Angela Ambroz
Gorgeous. Masterfully told - a perfect novel. Spiritual and profound and GORGEOUS.
Briefly: told through a series of letters from the protagonist, Celie, it begins as something atmospheric and shimmering and vague. She's young, terribly ignorant, afraid, and living in a very small, limited world. I had trouble placing the context and understanding what was going on, and so I cheated and looked it up on wiki: oh, it's 1930s Georgia, okay. Which I guess is one of the first big points of the book: the multi-generational nature of racism and oppression in the US. In other words, I could tell it was the South, but I couldn't tell which century. :/
The oppression is, indeed, very very oppressive, but the book is a touching and beautiful portrait of Celie's eventual emancipation and empowerment. It feels completely cliche to even write it like that, but that's what it is, and it's very special and very touching. It's uplifting in such a deep way. I don't want to give away the latter half of the book, but there's an extended sequence of letters from another (unexpectedly returned) character that was also eye-opening, mind-expanding. There's also a scene where the title is explained - okay, that is usually something I am always skeptical about (explaining book titles in books themselves, like “Now we must await... THE RETURN OF THE KING.” sigh) - but here it was such a surprising, perfect moment. The color purple indeed! THE COLOR PURPLE. Like all good art, it made me see my own world in a new, fresh way.
I also felt like this touched on such important, deep aspects of the black experience in America. Really, REALLY good. Can't recommend it enough.
A carrier-pigeon's-eye view of the Eternal City, lovingly - meticulously - dazzlingly rendered. I am in awe of Macauley's dizzying mastery of perspective. But I guess that's what you get with a RISD degree in architecture? This made me nostalgic for Rome.
This has been in rotation for several months now, and it always provides ample amusement to both kid and me. Lucy is a tutu-wearing extrovert who is READY. TO MAKE. SOME NEW FRIENDS!!! Her mother wishes her good luck, and Lucy mostly comes on way too strong, way too fast for all the other animals. She despairs that she'll never find a friend. Spoiler: she does find a friend.
This is a sweet, charming book about socializing - our primo ape behavior, after all!
Do you wish someone - JUST SOMEONE - would make a 1980s-fetishizing nostalgia-fest of some mainstream hegemonic geekery? And did you somehow miss: the Blade Runner reboot, the Star Wars reboots, the Indiana Jones reboot, the Battlestar Galactica reboot, the goddamn Fuller House reboot, Stranger Things, and the fact that Hollywood no longer makes any original content?!
Do you YEARN for someone to retell that plight of the white boy geek, with all its hilarious and heartbreaking stereotypes such as: (1) being pale and socially awkward while pining after a girl you don't know anything about! (2) attributing a sacred romantic connection via your certified Nice Guy(tm) behavior! (3) attributing sacred importance to knowing obscure pop culture (American, middle class) trivia! (4) the HIERARCHY OF POP CULTURE - for example, the received wisdom that Empire Strikes Back is the best Star Wars, synthwave is good music, and other Received Wisdoms that YOU SHALL NOT DOUBT!
Do you also enjoy having this tale of the worship of a totally corporate hegemonic geekery wrapped up in a moral fable that is ostensibly about how EVIL corporate hegemonic geekery is!?! Ha HA!
Well... maybe you do. I certainly don't! And so I found this book boring as hell, with ugh values. Look. I grew up as a geeky girl in Pennsylvania, right next door to Ernest Cline's Ohio. I was a middle class American geek. I thought Blade Runner was the pinnacle of fine cinema, I played text-based RPGs on my crappy ass AOL 56kbps connection, and I re-watched Star Wars many times. In other words, I was a super basic, standard issue geek, with nary an original thought. Now, together with the rest of my geek generation, we're using our consumer spending power to protract this adolescence and further idolize Boba Fett and inculcate this stuff as a cultural religion. It's SO BORING. Simon Pegg had some good thoughts about this a few years ago.
Anyway, I grew up becoming more and more aware of how Mainstream White Dude Geekery often gate-kept me out of their shit. I didn't realize this at first, but now that I'm an older lady, I notice it fast and have zero patience left.
WHICH BRINGS ME TO THIS BOOK!
