Ubik by Philip K. Dick
My rating: 4 of 5 stars "So it goes." Published in 1969, Philip K. Dick’s Ubik is set in 1992, when the moon has been colonized and a ruthless corporate war is being waged between psi and anti-psi companies. Hollis Talents, run by Ray Hollis, hires “psis,” people with various types of psychic abilities, especially telepaths and precogs, while Runciter Associates, run by Glen Runciter, hires “inertials,” people who can negate psi powers. Thus, companies like Runciter’s (called “prudence organizations”) advertise that they are safeguarding privacy, while companies like Hollis’ say the prudence organizations are trying to block progress. Leave it to Dick to monetize psychic powers via American capitalism! Dick imagines many more brave new consumer world innovations for 1992, like conapts (glorified apartments) equipped with snarky homeopathic (semi-sentient) machines that require payment each time you open your door or fridge or take a shower or make a cup of coffee, etc.; artificial organs enabling you to live way past a hundred; and a system of “cold-pac” cryonic suspension maintaining the deceased in a “half-life” so that their loved ones may talk with them, though each time a half-lifer is woken, a little more of their remaining vitality leaks away, bringing closer their inevitable full death and or migration to Somewhere Else, like to rebirth ala the Tibetan Book of the Dead. An early remark from a character reverberates through the novel: “Is this worth it?” One other aspect of “future” 1992 life deserves comment: fashion. The characters wear a panoply of outré outfits, a hybrid hodgepodge of colors, cultures, eras, materials, styles, and gender markers. A woman in “a silk sari and nylon obi and bobby socks,” a man in “a polyester dirndl, his long hair in a snood, cowboy chaps with simulated silver stars. And sandals.” And so on. Is Dick mocking fashion or using it to assert individuality in a consumerist future? Anyway, the plot begins when Glen Runciter, faced with the sudden vanishing from the earth of powerful Hollis psis (which is hurting business by reducing the need for inertials to counter psis), visits the Beloved Brethren Moratorium in Zurich to consult his half-life wife Ella. Alas, Ella can only tell him to increase the company’s advertising when Jory, a lonely and vigorous 15-year old half-lifer in the cold-pac unit by hers, usurps her communication line. Enter Dickian “hero” Joe Chip, Runciter’s field tester for the psychic fields that Joe, as a “Norm,” cannot himself emit. He is so absurdly in debt that he can’t use his conapt’s appliances and alternates between defeatism and confidence—only partly due to the downers and uppers he takes (when he can pay for them). Poor Joe, “doomed in the classical sense,” quickly falls under the sway of a beautiful, wise beyond her years Dickian femme fatale, Pat Conley, who barely looks 17 and is possessed of a unique psychic ability to change the past so as to change the present/future. She is unnerving and unflappable, untethered to truth or empathy, armed with a “CAVEAT EMPTOR” tattoo. And then Runciter gets a commission for a big job from magnate Stanton Mick, who wants his Luna colony psi-free but won’t let Runciter et al do any preliminary tests to see what psis have infiltrated. Runciter takes the lucrative job anyway, assembling a crack team of eleven crackpot inertials to go to Luna. Soon Joe and company are in way over their heads, having to confront existential crises of the most reality compromising sort. Are they dreaming? Hallucinating? Half-lifing? Time traveling? What’s happening and who’s behind it? It is often a funny book. “Real” 50-cent coins feature the faces of Walt Disney and Fidel Castro. The name of Runciter’s spaceship is The Pratfall II. Then there are Joe’s trials and tribulations trying to use machines. And humorous dialogue, as when a colleague says, “I think it’s fine for Joe to have a mistress who pays his front door,” or Glen Runciter tells his sleepy half-lifer wife about the disappearance of a top telepath, and Ella says, “I wouldn’t forget an S. Dole Melinpone. Is it a hobbit?” And the absurd fashions (a man in “a tweed toga, loafers, crimson sash and a purple airplane-propeller beanie”!) Dick saves his novel from silliness via metaphysical nightmare. Kipple--a hyper entropy force in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?--makes an appearance here, with suddenly aging phonebooks, cigarettes, coins, coffee, machines, and people: planned obsolescence speeded up and universally applied. A smoky, creepy red light may signal a bad rebirth womb. Is a malignant divine being behind everything? Aren’t we all half-lifers already, anyway? Can Joe get his hands on a spray can of Ubik before everything around him (and he himself) ages beyond the point of salvation? Ah, Ubik! We are told that it is related to ubiquity but doesn’t appear in dictionaries. Cheesy ads for a panoply of Ubik products begin each chapter, from coffee, cereal, and beer to plastic wrap, deodorant, and bras, all of which will surely improve your life—if used as directed: “Can’t make the frug contest, Helen; stomach’s upset. I’ll fix you Ubik! Ubik drops you back in the thick of things fast. Taken as directed, Ubik speeds relief to head and stomach. Remember: Ubik is only seconds away. Avoid prolonged use.” All this casts an unsavory light on Ubik, and yet instead of aiding entropy (which is ubiquitous), Ubik apparently supports the counterforce to entropy in the novel. Just what is Ubik and who made it? Audiobook reader Luke Daniels is entertaining but maybe tries too hard at times. Just cause someone says “Calm down Joe” doesn’t mean Joe is screaming, especially if there are no exclamation marks in the text. Fans of books whose mysteries are clearly solved and whose heroes fully triumph may be disturbed by this one. And it would bore you if you require page turning super-power X-men-esque fights, as Dick’s “action” scenes depict things like a decaying man climbing a flight of stairs or people making futile plans of action. But if you like reading lines like, “He felt like an ineffectual moth, fluttering at the windowpane of reality, dimly seeing it from the outside,” buy a can of Ubik. View all my reviews
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Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
