Reading has been dodgy since I got sick, I think everyone has figured that out from my previous review posts (or lack thereof.) I’m relying more on audiobooks right now because it seems like every time I sit down to read hard copy/ebooks, I fall asleep in a matter of minutes. Seriously, it’s like being drugged. As usual, my reading is a bit of a mixed bag, with one re-read.
The 1619 Project, by by Nikole Hannah-Jones (Author), The New York Times Magazine (Author), Caitlin Roper (Editor), Ilena Silverman (Editor), Jake Silverstein (Editor) – I didn’t expect this to be an easy read, which is one reason why I chose the audio format, but I also recommend the audiobook because this is a book about voices, voices of the past, the present, and voices that speak to the future of black people in America. There is nothing weak or hesitant about those voices either. From the unflinching accounts of the arrival of slave ships on our shore, to the unflinching accounts of the murder of George Floyd and Brianna Taylor (among others) the voices here speak about an experience most white Americans can’t even guess at.
I thought I was pretty well educated in real history, as opposed to the whitewashed version in which slave owners like Thomas Jefferson (who I used to like; that’s how poorly educated I’ve been) had the audacity to stand up and say “All men are created equal,” while owning black human beings, and even fathering children on Sally Hemmings. (I don’t want to hear a single word about how maybe they loved each other. It was rape. She couldn’t say no. Even if she was screaming “YES! YES! YES!” she was his slave and she couldn’t say no to him, so it was rape.)
I wasn’t even close to being educated enough to know half of what I read in this book. Maybe I allowed myself to slide past the worst of it as I read American history, I don’t know. What I do know is that the accounts are horrifying, and what lies beneath the actions of white Americans even more so, particularly as the playbook, though sanitized, is still in use today. Frex, infrastructure is still being used to divide black from white in US cities, even as our politicians assure us that “Oh no, it was just the best place to put this particular highway.” And of course, the ever-popular Second Amendment was created out of fear that the slaves might actually want freedom enough to rise up against their masters, and by god those masters were going to be armed to the teeth. I leave you to make the connection between the facts of history and today’s gun-fanatic rhetoric. Well-regulated militia, my arse.
But then… the chapter that lifted my heart: Music. It’s a long, beautiful chapter about how African music has evolved here in the US, and informed virtually every genre of music, making it one of the richest heritages on earth. I will hug that chapter close forever.
Read, or if you’re of a mind to hear black voices, listen. Learn the things they never taught us. Learn the things they never want us, our children, our grandchildren to know. Let it be a starting point, not the end of your study.
The Girl from the Metropol Hotel: Growing Up in Communist Russia, by Lyudmila Petrushevskaya – Someone in one of my reading groups on Facebook recommended this for people who loved A Gentleman in Moscow. Well apart from being set in 20th century Moscow, it really doesn’t have all that much to do with the Towles novel. And yet I found it fascinating. It’s a short autobiography of a girl from a well-connected Bolshevik family who nevertheless grew up nearly feral and in great poverty, to become one of Russia’s most eminent writers. AFAIK, she’s still alive and still writing, and her voice is so strong and assured, her personality so vigorous that reading her is a joy.
Still Life, by Louise Penny — Sometimes a girl needs a bit of comfort reading. First in the Gamache series, a group of novels I never tire of. This one is an introduction not only to Inspector Gamache of the Surete Quebec, but to the residents of Three Pines, which is more than a little mythic in character. I love mysteries with ensemble casts, and these are really top-of-the-line. I’m sure a search of this site will turn up a more complete review if you’re interested.
Daisy Jones and The Six, by Taylor Jenkins Reid – After reading The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo last month, I went looking for more by Reid. This one is an earlier outing, and appealed to me because, at least at the start, it reminded me strongly of my own novel White Rabbit. But by the time I was well into it, it stopped being as interesting as it seemed originally, and became essentially the kind of story you read in all those tell-all books about rock bands; you know the ones that document the drug, alcohol, and sexual excesses of the band members. Honestly, I didn’t find the characters – Daisy in particular – worth worrying about. So unless you’re really into 70s rock-and-roll, Rolling Stone pastiches, you might want to give this one a miss. I’m glad I got mine from the library.
How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide, by Crystal Marie Fleming – I have to fess up here, I didn’t quite finish this book. It was rough going because Fleming spares no one including herself (She explains how her background and education exempted her from a lot of harsh truths about the lives of most Black Americans.) and I only listened for short sittings. Net result, the library took it back before I managed to get all the way through, and if I want to finish it I have to put it back on hold.
I did learn a lot, probably not nearly enough, and am destined to remain stupid about race until I can reborrow the book. It’s not easy. You have to want to hear these things just like you have to want to hear what the 1619 project has to say. But as someone who never imagined what this country has done to people of other races (Fleming doesn’t limit herself to dealing with Black Americans.) it’s an important read.
Under the Black Flag, by David Cordingly – Okay so I’m on an Our Flag Means Death kick, and I wanted to read something about real pirates. But now I’m kinda feeling like maybe this wasn’t entirely what I wanted. At the same time the wealth of information is impressive. And dry, like, my-brain-skitters-sideways-a-lot-of-the-time dry. At one point I ended up surfing Facebook while listening to an exhaustive catalog of the kinds of ships pirates used, and the differences in them from number and configuration of masts to how many guns were on board and how many men were required to man each ship based on the number of guns aboard. Yeah there better not be a test on that one.
