Hour 14 & Mid-Event Meme

Hour 14! Mia and I have made guacamole, completed our mini-challenge (you guys are so awesome we decided to give away TWO prizes), and still have not done a huge amount of reading. >.<

1) How are you doing? Sleepy? Are your eyes tired? I’m still going pretty strong, though I’m sure that will soon change. In one hour, we’ll have been up for twelve hours.
2) What have you finished reading? NOTHING. Augh. I made good progress in Dresden, but then I had to set it aside and have flitted a little since then. I’m settling into A Fountain Filled With Blood by Julia Spencer-Fleming, but I don’t want to commit cause if I do it’ll probably be the only book I finish.
3) What is your favorite read so far? A Fountain Filled With Blood, so far! Love Clare and Russ.
4) What about your favorite snacks? Guacamole, definitely! So delicious.
5) Have you found any new blogs through the readathon? If so, give them some love! Not yet. Sometimes afterwards I’ll go through and find blogs, but it’s already too hard to balance reading with mini-challenges! If I add social stuff, I won’t read a page!

Now, Mia! It’s your moment to shine!

1) How are you doing? Sleepy? Are your eyes tired? Actually, not yet! I was a bit this morning (even though we didn’t get up at the very start of the Thon) but I’m pretty well-energized now.
2) What have you finished reading? I haven’t actually finished anything yet–the nonfiction was going slowly, so I switched to a quicker read, which I’m about 2/3 of the way through.
3) What is your favorite read so far? I’ve liked both Wait Till Helen Comes (for its campiness) and Local Babies, Global Science (for its insight into infertility technology in Egypt).
4) What about your favorite snacks? That guac kicked ass. I would show y’all a picture if my computer were working properly! Unfortunately, the wireless card is on the fritz so we’ve had to borrow my boyfriend’s Macbook Air.
5) Have you found any new blogs through the readathon? If so, give them some love! Madelaine, one of the winners of our Hour 10 Mini-Challenge, has a really fun tumblr that I’ve enjoyed checking out–the picture of her kitty sleeping on her legs makes me go “aww.”

Okay, y’all, back to the grindstone! (Bookstone? Grindbook?)

Read-a-Thon Introductory Post

Goooood morning, fine friends and Read-a-Thon-ers! Mia here, and Jessica and I are finally ready to ring in the Read-a-Thon and start reading! (It’s funny how much more appealing this sounds at 7:30am than it did at 5:00.) Here’s my version of the introductory meme to get us started:

1) What fine part of the world are you reading from today? Jessica and I are reading from my place in the Central Valley of California!
2) Which book in your stack are you most looking forward to? I’m really interested in finally reading Tekkon Kinkreet, a pretty well-known graphic novel by Taiyo Matsumoto, because I bought it like three or four years ago and somehow never got around to it.
3) Which snack are you most looking forward to? Homemade guacamole! The avocados are just sitting there, staring at me.
4) Tell us a little something about yourself! I just dyed my hair orange and black for October, and for some reason my cat is extremely frightened by Jessica. Poor cat. Poor Jessica.
5) If you participated in the last read-a-thon, what’s one thing you’ll do different today? If this is your first read-a-thon, what are you most looking forward to? This time I’ll be reading from my birthday-present Kindle Paperwhite, so that’s different! (I left my last Kindle on a plane, because I am a dummy.)

Take it away, Jessica!

1) What fine part of the world are you reading from today? The opposite side of the couch from Mia!
2) Which book in your stack are you most looking forward to? I’m looking forward to all of the books for different reasons, maybe particularly the Butler as I’ve been meaning to read the rest of the books in the Patternmaster series (I’ve only read Wild Seed).
3) Which snack are you most looking forward to? Most definitely the guac!
4) Tell us a little something about yourself! I have always had cats and it’s sad that Flat Tire (Mia’s cat) doesn’t like me. Love me, cat, like I want to love you!
5) If you participated in the last read-a-thon, what’s one thing you’ll do different today? Well, last read-a-thon was a bit weird as Mia and I had made plans that meant we only read for a portion of the 24 hours. I only read one book! So I’m looking forward to a more intensely read-y day today. :)

