bloodygranuaile

Last weekend I did so many things that I ran out of willpower by the end and decided it was time to treat myself, by which I meant not check my email, go to Porter Square Books, and buy a fantasy new release and read it in the bath, to give my poor brain a break in between books about Nazis. So I put on my two masks and dipped in real fast to pick up a copy of C. L. Polk’s Soulstar, the third and final book in her Kingston Cycle, a political steampunk fantasy about an Englandish country that is, quite literally, powered by the oppression of witches and the desecration of the souls of the dead. My absolutely deaded brain had sort of been like “Oh yeah, the gay steampunk murder mystery series, I need more of that right now for escapism reasons” and then I started reading it and it was like, whoops, not as escapist as I had intended, I had sort of forgot the uhhh whole point of the series, with its very well done but not precisely subtle subject matter about climate change and capitalist exploitation and imperialism and all the things? Also the main character in Soulstar is Robin Thorpe, a grassroots organizer with the revolutionary democracy group the Solidarity Collective, and let me tell you, we were in some Very Familiar Territory here, only with a suspicious lack of Signal chats. But it had all the rest of it, from gossipy steering committees and tedious strategy meetings in church basements to having to give ~stirring speeches~ on the fly while being like “what the fuck, I’m only here because I’m the only nerd willing to make all the lists” and having the police riot unprovoked all over your public assembly. I occasionally felt like Robin was a bit uptight about direct action but I have also definitely been at plenty of street actions where I was like “if people could stop being DUMB and ADVENTURIST and THINK about their STRATEGY for a second before they ESCALATE, please” and I haven’t even seen half the shit Robin has seen in this series. The bit where they storm the palace reads a little weird after the events of this winter where we had actual fascists doing the “storm the seat of government” thing but that is not really the book’s fault, it is clearly drawing on a long history of people storming palaces because the government was further right and more oppressive than the people doing the storming (that’s even the more common instance, I think).

There is a romantic plotline here but it is a little different from the previous ones in that it does not start at the beginning of the romance, but instead it already has a history. Robin, it turns out, has a spouse who was arrested and put into one of the power grid prisons twenty years earlier, and who, when khe gets out, promptly denounces kher shitty rich real-estate-mogul family and goes to live with Robin in the Thorpe clan house, which plays real nice for the press in a dramatic scene at the train station but which is then sort of awkward. It’s well done and Zelind is a pretty badass character in kher own right--an inventor of useful and creative gadgets--but I did find some of the obligatory marital strife boring (this is because I find marriage boring, not because of any weaknesses in the actual handling of the subject). But overall I just felt sort of at home in this series where everyone is queer and obsessed with politics in a way that is now normal to me and that makes all the books full of “normal” straight people whose lives don’t revolve around politics feel even more like they’re about aliens than they always did.

I was very surprised but I think kind of pleased that Polk did not have her characters magnanimously wuss out of one very important thing that happened at the end, which seems a bit of a departure from the usual rules of Good Revolutionaries in literature, and I really liked that choice.

Anyway. Murder! Police kettles! Old hotels! I enjoyed this book and this series very much. I hope once all the turbines are up and running Zelind invents Signal, it will make Robin’s life easier.

Despite my difficulties focusing on reading fiction lately, I borrowed an ARC of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic from a friend, because I am a stubborn bitch and I was absolutely DETERMINED to relax at least one weekend this ridiculous summer, and that means reading YA novels by the lake in Maine, goddammit. I didn’t get to it on my last Maine trip because I just napped through that one, but I decided to put it at the top of the list for this weekend, when I went up for three days, none of which were holidays, and had a bit more reading time even if I did end up taking some naps.

Mexican Gothic was definitely a good choice for me for trying to get back into a fiction groove because it is squarely within one of my very favorite genres of all time: one in which a lovely young girl meets a tall, dark, and brooding house. (Usually there’s a dude somewhere around too, but he’s usually kind of boring.) In this case the house is named High Place and it is a full-blown crumbling eighteenth-century English mansion, inexplicably stuck in the mountains well outside Mexico City. Well, not that inexplicably; there is definitely an explanation for why an English mansion has been painstakingly constructed in the middle of Mexico, and it unsurprisingly involves some super racist rich English people.

Our heroine, Noemi, is a 22-year-old socialite and anthropology student in fashionable 1950s Mexico City, where her pastimes involve going to parties, smoking cigarettes, changing her major, and squabbling with her dad, a paint company executive. It’s all fun and games and regular-level familial dysfunction until her dad gets an extremely creepy letter from her cousin Catalina, who married a rich English guy in a scandalously rushed fashion last year and who no one has seen since he whisked her off to his ancestral mining estate in the countryside. Dad sends Noemi to investigate, to see if Catalina needs to come to the city for psychiatric treatment or something, which seems to everybody to be the most likely situation.

High Place is a masterpiece of Manderleyesque creepery, a place where everything is falling apart as the handful of obsessive weirdos inhabiting it refuse to let anything change. There is a mean and judgemental female housekeeper, a lecherous old eugenicist patriarch who everyone is terrified to cross, Catalina’s handsome but vicious husband, some brainwashed servants, and the housekeeper’s son Francis, the only person around with half a personality and therefore the obligatory male romantic lead. Also Catalina, who may or may not be mad/poisoned/suffering from tuberculosis/whatever, but at any rate isn’t allowed to be in Noemi’s company nearly as much as she’d like, and therefore winds up being a fairly minor character. There are a few normal people down in the town--like a real doctor, and the village wise woman, who apparently get along quite well, have a healthy respect for each other’ s practices, and are united in their dislike of the weird-ass English doctor who has been treating Catalina for “tuberculosis”--and… actually, that’s mostly it, there’s just doctors everywhere and nobody else.

Anyway, High Place is very, very clearly and obviously haunted, regardless of whether you believe in hauntings or not, and so Noemi has to figure out what kind of haunting it is and how it works before she can do the thing you always have to do in haunted house stories, which is put the haunting to rest. I have to say that as much as I am pleasantly familiar with all the genre stuff that Moreno-Garcia is drawing on for this book (I have read a lot of girl-meets-house books), I absolutely did not see this particular backstory of madness and murder coming. It’s quite fascinating and extremely well set up; there’s all sorts of clues in the earlier parts of the book that I just zipped past at the time but were clearly foreshadowing in hindsight. Like all good horror novels, the story is rooted deep in questions of social order and family, and just how fucked up people can get about them. Like, the obligatory romantic plotline is reasonably boring as a romantic plotline but you get invested in it anyway because in order for it to work between Noemi and Francis, Francis has to extricate himself from the house and the family, and I use the word “extricate” here very deliberately--it’s not as simple as leaving.

The book also reminded me that I know fuck-all about Mexican history; I should probably do something about that.

Anyway, this was a really fun and suspenseful addition to one of my favorite genres of fiction, and I recommend it highly if you, too, like books where stubborn young women fight evil houses (and win).

Given the recent mass protest events I, like everyone else, decided it was timely to read some things about racism in the United States. Having already read The End of Policin g last year and being too much of a snob to want to read any of the 10 books with titles like “How To Not Be Racist” that everyone else is reading (even though some of them are supposed to be quite good), I figured it was therefore time for me to read The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

To be fair, it was actually long past time for me to read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, I just habitually don’t read books until well past time for me to do so. I had read a few excerpts back when I was working at Pearson; the bit where he re-learns to read by copying the dictionary in Norfolk Prison Colony is included in some of their American literature anthologies. That segment is both an excellent piece of writing on its own, hence its inclusion in the American lit anthologies, and also the sort of thing directly calculated to appeal to me personally as a huge dork.

Malcolm X was a hell of a talker and Alex Haley was a hell of a writer and between them both, The Autobiography of Malcolm X is a hell of a book. It is by turns funny, shocking, moving, incisive, dramatic, and even relatable. That last one is part of how you can tell just how well the book is crafted, since literally nothing about Malcolm X’s life bears any sort of resemblance to mine, unless you count “living in Boston” in its absolute broadest sense.

The most exemplary anecdote here is the one where teenage Malcolm, having made a few friends after a few months in Boston, first conks--i.e., chemically straightens--his hair. The way this story is told is whimsical and a bit self-deprecating, but only in the way that any story told as an adult about one’s teenage fashion adventures tends to be self-deprecating. Though this particular story concerns Black men in Roxbury in the 1940s and involves chemicals I’d never even heard of, the “country kid gets big city makeover” or “young person gets their first [insert significant adult beauty process here]” type story, whether real or fictional, is familiar enough for readers of any background to feel like they get what’s going on, and probably to bring back memories of whatever dumb shit they did in their teens to try to look cool (I have some less than dignified recollections of rinsing poorly toned hair dye out in the basement sink and essentially waterboarding myself in the process). There is no political commentary in this story as it is being told, just an amusingly earnest teen who is very excited about getting to be one of the cool guys now. Or there isn’t until the triumphant moment when baby hipster Malcolm looks into the mirror at his fashionable new hair, at which point author Malcolm recontextualizes the whole anecdote in terms of Black adoption of white beauty standards, theorizing that the conk represents internalized anti-Blackness and “self-degradation” and making the reader (or at least, this reader) feel like an entire dumbass for having been like “Haha, what a cute and structurally familiar story, this is a nice break from all the heavy political stuff” for even a minute, like, what fuckin’ book did I think I was reading? Just an absolute masterclass in setting up expectations and then batting your audience in the face with them.

