(Yes, I'm going through these at a rapid pace. I've got a backlog to post.)

The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan

In Mary's village, all life is focused on two things: preserving a vestige of humanity within the fence, and keeping the Unconsecrated -- the vicious, shambling dead -- out. To that end, life is extremely restricted, and each villager knows his or her role well, and follows the instruction of the religious Sisters who rule the village.

Mary, though, dreams of something else -- something beyond the village. So she chafes at the restricted possibilities for her life, dreams of the ocean... and is fascinated when someone arrives from outside the village.

This book had a lot of promise, which is, I think, why the flaws made me pull my hair out. I could see how great the book could be, and so I winced all the more when parts of it fell flat. It really was a page-turning read, with a lot of intriguing ideas, and so the holes in it frustrated me.

First, the good things: the book was written beautifully. Ryan has a lush, lilting voice, and that meshes well with the wild dangers outside the fence and with Mary's dreamy, searching-for-the-horizon personality. It read so easily and so enjoyably that, even with its faults, I'd be happy to read the next book.

I also liked some of the things that were done with the worldbuilding. It was enjoyable to read a zombie book that was so quiet and personal, and one that was set so long after the unspecified disaster that caused the zombies to appear. (I think it's actually several generations after.) I liked the details of how the villagers worked to slowly increase their protected village, and I was intrigued by the Sisters and by the stranger who arrived at the village. The book definitely kept the pages turning.

The biggest problem was the characters, which is a big problem for me because characters are the number one most important thing in a book for me -- and a big problem because this is a very character-centric book. Mary (the first-person narrator and definitely the main character) was well-characterized enough, but not terribly unique: she was a young woman who felt stifled by the options available at the village and who wanted to see the world. Not bad, and a character motivation that I, in general, like and am sympathetic to, but a fairly recognizable type. That would have been okay if the other characters had been more fully-rounded, but they weren't. The book focused on a core of, let's see, seven characters (eight if you count the dog), and unfortunately each one of them is defined only by their relationship to Mary. One is Mary's best friend and envies her; two are boys who are varying degrees of in love with her; one is her brother, who resents her; one is her brother's wife and has really no traits at all besides being her brother's wife; and one is a kid. The only desires and motivations they express are either a) related to Mary, or b) "not getting eaten by zombies." I really wanted one of them to have a goal or a desire or a response to something or anything that didn't have anything to do with immediate short-term survival or Mary.

The second big problem is that the book gets me intrigued by a lot of mysteries and secrets and then... never really explains them, or explains them in ways that don't make much sense. But I can't get specific about that without spoiling, so, cut for discussion and some flailing.

( Spoilers venture beyond the fence )

Despite all my flailing, I'll still be reading the sequel, partly in hopes that some of the unexplained things will finally be explained, and that Mary will get a bigger goal. I'd still recommend this, especially if you like zombie stories and/or smooth, pretty prose, but it's not as highly recommended as some of the other things I've recced.

This was a good book, and I think I would have liked it better if I hadn't loved The Hunger Games so much.

It's also basically impossible to talk about this without spoiling The Hunger Games to some degree, so if you're really strictly spoiler-phobic, you should probably scroll on by. I don't think any of the spoilers outside the cut are book-killers, though; all the major spoilers for either book will be behind the cut. Anyway, past this paragraph there are spoilers -- mild ones, but still spoilers -- for the end of The Hunger Games, but all serious spoilers for either book are behind the cut.

Catching Fire picks up where The Hunger Games left off, and Katniss is in an awkward situation. Because of the way she survived the Hunger Games, the oppressive, totalitarian government of Panem and the Capitol have it in for her. In order to prove that she was not a deliberate revolutionary -- and, therefore, save not only her life but the lives of her whole extended family -- she has to convince them that she was young, foolish, and desperately in love, rather than sharp-minded, clever, and a little bit ruthless, as she actually was.

To make matters worse, the other Districts -- inspired, largely, by her -- are fomenting rebellions, and the Capitol is, shall we say, not happy.

