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To Spin a Darker Stair
Catherynne M. Valente, Faith Mudge, Kathleen Jennings, Tehani Croft Wessely
So I ended up with this book because it was part of the Pozible (Australian Kickstarter) rewards for "Cranky Women of History" and I actually kicked up my donation in order to receive this chapbook with a Cat Valente story.
Both stories were lovely, both were brilliant subversions, both were stories written by writers who know how to do things with language that make intricate cathedrals look simple and complicated embroideries seem tame. They overwhelm you with words in the best possible way.
Both stories were lovely, both were brilliant subversions, both were stories written by writers who know how to do things with language that make intricate cathedrals look simple and complicated embroideries seem tame. They overwhelm you with words in the best possible way.
This was a delightful companion to the series; it was like reliving the TV series and all the extra details that we get as readers, especially about Lizzie's grad student life, just add to the experience.
Also, listen to the audiobook. It's read by Ashley Clements, which makes the experience even more fun.
My biggest...caveat/complaint is that I'm not sure how the book is as a book. As a companion to the vlog, it's wonderful and it feels just like reliving my first watch. But as a book of it's own...I'm not sure how it would hold us. Any readers who have never touched the Lizzie Bennet Diaries, but read this...feel free to weigh in!
Also, listen to the audiobook. It's read by Ashley Clements, which makes the experience even more fun.
My biggest...caveat/complaint is that I'm not sure how the book is as a book. As a companion to the vlog, it's wonderful and it feels just like reliving my first watch. But as a book of it's own...I'm not sure how it would hold us. Any readers who have never touched the Lizzie Bennet Diaries, but read this...feel free to weigh in!
Jeez, [a:ELizabeth Bear|108173|Elizabeth Bear|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1219878171p2/108173.jpg] knows how to write fantasy. While this was definitely a middle book and felt, at least a bit, like it existed to get characters from point A to point B, it was still excellent.
It's funny, I feel like this book was the one that Milan was most interested in writing–the other stories were a way to set this one up. And while this one was good, it also felt like the most...conventional of the three, at least somewhat. Insofar as Milan's characters are ever fully conventional, at least. Having said that, everything I enjoyed about the previous books (especially the appropriate use of history not only as widow dressing, but as plot!) remains true here as well.
For fairly obvious reasons, this book reminded me of Kate Atkinson's Life After Life. This book was rather tidier than Atkinson's and its conceit was a little less overwhelming. This book was more restrained - two stories, two worlds, two sets of possibilities and two people. It felt like a tighter narrative and it lacked the...pointedness of Atkinson's work.
Mild spoilers for the end to follow.
Having said all that, I liked Life After Life better. I wanted resolution in this book or, failing that, a return to the mystery. What I got was what felt like platitudes. I'm young enough to find those irritating. I either wanted MEANING or I wanted meaning denied. I didn't want to be told it didn't matter. So the book failed to sell me on its resolution, which made all the earlier, well-written and interesting bits more difficult to work with since they never went anywhere. I enjoyed this book and so much of it really did work - especially the two different ways that the world works out. I'm definitely on board with the book's politics. And yet...it was missing something.
What I found so interesting, about both this book and Atkinson's, was that the hardest parts to read were the bits that dealt with bad marriages and mistreatment by family members. Maybe it's a question of scale - giant catastrophes seem unstoppable by humans, but individual lives feel like the sorts of things we should be able to make better.
Mild spoilers for the end to follow.
Having said all that, I liked Life After Life better. I wanted resolution in this book or, failing that, a return to the mystery. What I got was what felt like platitudes. I'm young enough to find those irritating. I either wanted MEANING or I wanted meaning denied. I didn't want to be told it didn't matter. So the book failed to sell me on its resolution, which made all the earlier, well-written and interesting bits more difficult to work with since they never went anywhere. I enjoyed this book and so much of it really did work - especially the two different ways that the world works out. I'm definitely on board with the book's politics. And yet...it was missing something.
