Paradise Lost by John Milton
My rating: 5 of 5 stars Wowed by imagination and language-- Milton’s Puritan epic Paradise Lost (1667/74) gets off to an amazing start with Book I. The compelling anti-hero Satan and his fellow fallen angels have just been exiled from Heaven to Hell, “this dark and dismal house of pain,” where they speed-build Pandemonium. It's all sublime fantasy, majestic poetry, vivid language, wonderful epic similes, and absorbing psychology. Many delicious phrases like “by harpy-footed Furies hail'd” and “Hell trembled as he strode” and famous lines like “The mind is its own place, and in it self/ Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n” and “Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav'n.” Check out this wonderful description of Satan: Then with expanded wings he stears his flight Aloft, incumbent on the dusky Air That felt unusual weight, till on dry Land He lights, if it were Land that ever burn'd With solid, as the Lake with liquid fire; And this epic simile describing his “ponderous shield,” whose broad circumference Hung on his shoulders like the Moon, whose Orb Through Optic Glass the Tuscan Artist views At Ev'ning from the top of Fesole, Or in Valdarno, to descry new Lands, Rivers or Mountains in her spotty Globe. And this fantastic physiology: For Spirits when they please Can either Sex assume, or both; so soft And uncompounded is thir Essence pure, Not ti'd or manacl'd with joynt or limb, Nor founded on the brittle strength of bones, Like cumbrous flesh; but in what shape they choose Dilated or condens't, bright or obscure, Can execute thir aerie purposes, And works of love or enmity fulfill. Yikes—I’d better get going on my *concise* summary of the next eleven books! In Book II, the impious crew debate their next move: Hunker down in Hell? Naw. Renew the war against Heaven? Better not. Revenge ourselves on God by messing with his newest creation, man? Hmm. Satan meets his daughter Sin and his son/grandson by her (!), Death, and then scouts out earth, hanging there from a gold chain, ripe for the tainting. In Book III Satan approaches earth as God watches without interfering: his creations have free will, else no point in creating them. Someone will have to die to balance man’s impending sin and thereby save man for grace! Volunteers? What about the Son of God? *The sacrifice feels less heroic when Jesus declares that he’ll defeat Death by being resurrected. In Book IV, Satan spies on paradise, violently conflicted as to whether to submit to God or to mess up man, deciding on the latter, because “my self am Hell.” Adam and Eve are insufferably innocent, Eve revoltingly obedient to Adam (“my Guide/ And Head”), saying things like, “God is thy Law, thou mine: to know no more/ Is womans happiest knowledge and her praise.” I thus get a kick out of Satan enviously watching them and saying things like, You’ll soon join me in my less pleasing place! *Our pre-fall “general ancestors” Adam and Eve shamelessly have sex ‘cause God wants them to have pleasure (in wedlock) and to increase. In Book V Raphael pep talks Adam about obedience and contentment. He explains why God gave his creations free will (without it, obedience is meaningless) and recounts the story of Satan’s rebellion (sparked by his jealousy over God’s promotion of Jesus), including a rebel-rousing speech to the angels: are we going “to begirt th' Almighty Throne/ Beseeching or besieging”? And, hey, paradise is delightful: Awake, the morning shines, and the fresh field Calls us, we lose the prime, to mark how spring Our tended Plants, how blows the Citron Grove, What drops the Myrrhe, and what the balmie Reed, How Nature paints her colours, how the Bee Sits on the Bloom extracting liquid sweet. In Book VI Raphael vividly depicts to Adam the three-day war between Satan and his minions and God and his. It’s like a mini-Iliad—but nobody dies, because though the angels feel pain, they are immortal, ethereal, and quick-healing. The “obsequious” angels rout the “atheist” rebels, who return with dread new war engines only to be smothered by some sacred mountains, until finally the Son of God kicks the impious crew out of Heaven and sends them falling nine days to Hell. Book VII has Raphael vividly tell Adam how God created the heavens, earth, light, dark, lands, seas, plants, creatures, etc. in six days. It too closely follows Genesis—though there are splendid descriptions of animals coming into existence. In Book VIII Adam tells Raphael his memories of being created, not unlike Frankenstein’s creature telling his story (except Adam had a loving and caring creator), including God interdicting the knowledge tree. And the making of Eve from Adam’s rib. Adam’s account of waking up alive for the first time and enjoying his new world and body is splendid: By quick instinctive motion up I sprung, As thitherward endevoring, and upright Stood on my feet; about me round I saw Hill, Dale, and shadie Woods, and sunnie Plaines, And liquid Lapse of murmuring Streams; by these, Creatures that livd, and movd, and walk'd, or flew, Birds on the branches warbling; all things smil'd, With fragrance and with joy my heart oreflow'd. Starting with another super Satanic soliloquy as the fiend possesses a serpent’s body, Book IX relates the tempting of Eve and-- So saying, her rash hand in evil hour Forth reaching to the Fruit, she pluck'd, she eat: Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat Sighing through all her Works gave signs of woe, That all was lost. Wow. Adam decides to eat and die with Eve. Fruit-full and intoxicated, they enjoy carnal pleasure till they pass out, waking up the next day hungover and recriminatory, like any bickering couple: Why didn’t you stay by me? Why didn’t you force me to stay? In Book X Jesus compassionately punishes the sinners. God curses the poor serpent (more victim than Adam and Eve!). God/Jesus tells Adam the moral: your wife was made to serve you, so you lost all when you unleashed her. Sin and Death make a bridge over chaos from hell to earth (“Mace petrific”! “Gorgonian rigor”! “Asphaltic slime”!), while Satan oversees the anti-terraforming of the earth, making it hostile to man. In Book XI, Jesus brings Adam and Eve’s repentant prayers to God, who says death will remedy their pain and lead to a better second life, and Michael goes to banish the penitents from Eden but give them hope, so he reveals to Adam the future, from Cain and Abel to the Flood. Eve promises Adam, “I’ll never from your side stray,” while bruising the serpent becomes their life goal. In Book XII, Michael continues revealing the future to Adam, listing horrible diseases and deaths (thanks, Eve!) and relating the Exodus and Christ Redeemer stories: goodness infinite to bring grace out of evil, the fortunate fall. Michael preaches virtue, faith, patience, temperance, love, charity: paradise within thee. And our father and mother exit Eden, Eve in meek submission, and “the World was all before them.” About the Naxos audiobook, Anton Lesser reads the poem with understanding, empathy, wit, and pleasure; lovely melancholy music by John Jenkins and William Lawes, English composer contemporaries of Milton, introduces and concludes the twelve books. Finally, I recoil from the sexist Christian vision of the poem, and its Bible summaries bore me, but the insight that we have heaven or hell within us according to our thoughts, actions, and personalities, rings true. And the language, imagination, epic similes, and Satan are all wonderful. View all my reviews
