A Lot of Reading
May. 6th, 2018 08:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhI was unexpectedly busy for most of April, so this is several weeks' worth of reading – though weeks where I didn't have much time for reading for fun, alas. Enjoy an overabundance of reviews?
What did you just finish?
A Short History of Drunkenness: How, Why, Where, and When Humankind Has Gotten Merry from the Stone Age to the Present by Mark Forsyth. A shallow but funny history of humanity's relationship with booze. Brief chapters cover pretty much every historical era you'd expect: Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Greeks, the Romans, the Bible, Ancient China, Vikings, the Medieval Middle East, Medieval England, the Aztecs, colonial Australia, the Wild West, Russia, American Prohibition, and London's Gin Craze of the 1700s. That's quite the list for a book of less than three hundred pages, and indeed Forsyth is clearly focused on being amusing and easy to read more than he is on deep historical investigations – which isn't really a critique, as long as "silly and quick" is what you're looking for. (I am a bit skeptical of some of his claims, but he has footnotes to back him up; I suspect it's a case of Forsyth taking the most extreme possible side in genuine historical debates.)
It's a nice collection of "hey, did-you-know" trivia, but I doubt anyone will come away with more insight on the history of alcohol than they started with.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
Caliban's War by James S.A. Corey. The sequel to Leviathan Wakes, which I had mixed feelings about. Well, goddamn! Corey has levelled up their writing beyond my highest expectations, particularly in regards to characterization. This time around we have four PoVs. There's Holden again, who remains somewhat action-hero-y but has become far more sympathetic (possibly because he actually has idiosyncratic attributes now; I'm particularly fond of his deep attachment to a fancy coffee-maker). We're introduced to Bobbie Draper, a highly-trained marine from the Martian military and the only surviving witness of the opening salvo of the Martian-Earth war, which might actually have been an accident caused by an alien attack; she prefers battle to politics, and struggles with the question of who she should be loyal to when no one believes her or cares about the whole alien thing. Next is Chrisjen Avasarala, a tiny gray-haired grandmother with a meaningless-sounding title ("assistant to the undersecretary of executive administration") who is actually the power behind the throne of the UN, now Earth's ruling body; she smiles and snacks on pistachios in public and curses like a sailor in private, fiercely determined to ride over any opposition she encounters. And finally there's Prax – Praxidike Meng – a botanist and single father of a four-year-old daughter, more comfortable with plants or scientific reports than being social or having emotions, and completely over-his-head incompetent with the politics and violence he soon finds himself thrown into.
The plot sets off when that four-year-old disappears in the conflict of war. A great many people have disappeared or died, and more than that are starving, displaced, rioting, or soon to be all of the above, so Prax is unable to get the authorities to care about one lost little girl. That is until he accidentally encounters Holden et al, and finds the team he needs to solve what increasingly becomes a deep, wide-spread mystery. Meanwhile, Avasarala and Bobbie are trying to convince the militaries of Earth and Mars to back down and focus on the real problem: possible aliens from who-knows-where, capable of doing who-knows-what. Unsurprisingly, these plots eventually intersect for a dramatic climax.
I really appreciate how Corey doesn't focus on the action to the detriment of meaning. Yes, there's lots of space battles and killer aliens, but there's thoughtful insight on war and human nature too:
“So you’re in an entrenched position with a huge threat coming down onto you, right?” Avasarala said, sitting down on the edge of Soren’s desk. “Say you’re on a moon and some third party has thrown a comet at you. Massive threat, you understand?”
Bobbie looked at her, confused for a moment, and then, with a shrug, played along.
“All right,” the marine said.
“So why do you choose that moment to pick a fight with your neighbors? Are you just frightened and lashing out? Are you thinking that the other bastards are responsible for the rock? Are you just that stupid?”
“We’re talking about Venus and the fighting in the Jovian system,” Bobbie said.
“It’s a pretty fucking thin metaphor, yes,” Avasarala said. “So why are you doing it?”
Bobbie leaned back in her chair, plastic creaking under her. The big woman’s eyes narrowed. She opened her mouth once, closed it, frowned, and began again.
“I’m consolidating power,” Bobbie said. “If I use my resources stopping the comet, then as soon as that threat’s gone, I lose. The other guy catches me with my pants down. Bang. If I kick his ass first, then when it’s over, I win.”
