Canon Fodder

Don Juan, Canto I, by Lord Byron

2007-12-18T17:53:00.000-08:00

I listened to an excellent reading of the first Canto of Byron's Don Juan that I downloaded free from Librivox. Byron (a dissolute, corrupt, romantically brooding fellow) completed 16 cantos before his death, becoming more famous and more beloved of his publisher which each volume.

Byron took earlier versions of the legend of Don Juan and remade the character into a light-hearted amorous adventurer who is forever falling in and out of love with women. This first Canto introduces his family and traces his introduction into the arts of love by the beautiful Julia, who is 'married, charming, chaste, and twenty-three'.

There's as much amorous play, though slightly fewer farts, in Don Juan as in Canterbury. It was a pleasure to listen to these rolling verses, larded with editorial asides and commentaries. I've read so much about Byron, but this is the first time I've read any of his longer workss, the ones that made him a celebrity. He was scandalous! A darkly brooding figure who debauched maidens and youths and obsessed about his half-sister. One of his lovers, Lady Caroline Lamb, called him 'mad, bad, and dangerous to know.'

The Canterbury Tales, by Goeffrey Chaucer

2007-11-29T16:00:00.000-08:00

The Canterbury Tales is a great example of the kind of work that is best enjoyed by listening to it instead of reading it. First, it's poetry, and for most of its existence poetry was meant to be read aloud. Second, it's riddled with archaic spelling and vocabulary that can be difficult to understand when you are looking at words on a page, but (for me at least) is much easier to understand when you're listening to it. Third, it's full of humor. Sometimes if I'm reading something the humor in it sails right past me. Listening to the various readers in this LibriVox recording (free!) bring the humor and irony of the Tales to life is really a joy.

I've tried to read The Canterbury Tales before, only to give up after a few pages because the effort was too great. And I've got quite a few advantages over the average reader - I've actually studied Old and Middle English, and I speak French and Italian, which allows me to understand most of the Latin words thrown into the verse and figure out from the roots what most of the other unusual words mean. Listening was much easier - I could almost always figure out what an unusual word meant.

I had read that the Tales were similar to The Decameron, but I still didn't expect it to be so.... bawdy. There's farting and adultery and oh so much more! Because the pilgrims come from all walks of life I really feel like I got a good cross-section of life at the time in all its vulgar splendor. At the same time I was surprised by the amount of religiousity. References to Christianity and a concern with moral action pervaded almost all of the stories to an extreme extent. The last tale in particular kind of blew my mind; the Parson's Tale is a seemingly unending litany of sins to be avoided itemized in excruciating detail.

Wikiepedia seems to think that the Parson's Tale is straightforward and not ironic, but listening to the below made me wonder if this wasn't an exercise in irony:

Upon the other side, to speak of
the horrible disordinate scantness of clothing, as be these cutted
slops or hanselines [breeches] , that through their shortness
cover not the shameful member of man, to wicked intent alas!
some of them shew the boss and the shape of the horrible
swollen members, that seem like to the malady of hernia, in the
wrapping of their hosen, and eke the buttocks of them, that fare
as it were the hinder part of a she-ape in the full of the moon.
And more over the wretched swollen members that they shew
through disguising, in departing [dividing] of their hosen in
white and red, seemeth that half their shameful privy members
were flain [flayed]. And if so be that they depart their hosen in
other colours, as is white and blue, or white and black, or black
and red, and so forth; then seemeth it, by variance of colour,
that the half part of their privy members be corrupt by the fire
of Saint Anthony, or by canker, or other such mischance. And
of the hinder part of their buttocks it is full horrible to see, for
certes, in that part of their body where they purge their stinking
ordure, that foul part shew they to the people proudly in despite
of honesty [decency], which honesty Jesus Christ and his friends
observed to shew in his life.

I mean, come on. This can't be serious.

Lady Susan, by Jane Austen

2007-11-21T09:52:00.000-08:00

What a delight to discover a 'new' Jane Austen novel!

