Faith (August & September Reading)
Oct. 23rd, 2011 04:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
asePlease bear with the length of this delayed double feature.
AUGUST
Fire Monks: Zen Mind Meets Wildfire at the Gates of Tassajara (Colleen Morton Busch) (2011): Nonfiction. During the California 2008 fire season, a Zen retreat was evacuated under threat of fire. Ultimately, five long-term residents remained to defend Tassajara from the Basin Complex fire.
When R. stuck this on the dining room table, I thought, "that's nice." After striking out with my last nonfiction - an airy, information-free prologue, leading into bad essay-to-book conversion and finally losing me with a cutsey description of "an old vodka bottle labeled with an indecipherable chemical formula" in a book about demystifying a movement that believes science is "too important to be left to experts" - I was feeling poorly about lay nonfiction. I was pleasantly surprised to open Fire Monks and be welcomed into a compelling account based on interviews and research. (It helps that I have limited knowledge of firefighting or Zen practice.) The narrative integrates the residents' Zen mindset into the story of the fire. People felt like people: there were conflicts, respect, anxiety, accomplishment. A discussion of a flamewar that erupted on Sitting with Fire blog (established to update the wider San Francisco Zen community on Tassajara's situation) acknowledged neighbors' negative comments about Tassajara as well as the Zen community's deep feelings about the retreat site. The book has a mindset that Tassajara and its community is a net good that should be preserved, while fiddling with questions of risk and how mindful preservation should be accomplished.
This was a quick, easy read: I picked it up Friday morning and finished it in Saturday afternoon. I felt like it added to my sense of Bay area community. Recommended if you're interested in Zen practice or fires.
Proust was a Neuroscientist (Jonah Lehrer) (2007): Nonfiction. Essays on the link between 19th and 20th C artists' insights and early 21st C scientific research. Walt Whitman, George Eliot, chef Auguste Escoffier Marcel Proust, Paul Cezanne's paintings, Igor Stravinsky's "riot" of Spring, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and neurophysiology.
The first essay, on Whitman, was surprisingly entertaining. (Full disclosure, I loathe Whitman's writing. High school english inflicted "Song of Myself" on me during my period of vigorously rejecting all things transcendentalist.) This would have been better if I'd spaced out the essays; trying to read all of them without a break emphasized the collection's limited scope and Eurocentrism. It also suffered from trying to bridge science and the arts: with a foot stretching into each sphere, it did a very incomplete job rooting in either topic.
Fullmetal Alchemist, v.9-27 (Hiromu Arakawa) (2004 - 2010): EPIC WIN. I wanted something absorbing and fun for my train reading, and this fit the bill. My enjoyment makes it hard to write up: good entertainment is something I know when I see it. How do you pick out the components of pleasure when your brain is caplocking with happy reactions?
First, FMA danced around a lot of my pet peeves. Women aren't the primary protagonists, but they're shown in a variety of roles - military, pickpockets, bodyguards, mechanics, mothers, villains - without a lot of drama about being Special Examples. (Except maybe the Ice Queen, who would make a kickass Cherryh protag. Also, Tricia's death was kind of epic writing fail.) I like the characters I am supposed to like, and the villains teetered (mostly) on the right side of "evil JUST 'CAUSE". The writing evoked a world larger than the manga: countries offstage, lives before and after intersecting the protagonists' stories, a fantasy world deeper than quests and stew (with milk!) and a travelogue. At the same time, the plot loops and ties most of the characters into the core story line: Izumi mentions training on Briggs Mountain, and her apprentices eventually travel to Briggs; the civil war is initially evoked as a background element, whose consequences erupt in the personal and the political. Thematically, the war elements tread the division between exploring the dark side and exploiting cultural imperialist-ish shenanigans to make the reader feel better about their place in the world. For me, the manga mostly fell in the "exploring the dark side" range, especially in light of Japan's pre-1945 record of human atrocity. Ishbal looks and feels a lot like the Mideast conflicts of the last 20 years, but the human chimerism and medical experimentation evoke Japan's early 20th C war atrocities for me. (Don't read the wiki article shortly before lunch. Just don't.) Thumbs up all around.
Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith (Jon Krakauer) (2003): Nonfiction. Interleaving of the 1984 murder of Brenda and Erica Lafferty by Brenda's brothers-in-law with a history of Mormon faith contributing to the environment that let men think God wanted them to commit murder.
This has a weird depth (or shallowness?) of focus: starting with detailed reimagining of Allen Lafferty finding his wife and baby daughter dead, panning across the rise and migration of Mormonism broken with modern fundamentalist polygamy and the Lafferty family history. After the second explicit description of Brenda Lafferty's death scene, I puzzled over the curious depth of focus: zooming into the bloody fingerprints and Allen Lafferty's anguish; compressing the Mormon trail into one sentence of cholera and accidents; skimming a decade and catching on one declaration. The afterword and discussion helped sharpen my interpretation of Krakauer's motivation: id vortex! He started writing one book and kicked over to another. Which is why the focus is so deep and hair-wide, defining FLDS by polygamy and blood violence. Krakauer is not Mormon and writes from an outsider's perspective. So Under the Banner of Heaven has no empathy for the FLDS movement at all (the opposite flaw of Into the Wild, which focused on a young man Krakauer empathized with and I considered unforgivably selfish). Or perhaps I'm ignoring any trace of writerly connection to a narrative describing forced marriage of teenage daughters to fathers' friends.
Under the Banner of Heaven is interesting, but deals with people's cruelty in the drive for power, which makes for stressful reading. It's also sharply dated by its references to 9/11 and the absence of references to Prop 8. Worth reading if you're interested in the intersections of organized religion, power, and violence, but pack a strong stomach.
When Gravity Fails (George Alec Effinger) (1987): Fiction. A 22nd century Arabic punk gets the noir treatment. I will save the cognitive dissonance of the shift from FLDS to erratic Islam and the hilariously long list of novels I thought I'd picked up for another time. (This wasn't hard SF, Jerusalem Poker, or Srs Lit Bzns. Moving on!) I enjoyed the setting and atmosphere of the novel, without any particular attraction to the plot or protagonist, Marîd. Marîd suffers from saying he is a loner, relying on his native cunning to survive, between scenes of Marîd interacting with his girlfriend, buddies, and wider social network, and adjusting to some heavy-duty cyberpunk wetware upgrades with barely a pang. (Well, the denouncement with Hassan and Okking may be the pangs.) If I have to question whether the character's words and actions are congruent, and the book is not going for an unreliable narrator schtik? You're doing something wrong.
On the other hand, Marîd's low-brow 22nd century is an entertaining mix of bypassed cyberpunk and predictive power. Everyone has something like a cell phone, and information is power. The fringe elements that make up Marîd's social circle include transsexuals for whom somatic alteration was not cheap, but was possible; the surprise isn't that a female stripper used to be a boy, it's that she was a rich boy. The cyberpunk elements - wetware modifications that allow users to utilize personality modifications and knowledge add-ons - are one of the coolest elements in the story, cleverly and maddeningly presented as so mundane no one really thinks about what this means for the human condition, even as doctors evolve more sophisticated variations on the "moddies and daddies" theme. Such mundanity leaves the sense of wonder entirely in the reader's hands and mind, for a mixed experience.
Numbers game: 23 total finished. 23 new, 0 rereads; 20 fiction, 3 nonfiction; 19 graphic novel-ish, 1 essay collection.
SEPTEMBER
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Philip K. Dick) (1968): If PKD's purpose in writing this was to convince me Rick Deckard is Stanley Kowalski without the animal magnetism, it succeeded. If it is to set forth an argument that human beings will be petty and venal in most circumstances, it succeeded. If it's to envision a bleak postapocalyptic San Francisco, win. It's a venal story whose redeeming qualities are the local color (SF = love!) and curious reflections of 1968's nightmares. Robots are evil! In the future, Earth will be overrun by mechanical facsimiles of animals! And robots, too!