My rating: 5 of 5 stars Biblical, Ebonic, Sensual, Sad, Funny, Revelatory Dusk in Eatonville, a small all-black town in Southern Florida in 1928. Janie Crawford Killicks Starks Woods returns to her house in town after having been gone almost two years living with her third husband, Vergible Woods, AKA Tea Cake, in “the muck” of the Everglades: planting and picking beans, hunting and fishing, dancing and storytelling, laughing and loving. Janie has returned to Eatonville after burying Tea Cake. Walking in unaffectedly sexy and free forty-year-old beauty though clad in muddy overalls, “her firm buttocks like she had grape fruits in her hip pockets; the great rope of black hair swinging to her waist and unraveling in the wind like a plume; then her pugnacious breasts trying to bore holes in her shirt,” barely noticing the greedy-eyed men or the envy-eyed women of the town, Janie is magnificent. No matter that the women cruelly gossip about her, hating her for looking younger than forty, for having been married for twenty years to Joe Starks, the town mayor and post master and store owner and de facto emperor, and then for having had the temerity after Joe’s death to turn down all the older decent single men’s offers of marriage in order to run off with Tea Cake, a man without fixed occupation at least ten years her junior. Janie’s only friend in town, Phoeby Watson, visits her to give her a plate of mulatto rice and to hear what happened to her while she was away. The rest of the novel depicts Janie’s life story up to that point: her attempt to find a way to live so as to “utilize myself all over.” To live not as her loving but limiting grandmother wanted her to (marrying for stability not love) but rather as she had felt during a sensual epiphany beneath a blossoming pear tree at age sixteen “With kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world!” Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) is a rich, potent novel composed in two registers: the standard-English third-person narration that is Biblical, poetic, ironic, and sensual; and the Ebonic dialogue that is demotic, southern, witty, and colorful. The gap between the two is striking, as in the following passage: “They sat there in the fresh young darkness close together. Pheoby eager to feel and do through Janie, but hating to show her zest for fear it might be thought mere curiosity. Janie full of that oldest human longing—self revelation. Pheoby held her tongue for a long time, but she couldn’t help moving her feet. So Janie spoke. ‘Naw, t’aint nothing’ lak you might think. So ‘tain’t no use in me telling you somethin’ unless Ah give you de understandin’ to go ‘long wid it. Unless you see de fur, a mink skin ain’t no different from a coon hide. Looka heah, Pheoby, is Sam waitin’ on you for his supper?’” I’d never read anything by Hurston before, and her writing amused, moved, and enriched me. The vivid descriptions of everything from barbecued meat (“the seasoning penetrated to the bone”) to love: “He looked like the love thoughts of women. He could be a bee to a blossom, a pear tree blossom in the spring. He seemed to be crushing scent out of the world with his footsteps, crushing aromatic herbs with every step he took. Spices hung about him. He was a glance from God.” And the savory characters’ lines: “If dat was my wife, I’d kill her cemetery dead,” or “Put me down easy, Janie, Ah’m a cracked plate,” or “Ah’m gonna sweep out hell and burn up de broom.” There is much about the human condition as differently experienced by men and women. Janie’s first two husbands have no appreciation for her mind or soul, wanting only an obedient worker in the house who is thankful to be kept therein. Of her first marriage, we read, “She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie’s first dream was dead, so she became a woman.” Her second husband thinks women and chickens are of equal intelligence and that she should be grateful for what he gives her, though “She got nothing from Jody but what money could buy.” Janie is thirsting for love and poetry--the bees among the blossoms--and experience: “You got to go there to know there.” The novel also says much about the difficulties of black life in America, in ways still relevant today. Janie’s grandmother (who as a slave was raped by her master) tells her, “Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything as fur as Ah been able tuh find out.” Partly as a result, “us colored folks is branches without roots and that makes things come roun in queer ways.” White and black bodies (really all the same of course) are treated with egregious difference after a hurricane. Then there is the pathetic skin color snob Mrs. Turner who takes to Janie because of her coffee and cream-colored skin, Mrs. Turner telling her that she’s too good for the dark-skinned Tea Cake and scorning dark black people as an affront to her white God. Speaking of God, the title of the novel refers to a moment of existential fear during an apocalyptic hurricane. This connects to a provocative earlier passage: “All gods who receive homage are cruel. All gods dispense suffering without reason. Otherwise they would not be worshipped. . . Fear is the most divine emotion. It is the stones for altars, the beginning of wisdom.” As she reads the audiobook, actress Ruby Dee savors every word, from the narration to the black vernacular, convincingly voicing all manner of characters and moods. She makes the audiobook a five-star experience. (I'd give the novel itself four stars because I thought some of the humorous scenes of people debating or teasing go on a little too long.) Evocative blues guitar picking periodically closes or opens scenes, perhaps to start or end different audiobook disks. Readers who want to see a mother of Toni Morrison and Alice Walker at her peak or are interested in the African American experience centered in early 20th-century Florida but speaking to all people in any time should read this book. View all my reviews
Circe by Madeline Miller
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist. ” From the start of Madeline Miller’s Circe (2018), the first witch in western culture reveals how different she is from her myriad immortal Titan and Olympian relatives: while they are cruel, callous, egotistical, and powerful, she is kind, sympathetic, self-effacing, and (she believes) weak. She gives illicit nectar to Prometheus to ease his terrible punishment and sickens to imagine mortal astronomers who’ll be killed when their sun-based calculations go awry because her father, Helios, Titan god of the sun, delays his passage across the sky for his amusement. She doesn’t fight back when scorned by her mother Perse or mocked by her elder siblings Perses and Pasiphae. She doesn’t complain when her beloved brother, Aeetes, abandons her to found his sadistic magic kingdom in Colchis. Although early on she learns from her parents that mortals (“like savage bags of rotten flesh”) are shaped like the gods “but only as the worm is shaped like the whale,” she comes to be fascinated by their drooping, scarred, and wrinkled flesh and ephemeral lives. Her voice even sounds human, to the disgust of her family. Circe, it develops, has her own will and inner strength, as evidenced by her transformations of mortal Glaucos and nymph Scylla, which end up causing her to be exiled to the idyllic and uninhabited island of Aiaia. She has been on her island for about the last three hundred of her first thousand years of life when Odysseus and his ship with 48 men happen by. The Odysseus part of the novel is what anyone who’s read The Odyssey will be looking forward to, but such is Miller’s imagination and research and writing that although the encounter between the two is compelling, what comes before and after is much more fascinating and moving: how Circe comes to be a witch, how she teaches herself her art on Aiaia, how she comes to be Hermes’ occasional lover, how she tries to help deliver the Minotaur, how she first discovers what men are capable of, how