some books i read lately (october edition) (belated)
okay, i was in australia for half a month, so. i missed the day i'd normally put this up.
so, whatever, welcome to the "october" book post
League of Dragons: This was the very last book of the Temeraire series, wistful sigh. It's been such a fun ride.
I sent an ecstatic email to a friend immediately after I finished it, and I may as well just copypasta the email here, since it's basically a review (spoilers ahoy):
1) DANG ANAHUARQUE WAY TO WIN THE FUCKIN THRONE you go girl
2) so was that Tharkay asking Laurence out in the last scene or-
3) TEMERAIRE IN PARLIAMENT :DDD i can't wait
4) so has anyone written the Black Panther + Temeraire crossover fic yet? y'know, the one set after League of Dragons, where the whole balance of world power is totally shifted from our own history, and the whole continent of Africa is a giant fortress of FUCK OFF and can presumably amass incredible power all on its own, and also a young Prince T'challa rules with a trusted dragon companion-
-oh, or heck, the Tswana canonically hold that dragons are their ancestor's spirits reborn, right? something something Killmonger connecting with his dad again something etc etc
5) Ning is such a delightful little shit and so very much the child of Temeraire and Izkierka
6) gosh i'm full of such warm feelings now. such warm fun resolutions for like, everything. (churki finally got to meet hammond's family <3) i love this series so much
Leviathan Wakes: Hey did you like Firefly? Firefly was a fun time. Someone recommended this to me as "Firefly in book form" and it's a pretty accurate pitch. You've got a bunch of rogue-ish vagabonds hauling goods through space, when CRAZY SHIT HAPPENS and they get wrapped up in interplanetary war stuff while trying to mind their own business. Mal kinda-sorta maps to Jim, Zoe kinda-sorta maps to Naomi, and so on.
There is a side-ramble I could almost do here, about Leadership In Action-y Novels. I could also call this the "Why Isn't Hermione Granger Running Things" problem-it's way too goddamn common to have a brilliant, can-do-everything female sidekick, who for some goddamn reason defers to the "leadership" of some mediocre dude, and you're just sitting there like why?? that dude isn't even that great????
Leviathan Wakes doesn't subvert this, really-Naomi is Incredibly On Top Of Her Shit all the time-but it at least calls attention to it, in a scene that struck me. Naomi loses her shit at Jim at one point, for leaning on her too much-basically saying "look, I can fix the shit out of any engine, I can do some other shit, but you're the captain so fucking act like it, I don't want to have to make these choices-"
-and surprisingly he actually steps up, and makes some calls that Naomi couldn't have, and you're like, okay, at least there's a reason this dude is the leader and he's not taking her general badassery for granted.
As a mental exercise, compare this level of development to every other instance of the Why Isn't Hermione Granger Running Things problem in existence, and sigh quietly.
Anyway. Pick it up if you're looking for a fun low-effort space cowboy romp.
The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner: A very solid, very short little read. It's hard to say too much without spoiling, but it's basically a really slick YA fantasy heist novel, which I wish I'd read when I was eight, but is still a fun read at age twenty-eight.
I've been told the rest of the series is even better, and starts messing around with various political intrigue-y things and queer themes and stuff. I should... go bug the library to fetch me the rest of this series.
Places No One Knows by Brenna Yovanoff: I am irritated by how much I enjoyed this one.
It wound up on my to-read list by some means I can't remember, and it was just there at the library, so I checked it out even though the description really wasn't my kind of thing, and...
Well, and I read the first 200 pages in one huge go, and got pissed because i needed to go to bed but I wasn't finished and auuuughhh. (I finished it immediately after work the next day.)
There are so many eyeroll-worthy conventions here that should irk me. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl friend, trite. The notions of coolness that do not resemble at all what I remember from high school, ugh. And nothing much actually happens. And I don't understand why the dude is so relentlessly into her. And I don't understand why she can't just go for him. (But then, people who can't just go for it drive me bonkers in my daily life too, so.)
And yet. Somehow I found them all forgivable in this book. It helps that the narrator is such a strange, canny creature-I've mentioned before that I like seeing "emotionless" female characters, people who emotion in strange and invisible ways, and are intensely pragmatic, and so on, and the protagonist here is definitely that. (Apparently one of the readers of the first draft had to ask, "is she actually a sociopath, like, it's fine if she is, just unclear," so, lawl.)
At the risk of making it sound haughty or cheesy, the book has this intense undertow of, "love as a redemptive source." Not redemptive in the sense of saving you, or excusing you from crimes, or anything like that. Redemptive in the sense of, love being a way to feed the better parts of yourself, a way to keep an eye off the rat race and an eye on other people, as frustrating and weird and complicated as they are. I like this undercurrent so much more than more traditional treatments of love-it doesn't change you, it doesn't always make you high or giddy or start dreaming of weddings, but it gets you out of your own head (in this case, also out-of-body) and more genuinely in the world. So she loves Marshall, but it could be anyone; but it helps that Marshall's an endearing fellow all on his own.
