Wet Dog - Sophie Gamand

Wet Dog - Sophie Gamand - 144 pages

Okay, so this is one of those things that I don't generally go for: a coffee table book.  I don't even like coffee.  I don't need a table for it.  But this, this glorious, giggle-inducing collection of photography, has absolutely made my day on several occasions.  It started at the library, when someone featured it in a place of honor in one of our end-of-shelf easels.  Every day, I'd pass it on the way to the copy machine or as I was shelving (sometimes deviating from the shortest path just to peep at this little dude's adorable face), and then I saw it at the bookstore and I realized I had to have a copy all to myself.  It's one of those silly things like cat memes and kawaii faces on foodstuffs that never fails to put a smile on my face, no matter what kind of day I've been having.  Who doesn't need more of that in their life?

Napoleon's Privates - Tony Perrottet

Napoleon's Privates: 2,500 Years of History Unzipped - Tony Perrottet - 256 pages

So, I saw this on the shelf while I was out putting some things away, and it caught my eye.  Don't pretend you're not curious, too!

This one's basically a collection of anecdotes about sexual exploits and devious historical figures through history.  Featured, as the title suggests, is Napoleon, with anchor chapters ranging from evidence that suggests cryptorchidism all the way to his autopsy and the removal and safekeeping of his...canape?  Many other historical figures make appearances along the way, including Hitler, Cleopatra, and JFK, and some other interesting topics are touched on, such as the history of the castrato, the Victorian era's issues with sexuality in general, and for some reason I'm still not sure of, the wholly unsalacious birth of the restaurant.

Unfortunately, this book suffers from a terrible lack of organization (chronological order would have made sense, but it seems to jump around all over the place).  For as much exhaustive research as went on behind the scenes of the final product, I really wanted the chapters to be...longer.  Many of the chapters are only a page or two in total, even with the footnotes.  But it's a fun, gossipy, inclusive read overall.  If you're looking for something that delves more into the historical impact of sexuality, try Sex with Kings, but this is a great introduction into those parts of our collective past that are often overlooked in a classroom setting.

The Geek Feminist Revolution - Kameron Hurley

The Geek Feminist Revolution - Kameron Hurley - 272 pages

This book is a collection of essays and blog posts by the author about a wide variety of topics, most of which carry a common theme of inclusivity, feminism, and geekdom.  Specifically, she discusses the representation of women, various sexual orientations, races, and economic statuses in the realm of gaming, sci-fi/fantasy, and fandoms.

This collection is a clarion call to awareness and responsibility for members of all communities, not just the geeks.  Because she is so stylistically strident, I had to pace myself more than I usually would as I was reading my way through this book for a couple of reasons; first, after reading two or three chapters, the essay presentation started to feel formulaic and that lessened the impact of her otherwise pointed observations, but also just because there's a lot to absorb here.  At times, it also seemed a little like an advertisement for her other fictional works and herself (near the end of the book is an entire chapter about how it feels for her to be "the man," or the accomplished author that's made it, and her tone of humility seemed too strained to be convincing to me), but she also gets very personal about events in her personal life that brought her to this most recent presentation of how she feels about the modern feminist movement.  And that is kind of the overall point here: marginalized persons moving to de-marginalize themselves by ripping the veil of complicity off of the words and attitudes we exhibit as a society every day.  This book is going to open your metaphorical peepers, whether you agree with every point or not.

Red Rising Trilogy - Pierce Brown

Red Rising Trilogy - Pierce Brown - 1390 pages

The tl:dr version of my review is this: don't waste time putting your pants on, run out RIGHT NOW and grab this whole trilogy. Don't bother with socks either, because they're about to be BLOWN OFF into the inky blackness of emotionally unforgiving space.

I am a commitment-phobe when it comes to series reads, because I've been burned before (I'm looking at you, Laurel K.). But I passed by this one on the shelf several times and finally picked up Red Rising despite what I thought was my better judgement.  This series proceeded to surprise, engage, and utterly emotionally destroy me, and isn't that what we're all looking for in a great book, after all?

The upshot of the story is that Darrow, a young dude who lives and works in the dangerous mines of Mars, witnesses his equally young wife commit a relatively innocuous act of treason by speaking out in her way about the injustice of the caste system their society has imposed. She's hung for it, and in their Red tradition, Darrow is forced to participate by pulling her feet to snap her neck.  It's an eloquent metaphor for everything Darrow does over the course of the trilogy, from subjecting himself to extensive surgeries that make him one of the pinnacle elite Golds, to molding himself into an instrument of violence and war.  He is forced over and over again to make the choice between preserving his personal humanity and offering it up as a sacrifice for what he believes is the greater good.

