asakiyume | Entries tagged with reading

What a Fish Looks Like
by Syr Hayati Beker

Read this thanks to

skygiants' excellent review (here).

I loved the style of storytelling--love the way the author's mind works--and enjoyed aspects of the story a lot, but overall, I wasn't the right audience for the book. The right audience would be someone who is as interested in all the ideas as I am, but who is also very invested in portraits of people experiencing all the emotions associated with a breakup. The various narrators are really feeling their feelings about one another, and to enjoy the book fully, you need to be there for that.

It's the climate apocalypse, and some people are fleeing earth and others are staying, and there's conversation about what those decisions mean and what goes into them, but with a very loud undertone about what commitment to a lover means and what abandonment is, and bravery, etc. I was interested in the conversations about commitment to Earth more than the associated subtext (sometimes supertext) about commitment to one another.

So I read about halfway through with deep absorption, then skimmed the rest.

But the language and ideas are great. This quote, about hosting extinct animals' DNA, shows how marvelously the author explores the idea (and also how they nudge you about human relationships).

It's not like sharing a bed, struggling at first and then finding a rhythm. It's not like grafting an apricot branch to a plum tree. It is: your DNA turned into a factory for the DNA of extinct species until the day the world is safe enough that we can let the ghosts out, resurrected. Until then, it's a shorter life, but maybe less lonely. Maybe that's all there ever was.

There's also a great part where a character may or may not be talking to a collective mer-consciousness. The author plays with "A Lone" (a single, noncollective being, alone) and "Re-member" (come back into collectivity, remember). I loved the mer-collective's voice:

We remember what we eat
One Song:
One time a sailor fell off his ship. "Can you swim?" we said
No
So we ate him. Drank his tears
Now he is not
A Lone

And there's also a part about putting on a play (Antigone) that keeps doing "X, but Y" in very funny ways, e.g.,

The Sphinx, but with affirmations instead of riddles. It says, "what you are is fabulous, and that's what you are." It says, "the thing that walks on any number of legs belongs."
...
Your life, but in Thebes. Thebes is nice. It has no laundry, only sand.
...
A break up, but so well lit, you overcome your differences and fall back in love.
...
Romeo and Juliet, but with cell phones. Their elopement succeeds. Nobody dies. They move to a small apartment in Milan. They love and hate one another their whole lives, sheltered from the cold, touching all the old familiar walls.

Those are just some; there were more. The last of those X, but Y examples grated on me a little. I know "they love and hate one another their whole lives" is a thing that really does happen, but it feels very overrepresented in theater and literary fiction, and "touching all the old familiar walls" feels like every single young rebel's blithe certainty that they're going to live life differently.

But maybe they will! And people get to declare what they want for audiences that are thirsting to hear it.

So: good book, great ideas, me: not the target audience, but very glad to have read it.

ETA: I've gone this whole review without acknowledging that this book is queer centered. This book is queer centered! The lovers are nonbinary or trans, most of them. This was neither a plus nor a minus for me, but if you're yearning to spend time in a fully realized queer space, this story provides that--so that would be an added mark in its favor.

I'll post about things other than reading one day, but [movie!Aragorn voice] today is not that day.

I finished Elizabeth Acevedo's Family Lore, which I continued to love right to the end. The characters were so complete and multifaceted, and I liked them all. The places--rural Dominican Republic, capital of Dominican Republic, New York City, felt real and three dimensional. And Acevedo's way of observing things, whether it's the way two birds leave a tree branch or a person rubbing the indentations glasses make on each side of their nose--wonderful. And there are moments like this:

"I know it's too soon, but I love you. I have for a long time." And the silence in her body that followed was the most peace she'd ever known. There was no disclaimer on his declaration. And in the years since, she might have heard a fib or two in his voice about nonsense, but the truth of his love always cut through with clarity.

And I just started Gary Paulsen's The Cookcamp, drawn by

osprey_archer's write-up. During World War II, a five-year-old boy goes to live with his grandmother, who's a cook for a workcamp of men building a road from Minnesota to Canada. Truly beautiful writing here, too:

[The men] sat roughly to the tables, all of them big as houses, the boy thought. They sat to the tables and his grandmother brought heaping platters of pancakes and motioned to the boy to bring the big bowls of biscuits, which he did. Then she brought the huge enamel pot of coffee from the stove and sure enough each man turned his cup over--his hands so big the cup looked like a baby cup--and blew in it and held it up for coffee ... They made [the boy] think of big, polite bears.

Really nice, and as Osprey Archer promised, it's going to be a very quick read.

Current Music: Silversun Pickups: The Royal We

I've been reading Family Lore by Elizabeth Acevedo because it was our book group book. Usually I can take or leave (or prefer to leave) our book group books, but this one I expected I'd like, because I loved Acevedo's The Poet X (ended up teaching that one in the jail). And I am liking it! So much that although the book group date came and went, I've kept on reading it because I want to finish it.

It's about two generations of Dominican women, whose life stories we get in bits and pieces around the occasion of a living wake that one of them is throwing for herself. The characters, their lives, the language--it's all so vivid. I marked this, one woman (older generation) talking about her older sister:

The person I've hugged most in the world, beside my own offspring, has been Flor. It was she who carried me on her hip. As a child, hers was the first body I remember vining around, the way climbing plants claim homes.

