Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie - A Tale of Love and Fallout

Lauren Redniss' Radioactive:  Marie & Pierre Curie - A Tale of Love and Fallout is a beautiful book.  It is beautiful because of the amazingly subtle artwork that implies more than it compels, because of the process used to create that artwork, because of the typeface the author created herself based on manuscripts she saw at the New York Public Library, because of the archives and research Redniss delved into and included in the book to make it both very informative and intensely personal.

Redniss' book is different than many other graphic novels.  It's not structured in panels, but in full page illustrations, sometimes accompanied by dense, descriptive text.  It includes many types of artwork, from cyanotype printing (used to achieve a look similar to a radioactive glow), photos, grave rubbings, sketches, and more.  There is a Chernobyl Situational Map and photos of mutant flowers.  It's absolutely stunning.

Radioactive is described as the story of Marie & Pierre Curie, but that's more of a starting point than the arc of the whole story.  Pierre & Marie Curie's partnership was hugely productive, but Marie lived a full life after her husband's untimely death (including earning herself a second Nobel Prize).  She raised seriously amazing scientist children and inspired other scientists and changed the world.

She slept with a bottle of lightly glowing radium next to her bed.  Her clothes and skin glowed.  She had an affair with her husband's former student.  She won two Nobel Prizes.  During World War I, she made France mobile X-labs.  She died a slow, painful death due to radiation exposure, working to the last as she described her "crisis and pus."

Redniss used Marie Curie's life as the centerpoint of her web, but she goes well beyond the lives of the Curies to describe just how much her work has inspired and influenced other people and how much it has impacted the world.  Her work helped develop chemotherapy, treatment still used by cancer treatments today.  Conversely, it led to significant work on the development of the atomic bomb.  Many people in the world became ill or died due to their work with radium; others were inspired by it to study science.

I admit that sometimes this book could be hard for me to follow, and sometimes I had difficulty finding the thread between the Curie storyline and others.  But I really, really enjoyed this book.  The artwork is stunning, almost hypnotic.  Curie's life is fascinating, her work ground-breaking.  And it was so inspiring to read about all these truly amazing women.

Dispatches from Dystopia, by Kate Brown

I heard about Kate Brown's Dispatches from Dystopia:  Histories of Places Not Yet Forgotten on NPR's book concierge.  It's a series of essays about "the very human and sometimes very fraught ways we come to understand a particular place, its people, and its history."  In this slim volume (excluding the notes, it is only 150 pages long), Brown goes to Chernobyl and Seattle and many places in between, trying to understand how humans form a sense of place.  She specifically chooses places that are forgotten, talks to people who stayed behind when everyone else moved on.

This book was a little different than what I expected, though I am not sure what exactly I expected.  It is really beautifully and empathetically written, though Brown herself has more of a role in the essays than I expected her to.  She acknowledges this at the very beginning, saying that it is difficult for her to be a third party observer when she is in the midst of the story herself.  So instead of talking about the places and the people themselves, she talks about her interactions with the people and places she visits.  In this way, Kate Brown reminds me of Rebecca Solnit.

I really enjoyed this book, mostly because it gives a new perspective on many different places.  Very real to me was the chapter on Seattle's Panama Hotel, where many Japanese-Americans left their belongings before they were sent to internment camps during World War II.  Brown talks about how some words were used over others to make the whole thing seem more palatable, how people were taken away quietly and away from others so that no one had to see what they had brought to bear:

White Seattleites in February 1942 voted overwhelmingly for the Japanese Americans' removal.  Imagine their reaction if Japanese American deportees had left their possessions in plain sight: rain-soaked laundry dangling from clotheslines, produce rotting on fruit stands, goods in shop windows fading in the sun.  The unrepressed possessions of suddenly absent fellow citizens would have told a story starkly divergent from newspaper accounts of "evacuation," safety, national security, and inevitable fealty to race.  The basement full of belongings underscores the myth of what was euphemistically called "evacuation," a term implying benevolence, a federal government seeking to remove Japanese Americans for their own safety.  Like the deportations - indeed, like the deportees - the stockpile was meant to be forgotten.  To me, the Panama's storage room of locked-away possessions served as an icon for the quiet banishment of Japanese Americans from American society.

Much of Brown's book revolves around multiple ways of looking at either the same scene or the same situation and acknowledging the different biases or assumptions that get people to those viewpoints.  For example, she describes how American scientists looked at the impact of radiation on people by first studying the environment and what the minimum exposure level of a person was to an environment; Soviet scientists looked at people, saw the symptoms, and made diagnoses based on the person, not the environment.  The approaches reached different conclusions and led to different pros and cons.  The American method has now encroached on how we view almost all environmental disasters and impacts - upon individuals, not upon a whole system.

One of my favorite things about this book was the way Brown insists that we change our perspective on people who live their lives differently than we do.  She visits Chernobyl expecting to see so many horrors, but she sees that some people do still live there.  She visits another town, Pripyat, that has since been abandoned because of a nuclear explosion but that was really quite a beautiful, idyllic place to live when things were going well.  Meaning, just because people lived in the Soviet Union, that doesn't mean they were all unhappy and miserable all the time.  They had good lives, too.

