Peeking into the rock

Books month of March

2020-04-04T20:54:47Z

through April 4. That appears to be how I'm doing this now.
Completed books:
Caramelo, by Sandra Cisneros slightly magical realist Mexican family saga
Jackaby, by William Ritter, urban fantasy/post-steampunk vol 1 of a series
I'll Never Get Out of this World Alive, by Steve Earle, fantasy/magical realism, the latter life of Hank WIlliams's discredited doctor, and Hank's ghost and...
Fangirl, by Rainbow Rowell, YA college freshmen romcom
Sag Harbor, by Colson Whitehead, semi-autobiographical coming of age novel
New York 2140, by Kim Stanley Robinson, midfuture epic
Ghostly Echoes, by WIlliam Ritter, 3rd in Jackaby series
The Cardturner, by Louis Sachar, YA comic-drama coming of age story involving bridge and awful moneygrubbing parents
A Princess in Theory, by Alyssa Cole, surprise African royalty romance with an orphan scientist
Jepp, Who Defied the Stars, by Katherine Marsh, YA historical coming of age disability science romance-adjacent

Books dropped before the end:
Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell
Makers, by Cory Doctorow
The Reader, by Traci Chee
Wickedly Charming, by Kristine Grayson

Let me get the dropped books out of the way first. Cloud Atlas has some cool characters in it, but it's a setup to prove that humanity is bad and terrible and the worst ones will always win. I gave up maybe 75% of the way through. I do like the gimmick structure--a series of unfinished stories, whose "and then what happened?" is revealed in the story of a later character with only tangential, but at the same time substantive and consequential, connections to the earlier character. But that, and the really quite nice writing, are not enough to elevate the book from the tedious sophomoric "moral."

I was enjoying the hell out of Makers and would have finished it but nobody I knew could assure me that the next bit coming up wasn't going to be a second life-destroying physical attack on a main character graphically and lavishly described for many harrowing pages possibly resulting in the permanent maiming or death of the character. The fact that this character was a woman only opened up even more awful possibilities than the first attack, which nearly finished me. Nobody who talks about this book even notes that the first attack takes place, so the fact that the second potential one isn't mentioned is no kind of evidence at all. There was no reason for the way the first one was written except to highlight the erection that the attacker had.

The Reader is mischaracterized in its publicity materials. It's not about a world with no readers in it, where there is one magical book and one unlikely person who learns to read. It is about assassins. It's well written but not my cup of tea.

Wickedly Charming starts out with the premise that the archetypes of modern versions of fairytales are based on distortions of the real lives of people from backward but very magical countries. The stepmothers' lives have been outright lied about. Two expats from that world, Snow White's stepmother and Cinderella's divorced Prince Charming, collaborate on a novel meant to Tell The Whole Real Truth and have a light romantic comedy of their own while they're at it. And then, halfway through the book, we jump the shark and there's a bunch of artificially injected Plot with Nasty Villains in it, and all the fun goes out of the book as we stare slackjawed at the introduction of dumb stereotyped antagonists. Talk about missing one's own point.

Okay, the finished ones:

Caramelo This is a rush. I definitely recommend listening to this one rather than reading it, because CIsneros reads it herself andf her voice is soooo perfect for this. Also, while the title is explained by several bits in the story--the fundamental one being the name of the design of the unfinished rebozo that is handed down in the family-- it also describes the impact of the story's structure. The import of every little detail-and every little detail has import-spreads sweetly across your brain like the sugar of candy that you suck for a long time: and then, suddenly, something explodes like when you crunch down on a filled candy. CIsneros reads it in a sweet, high-pitched rush, sometimes full of mirth, other times outrage, other times, deep sympathy. Read it! Or better, listen to it.

Oops I didn't tell you anything about the story. Several generations of a Mexican family reveal their secrets to the modern daughter, especially "The Awful Grandmother" who, it turns out, has her reasons.

Jackaby A plucky middle class English maiden arrives in a fictional Massachusetts town in the late 1800s, in need of a job after having finished out a stint working on a paleontological dig in Ukraine. She crosses paths with a Seer who is fighting mostly fairytale creatures. This is a four-book series and apparently the stakes accelerate a lot. This is a category of book I usually avoid because I'm not fond of Jim Butcher or Laurell K. Hamilton, but these are their own thing. They have a little Dr. Who feel due to the title character's eccentricity and odd clothing, but the POV character is more than an observer, and the side characters all amount to something interesting.

