bloodygranuaile

I read Mansfield Park sometime a million years ago, by which I mean in college, but now I have a beautiful shiny Pepto-Bismol pink copy with a peacock on it, so I had to read it again. I read it four chapters a week as part of an online readalong, up until this weekend, when I decided that I was so tantalizingly close to the end that I would just finish it up before I had to start Bleak House. (I think I am doing too many nineteenth-century lit readalongs.)

A lot of people don’t like Mansfield Park very much because the heroine is very quiet and shy, which I think is bogus. I like Fanny Price; I do not so much like Edmund Bertram; he is a bit of a drip. This is a common enough fault in Austen heroes, but I suppose they have to be sort of dumb for plot reasons in order to be kept away from our heroines for the length of a story (except Henry Tilney, who is kept away via other means). In this case, Edmund, in a chronic case of opposites attracting, falls for a lively and materialistic young lady named Mary Crawford, and then spends a lot of time agonizing that she makes snarky comments and possibly won’t want to become a middle-income clergyman’s wife out in the country. This is very distressing to Fanny, who is in love with Edmund but would never say anything because she is a poor cousin whomst was brought in out of charity and has had it beaten into her head every minute of every day that she should be grateful and never ask for anything.

I hadn’t read this book in so long that it was basically like reading a brand-new Austen for me. I couldn’t remember what was going to happen with all these secondary characters for the life of me, and knowing Fanny and Edmund would get together at the end doesn’t count as remembering; we all know that’s how these types of stories end. Apparently some people are upset that they get together because they are cousins but I think this was normal at the time and they are clearly well suited for each other because they are both upstanding if somewhat judgmental country mice. Anyway, I don’t read Austen for the romance; I read it for her excellent taxonomy of Types of Guys, and Mansfield Park has Types of Guys galore. Aunt Norris is possibly the most memorable example of a Type of Guy (women can be Types of Guys too), being someone who always has big ideas about what other people can do with their money and time and resources, but who always totally would be involved/generous/etc with her own resources too but tragically can’t because reasons. Hating on Aunt Norris is one of the most fun parts of reading this book.

Some of the morals on display are a bit old-fashioned but they make sense in the context of the time, and if you grasp why these things are important (which may take some research), then it becomes full of scandalously bad behavior and is all very exciting! I had a blast rereading it!

March’s Discworld reread was Equal Rites, which is both a Discworld book and an entry in one of my most lifelong favorite subgenres of fantasy, Little Girls Rebelling Against Gender Roles. After nearly 40 years of this and seeing how little progress has been made in those 40 years I don’t love this quite as much as I did when I was myself a Little Girl with mixed feelings on how I was supposed to Rebel Against Gender Roles (the good and proper kind of Rebelling Against Gender Roles for girls in the ‘90s was to do sports, which I wasn’t interested in; the incorrect kind was to want to be a Catholic priest, which I was). It’s less complicated when reading pseudo-medieval fantasy novels where the things they are trying to do are not really choices for either gender, like being a knight or, in this case, a wizard.

Overall this is still very much an early Discworld book and it shows–it’s shorter, more episodic, and a little more ‘80s, having been published the same year I was born. But it’s still very funny, full of groanworthy puns and comically unflattering character descriptions. Most importantly, it introduces us to Granny Weatherwax, one of the all-time iconic characters of the Discworld, and her concept of “headology,” which I occasionally forget is not a real word outside of Discworld fans and have been known to use like I think people should know what I’m talking about. Anyway, despite being a little clunky at times, the gender politics of this one are reasonably solid, dunking on both gender essentialism and the devaluation of traditional “women’s work” (it’s amazing how many people manage to fumble one or the other of these). I had fun revisiting it.

My next short book for February was Kristen Ghodsee’s Red Valkyries: Feminist Lessons from Five Revolutionary Women, which I had received as a party favor at a wedding along with several other books. I had read Ghodsee’s Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism for a book club several years ago and had found it fun and readable.

