Swamp of Locusts

Clearing out tabs:

Bustle interviews Leigh Bardugo

"Books Won't Die," one of the few pieces about THE DEATH OF THE BOOK that doesn't make me want to set fire to things

Harvard's stranglehold via copyright on Emily Dickinson

The haunting death of John Steinbeck's son (The lawsuit over Steinbeck's literary estate has dragged on so long one judge quoted Bleak House)

Malcolm Gladwell is full of shit! Some of us had been saying this since THAT BROKEN WINDOWS NONSENSE, but ANYWAY

"Fandom can be both identity and liberation—but how do we keep our joys from being co-opted by corporate interests?"

Stacey Abrams schools that idiot Francis Fukuyama (access restricted)

I haven't been finishing much partly because my glasses prescription is way out of whack now (both eyes getting more nearsighted as far as I can tell) and getting glasses requires going outside and all that jazz, but recently --

Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her, Melanie Rehak.
This book turned into a real slog right at the start when the author began detailing the early lives of her heroines' grandfathers, and that was a prophetic (bad) sign. The rest of the book was often similarly padded, but there's also a frustrating lack of real depth and detail. Rehak tries to swoop through the history of dime publishing, American feminism, changing social mores from the 1890s to the 1980s, the famous Stratemeyer Syndicate and the real identity of Carolyn Keene (industry "creative personas," not only limited to Instagram! who knew!), and so on and on. The book would need to be twice as long to just touch on most of those topics, and it's not even a good guide to the series in some respects (no table of which authors wrote what books, no side-by-side comparison of the original books and the revised versions, and a fascinating "bible" was drawn up by the Syndicate owner but we only get a glimpse of it). Nancy Drew is a real and indestructible phenom, often linked to the rise of feminism, women working outside the home after WWII, and later "girl power," but her rock bottom appeal is that of wish-fulfillment, like the Ginger Rogers/Fred Astaire musicals that came out at around the same time as the very first books. (This isn't a knock on the series: I love/loved Nancy, and there's nothing wrong with wish-fulfillment or escapism. I also love those musicals.) The author has two lenses to examine Nancy through, the women who created her: Mildred A. Wirt, an ambitious unconventional Midwestern reporter, and Harriet Adams, the privileged daughter of Edward Stratemeyer whose life was confined and shaped by her father and his business. It would take a team of scholars to figure out who was responsible for what in the original series, since Stratemeyer typically gave writers outlines and then edited and rewrote their manuscripts, and his two daughters did the same after his death. Harriet also rewrote and heavily edited Mildred's books again when the series moved to another publisher in the 1950s. Both of these women held revolutionary positions in "male" industries, editing and journalism, and later publicly clashed over who was the "real" author of the series, and the historical backdrop of pre- and post-war publishing, the effects of ongoing book series, and inside details about how Nancy was created, is rich and interesting. Unfortunately this book doesn't really tap into any of that. It should be gripping but it's not even dishy.

Ninth House (Alex Stern, #1), by Leigh Bardugo.
I liked this a lot more so I'll probably have a lot less to say about it! LOL I hadn't read any of the author's earlier YA series (YA and I are typically not a good fit), but this one got a lot of buzz and the details I heard sound intriguing, and I've been really jonesing for something very specific: thrillers and mysteries about women, by women, which are realistic but don't have really grim OR fluffy endings. (Yeah. If you have recommendations, feel free to leave them in the comments!) Bardugo had one of those great 'lucky breaks' authors get when they're confident and skilled enough to just listen to a character and really let go: Alex's voice is remarkable, her grim background realistic and limiting but never defining, and she's believably very, very flawed, but also heroic. (Bardugo flat out calls her anti-heroic, but I'd disagree.) I would happily read crap prose about this kind of woman (I have all the Dragon Tattoo books), but the prose style in her chapters is very well-done and the book is wonderfully paced and tightly plotted. The most important characters in the book are also all women, from Alex's "typical" roommates to highly powerful magic scholars, and there's a really good twist at the end about the identity of the person who's been pulling all the strings that emphasizes the dark effects of thwarted, untamed, untrained power. The book is in tightly narrated third person (at one point we actually get the old "She listened while he told her details of the plot the author isn't sharing with the reader" dodge, which used to enrage me as a teenager and now makes me kind of chuckle fondly at the sight of it) but we're right there, inside her mind and soul. Unfortunately Alex's chapters are alternated with the POV of someone who's her opposite: a young man who is literally the "golden boy" of their magical Definitely Not Hogwarts, from a rich old blue-blood family now down on its luck, who is beautiful and perfectly put together, &c &c. He just bored me. Obviously the reason he's there is to not just provide a foil to Alex but know inside things she can't and let the reader see her from the outside. Like always I kept thinking why couldn't you have been a girl, but the book is all about white male structures of power and it's only logical he's there. He still annoyed me, and while he participates in the system's privilege, for plot reasons he never really either rebels or buys into it. But whatever, because ALEX. <33 I rolled my eyes at the sequelbait setup and the apparent journey in the next book is a type that I shy away from, but really, this is very good. (Is it too late to nominate it for Yuletide?)

