some books i read lately (august edition)
The Deities Are Many: Greer's A World Full of Gods was more interested in theological questions-lengthy discussions about the nature of gods, and why polytheism makes more sense than monotheism, and so on and so forth.
Paper's The Deities Are Many, by contrast, despite its subtitle, is really more interested in a comparative analysis of world polytheistic religions. He draws some interesting connections between them, but mostly he gives you just a bit of vivid detail of each tradition, such that you're hungry to hear more. It reminded me of Karen Armstrong's A Brief History of Myth, but thsi book seemed more learned and delightfully detailed overall (e.g., his explication of what exactly the "totem"/"totem animal" concept means in Native American cultures was interesting and useful).
My only complaint is that it felt more like a survey course than a thesis, but luckily, he has written lots of other things & has a super-comprehensive related works + bibliography section, a huge chunk of which have landed on my "to read" list. Thanks, Paper!
A few other fun tidbits:
* the Saami were among the first people to domesticate reindeer, and they've historically had different words for "domesticated reindeer" vs "wild reindeer," and different religious rituals for how they're prepared. In general sacrificial cultures for livestock vs wild game tend to be very different, in fascinating ways & for fascinating reasons that are detailed in the book.
* In general, mid-latitudinal-cultures tend to revere the Sun deity as male (since it helps the crops grow and all). Circumpolar cultures, on the other hand, tend to see the Sun as female, due to the wonkier day/night cycles, relative lack of agriculture, etc. This leads to an interesting theory behind the origins of Amateratsu, the feminine sun-diety of the Japanese-could this be a bit of evidence for the popular theory that the early Japanese migrated to the islands from the far north?.
* did you know: the cross was actually T-shaped, but the Chrisian cross shape fit more neatly with a popular pagan symbol, so that wound up being the iconography that propogated? I mean, this is hardly unusual in the history of Christianity (see: like basically all the Christian holidays), but for some reason I thought at least the damn thing that hangs around everyone's neck would be a bit more original.
Kindred: I did not intend to read this in the week corresponding wit Octavia Butler's death (requiascet in pace), but, coincidences are like that sometimes.
Two main takeaways:
Butler packed a lot of love into Kevin and Dana's relationship, and I adored them both. And few scenes seem remarkable, in particular, for illustrating an interracial relationship's unique strains: Dana loves Kevin, she trusts him completely, but there's times when he doesn't "get" things on the level she needs him to, when they're dealing with racist-ass slaveholders in the antebellum south. He's never stupid or clueless (which would be both frustrating and unbelievable), just, in the stress of their situation, he'll offer a rationalization for some southerner's behavior, and she'll point out that it's more like a justification, and he says he wasn't trying to do that, and she says you weren't trying to but you were and then they'd end up fighting for a bit. And there was a kind of beauty in how they fought: they'd wrestle with that difference, they'd both wrestle to try and understand, and those fights did not always end in agreement or resolution (no two humans will ever be able to fully share each other's feelings!), but still... their feelings were explicated, they were known, and after that they could fall back on that love and trust between them.
Also, Kindred tapped into the strangeness of relationships with people we should hate, have a right to hate, but just don't. Aspects of Dana's relationship with Rufus reminded eerily of experiences I've had of my own. Obviously it's to a more extreme degree-I don't think I've ever had a kinship with a literal slaveholder-but I could see how and why, despite his being mostly a selfish little prat, and growing up to become a stupid and cruel adult, Dana cares about him, keeps wanting him to just be a little bit better. Just like no two humans can ever fully share each other's feelings-neither can you wish a feeling of friendship or kinship away. Even if it's impossible to defend, it's still there. And it's only the most dire of circumstances that has her finally turn against him.
Beasts Made of Night: zzzzzz (i wanted to like it, and since it was YA it was a fast enough read, but zzzzzz)
Feed: I remember this book being on all the shelves in Barnes & Noble when I was in middle school. I read the blurb on the back, rolled my eyes, look this guy's trying to be 1984 but for YA, and put it back. At the time, I experienced the internet as a pure source of joy: it's where I first read secular philosophy, where I found the only music I liked listening to (I hated anything that played on the radio until I was 19), where I made worlds with other people thousands of miles away. My cyberpunk future was Neuromancer, not some sort of brain-dead numbskull advertising hellscape.
