Another Green World

Shards of Honor, by Lois McMaster Bujold. Vorkosigan Saga #1. Re-read. I've only read the Vorkosigan books once before, so it's a pleasure to begin them again. Cordelia Naismith is the captain of a small survey ship from Beta Colony, a socially permissive, high-tech society on a harsh world. She finds herself marooned on a beautiful wild planet with Aral Vorkosigan, an honorable aristocrat from Barrayar, a planet that was cut off from humanity for a few centuries that regressed - imagine Tolstoy's Russia with some futuristic technology. They discover they make a good team, but there are all sorts of military and political complications that must be overcome before they can get together (not to mention that eventually Cordelia has to escape from Beta to avoid all the psychiatric treatment they intend to subject her to, as part of her need to recover from non-existent trauma). On to the next one!

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow. Interesting! I'll be writing a blog post about it.

The Benevolent Society of Ill-Mannered Ladies, by Alison Goodman. First in a planned series. Fairly light reading with some very heavy material. It's basically a Regency romance, with two big exceptions - instead of being in her 20s, our narrator (and her fraternal twin sister) are 42, and our narrator is in serious rebellion against the norms of her time for the treatment of women (and people of color). She finds herself establishing a practice of rescuing women who need rescuing, and in the process, the reader learns about the shocking (to us) ways that women were treated in 1812 England.

She and her sister get started by retrieving letters from a blackmailer for a friend, then the friend asks them to take on something much more momentous - the rescue of a woman from the husband who has her imprisoned in their home with the intention of killing her so he can marry someone else whom he hoped would be more fertile. There's nothing illegal about imprisoning one's wife or, apparently, doping her up with opiates, right up to the point of murdering her. (Divorce is very difficult, requiring an act of Parliament, and divorced people aren't allowed to remarry.) After this adventure, the book covers two more, as more people need to be rescued from other circumstances. (The conditions in the third case were particularly horrific, so don't read this if you're faint of heart.) We also learn that the novelist Fanny Burney endured a mastectomy without anaesthesia (ACK) and survived another 30 years.

If you're interested in a Regency romance with a modern social conscience, and you don't mind being shocked by how awfully people can treat each other, then I recommend it. It's not great literature, but I enjoyed the characters.

Killers of a Certain Age, by Deanna Raybourn. For J's book club. Four women who are 60 work for a secret organization that sends assassins after Nazis, arms dealers, and other thoroughly bad people, but they discover that someone is after them. It's fairly light, considering the subject matter, and I was more cynical than the author intended.

The Lions of Al-Rassan, by Guy Gavriel Kay. This is an excellent fantasy novel inspired by the Reconquista of Spain in the 1400s; I've read it twice before. I realized I was reading a variety of Spanish-inspired books, and this one is the best of them all, so I had to read it again too. Curiously, the only thing that makes it a fantasy novel is that it's set in an imaginary land that just happens to be very much like Spain, although the places have different names and sometimes different locations (and there's no Portugal). I suppose the mild psychic powers that one child has could be considered fantasy, but I would also not be the least surprised if a historical novel about actual Spain of that era had something similar. Anyway, the writing is absolutely beautiful. Our two main point-of-view characters are Jehane, a female physician of the Kindath faith (basically Jews, except they worship the world's two moons),and Alvar, a young warrior in the army of King Ramiro, a Jaddite (which are basically Christians, except they worship the sun). The two most prominent characters are Rodrigo Belmonte (inspired by El Cid), the greatest warrior of Ramiro's lands, and his counterpart, Ammar ibn Khairan, a renowned poet and the greatest warrior of Al-Rassan, whose people are Asharite (basically Muslims, except they worship the stars). The internet tells me he was inspired by a real person too: Muhammad ibn Ammar, a poet and vizier in Muslim Spain.

The one thing that bugs me as a reader is that Kay has the habit of alluding to something sad or stressful but then takes page after page before revealing what he's actually talking about - basically, an artificial suspense. Relatedly, at the end of the book he deliberately tricks the reader into believing he's saying that one thing has transpired, when in fact it was its opposite. Since I've read it before, I wasn't tricked. Interesting - I just looked up his age to see if he happened to be very young when he wrote this book; instead he was 40ish, and the interesting bit is that he was born on the same day as my ex-husband.

