Reading and watching
11. Karen Healey (karenhealey), Guardian of the Dead -- I'd been hearing good things about this book and vaguely meaning to check it out for a while, and then I started thinking of what I wanted to read for the "book set in a place I've wanted to visit for a long time" bingo square, and New Zealand is pretty much at the top of my travel bucket list (OK, maybe the Galapagos is higher, but that would limit my choices somewhat, although there is Galapagos by Vonnegut, which I haven't read). Anyway, it seemed like a perfect confluence, and I remembered to check the book out of the library finally. And it was a really fun read! I enjoyed it a lot, and am planning to try to get L to read it, because I think she would like it, too.
The book has two quite distinct parts, different in setting, supporting characters, tone, and pacing -- really like two books smooshed together -- and (like several people whose reviews I've read) I liked the first part better than the second. The first part feels very Tam Lin-y to me -- like the Pamela Dean book, I mean, which is not a coincidence because the author is a fan (she's also a fan of LMB and Brust, but that's not really here or there). But it's definitely more than a homage (and the author having majored in English and Classics at the university she describes, with a personal involvement in theater, it totally makes sense that she would write about those things). The second part felt more Gaiman-y, which is also not a bad thing, "all myths are true"-y and with well done supernatural characters, benevolent and creepy. Spoilers from here!
It's a debut, but a really impressive one -- some things felt a little rough, but way, way better handled than I'm used to seeing them in first novels, especially first novels in YA. There is a careful commitment to representation, which on occasion feels more earnest than deft: you have the Eritrean-American professor of Classics with some kind of Norse background, too (in a book set in NZ), the woman who teaches Ellie Tae Kwon Do is Master Rosenberg-Katz, the two primary supporting characters are Ellie's part-Maori asexual best friend Kevin and Iris, who is of Chinese extraction (and speaks Chinese at least well enough to curse in it) and majoring in Maori studies, and most of the extras and cameos are non-white. Which is all great, and Iris, Kevin, and La Gribaldi felt like fully realized characters to me, not tokens, but it feels, IDK, deliberate, or noticeable, or something -- I kept trying to decide for myself why that felt more intrusive here than in the Rivers of London books, which are also very careful about avoiding the straight white Anglo default, and I'm still not sure. Is it because Ellie *is* the straight white Anglo default and Peter is not? Is it because Peter has the cop's tendency to observe and categorize everyone he comes across, and so him remarking matter-of-factly on people's race, etc. feels less highlighted than the way it comes through in Ellie's narration, which is usually more slipped in, like "pert brown nose" and stuff about her roommate campaigning for halal meat at the school cafeteria? And deftness is good! But only when it's really deft and subtle, and I feel like Healey wanted to be really sure certain bit of it got across, so we get them again and again, from different angles. Samia, the Muslim roommate, was the worst for me in that regard; she appears in a couple of scenes, and all I got from her, basically, was "Muslim [hijab], Muslim [dawn prayer], Muslim [halal], wants to be a journalist, Muslim [hijab]". The other students at the school, except for Kevin and Mark, are in general really undeveloped, but that being the case, a single reference to Samia's religious practices would've been enough. And I don't think we learn a single thing about Ellie's sister Magda other than that she's gay... That's certainly the only thing I remember.
But while there's all this stuff, representation, feminism, fat positivity, and some of it is occasionally not very subtle, it never felt like Tumblr-style PSAs or speechifying from the podium, the way it occasionally does (e.g. one of the things that bugged me about the Lynburns). Maybe it's because this book is narrated by Ellie in first person, and the narrative constraint makes it feel less speechy? Dunno, but I was glad of it.
And there are some pretty cool things this book does with diversity that did, on the whole, work for me. Kevin, Ellie's best friend, is asexual -- he tells her so, and then tells his oldest friend Iris, who's been crushing on him for a long time. I have actually never seen an explicitly asexual character in a book before, I think. I wish we'd gotten more about Kevin than the bits that make him "diverse" -- the Maori heritage (which is important to him even though it doesn't seem to be to his parents) and the asexuality -- like, he's really good at science, apparently, but that comes up a lot less often than those two things, but I wish we had gotten a lot more of (non-mind-whammied) Kevin in general, because I really liked Kevin, and his relationship with Ellie. It's not often you get to
see male-female friendship not tinged with UST in YA, and it was great. And Iris Tseng, who is tiny and nice and always perfectly dressed but also perfectly willing to fight for people and things she believes in, and is proud of being a great liar, was also a neat character.
And Ellie herself worked well for me, too, both in terms of diversity and just as, you know, a character. She's white and straight, but she's big and not conventionally pretty (and I really liked that she was a vegetarian -- that was an example of something unusual worked in deftly, I thought -- and a black belt in TKD, and boarding school food with scarce vegetarian options and lack of exercise because she was away from her studio on North Island was making her gain more weight, though she'd always been big). I like that Ellie has a quite unusual, for a female YA protagonist, facility with violence. No, that's not quite right, it's not "facility" exactly, but I don't think I've read a YA book yet where the heroine beat up (in earnest, not in sparring or training or whatever) the prospective love interest who was not physically stronger than her. And another refreshing thing was how direct Ellie is about going for what she wants with Mark, being the first to tell him she likes him (several times), taking initiative in kissing him, pushing him down on her bed. (Ellie kept making me think of Brienne of Tarth, on occasion, though, of course, being a modern woman, her being tall and strong and direct and non-feminine doesn't make her *quite* so much of a freak -- though she obviously still has body image issues and social awkwardness -- and people in modern NZ are less awful than those in Westeros tend to be, of course.) Oh, and I like it that she's an agnostic, too -- explicitly not sharing the faith her father went back to after his wife's diagnosis, but not like a campaigning atheist, either.
The relationship with Mark is interesting, if not one I could really root for. It's one of those things where YA heroines whom I generally respect seem to be more willing to forgive the objects of their affections than I would in their place (see, e.g. Mae in Demon's Noun), but at least it's not one-sided here. Mark mind-wipes Ellie (causing her great pain because she resists, which, to be fair, he didn't think she'd be able to do) and lies to her at length, she beats him up (though he lets her, thinking it might actually break the spell of silence he's under), he doesn't tell her about the Beauty-and-the-Beast curse which will turn *her* into the monster if she tells him she loves him (though it's because he thinks he's going to die before that becomes an issue anyway, and turns out to be pretty much right, as it happens). It's, you know, complicated. Ellie starts crushing on him because she thinks he's pretty and mysterious, but ends up falling in love with him because he's brave and loyal. And I found it very unusual to have a YA book deal so frankly with the reality of taking care of a disabled parent/adult, as Mark does with his bewitched and frequently catatonic father, and the moment of weakness when he contemplated killing him. It's... heavier stuff than I expected going in, and I'm glad for it. I like the resolution of Ellie and Mark's relationship, too -- even though Ellie does her Orpheus thing (and I found it quite neat that at the beginning of the novel Ellie argues with Mark about how the Greeks' different views of Orpheus, a male with magic, and Circe, a female, show the Greeks' misogyny, and they get to act out a genderswapped version of Orpheus and Euridice at the end) -- anyway, even though Ellie does her Orpheus thing and Mark follows her out faithfully, his death is not reset: he is not dead, and he is (presumably) no longer a "monster", the curse broken by his death, but he is not the human-looking boy she fell for, either, though there's hope for them, of a sort. But also Ellie is not planning to put her life on hold for him. I like the bittersweetness of the resolution, the "you can never go home again" feeling.
So far I've only talked about characters, not plot. I like the plot of the first half quite a lot, because it's got this whole Tam Lin / Snow Queen thing -- I love those stories where a girl has to rescue a boy who means a lot to her. And, once again, it's pretty neat that in this case the "guy who means a lot to her" is her best friend but not anything romantic, or even with potential for romance as a "reward" for sticking by him/saving him. I don't think I've ever seen that in YA that played this trope, and I'm not sure I've seen it outside of YA, either. Anyway, I really liked Ellie and Kevin hanging around the university campus -- the Tam Lin feel again, and also my own nostalgia for those places, and Reka the very creepy patupaiarehe (I'm sorry, but I just keep thinking of them as fairies, because Tam Lin). I like Ellie teaming up with Iris and gradually, somewhat grudgingly coming to actually like her instead of being irked by her too-perfect-and-pleasant-to-be-believed demeanor. I like seeing Ellie having to fight for real and dealing with that. I could have easily read a whole book of it.
But then Ellie and Mark take off to the North Island, and I liked that book, too, but a bit less than the first one. I like the people Ellie meets there: Mr Sand is a nicely creepy, Gaimanesque villain, scary and completely without scruples, but that's just who he is. Seeing La Gribaldi again, and her magical healing pancakes, was neat. The other characters that we glimpse but don't really get to know -- they really felt like background characters in Sandman to me for some reason -- I couldn't put my finger on it, but the blend of mythical and urban felt very similar. I liked the bikers especially, though am quite puzzled by what was actually going on with them.
Oh, and the thing with Reka's greenstone eyes in a bag, lent to Mark (and later taken by Ellie), Reka wearing sunglasses and looking off to the side, was so creepy and had such a true fairy-tale feel -- I loved this detail! And I also liked Ellie fitting the eyes into the mask, making the mask her own in a way, and having it intercede between her and the eyes that hate her. The mask and its seduction was quite creepy in its own way, although I do wish it had been set up in some way that better explained how an artifact of such power ended up in Ellie's hands, and whether it had a special link with her specifically or what the deal was. As it was, it felt kind of out of the blue, but I did like Ellie tempted and struggling with it, using it when she had to but horrified at the effect it had, especially on people she knew, like her neighbor.