she deals with Jason and Medea, and how she lives after Odysseus leaves her island. Miller is good at writing convincing and complex motivations for mythological characters, like Pasiphae’s reason for getting pregnant by a sacred bull and Odysseus’s reason for staying longer than necessary on Aiaia. I was especially impressed by the entire last part of the novel featuring Telegonus, Telemachus, Penelope, and Circe. The personalities and motivations of the four and their relationships and interactions are suspenseful and poignant. Miller works many Greek myths into her story, including the war between the Titans and the Olympians, the origin of Scylla, the birth and death of the Minotaur, the theft of the Golden Fleece, the siege and fall of Troy, and the adventures of Odysseus. Even though Circe was not a major player in most of the myths, she is a witness to some of them and a listener to accounts of others of them. Miller gives just enough details so as to fill in people new to the Greek myths without boring people familiar with them. Miller is really good at writing appropriate and original similes, like “Frail she was, but crafty, with a mind like a spike-toothed eel,” or “Athena snapped each word like a dove’s neck,” or “I pressed his face into my mind as seals are pressed into wax so I could carry it with me.” She’s good at depicting the outwardly sublime but inwardly petty nature of gods and, despite all the children they engender, their essential sterility. One of the best parts of Miller’s novel is its celebration of our humble, painful, and brief mortal lives. “My flesh reaches for the earth. That is where it belongs.” And “Gods are more dead than anything, for they are unchanging.” In all this, there are graphic, brutal scenes of torture, rape, birth, and metamorphosis. And much of the novel is emotionally painful. But there is also wisdom, like “Perhaps no parent can truly see their child. When we look we see only the mirror of our own thoughts.” Since the ancient Greeks until now, western writers and artists have mostly depicted Circe as a sexy witch who tempts and destroys men. As Miller says in A Conversation with Madeline Miller after the novel, “the unfortunate truth is that sexism, misogyny, and our culture’s distrust of powerful women are timeless.” But though she writes Circe from a 21st century feminist context, she does it without being simplistic or overbearing. Although amoral and abusive male characters appear in the book (including Aeetes and Helios and men who deserve to be turned into pigs despite Circe saying, “The truth is, men make terrible pigs”), there are also decent men (e.g., Daedalus, Telemachus, and Telegonus), as well as amoral and abusive female characters (e.g., Perse, Medea, and Athena). Finally, Miller’s Circe is a strong, creative, and compassionate goddess/witch/woman capable of making terrible mistakes but also of taking responsibility for and learning from them. Circe is an inspiring female and human figure. The audiobook reader Perdida Weeks is fine, with a pleasant British voice/accent, but she almost over-dramatizes intense moments, which couples with Miller’s highly wrought intense scenes, so together they sometimes almost make the audiobook too much of a good thing. After reading Miller’s The Song of Achilles (2011) and Circe, I’ve been impressed by her ability to take supporting characters and imagine their backgrounds and lives so as to make compelling main characters of them and to cast new light on their mythological settings. I am looking forward to reading whatever she writes next. However, I also hope that next time she will find new ways to make us root for her protagonists other than by inserting them into families who don’t love them or by making them the only sympathetic and kind people in their settings or by making them such obvious underdogs or by making them first-person narrators. View all my reviews
Quillifer by Walter Jon Williams
My rating: 3 of 5 stars “a gift for showing mortals as they really are” Walter Jon Williams’ Quillifer (2017) is a picaresque fantasy novel set in a secondary world that parallels late-Renaissance Europe: gunpowder, firearms, and artillery are replacing heavy armor on the battlefield; the rivalrous countries are monarchies with aristocrats atop the social and political pyramid; the printing press has expanded education to commoners; poets and playwrights are in demand; guilds run the labor sphere; and age of sail sea power for trade and privateering is vital. An unmarried, untested princess even becomes Queen after the death of her father. The differences between Williams’ Duisland and Elizabethan England are the existence of fantastic creatures like dragons (though in the novel only a few small wyverns play a cameo) and the persistence of polytheism alongside the dominant religion worshipping “the Compassionate Pilgrim.” Oh, and an absence of exploration and colonization and of people of color as they are in our world (there is a humanoid race of gold-skinned and strange-eyed Aekoi, remnants of an “Empire” whose glory days are long past but whose literature and language are still studied in the white countries). Our first-person guide to this world is Quillifer (his only name), an eighteen-year-old butcher’s son apprentice lawyer crackling with charisma, confidence, intelligence, humor, and folly. Williams uses a creaky and excrescent conceit for his narrative, having Quillifer tell his life story (which takes nearly nineteen hours as an audiobook!) in one sitting to a new lover who remains passively and fragrantly listening, nearly forgotten, and unidentified until the end of the novel. Because of his youthful energy, ambition, joie de vivre, and recklessness (“Content is not for the young and dauntless, those who wish to brand the world with their mark”), Quillifer is repeatedly doing something clever and foolish and getting into and out of a fix, all with increasingly higher stakes, including scenes in which he flees an interrupted tryst bare-arsed over city rooftops, serves a writ on a sharp practicing knight among his hounds and servants, gets captured by bandits, enters the world of a goddess, enhances the comedy of a play, arranges a sea battle, fights in a land battle, and much more. He ever evinces a gift for making enemies in high places and friends in lower ones. Throughout his (mis)adventures, he wonders how much of what happens to him is due to “necessity” (fate), to “divine malevolence,” or to his own ambition. Quillifer says he’s no swordsman, assassin, spy, or equestrian, but then, what is he? He starts coming across as a protean Johnny-on-the-spot entrepreneur dealing in military contracts, stolen treasure, prize ships, and pillaged deeds. He should be an actor in his friend Blackwell’s troupe, for when trying to persuade people he assumes a number of faces, from learned-advocate and exasperated-bailiff to attentive-courtier and innocent-choirboy. He is surely a lover of teenage girls and young ladies unmarried or married (one senses a goaty author enjoying Quillifer with mermaids and milkmaids and pregnant 17-year-old duchesses) who can’t understand why their men-folk should so oppose young people