A few weeks' worth of Reading Wednesdays
Feb. 28th, 2018 03:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhWhat did you just finish?
Provenance by Ann Leckie. A book set in the same universe as Leckie's Imperial Radch series (which I haven't read), but independent from them in terms of characters and plot.
In the culture of Hwae, it's common for the families of the powerful and wealthy to adopt large numbers of children – fostering children of the equally important, taking in children from families a step down in influence who are looking to build alliances, and raising children of anonymous parentage left at the public orphanages. But however many children a particular family adopts there will only ever be one acknowledged heir, who is not named until adulthood. As you might imagine, this fosters competition and vicious rivalries among the children raised under such conditions.
Ingray is a child from a public orphanage raised by an important politician, and she's absolutely certain that she's not going to become her mother's heir. But before she flounces forever from her family household, she wants one last revenge on the brother who bested her. He has a hobby of collecting trinkets and tokens connected to famous historical figures (indeed, the whole of Hwae society is a bit obsessed with historical artifacts), and Ingray wants to convince him to buy a forgery so that she can embarrass him, prove herself capable of outsmarting him, and – not incidentally – make off with a huge amount of his money. To this end she needs the help of a forger, and so she pays a bribe to have one smuggled out of prison.
And then everything goes wrong.
The forger is not particularly interested in helping her and anyway insists that e is innocent (multiple characters use non-binary pronouns, by the way: e/em/eir. This seems to be a standard part of Hwae society and isn't remarked on). The captain of the ship they hire to take back to Hwae is being chased by a mysterious alien species. Ingray witnesses a murder. False accusations are thrown around. Artifacts, both real and forged, are stolen, denounced, and given away. War threatens. People are taken hostage. Ingray is caught up in a spiraling series of events until the fate of the entire galaxy rests of her decisions.
This book was SO GOOD y'all! I know everyone has been saying that Leckie's an amazing writer for years, and all I can say is: yes, you were totally right, and I should have read her ages ago. I think my favorite part was the worldbuilding of Hwae. I caught influences of South Asian, Chinese, and African cultures, among others, but they were believably mixed and changed in such a way that it really felt like a world in such a far future that terms like 'South Asian' or 'Chinese' were no longer even recognizable. I used the term non-binary above, but it seems like it would be more accurate to call Hwae a society that has three gender roles: man, woman, and neman. Children are called "they" until they choose one at adulthood. Homosexuality is not an issue; the two most important romantic relationships in Provenance are one between two women, and one between a man and a neman.
I also loved the themes of the book: the tangled mess of parenthood and sibling relationships and finding your place as an adult. Ingray is pretty consistently negative about herself, with a clear self-esteem problem she doesn't acknowledge, and seeing her consistently rise to meet her problems was just wonderfully enjoyable. More than anything else, this book is total and complete FUN. Sure, people are getting murdered and declaring war, but this is a grand adventure in the old-school Space Opera sense... just centering people other than straight white men. Probably also a bit more emphasis on diplomacy and making the effort to see from someone else's perspective than Heinlein ever would have stood for.
Provenance is absolutely everything I have been searching for in my sci-fi reading lately. I want a thousand more books just like it.
Milk! A 10,000-Year Food Fracas by Mark Kurlansky. I'm a huge fan of Kurlansky. He's probably the most famous writer of microhistories currently, a genre I adore. Microhistories he's written include "Salt" and "Paper", books on oysters and cod, a history of just the year 1968 or the song “Dancing in the Street". You get the idea.
In this book, he takes on milk. Or, well, not only milk; Kurlansky also covers butter, cheese, ice cream, yogurt, and all the other things that can be made out of milk. It's not just cows' milk either! He includes recipes that use the milk of sheeps, goats, horses, donkeys, camels, and yaks. There's even a lot of discussion of human milk – is it better to breastfeed or to use formula? And what is the history of that debate? How does one choose a wet nurse? What about grass fed cows vs cows given fodder? Pasteurized milk vs raw? Is milk a health food? Kurlansky doesn't take a position on any of these debates or try to prove one side right with evidence; he's simply interested in how the same questions have been asked over and over again throughout history, with the pendulum frequently swinging back and forth between the same positions over the centuries.
