More books I don’t currently have
I think this leaves me with about 27 books to write up, two of which are definitely on my list for best I've read all year and so are taking me longer to write about than they did to read (possibly a slight exaggeration, but I'm certainly spending more time procrastinating about writing them up than I did reading...).
Marjorie Williams, The woman at the Washington Zoo. Nonfiction essays by a writer for Vanity Fair; the first third focuses on politics and power, particularly the claustrophobic world of Washington DC, the second third brings in more personal stories, and the final third relates to her diagnosis with the metastatic liver cancer that eventually killed her at the age of 47. Clear, lucid writing, and she deals with the personal elements particularly well; it’s impossible for me to know, obviously, but it feels as if none of her friends or family would deny recognising themselves here, nor feel that she had exposed them too much.
Neil Shusterman, Unwind. Near future YA where, after bitter fighting between pro- and anti-abortion forces, abortion is made illegal but, until the age of 18, adults can authorise the “unwinding” of their child, where all possible tissues are harvested for transplants (there vague hand-waving about the technology enabling this). The unexpected details are what worked for me in this story - one of the three Unwinds who are the main characters is a tithe child, dedicated to being unwound; it’s legal to abandon your baby on a doorstep, as long as you don’t get caught, and the family has to keep it - unless, of course, you sneak it on to someone else’s doorstep before you’re seen; the clappers, who I won’t describe further, and the description of the unwinding itself, which is nicely done. But the story itself was a bit more hit and miss - bits I liked (hiding out at school, with the baby, the final sequence in the camp) and bits I didn’t (much of the Admiral/junkyard plotline, actually, and I was a bit iffy about the transplanted tissue memory bit). Takes on both sides in the debate - the fondness of anti-abortion people for capital punishment/terrorism, for example, and some of the dodgier stem cell research approaches, although the most effective thing I read about this was a series of actual interviews with self-justifying Americans who opposed abortion but had paid thousands to fly to China to have fetal stem cells injected for various medical conditions (“it’s their culture”, etc).
Angela Bull, Wayland's Keep. Dual timeline story with cousins looking at the history of the keep, bought (by Wayland) two generations earlier under mysterious circumstances. The solution is obvious, but the characters are done well, with the various tensions between them explained without ever putting anyone clearly in the wrong.
Ruth M Arthur, On the wasteland. Gypsy at orphanage on the coast has visions of a Viking settlement that used to exist there, although this is much better than it could be from that description - low-key portrayals of the characters that are not obvious stereotypes. I did have a problem with the protective dog spirit scene, mainly because it blurs the underlying meaning of the Viking flashbacks, which seem much more strongly tied to a place than to a person.
Christopher Isherwood, Prater violet. Narrator works on Hollywood film project in UK with famous eccentric Austrian director as WWII draws closer. Great voice. Nice self-awareness of his own interactions with his family, although his other relationships get ducked out of (due to the year of publication, probably), and it rings oddly because the author so obviously knows he can’t say what he wants to, and is irked by it. Very nice detail and description of the film-making process, and those involved, and I was so caught up in the story that I was miffed to discover the film is entirely fictional, because I'd love to see it.
Helen Barber, A Chalet School headmistress. Another fill-in. I did like that it focussed on the staff, and it actually feels more believable than some of EM Brent-Dyer’s plots, but believable in this case did not mean exciting.
William Sleator, Boltzmon! House of Stairs and Interstellar Pig are two of my favourite books (with The Boy Who Reversed Himself and Singularity) pretty close up there, but I stopped reading Sleator a while back when his stuff seemed to be being incoherent and unpleasant. I'd heard that he had improved again, and while this isn't as good as his best it's still good, and gets significantly more done in 150 pages than many other stories manage in twice that length. The other thing Sleator does is write very well about sibling relationships, which reminds me that I've forgotten to put The Green Futures of Tycho in my earlier list (a particularly good example, although Singularity also works). Boltzmon! is about sibling rivalry and while the unknotting of this feels a little too easy, the interactions are good. I read that Sleator's sister Vicky, whom he was very close to (Oddballs is his autobiographical book for kids), died recently, and I think there's a book about this which I should track down. This is published 1999, presumably before-hand.
Marjorie Williams, The woman at the Washington Zoo. Nonfiction essays by a writer for Vanity Fair; the first third focuses on politics and power, particularly the claustrophobic world of Washington DC, the second third brings in more personal stories, and the final third relates to her diagnosis with the metastatic liver cancer that eventually killed her at the age of 47. Clear, lucid writing, and she deals with the personal elements particularly well; it’s impossible for me to know, obviously, but it feels as if none of her friends or family would deny recognising themselves here, nor feel that she had exposed them too much.
Neil Shusterman, Unwind. Near future YA where, after bitter fighting between pro- and anti-abortion forces, abortion is made illegal but, until the age of 18, adults can authorise the “unwinding” of their child, where all possible tissues are harvested for transplants (there vague hand-waving about the technology enabling this). The unexpected details are what worked for me in this story - one of the three Unwinds who are the main characters is a tithe child, dedicated to being unwound; it’s legal to abandon your baby on a doorstep, as long as you don’t get caught, and the family has to keep it - unless, of course, you sneak it on to someone else’s doorstep before you’re seen; the clappers, who I won’t describe further, and the description of the unwinding itself, which is nicely done. But the story itself was a bit more hit and miss - bits I liked (hiding out at school, with the baby, the final sequence in the camp) and bits I didn’t (much of the Admiral/junkyard plotline, actually, and I was a bit iffy about the transplanted tissue memory bit). Takes on both sides in the debate - the fondness of anti-abortion people for capital punishment/terrorism, for example, and some of the dodgier stem cell research approaches, although the most effective thing I read about this was a series of actual interviews with self-justifying Americans who opposed abortion but had paid thousands to fly to China to have fetal stem cells injected for various medical conditions (“it’s their culture”, etc).
Angela Bull, Wayland's Keep. Dual timeline story with cousins looking at the history of the keep, bought (by Wayland) two generations earlier under mysterious circumstances. The solution is obvious, but the characters are done well, with the various tensions between them explained without ever putting anyone clearly in the wrong.
Ruth M Arthur, On the wasteland. Gypsy at orphanage on the coast has visions of a Viking settlement that used to exist there, although this is much better than it could be from that description - low-key portrayals of the characters that are not obvious stereotypes. I did have a problem with the protective dog spirit scene, mainly because it blurs the underlying meaning of the Viking flashbacks, which seem much more strongly tied to a place than to a person.
Christopher Isherwood, Prater violet. Narrator works on Hollywood film project in UK with famous eccentric Austrian director as WWII draws closer. Great voice. Nice self-awareness of his own interactions with his family, although his other relationships get ducked out of (due to the year of publication, probably), and it rings oddly because the author so obviously knows he can’t say what he wants to, and is irked by it. Very nice detail and description of the film-making process, and those involved, and I was so caught up in the story that I was miffed to discover the film is entirely fictional, because I'd love to see it.
Helen Barber, A Chalet School headmistress. Another fill-in. I did like that it focussed on the staff, and it actually feels more believable than some of EM Brent-Dyer’s plots, but believable in this case did not mean exciting.
William Sleator, Boltzmon! House of Stairs and Interstellar Pig are two of my favourite books (with The Boy Who Reversed Himself and Singularity) pretty close up there, but I stopped reading Sleator a while back when his stuff seemed to be being incoherent and unpleasant. I'd heard that he had improved again, and while this isn't as good as his best it's still good, and gets significantly more done in 150 pages than many other stories manage in twice that length. The other thing Sleator does is write very well about sibling relationships, which reminds me that I've forgotten to put The Green Futures of Tycho in my earlier list (a particularly good example, although Singularity also works). Boltzmon! is about sibling rivalry and while the unknotting of this feels a little too easy, the interactions are good. I read that Sleator's sister Vicky, whom he was very close to (Oddballs is his autobiographical book for kids), died recently, and I think there's a book about this which I should track down. This is published 1999, presumably before-hand.