Also, the women all have gifts. One has dreams that foretell when someone will die. Another can tell if someone is lying. Another can salsa like nobody's business. And one has an alpha vagina ;-)

( cut for frank talk about down-there )

I've been surprised and delighted by how much I'm enjoying this character's thoughts and experiences with her gift. The book is overall super sensual and VERY sex positive.

I'm also still reading and enjoying Breath, Warmth, and Dream, by Zig Zag Claybourne, but I had to put it aside to read this one. But this one is nearly done, and Breath, Warmth, and Dream is very easy to fall back into.

Posting two days in a row, what?? Is this 2010?

But I wanted to share this quote from Zig Zag Claybourne's Breath, Warmth, and Dream, which I'm reading at a very leisurely pace:

"'There was once'--Orsys stopped to think--'that I taught a child queen to print her name in all the alphabets of her land.'"

Now that's a worthy thing for a child queen to learn. And after learning to write her name, she can learn to write the names of people who use these alphabets, can learn to conform her mouth to their names. But not all alphabets are human-made. Maybe the child queen also learned the alphabet of leaf miners, or the alphabet of animal tracks across a snowy field, or the alphabet of clam siphon holes in the sand.

What language and alphabet would you like to learn to write your name in?

Wherein I manage to answer every question with a No, I don't have one of these, but how about this tangentially related answer? (Via

sovay and

osprey_archer)

1. Lust, books I want to read for their cover.

There aren't any of these right now, but back when I was a kid, I picked up Patricia McKillup's The Forgotten Beasts of Eld because of this cover. I loved the evening sunset glow of it, very Maxfield Parrish-esque.

2. Pride, challenging books I finished.

When we're talking about reading for pleasure, I'm pretty much of a quitter when the going gets tough, so I can't really say there are any of these. Maybe reading the Portuguese version of Ideas to Postpone the End of the World (Ideias para apiar o fim do mundo), but see, then it's not entirely pleasure reading; it's partly language practice. And it's a very short book, so...

There are books that have lingered in my currently-reading pile pretty much untouched, and it's not that they're super challenging, they just take more commitment than I can often muster, e.g., Elinor Ostrom's Governing the Commons, which I want to read for the information, and it's engagingly written, just .... for pleasure I'd rather read other stuff.

3. Gluttony, books I've read more than once.

I did this a LOT as a kid, but I haven't as an adult (except for, e.g., reading childhood faves to my own kids). Instead what I do is reread particular sections or passages that I love, but honestly, I don't even do that very often; mostly it happens when I want to share something with someone. This happened recently with Susanna Clarke's Piranesi, for example.

4. Sloth, books that have been longest on my to-read list.

I put things on my to-read list with thoughtless abandon; I don't even know what-all is on my list, and often they're things I'm only vaguely curious about. A bigger sign of sloth is the books I start and don't finish, like Governing the Commons, noted above. Or Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass, which I think is beautiful in its moment-by-moment observations (some of which jump vividly to mind when I type this), but which, overall, I have a terrible time sitting down to read.

5. Greed, books I own multiple editions of.

I only own multiple editions of stuff I used when I was teaching in the jail, and I've been thinning those out (but e.g., I had multiple editions of Esmeralda Santiago's When I was Puerto Rican).

6. Wrath, books I despised.

Books I take a deep hate to I generally don't finish, but there are books that ticked me off mightily in some aspect or other, even if I didn't overall despise them. The focus on the technology of writing as a sign of cultural advancement that was present in Ray Nayler's The Mountain in the Sea annoyed me big time, though there were other elements in the book that I thought were very cool, very thoughtful. I have an outsized, probably unfair dislike of A Psalm for the Wild-Built, by Becky Chambers, very it's-not-you-it's-me thing (except that the dislike is large enough that I find myself whispering, But maybe it's a little bit you, actually)

7. Envy, books I want to live in.

I don't want to live in any books right now.

As a kid, I tried to get to lots of fantasy lands (the ol' walk-into-a-closet thing, because as an American kid I didn't even properly know what a wardrobe was: in our house, winter coats were in a closet), and I played that I was part of lots of others. But probably the ones I wanted to live in most were Zilpha Keatley Snyder's Greensky books. I wanted to glide from bough to bough of giant trees with the aid of a shuba and low gravity, have a life full of songs and dancing to defuse personal tensions, not to mention psychic powers and an overall jungle environment.

I added two new books to my reading mix: Breath Warmth & Dream, by Zig Zag Claybourne. I enjoy the author's social media posts (when I happen to see them, which isn't that often), and he and C.S.E. Cooney are big mutual fans. So I decided to try something of his, and so far, I'm enjoying it. It's told in a leisurely way, and I like the characters. Here, Khumalo, a powerful witch who's waiting for her daughter to return from a sea journey, talks with a beggar woman at the harbor:

“You’re so tall,” Orsys remarked.

“Do you like that?” Khumalo said kindly.

“I do.” When Orsys smiled, every wrinkle on her sun-bleached face moved like sudden lightning flashes, brightening the old woman’s visage immeasurably.

