cahn

Hiiiii I'm still alive!

4/5. This book was recommended by my kid's high school guidance counselor office in one of the daily mass emails we get from her school. I suppose the subtitle of this one may as well be, "Why your kid won't get into the super-elite school you think they ought to get into," which is the not-so-subtle messaging to parents (and I think has something to do with why the counselor office recommended it). This seems to boil down to the premise that the current incentive system (both in terms of generally how the school is perceived and how specifically ranking lists perceive the school) make it such that colleges have a lot of incentive to be sought-after by as many applicants as possible (they want to be "sellers" -- the ones who decide whether they want the students -- rather than "buyers," in the author's terminology, which are the ones wooing the students), so colleges have arranged things so that in many cases there are a whole lot of kids vying for a relatively very small number of spots. In any case, the book also makes the case that there are enough "buyers" that provide a great education and might also give you merit scholarships that in most cases it's a bit silly to restrict oneself just to the "sellers," especially if you are wanting financial aid -- it's sort of like picking a brand name vs. a non-brand-name. (And, as in the brand name case: though you are rather more likely to get a better deal with the non-brand-name, sometimes there are reasons to pick the brand name, though Selingo doesn't get into that so much.)

The author follows a few kids as well as a couple of admissions committees to see how it all works (and documents how the admissions people have a hard job, as well as how they are trying to craft a class, not just looking at individual students) -- this is really quite interesting, to see how all of this works. Along the way, he also puts in some details I didn't know, like how it got started that kids get overwhelmed with glossy mailers from college (this wasn't always a thing!) and how Northeastern went way up in the rankings in the last 10 years (the bare fact of which I did know, because my cousin once removed is a sophomore at Northeastern, but I did not know that it was a concerted effort). And then there's financial aid, which is this whole problem of inequitable information as the financial aid awards aren't done until after kids have applied.

Along with the buyer/seller college distinction, he also makes a distinction between "drivers" and "passengers" -- the former indicates the kids (and, let's get real, their parents) who are very savvy about what they're looking for and what they want, and for their entire high school career have been driving, so to speak, toward the college goals they're looking towards, and start their applications on a relatively early time frame. These are the kids who know the difference between early action and early decision, and have mapped out where they want to apply early (if they do) and, strategically, why. Then there are the passengers, who just get carried along by the whole process... the good thing is that it seems like they mostly still end up okay, though perhaps not in as optimized a place as the drivers.

There's a bit in the book about sports recruiting, which I knew nothing about when I started the book, but I learned shortly after starting reading it that D's niece (who comes from a very sporty family) was sports-recruited (as a junior!) and is going to attend a rather-elite school year after next :) So it was interesting to read this bit of the book in conjunction with learning this information. Moral of the story, perhaps: if you think you might be good enough to play varsity for your sport in college, and you have pretty good grades (niece has straight A's and what was described to me as a "good enough" SAT for her future school), this might be a relatively "easy" way of getting into college. (I put it in quotes because I honestly think niece, who has been swimming since she was practically an infant, worked as hard or harder than any other high school kid I know. Her swim team had practice Thanksgiving morning!) It is, however, a really good thing for my kids that college is not in fact based on their sporting chops, because early sports training was very much not their thing. Although E is consistently not last place in cross-country, which I'm very pleased about! :)

Anyway, this was an interesting read and worth reading if you want to know more about what goes on with college admissions.

Doc put a new splint on so let's experiment with posting (and maybe even commenting?) a bit. Will still not be posting/commenting as usual for at least the next month, but Hugo deadline is tomorrow, so... here are my novel/novella picks in order.

