[book post] March books
Apr. 2nd, 2022 03:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
queenluaBlankets by Craig Thompson
I have a deliberately-provactive shitpost somewhere in my Tumblr drafts, something along the lines of, "not every bad thing in fiction needs to be a fucking Trauma TM, there can just be Shit That Happened." Which is not to say that narratives involving trauma are bad—it's just that, too often, they're only allowed to resolve in certain ways, ways that don't match my own experience. Sometimes people just leave things complicated, or resolve their shit incompletely, or in ways that don't fit neatly into this arc of "experience a trauma, realize you're traumatized, experience righteous anger toward the source of your trauma, experience ~*~healing~*~, the end"—and arc that I keep tripping over in contemporary writing, which always leaves me cold.
Blessedly, instead of stewing over that shitpost, I stumbled upon this lovely graphic-novel-memoir thing instead. Blankets is a love story—a first love story, at that—and I was expecting it to be straightforwardly cute and sweet. It is sweet, but—it's also drawn from life, and thus incorporates all the messiness and sharp edges that entails. The author grew up in a stiflingly religious home, so he meets his high school love at church camp, because—of course he did; that's how you meet people when you're growing up in that kind of place. He finds some scattered solace in religion, but less and less as he grows up, and his parents are punishingly severe in restricting what he can draw and read and do, even as they clearly love him, in their own complicated way.
But it's not about those things; that's the background. What it's about is the quiet of a midwestern winter, and the girl he meets there, and the dozens of letters they write to each other thereafter. It's about his across-state-lines trip to go visit her and her family, and the jostlings of reality elbowing in on their first-love-fueled syrupy happiness—reality, again, all those complicated backdrops. Her family is complicated, too. They're both growing up; they're both growing apart. They go on a walk in the woods, and deer scatter as they pass, and so much is contained in those panels with the deer, leaping and bounding into the infinite white backdrop of everything. It's lovely.
And as a bonus, it's beautifully drawn—I tend to be one-and-done when it comes to comics, reading more for words and story than for the art, but I found myself picking this one off the shelf every few days for a while, thumbing through the pages that struck me, stopping to stare.
The Likeness by Tana French
My devouring of French's back catalog continues.
The premise for this novel is delicious—a woman's murdered, and by bizarre circumstance, this dead woman happens to look exactly like one of the Dublin police squad's undercover agents. The woman's housemates don't yet know she's dead. And, murder being what it is, those housemates sure are good suspects for the murder (it's usually someone close to you!). You could question the housemates, sure, and try to suss out if they did... or you could send your agent in, have them impersonate the dead girl, and see what you find out.
It's a totally deranged but also extremely entertaining plan—at least for Frank Mackey, the guy who comes up with it, and thus gets the metaphorical front-row seats—and our doppleganger-agent, Cassie, makes for an effortlessly compelling character. I enjoyed French's patience in letting this scheme unfurl slowly—first, Frank has to talk her into the batshit plan, and then we get a hella dope training montage where the two of them are scouring through old videos and photos and such to ensure Cassie can mimick the dead girl perfectly, and by the time Cassie's finally "released" from the "hospital," feigning recovered-from-a-stab-wound, I was practically vibrating with the need to see what will come of all of this.
And the tension carries so well from there on out. French gets a lot out of the premise alone; there's something so good about having Cassie dropped in the middle of all these old festering grudges and weird damn behavior between these bizarrely-codependent housemates, and the threat of "what if she slips and says something that gives her away" is always there.
Unlike the other two French novels I've read, I actually found the mystery itself in this book plenty compelling, every bit as compelling as Cassie's internal freakin' out. I liked the housemates, though I could see them grating on a different kind of person (they're very, uh, culty grad student types), and the cast was well fleshed-out.
