#dept of speculation

[the-ephemeral-ethereal]

But now it seems possible that the truth about getting older is that there are fewer and fewer things to make fun of until finally there is nothing you are sure you will never be.

from Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill

[rosemary-and----thyme]

-Dept. of Speculation, Jenny Offill

[st-just]

Books I Read In February

(not counting web serials, etc)

6. Dept of Speculation by Jenny Offill

Ah finally I have found real literature! Two hundreds pages about an upper-middle class New York creative’s failing marriage!

Do kind of wonder if it’s all some sort of elaborate flex – ‘look, I’m so good at writing that I can take the most boring possible subject matter and still make it entertaining!”

I mean it was actually really readable. The book’s really very well done on the level of craft, and the whole central conceit – story told in a long series of disconnected vignettes and streams of consciousness, ranging from a paragraph to a few pages – is well done and makes reading it like eating a bowl of potato chips, kind of, if that makes sense?

But in terms of plot, or stakes, or anything else, yeah, it’s really every stereotype of litfic written by, about, and for the literati.

And I mean, I read it in two sittings (and could have been one if I hadn’t needed to get to work) and at this point almost none of it has stuck with me. So, decent, I guess? Good airport novel, except for being so short?

7. Persuasion by Jane Austen

Because it’s vaguely shameful I’m in my late 20s and haven’t read her, and I’ve already seen the Keira Knightly Pride and Prejudice so figured I’d start with something else and a blog I read mentioned it.

So, like, in terms of reading as a social activity, leaving this lying around the apartment has been the cause of more real conversations than any other book I’ve read in, like, years. Which means ‘3’, but still. You see the argument for a shared cultural canon.

So I feel slightly bad in how I probably appreciated this more as a cultural/historical artifact than, like, a story. But the descriptions of life for the minor rural gentry in early 19th century England were actually really interesting! The relationships between families, the incredibly casual attitude towards incest (between cousins, anyway), the way that basically no one without money or a respectable name was even named or directly refereed to, and how claustrophobic and small the protagonist’s social circle felt as a result, the way that no one actually did anything, and the only occupation any had previously filled was ‘naval officer’, the way that there was just absolutely nothing to do, so being given tasks and being asked to help with things/given an oppurtunity to be useful by one’s social circle was something of a compliment, the customs of hospitality, the fact that writing from 200 years ago is still perfectly readable (if with weird vocabulary) compared to Shakespeare or similar, the attitudes towards courtship and marriage, just the way people amuse themselves and spend their time. It’s all really interesting!

As a story it was, um, fine? Interestingly low on drama, honestly. Like, the love triangle resolves with the tearful confession and proposal and their just isn’t any sort of confrontation with the villain. Or any real confrontation in general, really. All the conflict is gossip, miscommunication, and Anne’s crippling internal angst. All extremely British.

8. The Causal Angel by Hannu Rajaniemi

Because someone in a discord I’m in mentioned the series and I remembered I’d never actually finished it.

Honestly this is probably my favorite of the series? Or, well, properly, the Zoku as a culture and setting are just orders of magnitude less interesting than the Oubliette or Earth were, but in terms of actual plot? Actually cashed all the checks, very satisfying.

Though, like, for all the hard sci jargon technobabble, the entire plot was racing to get the hidden gem which allows you to make a wish and rewrite the universe before the evil spirit which is wearing the Emperor’s face can seize it for itself. So, you know, genre is fake, and the fantasy/sf distinction especially so.

Anyway the book gets bonus points from me for never having anything like a romance between Jean and Mieli. Like there’s a whole conversation at one point where someone offers Jean a chance to build a new life away from all the people trying to kill him and he says he can’t because he promised to help a friend and they go ‘a friend. Sure. C’mon now.” And he just rolls his eyes and it’s never followed up on! Truly a breath of fresh air (besides, Mieli exclusively falls for girls designed from scratch by superintelligences to be attractive to her, and Jean still isn’t over the milf he once literally destroyed the world to try and impress).

But yeah, lots of fun heists and schemes and gambits, I really enjoy most of the characters, and all the scene/environment descriptions are gorgeous and trippy and I want an artbook.

...still no idea what the takeaway from the last bit of the Mars chapter was supposed to be, though.

9. Lakota American by Pekka Hämäläinen

Because I’d seen his Comanche Empire recommended a couple places, but the book store couldn’t order that for whatever reason. And I’ve been meaning to learn more North American history. Also it’s kind of comforting to go back to nonfiction where the last hundred pages are all footnotes. Feels all virtuous and edifying compared to the usual educational diet of blogs and esoteric shitposts.

(Would you believe this took me longer to get through than all the previous books in this post combined?)

Anyways, incredibly interesting book, at least if you (like me) are starting with a knowledge base of ‘Great Plains, horse nomads, buffalo, Little Bighorn’. Hämäläinen’s insistence on spending a few paragraphs repeating the book’s thesis every chapter does admittedly get annoying, but still. (Also, you do occasionally get the sense he’s laying it on a bit thick, portraying the Lakota as heroic protagonists of history. But I’m kind of chalking up to the same sort of thing where anyone who writes a good book-length biography of someone ends up either kind of in love with their subject or else viscerally loathing them).

I mean not that ‘heroic protagonists of history’ isn’t probably a useful corrective, given how much the popular imagining of most indigenous nations still consists of ‘lived harmoniously with nature in perfect stasis until white people brought History to the Americas, which consisted exclusively of their being exploited and genocided’.

