A while back, lirazel posted about a bad book about an interesting topic -- Conspiracy Theories About Lemuria -- which apparently got most of its information from a scholarly text called The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories by Sumathi Ramaswamy.

Great! I said. I bet the library has that book, I'll read it instead of the bad one! which now I have done.

For those unfamiliar, for a while the idea of sunken land-bridges joining various existing landmasses was very popular in 19th century geology; Lemuria got its name because it was supposed to explain why there are lemurs in Madagascar and India but not anywhere else. Various other land-bridges were also theorized but Lemuria's the only one that got famous thanks to the catchy name getting picked up by various weird occultists (most notably Helena Blavatasky) and incorporated into their variably incomprehensible Theories of Human Origins, Past Paradises, Etc.

As is not unexpected, this book is a much more dense, scholarly, and theory-driven tome than the bad pop history that lirazel read. What was unexpected for me is that the author's scholarly interests focus on a.) cartography and b.) Tamil language and cultural politics, and so what she's most interested in doing is tracing how the concept of a Lemurian continent went from being an outdated geographic supposition to a weird Western occult fringe belief to an extremely mainstream, government-supported historical narrative in Tamil-speaking polities, where Lost Lemuria has become associated with the legendary drowned Tamil homeland of Tamilnāṭu and thus the premise for a claim that not only is the Lemurian continent the source of human origins but that specifically the Tamil language is the source language for humanity.

Not the book I expected to be reading! but I'm not at all mad about how things turned out! the prose is so dry that it was definite work to wade through but the rewards were real; the author has another whole book about Tamil language politics and part of me knows I am not really theory-brained enough for it at this time but the other part is tempted.

Also I did as well come out with a few snippets of the Weird Nonsense that I thought I was going in for! My favorite anecdote involves a woman named Gertrude Norris Meeker who wrote to the U.S. government in the 1950s claiming to be the Governor-General of Atlantis and Lemuria, ascertaining her sovereign right to this nonexistent territory, to which the State Department's Special Advisor on Geography had to write back like "we do not think that is true; this place does not exist." Eventually Gertrude Meeker got a congressman involved who also nobly wrote to the government on behalf of his constituent: "Mrs. Meeker understands that by renouncing her citizenship she could become Queen of these islands, but as a citizen she can rule as governor-general. [...] She states that she is getting ready to do some leasing for development work on some of these islands." And again the State Department was patiently like "we do not think that is true, as this place does not exist." Subsequently they seem to have developed a "Lemuria and Atlantis are not real" form letter which I hope and trust is still being used today.

This sequel to one of my favorite books of last year, a young adult post-apocalypse novel with a lovely slow-burn gay romance, fell victim to a trope I basically never like: the sequel to a romance that starts out by breaking up the main couple or pitting them against each other. It may be realistic but I hate it. If the main thing I liked about the first book was the main couple's dynamic - and if I'm reading the sequel, that's definitely the case - then I'm never going to like a sequel where their dynamic is missing or turns negative. I'm not saying they can't have conflict, but they shouldn't have so much conflict that there's nothing left of the relationship I loved in the first place.

This book starts out with Jamison and Andrew semi-broken up and not speaking to each other or walking on eggshells around each other, because Andrew wants to stay in the nice post-apocalyptic community they found and Jamison wants to return to their cabin and live alone there with Andrew. Every character around them remarks on this and how they need to just talk to each other. Eventually they talk to each other, but it resolves nothing and they go on being weird about each other and mourning the loss of their old relationship. ME TOO.

Then half the community's children die in a hurricane, and it's STILL all about them awkwardly not talking to each other and being depressed. I checked Goodreads, saw that they don't make up till the end, and gave up.

The first book is still great! It didn't need a sequel, though I would have enjoyed their further adventures if it had continued the relationship I loved in the first book. I did not sign up for random dead kids and interminable random sulking.

Over Memorial Day weekend genarti and I were on a mini-vacation at her family's cabin in the Finger Lakes, which features a fantastic bookshelf of yellowing midcentury mysteries stocked by genarti's grandmother. Often when I'm there I just avail myself of the existing material, but this time -- in increasing awareness of the way our own books are threatening to spill over our shelves again -- I seized this as an opportunity to check my bookshelves for the books that looked most like they belonged in a cabin in the Finger Lakes to read while I was there and then leave among their brethren.

