Books - Kate Degelau-Pierce

Responsibility and relationships

I picked this up because I thought it would be fun and gossipy about a family, both today and two generations ago. Alas. It wasn’t.

It’s not that The Necklace was terrible, per se. It just wasn’t for me.

It’s about a love and what it means to go find yourself and how your relationships may or may not make it through such a journey of self-discovery. And is it selfish to take time for yourself, to figure out who you are and what you want? I mean, now it’s not, what with our extended adolescences. But it definitely used to be kind of a problem. What if you didn’t want to get married at 18? There’s a dude in this book who travels around the world to find himself, but expects his lady friend to wait at home for him. (To be fair, he does offer to marry her and bring her with, and she’s the one who demurs.)

This one is going to end up in one of the local free little libraries.

Go forth and be a part of the world

I loved At the Existentialist Cafe. Perhaps it’s a Paris thing, perhaps it’s a cocktail thing, who knows. Who cares? It’s a pop history of Existentialism, along with the author’s reactions when she went back and re-read many of the seminal works on existentialism.

I’ve never read any Sartre or de Beauvoir (but I have read some Camus), and here’s what I learned.

Existentialism isn’t the depressing, disaffected Camus of The Stranger. It’s not black turtlenecks and sitting in cafés staring at your coffee, contemplating the meaning of life. The meaning of life is existing and getting out into the world, thinking about your experiences and your relationships with the people around you. You are nothing without the people around you and how you relate to them. Don’t sit back and expect things to happen! Make them happen! Be a part of the world.

I loved that message. I love it even more for not having to read Being and Nothingness and still learn something about it.

This version of existentialism is also totally applicable to the world we live in now: what are your circumstances? What can you do in those circumstances? What do you feel? How does it make you feel? What can you effect? Changing yourself changes your relation to the world, changing your relations to the world changes the world.

Anyway, go forth and be a part of things. You’ll make a difference.

Getting butt-in-seat time

Fangirl is a fun YA book about a young woman (she’s 18) who’s dealing with some things. She’s retreated into writing fanfiction, which is not a thing everyone is happy about.

But Fangirl is nothing if not a love letter to fanfiction and the people who write it. They’re finding their voices, they’re learning how to write, they’re getting butt-in-seat time of getting it done. You don’t become a better writer without, you know, WRITING. If fanfiction is your vehicle for that, great!

And, to my mind, if you’re willing to put what you write out there? That takes guts. The internet is not always a nice place – if you’re confident enough to put yourself out there like that, more power to you. (But maybe that’s how you get feedback too – how do you know if you’re any good without some way of finding out?)

Anyway, Fangirl is fun and I have a lot more respect for fanfiction authors and sites now.

Parenthood on Different Planets

Shortly after finishing The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, I decided to see if Becky Chambers had any other books – A Closed and Common Orbit is the sequel (and there’s a third! coming out sometime next year! I’m excited!).

A Closed and Common Orbit has strong themes around parenthood, specifically motherhood, and about what it means to be human. There are two parallel storylines. First, in the past Pepper is one of many human girls who clean up trash for reuse and recycling, at least until she escapes; how she makes it off the world she lives on, who takes care of her, all of that. Second, in the present day, Pepper is doing something highly illegal: taking an AI who’s meant to be running a ship and put it into a human (robot) body. Her name is Sidra; how Sidra perceives the world and interacts with it and adjusts, that’s this story.

The chapters interweave, letting you see how both are forming who they are and how they react to their very different worlds. This is different form than the essentially short-story collection of The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, and it works.

This is a universe I love, and you so rarely get good science fiction that focuses on women. It’s all the more precious for that.

Recommended.

Reminding me why I like science fiction

I have a sneaking suspicion that somewhere in Becky Chambers’ creative process for this book she thought, “I really miss Firefly.” This isn’t a criticism, and The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet doesn’t read as fanfic. But there is some shared DNA.

Rosemary Harper joins the crew of the Wayfarer as a clerk, running away from something, we don’t know just what. Along the way we get to know her and her crewmates as they journey across the galaxy to create a wormhole from their destination back to civilization. It’s not set up as a series of short stories, but that’s the book’s structure – each interlude tells us something new about one of the crew or the relationship between the everyone. We get to see where everyone shines and what their flaws are.

And it’s also about getting along – and not getting along – with each other. We are different, we come from different cultures, we like different things, but in the end we’re all just trying to make our way in the world. A little understanding goes a long way.