The most interesting stuff is, predictably enough, about the various pirate captains. I expected Blackbeard to loom larger, but beyond the spectacular account of his Rasputin-like demise, he’s just another player. (Did anyone else know that his skull remains in storage at the Peabody Essex Museum?) The standout personalities have been pirates like Bartholomew Roberts (Black Bart. You thought he was just a product of Ralphie’s imagination, didn’t you? Me too.) Anne Bonney and Mary Read, the most notorious of the women who turned to piracy, and Calico Jack Rackham of all people!
Cordingly also discusses pirates in the media, and how far from reality the portrayals are. Since he was writing pre-OFMD, my only comment there was “Buddy, you don’t know the half of it.” One interesting thing I did learn was that apparently Izzy Hands appears in Stevenson’s Treasure Island. (BTW, did anyone else realize he was also known as “Basilica Hands?” What was that about?)
Bottom line is that you really have to be a pirate fanatic to get the most out of this book. It’s not bad, it’s just, well, dry like I said. And the narrator is not what you’d call sparkling. I also question some of his pronunciation like rendering machete as “mah-SHET” at one point in the book. In another spot he actually got it right, at least in the plural. Did no one care enough to correct him? Oh well.
The Sandman: The Deluxe Edition, Book One, by Neil Gaiman — I first encountered the Sandman comics back in the very early nineties when a friend insisted I read them. I’ve always been grateful to her for that not only because it introduced me to Neil Gaiman’s writing, which I love, but because the images and ideas I encountered have stuck with me for decades and informed a lot of my thinking about my own work. I’ve been watching the series, so I decided to revisit the graphic novels and see why there’s been so much fussing about the changes and the casting and so on from some quarters.
First off the series is very different from the comics. It’s also very not different. I’m a firm believer in allowing every form of media to be true to itself because if it’s not, then why bother with translating stories into different forms of media? If Gaiman had written Sandman as a novel originally, and then had it translated into comic book form, you can bet there’d have been the same sort of pointless whining about how it’s wrong all wrong terrible horrible and should never have happened. In my opinion, the series remains true to the basic ideas within the comics even if it changes the details. I mean, come on, how many decades has Neil had to refine his ideas? You think Morpheus hasn’t grown and changed in his mind? He’s a genius for fuck’s sake, of course he’s always growing.
But I’m here to review the first volume of the graphic novels, and all of the above was in aid of explaining why I found this first volume jarring and unsatisfying to the story-teller in me. It’s not that I don’t love the comics, I do. But the way the stories are presented is a lot less subtle than in the series. They’re messy and sometimes needlessly complicated. Character motivation… well honestly a lot of doesn’t make any sense at all. The one I keep coming back to is 24/7, the story of John Dee. In the comic, his actions are chaotic. He’s just a crazy man doing crazy, horrible things, and a great many of those things seem to be included simply for shock value. In the series, there is a logic to all he does. It’s warped, but it makes sense, and as such it’s far more satisfying as a story.
One thing I did find jarring after all these years is the whiteness and maleness of the comics. People of color are background characters for the most part, though we do see a brief incarnation of Dream as an African at one point. It’s a comic that reflects what was considered acceptable and mainstream back in the day.
So I’m telling you that yes, if you love Sandman the series, reading the comics is a great idea. But be prepared for something that’s very different from what you’ve seen. And something that is very much the same as what you’ve seen.
Lilith’s Brood: The Xenogenesis Trilogy, by Octavia Butler: Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago — Wow. No, seriously, just wow. I lay in bed last night, after finishing Imago, the final book of the trilogy, and thought that maybe “Wow” would be the absolute best review I could write because there is so freaking much about these books that demands discussion, that it would be best served as an advanced lit course. But yeah, if I’m going to review, I need to review, so forgive me if I utterly miss some hugely important points about the books, but my brain can only translate so much into words at a time.
We start with Dawn, the book in which Lilith Iyapo is introduced as a woman in some kind of bizarre captivity. She’s isolated except for a voice that asks her questions. She is put to sleep many times and each time the awakening is unpleasant. Eventually we learn that she is a human woman who was rescued from a post-apocalyptic Earth by aliens known as the Oankali. Because we’re viewing all this through Lilith’s eyes, we know very little about why she’s been rescued, what they want from her, and who they are exactly. And this, right here, is one of the themes that run through the trilogy, both in content and structure. We only really know what we’re told. Sure we can infer from context, but that’s not always reliable. I read 700+ pages of this trilogy before I finally figured out what the term Akjai actually meant, and that realization underscored, for me anyway, the reactions of the humans to the actions of the Oankali. I found myself being resentful that this term, and many other words and ideas, weren’t made clear from the get-go.
The Oankali are really good at not telling people the truth. They don’t lie, they just omit. And because of this, and the fact that their understanding of human nature is flawed and they are incapable of recognizing this, there is a lot of conflict, both internal and external. So much of the trilogy is about agency, free will, and yes even enslavement, though that’s never a concrete issue as it might have been in the hands of a lesser writer. Butler was a brilliant, subtle writer who made every component of her work serve a greater purpose.
Do I recommend it? Not just yes but HELL YES. It’s not easy. If you want something easy look elsewhere. But if you want a multi-layered story about what it means to be human (and yeah, I know that’s starting to sound trite, but trust me it works here) and how humans have to look to the future as much as we have to learn from the past, then this is well worth the time and effort.
Tales from Crazy House 