Book 22: A Brightness Long Ago by Guy Gavriel Kay

I finished reading this book about 3 or 4 months ago, and have been putting off writing about it, mainly because I don't know how to write about works by GGK at this point. I ran into this same problem three years ago when I wrote about the last book he published, and both times it forced me to look at who I'm writing this blog for, and for what purpose. In general I've kept up with this blog because it both allows me to write about books at greater length than twitter does, and in a place where I can actually find my posts again, and because I like systems and inventories and all that. But am I here to review books? To recommend them, or steer people clear? There are times when I definitely do that--I've read books that I don't think are worth anyone else's time, and I try to make that clear. Or is this more of a reflection of how books make me, and only me, feel? Because the thing about GGK at this point is that he's writing exactly the book he wants to write, and I love them, because the themes that drive his writing are the themes I seek out in almost all of my fiction. But I also feel like if you're going to read this book, it's because you read all of his books, and not in a bad way--it's just impossible for me to think of them as individual works at this point. I think a reader absolutely could enter his novels via this one, but I don't really know why you would (although now that I've thought about that, I would love to hear someone's reactions to this story, if it's your first GGK).

I think my main takeaway from this book is that in many ways it's as explicitly a GGK novel as any I've ever read. He's always explored themes of legacy and how identity and history go together, in the creation and loss of cultures and empires and art, and the moments he chooses to tell us about are always clearly just one perspective out of many possible ones. In this one the framing of the story is from a first person POV, an older man telling the reader about his youth, and it's so self-conscious in its structure that I love it more for it. This is especially true because the story takes place about fifty years prior to the last book he wrote, and while there are those classic callback moments that are really a hallmark of GGK's work at this point, in his quarter turn historical fiction, there are fewer than I expected. It is about actions that are both much more important than any one individual expects they will be, while the actual earth-shattering change is happening hundreds of miles away from the place the story is set. 

The story is a slow burn, in part because it's about looking at the small, petty, all-consuming local issues societies obsess over until or unless something greater than all of that refocuses everything. Sometimes that great event is truly massive and wide-reaching, and sometimes it's something so intensely personal that nonetheless changes how a person behaves in their public life such that it becomes part of a city or country's history. I want to read all of his novels set in this universe again, leading up to here, because I want to see how his scope and scale and ambiguity or lack thereof shifts depending on the smaller narratives within each novel he's telling.

Also, this is by far the most bisexual book he's ever written, and his examination of sexuality in this era is, to me, pleasingly casual, where some people sleep with women and some people sleep with men and some sleep with both and whether or not they do is affected by so many cultural constraints and expectations in addition to desire and love. So that, for me, is fantastic, but I live in hope that I will finally get the FULLY GAY GGK book of my dreams in the future, or that I will eventually figure out how to write my own version of one.

Grade: A  

Book 21: The Prince and the Dressmaker by Jen Wang

This is a charming and beautifully drawn graphic novel about a prince who actually would rather wear dresses, and the dressmaker who designs them. It's very much 'it is what it says on the tin,' but that's not a complaint or a criticism -- the story hits all of the beats you might expect it to, but so satisfyingly, and the characters really land exactly how you want them to. There's secrecy and budding romantic feelings and a split caused by secrecy not being acceptable, followed by the grand revelation of just about everything all at once. The story floats through a fairy tale Paris that appears to be whatever era it needs to be to support the desired fashion from scene to scene, but the fact that the story doesn't attempt to exist in a real past, but rather the idea of what royalty and the aristocracy used to be, makes the story even easier to drop inside of. A really enjoyable read right before bed.

Grade: B

Book 20: Kids These Days by Malcolm Harris

The subtitle of this book is "Human Capital and the Making of Millennials," which gives a pretty good sense of the thrust of the argument made in this book. It purports to be a book intent on explaining why Millennials are the way they are, using facts and macroeconomic analysis, but it is also very much a philosophical point of view desperately seeking factual support, rather than a conclusion being discovered via research. The entire thing feels reverse engineered, which may be satisfying to read if you agree with the arguments being made, but doesn't exactly make it well supported or especially illuminating.

