Book 41: Authority by Jeff VanderMeer

This is a hard book for me to figure out how to write about! That will be (part of) my excuse for why it took me so long to actually write this post.

Authority is the second book in the Southern Reach trilogy that begins with Annihilation. I went into the second book having been slightly sort of spoiled for something because of a plot point that a book club member had seen on wikipedia and repeated before I said that I was planning to read the whole trilogy and so didn't want spoilers, but honestly I feel like having had any expectation for what the rest of the trilogy would be made the second book even more disorienting. After spending the entire first book with the biologist as our narrator, Authority is told from the perspective of a complete new character. John Rodriguez, who is identified as Control in much the same way that the biologist is simply the biologist, is the new director at Southern Reach, and he's been sent there in order to find out what happened during the biologist's expedition. Similarly to the first book, there are layers after layers of disorientation and unreliable narratives that slowly peel back, but unlike the first book one of the main (and most frustrating) obstacles is that of bureaucracy. I constantly wanted to just get to the part where I knew what was going on in a very different way than I did with the first book, because the mystery of the first book is inherent and the mystery of the second book felt man-made in a way that was infinitely more infuriating, to me.

It was fascinating to feel how defensive I was of the biologist whenever Control would attempt to speak with her; she was mine, even though the first book is careful to maintain a distance, and I felt like I knew the truth of her experience and Control never would, even though every narrator in these books, both internally and externally, has been the definition of unreliable. By the end of the book, however, it made me desperate to know what would be happening to and with both of them. I don't know if the final book of the trilogy will reframe how I see this book in the same way that this book changed how I think of the first one, but I'm definitely anxious to finally get to the front of the line of my library's hold list.

Grade: B

Book 40: Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik

Note: I know the author socially.

This is the second related but not directly connected book of this kind by this author, a story based on fairy or folk tales that goes in a different direction than the original. As may be obvious from the title, the foundational myth for this book is Rumpelstiltskin, but it goes far beyond that.

The story revolves around the choices of three women whose lives become interwoven. Miryem is the daughter of the town moneylender in a village that ranges from suspicious of her Jewish family to outright violent toward them. Wanda is the daughter of a drunk man who can't pay off his debts to Miryem's father and so Wanda (and eventually her two brothers) come to work for and with Miryem. And Irina is the plain daughter of a duke who wants his child to marry as well as she can for his own benefit with no regard to her wishes, and eventually succeeds in marrying her to the tsar. Each of them is framed by their world in the context of the men in their lives, their fathers and brothers and prospective husbands. Each of them rejects this narrow view of them, although it's not possible for them to truly transcend their surroundings.

Miryem first spins silver by being able and willing to collect on the debts that her father could not, solidifying the family's welfare in an incredibly hostile world. When that no longer suffices, she discovers she can spin that silver into gold and satisfy the greater threat to all members of the village, the Staryk monsters who raid for gold.

I don't want to discuss much more of the actual plot, both because I don't want to spoil any of it but also because this book is as much about how it made me feel as it is about what actually happens. I read it in the fall before the weather had actually turned, but the entire story felt like winter, that cold crisp clear silence in the clearing of a forest after a snowfall. The pacing of the story meant that with only fifty and then twenty and then ten pages left I had no idea how everything would be resolved, and it turned out that the answer was with a dagger to my heart in the final two pages. I could have read many pages more of the story, but I didn't need them, because the emotions landed so strongly for me. I want to reread this and her earlier book Uprooted next year, to see how they feel when I know what happens (but may not remember precisely how). I loved this book and I love all three of these women and I have many, many feels about the world created and how fantastical it is while also being deeply, sometimes distressingly real.

Grade: A

Book 39: His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet

I actually read this book back in September and have had ‘write book blog post’ on my to do list every day since then for this and two other books, but I finally have some time while home for Christmas and I’m getting things done before the New Year, dammit. So let’s see if I remember what I thought about this book.

We chose this book for our book club, and I was really excited about it because I had read an article about it back when it first came out and loved the concept behind it. It’s a novel that’s told as a true crime book about a gruesome murder in mid-19th century Scotland, with the texts of the novel being the journal account of the crime as written by the murderer in jail, various newspaper accounts of the trial, the writings of an advocate and a researcher on poor peoples’ propensity to commit crimes and it being an indication of their inherently base nature, and autopsy reports of the victims. There’s never any doubt in the novel as to whether Roddie Macrae committed the murders, but the trial revolves around his mental state at the time, and the novel itself is more concerned with why he murdered them, and what it says about the lives of poor villagers in that era.

