Reading Roundup - April 2017

2017 Reading Challenge

I dropped a book this time round. April was a very slow month for some reason (mostly Easter, I think,) and I only got through one of my challenge books (which is why I've swapped out 'Big French Novels' for 'The Luke Cage Syllabus' in August.) That book was Irvine Welsh's unrelenting Trainspotting, a brutal and unromantic slice of life from the drug-addled youth of Leith. On the other hand, I have made a decent stab at The Rose That Grew From Concrete, and the next month's books include the very short Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress.

I kicked off this month with Ancillary Sword, the sequel to Ancillary Justice and the second book of the Imperial Radch trilogy. Having precipitated the militarisation of the schism in the manifold clones of Anaander Mianaai(1), the Lord of the Radch, the rogue ancillary Breq is assigned as captain of a Mercy - smallest of the Imperial Fleet's ship classes - and to command the defence of a world that helps to fuel the Radch's inexhaustible thirst for tea.

Without her overwhelming thirst for revenge, Breq has more time to muse on the psychological impact of her losses in this novel, leading to a slower narrative with less focus on action and more on character. In addition to herself, Breq struggles to integrate Seivarden into the modern fleet, and to help a copy of Anaander Mianaai to become her own person after having her ancillary implants removed. As she bonds with the common folk of the Radch and butts heads with the great and the good, Breq's character emerges as, to paraphrase another work, a great sympathiser for cripples, bastards and broken things.

Adjoa Andoh once more provides a strong reading, and if not much happens in comparison to Ancillary Justice, the novel is never slow. I've got a bit of a backlog to work through, but Ancillary Mercy is definitely on my list for reading in the near future.

Next up is the second book in Rick Riordan's Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard series, as dead boy walking Magnus and Muslim Valkyrie Sam attempt to track down the missing Mjollnir on behalf of it dim-witted owner. Their best option appears to be to try to follow a dangerous ploy set out by Sam's father Loki halfway, then pull a fast one at the last minute, but can you truly pull a fast one on the God of Mischief? And can their new ally be trusted?

I was going to open by saying that Magnus Chase and the Hammer of Thor has little in common with Ancillary Sword, but that's actually not true. The Imperial Radch trilogy's calling card is its almost universal use of feminine pronouns to represent a virtually genderless society, while The Hammer of Thor introduces Alex Fierro, transgender and gender fluid child of Loki, whose greatest fear on arriving in Asgard is that the eternal form of an Einherji would mean sticking in one gender. Embracing the power of Loki in order to own it, Alex is not only an unusual example of a heroic non-binary character... well, anywhere, but especially in mainstream children's adventure fiction(2), but possibly - if it goes the way it's looking - perhaps the first children's adventure transgender love interest.

Kieran Culkin provides a far superior voice for the reading of this volume, as compared to The Sword of Summer's Christopher Guetig, whose performance made Magnus's disaffected narrative voice so unsymapthetic that it put my partner - as great a fan of Riordan's work and listener of audiobooks as I am - off the story altogether until she was able to get a paper copy.

Square cover art = audio only!

Tipped of by my industry contacts(3), I was quick to snap up the free, audio-exclusive short story A Rare Book of Cunning Device, by Ben Aaronovich. It's only thirty minutes long, which is barely a short-story in real terms, but thirty minutes in the world of Peter Grant and the Folly is worth thirty hours of willfully nonprogressive neo-Roman space nazi Scientologists(4). Also, free! And read, as always, by Kobna Holbrook-Smith.

At some point in the Rivers of London chronology, Peter Grant is called in to investigate what seems to be a haunting among the stacks and automated collection systems of the new British Library, the only problem being that it is much too new for ghosts. On the other hand, some of the books are old... Could be a job for Britain's only apprentice magician (assuming an increasingly narrow interpretation of 'apprentice magician',) assuming he can do the business without melting the tech in the book collecting system. The short story also introduces us to a no-nonsense lady librarian who knew Peter's mother, so I can't believe she's going to prove to have been a one-shot.

I don't usually go through the books that I read with my daughter, but then again there are a lot of them. At some point I ought to do a post devoted to some of them, like the alternative princess stories in Don't Kiss the Frog, Princess Daisy and the Dragon and the Nincompoop(5) Knights and The Princess Who Saved Herself, or the bucolic life lessons of Mathias Feldhaus' Frog books. 

For now, however, we're just going to look briefly at Cinnamon, a short story by Neil Gaiman released in a new edition, illustrated by American artist and author Divya Srinivasan. I picked this up on impulse at my FLBS and for two days Arya refused to let me read it, because it was new and uncertain. Then she agreed, if she could have 'The Clumsy Princess' and The Very Hungry Caterpillar as well, and since then she's asked that the story of a blind princess and the man-eating tiger who sets out to teach her to speak be read to her every night. I call that a success.