I really liked the beginning of this, and I liked elements of the whole thing. The writing and characterization remain strong, as in the first book. We got to see things that were only hinted at in the first book: the other Districts, more of Capitol politics, the growing unrest. And I liked watching Katniss deal with the aftermath of the Games while putting on a happy face for the benefit of the Capitol's propaganda machine. (She has to, on pain of her family's lives.) I liked seeing more of Gale. I liked the exploration of Katniss's romantic dilemmas. I also liked that we got to see one of Katniss's weak spots: she was extremely competent at keeping herself alive in the first book, but she's naive about politics, because she has grown up with no political voice whatsoever (even in terms of the smaller politics of her own hometown), and so there are moments where she was in over her head. I liked that: having established her as thoroughly competent, we can now see some of the places where she's not as competent, which makes her more well-rounded.

Indeed, I think my biggest problem with the book was that it felt like Collins wasn't confident enough with exploring new territory. We got tantalizing tastes of it... and then ducked back into a very similar plot as the first book. But I'll talk more about that behind the cut.

( Spoilers for both books )

But I still really enjoyed the book, and would recommend it to anyone who liked The Hunger Games -- and I'll be waiting impatiently for the third book.

I am thoroughly behind on my bookblogging, so I'm going to do a quick roundup and then hopefully I'll get myself caught up with full-fledged entries later.

( Books for April 2009 )

Plenty: Eating Locally on the 100-Mile Diet, by Alisa Smith and J.B. Mackinnon

Plenty is written along the same lines as Animal, Vegetable, Miracle -- they only eat things that were produced within a certain radius of them, in this case 100 miles -- with two differences: the authors are in British Columbia (not too far from me, actually), and they don't 'cheat' at all. Where Kingsolver's family had some exceptions from the rule, Smith and Mackinnon don't 'cheat' at all -- if it's not grown or raised within a hundred miles, they don't eat it.

This was a really uneven read. Parts of it were amazing, and I loved the inspiration for eating locally myself. (Since they're from BC, the things they eat at various parts of the year are very similar to the things I eat at the same parts of the year.) I was entertained by their frustration -- very much like mine! -- with late winter/early spring, where they ate potato pancakes, more potato pancakes, still more potato pancakes. And some of the things they ate sounded both delicious and possible for me to cook -- and I was delighted by the acknowledgment that shucking, steaming, and de-kerneling ten pounds of corncobs is kind of a pain-in-the-ass job.

On the other hand, there was some serious unevenness. Right after the chapter about potatoes potatoes oh god please no more potatoes, there was a rather smug bit where the husband was like, 'hard? it's not that hard! it's easy!', which was... sort of contradictory (and a little overly pleased-with-self). (Indeed, while I did like the eating-locally stuff, the smugness made me roll my eyes -- yes, it's very nice that you can spend a full month living in the back end of nowhere in a house with no power gathering berries, but it's easy to sound painfully superior about it.) And there was a lot of 'marriage in trouble!' stuff that I found frankly uninteresting and skimmed in search of more writing about food. (I'm probably going to convince you all that I hate memoirs, and that's not true at all. I like memoirs! I just have very short patience with middle-class ennui.)

I definitely think this one's worth reading, especially if you're a person in the Pacific Northwest interested in eating locally. There are just some parts that I thought lent themselves more to skimming.

Running Tally:

Total Books: 21
Fiction: 7
Non-Fiction: 14
POC Author: 6

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals and In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, by Michael Pollan

I haven't been bookblogging because I've been putting off blogging these books, and the reason for that is twofold. One: I'm not totally sure what to say about them. Two: They're books that tend to, mm, inspire strong feelings, and I'm not sure I'm up to a rousing debate on the ecology, ethics, and politics of factory farming vs. local farming. Not that it's not a worthy discussion, just that I think of refereeing that discussion right now and I put my head in my hands.

So, with that caveat, I want to blog these anyway so I can move on through my list.

The title of The Omnivore's Dilemma can be unpacked in two different directions. The dilemma of which he speaks is the fact that, the more things you can eat, the more choices you have as to what to eat. If you are a koala, the decision is very simple: if it looks like a eucalyptus leaf and smells like a eucalyptus leaf, it's dinner. If it doesn't, it isn't dinner. But if you're a bear, rat, raven, human or other omnivore, and you're living in something other than subsistence-starvation, suddenly life gets a lot more complicated. Given a finite stomach capacity, and finite hunting/gathering/growing/buying resources, do you eat the wheat, the berries, the potato, the apple, the dead bird? If the answer is 'some of all of the above,' then in what proportion? And hey, look, there's a plant you've never seen before, growing in abundance in this place! ...Can you eat it? Should you eat it? Maybe it's a great source of food, and you'd be stupid to pass it by. Or maybe it'll make you sick, and you'd better stick to your wheat and your apples. How can you know? Pollan's point is that the brain of an omnivore has to support a lot more complicated prioritization and decision-making than the brain of a koala, which just does an 'is eucalyptus y/n?' pattern match and goes on from there. And modern humans aren't exempt from that: a trip to the local megamart is an extreme example of an omnivore's dilemma.

