swamp ophelia

What I finished:

+ Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture by Kyle Chayka, the guy who wrote that article a few years ago about how disconcerting it is that you can find coffee shops with the exact same aesthetic everywhere in the world.

I have rarely read (er...listened to, as this was an audiobook) a book I agree with so strongly. Chayka hates algorithmically-driven platforms as much as I do--perhaps more! Which is saying something! He basically thinks they're destroying culture, and I do not think he is wrong!

This book is both a "wow, this thing is fucked up and I hate it!" book and also a love letter to human curation and the development of your own taste. Lots of examples, a chapter about his own relationship with these platforms, a chapter about human curation in the real world and one about the people who are trying to do something similar online. This isn't a book that hates the internet--instead, like me, he's very nostalgic for certain things about the 90s/early 2000s internet before social media ruined everything. His discussions of discovering obscure anime through forums in the early 2000s made me very happy. I think he does a good job balancing the bigger picture with his own experiences--there are some writers who just include too much of themselves in their books that are allegedly about wider phenomena, but I didn't get annoyed with him in the way I sometimes do, so he must have done okay with the balance.

I really enjoyed this, but I do not recommend the audiobook. The reader has a decent enough voice, but he does this weird thing where he chops up sentences strangely in a way that they were not written, inserting the pause and emphasis in ways that I know Chakya didn't intend. It only happened a few times, but it really annoyed me. Does this person not know how sentences work? The way he read them made so much less sense! I wish I could remember examples to share, but alas I do not. On top of that, he mispronounced several things that matter to me personally (though I can't remember what they are right now) so I just got annoyed with him. I really need to stick to books read by their authors.

+ I also finished my reread of The Dawn of Everything for book club. I know I wrote a review of it the first time I read it, but I can't find it now. I'll keep looking and update this with a link if I can find it.

Graeber and Wengrow's main project is dismantling the cultural ideas that there is a certain, linear way that human societies develop and that if you scale them up large enough, they can no longer be democratic (which they define much more strongly than we usually use it) and must instead involve state brutality, bureaucracy, etc. Their main project is saying, "No, this is not true, just look at past cultures that were large without (probably) developing states as we think of them today. People have arranged themselves in countless different ways over the course of history, they did it purposefully, and we can do the same if we only have the imagination and will." Obviously, this speaks to me deeply.

This time around, I especially appreciated how much emphasis they put on how people have always been people--that people in the past didn't live in some atemporal way where they sort of drifted along and as technologies arose (who developed them? this is usually left unspoken) and climate/geography changed, they changed in response. The authors very much believe that people have always had agency and used it, that they've thought of themselves as and indeed been conscious political actors all along, that societies could be headed on a certain trajectory and then their people could decide to take a different turn instead. They're less clear on just how people made these collective decisions and took different turns, which is the most frustrating thing about the book imo--I want to apply what I've learned here, but I don't know how!

The core of Graeber's worldview is that quote of his (from a different work): "The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently." I think he is right about this. But I think the time scale matters, which is not something they explore deeply in this book. These decisions are mostly not made (with a few exceptions) on the scale of a human life but over the course of generations, which I'm sure is true but is also dissatisfying for those us who want people to suffer less now. And again, the actual mechanisms through which societies made these decisions are not included in the book, mostly because there's no way to know how most of them did it and also because telling us how they did it is not the point of this book.

Perhaps some of this would have been addressed in later books if Graeber hadn't left us so soon. Last I heard (several years ago) Wengrow was still working on the second book of their planned three or four, but who knows if we'll ever see it and how different it will be without Graeber's input.

I'll add this: I am much more aware this time of the book as (as someone else in the book club described it) historical midrash. The writers are pretty clear about the fact that some of what they're saying is conjecture--they think a good case can be made from the historical record, especially the archaeological one, but we can't know for sure. Still, every historian/archaeologist/anthropologist/whatever comes to conclusions despite us not knowing things for sure, and the authors are sick of the conclusions that are derived from the main narratives of a) humans having always been terrible or b) there being some sort of Fall (usually related to scale, agriculture, and cities).

They're saying, "We can't know for sure that X is true, but a case can certainly be made, so let's make it and then ask ourselves what we can learn about human societies--what can we imagine about our own futures--if it is true?" This is a very ideological (and anarchist) book, but most books are, and they're upfront about it, and also their ideology is much more in line with my own than most.

If nothing else, my mind continues to be blown by the fact that five thousand years passed between human beings first learning how to cultivate crops (a development they believe was women's work) and the rise of actual domestication and reliance on agriculture as the primary form of feeding communities. You heard that correctly! The Agricultural "Revolution" was five thousand years long!

