Author: C S

As I walked to my studio the other day, I passed through freeway park to find a book sale put on by the library. One dollar for a paperback, two for a hardback. I couldn’t help myself and so five bucks later I had some fun reading for my vacation. Of course I didn’t have much time to read due to the storm cleanup and party preparations, but I did get one, long, gloriously hot day to sit and do nothing but take in the story of Sister Lucrezia. Historical fiction is almost as fun as actual history and this one in particular was, if not too deep, at least eye opening and interesting.

I described it to a friend as Jane Austen meets Assassin’s Creed. Set in Florence during the reign of the Medici’s, the story follows the youngest daughter of a wealthy cloth merchant. She is a curious and fiery young lady, resistant to ladylike pastimes but gifted with wit, learning, and a passion for painting. Of course this all was essentially forbidden to women, much less unmarked virgins so she navigates a relationship with her mother, a highly unusual marriage, and tensions in the city as the Medici’s fall from power, Florence goes through a religious revival, and power is eventually returned to the secular rulers.

The story is of particular interest to me for several reasons. First, it is a youngest daughter learning to please her family, husband, and self all at once. Obviously a young woman such as myself in today’s social climate has a far easier time, but the relationships between willful daughters and protective parents are timeless. I see in Alessandra reflections of my own past selfishness and willfulness and in her mother echoes of the wisdom and understanding of my own. I also see in the secrets and overlooked betrayals a reflection of the secrets in my own family. Revelations come to Alessandra as she comes into her own as a wife and mother and someone interested in huge political climate. Her father is not who she grew up with but in fact a powerful and recently deceased member of the Medici family. Her brother is a homosexual. The young painter her father discovers in a monetary turns out to have more talent for painting than anyone she has ever met and a powerful dynamic develops between them before his secrets of madness are revealed. Every layer that peels away reminds me of things I discovered as I got older. There are no perfect reflections but the feeling she expresses reminds me of some I experienced under similar circumstances.

Second is the social climate. Florence for some time was becoming ‘the new Athens’ and fostered wealth, art, and learning as ways to celebrate both life and god. During the years of interest in the novel, a friar in the Catholic Church begins preaching fire and brimstone, penitence and punishment. As is wont to occur in such zealotry, everyone goes overboard and this young, curious woman is affected very personally in several ways. Her family’s fortunes begin to fall, her brother is discovered to be a homosexual, something recently outlawed by the religious authorities, the young man her father hired to paint their home’s chapel begins to go insane, and her new husband turns out to be her brothers lover. The relationships are complicated and though the story wraps up a bit too neatly, it is explained away easily enough by the planning and influence of her mother and the young slave girl who has been Alessandra’s companion since childhood.

One other reason I appreciated the story is how the author anchored it to historical fact and when that was unavailable linked at least well known theories into her story. She wove a plausible history for great men and women and for great works of art that remain unexplained. It took a good five or six hours to finish but it was a compelling story with enough action and mystery and romance to keep the plot moving. The candid language was almost a shock to me but was refreshing, as were the suggested study questions at the end of the story. You could feel Alessandra’s discomfort and horror at her first sexual encounter with her husband (imagine trying to have sex with someone you find extremely unattractive. Now imagine being the unattractive one but not knowing why) and later you can feel her pleasure and enjoyment when she finds someone to share love and physical passion with. Her fear during the reign of the friar and religious authorities is palpable through the pages and can quicken the heart.

I would recommend this book fore either very light reading or for young people, between fourteen and twenty. It does have some valuable insights into the history of feminism and also the development of the Italian Renaissance. I know I enjoyed it, but I can’t promise anyone else will.

When I run out of new books to entertain me, I turn to the classics. Obviously the last foray into classical literature was less than successful (see Madame Bovary) however my more recent one was far better. Not nearly as old, Vermillion Sands is a collection of short stories, connected only by geographical location. Written in the fifties and compiled more recently, the stories of Vermillion Sands are a bizarre mashup of science fiction and outright fantasy. As pure entertainment they are brilliant. Fucking brilliant.

