Reading Wednesday

What did you just finish?
The Plot Against America by Philip Roth. An alternative history novel about the presidency of Charles Lindbergh (pilot and kidnapped baby dad), who is elected after running against FDR's third campaign. In real life, he seems to have been a serious anti-semite and Nazi admirer; as you might imagine, having him as President causes the history of WWII to go rather differently.

However, the vast majority of the book isn't about politics, or war, or anything else you might assume from the summary above; instead, it's written as the childhood memoirs of main character Philip Roth (which, by the way, I found really confusing! Don't write something that's blatantly fantasy and then name the main character after yourself. What is even the point of that?), the youngest child in a middle-class Jewish family in Newark, NJ.

Taken as a memoir, the book's pretty good. The writing is lovely, the depiction of tense family relationships is great, and I liked the ordinary people dealing with large sweeps of history. Roth does a very good job of showing how normal, reasonable people can become caught up with popular prejudices, and how something that seems absolutely unthinkable (like, you know, the Holocaust) can begin.

However, as an alternative history, the book is terrible. There's almost no change to history for the first 300 pages (and the few changes that are made mostly involve changing the dates on real events rather than coming up with new things to happen), and then there's suddenly INCREDIBLE DRAMATIC changes for about twenty pages, only to be resolved with a confusing deus ex machina that puts everything back on the course of real history, to such an extent that the US ends up entering WWII in literally the exact same month as in reality. Why write a whole book only to erase everything you did at the end?

So, what happens is that after two years of colluding with the Nazis as president (because they were the ones who kidnapped his baby and have been raising it as a hostage, WHAT THE HELL THAT IS THE WORST PLOT TWIST), Lindbergh abruptly decides to resist them, which he does by flying to Germany without telling anyone (???) and then disappears. This leads to eight days where the Vice-President takes control and tries to set up concentration camps and declare war on Canada, except that Lindbergh's First Lady has apparently also decided to stop working with the Nazis (even though she also knows about the baby thing) and so she makes a speech over the radio about how the army/police/supreme court/congress/everyone should stop listening to the new President and just go back to normal. Which somehow... works? Right away? Without devolving into civil war with some people listening and others not? How she pulls this off is not explained.

It's also never explained why Mr and Mrs Lindbergh stop being antisemites. I suppose it might be implied by their friendship with a Rabbi, but that would make for a really unfortunate moral. The entire book has been about how everyone hates this particular Rabbi – Christians hate him because he's Jewish, and Jewish people hate him because he's seen as a collaborator – so the message ends up being "Make friends with Nazis! If you're nice enough and patient enough, they'll totally stop being Nazis! :D" So I prefer to think that wasn't Roth's intention. But without that, there's literally not even a hint of an explanation for why the Lindberghs change their minds. Maybe Roth felt guilty for writing an entire book that's going to cement in everyone's memory what a dick Lindbergh was? But he was an antisemite, that part's accurate to history; I don't see why he needs a redemption arc that never happened.

So it's hard to assess the book as a whole. It wasn't at all what I expected or wanted it to be, but I suspect that what I wanted was really not Roth's goal. And I'm pretty sure he did a good job at what he set out to do! It's just that what he wrote was not what I thought a book with the title The Plot Against America would be, and so I was disappointed.


Sourcery by Terry Pratchett. Ahhh, this reread is still making me so happy! I barely remembered this book – I know I read it, but I'd forgotten about 99.5% of it entirely, and so it was mostly a new experience to me.

A wizard is someone who uses magic. A sourcerer is someone who creates entirely new magic (get the pun? A "source" of magic. I totally did not get it myself until someone pointed it out to me, mostly because I figured it was just a British spelling. In my defense, they put u's in a lot of things!). When the first sourcerer in a very, very long time is born, it leads to chaos, magical war, and (almost) the end of the Universe. Fighting for peace are Rincewind the cowardly, unmagical wizard; and the Librarian, who was accidently turned into an orangutan, but prefers it to his former human state, thank you very much. Along the way you get parodies of 1001 Nights, Conan the Barbarian, and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

But despite all the silliness obvious from that summary, this was the first book so far that as has the depth and darkness that I know Pratchett is capable of. There were so many startlingly powerful moments – burning the library, Rincewind's decision to go and face the sourcerer, the deaths in the war, the reshaping of Ankh-Morpork, and basically every single thing about Coin. It was just amazingly good.

One thing I've noticed while doing this reread is Pratchett's huge vocabulary. I think of the Discworld books as easy to read (at least on a sentence by sentence level, if not in all their allusions and implications), perhaps because I started reading them myself when I was very young. But just in this book I came across multiple words that I needed to look up: peristalsis, actinic, and well, more than that, but I've forgotten the others. I suppose back when I first read them, I simply figured out the meaning from context, but since I almost never come across words I don't know anymore, to do so multiple times in books I'd mentally classified as "easy" is surprising. Also, I'm pretty sure I spent an embarrassing number of years thinking "vermine" was a real word.


BookBurners, Episodes 1-3. This is the first serial out from Serial Box, which is a new company attempting to make books that are like TV. Episodes come out weekly, and are designed to be the right length to be read in about an hour (which usually translates to around 40-50 pages). "Seasons" will be between 13 and 16 episodes. (Full disclosure: I have a connection with Serial Box generally, but not with Bookburners specifically.) Bookburners is sort of like The Librarians, or Warehouse 13, or any of the many other similar TV shows/movies/book series with a plot of "hunt down magical objects and keep them from destroying the world".
Badge, Book, and Candle (Ep 1) by Max Gladstone. Sal is a NYC detective who gets caught up in problems outside her usual sphere when her younger brother steals an old book and is promptly possessed by the demon living inside it. She mets the team sent by the Vatican to deal with situations like this one – Grace (a martial artist who is always grumpy and only wants to read), Liam (a cheerful talkative guy, formerly possessed by a demon himself) and Menchu (the older, wiser priest leading the team) – and by the end of the episode has been hired to work with them. I really like the characters and action in this, but something about the plot didn't seem to fit the length. It needed to be either shorter or longer, but as it was it felt rushed and off-balance. But eh, pilots are hard, and this makes a good introduction to the world.
(You can get this episode for free off the Serial Box website.)

Anywhere But Here (Ep 2) by Brian Francis Slattery. Sal travels to the Vatican to learn more about the history and function of her new team. Meanwhile, a dude in Madrid accidentally opens an old book that allows him to create anything he can imagine. I liked this episode more than the first one; the evil book in this one was deliciously creepy and full of inventive, fascinating imagery. The length was just right for the story, and it was a great first case.

Fair Weather (Ep 3) by Margaret Dunlap. When a bookstore in Rome abruptly vanishes, Sal tracks down the latest evil book to a nearby yacht, and promptly gets herself, her team, and some innocent bystanders trapped on-board with a deadline ticking down until they're all buried by demon goo. This was by far my favorite episode yet. The writing was fantastic – very funny in the beginning, with lots of great snappy dialogue – and then with a surprising dark twist at the end that I did not see coming at all. It was less creepy than the previous episode, but the action and mystery were just so clever and well-done.
(Episodes 2 and 3 I read as ARCs from NetGalley.)

What are you currently reading?
I finished Fair Weather just a few minutes ago, so nothing yet!