Brown's last chapter takes her to Elgin, Illinois, a town not so far from where I grew up.   She tells a story that is now familiar to many of us that grew up in America's heartland, the steel belt turned rust belt, the towns that many feel have been left behind as jobs and people and money go to the cities.  But Brown also tells the flip side of the story, of how those towns often made decisions that hurt themselves in the long run, choosing short-term profits and cost-cutting over longer-term investment.  When workers at the main employer in Elgin went on strike to fight for better wages, the company response was fierce and immediate.  "For the following century, the company suffered no more strikes, and Elgin leaders enticed other manufacturers to town with tax breaks, land grants, and arguments that Elgin was 'a poor field for the agitator.'" 

And so, even though unemployment was low, people continued to work well past the age of retirement, and 40% of married women continued to work after marrying and having children to support their families.  And then the factory left, anyway, to find even cheaper labor.  Brown talks about how, for such a prosperous country, America has many towns that look abandoned and left behind, almost ghost-like.  "These are the muted smells and sounds of amputated careers and arrested bank accounts.  Looking at the chain of churches and shops displacing one another in quick succession, feeling something between depression and despair, I think about E.P. Thompson's question - who will rescue these places from the enormous condescension of posterity?"

In some ways, Dispatches from Dystopia has the same central premise as Strangers in their Own Land - we need to give people who feel forgotten and left behind a platform from which to speak and feel valued and empowered, rather than just telling their stories from our perspectives.  But perhaps because Kate Brown made the decision to go to multiple places, to draw parallels between towns in America and towns in the Communist bloc, the American approach to science and free will vs the Soviet approach, it felt much wider-reaching.  So much of what we believe is based on justifying acts, making ourselves feel better, like using the word "evacuation" instead of "imprisonment."  Talking about "diversity" instead of "equality."  And it's only when we really push ourselves to make those connections, draw the parallels, that we can fully acknowledge what we've done and what we can do going forward.

Are you interested in learning more about this subject?:
I put up loads of links at the end of my reviews on Strangers in their Own Land and The Unwinding.

If you would like to watch a documentary about the women who still live in the Chernobyl zone, check out The Babushkas of Chernobyl.

While there, you can listen to Holly Morris' TED Talk about the women and what happy, peaceful lives they are living, contrary to what all of us would generally believe.

Holly Morris' story about the Babushkas is also included in this episode of the TED Radio Hour, Toxic.

"This anxiety of non-belonging."

As soon as I read the New York Times' book review of Susan Faludi's In the Darkroom, I knew I wanted to read it.  I immediately put it on hold at the library, and I went to pick it up the same day my hold came in.

I have struggled a lot with my reading this year.  But this book brought back so much of that enjoyment to me.  Every day after work last week, I would finish my dinner, pour myself a glass of wine, and then settle down on my sofa for some quality reading.

I set myself the task this summer of being more outgoing, of inviting a lot of different people to do a lot of things with me, and of trying to form true friendships with new people.  It has been a lot of work (and I wouldn't say it always feels particularly rewarding), but it's also been pretty fun and kept me extremely busy.  I have a feeling the people I have gotten to know over the past few months probably think that I am far more extroverted and social than I would probably ever describe myself as being.

For whatever reason, last week, I made no plans.  I had no plans for ten days in a row.  It was the perfect time to settle down with a good, meaningful, beautiful book.  And I'm so glad that In the Darkroom was there because it is one of the most moving books I have read in a very long time.

I almost hesitate to share a summary of the book because I think it will frighten some people away, and that would be sad.  At a high level, the book is about a grown woman coming to know her father after many years of estrangement, after he has undergone a sex change operation to become a woman.  She goes to meet her father in Budapest and the story unwinds from there, from his childhood growing up in a very wealthy Jewish family to the horrors of the Holocaust and the many re-inventions he underwent before this final one - choosing to live as a woman at the age of 76.

[Apologies if I am misusing pronouns here; Faludi refers to her father as "him" before the operation and as "her" after.  I will try to do the same.]

Faludi is a staunch feminist, and as she talks to her father and others who have undergone the male-to-female operation, she is struck by their adherence to traditional (stereotypical) gender norms.  Her father says troubling things like, "Now I can communicate better, because I'm a woman... It helps that I'm a woman.  Because women don't provoke."  She reads memoirs of women who talk about their experience, and none of them sound very feminist at all.  Take this quote from Jan Morris.  As Jim Morris, she had climbed Mt. Everest.  And yet, as a woman:

"I was even more emotional now.  I cried very easily, and was ludicrously susceptible to sadness or flattery.  Finding myself rather less interested in great affairs (which are placed in a new perspective, I do assure you, by a change of sex), I acquired a new concern for small ones.  My scale of vision seemed to contract... It is, I think, a simpler vision that I now possess.  Perhaps it is nearer a child's."

It's difficult not to be offended by the comments above.  And yet, most men who want to undergo sex change operations to become women have to pass a horrible test that dates from mid-century and very much requires them to conform to stereotype.  In order to be approved for the operation, they are expected to say that they don't mind putting their careers on hold or not being the bread winner, etc.  I had no idea this was the case.  The way that all of these memoirs are written with this assumption that women are inherently different than men in their approach to the world, and that feminists are stupid to want to change things because being a woman is just such grand fun, is very hard to take.  For Faludi, whose father fetishized womanhood prior to her operation with costumes and posed photos and then became much more conservation after her operation (this happens a lot, it seems), it must have have been overwhelming.