It’s actually kind of wild how much of the book is funny given that most of its subject matter is extremely grim. The book kicks off with Malcolm’s family being threatened by the Klan while he is still in utero, and the violence in his early life escalates from there, including his house being burned down and his father being murdered and left on the railroad tracks. From a strictly storytelling perspective this is also very well done because setting that context right at the beginning really highlights how self-serving and point-missing all the white defensiveness is later in the book, when he has a speaking career that consists largely of fending off white journalists shitting their pants at the idea that he or anyone else might not like white people very much, although given that this is nonfiction and the choice to tell the story in a linear, chronological fashion is a fairly standard one, it would perhaps be putting it on a bit thick to credit that entirely to the authors. What is creditable to the authors is that they tell it very well; they know when to editorialize and when it’s more effective to just lay out shocking events plainly.

The parts of the book that take place in Roxbury and Harlem are certainly the most colorful, and not just because the fashion at the time involved loudly pigmented zoot suits. The slang is also to die for if you, like me, have an interest in historical slang, and it is never not funny to see people treat the word “cool” as if it is highly subcultural flash patter in the same register as calling someone “daddy-o.” This is also the part of the book where Malcolm falls into a life of crime, and who doesn’t like reading about people who have fallen into a life of crime? Even when it is not romanticized--and Malcolm X takes great pains to point out that living a life of crime is in fact bad, hazardous to one’s health as well as injurious to one’s morals--if it is told at all well it cannot help but be an exciting read.

After getting busted for running a drug-fueled armed burglary ring in Harvard Square, Malcolm is sent to prison, where we spend time in two different facilities: the ancient Charlestown State, which is now closed, and the Norfolk Prison Colony, now MCI Norfolk. Reading about Norfolk in the 1940s was quite interesting to me because at the time it was basically considered the swanky prison, given that it had flush toilets, and you could go into the library. It was founded as a “reform” prison and I guess this idea had not completely collapsed yet at the time Malcolm X was incarcerated there. This is a sharp contrast to the stories coming out of MCI Norfolk these days, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, which is raging through the Massachusetts prison system like a wildfire. Prisoners are being denied medical care, PPE, and basic cleanliness, while the Department of Corrections drags its feet on acknowledging the extremely basic fact that you can’t do social distancing in a prison, especially not one with a 134% overcrowding rate. MCI Norfolk also has well-documented issues with water cleanliness, and removed bottled water from the prison commissary somewhere around week three of the pandemic officially hitting the state. So yeah, it’s kind of weird to read about someone having a reasonably edifying time there, quietly working his way through the library and honing his rhetorical skills in the debating society.

In Norfolk Malcolm is converted to the Nation of Islam, a somewhat fundamentalist, very American sect of Islam that is in large part a cult of personality around a guy who (quite predictably, IMO) later turns out to have been fucking his secretaries. The book does a very good job of explaining why this sect was attractive to the people who joined it, not just ideologically, but in terms of the actual concrete ways in which it helped the people who were involved, from its success rate in rehabbing people off drugs to the self-defense classes it ran (which, predictably, scared the shit out of white people). The accounts of Malcolm X’s career as the Nation’s main spokesperson and “the angriest black man in America” are also extremely funny, in that they really succeed in highlighting how ridiculous the white press’ freakouts over the Nation of Islam were. White people’s concern about Nation of Islam was not wariness over the cult of personality aspect, which would be normal and sensible; instead, we are treated to a parade of highly undignified displays of white defensiveness, to which Malcolm does not concede one inch of cover. It probably wasn’t funny to have to deal with on a regular basis, but it’s pretty entertaining to read.

Following an acrimonious split with the Nation of Islam, Malcolm goes traveling, where he has many wholesome experiences dealing with non-American white people who aren’t terrible that cause him to develop somewhat less bitter, more optimistic views about the possibility of people of different races getting along if we can somehow purge America of its addiction to being racist as shit. While there is a bunch of really good stuff in this part of the book, I still found it a bit of a lull, because I am a terrible person as a reader and don’t go in much for wholesome stuff, and certainly not stuff that’s both wholesome and spiritual. The lull does make a pretty brilliant tonal setup toward the end of the book, all this becoming nicer and more optimistic sort of thing, because as you probably know, at the end he gets brutally murdered.

The epilogue, which runs a full 75 pages and is written in first-person POV by Alex Haley, is riveting. The beginning gives us a behind-the-scenes peek at the stuff we’ve all just read, and a different, outside perspective on Malcolm X, one unmediated by Malcolm’s own editorializing about what other people think of him. The middle recounts the weeks before the murder, as they rushed to get the autobiography finished, knowing that it was likely that one of the attempts on his life could be successful at any time. And the end is a horrifyingly unputdownable account of the assassination itself and its aftermath, including the unanswered questions about who actually carried out the murder, and why.

Fortunately for me, there is a Netflix documentary series that further explores those unanswered questions, so I might actually be motivated to carve out some time for myself to sit down and watch some TV like a normal person for the first time since this pandemic started.

For the last BSpec book club I was able to prod my friends into agreeing to read Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, which I was very pleased about for two reasons. One, I had bought it in paperback a few months ago, so I did not need to read it in ebook, which is nice because I'm a little sick of ebooks after reading *checks notes* one (this, of course, is why I just bought nine ebooks from Verso. Whoops). Two, I am utterly incapable of reading fluffy escapist stuff right now, and I have a very generous definition of what counts as fluffy and escapist to start with, so I'm grateful that my friends were willing to read the sort of thing that everyone else is apparently attempting to escape from.

Parable of the Sower takes place in a post-apocalypse in denial, a near-future version of the U.S. where climate change, plague, drugs, political corruption, and other assorted fuckery have combined to break down all but the last formal vestiges of the U.S. empire. There is a president, but nobody votes and the president doesn't really do anything. The states have begun acting largely as independent countries, ruthlessly policing their borders from the hordes of economic and climate refugees wandering around seeking employment. Private companies are again taking over entire communities, turning them into company towns where the lure of waged work sucks in people to desperate to mind that the wages never cover the expenses of living in the company's housing. Sound familiar?

Within all this chaos is a small community, what was once a single street in a suburban sort of neighborhood, now turned into a sort of walled tenement as multiple generations of extended kin networks cram into what were once single-nuclear-family homes. Our protagonist, Lauren Olamina, the oldest daughter of the Baptist preacher, lives in one of these with her dad, her stepmom, and her three stepbrothers. She is very lucky to have parents with jobs and only one family jammed into the house. She is somewhat less lucky to be afflicted with a condition known as hyperempathy, or "sharing," which means she can feel pain when nearby people (or animals, sometimes) experience it, which can be pretty brutal in a society where drug- and desperation-fueled street violence is a casual occurrence.

Lauren is a responsible, obedient sort in most ways, with two big exceptions: One is that she is sexually active--a part of the plot treated so casually that I'm almost not sure what the point of including it is, except verisimilitude--and the other is that she has her own religion, which she has been working on developing the founding writings for for several years. She eventually calls it Earthseed, and its central belief is that God is change. It's a very responsibility-focused belief system, and I found myself liking it a lot more than I figured I would like any sort of fictional religion. (One of the chapter epitaphs, which are all excerpt's from Lauren's Earthseed notes, just says "To get along with God, consider the consequences of your behavior." I laughed way too hard.)

One thing about reading this book in lockdown is that the first half, where times are "good," more or less, in that the compound where Lauren and her community live is intact, felt to me much darker than the stuff that happened after the compound is destroyed and Lauren goes out into the wild world to try to walk up the California freeway to somewhere where there might be work. That part was a very good Long Walk sort of storyline, but it was essentially a Long Walk storyline, a thing I have much experience reading about and, quite, thankfully, no experience actually doing myself. The claustrophobic bits, where everyone is crammed into a tiny cramped community trying to pretend things will go back to normal ever and where a bunch of people are in denial about just how badly everything's falling apart, hit much more close to home for the time being, in a way that can't help but make me wonder what happens next, even more than I am already spending all my mental energy wondering what happens next.

One of the few things left going on out in national-politics-land during this story is that the shredded remnants of the federal government have been taken over by right-wing elements who have decided to shut down the space program, on the basis that it constitutes Fraud And Waste and probably namby-pamby liberal nonsense like science and general intellectualism, just after a crewed mission to Mars ends in the death of an astronaut. Lauren is displeased about this, both because the astronaut in question was something of a role model for her, and because one of Earthseed's other core tenets in that its destiny lies in going to space. We had a very interesting discussion at book club about the ethics of space exploration and colonization, especially in light of what a pig's ear we've made of Earth these last couple centuries.

I do really want to read the sequel, although I might wait a bit until I can get my hands on a physical copy of that, too (I'm not exactly running low on books to read in quarantine... time to read them is a different story). One of these days I will remember that reading Octavia Butler is never a bad idea, and make myself do it more often.