What I found so interesting, about both this book and Atkinson's, was that the hardest parts to read were the bits that dealt with bad marriages and mistreatment by family members. Maybe it's a question of scale - giant catastrophes seem unstoppable by humans, but individual lives feel like the sorts of things we should be able to make better.
As a book with the fundamental premise that the way we associate with and place our expectations on technology is hurting us...I think Turkle has written a brilliant book. I have three serious objections, in order of severity from least to most.
1) She does not always successfully walk the line between "This is a problem that technology cannot fix and we need to stop relying on technology to try" and "Technology causes this problem". The post-fordist 80 hour workweek was not caused by Blackberry. The culture of "do what you love and do it ALWAYS with no vacation" was not created by email and the Internet. Email is, in a sense, our attempt at mediating between a culture of constant work and our desires for a home life. But while she touches briefly on the point that these issues need to be fixed beyond technology, she neither deconstructs the evolution of this attitude towards technology nor engages with the technological triumphalism on the level of a societal paradigm shift.
2) As, perhaps, a corollary to my first point, this book has a tendency to assume that technology as a stopgap against/symptom of contemporary pathology is created alongside contemporary pathologies that did not exist earlier. Children wonder about the suitability of robots as caretakers who can replace present but absent parents (parents who are there but digitally connected and don't really see them). Without mitigating the awfulness of being such a child, the idea that technology caused this loneliness and exacerbates it is absurd. There were lonely children ignored by their parents in the 80s as well. And in the 70s. And in the 800s. There were children who felt uncomfortable in high school environments and the difference was that they also lacked the outlet for online expression. Some of them got lost in books. Some of them were just lost.
Her original point, that technology is not a panacea but at best a bandaid, is taken, but technology does not necessarily create loneliness. It's possible that technology just makes us aware of the already felt gaps. Her argument seems specious to me when it shifts from pointing out that technology cannot do everything to when it becomes the scapegoat for people's refusal to enter into and engage with the real world. The story of the man who is barely getting by and spends all his time playing Quake is not the story of someone whose life was ruined by technology. Take away the game and everything is better? Of course not. So much of what Turkle's book does is point out how technology almost works as a diagnostic tool to point out the problems in everyday life.
3) Which brings me to point 3. The triumphalist psychological narrative within this book is troubling. And I mean that in two senses. The first is--as the previous point suggests--technology becomes a pathologic influence that takes people and breaks their "authentic" relationship with the world. Turkle assumes the existence of an authentic self, accessible through unmediated contact, from which technology cuts us off. So this promotion of an authentic self accessible to others is deeply troubling, given that I see no reason to believe that I offer an unmediated, authentic experience of my self to anyone other than me. A face to face conversation is differently mediated, the rules for what can be said and when and how are different, but it is just as much a performance of self as my Facebook page. Again, we're back to the idea that cultural shifts in what constitutes authenticity have some kind of correspondence to reality.
But this has a far more troubling implication if you assume that free, comfortable, face-to-face connections are the gold standards and everything else is a shoddy imitation that cannot satisfy. Because you pathologize psychological difference. If face-to-face interactions according to the complex and unstated rules of society are not only the norm (as they currently are) but the only healthy form of connection, you reduce anyone who is neuro-atypical to a broken human being. Mediated connections that force a new kind of conversation style or a new definition of connection can sometimes favor people on the spectrum for whom reading the affective cues in body language is extraordinarily difficult. Speaking to all but one's closest friends via Facebook as a way to avoid triggering anxiety attacks is not an excuse to avoid therapy, it's a way of using technology to make the world more manageable.
(Sidenote - where is this universe that Turkle lives in? Because there's this subtle sense I get from the book that she believes that therapy can help far better than technology and if everyone just underwent therapy and dealt with their problems, we would not need to rely on technological bandaids. So where is this world where therapy is constantly successful and accessible and affordable to all?)