What I'm currently reading:

+ After such books, I needed a palate cleanser, so of course I picked up a golden age mystery. This one is A Miss Marple book, Sleeping Murder. In middle school, I read all the Hercule Poirot books, but I didn't do something comparable with Miss Marple, so this one is entirely new to me (instead of just read so long ago that I've forgotten most of it). Very absorbingly written!

Yesterday I wasn't feeling well, but I am here today with book thoughts!

What I finished:

+ Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything by Kelly Weill. I listened to the audiobook read by the author. Weill is a journalist who's been digging into Flat Earther culture for a long time. She writes about them with a balance of compassion and even genuine affection for people she knows in that world and rage that the lie of Flat Earth is growing.

If you've read many books about conspiracy theories, most of this is pretty familiar, but I did not know about the roots of modern Flat Eartherism--it has its roots in one jerk in a utopian community in England in the 19th century--who knew? Then it had a few followers for the subsequent decades, but honestly it did not really take off till the 2010s and most of the reason was...YouTube. I'm sure we all know the trajectory of radicalization by now, so I won't go into that. But it's pretty harrowing reading.

This was good but not great! A good thing to listen to while I worked and dragged boxes around and such. The first few chapters about the history of Flat Eartherism were the best part to me--the rest was well written but stuff I mostly already knew. Still, if you have no idea how conspiracy theories are currently taking over the world, this would be a good case study introduction.

+ Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett. I was enjoying this as I read it. I liked the premise, the characters, and the dynamic between the leads. There was some fun worldbuilding stuff here.

But two things did not work for me.

1. The prose. I am much more forgiving of mediocre third person than I am of mediocre first person. If you're going to do first person, I want it to be really good (many of my favorite books are first person!), and this was not. For one thing, the author doesn't seem to have much of a grasp on how an Edwardian woman would actually write. Sometimes she would write these overly florid lines that seemed dated even for an early 20th century setting, and then she'd do things like have one character ask another character if two people were "an item." I found this annoying!

There weren't quite enough footnotes to warrant the footnotes conceit, though I did enjoy the stuff we learned in them (frankly, I think I would have enjoyed a book about Danielle de Grey more than this one!). I guess I'm just spoiled by Jonathan Strange? If you're going to do footnotes DO FOOTNOTES.

However, I could have forgiven this (not everyone can be Susanna Clarke!) if it weren't for....

2. The ending. Spoilers incoming, obviously.

So the book had made a very big deal about the pattern of faeries being learnable through the medium of folk stories. This is great! One of my favorite things about the book! So when we got to the end, where Emily was trapped by a faerie king in a faerie kingdom, and her human friends and her love interest were plotting to free her, and the plot was straightforward but violent, and Emily started going, "This isn't the way to do it! This isn't the way they do it in stories!" I was 10000% with her. I thought sure were were going to get her using what she knew from stories to free herself. The rule of three! A loophole no one else could see! You know, THE STUFF THE BOOK WAS ABOUT.

But no. Her boyfriend just grabbed her hand and they...ran out?

It was such a letdown that it soured my up-to-that-point mostly positive feelings about the book. This was one of those cases where the gun was introduced in the first act and then it did not go off in the last act. Instead, the characters mentioned, "Oh, remember that gun?" and then...nothing happened with the gun!!!

So anyway, I can see why everyone loves the book so much, but I was disappointed by it. I might still try the second book and see if it fixes the problem, but we'll have to see.

+ The Great Trek of the Russian Mennonites to Central Asia, 1880-1884 by Fred Richard Belk. I picked this up as background reading for The White Mosque, and I am here to tell you: you don't need to do the same. This extremely dry and straightforward account does what it says on the tin. I believe it was originally the author's dissertation, and it shows. I am sure that when this work was published, it was a big deal in the field of Mennonite Studies--bringing together accounts of all the various strands of immigration of Mennonites in Russia to various places in Central Asia--but it's definitely not for popular readers.

The history he writes about deserves a retelling as interesting as the original events. To make a long story very, very short, the Mennonites started out in Switzerland and the Low Countries, then moved to Prussia, then moved to Russia, then moved either to the Americas or to Central Asia. Each time they had to move because as Anabaptists they were extreme pacifists who refused to serve in the militaries of a given country. They would go to a certain place and at first the leaders of that place would be like, "It's fine if y'all just want to chill off by yourselves and farm and not have anything to do with the government so long as you pay your taxes," and then, inevitably, either months or years or decades later, someone else would come into power and be like, "No, you must serve in the military or the forest service or something," and then Mennonites would be like, "Well. Guess we've got to move."

