Book Review: How to do Nothing by Jenny Odell
Book Review: The House Witch: Your Complete Guide to Creating a Magical Space with Rituals and Spells for Hearth and Home by Arin Murphy-Hiscock
Book Review: DNF ‘Please Don’t Kill the Freshman’ by Zoe Trope
I got at least 30 pages into this and found it much too cryptic for me to keep up with (read: I’m too old now for this nonsense!). The multiple ‘List of Characters’ are more like a key to break a code and the writing style reads like someone overly inspired by their first creative writing class — where things like pills are described as “quiet” (“and take some quiet pink pills,” page 9). That gave me a good sense of the book. It’s not like any diary I’ve ever written, for sure, but sure is like assignments I’ve turned in.
I know I’m not the target audience for it and it was written by a teenager (yep, it’s a pretentious teenager. Spot on , duh, because it’s written by one.). There’s slack I should cut it. But I don’t think I can because of that $100K advance it apparently got after being republished. I’m still struggling with the plausibility and the legality (read the other goodreads review implying parts of it aren’t true. Sounds like a potential legal nightmare). The fact this book only has around 100 goodreads reviews since coming out in 2003-ish, despite being pumped by Dave Eggars and Zadie Smith, has me wondering if it was hyped properly by the publisher — has me wondering if the author merely had connections to publication that I’m not clear on. The author is now well known in the library world (Zoe Trope was a pen name) and Charlie Jane Anders has mentioned her on the Our Opinions Are Correct podcast (which I listen to religiously). Thus, I was compelled to pick this book up for reasons other than pure interest in teen angst. Bonus fact: she apparently went to college with Lena Dunham, but who knows why we know that? Was Dunham published young too? Probably. Anyway, it made me want to read the book even more. I apparently love drama.
One thing that did bother me in the book is how she says she doesn’t like being friends with girls. Maybe that changes throughout the book but it’s quite sad to read today. I certainly don’t think that’s true of the author anymore. I’m quite a fan of her writing about libraries and librarianship. I just don’t think this book ended up being what the publishing world probably wanted it to be?
Other reviews I found interesting:
Book Review: Necessity (Thessaly 3) by Jo Walton was no necessity
[The title of my post is inspired by another review of this book I read.]
The concept of gods in space and them dealing with robots is not new. C.S. Lewis did the planets thing in Perelandra and gods playing with or making robots is a tale as old as actual myth. Necessity finally couples the two in the most original way I’ve ever seen. That doesn’t mean it’s ultimately satisfying.
While it doesn’t seem like there were many loose threads in the last two books to warrant this story, you do learn a lot more about the gods and their functionality–you get answers to questions you didn’t know you had. They’re unnecessary answers, but still worth knowing— exploring more like. I say exploring because, like most things in this series, the answers are hardly set in stone or actually knowable, and even when they are I don’t tend to agree with Walton’s take.
It’s not that Necessity was unnecessary because of this, though. It’s that the titular subject (as a character) is rendered pointless in the process of the book. “Necessity” as a force is undermined, as I will explain. I also didn’t like that the title broke away from the pattern of the first two books: The Just City, The Philosopher Kings. Why not The Necessity at the very least? It’s jarring and isolating from the flow of the other books. I was turned off instantly, because there is no good reason it branched off as if it was a standalone. It cannot, in fact, stand alone from the other two books. Do not try to read this without first reading the first two. Even though I’ve read all of them, I was forgetting who characters were/had been. There’s too many to actually care about, quite honestly. Don’t let it bog you down, though.
There is much that doesn’t make sense about the new planet they live on. The fact they are given a pre-established planet frustrated me. The planet wasn’t made for them. They took it, nevermind the evolutionary potential and rights of the beings (fish) already there. I’m not sure why Zeus couldn’t have just whipped up a new world without all the undertones of colonization (a theme in the book that seems way too glossed over for my comfort).
The one positive thing about this book was Crocus finally stole the show. The Workers grew on me and were finally made interesting to me in the series; they being the only ones who could ever be truly Platonic (pun intended).
The rest of this is a review for those who have read the book.
Things I didn’t like about the book (spoilers):
The rules that bind the gods are still like arbitrary hoops Walton made her characters jump through in the first book. I still don’t understand how prayer works. Apollo laments on page 110 of my edition “I wished somebody in Bologna would pray for my help so that I could give them something better than this.” Why is prayer necessary for help? Why could Athena only pull those who prayed to her to populate her city in book one? I still don’t understand this. It would have saved them a lot of time if they could have just pulled in Plato himself to ask him what he meant, instead of three books of “what do you think he means by X?!” It seems a ridiculous contrivance sometimes, especially when there is no excuse. The entire book is about revising Plato to perfection, but Plato himself never learns this lesson. It requires his absence to function, meanwhile we can bring Socrates back for a second time? Also contrived is the guest-friends concept, how gods cannot eat unless sacrificed to or invited to share — “ritual purposes” (page 127). Is this some law the gods have given to themselves to not scare or exhaust humans? A curse Zeus put on them? Was that ever explained? This does not affect them in mortal form, it seems. I don’t remember Pythas needing permission to eat. So much is brought up again and again but no real answer is established.
