Book reviews: C.S. Lewis's Space/Ransom trilogy

The Space Trilogy (or Ransom Trilogy) is C.S. Lewis' only other fantasy (under the guise of science fiction/scientifiction) series, and when I read them the first few times, I loved them so much that I listed them among my favorite books. I've reread them now for my C.S. Lewis class, and my feelings about the books have changed. 

 

Out of the Silent Planet (description) - The first book in the trilogy remains my favorite. The fascinating planet and its inhabitants, their language and Ransom's learning of it, and the way Lewis marries science fiction with fantasy and Christianity makes this book so enjoyable to me. The opinions CSL promotes in this book are of the "we should not colonize other planets/don't be obsessed with furthering the human race to the point that we lose our humanity" variety, which is slightly surprising until you remember he's Irish. On the whole I agree with him; I think I enjoyed the other books in the trilogy less because I don't agree with the beliefs he endorses there. A couple things I found funny are that Dr. Ransom (a philologist) is based on J.R.R. Tolkien, and the space travel science is completely silly. Anyway, I really liked this book but I don't think I count it a favorite anymore. 4.5 out of 5 stars, permanent collection. Trigger warnings: everything you should expect from a male-written 1940s sci fi book, murder, death, animal abuse and killing mention, ableism, kidnapping, guns/shooting death, colonialist genocide mentions

Aesthetics moodboard for Out of the Silent Planet

Perelandra (description) leans almost completely outside of the science and into fantasy. The medieval cosmology he folded into his science fantasy is much more dwelled on, and I love the mythological references Lewis added to the story. Perelandra is new, lush, and beautiful, and I enjoyed spending time in it. I did not enjoy the spiritual horror that threatened it through one of the antagonists from OotSP. I also wasn't crazy about traditional/old fashioned gender beliefs being shoehorned into the story through the planet gods. Lewis was nonplussed that most people didn't pick up on the Christianity in the first space book, so he really hammered it in here. I gave this one 4 stars. Trigger warnings: murder, death, violence, cosmic/spiritual/supernatural horror (demonic forces), demonic possession, body horror, zombie if you squint, animal abuse and murder, blood, gun, a huge bug-like creature shows up for a bit

Aesthetics moodboard for Perelandra

That Hideous Strength is the last book in the trilogy and takes place entirely on earth. Ransom is no longer the main character/focus; instead, we have alternating POVs from Jane and Mark, a young married couple who are bored with their lives and each other. Jane's dreams of the future bring her into Ransom's circle, and Mark's desire to be in the inner ring/popular & intellectual group brings him further into a shadowy organization (ironically called N.I.C.E.) that wants to control the universe. There's an exciting subplot with Arthurian fantasy and more medieval cosmology planetary influence stuff that I really enjoyed. There's also spiritual/supernatural horror in this book, albeit less direct that in Perelandra, but still creepy because an organization like N.I.C.E. could really exist and take over cities with police control and make bad people evil. There's a so-bad-it's-almost-funny butch lesbian cop stereotype who is written to be monstrous and evil. Lewis hammers in even more nonsense about gender roles and how it's an "erotic necessity" for the woman to obey her husband, which, like, your k!nks are not universal, babe. Just because you feel that way doesn't mean it's a natural law. Jane is not a very likeable character (Lewis is famous for being sexist, at least until he met his wife), but almost all the men are dicks to her in this book. It's not her fault her husband sucks and neglects her by eating all his meals at the university and then ditching her for weeks and weeks to live at the Institute. Jane never asked to get future dream visions or (spoiler, highlight to read: be part of a bloodline that was supposed to end with her birthing a future warrior for God or something, which no one told her about!) Justice for Jane! One thing I did find kind of funny is that Lewis posits there are seven genders because of the seven heavens/planets. Kind of based? 3.5 stars. Trigger warnings: murder, animal attack + massacre, gore, rape, torture, body horror, cosmic/spiritual/supernatural horror, police violence, town placed under police control and people driven from their homes, mob violence, animal abuse and experimentation (vivisection), guns and shooting deaths, eugenics and ableism mentions, genocide mentions, homophobia, homophobic stereotype character, misogyny and sexism, gender roles, homelessness, sex mentions

