Helpless!

Okay, so breaking from the usual posts here (and breaking my broadcast silence, sorry!  Life!), I gotta talk about this weekend where my awesome friend took me to Chicago to finally see Hamilton.

Before I start my review, h/t to The Worst Bestsellers for helping to fuel my obsession, and serving as an outlet for these sorts of things.

We didn't get to sit together because seats next to each other would have required actual human sacrifices.

I told my friend, "Yes, I'm gonna be that bitch who takes a picture of the marquee.  Because HELL YES."

Men don’t get to complain about clothes

Cross-posting from my Tumblr, since some people can't see it there.

Apparently I wasn’t done ranting about this.  I’ll do my best to highlight all the things that don’t apply to women’s clothes in this scenario.

Hey, a threefer!

Finally finished The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000) and What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew: From Fox Hunting to Whist—the Facts of Daily Life in 19th-Century England (1993).  Also Howl's Moving Castle (1986).  For once all three are on my actual reading list, huzzah!  So let's break it down.

Kavalier and Clay is a fictionalized version of the Simon and Schuster story, essentially:  two Jewish comic artists in New York create a popular superhero and get screwed out of their rights by inexperience and necessity.  Add into that the backdrop of losing your entire family in the concentration camps, fighting Nazis (sort of), exploring your sexuality, the formation of the comics code and all the nonsense that goes with it, and that's what you're in for.  I enjoyed this thoroughly, and it blends fiction and fact beautifully, to the point where there were characters I had to double check to make sure I hadn't just missed them in the boom of the 1930s New York scene.  I listened to this on audiobook, and David Colacci does an excellent job giving each character a distinct voice.

So that book was published in 2000.  I would have been 18/19 then, just graduating high school.  I had no direction to my life apart from, "college, I guess?"  My first pick hadn't taken me because as a wee lass I was a nihilist (and undiagnosed depressive), convinced that something disastrous would happen, and none of my dreams would ever come true.  I was living in my hometown, which did not help my mental health or future outlook, dating my high school boyfriend (a relationship doomed to fail), and not at all interested in the superhero genre.  Up until that point, the only comics I ever bought were from Slave Labor Graphics.  I would not have predicted that fifteen years or so into the future that I would be buying tights and capes comics regularly, seeing superhero movies in theaters (I seem to recall telling my husband that if you'd told me ten years previous that I'd be hyped to see a Thor movie, I would punch you in the face), or editing a series of novels and short stories in a superhero universe.

Keeping in fiction, let's touch on Howl (which I have been perennially unable to spell correctly, for no reason I can think of.  I keep misplacing the apostrophe).  1986 puts me at 5 years old, and I don't remember much about being that small.  I do know I liked fairy tales (and later portal fantasies, which I was surprised to find this was), and Sophie delights me just as much now as she would have when I was little.  I adore the fact that she goes from a quiet nonentity to grouchy old busybody immediately upon being turned into an elderly woman.  And no, in spite of the fact that I was deep into anime for a time, I haven't yet seen the Miyazaki version of the story.  It is waiting for me when I get home.

Switching gears completely, how about an encyclopedia about Victorian England?  I have a fair amount of knowledge on this era (by no means comprehensive), but you really don't know how much you don't KNOW until you read something like this.  Just the different carriage types are enough to make you dizzy.  And I honestly don't know how anyone in the Church of England hierarchy keeps anyone straight.  The book comes with a glossary at the back which ranges from the obvious, "I don't know what I expected," definitions

to, "No, a little more explanation, please."

All in all, a good starting place if you're looking for some verisimilitude in your Victorian setting, but also not entirely exhaustive.

Dragging, flagging

Hit a rut hereabouts with my reading goals, hence the sparse nature of my posting here lately.  I recently got a second job, which leaves me very little free time for anything, including sleeping, socializing, or living.  Your intrepid author is in search of a solution to this problem, so hopefully this is a temporary situation.

I've been stuck at the 3/4 mark of the audiobook of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which is delightful, and I'm eager to finish up not only for the sake of my reading challenge but for my own edification.  The characters are complex, the original characters woven into history so well that I had to double check whether I had misremembered events or people from the 40s. 

I've also started reading Howl's Moving Castle, but work has been hectic enough that I'm barely into it, not really enough to make a judgement call.

And I'm in the middle of a re-read of Tipping the Velvet.  I tend to save re-reads for falling asleep to, so they go much faster.  Most of my re-reads are on audio, and the narrator for Sarah Waters' books is thoroughly delightful (Juanita McMahon, for the curious).  As always I recommend Sarah Waters unequivocally; her prose is phenomenal.

One of my main problems, in addition to lacking free time, is that I listen to most of my books nowadays (given most of my other activities that NEED to be done require my hands and eyes) and I subscribe to over a dozen podcasts that I can't bring myself to prune.

Words, words, words

Today's selection is from 2008:  Sarah Vowell's The Wordy Shipmates.  So where was I ten years ago?  In much the same place that I am now, depressingly.  I was working a job that didn't pay me enough to keep me alive (check), hanging out in the city I graduated from (check), trying to find something to keep body and soul together (aaaaand check).  Well, that puts things into perspective.

