things mean a lot

Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie

2013-05-09T15:15:00.000+01:00

Recently I was lucky enough to see the amazing Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie discuss her work, the social construction of race, and the politics of black natural hair (among other things) in an event that celebrated the release of Americanah, her first novel since 2006's Half of a Yellow Sun.

Adichie began by reading from the first chapter of Americanah, after which she talked a little about the novel. The story opens when Ifemelu, one of the two central characters, decides to move back to Nigeria after thirteen years in America. Adichie said she particularly wanted to explore the construction of racial identity: at one point, Ifemelu says that she only became black when she moved to America, because in Nigeria the way she looked was the default. Since race didn’t have a strong impact on her everyday life, she didn’t think of it as central to her identity; for her, black is an added category and not something she grew up thinking of herself as. Her experience is therefore very different from that of people of colour born in America, who have never been allowed to forget race because their social environment constantly reminds them of it.

Adichie also said she wanted to write an immigrant story that focused on middle-class African immigrants rather than on the disadvantaged or on war refugees. Obviously the latter have stories that are also worth telling, but she wanted to complicate our understanding of African immigrants by focusing on two characters — Ifemelu and Obinze, the other point of view character — for whom emigration was a choice. Ifemelu and Obinze have lives of relative privilege, but they dream of moving to American (whose wealth and cultural prominence make it their chosen destination) because they want options they don't feel are available to them in Nigeria. Their experiences in the US and in the UK (where Obinze, denied an American visa, ends up) therefore entail a loss of privilege and social prestige that Adichie was also particularly interested in. Having now read Americanah, I can say she did a brilliant job of exploring this kind of experience: what is it like for two smart, relatively well-off and high achieving young people to find themselves in an environment where they are suddenly "other"; where they're perceived as less; where being who they are suddenly closes doors to them? Adichie's two main characters both feel themselves reduced upon immigration, and experience a side of life they'd previously been sheltered from. She was additionally interested in comparing immigrant experience in the US and the UK — especially because the intersection between race and class in the UK complicates matters.

Adichie's goal when writing Americanah was twofold: she wanted to write an old-fashioned love story and she wanted to write a funny novel. Regarding love stories, she said she'd like to see more acknowledgements of their legitimacy and fewer dismissals of romance as "frivolous". She pointed out that as the first few reviews of Americanah started coming in, she noticed that some critics were very careful to say, "it's not just a romance, there's social commentary too!", and all the while she was thinking, "Well, what's wrong with romance"? Regarding humour, she wanted to write a funny book because she thinks there's something inherently absurd about racial categories. The consequences of race in people's lives are obviously serious, but the fact that we long ago started attributing such importance to this one aspect of human variation is nonsensical, and she wanted to highlight that in a way she feels that an African rather than an African-American is better positioned to do.

Lastly, we got to the subject of black hair, which plays a central role in Americanah: Adichie said that hair is a complicated issue for black women because what their hair generally looks like defies conventions of beauty. Afros are stigmatised, and most women end up straightening their hair with very abrasive products because they're told they won't look "respectable" or "professional" otherwise. Black hair is policed, and this makes it a political issue. If you have natural hair, people assume you're a radical out to make a statement; they never consider you're perhaps just tired of fighting nature to conform to a definition of beauty that isn't yours to begin with. Obviously this does amount to making a statement, but having their politics scrutinized by strangers because of how they look is not something black women should have to go through.

Adichie added that it's very hard to break out of this pressure, even if you know better: it took her many years and a deliberate conscious effort to stop straightening her hair. The idea that natural black hair was ugly took hold on her, and for a very long time she genuinely couldn't stand the way her natural hair looked. The matter is of course made worse by the fact that natural black hair is never really seen in pop culture or fashion magazines — except in "before" photos in makeover features. Black hair is portrayed as a problem to be solved, and this makes things very difficult for young black girls growing up surrounded by these images. We need to talk about why natural black hair is only perceived as acceptable if you're an artist, a poet, a musician or a political activist — never if you're "respectable" or "professional". We need to talk about what the forced transformation of natural markers of blackness implies.

There are two further points in my notes that I can't fit into the narrative flow of this post, but that I wanted to share with you anyway: one is that Adichie called herself "a happy and fierce feminist" and said she always makes a point of having a multiplicity of female voices in her novels. She's interested in defying ideas of what constitutes femininity, and she can think of no better way of doing that than by telling stories about a variety of women. The other is that she said she hoped Americanah would be a hopeful novel even though her characters go through very difficult circumstances. It's a novel about not belonging or fitting in, but she hoped to show that the possibility of human connection was nevertheless always there.

I don't know that I'll ever blog about Americanah, so I'll use this as an opportunity to say that I finished it last weekend and absolutely adored it. It's funny, moving and thoughtful, and very different in tone from Adichie's previous work. But what is versatility if not the mark of a great writer?

The Triumphant(?) Return of Discovered While Shelving

2013-05-08T18:34:00.001+01:00

Recently I made a deliberate decision to allow myself to feel excited about books again. It’s not that books ever stopped exciting me, exactly; it’s just that I haven’t been reading all that much lately, and somewhere along the way I developed a bad case of impostor syndrome. Because I haven’t been reading, I slipped into letting any tinge of bookish excitement make me feel guilty. There are so many books out there, I thought, so many untouched ones on my shelves, so many undiscovered gems at my library. What’s the point of letting myself get excited about more books when I can’t magically pour all the ones I know about into my brain before I stagnate intellectually? Why should I be discovering more books when I can hardly cope with the ones already on my radar?

Looking back, I suspect this is why I’ve been avoiding any wishlist type posts for the past few months. But you know what? I’m always telling other people not to worry about all the books they’ll never get to read; that it’s all about the possibilities, the potential, the excitement that comes with knowing life will never get dull because there’s always more out there than we could ever possibly take in; and it’s probably time I do a better job of remembering this myself.

I may not be reading all that much lately, and I may not trust my ability to say anything worth saying about books; but nevertheless books still occupy a huge chunk of my brain on a day to day basis, and I doubt this will ever cease to be the case. Even when I’m not reading, I’m thinking about reading. I’m constantly making themed reading lists in my head, making notes of interesting-sounding books I see here and there, thinking of recommending this or that book to a friend it reminds me of; I unapologetically plan holidays around bookshops and sites of literary interest; I travel miles to go to bookish events. And I’ve come to realise that this, all this thinking about reading, is a huge part of the pleasures of being a reader. The amount of time that passes before I actually get to the books I’m excited about has no relevance here. If I were to let go of this, if I stopped making plans and embracing the bits and pieces of bookish excitement I experience every day, I’d feel like something huge was missing from my life.

So, without further ado, here’s the latest edition of Discovered While Shelving. I have no idea when I’ll actually read any of the following books, but for the moment all I care about is that they exist, and that finding out about them makes me feel happy and excited and alive.

Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth by Margaret Atwood — Payback began its life as a series of radio lectures that Atwood delivered in 2008, which were eventually collected as essays here. The publisher describes it as follows:

[A] book that examines the metaphor of debt and the role it takes in our lives. (…) This is not a book about debt management or high finance, but about debt as a very old, central motif in religion and literature and also in the structuring of human societies. [Atwood] looks at the language of debt in the Old Testament - what was ‘owed’ to God, and why. She then turns to investigate debt as sin in medieval and Elizabethan literature, before it develops into a plot-driving concept in nineteenth and twentieth century novels. The debts to society and to nature are discussed in the final essay in this book as Atwood explores how debt as a metaphor affects our understanding of the environment and death.

This sounds perfect for my current interests, and I can’t believe I didn’t even know it existed until now.

Soonchild by Russell Hoban — A beautifully illustrated fantasy novel that draws from Inuit folklore and comes with an enthusiastic blurb by Patrick Ness. Also, the same day this passed through my hands at the library my friend Heather e-mailed me suggesting it as a book we might read together soon, which seems wonderfully serendipitous.

Injustice: Why Social Inequality Persists by Daniel Dorling — From the publisher’s description:

Leading social commentator and academic Danny Dorling claims in this timely book that in rich countries inequality is no longer caused by not having enough resources to share, but by unrecognised and unacknowledged beliefs which actually propagate it. Based on significant research across a range of fields, in Injustice Dorling argues that, as the five social evils identified by Beveridge at the dawn of the British welfare state are gradually being eradicated (ignorance, want, idleness, squalor and disease), they are being replaced by five new tenets of injustice, that: elitism is efficient; exclusion is necessary; prejudice is natural; greed is good and despair is inevitable. In an informal yet authoritative style, Dorling examines who is most harmed by these injustices and why, and what happens to those who most benefit. Hard-hitting and uncompromising in its call to action, this is essential reading for everyone concerned with social justice.

Sounds like a perfect follow-up to The Spirit Level, and is, again, very relevant to my current interests.

Troublesome Things: A History of Fairies and Fairy Stories by Diane Purkiss — Do we really need anything more than the title? Give me now!

A Reading Diary: A Year of Favourite Books by Alberto Manguel — I love reading diaries. Also, it’s Manguel.

On Becoming a Fairy Godmother by Sara Maitland — Recently I had the opportunity to see Sara Maitland read from and talk about her work as part of a panel on fairy tales, and she came across as an incredibly smart writer I should be reading right now. Only a few days after that I spotted this collection at work – a series of fairy tale retellings focusing on older women. Now I only have to decide whether I should read this or Gossip from the Forest (which my fellow panel attendee Ana highlighted recently) first.

Conclusion: yay, books? Perhaps thinking about reading can be a fitting subject for this blog after all.

Bath and Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights

2013-05-07T18:42:00.001+01:00

My literary pilgrimage of the UK continues: the latest place I got to tick off my list was lovely Bath, land of Roman ruins and elegant Georgian buildings. Bath is also famous among book lovers for being the home of Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights, an independent bookshop that has been twice voted the best in the UK.

The moment I stepped in, I could see why. Visiting Mr B’s was a little like going to a smart and interesting friend’s house and carefully perusing their bookshelves: you know you’re going to find promising books of whose existence you were previously unaware. And even better than that, you know that whatever you find will come with a personalised recommendation. Mr B’s Emporium manages to recreate this feeling by making copious use of reader to reader as well as bookseller to reader recommendations. There are staff favourite shelves, themed displays, reader reviews pinned to the walls, you name it. My visit left me full of ideas for creating a sense of connection among readers that I’d love to try at my library.

Sadly Bath is far away enough that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to take advantage of their events, but I got the impression that this is a bookshop that knows how to place itself at the centre of a vibrant community of readers. Allow me to give you the tour:

Best idea ever — and of course that now I want to see if I can adapt it for my library. The books mentioned included The Thief, I Kill Giants and The Fault in our Stars, which immediately made me feel at home.

Any bookshop that places The Brides of Rollrock Island among the staff favourites is a bookshop after my own heart.

It was nice to get a little glimpse of the Patrick Ness event they had a few weeks before my visit.

Tintin wallpaper, because why not?

Cushion signed by visiting authors.

...to go along with this signed lampshade.

And look what I found :D
And since I’m at it, here are a few pictures of Bath itself:

The Roman Baths.

Mandatory classic Bath shot.

The city and the Somerset hills seen from Prior Park.

1839 graffiti on the bridge.

Slightly creepy doll and man in period gear outside the Jane Austen centre.

Here Lived Jane Austen - Number 4 Sydney Place.

Bath also has the coolest independent shops.

As you can probably tell from the pictures, I was very lucky with the weather, and the result was an absolutely lovely long weekend. To those of you who know the UK, what’s the next bookshop or bookish place you think I should visit?

Happy World Book Night!

2013-04-23T10:00:00.000+01:00

World Book Night is here at last: by the time you read this, I’ll be out and about with a box full of copies of Patrick Ness’ The Knife of Never Letting Go, which will hopefully find their way into the hands of new readers. Some of you might have noticed that one of my customary ways of expressing bookish enthusiasm is to profess a desire to stand on a street corner somewhere pressing copies of whichever book I fell in love with into the hands of random passersby. There are in fact two categories of books that are likely to make me want to do this: one is non-fiction filled with ideas I think the world needs to hear more often (oh, if only Delusions of Gender or Bad Science were to become World Book Night books!); the other is a specific kind of favourite fiction. As a certain quote from a certain widely beloved book puts it, some favourite books you become fiercely protective of. Others, though, you want to share with the whole world – and fortunately, for me The Knife of Never Letting Go belongs to this last category.

Today, then, is a bit like the fulfilment of a lifelong dream. I’ll be getting as close as I’m ever likely to get to pressing copies of a book I love into the hands of unsuspecting passersby, and hopefully I’ll be doing my bit to help spread enthusiasm about books. Also, on Sunday some of you asked to see a close-up of the “if you liked this, try…” bookmark I’m putting inside my books, so here’s a photo. There’s also a photo of The World Book Night poster I made, which includes the opening lines of the novel. I figure they would probably make people want to read on.

Wish me luck, everyone! And if you’re a World Book Night giver too (or if you were one in past years), I’d love to hear about your experiences.

The Sunday Salon: What I’ve Been up to, Photo Edition

2013-04-21T11:42:00.000+01:00

These past few weeks, I have:

1) Put together a library display I’m quite proud of. As you can see, the theme is “Forgotten Classics” and it’s full of books I love.

Apologies for the poor quality of the photos, by the way. I felt like a huge dork taking pictures once I was finished putting it together, so I did it as quickly as possible. The DVDs you can’t quite see because of the reflection are Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day and Cheerful Weather for the Wedding.

And these are previous Carnegie Medal Winners in the YA section, to go along with a display devoted to the current shortlist. I love my job.

