I’ve been watching a fair amount of English Premier League soccer for a while now. I like it. It’s an interesting game to watch for those who don’t need the constant short-attention-span-theater adrenaline rush of scoring the way basketball fans seem to do. Concussions are considered abnormal, unlike in American football. And it can be an elegant game to watch in the way that hockey is, all back and forth and motion. It’s a game of space, where it often makes sense to go backwards. And it has a certain restful quality the way most spectator sports do – you get caught up in it and the rest of your brain turns off for a while.
That’s a nice quality to have this year. It’s been a long year and it’s still January.
The broadcasters here were smart enough not to hire Americans for their play-by-play announcers. They just stream the English broadcasts. I’m sure they have come to some arrangement whereby those original announcers take time now and then to explain things that the folks back in the UK probably don’t need to have explained, but I appreciate it.
Even so, there are noticeable vocabulary differences that took me some time to adjust to, even beyond the obvious “football” versus “soccer” dispute.
One thing I noticed after watching for a while was the constant use of the word “pace.” In the US, announcers would probably use “speed,” especially when describing the motion of the ball. Sometimes “velocity,” if they felt their audience could handle it. It’s interesting that the EPL announcers often use it to describe the motion of people too, usually as a property – “he’s coming down the side with pace.” We don’t really use the word that way here.
Nor do we use “quality” quite the same way. Quality in the EPL seems to be a general term covering all manifestations of skill. Teams have quality. Shots have quality (though in the US we would say that they displayed quality, if we used quality that way at all). “Skill level” seems to be the term here, as far as I can tell, as far as we have an equivalent.
Games are called “matches.” In the US, match is generally reserved for tennis. And there are all sorts of matches in soccer, none of which have any real equivalent here. “Fixtures,” which are the normal league games. “Friendlies,” which we would call exhibition games. And things in between that I have no idea what they are. EPL teams seem to play in about a dozen different leagues simultaneously – the EPL itself, the FA Cup, the European Cup, and so on. They all overlap. American sports are much more monotone.
Soccer games are generally played on a “pitch,” which is a word that has a number of meanings in the US, none of which have any connection to a playing surface unless that surface sits on a significant angle. “Field” is preferred here.
EPL players wear “boots” and “kit” for games. Kits are “uniforms” here. As for boots, well. During a halftime show of an EPL game I watched one announcer explain that in America boots were “cleats,” which struck me as inaccurate. Cleats go on the bottom of shoes. We say shoes. Boots are for skiing.
The announcers also use the word “touch” a lot. It mostly means contact with the ball and can be heavy or light depending on whether the ball gets kicked away or stays where it ought to be. I don’t know what the equivalent term would be in any American sport.
They also say “side” where we would say “team.” Matches are played by sides. Here games are played by teams.
It took me a long time to figure out what a “table” was and how it mattered. In the US we would say “standings.” It’s just the ranked list of teams according to their won/lost records, and sides move up and down the table just as American teams move up and down in the standings.
Soccer is a timed sport, like American football and unlike baseball. They have overtime like we have, at least in some World Cup games, but they also have “extra time,” which has no real equivalent here – time added on to the game to make up for various halts in the action. My favorite term, though, is “normal time” or “regular time” which refers to the standard 90 minutes of play without either overtime or extra time. We would say “regulation time,” which sounds kind of rigid. I like the idea of “normal time,” as if it is an island of sanity in a world gone mad. It makes a difference which side of the line you’re on.
The one thing that they do that isn’t really a vocabulary difference but which did confuse me for a while anyway is list the sides differently when describing matches and giving scores. At the top of the screen during the matches there will be a little graphic with the score that will look something like this:
Everton 1-0 Crystal Palace
It’s easy enough to see that Everton is winning, though in the US we’d put Crystal Palace’s score after their name rather than before. But who’s the home team and who’s the visitor?
In the US we’d read that as “Everton at Crystal Palace,” making Everton the visitor. But they would read it as “Everton hosting Crystal Palace,” making Everton the home team. This took me forever to figure out, but I’ve now gotten to the point where I find it more comfortable and am constantly having to stop and think the other way when looking at American sports.
So I drink my tea and let it all wash over me, unaware that I’m learning things anyway.
Saturday, January 31, 2015
Monday, January 26, 2015
Your Call Isn't Really That Important To Us, Now That You Mention It
So apparently my cell phone is really more of an anchor for miniature boats.
I hate having a cell phone. I’ve never found one that actually gets a signal and the fact that I am constantly reachable sort of grates on me. If it weren’t for the fact that I have kids and you never know when you will need to call someone in an emergency I’d probably have abandoned the whole cell phone idea as a bad move long ago.
But I have one nonetheless, and I pay money for the service. Therefore I expect it to work.
My cell phone provider – who, for the sake of not being sued, I will refer to as Sexually Inexperienced Mobile Company USA – does not share this expectation.
Now, it could be that they are just trying to get rid of me. I can understand this, actually. I have one of those grandfathered plans where you pay so much up front and they charge you as you go to whittle that pile of money down. And if you don’t whittle it down in a certain period, you still have to re-up every so often or they just declare the account dead.
I get charged 20 cents/minute for all calls, incoming and outgoing, and last year I think I managed to spend almost $30 total. They can’t be making any money off of me. I just don’t make that many calls, and I find texting to be an unmitigated nuisance with no redeeming value whatsoever. I will actively avoid sending or reading texts if there is any possible way to do so, and there almost always is. Most people I know are aware of this, which means that the only texts I get are ones I have no need to look at anyway, such as notifications from SIMCUSA about the wonderful things that they would be doing for me if only their service worked.
I’ve been trying to use the cell phone more this year, though, since the simple fact is that you have to put in so much money every time you re-up and it’s been piling up a bit. This means having to find somewhere with a half-decent signal and someone to call and time to call them, three things that rarely line up. Sometimes they do. I still have a lot of money in the account left to go even so, though.
Which brings me to my current situation.
On Friday I attempted to make a local call. SIMCUSA refused to allow this, informing me by recorded message that I did not have enough money in my account to make this call. I checked my account. There was $52.99 in there.
Query: is there anywhere on earth I cannot call from Wisconsin for less than $52.99?
Answer: no.
So I spent an unhelpful quarter hour on the phone with a SIMCUSA operator who, ironically enough, was clearly not anywhere in the USA, though I have no information on their sexual status nor do I really want any. I have no idea where their call center is located but my guess is they have far more interesting food than we do. What they don’t have is any actual clue what is going on, as we all agreed that I had plenty of money to make any call I wanted and yet no calls could be made. The best this person could come up with was that I should always dial the area code even for local numbers.
That was about as effective as you’d imagine.
So two days later I was back on the phone with another SIMCUSA operator whose basic argument was that there was tower maintenance in my area and therefore I was being unreasonable expecting my phone to actually make phone calls. The fact that I had tried to make phone calls from places beyond my home tower did not seem to move him. That was his story and he was sticking to it.
Let me tell you what an entertaining half hour that was. You can take the boy out of Philadelphia but you cannot take the Philadelphia out of the boy, and it is my fond hope that his ears are still ringing from the rather pointed denunciations of his company and the general nonsensical nature of his advice that he was favored with during that call.
I did get some financial recompense for the fact that I cannot use a service for which I am paying, and my plan is to burn through that within a week or two once I can make calls again, which the last SIMCUSA operator assured me would be no later than February 6, probably, if all went well and the telecom gods were properly propitiated with sacrifices of Sexually Inexperienced Actual Humans or, failing that, lemon meringue pies or other sweet pastries. And once my balance is whittled down to something I feel I can afford to lose, well, there are other cell phone providers who would no doubt be willing to provide an actual service for the money I feel constrained to give them for a device I'd rather not have in the first place.
So if I have your phone number, perhaps we'll be talking soon.
I hate having a cell phone. I’ve never found one that actually gets a signal and the fact that I am constantly reachable sort of grates on me. If it weren’t for the fact that I have kids and you never know when you will need to call someone in an emergency I’d probably have abandoned the whole cell phone idea as a bad move long ago.
But I have one nonetheless, and I pay money for the service. Therefore I expect it to work.
My cell phone provider – who, for the sake of not being sued, I will refer to as Sexually Inexperienced Mobile Company USA – does not share this expectation.
Now, it could be that they are just trying to get rid of me. I can understand this, actually. I have one of those grandfathered plans where you pay so much up front and they charge you as you go to whittle that pile of money down. And if you don’t whittle it down in a certain period, you still have to re-up every so often or they just declare the account dead.
I get charged 20 cents/minute for all calls, incoming and outgoing, and last year I think I managed to spend almost $30 total. They can’t be making any money off of me. I just don’t make that many calls, and I find texting to be an unmitigated nuisance with no redeeming value whatsoever. I will actively avoid sending or reading texts if there is any possible way to do so, and there almost always is. Most people I know are aware of this, which means that the only texts I get are ones I have no need to look at anyway, such as notifications from SIMCUSA about the wonderful things that they would be doing for me if only their service worked.
I’ve been trying to use the cell phone more this year, though, since the simple fact is that you have to put in so much money every time you re-up and it’s been piling up a bit. This means having to find somewhere with a half-decent signal and someone to call and time to call them, three things that rarely line up. Sometimes they do. I still have a lot of money in the account left to go even so, though.
Which brings me to my current situation.
On Friday I attempted to make a local call. SIMCUSA refused to allow this, informing me by recorded message that I did not have enough money in my account to make this call. I checked my account. There was $52.99 in there.
Query: is there anywhere on earth I cannot call from Wisconsin for less than $52.99?
Answer: no.
So I spent an unhelpful quarter hour on the phone with a SIMCUSA operator who, ironically enough, was clearly not anywhere in the USA, though I have no information on their sexual status nor do I really want any. I have no idea where their call center is located but my guess is they have far more interesting food than we do. What they don’t have is any actual clue what is going on, as we all agreed that I had plenty of money to make any call I wanted and yet no calls could be made. The best this person could come up with was that I should always dial the area code even for local numbers.
That was about as effective as you’d imagine.
So two days later I was back on the phone with another SIMCUSA operator whose basic argument was that there was tower maintenance in my area and therefore I was being unreasonable expecting my phone to actually make phone calls. The fact that I had tried to make phone calls from places beyond my home tower did not seem to move him. That was his story and he was sticking to it.
Let me tell you what an entertaining half hour that was. You can take the boy out of Philadelphia but you cannot take the Philadelphia out of the boy, and it is my fond hope that his ears are still ringing from the rather pointed denunciations of his company and the general nonsensical nature of his advice that he was favored with during that call.
I did get some financial recompense for the fact that I cannot use a service for which I am paying, and my plan is to burn through that within a week or two once I can make calls again, which the last SIMCUSA operator assured me would be no later than February 6, probably, if all went well and the telecom gods were properly propitiated with sacrifices of Sexually Inexperienced Actual Humans or, failing that, lemon meringue pies or other sweet pastries. And once my balance is whittled down to something I feel I can afford to lose, well, there are other cell phone providers who would no doubt be willing to provide an actual service for the money I feel constrained to give them for a device I'd rather not have in the first place.
So if I have your phone number, perhaps we'll be talking soon.
Friday, January 23, 2015
News and Updates
1. I find that I am always cold these days. I don’t know why, as I have always liked cold weather and it has not been especially cold of late anyway. It does give me an excuse for more tea, though, so that is okay.
2. There are a lot of similarities between birth and death – ask any poet, or get people to start singing from The Lion King if you doubt me – but the one that has struck me most this week is that both create a kind of null space in the world that puts you on one side and pretty much everything else on the other. I remember having this feeling when Tabitha and Lauren were born like, “Why is the rest of the world proceeding on as usual? What on earth could they be doing that is that important?” It’s been like that here for the last week. And if it has been like that for me, an old friend 4000 miles away, I cannot even imagine what it has been like for Julia’s family.
3. Unfortunately the rest of the world continues to roll on and make demands. The semester starts up on Monday and I still have syllabi to complete. At least I figured out the trick to making setting up online discussion areas a whole lot simpler. So there was far less obligatory profanity and whiskey consumption than usual during the set-up process, and in context this is probably a good thing.
4. I got my car back today. It was icy a while back and Kim ended up sliding into the back of a minivan while stopping for a red light. Fortunately the main injuries were to the vehicles involved and the city rescinded the ticket for unsafe driving, admitting that the conditions really did not allow safe driving at any speed, but it is astonishing how much damage one can do to a car at 4mph. I finally took it in to get fixed this week. It spent a few days in the shop while I drove the loaner they gave me. The loaner was essentially a stripped down version of my car, which was nice since all of the things were in the same place and I didn’t have to figure out how to turn on the wiper blades from scratch. It was entirely manual, though – windows, door locks, side mirrors, everything. This fascinated my children and their friends. “Oh!” said one friend, looking at the window cranks. “So energy efficient!”
5. Lauren insisted the loaner car smelled like a bowling alley. I kept telling her it just smelled like a clean car and not seven years’ worth of accumulated cracker crumbs.