Every now and then, someone suggests PKD's fiction in my hearing, and I make the mistake of listening to them. PKD writes well-crafted stories I dislike, and I don't see a good reason to read any more of them at this time.
Fledgling (Octavia Butler) (2005): Octavia Butler writes a Mary Sue vampire novel. Seriously! Shori's an amnesiac genetic engineering experiment who can walk in the day, has the strength of grown vampire men, is 50 years old and looks like a 10-year old African-American human, and oh yes, survived the slaughter of her entire vampire family as well as all their human symbiotes.
As you may have gathered, this isn't my favorite Butler novel. It plays with power dynamics in Butler's usual mode, but in a "vampire novel!" context, exclamation point mandatory. Vampires are not my thing. Erotic relationships between adults and apparent children are really not my thing. Butler's usual writing talents couldn't overcome those handicaps to make this book interesting or memorably enjoyable for me.
The Outskirter's Secret (Rosemary Kirstein) (1992): Reread. If I won the lottery, there are two writers I could try to endow. Kirstein would be one of them. (Doris Egan is the other. Lois Bujold doesn't need my endowment; she regularly publishes in hardcover already.) I love the Steerswoman series for its worldbuiling, the protagonists, and general enjoyability. The Outskirter's Secret has my favorite worldbulding and a really fantastic Rowan-and-Bel travelogue.
A Fire in the Sun (George Alec Effinger) (1989): Sequel to When Gravity Fails. Marîd Audran, now one of underworld kingpin Freidlander Bey's lieutenants, visits his mother, investigates a murder, and foils a plot launched by Bey's major rival. Marîd continues to puzzle the reader with questionable characterization, grumbling about his lack of freedom while lapping the cream of servitude from his whiskers. The characterization seems inconsistent; it feels like Effinger had a Better Idea between When Gravity Fails and A Fire in the Sun, but didn't manage to completely integrate the retcon. The worst part for me was the giant brother-gun Effinger put on the mantlepiece early in the novel, which he never bothered to fire. Whether that was just sloppy writing or sequelitis in the works, it was poorly handled.
Numbers game: 4 total finished. 3 new, 1 rereads; 4 fiction, 0 nonfiction.
AUGUST
Fire Monks: Zen Mind Meets Wildfire at the Gates of Tassajara (Colleen Morton Busch) (2011): Nonfiction. During the California 2008 fire season, a Zen retreat was evacuated under threat of fire. Ultimately, five long-term residents remained to defend Tassajara from the Basin Complex fire.
When R. stuck this on the dining room table, I thought, "that's nice." After striking out with my last nonfiction - an airy, information-free prologue, leading into bad essay-to-book conversion and finally losing me with a cutsey description of "an old vodka bottle labeled with an indecipherable chemical formula" in a book about demystifying a movement that believes science is "too important to be left to experts" - I was feeling poorly about lay nonfiction. I was pleasantly surprised to open Fire Monks and be welcomed into a compelling account based on interviews and research. (It helps that I have limited knowledge of firefighting or Zen practice.) The narrative integrates the residents' Zen mindset into the story of the fire. People felt like people: there were conflicts, respect, anxiety, accomplishment. A discussion of a flamewar that erupted on Sitting with Fire blog (established to update the wider San Francisco Zen community on Tassajara's situation) acknowledged neighbors' negative comments about Tassajara as well as the Zen community's deep feelings about the retreat site. The book has a mindset that Tassajara and its community is a net good that should be preserved, while fiddling with questions of risk and how mindful preservation should be accomplished.
This was a quick, easy read: I picked it up Friday morning and finished it in Saturday afternoon. I felt like it added to my sense of Bay area community. Recommended if you're interested in Zen practice or fires.
Proust was a Neuroscientist (Jonah Lehrer) (2007): Nonfiction. Essays on the link between 19th and 20th C artists' insights and early 21st C scientific research. Walt Whitman, George Eliot, chef Auguste Escoffier Marcel Proust, Paul Cezanne's paintings, Igor Stravinsky's "riot" of Spring, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and neurophysiology.
