The City and the City by China Mieville

This book has been causing thoughts since I finished it a couple of days ago. About cities, and what we see and don't see. And how those kinds of seeing are conditioned.

And then something happened yesterday that was both funny and a little frightening, illustrating exactly how much I might be missing as I walk down the streets of my city. My husband and I were walking towards the local gaming store, towards the lures of Free RPG Day, talking. I would have thought that I was fully aware of my surroundings, but...apparently not.

Because we somehow missed one of our closest friends walking down the street towards us, waving his arms in the air to attract our attention. It wasn't until we were turning a corner and he yelled out our names that I stopped, backtracked, and merrily said hello. I certainly wasn't trying to not see him, but I literally hadn't noticed someone half a block away, waving his arms in the air, trying to attract my attention.

So if I'm missing that, what else am I missing? What else am I conditioned to miss? How did that happen in the first place?

Seeing and unseeing in Ul Qoma and Beszel may be formally taught, but they do mimic something we do anyway, the people we try not to see, or truly don't see. The way that the surprising can walk right past us without anyone noticing, become the panda in the scene.

So with that experience under my belt, I sit down to write a review of The City and The City. I meant to write this review yesterday morning, but actually forgot and wrote another instead. It was like my brain was waiting for me to have that experience later in the day before it would let me do it.

Beszel and Ul Qoma occupy the same physical space, but they are two very different cities. One is modern, full of fluorescent lights, in the middle of an economic boom. The other is has a depressed economic situation, and different architecture. Ul Qoma seems to have a Middle Eastern vibe, while Beszel seems more Eastern European. And you live in one. Only one. You are allowed in only one. Crossing over in one of the areas where the cities intersect brings down the shadowy power of Breach, which can make you disappear and never reappear. Breach, however, can be as simple as staring somewhere you shouldn't be staring. You see what is in your city, and you work like hell not to see the other.

And in these cities, overlapping yet separate, a murder occurs, a young America graduate student's body is found in Beszel. But the lead Besz detective, Tyador Borlu, discovers that the woman was killed in Ul Qoma. A case of breach in the crime? Perhaps, perhaps not.

Despite the fact that he should turn this over to Breach, Tyador can't help prodding at it, working away at the edges. He uncovers nests of unificationists, who want the cities reunited and one once more. Nests of ultra-nationalists, for whom their city is the only city that matters.

But the murdered woman was looking into a third city, the stuff of legend, long rumoured to exist in a further space between the spaces of Ul Qoma and Beszel. Orciny. Does it exist? If it does, how has it kept itself secret? What powers would its occupants hold?

This is, at its core, an oldfashioned mystery, and a damned good one, packed full of ideas that spun my brain around and kept me occupied even when I wasn't actively reading it. If not as dense in vocabulary as I was expecting, given Mieville's reputation, it was stuffed with challenging and unsettling notions.

I don't want to say much more, because the mystery is such a good one, twisty and yet, when revealed, perfectly in keeping. But the mental stress of living in such a divided city, and the thoughts about seeing and not seeing, that is what will stay with me the longest.

For what city is not a divided city?

Booklinks:

I read this book as part of an attempt to read all the Hugo Nominees

Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman

*This review was originally written in 2011. As such, the book count doesn't reflect this year!

And with this book, I hit my goal for the year of reading 150 books. And what a book to go out on! I've only given five or six other five star ratings this year, and Life and Fate feels like the most consequential of them all.

This is a huge sprawling novel, centred around the battle of Stalingrad, but weaving in and out and incorporating the Holocaust, the Soviet detention centres, Soviet science under Stalin, life at the front, life at home, and the nature of freedom and humanity. (And I found Grossman's musings on the latter two more readable than Tolstoy's long philosophical digressions, to be perfectly honest.)

The cast is so sprawling that it wasn't until around page 500 that I was able to actually piece together who characters were and how they connected. Until then, I'd been treating it as a series of interesting vignettes, but was unable to make it into a more coherent picture. And suddenly it was all there, and the breadth and the detail really took my breath away.

There were parts of this book that almost moved me to tears, and that's unusual for books. And it took me weeks to read, which is also unusual, but I think gave the time to make everything I read seem more significant.

I don't know that this book is for everyone. It's a heavy Russian tome. The subject matter is heavy. But for me, it was one of the best I've read this year.

A Passage to India by E.M. Forster

Can there ever be friendship between the colonizer and colonized? Individuals from each group? Can that trust last? Can it flourish? What happens when events put it under stress?

Forster has no easy answers in this book, as he dissects British colonial rule in India, and its impact on Indians and the British who have come there expressly to rule over India.

