skygiants

I picked up Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech wanting it to be a history of the Luddite movement, an interesting period about which I know not as much as I would like.

In fact this book is about 50% history of the Luddite movement, 30% ideological argument about how the Lessons of the Luddites Can And Should Apply To Our Current Era Of Big Tech And AI, and 20% mini-biographies of Mary Shelley and Lord Byron.

The 50% that is the history of the Luddite movement is solid and compelling, though I raised my eyebrows a little at the fact that one of the most significant sources used to draw the narrative is Ben o' Bill's, the Luddite: A Yorkshire Tale, which is a work of fiction from 1898. It's a work of fiction that I am now planning to read, and the author was a local historian who clearly did an enormous amount of research for it, but I don't know if I, personally, would rely on it as my main historical referent for the events in question. That said I certainly now do know more about the Luddites than I did before, and I am glad to know it even though I hunger for more!

The 30% that is ideological argument is for the most part all stuff I agreed with and I expect many people will in fact find it useful and worth reading. However, since it was all stuff I agreed with, I did not feel the need to be told about it for 30% of this book when what I wanted to be told about was Luddites. However, this is a me problem; the book signaled pretty well that it was going to be at least 30% ideological argument and I ought to have listened to what it was telling me if I was going to be irritated by it.

I do however think it's legal to be annoyed by the 20% that's mini-biographies of Mary Shelley and Lord Byron. I think it is worth knowing that Lord Byron gave a pro-Luddite speech in Parliament once and that current Luddite events probably influenced Frankenstein, but why that means that we needed to devote 20% of the book to their lives I really couldn't say. It's not that I'm not interested in those guys but I already know about them! They're very famous! Give the Romantic movement's relationship with Luddism a couple pages and then go back to telling me about George Mellor and the Molyneux sisters and other people who don't already have Wikipedia pages on which I could read this same basic information!

I've never read any Alan Garner, but last month I decided it was finally time to change that -- in part because of a couple people talking about him in and around my circles and in part because I had also picked up a scholarly study for another project, Four British Fantasists: Place and Culture in the Children's Fantasies of Penelope Lively, Alan Garner, Diana Wynne Jones, and Susan Cooper. (I still have not actually read any Penelope Lively; that's next on my list to fix.)

Anyway, I decided to start with The Owl Service because it was the one I had heard discussed the most as particularly haunting and also relevant to the Welsh fantasy that I read a bunch of in my misspent youth. And indeed! what a haunting book it is, for a story whose basic premise is 'we found some strange dinner plates and everyone got very weird about them!'

( this is all broad vibes description but I'm putting it under a cut anyway )

It does not however surprise me either to learn from Four British Fantasists that Garner seems to have been an absolute misanthrope. My two favorite quotes of his:

In my opinion, and in that of better critics, [J.R.R. Tolkien] could not write fiction or verse. To compare his achievement to that of the Gawain poet is an assault on language.

and

Take C.S. Lewis' allegories. They are some of the vilest ever written. They are fascist in style and method. If you want to see what I mean read the first page of Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Although I may happen to agree with the opinions, Lewis sneers at people. People who behave in the way he describes I may find objectionable. But he says they are. Also I think his books are very badly written and morally repugnant.

I of course love both Tolkien and Lewis but this is so so funny ... Alan Garner, holding two guns, firing wildly in all directions. I have to respect it. Speak your truth, sir.

While I'm talking about it I did enjoy and do recommend Four British Fantasists, which as I have said above made me immediately want to read a bunch of Penelope Lively and also which I found useful and informative about the kinds of discussions that were being had in and around British children's literature in the 1970s and 80s. I do think the book sort of had the least to say about Diana Wynne Jones in whom I am of course the most interested -- not that it was less interested in her, per se but she was least like the other three, the most iconoclastic, and so I think it was hardest to draw her into the broader discussion.

