Note: Previous posts in this series were of all books read since the last upload (so as to leave enough time for building up a decent amount), but starting with this one they're just gonna be a list of books finished in the given month. This seems a bit more intuitive, and should help to encourage writing a little bit more frequently; besides, the last post was last month anyway.
Jeff VanderMeer (2006)
As with the previous novel, Shriek: An Afterword is, at every level, self-consciously literary. The framing device of its predecessor was a series of short stories and other documents set within the city of Ambergris, but here it's one long document. Janice Shriek, a minor character in the story of the painter Martin Lake, whose paintings were exhibited in her gallery, is assigned to write an afterword for her brother Duncan's Hoegbotton Guide to the Early History of Ambergris. Duncan was supposed to write a brief travel pamphlet, and produced a sprawling mess of history (and entry in City of Saints and Madmen) imbued with his own marginal theories on the Grey Caps who were slaughtered in the city's founding. Shriek was supposed to write a brief afterword to this barely-editable artifact, and produced a long, rambling account of the siblings' entire lives, as she understood it; believing him to be dead or otherwise forever gone, she rifled through his journals to do so.
But then there's another layer on top of that, which is that her brother came crawling back from the underground after she in turn vanished, and is now reviewing her manuscript, filling it with marginal notes; this in turn feeds into a third framing device, that the editor Sirin (for whom both worked) found the combined document, edited it down to a baseline level of coherence, and placed Duncan's notes in parentheses. Janice's account jumps forward and backward in time frequently, with little hints early on of where things are headed, and often misinterprets Duncan's thoughts and journal entries while he exasperatedly points this out in the margins. And running through all the personal drama of the pair's lives, of Janice's fall from grace and substance abuse, of Duncan's romantic failures and willingly colonizing his entire body with fungus, of the (eventually literal) war between rival business empires Hoegbotton & Sons and Frankwithe & Lewden, is the never-fully-explained Shift, the Grey Caps' project of flooding Ambergris with fungal life (more than was already aboveground, anyway) to accommodate their own mysterious ends.
Dee Brown (1970)
I found a copy of this (40+ years old!) while rifling through the small American frontier history section at my local library, and was pretty excited about it, having heard reference to Brown's book in Sherry Robinson's Apache Voices (2003). Admittedly those mentions were, to an extent, Eve Ball complaining about the incompleteness of the Apache section, and I more or less agree — Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is organized as a long series of quite short chapters about the fate of many different tribes after encountering European colonizers (displacement and near-to-total destruction, universally), with a mournful tone. As such, there's not really room in each chapter to go into that much detail (the longest sections are about Sitting Bull and the Lakota), and probably quite a few omissions escaped my notice. Off the top of my head, it claimed that mescal (food, not drink; the Mescalero Apache are named after this) is made from the leaves of the agave plant, when everything else I've read says it's the heart; and it was a hell of a lot more sympathetic to the Indian agent John Clum than David Roberts was in his longer account of the Apache wars, Once They Moved Like the Wind (1994).
At least as per Wikipedia the book has been criticized as focusing so heavily on this destruction that it plays into the whole “Vanishing Indian” myth, which is a fair perspective to take on it. But I do think it's still worth reading, as one of the earliest mainstream (white) academic perspectives against the United States' project of genocide.
Jeff VanderMeer (2009)
The final of the Ambergris books, after Shriek, and pretty radically different in tone from its predecessors. Where the others were dense and consciously literary, even academic, this is VanderMeer's take on a noir novel, within the setting of Ambergris. So while the other books had dense prose full of footnotes and parenthetical phrases (often referencing fictional works within the same world), this one has a consistent rhythmic style of brief, fragmented sentences. Staccato. Each little piece adding up to an image of the whole, like a comic strip. Artistic experimentation is broadly a good thing, so I'm not inclined to say this was a bad choice — it fits pretty well into the blighted landscape of Ambergris at this stage in the story: reconquered by the Grey Caps in one massive rush of slaughter as the river flooded, with much of the population now reliant on fungal drugs. Our detective (Finch) works for them, as the only civil authority left. Naturally he's trying to solve a murder.
There are still connections to the rest of the series, mainly Shriek, but I'll admit this style just didn't resonate with me as well as the earlier novels. I liked it, don't get me wrong, but it wasn't my favorite, and I probably wouldn't have read it if it weren't a sequel to the others; both because of that stylistic change, and because the latter half has a “save the world” style plot that felt disappointingly generic. I think I'll still go ahead and read some of the author's later work (the Southern Reach series is pretty well-known, to my knowledge), but this has dampened expectations for how well those will fit my taste. Still, at the end of the day, it's a perfectly competent dystopian novel, and I would recommend it on those lines.