The nights are long and getting longer, but now that we’re into the holiday season and people have their Christmas lights up it gives a little glow of cheer in the night! This was an interesting month, with a somewhat expected work event having some very unexpected developments.

In Books…

• Lady Jane Grey: A Tudor Mystery: What most people (in the United States anyways) know of what happened after Henry VIII died is that his young son Edward ruled briefly and then died, and then Bloody Mary ruled and burned a bunch of people in her efforts to restore Catholicism before dying, and then Elizabeth ruled and Shakespeare and the Spanish Armada and so on and so forth. Most people have long since forgotten, if they ever knew, that there was a glitch between Edward and Mary. For no longer than a fortnight, there was a different queen: Jane Grey. Jane was the granddaughter of Henry’s younger sister, and like Edward a devout Protestant. Mary, though, rallied troops to her cause as the daughter of Henry, named in his will as the second in line to the throne, and successfully marched on London to claim the crown. Jane (and her husband Guildford) was put into the Tower, but there was every reason to believe she might one day be released as it was her father-in-law, John Dudley, that was largely viewed as responsible for her very brief reign. As a figurehead for those opposed to Mary and her Catholic reforms to rally around, though, she came to be seen as too dangerous to live and was executed. Historian Eric Ives, though, finds this widely-understood narrative to be flawed. If you, like me, came to this book thinking it would be primarily about Jane because that is after all her name as the title, you will be disappointed. Ives’s real point in writing this book is to assert that John Dudley, her father-in-law was unfairly maligned and does not deserve the share of the blame he has gotten over the years. There is some extent to which this seems to be true. Where his argument hinges is on the way Henry VIII established his succession (Edward, Mary, Elizabeth). He did not ever walk back his declarations of the illegitimacy of his daughters. Rather, he continued to hold that they were illegitimate, but he personally chose them to succeed him if their brother were to die without offspring. Edward, Ives argued, was equally entitled as sovereign to make his own decisions about the succession, which entirely disinherited his sisters in favor of his cousins the Greys (Jane had two younger sisters who were set out as next in line after her). John Dudley was the leader of Edward’s council and was doing nothing “wrong” by seeking to enact the terms of Edward’s plan for succession. It was in fact Mary who was the usurper, not Jane. So far, so convincing. But he overeggs the pudding by trying to paint it as innocuous that Jane was married to Dudley’s own son, Guildford, shortly before the death of the king and that this was not an example of ambition, arguing that Dudley would have preferred to continue to be an advisor to Edward, who may not have seemed to be on his deathbad at the time the marriage was arranged, than to be the father of the king. This strains credulity. As Dudley himself had seen and even perpetuated, advisors could be toppled and it would be far more secure to be bound to royalty by blood ties than any other sort of connection. I wanted more about Jane herself, though Ives seems to honestly not find her especially interesting. She loved learning and was highly educated, she was devoutly Protestant. That’s about all we learn about her. This is a nitpick, but it also drove me crazy that Ives insisted on referring to Edward’s succession plan as a “deuise” instead of a “devise” because that’s how it was rendered in Edward’s handwriting. This book was written in 2019, just use “devise”, no one thinks you’re doing something about historical accuracy by using that spelling! This is clearly deeply-researched and will be most accessible to someone very interested in the intricacies of Tudor politics, those looking for information about Jane Grey herself should avoid this.