The second, more mythic, larger stakes part of the book did make me wonder a bit about Ellie's role, traipsing about the Maori underworld. I do think it's somewhat justified with the "all myths are true" and "you bring your own stories", and also it's pointed out several times that a) Ellie is there because Mark was taken out of commission, but she doesn't really belong there (as Mateu points out, and Ellie eventually acknowledges and apologizes*), and b) she doesn't really know what's going on, keeps mapping things onto the mythology she *is* familiar with, the Greek myths (like when she asks Mark if he hasn't eaten in the underworld as some kind of Persephone thing) -- so it doesn't feel like she co-opting the Maori myths, just blundering through them best she can because someone has to, and she's the only one there. And the final defeat of the antagonists is not by Ellie but by the guardian of the dead, and Ellie's final triumph is making it back out of the underworld, so it never felt like a white savior thing to me (although, of course, I wouldn't necessarily be especially sensitive to such things).
*In general I like that Ellie occasionally makes mistakes about this stuff, and has to have it pointed out to her on occasion, but reflects and does the right thing. It's probably there more for the message that even good people can occasionally thoughtlessly
do problematic things, but I don't care what it's there for -- it makes me like Ellie more. Like this bit: "I knew that 'China doll' [applied to Iris, who is Chinese, tiny, and pretty] was racist, even just in my head, but I couldn't help thinking it."
Speaking of mythic, the Maori myths that Mark tells Ellie about were kind of "as you know, Bob", but at the same time it was neat to hear them, because I have had zero exposure to them. Still, I wish it would've been handled a bit more elegantly, or maybe relegated to an appendix.
As I mentioned above in talking about Mark and his father, one of the things that surprised me, in a good way, about this book is how direct it was about a lot of things that I sort of expect YA to gloss over. There are several frank mentions of rape -- Blake brings it up when Ellie won't get back in the car with him (I liked Blake, btw, and was bummed he turned out to be an asshole), and Iris and Ellie both describe what Reka did to Mark's father as rape (even though she presumably doesn't think so because she doesn't see it that way), and even the guardian of the dead calls Maui the mythical trickster figure a rapist, after the elided-poetic version of the myth we got from Mark. A devastating earthquake still happens, and people Ellie knows directly, including a member of her family and a neighbor, die or are crippled for life as a result. It's not the millions of deaths that would have been unleashed if Ellie et al hadn't stopped the antagonists, but it's not a bloodless victory either. I respect that. Even a very tertiary, totally background thing like Ellie's mother's cancer, which I expected to be mentioned once, as the reason Ellie is on her own, kept being alluded to, for the way it had affected Ellie and her relatinship with her mother.
Some quotes:
"it occurred to me that if he'd had second thoughts about me, maintaining the sacred nature of whatever he was carrying [so Mark couldn't touch her] would be a great, culturally untouchable excuse. Or maybe, his dad had just been murdered and the body probably brutalized, and his mother was a psycho, and I should give the guy a break instead of being a paranoid bitch."
"His mother's eyes lay between my breasts, alive and horrible, and unhappy to be near me. [...] Mr Sand floated six inches off the ground, staring at my chest, where Reka's eyes hung. It was the least lascivious thing I'd ever seen."
"Mystical adventures seemed to involve a lot of minor aches and pains that didn't make it into the stories."
"'Hello,' I said, and discovered that even in the awe of this moment, there was room for embarrassment at my own inanity."
So, yeah. I thought this book did a ton of things impressively, if not flawlessly, and was also a really, really fun read. I am definitely looking forward to reading more things by Healey!
bingo: book set in a place I've wanted to visit for a long time (New Zealand!), author I have never read before, female protagonist. Also, they are not protagonist level, but there are several prominent characters of color, and a non-heteronormative character I liked a lot.
12. Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia -- about 15 years ago, my friend TK (the one who introduced me to B5) gave me two non-fiction books for my birthday. The first one was something by Carl Sagan (interesting, but didn't stick with me, I guess), and the second was The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks, which definitely DID stick around. I remember telling everyone bit of what I'd read in there, and thoroughly freaking out B and my friend R, who got the brunt of it. Some time ago I spotted Musicophilia at a garage sale and couldn't just leave it there. But because (you will have noticed) I'm really not much of a music person, I put off reading it until aletheiafelinea reassured me that it was possible to enjoy the book while not really careing about music. And so it was, although I did find Hat more engaging and memorable, and also now I really want to read An Anthropologist on Mars.
Compared to Hat, this one is skewed more towards "neat things the brain can do" and less towards "terrible ways in which you brain can betray you", which made it both less creepy but also less memorable than TMWMHWFAH. The most memorable chapter/essay I found was also the creepiest one, though -- the case of Clive Wearing, the British musicologist with the most severe case of amnesia ever recorded. The diary entries are terrifying: "[H]is journal entries consisted, essentially, of the comments 'I am awake' or 'I am conscious,' entered again and again every few minutes. He would write: '2.10 pm: this time properly awake... 2:14 pm: this time finally awake... 2:35 pm: this time completely awake,' along with negations of these statements: 'At 9.40 pm I awoke for the first time, despite my previous claims.' This in turn was crossed out, followed by 'I was fully conscious at 10:35 pm and awake for the first time in many, many weeks.' This in turn was canceled out by the next entry." This is possibly the most terrible thing I can imagine... The fact that he and his wife have managed to remain in love through 20 years of this is equal parts heartening and amazing to me; I cannot imagine how one could continue to live with this for so long, though, I suppose one cannot actually go mad when one has no memory of any of the 20 years of living this way outside of the present moment... The illustration of the difference between procedural memory (which he retained) and episodic memory (which he lost) is fascinating, too, but mostly this chapter just freaked the hell out of me. (Sacks also wrote a New Yorker article about this case which has much of the same information.)
Along less terrifying lines, I also really enjoyed the chapter on Williams syndrome. I forget where I first heard about it -- House, maybe? -- but I've been intrigued by it since and had read up on the symptoms and such, and the chromosome deletion that causes it, but this was the first I'd heard of the neurological differences between brains of patients with Williams syndrome and normal brains, and that was really interesting. And the story of Heidi, both as a child who refused to believe there was such a thing as strangers and as an adult who found her calling, was really touching. I kind of wish the book had ended on that note and not the chapter on dementia, even though that has a bittersweet poignancy of its own.
Neat things I learned:
Stuff about absolute pitch, like that it's more common in blind musicians, that it's more common for speakers of tonal languages (in a study, ~60% of Chinese music school students had absolute pitch vs 14% in the US), that there seems to be evidence that, like with the ability to recognize and produce all phonemes, infants are born with absolute pitch and then most lose that ability: "This suggested to them that absolute pitch may be universal and highly adaptive in infancy but becomes maladaptive later and is therefore lost. 'Infnts limited to grouping melodies by perfect pitches [...] would never discover that the songs they hear are the same when sung in different keys or that words spoken at different fundamental frequencies are the same." Also, the possibility of releasing absolute pitch via transcranial magnetic stimulation. And the Finnish entomologist who had absolute pitch and could actually pinpoint the precise frequency of an insect's wingbeats by that alone.
Stuff about historical figures, like Nabokov's synaesthasia (shared by his wife and son) and Hoffman likely had it too. And especially neat is the idea that synaesthesia might be something common in infancy that atrophies around 2-3 months of age in most people. (Actually, the stuff about colors having textures/tastes for synaesthetes made me wonder if L had something like it with her mysterious avoidance of 7 or other numbers containing 7 when she was little, but she says no). Che Guevara lacked a sense of rhythm, Freud's feelings about music ("Some rationalistic or perhaps analytic turn of mind in me rebels against being moved by a thing without knowing why I am thus affected and what it is that affects me"), Ulysses S. Grant who (apocryphally) only knew two songs ("One is Yankee Doodle and the other is not") and "the French neurologist [...] who once told me that when he heard music, he could say only that it was 'The Marseillase' or that it was not [...] I should have asked him how the recognized 'The Marseillaise': Was it by rhythm or the sound of a particular instrument? By the behavior or attention of other people around him? And what did it actually sound like to him?"
People's ability to, as Sacks's father, "play a score almost as vividly in his mind, perhaps with different moods or interpretations, and sometimes improvisations of his own. His favorite bedtime reading was a dictionary of musical themes." Or, "a very musical friend described to me how once, having put a favorite Mozart record on his turntable, he listened to it with gret pleasure, and then went to turn it over to play the other side -- only to find that he had never played it in the first place." This is so, SO alien to me... O.o
The musical "release" hallucinations of people who are going deaf and whose aural part of the brain requires stimulation it's not getting and so just makes some up -- and the way they can sometimes be totally random (like patriotic songs from the Boer War that Sacks's mother heard) or unpleasant, like the Jewish man who grew up in 1930s Germany and kept hearing Nazi marching songs.
Music as a remedy for aphasia: "They reported [...] that there was not only an inhibition of Broca's area in apahasic patients, but hyperactivity of a homologous area in the right hemishere. [...] This sutained hyperactivity on the right side exerts and active inhibiting action on the 'good' Broca's are, which, in its weakened state, is powerless to resist. The challenge, then, is not only to stimulate the normal, left Broca's area, but to find a way to damp down the right Broca's area, with its malignant hyperactivity. Singing and melodic intonation seem to do exactly this: by engaging the right-hemisphere circuits in normal activity, they disengage them from pathological activity."