2) Picked up my World Book Night books (on which more soon). That thing on top is a bookmark I made suggesting other titles people who enjoy this book might want to try, and also promoting the library service. There will be one inside each book I give away.

3) Bought books because I have zero self-restraint. I’ve already read the top one, Eleanor & Park, and have joined the ranks of people who are head over heels in love with that book. Also, The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister is a book I’d never even heard of before, but it has blurbs by Sarah Waters and Emma Donoghue which respectively say: “Anne Lister’s Diaries are an indispensable read for anyone interested in the history of gender, sexuality and the intimate lives of women” and “The Lister Diaries are the Dead Sea Scrolls of lesbian history: they changed everything.” !!! I can’t decide if I’m more excited that this book exists or that I found a copy for one pound.

4) Went to a literary festival and saw some amazing authors. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie signed my book and was generally awesome. I took lots of notes during her talk, so I could do a post later if you guys are interested in hearing more about it.

I also saw David Almond and got to rant along with him about library closures for a little bit, which was pretty awesome. Plus he signed my copy of The Savage, a book I adored:

5) Saw a stage adaptation of Wyrd Sisters! I’d been meaning to see a Discworld play for a very long time and it was lovely to have the chance to do so at last.

6) Found one of my most anticipated book releases of the year disappointing. Oh well; I’ve long ago learned to accept the fact that even my favourite authors will sometimes release books I won’t be able to connect with.

7) Saw Jack Zipes speak about fairy tales, feminism and the visual arts. He’s one of my favourite fairy tales scholars and it was lovely to have the chance to be there. He’s also doing a panel session on fairy tale retellings and feminism next week, which I’m really looking forward to.

8) Last but not least, enjoyed the fact that we’re finally getting some proper spring weather:

That’s it for me. Hopefully over the next few days I’ll be able to write actual words about some of these things. How about you? Have you been up to anything exciting?

Brief thoughts part two: Are You My Mother?, Here Comes Everybody & The Spirit Level

2013-04-11T15:11:00.001+01:00

As promised, here’s part two of my mini-reviewathon:

Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel: Bechdel’s follow up to her earlier graphic memoir, Fun Home, focuses on her relationship with her mother. In addition to being about family ties, Are You My Mother? is a story about creativity, autobiography, and how the process of writing a memoir affects your relationships. Some of the most interesting bits of Are You My Mother? were the ones that dealt with Bechdel’s mother’s feelings about the publication of Fun Home and the attention that followed. Bechdel feels that her story is her own, and furthermore that it’s not exactly the same as her mother’s story, but she nevertheless acknowledges all the complications and difficulties inherent to family memoir.

In Fun Home, Bechdel used James Joyce’s Ulysses to frame her own narrative; in Are You My Mother?, Virginia Woolf’s diaries and the works of British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott play a similar role. Indeed, this memoir is very deeply steeped in psychoanalysis, and I’m afraid this was what kept me from connecting with it in the same way I did with Fun Home. I love Alison Bechdel, especially her Dykes to Watch Out For, and spending time in her story world is always a pleasure. But in this particular work she makes sense of her experiences using a set of metaphors that are a barrier to me. This is, of course, a very personal reaction rather than a flaw with the book – if you feel differently than I do about psychoanalysis, you’re not likely to have these problems. But I couldn’t get past how disconnected from the story this made me feel.

I’ll leave you with one of my favourite moments, which put me in mind of what I was saying recently about Nicole Georges’ Calling Dr Laura:

“Whatever it was I wanted from my mother was simply not there to be had. It was not her fault. And it was therefore not my fault that I was unable to elicit it.”

***

Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens When People Come Together by Clay Shirky: I picked up both this and The Spirit Level shortly after reading Cory Doctorow’s Homeland for the same reason: I wanted to feel politically hopeful again; I wanted more books that would make me feel that the world can and eventually will become a better place. (And okay, the blurb from Doctorow on the Shirky book didn’t hurt either.)

The main argument of Here Comes Everybody is that the Internet has enormously lowered the cost of group formation, self-assembly, and self-organisation, and that this new ease of collaboration has enormous political power. Shirky puts it better than I have in the following paragraph:

The difficulties that kept self-assembled groups from working together are shrinking, meaning that the numbers and kinds of things groups can get done without financial motivation or managerial oversight are growing. The current change, in one sentence, is this: most of the barriers to group action have collapsed, and without those barriers, we are free to explore new way of gathering together and getting things done.

I don’t think this is something you can argue with – as Shirky says, it’s not a prediction but something that’s already happening – but I go back and forth on whether or not I trust that the existence of all this potential social and political power means it will be harnessed. I don’t want to come across as cynical, though – I love all the new possibilities for bringing about change that we have available today, and it’s a basic fact of behaviour that when the cost of doing something goes down, its frequency will go up.

Yet as you may have gathered, Here Comes Everybody didn’t make me feel quite as hopeful as I would have liked. I think this was mainly because the ideas it presents were already familiar to me, and a piece of non-fiction doesn’t always have the same power a novel has to reveal something you already know in new and inspiring ways. But even if not exactly what I was looking for right now, this was a worthwhile read – especially if you’re interested in political change, grassroots movements, social media, and managing collaborations of any kind.

The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett was more the kind of thing I wanted. It’s about the correlation between economic inequality and multiple social problems in countries that have achieved a basic standard level of living (the so-called developed world), and it supports its arguments about how we need to address inequality now with a whole lot of data. Wilkinson and Pickett say,

The problems in rich countries are not caused by the society not being rich enough (or even by being too rich) but by the scale of material differences between people within each society being too big. What matters is where we stand in relation to others in our society.

There’s a whole lot I could say about The Spirit Level, but I’ll keep this brief and only make two points. First of all, I loved the chapters about the correlation between self-worth and social status. More: I found them incredibly useful reminders of something I need to hear often. Wilkinson and Pickett present data that suggests that the belief that the world is a meritocracy has very real consequences for people’s well-being. The cultural narratives about how economic privilege is the result of talent and hard work (and therefore deprivation of their absence) are very prominent and widespread, and as inequality increases they become more harmful. We are social animals: we create hierarchies of worth and these get inside our heads and do a lot of damage. Sometimes I need someone other than myself to remind me of that.

Second point: at times Wilkinson and Pickett lost me because of their tendency to default to evolutionary psychology when sociology would do just fine (and lack the dodginess). For example, when explaining why “reckless, violent behaviour often comes from young men at the bottom of the social ladder”, the authors could have focused on how we define masculinity and on the potential consequences of feeling you have nothing to lose. Instead, they went the evolutionary psychology route and made it all about how “status is what matters most for sexual success among men” because “women value it in their partners” – a made up just-so story with far less explanatory power. This annoyed me for its own sake, but it also made me mistrustful of the theories they present regarding things I don’t have a background on and don’t know much about throughout the rest of the book, which is a real shame.

However, I don’t want to let that take away from the fact that the central argument of The Spirit Level is both convincing and extremely important. Here’s a bit I particularly liked:

Politics was once seen as a way of improving people’s social and emotional wellbeing by changing their economic circumstances. But over the last few decades the bigger picture has been lost. People are now more likely to see psychosocial wellbeing as dependent on what can be done at the individual level, using cognitive behavioural therapy – one person at a time – or in providing support in early childhood, or in the reassertion of traditional or ‘family’ values. However, it is now clear that income distribution provides policy makers with a way of improving the psychosocial wellbeing of whole populations. Politicians have an opportunity to do genuine good.
(…)
Rather than reducing inequality itself, the initiatives aimed at tackling health or social problems are nearly always attempts to break the links between socio-economic disadvantage and the problems it produces. The unstated hope is that people – particularly the poor – can carry on in the same circumstances, but will somehow no longer succumb to mental illness, teenage pregnancy, educational failure, obesity or drugs.
Every problem is seen as needing its own solution – unrelated to others. People are encouraged to take exercise, not to have unprotected sex, to say no to drugs, to try to relax, to sort out their work-life balance, and to give their children ‘quality’ time. The only thing that many of these policies do have in common is that they often seem to be based on the belief that the poor need to be taught to be more sensible. The glaringly obvious fact that these problems have common roots in inequality and relative deprivation disappear from view.

Yes, yes, yes. Obviously I don’t think individuals should be denied one-on-one help and support while we all stand around waiting for the revolution. But let’s not forget those links, and let us aim for systematic change too.

Affiliates disclosure: if you buy a book through one of my affiliates links I will get 5%.

Brief thoughts: Wheels of Change, The Stuff of Legend & Wonderstruck

2013-04-08T10:48:00.000+01:00

Mini-reviews time! Here are some brief thoughts on some of the books that have slipped through the cracks since February or so. Part two to follow soon.

Wheels of Change: How Women Rode the Bicycle to Freedom (With a Few Flat Tires Along the Way) by Sue Macy: This YA non-fiction title has been on my radar ever since I spotted it among the finalists for the YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction last year. As the title indicates, it’s about the development of bicycle culture – specifically the impact it had on first wave feminism at the turn of the 20^th century in America.

Sue Macy covers topics such as the history of the bicycle, the impact cycling had on feminine fashion, how freedom of movement changed women’s lives, and social reactions to ‘cycling madness’ (much like everything we have done before or since, the fact that women were cycling was seen by some as a sure sign of the impending moral apocalypse). Wheels of Change is particularly interesting because it examines the unexpected impact that a technological advance had on social change, and this is not something I pause to consider as often as I probably should.

The book is published by National Geographic, and it does read a bit like an extended National Geographic feature – but please don’t take this as a negative comment, because it absolutely isn’t. The page layout is magazine-like, but in the best possible way – there are photographs, clippings from period news sources, and boxes with extra information alongside the main text; these were informative and every bit a pleasure to peruse as the text itself.

I don’t have much else to say about Wheels of Change other than “it was fun and I learned plenty of interesting things”, but I still wanted to blog about it to let more people know that it exists. Also, the book was particularly timely for me because I’ve been learning how to ride a bike over the past few months (yes, only now). I never really had the chance to before, but once I moved to a city where cycling is one of the main means of transportation it became a big priority. It’s interesting to learn about the history of something I’ve been doing lately, and especially to consider how it’s linked to feminism and all sorts of things that really matter to me. Every time I go out to practice cycling I mentally salute the pioneers Macy highlights.

In sum, recommended. For a proper review, try Amy’s or the one at Slatebreakers, Books and Bicycles.

The Stuff of Legend vol 1 by Mike Raicht, Brian Smith and Paul Wilson III: This comic has an amazing premise and gorgeous artwork, and yet it did absolutely nothing for me – unless you count plunging me into a long-lasting spiral of anguish about whether or not I’m becoming a jaded reader, which some of you might have glimpsed on Tumblr or Twitter (thanks a lot, book).

The Stuff of Legend is set in New York during WW2: a little boy whose father is away fighting is kidnapped by the Bogeyman one night, which causes a group of his toys to journey into the Dark Realm to attempt to rescue him. The Dark Realm, it turns out, is mostly inhabited by lost, forgotten, and discarded toys, and it takes strength and vigilance for our heroes and heroines not to turn to the dark side themselves.

The story establishes some interesting parallels between the Dark Realm and the tensions of the period when it’s set; and as it’s often mentioned in the same breath as series such as Fables and The Unwritten, I image it also does cool things with themes such as storytelling and the imagination as it progresses. But for some reason I was just not feeling it. And because I believe in this absolutely, I have to say that I have no idea whatsoever whether the problem was the book or me. Some of my favourite examples of criticism are those that allow me to, if not to love a piece of media for myself, at least see it through the eyes of those who did love it and understand why someone might. So my greatest hope is that one of you will pick up The Stuff of Legend and tell me what you saw in it that I missed.

I’ll leave you with some of the artwork:

Isn’t that stunning? I really wish I’d enjoyed the book.

Wonderstruck by Brian Selznick: Much like the gorgeous The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Wonderstruck combines words and pictures to tell a memorable story. In Wonderstruck, the images and the words begin by telling two separate stories that eventually converge: the first, set in 1977, is about Ben, a twelve-year-old from Minnesota who runs away to New York in search of his dad and ends up hiding in the American Museum of Natural History; the second, which takes place fifty years earlier, is about Rose. Like Ben, she’s twelve; they also have in common the fact that they’re deaf (Rose from birth, Ben due to an accident), and the fact that the Museum of Natural History plays an unexpected role in their lives.

One of my favourite things about Selznick’s books are all the little historical details he packs into them. The Invention of Hugo Cabret is both a wonderful story and a crash course in film history; in Wonderstruck, I learned about dioramas, curation, the 1920’s, museum history, and wolf habitats in North America, just to name a few things.

Also worthy of mention is the fact that this book has two main characters with disabilities who are real, multifaceted people, which is still a rare thing. Wonderstruck didn’t make quite as strong an impression on me as The Invention of Hugo Cabret, but I suspect that’s only because my experience with the latter had the added pleasure of discovery as I encountered Selznick’s art and original storytelling for the very first time.

An example of Selznick’s art:

Proper review: here’s Jill’s, which is excellent as always.

(Have you posted about any of these books? Let me know and I’ll be happy to link to you.)

Affiliates disclosure: if you buy a book through one of my affiliates links I will get 5%.

Before and Afterlives by Christopher Barzak

2013-04-04T13:15:00.000+01:00

Christopher Barzak’s Before and Afterlives collects seventeen short stories, most previously published in anthologies or literary magazines over the past ten years. As customary in Barzak’s work, these stories combine elements from different genres in interesting and effective ways: there are ghost stories; stories about small town life with surprising science fiction or fairy tale twists; stories about the zombie apocalypse; stories where people slowly disappear; stories about family dynamics; stories with lgb teen protagonists discovering or coming to terms with their sexuality; stories about grief and loss and loneliness and disaffection.

