bloodygranuaile

It’s been a while since I immersed myself in the adventures of Upper-Class Twit of the Year Bertie Wooster and his long-suffering valet Jeeves, so in the interest of knocking out a light, fast read in between some longer, heavier ones I’ve got scheduled, I settled in with the ebook of The Inimitable Jeeves, the second volume in P.G. Wodehouse’s infamous series. I may or may not have read this one before, since I’ve apparently only got one Wodehouse book tracked as read on Goodreads but I’m know I’ve read more than that, which means whichever ones I did read I read before I started tracking properly and their memory has been lost to the mists of time.

The Inimitable Jeeves is a series of short vignettes in the life of Bertie Wooster. The vignettes alternate like clockwork between ones that involve the sorry love life of Bertie’s school chum Bingo Little, and ones about something else. One of Bingo’s great character flaws is that he falls in love with about every other girl he sees, and each time is wholly convinced that he has never truly been in love before and this one is totally different from all the other ones. Bingo’s other great character flaw is his habit of continually begging for help from Bertie to sort out the various scrapes his romantinc misadventures land him in, occasionally because he thinks Bertie himself will actually be able to help, but often enough he does have the sense to directly beg that Bertie bring in Jeeves. Intertwined with his romantic escapades, Bingo is always doing things to cause his uncle to cut off his allowance, thus necessitating that most degrading of activities, getting a job. The jobs in question are almost always tutoring jobs, in which Bingo goes out to some country estate or other to teach some gentry stripling to pass his exams, and then he falls in love with the stripling’s older sister or the local parson’s daughter or whatever suitably aged girl is around, and then Bertie and Jeeves have to go visit and push someone into the lake, or what have you.

Not all of these escapades, in town or in the country, involve Bingo’s love life, however. Some of them involve Bertie’s frightful younger cousins Claude and Eustace, who go to Oxford, or at least they go to Oxford until they get expelled for pouring a beverage (there is disagreement about what kind) on one of the higher-ranking teachers (there is disagreement about which one) and get themselves shipped off to South Africa. All the country stories also seem to involve a man called Steggles, an unscrupulous bookie who induces all the gents to bet on the outcomes of various dramas of village life and then interferes shamelessly with the unwitting contestants. The fearsome Aunt Agatha makes a few appearances, one of which goes so poorly that Bertie has to visit New York for several weeks to avoid her.

As always, the adventures themselves are fairly light and silly–and certainly entertaining–but the real comic joy here is Bertie’s voice, an unfiltered torrent of extremely time-and-space-and-class-specific slang from a man with no capacity or inclination to code-switch and not a whole lot of brains. Bertie is a delightfully dim bulb who manages to express his emotions effectively, if not eloquently, with a lot of “What, what?” and “I say” and the occasional petulant “bit rummy.” For some reason I was especially tickled by his referring to London on occasion as “the old metrop” and I intend to become insufferable and start referring to Boston the same way.

Anyway, whether or not I had read this before, I’m certainly glad I read it now, and I need to not wait so many years before getting to the next one. I could probably find them all in a box set, if I looked, and then they’d be sitting on the shelf instead of on Kindle and it might remind me to read them more than one every ten years.

Several years ago a friend who knew I was interested in bananas Victorian Gothics recommended me The Beetle, so I was excited when, on the heels of the success of Dracula Daily, some enterprising fellow fan of goofy Victorian Gothics started The Beetle Weekly, specifically promising us more of everything that made Dracula bad and less of anything that made Dracula good, even though The Beetle outsold Dracula by like a factor of four the year it was released.

The Beetle starts off relatively strong with a sympathetic story of a down-on-his luck clerk, Robert Holt, who has been reduced to vagrancy via the pitiless capitalism of pre-welfare-state Britain and finds himself, in desperation, crawling through the open window of an apparently uninhabited house. He is incorrect about the uninhabited state of the house and that is where the horrors begin, and also it is all downhill from there, because the horrors are fucking goofy and also pretty racist. Bobert (as he is known to fandom) is hypnotized by an ambiguously gendered brown person whomst can also shape-shift into a giant scarab beetle, and this beetle/person sends Bobert to burglarize the house of an up-and-coming statesman named Paul Lessingham, even though Bobert does not actually have any burglarizing skills, being actually an unemployed clerk. This begins a comedy of errors–that thinks it’s a thrilling horror story–of Bobert breaking ineptly into Paul Lessingham’s house to steal his letters, Paul Lessingham having a mental breakdown when Bobert yells “THE BEETLE!” at him, and a mostly-nude Bobert running hypnotizedly away and straight into Paul’s romantic rival and our second narrator, absolute shithead Sydney Atherton.

Sydney Atherton is an “inventor” who is in love with Marjorie Lindon, his childhood friend who has become secretly engaged to Paul Lessingham, and who ought to be but is not in love with Dora Grayling, a wealthy young maiden who wants to marry Atherton and fund all his horrible inventions, like death gas for conquering South America. They have some very bizarre interactions, including one where Dora wants Sydney to “demonstrate” the death gas and then gets upset when he uses it to kill a random cat that he picked up off the street and decided was Paul Lessingham’s cat. There is some third person around who also is in love with Marjorie Lindon and Sydney almost kills him by continually Fortifying His Nerves with hard liquors on an empty stomach. Atherton hates Lessingham and continually calls him “the Apostle” which is sort of appropriate given how obnoxiously sanctimonious Lessingham is, except that Sydney is even more obnoxious. For some absolutely inexplicable reason everybody keeps coming to Sydney for like, life advice and stuff–Marjorie, Dora, Marjorie’s dad, and even Paul! Most of the things they want advice on are how to deal with one or more of the other people coming to Sydney for advice, so he kind of bumbles around letting them all eavesdrop on each other while hiding in his death-gas-inventing studio.

Things take a twist when a nearly-dead Bobert passes out in front of Marjorie’s house and she, taking over the narration, takes him in and gives him a bath and some food and calls Sydney to see what the heck she should do about this babbling unfortunate that she picked up because she is sooo compassionate and charitable even though she’s actually never passed up a chance to be nasty to anyone once in this entire book. Sydney, having run into Bobert previously and also been the subject of some completely unsolicited confessions from “the Apostle,” is super jazzed to know exactly what Bobert is babbling about but refuses to tell Marjorie about it because he’s a vicious little misogynist, so instead all he tells her is that it’s terribly dangerous and he and Bobert are going out and can he borrow a revolver and also she can’t come because it’s too dangerous, so obviously she insists upon going because he won’t actually tell her what’s too dangerous (she does not, however, bring a revolver, even though the one thing she does know about this situation is that Sydney thinks it’s the kind of dangerous that can be helped with a revolver). This is how Marjorie gets lost in the house that hypnotized Bobert earlier.

From here we move to our last narrator, the previously unintroduced solicitor Augustus Champnell, because what’s a nineteenth century Gothic without a serious, sober-minded solicitor to document that all the horrors are real and definitely not wild fancies? It’s not like we have to trust Sydney, both because he’s a mad scientist who’s been huffing poison gases or whatever and because far from a disinterested party. Paul and Sydney both immediately seek the services of Champnell in bailing them out of whatever nonsense they’re involved in, which is how we get Paul’s full backstory, finally–a jaw-droppingly racist lurid fantasy of evil Isis-worshiping Arabs in colonized Egypt who capture white Christian Englishwomen and sometimes Englishmen and subject them to various tortures and sexual assaults and such before offering them up to a giant beetle idol as human sacrifices and burning them alive. All very normal. Anyway, after hearing this remarkable story, and doing some extremely funny Marx Brothers-sounding shit where the three grown men bounce around town in a hansom cab built for only two passengers, Champnell, Atherton, and Lessingham chase the Beetle and Bobert and a captive Marjorie all around southern England in a variety of hansoms, carriages, and trains, until the Beetle is finally defeated via an off-screen train crash and also the underground Beetle Isis cult human sacrifice caves over in Egypt coincidentally explode for no documented reason whatsoever. A solicitor is telling us this so you know it’s very serious and not at all funny business.

Truly this book is awful in every way nineteenth century British writing can be awful all at once, and then some. I had so much fun reading it along with a bunch of insane people on Tumblr and Discord so we could all make fun of it endlessly and try to figure out what in the name of Aryan Jesus Richard Marsh was thinking. Just a remarkable feat of bad Victoriana.

Another day, another Murderbot novella. A mere week after starting the series I knocked out the fourth one, Martha Wells’ Exit Strategy. In this one, Murderbot’s favorite human has gone missing, most likely kidnapped by the extra-evil corporation GrayCris, and probably as a direct result of the shenanigans Murderbot had very helpfully gotten up to in the previous book.

