Noah D. Arney

Tag: review

  • Thoughts on Invisible Boy

    Invisible Boy by Harrison Mooney

    https://www.harpercollins.ca/9781443463935/invisible-boy/

    As I was writing this I realized I wanted to do two things. I wanted to give a review and I also wanted to reflect on how I experienced the book. So it’s two posts in one now. Feel free to just read one or the other.

    Full disclosure, Harrison is a friend I’ve known since university.

    The Review

    This book will unsettle you. It is meant to. It is meant to show you truths many people would prefer not to see. This book made me cry. Crying in grief, in compassion, in horror, and in thankfulness for promised hope.

    This memoir walks you through Harrison’s life as a Black person adopted by a white family. It puts a bright light on the problems inherent in a certain thread of inter-racial adoption that happens all too often, such as in the recent case in the US of the use of inter-racial adoption as an attempt to assert whiteness and to “save” the souls of children.

    Though the focus of the book is on Harrison’s experience which may be new to many readers (growing up in a fundamentalist group considered extreme by the other Christians in the “bible belt”), the underlying concept (especially explored as Harrison moved out of the bubble his family created) is that their performance of whiteness was just one way that Blackness is attacked.

    In Harrison’s narrative he points out that whiteness and white supremacy are intertwined. When white becomes default all else gets swept away in the move to embrace the similarities, but only the similarities to whiteness. It’s a perspective that harms everyone because it hides that the differences matter, and ignoring that makes it very easy to privilege what we are used to and shun/hate/fear what we are not used to.

    This book is about the attempt of whiteness to use Blackness, to exert control over Blackness, and ultimately to erase and destroy Blackness. I wanted to start writing that sentence by saying “well meaning whiteness” but it doesn’t matter that those involved thought their intent was good, because the intent was only good for whiteness. Erasing and destroying are what white supremacy does, but worse, it makes us think that there can be a good way to do it. That the harms and lives destroyed in service to whiteness can be minimized because really the people doing it are good but misguided people.

    This book doesn’t let you walk away with that thought. It might make you walk away though. It is hard for those of us who grew up with whiteness being a default to face the truth. Like Harrison’s classmate late in the book you might walk away instead of facing truth.

    So it’s a book about attempted destruction, and about survival. About asking the questions were afraid to ask because it means moving away from the uniformity of using whiteness as a default.

    And it’s especially a book that brings us to the hard question James Baldwin wants us to ask ourselves. “If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.”

    If you’re ready to ask yourself hard questions, read this book.

    The Reflection

    For me reading Invisible Boy was an especially emotional read because I exist just off screen. Imagine reading a book where you exist in the world, in the city, at the camp, in the stores, at the university, but not in the book. Its unsettling, but comforting. Things you remember exist there but seen from a different perspective.

    I attended the churches his church saw as old and not charismatic enough (we didn’t do dancing). I attended the school his school said had too many Sikhs. I shopped at the same Christian book store, steered away from the products his parents embraced (what I didn’t realize then but do now is that my parents saw the Pat Robertson’s and the Charismatic Pentecostal and Evangelical celebrities as misguided, grifters, or heretics).

    I went to the same camp the same year, but I seem to recall reading a book through the entire cougar ordeal. Things that were impactful for him have since been wiped away by other memories I have of there. We met again at the secular University as he was wrestling with his identity and relationship with his adoptive family. I was part of the clubs and classes and theatre with him.

    I’m not in the book, but everything is so familiar that I am one of the extras who you only see the back of the head of in a crowd. When I knew him is almost a footnote in the book. A deep breath before his eyes were truly opened.

    And that makes everything hit harder. Because the people I thought were weird were in fact abusive. The places I shopped or visited used him and his existence to market themselves to me. Places I felt welcome in were actively hostile to him.

    Having read back through this I’m thankful for not being part of the story of my friend’s trauma. But I also know that not throwing stones doesn’t mean I wasn’t holding the coats. And this probably won’t be how others read the book (hence why it’s in a reflection), because that particular shining of the light isn’t hitting something they’re familiar with. But that was a big one for me, seeing how many places, people, and experiences from my childhood don’t move people toward being “larger, freer, and more loving”.

  • Starship Troopers Review

    Starship TroopersStarship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein

    My rating: 5 of 5 stars

    Starship Troopers is, in my opinion, one of the three best military sci-fi novels ever written. It shares that distinction with Ender’s Game and Old Man’s war.

