Cameron's Book Round-Up: Finishing 2020

So, classes start for me next week. I have three, and there are (obviously) major computer system problems that are making getting the damned things set up a real headache. As such, two things come to mind: first, for the next sixteen weeks or so, posts might come later in the day; second, I need time to work on things, and the level of invention I normally aim for isn’t really possible this week. So you all get a book round up!

The Jennifer Morgue (Charles Stross, the Laundry Files #2, Golden Gryphon, 2006)

A lot of Stross’s books get stuck with trashy covers, but this hammers home “James Bond + Lovecraft” in a way that no other design could.

I’m a general fan of Charles Stross’s presence on the internet. I started with the first of his Laundry Files books, The Atrocity Archives, in college, and quickly followed it up with his Eschaton books, which were largely my introduction to the New Space Opera.

The Laundry Files are an attempt to explore what the response of governments would be to the knowledge that the horrors written about in H.P. Lovecraft were objectively real (but shorn, thankfully, of their racial and class-based prejudice; I have some thoughts on this further down here). The response that Stross predicts is, obviously, that they would sweep it under the rug and do their best to ignore it, leaving it the province of the sort of spooks who get treated more like janitors than superstars.

In Jennifer Morgue, the stale beer-style espionage fiction has been traded out for a metafictional pastiche of James Bond: the hero, Bob Howard (no points for getting the reference) is ensnared in a magical trap by the villain, who has cast himself as a bond villain, and forced to unknowingly take the role of James Bond until the spell is lifted. There’s a great deal of comedy here: Howard is, by trade, more of a software engineer than anything else, and everyone else knows that he’s supposed to act like James Bond and is trying to prod him in that direction, but it’s simply not constitutionally something that he commonly does.

The villain’s plan is, of course, to capture him (as happens in just about every bond movie) and then turn the spell off, meaning that his only real opposition is captured and completely at his power, and not being pushed along by the eldritch forces of fiction. It’s a fairly clever plan, and there are some nice twists in it, but it is — fundamentally — popcorn reading. I feel that, for a time, the Laundry Files books turned into Stross’s version of The Dresden Files, something that he did to secure a regular paycheck, though it really seems from recent interviews that he realized just how useful they were for social commentary and political satire and has returned to them with a maniacal glee. I’m interested to see his take on Brexit in this world, but also I’m not sure I want to read through the intervening books.

Perhaps I’ll just find a solid recap somewhere.

Not quite as beer-swilling as the text, but a beautiful cover nonetheless.

Beowulf: A New Translation (Maria Dahvana Headley, MCD X Fsg Originals, 2020)

Treated by Edgar here. Author previously mentioned by me here.

There’s honestly not that much that I can add to the discussion of Headley’s Beowulf. I feel that it’s amazing that it got the degree of press that it did — not because it’s undeserved, but precisely because it is deserved and because Headley seemed to be a somewhat unknown name — I was unfamiliar with her before The Mere Wife, but perhaps I was simply out of the loop on this.

Her translation strikes a wonderful balance — it’s exceedingly capable, and feels extremely naturalistic. The opening still sticks with me, for just how easy it is to recall:

Bro! Tell me we still know how to talk about kings! In the old days,
everyone knew what men were: brave, bold, glory-bound. Only
stories now, but I’ll sound the Spear-Danes’ song, hoarded for hungry times.

Compare to Heaney’s (2002):

So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by

and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness.

We have heard of those princes’ heroic campaigns.

And McNamara’s (2005):

Hail! We have heard tales sung of the Spear-Danes,

the glory of their war-kings in days gone by,

how princely nobles performed heroes’ deeds

Headley takes these ancient words and makes them something that would only sound slightly out of place coming out of the mouth of a hockey player or football hooligan, which is exactly the sort of character that should go with Beowulf. It’s not the story of a gentleman adventurer gone to fight monsters, it’s a swaggering braggart who intends to back up his bluster by wrestling a supernatural ogre to the ground and ripping his arm off.