The rhythmic commonalities between a nation's language and music.
The girl with an eidetic memory for anything she could put to music ("No wonder I like her answers. She's quoting my lectures word for word!")
And I just liked the way he worded the experience of being married to someone with progressive dementia as the "inch-by-inch way in which she was being widowed". Because, OUCH. :(
Also, I have no idea if it's that Sacks is truly mentioning it more because there are more autobiographical bits in this book, including his childhood, or if I'm more attuned to it now and noticing it more, but I felt like there were a lot more Jewish themes and mentions here -- memories of his Orthodox family, Aramaic seder song, etc. And the tiny little chapter on "accidental davening", too.
bingo: non-fiction book, book of essays, I think this also counts for book written by someone famous for something other than writing, since Sacks is a doctor first and foremost and came to prominence as a result of the treatment of the Awakening patients.
13. Terry Pratchett, A Blink of the Screen -- this is the book of short stories from across PTerry's career (the first story, his first sale, is from when he was 13) that I did not realize existed until I stumbled across it while looking for Rivers of London at Heathrow. It's been sitting on my shelf since summer, waiting for the right time. Well. Spoilers for individual stories
There is a foreword by A.S.Byatt, from which I really liked this line: "You think you know all it is possible to know about a dragon, or a policeman, or a plot or a landscape, and he tells you more, a lot more than you had any right to expect, and this is exhilirating." Yes.
"The Hades Business" -- the story from when he was 13, and this was such a trip, because this is very much the sort of thing I remember trying to write when I was 13. I mean, PTerry, being PTerry, is quite a bit better at it than I was, but there's the Very Clever Premise and Very Clever Allusions and Very Clever Twist Ending, and it's all rather adorable. I laughed at the bust of Darwin shattering during divine manifestation, and I laughed even harder at the biographical note, which starts off "if I put my fingers in my ears and go 'lalalala' loudly I won't hear you read this story" and contains the really great line: "I was even bad at sports, except for the one wonderful term when they let us play hockey, when I was bad and very dangerous", because YES, that is also really, really familiar (field hockey in ninth or tenth grade, ahaha) and "But the other kids had like it [the story[. I'd sniffed blood" (and that was me at 11, during the Platon craze I'd somehow managed to kick off with my classmates). It's actually a totally cute story, but I'm definitely reading it more for 13-year-old Terry Pratchett and his older self looking back at that kid than for the plot.
"Solution" -- this is basically a joke in flash fic form. I'm not surprised PTerry has no recollection of it decades on.
"The Picture" -- yep, this is the sort of stuff I was trying to write, too, the short story illuminated by the final twist. Pratchett's better at it, unsurprisingly, at fifteen, than I was at the same age. But I'm glad he went on to embed his jokes and his twists in something more... meaty and permanent as he got older.
"The Prince and the Partridge" -- this is a retelling of "The Twelve Days of Christmas" as a fairy tale meant for a kiddie audience, and yet it kind of works. And there are Pterry's drawings, which are adorable, especially the partridge with the eyebrows.
"Rincemangle, the Gnome of Even Moor" -- mainly interesting to me as the obvious precursor for Rincewind's name. Apparently this idea eventually grew into Truckers, but as I haven't read that, the gnomes made me think of much-less-fun Feegles.
There are several pieces from the time he was working as a journalist which are creative sketches more than short stories, I'd say. "There's No Fool Like an Old Fool Found in an English Queue" made me laugh, "Kindly Breathe in Short, Thick Pants" was mildly amusing, and "Coo, They've Given me the Bird" basically comes down to "Russia, LOL" and "pigeons, LOL". And I'd say "And Mind the Monoliths" belongs in this category as well -- it's more like a short story, but, like, na zlobu dnya; it didn't do much for me, possibly you had to be there. Oh, and also a fake bio for the National Portrait Gallery, which is mildly amusing but doesn't really feel like it's got that Pterry touch. There are also two poems, "The Glastonbury Tales" and "The Secret Book of the Dead", which are not bad in their own right, but don't at all do for me what Pterry's prose does.
Of the proper short stories:
"The High Meggas" -- which is apparently the short story that kicked off The Long Earth idea (which I have not read and have not heard great things about). The story itself was engaging enough, but felt the least Pratchetty of all. The worldbuilding was interesting, and the ideas, but none of the characters appealed at all. It's also the only one of the lot that doesn't have some element of humour in it, and that just feels wrong. I did like the line (about diverging parallel earths) "California was already sparsely colonized out to several K [thousands of earths], and at the far ends was beginning to develop in ways that even Californians thought were nutty. In what remained of the USSR security men were combing nearby worlds for the previous lot of security men." But there's also a line (that a character speaks, so I'm not attributing the views to anyone real) that didn't sit right with me -- it just makes it harder to like the story I was already very lukewarm on.
"Twenty Pence, with Envelope and Seasonal Greeting" -- this is a gimmick story, Victorian-type horror with Christmas cards. Maybe I'd like it if I liked Victorian horror or Christmas cards. As it is, this was probably the story I was least interested in in the collection.
"Incubust" -- a drabble, that he managed to fit a footnote in. I would've expected Pratchett to be a master of the drabble, because he can be succinct and profound at once. But this is not profound, merely punny.
"Final Reward" -- a story about a writer visited by his creation, Erdan the Barbarian. This was quite a lot of fun, though not, like, Pratchett levels of fun. Favorite line: "he'd survived on 10,000-year old wooly mammoths, fortuitously discovered int he frozen tundra. Dogger had actually done some research about that. It had told him it wasn't in fact possible, but what the hell."
"Turntables of the Night" -- my favorite non-Discworld story, although it *feels* like a Discworld story, because it's a DEATH story. This is the point where Pratchett is starting to feel like Pratchett (1989, which is right around Wyrd Sisters/Pyramids/Guards! Guards!). I like the characters, the narrator and Wayne, the friend he is talking about, I like the dialogue, the set-up and the payoff in the last couple of lines. Just a really great story.
"#IFDEFDEBUG + 'world/enough' + 'time'" -- don't like the title, but I did like the story, a virtual-reality set mystery with a fun and likeable narrator.
"Hollywood Chickens" -- I surprised myself in really enjoying this one, because at first I didn't think it would work for me. But it's actually a great illustration in how the jokes that used to be the only thing anchoring the story now have all kinds of other things going on, stylistically and with characters and with story structure. Because this is basically an extended "why did the chicken cross the road" joke, but it actually totally works as a story, with pathos and suspense and worldbuilding and everything. I ended up really liking the way interspersed 'transcripts' of chicken speech show how the little community evolves religion, democracy, mechanical flight, rockets, and apparently FTL travel.
"Once and Future" -- Melin the time-traveler is probably a totally common conceit; I wouldn't know because I tend to steer clear of Arthuriana on account it bores me. But I liked this story, Mervin the narrator and Nimue his helper, and even the glimpse of Ursula. Favorite line: "You can't start with a democracy. You have to work up through stuff like tyranny and monarchy first. That way people are so relieved when they get to democracy that they hang on to it."
"FTB" -- another Christmas story, which is just my thing, but the last line is great: "'It's just that every time we take it off, the computer beeps at us and shuts down.' The engineer shrugged. 'Well, there's nothing I can do,' he said. 'You'll just have to put the teddy bear back.'"
Kind of interesting: I noticed that as we got to the short stories I really enjoyed, most of them were narrated in first person ("Turntables", "IFDEFDEBUG", "Once and Future", and even "Chickens" is written as a series of reports by a police officer), something Pratchett does with a lot of flair but that I haven't seen before because none of the Discworld books or the other ones I've read (Dodger, Nation, and the Carpet People) are like that.
Discworld stories:
"Troll Bridge" -- as I've mentioned elsewhere, I've read the story already -- it was actually my introduction to Pratchett. It was neat to reread it having read the entirety of the Discworld books, knowing how trolls work and who Cohen the Barbarian is. And I really liked the introductory note: (the story was written for a collection honoring Tolkien) "it seemed to me there was a mood I could aim for. Things change, things pass. You fight a war to change the world, and it changes into a world with no place in it for you, the fighter. Those who fight for the bright future are not always, by nature, well fitted to live in it."
"Theater of Cruelty" -- aka the one where Carrot interviews DEATH as a witness to a suspicious death, because, well, he was there, wasn't her. I like early Carrot, and have missed him in the more recent books! P.S. From Pterry's intro note I also learned that a dog named Toby is frequently part of Punch and Judy proceedings. Ohhhh, apparently that was a bit I missed in Rivers of London.
"The Sea and Little Fishes" -- a Granny and Nanny story, longer than the others and a lot of fun, very Witchy. Pterry says that if a short story/novellette opportunity hadn't fortuitously come along, it would've probably been the beginning of a novel, or a thread in one, and, yeah, I bet it would've been, because it feels like that. But it works very well at its current length, and both Esme and Nanny are great in it. The creepifyingness of Esme trying to be nice, and their different philosophies and ways of being, and Granny "winning" the Trials in a way that everyone realizes, even though there is no formal winner at all, without participating and without even doing any magic (though, of course, she cannot resist showing off after the fact, with lighting the celebratory bonfire). I really liked it! And the deleted scene in the Appendix was neat, too, though I definitely agree the story is better without it.
