Ice cream days and summer nights
Babylon 5 2.18 - "Confessions and Lamentations"
Keffer makes another appearance! I'm glad that he hasn't forgotten his experience in hyperspace, that he knows he saw something out there and he wants to find out what it is. Sheridan, obviously, has figured it out, and shuts him down; I would be surprised if that doesn't raise some questions, somewhere down the line.
In the meantime, the Markab plague is a pretty obvious AIDS parallel, with the Markab handling the new threat by falling back on their traditional beliefs, dividing the problem into moral (safe) and immoral (unsafe) parts and fooling themselves into thinking that disease is something you can deserve, and therefore the undeserving have nothing to worry about. The conflict between modern medicine and Markab belief is drawn really strongly here, because so many of the Markab's practices and assumptions make the problem worse, while Stephen (YAWN) takes the systematic scientific approach, figuring out how the disease operates and pulling together a remedy, if not a cure. But I don't think the episode ever really gets into science vs. religion territory, which is interesting. It opens with Delenn and Lennier (who continues to be awesome by being an expert cook) conducting a religious ritual centered around a meal, around the ritual preparation and consumption and enjoyment of food; and it ends with Delenn and Lennier emerging from the carnage in the Markab isolation hold, the only ones left alive, something they'd both subjected themselves to because of their strong belief in their role as potential comforters of the afflicted. Delenn's connection to the little Markab girl was overtly device-y, but it also was a connection that related specifically to Delenn's own faith, to the feeling of comfort she'd gained from finding a temple after getting separated from her own parents as a child. Just as the show is generally pretty good about showing diversity within non-human societies, it seems to be good about showing the wide variety of roles religion can play in individual lives, and the spectrum of ways people enact the tenets of their faiths, from the harmful to the helpful; and the joking in the bar at the end of the episode that Stephen overhears is a signal that those attitudes are not so much an aspect of faith as they are an aspect of people.
Babylon 5 2.19 - "Divided Loyalties"
One thing that hasn't aged very well about this show, in the age of the Internet, is the data transfer: the (recycled and re-printed) physical newspapers and letters and data crystals.
I'm excited that Psi Corps's ability to implant personalities on sleeper agents is coming up again, and that once again the connection to that program runs through the Mars Colony and the rebellion there. The two aren't directly related in any way that I can tell, but they seem to function in geographic proximity to one another, and it seems like the colony--because it is unstable--would be a place where Psi Corps could more easily operate secret programs.
Everybody has their secrets. Sheridan and Garibaldi and Ivanova and Stephen have the secret of their conspiracy around President Santiago's murder, and come close to telling Talia about it. Ivanova has the secret of her latent telepathic ability. All of those cross-currents complicate the investigation, as does Ivanova's relationship with Talia, which continues to be shown in a way that is blatant about what they are to each other and yet maintains broadcast standard plausible denibility, to my ongoing fascination. These are people who are caught up in the great events of their time, but they're also people with personal relationships, with attachments and fears and history. I think it was a smart move to make Lyta a previous resident of the station, because it gave her the background she needed to plausibly pass the Garibaldi smell test; but she was still an outsider, still suspicious. I had some guesses about who the sleeper agent couldn't be, but wasn't at all sure who it was until toward the end of the questioning, when the field of candidates had narrowed down and it became more and more apparent that it was Talia--and that among other terrible things, the Psi Corps will always be reaching into Ivanova's life and snatching away any of the happiness and security she's managed to cobble together for herself.
Zack Allen continues to be the everyman of creeping fascism, wearing his Night Watch armband over his uniform, taking the job because he figures it's easy money and a good cause, too blinkered and dumb to see where it's all going.
