And now the exciting conclusion!
--
Early Riser (Jasper Fforde)
This
one hadn’t actually come out in the US when I read it – we found it at
the Science Fiction Bookstore in Stockholm when we were there in August
and Kim was willing to schlep it across the Atlantic, and a good thing
too because it’s a fun book. Charles Worthing is about to become a
Winter Consul – one of the hardy band of misfits, loners, and
short-lived caretakers who watch over most of the human race as they
hibernate through the long and bitterly cold winters. This is a world
where much of Britain is simply unsurvivable in the winter unless you
hibernate, and the occasional asides about global cooling only reinforce
that. The story starts on a train, flashes back to how he got into
that situation, and then moves quickly forward into a deeply noirish and
not a little surreal mystery of financial crime, murder, identity, and
dreams. Tasked with bringing a nightwalker – someone whose mind has
been damaged beyond repair by the miracle drug that allows most people
these days to survive hibernation by suppressing their dreams – into
Sector 12, in an alternative version of Wales, Charles finds himself
embraced by the weirdness of that sector (the Wintervolk, Villains,
fellow Consuls, Hibertech employees, and something called the Gronk,
which may or may not be mythical) and constantly turned around as he
seeks to get to the bottom of whatever is going on around him. There is a
viral dream going around, and when Charles starts to have it – and when
bits of it seem to be coming true in his waking life – it draws him
deeper and deeper into the madness. The plot twists and turns, but much
of the fun of the book is Fforde’s trademark loopiness and humor – if
you enjoyed the Thursday Next books (as I did), you will enjoy this
one. I especially liked the quotes from histories and memoirs from this
world at the beginning of each chapter, which give the whole thing a
realistic kind of air until you think about it a bit. The book does
seem to be a one-off story, but perhaps Fforde will revisit that world
without having to worry about Charles.
Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World (Tim Marshall)
Geography
is making a comeback. For a long time it was fashionable in political
circles to downplay the impact of geography, but recently people have
come back around to the simple truth that where you stand depends a lot
on where you sit, and this is nowhere more true than in international
politics. Marshall does tend to err on the side of “when all you have
is a hammer, everything looks more or less like a nail” with his
analysis, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have important things to
say. And his basic point is this: modern nations work within the limits
of what their geography allows and paying attention to that will help
you figure out why they do things and why that isn’t going to change.
As he says, since the formation of the Russian state it has been
bedeviled by the same problems of defensible frontiers, and a thousand
years from now whatever entity inherits the mantle of the modern Russian
state will still have to deal with that problem. His ten maps are
nothing special – simply geographical maps of various regions – but he
goes through them and lists such challenges as ease of internal
transportation, resources, climate, ocean access, and yes, defensible
frontiers, and how these have impacted the nations within those
regions. Russia is the most obvious example of how his analysis can be
useful, followed by the United States and perhaps Latin America. In
other regions he tends to fall back on description and let the analysis
slide. Either way, though, it’s a useful thing to think about if
international relations, economics, or strategy are interesting to you.
The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O (Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland)
The
thing about collaborative novels is that so often you can imagine the
collaborators gathered around a table piled high with beer bottles and
the remains of vast meals, egging each other on to greater and greater
heights of absurdity in between gales of helpless laughter. Sometimes
(hello, Charles Stross and Cory Doctorow and
The Rapture of the Nerds!)
this just gets you a literary mess. Other times you find yourself
drawn into the fun. This is one of those other times. At the outset of
the novel, Dr. Melisandre Stokes is a put-upon adjunct instructor in
the Harvard University Department of Ancient and Classical Linguistics –
struggling with her classes and her pompously dismissive Chair, Dr.
Roger Blevins, who is a poster child for both academic misogyny and
Dunning-Kruger Syndrome. Quickly she meets Tristan Lyons, who – he
later explains to her – works for “a shadowy government agency” that
could use her talents. It turns out that magic once worked and had a
long and open history but began to fade during the Enlightenment before
fizzling out entirely in 1851. Since then its very existence has been
suppressed. Tristan wants Mel to work on uncovering that history and
then – once it has been uncovered (no great spoiler, really) – to set up
the Department of Diachronic Operations (DODO) – a top-secret US
military organization dedicated to using magic for its own ends. They
recruit allies – Erszebet Karpathy (a Hungarian witch), Frank and
Rebecca Oda, and a few others – and soon they have embarked on the main
plot engine of the book: using time travel to alter history in ways
advantageous to the US government. This works for a while and then,
inevitably, things get fouled up. The novel is, more than anything
else, a cautionary tale of how immense technologies can be turned
against their wielders, how bureaucratization and militarization blind
people to inevitable consequences, and how competing loyalties and
people working at cross purposes can turn a manageable problem into a
crisis faster than anyone involved might think possible. It’s an
enjoyably written book, told in a semi-epistolary style that encompasses
diary entries, incident reports, email exchanges, and even at one point
a medieval-style lay. It pulls you along nicely, even if it does end
rather abruptly, as if the food and beer had run out and the authors
suddenly remembered they needed to return to their normal lives. They
do make it obvious that there will (or at least they plan that there
will) be future volumes in the DODO saga, so I will look forward to
them.