“How many people have come off ships hoping to see your smile, dear one?” said Khumalo.

I'm reading this as an ebook, which means the other ebook I've been reading, The Apothecary Diaries, is taking a temporary back seat.

Then there's also Butter, by Asako Yuzuki. I was intrigued by

osprey_archer's review, but it's not a book I'd pick up for pleasure. However, it **is** the sort of book I'd read in my book group, and I had to pick the next book, so I've picked it. Only in the beginning pages, but enjoying it so far.

Neruda's Book of Questions isn't the sort of thing I read cover-to-cover; I prefer to dip in. How will I know when I'm done, though? What if there are ones I keep on missing? A Problem.

As I dip into it just now to find something to share, I'm coming across ones I *don't* like: they're opaque to me, or the images or juxtapositions don't speak to me.

But I like the bottom half of one:

Why do [waves] strike the rock
with so much wasted passion?

Don't they get tired of repeating their declaration to the sand?

And I like the whole of this one:

You don't believe that dromedaries
keep moonlight in their humps?

Don't they sow it in the desert
with secret persistence?

And hasn't the sea been lent
for a brief time to the earth?

Won't we have to give it back
with its tides to the moon?

He uses questions in the negative a lot.

Thanks to

osprey_archer's Newbery project, I got out The ~~Flying~~ Winged Girl of Knossos (thanks for catching that

light_of_summer!) originally published in 1933 and reissued in 2017 by Betsy Bird, who's served on the Newbery Committee, reviewed books for Kirkus, blogs about children's literature, and has in fact written her own middle grade novel (Long Road to the Circus --I haven't read it).

It's easy to see why Betsy Bird and

osprey_archer loved this story: it's great fun and excellently told. I loved it too. The author (Allena Best, writing under the pseudonym Erick Berry) was entranced with ancient Minoan culture, and that love shines through on every page. And in Inas, the daughter of Daidalos (she's genderswapped Icarus for Inas), she's got a great heroine. Who dives skillfully for sponges? Inas does! Who is the best bull vaulter? Inas is! Whose hang glider experiment leads to realization that flying into the wind works better than flying with it? Again, Inas!

The authorial voice is definitely not contemporary, but it's lively and fresh. Every now and then there's something about people's races or features that's winceworthy, but mainly the 1930s-ness of it wasn't intrusive in a negative way.

Tangentially, I loved this description of archaeologists, from the author's introduction: "Then in our own time came the archaeologists, those magicians who build authentic history out of lowly potsherds." Magician archaeologists.

I also read a hilarious short story about the foiling of a racist: "Supply and Demand," by

f0rrest. Why yes, his user name is my IRL last name, but we are not related in any way. We stumbled upon each other quite by chance.

In "Supply and Demand" a pushy racist is hoisted by his own petard, his petard in this case being his successful participation in capitalism: he ends up supporting and promoting what he despises. I loved the hapless narrator (a young employee at a big-box home goods store) and the digs at retail training scripts. I will also offer a content warning, though, because the racist dude says alllllll the negative things you can think to say about "those people," as he calls them. There are no slurs, and he never specifies exactly who comprises "those people," but you may not feel like imbibing his nonsense, even if it's to see him taken down. His vituperations are pretty hilarious though, e.g, his rant about the historical Santa Claus (and later, his praise of Santa Claus as a hard worker up there at the North Pole).

Anyway, if you want to see a racist taken down in an unusual way, give it a try. It's about 7,000 words.

What a breathtaking book Saint Death’s Daughter is. Truly magnificent in all respects: its exciting, imaginative story, its absorbing, immersive worldbuilding, its soaring writing, and its sharp, compassionate observations about human nature. I loved it completely.

It’s been a long time since I walked into a book and lost myself so entirely in it, so much so that I wanted to bring pieces of it back with me into this world. Can we have sothaín meditations, please? Can we have these twelve gods? … But just certain select pieces! Because the other thing about the world of Saint Death’s Daughter is that it’s cheerfully vicious and merciless—not always and everywhere by any means—but plenty enough. Take the fact that our protagonist, Miscellaneous (Lanie) Stones, comes from a family of assassins and torturers. And there are similar people in high places throughout the story. But the folks Lanie’s drawn to are nothing like that at all. We’re more than our family history, and we can make different choices—that’s the grounding hum that vibrates through the story. Lanie sets herself to make amends for the harm her family’s done: tries, fails, and tries again, all while growing into a powerful necromancer with a deep devotion to Doédenna, Saint Death.

( There's so much! This is just scratching the surface )

So those are some of my reasons for loving Saint Death’s Daughter. It’s doing so much that it’s impossible to cover it all in a review. Lanie eventually learns to speak with more than one voice at once, with a surface voice and a deeper one (kind of like throat singing, where you sing more than one note at the same time, only Lanie’s deeper voice isn’t audible in the usual way of things). The novel is like this too: it’s speaking in a surface voice and in many other voices as well. It’s broadcasting on many frequencies; you can hear many, many things.

I just found out that Joyce Carol Thomas, the author of Journey, which I just finished reading thanks to

rachelmanija's review, is no longer with us! This is too bad because I wanted to write her a note telling her how much I loved her use of language and that she includes so many beings and perspectives beyond the human, and one very sweet interaction between the protagonist and a boy who likes her.