“But if you cooperate—”
“Then you have to trust the other guy,” Bobbie said, shaking her head.
“There’s a million tons of ice coming that’s going to kill you both. Why the hell wouldn’t you trust the other guy?”
“Depends. Is he an Earther?” Bobbie said. “We’ve got two major military forces in the system, plus whatever the Belters can gin up. That’s three sides with a lot of history. When whatever’s going to happen on Venus actually happens, someone wants to already have all the cards.”
“And if both sides—Earth and Mars—are making that same calculation, we’re going to spend all our energy getting ready for the war after next.”
“Yep,” Bobbie said. “And yes, that’s how we all lose together.”
Caliban's War is a incredible page-turner of a book, with wonderfully engaging characters, detailed worldbuilding, and enough substance to give the action weight. Plus, how can you not like a book where the bad guy turns out to be the military-industrial complex?
Also there is a hell of a cliffhanger ending to this book. I'm really glad I didn't have to wait a year for the sequel to be published.
Abaddon's Gate by James S.A. Corey. The sequel to Caliban's War, part 3 of The Expanse series. The plot is becoming hard to talk about without spoiling the previous books, so if you don't want to know what happened, stop reading here.
The inexplicable alien presence (is it a virus? An AI? something else?) first encountered in the first book of the series has constructed a giant ring far out on the edges of the solar system. Earth, Mars, and the Outer Planet Alliance (OPA, a loose conglomerate of the various colonies on other planets, moons, and asteroids) have each sent ships to study it, but the only thing anyone can tell is that it seems to be a gate to somewhere else. Until, of course, plot events send several ships accidentally through it and into a truly alien, nicely creepy other-place, where even the laws of physics are mutable and prone to abruptly changing. Meanwhile, Holden is visited by Miller, who died in the first book and whose appearance/personality/knowledge the alien presence seems to have co-opted as a face for itself. Unfortunately trying to communicate across the barriers of species and millions of lightyears is just as difficult as it sounds, and what Miller manages to say comes across as garbled nonsense, often intelligible only after whatever he was warning about has already happened. The climax of the book goes small-scale, with two sides battling for control of a single spaceship, crawling through tunnels and fighting hand-to-hand. It's a striking change from the previous books that ended in giant confrontations with hundreds of ships while being just as exciting.
Once again we have a new set of PoVs (except for Holden, who continues on), and though I desperately missed Avasarala, Bobbie, and Prax, I have to admit these new guys were pretty fun too. First off is Clarissa Mao, the sister of Julie Mao (now dead from the alien zombie virus) and daughter of Jules-Pierre Mao (now imprisoned for life for war crimes, due to turning the alien virus into a bioweapon and trying to sell it to the highest bidder). Her once-powerful and crazy-wealthy family is disgraced and scattered, and Clarissa blames James Holden personally. She's determined to get revenge – not just to kill him, but to ruin him and his reputation, and make all the galaxy doubt his previous actions – and she doesn't care how many other people have to die to make that happen. To get to Holden, she disguises herself as a nobody, an electrochemical technician on a minor spaceship, and finds herself spending every day dealing with people and problems that were once far beneath her notice.
There's also Bull – Carlos Baca – head of security for the main spaceship of the OPA navy. Although Bull is far more experienced and sensible than either the captain or XO, he finds himself relegated to third in command because he grew up on Earth rather than in the Asteroid Belt, and Earthers are visibly distinct from Belters; it's a bit like getting demoted because you're the 'wrong' race, and it would look politically bad for you to be in charge. After an accident halfway through the book, Bull becomes paraplegic. I thought the handling of his disability was mostly well-done, and seeing a big, physically-imposing guy deal with being unable to use strength to enforce his will was an interesting twist.
