Last week I posted my nonfiction reads from 2015, with commentary. This week I’m tackling fiction. I’ve gotten back into science fiction and fantasy a lot this year, though my bibliophilic tastes run in a lot of other directions as well.
But first, a word from our sponsor!
Here at Top Comments we strive to nourish community by rounding up some of the site's best, funniest, most mojo'd & most informative commentary, and we depend on your help!! If you see a comment by another Kossack that deserves wider recognition, please send it either to topcomments at gmail or to the Top Comments group mailbox by 9:30pm Eastern. Please please please include a few words about why you sent it in as well as your user name (even if you think we know it already :-)), so we can credit you with the find!
Classics:
Jane Austen, Lady Susan
Willa Cather, My Antonia
William Faulkner, Light in August
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland
Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest
Sinclair Lewis, Babbit
Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
Anthony Trollope, He Knew He Was Right
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Best of this list is Austen’s brief, witty Lady Susan. Some of Austen’s most memorable characters are women who are shallow social climbers. Usually they’re minor comic-relief foils, but in Lady Susan, she takes center stage, and gets a well-deserved comeuppance.
Some of the other books fit the stereotype of a “classic.” Trollope’s book is well-written and the characters memorable, but it takes 900 pages to get the story out (including two nearly identical subplots). The Picture of Dorian Gray is a novel that would have made a great short story. And with Light in August, every sentence is beautifully crafted, but after a while it just feels like a slog. (Fortunately, my introduction to Faulkner was an easier book, As I Lay Dying.)
Herland is a curious bit of early science fiction, in which male explorers discover an all-female utopia. But in Gilman’s 19th-century feminist utopia, women are all about mothering, the very idea of abortion horrifies them, and they have zero interest in sex or romantic relationships. It’s useful to remember that in Gilman’s era, the popular conventional wisdom was that women’s all-consuming sex drive made them inferior to men and inevitably led to male dominance. Whereas now, in the era of “evolutionary psychology,” the popular conventional wisdom is that men’s all-consuming sex drive inevitably leads to male dominance.
Short Stories:
Sherman Alexie, The Lone Ranger & Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
Edwidge Danticat, Krik? Krak!
Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies
Gloria Naylor, The Women of Brewster Place
All fantastic books. Naylor’s stories overlap into a single narrative; each can stand on its own, but together they form a novel. Alexie’s stories (set on an Indian reservation) and Danticat’s (set mostly in Haiti) are more loosely connected: a character or event from one story will play a small part in another. Danticat’s stories are exceptional, but harsh: it was a relief to find one where nobody died. Alexie has a certain good-natured pessimism that doesn’t devolve into cynicism, set among people who know the odds are overwhelmingly stacked against them, but who refuse to give up. Lahiri’s stories are stand-alones, mostly around a theme of marriages falling apart.
Science Fiction/Fantasy:
Sage Blackwood, Jinx’s Fire
Octavia E. Butler, Lilith’s Brood trilogy
Suzy McKee Charnas & Ursula K. LeGuin, eds., James Tiptree Award Anthology 1
CJ Cherryh, Chanur series
CJ Cherryh, Downbelow Station
Phillip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Jasper Fforde, Thursday Next series
Jim C. Hines, Goblin Quest
Walidah Imarisha and adrienne marie brown, Octavia’s Brood: Stories from Social Justice Movements
Terry Pratchett, Snuff
James Tiptree Jr., The Starry Rift
I seem to have rediscovered science fiction and fantasy this year. Naturally, if you haven’t read the Jinx series, you’re missing out: author Sage Blackwood is better known on dailykos as Sensible Shoes, and her weekly “Write On!” diary is completely addictive.
The Tiptree award is given for SF/Fantasy stories that do interesting things with gender. For instance, Tiptree’s The Starry Rift had a species with a unique form of three-party reproduction. The award judges note that once upon a time it was cutting-edge just to have a woman in an important role; now, there are stories that question the whole notion of binary gender or the assumption that it can’t change. CJ Cherryh’s Chanur series is a space opera involving a matriarchal species where men are assumed to be good for breeding and violence — but the heroine’s husband wants to be something more. Octavia E. Butler’s Lilith’s Brood trilogy has humans rescued — but then colonized — by a three-gendered species that demands to interbreed with them. Butler’s work often deals directly or indirectly with the legacy of slavery, and what it means to be descended from both the enslaver and the enslaved. (Kindred, addressing that issue more directly, is her greatest book IMO.)
Octavia’s Brood frustrated me. The idea was appealing: science fiction written by social justice activists. But several of them were first-time writers, and the resulting stories were too-similar variations on the theme of scrappy rebels against the evil empire, with most of the attention given to describing the nature of the empire’s evils, and not enough to having a story grow from characters who feel like individuals. Over and over, I’d see a great premise that wasn’t developed enough. (The same could be said for the book, I guess.) The stories that stood out were ones that served up the unexpected: African-descended shape-shifters take over the modelling industry, and decide that the whole business needs a makeover. Or a parody script of Sanford and Son (no, really).