An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (Hank Green)
April
May – design student, self-proclaimed dairy-equipment heiress,
social-media-savvy young person scrambling to survive in New York City
with her lousy job and small but cozy social circle – is about to make
First Contact. While walking down the street at 3am she finds a giant
robot, whom she names Carl. And since she is the first one to say
anything about it on social media, she becomes the spokesperson for what
turns out are a lot of Carls, all of whom appeared simultaneously in
many of the major cities on Earth. April’s story is one of public
relations and identity in a world driven by “likes” and internet
content, and it takes its toll. On the one hand, she finds fame and
fortune. On the other, it wreaks havoc on her life, gets her tangled up
in national security, and spawns an equally media-savvy hate group
dedicated to destroying her. This engagingly written first novel is a
thinly-veiled satire of modern American cultural politics, and it is
clear which side Green favors (full disclosure: the same one I find
myself on, if I have read this correctly) even if he does have the grace
to make April a deeply flawed and occasionally maddening (if
sympathetic) heroine. Who are we, Green asks, and how will we survive
each other? Green ends this book on a note which clearly suggests that
there is a sequel coming, which would be interesting to read. This book
was an unlooked-for gift from a past student, and it was a lovely thing
to receive. Thank you!
Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook (Anthony Bourdain)
With
every book of his that I read or reread I miss Anthony Bourdain more.
His was a unique voice, willing to call out the bullshit that permeates
modern life – even, or perhaps especially, when he was the source of
some of it – and to celebrate that which should be celebrated. This is a
collection of short pieces about various things that set him off enough
to write about them, and if you like Bourdain this is the sort of thing
you’ll like. Perhaps my favorite bit is the last story, where he walks
through some of the people we met in
Kitchen Confidential and
lets us know Where They Are Now – as a historian, I find that sort of
thing irresistible. But mostly it’s about food and those who prepare
it, and you should read this and all of his books.
No Touch Monkey (And Other Travel Lessons Learned Too Late) (Ayun Halliday)
For
all that she is a good writer, Ayun (pronounced “Ann”) Halliday would
probably be a miserable travel companion. Entitled, obtuse,
overprivileged, and full of the Romantic obsession with Authenticity at
the expense of enjoyment or even civility toward the string of traveling
companions who populate these chapters, she tries to pass off her
trials and tribulations as humorous learning experiences but mostly I
learned what a chore it can be to get through a short book, even one as
well written as this one. The chapters are arranged by lesson in
roughly chronological order and track her adventures in places where one
can travel cheaply as an American (mostly in Africa and southern Asia).
She is accompanied by a string of boyfriends, miscellaneous companions,
and on one occasion her mother, and she spends most of the time longing
for, well, something other than what she has. She has adventures, gets
sick, meets people, schemes to meet other people, and rarely seems glad
to be there. She travels lightly – usually with just a backpack – and
on the cheap (she is constantly referring to how little money she has,
even thousands of miles from home in exotic locales), and because I
spent most of the book wanting to throw wet noodles at her I likely
missed most of what the back cover promised me would be an abundance of
humor. Oh well.
Odds Against Tomorrow (Nathaniel Rich)
Mitchell
Zukor is an analyst. Fairly early in this intriguing novel he gets
recruited out of his comfortable but frustrating job to be the lead
researcher, primary salesman, and second employee for FutureWorld – a
company that specializes in presenting worst-case scenarios to other
companies as a way to help their clients escape liability for them,
which is a growth industry after the destruction of Seattle by
earthquake early in the book. He’s very good at his job, and it suits
his personality very well – a personality defined by obsession, fear,
and an odd free-floating sort of mania. He’s also exchanging letters
with an old college friend, Elsa Bruner, whose health is defined by a
“could die any time without warning” condition that Mitchell finds
strangely compelling. When New York City is overtaken by an actual
worst-case scenario, he and FutureWorld’s third employee, Jane, end up
on an odyssey of their own, trying to survive in a shattered city and
working to find Elsa on her commune in Maine. Eventually it all ends up
back in a recovering New York, where Mitchell, at least, embarks on
what might be a new life. It’s a well written novel full of loose ends
(the framing device, the fate of his FutureWorld boss Alec Charnoble or
Mitchell’s parents – Hungarian refugees turned midwestern slumlords,
Jane’s career and future, for example, all of which dangle enticingly
without much resolution) and Elsa remains maddeningly offstage for
almost the entire novel, serving as an empty vessel for Mitchell’s hopes
and fears rather than a character in her own right. Ultimately, this
is a novel about fear and what it does to people, set against a backdrop
of climate change and ruthless capitalist opportunism. It’s a very
good book that I enjoyed a great deal, but it’s not a particularly
uplifting story.