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The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “All life is an experiment” The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories (2016) by Ken Liu collects fifteen stories ranging from Stapledonian cosmic exploration and evolution through steampunk alternate histories and cyberpunk serial killer thrillers to Chinese legends and postmodern “documentaries.” It features clear writing, convincing characters, unpredictable plots, serious themes, and neat plays with genre elements. His stories often foreground intercultural interaction and exotic Chinese culture, including foods, superstitions, paper money offerings for spirits, and written characters. The character for autumn is composed of the characters for fire and for rice/millet, because in the north of China in autumn they harvested grain and burnt the stalks to fertilize the fields. And the character for autumn combines with that for heart to make sorrow or worry. Liu’s Preface explains that the stories show his interests and that any story is a translation: we can’t be sure how people who read it understand it, but writing and reading stories bring people closer together. “The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species” explains the writing and books of interstellar species, including ones who write and read with their proboscises, mechanical ones whose stone brains are books, energy “field potentials” who read stars and planets and black hole event horizons, and a tiny people who collect other species’ obsolete books and turn them into tiny cities. (4 stars) In “State Change” Rina is a quiet young woman who believes that her soul is an ice cube. If it melts, she’ll die, she thinks, so she keeps it in a refrigerator by her bed at home and in a freezer by her desk at work, where she is completely ignored—no one knows her name—until a friendly new guy starts working there. Could she be wrong about souls? (3.5 stars) In “The Perfect Match” a search Engine called Centillion has become a lifestyle tool based on data collection. Sai’s virtual assistant Tilly plays wake up music for him, sets him up with compatible women, and suggests discounted products for him to buy. Ala Fahrenheit 451’s Clarisse and Montag, Sai’s neighbor Jenny makes him see his life in a new way. (3.5 stars) In “Good Hunting” the son of a demon hunter narrator tells his story over many years, as the traditional Chinese superstitions and magics and supernatural beings like fox demonesses are dying out and being replaced by seemingly more powerful western technology of trains, engines, and clockwork. The story has a weird, transcendent climax. (4 stars) “The Literomancer” is about a Texan girl in Taiwan, the magic power words have to affect the world and our lives in it, the awful things done by one group to another for “noble” reasons, and the tragedy of children discovering that their parents are not admirable. (5 stars) Through the plot lens of a new kind of camera and the fraught relationship between inventor father and estranged daughter, “Simulacrum” explores the nature of reality in the context of human attempts to capture it (and probably thereby to lose or avoid it). (3 stars) In “The Regular” a meticulous serial killer of prostitutes is sought in Boston by a 49-year-old private eye with a traumatic past requiring a spinal implant “regulator” to control her emotions. The story is too much of its genre, lasts too long, and ends in a too pat climax. (3 stars) In “The Paper Menagerie” the American narrator recounts how his relationship with his Chinese mother changed from loving, imaginative, and fun when he was little and speaking Chinese and playing with the paper animals she made for him and animated with her breath, to distant as he aged, became more American, and forced her to speak English. (5 stars) “An Advanced Readers’ Picture Book of Comparative Cognition” features an account of memory and cognition in different species (like one made of uranium), while the narrator tells his daughter why the child’s mother went on a mission out into the solar system to try to catch alien communications. After all, the world is a boat. (4 stars) In “The Waves,” the people traveling on an exploratory generation ship evolve through renewable flesh, uploaded consciousnesses, and steel bodies and silicon brains to become beings of light, while Maggie tells ancient origin stories from earth. (4 stars) “Mono No Aware” is about the last 1000 or so human beings in the universe traveling on a “habitat module” called The Hopeful to 61 Virginis. We get the background for all this and a message about the transience of life (we’re all ephemeral cicadas) from the narration of a young Japanese man: “a kitten’s tongue tickles the inside of my heart.” (3 stars) In “All the Flavors: A Tale of Guan Yu the Chinese God of War in America” Lord Guan, the 3rd-century Chinese hero God of War, (possibly) appears in frontier-era Idaho City. As in “The Literomancer,” a red-haired white girl called Lily meets a kind Chinese man who introduces her to Chinese culture, though here he learns the Irish song “Finnegan’s Wake” from Lily’s father instead of being tortured by him. (4 stars) Set during the golden age of the Qing Dynasty, “The Litigation Master and the Monkey King” features a “legal hooligan” who helps the poor in their legal conflicts with the rich. Egged on by the trickster Monkey King, the master has to deal with a verboten book and an exiled student as the comedic story turns heroic. “We are all just ordinary men faced with extraordinary choices.” (4.5 stars) “A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel” recounts how a 1938 trans-Pacific submarine tunnel linking Japan, China, and America prevented World War Two, maintained Japan's East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, and led to various technologies being innovated earlier than in our world. The Formosan narrator who worked on the tunnel tells the source of his nightmares to his American lover. (3 stars.) “The Man Who Ended History” uses an sf time travel breakthrough (photons, sub-atomic particles, the human brain, etc.) to relate the Japanese Unit 731’s appalling experiments (exposure, amputation, syphilis, etc.) on living and unanesthetized Chinese children, men, and (pregnant) women during the World War II era, killing up to 500,000 people. The story explores hegemony, history, memory, narrative, truth, and human nature. Does the Chinese American scholar of Japanese history Evan Wei end or free history via his and his Japanese American physicist wife Akemi Kirino’s invention? The “story,” a documentary composed of excerpts from interviews, news shows, hearings, and articles, warns that calling men like the doctors of Unit 731 “monsters” distances us from them when really anyone is capable of such behavior. The story devastated me--I’ve been living in Japan for thirty years. (4.5 stars) The audiobook lacks the reproductions of the Chinese characters described in “The Literomancer” and the notes and dedication (“to the memory of Iris Chang and all the victims of Unit 731”) after the last story. The readers Corey Brill and Joy Osmanski are capable. View all my reviews