Quotes from the story:
"It was the same in just about every trade. Sooner or later someone decided it needed organizing, and the one thing you could be sure of was that the organizers weren't going to be the people who, by general acknowledgement, were at the top of their craft. They were working too hard. To be fair, it generally wasn't done by the worst, neither. They were working hard, too. They had to. No, it was done by the ones who had just enough time and inclination to scurry and bustle. And, to be fair, the world needed people who scurried and bustled. You just didn't have to like them very much."
"Many people could say things in a cutting way, Nanny knew. But Granny Weatherwax could listen in a cutting way. She could make something sound stupid just by hearing it."
"People speak highly of her [Mrs Earwig]"
Granny sniffed. "Do they speak highly of me?" she said.
"No, they speak quietly of you, Esme."
"Good."
"You got on a lot better with people when you remembered to put frills round it, and took an interest, and said things like, 'How are you?' Esme didn't bother with that kind of stuff because she knew already. Nanny Ogg knew too, but also knew that letting on you knew gave people the serious willies."
"And it's the look you had the time all the snow slid down on ole Millson's house just after he called you an interfering old baggage..." said Nanny.
Granny hesitated. Nanny was pretty sure that had been natural causes, and also that Granny knew she suspected this, and that pride was fighting a battle with honesty--
"That's as may be," said Granny, noncommittally.
"[Nanny] herself didn't like winning things. Winning was a habit that was hard to break and brought you a dangerous status that was hard to defend. [...] Nanny had always pursued the policy of being a good loser. People liked you when you almost won, and bought you drinks. [...] Runners-up had more fun, she reckoned."
"This year Nanny had been idly working on the Man of Straw. It was an ideal trick for her. It got a laugh, it was a bit suggestive, it was a lot easier than it looked but showed she was joining in, and it was unlikely to win."
Nanny: "I did start out in witchcraft to get boys, to tell you the truth."
Esme: "Think I don't know that?"
"What did you start out to get, Esme?"
Granny stopped, and looked up at the frosty sky and then down at the ground.
"Dunno," she said at last. "Even, I suppose."
And the last bit, with the onion named after her (to Nanny's apples)
"A very useful vegetable, the onion," [Granny] said at last. "Firm. Sharp."
"Good for the system," said Nanny.
"Keeps well. Adds flavour."
The rest is not really stories but supplementary convention swag and such. Well, with the exception of the "A Collegiate Casting-Out of Devilish Devices", which is more storylike and was my favorite, because it's all academia LOL, and a very short story about DEATH and quantum. Beyond that, there's the story behind the Ankh-Morpork national anthem (which was written for and sung on BBC here), Vetinari's speech on the occasion of "twinning" with a real city, "Medical Notes" (which read like extended footnotes), a history of "Thud!", from which I learned that Thud-the-game, invented by a game designed came first, and the book grew up around it, Unseen Academicals cards, and a committee proposing the creation of Ankh-Morpork boy/girl scouts. Reasonably entertaining, but not like the real stories.
bingo: book of short stories, funny book
**
CSRB update: I have a bingo! :D [All three cards]
Serious: 9/25
Book with a female protagonist: Guardian of the Dead
Short story collection: A Blink of the Screen
Non-fiction book: Musicophilia
Books with a protagonist of color: Smek for President
Free Space: Point of Knives
Second book in a series: Red Seas Under Red Skies (Locke Lamora #2)
Book given to you as a gift: Wool (birthday present from my friend R)
Book with red cover: Benedict Jacka, Hidden
Author I've never read before: Melissa Scott, The Kindly Ones
Random: 8/25
Book set in a place you've wanted to visit for a long time: Guardian of the Dead (New Zealand)
Book written by someone famous for things other than writing: Musicophilia (Oliver Sacks is a neurologist)
Book by an author who shares the first letter of your last name (challenge mode: author who shares your initials): Smek for President, by Adam Rex
Free Space: Red Seas Under Red Skies
Book where male and female protagonists don't fall in love: Three Parts Dead (counting Tara and Abelard as the mains)
Independently published book: Wool
Book by queer author: Melissa Scott, The Kindly Ones
Book with queer protagonist: Melissa Scott, Point of Knives
Mix'n'Match: 11/25 and BINGO!
Book set in a place you've wanted to visit for a long time: Guardian of the Dead (New Zealand)
Book written by someone famous for things other than writing: Musicophilia (Oliver Sacks is a neurologist)
Funny book: A Blink of the Screen
Book with an author or protagonist of color: Smek for President
Book given to you as a gift: Republic of Thieves
Free Space: Hidden (Alex Verus #5)
Book where male and female protagonists don't fall in love: Three Parts Dead (counting Tara and Abelard as the mains)
Independently published book: Wool
Second book in a series: Red Seas Under Red Skies (Locke Lamora #2)
Book with queer author or protagonist: Melissa Scott, Point of Knives
Book by an author I've never read before: Melissa Scott, The Kindly Ones
And as a quick reminder, for people who are playing along with the Reading Bingo or would like to:
Cards and recs
Sharing and bragging post -- where we have our first bingo! Check out dhampyresa's banner :) (will be making these for anyone who gets to bingo or blackout and wants one)
tag: http://hamsterwoman.livejournal.com/tag/csrb
*
Also continuing to watch stuff: getting in the swing of Angel and making creeping progress on B5 now that my favorite arcs are done.
Babylon 5 (spoilers):
"Racing Mars" (4x10) -- So the thing I best remember about this episode is "Woo hoo" (the rodents laughed so hard, at that, and at Sheridan's expression when he walks in and sees the waiting Minbari, and when Delenn drags him into the bedroom). The whole thing with the two of them was great, and we also enjoyed the opening scene where Ivanova relieves him of command and sends him on vacation. Marcus and Franklin bits are also cute, especially the I Spy game ("Boxes", "More boxes", "Even more boxes"), and Marcus getting all into the pretending-to-be-married thing. The Garibaldi parts are painful to watch, though, especially the scenes with Sheridan. Also, I like the line that implies the Pope is a woman at this point.
Angel (spoilers):
OK, I admit, the credits music is growing on me.
Parting Gifts (1x10) -- OK, I feel kind of terrible about it, but I laughed out loud during Cordelia's commercial audition, where she's breaking down over Doyle's death while trying to be enthusiastic about stain remover -- the panel's expressions specifically did me in. Cordelia kissing people as an experiment, Wesley in leather being very insistent that he is a *rogue* demon hunter, Cordelia driving up the bidding on herself and being offended that it had started at only $2000 was also great. I totally fell for the twist with Barney the nebbishy empath demonkill being the bad guy, and I liked that Cordelia ended up being the one to kill him (and saving Wesley in the process); I had also liked Cordelia's "You are in great..." "Danger?" "Pain!" as she knees Barney in the groin. Basically, go Cordy! Wesley is a nice addition to the cast, even though he's like a walking locus of second-hand embarrassment, from the ridiculous (struggling to extract the knife from his ankle sheat) to the sad (attempting to translate the dying demon's Kungai) to the bitter (the self-castigation just before Angel tells him he needs his help saving Cordelia). Also, OK, the Wesley/Cordy kiss was kinda hot. The Wolfram and Hart lawyer looked interesting. And, on a totally random note, the Kungai demon looked like G'Kar to me -- something about the eyes, I guess, and the bonyness of the make-up?
Somnabulist (1x11) -- eh, a fairly interesting plot, but too heavy on Angel vs the ensemble cast, which don't tend to be my favorite. I did like his stark "They're not nightmares. I've been enjoying them." and the way "The tabloids are calling him the pope" echoes when Kate had jokes that only popes and I forget who, rock stars use one name, and Angel said "you got me, I'm the pope". Speaking of plot: seriously what is Kate doing going in there alone, without any backup? I did like the scene where she shoots Penn and he falls, and she checks his pulse to confirm he's dead before he reaches out and grabs her. Also, I kept thinking that Penn, the vampire Angel sired, looked familiar but couldn't place him until I looked it up on Wiki and turns out it's Hawkeye XD OK, he's definitely better with the cleanshaven look, but, acting-wise, I liked him better here than as either Hawkeye or Hansel.
Expecting (1x12) -- Charisma Carpenter is so pretty! I liked the funny beginning, with Wesley and Angel trying to cover for Cordelia's vision with Cordy's friends ("the good ones are always gay"), the classy Cordy/Wilson make-out montage, Phantom Dennis being jealous at first, and offering Cordy tissues when she asks Angel and Wesley to leave, Angel being grossed out by Cordelia drinking blood from the fridge, and the "moral": "I learned, um, men are evil? Oh wait, I knew that. I learned that L.A.'s full of self-serving phonies? Nope, had that one down, too. Uh, sex is bad?" Angel: "We all knew that". And the liquid nitorgen thing, with Angel throwing the drum, Wesley shooting it, and Cordelia smashing the frozen demon was both cool on its own merits and I liked that all three of them got to play a part in destroying it.
She (1x13) -- The opening scene, with Wesley and Angel being utter dorks at Cordelia's party was hilarious (as was Cordy criticising Angel's party awkwardness; socially awkward Angel being made fun of by other people is my favorite Angel), and Dennis pulling out a chair and offering a beer to Angel was quite sweet. As was Cordy's "Now we're really-- Do I have to take a paycut? -- a team :)" -- it's so her! And LOL at Wesley going for a hug with Angel, who demurs. Also, Angel vs the cell phone gave me a giggle. And then there was plot, which, eh, whatever. Clearly, there's a Very Important Message, which is worthwhile but as anvilicious as something from an early season of Buffy (although having the demon princess be an antagonist is a somewhat interesting touch. Also, my previous exposure has to Bai Ling has been only via the Go Fug Yourself blog, and it is very hard for me to take her seriously in this role.
