A year or two ago I stumbled over a copy of Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States in a used bookstore and brought it home with me with intent to read at some future time. Last month I ended up having to sit still in our living room out of reach of my phone/current book/etc for cat-related reasons and so pulled the nearest thing off the nearest shelf: the time had apparently come.

And what a weird time it was, is, to be reading this book. The book was published in 2004, the essays commissioned for the project. The essays themselves vary from interesting to funny to overwrought to banal to offensive -- and one can't really be offended even so; it is, of course, always fascinating to see oneself as others see one -- but all of them were written in the early 2000s, in the immediate years following 9/11, and so there is a kind of thread of envy and pity and a little fear running as an undercurrent throughout the whole book: you Americans, you stupid Americans, you thought you were exempt from terrible things happening to you, and what are you going to do now you've realized that they can?

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!

For my book group last month, we read Leaving Mother Lake: A Girlhood At the Edge of the World, a memoir by Yang Erche Namu in collaboration with anthropologist Christine Mathieu.

Namu is a Chinese celebrity (singer, author, TV appearances, etc.) and my understanding is that she's written numerous autobiographies about that; this book, her first in English, stops before any of that begins and focuses entirely on her childhood and young adulthood as part of the Moso culture, notable for being arguably matriarchal in that women are the head of household and both men and women live in their mother's house/are considered part of their mother's family for their entire lives until the house/head of household status is inherited by a daughter. Formal marriage is not usually practiced, and men only visit their partners' houses as guests at night.

Throughout Namu's childhood, the Moso town in which she lives is already in flux as a result of the Cultural Revolution and the intermittent arrival of Han Chinese troops bringing dictates from the central government. One set of visitors also brings the opportunity for Namu and two other girls from her village to participate in a singing competition for representatives of various Chinese minority cultures, which they win! Afterwards, the two other girls are glad to go home, but Namu discovers in herself the hunger for fame, fortune, and the broader world, and through a series of dramatic rebellions and determined grabs at long shots eventually ends up at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music; her experiences as a Minority Scholarship Student there make up much of the last section of the book.

Namu is a clear and distinctive narrator with a highly personal voice -- she's always got huge main character energy, but she does not present herself as a heroic figure so much as just one who is extremely and aggressively herself, whether she's impulsively offering food to a stranger or destroying everything in the house where she works before storming out the door. She's not so much describing what It's Like To Grow Up Moso as her specific and idiosyncratic childhood, as a relatively unusual person from a relatively unusual family who goes on to do unusual things.

As a sidenote, Namu seems to be a bit controversial as a media personality, and her Wikipedia page, which of course I went to after out of curiosity, does not seem to have been written by a fan. There's a line in there that says "her descriptions of her childhood and the culture she comes from have been characterised as deliberate self-exotification" -- citation extremely needed, so who is saying this I do not know, and anyway who can judge that? I certainly can't. Though I know this book has been presented and packaged for me, an English language reader, in a different way than it would be packaged for a Han Chinese reader in a different way than it would be packaged for a Moso reader, and further mediated through the view of an anthropologist, although there's a note at the end to emphasize that Namu did indeed read and approve the whole thing as her personal story, et cetera et cetera. You know. I always find memoirs the hardest sort of book to write about anyway. None of my usual tools seem relevant. This is someone's personal story, as they're telling it to me; this particular story I did find particularly interesting.

Despite having literally just purchased a baker's dozen of books in Hay-on-Wye, I convinced genarti to prioritize Visiting a Bookstore as an agenda item in Orkney. We walked out with A Glisk of Sun: Selected Works of 'Countrywoman' Bessie Skea and spent the rest of the trip trading it back and forth between other books because it was so exactly what we both wanted to be reading as we wandered around the Highlands and islands.

Bessie Skea wrote for various Orkney publications and published several books, now all out of print; her grandchildren put together this collection in honor of her centenary. Most of the book is composed of prose sketches of a life spent in Orkney: a cycle of anecdotes representing each month progressing through the year, memories of her childhood and young adulthood in the twenties and thirties, beautiful descriptions of the Orkney landscape and the various people and creatures that live in it. The book also contains some poems and short stories related to Orkney and those are also enjoyable and often a bit supernatural (there's a selkie and several ghosts) but the day-to-day anecdotes are IMO more fun and more interesting than any of the more dramatic fiction.