I'm not sure what kicked this off but at some point recently I looked at my giant pile of theory to read and was like "It's DARK and COLD and I'm UNEMPLOYED and BEHIND ON SEVERAL ENJOYABLE FANTASY SERIES, I am going to try to carve out some time to catch up." Then I put in holds for a bunch of stuff at the library.

One of them was Leigh Bardugo's Crooked Kingdom, the sequel to her excellent YA gang fantasy Six of Crows. This one has red-edged pages where the last one had black-edged pages, so you can already tell this is very much a series in my general style.

In addition to the lovely binding, it is my general style content-wise, as well. We've got gritty grimdark dangerous cities, ruthless moneygrubbing and cheating, organized crime, disorganized crime, extremely psychologically fucked-up teenagers with morbid backstories, zombies, murder, more murder, attempted murder, fake murder, and other such variations on the general murder theme, elaborate schemes that go elaborately awry, double- and triple-crossing, sex, drugs, and gambling (rock and roll hasn't been invented yet in Ketterdam), and all sorts of stuff like that. It reminds me of other indulgently Dickensian adventure reads I've liked in the past few years, like the Timothy Wilde books and Foundryside.

This one takes place entirely in the grotesque rathole of a trading city called Ketterdam, where the job from Book 1 has blown up in their faces a wee bit and they haven't gotten paid the outrageous sums of money they were supposed to be paid. Obviously this means it is all-out war against anyone and everyone who had a hand in that, which, unfortunately for Kaz Brekker and the gang, is quite a lot of people: the wealthy mercher Jan Van Eck, rival Barrel boss Pekka Rollins, several other sovereign nations, the list goes on. I can't really begin to explain the plot without immediately moving into massive spoilers, because there are fresh and exciting twists every few chapters that explode what you think is going on and force the characters to replace all their current insane plans with a fresh batch of insane plans. It is definitely the sort of book that makes me wish I were fiendish and clever enough to come up with plots like that, but alas, I am not.

While I don't know if I would call this an anticapitalist book per se, it has strong themes against not just enslavement and human trafficking--although those are certainly driving points--but also economic exploitation, the dubiously "free" nature of contracts, and rich people generally. The actual, literal religion in Kerch (the country Ketterdam is in) is some sort of mashup of Prosperity Gospel and making literal the popular economic belief that The Market is some sort of wrathful sacred god that must be appeased before all else (his name, apparently, is Ghezen). The biggest religious center in the city is literally a temple of commerce. And beneath all the pious pretensions at clean living--in this world, we're back to the Puritans' stern black coats and such, rather than today's weird obsessions with meditation retreats and only wearing one color t-shirt ever--the ruling class is just as corrupt, vicious, decadent, abusive, and dishonest as the Barrel scum they pretend to be so offended by. I think the book does a pretty good job of illustrating that all the rules are fake and the system will do anything to defend itself, and that the only real way of curbing the worst excesses is to engage in elaborate scheming and sabotage to convince some rich people that other rich people are being egregious enough to pose a threat to their own comfort. In this case it involves some multilayered spycraft and fraud involving sugar markets pulled off by a small crew of very specifically gifted individuals, rather than mass politics, but it is a fantasy adventure story and not actually a treatise on revolution, after all.

...OK, so much for taking a break from theory.

Probably my biggest criticism of the book is that I correctly guessed who was going to die, and since I don't usually try to call character deaths before I see them, which means it was signposted pretty heavily. Every character had some sort of idea of what they wanted to do when this job was over and they were all filthy rich, so I don't remember precisely what it was about this character's that made me go "This one's definitely not gonna make it," but I was just 100% certain he wasn't going to make it and I was correct. Possibly it was too wholesome; it's that kind of book.

Which reminds me. In addition to a lot of action and a lot of financial fraud, there's also a lot of FEELINGS, so it's not just a robotic showcase of twisty plotting like a lot of heist books are. I am absolutely fine with heist books that have underdeveloped characters and overdeveloped heisting, but you do get a bit more richness and texture when an author manages to avoid that. Inej and Kaz's can't-be-a-romance-because-they're-both-way-too-fucked-up-for-that-sort-of-thing is nearly interesting at times. The other romances are standard level boring but no one of them dominates the story enough to be annoying, and they're fairly secondary to all the themes about family and friendship and comradeship and (checks notes) shared thirst for revenge.

Anyway, while it would always be nice to have more Kaz Brekker schemes, I think this duology works quite well as a duology, especially with the lovely color-coded binding.

I missed it when the BSpec book club read Rebecca Roanhorse's Trail of Lightning, but I wanted to read it anyway so I stole Gillian's copy and read it this weekend. It's a YA/adult crossover sort of book, so it reads pretty fast. It's an excellent beach read, for my own personal definition of "beach read," which usually means it's very violent so it's good for reading in hot weather when your brain is melting out your ears, preferably indoors and nowhere near a beach. (Yes, I have an English degree, but in a certain sense I also have the literary tastes of an eight-year-old boy. Just explosions and jokes, please; hold all the boring feelings and stuff.)

Trail of Lightning is a post-apocalyptic Western (Southwestern?) grounded in Navajo mythology; after the climate apocalypse has destroyed most of North America, the Dine--the remnants of the Navajo nation--hang out on their surviving area of not-drowned land and are periodically attacked by monsters. Our protagonist is Maggie Hoskie, a late teenage (or possibly early 20s?) orphan turned monster fighter, former apprentice of a monster-slaying god whomst is kind of an asshole. Maggie's clan powers--two magical powers, each inherited from a parent's family--are "running really fast" and "killing really good," which makes her an excellent monster slayer. Maggie runs in the tradition of a certain type of grouchy, angry, unsociable, severely traumatized action hero, and the emotional arc of the book largely involves her beginning to learn how to people again. Toward this end we have the love interest, Kai, who, due to Maggie's emotionally-crippled-GI-Joe character type, avoids the annoying Mr Darcy/Brooding YA Hero tropes and is instead friendly, socially adept, good-humored, and otherwise crafted specifically for the task of resocializing Maggie. It works pretty well; he's pretty funny and he's also a useful character, being a medicine man in training, and a very powerful one.

Kai and Maggie and a secondary cast of post-apocalyptically grumpy ass-kicking types spend three hundred pages or so hunting wildly creepy monsters and dealing with cruel and manipulative gods, including the incredibly obnoxious Coyote, and getting blood and guts everywhere in the process. At one point there is a cat goddess who is also a bookie; she was a great character and I wouldn't have minded more of her.

I don't really have the brain right now to describe the monsters, and also I don't want to give anything away, but be assured they are incredibly creepy and when Maggie and co. kill them it is incredibly satisfying. Just absolutely A+ monster-hunting, would hunt again, will happily read sequels.

For book club this month, we decided to read Black Bostonians and the Politics of Culture (1920-1940) by Lorraine Elena Roses, a study of the Black art scene in Boston during the interwar period. It's a bit more academic than many of the other books we've read in this book club, but not overly so.

The book seems very thorough but is not very long, for the unfortunate reason that there's not a lot of surviving records about a lot of the arts projects that the Black population in Boston was involved in during this time period. The Black population in Boston was also very small in the interwar period, but that didn't stop them from producing quite a lot of art. The educated black elite in Boston was even smaller, which meant that much of the Black arts scene was organized and sustained by a relatively small cast of influential families. Two women's clubs, founded as relief groups for Black troops stationed in Massachusetts before being shipped off to fight in World War I, were especially important drivers of art initiatives, carefully navigating Boston's institutional segregation to occasionally cross the color line in the high arts. Black Bostonians discusses Black Bostonian's contributions to newspapers, theater, visual arts, music, and literature, as well as the institutions that facilitated these contributions, from private writing clubs to the Federal Theatre Project, a New Deal program to employ theater workers.

While the overall pattern is a bit depressing -- short periods of brilliance and successful artistic output, soon crushed by larger political forces -- the discussion of the works is quite interesting and there's an abundance of intriguing personal stories. Some of the editorializing rubbed me a tiny bit the wrong way; Roses' discussion of William Monroe Trotter carries a distinct tone of disapproval that he neglected his high culture training in favor of dedicating himself to public political protest, which she seems to find a bit embarrassing. I think he sounds friggin' awesome, and if he thought getting arrested and running an inflammatory newspaper were better uses of his time than "high-culture activities" then he gets to think that. He was a principal organizer on the protests against Birth of a Nation showing in Massachusetts, which is rad. (The movie aired anyway, and sold out repeatedly, because Boston is racist and disappointing.)

The relationship between the Boston scene and the Harlem Renaissance that was going on in New York is portrayed as complex, with New York providing both inspiration and a sense of rivalry, somewhat related to it being bigger with a much larger Black population, but also related to the fact that Broadway was there. (Still is, I believe.)

I'm not sure how much of the art discussed in the book is actually still available for consumption. Some of the visual art certainly is; the plays, on the other hand, don't seem to be ones that are still staged, and Roses assures us that a lot of the ones by the older generation would sound pretty goofy and Victorian to modern audiences if they were. This does exactly zero to make me not want to see a staging of The Trial of Dr. Beck; in 2018, as in 1939, "There's always room for a good murder trial in the theatre."

I think we will have an interesting discussion this weekend, especially if I can brain enough to pull together some halfway decent questions.

