Tag: English

Berries Goodman

Like Emil and the Detectives, Emily Cheney Neville’s Berries Goodman was another parental library inheritance that was always just around the house, never fully absorbed either into my books or my brothers’. It made for a nice break from dusting bookshelves, as it turned out.

We start off in a conversation between teenage Bertrand “Berries” Goodman and his childhood friend Sidney Fine, who Berries hasn’t seen since he moved out of the fictional suburbs of Olcott Corners to New York City. Sidney is playing truant and heading off to New Jersey for the day, for reasons unknown, and has called on Berries in New York for help and to catch up.

Then we flash back to one year in Berries’ and Sidney’s elementary school lives, right after the Goodmans’ relocation to Olcott Corners from New York. Berries quickly befriends Sidney, while jokes and comments from the adults around him make it clear that there is a not-so-subtle strain of anti-Semitism in the neighborhood. When other children, like Berries’ neighbor and frenemy Sandy, repeat similar talking points, Berries reacts in anger and confusion: anger at the insult to his friends (and by now it’s no spoiler that this includes Sidney as well as his friends back in New York) and confusion over the fact that anyone would even believe such stupid things. Everything comes to a head when the trio go ice skating and the bossy but well-meaning Sandy dares Sidney into a stunt that leaves him hospitalized. Sidney’s mother fears that the latent anti-Semitic attitudes are going to start escalating and pulls him out of their school in favor of the school in the nearby Jewish neighborhood and forbids Sidney from playing with Berries. For a while the two meet in secret, but after their fathers catch them out, they’re separated for good.

Not long after, Mrs. Goodman decides she’s tired of the suburban life and the Goodmans move back to New York. Years later this is where we catch up with teenage Berries and Sidney, who is trying to get a bus out of the Port Authority. Berries goes with Sidney back to Olcott Corners and things are eventually smoothed out between the two families.

The condensed version sounds like an anvilicious after-school special because I left out all of the slice-of-life incidentals. Everything in the actual book unfolds more carefully and casually than that and is interspersed with nostalgic unsupervised kids in suburbia shenanigans, and rather clear-eyed observations and criticisms of middle class American standards and parenting.

There’s an interesting comparison to be made just by looking at the difference in covers between Berries Goodman and another one of Neville’s young adult novels, It’s Like This, Cat. There are essentially two different covers for Berries Goodman, neither of which have been updated at all.

Screen shot of a Google images search for Berries Goodman. Only two cover images dominate: one with abstract color bars and one with an illustration of a boy on a bicycle in front of a house.
Berries Goodman

Meanwhile, It’s Like This, Cat seems to have been continuously updated and repackaged for a new readership.

Screenshot of a Google images search for "It's Like This, Cat." It shows a variety of covers in different art styles, seven in all.
It’s Like This, Cat

It’s Like This, Cat was on reading lists in my school years. I saw it in the library. But the only time I’ve ever seen Berries Goodman is in my shelves at home. Of course, I haven’t read Cat so I can’t make the comparison or even begin to guess at why that one has remained so popular and Berries hasn’t. But if you happen to stumble across Berries Goodman, you should pick it up. It’s a fun read and Neville has a fantastic ear for dialogue, especially between kids.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Hands up who read “The Lottery” for English class at one point.

Yeah, me too.

And that’s about where all of my Shirley Jackson reading stopped off. The Sundial was a selection for the Austin Feminist Sci-Fi Book Club a while back and I didn’t really care for it. Even now I barely remember it (which is why I like to keep this little book blog going). But We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a title people mention all the time; moreover, it was esteemed enough a book to remain in one half of my Austin hosting couple’s library after several years of purging and downsizing. Based on that, I figured the odds (please insert your own joke about odds and lotteries here) were pretty good that I’d enjoy the book. If nothing else, reading it would allow me to partake of a very particular moment of a friend’s life and a specific facet of their personality, and that alone is worth it.

A Tweet from @lastpages_ that says "'I read this book you recommended' is a love language."
Verily it is.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle did not fail to deliver!

Following the death of their family from an unsolved case of arsenic poisoning, Mary Katherine (Merricat) and Constance Blackwood, sisters, have secluded themselves in the ancestral home together with their Uncle Julian. Constance no longer leaves the property beyond her garden, leaving Merricat in charge of going into the village—whose residents have long been hostile to the Blackwood family and who are all convinced of Constance’s guilt in the arsenic case—to fetch groceries and items as necessary. This comfortable norm is interrupted by the arrival of cousin Charles, who has decided to reach out to this estranged branch of the family after the death of his father (brother to Uncle Julian and to the late patriarch of the Blackwood family). Charles and Constance strike up a relationship while Merricat immediately dislikes this interloper and does everything she can to drive him away.

