My goal for 2011 is to log at least
something about each book I read. This might slow down the 50 Book Challenge for the year, but I will do it anyway. I failed 2010's 50BC, which is particularly egregious since I was actually going for the 100. (In 2007 I beat the 100BC; in 2009 I failed it but I at least hit 50.)
Anyway, this blog gets devoted to books, movies, TV shows, vampires, and Nightwish videos. Not necessarily in that order. Particularly not today. Today the order is:
Vampires (also books)
The first book of 2011 for me was Elizabeth Kostova's
The Historian, which is about Dracula. Specifically, it is about Vlad Tepes, known as "the Impaler," a Wallachian prince in the fifteenth century who was nasty even by princes-in-the-fifteenth-century standards. It's an amazing combination of really well-researched stuff about Eastern European medieval history and Vlad Tepes, and more modern elements of a vampire story. It also has many of the tropes that are particularly near and dear to my heart, including:
-kickass ladies (Helen Rossi is the main one; also the narrator and Aunt Eva are pretty cool)
-vampires that actually are really scary and drink blood
-lots and lots of churches
-letters
-book nerdery
-WACKY LIBRARY HIJINKS
I am so not kidding about the wacky library hijinks. The basic plot of the book is that Dracula really does not like people researching him and trying to find his tomb, so the people involved in researching him keep getting attacked by vampires in university libraries and stuff. It's amazing.
The book is very much in the nineteenth-century-novel tradition of being long and deliberately paced, although it has avoided most of the ways in which long and deliberately paced nineteenth century novels suck; namely, the plot does show up fairly near the
beginning of the book. (If you've read
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which you should, you'll have an idea of what I mean by "stylistically very nineteenth-century except not bad.") It also uses my favorite framing device EVER, which is "giant packet of documents format." I don't know if this format actually has its own name or if it is considered a derivation of epistolary format (which I personally tend to think of as "a letter or packet of letters from one character to another, or a letter correspondence between two characters only"), but it is the format used in some of my favorite nineteenth-century novels ever, like
The Woman in White (which is framed as a police "case file" for the mystery), and is--something which I find particularly delightful and most people probably don't care about--also the format used in Bram Stoker's
Dracula. (The book even copies his notice about all the documents being put in the order that makes the most sense.)
Anyway, if you like vampires, history, books about books, and stories about scholars being all action-hero-y, you should drop whatever you're doing and read this
immediately.
BooksMy second book of 2011 was
tammypierce 's
Bloodhound, the second book in the Beka Cooper series. This is Tamora Pierce trying her hand at pseudo-medieval police procedurals. The awesomeness potential of combining all the awesomeness of pseudo-medieval fantasy stories with all the awesomeness of cop shows will not be lost on anyone familiar with Terry Pratchett's
Night Watch subseries of Discworld books, and I am glad to say that Tamora Pierce does not waste this potential. Beka is a hilarious narrator; her magic powers are cool and creepy but she's still a clever and resourceful heroine in her own right, not in any way a passive cipher for "wouldn't it be cool if I had those powers; I wouldn't have to ever try to be an awesome person in regular ways again" fantasies (I am looking at you, Bella Swan... and 90% of pulp fantasy). This series takes place a century or two before the Song of the Lioness series starts, and the differences between the two settings are fascinating--similar enough to be definitely the same place; different enough to show a marked change in history and social progress. The really interesting thing to me about the Beka Cooper series is the way in which it clearly demonstrates that sometimes society "progresses" in ways we think of as "progressive"... and sometimes it backlashes. In Beka's world, slavery is still legal in Tortall, something that has been outlawed in most of the Eastern Lands by the time Alanna shows up (although not in Carthak or the Copper Isles, which always have fascinating imperialism/colonialism storylines). However, gender roles are much freer in Beka's time--
Bloodhound hints at the emergence of a "cult of the Gentle Mother," a sort of Victorianesque angel-in-the-house type of thinking that Beka mostly ignores but makes the reader, if the reader has read all the other Tortall books, go "NOOOOOO NOT THAT IT IS GOING TO RUIN
EVERYTHING" and what's really interesting is, that is kind of true. The Victorians were much more restrictive than a lot of times and places in history before them, for all that the Victorian era was relatively recent. Beka's world still has lady knights as a matter of course (a bit rare, but perfectly legal and definitely in existence), as well as female police officers, female heads of organized crime syndicates, female mercenaries, and gender-neutral public bathhouses. And for most of the book, this is presented as completely normal. Pretensions towards femininity, and the apparently "new" idea of female modesty (a passing mention of nobles "starting to" have sex-segregated bathhouses), are luxuries of the very uppermost classes.