This book is the PINNAAAAACLLLE of gatekeeping white boy geekery. It perpetuates a super narrow view of what it means to be a “real geek”, and its ideas of geekery are completely frozen in time in the 1990s. The banter of Parzival, the hero, and his buddy, Aech, as they hang out in the virtual reality World of Warcraft-esque “OASIS” reminded me of middle school; not in a good way. “Chick flick” and “fag” are early insults, and the whole book can be summarized as a laundry list catalog of 1980s cultural references (as well as lots of our narrator TELLING us about how deep the laundry list goes - dude, oh God, I don't care).
The plot is a “capture the flag” tournament, embedded in the OASIS virtual reality world. The real world is a standard issue shitty dystopia, with paper thin worldbuilding. There's some awed references to “coding” and “l33t h4x0rs” that felt really tired. And, oh yeah, the only ladies in the story are a love interest (who the hero falls in love with instantly) and a shock reveal that felt, oh man, pretty social justice shoe-horned in.
Throughout the book, I was like, but how self-aware is all this? Is this a kinda meta commentary on white guy hegemonic geekery? The social justice shoe-horn towards the end of the book shows Cline means well. There's scenes where Parzival, in the real dystopian world, seems to be aware that he's missing out on reality outside. These scenes feel like they might be from The Machine Stops, an early 1900s proto-sci fi about a world where people fear direct, unmediated interaction with reality and live in underground hives. I laughed out loud about how Cory Doctorow and Wil Wheaton are the politician-gods of OASIS. BUUTTTT then we get more and more laundry lists of 1980s cultural paraphernalia, and we're off again.
I mean, for the love of God, this imagines a future world (WORLD, WHOLE PLANET) that is frozen in cultural time, has had no progress, diversity or advancement of its world culture, and everyone just frickin' loves their spoonfed Lucasfilm. Aaaaaghrhrghgrhh I DON'T CARE ABOUT YOUR XP POINTS, I DON'T CARE ABOUT INANE TRIVIA, AND I SAY THIS AS A PERSON WHO REALLY DOES ENJOY LUCASFILM, ZEMECKIS, SPIELBERG AND ALL THAT SHIT, BUT I WANT MORE FROM MY LIFE OKAY I WANT THAT AND OTHER THINGS, OTHER IDEAS, OTHER VIEWPOINTS
Okay, okay, sorry. It got away from me. But the thing that's especially disappointing is that the whole “virtual reality as safe space for geekery” HAS been done well and better by Cory Doctorow (!) indeed in the much smarter In Real Life and For the Win. So yeah, read those instead.
I'm writing this review in November 2014. At the moment:
- It's illegal for a woman in Saudi Arabia to drive a car.
- Women in the US earn less than men for the same work.
- Only 10% of Wikipedia's editors are women, 11% of open source software contributors are women, and don't even get me started on trying to be an entrepreneur while female.
- This happened last month.
And so on.
Also, as a lady who writes sci-fi and loves science/tech, I sometimes run into some - hmm, what's the technical word? - idiot talk from time to time. Just dudes sometimes implying or outright saying that I can't possibly be in it for the computers! (Let me say it plainly, I'm in it for the computers.) Or what have you. It's in moments like these, when Dude #1 makes a joke about women not knowing how to find CTRL+ALT+DEL, I rage-stroke and die at the lunchtable, and Dude #2 says, “But Angela, many women just don't go into computer science! It's a FACT.”
Or how many dudes - HOW MANY DUDES - appropriate the “fixed-state” model of ally-ness, where they decide, “I am not a sexist!”, as if it's a permanent state of being, and then get SO OFFENDED if I point out that they may have been sexist that one time when they said that one thing. Dude, sexism/feminism/any-ism-ing is a process, a series of behaviors, a SUBROUTINE IF YOU WILL. It is most definitely NOT a fixed state. You don't get a badge. THERE ARE NO BADGES.
I'm yelling. Sorry. As you can tell, I get worked up about this stuff. I get worked up about it because sometimes it feels like you still have to defend feminism, and that's just ridiculous. Feminism = civil rights = freedom and justice. I mean, COME ON.