This presentation allows the poem to live in a way that the more genteel translations don’t. The Geats of Beowulf — like the Anglo-Saxons that sang their songs in mead-halls, raised in Britain hundreds of years later — were not warrior-poets, or not just warrior-poets, and attempts to rehabilitate the character of the germanic peoples of the early middle ages don’t do them justice by portraying them as such. These were people who lived in unforgiving lands and supplemented their meager crop by raiding and warring. Their character was much closer to that of the football team than the chess club (I should write something about the persistence of high school paradigms in American thought, some time), and preserving that character in these words, while also preserving the fatalism and strangeness of the world depicted, was a magnificent feat.

You all have seen this image many times by now, if you’re regular readers.

Debt: The First 5,000 Years (David Graeber, Melville House Publishing, 2011)

I have discussed this book several times. I started it once, in early 2019, and then set it aside for a time. When I returned to it, after hearing about Graeber’s death, I discovered it to be as piercing and insightful as I recalled any of his writing.

While I enjoyed Bullshit Jobs, I feel that one was an entry point, a commentary on things that were dealt with much more deeply and substantively in Debt. Bullshit jobs is about how the world is making you unhappy — by giving you work that doesn’t matter — Debt, when you get down to it, is about why this happens. It draws how the three great centers of civilization on the Eurasian continent all made the same missteps (or inherited those missteps; Graeber, as much as he purports to talk about the last 5,000 years, is somewhat limited by the historical record, and it seems fairly clear to me that the great Bronze Age civilizations, which didn’t have the ability to keep detailed records of the sorts he relies upon, were mercantile societies that might…I’m getting off topic). That misstep, when you get down to it, is that we allowed two things that exist in many non-western societies — the market of goods and the ritualized “human economy” of dowry and bride price and gifts — to cross over and form perverse feedback loops, creating chattel slavery.

While “historical cycles” are something that can only really be used for description, and cannot be thought of as a predictive tool, he uses the oscillation between abstracted and concretized economies as the engine for his historical narrative.

And while this narrative is, obviously (and he admits this) incomplete and hyperfocused, I feel that he does make a successful argument that debt is a poorly-understood aspect of society and we have a great deal of difficulty seeing it at work in the world around it.

Go read the book. It’s a wonderful read that will make your blood boil.

This is unrelated to the text of Debt, but perhaps fitting to note here, given the title sans subtitle, but I feel a great deal of sorrow at the loss of so many important thinkers, performers, and figures in the last few years. Not just Graeber, but his fellow Goldsmiths teacher Mark Fisher. It feels as if there is a changing of the guard and the new guard is failing to step up with the same vigor as the old did.

Honestly, this book had more suggestions for what to read in the future than any of the other ones.

Future Histories: What Ada Lovelace, Tom Paine, and the Paris Commune Can Teach Us About Digital Technology (Lizzie O’Shea, Verso, 2019)

This was a book I received as a gift from Edgar, and it’s one that I worked on for a long period — I would keep it in my laundry bag and read it when I was at the laundromat, masked up and secured in a nook far from people between loads — and I must say it was a fascinating read: she would select a general problem or thorny issue, analogize it to a historical episode, and then analyze it. Honestly, it was a format that would work very well for a podcast.

Some of the chapters stick in my mind better than others. I think, perhaps, the one that worked the best for me was the discussion of extending personhood rights, or rights analogous to personhood, not just to natural systems (like a river) but also to artificial structures like the internet, as a safeguard against them being run for-profit.

It was an interesting adjunct to some of the other things that I was reading, but it really feels to me that this was weaker than a number of the other books that I read this year. Perhaps I would have a different set of thoughts on it, had I read it on its own.

I don’t say this in my review, but Gibson does a better job than most at imagining plausible and weird futures than just about any other living writer. I’m given to understand he doesn’t really keep up with tech news, though. Perhaps there’s something to keep in mind there.

