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aseSince I have already finished one book this month, it must be time to put up last month's book log!
Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (Samuel Delany): This is "how Marq Dyeth falls in love with Rat Korga" in the same way that Memory is "how Miles became an Imperial Auditor". Which is to say, it's where the novel goes, but it's not what the story's goal is. It's the plot-scaffold on which all the interesting parts of the novel are grown.
Korga is a "rat", a slave caste which has undergone Radical Anxiety Termination. He is also a survivor of catastophe.
Marq Dyeth is an Industrial Diplomat1, whose family has a castle (sort of) and ties to a dead tyrant. The castle brings students, among them the extraordinary Rat Korga, who may have some of the dead Vondramach Tyrannus' character, or who maybe is having that imposed by society.
It takes Delany something like half the book to get these two in the same room, and the story is so interesting that I don't care. I am all about the worldbuilding and the relationships between people in this story. (With the one exception of Rat and Marq, because there's emo romance moping. From a 36 year old.) There's also some really interesting things Delaney is doing with how people form families, and how they evaluate each other, and cultural assumptions. Okay, I'm starting in on quotes:
Notice the pronouns? Look - look! Dalany writes a novel where everyone is gendered female, regardless of sex, unless they're the object of your sexual desire: then they're "man" and "he". So you start out assuming everyone is a woman, until the incluing is too obvious to ignore. Think about that for a second: how does that use of gender subversion change your assumptions about the characters?
And this is only one small cool thing Delaney is doing. The worldbuilding is the big draw for me: the casual descriptions of life on Rhyonon for Korga and and his experiences on Velm, Marq's planet; the scene where Korga reads about seven books in three pages and five minutes; the feel of Velm as a very lived-in city. The shine has been knocked off, some of the lights are on the blink, there's clutter in the corners and sand blowing in from the street.
Also, the politics are awesome.
The major conflict in the novel's worldbuilding is the Family versus the Sygn; the details of each philosophy are embedded in the story, as in this microcosm:
It makes a little more sense in context, on the second or third reading. And that's why I am excited about this book: I want to put in that sort of effort. But that is not what I am trying to talk about! I was far more excited about the Family vs Sygn description in the context of early '80s gender studies and whatever preceeded queer theory, because I feel like Delany was going there with the Sygn.
When I start reading a book, I'll frequently peel off a post-it, fold over the sticky edge, and use the post-it as a bookmark and quickie note device. I have thirteen cryptic notes - things like "history/slave p104" that traces back to a long paragraph about home and history that ends: And if you are a woman, your choice is to take it knowingly and be its (and your new home's) silent friend, or take it unknowingly and be its (and your new home's) loud slave. This seems really resonant to the aggregate of cultural appropriation / racefail discussions some of you may be familiar with, especially since one form oppression can take is the suppression or destruction of someone else's history. Everything in Stars leads somewhere else: since this was the first half of a diptych Delany never finished, one wonders if some of the trailing ends, like Rat and Marq's star-crossed romance, or Rat's connections to Vondramach Okk, would have gone somewhere. (Incidentally, the part of the story I found least satisfying was Marq falling head over heels for Rat and moping after Fate in the form of the Web parted them. Think like an ID, Marq! What is actually going on here?) Or Rhyonon's cultural fugue, or the alien Xlv, or the Thants - what was going to happen next?
It's not 1984, so even if Delany sat down and wrote a sequel today, it would not be the story he would have written then. In 1984 AIDS was just hitting public awareness; in 1984 the Cold War was on (was cultural fugue inspired by those old nightmares of the world going up in nuclear fire?), in 1984 the Internet lived at a handful of universities (was Delany in touch with that evolution, or was his interstellar Web inspired by something else?).
Since I did not do well with Babel-17, I was very surprised to discover I was really enjoying Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, and would have been happy to follow the characters around for another 400 pages.