Fugitives and Refugees (Chuck Palahniuk)
They
sell t-shirts in Portland, Oregon, that urge readers to “Keep Portland
Weird.” Chuck Palahniuk – who has lived in Portland since moving there
after graduating high school in 1980 – clearly enjoys the weirdness of
his adopted home city and in this brief travelogue he intersperses
chapters on interesting things to do and people to see in Portland with
what he calls “Postcards,” brief stories from his own life in Portland.
You learn about the offbeat, the odd, and the flat-out weird, much of
which has a warmth and humanity that gets left out of the official
stories. I’ve never been to Portland, but this made me want to go.
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (Claire North)
Harry
August is a kalachakra – an ouroboros. He is both mortal, for he lives
his life from beginning to end, ages, grows infirm, and dies, and
immortal, for when he dies he is immediately reborn, exactly in the time
and place where he first entered the world, only with all of his
memories and knowledge intact. In his case, he is born in 1919 in
England, the son of a serving girl who dies in childbirth. He is farmed
out to a local family, meets others of his kind (as well as a great
many “linears,” as the rest of us are labeled by the kalachakra
community), and usually lives into his 70s – not every life is exactly
the same each time through, but there are certain fixed points in time
that must be experienced, it seems. How does one live that kind of
life? It can be lonely, but that’s what the Chronos Club is for –
kalachakras across time have formed this secret society and by
navigating the chain of lives can pass messages backward and forward in
time. It can also be dangerous, especially when faced with people who
want to know the future, or the personal temptation to change the larger
timeline. At the very beginning of the novel a young girl cryptically
warns a dying Harry August that the world is ending, as it always does,
but faster. In this rambling autobiography (autobiographies?), Harry
recounts his first fifteen lives and how they ultimately relate to this
warning. It’s a fascinating take on time travel and human nature.
Washington Schlepped Here: Walking the Nation’s Capital (Christopher Buckley)
This, it turns out, is part of the same “let a famous author tell you about a famous city” series of books that
Fugitives and Refugees
belongs to, a fact I did not know until I was about halfway through it
and read the back cover more carefully. Buckley – a comic novelist
whose work I have enjoyed on several occasions (
The White House Mess,
Thank You For Smoking,
and so on) – is an engaging if unapologetically old-school-conservative
tour guide. You will be regaled with tales of The Glory That Was
Reagan throughout the book, and, much like his hero’s recollections
under oath, it can be difficult to tell which parts of Buckley's descriptions
of Washington DC are fiction and which are real. Buckley goes into the
history of the city and many of the monuments, much of which are soaked
in blood, and provides an interesting tour of the place. It’s not as
warm or humane as Palahniuk’s Portland, but then neither is Washington
itself.
Fire Watch (Connie Willis)
This
is my third try at starting Connie Willis’ Time Traveler series,
because I can never tell where it starts. This time I did a bit of
research, and I am now reasonably confident that it begins with this
“novelette” – really a short story. It’s a first-person narrative told
by a history student who is sent from late 21st-century Oxford
University back in time to 1940, to the Blitz in London. There he
arrives at St. Paul’s Cathedral with a cover story, a thoroughly
incomplete understanding of the culture and events (he was preparing to
be sent back to St. Paul – the disciple and founder of the Christian
Church), and no clear idea what his mission is. He meets a number of
people – notably Langby, whom he suspects of wanting to burn down the
cathedral, and Enola, a young woman whose romantic interest he
cluelessly spurns (are historians that stupid about these things even in
the late 21st century? I’d hoped we’d grow out of that as a group by
then). He spends his time trying to protect the cathedral during the
nightly bombings, and when he goes home to his own time he discovers a
few things about himself, his mission, and what the purpose of history
might be in his world. As an introduction, it served its purpose well
as now I am looking forward to the next part of the series.
Doomsday Book (Connie Willis)
It
takes a long time for this book to get rolling, but the payoff is worth
it in the end because it is a book that will stay with you. When the
story opens it’s 2055 in Oxford – Christmas break at the University –
and Mr. Gilchrist, the acting head of the history department, is about
to send one of his best students, Kivrin, back to the 14th century in
violation of pretty much every protocol that surrounds this process.
