Does the Dog Die? A Brief Review of The Android’s Dream, by John Scalzi

I had so much fun reading this book! And that’s despite a major gripe with it, which I’ll discuss at the end.

One of the things I really liked about it was that it got almost all of the details about Washington DC right. (The exception? See the gripe at the end.) When you live in or near a book’s setting, you notice these details. Scalzi’s story is set in the future, where Earth’s State Department is working to avoid a war with a better-armed planet. Harry Creek, mid-level diplomat, ends up trying to save both the planet and his new love interest, Robin Baker. The book is alternately funny and clever, and Scalzi’s solution to the problems of inter-galactic conflict are inventive.

As far as animal lovers go, this book is Mostly Safe. There’s only one instance of violence against an animal character, and I found it jarring. It’s skippable, in my opinion. You can stop reading from the very last line of page 212 and pick up again about 2/3 of the way down page 213, with the sentence starting “Takk wedged his monstrous body…” Otherwise, the book was pretty good from an animal lover’s perspective. Robin Baker runs a pet store and deeply cares for her charges. A neighborhood of DC is known as “Dogstown” because it’s been taken over by an alien race of gregarious, cheerful carnivores. And there are sheep.

What there aren’t many of — and here comes the major gripe — is women, especially in places one would expect to find women. For example, the U.S. government hasn’t been this testosterone-saturated since the Hoover administration. I mean, come on — no women bureaucrats? At all? None in the State Department? An all-male army? In the future? I just came off of a NASA project where half the feds were women. Including the boss. So Scalzi gets everything right about DC except he turns it into an all-male enclave, aside from Robin. That’s the most unrealistic thing in the book (published in 2006), and it makes me question what planet he’s on. It’s one thing to believe our own sex is more interesting than the other and therefore favor them in telling stories and such, but this is just plain bizarre.

Does the Dog Die? A Brief Review of Francesca’s Party, by Patricia Scanlan

As a result of minor events from 2001 through 2003, I found myself in possession of several bags of free books in the mystery and romance genres. I gave away most of these but set aside a few for myself. One of the latter was Francesca’s Party, by Patricia Scanlan. Scanlan writes what I think of as mid-life chick lit. And chick lit differs from romance along two key lines: in chick lit, the woman’s career is at least as important as her love life; and chick lit heroines don’t always have an established relationship at the end of the story.

Francesca’s Party spends a lot of time watching Francesca, the protagonist, come to grips with the demise of her marriage. She moves on eventually and, as in standard chick lit, a career and a potential suitor enter the picture. But this book seemed to be mostly about selling a house. Francesca wanted to move. Kirwan, the philandering husband, wanted to keep his options open with Francesca and the old homestead. And they were rich and in their 40s.

The book was well-written and moderately entertaining, and there was a dog. Trixie was cuddled, fed, walked, and fussed over periodically. Kirwan even had the decency to miss her. So this book is SAFE for animal lovers.

However, it’s not quite as interesting as I wanted it to be. I also think Scanlan intended some scenes to be humorous, but for me she never got past “mildly amusing.” So I’m not going to recommend this book unless you’re really into reading about contemplation of divorce and real estate among rich, Irish 40-somethings. Oh, and villain is the woman with the best career. That wasn’t necessary. Why can’t the female villain ever have a middling career? You know, works at the bank and does a good job but isn’t a star? Reliable, with a good income but not rich? Now that would be novel.

Women and Work

Just the other day, I finished a cleverly written and entertaining book in which there were no women in the main characters’ offices. I thought, how weird. I’m now reading another book in which the career woman is “the bad guy.” Fortunately, these are anomalies, and I’ll leave the full critique for their individual reviews. But it did get me to thinking about how the workplace has changed over the past 30-some years.

Here’s what the Boomers — my generation — did: we swarmed. We swarmed into the colleges and universities, we swarmed into the workplace, and we made a strong female presence the norm. I’ve talked to other Boomer women who feel unappreciated by the following generations, or who regret that there’s still more to do, but none of that bothers me. We went to school and work for ourselves, and there was no way we were going to eliminate sexism in a generation. It was too much to do in too short a time. But we made it easy for our younger colleagues to follow us and take over where we left off. The glass ceiling will shatter someday, make no mistake about it. The women who will accomplish that are in school and the workplace now. We got them in.

A couple of vignettes from my own “brilliant career”:

I began my corporate life as a statistical analyst at a Fortune 500 company. My first day on the job, the woman I was replacing took me into the coffee room, showed me the coffee pot, and told me that since “the girls” took turns, I’d be making coffee for “the men” on Tuesdays. The following Tuesday, I accidentally-on-purpose broke the coffee pot. It was replaced a couple of weeks later. I made vile coffee for a couple of weeks, then accidentally-on-purpose broke the coffee pot again. It was never replaced. Some of the men would make comments to me about wanting coffee, and I’d look at them blankly, then duck around the corner and laugh. No woman ever made coffee in that department again. Yes, two coffee pots died at my hands for the cause of feminism and are now buried deep within a Massachusetts landfill. That was my first contribution; I was 23.

I decided it was time to be promoted. I worked hard, I worked long hours, I worked weekends. I developed new reports for “the men” and furthered their corporate cause. They kind of had to promote me, because otherwise they could never justify another promotion of a junior-level man. When I left, they replaced me with two people, both women who probably picked up where I left off — at least I hope so. I was 25.

There are a lot more vignettes, like the time I sat in a meeting with the Vice President of Marketing at my new employer and gasped “oh, my gawd, that’s awful!” when an ad agency muckety-muck proposed an insulting and demeaning print campaign targeting 20-something women (I was 27), the time a consultant refused to work with “that woman” (me, at 35) and by the end of the day told my boss that he wanted to work with me as much as possible in the future, etc., etc.

