Books read, September 2023
Oct. 2nd, 2023 06:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
swan_towerPursuant to yesterday's post (which I'll be following up on later), I tried to take some time off in September. Result: I read a lot, though some of these are quite short.
What If 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions, Randall Munroe.
Follow-on to the first one, which I read back in January. By the nature of these books, you don't need to read them in order -- by which I mean both first book then second, and the contents of said books. They're ideal for those moments where you have just a couple of minutes and don't want to dip back into a narrative or a complex nonfiction discussion, because each question and its answer are at most a few pages. I think this volume made me laugh less frequently than the first one, but that may not have been the book's fault; I read this toward the end of the Kickstarter I was running and had virtually no brain to spare for anything. Brief discussions of what would happen if you filled the solar system with soup out to the orbit of Jupiter were about my speed.
The Enterprise of England, Ann Swinfen.
Second book in her Elizabethan series, focusing on (this is not really a spoiler since it's right there in the title if you know the period) the threat of the Spanish Armada.
It got off to something of a rocky start, as Swinfen appeared too determined to give you a fleeting tour of key events around that time: the death of Philip Sidney, Drake's raid on Cadiz, the loss of Sluys, none of which the protagonist is involved in. I also continue to feel like this series is less well integrated than Swinfen's Oxford Medieval Mysteries. There's Kit's work as a doctor, which she keeps getting dragged away from in order to do espionage instead, and then it feels like Swinfen really likes the Elizabethan theatre scene, but instead of coming up with a different series about that, she crams it into the corners of this one instead. Honestly, theatre + espionage would have combined quite well -- especially since Marlowe shows up briefly here (in a really negative light, wow do I get the impression Swinfen thinks poorly of him). But the medical stuff, while interesting, just does not play particularly well with the other bits.
Having said that, this book found its feet much better once it settled into Kit and her father caring for the survivors of Sluys, then shifts reasonably well into espionage gear when Kit is sent to the Low Countries to try and discover who there might be betraying the English and Dutch to the Spanish. There's a slightly contrived encounter with the Armada toward the end, when the ship carrying Kit back home gets caught up in the hit-and-run fighting in the Channel, but it didn't feel too jarring. I will continue to read, despite my feeling that this isn't as well-knit as the Oxford series.
Lonely Castle in the Mirror, Mizuki Tsujimura, trans. Philip Gabriel.
Bestselling Japanese novel; in terms of subject matter it probably counts as YA or MG (based on the ages of the characters), but since it wasn't written for the English-language market, it doesn't partake of any of the standard tropes and dynamics of those categories. The narrator, Kokoro, has stopped attending school because of bullying -- and I find it interesting that, apart from one frightening incident (where a pack of girls surrounded her home and shouted for her to come out), the bullying doesn't come across as super awful. It doesn't have to be super awful; what matters is that it's triggered Kokoro into such a pit of depression and anxiety that even the simplest things send her spiraling.
Which I have to admit sometimes made for a frustrating reading experience. The central concept is that Kokoro's mirror lights up and when she touches it, she's pulled through into a strange castle run by a little girl in a mask who calls herself the Wolf Queen. That girl has chosen a group of children to search the castle for the key to the Wishing Room; whoever finds the key and enters the room will have one wish granted, and after that they'll all be kicked out forever. Because of Kokoro's depression and anxiety, though, her immediate reaction to this is to run away; although she can go to the castle for a certain amount of time every day (and her parents, who both work, won't know she's gone), her fears over how awkward it will be if she encounters one of the other kids/the idea that they're all there hanging out together without her/etc. combine to paralyze her into inactivity. It's the inherent challenge of having a reluctant protagonist: the reader is here for the cool thing that's going on, so a character who tries to avoid the cool thing and all the other characters is going to be frustrating.
Kokoro does eventually start engaging with the plot, of course; otherwise there would be no book. For quite a long time, the focus is more on life in the castle and the dynamics among the kids than on the macguffin of the key and the Wishing Room, but that's fine. All of them (save one odd exception) are avoiding school for one reason or another, and in many ways that's the real story here, as they gradually open up to each other and get past all the defenses and annoying habits that push them apart. For a while I wondered if the key and the wish would wind up not even mattering at all. But the fantastical promise that set everything in motion does pay off in the end, and while I correctly guessed at a couple of the things going on, there was one vital element that took me by surprise, in a very good way. Recommended if you're not going to be either triggered or driven to distraction by a character whose mental health difficulties form so much of a roadblock early on.
Another Life, Sarena Ulibarri.
A brief novella set in a climate apocalypse future, but focusing more on the efforts of one community to find an alternative way of life. I very much appreciated that while the residents of Otra Vida actively seek to create a better society, it's not utopian in the shallow sense of being perfect (or in the sense common in science fiction where the shallowest scratch on the surface of that utopia reveals a howling dystopia underneath). In particular, one of the central conflicts here focuses on the office of the Mediator, which the founders of Otra Vida hoped would work as a way to arrange conflict resolution without leaning on top-down enforcement. The main character, Galacia, has been the Mediator from the start of the settlement . . . and that's becoming a problem, both because she's not without bias -- no human can be -- and because her long occupation of the role means she's acquiring a kind of authority she was never meant to have. In that aspect it reminded me a bit of B.L. Blanchard's The Peacekeeper; I had significant problems with the plot of that latter book, but I very much appreciated its attention to how even a restorative rather than retributive system of justice is still flawed and can still fail the people it's meant to help.
Apart from the worldbuilding of this settlement in that future, the big speculative element here is the idea that people genuinely do reincarnate, and a new process has been developed that lets you discover who you were in your most recent life. Since this is in the cover copy, it's no spoiler to say that Galacia discovers she's the reincarnation of Thomas Ramsey, the Big Villain of the climate apocalypse -- but there were two aspects of that plot I particularly enjoyed. One is that, while she has a particularly shocking discovery, she's not the only one kind of screwed over by this new process; there's a minor side note of a gay couple who discover they were father and son in their previous lives. It shouldn't affect them now -- they're not related in this life -- but it causes a major disruption in their relationship. And the other thing I really enjoyed was the acknowledgement that, however much Thomas Ramsey may have caused massive problems back in the day, it's simplistic to paint him as the cause of the apocalypse; the issue was far larger than he was, and the records that survive of that time may not be wholly objective.
And fundamentally, that plot lands on a theme I really like, which is the question of how long you can hold someone accountable for past crimes -- particularly in contexts like reincarnation or immortality, where it's not just what they did forty years ago but four hundred years or literally in another lifetime. I've been rewatching the Highlander series recently (or, to be more precise, cherry-picking out Methos bits to rewatch), and it builds a really great thematic arc on that topic across a scattered range of episodes. So I was always a good audience for that aspect of the story, even if near-future post-apocalyptic SF is not usually my jam.
Living by the Moon: Te Maramataka a Te Whānau-ā-Apanui, Wiremu Tāwhai.