Indeed, loneliness is a common thread linking many of the protagonists in Before and Afterlives. What appeals to me the most about Barzak’s stories is not so much the speculative elements as the emotional realities behind them. I don’t want to say, “these are stories about real people” as if this weren’t something SFF usually does (in fact, emotional realism is something pretty much all my favourite genre works have in common); it’s just that the use of supernatural elements to cast light on human experiences is particularly accomplished in these stories. To quote from the review at Chasing Ray, which puts it better than I possibly could,

[E]ven though these lives might include mermaids or ghostly parents or talking fireflies, the extraordinary aspects are not what make his tales so magical. It’s the way [Barzak] sees plain ordinary people that gives his stories such power; the way he sees us and yet loves us anyway.

There’s a certain uniformity of setting to Before and Afterlives, but instead of making the stories samey, this only adds to the book’s thematic consistency. Many of the stories seem to be in dialogue with one another, and the collection is all the stronger for it. There’s also a very strong sense of place and history here: many stories are set in small communities; in post-industrial towns in clear economic decline, and the protagonists’ socioeconomic backgrounds are far from privileged. I was particularly interested in the fact that these are stories we don’t normally get to hear because they’re set when ‘everybody’ – by which I mean those who are traditionally given voices – has already left to seek a future elsewhere. But instead of following those who leave, these stories are often concerned with the people who stay behind.

Because of this, Before and Afterlives largely deals with how people cope with their community’s decline, with how they overcome hopelessness, with how they carve a future for themselves in circumstances where many wouldn’t think this was possible. They’re about people from these communities taking on roles that go beyond what’s usually seen as permissible for someone of their background. They’re about feeling lost and sometimes trapped; but they’re not always bleak and they don’t envision escaping to the big enlightened city where all the accepting people supposedly live as the only solution – instead, they focus on the more complicated process of finding or making a real home in unexpected places.

As is generally the case with short story collections, I liked some of them better than others. Stories like “What We Know About the Lost Families of – House”, “Dead Boy Found” or “Map of Seventeen” were very nearly perfect; others, like “The Language of Moths”, “Dead Letters”, “Plenty”, or “A Beginner’s Guide to Survival Before, During, and After the Apocalypse”, were a pleasure to read; and there was one I just couldn’t get along with but would still love to discuss with others. (That was “Caryatids”, in case you’re wondering – a science fiction story that made me uncomfortable because of the way the protagonist’s female body is described, even though I usually love stories about gender-bending and analyses of the power dynamics behind sexual relationships. We could chat for hours about why Kij Johnson’s “Spar” works for me but this doesn’t, especially because I don’t have an answer myself.)

One of the best examples of what I was describing above is “Map of Seventeen”, a story in which the protagonist’s older brother, a successful artist, returns from New York to Ohio to live beside his parents’ house with his male partner. The story is told from his younger sister’s perspective, and it deals with Meg’s adjustment to her brother’s return to her life, with her own impending journey beyond the boundaries of the known world, and with the challenging process of becoming someone else without losing touch with who you once were.

A few years ago, when I read Barzak’s amazing The Love We Share Without Knowing, I was particularly drawn to the kindness and generosity of his storytelling. In that novel, he writes about a mother coming to terms with the fact that her son was gay with extreme compassion and insight. Obviously the fact that lgbtq people should have their families’ full support is beyond any question for me, but I’m interested in the process by which people arrive to that place of acceptance and support, especially if they’re dealing with something that was once beyond their mental categories and their understand of the world. There are many people for whom this is not an easy journey emotionally, and while I think being willing to make it is a matter of basic human decency, I still like to see fiction that acknowledges, humanises, and sheds light on this process. Barzak does something similar with his portrayal of Meg in “Map of Seventeen”. Possibly because she’s younger, she doesn’t seem to struggle with the concept of same-sex relationships herself, but she’s concerned with the effect her brother’s presence will have on her community and especially on her parents’ standing in it. Throughout the story, we see her move beyond these fears towards a place where she can put her brother’s happiness first – and this only scratches the surface of everything “Map of Seventeen” manages to pack in.

Besides, how could I fail to love a story that includes passages such as this?

If I had a map of seventeen, of the years I’d lived so far, it would be small and plain, outlining the contours of my town with a few landmarks on it like Marrow’s Ravine and town square, the schools, the pond, our fields and the barn and the home we live in. It would be on crisp, fresh paper, because I haven’t travelled very far, and stuck to the routes I know best. There would be nothing but waves and waves of ocean surrounding my map of my hometown. In the ocean I’d draw those sea beasts you find on old maps of the world, and above them I’d write the words “There Be Dragons”.
What else is out there, beyond this edge of the world I live on? Who else is out there? Are there real reasons to be as afraid of the world as I’ve been?”

Before and Afterlives has a very strong opener in “What We Know About the Lost Families of – House”, a Southern Gothic/haunted house story that uses voice and perspective in really interesting ways. This story actually reminded me of The Little Stranger, particularly when it comes to the class dynamics between the watchers and the watched. It achieves similar things, which yes, is very high praise indeed. “What We Know About the Lost Families of – House” deals with class mobility and loss and the tension between different identities, which, again, is a theme I find really interesting.

Lastly, I’d like to highlight “The Language of Moths”, a gorgeous story with one big problem I unfortunately had trouble getting past. Much like “Map of Seventeen”, “The Language of Moths” is about family dynamics, sexual orientation and acceptance, and it blends magical elements and psychological realism in ways that allow the former to highlight the latter. The protagonist, Eliot, is spending the summer at a cabin with his family, so his father can attempt to find a previously undocumented moth species he thinks he may have spotted in the distant past. The language, sense of place and themes the story deals with are all beautiful, and I found myself really moved by the ending.

Yet there is one big “but”.

Eliot’s sister, Dawn, is autistic, and her role in the story had me considering the frequent fictional links between magical powers and disabilities/developmental disorders, in much the same way Toph from Avatar did. Only the problem here is exacerbated because this is a short story, so Dawn doesn’t get anywhere near as much character development as Toph. Toph gets a lot of screen time, so the potential problems in her representation are at least counterbalanced by the fact that she’s portrayed as a real person.

In “The Language of Moths” there are sections from Dawn’s perspective, which I appreciated, but when all is said and done she still doesn’t come across as her own person to me. Instead, she falls into a pattern of magical helpers who aid the protagonist in achieving growth or insight. As I said, the ending of the story is gorgeous and really moved me, but this pattern took away from its power to a considerable extent. “The Language of Moths” would be a much stronger story, I think, if we had learned something about what that summer’s experiences meant to Dawn herself. I wanted access to her subjectivity, and even the passages from her point of view didn’t give me that.

After reading the story I came across an old essay where Barzak addresses some of these issues. Anyone who reads this blog will probably know that I don’t see authorial intent as authoritative, but rather as a reading among many; one that stands on equal footing with any others for which there is textual support. So I’m linking to this post not in the spirit of going, “oh look, good intentions make it all okay”, but because I found the essay and the subsequent discussion in the comments genuinely interesting, and so I thought you might too.

Before and Afterlives is now out from Lethe Press. I found it a pleasure to read, and once again I was reminded of why I should read short fiction more often.

Reviewed at: Chasing Ray, Rising Shadow

(Have I missed yours? Let me know and I’ll be happy to add your link.)

Affiliates disclosure: if you buy a book through one of my affiliates links I will get 5%. I received a digital copy of this book for review from the author.

February by Margaret Atwood

2013-04-02T07:40:00.002+01:00

Picture taken in my backyard the weekend before last. I’d be able to appreciate the beauty more if I didn’t resent the cold so much at this point.

April is National Poetry Month in the US, and due to the nature of the Internet these things inevitably get globalised. Stefanie wrote a great post about the pros and cons of special events of this sort, so I won’t rehash her arguments – I’ll just say that I appreciate having the opportunity to remind myself of how much I enjoy poetry.

As in previous years, I’m taking part in Serena’s poetry blog tour, and I thought I’d share a poem that reflects how this very long winter has made me feel. It’s now April, not February; it hasn’t snowed since Saturday and the sun is shining this morning, but it’s still -3 outside and I still “think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries”.

“February” by Margaret Atwood

Winter. Time to eat fat
and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,
a black fur sausage with yellow
Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries
to get onto my head. It’s his
way of telling whether or not I’m dead.
If I’m not, he wants to be scratched; if I am
He’ll think of something. He settles
on my chest, breathing his breath
of burped-up meat and musty sofas,
purring like a washboard. Some other tomcat,
not yet a capon, has been spraying our front door,
declaring war. It’s all about sex and territory,
which are what will finish us off
in the long run. Some cat owners around here
should snip a few testicles. If we wise
hominids were sensible, we’d do that too,
or eat our young, like sharks.
But it’s love that does us in. Over and over
again, He shoots, he scores! and famine
crouches in the bedsheets, ambushing the pulsing
eiderdown, and the windchill factor hits
thirty below, and pollution pours
out of our chimneys to keep us warm.
February, month of despair,
with a skewered heart in the centre.
I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries
with a splash of vinegar.
Cat, enough of your greedy whining
and your small pink bumhole.
Off my face! You’re the life principle,
more or less, so get going
on a little optimism around here.
Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.

“February” can be found in the collection Morning in the Burned House, which I’ve been meaning to read in its entirety for ages.

Speaking of Margaret Atwood, I was ridiculous excited to find out the other day that she’s doing an event near me this summer. It’s about MaddAddam, the last book in the Year of the Flood trilogy, so I guess I’d better get my act together and read it before then.

Half a dozen years

2013-03-29T10:47:00.000Z

Photo credit

It’s my birthday! Well, not really my birthday, but things mean a lot is six today. Half a dozen years: where did the time go? And who would have known that I’d still be here all this time later? Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how much the seemingly minor decision to start a blog in early 2007 has shaped the course of my life. As I think I’ve mentioned before, I wouldn’t be on my current career path if not for blogging, and the things I’ve learned from the online reading community inform my work every day. I can’t tell you how grateful I am for that.

Speaking of work, I thought you might like to know that my adventures in public libraries continue to go well. In addition to my regular hours at a very busy central library (one of the top five busiest in the UK, as per last year’s stats), I’m now doing two days a week at a small branch on the outskirts of the city, where I’m a solo worker. It’s been a very different sort of experience: this library mostly serves an elderly population, and because things are much quieter than at my main workplace, I have time to interact with each person more leisurely. I also get a lot of people who clearly stop by at least partially for that human interaction; people who are eager to discuss whatever books they’re returning with me and to ask my thoughts on what to check out next (hooray, reader’s advisory!).

Working there has been a good reminder of how difficult it is to quantify the value of certain services. If you look at usage stats alone, you’d probably think this branch was failing – some mornings we get no more than a dozen visitors. But after spending some time there, you quickly realise just how much that small library’s continued existence matters to the people who actually use it. As I said, it mostly serves an elderly population, some with mobility problems; these are people who might not be able to travel all the way to the city centre to go to the library. But because we’re there, they get to visit a comfortable and familiar place that obviously adds a lot to their quality of life.

Other than that, I’ve also been having a lot fun doing display. They are, as a friend aptly put it the other day, like “visual lists of recommendations”, and it’s extremely satisfying to see people take them up and walk out with one of the books. I did this for International Women’s Day; I did one with past winners of the Carnegie Medal for the YA library; and now I’m working on a “forgotten classics” one that will mostly consist of Persephones and Virago Modern Classics. Perhaps I’ll post pictures when it’s ready.

Anyway, because it’s my blog’s birthday, I’m going to give myself permission to be self-indulgent and ask you for two uplifting things. My writing motivation has been wavering a lot lately (hence the relative silence), and as much as I love my job, sometimes it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that other people see its value too. So I’d like you two share two things with me, if you feel so inclined: one, a good memory of using the library or a reason why it made a difference in your life; two, a reason why you read blogs (it doesn’t have to be my blog, of course).

Thank you in advance for humouring me, and thank you – always – for reading. The blogging world has felt a bit fragile lately, but hopefully we’ll all still be here in a year’s time for another celebration.

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

2013-03-25T10:30:00.000Z

The Song of Achilles is a sort of retelling of The Iliad from the point of view of Patroclus, an exiled prince and the lover and companion of Achilles, the “Best of the Greeks”. I say a sort of retelling because the novel doesn’t just concern itself with the Trojan War: instead, it begins with Patroclus’ childhood and then follows his love affair with Achilles from its inception to its final days. Madeline Miller’s novel, then, mainly deals with the unexplored pockets and unaddressed possibilities of a well-known story, which is just what I like my retellings to do.

The Song of Achilles has received a lot of praise, mainly for the writing and for the beautifully told same-sex love story. There’s no denying that Miller does a super job of bringing Patroclus and Achilles’ love affair to life: the story is narrated in the first person, and the intimacy of Patroclus’ voice invites the reader to closely observe Achilles-the-beloved-object, as well as to experience Patroclus’ near constant longing – a longing that is sexual, but not just. I don’t think I’d read an evocation of passion this powerful since Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith a few years ago, and that’s saying a lot.

And yet. And yet there’s something to be said about the fact that this is one more addition to a long tradition of lgbtq love stories with tragic endings – stories that make our hearts beat faster, that invite us to empathise and cry, but where the characters are safely removed at the end. I know what you’re thinking just about now: ‘Ana, The Song of Achilles is based on The Iliad. There wasn’t exactly much room for puppies, rainbows and happy endings.’ Which, yes, is absolutely true. Not only that, but the very final scene suggests the possibility of hope; of an in-world reunion based on the novel’s mythology. That’s not something to be discounted, although it doesn’t erase the fact that at its core this is a tragic story.