6. I am thinking that I will completely revise my World History to 1500 class this fall to match the wonderful framework I found in a book Kim gave me for Christmas. I even emailed the author about it, and he graciously responded with more information. So now I have another project, because I clearly don’t have enough projects.
7. Lauren spent last weekend at a bonspiel. Tabitha spent last weekend studying for midterm exams and Skyping with friends. We never saw either of them. It’s such a different thing, having older kids.
8. Applejack sours: the universe’s way of letting you know that it sympathizes.
9. For all those who are still sending out Christmas cards, we give thanks and rejoice that we are not the only ones.
10. I have discovered Welcome to Night Vale. HP Lovecraft writes A Prairie Home Companion – why did I not know about this sooner? “Look to the north. Keep looking. There is nothing coming from the south.”
2. There are a lot of similarities between birth and death – ask any poet, or get people to start singing from The Lion King if you doubt me – but the one that has struck me most this week is that both create a kind of null space in the world that puts you on one side and pretty much everything else on the other. I remember having this feeling when Tabitha and Lauren were born like, “Why is the rest of the world proceeding on as usual? What on earth could they be doing that is that important?” It’s been like that here for the last week. And if it has been like that for me, an old friend 4000 miles away, I cannot even imagine what it has been like for Julia’s family.
3. Unfortunately the rest of the world continues to roll on and make demands. The semester starts up on Monday and I still have syllabi to complete. At least I figured out the trick to making setting up online discussion areas a whole lot simpler. So there was far less obligatory profanity and whiskey consumption than usual during the set-up process, and in context this is probably a good thing.
4. I got my car back today. It was icy a while back and Kim ended up sliding into the back of a minivan while stopping for a red light. Fortunately the main injuries were to the vehicles involved and the city rescinded the ticket for unsafe driving, admitting that the conditions really did not allow safe driving at any speed, but it is astonishing how much damage one can do to a car at 4mph. I finally took it in to get fixed this week. It spent a few days in the shop while I drove the loaner they gave me. The loaner was essentially a stripped down version of my car, which was nice since all of the things were in the same place and I didn’t have to figure out how to turn on the wiper blades from scratch. It was entirely manual, though – windows, door locks, side mirrors, everything. This fascinated my children and their friends. “Oh!” said one friend, looking at the window cranks. “So energy efficient!”
5. Lauren insisted the loaner car smelled like a bowling alley. I kept telling her it just smelled like a clean car and not seven years’ worth of accumulated cracker crumbs.
6. I am thinking that I will completely revise my World History to 1500 class this fall to match the wonderful framework I found in a book Kim gave me for Christmas. I even emailed the author about it, and he graciously responded with more information. So now I have another project, because I clearly don’t have enough projects.
7. Lauren spent last weekend at a bonspiel. Tabitha spent last weekend studying for midterm exams and Skyping with friends. We never saw either of them. It’s such a different thing, having older kids.
8. Applejack sours: the universe’s way of letting you know that it sympathizes.
9. For all those who are still sending out Christmas cards, we give thanks and rejoice that we are not the only ones.
10. I have discovered Welcome to Night Vale. HP Lovecraft writes A Prairie Home Companion – why did I not know about this sooner? “Look to the north. Keep looking. There is nothing coming from the south.”
Friday, January 16, 2015
Julia
Her name was Julia.
It is important to remember her name, I think. Names matter.
She was 48 years old. She had a husband and two children. She spoke with an accent somewhere between her native America and her adopted Britain. She studied Old Icelandic sagas, earned an MBA, and at one time ran a consignment shop for children’s clothing. She made her own homemade jellies, kept chickens for a while, and lived in a 350-year-old house full of books. She usually ended phone conversations by saying “Bye for now!” She died today.
She was my friend.
I met Julia at the tail end of ninth grade. She went to the other high school in my district, the one Matt had switched into after middle school because he had moved out to that end of the township. I was sufficiently nerdy that I took a day off from my high school to walk around his, and my parents were confident enough about my educational prospects that they said I could do it. Matt and I ran into her in a hallway. I remember exactly what he said to me as she walked away.
A little over a year later Julia and I found ourselves at a party together. She was getting over a bad experience with a guy and had pretty much sworn off the whole notion of love – the sort of grand gesture that comes easily to sixteen-year-olds. I remember thinking that this was a shame, that this woman would make such a decision, and trying to talk her out of it.
We were together for about three weeks after that. That turned out to be a surprisingly long and complicated story that would benefit nobody to tell at this point, but we remained friends for more than thirty years after it was over.
This photo is from that summer.
I’m on the left, in my short-lived bandanna phase. Julia is in the middle, obviously. That’s Jacob on the right, one of my best friends at the time and a key player in the weirdity that marked that summer’s story. We’re at a church-league softball game, where I had talked the both of them into playing for my team. I know why Jacob has the cast on his hand, but I don’t remember whether we won or lost the game. It didn’t seem important even then.
I am the only one in that picture still alive, which is a strange thought indeed. Jacob died about four years after this photo was taken. The ghosts accumulate as you get older.
Julia moved to Connecticut at the end of that summer and we wrote long letters back and forth, letters I still have. I remember the first time she called just to say hello. It surprised me that you could do that, make a long-distance call for no other reason than to talk to a friend. Long-distance calls were unusual then. The following spring Sharon, Jill and I went up to visit her there – three high school students on our own on the Northeast Corridor Amtrak line. We had a grand time. I still have the copy of Letters From the Earth that I bought when we visited Mark Twain’s house on that trip.
We traded a lot of visits over the years, Julia and I. I went back to Connecticut for two of the Medieval Feasts that she held in her back yard and we spent a fair amount of time picking far more strawberries than anyone could possibly eat, which is easier to do than you’d imagine. When we were in college I went up to New York for a weekend walking around her campus, and she came down to Philadelphia to return the favor. My first trip out of the US was to Cambridge University, where she was a student in the early 90s and where I first met Richard. Julia and Richard got married not far from where she was living when I met her in ninth grade. It all goes ‘round in circles. Kim and I took the girls to visit them in the UK in 2004 and 2012. They came here in 2005.
She always knew it would be her brain that would get her in the end, though I don’t think she saw cancer as the way it would choose to do so until it happened. When I saw her last, in 2012, we talked about her fears that her family history of dementia would circle around to her at last. We spoke on the phone a fair amount after her diagnosis, though, and she never did forget who I was. Nor I her.
If you knew her on Facebook you saw how she was open and honest about her diagnosis and treatment, a mark of bravery or perhaps just the studied inquisitiveness she brought to all things. Maybe both. She spoke of small victories and frustrations, of worry and hospital stays, of walks and hopes and concerns. Eventually, as always happens with her diagnosis, she spoke of the transition from curative to palliative care, though the British are far more up front about such things than Americans are. “Terminal,” they call it. And so it was.
I have never really figured out how to stop loving anyone.
I don’t think I will start now.
Love changes, of course. It grows, it evolves, it becomes new things and takes new shapes even as it remembers the old ones. If you are very lucky in this world you will find people to share that with, even as their part in your life moves from one role to another, even as physical distance tries to keep you separate, even as the years lengthen on and the memories and stories recede into the past until there is nobody left to tell them to except each other, all those old tales of drama for stakes no one recalls but you.
No, I don’t think I will start now. I do not.
Her name was Julia. She was my friend.
And I will miss her.
It is important to remember her name, I think. Names matter.
She was 48 years old. She had a husband and two children. She spoke with an accent somewhere between her native America and her adopted Britain. She studied Old Icelandic sagas, earned an MBA, and at one time ran a consignment shop for children’s clothing. She made her own homemade jellies, kept chickens for a while, and lived in a 350-year-old house full of books. She usually ended phone conversations by saying “Bye for now!” She died today.
She was my friend.
I met Julia at the tail end of ninth grade. She went to the other high school in my district, the one Matt had switched into after middle school because he had moved out to that end of the township. I was sufficiently nerdy that I took a day off from my high school to walk around his, and my parents were confident enough about my educational prospects that they said I could do it. Matt and I ran into her in a hallway. I remember exactly what he said to me as she walked away.
A little over a year later Julia and I found ourselves at a party together. She was getting over a bad experience with a guy and had pretty much sworn off the whole notion of love – the sort of grand gesture that comes easily to sixteen-year-olds. I remember thinking that this was a shame, that this woman would make such a decision, and trying to talk her out of it.
We were together for about three weeks after that. That turned out to be a surprisingly long and complicated story that would benefit nobody to tell at this point, but we remained friends for more than thirty years after it was over.
This photo is from that summer.
I’m on the left, in my short-lived bandanna phase. Julia is in the middle, obviously. That’s Jacob on the right, one of my best friends at the time and a key player in the weirdity that marked that summer’s story. We’re at a church-league softball game, where I had talked the both of them into playing for my team. I know why Jacob has the cast on his hand, but I don’t remember whether we won or lost the game. It didn’t seem important even then.
I am the only one in that picture still alive, which is a strange thought indeed. Jacob died about four years after this photo was taken. The ghosts accumulate as you get older.
Julia moved to Connecticut at the end of that summer and we wrote long letters back and forth, letters I still have. I remember the first time she called just to say hello. It surprised me that you could do that, make a long-distance call for no other reason than to talk to a friend. Long-distance calls were unusual then. The following spring Sharon, Jill and I went up to visit her there – three high school students on our own on the Northeast Corridor Amtrak line. We had a grand time. I still have the copy of Letters From the Earth that I bought when we visited Mark Twain’s house on that trip.
We traded a lot of visits over the years, Julia and I. I went back to Connecticut for two of the Medieval Feasts that she held in her back yard and we spent a fair amount of time picking far more strawberries than anyone could possibly eat, which is easier to do than you’d imagine. When we were in college I went up to New York for a weekend walking around her campus, and she came down to Philadelphia to return the favor. My first trip out of the US was to Cambridge University, where she was a student in the early 90s and where I first met Richard. Julia and Richard got married not far from where she was living when I met her in ninth grade. It all goes ‘round in circles. Kim and I took the girls to visit them in the UK in 2004 and 2012. They came here in 2005.
She always knew it would be her brain that would get her in the end, though I don’t think she saw cancer as the way it would choose to do so until it happened. When I saw her last, in 2012, we talked about her fears that her family history of dementia would circle around to her at last. We spoke on the phone a fair amount after her diagnosis, though, and she never did forget who I was. Nor I her.
If you knew her on Facebook you saw how she was open and honest about her diagnosis and treatment, a mark of bravery or perhaps just the studied inquisitiveness she brought to all things. Maybe both. She spoke of small victories and frustrations, of worry and hospital stays, of walks and hopes and concerns. Eventually, as always happens with her diagnosis, she spoke of the transition from curative to palliative care, though the British are far more up front about such things than Americans are. “Terminal,” they call it. And so it was.
I have never really figured out how to stop loving anyone.
I don’t think I will start now.
Love changes, of course. It grows, it evolves, it becomes new things and takes new shapes even as it remembers the old ones. If you are very lucky in this world you will find people to share that with, even as their part in your life moves from one role to another, even as physical distance tries to keep you separate, even as the years lengthen on and the memories and stories recede into the past until there is nobody left to tell them to except each other, all those old tales of drama for stakes no one recalls but you.
No, I don’t think I will start now. I do not.
Her name was Julia. She was my friend.
And I will miss her.
Thursday, January 15, 2015
Cheesesteaks and Conversation
We’ve had real Philadelphia cheesesteaks here in Wisconsin for the last two days.
You would think that in a state full of beef and cheese getting a decent cheesesteak would not be a problem, but you would be wrong. Nobody in the midwest knows how to make a crusty roll. Nor do they know how to prepare the meat. It’s not a complicated meal, but it does have to be done right.
Fortunately, there is Havertown Pizza, my new favorite restaurant in the entire world.
I spent this past weekend visiting my parents, because I could. As you get older and busier you realize that you want to do that more and opportunities to do that are fewer, so when they arise you should take them. Plus my dad’s birthday is around now, close enough to count anyway, and that was all the excuse I could possibly need. I would be on my own on this trip, as the girls are back in school and Kim had to be on campus, but there you have it.
So I packed up my bags, hopped in the car, and headed east, staying just ahead of the snowstorm that followed me across the country like a Congressman looking for a handout.
It was a glorious weekend.
My brother came down from New York, so it was the four of us once again. We watched football games (yes, the Dallas Cowboys got completely jobbed by that call; no, I’m not upset about it), ate cheesesteaks, and generally hung out as we did back in the 80s before anyone had moved out into the world on their own and far away. And when Jenny, whom I have known since high school, came over for a brief visit, it just made the feeling that much more so. It was lovely to see her as well.
When my family gets together we like to eat and talk. We’re good at it. We enjoy it. We look forward to it. The big meal this weekend was Saturday night, when Keith and I took our parents out for my dad’s birthday. If you’ve ever wondered why it is that you have a job and have to get out of your nice warm bed on cold dark mornings, remember that one reason is so that you can do things like that. We had a grand time.