Another book my parents brought back from their trip to the other side of the planet, but this time not a collection of folktales. Instead this is a slim volume about how the Māori of a particular tribe traditionally measured the cycle of the moon, and then how they shaped their hunting and agricultural cycles around it. It's very specific to not just an environment but a location, which is an aspect I think we urbanites often underestimate.
Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea, Rita Chang-Eppig.
A novel based on the life of the female Chinese pirate I've mostly seen referred to as Ching Shih, though according to Wikipedia she's also called Zheng Yi Sao, Shi Yang, Shi Xianggu, and Shek Yeung -- that last being the name used for her in this story.
This reminds me a bit of both Iron Widow and She Who Became the Sun, not only in its connection to Chinese history, but in its willingness to take a warts-and-all approach to its protagonist. Chang-Eppig does not attempt to sugar-coat Shek Yeung's behavior; although the novel credits her with the ban in the pirate fleet against raping female captives (which I'm given to understand probably didn't originate with her), it doesn't shy away from representing her as utterly willing to behead those who challenge her authority, manipulate those who could be of use to her -- not infrequently to the detriment of her tools -- and otherwise act with the ruthlessness required to keep a massive fleet of pirates in line. At the same time, it doesn't just treat her as a monster, either: Shek Yeung knows her behavior is frequently not admirable, but either doesn't see an alternative or is simply too tired and ground down by the challenges of her life to do any differently.
That same ambivalence extends well beyond Shek Yeung herself. The novel picks up at the point where her first husband, here called Cheng Yat, has just been killed. Under his leadership, Shek Yeung had command of half their fleet, but in order to keep from losing her position, she's forced to swiftly marry Cheng Yat's successor, Cheung Po. Both of them owe their power and wealth to Cheng Yat; both of them were also kidnapped away to sea and raped by him (Shek Yeung in the context of prostitution, but still, that's not exactly a great example of consent). As a consequence, they both have profoundly mixed feelings about the man they'd grown so close to.
Technically there's a central conflict here, in that the emperor has a new minister, Pak Ling, who's finally posing a real threat to the alliance of pirate fleets that have been ruling the South China Sea for so long. But really, the novel is more concerned with following Shek Yeung through this stage of her life, as she first secures her position in the fleet alongside Cheung Po, then faces the loss of that entire world to Pak Ling and the encroachment of various European powers. It's a mildly fantastical tale, in that the goddess Ma-Zou (Mazu, other forms) may have spoken to Shek Yeung once or twice, sometimes prayers seem to be granted, omens may be real . . . but it's right on that line where the narrative could possibly be just depicting the belief of the faithful, without objectively stating that there is supernatural intervention. (There are also brief chapters interspersed throughout that tell various stories about Ma-Zou, which is helpful for a reader like me who's not familiar with her mythology.)
Like Iron Widow and She Who Became the Sun, this is a novel deeply concerned with the problem of sexism, but in place of Iron Widow's incandescent anger it has a kind of weariness. Shek Yeung doesn't expect to change anything except her own circumstances, and she's extremely aware at all times of how precarious those are. It makes for a rather melancholy novel in the end -- especially since it doesn't leap for alternate history at the finale; things play out as they did in history -- but a very well-written one, on the level of prose and so forth. I think my biggest complaint is the pacing at the end, which skips off the surface of several major sea battles and then arrives very abruptly at the concluding negotiation with no connective tissue between the former and the latter. The book as a whole, though, I very much enjoyed.
Road of the Lost, Nafiza Azad.
This one managed to hook me within a page just on the basis of voice, which I wasn't expecting. I'd been a little iffy on the premise, simply because there's a quasi-Celtic basis for the worldbuilding -- the protagonist, Croi is a brownie (well, sort of), and there are pixies and the kingdoms of Talamh and Tine and other Irish words -- and I simultaneously love Celtic-based stuff and have seen enough of it, much of it done poorly, that my starting mindset tends to default to "skeptical." But I liked the voice, and I liked Croi even when she's being prickly, and I was intrigued by where the plot was going: although Croi seems to be a brownie, that turns out to be a powerful glamour placed on her by an unknown power using magic that should be lost. Croi, who's lived most of her life on the fringes of human society with no faerie company but a woman she calls the Hag, has to travel to the Otherworld and find out what her true nature is.
Naturally, she encounters other people along the way -- but those people drag her piecemeal into a much larger plot about the politics and metaphysics of the Otherworld, one I found fairly engaging. My complaint here, insofar as I have one, is that this feels very much like the first book of a series, yet I can't find any sign of a sequel coming out. We end with some revelations and with one character's final words to the protagonist being "come find me," but things are very far from resolved. I hope there will be a second book, and this isn't a case of the publishing industry axing something half-finished because sales weren't good enough.
The Kuiper Belt Job, David D. Levine.
Disclosure: the author is a friend, and sent the book to me for blurbing. Well, to me and Alyc, on the grounds that it's caper/heist-y and that might appeal to readers of M.A. Carrick, though this book -- as the title suggests -- is science fiction.
I inhaled it in about a day flat. The structure is interesting: the story centers on a group of thieves that call themselves the Cannibal Club (no cannibalism involved; it's just a name one of the characters thought sounded cool), who broke apart years ago after a job went wrong. The story alternates between segments showing you that earlier job, and segments that bring the surviving crew back together for a new challenge -- with each of those latter bits 1) being from the perspective of a different character and 2) involving smaller heists necessary to get the next person on board or out of whatever situation they're trapped in. This allows for a variety of challenges along the way, and each one has a distinct flavor.
You also get a really interesting tour of the solar system! There's a technology here, the skip drive, that lets ships go fast without instantaneously arriving wherever they want in the solar system, so travel time is still real without making the titular job, all the way out in the Kuiper Belt, a years-long undertaking. On the way there, the story hits a variety of locations, many of which are off the standard beaten path of fiction (at least the fiction I read -- admittedly my SF consumption is relatively small). Like, I learned about trailing trojans from this novel! So if this is your kind of thing, I highly recommend it, and you will probably see a blurb from M.A. Carrick somewhere in the marketing unless David decides not to use it. :-P
Worrals Flies Again, W.E. Johns.
Third of this 1940s series about a female WAAF pilot during World War II, and my god Captain Johns could that title have been any more bland? I genuinely will have to keep referring to the Wikipedia page to know what order these books go in, and to my own posts to remember which plot goes with which name.
In this one, Worrals and her best friend Frecks get dispatched to a chateau that's a collation point for intel from the French resistance. The idea is that the tiny little plane they use, which has foldable wings, can be hidden in the chateau's cellars; then, if an urgent message comes in, they can fly it back to the U.K. rather than using radio or pigeons, both of which have significant problems with reliability. As a side note, this series does a great job of really making me understand just how close the British and French coasts are to each other, because of the ease with which characters can fly back and forth. (Well, "ease" so long as you don't take into account flak guns and enemy planes.) I grew up in Texas, where everything other than More Texas was very far away; it croggled me when we were in New York City and my parents went to another state for dinner. Travel within Europe gives me much the same feeling of "buh? how?"