The Millionaire Next Door (William D. Danko, Thomas J. Stanley): How to get rich slowly. Basic tenants: put 15% of your pretax income into savings and investment, discipline your finances, pay yourself first?, you are your favorite charity. Is this a Conservative thesis? Take care of yourself first, disperse your estate on death (to grand/kids, charities). Things that may impact wealth creation since 1996 publication American cars aren't, mortgages, health care. The role of self-employment / business ownership: among self-made millionaires, a disproportionate number are business owners, but among business owners, a tiny number are millionaires. This may need pictures to illustrate the point correctly.
An important point that may seem self-evident is the difference between "wealth" as the writers define it and a lavish lifestyle. Danko and Stanley looked at people they called prodigious accumulators of wealth (PAWs) and under-accumulators of wealth (UAWs): the people flashing money and living high were often the people with no clue how they'd pay for retirement. People who did not "look" the part of the wealthy had more savings.
What is disguised by this assessment is the target audience: people who make more than $50,000 or $60,000 per year, significantly higher than the average US per capita. Also, if you have any sort of chronic health condition, that's going to impact both your ability to generate income and what you absolutely have to spend it on. I would point to health care as an important area to re-evaluate, because it's become so much more expensive for US citizens in the last decade. Possibly at least partly driven by PAWs willingness to spend well for health experts and specialists? I think the impact of two income families might also play a roll.
Chapters:
I hypothesized from the premise that the writers were some brand of conservative; what I didn't realize until I looked up William Danko's website is the depth of his Christian faith. I do not know why I am surprised by this, or why I even feel the need to point it out; I'm putting it down for my future reference and not because I am looking for a debate on correlations of religion and money.
I'm at a bit of a crossroads: do I pursue full time grad school, do I work and take classes toward an M.Sci or MBA, do I jump ship for something else entirely? My experiences in life have cemented in me a belief that money is not freedom, but its lack is certainly a cage. I don't think I have the interest or ambition to make Avi and Randy's "fuck-you money", but I have also have no desire to spend the next 20 years living paycheck to paycheck, freaking out about life after 65, and crashing on couches when I go on vacation because I have no other choice if I want to go on vacation. For me, The Millionaire Next Door is a reminder that I have to think about my money if I want to keep and control the way I use it, so I can achieve my goals in life.
Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions (Dan Ariely): In which people are consistently not rational operators, using pure logic to shape their decisions. In fact, kind of the opposite. Kept my attention in transit during vacation with descriptions of experiments demonstrating how people react to "free" versus one cent and other examples of how people's brains do not operate on pure logic.
The Knife of Never Letting Go (Patrick Ness): The blurb on the back (attributed to Frank Cottrell Boyce) says, "One of the best first sentences I've ever read and a book that lives up to it!"
I will not keep you in suspense: the first line is, "The first thing you find out when yer dog learns to talk is that dogs don't got nothing much to say."
I was completely underwhelmed. Fortunately, it got better from there.
When the book opens, Todd Hewitt is 30 days from his 13th birthday and manhood in Prentisstown, the only town on the planet, where all the settlers are men, survivors of a war that killed their women and left them hearing the Noise of every living animal, including each other. That's Todd's world - until he finds an empty hole in the Noise.
The novel is told from Todd's stubborn, nearly illiterate, first person past tense PoV, and the bad grammar and spelling nearly killed me before the end of the first chapter. Ness managed to keep me until Chapter Two, and then Todd's world started falling apart, and after that you couldn't tear me away. This is about life in a colony: surprising, problematic, brutal, occasionally beautiful, violent - this is also about armed conflict as a really, really bad idea.
The series is shaping up for a classic coming of age story, but Ness has thrown me once, and now that I know Todd is a totally unreliable narrator I want to see if he can do it again.
The Knife of Never Letting Go got the Tiptree this year (which is why I was aware of its existence), and watching Todd's interactions with his companion-of-the-road Viola I can see why: he moves from incomprehension at her silence to understanding:
This is a book about living in violent times, and it's absolutely riveting despite some really gross injuries I could have lived without reading about. I'll be reading the sequel, The Ask and the Answer, as soon as the library gets it.
