![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aseAir (Geoff Ryman): Absolutely worth reading. Do you know why this got a Tiptree? Because it's a story about a woman in a fake -stan. There's a number of interlocking plot threads that dovetail and swoop around each other to say more than the sum of their individual stories. Do you know why you've never heard about this story? Because there's really iffy fake quantum technology and magical realism biology. I want to rave about this, because it's working with some really cool themes, and falters just enough for me to get some science critique in, but I mostly wave my hands and stammer when trying to explain the many small and large storytelling moments that made this so enjoyable. I like messiness and technology on a deadline!
All the Fishes Come Home to Roost (Rachel Manija Brown): I don't know what to say about this one. Halfway through, I lamented to a friend it didn't include more context for Indian history, ashram traditions, "Westerners in India" stuff, etc. At nearly the end of the book, the writer emails several chapters of the manuscript to her mother, and her mother emails back extraordinarily detailed refutations of events small and large, closing the email "with love from the horrible, stupid, despicable [mom]." That's when it clicked: the frontispiece opens with a George Bernard Shaw quote, "if you have skeletons in the closet, you may as well make them dance," for a reason. I know that self-depreciating tone and the attitude that goes with it. This isn't a book about India. This is a book about surviving a catastrophic failure to equip one kid with the tools or protection to deal with the world, with a touch of comedy. Think Running With Scissors (which the author namechecks in the final "post-India" flash-forward). In that it succeeds. There's a different, more substantial book that could be that story and include more context, yadda yadda, but that's not what Brown was doing. Sometimes you're writing a honking big three-course book, and sometimes you're doing a really excellent soup and sandwich. This is the soup-and-sandwich, and excellent.
Watership Down (Richard Adams): Children's classic. A group of bachelor rabbits flee their threatened - later destroyed - home warren and establish a new warren. Did anyone actually read this as a child? It got several awards, and is a perfectly reasonable bus read, but I'm trying to figure out how it fits into the geography of British literature.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Rebecca Skloot): This is about the life of the (black) woman whose cancer gave (mostly white, often male) medical researchers a critical lab tool. Wait, this is about the impact of medical research on the Lacks family. No, this is about bioethics, as well as changes in law and human research practices!
This is a book trying to serve many goals: if you're looking for a broad overview on these topics, it's great. If you want depth, you'll wish it was more focused, and had better endnotes.
The HeLa cell line was one of the first opportunities for researchers to manipulate human factories - cells - outside the human body. It's everywhere. A book tracing the lineage of George Gey's original culture and explaining to lay audience the groundbreaking experiments made possible by that cell line could be three hundred pages by itself, especially if the writer got into some of the historical events that wouldn't fly with a contemporary ethics board - and how those boards came into being. I would have enjoyed hearing more about the ethical fights and legalities mentioned in passing (the Nuremburg Code, the American Medical Association Code of Ethics, Ted Slavin's lawsuit, hepatitis research, HIPPA, GINA, etc).
Henrietta Lacks' life is not as well-documented as the experiments done on the HeLa cell line. Nor are the facts of historic, unjust standard medical practice necessarily easy to access. (Hyperbole, emotion, and some outcomes, perhaps; but the intentions and actions, perhaps not so much.) This is probably the first nonfiction book to address the emotional and medical impact on Lacks' husband, children, and grandchildren. As Skloot points out, HeLa is a cornerstone of a multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical research industry, but Lacks' children often lacked the health insurance coverage to take advantage of that legacy without sinking family budgets.