But mostly we hung out at home, enjoying each other’s company until it was time to go.
On Sunday I stopped over at Havertown Pizza to pick up cheesesteaks for lunch – they make a fantastic cheesesteak, trust me on this – and got to talking with the guy who I think owns the place. I’m pretty sure he was surprised to see me, since I had just done the same thing not 24 hours earlier, but I explained that I was stocking up on my hometown foods since good cheesesteaks are nowhere to be had in Wisconsin. Ah, he said. If I wanted him to, he’d fry up the meat and package it separately from the rolls and the cheese and I could make them when I got home. “Just freeze it all and let it thaw while you drive and you’ll be fine.”
How can you turn down an offer like that?
They kept just fine while I drove across Philadelphia and stopped overnight to see Mike, Krista and Eli in Pittsburgh – another fine evening of eating and talking among good people.
They kept just fine while I drove from there to Wisconsin.
And then we ate them and all of the good times of the last few days were there with us even as new good times came about, because that is what good food does.
You would think that in a state full of beef and cheese getting a decent cheesesteak would not be a problem, but you would be wrong. Nobody in the midwest knows how to make a crusty roll. Nor do they know how to prepare the meat. It’s not a complicated meal, but it does have to be done right.
Fortunately, there is Havertown Pizza, my new favorite restaurant in the entire world.
I spent this past weekend visiting my parents, because I could. As you get older and busier you realize that you want to do that more and opportunities to do that are fewer, so when they arise you should take them. Plus my dad’s birthday is around now, close enough to count anyway, and that was all the excuse I could possibly need. I would be on my own on this trip, as the girls are back in school and Kim had to be on campus, but there you have it.
So I packed up my bags, hopped in the car, and headed east, staying just ahead of the snowstorm that followed me across the country like a Congressman looking for a handout.
It was a glorious weekend.
My brother came down from New York, so it was the four of us once again. We watched football games (yes, the Dallas Cowboys got completely jobbed by that call; no, I’m not upset about it), ate cheesesteaks, and generally hung out as we did back in the 80s before anyone had moved out into the world on their own and far away. And when Jenny, whom I have known since high school, came over for a brief visit, it just made the feeling that much more so. It was lovely to see her as well.
When my family gets together we like to eat and talk. We’re good at it. We enjoy it. We look forward to it. The big meal this weekend was Saturday night, when Keith and I took our parents out for my dad’s birthday. If you’ve ever wondered why it is that you have a job and have to get out of your nice warm bed on cold dark mornings, remember that one reason is so that you can do things like that. We had a grand time.
But mostly we hung out at home, enjoying each other’s company until it was time to go.
On Sunday I stopped over at Havertown Pizza to pick up cheesesteaks for lunch – they make a fantastic cheesesteak, trust me on this – and got to talking with the guy who I think owns the place. I’m pretty sure he was surprised to see me, since I had just done the same thing not 24 hours earlier, but I explained that I was stocking up on my hometown foods since good cheesesteaks are nowhere to be had in Wisconsin. Ah, he said. If I wanted him to, he’d fry up the meat and package it separately from the rolls and the cheese and I could make them when I got home. “Just freeze it all and let it thaw while you drive and you’ll be fine.”
How can you turn down an offer like that?
They kept just fine while I drove across Philadelphia and stopped overnight to see Mike, Krista and Eli in Pittsburgh – another fine evening of eating and talking among good people.
They kept just fine while I drove from there to Wisconsin.
And then we ate them and all of the good times of the last few days were there with us even as new good times came about, because that is what good food does.
Monday, January 12, 2015
Books Read in 2014, Part 4
And that about wraps things up. Stay tuned for next year!
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The Big Over Easy (Jasper Fforde)
DI Jack Spratt has a problem. He’s the head of the Nursery Crimes Division of the Reading Police, a career-killing assignment that he shares with his staff of misfits and officers who have crossed the powers that be (notably DCI Friedland Chymes and the Guild of Detectives), among them Constable Baker (a hypochondriac), Constable Ashley (an alien), and Constable Kandlestyck-Maeker, who questioned Chymes once too often and was dumped into the NCD as punishment. When Sgt. Mary Mary gets assigned to this crew, it just makes things complicated. There has been a murder – Humpty Dumpty has been found in pieces below his wall, and the trail of skullduggery extends throughout Reading – to the halls of Spongg Footcare, Reading’s premiere industry; to the Most Worshipful Guild of Detectives, who are more concerned with publication stats and narrative structure than with actual police work; and even to St. Cerebellum’s, the local mental hospital. Spratt and Mary must figure out whodunit whle carefully avoiding being done, and must navigate the moral slopes of the Guild of Detectives. Fforde is an astonishingly referential writer – almost every line in this book is an allusion to something, either a nursery rhyme or a noirish detective hero or something else – and the plot flows quickly. It’s a biting satire of detective novels and the culture that make them up, and in some sense it’s also an interesting take-down of the publish-or-perish world of academia, though I don’t know if Fforde intended that. Lauren and I read this as a bedtime story, because she’s old enough now to enjoy real stories.
Tigerman (Nick Harkaway)
On a doomed island in the Indian Ocean there is a sergeant and a boy. The boy is a local, nicknamed Robin, and a fountain of pop culture. His friend the sergeant – Lester Ferris, late of the British Royal Army – has been put out to pasture there after his service in Iraq and Afghanistan, declared to be the Brevet-Consul representing Her Majesty’s Government, and told mostly not to bother with doing too much before the island is destroyed. Because the island will be destroyed – thanks to a roiling pot of chemical and biological nastiness created out of industrial waste that has already devastated the island, the world has declared that it must be razed to the waterline. This creates an odd, self-contained little world just beyond legality, and the Fleet – a vast patchwork of ships anchored just offshore – takes advantage of this extralegal space to offer a wide variety of services that would otherwise be frowned upon. There is also an international force – NatProMan – headed by an American named Kershaw, a team of Japanese scientists whose leader Kaiko Inoue, provides some glimmer of romantic possibility for Sgt. Ferris (or as much as two representatives from famously self-effacing and polite societies can manage in that direction, at least), a former Legionnaire named Dirac, and a local bartender named Shola. And into this mix comes Tigerman – a hero for our times. The fact that our times are bleak and screwed up, that nothing ever quite works out the way it does in the comic books, is just how it goes. This is a more straightforward book than Harkaway’s earlier novels and a darker one, but his usual glorious prose slides you right along. Harkaway is one of my favorite writers, just for how he writes sentences.
What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions (Randall Munroe)
Randall Munroe draws the webcomic XKCD, which is deservedly famous among a certain kind of internet nerd as one of the best bits of science humor out there, but prior to that he was a genuine NASA engineer and he uses his scientific training and research skills to answer what are, on the face of them, genuinely stupid questions. The result is both fascinating and weirdly funny. Have you ever wondered what would happen if a pitcher threw a fastball at 9/10 the speed of light? Munroe actually gives you a serious scientific answer (the stadium and everything in it would be vaporized, and – in accordance with the rules of Major League Baseball – the batter would posthumously be awarded first base for being hit by the pitch, in a rather broad sense of “hit”). He walks his way through any number of such questions, and by the time you are done you are both educated and kind of shellshocked that people would ever think to ask such things.
The Outsourcerer’s Apprentice (Tom Holt)
How exactly would a fairy-tale kingdom actually function? What are the economics of dragon slaying? If all you have in your area are kindly woodcutters, who’s buying all the wood and why are they doing so when they could just walk out of their house and pick it up for free? Buttercup is this land’s version of Little Red Riding Hood, except she asks the hard economic questions and she’s getting tired of slaughtering wolves every day. Sir Turquine sells dragon carcasses to the king for bulk meat. And as for Prince Florizel, well, he’s kind of a lost cause. Literally lost, in this case, since he’s actually Benny Gulbenkian, graduate student in physics and party crasher into this world. He’d like to get back to our reality, except that requires a donut or other food with a hole in the middle and such things are violently taboo in this world. As for Benny’s uncle, well, it just gets more complicated from there. In this sharp satire of fairy tales and wizard stories (there’s a spot-on parody of the whole Moria sequence in The Lord of the Rings, for example), Holt explores the idea of what would happen if we could outsource our jobs to alternate realities and the results – while occasionally laugh-out-loud funny – are all too sobering. One gets the impression that this is a sequel to something, and now I suppose I need to find it.
The Fourth Bear (Jasper Fforde)
The Nursery Crimes Division is not a place where you find the normal, the mundane, or even the sensible, as DCI Jack Spratt well knows, and in this story he will find his expectations fulfilled in many ways. It opens with Goldilocks – a reporter and a Friend To Bears – on the trail of a story involving giant cucumbers (a trail littered with bodies, it turns out) – and winds its way through a murderous baked good (the Gingerbreadman), a self-repairing car purchased from a salesman named Dorian Gray, a half-built amusement park called SommeWorld, and a fair amount of conflict with the sentient bear community of Reading, Berkshire, UK, before ending on a more or less happy note, depending on how one defines things. Along the way DCI Spratt will confront new neighbors (Punch and Judy, whose second career is a bit of a shock), his very angry wife, and a psychologist who admits that he is probably better at his job for not being quite sane but still has to go through the motions of analysis anyway. There are side stories involving DS Mary Mary and her tentative relationship with the alien PC Ashley (whose family is trying to be human and not quite succeeding), a long-lost scientist named McGuffin, and a near disaster of a sting operation meant to catch the Great Long Red-Legg’d Scissor-Man, a figure out of British nursery rhymes who snips off the thumbs of children who won’t stop sucking them. In other words, it is a fairly typical romp through the cluttered and fascinating mind of Jasper Fforde, and Lauren and I enjoyed it thoroughly together.
Fragile Things (Neil Gaiman)
This collection of short stories and poems demonstrates once again what a skilled writer Neil Gaiman is and how rare that can be in the SF/F genre. Following an introduction mostly devoted to explaining the circumstances under which each piece was written, Gaiman reels off story after story, interspersed with poems, each one crystalline and cutting, most of which stay in your head long after you’re done. My favorite line in this book came from one of the poems, actually: “Do not fear the ghosts in this house; they are the least of your worries.”
The Eye of Zoltar (Jasper Fforde)
The story of Jennifer Strange – teenaged orphan, indentured servant, chief operating officer of Kazam Mystical Arts Management (the finest purveyor of magical services in the Ununited Kingdoms of Great Britain) – continues in this third installment that has all of the wit, allusions, and breakneck pacing of the first two (The Last Dragonslayer, and The Song of the Quarkbeast). Fforde is clearly tiring of the constraints of Kazam and is moving Jennifer’s story further afield. Little of this book actually takes place in the Kingdom of Snodd (somewhere in what is now western England). Instead, very early in the book Jennifer and Perkins, one of her sorcerers and potentially a boyfriend, are tasked with going into the Cambrian Empire (more or less Wales). There are three reasons for this. First, they need to ransom the Once Magnificent Boo from the clutches of Emperor Tharv (kidnapping is a thoroughly bureaucratized and routine function of the Cambrian government, and it is all strikingly aboveboard and rule-bound). Second, the Mighty Shandar has ordered Jennifer to fetch the Eye of Zoltar – a jewel of immense magical power – from there or he will kill the last two remaining dragons. And third, the queen of Snodd has switched her spoiled, bratty daughter’s mind into the body of a servant (Laura Scrubb) and asked Jennifer to teach her some humility and usefulness, so she comes along as well. The princess, it turns out, has an MBA-level understanding of finance, which is just one of the odd little things that occur in this book. Cambria makes most of its money from jeopardy tourism – tour guides quote fatality rates for each option you choose. There is a railroad militia war that occurs precisely on time with carefully scheduled breaks. Cambrian fauna defy logic. It’s a sprawling, at times deeply funny book, and it clearly sets Fforde up for the next volume in this series, a volume I will purchase at the first opportunity.
Technology Matters: Questions to Live With (David E. Nye)
One of the down sides to agreeing to help out a friend by giving a guest lecture is that you have to do the readings that the students have for that day, and when your friend is a philosopher rather than a historian, well, there’s no way that’s going to end well. This well-intentioned but ultimately deeply frustrating book sets out to address the issue of technology and human society – what it is, how it shapes our culture and is shaped thereby, and how we ought to be dealing with it – and it is arranged in a series of chapters each focusing on a single question. I knew I was in trouble when the first chapter – “Can We Define ‘Technology’?” – declared that the answer to that question was effectively “no.” This made the rest of the book kind of pointless, really, but I slogged my way through to the end and did my best to expunge its contents from my head the moment my guest lecture concluded.
