Great Catherine by Carolly Erickson

read by Davina Porter

Let’s get one thing straight: I could listen to Davina Porter narrate her grocery list. All day. The woman has a voice on her. And that’s how I found this book: I was searching Audible for more books she has narrated. (Thankfully she’s narrated quite a few.) I wasn’t looking for history or biography in particular, and definitely not about Catherine the Great. All I knew about the Russian empress was the (apocryphal) story about her and the horse… and if you haven’t heard of it and you have delicate sensibilities, do *not* Google it. Trust me.

So, with that unpromising start, I dove in because I trust Ms. Porter’s taste. And because it was available as a downloadable audiobook at my library, so I didn’t even have to use my Audible credits for it. And I was not even a little bored or disappointed with the writing. In fact, this is a delightful book from beginning to end.

Ms. Erickson walks the reader through the life of the Russian autocrat from *her* unpromising start, which went on for years and years, through her glory days as a powerful and (mostly) benevolent philosopher-empress who refused to either forsake men or be ruled by one (thus earning the rabid distrust and scurrilous rumors of the world), to her final days, beset by ill health and scheming courtiers. And it’s a grand, sweeping epic, as its subject matter demands—though not especially long, at 381 pages, considering the amount of territory it covers. (See what I did there? Territory? Russia? Oh, never mind, you had to be there.)

Empress Catherine II of Russia began life as the not-especially-pretty but very well-educated Princess Sophia of Anhalt-Zerbst. Which sounds like a grand title and a fine start in life, and so they should have been, but nevertheless her parents were far from certain they’d be able to make a good marriage for her. Nonetheless they took a gamble and tossed her name in the imperial marriage hat, so to speak.

Young Sophia was immediately swimming for her life in a sea of intrigue, and there was no guarantee she wouldn’t drown in it. She had, for one thing, to somehow win the trust and approval of her fiancé’s paranoid mother, Grand Duchess Anna Petrovna, who ruled the court with every dirty trick imaginable when her iron fist didn’t quite seem sufficient. 

Then, once Catherine finally married, her husband, Peter III, was an insecure, abusive, controlling petty tyrant (in addition to being emperor of all the Russias). Fortunately for her, his rule was brief; he was completely unsuited to lead Russia or Russians (whom he despised and whose language he barely spoke) and was assassinated after just six months. (Just how much Catherine herself had to do with that is open to debate; Ms. Erickson has an opinion on the subject.) And incredibly, even with such suspicions roiling about amongst the populace, Catherine managed what amounted to such a tremendous PR campaign that she was swept onto the throne by overwhelming popular support.

What followed was a tremendously successful rule—they don’t call just *anyone* “The Great,” after all—during which she greatly expanded Russian territory, kept up a regular correspondence with Voltaire, and popularized the newly-available smallpox vaccine by having first herself and then her son, the imperial heir, inoculated. She also, as I intimated earlier, went through a succession of men. Serial monogamy was very much not the done thing amongst female rulers in that place and time, and female rulers who themselves weren’t ruled by men were terrifying to men generally, so this earned her a lot of very nasty rumors. Including that horse thing.

This book is beautifully researched, relying quite a lot on Catherine’s own diaries and other primary sources. It’s also a very skillful condensation of a very large life lived in a very complex time.

Verdict: read it.

Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe

Gender Queer is a graphic memoir about coming of age as genderqueer and asexual. If you don’t know what any of this means, great! When you’re done reading this book, you will. But we can start here:

A graphic memoir is a memoir that looks like a novel-length comic book—it’s written and illustrated in panels, with word bubbles and so on. But it’s not a made-up story, and there are no superheroes or anthropomorphic animals. It’s somebody’s life story; specifically, the story of Maia Kobabe’s growing-up years.

The author identifies as genderqueer. That’s a pretty general label for people who don’t identify as either male or female—deep inside, they don’t feel like either, or maybe they feel like a little of both, or maybe which gender they feel like changes from day to day, or maybe the whole idea of gender, as either a binary or a spectrum, feels alien and wrong to their experience of the world and themselves--so the labels “male” and “female” both feel deeply wrong to them.

