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Really interesting article on how playing violent video games can be good for women’s spatial skills – and thus how what looks biological may be cultural. http://www.economist.com/science/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=9762790
Terry Pratchett, Making Money: Moist von Lipwig, the Jewish-analogue head of the post office in Ankh-Morpork, is tasked by Vetinari with fixing the outdated banking system, whose dead hand on the money supply is choking the city’s growth. Moist wants none of it, but Vetinari has a way of making things happen. Complications ensue. This is a perfectly competent but uninspired entry in the history of the city – perhaps Pratchett is too sympathetic to the main villain, who ends up a rather pathetic figure; despite his demonstrated deadliness, one never gets the sense that he’s any threat to Vetinari and the stakes of the potential conflict between Moist and Vetinari are only gestured at until the end. Moist may end up like Carrot, someone who is so perfected in role that he can’t be allowed to interact with Vetinari lest matters change forever in Ankh-Morpork, which Pratchett seems unwilling to allow.
John Steakley, Vampire$: Wow, a vampire book I found unfinishable. I would have sworn it couldn’t be done. Published in 1990, the book takes the modern vampire tale, in which the sexual aspects are explicit, and redoes it with a heaping helping of male fear and backlash. I stopped after a vampire’s female victim retold her degradation and shaming in lascivious detail to a group of male hunters (plus earthy mother-figure who never tries to cramp her boys’ hard-drinking and –fucking style), constantly emphasizing how awful it was to be truly aroused by what the vampire was doing and how shaming it was to be the person to whom this had happened and to be telling her story in such detail, though of course the level of detail was entirely voluntary on her part.
A nastier brew of victim-blaming and degradation-relishing I have rarely seen, made worse by the thin glass of disavowal into which it was decanted. Okay, that metaphor got away from me, but I wanted a metaphor after the brutal assault of the prose, both in content and style; Steakley uses lots of small words and short sentences – Ernest Hemingway has much to answer for -- and names his male characters’ feelings without actually describing them. So we get flat male angst – the life of a vampire hunter is short and painful, woe, we are misunderstood – combined with hypocritical fetishization of sexual abuse. I’d say use the book for kindling, but you might inhale some particles and then bits would end up in your brain.
Andre Norton & A.C. Crispin, Songsmith: This Witch World YA involves a young woman on a quest to heal her mind-wounded father, a quest that leads her to join forces with another young woman intent on escaping her impressment into the witches’ coterie – though that story ends quickly – and then with a young man of mysterious past and dangerous horse. The man-hating witches really bothered me; their misandry seemed unmotivated, especially since their belief that getting married (that is, losing one’s virginity) terminated one’s power was shown to be false from the outset. But if I’d read the other Witch World novels more recently I might have a different context.
Susannah Clarke, The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories: I shouldn’t have listened to this as an audiobook. Some of the pleasure of Clarke’s precise language was lost. Plus, footnotes sound weird; this book did them by having a different narrator read them out. Like Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, the stories in this book concern an 18th-century-ish England in which the borders with fairy have not yet closed, for good and ill. The best story is the title one, in which Jonathan Strange plays a supporting role as three young women friends experiment with magic for their own benefit and perhaps that of others. Though their actions are worthy of condemnation, it’s hard not to sympathize with their impulses, given the behavioral (and financial) constraints under which they operated. Ultimately, Clarke’s ability to recreate a charming version of English history is better served in a longer form.
Terry Pratchett, Making Money: Moist von Lipwig, the Jewish-analogue head of the post office in Ankh-Morpork, is tasked by Vetinari with fixing the outdated banking system, whose dead hand on the money supply is choking the city’s growth. Moist wants none of it, but Vetinari has a way of making things happen. Complications ensue. This is a perfectly competent but uninspired entry in the history of the city – perhaps Pratchett is too sympathetic to the main villain, who ends up a rather pathetic figure; despite his demonstrated deadliness, one never gets the sense that he’s any threat to Vetinari and the stakes of the potential conflict between Moist and Vetinari are only gestured at until the end. Moist may end up like Carrot, someone who is so perfected in role that he can’t be allowed to interact with Vetinari lest matters change forever in Ankh-Morpork, which Pratchett seems unwilling to allow.
John Steakley, Vampire$: Wow, a vampire book I found unfinishable. I would have sworn it couldn’t be done. Published in 1990, the book takes the modern vampire tale, in which the sexual aspects are explicit, and redoes it with a heaping helping of male fear and backlash. I stopped after a vampire’s female victim retold her degradation and shaming in lascivious detail to a group of male hunters (plus earthy mother-figure who never tries to cramp her boys’ hard-drinking and –fucking style), constantly emphasizing how awful it was to be truly aroused by what the vampire was doing and how shaming it was to be the person to whom this had happened and to be telling her story in such detail, though of course the level of detail was entirely voluntary on her part.
A nastier brew of victim-blaming and degradation-relishing I have rarely seen, made worse by the thin glass of disavowal into which it was decanted. Okay, that metaphor got away from me, but I wanted a metaphor after the brutal assault of the prose, both in content and style; Steakley uses lots of small words and short sentences – Ernest Hemingway has much to answer for -- and names his male characters’ feelings without actually describing them. So we get flat male angst – the life of a vampire hunter is short and painful, woe, we are misunderstood – combined with hypocritical fetishization of sexual abuse. I’d say use the book for kindling, but you might inhale some particles and then bits would end up in your brain.
Andre Norton & A.C. Crispin, Songsmith: This Witch World YA involves a young woman on a quest to heal her mind-wounded father, a quest that leads her to join forces with another young woman intent on escaping her impressment into the witches’ coterie – though that story ends quickly – and then with a young man of mysterious past and dangerous horse. The man-hating witches really bothered me; their misandry seemed unmotivated, especially since their belief that getting married (that is, losing one’s virginity) terminated one’s power was shown to be false from the outset. But if I’d read the other Witch World novels more recently I might have a different context.
Susannah Clarke, The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories: I shouldn’t have listened to this as an audiobook. Some of the pleasure of Clarke’s precise language was lost. Plus, footnotes sound weird; this book did them by having a different narrator read them out. Like Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, the stories in this book concern an 18th-century-ish England in which the borders with fairy have not yet closed, for good and ill. The best story is the title one, in which Jonathan Strange plays a supporting role as three young women friends experiment with magic for their own benefit and perhaps that of others. Though their actions are worthy of condemnation, it’s hard not to sympathize with their impulses, given the behavioral (and financial) constraints under which they operated. Ultimately, Clarke’s ability to recreate a charming version of English history is better served in a longer form.
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making money
Not as good as many of his others I agree.
spike
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