Babylon 5 2.20 - "The Long, Twilight Struggle"
The degree to which the Narn are outclassed and outgunned in this war is painful to watch. Even their last big gasp, the attack on the Centauri supply depot, is something that the Centauri can effortlessly counter and use to crush them. And Londo finally sees the end of all his plotting in person, the destruction of the Narn homeworld, from his place in the victorious Centauri fleet. Refa calls it his destiny. Londo wants to stop calling on the shadows; he's afraid that events are moving too fast and will spin out of control; but they already have. Refa's promise that this is the last time has all the emotional sincerity of a crack addict promising that this is his last hit of the pipe. The Centauri are exercising raw power now, using prohibited weapons on the gamble that no one is going to hold them accountable, exercising the prerogative of the victor to rewrite the history of the conflict as Narn aggression and Centauri benevolence turning to reluctant punishment. G'Kar has always been so proud, so it was especially significant that he had to ask for asylum, step down from the council, make himself what he needed to be in order to continue to help his people--a civilian, a guerilla leader, operating behind the scenes. Refa, in the meantime, is already picking off other small targets.
(G'Kar is, I've come to realize, the show's Cassandra. He tried to warn everyone about the shadows stirring around Zh'a'dum; he's tried repeatedly to warn the rest of the council about the extent of Centauri ambitions; he tried to warn about the possibility of an attack on the Narn homeworld; and nobody believed him until it was too late. Oh G'Kar.)
This was a really grim episode, so it was nice that there were small countercurrents to the rush of dark events: what looks like Londo's dawning realization of what he's made himself into; G'Kar's determined dignity in defeat; the gathering of the Rangers; the return of Draal and the forces on Epsilon 3, on the side of light. Those are the terms that Delenn sets out for the conflict: darkness and light; and the station seems like a very small and fragile point. I don't think the show could have built to this level of crisis without such a carefully laid-out background. This conflict has been coming from the beginning, but now it feels like a definite line has been crossed. And Londo was the one who put his foot forward first, foolishly thinking he knew where it was going to land.
Babylon 5 2.21 - "Comes the Inquisitor"
I... am not convinced this episode actually made a lot of sense. Or rather, it made more sense in theory than it did in execution. The Vorlons have high standards, and a better understanding than anybody else of the stakes involved, so I'm not actually surprised that they would test the leaders of the forces of light, to make sure that they want to help--not to help a grand movement in theory, but to help the people around them, in the everyday. And Jack the Ripper was an interesting choice of inquisitor--someone who had truly believed he was chosen, in his time, and come to understand the terrible seductive power of that kind of belief. Someone who might be able to identify it in others. But given that background, it was an odd choice in acting and direction to have Sebastian play it so gloating from the beginning, because gloating is the polar opposite of the kind of humility that experience should teach someone; and I wish JMS hadn't felt the need to not only stick a blinking neon sign over Sebastian that said "I AM JACK THE RIPPER," by naming the time and place and circumstances of his disappearance from Earth, but to actually then have him tell us that he's Jack the Ripper too. I think television writing has gotten more subtle in the last fifteen years; whether because of DVDs or something else, writers tend to let the audience figure out more; in some ways, this show is surprisingly contemporary, but in that area it's pretty dated.
I am also not convinced that Delenn needed another test of her purity of purpose, after the awful time she spent watching every single Markab she was shut up with die around her one by one just a few episodes ago, but as usual Mira Furlan did a good job of convincing me that Delenn felt it was necessary. She's so drawn to her purpose on the one hand, so unconvinced of her fitness for it on the other.
Vir's encounter with G'Kar in the elevator was the most painfully awkward elevator scene I've ever seen. On the one hand, I love that Vir tried to apologize, however inadequate any apology could be under those circumstances. On the other, I love that G'Kar just listened stone-faced, because these things are so far beyond personal forgiveness. And on the third hand, G'Kar is, as laurashapiro has observed, such a drama queen. He couldn't just sneer and walk out, he had to cut his own palm and bleed all over the floor. On the fourth hand, Andreas Katsulas really sells those moments of hyper-emotional overreaction. So.
Babylon 5 2.22 - "The Fall of Night"
Oh my goodness, Vir and Lennier meeting on the Zocalo to kvetch about their jobs is a thing of beauty and delight.