The book, on the whole, reminded me a bit of Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You, in that they both feature a disaffected strange young protagonist and not much happens. But Someday failed to click with me at all, while this lit me up for days. So apparently novels about sufficiently disaffected young people are very taste-specific. And when something strikes you this viscerally, it's impossible to make any kind of general recommendation about the book.
So: it worked for me. I don't know if it'll work for you. But it's a damn quick read if you end up being into it, and I adored it.
Pelican Blood by Cris Freddi: This book was made into a movie, actually, and someone told me it was their favorite birding-themed movie, though "it has a lot of sex drugs and rock 'n' roll."
My boyfriend asked: "Is this like when people say Die Hard is their favorite Christmas movie?" Ha ha ha.
Naturally I ordered it immediately (had to get it shipped from the UK!), and, well, it's not unlike that.
This is a story about birders, no doubt-really, it's about the subculture of birding that the Brits call "twitchers", crazypants young people who get their highs by driving six, eight, twelve hours at a time, just for the chance of seeing a rare gull blown in from Nova Scotia last week. Backyard birding is tedious to them; having the longest life list is everything. And it's a superbly endearing portrait of that culture: getting woken up by your One Friend With A Car at 4am because someone saw a gull ten hours away, arguing about ID features with the other dozen people staked out to look in the fucking 40-degree rain, the brutal swiftness by which you determine whether someone is Legit or a Worthless Goddamn Stringer, completely losing your shit when you see a lifer, and so on.
What I was not expecting, and found surprisingly effective, was its portrait of a couple young, super disaffected people. The narrator's so detached and bored of everything that he kills a guy in the opening chapter, just because he can't think of any reason to keep being. He's normal in every other way, has friends and a job, just-can't see a point, and birding is just some sort of weird addiction and/or numbing thing for him. It's a mindset I struggle to understand, but the author portrayed it in a curiously compelling fashion.
There's not a strong narrative thrust, though, and what is there doesn't really stick the landing, hiccuping to a coda rather than having a proper ending. So I'm not sure I can recommend it if you're not into birding or birding culture already. But if you are, the birding bits will delight you, and the rest is a mixed bag with some pleasant surprises.
The Mushroom at the End of the World: Before I begin this review, I must include an obnoxious long aside. I'm sorry.
[BEGIN OBNOXIOUS LONG ASIDE]
Once, when I was a wee lass in college, I was in this West African history class, and you got class credit for attending a few of the regular seminars/symposium-type things around campus when they were related to African topics.
So I wandered into a random symposium, where a Highly Respected Anthropologist was going to talk about modern protest movements in South Africa.
I was super-hyped, as I knew near-nothing about South Africa at all, and wanted to learn. Yet the talk had a curious vagueness that I couldn't understand at all. She talked about protests in the 1990s but was vague on crucial details like "what they were protesting" and "economics factors leading up to the protests" and all that. She showed photos of the protests but with little context.
I thought maybe I was just missing something, that I didn't have enough context for the talk.
"It's common for these protestors to set property on fire," she said, showing some photos of cars set aflame.
I thought to myself, hmm, probably because fire is a cheap and effective means of resistance, maybe the people protesting are quite poor, maybe there's a tradition of setting stuff on fire-
"-which is interesting, because as in all ancient myths, fire is a life-giving source-
At that point I felt the blood vessels burst behind my eyes. I listened for another few minutes, and she kept rambling on about "primordial human urges" regarding fire (with no evidence or clear connection to these protests!), so I left before I said something angry and unwise.
Look, something like "fire is a life-giving source and thus people were tapping into their primordial desire to create" is something you can do as a literary analysis technique, but you cannot be tossing stuff like that around with real people who have real lives at stake. When using that perspective on a novel, you're gathering a new and beautiful way to interpret a piece of art; but unless real people actually communicate in some way that they are using fire in a protest for some symbolic reason, you don't get to just make up symbolism for them.
As is typical, I got temporarily Very Furious and read up a lot on What Is Anthropology Even so I could understand what the hell just happened.
My maximally uncharitable reading of anthropology is that it was a very valuable field at its inception, largely because historians couldn't be assed to cover the history of various indigenous and marginalized groups under the umbrella of "history", and thus anthropologists did all that good, important work for them. Nowadays, however, historians do cover all those various marginalized groups, and anthropologists are left doing a lot of strange, ill-fitting "cultural anthropology" sort of things, which often consist of gross misinterpretations of human cultures and weird literary-analysis-esque moves on real people's lives.
A more charitable reading is, look, that chick sucked at anthropology, and there's other anthropologists who suck in the same way, but the field is still valuable for valuing observational work and cross-cultural understandings in a way that's less suited to the history department.