The things in the book I have found myself thinking about most, both in terms of conversations about DWJ and more broadly, are a.) the conversations about place and land who has a 'right' to it and what kinds of stories you want to tell about it and b.) the conversation about how to navigate the use of an underlying myth when writing for children; do you just retell it? do you use it as a touchstone for yourself without necessarily making it plain? In The Owl Service, Garner eventually just has to dump The Mabinogian in there in the text to make sure we understand that it's a riff, and later apparently felt that this was clumsy and veered further and further away from that. Well, I can't fully disagree, 'the wind blew away all my pages of The Mabinogian' is not subtle, but on the other hand I love meta-narrative and I do think it's fair play for an author to give us the text they're riffing on and then let us see them play the changes. Many ways to do it!

rachelmanija's recent post about The September House reminded me that I've also been meaning to write it up!

This book begins with our heroine Margaret grimly facing down the prospect of a visit from her adult daughter Katherine. It's not that she doesn't love Katherine! It's just that Katherine is a bit difficult at the best of times, and now she's fresh from a lesbian breakup, and she's going to want explanations for where her father is, and why Margaret has not mentioned that he is not in fact in their house where he is expected to be, and she's also probably not going to understand about the blood that drips from the walls and the ghost housekeeper and the creepy dead children that sometimes shriek and try to bite you.

Margaret doesn't have a problem with the blood-dripping walls and the creepy dead children. She has always dreamed of having her own home! and the house is a beautiful Victorian! and the ghost housekeeper is actually really lovely and helpful most of the time! except in September, when everything in the house gets extra special awful haunted, and of course Katherine would be coming in September, but They Are Gonna Get Through It. Obviously there is no question of moving. This is Margaret's extremely haunted dream house and we are in a housing crisis. She just has to fake it for a few weeks of nice visit until Katherine realizes that everything is fine and leaves again!

Alas for Margaret, Katherine does not agree that everything is fine. In fact, Katherine has never agreed with her mother that everything was fine, since long before Margaret bought the house; the starting premise is very funny and the book itself is also very funny but it is also using its premise to examine some serious topics and is also often very effectively creepy about it. (rachelmanija has a good list of content warnings over on her post.)

Horror is not my genre and this book is right on the edge of what's a good time for me, but it's having so much fun with its own haunted house tropes that for the most part I was having fun along with it. It's not a subtle book, and sometimes I wouldn't have minded a bit of a lighter touch, but it's doing exactly what it wants to do.

I'm pretty sure I picked up the recommendation for Álvaro Enrigue's You Dreamed of Empires somewhere around DW but I cannot for the life of me remember where, so if it was you please sing out so I can reread your post now that I've actually read the book! Anyway, I am very glad to have now read the book, which was deeply weird in a way that I think I liked but either way most definitely found compelling.

You Dreamed of Empires is a recounting of the day that Cortés and his men enter Tenochtitlan as invited guests-slash-prisoners of the Aztec Empire and have a series of formal meetings and meals with the emperor Moctezuma as well as his wife and several other politicians. At all times the book is straddling the lines between being deeply surrealist and incredibly mundane -- a lot of the reviews call it a 'humorous novel', which I do not think I would say, though I can see why you would say that because 'the encounter between two extremely bloody empires as a weird business meeting full of cultural miscommunication and messy office politics' sounds sort of like a bit from a comedy show. And the book is indeed often sharply funny, but it is just as often very matter-of-factly brutal. The fact that these are indeed two extremely bloody empires is foregrounded; indeed it is a large part of the point. The particular ways in which both these empires are bloody are very normal to the people involved and that is also part of the point. There is a rape on-page, which happens in three sentences that hit with a clang in the middle of other things, with an intentionally jarring lack of attention; for the victim and the perpetrator, this is an everyday event, although one that does have consequences. The whole book is permeated with the smell of blood. The Spanish visit a place of sacrifice and are mostly shocked, not by the wall of skulls, but by the fact that they're all so clean.