It was a kind of a strange story--there were a lot of observations from different characters' points of view, plus authorial observations, and various problems of life were glancingly or directly looked at, but then there was this suspense-novel plotline! But I really loved reading it, I think because I liked all those observations. I just liked spending time with the author as she told this story. (I wasn't actually so into the suspense-novel plotline, but I didn't mind it either; I was able to just go along with it.)

And the language, just great. I quoted some last time I talked about the book, but here's a little more. Here, for instance, is what I mean about all the living creatures in the world being present and part of the world in a way you don't often get (and that I love):

And [the teens] started running, like the deer who lived in the forest, but the deer bending over Eucalyptus Lake looked at the teenagers out of the corners of their velvet eyes and wondered at the young folks looking a little like trees and shrubs moving so resolutely down the hill, going into the town the deer visited more and more to get away from the evil that the lake had warned them about. (p. 109)

Or how about this, about lightning:

From her window Meggie watched the dance of lighting on Inspiration Mountain.

A configuration of white sticks clashing.

Far off a rumble smothered in a smokeless smoky sky.

A white leap of lightning overhead. White hot to the eyes.

A long-legged acrobat strutted, hissing between the sky and earth.

How lighting danced.

The hide-and-seek show changed everything to shadow; lightning, jealous of the light, left the red-leafed trees looking like a negative on a photograph. (p. 110)

It's not just the beauty of the images, it's that Thomas says the lightning is jealous of the light--it's that living-ness of everything. Just adore it. ... And mind you, she put this in a story of [rot13 for spoilers] grraf orvat noqhpgrq fb gurl pna or fnpevsvprq gb erwhirangr anfgl byq zra. I'm so glad she did! And so glad this story got published!

One more, when a boy who's been teasing her asks her why she doesn't like him:

Meggie suspected that past the despairing eyes, down, down into the depths of this person was an inquiring soul searching for his own blue quality of light. (p. 63)

His own blue quality of light. Did you know that that's what people seek? It feels so right.

I thought Thomas must be about my age, but no: she was my mother's age. She's a whole generation above me.

From Wikipedia:

Thomas was born in Ponca City, Oklahoma, the fifth of nine children in a family of cotton pickers. In 1948 they moved to Tracy, California, to pick vegetables. She learned Spanish from Mexican migrant workers and earned a B.A. in Spanish from San Jose State University. She took night classes in education at Stanford University, while raising four children, and received the master's degree in 1967.

Well thank you for everything Ms. Thomas. I really admire your outlook, your observations, and your writing, and appreciate what you gave to the world.

Ah, four good things on the docket right now, two of which were recommended to me by other people.

1. Journey, by Joyce Carol Thomas

I was intrigued by

rachelmanija's write up, and when I said so, she said, "You specifically would enjoy it." And I DO. The language is gorgeous, and the story moves along. Rachel quotes the final line of a sermon in her post, but man, that entire sermon! Here's more from it:

"Death dealing is the devil's duty.

"The devil's still swishing his long reptilian tail, hooding his ruby snake eyes, walking up and down seeing who he can devour, strewing banana peels on the steep path of life trying to see who he can trick into slipping. Be aware!

"Carry a light in your heart. Some of you're already shining like neon. Don't even need batteries;** you've got everything you require to keep the light going."

2. The Apothecary Diaries, vol 1, by Natsu Huuga, trans. Kevin Steinbach

My first-ever light novel! I got into it because of reading really intriguing fanfic of it on Mastodon; I loved the intelligent MaoMao in the fanfic, and lo and behold, the actual character is equally intelligent. Pressed into service as a poison taster to an imperial consort, she uses her knowledge of medicine to solve mysteries ... appears to be how it'll go. So far she has correctly diagnosed that it was the lead-containing face paint that was causing mysterious illnesses among some of the consorts and killing off their babies (who weren't wearing the face paint but were exposed to it via their mothers). Apparently there's also an anime.

3. Saint Death's Daughter, by C.S.E. Cooney

Continues to be just a breathtaking tour de force.

The twelfth and most abject of the Quadoni apologies was the truest word Lanie had ever spoken. It could be no louder than a breath; it was that fragile ...

All three sounds hung in the air, and together created a fourth sound, an overtone that hovered so delicately, so tremendously, over them all.

And burst.

And rained down such music that all their voices fell silent.

4. The Book of Questions, by Pablo Neruda, bilingual edition with both the Spanish and translations by William O'Daly

I became interested in this from going to an exhibition on endpaper art at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art that featured endpapers from a picture book version of this featuring only some of the questions.

The questions come in fours that form a poem. Sometimes one question in the poem stands out to me; sometimes the effect of the overall poem is what does it. Here's one where I love the overall poem, but especially the second question:

Do salt and sugar work
to build a white tower?

Is it true that in an anthill
dreams are a duty?

Do you know what the earth
meditates upon in autumn?

(Why not give a medal
to the first golden leaf?)

~ ~ ~

Trabajan la sal y el azúcar
construyendo una torre blanca?

Es verdad que en el hormiguero
los sueños son obligatorios?

