Another Green World

The Secret to Superhuman Strength, by Alison Bechtel. This graphic memoir details the author's relationship with exercise, over the years, and alcohol and other substances, and work. I enjoyed it very much. She makes great connections to Margaret Fuller and the other Transcendentalists, as well as Samuel Coleridge and William and Dorothy Woodsworth - also Jack Kerouac (for whom she's more sympathetic than I am). Now I'd like to read her two previous memoirs, the famous one about her dad and the later one about her mom.

Isolate, by L.E. Modesitt, Jr. With this book, Modesitt begins a new series. I've read half or more of his many Recluce books, and I very much enjoyed his Imager series, so I figured I'd start reading this new Grand Illusion series. My conclusion is that while overall I liked it, I can't picture many people to whom I would recommend it.

First, it's marketed a bit deceptively - we're told on the book jacket that our main character "is about to find out everything he believes is an illusion." With a book that's ostensibly fantasy, that's rather intriguing, isn't it? What will he do when he learns that "everything he believes is an illusion"? Well, unless there's something bigger than anything we learn in this first book in the series, the only illusion is that politics is not corrupt. Guess what? It often is.

Second, Modesitt's style has often been to choose a character and then go through every day, day by day, of their life during some interesting and pivotal time. That's great when the character is doing something new to them and unfamiliar to the reader, like beginning to learn magic or joining a medieval-type army or traveling in a strange country. Well, in this book, life isn't like that. Our character's days are tedious, and he doesn't seem to have much personality, although the people he's around are fine, but they're usually busy. So... (every freaking day!) he gets up, checks the weather, then glances at the newspaper over breakfast (which is usually two croissants, each with slices of quince paste, but sometimes they run out of that and he has tomato jelly instead).

Then he gets the "steamer" ready - it's a car that runs on kerosene and water - and drives his boss and another staff member to the office. Once he's there, he reads and drafts responses to letters sent in by his boss's constituents (the guy's a politician, in office). Later in the day, he and the other staff member walk their boss to another meeting then go get lunch in the cafeteria (he likes empanadas and a certain brand of lager, while she usually has some type of salad and a glass of wine). Then they accompany their boss to various functions and provide security support. Every few pages, there's an assassination attempt. They handle it. Often they have a nice dinner. Sometimes they shop for clothes. The same thing happens the next day, and the next. Meanwhile, the reader learns quite a lot about various policy issues, tax problems, legal precedents, and so forth, for this fantasy world. Modesitt is gambling that the kind of stuff that makes people's eyes glaze over in the real world will somehow interest them here.

Modesitt is politically a liberal moderate, and in this world, he's aligning himself with the creative folk and working class, who typically join the Craft party. The Commerce party is in power and corrupt, and the Landor party is traditional and usually supports Commerce. An especially interesting aspect of the book is Modesitt's decision to set up a political system in which individual legislators' votes are kept secret, as a means to avoid some of the dangers of populism. The press isn't free either, although there's some latitude. Our good guys have no idea that their system is fairly authoritarian. When we get to see the manifesto of a terrorist group, their tenets are pretty similar to standard democratic ideals in our world. So I'm interested to see how that will play out in future books.

Modesitt and our main characters are all strongly in favor of women's rights, which is a very strong theme in terms of how things play out personally and politically. A few other touches are quite nice, too - respectable women all wear head-scarves; being extremely light-skinned means you're less likely to be economically prosperous.

The fantasy aspect is minimal. Some people are "empaths," some are "susceptibles," and some are "isolates," while most are none of those. Empaths can sense others' emotions, and in some cases they can attack with them or deflect/absorb an attack. Susceptibles are easily controlled by empaths. Isolates can't be read or influenced by empaths. But this doesn't have much to do with anything, except (1) to mark a difference between our main character (an isolate) and his co-worker (an empath), and (2) probably more important from the author's perspective, to stand in for problem situations in our world without giving his world the same problems as our world. For example, he can do things like set up a class of people to be abused by others without reference to factors like skin color (e.g., susceptibles are enslaved in a neighboring country because it's easy to do that, but that's mostly relevant only because it means the resulting textile products are cheap to import), and he can justify setting up a situation where the isolate and the co-worker aren't competing in a particular context because she's legally barred from it, but that's for non-sexist reasons; it's because it would be an inappropriate role for an empath.

I did appreciate that unlike in his other books, where Modesitt often solves problems the easy way by having a particularly evil person become magically assassinated, in this one he's having to work to keep our characters alive, while assassinations are happening all around them.

Overall, though, although I did enjoy the book (moderately) and I'm looking forward to the next one, I'd have to imagine that the vast majority of fantasy readers would rate it somewhere between "boring" and "extremely boring."

Untamed Shore, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. This one was a "noir" thriller rather than fantasy. I liked it overall, but I can see the challenge of writing a book where the point-of-view character is bored with their life because reading about it (in the first few chapters) was pretty boring. Yet it works, because since most of the readers don't ourselves live in a small beachside town in Baja California, things that are boring for the main character are still new to us. Since I've read a lot, ( Mild spoiler ). Moreno-Garcia is a fine writer, though, and it's always a pleasure to read about someone who's smart, as long as they're morally sound, ( Another, more spoilery spoiler ).

