cahn | Entries tagged with books:2018

I devoured The Coddling of the American Mind and I have a lot of probably-incoherent thinky Thoughts about it. I read the Atlantic article it was based on and wasn't really expecting much more from the book, but indeed the book is so much better because it's able to expand on and discuss things that an article isn't able to.

( Us vs. them thinking, fragility and antifragility, parenting )

This is totally embarrassing to admit, but although I've read LOTR too many times to count, until this year I had never actually read the Silmarillion. I kept getting stuck at the very beginning and never making it through. ...This is even more embarrassing, but I went back and reread it because of a discussion with

ase where I was talking about my realizing this year what should have been obvious from the time I was in middle school, that I tend to fall really hard for canon-gen-loyalty-relationships-with-lots-of-subtext, and she recommended The Starless Road and I didn't get very far in before realizing that (a) it's really good (it is really good!) and (b) I was going to get about a tenth as much out of it without having read the Silmarillion. So. Here we are. I will also say that this was at the beginning of August, and I finished tonight. This took a very very long time for me, especially that first part. (The first part would have defeated me again if I hadn't both had an external reason to finish and also felt kind of silly for not ever being able to get through. Additionally it helped a lot that I'd been doing a lot of KJV reading this year for teaching at church.) It did get a lot faster once the Silmarils were made. (I also took a very long time to read the Third Age part, although I think in that case more because it was a bit anticlimactic ~~and also because of taking a large break for ToT~~.)

It took so long that I am not sure I have much coherent to say about it, but here are some not very coherent things I remember thinking:
-Tolkien is really into his shiny things. I mean, the Silmarils of course! But also the Rings and at one point some armor was described as being super shiny and I was like, JRR, I can tell you are really into your shiny things, this is great, LET'S BE SHINY PALS.
-Sons of Fëanor ruin everything! You are the reason we can't have nice things!
-Surely someone has written the AU where Fëanor actually does say he'll give back the Silmarils (even though it doesn't change anything in the short run). Right??
-Huan! :( I don't feel nearly as bad for Huan dying fighting the good fight as I do for him being torn between loyalties. See also: Sons of Fëanor ruin everything!
-Why doesn't anyone ever listen to Melian? WHY.
-In related news, Thingol is just completely useless. When he finally died I felt this not-nearly-as-guilty-as-I-feel-I-should-be sense of relief.
-Lúthien is seriously made of awesome.
-I AM NEVER GETTING OVER BELEG. THAT WAS NOT OKAY.
-Túrin is such a hot mess, I feel super bad for ANYONE HE EVER INTERACTED WITH EVER
-The whole Eärendil thing just hit me like a ton of bricks. This part:

And he called aloud in many tongues, both of Elves and Men, but there were none to answer him. Therefore he turned back at last towards the sea; but even as he took the shoreward road one stood upon the hill and called to him in a great voice, crying:

'Hail Eärendil, of mariners most renowned, the looked for that cometh at unawares, the longed for that cometh beyond hope! Hail Eärendil, bearer of light before the Sun and Moon! Splendour of the Children of Earth, star in the darkness, jewel in the sunset, radiant in the morning!'

I read this while pottering around at breakfast-time one weekend (actually, in fact, second breakfast) and started just tearing up like mad and my kids were rolling their eyes at me. (They are used to it by now, I guess, what with the Verdi and every single time I listen to "It's Quiet Uptown" and all.) I'm tearing up right now reading it again.
-I can't believe Tolkien made me feel sorry for Maglor. (He made me feel sorry for Maglor.)
-The Akallabêth is really interesting to me because the cadences seem to very closely mimic those of the KJV, much more so than the other parts of the Silmarillion. It made it stylistically sort of familiar to read, for me, even though I was less familiar (via osmosis) with this section than any of the others.
-Boy, Ilúvatar was Not Happy with Númenor, huh. (I have Feelings about this bit due to teaching Genesis this year and hitting back hard against the idea of natural disasters being caused by wickedness, see also our area got hit with fire and with mud last year, but anyway)
-Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age, while the easiest section to read, also seemed the most pedestrian (writing-wise) to me?
-I am currently really annoyed at the movies for what they did with Elrond, which was previously not in my top three list of annoyances (1. Denethor 2. Theoden 3. Galadriel 4. Aragorn) but is right now because Elrond is really really cool! And now it is much harder for my brain to take him seriously!

