What I’m Reading: Mosley, Kuang, Gladwell

Farewell, Amethystine by Walter Mosely

By my count, Walter Mosely has written 17 Easy Rawlins mysteries (and another 15 featuring Socrates Fortlow, Leonid McGill, King Oliver and Fearless Jones). I try to read them all though may have missed a few of the recent ones. In any case I’m back and so is Easy, smitten with the young women called Amethystine (who fortunately goes by Amy).

It’s the beginning of January 1970 and Easy has a nice life and a good business. It’s all upset by Amethystine Stoller, who asks him to find her ex-husband Curt. Curt turns up dead and Easy goes about untangling that crime and several others, including one targeting his LAPD friend Mel Suggs.

In this tale, Easy is caught in the middle, between the comfortable life he is building, the still vulnerable present, and his past. Excellent dialogue and style, and Fearless Jones plays a supporting role.

Babel by R. F. Kuang

Babel is the story of a biracial youth—Robin Swift–who’s caught between the British Empire, which will educate at its Oxford Translation Cetner (the titular Babel) and employ him, and the Canton colony of his birth. His father, an Oxford don, refuses to acknowledge him as his offspring but arranges for him to study at Oxford with the idea of a future as a translator and maker of magical silver bars power by semantics. As Robin comes of age with his friends Rami, Victorie, and Letty, he learns his own history and sees the effects of colonization and opium on his Chinese home.

It’s a long read, 500plus pages, with plenty of details—too much for some readers—but great for anyone interested in linguistics and history. There is betrayal and heinous behavior, adequate character development, plenty of world-building intermixed with real history, and a blunt critique of British colonialism.

This book is about racism, but basically only white-against-nonwhite racism. It barely touches the less obvious white-against-white racism, such as antisemitism or anti-Irish racism as examples. This book could have subverted expectations, while at the same time reinforced its points, by taking a more nuanced view of racism and exploring the topic fully. For me the best part was Robin Swift’s struggle between his growing conscience and his impulse to rationalize his privilege.

The Revenge of the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

Not just a new edition of The Tipping Point, but an all-new work.

As usual, Gladwell brings to the fore stories and bits of research I would not otherwise know about and makes the connections among them: epidemics of crime, suicide, drug abuse, as well as stories of social engineering and social change. As usual, it’s fascinating stuff but Gladwell does tend to overquote and he has the annoying habit (to me) habit of starting and stopping stories in an attempt to build connections among ideas. I found myself forgetting details of the earlier stories just as he was returning to them.

 

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Time, time, time is on my side

If I could turn back time …

Purely by luck, I’ve read three books on time travel recently. A friend recommended The Book of Doors by Gareth Brown, my book group choose Stephen King’s 800-page 11/22/63 for its December read, and I picked up Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time.

Each of them approaches time travel from a different angle.

In The Book of Doors, an elderly customer named Mr. Webber’s leave bookstore clerk Cassie Andrews a small, leather-bound book inscribed with a note explaining that “This is the Book of Doors. Hold it in your hand, and any door is every door.” The gift permits teleportation and time travel, and soon Cassie and her roommate, Izzy are being chased by sinister book collectors, including one known only as .“the woman.” Cassie is able to door her way into the past learns about time travel, which is a closed system. As one physics professor in the book explained “You cannot change events from what has already happened. If you go back and do something in the past, then that already happened in the past and is part of history. It is part of what made your present be the present that it is, the present that you departed from when you went into the past.” In other words, since the past has already happened, you can’t change it: you can only take part in it.

In Stephen King’s 11/22/63, high school English teacher Jake Epping finds a door that will take him back the late 1950s, where he must wait for November 1963 to roll around to try to save JFK. He’s constrained by a promise to make sure Oswald acted alone. Along the way, he makes some changes in history—saving this person or that and he learns that time resists being changed, throwing obstacle after obstacle in his way. He eventually succeeds in stopping the assassination, only to find that the present is worse. So it’s back to the past again to let time takes its course.

