Go Set a Watchman, Harper Lee

I am fiercely glad that this book was published, because I can relate a lot to adult Scout. I can relate to her frustration with coming home and seeing your racist/sexist family with new eyes, and I can relate to her concerns about getting married and losing her self. It's exactly the stage I am in life, and I am grateful to have Scout keep me company in my rage against what it's like to grow up.

I began reading this thinking, this is a perfectly good book, in line with most contemporary fiction at the time, whatever inspired her to write To Kill a Mockingbird instead? Whatever inspired her editor to think that she'd be capable of To Kill a Mockingbird, when the story of a liberal twenty something's disillusionment upon returning to her small southern hometown might've felt far more relevant and modern? The answer came to me as the story went on, though: I don't know much about the politics of this time, but I wonder if Harper Lee decided that -- instead of writing a novel about a young person's who's critical of racist politics, and being just another New York voice condemning the racial dynamics in Alabama, why not write a novel that logically lays out the social conditions, and ties racial injustice back to the Constitution? Maybe somewhere in the writing process, she did realize that she could make more of a difference deriving proof of human kindness, than expressing her frustration with it.

The Silkworm, Robert Galbraith

Robert Galbraith is killing it. His second book is ever more impressive than the first, which was already fantastic.

I think Jo's partly writing a satire here: award winning literary book veer towards abundant sex, discomfitting brutality and gore, more sex especially focusing on genitals, pretentious stuff like Balzac and palpitating balls, and characters that are completely unlikeable. And now Jo comes along and shows us you can write a perfectly good book with warm characters (rich with personal dilemmas beyond the realm of the job), good plot, and not much view of anyone's balls (although we can't escape the occasional dick).

The Vorrh, B. Catling

I thought this book was highly inconsistent and, in many parts, lacking.

The first chapter shows the promise of a concise, erudite short story that is unique in its conception and thoughtfully detailed; in other words, I think B. Catling proves himself capable of doing a lot better than he did. Then the rest of the book has great ideas, but they seem lackadaisically executed. Essenwald is a fascinating concept -- a city that feeds on a forest -- but the descriptions of it are highly generic. I wanted to know more about this place that sounds much like something you'd find on Geoff Manaugh's BLDBLOG, but we're not given the kind of specific, thoughtful details that make a setting tangible rather than a vague anyplace. The setting merely seems like feels like a weak mirror of present day or historic social, political and economic dynamics between city and industry. That's how I felt about most of the rest of the book: very interesting ideas, undeveloped.

I found it hard to care about the characters, and I didn't get the sense that the author cared that much about them, either. The cyclops, Gertrude, Cyrena, the frenchman... are all interesting, but that's like reading a miscellaneous piece of news in the papers and going "oh, interesting." I find them forgettable after I close the books. Most of the characters that populate the book seem incidental and not really relevant, which may be the point of surrealist art, but with an omniscient narrator and a story whose rasion d'etre is obscure, what is there to glean from scrutinizing the minute interactions between them? The only character who felt truly fleshed out is Muybridge, and I suspect this is because he is based on a real person. I know from writing fanfiction that it is far easier to write about a ready-made character, than to develop characters yourself to the point where they feel convincingly like real people. And maybe that's the problem here: the author is a better at writing about real events, real people, using real models for a place. It is not enough to imagine an interesting place like the Vorrh and call it done, for a setting to matter, it has to be fleshed out.

Yes, you can have a great novel with a generic setting and incidental characters, focusing instead on exploring a particular philosophy or scientific theory, or a single generic character's rich internal world. But the Vorrh is ostensibly about a place, and if the place is vague and elusive, then it must be through the character's adventures that we learn about it -- and the characters leave us little to learn.

crazy rich asians, kevin kwan

kevin kwan wrote the book that i'd never write, dealing with a topic (asian culture) that i'm super interested in writing about.

guys, i know people like these. spendthrift aunties, sensitive bromance guys, smart girls who go to top schools whose life is incomplete according to their families until they marry.

