Reading Wednesday

[brigdh]

What did you just finish?
Riot: A Love Story by Shashi Tharoor. A novel about a small town in northern India, communal riots, and a white American woman who is killed during the riots. She was having an affair with an Indian official, while also tied up in some personal vendettas, or just possibly in the wrong place at the wrong time. The most interesting thing about this is how it's told. The entire book is snippets of different characters' writing: letters, poems, diary entries, newspaper articles, interview transcripts, work memos, and so on. All of the characters are unreliable narrators, and none of them have all the information, so reading it is a bit like putting together a puzzle. Tharoor apparently wanted to write a book that you could read in any order; I'm not quite sure that would work quite as well as reading it in the printed order, but it's a neat idea. I've read enough of Tharoor's other books to be well aware of his personal politics, but I think he did a good job of writing in the perspective of people from all sorts of different political stances.

Etiquette & Espionage by Gail Carriger. This is a new series set in the same world as Carriger's Parasol Protectorate series (though the two series aren't directly connected), which means a steampunk 1800s with vampires, werewolves, and ghosts, and really neat worldbuilding (I love the idea that the reason the British Empire was so successful is because they were the only armies that employed werewolves). This series, unlike the first, is YA, and it really shows in this first book. I do like YA, but occasionally it can be very... shallow, or unsubtle, or some word I'm not quite thinking of, and this book suffers from that.

Sophronia, at 14, is a youngest daughter and a troublemaker, so her mother sends her away to a boarding school. However, this school– Mademoiselle Geraldine's Finishing Academy for Young Ladies of Quality– turns out to educate the students to be spies and assassins rather than the normal sort of society lady. Which is much more to Sophronia's interest. Also, the entire school is in a giant dirigible. And then there is a complicated plot involving the prototype of a new technology, that everyone– the Queen, the vampires, the Picklemen (an anti-supernatural organization)– wants.

Curtsies & Conspiracies by Gail Carriger. The sequel! I liked this book much more than the first; the first was fun and forgettable, but this one was genuinely good (which is sort of how I felt about Carriger's first series, actually). This one has a love triangle between Sophronia, Soap (a "sootie", one of the lower-class boys who works on the school's dirigible by loading the engines with coal), and Felix (a rake-in-training, the son of a Duke and a student at Mademoiselle Geraldine's brother school, Bunson's, which educates young Evil Geniuses). I have been totally Team Soap all along, but I was willing to let Felix join as a third, but then he called Soap a "darkie" and now I'm having none of it. Kick him to the curb, Sophronia.

What are you currently reading?
City of Devi by Manil Suri. A novel about post-apocalyptic Mumbai.

Memory by Lois McMaster Bujold. Back to the Vorkosigan series! I've just started this book, but I'm finding Miles's attempts to feed himself hilarious.

Comments

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

I was kind of frustrated by Riot, because we got the voices of all sorts of Indian men, and a white man, and multiple white women, and ... no Indian women. I think it was extra frustrating because I read the book as a response to Paul Scott's A Jewel in the Crown, which is another book about the impact of a crime against a young white woman in India, told in mosaic fashion through the documents and voices of multiple people involved in the story and with varying levels of concern about it. Tharoor refocuses the whole thing on the politics and communities of India, except that, just like Scott, Indian women don't get any voice.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

That's a great point. It's especially relevant because the white woman in question is in India to work with Indian women, but I had no sense of how her work was received, if she was at all helpful or not, and how she was perceived by them. I had a similar problem with Tharoor's The Great Indian Novel, where most of the male characters explicitly represented some part of society– the military, or the press, or politicians, etc– while the main female character just represented... women. Or democracy. Or something vague and uninteresting like that.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

There's one bit where it becomes clear that the Indian woman working at the nonprofit org with the main white woman thinks the white woman is naive, arrogant, oblivious, and causing women more problems by microfocusing on what she thinks is critical instead of considering long-term consequences and cultural consequences. And there's a recorded transcript where the main Indian guy's wife is at a temple. But those just made me more puzzled: why didn't the first woman get her own sections? Why doesn't the wife?

I think Tharoor does a good job of showing how the white woman is well-meaning, selfish, and recreating the same problems her father's affair did, with the genders reversed -- she is depicted critically, but not demonized. But, again, it just made me more frustrated that the same time on the page wasn't offered to the Indian women.

Thank you for posting about City of Devi! I've added it to my list.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

That's true. I also really would have liked a section from the woman who wants an abortion and whose husband is one of the potential killers. We only saw her from the outside, and I wished we'd gotten her perspective. Although to be fair, Tharoor was clearly way more interested in the communal tensions than in women; I've gotten that vibe from other things of his I've read.

I hope you like it!