Bookpost 17

Previous installments found here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 , 7, 8, 9, 10 , 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16

Story of Your Life and Others, Ted Chiang

A solid collection overall. Some weak ones, but mostly good. Tower of Babylon is an absolute banger and I am surprised that they chose Story of Your Life for the movie adaptation over it. Seventy-Two Names is my favorite and the one problem with it is that it is a short story and not a novel, because it is paced like a novel and I want more of this bizarro “what if outmoded Victorian scientific theories were actually true and also practical Kabbalah is involved”. Hell is the Absence of God really manages to hone in on the horror of the total arbitrariness of miracles. The only one that really flopped for me was the one about the guy who suddenly became superhumanly smart, that one was pretty dull except for the part where he invents not-Ithkuil.

 

Flatland, Edwin A. Abbot

When reading a suitably old book, you’re bound to run into some yikes moments. Flatland hits well above its weight class by delivered with some truly brutal satire that, as an anomaly in the genre, still works well over a century later. Our narrator the square does indeed praise the virtues of his iron-fisted eugenecist caste-system theofascist state with all the sexism, classism, and undifferentiated blind cruelty one would expect from a Victorian gentleman…and the book’s entire point is how he and the society he lives in are blind to greater reality and all of their oppression and repression is based on shit that doesn’t matter one bit in the grand scheme of things. It’s a short book, so saying more will dilute the effect, but I definitely recommend it. Easy read. Certainly telling that it was by book of choice while on 8-hour layover in Philly.

 

The Madman, Kahlil Gibran

This is a book that I do not have the ability, currently, to adequately describe in a shotgun review. I enjoyed it, it’s public domain, it’s 40-odd pages of prose-poetry, go read it.

 

The Northern Caves, nostagabraist

A wild bit of web fiction: a small cadre of nerds in the early 00s attempt to decipher the incomprehensible mysteries of a children’s fantasy series of questionable quality. Not an actual children’s fantasy series of questionable quality, a fictional one that contains some traits of extant children’s fantasy of questionable quality but is entirely its own thing.

Anyway, this contains both an incredibly accurate depiction of early 00s forums as well as one of the best examples of characters gaining Insight this side of Bloodborne. I recommend it if you want something with a very specific vision of weirdness that manages to deliver on it, though be warned that the ebook version I download borked the forum post interstitial chapters and didn’t display everything correctly.

The Book of Japanese Folklore, Thersa Matsuura

The Uncanny Japan podcast in book form. Definitely geared for a younger / more general audience, so it’s not a perfect fit for me personally, but the art is nice and it’s a breezy read. Good gift material.

The Complete Poems of Enheduana, the World’s First Author, trans. Sophus Helle

Last year, I read a terrible book about the writings of Enheduana and wrote at length about how bad it was. This book is the polar opposite of that one, and I couldn’t be happier with it. 

The translation is snappy and an easy read, and Helle does a very striking bit of design by limiting the lines to how they appear in the tablets: the lines are all in a narrow column, with about 2/3rds of a page left blank. Missing lines are represented with a row of asterisks (one of the poems is almost entirely dots because of this). 

This is all accompanied by a very thorough exploration of the historical context of Enheduana herself, the Babylonians who inherited her texts and used them as part of their classics curriculum, and how those texts were re-discovered in the 20th century. Every time there is a blank spot where we simply don’t have enough data, Helle will present the possibilities but never settle on one as definitive (an extremely welcome attribute). There are footnotes and endnotes galore, most of which are illuminated and several of which are very funny (To paraphrase some of the highlights -“We can translate this line but can’t figure out what it means, it’s probably a pun”; “This is probably a dick joke”; and “This is definitely a dick joke.”

 

Native Tongue, Suzette Haden Elgin

DNF 40/301

A book of feminist science fiction about linguistics, which has the unfortunate timing of being written in 1984 and thus aged like milk in the sun on all three accounts. This is on top of just stodgy, clunky prose, minimal plot, briefest whiffs of characterization, and no real care for the setting beyond what is necessary to justify the bunk linguistics (hard Sapir-Worf is apparently the only linguistics thing sci-fi authors have ever heard of, which is baffling in Elgin’s case because she was apparently an actual linguist. Come on, you’ve studied Navajo and you can’t think of anything better than “your language determines what thoughts you have”?)

