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firstfrost) wrote2025-05-04 02:57 pm
Seventeen books
- Coffee, Milk, and Spider Silk (by Coyote J.M. Edwards)
This is a Kindle Unlimited book - really a novelette - in the mold of Legends and Lattes ("drider retires from the Guard to open a coffee shop" compared to the latter "orc retires from an adventuring party to open a coffee shop"), but with less actual conflict. The peak challenge is "can the protagonist make latte art" - okay, that's actually probably a lot harder without a teacher or all the Youtube videos. If I had noticed that it was so short, I might have been less surprised when it was over before not much happened. (Also, puzzled by the drider having six arms in addition to eight legs. That's quite a lot.) However, Goodreads tells me that this pre-dates L&L, so it is not a cheap knock-off, it's a proof of concept!
- Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone and Everyone On This Train Is A Suspect (by Benjamin Stevenson)
Charles gave me the second one for Christmas, but there was enough referring to events of the first book that I decided I should read it first. There is a third book, but I haven't read it yet. Anyway. All mystery novels, or, at least, all mystery series, have to have a shtick, or they are just lost in the haystack. The shtick for these is clever, and, I think, works really well: the narrator's original day job is writing self-published books of advice on writing mystery novels, in particular, discussing the rules of "fair play" mysteries. There were a couple of different versions, but they boil down to, the book (and the detective) has to let the reader see the clues, and the resolution should make sense with the clues. So then, when the narrator finds himself in a real life murder situation, and writes it all down afterwards, he knows what the rules should be, and keeps pointing out how scrupulous he's being about them, while also being quite tricksy while keeping to both the letter and the spirit of the rules. Occasionally he'll collect things together and point out who has an alibi (as far as he knows at this point in the story) and who doesn't and which clues he hasn't figured out (again, at this point in the story). One example:
Here are some important nuggets I'd like to highlight at this point:
It's very meta, but it's a meta that doesn't quite break the fourth wall, it just traipses around noting that fourth-wall-breaking is against the rules and he won't do it. The mysteries themselves are complicated - I guessed bits and pieces here and there, but I didn't even get to the traditional "guess the last but one suspect", I just had no idea. I had one serious quibble with the first one, which is hard to discuss without explaining a major midbook secret; it didn't mess up the puzzle, but it was a Thing That Happened in an important flashback, that I just didn't find plausible, so it was jarring. The second book continues with the meta, and introduces some fun character development - the narrator is a bit self-centered and whiny, and gets called out on his assumptions that he is the Center of the Story by virtue of being the narrator. And he does improve, though I will have to see if he stays improved for book three. (Like having to have a shtick, a mystery novel also cannot have a perfect and unblemished protagonist.). Anyway, these are fun, and witty, and clever. Four stars, I'm deducting half a star for that Thing in book one.- Someone was in Sofia's chalet when she was in mine; they called my room's phone.
- Sofia's also the only one with an alibi, because she was with me in my chalet at the exact time Green Boots died, which you're not technically supposed to know, but I've told you anyway.
- Marcelo called off dinner because my mother was unwell. I had no contact with Andy, Katherine, or Lucy overnight.
- Sofia, Andy, and I have seen Green Boots' face, but Crawford didn't exactly spend the morning holding an open casket, so we might be the only ones. None of us recognized him.
- I still don't know where the bag of cash came from. It's about to occur to me that someone may be after it.
- There were three sets of footprints to Green Boots, only one back, and it didn't snow overnight.
- Lucy's taste in makeup is second only to Erin's taste in men and Michael's taste in terrain-appropriate vehicles.
- I haven't forgotten I dangled the plural "brothers" before.
- Michael would rather be suspected of murder than tell the truth about where he and Erin were the previous night.
- We are seven chapters away from the next death.