Finally we have my favorite character of this book: Annushka Volovodov, or Pastor Anna. She's a tiny, non-drinking, politically-unconnected, small-town Methodist preacher, determinedly pacifistic and married to a woman. She ends up heading to the Ring when Earth decides to send a team of artists, poets, philosophers, and religious leaders along with the scientists and military, mainly to show off that it can afford to do so, though theoretically to interpret the meaning of an alien presence. I can't imagine a character less likely to end up as the star of a space-opera thriller than a lesbian pastor who just wants everybody to stop fighting, you guys, seriously, why don't we talk about forgiveness and maybe organize a Sunday service with grape juice and a sermon about coming together?, and yet it works incredibly, unexpectedly well. I love Anna so much, and continue to be deeply impressed at the diversity of personalities Corey has written after a first book that was fairly disappointing in that regard. They even seem to be particularly good at writing women who are very different from one another but are all well-rounded, believable, and fascinating, and I would never have seen that coming.
The world-building continues to be really well-done. I particularly enjoyed the many scenes set on the Behemoth, an enormous spaceship originally built to be a colony ship for Mormons but retrofitted due to necessity into a warship. The murals of Jesus and angels providing a backdrop for war counsels and weapons storage are maybe a too-obvious irony, but one that never failed to make me laugh.
I didn't love Abaddon's Gate quite as much Caliban's War, mostly because the characters here were very good but just not as spectacularly wonderful as before. But that's a relatively minor criticism, and overall I admire Corey's focus on petty, recognizable human squabbling even in the face of worldchanging developments. I'm looking forward to the next book already.
Confessions of the Fox by Jordy Rosenberg. What is this? Well, a damn hard book to review, to start. On one level we have what is presented as the 'recently discovered autobiography' of Jack Sheppard, real-life petty thief and escapee from jail in early 1700s London. Sheppard lived fast and died young, then proceeded to become an enormously famous figure in English folklore, probably most recognizable today as the inspiration for "The Ballad of Mack the Knife" in The Threepenny Opera. But Confessions of the Fox is in fact a novel, and though it otherwise mostly stays close to the facts and dates (as we know them) of Jack's life, here Jack is a transman, his girlfriend Bess is the daughter of a South Asian man who was press-ganged by the East India Company before escaping into an independant communal society hidden away in the fens of East Anglia, and his best friend Aurie is a black gay man. Just to be clear, I am all for this presentation of a multiracial queer history.
A second level of story is presented through footnotes, much like House of Leaves (though infinitely less confusing than that book, since we only have two levels of story here rather than the four or five in House of Leaves). This narrator is Dr R. Voth, a professor of English literature who is editing Jack's "autobiography" for publication and who is a transman himself. Voth alternates between telling mundane stories of his life – his ex, his job troubles, his attempts to ask out a neighbor – and citing genuine academic sources to provide context for Jack's story. Voth is fictional but his sources are not, which makes for an unsettling mixture of truth and imagination; I think I would have assumed the academic footnotes were also fictional if I hadn't happened to recognize several early ones. I've read Gretchen Gerzina's Black London: Life Before Emancipation and Walter Johnson's Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market, among others, and seeing them mentioned by a fictional character was like water to the face, confusing my assumption of what was real and what wasn't.
As the story goes on, "P-Quad Publishers and Pharmaceuticals" in association with "Militia.edu" attempts to take control of Jack's autobiography and Voth's work on it, leading both levels of Confessions of the Fox to become critiques of the commodification of the body and its experiences, capitalism in general, the history of the discovery and modern patenting of synthetic testosterone, and how historical biographies enter (or, more often, don't enter) the archive.
Which leaves us in an odd place. If you didn't instantly recognize what I meant by The Archive in that previous line, if you're one of the vast majority of humans on Earth who haven't read Appadurai's "Commodities and the Politics of Value", then I'm not sure this book is interested in talking to you. Certainly if Rosenberg ever bothered to explain any of these concepts in an introductory way I missed it. On the other hand, if you, like me, are an overeducated liberal who can nod pretentiously at sentences like "A commodity is an entity without qualities", then I'm not sure Confessions of the Fox has anything new to say to you. It restates various queer, postcolonial, and Marxist theories without adding anything to them or combining them in interesting ways. Like, sure, we all agree with Foucault that prisons form the model for surveillance and discipline by the wider society, but so what? Do something with that idea, expand upon it, challenge it, or else there's no reason to read Rosenberg's book if you've already read Foucault's. So then who is Confessions of the Fox for? I have genuinely no idea.