Anyway! These being pulp adventures, naturally the above plan goes wrong immediately. There are Germans lodging in what should have been a nearly unoccupied chateau; there is an urgent message, but it's already in the hands of the Germans. Everything I've enjoyed about this series before continues, especially the way that Frecks, instead of being the Bumbling Comic Relief Friend, gets her moments to shine. And the relationship between Worrals and a fellow pilot, Bill Ashton, continues to fly in a zone I find very pleasing: there's attraction between them, but both of them put the war and their duties first, and while Bill is sometimes helpful, it's never in a "swoop in and save the ladies" kind of way. In this book Worrals has to rescue him from captivity, less through overt derring-do than through clever deceit. One male villain briefly cross-dresses, and I was delighted that this did not come across as hinting at Teh Evul Gayz; it felt like a tactical move by a chillingly pragmatic man, nothing more.
Two minor quibbles for this book, neither of which ruined my enjoyment. One is a particular side character who winds up being fine in the long run, but may register as an awkward stereotype at first if you don't know where the story is going. (I was spoiled for that because of Rachel Manija Brown's post about this book, but I didn't mind.) The other is one bit of drama that felt a little too over the top for me -- you know instantly that what seems to have happened can't possibly be true, so then it's just a matter of waiting for the explanation, which felt a bit too convoluted once it arrived. But whatevs, these are still rip-roaring Nazi-thwarting feminist adventures, and I'm gonna keep reading them whenever I want a couple of hours of delightful fun.
The Curse of Capistrano, Johnston McCulley.
This book was eventually republished under the name The Mark of Zorro, after the film with that title made the character a household name. Yes, gentle readers, this is the very first incarnation of Zorro!
It's kind of fascinating to see where it does and does not match the versions I've seen before. No real origin story here, except as briefly described by Diego at the end; we start out with Zorro already a notorious figure in California, terrorizing corrupt soldiers and aiding those they oppress. The story's omniscient narrator doesn't tell you Diego is Zorro -- there's just this dashing masked outlaw (full-face mask, unlike the cinematic depictions) and this incredibly effete nobleman, and I wonder if audiences at the time knew right away they would be the same person, or if that trope was still new enough in 1919 that the connection wasn't shriekingly obvious to everyone. Interestingly, though McCulley went on to write a ton more about this character, it's clear he didn't have that intent from the outset; this book ends with Zorro publicly unmasking as Diego and the corruption being dealt with and everyone living happily ever after, the end. (The introductory matter in my copy, which includes a brief biographical sketch of McCulley, notes that every adaptation ever and McCulley's own sequels just . . . pretend that ending never happened. No explanation, nothing to see here, just move along.)
Of course, it does also have its flaws. The narrative never misses a chance to remind you that the tavern landlord is fat as well as greedy, and there is definitely a certain ideal of masculinity being promoted here (albeit one that involves musical talent and other such elements). Indigenous Californians appear only as generic "natives;" none of them have names, I think only one gets like a single line of dialogue, and their agency is basically limited to getting the hell out of the way when they see that shit's about to go down. Zorro defends them, but only because they epitomize the helpless, oppressed masses, and the work of the friars in their missions is presented as unambiguously good. Women are not quite as backgrounded as the natives are, but there are only two in the story: Lolita Pulido, the young woman courted by both Diego (with extreme ineptitude) and Zorro (much more successfully), and her mother. I will say, though, that after I assumed Lolita's sole agency in the narrative would be refusing to marry Diego even though it would save her family from political and economic peril, she surprised me by proactively escaping the bad guys and displaying virtuoso riding skill -- so that was a pleasant turn.
On the whole, I'd class this under "historically interesting but not so great you should rush out to find it" (i.e. below what I shall now call the Worrals Line). What I bought was the Summit Classic Collector Edition, and while I appreciated the introduction and the context given there, I really wish they'd been more aggressive about cleaning up the obvious typos in the text, rather than piously presenting their approach as preserving the author's intent. I'm betting you could find this on Gutenberg, if you want to glance at it without committing money to the enterprise.
The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination, Alain Corbin, trans. Miriam L. Kochan, Roy Porter, and Christopher Prendergast.
I have no recollection of where I saw this book recommended, but it makes for a hell of an odd read.
The focus here is much more on "the foul" than "the fragrant," i.e. far less about perfume and such than I expected (though there is some discussion about how the fashions around that changed over time). Instead the central thread is, essentially, the deodorization of life, specifically in France, from roughly the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries: how ideas and attitudes toward stench changed, leading us to increasingly try and eliminate from our surroundings the odors of urine, feces, sweat, decay, mud, and more.
What made this interesting to me was the intense glimpse into "the past was a foreign country." You get a very real sense of how those smells were taken so much for granted that they kind of didn't bother people -- in fact there's one old woman mentioned in here who commented, post-Revolution, about how those smells made her nostalgic for the days of the ancien régime. You also get a tour of historical science, as scholars tried to figure out what smells even were, how air operated, how disease spread, and so forth. As gobsmacking as it is to think they believed that merely agitating air or water was enough to purify it, they did: something something restore the elasticity of the air, totally not how any of that works. And also too much water was bad because it relaxed the fibers of the body and made you vulnerable. A whole, completely alien understanding of the physical world, which led to an astonishingly filthy world where everyone was very convinced that cesspool clearers were robustly healthy because of their exposure to filth, and that's why you should spread it in the streets to combat plague.
I suspect I would have gotten more out of this if I were at all conversant with French literature, because Corbin frequently cites it to track changing ideas about and attitudes toward both good and bad smells. I did, however, follow the parts about how hospitals, prisons, and ships were testing-grounds for new approaches that later got rolled out to the general populace (including teaching people new techniques for taking a crap; schoolteachers were put in charge of this), and how the assumption that X group naturally stank shifted from occupation and/or place of origin, to economic class, to race. So basically, it's a whole lotta insight into historical mentalities of a sort very different from our own, and really fascinating so long as you're willing to cope with extended discussions of gross bodily matters.
The Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How the Daughters of Genghis Khan Rescued His Empire, Jack Weatherford.
So, I know very, very little about Mongolian history. If you'd asked me to name important women from that culture and time, I would have said, "uhhh, Khutulun?" and that would have been it.
Boy howdy is there stuff I was missing.
The subtitle is rather a misnomer. Genghis Khan's daughters, and also his daughters-in-law, did not "rescue his empire;" it collapsed with astonishing speed, due in no small part to the incompetence, rivalry, and cruelty of his sons, which included a truly massive backlash against the women who held power. I suspect it's supposed to refer, in a very broad sense, to Manduhai, who married one of Genghis Khan's few surviving patrilineal descendants and pulled the Mongols back together into a coherent state several centuries later, but that's far from the empire he himself had created.
