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queenluasplitting this into fiction vs nonfiction this month, since uh, historically my nonfiction reviews tend to run long. expect the nonfiction books sometime this weekend.
Crazy Weather by Charles L. McNichols
Why have I never heard of this book before?! THIS BOOK WAS AMAZING.
I picked it up on a recommendation from Ursula K. Le Guin—she wrote the foreward for this edition, for an imprint of books which tries to highlight rare, out-of-print-and lost books. (The idea that Crazy Weather was ever out-of-print stuns me.) And her foreward is a better pitch than I can give, but I’ll try to go for a tl;dr version anyway.
* Apparently one of the original inspirations for the book was the author meeting some white lad on a ranch in the southwestern US who spoke Spanish and Mojave better than he spoke English. Hence our protagonist, South Boy, a teenage kid between cultures. On the one hand, he’s white, with a very Proper Christian Mother and a hard-working rancher father. On the other hand, he’s raised deep in Mojave country. He speaks the language, he’s friends with the people, and when he’s off running around outside (which is most all of the time), he’s running around with the Mojave.
So the story starts when he runs off on an adventure, but this isn’t some ~spirit journey~ woo nonsense—he runs off because his good Mojave friend Havek invites him; he runs off because this particular kind of journey is a Thing You Do in Mojave culture, just like, I dunno, going to prom was a thing in the culture I grew up in. As Le Guin puts it, the author “is never disrespectful of Mojave ways, yet is as unsentimental as a coyote”—it helps a lot that our protagonist is young, and thus ignorant of some of the larger prejudices in the world; he’s able to hold Mojave creation myths and Christian teaching in his head simultaneously, with no apparent contradiction or impulse toward thinking of one as “better” than the other. And thus we get a wonderful window into those two worlds.
* But beyond the (very cool!) historical and cultural portrait, this book is just a rollicking good fun adventure. You know the structure of like, I dunno, Watership Down, where every chapter involves some fun new encounter, some new character or obstacle, and there’s some super-thrilling interaction with the thing, and the chapter ends not with a cliffhanger but with a feeling of triumph, of having just tangled with something really cool? It is such a good structure, and it’s the backbone of this tale. Like, yes, I love my gritty psychological realism and my political intrigue and people quietly pining over the course of many chapters or whatever. But I also fucking love starting a new chapter and we run into some dude called the Mormonhater who’s hurt and sick and South Boy has to scramble to save him, and we start another new chapter and now we’re hearing some kickass old war stories from Yellow Road, and so on and so forth...
* Here’s a thought I had while reading: very rarely are teens ashamed in modern YA, are they? They can be angry, they can be rebellious, they can be embarrassed—but I feel like I rarely see a teen do some minor selfish act, and feel actively ashamed, like they’re not being the sort of person they respect, like they’re not being the sort of person other adults would respect. South Boy, though, feels this in spades—not in a tedious Puritan-guilt way, but in a dang-I’m-trying-really-hard-to-be-a-person-worthy-of-respect-and-there-I-went-grandstanding, gotta-try-and-cut-that-out-next-time way. We take South Boy’s growing-up seriously because South Boy himself is taking it so seriously—it reminds me a lot of Osamu Dazai’s Schoolgirl, which I loved so very much. More of this please.
* I ask “why have I never heard of this book before” because, well, honestly it seems really well-suited for classroom teaching. It’s fun, it’s not too long, and while the tale itself is straightforward, it’s laden with all sorts of ironies and hints of deeper tragedy. It’s set in a dying world, after all—when South Boy asks the Mormonhater if he can apprentice under him, the answer he gets is a resounding no: “I’m the last of my kind . . . These is the times of steam trains and irrigating ditches. You go find somebody to teach you about steam trains and irrigating ditches. You got no business in a mud boat with me.”
This comes after we’re over halfway through the book, after we’ve fallen so deeply in love with these Mojave and these ranchers and these Mexicans and these odd vagabonds in-between, this little early-1900s portrait of the world, and it aches because, well, from our vantage point here in the year 2020, we all know the Mormonhater is right.
What a book.
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
So somehow I got this far in life without reading Slaughterhouse-Five, and honestly, I wasn’t sure what to expect. My knowledge of Vonnegut was pretty limited—on the one hand, I knew he’d written some truly beautiful letters. On the other hand, "Harrison Bergeron" sure is pretty cringe to a modern reader.