I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive More than a decade after he screwed up and accidentally killed Hank Williams with a drug overdose, the doctor is a junkie, patching up gangsters and providing illegal abortions to afford his next fix. He's haunted by Hank Williams's sarcastic and apparently vindictive ghost. And then... everything changes because he provides an abortion for the granddaughter of a curandero, who is just now ready to come into her own powers and use the teachings of her grandpa. This is written by the musician Steve Earle. I believe he avoids the exoticism trap pretty well when he depicts the young woman's point of view. I liked this book a lot.

Fangirl I think a lot of people were mad at this book for one reason or another, but I liked it. The protagonist is one of a pair of twins, freshmen at college, who have always done everything together until recently. The other twin has been fighting to separate herself, and it's not going well for our protagonist, who has some mental issues she handles either well or not depending on the circumstances. While her sister gets in over her head with the fast-living frat-adjacent crowd, the protagonist struggles with the divide between fan writing and mainstream writing (with a teacher who thinks all fan writing is at its core plagiarism, but has some good points about how to write mainstream writing: and an exploitive cowriter) There's a lot more plot: a mother who abandoned them, a manic father (I think it's not bipolarism), a couple of surprise friends. I thought it was a pleasant book.

Sag Harbor So apparently rich kid books are a lot more interesting if they are black rich kids. This is an amiable "how I spent the summer of my junior year" ramble, which I guess wasn't really supposed to be out to show how rich kid privilege gets totally undermined by race, but it does do that, while also telling a sweet coming of age story. I haven't read his serious science fiction books yet: I mean to, but the subjects of them make me ancxious, so I thought I'd read this first to get attached to the author before going there.

New York 2140 Kim Stanley Robinson annoyed the hell out of me with the Mars books: I didn't finish the first one because of grotesque stereotyping and I only glanced into the others before giving up. But I loved the California ones. This is more like those. It's pretty damn fine. It has the post-apocalyptic setup but it's not about the post-apocalyptic premise, at all. It's really germane to now, obviously, and though it has a deus ex machina in it, it's weird enough and fun enough that you don't really mind too much, also because the deus ex machina would not be enough without the collective and political action of, well, basically, New York.

Also I'm really looking forward to N.K.Jemisin's The City We Became, which is a different take on New York resiliency.

Ghostly Echoes The 3rd book of the Jackaby series, which I read out of order because availability: I don't think it's a problem, though they afre definitely in a progression.

The Cardturner Did you read Holes? Then you'll understand why I grabbed this book even though it's about bridge. The card game. I mean, that's not entirely true, I love books that are also about a thing, a world that people inhabit, like that. The blurb was a little more saccharine than necessary, but I trust this author! It turns out it's another book that is probably improved by being read by the author. The protagonist's parents are trying to get him to develop a favorite-uncle relationship with a great-uncle because they want to inherit from him. The opportunity arises because the old man has gone blind from diabetes and he needs a cardturner to help him play bridge, since he has just fired another teenager because she questioned his choices. There's a long-buried complicated love story, and a tentative relationship developing between the teenagers, and problems with longstanding friendships, and and and. And also hefty asides to teach bridge. I thought it was a lot of fun, though aspects of the plot were inevitable and therefore predictable.

A Princess In Theory I have a... complicated relationship with romance. In theory, I should love romance. I certainly love reading about romance books. In practice I am more likely to like reading books that are more what I would call "romance-adjacent"--there's a relationship story there, but there's another main focus to it. One rule that usually works for me is to avoid books with royalty in the title -- like anything "The Duke's Mistress" or whatever. Because I do enjoy reading about romances, I have heard rather a lot about Alyssa Cole, so I was quite willing to break that rule and test whether I would like this book. I kind of do. The protagonist is an epidemiologist! Very timely (even before the pandemic. We always knew the pandemic was coming). (this book does not have a pandemic in it)

I did like it, and I understand why Alyssa Cole has such stalwart fans. Among the pluses: it's sort of a Wakanda novel: the fictional African country has managed to mostly avoid colonization and so therefore is more prosperous and less unequal than other countries. Though there's some weird justification for the excesses of the palace. Cole is quite clearly trying to have her twirly princess dress and her social justice too, and that's fine. A strong plus for some people (including me at some time in the past) is its sex positivity. In romance categories I think it is what is called "sexy" rather than "erotic:" if I understand the difference, the former has sex in it, the latter is centered on sex or sexuality (and pornography is writing that is sex itself). At this stage of my life, written sex is very "meh" to me, so that after the first sex scene, I skipped forward over the others. I don't know why! I do the same with most fight and battle scenes.