The race issue can't be ignored, but I also find I have a lot of questions about family privacy and writer involvement. Skloot's biography states, "[s]he has a B.S. in biological sciences and an MFA in creative nonfiction. She financed her degrees by working in emergency rooms, neurology labs, veterinary morgues and martini bars." The relevant wiki article tells readers she's the daughter of a writer. Knowing this, it's reasonable to say that Skloot is a white woman with a socioeconomic background allowing her access to education up to a Master's in Fine Arts. That's quite a toolset for tackling life! Especially compared to the Lackses, who didn't send a family member to college until after the turn of the millennium. Skloot spends a non-negligible part of the book describing how she found people, places, and documents, and how she reacted to those discoveries. How much should she really be in the story? Skloot's a major player, by dint of her long association with the Lackses while writing this book; does that involvement mean she's a public figure, to be watched and reported on as she's reported on the Lackses? Do I get to ask what her reactions to religion say about her? (Gary, Gladys' son, laying hands and praying for the burden of cells to be transferred to Skloot (p291 - 292, HC); Skloot in church, "I'd never sat in a congregation before, let alone spoken in front of one" (p302 - 304, HC).) Where's the line between line between emotional honesty and taking over the story? And how much of the Lackses personal reactions does Skloot get to share in the guise of the narrator/writer? Skloot's pretty sensitive to these issues - and gets major points from me for organizing an educational scholarship fund for Henrietta Lacks's descendants - but these aren't issues with pat resolutions. How much is does the public get to share the laughter and tears of a family discovering its history?
Palimpsest (Catherynne Valente /![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
yuki_onna: This novel is the bastard child of Dunsany and Tanith Lee. If you like delicate, considered, ornate prose and lush (even "intoxicating", thank you cover copy) imagery, you will love this novel. If you like tight worldbuilding, clearly stated themes, and plot, you're going to contemplate throwing this one across the bus. A lot. I was pretty disappointed: Valente's blurb on Scalzi's blog sounded like the setup for some really awesome worldbuilding from a Tiptree winner, so I ignored the signs this was not the novel I was looking for. Palimpsest not an extended metaphor tackling isolation and connection through common experience; an exploration of post-penicillin post-pill post-HIV pre-HIV-vaccine attitudes toward sex and intimacy; meditations on self/other boundaries, or the lines of free will and social constraint. It might vaguely be about the experience of being the foreigner in a culture strange to the protagonist/reader, but it didn't feel like a major theme. The establishing sections called the protagonists "immigrants", but passed lightly over the difficulties of procuring food, housing, social networks, language, and new social mores and folkways. It might be said that the experience of being a tourist seeking a green card drives the plot, but the reader must experience 100 pages of delicate intoxicating prose before that's really established.
The timing in my personal life didn't help either. I spent a non-negligible part of August grappling with other people's pain and bad coping mechanisms. It wasn't the best mood for a novel about individuals unsuited for life in the real world, who had a Special Magical Destiny in an urban fantasy. I don't know that I'd ever be in the mood for this one. There's a line between empathizing with the crazy and embracing the attitude that intervention will destroy the delicate artistic temperament / mood. By the time the novel declared a protagonist had intermittently hallucinated his drowned sister most of his life, that line had long faded into the romanticized mists of Byronic suffering.
I want to emphasize, if you're into the prose game, you're going to be all over this; if you like slowly unwinding urban fantasy, you might like this; if you're into Tanith Lee? You will absolutely adore Palimpsest. I'm none of those categories, so I found myself, at the end of the novel, resigned to a writing style that - I'm going to guess - plays to Valente's strengths, but tooth-grindingly irritated by escapism which failed to illuminate the human condition or lighten my days with humor and distraction.
I skimmed Laurie King's The Language of Bees before tackling the sequel, The God of the Hive. The previous novel ended with Russell and Holmes splitting up, both wanted by New Scotland Yard, possibly in connection with events surrounding Holmes' brother Mycroft. When I read Bees I said, I keep waiting for tragic foreshadowings of WWII and Holmes' passing, and remain disappointed that so far, this has not been played for significant pathos. This remains mostly true, but parts of Hive mention Holmes' increasing age, which gives me hope. What didn't give me hope was the unfocused plot - several hundred pages of multiple points of view, two protagonists mostly in the dark, one PoV a fairly unreliable narrator, and the fourth a terribly uninteresting gloating villain. If this were a more dynamic series, I'd say the unfocused plot and theme are set-up for serious Mary-Mycroft moral conflict in a future novel, and maybe Mary taking over Mycroft's job, but I don't think it's that sort of genre novel.