The book consists of five biographical essays, then a concluding section distilling the lessons that modern leftists can learn from their lives. The first biography is a sketch of the life of record-breaking Soviet sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko, who racked up 309 confirmed kills in World War II before an injury took her off the front lines. Her career skewed young; she was barely in her mid-twenties when she had to retire from sniper work, at which point she had also already been married twice and had a son. From then she was something of a professional celebrity, touring Allied countries to gin up enthusiasm for the noble art of killing Nazis and fielding stupid, sexist questions from American journalists.

From there the book moves a couple decades back in time to give us biographies of three women who had done so much work to shape the society in which Lyudmila Pavlichenko could arise. These three women were all contemporaries and were very close with one another: Alexandra Kollontai, Nadezhda Krupskaya, and Inessa Armand. Alexandra Kollontai I’d heard about a bit before, although I haven’t actually read any of her writings. She was very forward-thinking about things like “free love” and polyamory and having strong relationships in your life outside of the traditional nuclear family. Nadezhda Krupskaya I’d heard about in passing mainly as Lenin’s wife, which, it turns out, is doing her a major disservice–she was also a deeply committed revolutionary herself with a specialization in radical pedagogy, who did a ton of work establishing public school and libraries and increasing the literacy rate. She and Lenin also got started in basically a revolutionary fake dating scenario, where they agreed to be each other’s “fiancés” in order to maintain lines of communication when one or the other was imprisoned, and eventually got married for real. Inessa Armand didn’t write quite as much original material as Kollontai or Krupskaya but did a lot of translation and editorial work, as well as absolutely monster amounts of movement gruntwork–organizing conferences, smuggling communications, networking, running a newspaper for socialist women, anything and everything you could think of. She was in and out of jail several times, while also raising five children–four by her husband and one by her husband’s younger brother, which apparently her husband didn’t mind. Armand was also interesting because she came from a noble family and got started doing charitable liberal feminism, but was radicalized through the paranoia of the tsarist regime that wouldn’t let the nice wealthy liberal feminists do their charity work in peace because they were afraid it was secretly a cover for anti-authoritarian activities. Well done, tsarist regime. No obvious own goals there.

The last of the five Valkyries that we meet is Elena Lagadinova, a Bulgarian woman who got her political start as a partisan during World War II, when she was barely a teenager. After the Nazi-allied government forces burned her house down–with her only pair of shoes in it–she hid out in the mountains armed with a pistol and became a local legend for being the youngest partisan in the resistance forces. Afterwards, she went to school and got a PhD in plant genetics, where she did a bunch of groundbreaking research into agriculturally useful things. She was willing to stand up to the government about the ways in which its suspicion of the last generation of scientific experts was causing problems, which, fortunately, got her noticed as a principled communists willing to stand up for what she believed would further the good of society, rather than as an enemy of the state, and she got promoted into government work. She then spent the last several decades of her life doing internationalist feminist organizing, liaising with women’s activists from across the world and across ideologies. She was rather abruptly sidelined when the Bulgarian government collapsed in the ‘90s, but is still a beloved figure in many women’s activist circles today. Somehow, I had never heard of her.

The bit at the end about lessons we can draw from these five women is a bit less exciting; it’s very much in the vein of “here are the bite-sized actionable conclusions because every politics book needs to end in bite-sized actionable conclusions” but like, for people who are doing leftism, there’s probably never really a bad time for a reminder to take some steps to avoid burnout. This book was also written during the pandemic, which was certainly a stressful time to be doing anything whatsoever. Maybe not quite as stressful as hiding in the mountains hunting Nazis with a pistol after the government burned your house down, but still pretty bad.

Overall, a fun, short read! It’s good to know more about these people! I’d recommend it alongside Red Rosa for anyone who wants to learn more about important socialists feminists that have tended to get left out of more mainstream Western feminist history.