Sabes qué meditaciones
rumia la tierra en el otoño?

(Por qué no dar una medalla
a la priemera hoja de oro?)

I haven't read them all but I see repeated words, themes--bees, lemons, yellow, tears, clouds ... I love it. I think creating a concordance could be a meditative thing to do.

**Queue Sia: "Unstoppable" 🎶I'm so powerful, don't need batteries to play🎶

Current Music: Sia: Unstoppable

Two weeks running with posting about reading on Wednesday, whohoo! ... It won't happen again for a while.

The Tail of Emily Windsnap, by Liz Kessler

I wanted to read this after

troisoiseaux recalled loving it as a kid and enjoyed it on a reread. I was intrigued by her description of Emily’s starcrossed parents’ romance and Emily’s needing to rescue her father from mer-prison (which is only half the story; the other half is Emily discovering she turns into a mermaid in water, meeting a mergirl who can be her best friend, and learning about mer-school, etc., while meanwhile managing her mother and babysitter and the mean girl at human school).

( more analysis than a slim volume should have to bear )

The tl;dr of this is that I thought it was a fun, imaginative adventure story, and I can understand why

troisoiseaux remembers it fondly.

Look at this! Posting about books I've read or am reading on an actual Wednesday. Wohoo, winning!

( The Lincoln Highway )

( Saint Death's Daughter )

( The Tail of Emily Windsnap )

Current Music: Yeahman: Miniyamba

It's a cold, surreal post-apocalyptic world, plagued by meteor showers, crumbling apartments patrolled by tigers, one where former tar-spreading technicians repurpose themselves as morning soup sellers. Bobby is wakened by a knocking at his door. He doesn't open it, but he's told, through the closed door, that Belle-Medusa, an immensely huge jellyfish, needs his help. Belle-Medusa has a library of scents in her memory, but they're mainly ocean scents. She wants Bobby to collect and convey land scents to her:

In truth, she only had one passion anymore: she collected smells. Aromas, perfumes, whiffs, and scents of all types. She numbered them and she put them in tiny special cases in her memory, in a classification system that nobody, apart from herself, was able to understand.

For this purpose, Belle-Medusa has already "plugged into" Bobby. There are various ways he can convey the scents to her, but the way he settles on is to plunge his face into water and speak them.

I had my cheek pressed against the windowpane. Just under my nose, fed by the steam that escaped from my mouth, the frost drew branching ice wisps, which imprisoned the dust. If I had had to specify the smell that lingered on the surface of the glass, I would have spoken of a dusty ice floe, of frozen goose down, of dark sherbet. Wait, I thought, maybe I could send that to Belle-Medusa, in order to check that the communication between us is well established.

I left my observation post. I groped my way to the bathroom and I filled the sink with what flowed from the faucet, water that carried with it cubes and needles of ice. Before immersing my face, I had to stir it with my hand so as not to use the end of my nose to break the film threatening to form ... I sank my head into it to my ears.

"It's me, Belle-Medusa," I said.

( Heh, this got long. Let's put in a cut. )

It's a strange and wonderful story, and I recommend it. I read it in an anthology called XO Orpheus: Fifty New Myths, edited by Kate Bernheimer and published in 2013. The anthology was lent to me by a friend who had picked out that story especially for me to read because (I'm flattered to say), they said it reminded me of the story of mine they'd read--and also, I suspect, because the story's important to them: it's entered their vocabulary. They talk about their scent library. The other stories in the collection look promising too; while I'm borrowing the book, I think I'll read some more.

It also exists as a 64-page standalone publication, but only in its original French, as Belle-Méduse. For the anthology, the translation was done by Sarah and Brian Evenson.

*Manuela Draeger is a fictitious author, a librarian whose stories are intended as distraction for children in containment camps. The author of her world is Antoine Volodine ... which is in turn a pen name of the writer Jean Desvignes.

Current Location: Manu Chau: Mr. Bobby (Playing for Change version)

I am loving Saint Death's Daughter, by C. S. E. Cooney, with a powerful love and a deep wonder. No description I encountered of the book before starting it comes anywhere near doing it justice, including the author's own, so I'm not going to try. Instead I'll tell you about its effect on me and some of the things it's done so far. (I'm a little more than a third of the way through the story.)

I was enjoying from the start its humor, both in language and in in-story encounters, and its tenderness and darkness, and how deftly and quickly I knew and loved the characters--there were some dramatic moments, some regrets for the main character, Lanie Stones, and some sweet successes--and THEN there was a tremendously dramatic moment, and I realized I was experiencing the story with the sort of bated breath and tenterhooks feeling that I haven't had since childhood. In that moment there were several swooping twists and turns that I totally didn't expect, and yet they were completely right and justified, if you know what I mean. They had been prepared for, but I hadn't noticed the gears and scaffolding of the preparation, not because I wasn't reading closely but because it had been in beautiful plain sight all along, and I'd been admiring it for other reasons. As if the painting on the wall of a woman with a sword is actually a woman with a sword--I didn't notice! But of course!

To be transported like that by a story, it's like flying.

But it's not plot magic for just for plot magic's sake, there's profound stuff going on too, about different understandings of love and everything it can shade into, and about regret/remorse/recompense, and about children and adults, but none of that stuff is blared out like an object lesson; it's not a burden the story's carrying-it's all just part of the weave.

