Mark

Series back on track; strong narration

Revisado: 04-12-20

I hadn't planned to read this because I’d given up on the series — loved the early books, thought it lost its way — but I’d started about 10 other crime/thriller books that I just couldn't get into so I tried this on a whim. And it's wonderful! If you like the series even a little, this is a definite winner. But if you haven't read these before, I suspect the story might seem scattered.

McDermid plays with expectations. She has characters point out that cases rarely play out like they do on TV crime dramas, and that's the case here. The story starts with clinical psychologist Tony Hill in prison and DCI Carol Jordan unemployed and trying to cope with PTSD. I love how Tony tries to make the world a better place from his cell, and how Carol's love for him keeps her moving forward, although he won't speak to her. We basically know the killer early on so the story is really about the investigation — bodies turn up on a plot of land that used to be a Catholic girls school. Even the car chase at the end is anticlimactic, which is just the way McDermid wants it. The series could easily end here because so much of the characters' personal lives is wrapped up, but if McDermid keeps going, I’m back on board.

As for the narration, I saw that a previous reviewer really dislikes Saul Reichlin, but I found the narration invisible so that I could just enjoy the story - to me the mark of a good narrator. And I found the implied words about the portrayal of the character Stacey Chen unfounded.

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Narration makes complex text more understandable

Revisado: 03-02-20

I don't know how Aph Ko does it. She's like your kind and generous older sister with a PhD who re-states academic social theory in a way that makes it relevant to your life. She still uses phrases like "decolonial Black epistemic frameworks," but never leaves you hanging there confused. She puts things in the context of "The Bachelor" and the horror film "Get Out," which is used throughout the book to describe the ways that white supremacy exploits and consumes black and brown bodies as well as animals.

As with her great book "Aphro-ism" (co-authored with sister Syl Ko), one of my favorite parts is how she explains that intersectionality is not a good method for analyzing oppressions. Excerpt:

"Although activists are accustomed to taking “race,” “gender,” and “class” and making them intersect, most people don't question how they have been trained to understand what “race,” “gender,” and “class” are to begin with. The reason why Black women are excluded from both the anti-racist movement and the feminist movement is because our cultural understandings of what constitutes a “Black person” and what constitutes a “woman” are already tainted and separated at the root. The mainstream public thinks of a “Black person” as a man and a “woman” as a white female. Making these two spaces connect doesn't discursively birth a Black woman."

Or she discusses how black men are excluded from positions of power in the Black Lives Movement as well as from stories of race-based sexual violence. I didn't know, for example, that Trayvon Martin might've thought George Zimmerman was a rapist. And I didn't know the long history of whites literally consuming slaves, making them into purses and even eating them, and how taxidermy has been used as a symbol of white supremacy.

Anyway, if the following passage speaks to you, you'll love this book:

"How is it possible that we live in an era in which anti-racist activists are acutely aware of how white supremacy treats people of color “like animals,” but are discouraged from examining how literal animals are casualties of this racial caste system as well?"

While I loved the book from the beginning, I read it fairly slowly because of the big words. When I switched to the audio version, I raced through. Both were helpful — the former so I could highlight parts I wanted to think upon later, and the latter so I could simply enjoy the discussion of how our society deals with race, gender, and animals.

Grade: A

As for the narration, Dana Brewer Harris was perfect. She really helped the complex ideas go down smoothly.

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Loved the ending

Revisado: 01-27-20

I can’t help but imagine how these DCI Banks books would be different if written today (2020). The author doesn't shy from subjects like immigration backlash and how some men and women perceive sexual encounters very differently. For example, in "The Hanging Valley," a woman is raped by a man who thinks of himself as a kind and gentle person and DCI Banks describes the act as her having "surrendered" to him. This word is emphasized and it feels wrong to ears in 2020, and yet you can feel the police struggling to improve their responses to such attacks. The author also seems to disagree with the DCI's assessment -- I wish the victim had been strong enough to respond differently.

It's another interesting character-driven mystery as the faceless body of a hiker is found on a fell in northern England, and the nearby town's local movers and shakers seem to know more than they are telling.

