Reading Wed – ugh, Friday
Aug. 26th, 2016 02:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhWhat did you just finish?
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon. In the early 1940s, when there was an increasing need to respond to Jewish refugees from Germany and other parts of Europe, a proposal was made to send them to Alaska, at the time not yet a US state. This, obviously, did not happen.
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is set in a world where it did, and thus in 2007 (the year the book is set and also was published) several million Jews are living in Sitka, Alaska, a federally administered territory which will revert to direct US control in two months, forcing most of the current population to find a new homeland. There are other hints as to how this world differs from ours – the Holocaust seems to have been smaller and to have made less of an impact on world politics, Israel as a country does not exist whereas Manchuria is an independant nation, there are veterans of a Cuba-American war floating around – though I wasn't always clear on what caused them.
Meyer Landsman is our protagonist and also the most archetypical noir detective I have ever seen. He's a policeman, divorced, alcoholic, living in a flophouse hotel, and vaguely suicidal, in such a way that his suicidal impulses seem more like ironic dark humor than an actual illness. His narration is rambling and witty and cynical, with the over-the-top metaphors and other stylistic conventions of Chandler and Hammett. There's so many great lines in this book; almost every page had some odd twist of words that leapt out and grabbed me: "houses jumbled like the last ten cans of beans on a grocery shelf before the hurricane hits", or "the winter sky of southeastern Alaska is a Talmud of gray, an inexhaustible commentary on a Torah of rain clouds and dying light".
The story starts when another resident of Landsman's hotel is found murdered; at first, the man seems to be a nameless heroin addict, indistinguishable from any other burnt-out addict on the street, or from Landsman himself. Of course there's more to the story than that. The dead man is eventually identified as the only son of the 18th Verbover Rabbi, the leader of the most influential Hasidic sect in Sitka and, oh yeah, also a powerful organized crime boss. As a child, the dead man had seemed to be a prodigy – playing chess, speaking multiple languages, even supposedly capable of miracle cures – and was believed by many to be the Tzadik ha-Dor, a potential messiah. How he got from those heights to the ones in which he died, not to mention who murdered him, is the rest of the mystery.
There's a lot to think about this book, which uses the plot to consider questions of homeland and exile, failure and redemption, land disputes and colonization, identity, the possibility – or not – of messiah and a perfect world, and justice. Here Landsman describes the funeral for the murdered man: "They smell of lamentation, these yids, long underwear, tobacco smoke on wet overcoats, mud. They're praying like they're going to faint, fainting like it's a kind of observance. Weeping women cling to each other and break open their throats. They aren't mourning Mendel Shpilman, they can't be. It's something else they feel has gone out of the world, the shadow of a shadow, the hope of a hope. This half-island they have come to love as home is being taken from them. They are like goldfish in a bag, about to be dumped back into the big black lake of Diaspora. But that's too much to think about. So instead, they lament the loss of a lucky break they never got, a chance that was no chance at all, a king who was never going to come in the first place, even without a jacketed slug in the brainpan."
Unfortunately the murder eventually turns out to involve an international war-mongering conspiracy, which I was disappointed by. As much as I can see what Chabon was going for, I preferred the small scale story of a man who was a failed prodigy, and what that meant for the few who knew him. But despite that twist, it's a great book, and I loved the first 3/4ths of it.
After I finished this, I decided to look up what Chabon has written recently, and apparently he has a new book coming out later this year. But alas for me, it seems to be a return to typical literary fiction. There's a million novels out there about someone's dying grandfather, Chabon! Cater to my taste and stick with your weird genre experiments, like the origin of comic books with golems (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay) or purple-prose sword & sorcery epics (Gentlemen of the Road) or hard-boiled detective alt-history novels! Ah, well.
Rusalka by C.J. Cherryh. In a fantasy version of medieval Russia, Sasha is an orphaned stableboy cursed by bad luck – or so he and the entire town believes. Anything Sasha wishes can come true, which is actually a terrifying, unpredictable power; as a young child, he wished for his father to stop beating him and his house promptly burnt down, killing both his parents. Sasha tries very hard therefore not to wish for anything, never to get angry, and to want as little as possible.