A Slip of the Keyboard (Terry Pratchett)
Terry Pratchett has spent his entire life writing, first as a journalist and then as one of the best satirists and moralists (two categories with a significant amount of overlap) in the English language. And he’s funny, too. This is a collection of his non-fiction pieces – talks given, letters published, articles written, and so on – that spans much of his life and is organized into three broad categories. The first is generally focused on writing, and contains more than its fair share of humor and observation. The second, similarly well-written and entertaining, is more generally focused on his life and opinions. The final section is more pointed – the reactions and exhortations of a man diagnosed with a rare and early form of Alzheimer’s Disease who knows his time is limited and would like that time to be spent well and to end when he wants it to end. It has its humor as well, but as you would expect it is a section more raw and angry than the other two. I have long loved Pratchett’s writing because it is extremely well written and makes me laugh and think at the same time – a combination more uncommon than you’d think – and this collection was no exception.
The Adventures of the Princess and Mr. Whiffle: The Thing Beneath the Bed (Patrick Rothfuss)
This is a picture book, but as the shiny gold sticker on the cover says, “This shit is not for kids. Seriously.” Rothfuss has a great deal of fun subverting the conventions of children’s books with what at first seems a fairly conventional tale of a princess and her stuffed animal, who live alone in a marzipan castle. The ending (well, the final ending, as there are three) can come as rather a surprise if you’re not paying attention. I bought this at a reading given by Rothfuss and read through it while waiting for him to begin his presentation. I was happy when he chose to spend the first part of the evening reading this and then pointing out that he was “not some hack writer who would spring a twist ending on you,” by going through the artwork and writing to show you how what might seem like a surprise ending is actually there from the beginning for those who are willing to see what is in front of them rather than what they expect to see in front of them. The second time you read the story through, he said, it is a very different book than it is the first time. And that is a lesson worth learning.
The Adventures of the Princess and Mr. Whiffle: The Dark Deep Below (Patrick Rothfuss)
The second installment of this series is a bit longer and more complicated and introduces a new character to the mix – the princess’ brother. How exactly she has obtained a brother is left unclear and after the events of the first book this is not something I choose to dwell upon for long. But there he is and, in the way of all baby brothers, he is deeply, deeply aggravating to the princess. But when he falls afoul of the goblins in the deep dark cave, the princess will spring into action. As with the first one, this is not a children’s book so much as a commentary on the genre, and it is a lot of dark fun.
Necrophenia (Robert Rankin)
Like all Rankin books, this is a cheesecake kind of novel – dense, rich, delicious, and extremely filling. You read one and you’re good for a while, no matter how much you look forward to the next one. Rankin is also extremely British and makes few concessions to his American readers. This is one of his more deliberately absurd books, written in a style that starts at “arch” goes through “deadpan,” and ends up somewhere in a collision between “vaudeville” and Waiting for Godot. The story is told as a memoir by Tyler, who starts out in the early 1960s as a schoolboy and member of the rock band The Sumerian Kynges and then proceeds through most of the pop culture of the late 20th and early 21st century in a Zelig sort of way. Elvis has a big role, for example, as does Mama Cass, George Formby, and Mick Jagger. Tyler spends much of his life being manipulated – first by Mr. Ishmael, and then by Keith Crossbar, whose relation to Tyler is only gradually revealed. There are long scenes in bars and even longer jumps – years – where Tyler has no memory and the narrative dissolves from one era to the next. It’s the story, as he says, of how Tyler almost saved Mankind, and if you are willing to get into the spirit of it and enjoy the flow of the language, it’s a wonderful experience. If you’re not, well, it will just be weird and awkward.
The Stupidest Angel (Version 2.0) (Christopher Moore)
It’s Christmas in Pine Cove, and it will be one to remember, or perhaps not. The evil developer Dale Pearson (generally described as such) is harassing his ex-wife Lena Marquez. Tuck Case is in town with Roberto, his talking fruit bat. Theo Crowe – former hippie turned well-intentioned lawman – is trying to keep a lid on things. His wife, a former B-movie action star named Molly Michon whose mental state is precarious at best, is off her meds and slowly losing the distinction between her actual self and the barbarian warrior princess she used to play on the screen. And the angel Raziel is about to grant a Christmas miracle, except that he is, indeed, the stupidest angel in the heavens and what he thinks people want is not actually what they want. It’s a swirling mix of murder, mayhem, love, action, and more than a few laugh-out-loud funny bits – as one would expect from Moore – and the “2.0” at the end is a little epilogue that gives you a look at the characters a year on, when a new threat to Pine Cove appears. Not one of Moore’s best, really, but well worth reading anyway.
Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America – An Evangelical’s Lament (Randall Balmer)
I should really know better than to read books like this one. It’s not like my blood pressure isn’t high enough already. Balmer is a committed evangelical Protestant who refuses to accept the stranglehold that the Religious Right has on his fellow evangelicals or the ways in which that stranglehold has destroyed most of the claims those evangelicals have on their own past or even, at times, the very notion that they are Christian at all. In a few short, well-documented chapters he outlines the history of the Religious Right in the US – a history that begins with a spirited defense of segregation and racism and only gradually expands to include more socially acceptable issues such as abortion, which evangelicals initially held rather pro-choice views upon – and the damage that history is doing to both the US in general and to American Christianity in particular. It is impossible to read this book with anything approaching an open mind and still believe that the right-wing extremists masquerading as conservatives in America today have any moral legitimacy whatsoever or that they speak from any real sense of what the Good News of Christ actually was. The fact that so many people in the US continue to give them that legitimacy and listen to their views speaks volumes about the sorry state of the American mind and the even sorrier state of American morals and faith.
Bridge of Sighs (Richard Russo)
Books like this are what the words “big-hearted” and “shambling” were created to describe, though that would shortchange the complex, multi-layered structure of the book. Told in a series of overlapping narratives – several in the present and one more as memory – this is the story of an ordinary life and the extraordinary events it can contain. Lou C. Lynch (forever known as Lucy, thanks to a teacher’s imprecise diction and the attempted cruelty of his classmates) is a boy in Thomaston, a town in upstate NY that is slowly withering. The tannery is poisoning the creek, and the old jobs are disappearing. When Lucy’s father impetuously buys a corner grocery, he ties his family to the town. It’s a story of Lucy and his father – warm-hearted, innocent, decent people. Of Lucy’s mother, Tessa, and his eventual wife, Sarah. Of Bobby Marconi, who flees the town to reinvent himself as Robert Noonan, an artist in Vienna. It’s a memoir of Lucy’s youth and a bittersweet, melancholic reflection on his present. Characters come in, play their roles (Lucy’s uncle Declan is a particularly interesting figure), and then disappear, sometimes tragically and sometimes quietly. Life happens, and then it stops. It’s a compelling and well-written tale of a quiet life full to the brim with stories.
Total Books: 66 to 74, depending on how one counts
Total Pages: 24,026
Pages/day: 65.8
Happy Reading!
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The Big Over Easy (Jasper Fforde)
DI Jack Spratt has a problem. He’s the head of the Nursery Crimes Division of the Reading Police, a career-killing assignment that he shares with his staff of misfits and officers who have crossed the powers that be (notably DCI Friedland Chymes and the Guild of Detectives), among them Constable Baker (a hypochondriac), Constable Ashley (an alien), and Constable Kandlestyck-Maeker, who questioned Chymes once too often and was dumped into the NCD as punishment. When Sgt. Mary Mary gets assigned to this crew, it just makes things complicated. There has been a murder – Humpty Dumpty has been found in pieces below his wall, and the trail of skullduggery extends throughout Reading – to the halls of Spongg Footcare, Reading’s premiere industry; to the Most Worshipful Guild of Detectives, who are more concerned with publication stats and narrative structure than with actual police work; and even to St. Cerebellum’s, the local mental hospital. Spratt and Mary must figure out whodunit whle carefully avoiding being done, and must navigate the moral slopes of the Guild of Detectives. Fforde is an astonishingly referential writer – almost every line in this book is an allusion to something, either a nursery rhyme or a noirish detective hero or something else – and the plot flows quickly. It’s a biting satire of detective novels and the culture that make them up, and in some sense it’s also an interesting take-down of the publish-or-perish world of academia, though I don’t know if Fforde intended that. Lauren and I read this as a bedtime story, because she’s old enough now to enjoy real stories.
Tigerman (Nick Harkaway)
On a doomed island in the Indian Ocean there is a sergeant and a boy. The boy is a local, nicknamed Robin, and a fountain of pop culture. His friend the sergeant – Lester Ferris, late of the British Royal Army – has been put out to pasture there after his service in Iraq and Afghanistan, declared to be the Brevet-Consul representing Her Majesty’s Government, and told mostly not to bother with doing too much before the island is destroyed. Because the island will be destroyed – thanks to a roiling pot of chemical and biological nastiness created out of industrial waste that has already devastated the island, the world has declared that it must be razed to the waterline. This creates an odd, self-contained little world just beyond legality, and the Fleet – a vast patchwork of ships anchored just offshore – takes advantage of this extralegal space to offer a wide variety of services that would otherwise be frowned upon. There is also an international force – NatProMan – headed by an American named Kershaw, a team of Japanese scientists whose leader Kaiko Inoue, provides some glimmer of romantic possibility for Sgt. Ferris (or as much as two representatives from famously self-effacing and polite societies can manage in that direction, at least), a former Legionnaire named Dirac, and a local bartender named Shola. And into this mix comes Tigerman – a hero for our times. The fact that our times are bleak and screwed up, that nothing ever quite works out the way it does in the comic books, is just how it goes. This is a more straightforward book than Harkaway’s earlier novels and a darker one, but his usual glorious prose slides you right along. Harkaway is one of my favorite writers, just for how he writes sentences.
What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions (Randall Munroe)
Randall Munroe draws the webcomic XKCD, which is deservedly famous among a certain kind of internet nerd as one of the best bits of science humor out there, but prior to that he was a genuine NASA engineer and he uses his scientific training and research skills to answer what are, on the face of them, genuinely stupid questions. The result is both fascinating and weirdly funny. Have you ever wondered what would happen if a pitcher threw a fastball at 9/10 the speed of light? Munroe actually gives you a serious scientific answer (the stadium and everything in it would be vaporized, and – in accordance with the rules of Major League Baseball – the batter would posthumously be awarded first base for being hit by the pitch, in a rather broad sense of “hit”). He walks his way through any number of such questions, and by the time you are done you are both educated and kind of shellshocked that people would ever think to ask such things.
The Outsourcerer’s Apprentice (Tom Holt)
How exactly would a fairy-tale kingdom actually function? What are the economics of dragon slaying? If all you have in your area are kindly woodcutters, who’s buying all the wood and why are they doing so when they could just walk out of their house and pick it up for free? Buttercup is this land’s version of Little Red Riding Hood, except she asks the hard economic questions and she’s getting tired of slaughtering wolves every day. Sir Turquine sells dragon carcasses to the king for bulk meat. And as for Prince Florizel, well, he’s kind of a lost cause. Literally lost, in this case, since he’s actually Benny Gulbenkian, graduate student in physics and party crasher into this world. He’d like to get back to our reality, except that requires a donut or other food with a hole in the middle and such things are violently taboo in this world. As for Benny’s uncle, well, it just gets more complicated from there. In this sharp satire of fairy tales and wizard stories (there’s a spot-on parody of the whole Moria sequence in The Lord of the Rings, for example), Holt explores the idea of what would happen if we could outsource our jobs to alternate realities and the results – while occasionally laugh-out-loud funny – are all too sobering. One gets the impression that this is a sequel to something, and now I suppose I need to find it.
The Fourth Bear (Jasper Fforde)
The Nursery Crimes Division is not a place where you find the normal, the mundane, or even the sensible, as DCI Jack Spratt well knows, and in this story he will find his expectations fulfilled in many ways. It opens with Goldilocks – a reporter and a Friend To Bears – on the trail of a story involving giant cucumbers (a trail littered with bodies, it turns out) – and winds its way through a murderous baked good (the Gingerbreadman), a self-repairing car purchased from a salesman named Dorian Gray, a half-built amusement park called SommeWorld, and a fair amount of conflict with the sentient bear community of Reading, Berkshire, UK, before ending on a more or less happy note, depending on how one defines things. Along the way DCI Spratt will confront new neighbors (Punch and Judy, whose second career is a bit of a shock), his very angry wife, and a psychologist who admits that he is probably better at his job for not being quite sane but still has to go through the motions of analysis anyway. There are side stories involving DS Mary Mary and her tentative relationship with the alien PC Ashley (whose family is trying to be human and not quite succeeding), a long-lost scientist named McGuffin, and a near disaster of a sting operation meant to catch the Great Long Red-Legg’d Scissor-Man, a figure out of British nursery rhymes who snips off the thumbs of children who won’t stop sucking them. In other words, it is a fairly typical romp through the cluttered and fascinating mind of Jasper Fforde, and Lauren and I enjoyed it thoroughly together.
Fragile Things (Neil Gaiman)
This collection of short stories and poems demonstrates once again what a skilled writer Neil Gaiman is and how rare that can be in the SF/F genre. Following an introduction mostly devoted to explaining the circumstances under which each piece was written, Gaiman reels off story after story, interspersed with poems, each one crystalline and cutting, most of which stay in your head long after you’re done. My favorite line in this book came from one of the poems, actually: “Do not fear the ghosts in this house; they are the least of your worries.”