Have some wonderful lines.

Here, a terrifying character observes her beloved:

Nita’s gaze tracked the gyration, a terrifying tenderness colonizing her face.

Here, a conversational gambit typical of children:

“Why not?” repeated her remorseless niece now. Datu was entirely capable of repeating those same two words for the rest of the night.

Here, curiosity described in a way that lingers:

“And what is it,” breathed the Blackbird Bride, her colorless eyes brilliant with calamitous curiosity, “that you ask?”

Here, a father (Mak) saying to his young daughter that choices have consequences:

“Mumyu is not here,” said Mak flatly. “Mumyu made her own choices, and her choices found her out. We are here. You and I and your aunt and the Elif Doéden. We are all here together in this place. We are in great danger. We must trust and respect each other. We must treat each other as allies.

Anyway--thoroughly enjoying it. And the sequel, Saint Death's Herald, comes out next month!

I'm reading too many things to do them all justice, and then interrupting them with other things, but the things I've spent most time with are

--More of Life Is Not Useful, by Ailton Krenak. The first essay was good; I felt more at sea in the second and now the third--I can't quite follow the logic of where he goes all the time, and sometimes there are jargonish phrases that I don't get. Even so, there are moments I like very much.

This, for instance, is both serious but also amusingly expressed:

We can inhabit this planet, but we will have to do so otherwise. If we don’t take steps in this direction, it would be as if someone wanted to get to the highest peak of the Himalayas but wanted to take along their house, their fridge, their dog, their parrot, their bicycle. They’ll never arrive with heavy luggage like that. We will have to radically reconceive of ourselves to be here. And we yearn for this newness.

And this I love:

There are people who were fish, there are people who were trees before imagining themselves as human. We were all something else before becoming people.

--I also have been reading Eagle Drums, by Nasuġraq Rainey Hopson, a story of an Iñupiaq boy who's compelled to live with eagles to learn what they want to teach if he wants to stay alive. I got this one from the library based on what

osprey_archer wrote in this entry, specifically, that it "is built on axioms about how the world works that are vastly different than the ones structuring most modern fiction." She's right! And I'm enjoying that very much.

--I started reading C.S.E. Cooney's Saint Death's Daughter-- I love CSE Cooney's writing so much! I just hope I can maintain momentum on it, because it's long, and somehow I don't apportion as much time to reading as I could (which is a terrible thing for someone who writes to confess to).

Meanwhile, here are some things that I want to read (or have read and want to call attention to):

Aster Glenn Gray's Deck the Halls with Secret Agents. Long-time rival Soviet and US agents meet at a Christmas party! I wonder what happens next ;-)

Iona Datt Sharma's Blood Sweat Glitter --Sapphic romance around roller derby!

This one came to me as a recommendation on Mastodon, and since I follow the author on social media but have never read anything by her, I'm very excited! It's also a podcast--not sure if I will listen or read it: "The Font of Liberty" by Elizabeth Porter Birdsall.

And then there's Kerygma in Waltz Time, which I've read and would recommend to fans of story retellings, fan fiction, and falling into stories--it's by Sherwood Smith, originally published under a pseudonym in It Happened at the Ball, an anthology of ballroom stories.

In The Mountain in the Sea, Ray Nayler made the fact that octopuses were able to write a central part of what indicates they're advanced (a character says, “Yes, they have writing… which is an enormous leap in cultural evolution”)--a hugely ethnocentric notion.

So it's very affirming to read Natalia Brizuela's introduction to another brief collection of essays by the Indigenous Brazilian activist Ailton Krenak. (The collection is called Life Is Not Useful.) She writes:

Yasnaya Aguilar, the Mixé linguist, writer, and activist, reminds us ... that Indigenous people do not have “oral traditions,” but rather “mnemonic traditions.”⁸... Western modernity, with its countless institutions and homogenizing temporal framework, always sees the oral as preceding the written, as falling somewhere behind in the chronology of development. But as Ailton and many other Indigenous people explain, the practice and activation of memories – through dreaming, singing, dancing, storytelling, and various other activities – are ways of belonging to and sustaining the cosmic sense of life.

⁸ See Yasnaya Aguilar Gil, “(Is There) an indigenous Literature?”, trans. Gloria Chacón, Diálogos 19.1 (Spring 2016), p. 158.

She goes on to quote Ailton about the importance of listening and then to unfold that:

“Either you hear the voices of all the other beings that inhabit the planet alongside you, or you wage war against life on earth” (p. 38) ... Listening means being alive, staying alive, and keeping the ecosystems to which one belongs alive as well. Listening is caring. Not listening brings war: that is, a type of destructive encounter, a form of non-co-existence. We listen with our entire bodies, not just our ears ... Our bodies are part of and an extension of the Earth. If we allow them to become sensing instruments for dreaming and conversation, the cosmic sense of life would not be so threatened.

I love this statement: We listen with our entire bodies, not just our ears.