The other part of the title -- A Natural History of Four Meals -- describes the content of the book. Pollan obtains and eats four meals, each an extreme example of one modern food choice paradigm, and then examines its roots (so to speak). There's the first meal, the industrial meal, predicated on corn: corn-laden (in the form of corn protein, corn syrup, corn starch, corn oil, etc) mass-produced bread products, soda, and sweets, plus corn-fed factory farmed meats. There are the second and third meals, two variants on 'pastoral': the 'big organic' organic meal and the small-local-farm meal. And there's the fourth meal, most of the components of which he hunted or gathered himself. The book is largely about environmental impacts, and -- to hugely oversimplify -- those impacts trend better the farther along you get in the book. Industrial farming has some serious issues; 'big organic' avoids some of those -- at least you aren't dousing X-thousand square miles of farmland with pesticides that are literally poisonous -- but is still problematic in other ways; small farming has a smaller footprint; gathering for yourself is fairly defensible, with caveats, as long as what you're gathering isn't, you know, endangered species. That's a massive oversimplification, but there we go.

In Defense of Food is specifically about defending 'actual' food -- that is, food made of definable ingredients, where you know that the quiche has, e.g., wheat and lard and salt in the crust, eggs and salt and cheese and spinach and herbs in the filling, rather than having an ingredient list as long as your arm where you can't pronounce or recognize half of them. Where The Omnivore's Dilemma was mostly about the effects our food choices have ecologically, In Defense of Food is about their effects to health. Essentially, it's got two parts: an attack on 'nutritionism,' where food-as-food is considered vastly less important than food-as-a-collection-of-nutrients, and where nutrients go into and out of fashion (fat is bad! no, carbs are bad! no, it's refined carbs that are bad! and certain kinds of fats! but not others! did I mention antioxidants? coffee is good this week, better drink a lot before we decide next week that it isn't!). The other part of the book ties into this: nutritionism tends to lead to the belief that it doesn't matter what you eat, as long as you're eating the ratio of nutrients that's in fashion at the moment. So, because it's cheap and tastes good, we eat a lot of refined food, particularly refined grains, and a lot of meat -- as long as we can find a company to buy it from who will tinker with it so that it's low in this and high in that and has lots of added that other thing to make us feel as if it's still healthy.

It's hard to know exactly what I want to say about this. There were a lot of parts of the book that I had to agree with, while wincing -- it's difficult to read anything about the way factory meat farming is done and not feel kind of oogy about it, even if (as I am) you're a pretty content carnivore. It's hard to feel too great about a method of plant farming that's eerily reminiscent of strip mining. (And I say this as someone who doesn't have a knee-jerk 'chemicals BAD' reaction, necessarily.) And I'm not exactly a hard sell on buying local-and-in-season -- I mean, I do it myself, and (apart from the times like, uh, now, when I might scream if I see another bunch of kale) I enjoy the process. And I think that my health has improved hugely since I started making most of my food from scratch, even though I cook with an embarrassing lot of butter, because at least I know what the hell it is I'm eating. If I eat mashed potatoes laden with cream, at least I know what I'm doing -- if I eat mashed potatoes laden with hydrolyzed protein and added starch and, oh, by the way, a quarter cup of corn syrup, I don't even know what I'm doing to my body.

