Dec 14 2020

The Haunting Of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

I don’t know whether the authors invited to write companion essays to classic novels have any say in the placement of their pieces in relation to the main text, but God Almighty, is it irritating to read a spoiler-filled introduction by Laura Miller when at least Jonathan Lethem’s smug thoughts on We Have Always Lived In The Castle had the sense to come at the end of that particular volume.

But to Shirley Jackson’s classic haunted house novel, that I’d put off reading for years because I saw the terrible 1999 movie adaptation and figured that that was all there was to know about it (yes, I know, I’m sorry, but having stayed away from this book for so long has been punishment enough.) After finally reading The Haunting Of Hill House, I am genuinely baffled by why anyone would change a thing about the plot when it is so wonderful and bizarre as is. Dr John Montague, an anthropologist with an interest in the paranormal, has decided to make a scientific study of Hill House, a secluded mansion with strange architecture and a sad, almost sinister history. To this end, he tries to track down a number of people with proven connections to prior paranormal activity, inviting them to join him in a summer of research at the mansion. Only two people accept: Eleanor Vance, whose home had been bedeviled by a poltergeist when she was a teenager, and Theodora (no last name), whose ability to guess the face value of a number of cards held by a research assistant in another room far exceeded statistical probabilities. Rounding out the party is handsome, feckless Luke Sanderson, nephew of the absentee owner who insisted that a member of her family be present for the study. Hill House is tended to by a married couple, the gloomy Dudleys: he keeps the gate and grounds while she deals with the house itself, but neither will stay on the estate a moment past sunset.

Eleanor is our viewpoint character, a meek woman of 32 who nursed her domineering mother through an illness that lasted over a decade. After her mother’s death, she went to live with her married sister, trading one position of servitude for another. Getting the invitation is like a lifeline to something new and different, a chance to be something other than a nursemaid or poor relation for once. Her long drive to Hill House is filled with imaginings of a small home of her own, where she tends to stone lions and is tended to in turn by a small elderly maid, only the first metaphor in this book for a longed-for kindly maternal figure. Arriving at Hill House itself is a shock: even aside from the ghastly Dudleys, the house itself emanates an aura of brooding and madness.

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Dec 10 2020

Fable (Fable #1) by Adrienne Young

Look at that gorgeous cover! It’s literally the best part of this nonsense book that had me wanting to dig up copies of Arthur Ransome’s Swallows And Amazons series so I could read a tale of young pirates that I would actually enjoy. Okay, Adrienne Young’s prose is pretty decent — there are some lovely descriptive pieces, particularly underwater — but the plot and characterization are so dreadful. It’s essentially a book of immature people making irrational choices, in a poorly fleshed out fantasy world that only hangs together due to plot contrivance.

The story goes like this: Fable is dumped as a 14 year-old on the crappy island of Jeval after a storm sinks her parents’ ship and claims her mother’s life. The dumping is done by her father, Saint, who we’re supposed to believe is so fearful for her safety that he leaves a pretty young teenager to fend for herself on an island of pirates and thieves. He tells her that when she can figure out how to get off Jeval and find him, he’ll give her her inheritance, so for four years, she starves and schemes, finally saving enough money to buy dredger’s tools that allow her to free dive into the reefs and dig up precious gems to trade with West, the helmsman of the Marigold. As she tries to collect enough copper to buy passage back to Ceros, where her father lives, she draws the unwanted attention of Koy, a supposedly ruthless skiff owner, who causes her to flee earlier than expected and with barely enough money to her name.

And then it’s all about traipsing around The Narrows, as the bay where all this action takes place is called, a bay that takes about two days’ sail to traverse and where Fable and the crew of the Marigold lie, cheat and trade their way to getting what they want. Everyone on the Marigold is mean to her at first because that’s just the world this is, a place where everyone is hostile until she can win them over by being a martyr and/or an idiot. But since this world is also logic-free, hey, why the fuck not? Why not have a passionate underwater first kiss while free diving when time is of the essence and you need all the breath you can get? The romance, btw, is another of those “let’s fall in love with the first attractive person who is interested in me” variety. Barf.

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Dec 08 2020

Lola’s Super Club: My Dad is a Super Secret Agent (Lola’s Super Club #1) by Christine Beigel & Pierre Foiullet

Plucky, imaginative young Lola is convinced that her father, stay-at-home dad Robert Darkhair, is actually the famed super spy James Blond in disguise. When his life is threatened by super-villain Max Imum, Lola must don her own disguise and, alongside her animal — stuffed or otherwise — sidekicks, form a super club to save her dad, her mom and the day!