The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “A hairbrush is NOT a gun!” First, I love the voice(s) and manner of audiobook reader Bahni Turpin, who really enhances Angie Thomas’ YA family romance race novel The Hate U Give (2017). The story is told (in de rigueur YA present tense) by 16-year-old Starr Carter, whose home is in the Garden Heights “ghetto,” where shootings, robberies, and drugs are common and normal jobs, well-equipped schools, and social services rare. When she was ten, her best friend Natasha was shot and killed while playing at an open fire hydrant, after which Starr’s parents put her and her younger and older brothers in the mostly white Williamson Prep school in the mostly white (and largely gated) Riverton Hills community 45 minutes away. As a result, Starr has been dividing herself into two personas in two worlds, Garden Heights Starr and Williamson Prep Starr, unable to speak her natural language or show her true feelings to her school friends. In the beginning of the story, she loses another childhood best friend, Khalil Harris, her first crush, when a white policeman pulls them over after a party and shoots Khalil three times in the back as he’s reaching for his hairbrush and asking Starr if she’s OK. The traumatic experience sends Starr wrestling with her guilt over having abandoned Khalil after going to the white school, with her awakening social conscience, and with her desire to keep a low profile as the only eyewitness to the shooting. As she watches the ensuing protests and riots over the killing (called “the incident” by the police, “the murder” by an activist attorney), gets interviewed by the police and the DA, and deals with her family members and friends, she finds it increasingly difficult to keep her two worlds separate. Will the merging of her two worlds be a wreck or a metamorphosis? Will she use her voice or remain safely anonymous? Will Khalil get justice, or will his killer get off scot-free? Will her father let her mother move the family out of Garden Heights to be safe or insist on staying to improve the community? Will their Garden Heights grocery store remain untouched by the riots? Will her complicated family grow closer or implode? The way Thomas answers such questions makes for a page-turning novel that is topical with the police killings of black people while staying universal with the relationships between family members and friends of highly wired teenagers. The novel depicts African American culture and human nature while dealing with interracial problems and enrichments. The book is not an anti-police diatribe, as Starr’s beloved surrogate father Uncle Carlos is a cop who genuinely wants to help Garden Heights and regrets temporarily assuming the worst of Khalil after he’s killed. Moreover, there’s lots of humor throughout, especially in the conversations between Starr and her family members and friends, which Angie Thomas writes with a fine-tuned ear for how kids and adults think and talk. There are funny scenes, like when Starr’s ex-gang banger and ex-con Black Panther and Malcom X idolizing father explains why Harry Potter is about gangs or discovers her *white* boyfriend Chris (“Y'all act like this dude been around a minute”), or when Starr and company tell Chris strange white behaviors so he tries to tell them strange black behaviors. And Starr’s salty grandmother steals any scene she’s in. While telling a realistic story about race, violence, and voice, the novel presses a lot of YA buttons, channeling a bit of Harry Potter (with the commentary on Rowling’s series and the outsider at school setting), a bit of the Hunger Games (with the first-person present-tense narration and themes relating to media and image), and a bit of Twilight (with the high school romance between apparently mismatched but ideally suited couple). Unfortunately, Thomas also indulges in the YA genre’s Righteous Punch of the Asshole, when Starr has had enough of her self-centered, manipulative, defensive, racist Williamson friend Hailey. Starr’s three-day suspension and her mother’s, Just-because-someone-says-something-you-don’t-like-doesn’t-mean-you-should-punch-them, are drowned out by the approval she gets from her father, brother, “sister,” friend, gang members, and author. In addition to referencing much popular culture (e.g., Starr’s beloved Jordan basketball shoes, Drake, Idris Elba, Taylor Swift, Beyonce, IHOP, Tumblr, Taco Bell), the novel depicts much African American culture, from Black Jesus, Huey Newton, dap, and “the Talk” about how to act when the police stop you if you’re black, to spicy Black English and slang like “a’ight” (all right) and “You just mad he threw you out,” “Loud-ass music,” “Giving Denasia Allen some serious stank-eye,” and “It's dope to be black until it's hard to be black.” She also writes some neat figures of speech, like Rosalie is “an African queen, and we are blessed to be in her presence,” “Suddenly I'm Eve in the garden after she ate the fruit,” and “’Love you’ isn’t as forward or aggressive as ‘I love you.’ ‘Love you’ can slip up on you, sure, but it doesn’t make an in-your-face-slam dunk. More like a nice jump shot.” And life wisdom, like “What's the point of having a voice if you're going to be silent in those moments you shouldn't be?” “People make mistakes, and you have to decide if their mistakes are bigger than your love for them,” and especially Tupac’s, THUG LIFE: “The Hate U Give Little Infants Fucks Everyone.” Maybe Starr’s family is a little too good to be true. She says at one point, “Embarrassing dancing and dysfunction aside, my family is not too bad,” and despite their arguments, they are (almost too) ideally supportive. I wonder how the novel would be if her family were truly broken like Khalil’s. Although I like the presence of Chris, who gives white me an outsider’s view of the black culture of the novel, I also think that Thomas takes the easy way out by not writing any scenes with his white parents. On the other hand, I think Devante (a Khalil-like Garden Heights youth from another broken family) is an unnecessary distraction during the climax. Anyway, overall, Thomas tells a suspenseful, moving, funny, and necessary story, and I’d like now to read her more recent Garden Heights novel Concrete Rose about Starr’s father when he was a teen. View all my reviews
Freddy's Cousin Weedly by Walter Rollin Brooks
