Clever Title Is Traveling 'Cross Undiscovered Countries (January Reading)
My hours sleep / caffeinated drinks ratio is edging towards one. I feel fantastic, whenever my eyes uncross, but I dimly sense there's been some intellectual impact.
A Daughter of the Samurai (Etsu Sugimoto): Charming memoir of a Japanese immigrant to America. Picked this up after Lois Bujold mentioned it on the LMB mailing list. My first reflection was, "this delights in the way Hitty: Her First Hundred Years charms," which is less of a surprise when one considers they were both published in the 1920's. Sugimoto's memoir is written in a light-hearted storytelling style, recalling details of her experiences growing up on the western side of Japan, in what's now part of the Niigata Prefecture, as well as her stories of attending a missionary school in Tokyo, living in America as a wife and mother, and her temporary return to Japan after her husband's death.
The gentle tone glides past shadows of other stories: how did her husband die? How did Sugimoto support herself as a widow when she returned to America? After her husband's untimely death, it was expected she would return to Japan, but what moved her to move back to America? Sugimoto gracefully speaks of both sorrow and joy in her life, opening a window to another time and place.
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (N.K. Jemisin): Heiress to a minor kingdom is summoned by her grandfather and named one of the three candidates to be heir to his authority over all the kingdoms. Yeine has her wits and her mother's training to defend her against family politics and fettered gods with a plan to end their slavery.
Jemisin came to my attention following the racefail fights of 2009 (to distinguish from previous but related cultural appropriation events dating back a couple of years, if you've been off the grid), so I'm reading this with an eye on that context. I think that might have been a disservice to the novel: my first reactions were to look for the agenda rather than enjoy the story. Instead of considering worldbuilding and plot, or paying attention to Jemisin's arrangement of a world forcibly at peace and the downsides of nominal benevolence, I found myself looking for traces of other people's flamewars on the plot and prose. I do not believe this was the intent.
Once I could focus my attention away from the outside context and onto the actual story, I found it clever, but not so interesting I am running out the door for the sequel. Yeine is dropped into a succession struggle she didn't expect and isn't particularly interested in winning, except that the other option is losing, so she moves to establish her power-base and familiarize herself with the palace of Sky, inhabited by her mother's powerful and dysfunctional family. 2,000 years previous to the novel, one of Yeine's mother's Arameri ancestors was a key player in a war where the god of light and order triumphed over all other gods; since then the Arameri have held the keys of the defeated gods' chains and used them as weapons to bring the known world under their god's sway. Hence the power, and the dysfunction, which is mostly vaguely hinted at. One gets the impression entire novels could be written about the "entertainments" of Yeine's mostly-offscreen Arameri kin.
That offscreen quality makes and breaks the novel. Yeine's absent mother has a giant impact on the plot, and her absence lends her an appealing mystique, but the absence of other influences lessens my interest in the protagonist. The coachman who was her companion in a months-long journey to Sky is dismissed in the second chapter without appearing onscreen at all. We're told Yeine's paternal grandmother is hostile, but she's shown as a source of information and strength. At one point, Yeine laments the loss of her pre-novel life, but the only connections we're shown to that life are her duty to her country and her dead parents: does she have no friends?
I'll also admit I wasn't drawn in by the romance. I wanted to wrap the primordial god of chaos in chains and drop him in an ocean; sexy dangerous evil is not my thing. The hints of political maneuvering around the "we're all one big happy confederation of kingdoms, eternally at peace" setup and information control were more appealing: the novel was about Yeine's radical answer to the problems of her world's political setup, not a detailed exploration of the injustices of that setup. The assumption that a world with nominal multiculturalism and enforced monotheism would have significant and negative consequences speaks to the social justice concerns that have been so energetically debated than mere skin color, and slid right past my radar until after I was nearly done with the novel. That's either a good sign - I'm thinking about the novel - or a bad one - I didn't think about until way late in the game.
I wasn't overwhelmed by the story or characters, but I was intrigued by the worldbuilding. The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is the first in a trilogy; my lukewarm reaction to the first novel means I'll be waiting to see what other people think of the second and third novels before picking up anything else in the series, but if you're in the mood for "god of light and order is not equal to god of right" fiction, you'd probably like this.
