Marie Brennan's Blog, page 136

A Year in Pictures – Buddha on the Roof

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Another shot from the garden of Fukushu-en in Naha, because it was so bloody photogenic. I actually don’t know whether the little figures on the roof points ought to be called “Buddhas” or not; that’s just what I mentally label that style of statue. Boddhisatvas? I welcome corrections in the comments.

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A Year in Pictures – Costa Rican Bug

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Another scanned print. Many of the insects and other small life forms of Costa Rica are terrifying (that bit in The Tropic of Serpents? That was me channeling all the dire warnings I got when I went to Costa Rica), but this one is cute. It disguises itself as a pair of leaves to hide from predators.

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A Year in Pictures – Pavilion Point

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The highest pavilion in Fukushu-en, in Naha (Okinawa), stands atop an artificial cave. If you stand at the right spot and look upward, you can see the point of the pavilion’s roof peeking out through the gap.

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There is no war in Ba Sing Se

Earlier today on Twitter, Chuck Wendig posted:

The myth that white people tell each other is we need to fear black people. The truth is that we are the scary ones. #BlackLivesMatter

— Chuck Wendig (@ChuckWendig) December 3, 2014

Every week, every month, every year, another story, the same story told over again. White police killing unarmed black men. White men on the street killing unarmed black men. Because they thought the black men were armed. Because they felt threatened. Because they were afraid for their lives. Because the black man didn’t obey fast enough, was wearing a hoodie, was playing his music too loud. And time and time again, verdicts handed down that say, that makes sense. Of course you were afraid; of course you killed to protect yourself from the threat that wasn’t there.

I think about what I feel like, as a white woman of less than Amazonian build, walking down the street alone at night. Tensing up just that little bit when I see someone else approaching; tensing up that little bit more when I see that it’s a man. I imagine what it would be like to be a black man, and to tense up that little bit more when I see it’s a police officer. To see such a person as a hazard, rather than an ally if trouble occurs.

An op-ed in the New York Times today said,

Any police department that tolerates such conduct, and whose officers are unable or unwilling to defuse such confrontations without killing people, needs to be reformed.

This is fundamental. When we have riot police on the streets in military gear, SWAT teams burning infants with stun grenades, tanks rolling through suburbia because they’re army surplus and they might as well go somewhere — then something has gone so profoundly wrong I don’t have the words to describe it. When police turn their force against black men who have done nothing to deserve it, I can’t say “something has gone wrong,” because that implies it was ever right to begin with. But this is just a new verse in the same song. From its very founding, the relationship between the United States of America and its black citizens has been wrong. (The relationship between the United States of America and any of its minority citizens.) This country has used every tool at its disposal, from law to money to rhetoric to armed violence, to preserve the imbalance against them. Our steps in the other direction have been too few, too small, too often reversed with steps in the other direction. The problem hasn’t gone away. It’s right there today, tonight, all around us.

We need to reform a lot more than just the police. But the police are a place to start. If we cannot trust them, then we cannot trust anything that follows.

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Books read, last several months

I realized a few weeks ago that I’ve been forgetting to make book posts. So this is September, October, and November — but it is also an incomplete list. (I’ve decided to omit my research reading, because it would constitute a minor spoiler for the fourth Memoir.)

Dragon Age: The Masked Empire, Patrick Weekes. From a writing standpoint, this is probably the best of the DA novels I’ve read so far — in part because unlike Asunder, it doesn’t deal with the mage/templar issue, which I remain convinced is an almost-excellent idea that never quite seems to work in execution. I still wouldn’t recommend this book to people who aren’t invested in the franchise, though, because it is blatantly here to set up various plots for Dragon Age: Inquisition (which I started playing in November). Like, things are just not. resolved. I look forward to seeing the resolution, but you ain’t gonna find it here.

The Golem and the Jinni, Helene Wecker. Part Five of my project to read all the World Fantasy Award Best Novel nominees. If you like finely-observed historical fiction (which you all know I do), this does excellently on that front. It didn’t give me quite the resolution I was hoping for with the central relationship, but I suspect Wecker was not out to give me that resolution in the way I wanted.

