Topic: Reading
And because I'm ridiculously behind - more books:
I mentioned earlier that I'd been reading Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman, which is a wide-ranging collection of short stories and poems, most hovering around the edges of the fantasy/horror genres. Gaiman does not write reassuring stories, but he writes with a clear eye to all the beauty and ugliness that people are capable of creating. His stories are dark, and true, and fantastic - in every sense of the word.
Also dark, and fantastic, at least in the elaborateness of the world she creates within the book, is Elizabeth Hand's Winterlong, which blends a postapocalypic vision of a deeply stratified and disjointed future society with ancient legends and rituals of death and rebirth associated with ancient goddess-centered religions. However, these elements tend to work against each other, rather than with each other. Hand's writing is gorgeous, though, and she certainly knows how to establish a compelling mood and setting. But even though I was drawn in to the story initially, I finished it feeling rather bemused. It just didn't hang together as a whole.
By contrast, Jane Smiley's Good Faith is seamless and seemingly effortless. I'm so glad I finally got around to reading it - I've had it on my 'to read' list for at least two years. Smiley is an amazing, engrossing, engaging writer and she turns the story of a small-town real estate agent who gets swept up in the big dreams and big deals of the early '80s into a nuanced cautionary tale about trust, confidence, and community. The one flaw is that she wraps everything up a bit too quickly, but I'm willing to forgive that because everything that came before was so very good.
In Mind of My Mind, Octavia Butler explores race, community, and symbiosis - themes that featured strongly in Fledgling from a slightly different angle, crafting a novel in which the protagonist and the antagonist are both complex characters that aren't easy to like. The story is of a poor Black girl who is the end result of a millenia-long experiment in selective breeding carried out by an immortal (it doesn't sound like it would work as a story, but it does) who exceeds all her creator's expectations and challenges his power. A profoundly isolated women becomes the core of an intimately connected new society that is fascinating, if uncomfortable. I'm not sure I liked this book, exactly, but I found it absorbing - I could hardly put it down once I started reading.
American Gods by Neil Gaiman, also verges on being unputdownable. I first read American Gods a few years ago, and decided it was time to revisit it. I liked it even more the second time around - I was able to appreciate all the detail that Gaiman pours into the worlds he creates, instead of tearing through it to see what happens next, which is what I did on my first reading. American Gods operates on the premise that the immigrant peoples who came to the 'New World' brought their beliefs with them, but that the old gods have found America an uncomfortable place to exist, particularly when they're struggling for space alongside newer gods - Cars, Media, Technology. America is about to become the battleground in a war between the gods, which we see slowly building up through the eyes of a mere mortal who has become embroiled in the whole mess. As a former mythology nerd, American Gods was right up my alley. And Mrs Dr says it's 'good theology', and being a theologian, she would know. And its such a good novel. I think it's becoming one of my favorites.
Another good novel about belief is Ursula LeGuin's The Telling. A far future earth has suffered through domination by a fundamentalist monothestic theocracy that persecuted other beliefs. Although that regime was eventually dismantled, it first managed to export its values - intolerance of other views, progress through consumption, obsession with technology - to another planet, Aka. A young woman who lived through the upheaval of the last days of the theocracy on Earth has been sent to Aka as an observer, and must work through the scars she carries from her past while trying to help preserve the ancient Akanian spiritual and cultural traditions that the modernizers have been trying to eradicate. The protagonist, Sutty, is a compelling character - flawed and self-aware, and her richness and realness is the best thing about The Telling. Overall, The Telling is pretty good, but not as stunning as earlier LeGuin works like The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed - although those two established a really, really high standard.
And yes, I have been doing reading for my thesis amidst all of these escapist novels. I just finished Barracks and Brothels: Peacekeepers and Human Trafficking in the Balkans by Sarah Mendelson last night. It was interesting reading - a tightly focused analysis of the organizational cultures of the UN, NATO and the US Department of Defense and how these fed into the problems of sexual exploitation of local women and girls by peacekeeping troops in the Balkans, and the associated increase in trafficking. Mendelson's research is very valuable for its accounts of incidents of trafficking, and its recommendation that organizational change is necessary, but I found myself frustrated by the absence of a gendered analysis of military culture that attempts to illuminate why purchasing sex is so much a part of military culture, and why, therefore, changing that aspect of military culture has run up against so many obstacles.
Finally, LeGuin again: The Lathe of Heaven, a very brief novel about George Orr, a perfectly ordinary man with one absolutely extraordinary ability - some of his dreams come true. This ability makes George very uncomfortable, though - who is he to arbitrarily and profoundly change reality? Dream therapist Dr. Haber ostensibly sets to help George, but finds himself seduced by the power to effect massive change and begins to use George's mind to fix the world's problems. The results are ... unanticipated. Again, this isn't one of LeGuin's best novels, but it's still good. It adopts an unusual perspective for science fiction - it's very clearly Taoist in its approach to change and the use of power, which puts an interesting moral spin on a story that could have just been about all the ways that changing the world can go wrong.
All caught up now. I'm already up to 34 books, so I'm thinking that a) hitting 50 by the end of the year won't be a problem and b) maybe, just maybe, there's a chance that it might be possible that I'm reading too many novels.