- Exodus: The Archimedes Engine (by Peter F Hamilton)
I enjoy Hamilton especially on audiobook, though I admit in part because he's long-winded enough that if I get distracted while cooking or washing dishes, I can tune out for half a minute and not have missed too much. The overall setting is the "Centauri Cluster", an area of space that has a lot of habitable / terraformable worlds, initially settled by the human diaspora, who subsequently evolved themselves into transhumans (now "Imperial Celestials"). Then it's more recently settled by humans from the diaspora who were going in other directions and then headed towards Centauri when the call went out "hey, there are good planets here." The humans include some mildly uplifted aristos, a bunch of specifically engineered races, and kind-of-normals. A whiny aristo heir meets up with the arrivals from the last arkship to arrive at Centauri (the one going the most wrong direction). He hooks up with one of them; another becomes a populist pro-human rabblerouser. The Celestials (who are in five Grand Houses under a rotating Empress) really don't like humans getting uppity, but they also have their own politics and weird gene-plus-mental-imprint-immortality heir politics and an interesting villain plot that becomes more and more apparent. This takes nearly all thirty hours of the book for the different subplots to really tie together properly (and there were enough characters that I lost track of who some of them were or where we had seen them before), and then it ends on a cliffhanger - so I don't know that you want to start yet. As I was going to see how long the series is expected to be, I happened upon this sentence: "Explore EXODUS, a new sci-fi action-adventure RPG coming soon from Archetype Entertainment featured in this epic novel from legendary author Peter F. Hamilton." which led me here, where I discover that EXODUS is "A new AAA science fiction action-adventure role-playing game franchise" - which seems to be a live action tabletop role playing video game animated series, which is just too many things at the same time. (Okay, so I guess it's multiple different things in the same universe: a video game, a bunch of mini-video-episode-short-stories, "live action TTRPG" is like what Critical Role is, and of course also a book. I feel like anything else I would have to say about the book is overshadowed by this whole on line thing, but in general I had fun. Yet another book in this set that ends on a cliffhanger, though!
- Alien Clay (by Adrian Tchaikovsky)
One part rebellion against technofascism, one part xeno-archaeology - the Mandate dumps its prisoners (including pesky scientists who disagree with dogma) in a research prison on a planet with a very hungry ecosystem. At first, I found the combination sort of odd, like a well blended and seasoned smoothie of pickle and chocolate - why is there all this oppression in my adventure story? Why does the resistance against the oppression have no heroes in it, they could really use some! But I should have trusted. Exploring the alien planet without the tyranny/bureaucracy would be banal. Having just the tyranny would go nowhere. The two together make everything a lot more stressful, in all directions, and then make the ending more earned. Maybe not my favorite of Tchaikovsky's books right now; there's enough tyranny in real life, but it's worthy. There is probably a sequel coming, but this at least comes to a proper end.
- The Invisible College (by Jeff Wheeler)
Hmm. Had I paid money for this book, I might actually rant about it. But it was a free Kindle Unlimited, so I'll say there were some good bits and some bad bits. A professor of sorcery and phonetics and a deaf daughter of middle-high society, caught up in a once-a-hundred-years war with the higher-magic but heat-intolerant Aesir, set in magical Victorian WWII. Or something like that. The premise is interesting. Some plot twists caught me by surprise. A few plot twist choices are startling possibly to the point of eyebrow-raising (again, hard to discuss without spoilers, but a bit like trying to figure out who is a Cylon in Battlestar Galactica. Having it be the one beloved character is a big reveal. Having it be *all* the characters makes no sense. Some of the plot twists aren't actually twists, they're more like backtracks or dead ends - there's this one subplot where the father gives his permission for the professor to court his daughter. Then he issues a ridiculous ultimatum threatening to deny permission unless the professor quits his job (his only actual income) and works only on one particular research project. Then the next day he changes his mind and it's all fine. Was there a point to that? Was it
