The Drawing of the Three, by Steven King

Book two of the Dark Tower series. Spoilers, mostly veiled.

I like this overall less than the first book, while finding it in some ways more interesting. The first book had a sense of running on rails, even though those rails bring Roland very close to death several times. In this book, almost the first thing he encounters is an unexpected setback whose consequences will be permanent. It makes a real change to the texture of the plot.

That's part of why I liked the start of this book so much and found it so hard to stop reading. Also: I said about the last book that King often abandons logistical detail, and here he really doesn't. This is a hyper-detailed book, which is very effective when I'm in the flow of caring about what's going on. Especially in the first sequence, where Roland makes his way to a door in the world, following information he's been given about his own future, and steps through it into a) an extremely tense situation in which he has to juggle an increasing number of factors his life absolutely depends on, and b) an airplane about to land in New York. Jadis in London, Thor in a pet shop: I really enjoy the blend of tension and comedy this sort of thing generates. Grand and deadly events pause a moment for the discovery of soft drinks...

When I'm not in the flow of what's going on, I find the same level of detail which can build tension doing the opposite. A bunch of things in a bunch of places made that switch for me. First and least: in this book, unlike the last one, King uses a lot of stylistic intensifiers which work on me backwards. An especially dramatic line is given its own whole section, like a bible verse, and I look up from the book and go, "Really, Stephen King?"

Second, there are many small segments presented from inside the heads of a wide range of minor characters. Sometimes I liked these. Mostly I wanted them to get out of the way and stop slowing things down. Roland is a highly intense and competent person, and the major characters he's interacting with in this book are characters who share or have the seeds of sharing those qualities. In the first book Roland was alone, but now he's finds potential equals and friends (and people he may someday have to lose all over again), all of them snarled in a mad quest for the nexus of everything. (This is the main thing I find more interesting about this book than the first book, and it's why I'm still as excited as I am to read the third). In theory I should like the fact that the intensity of their story is chopped up between many background characters having ordinary lives. In practice I like it maybe three times, and it happens a lot more often than that. (Specifically, a crime lord and his goons get a lot of buildup, and they left me not just cold but confused: that was where my initial inability to stop reading ended, and about where I was up to when I wrote 'Why didn't he revise this book if he was revising a book? This would be so much more interesting if there was less of it.') I really liked the sense in the first book that the minor characters were real people seen from outside, partially understood. Seeing this book's equivalent characters from inside makes them feel less real to me, not more.

Third and most majorly, the book has three segments centered around three characters, and I find the third one dull, and not as resonant in his resolution of certain difficulties as the plot would have him be. (Hmm, this may be the worst of both worlds in terms of spoiler-avoidance. And the number of people reading this who have not read the series, yet intend to, may be zero. Ho hum).

Of the other two central characters, I am interested in and like the first one, Eddie, a heroin addict with a lot of underlying steeliness and very little apparent chance of using it to get out of his predicament -- absent the unexpected arrival of a doorway to another world. The second character is very interesting, and I found her uncomfortable to read about. The first major female character, she's black, active in the civil rights movement, and part of her personality is a monstrous racist stereotype, in the sense that on some level she's seen the racism she faces and gone, "That's what you think I am? Alright, have that then, with a cherry on top." I found the large section of the plot in which two white men have to wrangle her monstrous aspect while she insults them in exaggerated dialect wince-inducing, but not simply so. (Various things around the edges of that: she doesn't get nearly as much of an introduction to Roland as Eddie does before she's irrevocably entangled with his world. That actually bothered me in a 'wish he'd changed it' kind of way, the fact that she gets less apparent choice when her life situation might have tended to offer her more; the things around racism bother me in a 'how interestingly bothersome, I will turn it over in my mind a while' kind of way). And if I wasn't reading the next book for any other reason I'd read it to see what she does next. (Although I would be reading it anyway: the oddness of this series makes me fairly certain that whatever I dislike about the third book will be different from what I disliked about this book, which is quite refreshing).

Oh, also, in this book Roland makes choices that involve actively avoiding unnecessary deaths, which was seriously not a feature of his actions in the first book. It's nice to see that I have some grounds for actually approving of him as well as finding him compelling.