Aesthetics moodboard for That Hideous Strength

Serial email ebooks and Christmas rereads

I subscribed to Dracula Daily due to peer pressure from tumblr and Twitter, and it was fun to slowly read the book via emails, which sent you the diary entries and letters that make up the book on the day they were "written". It was a fun and unique way to read the book, which I'd read ages before, and I liked seeing the memes and social media posts about it as we all read the book together and chatted about what our good friend Jonathan Harker had written. I don't think I'll do Dracula Daily again, but thanks to their recommendations I've subscribed to other ebooks-via-email subscriptions. Truly this is the best way to use Substack. 3.5 stars. Trigger warnings: blood (including consumption of), gore, body horror, off-page child murder, child endangerment, vampires kidnapping/feeding on children and adults, death, wolves/large dogs, various forms of horror

 

One of DD's recommendations was for Dickens December, which split up A Christmas Carol into equal-ish segments that were emailed out December 1 to 26. I also enjoyed reading ACC this way; I find the short email every day prompts more reflection than just reading the book in one gulp, which is what I usually do. I like to reread A Christmas Carol for Christmas anyway, and this was a fun way to do it. 4 stars. Trigger warnings: ghosts, supernatural horror, poverty, classism, death, homelessness mentions, prison mentions, a character flirts in a way that would be considered sexual harassment today

 

I reread Christmas with Anne, a compilation of L.M. Montgomery's holiday stories and the Christmas chapters from two Anne of Green Gables books. I reread it every year, and find the stories to be nice and old-fashioned in a comforting way. The non-Anne stories fall into one of three camps: an estranged family is reconciled during the holidays, stuck-up people learn humility due to sharing merry-making with others, or a poor family's children are gifted Christmas in a way they could not have imagined. Others may find the stories repetitive, but I don't mind it, having been inoculated due to repeated readings of the Christmas in My Heart books, which has even more repetitive stories despite being a 40-something book series. I believe this is now out of print, but you may be able to buy an inferior cover version that isn't as nice. 4 out of 5 stars, permanent collection. Trigger warnings: poverty, classism, xenophobia, lookism, fatphobia, sexism, controlling parental figure, death, loss, grief, past child abuse and neglect mentions, 1 brief infertility mention, loneliness, estranged families

 

Another Christmas reread was Jan Brett's picture book The Twelve Days of Christmas, which was a gift from my kindergarten teacher when I was five. It's beautifully, sumptuously illustrated, with lots of lovely details and interpretations of each of the true love's gifts. Truly a picture book to lose yourself in. 5 stars, permanent collection.

picture courtesy of Abebooks

Book Review: Dread Nation by Justina Ireland

Jane McKeene was born two days before the dead began to walk the battlefields of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania—derailing the War Between the States and changing the nation forever.

In this new America, safety for all depends on the work of a few, and laws like the Native and Negro Education Act require certain children attend combat schools to learn to put down the dead.

But there are also opportunities—and Jane is studying to become an Attendant, trained in both weaponry and etiquette to protect the well-to-do. It's a chance for a better life for Negro girls like Jane. After all, not even being the daughter of a wealthy white Southern woman could save her from society’s expectations.

But that’s not a life Jane wants. Almost finished with her education at Miss Preston's School of Combat in Baltimore, Jane is set on returning to her Kentucky home and doesn’t pay much mind to the politics of the eastern cities, with their talk of returning America to the glory of its days before the dead rose.

But when families around Baltimore County begin to go missing, Jane is caught in the middle of a conspiracy, one that finds her in a desperate fight for her life against some powerful enemies. 

And the restless dead, it would seem, are the least of her problems.

I read this book for Halloween, as it has zombies. This one was purchased from the thrift store a while back. Bookstagram informed me that a side character is ace, which made me happy. Part of the reason I picked this book above my other spooky reads was because I wasn't ready to let Ace Week go. 