In a rush to finish off one more series before my next round of book club assignments, I decided to pick up Elizabeth Bear's Steles of the Sky, the third and final book in her Eternal Sky trilogy. I'd read Range of Ghosts in 2013 and Shattered Pillars in 2014, and bought Steles of the Sky also in 2014 when it was first published, but, my book-buying and -reading habits being what they are, it got buried behind some other books, even though I had really liked the first two.

A downside of this is that it took me a while to get into this one, because I had forgotten a lot of stuff, and it's a pretty complex story. There are a lot of different players from a lot of different cultures under several different skies, and everyone's religion and magic work differently, and the thing I'd remembered most vividly from the previous book was the demons incubating in people's lungs, which is basically the only plot point that was apparently wrapped up last volume because there aren't any more lung demons in this one. There are lots of horses and yaks, though, and I will admit that I occasionally have trouble reading anything with yaks quite seriously, for which I blame Terry Pratchett. This is entirely a fault of mine as a reader, though, as the now-Dowager Empress Yangchen's journey of self-discovery and non-uselessness as she leads a refugee caravan to Rasa is an excellent story arc, and Yangchen's faithful yak Lord Shuffle is a perfectly good animal companion, even if he is not as supernatural as Bansh.

There is a lot of politicking, which I love, although various characters seem to finally be wising up and realizing how much al-Sepher is playing them off each other, which has the benefit of not making me real mad at how stupid they're all being for Plot Reasons (like... a lot of books) but on the other hand does seem to slow the pace down a bit now that it's largely Everyone vs. al-Sepher. (This slowing down is helped along by the fact that the writing is very descriptive--it's good descriptive, but there's a lot of it.) The best bits are Saadet vs. al-Sepher, considering Saadet is actually on his side, having married the now-deceased Qori Buqa and now bearing his child in order to take over the Khaganate for al-Sepher's purposes. The culture clashes between the Qersnyk and the extremely restrictive cult of the Scholar-God are quite intense.

Ultimately, it is the world-building that really is the coolest thing about this series, even though the plot and characters and intrigues and stuff are all quite solid. The world feels very detailed and very old, and has all kinds of rich secrets buried in it, and by secrets I mean GODDAMN DRAGONS. The dragons are kind of assholes; it's great.

This is not to undersell the number of great ladies in this series, from the Wizard Samarkar to the slave-poetess Ummuhan, Edene has truly become a queen of poisoned things, and Yangchen similarly finds herself in a position of authority over evil creatures. Saadet, as previously mentioned, comes into her own beautifully, even if she's still basically on the side of the bad guys. And those are just the viewpoint characters.

Probably my biggest complaint about the series is that I really do not know shit about horses, up to and including the colors, so there was a lot of horse talk that went totally over my head. One plot point involves Temur trying to put together a Sacred Herd of the sixty-four colors of horses, and I'm sitting here like a dumbass city girl going "What the fuck is a liver bay," even though there is a drawing of one on the book's cover. (Unlike many fantasy-loving little girls, I did not go through a Horse Phase.)

Overall, this series is pretty stellar, but I cannot quite shake the feeling that I should dutifully plug my way through some of the Elizabeth Bear books I already own before getting the second Karen Memory book, which adds a slight feeling of obligation that makes the reading of it less fun. That's on me, though.

Oh, and obligatory "How well would this translate into a TV show": Were it done properly and not whitewashed, fucking FABULOUSLY.

Current Mood: aggravated

Due largely to fighting off being sick, I had enough spare time this past week to actually read a book that's not for a book club. Unheard-of, I know. I need to figure out a way to do this without being sick.

Anyway, I took the time to get hooked on Babylon Berlin (the Netflix show, not the book) and to read Daniel José Older's Midnight Taxi Tango, the second book in the Bone Street Rumba series, which as usual I purchased ages ago with the intention of reading it immediately and then failed.

This book was published two frickin' years ago, and it's the sequel to Half-Resurrection Blues, which I loved, and it's got a big old picture of Kia with a machete on the front cover, so I knew I was going to like it, because Kia is great, and then... *gestures vaguely at entire life*

Anyway. It's been a while since I read Half-Resurrection Blues, but Midnight Taxi Tango contains enough brief summings-up to jog the old memory, so I appreciated that. This book has an entirely different main plot but it does revolve significantly around Sasha, Carlos' love interest who walked out on him at the end of the last book while pregnant, and Carlos' general inability to healthily process his feelings about all of that. But mostly the plot is about a creepy-ass cult of murderous cockroach-covered humanoids who are murdering people both on their own and through the use of the ghosts of small children, who have been somehow programmed into becoming tiny little spectral murderbots. I suspect Older first brainstormed this plot by just going "What are the creepiest, grossest, most unsettling tropes in the entire history of horror stories? One... creepy dead children... two... giant fuckoff swarms of bugs... um... underground murder tunnels, that's a thing, right?"

It could have ended up a bit tryhard and sloppy, but it doesn't, although it certainly doesn't fuck around; the book is loudly and viscerally disturbing from page... *checks* 4, which is actually the second page of original text. The roaches and child ghosts and murder tunnels all resolve into one new and terrifying supernatural threat that is eminently threatening and not quite like anything I've read before. The body counts are high, the combat scenes brutal, the dialogue sharp and funny and expletive-filled in the fine tradition of New York noir.

The viewpoint characters in this book are Carlos, the partially-resurrected private contractor for the New York Council of the Dead with no memory of his prior life; Reza, a dapper hit woman who's part of a gang that decides to get revenge on all its shady associates; and Kia, the sixteen-year-old niece of Carlos' friend Baba Eddie, who picks up the ability to see ghosts after getting attacked by one of the little weaponized dead toddlers and who is not very good at capoeira. Kia is the best. She is sometimes impulsive because sixteen-year-olds are not traditionally known for their impulse control, but more often than not she's still reining in Carlos, because Carlos is Noir Protagonist Man and therefore stabby and emotionally illiterate. Kia is stabby too, but generally smarter. She also has unresolved issues with her favorite cousin disappearing on her several years ago after witnessing some creepy supernatural shit at some dude's house, which obviously turns out to be highly relevant to our plot. Kia is really into King Impervious, who if I recall correctly is Izzy from Shadowshaper. (There's also a brief cameo by Sierra's dragon mural, and now I want crossover fanfic/short stories where Kia meets all the Shadowshaper girls and they hang out and kick supernatural ass together.) Kia avoids the "sassy black girl" stereotype by having too much character depth and genuine awesomeness to be a stereotype and by being a central character instead of someone's best friend; no reduction in sassing people required.

As an avid fan of secondary characters I am also pleased to report that the secondary characters are a ton of fun. Most of them are ghosts, but there's also a gay Brazilian capoeira instructor, the rest of Reza's combination taxi service/prostitution ring/murder gang, some creepy white people involved with the roach cult, a boss dope-smoking librarian called Dr. Tennessee, and the amusingly infuriating Council of fussy dead bureaucrats. Some are new; some are reappearances from earlier books, like the ghost Mama Esther, and Baba Eddie and his boyfriend Russell. Kia's best friend, Karina, babysits a bunch of white toddlers and is apparently training them to be Jamaican revolutionaries, which turns up in only one scene but it is solid gold.

This book also features several trips out to Long Island, which really made me aware of how bad my Long Island geography is. Like, I too went on a trip to Long Island, last weekend, and I have no idea where the fuck anything is! I recognized a couple place-names as place-names that are vaguely related to my family, in that I know I have family members that have been associated with those places, possibly recently (my entire maternal side of the family lives on Long Island except for my mom and one uncle), but I have no mental map of the place. I have no mental map of Brooklyn, either, just a memory of Grandma Rossi's apartment; I couldn't tell you what neighborhood it was in to save my soul. Great-Grandpa Martin lived in Flatbush. I have no idea where in Brooklyn my mother was born. I am now oddly motivated to go study a map of Long Island. But anyway, the point is that this book takes place in all the highly specific neighborhoods of New York, not just the shiny playground-for-the-rich bits that get featured on TV, with absurdly large apartments and no travel time between scenes.

Anyway, that was a major digression. I told you I was sick! If I stay sick for another week I might have to track down a copy of Battle Hill Bolero, preferably without leaving the house.

Current Mood: sick

I had a bit of a time getting hold of a copy of Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor's How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, including ordering direct from the publisher and getting notified it was out of stock, but I finally acquired it. Yay!

I'd been on the lookout since the organizers for the DSA SocFem Working Group gave a presentation on it as part of the WG's inaugural meeting, and they gave another presentation to the general membership during December's GM.

One thing I had not known before these presentations: While the Combahee River is in South Carolina, the Combahee River Collective was based right here in Boston. Learning this definitely bumped this book right to the top of my priority list, because my knowledge of Boston radical history is not great.

Another thing I learned in these presentations: the Combahee River Collective Statement is the first known time a text used the term "identity politics."

The book is a small one, coming in at just under 200 pages and about the dimensions of an iPad Mini. It consists of a reprint of the Combahee River Collective Statement itself, which here is a mere 12 pages long, and then interviews by Taylor with several members of the Collective and with Alicia Garza, the founder of #BlackLivesMatter.