But God. Fire as a life-giving source.
[END OBNOXIOUS LONG ASIDE]
The point of that long aside is to say: when I'm reading an anthropologist's work, my hackles go up, and I go into the piece already suspicious. But, somehow* I managed to buy this book, without actually realizing it was by an anthropologist, until I opened the first page. And at that point I was like, okay whatever, I already own it, let's see how it goes.
* "somehow" here honestly means "I was drunk and rambling through Amazon dot com," which is a truly dangerous combination, let's be real
Spoilers: it was very good, actually.
The book centers around the matsutake mushroom, which is considered a delicacy in Japan and is often used as a fancy gift. It doesn't cultivate well in labs/greenhouses/etc, so the only way you can obtain it is by wandering out into the forest and picking it. Because of this, it's very expensive; because it's very expensive, communities spring up wherever the mushrooms grow, looking to earn some solid cash. The author spends a lot of time with these communities, particularly those of eastern Oregon, where a lively mixture of Vietnam war vets, Cambodian refugees, and Japanese immigrants converge each year to pick matsutake and sell it in bulk, sometimes earning enough money to cover their expenses for the whole rest of the year.
The basic thesis* of the book is, roughly: these communities are "outside" capitalism in some sense, or at least, can only exist in the "ruins" of capitalism. Whereas standard capitalistic systems rely on wages and employees and highly legible inventories, this relies on unattached people plucking & selling freely, without any employer or alienation involved. By looking at the economic, social, and biological patterns of these communities, we can get a sense of what human and nonhuman communities might look like in the near future, and how they might find meaning, as employment grows ever more precarious and supply chains sprawl ever more widely.
* the author resists the notion of a central thesis, instead claiming to present a variety of observations into an "assemblage", so understand that I'm simplifying quite a bit
"WAIT WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY OUTSIDE CAPITALISM-"
The obvious objection to the thesis is, isn't just describing capitalism? Once truffles were like this; now we've figured out how to cultivate most truffles in an industrial setting, which is why "truffle fries" is something you can order at plenty of gastropubs these days. If there's enough profit in it, eventually people will find a way to commoditize it; this is just the pre-commodified state and not unique in-and-of-itself.
Despite my general suspicion of modern economic theory, I couldn't help but find myself thinking this way when I started reading the book, frowning the whole while. It's hard to think outside of that framing. (See also: analytic philosophy.)
But here's the thing, I think-all humanities-ish (history, anthropology, literature, etc) discussion are actually tone arguments. Not "tone argument" in the sense of "don't dismiss my argument because I sound angry" (though I think there's some sort of interesting connection to be drawn there). I mean "tone argument" in the sense of, two people can work with the same data, state the same facts, and come out with different interpretations, and saying "you could describe interpretation A in terms of interpretation B" doesn't actually respond to interpretation A; it's just sidestepping the crucial question. For instance, "human life was nasty, brutish, and short, and then civilization happened and things keep getting better" is not more true than "humans lived in close-knit family groups with tight bonds, and civilization has alienated people from each other in insidious and sad ways." Both can be backed up by facts, and argued for reasonably.
The crux of such a discussion is: if both things are true, which one describes reality in a more useful way?
Once I kept that in mind, I found the book to be a more comfortable read. (If you studied history in college, you are probably rolling your eyes that this was a new "insight" for me; sorry, I'm too technocratic and literally-minded by nature!)
ANYWAY, in the case of this book, the question is, does this description of a society in the "ruins of capitalism" seem more useful than just describing it as a part of the usual path to industrialization?
And the book convinced me that, yes, that's a useful definition. Though, crucially, if this view is more true, it's a problem for both right-wing capitalists and lefty socialists. The author doesn't portray the mushroom-picking industry as some sort of happy self-sustaining commune that makes its own egalitarian society in the outskirts of Oregon. Instead, the lives these people lead are hard and precarious. Vietnam vets wound up there because they couldn't fit in with standard employment; Cambodian refugees wound up there because the kind of support systems that helped previous generations of immigrants integrate into the US had fallen away; some people are out to make a fortune, but most are just trying to be left alone, or else can't "fit" into regular jobs.
And essentially, the author's implying that this may become the new norm, that this is the natural result of our widely distributed global supply chains. One can glance at the contractor-ification of our economy in recent decades and see some of the truth of this there. And-yeah, that's a problem from a lefty perspective, because it seems to suggest there's a more deeply-rooted reason that it seems harder and harder to fund national infrastructure projects and such, one that's inextricably tied to the consequences of how we've structured our economies, and thus hard to fix in a policy proposal.
God I hope those paragraphs made sense. It's a weird little book and you should read it if my haphazard description of its "big ideas" sounds compelling.
THE BEST BITS
The author's descriptions of the mushroom-hunting villages are fascinating and highly tactile. They're depicted with loving attention and exacting detail; the tensions and different attitudes between the various people who come to the forest is wonderful to explore.