She's got a vivid voice, evocative and pragmatic and funny by turns. The way she writes about her childhood reminds me a bit of L.M. Montgomery writing about Prince Edward Island, and I think I would have enjoyed it at any time, but in particularly it really was the perfect book to read while touring around Orkney, because Bessie Skea loves Orkney. She writes about it the way you only can when you know a place not just inside out, but well enough to be constantly rediscovering it. She's not a guide -- most of this work first appeared in The Orcadian and The Orkney Herald and so on, all very intentionally local and personal -- but all the same, if you're visiting a place that is new, it is really wonderful to be able to borrow the eyes of somebody else who loves it.

Amanda Vaill's Everybody Was So Young: A Lost Generation Love Story was a rec from portico that genarti got out of the library and then I stole from her; it's a joint biography of Gerald and Sara Murphy, whom I had actually not previously heard of but who were central to the Fitzgerald/Hemingway/Dos Passos/etc. 1920s expatriate set, both as artists (Gerald was a painter, Sara did some theatrical set design & costume work) and as extended-artistic-friend-network social glue.

The thing that is interesting about the Murphys -- well I mean there is a lot that is interesting about the Murphys, but specifically their vibe is like ... they were a maritally and financially stable upper-class married couple with three kids, nearly a decade older than most of the hip young artists and writers they were hanging out with, and appear to have just kind of decided to become the Lost Generation's collective mom and dad friends. (Gerald Murphy was known as "Dow-Dow" to his kids AND ALSO all their friends.) They threw very classy parties, and said enthusiastic and encouraging things about everyone's work, and floated everyone money, until tragedy intruded upon their endless Riviera summer [two of their three kids died in their teens, one of a long drawn-out illness and one of a short surprise illness]. And even then they kept saying enthusiastic and encouraging things about everyone's work and floating everyone money, and maintaining those friendships as well and as long as they could.

Vaill is one of those biographers who is very thorough and thoughtful and also really very extremely in love with her subjects. She is very interested in their gift for friendship and their beautiful artistic sensibilities and how they decorated all their houses. (I do not say this judgmentally, the ways in which they decorated their houses ARE relevant and interesting.) She is delicately interested in the question of whether Gerald may have been gay or queer (seems likely, and the book does imo do a great job of balancing this with its definite stance that Gerald and Sara's marriage was a genuine love story) and whether Sara had affairs with any of the famous artists and authors clamoring for her attention (Vaill is charmingly convinced that Picasso, Fitzgerald and Hemingway were all in love with her at one point or another and also very charmingly convinced that it would be out of character for Sara to have done anything untoward about it).

She is absolutely not at all interested in examining any of the inherited wealth or general privilege around Gerald and Sara even a little bit critically; we are told they had servants, we get the names of each of those servants perhaps, and they are not mentioned again. It's an interesting cross-read with the Mitchison memoir I'm reading now, You May Well Ask, which I'll write up in more detail when I'm done, but focuses on around the same time period and is extremely frank and forthright about the ways in which all these beautiful social creative lives were made possible by somebody else's labor. The tragedy that eventually hit the Murphys is incredibly brutal, but for their first golden decade on the Riviera they do seem to have lived as happy a life as anyone at any period of history ever could: kids and friends and art and culture and literature and creativity and constant magical excursions and environments, with no competing demands on one's time, and always someone else to do the dishes.

And the twist is that half of their best friends went on to write books about people loosely based on them who were absolutely miserable. They show up most famously as the model for the leads in Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night, about the dissolution of a marriage; Archibald MacLeish used them as his models for modern-day Job and Job's Wife in his play J.B.; they appear for a brief but fairly scathing moment in Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. I just keep thinking about this; I keep trying to imagine having such a powerful draw on the imaginations of all your friends that they keep writing you into things and making you worse.

The stated thesis of The Fall of Robespierre: 24 Hours in Revolutionary Paris is that the end result of 9 Thermidor [Robespierre & cohort ejected from government and eventually from life despite best efforts of supporters] was not the result of any particular figure's successful plotting, but the last great chaotic expression of popular will in the first French Republic.

The unstated, but clearly and dearly felt thesis is that every member of the Revolutionary government of this period was the most annoying coworker imaginable. Colin Jones is very good at summarizing his primary sources in ways that maximally evoke this, which makes the book extremely readable and occasionally very funny:

For some time now, Billaud has been taciturn and distant when Robespierre and Saint-Just are in the same room. Saint-Just accuses him of ponderous silences and endless mutterings of the phrase, 'we are on the edge of a volcano.' (It is unclear who or what he thinks will erupt, but the phrase has been given topicality by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, reported in the press just a few days earlier.)

