Rachel Manija Brown's Blog, page 128

The Bone Key, by Sarah Monette

A collection of old-school stories of ghosts and other things that go bump in the night, starring a socially anxious, neurasthenic archivist by the name of Kyle Murchison Booth.

The stories are in the tradition of eerie old tales like “The Monkey’s Paw” and “Whistle and I’ll Come For You, My Lad,” in which terrors are not laid out in gory detail, but lurk, mostly unseen, in the corner of your eye. Family curses, incubi, resurrected dead that come back wrong, and all sorts of hauntings beset poor lonely Booth, in addition to the more private terrors inside his head. The stories are atmospheric, eerie, and sad.

Booth’s social isolation is offset a bit by several stories in which people offer him friendship and understanding, though he generally isn’t sure exactly what to do with it. I was unclear on the exact time period of the book, other than “not contemporary.” Booth is gay, which certainly doesn’t help with his social problems, but I’m not sure he’d do much better nowadays in that department. He’s the sort of person who would really benefit from therapy, but would never see a therapist for the exact reasons which make him need it.

This pleasingly eerie book is best read in a soft armchair in front of a crackling fire on a dark and preferably stormy night. Sweet dreams, and don't look out the window.

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Hello, hello, to new and old!

Come on in! Discussion is welcome here. You don't need to know me to comment to a post. If you have any questions or comments about anything in this post or elsewhere, now or ever, just ask or say; I'm not touchy.

I mostly post book reviews. I also post about fanfic, writing, movies, TV, food, psychology, life in Los Angeles, emergency response, travel, etc. I cut for major spoilers, but otherwise this is a "read at your own risk" journal.

I moderate two comms. One is FF Friday ( fffriday , for recs, reviews, and discussion of F/F books, fanfic, etc. Just click to join. The other is eroticanons , for people who are or want to self-publish professionally. (Any genre, not just erotica; that's a holdover from earlier days.) If you're interested, click to join, then send me a message saying how you heard about it.

My favorite book is Watership Down, my favorite ice cream flavor is peppermint stick, and my favorite X-Man is Rachel Summers. Yes, I named myself after her.

( click here to read more about me, my fandoms, how to use tags on DW, disaster relief, and werewolf Marines. )

Things often burst into flames in my vicinity, especially cars, so I keep two fire extinguishers in the trunk. I once had my pants catch fire while I was naked and dripping wet. Welcome to my journal.

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Welcome, new people and old! If you want to ask me a question or give me a topic...

...I will answer in comments here, right now. Offer only valid for today!

(I can't do the December question meme, because I am spending most of December in a cabin without internet. I may post occasionally as I'll have it if I lug my laptop to my parents' house, but not daily. If you want to know what I usually post about, just page down or click on the tags to any entry to see more like it.)

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Adrift, by Steven Callahan

A well-written account of how Callahan spent 76 days alone and adrift in a life raft after his ship sank in a storm. He was an expert sailor and had been on a long solo voyage before that, so he was well-equipped to handle the situation. He goes into fascinating detail about how he set up his tiny raft (complete with hand-drawn diagrams), caught fish, etc. Even so, it was a dire situation and he survived only by means of extreme resourcefulness, previous foresight (he’d read and recalled other people’s adrift at sea accounts, and bought a “large” raft intended for six people because he could barely move in the smaller ones), and a lot of good luck.

That is, good luck considering that his ship sank, he nearly drowned trying to grab his survival duffel bag, ships passed him by without spotting him, and several crucial elements of his raft turned out to not work very well. On the other hand, he could have drifted in a direction where no one would have ever found him.

Callahan always had an essentially spiritual relationship with the ocean, which this experience only deepened, so the book falls into the category of “my relationship with nature” as well as straightforward survival story. I could have done with more of the aftermath but these sorts of books virtually always skimp on that, so I’m resigned. It’s considered a classic of first-hand survival experience and for good reason. My edition (Mariner) has a charming introduction which is well worth reading.

Only $2.99 on Kindle! Adrift: Seventy-six Days Lost at Sea[image error]

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What true survival stories are your favorites?

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Salute the Dark; The Scarab Path (Shadows of the Apt books 4 & 5), by Adrian Tchaikovsky

I took a break from the series after The Scarab Path and just picked it up again, so this isn't a review, just some flaily notes inspired by having just dived into the series again.

I'm glad I'm reading it right now, because the themes of doing your best in incredibly dark times and trying to make the right choices when it's not at all clear what is the right choice, is really something I want to read now.

It's a series largely about war, and without being very gory/gruesome, doesn't sugarcoat it at all. It's emotionally rough, but not despairing. So far at least, it's actually very hopeful about the good in humanity, and is that rare fantasy war series in which the characters who want peace and think it's possible to negotiate with the enemy are not presented as naive morons.

The brutality of the war is also offset by the sheer glee and exuberant inventiveness of the world. I fucking love the kinden, and every time a new one is introduced I share in the author's obvious delight. There's an especially good one in The Scarab Path.

Please don't spoil me for any new kinden introduced after The Air War! Especially, the nature of what's under the seal, which has not yet been confirmed. I love discovering them for myself.

I am not big on bugs in real life, but I admire and enjoy Tchaikovsky's obvious enthusiasm for all things insectile. Can you imagine his room as a young boy? It would be like my parents' cabin only on purpose.