The Statement and the interviews are absolutely packed with history and analysis. While the CRC was only in operation for a few years, they brought a wealth of experience in organizing in the various '60s and '70s political movements and were able to synthesize it all into a radical, anticapitalist queer Black feminism that combined analytical rigor with a deep respect for lived experience.

While the Statement is an excellent document, the interviews are really the meat of the book (and not just because you can find the text of the Statement online for free). The interviewees who wrote the Statement--Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, and Demita Frazier--discuss the founding of the Collective, their political awakenings and prior activism, the difficulties in coalition-building that they experienced, the work the Collective did in Boston, the development of the terms "identity politics" (used in the Statement) and "intersectionality" (coined by Kimberle Crenshaw in 1989, but the theory of which maps pretty closely to what's in the Statement), and the state of Black feminism today. There's some discussion of cooptation, aspiration, and the rise of a very small number of highly visible elite Black women that I think ought to be required reading for all white leftists, if only because this is an area where white leftists sometimes really put their foot in it.

The interviews also give a really important look into the ways in which the various -isms plaguing the disparate '60s-era political movements were hindrances to the women's participation and hindrances to effective organizing, while also recognizing what was important and effective and meaningful in them, and thus avoiding the tiresome Good Actually/Bad Actually dichotomy that's so irritatingly common in political discourse these days.

Overall, a very, very important read for anyone who's interested in not replicating the failures of the past in whatever strain of activist work is most important to them.

After we did The Dispossessed for BSpec book club I wanted to do another Very Political book but perhaps one that was not 90% philosophical discussions, so I suggested one that I'd been intending to read ever since I first heard of it at a convention a few years ago before it was published: Nishi Shawl's Everfair, a steampunk novel about the Belgian Congo.

In this alternate history, a coalition of somewhat messianic white English socialists called the Fabian Society, Christian Black American activists, and the actual native Congolese what live there somehow manage to scrape up enough money via donations and a wealthy benefactor or two to buy a big tract of the Congo away from King Leopold of Belgium, who of course sells it to them but then also attacks it to try to conquer in back. But in this history, due to the outside support involved in its founding, the newly formed, uneasily multiracial country of Everfair has access to enough modern weaponry to defend itself. With refugees from King Leopold's Congo often running to Everfair for asylum covered in the precious rubber they'd been harvesting, and an additional small influx of runaway Macao Chinese railway workers--including one extremely gifted inventor known mostly as Tink--Everfair is able to innovate, build military capacity, form alliances between its various factions, and push out Leopold's overseers and police with a gloriously steampunky multifront, multistrategy set of campaigns over the course of several years.

The book is split into two parts, the first covering from the "founding" of Everfair--i.e., negotiating the land purchase and raising funds--to the final defeat of King Leopold and the expulsion of Belgian powers from Africa. The second half of the book covers two, more complex wars: World War I, where Everfair ultimately decides to fight on the side of Whoever's Fucking Up the Belgians (which was... Germany), and a small civil war, an eruption of tensions that have been present throughout the book and that King Mwenda basically decided to deal with in a fit of macho/royal pride that make things worse and ultimately the women in the book have to bail him and the rest of the country out of the whole mess, because women are awesome and kings are inherently sort of dumb, even when they have good reason to be angry at the white socialists who have no idea how condescending they are because they're The Good Guys compared to, you know, King Fucking Leopold of Belgium.

This book has a pretty big and extremely diverse cast of characters, with robust representation of badass women in a variety of occupations, plenty of queer romance, lots of religious tensions, and some interesting age differences in the pairings-up. One of the big steampunk tropes in the book is that a lot of the characters have mechanical limbs, due to the historical atrocities of Leopold's regime, which involved a lot of cutting people's hands and feet off.

While most of the book isn't fantasy-steampunk, leaning much more to the traditional sci-fi/alt-history, things get a little fuzzy when it comes to religion, although I suppose they do in real life too, as some people claim it. One character, a Christian reverend when he starts out, accidentally winds up a priest of an indigenous religion, and he gets imbued with some pretty impressive powers when his new god decides to work through him. It's notable that only native spiritual practices seem to really "work" as magic in Everfair; Martha never gets to actually set people on fire via her dreams or anything cool like that as a result of her devotion to Christianity.

The country of Everfair is not a utopia, despite the best intentions of the Fabians; what it is, however, is an experiment that doesn't collapse, which is an impressive enough win. It's also a complex and institutionally unstable enough country to be really interesting enough to read about, and the personal-political factions and intrigue and the new problems that crop up when old ones aren't quite solved provide plenty of high-stakes plotlines over the 25-year span of time the book covers. By the end, the country's nascent intelligence network, run by a girl who can enter the minds of cats, is in impressive development, and I just think it's really cool to have a spy network of all girls and cats and would read five million sequels about it.

I have a couple critiques but I don't even feel like writing them down; they're quite boring compared to the brilliant, engaging originality on display. I'm really glad we decided to read this one and I'm quite looking forward to discussing it.

I fell behind on my NaNoWriMo writing because I had a book to return to the library, and I’d be absolutely damned if I didn’t actually finish reading it first. There was a waitlist, so I couldn’t renew, and I don’t think I could have handled having to re-request it and wait for it to circle back around to me while I was only halfway through. The suspense would have killed me.

The book in question was N. K. Jemisin’s The Stone Sky, the eagerly awaited third book in her fantastic Broken Earth trilogy, which I’m fairly certain is going to become a giant of the genre. The first two books each won the Hugo Award for Best Novel the years they came out, and I hope The Stone Sky does as well, because I’ll be very surprised if a better novel has come out all year.

At the end of the last book, Alabaster Tenring died, having been turned into stone by doing magic—not just orogeny, but magic—and eaten by a stone eater known as Antimony. Quite technically, our protagonist, Essun, killed him, turning the last of him to stone and inheriting his power when she activated the Obelisk Gate to save her experimental newfound comm, Castrima-Under, from an invading army of raiders from the city of Rennanis. This had effects not only on the invaders but also on Rennanis, so Castrima, their underground geode now destroyed, set out across the wastes of falling ash toward… the city of Rennanis.

Essun, meanwhile, is turning to stone, just like Alabaster was. And she still has to catch the Moon.

Like the other books, this book has three different timelines/viewpoints that it shifts between. Essun in the present is the main one, narrated in second person by the stone eater Hoa. The second perspective follows Essun’s daughter Nassun, in the same timeline and also narrated by Hoa, as she travels with Schaffa, her Guardian, away from the comm of Found Moon after some really serious stuff goes down there. Nassun’s also on a quest that involves traveling to the other side of the world and activating the Obelisk Gate, but hers is different: She plans to smash the Moon into the Earth, putting the world out of its misery and permanently ending humanity’s ability to oppress each other. It’s a very effective twist on what would otherwise be a traditional James Bond-villain bit of supervillainry, because Nassun’s not evil—she’s a traumatized eleven-year-old girl, the only remaining child of the protagonist, and her loyalties make perfect sense.

The third perspective is also Hoa, but this time he is telling his own story in the first person, tens of thousands of years ago in a civilization that consists of one massive, sprawling, continent-wide city named Syl Anagist. The civilization that created Syl Anagist has advanced plant-engineering skills and believes life is sacred, and they are the ones who built the obelisks. They were for a project. The project, as you may have guessed, went horribly wrong, in a way that resulted in a pissed-off Father Earth and the Seasons and a load of obelisks floating around in the atmosphere for millennia, but this doesn’t give anything away about how the world got to that point or why or what it all means or how to fix it, so it’s still a tense, gripping, unpredictable storyline, a backstory that could stand entirely on its own. But it’s better that it doesn’t, because the story of Syl Anagist is necessary to figuring it out how to end the millennia-long war between the humans and Father Earth.

The story of Syl Anagist is also begging for an hours-long discussion by the nearest group of socialist SFF nerds you can find, but in the meantime, I’m just gonna say that the relationship between Syl Anagist’s belief that life is “sacred” and the stuff they actually do with it is some extremely pointed commentary on commodification and the ways in which unsustainable growth-based economic systems enable horrific abuses on an industrial scale, and the way in which the very industrialization of those abuses becomes itself a way of papering them over so nobody has to see or think about it. It’s about imperialism rather than about capitalism per se but the destructively self-perpetuating expansionism thing should be recognizable to anyone with any grounding in either early- to mid-modern imperial history or modern globalization (which is basically imperialism via finance). There’s also a bunch of stuff in there about civilizational mythmaking, and I wonder if I’m the only reader who thinks “Syl Anagist” sounds kind of like “Los Angeles”—you know, the enormous sprawling city where so many of our myths are made and exported from. I may be overthinking that last bit.

