Have your reading habits changed since you were a child? (I mean, I’m assuming you have less time to read now, but …) Did you devour and absorb books when you were 10 and only just lightly read them now? Did you re-read frequently as a child but now only read new books? How about types of books? Do you find yourself still attracted to the kinds of books you read when you were a kid?

I didn’t actually read a lot of books as a child—I compulsively reread old books from my parents’ sea of books, as well as comic strip anthologies. (Public libraries and network televisions: things I didn’t understand as a child or during the Wombat Years.) I read How The Irish Saved Civilization at one point as a child, and got nothing out of it. I wasn’t getting a lot of meat off the bones, because I understood fairly little. Because I could read quickly and parrot back story information, I was identified as a good reader at school, but at home, I was paging through books I already knew over and over again. Looking back at it, it was probably a self-soothing exercise, as much as picking my belly button as a little kid was.

I get much more out of reading now. Not only do I read more, I’m a much better reader (in terms of understanding  and get much more out of the books I read. I adore having my commonplace book and reading wildly widely, instead of circling in a weird pool of comic strip anthologies, torn up copies of Asterix, and the wildly outdated and homophobic Understanding Other People. Just thinking about going back to that gives me the creeps.

Oxford Press’ Very Short Introduction series is a godsend for someone like me. I’ve mentioned before that there are massive, gaping holes in my pop cultural education (I have never seen The Wizard of Oz or The Sound of Music), but there are some in my academic education as well. Lately, I’ve come to tackle my blind spots with equally blind enthusiasm (“I’ve never seen a James Bond film! LET’S WATCH ALL OF THEM!”), but some are easier to tackle than others. And that’s why this series is perfect for me: in a little over one hundred pages, each volume has more depth and focus than a Wikipedia article and allows me to get a feel for the basics without going deeper into the subject than I need to.

Rhetoric: A Very Short Introduction, one of the latest installments in the wide-reaching series, is written by Richard Toye, currently the Professor Modern History at the University of Exeter. Starting with a brief overview of the history of rhetoric (otherwise known as the art of discourse or public speaking) as a practice, Toye then goes into how classical rhetoric is constructed, how it has been used in recent history, and how it is changing in the face of new communication technologies connecting the world.

In contrast against Music: A Very Short Introduction, the only other Very Short Introduction text I’ve read, Rhetoric: A Very Short Introduction is constructed as if meant for use in a class. A little over a week out of college, I appreciate that, but not only for nostalgia’s sake. By giving us specific exercises to examine the basics of rhetoric in, the casual reader gets to flex their rhetorical skills. And the historical timeline is much appreciated—I have difficulty placing things in temporal context, so having that right off the bat was great.

But I’ll admit: this felt like academic reading until Toye began to examine the implications of rhetoric and, more broadly, language itself. Towards the end, he discusses the use of symbol in rhetoric, quoting Kenneth Burke in describing man as the symbolic animal. (I’ve got three more book recommendations out of this. Magnificent!) For instance, the idea of capitalism being tyranny will often be expressed with metaphors about faceless corporations and chains. It’s the same reason a novel appeals to us much more than its outline: humanity, according to Toye and the scholars he draws upon, can grasp ideas and concepts through something that is only “rhetorically” true. I happen to think sometimes they can be communicated better that way, but I can only speak to my own experience.

In fact, I think there’s a lot of overlap between my training as a literary critic and rhetoric. As a discipline, Toye states, rhetoric has mostly dissolved into adjacent fields—public speaking obviously comes to mind, but also literature. When discussing how to properly analyze rhetoric (say, an inaugural speech), he offers guidelines familiar to anyone who analyzes literature. Ultimately, this overlap can be boiled down to three questions: what is this person saying, why are they saying, and why are they saying it the way they’re saying it? Toye does go into some of the more mechanical bits of rhetoric (I learned what antimetabole is!), but this, I think, is the beating heart of why understanding rhetoric is so important. It can give you the upper hand.

