Month: May 2015

Books of 2015, #20: Radio On: A Listener’s Diary, Sarah Vowell

The Wordy Shipmates was a book I enjoyed immensely, as was Assassination Vacation. The piece that Sarah Vowell did on This American Life regarding the “victory lap” Lafayette’s did of the US 50 years after the revolution—that is presumably the basis for her new book coming out in October—moved me to tears. She’s always a fun guest on The Daily Show.

Radio On was a bit of a slog, though not without points of interest.

I think it’s because so much of it just sounded…irritable. Annoyed. Even when the annoyance is understandable, it doesn’t necessarily make for fun reading—and I don’t really care enough about radio to necessarily even find her annoyance understandable, so at times it just grates.

Still, this book is an interesting time capsule for a number of reasons.

I guess the most significant is that towards the end, Sarah is there around the creation of This American Life.

But long before that—happening before the start of the book, and hovering over it like, well, a ghost—is the suicide of Kurt Cobain the year before; an event that I also felt pretty acutely. I can remember quite clearly staying up all night watching MTV for news about it. It was, coincidentally, the first time I saw the video for Nine Inch Nails’ Closer, because MTV would even only show the blurred-out version late, late at night.

The other thread of events that run through the whole book that I remember clearly is the fallout from the midterm elections in 1994—Newt Gingrich and the “Contract for America”, and the government shutdown, etc. It was annoying to see the same sort of crap play out last year.

Plenty of other people and things pop up that I wouldn’t have known then that I know now. David Sedaris is mentioned. The Internet, or at least the World Wide Web, is a very new thing, and there’s a couple of passages that effectively presage blogging, which is incredibly amusing in hindsight.

I dunno if I can really recommend it. It’s not bad, but it’s also not a strong narrative; it’s a diary, and it shows.

Books of 2015, #19: The World of Ice and Fire: The Untold History of Westeros and the Game of Thrones, George R. R. Martin, Elio Garcia, Linda Antonsson

I think you have to be a very particular kind of person to think reading something that’s fundamentally intended as a reference book can be edifying.

I picked this up on a lark—I have, in the past, read and even enjoyed reference works on other sprawling fictonal worlds (I’m thinking Middle Earth and the universe of Dune here), why not this one?

It took me a couple of sprints—both associated with trips that involved medium-ish flights and occasional bits of downtime to fill—but I finished it. That doesn’t really say much, though: I can still count the number of books that (as an adult) I’ve started but not finished without taking my shoes off.

I guess what it comes down to is that while I am still that person—after all, I am not accosting you with all of the damned technical books and papers I read (often repeatedly) at a rate of roughly 1:1 (or maybe a little higher) with mainstream fiction and non-fiction—I don’t care enough about this world to enjoy wading through a book like this.

It’s not that it’s bad—and many of the pictures are very pretty indeed—it’s just that I was bored out of my skull.

And yet I finished it anyway. What does that say about me?

Books of 2015, #18: The Affinities, Robert Charles Wilson

First, a side note: I am always a little bit surprised at the consistency of Robert Charles Wilson’s authorial voice.

Most authors find consistent voices at the cost of being idiosyncratic, or put more kindly, “instantly recognizable”.

On the other hand, Robert Charles Wilson voice is so neutral it disappears…and yet, of his novels that I’ve read, I couldn’t tell you with certainty which were written in the first person and which were written in the third—in memory they feel far more similar than they could ever be different.

I suppose much of it comes from the fact that his narratives are generally about witnesses—whether a first-person recollection (as The Affinities is), or third-person centered around a main character or characters who are involved but not prime movers in great events (as in Burning Paradise), they are more about how the characters are changed by the world and less about how they change the world.

And yet, their actions have consequences.

I read a review of The Affinities just before it came out that left me with lowered expectations; and yet, it was wrong. Although I understand that the book probably isn’t for everyone, I find it an interesting meditation on what it means to belong to a group, and what it means to identify completely with such a group, and what it means to a society when people no longer identify as part of the larger polity.

I suspect that some will find the subject uninteresting, but I believe the question of our investment in the greater society in which we exist is an important one. It’s not too much to say that the U.S. has come to its current political impasse precisely because people no longer think of themselves as part of anything other than the tribe they happen to have chosen.

Not that this is a “message” story—really it’s just a story of families, and what you do when your family rejects you, or you reject it—but if science fiction is defined by using the idea of something that isn’t in order to sharpen and refine our view of what is, I think this novel has to be called SF even when there’s nothing very outre happening.