Surprises in the Margins (April Reading)
Late, they tell me, is better than never.
Star Wars: Alleigance (Timothy Zahn): Rebels post-Yavin, Imperial corruption, Emperor's Hand, shake well and mix. Who cares about the details, it's Zahn writing a SW original trilogy novel! We all know that I am a gigantic fangirl for Zahn, what with the original characters I don't want to die and the prose that I can read without wincing, so this is all about the happy indulgent storytelling. Seriously, people: lightsabers!
One for the Money (Janet Evanovitch): Stephanie Plum has lost it all - her job, her savings, even her car. Her last hope for financial solvency is Joe Morelli - or rather, the $10,000 she can earn by bringing the New Jersey cop-turned-killer to justice. Will Stephanie overcome her mixed feelings for Joe to make the case, or will Rex the hamster be forced to eat hamster kibble for the rest of his days?
cathydalek recommended this, and she was smack on the money. I kept thinking of people while reading this - if norabombay lost her car, this would be her life - every sketchy NJ city story aoumd mentioned - the possible appearance of a cousin of cathydalek's family's Biscayne in the next book.
Pure junk reading, literally. I read this while compulsively chomping Cheetos.
Sixty Days and Counting (Kim Stanley Robinson): If you know KSR's previous novels, you know how this one goes, except maybe with Phil. I'm putting the gigantic rant below the cut, becuase it boils down to the novel (and the trilogy) being a policy story, not a policy secondary impact story.
This could have been a more awesome book. I mean, yes, there's a lot of cool stuff going on, but - the trilogy is called "science in the Capitol", not "science in Washington, DC". This is a policy book, not a policy effects story. The author basically wrote himself, which is nice, but fails to convey how I would expect the city to deal with a climate crisis. The PoV characters are Frank, who's a single tenured professor from sunny California on some sort of sabbatical at an NSF job "just for a year" - hah - and the Quiblers, a double-income two-kids Bethesda family. If you are living in Bethesda, you have already won at life, and are insulated in the short term from the worst consequences of any political decision by your college education, connections, and savings account. These are people who live at the place where research and politics grind together, not at the intersection of policy and the choices faced by the $30,000 a year single income household. The PoV characters are privileged, so the lack of balancing non-privileged viewpoints drives me nuts. Yes, the Quiblers are friends with the displaced Khembalis, and Frank hangs out with the fregans and the homeless bros, but the experiences of those characters are still filtered through limited third person perspective.
Frank's choices drive me especially nuts. Even when he's homeless and slumming it in his "modular home" treehouse phase, he's still got resources many people wouldn't in that situation. He has a full time job with the NSF, and after his year there, he is free to return to his tenured position at UCSD. He has an office, he has health care, he has a stock portfolio and education and the invisible knapsack of being a white man in America. I think if Frank had been Francine, or the black secretary mentioned in the first book, readers would have a different opinion of Frank's choices. Okay, they were crazy choices - are they even crazier coming from these alternate perspectives?
(Whoa. I referenced the invisible knapsack essay. I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day... Let it be noted that I acknowledge I've overanalyzed and jumped the shark. Laugh and point. While you're at it, consider Francine Vanderwal.)
Frank also has health care options that, say, the bros don't. This is particularly important in the third book, what with the neurosurgery and all. The book touches on this, but sort of drops it, since by that point there were many balls and a couple chainsaws in the air. It also generally failed to acknowledge the sociopolitical reality I live in, which is probably why this has taken so long to finish. I'm a 'burbs native who lives inside the Beltway. I read the Washington Post Metro section, and I read the stories about Fairfax curve-breaking SAT scores and DC schools that can't reliably stock toilet paper. The "science in the capitol" trilogy is a story about climate change that happened to be set in a city of poverty ringed by privilege, and it didn't really acknowledge that, in my opinion. So I find it really hard to take the Sixty Days and Counting on its own merits, or even see the story it's trying to tell past the one big worldbuilding misstep I can't get past.
Fortunately, I'm 80 pages from the end of a nice nonfiction polio book, so there's only so much griping you can expect in the May list.