Faludi doesn't only tackle feminism, though.  She also talks a lot about Jewish identity.  Faludi is not very religious, but she doesn't have to be.  "I was someone with only the vaguest idea of what it meant to be a Jew who was nevertheless adamant that I was one."  Her father's relationship with religion was much more up and down.  Born to affluent but negligent parents who didn't even attend his bar mitzvah, Istvan Friedman shed his Jewish identity during World War II when Hungary became extremely anti-Semitic.  The many stories he recounts over the course of this book are amazing; he saved his parents' lives and the lives of many others, often by pretending to be a Nazi.  He escaped Hungry with friends on a fantastic lie.  He moved to Brazil, changed his name to Steven Faludi, and then moved to America, got married and had a family.  It was only when Susan said she was considering becoming a Christian that he informed her, quite violently, that she was Jewish.  "I remember exactly what I said.  That they exterminated the Jews.  And how could you do this?"

There are many stories like this in Hungary.  After World War II, there was Communism.  Many people hid their religion just to get by.  Only now are people (ironically, some of them ultra-right-wing politicians who denounce Jews) coming to know their family history and religion.  Faludi shares some of these stories in a beautiful chapter in which she attends Rosh Hashanah services and dinner with her father.  Temples that were built to hold hundreds now cater to groups of twenty or fifty.

In the Darkroom is one of the most moving books I have read in a long time.  The way Faludi weaves her own story with her father's and Hungary's, and that thorny issue of identity, is beautiful.

I studied my father's face, averted as it so often had been in life.  All the years she was alive, she'd sought to settle the question of who she was.  Jew or Christian?  Hungarian or American?  Woman or man?  So many oppositions.  But as I gazed upon her still body, I thought:  there is in the universe only one true divide, one real binary, life and death.  Either you are living or you are not.  Everything else is molten, malleable.

How to follow your dreams and disappoint your parents

I am not sure why comics are such great vehicles for memoirs, particularly memoirs of growing up and coming of age.  Whatever it is, I definitely have a weakness for memoirs in comic book form (whereas I hardly ever read memoirs in prose).  So when I heard about Ozge Samanci's Dare to Disappoint, her memoir of growing up in Turkey in the 1980s and 1990s, I put it straight on my library wish list.

As usual, I have no idea where I first heard about this book.  I think possibly on some comic book round-up from the end of 2015.  While the story itself is nothing earth-shattering or ground-breaking, it's related in a very endearing and visually appealing way, and I really enjoyed it.

Ozge grew up in a pretty tense environment.  Turkey was in a period of high militarization, religious fervor and conflict, and an opening of the economy and culture to outside influences.  In the midst of all that, Ozge's parents worked very hard at low-paying jobs; they were insistent that Ozge and her older sister would do better for themselves.  Only study engineering at the very top school!  Otherwise, they'd be failures.

As someone who grew up in an Indian household, I completely understood the pressure Ozge felt to do well in subjects that were not nearly as interesting to her as others were (though, to be fair, Indian parents require their kids to be good in all subjects, not just math and science).  Similarly, I can understand parents' deep desire to ensure that their children's lives are easier and more comfortable than their own.

As this is a pretty universal conflict, it's not really Ozge's struggles that draw you into the story, though they are shared in a humorous and entertaining manner.  Instead, it's the juxtaposition of her coming-of-age against Turkey's growing pains.  She learns about herself, understands her environment better, and navigates a complicated system.  All with the help of fun, colorful illustrations and collages.

I really enjoyed learning more about Turkey in the 1980s and 1990s, at the end of the Cold War.  It's always fun to learn about everyday life in a different place, particularly when systems are set up so differently from what you are used to.  For example, Turkey's school system was set up (maybe still is?) in such a way that you had to do really well on tests to advance to the good schools and the well-paying jobs.  Students practiced military drills at school.  Ozge encounters devout Muslims (she is not one herself), studies and works herself to exhaustion, discovers boys, chats with Jacques Cousteau, and tries to figure out what she wants to do with her life.

Dare to Disappoint is not likely to change your world or blow your bind, but it's funny, bright, and thoughtful.  If you're a fan of comics or of coming-of-age stories or memoirs (that's a pretty wide range), then I'd recommend checking it out.

A darker, more ominous Paris

I was very excited to read Aliette de Bodard's The House of Shattered Wings.  I enjoyed de Bodard's short stories; she writes science fiction with a feminist, Vietnamese perspective that I love.  I was excited to see what she would do with a fantasy novel set in Paris some time after the end of an alternate version of World War I.

The House of Shattered Wings focuses mostly on the inhabitants of House Silverspires, a group of fallen angels (Fallen) and humans (Mortals) that live and work together.  The house's power comes from its founder, Morningstar (Lucifer), who set great wards and shields over it before he disappeared 20 years ago.  Now, House Silverspires is under attack by an unknown force, and the other houses in Paris are more than willing to take advantage of any weakness.

This novel is both a fantasy and a mystery; the characters spend much of the time trying to understand what is threatening Silverspires, even as they wield magic and deal with the politics that are mainstays of any fantasy novel.  I like this combination a lot as it forces readers and characters to focus on motivations and there's less about the procedure and run of events.