Wild Seed by Octavia Butler (A More Diverse Universe)

Like a couple of others, I decided to (re)read Wild Seed for Aarti & Co’s More Diverse Universe Blog Tour. Any regular reader of NBP knows that diverse reading is important to me, so signing up for the tour was a no-brainer. The real question was what to read. I have several SF&F books written by POC that have been on my TBR for a while (A Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, Who Fears Death, etc), but I’ve been meaning to reread Wild Seed for years so that I could continue on with the rest of the Patternmaster series which I haven’t read. Since it’s been on my TBR list for the longest, Wild Seed won.

Anyway, tl;dr for why I chose Wild Seed. Onto the book itself!

From Amazon (that link is to just Wild Seed, but I would recommend, if you are interested, in instead getting Seed to Harvest, the compilation of the four Patternmaster books): “Doro is an entity who changes bodies like clothes, killing his hosts by reflex — or design. He fears no one — until he meets Anyanwu. Anyanwu is a shapeshifter who can absorb bullets and heal with a kiss…and savage anyone who threatens those she loves. She fears no one — until she meets Doro. From African jungles to the colonies of America, Doro and Anyanwu weave together a pattern of destiny that not even immortals can imagine.”

The good: I love this book. It explores many of the same themes of other Butler novels: race, gender, sex, power. Butler also explores what it means to be truly immortal, in Doro’s case, or effectively immortal, in Anyanwu’s case. She explores the loneliness that each experience and their differing ways of dealing with it. She explores the relationship between morality and mortality. Wild Seed is about the relationship between Doro and Anyanwu, and is really a prequel to the rest of the series, so there isn’t an arcing plot. I’m fine with that, enjoy it even, but beware if you’re the type of reader who wants a big bad to fight or whatever. I should perhaps mention here that the next section will have spoilers, but given the not-so-plotful nature of the book, I don’t think it will ruin your experience. Still, don’t read the next section if you hate spoilers!

The rough: Many (most? all?) of Butler’s novels have an at least partially uncomfortable sexual and/or romantic relationship and this is no exception. Anyanwu and Doro are very different people and, truthfully, the one thing that keeps them together is that they are the only two immortal people they know of in the world. Doro’s lack of empathy, his obsession with his breeding program, and his ultimate power mean that he uses people, including Anyanwu, in very gross ways. I don’t blame Anyanwu for growing to hate him, and I don’t judge her for growing close to him again, in the end. If I was immortal in a world where almost everybody and everything is mortal, I don’t know that I could forever stay away from another immortal person. Anyanwu realizes this for herself and realizes that her only real choice is to either let herself die (which she can do, and which Doro cannot) or live with him. She chooses the latter and I refuse to belittle her choice. And I strongly disagree with Fangs for the Fantasy that that choice makes Anyanwu a long-suffering mammy. (I also disagree that Anyanwu and Doro’s ability to change sex, whilst still retaining their gender, and having relationships with women and men respectively is in any way excluding LGBT experiences and, in fact, is inclusive of trans* experiences. I do think Fangs for the Fantasy makes an important point about Anyanwu’s healing and what the books says about disability and the problems therein, but I do not think there is as much erasure/negativity as they are saying. I will have to think more on it. Anyway, head on over and see what they had to say!)

The bad/overall: For me, there is nothing, really, to say here. If you like book plots to have a distinct arc, you may have trouble. If you are sensitive to or triggered by race/gender/sex issues, I would recommend it only with extreme caution. Otherwise, I highly recommend it to everyone. If you haven’t read any Butler at all, you are seriously missing out! Get thee to the library/bookstore!