In The Ministry of Time, the unnamed narrator is a Cambodian-British bureaucrat who serves as one of the “bridges” to a small group of time refugees. England has found a time door and is testing it on individuals facing imminent death in the past, bringing them to now to determine what is possibly biologically.  Their bridges are minders who help to acclimate them to their new twenty-first century lives. Author Kaliane Bradley treats time travel as creating a set of alternate timelines (in the spirit of King’s approach, but without the resistance by time itself and of course all the lines coexist. To complicate things more, characters come from the near future to try to guide present-day characters in their timeline and interactions with the time immigrants.

In each case, the authors–Brown, King, and Bradley–manage to do a bit more than just a  time-travel trick: the possibilities of time travel are ties to the ways in which the characters connect with other people and their worlds.  And each makes us think about the possibility, impossibility, and difficulty of change.

 

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What I’m Reading (Nov 2024)

The River We Remember by William Kent Krueger

I’m becoming Kreuger fan. In The River We Remember, he fashions a mystery (who killed the execrable Jimmy Quinn?), along with a period study of the fictional small town of Jewell, Minnesota, in the post-war 1950s. The plot revolves around character of damaged characters and family secrets, and the tale features an ensemble of engaging characters from the sheriff to the café owner to the Native veteran who is accused of the murder yet refused to defend himself.

Close to Death by Anthony Horowitz

I’m new to Anthony Horowitz—this was a selection for my book club. The plot focuses on a disagreeable financier who moves into an exclusive community and winds up murdered—an arrow through the throat. The members of the community all have motives and seem to be hiding something. A bit into the book, we learn that this is actually a cold case and one that author Anthony Horowitz, the Watson to Hawthorne’s Holmes, is attempting to reconstruct without much help from the detective. The narrative structure creates a bit of initial confusion for a first-time Horowitz reader, but once you get the hang of it the story progresses nicely and we learn how the clues all fit together at the end. I liked it well enough to want to read more of the series, perhaps starting at the beginning.

This Perfect Day by Ira Levin

A friend told me that This Perfect Day was her all-time favorite book and loaned me a copy, so I re-read this dystopian tale by the author of Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives. It holds up well, despite some 1970s sensibilities. After a revolution, the world is run, efficiently enough, by a central computer and the population takes regular treatments to remain docile and happy. But no everyone is and there are rumors of islands of free-thinkers. If you’ve never read This Perfect Day, give this bit of retro-futurism a try.

The Two Cultures by C. P. Snow

I also reread The Two cultures, the 1959 lecture by the English chemist/novelist, in which he laments the gulf between scientists and humanists. In a (much quoted) key passage he laments the way in which old school literary intellectuals are at one pole and physical scientists are the other scientists, and “Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension—sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding. They have a curious distorted image of each other. Their attitudes are so different that, even on the level of emotion, they can’t find much common ground. Non-scientists tend to think of scientists as brash and boastful, … shallowly optimistic, unaware of man’s condition. On the other hand, the scientists believe that the literary intellectuals are totally lacking in foresight, peculiarly unconcerned with their brother men, in a deep sense anti-intellectual, anxious to restrict both art and thought to the existential moment. And so on.” He characterized the polarization as a dangerous misunderstanding but nevertheless worried that humanistic intellectuals were “natural luddites” unwilling or incapable of comprehending the scientific revolution.

It seems to me that his two cultures have more in common that in opposition (thought they sometimes have little patience for one another). Revisiting The Two Cultures leads me to think that there are perhaps four cultures: those or science and the humanities, which share an interest in intellectual autonomy and discovery (scientific or humanistic), professionalists, whose highest calling is efficiency and return-on-investment, and anti-intellectuals, who resent the elites of the other three cultures. Maybe someone needs to write The Four Cultures.

The Shakespeare Requirement and The English Experience by Julie Schumacher

A while back I read Dear Committee Members, Julie Schumacher’s Thurber Award winning send up of academic idiosyncrasies. In The Shakespeare Requirement and The English Experience, clueless Jay Fitger is back, first as the newly elected chair of his department (English, naturally) and in the second leading a group of Payne University students a board. While Dear Committee Members was a epistolary novel—largely a series of letters of recommendation which all turn out to be about Fitger, The Shakespeare Requirement centers on curriculum change and corporatization—in the spirit of Richard Russo’s Straight Man and just as funny: the chair of Economics, flush with resources sets out to eliminate the Humanities; an ancient Shakespearean resists. It’s a serio-comic take on the values of the university and its future, you find a good (if rueful) laugh every few pages. In The English Experience, Fitger finds himself chaperoning Payne University’s winter term “Experience: Abroad” with a quirky cast of students he finds himself appreciating. Despite their acid, all three novels are essentially hopeful and in the end, Fitger has grown and has grown on me–not as a hero to emulate, but as a tale of what could have been.