So the groups that went to Central Asia went there because a) the Russian empire was trying to make them do either military or national service of some kind and b) there was a charismatic leader who said that Jesus was about to return and he would be coming to the East.

So they packed up their covered wagons and road across steppe and desert and a bunch of them died and the places they were headed to seemed not to be the Edens they hoped they would be--you can guess how the rest of this song goes. Some of the communities ended up staying there for only a few months or years before leaving again (mostly to the US), a few stayed for about fifty years before leaving, and a handful might still be there! It's unclear--this book was published during the Cold War, so communication beyond the Iron Curtain wasn't great. At any rate, there were varying kinds of successes and failures.

This is super interesting stuff! I want to know everything about how their neighbors saw them and how they saw their neighbors! Tell me everything about culture clash! Tell me more about why the millenarian preacher appealed to them!

But alas, this is just an overview of who went where and who did what. There were a few moments--mere sentences, really--of something like personality that emerged in various tales (a mentally ill man saving his friends from brigands, a conversation between a little Mennonite girl and a Chinese girl whose feet are bound, these contraptions they rigged up to carry their kids balanced on either side of a camel, etc.) but there were never enough details to be compelling.

Now, I am judging this thing by unfair standards--this was not written for a popular audience, he wasn't intending to write a rip-roaring account of this era in Mennonite life. But I was still disappointed, and now I'm looking forward to The White Mosque even more than I already was!


What I'm currently reading:

+ 3/4 done with the book club reread of The Dawn of Everything.

+ A chapter into Shamanism: The Timeless Religion by Manvir Singh and liking it so far.

(Btw, between rereading The Dawn of EVerything, reading Proto a couple of weeks ago, always having Ursula K. Le Guin on my mind, and now reading Singh...I am wistfully imagining what my life would have been like if I had become an anthropologist and studied either extinct cultures or current ones with indoor plumbing. I am not cut out for the kind of field research that most anthropologists do.)

What I finished:

+ Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers by Caroline Fraser.

What a weird book. I was excited about this one because I appreciated her Prairie Fires, a biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder that won a Pulitzer, so very much. But this book was...not as good as that one.

Fraser grew up on Mercer Island, Washington in the Puget Sound in the 60s and 70s. In this book, she weaves together a bunch of strands:

* memoir-like scenes of growing up there
* the inordinate amount of serial killers that the state of Washington produced in the 20th century
* overviews of those many serial killers and their activities
* the history of smelting and heavy metal-producing industries in Tacoma (with jaunts to El Paso, Idaho, and Wichita so she can draw in some outside-the-PNW serial killers like BTK and Nightstalker)
* environmental tirades (complimentary) against corporate polluters, particularly the Guggenheims (bonus points for managing not to be antisemitic)
* facts and figures about the dangers of lead and arsenic poisoning and the truly obscene amounts of lead and arsenic people in the Puget Sound area were living with for most of the 20th century
* a series of stories about people who died on a particularly dangerous and irresponsible floating bridge that connected Mercer Island with the mainland
* a somewhat tortured metaphor about the Olympic–Wallowa lineament
* how much Tacoma sucks

Now, actually, many of these things are connected, and I can see how she thought she could make them all work together, but frankly, she didn't quite manage it. At least as far as I'm concerned.

The two main throughlines are Fraser's big ideas: 1. her theory that the ridiculously elevated levels of lead and other metals in the Puget Sound area are the reason there are so many serial killers from the area and 2. her contention that, really, Americans just don't care about human lives when there's money to be made. She may be right about the first idea. She's definitely right about the second.

The trouble is, she doesn't argue any of this straightforwardly. Everything is by implication; she thinks that by having a section about the lead and arsenic pumped into the air above the area of Tacoma where Ted Bundy grew up immediately before a description of something that Ted Bundy did, she's arguing that Ted Bundy did what he did because of lead poisoning, but she never actually argues that. The book is overwritten in that ~look what impressive prose I'm writing~ way, and it moves rapidly back and forth between various scenes till it's hard to keep up with which serial killer she's talking about at the moment (endless descriptions of young women and the terrible things that happened to them--I skimmed over most of the descriptions. I didn't need that in my life) and who we've met before. She's also very hung up on this particular incredibly dangerous bridge and how the powers that be didn't do anything about it even though people were dying on it at an alarming rate over decades. It's just so much.