Well, I’m pleased to say Slaughterhouse-Five holds up quite well—though it’s definitely more of an experience than a story.
It is almost prose-poem-y, in how it’s constructed—he uses a very thin sci-fi-y/magical-realism-y device to allow us to leap wildly between different parts of Billy Pilgrim’s life, back and forth in the timeline, such that the narrative gathers force not from the story’s progression but instead from how laden with meaning and feeling all those disparate repeating scenes, rhythms, and phrases become. (I think I will shiver when i see “so it goes” or “poo-tee-weet?” for the rest of my life.)
It’s often cited as an anti-war novel. Well, sort of. I think it’s obvious that Vonnegut hates war, that he thinks it’s brutal and awful and only chosen by trumped-up, self-important, narrow-minded men in power (like the horrible, horrible Harvard professor near the novel’s end). But there’s also a strange resignedness here—very early on, he mentions some jackass at a dinner party who derided the book’s premise, said that anti-war people may as well be anti-glacier, and the whole Tralfamadore thing only serves to reinforce this feeling of stoic inevitability.
So if the book’s anti-war, I think it’s only so because it’s a meditation and a mourning, and it’s very evocative and good at that.
Duplicity by N. K. Traver
Quick YA thriller-ish book; picked it up because of a (very vague and distant and one-sided) connection to the author. The problem with being a Full-Time Professional Hacker is that you’re, uh, very picky when it comes to fictional depictions of hacking (even if said depiction is obviously meant to be a little supernatural), and I will tactfully hold further comments :P
West by Carys Davies
Honestly, the NYT review summarizes my feelings better than I could, so just take a gander at that.
I’ll only add:
* I picked it up because when I read the back cover and saw “dude goes on journey out west because of ancient monster bones discovered in Kentucky,” I was like oh HELL yeah let’s see some magical-realist and/or supernatural Kentucky shit, let’s have mammoths wandering the old American west, etc... this book is not that :P It’s entirely within the realist world, which is not bad! Just not what I expected.
* The prose really is lovely; there were whole passages I copied into my commonplace book.
* While I wouldn’t necessarily read another novel by this author, I’d be very curious to read her short fiction—I think that lovely prose and loose plotting would work much better in a more compressed space.
Crazy Weather by Charles L. McNichols
Why have I never heard of this book before?! THIS BOOK WAS AMAZING.
I picked it up on a recommendation from Ursula K. Le Guin—she wrote the foreward for this edition, for an imprint of books which tries to highlight rare, out-of-print-and lost books. (The idea that Crazy Weather was ever out-of-print stuns me.) And her foreward is a better pitch than I can give, but I’ll try to go for a tl;dr version anyway.
* Apparently one of the original inspirations for the book was the author meeting some white lad on a ranch in the southwestern US who spoke Spanish and Mojave better than he spoke English. Hence our protagonist, South Boy, a teenage kid between cultures. On the one hand, he’s white, with a very Proper Christian Mother and a hard-working rancher father. On the other hand, he’s raised deep in Mojave country. He speaks the language, he’s friends with the people, and when he’s off running around outside (which is most all of the time), he’s running around with the Mojave.
So the story starts when he runs off on an adventure, but this isn’t some ~spirit journey~ woo nonsense—he runs off because his good Mojave friend Havek invites him; he runs off because this particular kind of journey is a Thing You Do in Mojave culture, just like, I dunno, going to prom was a thing in the culture I grew up in. As Le Guin puts it, the author “is never disrespectful of Mojave ways, yet is as unsentimental as a coyote”—it helps a lot that our protagonist is young, and thus ignorant of some of the larger prejudices in the world; he’s able to hold Mojave creation myths and Christian teaching in his head simultaneously, with no apparent contradiction or impulse toward thinking of one as “better” than the other. And thus we get a wonderful window into those two worlds.
* But beyond the (very cool!) historical and cultural portrait, this book is just a rollicking good fun adventure. You know the structure of like, I dunno, Watership Down, where every chapter involves some fun new encounter, some new character or obstacle, and there’s some super-thrilling interaction with the thing, and the chapter ends not with a cliffhanger but with a feeling of triumph, of having just tangled with something really cool? It is such a good structure, and it’s the backbone of this tale. Like, yes, I love my gritty psychological realism and my political intrigue and people quietly pining over the course of many chapters or whatever. But I also fucking love starting a new chapter and we run into some dude called the Mormonhater who’s hurt and sick and South Boy has to scramble to save him, and we start another new chapter and now we’re hearing some kickass old war stories from Yellow Road, and so on and so forth...