OKAY HIT ME WITH THE FIC RECS, you guys.

Someone (

julianyap, perhaps?) recced this book to me five years ago and I bought it while it was on sale, and read the first, maybe, five percent, and around that time a bunch of life stuff happened and I got away from it, and I didn't feel strongly enough about the characters to come back and read the rest of it.

Then I saw K and B this spring (yes, in fact, this is how behind I am in my reading) and B asked me if I'd read it. I said no, I'd just read the very beginning, and he told me about this whole -- I guess these are spoilers, but only for the first twenty percent of the book, and I'm not putting it under spoiler cut because this is in fact what convinced me to read the book -- this whole worldbuilding where the idea of a god is that it lends out power to people who need it, and later the god gets it back with some, oh, let's call it interest, tacked on, and all of this is mediated by Craft, which is this world's equivalent of magic and is expressed through contracts. And then the bright idea was had to lend out more power than the god actually possessed -- yes! fractional reserve, er, theology -- and it is possible to become defunct because a small drain in power triggers others to drain power too, and before you know it you have a run on the b -- god!

"That is amazing," I said, and I resolved to read it, which I have now done. And I enjoyed it a lot because of this worldbuilding, and it's very plotty and I enjoyed that a lot too. And I liked all the characters, especially the female ones -- Tara was great, Elayne was great, Cat was great, and I loved that they were also so different and had such different stories and motivations.

I still will confess that while I liked the worldbuilding a very great deal, I felt a little like both characters and worldbuilding were sort of shoehorned into the particular format that the author wanted? Like, I'm not sure Craft makes total sense to me -- sometimes it's portrayed as being able to do these super powerful things, and sometimes as the laws binding and putting limits on power, and I never got a good sense of what those limits were from scene to scene. (I mean, obviously it's going to be a bit inconsistent, that's why it's a magic drama and not a courtroom drama, but, say, in the Earthsea books I felt like I at least could pretend like I had a sense of when you could and couldn't unleash a whole boatload of magic, and why.) I also thought it was a little unbelievable that Tara made the choice she did in the middle/second-half of the book, regarding how to pursue her case, because nothing in the way she'd been presented up to that time made it sound to me that she had any inclination to make that choice.

But I am still really interested in reading the next one :D

gah, Hugo voting ends in a couple of days, where did the time go?? I... have not read a lot of things I was intending to read. I blame Verdi, mostly, but also all the people who sent their Hugo packet stuff in pdf. Anyway.

Summer in Orcus (T. Kingfisher) - 4/5. Portal fantasy. I loved this book and it absolutely deserves to win the not-a-Hugo for best YA. It is the best kind of YA in that it doubles as an adult book; it resonates for this adult in recalling for me what it was like to be twelve; but also it never loses sight that the primary function of a YA book, what any good YA book must grapple with in one form or another, is to engage with the questions of what it means to be human, what it means to grow up, what this life thing is anyway. It also functions as meta about portal fantasy, particularly Narnia (but unlike The Magicians, Summer only engages it tangentially, and more to the point is a very kind book). Also I loved all the characters and their friendship. (Reginald was such an adorable Heyer!pastiche!)

Also, this was really interesting to read after the Seanan McGuire, because I felt like it took everything McGuire was trying to do and did it right -- for example, the main protagonist background/motivation involves her terrible parent, just like in the McGuire, but we're never asked to judge the parent, only see her through the protagonist's eyes, which is much preferable. (In general Kingfisher/Vernon's prose, while reminiscent of McGuire's style, is gentler, which I prefer.)

The really interesting thing is that the book engages with something that I've found to be true but haven't seen so much in YA fiction (except in Voigt, because the Tillerman cycle does everything). All things considered, I'm content with my family and growing-up experience, but there were definitely parts of it that were not optimal. But... from these very suboptimal experiences I've learned things, gained skills, that are very useful and that I'm not entirely sure I would have gotten (or would not have gotten in the same way, certainly) had I not had these experiences. (It's interesting, because there are some ways I consciously choose not to parent in the way my parents did, and with my daughter, who is so much like me, I can see how in some ways she's benefiting from that, and in some ways we have to find other, often less effective methods to work on the skills that I developed more-or-less naturally in reaction to the way I was parented.)