Harris's essential argument boils down to the theory that millennials were born into a world in which there was ever greater competition for even fewer spots, that the middle class had ceased to have opportunities that the Boomers had enjoyed, and that millennials have become so accustomed to needing to go the extra mile in order to achieve anything that they've fundamentally and permanently undervalued their own labor. He gets some credit for actually understanding that, at the time of writing his book, millennials were anywhere from 20 to 35 years old, but he still fell prey to the impulse to equate millennial with young whenever convenient. He spends a short amount of the book acknowledging that our view of who a millennial is makes a bunch of assumptions about whose lives we mean when we reference generations: American, largely white, largely "middle class," largely suburban. He also acknowledges that many of the shifts from Gen X to millennial have causes beyond the economic hollowing out of the American middle class, but is fairly uninterested in exploring any of them. It is a book that is almost instantaneously dated; it was written mostly during 2016 but came out in 2017, and he makes no bones about the fact that in his view the entire world is now permanently fucked and that there's no way out for anyone, and in fact there hasn't been any way out since these beaten down millennials refused to collectively rise up and overthrow capitalism during the Occupy movement or at the very least by electing Bernie Sanders as president. It is a fundamentally short-sighted view of history that feels so entirely male and white even while it attempts to demonstrate that it recognizes women and people of color I cannot take it seriously. There are plenty of reasons for pessimism in this world, and millennials have in fact been dealt a shitty hand compared with their Boomer parents--but that shitty hand is only especially remarkable if you are one of the white male college educated millennials who thought things would be better for you, specifically. His afterward, in which he describes what he predicts the future will be, only made me shake my head at how limited and limiting his imagination truly is. Things are bad, and finding a path forward is and will be hard. But there is something too close to a celebratory tone of how fucked we all are in his analysis, and a condescending sympathy for those who don't acknowledge this permanent condition, and I stopped talking to dicks like that back when I was in college. I wish this book had actually been what I think a book on this topic really could be.

Grade: C 

Book 19: The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides

I have no idea why this book caught my eye; it's not my usual genre (psychological thriller), and it's a story that ostensibly about a woman but told from the POV of a man and written by a man, which I find really suspect at the best of times (which 2019 is, quite clearly, not). But I put it on hold at the library and then had a firm deadline once I got it, since there are a million holds on every copy of the book in the system and so it's impossible to renew it. That deadline meant that I did in fact make myself read it before it was due, and I'm really glad I did.

The setup is that there's a woman named Alicia Berenson who's a successful painter who murdered her husband, and then simply stopped talking. She's found not guilty by means of insanity (or whatever the equivalent legal situation is in the UK, which is where the story is set), and now lives in a mental hospital run by the state. Our POV character is Theo Faber, a psychologist who's obsessed with figuring her out: why did she stop talking? Why did she kill him? What did the self-portrait she painted after her husband was murdered mean? The narrative cuts back and forth between Alicia's journal entries in the month leading up to the murder, and Theo's POV as he uses progressively more dubious means to attempt to unravel who Alicia was before she murdered her husband, including visiting her relatives and the relatives of her dead husband. I knew that there was something I was missing, some connection that the narrative wasn't giving me quite enough information to put together, until suddenly it all hit at once. I didn't have the time to reread the book from the beginning, but I did think that much like Gone Girl, it's the sort of story that would read extremely differently the second time through. If this sounds remotely intriguing, I really recommend it.

Grade: A

Book 18: Gods, Monsters and the Lucky Peach by Kelly Robson

This was another sci-fi/fantasy book club read. It's a novella rather than a novel, which is definitely a good thing, I think, for the size of the narrative. I could imagine a longer version of this story, but I think the limitation of where the story started and finished made it stronger and more interesting.

The book takes place in an apocalyptic future, where people moved underground in the far north after climate change destroyed people's abilities to survive further south. It's also a universe in which people could have body modifications, like animal tentacles or legs, that changed their physical capabilities, and there's constant real time monitoring of their physical well being via nanobots. The main people who have these modifications are the plague babies, who initially survived the epidemics and fled the surface, and are now returning to attempt to restore the earth and build a new kind of society. The protagonist, Minh, is one of those plague babies, who is frustrated by how developing technology is interested in traveling back in time as a means of escape and entertainment, rather than as a means of obtaining the necessary knowledge to rebuild their habitat.