The point is, I’m not special. Just about every woman of my generation who worked outside the home has stories like mine. It was hard, it was infuriating, it was exhilarating, and it was all worth it. Whether or not succeeding generations appreciate what we did, we know what we accomplished. And now it’s their turn.

I’m self-employed. I can say “no”, I can set my boundaries, I can pursue goals that are unrestricted by a corporate infrastructure. I can blog in the middle of the afternoon, even! Things have loosened up, too. Unlike the 70s and 80s, I can now call my friends “the girls” without feeling like I’ve diminished them in some way. Women can look pretty at work instead of wearing dreary suits with bows that were really tie-substitutes. I had a wardrobe full of those at one time. Now I have work clothes that make me look like me, rather than like an aspiring man. It’s a big improvement.

We’ve made lots of progress, and there is lots of progress yet to be made. But we’re getting there.

Color, Golden Lion Tamarins, and an Internet Joke

I guess today’s post falls into the Random Thoughts category.

I thought this color hue test was difficult but fun. It’s certainly different.

Many years ago, I volunteered at the National Zoo, in Washington DC. One of the things I did was observe the golden lion tamarins every summer when the Zoo set them loose among some high trees. I have a lot of great photographs from that time, but this photo-essay from the Philadelphia Zoo is already up on the web and tells a story similar to mine.

Also … here’s one way to unsubscribe from an Internet list. I thought this was hilarious.

Reading History — Some Thoughts

Adapted from an e-mail I sent to a networking list, in response to a question about reading unbiased history books:

I was a history major in college and still read the occasional history book, but I’m not sure “unbiased” is possible. Recently, I read The Last Mughal, by William Dalrymple, a British author.  This was an excellent book about Mughal India, and I can recommend it to most readers of history (and in keeping with the theme of this blog, it’s MOSTLY SAFE for animal lovers). Is Dalrymple unbiased? Would an Indian author be unbiased? They can try, but will they succeed? Usually they don’t.

 

Much of what we view as “history” in this country is really the history of wars, first and foremost, with politics coming second. I think that’s a big reason history turns off some people — it’s rather flat in that regard. One of my professors had us read novels and autobiographies from the times and places we studied, because they provided us with a dimension that the traditional texts did not. This was some of the best advice I received in 4 years of college history classes. Think about 9/11, for example. There was an enormous emotional component to that, but in all likelihood history books will focus on the political developments, the rise of Al Qaeda, the subsequent conflicts in the Middle East, etc. Novels and memoirs will come much closer to capturing the emotions we all felt. I will give Dalrymple credit for having sought out the memoirs of women and civilians in order to flesh out his book, but it was still a story of politics (infused by religion) and war.

 

However, sometimes we just want an overview of what happened. For this, I particularly like the Traveller’s History series. These books are concise and well-written, and there is always a recommended reading section at the end in case you want to read further. I use the book on England to get up to speed any time we have tickets to one of Shakespeare’s historical plays. Shakespeare, of course, provides us with an emotional experience to go along with the facts from the history books. Having made some more Canadian friends online recently, I realized that my knowledge of their history was spotty, so I bought the Traveller’s History book on Canada. It’s 165 pages without the appendices and lists, and I think it will give me a decent background without my having to commit time to a 500-page recitation of political minutiae. Then again, it may make me want to buy such a book in the future.

Does the Dog Die? A Brief Review of The Blood of Flowers, by Anita Amirrezvani

I don’t get some of these book reviewers for major newspapers. I especially don’t get the Christian Science Monitor reviewer who compared this book to The Kite Runner. The two books are nothing alike — nothing! I can’t even imagine why someone would make that statement, unless they think that every book set in Iran is like every book set in Afghanistan. How ignorant! The two books couldn’t be more different.

I enjoyed The Blood of Flowers immensely, and I highly recommend it. Amirrezvani is a talented writer and storyteller, and she spent 9 years researching this tale of an unnamed narrator, a teenaged girl in seventeenth-century Persia. Left penniless and without a dowry after the tragic death of her father, she and her mother find themselves in the city of Isfahan, living with a distant relative and his grumpy wife. Despite a number of events that might crush the spirit of a less intrepid girl, the narrator persists in her quest for relative independence and dignity. She has an advantage in the form of a talent for rug design and crafting, but little else.

I have to say that I kept expecting this book to turn towards the unrealistic, and it never quite did. There was no deus ex machina coming in to rescue the girl, nor was there a neatly tied-up ending. That was satisfying. I did think throughout that the book had elements of chick lit, specifically a few sex scenes and a focus on the young woman’s career. Mostly, however, this was a well-written, well-told story with a realistic historical backdrop.

As for animals, there were horses and the usual farm animals. There were no unpleasant images involving animals aside from a tale of a hunter and an ass. That’s on page 211 in the first 3 paragraphs, which you can skip if you’re extremely sensitive to this kind of thing. Otherwise, this book is SAFE for animal lovers.

Does the Dog Die? A Brief Review of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, by Michael Chabon

Real life has been interfering with blogging. And reading.

However, I did read this book recently, for my book group. I would characterize it as literary fiction, though it won a science fiction award because the setting is invented. And it has a thread of the police procedural genre running through it. I thought it was good but not great, which was the majority opinion of the book group. One woman loved it, however. I am not fond of gloomy protagonists, nor do I like police procedurals, so it wasn’t something I would recommend to most people. However, we all have different tastes. And there were moments of humor, though I would never call it funny.

Anyway, this book is SAFE for animal lovers. There’s a brief scene with a morose dog, and a reference to a pet duck, but otherwise nothing happens regarding animals.