TWIB-II 37
Two (English-language) books, two days late.

1) Bottomfeeder - Taras Grescoe
Name a few looming environmental disasters off the top of your head. Be they global warming, terrestrial habitat destruction, industrial pollution, or declining fossil fuels, the worldwide collapse of wild fisheries isn't likely to be among them. Hopefully, however, Taras Grescoe's Bottomfeeder will change all that.

Grescoe sets out to argue several points in this book: that seafood is an intelligent and healthy source of protein, that the seafood industry's rapacious demand for fish as food and industrial input, primed as it is to wipe aquatic biodiversity off the face of the earth, is perhaps the most pressingly underacknowledged environmental issue of our time; and that intelligent consumers can continue to enjoy seafood provided they get informed and eat ethically. It's certainly an ambitious agenda; surprisingly, he roundly succeeds in making each of these cases, and in an engaging (and engagingly unpolemic) way.

Bottomfeeder is first and foremost an examination of the ecological roles played by some of mankind's favorite varieties of seafood: their habitats, roles in the food chain, and the big industries and artisanal fishermen who harvest them, and the effects that harvesting has on the environment. Grescoe is adept at turning what by all rights should be an exceedingly dull litany of scientific fact into highly entertaining reading, all without simplifying or dumbing down the science and its implications--a skill possessed by far too few authors in the genre of popular science. Furthermore, he lets the facts speak for themselves, conveying the gravity of the situation regarding declining fish stocks without whitewashing or mincing words, but without frothing at the mouth either (and thus losing skeptical readers). Finally, although Grescoe is certainly an advocate of ethical eating and sustainable seafood, he remains conscious of the plight of people who make their livings from the seas as well as the ethical dilemma in which lovers of seafood often find themselves.

The bottom line is that Bottomfeeder will not only make you smarter, but will keep you well entertained as it does so, enough that I'll most likely be pulling it out for a reread or two.

2) The White Mary - Kira Salak
Boy howdy, what a solid pile of dren. You gotta love a book in which the author, in the very first sentence, tells you that the main character is a thinly-veiled author insert. It's one step away from actually titling the book The White Mary: My (Often Embarassing) Ego-Driven Melodramatic Fantasies About My Life and Me, Me, Me. And in that regard at least, boy does Salak deliver.

According to the back cover, she is an award-winning journalist. That may very well be. Unfortunately, she would have done us all a favor by writing about her real life experiences instead of burying them beneath a paint-by-numbers relationship forced march. Folks, at best, The White Mary is a 350-page outline of the story Salak has yet to write. It is quite literally scores upon scores of pages of nothing but endless exposition told in lifeless, cliche-ridden prose. The author--I mean, main character is devoid of any personality beyond what the narrative (such as it is) demands that she evince at any given moment in order to drive the "plot", and thus equally devoid of any ability to induce sympathy or indeed, interest in readers. The love interest is the epitome of the spineless, emasculated "celebrate your inner child and deal productively with your issues" new age eunuch...it almost verges on self-parody. (Seriously, when I, who never, ever thought I would ever in my life find myself wishing desperately that a man start evincing more stereotypically masculine traits, end up doing just that, you know it's bad.) His concern for the protagonist is supposed (I guess) to be genuine and touching; rather, it comes off as creepy and desperate.

Now, as I can't actually back any of this up with quotes yet (although I would dearly love to make others share my pain), as I received the book as an ARC, perhaps a summary of a typical scene from the novel will suffice. The main character, who just can't handle the fact that her boyfriend loves her so much, escapes to a party where she gets drunk and goes home with another man who, insulted by her ballsiness, anally rapes her. After which, she gets up--after being sodomized, no lube, no preparation--and takes a walk for a bit.

And this book prides itself on its "gritty realism." Except when said realism would hinder the melodramatics of the daytime soap cliches it loves even more.

This is all such a shame because parts of the book--namely those told from the POV of Tobo, a Papua New Guinean shaman--are solidly decent. It's a shame both Salak and her editors opted for the lazy, trite, and overwrought instead of working on improving the passages where Salak did evince some promise as a writer.

That will be all.