This debut volume in the series actually collects two stories. In the first, which lends this book its title, Max Imum kidnaps Lola’s parents in the dead of night while she’s out on patrol as a costumed superhero. Lola, her cat Hot Dog and her stuffed dinosaur James must track down Max to his lair, then use all their abilities to outwit Max and his gang and bring her parents safely home. I particularly enjoyed how Lola used her skills at ballet and pencil drawing to excellent, villain-defeating effect, as well as how they picked up a few new friends for their Super Club along the way.

The second story, “My Mom Is Lost In Time”, sees Lola interpreting news that her mother will be delayed getting home for dinner as another ploy by Max Imum to make James Blond reveal his secret identity. So off she travels through time and space, inspired by studying for her history test at school the next day, to defeat Max and help her mother find her way home. Filled with wacky hijinks and the kind of connections only a kid would think to make, this was another exhilarating ride through Lola’s imagination that will likely charm its target audience.

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Dec 07 2020

Escape Pod: The Science Fiction Anthology edited by Mur Lafferty & S. B. Divya

I am not a pod(cast)person, but this anthology might change that for me! Or at least get me out of my very narrow lane of go-to things to listen to while wrapping Christmas presents or other visual-heavy artsy-crafty things. I tend to enjoy more radio-drama-type fare like Limetown or, even older than that, Sherlock Holmes stories that actually aired on the radio in the previous century. Which isn’t to say that I haven’t heard of Escape Pod and its sister casts, just that I haven’t had a chance to enjoy it yet, tho its reputation in the field is legendary.

So when I heard that they’d come up with an anthology of fifteen stories to celebrate their fifteen years in operation, I jumped at the chance to sample their wares! Just the author list alone is enough to make the contemporary sci-fi fan salivate, with luminaries such as N. K. Jemisin, John Scalzi and Cory Doctorow among the contributors, alongside perhaps lesser known authors like Tim Pratt and Tina Connolly, who coincidentally provided two of my favorite stories here. Ms Connolly’s Lions And Tigers And Girlfriends was a sweetly hilarious tale of theater kids on a generation ship, and I actually cried when Kai gave a stirring speech to rally her peers in communicating all their anger, hope and fear into storytelling (but also I am a sucker for stories that champion stories.) Mr Pratt’s A Princess Of Nigh-Space was almost a complete 180 in attitude, as a young woman grapples with her grandmother’s legacy: I found it chillingly charming regardless, and a nice upending of the Lost Heir trope.

Another favorite of mine here was Cory Doctorow’s Clockwork Fagin, which is also my favorite work of his to date. Set in an alternate steampunk reality, it tells the tale of long-suffering orphans living under the petty tyranny of a Dickensian Fagin figure, until a boy just as ruthless as the master comes in and refuses to be abused. I also enjoyed Ms Jemisin’s Give Me Cornbread Or Give Me Death, which imagines a future resistance against a tyranny extrapolated in distressingly logical if pessimistic fashion from the current state of American affairs. Another lively extrapolation of the future was on display in Tobias Buckell’s thoughtful The Machine That Would Rewild Humanity — if things ever come to the pass described in his story, I’m rather inclined to agree with the narrator’s actions (tho I did think it a bit silly that the future society didn’t care about “why” criminals committed their crimes but did care about understanding the criminals, which seem to me integral parts of one another.) Mr Scalzi’s Alien Animal Encounters was a cute/titillating/appalling series of vignettes that ended hilariously in large part due to its verisimilitude. Kameron Hurley’s Citizens Of Elsewhen felt very much of a piece with her excellent novel The Light Brigade, but with an interesting twist that is unfortunately spoiled by the illuminating, perhaps too much so, foreword by Escape Pod’s creator, Serah Eley. I did enjoy Ms Eley’s descriptions of each story, but would probably save the entire foreword for reading after the rest of the book. One thing I did disagree with her tho, was in her characterization of editor Mur Lafferty’s entry here, The Fourth Nail, as a satisfying standalone. It was a good story but definitely felt to me like a chapter from a bigger novel, as did Greg van Eekhout’s Spaceship October. The latter, at least, ended on less of a cliffhanger than the former.

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Dec 06 2020

Beowulf translated by Maria Dahvana Headley

Bro! As has been said before, Beowulf is a poem that forces translators to show their style from the very first word. That word in the original is “Hwæt,” an Old English attention grabber, and how translators render it tells a lot about what’s coming in the rest of the poem. Will the version lean heavily on medievalisms? Look for a “Lo!” or “Hark!” or, heaven forfend, “Forsooth!” right at the beginning. Seamus Heaney, translator of the only other Beowulf I have read, opted for “So,” and Headley describes that choice in her introduction to her version as “taken from the memory of his Irish uncle telling tales at the table.” (xx) She continues:

