Booklog 10: Questions need answers edition
It's October 31st, so, booklog! I didn't think I'd read much this month, but I must have done more waiting around than I realised. And I read some really good stuff, I think! Even the stuff I liked less was worth thinking about.
- The Deadly Dinner Party by Jonathan Edlaw
This is a non-fiction book of medical mystery case studies involving accidental poisoning. These are mostly food poisoning, but some other ways your environment can make you ill are involved as well. It's not massively thrilling, but it is reasonably interesting. If nothing else, it will definitely make you very careful about all ingestion for at least a week, omg. Though the creepiest one for me involved a bath sponge, omg.
- A Thousand Lives by Julia Scheeres
This is a non-fiction book about Jim Jones and the deaths of nearly a thousand people at his Jonestown camp. I had read a bit about Jonestown before, but this is the only book about it written after a whooooole bunch of primary source material had become available, and it's much the better for it. One lady had even written a diary every day for years - at Jones' behest - and the detail of daily life for her is really compelling.
This book is also notable for being very firmly on the side of the people Jim Jones conned, threatened, and bullshitted into joining him in Guyana. It tells the story through cases studies (I think five or six?) in detail, with the idea of explaining why anyone might follow Jim Jones in the first place, rather than just going "omg they were stupid to join a cult". It makes a very compelling argument that for most people there, they weren't stupid at all, just well-meaning and unlucky. The meglomania and evil built up over time until it exploded; it didn't start out that way. The stuff about Jones' early anti-racist work made it much clearer to me why even people like Harvey Milk were on Jones' side for a long, long time.
The other thing the focus on individuals does it help make it clear why, even when things were clearly very bad, people didn't just fight back. The sleep deprivation, the constant spying of everyone on everyone else, the perpetual stoking up of fear, the threats of violence, the control over all information coming in and out of the camp, the malnutrition - all those come through very clearly as adding up to a situation in which it was nearly impossible to do anything. If you haven't eaten properly or got a full night's sleep in months and you've got people with guns telling you everyone you previously knew has abandoned you, your homeland is now a dystopia and this is the best you're going to get... how are you supposed to stand against that? You can't. Honestly, it's incredible that as many people escaped as did.
I have such a weird compulsion to read about stuff like this, and I think that it's at least partly because I don't want to be one of those people who went in, talked to people, and didn't see how bad it was because they just couldn't believe the implications of what they were being told by survivors. They couldn't believe that any control could be that total, or that anyone could be as absolutely bug-fuck power-crazy as Jim Jones. But he was, and we have the audio tape and the nearly a thousand people dead to prove it.
- Thirteenth Child, Across the Great Barrier, and The Far West by Patricia C Wrede
This series is definitely best described as "frontier fantasy", which as a Brit is a bit weird. This is as American as it gets - wagon trails, settling out in dangerous inhospitable land. I mean, I enjoyed it in a lot of ways - I really like the main character and her growth towards appreciating her own awesomeness is exactly the sort of story I think girls need more of - but where I grew up, we really didn't get that myth of the American west at all.
There is also the extremely notable absence of the people who, in real life, were living in that "wild west" already. I can kind of see why someone might go "well, this is a fun series about wacky animals and travel that takes months and magic" and not want to deal with colonialism? But the problem is, the colonialism is already there, and ignoring it doesn't make it go away. If this is kinda "little magician on the prairie", you just can't do that and not have people remember that one of the famous bits in that book is the dad saying the only good Indian is a dead Indian. That atrocities were committed against Native Americans is just a fact which doesn't go away if you want it to. ESPECIALLY, I would assume, if you happen to be one of the people whose existence and history just got conveniently written out.
I kind of feel like the different-magics thing was supposed to help make up for that? Like, it is pretty cool that different cultures have different ways of doing magic and that using a blend of them is often better than just using one and being judgey about the others. (The insistence on that being a fundamentally "Columbian"/American thing is kind of anvilicious though.) But I really could not get over the sudden magical vanishing of an entire continent's worth of people! There was just no reasonable reason for it. I sympathise with the desire to not feature a whole load of racist horror in the story, but yo, you already had magic and ice dragons and whatever. There were other ways.