The Einstein Intersection, by Samuel R. Delany (A More Diverse Universe)

The Einstein Intersection

by Samuel R. Delany

“The Einstein Intersection won the Nebula Award for best science fiction novel of 1967. The surface story tells of the problems a member of an alien race, Lo Lobey, has assimilating the mythology of earth, where his kind have settled among the leftover artifacts of humanity. The deeper tale concerns, however, the way those who are “different” must deal with the dominant cultural ideology. The tale follows Lobey’s mythic quest for his lost love, Friza. In luminous and hallucinated language, it explores what new myths might emerge from the detritus of the human world as those who are “different” try to seize history and the day.” (via Amazon)

Good Things: As I’m sure other reviewers of this book have said before me, The Einstein Intersection (or, if you want to call it by its intended title, A Fabulous, Formless Darkness) is a tough book to talk about. It’s short, clocking in at around 150 pages, but it’s not a breezy read. Samuel Delany wrote it in his early twenties, and the book’s sections of narrative are interspersed with short journal entries that Delany jotted down while writing the book during a trip around Greece. That’s not a surprise, because The Einstein Intersection is dense with mythological references to the Minotaur, to Orpheus, to Phaedra, and many more besides that I’m sure went over my head. The main characters are all aliens who have come to Earth and inhabited the planet long after humanity has ceased to exist, and have taken human form for reasons never fully explicated. The main character, Lobey, describes himself as an oddly-shaped 23-year-old brown person with a bottom half larger than his top half, with hand-like feet and a great love of music. In this world, many people are born deformed, terminally disabled, or otherwise “different,” and Lobey begins to learn that he himself is “different” in a way that could endanger his life. When the also-”different” girl he loves, Friza, is killed, he sets out to find her killer and deal with him himself.

The language of The Einstein Intersection is often beautiful and fits the dreamlike structure of the story. I felt the atmosphere quite vividly the whole time I was reading, and there are certain scenes that will probably occupy my brain for quite a while. There are also moments of surprising humor that make me smile and which help define Lobey’s character and the world around him:

I began to learn what I was doing when about twenty dragons got stuck in a mintbog (a slushy quicksand bog covered with huge bushes of windy mint, right? Mintbog). (p. 68-69)

There are interesting explorations of gender and able-bodied-ness and able-minded-ness that are often ignored in science-fiction; it’s a very thoughtful, cerebral book that wanders through mythology, genetics, history, music, and death, touching on all and asking questions that it doesn’t necessarily answer.

Bad Things: All that meandering, that dreamscape quality, that obliqueness of the text? Is probably frustrating for some readers. It’s not a book that makes itself easily accessible to a lot of people. Do you know how it is when you get the feeling that the book you’re reading is probably smarter than you are? That’s sort of what reading The Einstein Intersection feels like. I felt a little lost at times when I didn’t get the mythological references or the talk about parthenogenesis and haploids, and I think some readers might end up feeling left out and quit reading partway through. I don’t believe it’s something Delany does on purpose; he was and is a brilliant man, and his books definitely go through cycles of being more or less accessible to a wide audience. The Einstein Intersection in and of itself feels less like a straightforward novel and more like an exploration of the themes mentioned earlier, hung on a fictional frame. The ideas explored don’t always come to a satisfactory conclusion–for me, particularly the parts regarding ableism and gender could have been taken farther and to more interesting places (why do the androgynes make Lobey so uncomfortable? difference and the true meaning of “functional” are discussed, but why is it okay to stick the severely non-functional disabled in “kages” and treat them as not-people?) .

I also felt a little sad that, of the few female (and neither-male-nor-female) characters in the story, none of them had much in the way of agency; La Dire exists to give Lobey direction and set him on his journey, Friza and Dorik die early on, and Dove is used by–who?–at Branning-at-sea to keep genetic lines from becoming too inbred.

Overall: Not easy reading, and may turn some readers off with its oblique references and shaky plot. Interesting and thoughtful, though, and a clear beginning of some of the ideas that Delany explores more thoroughly in later books. For more casual readers looking for more developed ideas and a stronger plot in POC-centered science-fiction, I’d suggest Nova, Babel-17 (reviewed at chasing bawa and to-be-reviewed at Necromancy Never Pays on Thursday), or Trouble on Triton over The Einstein Intersection, but it’s still nothing to sneeze at. Plus, the current edition available at Amazon has a foreword by Neil Gaiman! And who doesn’t like Gaiman, huh? (Don’t answer that.)