The book has two quite distinct parts, different in setting, supporting characters, tone, and pacing -- really like two books smooshed together -- and (like several people whose reviews I've read) I liked the first part better than the second. The first part feels very Tam Lin-y to me -- like the Pamela Dean book, I mean, which is not a coincidence because the author is a fan (she's also a fan of LMB and Brust, but that's not really here or there). But it's definitely more than a homage (and the author having majored in English and Classics at the university she describes, with a personal involvement in theater, it totally makes sense that she would write about those things). The second part felt more Gaiman-y, which is also not a bad thing, "all myths are true"-y and with well done supernatural characters, benevolent and creepy. Spoilers from here!
It's a debut, but a really impressive one -- some things felt a little rough, but way, way better handled than I'm used to seeing them in first novels, especially first novels in YA. There is a careful commitment to representation, which on occasion feels more earnest than deft: you have the Eritrean-American professor of Classics with some kind of Norse background, too (in a book set in NZ), the woman who teaches Ellie Tae Kwon Do is Master Rosenberg-Katz, the two primary supporting characters are Ellie's part-Maori asexual best friend Kevin and Iris, who is of Chinese extraction (and speaks Chinese at least well enough to curse in it) and majoring in Maori studies, and most of the extras and cameos are non-white. Which is all great, and Iris, Kevin, and La Gribaldi felt like fully realized characters to me, not tokens, but it feels, IDK, deliberate, or noticeable, or something -- I kept trying to decide for myself why that felt more intrusive here than in the Rivers of London books, which are also very careful about avoiding the straight white Anglo default, and I'm still not sure. Is it because Ellie *is* the straight white Anglo default and Peter is not? Is it because Peter has the cop's tendency to observe and categorize everyone he comes across, and so him remarking matter-of-factly on people's race, etc. feels less highlighted than the way it comes through in Ellie's narration, which is usually more slipped in, like "pert brown nose" and stuff about her roommate campaigning for halal meat at the school cafeteria? And deftness is good! But only when it's really deft and subtle, and I feel like Healey wanted to be really sure certain bit of it got across, so we get them again and again, from different angles. Samia, the Muslim roommate, was the worst for me in that regard; she appears in a couple of scenes, and all I got from her, basically, was "Muslim [hijab], Muslim [dawn prayer], Muslim [halal], wants to be a journalist, Muslim [hijab]". The other students at the school, except for Kevin and Mark, are in general really undeveloped, but that being the case, a single reference to Samia's religious practices would've been enough. And I don't think we learn a single thing about Ellie's sister Magda other than that she's gay... That's certainly the only thing I remember.
But while there's all this stuff, representation, feminism, fat positivity, and some of it is occasionally not very subtle, it never felt like Tumblr-style PSAs or speechifying from the podium, the way it occasionally does (e.g. one of the things that bugged me about the Lynburns). Maybe it's because this book is narrated by Ellie in first person, and the narrative constraint makes it feel less speechy? Dunno, but I was glad of it.
And there are some pretty cool things this book does with diversity that did, on the whole, work for me. Kevin, Ellie's best friend, is asexual -- he tells her so, and then tells his oldest friend Iris, who's been crushing on him for a long time. I have actually never seen an explicitly asexual character in a book before, I think. I wish we'd gotten more about Kevin than the bits that make him "diverse" -- the Maori heritage (which is important to him even though it doesn't seem to be to his parents) and the asexuality -- like, he's really good at science, apparently, but that comes up a lot less often than those two things, but I wish we had gotten a lot more of (non-mind-whammied) Kevin in general, because I really liked Kevin, and his relationship with Ellie. It's not often you get to
see male-female friendship not tinged with UST in YA, and it was great. And Iris Tseng, who is tiny and nice and always perfectly dressed but also perfectly willing to fight for people and things she believes in, and is proud of being a great liar, was also a neat character.
And Ellie herself worked well for me, too, both in terms of diversity and just as, you know, a character. She's white and straight, but she's big and not conventionally pretty (and I really liked that she was a vegetarian -- that was an example of something unusual worked in deftly, I thought -- and a black belt in TKD, and boarding school food with scarce vegetarian options and lack of exercise because she was away from her studio on North Island was making her gain more weight, though she'd always been big). I like that Ellie has a quite unusual, for a female YA protagonist, facility with violence. No, that's not quite right, it's not "facility" exactly, but I don't think I've read a YA book yet where the heroine beat up (in earnest, not in sparring or training or whatever) the prospective love interest who was not physically stronger than her. And another refreshing thing was how direct Ellie is about going for what she wants with Mark, being the first to tell him she likes him (several times), taking initiative in kissing him, pushing him down on her bed. (Ellie kept making me think of Brienne of Tarth, on occasion, though, of course, being a modern woman, her being tall and strong and direct and non-feminine doesn't make her *quite* so much of a freak -- though she obviously still has body image issues and social awkwardness -- and people in modern NZ are less awful than those in Westeros tend to be, of course.) Oh, and I like it that she's an agnostic, too -- explicitly not sharing the faith her father went back to after his wife's diagnosis, but not like a campaigning atheist, either.
The relationship with Mark is interesting, if not one I could really root for. It's one of those things where YA heroines whom I generally respect seem to be more willing to forgive the objects of their affections than I would in their place (see, e.g. Mae in Demon's Noun), but at least it's not one-sided here. Mark mind-wipes Ellie (causing her great pain because she resists, which, to be fair, he didn't think she'd be able to do) and lies to her at length, she beats him up (though he lets her, thinking it might actually break the spell of silence he's under), he doesn't tell her about the Beauty-and-the-Beast curse which will turn *her* into the monster if she tells him she loves him (though it's because he thinks he's going to die before that becomes an issue anyway, and turns out to be pretty much right, as it happens). It's, you know, complicated. Ellie starts crushing on him because she thinks he's pretty and mysterious, but ends up falling in love with him because he's brave and loyal. And I found it very unusual to have a YA book deal so frankly with the reality of taking care of a disabled parent/adult, as Mark does with his bewitched and frequently catatonic father, and the moment of weakness when he contemplated killing him. It's... heavier stuff than I expected going in, and I'm glad for it. I like the resolution of Ellie and Mark's relationship, too -- even though Ellie does her Orpheus thing (and I found it quite neat that at the beginning of the novel Ellie argues with Mark about how the Greeks' different views of Orpheus, a male with magic, and Circe, a female, show the Greeks' misogyny, and they get to act out a genderswapped version of Orpheus and Euridice at the end) -- anyway, even though Ellie does her Orpheus thing and Mark follows her out faithfully, his death is not reset: he is not dead, and he is (presumably) no longer a "monster", the curse broken by his death, but he is not the human-looking boy she fell for, either, though there's hope for them, of a sort. But also Ellie is not planning to put her life on hold for him. I like the bittersweetness of the resolution, the "you can never go home again" feeling.
So far I've only talked about characters, not plot. I like the plot of the first half quite a lot, because it's got this whole Tam Lin / Snow Queen thing -- I love those stories where a girl has to rescue a boy who means a lot to her. And, once again, it's pretty neat that in this case the "guy who means a lot to her" is her best friend but not anything romantic, or even with potential for romance as a "reward" for sticking by him/saving him. I don't think I've ever seen that in YA that played this trope, and I'm not sure I've seen it outside of YA, either. Anyway, I really liked Ellie and Kevin hanging around the university campus -- the Tam Lin feel again, and also my own nostalgia for those places, and Reka the very creepy patupaiarehe (I'm sorry, but I just keep thinking of them as fairies, because Tam Lin). I like Ellie teaming up with Iris and gradually, somewhat grudgingly coming to actually like her instead of being irked by her too-perfect-and-pleasant-to-be-believed demeanor. I like seeing Ellie having to fight for real and dealing with that. I could have easily read a whole book of it.
But then Ellie and Mark take off to the North Island, and I liked that book, too, but a bit less than the first one. I like the people Ellie meets there: Mr Sand is a nicely creepy, Gaimanesque villain, scary and completely without scruples, but that's just who he is. Seeing La Gribaldi again, and her magical healing pancakes, was neat. The other characters that we glimpse but don't really get to know -- they really felt like background characters in Sandman to me for some reason -- I couldn't put my finger on it, but the blend of mythical and urban felt very similar. I liked the bikers especially, though am quite puzzled by what was actually going on with them.
Oh, and the thing with Reka's greenstone eyes in a bag, lent to Mark (and later taken by Ellie), Reka wearing sunglasses and looking off to the side, was so creepy and had such a true fairy-tale feel -- I loved this detail! And I also liked Ellie fitting the eyes into the mask, making the mask her own in a way, and having it intercede between her and the eyes that hate her. The mask and its seduction was quite creepy in its own way, although I do wish it had been set up in some way that better explained how an artifact of such power ended up in Ellie's hands, and whether it had a special link with her specifically or what the deal was. As it was, it felt kind of out of the blue, but I did like Ellie tempted and struggling with it, using it when she had to but horrified at the effect it had, especially on people she knew, like her neighbor.