CylonsAesir pulling mysterious strings? I don't know. Which of the characters are puppets? This is one of the more unsettling questions in the book - by the end of the book (not the story, bah), one answer seems pretty obvious, except in that case what is the point of the whole thing? Solutions and wrapup presumably to come in the sequel, but I'm too aggravated.I've been mulling over the "was there a point to this subplot" a bit more. Once, I read I think it was a blog post where a professional editor tore into (quite politely) some chapters of some sort of action thriller. I don't remember the details, but the main character is sneaking up on a house, and there's a snake in the yard, but then it isn't a problem, and she says the whole thing with the snake should be cut because it does not serve any purpose in the narrative. It doesn't drive the plot, it doesn't reveal any character, it doesn't cause any change in anything. It just takes several pages. That's sort of what I was thinking about the subplot with the ultimatum. Maybe it drives the romance mechanic a bit (+1: Obstacle Overcome!) but it's way too convoluted. It doesn't really provide any actual insight into the father's character or his relationship with his daughter. It demonstrates that the professor has a backbone, but we knew that already. But then, I think about the chapters about whaling in Moby Dick or the the chapter about Napoleon in Les Mis. Are there good modern examples? Or is the emphasis on narrative use something that has caused that sort of thing to happen less? The musical numbers in modern musicals move things forward, whereas older ones are aside to the plot. And I also thought about things that happen in role-playing games - not everything there does drive the action. Sometimes a random encounter is just a random encounter, because the mechanics and the interactions are in themselves fun. 🤔 Not sure where I'm going with this, and it might be too much text for a middling good book.
- The Golem and the Jinni and The Hidden Palace (by Helene Wecker)
Two supernatural creatures, both wind up in New York City at the turn of the century. The Golem is newly created but without a master, and the Jinni is newly freed from his binding flask; they are more alien than the immigrants they live with, who are themselves somewhat alien to the larger city. They have very different natures; the Golem is made to be wholly obedient (and can sense the desires of those around her and is constantly pressured to meet them) and the Jinni is wild and mercurial (though bound by iron and unable to use his greater powers), but both have to pretend to be more human than they are. The details of the city itself feel real, and the careful fitting in that both characters have to do is an interesting challenge; most of the book is that sort of PvE learning to pass, learning who to trust. Eventually there's an antagonist, and I admit I was beginning to wonder about it by the time he appeared, but I think it would still have been interesting without that. The first book came out in 2013 (debut novel), and the second in 2021, but I didn't read the first one until now. The sequel does the thing that I dislike, of destroying some of the happiness that the first book earned, but some of it was probably inevitable (neither character ages visibly so keeping their covers indefinitely is not easy), and they do finally get to a better ending.
I highlighted these two bits in the second book, which capture part of a quarrel between Chava (the Golem) and Ahmad (the Djinni) and then a later conversation between Chava and Anna (someone who knows Chava's nature). They do a good job of the multi-layeredness the stories have; golems and djinni are different, men and women are societally different, being human is hard too...
"I'm talking about you." He'd quieted, but he was still more angry than she'd seen him in some time. "You and me. We are different, Chava. We cannot be their drudges, or allow them to ... to wipe their feet upon us, all in the name of 'hiding'. You let them rule you far too easily."
She'd stiffened at the word drudges. "That's all well and good, coming from you."
His eyes narrowed. "And what does that mean?"
"Only that you have freedoms that I don't. You can choose to lock yourself away in your shop, and take no note of others' opinions, and speak as little to your neighbors as you wish, and all they will think is, There goes Ahmad al-Hadid, that unsociable fellow. What do you think would happen if I were to do the same?"
"They'd say, There goes Chava Levy, that unsociable woman."
She snorted. "That is the least of what they'd call me. It's different for women, Ahmad -- no, don't argue, just listen. If a man smiles at me, I must smile back, or else I am a shrew. If a woman mentions she's having a terrible day, I'm obligated to ask what the matter is, otherwise I'm arrogant and uncaring. Then I become the target of their anger, and it affects me whether I deserve it or not. If I were to act as you do, and alienate half the people I meet-how long do you think it would be before the noise grew unbearable?"
He frowned and looked away, as though trying to imagine what it would be like to hear the unspoken opinions of his neighbors as he passed them on the street. Not for the first time, the Golem wondered if it would change him in the least.
