bloodygranuaile

The February entry in my Year of Reading Erics was Eric Jay Dolin’s Rebels at Sea: Privateering in the American Revolution. In November I had gone to a talk by the author about this same subject, and it was a lot of fun, even if I was the youngest person in the audience.

My thoughts on this book are a little scattered and I can’t tell if it’s because the content, while a lot of fun, actually is a little bit disjointed, or if it just seems that way to me because I read it in two- and three-page spurts at random times and kept getting interrupted, because I had the February from Hell, and somehow it took me upwards of ten days to read this even though it’s not very long and I’m sure if I had read it, like, by the lake in the summer, it’d have taken me one day, max. But anyway, it’s largely exactly what it says on the tin, which is a bunch of information about privateering in the American Revolution, and that is a very fun subject that is not usually talked about much, in my experience of people talking about the American Revolution, which does happen quite a bit when you spend your entire adult life in the immediate environs of Boston.

Some of the moral framing that is used in the marketing for this book annoys me, because it’ll be like “Some people think that privateers are basically pirates or war profiteers, but they were actually instrumental in winning the American Revolution,” even though the two parts of that sentence don’t contradict each other. The moral assumptions about piracy, war profiteering, and the American Revolution contradict each other, so the sentence only makes sense if you read it as “Some people think that privateers are [bad] but they are actually [good]” and this type of talk where people use words as if their only meaning is their moral connotation and their actual denotative meaning simply doesn’t exist drives me batty in the extreme. Fortunately, the moral assumptions made in this book only descend to this level of illiterate idiocy in the marketing; the rest of the book takes a pretty standard level of sympathy for the American Revolution and its ideals, as one would expect from an American author writing for an American audience, but nothing out of the ordinary and certainly not to the point of forgetting what words mean. My own understanding of the morals of the American Revolution is a bit more complicated than your standard American propaganda but only when talking about the American side; the few things in this world that can make me feel patriotism include sentences like “This annoyed the English considerably.”

Anyway. Privateering! The first of the rebelling colonies to legalize privateering and start issuing letters of marque was my own dear Massachusetts, a state full of little coastal trading ports and inhabited by very intense people. Salem, being a much more economically important place then than it is now, features fairly heavily; we sent out a lot of privateers. Eventually the fledgling US started sending out privateers as a country in addition to the ones being sent out under state flags; this was largely to supplement the just-founded US Navy, which was having a bad time getting off the ground. The new American privateers were pretty successful, wreaking havoc on British shipping and bringing badly needed commodities into the colonies, and making a pretty profit at the same time. The practice has its naysayers but mostly people thought this was a fantastic way to stick it to the English and men signed up for them in droves.

Disposing of the ships after they were captured added a whole other level of politicking, with Americans conspiring with the French and other supposedly neutral nations to turn prizes into cash at foreign ports, in defiance of various treaties with England. The English were big mad about it, and eventually started trying to do a bit of privateering back, although they never caught up to the Americans.

There is also a chapter on what happened to privateersmen when they got captured, which is pretty sobering. Some of them got sent to regular jails on land in England, which wasn’t fun but seems to have been humane enough by the standards of the time. Others got stuck on prison ships, including the notorious Jersey, a pestilential, overcrowded hulk in the Long Island Sound where the only way to get off the packed ship for even a little bit was to go bury corpses on the nearby beach.

Overall, I liked this book! I think! I’m glad I read it but I wish I’d gotten to read it… better? I was not at the top of my reading game lately and I wish I had been able to read it in big relaxed chunks on Derby Wharf, but alas, sometimes February happens. We’ll see how March’s reading fares in comparison.

I picked up A. R. Vishny’s Night Owls at a very bookish wedding because I thought it sounded like fun, even though it’s YA and I’m not finding myself to really enjoy a lot of YA anymore. (I think I am too old and stuff written for today’s teens does not resonate with me.) But this one promised queer Jewish owl-vampires and a lot of old New York lore and some shenanigans with dead people, so I figured it could be fun.