In Other Lands (Sarah Rees Brennan) - well, okay, I read this a year ago and never talked about it here. I liked it a lot; I like everything SRB writes. It's fic that doubles as fantasy (especially but not exclusively of the Harry Potter sort) meta, which is my favorite. Serene-Heart-in-the-Chaos-of-Battle is the best! Elf culture is inverted patriarchical culture (all the stupid generalities our culture makes about women, elf culture makes about men), and it seems like it might get old (and perhaps for other readers might) but I just never get tired of it being hilarious and sad at the same time. (And this book also understands that it's writing about what it means to grow up and what life is about, although stylistically very differently.) Voting it second to win for not-a-hugo-best-YA.

The Cloud Roads (Wells) - 3+/5 - First book of the Raksura series, which I read because I liked the Murderbot novella so much. I enjoyed this. Some nice worldbuilding. I do think that these days maybe I'm in the wrong headspace, or something, for epic fantasy, because I enjoyed this one a lot and then couldn't get through the second one (and I have had this problem multiple times with multiple authors, it's definitely not a Wells-specific thing).

A Natural History of Dragons (Marie Brennan) - 3+/5 - Much of the charm in this lies in the narrator's brisk and no-nonsense character voice. Because of the conceit (older narrator looking back on the adventures of her youth in a travelogue-ish format), although there's a good plot tying it together, it meanders, and while this would have been a plus for me ten years ago it's not now (a Me problem), so I really wish I had read this a while ago. Anyway, it's great and I might vote it second in Series (after Five Gods).

iberiandoctor made the mistake of asking me what I thought of Schiller's Don Carlos (I read the Gutenberg translation available here (all quotes are from here), and, well, here we are. Surprising no one, I have Lots of Thoughts about it. I guess my takeaway is that I liked the play a lot and would LOVE to see it performed; on the other hand, there's a reason the opera is the version everyone remembers and the play isn't. [eta 7-5-18, wow, now that I reread that it sounds terrible, and anyway

selenak has a very different viewpoint in comments -- and also I should actually see the play.] The play is a lot more complicated plot-wise, with a mad plethora of secret letters and conspiracies against other characters, and also a lot more complicated character-wise, especially in regards to the Marquis of Posa (honestly the entire play should probably have been called The Tragedy of the Marquis of Posa, but we'll get to that). The opera, on the other hand, distills all these secrets and conspiracies and complex characters down into more fundamental emotional truths, it seems to me, and there's a deep sympathy for all the characters which is sort of present in embryonic form in the play but isn't brought out quite as clearly. Being me I'm going to focus on the character differences, bringing the plot in when it's relevant to character (which is a lot, actually). I think this will make sense if you are familiar with the opera, and might not if you're not (since I don't discuss the plot in chronological order).

( In which I expand on this at (really) great length. )

In conclusion: a totally decent play, and as plays are, certainly more complex and interesting than the opera in many ways, and I would go see it in a hot second if I ever had a chance, but the opera takes something that's good and intensifies everything SO MUCH into something amazing <3 [haha, lol, past me, it would have been much more accurate and extremely less obnoxious to say that the opera speaks way more to my id; both play and opera are amazing in different ways!]

(1) So I watched 2+ entire Don Carlos without understanding why Posa takes Carlos' papers early in Act III, clearly with the idea in mind to use them to frame himself, but then doesn't actually make the final decision to use them until the quartet scene in Act IV, which is quite a bit later. (Doylistically, it's because the whole papers subplot in Schiller is cut and replaced by the auto-da-fe, so there's no room to mention them until then.) I thought -- and I still think this could be part of it, mind you -- that it was because Philip had finally gone too far in that scene, thus his determination to die after he speaks sternly to Philip. While writing this, it occurred to me that a) one reason could be that he just doesn't want them to be found on Carlo if he does something dumb, which, uh, yeah, it would certainly be a much shorter opera if Carlo had had them at the auto-da-fe; and b) (and I think this is the actual reason) he's waiting to see whether Eboli actually does accuse Carlo and Elisabetta or whether Filippo decides to execute Carlo -- if neither of these things happen, then maybe he doesn't need to move on that plan -- but when he sees what has happened in the quartet scene he knows that he has to do it.

Hey, I actually read something!

No one will be surprised that my media consumption lately has been 75% opera, 10% oratorio, 10% Old Testament (for teaching my Sunday School class -- one year is Not Enough for the OT, I am totally behind), and 5% works that were made into operas. (Schiller! I have Feelings about Schiller.) But I did actually read a couple of novellas last weekend while on a trip!