Speaking of series, I finally read Equal Rites, the first Witches book, and it was kinda disorienting. Granny is a strange combination of later Granny and Nanny, and her bedrock personality is there but also weirdly off (she has magical charms! she tries baby-talking to Esk!). Cutangle is sort of proto-Ridcully? It's fascinating to see what Pratchett cultivated in the later books in the series, and what got changed or just dropped. The prime example there is Esk, a lonely young girl with terrific untamed power (can you tell I have a Thing for those) who is there overturning the status quo right at the very start, but we don't hear anything about her until she returns in I Will Wear Midnight, in a very minor role. Pratchett chose to interrogate the narrative as we say nowadays through the much more conventional (at first) and traditional configuration of three stereotypical witches, but I really wonder what a female fantasy writer would have made of Esk. (I often wonder the same thing about Angua.)

The Turn of the Key, Ruth Ware.
In my never-ending quest for "thrillers written by women that aren't fluffy or too graphic" (see above), someone told me this book was like an updated Turn of the Screw, which I love. NOT REALLY. Whodunnit is obvious, as is a central mystery about the narrator's identity, and I am bad at guessing twists but I figured both out maybe about 1/3 of the way into the book. There's no real suspense! And when characters do dumb or dangerous things based on their own histories it's fascinating (see above, again), but when a first-person narrator is repeatedly dense just for the sake of the plot, it's unconvincing and annoying. Don't read this. (I thiiink I read The Lying Game a while ago, and wasn't that impressed, but it seemed better than this.)


I also started reading the very ballyhooed Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday, which I find irritating and overrated, but the structure is also fascinating (even if I don't think she quite pulls it off). The big draw is obviously it's supposedly a roman a clef about the author's affair with Philip Roth when she was young, but the other two sections of the book make it clear that Halliday is playing with the idea of writing, autobiography, empathy, the Other, and what we culturally accept as "real" or a default value system (Islam is exotic and baffling, Philip Roth should have won the Nobel Prize, great authors are entitled to young women). I didn't like it (I freely admit I'm jealous, lol) but my mind kept returning to it. It was also interesting to read in the context of #MeToo, endless But Was Roth Really Misogynist?! debates (answer: yes), including one of those typical Meghan Daum "I'm so hip I'm retro or vice versa" opinion pieces (the only one more cringeworthy was the New Yorker gathering together a bunch of women to say "Of course he wasn't misogynist!" directed, of course, by the male editor, AND including Halliday herself). And of course the splatterpunk takedown of John Updike which I'm not going to link here because it's everywhere and I actually didn't really like it (I agreed with it, sure, but it was basically blowing up fish with TNT in a bucket). Read this thoughtful, interesting piece by Meghan O’Gieblyn instead: "Paradise Lost: On (Finally) Reading John Updike".

(I loathed Rabbit, Run and its many awful sequels long before it was hip //lit-hipster Where Updike deserves maybe 1/3 of the praise he got is in his short stories, which almost never get discussed; he couldn't really structure novels well ((yeah I said it)) and was Just Bad at imagining people unlike him ((yeah I said it again)), but his short stories are powerfully packed and even well-plotted, and the raging sexism and twee convoluted prose style are a lot easier to take at shorter lengths. Ahem. The literary establishment loved him because he was ersatz European, and that was the side of him that produced the worst prose.)