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ofliterarynature · 9 months

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2023 Reading Wrap Up: Favorites from the First Half

Not to sound like a broken record, but I can't believe we're already halfway through the year! (and even further, given how late I'm posting this lol). I've read an ungodly amount of books already, and while I try my best to shout out my favorites as I go or in my monthly wrap-ups, I don't always succeed. So Here I Am, to do a little more shouting about the 10 most memorable books or series I've read so far in 2023!

The God of Endings by Jaqueline Holland

The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez

Sword Stone Table ed by Jenn Northington & Swapna Krishna

Sea Hearts (The Brides of Rollrock Island) by Margo Lanagan

Spill Zone by Scott Westerfeld & Alex Puvilland

Will Darling/Lilywhite Boys by K.J. Charles

Lord Peter Wimsey by Dorothy L Sayers

The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green

84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein

More discussion below the cut!

The God of Endings by Jaqueline Holland had me entirely engrossed. It's slow and moving and dark, with it's own take on vampirism, with any number of the associated content warnings. All the content warnings actually (but harm to animals, harm to children, and domestic abuse are some of the big ones. Does the Nazi murder make up for it?). Best described as The Historian meets everything I wanted from The Invisible Life of Addie Larue but didn't get.

The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez I have, in fact, already yelled about a bit. It was so good! Think A:TLA meets The Raven Tower and The Hundred Thousand Kindgoms, and queer! The thing that really blew my mind was the second-person narration, which is always a swing, and I think this nailed it! I loved how it worked with the story and frame narrative, and let me tell you, on audiobook parts of the story felt positively haunted. I won't say it's the perfect novel (I'm a little eh about the last third), but that in no way dampens my enthusiasm. cw for ritual cannibalism.

Sword Stone Table ed by Jenn Northington & Swapna Krishna is an anthology of Arthurian re-imaginings with about a 1-in-3 success rate (for me anyways. is that good for an anthology?) that snuck onto this list purely on the strength of Mayday by Maria Dahvana Headley. I just yelled about my love for unusual narrative structures, so when I tell you that this is a retelling of the Arthurian family drama set in late 19th century America, told only through found objects, newspaper clippings, and manuscript exerpts? I had *such* a great time trying to puzzle things out with my half-remembered memories of the lore (heavily corrupted by the show Merlin, lol). Additional shout-out to Spear by Nicola Griffith, which didn't make it into the collection due to length but was also amazing!

Sea Hearts (aka The Brides of Rollrock Island) by Margo Lanagan was an absolute surprise, for several reasons. For one, I own both a physical and digital copy under different titles and didn't realize it until I was cleaning up my goodreads account! And second, the Brides cover is an absolute travesty and is entirely the wrong vibe - this may be YA (technically?) but it doesn't read like it! Sea Hearts is the story of a small island community with a history of summoning wives from the sea, a tradition only whispered about until an outcast young woman revives the practices to sow discord and revenge among the community members we follow. Incredibly moving and sorrowful, this is for fans of literary, historical, and speculative fiction.

Spill Zone by Scott Westerfeld & Alex Puvilland. This graphic novel is about a city hit by an unknown disaster that has killed or mutated everything and everyone who wasn't able to evacuate in time. Our main character sneaks back in to take pictures to support herself and her little sister, and while I have some reservations about the larger plot, the art of the Zone is GORGEOUS. Sketchy, eerie, hauntingly beautiful, I loved it, enough that I have no regrets. I could see this making a great comic series or animated show instead.

Major, heartfelt shout-out to K.J. Charles, who absolutely saved my sanity for a few months there. My brain was in a weird spot for a few months and I burned through a good chunk of her backlist, so it's absolutely necessary to name drop a few of my favorites. The Will Darling series, a 1920's spy adventure/gay romance, did not immediately win me over, but exposure makes the heart grow fonder? I don't think they say that, actually, but I love a competent dumbass, and when I finally picked up on the crossover with Charles' England duo, I absolutely cackled. I can't wait to reread these! Any Old Diamonds of the Lilywhite Boys series did catch me immediately, even if I managed to read it out of order with one of it's prequel series. Jewel thieves, a heist, revenge, family drama, what's not to love? I loved every single book and novella in this series.