Gilchrist – the embodiment of academic careerism and self-centered
arrogance, whose only concern is how this will reflect on his part of
the department and his own professional advancement – has done none of
the preparatory work required to make this safe. Mr. Dunworthy, who has
vastly more experience with sending students back in time, is both
enraged and unable to prevent it. Once Kivrin goes through, the novel
splits into two tracks. In 21st-century Oxford there is an epidemic and
quarantine that shuts everything down and prevents Dunworthy from doing
anything to help, especially after Badri, the tech who actually ran the
drop, is struck down. In the 14th century Kivrin arrives already
deathly ill. She is taken in and looked after by the village priest,
Father Roche, and the lady of the manor, Eliwys. As Kivrin recovers she
gets to know Eliwys’ family – her waspish mother-in-law Imeyne, her
12-year-old daughter Rosemund (betrothed to the boorish Sir Bloet), and
her impish 5-year-old daughter Agnes – as well as others in the small
village, and she comes to know them as real people rather than just
historical constructs, and to care for them. And then, in a twist that
comes as no surprise if you’ve been paying attention, it becomes
clear to Kivrin that she has landed not in 1320, where she was supposed
to go, but in 1348, the year the “blue sickness” hit Oxford. As
Dunworthy works through the chaos and casualties of the 21st-century
epidemic to find a way to bring Kivrin back, Kivrin tries everything she
can to survive the Black Death (as it is known now) and help those
around her do so as well. “I wanted to come,” she says in a bleak
moment as the Plague claims more and more lives around her, “and if I
hadn’t, they would have been all alone, and nobody would have ever known
how frightened and brave and irreplaceable they were.” Ultimately, in
this novel as in the history, humanity and horror mix into a bittersweet
story of struggle, failure, and dogged perseverance.
To Say Nothing of the Dog (Connie Willis)
The
problem with time travel novels is that they are often hard to follow,
as characters jump back and forth across years or centuries and
timelines split, merge, or just get jumbled together like yarn, the
separate strands remaining distinct but tangled together just the same.
In the “present” of the historians, it is a couple of years after the
events of
Doomsday Book, and in this installment of the series
Willis moves from the stark horror and bittersweet clarity of the Black
Death to a more farcical sort of rolling 19th-century humor – something
that anyone who understands the reference in the title to Jerome K.
Jerome’s classic
Three Men in a Boat (mentioned explicitly in the
story several times) will get right away. Historian Ned Henry is being
run ragged by Lady Schrapnell – a bulldozer of an American whose
obsessive quest to restore Coventry Cathedral exactly as it was on the
day it was destroyed in World War II has taken over the entire Oxford
history department. In particular, she is trying to locate something
called “the bishop’s bird stump” – a uniquely ugly piece of Victorian
art that may or may not have stood in the cathedral at the time and
which played a large role in the life of one of her ancestors as well.
Exhausted, time-lagged, and only semi-coherent, Ned is sent back to 1888
for some rest and, if he can swing it, some searching for the bishop’s
bird stump. Not surprisingly he makes a hash of it, one that will
eventually involve Terence (an adventurous and lovesick college
student), Cyril (his companion, though not his love interest), Professor
Peddick (a don, forever nattering on about Character being the
motivating force of history), the Mering family (imperious Mrs. Mering,
gruff Col. Mering, and flighty Tossie Mering, the aforementioned
ancestor of Lady Schapnell), their resourceful butler Baine, and fellow
time-traveling historian Verity Kindle. Like all good farces there is a
never-ending swirl of entrances and exits, crises and resolutions, and
it all more or less works out in the end, though perhaps not as Ned
thought it would.
Blackout (Connie Willis)
It's
the mid-21st century and things are chaotic in Oxford. There are too
many historians trying to travel back in time and too few techs who can
get them there, and on top of that Dunworthy is rearranging everyone's
schedules without explanation. Eileen (Merope) ends up in northern
England as a servant minding evacuated children (including hellions Alf
and Binnie), Polly finds herself a shopgirl in London during the Blitz,
and Mike (Michael) ends up at Dunkirk as a war correspondent. But
events conspire against them, and they find themselves stuck in 1940,
unable to return to Oxford. They share the hardships and bond with the
"contemps" – nurses, shopgirls, vicars, captains, and so on. And they
fret – lawsey how they fret – about changing the course of history and
not being contacted by retrieval teams. They miss a lot, fretting, and
you begin to suspect that you do too. When they find each other, as you
know very well that they must, they fret some more, and then the book
comes to a stop – practically in mid-sentence – to be continued in
All Clear (which I didn’t finish until 2019). They are good people but obtuse, and as with
Doomsday Book
the characters that stand out are the locals, bravely going about their
lives without benefit of foreknowledge or hope of being retrieval to a
safer place. Willis is at her best when she gets out of her own way and
lets the story unfold rather than having the characters focus on the
mechanics of time travel, though for some reason those mechanics are the
center of the story she chose to write here. More of the locals and
how the historians try to understand them and less of retrieval teams
and the course of history would have made this a better book.
Total Books: 41
Total Pages: 14,903
Pages/day: 40.8
Happy Reading!