Also fascinating were some of the science-y bits that discuss how fungi work. I didn't really know anything about fungi going into this, and it turns out fungi are fucking weird and have a terrifying number of intimate, mutualistic relationships with higher life forms in general and I would like to learn more about them. (Also, yes, a subroutine in my brain started developing a fungi/bacteria-inspired magic system, because I've been trying to make biopunk a thing for a while now and boy is this ever biopunk.)
SOME STUFF THAT THIS BOOK REMINDED ME OF
* The book directly references James C. Scott's notion of "legibility", which at least serves as proof that Seeing Like a State is actually an important / well-regarded-ish text, rather than just The Kind Of Book Slate Star Codex Is Really Into.
* I thought of Into the Wild, Krakauer's book about that kiddo who wandered into middle-of-nowhere Alaska and tried to live off the land. He did this with little training and no real plan, which people tend to call "idiotic", but Krakauer argues it was very intentional: the kid felt there was nothing left uncharted, and thus no way to be free, so he simply "threw the maps away." Doing exhaustive research in advance and bringing proper safety gear would've been missing "the point" in some way (even if that point was, yeah, a little dumb).
This book made me wonder if that kiddo's life could've had a happier outcome, if he'd known about these matsutake villages. It's true there's no "escape" from the industrialized, commercialized world. No totalescape. But it's also true that little communities like this let you trade security for freedom, in a real way, not in a doomed false Quixotic way. It's not perfect, but it's an alternative to sheer recklessness or despair.
* There's a nice overview of the history of land use management in the United States, including the US Forest Service's surprising recent inclusion of matsutake into its management planning (previously focused exclusively on timber) even though picking in a lot of these forests is "technically" illegal. Most readers are probably all familiar with the disastrous results of the Forest Service's focus on fire prevention, which only gave way to much-more-sensible controlled burns in recent years. What was new, and interesting to me, was how the Japanese have tried to restore their local forests to promote matsutake growth-by specifically encouraging humans trampling around in the environment, cutting down trees, and so on, because that returns it to something closer to the state it was in when peasants were actually actively using and living off the land. This makes a further interesting contrast with Finnish forest management, which is highly regular and "industrialized", with even-aged strands of the same pine species throughout.
It all reminded me most of a very local, more recent controversy here in Seattle: the conversion of Union Bay Natural Area from mudflat to woodland.
Brief history time: Union Bay was previously known as Montlake Fill, and was, in fact, a giant garbage dump from the 1910s to the 1960s. (Previously, it was entirely underwater.) Eventually the local university filled it in, in the 1970s chose it to become an arboretum, and it enjoyed many decades as a protected, beautiful natural place right here in city limits. Of particular interest to birders was the many ponds and lakeshore the site offered, which drew in migrating shorebirds by the hundreds.
The Bay received a pile of money three years ago to overhaul its habitat (this was given as a way to "mitigate" the effects of expanding a nearby interstate). The US Army Corps of Engineers wanted to focus on restoring the habitat to a more "natural" state, e.g. by removing invasive blackberries and planting native plants and trees. On its face, this makes sense.
But there's something curious about the notion of restoring a previously-underwater, previously-garbage-dump site to a "natural" state. Even ignoring that aspect, the fact is, birds that thrive in native woodland are not facing any particular threats right now in Seattle, while shorebirds are in desperate decline worldwide, and even a small bit of migratory habitat would help them hugely. "Restoring" the native woodland actually means removing their habitat; they far prefer the mudflats.
Local nature groups spoke out, demanded a change of plans, submitted studies and reports. The USACoE didn't listen. The blackberries were ripped out in 2016 and a whole mess of new trees were planted.
Which is a huge downer, and I'm already noticing the shorebird declines after just a couple years. And yet: I still bird there. I wasn't around in the 90s to witness its heyday, though looking at those records makes me sigh with envy. But a little patch of nature is better than nothing. And the book offers a multitude of perspectives on the ways we've managed, mismanaged, and differently managed our land in the past, painting a broader picture of what this little anecdote hints that: that "conservation" is full of competing desires and interests and confusion, and is never so simplistic as Tree Huggers Vs The Corporations.
* Porpentine's penchant for trash-related motifs would gel well with this book.
FINAL THOUGHTS
The book leaves you feeling like you've just read a collection of only vaguely-related interesting shit, and that is, in fact, explicitly the intent (she refers to her book as as "assemblage" multiple times), so, mission accomplished. I found it a fun read, even though it got a bit repeating-itself-y near the end.
Also: near the end of the book, I found myself thinking: man, Ursula Le Guin would love this shit, all of these ideas are her jam, and it's even set in eastern Oregon! Then the author literally concluded the book by quoting Ursula Le Guin, so, ha. All crunchy vaguely-academic pacific northwesterners are the same person, apparently.
so, whatever, welcome to the "october" book post
League of Dragons: This was the very last book of the Temeraire series, wistful sigh. It's been such a fun ride.