Now that I’ve finally read the book once, I’d love to read it again and chart exactly how Jackson manages to ratchet up the spooky and the tension. (How appropriate that this review is going up as we gear up to enter Spooky Season!) I think the two hardest things to write are comedy and horror, because what people find funny and what people find terrifying are pretty personal at the end of the day. When a book succeeds in one of those genres, I think it’s worth paying extra close attention to figuring out why.

State Tectonics

State Tectonics marks the first time I’ve finished an entire new trilogy since I finished The Obelisk Gate back in 2017? 2018? (And we’ll overlook, as well, A Desolation Called Peace, which is so bound up with A Memory Called Empire  that I’m pretty sure the two novels started as one gigantic tome.) Genre fiction as of late has the bad habit of turning everything into series of some kind or another, and when my reading life is already navigating the tension between the scope of my ambitions and the limits of my time, series are the last thing I need. But I was so taken with Malka Older’s cyberpunk-y political thriller and the complex electoral near-future she had imagined that I went ahead and finished the next two books, though at this point if she comes out with further installations I will declare myself done. Not because I doubt they’ll be good, but because I only have so much time on this earth.

Like she did with Null States, Older jumps ahead to a few years after the previous book left off. It’s election time again, the same as in Infomocracy, and this time the sprawling tech giant Information itself is under attack. Rogue physical assaults are being launched against Information servers and hubs around the world; unsanctioned communications channels designed to go undetected by Information have been figuratively as well as literally unearthed; mysterious individuals are roaming around cities and handing out self-destructing paper copies of “local guides” that claim to be better sources of information than Information itself. Who is responsible? What’s their end game? Is it an inside job? How will all this affect the upcoming election? Again, like in Null States, Older expands perspectives to include secondary characters we haven’t spent much time with before—Maryam, a Muslim lesbian techie who first appeared on the side in Infomocracy; Amran, a young and inexperienced Sudanese Information employee introduced in Null States—while touching base with previous perspective characters like now-married, now-pregnant Roz from Null States and Mishima from Infomocracy.

I would recommend reading all three books in pretty close succession, if only to keep the rather large cast of characters straight in your head, particularly the side and secondary ones. My timing didn’t quite work out, so while I read Infomocracy and Null States back-to-back, I took six weeks off in the middle of State Tectonics to go on vacation (and I wasn’t about to bring a hardback library book with me in my carry-on luggage). Whatever nuance I failed to grasp because I forgot who was a member of which political party who had broken up with whom wasn’t enough to make the broader strokes of the action impenetrable to me, and quite frankly I just plain have fun spending time in the world to which Older has obviously given an incredible amount.

Without getting into serious spoiler territory, I will say this: State Tectonics is an incredibly satisfying ending that is on brand with how the geopolitics in the series have developed and shifted across all three books. People who are better at intrigue than I am might be able to guess where the story is going, but for me the ending was well-earned. Older sticks the landing, no doubt about it.

Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin

One of strongest pieces of evidence that, contrary to Leibniz’s assertion, we do not live in the best of all possible worlds is that somehow Richard Dawkins is still tottering around while we lost Stephen Jay Gould to cancer in 2002.

Or maybe there’s a parallel universe version of me lamenting a Gould who lived long enough to become the villain. Who knows!

While today I try to make a point of reading as many authors as possible, my default reading position up until maybe ten years ago was to focus obsessively on single authors and suck the marrow out of them—by which I mean, read every available book, article, essay, whatever. The only hard limit I drew for myself was posthumous publications, and only because I know from firsthand experience how utterly embarrassing all of my unrevised writing is. Stephen Jay Gould was one of those obsessive focal points for me, though the volume of his writing ultimately outstripped my attention span and, thus, much of his work remains for me to read. Hooray!

I acquired Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin during the period of hyperfocus, but then somehow kept on putting off reading it. I have a vague sense that I was holding off on it to save as a reward for other, more onerous reading, until that went on so long I just moved on entirely. Then, during my trip to the US, I uncovered the book in a cache I had packed up to make ready for shipping to Sweden and decided now was the time to read it and evaluate if I wanted to ship it across the ocean.

The argument Gould makes in Full House is basically one against the teleological framework of evolution: that things evolve for some higher purpose, or more specifically deliberately towards complexity; that complexity is somehow the best, most special, or most desirable form of life. Rather, Gould argues, we should look at it in terms of variety. Really what’s fantastic is that we have such a range of complexity! The basis of the book is his article “The Median is Not The Message,” originally published sometime in the early 90s, in which he points out how misleading (or not) the various statistical averages (that is, mean, median, and mode) can be.  In Full House he expands his focus from cancer prognoses to batting averages and bacteria.