The love story between Jack and Bess or the adventure of Jack's exploits should have been enough to carry their half of the story. I love me a good historical thriller of criminals and the whores they adore. But we didn't really get that here; we see Jack and Bess's first meeting and first night spent together, but then we jump ahead to them as an already established relationship without seeing how they grow together and build trust and affection. Similarly, we never see Jack learn to pick pockets or burglar houses; he's just an innocent apprentice and then suddenly a famously skilled thief. He meets Aurie once and then we're told they're brothers-in-arms without ever seeing their friendship. Etc. In addition to all this, it's hard to love characters who are more living examples of theories than they are three-dimensional people, particularly when they keep bursting into dialogue like this example:
Bess stood, speaking to the entire room. “Plague’s an excuse they’re using to police us further!” She looked out. Most continued to quaff and quarrel amongst themselves. “All of you! They’re panicking the people delib’rately. It’s a securitizational furor they’re raising to put more centinels on the streets. Can’t you see that?”
It's not even that I disagree with the concept of "security theater", but it's not good fiction to have your characters straight-up define it, and then POINTING OUT IN A FOOTNOTE THAT THE 1720-ISH DATE WOULD MAKE HER THE FIRST TO DO SO IS EVEN WORSE, OH MY GOD, DON'T PRAISE YOUR OWN FICTIONAL CHARACTERS FOR THE MODERN LANGUAGE YOU GAVE THEM.
Ahhh, I don't know. I agree with all of Confessions of the Fox's politics, I want to support histories (fictional or not) with more accurate, multiracial, and queer portrayals of the past, and I've certainly read far, far worse books, but in the end I just didn't much enjoy this. The worst I can say is that it's unengaging; I found my attention constantly drifting whenever I tried to read, and even put it down for a few weeks before finally coming back to finish it. But no matter what its good intentions, that doesn't make for a book I'd recommend. In the end Confessions of the Fox has a fantastic concept, but unfortunately doesn't pull off the execution.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
What are you currently reading?
The Pride of Chanur by C.J. Cherryh.sholio is going to be hosting a tumblr book club, if anyone else wants to read along!
What did you just finish?
A Short History of Drunkenness: How, Why, Where, and When Humankind Has Gotten Merry from the Stone Age to the Present by Mark Forsyth. A shallow but funny history of humanity's relationship with booze. Brief chapters cover pretty much every historical era you'd expect: Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Greeks, the Romans, the Bible, Ancient China, Vikings, the Medieval Middle East, Medieval England, the Aztecs, colonial Australia, the Wild West, Russia, American Prohibition, and London's Gin Craze of the 1700s. That's quite the list for a book of less than three hundred pages, and indeed Forsyth is clearly focused on being amusing and easy to read more than he is on deep historical investigations – which isn't really a critique, as long as "silly and quick" is what you're looking for. (I am a bit skeptical of some of his claims, but he has footnotes to back him up; I suspect it's a case of Forsyth taking the most extreme possible side in genuine historical debates.)
It's a nice collection of "hey, did-you-know" trivia, but I doubt anyone will come away with more insight on the history of alcohol than they started with.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
Caliban's War by James S.A. Corey. The sequel to Leviathan Wakes, which I had mixed feelings about. Well, goddamn! Corey has levelled up their writing beyond my highest expectations, particularly in regards to characterization. This time around we have four PoVs. There's Holden again, who remains somewhat action-hero-y but has become far more sympathetic (possibly because he actually has idiosyncratic attributes now; I'm particularly fond of his deep attachment to a fancy coffee-maker). We're introduced to Bobbie Draper, a highly-trained marine from the Martian military and the only surviving witness of the opening salvo of the Martian-Earth war, which might actually have been an accident caused by an alien attack; she prefers battle to politics, and struggles with the question of who she should be loyal to when no one believes her or cares about the whole alien thing. Next is Chrisjen Avasarala, a tiny gray-haired grandmother with a meaningless-sounding title ("assistant to the undersecretary of executive administration") who is actually the power behind the throne of the UN, now Earth's ruling body; she smiles and snacks on pistachios in public and curses like a sailor in private, fiercely determined to ride over any opposition she encounters. And finally there's Prax – Praxidike Meng – a botanist and single father of a four-year-old daughter, more comfortable with plants or scientific reports than being social or having emotions, and completely over-his-head incompetent with the politics and violence he soon finds himself thrown into.