The Privilege of the Sword (Ellen Kushner): Sequel to Swordspoint; briefly discussed previously. Duke Alec summons his sister's daughter from a country estate to settle a family break and have his niece trained as a swordsman. Niece Katherine expects a different sort of Season on the Hill in the wake of her uncle the Mad Duke. (I just love that phrase.)
Kushner is a charming stylist, but her plots are not nearly as intriguing. I liked Katherine, and I wanted to like the story, but I was disappointed that events didn't unroll to illuminate character or story very efficiently. For example, I can certainly make up a story about why Alec and Richard simply cannot be together despite their love, but I was sort of expecting the writer to explain how the characters got from Point A at the end of Swordspoint to Point B in Privilege of the Sword. I also hoped for some clever thoughts on Katherine taking up a role that was both traditionally male and beneath her class, but these didn't materialize. I can make inferences from her atraditional romance with Marcus, and her relationship with Artemisia, mediated through their mutual love for the "The Swordsman Whose Name Was Not Death", a novel-in-a-novel, but I was hoping for more explicit authorial intent and less Choose Your Own Adventure.
Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits (Linda Gordon): Picked off the library shelves on a whim. Dorothea Lange went down in history for photographing the iconic "Migrant Mother" picture of the Depression era, but also made significant contributions to national documentary photography and the San Francisco arts scene. An okay but not shockingly excellent biography: Gordon butted in with "I" statements and the occasional under-developed political parallel. For example, a footnote to a pre-WW2 overview notes "...targeting "pink" Hollywood, these attacks resemble today's conservative attacks on liberal and "immoral" Hollywood." (p460 HC, footnote 12) Contemporary analogies are brought up more than once, with frustratingly little true analysis or depth. Having given an example of a footnote that could have been dispensed with, on page 316, when Gordon discusses the constraints on Lange's Army-sponsored photography of WW2 Japanese internment camps, I would have liked to see more annotation.
Despite the focus on contemporary embedding, there are zero footnotes linked to this paragraph. It's surprising Gordon wouldn't choose to buttress her argument by linking to published memoirs of photographers who went to Baghdad, Fallujah, etc, with American troops, and likely have words about the tensions between OpSec and photographic journalism.
I wanted this to be much more of an identity story, showing Lange's similarities to and uniquenesses through historical periods. For example, Gordon indicates Lange struggled to balance what she considered a primary responsibility to her husband and household with her own career and interests, and suggests this is a "Victorian" value, but doesn't explore the social or psychological compromises and consequences of, say, fostering out her kids so she could focus on her Depression-era photography travels. When the writing focuses on those consideration, it occasionally gives way from creative Most FSA photographers were based out of the Washington, DC HQ; Lange lived in Berkeley, California and rarely made the cross-country trek to meet her boss or fellow photographers in person. Therefore, Gordon states on page 290, "[Other FSA photographers] perceived her as a diva. In face-to-face discussions, she would have been able to make her requests more softly, to charm her coworkers, and [department head] Stryker might have been better able to explain his constraints." What a splendid fancy! This is all out of Gordon's head, leaning on Gordon's perceptions of Lange. This isn't a creative way to get at a life-truth, this is author bias.
Perhaps I'm judging on tone; perhaps I'm holding a female biographer to a double standard. However, this sort of writer construction from bare-bones accounts happens more than once: Lange and the FSA photographers, her thorny relationship with her mother, how her childhood polio might have progressed. It pushes the bounds of creative nonfiction right out of biography and into storytelling, a disappointing development. I'm not inclined to recommend this, unless you're looking for a generalist bio and can remain aware of its flaws.
A Madness of Angels (Kate Griffin): Matthew Swift comes back to life. Inspired by the American cover, I described this as "Castiel in London" for![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
norabombay. The book is in that vein: high on concept and worldbuilding, a little low on characterization. I am long tired of the Lone Guy, Dead Chick trope; Dana's death is narratively logical but the lack of individuality gives off a whiff of stereotyping. Dana's magic is beautiful (the water-spell, hello there unreconstructed trope) but everything in this story says beauty doesn't carry the day. Oda... I do and don't want to think she's a balance for this. Oda's in the vein of Agent 355, Sarah Connor, et alia: women who fight hard and well, but someone else is setting the agenda. It's a different sort of incomplete characterization, especially since Oda fits in both the "gun-toting woman" box and the "person of color" box. Matthew himself is a bit of a cipher; it's tempting to call this the close-third narrative of someone who's never been terrifically introspective, but I'd have to read more by the writer to get a better bead on this.