* * *
Probably four stars for the first book, three and a half for the second, or for the other scale: made me care, made me think, didn't really make me laugh. It's a thoughtful book, but not a funny one."The poor girl," Anna murmured. "What happened to her?"
"I don't know. She left the country, and I never asked Ahmad for the details. But now I wonder if ..." She paused, then said in a miserable voice, "Maybe I'm just a woman he can't hurt."
Anna gaped at her. "Chava! What a thing to say!"
"Yes, but what if it's true?"
"Well, ask him!"
"But how will I know if he's lying?"
"You won't," Anna said, "any more than the rest of us ever do. You'll just have to decide whether to believe him."
- How to be Eaten (by Maria Adelmann)
In the basement of a YMCA, a group of women have been invited to a weekly session for experimental group therapy. One chapter at a time, they tell their stories, encouraged to "radical honesty" by the facilitator. Bernice is the first - she has recently been in the tabloids as "Bluebeard's Girlfriend"; Bluebeard is a tech billionaire with a trademark cyan-dyed beard and a bunch of exes who never made it out of the building. The reframing seems so perfect (would anyone even be surprised by Musk at this point?) - though the story itself has its own quirks and twists, it's not just a boring repaint - but it seems clear where the book is going (among the other women is a 'kidnap victim' named Gretel, and a homeless girl named Ruby wearing a wolfskin coat. Not everyone else is as obvious). But then Ruby's story, with a predatory groomer, also makes it clear that the predator is an actual wolf, when I was expecting a more metaphorical one. Ashlee, the third woman, is the winner of a reality TV show called The One, which is The Bachelor but with more rose colors. And "reality TV edits" turns out to be the straw that Rumplestiltskin spins into gold, in a later story.
It might seem like one of these things is not like the others, but much of the point of the book is it's not so different. True Love coming out of a played-and-edited-for-drama reality show is as weirdly fake and implausible as True Love coming out of rescuing a drowning prince, or being kissed while sleeping/dead. Also, the facilitator is not what he seems! Anyhow, this book is like if you take the "Always be grateful" monologue from Barbie and spin it into a long-form scream of sharp golden wire that wraps around all the women in fictional stories and "real" TV until it draws blood... okay, I tried to stuff too many things into that metaphor, but that's what this book is. I don't know that I enjoyed it --- and I definitely didn't predict it as much as I thought I was going to --- but I couldn't put it down.
I highlighted a bunch of different takes on the Barbie monologue, some of which also might be found in Into the Woods, but this psychopathic mansplaining bit is the moment that I was hooked.
Four and a half stars for me; probably less for you if the Barbie monologue left you cold or you want more subtlety.He began a speech I was sure he'd recited many times before, to the many girlfriends he'd murdered. The speech was about, among other things, aristocracy, meritocracy, mediocrity, technology, morality, disruption, and his associations with the color blue.
"My beard isn't just blue, it's cyan," he was saying. "Cyan is the C in CMYK, the four-color printing system that transforms the digital back into the physical. The word 'cyan' derives from 'cyanide'. Test a solution for cyanide with iron sulfate and you get Prussian blue, the first modern color. You know it?" he asked, rhetorically, though I did know it; it was a deep navy, you might say, but richer, a royal blue as seen through darkness. "Prussic acid is Zyklon B. The Nazis used it in the gas chambers. The B stands for blue acid, blausäure." He said the last word with his best German accent.
- Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales (by Heather Fawcett)
Andrea has been asking about comfort reads recently, and this series (this is book three) seems to be one of mine (though I haven't re-read it yet). It's clever, and amusing, and beautifully written - and the perils are perilous and the costs threaten to be too high, but aren't, in the end. (I think of low-stakes plots as popcorn; high stakes surmounted by cleverness and heroism comforts me more). Emily continues to be somewhat curmudgeonish but I no longer hold it against her; Wendell is hilarious and sparklingly charismatic, but also sincere. Emily defeated Wendell's evil stepmother in book two, so he's out to reclaim his kingdom now - but the stepmother is making her "from hell's heart I stab at thee" final attack, and it's one our heroes have a hard time solving. (It gets very bad for a little while, but I held to my trust in the "not too high in the end" rule and it did work out. That could be a spoiler if you are less trusting than me.) Also, we get some more of the brownie / high elf dynamic that reminds me of The Goblin Emperor except this is way over in fairy tale and not fae court. Some books I highlight almost nothing and some books way too much - this is the latter kind. Of the ten things I saved to quote in my review, you get one:
"You don't know where we are," I said in flat disbelief.