The plot sets off when that four-year-old disappears in the conflict of war. A great many people have disappeared or died, and more than that are starving, displaced, rioting, or soon to be all of the above, so Prax is unable to get the authorities to care about one lost little girl. That is until he accidentally encounters Holden et al, and finds the team he needs to solve what increasingly becomes a deep, wide-spread mystery. Meanwhile, Avasarala and Bobbie are trying to convince the militaries of Earth and Mars to back down and focus on the real problem: possible aliens from who-knows-where, capable of doing who-knows-what. Unsurprisingly, these plots eventually intersect for a dramatic climax.
I really appreciate how Corey doesn't focus on the action to the detriment of meaning. Yes, there's lots of space battles and killer aliens, but there's thoughtful insight on war and human nature too:
“So you’re in an entrenched position with a huge threat coming down onto you, right?” Avasarala said, sitting down on the edge of Soren’s desk. “Say you’re on a moon and some third party has thrown a comet at you. Massive threat, you understand?”
Bobbie looked at her, confused for a moment, and then, with a shrug, played along.
“All right,” the marine said.
“So why do you choose that moment to pick a fight with your neighbors? Are you just frightened and lashing out? Are you thinking that the other bastards are responsible for the rock? Are you just that stupid?”
“We’re talking about Venus and the fighting in the Jovian system,” Bobbie said.
“It’s a pretty fucking thin metaphor, yes,” Avasarala said. “So why are you doing it?”
Bobbie leaned back in her chair, plastic creaking under her. The big woman’s eyes narrowed. She opened her mouth once, closed it, frowned, and began again.
“I’m consolidating power,” Bobbie said. “If I use my resources stopping the comet, then as soon as that threat’s gone, I lose. The other guy catches me with my pants down. Bang. If I kick his ass first, then when it’s over, I win.”
“But if you cooperate—”
“Then you have to trust the other guy,” Bobbie said, shaking her head.
“There’s a million tons of ice coming that’s going to kill you both. Why the hell wouldn’t you trust the other guy?”
“Depends. Is he an Earther?” Bobbie said. “We’ve got two major military forces in the system, plus whatever the Belters can gin up. That’s three sides with a lot of history. When whatever’s going to happen on Venus actually happens, someone wants to already have all the cards.”
“And if both sides—Earth and Mars—are making that same calculation, we’re going to spend all our energy getting ready for the war after next.”
“Yep,” Bobbie said. “And yes, that’s how we all lose together.”
Caliban's War is a incredible page-turner of a book, with wonderfully engaging characters, detailed worldbuilding, and enough substance to give the action weight. Plus, how can you not like a book where the bad guy turns out to be the military-industrial complex?
Also there is a hell of a cliffhanger ending to this book. I'm really glad I didn't have to wait a year for the sequel to be published.
Abaddon's Gate by James S.A. Corey. The sequel to Caliban's War, part 3 of The Expanse series. The plot is becoming hard to talk about without spoiling the previous books, so if you don't want to know what happened, stop reading here.
The inexplicable alien presence (is it a virus? An AI? something else?) first encountered in the first book of the series has constructed a giant ring far out on the edges of the solar system. Earth, Mars, and the Outer Planet Alliance (OPA, a loose conglomerate of the various colonies on other planets, moons, and asteroids) have each sent ships to study it, but the only thing anyone can tell is that it seems to be a gate to somewhere else. Until, of course, plot events send several ships accidentally through it and into a truly alien, nicely creepy other-place, where even the laws of physics are mutable and prone to abruptly changing. Meanwhile, Holden is visited by Miller, who died in the first book and whose appearance/personality/knowledge the alien presence seems to have co-opted as a face for itself. Unfortunately trying to communicate across the barriers of species and millions of lightyears is just as difficult as it sounds, and what Miller manages to say comes across as garbled nonsense, often intelligible only after whatever he was warning about has already happened. The climax of the book goes small-scale, with two sides battling for control of a single spaceship, crawling through tunnels and fighting hand-to-hand. It's a striking change from the previous books that ended in giant confrontations with hundreds of ships while being just as exciting.
