#Francis Spufford

[laiqualaurelote]

I have just finished Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford and it has rewired my brain. I can't remember the last time I consumed such a perfect piece of hard-boiled detective fiction that nevertheless does completely original things with the genre; it is to noir what The English (2022) is to Westerns. It's set in an alternate Jazz Age America where, due to a historical divergence in the strain of smallpox that first reached North America, Indigenous peoples continue to hold power in Cahokia in the Roaring Twenties. (There is a cameo here from the cultural anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, who among many other things happens to be the father of Ursula K. Le Guin; it took me a while to figure out that Spufford dedicated Cahokia Jazz to her. This is the level of nerdery you can expect from what is otherwise a very fine piece of pulp fiction).

Anyway tl;dr I hope this gets made into a film someday so they can cast Chaske Spencer as the lead. I think what the world needs is Chaske Spencer as a hard-boiled detective, the man who must go down these mean streets but who is not himself mean, and who is also secretly a talented jazz pianist. I feel this would be such a gift.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"I resisted its lessons. The student wizard Ged cracks open the surface of the night and releases a shadow version of himself into the world, a Jungian clot of personal darkness, that hunts him till he turns to face it and incorporates it back into himself where it belongs, by naming it with its true name: his own. I resolutely thought of the shadow as a bogey alien to Ged, and wondered why he wasn’t different at the end of the book when that dark thing was inside him. You cannot outrun yourself, the story said: a deeply unwelcome thought to me. I didn’t go to the worlds of story to be reminded that on a dark road your anger and your cruelty pace just behind you, daring you to turn your head, unless you let them travel safely within you."

- Francis Spufford on Ursula K. Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea, in The Child That Books Built (2002), p. 84–85.

[incorrect-wormquotes]

This is a pretty average year. Worse than last year, better than the next.

Dinah

[bookymcbookface]

(From Francis Spufford’s “The Child That Books Built”)

[bookcoversonly]

Title: The Child That Books Built | Author: Francis Spufford | Publisher: Faber & Faber (2018)

[christinedepizza]

"Returned officers of polar expeditions could expect to see their narratives accepted by prestigious publishers; there was regular coverage of expeditions in the serious reviews, including condensed extracts of those narratives; and explorers, who had perhaps set off grateful for a full-pay posting in the shrunken peace- time Navy, found themselves celebrities when they docked in England. Doors opened for them into new social worlds: London society, the literary scene, the kind of clubs to which a hero might be admitted where a simple Navy man might not. The Navy was, anyway, in the process of gentrifying. Though it remained a distinct caste among the other subtle castes of genteel English life, it was shedding the rough-and-ready image of the eighteenth century, along with the social mobility that meant naval officers were not always fit for drawing-rooms. The Arctic captains were themselves of the generation that would cease to speak of money in public. And drawing-rooms received them. [...] The social success of the explorers contributed to the imaginative visibility of exploration. People from the world of the arts who had not particularly noticed the polar coverage in the journals, or paid much attention to the increasing presence of polar books on John Murray’s excellent list, might find themselves sharing a mantelpiece with an explorer at a party; and the Arctic made a social entrance into their minds. Questions could be asked. What is an iceberg like, sir? Is it true that some are a most beautiful blue? Even those fastidious types who let a person’s standing determine the mental houseroom they gave a subject might now, seeing an explorer deep in conversation with the unimpeachable Lady L—, discover that exploration was rude and barbarous only in an exciting way. One might go over oneself. One might permit oneself to be thrilled. I understand you ate your boots, Captain: how remarkable."

I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination, Francis Spufford

[justforbooks]

A thrilling tale of murder and mystery in a city where history has run a little differently -- from the best-selling author of Golden Hill. In a city that never was, in an America that never was, on a snowy night at the end of winter, two detectives find a body on the roof of a skyscraper. It's 1922, and Americans are drinking in speakeasies, dancing to jazz, stepping quickly to the tempo of modern times.

But in this 1922, things are a little different. Beside the Mississippi, the ancient indigenous city of Cahokia has lived on. It is now a teeming industrial metropolis, containing every race and creed.