So, to make it absolutely clear, I don’t think that the tragic pattern of The Song of Achilles, which mirrors that of its source material, is a flaw with the novel. I also don’t think we ought to limit the range of stories we tell about underrepresented groups by demanding that no writer ever go there, even though certain tropes are undeniably troublesome. What I do think is that there are interesting and relevant conversations to be had about why these are the stories we repeatedly shower all our praise and attention upon. This isn’t meant to make anyone feel guilty for enjoying this book (it case that wasn’t obvious before, I really did as well) – but the dangers of a single story are always worth thinking about.

Speaking of Miller’s source material, I really liked the fact that The Song of Achilles raises questions about the notion of heroism and glory while still adhering closely to a war narrative. Take the following excerpt, for example:

Chiron had said once that nations were the most foolish of mortal inventions. “No man is worth more than another, wherever he is from”.
“But what if he is your friend?” Achilles had asked him, feet kicked up on the wall of the rose-quartz cave. “Or your brother? Should you treat him the same as a stranger?”
“You ask a question that philosophers argue over,” Chiron had said. “He is worth more to you, perhaps. But the stranger is someone else’s friend and brother. So which life is more important?”
We had been silent. We were fourteen, and these things were too hard for us. Now that we were twenty-seven, they still feel too hard.

This refusal to uncomplicate war and the roles individuals play in it is one of Miller’s greatest triumphs. The introduction of moments such as the one above makes Achilles more than a killing machine, as does the portrayal of the side of him Patroclus explicitly tells us he wants us to remember. The stories that survive, the ones that are repeatedly told, and often stories that dehumanise and oversimplify people, and Patroclus’s narrative is one that actively resists that.

Most of the action of The Song of Achilles takes place in the world of boys and men, and because the setting is one where war and education were gendered segregated affairs, I can’t exactly hold this against the novel. There are moments where Patroclus seems to actively flinch away from the world women inhabit, but not, I think, wholly without sympathy for their circumstances. Take this observation about Deidameia, for example:

Confinement. I heard the bitterness in her voice when she said it. Some small house, at the edge of Lycomedes’ land. She would not be able to dance or speak with companions there. She would be alone, with a servant and her growing belly.
“I’m sorry”, I said.
She did not answer. I watched the soft heaving of her back beneath the white gown. I took a step towards her, then stopped. I had thought to touch her, to smooth her hair in comfort. But it would not be comfort, from me. My hand fell back to my side.

And yet, as before, there’s another angle to consider: is this vague and soon forgotten sympathy enough to make up for the fact that none of the women in this novel are as complex and fully developed as the men? Not only that, but their roles are fairly fixed: Deidameia is beautiful, jealous, childish and spoiled; Thetis is fearsome and cold; Briseis is the self-sacrificing woman who shields the male lovers from external scrutiny at the expense of her own feelings. None of this was a deal-breaker for me, mostly because, as I discussed above, there was a certain feminist sensibility to Miller’s descriptions that softened the blow; and also because the novel was doing enough other things that I loved that I was completely under its spell. But everyone’s mileage will vary.

Bits I liked:

Later, Achilles sleeps next to me. Odysseus’ storm has come, and the coarse fabric of the tent wall trembles with its force. I hear the stinging slap, over and over, of waves reproaching the shore. He stirs and the air stirs with him, bearing the must-sweet smell of his body. I think: This is what I will miss. I think: I will kill myself rather than miss it. I think: How long do we have?

*sob*

As we swam, or played, or talked, a feeling would come. It was almost like fear, in the way it filled me, rising in my chest. It was almost like tears, in how swiftly it came. But it was neither of those, buoyant where they were heavy, bright where they were dull. I had known contentment before, brief snatches of time in which I pursued solitary pleasure: skipping stones or dicing or dreaming. But in truth, it had been less a presence than an absence, a laying aside of dread: my father was not near, nor boys. I was not hungry, or tired, or sick.
This feeling was different. I found myself grinning until my cheeks hurt, my scalp pricking until I thought I might lift off my head. My tongue ran away from me, giddy with freedom. This and this and this, I said to him. I did not have to fear that I spoke too much. I did not have to worry that I was too slender or too slow. This and this and this! I taught him how to skip stones, and he taught me how to carve wood. I could feel every nerve in my body, every brush of air against my skin.

Big hat tip to Jodie and Clare, who shared their smarts and helped me brainstorm many of the ideas that made their way into this post.

They read it too: Necromancy Never Pays, Rhapsody in Books, Eve’s Alexandria, The Sleepless Reader, Booklust, The Book Smugglers, Chasing Bawa, Page 247, Iris on Books, Buried in Print

(And more – so many more. If yours is one of them, let me know and I’ll be happy to add your link.)

Affiliates disclosure: if you buy a book through one of my affiliates links I will get 5%.

Snowy Sunday Links

2013-03-24T10:19:00.001Z

An infographic of forgotten fictional female sleuths - So many I haven't met yet! I've been in the mood for mysteries lately, and this gives me lots of reading ideas. Are there any that you recommend?
Recently Jill wrote an outspoken and very informative post about the sexual abuse of women in the military. This, among other things, is why her blog is one of my must-reads.
Two very interesting links on romance novels and feminism. I'm a newcomer to romance, but I find these discussions fascinating, and the overall points they make about how competing reads can and often do coexist go for others genres as well.

Roxane Gay on the VIDA stats:

One of the favored stances is that it’s really all about submission ratios. Please. How much work from the submission queue gets into The New Yorker? These are magazines that publish a great deal of work from their staffs and by solicitation. I’m absolutely willing to agree that submission queues are, for most magazines great and small, dominated by white men. There are any number of reasons why this might be the case but editors can easily solve this problem. There is an abundance of diversity, not just in terms of writers, but in terms of aesthetic, in the writing world. Reach out and touch someone.
There will be more on these kinds of arguments on Lady Business this coming week. Also, from The Rumpus:

What I’ve come to realize, thanks to VIDA and the Count, is that my feminist convictions do not make up for the low number of books by women I’ve reviewed. Not yet. Good intentions are not enough. It’s people like me, people aware of the persistent sexism of our society, who need to do a better job of promoting books by women. To ignore the gender disparity in publishing is to perpetuate it. I can’t do that any longer. Instead, I will continue to champion all of the books I love in every way I can—only now I will do so with a clearer understanding of just how far we still have to go in building the literary community that we all deserve.
There's still time to enrol in this Massive Open Online Course on Gender Through Comics. I'm doing it with my friends Kelly, Heather and Andi, and we're all really excited about it. Join us?
The Lizzie Bennet Diaries DVD? Yes please!

I haven't been blogging or commenting all that much lately, and that leaves me feeling like I haven't talked to any of you in forever. What are you reading at the moment, and what was the last really great book you read? I'm almost finished with Before and Afterlives, a new short story collection by the always excellent Christopher Barzak; and I'm also reading The Spirit Level because Homeland left me craving more political writing. So far, so good: it actually helped me conceptualise things in ways I hadn't before, and the possibility of coming across new ideas and new ways of understand the world is a huge part of why I read.

I'll leave you with a picture of my backyard I took yesterday morning:

A whole day later, the snow still hasn't stopped and the layer is much thicker. What is happening? Have we somehow entered Narnia? As someone who spent most of her live in a temperate climate, I used to not really understand how anyone could possibly dislike snow, but I take it all back. I'm so tired of feeling cooped up by the cold weather, and so ready for spring.

Calling Dr Laura by Nicole Georges

2013-03-21T13:00:00.000Z

It’s difficult to resist comparing Calling Dr. Laura: A Graphic Memoir to Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. They’re quite different in tone, but both are autobiographical graphic novels by queer women who are trying to make sense of their complicated family dynamics, and who find their artistic voices along the way. Nicole Georges, a zinester and cartoonist from Portland, discovers at the age of twenty-three that the father she thought was dead her whole life is in fact very much alive. Calling Dr. Laura jumps back and forth between the present day and Nicole’s childhood to tell a smart and moving story about one young woman coming to terms with new truths about her life.

There are many reasons to love Calling Dr. Laura — the gorgeous and detailed artwook, the witty writing, the lovely representation of f/f romance, the moments of humour intermingled with the darkness — but my main one is the fact that Georges tells her story with such kindness. Her mother, who lied to her about her father’s death, is still a part of Nicole’s life, and their relationship is fraught, to put it mildly. It would be easy to dehumanise her, and it would be understandable if Georges had chosen to tell the story of her experiences as a wronged daughter unilaterally. However, she makes an effort to understand why her mother might have acted the way she did, and her story is all the more moving for it.

Calling Dr. Laura is a story about compromise, and I’ve noticed again and again how drawn I am to those. It’s a story about, as George puts it just before the epilogue, “cutting [one’s] losses and moving on”. She chooses to attempt to have a relationship with her mother even though there are severe limits to what she can expect from it emotionally because, as she puts it, she “already had a an empty, hollow feeling where [her] father should had been” and she “didn’t want a severed connection in the place of [her] mother, too”.

I want to add some caveats here, because I worry about upholding dangerous cultural myths about families and how people are always better off with them than without them. All emotional ties have the potential to become toxic, and families are no exception. Sometimes people really are better off without their families, and on top of everything else they’ve gone through, they shouldn’t have to deal with being guilt-tripped for what’s likely to have been a difficult decision.

Still, Nicole Georges’ attempts to go for something other than a clean break really resonated with me. Close relationships, family ones or otherwise, are often only sustainable because you make a conscious decision to let go; to keep a person you care about nearby regardless of their imperfections; to readjust according to how much you know you can realistically expect the other person to give. Sometimes this requires a radical revision of your expectations of said relationship, but opting for that instead of a “severed connection” can be the right thing for you. It makes me happy to find stories that acknowledge that.

They read it too: write meg!, Stuff as Dreams Are Made On

(You?)

Affiliates disclosure: if you buy a book through one of my affiliates links I will get 5%.

Homeland by Cory Doctorow

2013-03-18T10:46:00.000Z

“So we’re going to win?”
Jolu laughed. “There’s no winning or losing, Marcus. There’s only doing.”

Homeland is the sequel to Cory Doctorow’s brilliant political thriller Little Brother. Marcus Yallow, now aged nineteen, has decided to drop out of college rather than incur more student debt and is desperately looking for a job. This is a symptom of how the political climate around him has changed – the following passage will tell you most of what you need to know about the setting and premise of Homeland:

A few years later, everything changed again. It seemed like overnight, no one had jobs anymore, no one had money anymore, and people started to lose their houses. It was weird, because now that it was obvious that everything had changed, no one wanted to talk about how everything had changed.
When the streets are full of armed cops and soldiers telling you that everything is different, everyone can point at one thing, a thing with a human face, and agree, “It’s different, it’s different.”
But when some mysterious social/financial/political force upends the world and changes everything – when “everything is different now” is a description and not a demand – somehow, it gets much harder to agree on whether things were different and what we needed to do about it.
It was one thing to demand that the armed guards leave our streets. It was another to figure out how to demand that the silent red overdue bills and sneaky process servers with their eviction notices go away.

In this uncertain post-global financial crisis world, Marcus is lucky enough to land a dream job as a webmaster for an independent political candidate who seems committed to real change. But his life becomes much more complicated when a flashdrive with almost a million compromising documents concerning politicians and big businesses is entrusted to him. Is Marcus willing to risk his newfound safety to make these truths come to light?

Homeland is a messier book than Little Brother — there are fewer certainties, hazier enemies, and a far less clear victory at the end. But considering that everything is indeed messier now than it was in 2008, this is only appropriate. This lack of clear answers is a deliberate choice that mirrors the current state of the world. And even if there’s no unambiguous triumph for Marcus and his friends, Homeland filled me with hope. It’s the sort of novel that manages to make you feel alive and encouraged and like the world can in fact become better, and I don’t get to feel that way very often these days.

Doctorow’s writing is the exact kind of political writing I needed in my life right now. I absolutely loved Little Brother, but Homeland actually hits closer to home. My life changed a lot between 2008 and 2013: there’s now a whole year of unemployment in my life, plus student debt I didn’t know how I was ever going to repay, plus lots of broken dreams about how more education would improve my career prospects. It’s not that I was deceived, exactly, and I’m so incredibly grateful for what my education has done for me in terms of personal development. Still, during this time I had to face the fact that everything I was raised to believe, every strategy my parents’ generation used to make their lives comfortable and safe, is no longer effective or true.

Homeland is a novel about kids Marcus’ age coming to the same conclusions, and then deciding to do something about it by trying to change the whole system. Systematic change is less safe, but unlike merely finding a way to do well for yourself despite pervasive inequality, it has the potential to actually be permanent. In her excellent review of the novel, Jeanne asked her readers about the last time they chose safety over freedom, and these are indeed the choices Marcus faces. I really liked the fact that Homeland illustrates that good people often choose safety – people with a political conscience, people who are emphatic and who care, but who are humanly and very understandably terrified of losing the things or people they love. Doctorow doesn’t present us with a simplistic or naïve definition of courage and heroism, but instead shows us how complicated and absolutely terrifying doing what’s right can be. And yet you carry on, because what’s the alternative?

Whenever I read Cory Doctorow’s novels, I’m left in awe of how much non-fiction he manages to sneak into his narrative in a seamless and organic way. Homeland will teach you about anything from cold brewing coffee to electronic surveillance to abstract mathematics to the definition of “random”, and all of it is both fun to read and believable within the narrative, because these are the exact kind of thing our narrator, Marcus, is passionate about.