The author is also asexual, which is a sexual orientation (like straight, or gay, or bisexual, or any other label that identifies who you’re sexually attracted to). Asexuals (sometimes called aces for short) have no sexual desire for anybody, though some aces do enjoy romantic relationships.

So, those are the basics, extremely simplified. What this book does, skillfully, is help you *understand* all that, by showing it to you through the lens of one person’s experience.

You won’t just get exposed to the terminology (though that’s not a small part of this book); you’ll get a sense of what it feels like to grow up as a singularly-shaped peg that everyone insists should fit into either a round or a square hole. The author’s skill with words and pictures makes what could be a dry primer on gender into a story you will probably find yourself relating to—If you’ve ever been a teenager who feels at all different from their parents and/or peers, that is.

Definitely worth a read.

An Alien Heat by Michael Moorcock

This is the first book in the Dancers at the End of Time trilogy, though I read it (and read and re-read it numerous times as a teen and young adult) as a stand-alone book.

As the story begins, the universe is millions of years older than it is now and humanity has at last ceased to take itself seriously. It has also shrunk to a relative handful of individuals—but they are near-immortals with enormous amounts of power over their environment, their bodies, and, up to a point, matter itself. (Think of Q from Star Trek.) They use this tremendous power to sculpt fanciful landscapes and city-sized follies in which to throw parties and/or have sex, often at the same time. The point to all this being pleasure, and bonding, and to fight the one enemy left to them: boredom.

Into this ultimately decadent world arrives an alien, Yusharisp, from the far edge of the galaxy. He brings with him a dire warning: the universe is coming to an end. His own planet, in fact, has already been swallowed by the coming universal apocalypse, and he is traveling ahead of the wave of doom to warn as many planets as he can. 

What he has failed to predict (and could not have imagined) was that humanity was a species too fatally jaded to really believe his warning or to truly care if it is true—or perhaps too infantilized by millennia of any lack of real consequences for any action or event to truly understand the concept of finality. Also, humanity is, in this century, prone to keeping collections of captive aliens and time travelers. Yusharisp is snapped up by a colllector, preventing him (much to his baffled despair) from continuing his mission.

At about the same time, an inadvertent time traveler named Mrs. Ameila Underwood, from Victorian England, becomes part of someone else’s menagerie. Her captor brings her to a party to be shown off; there she’s spotted by our protagonist, Jherek Carnelian. His current obsession happens to be the 19th century, and he immediately becomes determined to fall in love with her.

Hijinks ensue, the plot thickens, and a Machiavellian individual’s machinations are slowly sensed by the reader—but not by poor Jherek, who ends up traveling to Victorian England, where he’s helpless as a newborn (though delighted by how friendly everyone is). Saying more would spoil the plot for you, so this is where I stop.

I don’t think anybody but Moorcock could have pulled this off. The wit, the vivid descriptions, the world-building--think Oscar Wilde meets Douglas Adams in the Q Continuum as painted by Salvador Dali. Like Q, these end-times humans have no concept of morality—how can they, when there are never any real consequences to anything, and what would be the point?  

With all their literally earth-shattering power, these people have created a surprisingly small world for themselves. Their only concerns are their own pleasure and the oddly conformist society they’ve created; they’ve lost their curiosity and turned inward to a remarkable degree, for a people with a historically unparalleled ability to satisfy their curiosity. And for all their access to knowledge, they’re shockingly ignorant about anything that doesn’t affect them directly (and much that does).

Jherek, meantime, is such an intriguing character--maybe the only truly interesting one on his planet. He’s the only person alive to have been actually born, in the old-fashioned sense, and maybe for that reason he’s a bit of a throwback. At the same time, he’s very much a creature of his time, an amoral, self-centered hedonist with no concept that there’s any other way to be. But Mrs. Underwood seems set to change that…

Well worth a read, especially as it’s both very much a period piece and oddly relevant to our times. It’s still my third-favorite Moorcock book (after Gloriana and The Warhound and the World’s Pain), and that still says a lot, even after all this time.