Having given myself a million nonfiction and classic literature reading assignments–which, granted, I have done because I enjoy those both very much–I have found myself with less time than I used to for my old favorite pastime of zipping through a nice easy-to-read fantasy adventure novel in a short time. This is also part of why one of my self-imposed reading assignments this year is to reread one Discworld book a month. But I should sometimes read things that are both fun and easy and also new to me, and so when Sam got a copy of Naomi Novik’s A Deadly Education out from the library, I decided I would also get the same book out from my library. I had, after all, enjoyed Uprooted and Spinning Silver, and I had heard broadly that the Scholomance series was fun.

The Scholomance is in fact a fairly old legend; it pops up in passing in Dracula where Van Helsing mentions that Count Dracula graduated from there. Traditionally, this was a bonkers Romanian legend about a very small school (ten pupils at a time) headed by Satan where the reigning graduate was tasked with riding a dragon that controlled the weather, or something like that.

Novik’s Scholomance is a bit different, a huge wizard school suspended in the void, with hundreds of wizard kids from around the world enrolled every year, of which about half of them die before–or during–graduation. It doesn’t have teachers; the school is instead malevolently animated to provide assignments and punish the students if they don’t complete them. The reason for the wizard school to exist at all is not really because the wizards value education, but because a fascinating demonology of horrible critters (referred to colloquially under the umbrella term “mals”) can sniff out magical ability and like to eat the people that have it. So the whole school is an ongoing game of demonic Survivor, with students forming alliances and French-royal-court-level social intrigue in order to like, take showers without getting jumped by demons coming up out of the drains. It is relentlessly miserable every second of every day, but in a way that still sort of tickles the wish fulfilment part of reading about magic schools in the first place (I want to study five dead languages simultaneously, with magical immersion to make me actually good at them, instead of what happens in actual school, where people just patronizingly worry about you if you study anything other than STEM and you have to learn to beat them to the “What Do You Do With a B.A. in English?” jokes so you don’t end up on the defensive).

Anyway, our main character is El, short for Galadriel, who does in fact have a hippy mother. Her mother is also a wizard; she is a rather famous healer who lives in a yurt in Wales and refuses to charge for her magical services and is generally an incorruptible cinnamon roll of a human being and magic worker. El, following the principle of balance of the universe, somehow got born with inherently bad vibes and an affinity for the magic of mass destruction. Everyone who’s ever met her, whether they believe in magic or not, is apparently just waiting for her to turn into a supervillainess. El is just stubborn enough to absolutely refuse to become a supervillainness but is otherwise thoroughly Jokerfied about human interaction in general; she is incredibly rude to everybody all the time because it’s not like anyone except her mom has ever liked her in her entire life, even when she hasn’t done anything rude or mean yet, so might as well.

This incredible rudeness lands her some sort of weird Unlikely Friendship/ambiguous love interest/rockstar odd couple dynamic with a fellow junior named Orion Lake, whose magical affinity is straight-up just for hunting mals. He has impressive combat magic but apparently can also just rip them apart with his bare hands and he draws magical power (referred to in this book, hilariously to me, as mana) from them when he kills them, so killing them makes him all charged up to kill more of them. For El, who has to charge mana the old-fashioned way by putting herself through hard work and/or misery (she does a lot of pushups and crochet, which she hates) and whose magical affinity tends to be for stuff that uses up huge amounts of mana if she does do it (and which she does not tend to have good reason to do), this is deeply insulting. Because everyone else in the wizarding world dotes on Orion for saving their lives all the time and basically thinks the sun shines out of his ass, El’s unrelenting rudeness is a novel experience for him. El hates it when Orion saves her life so she gets even ruder every time he does. It’s really delightful, especially when the attention Orion pays to El starts rippling out into the wider social milieu of the school, and El finds herself suddenly less isolated. Of course, she doesn’t trust it. She has good reason never to trust anyone or anything.