Equally interesting is the fact that modern rhetoric must now contend with the globalization of communication media. Rhetoric—and human interaction, really—is often very dependent on a group of people sharing the same assumptions and reference points. But now your words can travel far beyond your intended audience, letting everybody know exactly what your ideology is. Remember Romney and the 47%? As a reader-response theorist at heart, I’m tempted to link these two impulses together. We increasingly live in a world where few people experience things in the moment (something I’m still parsing out for myself) and more people experience things after the fact. At the end of this book, Toye quotes Walter Og: “According to Walter Ong, human culture moved broadly from its initial ‘primary orality’, in which the spoken word was everything, to dependence on writing, to the ‘secondary orality’ of the modern age” (106). Your words can go farther than you are; understanding rhetoric helps those words to be as clear (or as opaque) as you want them to be.

Bottom line: Another solid introduction to an academic topic from Oxford Press’ Very Short Introduction series. Toye’s timeline and exercises are academically useful, but I found the exploration of the implications of rhetoric and language as a whole as a means of communication fascinating. If you’d like!

I received a free copy of this book for review purposes from Oxford Press.

Poison Study by Maria V. Synder

Choose: A quick death . . . Or slow poison . . .

About to be executed for murder, Yelena is offered an extraordinary reprieve. She’ll eat the best meals, have rooms in the palace — and risk assassination by anyone trying to kill the Commander of Ixia.

And so Yelena chooses to become a food taster. But the chief of security, leaving nothing to chance, deliberately feeds her Butterfly’s Dust — and only by appearing for her daily antidote will she delay an agonizing death from the poison.

As Yelena tries to escape her new dilemma, disasters keep mounting. Rebels plot to seize Ixia and Yelena develops magical powers she can’t control. Her life is threatened again and choices must be made. But this time the outcomes aren’t so clear . . .

via Amazon

I’ve come across Synder before—specifically, I came across Storm Glass, the first in the Glass series. But completionist that I am, I must start with Poison Study, as apparently the series are mildly linked. I’ve heard good to mixed things, but you know me: I love good fantasy, I love bad fantasy. It’s mediocre fantasy I don’t have time for.

Jane at Dear Author found the worldbuilding a little vague and the romance (of course there’s a romance!) rushed, but, overall, she enjoyed it. Kristen at Fantasy Cafe liked its engaging and exciting plot and pace, but noted that the characterization was a little flat. Anna at Anna Reads loved it. Fyrefly at Fyrefly’s Book Blog liked it, but found the prose awkward and Yelena a bit thick-headed.

Poison Study was published on October 1, 2005.

When Anne McCaffrey passed away in 2011, I was saddened, as many people in the sf community were. I was also seized by a sudden urge to go back and read The Dragonriders of Pern. Well, go back… I distinctly remember reading a Pern novel featuring a tall, dark villainess in middle school, but, looking back, I definitely could have just imagined that. In any case, 2011 was when I determined to read Dragonflight and get a toehold back in the series, to see if I wanted to continue or not. Naturally, it took me two years to finally sit down with it. Yeesh.

Dragonflight takes place on the planet of Pern, an abandoned human colony so distant from its spacefaring past that it now resembles something more medieval. When Pern is threatened with the deadly spores from space known as the Thread, the dragonriders of Pern, telepathically connected to their steeds, fight it off, again and again. But the Thread haven’t landed in four centuries, leading many to believe they don’t exist. When Lessa, the sole surviving heir of Ruatha Hold, finally completes her decade-long quest for vengeance against Fax, she finds her destiny diverted when she is recruited by F’lar, a dragonman of the last remaining Hold, to be their Weyrwoman for the coming Thread fall, connecting her with the only Queen dragon. But even with Lessa, their numbers are simply too low to fight against the oncoming Thread… at least, for now.