enjoying life (the novel is heteronormative--even his friend the Duke of Roundsilver, who is rumored to be a “degenerate” and affectedly says r like w is happily married and never comes on to Quillifer). Williams writes all of the above things with panache, enthusiasm, and attention to historical detail--he must have researched the late Renaissance quite a bit, from the many different weapons and armor and ships to the poets and dramatists and language of the era. He loves language, so he has Quillifer (and a bandit and a goddess) indulge in coining new words like baseless, logomania, poetastical, credent, and unhoused. He writes colorful insults like “soulless mechanicals” and savory vintage dialogue like “Perhaps you should restrain your impulse to hurl yourself so whole-heartedly into situations fraught with ambiguity.” Indeed, the best moments in the book probably consist of Quillifer talking about philosophy, politics, love, war, chess, gunpowder, gods, plays, laws, and the like. And Williams writes many vivid descriptions, whether of ships, war, food, clothes, people, buildings, or action. Numerous neat touches, like an old man whose “voice sounded like a blind mouse scrabbling in its nest of paper” or the hail shot fired from a cannon making “wild wailing cries in the air.” He’s everywhere exuberant, even in a throwaway detail like the following that illustrates the Elizabethan vibe, Williams’ realism, and Quillifer’s character: “On my return to the quay I tarried by a barber’s shop, and there sought a preventative for parturience. My last packet of sheaths I had left with Annabel Greyson, and I could but hope her father hadn’t found them, proof of her perfidy.” Ralph Lister reads the audiobook professionally and enthusiastically, though I found his manner and voice for female characters grating, turning almost all of them into nasal shrews. Through the course of his misadventures Quillifer matures, coming to a “healthy to laugh at ourselves” appreciation of “mortals as they really are, scheming and blundering in their vain useless way to catastrophe,” and so because I enjoyed Williams’ language and hijinks, I intend to read the next book in the series--and not only to find out what his hero will do next. But if you don’t want to read a very white, very heterosexual, very male, and very European historical fantasy with plenty of verbal play and physical action, you might want to pass. View all my reviews
The House with a Clock in Its Walls by John Bellairs
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Poker, Baseball, History, Magic, and the Apocalypse In 1948, a freshly orphaned ten-year-old boy called Lewis Barnavelt rides a bus from Wisconsin to Michigan to live with his uncle Jonathan in New Zebedee, pop 6,000. Lewis cuts no heroic figure: he parts his oiled hair in the middle, wears purple corduroy pants, has a moony fat face with shiny cheeks, and murmurs Latin choir boy prayers full of sorrowful questions like “quare me repulisti?” (Why have you cast me off?”) He packs his enormous suitcase full of books and lead soldiers. He’s hopeless at sports (he can’t hit a baseball and always lets the bat fly out of his hands when he tries, while playing football he always collapses to the ground when anyone approaches him, and he is always picked last, if at all, when teams are chosen). He likes eating chocolate-covered mints while reading history books about bloody events like the assassination of Rizzio by Mary Queen of Scots’ noblemen (fifty-six stab wounds!). Lewis is also given to crying, whenever his feelings are hurt or he’s scared--which is not seldom. But he does have a lively imagination and a heart ready to love, and luckily, his eccentric uncle Jonathan van Olden Barnavelt is likeably strange and lives in a wonderful three-story stone mansion at 100 High Street that Lewis immediately takes to. When he first enters the house, Lewis finds a gray-haired smiley-wrinkle faced woman listening to the wall; it’s his uncle’s neighbor and best friend, Florence Zimmermann. And soon the trio are playing poker till midnight with old foreign coins and a dubious deck of old magician’s cards, with Lewis winning most of the hands. Is it due to his luck or to some kind of slight-of-hand performed in his favor by Mrs. Zimmermann and Jonathan? The pair are like a married couple who live next door to each other, always visiting each other and affectionately insulting each other: Weird Beard, Fatso, and Tub of Beans vs. Frumpy, Doll Face, and Frizzy Wig. Lewis quickly comes to love his uncle and Mrs. Zimmerman--way cooler parents than his own strict and threatening biological ones whose recent demise he never thinks or feels sad about. But why has Jonathan scattered a hodgepodge of clocks throughout his house? And why does he creep stealthily about the house late at night, turning the clocks off or tapping on the walls as if listening to something? The short novel depicts Lewis learning provocative half answers to his questions while experiencing vivid illusions and dangerous necromancy and a “device” that looks like a clock and becoming a catalyst for a battle for the fate of the world between bad good and good bad warlocks and witches. Bellairs writes a lot of fine descriptions, like “He heard the noise that earthworms make, as they slowly inch along, breaking hard black clods with their blunt heads.” He also writes telling life wisdom, like this: “You can’t prepare for all the disasters in this frightening world of ours.” Or “One of the troubles with people is that they can only see out of their own eyes.” He fills his novel with neat things, like Jonathan’s galleon hookah and a petrified forest family grave space in the local cemetery. Magic in his hands has a consistent basis: “Most magic is accomplished with solid everyday objects, objects that have had spells said over them.” He writes plenty of humorous lines, like “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Lewis, stop playing Sherlock Holmes. You make a better Watson.” I liked The House with a Clock in Its Walls (1973), because of Bellairs’ vivid descriptions of New Zebedee, 100 High Street, the town cemetery, and the historical and other illusions; because of the relationships between Mrs. Zimmermann, Jonathan, and Lewis and between Lewis and Tarby (the daredevil sportsman most popular boy in school); and because Lewis is such an atypical hero. Also because the antagonists Mr. and Mrs. Izard are pretty scary. And because of Edward Gorey’s typically dark, quaint, and stylized illustrations. And especially because of George Guidall’s savory reading of the audiobook. The novel ends a little abruptly. A new character is inserted without any preparation or narration in an off-handed way at the very end. Lewis can get a little frustrating. There is no explanation as to why early on Jonathan freezes when the bell in the monster-faced steeple of the town church tolls. Finally, I’m almost--but not quite--enticed enough by this first book to go on and read the others in the series. View all my reviews