In terms of overall craft, I think this is a bit weaker than Broken Harbor (French could've used an editor to tighten this one up a bit, because it's draggy near the end, and there's some prose that's coloring too purple), but I liked the story and mystery here a bit more, so I think this ends up as my second-fave so far.
also there's some fantastic fuckery unveiled in the eleventh hour that i absolutely might already be writing fanfic about, oops
It was only afterwards, reading some other folks' thoughts, that I realized how closely this book mirrors that one. So, hey, this is The Secret History, except it trades self-affected stylishness and strangely cool remove for some pulpiness and some real feeling and proper angst. Kinda easy to tell what side of that I fall on :P
Dangerous Crowns by A.K. Fedeau
I guess I'm getting to that point where I really need to figure out some kind of policy/disclaimer/whatever when I'm talking about books by People I Know Personally, huh. Here's a first pass—hi, I know the author, and thus hi, I'm full of bias, but! This is a delightful lil' indie romp, set in a Rome-ish fantasy universe, featuring a very charming and charismatic middle-aged couple ganging up to topple an undeserving king from his throne. Sweet without being twee; heroic without being tedious; the word that stuck around in my mind after reading it was charisma. Charismatic fantasy. Something like that!
My absolute favorite length of anything is the long-novella-slash-short-novel category (Crazy Weather, The True Deceiver, The Mysterious Stranger, Schoolgirl...). Dangerous Crowns is solidly that length and benefits considerably from that—in a longer novel, I'd expect the battle lines to be a bit less clear-cut and there to be more time fleshing out the world, but in this length, the light touch and quick pace are exactly right; you get fun spy shenanigans and court politics and gogogo and before you know it they've toppled a throne. If this book were a drink it'd be a Sprite: surprising, fun, and easy to like. Nom.
Red Plenty by Francis Spufford
"Where do you get your book recommendations, Lua?" Well, some analytic philosopher described his subgroup of academics as "Red Plenty types," which led me to google "Red Plenty", which led me to this lengthy and fascinating Crooked Timber review of the book titled Red Plenty, which both made me intensely nostalgic for linear programming (of all fucking things), and made me want to go read aforementioned book. If I've ever told you I'd read a book you recommended, and I still haven't gotten around to it, sorry, these are the random bullshit whims you're competing with. (I really will read it eventually!)
Based on said review (it's a great review, by the way, you should definitely read it instead of and/or in addition to mine), I was expecting this to be the TurboEconNerd book: watch all these Soviet econ bros duking it out while they try to build the Dopest Planned Economy Ever! And it is a little of that, to be clear; there are several passages with vociferous arguments at academic conferences, and desperate appeals to policymakers, and so on. But Spufford's scope is broad and elegiac: he wants to tell us "the story of an idea," as he puts it, through the eyes of every kind of Soviet: Nikitia Krushchev, and very bit as much, Nikitia Krushchev's driver; a young lady-postdoc, as well as a young Party wife; a black marketer and factory managers and students and a whole great gaggle of people. And for each and every one, he shows us what they hoped for, what they dreamed, and how it all fell short.
As such, the story's told primarily told entirely through vignettes, a new one each chapter, with occasional small interludes by the author to establish historical context. Which means some vignettes hit harder than others, of course. I particularly liked the author's depiction of Krushev, who's surprisingly sympathetic here—crass, overeager, somewhat vain and capricious—but also genuinely excited about moving past a bloody history, loosening society up a bit, and assembling the best minds to make their planned economy produce plenty for all. His inevitable replacement by the bloodless smiling Brezhnev and his cronies is a clear end-of-an-era cynical concession that they're no longer even trying for the dream. Other highlights: the fictional Zoya, a lady mutageneticist who's plopped into the bustling and baffling and wonderful "science town" of Akademgorodok, and the writer/singer Sasha Galich, some years before he's forced out of the Soviet Union, but when he's obviously starting to long for greater freedom. (Sasha's grim ruminations on why it took so long for him to really grasp the limits of his freedom, and the violence undergirding his world, were really affecting.)
I wound up reading this book slowly, as this was a really scattered month for me, but that felt like the right way to read it anyway... lots of ruminating and thinking in-between each section, and I finished with the sense I had indeed lived the life of an idea. Strange, singular, sad and charming.
As a bonus, the author offers extensive endnotes on his sources for all his sources—he tells you which parts are based directly on real occurrences, which ones are real events seen through the eyes of fictional characters, and so on. I mean this dude will make a throwaway comment about the dress a lady wears to a party, and then he'll have a detailed endnote like "while obviously you couldn't import dresses in this style, many Soviet women were able to get photos and recreate similar styles on their own, please see these three books for more details on Soviet fashion." Like, dude did some reading! These endnotes were so delightful that I wish they'd been interspersed throughout the text as footnotes—maybe they are, in the physical edition? (I was reading a digital copy.)