The second, more mythic, larger stakes part of the book did make me wonder a bit about Ellie's role, traipsing about the Maori underworld. I do think it's somewhat justified with the "all myths are true" and "you bring your own stories", and also it's pointed out several times that a) Ellie is there because Mark was taken out of commission, but she doesn't really belong there (as Mateu points out, and Ellie eventually acknowledges and apologizes*), and b) she doesn't really know what's going on, keeps mapping things onto the mythology she *is* familiar with, the Greek myths (like when she asks Mark if he hasn't eaten in the underworld as some kind of Persephone thing) -- so it doesn't feel like she co-opting the Maori myths, just blundering through them best she can because someone has to, and she's the only one there. And the final defeat of the antagonists is not by Ellie but by the guardian of the dead, and Ellie's final triumph is making it back out of the underworld, so it never felt like a white savior thing to me (although, of course, I wouldn't necessarily be especially sensitive to such things).
*In general I like that Ellie occasionally makes mistakes about this stuff, and has to have it pointed out to her on occasion, but reflects and does the right thing. It's probably there more for the message that even good people can occasionally thoughtlessly
do problematic things, but I don't care what it's there for -- it makes me like Ellie more. Like this bit: "I knew that 'China doll' [applied to Iris, who is Chinese, tiny, and pretty] was racist, even just in my head, but I couldn't help thinking it."
Speaking of mythic, the Maori myths that Mark tells Ellie about were kind of "as you know, Bob", but at the same time it was neat to hear them, because I have had zero exposure to them. Still, I wish it would've been handled a bit more elegantly, or maybe relegated to an appendix.
As I mentioned above in talking about Mark and his father, one of the things that surprised me, in a good way, about this book is how direct it was about a lot of things that I sort of expect YA to gloss over. There are several frank mentions of rape -- Blake brings it up when Ellie won't get back in the car with him (I liked Blake, btw, and was bummed he turned out to be an asshole), and Iris and Ellie both describe what Reka did to Mark's father as rape (even though she presumably doesn't think so because she doesn't see it that way), and even the guardian of the dead calls Maui the mythical trickster figure a rapist, after the elided-poetic version of the myth we got from Mark. A devastating earthquake still happens, and people Ellie knows directly, including a member of her family and a neighbor, die or are crippled for life as a result. It's not the millions of deaths that would have been unleashed if Ellie et al hadn't stopped the antagonists, but it's not a bloodless victory either. I respect that. Even a very tertiary, totally background thing like Ellie's mother's cancer, which I expected to be mentioned once, as the reason Ellie is on her own, kept being alluded to, for the way it had affected Ellie and her relatinship with her mother.
Some quotes:
"it occurred to me that if he'd had second thoughts about me, maintaining the sacred nature of whatever he was carrying [so Mark couldn't touch her] would be a great, culturally untouchable excuse. Or maybe, his dad had just been murdered and the body probably brutalized, and his mother was a psycho, and I should give the guy a break instead of being a paranoid bitch."
"His mother's eyes lay between my breasts, alive and horrible, and unhappy to be near me. [...] Mr Sand floated six inches off the ground, staring at my chest, where Reka's eyes hung. It was the least lascivious thing I'd ever seen."
"Mystical adventures seemed to involve a lot of minor aches and pains that didn't make it into the stories."
"'Hello,' I said, and discovered that even in the awe of this moment, there was room for embarrassment at my own inanity."
So, yeah. I thought this book did a ton of things impressively, if not flawlessly, and was also a really, really fun read. I am definitely looking forward to reading more things by Healey!
bingo: book set in a place I've wanted to visit for a long time (New Zealand!), author I have never read before, female protagonist. Also, they are not protagonist level, but there are several prominent characters of color, and a non-heteronormative character I liked a lot.
12. Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia -- about 15 years ago, my friend TK (the one who introduced me to B5) gave me two non-fiction books for my birthday. The first one was something by Carl Sagan (interesting, but didn't stick with me, I guess), and the second was The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks, which definitely DID stick around. I remember telling everyone bit of what I'd read in there, and thoroughly freaking out B and my friend R, who got the brunt of it. Some time ago I spotted Musicophilia at a garage sale and couldn't just leave it there. But because (you will have noticed) I'm really not much of a music person, I put off reading it until aletheiafelinea reassured me that it was possible to enjoy the book while not really careing about music. And so it was, although I did find Hat more engaging and memorable, and also now I really want to read An Anthropologist on Mars.
Compared to Hat, this one is skewed more towards "neat things the brain can do" and less towards "terrible ways in which you brain can betray you", which made it both less creepy but also less memorable than TMWMHWFAH. The most memorable chapter/essay I found was also the creepiest one, though -- the case of Clive Wearing, the British musicologist with the most severe case of amnesia ever recorded. The diary entries are terrifying: "[H]is journal entries consisted, essentially, of the comments 'I am awake' or 'I am conscious,' entered again and again every few minutes. He would write: '2.10 pm: this time properly awake... 2:14 pm: this time finally awake... 2:35 pm: this time completely awake,' along with negations of these statements: 'At 9.40 pm I awoke for the first time, despite my previous claims.' This in turn was crossed out, followed by 'I was fully conscious at 10:35 pm and awake for the first time in many, many weeks.' This in turn was canceled out by the next entry." This is possibly the most terrible thing I can imagine... The fact that he and his wife have managed to remain in love through 20 years of this is equal parts heartening and amazing to me; I cannot imagine how one could continue to live with this for so long, though, I suppose one cannot actually go mad when one has no memory of any of the 20 years of living this way outside of the present moment... The illustration of the difference between procedural memory (which he retained) and episodic memory (which he lost) is fascinating, too, but mostly this chapter just freaked the hell out of me. (Sacks also wrote a New Yorker article about this case which has much of the same information.)
Along less terrifying lines, I also really enjoyed the chapter on Williams syndrome. I forget where I first heard about it -- House, maybe? -- but I've been intrigued by it since and had read up on the symptoms and such, and the chromosome deletion that causes it, but this was the first I'd heard of the neurological differences between brains of patients with Williams syndrome and normal brains, and that was really interesting. And the story of Heidi, both as a child who refused to believe there was such a thing as strangers and as an adult who found her calling, was really touching. I kind of wish the book had ended on that note and not the chapter on dementia, even though that has a bittersweet poignancy of its own.
Neat things I learned:
Stuff about absolute pitch, like that it's more common in blind musicians, that it's more common for speakers of tonal languages (in a study, ~60% of Chinese music school students had absolute pitch vs 14% in the US), that there seems to be evidence that, like with the ability to recognize and produce all phonemes, infants are born with absolute pitch and then most lose that ability: "This suggested to them that absolute pitch may be universal and highly adaptive in infancy but becomes maladaptive later and is therefore lost. 'Infnts limited to grouping melodies by perfect pitches [...] would never discover that the songs they hear are the same when sung in different keys or that words spoken at different fundamental frequencies are the same." Also, the possibility of releasing absolute pitch via transcranial magnetic stimulation. And the Finnish entomologist who had absolute pitch and could actually pinpoint the precise frequency of an insect's wingbeats by that alone.
Stuff about historical figures, like Nabokov's synaesthasia (shared by his wife and son) and Hoffman likely had it too. And especially neat is the idea that synaesthesia might be something common in infancy that atrophies around 2-3 months of age in most people. (Actually, the stuff about colors having textures/tastes for synaesthetes made me wonder if L had something like it with her mysterious avoidance of 7 or other numbers containing 7 when she was little, but she says no). Che Guevara lacked a sense of rhythm, Freud's feelings about music ("Some rationalistic or perhaps analytic turn of mind in me rebels against being moved by a thing without knowing why I am thus affected and what it is that affects me"), Ulysses S. Grant who (apocryphally) only knew two songs ("One is Yankee Doodle and the other is not") and "the French neurologist [...] who once told me that when he heard music, he could say only that it was 'The Marseillase' or that it was not [...] I should have asked him how the recognized 'The Marseillaise': Was it by rhythm or the sound of a particular instrument? By the behavior or attention of other people around him? And what did it actually sound like to him?"
People's ability to, as Sacks's father, "play a score almost as vividly in his mind, perhaps with different moods or interpretations, and sometimes improvisations of his own. His favorite bedtime reading was a dictionary of musical themes." Or, "a very musical friend described to me how once, having put a favorite Mozart record on his turntable, he listened to it with gret pleasure, and then went to turn it over to play the other side -- only to find that he had never played it in the first place." This is so, SO alien to me... O.o
The musical "release" hallucinations of people who are going deaf and whose aural part of the brain requires stimulation it's not getting and so just makes some up -- and the way they can sometimes be totally random (like patriotic songs from the Boer War that Sacks's mother heard) or unpleasant, like the Jewish man who grew up in 1930s Germany and kept hearing Nazi marching songs.
Music as a remedy for aphasia: "They reported [...] that there was not only an inhibition of Broca's area in apahasic patients, but hyperactivity of a homologous area in the right hemishere. [...] This sutained hyperactivity on the right side exerts and active inhibiting action on the 'good' Broca's are, which, in its weakened state, is powerless to resist. The challenge, then, is not only to stimulate the normal, left Broca's area, but to find a way to damp down the right Broca's area, with its malignant hyperactivity. Singing and melodic intonation seem to do exactly this: by engaging the right-hemisphere circuits in normal activity, they disengage them from pathological activity."
The rhythmic commonalities between a nation's language and music.
The girl with an eidetic memory for anything she could put to music ("No wonder I like her answers. She's quoting my lectures word for word!")