With all of Essun’s family dead except Nassun, who is now basically the antagonist, this book also has a lot of stuff to say about family relationships, but especially about family relationships within wider political contexts, including really uncomfortable stuff like trying to figure out the appropriate ways to prepare your children for facing extreme and life-threatening oppression from the rest of society. I feel like I’m not really qualified to make any sort of coherent commentary on this but from other readings I’ve done, especially when I was doing freelance research on child protection systems, I’ve run into discussions about communities in which parents from marginalized communities are harsher disciplinarians toward their children than is considered acceptable by the sorts of white bourgeois families that judges and lawyers etc. tend to come from, because they know that their kids don’t have as much room to screw up as middle-class white kids, and then this in turn increases the likelihood of the parents being deemed abusive and having the kids taken away from them, and it’s a whole complicated mess of there being basically no good answers (other than, like, for society to stop being oppressive, but we obviously can’t do that, can we). With the orogenes, this kind of reasoning is encapsulated into the ritual of breaking an orogene child’s hand as a test of discipline. Schaffa broke Essun’s hand back when she was first discovered when she was young; Essun broke Nassun’s hand when she was secretly training her as a child in Jekity. One result of this chain of events is that when Schaffa becomes Nassun’s Guardian, he doesn’t have to do quite all the same dreadful disciplinarian things he did to Essun, because Essun has already done them to Nassun—and this has pretty major effects on Nassun’s relationships with her mother and her Guardian.

Anyway, that is just one aspect of things that jumped out at me as being a very clever way of creating distinctive world-building for this series that explores really deep and uncomfortable real-world issues, but frankly, everything N.K. Jemisin writes is like that, all the time. All her books are as serious and complex as a world war. Grad students are going to be writing master’s theses on her stuff centuries from now (if we still have grad programs and aren’t all dead of climate change). If America ever decides to stop being a bunch of total dipshits, we’ll make her more famous than the Kardashians. If the TV series adaptation of the Broken Earth trilogy doesn’t fuck it up, I hope it gets bigger than Game of Thrones and that Jemisin makes dump trucks full of money. In short, I am, in fact, dead now, but in a good way.

And yet for some reason, the second Dreamblood book has just been sitting on my shelf for like two years now. I think it’s because I got it signed and now I’m afraid to touch it? I also don’t want to be in a state of having no more N.K. Jemisin books to read; that would be an empty and barren existence. But I know I’m missing out on an excellent story by not reading it, and I have only myself to blame.

This month's selection for the politics book club was Angela Davis' Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement, a short collection of interviews and speeches published by Haymarket earlier in the year.

The speeches are generally very good, and must have been a wonderful experience to attend. But speeches are by their nature not usually super in-depth (if they are, it's a lecture rather than a speech); when they are good, they have a few really important, powerful insights or bits of advice that the audience can take away with them, and speeches from activist luminaries can often contain some pretty important wisdom from the elders. These are good speeches and contain many important insights and bits of advice. But it's a short book full of short works, and I kept running into a minor but persistent issue where this was just not the book I wanted to be reading. Davis references a whole number of different politics- and social-justice-related things in passing or in short form that I would like to know more about, and she even recommends a bunch of other works. So my problem with Freedom Is a Constant Struggle basically ended up being that: It's not actually a book examining what went on in Ferguson. It's not a history of the occupation of Palestine. It's not a history of the Black Panther Party. It's not an explication of black feminist theory, or a primer on intersectional theory, or an analysis of prison abolition proposing models for alternative forms of accountability and community justice. It's not Marissa Alexander's The New Jim Crow, or Davis' own Women, Race, and Class. It's really not a factual exploration of any specific historical or political topic at all, while simultaneously it kept reminding me that there are lots of factual explorations of all sorts of interesting and important specific topics out there that I have not read and am woefully undereducated about. (I did start a book club for the express purpose of reading those kinds of books, but the club elected to read this instead.) On several occasions, Davis mentions the importance of drawing connections between different movements and highlighting how all liberation struggles are connected, but there's little room for her to expound upon that much beyond affirming it as an important principle.

And it is, indeed, an extremely important principle, and one that the left has as longstanding and regrettable habit of failing at, and which the rise of the nonprofit industrial complex as the main vehicle for social justice action over the past several decades has probably contributed to by siloing "worthy causes" into their separate nonprofits and PACs. The fact that people keep being bad at it probably means that it is well worth having Angela Davis pop up at campuses etc. to remind us about it and try to inspire people to reorient their thinking a little bit. It's also important to one's education to realize what one does not know, and in that respect, the book really delivers: By touching on so many issues and the connections between them -- the role of large corporations and the profit motive in the militarization of the police and expansion of the security state, the problems with carceral feminism, the limits of civil rights and electoral politics, globalized local activism and digital information-sharing, queer and trans struggles and the deconstruction of gender, the unfulfilled demands of the Black Panther Party -- the book does a stellar job of highlighting just how many important things you've probably been mis- or under-educated about. (The book is less than 150 pages long but has a 12-page index; that's how many subjects are briefly crammed into it.) One of the speeches was given at a university in Turkey, and references a bunch of Turkish historical figures that I've never heard of, but who sound like they were probably pretty interesting.

The one substantial criticism I have of this book that is actually about the book and not my own bad mood is that the interviewer is pretty mediocre, with the result that, while each speech is a work of art, the interviews are decidedly OK. Angela Davis is an icon of liberation struggles. Editor dude is not.

It really is an important book in terms of how to approach political education and movement-building, so I am probably giving it short shrift. It will be especially useful to readers who have mostly taken a more siloed, issue-by-issue approach to their political education thus far, or who may have become disillusioned and cranky with the behaviors of TPTB and are feeling powerless about it. There are worse things than taking "What would Angela Davis say?" as a guideline in your activism.

I had a lot of good intentions about reading nonfiction on the plane but then there I was sitting in the airport and was like "but I am le tired" so I picked something out of my library that I knew was YA fiction, although I couldn't remember anything else about it, like what it was about or why I had bought it, so I figured I would find out. That book was Kate Elliott's Court of Fives, which turned out to be just the sort of YA girl's adventure fantasy comfort read I was in the mood for.

The main character, Jes, is one of four daughters in a stifling upper-class family, which in her case is especially stifling because of the particular ethnic/class system in place in this society: Her father is a Patron, which is basically the favored imperial ethnic class, but he's not a wealthy one, being a baker's son and an immigrant from the part of the empire where that ethnic group originates, and he's only climbed socially due to being an extremely good commander in the army. His social mobility is limited by his building a household with Jes' mother, who is Common--i.e., of the region's native ethnic class--and so he's not allowed to marry her. Their household is also burdened with four daughters and no sons, plus one of Jes' sisters has a clubfoot, which is the sort of thing that Patron families will often let babies die over, in addition to when there's too many girls. The Patron class is modeled after ancient Greek societies and the indigenous Common class is modeled after Egyptian ones, with the particular time and place of Court of Fives drawing heavily on the Ptolemaic period in Egypt, which is pretty cool.

In what is at this point a somewhat formulaic setup for YA girl's adventure novels (this is not a complaint necessarily since it is MY FAVORITE FORMULA), Jes feels all stifled and oppressed by the rigid social expectations placed on her as a sort-of upper-class young lady, and she wishes to have freedom and do fun active things, which in her case is compete in the Fives, the main sport in this society (I enjoy fictional societies that have a sport or tournament or other sort of competition that is the only one and is so popular that literally everyone is invested in it, even though I don't really find it realistic anymore, considering how many Olympicses I have managed to pay no attention to). The Fives is basically a five-part obstacle course; it's clearly very dangerous and sounds pretty rad. Like, it seems like it'd be kind of stupid as a real-world competition, but it works narratively and would probably look cool and martial-arts-movie-y onscreen.

Anyway, competing in the Fives is Jes' driving passion, because YA protagonists are unique among teenagers in always knowing exactly what they want to be when they grow up, but that's OK, it's how books work. Jes wants to be in the Fives so much that she regularly sneaks out to train, which she gets away with because her father is always away in the wars, and because literally everyone else in the household covers for her. (She thinks she is also sneaking from her mother but she's wrong, because that would be dumb.) This is obviously a terrible idea that will have terrible consequences, especially when Jes' father comes home early and promises to take them to go see the Fives on the day that Jes is secretly registered to compete. The sensible thing to do would be to eat the cover charge and not risk literally fucking up absolutely everything possible for her entire family, but Jes is a teenager and has an all-consuming passion, so of course she competes. She is careful to lose, and so does not get found out immediately, but does put into action a chain of events that results in her father dumping her mother and getting married to a princess and shipped out East for military service, the entire household sold off to a grasping local lord to cover the debts of the family's patron who had mysteriously died, Jes being forcibly separated from her family to train at the grasping lord's "stable" with his nephew, the Obligatory Love Interest, and Jes' pregnant mother and sisters getting walled up inside the dead lord's tomb with an oracle to die. Very worth the chance to compete in an event that she had to lose on purpose, I'm sure.

Anyway, most of the plot then becomes a questy sort of adventure where Jes has to team up with various people and use her wits and resourcefulness and athletic ability to rescue her family from being buried alive; in the course of doing so, she learns (which means we learn) a lot of cool stuff about the current empire and the lies it's built on. Very much my jam. The obligatory romantic subplot really didn't click for me even by obligatory romantic subplot terms; I'm not really sure why though. I liked the bit at the end where it all went horribly wrong, though, which means I will probably want to read the sequel eventually.