Anyway. I wasn't always like this. Recently, I dusted off and re-read some of my 2003 fanfic and was APPALLED, I tell you, at how deeply, stupidly sexist it all was. Big beefy dudes rescuing brainless women, and so on and so forth. I'm embarrassed some of these tropes permeated even my early published stories. I'm embarrassed that I once thought writing women was hard or boring. Wow, patriarchal osmosis!
WHICH BRINGS ME TO THE BOOK. This book is by Gloria Steinem, a 1970s “women's lib” icon who recently got the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Mr. Obama (husband of Michelle). It's a collection of essays she wrote throughout the 70s and 80s, with some 90s post-scripts. It covers your Standard Feminist Fare, from the stupid ways women are portrayed in our culture, to legislating women's bodies, to basic rights and freedoms. It's kiiinda mostly second-wave feminism, I guess: i.e. the feminism that's mostly about white middle-class Anglo ladies. Like, her essays on trans stuff were kinda, eh, close-minded? To put it lightly?
BUT! There were many pearls of wisdom here, things which resonated with my experiences very deeply. Stuff like how women tend to get more radical as they get older (hallo, 2014 Angela versus 2003 Angela!), stuff about absorbing/internalizing a lot of your supposed stereotyped characteristics (hallo, stereotype threat!), and stuff like how it's actually kinda hard to find spaces where ladies can just talk and “consciousness raise”, since - until recently - you didn't really have women meetings up in bars after work to chat.
Thankfully, a lot of stuff has improved. BUT! Never forget that shit could go all Handmaid's Tale on us, especially in the medium term. And while I generally subscribe to MLK's optimism (“The arc of history bends towards justice”), I have recently been thinking, “Medieval period/Dark Ages/oooh shiiiit”. I mean, even techno-utopian Star Trek: The Next Generation (which is 99% perfect, cuz sometimes they do fail on race/gender stuff, but their hearts are in the right place) takes place in a world after a crazy Dark Ages-style period of severe techno-regression. So... cautious hope?! Pessimistic optimism?! Maybe things will suck again but then get way better? I dunno. Read the book.
A rich, vast, tomey tome. But not as tomey as I feared! Half the book is appendices, bibliography, and so on. Phew. I was worried it would take half a year to finish, but not so!
The basic premise: with the “discovery” of the New World via Columbus, the wheels of economic - and ecological - globalization were set in motion. And what wheels they are!
We follow the trades of silver, rubber, guano (!), and slaves, and how these trades really drove the great mish-mashing of the world: culturally, politically, economically, everythingly! Mann argues that Columbus's smash-up of Old and New Worlds brought the global ecosystem together for the first time since Pangea. He has some great stories to tell, and a great eye for (human) detail.
The book is strongest when he focuses on the stories from 16th-19th century Latin America. I had no idea about any of it, as my understanding of the whole New World business is so completely Eurocentric. Mann did a lot to enrich that history: the maroon communities, the Chinese dentists in 17th century Mexico City, the Chincha Islands off the coast of Peru with their mountains of guano (and its role in fertilizing (!) modern agriculture in Europe).
I really do not care for Froggy. My kid, though, LOVES this series. I hate the rhythmic onomatopeias. I HATE THEM. STOP MAKING ME SAY FLOP FLOP FLOP AND ZIP ZOOP ZUT.
In this one, Froggy first has the classic, Freudian nightmare of “going to school in your underwear”. Then - poof! - he wakes up and it's time to actually go to school. And then, as Wanda Maximoff would say, the nightmare begins. Just kidding just kidding, it's fine. Obviously.
My kid does NOT get the “it was all a dream!” sequence.
A bit lecturey, but I guess that's the point. And yes, it is incredible how incredibly immediate Seneca's lecture TED talk teachings feel, given this was written 2,000 years ago. I credit some of that to the superb translation, as well as, of course, the timelessness of Seneca and Stoicness. Indeed, I was surprised these past few days how often I'd be either reading the book and immediately applying it to some present-day issue in my own life, or how often I'd be living my life and then think suddenly, “Oh my God, I'm doing exactly what Seneca said!”
Sic semper silly human nature, I guess?
Delightful! It's like I was there.