The romance was fine, the descriptions of not-Wakanda were very nice, the slice of life in New York were nice. I wasn't satisfied with the mystery B plot. I felt that it could have been a lot more interesting and consequential. The revelation of what happened with the protagonist's parents seemed to me to fall flat completely--as if Cole had actually worked out something that made full sense, had consequence, and actually explained what happened--and then didn't write it into the final draft because of word limits or deadlines or ennui or something.

Jepp This is based on the existence, at Tycho Brahe's Uraniborg castle, of a Dutch dwarf named Jepp and a tippling moose. It tells a fictional tale of how he got there and what he did after he got there. I tried checking on the romance but wasn't able to verify it. I hope it was true. I'm certain that the family origins are fictional, and his life at the court of the Infanta in Brussels: though her fondness for dwarfs and what she put them through is historical fact. The high drama and angst of the book are not just provided by the harrowing events in it, but also by the fact that they are the reminiscences of an innocent teenager in the wide world for the first time. Characters have depth, and the landscape is well-drawn. I just finished it and that's why I'm finally writing these books up!

comments

February reading

2020-03-05T09:06:19Z

through March 3
books I finished:
Alex, Approximately by Jenn Barnett (YA California romance-adjacent)
Misktik Lake by Martha Brooks (YA Canada romance)
The Music Shop by Rachel Joyce (UK austerity romance-adjacent)
Anatomy of a Disappearance by Hisham Matar (Middle Eastern coming of age)
The Library of Lost and Found by Phaedfra Patrick (UK womens lit)
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman (UK womens lit)
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee (Korean-Japanese family saga)
My Sister, The Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite (Nigerian ...I don't know what to call it genre-wise)
The Master Butchers Singing Club by Louise Erdrich (Midwest family saga)
The Painted Drum by Louise Erdrich (Midwest-Native magical realism)
What Was Lost by Catherine O'Flynn (UK austerity community mystery?)
Saints and Misfits by S. K. Ali (YA US Muslim coming of age, kind of)

_____
Books I got some ways into before giving up, for various reasons:
Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi (YA? Nigerian secondary world magical war)
Anatomy of Deception byLawrence Goldstone (US historical medical murder mystery)
Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson (UK intercultural elder romance)
Walkaway by Cory Doctorow (US not quite dystopian science fiction)

Alex Approximately features a girl moving to a California city where her online friend lives. Misunderstandings ensue because she wants to scope him out in secret before meeting him properly, out of a sense of self-preservation. Both kids have experienced dramatic traumas and commence to have outrageous adventures.I thought the outrageous adventures were unnecessary to the story, and the book was at its best just following these traiumatized kids around the fictional Central Coast town. It's really fictional too, not a thinly disguised Santa Cruz. (though Santa Cruz is the strongest influence in its inspiration) I did find a ridiculous geography moment, but it's more of a continuity lapse. In the beginning, the protagonist is driven 45 minutes from the San Jose airport to her new home. Then later, her boyfriend drives her an hour to Monterey "the nearest city." Forget which city is which, a city that is an hour away is not closer than a city that is forty-five minutes away (those distances, however, place Coronado Cove right on top of Santa Cruz). I think this book would work best for people who have visited California but not lived in the Central Coast, because it does get so much right but if you're from here you're going to be distracted by trying to decide what's meant to be a match and what's not.

Mistik Lake is not a misspelling, it's an Ojibway word for wood. I don't know how I feel about this. It feels like the author set out to write a full-on fantasy or magical realism novel, and then decided to give up and write a more or less realistic novella instead. There's a bunch of prophetic dreams that seem to come to nothing, and a big buildup about family secrets that I'm probably being unfair about feeling they don't have enough consequence because they seemed to have had a big consequence at the beginning of the story but resolving them feels anticlimactic. And yet, I did enjoy this book.

The Music Shop was another book where I was unsure whether the author originally intended for there to be a fantastic element. The owner of the music shop is pretty well fey, and has a talent of being able to direct a person to a piece of music that will solve their personal problems, a skill that is apparently learnable, but about halfway or two thirds of the way through the book this stops being central to the story for some reason. The last third of the book made me mad actually. There's a thread about a scammy development company, which could have used a better integration into the tragic denouement, the tragic denouement has a dissatisfying proximal cause, the cautiously upbeat ending feels contrived, the deep dark secret as to why the music shop owner is so damaged is almost offensively stupid. And yet... I did enjoy most of the book. Set in a working-class suburb of London hit hard by Thatcherism.