All of this changes when he meets Pyetr, a young gambler who has ingratiated himself with the rich men of town by being charming and fun. But Pyetr is unfairly accused of murder and his friends abruptly become a lot less charmed, leaving Pyetr with no one to rely on but a chance-met Sasha. The two of them flee town together and quickly find themselves lost in a forest in late winter, the worst time of year: mud and melt and dead branches and nothing new growing yet. They're taken in by a mysterious old man who could be a wizard – and thus tied to Sasha's own power of wishing – who asks in return for his help that they rescue his dead daughter, currently a rusalka (a sort of hungry ghost). And then things get complicated.
I liked the magic system in this book a lot. Magic is powerful and nearly everywhere, but it is also impossible to predict, slippery and wiley and full of unintended consequences. There are ent-like forest spirits, huge shapeshifter river things, protective and oddly cute house guardians. People give away their hearts, literally, and wizards prove to be very hard to trust.
Sasha is a great character, good-hearted and uncertain of himself and desperately wanting a friend. He reminded me a lot of Maia from The Goblin Emperor – that same sort of young man thrust into a position of power and struggling to learn how to use it without doing harm, and meanwhile being very lonely. Rusalka as a whole has a similar sweet, uplifting tone to The Goblin Emperor, in fact, though with a more adventurous plot and a bit more loss in the end. It also has a lot of people trudging through the woods at the end of their rope, injured and exhausted and under various spells or ghost influence, with all the accompanying H/C. Which I know is a plus for many of you. :D Sasha and Pyetr have an adorable friendship, and are constantly worrying about one another and putting the other first. It's a great book, though in a particularly iddy-fanfic sort of way. It's also the first of a trilogy, and I am looking forward to reading the others.
Note: I read the version available on Cherryh's website, which apparently has been slightly rewritten from the version published originally. She talks a bit about the choice to rewrite here.
Smashed, Mashed, Boiled, and Baked--and Fried, Too!: A Celebration of Potatoes in 75 Irresistible Recipes by Raghavan Iyer. I love potatoes! Who does not love potatoes? I especially love cold potato salad in overwhelming summer heat, as one of the few filling-but-cold dishes I'm good at – which may surprise anyone who knows my food habits and how much I hate mayonnaise. But there's so many excellent variations on potato salad that are not just chunks of potato drenched in mayo! This is the main reason I checked out this cookbook, and I was rewarded; Iyer has eight different recipes. I've made the "Harissa Potato Salad" and "Grandmother Ida's Russian Potato Salad", and they were both delicious. The "Mojito Potato-Pomegranate Salad" and "Roasted Potato Salad with Basil" also look great.
There's lots of non-salad recipes here too: "Potato Soto Ayam" (a pho-like noodle and chicken soup), Persian Style Potatoes and Eggs (sort like hash browns topped with baked eggs), Massaman Curry, Potato-Stuffed Chili Rellenos. Plus Iyer's own versions on many well-known ways of eating potatoes are included: baked, mashed, french fries, tater tots, latkes, perogies, patatas bravas, potatoes gratin, gnocchi. There's even a chapter of desserts, and though I am not entirely convinced of the appeal of "Chocolate Sweet Potato Pound Cake" or "Thick-Cut Potato Crisps with Dark Chocolate", they don't sound half-bad.
Anyway, potatoes! They're my favorite.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
What are you currently reading?
Shaman by Kim Stanley Robinson. Another in my cold-weather-books for August, though probably the last for now, since the worst of the heat seems to have broken. A novel set in Ice Age Europe which – so far, at least – seems very well-researched.
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon. In the early 1940s, when there was an increasing need to respond to Jewish refugees from Germany and other parts of Europe, a proposal was made to send them to Alaska, at the time not yet a US state. This, obviously, did not happen.