Dragonflight, as I learned prepping this post, began life as two novellas originally published in Analog—“Weyr Search”, which details Lessa’s journey from heir-in-disguise to Weyrwoman, and the two-parter “Dragonrider”, about her training and the growth of her queen dragon, Ramoth. Such a composition is known as a fix-up. (The more you know!) This accounts for Dragonflight’s peculiar, half-melted structure. While it’s nominally split into three parts, it lacks chapters, so you often get the feeling you’re speeding up and slowing down irregularly. That might be an interesting thing to play with, given the fact that this novel eventually explores time travel, but here, it really only serves to flatten the narrative and distance the reader.

Case in point: the characterization. While it took me a little longer than usual than I expected to get my bearings, I was happy to get invested in Lessa: she’s morally ambiguous (she’s killed a lot of people in her quest for revenge, which spans her entire adolescence), she’s powerful, she’s spiteful, and F’lar sees greatness in her. I liked her for the same reasons I like Princess Zelda in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time—when your situation is that bad, what would you do? (Lessa lies in wait for ten years; Zelda breaks time itself in half, you know, no big.) But despite her potential, I never felt like I connected with Lessa, or F’lar, or any number of characters whose perspective the narrative skips into like a giddy child. (It’s dizzying.) The very thing I had been excited by—the dragons of Pern’s only hope is a ruthless, cunning murderer!—is not explored or addressed at all. She’s headstrong and clever when the plot requires it, emotional (despite her upbringing and the text itself) when the plot requires it. It’s hard to get a read on characters who are so fluid.

Pern’s worldbuilding was always an interesting nugget for me to chew on during the Wombat Years—it was fantasy but it was also sci-fi! While I only read that one half-remembered novel in middle school, I think it may have helped me see how interconnected sci-fi and fantasy can be and, in fact, are, allowing me to roam freely in the speculative fiction plains. There’s plenty of infodumping right and left here, especially when time travel gets involved. It feels like McCaffrey is just so excited about her brand new world that she just wants to tell everyone. There’s a reason we discourage that in our young, but here, it’s almost charming to get to see her like this after her passing, excitable and young. It’s the magic of prose, the telepathy Stephen King talks about.

And that’s why, even though it’s not very good and it’s already slipping off my mind already, I still enjoyed reading it.

Bottom line: Dragonflight was compiled from two novellas and it shows. Even if there’s something charming about seeing an excitable young author after her own passing, it’s still opaque and impossible to get a hold on. Pass.

I rented this book from the public library.

I went to see Star Trek Into Darkness on Friday. I was so brutally disappointed that I had to put my face on the Internet about it. Thus, another video rant. I also direct you to Racebending’s comments on the subject. This io9 post is also a good read.

This week was a lot of cleaning, recycling, and donating, but my room (as seen in the video above!) is finally the way I want it. I’ve been making progress on Dragonflight and hope to tackle The Black Count soon. I also tried to make s’more cupcakes yesterday and failed, continuing my losing streak with putting marshmallows in ovens. But the exploded cupcakes were still delicious.

This week’s links:

• The Daily Show‘s John Oliver examines Australian gun control as a possible model for American gun control. It’s fascinating stuff.
  