Anatomy of a Disappearance was just lost on me. Elite Arab exile from an unnamed country (I thought from internal evidence, Iran, but the author is Libyan) with connections to the deposed king and a complex double or triple life, and we're dealing mostly with the story of his kind of unpleasant only child.

The Library of Lost and Found is another entry in the genre of "damaged/feral young woman finds solace and purpose through service to the community of book lovers" which I keep running into. Variations exist where the community is clients of a florist: and The Music Shop is kind of an inverse of it. I liked it. Set in a fictional Northern coastal town.

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine is another one, though there's no community of book lovers, just a workplace and a fellow, and also an old guy she helps to rescue when he has a cardiac event of some kind. It's set in Glasgow, so there's some local color.

Pachinko follows a small family of Koreans in Japan from just before World War 2 to the early 80s. I thought this was really interesting and compelling. I did get mad at one character who created his own tragedy by his reaction to learning about his father.

My Sister, The Serial Killer is one of those stories where someone gets a moral test and fails it, with terrible effects. Not my kind of book, but it's very very good.

The Master Butchers Singing Club is partly the life story of a post-WW1 German immigrant in the Midwest and partly the uncovering of the slightly mysterious life of his second wife. It's really rich, detailed, chewy, and kind, and I can't think of anything wrong with it. It's also, you know, weighted with its share of tragedy. I didn't go looking for more Erdrich after this one because I have learned that reading too much of one author too quickly sensitizes me to their quirks and I didn't want to experience that.

The Painted Drum travels in both directions in time from a stealthy repatriation of a ritual drum made in grief after a terrible tragedy, and I should not use the word reconciliation here because of its political meaning with respect to Native Americans, but the drum does appear to magically save lives and heal family wounds, but only because the people involved work very hard for it. This is a beautiful, beautiful book. Erdrich does this thing where she takes absolute destruction grows fine human lives out of it.

What Was Lost is probably classed as a procedural somewhere, and probably also somebody somewhere sees it as a complaint against modernity, but it's so much more. A little girl disappeared in a shopping mall 20 years ago, and this has had reverberating effects on her community (though the ones who should be most affected aren't). I should hate a book with this description, but this one is deeply beautiful, a number of linked character studies--including the mall itself, which is personified in a surprising way. It's set in the Midlands, too, which gives me a wee shock of recognition here and there though I've spent but 5 weeks total there so far.

Saints and Misfits was actually the last book I read in January but I'd already written January up. It's a delightful, bubbly story about a middle-school Muslim girl in a richly multicultural community. She's a hijabi and also kind of a punk, wrestling with her first crush on a non-Muslim boy, conflicting loyalties, sexual harassment from a well-respected boy in the mosque, her desires to be very very good and very very religious and very very independent... I do recommend this book!

So the books I did not finish, and why:

Children of Blood and Bone is a very good book but it exhausted me. At 80% I realized the pace was only going to keep up, the grinding through battles and the horror of the enemy were only going to accelerate, and there were at least two more books of it, and I just couldn't. The fact that the author seemed to be creating characters for the express purpose of messily killing them off was also a turn-off. I did want to know if my hunch that the king was actually secretly a magi himself was true, but since I couldn't keep reading to find out, it's not a spoiler for me to say so. The alternate-world of Orisha, loosely based on Nigeria, is wondrous and shiny, and the stories behind the magi, the gods, the sky mother, and the magic, were almost enough to keep me going.

Anatomy of Deception almost kept me going, but 1)the author does that thing where "I'm only reporting historical facts and attitudes of the times" becomes a smokescreen for actual racism and misogyny. The central character is really unappealing too and I found that I didn't care enough about who really killed these people to keep on slogging. If this had been a genre book I'd have heard a lot of complaints about infodumps and "as you know, Bob" but historicals apparently get a pass on this? I think much of the explanations were unnecessary, much could have been folded into the story better, and the rest is actually what kept me in the book so long. Oh, right--it's late 19th century, and Philadelphia real-life medical pioneers are bumping up against a botched abortion and some murders among upper class bohemians. Should have been wonderful.

Major Pettigrew's Last Stand is maybe too English for me, because something about it didn't grab me. Conservative old Little-English guy who's fundamentally decent falls in love with the Pakistani-English convenience store owner widow. I lost patience and I don't know why.

I don't know why I got tired of Walkaway. The premise is pretty great.

