Book round-up: April 2020

[sixthlight]

March: a million days long. April: about three days long. It's 2020, time is an illusion, new fiction continues to largely elude me, but I did read one of the Intellectual Bragging Rights Books of NZ non-fiction so I guess I put my fiction problems to good use?

Death at the Bar (Ngaio Marsh)
I got absolutely nowhere with any of the new fiction I tried this month...except this one, which is TECHNICALLY new in that I have zero memory of ever reading it but I possibly did read during my first Golden Age Detective Novel, er, golden age as a teenager. Anyway, Ngaio Marsh is solid as usual, there's a whole plotline that to modern eyes is about a rape but I genuinely can't tell if that's intentional, some Very Mid-Century Class Issues (I think exacerbated by Marsh being a Kiwi and therefore unable to provide a true insider's understanding of them), a classic Midsomer Murders-style 'by the time the victim dies you will be cheering for it to happen' murder. The kind of comfort food I needed.

Fifteen Million Years In Antarctica (Rebecca Priestly)
Book club book; a memoir of the author's three visits to Antarctica and lifelong obsession with the continent, combined with her musings on/fears about climate change, and how those two things interact with her anxiety. Kind of a weird read for me because the author is not a great deal older than me, grew up in the same city, and has had a career that intersects with so many of my professional acquaintances and institutions that I spent most of the book wondering why we'd never met. I enjoyed it a lot and I think it would be very good if you wanted to connect with a woman in science feeling the fear and doing things anyway, but literally too close to home for me to be able to review in a way useful to other people. Also: wow, straight women really do experience the gender anxiety of fieldwork in a highly male-dominated environment differently, hmm.

Dark Emu (Bruce Pascoe)
Essentially a book-long argument of something that can be summed up briefly: Indigenous Australians had a highly complex culture including settled agriculture and extensive alteration of the landscape, but white Europeans didn't recognise it and didn't care because they had a job to do and that job was genocide and settler colonialism. Depressing but makes a very thorough case for Australia needing to have a complete re-think of how it characterises the first eighty thousand years of human history on the continent.

The Great War for New Zealand: Waikato 1800-2000 (Vincent O'Malley)
A 600-page doorstopper you could commit grevious bodily harm with entirely by accident, and unquestionably the leading academic text on the central conflict of the New Zealand Wars. It's been sitting on my bedside table since 2016, waiting for me to find time. Not for the faint of heart, I meant it when I said academic, but still accessible. I would really urge Kiwis to at least read the early chapters on pre-Treaty Waikato, and the ones on land confiscation. The Waikato region had the largest population in Aotearoa pre-European colonisation, and was the most agriculturally productive; those things are still true today (50% of Kiwis live in the Auckland/Tauranga/Hamilton 'golden triangle') but most of those people are not Māori and this book is about why. I mean, the general takeaway won't be a surprise (the British Empire: terrible and usually with malice aforethought) but as a nation we haven't really come to terms with the systematic way in which Māori land was stolen. If you want to start, you couldn't do better than this book.

Dead Water (Ngaio Marsh)
The Ngaio Marsh I do remember having read - they also adapted it for the Inspector Alleyn TV show, except with a lot more Troy, which frankly was an improvement, Troy should be in all of the Alleyn books. Even decades later still quite a good take on tourism and its impacts, plus, you know, murder.

Dealing with Dragons and Searching for Dragons (Patricia C Wrede)
The first (and superior) half of the Enchanted Forest Chronicles, set in a very traditional fairy-tale world, where a deep sense of irony and meta-knowledge of How Fairytales Work will get you far. As I commented to Twitter, I'd never realised how very queer the first one is; princess runs away from arranged marriage to live with society of dragons who have an ambivalent relationship to gender, becomes professional librarian, has a fantastic time, fights wizards. The second sadly doesn't keep that up to quite the same degreebut is an enjoyable follow-on. Will probably come back to these again sometime, they're such reliable comfort reads.

Comments

[sophia_sol]

You know, I read Wrede's dragon books when I was young enough that I just internalized the way the dragons do gender as normal for those dragons and then NEVER ONCE THOUGHT ABOUT IT AGAIN, even when rereading these books as an adult, so it took until you writing this post for me to realize. Oh. Right. The dragons' approach to gender is pretty queer!

[sixthlight]

Fascinatingly, it isn't even obvious that the dragons in these books really understand/recognise human gender - they recognise gendered *roles*, like being a Knight or a Princess, but if any dragon can be the Queen or King then do they think very much about human reproductive status being tied to the ability to be a Princess? Who knows.

I do wish this attitude was more intentional in the way the books treat human women, where there's a lot of Not Like The Other Girls Princesses.

[sophia_sol]

Yeah, the Not Like Other Princesses thing is a bit unfortunate!

[merit]

Dealing with Dragons is the sort of book I'd like to be slightly updated to more modern social mores since as you noted, there's a strong theme of Not Like Other Girls. Until I was an adult, I didn't know there was more to the series so that made reading them a slightly difference experience.

Still need to try Ngaio Marsh as part of my embrace of mysteries! I'm finding that rereads and mysteries are A++++ at this time for fiction reads.