- The Island of Dr Moreau by HG Wells
This is a freaking weird book! I knew the basic plot already of course, but I'd never read it before, so when I saw it was on Gutenberg I thought I'd give it a go. And I just... I have absolutely no idea what this story thinks it's saying. I get the feeling that it's probably intended mostly as just "this is a creepy potential thing science could do, let me creep people out"? But the race stuff going on here is deeply, deeply odd on far more levels than I am capable of explaining or probably understanding.
Like, even if Wells was only drawing on the tropes about black people being animalistic for maximum freak-em-out value, what the hell? Are we supposed to read into that about the origins of said black people, or not, or what? And the end bit, is that about fear of mixed-race babies? It sort of veers all over the place, like, sometimes seeming to support all the worst racist readings and then sometimes undermining those and then supporting them again. And I feel entirely sure there's a lot more that I haven't thought of. It's a mess. It would however undoubtedly hit a bunch of nerves for a lot of people, so I am not surprised it's still famous.
- The Steerswoman and The Outskirter's Secret by Rosemary Kirstein
I have been looking for these for aaages, and I finally got them! This is the most difficult kind of book to review for me. I LOVE them and have already started the next one in the series and want everyone to read them and flail with me, and yet explaining WHY in even the most basic terms would be a massive, massive spoiler for most people. Like, even comparing it to anything at all would probably be enough of a spoiler to get me sporked in many communities. So all I will say is that there is a whooole lot more to them than is immediately apparent, in basically every way and they seem to just get better. Please, READ THESE BOOKS if you haven't! They have awesome ladies and adventures and amazingness, I promise. Then come back and flail!
If you have already read them, then you probably know what I'm gonna say next. SPOILERS NOW, PEOPLE.
I motherflipping love the way that the entire plot is basically "Rowan discovers she's wrong about what genre of book she's living in". I love it so much. I think I especially love it because of how well that's worked in as part of both the plot and Rowan's personality. Rowan, by virtue of both training and who she is as a person, doesn't quite fit with the fantasyland fascade. She fundamentally thinks there should be reasons for things - even if those reasons include stuff she doesn't currently understand, the possibility of understanding is a given. I adore that that is what gets her involved in the plot. Well, that and the fact she is actually good at maths and physics. Love it.
And oh, I really love the way that the revelations are paced - it must be so difficult to do something like that, where the understanding of the characters and the understanding of the reader are so different. The process of bringing them closer together is so exciting to me, I literally started the third book the minute I finished the second one even though I only had five minutes.
Oh, I also love that Rowan has both a female friend (who's badass! I love Bel!) and gets to have sex/romantic liasons which are part of her life but not overwhelming or undermining of her agency. It's great! And I actually really liked Fletcher - I felt so bad for him, once I got over my moment of AAAHHHH WHUT WHUT WHUT flail. I really need to know more, like, right now! I almost can't wait to finish this post to go and read the next bit!
- Excitements at the Chalet School and The Coming of Age of the Chalet School by Elinor M Brent Dyer
So,
nny and
catwalksalone and cat's husband and I all went to an amazing bookshop the other day, and while there I lucked on four Chalet School books I have either never read or had forgotten! Aaah, nostalgia. Love it.
And so I read these two in quick succession. :D (THe other two are a birthday gift, so I am gonna try not to read them until then.) I really adore them - yeah, their version of the world is old these days, but I still enjoy them so much in a very pathetic kind of way. I also properly started to recognise how astonishingly liberal they were for their time. Catholics and Protestants both valued! Girls from different countries living and working together! My god, for then, it's practially socialism. The editions I got - they are Girls Gone By editions - have stuff about the history of EBD herself and that also put some stuff into context in a really interesting way.
It is still deeply weird on disability, though, mostly due to Mary Lou, whose accident apparently makes her the final authority on all disability. And I noticed that even though there are a lot of deaths mentioned, and World War II is a massive part of the context (including noting that people have faced starvation and horrors, albeit not in detail), hardly anyone has parents or whatever who died in the war. It's always a car crash, or a tragic fever, or something similar. I haven't had many actual Thoughts about that yet, but I thought it was interesting!