Written as a semi-ironic “Lonely Planet”-esque travel guide for Rome circa 200 AD, this was a hoot. Such fun! This scratched the itch that, for example, The other side of history: Daily life in the ancient world failed to. But this! This was what I was after. You feel like you're THERE. It's hilarious. You remember that phrase, “the past is a foreign country”. Also, people are just people, everywhere and for all time. Romans are so funny and lovable - always have been.Some highlights:- You can bring traveler's checks.- Try to stay in an AirBnb-equivalent: i.e. a room in someone's house. Ideally, they'll have visited YOUR town earlier, you'll have succeeded in inviting them into your house, and so they'll owe you one. (Romans are big on face-saving HONOR like hospitality, etc.)- You'll probably get a dinner invite early in your trip. Make sure to check whether it's a “happy hour” or “full dinner”, and whether the drinking will be “Greek style” (i.e. very heavy) - in which case, you need to organize a litter home!- Men's formal wear = togas that have NO CLASPS, and so they have to keep their arm up ALWAYS or else it unravels, hahaha. Women wear tube dresses.- At dinner, you might have such delights as gerbil roasted in fermented fish sauce. And asparagus, boy do they like asparagus. Also honey wine!- Most people think the Colosseum spectacles are gruesome and low-class. - But eeeerrrrone loves the chariot races at the Circus Maximus. They have four teams - Red, Green, White, Blue - and people get REALLY INTENSE about their team; there are hooligans!- Avoid the Praetorian Guard at all costs; everybody hates them, they're seen almost as a dangerous gang.- Rome is WAAAY patriarchal - in a literal sense: fathers have all legal rights over everyone in the house. Men have three names (first name last name nickname), women have one name (their father's name - i.e. Claudius's daughter is Claudia). When a baby is born, it's placed at the feet of the father: if he picks it up, it is ACCEPTED. If he doesn't, it's left to die of exposure (!!!).- Rome had a magical mystical religious-legal perimeter that defined “The City” in a cosmic sense. On this perimeter, you'd find (a) all the babies that had been abandoned to die of exposure (!!!!!) and (b) all the generals that weren't allowed to enter (no general was allowed to enter the city without abandoning their rank - I guess this was coup fears?), and (c) miles and miles of graves, since only very special people (e.g. the emperor) were allowed to be buried within the City. Everyone else had to go be dead outside.And so much more!! I LOVED IT. Enjoy your roast fish sauce gerbil! A scene from C'eravamo tanto amati, one of my all-time favorite Italian films, wherein the very Roman Antonio (the wonderful Nino Manfredi) exclaims a very Roman exclamation, very adorably. NINOOOOO MANFREDIIIIIIIIIII
Very dated 1970s sci fi, written well, kinda fascinating, kinda tediously offensive. Overall, I did enjoy it, (oddly?!), though this basically failed ALL social justice tests of the modern era. David Selig, the protagonist, is a sexist, racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic loser and caricature of the neurotic 1970s New Yorker. He's a lonely misanthrope. Oh yeah, and he can read minds. Which lets him mostly confirm his misanthropy: everyone around him is ALSO mostly a hideous, anti-human caricature of whatever group he associates them with.
The threadbare plot is that Selig is slowly and mysteriously losing his telepathic abilities. There are long, loong meditations on mortality and Fine Literature. There is an acid trip. There are loooots of voyeur-type sex scenes. There is some Freud. It's 1970s New York!
Anyway, despite all of the above, I won't lie: I kinda dug this, man. I was hip to it. Is that what they say? I dunno. It was so richly atmospheric about a specific time and place; I could practically SMELL the pot, I could SEE Columbia's campus and the gritty height-of-crime streets. I also spent most of the book kinda thinking I was in cahoots with Silverberg: yeah, this Selig guy is a real asshole, eh? I also kinda like reading very dated sci fi; it makes me wonder about how dated OUR books (and tweets and social media fads) will be in 30-40 years time. Ursula LeGuin's The Lathe of Heaven was also super fun in its super datedness.
Also, Peter Sarsgaard in his late 70s Milgram beard should definitely play Selig. Though, oh God, never make this into a movie.
