Dec 23 2014

Alias: Grace by Margaret Atwood

In the interest of disclosure, I have to say that I have never read a Margaret Atwood book that I didn’t like. There were some that disturbed me, made me think, made me wish such things didn’t exist to be written about, but I have always been glad for the experience. Part of her charm is that you’re never quite sure what you’re going to get next when you pick up a Margaret Atwood novel. Yes, she has themes that she likes to return to, but there’s always something new to look forward to as well.

Alias Grace: A Novel is a different approach for Margaret Atwood, and managed to surprise me yet again. This book is an unusual layering of true crime, focusing on the acts of Grace Marks, who was convicted of killing her employer and suspected of killing his housekeeper as well in 1843, in addition to a fictional story based on the story as it’s known now. Atwood skillfully weaves the two together so that you get the pacing of a modern true crime novel without ever losing the essence of the era in which all this occurred. The answer as to whether or not Grace Marks was a skillful murderess or an innocent dupe is never given, and eventually the novel ends with Grace being released from prison and disappearing in upstate New York.

I found this book both satisfying and not satisfying. It was satisfying in that it addressed a subject of interest in an unusual way, and made you feel the characters as they went through their moves in this drama. The unsatisfying part is that no one really knows if Grace Marks truly was a “celebrated murderess” or if she was just a 15-year old girl with the cards stacked against her from the beginning.

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Dec 22 2014

Nightmare Ink and Bound by Ink by Marcella Burnard

I was hesitant about these books, to be honest. There’s so much urban fantasy out there and new ideas seem difficult to come up with, or doing the old ideas with a new twist. I’m glad that I read both books, however. Marcella Burnard has managed to take tattoos, demons, magic, and evil angels, and put them into a new setting, one that’s interesting in itself, not just within the story. There are some tropes in there that will be familiar, but at this point in the genre’s history it’s almost impossible to avoid those. Overall I was pleasantly surprised with the story, which kept my interest and has me looking forward to the third book in the series. If you’re looking for a good way to spend a couple-three hours, these would be a good choice. The writing is still a little rough, but I can see that the author is going places with her world.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/12/22/nightmare-ink-and-bound-by-ink-by-marcella-burnard/

Dec 22 2014

The Hienama, Student of Kyme, and The Moonshawl, a trilogy by Storm Constantine

Anyone who is familiar with Storm Constantine‘s Wraeththu Chronicles will enjoy these books. The first two are much shorter than the last, which was just released, but together they make a whole picture from three points of view, and tell a story that is more than just a story. These books delve deep not only into the personalities of the main characters, but also into the history of the Wraeththu, or, to put it more accurately, into their future.

The beginning of the Wraeththu as the dominant race on Earth has been accomplished. Now all the various tribes across the globe are working to find their way to their future, and part of that is the friction between former humans who have been incepted into the Wraeththu, and those Wraeththu who are second generation and thus born into the race with not ever having been human or having had a human experience. On top of this is a decent sprinkling of emotion, and difficulties communicating with other people, and finding your own ground in a new world.

This trilogy exemplifies all of that in a beautifully written way. There is the Hienama, a priest of sorts (although the word doesn’t do justice to what a Hienama is capable of), whom, despite his talents and abilities, is still subject to the need to play mind games with people and lead them to places without ever taking responsibility for having done so. There is his student, who falls in love with him (as they often do), but this time Ysobi (the Hienama) decides to try a bond and to make it work. It is something like a difficult marriage with one partner having a wandering eye, but this is Wraeththu and so that’s not correct. (I’m afraid you’ll have to read the first books to get a good feeling for these differences.) Another student shows up, there are ructions, and Ysobi ends up leaving his chesnari (mate) and going to some place completely new, where he manages to find a completion to his story that he didn’t expect and didn’t truly felt like he deserved.

In human terms – powerful person with a less than robust sense of responsibility, love triangle, eventual redemption for all three, with none of the three ending up together. But, it is so much more than that and so much better than that. I love this universe that Storm Constantine has created and I read every bit of literature I can get my hands on. Also, I stalk her on Facebook (ok, not really, but I do read her posts with great interest).