Leaving the inaccuracy of the title aside, though, this was absolutely amazing to read. Weatherford lays out very clearly how much power Genghis Khan put in the hands of the women around him, in ways that (in the afterword) Weatherford admits he himself wouldn't have believed if someone had handed him a book like this to read. The image has to be assembled from fragments; someone in the past literally cut a section out of the text now called The Secret History of the Mongols, leaving behind only one tantalizing phrase that suggests the missing bit had to do with the Great Khan's daughters. But we know that the women who married his sons were given the title of beki (usually only given to princes) or khatun (essentially "queen"), and served as important diplomatic representatives of their peoples, while his daughters were also called beki and were, in their nuptial edicts, explicitly sent to govern the peoples they were married off to. The sons-in-law, meanwhile, merely got a title that meant "son-in-law" and were given positions of honor in Genghis Khan's own guard . . . which 1) took them away from their homelands and 2) tended to shorten their life expectancies by a lot. His will left huge swaths of the Mongol Empire in the hands of women, whether his wives or his daughters.
Unfortunately, of course, none of that lasted. And it's not all on the shoulders of the men: the women also fought to extend their power (or that of their husbands/sons), with a lot of bloodbaths as a result. Still, things like the mass gang rape of four thousand women, followed by selling off the survivors -- in direct and flagrant contravention of laws laid down by Genghis Khan -- were certainly the fault of guys like Ogedei. It was basically a long downhill slope from there, with a trough in which the power and agency of ruling women was reduced to things like eye-popping ruses designed to keep a male Borijin clan baby safe from the people trying to exterminate Genghis Khan's lineage from the world, until things pick up again with Manduhai. But there's really intriguing information here on Mongolian culture and what you could almost call a fluorescence of thirteenth-century feminism, in ways that make me really crave an alternate history fantasy in which the ideology then managed to take root and go on holding power.
Alchemists, Mediums and Magicians: Stories of Taoist Mystics, trans. and ed. Thomas Cleary.
I don't think I realized, when I bought this book, that it's a translation of a fourteenth-century hagiographic Chinese text, rather than a modern work on the topic. As such, it wasn't as interesting as I'd hoped: the biographical sketches here (organized by dynasty and labeled with grouping terms like "Taoist Character" or "Taoist Influence") range from a couple of paragraphs to a couple of pages, and it isn't long before you start to see the formulaic elements they share.
They're not all identical; for starters, there's a distinct bifurcation between the Taoists who served in government and used their wisdom to improve their respective rulers, and those who found more or less eloquent ways to phrase "no, fuck off" when begged by emperors and kings to come serve. In the aggregate, the formulas are moderately useful from the perspective of getting a feel for Taoist beliefs and ideology, e.g. the various ways their deaths are described: some leave behind fragrant and undecaying corpses thanks to their Taoist cultivation, while others are as light as a feather and some leave behind only their clothes with the sash still tied, thus proving their bodies were sublimated right out of physical existence. But I had to take lots of breaks as I read through this, because otherwise my eyes started to glaze over.
One thing I noted: while none of the individuals who get biographies in here are women, there are a handful who show up as immortals in the tales, usually as instructors to the men. Also, there are a lot of footnotes mentioning other books of Cleary's; if (let's be real, when) I decide I want to read more about historical Taoism, I suspect his corpus of work would be a useful place to start.
Myths and Legends of the Navagraha: The Nine Movers of Destiny in Indian Astrology, Nesa Arumugam.
One of the random things I'm curious about is non-Western astrology and how it's set up. This turns out to be much less an answer to that question than I'd hoped; instead the emphasis really is on the myths and legends about the relevant deities. Which I didn't mind! Though the stories here do naturally bring up figures I know better, like Shiva and Vishnu and Laxmi, the only one of the Navagraha I felt at all familiar with was Surya, and I at least recognized the name of Chandra. The rest were new to me.
And you do get some information on the operation of Vedic astrology, if only because the selection of the Navagraha tells you some things. In addition to the usual suspects of the Sun, Moon, and five visible planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn), you get two deities representing, not celestial bodies, but the ascending and descending lunar nodes -- the places where the orbit of the Moon crosses the ecliptic. That right there is fascinating to me! Arumugam also touches on the associations each deity has in astrology, albeit only briefly.
But that's fine, because the stories were pretty great all on their own. Arumugam feels no need to try and nail mythology down to a single consistent tale; she freely relates contradictory versions from the Rig Veda and the Puranas, along with the occasional folk belief. I also appreciated the periodic comments on the difference between South Indian (specifically Tamil) and North Indian narratives, practices, and beliefs, since I know that what I've read in the past has tended to have a distinctly northern skew. And man, once again I am reminded of just how genderqueer Indian mythology can be: not only do you get the story I've heard before of Vishnu taking female form as the beautiful Mohini to trick the asuras, but one of the Navagraha, Budha (Mercury, and not to be confused with Buddha-of-Buddhism), is queer through and through, sometimes taking male form and sometimes female in response to what sex their spouse Ila/Sudyumna is at any given moment. It's really intriguing stuff.
Embracing Uncertainty: Future Jazz, That 13th Century Buddhist Monk, and the Invention of Cultures, John Traphagan.
I . . . really have a hard time summarizing this book, which my sister gave to me as a birthday present. Traphagan is an anthropologist who's spent much of his career studying Japan, but his earlier background is in philosophy, and also he plays jazz drums, and all those things kind of smush together to make some points about . . . look, this makes it sound like the book is bad, and it isn't. It's just so much a semi-rambling set of thoughts Traphagan has that attempting to encapsulate any core is difficult. He talks about cultures as being kind of like the lead sheets jazz musicians use, and how Dōgen (founder of the Sōtō school of Zen in Japan) diverged from earlier Buddhisms, and what Zen really is like in Japan (as opposed to how it gets represented in the West), and how contemporary America is miring itself further and further in binary oppositions which Dōgen's philosophy counters, and how we'd all be better off if we accepted that the world is uncertain, that we can never make it certain, and so we must embrace the jazz improvisation that is life.
Or something like that. In a bizarre sense, I think the best way for me to comment on this book is to lean into how I talk about Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. My pitch there is usually "if computer hacking, neurolinguistics, and Sumerian mythology sound interesting to you, then you might enjoy this book;" here it would be "if anthropology, Zen Buddhism, and jazz music sound interesting to you." I don't think the subtitle of this book is great, but also I don't know what I would use in its place, and hey, at least this one has the virtue of "does what it says on the tin."
(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/Fjkp5x)
What If 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions, Randall Munroe.
Follow-on to the first one, which I read back in January. By the nature of these books, you don't need to read them in order -- by which I mean both first book then second, and the contents of said books. They're ideal for those moments where you have just a couple of minutes and don't want to dip back into a narrative or a complex nonfiction discussion, because each question and its answer are at most a few pages. I think this volume made me laugh less frequently than the first one, but that may not have been the book's fault; I read this toward the end of the Kickstarter I was running and had virtually no brain to spare for anything. Brief discussions of what would happen if you filled the solar system with soup out to the orbit of Jupiter were about my speed.