Thirsty, by M. T. Anderson

Thirsty

by M. T. Anderson

“All Chris really wants is to be a normal kid, to hang out with his friends, avoid his parents, and get a date with Rebecca Schwartz. Unfortunately, Chris appears to be turning into a vampire. So while his hometown performs an ancient ritual that keeps Tch’muchgar, the Vampire Lord, locked in another world, Chris desperately tries to save himself from his own vampiric fate. He needs help, but whom can he trust? A savagely funny tale of terror, teen angst, suspense, and satire from National Book Award winner M. T. Anderson.” (via Amazon)

[REVIEW CONTAINS VAGUE, NONSPECIFIC SPOILERS FOR THIS BOOK]

Good Things: I’ll cut to the chase, guys: Thirsty is a pretty bleak book. Chris, a high-school freshman living in Massachusetts, lives in a world where vampires, changelings, and other nonhuman beings are real. They are hunted down and killed by humans, who fear for their own survival among the inhuman. One day, Chris is approached by a being who says he is with the Forces of Light, who needs Chris to help save the world before the annual Sad Festival of Vampires happens, and at the same time, Chris realizes he is becoming a vampire–the whole book is about his struggle to do the right thing and to resist his thirst for blood, to stay human. Ultimately, though, it’s something of a tragedy; the ending is somewhat ambiguous, but it sure ain’t happy. I don’t think I’m really spoiling anything by saying that, although I went into the book with absolutely no knowledge of the contents other than 1) that it was by an author I already like and 2) it was a vampire novel. So I don’t know if knowing that it’s a bleak book will affect your reading experience–well, scratch that, it probably will. I guess what I mean is that I don’t know if that’s a bad thing. I had pretty complex feelings immediately post-read, and I couldn’t have told you if I even liked the book or not, but now, a couple of days later, it feels weirdly satisfying, like putting your tongue where a tooth used to be and feeling the sore rawness of the space.

There’s a lot of good, dark, dry, almost-not-there humor that I’ve appreciated in Anderson’s books in the past. The dialogue is interesting; it’s stilted, due in part to the characters’ non-use of contractions, but the boys still call each other “buttplug” and “peckerhead,” etc. etc., so I’m inclined to call it a stylistic choice rather than any lack of knowledge about those damn teenagers and how they talk these days. I guffawed aloud at Lolli’s multicolored note to Christopher (C-R-E-M-A-T-E-D :( ), among other scenes. Thinking about it, the book reminds me of Etgar Keret’s novella “Kneller’s Happy Campers,” or Junji Ito’s series Gyo or Uzumaki (although, unlike the latter two, I would read Thirsty and “Kneller’s Happy Campers” again).

Bad Things: I don’t know if I can properly enumerate things that I found bad about the story, but I can talk about why other people might not like it, and why I understand the contentiousness of such a book. I’ve been thinking about this since I read the book two days ago, and I keep coming back to one of Joey Comeau’s posts about his own book, Bible Camp Bloodbath. If you haven’t read it, it’s a semi-comic horror story where there the murderer wins, there are no survivors, and the story ends on a pretty tragic note; in the later post, Comeau talks about how he stayed true to his original vision of a horror story where the murderer “just runs out of people to kill,” but ultimately regretted the resultant hopelessness of the story, and has plans to rewrite and republish it.

Thirsty is one of those books where readers are going to have to weigh its purity of vision versus its hopelessness for their own preferences, and I’m sure a lot of readers may find it coming up too hopeless. It’s a pretty gutsy thing, to write a whole book that ultimately resolves in ambiguous hopelessness; you see writers take that risk more often with short stories, because the readers don’t have as much invested in a twenty-page story versus a three-hundred-page novel, and for a lot of people, a truly hopeless ending to a novel can feel like a betrayal by the author. But here, I think, it fits. Anderson creates this world–this cold, grimy, tinny world that’s hardly worth saving in the end, and the hopelessness feels…right. There was no other way it could have happened.