So there's that, and that much of it I tend to be pretty agreeable about. But. But there's another angle of it that I have a lot of problems with, and that's this: he seems to be advocating a revolution that's only available to people with a lot of money and a lot of time. Now, I am a person with the luxury of a lot of both, for which I am grateful. I can afford to spend quite a bit on food. More importantly, I have the time to cook from scratch basically every day -- and even more important than that, I like cooking. (You can bet that if the trendy thing was a 'locawear' movement, where you made all your own clothes from scratch, I'd be waaaaaay less favorably inclined to it, just because I don't like sewing that much -- and I recognize that it's a huge advantage that I do enjoy it for cooking.) But I have major problems with promoting something as the ethical solution to a major problem that's only available to people with the privilege of money to spare and time to spare, and both in pretty good quantities. More to the point, I have major problems with the occasional dismissal of the issue by saying that people should just buy fewer pairs of fancy shoes in order to buy the food, because -- because there are plenty of people in America right now who are already not buying fancy shoes, not ordering HBO, not wasting money, and still having trouble making ends meet. Inasmuch as the American food system is a problem to solve, it's only going to be solvable if your solution can reach those people, and not just people like me. (And trying to spread it to those people by lecturing them and making them feel guilty is both pretty darn high-and-mighty and still not very effective -- if the money and time aren't there, they just aren't there.) This isn't just a matter of ethics, it's a matter of pure pragmatism. Your revolution will never spread very far until it can be practiced by the mother working a job and a half while raising three kids, who has maybe twenty minutes a day to put together a meal for them, and who's already squeezing her food bill until it squeaks. I don't care how theoretically rewarding it is, it just won't, because practicality does mean something.

Still, it's an interesting read, and, as I say, already a number of things I put into practice and have found very rewarding. I just would like to see more practical suggestions for making this something other than a luxury movement.

Running Tally:

Total Books: 19
Fiction: 6
Non-Fiction: 13
POC Author: 6

Right now fiction is lagging so much because I got onto a rereading stint of Discworld novels, and I'm not counting rereads.

Clay's Ark, by Octavia Butler (Link goes to "Seed to Harvest", the omnibus addition of all four books of the quartet.)

This was a hard book to read. It was rewarding, but oh my goodness, it was hard.

As Blake Maslin and his daughters Keira and Rane travel across the desert of California, they're stopped by armed men. This, while horrible, isn't that unusual a possibility in their dystopian future USA (the setting is some time after Mind of My Mind, but before Patternmaster): in between walled safe zones, extreme gang violence runs rampant, and traveling through those areas -- even armed, in a car -- is extremely dangerous. But the people who stopped them aren't a car family, and their goal isn't robbery, kidnapping, or murder. Instead, the kidnappers take the three back to their farmstead, where they discover what this group really is.

The farm is home to a group of people, small but growing, who were infected by an alien organism. The organism changes them -- enhances them in specifically physical ways. They're stronger and faster than normal people; they have better reflexes; they are physically tough to the point of being extraordinarily difficult to hurt; they have enhanced senses, particularly hearing and smell. But the infection also drives them to spread itself, both by infecting others and by breeding. And yet -- despite the infection that has changed their bodies and that fills them with unbearable, undeniable urges -- they're still people. They still have their consciences, and their memories, and the interests and desires they had before. Their personalities are just overlaid by a set of literally alien and very animal urges.

The bulk of the book is about their conflict, between the undeniable impulse to spread 'their' kind and their desire to remain human, and to avoid spreading the infection to the rest of the world. And that's the most terrifying thing about it: the bearers of the disease, the agents of this change (and indeed of the kidnappings that keep it going) are so sympathetic, they're trying so hard to stay themselves. What hurts the most is watching them fight and fight for their humanity, even as it slowly erodes.

Before going into the spoiler cut, I will say: this book is very depressing, and it's also brutal in places. Horrible, violent things happen; the violence is never glorified, but it also isn't glossed over; it was very difficult going. I warn not because I think people shouldn't read this, but because I was glad of having been warned myself. I think I would have found it impossible in places if I hadn't been prepared for it.

( Spoilers below the cut. )

I'd recommend this one, too. But I lined up a comfort reread for after I finished, and I think that might not be a bad idea for others.

Running Tally:

Total Books: 16
Fiction: 5
Non-Fiction: 11
POC Author: 5

Patternmaster, by Octavia Butler (Link goes to the "Seed to Harvest", the omnibus addition of all four books of the quartet.)

This was the first book of the Seed to Harvest quartet by publication date -- and the last one by internal chronology. I read it first for two reasons. One, unless I get a strong indication otherwise, I tend to read things by publishing order -- partly because I like to see the author develop, but also partly because there's more a guarantee that they make sense in that order, because they were presumably written to make sense to people who were reading them as they came out. (Unless they were very bad books indeed, but I don't expect that from Butler.) Two, because my general inclination was reinforced by other people, who said that they read better in publication order. And having read all four books, I think they were right, and I too would recommend that you read them in publication order rather than internal chronology.

I'm going to try to refer to each one without spoilers for the others, and then I'll post about all four of the books considered as a whole, because they stand along perfectly well but gain a lot of richness and depth when you consider them in context.

