Archive for the 'bookmaggot' Category

the magician king, by lev grossman

I never even reviewed the prequel to this book – The Magicians, Hogwarts and Narnia as reimagined by Curtis Sittenfeld – because the ending made me so mad. The hero-protagonist made a decision that was ethical and unselfish, and then (spoiler!) he turned around and did the opposite thing just ’cause.

Imagine my surprise! then, when this is actually addressed in the sequel, where escapist fantasy worlds suddenly cease to be consequenceless and people have to do the right thing, at whatever cost to themselves!

Also! You know how I do that thing where I say “There is a MUCH more interesting book to be written about what happened to Secondary Character X over the course of THIS book!” This is that book! I shall call it HERMIONE GRANGER STRIKES BACK.

not by accident, by samantha dunn

Me: “This is a lovely book! The nice lady’s Thoroughbred trampled her and dislocated her shoulder and put a hoof through her shin so that her leg was hanging off by a flap of muscle and skin. And then she had adventures!”

Optimal Husband: “Adventures?”

Me: “Well, surgeries.”

beyond black, by hilary mantel

I can’t figure out how to recommend this book without spoiling it, or how to provide sufficiently graphic trigger warnings without doing the same. So let’s just call it Northanger Abbey meets Being Human, with a generous side-helping of We Need to Talk About Kevin. It’s hilarious, but the comedy is (sorry) beyond black.

windsor knot, by christopher wilson

I felt yucky reading this. Regarding the British monarchy as my own private soap opera is all fun and games until someone gets hurt. And this is not the sort of book you can faux-justify to yourself as having any literary or historical merit. I might stick to the dead ones from now on. Dead plus thirty years.

This book was published in 2003 and in retrospect, all the guff about the Tampax and Squidgygate tapes being security intercepts or whatever is such obvious and weaksauce misdirection, how can we possibly have credited it for a nanosecond? Thanks for dulling our critical faculties, Murdoch, you poltroon.

pillow talk in europe and other places, by deborah levy

Clever, witty short stories with a liberal dash of Mavis Gallant, as is only right. I liked the first one best. In it, Levy is acute on the frenemyships of women:

I don’t find your life as boring as you think I do. I find it more boring than you think I do. People in couples are despicable company. They play out their lives to me hoping I will reassure them they’re deeply loveable together and frankly they are not. All the same I want a relationship and I want it to be more exciting than yours so I thank you for setting some very low standards that I can only improve on.

Her view of my countrypeople, while probably accurate, strikes this reader as surreal:

Marly is the first Australian I’ve met who has any angst. I can’t imagine suntanned existentialists. It’s not possible to exercise the philosophy of despair while sitting at beach bars in shorts, drinking smoothies with the surf rolling and moaning under a cloudless sky.

That made me laugh. When I lived in Sydney I was dead inside.

iphigenia in forest hills, by janet malcolm

Brilliant and chilling. A timely reminder that weird women (such as myself) should never get in any position where other people have power over us.

Borukhova’s contained, Cordelia-like demeanor at the defense table worked against her. Nothing came of nothing. “She had no emotion,” Jones said. “She didn’t seem upset. She wasn’t scared. If you’re innocent and being tried for murder, you’d be upset.”

Be exactly like everyone else, or suffer for it. Malcolm’s book is precision-engineered to afflict the comfortable. She is as troublesome as Helen Garner (high praise.) She’s also acute on class and privilege and their expression:

Whether to reflect the grandness of the Times or in accordance with a personal code, Barnard dressed differently from the rest of us. She wore interesting, beautiful dresses and skirts in contrast to the uninteresting jeans and corduroys and sweaters that Gorta and Bode and Pereira and I wore. Her sharp-eyed stories about the trial were as pleasing as her elegant clothes; not the least of the pleasure we took in them was the knowledge that Judge Hanophy would be irked by them.

Recommended to those with an interest in justice, women or writing.

the complete ivory, doris egan

These books are great fun. Theodora the barbarian is a witty and well-read guide through a solidly-thought-through, far-future planetary system. It’s as if the rest of the Vorkosigan books had been about awesome Cordelia, instead of poor old Miles.