I liked the way this one ended the most of the first four novels in the series -- where all of the explanation of who did it appears earlier and the final page is like a club to the head.

Bechdel test: Pass

Grade: B+

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Book from the late 80s but issues feel current

Revisado: 01-27-20

Police brutality and fears of terrorism -- this 1989 books feels a lot more current than it should, except for the music mentioned all being on cassette and the "terrorists" being white (Northern Irish and anti-Thatcher anarchists).

A Goodreads reviewer says that the early books in the DCI Banks series are more like Agatha Christie mysteries (except, I’d say, more character driven than Christie's) and only later do they become thriller plots. I concur. I've read one later "thriller" and I like these early ones just as much. Robinson really captures people and the physical and cultural places they live in, and I love that music is such an integral part to Banks' police work -- he intentionally uses his own personal car rather than checking out a department vehicle so he can listen to his tunes. And when his music actually helps him connect with a witness who otherwise would not have spoken to him, he feels vindicated -- which feels like the author responding to critics who may have disparaged his musical asides.

Anyway, a cop is stabbed to death during an anti-nuke protest and suspicion quickly falls on the local hippies. Here's an except that will give you a feel for whether this book is for you:

"Banks drove through Keighley and Haworth into open country, with Haworth Moor on his right and Oxenhope Moor on his left. Even in the bright sun of that springlike day, the landscape looked sinister and brooding. Banks found something magical about the area, with its legends of witches, mad Methodist preachers, and the tales the Bronte sisters had spun.

"Banks slipped a cassette in the stereo and Robert Johnson sang "Hellhound on My Trail." West Yorkshire was a long way from the Mississippi delta, but the dark, jagged edges of Johnson’s guitar seemed to limn the landscape, and his haunted doom-laden lyrics captured its mood."

Bechdel test: Pass

Grade: B+

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Excellent narrator

Revisado: 01-27-20

Some won't like this series because, well, it's written in the late 1980s so there are no female "coppers" and the characters are all very white and very British. And all of the women characters seem to be described in terms of their shagability (but this turns out to actually be a plot point here).

I got past these issues, perhaps because of my affinity for the TV series. And I’m hooked and I read the book fast, which is always a sign of a good one to me and despite its unmemorable title. I get impatient with writing that's manipulative, and this is anything but that. You are taken along on the investigation and it's a good ride. A body is found on the moors; the man seems beloved by everyone — and a teenage girl decides the police are lame and she's going to solve it herself.

Bechdel test: Pass

Grade: B+

The narrator on book #1 ("Gallow's View") was really good so I was worried when I saw a switch for book #2, but James Langton is excellent. He does women well and navigates the various accents easily (I personally couldn't tell a Yorkshire accent from a Welsh one, so he may do a horrible job for someone from the UK, but the accents are distinguished enough that as an American, I hear the characters from different areas of the country as distinct.)

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Takes vegan philosophy to a higher level

Revisado: 10-12-19

A fascinating examination of how racism and animal rights are intertwined even while most people who work in both philosophical areas intentionally try to keep the two ideas separate. Each chapter explores feminism, race, and animal rights from a different angle, and the overall book brings everything together in a path forward that I wasn't expecting. Animal rights books for years have basically been rehashing different aspects of Peter Singer's arguments in "Animal Liberation," but this one is fresh and vibrant and much more inspiring than most books on the topic.

There is some serious graduate level race theory academic language used throughout. Soon after using a jargon bomb, the authors use a simple metaphor or real world example that makes everything crystal clear. I point this out because I could see excerpts taken out of context that would make the book seem like a chore, but I never felt overwhelmed with talk about decolonizing one's diet in a white supremacist patriarchal society.

Also, it's worth noting that people often caricature thinkers who write about such topics as shaming and judgy, but that vibe never comes across. They sound more like sisters working through their own ideas, sharing their ideas, and asking you to join them.

So here are a few excerpts/ideas to give a feel for the book.

* The authors mention how it came out during the Rodney King trial that Los Angeles public officials in the justice system routinely used the acronym N.H.I. to refer to the rights of young black men being violated: "no human involved."