All of this probably sounds very interesting, and indeed I really wanted to like this book, but unfortunately I didn't. Kurlansky includes many recipes (126 of them, he says on the opening page), which means that many of the chapters devolve into listing one recipe after another with barely any discussion between them. Even if I wanted to try making them (a feat often barely possible, since recipes before the 1600s rarely bother to include amounts, times, or temperature), it doesn't make for interesting reading. I especially don't want multiple recipes for junkets, syllabubs, phirni, kalakand, etc, when I don't even know what those things are. Lists of ingredients are even more uninteresting than usual when you can't picture what the final product is supposed to be. I wish Kurlansky had included fewer recipes and instead spent more time on each one: a description of what the dish would look and taste like, how it functioned in the society of its time and place (is this an everyday meal? something fancy? something for breakfast, or for dinner?), and when and why it came into or out of popularity.
Kurlanksy also seems to assume a certain level of milk-knowledge from his readers that, personally, I simply don't have. I vaguely know cream is fattier than milk, but how one gets cream or what its exact definition is, I have no idea. Same for whey (Miss Muffet ate it?), curds, buttermilk, or how churning milk actually turns it into butter. After reading Milk!, I know not a single thing more about these topics than I did before, despite Kurlansky using these terms frequently. For example, he repeatedly insists that skyr (the Icelandic product that's recently become popular in the US) is not technically a yogurt but a soft fresh cheese. That's cool trivia to know, I guess, but what I'm really curious about is why. What separates yogurt and cheese? Is the line between them strict, or does one fade into the other? Is it based on method of production, taste, ingredients, something else? I could google these answers, of course, but if I'm reading a book for fun, I'd like not to have to turn to a different source just to understand what I'm reading. I wanted to learn about milk, but Milk! is just not interested in providing these sorts of basic facts.
Finally, Kurlanksy includes at least one blatant mistake: Was the first milking animal a goat, as goat enthusiasts always claim? Or was it a gazelle, the wild ancestor of goats? This is possible, but gazelle farming would have been difficult unless they were soon domesticated into goats. I try not to be overly critical when non-archaeologists make mistakes about archaeology, because I feel like it's an intensely difficult subject to make your way into without being a specialist, but c'mon, surely this is obviously nonsense? Even if one is not an archaeologist of early farming or a biologist, isn't it self-evident that gazelles and goats are not the same species, and no magic process is going to turn a gazelle into a goat? They're not even in the same genus! They don't even look alike! (Not that 'looking alike' is a reliable way of telling what is or isn't the same species, but wouldn't that send up warning signals in your subconscious?) Also the fact that it occured on page 13 may have prejudiced me against the rest of the book.
Anyway, a fascinating topic, but unfortunately not a good book. On the other hand, I happened to read the chapter on Basque cheese immediately before heading to Trader Joe's, where I saw a Basque cheese for sale. I have my suspicions about the authenticity of anything mass-produced for the American market, but this is some tasty fucking cheese, so overall my life is improved.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
All Systems Red by Martha Wells. A sci-fi novella (only 80 pages long), the first in the "Murderbot" series. Murderbot, as our first-person narrator calls itself, is a 'SecUnit', a Security Unit robot/cyborg/android/whatever composed of both organic and mechanical parts, with an inbuilt connection to various internet and local networks. It's also hacked its own system to become an independent operator. Rather than going wild and murdering any nearby humans, it continues to do its security job, though in a halfassed way so it can return more quickly to watching the galactic equivalent of Netflix:
Confession time: I don't actually know where we are. We have, or are supposed to have, a complete satellite map of the planet in the survey package. That was how the humans decided where to do their assessments. I hadn't looked at the maps yet and I'd barely looked at the survey package. In my defense, we'd been here twenty-two planetary days and I hadn't had to do anything but stand around watching humans make scans or take samples of dirt, rocks, water, and leaves. The sense of urgency just wasn't there. Also, you may have noticed, I don't care.
Murderbot has currently been outsourced to a team of scientists investigating a planet for potential natural resource extraction. It's all normal and boring until they notice some areas are missing from their maps. And then a few more things go wrong. Is it because they bought a cheap survey package? Is it sabotage? And if someone is trying to kill them, who and why? Murderbot starts to realize that maybe it does care after all – at least about these humans and at least a bit.
I absolutely loved this book. Reading it flew by. Murderbot's narration is hilarious, its voice and perspective are genuinely different from a human's in interesting ways, and I adored the resolution of the plot. I can't recommend this highly enough, and I can't wait to read the sequels.
What are you currently reading?
Death at the Durbar by Arjun Raj Gaind. The second in the series of mysteries set in India around 1910. I read the first book a couple of year ago, though uh, looking back at that review apparently I liked it less than I thought I did. I had found memories of it when I picked up this sequel! At any rate, I'm enjoying it so far.