The setting is never described completely. It is a resort town located somewhere in California, perhaps, but the reader doesn’t know. It is hot and sandy, but not too hot. The majority of it is beaches and beach towns, expensive villas and shops catering to tourists and the eccentric rich. It is the eccentric rich that form the core of interest. Each story is told from the perspective of an nominally average person, usually male, who lives in a modest place at Vermillion Sands and encounters by chance some wealthy eccentric. An editor meets a poet who fancies herself the muse of poetry and uses magic or something like it to play nefarious pranks. A beautiful pirate ranges the sand lake on her wheeled yacht, looking for an old love and controlling a pack of enormous flying manta rays. A singer is enthralled by a temperamental singing orchid and falls for its charms. A self absorbed socialite has a troupe of performers carve her face in the clouds and drives them to suicide and murder in the process. A house reverberates with the memories of its previous tenants and reenacts their violent relationship on the new owners. Sculptures sing and grow to immeasurable proportions, portraits paint themselves, and fabrics live and react to the emotions of their wearer. The goings on at Vermillion Sands are fantastical. The setting is a beautiful and curious backdrop for beautiful and curious people to live their beautiful and curious lives.

I highly recommend this collection. In fact I have already pressed it upon a friend and it took her only moments to be come enthralled by the characters and peculiarities of J.G. Ballard’s universe. Good for adults young and old, the themes and writing is probably a bit over middle school (except for those precocious readers of which I like to consider myself one). It is also a great bus read or bedtime story because it is a collection, not a novel. I encourage you to pick up any anthologies you can find of his work. If this collection is any indication, it is all magnificent.

Madame Bovary, for years the symbol of wifely infidelity, is a tragic figure in Classic French literature. Married to a widower at a young age, her grandiose notions and desperate search for intoxicating happiness drains every crumb of decency and grace from the lives of her and her family. A true tragedy, Madame Bovary is both a shocking revelation to the people of the time and a cruel morality tale, reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet except without the everlasting fidelity and true love.

Madame Bovary begins as a sweet young girl, loved by her father and schooled in a convent as such proper, beloved young ladies ought. While at the convent, she is exposed to romantic novels and stories, the kind that nowadays would have Fabiola or his sort on the cover. The women in the stories are consumed by love for their heroic renaissance men. The men in the stories know everything and do everything perfectly romantically, perfectly heroically, and perfectly everythingly. Of course we all know those stories set unreasonable expectations but no one told little miss who would later become the wife of a boring but doting widower that expecting her husband to live up to those heroes was destined to make her unhappy.

Sure enough, after the first glow of married life wears off, Madame Bovary begins seeking emotional excitement elsewhere. Like a drug addict she needs new things and more things all the time to excite her. First it is motherhood. She vacillates between being a doting mother and not bothering to care about her daughter. After the joys of motherhood fade, she falls in love. It is a respectable, virginal love and the young man is too proper to pursue it but they both feel it. She smooths over his imperfections with feelings of loathing towards her husband. Flaubert is extremely talented at describing the emotions Madame Bovary goes through in all her cycles of joy and depression. After her young love moves away, she is seized upon by an unscrupulous bachelor and their year long affair seems incredibly indiscreet to me, but there is no indication that the village is aware of their affair. After a dramatic end to her illicit romance, she sinks into a deep depression, much like Bella Swan in modern day Twilight. She rouses from this depression when she and her husband visit the city and she is once again presented with her young love. This time both are determined to consummate this love. Another year is spent in debauchery and frivolity and by this point Madame Bovary’s spending has driven her and her husband deep into debt, with him totally unawares. Her need for novelty and intense feelings has driven her to spending the capital of her youth, energy, and money until there is not only nothing, but less than nothing left. She has ruined not only herself but her loving husband and the future of her innocent daughter. She ends her life and the last few pages describe the extent to which I she has ruined nearly every life she ever touched.

