In the Wolf's Mouth

In the Wolf's Mouth by Adam Foulds
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There have to be as many angles about war, specifically WWII, as there are people who were involved. I have read A LOT of literature about concentration camps, occupation, relocation, and hiding of Jews during WWII, but not a lot about the soldiers themselves. This book follows two soldiers in Africa and Italy toward the end of WWII. What you realize is that even without the sadistic Nazis, barbed wire, or cruel depravations, war is brutal. It is a machine and the soldiers are cogs that must run to keep up with it, or be spit out the other side. Morals, justice, and friendships have no place here--only the apathetic bureaucracy and political alignments matter and the soldiers are simply the tools being used.

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Life was a skin; It could be peeled away like strips of wallpaper with its coherent pattern.  The soil wasn't that deep.  A shell gored it and there was a rock beneath.  Plants burned, uprooted.  It could all be scraped off easily.

That was what it was like in battle: Things happened very far away or lethally close.

Days of Blood and Starlight

 

Days of Blood & Starlight by Laini Taylor
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As the middle of the series, Blood and Starlight tends to be dark and hopeless, like most middle books. Things have to go from bad to worse to make the ending that much more suspenseful and triumphant (which I am assuming book #3 will do). Still, there are plenty of twists and surprises and this series has some of the best writing in YA Fantasy I have read.

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Citizen

 

Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Poetry and lyrical essays about how the little bits of throw-away racisim build up and magnify over time. "What did you say?" she asks repeatedly in the book. Perhaps the best descriptions of all those little misspoken, subtle prejudices that others dismiss as "joking", a "mistake", or "slip of the tongue" create a tension that those facing it must constantly battle against, and sometimes just can't take any more. This is a book that shows how art (poetry) can say the things that speechifying and lecturing can't.

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John Henryism--for people exposed to stresses stemming from racism.  They achieve themselves to death trying to dodge the buildup of erasure.

this other kind of anger is really a type of knowledge: the type that both clarifies and disappoints.  It responds to insult and attempted erasure simply by asserting presence

For all your previous understandings, suddenly incoherence feels violent.

For so long you thought the ambition of racist language was to denigrate and erase you as a person.  After considering Butler's remarks, you begin to understand yourself as rendered hypervisible in the face of such language.

Quotation Marks

A mirror of twins

mimicking the other

without empathy for the middle signals.

Doubled ears with tongue between.

Soldiers standing guard 

to fix the words in place

so, even unheard,

ciphers displace the atmosphere

like hurricanes dispatched from butterfly wings.

Ribs holding the breath of intention.

The Blazing World

The Blazing World and Other Writings by Margaret Cavendish
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

As a novel written by a woman in the 1600's, I have to admire it for how brazen it is. A woman makes her way to another world via the North Pole full of animal-men and becomes their Empress. She questions their science, religion, and politics, and the answers are interesting as a study in those subjects in the 1600's. Surely, Cavendish had a bounty of curiosity about many subjects. There are flying spirits, fire rocks that burn with water, and other worlds that exist. When her friend the Duchess wants to have her own world, she is told to imagine it and her and the Empress go on and create more worlds in their mind. I couldn't help but admire Cavendish for her curiosity, her imagination, and her confidence.

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our weak Senses cannot perceive all the various sorts of her Creatures

we take more delight in Artificial delusions, than in Natural truths

were there nothing but truth, and no falsehood, there would be no occasion to dispute, and by this means we would want the aim and pleasure of our endeavors in confuting and contradicting each other; neither would one man be thought wiser than another, but all would either be alike and knowing and wise, or all would be fools

there is no beginning in Nature, no not of Particulars; by reason Nature is Eternal and Infinite, and her particulars are subject to infinite changes, and transmutations by virtue of their own Corporeal, figuraative self-motions, so that there's nothing new in Nature, not properly a beginning of any thing.

Neither will the dissection of Monsters prevent the errors of Nature's irregular actions; for by dissecting some, we cannot prevent the production of others.

Whether they could have Knowledge without Body?

I had rather die in the adventure of noble achievements, then live in obscure and sluggish security

But she wonder'd most at, was, that they should prize or value dirt more than mens lives.

wheresoever Learning is, there is most commonly also Controversie and quarreling;