Star Wars: Alleigance (Timothy Zahn): Rebels post-Yavin, Imperial corruption, Emperor's Hand, shake well and mix. Who cares about the details, it's Zahn writing a SW original trilogy novel! We all know that I am a gigantic fangirl for Zahn, what with the original characters I don't want to die and the prose that I can read without wincing, so this is all about the happy indulgent storytelling. Seriously, people: lightsabers!
One for the Money (Janet Evanovitch): Stephanie Plum has lost it all - her job, her savings, even her car. Her last hope for financial solvency is Joe Morelli - or rather, the $10,000 she can earn by bringing the New Jersey cop-turned-killer to justice. Will Stephanie overcome her mixed feelings for Joe to make the case, or will Rex the hamster be forced to eat hamster kibble for the rest of his days?
cathydalek recommended this, and she was smack on the money. I kept thinking of people while reading this - if norabombay lost her car, this would be her life - every sketchy NJ city story aoumd mentioned - the possible appearance of a cousin of cathydalek's family's Biscayne in the next book.
Pure junk reading, literally. I read this while compulsively chomping Cheetos.
Sixty Days and Counting (Kim Stanley Robinson): If you know KSR's previous novels, you know how this one goes, except maybe with Phil. I'm putting the gigantic rant below the cut, becuase it boils down to the novel (and the trilogy) being a policy story, not a policy secondary impact story.
This could have been a more awesome book. I mean, yes, there's a lot of cool stuff going on, but - the trilogy is called "science in the Capitol", not "science in Washington, DC". This is a policy book, not a policy effects story. The author basically wrote himself, which is nice, but fails to convey how I would expect the city to deal with a climate crisis. The PoV characters are Frank, who's a single tenured professor from sunny California on some sort of sabbatical at an NSF job "just for a year" - hah - and the Quiblers, a double-income two-kids Bethesda family. If you are living in Bethesda, you have already won at life, and are insulated in the short term from the worst consequences of any political decision by your college education, connections, and savings account. These are people who live at the place where research and politics grind together, not at the intersection of policy and the choices faced by the $30,000 a year single income household. The PoV characters are privileged, so the lack of balancing non-privileged viewpoints drives me nuts. Yes, the Quiblers are friends with the displaced Khembalis, and Frank hangs out with the fregans and the homeless bros, but the experiences of those characters are still filtered through limited third person perspective.
Frank's choices drive me especially nuts. Even when he's homeless and slumming it in his "modular home" treehouse phase, he's still got resources many people wouldn't in that situation. He has a full time job with the NSF, and after his year there, he is free to return to his tenured position at UCSD. He has an office, he has health care, he has a stock portfolio and education and the invisible knapsack of being a white man in America. I think if Frank had been Francine, or the black secretary mentioned in the first book, readers would have a different opinion of Frank's choices. Okay, they were crazy choices - are they even crazier coming from these alternate perspectives?
(Whoa. I referenced the invisible knapsack essay. I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day... Let it be noted that I acknowledge I've overanalyzed and jumped the shark. Laugh and point. While you're at it, consider Francine Vanderwal.)
Frank also has health care options that, say, the bros don't. This is particularly important in the third book, what with the neurosurgery and all. The book touches on this, but sort of drops it, since by that point there were many balls and a couple chainsaws in the air. It also generally failed to acknowledge the sociopolitical reality I live in, which is probably why this has taken so long to finish. I'm a 'burbs native who lives inside the Beltway. I read the Washington Post Metro section, and I read the stories about Fairfax curve-breaking SAT scores and DC schools that can't reliably stock toilet paper. The "science in the capitol" trilogy is a story about climate change that happened to be set in a city of poverty ringed by privilege, and it didn't really acknowledge that, in my opinion. So I find it really hard to take the Sixty Days and Counting on its own merits, or even see the story it's trying to tell past the one big worldbuilding misstep I can't get past.
Fortunately, I'm 80 pages from the end of a nice nonfiction polio book, so there's only so much griping you can expect in the May list.