So: Patternmaster.

Patternmaster is set in... I can't actually tell how far in the future, because the changes to our world are so dramatic that it could be a hundred years or five hundred. (Indeed, I initially thought that it was set on another planet, the world was so different than the one I know.) Patternmaster is set in a future in which the human species has split into two... I was going to say "factions," but really, they're actually two new, separate species: the clayarks, people mutated by an alien microorganism, who are strong and tough and fast and make and use weapons and other technologies; and the patternists, who are psionicists of varying stripes, who use mental powers (including telepathy, telekinesis, healing/biomanipulation, and the ability to store memories in objects) instead of engineering as we know it. "Normal" humans -- people like you or me -- also exist; they're called "mutes" and are servants of the patternists. (There are no normal humans among the clayarks, because the clayark disease is extremely infectious.)

As you could probably guess from the title, Patternmaster is from the point of view of a patternist, Teray, who falls afoul of the strict rules of his traditional society and the political maneuvering therein, and becomes an "outsider" (essentially, a slave) to Coransee, an extremely powerful (politically and psionically) master of a House. The book is about his struggle to reassert his independence, and it's about the way he allies with an Independent -- a patternist who isn't subject to any House master, Amber. Amber is powerful, intelligent, and tough -- she's a healer, but she subverts the 'woman healer' stereotype by also being an extremely effective killer -- and, indeed, I think she's the strongest character in the book. The developing relationship between Teray and Amber serves as both the heart and the backbone of Patternmaster

Besides Amber, the most interesting thing about this book for me was the worldbuilding and the society, which is dystopian and yet fascinating, even for me (I'm picky about dystopian/post-apocalyptic futures). I find the nature of the 'disaster' really interesting: not one but two radical changes to humanity. (Indeed, I find it particularly cool that Butler put both the clayarks and the patternists in this world -- either idea could have spawned a series, but both together creates a richness and sense of conflict that would be difficult to achieve otherwise. The patternists and the clayarks both are extremely potent, but neither is quite strong enough to get the upper hand over the other -- and yet their very natures makes it impossible for them to stop fighting.) We see only glimpses of clayark society, because the protagonists see (indeed, for their own self-preservation, kind of have to see) the clayarks as inherently inimical, kill-or-be-killed. But patternist society is extremely interesting in its own right. Patternists live in Houses, run by powerful Masters, for their own protection against the clayarks. Within the house, there's a heriarchy: the Master on top, his apprentices beneath him, outsiders (slaves, but with psionic powers) beneath them, and mutes beneath them. (The position of women is more unclear to me: it appears that patternist women, in Houses with male Masters, are wives of varying degree of status -- it's not clear whether there are any female apprentices or outsiders who are not wives. It's also not totally clear what the status of men and women are in Houses run by women, which definitely exist.)

And then there's the Pattern, a really fascinating look at the way a telepathic society would exit. All patternists are linked together by the Pattern, although for the most part, only fellow House members are closely aware of one another. People who are sympatico, who are compatible in personality and metal attitude, are said to be close together in the Pattern, something that they can feel immediately and instinctively. It's a world in which you can tell immediately whether you're likely to get along with someone -- and that immediate awareness is acknowledged, and used.

( Spoilery stuff behind the cut. )

As far as recommendations go: Patternmaster is exceptional science fiction. It's not as good as the books in the series that would follow it, which in my opinion get better and better, but it's a good entry point to the series. (And I do recommend that you use it as the entry point: working in internal-chronology order rather than publication order would, in my opinion, be a mistake.)

Running Tally:

Total Books: 14
Fiction: 3
Non-Fiction: 11
POC Author: 3

The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga. (Man Booker Prize winner.)

The White Tiger is written as a letter from Balram, the protagonist, to Wen Jiabao, the Premier of the People's Republic of China -- a letter whose purpose, Balram says, is to explain "the truth about Bangalore" by describing his own life story and the way that he became what he calls a "self-made entrepreneur." Most of the book -- apart from asides where the adult Balram addresses Wen Jiabao directly -- are a depiction of Balram's childhood of extreme deprivation in rural India, and his efforts to pull himself out of it before it kills him, as it did both his parents.