As for the memoir-y parts, I think that she thinks that she's writing a story about what it's like to grow up in a place where lives are cheap, but the snippets we see of her own life are...not about that. She never tells us how it feels to be surrounded by all this death, so why are the memoir-y parts even there? We learn that her dad was an absolute asshole (definitely emotionally abusive, possibly physically too?), and maybe she wants us to think this is because of lead poisoning too? But she never says that, and the majority of her memories are not about him at all. There's a scene where she goes to a Star Trek con? And I'm like, "Well, I would read an essay about you going to a Trek con in the 70s, but what's it got to do with this book?" Is she just trying to show how life carries on even when people are dying from lead-caused cancer, horrible car wrecks, and unhinged misogynists? I don't think I needed that reminder, really.

She's full of righteous rage about the insane amount of pollution that people have to live (and die) with because some people make a lot of money off pumping it into the air and water. She's full of righteous rage about how nobody cared about all those people dying on the bridge because it would have been expensive to change the bridge. She's very, very good at making you care about needless death. I appreciate those things, but to me, they felt undercut by switching from descriptions of those things over to descriptions of what [serial killer] did to his victims.

As for her theory about serial killers being created by lead poisoning: I think she very well might be onto something here, but because she doesn't argue this in a straightforward manner so she never actually has to confront the weaknesses of her argument. Now, I think the causal relationship between high levels of lead and violent crimes in the US as charted over the course of the 20th century is really quite compelling. I lean towards believing that the two things are indeed connected.

But she's trying to convince us that this kind of lead poisoning produces particularly screwed-up killers, and because she never actually argues this, she never has to answer questions like: why are there way more serial killers in the industrial parts of the Pacific Northwest than in equally polluted parts of the Rust Belt? Why are most serial killers white when we know damn well that communities of color (especially Black and Indigenous ones) have some of the highest rates of environmental poisoning in the country? If the relationship between lead and this specific kind of brutal, misogynist, sexual violence was so straightforward, wouldn't we have seen a lot more serial killers who weren't white? There's this very weird moment where she acknowledges that Black neighborhoods in particular get a ton of pollution and then talks about the moral panic over crime in the 80s and 90s, but she's like, "But the real superpredators are white men." I don't disagree with that statement on its own, but in the context of the larger book, what are you trying to say here, lady?

Maybe she has answers to these questions of mine! But she doesn't allow space in the text to ask them, so how do I know?

By keeping her focus so tightly on the Pacific Northwest, she also never has to address what we might learn from similar situations all over the world. There are many, many places where people are still being poisoned by nearby industries; are their crime rates soaring? What do their most violent crimes look like? She briefly visits Ciudad Juarez to imply (because she never, ever does anything as straightforward as argue) that the femicides there were caused by lead poisoning, but that's the only extra-national location she touches on.

The book is readable, it's just frustrating! Like, lady, if you wanted to write a book arguing that lead poisoning caused serial killers, write that book. If you wanted to write a book about what it was like growing up in a place where human lives were taken so lightly, write that book. If you wanted to write a book about how capitalism prizes money over human lives, write that book. As it is, you didn't write any of them. You tried to do it all, you told it in a style over substance way, and so it didn't quite work.

ANYWAY!

I also finished two audiobooks:

+ Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World by Dorian Lynskey. Read by the author, this was a good thing to have on while I worked. Lynskey is very interested in...the stories we tell ourselves about the end of the world, mostly through newspapers, fiction, and film. He divides things up by various potential world-enders--asteroids, the atomic bomb, climate change, etc. He gives us the historical context of these stories--the 1816 year without a summer, the development of the atomic bomb, the theories that people had about nuclear winter--but he's mostly concerned about how the wider culture talked about these ideas both overtly and implicitly. There's a ton in here about very weird texts written by very misanthropic white dudes, but it's all very interesting.

It's a nice sweeping book, in that he starts with Mary Shelley, goes through Jules Verne, visits a bunch of lesser-known mid-century disaster books, and comes right up to the present day and Don't Look Up. I thought he did a pretty decent job of balancing the main thing he wants us to remember--that people have been thinking the world was coming to an end since...since the world began, basically, and they've always been wrong--and the fact that climate change is real and is already having major affects on us. Those are hard things to balance!

Two things that made me extremely fond of Lynskey: he is quick to call out misanthropy where he sees it (often his tone is, "Wtf is up with this really weird white dude???") and also thinks that Deep Impact is a vastly superior movie to Armageddon in every conceivable way.

+ Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global by Laura Spinney about the Indo-European language family and its development. I am going to have to read this one myself. It just isn't nearly as suited to audiobook-listening as other books are. But my audiobook hold came in before the ebook one, so I listened to it.

