back catalog

some books I've read in the last few whatevers

The Dandelion Insurrection by Rivera Sun
The only fiction on this booklist. The writer is Author Guest of Honor at Mythcon this year, so I figured I should try her work. This title is the first listed under her con bio, and was also the easiest to find in a library, so I went here first. It's not a fantasy as we customarily define them. It's set in a dystopian near-future US, with curfews and checkpoints supposedly to protect against terrorism, where an illegitimately-elected president presides over an increasingly rapacious government-industrial complex. In short, it depicts the textbook definition of fascism, though if the word is used at all it's not emphasized. The story focuses on a man who's a polemic underground journalist rather in the Glenn Greenwald mode, and a woman with a vision of a new society but who also carries the style of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. They essentially pull into existence by its own bootstraps what they insist will remain a nonviolent opposition movement, the Dandelion Insurrection of the title. In respects it resembles Occupy Wall Street, which predated this novel by two years, and the subsequent course of events in the novel is about what I suspect the organizers of Occupy Wall Street hoped would happen. It didn't.
As fiction, the book is competently written and flows easily. No scintillating prose, but nothing for Thog to smack his lips over either. There's a certain amount of heroes-get-the-last-word wish-fulfillment and self-congratulatory sleet to follow, but it's entirely devoid of the rancid. The author even draws a sedate curtain entirely over the sex scenes. In the choice for a polemic novelist between loading the tale with specifics at the cost of bogging the story down, or keeping the story moving at the cost of being vague in the message, the author leans strongly to the second option, but that may be because she's offloaded her list of nonviolent protest techniques to an appendix, and a protester's guidebook and a collection of the hero's journalism to separate books which I haven't seen. There's also a sequel to the novel, with a third book reportedly on the way.

Lost Transmissions: The Secret History of Science Fiction and Fantasy by Desirina Boskovich
Collection of brief essays, many of them guest-written, on things in the field that the author considers obscure or underappreciated. Covers literature, media, and some fan phenomena. In the literature section, I was pleased to find pieces on yea, even George MacDonald, David R. Bunch, and Phil Dick's Exegesis, along with some people I didn't think were so obscure, like Mervyn Peake and Angela Carter, and some even I didn't know. A piece on the Inklings is pretty bad, including errors like "Lewis's son Christopher" and defining the Inklings' influence as whatever crap fantasy happened to cross the author's mind. But pieces on two controversial works, The Dark Tower (the CSL one) and The Last Dangerous Visions, are admirable in their accuracy and judiciousness.

MetaMaus by Art Spiegelman
This book has been out for some years, but I only now have seen it. It's the making of Spiegelman's famous Holocaust comic, Maus, filled with memoirs and interviews (some with his family) and lots of illustrations of his drafts and of his earlier comics incorporating the same themes. Explains the relationship between the people in Maus and the real people they're based on, and the bizarre backstory to Spiegelman's idea of drawing humans as mice, cats, pigs, etc. in the first place. Should only be read by people well familiar with Maus, but if that work moves you, this is illuminating.

What's Your Pronoun?: Beyond He & She by Dennis Baron
I knew there was a long list of attempted neutral pronouns, from ae to zie - Baron's got a catalog of them all - but what I hadn't known was the huge legal argument that went on in the 19th century over whether he included an assumed she or not. When the topic was tax codes or criminal codes, the establishment would argue that of course the laws applied to women too: he meant she as well; that was how everybody used the language; it was understood. But when the laws concerned voting rights, defined eligibility for officeholders, or said who could be a lawyer, all of a sudden the same people insisted that women were excluded, because he meant only he. That's what it said, wasn't it? End of discussion. It was one thing if you had a grammar law stating openly that he meant she here and not there, and some jurisdictions had that, but these arguments were conducted on the basis of complete self-evidence with universal application.
Baron favors singular they, and points out its long history, but he doesn't draw a sufficient distinction among 1) they for ambiguous usages between singular and plural (everyone, no one), which all his pre-modern examples are, 2) they for a single but nonspecified or unidentified person, and 3) they for a specific known individual. I find these are distinctive usages which sit in the brain in different places and ways. Using #1 or #2 with comfort and ease doesn't mean you can pick up on using #2 or #3 with any facility whatever.

Music: A Subversive History by Ted Gioia
This is a social history of music, and can consequently spend many chapters on the place of music in the classical and early Mesopotamian world where a more technical history wouldn't be able to get very far. Gioia's thesis is that musical trends start out as subversive but then regularly get co-opted by the cultural establishment. His latest examples of co-opting, cited frequently, are Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize and Elvis visiting Nixon in the White House. (He doesn't seem aware that the visit was Elvis's idea.) He gets quite exercised over Pythagorean music theory turning from a descriptive account into prescriptive rules. There's a lot of good stuff on medieval church music, but I kind of lost the thread after the chapter on classical music from Bach through the 19th century, in which he treats it as a big surprise that Bach and Beethoven were subversive figures in their day. You only need look at a picture of Beethoven, with his untidy clothes and mop of wild hair, to realize that he's no orthodox dominant repressor.

Superheavy: Making and Breaking the Periodic Table by Kit Chapman
The first half, on the WW2-era and early postwar ventures into creating new elements at UC Berkeley, was very much to my taste, and not just because I attended UC and know all those buildings, but after the Russians and Japanese get into the picture and it just becomes a big international motorcar race to capture the next element, it got a lot less interesting.

Dominion by Peter Ackroyd
Came across this in the library; it's a volume in Ackroyd's history of England, this one covering 1815-1901. At that scale of coverage I was surprised to see it's only the fifth volume; the earlier ones are much more wide-spanning. I found this lucid enough; it's very clear, though once or twice inaccurate, on the political makeup of the successive governments, which is what I most want from an 18th or 19th century British history. Mostly chronological, it frequently dives into broader considerations of social history which are reasonably well cemented in, or picks up specific incidents like the Tichborne claim which aren't handled as clearly.

Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11 by Mitchell Zuckoff
Very large and necessarily grim account of the tragedy in detail, but it makes urgently compelling reading. It's in two parts: one in the planes (plus ATC and other controls) and one on the ground. For each part, Zuckoff has picked a lineup of specific characters to follow, beginning with their personal histories and then jumping back and forth as the timeline proceeds. He's pretty good at getting past the problem that there are no surviving witnesses to a lot of this stuff. This procedure works well in the first part, which is shorter, has fairly few characters with fairly parallel stories, and you already know everybody's fate. Part 2 is harder to follow: longer, with more characters with more diverse stories, and unless you've already read about them you don't already know which victims will survive. I took to digging out the successive entries on individuals just to get some coherence into it. I'd already read a book on the Twin Towers which took this approach (102 Minutes by Dwyer and Flynn), so I knew much of that, but it was still dismaying to read of burned victims, still conscious and functional, being carefully escorted down the stairs and handed off to medical care, only to die in the hospital. And I'd read nothing of this level of detail about the Pentagon, which in some ways is more horrifying because some of the people in the impact zone survived, so they can tell Zuckoff what it was like in there, or the bizarre account of being just a volunteer firefighter out in rural Pennsylvania, going about your business, when all of a sudden ...