Last but not least, I loved Homeland because it’s filled with the same trust in young people to be passionate, smart and politically engaged that made Little Brother and For the Win such a pleasure to read. Condescending to teenagers is still the norm in our culture, and Doctorow’s refusal to do that is part of why I enjoy his novels so much. When you’re young, or otherwise part of a demographic that nobody much sees as being of any consequence, having a single person show faith in you can be extremely empowering. Doctorow’s novels call shenanigans on the idea that the world is irrevocably broken and those coming of age in it can do nothing but bear it, and I love them for that.

More bits I liked:

Being waterboarded was terrible, awful, unimaginable – I still had nightmares – but it happened and then it ended. My parents’ slow slide into bankruptcy, the hard, grinding reality of a city with no jobs for anyone, let alone a semi-qualified college dropout like me, and the student debt that I had to pay every month. It was a pile of misery that I lived under every day, and it showed no sign of going away. It wasn’t dramatic, dynamic trouble, the kind of thing you got war stories out of years after the fact. It was just, you know, reality.
And reality sucked.

“Marcus,” he said. “Have you noticed how messed up everything is today? How we put a ‘good’ president in the White House and he kept right on torturing and bombing and running secret prisons? How every time we turn around, someone’s trying to take away the Internet from us, make it into some kind of giant stupid shopping mall where the rent-acops can kick you out if they don’t like your clothes? Have you noticed how much money the one percent have? How we’re putting more people in jail every day, and more people are unemployed every day, and more people are losing their houses every day?”
“I’ve noticed,” I said. “But haven’t things always been screwed up? I mean, doesn’t everyone assume that their generation has the most special, most awful problems?”
“Yeah,” Ange said. “But not every generation has had the net.”
“Bingo,” Jolu said. “I’m not saying it wasn’t terrible in the Great Depression or whatever. But we’ve got the power to organize like we’ve never had before. And the creeps and the spooks have the power to spy on us more than ever before, to control us and censor us and find us and snatch us.”
“Who’s going to win?” I said. “I mean, I used to think that we’d win, because we understand computers and they don’t.”
“Oh, they understand computers. And they’re doing everything they can to invent new ways to mess you up with them. But if we leave the field, it’ll just be them. People who want everything, want to be in charge of everyone.”
“So we’re going to win?”
Jolu laughed. “There’s no winning or losing, Marcus. There’s only doing.”

Here was a big slice of my city that had turned out to say WRONG. To say STOP. To say ENOUGH. I knew that these were all complicated problems that I couldn’t grasp in their entirety, but I also knew that “It’s complicated” was often an excuse, not an explanation. It was a way of copping out, saying that nothing further could be done, shrug, let’s get back to business as usual.
I’d never seen this many people in one place. From the copters’ point of view, it was like the city had come to life, the streets turning from lifeless stone and concrete into a living carpet of humanity that stretched on and on and on. It was scary, and I had no idea how it would turn out, but I didn’t care. This was what I’d been waiting for, this was the thing that had to happen. No more business as usual. No more shrugging and saying “What can you do?” From now on, we’d do something. Not “Run in circles, scream and shout,” but “March together, demand a change.”

As customary with Doctorow’s work, Homeland was released under a Creative Commons license and is available for free online. All the authors asks is that those who can afford to do so consider donating a copy to a teacher or librarian. Sounds fair enough to me.

They read it too: Necromancy Never Pays

(You?)

On International Women’s Day and VIDA (with bonus reading list)

2013-03-08T10:38:00.000Z

Today, March 8th, is International Women’s Day. As you probably know I’ve been a bit out of the blogging loop lately, and I didn’t really have a post planned for this year. However, earlier this week the VIDA stats for 2012 were released. The VIDA numbers, along with a data project for Lady Business I’ve been helping Renay with (more on which in the next few days), were a strong and timely reminder of two things: one, of exactly why we need dates like IWD; and two, of why blogging is a deliberate act with political implications. As I tweeted on Monday, “the VIDA count helps with the whole blogging motivation thing. I may be tiny in the grand scheme of things, but I can help fight this by creating and maintaining a space where women are not routinely ignored”.

The VIDA count has been happening for three years now, and in this period of time we’ve seen absolutely zero progress. I suspect that people often assume that simply drawing attention to these inequalities is enough to change them, but in fact in takes effort and deliberation to change deeply ingrained cultural habits. The VIDA numbers are not the result of chance, but of a culture that teaches everyone to see women’s contributions as less important and interesting than men’s. The fact that we’re still having these conversations in 2013 is enough to show this is not something that will just go away with time.

Over the past few months I’ve had several conversations with my fellow LB bloggers about how easy it is to feel discouraged when the issues you care about just don’t seem to change. I’ve been blogging for almost six years now, and in this period I’ve seen the exact same discussions about women’s writing, invisibility, and lack of prestige happen again and again. But what they helped me realise is that sometimes, for the sake of your peace of mind, you need to step away from the aforementioned circular discussions and adopt another strategy: you become the change you want to see. You push back by creating a space that embodies everything you’d like to see elsewhere, and you hope that doing that comfortably and successfully will help the rest of the world catch up.

This, I think, is a more effective strategy than we realise, and that’s what makes me want to use International Women’s Day as an opportunity to say that through my blogging I attempt to create spaces where women like me have a voice, and also where women’s writing is prioritised. I do read and celebrate media by men, and I don’t think this is something anyone ever has to apologise for. But I’ll also not apologise for having reviewed 65% books by women last year – in fact, this is a ratio I’d like to maintain.

I can’t change the whole world, but I can keep doing what I do and hope it’s a small part of a large change. And in the spirit of just carrying on, here are five books by women I’m currently very excited to read:

Feminist Perspectives on Sociology by Barbara Littlewood: Lately I’ve been wanting to read more about sociology, mainly because I’m wary of our ever-growing tendency to individualise problems that in fact have social roots. This is a tendency I’m critical of but in no way immune to myself, which is why I think a bit of reading might help me train myself to think differently.
The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home by Arlie Hochschild and Anne Machung: Same as above, and a classic work I can’t believe I still haven’t read. If any of you have further recommendations for sociology books, I’m all ears.
The Cultural Politics of Emotion by Sara Ahmed: an analysis of “of the role of emotions in debates on international terrorism, asylum and migration, and reconciliation and reparation, and reflects on the role of emotions in feminist and queer politics.” I can’t remember where it was that I saw this recently, but doesn’t it sound fascinating?
The Women’s History of the World by Rosalind Miles: I spotted this at work and it caught my attention. I’m familiar with Miles’ Arthurian novels, but I didn’t know she’s written any non-fiction. As the title suggests, this is a look at semi-forgotten historical women.
Disturbed by Her Song by Tanith Lee: Last but not least, some fiction. Tanith Lee’s gender-bending collection of linked stories, which has been compared to Angela Carter, has been on my cart countless times over the past year, but at the last minute I always seem to get something else instead. So I’m adding it here to remind myself that I really need to include it in my next book order.

To celebrate IWD, why don’t you tell me about a book by a woman you’re excited to read?

A Natural History of Dragons by Marie Brennan

2013-03-07T12:36:00.000Z

I wanted both to see dragons, and to understand them. I wanted to stretch the wings of my mind and see how far I could fly. I wanted, in short, the intellectual life of a gentleman—or as close to it as I could come.

A Natural History of Dragons: A Memoir by Lady Trent is a fictional memoir by the eminent Lady Isabella Trent, a renowned dragon naturalist from the country of Scirland. Set in a world inspired by the early Victorian period, the novel follows a passionate and intellectually curious young Isabella’s first steps into naturalism, with particular emphasis on her first field expedition – a journey to the country of Vystrana to study its native dragons.

I should probably start by telling you what A Natural History of Dragons isn’t: it’s not really a fantasy novel along the lines of Tooth and Claw, The Other Wind, Seraphina or Temeraire. Marie Brennan’s dragons are, in this first novel at least, presented as animals. They’re the focus point of Isabella’s passion for the natural world, but they’re no more interesting than, say, elephants or lions. Of course, I do find elephants and lions plenty interesting, but readers who go in expecting sentient beings like the ones in the novels I mentioned above will risk disappointment.

With that out of the way, I’ll tell you what this novel actually is: it’s a wonderful example of gaslamp fantasy, and it does a great job of capturing the feel of Victorian travel memoirs. There are chapter summaries (often used humorously), narrative asides, and plenty of direct appeals to the reader. The story is told by an elderly Lady Trent looking back on her childhood and youth, and her charming narrative voice put me in mind of Amelia Peabody and won me over from page one.

Some of the lovely illustrations by Todd Lockwood.
In fact, the juxtaposition of a contemporary point of view with a retrospective one is one of the most interesting things about A Natural History of Dragons: the two concurrent perspectives allow for asides, interrogations, and commentary on the story as it unfolds, and these are presented in a way that never feels heady-handed. Before I can give you a concrete example, I’ll have to tell you a little bit more about Isabella’s world: it’s different from ours in some very obvious ways, namely the existence of dragons, but the social structure and especially the gender dynamics are very much like those of the early 19th century. This means that Isabella has to overcome a series of obstacles before she can fulfil her career ambitions, which are not only social but also psychological. She’s told by the world around her that her passion for dragons is not appropriate for a lady, that it makes her broken and unlovable, and before she can defy convention she must defeat this idea in the private space of her head. Which is why she finds herself thinking:

No gentleman would want a wife covered in scars from misadventures with dangerous beasts. No gentleman would take on a woman who would be a disgrace to him. No gentleman would marry me, if I kept on this way.
For a few trembling, defiant moments, I wanted to tell my father that I would live a spinster, then, and everything else be damned. (Yes, I thought of it in those terms; do you think fourteen-year-old girls have never heard men swear?) These were the things I loved. Why should I give them up for the company of a man who would leave me to run the household and otherwise bore myself into porridge?
But I was not so lacking in common sense as to believe defiance would result in happiness, for me or anyone else. The world simply did not work that way.
Or so it seemed to me, at the wise old age of fourteen.

Here we see fourteen-year-old Isabella’s defiant streak, but also her insecurities and her very real fears of financial destitution in a world where marriage was a woman’s only career option. Finally, we see her current knowledge, acquired over a lifetime of rejecting convention, that one can go beyond “the world simply doesn’t work that way” - but it takes time and negotiation and the luxury of a backup plan.

As Memory noted in her review, A Natural History of Dragons is very much about small acts of rebellion. At first Isabella doesn’t really set out to demolish the social system that excludes women from public spaces and professional interests, but rather to carve a space for herself within it. This has the potential to be frustrating, especially if you believe, as I do, that no solution is permanent unless flawed social systems change. But my thoughts as I read A Natural History of Dragons were very much the same as my thoughts as I read, say, Jane Austen’s Persuasion. Big acts of rebellion that completely cut with everything that came before are not something everyone can afford. Yes, trailblazers like Isabella use the system to their advantage, but the example they set still opens up new possibilities for permanent change.

This retrospective awareness is also visible in Isabella’s attitudes towards colonial privilege. For example, she says:

I have written before about Drustanev, in A Journey to the Mountains of Vystrana. If you should happen to own a copy, though, or are intending to buy one (as I encouraged before), I beg you not to pay any attention to what I said there concerning the village, or indeed the Vystrani people as a whole.
The words I wrote then heartily embarrass me now. I was attempting, against my inclination, to conform to the expectations of travel writing, as practised by young ladies at the time. It is a worse piece of drivel than Mr. Condale’s Wanderings in Central Anthiope, inspired more by the theatrical convention of colorful, semiprophetic Vystrani characters than by the people I knew in Drustanev. To hear that book tell of it, Vystrana is a land of wailing fiddles, flashing-eyed women, and sweet, strong wines.
Which is to say, a land of the most tedious clichés.

I thought there was perhaps room for the novel to delve deeper when it comes to this, but hopefully the sequel will tells us more about colonialism in Isabella’s world. I’m also looking forward to seeing where Isabella’s journey will take her in regards to her feminist consciousness. She’s still only nineteen when this novel ends, and I have a feeling her acts of rebellion will become more and more overt the older she gets and the more confident she becomes.

As you’ll have gathered by now, A Natural History of Dragons is the first book in a series, but there’s no frustrating cliffhanger ending and it can be read as a stand-alone. If you’re anything like me you’ll still be eager for the next book, but because you want to spend more time with Isabella rather than because you were robbed of a satisfying conclusion.

Other bits I liked:

“Are you that bored?”
I met his gaze directly. “You have no idea. At least when men visit with friends, it is acceptable for them to talk about more than fashion and perhaps the occasional silly novel. I cannot talk to ladies about the latest lectures at the Philosophers’ Colloquium, and men will not include me in their conversations. You allow me to read whatever I wish, and that spares my sanity. But books alone cannot keep me company for a year.”

I envied Mr. Wilker, for the simple fact that our society made it easier to transcend class than sex. Which was not only unfair of me, but in some respects inaccurate: there is sometimes a greater willingness to make an exception for a woman than a man, so long as her breeding is good enough. But at the tender age of nineteen, I had not yet seen enough of the world to understand that.

More illustrations by Todd Lockwood:

Other reviews:: Stella Matutina, Thea at Kirkus, Liz Bourke at Tor, The Adventures of Cecelia Bedelia

(Yours?)

Affiliates disclosure: if you buy a book through one of my affiliates links I will get 5%. I downloaded a review copy of this book via NetGalley.

Fire and Hemlock Giveaway (Diana Wynne Jones March)

2013-03-05T16:04:00.000Z

Kristen at We Be Reading has declared March Diana Wynne Jones month, and she’s inviting readers everywhere to join the read-alongs she’s hosting, to watch Howl's Moving Castle together on Twitter, and to celebrate in any other ways they choose to. She also invited her fellow bloggers to host giveaways of their own, and of course I jumped at the chance to push one of my absolute favourite books on people. The book I picked was out of print for a few years (horror of horrors!) but thankfully it was reissued last year, so now I can recommend it to people without having to add “but you might have trouble finding a copy” in a forlorn tone.

