Strangely Socialised

Oh, how I wanted to like this book. It’s been sitting in a place of honour on my bookshelf for months waiting for me to make time to read it. Maybe my lovingly-built-up expectations are a part of why I was so disappointed when I finally did, but they’re certainly not the whole reason.

The book was originally published as Women Sailors and Sailors’ Women, which I think is a more honest title for what it actually contains. Most of the book was less about what women did and more about how men felt about women, whether they were authors or sailors, wives or prostitutes, and too much of life is already all about how what men feel about women is more important than the women themselves. I wanted a book about seafaring women to be a book about seafaring women, and not just another part of a neverending battle for visibility and respect that I already fight.

I had a bad feeling when the first chapter of the book was about prostitution, but I still didn’t write it off at that point because an examination of the role of these women is a valuable one. But already it deviates from the idea of “seafaring women” and firmly entrenches itself in “women in a supporting role to what men did.” Subsequent chapters continued on this theme, from writing about women sailors from the perspective of the men they sailed with, to how the men in charge felt about women even being on boats, to how crews felt about the wives of their peers and commanders.

Two chapters stand out as the most egregious examples of this book being far more about men and their needs and values than about women: “Men Without Women” and “Women and Water, Sirens and Mermaids.” One is upfront in its shortcomings: “Men Without Momen” is quite blatantly an examination of men, not women. The other is more insidious, because on the surface sirens and mermaids are most certainly female figures, but they are also not real, so it becomes one more lengthy examination of what men feel and what men see.

Male homosexuality at sea–a subject certainly worth of study in its own right–was touched upon briefly, with what I felt were extremely dubious and badly-researched conclusions. As something that wasn’t the focus of the work, and in fact a subject that by definition excluded women, I thought it was entirely unnecessary in this context to begin with. It didn’t add anything to the book, and felt so slapped-together that it called into question the research done for the rest of the book.

In an comparison between handling the boats of two centuries ago to the boats of today, the author does more to devalue the accomplishments of modern women than to impress anyone with what a few eighteenth century women did. The whole book has a pervasive tone of “Isn’t it astonishing that a handful of women managed to do what the average seafaring man did?” and often approached it as a problem of ability rather than a systemic societal issue.

The most satisfying chapter was on lighthouse keepers, which was the most straightforward examination of women in a marine career and what they actually did and how they lived. It might have been the only time the deeds and struggles and accomplishments of women were (sometimes, but still not always) examined in their own right and given the respect they deserve.

Overall this was less about “seafaring women” than “women sailors liked to fuck.” When there is an entire chapter devoted to completely fictional female beings and just a few pages to Bonny and Read, the notorious female pirates, it was never going to be the kind of female-focused work that I was looking for.

I’m sure this was the book the author intended to write, but it’s certainly not the book I wanted to read.

[A book by Malcolm Gladwell]

Generally speaking, the only time I’ll pick up a nonfiction book is when I’m doing research, or when it’s been recommended to me. This is not due to any bias against the multitude of nonfiction works that are published each year, but only because I have limited time to read, and would more often than not sooner pick up a good story to immerse myself in.

This book, then, was recommended to me quite strenuously by a good friend, and so I approached it with somewhat high expectations. While I can’t say I’ll ever speak of it with quite the same effusiveness as my friend, it was definitely a good read.

The tipping point is the point at which a relatively minor phenomenon becomes an epidemic; Gladwell takes us through such examples as Hush Puppies, Sesame Street and suicide to demonstrate just why certain things suddenly become as widespread as they are. It didn’t come to me as a new idea, reading this book — it builds on the idea of critical mass — but Gladwell articulates these ideas well and the text is engaging.

What he does do is break down the influences in new ways, and explain why, in the propegation of these kinds of epidemics, certain people are simply more important than others. Why small shifts in our environment have a ripple effect that takes something that had a somewhat contained effect — like a syphilis outbreak — and take it beyond its former boundaries.

What are more engaging than these ideas themselves are the examples he cites, and following them through their evolution to see the ideas in action. He doesn’t just spout theory about a butterfly flapping its wings in China, he grounds the book in a number of solid, real world examples that readers can often recall, and traces what their origins were.

All in all, a real page turner, especially for a nonfiction work.

[A book by Travis Hugh Culley]

Possibly because a number of the people I communicate with online belong to, or wish they belonged to, a distinct subculture, this book came highly recommended to me. And apparently to a number of other people, too, because the waiting list at the public library kept me from reading it until a couple of months past when everyone I knew was talking about it.

That’s well and good, though, because it means I’ve forgotten what was ever said about it and can start fresh with my own opinions. And overall, my opinion of it was very positive: the book was interesting, engaging, and showed me how to see a lot of things from a new perspective.