Lord Peter Wimsey (series) by Dorothy L Sayers. This has been a work in progress since 2022 and has consistently made my favorites lists, but truly, she saved the best for last! Murder Must Advertise was stellar, but everyone who said the Harriet Vane novels were the best is absolutely correct. I don't know why I love them, other than that they're wonderfully complex mysteries, but I do. I definitely need to find another long mystery series for my mental health or else I'm going to start these from the beginning again (I still need to read the short stories after all).

The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green. I'll be honest, I didn't write a review for this at the time, and my memory for non-fiction is terrible. But I loved this book, I love John Green, and this was fantastic on audio. Thank you John for putting hope and goodness and beauty into the world.

84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff was a beautiful little book for the book lover. It's a collection of letters between the American author and a used-book seller (and family and associates) in London in the 50s and 60s. Its funny, it's friendly, it's lovely, but there's also an underlying tension that builds throughout from the repeated invitations to the author to come visit, and the book copy saying that THEY NEVER MEET. It about killed me, and did make me cry. For further reading you can also check out the author's related memoirs, The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street and Q's Legacy.

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein. Frankly, I'm impressed by my nonfiction choices so far this year. This one is what it says and it HURT. SO. MUCH. I am absolutely a generalist and it's made life frustrating, so reading this was both extremely comforting but also enraging, because society doesn't need another reason to suck. Alas.

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astranemus · 3 years

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Folklore and traditional mytho-historical narratives offer an alternative approach to framing anthropogenic and other causes of environmental change, one that has existed since the dawn of humans capacity to historicize their lives and place in the cosmos. These narratives arguably have much to teach us about framing our understanding and contingent responses to environmental change over time and across spaces. They remind us of the futility of a managerialism that governs only for control and stability without proper consideration of relational feedbacks and the dynamic and anarchic forces in nature. As James Scott (1998) observes in Seeing Like a State, human social and environmental disasters that arise from even well-intentioned state-initiated managerialist efforts all too frequently involve the pernicious combination of four elements: (1) dangerous adherence to the administrative ordering of nature and society; (2) a commitment to a "high-modernist ideology" involving undue self-confidence about the value of scientific and technical progress; (3) the intervention of a powerfully centralizing or increasingly non-democratic forms of political organization; and (4) weakened civil society organizations. Prevailing discourses of "managing" climate change in the face of looming ecological disasters contain elements of all four of the above set within the broader narrative framework of crisis, which, as Edelman (1988) observes, often serves to mitigate resistance to, and helps to build popular support for, extraordinary interventions by social and political elites.

The tenor and rhetoric of the prevailing discussions of climate change and the Anthropocene are at odds with an alternative heuristics circulating in many indigenous communities that are instead shaped by the shared understanding that humans are but a small part of a relational universe that cannot be fully cognized, much less managed, by any one species. Raven tales of the Pacific Northwest and East Asia from the early Holocene, for example, celebrate the trickster-demiurge who excels at "improvisation in the face of unpredictability" (Scott 1998: 6), as a driver of, or respondent to, environmental shifts. Although Raven frequently appears as either the harbinger of or an active agent provoking extraordinary ecological events, they are nonetheless not cast in the rhetoric of crisis. Instead, Raven adapts, innovates, and transforms with Earth's changes, sometimes by relying upon his intimate knowledge of local species, sometimes by cunning and wiles, and sometimes by happenstance as a result of his ulterior manipulations, and, at times, buffoonery. In contrast to the overtly mechanistic cause and effect models that prevail in popular and scientific discourse today, the lessons Raven can and does teach offer a multivalent understanding of the place of human activity in the world. Taken collectively, Raven tales disseminated among and between indigenous communities across the Northwest coast of North America, Alaska, Japan and Siberia today emphasize a moral ecology of mutual dependence, intersubjectivity, survival, resilience, feedbacks, and adaptation in the face of ceaseless and open-ended ecological change.

Thomas F. Thornton and Patricia M. Thornton, The Mutable, the Mythical, and the Managerial: Raven Narratives and the Anthropocene

#quote #Thomas T Thornton #Patricia C Thornton #The Mutable the Mythical and the Managerial #Raven Narratives and the Anthropocene #raven #animism #totemism #Anthropocene #climate change #technocracy #science #James Scott #Seeing Like a State #traditional knowledge #ecology #environmentalism

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solarpunks · 4 years

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James Bradley:

The problem, I quickly realized, is that climate change is incredibly difficult to write about. Not just for all the obvious reasons to do with its gradual nature and inhuman scale, but because of its unboundedness, or what Amitav Ghosh has called “the inescapable continuities” of the Anthropocene. And that sense that climate change touches everything, and exceeds the kinds of temporalities humans normally inhabit meant that I quickly realized the subject was impossibly huge, and in some real sense writing a novel about climate change was like trying to write a novel about everywhere and everything.