I sent an ecstatic email to a friend immediately after I finished it, and I may as well just copypasta the email here, since it's basically a review (spoilers ahoy):
1) DANG ANAHUARQUE WAY TO WIN THE FUCKIN THRONE you go girl
2) so was that Tharkay asking Laurence out in the last scene or-
3) TEMERAIRE IN PARLIAMENT :DDD i can't wait
4) so has anyone written the Black Panther + Temeraire crossover fic yet? y'know, the one set after League of Dragons, where the whole balance of world power is totally shifted from our own history, and the whole continent of Africa is a giant fortress of FUCK OFF and can presumably amass incredible power all on its own, and also a young Prince T'challa rules with a trusted dragon companion-
-oh, or heck, the Tswana canonically hold that dragons are their ancestor's spirits reborn, right? something something Killmonger connecting with his dad again something etc etc
5) Ning is such a delightful little shit and so very much the child of Temeraire and Izkierka
6) gosh i'm full of such warm feelings now. such warm fun resolutions for like, everything. (churki finally got to meet hammond's family <3) i love this series so much
Leviathan Wakes: Hey did you like Firefly? Firefly was a fun time. Someone recommended this to me as "Firefly in book form" and it's a pretty accurate pitch. You've got a bunch of rogue-ish vagabonds hauling goods through space, when CRAZY SHIT HAPPENS and they get wrapped up in interplanetary war stuff while trying to mind their own business. Mal kinda-sorta maps to Jim, Zoe kinda-sorta maps to Naomi, and so on.
There is a side-ramble I could almost do here, about Leadership In Action-y Novels. I could also call this the "Why Isn't Hermione Granger Running Things" problem-it's way too goddamn common to have a brilliant, can-do-everything female sidekick, who for some goddamn reason defers to the "leadership" of some mediocre dude, and you're just sitting there like why?? that dude isn't even that great????
Leviathan Wakes doesn't subvert this, really-Naomi is Incredibly On Top Of Her Shit all the time-but it at least calls attention to it, in a scene that struck me. Naomi loses her shit at Jim at one point, for leaning on her too much-basically saying "look, I can fix the shit out of any engine, I can do some other shit, but you're the captain so fucking act like it, I don't want to have to make these choices-"
-and surprisingly he actually steps up, and makes some calls that Naomi couldn't have, and you're like, okay, at least there's a reason this dude is the leader and he's not taking her general badassery for granted.
As a mental exercise, compare this level of development to every other instance of the Why Isn't Hermione Granger Running Things problem in existence, and sigh quietly.
Anyway. Pick it up if you're looking for a fun low-effort space cowboy romp.
The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner: A very solid, very short little read. It's hard to say too much without spoiling, but it's basically a really slick YA fantasy heist novel, which I wish I'd read when I was eight, but is still a fun read at age twenty-eight.
I've been told the rest of the series is even better, and starts messing around with various political intrigue-y things and queer themes and stuff. I should... go bug the library to fetch me the rest of this series.
Places No One Knows by Brenna Yovanoff: I am irritated by how much I enjoyed this one.
It wound up on my to-read list by some means I can't remember, and it was just there at the library, so I checked it out even though the description really wasn't my kind of thing, and...
Well, and I read the first 200 pages in one huge go, and got pissed because i needed to go to bed but I wasn't finished and auuuughhh. (I finished it immediately after work the next day.)
There are so many eyeroll-worthy conventions here that should irk me. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl friend, trite. The notions of coolness that do not resemble at all what I remember from high school, ugh. And nothing much actually happens. And I don't understand why the dude is so relentlessly into her. And I don't understand why she can't just go for him. (But then, people who can't just go for it drive me bonkers in my daily life too, so.)
And yet. Somehow I found them all forgivable in this book. It helps that the narrator is such a strange, canny creature-I've mentioned before that I like seeing "emotionless" female characters, people who emotion in strange and invisible ways, and are intensely pragmatic, and so on, and the protagonist here is definitely that. (Apparently one of the readers of the first draft had to ask, "is she actually a sociopath, like, it's fine if she is, just unclear," so, lawl.)
At the risk of making it sound haughty or cheesy, the book has this intense undertow of, "love as a redemptive source." Not redemptive in the sense of saving you, or excusing you from crimes, or anything like that. Redemptive in the sense of, love being a way to feed the better parts of yourself, a way to keep an eye off the rat race and an eye on other people, as frustrating and weird and complicated as they are. I like this undercurrent so much more than more traditional treatments of love-it doesn't change you, it doesn't always make you high or giddy or start dreaming of weddings, but it gets you out of your own head (in this case, also out-of-body) and more genuinely in the world. So she loves Marshall, but it could be anyone; but it helps that Marshall's an endearing fellow all on his own.