I really dig learning anything we can about pre-history and anything about language development, so I was already inclined to like this book. I appreciated the way that Spinney tries to synthesize the latest theories from archaeology, linguistics, and genetics to create sketches of what life might have been like at various times and in various places. She explains linguistic concepts very clearly and seems especially to love thinking about how people's material situations would have affected how they spoke. She's very clear about when we know things for sure (rarely, given the age of what we're talking about), when things are speculative, which things have a lot of support, which things are fringe theories, etc. It feels like responsible "reporting on academic ideas to a general audience" to me, and that is a very difficult thing to do!

All in all, I think this is a strong book, but I'll need to read it with my own two eyes to properly appreciate it.

What I'm currently reading:

+ Re-reading The Dawn of Everything for a book club. Enjoying it again so far!

+ Half of The Time of Green Magic, a MG book about a blended family in London and their magical house. Wonderfully written, but I put it aside to finish up the other things I had to finish before they were due at the library. I will definitely finish it though!

Anybody got any book recs for either nonfiction or fiction set in Central Asia and/or Afghanistan prior to the 19th century? (Going back as far as you like.)

I just find this area of the world really interesting but find little information on it. I'm super interested in Samarkand, the Silk Roads, etc.

There are a number of travelogues that people have written, like, tracing the Silk Roads and things. And those are interesting! But I'm really looking for something that isn't filtered through a contemporary perspective.

Catching up for two weeks! I've read a lot of fanfic lately, so I've been reading fewer books than usual.

What I finished:

+ The Last Battle by C.S. Lewis. My Narnia reread is complete!

I'd been dreading this one and kind of putting it off, but on reread it's not actually all that bad? To me anyway--I totally get why other people hate it. I am not saying that it's good, but it's also not unreadable.

The problem is that Lewis has created this story entirely to serve the needs of his theological assertions, which makes for bad storytelling and worse worldbuilding. Preaching through fiction is always a bad idea because a story that exists to moralize is not going to be a good story. When, in previous books, Lewis sprinkled his theology throughout the stories, it was more or less fine--the story of a king who dies for the good of his people is a universal story, etc. You could always read the books literally as well as as analogy. Here, though, the theology takes over the narrative completely--there is no way to read this book on a literal level because just about every choice is made from the perspective not of a storyteller but of a preacher.

Plus, if you disagree with his theology, you're just going to be pissed off. I disagree with some of his theology myself, but I am much less pissed off than most because of my background. His particular brand of Christianity is very different than the white American evangelical kind I was raised in, for all those people have co-opted him. You have to understand how much gentler this view of soteriology is than the one I was surrounded with--Lewis embraces the idea of the virtuous pagan, for one thing, which is NOT a given in evangelical world. And perhaps more important, those who don't make it to heaven just cease to exist instead of being tortured for eternity. I realize this is probably hard for people who didn't grow up like I did to understand, but these ideas are significantly gentler than the evangelical view of hell. So when I encountered them as a kid, they felt freeing in a way I can't articulate. Between Lewis and Madeleine L'Engle, I had two Anglican fiction and nonfiction writers who had a more expansive view of God and life than I had been presented with, and they were lifelines to me.

So yeah, I don't hate this book, I just find it annoying and Not Good. I do like that we get more Eustace and Jill since they are my favorite of the characters from our world. I think it's kind of cool that we get to see Narnia from its first day to its last. Shift is a really good villain--not as good as Uncle Andrew, maybe, but Lewis knows how to write someone who is inherently selfish, and the early chapters with Shift and Puzzle are actually a fantastic depiction of an abusive friend dynamic. Lewis is really good at human foibles, the narratives we use to justify ourselves, etc.

I do not feel the need to ever read this one again but I'm glad I reacquainted myself with it as an adult so that I could decide how I feel about it.

+ Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water by Peter H. Gleick. This book is quite dated in statistics and things--I think it came out in 2010--but the central problem is, of course, still with us. This is a book that confirmed my belief that bottled water is problem: it is, of course, a lifeline for people in areas that don't have potable public water, and I am glad it exists. But it's ubiquity is indefensible in places that do, particularly in the US (places like Flint aside).

You can probably imagine the contents of this book: bottled water in the US is much less regulated than public water, therefore we don't know whether it's safe or not; it is not necessary in places that have clean public water; bottled water companies steal water from communities, destroying ecosystems; they prey on our fears; there's an industry (which I am 1000% confident has grown substantially since the time the book was published) of woo-y health grifters who sell special super waters, and these people are almost never stopped by authorities; and then there's the plastic. It's nice to see it all laid out clearly, though. And I also appreciate a book that is, really, a reminder that regulations are Good Actually.

