intearsaboutrobots

A short post this week, since I was very, very busy this weekend.

What I finished:

+ Behind Frenemy Lines by Zen Cho, which I enjoyed despite the awful name. Whoever is naming the books in this series is doing them a disservice! I really like the cover art though, so kudos to the artist.

The books in this series (two so far, the other being The Friend Zone Experience) are ostensibly romances, but that's not really why I read them. The romances move too fast for my ace ass, just like 90% of romances, but this is a Me Problem. If you don't have the "you barely know each other!" or the "I haven't spent enough time with you to be fully invested in this relationship!" kinds of problems that I have with almost all romances, then I do not think the romance will seem rushed. It's a nice dynamic between two immigrant London lawyers (one from Malaysia, one from Hong Kong) who have a series of unfortunate encounters before ending up working together.

I really like both of the characters, but as I said, I'm not so much here for the romance as I am for the other stuff. In both of these books, the real appeal are a) the family backdrops and b) the moral quandaries. Zen Cho is fantastic at writing complicated family dynamics that feel so very real--suffocating in some cases, loving but fraught in others. Family, no matter how loving, is never easy in her books--it involves responsibilities, expectations, negotiations but it's no less precious for all that. I deeply appreciate this aspect of her writing because it feels very real and immediate, especially in a world that (at times) can encourage us to just break things off with any relationship that involves conflict.

She's also really good at placing her characters in situations where they have to make difficult choices and are torn by dueling loyalties or moral commitments. The choices these characters make matter in a way that's rare in the kind of frothy fiction that these books get shelved alongside. Obviously, I dig anything that involves people making difficult moral choices, so I eat this up.

Honestly, my only real complaint about the book is that I wanted to spend more time with the characters and their problems. I wanted to dig deeper into their family stuff, have them struggle with the moral choices for longer, etc. I personally felt like this book could have used more room to breathe. But if this sounds appealing to you, I recommend it!

Oh, another thing I dig about Zen Cho's contemporary books-- they give me a glimpse of Malaysia, a really interesting multi-ethnic society I know very little about. And Cho doesn't over-explain things--she'll throw words in there that she doesn't take the time to define, so you either figure them out from context or look them up if you really want to know what they mean. I like this a lot! It feels like I'm being treated as an adult and also it feels like she's pushing back against the exoticizing that can happen in books published in Anglophone countries. For the characters, these aspects of their life are normal and not to be commented upon, and the specter of the white reader doesn't intrude through too much handholding by the text. It's great!

What I'm currently reading:

+ I'll be finishing up The Dawn of Everything for the last week of book club. As always, this book makes me want to write a dozen different anthropologically-focused fantasy novels a la Le Guin.

+ I read the lovely forward to Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine and I'm looking forward to reading the book. Shockingly, I've never read anything of his besides Fahrenheit 451.

Yesterday I wasn't feeling well, but I am here today with book thoughts!

What I finished:

+ Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything by Kelly Weill. I listened to the audiobook read by the author. Weill is a journalist who's been digging into Flat Earther culture for a long time. She writes about them with a balance of compassion and even genuine affection for people she knows in that world and rage that the lie of Flat Earth is growing.

If you've read many books about conspiracy theories, most of this is pretty familiar, but I did not know about the roots of modern Flat Eartherism--it has its roots in one jerk in a utopian community in England in the 19th century--who knew? Then it had a few followers for the subsequent decades, but honestly it did not really take off till the 2010s and most of the reason was...YouTube. I'm sure we all know the trajectory of radicalization by now, so I won't go into that. But it's pretty harrowing reading.

This was good but not great! A good thing to listen to while I worked and dragged boxes around and such. The first few chapters about the history of Flat Eartherism were the best part to me--the rest was well written but stuff I mostly already knew. Still, if you have no idea how conspiracy theories are currently taking over the world, this would be a good case study introduction.

+ Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett. I was enjoying this as I read it. I liked the premise, the characters, and the dynamic between the leads. There was some fun worldbuilding stuff here.

But two things did not work for me.

1. The prose. I am much more forgiving of mediocre third person than I am of mediocre first person. If you're going to do first person, I want it to be really good (many of my favorite books are first person!), and this was not. For one thing, the author doesn't seem to have much of a grasp on how an Edwardian woman would actually write. Sometimes she would write these overly florid lines that seemed dated even for an early 20th century setting, and then she'd do things like have one character ask another character if two people were "an item." I found this annoying!