The Eye of Zoltar (Jasper Fforde)
The story of Jennifer Strange – teenaged orphan, indentured servant, chief operating officer of Kazam Mystical Arts Management (the finest purveyor of magical services in the Ununited Kingdoms of Great Britain) – continues in this third installment that has all of the wit, allusions, and breakneck pacing of the first two (The Last Dragonslayer, and The Song of the Quarkbeast). Fforde is clearly tiring of the constraints of Kazam and is moving Jennifer’s story further afield. Little of this book actually takes place in the Kingdom of Snodd (somewhere in what is now western England). Instead, very early in the book Jennifer and Perkins, one of her sorcerers and potentially a boyfriend, are tasked with going into the Cambrian Empire (more or less Wales). There are three reasons for this. First, they need to ransom the Once Magnificent Boo from the clutches of Emperor Tharv (kidnapping is a thoroughly bureaucratized and routine function of the Cambrian government, and it is all strikingly aboveboard and rule-bound). Second, the Mighty Shandar has ordered Jennifer to fetch the Eye of Zoltar – a jewel of immense magical power – from there or he will kill the last two remaining dragons. And third, the queen of Snodd has switched her spoiled, bratty daughter’s mind into the body of a servant (Laura Scrubb) and asked Jennifer to teach her some humility and usefulness, so she comes along as well. The princess, it turns out, has an MBA-level understanding of finance, which is just one of the odd little things that occur in this book. Cambria makes most of its money from jeopardy tourism – tour guides quote fatality rates for each option you choose. There is a railroad militia war that occurs precisely on time with carefully scheduled breaks. Cambrian fauna defy logic. It’s a sprawling, at times deeply funny book, and it clearly sets Fforde up for the next volume in this series, a volume I will purchase at the first opportunity.
Technology Matters: Questions to Live With (David E. Nye)
One of the down sides to agreeing to help out a friend by giving a guest lecture is that you have to do the readings that the students have for that day, and when your friend is a philosopher rather than a historian, well, there’s no way that’s going to end well. This well-intentioned but ultimately deeply frustrating book sets out to address the issue of technology and human society – what it is, how it shapes our culture and is shaped thereby, and how we ought to be dealing with it – and it is arranged in a series of chapters each focusing on a single question. I knew I was in trouble when the first chapter – “Can We Define ‘Technology’?” – declared that the answer to that question was effectively “no.” This made the rest of the book kind of pointless, really, but I slogged my way through to the end and did my best to expunge its contents from my head the moment my guest lecture concluded.
A Slip of the Keyboard (Terry Pratchett)
Terry Pratchett has spent his entire life writing, first as a journalist and then as one of the best satirists and moralists (two categories with a significant amount of overlap) in the English language. And he’s funny, too. This is a collection of his non-fiction pieces – talks given, letters published, articles written, and so on – that spans much of his life and is organized into three broad categories. The first is generally focused on writing, and contains more than its fair share of humor and observation. The second, similarly well-written and entertaining, is more generally focused on his life and opinions. The final section is more pointed – the reactions and exhortations of a man diagnosed with a rare and early form of Alzheimer’s Disease who knows his time is limited and would like that time to be spent well and to end when he wants it to end. It has its humor as well, but as you would expect it is a section more raw and angry than the other two. I have long loved Pratchett’s writing because it is extremely well written and makes me laugh and think at the same time – a combination more uncommon than you’d think – and this collection was no exception.
The Adventures of the Princess and Mr. Whiffle: The Thing Beneath the Bed (Patrick Rothfuss)
This is a picture book, but as the shiny gold sticker on the cover says, “This shit is not for kids. Seriously.” Rothfuss has a great deal of fun subverting the conventions of children’s books with what at first seems a fairly conventional tale of a princess and her stuffed animal, who live alone in a marzipan castle. The ending (well, the final ending, as there are three) can come as rather a surprise if you’re not paying attention. I bought this at a reading given by Rothfuss and read through it while waiting for him to begin his presentation. I was happy when he chose to spend the first part of the evening reading this and then pointing out that he was “not some hack writer who would spring a twist ending on you,” by going through the artwork and writing to show you how what might seem like a surprise ending is actually there from the beginning for those who are willing to see what is in front of them rather than what they expect to see in front of them. The second time you read the story through, he said, it is a very different book than it is the first time. And that is a lesson worth learning.
The Adventures of the Princess and Mr. Whiffle: The Dark Deep Below (Patrick Rothfuss)
The second installment of this series is a bit longer and more complicated and introduces a new character to the mix – the princess’ brother. How exactly she has obtained a brother is left unclear and after the events of the first book this is not something I choose to dwell upon for long. But there he is and, in the way of all baby brothers, he is deeply, deeply aggravating to the princess. But when he falls afoul of the goblins in the deep dark cave, the princess will spring into action. As with the first one, this is not a children’s book so much as a commentary on the genre, and it is a lot of dark fun.
Necrophenia (Robert Rankin)
Like all Rankin books, this is a cheesecake kind of novel – dense, rich, delicious, and extremely filling. You read one and you’re good for a while, no matter how much you look forward to the next one. Rankin is also extremely British and makes few concessions to his American readers. This is one of his more deliberately absurd books, written in a style that starts at “arch” goes through “deadpan,” and ends up somewhere in a collision between “vaudeville” and Waiting for Godot. The story is told as a memoir by Tyler, who starts out in the early 1960s as a schoolboy and member of the rock band The Sumerian Kynges and then proceeds through most of the pop culture of the late 20th and early 21st century in a Zelig sort of way. Elvis has a big role, for example, as does Mama Cass, George Formby, and Mick Jagger. Tyler spends much of his life being manipulated – first by Mr. Ishmael, and then by Keith Crossbar, whose relation to Tyler is only gradually revealed. There are long scenes in bars and even longer jumps – years – where Tyler has no memory and the narrative dissolves from one era to the next. It’s the story, as he says, of how Tyler almost saved Mankind, and if you are willing to get into the spirit of it and enjoy the flow of the language, it’s a wonderful experience. If you’re not, well, it will just be weird and awkward.
The Stupidest Angel (Version 2.0) (Christopher Moore)
It’s Christmas in Pine Cove, and it will be one to remember, or perhaps not. The evil developer Dale Pearson (generally described as such) is harassing his ex-wife Lena Marquez. Tuck Case is in town with Roberto, his talking fruit bat. Theo Crowe – former hippie turned well-intentioned lawman – is trying to keep a lid on things. His wife, a former B-movie action star named Molly Michon whose mental state is precarious at best, is off her meds and slowly losing the distinction between her actual self and the barbarian warrior princess she used to play on the screen. And the angel Raziel is about to grant a Christmas miracle, except that he is, indeed, the stupidest angel in the heavens and what he thinks people want is not actually what they want. It’s a swirling mix of murder, mayhem, love, action, and more than a few laugh-out-loud funny bits – as one would expect from Moore – and the “2.0” at the end is a little epilogue that gives you a look at the characters a year on, when a new threat to Pine Cove appears. Not one of Moore’s best, really, but well worth reading anyway.
Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America – An Evangelical’s Lament (Randall Balmer)
I should really know better than to read books like this one. It’s not like my blood pressure isn’t high enough already. Balmer is a committed evangelical Protestant who refuses to accept the stranglehold that the Religious Right has on his fellow evangelicals or the ways in which that stranglehold has destroyed most of the claims those evangelicals have on their own past or even, at times, the very notion that they are Christian at all. In a few short, well-documented chapters he outlines the history of the Religious Right in the US – a history that begins with a spirited defense of segregation and racism and only gradually expands to include more socially acceptable issues such as abortion, which evangelicals initially held rather pro-choice views upon – and the damage that history is doing to both the US in general and to American Christianity in particular. It is impossible to read this book with anything approaching an open mind and still believe that the right-wing extremists masquerading as conservatives in America today have any moral legitimacy whatsoever or that they speak from any real sense of what the Good News of Christ actually was. The fact that so many people in the US continue to give them that legitimacy and listen to their views speaks volumes about the sorry state of the American mind and the even sorrier state of American morals and faith.
Bridge of Sighs (Richard Russo)
Books like this are what the words “big-hearted” and “shambling” were created to describe, though that would shortchange the complex, multi-layered structure of the book. Told in a series of overlapping narratives – several in the present and one more as memory – this is the story of an ordinary life and the extraordinary events it can contain. Lou C. Lynch (forever known as Lucy, thanks to a teacher’s imprecise diction and the attempted cruelty of his classmates) is a boy in Thomaston, a town in upstate NY that is slowly withering. The tannery is poisoning the creek, and the old jobs are disappearing. When Lucy’s father impetuously buys a corner grocery, he ties his family to the town. It’s a story of Lucy and his father – warm-hearted, innocent, decent people. Of Lucy’s mother, Tessa, and his eventual wife, Sarah. Of Bobby Marconi, who flees the town to reinvent himself as Robert Noonan, an artist in Vienna. It’s a memoir of Lucy’s youth and a bittersweet, melancholic reflection on his present. Characters come in, play their roles (Lucy’s uncle Declan is a particularly interesting figure), and then disappear, sometimes tragically and sometimes quietly. Life happens, and then it stops. It’s a compelling and well-written tale of a quiet life full to the brim with stories.
Total Books: 66 to 74, depending on how one counts
Total Pages: 24,026
Pages/day: 65.8
Happy Reading!
Sunday, January 11, 2015
Books Read in 2014, Part 3
The story continues!
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Absurdistan (Gary Shteyngart)
Misha Vainberg is a Russian Jew stranded in Leningrad when this novel opens. He’s fat (a fact to which he alludes on nearly every page of this 1st-person narrative), wealthy, and the son of Boris Vainberg – noted Jewish dissident from Soviet times, gangster in the post-Soviet era, and 1,238th richest man in Russia. Misha just wants to go back to New York, his home for years before the novel opens and the place where his girlfriend lives, but the Americans won’t let him back in the country because his father killed an Oklahoma businessman. So he sits in Russia with his American expatriate friend Alyosha-Bob, bemoaning his fate. When his father is assassinated it sets off a wild and chaotic chain of events that eventually leaves him in Absurdistan, a former Soviet republic on the Caspian Sea where Misha plans to buy a Belgian passport and use it to get back to New York. But when the Absurdis fall into perhaps the most inept and cynical civil war ever perpetrated things spiral out of control even further and Misha finds himself stranded once again. This is indeed an absurd novel, part Catch-22, part Portnoy’s Complaint, parts of many things, deliberately ironic and off-kilter, and at times very funny (the grant application Misha writes to try to get a Holocaust museum built in Absurdistan is priceless). There is a lot of sex in here, much of which is accompanied by a great deal of overthinking on everyone’s part, and a fair bit of violence. One of the more interesting running jokes of the book is the off-stage character Jerry Shteynfarb – clearly modeled on the author and treated with dripping contempt throughout. It’s a strange novel and inextricably bound up with its Russian Jewish point of view, but a fun one.
True Brews (Emma Christensen)
This is a recipe book and a guide to making hard cider, mead, sake, and other fermented beverages at home. It’s pretty straightforward, really – there’s a general introduction, written in the relentlessly perky style of someone who has an obsession they’d like you to share, followed by several sections of recipes. Each section starts with an interview with a professional in that particular field, followed by a base recipe and then a number of variations. One of my goals this summer was to learn how to make mead, so this may or may not have been a good book to have, depending on whether I ended up destroying the house or not.
Futureshocks (Lou Anders, ed.)
There is only so much dystopian science fiction you can read before it all begins to blend together. This is especially true for short stories, which simply don’t have the room to maneuver that they need to differentiate themselves from the herd. Thus this collection. Each story is set in a world not that far removed from ours in time, space, and/or culture, but with a few things amped up or altered to provide a grim future for the story to occur within. Each story is well written, nicely plotted, and generally of the high quality that you would expect in an anthology edited by Anders. And none of them are particularly memorable. They slide from one to the other, interesting enough to read but not incisive enough to get past the level of general entertainment. Perhaps some of them may one day be expanded into a novel-length story, and at that time they might become more individual. I’d read them then.
Wolf et al v. Walker et al (Barbara B. Crabbe)
I’m never sure whether to include judicial decisions in these reports, but then it’s my list and I can do what I want with it. This is the decision of the US District Court for Western Wisconsin that overturned the Wisconsin laws and constitutional amendments banning gay marriage. There has been quite a kerfluffle over this decision, as you would expect, but my guess is that few if any of the people loudly protesting the idea of civil rights for gay people have actually read what they’re protesting about, and thus it is my considered opinion that they can shut up now. I’ve read it. It is a carefully considered, fairly cautious decision that simply notes that the “defendants are making the same mistake as the Court in Bowers when they frame the question in this case as whether there is a “right to same-sex marriage” instead of whether there is a right to marriage from which same-sex couples can be excluded. … The question is whether the scope of that right may be restricted depending on who is exercising the right.” And the answer, of course, is no it may not. Constitutional rights are not subject to the whims of legislatures or rogue regimes, no matter how far they have subverted the machinery of state government.