Provenance by Ann Leckie. A book set in the same universe as Leckie's Imperial Radch series (which I haven't read), but independent from them in terms of characters and plot.
In the culture of Hwae, it's common for the families of the powerful and wealthy to adopt large numbers of children – fostering children of the equally important, taking in children from families a step down in influence who are looking to build alliances, and raising children of anonymous parentage left at the public orphanages. But however many children a particular family adopts there will only ever be one acknowledged heir, who is not named until adulthood. As you might imagine, this fosters competition and vicious rivalries among the children raised under such conditions.
Ingray is a child from a public orphanage raised by an important politician, and she's absolutely certain that she's not going to become her mother's heir. But before she flounces forever from her family household, she wants one last revenge on the brother who bested her. He has a hobby of collecting trinkets and tokens connected to famous historical figures (indeed, the whole of Hwae society is a bit obsessed with historical artifacts), and Ingray wants to convince him to buy a forgery so that she can embarrass him, prove herself capable of outsmarting him, and – not incidentally – make off with a huge amount of his money. To this end she needs the help of a forger, and so she pays a bribe to have one smuggled out of prison.
And then everything goes wrong.
The forger is not particularly interested in helping her and anyway insists that e is innocent (multiple characters use non-binary pronouns, by the way: e/em/eir. This seems to be a standard part of Hwae society and isn't remarked on). The captain of the ship they hire to take back to Hwae is being chased by a mysterious alien species. Ingray witnesses a murder. False accusations are thrown around. Artifacts, both real and forged, are stolen, denounced, and given away. War threatens. People are taken hostage. Ingray is caught up in a spiraling series of events until the fate of the entire galaxy rests of her decisions.
This book was SO GOOD y'all! I know everyone has been saying that Leckie's an amazing writer for years, and all I can say is: yes, you were totally right, and I should have read her ages ago. I think my favorite part was the worldbuilding of Hwae. I caught influences of South Asian, Chinese, and African cultures, among others, but they were believably mixed and changed in such a way that it really felt like a world in such a far future that terms like 'South Asian' or 'Chinese' were no longer even recognizable. I used the term non-binary above, but it seems like it would be more accurate to call Hwae a society that has three gender roles: man, woman, and neman. Children are called "they" until they choose one at adulthood. Homosexuality is not an issue; the two most important romantic relationships in Provenance are one between two women, and one between a man and a neman.
I also loved the themes of the book: the tangled mess of parenthood and sibling relationships and finding your place as an adult. Ingray is pretty consistently negative about herself, with a clear self-esteem problem she doesn't acknowledge, and seeing her consistently rise to meet her problems was just wonderfully enjoyable. More than anything else, this book is total and complete FUN. Sure, people are getting murdered and declaring war, but this is a grand adventure in the old-school Space Opera sense... just centering people other than straight white men. Probably also a bit more emphasis on diplomacy and making the effort to see from someone else's perspective than Heinlein ever would have stood for.
Provenance is absolutely everything I have been searching for in my sci-fi reading lately. I want a thousand more books just like it.
Milk! A 10,000-Year Food Fracas by Mark Kurlansky. I'm a huge fan of Kurlansky. He's probably the most famous writer of microhistories currently, a genre I adore. Microhistories he's written include "Salt" and "Paper", books on oysters and cod, a history of just the year 1968 or the song “Dancing in the Street". You get the idea.
In this book, he takes on milk. Or, well, not only milk; Kurlansky also covers butter, cheese, ice cream, yogurt, and all the other things that can be made out of milk. It's not just cows' milk either! He includes recipes that use the milk of sheeps, goats, horses, donkeys, camels, and yaks. There's even a lot of discussion of human milk – is it better to breastfeed or to use formula? And what is the history of that debate? How does one choose a wet nurse? What about grass fed cows vs cows given fodder? Pasteurized milk vs raw? Is milk a health food? Kurlansky doesn't take a position on any of these debates or try to prove one side right with evidence; he's simply interested in how the same questions have been asked over and over again throughout history, with the pendulum frequently swinging back and forth between the same positions over the centuries.