It can be hard to keep up energy when reading through a bunch of reviews, and so I'd actually recommend this more as a bathroom reading - something you can just dip into from time to time. That said, I read it cover to cover and it did:
(1) get me perversely interested in several of these terrible, early-/mid-2000s films, and
(2) make me laugh, even when I was down/seemingly un-laugh-capable.
Two choice quotes that caused me to lol:
On A Lot Like Love: To call “A Lot like Love” dead in the water is an insult to water.
On Freddy Got Fingered: This movie doesn't scrape the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn't the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn't below the bottom of the barrel. This movie doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels.
HA! So good.
A foundational text for me, this is 1970s, New Wave, fun, smart sci fi. Its vibe of the irreverent and the mundane, as seen through the eyes of a protagonist in a high-tension, kinda shitty “space adventure”, is just pitch perfect.
Robinette “Bob” Broadhead gets mixed up with other desperate (usually poor) human guinea pigs on the Heechee space station near Earth called “Gateway”. The Heechee are a species of mysterious alien life forms that have disappeared from the universe, but not before littering it with their stuff - including a space station full of small ships loaded with pre-set coordinates. Humans have just figured out how to turn the ON switch on the little space ships, but these inadvertent galactic leaps more often than not lead to ignoble, painful deaths. The ultimate glory that drives all these pilots: another Heechee archeological bits, to help solve the puzzle. (Pilots get MASSIVE royalty payments.)
The book's structure is a mix between: (1) present day therapy sessions between Robin, now the richest man on Earth, and his AI therapist; (2) a flashback retelling of his journey from no-name poor boy to Gateway test pilot; (3) ads in the local Gateway newspaper, running the gamut from “tri-marriage” proposals to desperate calls for information on lost pilots.
It's hilarious, funny, and it features a sharp eye for multiculturalism and feminism (always a problem in the American/male-dominated genre of sci fi). One of my favorite books eva.
Weird, pretty wonderful, slow, frustrating, did I say weird? WEIRD. I missed weird. This book brought weird back. Thanks, book!
We're dropped in media res into a far future weirdo landscape; to make matters worse, the plot is circuitous, characters ambiguous and complicated and ever-changing, and GOD THERE IS SO MUCH CHATTERING MUSIC PLAYING. I could have done without the music. But this was a slow-burn of frustrated “wtf”-ness that then, finally, sublimated into something exciting and fun and strange. There are heaps of endnotes. I'll get to them, maybe.
I kind of DON'T want to explain the plot, since I think the confusion is part of the sell. But this is a fun, very-1990s counterculture super far future sci-fi piece. The author/illustrator/everything-er, Carla Speed McNeil, calls it “aboriginal sci-fi”? Somewhere? Citation needed. It does have lots of mysticism, but also lots of grungy jeans and cigarette smoke. We follow sexy dude, Jaeger, a half-“Ascian” (Native American?) “Finder” (scout, though he feels like a woodsy private eye) as he flits around the weird dome city of Anvard. We meet a family of three sisters and a shell-shocked, traumatized mom, hounded by their abusive, unsettling shell-shocked dad. There are lion people. There was a raccoon guy. There are “clans”, which feel like castes, and waaaay too much inter-clan homogeneity, seriously, people, genetic diversity is a good thing. There was some AI. But mostly the world was a broken down mess, kinda post-apocalyptic, and very critiquing of late capitalist USA!USA!USA! It's not really dark, the tone feels mostly cheeky.
A fun, inventive, fable-like comix about a surly Russian-American teen, Anya, and her accidental friendship with a dead girl's ghost. Wonderful commentary on the self-involved, socially insecure narcissism of high school - aka that 30 Rock skit where Tina Fey remembers being an unpopular dork, but forgets that she was also super mean. I loved the rich characterizations of Anya's best friend, her mom, her little brother. And I loved the plot and pacing - it was like a John Hughes movie mixed with some light-touch Gothic horror. Charming and a lot of fun.
What I like about Cory Doctorow, ever since discovering him and his whole “give away my books as free pdfs” thing in 2007, is that he is the complete lifestyle package. He practices what he preaches, and he's often a veritable wealth of information and enthusiasm for certain predictable causes: most especially, civil liberties in the Age of Internet.
