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[roadrunnertwice]

The LURID and thrilling confessions of a real-life essay addict!!!

Things I Read During June

The Best American Essays 2007, David Foster Wallace, ed. (6/10?)

Every once in a while, I get a powerful urge to read a whole bunch of really good essays. The form fascinates me, and I love that the blogging revolution has kicked off a new golden age for it. But the thing about blogs, even the best ones, is that they’re more or less uncurated, and the best treasures drift through the feeds with no more fanfare than the clicks and hisses of daily life do. It’s not a good medium for bingeing. Thus, the only thing to do when the hunger hits is to hole up with a good anthology or an old Joan Didion book or something. As you can see, this year’s run was DFW-themed!

Also, um, I apparently reviewed every essay in the book. (WHUT.)

• Ian Buruma – “The Freedom to Offend” – Meh. I largely agree, but still, meh.
• Malcolm Gladwell – “What the Dog Saw” – Yes, it’s about the Dog Whisperer, whatever, but the interviews with the body-language experts were enlightening, and fun in that classic poppy, science-y, Gladwell-y way. By the way, did anyone else see that SGR interlude with him in it? I will never be able to think of him in any other way. I bet he was cavorting across the ceiling while writing this.
• Mark Grief – “Afternoon of the Sex Children” – Yeah, that bothers me, too. Not too taken with the essay itself, though.
• John Lahr – “Petrified” – A meditation on stage fright. Liked it. I didn’t know Stephen Fry ran away from home in the ’90s!
• Louis Menand – “Name That Tone” – Precise, bass-heavy, and hilarious. And thank you for stepping up and being the one to say this, it makes me feel much better about edging up on 30.
• Daniel Orozco – “Shakers” – Far, far too precious and self-impressed. No thank you.
• Cynthia Ozick – “Out From Xanadu” – Boy, do I love a well-placed nettle. This one was in the same class as “Name That Tone.”
• Molly Peacock – “Passion Flowers in Winter” – The mix of subjects was a bit forced, but a: Peacock is honest about it being so, and b: it’s a powerful treatment of its themes regardless.
• Phillip Robertson – “In the Mosque of Imam Ali” – Iraq war post-gonzo meta-journalism. Frightening, depressing, fascinating.
• Marilynne Robinson – “Onward, Christian Liberals” – The title had me expecting a boring-ass “Where are all the Christian progressives?!” chirp, circa 2005. NO. This, my friends, is a hard-core old-fashioned theological rhubarb, and it is glorious. Also, way to rehabilitate Calvin for me — “total depravity” and the like tended to hang me up, but this seems a more nuanced/lifelike angle on him.
• Richard Rodriguez – “Disappointment” – There was nothing here for me.
• Elaine Scarry – “Rules of Engagement” – War crimes, yay. Some of her points are significantly less than watertight, but god damn that’s still a lot of vile policy. (Storming hospitals? Yeah, stop doing that please.)
• Roger Scruton – “A Carnivore’s Credo” – Look. I mostly agree with what you’re saying — there’s nothing inherently evil about the predator/prey relationship, sure, fine. But if you wanted to arrive legitimately at the place where this essay ends up, the burden was on you to demonstrate why eating meat is morally equivalent or morally better than not eating meat, and your arguments were so weak (if everyone who thinks hard about their food goes vegetarian, then only people who eat unmindfully will be eating meat? Great! We just keep reducing that second number, and we’re suddenly using fewer resources and in a much better position to handle the global food crisis! Seriously, is that all you’ve got?) as to ultimately just beg that question. And no, you may not have it. Essay failed. (Keep trying, though — that piety angle seemed to be going somewhere, just not there.)
• Peter Singer – “What Should a Billionaire Give — and What Should You?” – Damn good question. Singer gets closer to an answer than anyone else I’ve heard talk about this, but it’s still an insanely difficult thing to think about. Also, this is as good a place to mention that I… I kind of like Bill Gates these days. I know, I know.
• Jerald Walker – “Dragon Slayers” – Wow.
• Edward O. Wilson – “Apocalypse Now” – If I were a religious person (even — no, especially — one with a liberal bent), I do not see how I could get through this without being quite offended. I have to wonder whether this was really intended to speak to evangelicals, or whether it was ultimately written for sanctimonious thrills. (If it sounds like the inside of my head sounded in late 2004, you should probably try writing a different open letter to church leaders. Just saying.)

Except for the ones I didn’t get to:

• Jo Ann Beard – “Werner”
• Mark Danner – “Iraq: The War of the Imagination”
• W.S. Di Piero – “Fathead’s Hard Times”
• George Gessert – “An Orgy of Power”
• Marione Ingram – “Operation Gomorrah”
• Garret Keizer – “Loaded”

Eiji Otsuka and Housui Yamazaki – The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, vol. 1 (ed. Carl Horn) (6/8?)