In the author’s notes, Anderson is quoted as saying, “I grew up in a suburb very much like Chris’s. It seemed to me that there were always a lot of kids struggling with the isolation of wanting to do the right thing when there was no right thing to do.” I don’t think anybody can articulate it better than that.

Overall: A complex, bleak book; not for everybody, although I thought it worked well, with a terrible, funny sadness. Probably good for fans of Etgar Keret, Junji Ito, and M. T. Anderson’s other works. For maximum impact, read in conjunction with a novel that is of the vampires-are-glamorous-and-sexy school.

The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror 2008

The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror 2008

edited by Ellen Datlow, Kelly Link & Gavin J. Grant

“As in every year since 1988, the editors tirelessly scoured story collections, magazines, and anthologies worldwide to compile a delightful, diverse feast of tales and poems. On this anniversary, the editors have increased the size of  the collection to 300,000 words of fiction and poetry, including works by Billy Collins, Ted Chiang, Karen Joy Fowler, Elizabeth Hand, Glen Hirshberg, Joyce Carol Oates, and new World Fantasy Award winner M. Rickert. With impeccably researched summations of the field by the editors, Honorable Mentions, and articles by Edward Bryant, Charles de Lint and Jeff VanderMeer on media, music and graphic novels, this is a heady brew topped off by an unparalleled list of sources of fabulous works both light and dark.” (via Amazon)

Good Things: Hey, look, it’s an anthology! I grabbed this one pretty randomly off the shelf at the library. I’ve been meaning to read more short stories, and “the year’s best XYZ” seems like a pretty reliable endorsement, no? Flipping through it, I landed on a poem by Catherynne M. Valente, “The Seven Devils of Central California,” and that’s when I knew the book was coming home with me–Central California doesn’t get featured a whole lot in fiction, especially not the San Joaquin Valley, where I’ve lived for 20 of the last 24 years of my life. Unfortunately, that particular poem ended up being a bit too obtuse to end up on my favorites list, but there are a number of stories that really impressed me, listed here in the order they appear in the book:

1) The Cambist and Lord Iron: A Fairy Tale of Economics, by Daniel Abraham. The title sums it up pretty well: a money-changer encounters a dangerous, powerful man, and is forced to outwit him in three puzzles regarding money, exchange, and value in order to escape with his job and his life.

2) “The Fiddler of Bayou Teche,” by Delia Sherman. A beautiful trickster tale set in Louisiana, where a young albino girl named Cadence makes a deal with a devil. Probably my favorite of the collection.

3) “Winter’s Wife,” by Elizabeth Hand. Teenage American Justin’s neighbor, Mr. Winter, marries a strange woman from Iceland who is more than she seems.

4) “The Gray Boy’s Work,” by M. T. Anderson. This is one of the few more obscure, opaque works in the collection that left me interested instead of annoyed. A sort of spooky American fairy tale; a boy’s father returns from war, and embodied concepts like Despair and Victory haunt their house.

5) “The Hill,” by Tanith Lee. A historical mystery, where an English spinster librarian is hired to sort the library of a near-empty mansion with an expansive menagerie, and the animals begin to act very strangely. (Miss Constable had a strong, practical narrative voice that I liked quite a bit; the drawback for me was the exoticization of non-English countries that, while appropriate for the story’s time period, still bugged me.)

6) “Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz Go to War Again,” by Garth Nix. A surprisingly sad fantasy by the author of one of my favorite fantasy series; a knight and an animated puppet travel from town to town, righting a very particular kind of wrong. I’ve read some of Nix’s books and short stories aside from the Old Kingdom series and generally found them disappointing in a good-but-not-as-good sort of way, so it was great to finally read a story that engaged me as fully as Lirael, Sabriel, and Abhorsen did.

7) “The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs of North Park After the Change,” by Kij Johnson. Dogs have gained the ability to speak, and many have subsequently been abandoned by their masters, who have become uncomfortable with the way the master-pet relationship has changed and is continuing to change. A young woman, Linna, visits abandoned dogs at a park to record their fables about One Dog, and to try to help them.