This is not a long book and the whole plot takes place in the span of a day, carefully choosing details to highlight. It's important when an extremely minor character makes a small misstep and is sentenced casually to death; it's important when a queer conquistador gets a transgressive high off experimenting with Aztec clothing; it's important when several stoned Aztecs see visions of a future man I absolutely could not identify wandering through their courtyard. Do I understand fully why all the things the book is showing me are important? Definitely not. Some of them I think are probably historical references that I am missing, and some of them I probably need a reread and a lit class to fully unpack, and some of them I think might just be funny. When Moctezuma, high on a trip, hears an entrancing new piece of music which turns out to be Monolith by T. Rex, is this important or just funny? Who could say, but it definitely is funny.

I also spent the entire book wondering if it was just a surreal historical novel playing in interstitial spaces or if it was going to end up going to end up counterfactual in some way. ( Description of the book's ending under the cut )

I've been meaning for months to write about a couple of Evie Dunmore romance novels, Bringing Down the Duke and Portrait of a Scotsman, which I read because my sister-in-law pushed them into my hands and said "you MUST bring these to Scotland! they are extremely silly but also the perfect vacation reads for reading In Scotland!"

I did not actually end up bringing them to read In Scotland, because they are large paperbacks and I was trying to allow myself luggage space to buy large paperbacks back from Scotland rather than lugging them to, but I read them on a later summer vacation so I could hand them back to my sister-in-law with a clear conscience. They are indeed very silly! I did not much like the first one but had a genuinely good time with the second, and also found them both sort of anthropologically fascinating as examples of how The Modern Historical Romance threads the needle of catering to all the particular reliable book-selling historical romance tropes with one hand while with the other continually assuring the reader that they are reading a Good and Feminist Book With Socially Progressive Mores, Do Not Worry About It.

These books are Victorian-era, and the connective tissue between them is that all the heroines are in a suffragette society Campaigning for the Women's Vote, and each of them will of course end up paired up with a very wealthy and probably aristocratic man who can support the cause! huzzah!!

In Bringing Down the Duke, our heroine Annabelle is a Cinderella figure who has gotten a suffragette scholarship to attend Oxford despite her family's unwillingness to waste money on sending her and also lose out on her free labor. At the beginning of the book she assures her relatives that she will somehow find the cash to pay for the salary of her replacement if they allow her to go, and then spends a couple pages stressing about that, which led me foolishly to believe that economics were going to be a major concern of the text. This of course was very silly of me as she almost immediately ends up in the Duke's house, where she spends most of the middle of the book convalescing from a convenient illness and having fantastic sex, and we never worry about this again.

Why is she in the Duke's house? uhhh they're trying to recruit him for the suffragette cause despite his reputation as a misanthropic Tory. Why is the Duke a misanthropic Tory? uhhhh he wants to buy back all his ancestral lands and he is profoundly wounded by the fact that a couple of them are still missing from the collection. The book takes this very seriously as an understandable cause of grief and it's presented as a serious sacrifice at the end when he gives up on His Ancestral Lands in order to support the Feminist Cause. huzzah! Feminism!! But, you know, it's True Love and he's not actively the WORST man in the world, so, fine. At one point Annabelle receives a proposal from a very nice professor to marry him in name only so she can go with him to pursue her dream research abroad -- at this point her only other option on-hand is being the Duke's Secret Mistress because he Cannot Marry Her, for Ancestral Land Reasons -- and it is so funny how the book does not even feel the need to try and make this research marriage of convenience proposition sound unappealing. This is not a St. John situation, everything about this seems like a great deal for her, but the Rules of the Feminist Historical Romance say she has to end up with the sexy duke and that, eventually, she WILL end up with the sexy duke, AND they will be married, AND she will still get to study at Oxford and be a member of the suffragette society, so why should we waste page space on anything else? And obviously it works, this book has sold Five Million Bazillion Copies. The tropes aren't my tropes but no one can say the balancing act is not performed to absolute perfection.

Portrait of a Scotsman is more fun for me because it is tropes I like -- the heroine in this one is the cheerfully artistic daughter of a big merchant family, and the hero is a dour Scots billionaire who rose from poverty and has ever since been gleefully using his financial leverage to trampling abusive aristocrats under his vengeful heel, and he ends up manipulating her into a marriage of convenience for reasons I don't remember.