Now that the Centauri have crushed the Narn, everyone's trying to figure out the best position to take in the changed political landscape. It was fairly obvious--even before the Munich parallels became text--that Lantz, Clark's guy in the Ministry of Peace, was there not so much to give the Centauri a stern talking-to as to make sure that the Centauri's attention is occupied elsewhere, so that their aggressive expansion is someone else's problem. We all know how well that usually works, but it's entirely consistent with Clark's Earth-first agenda. I was prepared for Our Heroes to be isolated voices in the wilderness at this point, but I thought it was interesting the way so much of this episode centered around their reactions to attempted cooption. Wells offers Ivanova a command if she helps the Night Watch; Lantz orders Sheridan to break his promise of sanctuary to the Narn cruiser; Zack Allen, the Everyman of Creeping Fascism, discovers what is expected of the members of the Night Watch. Just as Londo has made his choices, each of them make a choice here. Allen again functions as the stand-in for most ordinary people, going along nervously because he's starting to realize that this might not be going quite where he expected, but it's too difficult to push against the tide. Ivanova puts her personal ethics above her career, and although she does it in an understated way, she has built her entire life around her career; it's a sacrifice. Sheridan chooses not to break his promise, manages to make a decision that is both technically correct and supported by his superiors when he defends the Narn cruiser, and manages to avoid the humiliation of a public apology by almost getting blown up, but that incident just underscores that he's the public face of the station, and that his own side is sandbagging him now. (And we see Londo, living with the choices he's already made--everyone in that garden saw the angel except for him. He's been excluded from grace.)
We finally found out what Keffer was there for, too--to put two and two together about the ghosts in hyperspace, to get killed by his curiosity, and to blow the lid off the secret of the shadows. So much of Delenn and Kosh's planning has been predicated on having time to prepare, while the shadows don't know that anyone is aware that they're out there; this can't be good!
* * * * *
You know what else can't be good? It has recently come to my attention that KitchenAid makes an ice cream maker attachment for their stand mixers. I have KitchenAid stand mixer. This is tremendously tempting, and The Kitchn is not helping by running an entire month worth of ice cream posts with links to recipes like this and this. And this and this. But especially this. Mmmm, honey and figs.
On another level, I can't believe I'm fantasizing about ice cream right now because they moved everybody onto one floor at my work, and I somehow got relocated to the Arctic Circle, where it's maybe 60 degrees at its warmest in the afternoon. This is distressing for several reasons, the most immediate of which is that I have a large collection of extremely cute sandals that I can no longer wear to work. I should not be wearing winter sweaters in Silicon Valley in August, nor should I be contemplating wearing fingerless gloves so that my hands won't be too stiff to type, but--SHOES. Why can't the facilities people realize how much I'm suffering over here?!?
* * * * *
I finished Slings and Arrows earlier this week and like Anna--who is, by the way, always right--I was so disappointed, but not surprised, by Richard. The show is in a lot of fundamental ways about the tension between business and art. The second season was the perfect balance, the time when both could coexist briefly together, but it couldn't last. So Ellen, who is terrible with finances, messes up her taxes and tears up her contract and loses her house; Geoffrey puts Charles's dying dream over the success of the show, because Charles is his Lear; and Richard comes so close to being a human being, because he did understand how important the story was to that musical, but he was always distracted by the shiny, by the opportunities for power and, in the end, dominating the creative people he'd always secretly envied and feared and wanted validation from. Darren Nichols, Richard? Really? (East Hastings the Musical was wonderfully terrible/awesome. You could see why Richard was so caught up, even as the practical discussions of the production included words like "crack house scene." So great.)
There were a lot of things I really liked about the series, and I think it did some interesting things with structure, not just within seasons but across all three seasons. And I loved how messy all of the characters were, how they only really came together for their art.
* * * * *
More book report backlog...