Lady Susan is an epistolary novel, and Jane's first work. It's funny and naughty and about as far from Mansfield Park as I could imagine. Lady Susan, the wretchedly amoral titular corespondent, pulls everyone she meets into a chaotic whirlpool in the best and most recognizable tradition of drama queens throughout the ages. I can't believe I didn't read this earlier, and I strongly recommend it.

I listened to a free audio version performed by multiple readers from LibriVox.org. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain - they are read by volunteers (some of them professional-quality) and available for free download. I love listening to audiobooks so I was very excited to discover it - right now I'm working my way through The Canterbury Tales, and I have several more books lined up after that.

Also-reads

2007-05-07T14:18:00.000-07:00

A Series of Unfortunate Events, by Lemony Snicket
I love these books. I've almost finished the series - I just need to read the very last one and then I'll be done.

I honestly think they are better than the Harry Potter books.

I am lusting after this fantastic complete set.

Zodiac, by Neal Stephenson
One of his earlier works, a fun eco-thriller.

Under Orders, by Dick Francis
A chocolate bon-bon of a book. Not his best work, but good enough to eat.

Deathnote vol. 1 and 2
A manga (Japanese comics) about a teenage student who finds a magic notebook that he can use to kill people with. Interesting concept, but a bit slow-moving.

The Mislaid Magician, by Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stevermere.
I love me a good epistolary fantasy novel set in Regency England!

Expat: Women's True Tales of Life Abroad, by Christina Henry de Tessan
A collection of essay about an experience close to my own. Enjoyable.

For God and Country, by James Yee
A pretty good book about a horrible story. Not that I'm objective about this one.

1001 Nights of Snowfall, by Bill Willingham
A Fables graphic novel inspired by the stories of 1001 nights. There are some gems here, but it was surprisingly uneven. Fans of the monthly comic will want to read it for the backstory.

Shanghai Diary, by Ursula Bacon
A book club selection about the Jewish expatriate community in Shanghai during WWII. Clumsily written, but a great story.

The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond. Worthwhile, but too popular for my taste, and contains material that has been more satisfactorily explored in Collapse and Guns, Germs, and Steel.

The Mind-Body Problem by Rebecca Goldstein. Another book club selection. Very good, highly recommend.

Beloved, by Toni Morrison

2007-02-11T18:52:00.000-08:00

I finally read Beloved, by Toni Morrison, which was da winner of the NY Times survey seeking to crown the best American novel published in the past 25 years.

I had been avoiding it for a while, like I avoid reading many great books. I procrastinate as if they are homework I don't want to complete or movies I can never see for the first time again. In January, while I was 'on vacation' from blogging, the Seattle Public Library sent me an email telling me there was a copy waiting for me on my special shelf, and it was time.

I read it, but I didn't feel I could write about it. I don't feel qualified. In fact I feel grossly inadequate. When the New York Times reviewed it, they asked Margaret Atwood. That's about right.

I am too tired to talk about pain so deep. Having written that sentence, I reread it and realize that my reaction to this book is all about me. Inevitable, perhaps, but disappointingly egoistic.

The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells

2007-01-27T21:33:00.000-08:00

The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells is one of the first science fiction books. Aliens from Mars invade suburban England riding scary tripod machines.

The scariest thing about this book is that it was written in 1898, 16 years before World War I, yet it contains realistic depictions of the use of poison gas.

I saw the Spielberg movie when it came out in 2005, and I was surprised by how closely the plot elements were drawn from the book. The red vegetation, the mad 'curate' in the cellar, and of course the final downfall of the Martians are all the same.

But what worked in 1898 for H. G. Wells didn't work in 2005 for Spielberg. The ending frustrated me. How could alien beings with the technology to cross vacuum be defeated by something as common as microorganisms?

