Bourgeois Book Club

Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor by Tad Friend

Part memoir, part anthropological study, part family history, part therapy,Tad Friend examines what it means to be a "WASP" through the lens of his life and the history of his family. Charming, taciturn, reticent, boozy, snobby, conscientious, conservative-with-a-small-c, WASPs are a declining, but historically important, class that deserve, and here get, more than just to be the butt of jokes about Yale. Class expectations and emotional dysfunction thwarted and made unhappy many members of his family, from serial marriers to complete psychopaths. But they were also cultured, educated, and deeply rooted, with a sense of tradition and duty.

Though not fabulously wealthy, at least not anymore, his family were hardly paupers. Indeed, one could very well balk at feeling any sympathy for a man such as Friend, who attended elite private schools and Harvard and traveled around the world for a year and spent six figures on therapy, just to name a few of his perks, because his mother didn't hug him enough (his mother does loom large). But Friend is a good enough writer, and self-aware enough not to try to play the "poor me" card, to avoid that. This isn't really a plea for sympathy, but simply a reflection of and coming to grips with his personal and familial history, and his peculiar cultural baggage.

Funny, interesting, and sometimes melancholy, Cheerful Money is a fascinating exploration of the traditional American elite.

The House on Durrow Street by Galen Beckett

Sequel to The Magicians and Mrs. Quent. Jane Austen meets Bronte meets Lovecraft in this tale of magic, secrets, intrigue, and planetary mechanics set in a fantasy Regency England.

Servant of the Underworld by Aliette de Bodard

Medieval Europe, with magic and elves thrown in, is the standard template of the fantasy setting. This isn't a denigration; a lot of people have written a lot of fantastic stories in such worlds, and many have played with and inverted a lot of its standard tropes to wonderful effect. But we rarely get fantasy based in a non-Western setting and grounded in a different culture, and hardly ever does anything set in Mesoamerica get written. Servant of the Underworld changes that, introducing us to a world of jade and obsidian, where gods walk the world, mortals walk the divine realms, and blood powers the universe.

Servant of the Underworld's is not just unique in its setting, but in its genre-bending: it is not just a fantasy, but a historical fantasy, and not just a historical fantasy, but a historical fantasy mystery. Set in an Aztec Empire at its zenith, the blood of sacrifices fueling the magic of its priests, it beings with a relatively simple question: who murdered Priestess Eleuia? It's up to Acatl, High Priest of the Dead and estranged brother of the main suspect, to find out. What he finds is that Eleuia and her murder is just the center of a much vaster and more dangerous mystery and finding her killer is only the beginning of a quest to save the Fifth World itself from destruction.

In the backdrop of these grisly and momentous events, we're introduced to a totally different culture and its people, all while being reminded by Acatl's broken and dysfunctional family, the politics of the imperial court, and the human capacity for cruelty that no matter where we came from, we're all all-too-human.

The next book in the series, Harbinger of the Storm, comes out in January, and I for one can't wait to return to the shadows of Tenochtitlan.

Trying to Please: A Memoir by John Julius Norwich

One of my obscure little enthusiasms over the years has been the Byzantine Empire. Thus, the name John Julius Norwich was a familiar one to me, his books on Byzantium being the most well-known of the admittedly small supply of popular-level on the subject. I was thus intrigued to see this memoir of his in the bookstore. Being an Anglophile, and having a bit of a weakness especially for toffs, I dove right into this recounting of an upper-class life.

Name-dropping hardly describes Norwich's style. Name-anviling is really more like it. He's met and known a dazzling array of people, though I admit even with footnotes it's hard to keep them all straight or even figure out who the hell they even are. John Julius Cooper, Viscount Norwich, to give the author his full and proper title, has moved in only the most select and elite circles for his entire life.

It isn't surprising, then, that there's a whiff of old-fashioned British small-c-conservatism to him. Many is the time in the book when he bemoans modern Health & Safety preventing such jolly good pasttimes as drunk driving, the ghastliness of modern church architecture (a subject I actually wholeheartedly agree with), or New Labour. But, then, he is a peer, a former Foreign Office official, and the son of brilliant, well-connected people with friends like Winston Churchill. I suppose a bit of snobby codgerness is to be expected and forgiven.

He's a terrific writer, engaging and witty and not afraid to shy away from both the good and the bad, though not prone to salaciousness or gossip, sometimes to the frustration of the reader who wants a bit more of the juicy stuff. But he's certainly had an interesting life, full of travel and fascinating people, and it is certainly worth reading about.

Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks

As someone who had a visceral and perhaps-irrational dislike of the previous Culture novel by Banks, Matter, I was slightly leery of reading this new one, but I needn't have worried because it is FUCKING AWESOME. I need to reread Consider Phlebas and The Player of Games to make a true determination of the favorite rankings, but it's definitely up there.

If you've never read any of the Culture novels, don't worry: it's more a world Banks plays in than an actual series where you have to go in order to understand anything. Each book more or less stands on its own, though reading them all does add to one's enjoyment and the depth of detail. (A good primer for the Culture and its universe by the wonderful professional nerds at iO9 is here, if you're interested but don't have the time right this second to read all the other books.)

Perhaps the most ambitious Culture novel yet, Surface Detail is like an intricately woven carpet, weaving together many threads that especially at first don't seem to go together or even touch, but which are crucial to the larger design. An array of vibrant characters each contribute their part: Lededje, a tattooed slave given a literal second chance at life; Veppers, the evil corporate raider who owned Lededje; Prin, a pachydermoid social reformer and crusader who braves Hell itself for what he believes in; Chay, Prin's fellow crusader and mate who is (again, literally) transformed by Hell; Yime, a special agent for the dead; Falling Outside the Normal Moral Constraints, a sentient, more-than-a-little-deranged warship out for some fun/bloodshed; and Vatueil, a solider of the War in Heaven, willing to go to any lengths to free the damned. These characters and the disparate threads of their plotlines eventually weave together, though not always in the ways you expect, to give a satisfying, if not always sunshiney, conclusion.

What I think I love most about Banks, and which is on full display here, is he can write a novel combining heaps of technobabble, sociological speculation, and a rollicking good story full of action and intrigue that also just so happens to be a heavy meditation on death, truth, identity, and morality. What does it mean to be immortal? How can we tell what is real? Just what is the difference between reality and the perfect simulation? Are we more than a collection of biochemical processes that can be recorded and replayed? What are we willing to sacrifice for the good of millions? How far will we go to get revenge on those who have wronged us?

Oh, and on a purely superficial note: the cover is reallllllllllllllllly pretty.