The following is the GoodReads plot synopsis for Fire and Hemlock:

Polly has two sets of memories.

One is normal: school, home, friends. The other, stranger memories begin nine years ago, when she was ten and gate-crashed an odd funeral in the mansion near her grandmother’s house. Polly’s just beginning to recall the sometimes marvellous, sometimes frightening adventures she embarked on with Tom Lynn after that. And then she did something terrible, and everything changed.

But what did she do? Why can’t she remember? Polly *must* uncover the secret, or her true love – and perhaps Polly herself – will be lost.

This isn’t a terrible way to introduce a book with a notoriously complex plot, but it doesn’t really tell you why Fire and Hemlock fans are so passionate about it. Let me start by telling you a story: one day, many years ago, I saw Jenny say in a comment (at Geranium Cat’s blog, if I’m not mistaken) that she felt that Fire and Hemlock fans should all be part of a secret society, and that she immediately wanted to be friends with any that she met. This memory makes me smile because it was exactly this comment that made me click over to Jenny’s blog, decide that I was going to read it forever and ever, and immediately add it to my Google Reader favourites folder, where it’s been for the past five years.

Experience has taught me that assuming you’ll automatically have things in common with people who like the same things as you can lead to disappointment, but to this day I can’t help but feel that way about Fire and Hemlock. The people who really love it all seem to share the same sort of sensibility: not only do they generally enjoy the same kinds of books I do, but they seem to like them for similar reasons as me. Which is why I’m always so excited when I meet another fan, or when I successfully push it on a friend and they end up loving it as much as I do.

Fire and Hemlock is a sort of retelling of Tam Lin, which appeals to the folklore lover in me. It’s also, as readers of Reflections will know, the first book where Diana Wynne Jones felt comfortable having what she calls “a real female hero”, and I think the thought process behind that decision is visible in the text in lots of subtle ways. I love this novel for Diana Wynne Jones’ sharp and perceptive writing; for all the ways in which it reminds me of why I love reading so much; for what it has to say about growing up and memory and creativity and emotional ties of all kinds; and last but not least, for being such an extraordinary piece of storytelling. When I say that it has a complex plot, I don’t mean to imply it’s anything other than a gripping read; it’s just that it’s also a novel that rewards close reading and paying close attention to details and coming back to the story again and again (and of course that novels can and often do both). Jenny’s Law, which states that Diana Wynne Jones is always better on a reread, especially applies to Fire and Hemclock. The fact that I’ve never reviewed it here is a sign that my last reread was over five years ago, which makes me shake my head at myself in complete dismay.

Anyway! The point of this post is to give one of you the chance to read this book (or to win a copy of your very own even if you’ve read it before). Because comments sections that go “Please enter me!” are kind of boring, I’ll make things more fun by asking you a question: Is there a book you love whose fans you think should belong to a secret society? Which books make you feel an immediate sense of kinship with people who love them too?

To be entered, just leave your answer in the comments (though feel free to answer even if you don’t want to be entered, of course). The giveaway is open internationally and I’ll draw the winner in a week’s time.

Home

2013-03-03T18:24:00.000Z

So, the new house is in order, the books are all unpacked, and all that’s left to do is give you all a glimpse of what my new place looks like. I’ve done all the decorating I’m going to do for the time being: I’ve come to realise I don’t want too much new stuff, or too many things I specifically got to make the house look nice, or else I’d end up feeling like I was living in a stage set. What I want around me are objects with histories; objects that remind me of when and where I got them; gifts from people I love; objects that are little mementos of specific times in my life. That’s what makes a place more than just a flat but a place inscribed with my personal history – a place to call home.

And of course, my book collection fits the bill in almost every regard. While I was away M arranged for a few boxes of books I’d had in storage since after grad school to be delivered, so now I have more books with me than I’d had in quite a while, and I’m starting to feel like I have a real personal library again. Of course, there are still over 800 books that my parents are kindly keeping for me, but I don’t want to think about those for now.

Without further ado, allow me to give you the tour:

The house seen from the backyard. Yes, I have a backyard! And I’d love to put it to good use, as well as get a couple of potted plants for the kitchen windowsill. I know some of you are into gardening, so what do you recommend that’s resilient and low-maintenance?

The kitchen, which is probably my favourite room.

I have further fridge magnet plans, but all the ones I have now were either gifts or souvenirs I got when travelling, and I kind of want to keep it that way.

My modest cookbook collection.

The second bedroom, or as I like to call it, the book room:

My Eva Ibbotson collection now lives over the shelf. And because I know you all like your book porn, you can click on the pictures of the shelves to enlarge them.

The living room.

Wall-embedded shelves! All I have here so far are the Viragos and Persephones.

The bedroom.

Sewing kit in a jar.

So, who wants to come visit? One of the reasons why we were so thrilled to finally move to a place with lots of space is that our families and most of your friends are abroad, and it will be lovely to finally be able to have people come stay and receive them comfortably. If any of my bloggings friends ever find themselves in this part of the world, I’d be delighted to extent the invitation to them.

PS: In completely unrelated news, this happened and it made me happy and I wanted to share :D

Catching up with the Internet results in lots of shareable links

2013-02-28T10:38:00.000Z

Hello everyone! I’m all moved into my new flat, and today is my last day of visiting my family. Going back to work and resuming normal life is always a little bittersweet, but at least I have this to look forward to when I head back to the UK tomorrow, so I can’t really complain. During my time away I completely failed to write a backlog of posts like I’d hoped, but I did manage to finish a couple of books I’m really excited to tell you about – Cory Doctorow’s Homeland, A Natural History of Dragons by Marie Brennan and Bad Pharma by Ben Goldacre – so hopefully normal blogging service will resume soon.

Also, once I get back I’ll take pictures of my new bookshelves like I promised, and hopefully post them at some point over the weekend. In the meantime, I thought I’d share a couple of interesting links I came across as I was catching up over the past few days:

Cory Doctorow on Libraries, Hackspaces and E-waste: how libraries can be the hub of a young maker revolution. If Homeland weren’t enough to remind me of my brain crush on Doctorow, there would be this.
And while we’re on the topic of cool authors talking about libraries, here’s John Scalzi’s A Personal History of Libraries:

I don’t use my local library like I used libraries when I was younger. But I want my local library, in no small part because I recognize that I am fortunate not to need my local library — but others do, and my connection with humanity extends beyond the front door of my house. My life was indisputably improved because those before me decided to put those libraries there. It would be stupid and selfish and shortsighted [link mine] of me to declare, after having wrung all I could from them, that they serve no further purpose, or that the times have changed so much that they are obsolete. My library is used every single day that it is open, by the people who live here, children to senior citizens. They use the building, they use the Internet, they use the books. This is, as it happens, the exact opposite of what “obsolete” means. I am glad my library is here and I am glad to support it.

Here’s a post that perfectly sums up why I’m such a fan of Novel Readings - Is Cormac McCarthy a Terrible Writer?:

This is the reason I think debating “literary merit,” or ranking or rating books, quickly becomes an exercise in either folly, futility, or bullying. If you’re going to ask “but is it any good?” you need to flesh out the question: good at what? for what? for whom? There are myriad ways a novel can be. A much more interesting discussion will come from asking “what does McCarthy’s prose do?” or “what are the connections between McCarthy’s literary strategies and the central ideas of The Road?” then from asking if he is a good or a bad writer. Why would you even ask those questions, though, if you didn’t think the work was worth spending that kind of time and thought on? By assigning The Road to my class, I’ve implicitly endorsed it as good writing, haven’t I? And, to return to where I began, I think it is good writing. Good at what? Good for what? Well, one of the things it is unequivocally good at, or good for, is provoking discussions about good (or bad) writing.
On Jodie’s recommendation I’ve started watching the Why Poverty? series of documentaries and now I want to share them with the whole world. They’re thoughtful, insightful, and available to watch for free online. I know several of you are interested in structural inequality, so I thought I’d put them on your radar in case you missed them. (Jill and Aarti, once again I’m thinking of you.)
During my hiatus I read The Secret Life of William Shakespeare (terrible title, by the way) by the always wonderful Jude Morgan. I liked it a lot – Morgan’s prose alone made it worthwhile – but I don’t think I’ll get around to reviewing it because I read it in fits and starts over a period of almost a month - a period when I felt overwhelmed and exhausted, which wasn’t very conductive to close, thoughtful reading or note-taking. Luckily, I came across a review that does a good job of expressing how I felt about it – and I’m glad I wasn’t the only one to think of the Sandman connection.

Finally, thanks to Jenny I’ve become aware of the existence of these gorgeous new matching editions of Hilary McKay’s brilliant Casson Family books – finally, cover art that I like for these books! For now I’m going to resist the temptation to get myself a set, but I thought I’d use this as yet another opportunity to push this series on people. If you don’t want to take my word for it, I’ll just innocently point out that Ana at The Book Smugglers is a recent Hilary McKay convert.

One last thing: this probably goes without saying, but catching up with the Internet is always an unfinished task, so if you wrote or came across anything interesting while I was away, I’d be more than grateful if you send the links my way. Thanks in advance!

A little break (also some links!)

2013-02-12T07:34:00.002Z

I’m going to be moving over the next few days (yep, again), so the sensible thing to do is to go on an official blogging hiatus for a little while. This time I’m not moving to a different part of the world, only to a house about ten minutes away from my current one, but the hassle of having to pack and unpack is still there. Also, the move is kind of a Big Deal to me emotionally because in a way this feels like my first real adult home – the first one that isn’t shared, or a tiny attic, or very obviously student-y. Also, it has wall-embedded shelves and a garden and I’m kind of in love with it. If everything continues to go well this is a place where M and I can stay for the foreseeable future, and it will be really nice to finally have a home we don’t think of as temporary.

In addition to that, I’ll be visiting my parents for the last ten days of February, which might get in the way of my coming back to blogging sooner rather than later. On the one hand, this might be a good time to relax and get some reading and writing done; on the other hand, it’s likely that the time will pass much quicker than I anticipate and that I won’t be getting much done at all. I guess we’ll see. Before I go, here are some interesting links:

One of my favourite bloggers is back after some time away – hooray! You should all subscribe to The Hypeless Romantic if you haven’t already.
Mark your calendars: Diana Wynne Jones month is coming in March.
I absolutely loved Rohan Maitzen’s recent post on Richard III and history in general:

There’s something both thrilling and poignant about the spectacle of this broken body. It’s one thing to debate the theoretical value or responsibilities of historical fiction to the past. It’s another thing to see that past resurrected in all its tangible but enduring fragility. Difficult as our access to it may be, and impossible as it may be to reduce it to a single story, there is something that really happened. Now, here in front of our eyes, is, quite literally, the skeleton which has been fleshed out in so many memorable ways. I find it stunning: it gives me goose-bumps.
The other day Jeanne shared Billy Collins’ poem “The Lanyard” and wrote about her experiences as a mother. I found her post incredibly moving but couldn’t find a way to say so that wasn’t awkward – so, in the spirit of showing appreciation, I’m sharing it with you today.
yay, Victoria at Eve’s Alexandria loved Seraphina! And, unsurprisingly, she wrote one of my favourite reviews of it to date.
Lastly, some of you might want to know that my discussion of The Lizzie Bennet diaries with Renay is now up. The post doesn’t cover the most recent happenings in the series; however, the comments do, and you could always tell us what you think there.

I’ll see you all in March (if not before), when you can expect me to bore you all to death with countless pictures of the new house and bookshelves. You have been warned.

Regency Romance, Shakespeare Retold, and a Social History of Jewellery (among other things)

2013-02-10T11:05:00.000Z

Did any of you happen to notice that I changed by blog’s subtitle to “a reading journal” sort of recently? I’d actually been meaning to for quite a long while, only I’d misplaced the original text-less header image I’d used. Anyway, the new subtitle is part of my resolution to embrace the personal in my writing to a greater extent than I have so far. I really enjoy writing essays about books, and doing so will always be the bread and butter of this blog; but at the same time, I want to give myself permission to be a bit more conversational; to experiment with form more often; to do whatever feels right from moment to moment. For example, lately I’ve been really enjoying Eva’s Field Notes and can easily imagine my blog evolving in a similar direction in the future. What has kept me excited about blogging for the past six years was having the opportunity to engage with ideas through my reading and writing, and lately I’ve been thinking that I’d like to do that through a more narrative format – one that gave me room to explore the links between my reading and my life in a more explicit way.

Having said that, this will actually be a fairly traditional post: there were several January books I never got around to sharing with you, and I’d like to do that before I go away for a little while (more on that tomorrow). I read a lot of comics last month, so I’ll start by telling you about those:

Alison Bechdel, who wrote the introduction to Howard Cruse’s Stuck Rubber Baby, called it a graphic novel with “ambitious historical sweep”, “rich characters”, and an “unflinching look at sex, race, violence, hate and love”. Stuck Rubber Baby is set in a Southern college town in the 1960s, and it tells the story of Toland Polk, a young man who becomes involved with the Civil Rights movement while coming to terms with his own homosexuality. What I liked the most about it was its messiness: this is a story that acknowledges people’s contradictions, their capacity to do harm even with the best of intentions, and the fact that social progress isn’t always linear or straightforward. The characterisation is simultaneously unflinching and generous, and the historical backdrop made me want to particularly recommend it to Jill and Aarti.