Enter the insightful husband. When War of the Worlds was first published, he points out, germ theory was only a few years old. It was still cutting-edge science, so it seemed reasonable to people that other technologically advanced people might not know about it. Now germ theory is 100 years old so it seems obvious. The newness of computer viruses made the defeat of the aliens in Indepdence Day seem credible ten years ago. Would it be believable today?

What technology of today would be a good choice for bringing down invading aliens? Nanotech? And in twenty years it will seem run-of-the-mill.

The Prince, by Machiavelli

2007-01-19T19:40:00.000-08:00

I first read The Prince in high school, and I was tremendously disappointed. It's a small little thing and I was expecting the secrets of the ages. Or at least something that would help me deal with the cool kids who were making my life hell.

This time I decided to use my high school education to understand it better. No, not the mean-halls type of education, actual classroom instruction. That included a detailed history of Florence, where Machiavelli lived, because that was the city my high school was in.

No, I'm not Italian, although I speak it fluently. My parents moved there for work and sent us kids to the International School of Florence. Sounds nice, eh?

I hated it.

13 years later I've gotten over the hating and realized, damn, it WAS nice. I loved Florence, though I didn't love living there.

Machiavelli lived in Florence and grew to adulthood under Lorenzo Medici, who was a shrewed ruler of the city for many years until his death at a comparatively young age in 1492. Lorenzo Medici inherited the rule of Florence, after his father Piero and grandfather Cosimo. Before Cosimo, Florence had been a Republic. Lorenzo was 'Il Magnifico'. After he died, his son Piero was dubbed 'the Unfortunate' for messing everything up and getting the family temporarily kicked out of power.

Machiavelli served as part of the Free Republic of Florence, and when the Medici returned to power, he was tortured and exiled. He wrote The Prince and other political works during this period of exile, but it wasn't published until after his death.

The Prince refers to a surprising amount of chaos. Machiavelli is able to illustrate all of his theories with concrete contemporary examples of war, conquest, betrayal, and error. Italy didn't become a united country until the late 1800's. During Machiavelli's life, it was a boiling pot of different political parties and sovreignties. There was the Pope, who ruled large territories. There were the city-states. There were the neighboring rulers - France, Spain, etc. who had their eyes on plump prizes like Venice. And there was internal warfare as well. Florence tossed the Medici out, then they came back, then they got thrown out again, etc.

The Prince is more of a classification system than a how-to manual. Machiavelli divides the types of Princes into broad categories and outlines the best ways that each must use to hold on to his possessions. He seems to think that the way the Medici came to power was pretty good, because it's not easy for a foreign conqueror to get a Republic to give up its institutions. But of course, the Medici couldn't hold on to power during his lifetime. The book is dedicated to Lorenzo di Piero di Medici, son of Piero the Unfortunate, who is mostly remembered today for the magnificent tomb Michelango carved for him and for being the father of Caterina de Medici.

Why? Was he hoping to gain his favor, or was it some kind of ironic joke?

My theory (tentative and amateurish) is that the dedication is not ironic, and not an attempt at flattery, but made with an honest desire that the person in charge of Florence use his powers for the benefit of the people of Florence. Florentines are intensely loyal to their city.

Middlemarch, by George Eliot

2007-01-03T17:41:00.000-08:00

Middlemarch was hefty and glorious and absorbing, the perfect book to read on vacation. Well, the perfect book for me, at least. It's not your James Patterson. It's the literary equivalent of a chocolate layer cake. Delicious, worth savoring, but maybe not the kind of thing you take on an airplane.

Maxine pointed out to me that Middlemarch was a 'community read' at the Reading Middlemarch blog (which has now moved on to Tolstoy and Stendahl), and I poked around there a bit. Rachel claims that There are Dodo people and Lydgate people.

Dodo, Dorothea, is a higher-class young woman with spiritual aspirations. She marries Casaubon, an older man and a scholar, hoping to expand her intellectual horizons by helping him with his work. Too late, she realizes that Casaubon is more closed than open, his work is meaningless, and he is as incapable of entering into her goals as he is of consciously realizing his own deficits.