Characterization isn't the novel's strength, and it's not a good way to explain why I enjoyed reading this. Because I did, thanks to the powerful application of my favorite element of speculative fiction: worldbuilding. When people talk about magic in their urban fantasy, this is exactly what I'm looking for: the magic of an Underground ticket, enchantments in graffiti, the mundane embraced in the supernatural. Electric blue angels singing in the phone. Magic feels magic, organically integrated into the nonmagical and setting my sense of wonder singing, in a way I rarely feel in urban fantasy.
Really, if you were going to write a novel with my favorite things, it would look a lot like this. Kate Nepveau wrote a review, with quotes, which riveted my attention: identity shenanigans, a movie "about a genius arms dealer who discovered redemption, cardiac conditions and an interesting and potentially lethal use for spare missile components in a cave", the Yellow Pages with the bonus listings. The grace notes of constructed reality - the protagonist watches a movie and a play, limited plot impact, but contributing to the emotional arc - plays nicely with the certain and erratic narrative voice. There's a few moments when the prose weakens, like the painful alliteration of "...when the individual soldiers of said army can blend their skin to the colour of concrete or burst bubbles of burning hydrogen above your head or scream with the roar of the exploding fuel tank on the back of a bus in billows of black fumes..." but these are rare. Mostly it's serviceable to strong and colorful.
The cover flap tells me this isn't Griffin's first book; the internet tells me there's two sequels out. I have the second novel sitting on my bulging library loans shelf. If you're looking for depth, look elsewhere, but if you are in the mood for low-examination entertainment, try these.
I backslid and reread the back half of Cherryh's Regenesis. I stand by my earlier assertions there's a smashing good 300 page novel threading through some serious bloat.
Numbers game: 5 total finished. 5 new, 0.5 reread; 3.5 fiction, 2 nonfiction.
A Daughter of the Samurai (Etsu Sugimoto): Charming memoir of a Japanese immigrant to America. Picked this up after Lois Bujold mentioned it on the LMB mailing list. My first reflection was, "this delights in the way Hitty: Her First Hundred Years charms," which is less of a surprise when one considers they were both published in the 1920's. Sugimoto's memoir is written in a light-hearted storytelling style, recalling details of her experiences growing up on the western side of Japan, in what's now part of the Niigata Prefecture, as well as her stories of attending a missionary school in Tokyo, living in America as a wife and mother, and her temporary return to Japan after her husband's death.
The gentle tone glides past shadows of other stories: how did her husband die? How did Sugimoto support herself as a widow when she returned to America? After her husband's untimely death, it was expected she would return to Japan, but what moved her to move back to America? Sugimoto gracefully speaks of both sorrow and joy in her life, opening a window to another time and place.
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (N.K. Jemisin): Heiress to a minor kingdom is summoned by her grandfather and named one of the three candidates to be heir to his authority over all the kingdoms. Yeine has her wits and her mother's training to defend her against family politics and fettered gods with a plan to end their slavery.
Jemisin came to my attention following the racefail fights of 2009 (to distinguish from previous but related cultural appropriation events dating back a couple of years, if you've been off the grid), so I'm reading this with an eye on that context. I think that might have been a disservice to the novel: my first reactions were to look for the agenda rather than enjoy the story. Instead of considering worldbuilding and plot, or paying attention to Jemisin's arrangement of a world forcibly at peace and the downsides of nominal benevolence, I found myself looking for traces of other people's flamewars on the plot and prose. I do not believe this was the intent.
Once I could focus my attention away from the outside context and onto the actual story, I found it clever, but not so interesting I am running out the door for the sequel. Yeine is dropped into a succession struggle she didn't expect and isn't particularly interested in winning, except that the other option is losing, so she moves to establish her power-base and familiarize herself with the palace of Sky, inhabited by her mother's powerful and dysfunctional family. 2,000 years previous to the novel, one of Yeine's mother's Arameri ancestors was a key player in a war where the god of light and order triumphed over all other gods; since then the Arameri have held the keys of the defeated gods' chains and used them as weapons to bring the known world under their god's sway. Hence the power, and the dysfunction, which is mostly vaguely hinted at. One gets the impression entire novels could be written about the "entertainments" of Yeine's mostly-offscreen Arameri kin.