Novel:
-Some Desperate Glory (but you all knew that)
-Saint of Bright Doors (I had issues with it but it was doing interesting things, which I value for Hugo voting)
-Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi
-Translation State
-Witch King (did not manage to finish)
-Starter Villain (did not manage to start, but I'm sure it's fine)

Novella:
-Mammoths at the Gates (which I loved, and which moved me the most, after not particularly gelling with the other Singing Hills novellas after the first)
-Seeds of Mercury (I'm inclined to rate the Chinese nominees higher, and I thought this one was interesting)
-Rose/House (intriguing)
-Mimicking of Known Successes (*)
-Thornhedge (enjoyed)
-Life Does Not Allow Us to Meet (I kind of feel like I could have summed this up in 3 sentences and saved myself the trouble of reading it)

(*) I thought it was fine in general, but I discovered while reading it that while I really like having spectrum-coded characters as the POV character, I intensely dislike having that character as the love interest (or at least did in this case) because I can see how annoying one can be and I do not like feeling seen like that! :)

Okay, so, I didn't even try to write anything coherent about this book. Instead I had the idea to take quasi-real-time notes. I wasn't aware of this at the time, but of course it's somewhat thematic that I took notes during the actual events instead of writing it up afterwards as I did the other books... and also thematic that I was taking these notes because I was envisioning a dialogue with you, dear readers, but could not have that dialogue until I had finished the book (since the only other person I know who was reading this semi-concurrently, hidden_variable, had already finished reading it). (Also thematic that I often had to go back and revisit/edit my notes :P ) ( Notes: )

I'm very impressed by this whole series -- I really can't remember the last time I read a series that both was so thoughtful in its worldbuilding and so complete in the way it worked things out. With all these notes, I think it's less than half of the things I would have liked to say/talk about (if I'd really been taking real and constant live notes), there was so much! (I never even said anything about Carlyle, love them!)

I find it a series I find more impressive than lovable. I don't think that's an insult in any way, mind you: it's clearly setting out to do things in a way that is meant to engage me cerebrally rather than aiming directly at my tropes, for example. But wow there's a lot there and a lot to think about and I'm glad I read them.

In the Imperial Radch universe, Enae's life gets upturned from sie's previous circumscribed existence as sie is given the task to track down someone who has been missing for a couple of hundred years; at the same time, Reet struggles with never fitting in, and Qven grows up in a milieu that is alien to a human POV.

So for some reason, the only part of this I knew before starting was a little bit of Enae's opening dilemma. It was a much more complex and fascinating book than my priors made it sound! Which I should expect from Leckie; I love about her work that it always has a whole lot of threads running through it.

It's the sort of book where there are so many things I could talk about, but it turns out that I really only want to talk about a couple of things enough to type it out:

a) I really really like alien books from the POV of the alien, which probably says something about me, but anyway, I really like the idea that things look very different from the alien's POV and that they might have very different motivations and imperatives than a human in many ways. (This is something I loved about the Ancillary books.) This book kind of did that superficially -- Qven's upbringing is certainly very, very different than a human's and I enjoyed reading that (unsurprisingly, I especially enjoyed reading Qven's viewpoints about human scripts) -- but as the book goes on, I feel like it becomes clear that e's upbringing is just flat abusive and there's just nothing good or acceptable about it, which makes it much less interesting to me.

b) There is one character in the book that was absolutely my favorite -- who does try to do the right thing to the extent they are capable of, for no other reason than that they feel it's the right thing, as they are likely to not have gotten any reward or happy ending from it. I am speaking, of course, of ( Spoilers. )

I'm really glad this was Hugo homework, because like everything I've read by Leckie it was very worth reading. I still prefer Some Desperate Glory for the Hugo because it played to all my tropes, engaged even more with questions that really interest me, and blew my mind in ways that TS didn't, but TS would be a worthy Hugo winner, and I could totally see others preferring it to SDG.

Middle-grade graphic novel about eleven-year-old Avery Lee, one of seven children, as she navigates sibling conflicts (she really wants her own room, but instead her older brother gets his own room and her baby brother moves into the room she already shares with her sister), friendships (one of her best friends seems to be drifting away a bit), and family conflicts (there is the possibility they might move, which she really doesn't want to do). My 9-year-old niece brought this home from the book fair while we were visiting them, and I picked it up.

I really loved this book. I only had the one sibling, but I know a lot of people who have quite a few kids in their families, and this rang true to me in terms of both the good and the bad of having a large family. Avery is a realistic and sweet kid -- she gets into fights with her big brother where both of them are at fault and exchange harsh words (and apologize later), she loves art and wants her own room so that she can do her art without her younger siblings getting into it, she helps out her younger siblings and gets exasperated with them in equal measure.

