Walking on the Moon

Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin is slippery and solid at the same time.  As an interpretation of a ballad about Faerie, that’s delightful.

I found my way to it by way of Jo Walton’s glowing review in her excellent What Makes This Book So Great, a gift that keeps on giving.  That collection of reviews is well worth reading.  Tam Lin seems hard to come by electronically, which also delayed me.  The LA Public Library has a solid electronic version.  Now that my hat tipping is done, let me talk about Tam Lin.

Tam Lin is  part of a series of fairy tales re-imagined, and much of the introductory and other supporting materials in my edition describe that clearly.  It would be interesting to spring Tam Lin on someone without that warning. For much, if not most, of the telling the book is a sweet coming-of-age story set at a small liberal arts college in Minnesota in the early 1970’s. The narrator is a winning young woman, Janet Carter.

As a character, she’s tough to beat.  She’s universal enough that anyone can relate to her – including a male hillbilly from Western New York born a decade later – but specific enough to be instantly memorable and recognizable. The rest of the cast is equally well-realized. I love the idea of spending time with her and her literary, witty, quirky, friends.

Most of Tam Lin follows Janet and her compatriots through almost 4 years of school, with the shifting alliances, hard work, incongruous moments, and other excitement of that thrilling time.  I’m a sucker for coming-of-age stuff, and this is brilliant.

All that was such good stuff that without the introductory materials, I wouldn’t have noticed the fantastic elements coalescing.  When they do, the world cants in exactly the way it would if one woke up in a horror movie.  Janet doesn’t let us down in any way: she’s resourceful, intelligent, and every inch the capable hero.  The world she’s in changes its details and fundamentals – a literary world becomes a genre-based one – but she’s constant.  New rules, but everyone stays who they are.

As is my wont, I’ve talked about the details and features I liked about Tam Lin, but forget all that.  Tam Lin is a great story well told.

A must.

Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker is a solid steampunk thriller set in 1860’s Seattle.  Also, zombies.

And quite honestly, there’s not too much more to say about it.  Priest builds a believable, pretty consistent clockwork milieu and throws some vibrant characters into it.  There is a good mix between emotional stakes (mom seeking her lost son, son redeeming his father’s legacy), action sequences, and big reveals.  It’s a good popcorn movie of a book.

Recommended.

The more I turn this book over in my mind, the more I admire it.

In Everything I Never Told You, Celeste Ng has created an intricate and polished depiction of tragic events in a claustrophobic and contracting family sphere. Every time I consider another angle – themes, tone, iconography, historical context – I’m impressed by the care and sophistication of the work.

Tonally it reverberated with Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye and Stephen Dobyn’s Church Of The Dead Girls.  They share the sense of a series of moments that illuminate a lingering initial image in a cloistered world.  Ng brings that seeping revelatory technique to a family in small town Ohio pre-1980.  I feel the echoes of those other works but Everything is distinct.

The plot and characters all mesh intricately and organically.  It opens with a tragedy and oozes outward, though Everything is not a mystery. The puzzle frames the ideas rather than being the end.  That’s true of well-crafted mysteries as well – and I cast no shade on the genre – but Everything‘s world is messier and earthier than most genre settings. Different readers will come to different conclusions about the family here, yet the motivations and themes are clear and complex.

In addition to its literary power, Ng connects her plot and characters into a world that is simultaneously realistic and nostalgic.  One can feel the nods toward popular culture and the care given to accuracy. Those can be at odds, and Ng chooses the cultural iconography and historical themes well.  even things that feel incidental often become more illuminating on reflection.

The narrative incorporates more traditional literary iconography as well. Ng does the tricky work of balancing her characters’ realism and structural roles with uncommon skill.  Symbolism that might be too on the nose in a similar plot almost snuck up on me here.

It’s also a compelling read.  I’d like to say it’s a fun read, but that’s false.  The experience is a lot like my idea of wrestling a boa constrictor.  Everything about the novel becomes more claustrophobic and urgent as the narrative catches up to the climax from multiple angles.  As the book goes on and the characters grow more defined, individual scenes seamlessly jump between points of view.  That results in a sense of simultaneous disorientation and intensity.  Other techniques are deployed with similar virtuosity.

Overall, it’s a deep powerful novel.

A must.

Ray Kurzweil is an advocate for the idea that strong artificial intelligence will develop in the fairly near term and merge with human intelligence. He believes that this, combined with a combination of personality uploading and biohacking, will extend human lives arbitrarily.  The Singularity Is Near is one of his books outlining that position in some detail.  I’m unconvinced.

Part of this is undeniably because Singularity was published in 2006 and there’s a certain datedness to the text and technology. It makes the read feel like Kurzweil is behind the times, though at the time he obviously wasn’t.

That wasn’t where his arguments fall apart for me, though.  Kurweil spends a lot of his time talking about the accelerating performance of technology, but little on accelerating depth of understanding.  It seems to me that until we understand what we’re talking about when we talk about consciousness, there’s little hope of capturing it. I don’t believe that there’s any mystical element to capture, but whatever complexities produce a sense of self remain elusive.

It was an interesting read, but to me more of a diverting artifact than a convincing argument.

I should really confer with my friend Jeff before I write any of these capsules.  I’m frequently lukewarm on a book until I tell him about what I found out from reading it.  This is written after such a session, so I may actually be too excited about James Hamilton-Patterson’s Marked For Death.

Marked is a history of World War I aviation from a British author and perspective.  That’s an unusual one for me, as most of what I’ve read has been from the American  point of view (or from American or German participants.)  Hamilton-Patterson is very explicit that Marked is not a linear narrative of the war, but a ramble through topics about WWI aviation that interest him and that have been under-represented.  It’s an interesting set of topics, and clearly of our modern era.