THE BOOK: but is it ETHICAL to trample aristocrats under a vengeful financial heel? Does it perhaps make this man evil?
ME: well, no, but being a billionaire in and of itself migh makes him evil --
THE BOOK: no, no, I promise he's an ethical billionaire. He buys up impoverished coal mining towns in Scotland that are being abused by their aristocratic owners, which he knows about because he grew up in a coal mining town that was being abused by its aristocratic owners and experienced all these evils firsthand, and turns them into collectivist enterprises! power to the workers!
ME: okay great! thank you for ensuring that your billionaire hero is the world's MOST ethical billionaire. this is very very funny but I do appreciate it
THE BOOK: wait but does trampling aristocrats under his vengeful heel perhaps make him evil
ME: no I don't think so

Meanwhile the heroine bonds with the coal mining town inhabitants and decides that she's getting nowhere with this painting business, she's only middling at it and has nothing new to say with it, so instead she's going to channel her artistic talents into learning about PHOTOGRAPHY and pioneer PHOTOGRAPHIC EXHIBITS FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE. god bless!!

(I did keep expecting an explicit reveal that our heroine was Jewish -- her name is Hattie Greenfield, she comes from a large multinational merchant family with links to iirc the Ephrussi or some other famous real-world historical Jewish banking family, she's notably red-headed, there's an offhand reference to a grandparent having 'converted' to Anglicanism but it doesn't specify from what? Evie Dunmore I'm not sure why all this coding without actually saying it, what are you so nervous about?)

The chaos of my schedule recently has meant that my preorder of Zen Cho's The Friend Zone Experiment, which I foolishly set as 'bookstore pickup,' sat on the shelf of said bookstore while I cast longing looks in its direction for several months without ever actually managing to go collect it. However I have finally now managed to acquire it and of course then read it in approximately 24 hours because once I pick up one of Zen's books I always find it nearly impossible to put down and this one was no exception.

I love the way Zen writes the nuances of interpersonal dynamics, with charm and humor and deep attention to the details of how specific individuals relate to each other -- I rate The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo as one of my favorite romances of all time -- so I had no doubts that I was going to enjoy watching her ambitious Singaporean businesswoman rekindle a romance with her intensely ethical first love when they meet again in London while his family is off the grid. And indeed this was deeply charming and an absolute delight!

I also did not doubt that I was going to enjoy the family dynamics but I had less expectations about that because I did not know what they would be ... but in fact the relationship between Yap Ket Siong and his older brother, the disappearance of whose [best friend/partner/Yap Ket Siong has suspicions but 'right after this guy was possibly murdered by a vengeful corporation' is probably not the time to bring it up] is what sent the whole family off the grid to begin with, was maybe my favorite in the book, closely followed by the main romance and also the lovingly drawn relationship between Renee and her busy but beloved BFF. I also really enjoyed the horrible relationship between Renee and her awful brother, because it was so absolutely terrible most of the time but sometimes it wasn't, and you could feel how much it meant when it wasn't despite the fact that he was, indeed, awful. But also a human being, and also Renee's brother. Anyway, as I said, every character and every dynamic really lovingly and beautifully drawn and I extremely enjoyed spending time with all of them, and a part of me wishes indeed that I had spent longer with them instead of gulping the book down as fast as I could, but I really couldn't help it!

rachelmanija has a theory about Books that Commit to their Premise. Peaspout Chen: Future Legend of Skate and Sword absolutely commits to its premise. This is a book about a fourteen-year-old Ice Skating Martial Arts Prodigy who is going to Ice Skating Based Martial Arts School to become an Ice Skating Based Martial Arts Master and BY GOD does she perform a lot of Ice Skating Based Martial Arts! She competes in no less than five increasingly special and increasingly absurd Ice Skating Based Martial Arts Tournaments! We committed!

This book is also committing to a number of other things. It is extremely committing. The things it is committing to include but are not limited to high stakes espionage, heavy-handed geopolitical allegory, some very confusing beats around gender, and a level of unhinged lesbian drama that I absolutely did not expect in a MIDDLE GRADE book! for better and for worse!