The characters are so alone in this book. There's no community and no model for/of community--at all! Just people groping toward (or away from) one another on an individual basis. Evrim, the sole android ever created, Ha, the solo octopus researcher at the research site, Rustem the solo hacker, Altantsetseg the solo security agent, Arnkatla Minervudóttir-Chan (LOL, Minerva's daughter), the solo designer of the android. Eiko, the enslaved guy on the fishing ship, strives not to be solo: he actively tries to see people and build unity with them, but his efforts are mainly fruitless.

I thought this was going to be contrasted with something not-solo about the octopuses, but no. There is no octopus perspective, and the way the octopuses are "read" by the humans (and Evrim) presses them into a human mold rather than seeing them on their own terms. For example, the autonomy of octopuses' legs from their executive function gets talked about, but it never figures at all. Instead, we see the legs used for walking on (on land, even!), like human legs, and for holding weapons or gifts, like human hands. Octopuses as like us rather than different from us.

In the sense that they're living creatures, that's true. Organic life is having a hard time in this future world, whether it's octopuses or humans or sea turtles. The octopuses can kill one or two intruders in their garden, just as Altantsetseg can kill intruders in the cordoned-off zone where research is going on, but in the end, the nonhuman systems that people have built but no longer control are more powerful and not given to compromise.

So what does the future hold? Evrim is seen as better than human because they're incapable of forgetting things. And yet even within the story, perfect recall is shown as problematic. Characters talk about trauma being etched in the body and the memory. So it seems strange to celebrate perfect recall as an improvement. A solo being, able to brood over each and every thing that's ever happened to them ... brrrr, seems cold, very cold.

Huh, well that turned out more negative than I thought it would when I began writing this entry. My Goodreads review was more positive. I guess I have lots of very mixed feelings about the book. It sure has been food for thought, though.

Current Music: Ceolbeg: Johnny Cope

I'm nearly done with The Mountain in the Sea, by Ray Nayler, which I picked up hoping and expecting a cool nonhuman intelligence first-contact situation (with octopuses), and which has that, sort of, but is mainly about the nature of consciousness and the mind, human loneliness, and How Bad We Humans Are For This World Of Ours. To my amusement and chagrin, the plotline that pulled me in is the corporate scheming one--more so than the octopus researcher + lonely android, and definitely more than the slave fishing vessel. (Favorite characters so far: Rustem the hacker and Altantsetseg the security person.) But they've all been gripping enough to keep me reading and thinking.

I'll do a proper review later, but what I want to talk about here is the concept of "Point Fives" (.5). In the novel, a character remarks that many people don't really want to interact with a whole, complete other person (1.0)--too much friction! They want someone who's always interested in what they're doing--not just as a yes-man, but with genuine interest, asking appropriate questions, etc.--someone who has enough of a personality to have their own interesting quirks and unexpected conversational gambits, but who will never grandstand, never make emotional demands, will always take second place to the "full" person. (As I type this, it occurs to me that basically the character is saying that people want the stereotyped 1950s male ideal of a wife.) In the story, these exist! AI virtual companions. (Not physically, I don't think: just as like a hologram.)

Maybe needless to say, the narrative thrust of the story disapproves of this philosophically, while acknowledging its seductiveness. And I'm here to underline both parts of that! Both the disapproval, but also the seductiveness--speaking as someone who has essentially built up Point Fives in my head from time to time.

Example: When I was eight, friends of my parents came over from England, bringing two of their kids, one of whom, a girl, was my age. She read the same stories I did! Even the weird ones! I had a great time playing with her, and after she left, I decided she was my True Best Friend, my one and only. She wrote me letters in which she drew pictures of horses--and she could draw them so they looked real! I fantasized about her coming back to visit. I fantasized about her coming to school with me. I fantasized about drawing pictures together, going on adventures together, reading stories together, etc.

I did have some real input for these fantasies--she was really writing letters--but for the most part I was creating her to suit me. But it caused eventual disappointment because guess what! She was her own real person, with her own real interests, not ones scripted by me! I've done similar with other people. It always requires that the person be conveniently unavailable in some way: real, present people are not so amenable to this treatment. After years of experience, I now can recognize the danger signs of this behavior and (try to) nip it in the bud.

Meanwhile, I'm happy to say I've had real friendships, with people who are really present--not necessarily physically present in my house or neighborhood (though yes, in my house and neighborhood too)--but present in the sense that I'm interacting with them in multiple ways, and frequently, so we're seeing multiple aspects of each other. We have a sense of obligation or responsibility for one another--probably not an equal sense: for one thing, people are rarely exactly balanced in their degree of interest in or commitment to one another, but also, people need and want different amounts of commitment, and people have differing abilities to give. So it's not a balanced thing, and it's not without friction, stress, and disappointment. But it's also very rewarding, very beautiful, in moments.

In The Mountain in the Sea, one character reflects on not really seeing the people he's around. A traumatic thing has just happened, and it awakens in him a desire to have his eyes open from now on, to see and pay attention to the people (and one can extend this beyond just people, though probably we do own an extra something to our species siblings). It's the first step away from the solipsism represented by Point Fives.