That offscreen quality makes and breaks the novel. Yeine's absent mother has a giant impact on the plot, and her absence lends her an appealing mystique, but the absence of other influences lessens my interest in the protagonist. The coachman who was her companion in a months-long journey to Sky is dismissed in the second chapter without appearing onscreen at all. We're told Yeine's paternal grandmother is hostile, but she's shown as a source of information and strength. At one point, Yeine laments the loss of her pre-novel life, but the only connections we're shown to that life are her duty to her country and her dead parents: does she have no friends?
I'll also admit I wasn't drawn in by the romance. I wanted to wrap the primordial god of chaos in chains and drop him in an ocean; sexy dangerous evil is not my thing. The hints of political maneuvering around the "we're all one big happy confederation of kingdoms, eternally at peace" setup and information control were more appealing: the novel was about Yeine's radical answer to the problems of her world's political setup, not a detailed exploration of the injustices of that setup. The assumption that a world with nominal multiculturalism and enforced monotheism would have significant and negative consequences speaks to the social justice concerns that have been so energetically debated than mere skin color, and slid right past my radar until after I was nearly done with the novel. That's either a good sign - I'm thinking about the novel - or a bad one - I didn't think about until way late in the game.
I wasn't overwhelmed by the story or characters, but I was intrigued by the worldbuilding. The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is the first in a trilogy; my lukewarm reaction to the first novel means I'll be waiting to see what other people think of the second and third novels before picking up anything else in the series, but if you're in the mood for "god of light and order is not equal to god of right" fiction, you'd probably like this.
The Privilege of the Sword (Ellen Kushner): Sequel to Swordspoint; briefly discussed previously. Duke Alec summons his sister's daughter from a country estate to settle a family break and have his niece trained as a swordsman. Niece Katherine expects a different sort of Season on the Hill in the wake of her uncle the Mad Duke. (I just love that phrase.)
Kushner is a charming stylist, but her plots are not nearly as intriguing. I liked Katherine, and I wanted to like the story, but I was disappointed that events didn't unroll to illuminate character or story very efficiently. For example, I can certainly make up a story about why Alec and Richard simply cannot be together despite their love, but I was sort of expecting the writer to explain how the characters got from Point A at the end of Swordspoint to Point B in Privilege of the Sword. I also hoped for some clever thoughts on Katherine taking up a role that was both traditionally male and beneath her class, but these didn't materialize. I can make inferences from her atraditional romance with Marcus, and her relationship with Artemisia, mediated through their mutual love for the "The Swordsman Whose Name Was Not Death", a novel-in-a-novel, but I was hoping for more explicit authorial intent and less Choose Your Own Adventure.
Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits (Linda Gordon): Picked off the library shelves on a whim. Dorothea Lange went down in history for photographing the iconic "Migrant Mother" picture of the Depression era, but also made significant contributions to national documentary photography and the San Francisco arts scene. An okay but not shockingly excellent biography: Gordon butted in with "I" statements and the occasional under-developed political parallel. For example, a footnote to a pre-WW2 overview notes "...targeting "pink" Hollywood, these attacks resemble today's conservative attacks on liberal and "immoral" Hollywood." (p460 HC, footnote 12) Contemporary analogies are brought up more than once, with frustratingly little true analysis or depth. Having given an example of a footnote that could have been dispensed with, on page 316, when Gordon discusses the constraints on Lange's Army-sponsored photography of WW2 Japanese internment camps, I would have liked to see more annotation.
"Embedded photographers - this is a new word but not a new position - understood also that the "wrong" photographs could undermine the nation's security. In the embedded situation, censorship is so ordinary it can become taken for granted, even unnoticeable. Much heroic war imagery results not from intrepid photographers daring the line of fire but from photo ops set up by the military establishment. Lange was embedded in much the same way in the FSA. She accepted the censorship that came with that job because she identified with her employers' constraints."
Despite the focus on contemporary embedding, there are zero footnotes linked to this paragraph. It's surprising Gordon wouldn't choose to buttress her argument by linking to published memoirs of photographers who went to Baghdad, Fallujah, etc, with American troops, and likely have words about the tensions between OpSec and photographic journalism.