The book, on the whole, reminded me a bit of Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You, in that they both feature a disaffected strange young protagonist and not much happens. But Someday failed to click with me at all, while this lit me up for days. So apparently novels about sufficiently disaffected young people are very taste-specific. And when something strikes you this viscerally, it's impossible to make any kind of general recommendation about the book.
So: it worked for me. I don't know if it'll work for you. But it's a damn quick read if you end up being into it, and I adored it.
Pelican Blood by Cris Freddi: This book was made into a movie, actually, and someone told me it was their favorite birding-themed movie, though "it has a lot of sex drugs and rock 'n' roll."
My boyfriend asked: "Is this like when people say Die Hard is their favorite Christmas movie?" Ha ha ha.
Naturally I ordered it immediately (had to get it shipped from the UK!), and, well, it's not unlike that.
This is a story about birders, no doubt-really, it's about the subculture of birding that the Brits call "twitchers", crazypants young people who get their highs by driving six, eight, twelve hours at a time, just for the chance of seeing a rare gull blown in from Nova Scotia last week. Backyard birding is tedious to them; having the longest life list is everything. And it's a superbly endearing portrait of that culture: getting woken up by your One Friend With A Car at 4am because someone saw a gull ten hours away, arguing about ID features with the other dozen people staked out to look in the fucking 40-degree rain, the brutal swiftness by which you determine whether someone is Legit or a Worthless Goddamn Stringer, completely losing your shit when you see a lifer, and so on.
What I was not expecting, and found surprisingly effective, was its portrait of a couple young, super disaffected people. The narrator's so detached and bored of everything that he kills a guy in the opening chapter, just because he can't think of any reason to keep being. He's normal in every other way, has friends and a job, just-can't see a point, and birding is just some sort of weird addiction and/or numbing thing for him. It's a mindset I struggle to understand, but the author portrayed it in a curiously compelling fashion.
There's not a strong narrative thrust, though, and what is there doesn't really stick the landing, hiccuping to a coda rather than having a proper ending. So I'm not sure I can recommend it if you're not into birding or birding culture already. But if you are, the birding bits will delight you, and the rest is a mixed bag with some pleasant surprises.
The Mushroom at the End of the World: Before I begin this review, I must include an obnoxious long aside. I'm sorry.
[BEGIN OBNOXIOUS LONG ASIDE]
Once, when I was a wee lass in college, I was in this West African history class, and you got class credit for attending a few of the regular seminars/symposium-type things around campus when they were related to African topics.
So I wandered into a random symposium, where a Highly Respected Anthropologist was going to talk about modern protest movements in South Africa.
I was super-hyped, as I knew near-nothing about South Africa at all, and wanted to learn. Yet the talk had a curious vagueness that I couldn't understand at all. She talked about protests in the 1990s but was vague on crucial details like "what they were protesting" and "economics factors leading up to the protests" and all that. She showed photos of the protests but with little context.
I thought maybe I was just missing something, that I didn't have enough context for the talk.
"It's common for these protestors to set property on fire," she said, showing some photos of cars set aflame.
I thought to myself, hmm, probably because fire is a cheap and effective means of resistance, maybe the people protesting are quite poor, maybe there's a tradition of setting stuff on fire-
"-which is interesting, because as in all ancient myths, fire is a life-giving source-
At that point I felt the blood vessels burst behind my eyes. I listened for another few minutes, and she kept rambling on about "primordial human urges" regarding fire (with no evidence or clear connection to these protests!), so I left before I said something angry and unwise.
Look, something like "fire is a life-giving source and thus people were tapping into their primordial desire to create" is something you can do as a literary analysis technique, but you cannot be tossing stuff like that around with real people who have real lives at stake. When using that perspective on a novel, you're gathering a new and beautiful way to interpret a piece of art; but unless real people actually communicate in some way that they are using fire in a protest for some symbolic reason, you don't get to just make up symbolism for them.
As is typical, I got temporarily Very Furious and read up a lot on What Is Anthropology Even so I could understand what the hell just happened.
My maximally uncharitable reading of anthropology is that it was a very valuable field at its inception, largely because historians couldn't be assed to cover the history of various indigenous and marginalized groups under the umbrella of "history", and thus anthropologists did all that good, important work for them. Nowadays, however, historians do cover all those various marginalized groups, and anthropologists are left doing a lot of strange, ill-fitting "cultural anthropology" sort of things, which often consist of gross misinterpretations of human cultures and weird literary-analysis-esque moves on real people's lives.
A more charitable reading is, look, that chick sucked at anthropology, and there's other anthropologists who suck in the same way, but the field is still valuable for valuing observational work and cross-cultural understandings in a way that's less suited to the history department.
But God. Fire as a life-giving source.