Also as a result of the prior shenanigans, Murderbot has leveled up, and can now do more difficult and fancier things with hacking and multitasking and otherwise autonomously orchestrating fun pew-pew space battles against a variety of human and machine malefactors. There’s some more metahumor about TV in this one, and a lot of complicated human-type feelings. It’s very much a fun, comfortable popcorn read for extremely genre-savvy nerds, which really does seem to be the publisher’s bread and butter these days, a thing I am not complaining about (especially given how much of it is fun competence porn/power fantasy for extremely online queer nerds, particularly). There’s jokes and some plausible-sounding technobabble. The philosophical shit about what it means to be human is usually text, rather than subtext, but I don’t mind, because the text is mostly Murderbot going “Well, that’s fucking stupid” and I enjoy being able to occasionally indulge similar feelings about this whole being human racket. I liked that Murderbot’s happy ending was just, like, some space to think, and a reasonably chill support system of people who weren’t going to tell it what to do. It’s nice to have space. Upon finishing I did immediately check the novel out of the library, and I intend to read it this week.

This week I read the third installment of Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries series, Rogue Protocol. In this one, Murderbot, in their guise of augmented human Security Consultant Rin, sneaks along to a planet that’s somehow tied up in the case against the evil-even-by-corporation-standards GrayCris, a supposedly botched terraforming case that has now been bought out by another company. However, since we are all now suspicious that GrayCris wasn’t actually terraforming at all but was instead illegally mining for alien artifacts, the research party for the company that bought the planet is probably about to be in trouble, hence their need for a secret and dubiously human security consultant.

Murderbot first makes friends with the human party’s happy, trusting, and well-treated pet robot Miki, who, having been well-treated all its little robot life, is perfectly sweet and nice in a way that causes Murderbot to have to periodically bow out of the feed and go have Feelings by themselves, since therapy isn’t an option on this planetary outpost (or at all). There is a sufficiently exciting plot involving saving the humans from the various threats that GrayCris has left on the planet to exterminate them and destroy the evidence of their illegal alien artifact mining, much of which is theatrically staged under the large, transparent observation dome of the geohub while static-interference-inducing electric storm clouds rage picturesquely outside (everything from Tor.com these days seems deliberately written in the hopes that it will someday be translated into a visual medium, which I believe is intended primarily to torment visually-minded readers like me personally). It is very cool and contains many good dunks on how bad everybody else is at security work, spiced up with self-deprecating commentary on Murderbot’s own fuckups, such as that they have yoinked far too many of their plays from soapy serials like Sanctuary Moon.

While occasionally the combination of “depressed” + “thinks a lot about threat modeling” makes these books not quite as escapist as I would like right now, I’m still enjoying them very much, will be on to the next volume today.

Immediately upon finishing All Systems Red I began reading Martha Wells’ Artificial Condition, the second novella in her Murderbot Diaries series. In this one, Murderbot has fucked off from the planet in which they were supposed to be granted “citizen” status--but a qualified form of citizenship that basically resembles a modern-day employment visa instead of, like, literally be property, but if you know anything about modern-day employment visas you’ll know that they are not the actual same thing as citizenship rights--and is now on a journey to uncover the mystery of their tragic past (the one that caused them to name themself “Murderbot”). In journeying to Ganaka Pit to research the Ganaka Pit Incident, Murderbot befriends a research transport pilot bot that they name ART (it stands for Asshole Research Transport), is hired as a security consultant by a group of human researchers (Murderbot seems to like researchers and scientists, inasmuch as they like any humans), and liberates a sexbot (but like, not in a sexy way). While this is not a very large cast of characters, it is quite a lot for Murderbot, especially the ones they have to pretend to be a human in front of. Murderbot is relatably bad at things like “eye contact” and “not acting weird” and is frequently surprised when passing as a human means that people occasionally listen to them. Murderbot attempts to pick up some human mannerisms, like sighing when people say stupid things. It’s so much fun.

Murderbot’s gender is given as “indeterminate” in this one so even though I originally read them as male-ish by virtue of being a security android (oddly, I think being a woman who does a lot of security/community safety work has just highlighted for me the degree to which a corporate “generic”/unmarked security construct would definitely be designed to be male-coded, probably it would look like Tom Hardy), but now that Murderbot is on record as “not bothering to have a gender even when given the option” I’ll be switching pronouns in these reviews.

The actual plotline in Artificial Condition is… there? I wasn’t really invested in it, but that wasn’t really the point. It did its job of getting Murderbot and their humans into mortal peril that they they had to get out of again so that they could learn something heartwarming and then retreat into a low-key depressed funk to binge-watch Sanctuary Moon. And that’s what I want out of a space adventure novella, really.

I downloaded the first four ebooks in Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries series last year when they were being given away by the publisher as a promotion for the fifth book. I had intended to read them last year as they fit my “no male romantic leads” stricture for 2020, as the viewpoint character is aroace. This is partly because they’re an android--specifically, a mass-produced security android owned by a company known only as “the company”--but given how many AI stories use “falling in love” as an indicator of emerging humanity on the part of the AIs, it was nice to be pre-assured that this was not going to happen.

Though it took longer than I had intended, I finally got around to reading the first book, All Systems Red, and got to meet Murderbot. And I gotta say, I like him; I find him very relatable. He is sarcastic and pretty awkward when it comes to dealing with humans, task-oriented but not necessarily invested in his job the way the company intends him to be, has a low tolerance for corporate bullshit and would rather watch melodramatic TV all day, and does security work. Honestly he reminds me of a lot of people I’ve met doing community safety work, sometimes.

Subversive people’s hero anarcho-android Murderbot has a tragic past, which is obviously related to why he calls himself Murderbot, but instead of wallowing, he has taken safety matters into his own hands and disabled his governor’s module, which is the bit of programming that makes him obey the company. Having thus made himself ungovernable, he mostly just does his job with the minimum of effort and engages in time theft to watch TV, which, despite media depictions, is in fact standard operating procedure for anti-state leftists of all theoretical stripes.

Anyway, the book is novella-length, so that plot is short and action-packed: Murderbot is on a contract with a surveying team on a planet; the surveying team is being sabotaged or otherwise mysteriously under attack; there is some intrigue and mystery and Cunning Plans and running around shooting at each other, and Murderbot becomes actually somewhat emotionally invested in the humans he’s protecting, because they’re all basically low-key and nice and competent at their jobs. It’s a short, fun read, and I’m glad there are a bunch more of them.

In an act of supreme generosity, my friends, whomst I have been most shamefully blowing off pretty much since lockdown began because I can only handle so many Zoom calls and also my ability to people has worn away, kept me in the rotation for the now rather battered ARC of Tamsyn Muir’s Harrow the Ninth, the sequel to my new favorite novel in the history of absolutely ever, Gideon the Ninth. I have been having severe trouble focusing on fiction during this pandemicpocalypse but if anything was going to get me to actually pay attention to a fiction, it would be the dysfunctional goth lesbian space nuns of Drearburh, repressed nerd necromancer Harrowhark Nonagesimus and her dumb jock cavalier Gideon Nav.

I was a little disappointed but, given the ending of the last one, not entirely surprised that Gideon is not there for most of the first *mumblemumble* of the book, but it’s OK because we spend that time getting to know Harrow a bit better, and Harrow is also a hilarious character, if in a bitchier and more antisocial sort of way than Gideon, which is perfectly fine with me. The book is not written from Harrow’s point of view, although we certainly get inside her head a lot; rather, the book alternates between third person omniscient and second person, where an unnamed narrator is explaining to Harrow all the shit she’s gotten up to in the months before the Emperor’s murder. That’s not a spoiler; it’s how time is marked in the chapter titles.