Theodora rides in, a day late and a penny short. Whenever I have one of my profound insights I find out later that somebody had it first in the fifth century oldstyle and it’s been a cliche ever since. That sort of thing happens to me a lot. Back on Pyrene, whenever I found a piece of classical music that I liked I was usually told later that it was a big favorite centuries ago of the Poliker Secret Police, and they often played it when they were torturing people. Believe me, news like that can affect your self-esteem in all sorts of ways…

Doris Egan is better known as a screenwriter (for Torchwood and House, among many others) than as a novelist. My grand unified theory of screenwriting, inspired by the career of Aaron Sorkin and amply confirmed by that of George “Aargh, aargh” Martin, is that everything a screenwriter writes is about screenwriting and the unrecognized centrality of screenwriter heroism to an uncaring wider culture. The reason The Social Network is so oddly Not About Silicon Valley is that it’s actually about Hollywood, and how clever Mark-Zuckerberg-slash-Aaron-Sorkin is, and how dumb and pretentious everyone is who isn’t Mark-Zuckerberg-slash-Aaron-Sorkin. (He’s not an asshole, he’s just a very haughty boy!) And I could make some fanciful allegory here about how the Westeros dragons represent creativity and Wild Mind, and their skulls in the basement of Kings Landing are the Golden Age Hollywood studio sets on the back lots, dwindling in size until the species itself goes extinct, and Daenerys who walks through fire to resurrect them is Martin himself, but I think I just did.

Ivory belongs in the same genre, though without Sorkin’s increasingly unpalatable narcissism. Theodora is a bookish anthropologist stranded on a strange, sunlit planet where everyone else is gobsmackingly beautiful, but she maintains an excellent sense of humour about it.

His distorted view of marriage, distorted in its way as mine, is like an anchor: he’s unreasonably prejudiced in my favor, just because I had the good sense to marry him. So he’s willing to put up with a great deal, too, and just assume that my intentions are good.

That’s an attitude worth gold. It’s not why I married him, but I’m beginning to see that people get married for reasons that are different from the reasons they don’t get divorced.

Theodora is also a masseuse, and I am firmly of the opinion that massage-trained action heroines are underrepresented in literature.

war horse, by michael morpurgo

This was not very good on horses, and not very good on the war. So, um. He seems like a nice person?

Also! That’s a Western (as in cowboy) show halter on the horse on the cover! I just. Gnnrh.

bloodlands, by timothy snyder

The bloodlands lie between Berlin and Moscow. You’ve read parts of this history before, but Timothy Snyder’s contribution (a great one) is to change the frame of reference. His subject is the decade and a half of mass death in these lands, considered as the outcome of deliberate policies on the part of both Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany. Snyder’s story thus transcends national and ethnographic boundaries and the ideological differences between Hitler and Stalin to discuss how institutional genocide was allowed to take place. In Europe. And no one cared.

It is, as you might imagine, depressing. Parts of it are heartbreaking. Parts of it are nauseating.

It’s amazing.

It’s effectively the sequel to Margaret MacMillan’s Paris 1919 and a companion to both Deathless and The Hare With The Amber Eyes. The other book that keeps nagging at me is Helen Darville-Demidenko’s The Hand That Signed The Paper (no link love for you, lady: you know why) which considered the Holocaust as some sort of legitimate revenge for the Ukrainian famine… of course she was a liar, as it turned out. But that’s my country for you: people lying about genocide for notoriety. (Hi, Keith Windschuttle!)

I’m listening to it in the car, which is a good way of forcing yourself to keep going. The narrator has a very particular diction, with clipped enunciation and a downward inflection. I couldn’t place it for a while, then I realized who it reminded me of: Paul Darrow as Kerr Avon. Which is downright unsettling.

possible first line

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a girl in possession of a retirement-level liquidity event must be in want of a tax shelter.

my australianness

From The Truth About Grief:

Allan Kellehear, the Australian sociologist, wrote in 2005, “Australian ways of grieving… are not logical outcomes of our local experience but are rather socially constructed ways of understanding inherited from a variety of dominant foreign influences.”