Once again we have a new set of PoVs (except for Holden, who continues on), and though I desperately missed Avasarala, Bobbie, and Prax, I have to admit these new guys were pretty fun too. First off is Clarissa Mao, the sister of Julie Mao (now dead from the alien zombie virus) and daughter of Jules-Pierre Mao (now imprisoned for life for war crimes, due to turning the alien virus into a bioweapon and trying to sell it to the highest bidder). Her once-powerful and crazy-wealthy family is disgraced and scattered, and Clarissa blames James Holden personally. She's determined to get revenge – not just to kill him, but to ruin him and his reputation, and make all the galaxy doubt his previous actions – and she doesn't care how many other people have to die to make that happen. To get to Holden, she disguises herself as a nobody, an electrochemical technician on a minor spaceship, and finds herself spending every day dealing with people and problems that were once far beneath her notice.
There's also Bull – Carlos Baca – head of security for the main spaceship of the OPA navy. Although Bull is far more experienced and sensible than either the captain or XO, he finds himself relegated to third in command because he grew up on Earth rather than in the Asteroid Belt, and Earthers are visibly distinct from Belters; it's a bit like getting demoted because you're the 'wrong' race, and it would look politically bad for you to be in charge. After an accident halfway through the book, Bull becomes paraplegic. I thought the handling of his disability was mostly well-done, and seeing a big, physically-imposing guy deal with being unable to use strength to enforce his will was an interesting twist.
Finally we have my favorite character of this book: Annushka Volovodov, or Pastor Anna. She's a tiny, non-drinking, politically-unconnected, small-town Methodist preacher, determinedly pacifistic and married to a woman. She ends up heading to the Ring when Earth decides to send a team of artists, poets, philosophers, and religious leaders along with the scientists and military, mainly to show off that it can afford to do so, though theoretically to interpret the meaning of an alien presence. I can't imagine a character less likely to end up as the star of a space-opera thriller than a lesbian pastor who just wants everybody to stop fighting, you guys, seriously, why don't we talk about forgiveness and maybe organize a Sunday service with grape juice and a sermon about coming together?, and yet it works incredibly, unexpectedly well. I love Anna so much, and continue to be deeply impressed at the diversity of personalities Corey has written after a first book that was fairly disappointing in that regard. They even seem to be particularly good at writing women who are very different from one another but are all well-rounded, believable, and fascinating, and I would never have seen that coming.
The world-building continues to be really well-done. I particularly enjoyed the many scenes set on the Behemoth, an enormous spaceship originally built to be a colony ship for Mormons but retrofitted due to necessity into a warship. The murals of Jesus and angels providing a backdrop for war counsels and weapons storage are maybe a too-obvious irony, but one that never failed to make me laugh.
I didn't love Abaddon's Gate quite as much Caliban's War, mostly because the characters here were very good but just not as spectacularly wonderful as before. But that's a relatively minor criticism, and overall I admire Corey's focus on petty, recognizable human squabbling even in the face of worldchanging developments. I'm looking forward to the next book already.
Confessions of the Fox by Jordy Rosenberg. What is this? Well, a damn hard book to review, to start. On one level we have what is presented as the 'recently discovered autobiography' of Jack Sheppard, real-life petty thief and escapee from jail in early 1700s London. Sheppard lived fast and died young, then proceeded to become an enormously famous figure in English folklore, probably most recognizable today as the inspiration for "The Ballad of Mack the Knife" in The Threepenny Opera. But Confessions of the Fox is in fact a novel, and though it otherwise mostly stays close to the facts and dates (as we know them) of Jack's life, here Jack is a transman, his girlfriend Bess is the daughter of a South Asian man who was press-ganged by the East India Company before escaping into an independant communal society hidden away in the fens of East Anglia, and his best friend Aurie is a black gay man. Just to be clear, I am all for this presentation of a multiracial queer history.
A second level of story is presented through footnotes, much like House of Leaves (though infinitely less confusing than that book, since we only have two levels of story here rather than the four or five in House of Leaves). This narrator is Dr R. Voth, a professor of English literature who is editing Jack's "autobiography" for publication and who is a transman himself. Voth alternates between telling mundane stories of his life – his ex, his job troubles, his attempts to ask out a neighbor – and citing genuine academic sources to provide context for Jack's story. Voth is fictional but his sources are not, which makes for an unsettling mixture of truth and imagination; I think I would have assumed the academic footnotes were also fictional if I hadn't happened to recognize several early ones. I've read Gretchen Gerzina's Black London: Life Before Emancipation and Walter Johnson's Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market, among others, and seeing them mentioned by a fictional character was like water to the face, confusing my assumption of what was real and what wasn't.