Doctor Who: Volume 1: Fugitive (Tony Lee [writer], Al Davison and Matthew Dow Smith [art])
A friend of mine bought us an entire raft of Doctor Who graphic novels as part of a Humble Bundle promo, so despite the fact that I’m not much of a comic book reader I figured I’d download them and try them. This is the first volume, and it was an entertaining read. The Doctor (clearly David Tennant’s 10th Doctor) finds himself in 1920s Hollywood, where things quickly go wrong and he ends up in a rigged interstellar court headed for a bad end. There are adventures galore – and not a few silent film references – and then it all ends with the sort of cliffhanger that you would expect it would. It’s a colorful story and reads quickly, but I suspect that the best part of it is a bit wasted on me – I’m the sort of person who reads the words and barely skims over the artwork, and I would not be surprised if I missed a few critical things. But it was fun, and I’ll get to the rest of them eventually.
One Summer: America, 1927 (Bill Bryson)
The title of this book is somewhat misleading. While Bryson maintains a focus on the events of the summer of 1927 – a busy summer, by all accounts – he mostly uses it as a prism to examine the US throughout the tumultuous decade of the 1920s. And the sections – organized by month and theoretically focused on a specific individual (Charles Lindbergh, Babe Ruth, Calvin Coolidge, Sacco and Vanzetti) – actually double back on each other and contain all sorts of digressions into other figures such as Philo T. Farnsworth and Kennesaw Mountain Landis. All this is to the good, though. If you’re looking for a light, fun, fascinating history of the 1920s you should pick up this book immediately. It’s typical of Bryson’s style – full of dry humor and “wow, I didn’t know that!” facts that even this professional historian found surprising now and then – and you will emerge from it both enlightened and entertained.
Various textbooks previewed for 20th-Century History Class (note: each of these I read about 100-200 pages of before making a decision and moving on to the next book)
The Long Shadow: The Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century (David Reynolds)
This book seemed to promise a general analysis of how WWI – by any account the single most important event of the 20th century – shaped and determined nearly everything that came after it. But it was heavily focused on the UK and, honestly, rather plodding – it never really seemed to get started. So I set it aside and went to look for other, more useful things.
The Oxford History of the 20th Century (Michael Howard and Wm. Roger Louis, eds.) 1
This had an interesting thematic approach but at the expense of a useful structure for the class. Plus a book that is well over 300 pages of agate type is both intimidating to students and hard on the professor’s eyes. Possibly useful as supplementary reading, if I scan and enlarge it.
A History of the Twentieth Century (Martin Gilbert)
The polar opposite of the Oxford History, it has almost no thematic history whatsoever – indeed, it is little more than a catalogue of events, one after the other, for over 700 pages (impressive, considering this is actually “the concise edition” of the original work). At first this is rather dull, but as you read along it acquires a certain narrative force.
The Crowfield Curse (Pat Walsh)
William is a lay brother at the Crowfield Abbey in mid-14th-century England – an orphan taken in by the monks in exchange for his labor. One day out in the woods he comes across an injured hob – a fay creature, normally invisible to humans – and takes it back to the abbey for treatment. Somehow this gets tangled up in a different story of an angel buried in the forest centuries earlier after a confrontation with the Dark King of the fay, an angel sought by the mysterious Jacobus Bone and his companion Shadlock. There’s a lot of moving pieces in this YA novel, and Lauren and I enjoyed it together as a bedtime story. It leaves a lot of room for a sequel, and perhaps we will seek it out.
Who Fears Death (Nnedi Okorafor)
In a desert Africa sometime in a future not too far from ours but far enough that today is neither remembered nor missed, the Nuru people are exterminating the Okeke. Out of a brutal Nuru rape of an Okeke woman comes a half-blood, an Ewu, named Onyesonwu (which translates to the title). Onye, as she is called, will be an outcast, a sorceress, and – eventually – a figure of great power. In this book she will discover who she is, why she is, and what it means to rewrite the Great Book. This is a violent, intense, passionate story full of life and death, sex and rage, magic and physical reality. It is a story that deals head on with issues such as rape, female genital mutilation, and genocide, but also with love, friendship, and loyalty. It is a story that will stay with you, and – while not for everyone, perhaps – it is a story that deserves every award it has won. Okorafor’s voice is rich, vibrant, and deep. The story of Onyesonwu, Mwita, Luyu, Dita and Binta carries the reader across the African deserts, though a cultural landscape few Americans understand, and into a place that rewards close reading. One of the best books I’ve read in a while.
A Tourist Guide to Lancre (Terry Pratchett, Stephen Briggs and Paul Kidby)
After the intense experience of Who Fears Death, I decided I needed something light, and what could fit that bill better than a few Discworld Mapps. This one covers Lancre, the mountainside kingdom whose main export is witches. It comes with a handsome map (or mapp, as the title insists) and a small booklet introducing the place as written by Gytha Ogg (one of the Lancre witches) and Eric Wheelbrace, a parody of the sort of English gentleman whose main joy in life is walking through the countryside and across the rights of way that he insists exist wherever he wants to walk. It’s a fun little book.
Death’s Domain (Terry Pratchett and Paul Kidby) )
Very much like A Tourist Guide to Lancre, this booklet-and-mapp collection focuses on the house and land of Death, who lives outside of time and space, thus making this mapp a bit more conceptual than most. It’s hard to describe a place that exists mostly because its resident insists that it should (what need has Death of a bathroom, for example? – this gives the bathroom a certain “almost but not quite” quality perhaps best exemplified by towels that are rock hard but are there because bathrooms should have towels. The character of Death has always been one of my favorites in Discworld, in part because of his gently mystified view of humanity and in part because of his willingness to be exactly who he is.
The Compleat Ankh-Morpork City Guide (Terry Pratchett)
If you’ve ever seen a 19th-century city guide – the kind that nearly all American cities of any size at all issued nearly annually in those days before telephone directories – you’ll know exactly what this book looks like. It is a comprehensive guide to the leading city of the Discworld, complete with a large (roughly 30” square) and detailed double-sided map of the city. The city guide includes long sections discussing lodgings, pubs and restaurants, clubs and societies, temples, guilds, and so on, as well as an exceedingly fine-grained street index and a long directory of merchants of every kind. All of these sections – even the street index – are annotated and speak to a depth of creation unusual in any secondary world. Plus, if you look carefully, there are all sorts of references and jokes ranging from allusions to the Discworld novels (Ronnie Soak is listed in the merchant directory as a dairyman with no further explanation given) and beyond (there are apparently two goldsmiths in Ankh-Morpork: a Mrs. Niebelungsson and a Mr. Sauron [“rings resized”]). It is a strangely absorbing book that way.
Under the Shadow: The Atomic Bomb and Cold War Narratives (David Seed)
What is it about literary theory that turns fascinating subjects into dreary slogs? This should have been a much more interesting book than it was. Seed looks at some of the atomic bomb fiction that was produced in the second half of the 20th century (nobody could possibly look at it all – believe me, I’ve tried) and tries to fit it into a larger framework of the Cold War. He does a nice job of introducing a number of works, some of them more famous (those, such as Fail-Safe, he tends to hang chapters on) and others less so (often used as examples to flesh out the chapters, though Mordechai Roshwald’s now-neglected Level 7 does get a chapter of its own). And he has a lot to say about them. But even for this historian who teaches a class on the atomic bomb and who reads thoroughly in the subgenre of science fiction under discussion here (few of the books Seed mentions were new to me), this was a heavy and often ponderous book to read.
The Magician King (Lev Grossman)
Quentin Coldwater and his friends Eliot, Janet, and Julia, are now kings and queens of Fillory, the magical world they managed to break into in Grossman’s first book in this series (The Magicians). It was a costly victory, but they have now settled into lives of ease and luxury. Naturally, Quentin is restless. When an encounter with the Seeing Hare goes horribly wrong, he decides to go on a voyage to the Outer Island, for no other reason than the fact that it isn’t just hanging around the castle doing what he’s been doing, which hasn’t been much. And at that point things get complicated. There are side trips to Earth and to the Neitherworlds – a portal plane between worlds – and a long quest to collect seven golden keys that will save magic and, with it, Fillory itself. But there is a cost to this. The hero is not the one who triumphs, Grossman says several times in the book. The hero is the one who pays. Woven throughout this novel in alternating chapters is the backstory of Julia and how she became one of this group without going to Brakebills, the school of magic that provided entry into this world for Quentin and most of his friends. Julia’s story is dark, painful and angry, a bleak counterpoint to Quentin’s life, and is as much a focus of this novel as Quentin’s own story. A minor character in The Magicians, Julia is in fact a far more compelling figure here than Quentin, though he has matured and deepened also. And when it all converges at the end, as it must, the hero is indeed the one who pays. Yes, there is magic, Grossman says, but it is neither pleasant nor free and those who tangle with power must pay the price whether they win or lose. A much more complex, nuanced, and thoughtful book than The Magicians, this is the rare middle volume of a trilogy that easily surpasses its predecessor and recasts it in more a more favorable light.
The Toyminator (Robert Rankin)
Reading Robert Rankin is the literary equivalent of eating cheesecake – very good but very rich, and not something you’re going to do as often as you think you will when you start. Some authors are potato chip writers – you can snork down book after book. Others, like Rankin, you read one book at a time and then take a break. This is because Rankin writes with such density and has such fun with the language. His dialogue is wry and often absurd. His plots are thick with detail. And his books teem with references unhighlighted that the aware may enjoy and the unaware pass over. In this book – the sequel to The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse – there is trouble in Toytown. Former mayor Eddie (a talking teddy bear) and his human (“meathead”) sidekick Jack reunite to form their old private investigation team and are immediately drawn into a web of crime and deceit that will eventually lead them through the portal and into a version of Los Angeles that has clearly been set up as a jaundiced Englishman’s takedown of American culture – everything from television and movies to UFOs and a cutting satire of the American Dream. Plus, there are evil chickens. It’s a hard plot to explain and really there is no need – the joy of Rankin is in the writing and the ideas.
Fish (Gregory Mone)
Maurice – Fish, to everyone including his parents – lives on a farm in Ireland sometime in the indeterminate past when horses drove agriculture and pirates roamed the Atlantic. His family is poor and Fish hates farming, so when the family horse dies and he is sent to the city to be a messenger boy for his Uncle Gerry, it’s almost a blessing for him. But when a delivery goes terribly wrong, Fish finds himself pressed into the crew of the Scurvy Mistress, where he learns to become a pirate. This will involve making a few friends among those of similar age in the crew (Daniel, Nate, and Nora), figuring out a mystery that has eluded Captain Cobb, and trying to survive a mutiny among the crew. It’s a fast-moving and generally good-hearted YA novel that Lauren and I enjoyed reading together at bedtime, and we were sorry to see it end.
The Penguin History of the 20th Century (JM Roberts)
After having read a number of these histories for my class this fall, this was clearly the best of the bunch and the only one I managed to read all the way to the end. Granted, this may be damning with faint praise, but still. Roberts is a good writer and his chapters are well organized and can sustain longer arguments than simply “This happened which made that happen.” I did actually learn a lot, and once in a while – once in a very great while – he’d sneak in something funny, in an exceedingly dry British sort of way. I can assign this book to my students without regret. The fact that this is a British book had some other interesting consequences as well. The US is not the center of attention, for one thing. And one of his running themes is the declining importance of faith and religion in the Western world, an argument that can only be made outside of the US and which shows just how bizarre the US is on that score compared with other similar nations.
And If I Perish: Frontline US Army Nurses in World War II (Eveylyn M. Monahan and Roesmary Neidel-Greenlee)
US Army nurses served in all of the major campaigns in the ETO during WWII, but received little recognition for it. Their rank was honorary only. They were paid half what the men were paid. They were not counted as veterans until the 1980s. This book seeks to bring their service back to the forefront, and it does a very nice job of it. Based on archival research and interviews with many surviving nurses, it runs through the North Africa campaign, the invasion of Italy (Anzio was particularly hellish), the Normandy invasion, and the conquest of Germany, as seen through the eyes of the nurses. It is filled with compelling details and stories, and by the end you find yourself with a new perspective on WWII, which for a professional historian is sometimes a difficult thing to achieve.
Imperfect Birds (Anne Lamott)
I’m not really sure why this book didn’t do much for me. I normally enjoy Anne Lamott’s writing, and the story was well told. Rosie is a teenager. Her mother and stepfather care for her but don’t really understand her problems, and her problems are getting out of hand. I suppose there would have been further explanation and resolution had I continued, but having just finished a long book I was required to read, slogging through another one that didn’t do much for me that wasn’t actually required didn’t appeal to me, so I stopped. It was good, though, so perhaps I may get back to it when I am in a more receptive mood.
