[Book Reviews] The good, the bad, the useful, and the wise
Four book reviews here. There are spoilers under the cut for my review of "Gladiatrix", which I hated. But I couldn't explain *why* I hated it without getting into its various failures, and that gives away (angrymaking, possible trauma-survivor-problematic) plot points. So if you care in future about reading a really awful book without spoilers or don't want to read about deeply fucked up things, don't click through. All other reviewed books here are spoiler-free and something I'd happily give to a friend to read.
Having read and loved the original Bordertown books, the revival of "Welcome to Bordertown" was something I would have eagerly looked forward to even if a bunch of my friends weren't contributors in it. Since they were, though, there were even more reasons that I couldn't miss it. (This is not the most unbiased review in the world.) saansaansaan and I chose it as a reading-out-loud book for our recent trip, and there were times where the reading was well matched to the setting. Teeny twisty back roads among glorious summer mountains that we were getting lost in is a brilliant setting for such stories -- so is crossing time zones and not noticing for hours because you were reading the story of a liminal place. That kind of art/life interweaving definitely made our trip more epic and delightful than it otherwise would have been.
Reading this book, my brain had a lot of meta-commentary. It is (I presume) deliberately inclusive and reflects the awareness of social issues of many of the fantasy writers that contribute to it. I've seen a good number of LJ/DW discussions and sometimes arguments involving many of these writers over the last few years, and the ideas that came out of those discussions seem very present in the text. Our protagonists grapple, not always gracefully, with issues of race, class, and culture. There are times when that's clearly done as a teachable moment (seeing your teenage heroine say "where are you really from?" to an American character with Indian ancestry, I winced for her, aaaugh no), but it's not clobbering you over the head with "HEY KIDS THIS IS DUMB DON'T DO THIS" in a way that breaks suspension of disbelief. I don't know if a reader who hadn't read 409238409380928 comment threads on RaceFail '09 and since would be so aware of the "show, not tell, how to not be a jerk to people who are different than yourself". But knowing that many-to-most of the authors were active in those discussions and aware of the large conversations in fandom surrounding similar issues, it adds another dimension to reading to have been aware of the metacontext in which it was written.
As far as straight-up commentary on the stories and poems go, I was delighted to see so many diverse takes on Bordertown -- that really adds to my perception of the everyone-everything-everywhere nature of an active urban metropolis. In the titular story, my favorite character by far was Anush. I'm a character-driven reader, and I like books better if I find someone I can relate to and find sympathetic. Anush, with his academic hopes and his fieldwork that goes decidedly off-the-beaten-track of where he thought his life was headed, was a tremendously sympathetic character for me. (I don't intend to go back to grad school but it still bugs me that I'm not Dr. Me, and I do the best I can of living a life where I can learn all the things anyway.) Other favorites were Cory Doctorow's "Shannon's Law" for putting a packet-routing ISP hacker into Bordertown (yeah!), Jane Yolen for macing the Faerie Queen in her Tam Lin-themed "Soulja Grrrl: A Long Line Rap" (if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him), Nalo Hopkinson for unflinchingly taking on domestic violence in the queer community in "Ours Is The Prettiest", and all of the interweaved threads that ran through stories like the "Bordertown Lives" graffiti. I kind of hope someone paints that on a bridge somewhere.
I had moments of feeling too old for the world, and that profoundly saddens me. I recognize that the central theme of the Bordertown stories is running away from home to find yourself, and that this is a natural pairing with adolescence and young adulthood. And Bordertown's a YA book, so, even more so. But when I read Cat Valente's furiously eloquent "A Voice Like a Hole", I was acutely aware that I am twice the age of her questing protagonist. Alaya Dawn Johnson's "A Prince of Thirteen Days"... I'm nearly twice the age of that protagonist and a decade more on top of that. If the way between the worlds opened and I could pack up and go, would I? I'd go for leaning up against the gates of Faerie, but it would be a particular kind of horrible to realize that I was among a sea of churning teenagers whom I once was and am no longer. And they might annoy the hell out of me. I'm not looking to find myself, I'm looking to have adventures. I don't want to have aged out of something I loved.
I was going to give Neil Gaiman's "The Song of the Song" kudos for being the most impact-heavy poem in the volume, but then I listened to tithenai's sister sing her poem, and I was deeply struck by that. Her sister did SO MUCH BETTER than I did at rendering that poem -- I look at my reading-out-loud efforts there, blush, and take my hat off to the far superior artist. Night and day.