"Roughly, roughly." He looked puzzled by my consternation. "Well, what need would I have had to venture this far into the hinterlands? Of course, that isn't to say I never left the castle grounds when I was growing up. Many of the nobility are exceedingly fond of the Hanging Pools, where the river Brightmist spills down a ravine and forms a series of crystalline ponds, perfect for bathing in. And then there is the forest of Wildwood and its bog, hunting grounds forbidden to all but the monarchy and our chosen companions, where one finds uncommonly large boars and the rarest species of deer, which possess antlers of pure silver..."
He continued his rhapsodies concerning the bathing pools and hunting grounds. When at last he paused for breath, I said, attempting to keep my voice level, "Wendell. We are here to conquer your kingdom. This will be difficult if you do not know the way to the bloody throne. Now, answer me one way or the other---are we lost?"
"Oh, Em," he said fondly. "You worry too much---remember that we are in my kingdom, not some Godforsaken ice court or mountain wasteland. No, we are not lost, not in the sense you mean. I know where the castle is---what does it matter where we are?"
On that infuriatingly nonsensical note, he was off to rap on the standing stone again, this time after a little jam for the scones.
- The Actual Star (by Monica Byrne)
I gave up about halfway through. There are three stories happening simultaneously at different points a thousand years apart in time - one in the Mayan empire, one in present day, one in the post-climate-apocalypsed future. The future world was interesting, but not enough to put up with the other two. I don't care about anyone, and the future world-building does make me think a bit, but even the suspension of disbelief that I'm usually willing to grant a book couldn't get me past the hurdle of "there has to be something more/better than this world" being proof of Xibalbá.
- Days of Shattered Faith (by Adrian Tchaikovsky)
This is the third in the Tyrant Philosophers series. Here, the setting is Alkhalend, off near the edge of the Palleseen Empire. When the book starts, it's the Pal diplomats trying to make inroads, while rumors trickle in about cults and anti-cult purges going on (courtesy of the end of the previous book, which seems to have been some time ago). Loret is the new assistant to Sage-Invigilator Angilly, and she's not what she seems, and while she seems to be playing the part of the main character, it's really all about Angilly. Angilly seems to be a kind of decent person despite being a Pal; her compromises aren't bad, just a little selfish. And a selfishness isn't intrinsically evil - you can't put all your energy and passion, always, to the service of the greater good or the greater power you serve. But, as Angilly realizes (more clearly than I do, but she's a Pal and has skill in it) if you make compromises that don't serve your masters, that can lead to just as much harm to their ends as making compromises actively against them. "I am accepting a private bribe of flesh and joy", she notes to herself, and that struck me enough to write it down from audiobook. Anyway. Local politics happen, and more things happen, and Alkhalend goes from being one of the Pal's working-on-for-later projects to something in active conflagration. None of these books are really happy stories, but the other two had more temporary victories, while this one spends a lot of time with all the choices being bad ones. Probably the best of the three but less fun than the other two? I've read a lot of books about living under Empire (previous two in this series being two of them), but I can't think of another that walked me through the mechanics of becoming under the Empire so clearly (at least, that wasn't just "and then they got conquered by the Empire's army"). So this wins "made me think" by quite a lot, and as always I care about these characters. Maybe a little less laughing than before, though. Still five stars.