The Enterprise of England, Ann Swinfen.
Second book in her Elizabethan series, focusing on (this is not really a spoiler since it's right there in the title if you know the period) the threat of the Spanish Armada.
It got off to something of a rocky start, as Swinfen appeared too determined to give you a fleeting tour of key events around that time: the death of Philip Sidney, Drake's raid on Cadiz, the loss of Sluys, none of which the protagonist is involved in. I also continue to feel like this series is less well integrated than Swinfen's Oxford Medieval Mysteries. There's Kit's work as a doctor, which she keeps getting dragged away from in order to do espionage instead, and then it feels like Swinfen really likes the Elizabethan theatre scene, but instead of coming up with a different series about that, she crams it into the corners of this one instead. Honestly, theatre + espionage would have combined quite well -- especially since Marlowe shows up briefly here (in a really negative light, wow do I get the impression Swinfen thinks poorly of him). But the medical stuff, while interesting, just does not play particularly well with the other bits.
Having said that, this book found its feet much better once it settled into Kit and her father caring for the survivors of Sluys, then shifts reasonably well into espionage gear when Kit is sent to the Low Countries to try and discover who there might be betraying the English and Dutch to the Spanish. There's a slightly contrived encounter with the Armada toward the end, when the ship carrying Kit back home gets caught up in the hit-and-run fighting in the Channel, but it didn't feel too jarring. I will continue to read, despite my feeling that this isn't as well-knit as the Oxford series.
Lonely Castle in the Mirror, Mizuki Tsujimura, trans. Philip Gabriel.
Bestselling Japanese novel; in terms of subject matter it probably counts as YA or MG (based on the ages of the characters), but since it wasn't written for the English-language market, it doesn't partake of any of the standard tropes and dynamics of those categories. The narrator, Kokoro, has stopped attending school because of bullying -- and I find it interesting that, apart from one frightening incident (where a pack of girls surrounded her home and shouted for her to come out), the bullying doesn't come across as super awful. It doesn't have to be super awful; what matters is that it's triggered Kokoro into such a pit of depression and anxiety that even the simplest things send her spiraling.
Which I have to admit sometimes made for a frustrating reading experience. The central concept is that Kokoro's mirror lights up and when she touches it, she's pulled through into a strange castle run by a little girl in a mask who calls herself the Wolf Queen. That girl has chosen a group of children to search the castle for the key to the Wishing Room; whoever finds the key and enters the room will have one wish granted, and after that they'll all be kicked out forever. Because of Kokoro's depression and anxiety, though, her immediate reaction to this is to run away; although she can go to the castle for a certain amount of time every day (and her parents, who both work, won't know she's gone), her fears over how awkward it will be if she encounters one of the other kids/the idea that they're all there hanging out together without her/etc. combine to paralyze her into inactivity. It's the inherent challenge of having a reluctant protagonist: the reader is here for the cool thing that's going on, so a character who tries to avoid the cool thing and all the other characters is going to be frustrating.
Kokoro does eventually start engaging with the plot, of course; otherwise there would be no book. For quite a long time, the focus is more on life in the castle and the dynamics among the kids than on the macguffin of the key and the Wishing Room, but that's fine. All of them (save one odd exception) are avoiding school for one reason or another, and in many ways that's the real story here, as they gradually open up to each other and get past all the defenses and annoying habits that push them apart. For a while I wondered if the key and the wish would wind up not even mattering at all. But the fantastical promise that set everything in motion does pay off in the end, and while I correctly guessed at a couple of the things going on, there was one vital element that took me by surprise, in a very good way. Recommended if you're not going to be either triggered or driven to distraction by a character whose mental health difficulties form so much of a roadblock early on.
Another Life, Sarena Ulibarri.
A brief novella set in a climate apocalypse future, but focusing more on the efforts of one community to find an alternative way of life. I very much appreciated that while the residents of Otra Vida actively seek to create a better society, it's not utopian in the shallow sense of being perfect (or in the sense common in science fiction where the shallowest scratch on the surface of that utopia reveals a howling dystopia underneath). In particular, one of the central conflicts here focuses on the office of the Mediator, which the founders of Otra Vida hoped would work as a way to arrange conflict resolution without leaning on top-down enforcement. The main character, Galacia, has been the Mediator from the start of the settlement . . . and that's becoming a problem, both because she's not without bias -- no human can be -- and because her long occupation of the role means she's acquiring a kind of authority she was never meant to have. In that aspect it reminded me a bit of B.L. Blanchard's The Peacekeeper; I had significant problems with the plot of that latter book, but I very much appreciated its attention to how even a restorative rather than retributive system of justice is still flawed and can still fail the people it's meant to help.
Apart from the worldbuilding of this settlement in that future, the big speculative element here is the idea that people genuinely do reincarnate, and a new process has been developed that lets you discover who you were in your most recent life. Since this is in the cover copy, it's no spoiler to say that Galacia discovers she's the reincarnation of Thomas Ramsey, the Big Villain of the climate apocalypse -- but there were two aspects of that plot I particularly enjoyed. One is that, while she has a particularly shocking discovery, she's not the only one kind of screwed over by this new process; there's a minor side note of a gay couple who discover they were father and son in their previous lives. It shouldn't affect them now -- they're not related in this life -- but it causes a major disruption in their relationship. And the other thing I really enjoyed was the acknowledgement that, however much Thomas Ramsey may have caused massive problems back in the day, it's simplistic to paint him as the cause of the apocalypse; the issue was far larger than he was, and the records that survive of that time may not be wholly objective.
And fundamentally, that plot lands on a theme I really like, which is the question of how long you can hold someone accountable for past crimes -- particularly in contexts like reincarnation or immortality, where it's not just what they did forty years ago but four hundred years or literally in another lifetime. I've been rewatching the Highlander series recently (or, to be more precise, cherry-picking out Methos bits to rewatch), and it builds a really great thematic arc on that topic across a scattered range of episodes. So I was always a good audience for that aspect of the story, even if near-future post-apocalyptic SF is not usually my jam.
Living by the Moon: Te Maramataka a Te Whānau-ā-Apanui, Wiremu Tāwhai.
Another book my parents brought back from their trip to the other side of the planet, but this time not a collection of folktales. Instead this is a slim volume about how the Māori of a particular tribe traditionally measured the cycle of the moon, and then how they shaped their hunting and agricultural cycles around it. It's very specific to not just an environment but a location, which is an aspect I think we urbanites often underestimate.
Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea, Rita Chang-Eppig.
A novel based on the life of the female Chinese pirate I've mostly seen referred to as Ching Shih, though according to Wikipedia she's also called Zheng Yi Sao, Shi Yang, Shi Xianggu, and Shek Yeung -- that last being the name used for her in this story.
