You have my...

All's Quiet... I hope

I've got nothing for this morning. Probably nothing for tomorrow, either. Surreal Situations should still be on time, but everything else had just gotten swamped.

Music: Evil Ways

Blues Saraceno:

Music: Gonna Need A Grave

Book Review: 100 Ghost Soup

Hundred Ghost Soup
by Robert Chansky

From the official description:

A Beijing orphan is nearly eighteen. He wants a family and a name, if only for a while. He hacks adoption papers to get them.

He also gets: a long train ride into an empty station in a ghost town. Ghosts. Their leaders, calling themselves Mr. and Mrs. Vulpin, are his new parents. They are illusion-casting fox spirits, glamorous, clever, and trapped. They need him to free themselves of the ghosts.

Our hero works for them and accepts their flaws so long as they pretend to be a family. But then he discovers their wonderful meals are illusory. Are the Vulpins up to no good? And the People’s Republic of China will never allow spirits to possess a town. To save them all, he must travel back to Beijing, rifle the Politburo’s files, and find a Minister’s secrets. When he kindles the wrath of the People’s Liberation Army and the Minister of Fate himself, he must penetrate layers of illusions, decide whom he can trust, and learn to cook.

And then there is the matter of the soup’s main ingredient: him.

I just finished reading this about two weeks ago, and I think it's one of those books that really deserves a signal boost.

Unlike most urban fantasy books (which is broadly how I'd classify this one), Hundred Ghost Soup is set in China. The author handles the setting convincingly (at least to me, a white American who's never set foot in China), striking a nice balance between keeping the reader aware that this isn't a Western setting, and still making the setting comprehensible - without overexplaining. The plot is nicely layered and moves along quickly; there are ghosts, illusions, dreams, and even bits of reality here and there, but while it's sometimes confusing these things are never disruptive. Trying to figure out which is which, in fact, is a large part of the story's charm. The main character is likable and sympathetic, but still flawed and very, very human; the supporting characters are also handled well and fairly. From a technical standpoint, the book is excellent: unlike a great many self-published or even small press books (and I believe Hundred Ghost Soup is the latter) on the market, the editing is all but flawless. I simply didn't see any typos, mis-used words, incorrect grammar, or any of the dozen other kinds of technical mistakes that tend to yank me out of the story and disrupt my reading.

This is a very much a coming-of-age book. It's the story of a young man striking out on his own, using his skills and acquiring new ones, learning more about himself, and finding his place in the world. That said, the approach is anything but typical; Hundred Ghost Soup is fun, funny, sometimes eerie, and often fascinating. If you're looking for an enjoyable, unusual read ten I'd highly recommend giving this one a try. (I enjoyed reading it as an adult, but it would be perfectly suitable reading for high school or even middle school.)

Amazon | Barnes & Noble

Meme: We Are Writers

Text:
"We consume too much coffee, tea, and wine. We create worlds, people, conversations, relationships. We are the rulers of the mental wards inside our heads. We are authors, hear us procrastinate our roars!" ~Audra Trosper

Enthusiasm Gap

From a comment on Facebook:
"Much of this country is extremely frustrated by the inability of the government to take care of the middle and lower class. Hillary represents to a lot of people the class responsible for that failure. That was working against her from the very start and she never addressed it to the American people in a way that was convincing. She simply didn't represent a meaningful change in the states where it mattered. That's why her vote totals were lower than Obama's. The data basically tells you people just didn't show up where they needed to for her."

Meh. Maybe? I mean, you switch from a charismatic 40-something president to a... seventy-something? ...woman, you're going to have an enthusiasm gap. You nominate a candidate who's talking about policy and what can actually be done instead of making "bold" promises that nobody could possibly keep, you're going to have an enthusiasm gap. I'm not sure you can blame Hillary Clinton for that, especially since I'd generally consider a realistic outlook and a desire to present it honestly as, well, Things That Should Be Virtues.

But those virtues cost her votes. That's not all that cost her votes; belonging to the same party as the encumbent also cost her votes, being a woman cost her votes, years of Republican demonization cost her votes, agreeing that Black Lives Matter actually had a point cost her votes.

It isn't just an enthusiasm gap. It's also a perspective gap. Those of the Trump voters that I've actually spoken to (and admittedly, that's a small-as-hell sample size) not only genuinely thought that she was lying, corrupt, and definitely guilty of *something* even if we hadn't quite found out what yet. They also thought that Washington was hopelessly corrupt, even while they cheerfully voted Republican up and down the ticket. They thought that minorities were imagining racism, or maybe manufacturing examples of it to gain advantage for themselves. They genuinely believed that Trump was a bold outsider, and as such was the only person who stood any chance of "draining the swamp".

I don't know how to argue with that. I don't know how to react when someone presents me with "facts" that seem self-evidently wrong, but are just as self-evidently right to them. I don't know where to go when we can't even agree on how to decide on what actually constitutes a fact.

I'm not in touch with the ones who voted for Trump on the basis of open, proud racism. The ones I've spoken to seem, instead, simply to be blind to it: it's horrible, so naturally nobody would actually *do* that, so naturally minorities et al must be making it up. They're not bad people; they just want to get along... and that's precisely the problem: (what I see as) their blind spot is going to hurt an awful lot of my friends and co-workers, and possibly them too, if Paul Ryan gets his way.