But this guy is not a messiah of Red or Gold. (Okay, well...there was this one time...two times? Whoops. Maybe there is room to draw a parallel there.) He's desperately, basely human in so many ways, from the love he shares with his new bloodthirsty family to the strategic mistakes he makes in both over- and underestimating the people around him. And that's really what's at the heart of these stories: humanizing the big picture, and a mix of grand scale loss with the intimate losses that win or lose the war.  It could not be more personal than witnessing and participating in a revolution with Darrow the Reaper as he builds family and loses family for his cause. That cobbled-together family crosses all the castes, and each member of it humanizes another strata in this dystopian society where your Color defines who you are.

Real talk: I can't say I wasn't kind of frustrated by the message here; Darrow struggles internally with the difference of change through peaceful measures and through violent ones, and I really wanted him to find a peaceful out even if that meant a dreadfully boring third book. That does not happen, and these books are a bloodbath. By the third book, I was seriously concerned that none of the characters were going to make it to the last pages...and not very many did. But Brown is a master of twisting the knife by orchestrating emotional and symbolic deaths for almost every character. He also has a great handle on the negative space of novel crafting; you are literally in Darrow's head for every twist, every strategic happening, and Brown still manages to surprise and mislead in a way that makes this story an adventure on every page. It's a trilogy that demands that you appreciate the orchestrated violence and also appreciate the depth of the philosophical questions the premise raises about our own society. Borrowing a gaming term, it's a tank of a thinker.

In terms of relatively contemporary works, this trilogy combines elements of several mythologies, Star Wars, Game of Thrones, Tolkien's works, and the first book in particular could generally be described as The Hunger Games on some kind of hypothetical literary steroid that makes book muscles and brains explode by interplanetary proportions. It's thoughtful, extraordinarily and creatively violent, and it's unsettlingly timely to the social struggles we're facing right now. It is a trilogy well worth the emotional scarring you will suffer reading it. Get some kleenex, prepare to cringe through the next 1300+ pages, and resign yourself to staying up until 4am to finish "just one more chapter." It is an amazing ride.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J. K. Rowling

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone - J.K. Rowling - 336 pages

Okay. I avoided reading this series as long as I possibly could, but curiosity got the better of me and I went for it. We all know about Harry Potter...orphan Annie'd by his heroically wizardy parents and left to live with his rhabdophobic aunt and uncle, this kid is obviously destined for some far-fetched, magical save that puts him in just enough danger to keep it interesting. Three-headed dogs, illegal dragons, trolls, whiny blond boys, a mysterious but lethal enemy lurking, and professors who are either unbelievably under-prepared for the logistics of boarding school living or questionably irresponsible in the level of freedom they give these largely unsupervised children...it's all in here. Run into a brick wall, no injuries? Check. Handing over the secrets of magical nukes to eleven year old children? Yup. Oh, you wanna get into the restricted part of the library where the books might eat you alive? Okay, let's get you in there with an invisibility cloak! You want to break those long-standing rules about brand new students zipping around on magical jet engines with no helmets on?  Yeah, dude, let's ROCK!

I get it. I get that there's a pop culture tide that goes along with this book, and I get that parents can connect with their kids and their friends young and older by reading it together. But here's what I don't get, especially from this book in particular, considered outside the influence of the eight movies I've already sat through: the core messages in this book are kinda iffy. Harry is handed the perfect out to his unfortunate circumstances in the form of wizard school, and when he gets that perfect out he turns it on the Dursleys and chooses to treat them to the same bullying and fear mongering that they used to make his own life miserable. He makes friends at Hogwarts, and that's great, but he bonds with one because they have a common dislike of Malfoy (a boy they hardly know), and he bonds with the other only after making fun of her for being intelligent, driven, but somewhat socially awkward. Then he uses those friends and everything they offer him to unravel the mystery of the Sorcerer's Stone (which is absolutely none of their business, frankly), and in the pursuit of that mystery he allows those friends to sacrifice themselves for his cause. The main adult they hang out with is the dropout moving live animals through the black market of wizardom, and he's lovable but not bright, baiting these kids to involve themselves to the point of mortal danger instead of having veterans of the last major magical conflict handle it. And in the meantime, they vilify an entire quarter of their schoolmates for being Slytherin, they either crap their pants or set fire to Snape, who did nothing but expect discipline, respect, and space from these uppity upstart children, and Harry basically lets his buddies do the heavy lifting while he focuses on Quidditch.

...What?!

I know I'm in the minority here, and that's okay, but this book hit a lot of peeves for me. I know people love it because it's "magical," and to those people I say...have you read any other sci-fi/fantasy EVER?  Because what's in this book is not original, inspired stuff. Mythology, Shakespeare, Tolkien, practically every other fantasy writer writing prior to the release of this book...it's all out there. The saving grace here is that ignoring the plot holes and grossly unoriginal representation of wizarding, the characters are intentionally flawed, and that kept me reading into the second book. Because it's impossible to read Harry Potter in a bubble, I know that there will be growth and change in these characters, and that believable human element is what made the rest of this mess a tolerable read for me. And it's hard to ignore that although I have issues with this book, it's a piece of...literature that has brought a lot of people together, and even if I don't respect the work, I can respect that result.

