Cameron's Book Round-Up, 2024, part 7

We near the zero-hour on the election, the genocide enters its second year, and Broken Hands moves locations. But, at the very least, October brings a break in the heat. If you’ve got a few bucks to spare, I might recommend donating to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund — they’re a good organization and they need some extra funds to deal with…you know, the horrors.

Imminent: Inside the Pentagon’s Hunt for UFOs by Luis Elizondo.

I’ve talked a bit about my interest in High Strangeness and UFO disclosure — well, so long as you’re looking for something not written by Tom DeLonge, this is apparent the book on the issue, written by the man that everyone points to as the most credible guy on the issue. However, he also discusses, at length, the military’s “remote viewing” program, which he claims he received training from, and discuss (with minimal detail) his role in running Guantanamo Bay.

The book was interesting enough, but it didn’t leave as much of an impression, to be honest. The reasoning in the book (postulating that UFOs look the way that they do to make use of an “Alcubierre Drive”) is interesting enough, though his assertion that ET wants the hydrogen found in the water of Earth’s oceans is laughable (why not the water found in Saturn’s rings? Or coating the surface of the larger asteroids?). As with many such moves towards disclosure, I’m struck by the fact that it’s attempting to smash all of the “observables” down into something that makes sense by the modern, scientific worldview and then failing to do so.

Maybe I’ll try out DeLonge’s book, though that would require I engage with something that has the title “Sekret Machines” and I’m just not sure I have that in me. Ask again in late January when I’m struggling.

Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy by Colin Dickey

So, when you take a dose of poison, you should probably take the antidote as quickly as possible. Dickey's a longtime favorite of ours, and his treatment of hauntings and cryptids are fascinating. We appreciate his agnostic approach: leaving aside if this is true…why do we want this to be true?

In this book, he makes the argument that Hofstadter got it exactly wrong in his Paranoid Style. It is not that there is a stable center that resists the excesses of more ideologically charged wings, we should instead see the fringes as working like the steppes of Eurasia, which were a crucible for the formation of new cultures for most of human civilization: they generated the Scythians and the Huns and the Mongols, and launched them at the periphery. Our own political hinterlands create extreme and mutant ideological formations that crash into our political consensus and — for a time at least — can occupy that center and alter its position (consider the conspiracy theories about the Masons and Illuminati, which heavily shaped the early American republic, and look at how these conspiracy theories remain with us in the John Birch Society and Q-Anon (Dickey also makes a note that most real secret organizations exist to counter imagined ones.

A highly engaging read, quite recommended.

Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett (Discworld #8, City Watch #1)

I feel like the mental image of Terry Pratchett is somewhat defined by his later years. He was always a compassionate man, but he seemed to become more progressive as he got older, and so reading some of his earlier works can be enlightening. Guards! Guards! was his paean to the town guards that populate medieval fantasy stories of all varieties, and was — it seems to me — his attempt to do a send-up of a fairly common fantasy plot (the foundling king, here played by the dwarf-raised human man Carrot Ironfoundson) and I get the sense he had originally intended it to be a one-off, which ended up not being the case.

It tells the story of the last three men in the city watch of the fantasy metropolis Ankh-Moorpork, and how they foiled an attempted coup. Carrot is clearly meant to be the protagonist early on, but the story obviously wants to be about Sam Vimes, the highly principled captain of the watch.

In all honesty, one can pick up and proceed through the Discworld books in basically any order. It’s a truly episodic setting, where each individual entry is stand-alone. Given the popularity of the Watch as an ensemble, though, Guards! Guards! is a perfectly fine entry point (though I have yet to find one that eclipses The Truth as my favorite. I’ll just have to keep looking.)

The Lost Village by Camilla Sten

A sort of found-footage/folk horror outing that concerns an attempt to create a documentary relating to a (fictional) modern-day Roanoke in central Sweden. It’s a competently written novel, but the pitch of “Blair Witch meets Midsommar” both does it justice and turns out to be less interesting than it initially suggests. The real issue is that it’s written to be a highly visual story, but it’s communicated in a textual medium.

I might also suggest that the author’s attempt to tie everything off at the end misses what made the two comparison texts work. The Blair Witch Project succeeds because there’s an unanswerable question at the heart of it, that the ending very obviously flinches away from, and Midsommar ends with the main character finding a toxic and deadly version of the belonging and acceptance that she wanted throughout the story. The Lost Village, however, simply concludes with everything given a neat little bow.

It’s an enjoyable journey, but the ending doesn’t land for me.

Chainsaw Man, volumes #1 - #12 (Previously reviewed here and here), #13, #14 by Tatsuki Fujimoto

Okay, I’ll admit, I reread all of these because we were moving and I wanted to ensure that I got through the most recent ones before we packed them up and it seemed wise to reread them at some point. My thoughts aren’t exactly the same as my prior reviews, but I’m planning on doing a more in-depth review at some point, so I’m just going to leave you with this: It’s good, it’s worth reading, be prepared for it to get gory and violent.

Kraken by China Miéville.

This and the next book were released almost simultaneously. Miéville, in this one, tells the story of an occult wear unfolding underneath the surface of late-aughts London. It’s a cliche to say that “the city is a character”, but Miéville is the one author that regularly pulls it off. He has an unalloyed love for cities and the strangeness that they generate that is, honestly, a rarity in the population at large and among writers in particular.