Notice I've listed very little sff. That's because the Northern California Digital Library doesn't have much.

comments

Books finished or dropped in January

2020-01-27T22:24:21Z

Finished January 4 This side of Married Rachel Pastan
Dropped January 5 Rooms Lauren Oliver
Finished January 6 The Look of Love Sarah Jio
Dropped January 6 Social Crimes Jane Stanton Hitchcock
Dropped January 8 The Cruelest Month Laurie Penny
Dropped January 10 The Merry WIves of Maggody Joan Hess
Finished January 13 A Tale for the Time Being Ruth Ozeki
Finished January 16 Ahab's Wife Sena Jeter Naslund
FInished January 18 My Year of Meats Ruth Ozeki
Dropped January 19 The Keeper of Lost Causes, aka Mercy Jussi Adler-Olsson
Finished January 20 Sourdough Robin Sloan
Dropped January 21 I, Coriander Sally Gardner
Finished January 23 The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender Leslye Walton
Will finish before February Kraken China Mieville

Dropped: 6 books, mostly because I'm not the right reader.
Rooms turned out to be a thirllery thing with nastiness frontloaded, not my cup of tea (see Kraken review for more about that)
The Cruelest Month, was because I realized I had read it before and didn't like it well enough to re-read it.
Social Crimes I read two-thirds of before I came to the conclusion that the protagonist was not on a redemption arc and that the humiliation and antisociality was just going to go on and on. The hook is that very rich man's second wife is done out of her inheritance by her husband's evil lawyer and a pyschopathic probably serial-killer girlfriend and our widow is trying to claw her way back into society...come to think of it I don't know why I thought I might like this? I get a little desperate looking for books on Libby sometimes.
The Merry Wives of Maggody, a comic novel about a small town putting on a golf tournament and somehow Shakespeare is involved. Dropped it because the people were thin cardboard and I decided I had no patience for it.
The Keeper of Lost Causes, a police procedural thriller which I thought might be fun but I was bored and repelled immediately.
I, Coriander, a YA witch child historical which I might like another time but just couldn't get into.

Finished! 8 books. Reviews:
This Side of Married. The three thirtyish daughters of a high-achieving, long-married perfectionist Jewish doctor all in their own ways fail to have the perfect wedding and marriage. The protagonist has quit being a zoo vet and boy is that ever a good idea because she totally misses the philosophy of a zoo. However, she's leaning towards gardening, and her herpetology interests are going to serve her well in unexpected ways. I'd classify this as "women's lit:" it's not quite like a category romance. If you're a romance fan and you're wondering if you'd like it, call it "romance adjacent" and ask yourself how you feel about the romantic-adjacent relationships not quite resolving satisfactorily, though the characters do have some satisfactory growth.

The Look of Love. The premise is: if you're a certain person born at a certain time a woman will pass on to you w little gift--whenever you are in the presence of love, you'll have visual disturbances. If you are this person, you must write in a book that will be given to you six stories about people you see during the year before you turn thirty, each of them part of a couple that represents a certain type of love (named by their Greek names). Also you will be a florist because this all started with a florist in 18th or 19th century France, I forget exactly. If you don't do this writing task you'll miss out on the great love of your life unless, after you pass the gift and task on to the next woman, you go out to meet your love on a rainy full moon night. Yes, that's spoilers. I feel free to tell you this because this book is so dumb that you won't be reading it. I did persist for some reason. i had an okay time of it though I also kept saying "no, hospitals don't work that way," and "medical insurance doesn't work that way," and so on. Also I was irked by the fact that the richer a person was in this book, the more likely they were to be virtuous and lovable and honest and kind.

A Tale for the Time Being This might be my favorite Ruth Ozeki book. I think she's written three and I love them all though some are harder to read (My Year of Meats can be pretty hard, emotionally) Why doesn't anybody ever list Ozeki as sff or sff-adjacent? All three of the books I've read (including All Over Creation) have speculative aspects and this one is heavily rooted in ideas about time and space, as well as being about cruelty, kindness, life and death, aging and youth, and lots and lots of loss. I am really glad I read this and I wish there were more of these. It has another thing that's precious to me, and that is culture clash. Oh my the culture clash. It helps to know that Ruth Ozeki, like her protagonist her and in My Year of Meats, had a Japanese mother and spent time as a student in Japan. The story revolves around a Japanese schoolgirl's journal as she recounts the terrible things in her life and begins to plan her own suicide, which is picked up on a Canadian beach ten years later. I am going to withhold information beyond that even though I don't believe in the spoiler theory of reviewism, because in this one case the things that happen are amazing enough that you ought to experience them for new, once. It gets distressing for a while, in case you're having issues with that.

