July 2015 Reading

Well, I was browsing some other blogs that did monthly book reviews or round-ups, and I thought I'd give it a try since I haven't posted in a while. Also, I suspected July would be an easy month to reflect on, since it seemed like I'd read less this month than I had during any other month of the year. (Also, I've been procrastinating on writing my midterm.) When I actually checked my Goodreads stats, I found that July is actually my 2015 month of second-fewest-books-read. I only read four books in June, but one of those was The Crimean War by Orlando Figes and I was pretty sick for at least a good part of that month, so I give myself a pass. Also, I read  two issues of Foreign Affairs cover-to-cover (I'm digging that subscription much more this year than last time I tried it.)

Anyway, July. I suspect Station Eleven would be the stand-out of the month, but I'm only two-thirds through and not at all sure I'll finish by tomorrow. So instead I'll give the top spot to Shrubs: An Old Fashioned Drink for Modern Times by Michael Dietsch. This is a cookbook! It was also a birthday gift from Noah. It's rare I read a cookbook from cover-to-cover, but this is one of those rarities; it opens with a discussion of the history of shrubs (whose name comes from the same origins as sherbet and syrup), which are essentially fruity simple syrups with a vinegar base. They can be mixed into cocktails or blended with soda water to create homemade soft drinks, and I am looking forward to mixing up a few, which will apparently keep for a year in a fridge. (Hold the jokes, please.) 

The book opens with some traditional, heavy-on-booze, light-on-vinegar recipes, including recipes used by Benjamin Franklin and Martha Washington. (The whole section, with its presentation of the original recipe wording and a modern adaptation reminds me of the VHS-sponsored historical cider tasting at Blue Bee.) Ben's is basically oranges marinated in rum and is definitely on my to-try list. There are some suggestions for modern white rums that still have some of the rum "funk" associated with darker or blackstrap varieties. (I haven't checked yet to see how well represented these are in the local ABCs.) The majority of the book is devoted to simple but enticing fruity concoctions -- like the strawberry balsamic, cherry mint, and blackberry-raspberry shrubs. Experimentation is encouraged, and there's a cucumber shrub I'm itching to add a jalapeno twist to. The final section of the book is devoted to cocktails, ending with the "ultramodern" twist on an old fashioned: bourbon, Scotch, cinnamon fig shrub, and a dash of bitters.

Roadside Picnic, a Russian sci-fi classic by brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, was another July standout. The novel has a bit of the PKD high concept, slapdash feel about it, with long talky moments interspersed with action sequences. We begin, after an introductory faux interview, in the point-of-view of Red, who works at an international research institute but makes his real living as a "stalker," venturing into the perplexing and dangerous areas affected by alien contact and stealing artifacts to sell on the black market. In Roadside Picnic, the cosmos may be indifferent to humanity, and most characters try to make do in an amoral world.

House of Rain is probably the main reason for my slow July. This moderately hefty nonfiction volume had caught my eye some time ago, and the subject was indeed fascinating: author Craig Childs tackles the question of why the Anasazi culture "disappeared" around 1300 A.D., resisting the idea of disappearance and instead looking at archaeological support for possible migration paths southward. He doles out his argument in snippets along with descriptions of ruins and other landmarks (generally very well written; Childs has a feel for the locale) and ancecdotes detailing his own thoughts, hikes, and journeys (often with chance-met travelers or his wife and infant son filling mostly non-speaking roles as add-ons to the scenery). Hey, he obviously walked the walk, but I could do with a little less walking and meditating and a little more of the archaeological data and hypothesizing. The attitude toward the general public that comes across is also kind of ambivalent and perverse. (Many of the sites are on national parkland, and Childs is often trespassing or wheedling his way into special-exception status in order to complete his research/experience. Childs seems to thoroughly believe that he deserves special-exception status while also seeming to think that maybe more of these sites should be more open to the public while also seeming to think that the public are mostly bores who can't appreciate what they're seeing, block the scenery, and get in the way of his mystical experiences). The book was published in 2007, and Childs appears to be ahead of a curve, with contemporary archaeologists seeming to spend more time looking at patterns of migrations and leaning toward a consensus that, yes, many of the Anasazi did move to other population centers. Not a professional achaeologist, Childs is free to make some larger guesses and generalizations and makes a pretty convincing argument for linking many of the Anasazi sites to sites to the south and to worship of Tlaloc, a Mexican/mesoamerican rain god.

