Geek Luddite

I finally read Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary by Pamela Dean and I had a lovely time reading it and a lovely time journaling about it as I read it, and I'm saving those journal notes here.

The following is very much not a review in any sense. Nor does it contain summary. But it sure does contain a lot of feelings and reactions. And quite a bit of things that are probably spoilers. Notes in [ ] are my own later comments on the notes I took while reading.

( musings... )

I’ll be at Fourth Street Fantasy this year, where we will get to discuss some cool things from this possible list. It’s usually a very lovely and thoughtful time. The con was very careful with COVID safety protocol last year and plans to continue that this year. If you are looking for far-ranging conversations about fantasy and story, 4th Street is my favorite gathering for exactly that.
I’ll be delighted to meet up with folks there!

All Summer Long by Hope Larson came out 3 whole years ago and I have been missing out. What a funny, smart, beautifully drawn, sharply observed graphic novel about being at the prickly edge between childhood and adolescence, all the smartness and complications there, things you see much more clearly than you may a few years later and things that do not yet make any sense at all.

Oh, and it's about music, and friendship, and change. The upside to having taken quite a long time to finally read this is that the sequel, All Together Now, is already out, and I will be reading it as soon as possible.

The Ornament of the World is a charmingly frustrating book. It's enticing and nostalgic and a bit confusing. It's got the lovely subtitle "How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain" and... it is not at all focused on how-to. I would be delighted to read a book about the political strategizing necessary to create and preserve international cultures of tolerance. This is not that, so it takes a moment to re-focus on the charms the book does have.

This book is more "here are some wistful stories of various political figures, writers, religious figures, and philosophers situated in and around al-Andalus during the long arc of 700-1600 or so, and here's a bit of context for each of them."

(aside: Can I just say how frustrating I find it, personally, that books about al-Andalus are always cataloged as being about Spain? It makes it very hard to search for them.)

I enjoyed reading this and it made me want to read more about most of the people discussed, so I think it's a very successful book on those terms. I bought my copy late in 2019, it was originally published in 2002, and it looks like there was a reprint in 2019 because there was also a PBS special last year based on the book?

I honestly think this book is meant to be an enticement and an evocation more than a history or an analysis. One of the things this book feels like it does most consistently is make connections with the cultural framework that is likely available to someone with a sort of "classic" United States/maybe England liberal arts education: Boethius and Heloise and Abelard, Dante and Chaucer and Cervantes and so forth, and weave these people into the connections with the stories of different figures from different eras of al-Andalus.

If you're going to pick this one up, I recommend treating it as break-time snack historical reading, like those books with lovely 2 page biographies of various enticing people that make you want to read more. There are all sorts of buildings and libraries I now long to visit that no longer exist, that have not existed for hundreds of years, and that is its own lovely and sad feeling. And I love thinking of all the teams of translators working together, one reading a text in a language not their own, reading it out loud in a third language so that someone who understood that language could translate it into a fourth. How delightfully communal and precarious knowledge is shown to be!

I do have the lingering feeling that this is meant to be an enticement more for Christian and for a certain subset of European readers than for Jewish and Muslim and Arabic readers. It definitely makes me aware of the limitations of my education, that I do not have the language or context to read a similar book with a different focus. One of the nicest parts of the book, though, is that it does linger on who can speak to whom, in what languages, with what comfort and safety, in the different eras it touches on. Ultimately it's a slim little book (under 300 pages) that's skimming through cultural context of multiple kingdoms and empires over a 700+ year period. That it manages to be as readable as it is feels like a pretty good achievement.

I'm at 4th Street Fantasy this weekend, in case anyone is there and wants to say hi! It's my favorite place and time for talking about fantasy and stories (and science fiction) with a wonderful group of people.

Hope your weekend has something equally delightful!

It's seasonal card time! Let me know if you would like a seasonal card (and, optionally, if there's a holiday you particularly prefer in your seasonal card, elsewise your warm wishes will not reference a specific holiday) and I will be delighted to send you a card.
If you would like a card, please message me your current address and the name you like to have on the card (this bit is less optional as without it I can't, y'know, mail the card).

Hoping your end-of-year is full of connecting with people you like and only minimal time with those you're not so fond of, and that the necessary things are low stress and the unexpected things are all delightful ones.