Ahab's Wife starts lout with a horrible childbirth in a snowed-in cabin in the early 1800s. It is narrated mostly first person by a young woman who, among many other things, marries Captain Ahab from Moby-Dick. There's a little tendency to have her meet almost everyone of consequence of her era, but you kind if have to expect that from a book like this. It's a terribly adventurous book, and much that is terrifying happens. There's a dizzying amount of detail and action. And there's only one passage I remember that seems to be lifted directly from Moby-Dick. I had moments when this book was too much of a muchness, but overall I really liked it. If you've ever been enchanted by whaler's sea shanties, this book will tap that vein and then also cure you of it.

Speaking of difficult books, My Year of Meats gets very very difficult by the end. But there's a ramp up to it, and the characters are all interesting and some of them are sympathetic.The protagonist is a documentary filmmaker who gets hired by a Japanese ad agency to make TV shows about American families and how they eat beef. Hijinks ensue, but also things keep getting real.It's Ruth Ozeki, therefore it's great!

Sourdough was a kind of betrayal. Premise: San Francisco techie woman is gifted a sourdough starter by her soup and sandwihich delivery guys who
are being deported. There's something magic about the sourdough starter. Also, she begins to meet modern foodies and ...it all goes sort of satirical for a while, and then it goes haywire.

And the conclusion feels fucking racist to me. So while I enjoyed certain parts of the book, my ultimate feeling towards this book is anger. The presentation of this book is not helped by the fact that nobody saw fit to take the time to teach the reader how to pronounce San Francisco place names.

The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender also feels like a betrayal. It also reads like someone who read through a pile of books labeled "Magical Realism" and decided to program an AI to write it. The deepseated emotional dream logic was just kind of off by a beat? & the ending felt forced and like a slap in the face for many of the best characters and also for the reader. Again, I liked moments of it, but not the story as a whole.

Kraken has the China Mieville Problem. The man is a sadist. He will call time in the middle of the action to put you through a half hour of meticulously detailed gory fatal torture and as far as I can tell it's because he loves writing this stuff. You can tell me this is truthtelling at its unflinchingest. He just gets off on it.

That being said, there's as usual a lot of great writing, worldbuilding, character development, etc. I'm close enough to the end to recemmend it but I'm not sure what this story is for exactly. It sort of feels like an improvised shadow puppet play made from those graphics Monty Python used to use. I can recommend the book, definitely, and there's a couple ideas I wish I'd had, but it's not a book I wish I'd written, that's for sure.

comments

Reading and writing progress and chemobrain.

2020-01-27T05:02:11Z

Last year I read a lot of books. I have changed the way I go about reading, because I was not being able to read much. Oh wait, before I go on I should tangentize what I've discovered about my particular sort of chemobrain.

I have been really very frustrated about my brain functioning. It's been nearly three years since I started cancer treatment-more than two years since it mostly ended. I felt I had a right to expect more improvement. I don't know why I felt that! I have returned to the world of the living in so many ways. I no longer sleep four two to six hours every daytime, for example. I never got much flakier than I was to begin with. I mean, I don';t screw up my finances, I hardly ever forget my appointments or miss deadlines. Those are chronic problems I have always had. I have simplified my life so that there's less to screw up, but then there's less to my life too. So that's kind of a neither her nor there thing.

BUT. two really important functions of my brain have just been torpedoed and it is not until very recently that I've seen much improvement: reading and writing. No, I didn't lose the basic skills. I lost the thread. It was so hard to just read a book from beginning to end. And writing-it's like the story monster has just laid down and --maybe not died, but gone into a deep state of hibernation. With occasional surfacing. I've written a few drafts, maybe three? novellas and a couple-few stories? But not successfully? Sort of promisingly, but something's missing? And I haven't been able to do any sustained writing, hours at a time, days at a time, get the thing done. I've spent months at a time with a blank space where the story monster ought to be restlessly swimming or pacing or whatever it does. It's not like that part of my brain feels numb, either--it feels gone, a lot of the time.

I thought by now it couldn't be chemobrain anymore. It was depression, maybe. Or maybe I had just lost it. Maybe it was the onset of some sort of dementia. Maybe I actually never had a story monster, maybe it was an illusion, or it's a false memory. Or something. But recently I decided to look it up. I forget what search terms I used. But I got a revelation.

