Hail the conquering reviewer
Feb. 9th, 2016 05:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
missroseroseAs my Goodreads friends may have noticed, there's a particular book on Renaissance history that's been stuck on my currently-reading list since April of 2014. To celebrate finally conquering Magnifico (and, hopefully, the imminent conquering of this cold that's given me the time and motivation to finally get through its five hundred pages), here are some reviews of stuff I've been reading lately!
Magnifico, by Miles J. Unger. I was inspired to purchase this after reading this excellent series on Machiavelli and his time; I was looking for further insight into the place and period which spawned the infamous political theorist and his work, and the life story of the ruler most solidly associated with the previous generation seemed a promising avenue. By that metric, it succeeded, albeit in a more roundabout way than I'd originally hoped; the author's takeaway seems to be that Lorenzo was a gifted statesman and generally benevolent (if nearly despotic) ruler, but that his style of rule depended almost entirely on his personal charisma, which (along with the changing political climate of Europe) was why Florentine government and prestige went into more or less permanent decline after his death, and why Machiavelli's cynicism was so profound. (It's got to be pretty tough to spend one's whole life trying desperately to assist a government that appears to have no real interest in self-preservation, especially after growing up during the tail end of its golden age, and thus having seen firsthand what it could be.)
I don't have anywhere near the knowledge of this period of history required to accurately judge the author's assumptions and conclusions, but he's clearly done his homework - there's a good fifty pages of indices, footnotes, bibliography, and other ephemera, and he clearly delineates in the text the more controversial parts of the history he cites as well as giving his reasons for his own take. There were a few bits that seemed to have slipped through editing - references to parts of the text that were further along, for instance, or the omission of small factoids that a general audience might not know. (I was completely confounded as to why, for instance, the pro-Medici faction during the Pazzi coup was shouting "Balls! Balls!" until I Googled and discovered that the Medici coat of arms prominently featured five red balls and one blue.) Still, it's an impressive (if highly dense) recounting of a singularly splendid part of Italian history, and well worth the effort to read if you're interested in Renaissance history, or love the art of the period and are curious about the time in which it came about. B+
The Wicked & The Divine vol. 3: Commercial Suicide, by Gillen McKelvie & Wilson Cowles (with guest artists). Conspiracy mysteries, while a popular genre and one with a number of built-in advantages (there's a built-in question to hook the audience and a similarly inherent driving plot force), are ultimately some of the trickiest stories to do well, especially when it comes to pacing and payoff. (The mid-2000s reboot of Battlestar Galactica, for instance, completely fell down on the payoff end; Season 2 of Orphan Black, while entertaining, had a lot of pacing issues.) We're not quite to the payoff point, but the pacing here is masterfully done; after one volume of buildup and one of pell-mell "Fandemonium", the writers are easing off the gas pedal a bit, giving the characters time to regroup and reflect and the audience some much-desired backstory. Most impressively, they manage to do it all without losing momentum - even as some questions are answered, more arise. (And despite their cheeky titling of the last few pages "The Inevitable Cliffhanger", the most interesting cliffhanger this time actually occurs mid-arc, at the end of the Odin issue.)
The series continues to have interesting things to say on the subject of hero worship, desire, the relationship of a celebrity to their fans, the unspoken contract inherent to that relationship, and (perhaps most pertinently in our age of media oversaturation and Tumblrization) the way history and myths alike are constructed and managed through the continual editing and reediting of interviews, video, written notes, and other records. The authors' research continues to shine, leaving all sorts of visual and textual clues for those familiar with the mythology of the deities involved. (Special shoutout to the revolving panel of guest artists who covered this arc; they each did a wonderful job capturing something about the outlook of the particular god their issue focused on.) This series is definitely headed towards "all-time favorite" status, even if The Morrigan's story hit just a little too close to my teenage self's capital-R Romantic ideals to be read without wincing. A+
The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo, by Zen Cho. A delightful little gem of a tale. At first glance, it's a very traditional girl-on-her-own-goes-and-gets-into-trouble sort of story, but I loved how it defied the shopworn tropes of the genre; at every turn, the characters surprise and delight, refusing to fall into their proscribed roles even when their situation couldn't be more conventional. Additionally, despite nearly every character falling into some minority group or other, it never feels particularly strident; their ethnic identities, sexualities, or neurotypes are just part of who they are, and influence their perspective accordingly. And the main character has one of the strongest voices I've ever read in fiction. A
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, by Allison Bechdel. A beautifully crafted memoir that's by turns fascinating, heartbreaking, and hilarious - though as the subtitle implies, it leans more toward poignancy. Bechdel relates her family life and various formative experiences with a crisp straightforwardness that belies their emotional heft. Moving back and forth through time, she traces recurring themes, as well as cause and effect and cause again - examining how later revelations caused her to scrutinize and reevaluate earlier experiences.
It's probably not surprising I resonated to this story; I am, after all, a queer woman who loves books and has a somewhat troubled relationship with her father. But the clarity with which the author sets forth her ambivalence in her family relationships felt reassuring, in a way; it was fascinating to see how hers (dys)functioned, where it was similar and where it diverged from my own experiences. Similarly fascinating for comparison were her accounts of queer culture in the 70s, and how her self-discovery and coming-out process went; I was surprised at how similar it was to my own, even if her environment (and eventual self-identity) was different.