Orion is sort of boring but all the other secondary characters are fun. The people who eventually become El’s friends are the sort of ruthlessly practical, subtly scheming, Type A girls who were willing to trade with and walk with her even when she had no social capital whatsoever, and I enjoyed El’s uncharacteristic happiness at, after three years, starting to have actual conversations with them. I also particularly liked that one of the girls was smart enough to figure what actually happened when El, with the kind of luck she usually has, actually also did a big heroism that saved a bunch of lives at the school, but nobody saw her do it and also she was so fucked up by the experience that she couldn’t talk about it and nobody would believe her if she did.

Anyway, normally I’m not the biggest fan of fantasy with this much of a video gamey, Magic the Gathering–ass influence (the monsters get bigger the deeper you go! You have to store up mana to blast away the critters!) but in this case I actually really did enjoy this more character-driven take on being stuck in a video game magic school from Hell that also turns everyone into Mean Girls. I’m looking forward to eventually reading about what the gang (now that there’s a gang) does during their senior year!

My February entry into my rereading Discworld project was The Light Fantastic. I’m going to pretend the fact that I actually read it in the final days of January means I’m a proactive overachiever, and not that I was just procrastinating on the things I actually had to do this weekend because I slept poorly and didn’t want to do anything that required effort or brainpower. Reading Pratchett, fortunately, while it takes some attention–more than scrolling on my phone, as evidenced by the amount of time I was supposedly reading while actually scrolling on my phone–but less than most other things.

The Light Fantastic continues the rather episodic adventures of Rincewind–plus his traveling companions Twoflower, the Luggage, and the Great Spell that lives in his head–after he falls off the edge of the Disc at the end of the last book. He survives through what is not quite technically a deus ex machina, since the gods aren’t really paying attention (they’re tied up in litigation with the Ice Giants), but more sort of a librum ex machina–i.e., the Eight Great Spells of the Octavo really need him alive, because one of their number is stuck in his head.

Once again, I am aware that this is not really a great one for a Discworld book, but it’s still so much funnier than most other books that I still had a pretty great time. We meet Cohen the Barbarian, and the immortal “horse d’oevres” pun is in this one. We learn a little bit more about the Luggage’s mysterious backstory. There’s even a sensibly dressed female sword-swinging heroine, although she has the bad luck to be employed by an evil wizard, so the narrative can’t let her win. You can see the beginning of some ideas that will be fleshed out much later in the series, like the biology of trolls and the role of belief in shaping reality (i.e., much more literal on the Disc than here). Overall it was a great way to spend a cold winter day where I didn’t really want to do anything else, and I’m looking forward to revisiting Equal Rites next month!

My big fat slowmaxxing winter break reading was Leo Tolstoy’s classic Anna Karenina, or at least that was the plan. The book is over 850 pages long and I had been reading some other stuff during the first half of break, so I don’t know what on Earth made me think I was going to read the thing in six days and have a nice fat book already on my list by January 2nd, even if I hadn’t ended up spilling water all over it on December 30 and needing three full days just to dry it out to a readable condition. (It took at least five days to get it fully devoid of moisture again, even when strategically placed right by a heating vent.) Then I had to go back to work, and so here we are, halfway through January, and I have finally finished it.

It was absolutely worth the time and even the damp interruptions.