I’m honestly not even really sure where to start reviewing because the structure of Harrow is deliberately confusing; it’s one of those jigsaw-puzzle-like books where you keep reading in part due to the tantalizing possibility of getting to the part where you understand what’s going on. I personally love this sort of thing; the narrative tension it provides is much more my style than, say, romantic or sexual tension, of which this book also has a good deal of but mostly just for seasoning; it doesn’t really constitute a subplot and it doesn’t ever do anything so boring and conventional as get resolved. Harrow is a deeply prudish character (which, relatable) in addition to literally being a nun so all instances of sexual tension (in many cases it’s not even attraction, just tension, due to everybody being very tense) are wrapped in several layers of distaste, either from Harrow (who hates everybody and describes them all in very unattractive terms) or from everybody else (Harrow is horrendously in love with A CORPSE, literally a dead body, who is referred to throughout the book explicitly as “the Body”). For a book whose back cover text reads “The necromancers are back, and they’re gayer than ever,” not very much actually happens on that front, except at one very drunk dinner party that Harrow flees as soon as she’s allowed to. This is not a complaint; if anything, this is perhaps the only book series I’ve ever read that rings true to my real-life experience, where everyone is queer but I have absolutely no idea what, if anything, anyone is up to at any particular time because it has nothing to do with me and at this point most people don’t even try to talk to me about it, both because I am also a deeply prudish character and because there is always other stuff to do instead, although at least in my case it usually doesn’t involve reanimated skeletons. (On the other hand, a lack of nonbinary characters is beginning to be something that significantly messes with my suspension of disbelief, and if I have one request for Alecto it would be that.) Anyway, I love a book that forgoes the obligatory romantic subplot in favor of just a lot of people avoiding dealing with their very complex feelings and blowing things up instead.

I meant to be dithering about structure there but ended up dithering about feelings, but I’m going to keep it, because I think that’s actually why the book is the way it is. It mirrors the stuff that is going on in Harrow’s brain, which is extremely messed up, due to lots of traumatic shit happening but also for magical reasons. Harrow’s general personality is already geared toward a pretty hardcore, disordered sort of asceticism--foregoing sleep to hyperfocus on studying, unable to bear the stimulation of food or drink (with one very memorable exception), uncomfortable being seen in any way other than completely covered, including her face (also relatable, although I just wear a full face of people makeup every day and not skull makeup, because I am a coward)--and there are times where she just Harrows herself into total dysfunction and you don’t find out about it until later. It’s fantastic. One downside is that it seems to have kicked up something ascetic and Catholic deep in my psyche and I have been in a weird mood since Sunday, but that’s probably also quarantine-related.

While Harrow is not quite as much of sentient pile of memes as Gideon, she still has her moments, as does...well, everyone else. In fact, two out of the three jokes that made me nearly throw the book off the balcony were made by God, the King Undying, whose real name is apparently John. One of the main features of this installation of necromantic nonsense is the appearance of a lot of high-ranking religious figures, as Harrow and Ianthe Tridentarius have ascended (or mostly ascended) to Lyctorhood, putting them in the legendary ranks themselves if they can survive more than a few months. Most of the book’s action takes place trapped in God’s enormous, eclectically decorated safe house/space station, and the only people around Harrow and Ianthe are God and three of the ancient and terrifying Lyctors, all of whom are just absolute bastards. Augustine, the Saint of Patience, is my favorite, because his entire personality consists of using flippancy as a coping mechanism. Mercymorn, the Saint of Joy, is also a delightful character, in that she is a hypercritical, waspish bitch who really wants nothing more than for Harrow to die already and get out of her hair. Ortus mostly just keeps trying to murder Harrow, which makes for some very gory action scenes, so no complaints from me.

There’s another Ortus, who was a minor entertaining character in the first book but is back as a much more substantial and extremely entertaining character in this one. He has one personality trait, which is being a Poetry Guy, which could have been annoying if the book treated this as being in any way deep or admirable, but mostly the book treats it as being entirely insufferable, which is good and correct. Honestly, if you are in any way a cranky or judgmental person, there’s just too much shit in this series that is so immensely satisfying. At one point someone is eulogized with a line like “She never said an unkind word, unless it was extremely funny,” which is certainly not a good description of me but is definitely a good description of some of the people I count as the kindest and most generous-hearted folks in my life, because anyone that can’t at make a decent mean joke when it’s warranted just isn’t going to be someone who stays in my life very long. These books are definitely for people who need to make that caveat even for the nicest people we know. Harrow is basically the triple-distilled form of my worst, most impatient self when I am trying to do shit and people are in my way (a thing that I’m struggling with a lot during quarantine especially) and I, at least, find reading her to be extremely indulgent in ways that probably don’t say flattering things about me.

The proper publication date for this book is August 4, which I am setting as now the date by which I need to konmari my book collection, so I can reward myself by buying hard copies of both Gideon and Harrow and rereading them and also just keeping them on the shelf where they can spark dumb, dysfunctional goth jock joy every time I see them.

While looking for another book to start last night I noticed that I had a few Edward Gorey (or at least Gorey-illustrated) books on my TBR shelf instead of over where all the other Edward Gorey books are, and I figured that one would be about the right length that I could read the whole thing while feeding the cats. So I picked up The Willowdale Handcar, which did in fact take me almost exactly 15 minutes to read.

This story concerns three friends--I assume they are friends; they are hanging out together--named Edna, Harry, and Sam, who find a handcar at the railroad station in Willowdale and decide to ride it around to other towns, seeing whatever they can see. Most of what they see is random, rather boring stuff, touched up with that very dry Gorey sense of whimsical absurdity, such as visiting a man with a collection of telephone pole insulators. A handful of events hint at another, much more exciting story, involving Edna's friend Nellie, her beau Dick, a friend of Dick's who is driving around frantically, and a financier named Titus W. Blotter, and an abandoned baby that looks like Nellie. The three traveling friends never quite figure out what the story there is, even when they rescue Nellie from being tied to the train tracks, and neither does the reader.

The book is subtitled The Return of the Black Doll, which... doesn't feature in the story at all. It is pictured on the cover and in one illustration. It is never mentioned in the text. These are the sort of odd little things you get when you read Gorey books.

I am also reminded that I have lived in Massachusetts since 2006 and have not yet been to the Gorey House. Who wants to organize a day trip with me before Cape season kicks off too much?

Some days, you're tired and unproductive and don't want to do any of the things you're supposed to do that day, and so you pick up books based on criteria like "What is short and looks non-taxing" and that's when it turns out that it's good to have gently wacky things like Norse Mythology... According to Uncle Einar in your TBR pile. I'd borrowed it from Bobby even though he had substantial criticisms of it, which means it was a strong contender for just staying in the TBR pile forever while I worked my way through things people had only said good stuff about, but most of those are longer and don't tell stories I already know.

Who is Uncle Einar? I have absolutely no idea. Presumably the author's uncle. I don't know if he's real or fictional. He is a framing device, retelling old Norse myths--most of which I remember from my own childhood, from D'Aulaires' Book of Norse Myths and Mary Pope Osborne's Favorite Norse Myths--in a breezy, spoken sort of way, full of second-person asides to the children and with every "um" and "heh" transcribed. The stories are modernized in the way that medieval retellings were "modernized" from their earlier versions, which rarely works as well when modern authors try to do the same thing, because for modern audiences, modernity is boring and not fantastical; we already live here. I have no idea why medieval audiences liked that stuff so much. Some of the results are humorous; some border on twee. Actually, scratch that. It's definitely twee. I ended up with the sense that, while this book was quick and easy and somewhat amusing to read, it must have been a blast to write, especially considering the author is a Ph.D. in Norse mythology and so presumably has spent a good deal of time being up to her eyeballs in the real old-timey stuff and might want to play around with mixing together her worlds and seeing what came up. And I will grant that the result is much more accessible to a modern lay reader than slogging through the Eddas, which is why I spent today reading this book and not my copy of The Sagas of Icelanders.

While this book is framed as being told to children, our possibly fictional Uncle Einar seems willing to tell the children some stories that didn't quite make it into any of the myth anthologies that I was allowed to read in elementary school, although he is necessarily vague on the details.

Even though this is a book that contains such notions as Heimdall working for the FBI, even though the FBI is a US-specific entity, I still ended up doing fact-checking on certain claims in order to determine what was based in myth and what was made up for this book. I was unable to corroborate the claim that Heimdall was the god of editors; as best I can tell, this is a joke. I was also thrown for a bit when Freya's cats were given the names Puff and Fluff; I had been under the impression they were named Bygul and Trjegul (Bee-gold and Tree-gold, i.e., Honey and Amber), but it turns out that these names were only bestowed upon said cats in 1955 by the author Diana Paxson. How did I ever survive being an insufferable nerd before Google?

I don't entirely know if I'd recommend it to someone unless they were making some pretty specific asks, like "I want to read a story in which Loki turns into a mare and gets knocked up, but also there are jokes about union regulations."

I kind of didn't want to read Disrupted.

I heard a lot about it because it takes place right around here, so it was getting a lot of press in the regional news; some of the reviews were also getting sent around a certain part of my social circle; namely, the part I developed when I worked at a hip and dysfunctional marketing tech startup in Boston. It was not HubSpot, but many of the things I was seeing in the reviews being sent to me sounded quite familiar.