Pierce's books, looked at in the order they're written rather than the order they take place in, are actually a pretty solid case study in phases of feminism (and probably most social justice movements in general, these just happen to focus on women):
Song of the Lioness Quartet: very much Wave 1: "I can do the same things the boys can do, and you're wrong to tell me I can't." Dealing with very blatant (including "enshrined in law") issues of being restricted from doing things on the basis that girls are lesser and can't do the cool stuff. Straight-up fight-the-patriarchy. (Also crazy plot about necromanced dukes and throne-stealing and stuff! Man, I need to reread that series.)
Immortals Quartet: Deals with women and power that's not been coded specifically masculine. Daine has animal magic, something that is pretty rare in the Tortall books, but a lot of the aspects of "wild magic"--including its first manifestation of "talking to animals," and particularly "I have a pony and I can talk to it and it's my best friend"--are, out in this universe, basic Disney Princess powers. The Immortals quartet revisits "feminine" coded tropes and instead of eschewing them for being feminine, it develops, expands and explores them to create story in which "talking to animals" magic is the first stage of seriously crazy powerful magic that results in shape-shifting abilities and saving the world from horrible things that want to suck it into the Chaos Realms. It's also seriously deromanticized--Daine's animal magics result in her spending time running around the woods thinking she's a wolf, and stuff like that.
Protector of the Small is the book for what happens when you've stopped being specifically barred from stuff because you're female, but you're still facing non-legal hurdles: Kel gets put on probation for a year for no reason whatsoever, and, while only a few seriously cranky old misogynists will flat-out argue that she shouldn't legally be allowed to be there, she is very much
not welcome. She is othered, alienated, judged extra harshly, doubted and singled out, etc., and has to deal with all of that. This is also the first series where Pierce begins talking substantially about other social justice issues, such as homosexuality.
The
Trickster quartet deals somewhat less with femininity and a lot more with colonialism. Intersectionality is very important. There are some interesting scenes between Aly and her mom that have some parallels to issues of intergenerational/"waves"-of-feminism conflicts, though. But mostly: racism, colonialism, class warfare! These are all important things for feminists to know about, since gendered power is only one facet of a dominance-based social order and all the other types of power dynamics all play off each other in weird ways. (In a word: kyriarchy.)
And then we get Beka Cooper, where we have: NORMALIZATION. Where we get to stop invoking stereotypes (and stereotype threat) altogether; we get to stop saying "Prove you can do what the boys can do" and it's just portrayed as perfectly normal that you can, why would you bring up the idea that you couldn't? Beka doesn't have to be the groundbreaker or the pioneer or the martyr For The Cause. The Provost's Dogs are predominantly made up of male-female pairs, but Beka spends most of
Bloodhound with Clara Goodwin as her partner (Tunstall's injured for a good chunk of the book), and... they fight crime. They are allowed to focus on fighting crime and having an awesome adventure trying to break counterfeiting rings and shit instead of having their gender made a focal point of every page. This series also introduces (who I think is) Pierce's first transgender character, Okha. (Okha's awesome, btw.)
The one downside to this series: The language is a little different than the other books, in that it takes place two hundred years earlier and as such the "medieval" street slang is
two hundred years more medieval. If you ever laugh at modern American authors using terms like "lads and lasses," be prepared to bust a gut over "lads and gixies." It's actually a fascinating set of vocab (cove, mot, spintry, doxie, bardash, honeylove, looby, pox, murrain...
God they are so much fun to say) but it definitely starts to remind you of the awkwardest people you run into at Ren Faires.
Movies
I am afraid I gotta let you guys down on this one. I've had
Scarface sitting around for a week. I'll watch it soon!
TV Shows
Castle is awesome, as always, and the latest episode,
Nikki Heat, was no exception. Watching somebody make Beckett uncomfortable is way more fun than it should be; I usually love that Beckett is all cool and in control and basically awesome in every way, but seeing other sides of her definitely humanizes her a lot. And uncomfortable-Beckett is
really, really funny because Stana Katic just does everything about the character so well. Also: Ryan and his girlfriend are so adorable I almost cried. Also also: I forgot Esposito's first name was Javier and for some reason I found it really jarring to hear Ryan call him that, probably just because mostly he never does.
Nightwish videos
I Wish I Had an Angel is one of my favorites.