And it was! I am not super familiar with Jewish folklore, so for me as a reader, the estries were a fairly novel take on vampires, a subject upon which I am otherwise very familiar (possibly too familiar). I also learned a lot about late nineteenth and early twentieth century Yiddish theater, a subject upon which I am again not familiar. I don’t think I am the primary target audience for this book, in that the author is Jewish and seems to want to write about Jewish things for other Jewish people, but I enjoyed it very much all the same–it’s YA, so it’s an easy enough read and willing to explain all but the most obvious stuff to its adolescent characters, and I’ve read enough hundreds of variously warmed-over Christian-derived monster books over the past three decades that it was really great to get something else.

The setup is as such: Clara and Molly appear to be in their late teens but are in fact each well over 100 years old because they are estries. They are the curators and inhabitants of an old Yiddish theater called the Grand Dame, which has been revived as an indie cinema. They rent this building from the prince of demons in exchange for pictures of faces, because how else are you going to get affordable rent in Manhattan when you look like a permanent 18-year-old.

The shenanigans really kick off when Anat, Molly’s current human girlfriend, gets possessed by the ghost of what might be Molly’s first human girlfriend, Lena, who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. Other strange things are happening, too. Initially unbeknownst to Molly and Clara, their hot mess of a box office assistant, Boaz, is also dealing with supernatural stuff, because his family is cursed to be able to talk to ghosts, and the ghosts are getting bolder and pushier. In order to save Anat, and save the world from the demon prince’s machinations, all our main characters will have to come clean about their supernatural secrets and start being able to trust each other for long enough to piece together what is actually going on–which is difficult both because they’re all long used to keeping this stuff secret, and because in true paranormal romance fashion, they are all full of inconvenient feelings. This all builds up to a beautifully chaotic climax involving the space between worlds–the world of the living and that of the dead–manifesting as all sorts of stage and movie sets and places from the characters’ pasts, as various ghosts and demons try to kidnap our characters, steal the family heirloom that Boaz’ Aunt Hila uses to do medium-ing, and generally overrun the world of the living.

Trying to thwart ancient demons isn’t particularly easy–they are clever and have had a lot of time to practice being shady–so the tension remains pleasantly high as characters are crossed and double-crossed, especially in the second half of the book where saving Anat/the world gets quite time-sensitive and poor anxious Boaz is getting hassled by strong-willed secondary characters left and right. Overall I found this book to just be really cute and fun–it’s a pretty quick read, and I got through it over the course of one snowstorm. There’s teenage angst and demons with bird feet and a bunch of wish-fulfillment-y nerd shit about old movies; what else do you need from a YA fantasy?

For Christmas I bought my girlfriend a copy of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, both because it is generally delightful and because I remembered specifically that the worldbuilding and use of dramatic irony was incredible and thought it might be appealing from a gamemaster/game designer perspective. Then my weightlifting Discord server decided to start a book club and it was chosen as the first book, so I had to borrow my own gift in order to reread it, since it has been a long time and I didn’t remember much except the general vibes and the mental image of the House.

The vibes are, as they say, immaculate; both the dreamy, old-fashioned tone of the writing and the images of the House it conjures up are beautiful, suffused with both childlike wonder and a melancholy loneliness. A few things are clear to the reader right off the bat–our narrator has forgotten his own backstory, though he is in denial that he has forgotten anything; the Other is clearly a douchebag, though the narrator insists they are good friends–but this doesn’t make it any less satisfying as the story comes together, the narrator finding bits and pieces of the puzzle and putting them together even as they upend everything he thought he knew about himself, the Other, and the World he has been so meticulously researching.

Even though this was, in theory, a reread (sometimes I am as forgetful as the narrator about books I have read), I found it just as unputdownable as I had the first time I read it. It is good that it is short because otherwise I would find myself canceling stuff left and right to finish it. As it is, I once again read the whole thing in less than 24 hours. I got into bed at 8:30 last night so I could be sure I had at least a good two hours of bedtime reading in which to get properly into it.

This really is just a wonderful little jewel of a book, even if Rafael is a police officer.