• Merida’s official Disney princess coronation was adorable because her mom crowned her on Mother’s Day. Send these pictures to your mom, you know you want to.
  • Speaking of Merida, Feminist Disney reminds us, when it comes to criticizing her redesign, we gotta make sure we’re not hating on ladies. There are few things I hate more than ladies hating on ladies.
  • Speaking of the redesign, this article about character honesty in costume design sheds a lot of really good light on the subject.
• Mental Floss brings us “11 Songs that Brought People Out of Comas“.
• You didn’t know you needed the Once Upon a Time spin-off Once Upon a Time in Wonderland, but if you like Victorian girls punching dudes, buckling swashes, and saving their genie boyfriends, you do. (And if you don’t… why are you here?)
• Normally, I don’t post recipes here, but this is a recipe for ice cream cake that requires two ingredients: ice cream and self-rising flour. Get on that right now.
• Genevieve Valentine witnesses the Sleepy Hollow trailer so you don’t have to.
• With the finale of Doctor Who, some viewers may be interested in checking out old classic Who. Slate recommends a certain episode as an introduction.
• How did I not know Prince wrote the Bangles’ “Manic Monday”?
• From Vanity Fair, the making of Thelma and Louise. 
• If you don’t know who Julie D’Aubigny is, you owe it to yourself to learn. A French bisexual fencing master and opera singer in the 17th century? God bless the motherland.
  • And a woman named Kelly Gardiner is writing a novel about her!
• Last night was Bill Hader’s last night on Saturday Night Live. Here is a list of every club Stefon has ever mentioned to mark his passing.
• RMJ at Deeply Problematic discusses the usage of the word “kyriarchy”.
• Gavia Baker-Whitelaw, of Hello Tailor, examines the evolution of the Star Trek costumes of the original and rebooted casts at Empire.
• Rose at Autostraddle talks magical girl shows and how they’re important to feminism.

If you saw Star Trek Into Darkness, what did you make of this?

I was driving home with a few friends in the car, on the way back from something, when “Live and Let Die” came on one of Atlanta’s classic rock stations. I usually play Russian radio roulette while in Atlanta since they took my beloved the Journey away, but I paused. “Hold on,” I said. “I think I recognize it.” “It’s that Bond song Paul McCartney did,” my friend Isobel informed me. “Back up, Paul McCartney did a song for James Bond?” Much riffing (on McCartney, Bond, and my own ignorance) ensued. So, as you can see, between Sean Connery and Pierce Brosnan, the James Bond franchise is an empty desert dotted by the occasional Grace Jones. I had literally no idea what to expect from Roger Moore, so I went into Live and Let Die utterly blind.

Live and Let Die sees Roger Moore step into the shoes of James Bond. When three MI6 agents in various locales are killed within twenty-four hours of each other, the British government sends Bond to New York to investigate. Alas, his driver is immediately shot, but Bond tracks the killer, which leads him to Mr. Big, a corrupt businessman who owns a chain of Filet of Soul restaurants throughout the US. Also in New York is Dr. Kanaga, the corrupt dictator of San Monique, who relies on Solitaire, a young woman who can see the future through the art of tarot, to aid his nefarious goals. As Bond investigates further, he discovers a drug ring that goes deeper than he ever could have thought. It’s a new Bond in the New World.

So far, Connery was a cheerful, thuggish, and Scottish sociopath, and Lazenby was supple, good-natured, and sensitive—what’s Moore bringing to the table? Well, fussiness. It’s odd to think of Bond as fussy, but there’s something very light about Moore’s Bond. My friend Natalya informs me that Moore, in Bond on Bond, insists on referring to James Bond as “Jimmy”, which, I think, tells you quite a lot. We’re introduced to Moore’s Bond not in a fight scene, but rather in a comedy of errors scene, where M and Moneypenny pay a visit to Bond in the dead of the morning, but Bond has a half-naked Italian secret agent in his flat that he doesn’t want M to see. (You should assume that every time I mention Moneypenny I am also mentioning the fact that Lois Maxwell is flawless.) He’s capable, surely—he’s quite believable in action scenes—but there’s something so British about him that Connery and Lazenby didn’t put into him. His one-liners come off as dry, witty, and a little camp, for Pete’s sake. I’m into that.