My rating: 3 of 5 stars “I like honesty, even in an enemy” OR Home Alone on the Bean Farm OR Draw a Fierce Mustache and Angry Eyebrows on a Timid Piglet at Your Own Peril In the main plot of Freddy’s Cousin Weedly (1940), the seventh entry in Walter R. Brooks’ humorous and savory Freddy the Pig series (twenty-six books published from 1927 to 1958), Aunt Effie and Uncle Snedeker show up at the New York farmhouse of Mr. and Mrs. Bean, who are absent vacationing in France. The aunt and uncle aim to locate and abscond with the silver teapot Effie believes that her mother should have left to her instead of to Mrs. Bean. Needless to say, Freddy the pig and his fellow Bean farm animals will do everything they can to foil the interlopers. The sub-plot consists of Jinx the black cat adopting Freddy’s timorous cousin Little Weedly and trying to instill confidence in the piglet. The book is a comedy of manners: uninvited house guests, contested heirloom, practical jokes, apologies and forgiveness, and so on. The aunt and uncle who seem like villainous invaders turn out to be responsible house guests, helping the animals protect the Beans’ garden from an invasion of martial caterpillars, maintaining the farm in good order, and even, finally, inviting all the farm animals and a number of local wild ones to a consummately polite tea party. As Freddy and company learn that Effie has redeeming qualities, so she learns that pigs and other animals can be at least as well-mannered as people. Effie thinks that being “polite to people even when they’re your enemies” should be in her etiquette book. The book posits that “There are two things you can do if you have a disagreement with somebody. You can try to settle it by fighting, or you can try to settle it by being friendly with them.” Through all that runs an allegorical commentary on race relations using animals as stand ins for people of color. (This is not as offensive as it sounds, because Brooks respects and likes animals at least as much as people and writes most of his stories from the animal point of view.) When Effie goes to watch a movie, she discovers Freddy (a pig!) sitting next to her and demands his removal, only to be told, “We make no class distinctions in this theatre, madam… Bankers, working men, Eskimos, Hottentots, elephants, lizards—we treat them all alike. If they have the price of admission.” It may seem condescending to minorities when Freddy comes off as admirable (and wins Effie’s approval) for offering to leave to avoid causing a disturbance. But as the book was published before the Civil Rights era, Brooks’ attempt to open child readers’ minds about “people” who are different is impressive. Like the other Freddy books, this one is pretty funny. Brooks here presents many amusing animal “facts” like, “Cows do a good deal of resting. They are not very ambitious, and few cows have ever made great names for themselves in the world. They would much rather sit around in the shade and talk. But they are often very wise animals, and their opinions are well worth listening to.” Indeed, the cow Mrs. Wiggins says several wise things. Once she explains the difference between manners and politeness: “Aunt Effie’s only polite when her etiquette book says she ought to be, and that’s when she’s having a party, or maybe when somebody else is being polite to her. I guess with her it’s just manners, and not real politeness.” Elsewhere she explains why she doesn’t open letters: “As long as it isn’t opened, I can think of lots of nice things it might be. But as soon as I open it, then it means I’ve got to do something.” Brooks also writes interesting animal behavior that seems like something real animals might do, as when Jinx tries to get Effie to let him into the house: “Jinx had used his saddest and most mournful mew. It made you think of little children crying and cats dying of starvation and all sorts of sorrowful things, and you would be pretty hard-hearted if you could keep from going to the door.” There is plenty of humor for adults here, too, like when the narrator says that “Uncle Snedeker was usually considered to be a pretty good husband. That is, he almost always did what Aunt Effie told him to.” Brooks usually writes unadorned, straightforward, demotic English suitable for kids, but he’s also capable of vivid, original, and poetic figures of speech like, “The first raindrops pattered like mice running over the shingles.” Freddy is a charismatic protagonist, a protean pig whose interests run from detective work to poetry. Yet he is quite lazy, so that he trains his animal staff at his First Animal Bank to say “good morning” when he shows up late in the afternoon. And he likes poetry too much: “Freddy should have seized the teapot and made off with it without a moment’s delay. But he was a poet as well as a pig of action.” The illustrations by Kurt Weise are perfect: realistic (his animals look like real animals, not Disney cartoon creatures), accurate (he has carefully read the story), well-chosen (he illustrates important and or funny scenes), and witty (his minimalistic picture of Emma the duck trying to look like a wicked tiger is comical). Finally, this is a solid, if not stellar book, being sillier, lighter, and less tightly plotted than the best Freddy books (like Freddy the Detective and Freddy and the Poppinjay), but it has many virtues. The high point is an absurd tour de force play in verse written by Freddy, performed by the Bean farm animals, and featuring Queen Elizabeth I (the cow Mrs. Wiggins), her ladies in waiting (the ducks Emma and Jane), Sir Walter Raleigh (Weedly), Captain Kidd (the horse Hank), Sherlock Holmes (Freddy), a G-man (Jinx), and an unsanctioned marriage plan, stolen jewelry, a lot of ordered executions, and a bad rhyme competition. A smaller-scale high point is a Paul Revere-esque mouse-back midnight ride by the husband-and-wife spiders Mr. and Mrs. Webb (the illustration by Kurt Weise is prime). Oh, and the idea of Jinx (a cat!) adopting Little Weedly (a piglet!) and the timid piglet turning into a cocky prankster after Freddy paints a fierce mustache and angry eyebrows on him is funny. Hey, it’s starting to sound pretty good after all! View all my reviews
Tales from Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “What matters is whose house we live in and who we let enter ours.” Ursula K. Le Guin’s fifth Earthsea book, Tales from Earthsea (2001), collects two novellas, three short stories, and a Description of Earthsea. Though some of the tales are better than others, all of them are vintage Le Guin: thought-provoking, imaginative, original, moving, and poetically and precisely written. The characters are compelling and the action suspenseful, without relying on violent action. Except for the novella “Dragonfly,” which is “a dragon bridge” between the fourth and fifth Earthsea novels, the stories are stand alones. In the Foreword (well read by Christina Moore), Le Guin talks about things like the commodification of fantasy, how she came to revisit Earthsea after having subtitled Tehanu “The *Last* Book of Earthsea,” and how real world history writing is similar to fantasy world history writing. All with her wit and clarity. “The Finder” is a moving novella about love, power, learning/teaching, and gender during a time of disunity, slavery, and tyranny, similar to what is going on around the later chaotic time of The Farthest Shore and Tehanu. Otter’s boatwright father tries to beat the boy’s natural gift for magic out of him, until he is bound to work as a dowser for a crazy, amoral wizard looking for cinnabar to refine into quicksilver. How this hellish situation leads to the founding of Roke School (by men *and* women) makes an interesting story. Especially moving and neat are Otter’s relationships with a nude, deformed, mercury-poisoned female slave and with a pirate king’s “crafty man” finder, the Hound. “All the hope left in the world is in the people of no account.” (4 stars) “Darkrose and Diamond” is a romantic story about Diamond, the gifted son of a wealthy lumber merchant, who thinks he can only choose one thing, music, magic, or business, though his mother believes that everything in life is connected, tangled together. Will Diamond follow his bliss and his heart or fulfill his father’s desires? Will Diamond’s beloved Darkrose, daughter of a witch, fit into his life? Le Guin has decided that the voluntary celibacy of wizards is misguided, unnecessary, and possibly harmful. “Why can’t you have everything you want?” (3.5 stars) In order to try to save Gont Port Town from being destroyed by an earthquake, the old wizard Dulse teams up with his former student Ogion to use a powerful elemental spell taught Dulse by his teacher Ard sixty years earlier. The perfectly crafted story, about relationships between teachers and students, fathers and sons, friends and friends, and humans and the earth, is moving. It also says subtle, potent things about gender. It’s poignant to see Ged’s old teacher as a young man. “In the dark under the water all islands touch and are one.” (5 stars) The widow Gift thinks that a traveler who shows up one day at her farm is a king or a beggar. He is surely broken and may be mad, but she senses that he is a kind and true man and offers him hospitality, and he sets about healing the area cattle afflicted by an awful murrain. The story is like a western in which a damaged gunfighter shows up in a small town, hides his guns for fear of harming another person with them, and works on a widow’s ranch. What is the man’s story? Who is he running from? Is he dangerous or safe? When a scarred stranger called Hawk shows up at Gift’s farm, we expect a wizardly showdown. Will Le Guin subvert genre again? Her story is a moving middle-aged romance. “The changes in a man's life may be beyond all the arts we know and all our wisdom.” (4.5 stars) “Dragonfly” is a novella about an uneducated, uncouth, large, vital, beautiful young woman who wants to find out who she is and so tries to enter the male-only Roke School for wizards disguised as a young man and catalyzes a change in the school. The story develops more of the human/dragon thing introduced by Tehanu. The relationship between Irian and a bitter expelled wizard from Roke called Ivory, is neat and funny. I love it when he tries to cast a love spell on Irian, and she punches him while her dog grins at him. The story links Tehanu (1990) to The Other Wind (2001). “I think we should go to our house and open its doors.” (4 stars) After the five tales comes A Description of Earthsea, in which Le Guin writes a kind of encyclopedia entry on Earthsea, with topics like the traits and cultures and histories of the Hardic, Kargad, and Dragon peoples (including their Languages, Writing and Magic), the School on Roke, and Celibacy and Wizardry. Most of this appears here and there throughout her six Earthsea books, but it’s ever a pleasure to read Le Guin’s writing. (3 stars) The audiobook closes with a new Afterword (well read by Christina Moore) in which Le Guin explains why she published the fifth book of tales before she wrote the sixth novel. She uses an analogy between the “uncertain beginning of the last movement of Beethoven’s last symphony,” wherein he’s searching for the right way to go forward, and what she was trying to do with these tales: find the right way to finish her Earthsea cycle. She also talks about the need for the reality of imaginative fantasy literature in our contemporary virtual world. The audiobook reader Jenny Sterlin is prime. View all my reviews
Deathless Divide by Justina Ireland
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “I ain’t gonna be part of his science experiment!” The premise of Deathless Divide (2020), the sequel to Justina Ireland’s 19-century alternate history zombie apocalypse race relations novel Dread Nation (2018), is that during a Civil War battle for some unexplained reason the dead rose up and started attacking, eating, and turning the living. To kill the “shamblers” you must generally remove their heads, hence the preference among experienced fighters for bladed weapons (though they’re also proficient with firearms). African Americans are made to do the dirty work of putting down the dead, while whites stay out of harm’s way, though when an entire town is overrun by a horde, no one is safe. The southern and eastern states have been lost. With its protective mountains and deserts, California has resisted the worst of the shambler plague, but “Eventually, the dead will come walking.” The narrator Jane McKeene, now about 18, explains that at Miss Preston’s School for Combat for Negro Girls near Baltimore, she and Katherine Deveraux started off enemies, but that their adventures, culminating in an escape from the white nationalist “utopia” Summerland when it was overrun by a shambler horde at the end of the first novel, have made them best friends. Jane thinks she’s getting her ex-boyfriend Jackson back, until a shambler ambush and a past marriage destroy her hopes. Acompanying them are Jackson's little sister, an orphan boy, and some prostitutes. Jane also reveals her attraction to Gideon Carr, a white scientist-inventor. Jane et al decide to try for the Great Plains African American town of Nicodemus, where they hope to find some Miss Preston alumni. Jane’s ultimate goal is California, where she hopes her mother and aunt are waiting for her in an idyllic community called Haven. While Dread Nation was narrated solely by Jane, here she and Katherine take turns narrating chapters. Their different voices, personalities, and experiences complement each other. Their chapter epigraphs come from Shakespeare (Jane) and the Bible (Katherine). Jane is more violent, reckless, and down to earth, Katherine more ladylike, careful, and polite. With her golden skin, blond hair, and blue eyes, Katherine can pass for white, while Jane is obviously black. While Jane has loved both boys and girls, Katherine has never needed a lover. One moment, she’ll say, “A good pair of swords is always the best accessory,” the next, “I take a deep breath, enjoying the reassuring grip of the corset on my ribs before I set out.” Katherine fills us in on Jane killing the hateful sheriff of Summerland at the end of the first book. Ireland writes other interesting characters, like Jackson, who becomes a resentful but helpful haint haunting Jane; Gideon, who is driven to continue his experiments on living (especially black) people as he tries to perfect his anti-shambler serum so he can (he hopes) make up for causing the deaths of untold people; and Daniel Redfern, a Native American “survivor” who won’t risk his neck to help anyone. The first part of the novel takes place in the Great Plains, the second in California, morphing into a hardboiled zombie western, as Jane’s character transforms from the Angel of the Crossroads (shambler scourge) to the Devil’s Bride (human bounty hunter), saying things like “Killing a person who needs it is like making a garden. It's hard work but the result is pleasurable.” Gone are the days when she worries about crossing the line