There, it's only the sixth of July and I'm already only two books behind.

(I've never actually tracked my reading rate before. Total books read in June, let's see: eight, one nonfiction, three rereads, in a month with quite a lot of available reading time. Would probably have read two or three shortish novels in the time the nonfiction took me. Also I've been nibbling my way up to the end of the book about American suburbs I meant to have finished a month ago).

1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus, by Charles Mann

If I wait as I was planning to and do supplementary reading before writing about this book, I'll probably not write about it at all, certainly not within the same month that classes start up again. Which is a shame, because I know so little else about the pre-Columbian Americas, and while I was looking for this one in the library I walked back and forth along shelves of tempting-looking books on the topic. And this book presents controversies in every chapter, and I like its writing and its argument so much that I want to take its side on every single one of them, which seems like a good provisional position -- but this is one of those times where I want additional branching and recombining lifetimes, so I could get more detail, and see what's come up in the scholarship in the last fourteen years. Given only the one lifetime: bits and pieces, eventually.

This book is, most broadly, attempting to demolish the European scholarly contention that the indigenous peoples of the Americas had no history, that with a few monument-building exceptions they lived lightly on the land in small numbers and had always done so. That belief (which the book names Holmberg's Mistake) stemmed from non-indigenous scholars looking through racist lenses at unfamiliar technologies and techniques, and from thinking that observations made of indigenous cultures in the aftermath of the apocalyptic plagues of first contact with Europe could reasonably be extrapolated back over all their prior existences.

Filter-feeding on the internet, I'd met some of this, but I'd never actually read a book about it, and there's a huge difference in weight, when for my whole life I've also been filter-feeding on the stereotypes. I felt -- and there's room for this to happen again and again, as I read about places, but maybe not often to this extent -- like I did when I went to Montreal last year, sitting in a cafe feeling overwhelmed because somehow I'd planned a trip to Canada without fully understanding that it would involve actually being in Canada. I didn't exactly not know that the pre-Colombian Americas were populated by more cultures than I'd ever heard named, by an order of magnitude; I didn't exactly not know the scale of the tragedy Columbus brought; and it's not as though I know those things with all that much immediacy now. But it's a damn sight more immediacy than it was before.

Many of the smaller questions the book aims at that larger point are up for debate, to varying degrees, but the larger point isn't. Estimates of what percentage of the Amazon Basin was cultivated vary; things which don't seem up for debate are the fact that it was, and the smaller but regrettably influential fact that considerable intelligence over long careers was devoted to proving that in principle it couldn't have been. Here's the argument against the possibility of cultivating the Amazon Basin: rainforest soil will not yield crops reliably, because soil under conditions of constant rainfall turns into a slurry from which nutrients easily escape. Once high-yield crops replace the tree cover which both sheltered the soil and held within itself most of the system's stock of nutrients, the land remains high-yield for two or three years and then goes dead. Therefore the Amazon Basin could never have supported complex cultures or high population densities. This is an example of the kind of argument which pops up again and again in the book, the kind that seems good until you step outside it or unless you never stepped inside it to begin with, in which case you say: cultivate high-yield trees.*

The degree to which nineteenth and twentieth century estimates of indigenous American population levels fell short is debatable; the fact that they did fall short, for bad reasons, isn't. The precise account of when and how indigenous Americans got to the Americas in the first place is still uncertain and complicated (as of 2005 there was no reigning theory), but the previous reigning theory of a single migration over the Bering landbridge during a brief window when the North American ice sheet had a traversable corridor is out: people reached the Americas earlier than that would account for. Everyone's heard of the Inca, but the cultures which preceded them, not so much. (At least, I hadn't).

There's so much in this book. I could go on and write about things like the quipu, the undeciphered writing system of the Inca which was not recognized as such for a long time on account of being made of knotted cords, but instead I will just say 'I recommend this book' and go have lunch.






*And also, in the long term, you change the soil type using the retentive properties of charcoal, where by 'you' in this case I mean 'some of the peoples of the Amazon Basin who have never in fact stopped doing that.'