Also, it's not made a big deal of (I don't think it's ever stated explicitly), but the Lees are Korean-American. And also the mom is in the process of becoming the major breadwinner (it's her job search that is driving the plot about the possible move) but it's also not a big deal, which I also loved.

I also read Allergic by the same authors because my niece happened to have that one around too, which I liked a lot as well but not as much as Squished, which I thought was richer both in story and art.

From selenak. This is a book that plays with the line between biography and historical fiction: it quotes extensively from letters and other primary sources, but does not really cite the sources, and also sometimes talks about what characters were thinking when there doesn't seem to be any source at all, in language that is more flowing and lyrical than I usually expect from a biography.

It is about the German writer Heinrich Mann (the brother of the writer Thomas Mann, who, sorry Heinrich, may be more familiar) and his wife Nelly Kroeger-Mann, whom I got interested in when selenak had me watch Youtube clips of Alec Guiness playing Heinrich Mann in Christopher Hampton's play Tales from Hollywood. (The links to the clips are in the second paragraph.) It's also about the milieu of the years 1934-1944 as approached from the viewpoint of (primarily but not exclusively) the other German authors who had to leave Germany and the people around them: Heinrich's brother Thomas, Bertolt Brecht, and others, whose thoughts and letters and words paint a picture of what they were all going through and what all of this must have been like. Also, very weirdly, Virginia Woolf is one of the people who shows up in the prose on a regular basis; this is weird because as far as I can tell, she had nothing to do with any of these other people (I guess the author speculates they might have crossed paths once), and every time she showed up I was like "...what is she doing here??"

Anyway -- it's a good book and it really brings home how jarring and difficult this emigration experience must have been for all of these displaced people. (I'm also rereading The Oppermanns right now, which as a fictional portrait of that same 1933-1934 era through a mostly-non-intellectual-character lens is an interesting point-counterpoint.) Nelly Kroeger-Mann eventually committed suicide, but reading their letters and the kinds of things they had to go through, I almost found it more surprising that more of them didn't think about it more. (Except for Thomas Mann, who definitely comes across a bit as someone who had a charmed life and could be a jerk about it, too, ha.) I thought the book was well worth reading, and in many places quite beautiful.

selenak's less incoherent review is here.

From selenak. Ted Hughes doing a poetic translation of Ovid. This was an interesting read and I'm really glad to have read it. I was familiar with most of the stories (though there were a couple that were new to me) from D'Aulaire and Edith Hamilton and so on, but it's been a while since I have thought much at all about Greek/Roman mythology.

I was struck, on reading these, how differently the people/gods in these stories think about what is right or what is fair. Might seems to make right, and there is often something of a lack of judgment, or at least certainly authorial commentary, of those who engage in what we'd call harassment or abuse or assault. For example, Peleus rapes Thetis -- now that was a story that got left out of my kid-friendly D'Aulaire! -- at Zeus's command, so that the prophecy of "son greater than his father" is neutralized, with no one registered as protesting all that much, including Thetis herself. Though at the same time there is always the knowledge that if someone more powerful or more cunning decides to take revenge (e.g. Apollo and Artemis taking revenge on Niobe), then, well, sucks to be you, even if what they do is not at all proportional to what you did.

For a couple of them I went back to look at the original Ovid. It was striking to me how closely Hughes followed the original, while still using evocative language that was his own.

selenak has an excellent post on this book, which I highly recommend, where she quotes various bits, including one comparing translations and also including a couple of quotes where Hughes tantalizingly adds a bit to Ovid.

I have read Seven Surrenders!

I am glad that hamsterwoman mentioned in her Terra Ignota post that SS was really meant as the second half of Too Like the Lightning, because it really was. It's like TLtL carefully set up a lot of dominos, and SS... knocks them all down. It's pretty amazing to watch (well, read) and I'm glad I read it even though I suffered a lot from not reading the first one carefully enough (though I think if I'd read it as carefully as I needed to in order to catch everything, I'd never have finished, so it's just as well). Very curious as to what I'll think on a reread; this seems like the kind of series that well rewards rereads.