The name of the book comes from a scene early in the book while Balram was still in school, when his (drunk -- at the time and in general) teacher got a surprise inspection from the government. The official questioned the students; Balram, bright and ambitious, was the only one who impressed him. He compared Balram to the white tiger, 'the rarest animal in the forest -- and by the comparison indicates that he has no expectation of finding intelligent and determined students in rural villages with any more frequency than he would find a white tiger. He arranged for Balram to receive a scholarship. And in a more hopeful book, that would be the first step in the direction of Balram's progress out of poverty: that Balram should get a scholarship, better education, movement out of the crushing inequity of his childhood.

This is not that kind of hopeful book. Before Balram got even a sniff of the scholarship, his grandmother pulled him out of school and sent him to work in the teahouse to pay for the wedding of one of his female cousins. (Weddings are treated much like natural disasters in the book, unavoidable crises -- at least the weddings of female relatives: each of the men in Balram's family got pulled out of school to work to pay for the wedding of a female relative.) There's no question after that that he'll get more education. He was sucked into the pattern of work and death that doomed his father and mother both.

(I should pause here and say that I know embarrassingly little about poverty and class in India. For the purposes of this review, I'm taking the book at face value -- although it's a sign to me that I could definitely stand to educate myself more on this subject.)

Balram does find a way out -- but it's got nothing to do with the naive 'pull yourself up by your own bootstraps' fantasies that I'm familiar with from most rags-to-riches stories.

( And I can't talk about it more without spoilers, so, cut. )

This book reminded me a great deal of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian; I tried to avoid too many comparisons in the rest of the review in order to allow this one to stand alone, but I can't help it, I have to indulge the comparison here. They're both about ambitious, intelligent young men born to crushing poverty, living in towns/villages with very little possibility for improvement, and fighting for a better chance -- and more to the point, both are exceptionally depressing but written in a way that's very funny. I think I'd like The White Tiger better if it didn't remind me of Absolutely True Diary, because... because I just didn't like Balram as much as I liked Junior. I don't think this is a failing of the book: it's pretty clearly partly about the way people act in extremity, and the way people act in extremity is not always pretty. It's a bleak, bleak book, and the fact that it's funny doesn't obscure the way that it's deeply depressing.

And yet -- and yet Balram gets a happy ending, of sorts. It's just -- it's not a cheerful happy ending. It's a making-the-most-of-horrible-things happy ending. It's a happy ending in which the protaginst admits that he still has to ignore certain things that have happened, certain things he has done.

It was a very good read, sucked me in and didn't let me go, and gave me so much to think about. It was also about as far from a comfortable read as I can imagine, so do be aware of that if you're planning to read it.

Running Tally:

Total Books: 12
Fiction: 2
Non-Fiction: 10
POC Author: 2

Posting before I head off to lunch -- expect more tonight; I have a backlog to catch up.

The Final Days, by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward

All the President's Men left off at the press conference where Nixon announced that he was "not a crook" and would not resign; The Final Days picks up from almost exactly that point, and continues through Nixon leaving the White House. Despite the continuity of time, though, it's not at all the same book as All the President's Men -- instead of an investigative thriller viewed from outside the halls of power looking in, it's entirely from the inside perspective of the Nixon White House in its last year of sliding into ruin. Ironically, where All The President's Men was all about uncovering, The Final Days was all about concealing.

The book begins with an explanation of the process they used to research the book, which sums up to: about a squillion interviews. Plus memos, transcripts, supporting documents, etc. -- specifically, they say that any information that could not be confirmed by two separate accounts was left out. And then we dive right into the Nixon White House in its death throes -- even before they realize that the flailing will turn out to be death throes.

There is a lot of flailing.

The thing that's interesting is that I-the-reader, of course, know that Nixon won't wriggle out of the charges in the end. I know he'll have to resign. But, in the book, there's no such awareness, of course -- at the beginning pretty much everyone except two of Nixon's lawyers seem to think that they can make the problem go away somehow, or at least downplay it enough that it will be a survivable blow. And over the course of the book, one by one, they lose their faith that it's possible to avert the looming disaster, until there's nobody but Nixon left.

In that sense, it reads a great deal like a tragedy. Which was interesting as a reader, because I really wanted to see Nixon get taken down for hisbehavior, which was both illegal and unethical. And yet, at times, it was hard not to feel -- well, not pity, exactly, but more like embarrassment-squick; as he resorted more and more to alcohol, and as his behavior became more and more irrational, I didn't exactly feel sorry for him, but I did flinch every time he did something self-destructive. I wanted him gone, but the flailing was painful. (I have to admit, I kept thinking in Internet memes: OH RICHARD NIXON NO, and I C WHAT U DID THAR, and so on. I can't help it.)