This entry was originally posted at http://soupytwist.dreamwidth.org/119554.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
- The Deadly Dinner Party by Jonathan Edlaw
This is a non-fiction book of medical mystery case studies involving accidental poisoning. These are mostly food poisoning, but some other ways your environment can make you ill are involved as well. It's not massively thrilling, but it is reasonably interesting. If nothing else, it will definitely make you very careful about all ingestion for at least a week, omg. Though the creepiest one for me involved a bath sponge, omg.
- A Thousand Lives by Julia Scheeres
This is a non-fiction book about Jim Jones and the deaths of nearly a thousand people at his Jonestown camp. I had read a bit about Jonestown before, but this is the only book about it written after a whooooole bunch of primary source material had become available, and it's much the better for it. One lady had even written a diary every day for years - at Jones' behest - and the detail of daily life for her is really compelling.
This book is also notable for being very firmly on the side of the people Jim Jones conned, threatened, and bullshitted into joining him in Guyana. It tells the story through cases studies (I think five or six?) in detail, with the idea of explaining why anyone might follow Jim Jones in the first place, rather than just going "omg they were stupid to join a cult". It makes a very compelling argument that for most people there, they weren't stupid at all, just well-meaning and unlucky. The meglomania and evil built up over time until it exploded; it didn't start out that way. The stuff about Jones' early anti-racist work made it much clearer to me why even people like Harvey Milk were on Jones' side for a long, long time.
The other thing the focus on individuals does it help make it clear why, even when things were clearly very bad, people didn't just fight back. The sleep deprivation, the constant spying of everyone on everyone else, the perpetual stoking up of fear, the threats of violence, the control over all information coming in and out of the camp, the malnutrition - all those come through very clearly as adding up to a situation in which it was nearly impossible to do anything. If you haven't eaten properly or got a full night's sleep in months and you've got people with guns telling you everyone you previously knew has abandoned you, your homeland is now a dystopia and this is the best you're going to get... how are you supposed to stand against that? You can't. Honestly, it's incredible that as many people escaped as did.
I have such a weird compulsion to read about stuff like this, and I think that it's at least partly because I don't want to be one of those people who went in, talked to people, and didn't see how bad it was because they just couldn't believe the implications of what they were being told by survivors. They couldn't believe that any control could be that total, or that anyone could be as absolutely bug-fuck power-crazy as Jim Jones. But he was, and we have the audio tape and the nearly a thousand people dead to prove it.
- Thirteenth Child, Across the Great Barrier, and The Far West by Patricia C Wrede
This series is definitely best described as "frontier fantasy", which as a Brit is a bit weird. This is as American as it gets - wagon trails, settling out in dangerous inhospitable land. I mean, I enjoyed it in a lot of ways - I really like the main character and her growth towards appreciating her own awesomeness is exactly the sort of story I think girls need more of - but where I grew up, we really didn't get that myth of the American west at all.
There is also the extremely notable absence of the people who, in real life, were living in that "wild west" already. I can kind of see why someone might go "well, this is a fun series about wacky animals and travel that takes months and magic" and not want to deal with colonialism? But the problem is, the colonialism is already there, and ignoring it doesn't make it go away. If this is kinda "little magician on the prairie", you just can't do that and not have people remember that one of the famous bits in that book is the dad saying the only good Indian is a dead Indian. That atrocities were committed against Native Americans is just a fact which doesn't go away if you want it to. ESPECIALLY, I would assume, if you happen to be one of the people whose existence and history just got conveniently written out.
I kind of feel like the different-magics thing was supposed to help make up for that? Like, it is pretty cool that different cultures have different ways of doing magic and that using a blend of them is often better than just using one and being judgey about the others. (The insistence on that being a fundamentally "Columbian"/American thing is kind of anvilicious though.) But I really could not get over the sudden magical vanishing of an entire continent's worth of people! There was just no reasonable reason for it. I sympathise with the desire to not feature a whole load of racist horror in the story, but yo, you already had magic and ice dragons and whatever. There were other ways.