As the story goes on, "P-Quad Publishers and Pharmaceuticals" in association with "Militia.edu" attempts to take control of Jack's autobiography and Voth's work on it, leading both levels of Confessions of the Fox to become critiques of the commodification of the body and its experiences, capitalism in general, the history of the discovery and modern patenting of synthetic testosterone, and how historical biographies enter (or, more often, don't enter) the archive.
Which leaves us in an odd place. If you didn't instantly recognize what I meant by The Archive in that previous line, if you're one of the vast majority of humans on Earth who haven't read Appadurai's "Commodities and the Politics of Value", then I'm not sure this book is interested in talking to you. Certainly if Rosenberg ever bothered to explain any of these concepts in an introductory way I missed it. On the other hand, if you, like me, are an overeducated liberal who can nod pretentiously at sentences like "A commodity is an entity without qualities", then I'm not sure Confessions of the Fox has anything new to say to you. It restates various queer, postcolonial, and Marxist theories without adding anything to them or combining them in interesting ways. Like, sure, we all agree with Foucault that prisons form the model for surveillance and discipline by the wider society, but so what? Do something with that idea, expand upon it, challenge it, or else there's no reason to read Rosenberg's book if you've already read Foucault's. So then who is Confessions of the Fox for? I have genuinely no idea.
The love story between Jack and Bess or the adventure of Jack's exploits should have been enough to carry their half of the story. I love me a good historical thriller of criminals and the whores they adore. But we didn't really get that here; we see Jack and Bess's first meeting and first night spent together, but then we jump ahead to them as an already established relationship without seeing how they grow together and build trust and affection. Similarly, we never see Jack learn to pick pockets or burglar houses; he's just an innocent apprentice and then suddenly a famously skilled thief. He meets Aurie once and then we're told they're brothers-in-arms without ever seeing their friendship. Etc. In addition to all this, it's hard to love characters who are more living examples of theories than they are three-dimensional people, particularly when they keep bursting into dialogue like this example:
Bess stood, speaking to the entire room. “Plague’s an excuse they’re using to police us further!” She looked out. Most continued to quaff and quarrel amongst themselves. “All of you! They’re panicking the people delib’rately. It’s a securitizational furor they’re raising to put more centinels on the streets. Can’t you see that?”
It's not even that I disagree with the concept of "security theater", but it's not good fiction to have your characters straight-up define it, and then POINTING OUT IN A FOOTNOTE THAT THE 1720-ISH DATE WOULD MAKE HER THE FIRST TO DO SO IS EVEN WORSE, OH MY GOD, DON'T PRAISE YOUR OWN FICTIONAL CHARACTERS FOR THE MODERN LANGUAGE YOU GAVE THEM.
Ahhh, I don't know. I agree with all of Confessions of the Fox's politics, I want to support histories (fictional or not) with more accurate, multiracial, and queer portrayals of the past, and I've certainly read far, far worse books, but in the end I just didn't much enjoy this. The worst I can say is that it's unengaging; I found my attention constantly drifting whenever I tried to read, and even put it down for a few weeks before finally coming back to finish it. But no matter what its good intentions, that doesn't make for a book I'd recommend. In the end Confessions of the Fox has a fantastic concept, but unfortunately doesn't pull off the execution.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
What are you currently reading?
The Pride of Chanur by C.J. Cherryh.
sholio is going to be hosting a tumblr book club, if anyone else wants to read along!
no subject
Date: 2018-05-07 03:00 am (UTC)Thank you for the reviews of The Expanse books! I saw the first season of the show but couldn't figure out where it was headed. I'm reassured to hear that Holden and Miller aren't the only two characters who get developed.
no subject
Date: 2018-05-07 05:30 pm (UTC)I haven't seen the show yet! I hear it's good, but I'm planning to wait until I finish the books to go back and watch it.