• The Vegetarian: Yeong-hye Kim is a completely ordinary-seeming young woman in South Korea. She’s been married to a salaryman for several years, she does freelance graphic design projects, and the couple seems likely to begin following the path of her sister, In-hye, and brother-in-law and have a child soon. But one night her husband awakes in the middle of the night to find her going through their refrigerator and throwing out every bit of meat inside it. When he asks her what’s going on, she tells him she had a dream. She refuses from that point forward to cook or eat meat, causing tension within both her household and her larger family as she stops eating much in the way of other food either (she goes fully vegan very quickly). She wastes away physically and in many ways withdraws from the world, but no matter what anyone tries she will neither engage in debate about her choice or change it. This inspires a range of reactions and counter-reactions with ramifications more dramatic than anyone might have ever imagined. There’s more plot, but the point of this book really isn’t about the plot. The story is narrated by three people: her husband, her brother-in-law, and her sister…notably none of which are Yeong-hye herself. It’s a book much less about her than about the way the people around her react to her decision. Her husband, whose narration makes it clear that he sees her as not a person as much as a body to fit into the role of “my wife” (in fact, I don’t think the portion of the book that deals with him has him once refer to her by name), is dismayed not at what she is doing to herself but how it impacts and reflects upon him. Her brother-in-law, an artist, sees in her a body that could serve his artistic purposes. Her sister does see her as a person, but also resents her in a way, for finding an escape hatch from the pressure of performing the role of “successful woman” that she herself feels trapped by. It should not be surprising that in a book that centers men thinking of women as something less than fully realized people, that there are some very upsetting things that happen to Yeong-hye. I do not personally tend to find these sorts of highly symbolic narratives compelling. I’m perfectly happy to have my nonfiction be about ideas, but I prefer fiction to be about people, and this is only vaguely that. This is a book full of triggers: disordered eating, sexual assault, physical assault, self-harm, and while I get why they’re there for what it seems Han Kang is trying to do here, I mostly found it unpleasant and upsetting for very little purpose, in the end. I did not enjoy the experience of reading this book and I cannot recommend it.
• Cape Fever: When Soraya Matas goes to interview with Mrs. Hattingh for a position as her maid, she does not let her future employer know that she can read. In the wake of World War I in Cape Town, South Africa, Soraya’s mother advises her to keep her literacy (she’s a good reader, though a relatively poor writer) to herself, as many of the rich white people who employ servants prefer them to not have this skill. Soraya immediately notices that the once-grand home has fallen into disrepair, with obvious spots that used to hold paintings left bare when the art was sold. But Soraya needs the money to help support her family so she takes the job, though she’s dismayed at the condition that she can return home to the nearby Muslim Quarter only once every two weeks. Hattingh, long since widowed and with her only child, a war veteran, living in London, is lonely and clearly needs the companionship of another person in the home almost as much as she needs Soraya’s work cooking and cleaning. Hattingh is every inch the colonial white woman, holding a lot of opinions about Soraya’s “people” based on virtually no real interaction with them. She peppers Soraya with questions and she learns that she’s engaged to a childhood friend, Nour, who is working on a farm outside the city while he prepares to enter the teacher’s college. When she proposes that she will help the young couple correspond by writing letters for Soraya and reading the responses to her, Soraya can’t resist the opportunity to stay in touch with her fiance. After a family tragedy, though, Soraya realizes that something is amiss, and the truth is something she would never have imagined. The plot developments aren’t especially hard to see coming here, so if you’re looking for a twisty mystery/thriller this might not be the read for you. If you’re looking for gothic vibes, though, they’re here. Big, mostly-empty house with secrets inside, check. Soraya loves ghost stories, putting together yarns spooky enough to have caused a fuss in the neighborhood about scaring the little kids, but what seems at first to be just a powerful young imagination is revealed as potentially being much more. Hattingh at one point hosts a seance, and it’s ambiguous whether the medium is a total charlatan or only half of one. I found it atmospheric and engaging despite its lack of real surprises on offer, and I appreciated getting the opportunity to learn a bit about a time and place I’d never really read about before. Soraya and Hattingh are both well-developed characters considering the relatively brief length of the book, which comes in under 250 pages. I appreciated its brevity, I feel like many writers would have tried to pad it out but the story felt like it was fully told and I think would have felt bloated with more.  Did it feel like maybe it wrapped up a little too neatly? Sure. But I found it an enjoyable, quick read and appreciated the nods to classic gothic tropes and I would recommend it!
