December 20, 2019

The Annual Reckoning

This year I finished my novel, twice, once in February and once in November. That's pretty cool, but it's not unprecedented. In my long history of finishing THE EXTENT OF THE DAMAGE, there was another year I reached The End twice, way back in 2013.

I wrote last December about the repetitive nature of my year-end posts, but it's not every year I complete this novel even once, so 2019 was definitely a year of accomplishment. One consistent feature of my annual wrap-ups is the belief that the following year will bring a much more triumphant accomplishment, though I think I stopped stating this explicitly way back in 2011. So I'll just say that this time, I'm extra optimistic.

This particular end of the year is also the end of the decade, and everyone's been reflecting accordingly. I started this blog in 2010, so it's easy to check back on what I was up to at the beginning the decade. I was preparing to embark on a revision of this same novel. As much as the world has changed since then, I guess it's nice to find points of stability.

Here's to a new year, a new decade, and progress in positive new directions. I wish you all much happiness!

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At The Millions, Adam O'Fallon Price decides to face the horror of rereading his first novel: "One thing that struck me on this reading is just how much there is going on. It's a common feature of the debut novel, in which an author takes decades of reading and thinking about novels and compresses it all into their first try, as though it will also be their last. Some of it works here, and some of it doesn't. If I were to give critical advice to the person who wrote this, I might tell him to think about losing at least one of the component parts--maybe the Vietnam sections--and to also not feel like he has to conclude all of the proceedings with quite such a bang."

December 6, 2019

November Reading Recap

Last month I got through four books and a lot of variety:

THE DEEP by Rivers Solomon: Yetu is the historian of her people, the one tasked with carrying the memories of the ancestors so the other wajinru can forget the painful origins of their underwater civilization. She alone remembers, and constantly relives the story: The first wajinru were born in the ocean from drowning two-legs mothers, thrown overboard from slave ships. Yetu has never been well-suited to the role of historian due to her unusual sensitivity, and this year when she shares the memories at the Remembrance, she can't bear the thought of taking them back.

THE DEEP is a beautifully written, emotionally charged story. What I knew going in was that the book was inspired by a song by clipping., itself inspired by the music of Drexciya, who imagined water-breathing descendants of enslaved Africans drowned during the crossing. (An excellent afterword by the members of clipping. discusses the evolution of this collaborative mythology.) Where Solomon takes the story, and how they structure their telling, is fascinating and unexpected (a trait I admired in their debut). Some of the elements this short novel dwells on were not as interesting to me as other parts that got less attention, but I remain a fan of Solomon's inventive writing.

THE CHARISMA MACHINE: THE LIFE, DEATH, AND LEGACY OF ONE LAPTOP PER CHILD by Morgan G. Ames: The One Laptop per Child project aspired to build cheap, sturdy laptops that kids in the developing world would use to teach themselves software programming and hardware maintenance. From the beginning, OLPC failed to live up to many of its goals, but the project still captured the public imagination due to the charismatic ideas and personalities behind it. Morgan Ames spent half a year in Paraguay observing schools with OLPC laptops to discover the reality of how they worked in classrooms (frustratingly, with much breakage) and how children used them in their free time (more for media and games than learning). In this book, she examines OLPC in the context of other utopian projects, presents findings from her fieldwork, and considers how cultural and gendered biases shaped the project.

THE CHARISMA MACHINE traces a fascinating subject with care and insight. While the writing is generally accessible, the book is a work of scholarship from an academic press, and parts were a bit dense on theory for me, especially the first chapter. I wouldn't fall into the usual audience, but Morgan is a friend, and I've followed this book's progress from fieldwork to dissertation to manuscript. Once past the more abstract section, I read the rest with interest, curious to learn about the development of the laptop and eager to discover how it was received by the children of Paraguay. This is a thoughtful, thoroughly researched book with a charisma of its own.

REMAINS OF THE DAY by Kazuo Ishiguro: Stevens has served as the butler of Darlington Hall for over thirty years. He worked for Lord Darlington himself until his death, and now in 1956, the home is owned by an American gentleman. The state of the house and the size of its staff are greatly diminished, and so is the reputation of his late lordship, all facts that trouble Stevens when he takes the time to think about them. He's presented with quite a bit of thinking time when he gets the opportunity to borrow his employer's car for a road trip to admire the beauty of England and visit a former colleague. Along the way, he ponders the question of what makes a great butler, the nature of dignity, and the political choices of Lord Darlington before and during the war.

The core of this novel is Stevens's narration and his tightly controlled perspective on everything he's experienced and witnessed in his years of service. What first drew me in is the intriguing way Stevens addresses his audience as already familiar with the world he's describing and, for example, knowledgeable about which butlers are held at the top of the profession. (Ishiguro uses the same narrative trick in the excellent NEVER LET ME GO, but I still found it just as effective here.) Then as the book progresses, it becomes clear there's an awful lot in Stevens's memories he's determined not to consider, and the story becomes about reading between the lines. I thought the setup was leading to a surprising reveal at the end, and that wasn't the case, but aside from that letdown, I enjoyed the journey and the craft of this story.

THE REVISIONERS by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton: In 2017, Ava accepts a job taking care of her rich white grandmother so she can move her son to a better neighborhood and school. In 1924, Ava's multiple-great-grandmother on the other side, Josephine, looks back on her long life, the family she's raised, the farm she's built, and her childhood in slavery. Ava worries about her son being one of the only black students in his new school. Josephine worries about how her grandson will fare when his father remarries. Both women face looming racist threats: Ava from the declining mind of her grandma, Josephine far more dangerously from her new white neighbors. Josephine's memories of her time in slavery, and the visions and dreams that appear in the story, shed more light on the connections between the distant generations.

In reflecting on how to describe this novel, I've teased out some parallels that tie the timelines together, but these were less clear while reading the somewhat disjointed narratives. Ava and Josephine are both strong characters with complicated lives, and I wished for a greater and earlier understanding of why their stories were paired. The novel contains good historical detail in the 1924 and 1855 sections, and I was interested to see childbirth and midwifery depicted in all the time periods. Unfortunately, though, the overall story fell short for me.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ For Book Riot, Danika Ellis researches the various reasons why books are rectangular: "The other crucial piece of human anatomy that comes into play while reading is our hands. The proportions of a book look pretty similar to that of our hands, which makes sense because they should fit together. While the first books being bound were usually put on pedestals to be read, books now are meant to be held, which means they should be optimized to that shape--which may also explain how books have gotten shorter since their first incarnations."