The Human Division (John Scalzi)
In this installment of Scalzi’s Old Man’s War universe, things are not right in the human part of the galaxy. The Earth is not happy about the fact that the Colonial Union had kept them in the dark about so much of the rest of the universe for so long and used them as a breeding pool for colonists and farmers. The Colonial Union, while contrite, is not happy about having to deal with an Earth that remains fractious, suicidally self-interested, and generally unable to grasp any larger point about the universe at all. Meanwhile the Conclave – an alliance of some 400 of the 600-700 known alien species – is working to limit humanity’s reach, and possibly destroy it altogether. Into this comes “the B team” – Ambassador Abumwe, of the Colonial Union diplomatic corps, and her assistants and attached personnel, notably Hart Wilson, Lt. Harry Wilson of the Colonial Defense Forces, and – eventually, Captain Sophia Coloma of the Clarke. There will be plots, twists, skullduggery, and action aplenty in what is clearly part one of a longer story. It’s typical Scalzi – well written, fast-paced, light reading, with a few nods to a larger 21st-century humanistic morality and a few more to the golden age of science fiction (tm), circa 1960. It’s not the most profound thing I’ve ever read, but it was a lot of fun.
Mainspring (Jay Lake)
Hethor Jacques is a man with a problem. A clockmaker’s apprentice in New Haven, Connecticut, he has just been visited by the Archangel Gabriel who has commanded him to find the Key Perilous and wind the Mainspring of the world. On a planet where the earth is visibly clockwork – where the brass gears of God spin the planet along its track by meshing with the Great Southern Wall along the equator – this is no small charge. Hethor’s journey will take him far from New Haven – to Boston, where he will meet the Viceroy who, even in 1900, rules America in the name of the British crown; to Her Majesty’s Ship of the Air Basset, a Royal Navy fighting airship; and – eventually – to the Great Southern Wall itself. Along the way he will find friendship and enemies where he least expects them, learn about a world more complex and troubled than he ever imagined, and maybe, just maybe, find love in the bargain. Lake’s clockwork world is made of brass and oil and no small amount of sweat – it is a steampunk vision of faith and politics, complete with a Brass Christ and a theological argument that runs its entire length. I bought this because it looked interesting, but held off reading it until he finished the series. When Lake died recently I went back and checked and, sure enough, he had. So now I have all three volumes, and all I can do is regret that he won’t be around to write more fascinating stories like this one.
Escapement (Jay Lake)
Hethor Jacques does not appear in this second installation of the Mainspring universe, except once or twice in passing reference. Instead, the focus of attention shifts to three other characters – two returning faces from Mainspring, both minor characters in that book, and one new one. Thus we greet again Chief Petty Office Threadgill Angus al-Wazir, late of Her Majesty’s Ship of the Air Bassett and now tasked with the unenviable mission of keeping watch over Doctor Ottweill, a mad and maddening engineering genius whom the British government has commissioned to drill a hole in the miles-high Wall that girdles the Earth at the equator. Thus also we meet Emily McHenry Childress, Librarian at Yale and the person who sent Hethor on his way several years earlier. Through a series of actions she will end up on a Chinese submarine masquerading as a much more important person than she actually is and hoping that she can stave off a dire threat to the world. And, most intriguingly, we meet Paolina Barthes, a teenaged girl growing up on the Wall (a Muralha, in her native Portuguese). Paolina is a genius, a wonderworker, and an independent spirit who has had it Up To Here with the shiftless, brutal men who run her little village. When she creates a Gleam – a mechanical device that allows her to tap into the rhythms of Lake’s clockwork world – she flees her village and sets off a chain of events that will eventually draw all of the characters into the larger narrative. Fast-paced, fascinating, and a good set-up for the third volume of this series.
Pinion (Jay Lake)
The cast increases severalfold in this concluding volume of the Mainspring universe, and the action spreads out across the globe. Paolina, Childress, and al-Wazir are all back for more and Hethor Jacques makes a reappearance as well. Other old characters – Kitchens, Boaz – reappear as well, promoted to major character status, and new major characters (Wang, Gashansunu) appear as well. There are a lot of balls in the air, in other words, and only once – and only for about half a chapter – are they all in the same place at the same time. Mostly the reader is left to follow their adventures separately, each with their own subtitled sections of chapters, as the action gradually builds to a conclusion. The major empires of the Northern World are now at war, and this sets in motion a dizzying array of plots, sideplots and counterplots – if there is a flaw in this book it is that the kaleidoscope of viewpoints obscures the narrative flow (the drilling project so central to the previous book is largely relegated to insignificance here) and does not reward a reader who can devote only so much time per day to the book. New and other central characters who don’t get their own subsections weave their way through the plot as well. The plot soars through theology, politics, love and identity, and Lake does a reasonable job of tying together most of the loose ends, though he is not above leaving a few of them dangle or resolving them with rather swift brutality on occasion. This is the weakest of the three books in this series, but still a very good book.
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Absurdistan (Gary Shteyngart)
Misha Vainberg is a Russian Jew stranded in Leningrad when this novel opens. He’s fat (a fact to which he alludes on nearly every page of this 1st-person narrative), wealthy, and the son of Boris Vainberg – noted Jewish dissident from Soviet times, gangster in the post-Soviet era, and 1,238th richest man in Russia. Misha just wants to go back to New York, his home for years before the novel opens and the place where his girlfriend lives, but the Americans won’t let him back in the country because his father killed an Oklahoma businessman. So he sits in Russia with his American expatriate friend Alyosha-Bob, bemoaning his fate. When his father is assassinated it sets off a wild and chaotic chain of events that eventually leaves him in Absurdistan, a former Soviet republic on the Caspian Sea where Misha plans to buy a Belgian passport and use it to get back to New York. But when the Absurdis fall into perhaps the most inept and cynical civil war ever perpetrated things spiral out of control even further and Misha finds himself stranded once again. This is indeed an absurd novel, part Catch-22, part Portnoy’s Complaint, parts of many things, deliberately ironic and off-kilter, and at times very funny (the grant application Misha writes to try to get a Holocaust museum built in Absurdistan is priceless). There is a lot of sex in here, much of which is accompanied by a great deal of overthinking on everyone’s part, and a fair bit of violence. One of the more interesting running jokes of the book is the off-stage character Jerry Shteynfarb – clearly modeled on the author and treated with dripping contempt throughout. It’s a strange novel and inextricably bound up with its Russian Jewish point of view, but a fun one.
True Brews (Emma Christensen)
This is a recipe book and a guide to making hard cider, mead, sake, and other fermented beverages at home. It’s pretty straightforward, really – there’s a general introduction, written in the relentlessly perky style of someone who has an obsession they’d like you to share, followed by several sections of recipes. Each section starts with an interview with a professional in that particular field, followed by a base recipe and then a number of variations. One of my goals this summer was to learn how to make mead, so this may or may not have been a good book to have, depending on whether I ended up destroying the house or not.
Futureshocks (Lou Anders, ed.)
There is only so much dystopian science fiction you can read before it all begins to blend together. This is especially true for short stories, which simply don’t have the room to maneuver that they need to differentiate themselves from the herd. Thus this collection. Each story is set in a world not that far removed from ours in time, space, and/or culture, but with a few things amped up or altered to provide a grim future for the story to occur within. Each story is well written, nicely plotted, and generally of the high quality that you would expect in an anthology edited by Anders. And none of them are particularly memorable. They slide from one to the other, interesting enough to read but not incisive enough to get past the level of general entertainment. Perhaps some of them may one day be expanded into a novel-length story, and at that time they might become more individual. I’d read them then.
Wolf et al v. Walker et al (Barbara B. Crabbe)
I’m never sure whether to include judicial decisions in these reports, but then it’s my list and I can do what I want with it. This is the decision of the US District Court for Western Wisconsin that overturned the Wisconsin laws and constitutional amendments banning gay marriage. There has been quite a kerfluffle over this decision, as you would expect, but my guess is that few if any of the people loudly protesting the idea of civil rights for gay people have actually read what they’re protesting about, and thus it is my considered opinion that they can shut up now. I’ve read it. It is a carefully considered, fairly cautious decision that simply notes that the “defendants are making the same mistake as the Court in Bowers when they frame the question in this case as whether there is a “right to same-sex marriage” instead of whether there is a right to marriage from which same-sex couples can be excluded. … The question is whether the scope of that right may be restricted depending on who is exercising the right.” And the answer, of course, is no it may not. Constitutional rights are not subject to the whims of legislatures or rogue regimes, no matter how far they have subverted the machinery of state government.
Doctor Who: Volume 1: Fugitive (Tony Lee [writer], Al Davison and Matthew Dow Smith [art])
A friend of mine bought us an entire raft of Doctor Who graphic novels as part of a Humble Bundle promo, so despite the fact that I’m not much of a comic book reader I figured I’d download them and try them. This is the first volume, and it was an entertaining read. The Doctor (clearly David Tennant’s 10th Doctor) finds himself in 1920s Hollywood, where things quickly go wrong and he ends up in a rigged interstellar court headed for a bad end. There are adventures galore – and not a few silent film references – and then it all ends with the sort of cliffhanger that you would expect it would. It’s a colorful story and reads quickly, but I suspect that the best part of it is a bit wasted on me – I’m the sort of person who reads the words and barely skims over the artwork, and I would not be surprised if I missed a few critical things. But it was fun, and I’ll get to the rest of them eventually.
One Summer: America, 1927 (Bill Bryson)
The title of this book is somewhat misleading. While Bryson maintains a focus on the events of the summer of 1927 – a busy summer, by all accounts – he mostly uses it as a prism to examine the US throughout the tumultuous decade of the 1920s. And the sections – organized by month and theoretically focused on a specific individual (Charles Lindbergh, Babe Ruth, Calvin Coolidge, Sacco and Vanzetti) – actually double back on each other and contain all sorts of digressions into other figures such as Philo T. Farnsworth and Kennesaw Mountain Landis. All this is to the good, though. If you’re looking for a light, fun, fascinating history of the 1920s you should pick up this book immediately. It’s typical of Bryson’s style – full of dry humor and “wow, I didn’t know that!” facts that even this professional historian found surprising now and then – and you will emerge from it both enlightened and entertained.
Various textbooks previewed for 20th-Century History Class (note: each of these I read about 100-200 pages of before making a decision and moving on to the next book)
The Long Shadow: The Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century (David Reynolds)
This book seemed to promise a general analysis of how WWI – by any account the single most important event of the 20th century – shaped and determined nearly everything that came after it. But it was heavily focused on the UK and, honestly, rather plodding – it never really seemed to get started. So I set it aside and went to look for other, more useful things.
The Oxford History of the 20th Century (Michael Howard and Wm. Roger Louis, eds.) 1
This had an interesting thematic approach but at the expense of a useful structure for the class. Plus a book that is well over 300 pages of agate type is both intimidating to students and hard on the professor’s eyes. Possibly useful as supplementary reading, if I scan and enlarge it.
A History of the Twentieth Century (Martin Gilbert)
The polar opposite of the Oxford History, it has almost no thematic history whatsoever – indeed, it is little more than a catalogue of events, one after the other, for over 700 pages (impressive, considering this is actually “the concise edition” of the original work). At first this is rather dull, but as you read along it acquires a certain narrative force.
The Crowfield Curse (Pat Walsh)
William is a lay brother at the Crowfield Abbey in mid-14th-century England – an orphan taken in by the monks in exchange for his labor. One day out in the woods he comes across an injured hob – a fay creature, normally invisible to humans – and takes it back to the abbey for treatment. Somehow this gets tangled up in a different story of an angel buried in the forest centuries earlier after a confrontation with the Dark King of the fay, an angel sought by the mysterious Jacobus Bone and his companion Shadlock. There’s a lot of moving pieces in this YA novel, and Lauren and I enjoyed it together as a bedtime story. It leaves a lot of room for a sequel, and perhaps we will seek it out.
Who Fears Death (Nnedi Okorafor)
In a desert Africa sometime in a future not too far from ours but far enough that today is neither remembered nor missed, the Nuru people are exterminating the Okeke. Out of a brutal Nuru rape of an Okeke woman comes a half-blood, an Ewu, named Onyesonwu (which translates to the title). Onye, as she is called, will be an outcast, a sorceress, and – eventually – a figure of great power. In this book she will discover who she is, why she is, and what it means to rewrite the Great Book. This is a violent, intense, passionate story full of life and death, sex and rage, magic and physical reality. It is a story that deals head on with issues such as rape, female genital mutilation, and genocide, but also with love, friendship, and loyalty. It is a story that will stay with you, and – while not for everyone, perhaps – it is a story that deserves every award it has won. Okorafor’s voice is rich, vibrant, and deep. The story of Onyesonwu, Mwita, Luyu, Dita and Binta carries the reader across the African deserts, though a cultural landscape few Americans understand, and into a place that rewards close reading. One of the best books I’ve read in a while.