For Black History Month, the politics book club decided to read Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. I had read this back in college as part of a survey course of early American literature, and while “enjoyed” seems maybe not quite the right word for the experience of reading a slavery narrative, I did think it was very good and–well, frankly, I did enjoy reading it, because it was a tense and dramatic story, and things that make good reading are different from things that I approve of.

Like all slave narratives of the time, this was an explicitly abolitionist text. It is bookended with a lot of testimonials vouching for its veracity, and its clearly stated purpose is to let people know about how bad slavery is so that they will be moved to oppose it. Only the names have been changed, to protect the guilty as well as the innocent.

Jacobs is very clear to emphasize that, as far as slaves go, she didn’t even have it too bad. She was a house slave, not a field slave, and her grandmother was free, so she had some relatives who had some measure of rights, and who weren’t entirely under the power of her owner. This relative privilege is also part of how she learned to read well enough to be able to also eventually be able to write an entire book, and she is careful to stress the importance of education and the ways in which denying slaves literacy is a method of control.

Being in the house, however, puts Jacobs squarely in the line of fire for years of sexual harassment from her owner–or more specifically, her owner’s father, since she is owned by a small child. The father, therefore, is the one with power over her, although he very conveniently remembers that he’s not her actual owner only when one of Jacobs’ friends or family is attempting to buy her out of his household, at which point his hands are tied because she’s totally his daughter’s and is not his to sell, sorry guys.

After many years of creatively attempting to avoid incessant sexual harassment from Dr. Flint, Jacobs–in the story, going by the pseudonym Linda Brent–decides to escape, and concocts a brilliantly counterintuitive, though very dangerous, plan to do so. This plan sees her living in a small, poorly insulated garret in the garden shed at her grandmother’s house for seven years, watching her two children grow up via a peephole the size of a coin, while Dr. Flint makes multiple trips to New York to try and hunt her down. There are a few close shaves where Linda/Harriet is almost found out, but her hiding-place holds, and eventually she is presented with an opportunity to take a boat to Philadelphia with another female runaway. She eventually does wind up in New York, where she navigates the different style of racism in the North and works to secure herself and her children away from their Southern owners. This eventually involves one of Linda’s abolitionist friends buying her, in New York, which is not really supposed to happen, but I guess the sale was legal on the part of the seller but not legal on the part of the buyer, thus leaving her un-owned? The legal details were not entirely clear to me.

Jacobs is careful to tell not just her own story, but also the stories of as many friends, family members, and acquaintances as she can, especially those of slaves who are illiterate and thus would never be in a place to publish their own experiences. There is an interesting style choice here, where the dialogue of Linda and her immediate family is written in standard English, but the speech of other slaves is written in eye-dialect, highlighting how nonstandard their speech is. I am sure someone somewhere has written an analysis of this but for right now I just think it is interesting and notable.

Moral degradation is a big theme here, for what I hope are obvious reasons. Jacobs tackles head-on the moral charges levied against Black people and especially enslaved Black people, illustrating how the dire circumstances they are in force them to become cunning, dishonest towards their masters, and even–the biggest horror to her nineteenth-century readership–unchaste. She also illustrates, with some pity, the moral degradation of the mistresses of slave-holding households, and the way in which their husbands’ practices of sexually assaulting female slaves leads them to enact their rage and jealousy upon all the other people in the household that they do have power over, instead of upon their husbands, the one person they generally don’t. And of course, the self-centered, contradictory, always-having-it-both-ways moral reasoning of men like Dr. Flint is repeatedly put on display and carefully dissected for both its inconsistency and its general moral repugnance.

Overall this book is both must-read education about life under slavery, and a genuinely great memoir. Highly recommended, especially if you find yourself ever, under any circumstances, in a position where you are even thinking about opening your mouth about American slavery.

I have had a copy of Dan Jones’ The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England sitting on ye olde TBR shelf for… probably ten years now? Anyway, I was chatting with one of the bartenders at East Reg who said he was reading it and was having a great time, so I bumped it up the priority list and started reading it last week. It’s about 500 pages long, so I wasn’t able to crank my way through it before I got un-sick enough that I had to start getting out of bed and doing things besides read, but it was very fun and fast-paced, so I did spend a few evenings last week staying up a little too late reading it.