The Peripheral (William Gibson, Jackpot #1, Berkley, 2015)

Well, after all of that, I needed some fiction. 2020 was cyberpunk year — not just because of the release of Cyberpunk 2077 near the end of it, though that did happen and I’m enjoying the game despite all of its bugs — but also because we had a global pandemic that most of our governments did just about nothing to quell and we saw transparently just how the wealthy were screwing the rest of us over.

The Peripheral is from William Gibson, one of the fathers of Cyberpunk, and it pushes the genre in new and interesting ways. It is, at root, a time-travel story, constrained by physics. There are two parallel stories: one concerns Flynne Fisher and her brother Burton, in the near-ish future (I had it pegged at 2040-2050 or so), who live in a rural United States where the biggest employer is the county drug runner, Homeland Security might imprison you for a time in a converted high school football stadium, and you might get in trouble for using an illegally-printed mobile phone. The other story concerns Wilf Netherton, a publicist in post-Singularity (2120?) England who recently got fired because he was an accessory to a political assassination and is staying at his friend Lev’s house, sleeping in an RV that was designed to off-road through the Gobi desert by Lev’s kleptocrat father.

The stories cross over because someone in Wilf’s time has established a computer line to Flynne’s — from that point on, the two timelines begin to diverge. Burton, Flynne’s brother, is hired to run security using a drone on Wilf’s end of things, and Flynne fills in for him one evening, witnessing a murder in the process.

The investigation of this murder forms the engine of the plot, with people upstream using their computing power to make more and more money and using that to encourage Flynne and Burton’s cooperation and safety while trying to solve the murder.

Gibson does an excellent job, as usual. To tell you the truth, I find his worlds to be more interesting than his plots sometimes, and this one was a bit of two-for-one, but it was still quite a competent story.

This year had a pornographic fixation on the fall of Rome. Reading this book was my acknowledgement of that.

Alaric the Goth (Douglas Boin, W. W. Norton Company, 2020)

Reviewed by Edgar here. I’m going to let Edgar’s review suffice for most of this, so this is mostly going to be my addition to their thoughts on it. I will echo that it is very frustrating that it turns out to be the same damn bullshit every time, but I will also point out that there was a bit of comfort for me in this story. While Alaric didn’t get the acceptance from Rome that he sought, his people did, eventually, establish a Gothic kingdom in Gaul, maintaining the rule of law and a generally tolerant and evenhanded (for the time) government.

One of the key differences between Edgar and I, as far as our education goes, is that while Edgar was a Classicist, I was an English major, and that included a fair amount of study of the Anglo-Saxons (hence my exuberance about Beowulf up above), which means knowing a thing or two about the Migration Period following the fall of Rome in Western Europe.

The Dark Ages were certainly dark. They represented a failure of civilization. But they also represented the end of slavery in Europe (similar changes, Graeber asserts, happened in India and China at roughly the same time). And while serfdom wasn’t much better, it was better. Alaric’s march on Rome was perhaps not the cause of the end of Rome, but it was the symbol of the fall of Rome and the inauguration of the new age. One that was harder, and less safe, but more free, and one that led to the world we now live in — as fucked up and difficult as it is.

I don’t know why so many self-consciously important books opt for just typography on a monochrome background. There are a lot of those from here on out.

Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging (Sebastian Junger, Twelve, 2016)

This was recommended by Robert Evans on one of his podcasts (I don’t know which one, but I’ll point you to his twitter and you can figure it out from there). It seemed an important thing for me to read because the college I teach at has many veterans in its student body, and I’ve noticed over the past few semesters that there’s a semi-consistent problem with PTSD. It isn’t my job to fix it, by any means, but I can do my job more easily if I understand it.

So I looked this book up. The audio book was under three hours, and it was a fairly interesting read. It discusses how social structures exacerbate or help protect members of the society from trauma, and compares — to an extent — the social structures of traditional indigenous societies with those of contemporary American and post-industrial society, and discusses how to build a more functional space within it for dealing with that trauma.

Brief, to the point, not bad. Junger, a war correspondent, was a bit too much of a centrist for my taste, but I knew that going in, and I won’t hold it against him.

See? Serious book. Typography, no real image.

