Blog Defunct

This is probably obvious already from the many months of silence, but I've stopped using this blog. I still post occasionally on Facebook and more often on the Quartertothree forums, but have no further plans to add anything here.

Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany

Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

In Dhalgren, the town of Bellona is isolated. It's somewhere in the central United States, but we don't know exactly where. People live in a kind of chaotic anarchy, with no authorities present to enforce order. Occasionally strange things happen in the sky, but generally life continues with little interference from whatever has affected the town. The story follows the Kid, a wanderer who comes into town without knowing even his own name, but becomes part of the community.

Dhalgren is a very different kind of escapism than I usually look for in science fiction or fantasy. There's very little in the way of explaining why the world is the way it is, or how. Instead it's almost entirely about people finding ways to keep living their lives. Some go with the flow of things, some fight against it. Bellona is a place of benevolent anarchy, where everyone pretty much does whatever they like and things will largely just work out.

There are a lot of themes running through this book. Sex is a big one, present at the very beginning, and explicitly pornographic at times. Homosexuality, multiple partners, wide promiscuity - it reads to me as if Delaney was trying to touch on everything from the 1960s free love movement. Racial tensions appear as well, with some fairly bigoted characters as well as prominent black figures. Several characters, including the Kid, exhibit symptoms of mental illness. There's plenty of drug and alcohol use, sometimes to the point of abuse.

But it's just as interesting what doesn't appear. There are basically no economics - everyone just takes what they need from abandoned stores, squats in the park or abandoned homes, even drinks are free at the bar. There's no religion - the one church that we see is a community center but not a place for traditional worship, and the characters largely ignore the spiritual (at least in a religious context). And there's no government or other controlling authority, or any attempts to form one.

Taken together, the things that Delaney includes and chooses to leave out gives the impression of being unhappy with many realities of the world - living under authority, restrictions on sexual expression, economic hardships - and describing a world that simply removes them. I don't know if that's how Delaney felt himself, or it was a viewpoint he was trying to capture. I think it succeeds to some extent, although it's clearly not a stable reality. The reader can see that at some point, either resources will begin to run low or someone will get power-hungry, and the anarchy will turn much less benevolent. But that time doesn't come during the book.

All told, I can't say I particularly liked Dhalgren. It says some interesting things on quite a few topics, and that part I did enjoy. However, I just couldn't get behind the idea that you can take a random city full of people, remove the constraints mentioned above, and end up with a chaotic-but-largely-benign utopia of personal freedom and sexual expression. Someone or something has to make an effort to get that scenario and keep it going, and Dhalgren doesn't have any such controlling force. Without that, it feels like reading one long dream sequence rather than a commentary on reality, which is just not my thing.

Darius the Great Is Not Okay by Adib Khorram

Darius the Great Is Not Okay by Adib Khorram
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Darius the Great Is Not Okay is written from the perspective of a Persian-American teenage boy who struggles with depression and anxiety. It's a young adult novel, but it says plenty of good things for adults as well.

The story starts with Darius at home in Portland, Oregon, where he doesn't seem to fit. Teased by his peers, uncomfortable with his father, unpopular at school, overweight, feeling neither truly Persian or American...he's got plenty of reasons to feel out of place. Then his family takes a trip to his mother's home in Iran, which is stressful but also gives him a different perspective, the opportunity to meet family in person for the first time, and where he finds a friend for life.

I know something about being a teenager who doesn't feel like he fits in - don't we all? Some of the situations Darius finds himself in, and his reactions, were extremely familiar. But other parts - Darius' split heritage, his treatment for depression - stood out to me as they hadn't been part of my own experience. Khorram does an excellent job of helping the reader understand how those aspects of Darius' life impacted everything, from how he relates to his family to his ability to communicate to his peer interactions.

This book was a quick read for me, and Khorram's simple and clear writing style is great. There's plenty of humor to balance some of those heavy psychological topics. For me, the fact that Darius' thoughts are laced with references to Star Trek and Lord of the Rings was a big plus. There are also a lot of discussions of tea, for those heavily into that.

I'd recommend that everyone read Darius the Great Is Not Okay. If your personal experience has parallels with that of Darius, you'll find a story that hits close to home. If not, then you'll find a window into a world of split cultural heritage and living with depression. An excellent experience either way.

The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey

The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Monkey Wrench Gang is a rant against wilderness development and commercialism through the lens of outrageous ecoterrorism. It's often funny, too, and on occasion deep. But mostly, it's really, really wordy.

The first thing I noticed about this book is just how many words it takes Abbey to say anything. No simple description will do. Entire paragraphs are devoted to what could easily have been described as "the car moved forward" or "cars full of wild teenagers zoomed past on the highway" - and those are just a couple of examples from the first chapter. I appreciate detailed and descriptive writing, but this was excessive. Antoine de Saint-Exupery, he of the famous quote "Perfection is Achieved Not When There Is Nothing More to Add, But When There Is Nothing Left to Take Away", would not have approved.

Once you've dug the characters and plot out of the pile of words, The Monkey Wrench Gang isn't bad. A small group of arguably insane friends got roaming around the southwestern US, protesting against development encroaching on the wilderness. These aren't symbolic protests; they inflict destruction ranging from burning billboards to crippling heavy equipment to felling bridges. This isn't a dark, gritty, realistic description of ecoterrorism; it's more the telling of a larger-than-life legend, a play set on the stage of a disappearing wilderness.

This is a novel from the 1970s, and thus it's no surprise that some of the other themes of the time are also prominent. Marijuana appears regularly. One of the main characters is a Vietnam veteran, suffering from mental trauma from his experience. Another is a woman living well outside the traditional female role of wife and mother. We're used to all of this now, largely because of the cultural influence of these kinds of books, movies, songs, etc.