The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler: I always Fowler's writing; her use of language is so deft. This is another novel that is far less about events than people; and in this case, about how we read and the universality of stories, and the way absorb them through the membrane of our own experience, like osmosis. The different members of the book club don't just admire Jane Austen, the particular novels that speak to them as individuals become the frames around their own life stories. Fowler makes this framing explicit, by dividing the novel into sections that pair each character with an Austen novel, but she also widens the theme by using Grigg's interest in science fiction to translate the book club's interest in Austen's stories as they relate to their own lives into a more general point about storytelling. The one off note in the novel, for me, was the setting: the Sacramento Fowler describes doesn't have the greater sense of landscape and geography, of the physical reminders of location and season--hills to west and east dominating the horizons, flat alluvial plain, winter greenery and summer brown--that I associate with the Central Valley, and with living in California in general; and without that sense of landscape, the Sacramento setting came across as weirdly generic.
The Thin Place by Kathryn Davis: Davis uses a series of intersecting points of view to tell the story of one summer in a small New England town, some of them human and some of them animal, all of them with distinctive voices. However, I had to rely on the cover blurb to tell me that the town was a "thin place" where reality is a little more tenuous and a more mystical force bleeds through; maybe I was just being dense, but although I could identify the individual moments of magic, the text never seemed to establish the overarching, coherent connection between them that the blurb text explained. So the novel was an enjoyable read and an interesting exercise in telling stories through different points of view, but didn't quite work for me on the thematic level.
The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier: I really, really enjoyed this novel, which alternates between the stories of a number of people who have washed up in some nebulous afterlife and the story of Laura Bird, the person who knew them all and who is still living, stuck alone on in an Antarctic station, while the distant world falls apart. The conceit behind this afterlife is that when people die, they linger on until the last person who remembered them is gone. But what happens to those people--and by extension, to human memory, and human history--when the last person on Earth is gone? It's a story of the end of the world, approached from an unusual and interesting angle. Brockmeier lays the pieces of the story out carefully and lets the reader put them together, and the end of Laura's struggle has the weight of inevitability without ever becoming actively depressing; her dogged determination is mirrored by those she knew figuring out why they're still there, and in the role of memory in shaping how all of them got where they end up. Highly recommended, especially if you enjoy a good apocalypse.
Keffer makes another appearance! I'm glad that he hasn't forgotten his experience in hyperspace, that he knows he saw something out there and he wants to find out what it is. Sheridan, obviously, has figured it out, and shuts him down; I would be surprised if that doesn't raise some questions, somewhere down the line.
In the meantime, the Markab plague is a pretty obvious AIDS parallel, with the Markab handling the new threat by falling back on their traditional beliefs, dividing the problem into moral (safe) and immoral (unsafe) parts and fooling themselves into thinking that disease is something you can deserve, and therefore the undeserving have nothing to worry about. The conflict between modern medicine and Markab belief is drawn really strongly here, because so many of the Markab's practices and assumptions make the problem worse, while Stephen (YAWN) takes the systematic scientific approach, figuring out how the disease operates and pulling together a remedy, if not a cure. But I don't think the episode ever really gets into science vs. religion territory, which is interesting. It opens with Delenn and Lennier (who continues to be awesome by being an expert cook) conducting a religious ritual centered around a meal, around the ritual preparation and consumption and enjoyment of food; and it ends with Delenn and Lennier emerging from the carnage in the Markab isolation hold, the only ones left alive, something they'd both subjected themselves to because of their strong belief in their role as potential comforters of the afflicted. Delenn's connection to the little Markab girl was overtly device-y, but it also was a connection that related specifically to Delenn's own faith, to the feeling of comfort she'd gained from finding a temple after getting separated from her own parents as a child. Just as the show is generally pretty good about showing diversity within non-human societies, it seems to be good about showing the wide variety of roles religion can play in individual lives, and the spectrum of ways people enact the tenets of their faiths, from the harmful to the helpful; and the joking in the bar at the end of the episode that Stephen overhears is a signal that those attitudes are not so much an aspect of faith as they are an aspect of people.
Babylon 5 2.19 - "Divided Loyalties"
One thing that hasn't aged very well about this show, in the age of the Internet, is the data transfer: the (recycled and re-printed) physical newspapers and letters and data crystals.