• Beautiful: Hedy Lamarr is famous for being both gobsmackingly gorgeous and having helped invent, in the 1940s, some of the technology that would one day lead to WiFi. Born as Hedwig Kiesler in Vienna in 1914, Hedy lived a privileged childhood as the child of a well-off ethnically Jewish couple (her mother had converted to Christianity and Hedy was not raised in the Jewish faith). Her parents were socially active and Hedy apparently felt lonely as a child, which did not stop her from also being very busy during the early years of her own children. Hedy was an indifferent student, though intellectually curious at home, and left even her finishing and acting schools early to pursue a career in entertainment, finagling her way into a job at a silent film studio and debuting on the stage. At only 18 she starred in what became rather a notorious movie, Ectasy, about a younger woman married to an older man who has an affair with a guy her own age. The role had significant nudity and her conservative parents did not approve. Neither did the man she married only about a year later, a wealthy and powerful munitions dealer with significant ties to right-wing regimes including that of Benito Mussolini. Fritz Mandl, the first of what would turn out to be six husbands, was controlling to the extreme that Hedy had to flee in disguise to get away from him about four years later. She met Louis B. Mayer, who signed her to MGM, beginning what would be about a 15 year-long career as a major Hollywood star. In the 1940s, a staunch patriot of her adopted country, she was top seller of war bonds and worked happily at the Hollywood Canteen. It is in this period that she worked with a close friend, a composer, on an frequency-hopping torpedo whose patent they donated to the government. She adopted a child with her second husband and had two biological children with her third. All of her marriages were impulsive, often happening within just weeks of meeting, and it became a slippery slope, with her inclination to abandon her career for love tanking her earnings, making her more likely to take a bad role with a good paycheck. She was never good with money and frequently embroiled in lawsuits. A trial for shoplifting in the mid-1960s, though she was acquitted, damaged her reputation even further. She eventually became a bit of a recluse and moved to Florida, where she faced shoplifting charges again in the early 90s but eventually played the stock market well enough to leave a substantial sum behind in her will. Hedy was clearly a complex, multi-faceted woman who lived a life including both the highs of fame and fortune and the lows of seclusion and barely scraping by, virtually none of which she’d have ever been able to imagine growing up as a privileged Austrian girl. But author Stephen Michael Shearer isn’t interested in taking a look at her life in the macro and identifying patterns, like an obvious tendency to impulsivity and even recklessness that persisted from her teenage years fleeing her finishing school to lifting eye drops at a Florida drugstore. His book is a straightforward, linear recitation of her life, including sometimes tedious levels of detail about her film, television, and radio roles. It is obvious that he’s a fan, he takes pains to present positive reviews of her work in movies as well as his own, almost uniformly glowing opinion about how well she did with her roles. His attention to her personal life, outside of tracking headlines about who she was dating at any given time, is frustratingly inconsistent. He mentions that Hedy was concerned about getting her mother out of Austria after the Anschluss, then goes like 50 plus pages before he mentions it again with an update, followed by another like 50 pages after that before a conclusion. There’s just no analysis or critical engagement here, it’s a recitation of facts. His attempts to put a bow on it in his prologue and epilogue go straight to cliche, falling back to describing her as a simple, romantic Austrian girl when all of the evidence is that even as a teenager she was clever and resourceful. I’m sure there’s a good book to be written about her, but it isn’t this one. I can’t recommend it.
• The Stand: One day in 1990, a security guard flees a top secret portion of a military base in the California desert, scared out of his wits. The unit he’s escaped from is developing viruses for germ warfare and their latest trial, a variation on the flu, has killed every single one of the research subjects. The man takes his wife and daughter and flees east. Several days later, his car crashes into a gas station in a small town in Texas where Stu Redman and his friends are hanging around chatting. The only one still alive in the car is the man himself, and only just barely. He dies in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. But the new disease, soon nicknamed Captain Trips, has entered our interconnected world and it begins to spread. It spreads to New York, where Larry Underwood, a session musician whose first studio single has started climbing the charts and who has fled home from getting into trouble with his new success in California, will end up taking care of his mother while she dies. It spreads to Arkansas, where a completely Deaf man, Nick Andros, is recovering from being attacked by a group of local meatheads, recuperating at the sheriff’s house while the men who assaulted him are in jail. It spreads to Maine, where college student Frannie Goldsmith has just told her parents that she’s become pregnant despite being on birth control. While the flu wipes out 99% of the world’s population, that leaves all these people among the 1% left to figure out how to survive in this new world. The survivors begin having dreams about two figures. One, Mother Abagail, is a 108 year-old Black woman from Nebraska who appears in peaceful dreams. The other is called Randall Flagg, a presumably white man (he was once a member of the