Lydgate is the tentpole of the second main plotline and Dorothea's mirror. A young doctor with great goals for reform, he is drawn into a bad marriage and political machinations that destroy him.

I am neither a Dodo person or a Lydgate person. I found both of them a teeny bit annoying. Dodo in her unrepentent idealism was going to come to grief inevitably; it's only by authorial grace that she get s ahcnace at a happy ending after her husband's death. Lydgate waltzes serenely toward disaster on every front.

The character who I felt the most sympathy for was Casaubon. Poor guy. He is as trapped by his character faults as all the other inhabitants of Middlemarch, but since his are intellectual and emotional he gets less sympathy and has less fun.

Casaubon is my personal nightmare. This description of him rung in my head for days:

He had not had much foretaste of happiness in his previous life.
To know intense joy without a strong bodily frame, one must have an
enthusiastic soul. Mr. Casaubon had never had a strong bodily frame,
and his soul was sensitive without being enthusiastic: it was too
languid to thrill out of self-consciousness into passionate delight;
it went on fluttering in the swampy ground where it was hatched,
thinking of its wings and never flying. His experience was of
that pitiable kind which shrinks from pity, and fears most of all
that it should be known: it was that proud narrow sensitiveness
which has not mass enough to spare for transformation into sympathy,
and quivers thread-like in small currents of self-preoccupation
or at best of an egoistic scrupulosity. And Mr. Casaubon
had many scruples: he was capable of a severe self-restraint;
he was resolute in being a man of honor according to the code;
he would be unimpeachable by any recognized opinion. In conduct
these ends had been attained; but the difficulty of making his Key
to all Mythologies unimpeachable weighed like lead upon his mind;
and the pamphlets--or "Parerga" as he called them--by which he tested
his public and deposited small monumental records of his march,
were far from having been seen in all their significance.
He suspected the Archdeacon of not having read them; he was
in painful doubt as to what was really thought of them by the
leading minds of Brasenose, and bitterly convinced that his old
acquaintance Carp had been the writer of that depreciatory recension
which was kept locked in a small drawer of Mr. Casaubon's desk,
and also in a dark closet of his verbal memory. These were heavy
impressions to struggle against, and brought that melancholy
embitterment which is the consequence of all excessive claim:
even his religious faith wavered with his wavering trust in his
own authorship, and the consolations of the Christian hope in
immortality seemed to lean on the immortality of the still unwritten
Key to all Mythologies. For my part I am very sorry for him.
It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and
yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life
and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self--
never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have
our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness
of a thought, the ardor of a passion, the energy of an action,
but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid,
scrupulous and dim-sighted. Becoming a dean or even a bishop would
make little difference, I fear, to Mr. Casaubon's uneasiness.
Doubtless some ancient Greek has observed that behind the big mask
and the speaking-trumpet, there must always be our poor little
eyes peeping as usual and our timorous lips more or less under
anxious control.

Focusing

2007-01-03T17:38:00.001-08:00

Given that I can't read five books a week any more, I've decided to refocus the blog on reading the classic works that I originally got into this for. Hence the new title. New year, new business, new blog name. I'm on a roll.

Books I read while on vacation

2006-12-28T12:09:00.000-08:00

Here are some of the books I've read over the past two months.

Beguilement: The Sharing Knife, by Lois McMaster Bujold

This was a bit disappointing - only because I have such high expectations for Bujold's work. It was fun, but lighweight. I will read the sequels.

Outwitting History, by Aaron Lansky

The story of the founding of the National Yiddish Book Center. This was a book club selection, and everyone loved it! That never happens! Lansky took a dry story and made it funny and charming. Very good.
The Three Sisters, by Rebecca Locksley

Another lightweight fantasy, marred by typographical errors.