So yeah, a worthwhile read.

+ Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves by Sophie Gilbert.

YIKES!!!!!! Gilbert deep-dives in pop culture depictions of and messages to and about women from, roughly, the late 90s to the mid-2010s, visiting topics like the way the powerful female musical artists of the 1990s were replaced by girls who couldn't stand up for themselves; the way the same thing happened in fashion with the powerful supermodels of the 1980s and early 1990s being replaced by, again, girls who couldn't stand up for themselves; depictions of women and femininity in reality TV; the way movies shifted from romcoms that centered female stories to bro comedies that hated and/or erased women; the era of Us Weekly, TMZ, and Perez Hilton and the way it ate female celebrities alive; and the #girlboss and Lean In eras. She keeps a Susan Faludi "backlash comes in waves" perspective on the whole thing.

There's also a lot about the pornification of culture--I really appreciated the nuance with which Gilbert handled this topic because I agree with her. Pornography, in the sense of art that exists to titillate and turn-on, is not a bad thing in itself and there are plenty of people who are out there creating and enjoying it in completely unobjectionable ways. But they're a minority: porn culture is hugely misogynistic, and the vast majority of porn that exists (often free of charge and disturbingly easy for children to stumble on) is hateful, violent, cruel, and racist. Gilbert worries, as do I, about how boys (and some girls) are getting their entire sexual education from these sources; porn provides a narrative of how to relate to sex and to women that is frankly terrifying. I think this is a huge problem that is very difficult to talk about, because most people who are talking about porn in negative ways are doing it from an anti-sex pov, often religious, and I think their criticisms are wrong. Again, I really appreciated how Gilbert talked all of this.

Overall, Gilbert is insightful, compassionate, clear-eyed, and accessible. This is a very well-written book by a very good writer, and I recommend it, whether as a book or, as I read it, an audiobook read by the author. It depressed the hell out of me, but it also reminded me of how resilient and strong and creative women are.

What I'm reading now:

A Lonely Death, the next Ian Rutledge mystery by Charles Todd.

What I finished:

+ Appointment with Death by Agatha Christie. Recced by scripsi, this is a very solid Christie with an interesting exploration of emotional abuse. There's no particular reason it needs to be set in the Levant and feature people visiting Petra--it could have been set literally anywhere outside the US--but it adds some nice color. The downside is the egregious amount of fatphobia and the weirdness of Christie writing about a pre-1948 Palestinian character as being antisemitic (I can't even BEGIN to unpack this), but otherwise a good Christie!

+ Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883 by Simon Winchester. This is an Erik Larson-style account of the largest volcanic explosion of modern times, which took place on a tiny volcanic island in between Sumatra and Java and killed tens of thousands of people. It was also one of the first major disasters that took place after the whole world was connected via underwater telegraph tables, so it became a worldwide phenomenon in a way that previous disasters had not.

The reason I say it's Larson-style is that it's cultural history, natural history, history of natural history, etc. all interwoven together. The major differences are that a) Larson tends to go back and forth between the different strands on a chapter-by-chapter basis, essentially creating a braid, and you never spend too much time on the "these are the mechanics of how this natural disaster happened" before getting back to people you care about, whereas Winchester divides his into chunks so you're kind of stuck with one topic until it's over and then you get to move onto a new one, and b) Larson is just a more engaging writer. Which is not to say that Winchester isn't an engaging writer, but the immediacy of Larson's writing that makes something like Isaac's Storm so suspenseful isn't nearly as strong with Winchester.

I've seen some people complaining on GoodReads that it focuses too much on the context and not enough on the explosion itself, but that doesn't particularly bother me.

My actual complaints are three-fold:

a) the GoodReads people are right in that there should have been more about the actual explosion and its aftermath. I like having all that context, but it shouldn't cut into the actual meat of the story. The aftermath in particular gets short-shrift, other than a chapter about how the explosion possibly contributed to an up-swelling of Islam-inspired nationalism in the decades afterwards. But Winchester is not the person I want to read that particular account from!

b) everything is super white-people-centric. I realize that the majority of the sources he had access to are in European-languages. But presumably he doesn't speak Dutch, and yet he drew on a number of Dutch sources, so he clearly knows how to get information from sources in languages he doesn't speak. Which makes the lack of it in non-European languages really egregious. Frankly, if you refuse to do the same for other languages, perhaps you are not the right person to write this particular book? I simply do not believe that an event of this magnitude that happened in the late 19th century wasn't written about in languages other than English and Dutch. There might not have been nearly as much out there in various Indonesian languages, for instance, but surely some of it had to exist! I really feel like it's incumbent upon someone telling this particular story to find those sources and make much of them.

c) Winchester seems to think that colonialism was not that bad, actually? He's really clear that certain parts of the Dutch colonial project were that bad, but he seems to think that once those were changed, then the Indonesians didn't have much to complain about. He doesn't ever say this, it's just a vibe I got. I could be wrong about it, but I kind of doubt it.