I did not know a whole lot about the Plantagenets before going into this. I had heard the name, but my knowledge of pre-Tudor rulers of England is very spotty, and I had no sense of what order any of it went into. I knew there were way too many Henrys and I didn’t know anything about any of them except the seventh and eighth. I knew Richard the Lionheart was the king when the Robin Hood stories take place and that he was off on crusade sometimes. I knew Eleanor of Aquitaine was kind of a big deal but I couldn’t have told you how she was related to anybody.

As a result, this was a very good book for me! The blurbs on it frame it as basically a “primer” on the Plantagenet dynasty, and that was exactly what I needed. It walks us through the 300 or so years of history from the reign of Henry II through the deposition of Richard II and into the outbreak of the Wars of the Roses with the ascension of Henry IV. I have another book on the Wars of the Roses that I am now interested in reading quite soon, although it is not the one by this author, who seems to have written quite a number of popular medieval histories and also hosted a TV show I’m now watching on Netflix called The Secrets of Great British Castles, which is exactly what it sounds like and perfect edutainment content for me.

The main narrative throughline in this book in terms of trying to tie it all together into an argument for historical importance is the relationship between Plantagenet monarchs and the rest of the English political community. We all learned at least a little bit about the Magna Carta at school but other than that, US kids don’t get all that much in the way of lessons about UK civics; hell, in a lot of places we barely learn about US civics. Here, Jones walks us through the changing relationships between the Plantagenet kings and their barons, knights, and occasionally the commons, and the increasingly sophisticated system of charters, parliaments, courts, and other administrative apparatus that governed England as it chugged slowly and unknowingly toward the modern era. Disputes over the taxes to finance the endless wars with France, Scotland, Wales, the Holy Land, and occasionally Ireland and Spain bring together military and financial history in a way that’s fun and easy to follow even if you are the sort of person who usually likes the military history more than the financial history (I do like financial history but I can recognize that it’s sometimes dry. This is not dry).

There are probably more scholarly books on the Plantagenets you can read if you want to be really serious about it–Jones provides a pretty intriguing “further reading” list at the back. But if you are just like “I can name all six of Henry VIII’s wives and what happened to them, but I couldn’t tell you if Prince John from Robin Hood and King John from Shakespeare’s King John are the same person or not if you put a gun to my head,” then this is certainly the book for you (they are indeed the same person). A few years ago I read Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle and when Merricat’s list of things she liked included “Richard Plantagenet” I was vaguely embarrassed that I wasn’t sure who that was other than that it probably wasn’t Richard III because nobody liked him. I am now no longer embarrassed because even though there are two Richard Plantagenets I now know enough about them to be pretty confident that it’s the first one because nobody liked Richard II, either. I am also very pleased to be confident that if I ever have to watch another adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry IV I will be able to at least sort of tell some of the Henrys in it apart.

Sometimes when I am having a bad time I like to read about people having an even worse time, so it is fortunate for me that my hold on Eric Jay Dolin’s Left for Dead: Shipwreck, Treachery, and Survival at the End of the World came in right before I fell sick last week.

Dolin lets us know right off the bat that this is not a story of far-reaching historical importance; instead, it is merely a really wild tale that he wanted to rescue from oblivion because of how nuts it is.

There are a couple of main parties in this story, which takes place during the War of 1812. Party 1 is the crew of the Nanina, an American ship on a sealing voyage to the Falklands, which had sailed out of New York right before war officially broke out. They were hoping to spend a year or so sealing and then sail back when the war had blown over. This didn’t quite work out for them. It is important to note, however, that the Nanina was in the Falklands on purpose and was not shipwrecked. The Falklands were otherwise uninhabited at the time, the Spanish settlement having been abandoned a year or two earlier.