What Came Before He Shot Her, by Elizabeth George

This is a sequel, or prequel, to the frustrating With No One As Witness. Unfortunately, reading it was a complete waste of time. The plot converges with 'Witness' only at the end of the book. What Came is the story of the disintegration of a lower-class family, dis-spiriting and, what's worse, uninteresting. This can safely be skipped.

A Conspiracy of Paper, by David Liss

Another book club selection. A seventeenth-century detective story featuring a Jewish boxer. I loved it.

The Great Influenza, by John M. Barry

A riveting non-fiction account of the Infuenza epidemic. Very well-done.
The Machine's Child, by Kage Baker

Kage Baker returns to the best time travel series ever, The Company, and this time, she advances the plot. Yay! I thought she had lost her way in The Children of the Company. The Machine's Child made up for it. The narrative was sometimes overly complex, but there is plenty of (ehem) internal drama. Very enjoyable.

Guests of the Ayatollah, by Mark Bowden

Very good non-fiction account of the Iran hostage crisis.

Fragile Things, by Neil Gaiman

So good it made me want to cry. From envy.

The Areas of my Expertise, by John Hodgman
Hilarious. I almost bought it for myself, because it's one of those books that I want to keep and leaf through every other day or so. Instead I bought it for someone else as a gift.

The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge, by Vernor Vinge

Vinge is a very imaginative author. I've loved his novel-length works. These stories were not always as ground-breaking, but there are enough gems to make it worthwhile.

breaking radio silence

2006-12-06T17:22:00.000-08:00

I'm still here.

I'm just trying to figure out what to do.

I realized in November that my reading habits had become negative. I was arranging my life around reading five books a week, and I didn't have time to enjoy them thoroughly or think about them thoroughly when writing a review.

Reading was becoming a chore. And I was putting off reading the classics that I wanted to read because they were too long and would mess up my schedule.

This is not consistent with my goals. Since I will be starting a new business, I will have less free time to read anyhow.

I don't think I will keep on reviewing a book every weekday. That means I need a new blog name. And raison d'etre.

I'll think fo one shortly. Meanwhile, I am reading Middlemarch and enjoying it very much.

Blue Hair

2006-11-05T18:28:00.000-08:00

A celebration.

Hiatus

2006-11-02T13:15:00.000-08:00

Book of the Day will be on hiatus for the month of November for National Novel Writing Month.

And in completely unrelated news.

Recently I have not been averaging a post a day. I have had some personal and professional stresses eating up my time.

Well, on the last day of October (Happy Halloween!) I quit my job. I'm going to take a short vacation and then start my own lecture agency. Wish me luck! I'm very excited.

I hope I will continue to have time to devote to reading. If it becomes a problem, I'll evaluate my time management and make a decision. But as of this moment I intend to get going again at the beginning of December.

Books I read but didn't blog this week

2006-10-28T11:20:00.000-07:00

The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran.

I can see why this became a cult classic in the sixties. It was like drinking a glass of cool water.

The Anti-Death League, by Kingsley Amis

This goes into the Catch-22 category of desperately funny and sad at the same time.

Twelve Sharp by Janet Evanovich

New verse, same as the first.

Reading Journal Entry: Diary of Lady Murasaki

2006-10-24T19:51:00.000-07:00

Lady Murasaki is the author of one of the Great Books on my list, the Tale of Genji, which is one of the earliest works of Japanese literature, as well as one of the earliest novels in all of global literature.

I haven't gotten to the Tale of Genji yet, but I hear that Genji is a handsome and naughty boy who gets up to lots of amorous escapades.

Murakasi Shikibo lived around the turn of the first millenium, one of the court ladies attendant on the Empress in Kyoto. This 'diary' seems to be a combination of personal recollections and letters edited together at a later date. It records several significant events in court life, beginning with the birth of the Empress's first son and including several elaborate and involved religious ceremonies.

Personal reflections and observations of extreme delicacy make this a surprising record. There is subtlety here. It's a fascinating window onto a world that seems very alien. I was very glad to have the introductory historical materials. It's amazing that people were living like this in Japan while Europeans hadn't even started building cathedrals yet.