In retrospect, the earlier chapters feel stronger and more contained, whereas the later ones feel a bit more open-ended; I'm not sure if it's due to the opacity of the source text or simply a lack of any new information, but the final, Ulysses-based chapter especially felt like it didn't quite hit the emotional notes it was aiming for. Still, the book as a whole was fascinating - as a time capsule, as a story of a family, and as an account of the experiences that made Bechdel the writer and artist she is today. A
Magnifico, by Miles J. Unger. I was inspired to purchase this after reading this excellent series on Machiavelli and his time; I was looking for further insight into the place and period which spawned the infamous political theorist and his work, and the life story of the ruler most solidly associated with the previous generation seemed a promising avenue. By that metric, it succeeded, albeit in a more roundabout way than I'd originally hoped; the author's takeaway seems to be that Lorenzo was a gifted statesman and generally benevolent (if nearly despotic) ruler, but that his style of rule depended almost entirely on his personal charisma, which (along with the changing political climate of Europe) was why Florentine government and prestige went into more or less permanent decline after his death, and why Machiavelli's cynicism was so profound. (It's got to be pretty tough to spend one's whole life trying desperately to assist a government that appears to have no real interest in self-preservation, especially after growing up during the tail end of its golden age, and thus having seen firsthand what it could be.)
I don't have anywhere near the knowledge of this period of history required to accurately judge the author's assumptions and conclusions, but he's clearly done his homework - there's a good fifty pages of indices, footnotes, bibliography, and other ephemera, and he clearly delineates in the text the more controversial parts of the history he cites as well as giving his reasons for his own take. There were a few bits that seemed to have slipped through editing - references to parts of the text that were further along, for instance, or the omission of small factoids that a general audience might not know. (I was completely confounded as to why, for instance, the pro-Medici faction during the Pazzi coup was shouting "Balls! Balls!" until I Googled and discovered that the Medici coat of arms prominently featured five red balls and one blue.) Still, it's an impressive (if highly dense) recounting of a singularly splendid part of Italian history, and well worth the effort to read if you're interested in Renaissance history, or love the art of the period and are curious about the time in which it came about. B+
The Wicked & The Divine vol. 3: Commercial Suicide, by Gillen McKelvie & Wilson Cowles (with guest artists). Conspiracy mysteries, while a popular genre and one with a number of built-in advantages (there's a built-in question to hook the audience and a similarly inherent driving plot force), are ultimately some of the trickiest stories to do well, especially when it comes to pacing and payoff. (The mid-2000s reboot of Battlestar Galactica, for instance, completely fell down on the payoff end; Season 2 of Orphan Black, while entertaining, had a lot of pacing issues.) We're not quite to the payoff point, but the pacing here is masterfully done; after one volume of buildup and one of pell-mell "Fandemonium", the writers are easing off the gas pedal a bit, giving the characters time to regroup and reflect and the audience some much-desired backstory. Most impressively, they manage to do it all without losing momentum - even as some questions are answered, more arise. (And despite their cheeky titling of the last few pages "The Inevitable Cliffhanger", the most interesting cliffhanger this time actually occurs mid-arc, at the end of the Odin issue.)
The series continues to have interesting things to say on the subject of hero worship, desire, the relationship of a celebrity to their fans, the unspoken contract inherent to that relationship, and (perhaps most pertinently in our age of media oversaturation and Tumblrization) the way history and myths alike are constructed and managed through the continual editing and reediting of interviews, video, written notes, and other records. The authors' research continues to shine, leaving all sorts of visual and textual clues for those familiar with the mythology of the deities involved. (Special shoutout to the revolving panel of guest artists who covered this arc; they each did a wonderful job capturing something about the outlook of the particular god their issue focused on.) This series is definitely headed towards "all-time favorite" status, even if The Morrigan's story hit just a little too close to my teenage self's capital-R Romantic ideals to be read without wincing. A+
The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo, by Zen Cho. A delightful little gem of a tale. At first glance, it's a very traditional girl-on-her-own-goes-and-gets-into-trouble sort of story, but I loved how it defied the shopworn tropes of the genre; at every turn, the characters surprise and delight, refusing to fall into their proscribed roles even when their situation couldn't be more conventional. Additionally, despite nearly every character falling into some minority group or other, it never feels particularly strident; their ethnic identities, sexualities, or neurotypes are just part of who they are, and influence their perspective accordingly. And the main character has one of the strongest voices I've ever read in fiction. A
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, by Allison Bechdel. A beautifully crafted memoir that's by turns fascinating, heartbreaking, and hilarious - though as the subtitle implies, it leans more toward poignancy. Bechdel relates her family life and various formative experiences with a crisp straightforwardness that belies their emotional heft. Moving back and forth through time, she traces recurring themes, as well as cause and effect and cause again - examining how later revelations caused her to scrutinize and reevaluate earlier experiences.
It's probably not surprising I resonated to this story; I am, after all, a queer woman who loves books and has a somewhat troubled relationship with her father. But the clarity with which the author sets forth her ambivalence in her family relationships felt reassuring, in a way; it was fascinating to see how hers (dys)functioned, where it was similar and where it diverged from my own experiences. Similarly fascinating for comparison were her accounts of queer culture in the 70s, and how her self-discovery and coming-out process went; I was surprised at how similar it was to my own, even if her environment (and eventual self-identity) was different.
In retrospect, the earlier chapters feel stronger and more contained, whereas the later ones feel a bit more open-ended; I'm not sure if it's due to the opacity of the source text or simply a lack of any new information, but the final, Ulysses-based chapter especially felt like it didn't quite hit the emotional notes it was aiming for. Still, the book as a whole was fascinating - as a time capsule, as a story of a family, and as an account of the experiences that made Bechdel the writer and artist she is today. A