From Among Others:

It wasn’t that we didn’t know history. Even if you only count the real world, we knew more history than most people. We’d been taught about cavemen and Normans and Tudors. We knew about Greeks and Romans. We knew masses of personal stories about World War II. We even knew quite a lot of family history. It just didn’t connect us to the landscape. And it was the landscape that formed us, that made us who we were as we grew in it, that affected everything. We thought we were living in a fantasy landscape when actually we were living in a science fictional one…

It’s amazing how large the things are that it’s possible to overlook.

and when that’s done? i blog

Homework supervision, piano practice supervision, roast chicken with kale, yams and spinach salad, dinner all sitting up at the table, bedtime at the official house standard bedtime and no later. And then! After reading Claire a chapter of The Little White Horse, then my daily mandated five hundred words on the novel?

Jesus God, this fiction gig is freakin hard! (And parenting’s no picnic either.)

The smugness when I actually hit the word count, though! The meaningless bullshit sense of achievement! The glow.

nothing to envy, by barbara demick

Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il, on the other hand, are terrible, atrocious people.

columbine, by dave cullen

After my first year at uni I got a summer gig on an archaeological dig at Port Arthur, the big Colonial gaol site and open air museum on the Tasman Peninsula. It was fantastic, my first adventure away from home, prefiguring Ireland and America. I got to try on different selves and to spend my days in hard physical labour and my evenings flirting and learning to cook. (Zucchini should be peeled and sliced and blanched and served with pepper and too much butter. Whatever you do to them, eels hand-caught out of the well are gross.) And despite its awful history Port Arthur was, and is, gobsmackingly beautiful. Every Benthamite Panopticon should be built out of sandstone and set in parkland, on a cove.

In 1996 there was a huge, terrible massacre there. The person responsible has said that he did it in order to be famous, and so I have not spoken or written his name since I read that, fifteen years ago. (Boy, I sure showed him!) But my desire to expunge his infamy reflected a deeper conviction that the massacre was an aberration, a rain of lead from the sky. It wasn’t about Port Arthur. It wasn’t some terrible reflection on human nature (Port Arthur’s awful history is that.) It wasn’t how life is. I resist all efforts by heartless men with guns to define the human condition.

The Columbine book is super-interesting in this way, because it discusses Eric Harris as a fully-fledged psychopath. (Dylan Klebold’s is a very different case.) Harris was, as far as anyone can tell, clinically aberrant; as if incapable of empathy at the genetic level. He was a rain of lead from the sky. He doesn’t tell us anything about bullying or nerds or people who wear trench coats or social life in American high schools. He is a natural disaster, like a hurricane or a flood. And this is most movingly expressed by Patrick Ireland, who is best remembered for climbing out a window with blood pouring from the bullet wound in his head. What kept him going through the hours it took him to crawl to the window? Not hope, as it turned out. Trust. At his valedictorian address to his class, Ireland said:

“When I fell out the window, I knew somebody would catch me. That’s what I need to tell you: I knew the loving world was there all the time.”

Life is mysterious and amazing.

also how beautiful was the shark?

Not exactly a spoiler to say there’s a scene in the Doctor Who Christmas special (which I watched, not in the approved behind-the-sofa position, but on the edge of my seat hanging on every word, oblivious to the wet Boxing Day unfolding around me) in which Eleven discovers that there are fish flying around in the fog and says something like:

“Who invented boredom? Ridiculous. How is anyone ever bored?”

Reminds me of “So high, so low, so many things to know!” from Sherkaner, in A Deepness in the Sky. This universe! The attention to detail that went into it! Fantastic. Would choose to live again!

book of the year, decade, century so far

Another no-contest. A Place of Greater Safety is crazy-wonderful and amazing, but Wolf Hall was the first. About 200 pages in, I was no longer Rachel sitting in front of a novel. I was Thomas Cromwell walking to the Palace to meet the King.

That, in case you’re wondering, is why I read.

The life so short, the craft so long to learn.

novels of the year

All ladybooks. And it’s not like I didn’t read dudebooks all year; I did. It’s just that the ladies were all, oh, freer and looser and madder. They were all resurrecting the dead and overthrowing the state and having relations with animals. They were appropriating true stories and speaking with the voices of drunks and historical personages and even First Ladies! They were taking bold risks and those risks were paying off! Dudes are going to have to step up if they want to write like the ladies. You should read any of these but ideally all of them because they are each of them intricately constructed WORLDS UNTO THEMSELVES. So brilliant! Kudos, ladies!

