What are you reading these days?

I've been reading a couple of books lately.

I'm finally reading The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap by Stephanie Coontz. It's been on my list for about a year. It's a nonfiction book that details statistical and societal changes/myths about the American family. It's providing a deeply fascinating context for the now vs. then dichotomy of the "good old days".

The other book I'm reading is It Came From Memphis by Robert Gordon. It takes a look at the cultural landscape (primarily centered on music) in Memphis 1950s/60s and the profound shifts that were, at least in part, exported from Memphis and adopted elsewhere.

Dead Astronauts by Jeff VanderMeer.

My wife got it for me because I love space horror and the title implied it was as such.

...it is not space horror at all. It's more of Jeff's New Weird written with bends in time and space on earth which I adore the idea of but... not the way he writes it. It's probably me and my ADHD, not him. I enjoyed his Annihilation book probably solely because my attention span and lazy brain could piggyback off the visuals the movie made for me (i'm terrible, I know, but I like when movies do the work, it makes the book so much easier for me to read).

I've been told to read Ship of Fools for some space horror that'll satisfy me until my Dead Space/Castillo Protocol games come out.

I recently read The Old Nurse’s Story by Elizabeth Gaskell, a story originally published in an 1852 Household Words periodical edited by Charles Dickens. The story is an old style, spooky ghost story; and even though we've now passed Halloween, I highly recommend it. In fact, most of the story is set in the howling winds and snows of wintertime, so it may even be appropriate if you wait a few months to read it.

The narrator in the story is a young girl hired as a nursemaid for a younger girl, both of whom, upon the death of the younger girl's parents, are taken to live in a massive Victorian era manor house owned by the deceased father's family. The manor house is pretty much the archetypal haunted mansion, overgrown with ivy and filled with giant fireplaces, musical organs played by spectral beings, and tormented by sordid deeds of the family's past. The cursed events are a consequence of bitter family betrayals and result in the death of an ancient member of that family and the near death of the nursemaid's charge. Gaskell's writing paints imagery that may be exactly what people think of in a terrifying haunted Victorian manor house.

If you want to read a good quick spooky story, this is a good one. But you don’t have to take my word for it. Read it yourself: https://www.gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0605581h.html#ch1

I finished Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy over the weekend. What a spectacle. The enmeshing of Moby-Dick with the realities of Manifest Destiny was incredible. That final passage is haunting, and I won't ever be able to get it, or the opening, out of my mind. Or so is said.

Fortunately, on Sunday, a copy of Watchmen (Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons) arrived, so I didn't have to worry about what was next. Funny how both tackle the violence inherent to American identity in 1985, that wasn't intentional. I'm not a comic reader, I read the original run of The Amazing Spider-Man as a child, and then most of V for Vendetta in high school, but that's the sum total of my exposure to the medium. I'm sure that I missed plenty of allusions as a result, but on the other hand, it was still excellent. I loved the nesting of stories, the interlocking themes, the truth behind every character. Even Rorschach was sympathetic, despite being a shitty wannabe ubermensch and near-monster. It's a real shame how this comic series is the perfect testcase for why the wider public can't be trusted to actually read the words on the page. "I'm not locked in here with you, ..." doesn't make up for torture, turns out.

Seeking more manageable stakes than genocide and global nuclear war, I turned to Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, translated to English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. The narrator is such a curious character, deeply believable, charismatic, and endearing. She's a late-middle aged woman living in rural Poland, who studies astrology empirically, refuses to listen to cries for quiescence, and deeply cares for the nature around her. I didn't feel the actual mystery too engaging, or even particularly esoteric, but her perspective was engrossing and serene, despite the happenings.

Oh, look at the calendar, it's November! Suppose that means it's been...close enough to two months to get back to Thomas Pynchon. It may be time for me to finally embark on his physically largest and most narratively sprawling novel, Against the Day. Drive Your Plow... really set me in an anarchic mood.

I started reading Engineering in Plain Sight by Grady Hillhouse. He runs the Practical Engineering channel on youtube. It covers the basics of all the feats of engineering like the electrical grid, roads, telecommunications, etc. It's pretty good but I think it could use more real life pictures.

I just finished re-reading China Miéville's The City & The City. I had forgotten most of the plot, but I remembered that it was good, and it's better than I remembered.

It's a strange book. I guess I'd call it cultural science fiction, sort of like what Ursula K. Le Guinn used to write. It's a police procedural with a grim, cold war feel to it. There is politics and borders and checkpoints, and it starts with a murder to solve.

The two cities in the title, Besźel and Ul Qoma, are somewhere in eastern Europe and on opposite sides of an international border, perhaps like East and West Berlin during the Cold War. But not really. The cities are intertwined and the borders are everywhere. Neighboring buildings may be in opposite cities. Fragments of public property like streets and parks may be in either city or "cross-hatched" so they may be used by residents of either one.

How can this work? The boundaries between the cities are lines on a complicated map, but they're also cultural and legal. Their origins are unknown. The cities have been this way, separate but mingled, for almost all written history. People in Besźel and Ul Qoma wear different clothing, have different foods, different languages, even walk in different ways. Buildings and vehicles have different styles. Usually, but not always, they're easy to tell apart.

The people are raised to "unsee" anyone and anything in the other city. This means ignoring them as much as possible. On the shared streets they go their separate ways, ignoring and avoiding traffic and crowds from the foreign city.

The author has lots of fun playing around with the ludicrous implications of these cultural and legal rules, and this is the part of the book I enjoyed the most. The rules are strict - how are they enforced? What allowances are made for mistakes, accidents, crimes? Visiting foreigners must be rigorously trained, and still might not take the rules seriously. There are political dissidents who want to break or eliminate the border rules - how are they kept in line?

Each city has a separate government and police force. There is also a mysterious, feared, possibly-alien secret force called "Breach" whose job is keep the two cities separate. Anyone who makes a serious "breach" of the border rules gets disappeared, never to be heard from again. Jurisdiction is seemingly well-defined, but edge cases make it complicated. (So, naturally, the plot is built around edge cases.)

The weirdness is strangely familiar, so it's tempting to look for cheap analogies, but none of them really fit. Maybe it's like religious boundaries, or racial boundaries, or caste boundaries? Sort of, not really. The author pulled in aspects of all these things and made something different.

The intricate rules also remind me a bit of kosher law, or law in general, or property law in particular. A property line can be an obvious fence or wall, but it can also be more or less invisible and nothing that animals will care about. The boundaries are real and important to people, not nature, and people have to work hard to keep them in place, willingly or not.

As is often the case with mysteries, the suspense builds up, but when we find out who's behind the crimes that drive the plot, it's a little disappointing, and that's probably why I had forgotten what happened. I liked the ending, though.