Anyway. Long story short, we would not judge Stephen Hawking as a conversation partner without the technology he uses to achieve face-to-face dialogue. There is no one "normal" person that we all should strive to be. So the role that technology plays in making our lives better or worse or simply altering our relationships with others is complex. And Turkle's assessment of the ways in which technology cannot be a grand savior of humanity is both an excellent case study in our relationship with one of our symptoms (in the Lacanian sense of symptom) and a useful corrective to Utopian rhetoric. But this book often veers too far into condemnation and, in doing so, it blames technology for problems that have less to do with robots and far more to do with contemporary culture and, most worryingly, it conflates psychological disease with "does not function according to a particular ideal".
1) She does not always successfully walk the line between "This is a problem that technology cannot fix and we need to stop relying on technology to try" and "Technology causes this problem". The post-fordist 80 hour workweek was not caused by Blackberry. The culture of "do what you love and do it ALWAYS with no vacation" was not created by email and the Internet. Email is, in a sense, our attempt at mediating between a culture of constant work and our desires for a home life. But while she touches briefly on the point that these issues need to be fixed beyond technology, she neither deconstructs the evolution of this attitude towards technology nor engages with the technological triumphalism on the level of a societal paradigm shift.
2) As, perhaps, a corollary to my first point, this book has a tendency to assume that technology as a stopgap against/symptom of contemporary pathology is created alongside contemporary pathologies that did not exist earlier. Children wonder about the suitability of robots as caretakers who can replace present but absent parents (parents who are there but digitally connected and don't really see them). Without mitigating the awfulness of being such a child, the idea that technology caused this loneliness and exacerbates it is absurd. There were lonely children ignored by their parents in the 80s as well. And in the 70s. And in the 800s. There were children who felt uncomfortable in high school environments and the difference was that they also lacked the outlet for online expression. Some of them got lost in books. Some of them were just lost.
Her original point, that technology is not a panacea but at best a bandaid, is taken, but technology does not necessarily create loneliness. It's possible that technology just makes us aware of the already felt gaps. Her argument seems specious to me when it shifts from pointing out that technology cannot do everything to when it becomes the scapegoat for people's refusal to enter into and engage with the real world. The story of the man who is barely getting by and spends all his time playing Quake is not the story of someone whose life was ruined by technology. Take away the game and everything is better? Of course not. So much of what Turkle's book does is point out how technology almost works as a diagnostic tool to point out the problems in everyday life.
3) Which brings me to point 3. The triumphalist psychological narrative within this book is troubling. And I mean that in two senses. The first is--as the previous point suggests--technology becomes a pathologic influence that takes people and breaks their "authentic" relationship with the world. Turkle assumes the existence of an authentic self, accessible through unmediated contact, from which technology cuts us off. So this promotion of an authentic self accessible to others is deeply troubling, given that I see no reason to believe that I offer an unmediated, authentic experience of my self to anyone other than me. A face to face conversation is differently mediated, the rules for what can be said and when and how are different, but it is just as much a performance of self as my Facebook page. Again, we're back to the idea that cultural shifts in what constitutes authenticity have some kind of correspondence to reality.
But this has a far more troubling implication if you assume that free, comfortable, face-to-face connections are the gold standards and everything else is a shoddy imitation that cannot satisfy. Because you pathologize psychological difference. If face-to-face interactions according to the complex and unstated rules of society are not only the norm (as they currently are) but the only healthy form of connection, you reduce anyone who is neuro-atypical to a broken human being. Mediated connections that force a new kind of conversation style or a new definition of connection can sometimes favor people on the spectrum for whom reading the affective cues in body language is extraordinarily difficult. Speaking to all but one's closest friends via Facebook as a way to avoid triggering anxiety attacks is not an excuse to avoid therapy, it's a way of using technology to make the world more manageable.
(Sidenote - where is this universe that Turkle lives in? Because there's this subtle sense I get from the book that she believes that therapy can help far better than technology and if everyone just underwent therapy and dealt with their problems, we would not need to rely on technological bandaids. So where is this world where therapy is constantly successful and accessible and affordable to all?)