There weren't quite enough footnotes to warrant the footnotes conceit, though I did enjoy the stuff we learned in them (frankly, I think I would have enjoyed a book about Danielle de Grey more than this one!). I guess I'm just spoiled by Jonathan Strange? If you're going to do footnotes DO FOOTNOTES.

However, I could have forgiven this (not everyone can be Susanna Clarke!) if it weren't for....

2. The ending. Spoilers incoming, obviously.

So the book had made a very big deal about the pattern of faeries being learnable through the medium of folk stories. This is great! One of my favorite things about the book! So when we got to the end, where Emily was trapped by a faerie king in a faerie kingdom, and her human friends and her love interest were plotting to free her, and the plot was straightforward but violent, and Emily started going, "This isn't the way to do it! This isn't the way they do it in stories!" I was 10000% with her. I thought sure were were going to get her using what she knew from stories to free herself. The rule of three! A loophole no one else could see! You know, THE STUFF THE BOOK WAS ABOUT.

But no. Her boyfriend just grabbed her hand and they...ran out?

It was such a letdown that it soured my up-to-that-point mostly positive feelings about the book. This was one of those cases where the gun was introduced in the first act and then it did not go off in the last act. Instead, the characters mentioned, "Oh, remember that gun?" and then...nothing happened with the gun!!!

So anyway, I can see why everyone loves the book so much, but I was disappointed by it. I might still try the second book and see if it fixes the problem, but we'll have to see.

+ The Great Trek of the Russian Mennonites to Central Asia, 1880-1884 by Fred Richard Belk. I picked this up as background reading for The White Mosque, and I am here to tell you: you don't need to do the same. This extremely dry and straightforward account does what it says on the tin. I believe it was originally the author's dissertation, and it shows. I am sure that when this work was published, it was a big deal in the field of Mennonite Studies--bringing together accounts of all the various strands of immigration of Mennonites in Russia to various places in Central Asia--but it's definitely not for popular readers.

The history he writes about deserves a retelling as interesting as the original events. To make a long story very, very short, the Mennonites started out in Switzerland and the Low Countries, then moved to Prussia, then moved to Russia, then moved either to the Americas or to Central Asia. Each time they had to move because as Anabaptists they were extreme pacifists who refused to serve in the militaries of a given country. They would go to a certain place and at first the leaders of that place would be like, "It's fine if y'all just want to chill off by yourselves and farm and not have anything to do with the government so long as you pay your taxes," and then, inevitably, either months or years or decades later, someone else would come into power and be like, "No, you must serve in the military or the forest service or something," and then Mennonites would be like, "Well. Guess we've got to move."

So the groups that went to Central Asia went there because a) the Russian empire was trying to make them do either military or national service of some kind and b) there was a charismatic leader who said that Jesus was about to return and he would be coming to the East.

So they packed up their covered wagons and road across steppe and desert and a bunch of them died and the places they were headed to seemed not to be the Edens they hoped they would be--you can guess how the rest of this song goes. Some of the communities ended up staying there for only a few months or years before leaving again (mostly to the US), a few stayed for about fifty years before leaving, and a handful might still be there! It's unclear--this book was published during the Cold War, so communication beyond the Iron Curtain wasn't great. At any rate, there were varying kinds of successes and failures.

This is super interesting stuff! I want to know everything about how their neighbors saw them and how they saw their neighbors! Tell me everything about culture clash! Tell me more about why the millenarian preacher appealed to them!

But alas, this is just an overview of who went where and who did what. There were a few moments--mere sentences, really--of something like personality that emerged in various tales (a mentally ill man saving his friends from brigands, a conversation between a little Mennonite girl and a Chinese girl whose feet are bound, these contraptions they rigged up to carry their kids balanced on either side of a camel, etc.) but there were never enough details to be compelling.

Now, I am judging this thing by unfair standards--this was not written for a popular audience, he wasn't intending to write a rip-roaring account of this era in Mennonite life. But I was still disappointed, and now I'm looking forward to The White Mosque even more than I already was!


What I'm currently reading:

+ 3/4 done with the book club reread of The Dawn of Everything.

+ A chapter into Shamanism: The Timeless Religion by Manvir Singh and liking it so far.

(Btw, between rereading The Dawn of EVerything, reading Proto a couple of weeks ago, always having Ursula K. Le Guin on my mind, and now reading Singh...I am wistfully imagining what my life would have been like if I had become an anthropologist and studied either extinct cultures or current ones with indoor plumbing. I am not cut out for the kind of field research that most anthropologists do.)