Oh Pure and Radiant Heart

A Japanese photographer assigned to Nagasaki after the bombing said this of the scene he surveyed: “I tried climbing up onto a small hill to look. All around the city burned with little elf-fires, and the sky was blue and full of stars.”

Blame

Patsy MacLemoore came to on a concrete shelf in a cell in the basement of the Altadena Sheriff’s department. Her hair had woken her up. It stank.

She had said she would rather die than come back here. She’d said that both times she’d been here before.

A Place of Greater Safety

The child particularly presented an insoluble problem. It seemed inaccessible to the processes of legal reasoning. He smiled at it, and it learned to smile back; not with the amicable toothless grin of most infants, but with what he took to be a flicker of amusement. Then again, he had always understood that the eyes of small babies did not focus properly, but this one – and no doubt it was entirely his imagination – seemed to look him over rather coolly. This made him uneasy. He feared, in his secret heart, that one day in company the baby would sit up and speak; that it would engage his eyes, appraise him and say, “You prick.”

The Haunting of Hill House

The only person in the world she genuinely hated, now that her mother was dead, was her sister. She disliked her brother-in-law and her five-year-old niece, and she had no friends.

The Little Stranger

I wasn’t a spiteful or destructive boy. It was simply that, in admiring the house, I wanted to possess a piece of it…

Niagara Falls All Over Again

Though both men are rotten marchers, they make it to the altar, where a minister opens a Bible in a chiding way; because there’s no good reason to be late to your own wedding, even if the bride is a pony. Which she is, a chubby, sway-backed roan pony whose hindquarters keep shifting – she’s not thrilled about the match either.

Bear

She sucked in her breath and waited; then, when they were close to the dock she saw that what she had thought was true: the house was a classic Fowler’s octagon.

“Wow,” she said.

“Pretty fine, isn’t it?”

“It’s not mentioned in the textbooks. There’s an index of houses like that.”

“Oh, we’re pretty cagey, up here…”

Blackout / All Clear

For a moment after the siren started its up-and-down warble, Polly simply stood there with the stockings box still in her hand, her heart pounding. Then Doreen said, “Oh, no, not a raid! I thought for certain we’d get through today without one.

We did, Polly thought. There must be some mistake.

American Wife

Have I made terrible mistakes?

Room

Eggsnake is more longer than all around Room, we’ve been making him since I was three, he lives in Under Bed all coiled up keeping us safe.

worst book of the year

I read some stinkers – Solar was self-pitying crap! I Don’t Care About Your Band actually made me feel sorry for some douchey dudebros! That ain’t right! – but this was no contest.

…the bestselling books in the world are poorly written, erotic fan fiction that a man wrote about himself.

Ugh.

nonfiction books of the year

As usual, the number ten is completely arbitrary. Honourable mentions go to Logicomix, Plenty Enough Suck to Go Around, The Indian Clerk, A Final Arc of Sky, The Marketplace of Ideas and Imperial Life in the Emerald City. But the following are all GREAT BOOKS.

Somewhere Towards the End

If you don’t have an old lady friend who is willing to be completely honest with you, that is a great misfortune, but this no-bullshit memoir by Diana Athill should fill some of the void. She is excellent on sex, race, writing and the indignity of growing old. She also wrote this unsparing article on her decision to move to a nursing home. It is all essential reading for aspiring crones.

River Town

I raced through everything else Peter Hessler has written this year as well, and consider him my most reliable informant on China – Country Driving is especially awesome on the manufacturing towns – but River Town is the place to start. Hessler’s two years as a Peace Corps English teacher in Fuling, on the Yangtze, sets the context and introduces some of the characters who will reappear in his other books. Peace Corps sounds like murder, by the way. In a good way. Sort of. My friend Fred and his wife Susan are in Armenia right now. Something to think about for my post-sprog, pre-crone years?