* "'Animal' is a category that we shove certain bodies into when we want to justify violence against them, which is why animal liberation should concern all who are minoritized, because at any moment you can become an 'animal' and be considered disposable."

* "Intersectionality is a wonderful and useful tool to help oppressed folks navigate current systems of oppression that we never created, but it was never designed to map out the future. This is, in part, why some movements that claim to be 'intersectional' feel stagnant; they keep dogmatically regurgitating the same analyses. Many intersectional movements assume liberation rests in finding newer intersections of oppression and creating new terms to add to the lexicon of oppression. These activists tend to replicate cosmetic diversity under the guise of intersectionality. Unfortunately, intersectionality doesn't really trouble the systems looming over us that we never created. Intersectionality maps out the world that has been imposed on us; it doesn't begin the process of mapping out the future."

Grade: A

P.S. Excellent narration.

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Truly thought-provoking

Revisado: 07-07-19

A short book whose acknowledgments were so good, they almost caused me to bump it up a star. It's so generous and filled with good will that you can’t help but realize how selfish most other acknowledgment sections are. And the list of scientists and philosophers who offered feedback is jaw-dropping in their prominence.

As for the book, it offers some of the clearest and most concise descriptions of free will and consciousness I’ve ever come across. The book's biggest contribution is a case for panpsychism — the idea that everything contains an element of consciousness, including the keys of my keyboard that I’m typing this with. Of course, she's not suggesting that all matter is capable of complex thought, just bits of consciousness, because otherwise, it's difficult to explain how consciousness appears. She takes apart the pieces of what we consider consciousness and explains how those traits are seen in things we don’t normally attribute consciousness to, such as how a "mother" tree can tell the difference between her genetic kin and unrelated trees of the same species — and can actively help them.

One especially intriguing part brings together the way a conscious observer today has the power to affect the path of a particle 10 billion years ago. And if you think this sounds absurd, Harris will agree with you and then offer convincing evidence to indicate it just might be true anyway.

Grade: A-

Narration: Clear, doesn't get in the way of the text.

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Not much happiness but if you like mathematics...

Revisado: 01-20-19

There is a gentle beauty to much of this book, infusing mathematics and Japanese baseball with grandeur. And while I didn’t dislike the book, I’d never recommend it to anyone. My own cultural ignorance may be related to my lukewarm feeling — emotions are not expressed so actions that might push the story forward are not pursued and melancholy blooms.

Because there is so little action, I couldn't help but be nagged by one of my pet peeves: The main female character has no interests of her own and only finds joy in life when living through the pleasures of the males around her. Still, I'll think about the book often as I recall amicable numbers and the strange relationship between 220 and 284.

Bechdel test: Fail — there are two female characters who speak but they don’t speak about anything other than a man.

Overall grade: B

Perfect narration.

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Essential listening

Revisado: 11-25-18

Essential reading. I recommend listening, though — each writer narrates their own entry, and their voices add so much to the telling that I can’t imagine experiencing the book any other way (although I got the Kindle version, too). The essays are not about the rapes and assaults themselves but generally about how the writers dealt with the aftermath. It's all so nuanced and powerful. Most writers didn’t tell anybody, let alone report, what happened — although there’s one particularly memorable essay where a teenage girl tells everyone and no one believes her. This book couldn't help but make me think about those who say America doesn’t have a rape culture and point to a country where women are stoned to death for being raped — “Now that’s a rape culture,” they say. In this book, so many of the women downplayed their own trauma because at least it wasn’t as bad as if it'd been a stranger with a gun, a gang rape, or a murder, too. Their suffering was prolonged because they couldn't stop thinking of others who had it worse. The suffering caused by this country’s pervasive sexual violence and aggression will continue as long as people are given credence who say it’s not that bad compared with what’s happening over there. Grade: A

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Not much world or character building

Revisado: 10-29-18

A standard sci-fi action novella with a tiny bit of world and character building. I'll try the next in the series to see if it goes anywhere, but right now, it’s just OK. (I started reading the Kindle version and imagined the “murderbot” as female in spirit but the Audible version has a male narrator. Did I miss mention of gender for this “security unit” with “organic parts” but no genitals?) Bechdel test: Pass. Grade: B

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