I don't have much really to say about it as a whole except "whoa, that ALL HAPPENED" but I have a few random thoughts:
-I feel like the prose is smoother and less, idk, irritating than I found the first book. Some of the mannerisms that annoyed me in the first book are toned down a lot in this one, like, Mycroft spends significantly less time explaining random Enlightenment stuff and praising Voltaire, and there are fewer times where he feels that, for example, he needs to have a literal conversation with the reader from his future. (Also, Émilie du Châtelet is namechecked in the acknowledgements, nice!)

-There was one point where Cornel MASON is speaking where I said to myself, "Palmer has read John M. Ford!" Now, I know she's friends with Jo Walton, and Walton has read JMF, so I'm not saying this in a vacuum either... but... yeah, I'd be shocked if she hadn't.

-After this book Utopia has now become my favorite problematic Hive, in the sense that I don't want to be a Utopian at all (it sounds completely exhausting!) but I am so intrigued by everything they do: their particular mode of surrender when confronted with the events of SS, their planning 150 years in the future (like... seriously?? modeling is clearly MUCH better in the future, lol!), their constant visor tagging of "how things could be better"... I would super like to know what's up with them. (The title of the fourth book makes me believe that we will find out more...)

Spoilers:

-BRIDGER! Gosh, poor kid. (I think I cared about him more than anyone else, as the only character who a) wasn't complicit in about five different plots at once and b) wasn't literally a god, even if he had godlike powers.) He even kind of says that he's fulfilled his element of the plot and now he's gonna off himself :(
(Mycroft, Bridger is not the protagonist as you said in TLtL, much as you would have liked him to be. He is the plot device :P Unless there's more about him later I don't know about :PP I mean, I guess we've had one resurrection already, why not two?)

There were two spoilery places where I was like, really?

-First: when Heloise talks about how they are super missing something in their society by not recognizing the old cultural constructions of gender, like the part where women are nurturing and men are manly, and they need to have a conversation about that. She says "Back when half the race identified as feminine it meant that half the race was devoted in some way to nurturing, peace, and charity, and we never developed a substitute for that."

I've read this bit about ten times now, trying to articulate what I disagree with, and after about my tenth read I guess... I don't disagree with most of what Heloise says. (For what it's worth, it seems pretty clear to me that Palmer meant to present this in an intentionally shocking way that would inspire disagreement -- because I also think it's the process of having the argument that Palmer is interested in.) I can see a lot of her points: maybe in a genderless world you don't have a world where half of everyone is devoted to nurturing, peace, and charity (and I do get her point that culturally that's sort of the effect of gender, and I can definitely see that if you got rid of gender all at once that the default might tend to be sort of a leaning-masculine sort of persona and not a leaning-feminine one), and maybe that's a problem, and maybe you DO need something to bolster that.

I think my point of remaining disagreement is that Heloise says things like "...the words are taboo so no one dares admit [the Cousins are "feminine"], and it feels like the Hive is weak and teetering. Of course it's teetering! The Masons would teeter if we banned the word 'Empire' and Gordian if we banned the word 'psyche'." I... don't really think this is how people and language work? People would come up with new words for the same concept. :P

Also, I feel like this ties into my wondering about the educational system and raising kids. Idk, I think either you have enough people who are "nurturing" that you are able to raise and educate the next generation, and then they also have role models who (one hopes??) teach them to be nurturing... or you don't? how does this society propagate itself at all if no one is nurturing enough to actually raise kids??

Heloise says, "Think of the Set-Set riots. How many fewer people might have died if the Cousins had felt free to say overtly why they were really upset? That their motherly feelings judged it inhumane to do such things to children. Without that vocabulary, the real cause of the conflict couldn't even be discussed!" I... do not agree with this AT ALL. First, any parent might think it inhumane to do Thing X to children. Also, there's another issue in there about "sanctity" of humanity and what we might think is humane vs inhumane that I think overlaps with this but which should be disentangled a bit, and which I think belongs more on the axis of conservative-liberal, if anything, than male-female.