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is set in a world where it did, and thus in 2007 (the year the book is set and also was published) several million Jews are living in Sitka, Alaska, a federally administered territory which will revert to direct US control in two months, forcing most of the current population to find a new homeland. There are other hints as to how this world differs from ours – the Holocaust seems to have been smaller and to have made less of an impact on world politics, Israel as a country does not exist whereas Manchuria is an independant nation, there are veterans of a Cuba-American war floating around – though I wasn't always clear on what caused them.
Meyer Landsman is our protagonist and also the most archetypical noir detective I have ever seen. He's a policeman, divorced, alcoholic, living in a flophouse hotel, and vaguely suicidal, in such a way that his suicidal impulses seem more like ironic dark humor than an actual illness. His narration is rambling and witty and cynical, with the over-the-top metaphors and other stylistic conventions of Chandler and Hammett. There's so many great lines in this book; almost every page had some odd twist of words that leapt out and grabbed me: "houses jumbled like the last ten cans of beans on a grocery shelf before the hurricane hits", or "the winter sky of southeastern Alaska is a Talmud of gray, an inexhaustible commentary on a Torah of rain clouds and dying light".
The story starts when another resident of Landsman's hotel is found murdered; at first, the man seems to be a nameless heroin addict, indistinguishable from any other burnt-out addict on the street, or from Landsman himself. Of course there's more to the story than that. The dead man is eventually identified as the only son of the 18th Verbover Rabbi, the leader of the most influential Hasidic sect in Sitka and, oh yeah, also a powerful organized crime boss. As a child, the dead man had seemed to be a prodigy – playing chess, speaking multiple languages, even supposedly capable of miracle cures – and was believed by many to be the Tzadik ha-Dor, a potential messiah. How he got from those heights to the ones in which he died, not to mention who murdered him, is the rest of the mystery.
There's a lot to think about this book, which uses the plot to consider questions of homeland and exile, failure and redemption, land disputes and colonization, identity, the possibility – or not – of messiah and a perfect world, and justice. Here Landsman describes the funeral for the murdered man: "They smell of lamentation, these yids, long underwear, tobacco smoke on wet overcoats, mud. They're praying like they're going to faint, fainting like it's a kind of observance. Weeping women cling to each other and break open their throats. They aren't mourning Mendel Shpilman, they can't be. It's something else they feel has gone out of the world, the shadow of a shadow, the hope of a hope. This half-island they have come to love as home is being taken from them. They are like goldfish in a bag, about to be dumped back into the big black lake of Diaspora. But that's too much to think about. So instead, they lament the loss of a lucky break they never got, a chance that was no chance at all, a king who was never going to come in the first place, even without a jacketed slug in the brainpan."
Unfortunately the murder eventually turns out to involve an international war-mongering conspiracy, which I was disappointed by. As much as I can see what Chabon was going for, I preferred the small scale story of a man who was a failed prodigy, and what that meant for the few who knew him. But despite that twist, it's a great book, and I loved the first 3/4ths of it.
After I finished this, I decided to look up what Chabon has written recently, and apparently he has a new book coming out later this year. But alas for me, it seems to be a return to typical literary fiction. There's a million novels out there about someone's dying grandfather, Chabon! Cater to my taste and stick with your weird genre experiments, like the origin of comic books with golems (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay) or purple-prose sword & sorcery epics (Gentlemen of the Road) or hard-boiled detective alt-history novels! Ah, well.
Rusalka by C.J. Cherryh. In a fantasy version of medieval Russia, Sasha is an orphaned stableboy cursed by bad luck – or so he and the entire town believes. Anything Sasha wishes can come true, which is actually a terrifying, unpredictable power; as a young child, he wished for his father to stop beating him and his house promptly burnt down, killing both his parents. Sasha tries very hard therefore not to wish for anything, never to get angry, and to want as little as possible.
All of this changes when he meets Pyetr, a young gambler who has ingratiated himself with the rich men of town by being charming and fun. But Pyetr is unfairly accused of murder and his friends abruptly become a lot less charmed, leaving Pyetr with no one to rely on but a chance-met Sasha. The two of them flee town together and quickly find themselves lost in a forest in late winter, the worst time of year: mud and melt and dead branches and nothing new growing yet. They're taken in by a mysterious old man who could be a wizard – and thus tied to Sasha's own power of wishing – who asks in return for his help that they rescue his dead daughter, currently a rusalka (a sort of hungry ghost). And then things get complicated.