    It’s also a good primer on, in the books own words, “moral philosophy”. Though it’s main story is about Johny Rico’s time in the Mobile Infantry and their fight against the pseudo-arachnids (the bugs) most of the novel is the musings of Johny on morals, primarily through his remembrances of his “History and Moral Philosophy” teacher in high school.

    The basis of morality according to Heinlein (through his characters) is spelled out in the middle of Chapter 12: “Morals – all correct moral rules derive from the instinct to survive; moral behavior is survival behavior above the individual level – as in a father who dies to save his children.”

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  • Brief Review of For the Win

    For the WinFor the Win by Cory Doctorow

    My rating: 3 of 5 stars

    While not as good as Little Brother I enjoyed this book. Doctorow has somehow managed to put together MMOs with an easy to understand overview of unions and global economics. Along the way he explains the basis of why economies collapse, what inflation is, and gives us an understanding of the reason unions exist.

    If you’re a high school teacher I highly recommend using this book. It’s interesting, current, and will help your students gain a basic understanding of economics.

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  • Review of The Last Colony by John Scalzi

    The Last Colony (Old Man's War, #3)The Last Colony by John Scalzi

    My rating: 5 of 5 stars

    A brilliant novel. The perfect way to wrap up the trilogy (yes, I know it continues, but it was originally the end of the trilogy). Scalzi has the perfect combination of military sci-fi mixed with bits of humor, political maneuvering, and all set against a backdrop of inter-species relations that impacts the story without ever coming across as being one-dimensional.

    I haven’t enjoyed a sci-fi book this much since the Enders Game/Shadow series’ and before that Starship Troopers. Though Scalzi isn’t Heinlein he’s not that far behind and definitely gives Card a run for his money.

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  • Of Course It’s Derivative

    I read a lot.  I know this because I keep track of it.  The first year I kept track was from summer 2007 to summer 2008.  I was taking the bus to UBC every day and had a lot of time to read.  I read 54 books that year.  Yes, I averaged over one a week.  In 2011 I started tracking again, this time starting January 1st.  I read 41 books in 2011.  So far in 2012 I’ve read 23 books.  We’re in week 26, so I’m doing pretty good.  I try to read at least 30 books a year.

    Because I read so much I read a lot of bad books.  I read a lot of good books to, but I read a lot of crap.  Sturgeon said that “ninety percent of everything is crap”, and it’s true to a certain extent.  For example I no longer read books published only in e-book format, when three for three were terrible I gave up.  The lesson I took from this is that there’s a purpose to gatekeepers.

    Why is any of this important?  Because I’m noticing a problem with peoples definitions of “bad”.  Too often I read a review of a book that talks about how derivative it is of previous books.  I’ve even made the same argument.  But there’s a difference between derivative and bad.  A derivative book is one that pulls a lot of concepts from previous works.  Because over 75% of my reading tends to be Fantasy I feel that I can accurately say that nearly all Fantasy novels have some derivative elements to them.

    For example:

    Tall elegant elf like creatures: Tolkien
    God stand-in to guide the plot: Lewis
    Super intelligent horse: Lackey
    Long drawn out quest: Tolkien, and too many to count
    Mass group of intertwining characters: Jordan (or GRRM)

    But here’s the issue.  These writers were derivative as well.  Do you like George R. R. Martin?  Well I’m afraid that it comes down to a mixture of War of the Roses with a pretty standard fantasy setting, and some Mervyn Peake.  Try watching a Shakespeare history play, basically the same thing.

    Robert Jordan?  Re-read Eye of the World. There is so little original in it that it’s almost laughable.

    Mercedes Lackey?  cookie cutter fantasy with magical horses added in.

    C.S. Lewis and Tolkien must be original!  Nope.  Lewis owes everything to George MacDonald, which he gladly admitted, and Tolkien has tied together Norse and Germanic fairy tales with Anglo-Saxon romances.

    Ahh… but does taking things from further back in history make one less derivative?  No.  It just means that you have a broader education.  If I lift part of my song from Bach instead of the Beatles am I any less derivative?

    This doesn’t mean any of those authors aren’t good.  I read and re-read all of their books (well except for GRMM, but I’ve never been a War of the Roses fan anyway).  What it means is that being derivative doesn’t matter.  Fantasy literature comes out of the Romances (traditional meaning, not modern one) of the Germans and Anglo-Saxons.  It comes out of the fairy tales and legends of the past.  And it comes out of a desire to reconnect with the Quest.