I was initially somewhat hesitant to buy Russell Whitfield's "Gladiatrix", and so I should have been. I'm not really fond of stories about ancient Rome... I know rather a lot about the cultures of the time and I don't really appreciate some of it. But this was well reviewed somewhere I like, and I generally do like stories about kickass woman warriors, so I thought I'd give it a shot. It managed to piss me off pretty impressively by about page 8. Our heroine, the Spartan virgin priestess of Athena, has been shipwrecked and sold into slavery. As the story opens, she is being led into the school where she will learn to be a gladiatrix, along with the other new female slaves. Enter a few paragraphs of how pure and hairless and perfectly alabaster her body is, slender and athletic, small budding breasts (of course she is naked and the first thing you do with your new slaves is to give them a bikini wax and shave). As opposed, of course, to the Celtic women, who are describes as laughably short, fat, stocky, hairy, and have "breasts like udders". Our heroine cannot contain her amusement at her obvious superiority. This attitude is carried throughout the book.
...
Naturally, our heroine the Spartan virgin priestess is the prettiest anyone has ever seen, and also amazingly good at fighting, having been trained for it her whole life. So as long as she remembers she's a Spartan, she kills everyone before her while never mussing her hair. She has scars, but only on her back, so her perfect breasts and perfect face are still untouched and she's the admiration of everyone with her alabaster perfection, no matter how many fights she's in. Those brutes of women from other countries, of course, get all kinds of mashed up horribly, but well, they're barbarians, what can you expect? Also, all Celts are the same, and they all speak the same language and are one big tribal family, so in the gladiatrix school we have the Celtic tribal camp (which includes Dacians who are actually Amazons, as well as Silurians, Gauls, Brigantes, etc. -- all the same!). The Amazon queen is a major villain, easily going from disapproving of everything as a sin against the Earth Mother to saying that it's okay that our Spartan virgin gets brutally raped because she deserved it anyway. (!!!) The rapist, naturally, is a monstrously strong black man who goes crazy with sadism and the need to rape white women (plural) when he's smoked too much hash. But he's a bad person the rest of the time too! Our Spartan finds true love with the only Celt that's tall, blonde, and pretty, and they have lots of hot lesbian sex until the Amazon kills her lover in the arena, so then she wants to fight the Amazon to death and discards all her training. They both throw away their swords and have a brutal mud wrestling match while mostly naked, ending in trying to choke each other to death because they can't fight any harder. So the Roman in charge of the games is so happy that he gives them both their freedom and they live happily ever after. Our Spartan sees no irony in taking over the gladiator school full of slaves that killed her lover and got her beaten and raped. The Amazon queen goes back to being an Amazon queen. The end!
There are not enough words for everything that is wrong with that book; it's a badly written bingo card of fucked up social tropes. It's Oh John Ringo No caliber wrongness, being written unironically by someone who has none of Ringo's writing skill. It's the product of someone who thinks that it adds interesting depth to his characters to make them have flat-panel lesbian sex when I doubt he's ever met a lesbian in his life. It has pretensions towards historical accuracy yet can't even recognize the present, much less the past. (Greeks and Romans are also totally the same, and Spartans are cool with that. Even if you make them slaves.) It is the worst book I have read in ages, and I heartily recommend that none of you ever read it. I'm sorry I did. Zero cluebats out of five.
Much better was Amanda Ripley's "The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes -- And Why", which I read on a recommendation by docstrange. It's a clear summarization of recent research in psychology, neurology, and several flavors of disaster science to try to figure out how people's minds adapt to an unexpected terrible occurence, and what can up your chances of survival. I appreciated Ripley's straightforward, wry "just the facts" style of writing and her candor in addressing difficult topics. I was able to map several of the discussions of things brains do under stress to my own experiences, though clearly I've never lived through anything on that scale of badness (yet!). I feel confirmed in some of my calm-and-center in the moment breathing techniques... apparently they work for even more people than I was aware of. It was nice to hear still more confirmation that what you do under stress is automatic and unthinking -- what you have trained will kick in, and you'll run on autopilot. The book has a strong theme of preparation and practice being a huge percentage of the battle to do well, and I appreciated its discussions of emergent leadership in crisis. I feel it gave me more useful data in case I'm ever in a really bad situation, and I would recommend this one to people interested in figuring out how they can improve risk assessment and behaviour under stress. Four precarious evacuations out of five.