A People’s History of the United States (Howard Zinn, Harper Perennial, 2005)

Recommended by Cody Johnston on the podcast Worst Year Ever, and found in audiobook form, leading to a sort of “eh, why not?” moment. A fascinating read, and perhaps too big to listen to all in one go in audiobook form and internalize everything. Zinn, clearly, has an agenda. He has his biases and his predilections, and he admits that up front, but backs it up with research.

The way that history is taught in America is appalling. There are gaps and lacunae in the historical narrative that Zinn attempts to fill in, and it it a work of heartbreaking complexity and terrible failures. I often wondered about what transpired between the founding of Jamestown (1607) and the Revolutionary War (1776), for example, or what happened between then and the Civil War (1861), or between then and the First World War (1914). I knew about the existence of Bacon’s Rebellion (1676) or the concurrent King Philip’s War (1675-1678), Shays’ Rebellion (1786-1787), the Mexican-American War (1846-1848), or the St. Louis General Strike (1877).

We’ve discussed history and historiography a great deal on this website, and I’m honestly ashamed of the fact that I hadn’t read Zinn to begin with. He clearly lays out the way that political forces are manipulated by the wealthy since the very beginning — I think that he wrote that there were something like 13 colonial insurrections before the Revolutionary War.

How different the world might have been? Maybe we could have avoided some extremely bad art.

My brain is stupid, because my first thought on seeing this was “Ah, yes, Malcolm Gladwell’s No One’s First, and You’re Next.” This is a variation on the other one I talked about — I guess the graphic designer didn’t want to make up a new font.

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (David Wallace-Wells, Tim Duggan Books, 2019)

So I decided to keep the horror show going, turning my eyes to the future. It’s frustrating to me that people simply deny the existence of global warming, and while Wallace-Wells doesn’t really get into the inability of people to accept the existence of climate change, but he does get into the probable fallout of it.

The world that Wallace-Wells describes is not one that I think it is desirable to live in. He specifically describes the worst-case scenarios, noting that doing so means that it won’t be as bad as he discusses. The history of our interaction with the climate should help put a stop to that sort of hope: it’s always bad, it’s always worse than we think, and it’s impossible for an individual person to do anything about it.

I’ll tell you what I want. I want a book about climate change that begins with the mantra from Neoreaction a Basilisk: “So, we’re fucked. Now what?” The panoply of ways that we have killed ourselves with our handling of the environment is dizzying. How do we rob this monster of its teeth? What do we do?

This has the cover pretending to be a page in a longer book, which signals something, but it’s largely just important typography on a blank background.

White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (Nancy Isenberg, Viking, 2016)

Finding the future terrifying, I turned back to the horror of the past. There was a lot of discussion of this book several years ago (I think in the lead-up to the 2016 election, when it looked like America might finally start to reckon with class, but there were dangers there — more on that in a moment). I decided to listen to it in audiobook form — a lot of my reading has actually been listening; shout-out to the Libby app — and found some material that ran parallel to A People’s History of the United States: a discussion of the concept of the Americas as “waste-land”, and economic interaction between the “free labor” of poor white people versus the slave labor of enslaved Africans, for example.

One thing that really struck me about Isenberg’s account was the way that class has always been biologized. Poor white people were thought to take on “degenerate” traits due to the land that they lived upon, for example (here, my mind returned to Lovecraft, who enjoyed talking about “degenerate whites” almost as much as he loved the N-word).

One thing that was missing here, though, was a certain attention paid to labor. In Isenberg’s assessment, “white trash” or “lower class” whites were specifically not laborers, and while a discussion of people so dispossessed that they can’t even properly sell their labor is important, I think that a picture of class without economics is fundamentally an incomplete picture, and robs her subject of moments of agency. While the backwoods white trash becomes active in Jacksonian democracy, I don’t recall a mention of the Battle of Blair Mountain, for example.

An excellent book, on the whole, if incomplete.

This is an older book, and shows older-school graphic design. The horizontal bars give it a somewhat art-deco quality. Still, a fascinating and excellent book.