There is a lot going on here - possibly too much for me.  I liked that de Bodard just dropped us into her world and gave us very few footholds to understand the background or history of her setting.  She clearly knows much more about the Paris she created than she chooses to share with readers.  I love when authors do that!  But this world was, for whatever reason, very complicated for me, and I often became confused.  For example, there are both Fallen and Mortals in the book, but I could not really keep track of which characters were Fallen and which were not.  And then it seemed like humans could wield magic, too, so I was confused by that, since at other times, I thought it seemed like humans had no intrinsic magic of their own.  And there were so many flashbacks, and I didn't know how far back the flashbacks were taking me.  Twenty years?  Sixty years?  300 years?  It depended on the character, and I became quite muddled.

Another thing that stood out to me in this book was the way de Bodard brought in colonialism.  One of the main characters, Phillippe, is Vietnamese and has a magic unlike anyone else in the story.  He is immediately treated with suspicion, as an outsider, and he in turn does not feel bound by the laws and loyalties other characters have.  He was brought to Paris to fight in a war he did not believe in, dragged from his home and given very little in return for the sacrifice.  He makes so many comments about colonialism throughout the book, how even very wonderful and kind people benefit from the system and keep it propped up, so that one side can continue to gain more than the other.  This is mirrored in the relationship that Fallen and Mortals have.  Fallen don't seem to care much at all about humans; they view them mostly as expendable.

The problem I had with Phillippe, and with all the characters, really, was that I didn't feel like I knew any of them.  It's hard to justify that statement, since the book is 400 pages long.  How could I spend so much time with these people and not know them at all?  And honestly, I don't know.  They interacted but never trusted each other, so it was hard to see a lot of connection between anyone.  They all had very different back stories, and I didn't learn any of those very well, so that made it difficult.  And none of them really liked each other, so we rarely saw anyone with their guards down or willing to say anything honest or true to each other.  It was hard to break through.

There are a few shorter prequels to this book that I think I will check out in the hopes of understanding the characters and the setting a little better.  The House of Shattered Wings is the first book in a series, though it can stand alone pretty well, for the most part (in that the main mystery is solved, though there are quite a few loose ends).  I definitely plan to continue with the series; I hope at some point the plot will take us to Vietnam!  But there's a long wait before the next book comes out, and this was a complicated story, so just something to keep in mind.

George Orwell's War

I am not sure what exactly piqued my interest in the Spanish Civil War.  I feel like there are so many books set during World War II, but hardly any (at least in English) set during the Spanish Civil War that immediately preceded it.  Considering the impact the war had on so many influential people, it seemed like something I should try to learn more about.

I chose George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia as my introduction to the conflict, mostly because it was available at the library on audiobook.  While that isn't the most flattering reason to choose a book, I didn't really know what else would work.  I didn't want a super-detailed, exhaustive history, and I wanted to read a first-hand account.

Orwell was a pretty great guide.  I loved his dry sense of humor.  It is hard to imagine Orwell having strong feelings about anything, based on his narrative style, but clearly he felt strongly enough about a cause to go to a foreign country and fight for it.  (And, obviously, he felt strongly about many things, based on the subjects he chose to write about.)

I do think many of the intricacies of the politics and maneuverings were over my head, possibly because I was reading this via audiobook and possibly because Orwell assumed that his readers would have at least a passing knowledge of current events at the time of publication.  Unfortunately, I have hardly any working knowledge of what was going on during the Civil War, so I was a bit at sea during some chapters.  But I didn't mind because the other chapters were very engaging.  Orwell definitely falls victim to stereotyping, describing Spaniards as slow and lazy, Italians as fashionable, etc., but he does it with so much humor that it's hard to take it very seriously.  He also gives himself the same treatment - at the beginning of the book, he talks about his obsession with learning how to use a machine gun, and using his very limited Spanish skills to ask if he can learn every day.  But instead of mastering the weapon, all the soldiers are taught is how to look good in a parade.

But even more than the humor, what stood out in this book was Orwell's own experience in the war.  He started as an idealist socialist, but as the war continued and he saw first-hand the effect on both soldiers and civilians, the propaganda machine, the lies and the politics, his perspective changed.  He no longer trusted the Communists to be honest and straight-forward; he saw that they, too, lied and cheated and committed all sorts of atrocities.  And then, I assume, he went and wrote Animal Farm, which proceeds in much the same manner.

Homage to Catalonia is an excellent read to fully appreciate Orwell's writing style and humor.  It's also a very honest look at how ideals can be lost in the midst of a horrible and bloody war.  While I don't know if it's the best book to read to get an understanding of the background and lead-up to the Spanish Civil War, it's definitely an excellent book to get you interested in the conflict.  And to understand a man's internal conflict, too.  Highly recommended.

Review-itas: The TBR Edition

Every once in a while, I will look at the many bookshelves in my house filled with books that have sat patiently unread for years (and seriously... many, many years) and be filled with a sense of panic.  What am I doing borrowing all these books from the library when I have at least a couple hundred on my shelves that I haven't read yet?  It makes me feel guilty and stressed out and pretty far behind.

This past weekend, I did a shelf clean-up and got rid of a few dozen books that I really don't have any interest in reading any more.  My tastes have changed, as you will see from the reviews below.  I frankly no longer really care that much about Medieval England's religious struggles. class struggles, and gender roles.  I really don't care that much about Medieval England at all.  As various periods in English history have prominent placement on my bookshelves, this was a difficult lesson to learn and I don't know if I have fully come to terms with it.  I think I am still a huge fan of 18th and 19th century British history.  I am absolutely fascinated by the class struggles and gender roles in that era and how technological advancement impacted social norms and roles.  At least, I think I am.  But it's been quite a while since I read a book set in that era, too, so I don't quite know.