The Christmas Hirelings by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Well-Written and Moving but also Manipulative and Complacent Well-written by Mary Elizabeth Braddon and well-read by Richard Armitage, The Christmas Hirelings (1894) is a heart-warming Christmas novella audiobook in the vein of Charles Dickens and Frances Hodgson Burnett. Braddon is a female late-Victorian author of eighty plus novels whom I’d never even heard of before listening to this audiobook of The Christmas Hirelings. I am glad to have made her acquaintance, but-- In the story, Sir John Penlyon is an aging baronet widower planning to spend a quiet Christmas at his family’s manor estate Penlyon Place on the Cornish coast with his “smart young lady” niece Miss Adela Hawberk and his best friend Danby (who lives in a series of other people’s homes but is so charming that he’s usually “booked” for his visits far in advance), when Danby suggests hiring for the Christmas holidays “some children … of respectable birth and good manners, but whose parents are poor enough to accept the fee which our liberality may offer.” Sir John accedes to the plan but insists that whatever kids Danby hires, they are not to have any claim on him or Penlyon Place. Background chapters reveal that after bearing two daughters Sir John’s young wife died unloved because the baronet mistakenly thought she’d only married him for his land and title. Although in early childhood the two little girls spent their days healthily running wild and doing as they pleased with a permissive and sympathetic governess, Sir John’s sister finally entered the scene and took charge, bringing in a new governess and transforming the daughters’ lives into one of constant study so as to enable them to make reputable debuts in society. The older sister died childless not long after marrying, while the younger daughter eloped with a penniless parson and was disowned by Sir John. The hirelings duly arrive at Penlyon Place: three little kids, Laddie (the eldest), Lassie, and then four-year-old Moppet, who’s quite the spunky cutie. Then follows the bulk of the story, which involves the hirelings’ Christmas holidays at Penlyon, a serious illness, and the revelation of a well-intentioned scheme. The novel is capably written: British upper crust life, the psychology of its members, the descriptions of moors and manors. Braddon knew the Victorian British novel. Plenty of neat descriptions of the kids, like, “Her quaint little face in which the forehead somewhat overbalanced the tiny features below it was all aglow with mind. One could not imagine more mind in any living creature than was compressed within this quaint scrap of humanity.” There is also at times something almost cloying in her depiction of the kids, whom we just know are going to melt old Penlyon’s frozen heart. There are some intriguing hints about gender and sexuality and Mr. Danby, whom Sir John refers to as “a lady’s man” (not the Casanova kind) and as “Nurse Danby.” The guy is an eternal bachelor who loves playing with kids. . . Reader Richard Armitage does an excellent job enhancing the story and its characters and scenes, never overdoing it even when voicing Moppet, nailing gruff Penlyon and good-natured Danby. He made listening to a three-star story a four-star experience. I did find something smug and conservative about class in the story. There are, of course, no words about changing a patriarchal social system that has a small number of lords like Sir John living in luxury in palatial mansions on vast estates and passing them on to his male heirs while most people are working poor, and his gestures of charity mainly (to this reader) highlight the inequity of it all. Although Moppet momentarily cannot be happy when she imagines poor kids who can’t enjoy Christmas as she is doing, she is soon enough almost condescendingly presiding over the distribution of leftover toys to the lower-class village kids. Even the hirelings’ mother seems partly a cultural snob, in that she won’t let her children play with the local French kids living in the continental coastal village where they all live. There are lines that effectively convey how much little kids hate having to go to bed before grownups, like “The idea of bed is pretty much like the idea of Portland or Dartmoor is to the criminal classes,” but then that is another reinforcement of the class consciousness of the novel. (And just who belong to the criminal classes, anyway, and why?) If you think that this novella was published in 1894, near the end of the Victorian era, while Dickens’ books were published much earlier, you might be a little disappointed that Braddon didn’t seem (in this work anyway) to absorb more of his social conscience. Finally, I really did mostly enjoy this Christmas story and was moved or amused by much of it, but will I now hunt for more of Braddon’s old novels? Honestly, I probably won’t, but I am glad I chose this one as one of my free Audible Member monthly books. I recommend it to people who like The Secret Garden but want something similar and shorter for adults… View all my reviews
La peste by Albert Camus
My rating: 4 of 5 stars A Grueling, Bracing Read Whew! La Peste (1947) by Albert Camus was one of the hardest books for me to finish. After starting it because, of course, of the current pandemic, it took me at least three months to finish the not so long novel. Why? Well I was trying to read it in French, but the real reasons were because it is no page turner, being objective and deliberate in detailing the ways in which the bubonic plague affects life in the French Algerian city of Oran, and especially because I was so exhausted preparing and teaching online classes for the first time during our spring semester. When I did finally finish the book, I fancied myself feeling nearly as exhausted as the Oranians during their seemingly never-ending plague (resembling how covid-19 doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon in the real world). Through the objective voice of the narrator (who remains anonymous till near the end), Camus reports the coming of the plague, its spread, the reaction of the authorities, of the people, and of a few individuals, and so on. Without sensationalizing anything, he depicts the appalling nature of the plague. Although I had some trouble distinguishing between the compact cast of main characters at first and even forgot their names (so fitful was my reading), I finally came to see them as real, distinct individuals: Dr. Bernard Rieux (who wants to minimize the plague sufferings of as many people as possible without judging anyone or succumbing to what would be debilitating feelings of pity), Jean Tarrou (who helps Rieux as part of his quest to see if a man can become a saint without believing in god), Raymond Rambert (a visiting investigative reporter who at first desperately tries to escape the city to be with his wife in Paris), Joseph Grand (a minor bureaucrat who continually rewrites the first sentence of a novel he’s writing in his quest to find the right words), and Cottard (an unstable shady figure who perks up when everyone is living in fear like him). I like how these unheroic men become heroes despite Camus’ efforts to not play the hero-game: “the narrator perfectly knows how regrettable it is to not be able to report here any real spectacle like