Although I consider Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom his best science fiction book, Little Brother is probably what he considers his (as-of-now) magnum opus. It's a lively, passionate, pedantic YA novel about the dangers of post-9/11 paranoias and how easy it is to invade individual privacy in our Facebooked, Interwebbed world. (What's most alarming, and Cory doesn't touch on it too much in this book, though, is our willingness to give that information away for free. cf: The Facebook prison, the Google empire.)
The story follows 17-year-old Marcus Yallow, a smart, snarky California hacker with a slightly preachy, morally-indignant vibe. i.e. Cory as a young man? Marcus definitely feels like a Mary Sue. But let me emphasize that that is FINE. We need people with such mentalities to shake us out of complacency. Anyway, Marcus is just livin' his life, hacking his way around his school system's invasive Internet measures and palling around with his bff Darryl as they go on geekquests and LARP adventures (live action role playing). Until, that is, Al Qaeda bombs the Bay Bridge and the kids are inadvertently pulled in by the Department of Homeland Security for questioning.
When Marcus is finally released, traumatized and horrified by what he had to endure, he goes on a Christ-like mission to get the DHS out of San Francisco and stop the slow erosion of our fundamental American values (freeedoooom) as freedom/privacy are traded in for “safety”/”security”. There's a slightly libertarian vibe there, now that I think about it, which I seem to often find in hacker culture. But nonetheless, I agree with Cory's politics - a lot of these purported “security” measures don't make us safer, and there have been a LOT of violations of basic civil liberties and just ethics since 9/11 (e.g. the drones...) - even if, at times, the story felt like a dystopian morality play which I had trouble totally believing.
Like For the Win, Cory's other YA work, the story suffers from somewhat extended didactic asides. We learn about Alan Turing, Berkeley in the 1960s, Wavy Gravey, cryptography, and all that. Most of the time, it feels like Cory is talking down to you. “Now, kids...” That sort of thing. But I take that as part of the YA package. Maybe? Now that I think of it, there are a lot of very good YA books (A Separate Peace, The Perks of Being a Wallflower) that avoid this didactic vibe entirely, so maybe I shouldn't cut Cory so much slack. I guess, on a meta level, I did like how he leveraged the Bay Area setting to link our current, apathy-ridden civil rights struggles (the commodification of the “social”) to the more glamorous civil rights struggles of the 1960s. As Mario Savio would say, maybe we should be throwing our bodies onto Facebook and MAKING IT STOP.
Anyway, overall, I really enjoyed it. When Cory's on his A game, it's hard not to get swept up in his politics and passion. I'm not a hacker by any definition, but I do loiter around Wired and BoingBoing and think about these things. This book gave me a lot of new things to think about and loiter around. Definitely recommended, and I'm now happy to be prepped for his newly-released sequel, Homeland.
Main takeaways:
- Farms.
- Chocolate is onerous indeed. Now I feel guilty eating chocolate. Someone once tweeted that so much human suffering has been undergone so rich British people could have a “nice breakfast” (sugar cane plantations, coffee and tea plantations, colonialism, imperialism, etc). Chocolate really takes a lot of steps.
- You know what's missing, and what we all noticed - parents and kids - MEAT? That conversation was left up to ME to describe. Thanks a lot, book.
kid: how are fish made even?
me: uh well ok, the book is not showing you because it's sort of sad and scary, but fish and meat are things that we kill to eat.
kid: [loving it] O RLY? HOW DO WE KILL THEM?
me: uh
kid: HOW?
me: uh well i'm actually not sure, i think we pull fish out of the water and they suffocate? ...
kid: O RLY [popcorn emoji] WHAT ELSE
me: uh and for cows i think we make them bleed until they die?
kid: OH WOW
I don't even know. I mean, I'm not going to go into the dystopian nightmare hellscape that is industrial meat production. But even virtuous pastoral meat production, I'm shaky on. They behead chickens, right?
I love 30 Rock. Sometimes, I think it fully encapsulates the essence that is me. I think it touches deep down in my inner insecurities, my feminism, my love of the absurd, and my long-time crush on Alec Baldwin.