I was a bit concerned at first; the introductory chapter felt very overwraught and was difficult to slog through, even though there was some very interesting imagery and some clever turns of phrase. I despaired that the whole book would be written like that, meandering, philosophical, never really saying anything. It certainly wasn’t what I’d been given the impression it would be like.

But I persisted, and shortly after I got into the meat of things. And the book is meaty. Travis Culley was, for years, a bike messenger in Chicago. The book follows his story, from his artistic aspirations to bicycling activism, and through his career as a bike messenger.

Messengering is, through Travis’s eyes, more a way of life than just a job. There’s a whole culture that surrounds it, a whole mindset born of being around people who are so diverse yet so similar to you, and being around other people who see you in a very particular way just because of what you do. Bike messengers see the corporate, suburban world from the bottom up and from the outside in, and what they see isn’t very pretty at all.

Travis’s story is an engaging one, his anecdotes sometimes poignant, sometimes amusing, and only very occasionally out of place. There’s a message here, too, about the rights of people who don’t charge down the road encased on a ton of steel, blind to everything around them, about the people who like being in the middle of things, and not on the outside.

Highly recommended.

[A novel by Chuck Palahniuk]

I saw the movie Fight Club when it came out, years ago. I hadn’t really planned to, but after hearing to radically different responses to it from two different coworkers — one thought it was the best movie he’d ever seen; one walked out in disgust before the end — I decided I had to see it for myself. I say this because it’s impossible to read the book now without remembering my response to the movie.

Last week I read Homicide: Life on the Killing Streets for the first time, and found it dense with detail, elaborating on what I’d seen on the television show it spawned. I’m not sure if I was expecting the same thing with Fight Club, but I do know I was surprised when I picked up the slim book from the library, wondering how it could possibly contain the nuance of the movie.

But, of course, it did. The book is a cult classic for a reason.

The book is a book of ideas, a book of punches and clever turns of phrase, a book where the reader has to pull the threads of it together. It’s not a spoon-fed read, and it’s more powerful for that. It looks sparse, at first glance, but it’s really not, it contains everything necessary for a good, deep read.

I do wonder what it would be like to go into it not knowing that the two protagonists are two halves of a whole; I think perhaps I would have focused on different things, might have missed the clues that are there that point to it. Even knowing, though, they two men are so distinct that you do view them as two separate entities. You read their interactions as between two people, not between a man and himself.

It was a quick read, but one I’m still thinking about a couple days later, remembering certain phrases that pepper the novel and give it the character it has.

[A novel by Stephen Walker]

This is possibly one of the most bizarre and confounding, yet enjoyable, books I’ve ever read. And I say that having a great number of books, and in genres that pretty much require the presence of situations and characters of a bizarre nature. This one really does take them all.

Everyone wants to see Danny Yates dead. Some of them for no particular reason, some of them in purely accidental ways, some of them because they’d like to see the entire human race conquered. But Danny Yates is a resiliant bloke and somehow manages to endure odd incident after odd incident and come out relatively unscathed.

At times the book doesn’t even seem particuarly linear, jumping from character to character and situation to situation without transition, without explanation. Things happen out of nowhere and there’s no way to anticipate them. In another book, this would be just one big giant mess. In this one, it works. It’s the very nature of the story that everyone is bizarre, everyone has their own quirks, and it doesn’t really matter all that much why.

It’s a brisk read and certainly doesn’t really require a lot of rapt attention, though if you’re trying to make sense of it all, you might give it more study than it really deserves. It’s just a lot of fun, and definitely a conversation pieces. And that’s even before you get to pages thirty-five to thirty-eight, which consist of nothing but the words “Sea horsie” over and over again.

Don’t worry, it’ll make sense when you read it. Or not.

[A novel by Robin McKinley]

When I was thirteen years old, my family drove to southern Ontario to visit my aunt for the Christmas holiday. On December 23, 1988, our house back in Manitoba burned to the ground. On December 25, we started the drive back home again. On this trip, I had brought with me just two books. I don’t remember what one of them was, and the other was Robin McKinley’s The Hero and the Crown, which I was reading for the first time. For a short while, those were the only two books I owned, two of my only possessions in the world, and I will forever associate Robin McKinley with that time period, and with new beginnings and new lives.

It didn’t hurt that I loved the book.

So whenever I see a new Robin McKinley book on the shelves, I pick it up, knowing that no matter what it’s about, at least I’ll return to that sense of hope and magic, where I could escape from the whole world. Such was the case with Spindle’s End.