And back to the prayer concept – even when Kebes is forced to pray to Hermes/Jathery to take him into the future, he doesn’t address Hermes by name (calling him “Dear demon that I see before me”). So how important can prayer be? If he had actually prayed to Hermes, I suppose the twist that it was actually Jathery the whole time would have been a plot hole. But why couldn’t Hermes have also been Jathery? If Apollo and Athena can patron Earth and Plato, why can’t Olympians champion alien planets? Apollo even goes into a tangent about Platonic Forms and how he and the gods have several (an idealistic Dolphin form, etc.), so why couldn’t he have a Saeil (spelling?) Form? (Side note: At one point Apollo implies that the emblematic animal of Hephaistus (Hephaestus) is a lion, which is wrong. It is a donkey. Where on earth did Walton get that it was a lion?). I thought that the Forms discussion was where this was headed, that gods can have “alien” Forms. It made no sense to create new gods when there are already gods. In fact, it seemed speciesist (racist?) when all of Necessity was undermined just so that Marsilia didn’t have to have Jathery’s baby. I’m not sure what statement was trying to be made there. Hermes takes one for the team, though. Still not sure why it couldn’t have just been Jathery. Jathery is a god. There’s ways it could have, even if biology was an issue.
What is strange about this book was Walton’s need to create new alien gods instead of having them share ones that are already ours. It made Earth-gods seem less potent and limited to human form, which I think they should be beyond. Like in previous books, there is acknowledgement of other earth pantheons but that really just means Jesus (Yayzu), and how they don’t mingle with each other, which gets incredibly too complicated to think about when the alien gods are introduced. There’s no overt acknowledgment of Norse or Hindu or other gods. Only Christianity and Egyptian (Toth). This is likely, yes, because so many Neoplatonists also dabbled with Christian theology. I’m sure it was something she was forced to address because we really couldn’t have modern Christianity without Plato. But what doesn’t seem fair is that she introduced alien gods over explaining the different pantheons we already have and how those intersect well. Maybe she did it well enough in book one.
Kebe’s Christianity still rubs me the wrong way even using something like Ikaros/Pico’s view of “gods are angels/demons.” Maybe someday I’ll put my finger on it. Even if you think the gods are demons, they become part of the Christian pantheon and vice versa — part of the same mythos. This is essentially what Walton is promoting, yet how is it that Apollo has never met Yayzu yet, saying he should meet up with him sometime to talk about incarnation (page 101)? Apollo also has never met Thoth either, apparently, which I just find hard to believe especially since so many of their gods overlapped or morphed into the same being in real life (page 169).
I’m also confused as to why Pico/Ikaros continually gets credit for coming up with the “angels are gods” thing when there were philosophers who did it earlier? Was this addressed in earlier books? I may have missed something, but there seems to be a huge lack of St. Augustine and other earlier philosophers. Especially since he seems like someone Kebes would want to emulate.
I also don’t believe that the gods can’t be in the same place twice. What is to stop them? Apollo is said to have “had no power while he was incarnate,” which means he has no ability to perform miracles. The fact “Yayzu” has power (according to his mythos) while incarnate is no matter for Walton. I also find it hard to believe Apollo had no power because his children became gods. He clearly doesn’t have mortal sperm, ahem. There’s so many big ideas crammed in that it makes it feel rushed or it seems insensitive/careless. Walton needed more time for certain things–things like the fact the Workers create a city of their own and exclude non-Workers from being citizens seems like positive reinforcement for nationalism. I’m not sure I like where it landed.
Also, I don’t understand how they have honey (page 253) on a planet inhospitable to bees!
The second book is still my least favorite of the series. I’m sad it’s over. I bought this book back when it originally came out and let it sit on the shelf. It was my hope and I didn’t want to let it go.
Other reviews I agree with:
And speaking of Sokrates, he’s back and I’m pissed about it. About half this book feels like characters explaining things to Sokrates, and him saying wise or rebellious things back to them. It’s time for other characters to get to be interesting and philosophical!
Book Review: Almost Lost Arts by Emily Freidenrich
If I had a coffee table, this is the kind of book I’d want on it!
I picked this up because Brittany Nicole Cox is featured and I find her work delightful.
The author has a fascinating instagram as well.
Book Review (?): The Companion Species Manifesto by Donna Haraway
“Dogs are said to be the first domestic animals, displacing pigs for primal honors. Humanist technophiliacs depict domestication as the paradigmatic act of masculine, single-parent, self-birthing, whereby man makes himself repetitively as he invents (creates) his tools. The domestic animal is the epoch-changing tool, realizing human intention in the flesh, in a dogsbody version of onanism. Man took the (free) wolf and made the (servant) dog and so made civilization possible. Mongrelized Hegel and Freud in the kennel? Let the dog stand for all domestic plant and animal species, subjected to human intent in stories of escalating progress or destruction, according to taste. Deep ecologists love to believe these stories in order to hate them in the name of Wilderness before the Fall into Culture, just as humanists believe them in order to fend off biological encroachments on culture.
