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books 2008

Books 2008
32. The Man in the Queue, by Josephine Tey

My favorite line of this, or perhaps any book I've read so far this summer?

"Well," I said to him, "it has been a queer case, but the queerest thing about it is that there isn't a villain in it."

"Isn't there!" Grant said, with that twist to his mouth.

Well, is there?

There are many reasons I love this line. The entire book is told in close 3rd, mostly through Grant's eyes, but there are two places where this breaks and the section is told in first person, without any indicated of who that person is -- so it's a reasonable assumption that it's Tey herself. So that's the first thing.

The second thing is that, disregarding the crazy woman, there isn't actually a villain. And crazy people aren't villains, they're just crazy. But of course a policeman would think that most of the characters in this story are villains -- Ray is, and so is Jerry in some ways (for running), and Mrs. Everett. And definitely the man in the queue is a villain. Pretty much the only person who isn't a villain is Mrs. Everett's niece, whom I would like to know more about.

I liked this one a lot more than A Shilling for Candles or The Daughter of Time, but a lot less (a lot a lot) than The Franchise Affair.

33. A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula Le Guin

Ged's an idiot. I know his idiocy had to be played up in the first part so that he would do something really, really dumb, and I know it's a kid's book and kids can't do subtle or something, but the guy's an idiot. I'm just not interested in him. (This could make the rest of the books somewhat difficult for me.)

The missing women were really, really noticeable. The gender relations on Earthsea are extremely problematic, in fact, given the facts of the first book: women aren't allowed to do much of anything, including travel from island to island, it seems (all the people on all the boats were men). And if women aren't allowed to become wizards, but Ged has all this innate power, well that speaks to a sort of biological determinism that I'm really not happy with. Not to mention the "women's magic" is of a lower class -- and men can learn it -- while "real magic" is not given to women. If LeGuin doesn't do something about this in later books -- at least acknowledge it -- I'm going to be very unhappy.

As for Vetch, he was a cypher -- I know nothing about him except that he's a big guy who loves his family. Of course, other than Ged having a temper and a self-esteem problem, I know nothing about him, either.

I liked it a lot more than most of the Dark Is Rising books, though. (Except for The Grey King, which it turns out I sort of enjoyed and would read again many time before I picked up this one again.)

34. The Tombs of Atuan, by Ursula Le Guin

A Wizard of Earthsea had all of two named women in it (and they never talk to each other, much less about anything other than a man, and wait, did Ged's aunt even get a name?); The Tombs of Atuan stars a woman. Is narrated by one, anyway, because these are all Ged's books. And I like Ged a lot better in this book than I did in the previous one.

It's just, well, Tenar doesn't really do anything except take Ged's hand (both literal and metaphorical) when they're both about to die horrible and miserable deaths. She's mostly scared and hidden and not very well rounded as a person. The woman who really has agency in this story is the Godking's priestess -- and you can tell how much impact this book made on me in the greater scheme of things, because I can't remember the woman's name at all.

And now let's delve into the way Le Guin treats religion in these books. Because it's a really great thing when an author sets up a religion just to completely destroy it entirely, and 'prove' that belief is false and stupid and gets you killed. What was she thinking? (Okay, I know what she was thinking, but I don't have to agree with her.)

On the plus side, at least there is a wide range of visible ethnic variation, even if I can't for the life of me figure out how this world developed like that -- there is no way the people in the Kargish reason would be white while the people of Gont are dark, and ... no sense. Whatsoever. I hate that.

35. Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal, by Randall Kennedy

Excellent. Possibly the best non-fiction book I've read in several years.

Partly because of the subject matter -- does what it says on the tin -- but also because of the way Kennedy, a legal scholar, treats his data. The book covers 250 years of American history and traces the role of blacks' conceptions of integration in that integration, using literature, case law, and rap lyrics (amongst other things). It also tries to untangle some of those conceptions, but that's a harder task, I think. This isn't a new argument, and it's not a resolvable one, either.

One of my particular interests is the role of statistics in policy-making: more information is usually good, but sometimes it isn't. Things like racial classification -- now just why are the blacks kids sitting together, but how many black kids are there? -- can be extremely useful in making political determinations. They can also be extremely destructive.

Kennedy tackles this when he spends an entire chapter on Clarence Thomas, particularly focusing on Thomas' preference for colorblind admissions approaches. The tension between the theory of colorblindness and the necessity for accurate accounting and appellation of appropriate causes (if we get rid of color as an explanatory factor, then maybe it really is just that blacks and Latinos and some Asians are poor and stupid) has huge real world consequences.

And it's to Kennedy's credit that he doesn't outright condemn Thomas for his theoretical stance, because even Thomas can bend his intellectual underpinnings when he has to.

(There's also a little aside in that chapter where Kennedy takes on Thomas' preference for Originalist interpretations of the Constitution; it's the easiest smackdown in the world, because the originators didn't even agree with themselves, and knowing what writers across 150 years of history "really meant"; well, it's a losing prospect. Also, and Kennedy doesn't mention this: the Constitution does mention color. Slaves were 3/5 of a person, and in the writers' opinion, slave was a synonym for black. So.)