The second main party is the crew and passengers of the Isabella, a British ship inbound from Australia. The captain of the Isabella is not the greatest at his job and manages to wreck the ship on one of the outer islands in the Falklands. The resourceful Aussies are able to set up a little camp on their spit of land that keeps them all alive, although not quite in the style they are accustomed to. They send some guys out in a longboat on a hail Mary trip to South America to try to get help.

While the guys in the longboat are on their way to Rio, the American sealers discover the stranded British Australians. Though the two countries are at war, the Americans figure that’s not really the top priority here outside of what they would have considered civilization. The Americans agree to cut their sealing voyage short and give the stranded Brits a ride back to the mainland.

Unbeknownst to them, the hail Mary longboat trip works out! While the Nanina is preparing to house its own crew and the folks from the Isabella, the head of British naval operations in Buenos Aires sends out his subordinate, William D’Arada, out to rescue his fellow countrymen in a rickety tub called the Nancy. D’Arada, upon arriving in the Falklands, is delighted to find not only the folks he was sent to rescue, but also a bunch of Americans! He promptly, and somewhat illegally, takes the Nanina as a prize and its crew as prisoners. His fellow Brits find this pretty ungallant but don’t do much about it. D’Arada sends the Nanina off to England under his prize master and then sails the Nancy back to Buenos Aires with the rescues from the Isabella.

Unfortunately, while D’Arada was upsetting all their plans, a hunting party of five men–mixed American and British–had separated from the main group to get food. When they returned to the main camp, everyone else had departed. Again, some of the Isabella passengers thought this was pretty douchey of D’Arada, but nobody really had the standing to mess with him, nor did they try too hard.

Thus, in the second half of the book, our cast of characters is drastically reduced, from two or three ships’ worth of people to merely five, plus a dog. These five guys (and their dog) have an eventful but, fortunately, never fatal eighteen months of Robinson Crusoe-ing it up in the Falklands, having interpersonal falling-outs, at least one mutiny, numerous attempts at conflict resolution in different levels of success, trips to hunt seals, hogs, and penguin and albatross eggs, and other such shenanigans as they wonder if anyone will ever come to get them. Navigating around the Falklands in their little shallop is dangerous enough that sailing to Rio or wherever seems to be out of the question, although if I recall correctly they do try once and basically can’t get the little boat out of the Falklands in one piece. Meanwhile, back in Buenos Aires, and then New York, and then London, legal and press machinations are afoot, and eventually, the Americans who had made it back to America–after some time as British prisoners of war–are able to send a brig out to the Falklands to rescue the five men. It takes some of them a whole other relay race of shipping voyages to get their arses back home again, but at least in the meantime they got to see some other people. One of the stranded men, Captain Charles Barnard (the original captain of the Nanina), eventually writes a rather pompous memoir about his adventures, which sells moderately well for the time and then fades into obscurity, until apparently one day Eric Jay Dolin found it and was like “This is nuts; I gotta tell people about this” and wrote Left for Dead.

This was overall a very fun read. I’m not sure it quite reaches the “masterpiece of narrative nonfiction” level of something like The Wager but I’d still definitely recommend it for fans of The Wager because it tells a similar type of story, and is very fast-paced and readable. Dolin goes to great pains to avoid moralizing about things like the ethics of sealing or basically anything other than D’Aranda’s personal conduct, which pretty much everyone except D’Aranda agrees was shitty. The book has lots of pictures, which I thought was great, and lots of footnotes, which were informative but interrupted the flow a little. There is plenty of interesting historical context to flesh out what the world was like for the people involved, which I think is valuable even if there’s simply no case to be made that this event had any particular far-reaching impact on history writ large. It’s an excellent addition to the “putting dudes in Situations” canon of maritime literature. Those dudes were for sure in a Situation! In fact, the Situations kept compounding into new and worse Situations, for quite a while! None of these Situations devolved into cannibalism, which was frankly a lucky break for these guys, but there weren’t too many other people around to eat anyway, so instead we get interesting lessons in how to hunt all the weird fauna that was hanging out in the Falklands around 1813 or so, and several near-death experiences with elephant seals. Exciting!