This reminds me a bit of both Iron Widow and She Who Became the Sun, not only in its connection to Chinese history, but in its willingness to take a warts-and-all approach to its protagonist. Chang-Eppig does not attempt to sugar-coat Shek Yeung's behavior; although the novel credits her with the ban in the pirate fleet against raping female captives (which I'm given to understand probably didn't originate with her), it doesn't shy away from representing her as utterly willing to behead those who challenge her authority, manipulate those who could be of use to her -- not infrequently to the detriment of her tools -- and otherwise act with the ruthlessness required to keep a massive fleet of pirates in line. At the same time, it doesn't just treat her as a monster, either: Shek Yeung knows her behavior is frequently not admirable, but either doesn't see an alternative or is simply too tired and ground down by the challenges of her life to do any differently.
That same ambivalence extends well beyond Shek Yeung herself. The novel picks up at the point where her first husband, here called Cheng Yat, has just been killed. Under his leadership, Shek Yeung had command of half their fleet, but in order to keep from losing her position, she's forced to swiftly marry Cheng Yat's successor, Cheung Po. Both of them owe their power and wealth to Cheng Yat; both of them were also kidnapped away to sea and raped by him (Shek Yeung in the context of prostitution, but still, that's not exactly a great example of consent). As a consequence, they both have profoundly mixed feelings about the man they'd grown so close to.
Technically there's a central conflict here, in that the emperor has a new minister, Pak Ling, who's finally posing a real threat to the alliance of pirate fleets that have been ruling the South China Sea for so long. But really, the novel is more concerned with following Shek Yeung through this stage of her life, as she first secures her position in the fleet alongside Cheung Po, then faces the loss of that entire world to Pak Ling and the encroachment of various European powers. It's a mildly fantastical tale, in that the goddess Ma-Zou (Mazu, other forms) may have spoken to Shek Yeung once or twice, sometimes prayers seem to be granted, omens may be real . . . but it's right on that line where the narrative could possibly be just depicting the belief of the faithful, without objectively stating that there is supernatural intervention. (There are also brief chapters interspersed throughout that tell various stories about Ma-Zou, which is helpful for a reader like me who's not familiar with her mythology.)
Like Iron Widow and She Who Became the Sun, this is a novel deeply concerned with the problem of sexism, but in place of Iron Widow's incandescent anger it has a kind of weariness. Shek Yeung doesn't expect to change anything except her own circumstances, and she's extremely aware at all times of how precarious those are. It makes for a rather melancholy novel in the end -- especially since it doesn't leap for alternate history at the finale; things play out as they did in history -- but a very well-written one, on the level of prose and so forth. I think my biggest complaint is the pacing at the end, which skips off the surface of several major sea battles and then arrives very abruptly at the concluding negotiation with no connective tissue between the former and the latter. The book as a whole, though, I very much enjoyed.
Road of the Lost, Nafiza Azad.
This one managed to hook me within a page just on the basis of voice, which I wasn't expecting. I'd been a little iffy on the premise, simply because there's a quasi-Celtic basis for the worldbuilding -- the protagonist, Croi is a brownie (well, sort of), and there are pixies and the kingdoms of Talamh and Tine and other Irish words -- and I simultaneously love Celtic-based stuff and have seen enough of it, much of it done poorly, that my starting mindset tends to default to "skeptical." But I liked the voice, and I liked Croi even when she's being prickly, and I was intrigued by where the plot was going: although Croi seems to be a brownie, that turns out to be a powerful glamour placed on her by an unknown power using magic that should be lost. Croi, who's lived most of her life on the fringes of human society with no faerie company but a woman she calls the Hag, has to travel to the Otherworld and find out what her true nature is.
Naturally, she encounters other people along the way -- but those people drag her piecemeal into a much larger plot about the politics and metaphysics of the Otherworld, one I found fairly engaging. My complaint here, insofar as I have one, is that this feels very much like the first book of a series, yet I can't find any sign of a sequel coming out. We end with some revelations and with one character's final words to the protagonist being "come find me," but things are very far from resolved. I hope there will be a second book, and this isn't a case of the publishing industry axing something half-finished because sales weren't good enough.
The Kuiper Belt Job, David D. Levine.
Disclosure: the author is a friend, and sent the book to me for blurbing. Well, to me and Alyc, on the grounds that it's caper/heist-y and that might appeal to readers of M.A. Carrick, though this book -- as the title suggests -- is science fiction.
I inhaled it in about a day flat. The structure is interesting: the story centers on a group of thieves that call themselves the Cannibal Club (no cannibalism involved; it's just a name one of the characters thought sounded cool), who broke apart years ago after a job went wrong. The story alternates between segments showing you that earlier job, and segments that bring the surviving crew back together for a new challenge -- with each of those latter bits 1) being from the perspective of a different character and 2) involving smaller heists necessary to get the next person on board or out of whatever situation they're trapped in. This allows for a variety of challenges along the way, and each one has a distinct flavor.
You also get a really interesting tour of the solar system! There's a technology here, the skip drive, that lets ships go fast without instantaneously arriving wherever they want in the solar system, so travel time is still real without making the titular job, all the way out in the Kuiper Belt, a years-long undertaking. On the way there, the story hits a variety of locations, many of which are off the standard beaten path of fiction (at least the fiction I read -- admittedly my SF consumption is relatively small). Like, I learned about trailing trojans from this novel! So if this is your kind of thing, I highly recommend it, and you will probably see a blurb from M.A. Carrick somewhere in the marketing unless David decides not to use it. :-P
Worrals Flies Again, W.E. Johns.
Third of this 1940s series about a female WAAF pilot during World War II, and my god Captain Johns could that title have been any more bland? I genuinely will have to keep referring to the Wikipedia page to know what order these books go in, and to my own posts to remember which plot goes with which name.
In this one, Worrals and her best friend Frecks get dispatched to a chateau that's a collation point for intel from the French resistance. The idea is that the tiny little plane they use, which has foldable wings, can be hidden in the chateau's cellars; then, if an urgent message comes in, they can fly it back to the U.K. rather than using radio or pigeons, both of which have significant problems with reliability. As a side note, this series does a great job of really making me understand just how close the British and French coasts are to each other, because of the ease with which characters can fly back and forth. (Well, "ease" so long as you don't take into account flak guns and enemy planes.) I grew up in Texas, where everything other than More Texas was very far away; it croggled me when we were in New York City and my parents went to another state for dinner. Travel within Europe gives me much the same feeling of "buh? how?"