I liked the magic system in this book a lot. Magic is powerful and nearly everywhere, but it is also impossible to predict, slippery and wiley and full of unintended consequences. There are ent-like forest spirits, huge shapeshifter river things, protective and oddly cute house guardians. People give away their hearts, literally, and wizards prove to be very hard to trust.
Sasha is a great character, good-hearted and uncertain of himself and desperately wanting a friend. He reminded me a lot of Maia from The Goblin Emperor – that same sort of young man thrust into a position of power and struggling to learn how to use it without doing harm, and meanwhile being very lonely. Rusalka as a whole has a similar sweet, uplifting tone to The Goblin Emperor, in fact, though with a more adventurous plot and a bit more loss in the end. It also has a lot of people trudging through the woods at the end of their rope, injured and exhausted and under various spells or ghost influence, with all the accompanying H/C. Which I know is a plus for many of you. :D Sasha and Pyetr have an adorable friendship, and are constantly worrying about one another and putting the other first. It's a great book, though in a particularly iddy-fanfic sort of way. It's also the first of a trilogy, and I am looking forward to reading the others.
Note: I read the version available on Cherryh's website, which apparently has been slightly rewritten from the version published originally. She talks a bit about the choice to rewrite here.
Smashed, Mashed, Boiled, and Baked--and Fried, Too!: A Celebration of Potatoes in 75 Irresistible Recipes by Raghavan Iyer. I love potatoes! Who does not love potatoes? I especially love cold potato salad in overwhelming summer heat, as one of the few filling-but-cold dishes I'm good at – which may surprise anyone who knows my food habits and how much I hate mayonnaise. But there's so many excellent variations on potato salad that are not just chunks of potato drenched in mayo! This is the main reason I checked out this cookbook, and I was rewarded; Iyer has eight different recipes. I've made the "Harissa Potato Salad" and "Grandmother Ida's Russian Potato Salad", and they were both delicious. The "Mojito Potato-Pomegranate Salad" and "Roasted Potato Salad with Basil" also look great.
There's lots of non-salad recipes here too: "Potato Soto Ayam" (a pho-like noodle and chicken soup), Persian Style Potatoes and Eggs (sort like hash browns topped with baked eggs), Massaman Curry, Potato-Stuffed Chili Rellenos. Plus Iyer's own versions on many well-known ways of eating potatoes are included: baked, mashed, french fries, tater tots, latkes, perogies, patatas bravas, potatoes gratin, gnocchi. There's even a chapter of desserts, and though I am not entirely convinced of the appeal of "Chocolate Sweet Potato Pound Cake" or "Thick-Cut Potato Crisps with Dark Chocolate", they don't sound half-bad.
Anyway, potatoes! They're my favorite.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
What are you currently reading?
Shaman by Kim Stanley Robinson. Another in my cold-weather-books for August, though probably the last for now, since the worst of the heat seems to have broken. A novel set in Ice Age Europe which – so far, at least – seems very well-researched.
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Date: 2016-08-26 08:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-08-26 09:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-08-26 09:30 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2016-08-26 09:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-08-26 09:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-08-26 09:13 pm (UTC)(I am with you on mayonnaise, ugh. But here's a <a href="http://www.runninginaskirt.com/greek-yogurt-potato-salad/2/'>really nice one</a> with Greek yogurt and dill which, if it isn't in the cookbook, should be!)
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Date: 2016-08-26 09:44 pm (UTC)Ha, well, in this world there's a large city there, since they've had several decades to build skyscrapers and apartment buildings and whatnot. It didn't bother me since I know nothing about Sitka or, really, Alaska, but I can see why it would be stranger if you were familiar with the real-world version.
I think you'll like Rusalka!
That recipe looks right up my alley. Thank you!
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Date: 2016-08-27 01:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-08-27 03:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-08-27 11:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-08-27 08:19 pm (UTC)