But the story itself was interesting, and I particularly appreciated the chapters about how all the amateur meteorologists all over the world gathered data that showed the effects the explosion had--that was so cool! I knew nothing about Krakatoa, so I actually did learn a lot, but I wish someone else had written this book.

+ The Red Door by Charles Todd. The premise of the Ian Rutledge series is that it's 1919/1920, he's back from the Somme with major PTSD and even more major survivor's guilt, fresh out of a mental institution, and trying to lose himself in his work at Scotland Yard. We travel around the UK with him as he investigates various things while trying to keep his grip on his sanity. I like this series because it's well-written and not fluffy; so many historical mystery series are just so cozy, and I do not want cozy in my mysteries. It definitely has that heavy sense of "we just watched an entire generation of young men be destroyed for absolutely nothing and now we are living in a death-haunted world" that I want in my post-WWI stories.

This particular offering had a very unique premise: a well-respected man just...disappears in London. Nobody knows where he's gone, but his family is definitely lying to Rutledge about something. Meanwhile in the north, there's a seemingly-unrelated murder, and Rutledge finds himself bouncing back and forth between these places, trying to prove that they're related.

Somebody complained in a GoodReads review that there's too much of him driving back and forth, and I am like, "Friend, have you read any of the books in this series so far?" That's like complaining that Ben January isn't getting enough rest. It's just part of the setup of the series.

But yeah, this was a good one.

What I'm reading now: I shockingly haven't started anything new yet! Yesterday was Juneteenth so I was off work and I basically lay around napping and reading fanfic all day. Probably I'll start something new tonight, and we will see what I am in the mood for then.

And we're back with book updates!

What I finished:

+ Lady of Perdition, the 17th (!) Benjamin January book by Barbara Hambly. This is one of the field trip books that's set outside New Orleans, this time in the Republic of Texas, which sounds like it was hell for anyone who wasn't a white dude, even more so than the rest of what would become the southern US later. The inciting incident of the book is so harrowing in concept (though not in actual description) I don't even want to speak of it but is very much a reality of being Black in the antebellum US.

It's also one of the ones where we meet up with a character from an earlier book, and those always make me wish I weren't reading the series so very slowly. The last time we met said character, it was back in book 7! Which I read several years ago! So I had vague memories of her and much stronger memories of the vibes of that book. But Hambly does a good job of reminding us of what we need to know without being heavy-handed.

Lots of good Ben-and-Hannibal stuff in this book, though, as always when we're away from New Orleans, I miss Rose and everyone back home. And as always with every single book in the series, I spend the whole time going, "When will Ben get a bath and a good meal and a full night's sleep?????" Poor guy is in his 40s, won't someone let him rest? If you're into whump, you don't get much better than Ben. I want to wrap him up in blankets (actually, no blankets, since all the places he goes are so very hot) and let him sleep for a thousand years.

All in all a good but not standout entry in the series. A thousand bonus points for a plotline involving stolen archives, apparently based on a real occurrence! THE TEXAS ARCHIVE WAR WAS A REAL THING.

+ The Incandescent by Emily Tesh, which I appreciated a lot but did not love. Tesh is a great writer, and this book has a fantastic premise--one of those dangerous magical schools books, but told from the perspective of one of the instructors. What makes this work so well is that Tesh clearly has a background in education and the book is, in many ways, an exploration of what it's like to be a teacher, both in the basic dealing with administrative tasks and finding time to grade papers and also in the struggle to connect with and inspire students. The book is suffused with real details of what teaching in a British school is actually like, and I always enjoy a take-your-job-to-ficbook take.

Our main character is, as in Tesh's last book, another strength. Tesh writes fantastic flawed characters--Walden isn't as immediately off-putting as Kyr from Some Desperate Glory, but her besetting sin is pride and it's a doozy. She's so well-intentioned and trying so hard and she's way more likeable than Kyr starts out, but also, like, LADY. So realistic in the depiction of an academic with a PhD and a certainty that her understanding of her field (in this case magic) is superior to everyone else's. The book is about her learning her limitations and to appreciate other people's insights and I liked that a lot.