I had at that point never heard of Sarah Vowell.  I didn't read a lot of nonfiction at the time, was just starting to broaden my reading horizons.  Since then I have read Assassination Vacation and Lafayette in the Somewhat United States due to suggestions by Stuff You Missed In History Class and later Get Booked though the specific episodes escape me. 

The Wordy Shipmates is a brief exploration of the Massachusetts Bay Colony focusing mainly on John Winthrop, Roger Williams, and Anne Hutchinson.  I readily admit that I had no familiarity with these figures except a hazy memory of Anne Hutchinson helping to found Rhode Island based on a premise of religious freedom.  American history has never been my particular area of interest or expertise, and aside from middle and high school history classes long forgotten, I haven't delved much into the subject.  But then Hamilton happened, and I decided I needed more American history under my hat.

Vowell seems to have an affection for John Winthrop in particular, and given the bulk of the first-hand narratives come from his journals, that's understandable.  It's hard to read the minutiae of a life and not become at least a little sympathetic.  That said, this is still a man living in the 1600s, in a Puritan country, if not of the Puritan faith (she is at pains to point out that the Massachusetts Bay colonists aren't Separatists), so I had little enough in common to share as far as experiences or beliefs.

The main bugbear I have here is Calvinism.  Good lord, if there were ever a more hopeless, insidious philosophy more widely spread and destructive, I've yet to become acquainted with it.  How on earth would you even get up in the morning if you believed that whatever you did, you were either damned or saved from the start?  What would be the point?  Where would you ever find joy or peace?  That level of perceived certainty would (and did) drive people mad.

Overall, a quick read, and a light touch on a period in history I didn't know much about.  Enough toothy bits to spark interest in further more in-depth reading.  I will say my used copy was merrily defaced throughout by the previous owner who has 1-dreadful handwriting and 2-a dim view of feminism and politics, and yet picked up this book.  Wherever you are sir (for it must be a sir), I wish you happiness in your narrow view, and I wish you wouldn't write in pen.  I will undoubtedly spend a fortune trying to get this back into a readable shape.

Oh, and if you're a fan of audiobooks (which I certainly am), Sarah Vowell's books are read predominantly by the author, with various bits voiced by a troupe of more or less well-known guest narrators (Patton Oswalt did several bits in Lafayette in the Somewhat United States).

Rebirth, and a review

In an attempt to both line my portfolio with content, and to hold myself accountable for my 2018 homemade reading challenge, I've decided to repurpose this old clunker to a place to host my nonfiction writing.

Over the last couple years I've tried a few curated reading challenges such as PopSugar's or BookRiot, and while they are by and large excellent ways to bust out of your reading rut, I have yet to complete any of them.  So this year I just picked a book published in every year I've been alive.  My qualifications were precise:  these had to be books I could borrow from a library or digital site, or books that I already owned, to try and thin my ever-growing pile of books to read.  I'm not reading them in order, and some years didn't have anything I was interested in that I hadn't already read, so some of these will be re-reads.  My goal was just to have a nice, low-stress goal that I could hammer out and generate some reviews.

My first selection was from the year I was born:  1981's The Door in the Hedge, by Robin McKinley.  I hadn't read any of her works before, but she'd been recommended a number of times before, and frankly I'm shocked I'd managed to avoid her this long.  This collection is four short stories that are either retellings of fairy tales or else original works in that style; The Stolen Princess, The Princess and the Frog, The Hunting of the Hind, and The Twelve Dancing Princesses.

As you might guess, these stories are princess-heavy, which is fine for fairy tales.  McKinley goes out of her way to make her princesses beautiful, but not helpless, and gives them agency and melancholy.  That said, they're all similar to the point of being indistinguishable from the others.  This is particularly evident in the final tale of the Twelve Dancing Princesses, where none of the characters are given a name, and the titular princesses rarely if ever speak.  There's just not a lot to catch hold of here, no real edges, no sense of danger in spite of evil magic being a major factor in 3 of these stories.  People fall in love at first sight, and as they have very little in the way of personality, they must live happily ever after because they have no personality flaws to rub each other the wrong way.

In that sense, they're true to their fairy tale roots; what real difference is there between Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella?  Between Snow White or Beauty?  All are kind and beautiful at at the mercy of forces beyond their control.  Before the Disney era, you could easily have imagined them all with the same face, and not been incorrect.  Likewise their princes are so similar and tepid that they scarcely ever get a name.  The brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson are chock-full of these inoffensive paper-doll characters that glide off together into the sunset of bland and generic happiness.

I don't know if this collection is a fair starting point to the works of McKinley; I'm to understand the majority of her work is in novels rather than short stories.  Whether these are representative of her style of prose or whether her original characters get more defining characteristics, I can't say.  I'm not necessarily turned off from reading anything further of hers, but I can say I was underwhelmed.  For more colorful fairy tale reimaginings I can gladly recommend the Enchanted Forest Chronicles by Patricia C. Wrede, which at least attempts to subvert the cookie-cutter templates of western fairy tales. 

To buy The Door in the Hedge, click here.