Among them, peace holds. Just about. But that body on the roof is about to spark off a week of drama that will spill the secrets of this altered world, and bring it, against a soundtrack of jazz clarinets and wailing streetcars, either to destruction or rebirth.

The multiple award-winning Francis Spufford returns, with a lovingly-created, richly pleasure-giving, epically-scaled, wise-cracking, bone-breaking novel set in a golden age of wicked entertainments.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[writerly-ramblings]

Books Read in November:

1). Antarctica (Claire Keegan)

2). Dottie (Abdulrazak Gurnah)

3). Almost English (Charlotte Mendelson)

4). Things to Come (Hester Styles Vickery)

5). The Dear Departed (Brian Moore)

6). The Child that Books Built (Francis Spufford)

7). Mr. Fox (Helen Oyeyemi)

8). Wild (Cheryl Strayed)

[thehappyscavenger]

Books Read December 2022

Light Perpetual by Francis Spufford

This was pitched to me as more of a speculative fiction concept and while the initial pitch is sort of in that vein it’s actually more slice-of-life describing the immense social changes Londoners have experienced from WWII to the early 2000s. I actually enjoyed this quite a bit. 

When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill

The concept of this sounded SO fabulous. It’s an alternate history book where abused or subjugated women can transform into dragons and follows a period in the 1950s when there was a mass dragoning event. But I didn’t find it that well thought out as historical fiction and anytime Barnhill tried to examine how this would have worked intersectionally it falls apart. Also some passages just sound so goofy. I was not surprised to find afterwards Barnhill used to mostly write for kids. 

The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot

I mostly don’t like the Eliot books I read and I have no idea why I started this one except that one day I was craving the lush maximalism of Victorian era writers. OMG this is truly the first Eliot book I’ve connected with. It’s mostly about a small town brother and sister who undergo terrible things in life and talks a lot about debt both monetarily and emotionally. Incredibly interesting. I loved Thomas Hardy as a teen and this is the first time I can really see how he was influenced by Eliot. This work is melodramatic, sure, but also incredibly complex morally. The ending was sadly disappointing but everything until that point was fascinating. 

How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu

This is a novel-in-stories set in a future world hit hard by a pandemic. I liked a lot of the stories but the end kind of fell apart and was over-explainy. Still an enjoyable read overall. A lot of the stories dealt with parent child relationships and grief and those are things that really interest me. 

[sea-changed]

The thing that makes Spufford's woldbuilding so good in Cahokia Jazz is that everything is only one step to the left of our own timeline--he never has to sit down in the mud of his own universe and start drawing pictures because a single breezing reference is enough. (I thought of this especially when he introduced the Radical Party and mentioned them branching off from the Republicans--there you go! The reader understands immediately who they are and what they're about, and Spufford can get on with his story. And this is only one of many examples of this in the novel; he does it really, really nicely.)

But also--the thing that makes Spufford's worldbuilding so frustrating is also the fact that everything is only one step to the left of our own timeline. You're telling me that the Mississippian culture survived and thrived and the subsequent world is only that little bit different? I had this reaction before even starting the actual text of the novel, looking at the alt-history U.S. map in the front, and throughout the whole rest of the book I couldn't stop thinking about it. I won't say the world Spufford created seemed thin, because it didn't--that's the excellence of this style and how he deployed it, because the surface of Spufford's prose and of Cahokia itself was so rich and textured. But it was I thought very shallow--once you tried to step down beneath that surface there's nothing there, because in order to make an invented history explicable it can only be a little bit invented, and the premise Spufford used as his jumping-off point was just too big.

(I don't read a lot of alt-history, so maybe I am just relitigating a known problem or stepping into a hotly-debated mire, but I found it to be a fascinating catch-22--especially for a writer like Spufford, who is so good at history and stories and telling history as stories.)

[pazodetrasalba]

A Taste of Freedom

Dear Caroline:

Just one day late, here are some considerations on the last of my Carolingian reads and recommendations (and also making progress with Too Like the Lightning). I concur that the book is delightful to read: the author shows a very seductive, somewhat baroque and leisurely language in each and every page which makes it a little work of art - in view of that fact that we're in the 18th century, perhaps a metaphor for those antique pocket watches I so very much love, their tiny gears embracing metallic cogs and wheels, and the occasional semi-precious stone, a melding of quaint, industrial and lovely which seldom pair well together. But I digress: the language was nice and the plot was artistically done. Alas, for all the joy it has given me, I would happily exchange it for a glance at your delight, and at your hands gesticulating excitedly.