Numbers game: 6 total finished. 6 new, 0 reread; 4 fiction, 2 nonfiction.
All the Fishes Come Home to Roost (Rachel Manija Brown): I don't know what to say about this one. Halfway through, I lamented to a friend it didn't include more context for Indian history, ashram traditions, "Westerners in India" stuff, etc. At nearly the end of the book, the writer emails several chapters of the manuscript to her mother, and her mother emails back extraordinarily detailed refutations of events small and large, closing the email "with love from the horrible, stupid, despicable [mom]." That's when it clicked: the frontispiece opens with a George Bernard Shaw quote, "if you have skeletons in the closet, you may as well make them dance," for a reason. I know that self-depreciating tone and the attitude that goes with it. This isn't a book about India. This is a book about surviving a catastrophic failure to equip one kid with the tools or protection to deal with the world, with a touch of comedy. Think Running With Scissors (which the author namechecks in the final "post-India" flash-forward). In that it succeeds. There's a different, more substantial book that could be that story and include more context, yadda yadda, but that's not what Brown was doing. Sometimes you're writing a honking big three-course book, and sometimes you're doing a really excellent soup and sandwich. This is the soup-and-sandwich, and excellent.
Watership Down (Richard Adams): Children's classic. A group of bachelor rabbits flee their threatened - later destroyed - home warren and establish a new warren. Did anyone actually read this as a child? It got several awards, and is a perfectly reasonable bus read, but I'm trying to figure out how it fits into the geography of British literature.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Rebecca Skloot): This is about the life of the (black) woman whose cancer gave (mostly white, often male) medical researchers a critical lab tool. Wait, this is about the impact of medical research on the Lacks family. No, this is about bioethics, as well as changes in law and human research practices!
This is a book trying to serve many goals: if you're looking for a broad overview on these topics, it's great. If you want depth, you'll wish it was more focused, and had better endnotes.
The HeLa cell line was one of the first opportunities for researchers to manipulate human factories - cells - outside the human body. It's everywhere. A book tracing the lineage of George Gey's original culture and explaining to lay audience the groundbreaking experiments made possible by that cell line could be three hundred pages by itself, especially if the writer got into some of the historical events that wouldn't fly with a contemporary ethics board - and how those boards came into being. I would have enjoyed hearing more about the ethical fights and legalities mentioned in passing (the Nuremburg Code, the American Medical Association Code of Ethics, Ted Slavin's lawsuit, hepatitis research, HIPPA, GINA, etc).
Henrietta Lacks' life is not as well-documented as the experiments done on the HeLa cell line. Nor are the facts of historic, unjust standard medical practice necessarily easy to access. (Hyperbole, emotion, and some outcomes, perhaps; but the intentions and actions, perhaps not so much.) This is probably the first nonfiction book to address the emotional and medical impact on Lacks' husband, children, and grandchildren. As Skloot points out, HeLa is a cornerstone of a multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical research industry, but Lacks' children often lacked the health insurance coverage to take advantage of that legacy without sinking family budgets.
