Journal of No. 118

 I've been remiss. In no particular order:

Equal Rites, by Terry Pratchett. Hey, it's a Discworld novel. It does what it says on the cover. I was never big into Discworld in its heyday, and I'm still not. The best parts, as is often the case, are little humanist asides. Chosen by work book club

The Poisoner's Handbook, by Deborah Blum. Really a fascinating nonfiction look at the development of forensic science in the 1920s and 1930s in the New York coroner's office, bringing a professional scientific eye to something that had been slapdash at best previously. Also an interesting look at various poisons. Each chapter is devoted to a particular poison and there's a wealth of historical detail on famous criminal cases and horrific industrial accidents and mishaps. Very good.

19th century interlude...

Three Men in a Boat (to say nothing of the dog), by Jerome K Jerome: Three upperclass twits go on a boating holiday by mistake. Hilarity ensues. There are some laugh out loud moments, and it's generally amusing in a Dave Barry-esque breezy way. Two n-words appear as landmines in the middle. Anyway a sample:

[Travelling with cheese in a close railway carriage] And then they both began sniffing, and, at the third sniff, they caught it right on the chest, and rose up without another word and went out.  And then a stout lady got up, and said it was disgraceful that a respectable married woman should be harried about in this way, and gathered up a bag and eight parcels and went.  The remaining four passengers sat on for a while, until a solemn-looking man in the corner, who, from his dress and general appearance, seemed to belong to the undertaker class, said it put him in mind of dead baby; and the other three passengers tried to get out of the door at the same time, and hurt themselves.

...

Now, I’m not like that.  I can’t sit still and see another man slaving and working.  I want to get up and superintend, and walk round with my hands in my pockets, and tell him what to do.  It is my energetic nature.  I can’t help it.

...

Rather an amusing thing happened while dressing that morning.  I was very cold when I got back into the boat, and, in my hurry to get my shirt on, I accidentally jerked it into the water.  It made me awfully wild, especially as George burst out laughing.  I could not see anything to laugh at, and I told George so, and he only laughed the more.  I never saw a man laugh so much.  I quite lost my temper with him at last, and I pointed out to him what a drivelling maniac of an imbecile idiot he was; but he only roared the louder.  And then, just as I was landing the shirt, I noticed that it was not my shirt at all, but George’s, which I had mistaken for mine; whereupon the humour of the thing struck me for the first time, and I began to laugh.  And the more I looked from George’s wet shirt to George, roaring with laughter, the more I was amused, and I laughed so much that I had to let the shirt fall back into the water again.

---

Ramona, by Helen Hunt Jackson: The book that brough so many Midwesterners to California in the late 19th century, a romance in Southern California as Mexico gives way to the United States. Race prejudice from white Americans to Mexicans to natives. Miscegenation. Hidden treasures. Missed connections. Horse thieves and gunplay. Plenty of tragedy. I'm not sure it really presents a pleasant picture that should attract people, but there are a few lyrical passages of description of mustard fields and hills and whatnot that really are part of the SoCal landscape and may have felt exotic in Dubuque cornfields.

Back to a more modern century

Lessons in Chemistry, by Bonnie Garmus: Female scientist in the 1950s has really bad experiences at UCLA, pretty bad experience at a Lawrence Livermore-esque lab, finds and loses love, has a second act as a TV cooking/chemistry host, and then a rushed final act where vengeances and come-uppances come up. Enjoyable, but a few cheats and gimmicks and dropped plot threads. On the last point, I'm thinking particularly of the host stating she's an atheist on her live TV show in 1960. Although there's a bit of a flap, the book trundles on and takes the express train to the finale without fully dealing with that.

That Librarian, by Amanda Jones. A Louisiana school librarian thrust into prominence when she stands up for a public library (not school library) being attacked by censors. She is vilified by some of the townsfolk, and ultimately sues a couple of the worst for defamation. She's be the first to tel you she's no saint or superhuman figure, and she's right about that. What I think is both charming and yet detracts from her reliability as the teller of her own tale is how much she indulges in some score-setlling with some of the folk in her own small town. It's petty and yet dish-y. There's some "I won't name any names, but everyone in my town will know exactly who this is." No, really:

...[different person below]
But on the good side, the book does do a good job of telling people how librarians deal (within the system) with challenges to books, and why that's probably an adequate and professional way to handle things, and the public can have its say. (And there's no need for grandstanding and running off to lawyers and politicians to start passing laws.)

--

Space Chantey by RA Laffery: A tall-tale science fiction-y retelling of the Odyssey. Bonkers and genius in parts, but a little too bonkers. If Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius is NOT BONKERS ENOUGH for you, this might be perfect.