The first essay, on Whitman, was surprisingly entertaining. (Full disclosure, I loathe Whitman's writing. High school english inflicted "Song of Myself" on me during my period of vigorously rejecting all things transcendentalist.) This would have been better if I'd spaced out the essays; trying to read all of them without a break emphasized the collection's limited scope and Eurocentrism. It also suffered from trying to bridge science and the arts: with a foot stretching into each sphere, it did a very incomplete job rooting in either topic.
Fullmetal Alchemist, v.9-27 (Hiromu Arakawa) (2004 - 2010): EPIC WIN. I wanted something absorbing and fun for my train reading, and this fit the bill. My enjoyment makes it hard to write up: good entertainment is something I know when I see it. How do you pick out the components of pleasure when your brain is caplocking with happy reactions?
First, FMA danced around a lot of my pet peeves. Women aren't the primary protagonists, but they're shown in a variety of roles - military, pickpockets, bodyguards, mechanics, mothers, villains - without a lot of drama about being Special Examples. (Except maybe the Ice Queen, who would make a kickass Cherryh protag. Also, Tricia's death was kind of epic writing fail.) I like the characters I am supposed to like, and the villains teetered (mostly) on the right side of "evil JUST 'CAUSE". The writing evoked a world larger than the manga: countries offstage, lives before and after intersecting the protagonists' stories, a fantasy world deeper than quests and stew (with milk!) and a travelogue. At the same time, the plot loops and ties most of the characters into the core story line: Izumi mentions training on Briggs Mountain, and her apprentices eventually travel to Briggs; the civil war is initially evoked as a background element, whose consequences erupt in the personal and the political. Thematically, the war elements tread the division between exploring the dark side and exploiting cultural imperialist-ish shenanigans to make the reader feel better about their place in the world. For me, the manga mostly fell in the "exploring the dark side" range, especially in light of Japan's pre-1945 record of human atrocity. Ishbal looks and feels a lot like the Mideast conflicts of the last 20 years, but the human chimerism and medical experimentation evoke Japan's early 20th C war atrocities for me. (Don't read the wiki article shortly before lunch. Just don't.) Thumbs up all around.
Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith (Jon Krakauer) (2003): Nonfiction. Interleaving of the 1984 murder of Brenda and Erica Lafferty by Brenda's brothers-in-law with a history of Mormon faith contributing to the environment that let men think God wanted them to commit murder.
This has a weird depth (or shallowness?) of focus: starting with detailed reimagining of Allen Lafferty finding his wife and baby daughter dead, panning across the rise and migration of Mormonism broken with modern fundamentalist polygamy and the Lafferty family history. After the second explicit description of Brenda Lafferty's death scene, I puzzled over the curious depth of focus: zooming into the bloody fingerprints and Allen Lafferty's anguish; compressing the Mormon trail into one sentence of cholera and accidents; skimming a decade and catching on one declaration. The afterword and discussion helped sharpen my interpretation of Krakauer's motivation: id vortex! He started writing one book and kicked over to another. Which is why the focus is so deep and hair-wide, defining FLDS by polygamy and blood violence. Krakauer is not Mormon and writes from an outsider's perspective. So Under the Banner of Heaven has no empathy for the FLDS movement at all (the opposite flaw of Into the Wild, which focused on a young man Krakauer empathized with and I considered unforgivably selfish). Or perhaps I'm ignoring any trace of writerly connection to a narrative describing forced marriage of teenage daughters to fathers' friends.
Under the Banner of Heaven is interesting, but deals with people's cruelty in the drive for power, which makes for stressful reading. It's also sharply dated by its references to 9/11 and the absence of references to Prop 8. Worth reading if you're interested in the intersections of organized religion, power, and violence, but pack a strong stomach.