Also, I read much more diversely now, and my bookshelves aren't very diverse.  This makes it even more difficult to pull books from my shelves to read because I want to make sure I maintain a good balance in the diversity of the authors I read.

Basically, I've come to realize that my bookshelves no longer fully reflect my reading tastes, and I've been having trouble coming to terms with that.  There are still a lot of books there that sound interesting to me!  Hopefully I find some sort of balance and read those in the coming years without panicking too much about how or when I choose to read them.  Until then, though, I will probably continue as I am now, with spurts of reading from my shelves coming all at once, brought on more by guilt and panic than by pure interest.  So it's no surprise, then, that I am fairly lukewarm about the results:

Based on the above, it's probably no surprise that I didn't finish The Illuminator, by Brenda Rickman Vantrease.  I read it because it has been on my shelf for years (at least 8) and it was available on audio download at the library and I wanted to feel like I was making progress on my TBR.  Not exactly the most promising of situations, so I apologize to the author.  No one wants to be up against those odds!

A widow is trying to care for her property and her family, even against the grain of society at the time.  And then a man comes into her life and sets her heart racing and her mind thinking and complications ensue.  And the man is an illuminator who transcribes the Bible (very prettily).  And he transcribes other (Treasonous!  Heretical!) things, too.  Also, there's a mystery around the murder of a corrupt man of the cloth.

Considering that I didn't really have much interest in reading this book, I actually found the story and the audiobook quite engaging.  The characters are real and likable, though they felt very likable to my tastes.  I get that there were dissenters throughout history that had progressive views, but I do think that you can make a character likable and powerful within the confines of their environment rather than always being the one person in a crowd who looks away from a hanging or thinks that servants are basically the same as rich people, except not as rich.  Anyway, later on in the book, one of the main characters expresses very anti-Semitic viewpoints, so that took us right back to the 1300s.  Or the 1940s, anyway.

I think I just didn't finish reading this book because another one came up in my library audio queue that I really did want to read.  And because, while I was interested in the story, I wasn't terribly engaged or excited by it.  I didn't really care what happened next.  Again, I think that is just because my reading tastes have changed.  I can see 23-year-old Aarti being very into this book, and 23-year-old Aarti was pretty great, too, just different.  So if you enjoy Medieval England and tales of religious dissent and the way people of different classes were treated in that period, I think you would really enjoy this one.

I distinctly remember reading a review of The Pericles Commission in a newspaper and noting it down because I was finished with the Marcus Didius Falco mystery series set in ancient Rome, and I thought that a mystery series set in ancient Greece would be a good fix.

The Pericles Commission works very well as a Falco substitute.  You have a private investigator who is middle-class and trying to make his way up in the world.  He meets a beautiful and savvy young woman, totally ineligible for him, and the two become partners in crime-fighting.  The guy has a pretty entertaining and fun family that we get to meet and spend time with (including a precocious younger brother named Socrates).  And the author seems to know his stuff - you learn a lot about ancient Athens, from the geography to the historical figures to ancient laws and customs and much more.  There's some humor, too, but if you are used to Lindsey Davis' quick-witted, self-deprecating, and completely lovable Marcus Didius Falco, it will be hard for Nicolaos to compare.

The Pericles Commission was just what I needed.  I had just finished Who We Be, which was an amazing book, but not exactly light reading.  And people were rioting in the streets all over America over a grand jury's lack of indictment over the events in Ferguson, MO.  Basically, I wanted a book that was fun and didn't require me to think very much.  And, damning as that might be to the author, this book really fit the bill, and I enjoyed it for that reason.  There are fun scenes here!  And while sometimes the dialogue (both internal and external) and the clue-dropping (or red herring-dropping) can be clunky, that is to be expected from a first novel.

I am not sure if I will continue on with this series, just because as I've gotten older, I've gotten progressively worse at keeping up with series.  And because I honestly don't think that ancient Greece has the same pull on me these days as, say, 1950s South Africa or 1960s America or ageless Henrietta or countless other settings.  But it was fun and it was light and I learned a bit more about Athens circa 450 BC.  And that was just what I wanted,

Review-itas: Japan Edition

Guys!  I went to Japan in May, and due to the long flights and some down time, I got some reading done.  I am reviewing a couple of the books separately, but I think I can do the two below as mini-reviews.  Not because they are not complex books!  But because sometimes, brevity is a virtue, and I need to practice it.

Scattered Among Strange Worlds, by Aliette de Bodard.  I told you before why you should read Aliette de Bodard, and I stick to my story here.  Scattered Among Strange Worlds is a collection of two short stories, one set in the same universe as On a Red Station, Drifting, and one set on Earth, though a future, different Earth.  I enjoyed these stories for many of the same reasons I enjoyed On a Red Station, Drifting:  they center on thoughtful women who are just living each day (though the first story does include the reminiscences of a rabble rouser, who is also a thoughtful woman), and they focus more on civilian life during a time of strife than they do on war maneuvers.

The first story is set at a funeral and has a wistful tone.  It really shows how people start revolutions and movements with a lot of hope and optimism for how things will change, but often ... things don't change that much.

The second story is set in France and the main character is a mermaid.  This story was also about well-meaning people trying to improve the lives of mer-people by bringing them to land, but the mer-people were just unhappy and desperate to fit into a world they did not really like.  This story referenced colonialism to my mind, but I find references to colonialism everywhere.