When Madame Bovary was first published, so many women identified with our protagonist that dozens came forward as the inspiration for the main character. Flaubert’s eloquent descriptions of her passion and depression are frequent enough that anyone who feels mildly dissatisfied in their relationships or feels like they need emotional highs to tolerate life can find company in Madame Bovary. As a cautionary tale, it does well for several reasons. The first and most obvious is how dangerous stifling youthful experimentation can be. This young woman has romance novels as her only source of relationship advice, poisonous as they are written to be risqué and unrealistic flights of fantasy. I remember reading my first romance novel as a teenager. My mother didn’t forbid me, nor did she encourage me, she only told me that real relationships aren’t like that and not to be fooled. I feel as though I should thank her for what many young women are not to getting these days. Madame Bovary is an excellent example of why not to let your daughters read twilight or its ilk. Real relationships are not like fairy tales and reading fairy tales as an impressionable young woman, or young men, is extremely hard to get over, specially when parents feel too uncomfortable to talk to their children about relationships and sex.

It is also a cautionary tale against allowing others to take advantage of one’s naïveté. The local merchant uses judicious extensions of credit to trap our Madame in a cycle of debt. The local apothecary discredits Madame Bovary’s husband through mild trickery and judicious rumormongering. Madam’s first lover feeds her lies of love and fidelity to seduce her. The common thread in their downfall is a lack of skepticism. She wants so badly to believe that she deserves a life full of romance and passion that she seizes anything that leads that direction. He believes that he has a perfect life and shrugs off anything that might indicate otherwise. The two make a foolish pair who end their lives miserably and leave their daughter to a life of bitterness and manual labor, bereft of what her parents inherited from theirs.

All in all, I would prefer to have read one of Aesop’s fables. They are far more entertaining and fanciful. I do realize that perhaps the biggest reason for my distaste is my removal from the culture. When published, it so resounded with the women of the time that I have to think that, much like heart of Darkness, it was a conversation that needed to happen at the time and perhaps needs to happen with more conservative families, but Seattle hardly needs the morality tale of the cheating wife full of ennui that mid century France needed. All in all not a bad read. I would recommend it for young women or someone who likes sad endings.

Speaking of, I will say that I do appreciate the manner of her death. Not ironic exactly, but Madame had high ideas of some noble, beautiful, and quiet death but didn’t realize just how ugly her method would be. Flaubert specifically details what she looks and sounds like in death and as someone who finds her ideas foolish I appreciate that he took the wind out of her sails as it were, showing her finally that no matter what she wished, some things are just ugly.

I am often blessed by gifts of books that I may not have otherwise picked up, because they reminded the giver of me in some way. I suppose it should come as no surprise that I would eventually come into possession of some unusual erotica. Namely: monster porn. A conversation between myself and a friend turned towards a new trend of amateur authors writing explicit sex scenes between human women and monsters, in this case, obviously Bigfoot.

Volume one follows three young women as they are kidnapped and gently but firmly forced into intercourse with twelve foot tall hairy creatures. Volume two follows the one who chooses to stay with her Bigfoot because she falls in love with him and decides to join he and his tribe in woodsy living, complete with nightly orgies. Both books are a narrated by the young woman as she is pleasured in nearly every chapter by her Bigfoot and often several others as sharing women is not. Unusual in the ‘tribe’.