I was partly curious to read it, but also sort of figured that since I'd already lived through a brief and disastrous tenure at a chic marketing startup, I figured that actually reading the book would mostly just give me unpleasant flashbacks and impede my attempts to let go of the whole thing. I am already pretty bad at letting go of grudges, so I figured I shouldn't actively sabotage myself.

Enter my mom, who, having had two children lose jobs at super trendy Boston-area startups in the space of about a year, ordered the book and read it, apparently to see if these places really are that unnavigably volatile or if her children are just stupid. Then she told me I had to read it. At this point, curiosity got the better of me and I started reading it, although I refused to actually borrow it and have it in my possession; it stayed at her place and I read it there.

My feelings on this book are mixed. Basically every shitty thing Lyons writes about HubSpot rings true to me, either from my own reading about the way the economy has gotten disastrously fucked, especially for young people; from my own lived experience working at a similar company; from stories I've heard from other people who work at similar companies (including other reports of people having a shitty time working at HubSpot; apparently they're TERRIBLE to their female web devs); and, in the latter half of the book, from dealing with and witnessing the behavior of gaslighting assholes whose main tactic is to stun you into compliance with WTF-ery so off-script from normal human behavior that you just can't figure out how to react to them.

So when it comes to strictly factual, reporter-y things, Lyons is stellar. He does a fabulous job of laying out how these "new economy" companies spin themselves as being Great Places to Work with tactics that sound good but actually screw people over — like "unlimited vacation time," which is code for "you don't bank PTO so when we let you go we don't have to pay you any banked PTO" (thank God the place I worked didn't do that one, at least), or giving people lower wages in exchange for stock options that vest in five years, when the tenure for most workers — especially lower-level ones, who are most likely to think that "stock options" sounds impressive and grown-up, and who probably don't realize that their salaries are being lowered to supposedly account for this because most industries have depressed entry-level wages ridiculously already — is half that or less, meaning that most workers will simply not receive this part of their supposed compensation. Shit's enough to make you vote for Bernie Sanders.

Unfortunately, Lyons seems to have a severe cognitive disconnect between the stuff he reports on and his ability to understand exactly the same things when they are going on in his immediate vicinity — or, heaven forbid, to him — and there are times when it really hurts his reporting. Much review ink has been spilled pointing out that Lyons is clearly kind of an asshole, and it is true that he is playing the Cranky Old Man Journalist role to the hilt — an archetype I personally find to be in a weird halfway territory between relatable and insufferable — but my issue with his general cranky asshattery is not really that it is unlikeable, but that it prevents him from being able to get more than surface-level observations about the general weirdness and shenanigans going on around him. In short, he styles himself as an anthropologist, but he's definitely the sort of anthropologist that is why anthropology as a discipline has so many issues and so much incomplete information. What he doesn't manage to do is go undercover, which I think would have provided a lot more insight and depth into how anyone but Dan Lyons actually feels about any of the shit that goes on in these companies.

More specifically:
—Lyons points out the lack of diversity and the labor exploitation at these companies, but mostly just seems to use these stats as a club against companies to reinforce that they suck. He doesn't demonstrate any sympathy for the people hurt by practices like insta-firing or sexual harassment, or even interview them. This is a sharp contrast to the beginning of the book where he loses his own job and spends about two chapters illustrating at great length how destabilizing and scary it is, even though he gets notice and severance and all that stuff, and tries to negotiate for things like "just" staying through the end of the year (several months away at the time). While he's happy to point out that it's mean for HubSpot to fire people on a "go to lunch and don't come back" basis, he doesn't acknowledge — even in passing — that, judging from his reaction to being given notice and severance, if this had happened to him he would probably have had an actual heart attack.
—He notices that turnover is high and people get disappeared fast and mysteriously, also notices that everyone around him is RELENTLESSLY CHEERFUL and ALL-IN all of the time, and concludes that all millennials are dumb and easily hoodwinked. Dude: Everyone whose facade of less than 100% committed Kool-Aid drinking cracked even for a moment got let go before you were able to see it. DUH.
—He doesn't really establish relationships with his colleagues, so if any of them are secretly stressed to death and miserable under their cheerful marketer faces, there's no reason to believe they'd confide in him about it. In fact, as an older celebrity hire for whom a new position was specifically created and who seemed to be wandering around a lot of the time not actually doing much, I think if I, a twentysomething young lady who hates self-important business buffoonery with a passion that makes her teeth hurt, were working there during that time, Dan Lyons would be the absolute LAST person I'd let my Obedient Capitalist Robot face slide in front of, especially considering he doesn't seem to have the social intelligence to keep his opinions to himself in a dangerous situation and put on an Obedient Capitalist Robot face of his own, meaning if he didn't rat me out deliberately I'd worry he'd do it just without thinking anything of it. And I say this as someone whose Obedient Capitalist Robot face isn't even very good to start with.
—Specifically, at one point he asks his younger colleagues if they wouldn't rather make more money than be paid in candy, and is baffled when they're all like "I like candy!" Like having some Baby Boomer with a nebulously defined job trying to goad you into complaining about your pay IN THE WORKPLACE doesn't have IT'S A TRAP written all over it in aggressively orange letters with a gif of Admiral Ackbar on it. Millennials know what Baby Boomers think of us when we indicate in any way that we would like to be compensated for our labor. If Lyons is unaware, he should go read some of the stuff put out by the legacy media companies that can't afford to employ him anymore because millennials aren't subscribing to them, and see if he can't figure out why we're not.
—He believes that everyone besides him who worked at HubSpot liked it because they have great Glassdoor reviews. I know at least one hip martech company in Boston that has specifically asked employees to leave positive ratings/reviews on Glassdoor to cancel out negative ones. If Lyons had been at all plugged into the Secretly Miserable Stressed-Out Debt-Ridden Underpaid Millennial Underground Gossip Network at HubSpot, he may have heard something similar. Learning to tap into and navigate the gossip network at my old place of employment was the single most valuable skill I learned there, although I learned it too late. Lyons, it seemed, never learned to use gossip at all. He seems unaware that he could be missing anything. Not a good investigative journalist trait, dude. Be more suspicious!
—HE'S SURPRISED HE GOT IN TROUBLE FOR A COMMENT ON SOCIAL MEDIA THE GODDAMN SECOND TIME HE GOT IN TROUBLE FOR A COMMENT ON SOCIAL MEDIA. And after he'd seen other people also get into giant unprofessional fights over comments on social media. Learn from your experiences! And yet he continues to be incredulous, instead of appreciating that he's the only nonexecutive in the company who would be allowed to hang around long enough to do that twice.
—Basically he complains about how ageist HubSpot is, which is entirely true, but completely fails to acknowledge the other ways in which he still really does have old white guy privilege, because he keeps getting breaks other people don't get. Like being able to negotiate a leave of absence (lol) and actually being able to get anything out of his stock options. I know this stuff is probably invisible to him because it's supposed to be a standard part of how jobs work, but it's not anymore.
—OK, so basically all my complaints boil down to one thing: I think he blows off the younger generation of workers as stupid and hoodwinked too easily and glosses over the ways the 99.9999% of us who aren't startup founders are getting screwed, because his desire to tell an entertaining fish out of water story about how full of wacky people HubSpot is is stronger than his empathy for a generation that's been comprehensively fucked over economically, and certainly a hell of a lot stronger than his curiosity. Most of the people I know who have been struggling through workplaces like this are not dumb. I know people who have been made "executives" at content farms who are 100% aware the moment they get the job that a) they are not ready for this, b) the company is using the prevalence of internships and contract work in the "gig economy" to make themselves look good for giving people salaries at all even when they're abysmally low, c) calling someone an "executive" or "manager" is a shitty way to make them work an additional 20 hours a week with no overtime pay like they're a fuckin' lawyer or something, and d) we'll be called lazy and entitled and told to work harder and make better decisions if we point out that we can't live in the rapidly gentrifying cities where the jobs are and pay the student loan bills racked up from getting the degrees the jobs require on the wages the jobs are paying. WE DON'T LIKE WORKING FOR SHIT WAGES AND WE'RE NOT DOING IT DELIBERATELY TO UNDERCUT BABY BOOMERS. WE DON'T HAVE A FUCKING CHOICE. There's too many of us, too many of us are college-educated, we have mortgage-size debts to pay off even if we don't have houses and families, and so much former entry-level work has been downgraded to usually-unpaid "internships" that we can't afford to not take any job we can find that pays us in actual money at all — even if we're only being paid partly in money and the rest is in stocks we'll never cash out, or salt and beer like we're in the fucking first-century Roman Army. Oh, and if we ever turned down a job just because it was laughably underpaid, five million pseudoCalvinist Baby Boomers with pensions 'n' shit would immediately materialize to lecture us on how awfully full of ourselves and lazy we are and that we should be grateful we could get a job at all and not think we're too good for it. Hey, wait, no — we don't even have to turn down the laughably underpaid jobs for that to happen! But basically, if Baby Boomers are worried that their jobs are being threatened because companies can hire 22-year-olds for a third of the salary they'd have to pay real adults, they may also wish to STFU about how enormously entitled 22-year-olds are that they think they deserve a whole third of a salary. Please see how these two things are related and stop calling us dumb.