Another reason for the relatively low July book count was my tackling of the massive volume The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year (Volume 9), edited by Jonathan Strahan. I enjoy short stories, but I often find reading a collection of short stories takes me longer than reading a novel ... with a novel, once I get into the rhythm, I can usually read a few pages while standing in line or eating lunch and be able to be fully immersed and remember what I've read. This is not as true for me with short stories, which I prefer to read in one sitting (though that can be hard to count on with some of the novella-length works). So, trying to find sustained reading time slows my pace, as does a preference for pausing for some processing time between stories. A great short story, even though short, is like a novel in that you want some time to think about it before diving into a new work.

Overall, although several of the stories veered more toward the slice-of-life approach than I'd prefer, this was a very strong volume. Holly Black's "Ten Rules for Being an Intergalactic Smuggler (The Successful Kind)" was a highlight, telling a somewhat familiar but happily complete story with a few interesting authorial tricks. K.J. Parker's "I Met a Man Who Wasn't There," about a sorcerer's student, is full of delightful black humour and about as far from Harry Potter as it gets. Joe Abercrombie tells a cursed-object in sorta-fantasy-Venice tale with switching points of view; Lauren Beukes deftly tackles biotechnology in "Slipping" while Greg Egan finds utilitarian and criminal uses for drones in "Shadow Flock"; Ian McDonald's "The Fifth Dragon" takes a hard SF approach to life on the moon that also speaks to sacrifice and relationships; Elizabeth Bear's artificially "right-minded" sociopath makes for a compelling narrator in "Covenant," a mini crime thriller that poses several ethical quandaries. Peter Watts detonates the ethics case study in "Collateral"; Kelly Link tells an atmospheric fairy tale; Rachel Swirsky write a well-crafted AI tearjerker; Usman T. Malik writes an ambitious tale that brings together science metaphors, superpowers, conflict in the Middle East, and family values. I'm not much of a horror fan in general, but I found the aestheticization of violence in Caitlyn Keirnan's short story particularly problematic. (That's not to mention the incest, er  twincest, which I'm not certain was a problem, but I'm not certain it wasn't, either.) On the other hand, the charming octogenarian narrator in Garth Nix's horror short "Shay Worsted" made for an entertaining if slight piece. There are 28 tales and 634 pages in all. 

Largely inspired by my viewing of Justified (and listening to a few of the commentary tracks) was a spurt of crime reading. I read The Friends of Eddie Coyle, which Elmore Leonard called the best crime novel ever written, published in 1970 and set in the Boston of cops and criminals. Its dense, fast-paced dialogue and way of coming at the main action sideways through different POVs was deft and enjoyable; however, even when it deliberately tries to give female characters some agency or autonomy, it fails miserably in its writing of women. (Thankfully? the book mostly focuses on men.) Swag has a similarly distinctly 70s vibe (also with a bit of a whiff of misogyny, although less so) and tells an entertaining story of odd-couple armed robbers. Leonard has a spare but humorous style that works well here and perhaps even better in his short story collection Fire in the Hole.   

Closing the Book on 2014, One Chapter Down in 2015

So, how did I do on the reading challenges I set myself in 2014? Goodreads data shows that, with 185 books read, including 139 works of science fiction and fantasy and 11 volumes of poetry, I met all but one. A few highlights below:

Since I had never read a science fiction or fantasy graphic novel before, I set a small goal of 5 books for the Science Fiction & Fantasy Graphic Novel Challenge, which I quickly upped to 10. After that, I stopped changing the goal but kept reading (torn between wanting to try a variety of approaches and a strong impulse toward series completism), winding up with 43 volumes read. At the top of the list stands Saga – fun, thoughtful space opera with incredible painterly illustrations. Another favorite was the entertaining The Sixth Gun, an action-filled Western with an engaging cast and wonderful, detailed illustrations (the Thunderbird remains a highlight). Also standing above the crowd were Y: The Last Man, particularly strong in its opening volumes describing the responses to a global catastrophe that seems to have killed all the world’s males and bringing our hero Yorick’s story to a satisfying conclusion in volume 10, and Fables, a less philosophical series that follows the lives of fairy tale characters living in modern-day New York, at its best when telling war stories or poignant morality tales.