Bad Things: My main complaint with this volume is that, for something titled “the year’s best XYZ,”there were a lot of stories that left me unimpressed. I’ll admit that I skipped over a fair number of them, especially when I started noticing a pattern where many of the stories a) were narrated first-person by b) a young-to-middle-aged white guy who c) acts as a thoughtful observer to certain mystical or horrific events that teach him an important lesson about his young-to-middle-aged white guy life. Do you know what I mean? There was such a narrow scope, and it started getting really repetitive. I really would have liked to see the inclusion of more POC, and stories from more countries and with a greater variety of circumstances. It’s supposed to be the year’s best, for pete’s sake! The ones that really tended to grab me (as you can see above) varied from the pattern or stood out in some way.

Overall: A somewhat uneven collection of stories with some incredible standouts and some forgettable works. Includes a long series of introductions listing the best fantasy and horror novels, media, comics, and music of 2007, if that sort of thing floats your boat. It’s unfortunate that 2008 was the last year of the anthology, because while I suspect that I would continue to skip a portion of stories for more recent years, there would be a few really knockout pieces that would, like this one, make the whole thing worth it.

Skinned by Robin Wasserman

I have been so lax in reviewing, guys.  Hell, I’ve been lax in blogging, period. Partially I just haven’t been reading a whole lot (I fee like this always happens), but also I just haven’t been feeling the need to share my opinions.

Anyway, here’s a short selection, as collected from reviews I’ve started and not finished. It may be a little rough, since I read these as far back as January (!):

From Amazon: “Lia Kahn was perfect: rich, beautiful, popular — until the accident that nearly killed her. Now she has been downloaded into a new body that only looks human. Lia will never feel pain again, she will never age, and she can’t ever truly die. But she is also rejected by her friends, betrayed by her boyfriend, and alienated from her old life.”

Robin Wasserman was sweet enough to send me a whole set of her Skinned trilogy when she needed to make room for its repackaging into the Cold Awakening trilogy. I wanted to read the whole trilogy before reviewing it, but my reading whims cannot be tamed and I have still only read the first one.

You might be thinking that that’s a bad sign, but that’s just not the case with me. I like to read series’ slowly. For instance, I read The Hunger Games way back in January of 2009, didn’t read Catching Fire until last year, and am only getting to Mockingjay now.  I read the first Temeraire book a couple of years ago and enjoyed it a lot… And I still haven’t read any of the others. Throne of Jade has been waiting for me in the trunk of my car for quite a while. Poor thing.

Anyway, I did enjoy Skinned, though not as much as I hoped I would. I was intrigued by the premise – your mind downloaded into a new body that is way too Uncanny Valley for the comfort of yourself or your loved ones. Unfortunately, Lia is the wrong character for the kind of identity ruminations I wanted. In many ways, I think Lia is super realistic in her reactions and not dissimilar to me, actually. She spends a good portion of the book trying to ignore the implications of her situation, most of the rest simply being angry and sad, and she is generally more focused on how the people in her life see her than how she sees herself.

That last, especially, seems realistic. Lia doesn’t know what to think of her situation. She’s freaked out and confused and so takes cues from her family and friends. If they treated her normally, then maybe she was normal. Maybe she could start to feel normal. Unfortunately, it becomes quickly clear that things aren’t normal, that she isn’t normal, that nothing is alright.

There’s a lot more to the book, setting up the plot of the next two, introducing new characters who are like her, etc etc. But I almost wish this had been a quieter book. Perhaps a standalone that focused more on Lia and her immediate surroundings. You know, one of those literary family dramas full of dysfunction. Still, it is what it is, and because I love dystopias (oh, did I mention that this is a dystopia?), I know I will be reading the other books eventually!

Okay, well, this turned out longer than I meant it to, so I’m just going to end it here and go write those other reviews RIGHT NOW and QUEUE THOSE BABIES UP oh yeah that’s right.