The thesis, for the record, is that the Lakota as a people were unusually opportunistic and adaptable and (combined with some luck of geography and having a relatively large population) were able to not only survive migrating from the Great Lakes to the plains but genuinely thrive, making themselves one of the first intersections of the spreading technological frontiers of horses (from the south) and guns (through trading relationships brought with them) to create something like a genuine nomadic empire in the northern great plains through the in the late 18th through late 19th centuries (an empire without an emperor (or central leadership at all until conflict with the US required mass mobilization and coordination), granted).

Reading it has also left me infinitely more convinced of the correctness of that famous Sankara quote about foreign aid, though. Even at their richest and most powerful (which was really very rich and powerful!) they were entirely reliant on trading (basically exclusively buffalo products) to Europeans and Americans (and later Metis) for manufactured goods, metal tools, and guns (or just being supplied them as treaty payments, and you know with horse nomads throughout history the lines between ‘charity’, ‘payments for land/goods’, ‘political subsidies’, ‘tribute’ and ‘protection money’ are all very thin and easy to confuse), and after Little Bighorn that’s the lever the US used to break them as a military and territorial threat to white settlement, more than anything else.

Both by denying them access to those goods and encouraging the destruction of the buffalo population to leave them nothing to trade others with/subsist on on their own, I mean.

10. Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Because I have an incredible soft spot for books that are clearly worldbuilding exercise first and everything else second, and Tchaikovsky really writes some of the best xenofiction I can recall. Plus I really did love Children of Time, so figured I’d give the sequel a shot even if it seemed totally needless. (and hey, now I can check off the ‘hard SF’ category on some imaginary bingo card)

And hey, despite my misgivings about where he’d go with a sequel, it worked! The story of Senkovi and the Octopuses doesn’t feel like much of a retreat of Kern and her spiders at all, and the octopuses themselves are wonderfully distinct from both the spiders and humanity in terms of how they think and express. And are just a lot of fun to spend time with. (The actual aliens are a lot of fun too, of course, though they were rather more high concept and space-opera-magic-ey than any of the earth’s descendants).

Despite not technically being aliens, Tchaikovsky's uplifted animals really do always manage to be both psychologically alien but also believably able to maintain a civilization of themselves, something that’s, like, vanishingly rare in SF write large. They’re great.

And I mentioned a bit back how these books are more Star Treky than anything I’ve seen recently, (including all the scraps of modern trek I’ve watched). By which I mean there’s just a real underlying optimistic xenophilia to them? That even the maddened computer after-image left by a myriad-old megalomaniac scientist and the alien parasites with an instinctive drive to assimilate the entire universe can be talked with, negotiated with, understood, integrated into a society that’s greater and more vibrant for their inclusion (this is, in fact, the argument that convinces the parasites, that diversity and coexistence allows for a richer and more adventurous life than merely consuming everything to understand it through recreation in your own image). And then the kind of accompanying assumption that a cosmic sort of noble curiosity is something like life’s highest calling, that given the option of course people would want to come together in a grand adventure exploring the universe. It also manages the impossible task of actually selling that hopefulness without coming off as twee or saccharine.)

It’s also kinda Star Trek-ey in ‘using an alien culture for social commentary of humans, despite also having humans right there’. I mean less so than trek, obviously, but the juxtaposition of humanity just, like, not caring* about anyone’s gender or sexuality and Fabian’s whole character arc of being a male Portid spider trying to excel and make a name for himself in a formally-equal-and-you-aren’t-literally-hunted-for-sport-anymore-but-c’mon sort of matriarchal academic environment did feel a bit on the nose.

*Like really, you know how on writing 101 boards you get guys asking how to write female characters, and sometimes the response is something like ‘just write everyone as characters, and then go back and flip a coin to see what pronouns to give people’? You could probably actually convince me that’s how the humans in this story were written. (Well, not quite. But, like, close).

11. That Time of Year by Marie NDiaye

I have zero idea how this ended up on my TBR list, except that I wanted to read some more works in translation and this was originally French. And okay maybe it’s because it’s French or something about the translation but this one’s officially too literary for me. (I mean I’m absolutely sure the translation didn’t do the dialogue any favors, at least.)

It’s an interesting concept, at least, somewhere on the edge between magical realism and outright horror, I guess? The imagery of the little village getting buried in fog and rain the day after the tourists leave, the eerie similarities of all the locals, the ghosts, it’s all really quite vivid. But even at ~150 pages it felt like there was a lot of padding and wheel-spinning. And the ending literally made me go online and make sure the library’s copy wasn’t missing some pages, somehow.

More dammingly, even short as it was it just felt like a slog to get through.

[intrepidgirlreader]

Dept. of Speculation, Jenny Offill

[wordsthat-speak]

How has she become one of those people who wears yoga pants all day? She used to make fun of those people. With their happiness maps and their gratitude journals and their bags made out of recycled tire treads. But now it seems possible that the truth about getting older is that there are fewer and fewer things to make fun of until finally there is nothing you are sure you will never be.

Dept. of Speculation (Jenny Offill)

[moral-disorder]

Reading Dept of Speculation by Jenny Offill again and its still the most absurdly funny and painfully sad book, and I mean that in a really positive way.

“Sometimes she just stands and looks out the window where the people whose lives are intact enough not to have to take yoga live.”

“So it begs the question, doesn’t it? Did she unkind and ungood and untrue him?”

“Are animals lonely? Other animals, I mean.”

[waitinqroom]

dept. of speculation, jenny offill

[intrepidgirlreader]

"How is that even possible?” the philosopher says. “He’s one of the kindest people I’ve ever met.” She knows. She knows. So it begs the question, doesn’t it? Did she unkind and ungood and untrue him?

Dept. of Speculation, Jenny Offill