This challenge also encouraged me to check out some of the much-vaunted classics of the speculative graphic novel. While I didn’t especially care for Neil Gaiman’s Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes (perhaps I should have heeded Internet advice to start with a later volume), I enoyed Snowpiercer’s starkly drawn tale of postapocalyptic class struggle aboard an unstopping train despite its weaknesses in characterization. It was easy to see why Alan Moore’s work has been deemed classic, and I certainly thought V for Vendetta and Watchmen earned their status, although they didn’t necessarily become favorites (a bit of datedness/the fact that I’ve now seen many variations on these themes – many of them inspired by Moore’s work – comes into play, as well as the fact that despite a few attempts to portray well-rounded females, I found Moore’s characterization of women to be problematic overall). I probably give the edge to V for Vendetta; although I’m not sure I buy a key relationship, the politics is still interesting; interesting, too, is how important words are in the way this graphic story is told, from a full sermon to vaudeville-style lyrics. Reading Watchman’s reflections of what it might really mean to possess a superpower or to exist “beyond the law” was made even more interesting by comparing its 1980s outlook to the current outpouring of books, films (Man of Steel and Birdman to mention but two), and TV shows now tackling the same themes.  
 

Then there was the SFF Explorer Challenge to read authors whose work I hadn’t read before. I expected that this category would lead me to explore some of the older “classic” science fiction writers whose work I wasn’t familiar with and perhaps also more military sci fi, which is a genre I often find entertaining and frustrating at the same time. In fact, what this challenge mostly prompted me to do was prioritize some writers who’d been on my to-read list for a while (like N.K. Jemisin with the Dreamblood duology) and some newer writers (like Madeline Ashby, who explored the ethics of artificial intelligence, with a lot of action and roadtripping thrown into the mix, in vN and iD). Nalo Hopkinson was one of these writers, and Midnight Robber was one of my top books of 2014, a book in which a high tech space colony can also be a bastion of Carribean culture, propelled at the sentence level by vivid dialect, and exploring (among many other topics) female friendships and coming of age.

I started with a goal of 15 or 20 for the Explorer Challenge, eventually raised it to 30, and ended with 34 titles fitting the bill. Of course, completing other challenges had a spillover effect in the “new to me” category, as did the books and stories I read in order to take place in online discussions. “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen’s Window,” was one of my first reads in 2014 and Rachel Swirsky’s haunting short story collection How the World Became Quiet remains one of the most memorable. Many of Swirsky’s stories explore gender through a speculative lens, but How the World Became Quiet is by no means a one-note collection. It begins with “The Lady Who…” novella, in which a sorceress from a warrior caste finds her consciousness preserved and her beliefs challenged as she encounters generation after generation of descendents and others. While not every story reaches the same level, there are numerous highs, from a ghost story set in Japan’s “Sea of Trees” to “A Monkey Will Never Be Rid of Its Black Hands,” which takes a personal look at global violence, to a relationship story that asks how an artificial intelligence experiences “Eros, Philia, Agape.”  

Another short fiction standout was On a Red Station, Drifting, part of Aliette de Bodard’s Vietnamese-inflected Xiyun universe. In the novella, a refugee crisis and uncertain peace are the backdrop for a multigenerational power struggle on Prosper Station. de Bodard draws strong, not always likeable, female characters and gives depth to most of her cast (be they male, female, and/or computer).

I found a lot to enjoy in my 2014 reading -- the great fun of Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn series and Michael J. Sullivan’s old-fashioned Riyria books; Jeff VanderMeer’s very weird Southern Reach trilogy; China Mieville’s marriage of science fiction and linguistics in Embassyville; Samuel R. Delany’s darkly playful The Einstein Intersection; Toby Barlow’s unique story of Parisian detectives, American spies, and Russian witches in Babayaga; K. J. Parker’s tactical and tough Fencer Trilogy; the Afro-Celtic scope of Kate Elliott’s Spiritwalker trilogy; The Lathe of Heaven (in which Ursula K. LeGuin seems to channel reality-bending Philip K. Dick); Jonathem Lethem’s Chandler-meets-Dick noir with a talking kangaroo Gun, With Occasional Music; and Dick’s own, suprisingly personal, paranoid yet exuberant A Scanner Darkly. 

I read a number of books from C.J. Cherryh’s celebrated Alliance/Union Universe (conceived in some ways as a mirror of the Cold War), in which I found the recurring themes I expect from Cherryh (attention paid to economics, politics, and the mechanics of ships and stations) as well as a few surprises (“damaged” male adolescents as protagonists or prominent characters). Downbelow Station makes a complicated conflict between planets, ships, and unions into a pageturner; Rimrunners’ tough vet narrator, Bet Yeager, is compelling in her struggles to leave behind staion life; Cyteen tells an expansive and insightful tale of cloning, politics, and parenting. 

My reading outside the realms of fantasy and science fiction included the enraging but important nonfiction Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press, multigenerational Vietnam memoir The Eaves of Heaven, and Monica Drake’s not-just-chick-lit The Stud Book.