I ended up listening to the audiobook, despite the fact that I’d bought the paperback. I’m glad I have both – I walk a lot, and The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet was good company. But I also like being able to go back and pick out the particular story/chapter I want to re-read in the physical book.

Highly recommended.

We’re all going to die so you might as well be happy about being alive right now

What does it mean to be happy? Do you have to be happy all the time? Perky? What if you’re happy but everyone around you isn’t? What if you were just aware of what’s going on around you and generally satisfied with things?

The Antidote argues that happiness is the wrong goal. That by always striving towards something – perfect happiness – you’re setting yourself up for failure. You’ll never get there, not really. What happens when you get sick? When something doesn’t go right? You won’t be happy.

Instead, we should all strive for what I will call awareness. Awareness of our place in the world, of the network of people we surround ourselves with. Awareness of who we are and the situations we’re in. Our whole lives too, not just one part (work, marriage, whatever). Awareness and acceptance that we’re going to age and die.

I agree with this all up to a point. I mean, awareness is, I think, a better and more realistic goal than happiness. But as a person with some ambition who would like to make some things happen in life… it’s hard to fit that in sometimes with the awareness/zen buddhist way of thinking about things. Maybe it’s figuring out how to make things happen while not making yourself unhappy – keeping that awareness and understanding who you are and why you want things. Hm.

Anyway, The Antidote is a useful book to read as a counterargument to the idea that you should always be positive and upbeat.

Be yourself

I really really really really really like Fear and Clothing. I like how it explores the different ways that Americans dress. I like that Cintra Wilson tries to reason out why people in different parts of the country dress differently. I like her feminism, I like her ideas of weaponized femininity, I like her respect for Valerie Steele, I like her attitude towards Iowans.

What I didn’t like was how the structure of the book sort of falls apart at the end – why are there so many photos of Seattle fashion if you’re not going to have a chapter on Seattle? Why couldn’t she have talked directly to more people who lived in each place she visited, who live with that fashion day in and day out? Did she have to be so mean towards Salt Lake City?

But mostly, I like her ideas that fashion is a way of expressing who *you* are and your fashion should be unique and different. Clothes really are fun and do communicate a lot about who you are (or who you want to be). You are unique. Why shouldn’t your clothes be?

Recommended.

Skippable bits and infidelity

I never really understood Elmore Leonard’s writing advice: Try to leave out the parts people will skip. As a reader, I don’t skip parts of books; sometimes they’re slow and maybe I’ll skim some, but fully skipping has always seemed like a recipe for misunderstanding.

But Rich People Problems has skippable parts. The bits with Eddie. The bits with Kitty. They’re two characters who are so venal – they just grate on me. They’re funny in small doses, but a little bit goes a long way. There is FAR too much of them in this book. I ran an eye over those parts as I turned the page, so I didn’t miss any major plot points.

Otherwise, I think this is a fun, fine book. It’s made me want to visit Singapore and eat all the food there. It even explores many different types of infidelity, without doing it in an in-your-face, overly intellectual kind of way. (Does that make it trashy? Maybe.)

Recommended, if you liked the first two.

Sex and violence and feeling worthless

Difficult Women is easily the most literary of all the books I’ve read lately. Roxane Gay is an excellent author, able to express herself clearly and concisely and in a way that makes me appreciate just how good she is. Which is not to say that these stories are overly intellectual or anything. Just… she’s good.

All of the women in these stories have issues with sex, violence, feeling worthless, and the combination thereof. None of them are particularly likable. There is at least one thinly veiled story of Roxane Gay’s own gang rape at the age of 12. I cannot imagine – literally, I can’t.

Are these stories part of her working through that? Maybe? I mean, I suspect the therapy was long and involved and that’s not the kind of thing you can work through whilst writing even one book. Do I think this book of short stories would be completely different if that hadn’t happened? Absolutely, because she would have been a completely different person.

Difficult Women: worth your time.

Is lying always bad?

Is it ever ok to lie to someone?

A little white lie or a big fat lie, either one, I won’t judge you. Sometimes we do things during wartime we can’t or shouldn’t admit to later. Sometimes we’re not allowed.

Sometimes, it’s just a little white lie, to spare your feelings or to make ourselves feel better about why we did something. Sometimes we make up huge stories to hide completely from – well. If we told you that wouldn’t be hiding now would it?

Recommended, though I do prefer the audio version of these books.