Afterlives of the Saints by Colin Dickey

Afterlives of the Saints: Stories from the Ends of Faith

by Colin Dickey

“Afterlives of the Saints is a woven gathering of groundbreaking essays that move through Renaissance anatomy and the Sistine Chapel, Borges’ “Library of Babel,” the history of spontaneous human combustion, the dangers of masturbation, the pleasures of castration, “and so forth” — each essay focusing on the story of a particular (and particularly strange) saint.” (via Amazon)

Good Things: As the above summary says, this book is a collection of essays, each about a particular saint–but this book departs from traditional hagiography (biographical writings about saints) in that, while each essay includes each saint’s story, the true focus is generally the cultural impact or relevance the particular saint gained post-canonization. This is an interesting direction to take, and gives the author freedom to cover a lot of ground, which he does: discussion of Saint Paula leads to Chaucer’s depictions of women; discussion of Saint Lawrence leads to the often-confusing iconography of saints in general (Lawrence was burnt alive over a gridiron, and so is depicted carrying one, which has alarmingly led to his becoming the patron saint of barbecues); discussion of Saint Bartholomew, flayed alive, leads to the evolution of the study of anatomy. Despite being a distinctly unreligious person myself, I have a lot of interest in the way that different religions and pieces of religions shape world cultures and how we live, and Afterlives of the Saints is right up my alley.

There’s a decent amount of the juicy details, too–I like to imagine that, like me, at least a decent number of people who seek out stories of saints are interested in the weird and gory details of their martyrdom, like Saint Lucy and her gouged-out eyes or Saint Agatha and her cut-off breasts. The book doesn’t shy away from these, and often helpfully provides images of paintings discussed in the text, so we get to see Saint Sebastian pierced by arrows in all his weirdly sexy glory. It also doesn’t shy away from the strange and myriad connections saints have to the rest of history. Pornography, castration, masturbation, racism, and all sorts of other complex subjects come up, and I appreciated the frank (and non-moralizing) treatment of all of the above.

Plus, I just plain like collections of essays. The variety of topics keeps things interesting, while the overarching theme mostly brings it all back around in the end. I thought it would be something that I would pick up and put down frequently over the course of a month, an essay here and an essay there, but I actually ended up reading it almost straight through over the course of two or three days. Saints are fascinating! I would, however, caution against reading it in the wee hours just before going to sleep, however. Reading about Bartholomew being skinned is one thing, but dreaming about it is entirely another.

Bad Things: Unfortunately, I felt like the essays didn’t really hit their stride until Part Two. The book is divided into five Parts, with Part One covering saints that have written things, Parts Two and Three covering saints that inspired art and literature, Part Four covering “the wide range of beliefs [certain saints] encompassed,” and Part Five covering some non-saints, those who were not formally canonized but who are of interest despite (and partially because of) their non-sainthood. While I found Part One interesting, particularly as a former student of Literature, I felt like the essays in this section tended to wander a bit more, and didn’t feel as tightly written as the later sections. I still enjoyed them, but didn’t feel that they would draw a standard reader into the book as easily. When the book is at its strongest, it is fun interesting, fun, and informative, but occasionally the essays get either a bit didactic or a bit muddled, which both serve to draw one out of the text.  I also occasionally disagreed with the conclusions the author came to about this or that saint, but that’s not so much a “bad thing” as “humans having differing opinions,” so I won’t count that against him.

Overall:  In the prologue, Dickey writes, “I, too, am uninterested in writing that downplays the humanity of the saint in favor of God’s divinity. For me, saints exist not as a medium for God but as a lens for humanity.” The essays that come after serve this vision well–even when the essays stray from the original topic, they always get to the heart of the universal nature of the saints’ stories, whether some of them were real people who actually existed or whether they are simply symbols of a certain place and time. We see what the saints meant and continue to mean to people, Catholics and non-Catholics alike, and how they interest and inspire and connect us through all sorts of media. It connects pornography, spontaneous human combustion, WWII, and Margery Kemp’s endless torrent of tears, and through that, this book makes me see the web of the world.

Disclosure: I received a review copy from the publisher via NetGalley. Afterlives of the Saints is available now.

Beauty, by Robin McKinley

Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast

by Robin McKinley

“Beauty has never liked her nickname. She is thin and awkward; it is her two sisters who are the beautiful ones. But what she lacks in looks, she can perhaps make up for in courage.

