Pakistan (or some third party claiming to be as Pakistan) has vowed to drop a nuclear bomb on Mumbai / Bombay (the book’s agnostic as to which name it prefers) on a particular day, and the city is emptying of citizens. Those who remind behind are in perpetual danger from gangs of religious extremists, both Hindu and Muslim, slaughtering anyone they come across from the other faith. Statistician Sarita, hunting for her husband Karun, struggles to find safety in a world gone mad, while also looking back on her courtship with Karun. Soon she joins forces with a Muslim named Jaz, who is looking for Karun for reasons of his own.

(Sex reasons. Spoiler! But, okay, it’s pretty obvious pretty quickly, the reason Karun doesn’t want to have sex with Sarita. You and I were not born yesterday. We are men of the world.)

Though Suri’s conflict-torn India is extreme, it’s also hideously plausible (particularly if you recently read a book about Partition and then a book about the Indian subcontinent after Partition, AS I DID). And Suri describes his horrors matter-of-factly, neither eliding the evil that lurks in the hearts of men nor lingering voyeuristically on the details. It helps that the main characters have a driving quest (find Karun!) to which everything else is incidental — we can’t linger too long with any one group, because Sarita and Jaz have to move on, following clues to their beloved scientist.

The book alternates between Sarita’s perspective and Jaz’s, with Karun a slight cipher between them. Jaz is vivid and engaging, utterly frank about what he wants and how he will pursue it, and if Sarita’s a little more circumspect, she’s still clear in her goals and desires. The book’s weakness is failing to make Karun seem worth any of this. I wanted Jaz and Sarita to find him because that’s what they wanted, but I also kept thinking, You could both do better.

This would have been an excellent read for Aarti’s A More Diverse Universe event, so bookmark it for next year! Or read it before then — there’s never a wrong time for a novel of apocalyptic India!

Thanksgiving’s this week, so I’ll be away from the lovely internets for a few days partying with my kinfolk. If you’re in America, happy happy Thanksgiving, and I hope you do not have to travel far or argue with crazy relatives this holiday! If not, have a wonderful late-November week, and I’ll see you on the other side.

The post The City of Devi, Manil Suri appeared first on Reading the End.

Are you familiar with the Kennewick Man? Spend some time on his Wikipedia page — it’s a fascinating story — and then read about why the scientists should feel like dicks now.

Awesome zookeepers awesomely doing Chris Pratt’s raptor-taming move.

Poetry coopted for Supernatural fanfic: An interview with poet Richard Siken that just fills me with joy for the utter weirdness of the world we live in.

A linguist explains how we convey sarcasm typographically. LANGUAGE FINDS A WAY.

Alyssa Rosenberg on how white supremacists in pop culture largely exist so that other white folks can defeat them. Heroically.

How royalties work on Kindle Unlimited vs. Oyster. (Also, Scribd? What about Scribd? Can we get some information on Scribd?)

Questions about slavery asked of a (white) tour guide at a plantation home.

ZOO (is a show I want to watch)!

The impact of sexist “jokes”:

The evidence, they said, showed that joking reinforces existing prejudice. If you joke about women and get away with it, those who are hostile to women will see this as social sanction for their views and behavior.

Enjoy your 4th of July weekend if you’re in America, and if not, have a very nice and regular weekend!

The post Moral amnesty: A links round-up appeared first on Reading the End.

(This is Science.)

After On Sal Mal Lane, I had some vagueish, unanswered questions about the Sri Lankan civil war, which made me more inclined to pick up another book dealing with the same topics (such as Island of a Thousand Mirrors), which in its turn clarified some of my questions (Buddhist, Hindu, and Christian; yes, but Dutch more than Portuguese; you really can’t; an independent state encompassing various coastal provinces; that they would ally with Tamils from India and take over all the Sinhalese stuff), which in turn has made me interested in reading further books set in Sri Lanka in the future. The more you do know about a topic (unless it sucks, like economics), the more you want to know. And that is a good thing about reading diversely.