Well.
Turns out this novel was pretty on-point, in a lot of ways. It taps into the feeling of relentless-notifications-dot-future super-well-at multiple points, the protagonist just wants to look up one thing or call one person and he has to keep doing the neural equivalent of "swiping" the bullshit away, and oh, I ached for him there. I don't think it captures the anxiety of it so well, though-he's portrayed as just "listening" to the Feed to veg out whenever he needs to relax, but the whole problem with notifications and clickbait is that they make you anxious and restless and itching to click something, and that's what they want you to feel.
Also, they get nutrient feeds at an IV party on the moon, which, y'know, is a literal thing that happened at a party I went to in Nashville, so.
Technology aside, though, what I was struck by was how ambiguous the novel is about its "dystopia," in a really good way. The protagonist is a shitty, self-absorbed teenager, like so many other shitty self-absorbed teenagers I've known, and it's unclear whether the Feed is what makes him so shitty, or if he'd be shitty in just about any universe. He doesn't know how to handle it when his girlfriend is dying; well, here's the shitty truth that so rarely gets touched on in public-lots of young people are shitty when it comes to death. Is the Feed exacerbating it, or just the most convenient way for him to not deal with his feelings?
I'm not sure. I like that I'm not sure.
Also the author has some startlingly beautiful turns of phrase. I highlighted these bits:
She walked in front of me. Her slippers went fitik, fitik, sliss, fitik on the floors. They were soft sounds, like the sounds mouths make when they close and open. I watched her from behind. When we stopped to wait for an uptube, she lifted her ankle so her heel came out of the slipper, and with her toes she slid it back and forth on the tiles without thinking about it. She massaged the floor. When the uptube was free, she settled her foot back in, and walked, fitik, fitik, sliss, fitik, right on in.
and
Try to move the foot. Just try.
[Violet] just sat there, smiling kind of sick, not moving while right next to her Mom and Smell Factor crinkled up the disposable table together and threw it away. Violet was still in her chair, near where the table had been. She was alone in the middle of the rug.
Finally, she moved the foot. She moved it slowly in circles. She breathed out really deep. Her eyes were closed, like it was sex.
I held out my hand and pulled her to her feet. She came to my arms like we were doing some kind of flamenco rumpus. My mom smiled, and my dad, who was still pissed, said, "Yeah. Cute."
and
Later, we went and climbed up an observation tower over the [meat] farm. It was getting to be sunset, so it was meg pretty.
We were sitting side by side, with our legs swinging on the wall of the tower, and the CloudsTM were all turning pink in front of us. We could see all these miles of filet mignon from where we were sitting, and some places where the genetic coding had gone wrong and there, in the middle of the beef, the tissue had formed a horn or an eye or a heart blinking up at the sunset, which was this brag red, and which hit on all those miles of muscle and made it flex and quiver, with all these shudders running across the top of it, and birds were flying over, crying kind of sad, maybe seagulls looking for garbage, and the whole thing, with the beef, and the birds, and the sky, it all glowed like there was a light inside it, which it was time to show us now.
Also, the slang is really impressive-very Future-sounding without being based on any actual slang system; it felt like slang I could actually be using in an alternate universe.
The fact that it's so short makes me feel comfortable recommending it to just about anyone-I don't think it'll blow you away, and the plot points are a little cliché, but, it made me laugh and made me think and that's pretty good for a slim YA book.
Blood of Tyrants: This was the book I brought with me to Alaska, because being trapped alone in the wilderness with a bad book was a dreadful prospect, and damn if I can't rely on the Temeraire books to be reliably entertaining. This was one of the weaker entries (possibly my second-least-favorite, after the adventures-in-Australia one), but it turns out even a weak Temeraire novel is still a rollicking good time. Laurencer's amnesia was a weird plot device, forcing us to rehash all the character development he'd been doing in the previous seven novels, but WHO CARES WE GOT TO SEE DRAGONS IN JAPAN. And seeing Napoleon on the battlefield was a delight as always. Was terribly disappointed that Tenzing "Sex Appeal In Literary Form" Tharkay wasn't featured more prominently also is it just me or is Laurence going gay for him but at least he got some stage time.