I’m late to the party when it comes to Stitches by David Small, since so many people sang its praises back in 2010. Stitches is a graphic memoir of the author’s difficult childhood, and if you’re thinking you could do without another “misery memoir”, hear me out: Stitches is a heartbreaking story, but it’s also one that’s told generously and compassionately. The book won me over for good when, in the last few pages, Small humanises his parents and acknowledges that although this is not their story, they were real people who carried around entire worlds of secret, private miseries of their own. None of this excuses the mistreatment he suffered at their hands, but it gives the reader more than a child’s vision of all-powerful villains by mixing it with an adult’s understand that parents also flawed human beings.

Besides, the emotional range of Small’s artwork is really impressive. This is a book you can read in under an hour, but I’d recommend taking time over each page – most of its nuances are in the art rather than in the text.

Kill Shakespeare by Anthony Del Col, Conor McCreery and Andy Belanger is a comic series in the vein of Fables, Jack of Fables or The Unwritten, which is to say: it’s a story about stories and it’s not one bit apologetic about it. The premise is the following: the heroes and the villains of Shakespeare’s most well-known plays come together in a world where the Bard himself is a reclusive wizard whose pen holds more power than they can imagine. I find this a really exciting premise, for reasons best expressed in Isabella’s excellent reviews of the series:

I'm all for using popular culture as a vehicle to the classics. There's nothing so sacred about Shakespeare that a divide should be drawn to keep him unsullied. Let his blood mingle with the rest of our entertainments — let him be popular culture.

Or, as Nick Hornby so well puts it, nothing kills classics faster than the idea that they should be put behind a glass case instead of being allowed to exist in the same world as us. One of the reasons why remixes are exciting is that they do a great job of challenging the idea that certain stories should be put in a pedestal.

But enough abut the premise – how good is the execution, you ask? Well, I enjoyed Kill Shakespeare, but I suspect I’d have enjoyed it more if I hadn’t read other series that do more or less the same thing, only better – especially when it comes to using stories to shed light on our fascination with narrative. Oh, The Unwritten — you have spoiled me for everything else. I should add, though, that I’m not the most Shakespeare literate person around, so it’s quite likely that there were a hundred subtle details and cool subversions and in-jokes that I simply didn’t get. I’m guessing that the more you know about Shakespeare, the more you’ll get out of this series.

***

In for a Penny by Rose Lerner was my first real romance novel. Actually, I should probably amend that and say it was my first romance novel that openly markets itself as such, because I’ve read plenty of things that aren’t “really” romance in the same way Margaret Atwood or Kazuo Ishiguro aren’t “really” science fiction. Anyway, In for a Penny is a delightful regency romance that subverts the usual “marriage to a pure woman reforms a lovable rogue” storyline. There’s a lot of emphasis on communicating honestly, on slowly developing intimacy and building a relationship, and on contextualising marriage as one of many relationships that are important in the characters’ lives.

I also loved that the heroine’s sexual inexperience is never essentialised, but firmly tied to her upbringing and to expectations surrounding “proper” ladies instead. Add an interesting historical backdrop of class inequality, riots, and the Peterloo massacre, and my first foray into regency romance couldn’t have been a greater success. I look forward to continuing to explore the genre – my romance source, Ana, lent me Revealed by Kate Noble to read next, but if you have any other suggestions I’m all ears.

Victoria Finlay’s Buried Treasure (also published under the title Jewels: A Secret History) is many things: a micro-history of jewellery, a book that combines sociology, science, economics, travel writing and cultural analysis, and above all an excellent read. The chapters are divided according to Mohs’ scale of hardness: Finlay starts with amber and moves up through jet, pearl, opal, peridot, emerald, sapphire and ruby, until she finally reaches diamonds.

I don’t particularly care about jewellery (please don’t take that as an excepto girl statement, though, because it absolutely isn’t), but the reason why I couldn’t put this book down is best expressed by something Finlay says in the postscript: “the desire for, and sometimes veneration of, pretty stones is a matter of human storytelling, complex as that has been”. In Buried Treasure, Finlay explores the stories we tell ourselves about each particular “pretty stone”, how these stories attribute value to something that would otherwise be irrelevant for human life, and the effects changing narratives can have on a region’s economy, on the environment, and on the lives of real human beings. It’s possible that I’m not making this book sound as riveting as it is, but trust me when I say that I’d read Victoria Finlay’s take on absolutely anything. Like the best writers, she makes you care about topics you didn’t previously know you were interested in. Don’t believe me? Here’s Fyrefly’s review, which first put Finlay on my radar (thank you!).

***

Lastly, I’ve been reading a lot of picture books lately, mostly for professional development reasons. I’ve found that I’m not the best at evaluating picture books, possibly because I didn’t read that many as a child and because I haven’t really had the chance to watch children react to them until now. But as with most things, I expect this is something that practice and knowledge will fix. Lately I’ve fallen in love with Emily Gravett, who I first heard about at Valentina’s blog many years ago. Gravett’s art is stunning, but the main things that draw me to her books are the quirky humour, the very slight hints of darkness, and the implicit trust that what children want from a story is not necessarily what they’re expected to want. Here’s Liz Burns on Wolves, which is my favourite so far, and here’s some of the art:

Do you have a favourite picture book author? What do you love about them?

Affiliates disclosure: if you buy a book through one of my affiliates links I will get 5%.

Wrapping Up Long-Awaited Reads Month

2013-02-07T12:45:00.000Z

First of all, my apologies for posting this round-up so late. Long-waited Reads Month ended a week ago, but it’s taken me until now to finish this post. As Iris and I said at the beginning of January, the goal of these round-ups is to gather everyone’s links, so we can share our experiences of the month and have them all in one place. The first link round-up can be found at Iris’ blog, and the second is below:

Priscilla at The Evening Reader read Zadie Smith’s The Autograph Man, and reminded me that I really ought to pick it up. Somehow I always catch myself thinking that I’ve read all of Smith’s novels, even though I know perfectly well that this one exists.
Library Hungry posted about Kristin Cashore’s Bitterblue (I could totally have read this whole series for LAR Month) and declared the month a success – hooray!
Jenny read Thomas King’s excellent Green Grass, Running Water, a favourite among book bloggers, and very kindly passed on her copy to another reader.
And the lovely Care did the same with Toni Morrison’s Beloved, which is now in Iris’ hands. Don’t you love book bloggers?

Sasha discovered Stephen King’s Dark Tower series last month and posted about it several times. I love her enthusiasm.
Sakura at Chasing Bawa read Silence by Shusaku Endo, “a study of Christianity in early modern Japan and the terrible path it carved through the lives of its believers and those who tried to stamp it out”.
Charlie at The Worm Hole read and enjoyed Beatrice Colin’s The Luminous Life Of Lilly Aphrodite.
Debi at Still Nothing of Importance blogged about Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science, which is also a big favourite of mine.
Joanna at Create Your Own World loved The Peach Keeper by Sarah Addison Allen (an author I really have to try).
Bina read a historical mystery for LAR Month: Iain Pears’ An Instance of the Fingerpost.
Meghan finished Connie Willis’ WW2 duology and reviewed the second instalment, All Clear. I meant to have read these books too, but unfortunately I didn’t get around to them.
Julia at The Card Catalog shared some reading notes on Anna Karenina.
At Charlotte’s Library, Charlotte shares her thoughts on Lev Grossman’s The Magicians.
Beth at Too Fond listened to Ready Player One by Ernest Cline and had a lot of fun with it.
Finally, my co-host Iris read her first Moomin book, A Comet in Moominland. Earlier in the month she also read E.M. Delafield’s Thank Heaven Fasting, one of my favourite books.

As for me, the month was certainly a success: I fell in love with Megan Whalen Turner’s Queen’s Thief series, finished Jo Walton’s excellent Small Change trilogy, and finally read The Song of Achilles, which I still need to tell you about. One thing I’d have liked to do was get around to all those long-awaited classics on my shelf, but alas. I briefly toyed with the idea of making February my own personal Long-Awaited Classics Months, but because of some upcoming changes in my life (on which more soon) I doubt I’ll get much reading done at all. Guess how many books I’ve finished so far in February? I also don’t want to overplan my reading – I think the reason why this themed month worked for me was that it was broad and flexible enough that it never felt restrictive.

Before I go, a housekeeping note: Iris and I are still going to drawn two winners from among the participants in Long-Awaited Reads month, and they will get a book they’ve always wanted to read but don’t own yet that is up to $15/€11/£10 on Book Depository. There are two reasons why I didn’t draw a name from this link round-up and announce it now: a) I worried I might have missed a couple of links and b) you don’t actually need to have reviewed your book(s) to be entered. So if you’ve read something you didn’t review, just let me know in the comments before the end of the month and I’ll put your name in the hat. The same goes for if you wrote a review that wasn’t included either here on in Iris’ earlier link round-up. We’ll draw two names and get in touch with the winners.

TFiOS live: John and Hank Green at Cadogan Hall

2013-02-06T13:23:00.000Z

Last Sunday evening Ana and I went to London to see John Green and his brother Hank at Cadogan Hall, in an event celebrating the UK publication of The Fault in Our Stars. If you happen to have watched the Carnegie Hall stream a few weeks ago, you’ll have a good idea of what the Green brothers’ live shows are like: there are readings, songs, questions and answers, special guests, plenty fun, and most of all large groups of very enthusiastic people unapologetically celebrating their own nerdiness.

Before I go on, a side note: remember how about a year and a half ago I posted about meeting Neil Gaiman? Back then I explained that the reason why the experience had mattered so much to me was that I felt that, in a strange and roundabout way, his blog had helped raise me. I was in my teens when I started reading it, and because my exposure to fantasy literature (among oh so many other things) had been very limited up until that point, I encountered many of my favourite things for the first time via his blog (and those things led to ideas, and you know how the rest goes). It seems funny now to think that there was once a time when I didn’t know Diana Wynne Jones or Ursula Le Guin – and yes, of course they’re household names that I’d have encountered sooner or later, but you do remain grateful to the person who first expands your world.

The reason why I’m talking about this is that it was very obvious that Cadogan Hall on Sunday was full of young people for whom John and Hank Green are what Neil Gaiman was to me.I became a Nerdfighter in mid-2008, and being in my twenties meant that my relationship with the community was different than it would have been if I’d been younger. Don’t get me wrong; the enjoyment I get out of what John and Hank do is in no way inferior because I’m an adult, but the whole experience is qualitatively different because things impact you differently at different stages of your life. Sometimes I wish I’d had access to something like the Nerdfighter community when I was growing up, but the main feeling I get when I think about its existence is not wistfulness because I missed out – it’s extreme gratitude that it exists today; that it creates a safe space for kids who need to escape the pressures of anti-intellectualism; that it helps thousands of people connect and feel less lonely and discover who they want to be. The Green brothers refuse to condescend to their audience because of their age and they treat teens like the thinking human beings that they are, and something like that can make such a huge difference in your life.

Anyway: John and Hank Green may not have introduced me to, say, environmentalism or The Catcher in the Rye, but that doesn’t mean the community they created hasn’t helped shape me as a person over the past five years. I’d say I look up to them, but that suggests a kind of hierarchical relationship that is the opposite of what they’ve been trying to build. I guess the main thing is that I’m extremely grateful for them, and I appreciate having had the opportunity to tell them so in person.

With that out of the way, let me tell you what the event was actually like. John Green started by talking about the experiences that inspired him to write The Fault in Our Stars. He first had the idea for the book when he was working as a chaplain at a children’s hospital in his early twenties, and he made several attempts to write about it then. But the story didn’t come together until he removed himself from it, which is something he was only able to do many years later. He said that at first he was trying to work out some of his own issues through fiction, and that made it impossible for the book to work as a story.

His friendship with Esther Earl, a nerdfighter he met through the Make a Wish foundation, allowed for a complete reimagining of the story he wanted to tell. (At this point he paused to explain what nerdfighters are: “a community that celebrates intellectualism and thoughtfulness and created spaces for engagement online”. The audience, mostly made out of nerdfighters, laughed at this, but John Green pointed out that there were probably people there who didn’t know. And I’m telling you this because it’s yet another example of the inclusion and accessibility they try to create, and I love them for it.)

Getting to know Esther allowed John Green to see that there was more to a life cut short by cancer than loss, horror, misery and despair, and that nihilism was not the only possible answer. Yes, illness and death suck, but people like Esther are alive before they die, and their early deaths don’t mean their lives weren’t worth living. We have trouble making sense of short lives, and as a result we tend to make the stories we tell about people who die young not really about the person who dies, but about their friends and loved ones – about how they learned a valuable lesson about loss and impermanence and making the most of every moment. This is an understandable human reaction, but it’s also incredibly dehumanising, because the sick person is never given a voice. After spending time with Esther, he wanted to write a story that broke that pattern – which, by the way, is one of my absolute favourite things about The Fault in Our Stars.

John Green reading from my copy(!!11@) of The Fault in Our Stars.

John Green then read from the first chapter of the book, but because he’d forgotten to bring his own copy he asked the person sitting right in front of him on the front row to lend him theirs. That person just happened to be me, and once he was done reading he asked me my name and I got my own round of applause. This is the kind of experience that makes for a cool story, but that also makes you want to disappear into a hole when you’re an introvert whose reaction to 900 pairs of eyes suddenly on her is a very loud EEK. Still, I think I coped fairly well all things considered. And I realise this is a very long shot, but if anyone out there on the Intrawebs happens to have any photos or videos of the Sunday evening event that show John Green giving me back my book and/or talking to me, that would be a cool thing to have and I’d be incredibly grateful.

DID I MENTION THAT'S MY BOOK?