Both stories were very good, and I plan to read as much de Bodard as I can in future.  I recommend you to do the same.

Yukio Mishima's The Sound of Waves is the only book by a Japanese author I read while in Japan.  I often try to read books written by authors from the place I am visiting, and I often fail at at this endeavor.  I also took The Devotion of Suspect X with me on my trip, but for some reason, it did not appeal to me.

The Sound of Waves is set on a Japanese island during the 50s or 60s.  It's a pretty remote island; everyone knows everyone else, and everyone fishes for a living.  Shinji is a young fisherman who is not particularly smart but is very hard-working and strong.  Hatsue is new on the island and generally pretty, so obviously everyone is intrigued by her, including Shinji.  The two meet and like each other instantly, but it's hard work being secretly in love on a tiny island, and the two become victims of gossip and misunderstandings before long.

This book has won several awards and is something of a modern classic.  I admit that I'm not sure why.  Maybe it was just my translation, but I didn't think it was very memorable.  I did enjoy many aspects of the novel.  There are beautiful descriptions of island life, the theme of Japanese traditions at war with western influence, the impact of cruel gossip in a tiny tine, the sacrifices people make for family.  And it was refreshing to see a story about two teenagers who didn't really have much angst - there wasn't really a love triangle, the two didn't toy with each other's feelings, and they were pretty much completely honest with each other.  Woohoo!  But I didn't find the characters very interesting.  I think Mishima has written longer novels, too, so I think I may check one of those out - perhaps the characters will have more time to develop in a longer form novel and I will be more engaged.

Rapunzel, MD

Sold for Endless Rue, by Madeleine E. Robins, is an adaptation loosely based on Rapunzel, though I didn't even realize that until near the very end when the Rapunzel character chopped off her hair.  It is set in Medieval Italy and focuses on a female line of healers and physicians.  The second in that line, Laura, is an orphan adopted by a kind and confident healer.  Laura is very intelligent and goes on to become a physician in the city.  Her adopted daughter Bieta also wants to be a physician but struggles a lot with her studies and falls in love with a fisherman.  This angers her mother, who wants her to study only.  The fisherman is not acceptable.  Thus, Bieta's life becomes more and more limited, and then there is mention of her long hair, and that is when I realized that Bieta was actually Rapunzel and Laura was the villain.

I really love Robins' Sarah Tolerance series, set in an alternate history Regency England with an awesome fallen woman private investigator.  However, I have not enjoyed any of her other books nearly as much.  Sold for Endless Rue was fairly disappointing as well.

What I did like was the detail about medicine in 13th century Europe, and Robins making clear that women, whether as midwives, rural healers, or highly respected physicians, had a very strong and respected role in healing.  I also enjoyed reading more about the rigorous training required to be a physician in the 13th century, though there is of course the irony that the physicians spent a lot of time learning things that, I assume, did not make them much better at all than their rural healer counterparts who did not need to understand algebra and astrology to help their patients.  I do think that Robins is quite skilled at showing how women in history expanded their worlds, proving that our narrow way of assuming that all women ran homes and nothing else is false.  And even if it's mostly true, women did do a lot that we don't give them credit for.

Allons! Vive le republic!

I heard about Rafael Sabatini's Scaramouche from Heidenkind when she read it and reviewed it on the Project Gutenberg Project blog.  It sounded like such a swashbuckling and fantastic story!  Plus, it takes place during the French Revolution, which is one of my favorite historical periods to read about (not one that I would ever choose to live through, however).

Scaramouche is the stage name of Andre-Louis Moreau.  Andre-Louis does not know who his parents are but was raised by a man in the French gentility.  After his best friend is killed in a duel by a marquis, Andre-Louis vows revenge and joins the revolution, giving stirring speeches that really get the people going and rioting and mobbing.  Then he becomes an actor and OWNS the stage.  And then he becomes a fencing master and is AMAZING at that.

Basically, Andre-Louis is good at everything he does.  While this generally annoys me in a character, in this situation it did not because, hey, he's a swashbuckling hero who saves France from the aristos, and he does it in style.

This is the sort of story that works best if you devote a weekend to reading it.  I, unfortunately, did not do this, but instead read it in fits and bursts over the course of several weeks.  This often caused me to forget people's names and their relationships to one another and that was to my detriment.  Finally, I powered through half the book in one evening, and then I got completely absorbed and wrapped up in the story.  It was fantastic.

In many ways, Scaramouche is the stereotypical adventure story of a man who rises through society by his wits and his skill and his ability to keep a cool head in a crisis.  But just because a story's arc is fairly predictable, that doesn't mean that it can't also be REALLY fun, and this book is just a LOT of fun.  There are dastardly villains, beautiful heroines, greedy friends, and a tale of pure vengeance.

It's a great read for this time of year, and I highly recommend it if you want a fun and exciting story that will take you back to days of powdered wigs and swords.

Also, there's a movie version.  I must find it!

If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen

Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany, by Bill Buford, first interested me because I really enjoyed his other book, Among the Thugs, in which he followed racist hooligan English soccer fans around Europe.  Buford has a fantastic way of immersing himself in a situation to understand what it feels like for people who make their lives doing something, but then he's able to step outside the box and share his insights with those of us on the sidelines in a very engaging, thoroughly entertaining way.