Anyway. Long story short, we would not judge Stephen Hawking as a conversation partner without the technology he uses to achieve face-to-face dialogue. There is no one "normal" person that we all should strive to be. So the role that technology plays in making our lives better or worse or simply altering our relationships with others is complex. And Turkle's assessment of the ways in which technology cannot be a grand savior of humanity is both an excellent case study in our relationship with one of our symptoms (in the Lacanian sense of symptom) and a useful corrective to Utopian rhetoric. But this book often veers too far into condemnation and, in doing so, it blames technology for problems that have less to do with robots and far more to do with contemporary culture and, most worryingly, it conflates psychological disease with "does not function according to a particular ideal".
Oh man. ALL THE FEELS!
No, seriously, all of them! Sometimes I forget what it's like to get so caught up in a novel that I can't stop reading or go to sleep. It happens far more rarely than it used to. But when it does...
This was one of those series that just stays with you. It's everything that little epic fantasy ideas dream of growing up to be.
Sometimes I think that epic fantasy could survive entirely on [a:Elizabeth Bear|108173|Elizabeth Bear|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1219878171p2/108173.jpg] and [a:N. K. Jemisin|2917917|N.K. Jemisin|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1334966221p2/2917917.jpg] and, while there might not be as much literature, what is there would be so fantastic that no one would complain.
Yeah, I enjoyed this. The writing was exquisite, the thought that went into developing a universe that is both grounded in the large swath of the Asian continent and also deeply fantastic clearly paid off. And the people and their cultures - Bear does some things that few authors properly achieve; she can create villains that are sympathetic without redeeming them, she can portray a multitude of religious practices without ever veering into the trite or the offensive. And she can make her characters feel more than real. I was sad when it ended, even though the story was done and done well. And that, in some ways, is the highest praise I can give.
No, seriously, all of them! Sometimes I forget what it's like to get so caught up in a novel that I can't stop reading or go to sleep. It happens far more rarely than it used to. But when it does...
This was one of those series that just stays with you. It's everything that little epic fantasy ideas dream of growing up to be.
Sometimes I think that epic fantasy could survive entirely on [a:Elizabeth Bear|108173|Elizabeth Bear|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1219878171p2/108173.jpg] and [a:N. K. Jemisin|2917917|N.K. Jemisin|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1334966221p2/2917917.jpg] and, while there might not be as much literature, what is there would be so fantastic that no one would complain.
Yeah, I enjoyed this. The writing was exquisite, the thought that went into developing a universe that is both grounded in the large swath of the Asian continent and also deeply fantastic clearly paid off. And the people and their cultures - Bear does some things that few authors properly achieve; she can create villains that are sympathetic without redeeming them, she can portray a multitude of religious practices without ever veering into the trite or the offensive. And she can make her characters feel more than real. I was sad when it ended, even though the story was done and done well. And that, in some ways, is the highest praise I can give.
I feel like my reviews should also come with some notes on behavior. I have 4 other things sitting around that I've been meaning to read and yet I finished this the day I got it.
This was definitely a higher 3 star than the previous one. I was less bothered by the language because there were fewer characters who were ostensibly speaking English.
Also, the nuns. The nuns were excellent. So was Byron.And poor John Polidori's was replaced by Matt Smith. I especially loved the shoutout to Paul Cornell who helped with someone's dialogue.
Overall, this was closer to what I want this series to be - magic in the regency! Convoluted plots! People dealing with issues of status and magic and how they intertwine! Slightly progressive attitudes working within a patriarchal past in a way that neither excuses the 19th century nor paints it worse than it was.
I admit that my feelings about Jane and Vincent are not always fully charitable, but I will grant that Kowal has not, since the first book, gone the "this is a totally unreasonable fight, but it makes the plot more exciting" route and I appreciate that.