Maisie Dobbs, by Jacqueline Winspear. This is the first in a mystery series about a young working class woman whose intelligence found her a patron who supported her education (including Cambridge), although her education was interrupted by years of nursing duty in World War I. Now it's 1929 and she's a private investigator, mostly focused on helping people deal with the aftermath of the war. She herself is still suffering PTSD. The series was recommended by my friend whom I've "met" through our books' proximity in the library's "holds" section. (We haven't met in person but now email each other regularly.) I enjoyed it and will continue with the next one, but I hope as the series progresses that Maisie (and the author) will rely less on two gimmicks - she takes on the posture of someone she's studying to glean insight into their emotional state, and she has random intuitions or hunches that turn out to be accurate, but that don't seem to be grounded in anything beyond the author's convenience.

Finally, I have finished this book.

Out of the Cave: A Natural Philosophy of Mind and Knowing, by Mark L. Johnson and Don M. Tucker. I've known Mark for years; he's a philosopher at our local university. I don't know Don; he's a neuroscientist in my psych department and also has a business in our building at work. He's very busy! In many ways this is an excellent book, explaining the biological basis for things like "concepts" (which I need for the paper I'm writing). I didn't really care for the terminology they used for two of the main brain activities, though, one being more positive and one more negative, although they're both essential and normal human activities. I suppose I'll email them with my thoughts at some point.

The other main thing about my day is that I've been exchanging mystery novel recommendations back and forth between J's mom and my email friend E, which is fun but more time-consuming than I would like. J. has been playing Magic all day, and D. worked today so he could have yesterday off for another performance by his girlfriend's k-pop dance group.

Witchmark, by C.L. Polk. This is the first in a trilogy that's set in a fantasy world similar to Edwardian England. Miles Henley is a psychiatrist at a hospital for veterans of the war with Laneer, and far too many of his patients have a strange brain infection that he can see because he's a "witch." But Miles has a secret beyond being a witch - he's actually Sir Christopher Henley. His father is the chancellor of the realm, and Miles had run away from home to avoid becoming his sister's slave, a backup battery of magical power for her important job as a storm mage. Meanwhile, a murder victim begged for Miles' help as he died, and an extremely handsome man needs Miles' help to solve the murder too. (Okay, it's Edwardian England plus Tolkien elves.) As far as I can tell, this book completed Miles' story; the next will be about his sister Grace, and the third about his friend Robin. I liked it, though it did get pretty "horror" by the end.

My Life in Middlemarch, by Rebecca Mead. This was quite interesting. The author, an English-born woman who moved to New York City and became a journalist with the New Yorker, regularly rereads Middlemarch, and this book is somewhat memoir, somewhat George Eliot biography, while also summarizing the key points and scenes of the book. I see online that the author has a new book coming out in February, as she and her husband and their teenage son moved back to Britain with the election of Donald Trump.

The Beautiful Ones, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. This one was delightfully unlike Mexican Gothic, a novel of manners set in a slightly fantasy world, in a country inspired by 19th century France. What makes it fantasy (besides the world not being our own) is that telekinesis is real but relatively uncommon. Her writing style is vivid, and the characters were well developed.

The premise is that young Nina, born into the aristocracy, is in Loisail (think "fantasy Paris") for the season, as she's just old enough to be courted. She's staying with her cousin Valerie, who is breath-takingly beautiful but not very nice (an understatement). Then she meets a man she's studied in the scientific journals, who's mastered his telekinetic powers and performs with them at the highest level. They hit it off as friends - unfortunately, he's spent the last 10 years dwelling on how Valerie has broken his heart, so he's not exactly emotionally available. Will Nina and the performer, Hector, get together? Does he even deserve her?

Tomb of the Golden Bird, by Elizabeth Peters. This is the last book, in terms of internal chronology, for the Amelia Peabody series of mysteries set in Egypt during the era of European archaeology. I read the rest maybe 3 years ago but didn't want to read this one then, as it seemed too sad for our heroes to be sidelined during the discovery and excavation of Tutankhamun's tomb. I finally got around to it, and it's fine. Maybe I'll reread the others? I can't remember whether I bought them or just got them from the library; if the former, they're boxed up. No urgency, though, as I prefer to sit outside when reading books set in hot climates, and it's nearly autumn.

Mexican Gothic, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. I learned about this from the list of finalists for the World Fantasy Award. Basically, it's a horror story set in the mountains of Mexico, where an English family had once operated a mine. It's about 1950, and our heroine goes to the English family's creepy house to learn what has happened to her cousin, who married into the English family and then sent the heroine's father, her uncle, a disturbing letter begging to be rescued. Somewhere I saw that the book is more or less a cross between Jane Eyre and The Blob. Did I like it? Not sure... It's well written, regardless.