Heat has been on my bookshelf for a few years now, but I quite frankly don't know that I'd ever get around to reading it if it wasn't available as an audiobook download.  It's one of those books that sounded so good at the time  (Food!  Kitchens!  Drama!) but was never compelling enough to pull down off the shelf.  But when you get through about an audiobook a week (if not more than that), then it's much easier to commit to reading a book you're unsure about because, well, you have to do something during that commute.  And so I finally read Heat, and I'm quite happy that I read it as an audiobook.

Spies who get caught!

Rose Under Fire, by Elizabeth Wein, is the companion novel to Code Name Verity.  This book starts a bit after Code Name Verity ends and features only a few of the same characters.  The main character here is Rose, an American pilot working for the Air Transport Auxiliary in England.  One day, she flies off-course and is caught by the Germans and sent to a concentration camp, Ravensbruck.  She spends six months there before she escapes with some friends, and then she shares her story through journal entries.

Similar to Code Name Verity, this book is about the strength of friendship between women and just how much those friendships can mean to people.  I love that Wein gives friendship so much the spotlight in her novels, much more than romance, and that she makes clear that platonic relationships can do so much to help us through horrible times and keep us trucking on.  There was so much sacrifice of one person for another in this book, so much attention to the greater good or to help ease someone else's pain just slightly.  I think that was wonderful.  And, importantly, I loved that Rose was always the protagonist and hero of her own story.  She instigates the action in her life; she gets herself into a mess and she works with a team to get herself back out of it.  And then, when she's out, she deals with pulling together the pieces of herself to become a working human being again.

Gardening in Germany, interrupted by annoying house guests

Elizabeth and Her German Garden, by Elizabeth Von Arnim, is one of those books that so many people in blogosphere seem to have on their TBR lists.  Those that do not have already read it and hold it close to their hearts.  I got it on Project Gutenberg and read it while on vacation in Wyoming - not an area with many cultivated gardens, but one that is riotous with wildflowers during the summer.  And this seemed a fitting book to read there, as I often wandered (solitary) among the mountains and streams and flowers.

Elizabeth and Her German Garden is a semi-autobiographical story of von Arnim's time at her country home in Pomerania.  After living in the city for years and popping out three daughters in three years, von Armin comes across one of her husband's homes and falls in love with it.  She promptly moves there.  (It is unclear to me whether her husband moves there, too.)  And sets out on the tall task of creating a lovely garden for herself to enjoy.

Going to the beach, flying a kite, and other rites of summer

Last week, we had some beautiful days of gorgeous weather, so I decided it was the perfect time to read Tove Jansson's The Summer Book.  The only previous experience I've had with Jansson is with her book The True Deceiver, which is set in the deep of winter and has a different atmosphere entirely to this one.  Though not so different that you can't tell they are written by the same author.

I was quite excited to read The Summer Book because it seems like most people really love it.  It's more a series of short stories than one cohesive novel, all centered on a young girl, Sophia, and her grandmother.  Sophia's mother passed away recently and she's taken care of by her father and grandmother on an idyllic little island.  Sophia and her grandmother spend their days together traipsing through the woods, going to the beach, flying kites and doing other lovely activities, all the while talking about life, love, death, and other important matters.

I am sorry to say that I didn't really like Sophia.  Maybe something was lost in translation but it seemed like Sophia never just talked, she was always shouting or yelling.  Granted, she's six.  So... well, she probably did scream a lot, but it got exhausting even for me to just read about it.  That said, I do think that Jansson captured Sophia brilliantly here.  I don't know many six-year-olds, but I think that Jansson probably did because the way she shows Sophia's short-term thinking, her ability to jump from one topic to another, her passions and her boredom, is just so spot on.  She doesn't make Sophia out to be some sort of angel - she really does humanize her and shows us childhood, warts and all.

I did really like Grandmother.  Similarly to how she portrayed Sophia's youthfulness so wonderfully Jansson is fantastic at conveying Grandmother's mortality.  She gets exhausted quickly but doesn't want to show it.  She has lived a long and full life that Sophia doesn't even think about.  In every story, I was vividly aware that Sophia would not have her grandmother around for many more years, and it made me so sad for her. 

I admit I did not love this book the way that I expected to.  I don't blame the book, though, which when I think about objectively, really does sound quite lovely and just the sort of book that I would really enjoy.  I love vignettes!  And stories about young learning from old and vice versa.  And as someone who loved reading about Anne Shirley, who also grew up on an idyllic island, I feel like I should really like this book, too.  But I didn't adore it as much as I expected.  I think it's one I'll keep on my shelf to read in another few years, though.  Have you ever read a book and just known that if you read it again, you would have a totally different experience of it?  That's how I felt reading this one.

So if you are looking for a book that isn't too much of a time commitment but really does deliver on lovely stories and memorable characters, then try this one out!  But only if you are in the proper frame of mind :-)

King Hereafter and Queen Once Again

I read Dorothy Dunnett's King Hereafter over several weeks, but I don't think I would say that I read it slowly.  It's a long book with tiny font, with foreign words and subtle plot development, with larger-than-life characters and evocative landscapes.  It's the sort of book you can't read too slowly because it takes some time to get into the rhythm of it, to remember everyone's names and their histories and their relationships to the other characters.  So I would read it in bursts - 40 or 50 pages in a night being a "burst" - and then go to bed, exhausted but enthralled.