All Systems Red (Wells) - 4/5 - everyone has been saying nice things about this, and I will too. Somehow from osmosis I had gotten the idea that the entire idea of the novella was a robot who really liked to watch serial dramas -- well, that's certainly a nontrivial part, but there's also a whole plot tacked on to it, of which I was unaware, that does not particularly involve serial dramas. (I had seriously thought that the plot involved a lot of watching TV -- I guess I'd pegged it as a sort of YA emo sort of book? Wrong.) The protagonist has a very human voice, and says it has organic parts, including an organic head, so in my conception it's more like a cyborg? Anyway, I liked it a lot, though a large component of that was (as I am sure it is for a lot of people) identifying really hard with a protagonist who really just wants to be left alone to watch its ~~opera~~ dramas.

Flowers of Vashnoi (Bujold) - 3+/5 - I read it and liked it? I... remember very little about it, a week later, except that "See what other people have highlighted" keeps getting turned on my Kindle and apparently there are three people out there (at the time of my reading) who are really interested in when Miles is gonna die, based on their highlighting of every line where anyone mentions Miles' poor actuarial prospects. No, I'm sure there's more I remember. Enrique was a much more sympathetic character in this one, which I enjoyed a lot (I have a total soft spot for Enrique). Everything ended happily, despite a good deal of angst in the middle, none of which really would have had an impact on Our Heroes, which I think may have precluded my total engagement with the book. It was quite nice to spend more time with Ekaterin and I would definitely not mind more of that!

I am cranky because I have managed to read almost nothing published last year. (I was busy mainlining Eugene Onegin and La Traviata. Don't judge me!) I thought I should at least read some of the Nebula nominees. Thanks to File 770 for the links.

Novella:

And Then There Were (N-One) by Sarah Pinsker (Uncanny 3-4/17) - A multiverse conference of Sarah Pinskers. This was pretty good, and I guess I may put it on my ballot for lack of anything better to do. I didn't think it was earthshattering, but it was solid, and it made me think (as I expect it's supposed to) of what a conference of cahns would be like. (We would all be super geeky and mostly not talk much to each other at first until separation into the ones who were shouting loudly about Extremely Important Opinions About Books And Music And TV, and the ones who had realized that they could actually do complicated vocal arrangements together. OMG. Now I REALLY WANT THIS.)

Novelette:

“A Series of Steaks” by Vina Jie-Min Prasad (Clarkesworld 1/17) - 3D printing (forging!) steaks. WHAT COULD BE BETTER. Everything about this story is lovely. Almost certainly going on my ballot.

“A Human Stain” by Kelly Robson (Tor.com 1/4/17) - I always find Robson's pieces spooky and working on a level that I'm not at. I think this is probably really good but not for me.

Short story:

“Fandom for Robots” by Vina Jie-Min Prasad (Uncanny 9-10/17) - I don't even care if this story is any good or not, because I loved it. Definitely going on my ballot. Exactly what the title says. It really captures that experience of fandom and the sense of connection one seeks for in fandom, even if one happens to be a robot.

“Utopia, LOL?” by Jamie Wahls (Strange Horizons 6/5/17) - I love this one too. I think I'm mostly just in love with the ADHD mentor/tour-guide heroine (because when do you ever get that??). Definitely going on ballot.

“Carnival Nine” by Caroline M. Yoachim (Beneath Ceaseless Skies 5/11/17) - I liked this one, and it had some lovely writing.

Non-Nebula nominees but eligible for the Hugo:
Short story: A Burden Shared - Jo Walton (Tor.com) - This is also going on my ballot. I just feel like it has a lot of things to say about pain and burdens, and maybe even how gender relates to that.

Novel: Bannerless (Carrie Vaughn) -- I had read Vaughn's two stories set in the same universe and really liked them. This novel I think was a lightweight addition to the stories. The thing that got me about the stories is that it postulates a dystopian future in which a shame society makes a comeback -- but in that society, not shame about sex, but rather shame about wasting resources or having unapproved pregnancies (everyone has implants so it's about the population increase, not the sex). The stories weren't shy about poking at both the good and bad about a society that relies on shame for policing, but the novel... kind of is shy about it; the main character basically thinks it's a great thing and that's the only perspective we get. Though apparently it's the first of a series, so maybe the next book will get into that a little more.

Also I'm totally nominating The Good Place (Michael's Gambit) for Short Dramatic Presentation.