As a result, I have now finally read the second-to-last of the stock of Weird Joan Aikens that coffeeandink gave me many years ago now, and boy was it extremely weird!

My favorite Aiken books are often the ones where I straight up can't tell if she's attempting to sincerely Write in the Genre or if she is writing full deadpan parody. I think The Embroidered Sunset is at least half parody, in a deadpan and melancholy way. I actually have a hypothesis that someone asked Joan Aiken to write a Gothic, meaning the sort of romantic suspense girl-flees-from-house form of the genre popular in the 1970s, and she was like "great! I love the Gothic tradition! I will give you a plucky 1970s career girl and a mystery and a complex family history and several big creepy houses! would you also like a haunted seaside landscape, the creeping inevitability of loss and death, some barely-dodged incest and a tragic ending?" and Gollancz, weary of Joan Aiken and her antics, was just like "sure, Joan. Fine. Do whatever."

Our heroine, Lucy, is a talented, sensible, cross and rather ugly girl with notably weird front teeth, is frequently jokingly referred to as Lucy Snowe by one of her love interests; the big creepy old age home in which much of the novel takes place is called Wildfell Hall; at one point Lucy knocks on the front door of Old Colonel Linton and he's like 'oh my god! you look just like my great-grandmother Cathy Linton, nee Earnshaw! it's the notably weird front teeth!" Joan Will Have Her Little Jokes.

The plot? The plot. Lucy, an orphan being raised in New England by her evil uncle and his hapless wife and mean daughter, wants to go study music in England with the brilliant-but-tragically-dying refugee pianist Max Benovek. Her uncle pays her fare across the Atlantic, on the condition that she go and investigate a great-aunt who has been pulling a pension out of the family coffers for many years; the great-aunt was Living Long Term with Another Old Lady (the L word is not said but it is really felt) and one of them has now died, but no one is really clear which.

The evil uncle suspects that the surviving old lady may not be the great-aunt and may instead be Doing Fraud, so Lucy's main task is to locate the old lady and determine whether or not she is in fact her great-aunt. Additionally, the great aunt was a brilliant folk artist unrecognized in her own time and so the evil uncle has assigned Lucy a side quest of finding as many of her paintings as possible and bringing them back to be sold for many dollars.

However, before setting out on any of these quests, Lucy stops in on the dying refugee pianist to see if he will agree to teach her. They have an immediate meeting of the minds and souls! Not only does Max agree to take her on as His Last Pupil, he also immediately furnishes her with cash and a car, because her plan of hitchhiking down to Aunt Fennel's part of the UK could endanger her beautiful pianist's hands!! Now Lucy has a brilliant future ahead of her with someone who really cares about her, but also a ticking clock: she has to sort out this whole great-aunt business before Max progresses from 'tragically dying' to 'tragically dead.'

The rest of the book follows several threads:
- Lucy bopping around the World's Most Depressing Seaside Towns, which, it is ominously and repeatedly hinted, could flood catastraphically at any moment, grimly attempting to convince a series of incredibly weird and variably depressed locals to give her any information or paintings, which they are deeply disinclined to do
- Max, in his sickroom, reading Lucy's letters and going 'gosh I hope I get to teach that girl ... it would be my last and most important life's work .... BEFORE I DIE'
- Sinister Goings On At The Old Age Home! Escaped Convicts!! Secret Identities!!! What Could This All Have To Do With Lucy's Evil Uncle? Who Could Say! Is Their Doctor Faking Being Turkish? Who Could Say!! Why Does That One Old Woman Keep Holding Up An Electric Mixer And Remarking How Easy It Would Be To Murder Someone With It? Who Could Say That Either!!!
- an elderly woman who may or may not be Aunt Fennel, in terrible fear of Something, stacked into dingy and constrained settings packed with other old and fading strangers, trying not to think too hard about her dead partner and their beloved cat and the life that she used to have in her own home where she was happy and loved .... all of these sections genuinely gave me big emotions :(((

Eventually all these plotlines converge with increasingly chaotic drama! Lucy and the old lady meet and have a really interesting, affectionate but complicated relationship colored by deep loneliness and suspicion on both sides; again, I really genuinely cared about this! Lucy, who sometimes exhibits random psychic tendencies, visits the lesbian cottage and finds it is so powerfully and miserably haunted by the happiness that it once held and doesn't anymore that she nearly passes out about it! Then whole thing culminates in ( huge spoilers )

Anyway. A wild time. Some parts I liked very much! I hit the end and shrieked and then forced Beth to read it immediately because I needed to scream about it, and now it lives among its other yellowing paperback friends on the Midcentury Mysteries shelf for some other unsuspecting person to find and scream about.