[END OBNOXIOUS LONG ASIDE]
The point of that long aside is to say: when I'm reading an anthropologist's work, my hackles go up, and I go into the piece already suspicious. But, somehow* I managed to buy this book, without actually realizing it was by an anthropologist, until I opened the first page. And at that point I was like, okay whatever, I already own it, let's see how it goes.
* "somehow" here honestly means "I was drunk and rambling through Amazon dot com," which is a truly dangerous combination, let's be real
Spoilers: it was very good, actually.
The book centers around the matsutake mushroom, which is considered a delicacy in Japan and is often used as a fancy gift. It doesn't cultivate well in labs/greenhouses/etc, so the only way you can obtain it is by wandering out into the forest and picking it. Because of this, it's very expensive; because it's very expensive, communities spring up wherever the mushrooms grow, looking to earn some solid cash. The author spends a lot of time with these communities, particularly those of eastern Oregon, where a lively mixture of Vietnam war vets, Cambodian refugees, and Japanese immigrants converge each year to pick matsutake and sell it in bulk, sometimes earning enough money to cover their expenses for the whole rest of the year.
The basic thesis* of the book is, roughly: these communities are "outside" capitalism in some sense, or at least, can only exist in the "ruins" of capitalism. Whereas standard capitalistic systems rely on wages and employees and highly legible inventories, this relies on unattached people plucking & selling freely, without any employer or alienation involved. By looking at the economic, social, and biological patterns of these communities, we can get a sense of what human and nonhuman communities might look like in the near future, and how they might find meaning, as employment grows ever more precarious and supply chains sprawl ever more widely.
* the author resists the notion of a central thesis, instead claiming to present a variety of observations into an "assemblage", so understand that I'm simplifying quite a bit
"WAIT WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY OUTSIDE CAPITALISM-"
The obvious objection to the thesis is, isn't just describing capitalism? Once truffles were like this; now we've figured out how to cultivate most truffles in an industrial setting, which is why "truffle fries" is something you can order at plenty of gastropubs these days. If there's enough profit in it, eventually people will find a way to commoditize it; this is just the pre-commodified state and not unique in-and-of-itself.
Despite my general suspicion of modern economic theory, I couldn't help but find myself thinking this way when I started reading the book, frowning the whole while. It's hard to think outside of that framing. (See also: analytic philosophy.)
But here's the thing, I think-all humanities-ish (history, anthropology, literature, etc) discussion are actually tone arguments. Not "tone argument" in the sense of "don't dismiss my argument because I sound angry" (though I think there's some sort of interesting connection to be drawn there). I mean "tone argument" in the sense of, two people can work with the same data, state the same facts, and come out with different interpretations, and saying "you could describe interpretation A in terms of interpretation B" doesn't actually respond to interpretation A; it's just sidestepping the crucial question. For instance, "human life was nasty, brutish, and short, and then civilization happened and things keep getting better" is not more true than "humans lived in close-knit family groups with tight bonds, and civilization has alienated people from each other in insidious and sad ways." Both can be backed up by facts, and argued for reasonably.
The crux of such a discussion is: if both things are true, which one describes reality in a more useful way?
Once I kept that in mind, I found the book to be a more comfortable read. (If you studied history in college, you are probably rolling your eyes that this was a new "insight" for me; sorry, I'm too technocratic and literally-minded by nature!)
ANYWAY, in the case of this book, the question is, does this description of a society in the "ruins of capitalism" seem more useful than just describing it as a part of the usual path to industrialization?
And the book convinced me that, yes, that's a useful definition. Though, crucially, if this view is more true, it's a problem for both right-wing capitalists and lefty socialists. The author doesn't portray the mushroom-picking industry as some sort of happy self-sustaining commune that makes its own egalitarian society in the outskirts of Oregon. Instead, the lives these people lead are hard and precarious. Vietnam vets wound up there because they couldn't fit in with standard employment; Cambodian refugees wound up there because the kind of support systems that helped previous generations of immigrants integrate into the US had fallen away; some people are out to make a fortune, but most are just trying to be left alone, or else can't "fit" into regular jobs.
And essentially, the author's implying that this may become the new norm, that this is the natural result of our widely distributed global supply chains. One can glance at the contractor-ification of our economy in recent decades and see some of the truth of this there. And-yeah, that's a problem from a lefty perspective, because it seems to suggest there's a more deeply-rooted reason that it seems harder and harder to fund national infrastructure projects and such, one that's inextricably tied to the consequences of how we've structured our economies, and thus hard to fix in a policy proposal.
God I hope those paragraphs made sense. It's a weird little book and you should read it if my haphazard description of its "big ideas" sounds compelling.
THE BEST BITS
The author's descriptions of the mushroom-hunting villages are fascinating and highly tactile. They're depicted with loving attention and exacting detail; the tensions and different attitudes between the various people who come to the forest is wonderful to explore.