- The Island of Dr Moreau by HG Wells
This is a freaking weird book! I knew the basic plot already of course, but I'd never read it before, so when I saw it was on Gutenberg I thought I'd give it a go. And I just... I have absolutely no idea what this story thinks it's saying. I get the feeling that it's probably intended mostly as just "this is a creepy potential thing science could do, let me creep people out"? But the race stuff going on here is deeply, deeply odd on far more levels than I am capable of explaining or probably understanding.
Like, even if Wells was only drawing on the tropes about black people being animalistic for maximum freak-em-out value, what the hell? Are we supposed to read into that about the origins of said black people, or not, or what? And the end bit, is that about fear of mixed-race babies? It sort of veers all over the place, like, sometimes seeming to support all the worst racist readings and then sometimes undermining those and then supporting them again. And I feel entirely sure there's a lot more that I haven't thought of. It's a mess. It would however undoubtedly hit a bunch of nerves for a lot of people, so I am not surprised it's still famous.
- The Steerswoman and The Outskirter's Secret by Rosemary Kirstein
I have been looking for these for aaages, and I finally got them! This is the most difficult kind of book to review for me. I LOVE them and have already started the next one in the series and want everyone to read them and flail with me, and yet explaining WHY in even the most basic terms would be a massive, massive spoiler for most people. Like, even comparing it to anything at all would probably be enough of a spoiler to get me sporked in many communities. So all I will say is that there is a whooole lot more to them than is immediately apparent, in basically every way and they seem to just get better. Please, READ THESE BOOKS if you haven't! They have awesome ladies and adventures and amazingness, I promise. Then come back and flail!
If you have already read them, then you probably know what I'm gonna say next. SPOILERS NOW, PEOPLE.
I motherflipping love the way that the entire plot is basically "Rowan discovers she's wrong about what genre of book she's living in". I love it so much. I think I especially love it because of how well that's worked in as part of both the plot and Rowan's personality. Rowan, by virtue of both training and who she is as a person, doesn't quite fit with the fantasyland fascade. She fundamentally thinks there should be reasons for things - even if those reasons include stuff she doesn't currently understand, the possibility of understanding is a given. I adore that that is what gets her involved in the plot. Well, that and the fact she is actually good at maths and physics. Love it.
And oh, I really love the way that the revelations are paced - it must be so difficult to do something like that, where the understanding of the characters and the understanding of the reader are so different. The process of bringing them closer together is so exciting to me, I literally started the third book the minute I finished the second one even though I only had five minutes.
Oh, I also love that Rowan has both a female friend (who's badass! I love Bel!) and gets to have sex/romantic liasons which are part of her life but not overwhelming or undermining of her agency. It's great! And I actually really liked Fletcher - I felt so bad for him, once I got over my moment of AAAHHHH WHUT WHUT WHUT flail. I really need to know more, like, right now! I almost can't wait to finish this post to go and read the next bit!
- Excitements at the Chalet School and The Coming of Age of the Chalet School by Elinor M Brent Dyer
So,
nny and
catwalksalone and cat's husband and I all went to an amazing bookshop the other day, and while there I lucked on four Chalet School books I have either never read or had forgotten! Aaah, nostalgia. Love it.
And so I read these two in quick succession. :D (THe other two are a birthday gift, so I am gonna try not to read them until then.) I really adore them - yeah, their version of the world is old these days, but I still enjoy them so much in a very pathetic kind of way. I also properly started to recognise how astonishingly liberal they were for their time. Catholics and Protestants both valued! Girls from different countries living and working together! My god, for then, it's practially socialism. The editions I got - they are Girls Gone By editions - have stuff about the history of EBD herself and that also put some stuff into context in a really interesting way.
It is still deeply weird on disability, though, mostly due to Mary Lou, whose accident apparently makes her the final authority on all disability. And I noticed that even though there are a lot of deaths mentioned, and World War II is a massive part of the context (including noting that people have faced starvation and horrors, albeit not in detail), hardly anyone has parents or whatever who died in the war. It's always a car crash, or a tragic fever, or something similar. I haven't had many actual Thoughts about that yet, but I thought it was interesting!
This entry was originally posted at http://soupytwist.dreamwidth.org/119554.html. Please comment there using OpenID.