I really liked a lot of aspects of the novel; the various ‘primary sources’ were all well-written and distinctive and really hammered home how biased all points of view are, no matter how ‘truthful’ they may claim to be, and the way a reader’s opinion of the murders can change with each additional source is really compelling. I felt for Roddie and how he was essentially pushed into believing that murder was his best option in life, because so much was so unfair to him, and yet only one of the three victims could in any way be thought to deserve to die, and various inconsistencies among the accounts of what happened make it (intentionally) hard to fully believe his version. Mostly the book made me mad at the way that the poor in general but specifically poor women and children were treated by men and rich people and rich men most of all. The life of a male laborer or farmer in that era was pretty terrible by modern standards, but I found it hard to fully sympathize with Roddie or any of the men, mostly because I wanted to murder all of them on behalf of the women in their lives. Which either means that the book was completely successful in the way the author intended, or that I can’t read fiction without that as a lens these days. I wanted better for Roddie, but I also desperately wanted better of Roddie. That shouldn’t be that strange to desire of a murderer, but for me it was less about the fact that he killed people (or at least one of the people) and more because of how and why he killed the other two.

Grade: B

Book 38: St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell

This is another one of those books that I've had for at least ten years and have no recollection of what made me buy it. I'm guessing I was caught by the title and the cover on a display in Barnes & Noble back when there was one within walking distance of my office, but who can say?

That's pretty similar to how I feel about this collection of short stories, honestly: a bit baffled and without a clear sense of how I got here. Each of the stories takes place in a fantasy version of modern reality, such as the titular Catholic school for reforming wolfgirls. That was one of the stories I enjoyed the most, but as with all of the other bizarre universes (a sleepaway camp for various sleep disorders that don't resemble our own at all, an alligator amusement park in the middle of a swamp, a boys' chorus used to bring down avalanches each spring in the great north), I never felt like I could hook into the worlds or the characters. Part of that may just be caused by the short story form, which often don't give me enough time to become properly invested. But most of these stories just made me feel either sad or alienated or like there was something I was supposed to be feeling, but didn't. I don't know that a book always has to have a distinct, identifiable point, but I kept feeling like I was either missing something, or that I just didn't like it, depending on the story in question. And I can't tell if this is the sort of collection that I don't think is very good, or that just isn't for me as a reader. It's not poorly written, on a sentence or even scene level, but I need something more from stories than what this collection gave me, and whether that's a failing of the book or simply a matter of taste or preference, I'm not sure.

Grade: C

Book 37: Barrayar by Lois McMaster Bujold

This is a story that exists within the context of a much larger series and world. It's the second half of the story begun in Shards of Honor, which brings together Cordelia, a Betan scientist and captain, and Aral Vorkosigan, a captain and noble of Barrayar. Barrayar is a world which had been separate from the rest of the intergalactic society until recently, and it is very war-focused and obsessed with bloodlines and physical abilities and all that. Cordelia and Aral fell in love and got married and Cordelia got pregnant, and on top of all of that, Aral is named regent for the 6 year old grandson of the dying emperor, Gregor.

Barrayar itself focuses on their marriage a bit but mostly on how they can survive in the political situation they're in, and there are attempts on Aral's life and on Gregor's and fights between Cordelia and her father-in-law. Things come to a head in two separate incidents: one in which Cordelia and Aral are poisoned, and while they receive the antidote in time, it affects the health of her baby. So she arranges for essentially a c-section in which the baby is then put into a classic sci-fi incubator and treated, but it's very uncertain if the baby will survive, and even if he does, he will likely be deformed or weak which has made her father-in-law disown him already. And then Gregor is attacked and there's a palace coup and they need to hide the child emperor until they can save the day.

These books are prequels, and they do feel like it in many ways. I haven't read the rest of the series, but I know that the protagonist is Miles Vorkosigan, so I know the baby has to survive one way or another. There's a lack of suspense at points as a result, and a feeling that the story is showing various aspects of the society for reasons I don't understand yet but will later. But the main ambivalence I feel about the story is I don't know how to feel about the culture and characters in general! There is a lot of very odd sexual politics--characters who are supposed to be people we like in some ways have very bizarre sexual desires and practices, and while Cordelia herself is also experiencing a sense of outrage over a variety of things, it's just an odd world to be a part of right now. I don't need my characters to all be completely good, but there's a level of moral relativism in this book that I'm not sure how to handle. And again, while there's plenty in the book that's high stakes, that's lessened by the fact that I knew at least one thing that had to happen, and from that I could extrapolate quite a bit more. I don't know! I can't tell if this just isn't exactly my style of speculative fiction, which is possible, or if there's something more that didn't sit quite right with me.

