Review: Throne of the Crescent Moon

Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’m familiar with Saladin’s short fiction and been wanting to read this for a while.

This book really appealed to my spiritual self. I loved how Adoulla and Raseed had different views of their faith. Raseed being more the literal, by the book conservative while Adoulla was more relaxed and liberal. And it was so cool to see Adoulla using God’s name to fight the ghuls. Also, Saladin is the best blasphemer ever. The insults in this book had me in tears.

I also liked the depiction of the different relationships, particularly the tension between Adoulla and Miri. The book did slow down in the middle, where I found myself skipping a lot of talking scenes. But the story itself was good, and the action scenes, particularly towards the end of the book, had me riveted. It has me all psyched up for the next book. Four cardamon teas out of five.

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Book Review: The Female Man

The Female Man by Joanna Russ
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I’m still trying to decide if I liked this book.

Being a meta lover, I dug Russ’s writing style. It had this wonderful stream of consciousness that reminded me of Virginia Woolf, particularly during Jeannine’s parts. I also kind of liked the whole breaking the fourth wall aspect, though it made for difficult reading. I remember when it came to me like a jolt that all three characters were the same person. And I felt proud for recognizing that.

But aside from the writing style, I grew bored with the story real quick. I’m sure when it first came out, it was amazing and it rattled cages and whatnot. I also got a lot of the anger Russ was expressing. But I couldn’t identify with it. Part of it is the characters. There’s no real women or men in here, just cardboard cutouts. Aside from the “J”s, all the women are either asinine or male versions of women, and all the men are chauvinistic sexaholics. It got old real quick.

The whole “get married, then stay at home and be pretty” lifestyle Russ rants about just did not apply to the black women of my childhood. My grandma did laundry for a living, put herself through nursing school and had several kids through different men (she eventually married the last one). She didn’t have time to sit around looking pretty. There was this whole educated white woman privilege theme running through the story that grew wearying after a while. There were even a couple of scenes where Russ lapses into black slave “Massah” talk. I know she was trying to show how farcical it was for women to put on a show for men, but to try to compare that with how Black people were treated in that time was very ignorant and stupid on Russ’s part.

I really wanted to read more about Whileaway. Russ told us all these details, but the story never focused on it. It was more Janet playing commentator: “I’m a visitor here! Your world is weird!” Then she sort of faded into the background. At least Jeannie’s story grew on me, simply because it was the most complete and coherent. Joanna grew tiresome after a while with all her man hate. By the time Jael came along, I was skipping more pages than reading them. Laura, the only female character not a “J”, faded in and just as quickly faded out. What I wanted was a science fiction story. What I got instead was a long diatribe dressed up in science fiction clothes.

Was Russ’s anger justified? Yes, I think so. Did this book need to be written? Yes, absolutely. Is it relevant now? Is many of the ideas in it still relevant? As I write this, everyone is talking about Steubenville. It feels like nothing’s changed. And yet there are women and men alike challenging rape culture, calling out the media for their coverage. So people are at least more aware and crying out for justice and change.

But was this a good story? I don’t think so. I think I’m going to go read When it Changed, which I believe has what I want: a story set in Whileaway, and Russ’s good writing to boot.

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Review: Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling

Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling by Andy Crouch
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I really enjoyed reading this. This book opened my eyes on the nature of culture. The culture of world. The culture of church. The culture of science fiction. And knowing that you must know culture in order to change it.

I was struck most by his four postures Christians use to respond to culture outside of the church: condemning, critiquing, consuming and copying, and found myself applying it on numerous occasions. For instance, Jon and I went to the mall were we went to a restaurant called Kato’s Cajun, which was based on the same restaurant as Sarku Japan, except all the Asian dishes had “Cajun” names. Jon went up to get a sample, and when he came back, he said, “The Cajun chicken tastes just like the Bourbon chicken.”

I then start grouching that sticking a ethnic name in front of a dish doesn’t magically make it so, but then I started thinking about it. Here I was, condemning the fact that mall food courts are slapping ethnic labels together and calling them fusions just to get people to eat their food. I’m critiquing that they think their customers are clueless enough not to know Asian cuisine from Cajun. But I’m consuming the food anyway because labels aside, it’s delicious and is (hopefully) better than eating McDonalds. And let’s face it, when I cook Asian dishes at home, I put my own spin on it, thus copying the culture of fusion cuisine.