In one of my book groups, we decided to kick off the year with Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman’s classic of media studies, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. I voted for this but for some reason I was under the impression that it was a short book; I was extremely wrong about that. This is a 350-page book only because it is blithely printed with small, single-spaced text on fairly large pages–basically, standard hardback sized pages, but mass market paperback print.

It is pretty content-dense (the prose, while hardly magazine-like breezy, is pretty readable by scholarly standards), and also the subject matter is very depressing, so it took me a while to get through even though I am very interested in this sort of thing. One of the strengths of the book as a work of both scholarship and argumentation is a weakness in terms of its readability: It backs up its points with evidence, and lots of it. The beginning of the book lays out the “model” by which media spin and servility happen and the rest of the book mainly consists of very detailed case studies about mass-media fuckery that were relevant at the time this book was published in the 1980s–the Vietnam war, the wars in Laos and Cambodia, coverage of foreign elections, coverage of specifically murders of humanist activist clerics in foreign countries, and a fascinating chapter on an attempt to assassinate the Pope that I had somehow never heard of. All of it makes the New York Times’ role in lying us into the Iraq War in the early 2000s sound more like standard operating procedure than a rare and embarrassing lapse, which, personally, I think is because it was (the New York Times is a bloodthirsty rag and I will never, ever forgive it).

This book is largely interesting as a Foundational Text of leftist media criticism and as a source of interesting information about stuff that happened during the Cold War, but it also does hold up fairly well as a way of explaining how media works. The media has changed quite a lot since this book was published in the ‘80s, and the rise of the Internet and of social media has really thrown a wrench in the way media works in many ways, but TV news still exists and millions of people still watch it, and the New York Times still exists and is still considered the flagship paper of the United States (because we are a fundamentally unserious country)–and, perhaps most importantly, the legacy media still portrays itself as a credible, resolute investigative watchdog against unchecked government power that works in the public’s interest and informs them about how the world works. This is a very important thing to have a realistic assessment of if one is evaluating or participating in conversations about how people these days are all stupid and don’t know how shit works because they get all their news from TikTok, which is indeed bad, but the solution proposed is usually to get these dumb-dumbs to “realize” that they should be consuming “real” news so that they can have a “realistic” and unified understanding of the world and consensus reality like the country did back when everybody watched Walter Cronkite every night. The conversation about the abandonment of legacy news in favor of whatever we’re flocking to now that Twitter’s unusable is incomplete if it does not address that people’s distrust of the mass media is correct because the mass media is indeed full of shit, it’s just that the correctness ends there and from there you can go in many, many different directions, most of which are dodgy. Anyway, I think the book provides enough explanation of the sorts of things that put pressure on media coverage that an intelligent person can extrapolate a bit when trying to factor in things like Facebook.

Winter to me always feels like a good time to revisit Tolkien, so yesterday while recovering from Christmas I picked up the copy of Beren and Lúthien that I had borrowed from my girlfriend over the summer. Like most of the books on Tolkien’s unfinished works, this was put together by his son, Christopher Tolkien, as part of the run of post-movie-series books that revisited tales told or explicated in works like The Silmarillion and the History of Middle-Earth series, but that rather than being compilations of many different tales, focused on one tale per volume and took us through their development and the various drafts.

The tale of Beren and Lúthien is one of the most important tales of the First Age, and it is referenced a lot in The Lord of the Rings, especially as concerns the romance between Aragorn and Arwen. This work compiles various versions, both finished and unfinished, in verse and in prose, to illustrate the development of the tale over the years as Tolkien fiddled with it, changing names and occurrences and how much detail to go into. The early versions of the tale are interesting particularly for how they differ from the version alluded to in The Lord of the Rings, which must be regarded as canon: in the very earliest draft Beren is not even a mortal man, but an Elf (or Gnome) from a rival group of Elves. In addition, one of the earlier version features Morgoth’s (or Melko, in this one) lieutenant Tevildo, the Prince of Cats, a rather comic character who occupies the space in the more serious later versions occupied by Sauron (who also goes through a bunch of names, spending some time as Thu the Necromancer). Tevildo is some sort of demon in cat form who holds all other cats in thrall and makes them big and scary, and his enemy is the hound Huan, who sticks around through all versions of the story even when the silly cat vs. dog rivalry is abandoned. Some of the cats have silly names like “Miaule.” I loved this version of the story but it definitely had a more The Hobbit sort of bedtime-stories-for-children vibe than this particular tragic romance seems to call for. Sometimes we forget that Tolkien could be a very funny man when he wanted to be.