My Enemy, My Ally (Diane Duane): If I had read this when I was ten*? Awesome. Unfortunately, I will be 26 in less than a week, and I am fully cognizant of Duane's writing quirks. So some of Ael's reflections on Powers and elements threw me right back into Duane's Young Wizards series, which I do not think was the intended effect. It's a perfectly reasonable story of James T. Kirk and the Enterprise on a mission of derring-do, with heavy Duane flavor. It just didn't scratch my post-reboot itch.
*I say ten because, to the best of my reconstruction, that's when dad left a library copy of Star Wars: The Last Command lying around, introducing me to media tie-in novels. Before I broke up with the Extended Universe I had read such deathless works of prose as Young Jedi Knights: Crisis at Cloud City.
Numbers: 5 total. 5 new; 3 fiction, 2 nonfiction.
Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (Samuel Delany): This is "how Marq Dyeth falls in love with Rat Korga" in the same way that Memory is "how Miles became an Imperial Auditor". Which is to say, it's where the novel goes, but it's not what the story's goal is. It's the plot-scaffold on which all the interesting parts of the novel are grown.
Korga is a "rat", a slave caste which has undergone Radical Anxiety Termination. He is also a survivor of catastophe.
Marq Dyeth is an Industrial Diplomat1, whose family has a castle (sort of) and ties to a dead tyrant. The castle brings students, among them the extraordinary Rat Korga, who may have some of the dead Vondramach Tyrannus' character, or who maybe is having that imposed by society.
It takes Delany something like half the book to get these two in the same room, and the story is so interesting that I don't care. I am all about the worldbuilding and the relationships between people in this story. (With the one exception of Rat and Marq, because there's emo romance moping. From a 36 year old.) There's also some really interesting things Delaney is doing with how people form families, and how they evaluate each other, and cultural assumptions. Okay, I'm starting in on quotes:
Well, don't we all live with some such idea anyway: Somewhere in the known universe is the perfect woman waiting for me?
Maybe now I tried to visualize him - for that's what he was, now - a little harder than one usually does. You can come up with near perfect that way.
But perfect?
At thirty-six years standard you know it can't be done.
Which I guess is what desire is all about.
Notice the pronouns? Look - look! Dalany writes a novel where everyone is gendered female, regardless of sex, unless they're the object of your sexual desire: then they're "man" and "he". So you start out assuming everyone is a woman, until the incluing is too obvious to ignore. Think about that for a second: how does that use of gender subversion change your assumptions about the characters?
And this is only one small cool thing Delaney is doing. The worldbuilding is the big draw for me: the casual descriptions of life on Rhyonon for Korga and and his experiences on Velm, Marq's planet; the scene where Korga reads about seven books in three pages and five minutes; the feel of Velm as a very lived-in city. The shine has been knocked off, some of the lights are on the blink, there's clutter in the corners and sand blowing in from the street.
Also, the politics are awesome.
The major conflict in the novel's worldbuilding is the Family versus the Sygn; the details of each philosophy are embedded in the story, as in this microcosm:
Perhaps because, with the Family trying to establish the dream of a classic past as pictured on a world that may never even have existed in order to achieve cultural stability, and with the Sygn committed to the living interaction and difference between eah woman and each world from which the right stability and play may flower, in a universe where both information and misinformation are constantly suspect, reviewed and drifting as they must be (constantly) by and between the two, a moment when either information or misinformation turns out to be harmless must bloom, when surrounded by the workings of desire or terror, into the offered sign of all about it, making and marking all about it innocent by contamination.
It makes a little more sense in context, on the second or third reading. And that's why I am excited about this book: I want to put in that sort of effort. But that is not what I am trying to talk about! I was far more excited about the Family vs Sygn description in the context of early '80s gender studies and whatever preceeded queer theory, because I feel like Delany was going there with the Sygn.