kwan's world is so rich with stereotypes, references, canto "pidgin" dialect (i love it when writers introduce dialect to english novels), all the secret acronyms popular amongst asians. like rachel, i'm only dimly aware that there are crazy rich asians, but this is the world i grew up in. kwan gets it and shows it so well.

i think a good writer is a good observer of human nature (and culture), and kwan's characters and settings ring true. this book is really a documentary, with the very conventional catty chicklit plot as a vehicle for us to be voyeurs to a culture that is largely undocumented. most hong kongers live these lives that are materialistic, paradoxical, but few reflect upon it (unless they've had some sort of foreign contact) because it's the norm. and kwan has captured it in all its material contradictions, its habits, all the -las and fucky fucks that locals think and talk in.

at times i was frustrated that kwan doesn't go deeper be literary rather than poppy -- he's quite capable of it, just read his sentences, acute one-liner descriptions of a character of full chapters devoted to the shallow Christian aunties -- but i think the shallowness is intentional. crazy rich asians is unabashedly voyeuristic, and i think it works that way. too much self-reflection gets didactic; here we're forced to draw our own conclusions, feeling slightly guilty that we enjoy the details of rich people's lives so much.

it's not a bad thing to write for a pop audience -- i think, now, of how many people more people are made aware of this social phenomenon of the dynastic families and the nouveau rich of asia. the beginning is perfection -- we all have these stereotypes about asians, right? and with Ormsby/Wormsby's racism at the outset, kwan's saying, get ready for a whole new set of stereotypes. a set more intricate and nuanced than you're aware of.

i wonder if, two hundred years ago, Vanity Fair would've been put on the chicklit shelf. if victorian novels of the nouveau rich were just newcoming bestsellers. this book is GOOD. maybe there's nothing wrong with it chasing a pop formula.

Seraphina, Shadow Scale, and Sex-Positive YA Lit

NOTE: Contains Spoilers for Seraphina and Shadow Scale

Rachel Hartman's Gorredd, the quasi-medieval fantasy world that Seraphina and Shadow Scale are set in, is particularly awesome for its sexual diversity, with a full cast of LGQTB characters.  In an interview on The Midnight Garden, she says that "Diversity is very important to me, and I honestly don’t see how one could populate an imaginary world without it."  What I like even more is that although this is YA, she doesn't shy away from sex at all: sex doesn't just come up as romance, it simply is, matter-of-factly, part of the story.  After all, Seraphina is the love child of a dragon and a human.  Raunchy jokes sprinkle the text as part of the fabric of medieval life (very believable, as any scholar will know, read Pantagruel and Gargantua for a start) rather than something written in for sensational reading, and Seraphina, a witty sixteen-year-old, is no stranger to sexual innuendo.

"Banished men, and likely troublemakers?; scoffed Guntard. 'They’re locked in the eastern basement, the proper donjon being full of wine casks for some significant state visit coming up."

"Sweet St. Siucre, which one might that be?" someone asked with a laugh.

"The one where your mother beds a saar and lays an egg. Omelette for all!"

-- Chapter 12, Seraphina

He thought we’d been up to something back here, with the curtains drawn. Tuning each other’s lutes, as they say. Practicing our polyphony. Playing the crumhorn.

-- Chapter 16, Seraphina

“All great houses are near a village and a river. We have a proverb: ‘In highlandts, every man is earl of his own valley.’ Thet means a lot of valleys. Also, means a rude joke in Samsamese.”

"Uh, I don't need that one spelled out."

-- Chapter 11, Shadow Scale

While Kiggs and Seraphina respectively revere and wrestle with propriety almost religiously (a self-imposed standard that we discover is of their own making), amid a conservative cultural background -- one where illegitimate children are scorned and Daanites (gay) are persecuted, and human-dragon intercourse seen as the most revulsive of all -- the characters we get to know are unhesitatingly sex-positive.  Speaking about watching her dragon mother fall in love with her human father, Viridius tells Seraphina, "I'm a Daanite, I don't judge other people's love affairs." (Chapter  The elderly and ailing Viridius cohabits with a much younger, oversized half-dragon.  A decidedly unattractive, bald, white man falls in love with a transgender, dark-skinned ityasaari.  Eskar, though devoted to Orma, apparently has no qualms being non-monogamous: 

"I wonder if Eskar will consent to be mated?"

