco started everything. Mary Ann in Autumn charted her return, many years later, following a career back on the East Coast and a divorce, as she fends off cancer and makes peace with people and places. Now Anna Madrigal, once the landlady and den mother to the novels’ cast of characters, has reached the advanced age of 92.

He settled in the other chair. “I talked to Anna last night. She sounded good.”
Shawna shrugged. “She’s okay.”
“What’s the matter?”
“She’s ninety-fucking-two, Dad.”
“She’s not sick, though?”
“No—just kinda … packing up.”
He took that in glumly, saying nothing.
She stroked the arm of the chair, comforting something inanimate in lieu of the more vulnerable human alternative. “We have to honor it, Dad. Anything else would just make her feel alone. We have to—”
She didn’t finish, so he did it for her. “‘Drive her to the station and wave good-bye.'” He was quoting Mrs. Madrigal herself. Their long-ago landlady had hit them with that sobering train metaphor a few years back. They were not to make a fuss, she had said then, but she wouldn’t mind having “family on the platform.”

While the end of Anna’s days permeates the book, it is anything but an elegy, and she is as cheerfully irreverent as she ever was. She’s also keen to wrap up a few pieces of unfinished business, and this, as much as anything, drives the story. It also enables Maupin to tell of some of Anna’s earliest days in flashbacks set in small-town Nevada when Anna was a Depression-era child. Nine books later, readers are still learning new things about Mrs. Madrigal.

The present-day story eventually takes most of the characters to Burning Man, an annually temporary colony of the Bay Area in the Nevada desert. For people who want to see them, there are implied contrasts between the community of fate when Anna was a teen and the intentional community created by and for Burning Man; there are also contrasts within the people participating in the Burning Man event, a way for Maupin to show the creativity of the event, as well as the foibles and absurdities that come along with it.

Mostly, however, the book offers a chance to spend more time with people that readers have known for 30 years or more, people who have now led full lives and are reflecting on them, even while setting forth new chapters.

Mary Ann had sent [Michael] on his way that night [in the 1970s]. Squeaky clean out of Cleveland, she had already begun to accept his brand-new randiness as if it were her own. “Go find a nice billy goat,” she had told him with a playful shove, and in some ways that was the version of her he still maintained, the smart girl creeping up on adventure with one eye covered, not the liberal rich lady from Woodside taking Zumba lessons at the Zen Center. He had come to like the later-day Mary Ann, but never with the intimacy of old. She probably felt the same about him—that stodgy old queen fussing in his garden, holed up with his younger husband in the Castro.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/12/16/the-days-of-anna-madrigal-by-armistead-maupin/

Dec 15 2014

The House of Hades by Rick Riordan

One of the nice things about not being in a book’s target audience is being able to stand back a bit more and see what the author is up to, what’s happening structurally within a book or series, to generally chew on it a bit more. The House of Hades reaches its main intended audience perfectly: Kid One tore through it in just a few days, never mind school or much of anything else. A whole bunch of people are growing up with Percy Jackson and his friends as formative reading experiences, and I think that’s great. They’re fun, and they work well on several different levels.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/12/15/the-house-of-hades-by-rick-riordan/

Dec 15 2014

The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare

Some people come away from this play with the impression that it is anti-semitic, but Shakespeare puts such eloquent defenses and rebuttals in the mouth of Shylock, on behalf of himself and his people, that for me the charge does not ring true.  The more serious theme of this drama is the balance, at times the conflict, between law and mercy.  Of course Shakespeare makes the Christian worldview prevail, yet ironically he does this by upholding the letter of the law, in a way that utterly confounds the legalistic Shylock.  There are some memorable lines in this play, such as Launcelot’s speculation that converting Jews to Christianity will drive up the price of pork, and Antonio’s fit of melancholy at the beginning of the story, and the playful repartee between lover and beloved shows Shakespeare in his usual fine form.  The tale of the three caskets is a side plot that seems a tad out of place, and its outcome smacks slightly of insincerity, since the one who hazards all gains all without paying a price…but obviously Shakespeare deems it unseemly that his lovers should be paupers.  Yet this is a marvelous play, entirely deserving of its reputation, and every time I revisit it I am quite enchanted by it.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/12/15/the-merchant-of-venice-by-william-shakespeare/