And I just liked the way he worded the experience of being married to someone with progressive dementia as the "inch-by-inch way in which she was being widowed". Because, OUCH. :(
Also, I have no idea if it's that Sacks is truly mentioning it more because there are more autobiographical bits in this book, including his childhood, or if I'm more attuned to it now and noticing it more, but I felt like there were a lot more Jewish themes and mentions here -- memories of his Orthodox family, Aramaic seder song, etc. And the tiny little chapter on "accidental davening", too.
bingo: non-fiction book, book of essays, I think this also counts for book written by someone famous for something other than writing, since Sacks is a doctor first and foremost and came to prominence as a result of the treatment of the Awakening patients.
13. Terry Pratchett, A Blink of the Screen -- this is the book of short stories from across PTerry's career (the first story, his first sale, is from when he was 13) that I did not realize existed until I stumbled across it while looking for Rivers of London at Heathrow. It's been sitting on my shelf since summer, waiting for the right time. Well. Spoilers for individual stories
There is a foreword by A.S.Byatt, from which I really liked this line: "You think you know all it is possible to know about a dragon, or a policeman, or a plot or a landscape, and he tells you more, a lot more than you had any right to expect, and this is exhilirating." Yes.
"The Hades Business" -- the story from when he was 13, and this was such a trip, because this is very much the sort of thing I remember trying to write when I was 13. I mean, PTerry, being PTerry, is quite a bit better at it than I was, but there's the Very Clever Premise and Very Clever Allusions and Very Clever Twist Ending, and it's all rather adorable. I laughed at the bust of Darwin shattering during divine manifestation, and I laughed even harder at the biographical note, which starts off "if I put my fingers in my ears and go 'lalalala' loudly I won't hear you read this story" and contains the really great line: "I was even bad at sports, except for the one wonderful term when they let us play hockey, when I was bad and very dangerous", because YES, that is also really, really familiar (field hockey in ninth or tenth grade, ahaha) and "But the other kids had like it [the story[. I'd sniffed blood" (and that was me at 11, during the Platon craze I'd somehow managed to kick off with my classmates). It's actually a totally cute story, but I'm definitely reading it more for 13-year-old Terry Pratchett and his older self looking back at that kid than for the plot.
"Solution" -- this is basically a joke in flash fic form. I'm not surprised PTerry has no recollection of it decades on.
"The Picture" -- yep, this is the sort of stuff I was trying to write, too, the short story illuminated by the final twist. Pratchett's better at it, unsurprisingly, at fifteen, than I was at the same age. But I'm glad he went on to embed his jokes and his twists in something more... meaty and permanent as he got older.
"The Prince and the Partridge" -- this is a retelling of "The Twelve Days of Christmas" as a fairy tale meant for a kiddie audience, and yet it kind of works. And there are Pterry's drawings, which are adorable, especially the partridge with the eyebrows.
"Rincemangle, the Gnome of Even Moor" -- mainly interesting to me as the obvious precursor for Rincewind's name. Apparently this idea eventually grew into Truckers, but as I haven't read that, the gnomes made me think of much-less-fun Feegles.
There are several pieces from the time he was working as a journalist which are creative sketches more than short stories, I'd say. "There's No Fool Like an Old Fool Found in an English Queue" made me laugh, "Kindly Breathe in Short, Thick Pants" was mildly amusing, and "Coo, They've Given me the Bird" basically comes down to "Russia, LOL" and "pigeons, LOL". And I'd say "And Mind the Monoliths" belongs in this category as well -- it's more like a short story, but, like, na zlobu dnya; it didn't do much for me, possibly you had to be there. Oh, and also a fake bio for the National Portrait Gallery, which is mildly amusing but doesn't really feel like it's got that Pterry touch. There are also two poems, "The Glastonbury Tales" and "The Secret Book of the Dead", which are not bad in their own right, but don't at all do for me what Pterry's prose does.
Of the proper short stories:
"The High Meggas" -- which is apparently the short story that kicked off The Long Earth idea (which I have not read and have not heard great things about). The story itself was engaging enough, but felt the least Pratchetty of all. The worldbuilding was interesting, and the ideas, but none of the characters appealed at all. It's also the only one of the lot that doesn't have some element of humour in it, and that just feels wrong. I did like the line (about diverging parallel earths) "California was already sparsely colonized out to several K [thousands of earths], and at the far ends was beginning to develop in ways that even Californians thought were nutty. In what remained of the USSR security men were combing nearby worlds for the previous lot of security men." But there's also a line (that a character speaks, so I'm not attributing the views to anyone real) that didn't sit right with me -- it just makes it harder to like the story I was already very lukewarm on.
"Twenty Pence, with Envelope and Seasonal Greeting" -- this is a gimmick story, Victorian-type horror with Christmas cards. Maybe I'd like it if I liked Victorian horror or Christmas cards. As it is, this was probably the story I was least interested in in the collection.
"Incubust" -- a drabble, that he managed to fit a footnote in. I would've expected Pratchett to be a master of the drabble, because he can be succinct and profound at once. But this is not profound, merely punny.
"Final Reward" -- a story about a writer visited by his creation, Erdan the Barbarian. This was quite a lot of fun, though not, like, Pratchett levels of fun. Favorite line: "he'd survived on 10,000-year old wooly mammoths, fortuitously discovered int he frozen tundra. Dogger had actually done some research about that. It had told him it wasn't in fact possible, but what the hell."
"Turntables of the Night" -- my favorite non-Discworld story, although it *feels* like a Discworld story, because it's a DEATH story. This is the point where Pratchett is starting to feel like Pratchett (1989, which is right around Wyrd Sisters/Pyramids/Guards! Guards!). I like the characters, the narrator and Wayne, the friend he is talking about, I like the dialogue, the set-up and the payoff in the last couple of lines. Just a really great story.
"#IFDEFDEBUG + 'world/enough' + 'time'" -- don't like the title, but I did like the story, a virtual-reality set mystery with a fun and likeable narrator.
"Hollywood Chickens" -- I surprised myself in really enjoying this one, because at first I didn't think it would work for me. But it's actually a great illustration in how the jokes that used to be the only thing anchoring the story now have all kinds of other things going on, stylistically and with characters and with story structure. Because this is basically an extended "why did the chicken cross the road" joke, but it actually totally works as a story, with pathos and suspense and worldbuilding and everything. I ended up really liking the way interspersed 'transcripts' of chicken speech show how the little community evolves religion, democracy, mechanical flight, rockets, and apparently FTL travel.
"Once and Future" -- Melin the time-traveler is probably a totally common conceit; I wouldn't know because I tend to steer clear of Arthuriana on account it bores me. But I liked this story, Mervin the narrator and Nimue his helper, and even the glimpse of Ursula. Favorite line: "You can't start with a democracy. You have to work up through stuff like tyranny and monarchy first. That way people are so relieved when they get to democracy that they hang on to it."
"FTB" -- another Christmas story, which is just my thing, but the last line is great: "'It's just that every time we take it off, the computer beeps at us and shuts down.' The engineer shrugged. 'Well, there's nothing I can do,' he said. 'You'll just have to put the teddy bear back.'"
Kind of interesting: I noticed that as we got to the short stories I really enjoyed, most of them were narrated in first person ("Turntables", "IFDEFDEBUG", "Once and Future", and even "Chickens" is written as a series of reports by a police officer), something Pratchett does with a lot of flair but that I haven't seen before because none of the Discworld books or the other ones I've read (Dodger, Nation, and the Carpet People) are like that.
Discworld stories:
"Troll Bridge" -- as I've mentioned elsewhere, I've read the story already -- it was actually my introduction to Pratchett. It was neat to reread it having read the entirety of the Discworld books, knowing how trolls work and who Cohen the Barbarian is. And I really liked the introductory note: (the story was written for a collection honoring Tolkien) "it seemed to me there was a mood I could aim for. Things change, things pass. You fight a war to change the world, and it changes into a world with no place in it for you, the fighter. Those who fight for the bright future are not always, by nature, well fitted to live in it."
"Theater of Cruelty" -- aka the one where Carrot interviews DEATH as a witness to a suspicious death, because, well, he was there, wasn't her. I like early Carrot, and have missed him in the more recent books! P.S. From Pterry's intro note I also learned that a dog named Toby is frequently part of Punch and Judy proceedings. Ohhhh, apparently that was a bit I missed in Rivers of London.
"The Sea and Little Fishes" -- a Granny and Nanny story, longer than the others and a lot of fun, very Witchy. Pterry says that if a short story/novellette opportunity hadn't fortuitously come along, it would've probably been the beginning of a novel, or a thread in one, and, yeah, I bet it would've been, because it feels like that. But it works very well at its current length, and both Esme and Nanny are great in it. The creepifyingness of Esme trying to be nice, and their different philosophies and ways of being, and Granny "winning" the Trials in a way that everyone realizes, even though there is no formal winner at all, without participating and without even doing any magic (though, of course, she cannot resist showing off after the fact, with lighting the celebratory bonfire). I really liked it! And the deleted scene in the Appendix was neat, too, though I definitely agree the story is better without it.
Quotes from the story:
"It was the same in just about every trade. Sooner or later someone decided it needed organizing, and the one thing you could be sure of was that the organizers weren't going to be the people who, by general acknowledgement, were at the top of their craft. They were working too hard. To be fair, it generally wasn't done by the worst, neither. They were working hard, too. They had to. No, it was done by the ones who had just enough time and inclination to scurry and bustle. And, to be fair, the world needed people who scurried and bustled. You just didn't have to like them very much."
