Books - Kate Degelau-Pierce

Second person is weird

My apologies for the lack of posts. I’ve started working! It’s only a half-time job, but somehow I’ve fallen behind. Far, far behind.

What this means: it’s actually been an incredibly long time since I read The Divers Clothes Lie Empty. Well, what I actually read of it. I didn’t read much. It’s written in the second person (it’s not “I” or “the woman” but “you”). Honestly, I have a hard time getting past this because, back in the sixth grade when we were passing notes around, we were always telling stories in the second person voice. It signals immaturity to me. I’m aware that this is a Kate thing and not a universal thing. However, it set my teeth on edge from the beginning.

It’s also a very unsettling book. The unnamed woman at the center of the story is clearly running from something and has a series of terrible things happen to her. We’ve already established that I didn’t like Girl on the Train and had no desire to read Gone Girl. I got my required 50 pages into the book*, and then bailed.

I didn’t like it, but your milage may vary.

* My self-imposed rule is that I can put a book down that I don’t like as long as I’m 50 pages or more in. I figure 50 pages is a fighting chance for the book to win me over.

Climate change won’t be pretty

What’s it about?
It’s Phoenix, AZ sometime in the future. There’s no water – because of climate change the drought is never-ending. Las Vegas and California are the two big cheeses when it comes to groundwater and (especially) the Colorado River. There are three interacting story lines. First, Angel is the titular water knife, a guy from Las Vegas who will do anything to make sure his city gets water. Including going to Phoenix to see who has what water around there. Second, Lucy, a reporter bound and determined to get the real story – not just the click-bait-y stories – about the politics around water rights and who gets what. And third, Maria, a teenager from Texas – which has even less water than Arizona – who’s just trying to stay alive.

Why should you read it?
The Water Knife is noir-y and grittier than I usually read and recommend. But this is good. I like the noir bits: the world isn’t always a clean place and people are often greedy. Especially in a place where there’s not enough to go around.

Look, I live in California and we are on our fourth year of drought. There’s some evidence that there will be a rainy winter this year, but there’s also a prediction that that rain is going to go north of us. We may not see it. The Water Knife is an interesting take on what a waterless West might end up looking like, particularly if there’s a weak national government. It’s worth reading.

Funny Women are Funny

What’s it about?
Yes Please is Amy Poehler’s memoir. She is a workaholic of a person, but she loves it. She is also funny and warm and this made me want to watch Parks & Recreation. (I had a small child when it aired. I wasn’t watching anything at that point.)

Why should you read it?
It’s another entry in the smart, funny women memoirs that I like to think of as a series: Bossypants, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me, Yes Please. These are great books for a teenaged girl (or an adult woman!) to read because these women are amazing role models. Plus, it made me laugh. What more could I ask for?

A Surprising Beach Read

What’s is about?
A Paris Affair is a set of short stories about couples, mostly in their thirties, many with young children, who are on their way to breaking up because one or the other is having an affair.

Why should you read it?
It’s a lovely little slip of a book. It made a great back-from-vacation read last month; my brain always lingers in Europe and who doesn’t enjoy Paris? Examining the ways a relationship can go south can be as interesting as how two people get together. It’s not heavy, but who cares? I would classify this one as a sophisticated beach read.

Surviving Mars

What’s it about?
Watch the trailer. It’ll do a better job describing it than I ever could.

Why should you read it?
Because The Martian is a damn good adventure story. Take a normal, albeit gifted, person and strand him on Mars. What are the challenges? What will go wrong? How will he deal with it? It moves at a good clip, though there are parts where it bogs down a bit. Switching between his viewpoint and NASA’s is an effective way to take care of the parts where it gets slow.

I should tell you: this book is *heavy* on the engineering, and it’s very Macgyver-y. It was initially self-published and I suspect that if it had gone through the normal publishing process most of the math & science would have been edited out. But it’s in there, and it helps the story because so much of the action is centered around using science to make sure he lives.

What happened here?

What’s it about?

Alice is 29, happily married, and pregnant with her first child. She’s happy about this. Which would be wonderful, except for the fact that it’s in her head – she’s really a 39-year-old mother of three and about to be divorced. She’s hit her head. Now she needs to figure out just what happened in the last ten years.

Why should you read it?

I personally will always pick up any book by Liane Moriarty because she does the PTA-mom thing so well. She gets all those power dynamics, and because that’s the world I live in, I enjoy the satirization of it. In What Alice Forgot, she also covers exercise, long-term relationships, power dynamics, and, in this case, how a friendship ruined a marriage.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about books about relationships. This is partially because of my recent foray into reading romance books. But anything that’s about relationships, particularly when there’s at least one woman involved, tends to get classified as “women’s literature” whether thats romance or chick lit. And then it can be dismissed, or treated as lesser somehow.