I'd have liked The Monkey Wrench Gang more without about half the words, but even so it was an interesting read. A bit of cultural history that informs the things we see in today's books and other media.

The Girl Who Smiled Beads by Clemantine Wamariya

The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After by Clemantine Wamariya
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Girl Who Smiled Beads is a memoir by Clemantine Wamariya, who became a refugee in Rwanda as a child and later came to the United States. It's a story both of a child struggling to survive as a refugee, and a young woman struggling to adjust to a new world.

I picked up this book on recommendation from someone who works with refugee children at a nonprofit organization. She recommends it to those of us who volunteer so that we can get a small idea of what some of the kids we work with have gone through. Simply reading about an experience like living as a refugee will always be only a small window into the reality, but even that little gives us a bit more empathy.

The part of the story about Clemantine's days as a refugee described a sad, dangerous, desparate struggle for survival in terrible conditions. I more or less expected that, but expecting it doesn't make it any easier to read about people barely surviving on meager food handouts, children abandoned, unsanitary conditions, and all the other horrors of refugee life. Those of us in the developed world, in our comfort, tend to forget how awful things can be for people who simply had the misfortune to be born in the wrong place. It's good to be reminded occasionally, and hopefully jolted out of our apathy.

I was less prepared for the part of the story about Clemantine coming to the United States. Her life changed for the better, certainly, and there's no doubt she and her family were grateful, but it still was such a difficult experience. I knew in theory that the trauma of war and her refugee experience didn't disappear when she left Africa, but reading through repeated examples of how that trauma kept affecting her for years was still something of a shock. She describes a myriad of personal struggles that are completely foreign to those of us who haven't suffered through the same kinds of trauma.

And while plenty of people here in the United States provided help, there are also many examples of how Americans confused or frightened her with well-meaning gestures of assistance, or how things we take for granted grated against her instincts. Or how our reactions differed from hers - for instance, there's a brief story about 9-11, and how the extreme reaction of everyone around her was confusing. To her, that kind of terrible disaster was just part of life, another in a long line that she had seen, and she couldn't understand why it was such a shock to everyone else. It's a good lesson for those of us wanting to help, that we need to exercise empathy and do our best to understand when our actions or other circumstances cause confusion or misunderstanding.

The Girl Who Smiled Beads isn't an easy book to read, but I think it's an important one. Not just for those already involved with refugee families, but all of us with the good fortune to have avoided such experiences. Understanding their experience, even in a small way, is an important step in finding ways that we can be involved in a solution.

Markswoman by Rati Mehrotra

Markswoman by Rati Mehrotra
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Markswoman reads like a cross between the post-apocalyptic world of Fred Saberhagen's Empire of the East, and the romantic space opera style of Star Wars. If that sounds like an interesting mix, you'll likely enjoy it.

The book is set in a post-apocalyptic fantasy world where the human population is fairly small and technology is limited. But occasionally high technology (or magic, call it what you like) shows up, left over from the old world, such as the psionic blades wielded by the Orders of Markswomen. They are peacekeepers and (when necessary) executioners, focused on martial prowess and mental discipline.

The story mostly follows Kyra, an orphan who recently became a full member of the Order of Kali. Events force Kyra to leave everything she knows to strike out into the world. Along the way she discovers truths about the past, finds romance, confronts dangerous enemies, and makes allies. It's a fairly straightforward hero(ine)'s journey plot, but I thought it was well crafted.

Kyra is a well-developed character, as are many of those she meets along the way. The completely predictable romance angle is a little boring, but otherwise I thought Mehrotra did a good job of keeping the characters interesting.

One of my favorite parts of any sci-fi/fantasy work is discovering the world, and Markswoman is no exception. There are lots of hints of the history that led to Kyra's world, but not much in the way of hard facts. That worked fine for me in this case, as Mehrotra keeps the historical reveals relevant to the unfolding story. This book leaves plenty of that history to the imagination, presumably to be revealed in future books.

Markswoman doesn't break much new ground, but many of the themes that it repeats are some of my favorites in the genre. I'll likely search out the later books in the series to see how it delivers on this good beginning.

φ, π, e, and i by David Perkins

φ, π, e, and i by David Perkins
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It's been a couple of decades since I did any real math study. φ, π, e, and i caught my eye because I know the author through an online forum, plus I was looking for a book with a non-alphanumeric character in the title for a book club.

Fortunately, φ, π, e, and i is written for undergraduates so it required only that I unearth some things that are buried in my brain under 20 years of other stuff. For someone who is actively learning college-level mathematics, most of the stuff that I'd forgotten would be fresh in mind. Of course, when I got confused I could always ask the author for clarification! But that wasn't often necessary, since the book is clearly written and uses endnotes to provide extra detail where a conclusion may not be obvious.

φ, π, e, and i isn't just about the math itself, but also some of the history behind the numbers. The Sanskrit poet and the Italian mathematician who both discovered the Fibonnaci sequence, for instance, which comes up as one learns about φ. Or the parallel conception of complex numbers in Norway and Germany around 1800. I found the history to be just as interesting as the math itself, particularly when more than one historical figure had approached a problem from different directions but came to the same conclusion. That kind of convergence really puts the universal nature of mathematics in focus.

The four chapters of the book (one for each constant, naturally) build on one another nicely. Techniques used in the earlier chapters make appearances later on, and the book ends with the well-known e^(iπ)=-1 and less well-known φ = e^(iπ/5) + e^(-iπ/5), tying all four together in one statement. A fitting way to wrap up an interesting trip through the definition and history of some of math's most important numbers!