He spends his time talking about how the UK bureaucracy inhibited adoption and development of aviation early in the war, some under-explicated specifics of the aircraft design, the structure of flight training, and aeromedical issues.  One gets the sense that he’s a pilot, as many of these issues are hot buttons in our fraternity.  It was a pleasure to learn more about many of them.

While I did enjoy the ramble, the lack of narrative focus did allow some of the chapters to drag.  I’m largely a motivated reader on many of these topics, and I felt the momentum flag at several points.

Overall, Hamilton-Patterson brings a fresh perspective and solid research to under reported topics in WWI aviation.

Recommended.

Sidewalking is David Ulin’s collection of thoughts composed while walking the streets of downtown LA.  Of course he’s polished those thoughts more than that, but that’s the idea.

Ulin is a New York City transplant and academic, which shapes his thought and writing style.  His views of LA are informed by comparisons to NYC’s own vibrant street life.  These places are very different, though the differences seem to constantly surprise those raised in either place.  I say that as a transplant myself who has been surprised by the differences between LA and my life.  Everyone’s experiences light LA from a different angle, and Ulin’s are both interesting and well expressed.

Ulin does have the perspective of writing as an academic.  Again, I have some experience in that world, and we often write for posterity.  Ulin does this, citing historical perspectives and framing his physical and literary ramblings against the policy initiatives that LA city government are carrying out to revitalize downtown.  It’s a nice combination of erudition and street experience, albeit from different streets.  For me many of his thoughts are as much conversation starters as pronouncements. I keep wanting to say “yeah, but in Southern California…”

And I’m no native.

Overall, an interesting read.

I was successfully marketed to for this book by The Big Library Read at the LA Public Library.  It’s a book targeted to young adults – the Twilight demographics – about a school shooting.  A book for high schoolers about a school shooting seems inherently interesting to me.

Overall, Marieke Nijkamp’s This Is Where It Ends is a well constructed thriller with some meat to it. Nijkamp builds a set of detailed characters who turn like clockwork through a believable scenario.  The motivations all feel realistic to me, often forming reasons for the horrifying actions without becoming excuses.  The story is told from various students’ points of view that form a mosaic view of the events.  The plot and storytelling are excellent.

The diversity of the cast is also impressive.  Despite being set in a small town, the students all come from believably different backgrounds.  Multiple sexualities and ethnicities are all represented without feeling forced.  The sexuality of some of the students is a plot point, but not one that is overplayed.  It all fit together well and felt like a look at a realistic school, not something constructed to make a point.

The major shortcoming for me was that none of the student’s narration had a different voice to me.  Everyone had different details and features, but their word choices and sentence constructions all were consistent. Nijkamp corralled a bunch of diverse students who all talk like they’re in the same English class.  A missed opportunity, IMHO.

Recommended.

Between the World and Me caught a fair amount of attention for its frank and clear assessment of the dialog between black men and their sons, not to mention between black society and America as a whole.  It is all that – and that’s a lot – but it’s also something more special.

As harrowing and sometimes appalling as America’s treatment of black people has been, there are many heartfelt factual histories of that treatment and the ongoing evolution of that situation.  Ta-Nehisi Coates’s work here is more brave and personal than most.

Here is what I’ve learned about Mr. Coates from Between the World and Me: he’s a deep thinker and a poetic writer.  The abstractions and metaphors he chooses when writing of his experience illuminate people and institutions in personal and unique ways.  Individual word choices turn colleges into churches and human policies into automations of menace.  His expressions are clear and powerfully show institutions and experiences in new ways.

Beyond that, Coates is an atheist.  His point is not to justify his religious position, but it informs everything he writes.  He speaks of how American systems control the bodies of black people; he describes the mixed feelings that the power of churches in the black community evoke in him – and particularly how his beliefs can deny him solace.  The reflections of his atheism are only one way that World is powerfully personal, but it is unusual and telling.

Overall, a brilliantly written mixture of memoir, position paper, and message to the future (the text is written as a message to his son) well worth one’s time.

Strongly recommended.

Huh.

I hadn’t realized that Jean Stein’s West of Eden was such a recent release.  I checked it out of the LA Public Library‘s e-book collection to try that out and assumed that it was an older book.

Eden is essentially a set of interviews about key players in Los Angeles’s past.  I mean that there is no explicit narrator’s voice or textual context.  The whole book is composed of transcribed snippets of interviews laced into these discussions.  The compositions are deft, which provides Stein’s narrative voice.

Reading the interviews rather than hearing them in a narrator-free documentary gave me a sense of distance from the events being described.  Some of these events are detailed stories of chaotic LA parties, which makes the absence of immediacy pleasantly dissonant.  Drinking stories on the page are different than in a secluded bar, though the implications flow both ways. The overall effect is an unusual reading experience to say the least.

While I found this to be an interesting way to understand these figures – and the figures are fascinating – I think I need more context to really understand the significance of them. I’m still looking for more conventional histories of LA.

Recommended.

It’s Warren Ellis‘s fault that I read this, and I thank him for it.  Kio Stark has a great gift for seeking out and describing the small moments that interacting with strangers can bring you.  There are moments of fright, enlightenment, joy, melancholy, and usually mixtures of all those.  She writes remarkably beautifully about them.  Ellis brought them to me by mentioning her brilliant newsletter in his brilliant newsletter.

When Strangers Meet is Stark’s manifesto claiming that people should seek these moments out. The whole thing is brought to us by the TED folks, no relation.  She makes a fine argument and I’m predisposed to believe her.  Seeking out exchanges with strangers one of the things I’ve begun doing lately, and I agree with all the benefits she claims.  But the best arguments for her position are her vignettes.

Recommended, as is her newsletter.