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore - Robin Sloan

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore - Robin Sloan - 288 pages

Okay, so if you love books/bookstores, clandestine mysteries, high fantasy nerdery, and don't mind a couple easy-way-out plot devices, this book is your man.  Or...book.  Whatever, the point is that if Dan Brown, Tolkien, and Ernest Cline had a three way baby book, this would pretty much be it.  It is a shameless geek out about old books, mysterious legacies, high fantasy, secret societies, Googling EVERYTHING, AD&D references, movie props, computer hacking, and buddy adventuring, wrapped up in earnest humor and a glow in the dark cover (seriously, it glows in the dark!).  What is not to love here?! 

Challenger Deep - Neal Shusterman

Challenger Deep - Neal Shusterman - 320 pages

This was...something.  Something disturbing, something hilarious at times, something that inspired sympathetic longing, and something that frankly hurt to read.  This is Caden's seafaring voyage through the treatment of his mental illness, and Shusterman is brilliant at weaving the real and the almost real and the hopefully not real here.  Challenger Deep is the deepest trench in the ocean, and in Caden's delusions, he is the first mate on a pirate ship heading straight for it to collect sunken treasure.  The captain of the ship is changeable and dangerous, his talking parrot cryptic, and each plots against the other with Caden's help.  Caden's fellow hospital dwellers come along through parts of his voyage as different members of the ship's crew, but in the end, it's just Caden and the sea and whatever's at the bottom of it.

What made this such a painful read was the artful way Shusterman wove the real and almost real together, based on his own son's experience with schizoaffective disorder.  Drawings from his son's time in the hospital moonlight on pages throughout the book, illustrating Caden's descent, and the tangible evidence of those drawings promotes a visceral realness to this not-quite-fictional account.  Caden's resignation (and the author's implied resignation) about the difficulty of living with ongoing mental illness make it a bittersweet journey; you're going to want a happy ending, but even if Caden finds his equilibrium back on the high seas, you know he's going back again eventually.  It'd be easy to close the book with a riding off into the sunset victorious moment to satisfy our want for definitive, permanent wins, but what you'll get here is much more honest.

Confessions of a Prairie Bitch - Alison Arngrim

Confessions of a Prairie Bitch - Alison Arngrim - 320  pages

Okay, so I watched a lot of Little House when I was growing up, and even now if I see a re-run, it is ON (does anyone else do that?  Re-watch all those shows you watched as a kid to see exactly how they warped you?).  And, confession time: Nellie Olsen was bar none my favorite character in Walnut Grove.  Especially when she was doing mean things to that goodie two shoes Laura.  Get her, Nellie!

I picked this up thinking there'd be some juicy behind the scenes insider stuff about Little House, and there was some, but mostly the take away here is what Arngrim's done with her Nellie success.  From the attitude to the exposure, she's used her time in ringlets as a vehicle to propel her into activism for both abused children and AIDS awareness.  Her narrative is sassy, thoughtful, compassionate, and at times brutally honest about her childhood experiences of abuse and neglect that inspired her to speak up and speak out.

Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel

Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel - 352 pages

Arthur Leander is an actor literally dying for his craft on the stage during King Lear, and then the world ends.  Georgia Flu sweeps across the world and wipes out 99% of humanity, leaving the rest scrambling to survive.

The real heart of this book is its cast of characters, all revolving in some way around Arthur.  One man tries to resuscitate him on the stage.  One man is his lifelong friend.  His three ex-wives, his son...all of them connected in some way to Arthur and in smaller ways, to each other.  The most fascinating of these is the girl who was on stage with him for King Lear; in the aftermath of the flu, she joins a travelling symphony and makes her way around the barren Midwest, acting out Shakespeare for the people left along the way.

If you're looking for something heavy on plot, you won't find it here, but what you will find is a deeply engaging, melancholy, regretful, and thoroughly destroyed (in some cases) cast of characters who manage to keep each other alive in memory and deed.

Annihilation - Jeff VanderMeer

Annihilation - Jeff VanderMeer - 208 pages

For a depressing time, call this book.

No, really.  Here we are, hanging out with a biologist on an expedition with three other scientists who have been sent to explore Area X.  They know that the previous twelve (is it twelve?) expeditions have all failed in one way or another; some people come back with terminal cancer, others don't come back at all...so why would anyone volunteer to go again?  As the book unfolds, the biologist's reasons become semi-clear, but not before a conspiracy of her fellow expeditionists, the people that sent them, and even Area X itself are thrown in the mix.

The thing is, this book reads like a bad dream.  Everyone is broken, including the narrator, and that equates to neurotic internal dialogues and paranoia.  There's violence and revelatory discoveries and betrayal, but the narration wrestles around in a scratchy, depressing blanket of bland descriptions and not quite enough clear information to really make sense of anything.  You can infer, you can guess, but the answers just aren't there.