I like how Crouch also intertwines how God uses culture in the Bible into how culture is so relevant today, and how we can work with culture instead of hiding from it. We’re not guaranteed to make any differences. But the mere fact that I’m writing a review (there are instances in the book that is delightfully meta) and putting it up for people to read does show that I can add my own voice to culture and thus, while not change the world, at least to touch it through my readers. Four omelets out of five.

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Review: Cloud Atlas

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

For the first time I ever known in my entire reading life, a movie I’ve never even seen spoiled a book for me.

I didn’t know there was a book about Cloud Atlas until trailers for the movie came out, and even then, I hadn’t paid attention until people in my facebook stream started complaining about the yellowface, and then other people started defending the yellowface, and then more people said they hated the yellowface but understood why it was there, and that the whole issue of reincarnation muddied up the works, and meanwhile, I was like, “Wait..What the heck are you talking about about? What’s Cloud Atlas?” And everyone was like “Get it together, LaShawn. Go read the book.”

And so I did, because, hey, controversial movie, yadda yadda yadda.

Cloud Atlas is six short stories that span from the 1800s to the far off future. Each story has a reoccurring element–a person with a tattoo, a cowardly, stupid jerk, a chase or some sort of pursuit, and mentions of the previous story appearing in some type of form: journal, letter, book, etc. Each story also had a unique voice, which, in several stories, made it very hard to read. In fact, the Sloosha story was so unreadable with its futuristic native slang and apostrophes, I pretty much skimmed through the entire thing without reading it through. Which was a shame, because I would have loved to read it more indepth once I realized it was a far futuristic time setting, but I just couldn’t get a handle on it. It also didn’t help that I was reading a “borrowed” ebook from Overdrive and I only had a 14 day window to read it–which sucked because instead of savoring it like I should have, I was under a time constraint.)

If I had discovered this book back in 2004 when it was published, I suspect Cloud Atlas would’ve blown my mind. And indeed, I loved the exploration of the privilege/unprivileged motifs, though the juxtaposition of the stories made the exploration a little odd sometimes. A bigoted coward unwillingly helping a slave, okay, I get it, but how does a young composer sponging off an older man compare to that? I think the author was exploring oppressed/freedom motif in all aspects, and in a couple of the stories, it felt like he was really stretching to hold on to that motif. The best stories that reflected it well was the Adam Ewing story (though it was hard to read because the Ewing was such a bigot, he made my skin crawl), the Luisa Rey story, and the Sonmi-451 story. In fact, I would have said that the Somni story was the best one in the entire book, but I can’t.

You see, the reason why I picked Cloud Atlas was because of the controversy of the actors appearing in yellowface in the movie. I wanted to know what justified them to do so. There are many good websites out there dissecting why it didn’t work in the movie. Suffice it to say, I’ve seen the pictures. So when I started reading Somni’s section, all I could see in my mind’s eye was the white men in Korean makeup. I tried to change it, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t come up with my own picture of the characters. And it absolutely did not help that the ebook I was reading had the cover of all the actors right there.

It spoiled the story for me.

I wish I never knew about the movie. I know that the movie was supposed to be about reincarnation and characters transcending race, but that’s not what the book was about. The book was about how powerful people use their privilege to keep back people without power. The book is about how such privilege is abused, and how it goes deep: culturally, ethnically, racially. The movie took that and said, “yeah, screw that. It’s going to be what we want it to be. And we want all our main white characters to appear in all the stories. And to make sure we won’t get yelled at, we’ll do the same for our only two POC women. But the black guy? Nah, let’s just keep him in only a couple of stories. It’ll be too hard to put makeup on him in a different race.”

(And wait a second…isn’t the first story set it in the Pacific Islands? Why did they change it to black slaves then? Arrrrghhh…)

Understandably, I’m bitter.