Got turned onto this by the joint PBS NewsHour/NYT Book Review reading group, newly started up for 2018. I remember interviews with Ward about this or other books and was at least intrigued, and this got me over the edge.

Sing, Unburied, Sing won a National Book Award and other such prizes, so it's decidedly in the 10% of things that are not crap (per Sturgeon's Law).

It relates the story of an extended black(ish) family in modern Mississippi: Voudon-adjacent grandma, salt of the earth Grandpa, shot by white people dead son, negligent mom daughter, initially imprisoned white baby-daddy, adolescent grandson, and toddler granddaughter.

On the surface, daughter takes her kids to meet baby-daddy when he gets out of prison and brings him back. Plenty of side-orders of family dysfunction and racism from baby-daddy's family.

Also, the supernatural. Having seen a number of people bloviate about what the ghosts 'mean', I'm here (safe in my blog) to set them straight.

Yes, they have a role to play in what the author is trying to say. But that's not the same as being able to dismiss them from the story as 'symbols'.

When we look at The Christmas Carol, we can see that the Ghost of Christmas Past has utility for Dickens for setting up Scrooge's regrets over the past. Christmas Present is a guide for how to enjoy life in the now. But this is not a story of Scrooge having some fanciful dreams and waking up cured. In the reality of the story, the ghosts show him things he could not have known (as if Scrooge gave a shit about where bob Cratchit lived and the names of his superfluous progeny).

Similarly here, we can't (I assert) interpret the ghosts as figments or imaginations of the other characters. They are real, yet also have meaning to the overall story.

(This is as opposed to pure fantasy, where of course ghosts or elves or what-have-you are real, and no one doubts it, and they are 'just' characters.)

One ghost is laid to rest, and fights off an attempt by another ghost to usurp him. The other ghost (I deem) has to be laid to rest by someone else. That ghost has seen 'the Promised Land', but it's not for him. 

 At the crudest level, the ghosts are symbols of deaths that can be laid at the feet of racism. And the other thing we see is that they are legion. They may not have a familial connection to the rest of the story, but there are out there, a nebulous cloud or tree of spirits.

These (I deem) are the Trayvon Martins, and Freddie Grays, and Philando Castiles, and Tamir Rices, and... a throng that is both perceptible and imperceptible.

I enjoyed the book. It's not perfect by any means, despite the plaudits. Most glaringly, though written first person (from different characters' perspectives in each chapter), the characters typically speak in a rather vocabulary-sparse Southern dialect, but 'think' in terms that often become disbelief-shatteringly poetic and authorish.

Looking at the book club, the other reaction that is perplexing to me is that certain characters/situations are too realistically depressing and nasty for some. "I'm sorry, this is too truthful for me to read. I had to set it aside. Where is my white wine spritzer?"

A collection of short stories, about half set in distinctly Islamic settings, often a mix of the near-future and the 1001 Nights. Others range further, from the Old West to a more traditional sword and sorcery land. All very good stories, with strong character focus, with the possible exception of one supervillain-themed bagatelle that didn't quite work for me. Maybe just because it's fresh in my mind from being last, but I really dug the sword and sorcery milieu of 'Iron Eyes and the Watered Down World’. It starts as a love-letter to Fritz Leiber -- and you will always earn high marks from me for that -- and then wanders off into territory Fritz would never have trod in Nehwon.

A pretty neat anthology of fantasy/spooky stories from the early 1940s [my cheapo garage sale find is the 1954 Cardinal reprint], edited by Philip Van Doren Stern, who wrote the story that was eventually filmed as It's a Wonderful Life.
Being a pretty early anthology, it has an interesting mix, including both the obvious genre luminaries (Wells, Poe, Dunsany) and more mainstream authors - EM Forster, O Henry, and a surprising (if not very good) story by F Scott Fitzgerald.
Highlights (tough in a group of mostly excellent stories):
Max Beerbohm's "Enoch Soames"
Wells' "The Man Who Could Work Miracles"
Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Bottle Imp"
Ralph Straus' "The Most Maddening Story in the World" [a better English club story than the Dunsany, despite its all too accurate title]

The Ebb Tide is a slender new entry in the fabled history of Professor Langdon St. Ives, which Blaylock (one of the original steampunks) has set down in several previous novels back in the 80s and 90s. Or rather I should say that Jack Owlesby set down St. Ives' adventures at the time, and Blaylock has been fortunate enough to discover these records, and magnanimous enough to share them with the rest of us.
The adventure breezes by smoothly, but definitely a light entertainment. But it's always a treat to visit Blaylock's plausibly zany Victorian era, no matter how oxymoronic 'plausibly zany' is. And I've long been a fan of JK Potter's work, and he contributes several nice pieces of interior art, along with the cover. Another lovely book from Subterranean Press.

and found this