I'm excited that Psi Corps's ability to implant personalities on sleeper agents is coming up again, and that once again the connection to that program runs through the Mars Colony and the rebellion there. The two aren't directly related in any way that I can tell, but they seem to function in geographic proximity to one another, and it seems like the colony--because it is unstable--would be a place where Psi Corps could more easily operate secret programs.
Everybody has their secrets. Sheridan and Garibaldi and Ivanova and Stephen have the secret of their conspiracy around President Santiago's murder, and come close to telling Talia about it. Ivanova has the secret of her latent telepathic ability. All of those cross-currents complicate the investigation, as does Ivanova's relationship with Talia, which continues to be shown in a way that is blatant about what they are to each other and yet maintains broadcast standard plausible denibility, to my ongoing fascination. These are people who are caught up in the great events of their time, but they're also people with personal relationships, with attachments and fears and history. I think it was a smart move to make Lyta a previous resident of the station, because it gave her the background she needed to plausibly pass the Garibaldi smell test; but she was still an outsider, still suspicious. I had some guesses about who the sleeper agent couldn't be, but wasn't at all sure who it was until toward the end of the questioning, when the field of candidates had narrowed down and it became more and more apparent that it was Talia--and that among other terrible things, the Psi Corps will always be reaching into Ivanova's life and snatching away any of the happiness and security she's managed to cobble together for herself.
Zack Allen continues to be the everyman of creeping fascism, wearing his Night Watch armband over his uniform, taking the job because he figures it's easy money and a good cause, too blinkered and dumb to see where it's all going.
Babylon 5 2.20 - "The Long, Twilight Struggle"
The degree to which the Narn are outclassed and outgunned in this war is painful to watch. Even their last big gasp, the attack on the Centauri supply depot, is something that the Centauri can effortlessly counter and use to crush them. And Londo finally sees the end of all his plotting in person, the destruction of the Narn homeworld, from his place in the victorious Centauri fleet. Refa calls it his destiny. Londo wants to stop calling on the shadows; he's afraid that events are moving too fast and will spin out of control; but they already have. Refa's promise that this is the last time has all the emotional sincerity of a crack addict promising that this is his last hit of the pipe. The Centauri are exercising raw power now, using prohibited weapons on the gamble that no one is going to hold them accountable, exercising the prerogative of the victor to rewrite the history of the conflict as Narn aggression and Centauri benevolence turning to reluctant punishment. G'Kar has always been so proud, so it was especially significant that he had to ask for asylum, step down from the council, make himself what he needed to be in order to continue to help his people--a civilian, a guerilla leader, operating behind the scenes. Refa, in the meantime, is already picking off other small targets.
(G'Kar is, I've come to realize, the show's Cassandra. He tried to warn everyone about the shadows stirring around Zh'a'dum; he's tried repeatedly to warn the rest of the council about the extent of Centauri ambitions; he tried to warn about the possibility of an attack on the Narn homeworld; and nobody believed him until it was too late. Oh G'Kar.)
This was a really grim episode, so it was nice that there were small countercurrents to the rush of dark events: what looks like Londo's dawning realization of what he's made himself into; G'Kar's determined dignity in defeat; the gathering of the Rangers; the return of Draal and the forces on Epsilon 3, on the side of light. Those are the terms that Delenn sets out for the conflict: darkness and light; and the station seems like a very small and fragile point. I don't think the show could have built to this level of crisis without such a carefully laid-out background. This conflict has been coming from the beginning, but now it feels like a definite line has been crossed. And Londo was the one who put his foot forward first, foolishly thinking he knew where it was going to land.