Anne Charnock:

I have always thought of fragmentation as a form that mirrors the complex lives we now lead. […] I agree that a discontinuous form works well for narratives on climate catastrophe, allowing the author to switch setting and switch voice, staccato in style, without warning. The reader may struggle to keep up, but isn’t that how we all feel with the onslaught of climate news from around the world? Each story declaring “the hottest,” “the wettest,” “the most destructive.” I’ve recently read a good example of this staccato approach, Stillicide (2019), a short and poetic novel by Cynan Jones about a future UK suffering from acute water shortages.

More great quotes pulled out from the LARB article by Paul Graham Raven at the link

#Paul graham raven #climate change #climate crisis #narrative #writing #fiction #narrative form #scifi #clifi

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religionanthropocene · 5 years

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Faith In The End Times: Paul Schrader’s First Reformed

For my final in this class I’m writing about two recent and powerful responses to the Anthropocene era in film. One of them is First Reformed, the breakout independent hit from last year helmed by Hollywood legend Paul Schrader and starring Ethan Hawke in doubtless one of his best performances (he deserved the Oscar-- he was robbed!). Watching the film was an extremely moving experience for me-- I’ve heard this called both the best film about the Anthropocene ever made and the best Christian film ever made, and while it’s so much more than either of those two things, I can’t disagree.

To summarize the film without spoiling too much, First Reformed follows Reverend Ernst Toller (Ethan Hawke), the troubled caretaker of a historic church in upstate New York with a dwindling congregation (Toller jokingly yet darkly refers to the church as a “souvenir shop”). When one of his congregants, a pregnant young woman named Mary (Amanda Seyfried), comes to Rev. Toller asking for help for her depressed eco-activist husband (who wants to abort their child so it won’t be born into a dying world), Toller begins a dark journey of radicalization into the eco-activist cause that tests his faith and causes a descent into mental and physical crisis.

I don’t want to give away too much of my paper here either, but I wanted to share some of the bigger ideas contained in First Reformed and how it does the impossible task of telling a story about something so big and so unknowable, and is also themed around the absolute horror of trying to understand something so huge and terrifying. It seems we’ve spent much of the semester wrestling with how to tell the story of the Anthropocene, and have found that one ubernarrative can’t possibly explain the gravity of the situation or spur people into action, and instead we need to focus on the proliferation of many smaller interwoven narratives (as advocated for by Bonneuil and Fressoz). First Reformed succeeds in talking about the Anthropocene and addressing its unknowable hugeness by sticking in the deeply personal-- the whole film seems to take place inside Rev. Toller’s head-- and using the pared-back, minimally editorial “transcendental style” Schrader is a proponent of (that this article explains well).

I picked this review specifically to share because it introduced me to some useful vocabulary for understanding the difficulty in telling stories about the Anthropocene. Critic Brian Raven Ehrenpreis explains that all Anthropocene storytelling comes up against “the difficulty of human thought when presented with what eco-theorist Timothy Morton calls the Hyperobject; an object that is so massively distributed in time and space that it transcends any spatiotemporal specificity. In other words, a system that is simply too large and all consuming to be held properly in the mind, to be cogently conceptualised.”

He goes on to say “What is so laudable about First Reformed is that it chooses to take seriously just what exactly it means to try and think the unthinkable; to think through the death of our planet from degree zero, from the inside of a problem so large that its horizon line cannot be seen or even properly imagined. First Reformed isn’t just paying lip-service to these ideas, it is deadly serious about exploring what it means to try and think through an encounter with a mind shattering realization, and what it means to live with the knowledge that we are all of us living in end times – now – that this is the apocalypse.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.