When her father comes home with the tale of an enchanted castle in the forest and the terrible promise he had to make to the Beast who lives there, Beauty knows she must go to the castle, a prisoner of her own free will. Her father protests that he will not let her go, but she answers, “Cannot a Beast be tamed?”

Robin McKinley’s beloved telling illuminates the unusual love story of a most unlikely couple: Beauty and the Beast.” (via Amazon)

Good Things: Okay, you guys know the story. You probably even know Robin McKinley’s version of the story, if you’re the kind of person who reads book blogs. But, you guys!!! This is the fourth Robin McKinley book I’ve read, and she continues to impress me with her…her Robin McKinley-ness. I might even like Beauty better than I liked Chalice, Deerskin, or The Hero and the Crown. Let’s figure out why, shall we?

I think the most immediate thing is that Beauty has a waaaaay better support system at home than the heroines of the other three books I’ve read. Okay, so Aerin in The Hero and the Crown has her father and Tor, but she is also pretty much feared and/or hated by everybody else. Beauty, on the other hand, has a family that loves and supports her–a dead mother, of course, but a pretty stable father and two pretty stable sisters, and friendly, supportive townsfolk besides. Beauty works hard to support them in turn, not just out of duty but out of love. And, you know, it’s nice! Human relationships and simple interactions are one of McKinley’s (many) strengths, and they really shine through in Beauty–which isn’t to say that there aren’t some lovely interactions and relationships in her other novels, but Beauty is coming from a different place than Mirasol, Lissar, and Aerin do, and consequently has different strengths and challenges.

Beauty isn’t so different from McKinley’s other heroines, though. As with her other novels, a large portion of the story has to do with Beauty’s personal growth as she discovers hidden strengths inside herself and really comes into her own. She changes during her time living at the Beast’s enchanted castle, and that change benefits the Beast and ultimately breaks his curse, but in the end, she changes for herself. And that’s one of the things I love most about McKinley’s heroines.

Plus, I really liked the alternate history/future thing that McKinley let us onto with Beauty’s studying, and the not-yet-written books in the Beast’s castle. WHAT! I love the idea of Sophocles existing in the same world as magic and goblins and crap.

Bad Things: Do I sound incredibly suck-uppy if I can’t think of any? There’s a cat on my lap and she’s making it hard to type. It’s a bit short, and Beauty doesn’t quite have the bite of McKinley’s later books (Beauty being her first). The story is pretty quiet and gentle, and the ending, despite some of the drama, ends pretty quietly and gently–there aren’t any towering battles or end-of-the-world magical showdowns. Only a dubious Beauty, a troubled Beast, and a loving family.

Overall:  Sweet! Smart! Beauty is a heroine with punch and sass and I like the heck out of her and her family, and I even like the Beast too. McKinley fleshes the story out and makes it more complex, and I like that too. Go read it if you haven’t! It’ll only take an afternoon or so, and I don’t think you’ll regret it.

MORE More Cheap Books

Good news, everyone! I semi-religiously follow Amazon’s Kindle Daily Deal page because I’m a cheapskate like that, and guess what! For the next six hours (I should have checked this morning, whoops) all three of the books in Patrick Ness’ Chaos Walking trilogy are on sale for $0.99 each! Plus, there’s a free short story prequel to the series, “The New World,” available for I-don’t-know-how-long.

via kallichore.wordpress.com

I’ve been meaning to read this series for ages and ages, and what an opportune time! I can’t convince you that you should read them too, because I haven’t read them myself, but they’ve been talked about all over the place and won awards and blah blah blah, and really–can’t you take a risk, when you’re getting a whole trilogy for $3? Go on, buy ‘em! (Okay, so I’m a terrible influence when it comes to spending money. But c’mon, really, $3 ain’t bad.)

P.S. Anyone who doesn’t have a Kindle, I hope you stuck your fingers in your ears and went “LALALALALA” for the entirety of this post. I’m sure good book deals are coming your way in a variety of other capacities, though, never fret!