I finally (finally, after a year of picking it up and putting it down in 4 page increments!) finished The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century, by William Chester Jordan.

Oh gosh, this was an excellent book of academic history. This is the kind of book that will snark gently (and sometimes less-gently) in the end notes about the historical practices and interpretations of other historians. It's a book that manages to consider biology and weather and politics and shipping and logistics and also parades of people and kindness and desperation and it was just so dense and so much.

Definitely this ranks high in my list of books someone trying to write gritty medieval fantasy should consider as possible source material. The merchants and the abbeys and the pirates and the shipping contracts!

If you think it might be useful please be prepared for the kind of book that has about 180 pages of text and about 100+ pages of endnotes, bibliography, and index. Many of the endnotes are totally skippable, a good helping are in untranslated German, French, Latin, etc., and then there are the random ones that sneak up on you with a solid paragraph of snark and analysis. I had to read the book with two bookmarks, one for the text and one for the endnotes, so I could be sure to catch the good snarky ones.

Also, there's some really fascinating speculation (clearly labeled as speculation) about whether the long term health and immune system suppressing effect of starving during early development for people who were kids during the Great Famine might have something to do with very high mortality in the plague a generation later. I'd love to know if someone has followed up on that line of inquiry since the book was written (1996 is an oddly long time ago, now).

Content notes: Since this is a book whose subject matter is famine, a lot of awful life stuff on the part of humans. And, perhaps less expectedly, lots of animal distress. Apparently the awful weather conditions that lead to the famine also led to quite a lot of suffering on the part of domestic animals. Mentions of cannibalism and riot and murder and larceny and... ok, the tone of the book is thoughtful and nice but there is some quite distressing content (though not as bad as reading about the French Inquisition). Also, as is par for the course in Medieval Europe, apparently a lot of people reacted to disaster by killing people who stood out as different, so this might be a canon-typically distressing read if you are Jewish.

As this all sounds quite dour I hasten to add that there are some charming stories of charity and alms-giving and practical solutions and miracles and analysis of literature.

And there was So Much Logistics and economics and trade. And thinking stuff about the long term effects on people of having less salt here, or higher prices for fish there, or disruption of trade guilds and real estate markets because of short term fiscal crises. I want to say it was delicious but that seems like a really wrong word to apply to a book about famine. Satisfying? Ok, I am hungry and today I read about famine and the unfortunate food metaphors and similes keep happening. This book was good and smart and hard and I'm glad to have read it.

This weekend I had two tries at saying a thing and managed both badly, so I thought, well, third time's the charm and I will try again in text and see if it works better than speech.
( And lo, here I ramble about art and love again )

On a recent trip a dear friend took me to a fabulous used bookstore (in a converted mill! overlooking a river! surrounded by trees, and with its own coffee shop where one could (and I did) purchase fabulous sandwiches and strong caffeinated beverages and sit with the spoils of one's book trawl while looking through the branches to the rocky water below).  The slogan of the bookstore was "Books you don't need in a place you can't find" and I came home with several books I did not need but, so far at least, am enjoying very much.

Unsettling History by Jane Kramer is a slim book bringing together four essays about... well, about what it's like to be a person whose life is in the cracks of the narrative that the people around you are bent on telling? Reading this book now has a very particular historical feeling because these are essays written in the 1970s, which means the time they're written in is 40 years in the past, and they're essays with a wide historical scope and perspective, so this is the voice of the 1970s commenting on lives stretching from the 19teens to the then-present 1970s.  Reading them now is like reading history of history - but at the same time it's a very immediate voice, and some of the assumptions of the narrative are oddly off in the same way that reading old science fiction about the future is off

The first essay is my favorite, a novella length piece with a whole series of novels worth of scope. The elderly communist Italian couple at the heart of the essay lived through So Much Change in Italy, and have such... such intensely and complexly human lives, and I think the essayist must have fallen in love with them a little writing about them, because the quality of the essay made me love them both very much, and feel as if they were relatives I'd known at family reunions and wanted the best for.  The essay about workers from Yugoslavia working in Sweden had its own sort of heartbreak because there is no Yugoslavia anymore, so those poor workers who spent decades working in other countries to build houses they hoped to return to... did they ever enjoy those houses?  Were they able to stay on and ever plant roots in Sweden?  And then just after reading their essay I was doing laundry in my own apartment and talking with two women who left Yugoslavia and... the way in which the echoing concerns of 1970something so directly come and affect now was one of the lasting effects of this short book for me.