And I think it’s played up a little bit to emphasize the humor of MI6 sending the whitest man alive into Harlem to investigate a murder, which characters actually comment on. I don’t have the specific lines, but one of the bad guys asks his boss who they’re looking for, and their response is essentially, “The only white guy in Harlem.” Watching Bond blunder into a blaxploitation movie is an utterly bizarre delight, especially for me, because I love seeing Bond fail. Of course, this is overshadowed by the fact that Live and Let Die is a movie where every black character is evil and involved in this particular drug ring, even the incidental singer in a restaurant. (There is a black CIA agent, who really should have been lead on this case, but he gets murdered off-screen. Of course.) On the one hand, yes, Bond is blundering into the predominantly black contexts of Harlem, New Orleans, and the fictional Caribbean island of San Monique. On the other hand, the only redeemable villain, Solitaire, is white. Screenwriter Mankiewicz briefly considered casting Diana Ross as Solitaire, which would have at least given them a little wiggle room, but the idea was rejected. Live and Let Die does feature the first black Bond girl in Rosie Carver, who, of course, turns out to be evil. I liked her clumsy, plucky CIA intern vibe, too! Curses!

As for the women… well, the film gets off to a good start with Miss Caruso, the Italian agent, who has a cute, flirty back and forth with Bond, but Solitaire… well, her power (which goes utterly unquestioned, interestingly for a supposedly “realistic” film series) is linked to her virginity. Bond, who does not know this, tricks her into having sex with him by offering her a loaded Tarot deck, which takes advantage of her previous vision that she and Bond would be lovers. The move is played as cheeky—my parents found it quite funny, while I clutched my head at yet another woman coerced into having sex with Bond, which we call rape where I come from—but Solitaire’s quiet anguish over the loss of her power and, therefore, her usefulness to Mr. Big before she embraces sex is hard to laugh at. Even Bond seems uncomfortable, until she suggests they have another go before they escape. It’s a rare moment of uncomfortable truth in an otherwise silly film. I don’t want to get into the ending, but it’ll make even someone invested in the movie quietly gather their things and leave the theater. It involves inflatable men. It’s definitely a rocky start to Moore’s reign as James Bond, but there’s enough in here that I like about his Bond that I look forward to The Man with the Golden Gun.

Bottom line: Roger Moore’s Bond, the most British thing to ever British, finds himself in an blaxploitation film, with problematic results. The problematic racial and sexual issues are hard to get down, especially in some of the film’s sillier moments. If you’d like.

I bought this film on iTunes.

What book(s) do you find yourself going back to? Beloved children’s classics? Favorites from college? Something that touched you and just makes you long to visit?

(Because, doesn’t everybody have at least one book they would like to curl up with, even if they don’t make a habit of rereading books? Even if they maybe don’t even have the time to visit and just think back longingly?)

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not that much of a rereader; I’m like a shark, I have to keep going forward. Nonetheless, every time I come across a copy of The Lord of the Rings, I always open it to a random page, read a few paragraphs, and feel better about my place in the universe. And since I’m back where my collection of out-of-print American editions of The Lord of the Rings is, that’s a lot.

Matthew Goodman’s Eighty Days is a really fantastic piece of nonfiction—the kind that’ll make you gasp out loud, even though you know how this race between two lady journalists in the 1880s is going to turn out. I’d heard of Nellie Bly in passing before (something something asylum something something), but Eighty Days introduced me to her in her entirety, from birth to death. Naturally, despite Goodman’s warnings about Bly’s subpar attempts at writing novels, I was interested in what put Nellie Bly on the map: Ten Days in a Madhouse. While it was originally published as a series of articles in The New York World, it was collected into a book the same year (1887), making it eligible for my establishment.

In Ten Days in a Mad-House, New York journalist Nellie Bly answers her editor’s challenge to come up with a stunt by feigning mental illness in order to be committed to the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell Island. Rumors of corruption and abuse have been pouring out of the island, but no one has been able to confirm anything—until now. Posing as Cuban immigrant Nellie Moreno (although she initially determines to go by Nellie Brown), Bly gets herself committed and begins documenting the harsh treatment of society’s most vulnerable members. This edition includes a few more of Bly’s investigative adventures, from servant to factory worker.

Well, Goodman was right—Bly isn’t exactly someone you read for her writing. It’s capable enough, but in the face of modern nonfiction, not exactly gripping. What is gripping is Bly’s pluck, determination, and bravado. She glosses over being assigned the project, but imagine yourself, a young woman of twenty-three, penniless, eager to support yourself on your own pen… and this is the first assignment you get from your boss. It takes a lot of wherewithal in order to tackle that.