The basic plot is that our girl Peasprout, number one skating martial arts prodigy of the large but under-resourced empire of Not China, and her little brother have been sent to Ice Skating Based Martial Arts School on the small but wealthy island of Not Taiwan as part of a goodwill exchange. They are about to be the first skaters from Not China ever to attend the school -- Not Taiwan has a major advantage in Ice Skating Based Martial Arts because they possess the secret of a building material that's Perfect for Ice Skating and never melts, so they can practice all year long -- but nonetheless Peasprout is extremely confident in her abilities and determined to graduate number one!

THINGS ESCALATE DRAMATICALLY FROM THERE.

I think this book is doing several things that are quite good, several things that are quite bad, and several things that I just need help reacting to, all of which I am going to ( spoil extensively under the cut! )

On Saturday genarti and I went for a moderately challenging mountain hike. Knowing that I would want frequent short rests but would not want to haul a book of any weight with me, I went looking for something pleasantly distracting that I could put immediately on my phone and ended up with D.K. Broster's The Wounded Name.

genarti may have had cause to regret this, as it meant that every time we started walking again she was favored with non-consensual Wounded Name updates. The first half of this book is, without exaggeration, perhaps the gayest and most dramatic thing I have ever read. (The second half is somewhat less dramatic but no less gay.)

The year is 1815; we are at the end of the Napoleonic Wars and we are VERY Pro Bourbon; our plucky young protagonist, Laurent has a brief meet cute with Aymar, the hottest and bravest and noblest young war hero that France has to offer, and has developed the world's biggest crush in consequence. In a breathtaking stroke of luck for our young fanboy, Laurent is captured on a routine mission and finds Aymar was captured before him! and is gravely wounded! and the doctor wants Laurent to help him tenderly nurse Aymar back to health, because Aymar has no will to live, BECAUSE! he's been credibly accused of betraying his own side for personal gain and leading his own men into certain death!

Aymar, of course, absolutely refuses to explain himself or say anything other than telling Laurent that he should leave him alone to die. The evidence against him, of course, is absolutely overwhelming. But Laurent, of course, refuses to believe that the hottest and handsomest and noblest young war hero that France has to offer could ever have done a single inappropriate thing in his hot and brave and noble life, and he is going to Save Aymar, yea, even unto the point of collapsing from exhaustion at his bedside, no matter the risk and no matter how many people tell him that Aymar Is Not Worthy Of His Deathless Devotion And Sacrifice. And though Aymar spends many, many chapters grimly resentful of said unwanted Deathless Devotion from this near rando who is always there staring at him with enormous shining eyes, he does eventually, inevitably, rebuild his will to live using Laurent's ardent trust and affection as his single emotional mainstay, without which he will simply walk into the sea.

I will note at this point that the enemy soldiers call Aymar Saint Sebastian while Laurent is compared to Patrocles and Pylades rolled into one, which really tells you that Ms. Broster, gleefully writing her little Napoleonic war angst fictions in 1922, absolutely knew one hundred percent what she was doing.

The drama escalates! there are daring escapes and near-death experiences and fraught hand and forehead kisses! Aymar allows himself to be tortured to save Laurent just at the moment that Laurent is finally experiencing agonizing doubt! This leads to perhaps the most interesting moment in the book, when Laurent contemplates the awful possibility that Aymar could perhaps have done something without honor in the past and still love Laurent (who, again, at this point, has spent several months as Aymar's single physical and emotional prop) enough to suffer heroically for him, and that Laurent has accidentally entered into inescapable romantic codependence with a Bad Person ... obviously this is not the kind of book in which there is much nuance between Honorable Good People and Dishonorable Bad People but it's a fun little glimpse at the Debrief version of this plot that could have been.

Anyway, Aymar finally consents to tell the truth, though not before begging Laurent to share his bed with him for one more night before learning the whole truth in case he hates him in the morning. ( The Awful Truth! )

genarti got Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries out of the library recently after seeing a couple of positive reviews around DW, so I snagged it and read it before it went back -- and I am glad of the reviews, because otherwise I would have immediately assumed from the title that I was likely to be completely allergic to it. In fact it was much less agonizingly twee than suggested by the title and I was not allergic to it; it was a fun time!

This is one of those books that is written as An Academic's Field Notes, which depending on how plausibly the voice lands can either be enjoyable or excruciating. This one did not grate on me, although I did spend most of the book assuming we were in the 1890s until Emily Wilde mentioned something casually in passing about 'black-and-white like a film' and I was like WHAT? and immediately looked up and demanded of genarti when she thought the book was set. (genarti said '1910s? we must be pre WWI because nobody ever mentions it?' but given givens I have got to assume that this is simply a World With Fairies And Without WWI.) Honestly I think I think the reason I assumed it was set earlier is because it feels like it wants to be the romantasy Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell -- it's got the eerie/incomprehensible fae encounters and the various bits of folklore that genuinely feel like they run on a kind of non-human logic, as well as the fun academic footnotes dropping intriguing hints about other interesting stories along this world's timeline. Obviously it is not much like JSMN, at heart this is still extremely a relatively light romantasy, but aiming in that direction makes it stronger and more substantive and convincing I think than it might otherwise be.

The other thing it feels a bit like it wants to be is Howl's Moving Castle -- the love interest to our awkwardly brisk professor is her annoyingly flamboyant colleague, darling of the department, who never travels anywhere without an entourage of supportive graduate students. One certainly enjoys annoying 4 annoying ( spoilers )

Anyway. Otherwise, Fawcett, as I've mentioned, is very good at coming up with faerie lore if perhaps slightly less good at grounding the human bits of the worldbuilding. Enjoyable read! I think I forgot to mention what the leads are actually doing for most of the book, which is 'being bad at over-wintering in a small Scandinavian town whose inhabitants are constantly judging them for not knowing how to chop wood.'

Often when I read a archival dual-timeline book (is that the right phrase for these? surely there's something more pithy that I am forgetting) about someone in the present day discovering the secret history of someone in the past through letters or diaries, I find myself extremely compelled by the historical storyline and sort of bored by the present-day storyline. However, with Shubnam Khan's The Djinn Waits A Hundred Years, the opposite was the case -- I thought the present-day narrative was cool and compelling, while the historical narrative made me increasingly annoyed.

In the present day, adolescent teenager Sana and her father Bilal move into a sinister once-glamorous mansion on the South African coast that has been converted into crumbling apartments. Sana is extremely haunted by the mysteries and potential ghosts of the house, and also more directly by the resentful ghost of her dead twin sister who's been following her around making her life miserable her whole life.

As Sana starts uncovering the secrets of the building, she gets to know the other inhabitants -- mostly elderly members of South Africa's Indian diaspora community -- and gets invested in their stories, as well as discovering the diary of a woman who lived in the house in the 1920s and 30s, before its Diary Related Doom.

I like Sana a lot; I like her story and her haunting and the little journal in which she notes down everything that her variously depressed neighbors have to say About Love and the community she forms with them. I do not much care for the diary and the past storyline that it relates, a deeply fairy-tale narrative about an eccentric wealthy Indian man who decides to establish a factory in South Africa and build a Magnificent House there, complete with imported tigers. Then he falls passionately in love with one of his factory workers and decides to marry her, but his mother, first wife, and spoiled daughter all make his second wife's life a misery ... still, they are happy in their love! But, alas, the Doom approaches ....

'Look at this wealthy family; the mother in law was awful, the wife was selfish, daughter was spoiled, but the HUSBAND ... the husband is kind' is always a very difficult sell for me. I understand that this is fairy tale logic and I must leave my prejudices against eccentric wealthy men who move their miserable families to places they don't want to be and then build Magnificent Houses with Imported Tigers at the door. Still, I could not warm to this man and I could not warm to the Great Love that's at the center of the book. I wish there had been an option for her to leave him and run away with the djinn.

(As indicated in the title, there is a djinn. As indicated in the title, he's mostly just sadly chilling.)

Anyway, that aside, it's a lovely haunted fairy tale of a book, so if you have more tolerance than me for This Man you may well like it better than I did!