I finished Rebecca Fraimow's Lady Eve's Last Con, which was rollicking good fun from cover to cover. A couple more quotes (nonspoilery) from further on in the story:

"I’d given her plenty of time to put me back in my place; she’d be faster on the draw next time around. It’s a bad habit to let yourself get caught tongue-tied. Life’s too short for should-have-saids." (51% in)

"I stuck my chin up, and tried to look like a person who was trying to look brave." (91% in)

I got one hilarious surprise, which was that one firm prediction I'd had since the very beginning ... didn't come true. All along I'd been congratulating Rebecca on treading a very difficult line to just about allow it to be possible--and then it didn't happen. I was so sure of my prediction that I had a hard time believing the evidence on the page, and then when I'd absorbed the fact, it threw what I'd seen as delicate treading into a whole other light (of the "No, actually it's quite simple: the obvious judgment is the correct one" variety). The way the story played out in reality makes for more satisfying storytelling, I think, and allows for more nuance and growth for one character, so I was pleased with it. It just took a moment of mental rearranging for me to get there (and I was retroactively a little ashamed of my prediction).

My morning morsel of Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass brought a reflection on strawberries:

In a way, I was raised by strawberries, fields of them. Not to exclude the maples, hemlocks, white pines, goldenrod, asters, violets, and mosses of upstate New York, but it was the wild strawberries, beneath dewy leaves on an almost-summer morning, who gave me my sense of the world, my place in it.

I grew up in upstate New York too. For me it was the black raspberries of early July. Being with them was my everything.

Robin Wall Kimmerer went on to talk about how the nature of a thing can change depending on how it comes to us:

It's funny how the nature of an object--let's say a strawberry or a pair of socks--is so changed by the way it has come into your hands, as a gift or as a commodity. The pair of wool socks that I buy at the store ... I might feel grateful for the sheep that made the wool and the worker who ran the knitting machine ... But I have no inherent obligation to those socks as a commodity, as private property ... But what if those very same socks ... were knitted by my grandmother and given to me as a gift? That changes everything. A gift creates ongoing relationship. I will write a thank-you note. I will take good care of them and if I am a very gracious grandchild I'll wear them when she visits even if I don't like them. When it's her birthday, I will surely make her a gift in return ... Wild strawberries fit the definition of gift, but grocery store berries do not.

Continuing to work my way through Why Didn't You Just Leave, edited by Julia Rios and Nadia Bulkin. As usual with an anthology, some stories strike my fancy more than others.

Current Music: Atomic Drum Assembly: We Out Here

I have so many saved up for this! And I'm actually writing on a Wednesday. Wohoo, win condition!

What I've just finished

A Family of Dreamers, by Samantha Nock.

radiantfracture put me onto this collection by quoting one of the poems. Samantha Nock is an indigenous poet, and her poems reflect that heritage, but also explore family relations, love, self doubt--you know: the stuff we write poetry about.

( Some quotes )

* * *

Ideias Para Adiar O Fim Do Mundo, by Ailton Krenak
This has also been translated into English (Ideas for Postponing the End of the World). Ailton Krenak is an indigenous activist from Brazil, of the Krenak people, and this very short book collects talks that he's given, including the title one. He's very, very good at reminding his listeners that there's more than one way of understanding things, more than one way of approaching problems, and that for some people, the end of the world has been happening for a long, long time. (My Goodreads review has quotes that give a feel for it)

* * *

Besty and Tacy Go over the Big Hill, by Maud Hart Lovelace
They do, and they discover a community of Syrian refugees. The more things change...

This story mulls over kings and queens in lots of different ways. Early on the girls write a letter to Alfonso XIII, who upon turning sixteen has become king of Spain. The girls tell him that they'd love to marry him but realize that, sadly, they can't, since they're not of royal blood (also they're only ten, but they don't mention that), but that nevertheless they wish him the best. And then at the end of the story they get a letter back from the royal secretary, telling them the king appreciates their thoughts! And I was thinking how much smaller the world was then--that girls could write a letter to the royal palace in Madrid, and that a palace secretary would actually answer! ... Well, assuming that that incident is based on something that actually happened in MHL's life--it might not be. But it's conceivably possible. Alfonso XIII came into his majority in 1902. Wikipedia tells me that in 1900, the human population was a much more intimate 1.6 billion. Not like our current 8 billion. Palace secretaries could write to little girls in Minnesota!

What I'm reading now

Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer. My approach to this has been very roundabout. I'm not a big fan of long books of serious essays, even when I should like them. So I started by just dipping in. But it's won me over, so I'm going to read it straight through.

* * *

Why Didn't You Just Leave, edited by Julia Rios and Nadia Bulkin. A collection of horror stories that answer the question of why people don't just leave the haunted place they're in. Excellent so far.

* * *

Lady Eve's Last Con, by Rebecca Fraimow. A rom-con romcom in SPACE that I've only just started but is highly delightful already, with lines like this:

Ever since we got in on the luxury-liner gambit, money had been dropping into our hands like coolant from a leaky ceiling

and

It wasn't so hard to get someone like Esteban to think that you were their romantic ideal; all you had to do was present an attractive outline and leave plenty of space, and they'd fill in the rest all by themselves.

I think I can see what the end state is going to be, but I am here for the ride!

Coming Soon
Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown, the next of the Betsy-Tacy books.

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Asakiyume mita

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Saint Death's Daughter

Joyce Carol Thomas

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