July reading: Hiding from the heat

 I think I'm a bit behind on my reading; if we count my Spin title, I've now read 14 books of summer and have six to go, which isn't terrible.  But I'm going to need to buckle down a bit in August.  And I had this month off!  In August I have to go back to work!  I've admittedly been rather lazy, pottering about, working on crafty projects, and watching too many YouTube videos (but stitching while I did so!).  I've also done some day trips and hikes, and enjoyed air conditioning a whole lot.  And I've been getting a bit involved with the local public library!   How has your summer been going?

Summerbook #9: Notes From the Burning Age, by Claire North:  Centuries after the apocalypse, humans live in a carefully balanced world built from the ruins of the old one.  At some point during a destructive world war, chimaerical monsters -- kakuy -- arose from the depths and wreaked destruction upon humankind in revenge for their hapless destruction of the earth.  Now people worship the kakuy as nature spirits and try not to re-awaken them.  Priests salvage ancient hard drives and go through them, sorting between find helpful information, the random effluvia of life, and heresy -- anything that could be used to destroy.  But humans are nothing if not ambitious, and some are looking for power.  The kakuy haven't been seen in ages; are they even real?  Why not build tanks again and start a war for domination?  Our narrator, Ven, is a priest trained in ancient languages and a spy nestled in the center of the war faction and trying to track down his opposite number.  It's all set in what was once Eastern Europe.

It took me forever to get into this book.  Honestly, I was so bogged down!  In the first half I just kept reading because it was mildly interesting and I wanted to finish it.  Then I whipped through the second half in two days.  I don't know if it was just me or what, but I mostly just wasn't that into this one.  I found the descriptions of various factions unclear and somewhat confusing.

Summerbook #10: How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, by Slavenka Drakulic:  I really enjoy Drakulic's work.  She was born in Tito's Yugoslavia and ended up in Croatia; this book of essays on life under Communism and the dissolution of it ends just as the war is starting between the Serbs and the Croats.  Most of the essays focus on everyday life; the difficulties of constant poverty and shortages, the daily indignities of life when soap and toilet paper are officially considered luxuries that people don't really need (and menstrual products aren't considered at all), the importance of soup.  I enjoyed these a lot, especially the essay dedicated to toilet paper.

One thing I noticed was that in a society where everyone is poor -- or at least in Communist Yugoslavia -- things that I, a bourgeoisie, consider normal become laden with significance.  Hand-me-downs or used clothing aren't an easy way to save money; they're humiliating, implying that the recipient is less than the giver.  Saving yogurt containers and plastic bags for re-use isn't an eco-conscious practice; it's what your grandmother does because she's lived through much worse times.  And making cloth pads isn't a slightly oddball hippie eco-mom fad; it's what you all have to do because there is no such thing as a feminine product aisle at the store, and if there was it would be empty.  The lack of choice makes it all humiliating instead of simple choices.

Summerbook #11: Pageants of Despair, by Dennis Hamley: The title of this early YA novel was so intriguing, and so baffling!  What on earth does that mean?  This novel is from 1974, and concerns Peter -- about 12/13 -- whose mother is the victim of a violent mugging.  He's sent to stay with relatives so his dad can stay at the hospital, and on the train he meets Gilbert, who has traveled forward in time 500 years to find the answer to his problem.  Some evil presence is determined to ruin the yearly pageant of mystery plays, but why?  Peter goes back with Gilbert to the 15th century, where actors are becoming the characters of their plays, and together he and Gilbert must find out how to stop the pageant -- with its message of hope and purpose in life -- from becoming a pageant of despair which will spread its message through the world.

It's a really interesting and unusual story!  I'm glad it's been reprinted so I could read it.  Worth seeking out if the description appeals to you. 

Summerbook #12: To the Diamond Mountains: A Hundred-Year Journey Through China and Korea, by Tessa Morris-Suzuki:  In 2010, Morris-Suzuki -- a historian of East Asia -- wanted to do a trip through China and Korea, and she wanted to base it on a historical trip.  She eventually chose Emily Kemp, an intrepid Englishwoman who traveled through the same area in 1910.  And she took her sister along too!  So together they did a circuit through southeast China, North Korea, and South Korea.  Of course it was impossible to do the same route, because the DMZ gets in the way, but they did their best.  The center -- really the impossible goal -- of the trip was the Diamond Mountains, a range that carries great historical and cultural significance and amazing beauty, and which is also almost completely inaccessible.  It's in North Korea, and for a while the split country was cooperating on a project for people to be able to visit it and reunite with family members, but that closed down.  Morris-Suzuki was writing at a time of heightened tensions, and she was sure that North Korea didn't have much time left, but ten years later, Kim Jong-Un is settled in and nothing much has changed.  I would say that at least half the book is focused on North Korea and her observations about it, which are quite interesting.  I would have liked to see more about South Korea too, but there's some nice material about it.  A paragraph that tickled me:

[Emily Kemp in Korea] ...friends in China had cheerfully assured her that Chinese was understood everywhere in Korea, so she and Mary MacDougall had hired a Chinese guide, Mr. Chaio, to accompany them on their travels.  It was true that in the early 20th century all Korean literati could read Chinese characters, but the travelers quickly discovered that most of the people they met on their journey were not literati.  Spoken Korean and spoken Chinese are about as mutually comprehensible as English and Russian, and the hapless Mr. Chiao spent much of his time hunting for local scholars or officials with whom he could communicate through messages written on scraps of paper or scratched into the dirt of unpaved roads.  His task was not helped by the fact that their itinerary through Korea had been planned on a German map that rendered some place names into Germanized approximations that were utterly impossible to correlate with Korean, Japanese, or Chinese equivalents.

Summerbook #13: The Cabin at the End of the World, by Paul Tremblay: I didn't know anything about this book except the blurb on the cover, which led me to think that it was probably going to be something kind of apocalyptic.  I didn't know it was a movie or anything.  (It's a movie, by the way.)  This turned out to be a very fast, gripping read, but not really entirely my cup of tea.  The end is left completely open, with no resolution to the question, and it's also more violent than I expected.  The story --

A little family is on vacation at a remote cabin, and Wen is playing in the front yard.  A man arrives, introduces himself and makes friends, and then says “None of what’s going to happen is your fault....Your dads won’t want to let us in, Wen. But they have to. We need your help to save the world.”  He and three others are convinced that one of these people must voluntarily sacrifice themselves in order to save the whole world.  This belief obviously makes no sense, and so begins a tense and violent stand-off, in which Wen's little family clings together and tries to escape, and their jailors insist that -- even though they don't want to do this -- the sacrifice must be made.