So sad I've only got one book left to read; I don't want the series to end!
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay: Ho boy. For something that everyone said was HOMG AMAZING and won the Pulitzer, I really expected something... more...?
I mean, sure, it's a Great American Novel, to the T. There's Romance and War and Major Life Events and Struggles With Identity and What It Means To Be A Man TM and all that. And there were times when I really appreciated its epic scope, where I was able to sink into the story and revel in the feeling that I was experiencing whole lives and worlds in these pages.
But the problem is, this thing is six hundred goddamn pages and only about 200-300 didn't risk my falling asleep.
The opening is slow, though there's enough warm feeling there to push you along. I'm not sure how you could shorten the opening-the book does need that time, to build up Joe's relationship with his brother, and the mystique and mystery of a magician's training (super-interesting to read about), and to make us really feel for him, in his harrowing escape from Prague. But it's still slow.
But then, Sammy and Joe go into business together, and the pages start crackling. This was the point, when reading, that I eagerly told friends that the book was finally getting good. Joe's deadpan and Sam's fast-talking wheeling-dealing play wonderfully off of each other; the frenetic energy of creation and spawning comic ideas and scribbling scribbling scribbling to make the damn things; the shenanigans and scuffles they get into hit both comic and somber notes with laser precision; I loved these guys and ached to see what would come of their success.
But then the novel separates the dynamic duo after a tragedy, and we hang out with Joe in Antarctica, and watch him mope around, and we also watch Sam and Rosa mope around, and there's some irritating sideshow with the kid that takes way too much time. And everyone has Feelings, and Chabon name-drops every goddamn public structure in New York City, and I'm head-in-hands going dude, I get it, everyone is sad and not doing anything about it, just get on with it. By the time I got to the end he'd burned up most of the goodwill he'd built during the middle section.
Like, sure, there's stuff that happens in the last third. It's not awful. It just doesn't have the crackle of the middle section and makes you wish you'd stopped reading halfway through. Alas.
Paper's The Deities Are Many, by contrast, despite its subtitle, is really more interested in a comparative analysis of world polytheistic religions. He draws some interesting connections between them, but mostly he gives you just a bit of vivid detail of each tradition, such that you're hungry to hear more. It reminded me of Karen Armstrong's A Brief History of Myth, but thsi book seemed more learned and delightfully detailed overall (e.g., his explication of what exactly the "totem"/"totem animal" concept means in Native American cultures was interesting and useful).
My only complaint is that it felt more like a survey course than a thesis, but luckily, he has written lots of other things & has a super-comprehensive related works + bibliography section, a huge chunk of which have landed on my "to read" list. Thanks, Paper!
A few other fun tidbits:
* the Saami were among the first people to domesticate reindeer, and they've historically had different words for "domesticated reindeer" vs "wild reindeer," and different religious rituals for how they're prepared. In general sacrificial cultures for livestock vs wild game tend to be very different, in fascinating ways & for fascinating reasons that are detailed in the book.
* In general, mid-latitudinal-cultures tend to revere the Sun deity as male (since it helps the crops grow and all). Circumpolar cultures, on the other hand, tend to see the Sun as female, due to the wonkier day/night cycles, relative lack of agriculture, etc. This leads to an interesting theory behind the origins of Amateratsu, the feminine sun-diety of the Japanese-could this be a bit of evidence for the popular theory that the early Japanese migrated to the islands from the far north?.
* did you know: the cross was actually T-shaped, but the Chrisian cross shape fit more neatly with a popular pagan symbol, so that wound up being the iconography that propogated? I mean, this is hardly unusual in the history of Christianity (see: like basically all the Christian holidays), but for some reason I thought at least the damn thing that hangs around everyone's neck would be a bit more original.
Kindred: I did not intend to read this in the week corresponding wit Octavia Butler's death (requiascet in pace), but, coincidences are like that sometimes.