I finally got around to picking up the third book in Max Gladstone’s excellent Craft Sequence, Full Fathom Five. I decided to prioritize this over the other giant pile of stuff I have to read because I am mentally exhausted reading about capitalism and politics and so wanted some nice escapist fantasy. And also because I am apparently stupid and self-sabotaging, since the Craft Sequence is basically all about technocorporate capitalism, just with souls as currency and gods taking the place of… fossil fuels? Basically energy utilities.

My favorite thing about Full Fathom Five right off the bat was that one of its viewpoint characters is very poor, which the previous ones have generally not been, so we get some scenes in which poverty is literally soul-sucking. Izza is a street thief, and it is through her that we see the effects of running low on soul—blurred vision, faintness, dizziness, basically what it sounds like it would be—when she has to buy incense when her goddess dies.

Full Fathom Five takes place on the small touristy island of Kavekana, the main industry of which, besides tourism, is the creation of idols—rudimentary godlike constructs that can be built upon request and worshiped by Kavekana’s priests, as a stable, safe investment with less sacrifice required than traditional actual deities. There are parallels here to any number of complicated financial hedging products that exist all up on Wall Street and elsewhere, and some other distinct parallels to the economies of assorted lovely small islands in places with nice weather that are referred to by residents of larger jurisdictions as “offshore.” The core of the plot is the core of so many stories of modern finance: a bunch of smart finance bros build products that they think have permanently beaten or ended some element of risk in the market, but the thing they thought they’d eliminated the risk of happens anyway. No one can get one over on capitalism indefinitely.

Our other main viewpoint character is Kai, an idolmaker/priestess who ill-advisedly attempts to save a dying idol, nearly dies herself, is hospitalized and demoted, and winds up uncovering a giant conspiracy involving idols, an insufferable poet, and Cat the drug addict policewoman from Three Parts Dead. By the end it also involves Dickensian street urchin Izza and features a cameo by Teo from Two Serpents Rise, forming a wacky girl gang of priestessy types with terrifying powers. It’s FANTASTIC.

After the initial exciting bit with the idol dying and Izza’s goddess dying and Kai almost dying, the plot takes a somewhat leisurely but not too slow pace to really put together a full idea of what’s going on and how urgent it is to fix it, but that’s fine because the backstory and worldbuilding and meandering around Kavekana getting drunk and looking for poets is quite a lot of fun. It’s clear from pretty much the beginning that Izza’s Blue Lady is the idol Kai tried to save even though that’s supposed to be impossible, but this is OK because the real mystery is how the hell that happened, and it’s fun to see when and how the two main characters will finally cross paths (it’s a small island so they run into each other a bunch of times before interacting properly, which is probably a little gimmicky but I liked it?). I figured out who the bad guy was probably a chapter or two ahead of the protagonists; I think it’s pretty heavily telegraphed but only for a little bit, so the period of time you spend basically going “Don’t go into the basement with just a thimble!” is limited.

Kavekana also features a terrifying rock-based police force, although one quite different from the gargoyle-derivative black ops-y Justice agents in Three Parts Dead. These are called Penitents and they are basically big magic geodes/iron maiden type things that criminals are trapped in until their wills are brought in line with the programming of the Penitents. The Penitents basically wander the streets scaring petty thieves, while the rich powerful folks are able to use the Penitents on their enemies to help them cover up crimes. This has no analogies to our current society’s issues of police militarization and their being used by large corporations (like, say the DAPL builders) against regular citizens whatsoever, I am sure.

I’m planning on getting to the last two books in this series later in June when I get up to Maine. I’m really, really glad I finally got around to reading this series; it’s just so great to have well-done fantasy that also indulges my love of reading about financial crime.

I had the privilege of hearing N. K. Jemisin read from a draft of The Fifth Season, the first book in her Broken Earth trilogy, at Arisia way back in 2015. It was beautiful and terrifying, and yet I still didn't immediately read the book when it was published, nor even when it won the Hugo Award for Best Novel last year, because I am always and eternally months behind on what I intend to be reading. But it was high up on The List, and when it was suggested for this month's BSpec book club -- which is still three weeks away -- I was thrilled to be coerced into finally getting around to it.

The story takes place on a viciously volatile planet, prone to earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and other seismic cataclysms to a point that surviving through them defines all human culture. The big continent all the humans live on is sarcastically named the Stillness; no one lives on islands, because if it's small enough to be considered an island it's also small enough to disappear tomorrow under a tsunami. Every couple hundred years the planet undergoes a Fifth Season, defined as any sort of environmental catastrophe resulting in six months or more of winter. Usually these see civilization go to pieces to some degree or another. There are people with magical abilities to work with seismic energies; they are called orogenes, and they are feared and loathed, carefully trained to guard civilization from the Earth's ravages, but distrusted and tightly controlled.

There are three storylines in this book, which take place in three different times, and the most recent one -- which is related in the second person -- happens at the beginning of one of these cataclysms. The protagonists are a young female "grit" (an orogene still in training) called Damaya; a twentysomething trained orogene named Syenite; and a middle-aged orogene named Essun, who is the protagonist of the second-person sections where the Season has started. I was able to guess how these characters were related just enough before it was revealed to feel smart, but not far enough in advance to feel like Jemisin was treating the reader like they're dumb.

This might be as close a thing to the perfect book as I've read in quite a while, from a whole bunch of different angles. The worldbuilding is fantastic -- utterly unlike anything I've ever read, but based in enough real stuff to make it easy to vividly imagine. The societies in it are old-fashioned -- rustic, even -- and modern at the same time, with distinctive language that sounds naturally evolved and is easy to pick up on quickly. The three-threaded way the story is structured is brilliant, especially once you do find out how they all come together. The language is rich and alive and beautiful and makes me want to roll around in it except that it also has sudden stabby bits and you should never roll around in anything that comes out of N. K. Jemisin's imagination, figuratively or otherwise, because it will probably eat your face off. It's scary, but also makes me remember how much I enjoyed collecting shiny rocks as a kid and that Earth science is really interesting. The characters are mostly POC, at least half of them women, and a range of sexualities are represented, including a trans character. The ending, which is obviously a setup into the next book, is one of the most brutal verbal cliffhangers in the history of brutal cliffhangers -- like, ending a 450-page novel with a question could be cheap, but in this case it's really, really not.

Jemisin is clever with little details, too. An example: The very hateful, very obscene slur for orogenes is rogga. You can see the -rog- taken from orogene as its root, but the dropped vowel makes it start off sounding like rock, which is both plebian and on-topic. The double g in the middle parallels that in one of the most hateful, most obscene slurs in American English, subtly -- possibly subconsciously -- driving home just how unacceptable the word is: It sounds, instantly, blunt and harsh and taboo, even though it's a completely made-up word that I've never heard before in my life. When reading the book, I occasionally read sentences out loud to myself, because sometimes I do that in books with really good sentences, but whenever I reached that word, I couldn't say it out loud; I'd absorbed the taboo already.

In short, we are not worthy of N. K. Jemisin.

I'm kind of annoyed I can't just dive right into the sequel since I have other book clubs to read stuff for, but maybe I'll blow them off.

Current Mood: geeky

I loved Three Parts Dead so much that I immediately ran, did not walk, to borrow the sequel Two Serpents Rise from my roommate, and then I ate it (by which I mean I read it really fast; eating other people's books is rude).

The book started off inauspiciously with me catching two minor terminology errors in the first chapter, which depicts what is clearly a game of no-limit Hold'em, one in which our main character makes a very bad fold. But at least the book knows it's a bad fold, so it's got that going for it. Fortunately, things get better after that, as we learn more about the city of Dresediel Lex and the complex system of creepy magic that keeps it supplied with water.

Dresediel Lex, part Las Vegas and part Tenochtitlan, is a desert city that is trying to be very modern and run on Craft and ignore its prior history of human sacrifice, a history that only ended a few decades earlier. Our main character, Caleb, is the Dresediel Lex equivalent of an annoying finance bro, doing risk management and analysis for Red King Consolidated--the magical Concern that runs the city's water supply--and playing a lot of poker. He has daddy issues -- quite understandably, since his dad is one of the last priests of the old religion (the one that feeds its gods hearts) from before the God Wars, and he keeps running around trying to overthrow the Craftsmen and return to the old ways, and basically being a creepy terrorist zealot.

In classic annoying white bro protagonist fashion, Caleb picks up an Obligatory Love Interest by seeing a woman out and about and immediately becoming completely obsessed forever. In this case, the woman is a cliff runner named Mal, who turns out to be a Craftswoman for the firm that Red King is currently in the middle of a rather complicated merger with.

Meanwhile, back at Caleb's job, one of the reservoirs is suddenly full of creepy demons, and while that initial attack is sorted out easily enough, it really wasn't supposed to happen and it turns out to just be the first in a long line of complicated god- and demon-related acts of sabotage that somebody somewhere is committing against Red King Consolidated and Dresediel Lex's water supplies. The resulting complex web of law, religion, magic, explosions, and creepy lobstery water demons is fantasically difficult to sum up but it all makes sense in the book, I promise.