While Anna is the title character–and certainly provides one of the main storylines–this book has a pretty large cast of characters, and we spend significant inside-their-head time with at least half a dozen of them. The book opens from the point of view of Anna Arkadyevna’s brother Stepan Arkadyevich, a friendly, good-humored specimen of Russia’s upper class, holding various executive-level government jobs that consist entirely of schmoozing and continually cheating on his long-suffering wife with an absolutely clueless lack of malice about it. We also end up spending a lot of page time with his wife Dolly; with Dolly’s little sister Kitty Schterbatskaya; with Konstantin Levin, a friend of Stepan’s who’s in love with Kitty; and of course, with Count Vronsky, the man Anna blows up her life over, who in the beginning is having a flirtation with Kitty that temporarily blows up Levin’s plans to marry her. We also spend some time with Anna’s husband, who I found to be a particularly fascinating character. A lot of the time we spend with these folks they are not necessarily doing very much, although they are all very busy; Levin is basically a little freak among the Russian aristocracy in that he spends a lot of time in his place in the country, not only managing it and trying to come up with better administrative schemes, but also actually doing the occasional spot of farming himself. He’s got very tortured ideas about what it would mean to fix Russian agriculture and how to be alive, which are oddly relatable if you are the type of person prone to overthinking things sometimes, like me, even if the things he is overthinking are entirely outside of my experience (I have no opinions, tortured or otherwise, about 1870s Russian agricultural improvements). These very close third-person POVs are full of dryly funny observations about the absurdities and hypocrisies of these characters, and yet all of them are ultimately sort of endearing (except Vronsky, who is not necessarily actually a bigger piece of shit than any of these other useless rich idiots but who I just could not ever warm up to). The result is both timeless & universal exploring the human condition etc. and also extremely specific, deeply rooted in the time and place that the story takes place in. The place of the church in society, the influence of various 19th-century social and political movements, the state of the divorce and custody laws, the unsustainable financial state of the Russian nobility, all shape the novel and the events that happen in it profoundly, and it simply could not be the novel that it is if it took place somewhere else or at another time.

It is very hard to try to say anything about this book that smarter people than I haven’t said a million times in the past 150 years, I am sure. I haven’t read all that people have said about it but I really don’t feel like I have the chops to comment on a work like this. For starters, everything I know about 1870s Russia is basically running on knowledge of 1870s England and hoping it’s not that vastly different.

One reason I am under-read in the great Russian novels is that every Russian short story or novella I have ever read has been the saddest thing in the entire world, especially Gogol’s “The Overcoat,” which continues to haunt me even as it’s been several years since I’ve read it. As a result I have been a little hesitant to be like “Yes, I want 870 consecutive pages of that.” But somehow, Anna Karenina ends on a hopeful note, even though Anna rather famously dies by throwing herself under a train. The trick to this is that the train thing is a full fifty pages from the end, and we have to tour the entire rest of the dramatic personae afterwards to see how they are reacting to it. Somehow, this works.

This book is just truly excellent on a craft level. While the whole book is long, its story huge and sprawling and taking place over many years, the sentences and chapters are wonderfully clear and direct, especially compared to a lot of other 19th-century writing that I’ve been exposed to. They are only convoluted and long when a character is having convoluted long thoughts, in which case, they work perfectly to illustrate the confusion, heartbreak, dissociation, or just plain disordered thinking that afflicts the characters. Big credit to translator Constance Garnett, since I certainly wasn’t reading the book in the original Russian.

I am extremely curious to check out some of the many, many, many adaptations that have been made, since I really can’t see how they could get across some of the stuff going on in these characters’ heads. Maybe they don’t. But I will find out!

It’s cold and snowy and on the day after Christmas I figured it was a good time to read Seamus Heaney’s North, which I had picked up in Philadelphia in May. May was not the correct time to read North but I know my seasonal reading habits. I figured chances were high that I would end up reading it when I was sick because I do tend to read poetry when I’m sick, but while I am not sick, everyone else is sick this Christmas so I figured it counted.

I am not the world’s strongest poetry reader and I am definitely not a strong poetry reviewer so all I will say about North is that it is extremely good and extremely North of Ireland a lot of it goes over my head. Some of what went over my head was easily enough looked up online, like the poem The Grauballe Man, which is about the Grauballe Man, who has a Wikipedia article with photos. I don’t think he did at the time this poem was published but that doesn’t make the poem any worse. There are a lot of poems about bogs, which somehow do manage to convey a sort of wet, humble beauty. Many of the poems, especially in Part II, touch on the Troubles, in a way that gets across a claustrophobic sense of living during them and the social pressure to talk about them just the right way.