Also fascinating were some of the science-y bits that discuss how fungi work. I didn't really know anything about fungi going into this, and it turns out fungi are fucking weird and have a terrifying number of intimate, mutualistic relationships with higher life forms in general and I would like to learn more about them. (Also, yes, a subroutine in my brain started developing a fungi/bacteria-inspired magic system, because I've been trying to make biopunk a thing for a while now and boy is this ever biopunk.)
SOME STUFF THAT THIS BOOK REMINDED ME OF
* The book directly references James C. Scott's notion of "legibility", which at least serves as proof that Seeing Like a State is actually an important / well-regarded-ish text, rather than just The Kind Of Book Slate Star Codex Is Really Into.
* I thought of Into the Wild, Krakauer's book about that kiddo who wandered into middle-of-nowhere Alaska and tried to live off the land. He did this with little training and no real plan, which people tend to call "idiotic", but Krakauer argues it was very intentional: the kid felt there was nothing left uncharted, and thus no way to be free, so he simply "threw the maps away." Doing exhaustive research in advance and bringing proper safety gear would've been missing "the point" in some way (even if that point was, yeah, a little dumb).
This book made me wonder if that kiddo's life could've had a happier outcome, if he'd known about these matsutake villages. It's true there's no "escape" from the industrialized, commercialized world. No totalescape. But it's also true that little communities like this let you trade security for freedom, in a real way, not in a doomed false Quixotic way. It's not perfect, but it's an alternative to sheer recklessness or despair.
* There's a nice overview of the history of land use management in the United States, including the US Forest Service's surprising recent inclusion of matsutake into its management planning (previously focused exclusively on timber) even though picking in a lot of these forests is "technically" illegal. Most readers are probably all familiar with the disastrous results of the Forest Service's focus on fire prevention, which only gave way to much-more-sensible controlled burns in recent years. What was new, and interesting to me, was how the Japanese have tried to restore their local forests to promote matsutake growth-by specifically encouraging humans trampling around in the environment, cutting down trees, and so on, because that returns it to something closer to the state it was in when peasants were actually actively using and living off the land. This makes a further interesting contrast with Finnish forest management, which is highly regular and "industrialized", with even-aged strands of the same pine species throughout.
It all reminded me most of a very local, more recent controversy here in Seattle: the conversion of Union Bay Natural Area from mudflat to woodland.
Brief history time: Union Bay was previously known as Montlake Fill, and was, in fact, a giant garbage dump from the 1910s to the 1960s. (Previously, it was entirely underwater.) Eventually the local university filled it in, in the 1970s chose it to become an arboretum, and it enjoyed many decades as a protected, beautiful natural place right here in city limits. Of particular interest to birders was the many ponds and lakeshore the site offered, which drew in migrating shorebirds by the hundreds.
The Bay received a pile of money three years ago to overhaul its habitat (this was given as a way to "mitigate" the effects of expanding a nearby interstate). The US Army Corps of Engineers wanted to focus on restoring the habitat to a more "natural" state, e.g. by removing invasive blackberries and planting native plants and trees. On its face, this makes sense.
But there's something curious about the notion of restoring a previously-underwater, previously-garbage-dump site to a "natural" state. Even ignoring that aspect, the fact is, birds that thrive in native woodland are not facing any particular threats right now in Seattle, while shorebirds are in desperate decline worldwide, and even a small bit of migratory habitat would help them hugely. "Restoring" the native woodland actually means removing their habitat; they far prefer the mudflats.
Local nature groups spoke out, demanded a change of plans, submitted studies and reports. The USACoE didn't listen. The blackberries were ripped out in 2016 and a whole mess of new trees were planted.
Which is a huge downer, and I'm already noticing the shorebird declines after just a couple years. And yet: I still bird there. I wasn't around in the 90s to witness its heyday, though looking at those records makes me sigh with envy. But a little patch of nature is better than nothing. And the book offers a multitude of perspectives on the ways we've managed, mismanaged, and differently managed our land in the past, painting a broader picture of what this little anecdote hints that: that "conservation" is full of competing desires and interests and confusion, and is never so simplistic as Tree Huggers Vs The Corporations.
* Porpentine's penchant for trash-related motifs would gel well with this book.
FINAL THOUGHTS
The book leaves you feeling like you've just read a collection of only vaguely-related interesting shit, and that is, in fact, explicitly the intent (she refers to her book as as "assemblage" multiple times), so, mission accomplished. I found it a fun read, even though it got a bit repeating-itself-y near the end.
Also: near the end of the book, I found myself thinking: man, Ursula Le Guin would love this shit, all of these ideas are her jam, and it's even set in eastern Oregon! Then the author literally concluded the book by quoting Ursula Le Guin, so, ha. All crunchy vaguely-academic pacific northwesterners are the same person, apparently.