Yep, still reading...

In keeping with my new-ish plan to write about what I’m reading closer to when I read it, I need to catch up a bit.  I’ve got ten books to write about since last time.

Much of my reading outside of my nutrition text book has been about flat-out escapism.  In that vein, I was thoroughly excited when I remembered that I had the first volume of the Munchkin graphic novel on my shelf.  It was just like the game:  fun and low-stakes with doses of goofy humor and a surprising amount of attachment to fairly minimal characters.  I will seek out volume two at some later date (maybe after kicking in the door of my local game shop to loot the room for it?) (That was a Munchkin game joke…).

My bookshelf-clearing friend bequeathed me several Bobbsey Twins books, written by Laura Lee Hope (who may, for all I know, be like Carolyn Keene, a pen name for anonymous write-to-order authors).  I read The Bobbsey Twins in the Country and The Bobbsey Twins at Spruce Lake.  I remember having read some of the many zillion in the series when I was a kid.  I did not remember the casual racism and classism and sexism.  Rereading left me feeling somewhat split—my uncritical, soaking-in-it small self enjoying the adventures and my current, appalled self wanting to apologize to pretty much everyone in the world for the arrogance, bias, and general entitlement of white people.  Somewhere in the middle of those two selves lurked the ghost of an earlier version of adult me who used to believe that we put the best of our society in our books for children, the golden, good parts that laid out our ideals; she looked unhappy.  So that route to escapism didn’t turn out entirely well.

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s work in A Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales (both in one volume, so counting as one book) held up somewhat better, possibly because he makes fun of everyone, from the young adult narrator to the sassy children to the erudite elders as he retells various Greek myths.  Myths, being durable, seem to survive the interpretations layered on them through succeeding generations.  After all, almost everyone enjoys a good monster battle, even if we tend to redefine the monsters in every generation.

Speaking of monsters, Neal Stephenson and J. Frederick George create a scary one in Interface.  It’s a tale of AI gone wrong, unleashed on politics via cyber upgrades to a candidate’s brain, making him remotely controllable, eminently electable, and very, very dangerous.  I liked it, but found it depressing because the manipulation of the electorate seemed all too real and the relatively happy ending all too imaginary.

Then I turned to Jonathan Stroud, who also has much to say about monsters (well, ghosts) and the monsters that unleash them on the rest of us.  I read the fourth and fifth books in the Lockwood and Company series, The Creeping Shadow and The Empty Grave.  The series as a whole has an interesting premise, in that only children and teens can see and deal with the ghosts that are haunting and hunting the living in dystopian modern London and environs.  It’s a good way to deal with the get-rid-of-the-adults-so-the-adventure-can-happen problem in these days of helicopter parenting.  It’s also a gesture of faith in the next generations:  they have the resilience and tools to fix the messes we older people have made for them.  As always, the prose is well-constructed and amusing.  The characters have depth, by which I mean that they remain likeable even when they have flaws if we are rooting for them and they have motivations that aren’t just evil for the sake of evil if we are rooting against them.  The fifth book could be the last, although it leaves a little room for another go.  Our heroes are going to age out soon, so I don’t see more than one more coming in any case.

Robert Galbraith (aka J.K. Rowling) turns in some respectable work in Lethal White, the new Cormoran Strike mystery.  Good prose and the twists and turns of romance made up for the fact that I figured out who did it (and I almost never manage that).  I have liked all the books in the series, but have not felt the need to keep or reread them.

Julia Buckley’s book A Dark and Twisting Path at last provided the escapism I was looking for all along.  Buckley writes cozies.  Bad things happen, of course, but our attractive heroine bravely faces whatever happens with her dear friends and handsome boyfriend to help.  Also, there is delicious food.  She could write faster and I would be okay with that because in these times, solvable problems are extremely satisfying.

Finally, I read something practical for facing these times:  Decolonizing Methodologies by Linda Tuhiwai Smith.  My kid told me to read it.  Tuhiwai Smith writes about the indigenous experience of research, how it and researchers have often perpetrated further crimes against the indigenous populations in the name of “extending knowledge.”  The first half of the book describes the problem, which is familiar to anyone who has been paying attention to any of the oppressed people’s complaints about white Western society in the last long time.  The second half describes actual useful ways of thinking and doing to get past the evil and move toward something much better.  Elegant and accessible writing make the book much more pleasant to read than I expected and I was encouraged that there was hope to be found in her practical, thorough, and inclusive plans.  Turns out I needed that more than escapism.  Go figure.

I am now up to date.  Fall total so far:  16 books.