First of all, there's no expiration date on chemobrain. Secondly, some people have late onset chemobrain. Thirdly, it can be quite this specific, though I didn't see any examples quite like mine. Fourthly, while there's a lot of mystery, there's some known mechanisms for this when a person has the kind of cancer I had and the kind of treatments I had...and the kind I am still undergoing. I had an estrogen-dependent breast cancer and a large part of the treatment was starving it of estrogen. And now I am taking an estrogen antagonist called arimidex, which shuts down every last scrap of estrogen production in my body. There's a bit of redundancy in the body, so you can do without a lot of your basic chemicals, I guess.

So one of the jobs that estrogen does is some subtle regulating in the brain. When you take away all the estrogen from the brain, cells stop reproducing in the hippocampus, and myelination in the brain is messed up. This is kind of teasingly interesting, but I've read about hippocampus function, and that seems to be fine for me (the hippocampus is implicated in several kinds of memory and some spatial functions. I have never had a great memory, but my memory is not pathologically bad). I saw some assertions that estrogen helps regulate mood, but I'm not sure that's part of its brain function, and I'm pretty sure my range of moods are not strikingly different from before. I'm less volatile than I was when I was younger, but I've been that way for a long time. And I can't say that I see things in myself that are the result of demyelination (which is a process of MS as well, but I don't see any indication that estrogen lack causes MS).

So what I have left in this is: well, I think probably that the mental problems I've been having might be a bit related to wiping out every scrap of estrogen from my body. But the mechanism is a mystery, because my problems aren't the problems that are listed for these brain functions. But. Having a thing to blame it on does wonders for my mood and optimism! Because if there's probably a cause for it, I can fight that. If it's all completely subjective and there's no reason for it, I don't know how to not wallow.

I signed up for the electronic library that my pub lic library belongs to. I read these ebooks and listen to these audiobooks mainly on my phone. And it turns out this change works for me! Not, I think, because of any particular virtue of the format, but just because it's different. Audiobooks have the advantage that I can listen to them while I do things with my hands, and ebooks on the phone have the advantage that reading them on the bus doesn't cause me to get motion sickness.

Last year I read about two books a week, starting in July. This year I seem to be doing the same. I do still reject a lot of books without finishing them. Part of that is that the Northern California Digital Library doesn't have a lot of books in my favored genres. I end up sometimes unable to find any sff available except for stuff I really don't want to read. So I end up exploring other kinds of books, and I'm just likely to not like quite a lot of mysteries, romances, literary novels, women's fiction (by which I mean that kind of literary-adjacent novel that centers the experience of modern women), or historicals. But I'm been doing pretty well at picking ones I'm going to be able to finish, and it's a lot less frustrating to put a book down without finishing it when there's been quite a lot of appealing ones recently.

On the writing front. I don't want to jinx it, but I seem to be a bit better. I don't know what's doing it. Back in August I tried doing a lot of intensive outlining in a paper notebook, and it was fun for some weeks, but that book is still unwritten. I've been talking with some supportive (and demanding) friends, and maybe that's done it? But I think maybe knowing that my drug is causing at least some of the problem may have loosened me up also? Maybe being freed of the feeling of frustration in my self has been the thing I needed?

Anyway, that's where I'm at. And I think I want, at the end of the month, to do a wee roundup/capsule review of the books I've read this month, and maybe continue the rest of the year?

edit: the biggest symptom caused by the arimidex that I've noticed all along is an intermittent, trivial-to-severe, nocturnal pain in my arms and hands (weirdly specific). It lasts just long enough to wake me up and rarely keeps me awake. The frequency and severity of the pain vary randomly as far as I can see. I have a small prescription of tramadol (an opioid!) which I more or less keep as an amulet. Aside from the sleep interruption it doesn't seem to interfere with my life: there's no impact on use or function. I wonder if this is a myelination issue? Or is there a different mechanism?

The thing about having had several long-lasting painful conditions in one's life is that one can assess a severe pain as no big deal, comparatively, because its duration is not huge and it doesn't accompany other more important problems.

comments

so I've been reading things

2017-09-28T21:38:06Z

I've had a hard time reading books for a few years, more even than I've admitted to (complained about). I have attributed it to mind scatter from all the various One Damned Thing After Another and also widowhood. Maybe so because suddenly I can read again so long as the thing I'm reading doesn't annoy me too much.

For example, my friend Israel lent me Albion's Seed by David Fischer (you can read a summary and more positive review of it here) and I can't get into its nine hundred pages of argument that American culture and politics are almost exclusively descended from four waves of English migration. Despite its length and copious documentation, the actual assertions about culture, psychology, politics, etc. feel unsupported to me. I felt like some asshole had cornered me at a party and was booming along about their nutcase theory. Even though the book has a fat bibliography and a lot of material from primary sources. I don't know why it felt that way to me, but I can't finish it right now. I occasionally browse it for story bits, but it's joyless work.

