landingtree

...I mean, some of these were last Wednesday, but still and all.

The Anubis Gates, by Tim Powers

A Coleridge scholar is asked to accompany a tour group back in time to see the poet himself give a lecture. Unfortunately, the mechanism used to do this involves piggybacking on holes punched in the fabric of existence by a group of Egyptian sorcerers, due to whose presence almost everything goes wrong.

I don't know how you'd go about starting to write a book like this. It's a closed time loop story which devotes considerable cleverness to making sure all the events line up logistically. Powers seems to have said, “Right. Where was Byron in the year 1810? That's wrong, I want him somewhere else, so I need to build in a mechanism to move him across country at high speed. What folkloric ideas were at large in London around then? Right, I can explain those in a way that helps me move Byron. And when character A meets character B he shouldn't recognize him, so give B a good reason to have a new hairstyle betweentimes.” But I don't know where he started the outline, since the edges have since been sanded off and now it all sits together depending on itself. Not much of it is likely, but it's all plausible, and watching the logic is half the book's fun. The other half is a mixture of effective grotesqueries – Things In The Dark, an impressively horrible murderer – and ironies – a tangle of megalomaniacal scheming fails to change history by even a whisker – and the Coleridge scholar protagonist running around wildly, hoping that any minute now the plot might stop happening.

I read the book in a strange way: I started chapter one, and then when I next picked up the book thought I'd finished chapter one – and it was a gloomy day, so I just opened the book to a point near the beginning and started reading where my eye fell. Almost at once, I forgot I'd done this. Chapter one contains a huge whack of setup and exposition about Egyptian gods which I'd missed, and as I got closer and closer to the end of the book I was thinking, “Gosh, he isn't giving himself very many pages to deal with the revelations about how this all ties together, I suspect all these people are going to somehow go back in time much further than we've already seen, and all this sorcery perhaps originates as science in the future.” At the end I said, “Wait, what just happened?” and went back to reread the beginning. This seems not totally inappropriate as a way to engage with a time-loop novel, but leaves behind in my head the glorious ghost of a book with even more loops.

I may now have read more s.f. Coleridges than any other poet. (Surely Shakespeare overtakes him? But only a couple of him are coming to mind).

(Note: there are Roma people in this book, and it doesn't call them that. Also sexual assault is there as a threat at several points, and almost everyone is men).



Princess Floralinda and the Forty Flight Tower, by Tamsin Muir.

Princess Floralinda has been imprisoned by a witch. In theory, a prince will rescue her any minute now, but the dragon at the base of the tower ate the first dozen or so, and Floralinda doesn't want to wait.

The particular fairytale-reworking style of this is 'imaginary goblins which give you real septicaemea'. That and the pragmatism of how to fight your way down a tower full of monsters using only the five items the witch has provided (plus an increasing trove of dead monster components) are what make this particular.

Also, here are some queer characters who hate each other, hurt each other, depend on each other, and tend each other's wounds, which they get by fighting large monsters, whose intestines are described: I'm starting to think Tamsin Muir's work might have an emotional throughline. I thought this one got ahead of itself aiming for that Gideon/Harrow dynamic, ( Read more... ) but was overall charming (and actually very restrained, in the way of intestines).




Rights In Transit: Public Transportation and the Right to the City in California's East Bay, by Kafui Ablode Attoh.

I liked this book. My first impression was 'Ooh, this has an argument and a structure and regularly conveys new information!' (Last book club book set a low bar for this one to jump over).*

The argument: that civil rights aren't enough to unify transit activism, and a right to transit, or 'right to the city', is needed as a framework in activism and law, to keep public transport serving the people of its cities instead of other interests – i.e. making things like fancy new airport rail connectors which serve no function the existing buses didn't except to be more marketable to tourists.

The structure: an introduction on the value of legal rights, and a chapter each on four ways East Bay transit has been contested: court cases, transit activism groups, drivers' unions, and alternative independent transit systems.

I was very sold on the details, lots of interesting things here, books in the bibliography I want to go find. I did not leave this book with a strong commitment to the right to the city as an organising framework, but I'm not opposed to it either: the argument kept reaching a level of abstraction which left me saying, 'Maybe?' If that abstraction works on the ground, if it lands with people as a tool of coalition and source of explanatory power, then yes, good, go for it. This is a strongly anti-capitalist book – the right to the city originates with Marxist Henri Lefebvre, and stands against the idea that you could maybe fix transit without having to do any politics.

ambyr, I'd be interested to know what you and the rest of the group thought of this! (I missed the session on account of having forgotten about daylight saving. I like a lot of things about daylight saving, I find the slow encroachment of winter a little melancholy so there's something quite nice about how the dark comes down suddenly, an encouragement to go straight from sitting outside on the porch one evening to cuddling up in blankets with a warm beverage beverages in the dark the next'. However.)



Currently reading: Addiction by Design, about casinos and slot machines. I paused that because it was being interesting but exactly as depressing as it sounds to pick up Code Name Verity, a book which I trust to be good but which turns out to start with its narrator matter-of-factly describing her recent torture and continued imprisonment... so I turned from that to Atul Gawande's Better and am currently reading about surgery during the Iraq war. Which is more cheerful, since it's so far mostly a history of success stories, but I may take a further step toward not reading about any horrible things at all and start Cat Pictures Please. (I know fairly little about this, so we shall see, maybe the first sentence involves prowling ravenous wolves and I'll throw up my hands and read a cookbook).










*Last book club book, Windshield Wilderness, was fine, but did not so much do these things - it had some interesting details about the U.S. Parks Service versus the Forest Service etc., but 'the concept of wilderness is socially constructed and has changed over time' was its main point of analysis, which it restated at the beginning and end of every chapter, and there could have been more.