The author described this novel in an interview as “a dark comedy about a squid-worshipping cult and the end of the world. It takes the idea of the squid cult very seriously. Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they’re not absurd.”

The story concerns Billy Harrow, an employee at the British Museum of Natural History, the prize exhibit of which is a preserved giant squid. One day, however, the giant squid disappears, and Billy is questioned by a branch of the police that works on cult issues. As he is turning this over in his head, he discovers a body that has been preserved in a bottle whose mouth is too small for the body to have gone into — and, anyway, it’s been there far too long for the relatively contemporary tattoos on it.

So Billy enters an occult demimonde to attempt to figure out what’s happening, because it’s possible that the squid he had been caring for was a deity of some kind, and it’s possible that Billy is its prophet. In the process, he is menaced by a number of strange individuals: a crime boss that’s a living tattoo, the ambassador of the sea, a whole cult of kraken-worshipers time-sharing a church with a more traditional sect, and a pair of surreal hired killers — Goss and Subby — who outshine all other examples of the character type.

It’s a beautiful piece of writing, and well worth engaging with.

The City & The City by China Miéville.

Almost immediately, I turned around and read Miéville’s other novel from the same time — 2009’s The City & the City, which I feel has a lot of Jan Morris’s Hav in its DNA, alongside the Kafka and Raymond Chandler that are called out in the dedication, concerning, as it does, a fictitious city-state in south-eastern Europe. Or a pair of them.

It’s complicated.

So there are two cities: Besźel and Ul Qoma. Besźel has a post-soviet feel, being dingy and gray and full of concrete. Despite the feeling, it’s more firmly in the American sphere of interest than its counterpart, Ul Qoma, which is a city of gleaming glass spires, globally on the upswing despite being embargoed by the Americans.

Besźel and Ul Qoma occupy the same physical space. It’s not that there’s a dimensional cleavage or something, they literally exist in the same space. The citizens in one city are trained extensively and thoroughly, from birth, to “unsee” their geographic counterparts. Some parts are completely one city or the other, and some are “cross-hatched.” There’s even a scene where — as far as I understood the narrative — a governmental committee with members in both cities video-conferenced with itself while all members were in the same room.

This absurd state of affairs is enforced by Breach, the seemingly supernatural power that disappears people who commit the sin that gives this force its name.

All of this is fine and good, you might say, but what about the narrative? What actually happens?

A young woman, an American graduate student working on an archaeology dig is killed in one city and her body is dumped in the other, and whoever did it made damned sure that this crime isn’t committed in a way that will get Breach involved. Instead, it falls to Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crimes Squad, who must go back and forth between the two cities and try to understand her notes regarding a potential third city, Orciny, undetected by the other two.

It’s a fascinating read, but the ending is less satisfying. Miéville opts to tie things off in a way that don’t work as well for me, but he could always pick up the idea again at some point. I hope he will: it’s a fascinating read.

Goliath by Tochi Oyebuchi (reviewed here by Edgar).

I’ll admit, first off, that I approached this book wrong.

Edgar reviewed it, and made the note that it somewhat resembled The Blade Between. I respectfully disagree with that assessment: while both deal, fictitiously, with issues of gentrification in New England and touch meaningfully upon issues of race and sexuality, Goliath is not quite a science fiction equivalent to the modern fantasy/horror story told in The Blade Between. This is because to read Goliath specifically for its plot is wrong. It is, instead, a character-driven story, and it’s important to keep track of those characters and their relationships as they navigate an Earth that has been depopulated by trans-orbital white flight.

My tendency is always to read print books before sleep, unless I’m teaching a literature class and can categorize it as “work” to do so. It puts space between the last screen I look at in the day and my attempt to sleep — which I understand is somewhat pseudo-scientific, but it feels accurate enough and aligns with my experience, so I’ll continue with it — and this is often accompanied by moments of nodding of, which can be bad for tracking a story line.

In contrast, I get the sense that Goliath would benefit from taking notes and making a social map of the characters, tracking who knows and relates to whom, and the qualities the relating brings out.

I may reattempt it at some point, but I need to build up a different set of habits to get everything out of it.

Until Proven Safe by Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twiley.

Until Proven Safe is a history of the practice of quarantine, from its implementation in the Adraitic some six or seven hundred years ago to provide a buffer against the transmission of disease, up through the modern day. Manaugh and Twiley make the interesting note that quarantine, as a kind of preemptive and limited isolation, is as much a legal and architectural issue (Manaugh maintains BLDGblog and wrote The Burglar’s Guide to the City, which I reviewed here) as it is a medical one.

The book contains several extensive and detailed accounts of visiting Lazarettos throughout the Mediterranean, descriptions of the effects of quarantine on trade, interviews with a philatelist who specializes in letters that have notices from public health departments stamped on them and the engineers designing facilities for long-term nuclear waste storage.

As with most of Manaugh’s projects — I’m unfamiliar with Twiley’s work — the book is an omnivorous and amphibious beast that ranges quite far in search of the information that it looks for. While I believe The Burglar’s Guide is a more inherently interesting book, I think that this is perhaps a more interesting one: it’s not certain that you will be burgled, but I think it’s a smart bet that we’ll all be placed in quarantine at some point.

And, given work-from-home-regimes, you won’t even have a break from your employment.

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