Lanna Michaels (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lannamichaels) wrote2024-02-20 08:05 pm
lannamichaels) wrote2024-02-20 08:05 pm
Entry tags:
Three books
- The Iliad, translated by Emily Wilson: As with The Odyssey, I was not actually all that interested in reading The Iliad. I read the introduction and most of the chapter end notes before the library wanted it back. I thought it was good and liked how she handled Achilles/Patroclus.
If I had to read Homer again for school, these are definitely the translations I'd want to use, rather than whatever were the ones I actually did encounter. - Starter Villain by John Scalzi: My first Scalzi and everything osmoses had let me to believe a Scalzi book would be. This book is completely fine and enjoyable. It doesn't have much in the way of depth; it's a light surface book that skims and dances over its entire premise: a random divorced dude suddenly inherits his estranged uncle's supervillain enterprise.
It could have, in fact, dug a lot deeper. There's a lot just beneath the surface, including Our Hero Charlie's completely estranged relationship from his much older half-siblings from his father's first marriage, his divorce some number of years before this, any actual friends he might have, etc. Hell, his relationship with his father's lawyer is ripe for some digging into all of *waves hand vaguely* that.
For what it is, it's light and enjoyable and fine. I read it in a day and don't regret it. But in the hands of an author willing to engage with its premise a little more and not end with a reset switch, or one too many double-crosses, it would have been a more memorable book.
Because the more you think about it, the more it falls apart and the worse it gets. The end result of all those double-crosses means there was literally no point to bringing in the Protagonist in the first place. And the "hope you don't hate me" post-mortem letter from the uncle is so awful because it's apologizing for things he'd set in motion that hadn't happened yet, that could kill Charlie, and the uncle is apologizing for it and saying he shouldn't have treated Charlie that way. Then, idk, maybe, don't treat him that way? If you know it's bad and are going to send a post-mortem letter to apologize, maybe just don't do the thing? Especially since it was pointless and unnecessary in the first place?
Whatever.
Are all Scalzi books the literary equivalent of those puffed rice snacks that are like eating air? - The Dubious Pranks of Shaindy Goodman by Mari Lowe: During sleep away camp in the summer before 6th grade, a bunk of preteen girls plays hide-and-seek. Gayil, the popular perfect girl, decides to hide really really well (because she needs to be the best at everything) and wanders into the woods and gets lost. She finds her way back the next morning to discover that her friends had decided not to look for her and not alerted anyone that she was gone, because the loner of the group, the one who had no friends, the one who suggested the hide-and-seek game in the first place, had convinced them that Gayil disappearing was just Gayil being Gayil and she'll show up when she's ready. And so instead of Gayil telling anyone what happened, or alerting a counselor the moment she came out of the woods in the morning, or recognizing that there are a whole lot of people at fault for not noticing a camper going missing, Gayil then decides to plot revenge on the bunkmates who went to her school. And she'll pin the blame on the one she decides was the ringleader, the unpopular kid, the one no one likes: Shaindy Goodman.
Or, a shorter summary: This is an excellent mid-grade book about all the ways Bais Yaakov girls go apeshit.
Shaindy is not bullied in school, she is not excluded, because that would be mean, and Bais Yaakov girls are not mean. She's just never actively included, ever, for years at school. She's a social outcast but you know, in a nice way. There is no outward reason why she is excluded, she's just the kid no one likes or wants to hang around with or talk to. No one is mean to her in a way that can ever be pointed to as mean, that can be complained about, that can be fixed.
During the course of the book, Shaindy gets two overtures of friendship, one from Gayil and one from a girl she went to camp with. Gayil is doing it to manipulate her by dangling the prospect of Having A Friend in front of her. It is unclear why the other girl is suddenly deciding to be friendly to Shaindy; maybe she just decided that it would be her mitzvah regarding Shaindy (oh yeah, that was why Gayil decided to go along with hide-and-seek when Shaindy suggested it, because Gayil decided that being nice to Shaindy would be her mitzvah for the day. This is infuriating and also even more so because Shaindy shrugs off being told this. I guess it's just one more indignity for her.)
So that's Shaindy.
Gayil has nine siblings and she claims it took four years in the school, four years of her striving to be perfect and memorable, before teachers would bother to remember her name and stop calling her by her sister's name. She claims the only people who remember her as herself are her friends. And then, that day in camp, even her friends abandoned her. Even her friends shrugged her off. And so her friends need to pay, and so do the classmates who aren't her friends. (The bunkmates who don't go to her school? Eh, whatever. The counselors who should have noticed? Not even mentioned.)
This revenge ranges wildly, and concerningly. The lightest of them is having her notebook stolen. Gayil's best friend's hair is covered in slime and rather than try to get the slime out, she has to get a radical haircut instead. Okay. The notebook is returned as part of framing Shaindy, and the hair will grow back eventually. These are awful but within the range of "you'll get expelled but your family won't necessarily have to move, if another school will take you (and there are textually multiple schools in this town)".
But then there's the girl who Gayil tells to go do gymnastics on a stage that has been covered in bubble solution. And the girl who barely has a speaking role, but also has a bee allergy, and Gayil releases bees deliberately. Which is something approaching premeditated attempted murder.
This is a good book and I am very worried about Gayil. Shaindy's problems can be easily solved in the short term by her family moving away and her going to a different school where no one knows her, and considering the experience she's having in school as of the end of the book, that's probably going to happen anyway. This book takes place before Succos. The way things are going as of the end of the book, that might even happen in the middle of this school year if her parents can manage it; certainly the school is going to make it clear that Shaindy is not welcome back next year. I don't know why her parents didn't start planning to pick up and move already; I didn't get a sense of her mother's job, but her father seems to be a kollel guy. Uh. Your kid is a social outcast and now it's even worse. Your sons are already learning at an out of state yeshiva and aren't even home for Rosh Hashana (??????), you have a daughter in tenth grade, and then there's Shaindy in sixth. Get out, go somewhere else, do as much of a fresh start as it's even possible to do in a world this small. Yes, yes, there are not that many girls high schools. There are enough. You can move in next to Honey.