for example some comforting hero or some striking action similar to those one finds in old stories.” But because Rieux and his friends know that “It’s necessary to fight by one means or another to avoid kneeling,” and that “The essential thing was to do one’s work well,” they work past the point of exhaustion to help people afflicted by the plague, and really do (despite Camus) become heroes for the reader if not for the people of Oran. They become unaffected heroes, not like Oran’s memorial statues, “the taciturn effigies of forgotten benefactors or former great men stifled forever in bronze and trying alone, with their false faces of stone or iron, to evoke a degraded image of what had been the man,” but rather like what Doctor Rieux says: “I don’t have the taste, I think, for heroism or sainthood. What interests me is to be a man.” Human nature being what it is, there are numerous parallels with our coronavirus pandemic and the way it warps the daily lives of individuals and communities, though Camus is focusing laser-like on a single city that has to shut down to avoid spreading the plague beyond its walls: incompetent and obtuse authority figures (officials, doctors, etc.) who don’t want at first to admit the reality of the plague to avoid panicking the people (and themselves) and who hence make it worse when it inevitably ignites; a special hospital ward for plague victims that’s quickly swamped with cases; people trying to profit off the plague economy; people partying in bars during the epidemic; attempts to understand why the plague came giving way to fatalistic acceptance; fruitless attempts to make a vaccine, etc. As the narrator puts it early on, “Plagues, in effect, are a communal thing, but one believes with difficulty in them until they fall on one’s head. There are in the world as many plagues as wars. And, nevertheless, plagues and wars always find people unprepared.” Despite my long and difficult reading of the novel, some scenes remain vivid in my mind: Rieux and his friends watching a boy die in prolonged agony (one of the most painful passages I’ve read in any novel); Rieux and Tarrou going for a swim in the sea; Rieux and Tarrou helping Grand find a word in the first sentence of his novel; Rambert deciding that, “I’d been thinking that I was a stranger in this city and that I had nothing to do with you. But now that I’ve seen what I’ve seen, I know that I am from here, whether I like it or not. This story concerns all of us.” And generally Camus’ descriptions of the plague-afflicted city through the changing seasons. . . Finally, the power of the novel lies in the questions it poses but doesn’t answer, like this one: “Who could affirm that an eternity of joy could compensate for an instant of human pain?” View all my reviews
A History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars An Engaging History Biased Against Dogma In A History of Western Philosophy (1945), Bertrand Russell introduces the lives and explains and critiques the philosophies of key figures from the history of western culture. The subtitle of Russell’s book says that he will cover philosophy’s “Connection with Political and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day,” and often his book is at least as much a history of western culture as of western philosophy. Russell is good at explaining different philosophies and the cultural contexts they influenced and were influenced by. Russell demonstrates, for example, that Marx contributed to philosophy by showing how past philosophers were all shaped by their subjective biases and then points out that Marx himself was no different (believing in progress, for instance). The reader should keep in mind that the “Present Day” when Russell stops his survey was the 1940s and World War II. Sometimes he dates himself, as when he comments that dictators don’t pass on their rule to their descendants or that big corporations loathe war or that Japanese professors are fired if they cast doubt on the Mikado being descended from the sun-goddess. Russell divides his history into three sections: I. Ancient Philosophy: pre-Socratics like Pythagoras and Anaximander; the three giants Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; and their successors like the Cynics, Sceptics, Epicureans, and Stoics. II. Catholic Philosophy: Jewish antecedents and Islamic contemporaries; saints like Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, and Benedict; the Schoolmen like John the Scot and St. Thomas Aquinas. III. Modern Philosophy: Renaissance figures like Machiavelli, Erasmus, and More; post-Renaissance figures like Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, and Berkeley; Romantic figures like Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Byron; and more modern figures like Nietzsche, Utilitarians, Marx, Bergson, Williams James, and Russell himself. Rather than dryly presenting a series of different philosophies and the cultural eras that shaped and were shaped by them, Russell also critiques the men (always men) and their philosophies with a dry wit and an appealing rational humanism. His book, then, is quite biased, in mostly, for this reader, a good way reminiscent of other works of history by individual, knowledgeable, and opinionated writers, like Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Hendrik Willem van Loon’s The Story of Mankind, or E. H. Gombrich’s The Story of Art. I learned a lot from Russell (though I am a philosophy neophyte). Russell’s aim in critiquing different philosophies is to objectively understand them and their inconsistencies, aware that “No one has invented a philosophy that is both credible and self-consistent.” His bete noir is dogmatism, which is the enemy of philosophy, for, he says, the philosopher’s task is to openly and never-endingly inquire into the nature of the world and of the universe and of truth etc. He thus disapproves of the too long and too potent influences of Aristotle and Aquinas and prefers open-minded empirical philosophers like Locke. He is also no fan of Romanticism with its overemphasis of emotion at the expense of reason: “Tigers are more beautiful than sheep, but we prefer them behind bars. The typical Romantic removes the bars and enjoys the magnificent leap with which the tiger annihilates the sheep. He exhorts men to imagine themselves tigers, and when he succeeds, the results are not wholly pleasant.” Russell prefers open-minded reason and thought to blind belief and raw emotion. He holds that any philosophy that contributes to human pride is dangerous. He likes men like Boethius who achieve something outstandingly unusual for the ages in which they lived and men like St. Francis and Spinoza who genuinely cared about the suffering of others. His take down of Nietzsche is amusing, one of the high points of the book being a fanciful moment when Buddha and Nietzsche debate the relative merits of caring about all people or only the superman. The audiobook reader Johnathan Keeble effectively uses two modes: his base natural voice for Russell, which is educated, intelligent, and engaged, and his older, gruffer, authoritative voice for the quotations of historical philosophers. This immediately