Two main takeaways:
Butler packed a lot of love into Kevin and Dana's relationship, and I adored them both. And few scenes seem remarkable, in particular, for illustrating an interracial relationship's unique strains: Dana loves Kevin, she trusts him completely, but there's times when he doesn't "get" things on the level she needs him to, when they're dealing with racist-ass slaveholders in the antebellum south. He's never stupid or clueless (which would be both frustrating and unbelievable), just, in the stress of their situation, he'll offer a rationalization for some southerner's behavior, and she'll point out that it's more like a justification, and he says he wasn't trying to do that, and she says you weren't trying to but you were and then they'd end up fighting for a bit. And there was a kind of beauty in how they fought: they'd wrestle with that difference, they'd both wrestle to try and understand, and those fights did not always end in agreement or resolution (no two humans will ever be able to fully share each other's feelings!), but still... their feelings were explicated, they were known, and after that they could fall back on that love and trust between them.
Also, Kindred tapped into the strangeness of relationships with people we should hate, have a right to hate, but just don't. Aspects of Dana's relationship with Rufus reminded eerily of experiences I've had of my own. Obviously it's to a more extreme degree-I don't think I've ever had a kinship with a literal slaveholder-but I could see how and why, despite his being mostly a selfish little prat, and growing up to become a stupid and cruel adult, Dana cares about him, keeps wanting him to just be a little bit better. Just like no two humans can ever fully share each other's feelings-neither can you wish a feeling of friendship or kinship away. Even if it's impossible to defend, it's still there. And it's only the most dire of circumstances that has her finally turn against him.
Beasts Made of Night: zzzzzz (i wanted to like it, and since it was YA it was a fast enough read, but zzzzzz)
Feed: I remember this book being on all the shelves in Barnes & Noble when I was in middle school. I read the blurb on the back, rolled my eyes, look this guy's trying to be 1984 but for YA, and put it back. At the time, I experienced the internet as a pure source of joy: it's where I first read secular philosophy, where I found the only music I liked listening to (I hated anything that played on the radio until I was 19), where I made worlds with other people thousands of miles away. My cyberpunk future was Neuromancer, not some sort of brain-dead numbskull advertising hellscape.
Well.
Turns out this novel was pretty on-point, in a lot of ways. It taps into the feeling of relentless-notifications-dot-future super-well-at multiple points, the protagonist just wants to look up one thing or call one person and he has to keep doing the neural equivalent of "swiping" the bullshit away, and oh, I ached for him there. I don't think it captures the anxiety of it so well, though-he's portrayed as just "listening" to the Feed to veg out whenever he needs to relax, but the whole problem with notifications and clickbait is that they make you anxious and restless and itching to click something, and that's what they want you to feel.
Also, they get nutrient feeds at an IV party on the moon, which, y'know, is a literal thing that happened at a party I went to in Nashville, so.
Technology aside, though, what I was struck by was how ambiguous the novel is about its "dystopia," in a really good way. The protagonist is a shitty, self-absorbed teenager, like so many other shitty self-absorbed teenagers I've known, and it's unclear whether the Feed is what makes him so shitty, or if he'd be shitty in just about any universe. He doesn't know how to handle it when his girlfriend is dying; well, here's the shitty truth that so rarely gets touched on in public-lots of young people are shitty when it comes to death. Is the Feed exacerbating it, or just the most convenient way for him to not deal with his feelings?
I'm not sure. I like that I'm not sure.
Also the author has some startlingly beautiful turns of phrase. I highlighted these bits:
She walked in front of me. Her slippers went fitik, fitik, sliss, fitik on the floors. They were soft sounds, like the sounds mouths make when they close and open. I watched her from behind. When we stopped to wait for an uptube, she lifted her ankle so her heel came out of the slipper, and with her toes she slid it back and forth on the tiles without thinking about it. She massaged the floor. When the uptube was free, she settled her foot back in, and walked, fitik, fitik, sliss, fitik, right on in.
and
Try to move the foot. Just try.
[Violet] just sat there, smiling kind of sick, not moving while right next to her Mom and Smell Factor crinkled up the disposable table together and threw it away. Violet was still in her chair, near where the table had been. She was alone in the middle of the rug.