But, really, what did I think of the book? It was okay. Not spectacular. There were times when I found the meta a little too grating for my tastes (but then again, some meta works for me and some meta don’t). I was reminded of my favorite short story Lull, by Kelly Link, who does a similar thing of a story within a story within a story, but she does it far better, in my opinion. I found the splitting of the stories in Cloud Atlas jarring–at times, I wondered if my ebook had loaded wrong. It wasn’t until I realized the characters were reading the previous story that the breaks were intentional (and this was one of the ways the meta failed). Also, I didn’t really empathize with the characters all that much. Adam Ewing was a bigot, Robert Frobisher was a leech, Luisa Rey was an idiot, and Timothy Cavendish was a jerk–though, to my complete surprise, I enjoyed his story the most. His was the only character who truly stood out, and though he was a jerk, his comeuppance, and his subsequent turnabout, was quite satisfying. The Somni and Sloosha stories…well…I think what I’ll do is wait a few years and try to read Cloud Atlas again without the movie cover on it, so I can form my own opinion.

So this gets 2-1/2 comet birthmarks out of 5. I’m pretty sure I’m not going to see the movie, but it feels like I’ve already have.

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Review: Dark Faith: Invocations

Dark Faith: Invocations by Jerry Gordon
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I’m in this so I’m a bit biased. I also have the first anthology.

I found this one less disturbing, though there are a few stories that made me put the book down and back slowly away (Lucy Snyder, I’m looking directly at you). Most of the stories had me thinking about the nature of faith.

The ones that stuck with me the most:

Subletting God’s head, Tom Piccirilli: a guy living in God’s head and being privy to His innermost thoughts. A part of me felt rubbed wrong by his portrayal of Jesus.

The Cancer Catechism by Jay Lake: I’ve followed Jay Lake as he tweeted about dealing with cancer and this is his most poignant,vulnerable, open, honest take on it. His experience with anesthesia is very much as I found it, disturbing and unsettling. His last line is so strong, it is worth the entire book alone.

Kill the Buddha, Elizabeth Twist – most surreal and sad

Night Train, Alma Alexander – lonely story about belief and trains.

The Sandfather, Richard Wright – this can be considered a sequel to his story “Sandboys” in the first anthology. I didn’t find this one as devastating, but it still stood out.

Sacrifice, Jennifer Pelland – a cool alt-choice story.

Thou art God, Tim Waggoner – Loved this take on “All is God and God is All” belief

Wishflowers, Tim Pratt – I just listened to his story “The Secret Beach” on Podcastle, and this could be considered a continuation of that tale, sort of. Like all Tim Pratt tales, this one socked me in the gut at the end.

Starter Kit, RJ Sullivan – Cute story about the universe as a kid’s aquarium. The apocalypse could really be God hitting the reset button & starting over.

God’s Dig, Kelly Eiro- A kid hears God telling her to dig, and she does. Oh, so disturbing. This was one of those stories that made me put the book down and slowly back away.

The Birth of Pegasus, K. Tempest Bradford – A retelling of Medusa and Poisiden. Loved the style of the story, and loved how it lead into the next story, which is…

All This Pure Light Leaking in, LaShawn M. Wanak – Okay, yes, this is mine. But I reeeeeeeally loved how they juxapositioned this after The Birth of Pegasus. And, it led very nicely into what I consider the “angel” section of the book. Plus, every time I read it, I think, man, I write the freakiest stuff…

Fin de Siecle, Gemma Files – Another angel story that’s more creepy.

The Angel Seems, Jeffrey Ford – Scary folktale, though the ending fell flat for me.

Magdala Amygdala, Lucy Snyder – Holy crap this was disturbing. Probably the most disturbing story in the entire book. How Snyder describes the brain sucking…I can’t even look at someone’s head now without thinking, “Brain jelly…” Oh…guh ::shudders::

In Blood and Song, Nisi Shawl & Michael Ehart – Cool story about how different people have their different gods.

Little Lies, Dear Leader, Kyle S. Johnson – While Madgala Amygdala was creepy, this one affected me the most because it’s so close to real life, it could easily have happened. My inlaws were in South Korea a year ago, so they were able to see the reactions to Kim Jong-il’s death. How all the tvs showed women weeping as if they were heartbroken. This was a hard read, but also necessary, I think.

I inhale the City, the City Exhales Me, Douglas F. Warrick – a great story to end the anthology, this was a nod to all the apocalyptic anime where a blob engulfs Tokyo. Reminded me a lot of Paranoid Agent. Also was a strong theme on stereotype and how we believe cultures are/should be.