When I start reading a book, I'll frequently peel off a post-it, fold over the sticky edge, and use the post-it as a bookmark and quickie note device. I have thirteen cryptic notes - things like "history/slave p104" that traces back to a long paragraph about home and history that ends: And if you are a woman, your choice is to take it knowingly and be its (and your new home's) silent friend, or take it unknowingly and be its (and your new home's) loud slave. This seems really resonant to the aggregate of cultural appropriation / racefail discussions some of you may be familiar with, especially since one form oppression can take is the suppression or destruction of someone else's history. Everything in Stars leads somewhere else: since this was the first half of a diptych Delany never finished, one wonders if some of the trailing ends, like Rat and Marq's star-crossed romance, or Rat's connections to Vondramach Okk, would have gone somewhere. (Incidentally, the part of the story I found least satisfying was Marq falling head over heels for Rat and moping after Fate in the form of the Web parted them. Think like an ID, Marq! What is actually going on here?) Or Rhyonon's cultural fugue, or the alien Xlv, or the Thants - what was going to happen next?
It's not 1984, so even if Delany sat down and wrote a sequel today, it would not be the story he would have written then. In 1984 AIDS was just hitting public awareness; in 1984 the Cold War was on (was cultural fugue inspired by those old nightmares of the world going up in nuclear fire?), in 1984 the Internet lived at a handful of universities (was Delany in touch with that evolution, or was his interstellar Web inspired by something else?).
Since I did not do well with Babel-17, I was very surprised to discover I was really enjoying Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, and would have been happy to follow the characters around for another 400 pages.
The Millionaire Next Door (William D. Danko, Thomas J. Stanley): How to get rich slowly. Basic tenants: put 15% of your pretax income into savings and investment, discipline your finances, pay yourself first?, you are your favorite charity. Is this a Conservative thesis? Take care of yourself first, disperse your estate on death (to grand/kids, charities). Things that may impact wealth creation since 1996 publication American cars aren't, mortgages, health care. The role of self-employment / business ownership: among self-made millionaires, a disproportionate number are business owners, but among business owners, a tiny number are millionaires. This may need pictures to illustrate the point correctly.
An important point that may seem self-evident is the difference between "wealth" as the writers define it and a lavish lifestyle. Danko and Stanley looked at people they called prodigious accumulators of wealth (PAWs) and under-accumulators of wealth (UAWs): the people flashing money and living high were often the people with no clue how they'd pay for retirement. People who did not "look" the part of the wealthy had more savings.
What is disguised by this assessment is the target audience: people who make more than $50,000 or $60,000 per year, significantly higher than the average US per capita. Also, if you have any sort of chronic health condition, that's going to impact both your ability to generate income and what you absolutely have to spend it on. I would point to health care as an important area to re-evaluate, because it's become so much more expensive for US citizens in the last decade. Possibly at least partly driven by PAWs willingness to spend well for health experts and specialists? I think the impact of two income families might also play a roll.
Chapters:
- Meet the Millionaire Next Door ("Our studies reveal...")
- Frugal Frugal Frugal
- Time, Energy, and Money (spend time budgeting, artificial scarcity)
- You Aren't What You Drive
- Economic Outpatient Care
- Affirmative Action, Family Style (dependent daughters)
- Find Your Niche (accountants, health care, finances: cater to the wealthy)
- Jobs: Millionaires versus Heirs
I hypothesized from the premise that the writers were some brand of conservative; what I didn't realize until I looked up William Danko's website is the depth of his Christian faith. I do not know why I am surprised by this, or why I even feel the need to point it out; I'm putting it down for my future reference and not because I am looking for a debate on correlations of religion and money.
