June Books

She Who Remains was the latest choice for my Women in Translation Book Club. It turned out to be a somewhat controversial book in our discussion. I guess we've had differing opinions on books before, but this seemed more contentious than usual. There were questions about whether it was exploitative, about who has the right to tell this story, about the choice to use the Sworn Virgin terminology, about whether some aspects of the storytelling were lazy. Some of these were questions I had while reading the book. And yet, I also have the question of whether it was worth all this discussion in the first place. 

That said, I liked She Who Remains quite a bit more than I expected to. It's disjointed and in fragments with variable formatting and punctuation. When I saw the text visually - without reading it at all, I thought it was going to be an impenetrable slog. I don't have much tolerance for freeform text. But it turned out not to be a slow read. I got through it quite quickly and found it easy to get into. But while it tackles some very serious subjects, I didn't find that it had a lot of substance. I had nothing much to say about it.

It feels a little funny to include it here, but on Saturday I read -- cover-to-cover -- a book my uncle gave me for Christmas in 1983: White Wash and Pink Feathers, the story of Petros the pelican, a celebrity on Mykonos since his arrival there in 1958 until his death in 1985 (which I only just learned of when I searched up Petros). My uncle went to Mykonos annually as far back as I can remember and often brought me back gifts from there, but this book was probably the first. My uncle went into home hospice care on Saturday and passed away in the early hours of Sunday morning. And so on Saturday morning, I went into my jewelry box and put on a necklace he got me from Mykonos a few years ago and a bracelet he got me from I don't know where some 20 years ago, and I found White Wash and Pink Feathers, which I kept among a small selection of books from my childhood and I sat down and read it. I think my parents probably read me parts of the book -- or maybe even the whole thing; it's not very long -- when I was a kid, but I certainly didn't remember much. It recounts Petros' life on Mykonos from when he was a young pelican (supposedly with his parents and an aunt and uncle? I don't know how much truth there is to this story) who survived a storm that killed most of his family. The book recounts Petros' friendship and fame among humans, but also with some other birds on the island (a stork from Russia, a rooster, a few other pelicans). It's also very much about Mykonos and the changes on the island from the 1950s to the 1980s, with the increase in tourism. I imagine the island of the 2020s looks quite different from the one of 1982, the year of the book's publication - let alone when Petros arrived there in 1958.

On Sunday I started Ann Leckie's latest, Radiant Star, and I finished it this morning before work. I was very excited when I heard she had a new book out. I ordered it from the library a few weeks back. Of course my hold came through while I was out of the country, so I sent it back into circulation (or thought I did) and ordered it again and my second hold showed up just before I returned home. When I went to pick it up at my local branch, both copies were there waiting for me in the hold section, which made me feel a little bad but there wasn't a waitlist anymore so not that bad. I had heard mixed to negative reports from several other folks reading it, so my hopes were tempered, but in the end I really liked it. Someone pointed out that it may be playing on a different genre from some of Leckie's earlier books, and I would certainly say it had a different voice. The story is not told as a first person narrative, but the unknown narrator -- maybe the storyteller more accurately, has a very distinctive tone and interjects quite a lot in a way that I don't recall as a feature of the other books. Radiant Star ends up being mostly about power struggles among several factions with unlikeable leadership, but it also felt like a prequel to stories to come. Perhaps I'll need to reread it if a successor arrives. 

Absence, by Andrew Dana Hudson; All Systems Red, by Martha Wells

The author of Absence is an acquaintance from the internet. I'm not sure I would have heard about it otherwise – I'm not very up on new books these days. There was a book event here in Brooklyn, so I went and I got my copy of the book there. This was the same book event where I picked up The Old Man by the Sea and I started Absence just after finishing that book. (I might have read it first, except that it's a somewhat bulky hardcover and with my travel plans I preferred a slim paperback.) I heard the first two chapters at the event, so it was as if I had already started it. 

Absence is about sort of a slow apocalypse. The sudden and unpredictable disappearance of people over a period of years, resulting in an ever-diminishing global population, and everything that might entail. It was fun to read what Hudson imagined might happen in this circumstance: some positive changes, some ambiguous, some predictably bad outcomes. I was also really impressed with the way the book handled the uncertainty of the conflicting potential truths in the story. I feel like the conclusion could have been very unsatisfying, but it wasn't.

Perhaps because I had heard the author in discussion talking about writing this book, I found myself paying a lot of attention to the structure – at least, more than I usually do. I'm more likely to focus on language when it comes to writing craft, but the structure of Absence really impressed me. It has more than 100 chapters, across several sections – most of which encompass one day. Part of the book includes a woven narrative of past and present, which I think is when I first noticed the structure. The narrative about the past was brought in to give the reader some background on the narrator, and when you got everything you needed to know, it ended – but it was so seamless, I couldn't tell you when it returned to being just the single, present narrative. 

Absence is a fast-paced book. I tore through the latter two-thirds of it in just a couple days. I would have finished it much sooner if not for the fact that, on whim inspired by the same Discord group where I'm connected to the author, I decided to experiment with the novelty of requesting holds from the library.

I'm an enthusiastic supporter of libraries in theory – and an annual donor to both the New York and Brooklyn Public Library, but I rarely actually use the library in practice. Several of my online friends were talking about putting a hold on the new Ann Leckie book, Radiant Star and I thought, I should do that! So I did. And while I was at it, I also put a hold on the first Murderbot book, All Systems Red, because I'd been curious about the books. I enjoyed the TV show and people said the books were fun, and fun was what I was in the mood for. My hold came in within just a couple days and – magic! – I could just walk over to my nearest branch and grab it off the shelf and take it home with me. 

I was a little worried the fact that I had watched the TV show would spoil the book. Maybe it did a little (though also the TV show took a turn that wasn't in the book, or at least as I recall it), but I am a completist by nature and I didn't want to start the series anywhere but book one. I also wanted to see if I enjoyed the book as a reading experience. I did! I'm not going to put the next one on hold jut yet because I have some travel over the next few weeks, but I look forward to reading it when I'm back. Libraries: what a concept!