That old New York long ago ceased to exist, and yet I imagine that more than once you treaded on its shadows, when you yourself were working in the Big Apple. I don't know if Jane Street's offices are in Manhattan, but it would be apt, with your footsteps running from time to time upon the unseen cobbles of long-disappeared Golden Hill street.

I am tempted to take a look at Digital Gold -gold always tempts, doesn't it-, although I have already gone through some books on cryptocurrencies, and I would not be able to pool the synergies of the double bind you suggest. But I do love cities -generally, from a distance- and my next digital foray is likely to be Glaeser's Triumph of the City, a pean to the spaces where, since not so long ago, live more than half of the planet's residents.

Talking of shadows, I tend to see them behind every intelligent and engaging woman I read about, and Tabitha isn't going to be an exception. I see her as a mirror of yourself in those words that Mr. Smith exchanges with her in their last meeting:

Quote:

“And I am trying to tell you that I like you. ‘Despite all the flaws I have, according to you?’ ‘Despite them; because of them; who knows? I like all of you. I like the bird and I like the cage. I like the polished mind and the rough tongue. I like the tearing claws and the warm hands. I like the monster and I like the girl.’ ‘I do not like myself very much,’ said Tabitha painfully. ‘I know.”

Francis Spufford, Golden Hill

[homelovers-tales]

He led him through a door in the panelling, and Smith found himself in what was plainly the hall-way of the merchant's private residence, for it ran perpendicular to another street-door, whence fell the faint remaining light of the day; and where the counting office had smelled of ink, smoke, charcoal and the sweat of men, this had the different savour of waxed wood, food, rosewater and tea-leaves, with a suggestion of (what is common to both sexes) the necessary-house. At the end of the hall a stair spiralled steeply up in the dark. At each turn it passed a window but, the outlook being to the east, little came in through the glass but roofs and spars in black outline, upon the ground of a slice of heaven but one degree brighter. Stray gleams of polish showed the placing of the banisters and newel posts; picture frames set faint rumours of gold around rectangles of darkness or curious glitters too shadowed to make out, as if Lovell had somehow collected, and drowned, a stairwell's-worth of distant constellations. This being Lovell's home, it might be expected that the merchant would put off the weight of business, and resume the legerity of domestic life, yet on the first step he paused for a moment, and Smith saw the level of his shoulders fall, as if they had taken on them some effort, perhaps the effortful thought of the thousand pounds, and Smith anticipated a slow, perhaps a wheezing, ascent.[...]The long room it opened on did have western windows, a pair of them letting in the day's last glow of light, rather the silver of rain than of the metal, streaked with a faint crimson admitting to the distant existence of the sun; brilliant light to Mr Smith, and it burnished with borrowed brilliance the faces of the three young women in the room, plain-dressed among the plain furniture.

Golden Hill, Francis Spufford

[coldfruitwater]

the couple of pages about wilson in i may be some time are . auuhghhhh im really really normal about this guy

[jesslovesboats]

BECAUSE YOU DEMANDED IT, I'm back with more Sad Boat Books for Sad Boat People! But first, some words.

I never dreamed that a silly little graphic I made for some friends would generate this much response on twitter and here, but I'm overjoyed that it resonated with so many of you! I read every single comment and tag, and by far my favorites are all of the people who say some variation of "I thought I was the only one who loved these books." We are NOT alone, there are literally thousands of people who reblogged or retweeted this list-- people of all ages and backgrounds and gender identities. Sad Boat isn't just for old white men! I was also delighted to hear from other librarians who are using this in displays and for reader's advisory. PLEASE go forth and do so with my blessing, nothing would make me happier! I was recently laid off from my librarian job as part of a restructuring under new management (don't worry about me, it sucks right now but I'm gonna be fine), so I would love to think that I'm still contributing to the library ecosystem while I'm out of commission. I would also love to keep making these lists (including one that deals with Sad Boat fiction and one with recommendations for other types of media), and I've never had more time to do it, so if you have suggestions, please drop them in my inbox!