signals whenever Russell is quoting a philosopher, which is helpful, as sometimes his text does not introduce a quotation. And it a relief that, unlike some readers of audiobooks of history, Keeble does not artificially change his voice to suit the presumed accents when speaking English of philosophers who were Greek, French, German, Scottish, and so on. Russell writes many great lines full of wit and wisdom. Here are several: “Seneca was judged in future ages rather by his admirable precepts than by his somewhat dubious practice.” “Those who do not fear their neighbors see no necessity to tyrannize over them.” “Men who have conquered fear, have not the frantic quality of Nietzsche’s ‘artist-tyrant’ Neros, who try to enjoy music and massacre while their hearts are filled with dread of the inevitable palace revolution.” “His [Nietzsche’s] opinion of women, like every man’s, is an objectification of his own emotion towards them, which is obviously one of fear.” “To frame a philosophy capable coping with men intoxicated with the prospect of almost unlimited power and also with the apathy of the powerless is the most pressing task of our times.” Russell ends his book abruptly but potently, with an appeal to the pursuit of “scientific truthfulness. . . the habit of basing our beliefs upon observations and inferences as impersonal, and as much divested of local and temperamental bias, as is possible for human beings,” for the resulting “habit of careful veracity” will decrease fanaticism and increase “sympathy and mutual understanding.” His closing words ring in my ears due to the egregious miasma of untruth belched forth every time the current occupant of the White House speaks or tweets. View all my reviews
Alien: Out of the Shadows by Tim Lebbon
My rating: 2 of 5 stars Why? Well, why not? But then, Why? Why force Ellen Ripley into ANOTHER nightmarish alien encounter in between the first two movies (Alien and Aliens), an encounter that is a wee bit reminiscent of both? It’s a little creaky and cruel to do what writer Tim Lebbon and director Dirk Maggs and an ensemble cast of actors do to Ripley in Alien: Out of the Shadows (2016), an Audible Original Drama. This drama adapts Lebbon’s novel like a radio drama with sound effects and background music. And how things in Maggs’ 4.5-hour drama are arranged so that nothing that happens here can affect Ripley’s experience in Aliens increases the contrivance quotient. The drama is entertaining sf horror with solid characters and an anti-corporation ax to grind, so I want to answer my raised-eyebrow Why? with a whimsical, Why not? However, when I think of all they could have done without the constraining presence of Ripley, I start wondering again, Why? In the prologue (about the only calm part of the non-stop action drama) Ripley settles into the lifeboat shuttle Narcissus with cat Jones, dictating log messages to summarize the events of the first movie before going into hypersleep, hoping to be rescued in a year or so. Cut to the orbital mining space station Marion as its two drop ships (Samson and Delilah) return from a disastrous mission picking up miners from LB178, a planet their company has sent them to mine. It turns out that aliens have hitched a ride in Samson and Delilah and have been forcing unwanted “pregnancies” on the crew and miners in the appalling alien way. The drop ships crash into the Marion, seriously damaging it, killing its captain, and knocking it off orbit, so that in 90 days it will burn up in the atmosphere of the mining planet. After assuming command, Chief Engineer Chris Hooper has the crew seal off the Samson in a loading bay because it’s packed with aliens (the Delilah has been destroyed). Fast forward 77 days. Ripley’s Narcissus has docked on the mining orbital. Upon being woken, Ripley is shocked to learn 1) she’s been asleep for 37 years, 2) there are aliens shut up in a drop ship on the doomed orbital that’s “rescued” her, 3) the Marion is not 15 days from burning up in LB178’s atmosphere but two, and 4) Ash, the android who was so keen in the first movie to fulfill the Weyland-Yutani Corporation’s Special Order 937 by bringing a “viable” “creature of interest” home with him no matter what, human crew expendable, has uploaded his “mind” to the Narcissus’ computer system. Ash couldn’t get into the Marion’s computer systems, could he? The only way out for the eight surviving crew members of the Marion (plus Ripley) would be to jam into the Narcissus and head for the solar system in hopes of being rescued. To make that happen, they’ll first have to clean the Samson free of however many aliens are lurking inside it (the plan being to catch the nine-foot critters in sturdy nylon cargo nets, watching out for their ten-foot spiked tails, talons, double jaws, and acid blood) and use the drop ship to make a hit and run trip down to the mining planet to get an energy cell for Narcissus (which is down to 10% juice). For weapons, Hoop, Ripley, et al have two acid guns, bolt firing flare guns, and plasma torches. Who knows how many aliens are down there waiting for more humans to “impregnate” with their toothy babies? The drama is that kind of time-ticking-improvise-your-way-out-of-(or-into)-hairy-situations horror suspense story. There is much violent mayhem, graphic sight and smell and sound, buck-up banter, desperate situations, and creepy alien sound effects. It’s well done. But there are contrivances, like the only usable energy cell for Ripley’s Narcissus being down on the mining planet, and—well, I won’t mention others to avoid spoiling the plot. Ash’s presence is neat: voiced by Rutger Hauer, the android is calm, creepy, and crazy. He gives regular “progress updates” to Weyland-Yutani, in which he reveals what he’s planning for Ripley and company, thus heightening suspense. Unfortunately, Ash repetitively summarizes the situation way too often, saying multiple times things like, “I no longer have a body, having uploaded my consciousness into the Narcisuss computer,” or “I am monitoring the helmet feeds of the landing party,” or “Ellen Ripley, who was the warrant officer on my former ship the Nostromo is here.” Maybe the drama was conceived in episodes, requiring Ash to bring listeners up to speed each time a section begins, but it makes for flabby storytelling. In addition to Hauer’s fine performance, the voice acting is all convincing, the Ripley actress Laurel Lefkow channeling Sigourney Weaver and Corey Johnson doing a natural-born laconic engineer leader in Hooper. It’s disappointing that apart from Ash the only negative character is the only British-English speaking character, Science Officer Snedden (?), who finds the aliens “beautiful” and “fascinating” and spends way too much time “recording” things alien, so we assume it’s only a matter of time before she learns her lesson the hard way. Why is such a character the only one with a British accent? Of course, the old Corporations-Are-Bad schtick is on full display here, and the big villain is Weyland-Yutani: “They want something they can sell over and over at an inflated price. Medicine. Or weapons.” There are vivid descriptions, as of the alien secretions that look like organic melted plastic. There are neat lines, like “A drunk with a gun on a spaceship. What could possibly go wrong?” There are, alas, too many corny lines: “You good?” “I’m Good.” Or “Stay sharp, people!” Or “Come on folks, saddle up and move out.” If people really say such things like in real life, I bet it’s cause they watched a lot of action movies and TV shows! There are plenty of f-word utterances (e.g., “WTF?”), but the line is drawn at mf, which is abbreviated “mother.” Finally, I’d recommend this only to diehard fans of the Alien movies in dire need of another Alien fix. View all my reviews