So, yeah. Good stuff.
I have a deliberately-provactive shitpost somewhere in my Tumblr drafts, something along the lines of, "not every bad thing in fiction needs to be a fucking Trauma TM, there can just be Shit That Happened." Which is not to say that narratives involving trauma are bad—it's just that, too often, they're only allowed to resolve in certain ways, ways that don't match my own experience. Sometimes people just leave things complicated, or resolve their shit incompletely, or in ways that don't fit neatly into this arc of "experience a trauma, realize you're traumatized, experience righteous anger toward the source of your trauma, experience ~*~healing~*~, the end"—and arc that I keep tripping over in contemporary writing, which always leaves me cold.
Blessedly, instead of stewing over that shitpost, I stumbled upon this lovely graphic-novel-memoir thing instead. Blankets is a love story—a first love story, at that—and I was expecting it to be straightforwardly cute and sweet. It is sweet, but—it's also drawn from life, and thus incorporates all the messiness and sharp edges that entails. The author grew up in a stiflingly religious home, so he meets his high school love at church camp, because—of course he did; that's how you meet people when you're growing up in that kind of place. He finds some scattered solace in religion, but less and less as he grows up, and his parents are punishingly severe in restricting what he can draw and read and do, even as they clearly love him, in their own complicated way.
But it's not about those things; that's the background. What it's about is the quiet of a midwestern winter, and the girl he meets there, and the dozens of letters they write to each other thereafter. It's about his across-state-lines trip to go visit her and her family, and the jostlings of reality elbowing in on their first-love-fueled syrupy happiness—reality, again, all those complicated backdrops. Her family is complicated, too. They're both growing up; they're both growing apart. They go on a walk in the woods, and deer scatter as they pass, and so much is contained in those panels with the deer, leaping and bounding into the infinite white backdrop of everything. It's lovely.
And as a bonus, it's beautifully drawn—I tend to be one-and-done when it comes to comics, reading more for words and story than for the art, but I found myself picking this one off the shelf every few days for a while, thumbing through the pages that struck me, stopping to stare.
The Likeness by Tana French
My devouring of French's back catalog continues.
The premise for this novel is delicious—a woman's murdered, and by bizarre circumstance, this dead woman happens to look exactly like one of the Dublin police squad's undercover agents. The woman's housemates don't yet know she's dead. And, murder being what it is, those housemates sure are good suspects for the murder (it's usually someone close to you!). You could question the housemates, sure, and try to suss out if they did... or you could send your agent in, have them impersonate the dead girl, and see what you find out.
It's a totally deranged but also extremely entertaining plan—at least for Frank Mackey, the guy who comes up with it, and thus gets the metaphorical front-row seats—and our doppleganger-agent, Cassie, makes for an effortlessly compelling character. I enjoyed French's patience in letting this scheme unfurl slowly—first, Frank has to talk her into the batshit plan, and then we get a hella dope training montage where the two of them are scouring through old videos and photos and such to ensure Cassie can mimick the dead girl perfectly, and by the time Cassie's finally "released" from the "hospital," feigning recovered-from-a-stab-wound, I was practically vibrating with the need to see what will come of all of this.
And the tension carries so well from there on out. French gets a lot out of the premise alone; there's something so good about having Cassie dropped in the middle of all these old festering grudges and weird damn behavior between these bizarrely-codependent housemates, and the threat of "what if she slips and says something that gives her away" is always there.
Unlike the other two French novels I've read, I actually found the mystery itself in this book plenty compelling, every bit as compelling as Cassie's internal freakin' out. I liked the housemates, though I could see them grating on a different kind of person (they're very, uh, culty grad student types), and the cast was well fleshed-out.