This was cool as hell. I will leave the explication to shaenon and simply add my endorsement.

Elizabeth Bear and Emma Bull – Shadow Unit: Refining Fire (6/10)

Christ. That was, uh, cathartic. Not particularly enjoyable, but at least a solid story?

I seem to have learned some heretofore unknown things about myself and my squicks. Like I mentioned last month, the first part where the dude makes Chaz drink water out of his hands just about made me throw up, and the further iterations didn’t get much better. Likewise all the mind-rape. We’re talking, like, visceral squick, of a sort I don’t think I’ve really felt before from a story. I only kept going because I already cared about the characters; if this had been about people I hadn’t let into my brain yet, I’d have dropped it like a hot potato. A hot potato filled with tarantulas.

Kelly Link – Stranger Things Happen (6/11)

It was a Kelly Link sort of day, so I went through this collection and hoovered up everything I hadn’t yet gotten to.

• “Vanishing Act” – You know who this one made me think of? Stephen King. It had the feel of one of his not-scary short stories.
• “Survivor’s Ball, or, The Donner Party” – I didn’t think much of this one qua story, but there was this thing it did really well. It’s this: you know that phenomenon where a person you meet traveling seems to fit you like a glove and be the exact right person to be with right now, except that actually they’re not and they don’t, and the sinking-in of that feels kind of like a car driving off the road in slow motion?
• “Shoe and Marriage” – Well, that explains why “Miss Kansas on Judgement Day” didn’t feel particularly complete, doesn’t it. (Shoes? Marriage? Well, okay.)
• “Most of My Friends Are Two-Thirds Water” – I don’t know my PKD, so I can’t tell whether there was anything interesting packed in the title reference.
  
  This felt more like a Miranda July or Aimee Bender story than a Kelly Link one.
• “Louise’s Ghost” – You were never a dog!
  
  This is one of the better ones in the collection. Link sometimes throws huge slews of Mysterious Stuff into her stories, and whether this is a strength or a failing will tend to come down to the reader. At its worst, it can make a story seem unfocussed and scattershot (see: “Stone Animals,” “Shoe and Marriage”), but it can also, as it does here, make for a hypnotic sense of interconnectedness and a particularly devastating payoff.
• “The Girl Detective” (reread) – …And this is one where Link’s kitchen-sink-ism falls a little flat, but there are enough truly wonderful paragraphs in it that I don’t particularly care.

Jo Walton – Farthing (Tor.com free ebook) (6/15)

A good-natured little cozy mystery about power, privilege, fascism, genocide, evil, and afternoon tea.

I lie, it’s not the slightest bit good-natured. It is, however, good.

The crux of the setting for this series* is that Churchill didn’t get his way, the UK didn’t get any American assistance to speak of, and the Third Reich DID get possession of the Continent. A faction within the Parliament known as the Farthing Set struck a peace with the Reich, and the UK has survived the war as a sovereign nation — shame about Europe, though. (An image invoked by one of the narrators is of a perfect little flower garden in the midst of an ocean of shit.) The plot centers on the murder of the man who negotiated the Nazi peace, as investigated by an honest cop and a sort of Jenna Bush character (who grew up surrounded by the sort of privilege that only the English aristocracy really know how to do and then went and married a Jew.)

Like I said, this story is about power, privilege, and fascism, and it’s a deeply cynical and ironic book, full of all kinds of nasty little reversals. I felt a little sick and dizzy while reading it, and — spoiler — it doesn’t end particularly well. I cannot wait to get my hands on the rest of the series.

Please go read it. Aside from it being an honest and deftly characterized gem of a novel, it is engaged in an extended thought experiment of no small importance. To wit: We’ve learned from experience what it costs to dismantle a fascist empire when we have a great deal of luck on our side; what on earth might it cost to dismantle a Reich for which everything is going as planned?

As of the end of Farthing, god only knows.

Cherie Priest – Four and Twenty Blackbirds (Tor.com free ebook) (6/16, didn’t finish)

I’m not a practiced reader of the form, so it took me about two and a half chapters to realize this was, in fact, totally a Gothic. At which point I was like, “I’m out.”

I’m sure it was a perfectly good Gothic! It’s just that said genre is entirely too rich for my blood, and I was expecting a rather different sub-breed of ghost story.

David Foster Wallace – Consider the Lobster (6/26)

I left an essay or two unread, here — partially because I’d finally sated The Hunger, and partially in obedience to some obscure hoarding instinct. (Never know when you’ll find yourself needing a Wallace infusion, right? Now that I think of it, it was the same deal with that Kelly Link book.)

Steven Brust – Agyar (6/28)

I find myself in a bind w/r/t explaining what made this book so good, as part of it has to do with some formal tricks and slow revelations which are delicate and easy to spoil. (If you’re seeing this on Goodreads, don’t click through to the book’s page and risk seeing a summary — I enjoyed it greatly despite having been spoiled, but trust me on this one.)