“She chose Orma,” I said throatily, still coughing.

“Nothing stops her from choosing me as well.” The old saarantras gave me a sly sidelong look. “Sometimes our reason will lead us to the same morality as your empathy and feeling, and sometimes it won’t. I find that …” His mouth formed not-quite words, waiting for his mind to catch up. “Exhilarating?” he offered at last.

-- Chapter 27, Shadow Scale

At the end of Seraphina, Kiggs (remember he's an eighteen year old boy) blushes to think of the mechanics of Seraphina's conception.  At the end of Shadow Scale, Seraphina is unfazed by Dame Okra's learing comments about how Glisselda and Kiggs will produce an heir (Dragons have artificial insemination technology, right, Rachel?).  Seraphina's reply politely indicates that she doesn't give any fucks about what Dame Okra thinks.

So many readers are uneasy with the ending, because it presents a lie, a fabrication not so different from the one that haunted Seraphina's childhood.  I think there is a difference.  Bluffing, wit, stealth, and deviously legal loopholes, have never been a liability in Seraphina's world: falsehoods are not inherently wrong though they have consequences, but honesty is not black and white, not without consequence, either.  The truth that liberated Seraphina was a personal truth, coming-to-terms with whom she is and finding acceptance for that.  A younger Seraphina -- the one tortured by all the rude jokes about dragons -- might have blushed to hear Dame Okra's insinuations about her sex life.  Seraphina at the end of Shadow Scale is perfectly confident in her new role.

Eighty years later, it appears that the people -- or historians -- of Gorredd were not fooled by this subterfuge.  "Is it true that you and Prince Lucian Kiggs, Heaven hold him, confessed your love for each other before the dragon civil war even began?" Father Fargle asks her.  Seraphina, who was so tortured about having to remain discreet in her adolescence, has completely owned discretion now, to a degree that even the historian was complicit in, for he says, "yet I felt and still feel that her twinkling eyes answered, even if her tongue would not."    

I am a cat, Soseki Natsume

At first this cat was tedious, but the relentlessness of the cat's musings, or the persistence of the (presumably) faithfulness in translation, brought me, eventually, fully, into his world.



pg. 104
Cat's paws are as if they do not exist.  Wheresoever they may go, they never make clumsy noises.  Cats walk as if on air, as if they trod on clouds, as quietly as the stone going light-tapped under water, as an ancient Chinese harp touched in a sunken cave.  The walking of a cat is the instinctive realization of all that is most delicate

pg. 223
Even this gathering of gasbags cannot wheeze on forever, and the pressure of their conversation is now fast whimpering down toward exhaustion.

pg. 278
One seeker after inspiration, convinced that the secret of its attainment lay in constipation, assiduously strove for that prior condition by eating a dozen unripe persimmons for fruitless years on end.

I'm sure no good can come of encouraging a cabbage, that creature born to craven passiveness, to indulge himself in loafing gloomy idelness. ... But bigots such as he would never listen to a cat's advice; so I decided to let him stew in his own dull juice..
 pg. 312

I am a cat.  Some of you may wonder how a mere cat can analyzehis master's thoughts with the detailed acumen which I have just displayed.  Such a feat is a mere nothing for a cat.  Quite apart from the precision of my hearing and the complexity of my mind, I can also read thoughts.  Don't ask me how I learned that skill.  My methods are none of your business.  The plain fact remains that when, apparently sleeping on a human lap, I gently rub my fur against his tummy, a beam of electricity is thereby generated, and down that beam into my mind's eye every detail of his innermost reflections is reflected.  One day, for instance, my master, while gently stroking my head, suddenly permitted himself to entertain the atrocious notion that, if he skinned this snoozing moggy and had its pelt made up into a waistcoat, how warm, how wonderfully warm, that Kittish Warm would be.  I at once sensed what he was fthinking, and felt an icy chill creep over me.  It was quite horrible.  Anyway, it is this extrasensory gift which has enabled me to tell you not only what my master said but even what he thought throughout this dreary evening.  pg. 349