- The Twyford Code (by Janice Hallett)
Janice Hallett is writing really interesting mysteries. The Appeal was primarily written via a collection of emails and texts - the epistolary novel is not uncommon, but those usually focus on letters by the narrators who are following the plot, but instead the emails/texts were being dissected by the narrators solving the plot. This one is a transcription of (important!) audio files recorded by the narrator, who is following the plot of trying to solve a mystery and also trying to solve a puzzle. Except (spoiler) it's not really that at all, the narrator is actually trying to make a puzzle for someone else to solve. In theory it's really very clever, and if I had been enjoying it more, the reveals and extra layers would have been a lot of fun, but for me I didn't care quite enough to want to go back and figure out or unravel the extra clues that had been left. This one might not have been quite for me, but this author is doing Interesting Things and I must keep reading them.
- A Drop of Corruption (by Robert Jackson Bennett)
Book two of Shadow of the Leviathan. It reminds me of Tyrant Philosophers because of the world-building and the Empire bureaucracy, but as Andy points out, there's a lot more fungus in this one. These are also mystery novels, which means that they're doubly my genre - but while they're really lovely creepy bio / fungus / alchemy novels, they're not perfect mysteries. The previous plot had "and then an accident happens" play an unfortunately large role in the solution to the mystery, and this one has a revelation that was clued way too heavily (including what I think was a clumsy authorial attetmpt to misdirect that rang oddly false to me); I was very disappointed in Ana (the brilliant detective) for not figuring it out much sooner. My theory is that this sort of thing can happen whenever you have an author who is mainly working in one genre, who decides to dabble in another genre; they haven't leveled up as much in the other genre.
My inner Andrea reminds me I haven't said anything about the plot, so: Ana (the detective) and Din (her assistant) are in Yarrow to investigate a mysterious disappearance. Yarrow is not part of the Empire, but ninety-two years ago, Yarrow's king signed a treaty saying the Empire could pay him now and get Yarrow in a hundred years. There's a lot of negotiations happening, but in the meantime, Yarrow has become the industrial center for extracting useful creepy-bio-alchemy from dead leviathans. A Treasury official has disappeared from his locked room at the inn - but the plot quickly balloons into murder and bandits and the politics of Empire. The Empire is (like all empires) pretty terrible, but Yarrow, with its hereditary slave class, is worse. A quote from Ana to Din about why the Iudex (the justice department of the bureaucracy) is important:
This work can never satisfy, Din, for it can never finish. The dead cannot be restored. Vice and bribery will never be totally banished from the cantons. And the drop of corruption that lies within every society shall always persist. The duty of the Iudex is not to boldly vanquish it but to manage it. We keep the stain from spreading, yes, but it is never gone.
I'm deducting one star for the mis-steps in the mystery (the misdirection being a greater sin than being too easy), but still four stars.- Night Watch (by Sergei Lukyanenko, translated by Andrew Bromfield)
This series was recommended by one of my Hungarian co-workers; I have very little skill in "what does Russian literature read like?" but this feels very Russian to me. Start with the urban fantasy conceit that humanity has always had the Other among them (mages, vampires, etc). The Dark Others (malign) and the Light Others (helpful) were always at war, but the war threatened to destroy everything, so there's been a Grand Treaty for a long time. So now there are two Watches: the Night Watch is made of Light Others, who police the Dark Others and come down hard on them when they use their powers to harm normal humans. And the Day Watch is made of Dark Others, who police the Light Others and come down hard on them when they use their powers to help normal humans. Anton works for the Night Watch, so he's a good guy, but also a loyal tool of his organization, and so he gets caught up in the above-his-pay-grade machinations which (for the Night Watch) involve breaking eggs to make omelets of the better future. The emotional beats feel more like gritty spy fiction, and the setting is dingy and concrete and everybody smokes and drinks a lot. Interesting, especially for the flavor, but it didn't grab me.
Many years ago someone told me something that I flatly refused to accept. And I still don't accept it now, despite all the times I've seen it proved right.
"The common good and the individual good rarely coincide..."
Sure, I know. It's true.