At any rate, this is the story of a very bad person trying — perhaps futilely — to become something else. It’s a thing that’s been done before, but no previous attempt has left me so convinced nor quite so full of doubts. This is a dazzlingly good novel which deftly avoids becoming any of the several things one thinks along the way that it might be. Read it.

Hope Larson – Gray Horses (graphic novel, 6/29)

(…and yes, emmling, I blame you for the little internal voice that made me double-check the title spelling.)

I can see myself re-reading this fairly often. It’s… meditative. And textured. Yes, I think those are the words I’m looking for.

Also, the emotional and temporal spaces it’s about are ones I seem to inhabit more often than not. Shelf with Kiki’s Delivery Service, I think.

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* Do you know, I’ve noticed a funny thing about these Tor.com freebies…

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Okay, so this is the first book post I’ve done in tandem with my Goodreads thing. I think I’m liking Goodreads a lot, but I’m still working out the kinks in my, uh, methods. For now, I'm ending up with rougher versions of my reviews over there, and anything that's not in their database (short stories, Shadow Unit, etc.) ends up here exclusively. In exchange, I'll be trying to update Goodreads a bit more evenly for people who don't have time to read the whole enchilada over here.

Let me know if you want me to switch anything around.

Comments

[b-zedan.livejournal.com]

I am seriously amazed that you can leave parts of a collection unread. The hunger never stops for me, I guess. Speaking of which—

Tor.com's "first one's free" thing only caught me the once, with the Chaos books (I now have the other two and you can borrow them if you want). What pissed me off to no end, though, was that I couldn't just go to Tor's site and pay to download the next two books. I was all, "Um? Your evil plan worked Mr. Company, I would like to give you monies now, only I live in the sticks and it's forty minutes to go buy the rest of these things you want me to buy." Then I found I couldn't get them instantly online, nor were there torrents, so my Very Nice and Understanding Chase drove me to said forty-minutes-away bookstore.

I need to gather my month's reads. I think it came to 21 books, Jesus God there is something wrong with me. Also because although I found the Shadow Unit ending 'ew', it did not utterly squick me out (though I finally broke my habit of seeing Chaz as a darker version of one of Chase's co-workers, because that was gross).

[b-zedan.livejournal.com]

Please imagine that above I used my commas properly and was grammatical and shit.

[roadrunnertwice]

What pissed me off to no end, though, was that I couldn't just go to Tor's site and pay to download the next two books.

It's possible you could do some good by telling them so -- the only email I could find was questions@tor.com (and I don't know who reads it), but the site seems to be a pet project of some actual editors there (e.g.), and they might be able to use the occasional "have ducats, want more no-DRM ebooks" nudge as leverage for whatever they're hoping to accomplish. Maybe.

(--Do you know, I hadn't made the connection that Orphans of Chaos was one of those Tor.com books? I put 'em all in a folder without looking too closely and am getting to them one at a time, so I'd figured you'd found out about the series somewhere else. Well, that one's next after Spirit Gate, then.)

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Not cleaning my plate seems to be a very specific sort of thing for me -- I can snort up several novels by the same person in a row, but the essay hunger is something that has a very discrete on/off switch, and when I'm done, I'm done. Something similar happens with short stories, but it's not quite the same and isn't as predictable. My attention span is extremely squirmy and non-linear, I think.

[b-zedan.livejournal.com]

Hm, I may just wrangle human thoughts together and write them. It seems like doing no-DRM ebooks isn't their main focus for the project, but they should still grease the wheels of commerce by allowing folks to get their product.

I don't find essays I dig much, so when I do, they're gone in an instant. Five novels by the same person is the limit for me (at least for shorter ones, like the Oz books, longer it's three). Then I mix it up as much as I can with something different and plunge back in. Even when I was trying to work through all of Asimov's sf work, I couldn't do too many in a row.

[gyladia.livejournal.com]

Can you tell when I post and delete comments? I wrote a really long one and then decided it had nothing to do with anything.

I've made an account on goodreads, it wouldn't let me see your reviews without it. I have 37 books and 0 friends.

[gyladia.livejournal.com]

And I give out 5 stars like it's going out of style. I'm a bad reviewer.

[roadrunnertwice]

Yeah -- LJ sends a notification email whenever you hit the post button, but it can't exactly delete the mails once they're on my server, so they stay there after the comment is gone. I wasn't going to say anything about it. :P

If you do Facebooky shit, you can add the Goodreads "application" as a friend-getting shortcut -- it'll automatically ask for friendship with any Facebook friends who are already on Goodreads.

(Goodreads walls off my reviews? Lame! Well, they're the same as what I post here except more slipshod and less complete, as you can now see.)