Books!

I've been reading a little more than usual (or at least I had been until Lost Ark came out fml) and have hit some good things, some bad, things, and some things where I'm not sure where to place them.

Two books I got from the librarything review program, which tends to be a crapshoot. Sometimes there's good stuff that comes through, but most of the books that are put up for grabs are from vanity presses, small presses, self pub stuff, and so on and so forth. I don't believe that such books must necessarily be bad and have enjoyed a number of them, but I do think that major publishers have more robust filters to prevent the really awful stuff from getting through. Often times reading and reviews these books feels more like participating in a writer's workshop than reviewing a finished book.

The first book I read for the purpose of a review was called Madison's Cave, and stylized itself as an experimental work of epistolary fiction. Basically it was Thomas Jefferson kinda sorta writing letters to James Madison (who has nothing to do with the cave of the same name). These letters are extremely boring. Jefferson just goes on and on and on about what feels like very little. He's not even trying to make an argument or anything, he's just like, let me write a few thousand words about my gravestone in the most opaque and difficult language possible. Is this true to Jefferson's actual approach to writing? Maybe? Does that make it enjoyable? Not at all. I didn't finish. And I read 19th century material with some regularity so it's not like I am a stranger to tedium.

The second book I got from the program was called Anax, and the less said about this one the better. It was just... not ready for publication. There were typos and basic grammatical mistakes galore, and the plot was actively making me angry because it was so dumb. But this is also a book that I think came out of a vanity publisher and I have expelled my bile about it in my review on librarything so I'm not going to rehash the same shit here. Suffice it to say that if you promise an interesting mystery on page one, and then on the final page are still swearing that that there's something interesting that may be revealed... next book, you've wasted everyone's time. I can feel the ranting mood coming on again so I'm moving on.

The next book I read was a SIGNIFICANT jump in quality. I grabbed it from the new acquisitions shelf in the library. It was called When we Cease to Understand the World and was, to put it simply, a fictionalized account of certain scientific breakthroughs, mostly regarding physics. I had some issues with it, mostly how it slowly folds more and more fiction into what starts out as almost completely factual narrative. There's a review in the New Yorker that reflected my thinking on it pretty well so I don't feel the need to elaborate too much.  Because it sort of tells you that it's lying (if you read the back matter first like I always do) I found it difficult to get completely absorbed because I was in a state of constant skepticism. I also found some of the fictional embellishments to be the weaker parts of the book, particularly when the author spends a bunch of time making Schrodinger inappropriately fixated on a teenage girl to the point where he molests her in her sleep. Something about taking a real person and describing them that way feels inappropriate, especially when so much of the book is sitting in a "true or not" gray area. Did Schrodinger actually sexually assault someone? This isn't a fact I want to be unsure about.

The other thing I was a little wary of was the core premise of the book, which sort of describes all of these big thinkers as a little crazy (which is semi true as a lot of their behavior I looked up and yeah, little crazy) but also people who after being exposed to a deeper mathematical truth seem to decide that it's just too dangerous and they're done with math, or at least disturbed by what they've discovered. The book sets the scene in the first chapter by describing a lot of the scientific advancements that the Nazis exploited to murder millions of people, and makes reference to then atom bomb and so on, and goes on to discuss the sacrifices we might make to know, or whether knowing is a good thing after all. I wasn't super comfortable with this question, as someone who very firmly does want to know, and who thinks that turning from what's true doesn't stop it from being dangerous, if it's dangerous. And in particular because the author is putting these feelings into the mouths of historical scientists, I wasn't sure how much I liked people being mouthpieces for an attitude I couldn't tell if they actually held.

But I still really liked the book because even where I disagree with it, and even if I am not entirely sold on the approach, it was challenging and narratively engaging. The first half in particular I enjoyed a lot. The "novella" section with Schrodinger and Heisenberg started to show some weaknesses, but the final chapter stuck the landing. I've already recommended it to a friend who's a fellow Calvino fan because it has a similar feel at times. It's a book I wanted to talk about, which is a nice change from the two that came before it.

After that I picked up Piranesi, which is the second novel of Suzanna Clarke's. I loved Johnathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. In fact it's probably my favorite fantasy book of all time. So I was excited to read this one and wasn't disappointed. It generates the same atmosphere, and has the same approach to fantasy that I loved so much in the first book. Magic is wonderful, terrifying, and mysterious. I generally prefer the "soft magic" as Sanderson puts it, where the story is not about mastering the system but surviving it, and this feels like Clarke's specialty.

The tension is centered on Piranesi slowly beginning to realize something we as readers understand quite quickly, and so the book reads something like a mystery story where one is anticipating just how much will be revealed and whether or not certain people will get away with it. This book is a lot shorter than Strange and Norrell so the elaborate connections between characters is not quite there, but even with more limited space and a more focused story they're all still intriguing. Piranesi, the main character is a great protagonist. He's an innocent and trusting person surrounded by deceitful, terrible people. The supporting cast is full of people who are significantly more unpleasant than those in Strange in Norrell, but they're interesting in the way reading a wiki about a real world cult can be interesting.

My only gripe, and it is a pretty big gripe, is that one of the characters' homosexuality is explicitly associated with a distasteful, transgressive personality that involves things like smelling like shit and being a murderer. It felt so strongly like a quintessential queer villain trope that it dampened my enthusiasm for the book considerably. I kinda like the queer villain trope in certain contexts, but this one rubbed me the wrong way. I'm bummed about it, actually, cause I want to rec the book unequivocally but I just can't with this bit stuck in my craw.

That's not enough for me to dislike the book entirely though. I just have to put that caveat in, unfortunately.