The race issue can't be ignored, but I also find I have a lot of questions about family privacy and writer involvement. Skloot's biography states, "[s]he has a B.S. in biological sciences and an MFA in creative nonfiction. She financed her degrees by working in emergency rooms, neurology labs, veterinary morgues and martini bars." The relevant wiki article tells readers she's the daughter of a writer. Knowing this, it's reasonable to say that Skloot is a white woman with a socioeconomic background allowing her access to education up to a Master's in Fine Arts. That's quite a toolset for tackling life! Especially compared to the Lackses, who didn't send a family member to college until after the turn of the millennium. Skloot spends a non-negligible part of the book describing how she found people, places, and documents, and how she reacted to those discoveries. How much should she really be in the story? Skloot's a major player, by dint of her long association with the Lackses while writing this book; does that involvement mean she's a public figure, to be watched and reported on as she's reported on the Lackses? Do I get to ask what her reactions to religion say about her? (Gary, Gladys' son, laying hands and praying for the burden of cells to be transferred to Skloot (p291 - 292, HC); Skloot in church, "I'd never sat in a congregation before, let alone spoken in front of one" (p302 - 304, HC).) Where's the line between line between emotional honesty and taking over the story? And how much of the Lackses personal reactions does Skloot get to share in the guise of the narrator/writer? Skloot's pretty sensitive to these issues - and gets major points from me for organizing an educational scholarship fund for Henrietta Lacks's descendants - but these aren't issues with pat resolutions. How much is does the public get to share the laughter and tears of a family discovering its history?
Palimpsest (Catherynne Valente /
yuki_onna: This novel is the bastard child of Dunsany and Tanith Lee. If you like delicate, considered, ornate prose and lush (even "intoxicating", thank you cover copy) imagery, you will love this novel. If you like tight worldbuilding, clearly stated themes, and plot, you're going to contemplate throwing this one across the bus. A lot. I was pretty disappointed: Valente's blurb on Scalzi's blog sounded like the setup for some really awesome worldbuilding from a Tiptree winner, so I ignored the signs this was not the novel I was looking for. Palimpsest not an extended metaphor tackling isolation and connection through common experience; an exploration of post-penicillin post-pill post-HIV pre-HIV-vaccine attitudes toward sex and intimacy; meditations on self/other boundaries, or the lines of free will and social constraint. It might vaguely be about the experience of being the foreigner in a culture strange to the protagonist/reader, but it didn't feel like a major theme. The establishing sections called the protagonists "immigrants", but passed lightly over the difficulties of procuring food, housing, social networks, language, and new social mores and folkways. It might be said that the experience of being a tourist seeking a green card drives the plot, but the reader must experience 100 pages of delicate intoxicating prose before that's really established. The timing in my personal life didn't help either. I spent a non-negligible part of August grappling with other people's pain and bad coping mechanisms. It wasn't the best mood for a novel about individuals unsuited for life in the real world, who had a Special Magical Destiny in an urban fantasy. I don't know that I'd ever be in the mood for this one. There's a line between empathizing with the crazy and embracing the attitude that intervention will destroy the delicate artistic temperament / mood. By the time the novel declared a protagonist had intermittently hallucinated his drowned sister most of his life, that line had long faded into the romanticized mists of Byronic suffering.
I want to emphasize, if you're into the prose game, you're going to be all over this; if you like slowly unwinding urban fantasy, you might like this; if you're into Tanith Lee? You will absolutely adore Palimpsest. I'm none of those categories, so I found myself, at the end of the novel, resigned to a writing style that - I'm going to guess - plays to Valente's strengths, but tooth-grindingly irritated by escapism which failed to illuminate the human condition or lighten my days with humor and distraction.
I skimmed Laurie King's The Language of Bees before tackling the sequel, The God of the Hive. The previous novel ended with Russell and Holmes splitting up, both wanted by New Scotland Yard, possibly in connection with events surrounding Holmes' brother Mycroft. When I read Bees I said, I keep waiting for tragic foreshadowings of WWII and Holmes' passing, and remain disappointed that so far, this has not been played for significant pathos. This remains mostly true, but parts of Hive mention Holmes' increasing age, which gives me hope. What didn't give me hope was the unfocused plot - several hundred pages of multiple points of view, two protagonists mostly in the dark, one PoV a fairly unreliable narrator, and the fourth a terribly uninteresting gloating villain. If this were a more dynamic series, I'd say the unfocused plot and theme are set-up for serious Mary-Mycroft moral conflict in a future novel, and maybe Mary taking over Mycroft's job, but I don't think it's that sort of genre novel.
Numbers game: 6 total finished. 6 new, 0 reread; 4 fiction, 2 nonfiction.