Anyway, kudos to Palmer for making me so annoyed that I had to reread Heloise's speech several times to articulate the things I actually did disagree with, versus the things I thought Heloise was saying but that she actually isn't (for example, she never said that she thinks gender is necessary or that she thinks there aren't other ways of structuring society without it, but my first draft of this post assumed she did).

-Second: Madame being all "so, I did the amazing educational thing of raising a child with all philosophies/languages/beliefs at once and it produced Enlightened Man, which turned out to be a god." (Paraphrased, of course.) It's really unclear whether the narrative a) expects you to take this at face value b) expects you to believe that Madame's education made it possible for the god to appear in J.E.D.D. Mason, or c) is just something Madame is saying that is her belief but is actually not even kind of relevant to the god appearing and that we're not supposed to take at all seriously. I think (b). (I would prefer to think (c) but in that case I don't see any Doylistic reason why she's saying it to begin with.) In any case, this is the kind of thing where I honestly think Madame is deluded.

Because a) everything you teach is a choice. I don't care if you are being so very careful about giving all philosophies equal time or whatever, by teaching anything you are making choices about what you present and how you present it, that is just the way of things b) anyone, anywhere, who has ever been around kids KNOWS that kids literally have minds of their own and no matter how you construct their education, they are gonna come out with things that you didn't intend and that you didn't want to teach them (*) -- Madame thinks she's teaching disregard for social values by showing Jehovah "the people our world respects most, emperors and kings... fucking like animals," but honestly a kid is just as likely to get out of it something super unintended and possibly untrue, like "fucking is sacred" or, idk, "maybe only kings fuck, peasants reproduce via parthogenesis." Kids can come up with super weird things!
c) kids learn A LOT from other kids, and Madame said she could only do this once, so basically in order to run her experiment J.E.D.D. must have been isolated from any other children while he was growing up for this to work (because those children would have wrecked the experiment by being not steeped in this "all-philosophies" education). In fact, he must have been isolated from any other people who were not part of Madame's educational program. Which is NOT OKAY. Even Ferdinand of Parma was able to run away and have lower-class friends! Maybe the god was attracted to this poor kid because he was the loneliest kid in the world!

(*) All this makes me think of Ferdinand of Parma, or at least did once mildred_of_midgard reminded me what his name was, lol. To be fair childhood education has advanced a lot since then! Probably Madame did not beat her child! But... this is the kind of thing that can happen in real life in the Enlightenment Madame is so proud of, Diderot and all, when the kid doesn't end up thinking about things the way you want them to.

Anyway, I was satisfied by this one, and the question now is whether I will have to dive in to the next book (because I want to know what happens next!) or whether I will have to take a break first (because these books are also hard going!)

troisoiseaux recced these two books and... then I read them right through, because both of them were quite compelling! They also make a good pair to chew on -- they're both concerned with journeys through life that have a large component involving high school/college during the 1990's.

I Have Some Questions for You (Makkai) 3+/5. This was a book that was doing a lot of things and by and large doing them well, although it didn't necessarily offer answers to everything (rightly so, since some of the questions it asked don't have good answers).

It's a book narrated by a podcaster, Bodie, who returns for a visit (in the 2018-ish time frame) to her old prep school, Granby, to teach a two-week mini-class in podcasting (and another in film studies, but that one is more ambience-related than plot-related). One of the students in the class decides to make a podcast regarding the girl who was killed while the podcaster was in school there.

( Fictionalized true crime in the age of MeToo. )

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow (Zevin) 3+/5. Follows two friends and professional (platonic) partners, Sam and Sadie, through adulthood (and childhood, mostly through flashbacks), making video games together, hurting each other, and being there for each other. There is also a major spoiler/content warning that I was vaguely warned for beforehand and which I'm glad I was vaguely spoiled for.

The most important character who's not the two friends gets killed, awfully, in a shooting, about 2/3 of the way through the book.

( I found this more enjoyable and less profound than the Makkai. )