Anyway! These being pulp adventures, naturally the above plan goes wrong immediately. There are Germans lodging in what should have been a nearly unoccupied chateau; there is an urgent message, but it's already in the hands of the Germans. Everything I've enjoyed about this series before continues, especially the way that Frecks, instead of being the Bumbling Comic Relief Friend, gets her moments to shine. And the relationship between Worrals and a fellow pilot, Bill Ashton, continues to fly in a zone I find very pleasing: there's attraction between them, but both of them put the war and their duties first, and while Bill is sometimes helpful, it's never in a "swoop in and save the ladies" kind of way. In this book Worrals has to rescue him from captivity, less through overt derring-do than through clever deceit. One male villain briefly cross-dresses, and I was delighted that this did not come across as hinting at Teh Evul Gayz; it felt like a tactical move by a chillingly pragmatic man, nothing more.
Two minor quibbles for this book, neither of which ruined my enjoyment. One is a particular side character who winds up being fine in the long run, but may register as an awkward stereotype at first if you don't know where the story is going. (I was spoiled for that because of Rachel Manija Brown's post about this book, but I didn't mind.) The other is one bit of drama that felt a little too over the top for me -- you know instantly that what seems to have happened can't possibly be true, so then it's just a matter of waiting for the explanation, which felt a bit too convoluted once it arrived. But whatevs, these are still rip-roaring Nazi-thwarting feminist adventures, and I'm gonna keep reading them whenever I want a couple of hours of delightful fun.
The Curse of Capistrano, Johnston McCulley.
This book was eventually republished under the name The Mark of Zorro, after the film with that title made the character a household name. Yes, gentle readers, this is the very first incarnation of Zorro!
It's kind of fascinating to see where it does and does not match the versions I've seen before. No real origin story here, except as briefly described by Diego at the end; we start out with Zorro already a notorious figure in California, terrorizing corrupt soldiers and aiding those they oppress. The story's omniscient narrator doesn't tell you Diego is Zorro -- there's just this dashing masked outlaw (full-face mask, unlike the cinematic depictions) and this incredibly effete nobleman, and I wonder if audiences at the time knew right away they would be the same person, or if that trope was still new enough in 1919 that the connection wasn't shriekingly obvious to everyone. Interestingly, though McCulley went on to write a ton more about this character, it's clear he didn't have that intent from the outset; this book ends with Zorro publicly unmasking as Diego and the corruption being dealt with and everyone living happily ever after, the end. (The introductory matter in my copy, which includes a brief biographical sketch of McCulley, notes that every adaptation ever and McCulley's own sequels just . . . pretend that ending never happened. No explanation, nothing to see here, just move along.)
Of course, it does also have its flaws. The narrative never misses a chance to remind you that the tavern landlord is fat as well as greedy, and there is definitely a certain ideal of masculinity being promoted here (albeit one that involves musical talent and other such elements). Indigenous Californians appear only as generic "natives;" none of them have names, I think only one gets like a single line of dialogue, and their agency is basically limited to getting the hell out of the way when they see that shit's about to go down. Zorro defends them, but only because they epitomize the helpless, oppressed masses, and the work of the friars in their missions is presented as unambiguously good. Women are not quite as backgrounded as the natives are, but there are only two in the story: Lolita Pulido, the young woman courted by both Diego (with extreme ineptitude) and Zorro (much more successfully), and her mother. I will say, though, that after I assumed Lolita's sole agency in the narrative would be refusing to marry Diego even though it would save her family from political and economic peril, she surprised me by proactively escaping the bad guys and displaying virtuoso riding skill -- so that was a pleasant turn.
On the whole, I'd class this under "historically interesting but not so great you should rush out to find it" (i.e. below what I shall now call the Worrals Line). What I bought was the Summit Classic Collector Edition, and while I appreciated the introduction and the context given there, I really wish they'd been more aggressive about cleaning up the obvious typos in the text, rather than piously presenting their approach as preserving the author's intent. I'm betting you could find this on Gutenberg, if you want to glance at it without committing money to the enterprise.
The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination, Alain Corbin, trans. Miriam L. Kochan, Roy Porter, and Christopher Prendergast.
I have no recollection of where I saw this book recommended, but it makes for a hell of an odd read.
The focus here is much more on "the foul" than "the fragrant," i.e. far less about perfume and such than I expected (though there is some discussion about how the fashions around that changed over time). Instead the central thread is, essentially, the deodorization of life, specifically in France, from roughly the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries: how ideas and attitudes toward stench changed, leading us to increasingly try and eliminate from our surroundings the odors of urine, feces, sweat, decay, mud, and more.
What made this interesting to me was the intense glimpse into "the past was a foreign country." You get a very real sense of how those smells were taken so much for granted that they kind of didn't bother people -- in fact there's one old woman mentioned in here who commented, post-Revolution, about how those smells made her nostalgic for the days of the ancien régime. You also get a tour of historical science, as scholars tried to figure out what smells even were, how air operated, how disease spread, and so forth. As gobsmacking as it is to think they believed that merely agitating air or water was enough to purify it, they did: something something restore the elasticity of the air, totally not how any of that works. And also too much water was bad because it relaxed the fibers of the body and made you vulnerable. A whole, completely alien understanding of the physical world, which led to an astonishingly filthy world where everyone was very convinced that cesspool clearers were robustly healthy because of their exposure to filth, and that's why you should spread it in the streets to combat plague.
I suspect I would have gotten more out of this if I were at all conversant with French literature, because Corbin frequently cites it to track changing ideas about and attitudes toward both good and bad smells. I did, however, follow the parts about how hospitals, prisons, and ships were testing-grounds for new approaches that later got rolled out to the general populace (including teaching people new techniques for taking a crap; schoolteachers were put in charge of this), and how the assumption that X group naturally stank shifted from occupation and/or place of origin, to economic class, to race. So basically, it's a whole lotta insight into historical mentalities of a sort very different from our own, and really fascinating so long as you're willing to cope with extended discussions of gross bodily matters.
The Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How the Daughters of Genghis Khan Rescued His Empire, Jack Weatherford.
So, I know very, very little about Mongolian history. If you'd asked me to name important women from that culture and time, I would have said, "uhhh, Khutulun?" and that would have been it.
Boy howdy is there stuff I was missing.
The subtitle is rather a misnomer. Genghis Khan's daughters, and also his daughters-in-law, did not "rescue his empire;" it collapsed with astonishing speed, due in no small part to the incompetence, rivalry, and cruelty of his sons, which included a truly massive backlash against the women who held power. I suspect it's supposed to refer, in a very broad sense, to Manduhai, who married one of Genghis Khan's few surviving patrilineal descendants and pulled the Mongols back together into a coherent state several centuries later, but that's far from the empire he himself had created.
Leaving the inaccuracy of the title aside, though, this was absolutely amazing to read. Weatherford lays out very clearly how much power Genghis Khan put in the hands of the women around him, in ways that (in the afterword) Weatherford admits he himself wouldn't have believed if someone had handed him a book like this to read. The image has to be assembled from fragments; someone in the past literally cut a section out of the text now called The Secret History of the Mongols, leaving behind only one tantalizing phrase that suggests the missing bit had to do with the Great Khan's daughters. But we know that the women who married his sons were given the title of beki (usually only given to princes) or khatun (essentially "queen"), and served as important diplomatic representatives of their peoples, while his daughters were also called beki and were, in their nuptial edicts, explicitly sent to govern the peoples they were married off to. The sons-in-law, meanwhile, merely got a title that meant "son-in-law" and were given positions of honor in Genghis Khan's own guard . . . which 1) took them away from their homelands and 2) tended to shorten their life expectancies by a lot. His will left huge swaths of the Mongol Empire in the hands of women, whether his wives or his daughters.