Despite my general underwhelmedness with both Caleb and Mal as people -- seriously, they're perfect for each other, because they're both irritating and I would not like to hang out with either one of them in real life -- I thoroughly enjoyed the book. They were still entertaining enough characters, and they certainly went through enough interesting shit. Plus a lot of the secondary characters were great, especially the Red King, a coffee-drinking skeleton who usually appears in a red bathrobe, because he lives in the creepy pyramid that is the Concern's headquarters. Caleb's dad is also actually quite hilarious, despite being a giant scary religious zealot.

Anyway, it's a book about unsustainable resource extraction, but it's also about giant fiery serpents and water gods and human sacrifice and all that good stuff, so it's quite a head trip in a good way.

For BSpec's book club I finally got around to reading the first book in Max Gladstone's Craft Sequence, which I have been meaning to do for at least two years now. I have the last two books in the sequence signed, but the first one only in paperback, and am missing the second and third. To make it even more complicated, the books take place in a different order than they are published -- they are ordered by the number referenced in the title.

The first book, therefore, is Three Parts Dead, which follows the adventures of young Craftswoman Tara Abernathy as she is hired on probation at the necromantic law firm of Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao under the mentorship of terrifyingly efficient senior Craftwoman Elayne Kevarian. Tara graduated from Craft school under dubious circumstances that involved her trying to kill one of her professors and getting thrown out of the school, literally, which is pretty dangerous because the school floats up in the sky, as all the best magic schools do.

Tara's first assignment is in the city of Alt Coulomb, which runs off the power of its god, Kos Everburning. Unfortunately, Kos has died under mysterious circumstances. Tara, with the help of a hilarious sheltered young priest (or Novice Technician, as he is called) named Abelard and his junkie policewoman friend Cat, has to help Elayne figure out who killed Kos and why and how and who benefits and all that stuff and generally unravel the massive conspiracy hidden in the heart of the Church.

While the story is plenty funny, it's not as much of a comedy as one might think from some of its elements -- demon lawyers! a vampire pirate captain! divine contract law! -- and the world of magical techno-corporatocracy that Gladstone builds is convincing, at once both weird and distressingly familiar.

Tara is a great protagonist, driven and talented and badass and definitely in a bit over her head, and Abelard is a great dual lead, being an earnest bumbling weirdo in an arcane religious order who chain-smokes to show religious devotion and doesn't know what a newspaper is. They're a fantastic, fantastic team, especially since the book very sensibly eschews the unnecessary romantic subplot that I think a lot of authors would have found obligatory. Instead of romance we get, like, shape-shifting gargoyles and blood magic libraries and a nine-story demonic BDSM nightclub and stuff like that.

The philosophical underpinnings of the main conflict ends up having a lot to do with free will and consent and the dangers of clever, talented technolibertarian douchebags being allowed to exploit other people without adult supervision, so suffice it to say that the book is not all fluff and explosions, although like any good urban fantasy it certainly has quite a lot in the way of fluff and explosions, and even an instance of leather pants.

I think we're going to get a really good discussion out of it. I've already started reading the next book in the Sequence, so we'll see how many we get through by the time book club rolls around.

After the election, I decided to start a book club.

The first meeting is in January, well before inauguration. For our first book, we picked Sarah Jaffe's Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt.

Necessary Trouble covers a bunch of the different protest/activist movements that have arisen in the U.S. since the financial crisis hit in 2008: Starting with the Tea Party, it moves on chapter by chapter to cover Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Our Homes, the Fight for $15, Black Lives Matter, Moral Mondays, and a number of climate actions. The section on climate actions, mostly the anti-fracking movement, are kept for the end of the book so that it ends on a maximally apocalyptic note: These are the people fighting government's attempts to literally burn the earth and poison people to make a buck.

Jaffe contextualizes each movement in terms of the events and policies that led up to it being born, often giving recap that go far back into the history of capitalism and of the United States. She ties that in with the stories of activists within each movement, providing in-depth interviews about how and why they got involved and what the movement means to them.

A couple key themes continually emerge. One is that many of these crises have been a long time coming and will not be easily solved. Another is a theme among the activists that so many of them found themselves ashamed of being in the sorts of situations that instigated these movements--of losing their jobs or retirement savings in the financial crash, of being foreclosed on, of holding student debt. Americans really, really want to be hard-working and self-sufficient, and this is part of what's allowed things to get as bad as they have: People will tell themselves that they should individually work harder to overcome whatever's being thrown at them instead of insisting upon being treated fairly, which we tend to believe sounds like petulant whining--that if someone's treating you unfairly, you should be awesome enough to make them treat you fairly, instead of complaining that they're not. The result of this is that the powers that be have been able to tilt the playing field ENORMOUSLY in their own favor before folks who see themselves as average hardworking Americans are willing to admit that they haven't been able to overcome the enormous structural disadvantages they've been put at and maybe you fuckers should just stop stacking the deck. Americans are highly prone to believing that there is still shame in losing even if the other guy was cheating, because you should have been awesome enough to stop the other guy from cheating you.

The book is very hopeful--hopeful that Americans are willing to learn and to organize and to come together in solidarity to get into "good trouble" and demand change. But it also warns of the temptations of the dark side of populism, the scapegoating, tribalist kind illustrated by Trump, who had not yet been, to our eternal shame and possibly to the end of our democracy, barely elected on a technicality with some help via cheating. (And yeah, in true American fashion, I'm pretty ashamed that the Clinton campaign couldn't still beat him even with the cheating, because he's the worst con man ever.) The hopefulness is alternately infectious--Americans have been organizing and fighting; we'll be able to do it more--and depressing. Frankly, the emotional whiplash is a little hard to take.

I learned a lot, though, even as someone who tried to follow these movements relatively closely on social media when they first happened. (For example, I didn't know that Lehman Brothers had gotten its start selling security bonds on slaves--honestly, and this is probably stupid of me, I hadn't realized you could create any sort of financial instruments with slaves as collateral, even though now that I think about it that's precisely what the "chattel" designation means. And I hadn't realized how much of what some of these banks got up to in the mortgage crisis was actually fraud--as in, already illegal--rather than just goddamn stupid.) And the book is so well-written that even though its subject matter is so heavy, it'll make you want to get out into the streets and crash your Congresscritter's next town hall. (My Congressman doesn't have a Town Hall scheduled so I called his office and asked him to have one. Le sigh.)

Highly recommended reading for the resistance. I can't wait to discuss it at book club.

So not a lot of great stuff has been happening since the election, but a brief moment of relief arrived yesterday in the form of a brand-new shiny Shadowshaper novella from Daniel José Older, which only cost $0.99 on Kindle. I promptly cancelled my evening plans to bug out about stuff on Twitter and bought Ghost Girl in the Corner. I then had a lovely evening with Tee and Iz and three glasses of boxed wine and it was the best I’ve felt in three weeks.

Anyway, as for the novella itself: Most of the most-beloved characters from Shadowshaper are here, but the main action surrounds Tee and Izzy, with a big helping of Uncle Neville. The mischief all starts when Tee sees the ghost of a teenage girl in the basement where she’s taken over Manny’s local newspaper after he died in the last book. Tee has acquired some sort of community journalism grant and has a small crew of intrepid teenage reporters, including a white girl from Staten Island whose grandma is the creepy old lady with the creepy dolls from one of the short stories in Salsa Nocturna. There is also a dude who writes about sports, but when he’s first introduced he says “I write about esports” and I thought he meant eSports like competitive video gaming and then got all confused when he was covering local baseball games and not, like, CS:GO tournaments, but no, it’s just that Older writes out people’s accents and I am a huge fucking nerd.

Anyway, the local baseball games are important because, while Tee is trying to figure out who the ghost in the corner is and simultaneously screwing up her relationship with Izzy, one of the local teams’ star players mysteriously disappears. The cops are, predictably, zero help. The ghost girl in the corner, on the other hand, is, as are the giant printing press and Uncle Neville. How do all these things fit together? You can find out for $0.99.

While the plot is very heavy, the characters are delightful. The dialogue is witty and vivid, which will be surprising to no one who has read anything else by Older or heard him speak at a convention or reading. The social commentary is sharp and incisive—mean, yes, but insightful and hilarious with an eye for detail, like Jane Austen except about modern urban Latinx communities instead of 18th century English countryside gentry nonsense. (If you’re thinking “So not like Jane Austen at all, then,” let me know and I will gladly subject you to three hours of rambling about social satire and economics.) It's also full of fun little references to things, from Older's other work (I mentioned the creepy dolls lady above) to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. There is also a brief but very timely and satisfying instance of straight-up Nazi fighting.

Overall, it is a wonderful and much-needed morsel of awesomeness to tide people over until Shadowhouse Fall comes out.

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Entries tagged with kickass poc

"Bottoms and tops, we all hate cops" but make it steampunk

Horror in the silver mines

A chronology of changes

A near-future dystopia

I can haz crime?

Blood and guts and the climate apocalypse

The Boston renascence

Re Temur builds his army

In which Brooklyn is very, very haunted

Boston's history of radical Black socialist feminism

An experimental democracy, but not the one you're thinking of

The Earth, the Moon, and politics

Thinking globally in 150 pages

Fantasy sports--no, not that kind of fantasy sports

The false gods of offshore banking

When the Earth is evil, no one looks at the stars

I think there might be a metaphor in here about exploitation or something

In which God is dead

A brief history of Occupying things

A nice little story about journalism and murder