I'm at a bit of a crossroads: do I pursue full time grad school, do I work and take classes toward an M.Sci or MBA, do I jump ship for something else entirely? My experiences in life have cemented in me a belief that money is not freedom, but its lack is certainly a cage. I don't think I have the interest or ambition to make Avi and Randy's "fuck-you money", but I have also have no desire to spend the next 20 years living paycheck to paycheck, freaking out about life after 65, and crashing on couches when I go on vacation because I have no other choice if I want to go on vacation. For me, The Millionaire Next Door is a reminder that I have to think about my money if I want to keep and control the way I use it, so I can achieve my goals in life.
Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions (Dan Ariely): In which people are consistently not rational operators, using pure logic to shape their decisions. In fact, kind of the opposite. Kept my attention in transit during vacation with descriptions of experiments demonstrating how people react to "free" versus one cent and other examples of how people's brains do not operate on pure logic.
The Knife of Never Letting Go (Patrick Ness): The blurb on the back (attributed to Frank Cottrell Boyce) says, "One of the best first sentences I've ever read and a book that lives up to it!"
I will not keep you in suspense: the first line is, "The first thing you find out when yer dog learns to talk is that dogs don't got nothing much to say."
I was completely underwhelmed. Fortunately, it got better from there.
When the book opens, Todd Hewitt is 30 days from his 13th birthday and manhood in Prentisstown, the only town on the planet, where all the settlers are men, survivors of a war that killed their women and left them hearing the Noise of every living animal, including each other. That's Todd's world - until he finds an empty hole in the Noise.
The novel is told from Todd's stubborn, nearly illiterate, first person past tense PoV, and the bad grammar and spelling nearly killed me before the end of the first chapter. Ness managed to keep me until Chapter Two, and then Todd's world started falling apart, and after that you couldn't tear me away. This is about life in a colony: surprising, problematic, brutal, occasionally beautiful, violent - this is also about armed conflict as a really, really bad idea.
The series is shaping up for a classic coming of age story, but Ness has thrown me once, and now that I know Todd is a totally unreliable narrator I want to see if he can do it again.
The Knife of Never Letting Go got the Tiptree this year (which is why I was aware of its existence), and watching Todd's interactions with his companion-of-the-road Viola I can see why: he moves from incomprehension at her silence to understanding:
I know what she's thinking.
I know what she's thinking.
Even looking at her back, I now what she's thinking and feeling and what's going on inside her.
The way she's turned her body, the way she's holding her head and her hands and the book in her lap, the way she's stiffening a little in her back as she hears all this in my Noise. . .
I can read her Noise even tho she ain't got none.
I know who she is.
I know Viola Eade . . . Each of us knowing the other. (p420, very end of ch 38)
This is a book about living in violent times, and it's absolutely riveting despite some really gross injuries I could have lived without reading about. I'll be reading the sequel, The Ask and the Answer, as soon as the library gets it.
My Enemy, My Ally (Diane Duane): If I had read this when I was ten*? Awesome. Unfortunately, I will be 26 in less than a week, and I am fully cognizant of Duane's writing quirks. So some of Ael's reflections on Powers and elements threw me right back into Duane's Young Wizards series, which I do not think was the intended effect. It's a perfectly reasonable story of James T. Kirk and the Enterprise on a mission of derring-do, with heavy Duane flavor. It just didn't scratch my post-reboot itch.
*I say ten because, to the best of my reconstruction, that's when dad left a library copy of Star Wars: The Last Command lying around, introducing me to media tie-in novels. Before I broke up with the Extended Universe I had read such deathless works of prose as Young Jedi Knights: Crisis at Cloud City.
Numbers: 5 total. 5 new; 3 fiction, 2 nonfiction.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-08 07:00 am (UTC)Actually I disagree.
Duane, uh, writes in a multiverse. Did you know Young Wizards canonically crosses over with Doctor Who as well?
STARS IN MY POCKET LIKE GRAINS OF SAND I LOVE THAT BOOK I nearly pitched it for yuletide last year. I don't even care what all would be different, I want a sequel.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-08 01:16 pm (UTC)No, I did not! Who (new or old) isn't a show I've ever been much interested in.