Obviously, there are only so many things you can cover in one book, and Lyons' focus here was on how colorfully strange HubSpot is and on the shortsighted, jargon-riddled fuckery of the startup bubble, rather than the younger generation's lack of economic opportunity. But if someone's getting overpaid, someone else is getting underpaid — and I think the underpaid deserve a little more real compassion than just being used as a rhetorical device against the overpaid. Also, full confession: Baby Boomers whining about millennials like we fucked ourselves over is something that got on my last goddamn nerve several years ago; I am well out of nerves and even the slightest hint of it will turn me into a giant angry class warfare rage monster.

For a calmer and more rational takedown than mine of the irresponsible, victim-blaming ways the media covers the idiosyncrasies of millennial lifestyles and economic habits, please see Sarah Kendzior's excellent piece on Quartz this week: http://qz.com/720456/the-myth-of-millennial-entitlement-was-created-to-hide-their-parents-mistakes/

I got less angry near the end when the story refocused away from "observing" the rest of the company and making assumptions about them and onto the process of Lyons getting what in the business world I guess is called "managed out," in this case, the process by which it happened is, in the mental health, sociology and social justice worlds, called "gaslighting." Trotsky's calculatedly incomprehensible behavior is probably unfamiliar to anyone who has so far escaped being in the line of fire of similar emotional abuse, but from my weird addiction to reading advice columns, I don't think it's as uncommon as we'd all hope it would be. Some people just regularly operate in extreme bad faith. This part of the book also reawakened my sympathy for Lyons because nobody, nobody deserves to be deliberately blocked from getting shit done at work, especially not by the people whose job it is to enable you to get shit done. This is the opposite of the point of work and it is truly, truly baffling to deal with, especially in places that talk a big talk about rewarding people who TAKE INITIATIVE and DO THEIR OWN THING but if they personally don't like you they will permanently back-burner any idea you try to run past your superiors and dress you the fuck DOWN for subordination if you try to do anything without running it past your superiors. People and places that operate solely on vague buzzwords do it because they don't want you to have anything to fight for yourself with. It's all too common, but its still inexcusable, and Lyons documents it all clearly, thoroughly, and with the same sense of disbelief/naivete that irritated me so much during the rest of the book, except here it comes off more as a type of innocence that it's sad to see destroyed.

Honestly, the scariest, most effective, and most dramatic part of the whole book is the afterword, which covers the scandal surrounding the firing of two HubSpot executives for what, as far as anyone's been able to figure out, appear to be attempts to procure a copy of the manuscript for Disrupted via hacking and possibly extortion. This is the kind of stuff that really illustrates why the self-important cowboy culture of startups — the deliberately ill-defined rules, the cults of personality, the might-makes-right (or more often, money-makes-right) sense of entitlement, the unshakable belief that if you can get away with something, it must be a moral good for you to get away with it — aren't just irritating quirks of individual douchebros with too much money, they are problems. They allow morally bankrupt people with delusions of technosainthood to seriously fuck with the rest of us honest dumbasses who got suckered into trying to work for a living.

In short: Eat the rich.

Anyway, things end fairly well for Lyons, as he goes on to be a writer for Silicon Valley, which is better than being jerked around in a culty martech startup in New England, and if the people at HubSpot legitimately don't understand that then maybe they are even weirder than the people in other culty martech startups. Things ended OK for me, too, in case you were wondering; I got a job at a newsroom in an industry that might have the least social utility of any sector of journalism ever, but I am OK with that, since I am also allowed to make jokes and they are even letting me occasionally do journalism-ing instead of just editing (I'm still probably getting paid like a third of what Lyons was making as a journalist, though, so we can't put that one entirely on startups). Lyons is right that journalism is much much better for people with cranky senses of humor, even though I know he would probably think I am dumb because I am an overly excitable young lady with a cranky sense of humor instead of an important middle-aged guy with A Family To Support.

Anyway, I know this is (a) a long political rant and (b) about the farthest thing away from an objective book review as you can get, but I did only read the book because someone wanted to hear about it specifically through the filter of my personal experiences with a similar type of company, so that's what you're all getting (congratulations if anyone who's not my mom actually read it this far; I owe you a drink or something) (Mom, I probably owe you a drink too).

Should you read this book? This is going to depend a lot on your personal experiences. If you've worked at one of these places and have any political opinions in the directions that work should produce something useful, or companies should treat employees like humans, then maybe not; it's bad for your blood pressure. If you think that genius is directly correlated to net worth, don't bother — this book is going to challenge your assumptions, but let's face it; you're not going to want to hear it and you're going to write Lyons off as a douchebag who's just sour that he's not quite a big enough douchebag to pull off bilking other people out of millions. (Also, get back in the sea.) If you're a person who has been sheltered within traditional office environments and you are curious about how all this hip open-office-plans-and-ping-pong-tables stuff you've been hearing about works in practice (spoiler: it doesn't), then you should DEFINITELY read it. If you're a manager dealing with low employee morale and are considering trying to fix it by adding branded taps and a foosball table instead of taking another look at your training or performance evaluation processes and making sure they're not made out of holes, also read this book.

Current Mood: angry
Current Music: "Do You Hear the People Sing?" Les Mis

I'm officially six months behind on Mark Reads stuff.

I just finished, er, "reading along" (??) Sir Terry Pratchett's Lords and Ladies, which I remembered as "the one with the elves," although I think elves eventually show up again in one of the Tiffany Aching books as well.

In this one, Magrat is unhappily engaged to the new King Verence and is bored as hell with what being queen is apparently going to consist of; a bunch of young Goths are playing with things that are too powerful for them; Granny Weatherwax's old boyfriend returns; and a group of local Morris dancers are trying to put on a play for the royal wedding and are definitely, definitely not going to do the stick-and-bucket dance. On top of all that, crop circles keep appearing.

I'm sort of having trouble coming up with much to say about this book because it's pretty typical Discworld. Fortunately for the reader, "pretty typical Discworld" means it's engaging, hilarious, and equally full of groanworthy puns and deeply insightful humor. This one's deeply grounded in old British Isles traditions of the Fair Folk (as well as a lot of other really old country British stuff), so it's rich with references if you're sufficiently well grounded in those traditions yourself, and probably a bit baffling if you're not. It has wonderful footnotes. Granny Weatherwax continues to kick all kinds of ass, being totally awesome while simultaneously being kind of a terrible person.

Also, I just got the pun in Casanunda's name this time around and I've been reading these books for like fourteen years. Half my life. Clearly my command of the Englishes has improved since I was a high school freshman, which I suppose is a good thing, since in the intervening years I've only gotten a degree in the stupid language and started a career in it.

As a matter of professional interest and definitely not because I am just a giant nerd anyway, I finally got my hands on a copy of Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, by Mary Norris, the senior copy editor at The New Yorker, a highly prestigious publication. Full disclosure: I don't read The New Yorker. My interest in The New Yorker extends about as far as being vaguely proud that a friend from my high school days who works as a fact checker there recently became mildly Internet famous for making Alex Trebek say "Turd Ferguson" on air. Other than that, I figure if there's anything good--usually the Borowitz Report--somebody will post a link to it somewhere.

I went into this book prepared to nitpick, due largely to my own prejudices about The New Yorker being maybe a wee bit pretentious, and I nearly immediately found ample stuff to nitpick, since quite early in the book Norris starts talking about dictionaries. Now, when she gets deeper into talking about dictionaries, it turns out that she actually is aware that, for example, "Webster's" is not a brand name and any dictionary can use it, and that some "Webster's" dictionaries are published by Merriam-Webster and others are published by completely unaffiliated publishing houses. But that doesn't stop her from kicking off the section on dictionaries with an announcement that The New Yorker is fully committed to the Webster's "brand," to the exclusion of all other dictionaries--"even Oxford," she says, as if it were somehow surprising that an American publication would limit itself to using American dictionaries and not employ a British dictionary as its spelling reference. Perhaps this book is not aimed at people who actually work with dictionaries, I thought, especially considering that she introduces the book by seeking to dispel a number of myths about copy editors. But then I'm not entirely certain who besides copy editors she expects to be very interested in all the stuff about pencils and the copy editing workflow at The New Yorker and who put the hyphen in Moby-Dick that she gets into in the second half of the book. I, for one, loved the second half of the book, especially the Moby-Dick chapter. (The capstone course for my English degree was an entire semester on Moby-Dick. I have strong, if mixed, feelings about it.)