All four essays echoed backward and forwards for me, reflecting on the times that led up to when the essays were written and the ways in which the issues raised in the essays are still unresolved now. The other two essays were about the relocations that accompanied the wars for independence in former French and English colonies after the second World War.  Reading about the racism and violence and economic loss experienced by these travelers in the 1970s, and matching that up with the news about Brexit and about the struggles in France that have made frequent news the last few years was... complicated and exhausting and fascinating?

The whole book was about 250 pages long. It gave me a lot to think about.  And I think it would be a fascinating quick reference for worldbuilding, for thinking about the kinds of characters that live in the worlds we create and how they see and experience those worlds. The people in these essays lived very hard lives, so I do want to mark out that these essays touch on sexual assault, physical violence, emotional abuse, racist language, and a number of just really astonishingly, complicatedly painful situations.  The text, written in the 1970s, occasionally has a narrative voice and framing for these events that is not what I would want from a text written now (things acknowledged but treated casually then that would I think be treated less casually now). If those aspects aren't deal breakers for you, there is a lot of really valuable material in this very short book.

Oh gosh, never have I wanted to recommend bits of a book so much while simultaneously being so disappointed in that same book. This biography was a hot mess. It's full of awkward, uncomfortable language used about its subject in a thoughtless way; it is not very good at providing a clear throughline to its sections; the opening section is unfortunately one of the least effective, most problematic sections in an often ineffective and problematically structured narrative... and yet.

There just aren't going to be that many book length biographical options about this fascinating person, and there also aren't that many biographies about significant black figures from Europe in the 1700s. And I am a sucker for biographical and historical narratives of the 1700s that span multiple countries.

So, strengths: the bits tracing Gannibal's interactions with 1700s French intellectuals and the bits about Russian court politics feel deeply researched and intriguing. There's a gorgeous tiny bit about Gannibal writing protections for the serfs on one of his estates into a lease contract, and then actually taking the person he leased the estate to to court, and winning, when that person mistreated the serfs. There are some snarkily fantastic bits about Peter the Great.

Weaknesses: the opening bit about slavery in the Ottoman empire, and indeed all the references to the Ottoman empire, are stunningly orientalist in tone. The kindest thing I can suggest is that perhaps... the author read a bunch of very offensively orientalist things for research and then toned them down for reuse without actually stopping to analyze whether the toning down had in fact gone far enough to, y'know, stop being awfully orientalist (hint: it had not). Then there's the consistent narrative textual reference to Gannibal as "The Negro of Peter the Great" which.... no. no. please do not do this as narrative nomenclature outside of references. Maybe this comes across less awfully in the United Kingdom than in the United States.

Which, actually, is a nice segue to the biggest problems I had with this book: 1) it does not seem to be written with an intended audience that includes black people of any nationality (I mean, obviously I cannot definitively judge this given that I am a) white, and b) not the best reader of subtext, but... I would be very deeply surprised if it didn't grate on the nerves of black readers in many spots, which is extremely unfortunate given that it is a biography of an important historical black European), and 2) it does not seem to have been written with any eye to discussion of race, racism, or slavery in the broader context of its own time period, let alone contemporary perspectives. There are persistent and, to me, inexplicable references to Byron's poetry in the narrative, and an excruciating bit paralleling Gannibal with Shakespeare's Othello, but the only time that Aphra Behn's Oroonoko gets mentioned is in a caption to an illustration. There are no, none, zero references to other historical captivity narratives of the 1600s and 1700s, even though the captivity narrative was a thriving literary genre and widely published.

Basically: come for the bits of translated Russian politics and snark about French intellectuals, enjoy the fragments about Gannibal's life, and... sort of wade through the many pieces of unfortunate frosting holding these pieces of cake together?

So many not delicious things wrapped around so many delicious excellent things. I just... I dunno what to say overall here. Absolutely worth it if you're the kind of reader who is interested in this topic and good at sort of... forking aside the less appetizing bits of the presentation to the side of your plate?

On the plus side I found out while looking up title and author for this post that there is a different book also written about Gannibal by a children's author who made him the star of a chapter book series for kids, so at least I have some next things to read.