Grade: B

Book 36: It Takes Two to Tumble by Cat Sebastian

Now this is the sort of story I'm hoping for when I pick up a Cat Sebastian novel!

The central focus of this story is in many ways a version of the romance plotline from The Sound of Music. Captain Phillip Dacre has been off with his ship for two years, leaving his three children to be cared for by his sister and tutors after the death of his wife. His last letter from his sister informs him that his children have been running amok, and his plans for his summer at home in the countryside are to re-instill discipline in his household! But when he gets there, he discovers that the most recent tutor is the local vicar Benedict Sedgwick, who is wonderful at handling wild children as a result of raising himself in an even more chaotic home by his bohemian poet father. Ben is engaged to his closest childhood friend Alice out of a sense of friendship rather than passion, since she's quite ill and he feels indebted to her family, and also because his interest is in men rather than women so a marriage based on friendship seems to be the best he could ever want.

Of course, that becomes far more complicated once he meets Phillip and begins to see the caring man underneath the strict disciplinarian. There are other complications in the town caused by Ben's father and brother and Alice's family, but I honestly glazed over a fair amount of them, because the real point and draw of the story is the developing relationship between Phillip and Ben and with the three children as well. I found the story a bit tense at times because I kept being afraid that their attraction would be discovered when it shouldn't be, but it's not really a story that's interested in that kind of conflict. The resolution at the end is a bit too pat for my liking, but it's a reasonably satisfying fantasy ending of how two men could essentially share a life and three children together without raising too many eyebrows, without too many complications too easily waved away. It was definitely my favorite book by this author since The Lawrence Browne Affair.

Grade: B  

Books 34 and 35: Blackout and All Clear by Connie Willis

I'm writing one post for two books because the story is really a single giant novel published in two parts, and I don't think discussing the two parts separately would benefit me or a reader in any way, since I've already finished both of them. So! Here we go.

These books take place in a larger book universe in which time travel has been invented at Oxford University in the mid-twenty-first century, and is used as a means of learning more about historical events by going back in time and essentially observing. The predominant theory is that historians can't make significant changes to history, so they don't need to worry about changing things, just to avoid something calamitous happening to them in the past, because if you die in the past you die in real life, too. In the first book we're introduced to three historians, Michael, Polly and Merope. Merope has an assignment in the English countryside during the Blitz (where she's known as Eileen), when children were sent away from London, Michael is about to go to observe the Dunkirk evacuation, and Polly is going to London itself during the Blitz to work as a shopgirl.

From the very beginning of Blackout the reader is more aware than the characters that something isn't quite right. The way time travel is supposed to work is that there's a drop location in time and place where a person goes when they want to be retrieved by the future again, and for all three of them their drops don't work. They each also get closer to the big inflection point moments of history than they had been taught they would be able to get, and Michael and Polly in particular begin to worry that they've both altered history that they weren't supposed to, and that the reason they can't get home is because they've changed things so much that England no longer wins the war. The book ends with the three of them finding each other in London (which was never a part of their assignment originally).

The second book is more chaos and inability to get home and talking at cross purposes and characters withholding information from each other AND from the reader even when it's in their POV and a couple of big reveals that are either lessened because the reader has realized the truth long before the characters have and/or because the characters really should have been more insightful in general. There's so much about this story that I like, and I enjoyed the setting immensely and Eileen's arc is delightful and the most genuine in my mind, but so much of the tension is from characters behaving in ways that may be understandable but that I found deeply frustrating. The entire story needed to be edited down by about two hundred pages between the two books, in my opinion, and there are aspects of how time travel is supposed to work in this universe that just felt almost unreasonable to me, someone who grew up watching Quantum Leap and has a lot of thoughts and feelings about what people are supposed to be able to change about history and what they're not. These are two books about incredibly high stakes--indeed, what I found the most affecting were the discussions of how many coincidences or quirks of geography resulted in England being able to win the war, and how close it all really was--but I never felt those stakes for the characters themselves, or felt that they truly appreciated what they were doing while they were doing it, and especially before they got trapped in the past. The role of a historian in the universe as described would really be the role of a spy and actor, and none of them seemed to fully appreciate that.

Having said all that, there's another book by the author in the same general Oxford time travel universe that I'm definitely going to read, because while I was quite frustrated by a number of things in these books, I also really enjoyed many aspects of them, and I'm glad I read them. They're the sort of books which are close enough to being great that the flaws are even more frustrating than they would be in a lesser story.

Grade: B