In a way it would probably be interesting to read this alongside Taleb’s Black Swan, which focuses on the extreme tails of the bell curve that Gould alludes to, but I don’t particularly feel like going back to re-read Taleb (I’m hoping that If Books Could Kill will one day cover Black Swan) so that essay will have to wait another day.

Full House is an interesting read, and a relaxing one. Gould had principles and politics, and much of his fame stems from publicly taking very specific stances. Here he isn’t addressing creationism or Charles Murray; the paradigm he’s looking to shift here is much more benign and so Full House is a much less stressful book. (Yes, it’s good that someone is debunking Murray, but then it’s stressful to remember that Murray is out there needing to be debunked.) But because it’s so relatively light and uncontroversial, it’s not the most essential Gould book for a personal library. Will I need to look anything up in here in order to prove a point on the Internet? Nope. Will I want to quote anything from this in order to better express my opinion on a topic? Again, probably not. The Mismeasure of Man, Rocks of Ages and The Hedgehog, the Fox and the Magister’s Pox are more the kinds of Gould books with a permanent residence in my shelves. Nonetheless a worthwhile read, and another book crossed off the to-read list.

The Beast of Wolfe’s Bay

I read a lot during my American vacation, enough that I hit my annual book goal early in September. This was due in part to revisiting children’s and middle grade books while staying with my parents (Emil and the Detectives, Berries Goodman) and also to reading very short volumes, of which The Beast of Wolfe’s Bay is one.

The Beast of Wolfe’s Bay was part of a care package from a friend in Texas; I’d never heard of Erik Evensen or any of his work before this. Thus I had no expectations going in and, as a result, had a fun time reading it. I’m also not as well read in The ClassicsTM as I should be, since I didn’t twig to the Beowulf structure/retelling until reading the afterword from the author. No, not even the title tipped me off.

My only criticism is a point of taste, and one that I think most of the people who enjoyed the book will disagree with. I’m as steeped in teeaboo geek pop culture as the best (or worst?) of them, but when other works start laying on the references with a trowel—specifically when the author leans extra hard in making it clear to the audience that a character is That Kind of person—it becomes a bit much. There were lots of conversations that felt, to me, like cringe-inducing pandering.

Gags like license plates or t-shirts are one thing, and actually are a great way for a visual medium to be subtle in a way that pure text can never be. (Think of all of Roy O’Dowd’s t-shirts in The IT Crowd. Now reflect on how it would be impossible to make the same off-hand reference in text without tediously describing the t-shirt in question and, in doing so, drawing extra attention to it.) Evensen includes these sorts of visual references, and if that had been his only approach I would have thought them well done. But the references to Star Trek or Red Dwarf in conversations have nothing at all to do with the story, or even the characters, and feel shoehorned in just for the sake of showing off to the audience that “I like your favorite geeky thing!”

For all the words I just spent on it, though, it’s really only a minor criticism; nothing ever took me fully out of the story. Like I said, a matter of taste.

If your favorite X-Files episodes were the monster-of-the-week stories, or if you’re really into collecting Beowulf translations and retellings, this is exactly the little one-shot for you and it’s worth throwing a couple bones at the author. As for me, I won’t be revisiting The Beast of Wolfe’s Bay, but I’ll put Gods of Asgard on my TBR.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

I mentioned elsewhere on the Internet that unless you make a concerted effort to review your to-read list, it really becomes just a graveyard of aspirations. On this particular blog I used the graveyard metaphor in my review of The Jakarta Method, but originally I used it in a post elsewhere about Farewell to Manzanar, which I read over two years ago now: September 4, 2021, if Storygraph has it right. Farewell had been on my to-read list since probably around 2010 or so.

And yet I don’t have a post here about Farewell to Manzanar. I might have been too overwhelmed or too lazy or too whatever at the time, but I think another part of it was easily: what is there to say about a book like this one? There’s nothing I could say about this book that wouldn’t just be superfluous and trite, so why bother, in the end it would just come across as glib.

The same feeling prevails for I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings but I want to at least push through that wall to say: here is a book I read. Not for the sake of getting anyone else to read the book, because it doesn’t exactly need more hype, but because I want as complete a record of my reading as possible. So, to that end: story time!

My sambo’s discovery of mid-century pulp magazines a couple of years ago led to him occasionally reading spooky poetry from publications like Weird Tales etc. on his Twitch stream. This, in turn, has led to occasional suggestions for other poems from viewers and regulars, which is how earlier this year he ended up asking me if I’d ever heard of Maya Angelou. I thought for a second that he was joking, since he’s usually extremely clued in to American (popular) culture, but no, the question was in earnest.