Alas, this book, 30 Rock it is not. And while Tina Fey has a unique, quirky, delightful TV writer voice, her authorial voice hit me more as a bit catty, and not terribly insightful. I know. I feel awful saying that. I feel like I'm bashing Nora Ephron, Annie Lammott, and all other savvy, sassy comedienne-turned-wise-women writers. Bossypants, a semi-structured autobiography, goes for some jokes, and mostly nabs them (I did LOL now and again). But when it tries to hit on the bigger issues - raising a kid, or celebrity, or feminism - it often fell short. The feminism thing in particular. I had high hopes, because Tina Fey is a crusader against criticisms like Christopher Hitchens' (RIP) re: “women can't be funny”. The sometimes eviscerating satire of femininity and gender norms on 30 Rock proves that. But, in Bossypants, Tina Fey brings up some interesting points but then seems to shy away - I guess I wanted her more angry, less apologetic? I dunno. Maybe I just disagreed with her laissez faire attitude towards Photoshop? It just felt like, had she gone at it with more gusto, I could have been convinced. Instead, I just felt a bit meh.
The tone of the book is light and frothy, with a touch of the self-satisfied, and so it's a fast, generally pleasant read. But I couldn't shake that sense of let-down. Ah well! Back to the genius of 30 Rock I go!
I'm sad I didn't love this more. Kind of a slog. I love Oxford, and I loved the window into 1930s Oxford daily life - and a woman's college!! my heart - but tbh I always struggle with mystery novels.
Pretty fantabulous. I'm not one for surrealism, but here it was great. A tale of immigration, told without words, and with huge, strange gestures and moments and creatures and things. I loved the little interludes about other immigrants' tales of arrival. I also loved the sheer expressiveness of Tan's drawing style (all pencil?); the shadowing! The faces! Oh my.
The first alt history book? Perhaps. Proto-steampunk? Fo' sho'.
Ward Moore relates a tale of an alternative reality 1950s USA, where, 90 years ago, the Union lost the Civil War and now a divided North America struggles to get by. The industrialized North has decayed into a decrepit, poverty-stricken smogfest (hence the steampunk), while the South/CSA is put-putting along with slavery and agricultural stuff. Protagonist is a bookish history student who wins a scholarship to study at a fancy Dead Poets Society-esque college in rural Pennsylvania. There, he hits it off with a lady physicist, who... has invented a time travel machine! Hilarity ensues. Well, not really.
Is it wrong that I liked the movie better? The book is fine: fleshing out certain aspects and providing a slightly different spin (Theo's an Oxford don instead of a City drone? or something). The whole birth-of-Jesus allegory is still there - which is good, as it was the spine of the film and what made it fascinating. In fact, James made it more overt in the book. No Michael Caine co-starring (alas).
Aw hell no. Kids, I WILL throw your shit out if the room doesn't get clean. The room gets clean. The end.
Wonderful!
A brilliant - BRILLIANT, MWAH! MWAH! - gimmick marred by imperfect execution. This was (mostly) huge fun to listen to, with a sparkly all-star cast and ambitious world-building and clever plotting.
The gimmick is this: modeled closely on Studs Terkel's The Good War, this is a Near Future oral history of a world that has just emerged, panting and traumatized, from a global zombie apocalypse. We meet soldiers from the Ukraine, moms from the US, uber-capitalists and priests and doctors and policymakers and generals and lots and lots of more soldiers. We meet, in one brilliant moment, an Australian astronaut who was on the ISS when the zombies took over and watched it all happen via high-resolution satellite monitoring. We see countries rise and fall; the post-zombie world has Cuba as its economic powerhouse, Russia as an Orthodox Christian theocracy, and Iceland as a shitshow of semi-frozen undead. The scope is vast, ambitious, and - again, SO SMART. Such a great idea! Max Brooks! Great idea.
But! And this is a big, marring butt: there are two big aspects that kinda kill the joy. First, all the voices sound the same: they sound like Max Brooks. i.e. Over-written, over-wordy, white American guy-isms, military fanboy guy-isms. It's sort of absurd to hear ostensible South Africans, Russians, Indian, Israelis, and Germans speak in such obviously American ways. And while Brooks tries hard - very hard - to incorporate the socio-political realism of each country (the German soldier who recounts his prejudice against his east German commanding officer was spot-on; like, LITERALLY a German person IRL had explained to me the EXACT SAME cultural dynamic of West vs. East the day before I read that part) - anyway, while Brooks tries hard, he also frequently stumbles. Some countries feel vivid and real, but many also feel like Americanized stereotypes of themselves; and this is unfortunate, since it kills the suspension of disbelief in those sections.