This series is not perfect but, as my expectations have adjusted and as Kowal moved further and further away from anything Jane Austen would have dealt with, I find myself more charitable.
It does make me want to reread Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell once I have time again (i.e. my orals are over).
This was definitely a higher 3 star than the previous one. I was less bothered by the language because there were fewer characters who were ostensibly speaking English.
Also, the nuns. The nuns were excellent. So was Byron.
Overall, this was closer to what I want this series to be - magic in the regency! Convoluted plots! People dealing with issues of status and magic and how they intertwine! Slightly progressive attitudes working within a patriarchal past in a way that neither excuses the 19th century nor paints it worse than it was.
I admit that my feelings about Jane and Vincent are not always fully charitable, but I will grant that Kowal has not, since the first book, gone the "this is a totally unreasonable fight, but it makes the plot more exciting" route and I appreciate that.
This series is not perfect but, as my expectations have adjusted and as Kowal moved further and further away from anything Jane Austen would have dealt with, I find myself more charitable.
It does make me want to reread Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell once I have time again (i.e. my orals are over).
The term that best describes this book is clever, and I mean that both as a serious testament to the intricacies of the novel as well as the slight damnation that always comes from faint praise.
The novel's conceit is very clever and I'm ashamed it took me even five minutes to figure out what Horn was doing. The storyline was handled well; it refuses to follow its Biblical antecedents exactly while still retaining the flavor of the story. And the jumps back to historical characters were appealing.
Having said that, this book felt both a bit too neatly constructed and a bit like it failed to fit together. The contemporary (more or less) story had very obvious connections with the historical narratives, but fewer deeper level connections. Other than some name dropping and thoughts about siblings, it was difficult to get them to speak to one another. It felt like a history lesson for those unfamiliar with the Cairo Genizah was inserted into the story simply because the author was worried that her readers might not be familiar with the Cairo Genizah and she just had to tell us about it. To be fair, the Cairo Genizah is amazing! But there are plenty of amazing things that need a bit more justification before they get prime billing in a novel. And the main narrative eclipsed the characters, all of whom seemed like they could be really interesting, but Horn just breezed past them.
However, coming off of a week where I spent some time complaining about how its so much harder to write Jewish fantasy literature when the background of contemporary culture is Christian, there was something delightful about reading a book and having the references refer to my culture and rely on my shared knowledge base. Naming the software that archives one's life "Genizah" just made me happy and the book goes on from there.
The ending, for all that it failed to wrap up the multiple narratives in the way I wanted, did succeed in pulling together the main narrative in a manner that seems more and more right as I think on it.
The novel's conceit is very clever and I'm ashamed it took me even five minutes to figure out what Horn was doing. The storyline was handled well; it refuses to follow its Biblical antecedents exactly while still retaining the flavor of the story. And the jumps back to historical characters were appealing.
Having said that, this book felt both a bit too neatly constructed and a bit like it failed to fit together. The contemporary (more or less) story had very obvious connections with the historical narratives, but fewer deeper level connections. Other than some name dropping and thoughts about siblings, it was difficult to get them to speak to one another. It felt like a history lesson for those unfamiliar with the Cairo Genizah was inserted into the story simply because the author was worried that her readers might not be familiar with the Cairo Genizah and she just had to tell us about it. To be fair, the Cairo Genizah is amazing! But there are plenty of amazing things that need a bit more justification before they get prime billing in a novel. And the main narrative eclipsed the characters, all of whom seemed like they could be really interesting, but Horn just breezed past them.
However, coming off of a week where I spent some time complaining about how its so much harder to write Jewish fantasy literature when the background of contemporary culture is Christian, there was something delightful about reading a book and having the references refer to my culture and rely on my shared knowledge base. Naming the software that archives one's life "Genizah" just made me happy and the book goes on from there.
The ending, for all that it failed to wrap up the multiple narratives in the way I wanted, did succeed in pulling together the main narrative in a manner that seems more and more right as I think on it.