I enjoyed this very much but the flip side is that while Colin Jones is indeed very good at summarizing I still usually want more quotations from the primary source texts that allows me to have confidence in the summary and Colin Jones wants me to be Appreciating the Immediacy and Tension of the Moment and as a result generally does not want to give it to me in any form except a brief endnote directing me to a source I probably can't access. This is an eternal struggle with me and nonfiction books but I feel it especially whenever me and Colin Jones have a little chuckle together at the expense of this toxic revolutionary workplace. I want to feel fully justified in my little chuckle!

Anyway. The book is structured, also, as an argument about time & distance -- as the city divides itself between the National Convention [national revolutionary government] which has just ordered Robespierre & cronies arrested, and the Paris Commune [local revolutionary government] which has just launched an attempt to rescue him from prison and declare itself + Robespierre the legitimate government and the National Convention in counterrevolutionary revolt, we are tracking The Day and we are tracking Every Hour as the people of Paris slowly figure out a.) what the fuck is actually going on and b.) who they actually want to support about it. To be honest I think this feels a bit forced as a conceit up until noon or so when the Convention unexpectedly turns on Robespierre, because everything that's happening to that point is more or less about Important Revolutionary Figures (and also because he feels he has to start at midnight and all that happens at midnight is people thinking about what happened the previous day) but it really does pick up in the afternoon-to-evening period when the outcome of events depends much more on where the National Guard is and who they decide to support. I very much enjoyed the account of various battalions sending each other earnest messages to suss out each other's political sympathies and stealing memelike phraseology from each other as the trend caught on and felt deeply for the out-of-his-depth individual who got appointed temporary commander of the Paris Commune's contingent of the National Guard on account of his magnificent moustaches ("Me! Me! Fucking commander of potatoes more like!")

Actually, in my heart of hearts I think that the thesis that Jones is trying to make about the ways in which the outcome of the day was decided by popular consensus would actually be stronger if he had just written a book focusing entirely on the response in the city for the twelve hours after the shit hits the fan in the National Convention, rather than stretching it out for the full twenty-four. On the other hand I think that he would have been deeply sad to lose so many opportunities to be sarcastic about the toxic work environment up at the National Convention, and who am I to deny him this. Every time I read a book about the French or Russian revolutions I am struck all over again by the committee meetings that might kill you but, crucially, also have all the other normal miserable features of committee meetings, and that's why I will never be strong enough to be a leading player when the revolution comes.

I asked osprey_archer if I could crib some of her research notes on the Soviet Union while she was here a few months back; she gave me an extensive and helpful reading list but the first that I have actually managed to acquire and read was David Tuller's Cracks in the Iron Closet: Travels in Gay and Lesbian Russia, which I found simultaneously deeply fascinating and deeply frustrating.

This is one of those nonfiction books that's half broad cultural analysis and half memoir/personal journey, which is a format I find pretty variable; sometimes it is delightful and sometimes I unfortunately learn too much about the author in the process to trust their opinions on the cultural analysis part. To a certain degree this did in fact turn out to be the case with David Tuller. I am really genuinely pleased for him that he went on a meaningful personal journey and made deep personal connections in Russia and along the way learned that sexuality and gender were a spectrum and that bisexuality and trans identities were real and should be respected! This seems like important personal growth! However I am not sure that a guy who fully admits that he went in with a base attitude that there were straight people and gay people and everyone else was lying or confused was ... the guy ... to write a nuanced cultural history about queer identity in the former Soviet Union ... I mean I am aware it was the nineties, and the nineties were a different time, And Yet.

And on the other hand, the personal accounts as presented in this book through the author's conversations with the people he met were really compelling! The part that was most compelling to me (and most specifically what I hoped for when I picked up the book) is when he starts getting into the way that Soviet state policy has informed the development of queer culture and the challenges that creates around building trust and community, all the political infighting turned up to eleven -- there's a particularly harrowing [to me] story that he recounts in which one organizer lends him an unpublished manuscript, and then he gives it back to another organizer who promises to return it to her, but he is unaware that in the meantime the two organizers have had a falling out and accused each other of being KGB informers and so the first organizer calls him in a panic to ask if he can get the manuscript back, which he can't because the other friend keeps calmly reassuring him that there's nothing to worry about. As far as I or the book is aware she never did get her unpublished manuscript back, although at least nobody ended up arrested.