Second big killjoy is how completely military fanboy/”who cares about ladies” Brooks's writing is. Honestly, I could have done with about 50 pages less of weapon laundry lists, in exchange for just ONE lady character who wasn't: a mom, an emotionally stunted girl-woman “with the body of a supermodel”, or a butch soldier. Seriously, those are your options? Mom, model, military? Sigh. Especially since there were a bunch of obvious places where, duh hello, you could have gender-swapped. But I guess Brooks's imagination - as vast and globalized and near futurey as it is - doesn't go that far.
Anyway, I didn't even get to the ZOMBIES. I love zombie apocalypses. If you love them, then you will love this. Even if you DON'T love them, you may love this. This takes the zombie apocalypse and disaster movie, and follows it to many of its logical/political conclusions. By the end of the “war”, you feel exhausted yourself: the world is so changed. Of course it would be! From the first inkling of a “human rabies”, to the worldwide “Great Panic”, to the various countries' various methods to try to contain the problem, to the desolation and eventual reclamation. There are some incredible set pieces - little micro-stories that would have been, on their own, amazing. (In a way, this was the most meta-realistic part, since I've always felt that with oral histories: we're getting small glimpses of amazing lives.)
Some of my favorites: the Chinese nuclear submarine crew who decides to go AWOL as a last-ditch ark of humanity; the Ukrainian soldier trying to help fleeing refugees across the Paton Bridge in Kiev, while moaning zombie hordes approach; the blind “hibakusha” man fleeing to a national park and fighting off zombies there; the helicopter pilot watching epic traffic jams, people locking themselves in their cars, freaking out, as zombies claw at the windows; the young, angry Palestinian kid whose family decides to try to enter Israel's self-quarantined fortress-state.
It's funny, because - while I did enjoy the movie's epic set-pieces (and Israel's fortress-state scene does appear in both the book and the movie), the movie also failed to capture some scenes that were so obviously cinematic: zombie hordes walking the bottom of the ocean, scratching at a submarine's hull? HELLO, THAT'S AWESOME. Zombie hordes approaching up winding Himalayan roads, as the Indian Army debates whether to nuke them? While World War Z the movie was a very satisfying disaster movie, it could have been a VERY EPIC disaster movie.
I do think that much of my enjoyment also came from the excellent audio production, and hearing all my long-lost fave actors. As I said, Brooks's writing suffers from being completely mono-voice, yet there's enough actorly talent here to make these characters their own: Martin Scorsese (!) as the unrepentant capitalist who sold a snake oil “zombie vaccine”; Alan Alda (!) as a privileged technocrat tasked with a New Deal-style national rebuilding project; Rob Reiner (!) as “the Whacko”, the odd and fascinating Vice President (who seems to have been modeled on a funhouse version of Joe Biden, even though this book predates Obama's election!?); David Ogden Stiers as the Ukrainian soldier (what an accent!); Alfred Molina as the Aussie astronaut (also what an accent!); oh yes, and Mark Hamill as a crazed “gnarly, dude!” Vietnam-vet-style veteran of the failed “Battle of Yonkers”. There's many more (F. Murray Abraham! Rene Auberjonois! Kal Penn! Common!), but those stuck out as particularly good readings.
Oh yeah, and the ONE THING that I was surprised Brooks didn't capitalize on - since its one of the most brilliant of zombie movie tropes - is the scene of subverting a zombie's Otherness. That is, usually, the zombies approach as mindless, horrifying hordes. But then there's a scene (such as this brilliant one in Shaun of the Dead), where one of your loved ones gets bitten. THE URGENT TRAGEDY OF IT! I thought an oral history would have a-plenty of such tales of family members turning on each other. But there was none of it: the zombie hordes remained an alien monolith. Oh well, missed opportunity.
Overall: listen to the audiobook, the cast makes up for the so-so characterizations. Plot is amazing.