book post: A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine

A friend’s pitch is what convinced me to pick up this book:

so I was sold on this book because the author is Byzantine Historian
and this book is about
a Weird Empire
and no one does Weird Empire like the Byzantines
but it's
the prose is good, not earth-shakingly good
but for a first novel, far more than just competent
There are Very Obvious Themes
but in a good way
it's doing the thing where
people very consciously, in setting, have ideological and political dispositions
and a sense of politics that's more than "X good, Y bad"
like there's a very specific feeling they get across of
what it's like to visit the Imperial Metropole
which I think is basically the feeling you get as an immigrant and you get dropped for the first time into the developed world
I can't pin down the quote but
there's a small anecdote from Roman history that feels very appropriate to this story
it's basically this King of a German tribe gets captured
and hauled to Rome as a part of a triumph
and looks around at the majesty of Rome and says
"And you who have so much, covet what little we have?"

If that pitch sounds intriguing, this book is very likely to please you—with the caveat of, I went in thinking this would be some contemplative Novel Of Ideas TM with only a putative plot, but instead it’s actually a page-turning adventure/thriller/mystery that happens to also have things to say about empire and aesthetics and the like.

Which is how I like the balance of my books to fall! Mahit’s an intensely likeable main character, a mixture of bookish/weebish enthusiasm and longing for all things Teixcalaani, and nascent political savvy and guardedness. The worldbuilding is refreshingly unique (poetry competitions! cryptography based on pretentious poetry! strange-yet-charming naming system! etc), and the sci-fi constructs are evocative (the whole concept of literally manifesting institutional memory via the “imago machines” is just lovely). But you never lose the beat of the page-turning political-thriller in the middle of it. Fun times; will read the sequel when it comes out.

book post: Captive Prince and Prince's Gambit by C. S. Pacat

( in which I read some erotica by accident )

[book post] To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq by Robert Draper

Stop me if you’ve heard this story before:

There’s this one very Charismatic Guy. He has a lot of credibility in his industry, and in the companies he’s worked for: because he’s had some past successes, or because he knows people, or he got lucky. But people listen to Charismatic Guy.

Charismatic Guy has this weird pet project. He has a ~vision~. He knows This One Weird Trick for transforming his whole field, and he just needs like a ton of headcount and money and time, but seriously guys, listen to me, it’s gonna be so awesome.

The C-suite, they listen and smile indulgently, and maybe even give him a little R&D project, as a treat. But they’re not gonna buy in to this dude’s vision. Everyone knows it’s a bit tenuous, a bit silly, a bit out there.

But then something happens. Something big. Something that shakes the company’s confidence to its core. Maybe a competitor put out a product that is way better than anything the company can do, and the company thinks its days are numbered. Maybe the company’s terrified they’re about to miss out on the next big market sector. The company is like, oh shit, we’ve got to do something. We cannot lose here.

And Charismatic Guy, he’s had this agenda for a long time. And, in fairness, the entire company’s putatively had this agenda for a while. Like, Charismatic Guy’s project is tangentially related to some goals the company set five years ago.

Charismatic Guy says, I can do this. Charismatic Guy says, trust me.

People who actually know Charismatic Guy think, well, this dude’s obviously full of shit. This dude’s pet project has nothing to do with the crisis at hand; this dude’s pet project is exactly the wrong way to handle this crisis.

But the C-suite doesn’t ask the right questions. They listen too much to Charismatic guy. They don’t know what else to do and this option is right here. Or maybe they’re just criminally incurious. They buy into Charismatic Guy’s mission, shut down all dissent, and it’s Full Steam Ahead on this quixotic quest for the next n years.

Okay. I’ve just told the story of how Google+ happened. I’ve also told the story of, like, a billionty similar scenarios that happen in bigtech and academia all the time. If you’ve worked in any large-ish company, you have probably seen this scenario play out, personally.

What happened when your company did it? A fucking waste of time and resources, probably. Maybe the project eventually got shitcanned, maybe it limped along for years and years until the resources quietly dried up, something like that.

What happens when the US government does it? Well. Read this book and find out.

( Read more... )

[book post] Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Masterful, in that I marveled at the sheer number and variety of stories Adichie was telling, how she had woven together so many lives, cities, and places, and managed to make it all hang together.

Fascinating, in that the subject matter was primarily things that I know very little about (I’ve never been to Nigeria; I’ve only barely been to London; I’ve never been on a student visa; I’ve never overstayed my visa and done the whole undocumented-worker thing; I’ve never been a professor in a country that’s suffering brain drain from repeated government coups; I’ve never been a doctor navigating the hell of the US’s medical credentialing system to try and transfer my medical license from Nigeria to the US; I’ve never braided hair or been to a hair-braiding salon...).

And the bits that I was familiar with rang amusingly true (Adichie nails genuinely-well-meaning-yet-awkward upper-class white culture, and she nails the weird sort of parties and potlocks that grad students and academics get up to, with all their amusing Big Ideas and intellectual puffery).

Yet, near the end of the novel, I felt a vague nagging sense of remove—I was admiring this novel like a mountain, like something distant and beautiful, and yet I wanted to be closer. Why didn’t it all feel more immediate?

I felt like I must be missing something, until I chatted with a friend who’d also read the book—she said it was masterful (yes), said she was glad she read it (yes same), and said it also felt a touch... cold (yes!). But, she continued, she liked that—when narratives get feels-y, they often start feeling mawkish, to her, so she liked that thin layer of remove. (She’s a voracious reader of dense nonfiction histories, for a sense of her wider reading preferences.)

This makes sense enough to me. I have a pretty well-known preference for bombast and melodrama, and that’s not how this book leans. But its attention to detail and nigh-War-and-Peace scope still make it something I’m glad I read.

I’d thus cautiously recommend this book to anyone interested in the subject matter, and I’d enthusiastically recommend it to anyone who shares that aesthetic preference—who wants a story told straight, and perhaps a touch distantly, but very true. I saw someone comment that this should be regarded as a Great American Novel and, yeah, I can see this as a candidate.

That’s the high-level view; now for my own personal natterings:

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[book post] The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature by J. Drew Lanham

I started my local Bird Book Club on a whim, prompted by three factors: (1) a desire to bro out with my bird bros at not the crack of fucking dawn, (2) if I pick the meeting place I effectively get to pick the beer, and (3) fond memories of the nature writing I enjoyed as a kid: Aldo Leopold and the like.

Well, since our club's inception, we’ve alternated a few times between nature writing and science writing, and I’m at last forced to admit that I’m just plain enjoying the science writing more. This realization gives me no great joy; like my recent shift in preference for podcasts over music albums, I worry that this is yet another sign that I am becoming old, boring, jaded. Like, when I was in high school, I could quote that poetic green fire bit from A Sand County Almanac by heart; would those words move me similarly now? Or would I just sigh and say, too sentimental, too purple, too simple?

I feel a bit bad, offering this prelude for this particular post, because it's not Lanham's fault that I’m not much for rose-tinted memoirs these days. He's just the poor dude whose book I happened to read while I was kicking these thoughts around anyway, and they had to come out somewhere, so yeah, here they are on my blog.

Putting aside my newfound realization that I’m just not as into this kind of book as I used to be—

( Read more... )

And yeah, I'm all caught up on book posting for a bit! More coming in a month or two~