Books Read: January-February 2013

[ashnistrike]

Bound for Canaan: the Epic Story of the Underground Railroad, America's First Civil Rights Movement, by Fergus Bordewich. I've been obsessed with the underground railroad since I was a kid. No, that's not quite right--I imprinted on it.  My ethical system derives almost entirely from Passover seders and stories about Harriet Tubman.  And Holly Near songs about Harriet Tubman.  And, as this book points out, Harriet Tubman is most of who and what it's easy to find out about.  The book starts to fill in the gaps--some of them, anyway.  The railroad was around for less time than I had thought, for example, growing slowly over the course of the 1800s and peaking in the decade or two before the Civil War.  I suppose it makes sense that once it got big enough, the war became inevitable. I also had no idea how public the movement was in many places.  Fascinating reading.

Where the book fails, for me, is in its treatment of women other than Harriet Tubman.  Many times, it will go into great depth about some famous male conductor or abolitionist.  Many times, it will mention in passing that of course his wife and daughters were instrumental in running the actual station.  Many times, we get nothing about what's involved in the female-dominated work of putting up hungry, frightened guests on no notice.  There's a brief chapter on the connection between abolitionism and suffrage.  But the book gives only lip service to the railroad's diversity.  Recommended, ultimately, as a starting point.

Caleb's Crossing, by Geraldine Brooks.  As with all of Brooks's writing, this is a beautifully detailed, beautifully personal take on a very specific historical milieu--in this case, the interacting Puritan and Wampanoag societies of 1600s Massachusetts.  Brooks gets writing the other, and both of these societies are indisputably other for a modern American reader.  The Puritans are, if anything, more alien, for all that their religious canons are more familiar.  Highly recommended, for all that I could wish that Bethia would go just a little further in questioning her society's assumptions.

Shades of Milk and Honey, by Mary Robinette Kowal.  Pride and Prejudice, with illusion magic and gender politics.  Good stuff, even if the ending felt a little too pat.  Recommended.

Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel.  I love Dykes to Watch Out for, which is was funny and thoughtful and has characters and situations that reflect my life in a way I rarely see, along with ones that reflect parts of Lesbian Culture that I just missed by virtue of where and when I came out.  There is one character in DTWOF, Mo, who is depressed and cynical and uses politics as an excuse to neglect the personal relationships she doesn't understand.  Surrounded by more functional people, she's very funny.  Bechdel's memoirs feel like reading a couple of hundred pages of Mo, moping and obsessing all by herself.

Shadow Unit, Volume 1, Edited by Elizabeth Bear and Emma Bull.  Reread, technically, but it's been several years and this puts all the episodes and Easter eggs and Livejournal entries in order.  And it is so obvious, on reread, that everything about this series was planned from the start.  Foreshadowing, in the first episode, of things that have come crashing down in Season 4.  Hints at character reveals that would only come to light much later.  If you can stand descriptions of bloody murder scenes, and think that televised procedurals need to spend more time on questions of agency and neuroscience and awesome geeky character interactions, read this if you haven't already.

Shoggoths in Bloom, by Elizabeth Bear.  New short story collection.  Some of the older stories have a little too much random unnecessary self-sacrifice, but the newer ones are brilliant and dark and thoughtful.  Highly recommended.

Discount Armageddon, by Seanan McGuire. Reread in preparation for the new one coming out.  Funny, snarky urban fantasy that doesn't take place in Not-the-World-of-Darkness.  Highly recommended.

Talking Man, by Terry Bissom.  There are some brilliant images in this--I will never take a road trip again without thinking about the Mississippi River Canyon--but ultimately, it turns out that I don't like magical realism regardless of whether it takes place in South American or southern Appalachia.  I like things to happen for reasons.

A Planet of Viruses, by Carl Zimmer.  Freebie at the AAAS conference.  Awesome freebie.  This is a bunch of short essays, by a brilliant science writer, about how you probably know a lot less than you think you do about viruses.  They are weird.

Total Books: 9
Recent Publication: 6
Rereads: 1
Recommendations: papersky recommended the Bissom, and the entire internet recommended the Kowal.
New Music: None.
New Media Created: Some intensive work on the urban infrastructure fantasy, and I actually finished the Jewish Narnia drabble cycle.  Anyone have any idea about markets for a Jewish fantasy drabble cycle?

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I am suddenly noticing that the Underground Railroad was an afterthought in my formation of these concepts, because the narrative I was taught as an explicit model--as this is what we do, nay, What We Do--was the smuggling of Jewish children out through Denmark and into Sweden.

I mean, it makes sense in multiple ways given my background, and given the fact that we in some more immediate sense do in fact do that--our Liesel was one of those formerly smuggled children. But my detailed plans for getting the ethnic and religious minorities in my kindergarten class to Duluth and thus on the ore boats to safety (yes, really) were entirely based on the Danish fishers and The Scarlet Pimpernel, not anything that actually happened in my actual country of residence and citizenship. When I found out about the Underground Railroad, my reaction was basically, "Oh yes! More people who do this then! Good!"

Brains and upbringings. Weird weird.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Canada has this mythological existence as The Place To Escape To, which has odd real world repercussions, especially for those of us who escaped here.

I met somebody at a bus stop once who was a descendant of one early Underground Railway escapee and a zillion Quebecois. In the early C.19 very few of them got here and they were just absorbed by the locals, but by the 1850s there was a whole ex-slave escapee community, near Lionel Groulx metro station, where there is a Union United church of that era.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I will enjoy knowing that when I'm on the metro.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

The book had a lot about communities like that. I would love to visit there next time we're in Montreal and have time for a field trip.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

That's awesome that your family was involved in that.

And yeah, the different reference points that people can have for this kind of ethics. The more the better.

I'm sure I'm supposed to know who Liesel is, but I'm afraid I don't recall?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Ah no, you're not particularly supposed to--she's one of my Swedish relatives. She's the mother of the person I call "my Swedish uncle," though the official kinship is more distant than that. There was no one left for her to go back to in Austria, so she stayed in Sweden.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, and the first time I read Talking Man I wasn't sufficiently aware of US geography to notice what it did with it.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

And that's the best part of the book--or at least it was for me.

[almeda.livejournal.com]

Discount Armageddon and its sibling volumes aren't set in the not-WoD; they're set in not-Buffyverse, because the characters and situations in them were generated during a Buffy-RPG campaign. With much originality, of course, because it's Seanan. :->