When Gravity Fails (George Alec Effinger) (1987): Fiction. A 22nd century Arabic punk gets the noir treatment. I will save the cognitive dissonance of the shift from FLDS to erratic Islam and the hilariously long list of novels I thought I'd picked up for another time. (This wasn't hard SF, Jerusalem Poker, or Srs Lit Bzns. Moving on!) I enjoyed the setting and atmosphere of the novel, without any particular attraction to the plot or protagonist, Marîd. Marîd suffers from saying he is a loner, relying on his native cunning to survive, between scenes of Marîd interacting with his girlfriend, buddies, and wider social network, and adjusting to some heavy-duty cyberpunk wetware upgrades with barely a pang. (Well, the denouncement with Hassan and Okking may be the pangs.) If I have to question whether the character's words and actions are congruent, and the book is not going for an unreliable narrator schtik? You're doing something wrong.
On the other hand, Marîd's low-brow 22nd century is an entertaining mix of bypassed cyberpunk and predictive power. Everyone has something like a cell phone, and information is power. The fringe elements that make up Marîd's social circle include transsexuals for whom somatic alteration was not cheap, but was possible; the surprise isn't that a female stripper used to be a boy, it's that she was a rich boy. The cyberpunk elements - wetware modifications that allow users to utilize personality modifications and knowledge add-ons - are one of the coolest elements in the story, cleverly and maddeningly presented as so mundane no one really thinks about what this means for the human condition, even as doctors evolve more sophisticated variations on the "moddies and daddies" theme. Such mundanity leaves the sense of wonder entirely in the reader's hands and mind, for a mixed experience.
Numbers game: 23 total finished. 23 new, 0 rereads; 20 fiction, 3 nonfiction; 19 graphic novel-ish, 1 essay collection.
SEPTEMBER
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Philip K. Dick) (1968): If PKD's purpose in writing this was to convince me Rick Deckard is Stanley Kowalski without the animal magnetism, it succeeded. If it is to set forth an argument that human beings will be petty and venal in most circumstances, it succeeded. If it's to envision a bleak postapocalyptic San Francisco, win. It's a venal story whose redeeming qualities are the local color (SF = love!) and curious reflections of 1968's nightmares. Robots are evil! In the future, Earth will be overrun by mechanical facsimiles of animals! And robots, too!
Every now and then, someone suggests PKD's fiction in my hearing, and I make the mistake of listening to them. PKD writes well-crafted stories I dislike, and I don't see a good reason to read any more of them at this time.
Fledgling (Octavia Butler) (2005): Octavia Butler writes a Mary Sue vampire novel. Seriously! Shori's an amnesiac genetic engineering experiment who can walk in the day, has the strength of grown vampire men, is 50 years old and looks like a 10-year old African-American human, and oh yes, survived the slaughter of her entire vampire family as well as all their human symbiotes.
As you may have gathered, this isn't my favorite Butler novel. It plays with power dynamics in Butler's usual mode, but in a "vampire novel!" context, exclamation point mandatory. Vampires are not my thing. Erotic relationships between adults and apparent children are really not my thing. Butler's usual writing talents couldn't overcome those handicaps to make this book interesting or memorably enjoyable for me.
The Outskirter's Secret (Rosemary Kirstein) (1992): Reread. If I won the lottery, there are two writers I could try to endow. Kirstein would be one of them. (Doris Egan is the other. Lois Bujold doesn't need my endowment; she regularly publishes in hardcover already.) I love the Steerswoman series for its worldbuiling, the protagonists, and general enjoyability. The Outskirter's Secret has my favorite worldbulding and a really fantastic Rowan-and-Bel travelogue.
A Fire in the Sun (George Alec Effinger) (1989): Sequel to When Gravity Fails. Marîd Audran, now one of underworld kingpin Freidlander Bey's lieutenants, visits his mother, investigates a murder, and foils a plot launched by Bey's major rival. Marîd continues to puzzle the reader with questionable characterization, grumbling about his lack of freedom while lapping the cream of servitude from his whiskers. The characterization seems inconsistent; it feels like Effinger had a Better Idea between When Gravity Fails and A Fire in the Sun, but didn't manage to completely integrate the retcon. The worst part for me was the giant brother-gun Effinger put on the mantlepiece early in the novel, which he never bothered to fire. Whether that was just sloppy writing or sequelitis in the works, it was poorly handled.
Numbers game: 4 total finished. 3 new, 1 rereads; 4 fiction, 0 nonfiction.