A Stranger in Olondria, Sofia Samatar. Part Six of the aforementioned project, and as we all know by now, the winner of the award. Samatar’s writing is beautiful, and the density of the worldbuilding was absolutely delightful to my inner anthropologist. I’ve heard she’s writing a sequel, which pleases me greatly; I was very interested in the religious conflict that got presented here, and I’m hoping the second book will follow that in more detail.

The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo, Zen Cho. Non-fantasy romance novella recommended by a friend. The real hook here is the protagonist’s voice; as for the romance itself, I liked it, but would have loved to see it written out as a full novel, with more complicating detail. As it stands, I didn’t have quite enough time to get invested in it.

Returning My Sister’s Face, Eugie Foster. I hate it when I only get around to picking up somebody’s work because I’ve heard they died. I had enjoyed the stories of Foster’s I’d encountered in various places; this is a collection of a bunch of them, with an East Asian focus. (A common motif in her work, but by no means the only one.) I enjoyed them, and will certainly read the other two collections I bought, but not yet: I don’t want to overdose on the theme.

The Shattered Gates, Ginn Hale. First in a portal fantasy ebook series, each book of which is (I believe) a novella. This was recommended by Rachel Manija Brown, I think; whoever it was, they gave the caveat that the series picks up a great deal later on. So this didn’t really hook me, but since I like portal fantasies, I’m willing to give this one another installment or two before I give up.

Wolf Hall, Hillary Mantel. Speaking of finely-observed historical detail! This is that huge brick of a book about Thomas Cromwell (not to be confused with Oliver, though he was Oliver’s great-great-uncle or something, and adopted the grandfather or whoever it was as his son) during the reign of Henry VIII. My knowledge of Tudor history is heavily skewed toward Henry’s kids, so I know just enough of what’s going on here to kind of recognize stuff; not enough to feel like I can see where everything is going. My one complaint is that Mantel has this weird habit of never referring to her protagonist by name, except in dialogue: Cromwell is always just “he,” and sometimes you have to stop and look to figure out which “he” a sentence is referring to. I have no idea why she does that. It’s off-putting, but the book does enough other things excellently well that I can get past it. Will definitely be reading the sequel.

The Younger Gods, Michael R. Underwood. (Full disclosure: the author has been a friend of mine for the last decade or so.) Fast-paced urban fantasy YA about a guy who runs away from his family of ~Cthulhu cultists, but of course doesn’t manage to escape their schemes for world destruction. I like the fact that Underwood made his own mythology; the metaphysics have a distinctly Lovecraftian feel, but aren’t based on actual Lovecraft. There were times where I wished the story had slowed down for more of a breather between action pieces, but given that I inhaled this entire thing on my flight home from Boston, clearly it was doing something right. People who like stories set in New York City to actually pay attention to the specific qualities of different neighborhoods may especially appreciate this one.

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A Year in Pictures – Fashion Hat

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This is just a random hat on a mannequin in the Museum of London — but I loved the way the various textures caught the light. (As is the case with so many of my “random object” photos.)

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A Year in Pictures – Tower and Head

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I have no idea why there is a giant sculpture of a severed head at the foot of the Town Hall Tower in Kraków. It’s hollow and big enough to climb inside (if you look closely at the photo, you can see somebody peering out through one of the eye sockets), and it’s one of the more inexplicable bits of public art I’ve ever seen. Dusted with snow, though, it lands in a weird zone between “creepy” and “charming.”

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A Year in Pictures – Hagia Sophia Mosaic

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I got a remarkable number of good shots out of the Hagia Sophia, considering that I had no idea how to use my camera at the time . . . .

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A Year in Pictures – Stonehenge Crow

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I don’t actually know whether this is a crow or a raven or what. All I know is that it was perching atop one of the rocks of Stonehenge, and I leapt like a mad thing to get this shot before it flapped away.

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A Year in Pictures – A Napoleonic Dinner

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I’m not enough of a food photographer to have a really splendid picture appropriate for Thanksgiving, but in lieu of that, I give you this dinner table from the apartments of Napoleon III, in the Louvre.

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