In addition to this, Tuller's closest friends group in Russia all hang out in a dacha that appears to have been chock full of lesbian drama, which he chronicles in great detail, and he does also travel outside of the cities to get a sense of what queer life is like there. And I do find the mosaic model -- putting together a bunch of deeply personal and individual stories and see what kind of picture emerges from them -- to be a really valuable one for conveying a sense of cultural complexity; on the other hand I don't necessarily trust Tuller to be a reliable narrator so one does take all the stories with a certain grain of salt.

I am also still in the market for nonfiction books about the late phases of the Soviet Union, specifically Jewish and/or queer life therein, so if you have recs please let me know!

I read half of Ben Macintyre's latest, Agent Sonya: Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spy, while I was traveling last month, and then the e-book was cruelly ripped away from me in unrenewable fashion by the library [because of my library crimes, which I could not address while on vacation.]

Anyway, now I have addressed my library crimes, so I finished it last week and enjoyed it very much! It's kind of an interesting contrast to Macintyre's other books -- most of them spend a lot of time emphasizing the absurdist human detail and banal minutiae and foolish mistakes of spycraft, which is a large part of the reason why I like them. They're very funny! One has the sense of Macintyre sitting there with a twinkle in his eye telling you all his favorite anecdotes, inviting you to have a little chuckle at the expense of these undoubtedly daring and yet rather silly secret agents.

Agent Sonya is in a different and more respectful key: Ursula Kuczynski-Hamburger-Beurton's life as told by Macintyre is High Romantic Drama, all throughout. Possibly this is because Burton was also a romantic novelist, and a major source for this book is her autobiography as well as her significantly autobiographical novels ... anyway, I'm not saying he's wrong, her life certainly merits the Romantic Drama treatment and is stuffed full of incredible trope material.

Young Ursula was an ardent German Jewish communist, who was recruited into the USSR's spy network while living in Shanghai with her (also Jewish, but less politically committed) husband in the 1930s, and ( I will spoiler-cut the rest of this in case anyone wishes to read the book and preserve suspense )

As a sidenote, this is the second nonfiction book set in/around/related to Nazi Germany that I've read this year in which one of my grandfather's Ullstein uncles makes a cameo appearance. Mildly disconcerting to suddenly see them popping up everywhere!

Martin Edwards' The Golden Age of Murder, a nonfiction book about the 1930s detective writers' org where Agatha Christie & Dorothy Sayers & G.K. Chesterson &cetera hung out together, has a number of irritating qualities, but I also found it compulsively readable!

The book is a miscellany of reasonably solid social history interwoven with author biographies, plot summaries of Edwards' favorite 1930s crime books (carefully vagued out because Edwards feels very strongly that it is his solemn obligation not to spoil the endings even when it's relevant to a point that he wants to make), anecdotes about the historical crimes that inspired some of the books, and gossipy speculation about the ways in which the books may have reflected Personal Feelings or Secrets of their Authors.

So, like, on the one hand
- Edwards does not do a great job tracking when people show up in his narrative and when he's actually explained who they are, and since there were a LOT of people in the Detection Club at various points it makes it fairly confusing to keep track of them all
- he loves melodrama. he LOVES melodrama. he loves building up Mysterious Secrets and Ominous Foreshadowing in his nonfiction narrative, most of which do not actually justify the level of Portentous he is giving to them
- relatedly: he's absolutely convinced that he's discovered a Secret All-Consuming Golden Age Love Affair! no one else has written about this! his evidence is that they wrote some characters that sort of resembled each other into their books! he's very proud of himself about this!
- his examination of genre tropes and shifts over the course of the approximate-decade of his focus is necessarily not particularly nuanced because a.) he's trying to do too many things in his book b.) as aforementioned he thinks it's bad form to actually spoil the plots which unfortunately is a relevant part of genre analysis and c.) as far as I can tell he is totally uninterested in the concept of noir
- this is a tiny pet peeve of mine but he has a deeply annoying habit of referring to periods in the lives of various authors as either At the Height of Their Powers or When Their Powers Were Fading, as if they were mysterious wizards