These conventional accounts have been thoroughly reworked in recent years, when distributed everything is the name of the game all over, including in the kennel. Even though I know they are faddish, I like these metaplasmic, remodeled versions that give gods (and other species) the first moves in domestication and then choreograph an unending dance of distributed and heterogeneous agencies. Besides being faddish, I think the newer stories have a better chance of being true, and they certainly have a better chance of teaching us to pay attention to significant otherness as something other than a reflection of one’s intentions.”
Book Review: The Great Vanishing Act: Blood Quantum and the Future of Native Nations
Some quotes from the book I want to highlight:
“Yet blood quantum has so thoroughly permeated ideas of race and citizenship in Indian Country that even the most common alternative to the blood quantum system – enrollment by lineal descent –largely adheres to the same racial logic. The Cherokee Nation, for example, grants citizenship based not on degree of Cherokee blood but on the ability to prove biological descent from an individual listed as Cherokee by blood on the Dawes Rolls generated in the late nineteenth century. Importantly, this reckoning excludes thousands of Cherokee Freedmen, the descendants of African slaves whose history within Cherokee society traces back to the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Configuring identity on the basis of descendent recycles the concepts of indigeneity as biology and posits that sociocultural belonging in Indian Country – along with ties and claims to Indigenous lands – is on some level transmitted genetically.
…How can we explain the persistence of blood quantum as a mechanism for determining tribal membership in a way that does not shame or blame the colonized? Critics of blood quantum such as Joanne Barker have pointed out that the practice indirectly works to destroy Indigenous nations by creating a dilemma of identity: Native nations must either racialize themselves or risk losing recognition as ‘authentic’ Indians. This colonial double bind leaves Indigenous communities to exemplify notions of authenticity that are not entirely of their making, yet have become central to Native self-identity. This painful situation is exacerbated by the fact that the system of racial registration – along with the unscientific notion that race and purity even exist as biological realities – is a remnant from an era of eugenics and theories of white racial superiority.
…So long as blood quantum alone confers citizenship, Indian Country will remain bound to an enrollment system that reifies biological categories that were originally founded upon the hierarchical presumption of white supremacy.” – Doug Kiel, ‘Bleeding Out: Histories and Legacies of ‘Indian Blood.’’
“Historically, federal policy to determine who is Indigenous goes back to those first counts of our people during the early wars and Indian Agent period in the latter half of the 1800’s. It was a military process in which they needed to count, and name, our people and place them on reservations, or in prisons/forts, or to forcibly remove them to some remote reservation. These initial lists are called base rolls and create the baseline for subsequent membership or citizenship determinations. The individuals on the initial base rolls are artificially considered to be full-blooded or 100% of a particular tribe. However, these base rolls were created to during the time of intense wars and conflict. Our people had been subjected to capture by the military, others had to flee to other locations, some were forcibly removed to remote localities. These base rolls are based on an arbitrary process of issuing our people a number, a new name (because they couldn’t understand our real names in our own languages), and an identity. It fails to take into consideration that our peoples have always been fluid, and we moved about, traded, and intermingled with other tribes throughout our history.” –Debra Harry, “Decolonizing Colonial Constructions of Indigenous Identity: A Conversation between Debra Harry and Leonie Pihama”
“The overwhelming majority of Cherokees did not hold any slaves at all. The 1835 census indicated about 1,600 slaves held by Cherokees in the years just prior to the forced removal, the Trail of Tears of 1838-39. One claim often heard by freedmen descendants is that their ancestors, too, were on the Trail of Tears. However, the wealthier slaveholding families did not subject themselves or their slaves to the hardships of removal. They had the means to remove independently and in greater comfort, and they did. About ¾ of the slaves immigrated to the Indian Territory with these families previous to the Trail of Tears. The ¼ who were on the trail, about 400 people among the 16,450 Cherokees who were also removed, were those who were owned as one or two by the smaller subsistence households who had no means to transport either themselves or their slaves more comfortably. These 400 indeed suffered the same rigors of the march as the Cherokees, but it’s very difficult to know exactly which ones they were or who their specific descendants are.” – Julia Coates, “Race and Sovereignty”
“Lineal descent does not de-emphasize biology. It emphasizes it differently, making a distant relative more like to stand for social relations.” – Kim TallBear, “Twentieth Century Tribal Blood Politics: Policy, Place, Descent”
“In short, Tribes should use membership in disregard of the Tribe’s jurisdictional boundaries, and that membership could and maybe should be based on blood quantum – jus sanguinis. However, Tribes must evolve a citizenship model for those who are born or who at least reside inside the Tribe’s jurisdictional boundaries, regardless of whether the person is a ‘member’ or not, regardless of that person’s blood quantum. Instead, the contours of such citizenship can be determined by birthplace, a minimum residency requirement, and cultural proficiency. And it must have civic relations, responsibilities, and participatory rights as its benchmarks.” – Richard Monette, “Blood Quantum: Fractionated Land, Fractionated People”