from survivor to killer. Katherine also changes in the second part, determining never again to pass for white, abandoning her corset, and becoming a shrewder observer of men. Jane’s part-two chapters start with epigraphs from books of sensational “true stories” of the “wilding west,” Katherine’s with quotations from travelers’ accounts of the wonders of California. Ireland imagines a fallen world of misery, loss, and death for all, and not only because of the zombies. At least as deadly for people of color are the pervasive white supremacy, racism, and discrimination. In San Francisco Katherine finds the same “greed and exclusion” as everywhere else in America, but here it's the Chinese running things, the whites paying for their labor and goods, and the negroes getting burnt out of their neighborhoods. Black people are “illegal” in the Oregon Territory, and criminals only get prices on their heads for crimes against whites. The absence of justice for black people in the novel’s alternate history reflects today’s USA. The sketchy steampunk elements introduced in the first novel remain underdeveloped here, with cameos by a “pony” (a steam-driven ironclad wagon) and a limited railgun. Ireland should leave such things out. And there are some unconvincing, lazy plot developments when for suspense Jane and or Katherine get snuck up on and put in tight spots there’s no way they would permit, given their trained, experienced, and capable characters. And the climax is too quick and tidy after so many chapters leading up to it. Nonetheless, the novel is exciting, moving, relevant, and funny. It’s exciting to read a book in which strong, capable, and charismatic young heroines of color have adventures and pursue justice in dangerous, unjust world. LGBTQ people are fully represented, too, even as Ireland resists de rigueur YA love triangles. And the writing is enjoyable, as in the following lines. “You and this corset are a recipe for disaster.” “My voice is as flat as the Great Plains themselves.” “God aint’ got nothing to do with this. It is the province of man.” “A mouthy Negro girl without any kind of sense? I am the world's most perfect scapegoat.” One sign of the strong writing is that, although audiobook reader Jordan Cobb irritatingly overread the overwrought Song of Wraiths and Ruin, she was OK reading Katherine’s half of this novel (though her “refined” English voice is egregious). When Katherine’s chapters read by Cobb feature Jane’s dialogue and when Jane’s chapters read by the *prime* Bahni Turpin feature Katherine’s, it’s not as jarring as it could be in less careful hands. The themes re race, revenge, survival, and identity are potent, the resolution satisfying, and Jane and Katherine appealing, so if Ireland writes a third book set in their world, I’ll read it. View all my reviews
Vagabonds by Hao Jingfang
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Immersive, Thoughtful SF about Society and Self Vagabonds (2016) by Hao Jingfang begins in the year 2190 on earth, the year 40 on Mars, forty years after Mars won a war of independence from earth, David defeating Goliath (in the present of the novel, Mars has 20 million people to earth’s 20 billion). Ever since, the two countries have been caught in a cold war with mutual suspicion and misunderstanding, earth seeing Mars as a dictatorship where people have no individual freedom and children are exploited for labor, Mars seeing earth as a selfish, corrupt capitalist dystopia where everything and everyone is for sale. As the novel opens, a Martian spaceship called Maearth is bringing a group of Martian youths home after their five-year study stay on earth and a group of Terran diplomats on a mission to work out a trade agreement with Mars. Two of the most important point of view characters are Luoying Sloan and Eko Lu. Luoying is the dance student granddaughter of the Consul of Mars, Hans Sloan. She experiences reverse culture shock upon her return to Mars, seeing her culture through the lens of her five years on earth, making it difficult to fit back into Mars or to view either world’s system as idyllic or dystopic. She begins asking questions like why her parents were punished when she was a little girl, leading to their deaths in a mining accident; whether her grandfather is, as the Terrans say, a dictator; why she was chosen to join the group of students sent to Earth; and how she can live on Mars while chafing at limitations she didn’t notice before. Eko is a Terran film maker visiting Mars for the first time. He realizes that he is seeing Mars through the critical lens of Terran culture when he thinks that the transparent glass walls of his hotel room reveal the comprehensive surveillance of the compliant Martian citizenry but then learns that glass is the main building material on Mars and that he can make his walls opaque with the turn of a switch. Eko starts asking questions like why did his recently deceased teacher Arthur Davosky’s short visit to Mars turn into a stay of years, why did he return to earth after staying on Mars for so long, why did his teacher’s friend (who is also Eko’s patron), the influential businessman Thomas Theon, recommend that Eko talk to Luoying about his documentary on Mars, what kind of film can he make about Mars that will tell the truth while satisfying both cultures, and what kind of films did his teacher make on Mars. The first part of the novel features chapters alternating between Luoying and Eko with titles for settings on Mars (e.g., The Hotel, Home, The Film Archive). The second part of the novel is made of Luoying point of view chapters with titles for things on Mars (e.g., Membrane, Sand, Rock). The third part features chapters alternating between the points of view of multiple characters of interest with titles for their names, Luoying, her young friends (including those who stayed on Mars and those who went with her to earth), her ambitious brother Rudy, her solitary and philosophical mentor Dr. Reini, and her grandfather. One of the impressive things in this book is how Hao Jingfeng eschews easy sentimentality and typical scenes and situations involving romance and familial relationships, handling them with restraint, so that it’s moving rather than corny. Although Hao Jingfeng runs the threat of renewed war throughout her novel, she is not writing military fiction, so any bombs, battles, strategies, and casualties are only memories mentioned in passing. Readers who need plenty of violent action may be bored. That said, the trade negotiations between Mars and Earth are intense, because hawks on both sides are eager to find excuses to go to war, while political maneuverings between Martians who want to stay in their domed city or abandon it to live in an open-air crater assume great importance. And there are some suspenseful action scenes involving young Martians adventuring outside their city without permission or participating in a demonstration in Capital Square--will it turn into another Tiananmen Square event? The novel engages with world culture, referencing Camus, Dostoyevsky, Tarkovsky, St. Exupery, etc. And there is plenty of wonder-inducing sf technology, though not as much as in the writing of, say, Iain Banks. The English translation by Ken Liu