So much happened in King Hereafter that I am not even going to attempt to do a plot summary.  Instead, here's the blurb from the back of the book:

In King Hereafter, Dorothy Dunnett's stage is the wild, half-pagan country of eleventh-century Scotland.  Her hero is an ungainly young earl with a lowering brow and a taste for intrigue.  He calls himself Thorfinn but his Christian name is Macbeth.

Dunnett depicts Macbeth's transformation from an angry boy who refuses to accept his meager share of the Orkney Islands to a suavely accomplished warrior who seizes an empire with the help of a wife as shrewd and valiant as himself.  She creates characters who are at once wholly creatures of another time yet always recognizable--and she does so with such realism and immediacy that she once more elevates historical fiction into high art.

In this novel, Thorfinn is a giant - he is taller than everyone around him, with a deep and gravelly voice.  He's ugly, hardly ever smiles, and he rarely takes anyone else's advice.  He's brilliant, like so many of Dunnett's other male characters are.

He's also married to one of the most beautiful women ever, Groa, who has the great honor of being the newest entry (and the first new entry in years) to my Heroines Who Don't Annoy Me list.  Groa is wonderful.  She supports Thorfinn in everything, but she is also one of the few people who talks back to him.  She's witty and well able to understand political intrigue, and she was, for me, the focal point of this whole story.

[NOTE:  The rest of this review assumes that you know how this story (the story of Macbeth) ends.  I wouldn't say they are spoilers as it's heavily implied through the whole story, and well - most people know the ending, but just wanted to give a heads up.]

Joint Musings: King Hereafter, Part 2

To start this year off right, Sharon from Library Hungry and I decided to do a buddy read of Dorothy Dunnett's King Hereafter, which is a book that's been on my TBR pile for years and years. King Hereafter is about Thorfinn, better known to history as Macbeth, and his rise from an awkward boy trying to defend his small plot of land to a respected king of a vast swath of land. And at his side is his beautiful, brilliant wife Groa, who helps his come fully into his own.

King Hereafter is a very long book, so we've broken up our discussion into the books four parts. Below is the first half of our discussion on Part 2. For the second half, please visit Sharon's blog at Library Hungry. The first part of our discussion can be found here and here. Enjoy!

Joint Musings: King Hereafter, Part 1

Not to brag, but I'm making some awesome progress on my TBR pile so far this year. Not only am I reading books that I own, but I'm reading books that I've owned for a long time!

One of these books is Dorothy Dunnett's King Hereafter, which I was finally motivated to pick up when Sharon at Library Hungry promised to read it with me. King Hereafter is about Thorfinn, better known to history as Macbeth, and his rise from an awkward boy trying to defend his small plot of land to a respected king of a vast swath of land. And at his side is his beautiful, brilliant wife Groa, who helps his come fully into his own.

King Hereafter is a very long book, so we've broken up our discussion into the books four parts. Below is the second half of our discussion on Part 1. For the first half, please visit Sharon's blog at Library Hungry. Enjoy!

A Life-Changing Search for Eggs

You guys.  This book.  It is so good.

I am trying to think of a way to describe it in a way that won't make it seem super-depressing because it is not super-depressing.  It is quite funny, heart-felt, and wonderful.

City of Thieves is set during the Siege of Leningrad.  Lev, a 17-year-old volunteer firefighter, gets caught by the Russian police while stealing from the corpse of a German soldier.  He is taken to prison, where he meets Kolya, a deserter.  Instead of being executed, though, they are set the impossible task of finding a dozen eggs for a powerful colonel's daughter's wedding cake.

So Lev and Kolya are off to find eggs!  They start in Leningrad then move to the country.  Along the way, they meet people both terrifying and wonderful, and learn so much about themselves and other people and friendship and courage.

Musings: The Song of Achilles

This book is SO GOOD.  Honestly, I was reading the first 250 to 300 pages or so and it was good but I was thinking, "I mean, this is a good book, but it's not AMAZING."  And then I spent the last 50 pages or so just bawling uncontrollably, and couldn't stop.  And I mean that in a GOOD way.  It is the kind of crying you do because you are just overwhelmed by the poetry and beauty and love of what you are reading.

The Song of Achilles, by Madeline Miller, is told from the point of view of Patroclus.  Born to a cruel father and a simple-minded mother, Patroclus' life really begins when he's exiled to Phthia.  There, he meets the golden boy Achilles, who will be the greatest warrior the world has ever known.  But Achilles is not war-obsessed.  He is kind and trusting and friendly and he plays the lyre beautifully.  Patroclus and Achilles become good friends, then they become inseparable, and then they become lovers.  And when Achilles goes to fight in the Trojan War and gain his fame, Patroclus goes, too.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Musings: The Prisoner of Heaven

The Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, is one of those very rare books that my sister, my brother and I all really enjoyed. (In fact, it may be the ONLY book that all three of us have enjoyed.)  So whenever a new book in the series comes out, we get very excited and all try to read it around the same time so that we can discuss it.  That's what happened with the newest installment in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books series, The Prisoner of Heaven.

I did not re-read the other two books in the series before starting this one because Ruiz Zafon says that each book can be read and understood on its own and that you can read the books in any order to get the full story.

I must say that I disagree with this statement.  There were so many names mentioned in this book that were vaguely familiar to me, and I think that if I had re-read the previous installments in this series, I would have made the connections and enjoyed The Prisoner of Heaven much more.