I wanted this to be much more of an identity story, showing Lange's similarities to and uniquenesses through historical periods. For example, Gordon indicates Lange struggled to balance what she considered a primary responsibility to her husband and household with her own career and interests, and suggests this is a "Victorian" value, but doesn't explore the social or psychological compromises and consequences of, say, fostering out her kids so she could focus on her Depression-era photography travels. When the writing focuses on those consideration, it occasionally gives way from creative Most FSA photographers were based out of the Washington, DC HQ; Lange lived in Berkeley, California and rarely made the cross-country trek to meet her boss or fellow photographers in person. Therefore, Gordon states on page 290, "[Other FSA photographers] perceived her as a diva. In face-to-face discussions, she would have been able to make her requests more softly, to charm her coworkers, and [department head] Stryker might have been better able to explain his constraints." What a splendid fancy! This is all out of Gordon's head, leaning on Gordon's perceptions of Lange. This isn't a creative way to get at a life-truth, this is author bias.
Perhaps I'm judging on tone; perhaps I'm holding a female biographer to a double standard. However, this sort of writer construction from bare-bones accounts happens more than once: Lange and the FSA photographers, her thorny relationship with her mother, how her childhood polio might have progressed. It pushes the bounds of creative nonfiction right out of biography and into storytelling, a disappointing development. I'm not inclined to recommend this, unless you're looking for a generalist bio and can remain aware of its flaws.
A Madness of Angels (Kate Griffin): Matthew Swift comes back to life. Inspired by the American cover, I described this as "Castiel in London" for
norabombay. The book is in that vein: high on concept and worldbuilding, a little low on characterization. I am long tired of the Lone Guy, Dead Chick trope; Dana's death is narratively logical but the lack of individuality gives off a whiff of stereotyping. Dana's magic is beautiful (the water-spell, hello there unreconstructed trope) but everything in this story says beauty doesn't carry the day. Oda... I do and don't want to think she's a balance for this. Oda's in the vein of Agent 355, Sarah Connor, et alia: women who fight hard and well, but someone else is setting the agenda. It's a different sort of incomplete characterization, especially since Oda fits in both the "gun-toting woman" box and the "person of color" box. Matthew himself is a bit of a cipher; it's tempting to call this the close-third narrative of someone who's never been terrifically introspective, but I'd have to read more by the writer to get a better bead on this. Characterization isn't the novel's strength, and it's not a good way to explain why I enjoyed reading this. Because I did, thanks to the powerful application of my favorite element of speculative fiction: worldbuilding. When people talk about magic in their urban fantasy, this is exactly what I'm looking for: the magic of an Underground ticket, enchantments in graffiti, the mundane embraced in the supernatural. Electric blue angels singing in the phone. Magic feels magic, organically integrated into the nonmagical and setting my sense of wonder singing, in a way I rarely feel in urban fantasy.
Really, if you were going to write a novel with my favorite things, it would look a lot like this. Kate Nepveau wrote a review, with quotes, which riveted my attention: identity shenanigans, a movie "about a genius arms dealer who discovered redemption, cardiac conditions and an interesting and potentially lethal use for spare missile components in a cave", the Yellow Pages with the bonus listings. The grace notes of constructed reality - the protagonist watches a movie and a play, limited plot impact, but contributing to the emotional arc - plays nicely with the certain and erratic narrative voice. There's a few moments when the prose weakens, like the painful alliteration of "...when the individual soldiers of said army can blend their skin to the colour of concrete or burst bubbles of burning hydrogen above your head or scream with the roar of the exploding fuel tank on the back of a bus in billows of black fumes..." but these are rare. Mostly it's serviceable to strong and colorful.
The cover flap tells me this isn't Griffin's first book; the internet tells me there's two sequels out. I have the second novel sitting on my bulging library loans shelf. If you're looking for depth, look elsewhere, but if you are in the mood for low-examination entertainment, try these.
I backslid and reread the back half of Cherryh's Regenesis. I stand by my earlier assertions there's a smashing good 300 page novel threading through some serious bloat.
Numbers game: 5 total finished. 5 new, 0.5 reread; 3.5 fiction, 2 nonfiction.