We get a fun outsider pov of the four students who would, if this book was written by anyone else, be the main characters, and I must say that I would absolutely read a fic bout Will pining for Nikki. The magical system is quite fun and distinctive and lends itself well to formal study.

So yeah, I think this is a very strong book, I really liked it, but it didn't scratch any particular itches for me that would bump it up into the tier of books I love. Still, I like Tesh's writing so very much and can't wait to see what she does next.

+ Miss Silver Comes to Stay, the 15th(!) Miss Silver book by Patricia Wentworth. As usual, I don't have a great deal to say; I always enjoy a Wentworth book, but they're always doing loosely the same thing. I do appreciate her commitment to having the victim be someone we really hate.

+ The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. I haven't read this one since my British Gothic Fiction class in undergrad. (This was a summer semester class and there were only four other people in the class, and I think I was the only one who really wanted to be there. But I really wanted to be there, so hopefully I made up for the others' lack of enthusiasm.)

I remembered this as more of a horror story, but I think that's me confusing it with the film adaptation The Innocents, which is a banger of a movie and highly recommended. The book is also a banger, but it feels much more like a psychological thriller than a horror story imo. The fun of it is the perspective of our main character, an example of the gothic governess type, whose mind we're immersed in. Is she crazy? Is she evil and lying to us? Is everything she's describing really happening?

This is a book about suggestion and subtext, and I love that about it. More is not stated than is, which is always really effective in a ghost story. In this case, though, the things that aren't stated aren't related to the actions or appearance of the ghost/monster/killer but instead to the nature of the damage the bad guys are doing to the alleged victims. The book is more chilling than scary, which I'm into.

This was apparently James's selling out book, and I, for one, wish he sold out more often. There can never be enough gothic novels in the world as far as I'm concerned.

What I'm reading now:

+ Sad Cypress by Agatha Christie. I read most if not all of the Poirot books in middle school, but that was...over twenty years ago, so I remember nothing about this particular one. Shoutout to scripsi for mentioning it as one of her favorite Christies!

What I finished:

+ Westmark by Lloyd Alexander. I read the Chronicles of Pyrdain a couple of times when I was a kid and also The Iron Ring, but I completely missed this series. Several people with good (read: my) taste had it on their 100 books list, so I ordered it through interlibrary loan.

I see why people imprinted on it! I did not imprint on it, being not the right age for it, but it went directly to my "wish I'd discovered it as a kid" shelf on GoodReads. Alexander is better at the prose level than I realized as a kid, and it was a joy to read his writing. I liked our main character Theo, who is a person who always tries to do the right thing but is not always sure what that is (relatable) and is surrounded by people with different ethical frameworks than he has. I hate to be all "the publishing industry has gone downhill!" but honestly, very few authors (Hardinge, as always, is a big exception) are doing this level of nuanced morality and prose on even the YA level, much less the MG one. It's a joy to read "old school" YA/MG books and be so totally trusted by the writer. That said, it is very much a book for kids, so every time I wanted the writing to really dig into a particular idea or feeling, it didn't, but, like, that's a me problem. It's perfect for a MG reader!

I also think it's interesting how his worldbuilding looks at a glance like Generic Medieval European Fantasy, but it's clearly not--this is actually Reformation-era fantasy with the importance of printing presses and a Cromwell-esque villain, and it reminded me that your worldbuilding doesn't have to be complex to be good and distinctive. Just a few details make things feel realistic.

Also, this is an aside, but I was looking at Alexander's GoodReads page, I do not think I'd ever seen a picture of him before, and I am so taken by his face, especially his nose. He looks like a Froud illustration! Exactly what a children's fantasy author should look like! What a wonderful face!!!

+ Also, Everything Is Tuberculosis again. I had long ago put both the book and the audiobook on hold at the library and then ended up buying a copy of the book instead, so I read it right after it came out, but the audiobook hold finally arrived last week so I listened to it again. I still think it's great; I still wish it was longer; I still understand why it isn't.

What I'm currently reading:

+ Still working on City of Stairs. I might not finish it before it's due back at the library and then I will probably have to wait for it to come around again!

+ I also finally started Tendencies by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. This is my first time reading more than short excerpts of queer studies icon Sedgwick and damn, that woman could construct a sentence. This book is a collection of essays and I am reading one essay at a time. It'll take me a while to get through it but she is not a writer that you rush through! Many of her insights seem even more relevant now than they did in the early 90s when she was writing.

Lol there’s an entire section of the Chronicle of Narnia wiki page about the reading order question!!!