My favorite Zen book that I've read in some time, Soko Morinaga's "Novice to Master: An Ongoing Lesson in the Extent of My Own Stupidity" had me alternately laughing, agreeing, and seeing my own fallibility in its pages. I'm not a Zen monk by any stretch, but I can still see many of the themes he discusses showing up in my own martial arts and meditative practices. (And I kind of suck at them. Certainly I do compared to the folks he's discussing!) It gives you a lot to think about without being facile or didactic, and the author's humility and sense of humor make him a tremendously sympathetic narrator. Some of his passages were helpfully striking for me in getting my head out of the knots of "what if" I can create for myself. It's a reset button for the brain. For example, "Always now -- just now -- come into being. Always now -- just now -- give yourself to death. Practicing this is Zen practice." as the finisher of his advice to an 80 year old woman he'd known for 40 years in the temple, when she found out that she had cancer and didn't have much longer to live. The rebirth and death of the self in every moment was a very helpful way for her to cope with the cancer and enjoy the time she had left. (The story after about her last words was both tremendously sad and very beautiful, in a glass-half-full glass-half-empty kind of way.) I appreciated the author's emphasis that practice is in doing, not in collecting things or storing up words or accumulating teachers or looking very devoted. Working on that also tends to help me unknot my brain when I'm overthinking things. Just do.
The other thing that's food for thought (pun sort of intended) for me in his writing is in considering what a terrible monk I'd make. He discusses the Rinzai monastery schedule and diet. I would have a tremendous struggle with having no preferences and just taking what I was given to do. Wow, I suck at that. I'm a take-the-world-by-storm kind of woman. It's both fascinating and deeply disturbing to think about trying to accept that experience for more than a weekend or so. I can be annoyed at everything for a short period of time if I know I'm getting out at X time. Knowing that it was my foreseeable future and choosing to *really* accept such external structure, not just mentally plan to get around it when I can? Wow. That's (probably literally) a brain-changer. I don't see it coming, but it makes me more curious about how people do do that willingly and how it shapes their outlook on life to go through that. Four empty bowls out of five. (The fifth bowl is also empty.)
This entry was originally posted at http://ivy.dreamwidth.org/96507.html . Please feel free to comment on either site; comments rock.
Having read and loved the original Bordertown books, the revival of "Welcome to Bordertown" was something I would have eagerly looked forward to even if a bunch of my friends weren't contributors in it. Since they were, though, there were even more reasons that I couldn't miss it. (This is not the most unbiased review in the world.) saansaansaan and I chose it as a reading-out-loud book for our recent trip, and there were times where the reading was well matched to the setting. Teeny twisty back roads among glorious summer mountains that we were getting lost in is a brilliant setting for such stories -- so is crossing time zones and not noticing for hours because you were reading the story of a liminal place. That kind of art/life interweaving definitely made our trip more epic and delightful than it otherwise would have been.
Reading this book, my brain had a lot of meta-commentary. It is (I presume) deliberately inclusive and reflects the awareness of social issues of many of the fantasy writers that contribute to it. I've seen a good number of LJ/DW discussions and sometimes arguments involving many of these writers over the last few years, and the ideas that came out of those discussions seem very present in the text. Our protagonists grapple, not always gracefully, with issues of race, class, and culture. There are times when that's clearly done as a teachable moment (seeing your teenage heroine say "where are you really from?" to an American character with Indian ancestry, I winced for her, aaaugh no), but it's not clobbering you over the head with "HEY KIDS THIS IS DUMB DON'T DO THIS" in a way that breaks suspension of disbelief. I don't know if a reader who hadn't read 409238409380928 comment threads on RaceFail '09 and since would be so aware of the "show, not tell, how to not be a jerk to people who are different than yourself". But knowing that many-to-most of the authors were active in those discussions and aware of the large conversations in fandom surrounding similar issues, it adds another dimension to reading to have been aware of the metacontext in which it was written.