But some truths are probably worse than lies.- One Level Down (by Mary G. Thompson)
Ella's Daddy was given powers over the simulation (at least, the human objects in it) in which Ella and her Daddy and the other people in their mining town live. Daddy's original five-year-old daughter, and Daddy's original wife, were killed in the plague on the original planet their town was on; the plague is why they retreated into simulation. Ella is five, and she's been five for fifty-three years. Samantha, the simulation replacement for Ella's mother - Daddy deleted her when she argued with him that it was wrong to not let Ella get older. Ella knows how to smile and bounce and chirp like the five-year-old Daddy wants her to be, but she has a plan to escape... It's not a long book, but it does everything it wants to do just right. It could be more horror than it is, but is likely to be triggering for child abuse. Four stars.
- The Ministry of Time (by Kaliane Bradley)
I've read other versions of the Time Traveling Bureaucracy - Connie Willis has her ferociously inept historians, Jodi Taylor has St. Mary's (which I haven't gone back to yet). This version, the bureaucracy is a spy-flavored government ministry (a lot of my SF/fantasy recently seems to have been spy flavored recently), and they're extracting people from time one at a time for not-initially-explained reasons. The protagonist (she has a name which is hinted at but we never learn; I am unsure why) is the "bridge" (the assigned caretaker and liason for a traveler to bring them gently up to speed) for Graham Gore, extracted from the doomed Franklin expedition. (I am always excited to run into these people, having initially met them in Dan Simmons's Terror). Our protagonist works for a spy ministry, but has no proper spy instincts herself and is a second-generation immigrant from Cambodia; the story is told later by a much-older and somewhat wiser version, with the combination of bitterness and affection that you can only have for a younger you making stupid mistakes. It's thoughtful and interesting and sometimes funny, and is an astonishing first novel by the author - it's nominated for this year's Hugos (I have now read all six nominees!). Made me care, made me laugh, made me think; four and a half stars. I highlighted a lot of bits; I'll give you two.
In January 1839, the British decided to acquire the port of Aden, which was part of the sultanate of Lahej. It was a useful port on the trade route to the Far East. So far as I understood the British Empire, other people's countries were useful or negligible but rarely conceived of as autonomous. The empire regarded the world the way my dad regards the elastic bands the post deliverer drops on their round: This is handy, it's just lying here; now it's mine.
* * * You can't trauma-proof life, and you can't hurt-proof your relationships. You have to accept you will cause harm to yourself and others. But you can also fuck up, really badly, and not learn anything from it except that you fucked up. It's the same with oppression. You don't gain any special knowledge from being marginalized. But you do gain something from stepping outside your hurt and examining the scaffolding of your oppression. You'll find the weak joints, the things you can kick in. When I look back at myself on the bridge year, I see that I thought I was doing something constructive, escaping exploitation by becoming exceptional. In fact, what I was doing was squeezing my eyes shut and singing la la la at the gathering darkness, as if the gathering darkness cared that I couldn't see it.
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(I like having blockquotes be italic for quotations, but that messes with the italics inside. Never sure what to do about that...)
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I finally saw the Barbie movie, after not bothering first for Andrea-resists-things-that-are-too-popular reasons and then because I heard enough about it to get the impression it would just annoy/disappoint me (which it did). I thought the monologue was a good essay -- so it didn't leave me cold in the sense I think you mean here -- but I didn't think it worked particularly well dramatically. Er, narratively? That is, nothing wrong with the performance, but it felt to me like "And now we will have a Dramatic Monologue, because we need to get there somehow, especially because we didn't do a great job of coherently showing what we want to tell." (Possibly that opinion puts me in the "wants more subtlety" reader camp.)
ETA: also, I'm amused by your citation of the Waterloo book of Les Mis, as I've embarked on a project of re-reading it in French while attempting not to skip/skim too badly on all the 50-page-discursion-on-something-you-don't-really-need-to-hear-about sections. :) Right now I'm in the history of the convent (in which Hugo even comes out and says "this anecdote I'm about to tell you has nothing to do with the story I'm telling").
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