    When we criticize Fantasy novels as being derivative we need to ask ourselves “Why does it matter?”  Because  everything is derivative.  Instead we need to look at the story by itself.  That’s what’s important.  How well does the author immerse you in their story?  How well constructed is it?  Not where s/he got this idea from or that idea from.  That should be a last refuge for when the story fails.  If the story doesn’t work then you can sit and pick it apart as being derivative.  But not before.

    Look at stories as they are.  Read them for them.  You can recognize where some elements came from, but remember everyone is derivative.

  • Brief Review of “Lowering Higher Education” by James E. Côté & Anton L. Allahar

    Lowering Higher Education: The Rise of Corporate Universities and the Fall of Liberal EducationLowering Higher Education: The Rise of Corporate Universities and the Fall of Liberal Education by James E. Côté

    My rating: 5 of 5 stars

    If you are at all interested or involved in Higher Education I recommend you read this book. If the government and schools were to implement even some of their recommendations I think that it would drastically improve the preparation of students for University.

    One of the best points is that we need to remember that it’s OK for our students to be “average”. And average is the C range, not the B range. Too many schools have their grades clustered in the top third of the spectrum which doesn’t actually give students a good idea of how skillful they are at different subjects.

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  • Review of The Gnostic Mystery by Randy Davila

    The Gnostic MysteryThe Gnostic Mystery by Randy Davila
    My rating: 1 of 5 stars

    I actually chose not to review this book originally because I felt that it was such a poor attempt at disguising a string of logical fallacies as a novel that I couldn’t imagine putting any more thought into it.

    The book starts out as a mildly interesting mystery, but it ends up being so heavy handed that any interest you might have in the novel is killed. The character who is introduced as being a logical and intelligent person soon forgets the basic concepts of logic and automatically agrees with whatever logical fallacy his guide/author stand in says.

    If you are looking for a good mystery novel delving into the history of Gnosticism don’t pick this one.

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  • Review of “Arthurian Omen” by G. G. Vandagriff

    Arthurian OmenArthurian Omen by G.G. Vandagriff

    My rating: 2 of 5 stars

    The Arthurian Omen, by G.G. Vandagriff deals with the intense passion that arises when the location of a long lost manuscript is uncovered. The story is starts out being riveting and it makes you want to find out more, and then when you do, it disappoints.

    The first thing that will strike you about this novel is the stupidity of the characters. They seem to make more bad decisions in the first three chapters than most of us make in a year. Their stupidity, though, doesn’t stop there. They continue to make poor decisions, and leaps of logic that can only be author inspired.

    From beginning to end the characters come across as flat caricatures who exist merely for the convenience of the plot. The “bad guy” in the novel is constantly ascribed greater malevolence than befits his actions, while the lurking secret behind the story, a Colombian drug cartel, disappears into the mist several chapters before the lackluster climax.

    The suspense is held by keeping the identity of most of the characters a secret from the reader, while showing us tantalizing hints of which of the hunters on the grand quest might have an alter-ego under one of the pseudonyms we know is used by one of the bad guys. This suspense is held until about two thirds through the book when, for no apparent reason, Vandagriff breaks the suspense and tells us who is who, leaving just one villain unmasked. The unmasking of the final villain at the climax of the book, left me with only one word: meh. I didn’t care about who it was. The reasons behind the nefarious deeds then come out to be some sort of poor family relationship that the character had as a child, and a nanny who brainwashed them. Of course none of this is mentioned until after the unmasking, which means that the reader is not invested in the investigation, and so has no “aha” moment at the unmasking.

    I was once told that directors and writers are like the Wizard of Oz, the character, not the book. If they’re very good you’ll never notice the man behind the curtain. Every author’s motto should be “take no notice of the man behind the curtain”. Vandagriff, instead, writes more like she is standing in the middle of a three ring circus, rather than behind the curtain. The author’s hand is visible on the strings of every character, forcing them into decisions that no reasonable person would make, and manipulating them into actions that seem out of place given their past history.

    This is not to say that the novel is not enjoyable. I quite enjoyed the quest through the Welsh countryside. I enjoyed her descriptions of the landscape as they moved through it. I did, though, have some concerns about the amount of detail that went into describing the outfits of the main character, not seeing the reason behind telling us exactly what she is wearing down to the last stitch and hue.

    Though the novel had some bright points, this is not an author I will be seeking out in the future. She is too visible in the actions of her characters, and does not allow them to behave as they desire. The story, while interesting, can not make up for the lack of depth in her characters.

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