Adele Quested comes over to India with her prospective mother-in-law, Mrs. Moore. She wanted to see the country before she made up her mind whether or not to marry Ronny. Once there, she is determined to "see the real India" and not to become like the class- and race-bound community of the English.

Everyone arrives there wanting that, she is told. They change. The English think she will see how the Indians are not to be trusted. The Indians know that enough time being around people who are constantly telling you they aren't to be trusted will warp your perceptions.

Similarly, Mr. Fielding, who runs a school, has stayed largely apart from English society, and has mostly kept his autonomy. He becomes friends with Dr. Aziz, a Muslim doctor who, despite his suspicions, wants to believe he can be friends with both Fielding and Mrs. Moore.

Then, on an outing to the Marabar Caves, an incident occurs. But what occurs, and who is involved? The incident causes a crisis, and causes the English to demand that everyone fall into line and support an Englishwoman, no matter what. Fielding is unable to do so. He becomes persona non grata.

For the Indian population, the charges against Dr. Aziz throw them into a rage - with little evidence and no investigation, his guilt is presumed by the British legal system.

The incident becomes a flashpoint for long-simmering anger over the power of the British in India.

Even after it is resolved, and one would think that Aziz would trust Fielding, the man who stood by him the entire time, cultural expectations on both sides mean that even after the crucible, trust is not easily maintained, and far too easily broken. When power is so unequal, it is difficult, if not impossible, to extend the benefit of the doubt to those who hold power, even if only through the virtue of their nationality.

The effect of colonial power on individuals, both colonizers and colonized is examined, and no easy way out is found. Forster creates a broad range of characters, from the good-intentioned to the authoritarian, and puts them all in a pressure cooker.

That pressure cooker does not create tension, it allows the tensions that were already there to come to the point of exploding. And because the incident at the Marabar Caves centres around an English woman, gender expectations, and the ways in which the protection of white womanhood is at the core of colonial rhetoric, most of the British react with something near hysteria.

A Passage to India finds the colonial project deeply flawed, and exposes its worst assumptions and difficulties through a merciless eye. Even those who genuinely want to build bridges between the British and the Indian populations find that, in the end, it is difficult if not impossible.

Ghostwritten by David Mitchell

Ghostwritten, and ghostridden and by a ghost, ridden.

I have no idea how to talk about what I want to talk about without referring to specifics in this book. I'm not sure how spoiler-ish they may be, but you have been warned.

This is my second David Mitchell, and I like it almost as much as the first one I read, which was Cloud Atlas, and absolutely blew my socks off. I think Cloud Atlas is a more masterful and audacious use of the same technique that you can see developing in Ghostwritten, but I enjoyed it in its developing stages here quite a lot.

Initially, I was skeptical of the claim that this was a "novel in nine parts," as they seemed to be discrete stories, with occasional references to the preceding chapters, through incidence and coincidence. But as the stories continued, they start to pull together, to somehow knit into a whole, even though most of the characters never met, or if they did, never realized the importance of the other stories to their own.

This is a book full of life, and humanity, and beautiful writing, and intriguing ideas, and glimpses of the unknown and improbable. It switches genres and countries, transcends humanities, and in the end, resolves.

And that is what keeps this from being five stars for me. That, and that it isn't quite Cloud Atlas. I'm not sure about the ending. I'm not saying it isn't a good and logical, if shocking, ending. I'm saying I'm personally not particularly enamoured with a book so in love with humanity that ends with its end.

It's the second story I've read or heard in the last week that ends with the unexpected extinction of humanity by a larger, implacable, inexorable force. (The first was a John Varley short story.)  While it was an ending that seized me and took me by surprise, it also overshadowed the entire previous 400 pages, and I loved those 400 pages. I feel like I'm struggling to remember all the things I enjoyed about the book, without having them completely drowned underneath all the emotions that the ending provoked.

That's what happens with a loss, I know. Initially, the end obscures all the times before.

But I realize I haven't really spoken in any specifics about the book, or the stories that make it up. But how can I tie together and make coherent a book that combines stories about a Japanese cultist responsible for a subway attack, a jazz-loving Japanese teenager, a shady English financier in Hong Kong, the life of a woman who owns a tea house on the side of the Holy Mountain through the tumultuous events in the 20th century in China, the travels of a noncorporeal entity that lives in human hosts, a Russian art theft ring, a penniless womanizing drummer and ghostwriter in England, an Irish expert in quantum cognition, and a New York late night talk radio host who gets yearly calls from a mysterious listener?

Except to say that although I couldn't tell you exactly what binds these stories together, I am absolutely, positively convinced that they are part of a whole. And that they were utterly engrossing to read, and provided constant delight.