Anyway, enough of that-- here are more books! I've either read all of these, or the recommendation came from someone I trust, so read with confidence!

First Hand Accounts

The Quiet Land: The Antarctic Diaries of Frank Debenham edited by June Debenham Back

The Voyage of the Discovery by Robert Falcon Scott

Farthest North by Fridtjof Nansen

Endurance by F.A. Worsley

Boats boats boats!

Franklin's Lost Ship: The Historic Discovery of HMS Erebus by Alanna Mitchell and John Geiger

The Voyages of the Discovery: The Illustrated History of Scott's Ship by Ann Savours

HMS Terror: The Design, Fitting, and Voyages of a Polar Discovery Ship by Matthew Betts

The SS Terra Nova (1884-1943): Whaler, Sealer, and Polar Exploration Ship by Michael C. Tarver

You'll learn about the Ross Sea Party and you'll like it

Shackleton's Heroes by Wilson McOrist

Shackleton’s Forgotten Men: The Untold Tragedy of the Endurance Epic by Lennard Bickel

The Ross Sea Shore Party 1914-1917 by R.W. Richards

The Lost Men by Kelly Tyler-Lewis*

Polar Castaways by Richard McElrea and David Harrowfield*

*These were on my other list, but this is my graphic and I'll do what I want

Sad Airships and Planes

From Pole to Pole: Roald Amundsen's Journey in Flight by Garth James Cameron

N-4 Down: The Hunt for the Arctic Airship Italia by Mark Piesing

Antarctica's Lost Aviator by Jeff Maynard

Disaster at the Pole: The Tragedy of the Airship Italia and the 1928 Nobile Expedition to the North Pole by Wilbur Cross

More Shackleton Content

Shackleton: A Life in Poetry by Jim Mayer

Shackleton's Last Voyage by Frank Wild

The Quest Chronicle: The Story of the Shackleton-Rowett Expedition by Jan Chojecki

Shackleton's Forgotten Expedition: The Voyage of the Nimrod by Beau Riffenburgh

Polar Partners

Snow Widows by Katherine MacInnes

Polar Wives: The Remarkable Women Behind the World's Most Daring Explorers by Kari Herbert

Widows of the Ice by Anne Fletcher

Sad Boat Graphic Novels

Shackleton: Antarctic Odyssey by Nick Bertozzi

The Worst Journey in the World- The Graphic Novel Volume 1: Making Our Easting Down adapted by Sarah Airriess from the book by Apsley Cherry-Garrard*

How To Survive in the North by Luke Healy

*This was also on my other list, but this is my graphic and I'll do what I want

Biographies

Scott of the Antarctic by David Crane

Ice Captain: The Life of J.R. Stenhouse by Stephen Haddelsey

Cherry: A Life of Apsley Cherry-Garrard by Sara Wheeler

Birdie Bowers: Captain Scott's Marvel by Anne Strathie

Roald Amundsen by Tor Bomann-Larsen

Miscellaneous sad boat books that are well worth your time

I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination by Francis Spufford

Fatal North: Adventure and Survival Aboard USS Polaris, The First US Expedition to the North Pole by Bruce Henderson

Barrow's Boys: A Stirring Story of Daring, Fortitude, and Outright Lunacy by Fergus Fleming

Pilgrims on the Ice by T.H. Baughman

The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture by Michael F. Robinson

Ghosts of Cape Sabine by Leonard F. Guttridge

Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World by Andrea Pitzer

If you read and enjoy any of these, please let me know!

EDITED TO ADD: OG Sad Boat Books post here!

[bookymcbookface]

The Child that Books Built, by Francis Spufford

[terrorcamp]

Updates - Terror Camp 2023 is in 10 days!

Hi all, we've adjusted some times on our schedule — if you have panels added to your calendar, make sure to update them to the new times.

Also, you have ONE WEEK left to submit your questions to Nive Nielsen & Paul Ready and Francis Spufford & Sarah Airriess for the keynotes!

Finally, if you haven't RSVP'd, please make sure you do so in order to receive the link to the Discord and the Zoom webinars!

xoxo Terror Camp Command