Babylon 5 2.21 - "Comes the Inquisitor"
I... am not convinced this episode actually made a lot of sense. Or rather, it made more sense in theory than it did in execution. The Vorlons have high standards, and a better understanding than anybody else of the stakes involved, so I'm not actually surprised that they would test the leaders of the forces of light, to make sure that they want to help--not to help a grand movement in theory, but to help the people around them, in the everyday. And Jack the Ripper was an interesting choice of inquisitor--someone who had truly believed he was chosen, in his time, and come to understand the terrible seductive power of that kind of belief. Someone who might be able to identify it in others. But given that background, it was an odd choice in acting and direction to have Sebastian play it so gloating from the beginning, because gloating is the polar opposite of the kind of humility that experience should teach someone; and I wish JMS hadn't felt the need to not only stick a blinking neon sign over Sebastian that said "I AM JACK THE RIPPER," by naming the time and place and circumstances of his disappearance from Earth, but to actually then have him tell us that he's Jack the Ripper too. I think television writing has gotten more subtle in the last fifteen years; whether because of DVDs or something else, writers tend to let the audience figure out more; in some ways, this show is surprisingly contemporary, but in that area it's pretty dated.
I am also not convinced that Delenn needed another test of her purity of purpose, after the awful time she spent watching every single Markab she was shut up with die around her one by one just a few episodes ago, but as usual Mira Furlan did a good job of convincing me that Delenn felt it was necessary. She's so drawn to her purpose on the one hand, so unconvinced of her fitness for it on the other.
Vir's encounter with G'Kar in the elevator was the most painfully awkward elevator scene I've ever seen. On the one hand, I love that Vir tried to apologize, however inadequate any apology could be under those circumstances. On the other, I love that G'Kar just listened stone-faced, because these things are so far beyond personal forgiveness. And on the third hand, G'Kar is, as laurashapiro has observed, such a drama queen. He couldn't just sneer and walk out, he had to cut his own palm and bleed all over the floor. On the fourth hand, Andreas Katsulas really sells those moments of hyper-emotional overreaction. So.
Babylon 5 2.22 - "The Fall of Night"
Oh my goodness, Vir and Lennier meeting on the Zocalo to kvetch about their jobs is a thing of beauty and delight.
Now that the Centauri have crushed the Narn, everyone's trying to figure out the best position to take in the changed political landscape. It was fairly obvious--even before the Munich parallels became text--that Lantz, Clark's guy in the Ministry of Peace, was there not so much to give the Centauri a stern talking-to as to make sure that the Centauri's attention is occupied elsewhere, so that their aggressive expansion is someone else's problem. We all know how well that usually works, but it's entirely consistent with Clark's Earth-first agenda. I was prepared for Our Heroes to be isolated voices in the wilderness at this point, but I thought it was interesting the way so much of this episode centered around their reactions to attempted cooption. Wells offers Ivanova a command if she helps the Night Watch; Lantz orders Sheridan to break his promise of sanctuary to the Narn cruiser; Zack Allen, the Everyman of Creeping Fascism, discovers what is expected of the members of the Night Watch. Just as Londo has made his choices, each of them make a choice here. Allen again functions as the stand-in for most ordinary people, going along nervously because he's starting to realize that this might not be going quite where he expected, but it's too difficult to push against the tide. Ivanova puts her personal ethics above her career, and although she does it in an understated way, she has built her entire life around her career; it's a sacrifice. Sheridan chooses not to break his promise, manages to make a decision that is both technically correct and supported by his superiors when he defends the Narn cruiser, and manages to avoid the humiliation of a public apology by almost getting blown up, but that incident just underscores that he's the public face of the station, and that his own side is sandbagging him now. (And we see Londo, living with the choices he's already made--everyone in that garden saw the angel except for him. He's been excluded from grace.)
We finally found out what Keffer was there for, too--to put two and two together about the ghosts in hyperspace, to get killed by his curiosity, and to blow the lid off the secret of the shadows. So much of Delenn and Kosh's planning has been predicated on having time to prepare, while the shadows don't know that anyone is aware that they're out there; this can't be good!
* * * * *
You know what else can't be good? It has recently come to my attention that KitchenAid makes an ice cream maker attachment for their stand mixers. I have KitchenAid stand mixer. This is tremendously tempting, and The Kitchn is not helping by running an entire month worth of ice cream posts with links to recipes like this and this. And this and this. But especially this. Mmmm, honey and figs.