Beowulf by Maria Dahvana Headley

I come equipped with my own memories of sitting at the bar’s end listening to men navigate darts, trivia, and women, and so, in this book, I translate [hwæt] as ‘Bro.’ The entire poem, and especially the monologues of the men in it, feels to me like the sort of competitive conversations I’ve often heard between men, one insisting on his right to the floor while simultaneously insisting that he’s friendly. ‘Bro’ is, to my ear, a means of commanding attention while shuffling focus calculatedly away from the hierarchy. (xx-xxi)

Headley adds:

Depending on the tone, ‘bro’ can render you family or foe. The poem is about that notion, too. … When I use ‘bro’ elsewhere in the poem, whether in the voice of Beowulf, Hrothgar, or the narrator, it’s to keep us thinking of the ways that family can be sealed by formulation, the ways that men can afford (or deny) one another power and safety by using coded language, and erase women from power structures by speaking collegially only to other men.
There’s another way of using ‘bro,’ of course, and that is as a means of satirizing a certain form of inflated, overconfident, aggressive male behavior. I think the poet’s own language sometimes does that, periodically weighing in with commentary about how the men in the poem think all is well, but have discerned nothing about blood relatives’ treachery and their own heathen helplessness. (xvi)

Right off the bat, Headley is letting readers know that she’ll be using plenty of contemporary language, looking at the roles of masculinity in the stories Beowulf contains, and emphasizing the layers of commentary and story within the overall work. And there are plenty of layers. For anyone who hasn’t read Beowulf in a many years, or is coming to it for the first time, there are not just the three main stories — Beowulf’s fight against Grendel that starts the whole thing off, the reprise against Grendel’s mother, and many years later Beowulf’s final battle against a dragon — there are all kinds of side notes and backstory. As Headley puts it, “The poem employs time passing and regressing, future predictions, quick History 101s, neglected bits of necessary information flung, as needed, into the tale. The original reads, at least in some places, like Old English freestyle, and in others like the wedding toast of a drunk uncle who’s suddenly remembered a poem he memorized at boarding school.” (xiv)

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Dec 04 2020

Writers & Lovers by Lily King

At this point in my experience with Lily King, I know what to expect: a meticulously rendered milieu with quietly simmering emotions that are universal despite the very specific circumstances and locales of our narrators, and then BAM! a figurative punch to the face, and then the throat, and then the solar plexus, rendering this reader completely helpless, tears unexpectedly streaming down my face after being lulled by her deceptively tranquil prose. She did this with Euphoria, a story loosely based on the life of Margaret Mead, and six years later — the same amount of time that it takes Writers & Lovers’ protagonist Casey to finish writing her book — here I am in my kitchen, feeling as if Ms King has plunged her hand into my psyche, rummaged round and brought out my raw and bleeding heart for everyone to see, again.

Here’s the thing, tho: this is an entirely commonplace story being told here. Casey is 31 years-old, a former prodigy turned struggling author who supports herself by waitressing at a tony Cambridge, Massachusetts restaurant. It’s 1997, her mother has recently died, and she’s grieving and trying to make sense of her own life while figuring out the romantic relationships she finds herself in. It’s essentially a bildungsroman with a slightly older protagonist than usual. Her two main romances, or the men she’s trying to choose between, serve as stand-ins for greater issues and desires, not that that’s ever stated so bluntly. Oskar, the older established author with two delightful children, represents stability and family and the future she wants, all in one convenient, immediate package. Silas, whom she lusts after, is talented but erratic: the perfect embodiment of the bohemian life she currently leads. While I wanted her to choose neither, it actually worked out better than I thought it would in the end. Mostly, I admired how she didn’t have to compromise, how all her hard work and self-belief paid off even as I felt deeply her struggles with poverty and the American health insurance system and just some really shitty people and situations. Those restaurant scenes brought me back so vividly to my own restaurant years that I felt traumatized all over again; by the midpoint of the book, I empathized so deeply with Casey that it felt like she was a former co-worker telling me all about her life while we were waiting for our tables to clear.

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Dec 03 2020

Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Books 1, 3, 4, 5 & 6 by Jeff Kinney

My 9 year-old has been nagging me so hard to finish reading these books so we can discuss them together, which has been an experience at once delightful (he wants to discuss books with me!) and disconcerting (someone is nagging me to read?) So I’ve been slipping several of these into my schedule and am slowly catching up with Jms, tho not as quickly as he’d like, if we’re being perfectly honest.

Since I’ve been reading these slightly out of order, I thought I’d go back to the beginning and fill in the gaps from there, starting with the series’ debut. Honestly, I’m glad this wasn’t where I started, because the titular wimpy kid of Book One is insufferable. Lazy, mean and entitled, following Greg Heffley’s adventures in this volume is an exercise in tamping down my desire to constantly remind my kid that this is not how good, considerate people behave. That said, I do feel that this is an oddly accurate recounting of the author’s growing up experiences (here in Silver Spring, MD!) some decades ago, particularly in his father’s aversion to his sons doing anything remotely “girly”. Not that I know of this as fact: it just rings with an authenticity that’s hard to fake.