Unfortunately, that moxie feels a bit submerged. Part of that is probably period dissonance: what’s utterly shocking to a Victorian audience is pretty blase material for someone who spent a Thanksgiving break in middle school binging on CSI. But part of that is Bly constantly negotiating her position in society. As Eighty Days shows us, plucky female journalists hellbent on getting the story are really only tolerated as long as they’re pretty, modest, and demure. In one of the other investigations collected in the book, Bly goes undercover as a factory worker to expose labor exploitation. But she opens it by creating a dichotomy of pleasure-seekers and working people, and talks about joining the working people for the first time—as if she herself is not a working woman. It’s quite shrewd, in a way, although I suspect part of it is internalized; still, it’s always a pleasure to peek behind the curtain and hear Bly be vain of her hair.

The abuses Bly discovers at the asylum are awful. Bly constantly points out that Blackwell Island (now Roosevelt Island) is handling the most vulnerable members of society, and we see (and hear, through second-hand accounts, as Bly could not bring herself to be committed to “the rope gang”) women being slapped, choked, forced to sleep in wet hair and clothing in freezing temperatures, all in incredibly poor sanitation (by Victorian standards, mind). Most horrifying are the haphazard ways of curating who should and should not be committed—one of Bly’s tests is administered by a doctor much more interested in getting into the nurse’s skirts than making sure a sane woman isn’t committed.

But what defines a sane woman in a misogynistic and xenophobic society? It’s nebulous, fickle, and cruel, as Bly shows us. She does meet women with legitimate mental illnesses, whose stories are harrowing (especially after she returns and several of them are mysteriously gone), but, among other women committed due to their foreignness or sexual appetites, the story of Margaret gripped me the most. Margaret, a German servant, is committed because she had a fight with the other servants. “Other people are not shut up for crazy when they get angry,” Margaret fumes.

Well, they’re not shut up anymore, Margie, but women’s anger is still constantly treated as irregular or unnatural—anything to make it not real. You just had the misfortune to live in a time and a place where they could shut you up physically and torture you mentally by forcing you to sit without any stimulation, physical or intellectual, all day long. It’s enough to drive a sane woman “insane” by your society’s standards: just look to your right and behold Tillie Maynard’s downward spiral.

(Sometimes you think old books don’t apply to you and then you’re brutally, brutally wrong.)

I read this book online due to the efforts of Lisa Bartle and Mary Mark Ockerbloom at the Celebration of Women Writers.

The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break by Steven Sherill

Five thousand years out of the Labyrinth, the Minotaur finds himself in the American South, living in a trailer park and working as a line cook at a steakhouse. No longer a devourer of human flesh, the Minotaur is a socially inept, lonely creature with very human needs. But over a two-week period, as his life dissolves into chaos, this broken and alienated immortal awakens to the possibility for happiness and to the capacity for love.

via Amazon

I’m a devotee of the Nerdist podcast, as hosted by stand-up comedian Chris Hardwick, and my favorite episodes are the ones where he interviews people with passions further afield than his own. One such guest was Alton Brown: it’s a fun episode, I recommend it. (There’s probably cursing, if you need a heads up for that.) In the course of the interview, he recommended this novel, and I liked him so much I had to add it to the reading list.

Joseph J. Finn at Bookslut found it “oddly charming“. J.C. Montgomery at The Biblio Blogazine concluded it was a “keeper“. The proprietor of The Guilded Earlobe enjoyed its quiet, slice of life nature. Jason at FNORDinc pointed out that the central metaphor, that of minotaur for manchild, is quite blunt.

The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break was published on July 1, 2000.