She gets the opportunity to go back in time to ancient Mesopotamia and do research on the river basin. But of course the trip doesn't go exactly as planned, due to her travel partners being interested in slightly different things than she is, and to the chaos of time travel. It's not my usual kind of story, but I found it really compelling and unpredictable--even when I thought I could guess where the narrative would go wrong for Minh, what that eventually meant for her was completely different than what I expected. There's also a parallel story that's told at the beginning of each chapter that feels unrelated to the main narrative, and when those two paths finally come together it's really satisfying and also fairly shocking. I wouldn't have read this outside of my book club, but I'm really glad I did.

Grade: B

Book 17: Good to Go by Christie Aschwanden

I have a whole subcategory of books on my to-read list that are books I heard about on the longform podcast and decided I needed to pick up. This one made the list because I loved the author's interview, and the concept of actually analyzing which kinds of physical recovery techniques make a measurable difference and which ones don't really intrigued me. I am not an athlete, but I am a fan of many sports and someone who is becoming more and more aware of how my body is changing as I get older, and so I read it both with the aim of potentially discovering better ways of living and seeing which tried and true methods are at best placebo effects and at worst actively hinder people.

The answer to the first part of that inquiry is basically that getting a sufficient amount of quality sleep is the most important aspect of any kind of physical recovery, and the aspect other methods of recovery are the least good at mimicking or replacing. Our bodies are simultaneously incredibly adaptable--she goes through a whole section demonstrating that basically as long as our bodies get some kind of food within an incredibly wide period of time post-exertion, our bodies will generally extract the fuel it needs from anything--and also incredibly finicky and demanding, and what it really comes down to is that every body is different, and if you truly believe that something you're doing is making a difference, it probably will, because we're creatures of habit and the placebo effect is real. Most of the things we believe (dehydration kills performance, icing and ibuprofen after exertion and/or injury helps, eating protein within an hour of weight training is vital for gaining muscle) are either probably not true and based on studies funded by industries that only publish the studies that benefit them (and are unconfirmed by independent studies), or are the result of confirmation bias/survivorship bias: we look at how the best athletes in the world train, and assume that their performance is due to their training methods, rather than them being exceptionally talented individuals who would succeed no matter what within a fairly broad framework of methods and techniques, so long as they believed their methods helped. But that's not something that can be marketed, so instead we are told (and believe, no matter how much we tell ourselves we're too smart for this) that Michael Jordan is MJ because he drank Gatorade, and not because he's an exceptionally talented individual.

I actually found the fact that there's no magic pill (aside from sleep) to be extremely reassuring and helpful. It turns out I didn't miss out on a secret that would have made me a natural athlete; bodies are simply different, and the best thing that I can do is actually listen to what my body is telling me it wants or needs, and do my best to provide that. Easier said than done, but at least I won't need to start sitting in ice baths.

Grade: A

Book 16: The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal

So this was a read that was a classic 'man I wish I actually liked this book as much as I wanted to' book. I read it for my sci-fi/fantasy book club, and the premise of it is really interesting: a meteor strikes the earth in the early 1950's, and in addition to causing initial chaos and upheaval and all that, scientists are also able to calculate that within ten or so years the earth will warm to a degree that will not sustain life. So there is a push for the space program to work to set up a colony in space for the survival of the species, and of course any kind of successful long term colony would require that both men and women become astronauts.

Elma York, who was a female pilot during WWII and is married to a scientist in the space program, is a natural candidate for women to be included in this colony. But the entire book after the initial aftermath to the meteor strike is just two steps forward and one step back repeated ad nauseam, as she's confronted over and over again with sexist roadblocks and red tape, and also learns the same valuable life lessons about how no matter how difficult it's been for her, it's even harder for black women, a truth that she never actually seems to remember that she's learned before. A friend of mine mentioned that the bureaucratic nonsense that she deals with felt very true to life in terms of how government works, but something being realistic doesn't necessarily make it a good or compelling narrative, and I just found myself getting so impatient for the actual story to start. And of course it's actually the first book in a series, and so the story in fact barely does start even by the end of the book.

I actually found the first part of the story to be the most interesting, when the world is dealing with the ramifications of a major meteor strike only seven years after the end of WWII. But the book itself is only interested in that major world event to the extent that it's a good catalyst for the space program to be both fast tracked and forced to include women, and the narrative wasn't compelling enough for me to stop myself from pulling on the thread of how else such a major event would have changed everything. This book has been lauded by many and clearly must work for other people in a way it simply didn't for me, but I felt at many points of the story that I would have enjoyed reading the historical and scientific works that the author read as part of her research far more than I did the narrative result.

Grade: C