On another level, I can't believe I'm fantasizing about ice cream right now because they moved everybody onto one floor at my work, and I somehow got relocated to the Arctic Circle, where it's maybe 60 degrees at its warmest in the afternoon. This is distressing for several reasons, the most immediate of which is that I have a large collection of extremely cute sandals that I can no longer wear to work. I should not be wearing winter sweaters in Silicon Valley in August, nor should I be contemplating wearing fingerless gloves so that my hands won't be too stiff to type, but--SHOES. Why can't the facilities people realize how much I'm suffering over here?!?
* * * * *
I finished Slings and Arrows earlier this week and like Anna--who is, by the way, always right--I was so disappointed, but not surprised, by Richard. The show is in a lot of fundamental ways about the tension between business and art. The second season was the perfect balance, the time when both could coexist briefly together, but it couldn't last. So Ellen, who is terrible with finances, messes up her taxes and tears up her contract and loses her house; Geoffrey puts Charles's dying dream over the success of the show, because Charles is his Lear; and Richard comes so close to being a human being, because he did understand how important the story was to that musical, but he was always distracted by the shiny, by the opportunities for power and, in the end, dominating the creative people he'd always secretly envied and feared and wanted validation from. Darren Nichols, Richard? Really? (East Hastings the Musical was wonderfully terrible/awesome. You could see why Richard was so caught up, even as the practical discussions of the production included words like "crack house scene." So great.)
There were a lot of things I really liked about the series, and I think it did some interesting things with structure, not just within seasons but across all three seasons. And I loved how messy all of the characters were, how they only really came together for their art.
* * * * *
More book report backlog...
The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler: I always Fowler's writing; her use of language is so deft. This is another novel that is far less about events than people; and in this case, about how we read and the universality of stories, and the way absorb them through the membrane of our own experience, like osmosis. The different members of the book club don't just admire Jane Austen, the particular novels that speak to them as individuals become the frames around their own life stories. Fowler makes this framing explicit, by dividing the novel into sections that pair each character with an Austen novel, but she also widens the theme by using Grigg's interest in science fiction to translate the book club's interest in Austen's stories as they relate to their own lives into a more general point about storytelling. The one off note in the novel, for me, was the setting: the Sacramento Fowler describes doesn't have the greater sense of landscape and geography, of the physical reminders of location and season--hills to west and east dominating the horizons, flat alluvial plain, winter greenery and summer brown--that I associate with the Central Valley, and with living in California in general; and without that sense of landscape, the Sacramento setting came across as weirdly generic.
The Thin Place by Kathryn Davis: Davis uses a series of intersecting points of view to tell the story of one summer in a small New England town, some of them human and some of them animal, all of them with distinctive voices. However, I had to rely on the cover blurb to tell me that the town was a "thin place" where reality is a little more tenuous and a more mystical force bleeds through; maybe I was just being dense, but although I could identify the individual moments of magic, the text never seemed to establish the overarching, coherent connection between them that the blurb text explained. So the novel was an enjoyable read and an interesting exercise in telling stories through different points of view, but didn't quite work for me on the thematic level.
The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier: I really, really enjoyed this novel, which alternates between the stories of a number of people who have washed up in some nebulous afterlife and the story of Laura Bird, the person who knew them all and who is still living, stuck alone on in an Antarctic station, while the distant world falls apart. The conceit behind this afterlife is that when people die, they linger on until the last person who remembered them is gone. But what happens to those people--and by extension, to human memory, and human history--when the last person on Earth is gone? It's a story of the end of the world, approached from an unusual and interesting angle. Brockmeier lays the pieces of the story out carefully and lets the reader put them together, and the end of Laura's struggle has the weight of inevitability without ever becoming actively depressing; her dogged determination is mirrored by those she knew figuring out why they're still there, and in the role of memory in shaping how all of them got where they end up. Highly recommended, especially if you enjoy a good apocalypse.