“Of course. She’s probably one of the premiere American poets of the twentieth century. National treasure.”

“Someone requested a poem by her today and it was almost impossible for me to get through it without crying.”

“Mm-hm. Like I said, national treasure.”

And yet I didn’t get around to I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings until now. I’m glad that I read it but embarrassed it took this long.

Severance

Ling Ma’s Severance was the Austin Feminist Sci-Fi Book Club’s pick for August, a meeting I was lucky enough to attend in person for once!

“Here’s a question for everyone,” I announced during an early lull in the conversation. “Describe this book as a mash up of two other works.”

My own answer was Station Eleven and My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Other names that came up included The Last of Us, Girls, The Road, Dawn of the Dead, and Sex and the City. A pattern emerges, but to spell it out more clearly:

Candace, our protagonist, is part of a group of zombie apocalypse survivors led run by a cult-guru-in-the-making named Bob escaping New York City to a shopping mall in Illinois. Why a shopping mall in Illinois? Through some weird happenstance, Bob happens to be part owner of the property. Don’t think about it too much.

The zombies, meanwhile, are not only slow zombies—they’re not even particularly hungry or aggressive ones. Spawned by a fungal infection that can sit dormant for ages until it’s triggered, these zombies are entirely docile and stuck in loops of activity until their bodies give out. We see a family in a dining room go through countless iterations sitting down to an imaginary dinner; another character keeps on trying clothes from her closet. Interspersed with the zombie apocalypse narrative, we get flashbacks to Candace’s life right up until the killer fungus: her family’s contentious move from China and lifelong strain it caused, her father’s unexpected death, her mother’s rapid decline into dementia, her lackluster relationships, her job in publishing  various glitzy and gimmicky editions of the Bible.

That’s pretty much it. Some people get infected, some people die, and the narrative eventually just…peters out.

Everyone at the meeting agreed that a lot of the public health responses to the fictional virus (or well, fungus) in Severance felt very Covid-y despite the 2018 publication date; my hypothesis is that Ma drew from how epidemics like bird flu and swine flu were handled in Asia when it came time to write about how an actual pandemic would unfold. We were also all in agreement that the book felt very gimmicky with a lot of vague ideas that were only half explored and that at the same time felt like pretty heavy-handed critiques and observations of Our Current Society. Candace is passive to the point of frustration, making poor decision after poor decision, and none of the other characters really have a distinct personality (except Bob the cult leader). To me it read like a novel of the Chinese Immigrant Experience but then someone suggested to Ma that she examine it through the framework of a zombie story instead and…I don’t know. I’m not mad I read it, but it never really coalesced into something coherent.

Gift From the Sea

Another random “left field” book, I stumbled across Gift From the Sea when a college friend asked me to read a selection from it at her wedding in Seattle. It’s a short book, and in the run-up to a wedding there’s a lot of “hurry up and wait,” so over the next couple days I just…read most of it. After the wedding I put it on my to-read list so I would eventually finish reading it. An excellent souvenir, then, when years later I was visiting that same friend in Seattle and came across a copy of Gift From the Sea in the bookstore!

As Becky (my friend) describes it, it’s a book that Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote to convince herself to stay in a crappy marriage. That knowledge, paired with the couple’s Nazi and Fascist sympathies, certainly takes a bit of the shine off of it—here’s an excellent example of separating art from artist and where people are comfortable drawing the line. For me, Gift From the Sea is on the “I still feel comfortable consuming this” side of the line; an example of a “nope, no thank you” would be the music of Percy Grainger.

Gift From the Sea is an installment in one of my favorite not-really-a-genres, “author retreats into isolation and writes their Deep Thinky Thoughts.” Other examples of the form include Walden and Journal of a Solitude. Lindbergh writes a great deal on the need for solitude and alone time in romantic relationships, particularly for women; as much as it’s depressing to admit in the Year of Our Lord 2023 (compared to 1955), this still rings true. All the data currently available about the burden of childcare and domestic duties in hetero partnerships, marriage or otherwise, indicates that the bulk of it still falls on women. Hence why the alone time—time “off the clock,” so to speak—is particularly important for women in this situation.