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An Interview with Holly Searcy, author of The Shiver Tree

Holly Searcy is a writer, editor, and self-avowed wordinista. A graduate of Southern Oregon University, she has worked in both the publishing industry and advertising industry and now pursues her passion for stories.

She lives in Ashland, with her husband Ben, two wonderful black cats and a devilish orange tabby.

Her debut novel, The Shiver Tree, published by Blackstone Publishing, and is available November 12, 2024.

Ed Battistella: Congratulations on The Shiver Tree, which I really enjoyed. Tell us a bit about the book.

Holly Searcy: Thank you! I’d been trying to write a novel for almost a decade before I realized this was the story I wanted to tell, so I’m thrilled I get to share it with a wider audience. The book actually came about while enjoying a bit of lockdown with the rest of the world in 2020. I’d been playing in a Dungeons & Dragons homebrew campaign with my husband, my brother, and a few of our closest friends for five years, and one day I started thinking about a piece of backstory for my character, an elf druid, that I discovered had potential connections to a quest we had done in the game. I had never properly written a backstory for my character, so I decided to just start writing using that quest as inspiration, and the adventure simply tumbled out of me. Thus, The Shiver Tree was born.

EB: How long has the story been percolating in your head and at your desk?

HS: Really the story had been building in my mind for five years while playing D&D, which is essentially a collaborative storytelling game, but I’d only been thinking on the specific idea for a couple weeks before I started writing. I completed the novel in about a year, and then came the many rounds of edits, beta reads, more edits, etc. Then I found a publishing home with Blackstone, and my amazing editor had me diving back in and actually creating new lore, so the whole journey ended up being about three years.

EB: How would you describe the culture of your fictional land of Amarra?

HS: Depends on where you go! The continent is large and filled with a number of peoples, from elves to humans to gnomes. Most of the main characters in the story are elves, who tend to have a more traditional culture of close family ties and a collectivist mindset, while humans are, well, more chaotic and self-centered. Though there is a general peace among races on the surface, threads of disquiet have been building for a long time and are now starting to have ripple effects.

EB: Who are some of your influences as a writer and as a world-builder?

HS: Terry Brooks is phenomenal at creating magical worlds that you want to dive deeper into, so while I in no way claim to have his gift for world-building, he’s certainly an influence and inspiration. I also love infusing humor into characters and situations, and Jim Butcher has been a great influence in that aspect of my writing.

EB: What was the most challenging aspect of writing The Shiver Tree?

HS: Self-doubt was an issue, for sure, but also overcoming the problem of being so familiar with the world and characters that I had a hard time stepping back and figuring out how much information the reader needed at any given time. I wanted to avoid lore dumps that would overwhelm readers, but I also didn’t want to have them wondering what was going on for too long. I tended to get conflicting feedback from beta readers in that regard, so navigating that terrain became difficult.

EB: What was the most fun?

HS: The characters. I loved sitting down to write with an idea in my mind for the day and then watching my characters take a left turn and do something entirely different for the next thirty pages. I only had a few concrete plot points in my mind that I needed to hit, and I let the characters guide me in getting there.

EB: You hint at the end that there will be more stories of Amarra and the high druid Kiana Paletine? What’s next? Will we see more of her sister Ravaini?

HS: As a matter of fact, I’ve already finished the first draft of book two—and Ravaini is along for the adventure this time, as are a handful of new quirky friends. Book three is also in the works. They have more Trees to find!

EB: Thanks for talking with us. Where can people get The Shiver Tree?

HS: The Shiver Tree is available for pre-order from Blackstone Publishing, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble. On November 12 it will be hitting physical bookshelves at Barnes & Noble, Bestow in Ashland, and a few other locations that are TBD.

 

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