The real low point of this book is the chapter on gender, and not even entirely because of her rather idiotic insistence that pseudogeneric "he" wouldn't be a problem if people didn't notice it and think it was (which: welcome to literally how words meaning things works) while, as usual, completely glossing over the fact (actual, scientifically studied fact) that singular "they" straight up actually is not a problem because people don't notice it and even people who claim it is Very Very Wrong and one of their Biggest Pet Peeves and are deliberately on the lookout for it so they can correct it manage to miss it at least half the time in other people's speech or writing and can usually be counted upon to use it regularly themselves. (Tom Freeman calls out her use of singular they in this very book over at Stroppy Editor: https://stroppyeditor.wordpress.com/2015/04/21/everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-singular-they/). This was, indeed, a disappointing argument to run into, especially after what is a very intelligent discussion of the fundamental flaw in most attempts to come up with new pronouns to fit into the language: most of them try to be logical, so they stick out, where as English is not logical and the whole damn point of pronouns is to blend in. No, most awkward part of the chapter on gender is her somewhat self-congratulatory account of her bumbling journey to accept her transgender sister--who she introduces as her brother, although at least she doesn't deadname her (I think). While I mostly like the personal, autobiographical stuff in this book, I would have been pretty OK if this chapter had stuck to being A Brief History of Pronoun Schemes Academics Have Come Up With To Avoid Admitting Singular They Exists.

The high point of the book, in my opinion, is the chapter on swearing, which is very sweary and thoroughly delightful. Although this is in close competition with the discussion on VICTORIAN COMMA USAGE, because I adore both wacky Victorian writing and fussing over commas, and I admit I've always sort of wondered what passed for "copy editing" back in the day when all the sentences were 50 words long and full of too many commas and stuffed with Significant Caps. Well, now I know! I don't know how many other people feel that their lives are greatly improved for knowing this--maybe it is just me--but I am WAY happy. Oh, and the bit about the pencil convention was golden.

Actually, everything after the third chapter (that being the gender one) had me pretty much completely hooked, full of gossip about the staff at The New Yorker, dryly funny personal anecdotes about really nerdy things, and grammar advice delivered with, huzzah, a good attitude. Idunno, maybe they had to put the weird, less-good-attitude stuff at the beginning to lure in the sort of target audience that reads books by copy editors? Apparently if you start off by saying "I am a professional copy editor and I have no time for fucksticks who think bad grammar signals the End of Civilization and probably think Strunk & White is a good grammar guide, what twerps" you won't retain readers who self-identify as "interested in grammar" for long enough to teach them anything--you have to lure the people who liked Eats, Shoots and Leaves in first. Like how the first few episodes of Orange is the New Black had to be about the middle-class blonde white girl to bring in a middle-class white audience before it could start giving them everyone else's interesting stories. Or that seems to be the going theory for why the first three episodes are kinda weak, anyway. What was I saying? Oh, yes--the book gets less cranky as it goes on.

Also, I am super, super jealous of the sheer number of people involved in the QA process in a New Yorker piece. The place has a separate style editor. A STYLE EDITOR. I want to be one of those when I grow up. I sort of am, at my current place, but I am also the sole copy editor for most pieces, the proofreader, the fact checker, the collator, the person who has the graphic designer input all the changes, and sometimes the formatter. I'm also turning into the foreign languages and geography QA'er, apparently, which I suppose is somewhere between being a style editor and a fact checker at the same time.

GOOD LORD AM I BEHIND ON MY MARK READS OR WHAT.

Anyway, last weekend I finally caught up on Witches Abroad, which I vaguely remember as being "the Cinderella one." Which it is! But I'd forgotten most of the rest of it.

Like many Discworld books, this one is about stories; like many of the Witches books in particular, it is about fairy tales; but this Witches Discworld book, specifically, is about Disneyfication.

The "abroad" where the witches go is a city-state called Genua, which seems to be based in part on New Orleans, but which is being sanitized and forced into basically becoming the Magic Kingdom (it also reminds me of the walled city in Shrek). It's really just Magrat who is supposed to go, officially—after all, Desiderata Hollow left the magic wand to her when she died—but obviously Nanny Ogg and Granny Weatherwax aren't going to let Magrat go off and do anything on her own, so all three of them go, with Granny complaining about "forn parts" the whole way.

While Granny is staunchly (and meanly) provincial, Nanny Ogg is a belligerently enthusiastic and clueless tourist, bulldozing her way through Genua with a hodgepodge of incorrect common phrases from a variety of languages, apparently under the impression that "foreign" is a language and she speaks it. It's hilarious, and probably very embarrassing for Magrat. Magrat is, as usual, ineptly well-intentioned, and can't figure out how to do anything with the wand except turn things into pumpkins.

The entity Disneyfying (Disnifying? Disnefying?) Genua is a fairy godmother named Lilith, who uses mirror magic. This Evil Queen trope makes her scary as hell because she can basically always be spying on people; her whole magical system bears more resemblance to George Orwell's Big Brother than anything else: She's always watching, and she can have you disappeared if you don't behave according to the exact code expected of you. Her goal is to provide everyone with a happy ending, whether they like it or not, which on second thought also has weird Communist dictatorship overtones. I think there's some underhandedly political commentary about authoritarian utopianism going on in this book, y'all. I always missed it because I was too busy focusing on the fairy tales aspect and the puns!

The fairy tale tropes are deconstructed mercilessly, especially once you find out more about Lilith. It involves more mirroring, in a way.

While the sanitized/gentrified/Disneyfied aspect of Genua is handled brilliantly, the New Orleans-y stuff underneath falls a bit flat sometimes—Pratchett is clearly very familiar with his fairy tale tropes and the way they differ from messy reality generally, but he's not as familiar with the voodoo stuff he's incorporating as he is with the rural British cultures he draws on in places like the Ramtops, so some of the jokes feel more obvious than I generally expect from Pratchett and some of them are just plain racially awkward. (Lilith's whitewashing of Genua would have been SUCH a powerful layer if it had been handled a bit better!)

Overall, though, it is basically everything you'd expect and want out of a Witches book, and then a little bit more.

Current Mood: hot as heck
Current Location: a heat wave in september
Current Music: none

I hadn't remembered Reaper Man as being one of the mid-series Discworld novels, but we're definitely getting into mid-series now. And mid-series Discworld is generally the best Discworld; I hadn't remembered it as being one of the particularly good ones either.

Upon rereading it with Mark who Reads Things, it turns out that this is likely just because I only read it once, in ninth grade. I vaguely remembered it as the one where Death becomes a farmer, although I'd forgotten why. Reaper Man is a thoughtful exploration of the role of death in our lives and what it means to have only finite time in our lives--at least, it is when it's not full of madcap puns and zombies and animated compost heap monsters.

I'd also forgotten that this book is where we are introduced to the Auditors, who are existentially terrifying.

The Auditors are much like Dementors except that they are terrifying in a boring soulless way instead of in a traditionally terrifying soul-sucking way. They have no personal identities and they keep the universe running in an orderly and predictable fashion, which is not really how it all ends up working once you get near the Discworld. They fire Death for, essentially, developing too much personality. (Because soulless business culture FOR THE UNIVERSE.)

Death, now with a small batch of time in his hourglass before he gets annihilated, goes to work on a farm down on the Discworld, harvesting crops for an old widow lady named Mrs. Flitworth. Here he becomes Bill Door, and learns about his neighbors in a more individualized and human fashion than he ever has known his assignments before. Unfortunately, with no Death, the natural circle of life is disrupted--people can't die, and neither can animals, really, and apparently neither can general nature life-energy organic matter stuff, hence the animated compost heap. As the extra life energy builds up and people who were supposed to die float around being ghosts or zombies or whatever and generally not passing on, some other unknown thing shows up, a parasitical thing that seems to want to leach all this extra life out of the city. Windle Poons, a very ancient wizard who manages to become a sort of zombie out of sheer willpower when he dies and can't reincarnate, investigates, along with a ragtag band of undead creatures and a bunch of typically useless wizards all hepped up on saying "yo." Along the way, Poons learns more about life than he'd ever arsed himself to learn while he was alive.