I'm equally sure this isn't for everyone. Like many of the books I love, it requires a high tolerance of ambiguity, and a willingness to simply go along for a ride with no idea as to how it will end. So many books are predictable. This one is not.

Bossypants by Tina Fey

I was expecting more funny.

Having read a small portion of this book online (A Mother's Prayer), and having found that very entertaining, I had high hopes for this book. And I should say, it's not a bad read. It's just not that funny. I laughed out loud maybe once, and smiled a few times more. Most of the jokes fell under the category of fairly amusing. Maybe as a script, it'd be great.

But that isn't to say that this isn't a pleasant read. Her stories are interesting, and I looked forward to picking this up to read a few pages more. It wasn't gripping, but it was enjoyable. On the other hand, it's not going to stay with me. But I wasn't really expecting that anyway.

Does anyone else get unduly excited when you discover you have something in common with someone you admire? (Also known as "Joss Whedon has the same favourite comic book character as me!") I do this all the time. So I was so pleased to read that Tina Fey doesn't drive, and her husband has to do all the long drives, while she sleeps, and is probably trying to remember why he married her in the first place. 'Cause, yeah.

The book picks up after her daughter arrives - suddenly there's a lot more intensity to the writing (and, it sounds, to life as she was experiencing it at that moment.) The chapter on juggling her daughter's third birthday party, Oprah's appearance on 30 Rock and appearing as Sarah Palin on SNL for the first time, all on the same weekend, was probably my favourite. And they included the entire sketch, which is brilliant.

If you're looking for light entertainment, and you like Tina Fey, this is probably worth a read. Just don't expect belly laughs.

However, after having read a couple of reviews from Goodreads friends, I noticed that those who listened to this on audiobook gave it higher ratings than those who just read it, like me. For this one, that may be the way to go.

Ulysses by James Joyce

I finished this a couple of days ago, flew to the other side of the continent, and am right now jetlagged. So, maybe not the best time to be trying to sit down and review Ulysses.

Or maybe it's exactly the right time. Maybe when I'm tired and not thinking straight is the only time to sit down and let this review spill out, when I'm not overthinking it, or trying to figure out exactly what I want to say.

Because really, I have no idea. This book has been my constant companion for the last four or five months, reading 10-20 pages a day, taking my time, and for the most part enjoying myself. But I don't feel like I have deep insights to offer.

I'm glad I've read it. It was an accomplishment. It was a pain in the ass. It was enjoyable. It wasn't nearly as hard as I was expecting. It was harder than I had expected.

Ulysses is a tour de force of detail and lived experience and lyricism, and boringness. He explores virtually every kind of prose there is, every writing style you could imagine, from school examination to stuffy 19th century to stream of consciousness.

Leopold Bloom walks the streets of Dublin, intersecting the lives of others, walking through a history of literature styles from myth to overblown newspaper society pages. And a play.

And damned if I can explain any of it to you. But it's worth a read, worth the effort, and the joys and the struggles.

Perhaps when I have my wits more about me, I may come back and expand this.

 Read as part of the BBC Big Read

The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran

I don't know if I can write this review. I really don't. It makes me feel extremely vulnerable, to contemplate putting so much of my heart out on view for people on the internet to see. I also don't know if I have the words.

Reading this book was both devastating and awe-inspiring. I was moved beyond words, particularly when I started reading it, started to let the words wash over me. When I realized how familiar they were, not the words, but the meanings behind them. It felt like something I'd been swimming in my whole life and never realized it.

Let me try to explain. I was raised by two people who found great meaning in this book. My mother read from it at my wedding reception. I don't mean they tried to make me read it, because they never did. Or conform to anything in it, because they never did. But having read it, I can see so many of the lessons they tried to teach me, the values they held dear, the ways they made sense of the world reflected in these pages. The way that they thought about love, and children, and work, and the world, I can see how this book was important to them. Whether they took inspiration from it, or found it a reflection of what they already believed, I'm not sure. I could ask my mother. I may.

I can't ask my father anymore. And reading this book made me miss him so much. Not that I don't already, every day for the past year and a half. The wonderful thing about reading this was that it took me out of the memories of those last few terrible weeks, and back to all the times I had before pancreatic cancer took him from us.

It made me think of riding in the car, having the front seat beside him while the rest of the family slept in the back, and talking about finding, not the work you love, but the work that you can't not do, the things that are so important that you would do them even if you weren't paid.

It made me remember how gently my parents pushed me to be an independent, reasonably sane adult, gave the room to make mistakes, never thought they owned me, but were always there when I needed them.

It made me realize how much of this book I already carry in me, how much of my heart is already out there on someone else's pages. That's a terrifying and wonderful thing.

So there is my heart, it's out there on display. I read this book, and could barely breathe.