A few books and authors merit special mention:

Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being was a January 2014 read that’s stuck with me. It meditates on Zen, time, and mortality while telling the stories of a West Coast novelist and a Japanese teenager facing brutal bullying. Ozeki’s stories tend to be emotional but not sentimental, to ask big questions, and to promote environmentalism. In 2014, I also enjoyed My Year of Meats, which begins with a quote from Shonagon’s Pillow Book and introduces two very different protagonists, a brash Japanese-American documentarian working on a television series funded by the Beef Export and Trade Syndicate and a subdued Japanese housewife whose husband is part of BEEF-EX.

I had long heard fantastic recommendations for Mary Doria Russell’s Jesuits-in-space novel, The Sparrow. Both it and its sequel Children of God live up to the hype in their exploration of spacefaring possibilities; real questions of values, faith, and reason; and how individuals can change over time or just when looked at from a different point of view.

Although I’ve heard very little about this book and its author, A Guide for the Perplexed by Dara Horn would be very close to the top of the list if I was attempting numerical rankings for my 2014 reading. The central story focuses on Josephine Ashkenazi, who has designed the program Genizah, which takes social media and other information to create incredibly detailed personal archives or living memories. Focused more on her work than her young daughter, Josie has been invited to do some high-profile consulting work with a library in Cairo. Not far into the book, you realize that you are reading a modern-day version of the Biblical Joseph story, but Horn ably walks the line of hewing to many of the details of the original while allowing enough differences to make the current tale seem plausible and its outcome uncertain. Into the layers of the novel, Horn pulls the story of Jewish scholar Maimonides (who like Josie faces political, religious, and sibling tensions) and the nineteenth-century Cambridge professor who helped uncover Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed in the geniza (worn-out document storage) room of a Cairo synagogue. Horn paints a complex view of Josie, her family, and global conflict in a novel that muses on the importance of memory and tradition. At least one review characterized this, Horn’s fourth, as her “best novel yet,” which seems likely to be true. I read Horn’s second novel, The World to Come, which includes an art theft, Marc Chagall’s early job teaching in a Soviet orphanage, Yiddish parables, and American Jews in Vietnam and New Jersey. Although I enjoyed it, I found the multilayered story tended a bit more toward the vignette than in Guide for the Perplexed. I’ll read Horn’s other two novels as well, but I’ll also eagerly look forward to her future work.

The only challenge I didn’t meet was my “14 books of contemporary poetry for every year of the 21st Century challenge.” I got as far as 7 books (though some publication years were particularly alluring, so I actually read nearly a dozen volumes of poetry). I won’t be too hard on myself for coming short: the two main themes of poetry are love are death; you could say that the main theme of poetry is ephemerality, and that can sometimes get a little dark. I’m not always in the mood for that. (Of course there are other, sometimes overlapping themes, including self expression and promotion of social change. I’ll admit that sometimes a book like Stacey Waite’s Butch Geography can be more enjoyable just for the fact that it presents someone else’s struggles, strengths, and weaknesses.) A lot of the poetry I read last year struck me as “just OK,” perhaps partly due to the fact that, while reading a full collection allows for emergence of themes and interesting points of comparison, it may also have a bit of a dilution effect, with individual verses fading into an overall remembered blur. Some works stood out as collections: the overall project of Susan Slavierno’s Cyborgia was perhaps more impressive than any of the individual poems on their own. Outstanding in my 2014 poetry reading was Blowout by Denise Duhamel. The biggest fault of the collection is probably that it never quite surpasses the height achieved in its opening poem, “How It Will End” – with a believable conflict that turns and develops, everyday language that is rhythmic and propelling, humor, a point of view, and a real sense of stakes.

How best to address this missed goal? As the 21st Century remains young and full of appealing poetry titles, I think I’ll turn it into a two-year challenge. In 2015, I’ll aim to fill in the years missed plus something as-yet-unpublished. I was inspired by a collection of newspaper columns by poet Edward Hirsch (whose taste I’m not sure is very similar to mine but who seems to have pulled together quite a strong group of world poets) in which he writes about a poet at a time, giving some broad background on the writer but focusing on discussion of a single poem. My ambitious goal will be to review each volume of poetry I read this year in this way, focusing on a single poem (my favorite, or perhaps one I find most emblematic). I think this might be a fairer way to discuss and evaluate the poems I’ve read, a way of resisting the lyric blur.

What are other goals for 2015? I set a relatively modest goal of reading 100 books overall (I’ll probably read more, but reading is one thing for which I don’t need to find an incentive) and at least 20 science fiction or fantasy authors who are “new to me.” I also set a goal to participate in online discussions. I should probably set a goal for “number of books reviewed on this blog” … what would a good quantity be? Hmmm, I’ll think on it …