For some insane reason, I thought that my final finals season at Agnes meant that I would have tons of time for reading. This was not only a lie, but a damned lie. I checked out every book I could only get at my college library and a handful of books from the local library. Fines piled up on the school books and the local books went home, unread, save for one: The Man in the High Castle. I’d only known Philip K. Dick by reputation, and I had confused The Man in the High Castle, the “Nazis won World War II” story, with another “Nazis won World War II” alternate history short story that was much more dour and depressing. Well, not that this isn’t…

The Man in the High Castle takes place in an alternate universe, where the Axis forces won World War II. The United States is divvied up between Japanese occupation on the West and German occupation on the East, with the ignored Rocky Mountains remaining the only place reminiscent of pre-World War II America. While the Japanese tend to their holdings, the Nazis travel to Mars and decimate Africa. Against this backdrop, a Japanese trade commissioner in San Franscisco meets with a man who claims to be a Swedish industrialist; a man attempts to conceal his Jewish identity and make a living; a woman picks up a suspicious lover; and the whole continent is secretly reading The Grasshopper Lays Heavy, a novel that imagines history as if the Axis had lost.

Even in novels you don’t enjoy, there are sometimes images that stick with you and haunt you. Late in The Man in the High Castle, Juliana, the novel’s sole female character out of the ensemble that functions as a protagonist, has functionally killed a man. She contacts the wife of the man who wrote The Grasshopper Lays Heavy, and reads her a reading of the I Ching. It’s a fleet moment in the text, but a human one that just expands: the darkness around Juliana, the closeness of the booth, the battered copy of the I Ching splayed against the glass, and the phone tucked against her shoulder by her head. In that image, I think you can get much of the darker meat of the novel: the desire for and impossibility of authenticity (Juliana must prove that she’s not an average fan, but Mrs. Abendsen isn’t a believer), the darkness of this strange, oppressive world, and the unstable despair of those who try to think outside it to correct it. The West Coast may be Japanese, but the East Coast is all Nazi Germany, and eager to expand. (They’re described almost like automatons.)

And all of this hinges on the idea that there is something inherently American being beaten out of Americans under Japanese and Nazi occupation. Occupation such at this is obviously oppressive, so I’ve no issue with that. What I do have issue with is what Dick argues is inherently American. One character in the novel, Robert Childan, an antiques dealer specializing in Americana, tries to assimilate the best he can to this new world order. The next generation of the Japanese occupiers is wild about Americana. At dinner with a client and his wife, Childan is offended when they want to listen to jazz: “Was he supposed to deny the great masters of European music, the timeless classics in favor of New Orleans jazz from the honky-tonks and bistros of the Negro quarter?” (109)

I think it’s a perfect illustration of what is considered American here, throughout all the perspectives offered, which include Americans, Japanese, and one supposed Swede. Jazz is one of the rare things that is wholly and utterly American—and Childan, one of the various men throughout the novel that commodifies American identity, is offended by it. Of course, Childan is more racist than the other characters, but there is a constant refrain of America and the American culture worth saving being not only white, but Anglo-Saxon: the gifts given in the novel include Civil War-era pistols, comic books featuring lantern-jawed white men, and a Mickey Mouse watch. Race isn’t particularly explored here in any significant manner: while black slavery has been reinstated (!), it’s never explored (unlike several other passages of straight worldbuilding), and we only see concrete evidence of a segregation system where the Japanese are on top fleetingly at the end of the novel.

And that’s, I think, why I couldn’t ultimately connect with The Man in the High Castle and could only see it as a product of its time. Juliana, the lone female character, doesn’t fare particularly well and it feels like Dick doesn’t have the best handle on writing women. The meandering plot designed to focus on the world didn’t help, although the ending was heartrending and economical. It feels much more, especially considering the ending, a particularly thoughtful worldbuilding exercise, than a novel I will come back to time and time.

The bottom line: Alternate history classic The Man in the High Castle feels like a particularly thoughtful worldbuilding exercise than a novel. And its concept of what constitutes “American” is particularly dated. Worth checking out for its reputation, but maintain a grain of salt.

I rented this book from the public library.