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/12/22/the-hienama-student-of-kyme-and-the-moonshawl-a-trilogy-by-storm-constantine/

Dec 22 2014

Carniepunk: Daughter of the Midway, the Mermaid, and the Open Lonely Sea by Seanan McGuire

This was a short story by Seanan McGuire that was part of the Carniepunk anthology released last year (2013). It is, like all of Seanan McGuire’s/Mira Grant’s books, an absolutely delectable piece of writing. I realize that I’m verging on the edge of hyperbole, but truly I have yet to read anything by Seanan McGuire that didn’t please me. She covers such a variety of genres – Science Fiction/Fantasy, including her October Daye series which deals with the Fae in a modern world, to the Incryptid series, which is probably a cryptozoologist’s dream come true and has a gritty urban fantasy setting. Don’t leave the zombies out, though, because she’s written about those as well, in her Newsflesh trilogy. She’s also written about parasites gone awry in her Parasitology series, which I believe is loosely connected to the Newsflesh series.

And, now, here we are, with a short story that combines carnivals and mythical creatures in a beautiful, self-contained little snippet of wonder and curiosity. Ada has lived her entire life with the carnival, traveling across the country to various small towns and learning and loving the carnie life. She has a secret, though, one that she inherited from her mother, and when the carnival decides to stop in her father’s hometown in Alabama, well, things begin to happen. I won’t say more because this is a short story, and to say more would leave nothing for the reader to discover.

This story was perfect on its own. It caught my interest immediately, and I read about each character avidly, waiting to find out what was happening to everyone and how things would turn out. The ending was satisfactory for a short story, but it did leave me wanting more. I would love to see a series about Ada and her carnie family someday.

I highly recommend reading this short story, or even buying the entire anthology if you enjoy carnivals and steampunk and things that go bump in the night.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/12/22/carniepunk-daughter-of-the-midway-the-mermaid-and-the-open-lonely-sea-by-seanan-mcguire/

Dec 20 2014

Horseman (The Hollow #1) by Christopher Golden and Ford Lytle Gilmore

Interesting take on the Sleepy Hollow/Headless Horseman mythology that was undermined by serious plot holes and obvious plot devices. The book is written in a very cinematic manner, and clearly serves as the lead-in to a series, but I spent way too much time being annoyed with Aimee and then with the writers for so obviously shoe-horning the characters into dramatic action scenes instead of letting them develop in a way that felt unforced. Not a piece of YA literature I would recommend to anyone who isn’t looking for a fast, slight read a/o a twist on the traditional Sleepy Hollow tales.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/12/20/horseman-the-hollow-1-by-christopher-golden-and-ford-lytle-gilmore/

Dec 19 2014

Persian Fire by Tom Holland

I have read other books on the Greco-Persian wars, but this was the most readable account I have come across, and the rendering of the battle of Thermopylae was the best I have ever read. The courage and resourcefulness of the Greeks is well documented, but the author also gives the Persians their due, arguing that they were by no means the ignoble barbarians that the Greeks and later western historians have regarded them as. Indeed, if one regards the outcome of wars as manifesting the will of God, one might well wonder why God sided with the pagan, homosexual Greeks against the monotheistic, heterosexual Persians. Persia was a great civilization in its own right, and deserves more respect than jingoistic western scholars have afforded it. Nevertheless, the preservation of Greek freedom and autonomy was undoubtedly a boon to the West, one which we still benefit from today. We Westerners are all the heirs of Thermopylae.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/12/19/persian-fire-by-tom-holland/

Dec 18 2014

Oryx and Crake – Margaret Atwood

Let’s face it, Oryx and Crake is not a book you’d read for the plot. I mean, it’s there, vaguely. Mankind wiped from the world, a new species there to take its place. It is a story of what leads up to the end of man, and what it means to be alive afterwards.

 

I am a post-apocalyptic junkie. I love stories of devastation and chaos, of struggle and despair. And there is enough in Snowman’s story to fulfil that desire for me. He is a man alone, in a world that no longer fits him, that he has a hard time surviving in. But it becomes clear that the world itself has no changed. Instead it is the absence of a society that cushioned and contained them all. Gone are the climate controlled homes, the mass produced food, the image of security.

 

But what the world became was secondary to what the world had been. And this, with my love of deep thought, is where my enjoyment of the book lay. There are questions that Atwood gives a particular version of answer to in this first book of the MaddAddam trilogy.