A Tourist Guide to Lancre (Terry Pratchett, Stephen Briggs and Paul Kidby)
After the intense experience of Who Fears Death, I decided I needed something light, and what could fit that bill better than a few Discworld Mapps. This one covers Lancre, the mountainside kingdom whose main export is witches. It comes with a handsome map (or mapp, as the title insists) and a small booklet introducing the place as written by Gytha Ogg (one of the Lancre witches) and Eric Wheelbrace, a parody of the sort of English gentleman whose main joy in life is walking through the countryside and across the rights of way that he insists exist wherever he wants to walk. It’s a fun little book.
Death’s Domain (Terry Pratchett and Paul Kidby) )
Very much like A Tourist Guide to Lancre, this booklet-and-mapp collection focuses on the house and land of Death, who lives outside of time and space, thus making this mapp a bit more conceptual than most. It’s hard to describe a place that exists mostly because its resident insists that it should (what need has Death of a bathroom, for example? – this gives the bathroom a certain “almost but not quite” quality perhaps best exemplified by towels that are rock hard but are there because bathrooms should have towels. The character of Death has always been one of my favorites in Discworld, in part because of his gently mystified view of humanity and in part because of his willingness to be exactly who he is.
The Compleat Ankh-Morpork City Guide (Terry Pratchett)
If you’ve ever seen a 19th-century city guide – the kind that nearly all American cities of any size at all issued nearly annually in those days before telephone directories – you’ll know exactly what this book looks like. It is a comprehensive guide to the leading city of the Discworld, complete with a large (roughly 30” square) and detailed double-sided map of the city. The city guide includes long sections discussing lodgings, pubs and restaurants, clubs and societies, temples, guilds, and so on, as well as an exceedingly fine-grained street index and a long directory of merchants of every kind. All of these sections – even the street index – are annotated and speak to a depth of creation unusual in any secondary world. Plus, if you look carefully, there are all sorts of references and jokes ranging from allusions to the Discworld novels (Ronnie Soak is listed in the merchant directory as a dairyman with no further explanation given) and beyond (there are apparently two goldsmiths in Ankh-Morpork: a Mrs. Niebelungsson and a Mr. Sauron [“rings resized”]). It is a strangely absorbing book that way.
Under the Shadow: The Atomic Bomb and Cold War Narratives (David Seed)
What is it about literary theory that turns fascinating subjects into dreary slogs? This should have been a much more interesting book than it was. Seed looks at some of the atomic bomb fiction that was produced in the second half of the 20th century (nobody could possibly look at it all – believe me, I’ve tried) and tries to fit it into a larger framework of the Cold War. He does a nice job of introducing a number of works, some of them more famous (those, such as Fail-Safe, he tends to hang chapters on) and others less so (often used as examples to flesh out the chapters, though Mordechai Roshwald’s now-neglected Level 7 does get a chapter of its own). And he has a lot to say about them. But even for this historian who teaches a class on the atomic bomb and who reads thoroughly in the subgenre of science fiction under discussion here (few of the books Seed mentions were new to me), this was a heavy and often ponderous book to read.
The Magician King (Lev Grossman)
Quentin Coldwater and his friends Eliot, Janet, and Julia, are now kings and queens of Fillory, the magical world they managed to break into in Grossman’s first book in this series (The Magicians). It was a costly victory, but they have now settled into lives of ease and luxury. Naturally, Quentin is restless. When an encounter with the Seeing Hare goes horribly wrong, he decides to go on a voyage to the Outer Island, for no other reason than the fact that it isn’t just hanging around the castle doing what he’s been doing, which hasn’t been much. And at that point things get complicated. There are side trips to Earth and to the Neitherworlds – a portal plane between worlds – and a long quest to collect seven golden keys that will save magic and, with it, Fillory itself. But there is a cost to this. The hero is not the one who triumphs, Grossman says several times in the book. The hero is the one who pays. Woven throughout this novel in alternating chapters is the backstory of Julia and how she became one of this group without going to Brakebills, the school of magic that provided entry into this world for Quentin and most of his friends. Julia’s story is dark, painful and angry, a bleak counterpoint to Quentin’s life, and is as much a focus of this novel as Quentin’s own story. A minor character in The Magicians, Julia is in fact a far more compelling figure here than Quentin, though he has matured and deepened also. And when it all converges at the end, as it must, the hero is indeed the one who pays. Yes, there is magic, Grossman says, but it is neither pleasant nor free and those who tangle with power must pay the price whether they win or lose. A much more complex, nuanced, and thoughtful book than The Magicians, this is the rare middle volume of a trilogy that easily surpasses its predecessor and recasts it in more a more favorable light.
The Toyminator (Robert Rankin)
Reading Robert Rankin is the literary equivalent of eating cheesecake – very good but very rich, and not something you’re going to do as often as you think you will when you start. Some authors are potato chip writers – you can snork down book after book. Others, like Rankin, you read one book at a time and then take a break. This is because Rankin writes with such density and has such fun with the language. His dialogue is wry and often absurd. His plots are thick with detail. And his books teem with references unhighlighted that the aware may enjoy and the unaware pass over. In this book – the sequel to The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse – there is trouble in Toytown. Former mayor Eddie (a talking teddy bear) and his human (“meathead”) sidekick Jack reunite to form their old private investigation team and are immediately drawn into a web of crime and deceit that will eventually lead them through the portal and into a version of Los Angeles that has clearly been set up as a jaundiced Englishman’s takedown of American culture – everything from television and movies to UFOs and a cutting satire of the American Dream. Plus, there are evil chickens. It’s a hard plot to explain and really there is no need – the joy of Rankin is in the writing and the ideas.
Fish (Gregory Mone)
Maurice – Fish, to everyone including his parents – lives on a farm in Ireland sometime in the indeterminate past when horses drove agriculture and pirates roamed the Atlantic. His family is poor and Fish hates farming, so when the family horse dies and he is sent to the city to be a messenger boy for his Uncle Gerry, it’s almost a blessing for him. But when a delivery goes terribly wrong, Fish finds himself pressed into the crew of the Scurvy Mistress, where he learns to become a pirate. This will involve making a few friends among those of similar age in the crew (Daniel, Nate, and Nora), figuring out a mystery that has eluded Captain Cobb, and trying to survive a mutiny among the crew. It’s a fast-moving and generally good-hearted YA novel that Lauren and I enjoyed reading together at bedtime, and we were sorry to see it end.
The Penguin History of the 20th Century (JM Roberts)
After having read a number of these histories for my class this fall, this was clearly the best of the bunch and the only one I managed to read all the way to the end. Granted, this may be damning with faint praise, but still. Roberts is a good writer and his chapters are well organized and can sustain longer arguments than simply “This happened which made that happen.” I did actually learn a lot, and once in a while – once in a very great while – he’d sneak in something funny, in an exceedingly dry British sort of way. I can assign this book to my students without regret. The fact that this is a British book had some other interesting consequences as well. The US is not the center of attention, for one thing. And one of his running themes is the declining importance of faith and religion in the Western world, an argument that can only be made outside of the US and which shows just how bizarre the US is on that score compared with other similar nations.
And If I Perish: Frontline US Army Nurses in World War II (Eveylyn M. Monahan and Roesmary Neidel-Greenlee)
US Army nurses served in all of the major campaigns in the ETO during WWII, but received little recognition for it. Their rank was honorary only. They were paid half what the men were paid. They were not counted as veterans until the 1980s. This book seeks to bring their service back to the forefront, and it does a very nice job of it. Based on archival research and interviews with many surviving nurses, it runs through the North Africa campaign, the invasion of Italy (Anzio was particularly hellish), the Normandy invasion, and the conquest of Germany, as seen through the eyes of the nurses. It is filled with compelling details and stories, and by the end you find yourself with a new perspective on WWII, which for a professional historian is sometimes a difficult thing to achieve.
Imperfect Birds (Anne Lamott)
I’m not really sure why this book didn’t do much for me. I normally enjoy Anne Lamott’s writing, and the story was well told. Rosie is a teenager. Her mother and stepfather care for her but don’t really understand her problems, and her problems are getting out of hand. I suppose there would have been further explanation and resolution had I continued, but having just finished a long book I was required to read, slogging through another one that didn’t do much for me that wasn’t actually required didn’t appeal to me, so I stopped. It was good, though, so perhaps I may get back to it when I am in a more receptive mood.
The Human Division (John Scalzi)
In this installment of Scalzi’s Old Man’s War universe, things are not right in the human part of the galaxy. The Earth is not happy about the fact that the Colonial Union had kept them in the dark about so much of the rest of the universe for so long and used them as a breeding pool for colonists and farmers. The Colonial Union, while contrite, is not happy about having to deal with an Earth that remains fractious, suicidally self-interested, and generally unable to grasp any larger point about the universe at all. Meanwhile the Conclave – an alliance of some 400 of the 600-700 known alien species – is working to limit humanity’s reach, and possibly destroy it altogether. Into this comes “the B team” – Ambassador Abumwe, of the Colonial Union diplomatic corps, and her assistants and attached personnel, notably Hart Wilson, Lt. Harry Wilson of the Colonial Defense Forces, and – eventually, Captain Sophia Coloma of the Clarke. There will be plots, twists, skullduggery, and action aplenty in what is clearly part one of a longer story. It’s typical Scalzi – well written, fast-paced, light reading, with a few nods to a larger 21st-century humanistic morality and a few more to the golden age of science fiction (tm), circa 1960. It’s not the most profound thing I’ve ever read, but it was a lot of fun.
Mainspring (Jay Lake)
Hethor Jacques is a man with a problem. A clockmaker’s apprentice in New Haven, Connecticut, he has just been visited by the Archangel Gabriel who has commanded him to find the Key Perilous and wind the Mainspring of the world. On a planet where the earth is visibly clockwork – where the brass gears of God spin the planet along its track by meshing with the Great Southern Wall along the equator – this is no small charge. Hethor’s journey will take him far from New Haven – to Boston, where he will meet the Viceroy who, even in 1900, rules America in the name of the British crown; to Her Majesty’s Ship of the Air Basset, a Royal Navy fighting airship; and – eventually – to the Great Southern Wall itself. Along the way he will find friendship and enemies where he least expects them, learn about a world more complex and troubled than he ever imagined, and maybe, just maybe, find love in the bargain. Lake’s clockwork world is made of brass and oil and no small amount of sweat – it is a steampunk vision of faith and politics, complete with a Brass Christ and a theological argument that runs its entire length. I bought this because it looked interesting, but held off reading it until he finished the series. When Lake died recently I went back and checked and, sure enough, he had. So now I have all three volumes, and all I can do is regret that he won’t be around to write more fascinating stories like this one.
Escapement (Jay Lake)
Hethor Jacques does not appear in this second installation of the Mainspring universe, except once or twice in passing reference. Instead, the focus of attention shifts to three other characters – two returning faces from Mainspring, both minor characters in that book, and one new one. Thus we greet again Chief Petty Office Threadgill Angus al-Wazir, late of Her Majesty’s Ship of the Air Bassett and now tasked with the unenviable mission of keeping watch over Doctor Ottweill, a mad and maddening engineering genius whom the British government has commissioned to drill a hole in the miles-high Wall that girdles the Earth at the equator. Thus also we meet Emily McHenry Childress, Librarian at Yale and the person who sent Hethor on his way several years earlier. Through a series of actions she will end up on a Chinese submarine masquerading as a much more important person than she actually is and hoping that she can stave off a dire threat to the world. And, most intriguingly, we meet Paolina Barthes, a teenaged girl growing up on the Wall (a Muralha, in her native Portuguese). Paolina is a genius, a wonderworker, and an independent spirit who has had it Up To Here with the shiftless, brutal men who run her little village. When she creates a Gleam – a mechanical device that allows her to tap into the rhythms of Lake’s clockwork world – she flees her village and sets off a chain of events that will eventually draw all of the characters into the larger narrative. Fast-paced, fascinating, and a good set-up for the third volume of this series.
Pinion (Jay Lake)
The cast increases severalfold in this concluding volume of the Mainspring universe, and the action spreads out across the globe. Paolina, Childress, and al-Wazir are all back for more and Hethor Jacques makes a reappearance as well. Other old characters – Kitchens, Boaz – reappear as well, promoted to major character status, and new major characters (Wang, Gashansunu) appear as well. There are a lot of balls in the air, in other words, and only once – and only for about half a chapter – are they all in the same place at the same time. Mostly the reader is left to follow their adventures separately, each with their own subtitled sections of chapters, as the action gradually builds to a conclusion. The major empires of the Northern World are now at war, and this sets in motion a dizzying array of plots, sideplots and counterplots – if there is a flaw in this book it is that the kaleidoscope of viewpoints obscures the narrative flow (the drilling project so central to the previous book is largely relegated to insignificance here) and does not reward a reader who can devote only so much time per day to the book. New and other central characters who don’t get their own subsections weave their way through the plot as well. The plot soars through theology, politics, love and identity, and Lake does a reasonable job of tying together most of the loose ends, though he is not above leaving a few of them dangle or resolving them with rather swift brutality on occasion. This is the weakest of the three books in this series, but still a very good book.
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