Anyway, WHEW THIS BOOK. It was so gory and horrifying and suspenseful and amazing. While it does take place in an alternate timeline, the racism and inequality of the Reconstruction South feels like it rang true (obviously I was not alive then but I'm guessing it was like that). It's really saying something when the racism is scarier than the zombies. The zombies themselves are pretty standard; the only unique qualities are that their eyes turn yellow, and the newly turned are faster and stronger than the longer-undead ones. I don't consume a lot of zombie media, but that was new to me. There was a line in the book about white people claiming certain people of color had been bitten in order to enslave them, in an echo of the 13th amendment loophole. There were parts of this that were hard to read and very sad (zombies attacking children etc., the kind of racism that you already know to expect).

I liked Jane, although I found her impulsivity and inability to keep her mouth shut annoying. You'd think a Black girl raised in the mid- to late-1800s would know when not to mouth off, even if she was raised by a white mother who coddled her and didn't believe in corporate punishment for Black workers. She was pretty badass though. Katherine, Jane's classmate in the finishing school, begins as an annoying tattling prig, but due to circumstances that bring them together, grows on Jane and us. She's the ace character, and due to her lack of interest in relationships, I read her as aroace. There's a fun surprise as to another character's LGBTQ+ identity. There's also a Black smoothtalking conman and nice white scientist for Jane to have sparks with. One of the more interesting characters was Mr. Redfern, a Native American badass and morally gray character who is only in the first half of the book. I hope we see him again in the sequel, which I can't wait to read. 

Score: 4 out of 5 stars
Read in: October 31
From: Savers thrift store
Status: giving away eventually

Cover notes: I really like this cover. "Jane" with her sickles in front of the American flag? Perfection. My only quibble is that she seems to be wearing an Edwardian dress and the book clearly takes place in 1880 or so.

Trigger warnings: murder, gore, zombies attacking/eating children and other people, attempted murder of infant, attempted murder of child, attempted drowning of child by adult, white supremacy, racism, death/murder by shooting (multiple instances), racial slurs, violence, Black character struck and flogged by white men, use of Black servant as zombie bait in medical experiment, police brutality, evil sheriff character, starvation, enforced hunger, imprisonment, internalized white supremacy in Black characters who betray their own, the Bible/religion/Christianity used to support racism, segregation and slavery; corrupt preacher character, sexism, misogynoir, whorephobia (prejudice against sex workers)

April-June 2017 books

The first book I read in April was Ella Minnow Pea: A progressively lipogrammatic epistolary fable by Mark Dunn. This is one of the most unique books I’ve ever read because as the book goes on, it keeps using words with fewer and fewer letters. It’s also a fable with a moral in it. In a fictitious? island off the coast of South Carolina, a charmingly retro town adores its statue of a hometown boy made good: the guy who invented the phrase “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”, which is mounted on his statue. When the letters begin to fall off the decaying statue, the superstitious (or enterprising?) town elders decide it is a message from beyond the grave that the entire island must give up using that letter from the alphabet. You can imagine what happens when more and more letters keep dropping from the statue, and the faster they fall, the more outrageous and rapacious the demands on the townspeople become. This book made me angry because I could see a clear parallel between the “devout” town elders, who really just wanted a reason to take others’ houses and property, and current events. Clever, creative, sweet and mirroring our times: highly recommended. 4/5

Ellen White’s World: A fascinating look at the times in which she lived is the third book from George R. Knight’s Ellen White series. It’s basically a sweeping overview of the nineteenth century’s religious and cultural aspects, with a few EGW quotes thrown in to tie it to the Adventist prophet and writer. I had to read this for a class and found this book interesting, but I thought Ellen White’s World should have included more on the prophet herself and not kept to such an insanely short page length. 3.9/5

Bee: The Princess of the Dwarfs by Anatole France is a classic old-fashioned fairytale about a princess and her cousin/betrothed who, as children, wander from home and get kidnapped by dwarves and nixies, respectively. It was a nice story but very short, and I felt like it could have been fleshed out more. The ending was also kind of meh because there wasn’t any sort of climactic battle; the kids end up being freed by the king of the dwarfs because he loves Honeybee. Yes, that’s her nickname; not sure why they didn’t just put Honeybee instead of Bee in the title. I mostly liked this anyway. This was a Nook ebook. 3.4/5