Fforde’s Thursday Next is great for book nerds, as the heroine travels back & forth between reality & fiction, conducting group therapy with the characters of Wuthering Heights, saving the Pride & Prejudice cast from being part of a Big Brother-type reality show, and discovering the real reason Godot kept everyone waiting.
Goblin Quest is written for fans of the Dungeons & Dragons genre — but from the point of view of the goblin, who’s exasperated that adventurers are forever invading the monsters’ caverns in search of treasure. It’s a hoot, and I can’t wait to read the rest of the series. And even before I read the book, I loved Hines for his infamous pose-off with John Scalzi, where they imitated the anatomically-impossible poses of women on the covers of science fiction books.
Miscellaneous Fiction:
Pete Dexter, Train
Carl Hiaasen, Lucky You
Carl Hiaasen, Skin Tight
Stanislaw Lem, A Perfect Vacuum
Nancy Mitford, Love in a Cold Climate
David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks
Joshua Mohr, Damascus
Carl Hiaasen is one of my comfort reads: humorous mystery/thrillers filled with the zaniness unique to Florida. Usually there’s a plot or subplot involving environmentalism (Skin Tight was an odd exception). He always ends with the good guys coming out winners, and the bad guys getting punished in suitably ironic ways.
I didn’t know how to categorize A Perfect Vacuum, a collection of reviews of books that don’t exist, and in some cases, couldn’t exist. (“If you turn chapter 3 upside down and overlay it on chapter 4, it explains Freudian theory in Aramaic...”) Weirdly funny.
Train is very violent, and less cohesive than Dexter’s better known Paris Trout. I only finished Damascus because it was a gift from a writer friend, but it relied on some overused tropes (like the Meaningful Encounter between the man and the sex worker, making him a Better Man so he could go back to his family).
The Bone Clocks is another hard-to-categorize book. It’s sorta SF/fantasy, and sorta literary. As he did in Cloud Atlas, Mitchell takes several stories from different time periods and fits them together. I preferred Cloud Atlas, maybe because some of the narrators in The Bone Clocks were so unsympathetic, but The Bone Clocks was enjoyable and had more of a clear story arc. Most of the plot involves heroes vs. supervillains, but in the final section, the story takes a hard turn and it becomes clear that ordinary human folly was the real threat all along.
Plays:
Berthold Brecht, The Jewish Wife and Other Short Plays. Review of The Exception and the Rule here.
Oliver Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer
Ben Jonson, Every Man in His Humour
Ben Jonson, Sejanus
Tragedy seems to hold up better over time than comedy does. In Every Man in His Humour, I could recognize some individual tropes (like the clever servant who outwits his master), but a lot of it was lost on me. Sejanus, on the other hand, was a timeless story: a politician (in this case, Roman) maneuvers his way to dizzying heights — followed by a spectacular fall.
In She Stoops to Conquer, the humor relies on the familiar device of mistaken identity, but also on the assumption that it’s ok for the young man to make passes at the maid while planning to court the “respectable” upper-class woman.
The Brecht plays, some of them very brief, are a chilling slice of life in the early days of the Nazi rise to power. A Jewish wife plans to leave her Aryan husband for his own safety, and he doesn’t want to hear it. A couple worries that their son will turn them in for some trivial offense or other. A judge will deliver the verdict that the state demands — if only he could figure out what that is. Each vignette conveys the feeling that, given the right circumstances, this could be you.
Graphic Novels:
Alison Bechdel, The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For
Declan Greene & Gabe Ostley, Moth
Bechdel brings together selections from thirty years of her classic comic strip. Like Doonesbury, the characters grow and change, get together and break up. (Except Mo and Sidney — WHY hasn’t Mo dumped her yet???) The comments on politics are remarkable both for what’s changed (remember the fight over civil unions?), and what hasn’t. There’s a weirdly prescient moment in 1991 when Clarice, exasperated with the state of the country, says the most absurd thing she can think of: “Twenty years from now, Arnold Schwarzenegger will probably be President!” Twelve years later, of course, he was Governor of California.
On to Top Comments!
Borrowing Brillig's ObDisclaimer: The decision to publish each nomination lies with the evening's Diarist and/or Comment Formatter. My evenings at the helm, I try reeeeallllyy hard to publish everything without regard to content. I really do, even when I disagree personally with any given nomination. "TopCommentness" lies in the eyes of the nominator and of you, the reader - I leave the decision to you. I do not publish self-nominations (ie your own comments) and if I ruled the world, we'd all build community, supporting and uplifting instead of tearing our fellow Kossacks down.
From Chris Reeves:
I know generally you don't nominate in your own diary, but this comment is too damn funny. (Note from Tara: Comment is from indycam. And there’s no rule against nominating a comment from your own diary, as long as it’s not your own comment.)
From expatjourno:
While bickering goes on over Chelsea Clinton's attack on Bernie Sanders' health care plan, koneksean offers Hillary Clinton's devastating response to her daughter.
From your humble (if antisocial) diarist:
In jpmassar’s diary, which deals with Flint residents being ordered to pay for their poisoned water, jwinil14 offers this pithy description.
Top mojo, courtesy of mik:
Picture quilt, courtesy of jotter: