Storytellers (November Reading)
Dec. 18th, 2010 11:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aseIt was not my intent to have an all-male reading list this month; in a possible first, it just fell out that way.
The Zanzibar Chest (Aidan Hartley): When I first acquired this, I thought it was a lighthearted boys' adventure, possibly with some father-son issues. Never in my life have I been so wrong. It would be more true to say this is a pensive encounter with the End of Empire and life as a white male "stringer" covering Africa's convulsions of violence for the news agencies through the '80s and '90s.
I think I take this book with a grain of salt; there's a nostalgia for the better days of Empire that I don't entirely trust. The author claims his father had a romance with an "outcast princess", Binti Mwalimu (p22 HC), and laments the dissolution of native culture in ways that sound like verse n+1 of self-centered White post-colonial attitude. Hartley notes that, as a White son of Africa, he could get any of a list of jobs in African nations "since I would live in a brutal dictatorship just about wherever I lived in Africa - and on account of my white skin, which disqualified me from participating in the politics of my own homeland - I must be blind to the corruption, killings, and general misrule" (p67). He struggles with the experience of being an outsider, but there's an element of "where is my birthright" with which I'm not in full sympathy. Struggling with the experience of being neither English nor African, Hartley becomes a journalist, witnessing and recording conflicts in Ethiopia, Rwanda, Somalia, and elsewhere, between drinking, getting high and partying at home base in Dar es Salaam or Nairobi. The events Hartley covered left their mark, in ways trivial and hair-raising: a certain attitude towards airplanes (perhaps acquired after a disastrous non-flight that never left the Sudan), trying to file a story on a bomb (during a thunderstorm in London).
The "Zanzibar Chest" of the title belonged to the writer's father, one of the men who left England for colonial service, and contained incomplete memoirs as well as the diaries of a long-buried friend killed before the writer was born. In Davey's tale of death Hartley the younger seems to see some connection between this "man who had become a story" (p388) in the Middle East and his own life, turning bloodshed and death into column inches.
If there's a unifying theme, it's damage: Hartley in London mistakes thunder for bomb explosions; his father's friend's death in a quarrel of tribal and Imperial loyalty ends a life made narrow by English duty; African nations rip themselves apart in civil war, famine, and power grabs. This doesn't read as a story that the writer wanted to pen, but in some way felt obliged or compelled to set down. I'm not sure if liking is a useful way to assess this book: one cannot respond to such intensity with mildness.
How Starbucks Saved My Life: A Son of Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else (Michael Gates Gill): Title is nearly longer than the book. The author, fired from the advertising firm he had worked for since graduating college, tries freelancing and eventually lands a Starbucks job - almost by accident - to make ends meet. Gill reflects on his emerging awareness of how the world works for people who aren't white male Yale graduates, but some of his stories lack the "and then I changed my behavior" that would really endear the book to me. It's also worth noting that Gill speaks highly of his Starbucks experience, but what I saw was a really good manager to bringing the most out in her employees. Crystal deserves a shoutout for working with Gill as he learned the ropes as a Starbucks employee.
Aye, and Gomorrah, and Other Stories (Samuel R. Delany): Short story collection. Oddly, short stories are a tougher read than novels, for me: I want to read fairly quickly and enjoy a 100-plus page immersive experience. Short stories require a different focus, more attention to the sentence and paragraph level. It's more energy-intensive to react to individual pieces. I most enjoyed "Omegahelm" because it's set in the same universe as Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand. "Cage of Brass" actively annoyed me; most the the other stories fell in between. I like Delaney's grungy, "not everything works out for everyone" speculative fiction, but I'll have to give this another run when I'm ready to connect at the sentence level and reread to find the overarching themes between stories.
Table of Contents
"The Star Pit"
"Corona"
"Aye, and Gomorrah..."
"Driftglass"
"We, in Some Strange Power’s Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line" (Zelazny homage?)
"Cage of Brass"
"High Weir"
"Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones"
"Omegahelm"
"Among the Blobs"
"Tapestry"
"Prismatica"
"Ruins"
"Dog in a Fisherman’s Net"
"Night and the Loves of Joe Dicostanzo"
Afterword: Of Doubts and Dreams
I reread Garth Nix's Sabriel, Lirael, Abhorsen trilogy. My, people spend a lot of time nauseated by magic gone wrong. I like Sabriel best, because it has the most worldbuilding; I don't like Lirael or Abhorsen nearly as much: the bloodline arguments feel incredibly silly in those two books, and Lirael's teenage suffering is taken to excesses in the novel bearing her name. These aren't quite bog-standard YA fantasy, but they bear a strong stamp of genre, not always in ways I appreciate.
Who Killed Mr. Chippendale? A Mystery in Poems (Mel Glenn): I picked this up for novelty value; I was hoping for a story in different poetic forms, but this was pure free-verse. It's more about school politics than playing with language, unfortunately; not what I was looking for.
Numbers game: 7 total finished. 4 new, 3 reread; 6 fiction, 1 nonfiction; 1 short story collection
The Zanzibar Chest (Aidan Hartley): When I first acquired this, I thought it was a lighthearted boys' adventure, possibly with some father-son issues. Never in my life have I been so wrong. It would be more true to say this is a pensive encounter with the End of Empire and life as a white male "stringer" covering Africa's convulsions of violence for the news agencies through the '80s and '90s.
I think I take this book with a grain of salt; there's a nostalgia for the better days of Empire that I don't entirely trust. The author claims his father had a romance with an "outcast princess", Binti Mwalimu (p22 HC), and laments the dissolution of native culture in ways that sound like verse n+1 of self-centered White post-colonial attitude. Hartley notes that, as a White son of Africa, he could get any of a list of jobs in African nations "since I would live in a brutal dictatorship just about wherever I lived in Africa - and on account of my white skin, which disqualified me from participating in the politics of my own homeland - I must be blind to the corruption, killings, and general misrule" (p67). He struggles with the experience of being an outsider, but there's an element of "where is my birthright" with which I'm not in full sympathy. Struggling with the experience of being neither English nor African, Hartley becomes a journalist, witnessing and recording conflicts in Ethiopia, Rwanda, Somalia, and elsewhere, between drinking, getting high and partying at home base in Dar es Salaam or Nairobi. The events Hartley covered left their mark, in ways trivial and hair-raising: a certain attitude towards airplanes (perhaps acquired after a disastrous non-flight that never left the Sudan), trying to file a story on a bomb (during a thunderstorm in London).
The "Zanzibar Chest" of the title belonged to the writer's father, one of the men who left England for colonial service, and contained incomplete memoirs as well as the diaries of a long-buried friend killed before the writer was born. In Davey's tale of death Hartley the younger seems to see some connection between this "man who had become a story" (p388) in the Middle East and his own life, turning bloodshed and death into column inches.
If there's a unifying theme, it's damage: Hartley in London mistakes thunder for bomb explosions; his father's friend's death in a quarrel of tribal and Imperial loyalty ends a life made narrow by English duty; African nations rip themselves apart in civil war, famine, and power grabs. This doesn't read as a story that the writer wanted to pen, but in some way felt obliged or compelled to set down. I'm not sure if liking is a useful way to assess this book: one cannot respond to such intensity with mildness.
How Starbucks Saved My Life: A Son of Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else (Michael Gates Gill): Title is nearly longer than the book. The author, fired from the advertising firm he had worked for since graduating college, tries freelancing and eventually lands a Starbucks job - almost by accident - to make ends meet. Gill reflects on his emerging awareness of how the world works for people who aren't white male Yale graduates, but some of his stories lack the "and then I changed my behavior" that would really endear the book to me. It's also worth noting that Gill speaks highly of his Starbucks experience, but what I saw was a really good manager to bringing the most out in her employees. Crystal deserves a shoutout for working with Gill as he learned the ropes as a Starbucks employee.
Aye, and Gomorrah, and Other Stories (Samuel R. Delany): Short story collection. Oddly, short stories are a tougher read than novels, for me: I want to read fairly quickly and enjoy a 100-plus page immersive experience. Short stories require a different focus, more attention to the sentence and paragraph level. It's more energy-intensive to react to individual pieces. I most enjoyed "Omegahelm" because it's set in the same universe as Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand. "Cage of Brass" actively annoyed me; most the the other stories fell in between. I like Delaney's grungy, "not everything works out for everyone" speculative fiction, but I'll have to give this another run when I'm ready to connect at the sentence level and reread to find the overarching themes between stories.
Table of Contents
"The Star Pit"
"Corona"
"Aye, and Gomorrah..."
"Driftglass"
"We, in Some Strange Power’s Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line" (Zelazny homage?)
"Cage of Brass"
"High Weir"
"Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones"
"Omegahelm"
"Among the Blobs"
"Tapestry"
"Prismatica"
"Ruins"
"Dog in a Fisherman’s Net"
"Night and the Loves of Joe Dicostanzo"
Afterword: Of Doubts and Dreams
I reread Garth Nix's Sabriel, Lirael, Abhorsen trilogy. My, people spend a lot of time nauseated by magic gone wrong. I like Sabriel best, because it has the most worldbuilding; I don't like Lirael or Abhorsen nearly as much: the bloodline arguments feel incredibly silly in those two books, and Lirael's teenage suffering is taken to excesses in the novel bearing her name. These aren't quite bog-standard YA fantasy, but they bear a strong stamp of genre, not always in ways I appreciate.
Who Killed Mr. Chippendale? A Mystery in Poems (Mel Glenn): I picked this up for novelty value; I was hoping for a story in different poetic forms, but this was pure free-verse. It's more about school politics than playing with language, unfortunately; not what I was looking for.
Numbers game: 7 total finished. 4 new, 3 reread; 6 fiction, 1 nonfiction; 1 short story collection