-Mina

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astranemus · 3 years

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Scott draws a contrast between the radically simplified designs for natural environments forwarded by "high modernist" developmental state elites and the wide array of practical skills and acquired intelligence that emerge from local actors who are pressed to adapt to a con stantly changing natural and human environment at the social grassroots. In Scott's telling (1998: 7) the value of mētis [practical and improvisational knowledge] lies less in the breadth and depth of techno-scientific knowledge than "in the limits, in principle, of what we are likely to know about complex, functioning order" Invoking the example of Odysseus, who was frequently praised for his cunning intelligence, and for have made ample use of it to outwit his enemies and make his way home, Scott highlights the value of classic Greek narratives of resilience and adaptation in the face of uncertainty and unpredictability in a manner uncannily like what we find in both the early and enduring Raven myths of the North Pacific and classical China. Like Odysseus, ultimately, Raven teaches us that humans, or other pretentious beings, cannot single-handedly engineer their futures or know all the critical thresholds, boundaries or safe spaces of the complex systems in which they dwell.

Raven suggests we must recognize and respect, as Gaia theory and most indigenous cosmologies hold, that earth systems' responses are contingent in part upon anthropogenic stimuli. Wallace Broecker, a preeminent climate scientist, put it this way: "The climate is as an angry beast and we are poking at it with sticks," an analogy Julie Cruikshank's (2005: vii) animistic Tlingit and Tagish informants could readily identify with in terms of their own intersubjective view of glaciers, which "listen" and respond to humans in a moral way. Indeed such conceptualizations confirm that earth's complex systems collectively comprise not only a kind of colossal being - a beast - but one capable of listening, and of being seriously insulted and reactive if per turbed by human activity (be it consciously directed or not). This is the anarchic stuff of Raven stories. Of course, the reaction is contingent on the level of insult; and our ability to respond appropriately is contingent upon our ability to recognize what constitutes an insult as opposed to an acceptable level of manipulation (as in Raven pricking the Old Woman of the Tides), and adjust our behavior accordingly.

In short, Raven teaches us, through his accomplishments and failings, how we must become aware and respectful of the contingency and integrity of human-environmental relations. He does not accomplish this through high moralism against human profligacy as an environmental Jeremiad, or through the high managerialism of the Technofix Earth Engineer, or by reenchanting scientific knowledge as New Genesis proponents seek to do. Rather, Raven demonstrates - sometimes with humor and sometimes with hubris - his own capacity to adapt to the exigencies of life he faces and dynamic reactions he catalyzes in a world in which critical thresholds are often exceeded.

Thomas F. Thornton and Patricia M. Thornton, The Mutable, the Mythical, and the Managerial: Raven Narratives and the Anthropocene

#quote #Thomas F Thornton #Patricia C Thornton #The Mutable the Mythical and the Managerial #Raven Narratives and the Anthropocene #raven #animism #totemism #mētis #metis #Gaia theory #climate change #environmentalism #technocracy #Tlingit #Tagish #traditional knowledge #indigenous lifeways

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astranemus · 3 years

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Raven represents multiple knowledges, both practical and conceptual, and we argue that his intersubjective manipulations of earth systems and species reveal the integrity, balance, exigencies, and contingencies of life on earth. Indeed, we propose that Raven, through his knowledge and encounters, often exhibits what Scott (1998: 6) has termed mētis: "the indispensable role of practical knowledge, informal processes, and improvisation in the face of unpredictability" (Scott 1998: 6). Raven is a master of this mode, even if his novel experiments and improvisations do not always produce their intended ends. Raven's other crucial modality is as a mutable transcender of conventional boundaries. He marries other species, becomes their offspring, and otherwise pushes beyond the conventional limits of intersubjectivity and interanimation, such that nothing is beyond his manipulations. In this respect Raven in the "Ravencene" anticipates humanity in the Anthopocene, both as an agent (or "driver") of change through his appetites and aspirations to control things for his own purposes, and as a resilient respondent to change (through coping, mitigation, adaptation, etc.) when earth systems and their constituent elements prove too powerful, dynamic, and complex to be harnessed for the benefit of one being or species.

Thomas F. Thornton and Patricia M. Thornton, The Mutable, the Mythical, and the Managerial: Raven Narratives and the Anthropocene

#quote #Thomas F Thornton #Patricia C Thornton #The Mutable the Mythical and the Managerial #raven #animism #totemism #Anthropocene #Ravencene #climate change #intersubjectivity #metis #knowledge #traditional knowledge #indigenous ways #Raven Narratives and the Anthropocene

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