The only reason this series is remembered is because there is a conlang attached, which is the only reason I picked it up. The conlang does not, in fact, actually occur in the book, despite the book being mostly about its creation and about how impossibly miraculous it is for someone to make up new words to describe concepts that don’t have dedicated terms (please note the sarcasm: this is the process that all languages are doing all the time, forever.)

 

House of Rust, Khadija Abdalla Bajaber

DNF 18/252

There is something about the prose in this one that just doesn’t work for me. It’s dense and obtuse, but not in a way that invites engagement. Weird tense shifts, pronouns with unclear antecedents, and other assorted rocky writing methods made it difficult from jump.

Burning Roses, S.L. Huang

A novella that is very well written and has some great character work about guilt, forgiveness, and generational trauma, which then undermines all of that in the last 20 pages by committing the cardinal sin of mixing “story about wrestling with familial drama” with “this guy committed some fucking war crimes”. This keeps happening, and I would like it to stop. But sure. Reward them with peaches of immortality because mother and son have forgiven each other and come to terms with their mutual failings. I’m sure the charred corpses of the hundreds of people killed by the giant magical firebirds will take great solace in the afterlife knowing that the little shit who gave the order finally got over his issues with his mother. Sure. Fucking wonderful. Fucking redemption arcs, not even once. Forgiveness is not a gatcha machine you can just put tokens in until you win the prize you want.

A Court of Thorns and Roses (+sequels), Sarah J. Maas

Didn’t actually read these, but my partner has been listening to the audiobooks and telling me about them. Everything I have is second hand summaries of the first 5 books. 

It’s kinda like observing antimatter from a safe distance, or an encounter with a logic wholly alien and orthogonal to the one I know.

I don’t know how my partner puts up with my constant “this all sounds miserable, why do they not simply destroy the aristocracy, when does the plot about destroying the aristocracy happen, why has no one hit Tamlin in the head with a heavy object, so is there an actual government with like, roads and taxes or something, would it be possible to just invent a gun, what do you mean they can’t do a C-section they have resurrected the dead twice” and so on. 

The one actually meaningful critique thing I can say is “fated mates and weird age gaps and magical bloodlines and the weird and kinda dehumanizing insistence on using male/female instead of man/woman make me want to crawl out of my skin and flee the premises, what the fuck.”

 Also I don’t understand how a series that keeps bringing up fantasy politics consistently doesn’t seem to care one bit about fantasy politics. (Actually, I do understand this: Maas is not a political materialist; the fantasy politics she writes about are not beholden to the logistical calculus of the flows of food, information, transit and violence.)

Gyo, Junji Ito

It’s Junji Ito; you’re going to get gross shit, horrible, absurd things happening, and a steady escalation in terrible horrible no good very bad shit. I sat down and binged it in a single day, and while I don’t like it as much as Uzumaki, it was effective with the creepiness and the grossout factor. Unfortunately the characters are paper-thin, which means that it is also pretty dang misogynist out of genre convention. It’s rough. I was hooked by “how is this going to escalate”, but if that’s not enough to keep you going, you’re probably not going to have a great time. 

Golden Kamuy, Satoru Noda

LET’S FUCKING GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Primo combination of Things I Love to See. Certified freaks: check. Dudes getting in over-the-top fights: check. In-depth asides about anthropology: there’s a fucking works cited at the back of every volume we are checked and ready for launch. By volume six we have seen at least three dudes get absolutely wrecked by bears. 

Sugimoto gets a surprising amount of surprisingly subtle characterization as a young man aged beyond his years by trauma, and that’s something you don’t see often in this conceptual space - especially not with as light a touch as you get here. And major props for nimbly dodging the magical indigenous person trope - Noda’s research into Ainu culture really shows, because he will take every opportunity he can to go “here is how the Ainu live in their environment and how their culture is materially informed by that environment.”