As a political thriller, though, it's absolutely fascinating: informative, interesting, and surprisingly suspenseful given that I do know how it's going to turn out. The feint-and-parry of the Nixon White House versus the court, where the court demanded tapes and the White House requested time, requested the right to censor for 'national security reasons', and stalled, and then the court overturned their requests, and on and on -- it's just fascinating. Worth a read, if you have any interest in 20th-century US political history, or in nonfiction thrillers.

(I need a new Vetinari-related politics icon that isn't quite so dated.)

Running Tally:

Total Books: 10
Fiction: 1
Non-Fiction: 9
POC Author: 0

His Majesty's Dragon, by Naomi Novik

And finally, some fiction!

I admit: it took me so long to read this book in part because I'd had it recommended from all sides, and I was afraid it wouldn't live up to the hype. So I let the hype die down a little before I cracked it open -- and I'm glad I did finally read it, because this is a fun, fun book. Very enjoyable indeed.

His Majesty's Dragon begins when Napoleonic-era naval captain William Laurence captures a French ship carrying a dragon egg -- a dragon egg close to hatching. As dragons are valuable in the Aerial Corps (a kind of air force made up of dragons and their handlers) and the country is currently at war, it would be a gross waste to allow the dragon to go feral. (If a dragon doesn't accept the harness from a human hand shortly after he or she is hatched, that dragon will never voluntarily ally with humans thereafter.) The men of his ship must therefore attempt to harness the dragon, and, unfortunately for him, Laurence is the one the dragon wants. Laurence names the dragon Temeraire -- and then is snatched away from his position, the Navy, and his family, to join the mysterious Aerial Corps and fly, rather than sail, to war on behalf of England.

Because the book was billed to me as 'Napoleonic War with dragons,' I expected that the setting would make or break it for me, but that wasn't the case -- though the setting is interesting enough, it's the characters that made the book for me. Hands-down my favorite thing was the relationship between Laurence and Temeraire. It's clear from the book that, while the dragon is inclined to imprint on a particular person at hatching (much like, say, a baby duck), the imprinting isn't any kind of magical soulbond, as with other bonded-companion-animal stories. It's a friendship: a friendship predisposed to being very strong, but still, a friendship. (It has parental overtones when the dragon is new-hatched, but that fades away with time.) It takes work on the parts of both parties and yet, because of that, it is far more rewarding to me than if it had been instalove complete with rainbows and sparkles and Never Being Alone Again. (Indeed, the dragons and humans don't have any kind of telepathy or empathic bond at all, that I can see -- the dragons speak out loud, in human language, and they and their human companions bond by spending time together. And if the humans and dragons don't spend time together, their relationship gets strained and dysfunctional.) It's a really genuine, solid connection, and I love to read about strong friendships, so this just made me grin foolishly all through.

Mostly, though, I loved the book because I loved Temeraire himself. He's got a personality of his own -- smart, curious, thoughtful, sweet-tempered, a little bit elegant. He gives the impression of being very smart and dignified but also being young. He likes to read (or, well, be read to, because of the scale problem) and is fascinated by history, science, mathematics. He's just -- I love Temeraire. Really, I love that the dragon characters are characters in their own rights. The dragons Celeritas, Lily and Maximus all had distinct personalities, and while they didn't get all that much 'screen time' (all of the other characters are very much secondary to Laurence and Temeraire, who are the heart of the book), they're pretty much as well-developed as comparable human characters.

I could certainly nitpick things. It seems a bit, uh, implausible to me that the world is full of dragons, the Americas host a thriving Incan empire, and so on -- and yet those major changes haven't altered the track of history in England/France at all, such that not only is there still a Napoleonic war but all the major players seem to be the same -- and in a lot of ways Laurence is sort of too good, although he's genuinely likable enough, to me, to escape being irritating about it. But here's the thing: the book hit me in a very reading-for-fun-and-pleasure place, and though I can see the flaws, I don't want to nitpick them. I want to just spend a few hours with Laurence and Temeraire and grin at the image of Regency London with dragons flying overhead.

( Spoilers below the cut )

But yeah, this was a really good time, not deep but a quick and entertaining read. If you like fantasy, are entertained by the idea of 'Napoleonic War with dragons,' or like stories with likable characters and strong friendships, I'd recommend it. And now I have to go read the sequels!