* Here’s a thought I had while reading: very rarely are teens ashamed in modern YA, are they? They can be angry, they can be rebellious, they can be embarrassed—but I feel like I rarely see a teen do some minor selfish act, and feel actively ashamed, like they’re not being the sort of person they respect, like they’re not being the sort of person other adults would respect. South Boy, though, feels this in spades—not in a tedious Puritan-guilt way, but in a dang-I’m-trying-really-hard-to-be-a-person-worthy-of-respect-and-there-I-went-grandstanding, gotta-try-and-cut-that-out-next-time way. We take South Boy’s growing-up seriously because South Boy himself is taking it so seriously—it reminds me a lot of Osamu Dazai’s Schoolgirl, which I loved so very much. More of this please.
* I ask “why have I never heard of this book before” because, well, honestly it seems really well-suited for classroom teaching. It’s fun, it’s not too long, and while the tale itself is straightforward, it’s laden with all sorts of ironies and hints of deeper tragedy. It’s set in a dying world, after all—when South Boy asks the Mormonhater if he can apprentice under him, the answer he gets is a resounding no: “I’m the last of my kind . . . These is the times of steam trains and irrigating ditches. You go find somebody to teach you about steam trains and irrigating ditches. You got no business in a mud boat with me.”
This comes after we’re over halfway through the book, after we’ve fallen so deeply in love with these Mojave and these ranchers and these Mexicans and these odd vagabonds in-between, this little early-1900s portrait of the world, and it aches because, well, from our vantage point here in the year 2020, we all know the Mormonhater is right.
What a book.
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
So somehow I got this far in life without reading Slaughterhouse-Five, and honestly, I wasn’t sure what to expect. My knowledge of Vonnegut was pretty limited—on the one hand, I knew he’d written some truly beautiful letters. On the other hand, "Harrison Bergeron" sure is pretty cringe to a modern reader.
Well, I’m pleased to say Slaughterhouse-Five holds up quite well—though it’s definitely more of an experience than a story.
It is almost prose-poem-y, in how it’s constructed—he uses a very thin sci-fi-y/magical-realism-y device to allow us to leap wildly between different parts of Billy Pilgrim’s life, back and forth in the timeline, such that the narrative gathers force not from the story’s progression but instead from how laden with meaning and feeling all those disparate repeating scenes, rhythms, and phrases become. (I think I will shiver when i see “so it goes” or “poo-tee-weet?” for the rest of my life.)
It’s often cited as an anti-war novel. Well, sort of. I think it’s obvious that Vonnegut hates war, that he thinks it’s brutal and awful and only chosen by trumped-up, self-important, narrow-minded men in power (like the horrible, horrible Harvard professor near the novel’s end). But there’s also a strange resignedness here—very early on, he mentions some jackass at a dinner party who derided the book’s premise, said that anti-war people may as well be anti-glacier, and the whole Tralfamadore thing only serves to reinforce this feeling of stoic inevitability.
So if the book’s anti-war, I think it’s only so because it’s a meditation and a mourning, and it’s very evocative and good at that.
Duplicity by N. K. Traver
Quick YA thriller-ish book; picked it up because of a (very vague and distant and one-sided) connection to the author. The problem with being a Full-Time Professional Hacker is that you’re, uh, very picky when it comes to fictional depictions of hacking (even if said depiction is obviously meant to be a little supernatural), and I will tactfully hold further comments :P
West by Carys Davies
Honestly, the NYT review summarizes my feelings better than I could, so just take a gander at that.
I’ll only add:
* I picked it up because when I read the back cover and saw “dude goes on journey out west because of ancient monster bones discovered in Kentucky,” I was like oh HELL yeah let’s see some magical-realist and/or supernatural Kentucky shit, let’s have mammoths wandering the old American west, etc... this book is not that :P It’s entirely within the realist world, which is not bad! Just not what I expected.
* The prose really is lovely; there were whole passages I copied into my commonplace book.
* While I wouldn’t necessarily read another novel by this author, I’d be very curious to read her short fiction—I think that lovely prose and loose plotting would work much better in a more compressed space.
no subject
Date: 2020-04-23 09:38 pm (UTC)I just remember reading it and being like, this guy sure can construct some astounding sentences but put the whole man in the fire.
no subject
Date: 2020-04-23 09:39 pm (UTC)