The friendship between Death/Bill Door and Mrs. Flitworth is far and away the most touching part of the book, especially the bittersweetly comic bits near the end as Death tries to make sure she has the best death ever in return for all she's taught him. Mrs. Flitworth also gets mad props for being so accepting of Death even when she finds out who he is.

The book is a good one to read after the recent passing of Sir Pterry himself, as it's all about accepting Death as a natural and necessary thing, and not in too cheesy a way, either.

Current Mood: hot
Current Location: lower allston
Current Music: Grateful Dead

One of the books I was most excited for when Mark Oshiro started reading Discworld was Moving Pictures. Once he started reading it, to my surprise, I became even *more* excited, because I had not known that apparently he spent a good chunk of time living in Hollywood, and Moving Pictures is about Hollywood. Would Mark, for once, be prepared?

He was not. No one can ever be quite prepared for Moving Pictures, although it is good to have a solid background in movie references, to fully understand all the ungodly number of jokes.

Moving Pictures is strictly in the "a Modern Thing gets invented, Discworld-style, and chaos ensues" tradition of Discworld plotlines, which is unabashedly my favorite Discworld plot type. In this case, the movies are invented, as one might guess from the title, and a small town devoted to making movies springs up in a desert, and is called Holy Wood. People start being called to go there. Victor Tugelbend, a fairly boring, generically handsome, surpassingly lazy student wizard, is one of them. He is apparently called to be a fairly boring, generically handsome action hero/romantic lead with dashing moustaches, or something. He teams up with a talking mutt named Gaspode the Wonder Dog to try and figure out what is going on with this whole Holy Wood thing and why everyone is acting strange, especially why Victor's usual film opposite, Ginger--a smart, driven, interesting character whose role as a starlet means that in films all she gets to do is look sultry and be rescued--keeps sleepwalking and trying to dig a hole in the ground on the outskirts of the city.

This is the... tenth Discworld book, I think, and it does a lot to further establish and develop the rules of reality on the Discworld--especially the roles of story and belief, which are a huge theme throughout the entire series. It also has some pretty hilarious critiques of certain story tropes that are basically dumb, and a lot of fairly biting satire about the corrosive, greedy, exploitative, appearance-obsessed aspects of Hollywood culture. But it also shows love for the magic and splendor of movies and storytelling, and thus avoids becoming cranky elitist trash. Also it has a shameless cartoon-chase scene, which is not particularly elitist either. The metahumor and references certainly have created a monster in that so much comedy following Pratchett has gone down those paths so hard they've ended up well up their own arseholes, but in this case, it works beautifully--genre fiction, movie melodrama included, being a thing that relies so heavily on being "in conversation with" other stories in order to exist and function and to train its audience into understanding its shorthands.

Overall, definitely one of the more memorable Discworld books for me. Now let's see what happens when we get to Soul Music!

As many who hear me ramble about books know, I have a not-very-deep but quite enthusiastic love for Gail Carriger's fantasy-of-manners steampunk books, the Parasol Protectorate quintet and the ongoing Finishing School series. So I read the first book, Prudence, in her new series set in this universe, The Custard Protocol.

This series takes place about twenty years after the end of the last Parasol Protectorate book, and its protagonist is Prudence Alessandra Maccon Akeldama, the metanatural child of werewolf Conal Maccon and soulless Alexia Tarabotti, adopted by the mysterious vampire dandy Lord Akeldama. She goes by Rue. She can "steal" vampires' and werewolves' skins, meaning she touches them and she turns into the sort of creature they are, leaving them mortal until either the sun comes up or they get far away enough that the tether snaps.

While Rue gets into a number of scrapes that add up to her being at least not at all a passive character--not that I'd want to be anywhere within fifteen hundred million miles of her in real life, considering her principled disdain for such stodgy middle-class values as "being even dimly aware of other people and giving half a shit about them"; I think she's supposed to be a heroine but I can only stomach her as an anti-heroine--and the further development of the wacky steampunk universe is a lot of fun, I didn't end up liking this book as much as the others.

While I'm not usually focused so much on the plots in Carriger's books as I am the wacky hijinks, I feel like the plots in this one were a little more confused than usual. I'm usually quite fine with the plots of comedies being basically vehicles for jokes, and some of these were, mainly the bit where Rue is only aware of one of the two major plotlines for a good long time and thinks people are talking about one thing when they're actually talking about another and everyone is being too ~mysterious~ to use their words and clear it up, but I still felt like I just didn't really buy it? Perhaps the jokes weren't as funny as they needed to be for me to not mind. And Rue's trip to India ended up being far too pro-colonialism for my taste--I know it's a fluffy book series taking place in an alternate history, but one of the basic plotlines (which doesn't really become clear until a good two-thirds of the way through the book) is that the English crown ~accidentally~ pissed off one race of supernatural beings in India by allying with a different race of supernatural beings in India, and they have to sort out a way to ally with both of them because the race they didn't know about ~stubbornl~y insists upon being mortal enemies with the other race and won't recognize England's ~super enlightened~ policy of blanket alliance with all supernatural races they come into contact with. The entire idea of Indian independence appears in the book only as a red herring, on the occasions when the doer of a nefarious deed is as yet unknown and therefore might possibly be "dissidents." It's a lot uglier than the trip to Egypt at the end of the Parasol Protectorate, where the plotline focused on issues that were essentially unrelated to British colonialism--this plotline is basically about how best to pull it off. I kept waiting for Rue to realize that the British were wrong to be ruling India, and she just never fucking did. If Carriger wants this universe to be fun and fluffy even though it's about the British Empire, she's welcome to do that, and I'll read it, but there are some places she just should not go if she wants to not go anywhere serious, and "India" is one of them. Now I'm half afraid that the next Finishing School book, which takes place in the 1840s instead of the 1890s, is going to involve the cast going off to Ireland to have wacky hijinks at the potato famine.

The characters were often fun the possible exception of Quesnel, who is a terrible obnoxious love interest. Ivy's twins--Primrose Tunstell, Rue's best friend, and Professor Percy Tunstell, played in my head by Eddie Redmayne--accompany Rue on her dirigible journey, and are good solid sidekicks. Basically, things are OK as long as they never leave the dirigible, but when they do it gets pretty cringeworthy at times.

Whether or not I read the second Prudence book is probably going to depend on how much I like the fourth Finishing School book, and possibly whether I hear any news of whether or not the second Prudence book involves everything from the first book coming back to bite Prudence firmly in her self-absorbed imperialist ass.

Also, was it just me or was the humor that there was considerably more lowbrow in this one? There's always been raunchy humor in the books in addition to the farce and whimsy, but this one really came off as a lot cruder and with a lot more fart jokes.

Current Mood: disappointed

Sometimes, I’m just not up for reading anything of substance or anything that’s going to be too distractingly interesting. The beginning of this month was one of those times, so I picked up P. G. Wodehouse’s Right Ho, Jeeves, a classic in the “utter fluff” genre. This one’s a novel rather than a series of short stories, although it is a pretty short novel.

Following an eventful trip to Cannes with his Aunt Dahlia and Cousin Angela, Upperclass Twit of the Year Bertie Wooster finds himself entangled in a handful of other people’s plotlines, each of which he manages to bungle fabulously. Bertie is in the middle of a spat with Jeeves about a white mess jacket, so Bertie is determined to solve all his friends’ problems himself, rather than letting Jeeves do all the scheming, to prove that he isn’t dumber than his valet and to show Jeeves who’s boss. Predictably, Bertie is actually a lot dumber than his valet, and Jeeves is functionally the boss.

Plotline number one concerns one Gussie Fink-Nottle, a school friend of Bertie’s who is also a hopeless nerd. Usually quite antisocial and retiring and unable to talk about anything except newts, Gussie has fallen dreadfully in love with Madeline Bassett, a friend of Cousin Angela’s from their trip to Cannes. Gussie is too nervous to bring himself to ask Miss Bassett to marry him.

Plotline number two concerns Cousin Angela, who has broken off her engagement with Bertie’s Drone Club buddy Tuppy Glossop, because Tuppy didn’t believe that a shark had tried to eat Angela in Cannes and kept mansplaining to her how that wasn’t possible and it must have been a flatfish or something. Angela—quite rightly, in my opinion—broke off the engagement and has since been flatly refusing to say a single civil word to Tuppy until he apologizes for not believing about the shark, which is the one thing Tuppy can’t seem to bring himself to do (Tuppy is a bit of an idiot).