(1) Advantages of audiobooks: I would never have pegged the pronunciation of this as An-ah-ander Mee-ah'nee-eye.

(2) Up to younger teen target audience, I mean. Obviously in YA pretty much anything goes, most likely because at that point you're selling purely to the reader and not their parents.

(3) I follow Ben Aaronovich's blog, okay.

(4) More on this when and if I finish the book.

(5) "Does that mean that they poop?" - Arya-Rose, age 4.

2017 Challenge - The Rose That Grew From Concrete

Poetry Bonus 1

The Rose That Grew From Concrete, by Tupac Shakur

Reason for Reading: This challenge is about broadening my perspective, and the world of hip hop is a mystery to me. Now, this is a collection of poetry and not a novel, so I didn't read it through.

I don't know much about Tupac's life or music. Honestly, I could stand to do a similar challenge for music, because I barely know any music outside of that which utterly pervades western culture. I know only that he was a rapper who came up from nothing and wrote about hardship and violence, and who was killed in a probably gang-related shooting, while still fighting a sexual assault conviction on appeal(1). The latter is especially  noteworthy given his preoccupations in verse with love, rather than lust, friendship and respect. A good proportion of the poems in the collection are dedicated to a specific individual, as a token of friendship or deeper affection. Those later in the book have a darker tone, as those are mostly the ones that talk about his own death, many written months or weeks before he was shot. Even these, however, are introspective and concern his fears or his hopes more than dwelling on the possibility of violence.

There is a simplicity to Tupac's verse. This is not a man steeped in years of exposure to the classics and certainly not someone who obsesses over every single word, which by some lights probably makes him a poor poet, but there's a clarity and a power in that simplicity, rather than naivety. The book is composed with facing pages carrying a printed version of a poem and the original, written in an exercise book in a mix of capitals and lower case print, with crossings out and corrections still in place and never a word if a number would do.

Normally I would hate that, but that's because normally retaining such shorthand would be a sign of sloppy editing, but there is no editing here. These aren't verses carefully curated for publication, but thoughts and feelings preserved in the moment. It's an extraordinary glimpse into a man who was patently more complex than just another dead gangsta; far too complex for me to offer any substantial analysis based on a few readings.

(1) I don't have an opinion on whether he did it or not. He was convicted, but I find it as easy to believe that a black rapper could be wrongly convicted of such a crime as I do that a white businessman could get away with it.

2017 Challenge - Trainspotting

Book 6 (March, Mad People)

Trainspotting, by Irvine Welsh (read by Tam Dean Lin)

Reason for Reading: Set primarily in Leith before its late-80s revival, Trainspotting is as alien to me as anything I've yet approached, and the madness which marks it for March reading (and, yes, I actually read it in late April,) relates to heroin addiction, which is also something alien to me.

The striking thing about comparing novels that have achieved classic status to those which have not and likely will not is the language. Your run of the mill fantasy epics, milporn SF and airport potboilers, even the best of them, use language as a simple medium, a means to convey meaning from the author to the reader, and yes, that's what language is, but... But a great book doesn't just do that; a great book contains language that both conveys meaning and is aesthetically striking in its own right, and this is true no less of the profanity laden, idomatic invective of Trainspotting than of the lyrical flow of One Hundred Years of Solitude. The novel contains more uses of the c-word than any, probably every other book I've ever read, but it is never gratuitous, even when it is. If that makes any sense.

Trainspotting is an angry, hard-to-like book about angry, hard-to-like people being angry and hard to like. It's tough going, but it's supposed to be, and it is the triumph of the novel that even if you don't like its various protagonists, you end up kind of getting them. The shifting narrative voice provides multiple perspectives on each character: Of particular note is the tension between self-styled idealist Renton and self-styled man of the world Sick Boy, and the juxtaposition between Spud's rambling speech and more coherent narrative voice. Franco Begbie is a monster for the ages, and Renton's musings on the group's communal creation of the legend of Begbie the hard man, the stand up mate, is one of the most interesting threads of the book.

This is not a book for the faint-hearted, and it's not a book to be approached casually, especially by those not familiar with the Scots - and specifically Leith - vernacular. I went with an audio book, which probably helped, but it still had to go off when I was tired (and of course could not be listened to in bed for fear that my daughter would wake up, wonder in and start calling people doss c&*$s.) Leith-born actor and professional reader of Irvine Welsh novels Tam Dean Burn runs around every conceivable variation of the Leith accent in the course of the book, infecting the listener's inner monologue with the best variation it can manage - in my case, not very good - and an urge to call people radge bastards. That alone speaks to the power of language.

Did I like it? No, but then it's not a book that wants to be liked. It's a very good book, possibly a great book, but you wouldn't want to hang out with it all the time.