Spindle’s End is a retelling of the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale, follow the handful of other retellings that Robin McKinley has done. She’s very skilled at it, at picking out the essential parts of the fairy tale, the parts that make it recogizable, and then telling the story so that it’s completely fresh and new. On the occasion of her naming day, the young princess is gifted with beauty and grace by a number of faeries of the land, but one evil, uninvited guest throws a curse on her instead. Just as in the legend. But in this retelling, the child is stolen away and hidden far from the palace, and raised with no knowledge of who she is. Until her twenty-first birthday comes along, and everything is revealed, alongside the lingering curse.

This novel started out in unexpected ways. The first thing we are introduced to is the land, and not the characters. I was a little surprised by this at first, but immediately found myself immersed in the unique texture of the magical world she built. It came to me, as I continued reading the book, that perhaps it was done this way because the world itself, the way it works, is almost a bigger character in the novel than anyone else. A number of the minor characters in the novel seem undeveloped, unless you view them more as outcroppings or facets of the land itself instead of three dimensional characters.

What I found most interesting about the novel was the way magic worked, which was alarming and ludicrous and all stations in between. The idea of magic being a nuisance, of fish being merely a myth, of children manifesting magic in bizarre and hazardous ways, it sets the tone of a world that won’t work the way we think it will. Where things aren’t just a little bit different, but very different, though human nature remains a familiar thing. Love, hate, pride, friendship, justice. These things are all familiar to us, in a world that is not.

I really enjoyed the character development of Rosie, the princess, as she grows and learns and becomes the woman she chooses — not is destined — to be. She manages to avoid both being a stereotype of a perfect princess and the opposite of that as well. She’s a well-rounded person who isn’t at all pleased to learn that everything she has chosen to be in her life doesn’t matter. It’s a lovely twist that when all is said and done, things work out for her in a bittersweet but appropriate way.

As much as I enjoyed the novel, ultimately I think it starts to fall apart at the end, from about the time they celebrate the birthday to the end of the novel. The final battle with the evil fairy doesn’t feel climactic enough, and the resolution comes off more confusing than not. Especially since the novel really seems to change tone at this point.

It is also highly reminiscent of the end of The Hero and the Crown, and I think it worked much better the first time ’round. Rosie’s life has, up until that point, very much been about her relationships with people. The legend dictates that those people all sleep through the climactic scenes, but I think the novel suffers for it.

Still, I enjoyed it as much as I enjoy all of Robin’s McKinley’s work, and definitely think it’s worth a read.

[A novel by Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman]

Ever since reading Swordspoint for the first time years ago, I’ve been looking forward to this book. Before I even knew there was a book to look forward to, I’ve been looking forward to this book. And so it had a lot to live up to, by the time it was released.

I read it all in one day, between a couple plane rides and a bus ride and the space between bed and sleep. I don’t read a book all at once if it doesn’t engage me, engage my imagination and involve me with its characters. So it definitely has that going for it, which is arguably the most important thing. The world it is set in is obviously one I was already familiar with, so it was easy to fall into the narrative and know what was going on.

All in all, it holds up as a strong, readable, imaginative book. The only place where it doesn’t hold up, is in comparison to Swordspoint. Swordspoint is one of those magical books that you can never get enough of; the characters are complex, the world is lush, the detail is exquisite and the story is tight. It’s romantic and capitivating and it sweeps you away. The Fall of the Kings isn’t, quite, that.

The politics of the two books, I would put on par. Part of the whole atomosphere of the world comes from politics, whether it’s the politics of the city, the upper class, the lower class or the university. It’s always rich and complex. In The Fall of the Kings, the situations are perhaps a bit more cliche, but they don’t go against the spirit of the world and don’t contradict anything that’s already been set up. One of the things I love best about the books is their intelligence. and on that level this novel certainly succeeds.

I think the problem lies in a couple areas. The central relationship of the story isn’t quite as strong — we see more of it, and yet it doesn’t have that same sense of binding and romance as the first. It’s hard to pinpoint just why, because neither of them really fall under any conventional definition of romance. Perhaps it’s that one seems devoted and mutual, and one does not.
It’s really when you get to the end that The Fall of the Kings really begins to suffer by comparison. A character is introduced who becomes instrumental in getting one of the main characters out of a bind, and the whole thing seems very contrived. The character isn’t set up properly at all and comes off very much as a Mary Sue type — the author’s avatar in the story, and not particularly well executed. Which is disappointing, because she had the potential to be a very interesting character if introduced and developed properly.

While I knew that it probably wouldn’t be a happily ever after kind of story, the end still caught my by surprise. It was very abrupt and jarring and I’m still not entirely sure how I felt about it, and may not be sure until I give the book another read.

So a good, strong book that still wasn’t everything it could have been.