The American Agent, by Jacqueline Winspear. Maisie Dobbs #15. As the title suggests, this book has American elements, although it's set entirely in London and Kent. We have an American journalist (the victim), her best friend, and the American airmen our victim is interviewing, with the goal of joining Edward R. Murrow's team working to help bring America into the war. We also have Maisie's new American love interest (I guess bringing the other guy back briefly was a romance red-herring). Also we have Joe Kennedy (father of Jack, Bobby, and Ted) - I knew he wasn't a great person but I didn't realize he was quite so bad. Great book. Too bad I have only two more to go before I'm entirely caught up with the series. Oh! The internet tells me the one coming out next year will wrap up the series! Aww.

Today was a typical Monday - bit of work, then visited the library and ate at the Bier Stein with J, D, and DG. Haydn class online in the evening, then I mostly read. Plenty cold tonight - 26°F.

To Die But Once, by Jacqueline Winspear. Maisie Dobbs #14. This one was exciting and emotional - I found myself in tears several times, usually with relief. The story this time overlaps with the dramatic evacuation of Dunkirk, and the children we'd met in the earlier books are now brave teens eager to serve their country, which of course is enormously stressful for their parents.

Today was so cold! I didn't go out until 6 pm, and by then the cars were already covered with frost.

The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time, by Yascha Mounk. Well. I feel pretty ambivalent about this book, and rather frustrated. Mounk is making the case that wokeness, or what we used to call political correctness, has become its own ideology, which is interfering with the values that we place on doing well by all of our people and treating everyone fairly. I firmly agree in the alternative he proposes (the type of political liberalism that's common across most of the political spectrum - our standard beliefs in free speech, individual rights, and an ideal of equality, as something we would like for everyone despite their ancestry, skin color, gender, sexual orientation, etc.). And I also firmly agree that there's something wrong with the examples he gives of different types of wokeness, or what he calls the "identity synthesis" - for example, if a few white children are invited by their Nigerian teacher to wear traditional Nigerian clothing to school for a special event, they obviously should not be disciplined by the school for doing what their teacher asks.

However, his arguments aren't sufficiently nuanced - he doesn't ever express concern that microaggression is a real thing, for example. He also argues against the supposed "identity synthesis" position that white people can never experience empathy fully for people of color, when I would say, duh, none of us can ever experience empathy fully for anyone else, even though there are many cases when we should try, and I would also say that of course there's a value for white people to realize that they get to take many things for granted that many people of color do not. He never really addresses how we should acknowledge the continuing challenges faced by people who are Black, gay, trans, etc. other than that we should work to make things fair for everyone.

Overall, it often felt like he was setting up straw man positions to argue against, and he was able to find examples to illustrate them because it's a big and complicated world, and examples are out there if you look for them. Maybe I'm just being naive, but I don't see this "identity synthesis" ideology as being as fully developed and entrenched as he claims.

Paladin of Souls, by Lois McMaster Bujold. Reread. This is the sequel to The Curse of Chalion, in which poor Ista gets her life back. She's been considered "mad" for quite some time and is stuck in her family's castle, but then she decides she wants to go on a pilgrimage, and her daughter the new queen and Cazaril, from the earlier book, agree. Then she finds herself having to unravel an extremely difficult problem at a remote castle - the gods have called upon her once again. The book won the Hugo for best novel and was acclaimed as one of the few fantasy books featuring a middle-aged woman (Ista is 40). It's beautifully written, with some emotionally powerful scenes and a good ending.

System Collapse, by Martha Wells. Murderbot #7. This one takes place immediately after Network Effect, so immediately that my reaction was, wait, I thought they'd left that planet? Nope, there was more to do there. My favorite three things besides the overall story and the relationships were: 1. There's a video series with the name Cruel Romance Personage - ha!!! 2. A book had been published by Cloud Sun Harbor University Press - a crossover with Raksura??? and 3. Our hero solves the main problem by ( spoiler )!!! I think we're expecting at least two more books in the series, yay!