NB: in addition to everything else a cat dies in this book .... Joan Aiken hates this cat in particular and I do not know why. She likes all the other cats! But for some reason she really wants us to understand that this cat has bad vibes and we should not be sad when it gets got. But me, I was sad.

A historical children's novel by a Ukrainian-Canadian author, based on Ukrainian teenagers and children forced into slavery during WWII. After watching her neighbors and finally her family getting dragged off by the Nazis, Lida, a Christian Ukrainian girl, is kidnapped along with her younger sister. They're immediately separated and Lida is sent to a horrendous work camp. She's skilled at sewing, which keeps her useful and so alive for a while. But then the Nazis need bombs more than uniforms...

This book is an impressive feat of walking the line between being honest and straightforward about how terrible conditions are while not being too overwhelming for children to read. Lida and the other girls endure and try to support each other. Lida gives a Jewish girl her crucifix necklace to help hide her identity, and an older girl advises Lida to lie about her age so she isn't killed immediately for being too young to work. The German seamstress Lida works with (an employee, not a prisoner) is occasionally casually kind to her, but also gets a gift of looted clothing from a probably murdered French woman, and gets Lida to meticulously remove the woman's stitched-in initials and re-sew them with her own. A Hungarian political prisoner, who gets better soup than the Ukrainians, advises Lida to say she's Polish, as that will improve her her food. Later, Lida muses, It seemed that just as there were different soups, there were different ways of being killed, depending on your nationality.

( Read more... )

The book is interesting as a depiction of an aspect of WWII that isn't written about much, a compelling read, and a moving story about some people trying to keep hope and caring - and rebellion - alive when others are being as bad as humans can get. It's part of a trio of books involving overlapping characters, but stands completely on its own.

The afterword says that Skrypuch based the book on her interviews with a survivor.

1. Roméo et Juliette at the Boston Ballet

This was incredible???

( More rambling about that )

If you're in the Boston area and interested, it's open through June 8 and I highly recommend it.

(ETA: skygiants has also written this up in a much more detailed blow-by-blow way!)

2. Fun Home with The Burlington Players

Another great show, although this one isn't still going; we saw one of the last performances of the run, a couple weeks ago.

( More thoughts (briefer) )

...And I'll leave this post there, because it's already long and the hour is late. I was going to add in an art show that I had a pottery piece in (!?!?! I'm delighted and that still feels fake) but that'll get its own post, instead, in a day or two. I'm mentioning it all the same to remind myself to follow through.

The Boston Ballet production of Maillot's Romeo et Juliette has turned out to be not only my favorite Boston Ballet production that I've seen so far but also tbh one of my favorite Romeo and Juliets full stop. It is Taking Swings and Making Choices and some of them are very weird but all of them are interesting.

( we're just gonna go ahead and cut for length )

In a magical version of the medieval Middle East, a middle-aged single mom, who was once the notorious pirate Amina al-Sirafi, is dragged out of retirement for one final job.

This book is a complete and utter delight from start to finish. It has all the pirate tropes you could possibly want - sea battles! sea monsters! quests for magical objects! loyal crews! tossed overboard! marooned! - and sly twists on others. It's got great characters. It's got hilarious dialogue and character interactions. The world is wonderfully detailed and varied, full of plausible historical details and with a lovely faux-historical feel. There are stories within stories. It's all marvelous.

As a child, I had a book called Muslim Saints and Mystics, which was a translation of parts of the Tazkirat al-Awliyā, a collection of stories about Muslim saints written around 1200. It was funny and magical, and some of the stories-within-stories in Amina al-Sirafi have a similar feel. The novel neatly toes the line between dialogue that feels fairly contemporary and a plausibly historical mindset. Amina is horny as hell, but a serious Muslim who believes in not having sex before marriage; as a result, she's had five husbands. There's a major trans character, in addition to several gay characters; Amina has come across people before who prefer to live as the other sex, and takes it in stride without resorting to Tumblr-esque labels or attitudes.

I loved every moment of this book, and was delighted that though it has a reasonable ending, it is the start of a trilogy. It's the first book I've read by Chakraborty, and I'm excited to read her City of Brass series.

( Read more... )