reads well. It has vivid, evocative descriptions, like “The western sun shown on the stern of the ship, casting a long shadow ahead of the hull on the yellow sand like a long black sword probing over the ground.” The audiobook reader Emily Woo Zeller has a nice manner, voice, and pace, though perhaps her male voices are a bit too dramatically male. Vagabonds is a bit like The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress if Heinlein’s novel took place forty years after the war of independence from earth, but it is more reminiscent of Le Guin’s sf like The Dispossessed and “Paradises Lost” in being thoughtful, imaginative, political, character-driven, and full of convincing extrapolation about human nature and society from a set of science fictional givens. Like the best sf, the novel effervesces with ideas: on cities, freedom, creativity, art, travel, cultural exchange, commerce, communication, language, history, dance, flight, fashion, memory, fate, love, relationships, social systems, etc. If it’s possible to see Martian society mirroring that of contemporary China, Terran that of America, Hao Jingfeng doesn’t choose which is “better.” Instead, she leaves it up to the reader to decide while suggesting that all societies have good and bad points because they’re made by people, and that after all the best thing we can do is to remain individuals while helping other individuals—and to remain perpetual vagabonds without any fixed address, ever visiting different cultures. View all my reviews
Le Roi de fer by Maurice Druon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Witnessing the End of Chivalry “The king was still against the balustrade. He looked at the black hand of the grandmaster planted in the red cinders. A burnt hand; all that remained of the illustrious order of the knights of the Temple. But this hand was immobilized in the gesture of anathema.” Starting in 1314, Maurice Druon’s Le Roi de Fer (The Iron King) (1955) works three interrelated plots together: the cruel end of the Templars and the unfolding of their grandmaster’s curse; the efforts of King Philip the Fair’s unhappily married daughter Isabelle, Queen of England, and her larger than life cousin Robert Artois, to nail the wives of Philip’s three sons for adultery; and the French countryside love story of a young Lombard (Italian) money lender in training (who at one point travels to London with Bocaccio’s father). As in the best historical fiction, Druon makes his story come alive by convincingly setting the historical stage of his novel through vivid details of daily life in the past, here in the early fourteenth century, including its superstitions, passions, pleasures, machinations, and brutality, focusing on the aristocracy but not neglecting the commoners. It's a compelling book because everyone is so human, while the situations they’re in are often so terrible: interrogating or being interrogated via torture, attending or suffering gruesome public executions, learning that their sons are cuckolds or daughters adulterers, gloating over the downfall of a nemesis, using blackmail to stop a persecution or poison to kill an enemy, and so on. King Philip is ruthless, unforgiving, and cold, like a statue, an Iron King (“In the terrible function of justice he filled, Philip the Fair seemed absent from the world, or rather he seemed to communicate with a universe vaster than the visible world”); he regrets that his people complain about taxes and don’t appreciate what he gives them; he’s only comfortable with animals like his hunting dogs; he hasn’t stopped missing his deceased wife, the only woman he ever loved. Queen Isabelle is pious, cold, and cruel like her father Philip, but also misses loving and being loved, because her husband King Edward spends his love on dirty rascals from the streets around the port of London. Druon perks up his narrative by dropping occasional foreshadowing bombs, like this: “People called on to play a decisive role in the history of nations are most often ignorant of the collective destinies incarnated in them. The two personages who came to have this long interview, on an afternoon in March 1314, in the palace of Westminster, couldn’t imagine that they would, by the linking of their acts, be the first artisans of a war between France and England which would last more than a hundred years.” Or this: “But destinies slowly form, and no one knows, among all our acts sewn at random, which sprout and flourish, like trees. No one could imagine that the kiss exchanged on the border of the Mauldre would conduct the beautiful Marie to the cradle of a king.” He writes many cool lines on human nature and life: “The suffering of others, the blood of others, the insults of his victims, their hate or their despair, didn’t touch him. This insensibility was a natural disposition aiding him to serve the superior interests of the kingdom. He had the vocation of public good as others had the vocation of love … There is in history a singular line, always renewed, of fanatics of order. Destined for an abstract and absolute ideal, for them human lives have no value if they threaten the dogma of institutions; and one could say that they have forgotten that the collectivity they serve is composed of men.” He describes characters memorably: “This curious slowness that she had in her voice, gestures, and even in her manner of moving and looking at something. She gave the impression of undulating softness and abnormal placidity; but irony shone in her eyes between her long black eyelashes. The misfortune of others, their struggles and their dramas, surely delighted her.” He can even write lyrical romance scenes: “And they stayed like that [kissing] for long seconds, among the peeping of birds, the far off barking of dogs, and all the great respiration of nature that seemed to lift the earth under their feet.” He also includes some helpful notes to explain historical concepts or events or laws, etc. I found the French of the 20th-century book harder to read for some reason than that of the 19th-century Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, looking up and not finding more words in my Kindle dictionary in Druon’s book than I did in Dumas’. Moreover, it is true that there are few “good” characters in Druon’s novel; there are flawed ones or out and out vile ones, like Nogaret. But I was completely caught by The Iron King and look forward to reading the next six books in his Les Rois Maudits (The Accursed Kings) series. View all my reviews
Hadashi No Gen Vol.1 - 10 Complete Collection [In Japanese] by Keiji Nakazawa