I think I need to read more Heaney but maybe not all in one go. One of these days I will learn that the correct way to read poetry collections is one poem a day, and not cover to cover in one sitting like it’s a novella or something. Maybe another winter I will revisit North in that way.

Yesterday I wasn’t feeling great so I called out of work and spent a big chunk of the day reading Lois McMaster Bujold’s Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen, the final work in the Vorkosigan Saga.

In this installment, we swing back around to where it all started: with Cordelia. Now the Dowager Countess Cordelia Vorkosigan, Vicereine of Sergyar, she is 76 years old, and three years widowed. But because she is Betan, and because she is Cordelia, she’s thinking of what to do with the next phase of her life–after all, she can expect to live to be at least 100.

Due to the galactic reproductive technology that she has spent a lot of time and energy establishing on Barrayar, Cordelia decides to finally pursue a lifelong dream of hers: having daughters. It turns out that she can have six daughters with Aral even three years after he died. But the plot really kicks off here when she figures out she can do something even more science fictionish: she can fill some of her enucleated ova with X-chromosomal DNA from Aral and give them to Admiral Oliver Jole, who had been the semi-secret third in their marriage for many years, so that Jole can have sons with Aral.

Jole, being a native Barrayaran man and also very wrapped up in his work in the three years since Aral died, had not really considered that becoming a parent was still in the cards for him. He was, after all, single, and just about to turn fifty, and lives on a military base in tiny single-military-officer housing. But Cordelia’s gift of Aral’s gametes sets him on a path of thinking about all sorts of major life changes he could make, like retiring, or becoming a parent, or getting together with Cordelia without Aral being there, or getting really into Sergyaran marine biology.

The book has several other plotlines but they are basically there to help shape the main one, which is the romance between Jole and Cordelia: two older, very busy, very competent Imperial officials with a lot to balance if they want to squeak out a personal life, both in terms of work and in terms of their previous personal lives (which, given Barrayar’s still ultimately feudal system of governance, doesn’t have as clear-cut a dividing line as you might think for a high-tech space future). We get to see Miles, now 43 years old and Count Vorkosigan in his own right, have to deal maturely with learning a lot about his parents’ sex lives while also running after a squad of his own kids. We also learn a fair amount about the colonization process on Sergyar, which for most of the second half of the series has kind of just been sitting in the background in order to ensure Aral and Cordelia don’t crush everybody else’s ability to have plotlines by sheer force of personality.

This book is rather short on actual political intrigue, which is so unusual that basically everybody starts looking for it where it doesn’t exist. Conspiracy is much more believable and palatable to the general cast of characters of these books than old people romance, apparently, but mainly the book really is just a sweet old people romance plus a healthy helping of typical Bujold competence porn. One of the key plot events is Admiral Jole’s fiftieth birthday party, which he didn’t really want to have, but which his subordinates basically insisted on as an excuse to have a really big party and invite everybody in Kareenburg. The party isn’t attacked by terrorists or anything–just a cloud of mosquito-like local pests and a drunk polo team. It is still, somehow, the most traditionally action-packed scene in this book that is still very much military sci-fi. It’s just that when you’re old, I guess, the part of the military you end up in is the one where you argue with plascrete contractors and aren’t allowed to shoot them.

Overall, it is a charming if somewhat fanficcy end to a series that I have very much enjoyed over the past year and a half. It’s been fun watching all of these characters grow up and grow old, and it’s nice that they all get their happy endings.