Island of a Thousand Mirrors tells the stories of two Sri Lankan girls growing up as the war between Sinhalese and Tamil reaches its crisis point. Yasodhara falls a little in love with her Tamil upstairs neighbor, though such a relationship could never really be; and Saraswathi watches her brothers, one after the other, be taken off to train as Tamil Tigers.

More broadly, the arc of the story was predictable. Yasodhara lives a safer life, because she is Sinhala, and because her family can afford to leave for America. Saraswathi has no means of escaping her life of danger and death, and she becomes (in a not-particularly-inventive narrative transformation) the sort of soldier her family has learned to fear. You can probably make a fair guess at what happens from there.

But even with that drawback, Island of a Thousand Mirrors was a very good read in many ways. Munaweera’s writing is lovely, and she has a knack — which feels not quite yet fully developed and promises gains in her future career — for the striking juxtaposition.

They set fires on front lawns, threw in furniture and children over the wailing of mothers. They committed the usual atrocities in the usual ways, but here was something unexpected and incongruous. In their earth-encrusted, callous fingers, they clutched clean white papers, neatly corner-stapled. Census accounts, voting registrations, pages detailing who lived where and most important, who was Tamil, Burgher, Muslim, or Sinhala. And in these lists was revealed precision and orchestration in the midst of smoky, charred-flesh-smelling  chaos.

I have had enough now for a while of painful fiction about civil wars. (My tolerance is low.) If anyone can recommend a good history of Sri Lanka, whether of the civil wars in the late twentieth century or a broader, all-encompassing history that gets to the colonialism stuff a bit more, please recommend in the comments. I want a proper history, though, not something along the narrative nonfiction lines. I want some intense endnoting or I cannot be satisfied.

The post Review: Island of a Thousand Mirrors, Nayomi Munaweera appeared first on Reading the End.

I like this book because although the set-up would make it seem like a battle between Cliff and Robin, the true winner in all this is SCIENCE. I won’t say more because I don’t want to ruin the end for those people who believe, contrary to the findings of SCIENCE, that ends are ruinable. I will just say that the last scene of the book made me very happy while also staying true to everything that had led up to it. The book is about devotion to science and how it can be sullied or diluted, and it was great to have the book conclude that the characters care about science first and most.

Allegra Goodman has a keen, observant eye for human interaction and subtext. Occasionally this got too text-y — I am smart and could have deduced what wasn’t being said from what was — but overall she did a great job of describing the multitudinous undercurrents that exist between these scientists in this lab. The action of the book is small, but the book feels large; there is more at stake than just this one set of experiments in this one lab. Unfortunately I can’t quote much from the book to depict this, as it depends heavily on context for its impact, so you will just have to trust me that Goodman is good at teasing out the complicated motives and emotions of her characters.

I could have done with — but this is a personal preference and not Allegra Goodman’s responsibility — more exploration of the gender issues at play here. This doesn’t go unmentioned, the question of women in science and the pressures there and stereotype threat and the additional trope of the Bitter Ex-Girlfriend and how that weighs into people’s reactions to Robin. I just think it’s an interesting thing, and it could have been explored more. Goodman mostly leaves it alone, which I think it’s fine, since women doing science is unremarkable and there’s no need to make it remarkable. I just like stories that talk about gender dynamics.

Oh, but there was this one thing thrown casually in there, and I’m going to gripe about it because I am loyal. One of the two people who runs the lab has a wife who’s working on a book about invalids, and her book is mentioned a few times in passing. And in one of these passing mentions there’s this casual drive-by insinuation that Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s illness was psychosomatic. Whoa whoa WHOA, Allegra Goodman. Just because you do not know what she had doesn’t mean she had nothing.

So we’re in a fight now.

Even though I liked (-not-loved) her book. Even though the true winner was SCIENCE, and I too want science to win.

(We’re not really in a fight. Only a little bit.)

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