As far as straight-up commentary on the stories and poems go, I was delighted to see so many diverse takes on Bordertown -- that really adds to my perception of the everyone-everything-everywhere nature of an active urban metropolis. In the titular story, my favorite character by far was Anush. I'm a character-driven reader, and I like books better if I find someone I can relate to and find sympathetic. Anush, with his academic hopes and his fieldwork that goes decidedly off-the-beaten-track of where he thought his life was headed, was a tremendously sympathetic character for me. (I don't intend to go back to grad school but it still bugs me that I'm not Dr. Me, and I do the best I can of living a life where I can learn all the things anyway.) Other favorites were Cory Doctorow's "Shannon's Law" for putting a packet-routing ISP hacker into Bordertown (yeah!), Jane Yolen for macing the Faerie Queen in her Tam Lin-themed "Soulja Grrrl: A Long Line Rap" (if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him), Nalo Hopkinson for unflinchingly taking on domestic violence in the queer community in "Ours Is The Prettiest", and all of the interweaved threads that ran through stories like the "Bordertown Lives" graffiti. I kind of hope someone paints that on a bridge somewhere.
I had moments of feeling too old for the world, and that profoundly saddens me. I recognize that the central theme of the Bordertown stories is running away from home to find yourself, and that this is a natural pairing with adolescence and young adulthood. And Bordertown's a YA book, so, even more so. But when I read Cat Valente's furiously eloquent "A Voice Like a Hole", I was acutely aware that I am twice the age of her questing protagonist. Alaya Dawn Johnson's "A Prince of Thirteen Days"... I'm nearly twice the age of that protagonist and a decade more on top of that. If the way between the worlds opened and I could pack up and go, would I? I'd go for leaning up against the gates of Faerie, but it would be a particular kind of horrible to realize that I was among a sea of churning teenagers whom I once was and am no longer. And they might annoy the hell out of me. I'm not looking to find myself, I'm looking to have adventures. I don't want to have aged out of something I loved.
I was going to give Neil Gaiman's "The Song of the Song" kudos for being the most impact-heavy poem in the volume, but then I listened to tithenai's sister sing her poem, and I was deeply struck by that. Her sister did SO MUCH BETTER than I did at rendering that poem -- I look at my reading-out-loud efforts there, blush, and take my hat off to the far superior artist. Night and day.
I was initially somewhat hesitant to buy Russell Whitfield's "Gladiatrix", and so I should have been. I'm not really fond of stories about ancient Rome... I know rather a lot about the cultures of the time and I don't really appreciate some of it. But this was well reviewed somewhere I like, and I generally do like stories about kickass woman warriors, so I thought I'd give it a shot. It managed to piss me off pretty impressively by about page 8. Our heroine, the Spartan virgin priestess of Athena, has been shipwrecked and sold into slavery. As the story opens, she is being led into the school where she will learn to be a gladiatrix, along with the other new female slaves. Enter a few paragraphs of how pure and hairless and perfectly alabaster her body is, slender and athletic, small budding breasts (of course she is naked and the first thing you do with your new slaves is to give them a bikini wax and shave). As opposed, of course, to the Celtic women, who are describes as laughably short, fat, stocky, hairy, and have "breasts like udders". Our heroine cannot contain her amusement at her obvious superiority. This attitude is carried throughout the book.
...
Naturally, our heroine the Spartan virgin priestess is the prettiest anyone has ever seen, and also amazingly good at fighting, having been trained for it her whole life. So as long as she remembers she's a Spartan, she kills everyone before her while never mussing her hair. She has scars, but only on her back, so her perfect breasts and perfect face are still untouched and she's the admiration of everyone with her alabaster perfection, no matter how many fights she's in. Those brutes of women from other countries, of course, get all kinds of mashed up horribly, but well, they're barbarians, what can you expect? Also, all Celts are the same, and they all speak the same language and are one big tribal family, so in the gladiatrix school we have the Celtic tribal camp (which includes Dacians who are actually Amazons, as well as Silurians, Gauls, Brigantes, etc. -- all the same!). The Amazon queen is a major villain, easily going from disapproving of everything as a sin against the Earth Mother to saying that it's okay that our Spartan virgin gets brutally raped because she deserved it anyway. (!!!) The rapist, naturally, is a monstrously strong black man who goes crazy with sadism and the need to rape white women (plural) when he's smoked too much hash. But he's a bad person the rest of the time too! Our Spartan finds true love with the only Celt that's tall, blonde, and pretty, and they have lots of hot lesbian sex until the Amazon kills her lover in the arena, so then she wants to fight the Amazon to death and discards all her training. They both throw away their swords and have a brutal mud wrestling match while mostly naked, ending in trying to choke each other to death because they can't fight any harder. So the Roman in charge of the games is so happy that he gives them both their freedom and they live happily ever after. Our Spartan sees no irony in taking over the gladiator school full of slaves that killed her lover and got her beaten and raped. The Amazon queen goes back to being an Amazon queen. The end!