My rating: 5 of 5 stars A Manga Epic about War, the Bomb, and Buckwheat Whew! I finally read Kenji Nakazawa’s atomic bomb manga epic Hadashi no Gen (Barefoot Gen). Twenty years ago, I bought the three-volume set in the Hiroshima Peace Museum (the original was published in ten-volumes from 1973-1987), but I’d never read it ‘cause it’s so long (2600+ pages) and promised to be so horrifying. It turned out to be a harrowing but also funny and moving story and good practice for reading Japanese (e.g., I learned the Hiroshima dialect way to hostilely address a person: “Odore!”). Inspired by Nakazawa’s experiences before, during, and after the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the story recounts eight years in the life of his fictional alter-ego (Barefoot) Gen Nakaoka, from age five to thirteen, including his relationships with his family, friends, and nemeses as they struggle to survive before and after the bomb. Throughout, Nakazawa relates historical facts (e.g., how American scientists developed the bomb, how American researchers took samples from the victims to see what effect radiation had on them, and how American authorities suppressed such info to avoid criticism) and reveals Japanese culture (e.g., foods, clothes, jobs, baths, beds, houses, songs, jokes, schools, and communities) and human nature (from selfish and cruel to generous and loving). He draws and writes many memorable scenes, like the following: Gen’s father being beaten by the Japanese police. Gen and his family being helped by their good Samaritan Korean neighbor. Gen and his little brother fighting over a grain of rice. The atomic bomb detonating and destroying. Gen trying to free his family members from their collapsed house as an inferno approaches. Gen helping his mother bear his baby sister. Gen losing his hair. Gen caring for a badly burned young artist whose family won’t touch him. Gen mistaking Ryota for his deceased little brother. Ryota recalling reaching for a cicada when the bomb detonated and killed his parents. Gen trying to steal milk for his sister from the US military but ending up with condoms. Gen earning money by scavenging scrap metal, collecting sewage, and selling skulls. Gen learning how to draw perspective from an old artist. Gen going on a date to Miyajima with Mitsuko. Gen giving Mitsuko’s chastened father a portrait of her. Although Nakazawa depicts the terrible nature of the bomb, he also shows how Japanese war fervor, atrocities against civilians in China and Korea, and abuse of Chinese and Koreans in Japan, deprive the country of innocent victim status. Some of the most disturbing parts of the manga occur before the bomb when, because his father is antiwar, Gen’s family is tormented by neighbors, teachers, and police. Nakazawa’s art looks like that of 1970s manga, ranging from realistic to cartoonish and effectively using camera shots, dynamic motion lines, and expressionistic emotion lines. His panels are rectangular or square, and he dramatically employs rare full-page, half-page, or third-page pictures. He depicts the aftermath of the bomb as a hellscape: buildings collapse, streets buckle, telephone poles snap, and everything burns (even horses); semi-nude people shuffle with hands outstretched before them, their melting skin dripping like wax, or stagger like walking cacti, their bodies bristling with glass fragments; corpses bloat and burst in the river; maggots squirm, flies swarm, and mass cremations smoke. An appalling visual assault on the senses. Maximum body horror. Nakazawa also draws beautiful pictures, like in establishing shots of the sky, as in a small panel showing three flying birds silhouetted against the sun and singing “chi-chi-chi.” He also draws subtle and moving images, as when a closeup of the kids’ footsteps through the sand leads to a zoomed-out picture of their silhouettes starting to run home from the beach with a bright sun above them. He evokes strong emotions via his layouts, as when Gen has been missing his hospitalized mother, and the turn of a page reveals a close-up of her smiling face, evocative lines radiating out from it, her eyes with stars in them. She’s home! Nakazawa also effectively uses suspense and time, as when he informs us that the bomb detonated on August 6th at 8:15 AM, so the family wall clock reading 7:00 means 75 more minutes of “normal” wartime life. When Gen assures his mother that they have nothing to worry about, we worry for them. And when the family clock reads 8:00, they should have fifteen more minutes, but when we turn the page the bomb detonates, time having skipped forward to shock us. Throughout the epic, Nakazawa vividly shows that “In any and every way, war ruins people’s lives.” Gen meets many physically and psychologically damaged people, like the burn-scar-faced girl he says is beautiful only to have her curse him and try to commit suicide after she sees her reflection. At the same time, Nakazawa depicts the resilience of the human spirit. Despite everything he experiences, Gen lives spunkily and encourages other people to try. Surviving adversity makes us stronger, as Gen’s father tells him early on: “Be like buckwheat! The more you step on it and press it down, the stronger and straighter it grows.” It becomes an inspiring refrain for Gen. There are other themes in the manga: Hard work and a positive attitude improve your chances of survival; in any society, in wartime or peacetime, there are unethical, amoral, and cruel people (e.g., politicians, officials, police, gangsters, and any majority) exploiting and tormenting weaker people, and we must oppose such bullies with all our strength; families don't have to be biological to be strong; art should be borderless. At times Gen seems too articulate, intelligent, and aware for his age, serving as mouthpiece for the creator Nakazawa. At one point, Gen’s mother says, “Any time you sense a war feeling starting, you have to immediately speak up loudly against it. There’ll always be some people who say, ‘for the country,’” and Gen replies, “Mom, I won’t let another war happen! No matter what noble and beautiful things people say, I won’t be deceived.” Another time he stops “Kimigayo” from being sung at his junior high school graduation ceremony, telling the audience that the song represents the emperor, who is a war criminal, and that Japanese soldiers cut babies out of pregnant Chinese women with bayonets. Such messages are apt and necessary, but I can’t always believe Gen’d be able to deliver them. The manga has other slight flaws. Given its antiwar thrust, it indulges in too much typical Japanese slapstick violence among family members--though that may be a matter of cultural taste. Nakazawa seems to distinguish between different kinds of violence, acceptable one-on-one fighting vs. abominable bombing and war. Gen is righteously violent: as he ages, he moves from biting evildoers’ fingers to the bone and headbutting their groins to knocking them out with his fists. More than once the manga condones the killing of wicked yakuza by Gen’s surrogate little brother Ryota, being nothing compared to what war criminals did during WWII. Finally, there’s a bit too much potty humor, as when Gen pees on malefactors. All that said, the work is majestic. Anyone wanting to know what it was like to live in Hiroshima before, during, and after the bomb while affirming the power of the human spirit to survive horrors should read Hadashi no Gen (and there are English and other translations). 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
Perfect Stories of Life in Early 20th Century China
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Fine Writing, Great Characters, Immersive World
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An Overwritten, Oddly Compelling Gothic Father
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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