Tag: racism

  • book reviews: on down the river

    September may be the end of summer reads, but no doubt that I am still trudging through a reading list longer than I care to admit. My lack of completed tomes this last few weeks has less to do with the quantity of reading I am going and more to do with my ability to focus on just one book.  It would seem that my digital distractibility in this department is no less a problem than the analog version.

    That said, I have been reading. And reading. And reading some more. 

    And lately I’ve read…

    James by Percival Everett

    James is a horror story. Flipping the perspective on a book I literally just read, it instead retells the events of the famous Mark Twain novel Huckleberry Finn from the view of the runaway slave Jim.  But where Twain’s original text is merely a weighty adventure romp with a moral imperative baked into its layers, all of it nudging and imploring readers to examine their notions of the racial divide in the Americas of that time, James wraps Jim in a kind of fictionally-driven agency to offer a story that is both compelling in its context and chilling in its implications. It is made no better, of course, that the all-too-real monster chasing James as a runaway slave through the pre-civil war south is the great grand-pappy ancestor of the same monster now creeping out of the shadows and into seats of vengeful political power in the US in 2025. Being a white, middle-aged Canadian man leaves me in no good position to offer any opinion on what this book does right or what it is supposed to mean or how it should be read. All I know is that it shook me, shook me to the point that like a horror story I often had to put it down for days at a time to process the descriptions of inhuman cruelty written inside. It is a fictionalized account, of course, and rightly so told as it is as a counterpoint to a “great American novel.” My reread of Huckleberry Finn recently was still quite fresh in my head, of course, and having just revisited the raft ride down the Mississippi I was all too aware of the weight of that story in the modern context of American neo-racism and an orange menace normalizing two hundred year old ideas that should have long been sent to their grave. But naivety of reality is the greatest ally of the dark impulses of humanity and one’s greatest weapon is education of the horrors as painted in even just a fictional tale, and empathy for the fact that while James is fictional his is a story built upon more truth than many of us can stomach.

    Shit, Actually by Lindy West

    There are days when I fashion myself a humorist of a sort, attempting to write clever reflections of life, the universe and everything—but mostly books and video games if I’m being honest. But that said, even if I can’t always measure up in my own witty writing, I do have a vibe and am drawn to reading the kind of observational kinds of reviews that I wish I could churn out with my little keyboard here at a Starbucks. This book of clever film reviews of a bunch of movies, all of which I have almost certainly seen every last one (except Twilight, I’ve never seen that one!) multiple times, showed up as a recommendation in my audiobook feed—and there I was looking for a low risk, light-hearted listen with a credit burning a hole in my digital pocket. I am also, notably, a fan of the oft-chided podcast rewatch genre, which has led me into similar additional reading expeditions. In other words, this wee book checked a lot of boxes for me. I consumed the whole damn thing inside of two days, all seven hours of short essays read by the author, providing clever, witty and jabbing summaries spectacularly mediocre movies while sticking her finger into the gaping plot holes of the same. And what else is there to say. I was funny, sometimes laugh out loud funny, which startled me almost as much as it did the other people in the room where I was listening with headphones.

    The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

    The day I finished re-reading this classic all tangled up in the history of American racism and slavery as it definitively is, the government of my (Canadian) province released a book ban list to the public, which given the company it would have been among—classics of political reaction like 1984, cautionary tales of amoral governments tangled up in religion like The Handmaid’s Tale—it was almost surprising that there was no Twain on the list. We live in dark times here in the mid-20s and while I’m not exactly sure the motivation for Twain to have written a book and a character like Huckleberry Finn, and can’t help but believe it was, too, a reaction to dark times. The book, obviously, is an indictment of American slavery told from the perspective of young adventurous Huck Finn whose adventures in a previous novel landed him a rich kid with an abusive, alcoholic father (all too normalized by the society in which Finn lives.). He escapes by faking his own murder and lands up in a classic travelling-the-river tale in the company of Jim, a slave who has also escaped. The duo’s adventures are a fictionalized glimpse at middle America of an era, one assumes, peppered with the moral maturing of Huck as he faces down the complex questions of right and wrong in a society that taught him that certain people are property and that what he is doing is abetting a crime the likes of which he figures will condemn him to hell, all the while we as the reader look at it from the modern perspective of Finn’s innate judgement being the right one. And still it is a hard book to read, not because of anything particularly narratively confusing, but if only because does at time feel as though the demon Twain was shining sunlight upon has risen up once again, never truly departed from this world.  It wouldn’t surprise me to see this wind up on the banned list of any American politician who had both read and understood its story.

  • $3 Book Club: Old Books, Old Ideas

    I’ve been reading.

    If you’ve been reading this blog you may recall that my 2023 plan to dig into some vintage science fiction was something I coined the three buck book club, and was the result of some thrifty used book shopping and a notion that half-a-century old science fiction might be worth a second read.

    Or in my case, a first read.

    I wasn’t particularly wrong.

    And my reading has introduced me to a small stack of novels that (chosen by literal chance and randomness) I would never have encountered in any mainstream way.

    Great.

    But it has also introduced a new problem.

    Old books are full of old ideas.

    I guess I knew this, but I didn’t think it would punch me in the gut so firmly as it has.

    I’m on my second novel of the project and so far I’m two for two on some very misogynistic protagonist characters and a solid one hundred percent for some cringe-worthy bits of colonial-bent racism.

    These books are products of their time.

    But their time in the past had a few ideas that are probably — certainly — not worth dragging into the present.

    Sunlight in Cleansing

    Thus, I find my role here a little muddled.

    At one end I could turn this into a kind of, to borrow a politically charged idea, “woke witch hunt” against decades-gone authors who had the misfortune to be randomly plucked from used-bookstore obscurity by some guy looking for something cheap to read.

    On the other end, I (as a middle-aged Caucasian man in a position of privilege) could articulate that perhaps it isn’t my place to talk and write about that particular aspect of these books and focus on the stories they tell.

    And yet…

    An yet there is a tangled mess here that isn’t so easy to unravel.

    I tend to think that discussion and education are pretty good solvents for bad ideas.

    I can’t undo what these folks thought, believed or wrote. I can’t change the fact that uncountable numbers of cornball science fiction books still exist on shelves around the world filled with deeply rooted concepts that today would bin those stories before they made it past an agent. I can’t change any of that.

    I can acknowledge it. I can call it out. I can make sure that as I pry open their dusty covers and look for the bits of vintage treasure inside that I also try to make sure everyone understands that there is some rot in there too.

    Inevitably someone else is going to find copy of these books, and if they are anything like me google the title and read or watch what comes up. And there on the screen is my article, my video…

    What would you want them to know?