Deep thoughts

2006-10-19T13:40:00.000-07:00

That's what I've been having.

I misjudged my reading schedule this week because I expected Magic for Beginners to be a quick read, because it's short stories.

I was wrong, it's very complex. I'm still collecting my thoughts.

******
Thoughts collected. Thanks Richard. I agree with some of the comments in your review. 'The Faery Handbag' was the most traditional inclusion and possibly the most enjoyable (although not necessarily the best). Other entries were more or less, well, difficult. I liked 'Some Zombie Contingency Plans' very much. But man, this stuff is hard. Post-modern isn't the word.

One of the characters requests a story in 'Lull' that should be 'about good and evil and true love, and it should also be funny. No talking animals. Not too much fooling around with the narrative structure. The ending should be happy but still realistic, believable, you know, and there shouldn't be a moral although we should be able to think back later and have some sort of revelation."

I couldn't tell if it was excess trust in the readership or a desire for obscurity that pushes her away from this goal.

Reading Journal Entry: Finding Home by Jill Culiner

2006-10-16T22:22:00.000-07:00

The title is Finding Home: Following in the footsteps of the Jewish Fusgeyers, by Jill Culiner. The Fusgeyers are brave Romanian Jews who walked across Europe atthe turnd of the nineteenth century in order to emigrate to the US and other locations. Their story is interesting.

Jill Culiner is a stuck-up Canadian pseudo-historian who walks across Romania sneering at the tourists, the buildings, and the locals. Her story is not interesting.

Skip this and find a real history book instead.

Reading Journal Entry: A Brother's Price by Wen Spencer

2006-10-13T16:45:00.000-07:00

Wen Spencer's Tinker and Wolf Who Rules were pretty good as self-indulgent mind candy goes. I decided to check out the rest of her oevre.

A Brother's Price is alternate history that plays with gender roles. We've got late 17th century levels and men are far and few between. It's never made quite clear.

Men are scarce and family structure has changed to reflect the fact that one man can sire children on multiple women. Sisters live together and share a husband; sons are traded for a husband for the next generation or sold to other families.

Men are so valuable they are often stolen and must be protected, rarely appearing in public and always guarded. Women fulfill all of the public roles in society, and raising babies and cooking is considered 'men's work'.

Jerin is the oldest son in a large family of landed gentry about to come of age and afraid of being traded to the hickseed girls next door. He's a sweet guy, loves kids, cooks well, and was taught expert sexual techniques handed down by his grandfather the kidnapped prince (even though he's still a virgin). He's breathtakingly beautiful. Luckily for Jerin, his family is pulled into involvement with the Royal Family (and my, it is a whole family of women sharing power) and the Eldest Princess just happens to develop a huge crush on him after he lets her touch his naughty bits in the farmhouse kitchen.

Spencer is able to even build in a 'virginity' clause for men by including a rabid fear of disease.

While this is well-constructed to foreshadow plot points and explore some of the male-female issues, there are times when it seems a little mechanical. I got the feeling Spencer had a checklist about sexual stereotypes and was checking off items as she went along. 'Men have long hair - check. Jerin is described as beautiful instead of handsome - check. Female whores with dildos - check.' Etc.

Reading Journal Entry: The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists by Neil Strauss

2006-10-12T20:58:00.000-07:00

Neil Strauss goes from AFC(Average Frustrated Chump) to PUA (Pickup Artist) able to pick up the hottest girls in any location, and joins a weird community of manipulative sex-crazed males. This is his story.

I assummed this was one big piece of fiction. Not that I disbelieved the pickup techniques Strauss describes. I just didn't believe in the characters and drama he creates around the set piece that becomes known as 'Project Hollywood'. I didn't believe Mystery, Papa, Herbal, or even in Style (his own moniker). I didn't particularly believe in any of the women he describes or that he actually interviewed Courtney Love, Britney Spears, or Tom Cruise.