As a whole, I really enjoyed this one. It’s more dark fantasy than horror, but I really liked the focus on all kinds of faith throughout the book. This gets five angels out of five…and if I want to see an angel, I’ll ask the right way…

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Review: Shades of Milk and Honey

Shades of Milk and Honey by Mary Robinette Kowal
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Oh my goodness, I devoured this book in two days. And I am not that much of a Jane Austen fan, but loved, loved, LOVED this book! I loved the fierce love/jealousy between Jane and Melody. Melody is a silly goose, but Jane could be so stubbornly blind to her own strengths. I knew full well how the love affairs would play out, and yet I went along for the ride anyway because it was so delightful. And the glamour in this was wonderful. The magic fit so well with the rules of etiquette, it didn’t feel forced like the zombies in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. It flowed very natural with a very satisfying finish. Now I’ll have to read Glamour in Glass next! Five glamurals out of five.

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Review: Parable of the Sower

Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I thought I had read this book back in college. At the time I had thought it so-so…lots of mumbo jumbo about God and what not. I read it again this month for our book club and I can say I have not read this before. If I had, I would have remembered sitting up all night unable to sleep.

The world in PotS is a couple of steps to the side of us, closer to a probable dystopian future. Entire neighborhoods have walls around them, unemployment is rampant, no one drives because the cost of gas is too high, firefighters and police have grown more expensive and a new drug called pyro causes people to go on arson rampages. And throughout all this, Lauren Olamina is coming of age.

Prior to reading this, I had read the Wastelands anthology by John Joseph Adams, so this was a fitting endpiece to all the dystopian literature I had been reading. It was frightening to read of the rampant poverty and crime that existed outside Lauren’s neighborhood, and how it slowly seeped in. Lauren’s a bit of a prophet–she sees disaster coming on the horizon, but being a teenager, no one pays any heed to her until it’s too late. But Lauren doesn’t plan to mourn, or try to get things back to the way they used to be. She plans to survive, and more than that, she plans to transcend.

That’s what set this apart from the other dystopian stories I’ve read. In PotS, we see the beginnings of an entirely new religion, Earthseed, which equates God with Change. Very interesting idea, since in Christian theology, God never changes. The verses that spell out the Earthseed religion at times seem too zenlike and simplistic (one of the characters even point that out–a nice touch), and there were some statements I couldn’t agree with (I’m more in the God is Love camp, so I can’t full agree that God is an impersonal god, since love can’t be impersonal). At the same time, the book did make me think how change has been a huge influence throughout history. (My own realization I’ve been trying to reconcile over the past few years–God doesn’t change, but people do).

I want to read the next book, which I believe goes into more detail about the religion. I’m now certain I read that book, and now I have Lauren’s background, I think I’ll be able to appreciate it more.

Today, I picked my son up from school. We walked home, kids waving goodbye as they passed by us. We passed by the community garden, where there has been a problem of vandalism this summer, some veggies getting smashed before they’re ripe. At home, I learned my son had tossed a whole sandwich away and chastised him on it. Later on, my inlaws got into a small fender bender and a policeman came by to make a report and make sure they were okay.

Then I got on the internet and learned about a black woman who had been set on fire by three men and racist slurs scratched into her car, another mass shooting in Wisconsin, and child laborers in China.

Butler’s dystopia is a lot farther, and yet a lot more closer, than we think. Five acorns out of five and maybe I should pay more attention to the oak tree in our backyard. Just in case.

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Review: Wastelands

Wastelands by John Joseph Adams
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read this since I am slushing for Wastelands 2. Nice collection. Stories that stood out to me:
-The End of the Whole Mess, Stephen King. Very good one by the master.
-Bread and Bombs, M. Rickert. Disturbing story that I had to read twice to understand what the kids did.
-The Last of the O-Forms, James Van Pelt. I saw the ending coming but I didn’t care. Good story.
-Mute, Gene Wolfe. In my quest to find a Gene Wolfe story I resonate with, this came closest so far. The last paragraph in this story is probably the saddest and creepiest paragraph I’ve ever read. I’ve found myself coming back to it again and again and asking, “Does that mean what I *think* it means?” I’m not sure I want to know.
-And the Deep Blue Sea, Elizabeth Bear. I loved how Bear portrayed the motorcycle like a living steed. Nice play on the Devil at the Crossroads myth.
-Speech Sounds, Octavia Butler. Scary how Butler portrays a world where speech is attacked.
-Ginny Sweethips Flying Circus, Neal Barrett Jr – the only story in the collection that had me outright laughing. I wish to see more of Ginny Sweethips and her companions.
-The End of the World as we know it, Dale Bailey – This one made me think the most. Fact is, the end of the world happens to people all the time.
-Episode Seven: Last Stand Against the Pack in the Kingdom Of the Purple Flowers, John Langan. A great response to Dale Bailey’s story. I loved the format, and the fact that the MC is pregant.