Another Nook ebook that I read was A Sicilian Romance by Ann Radcliffe, which was a Gothic Romance. Secret passageways and tunnels below a castle, possible ghosts, tons of chases, heroine is constantly fainting and needing to be rescued, several faked deaths, a corrupt abbot, a band of thieves, caves, forced marriages and true love. A fun trip. 3/5

I guess I was in the mood for Gothic novels since after that I read Carmilla by J. Sheridan Le Fanu. Carmilla, which has been adapted into a YouTube video series, is the OG lesbian vampire who preys on pretty young women, hilariously changing her name to another anagram as the decades pass (Marcilla etc.). As with most if not all classic vampire novels, it ends with the hunting and elimination of the vampire threat. Even going in with full knowledge of what friendships between girls were like in Victorian times, this was super gay. It ended pretty abruptly (I guess a lot of novels from this period do), but I liked it anyway; it was pretty funny. 3.5/5

Technically I finished this book in July but I mostly read it in June, so I’m going to include it in here anyway. Torn: Rescuing the Gospel from the Gays-v.s.-Christians Debate by Justin Lee is an excellent book about how we should view and treat gay Christians and gay people in general, and how our church should change its view of homosexuality and how it treats those in the LGBT+ spectrum if it wants to repair relationships rather than cause pain. This was excellent; highly recommended. I honestly feel like every Christian should read this regardless of their orientation and opinion. 4.9/5

Flash book reviews because I am super behind

Cruel Beauty by Rosamund Hodge (May 10)
Til We Have Faces meets Pandora's Box meets Howl's Moving Castle meets Rose Daughter. I LOVED THIS WOW. 4/5

The Distant Hours by Kate Morton (May 31-June 6)
Thrift store purchase because it had a pretty cover. Gothic novel told through flashbacks, journal entries, letters, etc. set in WWII and present day (1990s). Well-written, atmospheric mystery. Initially sucked me in but in the end I sort of hated it due to the difficult, controlling, messed up family situation and unnecessary deaths. No one in this book gets to have nice things. 3.9/5

Dracula by Bram Stoker (mid June)
I read this for the fantasy & science fiction class I enrolled in from Coursera. I know it's a classic, and upon reading it I can see why, but I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. It's surprisingly religious and Mina is pretty awesome, despite how Perfect Victorian Woman she is. 4/5

Nimona by Noelle Stevenson (June 17)
I've been following Noelle Stevenson on Tumblr for years now. This was originally a webcomic, and I had read all but the last chapter or so since I got busy with school and work. It's a sort of steampunk (not Victorian or much steam, just knights who fight with mechanical lances and mad scientists researching magic) graphic novel about a "villain" and his mysterious sidekick trying to overthrow an oppressive government. This was wonderful and I enjoyed it. The feels. 4/5

Here There Be Unicorns by Jane Yolen (June)
This was such a favorite of mine growing up. I used to read it from our public library all the time. I had some credit in my Amazon account so I bought this. It's such a weird experience rereading a book you loved as a child and haven't read since then. It's always much shorter and less impactful, less substantial, in a way. You're a different person who has learned and grown a lot since then so it doesn't affect you like it used to. Still, I have a lot of love for this book. I was kind of amazed that  I loved it that much as a kid, since the stories/poems are pretty advanced and open-ended/vague rather than having happy, tidy endings, and I was a lot less used to sad, philosophical stories back than than I am now. 4/5

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (late June)
I guess I see why this is a classic, as this is the first science fiction novel (written by a teenage girl, so take that, sexist nerd bros who think SF is only for guys), but I kind of hated this. Victor is an idiot, tons of unnecessary deaths, and no one is allowed to have nice things. Just misery. Also, I downloaded a random free ebook from the Nook store because I was feeling too lazy to connect my Nook ereader to my laptop in order to download the version supplied by the instructor of my SF/F class and it had the worst formatting I'd ever seen. Whole paragraphs, pages, were jumbles of letters with symbols. Terrible. 3.5/5