Any maybe this is just me being ashamed of something I shouldn’t be – maybe this is a latent, internalized misogyny on my part. (God knows I’ve found enough of that as I’ve been raising my daughter – it’s amazing where it lurks.) But I suspect it’s more than just me – that books written by women, about relationships really are marginalized. (This story on Jezebel about what happened when a female author sent out her novel under a man’s name is enlightening.) And I wish that didn’t happen.

So I will continue to read and review books by women about women and relationships. And hope it helps de-marginalize it at least a tiny little bit.

K-i-s-s-i-n-g

What’s it about?
This review is actually going to be for the part of The Iron Seas series that I’ve read so far: The Iron Duke, Riveted, and The Kraken King. So: what are these books about? They are steampunk romances. In this world, Genghis Khan’s hordes made it all the way to Europe, and his Mongolian Empire never fell. The Horde is mechanically inclined and has learned how to mechanically graft things on to people – so, for example, if they decide you’re going to be a miner, you might lose your lower arm and get a shovel or a pick-axe grafted on instead. They don’t sound like particularly pleasant rulers. But it is the late 1800s now; the Horde never took over Scandinavia, and Britain has just successfully rebelled. Europe, however, is a no-go zone and Japan is firmly entrenched Horde territory. One of the books takes place in London and Africa; one is in North America and Iceland; the last is Australia – where the Japanese fled when the Horde invaded.

Why should you read them?
I am generally skeptical of romance books. I’m not personally great with emotions, and I’m not so much with the stories that are all about the back-and-forth of your romantic intentions. But this NPR’s summer books theme this year is romance and I like steampunk and Meljean Brook was highly recommended. And I was looking for an audiobook I could check out from my library. Riveted fit the bill.

And I was impressed. Riveted was a good adventure, the heroine was strong, it dealt gracefully with social issues (hitting both gay and disabled issues) and the hero wasn’t an ass. The Kraken King’s hero was shockingly emotionally intelligent. The Iron Duke… sigh. He can’t express his emotions *and* there’s a rape scene. Not so much with that one. Oh, and the portrayal of evolution is more than a little appalling.

So: I have gotten over my disdain of romance novels enough to thoroughly enjoy these. I plan to read the rest of the series.

Well done, not my thing

What’s it about?
Paul is a middle aged man, going to have a fancy dinner with his wife, his brother, and his sister in law. His brother would like to discuss an issue that has arisen involving their children. Paul would like to avoid it all.

Why should you read it?
The Dinner was a book club book, so I had to read it. I didn’t want to. I was predisposed to not like it, given the Gillian Flynn blurb on the cover. I don’t like those types of books – the borderline sociopathic/psychopathic characters getting involved in horrible situations, and the people around them either enabling them or getting caught in the crossfire. It’s not my thing. If it’s yours, go for it. You’ll almost certainly like the book more than I did. (It is well executed book – but not my cup of tea.)

We need a good math in pop culture book, dammit

$Math in Pop Culture$

What’s it about?
Mathematics in Popular Culture is a group of essays written by a number of different math professors. They cover various aspects of how math is represented in popular culture – are mathematicians portrayed as crazy? What does math phobia look like? What is game theory? Is it important that Lindsey Lohan’s character in Mean Girls is good at math? It hits all kinds of pop culture: Lost (TV), Cryptonomicon and Moneyball (books), Good Will Hunting (movies), and the tarot (games? belief systems? I’m not sure how how classify that one). It’s kind of all over the place.

Why should you read it?
Oh, I don’t know that you should. Have you at least taken calculus? Can you deal with academic writing? If so, I’d recommend it. But this work isn’t for the general public (though, I’d LOVE it if someone wrote a series of essays on math in pop culture for general consumption). Overall, the topic is a good one, but it was sometimes rough going.

Coloring ancient Rome

What’s it about?
Mary Beard is a famous Cambridge classicist (if such a thing exists). She’s hosted television shows and written books and published papers and taught many students about the ancient world. The Fires of Vesuvius is her studying the Pompeiian ruins and sharing what we can learn about ancient Roman society from them. So what did I learn? Phalluses were everywhere; people ate fancy dinners reclining on couches arranged in a group of three in a c-shape; people ate regular dinners on chairs and tables; women were second class citizens (sigh); and no one knows where ancient Romans slept. Seriously – beds weren’t a thing, so…. did they sleep on the couches? On the ground? No one knows.

Why should you read it?
Well, *I’m* clearly fascinated by ancient Rome. I love learning about it and I love the stories. Modern society has a stereotype of the ancient world being very serious and no color at all. In fact, there’s color everywhere in the Pompeiian ruins, and the graffiti makes it clear that these were people just like we are. There are political slogans and advertising on the walls; there’s evidence of a child’s lessons on the walls; even some random doodling. It was, apparently, very stinky. The Pompeiians didn’t brush their teeth, and there’s no evidence of soap at the baths. No wonder perfumes were used.

The Fires of Vesuvius makes my views of the ancient Roman world richer – it’s not just Julius Caesar and Nero fiddling while Rome burns. It’s real people living their lives, making money, having babies, worshipping gods. I quite enjoyed it.