After the reading Hank came on stage, which meant it was time to hear 900 people joyfully sing along to nerdy songs about physics, Harry Potter, My Little Pony, nuclear energy and deep sea fishes. It was all wonderful, and my cheeks hurt from smiling by the time his set was done. Then there was a question and answers session with special guest Maureen Johnson (!). I did a lousy job of taking notes because I was too busy laughing and being way too excited, but here are a couple of highlights:

One of the reasons why John Green wrote Will Grayson, Will Grayson was that he wanted to write a love story about best friends, as this kind of emotional tie is never really given as much importance as romantic love.

Someone handed in a question about the parallels between the water imagery in The Fault in Our Stars and in T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”. Before answering, John said he suspected that the question had been asked by a teenager, and that this was yet another example of why it’s ridiculous for adults to keep telling teens how smart they aren’t. He then said that the parallels are there because water is often a stand-in for how we think about transience. Temporary things like consciousness are what makes us interesting, and they make us alive in the sense we usually attribute to the term. The imagery of water as something that is life-giving but also has the potential to drown us is often used as a metaphor for this.

When asked about doing research for TFioS, he said that yes, he read about cancer and talked to people who’d experienced terminal illness first-hand, but there was also a lot of imagining involved in the process. He wanted the book to be an exercise in seeing the world through different eyes – an exercise in empathy. The fact that there are limits to our empathy is what makes us functional, as none of us could handle feeling every single human tragedy as keenly as we feel the ones that touch us or the people we love. But on the other hand, these limitations are also a barrier to connection, and books give us the opportunity to go beyond that. He also said that he was very conscious of the fact that he was telling a story that didn’t belong to him, but he thought it was worth telling anyway because he believes fictional stories are relevant and real in the context of our lives.

When asked if there’s anything he really hopes won’t be left out of the movie version of The Fault in Our Stars, he mentioned the immediate physical markers of the characters’ disabilities – in Hazel’s case, the oxygen tubes. They’re important because they deeply affect how people respond to her and are therefore a part of her everyday experiences. But he also said that the details of the plot matter less than the movie capturing the overall themes and tone of the book.

The last question (cunningly left for last by Maureen Johnson, so that John would go over his allotted time and get slapped by Hank) was about YA literature being used in the classroom. He said it’s not a matter of either/or – he thinks that reading classics in a classroom context that be an extremely enriching and rewarding experience, but at the same time, it’s important to teach teens that books aren’t just written by dead white guys, and that there’s a vibrant book culture alive in the world today.

There was an extremely well-organised signing at the end of the event, but because this was the second event the Green brothers were doing that day, and also because they’d already signed/doodled on the copies of The Fault in Our Stars we all got as we were coming in, there was a limit to how many items we could get signed and a no dedications rule. To be honest, I’d be a jerk if I complained that the morning people got a better deal. I can barely imagine how exhausting it must have been to meet and greet 900 people twice in the space of less than 12 hours, and I really appreciate how generous they were with their time.

Because I was sitting up front, I didn’t have very long to wait at all. I decided to get my e-reader signed in permanent marker, which is something I’d wanted to do since Edinburgh last year, only of course I only had the idea after meeting all the-e-reader-in-permanent-marker-worthy people. But if anyone’s worthy, it’s John and Hank Green. I got to thank them for being themselves and being as awesome as they are, and Hank made fun of my “giant blue pen”. Also, I squeed about the Lizzie Bennett Diaries. The whole thing was pretty quick as I’m sure you can imagine, but it was lovely to see that everyone left with a smile on their faces. I’ll leave you with a couple more pictures:

Books! Beautiful books!

A theatre full of excited nerdfighters.

MY BOOK. (Okay, I'll shut up now.)

Since there would be no time to pose for pictures during the signing, they posed on stage and left room in the middle for people to photoshop themselves in.

D'aww.

The signing begins.

There were lots of people getting their shoes signed :D

Everyone waiting very patiently for their turn to queue up.

My turn approaches.

Precious :D

Ha’Penny and Half a Crown by Jo Walton

2013-01-30T16:08:00.000Z

Ha’Penny and Half a Crown are the second and third books in Jo Walton’s Small Change trilogy – the first is Farthing, which I co-reviewed with Aarti earlier this month. The novels are alternate histories set in a Britain that made peace with Hitler’s Germany at the end of WW2, and then began to veer towards fascism. All three have parallel structures: they alternate a female first person narrative voice with third person chapters from the perspective of Inspector Carmichael, and the two points of view contrast with and complement each other. In Farthing we had Lucy Khan; in Ha’Penny there’s Viola Larkin, an upper class young woman from a Mitford-like family who has become a stage actress; and in Half a Crown we have eighteen-year-old Elvira Royston, a débutante and the daughter of Carmichael’s former colleague Sergeant Royston.

The books are also structurally similarly in that they all blend genres in surprising and exciting ways. In Farthing, Walton made use of the tropes of the cosy mystery to lull readers into a false sense of security; Ha’Penny mixes the political thriller with the theatre novel; and Half a Crown is a débutante story in addition to… well, I don’t want to give everything away. As for their settings, whereas Ha’Penny takes place only a few weeks after Farthing, the last book in the trilogy is set ten years later, at the beginning of the 1960s, when people who grew up in a fascist country are beginning to come of age. I realise I’m being pretty vague about each novel’s actual plot, but since I can’t say much about each of them without spoiling the previous one, I’ll leave it at that and just move on to the trilogy’s themes.

The alternate title for this trilogy is “Still Life with Fascists”, which is a very apt description of what it does: these novels are about stillness; about political inertia in the face of the unthinkable; about what can lead people to remain still and what can help them break free from that stillness. I love the fact that Walton gives every character both the potential to do horrible things and the potential to take a stance. Goodness and badness, cowardice or courage, are never oversimplified or essentialised. Even for characters who have made questionable choices in the past there’s always the next moment, the moment when they can make the choice they haven’t been able to make before. When I discussed Farthing with Aarti, I said the following:

I think Walton did a brilliant job of demonstrating how ethical people can unfortunately become complicit in corrupt systems - because they’re being blackmailed, because they’ve been put in a position of powerlessness, or a combination of both. Of course, realising you can’t fight the system at a particular moment in time doesn’t mean you will never be in a position to fight it, and I really look forward to seeing how Carmichael’s story will develop as we read the rest of the trilogy.

I was pleased to see that this was exactly the path the rest of the trilogy followed. Take, for example, this conversation between Carmichael and Abby Talbot. It’s a long quote, but well worth reading because I think it captures something that is central to these books (be warned, though, that it contains spoilers for Farthing):

“The real problem is that people mostly are perfectly happy with things as they are, or else too afraid to do anything. I sometimes wonder whether if things hot notably worse it would be an improvement, because they’d have to take notice.”
“And what would come of it if they took notice at that point?” Abby asked. “It would be too late for them to act. It is possible to make people brave, and clear-sighted, and open-eyed. I do it with my pupils. But I do it individually, and it’s hard work that takes years. I don’t know how to do it for a whole country, so that they’d look at what their government is doing in their name instead of ignoring it, and then throw them out instead of making excuses. But they have to have the power to throw them out if they do wake up to it. At the moment, the inertia and the institutions are still just about there. If we took them away, as they have been taken away in Germany, if we installed a king to rule over us by divine right, what would a waking-up avail but a massacre, as happened in Vienna two years ago?”
Carmichael had paced back the length of the room and found himself at the window; he turned back to her. “Every day I see men and women betraying their friends and families because they are afraid. It’s easy for me to despite them, but I do my job for the same reason. I betrayed Lucy and David Kahn when I had proof they were innocent, proof! But it wasn’t enough when nobody would accept it, when I was threatened myself.” He hesitated, wincing as he spoke, still bitterly ashamed ten years later and after all that had happened since. Not even to Jack had he talked about it this clearly. “They knew I’d warned Lucy, they knew about what they called my proclivities, they threatened me, they threatened Jack, they cut me off so I couldn’t have achieved anything by speaking out, and in the end I sold my soul to them.”
“It wasn’t the end,” Abby said, twisting on the sofa to face him head on. “Your soul is still your own. You know how to be brave. Think what you have done since, how many souls are alive and free in Ireland instead of slaves or dead on the Continent. You failed a test, yes, that one and perhaps others, but you have never surrendered your soul. And I believe it’s the same for the whole country.”

I love how these novels draw attention to the fact that ethical decisions are a continuous process, that being wrong is not a permanent state, and that good people often do bad things. The fact that we have access to Carmichael’s point of view means we get uncomfortably close to what it’s like to be complicit in a terrible regime even if you know in your heart how wrong it is. And in addition to Carmichael, we see people we agree with using extremely questionable methods for the best of reasons, generally unsympathetic characters surprising us at the last moment, and so on. It’s all messy, terrifying, and incredibly useful, effective political writing – much more so than a rigid separation between sides could ever be.

If you’re wondering how the rest of the series compares to Farthing, I’d say the first book is the one with the greatest emotional impact, but Half a Crown in particular is also an excellent novel. The way readers get used to the horrors of this world after the ending of Farthing is telling in its own right, and Half a Crown does something that I found very interesting: it gives us a narrator who grew up in a fascist Britain and has never really known anything else. There’s a lot Elvira doesn’t question, but because she’s observant, she eventually grows and learns. There is – slight spoiler ahead – a worthy discussion to be had about whether or not the final stance she and another character take defies credibility, especially coming from someone who was raised as they were, but the non-fatalist in me really wants to embrace the ending and to go along with everything that happens. Walton says in the acknowledgements that she wrote these books because she’s “always been a very hopeful and optimistic person”; as dark as they are, I can definitely see how that’s the case.

These books are currently a little difficult to find, especially in the UK, but according to Book Depository there are new editions coming out in May. I hope I have convinced at least some of you to give them a try.

They read it too: Stella Matutina (Ha’Penny, Half a Crown), The Literary Omnivore (Ha’Penny), Jenny’s Books, Shelf Love (Ha’Penny, Half a Crown)

(Have I missed yours? Let me know and I’ll be happy to add it.)

Affiliates disclosure: if you buy a book through one of my affiliates links I will get 5%.

Are you watching the Lizzie Bennet Diaries?

2013-01-27T12:05:00.000Z

Charlotte, Lizzie, Jane and Lydia.

You know how sometimes, when something is really popular among a particular group of people, you tend to assume that it must be popular everywhere, and maybe even that the whole world is tired of hearing about it? But then you realise that different social circles often operate completely independently, which means that there might be tons of people out there who have not yet encountered this wonderful thing that has you and all your friends so excited.

Such is the case with the Lizzie Bennet Diaries. I’m completely in love with this series, and I know that fellow bloggers Iris, Jodie, Renay, Simon, Chachic, Heidi and probably many others would totally back me up, so I assumed it was wildly popular all over the Internet. But then two things happened: one, Jenny mentioned not being familiar with Hank Green in a comment. Hank, John Green’s brother, is a producer for the series, so I started thinking about whether she was watching it and how Jenny is someone I’d particularly love to share the Lizzie Bennet Diaries with. Two, I read this post at Gossamer Obsessions, and it got me thinking about how sometimes, even if a piece of media is all over the place, it takes a particular post worded in a certain way that catches you at the right moment for you to pay attention and decide to seek it out. Nothing would please me more than to make that happen for someone with the Lizzie Bennet Diaries.

But let me begin at the beginning: The Lizzie Bennet Diaries is a web series adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. The setting is contemporary and the premise is the following: Lizzie is a Master’s student who started recording a video blog with the help of her best friend Charlotte. There are three Bennet sisters instead of five – in this version, Mary is a cousin and Kitty is, in what I thought was a delightful touch, the actual family cat – but despite these changes the order of events is actually very faithful to Austen’s novel.

Lizzie and Charlotte dressed up as Mr and Mrs Bennet.
I’m not going to review the series in depth (Renay and I are working on a discussion post for Lady Business, which will hopefully be up soon), but I’m going to tell you why you should watch it: first, I love how human it is. The pace of the series is slow, which allows the characters to be fleshed out and their motivations to be carefully considered in a way that goes beyond what the original does (explicitly, at least). The characters are all treated with kindness and given the benefit of the doubt. Secondly, the acting and the production value are both amazing. Thirdly, it’s smart, funny, charming, delightful, and it passes the Bechdel Test with great ease. Although there are plenty of swoon-worthy romance moments, the angle of Pride and Prejudice this adaptation brings to the forefront is the coming of age story. This is a series about a young woman and her sisters and best friend, all twenty-somethings who experience personal growth, who are trying to figure out what they want the next stage of their lives to be like, and who have meaningful, emotionally charged relationships with each other.

Last but not least, there’s ease of access: you can start watching the series for free right now by heading over to YouTube. There are 82 episodes so far, but that’s not as daunting as it sounds because they’re all between 3 and 6 minutes long. I started watching The Lizzie Bennet Diaries in October, when there were already close to 70 episodes, but it only took me two days to get up to date. You don’t have to binge like I did, though – you can catch up by watching an episode here and there and I bet you’ll be done before you know it. 3 to 6 minutes, after all, is the perfect length for a coffee break.

Another thing: the series is kind of a multimedia experience, with the characters all having Twitter and Tumblr accounts, and with Lydia having her own YouTube channel in addition to Lizzie’s. I realise this can be intimidating – knowing there’s too much out there can paralyse people because they don’t know where to start. But the good news is that you can watch and read as little or as much as you want and the story will make sense. Don’t want to go beyond Lizzie’s videos? That’s absolutely fine. Want to obsessively follow all the characters on Twitter and consume every story crumb they throw your way? That works too.

So: The Lizzie Bennet Diaries are awesome and you should be watching them. If you’re already a fan, consider this post an open invitation to come squee with me. If you’re not and decide to give them a try, I’d absolutely love to hear what you think.