Finally, she moved the foot. She moved it slowly in circles. She breathed out really deep. Her eyes were closed, like it was sex.
I held out my hand and pulled her to her feet. She came to my arms like we were doing some kind of flamenco rumpus. My mom smiled, and my dad, who was still pissed, said, "Yeah. Cute."
and
Later, we went and climbed up an observation tower over the [meat] farm. It was getting to be sunset, so it was meg pretty.
We were sitting side by side, with our legs swinging on the wall of the tower, and the CloudsTM were all turning pink in front of us. We could see all these miles of filet mignon from where we were sitting, and some places where the genetic coding had gone wrong and there, in the middle of the beef, the tissue had formed a horn or an eye or a heart blinking up at the sunset, which was this brag red, and which hit on all those miles of muscle and made it flex and quiver, with all these shudders running across the top of it, and birds were flying over, crying kind of sad, maybe seagulls looking for garbage, and the whole thing, with the beef, and the birds, and the sky, it all glowed like there was a light inside it, which it was time to show us now.
Also, the slang is really impressive-very Future-sounding without being based on any actual slang system; it felt like slang I could actually be using in an alternate universe.
The fact that it's so short makes me feel comfortable recommending it to just about anyone-I don't think it'll blow you away, and the plot points are a little cliché, but, it made me laugh and made me think and that's pretty good for a slim YA book.
Blood of Tyrants: This was the book I brought with me to Alaska, because being trapped alone in the wilderness with a bad book was a dreadful prospect, and damn if I can't rely on the Temeraire books to be reliably entertaining. This was one of the weaker entries (possibly my second-least-favorite, after the adventures-in-Australia one), but it turns out even a weak Temeraire novel is still a rollicking good time. Laurencer's amnesia was a weird plot device, forcing us to rehash all the character development he'd been doing in the previous seven novels, but WHO CARES WE GOT TO SEE DRAGONS IN JAPAN. And seeing Napoleon on the battlefield was a delight as always. Was terribly disappointed that Tenzing "Sex Appeal In Literary Form" Tharkay wasn't featured more prominently also is it just me or is Laurence going gay for him but at least he got some stage time.
So sad I've only got one book left to read; I don't want the series to end!
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay: Ho boy. For something that everyone said was HOMG AMAZING and won the Pulitzer, I really expected something... more...?
I mean, sure, it's a Great American Novel, to the T. There's Romance and War and Major Life Events and Struggles With Identity and What It Means To Be A Man TM and all that. And there were times when I really appreciated its epic scope, where I was able to sink into the story and revel in the feeling that I was experiencing whole lives and worlds in these pages.
But the problem is, this thing is six hundred goddamn pages and only about 200-300 didn't risk my falling asleep.
The opening is slow, though there's enough warm feeling there to push you along. I'm not sure how you could shorten the opening-the book does need that time, to build up Joe's relationship with his brother, and the mystique and mystery of a magician's training (super-interesting to read about), and to make us really feel for him, in his harrowing escape from Prague. But it's still slow.
But then, Sammy and Joe go into business together, and the pages start crackling. This was the point, when reading, that I eagerly told friends that the book was finally getting good. Joe's deadpan and Sam's fast-talking wheeling-dealing play wonderfully off of each other; the frenetic energy of creation and spawning comic ideas and scribbling scribbling scribbling to make the damn things; the shenanigans and scuffles they get into hit both comic and somber notes with laser precision; I loved these guys and ached to see what would come of their success.
But then the novel separates the dynamic duo after a tragedy, and we hang out with Joe in Antarctica, and watch him mope around, and we also watch Sam and Rosa mope around, and there's some irritating sideshow with the kid that takes way too much time. And everyone has Feelings, and Chabon name-drops every goddamn public structure in New York City, and I'm head-in-hands going dude, I get it, everyone is sad and not doing anything about it, just get on with it. By the time I got to the end he'd burned up most of the goodwill he'd built during the middle section.
Like, sure, there's stuff that happens in the last third. It's not awful. It just doesn't have the crackle of the middle section and makes you wish you'd stopped reading halfway through. Alas.