The other underlying current in Gift From the Sea is the vague sense that modern life is overwhelming and things are happening too quickly, which again: looking back on 1955 from the distance of 2023 the idea of life moving too fast is ludicrous. I suppose that overwhelm is a permanent part of life anymore, and as such sentiments like Lindbergh’s will remain relatable. You read books like this one not necessarily to learn anything new but to remind yourself of what you value and what’s important in your life. “Yes, that’s right, I need to take more time for myself,” you say, nodding along. “Yes, that’s right, I do best when I have alone time to recharge.” Sometimes we need that reminder, and that’s probably why Gift From the Sea remains such a favorite.

Braiding Sweetgrass

I was concerned about the environment from a pretty young age, though whether it’s because Captain Planet was a successful piece of propaganda or because the combination of pragmatism and anxiety (“There’s nowhere else to go if we ruin the Earth”) set in early, who can say? Either way, “environmental awareness” has always been in the back of my mind, though usually in the form of planet-wide existential crises: the hole in the ozone layer, climate change, that sort of thing.

Coming up on ten years in Sweden, however, I’ve started thinking about the environment as a means of creating place on a personal level. How do you create the feeling of at-home, of belonging? The first step is to make the new surroundings familiar, to learn the names and properties of things. Theoretically. I don’t actually know very many plant or tree names for anywhere I’ve lived, but sometimes I page through our copy of  Den Nordiska Floran with a guilty conscience.

Braiding Sweetgrass, as a collection of essays on ecology and the nature of relationships, speaks to that approach to the environment. Yes, planet-wide catastrophes are looming, but any individual disconnect from the environment is a loss on a personal level as well. Each essay in the collection explores a different facet of this disconnect, including at the academic level where the dispassionate and disconnected objective approach to environmental studies supercedes or ignores a squishier, more subjective one. Kimmerer is at home in both worlds and has a knack for transforming bleak, dry data points about a particular moss or plant or animal species into a narrative that, again and again, focuses on relationships and interdependency.

Here is an interesting tension: supporting worthy causes versus acquiring stuff. I always like to buy at least one thing if I visit a local independent bookshop, but I was on vacation, traveling only with my carry-on bag and a purse, and with limited shelf space at home. Financially support Reading in Public, an adorable bookstore and cafe in West Des Moines, or add to my growing mountain of stuff?

It comes as no surprise that I bought the book, of course. Now the escape route to avoid the mountain of stuff: am I deluding myself if I think that a curious reader taking the Greyhound out of Indianapolis will find the book before a harried cleaner just tosses it in the garbage? Would the profit earned by Reading in Public be worth whatever environmental cost may be incurred by the book once it leaves my hands? Is my motivator a noble detachment from stuff or the mindless disposability that naturally arises in a world filled with consumer goods that are constantly made anew? Am I a thoughtful steward of the planet or just lazy?

I suppose the only downside is that the people most likely to read and enjoy Braiding Sweetgrass are the ones who are already asking themselves those sorts of questions—preaching to the converted. But better to light a candle than curse the darkness.

Rose/House

Appropriately enough, this review of an Austin Feminist Sci-Fi Book Club pick will go up while I’m en route to Austin!

A Memory Called Empire and A Desolation Called Peace were some of the best sci-fi I read in…whatever year it was. So when a new novella from Arkady Martine was announced, I immediately suggested it to the Austin Feminist Sci-Fi Book Club.

Rose/House is a completely different beast from the Teixcalaanli books. Rather than the far-flung reaches of space, we’re on Earth in a relatively near future. A world-famous architect who incorporated AI into all of his creations has recently died in the last and best of his houses, Rose House. In accordance with his will, the only visitor allowed in the house is his archivist and former student Selene—and since the Rose House AI takes this protocol extremely seriously, it’s more than a little concerning when the AI calls the police to report the presence of a dead body inside the house. Selene is therefore flown in as a person of interest, not to mention that investigating officer Martinez has no other way of accessing her John Doe.

Some novels should be short stories; some short stories should be novels. Or I’m not sure what this should be. There’s a lot that’s implied that requires reading between the lines—something I’ve never been good at as a reader. The solution to the mystery also feels like a cheap trick, and the hint to a later plot twist was so heavily telegraphed earlier on that it feels unsatisfying.

A comparison naturally arises to Six Wakes (sci-fi locked room whodunnit) and on the plus side, this was a much quicker read and therefore all the more enjoyable for not wearing out its welcome. Nonetheless, Rose/House doesn’t live up to the impossibly high bar Martine set up in the Teixcalaanli novels; I would have been hard pressed to name her as the author if I hadn’t known going in. I don’t know that I necessarily want more Teixcalaanli novels from Martine—it’s always something of a tragedy, I think, when a character’s or series’ popularity essentially forces their author to continue along a track they’d much rather abandon—but the brand of noir in Rose/House doesn’t seem like her strong point.