Also, once I got over the hump of the Apt/Inapt divide being 1) essentially magical and so not based on Earth logic like how one defines a machine, 2) being based more on time period, i.e., people from the Bronze Age existing at the same time as people from the Industrial Revolution, than on literally how machines work, it became really fascinating and I love how he's exploring it and introducing new aspects of it.

I've read through book 8 (The Air War) by now, and my book notes include spoilers through that. Please no spoilers past that point! I am delighting in not knowing WTF is going to happen next.

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"Fogarty's Cove" comes across very differently if you have electric coils

View Poll: #20813

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The Journey, by John Marsden; Out of Time, by John Marsden

I usually like Marsden a lot but The Journey really didn’t play to his strengths. It’s an attempt to teach a lot of life lessons wrapped up in a story about a boy in a rather vague country with a tradition of adolescents going on a solo journey to become an adult. Argus’s journey is full of insights that do feel revelatory when you actually experience them, but fall flat when he just tells them.

He walks a lot, works for food, joins a traveling circus, has a first love, encounters birth and death, and returns home an adult, and it’s all remarkably boring. I think I would have liked it better if I’d read it when I was eleven or so, but I’m not sure I would have liked it a lot better.

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Out of Time is better-written and less preachy, but more frustrating. A boy named James who doesn’t speak due to some trauma gets hold of a time machine and uses it to make several journeys into the past, concluding with his own.

This story is interspersed with a whole bunch of others about other people in different time periods. As far as I could tell, only one of them intersects with James’ story in any direct manner. They mostly involve missing, mysterious, or displaced people. I could not for the life of me tell whether the other stories were supposed to have purely thematic resemblances to James’, or whether the people in them had also been switched around in time. James has a brief fantasy in the beginning of the book in which the latter happens, so maybe that but if so, I have no idea how or why. Maybe every time he uses his time machine, it displaces someone else??? (Wild guess, there’s nothing in the book to suggest this.) I was pretty baffled by the structure, and while James’ story has a resolution, most of the others don’t.

His final use of the time machine was also odd—( Read more... )

If anyone understood the book better than me, please explain it to me.

These are early books of his which seem fairly obscure, and I can see why. I’ve liked everything else I’ve read by him way better.

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The Monster Garden, by Vivian Alcock

Frances “Frankie” Stein, the youngest child and only daughter of an emotionally distant scientist and single dad, obtains a bit of mysterious gray goo from his mysterious laboratory. With the help of a bit of her own blood and a fortuitous lightning strike—and, just as importantly, her own ability to see the resultant “It’s alive!!!” as a life to be cared for rather than a thing to be dissected or a monster to be killed—she creates a monster.

A very, very cute monster, which she names Monnie. But if her father, her brothers, the lab, or the world at large discover it, they’ll probably kill it or keep it in a sterile cage forever. Her attempts to keep Monnie a secret as it grows and bonds with her lead to a deepening of some old relationships, the start of some new ones, and the creation of a new enemy.

Though this was very well-written and I loved the concept, in execution it combined enough elements of “adorable pet in danger” and “very young child in danger” that it was a bit of an upsetting read. Especially since these sorts of books often end with the death of the helpless thing in question. (If you want to know what happens to Monnie, ( Read more... )

I liked the prose a lot and the book overall was very well-done, but I enjoyed The Stonewalkers more. I’ll definitely be looking for more by Alcock.

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Final CA Midterm Election Results

CA election results in close races often come in late. This is because voting by mail is common and the ballots must by postmarked (as opposed to received) by Election Day. So we just got the results of one of the midterm elections, CA-21, on the 28th.

This district was not generally considered to be in play as a likely Democratic flip, as the Republican incumbent, David Valadao, was running for his fourth term and had won handily in his previous three elections. I hadn't been following it closely and was unsurprised when AP and several other media outlets called it for Valadao. However, that turned out to be a "Dewey Defeats Truman" moment, as it was extremely close when they called it and many ballots had not yet been counted. The Democratic challenger, TJ Cox, won.

That makes 7 seats flipped in CA, and brings the Democratic House gain to 40 seats. It's looking like the Republican Party is more or less dead in CA. There are still some strongholds, but they're outnumbered. Also, one of the Republicans who won, Duncan Hunter, is currently under indictment for flagrant misuse of campaign funds. (The indictment is pretty hilarious reading as it lists every single item he and his wife illicitly bought with campaign funds, with items like "one brown beanie and a tube of plastic animals, from Target" and "Twenty-three shots of whiskey and one steak.") I have a feeling that district will flip next election.

Despite some annoying moments, I generally had a very good experience volunteering with Swing Left. And the results have been beyond satisfying.

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A Kiss Before Dying, by Ira Levin

A classic noir novel by the author of Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives.

A handsome young sociopathic decides to set himself up by romancing and marrying a young woman with a rich father; unfortunately, this plan depends on him not getting her pregnant until after they’re safely married. When he gets her pregnant before she’s even told her father he exists, he has only two choices: abortion or murder. The former proves difficult…

That’s just the first third of this perfect little thriller, which has a great narrative voice and a plot with the intricacy and neatness of an expensive pocket watch. It has a number of plot twists, several of which are genuinely surprising and which I have not seen imitated before. It’s less dated than it is a snapshot in time, and a quite atmospheric one at that. I read it in an evening, which I recommend as it’s short and also the sort of book where every little detail is going to turn out to be relevant.

This has been filmed twice; please don’t spoil me for how the movies changed things, as I either haven’t seen them or don’t remember them, and now I want to see them.

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