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Dec 02 2020

Bluebeard’s First Wife by Ha Seong-nan

Happy December, everyone! Let’s start the month with a chilling read!

I have a bad habit of not remembering why I picked up certain volumes, not helped by the often considerable lag time between me deciding I want to read a book and me actually getting the opportunity to read it. So I vaguely recall placing a library hold on Bluebeard’s First Wife by Ha Seong-nan because I was told it was a collection of horror stories set in contemporary South Korea. And it’s not. It’s actually better.

I mean, if your idea of horror is anything psychologically thrilling a/o supernaturally tinged, then sure, BFW is going to be the spooky read you’re looking for. Of the 11 stories included here, only two have an overtly supernatural component to them, and even fewer verge into territory so violent or grotesque that the horror genre may take over from mere crime. But each and every one of these tales is disquieting and sad, with survival being perhaps the happiest ending available to the heroes, who are also often the victims, of these stories. In some ways, this book reminded me of Patricia Highsmith’s Little Tales Of Misogyny: where Ms Highsmith wrote with a barely concealed contempt of her characters however, Ms Ha treats hers only with empathy, even when they’re being foolish or just plain wrong.

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Nov 30 2020

Ghost River: The Fall And Rise Of The Conestoga by Lee Francis IV, Weshoyot Alvitre & Will Fenton

With Native American Heritage Month coming to a close, I’m so glad I could finally get to this graphic novel!

The history and, frankly, present-day reality of America’s indigenous peoples is too often overlooked, particularly in relation to the settlers and policies that continue to drive them to the margins of our nation, if not to outright extermination. So it’s important for books like this one, and especially in the reader-accessible format of graphic novels, to keep telling the stories of Native Americans past and present, to amplify their voices and remind readers, “We are here. We matter. We will not fade away.”

Created as part of the Redrawing History: Indigenous Perspectives On Colonial America project supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, this volume examines the massacre of the Conestoga in today’s Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, from their own perspective, both then and now. An entire settlement was razed by selfish white men trying to justify their own greed, who then went on to murder the survivors held in (a somewhat condescending before becoming entirely failed) protective custody. It’s a harrowing tale that deserves greater publicity, and I’m glad Lee Francis IV and Weshoyot Alvitre collaborated to tell it, and especially that they chose to center the Conestoga as the vital, beating heart of their story.

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Nov 27 2020

Record Of A Spaceborn Few (Wayfarers #3) by Becky Chambers

Every book of Becky Chambers’ Wayfarer series has centered on a slightly different, but extremely relevant, facet of life that is common to the modern millennial and Gen Zer, perhaps even more so than to prior generations. Her knock-out debut, The Long Road To A Small Angry Planet, discussed the found families that have become integral parts of (particularly young adult) society, while its follow-up, A Closed And Common Orbit, focused on personhood, adult autonomy and, in a more overt nod to its science fiction setting, sentience. This third installment of the series edges from the social to the political after a fashion, tackling the topic of migration at a complete remove from any real-world policies, tho it’s pretty clear that Ms Chambers, like myself, is an open borders advocate, if her narrative choices are anything to go by.

Record Of A Spaceborn Few follows the lives of five human descendants of the Exodan Fleet, as the survivors who fled a dying Earth for the stars (as opposed to Mars or the Outer Ring planets) call themselves, interspersed with the sociological observations of a Harmagian anthropologist, Ghuh’loloan. The Harmagian has come to visit one of these ships now that the fleet has lived for several generations as part of the Galactic Commons uniting most of the known universe’s sentient species, and Isabel, one of our viewpoint characters, serves as her guide. As one of her ship’s resident archivists, Isabel is in an excellent position not only to show Ghuh’loloan around, but also to answer her many questions.

The other four descendants are Tess, the sister of the pilot from TLRtaSAP, a middle-aged technician struggling to raise her two young children and look after her increasingly irascible dad while her husband is off mining asteroids; Kip, a disgruntled 16 year-old who wants more than what he thinks the Fleet has to offer; Eyas, a caretaker for the dead whose lofty position in society can’t make up for how lonely she often feels, and Sawyer, a young man who’s lived his entire life on the Harmagian planet of Mushtullo and is looking for something new. The way their narratives intersect makes for a really comprehensive overview of why people uproot their entire lives for territory foreign to them, and sometimes why they don’t, and sometimes why they return, and what our responsibilities are to those who choose to brave new places in search of safety or belonging. It is one of the most powerful, intensely empathetic looks at the immigrant experience that I’ve ever read. This quietly devastating novel had me ugly crying my way through entire passages that could have easily described the inner turmoil of my teens and 20s, even as I recognized and grieved the differences that had me far removed from some of the decisions made.

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