Good collection. Can’t wait to see how the next one pans out.

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Review: Me and the Devil Blues: The Unreal Life of Robert Johnson, Volume 1

Me and the Devil Blues: The Unreal Life of Robert Johnson, Volume 1 by Akira Hiramoto
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Interesting supernatual reimagining on the life of bluesman Robert Johnson. Seeing that most of his life is undocumented, Hiramoto has taken the legend of Johnson meeting up with the devil and running with it. He also brings in Clyde of Bonnie and Clyde fame, and pairs him with Johnson in a strange, mad partnership that has them caterwauling across the south.

The manga gets nice and spooky during the supernatural bits, but even if you take out the supernatural, there are times when it’s freaky, such as when Johnson gets captured by a bunch of men who’s looking to do a lynching. Among them is a young white boy, who casually says the n-word and treats the upcoming lynching like a day at the circus. And the knowledge that people truly did make festivals out of lynchings truly is chilling.

I would say though that Clyde’s appearance slowly takes over Johnson’s storyline, which is why I liked the second volume less. But as a supernatural imagining, this was pretty good.

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Review: Shout, Sister, Shout!: The Untold Story of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe

Shout, Sister, Shout!: The Untold Story of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe by Gayle F. Wald
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Sister Rosetta Tharpe died in 1973 when I was two years old. 39 years later, I am listening to her for the first time in my life.

Shout Sister Shout is a wonderful account of Tharpe’s life, but also gives insight and history into gospel music as a whole. I have grown up being surrounded by gospel music, but it was always contemporary. In reading this book, the only gospel names I recognized was Thomas Dorsey and Mahalia Jackson, the former because my mother had a record of his, the latter because we learned about her at school. But I never heard oldie gospel tunes on the radio; they’d play R&B from the 50s, but not gospel. (It is the same today of contemporary Christian–no oldies.) I didn’t even know there were different types of gospel.

Tharpe had an amazing life, and she had an AMAZING mother. To be a black single mother and a traveling evangelist? That took guts to do in the 20s and 30s. It’s easy to see where Sister Rosetta got her ambitious spirit from. But what blows my mind is how great a guitarist she was. Some criticism of this book has been that it’s hard to describe Tharpe’s playing in words; it is much better heard and seen. Considering, though, that we live in the age of the internet, it wasn’t hard at all to google her on YouTube and listen along. It makes for a better multimedia experience.

And dare I say that Tharpe and Marie Knight’s version of “Didn’t it Rain” is absolute MAGIC?

Wald does a good job in weaving history and the culture of the times into Tharpe’s narrative. In some ways, it also gave me more insight into what it meant to be a black woman during those times, and how Tharpe worked her way around racism with a loving smile, but also a business savvy to be admired. Her choice to buy a bus so she didn’t have to stoop to the indignity of being turned away from white-only restaurants? Brilliant. And I like how we get this picture of Tharpe who truly believed in her faith, but also whooped it up, so to speak.

Along with this, I was reading the biography of Memphis Minnie, another black female guitarist who played the blues. It was very interesting to compare the two women–while Minnie had no interest in expanding and completely focused on the blues, Tharpe constantly looked to reinventing herself; though she mainly stayed within the gospel genre, she also dipped into the blues and even did folk for a while.

The epilogue did feel like Wald was overstretching a bit, waxing long on the fact that because Tharpe didn’t have a gravestone, it could be considered a metaphor for the fragility of life, yadda yadda yadda. But then again, she mentions how quickly it seems that Tharpe was forgotten after her death, and I do have to agree to that. Rock and roll owes a lot to her legacy. Four guitars out of Five, and I guess I’ll have to wait to get to heaven to tell her she has a new fan.

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