But on the other hand:
- many of these problems are because he is so CLEARLY so enthused about his subject that he CANNOT stop himself from going off on tangents and also he REALLY wants everyone to read all his favorite 1930s crime books someday, which honestly is pretty endearing
- I love collective history ... I love reading about how members of a community bounce against each other and inspire and challenge and irritate each other and get into tangled collective group projects that they then are bad at completing ... the chapters about Dorothy Sayers cat-herding her colleagues into writing round-robin novels together were so much fun for me that they alone justified the price of admission (which was zero, because this was a library book)
- Edwards' polite No Spoilers policy was effective, I now have a Golden Age TBR list twice as long as my arm

I will leave you with my favorite factoid that I learned from this book, which is that Berthold Brecht and Walter Benjamin were at one point planning to co-write Marxist detective novels together and got as far as a first chapter and an outline. I want to live in the universe where I get to read that book.

Okay I am sorry but I am also incapable of not making the joke that I'm sure has already been made a hundred times before: Merlin Sheldrake, the author of Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures, seems like a really fun guy ....

And that's important! I needed a fun guy to guide me through mushroomland without fully activating my fight or flight response! Eukaryotic organisms are mysterious and terrifying to me -- I know all about the zombie ant fungus, I've read a lot of freaky Yumi Tamura evil mushroom plots, and I don't particularly like how most of them taste so I don't even have the satisfaction of culinary conquest -- but Merlin Sheldrake is just so genuinely delighted by the wide, weird world of fungi that it helped me suspend my innate discomfort and experience some of his joy vicariously. Do I, personally, want to take LSD and bury myself in a rotting leaf mound in order to fully participate in Mushroom Decay Vibes? No! Absolutely not! But it's quite fun to read about Sheldrake throwing himself wholeheartedly into all forms of The Fungus Experience in between deep dives on mycorrhizal networks and slime molds.

This also ended up being a great accidental wine pairing with the nineties science fiction novel I just finished and loved, Amy Thompson's The Color of Distance. This is a first contact novel set on a planet populated by intelligent amphibioid aliens with extremely minimal mechanical technology but incredible skill at biological modification, called Tendu. When the Tendu find stranded biologist Juna on the verge of death due to being fatally allergic to everything on the planet, a Tendu elder decides to save her life as his final and most impressive project; Juna wakes up to find herself a.) suddenly the first human to have successfully communicated with an intelligent alien species and b.) significantly more amphibioid than she used to be.

Meanwhile, the elder's heir Anito reluctantly takes on the responsibility of bringing this new weird creature that they've found into harmony with the rest of the Tendu world. All adult Tendu are given responsibility for managing a certain part of their environment and maintaining its harmony in this way; at one point later in the book Juna has to train in someone else's area of responsibility after accidentally killing an off-season creature and spends weeks studying a single tree, inside and out, learning all the ways that the plants and bugs and birds and fungi around it are interconnected, in a chapter that reads like something straight out of Entangled Life which is also tremendously concerned with complex ecosystems and symbiotic relationships.

Then of course she has to give a Ph.D. presentation on it to an audience of jugmental Tendu in order to prove she's understood well enough that the delicate, careful process of cross-cultural communication can continue. (There are several stressful alien-frog academic presentation scenes throughout the book and all of them were extremely fun for me.)

Anito and Juna both spend some time coming to terms with the fact that regardless of what they'd originally planned or hoped for themselves, the task of helping their species to understand each other is their life now, and the most difficult and important work that they will ever do. Most of the events in the book are portrayed through both Juna's perspective and one of the Tendu's -- in addition to Anito, the other main Tendu POV are Ukatonen, a wandering elder who finds the Juna situation the most interesting thing he's been a part of in centuries, and Moki, a junior Tendu that Juna ends up adopting in order to save his life, with extremely complex consequences -- which works really well to express the difference in viewpoints and expectations from both sides, and make the reader feel how much of a triumph it is when understanding is eventually reached.

The overall tone of the book is surprisingly optimistic: Juna and the Tendu who are most involved with her all end up situated in complicated positions somewhat in between the two cultures, and the loss and loneliness of those positions are extremely real and significant, but so are the gifts and the gains. The connection between human and Tendu will inevitably bring enormous change, and it's not a given that they'll be able to come into harmony with each other, but because of the work that the characters put in, there is a solid chance for it.

(There is apparently a sequel, but I've been strongly warned not to read it and I do not intend to do so; this book works tremendously well as a standalone!)