In terms of overall craft, I think this is a bit weaker than Broken Harbor (French could've used an editor to tighten this one up a bit, because it's draggy near the end, and there's some prose that's coloring too purple), but I liked the story and mystery here a bit more, so I think this ends up as my second-fave so far.
also there's some fantastic fuckery unveiled in the eleventh hour that i absolutely might already be writing fanfic about, oops
It was only afterwards, reading some other folks' thoughts, that I realized how closely this book mirrors that one. So, hey, this is The Secret History, except it trades self-affected stylishness and strangely cool remove for some pulpiness and some real feeling and proper angst. Kinda easy to tell what side of that I fall on :P
Dangerous Crowns by A.K. Fedeau
I guess I'm getting to that point where I really need to figure out some kind of policy/disclaimer/whatever when I'm talking about books by People I Know Personally, huh. Here's a first pass—hi, I know the author, and thus hi, I'm full of bias, but! This is a delightful lil' indie romp, set in a Rome-ish fantasy universe, featuring a very charming and charismatic middle-aged couple ganging up to topple an undeserving king from his throne. Sweet without being twee; heroic without being tedious; the word that stuck around in my mind after reading it was charisma. Charismatic fantasy. Something like that!
My absolute favorite length of anything is the long-novella-slash-short-novel category (Crazy Weather, The True Deceiver, The Mysterious Stranger, Schoolgirl...). Dangerous Crowns is solidly that length and benefits considerably from that—in a longer novel, I'd expect the battle lines to be a bit less clear-cut and there to be more time fleshing out the world, but in this length, the light touch and quick pace are exactly right; you get fun spy shenanigans and court politics and gogogo and before you know it they've toppled a throne. If this book were a drink it'd be a Sprite: surprising, fun, and easy to like. Nom.
Red Plenty by Francis Spufford
"Where do you get your book recommendations, Lua?" Well, some analytic philosopher described his subgroup of academics as "Red Plenty types," which led me to google "Red Plenty", which led me to this lengthy and fascinating Crooked Timber review of the book titled Red Plenty, which both made me intensely nostalgic for linear programming (of all fucking things), and made me want to go read aforementioned book. If I've ever told you I'd read a book you recommended, and I still haven't gotten around to it, sorry, these are the random bullshit whims you're competing with. (I really will read it eventually!)
Based on said review (it's a great review, by the way, you should definitely read it instead of and/or in addition to mine), I was expecting this to be the TurboEconNerd book: watch all these Soviet econ bros duking it out while they try to build the Dopest Planned Economy Ever! And it is a little of that, to be clear; there are several passages with vociferous arguments at academic conferences, and desperate appeals to policymakers, and so on. But Spufford's scope is broad and elegiac: he wants to tell us "the story of an idea," as he puts it, through the eyes of every kind of Soviet: Nikitia Krushchev, and very bit as much, Nikitia Krushchev's driver; a young lady-postdoc, as well as a young Party wife; a black marketer and factory managers and students and a whole great gaggle of people. And for each and every one, he shows us what they hoped for, what they dreamed, and how it all fell short.
As such, the story's told primarily told entirely through vignettes, a new one each chapter, with occasional small interludes by the author to establish historical context. Which means some vignettes hit harder than others, of course. I particularly liked the author's depiction of Krushev, who's surprisingly sympathetic here—crass, overeager, somewhat vain and capricious—but also genuinely excited about moving past a bloody history, loosening society up a bit, and assembling the best minds to make their planned economy produce plenty for all. His inevitable replacement by the bloodless smiling Brezhnev and his cronies is a clear end-of-an-era cynical concession that they're no longer even trying for the dream. Other highlights: the fictional Zoya, a lady mutageneticist who's plopped into the bustling and baffling and wonderful "science town" of Akademgorodok, and the writer/singer Sasha Galich, some years before he's forced out of the Soviet Union, but when he's obviously starting to long for greater freedom. (Sasha's grim ruminations on why it took so long for him to really grasp the limits of his freedom, and the violence undergirding his world, were really affecting.)
I wound up reading this book slowly, as this was a really scattered month for me, but that felt like the right way to read it anyway... lots of ruminating and thinking in-between each section, and I finished with the sense I had indeed lived the life of an idea. Strange, singular, sad and charming.
As a bonus, the author offers extensive endnotes on his sources for all his sources—he tells you which parts are based directly on real occurrences, which ones are real events seen through the eyes of fictional characters, and so on. I mean this dude will make a throwaway comment about the dress a lady wears to a party, and then he'll have a detailed endnote like "while obviously you couldn't import dresses in this style, many Soviet women were able to get photos and recreate similar styles on their own, please see these three books for more details on Soviet fashion." Like, dude did some reading! These endnotes were so delightful that I wish they'd been interspersed throughout the text as footnotes—maybe they are, in the physical edition? (I was reading a digital copy.)
So, yeah. Good stuff.