The December installment of my Vorkisigan Saga reading project was Cryoburn, the second-to-last in the series! This felt a bit like a return to the “main plot” of the series, in that it is a story about Miles, not any of our (highly beloved!) side characters, and in it, Miles is doing good old-fashioned spy shit. In this case, Miles has been sent in his role as an Imperial Auditor to check out something that Seems Off about a corporate project currently underway on Komarr. The short version is that a cryonics corporation from Kibou-Danai, a planet that’s bizarrely obsessed with cryonics and where huge portions of the population put themselves into cryonic freeze until [whatever they were afraid of dying of] is cured and/or their contract is up or runs out of money, is setting up a branch on Komarr, a slowly terraforming planet in the Barrayaran imperium. Miles goes to Kibou-Danai with his armsman Roic and a borrowed scientist from the Durona Group as delegates to a cryonics conference as cover to poke around. It’s all slick corporate bullshit until the conference is attacked by an inept but passionate group of dissidents who try to kidnap everybody. This does not go exactly as planned for the dissidents but it also means nothing is going as planned for anyone else–least of all Miles, who has a spectacular allergic reaction to the sedative they tried to give him–but things not going to plan is where investigative breaks tend to happen, so overall you could say that, near-death experiences aside, the attack was quite a lucky break for Miles.

Because Miles is still, at the age of thirty-whatever, protected by the same foot-thick plot armor that allowed him to survive adolescence and revive from dying in his twenties, he instantly stumbles into the exact correct small child to really get the plot going. In typical Bujold fashion the plot is a mix of classic military sci-fi action-adventure shenanigans–heisting frozen bodies, tailing the goons that are tailing you and getting into stunner shootouts with them, corporate cover-ups, pretending to take bribes, cases of mistaken identity, a brilliant but politically naive scientist type who Makes A Dangerous Discovery, all that good shit–and a deep interest in reproductive and life technologies and the way they affect the culture, politics, and economics of very different civilizations. The ultimate plot from WhiteChrys ends up being about when two very different forms of blatantly anti-democratic vote hoarding on supposedly democratic planets collide. But this ends up basically being only the secondary plot for what is rotten in the state of Kibou-Danai. It all ends rather satisfyingly with corporate bigwigs actually being put on trial for murder, because this series is, after all, ultimately a power fantasy about being able to solve problems.

But the depth of this book comes from basically being a meditation on death, grief, what the living and the dead owe each other, aging, child-parent relationships, the cost to families of taking on the risks of causing political trouble, and all that personal stuff. One of our viewpoint characters is an eleven-year-old runaway whose mother was essentially kidnapped by the police and frozen under dubious circumstances, and who has never been given the time and space to mourn her sudden disappearance from his life, because after all, she is technically not dead.

This all adds up very nicely to provide thematic foreshadowing for the plot point that drops on us right in the epilogue, which prompted me to unfreeze (lol) my hold on Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen immediately instead of waiting until next month. I gotta see what happens next.

The Monday night history call recently finished up the third book in what I’m calling Alan Taylor’s “American Nouns” series, American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850. This book follows the period that I think of as “the time when I don’t know who any of the presidents are,” i.e., the interim decades between the Revolution and the Civil War.

Unsurprisingly, this book continues many of the themes of the previous two books, likely because they are recurring themes in American history. One of these themes is “stealing people’s land, pretending you are the victim when they fight back, and using your pretended victimhood to steal more land.” Another one is “seeing who can be the most racist against the most people in the most innovative ways,” giving us such all-American gems as “being anti-slavery but only because having slavery means keeping black people around and you’d rather deport them all to Liberia.” I learned that during Texas’ brief period of being an independent republic, it was illegal to manumit slaves and illegal to be a free Black person. An additional theme that it is hard not to notice is that every time someone tries to be reasonable or compromising or open-minded to white settlers–both the pro- and anti-slavery ones–they are punished for it.

Throughout, Taylor does a good job of making the various depredations of our garbage republic engaging, comprehensible, and–most distressingly–relevant. The choices of quotations and epigraphs are often pointed and sometimes funny. There are lots of interesting little stories about individual people woven into what is a very wide-ranging survey history, and not all those individual people are particularly famous these days. There is a strong focus on the politics and fortunes of Native nations, as well as some stuff about other countries in North America that aren’t the U.S., such as Mexico.

Anyway, now I know a lot more about How The West Was Won and all that and I sort of wish I didn’t. This is a very good book all the same.