This book also has a bunch of gorgeous illustrations by Alan Lee, apparently the only person to do correct Middle-Earth illustrations, going by some of the nonsense I’ve seen. It really is just a gorgeous book, gorgeous story, gorgeous poetry. (And much easier to read than the HoME series.) Highly recommended for Tolkien fans.

For reasons related to my current maritime disasters kick I vowed that this December I would finally read the copy of The Great Halifax Explosion that has been sitting on my shelf since January 2019. I first learned about the event when I visited Nova Scotia in 2017 and everybody was doing centenary stuff about it, and I am reminded of it every year when Boston gets its Christmas tree, which the Haligonians send us in thanks for our relief efforts. So I know the short version of the story pretty well but I wanted to read the book-length version, which is why I bought this book when I saw it in an airport, a place I almost never buy books.

The short version of the story is that at 9 o’clock in the morning on December 6, 1917, two ships accidentally bonked into each other in Halifax Harbor. This was not a very fierce crash and it would not have been a huge deal except that, Halifax Harbor being a major port in the World War One supply line, one of the ships was carrying six million pounds of explosives. The resulting blowup was the largest man-made explosion in history at the time and would retain that record for another almost thirty years until the US dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. This short version is very exciting but doesn’t contain any important lessons, other than maybe that it was very heroic for Boston to send so many doctors and nurses and blankets and hits of cocaine afterward.

The long version is a whole different story! In addition to the added human interest element, of which there is quite a lot–eyewitness accounts by survivors, photographs, a lot of historical context of the different neighborhoods in Halifax and Dartmouth–John U. Bacon spends a good amount of time giving a play-by-play account of every single safety regulation, norm, and best practice that was disregarded over the course of both ships’ journeys, starting with the Mont-Blanc’s unsuitability for the job it was doing and going through the inadvertent packaging of the Mont-Blanc into a perfect floating bomb, Halifax Harbor’s decision to rescind safety protocols like requiring munitions boats to fly a red flag, and the Imo’s Captain From’s impatient decision to blow out of Halifax Harbor at top speed in the wrong lane and play chicken with anyone coming the other direction. This book has lots of things it wants us to learn about the importance of safety regulations, which I agree is very important. It’s also genuinely thrilling reading–well paced, and you can see the disaster inching nearer with every corner cut. I also learned a lot about Halifax and the people who lived here, which as an idiot American I am in sore need of education on.

The explosion itself occurs about halfway through the book, and the second half describes in horrifying detail the immediate aftermath–told largely through the eyes of the ordinary survivors we’ve been getting to know in the first half–the relief and cleanup efforts in the following few weeks, and the later legal wrangling to determine blame, a series of four trials that started with the local Wreck Commission and ended up being appealed all the way to London. The descriptions of the medical relief efforts, from both the local and semi-local Canadian doctors who could make their way in that day and the US contingent sent by Massachusetts’ first experimental iteration of a disaster relief commission, are thorough, vivid, and incredibly nasty. I found it absolutely riveting but some readers might get squicked, so caveat lector if you are squeamish about gross medical stuff, especially eyeballs.

While I read this in December specifically to be seasonal, I did not expect the Christmas season connection to affect me as much as it did, especially reading it warm and cozy in my bed on a bitingly cold morning, reading about these poor folks whose windows had all been blown out of their houses trying stay warm through a particularly ill-timed blizzard. It manages to get all heartwarming at the end, so I guess it really is a Christmas book. It’s not one that could ever be made into a family holiday movie, though; too many people get their eyeballs removed.

Continuing my Lois McMaster Bujold adventures, I read Cetaganda, the next installment in the Vorkosigan Saga. This one follows Miles and his much handsomer, much dumber cousin Ivan as they go on a diplomatic mission to the Cetagandan Empire, which until very recently has been a recurring enemy of Barrayar.