"Many people could say things in a cutting way, Nanny knew. But Granny Weatherwax could listen in a cutting way. She could make something sound stupid just by hearing it."
"People speak highly of her [Mrs Earwig]"
Granny sniffed. "Do they speak highly of me?" she said.
"No, they speak quietly of you, Esme."
"Good."
"You got on a lot better with people when you remembered to put frills round it, and took an interest, and said things like, 'How are you?' Esme didn't bother with that kind of stuff because she knew already. Nanny Ogg knew too, but also knew that letting on you knew gave people the serious willies."
"And it's the look you had the time all the snow slid down on ole Millson's house just after he called you an interfering old baggage..." said Nanny.
Granny hesitated. Nanny was pretty sure that had been natural causes, and also that Granny knew she suspected this, and that pride was fighting a battle with honesty--
"That's as may be," said Granny, noncommittally.
"[Nanny] herself didn't like winning things. Winning was a habit that was hard to break and brought you a dangerous status that was hard to defend. [...] Nanny had always pursued the policy of being a good loser. People liked you when you almost won, and bought you drinks. [...] Runners-up had more fun, she reckoned."
"This year Nanny had been idly working on the Man of Straw. It was an ideal trick for her. It got a laugh, it was a bit suggestive, it was a lot easier than it looked but showed she was joining in, and it was unlikely to win."
Nanny: "I did start out in witchcraft to get boys, to tell you the truth."
Esme: "Think I don't know that?"
"What did you start out to get, Esme?"
Granny stopped, and looked up at the frosty sky and then down at the ground.
"Dunno," she said at last. "Even, I suppose."
And the last bit, with the onion named after her (to Nanny's apples)
"A very useful vegetable, the onion," [Granny] said at last. "Firm. Sharp."
"Good for the system," said Nanny.
"Keeps well. Adds flavour."
The rest is not really stories but supplementary convention swag and such. Well, with the exception of the "A Collegiate Casting-Out of Devilish Devices", which is more storylike and was my favorite, because it's all academia LOL, and a very short story about DEATH and quantum. Beyond that, there's the story behind the Ankh-Morpork national anthem (which was written for and sung on BBC here), Vetinari's speech on the occasion of "twinning" with a real city, "Medical Notes" (which read like extended footnotes), a history of "Thud!", from which I learned that Thud-the-game, invented by a game designed came first, and the book grew up around it, Unseen Academicals cards, and a committee proposing the creation of Ankh-Morpork boy/girl scouts. Reasonably entertaining, but not like the real stories.
bingo: book of short stories, funny book
**
CSRB update: I have a bingo! :D [All three cards]
Serious: 9/25
Book with a female protagonist: Guardian of the Dead
Short story collection: A Blink of the Screen
Non-fiction book: Musicophilia
Books with a protagonist of color: Smek for President
Free Space: Point of Knives
Second book in a series: Red Seas Under Red Skies (Locke Lamora #2)
Book given to you as a gift: Wool (birthday present from my friend R)
Book with red cover: Benedict Jacka, Hidden
Author I've never read before: Melissa Scott, The Kindly Ones
Random: 8/25
Book set in a place you've wanted to visit for a long time: Guardian of the Dead (New Zealand)
Book written by someone famous for things other than writing: Musicophilia (Oliver Sacks is a neurologist)
Book by an author who shares the first letter of your last name (challenge mode: author who shares your initials): Smek for President, by Adam Rex
Free Space: Red Seas Under Red Skies
Book where male and female protagonists don't fall in love: Three Parts Dead (counting Tara and Abelard as the mains)
Independently published book: Wool
Book by queer author: Melissa Scott, The Kindly Ones
Book with queer protagonist: Melissa Scott, Point of Knives
Mix'n'Match: 11/25 and BINGO!
Book set in a place you've wanted to visit for a long time: Guardian of the Dead (New Zealand)
Book written by someone famous for things other than writing: Musicophilia (Oliver Sacks is a neurologist)
Funny book: A Blink of the Screen
Book with an author or protagonist of color: Smek for President
Book given to you as a gift: Republic of Thieves
Free Space: Hidden (Alex Verus #5)
Book where male and female protagonists don't fall in love: Three Parts Dead (counting Tara and Abelard as the mains)
Independently published book: Wool
Second book in a series: Red Seas Under Red Skies (Locke Lamora #2)
Book with queer author or protagonist: Melissa Scott, Point of Knives
Book by an author I've never read before: Melissa Scott, The Kindly Ones
And as a quick reminder, for people who are playing along with the Reading Bingo or would like to:
Cards and recs
Sharing and bragging post -- where we have our first bingo! Check out dhampyresa's banner :) (will be making these for anyone who gets to bingo or blackout and wants one)
tag: http://hamsterwoman.livejournal.com/tag/csrb
*
Also continuing to watch stuff: getting in the swing of Angel and making creeping progress on B5 now that my favorite arcs are done.
Babylon 5 (spoilers):
"Racing Mars" (4x10) -- So the thing I best remember about this episode is "Woo hoo" (the rodents laughed so hard, at that, and at Sheridan's expression when he walks in and sees the waiting Minbari, and when Delenn drags him into the bedroom). The whole thing with the two of them was great, and we also enjoyed the opening scene where Ivanova relieves him of command and sends him on vacation. Marcus and Franklin bits are also cute, especially the I Spy game ("Boxes", "More boxes", "Even more boxes"), and Marcus getting all into the pretending-to-be-married thing. The Garibaldi parts are painful to watch, though, especially the scenes with Sheridan. Also, I like the line that implies the Pope is a woman at this point.
Angel (spoilers):
OK, I admit, the credits music is growing on me.
Parting Gifts (1x10) -- OK, I feel kind of terrible about it, but I laughed out loud during Cordelia's commercial audition, where she's breaking down over Doyle's death while trying to be enthusiastic about stain remover -- the panel's expressions specifically did me in. Cordelia kissing people as an experiment, Wesley in leather being very insistent that he is a *rogue* demon hunter, Cordelia driving up the bidding on herself and being offended that it had started at only $2000 was also great. I totally fell for the twist with Barney the nebbishy empath demonkill being the bad guy, and I liked that Cordelia ended up being the one to kill him (and saving Wesley in the process); I had also liked Cordelia's "You are in great..." "Danger?" "Pain!" as she knees Barney in the groin. Basically, go Cordy! Wesley is a nice addition to the cast, even though he's like a walking locus of second-hand embarrassment, from the ridiculous (struggling to extract the knife from his ankle sheat) to the sad (attempting to translate the dying demon's Kungai) to the bitter (the self-castigation just before Angel tells him he needs his help saving Cordelia). Also, OK, the Wesley/Cordy kiss was kinda hot. The Wolfram and Hart lawyer looked interesting. And, on a totally random note, the Kungai demon looked like G'Kar to me -- something about the eyes, I guess, and the bonyness of the make-up?
Somnabulist (1x11) -- eh, a fairly interesting plot, but too heavy on Angel vs the ensemble cast, which don't tend to be my favorite. I did like his stark "They're not nightmares. I've been enjoying them." and the way "The tabloids are calling him the pope" echoes when Kate had jokes that only popes and I forget who, rock stars use one name, and Angel said "you got me, I'm the pope". Speaking of plot: seriously what is Kate doing going in there alone, without any backup? I did like the scene where she shoots Penn and he falls, and she checks his pulse to confirm he's dead before he reaches out and grabs her. Also, I kept thinking that Penn, the vampire Angel sired, looked familiar but couldn't place him until I looked it up on Wiki and turns out it's Hawkeye XD OK, he's definitely better with the cleanshaven look, but, acting-wise, I liked him better here than as either Hawkeye or Hansel.
Expecting (1x12) -- Charisma Carpenter is so pretty! I liked the funny beginning, with Wesley and Angel trying to cover for Cordelia's vision with Cordy's friends ("the good ones are always gay"), the classy Cordy/Wilson make-out montage, Phantom Dennis being jealous at first, and offering Cordy tissues when she asks Angel and Wesley to leave, Angel being grossed out by Cordelia drinking blood from the fridge, and the "moral": "I learned, um, men are evil? Oh wait, I knew that. I learned that L.A.'s full of self-serving phonies? Nope, had that one down, too. Uh, sex is bad?" Angel: "We all knew that". And the liquid nitorgen thing, with Angel throwing the drum, Wesley shooting it, and Cordelia smashing the frozen demon was both cool on its own merits and I liked that all three of them got to play a part in destroying it.
She (1x13) -- The opening scene, with Wesley and Angel being utter dorks at Cordelia's party was hilarious (as was Cordy criticising Angel's party awkwardness; socially awkward Angel being made fun of by other people is my favorite Angel), and Dennis pulling out a chair and offering a beer to Angel was quite sweet. As was Cordy's "Now we're really-- Do I have to take a paycut? -- a team :)" -- it's so her! And LOL at Wesley going for a hug with Angel, who demurs. Also, Angel vs the cell phone gave me a giggle. And then there was plot, which, eh, whatever. Clearly, there's a Very Important Message, which is worthwhile but as anvilicious as something from an early season of Buffy (although having the demon princess be an antagonist is a somewhat interesting touch. Also, my previous exposure has to Bai Ling has been only via the Go Fug Yourself blog, and it is very hard for me to take her seriously in this role.