 

What happens to a world overpopulated with dwindling resources?

  • Is genetically created food substances a solution?
  • Do people become chattel?
  • Is sterilisation and population control the only answer?

What happens when sexual and government violence becomes normalised?

  • Do we always search for a greater thrill?
  • Is violence then entertainment?

There aren’t answers to these ideas in the book, this isn’t a moral telling. There are no solutions, no heroic journey to enlightenment. What makes it so stark and disturbing to me is how normal it seemed to those living it. How slowly we as a society lose our inhibitions, lose the shock until it becomes blasé.

 

Did I care about Snowman, Crake and Oryx? No not especially. I didn’t even really care what the cataclysm turned out to be, and only had a passing interest in Snowman’s survival in the world afterwards. But what caught and held my attention were the lives of rather mundane people surviving in a world where the harsh desolate reality was viewed as the norm. Snowman, or Jimmy as he was back then was just a regular person, neither a hero or a villain. And it was his averageness that contributed to the normality of the horrible.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/12/18/oryx-and-crake-margaret-atwood/

Dec 18 2014

Odessa by Charles King

What I liked most about Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams is how clearly Charles King tells the early stories of Odessa’s founding. For while there had been a small settlement at the site under khans and Ottomans,

none of the extant written records gives an unambiguous account of long-term settlement [at Odessa’s site]. Other modern cities on or near the Black Sea—the grimy port of Constanta in Romania, the storied Russian naval station at Sevastopol, and the jewel of the Black Sea world, Istanbul—all have ancient pedigrees. Beneath modern concrete and asphalt lie Greek, Roman, and Byzantine ruins. But Odessa has none of this. The site had little to offer beyond a bay open to harsh northeasterly winds. When you see the city from a cruise ship or ferry, you are looking at a recent creation, a place that for two hundred years has both reveled in and regretted the fact that it has no history. p. 25

That last phrase is also as succinct a statement of King’s view of the city’s genius loci as the book has to offer. Given a nearly blank slate, statesmen and entrepreneurs of the late Russian Empire created a city that was free of the burdens of history, one that to greater extent than other Russian cities gave a home to minorities (particularly Jews), and one that was simultaneously an expression of commercial needs (for a port in the region) and an example of what the concentrated power of will and empire could create.
Continue reading

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Dec 17 2014

Watership Down by Richard Adams

I’m deeply troubled by the thought that my young adolescent self was not as hard-hearted as I’ve always believed. See, I first read Watership Down while either 11 or 12, on a family vacation, and I remember bawling my eyes out at some point near the end, thereby casting a pall on the rest of the holiday. So when I thought to re-read this, I braced myself for tragedy… only there isn’t any really, or at least none that I can understand as being sufficiently traumatic to myself at that age. Perhaps I hadn’t yet experienced epic drama of its sort before, and was more emotionally invested in the fate of the warren than I was used to feeling with fictional characters. Decades later, I’m a bit disconcerted to find that my memory has served me so poorly, though this book once again reinforces my belief that certain books should be read at a certain point in one’s life. Watership Down is a good, entertaining novel now, but it was a devastatingly excellent one to me as a child.

Oh, and Bigwig is still the greatest.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/12/17/watership-down-by-richard-adams/

Dec 16 2014

A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

I just finished this book, and now I am almost speechless. I laughed out loud through the first half of it, which now seems irreverent and almost blasphemous considering the way it turned out, but about halfway through it I perceived that it was heading toward some kind of mysterious and profound resolution, and after that it stopped being funny and became heart-wrenching. This book is an extraordinary creation that in its own homespun way tackles some of the deepest issues of existence, without ever descending into ponderousness or pretentiousness. There is, of course, a strong dose of the author’s liberal politics sprinkled throughout, but the author, or at least the narrator, has the good taste not to take himself too seriously, and the contempt he pours on the self-righteousness of the ’60’s antiwar movement is obviously sincere and unfeigned. But this book is so much more than merely political; it is one of the most profound expressions of spirituality I have ever read. This is undoubtedly the opus magnus of one of the most gifted novelists of our time.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/12/16/a-prayer-for-owen-meany-by-john-irving/