The Map of Salt and Stars by Zeyn Joukhadar
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Necessary and Potent, but too Rich Zeyn Joukhadar’s The Map of Salt and Stars (2018) is a moving, harrowing, beautiful novel framing a folktale, the frame story occurring in 2011 during the chaos of the Arab Spring, the folktale in the 12th century during the conflict between the crusader kingdom of Jerusalem, the Sunni Turkish ruler Nur ad-Din, and the Shia Fatimid caliphs. After the death to cancer of her father (“Baba”), eleven-year-old Syrian-American Nour moved with her mother and two big sisters, sweet Huda and prickly Zahra, from Manhattan to Homs in Syria--just in time for the start of the Syrian civil war. As the novel opens, Nour is still grieving the loss of her beloved Baba, and so she begins telling her favorite story that he used to tell her, about 16-year-old Rawiya running away from home, disguising herself as a boy, and becoming the apprentice of the map-maker al-Idrisi as the old man is about to embark on a journey to make the most accurate and complete (and beautiful) map of the known world for King Roger of Sicily. Nour, then, recounts two stories: her own in the present as she and her family embark on their refugees’ journey west through Syria, Lebannon, Egypt, Algeria, and Morocco, and Rawiya’s adventures with al-Idrisi visiting the same locations 800 years or so earlier. How the two tales mirror each other is one of the pleasures of the novel. Both Nour and Rawiya are spunky, sensitive, capable, intelligent, likeable girls, and while Nour’s mother is a professional map maker, so is Rawiya’s mentor. Nour’s story is realistic and features no supernatural creatures, whereas Rawiya’s is a historical adventure peopled by real figures like King Roger and by fantastical figures like the roc. I was quite moved by Nour’s 2011 story, which depicts things that many Americans (like me) should be more aware of: living in a city being destroyed by civil war (kids trying to hear the shelling as distant thunder), becoming a homeless refugee, making deals with human smugglers, crossing deserts on foot, boarding rickety ferries vulnerable to fires and missiles, stowing away in a refrigerated fruit truck, and encountering young men bent on rape. All such scenes are depicted with an intense, sensual, and emotional detail that render them suspenseful and terrifying. And Nour’s relationships with her father’s best friend Abu Sayeed and her two big sisters, Zahra and Huda, are fine. The folk tale about Rawiya was less compelling and a bit too long. One problem I had with the novel concerns Joukhadar’s impressive style, scintillating with striking similes and descriptions, because often I wondered, “Could an eleven-year-old girl say that?” For example: --“A truck disappears under the shimmer of heat in front of us. Mountains loom. Cliffs of red sandstone rise up, wind carved, pockmarked like sheets of termite-eaten wood.” --“Arabic fills the air like a flock of startled birds.” --“an oblong pastry armored with almond slivers.” Sometimes I was pulled out of my immersion in the story to marvel at Joukhadar’s poetic language and or to question whether Nour could use it, especially for details that don’t seem relevant or important enough to warrant the attention, e.g., “al-Idrisi’s beard was tinged with dust, and the wind lifted stray camel hairs from his turban.” Sometimes Nour’s distinctive descriptions were too much of a good thing. The occasional misuse of lay/lie in the novel (e.g., “My stomach hurts and I want to lay down”) makes me wonder if they’re Nour or Joukhadar’s mistakes. . . I also found myself wondering why Joukhadar made Nour prone to synesthesia, so she sees sounds and letters as colors, like this: “’Nour.’ It’s Mama’s voice, warm cedar brown, its edges curled up into red. She’s annoyed.” The novel would have been moving, beautiful, terrible, and poetic enough without the synesthesia, which seems to serve mainly to make Nour more special, which, in her curiosity, intelligence, sweetness, courage, love of stories, and so on, she already is enough. YA overkill. Speaking of YA fiction, first person present tense narration is so common these days (e.g., Hunger Games, Divergent, Dread Nation) that it almost ruined my reading. If Joukhadar had used third person for the frame narration (as he does for her folk tale), I could have more easily accepted the vivid poetic writing. Or if he had had Nour use the past tense for her frame narration (as he does for her folk tale), I wouldn’t have kept thinking, “When is she telling her stories?” Joukhadar avoids detailed contemporary political commentary, as Nour knows little of what’s going on in Syria and doesn’t explain the different sides fighting the civil war or criticize the western world’s lack of sympathy for the plight of refugees like her family. The main good the novel does is to make us imagine through the eyes of a precocious girl what it’s like to have one’s world and home and family upended (“How many times can you lose everything before you become nothing?”) and then to have to go on a series of refugee journeys with ever dwindling resources (“Is pain poisonous?”). Despite my criticisms, I was moved, impressed, and enriched by the novel and recommend it. I usually prefer rich writing to plain. And we need more YA novels about Arab protagonists. The reader Lara Sawalha talks like a typical American girl for Nour’s narration and dons a Middle-Eastern Arabic type accent for the characters in Rawiya’s story. She does a good job both ways (though she does for some reason pronounce coyote as kay-otee and turquoise as tur-kwise). If you like fantasy and reality and YA fiction and are curious about Syrian/Arabic/refugee culture and plights, you should read this book. It answers the following question in the affirmative: “Is there still room in the world for extraordinary things?” View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
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by Sabaa Tahir
A Young Adult Epic Fantasy with Lots of Violence & Romance
Elias is an elite Martial soldier, Laia a naïve Scholar slave. As they alternate telling their stories (in trendy Young Adult first person, present tense narration), we soon rea...
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by Lu Xun
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Matthew Lewis' notorious and influential Gothic novel The Monk (1796) takes place during the heyday of the Spanish Inquisition. Ambrosio, the monk/friar/abbot/idol of Madrid, is nicknamed ...
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