Mountains Beyond Mountains

Do you like yourself? Do you feel good about your place in the world? Mountains Beyond Mountains will fix that! I have an occasional series on my professional Twitterstream (yes, I have a professional Twitterstream, I told you my life was absurd) called Inspirational Badass of the Day. Farmer’s schtick is the preferential option for the poor – ie, that we should treat all human beings as if they are human, not just rich people. REVOLUTIONARY STUFF. Between the earthquake and cholera, Farmer – whose Partners In Health was the first medical organization on the ground in Port au Prince – has amply earned his title of Inspirational Badass of the Year. He’s kind of an asshole, and a wiseass, too: one of his books on institutional poverty and the collusion of Western powers is called The Uses of Haiti. I love him. Go give some money to PIH. God knows they could use it.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

OH HOLY FUCK this book made me sob like a little kid. Gender, race, cancer, grief, Big Science, poverty, families, the reporter’s responsibility to the truth, our responsibility to each other. My America, in all its fucked-up glory, from Wired to The Wire.

The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters

My America’s dark mirror. Progressives who suggest that there is nothing to choose between America and North Korea (yes, such people exist) find themselves on my shit list in short order. The USA is unquestionably fucked up, but there is no possible excuse for ignorance of conditions in North Korea. If you think you’re a hero of the resistance because you launched a DDoS attack on Mastercard? You really need to swallow your fucking ego and study some survivor testimony. Just sayin.

Nuclear Rites

What a surprise and pleasure this book was! Exemplary, imaginative anthropology field-work in the early nineties in Livermore. The nuclear test as a rite of passage for nuclear scientists. An anti-nuke activist turns himself INSIDE OUT trying to understand his own dark mirror. In my opinion this is what our great big monkey brains are FOR.

Songs of the Gorilla Nation

The much better neuro-atypical memoir about animal behaviour; also magnificently insightful on sex work, orientation, gender identity and parenthood.

The Language of Blood

The book that had me sitting at my favourite table in Atlas Cafe, waiting for my mechanics to finish an oil change, with tears running unchecked down my face, crying my guts out for a South Korean housewife I never met.

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

I really am a death-obsessed little crypto-Goth, no? I can’t believe it took me this long when everyone I know adores Mary Roach. With good reason, as it transpires! Her little asides crack my shit up. Funniest book about human remains since The American Way of Death and The Loved One.

Winter Season

Department of Redundancy Department! See also Joan Ryan’s Little Girls in Pretty Boxes, for the gymnastics and figure skating side of the All Beauty Is A Tool Of The Patriarchy story. Oh, young girls and your aspirations! Like Chum in shark-infested water! Christ.

the literature of envy

While I quite liked all three books, I think it’s symptomatic of the pathology of the modern West that the protagonists of Franzen’s Freedom, Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story and Lipsyte’s The Ask are all sad white men who orbit the uberrich like anxious and stupid moths. And they are all subjected to ritual humiliation, lovingly detailed. And did I mention that they are all transparent authorial stand-ins?

Ah, Bush’s America. Zombie Bush’s America, in fact, in which Cheney has a Cylon heart and the rest of us have a Democratic administration and everything’s getting worse, especially if you were shortsighted enough to be born in Iraq or Afghanistan. (What were you thinking?) People, by which I suppose I mean novelists, are very open about their envy these days. They document the dewy features and lithe musculature of the wealthy. They specify the exact brand of luxury crap they wish they could afford. (William Gibson’s especially ridiculous in this regard, but I’m letting him off because I have finally realized that he’s a comedian. Also he offers a vision of what an alternative life might be like, which none of the others do.) In Zombie Bush’s America there is endless shame in not being rich (for very large values of rich, note well; mere upper-middle-class-ness is the most shameful condition of all, HOW CAN I SHOW MY FACE) and no shame in admitting how abjectly ashamed you are. Quite the reverse. It’s as if Jane Austen approved of Lady Catherine de Burgh.

Of course the most revolting thing about this whole queasy ritual is that if the writer abases himself disgustingly enough, the amused uberrich will anoint him (yes, always a him) and he’ll get to be superrich himself. I’m going to be a prescriptive little bitch here and say that writers should not aspire to the condition of plutocrats; not because I hold writers to higher standards (ha!), but because NO ONE SHOULD.