Plotlines three and four involve Aunt Dahlia, who lost a lot of money at baccarat in Cannes and now need to figure out how to wheedle another sum out of her husband to print her ladies’ magazines, and who needs somebody to hand out prizes at the local grammar school at the end of the month.

Bertie’s initial plans involve sending Gussie Fink-Nottle to Aunt Dahlia’s house to give out the prizes, in the hopes that living in the same adorable English country manor for weeks will prompt Gussie to speak to Miss Bassett, but instead the whole thing devolves into a complex farce that sort of reminds me of the sillier everyone’s-stuck-in-one-house English murder mysteries, except that the only murder-related mystery is when Aunt Dahlia will actually murder Bertie. People all get engaged to the wrong other people; Aunt Dahlia’s wonderful French cook Anatole quits (this is a BIG DEAL); Gussie gets into more extremely embarrassing scrapes (impressive since he kicked the book off by dressing up in scarlet tights and showing up at a total stranger’s house instead of getting to the fancy-dress party); there is much emotional eating of disgusting-sounding British food.

But as entertaining as all these convoluted plots are, the real high point of this book is its voice, which, the book being a first-person narrative where the person is Bertie Wooster, is that of a high-spirited, eminently dumb, fashionable young man who is hip to all the kickin'est slang in use in England in 1920/30/40-whatever. Bertie as a narrator is in his own way wonderfully observant, his own way being that which is superficially detailed and full of vivid figurative language what would be poetic if it could be taken seriously but instead is jokes. Regardless of circumstance, Bertie thinks and speaks in the what-ho-cheerio register of a certain time period of British public schoolboy, and the closest thing to intellectual stimulation this flufftastic book provides is trying to puzzle out some of the less obvious slang terms. (They're usually pretty easy to gather from context, especially if you're decently familiar with English upper-class-twittery.) There's a running gag where Bertie always refers to his aunt as being "an aunt" rather than a person, woman, being, etc., like aunts are an entirely separate species from any other human demographic--so you get sentences like "She looked like an aunt who has just bitten into a bad oyster" instead of, say, "She looked like she'd just..." or "She looked like someone who had just..." I think I liked that one because it was a bit more understated than most of the other, more blatantly farcical gags. And while it's hard to be as witty as Wodehouse on the spot in terms of actually coming up with hilarious observations, the basic register is easy enough to ape and also quite a lot of fun to engage in! I recommend trying it next time you text someone.

I thought I had read all the Discworld books! Well, I’ve read all the Discworld novels, it turns out. There are other Discworld books out there—faux-nonfiction set in-universe to fulfill that weird sector of the book market where the books are essentially merchandise for other books. It’s a weird sort of metamarketing that I’m never sure what to make of, despite owning a whole bunch of “companion books” for some of my more expansive geeky canons.

One of these amusing extras is Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook, in which a collection of recipes serves as an understructure for a whole lot of jokes. An odd thing about this book—besides its content—is that it seems to have been accidentally published with all the notes between the publisher and the agent left in. Most of these notes are arguing about what is and isn’t appropriate to publish, since Nanny Ogg generally offends people’s delicate sensibilities, and apparently her previous books had made the publisher’s wife laugh. The text itself also contains a number of allusions to leaving out certain “active” ingredients, such as arsenic, and some others which are unnamed.

Since Discworld does not follow in the fine old fantasy tradition of loading itself up with lots of food porn, the way that ASoIaF and Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings and Redwall and basically all of the others do, instead preferring to dwell on the disgustingness of literally everything in Ankh-Morpork, the editors of this book have apparently had to alter the recipes quite a lot so that they become decent recipes that regular humans on Roundworld would ever eat. The caveat here is that the Roundworlders who do decide to make these recipes have to be British or at least be able to cook in British, because most of the measurements are given in metric and some of the ingredients are either named differently or are things I’m not sure we have in the US. I’m pretty sure “bicarbonate of soda” is baking soda, but I don’t know how much butter is 500mg and I don’t know what suet is. (OK, Google tells me it is “hardened beef or mutton fat” and how do you cook with this and WHY do you cook with this?)

Nanny Ogg appears to have collected these recipes from a number of notable personages in the Discworld, and so there appears Lord Vetinari’s recipe for bread and water, which involves a billion taste tester and several years of political manipulation, and Leonard of Quirm’s recipe for cheese sandwiches, which involves inventing all sorts of machines for making bread and cheese and then ordering some pizza. (There are also quite a number of regular recipe for curries, various English country dishes, candies, and things with names like “bananana surprise.”)

While I think I have to give the copy I read back to the friend I borrowed it from, I fully intend to borrow it back and try out some of these recipes just as soon as I learn to cook with the metric system.

In the “Mark Reads Discworld Books to Me” section of my current reading life, we just finished Terry Pratchett’s Guards! Guards!, the beginning of the Watch subseries and the first book in the part of the Discworld series where it really comes into its own and can handle being big fat full-length novels instead of slim little comic novels. It’s still comic, of course, although it is also a lot of other things, most obviously a fantasy book, what with the dragons and all, but in most ways, it’s a noir. (It’s a little like how the Beka Cooper books are police procedurals, except with more puns.)

There’s little to say about Guards! Guards! that hasn’t been said by a billion Pratchett fans over the years and that hasn’t been discussed to death, accompanied by many pictures of nuns, over at Mark Reads. As for my own personal reactions—I, for one, love everything about this book. I love stuff that has fun with noir, because I love noir-ishness but am bad at taking things seriously sometimes, and I love that we get to really stay in and explore Ankh-Morpork, and I love Sam Vimes as a sometimes-goofy take on Sad Drunk Noir Protagonist Man who is also a genuinely well-drawn and engaging character, even at this early stage. And I love the dragons, both all the nifty stuff about the fancy dragons and the shaping power of belief on the Discworld (I eat that power of belief stuff up with a spoon in books, possibly because I’m a dreadful cynic in real life) and the swamp dragons (or as they are now known as, DRAGON PUPPIES!). And of course, I love the hell out of Lady Sybil, aristocratic badass. In addition to embodying one of my favorite tropes ever, Weaponized Manners, she’s vulnerable without being weak or useless, kind without being soft, and still, awesome without being perfect. In short, she’s Lady Sybil Ramkin, and she has finally shown up!

I read two books this week and I’m reviewing them OUT OF ORDER because I DO WHAT I WANT and what I want right now is to tell you about Texts From Jane Eyre.

From Mallory Ortberg, the genius behind Two Monks Inventing Art and Women Doing Stuff in Western Art History, among other works of genius humanties-related humor over at The Toast, TFJE is exactly what you think it would be. If you are already familiar with The Toast and with Mallory’s sense of humor, all I really have to say is: It is just as good as you hoped it would be. Go read it.

If you are all like “But I don’t know what this Toast thing all the hip ladies on the Internet are on about is, who is Mallory Ortberg,” I am sad for you, for you are missing out. But anyway: TFJE is a collection of goofy, lovingly snarky imagined text conversations—complete with misspellings and smiley faces and expressionist punctuation—from and among characters and authors of various works of literature. Most of them are staples of the Western canon that you probably read a bunch of in school, but the last portion of the book features more pop-cultural works like The Babysitter’s Club and The Hunger Games. If you like Kate Beaton’s webcomic Hark! A Vagrant!, TFJE’s similarly well-educated but irreverent sense of humor will probably appeal to you—because let’s face it, people tend to either not bother with literature or history or, when they do, they are WAY too serious about it. Just because they’re important doesn’t mean we have to take them seriously all the damn time.

Also, apparently you can make margarine out of whale oil? I don’t know if that’s true or not but I’m super curious now.

Because this book is literally all text conversations, it is a really fast read even though it covers a lot of different works. This means that in addition to being a work of art on its own, it makes a particularly good palate cleanser if you have been reading something long and serious, or if you’re avoiding starting something long and serious but will feel bad if you avoid it too hard.

Current Mood: snowed in again
Current Location: Hoth
Current Music: Clarkesworld podcast

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Entries tagged with comedy

The misadventures of Bingo Little

What the hell did I just read

Space battles and Sanctuary Moon

A heartless killing machine with moral dilemmas

If the humans were dead, who would make the media?

Become ungovernable, watch TV

Where do I get a ribcage corset?

Pseudo-Victorian Gothic joyriding

Gods are very serious business

Eat the rich vs. eating our young

Elves are terrific; they inspire terror

Pencils, whales, and pronouns in the objective case

Not like I didn't have a blast at Disney World though

Snow globes and sucking at darts

eats banged grains

India minus Indians

Pour yourself a b. and s. and put on your mess jacket

Food is serious business

The city is a farting dragon

No time for jokeless literature