Klan) of uncertain age, whose manifestations are nightmarish. Two camps become established as survivors find each other and are drawn to either Abagail or Flagg, with Abagail’s group eventually settling in Boulder while Flagg sets up shop in Las Vegas. The Boulder group, knowing that Flagg will not be content to leave them alone, prepare for confrontation by sending spies, but what is to come is a surprise to everyone. This was only my second-ever Stephen King, despite having quite enjoyed The Shining. This nearly 1500-page doorstopper was a very different experience in some ways, but less so in others. On display again is his real talent for character work, the cast here is sprawling and each of them feels like a person. What kept me engaged was less the plot, which is terribly paced and was honestly not especially compelling to me, but the characters and their relationships. With the sheer number of characters to play with, King gives himself a lot of room to explore parallels and mirrors. Abagail and Flagg, of course, but also some morally grey characters, like Larry Underwood and a woman he encounters on the road called Nadine Cross. He may have been a dissolute wannabe rock star and she a virginal schoolteacher, but given the opportunity to become whoever they want to, Larry and Nadine make choices that set them on very different paths. Indeed, the theme of destiny v. free will is a constant. Even with the characters, though, there are some issues. As might be expected from King, his writing of women and minorities is suspect. While there’s something to be said for portraying the leader of the forces for good as a Black woman and making white dude Flagg essentially a literal demon, Abagail is very much in the media trope of a Magical Negro and she is the only character of color in the book that I can recall. Overall, though, the characters are a strength, especially as compared to the plot. The version of this book that I read is King’s preferred text, but it was originally published with about 400 pages less of material, apparently based on concerns about how much the book would need to cost at full length. Without having read that version, I do believe there is probably about 400 pages that could be cut from this version for a better book. The opening section of the book, detailing the spread of the flu, does have some interesting things to say about the ways government sometimes looks to serve itself above its citizens. Even as the President comes down with the virus, he goes on TV to lie about its origins, about the military response, about a vaccine to be made available. Even though he’s immune, Stu’s survival is imperiled because he’s fallen into the hands of government agencies who see him as a liability who knows too much and he’s forced to kill his own would-be assassin to escape death. The problem is that these introductory portions go on for well over 300 pages alone. Knowing that the book is a post-apocalyptic story, I found myself impatient to get to the end of the apocalypse. Once we get there, I thought the bits where survivors begin to come together were engaging enough and while I imagine plenty of other people found it dull, as a person whose work is politics, I was very much interested in the ways that the Boulder community began to be organized. But again, there were issues because while we change perspectives to the Las Vegas world occasionally, it was hard to have much of a sense of what Flagg actually wanted. What the Boulder group wants is easy enough to understand, and the struggle of how to effectuate it is where the tension comes in, but what exactly the Las Vegas contingent hopes to attain (beyond the destruction of the other) was a mystery to me. Control, yes, but then what? I suppose the same question may be asked of the end goal of any despot but it left that portion of the narrative without much energy. When the central conflict comes to a climax, the denouement was, to me, a little too rushed. I wanted to see more of what happened, how it played out. We get some fast-forward bits but they only hint at developments that could have been fleshed out. Knowing that The Lord of the Rings was an inspiration for King, I found myself thinking about the Scouring of the Shire. The first time I read the books it left a bad taste in my mouth, to have the heroes go through all of that and then being rewarded for their immense sacrifice with yet more hardship, but the older I get and the more I understand about human history, the righter it feels. While what the characters decide to do at the end makes sense, the wrong character drives that decision, for me. Am I glad I read this? Yes. It’s nowhere near being The Great American Novel, but I do think it is an interesting American novel. It’s very readable, I tore through it in about two weeks despite its page count (classics of similar length have previously taken me at least a week more). It’s hard to recommend because of its length and its supernatural elements, which some readers may find alienating. But I think it’s worth reading and if someone is at all curious about it, they should give it a try.

In Life…

• Special session: Regular session ended with some dramatics, which left some things undone, and so we ended up having a special session. Starting on a Thursday, most hoped it would wrap by the end of the weekend (typically in the past decade special sessions last 3-4 days maximum) but it ended up taking until the following Wednesday to get everything done. The legislature actually ended up doing something it had never done before in Nevada and amended the special session by a supermajority vote to hear a bill that was not on the original list of subjects to be considered. There were some very very long days, there was a lot of waiting around for things to get going, two bills died dramatically and unexpectedly on the floor right at the end. It is all over now, though, and I have been very glad for that.