The Fire Next Time (James Baldwin, Vintage, 1993)

After that last read, I thought I needed a counterpoint. I placed a hold on Between the World and Me and found that James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time was free. I’ve got a lot of affection for James Baldwin — I use “If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me What Is?” in my classes, and I still remember reading Go Tell It On the Mountain in college.

The Fire Next Time is a lyrical memoir of being black in America, and while it doesn’t go terribly deep into the history, it does offer a compelling snapshot of life in America during the early civil rights movement, from the point of view of someone who eventually quit the country for Provence in France. You can see a bit of the thinking that led Baldwin to exit the country at work here — the thoughts of a man who is so sick at heart that he can’t stand to be a part of something that chews up and dehumanizes his people that he saw no option other than leaving. This is complicated by Baldwin’s double markedness: he is not simply a black man, but a gay black man, and this complicates life for him, because the struggle of queer people of all races was his, as was the struggle of black people of all orientations. He was hit from multiple sides by identities imposed on him, which most likely differed from how he felt about himself. The episode in which he describes having met with Elijah Muhammad hammers this home, and illustrated something quite fascinating.

While I have talked about how I have complicated thoughts on desertion (see my piece entitled “The Nature of the Unnatural”, linked above in the section on The Uninhabitable Earth), I am also reminded of Analee Newitz’s book Scatter Adapt Remember, which might be another one worth rereading, honestly.

Between the World and Me (Ta-Nehisi Coates, Spiegel & Grau, 2015)

Another important read. Coates wrote this extended letter to his son — similar to how The Fire Next Time begins with a letter Baldwin wrote to his nephew — about the trauma of living as a black person in America. I was interested to discover that Coates seemed to have a similar idea about consicousness to me: the idea that we are primarily our bodies, and that the indignities we suffer in our society are principally aimed at weighing that body down, at reducing us to that body and robbing us of the life of something apart from it.

The story told in this book is a painful one, as any extended meditation on subjugation and prejudice tends to be. Still there were moments of hope for the future — the thought that perhaps the future might be different, might one day be rectified.

Whether that will happen or not is a bit of a question, but it’s one that we can hope for an affirmative answer to.

The River of Consciousness (Oliver Sacks, Knopf Publishing, 2017)

It’s ironic that a book I read as a breather challenged me more about my basic assumptions on the world than anything else I’ve read recently. Then again, that’s Sacks for you. This book was a poshumous collection of essays that takes aim at the fundamental questions of consciousness. The title essay grapples with the question of whether our perceptions are a continuous stream — a running tap of thought, so to speak — or made up of discrete moments. I largely gravitate towards the former, personally, but Sacks uses empirical observation to make a solid case for the latter.

If perception is discontinuous, Sacks reasons, there is no reason to believe that consciousness is continuous. Our thoughts are made up, fundamentally, of quanta that could be described as having a character like a digital file, each instant bound together by some alchemy in the brain and turned into a “world” presented to us that we then respond to.

While I still reject the assumption that the brain is anything like a computer, this did deliver a rather striking blow to that worldview, and I’m going to be digesting it for some time.

Completely different school of graphic design here. I can’t say that didn’t pull me into it.

The Luminous Dead (Caitlin Starling, Harper Voyager, 2019)

The first book I finished in 2021, though I began it in 2020. This was another one that Edgar read first. I enjoyed it for many of the same reasons, though I’m still digesting it, having finished it last night while washing the dishes.

I found it a competent book, and one that owes a slight debt to Dune — the “Tunnelers” of The Luminous Dead are worm-like subterranean creatures drawn to vibrations and are imminently hostile to human beings. (Perhaps they draw more from the “graboids” from Tremors, but what are they but smaller sandworms?)

While hardly high literature, it was a tense, compelling book, and a genuinely horrifying look at the conditions that the characters were working under. It turned out to be less…science-fictional…than I was expecting, and I was slightly disappointed by that, but I will not give it a black mark for failing to live up to an expectation it didn’t really intentionally instill. I would recommend it.

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