Unfortunately, of course, none of that lasted. And it's not all on the shoulders of the men: the women also fought to extend their power (or that of their husbands/sons), with a lot of bloodbaths as a result. Still, things like the mass gang rape of four thousand women, followed by selling off the survivors -- in direct and flagrant contravention of laws laid down by Genghis Khan -- were certainly the fault of guys like Ogedei. It was basically a long downhill slope from there, with a trough in which the power and agency of ruling women was reduced to things like eye-popping ruses designed to keep a male Borijin clan baby safe from the people trying to exterminate Genghis Khan's lineage from the world, until things pick up again with Manduhai. But there's really intriguing information here on Mongolian culture and what you could almost call a fluorescence of thirteenth-century feminism, in ways that make me really crave an alternate history fantasy in which the ideology then managed to take root and go on holding power.
Alchemists, Mediums and Magicians: Stories of Taoist Mystics, trans. and ed. Thomas Cleary.
I don't think I realized, when I bought this book, that it's a translation of a fourteenth-century hagiographic Chinese text, rather than a modern work on the topic. As such, it wasn't as interesting as I'd hoped: the biographical sketches here (organized by dynasty and labeled with grouping terms like "Taoist Character" or "Taoist Influence") range from a couple of paragraphs to a couple of pages, and it isn't long before you start to see the formulaic elements they share.
They're not all identical; for starters, there's a distinct bifurcation between the Taoists who served in government and used their wisdom to improve their respective rulers, and those who found more or less eloquent ways to phrase "no, fuck off" when begged by emperors and kings to come serve. In the aggregate, the formulas are moderately useful from the perspective of getting a feel for Taoist beliefs and ideology, e.g. the various ways their deaths are described: some leave behind fragrant and undecaying corpses thanks to their Taoist cultivation, while others are as light as a feather and some leave behind only their clothes with the sash still tied, thus proving their bodies were sublimated right out of physical existence. But I had to take lots of breaks as I read through this, because otherwise my eyes started to glaze over.
One thing I noted: while none of the individuals who get biographies in here are women, there are a handful who show up as immortals in the tales, usually as instructors to the men. Also, there are a lot of footnotes mentioning other books of Cleary's; if (let's be real, when) I decide I want to read more about historical Taoism, I suspect his corpus of work would be a useful place to start.
Myths and Legends of the Navagraha: The Nine Movers of Destiny in Indian Astrology, Nesa Arumugam.
One of the random things I'm curious about is non-Western astrology and how it's set up. This turns out to be much less an answer to that question than I'd hoped; instead the emphasis really is on the myths and legends about the relevant deities. Which I didn't mind! Though the stories here do naturally bring up figures I know better, like Shiva and Vishnu and Laxmi, the only one of the Navagraha I felt at all familiar with was Surya, and I at least recognized the name of Chandra. The rest were new to me.
And you do get some information on the operation of Vedic astrology, if only because the selection of the Navagraha tells you some things. In addition to the usual suspects of the Sun, Moon, and five visible planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn), you get two deities representing, not celestial bodies, but the ascending and descending lunar nodes -- the places where the orbit of the Moon crosses the ecliptic. That right there is fascinating to me! Arumugam also touches on the associations each deity has in astrology, albeit only briefly.
But that's fine, because the stories were pretty great all on their own. Arumugam feels no need to try and nail mythology down to a single consistent tale; she freely relates contradictory versions from the Rig Veda and the Puranas, along with the occasional folk belief. I also appreciated the periodic comments on the difference between South Indian (specifically Tamil) and North Indian narratives, practices, and beliefs, since I know that what I've read in the past has tended to have a distinctly northern skew. And man, once again I am reminded of just how genderqueer Indian mythology can be: not only do you get the story I've heard before of Vishnu taking female form as the beautiful Mohini to trick the asuras, but one of the Navagraha, Budha (Mercury, and not to be confused with Buddha-of-Buddhism), is queer through and through, sometimes taking male form and sometimes female in response to what sex their spouse Ila/Sudyumna is at any given moment. It's really intriguing stuff.
Embracing Uncertainty: Future Jazz, That 13th Century Buddhist Monk, and the Invention of Cultures, John Traphagan.
I . . . really have a hard time summarizing this book, which my sister gave to me as a birthday present. Traphagan is an anthropologist who's spent much of his career studying Japan, but his earlier background is in philosophy, and also he plays jazz drums, and all those things kind of smush together to make some points about . . . look, this makes it sound like the book is bad, and it isn't. It's just so much a semi-rambling set of thoughts Traphagan has that attempting to encapsulate any core is difficult. He talks about cultures as being kind of like the lead sheets jazz musicians use, and how Dōgen (founder of the Sōtō school of Zen in Japan) diverged from earlier Buddhisms, and what Zen really is like in Japan (as opposed to how it gets represented in the West), and how contemporary America is miring itself further and further in binary oppositions which Dōgen's philosophy counters, and how we'd all be better off if we accepted that the world is uncertain, that we can never make it certain, and so we must embrace the jazz improvisation that is life.
Or something like that. In a bizarre sense, I think the best way for me to comment on this book is to lean into how I talk about Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. My pitch there is usually "if computer hacking, neurolinguistics, and Sumerian mythology sound interesting to you, then you might enjoy this book;" here it would be "if anthropology, Zen Buddhism, and jazz music sound interesting to you." I don't think the subtitle of this book is great, but also I don't know what I would use in its place, and hey, at least this one has the virtue of "does what it says on the tin."
(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/Fjkp5x)
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Date: 2023-10-02 08:58 pm (UTC)What are you doing after your next three books?
(I read this book in 2017 and it made me feel very justified in a piece of terrible fiction I had written in seventh grade to introduce a paper about the Mongols. Have you read Elizabeth Donnelly Carney's Women and Monarchy in Macedonia (2000)? Have I already recommended it to you?)
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Date: 2023-10-02 09:56 pm (UTC)Heh. I would need to know a lot more about the Mongols before I could write such a thing, and even then, the zeitgeist is such that my whiter-than-white ass is not the best choice for telling such a story. Besides, I think it wants someone more interested in fate-of-nations-scale politics and war than I am.
Have you read Elizabeth Donnelly Carney's Women and Monarchy in Macedonia (2000)? Have I already recommended it to you?)
I have not, and I don't believe you have! It is now on my wishlist.
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Date: 2023-10-03 03:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-10-03 07:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-10-03 07:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-10-03 08:12 pm (UTC)