The plot is only barely believable and features your traditional Stockholm syndrome and of course fantasies including but not limited to double penetration, enormous penises, forced pleasure, forced orgasm, triple penetration, and oral stimulation. The protagonist’s pleasurable experiences are billed as genuine but don’t include much that I think I’d be comfortable with and much that I actively have ethical issues with such as interspecies sex and rape. In additions, the technical aspects of writing and publishing are often just bad. The author uses passive voice which is always and forever a huge no-no, there are chunks of chapters that are repeated bored for word, and the euphemisms are cliche. At least the author uses them sparingly; she mostly uses explicit language which makes the scenes nice and clear. I might have to appropriate some of her language conventions in my own writing 😉

Despite the technical issues, predictable plot, and force fantasies, I find myself responding physically to the mental input and so, despite my better judgement, I have read them both, in full (mostly) about twice now. I don’t have wifi at my studio so when I have a half an hour and nothing to do with it, instead of using up my data with internet videos, I’ll ‘read a book’ for a while. Because of that I have to give them a four out of five on the sexy scale, though they earn a mere one out of five for actual reading pleasure.

This is my frivolous book review. The next one will be of Madame Bovary and is far less fun :-/ I won’t be able to recommend either books for reading for fun.

I was recently gifted what many consider a SciFi classic. I had heard of it in passing several times but hadn’t gone out of my way to find it. What a mistake that was; The Left Hand of Darkness is a classic for a reason.

The basic premise is an envoy from the joint worlds comes to a planet called Winter as a representative to invite the occupants of the planet to join the 88 other worlds that are considered of social and technological advancement sufficient to warrant a place with the rest of the worlds. Two things make this planet peculiar among the rest: the climate and the nature of the occupant’s sexuality.

The planet is named aptly. The temperature rarely rises above 40C and the only habitable zone falls between 20 degrees above and below the equator. The rest of the planet is essentially matching glaciers and uninhabitable.

The envoy often refers to the race inhabiting Winter as unisexual and the races occupying the rest of the planets as bisexual. It might be more accurate to label Winter’s populace hermaphroditic. Any person on Winter can be either the father or the mother of a child. Each person has a monthly cycle of estrus where hormones begin to run wild and there are physical changes to secondary sex characteristics such as swelling of the breasts or increase in genital size and changes in shape. Two people who are beginning their cycle at the same time engage in a hormonal struggle. The winner becomes male and the loser becomes female independent of past iterations. This means that one person can sire one child and bear another later in life. It is a fascinating concept and the central one for which LeGuin is praised. Not only is it a novel approach to sexuality but she explores the social ramifications of unisexuality as well. She proposes, through the mouth of her protagonist, that war has never become a tool in the arsenal of these people because the battle of the sexes never occurred. Since there is no biological basis for ‘us vs them’, the mindset required for widespread warfare never developed. There are of course fight and battles, but no large-scale war.

Complicating the question is of course the climate which of course would dissuade any army from trying to wage a campaign, as many have discovered in the wilds of Russia. The climate also dictates a small populace which may be yet another factor in the lack of war. These complications further prod the reader into an examination of our own mindset. Do we refrain from fighting simply because we don’t have the attitude required or is it a simpler motivation of self-preservation and preservation of the species? On the other hand, the lack of inhabitable land should have sparked even more warfare than expected, right? And yet perhaps it’s that the lack of an ‘expendable’ sex that causes this unusual species an aversion to mass death.

The complexity of the issues raised by the setting provides a magnificent background for a touching story of friendship, bravery, camaraderie, and honor. Political machinations put our envoy into several difficult situations. His commitment to his goal is tested as is his faith in the few friends he has made since he arrived, alone, on this planet where he can never be really comfortable. He can never get warm enough, nor is he able to warm to the only person on the planet who believes him and wishes for his success. I kept expecting love and lust to blossom in this unusual partnership but what comes of the grueling adventure these two undergo is far more real and meaningful.

I would recommend this book to readers from high school and up. In stark contrast to such popular love stories as Twilight and its ilk, The Left Hand of Darkness presents the kind of love that is steadfast, that is earned, and that is respectful. The story itself is interesting enough to hold the attention of even young readers and encompasses concepts such as loneliness, frustration, maturity, self control, and what makes good communication. It is also complex enough to intrigue more mature readers who would like to discover interesting concepts and think interesting thoughts. I heartily recommend this book and am looking forward to reading more of her works.