I picked up The Tree Climber's Guide by Jack Cooke at the San Francisco Friends of the Public Library's book sale and I can't read it either. Again, it's the theoretics that defeats me. This book should be right up my alley. It's about the trees of London, as a class and as individuals, meant for people who want to enjoy them to the fullest, including climbing up into them. But it's ruined for me with his uninformed pronouncements on human evolution and nearly spiritualistic approach to everything. I can handle a certain amount of spirituality in a nature book, just not this much. But I still have it in my bathroom waiting for me to give it a fourth chance. After all, it's still a book about urban trees.

Another book I couldn't read was an old Charles deLint, The Little Country. I had the usual deLint trouble where his writing hits an uncanny valley of almost being exactly what I want but somehow tweer than I want even though if I try to catalog the things that make it twee I don't find them--it should be "gritty" almost. Except in this case the things that are supposed to make it gritty include a thing I do not tolerate, which is a fancy, "let's get into the twisted mind of a sociopathic serial killer who likes to torture people" element. I think most people like it better than I do.

So what have I finished? Alif the Unseen by G. Willow WIlson. I went looking to see if there was tumblr discourse about this because there's an aspect of this that I thought the kiddies would go wild for--this book is set inside a not-quite Egyptian world and the author is an American convert to Islam. But she seems to have escaped the discourse treatment. I think the book works. There's a very nice self-insertion element--a character is an American convert living in the nameless City (which seems to be a neighbor of the Emirates). But it's well handled, and she's not the main character or even the main character's girlfriend or his other relationship either. Every character has many layers and you can't waves their short description around and think you've told their story. You need the whole book for that. The story is sort of like North by Northwest in that the protagonist is being pursued by evil forces beyond his ken (that is, the secret police) before he even knows why (he thinks he knows why, but he's wrong). The McGuffin is delicious--it's not a spoiler to say that while at first Alif thinks it's a program he's written, it turns out to be a book. And there's djinns in it and they are not what you think they are. No, not that either.

I also read The Goose Girl by Shannon Hale. I have mixed feelings about this book. It has some things I hate, which I'll get to, but first let me tell you that Hale can write suspense to the point where you want to claw something to shreds. And it has something I love: worker solidarity, though it's a little shallow in that their solidarity is all about elevating a blond queen over their brown selves. Yep, that's there. You can see why: the story has every goddamned element from a particular version of the fairy tale--no worries, there's lots of suspense for you even if you know the fairy tale and think you know how it's going to work out, so if you care about those things know that you're not going to be ripped-off in the dimension of discovery. But there's problems in the world-building that bug me a lot. One, all the people from the goose girl/princess's country are pale and blond while right next door all the people are dark. Two, these countries are next door to each other and share some history somewhere so that their speech is completely mutually comprehensible--the only difference is an accent so mild that it never interferes with comprehension--and yet they are utterly isolated from each other by geography: it takes months to ride from one country's center of population to the other, over nearly-impassable mountains with only one usable pass, and the royal families have never met each other in generations. The only communication between them in the normal course of things is a small handful of trading caravans that apparently never gossip about one country to the other. Excuse me, but I've met real-world languages that diverged farther than that in a shorter time when they had daily contact. There were details about animal husbandry, clothing production, and cooking that felt not quite fully researched and developed, but I always feel this way except when reading Heather Rose Jones's books honestly, so I don't hold it against this book. Besides, there's other details that are really really nice.

Right now I'm reading Nova Swing by M.John Harrison and I can tell you I kind of like the poetic language but not the fact that all the characters speak in the same register and I'm truly creeped out by the way all the female characters seem like simulacrums (some of them are supposed to be such, but not all). I'm glad it's short: I think I will enjoy it by the time it's done, instead of hating it as I might if it was long and kept on doing what it's doing.

So I've spent my time for updating and I'll write about my health (mostly great, with Another Big Honking Deal probably cooking itself up in my lungs) and other stuff at another time.

comments

I read The Egyptologist by Arthur Phillips

2017-08-21T08:56:49Z

I think someone else would like this better than me. I skimmed a lot of it because the voice of "Ralph Trilipush" didn't engage me. The core question's pretty easy to the reader, but that's not a problem, because the secondary questions are the point anyway. I think the right person would like it: even though it is not actually a thriller, I think thriller readers would be about right. I looked at his other book, called Prague though it is set in Budapest, and I was not taken with it, but again it looked like someone else might like it better.

comments