But Gayil? There is no short term solution to Gayil's problems. She experienced a really traumatizing event, told no one, and retaliated in wildly inconsistent ways that speak to what she has the opportunity to do, not what she considers morally acceptable revenge (there's also the Doylistic reason that the author needed things that Gayil could realistically pull off). Gayil needs help, and her family and the book shoving it under the table because her father's on the school board and so she can't be suspended, so her parents are only going to find out the full extent if Gayil tells them, because Shaindy has been guilted into keeping Gayil's secret -- this is not good.
Gayil needs, immediately, to be out of the BY environment. She needs, immediately, to feel like her family see her as a person and take time for her. Neither of those seems likely to happen.
Shaindy will be okay if she gets out of that school. Gayil needs a lot more than that. But at least with the whispers that Gayil is the one Shaindy is protecting, Gayil will probably stop being the "perfect one".
Which is not, you know, going to help this situation in the slightest.
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All the ones I've read, which is why I stopped reading them years ago.
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Yeah, I did not leave that book with a strong urge to read more. Maybe if he'd actually committed to the premise...
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Starter Villon was intended to be high concept fun how to get the cats in charge, and he structured it to achieve that. It's something of an outlier for Scalzi. He was writing a much darker book in 2020 when everything went to hell and he just couldn't. He ended up setting that aside and his next two books are lighter in tone. The Kaiju Preservation Society is a high concept premise that didn't need and doesn't have the contortions Starter Villon used to put the cats in charge, tell the story, and then leave the cats in charge.
I started reading Scalzi 20 years ago when someone linked me to "The Child on the Train" a deeply moving post he wrote on his Whatever blog six months after a pregnancy loss. After that I read his first book, Old Man's War (first of a multi book series) and his books have been an auto buy for me ever since.
Lock In, Head Out, and Unlocked An Oral History of Haden's Syndrome, is a series he wrote a few years ago about the aftermath of a world wide deadly epidemic initially presenting as a really infectious flu running rampant among people who went to the Super Bowl. Millions died and more millions survived with fully functional minds trapped in completely paralyzed bodies. Probably hits reallllly differently now.
I also really like The Interdependency series. It's empire politics facing an impending apocalypse, and also excellent space opera, set in a human galactic empire a thousand years in the future when the method used to travel between widely separated systems begins an unstoppable collapse.
I'm always hesitant to make book recommendations because taste varies so much. He's not a literary writer. He's a storyteller and people who like casual writing style and natural dialog tend to like his books. He's enjoyable reading, interesting characters, dialogue that sounds like real people said it, and plots that make sense. He's not the guy who digs deep to add layers. He doesn't need to, to tell the stories he writes.
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I see what you're saying, but the cats aren't actually in charge of anything. I can see why he might write a book where the cats are running things but that's not this one. The cats work for the humans, and then the cat at the end does a favor to the human and moves back in, but it's also very easy to read that as the cat is still working for the villains and is keeping an eye on Charlie as part of her job. Yeah, it got in a joke about cats being management, but the cats aren't the CEOs.
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Because. All the things they were complaining about not being popular any longer? He writes that stuff! He's a straight white man who writes modern versions of the sort of pulpy stuff Heinlein did (minus the racism and sexism)! His stuff is exactly what they claim is being discriminated against and yet he is one of the best-selling SF/F authors in the world. They just didn't like that someone who should have been On Their Side was willing to publicly explain why they were bigoted dipshits and point and laugh at them.
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I have also read the entire Old Man's War series, which was entertaining but pretty forgettable.
The internet loved Redshirts the most, which is humor and SF, but since it's entirely meta disguised as fiction, I was not the intended audience as that is the kind of fiction I hate the most.
His stuff is pretty fluffy usually. But sometimes fun.
I didn't finish The Interdependency series because one of the characters got on my nerves too much and also I couldn't figure out why everyone in that book said FUCK as much as the characters in Yellowstone, but it had a really engaging premise.
I felt about Starter Villain just as you did. It was fun like potato chips but if you think about it too hard it all falls apart.
ETA: You are getting some great more detailed info here from your other commenters! I agree with them! Also his blog is always interesting I think.
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My sense is that he's all over the place. My memory of Old Man's War is that it's very much in that vein - cool premise, enjoyable to read, but not enough there there.
The Dubious Pranks of Shaindy Goodman sounds terrifying in that way middle grade books often do, where the intended audience is not at all going to understand how horrible it all is. Yikes.
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Oh yeah, on the one hand, if I were in third grade, this would be a fun book about the dangers of peer pressure, just like all the other books about the dangers of peer pressure. (It's been pointed out to me that "dangers of peer pressure" books tend to be girls books, so I'd love to read a "dangers of peer pressure" book that's a boy book).
I can't believe I'm in a position to rank midgrade frum books published by non-frum publishers, but since I have now read two of them, I get to say that this one is better than Honey And Me, the Bais Yaakov details are on point except for a little quibbling I have that doesn't really matter because it's just there for exposition to the audience, and it has a book-length plot with excellent foreshadowing where an adult reader knows what's about to happen but it's not heavy-handed.
But I need to quibble with the library summary. Shaindy isn't 12. She's 11. The age is important. (But unlike Honey and Me, her upcoming bas mitzvah isn't a big important event, it's just an indicator of her religious responsibilities, which is also Very Bais Yaakov, and Honey And Me is not Bais Yaakov.)