Miles and Ivan were actually not sent to Cetaganda on any mission other than their public one, which was to represent and deliver a gift from Emperor Gregor at the funeral of the Cetagandan Dowager Empress Lisbet Degtiar. However, a very sensitive intelligence mission attacks them before they’ve even docked properly at the Cetagandan shuttle station (getting them to dock improperly is the opening salvo of the plot, in fact). Miles then spends a tight 300 pages trying to figure out what the fuck is going on and which Cetagandan nob is trying to frame Barrayar for their own treason so they can start another war, which, while Barrayar has won the last couple wars against Cetaganda, they’d still really like to take a good generation-long break from. Miles’ ability to do intel/counter-intel is initially hampered by being in a strange civilization where he doesn’t know anybody and doesn’t know how stuff works, but through sheer enfant-terrible-whiz-kid-ness and plot armor a mile thick, he manages to avoid dying (multiple times) for long enough to talk his way into cultivating some allies, spinning some theories, and gaining access to all sorts of very off-limits-to-barbarian-outworlders spaces in Cetagandan culture.

The Cetagandans are master… well, eugenicists, basically, although (as far as we can see) they are less about murdering undesirables (for genetics reasons, anyway; they’re real big on it as part of regular imperial expansionism) than about tinkering with gene lines to create an incredibly baroque and insular aristocratic power structure, kind of like how all European royalty are cousins with each other, except since it’s being done by Science instead of the old-fashioned way they can avoid any unfortunate Habsburg chins and suchlike. The upper class of genetically on-purpose Cetagandans are called the haut, and they are all very hot, and the women float around in little force-bubbles when in public so no one can see them. The sort of gentry or lower-aristocratic class, from which most of the military brass is drawn, are called the ghem, and the highest honor a ghem-lord can win from the Emperor, even higher than the Order of Merit, is an haut-lady wife. The other big division of labor in Cetagandan society is gender, with the women in charge of the genome project and the men in charge of externally facing Imperial politics. This division does not in any way usurp the class solidarity of the haut, of course.

All this is a bit baffling to Miles, who comes from Barrayar, a place where power is very firmly in the hands of Men Who Can Kill Lots of People. Fortunately, as befits a protagonist, Miles is a quick study, and has the benefit of being constantly underestimated. (He is, in fact, so underestimated that at one point the as-yet-unknown antagonist sees Miles poking around and assumes that Ivan must be the one directing him, and promptly kidnaps Ivan, who is a dumbass who doesn’t know shit about what’s going on.)

In very classic Miles fashion, our hero spends nearly as much time and effort trying to avoid reporting his mission to his superiors–either the Barrayaran ambassador, or the protocol officer, who is actually the embassy’s ImpSec commander–because he doesn’t want them to take the mission away from him and send it up the chain of command, which is what would probably happen given that Miles is a 22-year-old lieutenant with no subordinates.

This gets increasingly difficult as the shenanigans heighten. A low-ranking, broke young ghem-lord takes a sort of half-assed interest in the Barrayaran oddities and plays a series of minor xenophobic pranks on them that are sometimes actual assassination attempts, which he doesn’t seem to be aware of. Ivan develops a reputation among the ghem-women while Miles does detective work and keeps causing minor diplomatic incidents by being in places he shouldn’t be. An Imperial servant is murdered and it is staged to look like a suicide, and Miles tries to gently direct the Cetagandan security officer in charge of the investigation to do actual investigating instead of wrapping it up quickly and quietly, which he is under significant pressure to do. This works because Miles, insufferably protagonist-y as he can be, is certainly not The Guy With the Only Brain Cell–in fact, in this particular book he seems to be surrounded mostly by very smart and competent people, except for Ivan and Lord Yenaro (and even they are competent at some things. Yenaro’s competency, unfortunately, is perfumery, not political intrigue).

Overall verdict is pretty in keeping with the rest of the Saga: a little tropey but a lot of fun.