All of this probably sounds very interesting, and indeed I really wanted to like this book, but unfortunately I didn't. Kurlansky includes many recipes (126 of them, he says on the opening page), which means that many of the chapters devolve into listing one recipe after another with barely any discussion between them. Even if I wanted to try making them (a feat often barely possible, since recipes before the 1600s rarely bother to include amounts, times, or temperature), it doesn't make for interesting reading. I especially don't want multiple recipes for junkets, syllabubs, phirni, kalakand, etc, when I don't even know what those things are. Lists of ingredients are even more uninteresting than usual when you can't picture what the final product is supposed to be. I wish Kurlansky had included fewer recipes and instead spent more time on each one: a description of what the dish would look and taste like, how it functioned in the society of its time and place (is this an everyday meal? something fancy? something for breakfast, or for dinner?), and when and why it came into or out of popularity.
Kurlanksy also seems to assume a certain level of milk-knowledge from his readers that, personally, I simply don't have. I vaguely know cream is fattier than milk, but how one gets cream or what its exact definition is, I have no idea. Same for whey (Miss Muffet ate it?), curds, buttermilk, or how churning milk actually turns it into butter. After reading Milk!, I know not a single thing more about these topics than I did before, despite Kurlansky using these terms frequently. For example, he repeatedly insists that skyr (the Icelandic product that's recently become popular in the US) is not technically a yogurt but a soft fresh cheese. That's cool trivia to know, I guess, but what I'm really curious about is why. What separates yogurt and cheese? Is the line between them strict, or does one fade into the other? Is it based on method of production, taste, ingredients, something else? I could google these answers, of course, but if I'm reading a book for fun, I'd like not to have to turn to a different source just to understand what I'm reading. I wanted to learn about milk, but Milk! is just not interested in providing these sorts of basic facts.
Finally, Kurlanksy includes at least one blatant mistake: Was the first milking animal a goat, as goat enthusiasts always claim? Or was it a gazelle, the wild ancestor of goats? This is possible, but gazelle farming would have been difficult unless they were soon domesticated into goats. I try not to be overly critical when non-archaeologists make mistakes about archaeology, because I feel like it's an intensely difficult subject to make your way into without being a specialist, but c'mon, surely this is obviously nonsense? Even if one is not an archaeologist of early farming or a biologist, isn't it self-evident that gazelles and goats are not the same species, and no magic process is going to turn a gazelle into a goat? They're not even in the same genus! They don't even look alike! (Not that 'looking alike' is a reliable way of telling what is or isn't the same species, but wouldn't that send up warning signals in your subconscious?) Also the fact that it occured on page 13 may have prejudiced me against the rest of the book.
Anyway, a fascinating topic, but unfortunately not a good book. On the other hand, I happened to read the chapter on Basque cheese immediately before heading to Trader Joe's, where I saw a Basque cheese for sale. I have my suspicions about the authenticity of anything mass-produced for the American market, but this is some tasty fucking cheese, so overall my life is improved.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
All Systems Red by Martha Wells. A sci-fi novella (only 80 pages long), the first in the "Murderbot" series. Murderbot, as our first-person narrator calls itself, is a 'SecUnit', a Security Unit robot/cyborg/android/whatever composed of both organic and mechanical parts, with an inbuilt connection to various internet and local networks. It's also hacked its own system to become an independent operator. Rather than going wild and murdering any nearby humans, it continues to do its security job, though in a halfassed way so it can return more quickly to watching the galactic equivalent of Netflix:
Confession time: I don't actually know where we are. We have, or are supposed to have, a complete satellite map of the planet in the survey package. That was how the humans decided where to do their assessments. I hadn't looked at the maps yet and I'd barely looked at the survey package. In my defense, we'd been here twenty-two planetary days and I hadn't had to do anything but stand around watching humans make scans or take samples of dirt, rocks, water, and leaves. The sense of urgency just wasn't there. Also, you may have noticed, I don't care.
Murderbot has currently been outsourced to a team of scientists investigating a planet for potential natural resource extraction. It's all normal and boring until they notice some areas are missing from their maps. And then a few more things go wrong. Is it because they bought a cheap survey package? Is it sabotage? And if someone is trying to kill them, who and why? Murderbot starts to realize that maybe it does care after all – at least about these humans and at least a bit.
I absolutely loved this book. Reading it flew by. Murderbot's narration is hilarious, its voice and perspective are genuinely different from a human's in interesting ways, and I adored the resolution of the plot. I can't recommend this highly enough, and I can't wait to read the sequels.
What are you currently reading?
Death at the Durbar by Arjun Raj Gaind. The second in the series of mysteries set in India around 1910. I read the first book a couple of year ago, though uh, looking back at that review apparently I liked it less than I thought I did. I had found memories of it when I picked up this sequel! At any rate, I'm enjoying it so far.