There are not enough words for everything that is wrong with that book; it's a badly written bingo card of fucked up social tropes. It's Oh John Ringo No caliber wrongness, being written unironically by someone who has none of Ringo's writing skill. It's the product of someone who thinks that it adds interesting depth to his characters to make them have flat-panel lesbian sex when I doubt he's ever met a lesbian in his life. It has pretensions towards historical accuracy yet can't even recognize the present, much less the past. (Greeks and Romans are also totally the same, and Spartans are cool with that. Even if you make them slaves.) It is the worst book I have read in ages, and I heartily recommend that none of you ever read it. I'm sorry I did. Zero cluebats out of five.
Much better was Amanda Ripley's "The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes -- And Why", which I read on a recommendation by docstrange. It's a clear summarization of recent research in psychology, neurology, and several flavors of disaster science to try to figure out how people's minds adapt to an unexpected terrible occurence, and what can up your chances of survival. I appreciated Ripley's straightforward, wry "just the facts" style of writing and her candor in addressing difficult topics. I was able to map several of the discussions of things brains do under stress to my own experiences, though clearly I've never lived through anything on that scale of badness (yet!). I feel confirmed in some of my calm-and-center in the moment breathing techniques... apparently they work for even more people than I was aware of. It was nice to hear still more confirmation that what you do under stress is automatic and unthinking -- what you have trained will kick in, and you'll run on autopilot. The book has a strong theme of preparation and practice being a huge percentage of the battle to do well, and I appreciated its discussions of emergent leadership in crisis. I feel it gave me more useful data in case I'm ever in a really bad situation, and I would recommend this one to people interested in figuring out how they can improve risk assessment and behaviour under stress. Four precarious evacuations out of five.
My favorite Zen book that I've read in some time, Soko Morinaga's "Novice to Master: An Ongoing Lesson in the Extent of My Own Stupidity" had me alternately laughing, agreeing, and seeing my own fallibility in its pages. I'm not a Zen monk by any stretch, but I can still see many of the themes he discusses showing up in my own martial arts and meditative practices. (And I kind of suck at them. Certainly I do compared to the folks he's discussing!) It gives you a lot to think about without being facile or didactic, and the author's humility and sense of humor make him a tremendously sympathetic narrator. Some of his passages were helpfully striking for me in getting my head out of the knots of "what if" I can create for myself. It's a reset button for the brain. For example, "Always now -- just now -- come into being. Always now -- just now -- give yourself to death. Practicing this is Zen practice." as the finisher of his advice to an 80 year old woman he'd known for 40 years in the temple, when she found out that she had cancer and didn't have much longer to live. The rebirth and death of the self in every moment was a very helpful way for her to cope with the cancer and enjoy the time she had left. (The story after about her last words was both tremendously sad and very beautiful, in a glass-half-full glass-half-empty kind of way.) I appreciated the author's emphasis that practice is in doing, not in collecting things or storing up words or accumulating teachers or looking very devoted. Working on that also tends to help me unknot my brain when I'm overthinking things. Just do.
The other thing that's food for thought (pun sort of intended) for me in his writing is in considering what a terrible monk I'd make. He discusses the Rinzai monastery schedule and diet. I would have a tremendous struggle with having no preferences and just taking what I was given to do. Wow, I suck at that. I'm a take-the-world-by-storm kind of woman. It's both fascinating and deeply disturbing to think about trying to accept that experience for more than a weekend or so. I can be annoyed at everything for a short period of time if I know I'm getting out at X time. Knowing that it was my foreseeable future and choosing to *really* accept such external structure, not just mentally plan to get around it when I can? Wow. That's (probably literally) a brain-changer. I don't see it coming, but it makes me more curious about how people do do that willingly and how it shapes their outlook on life to go through that. Four empty bowls out of five. (The fifth bowl is also empty.)
This entry was originally posted at http://ivy.dreamwidth.org/96507.html . Please feel free to comment on either site; comments rock.