I was wrong. I can't think that The Times of London would publish an interview backing up multiple aspects of the story unless it were true.

It's true.

It's awful.

Strauss is a geek who can't get laid. He apprentices himself to the master PUA (encountered online, of course) and learns how to pick up women. They refine their techniques and get better and better. They recruit more disciples, charging for workshops and running seminars in the wild at clubs and bars. They create 'Project Hollywood' a house in LA that they share with other PUAs with the goal of reversing the equation and getting attractive women to come to them.

Drama and chaos ensues, as it so often does in internet-related groups. Strauss allegedly realizes the emptiness of this life and hooks up with an alpha female (who dumped him about six months after the book ends according to wikipedia) and moves out of the house. End of story.

Morality: Strauss defends his chosen path quite vigorously several times. It's about bringing people together. Women want sex just as much as men, they just don't like to admit it as much. Turning other men into PUAs helps their self-esteem and gives them the opportunity to have relationships they otherwise might never have.

I'm a pretty judgmental gal. I have some guidelines I use when I need to decide if something is moral or not. Here's the first one: does it require lying? Answer: yes. Almost all the techniques and lines are flat out lies.

Strauss lies to women in order to manipulate them into having sex with them. And then he teaches other people how to do this. It's not just one lie. Everything is a lie. The PUAS construct entire personas and entire conversations ahead of time until Strauss admits they become 'social robots' reciting preprogrammed dialogue.

That's not a genuine connection. That's not a relationship. It's Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

It's scary and unhealthy and frankly a bit disgusting.

I can only hope that guys who pick this up looking for a how-to manual instead of memoir read through to the end and the spectacular crash and burn.

Great Book: Has Man a Future? by Bertrand Russell

2006-10-11T21:54:00.000-07:00

An examination of the consequences of the development of nuclear weapons, by Bertrand Russell.

I don't have memories of the Cold War. I was alive, sure, but I was just a kid, and by the time I started paying attention to politics the fear was moderated. I don't remember experiencing anything like the peril and fear that Russell conveys about the international situation in the decades immediately following World War II.

One thing struck me the most about this treatise, and that's were Russell's criteria for success. The ways that humanity might manage to destroy itself in a nuclear holocause are not so interesting or varied. Russell's condition for permanently aavoiding such destruction were novel. He posits a world government, federal in nature, which would take control of all military power monolithically. Freedom of speech would be curtailed to reduce nationalistic sentiment and avoid uprisings. Can't have people praising military leaders or talking about how great their country is.

Other than that little weirdness, it all seemed quite reasonable (if hair-raisingly scary). It's amazing that we survived, really.

Reading Journal Entry:A Woman's Liberation, edited by Connie Willis and Sheila Williams

2006-10-10T21:09:00.000-07:00

An anthology of female-themed science fiction stories. This collection includes several wonderful classics. Connie Willis' 'Even the Queen' won the Hugo and Nebula Awards. "Rachel in Love' by Pat Murphy won the Nebula. McIntyre's 'Of Mist, and Gress, and Sand' won the Nebula. 'Speech Sounds' won Octavia Butler her first Hugo Award and reads surprisingly modern for something first published in 1983.

Most entries will be familiar to the well-read genre fan, but this would make a great gift for the new reader or even for your generic hippie female.

Great Book: The Color Purple by Alice Walker

2006-10-09T20:46:00.000-07:00

Summer is now truly over. I'm back to reading Great Books.

So I decided to read Alice Walker's The Color Purple because I read her daughter's book Black ,White, and Jewish.

All this time I thought The Color Purple would be a bad book because it was made into a movie with Oprah Winfrey in it. How stupid! It's wonderful.

It's an epistolary novel, beginning with letters from Celie, a young black woman in pre WWII Georgia, to God, asking Him to explain what is happening to her and help her.

And what letters. Celie is raped by her father, who takes the two children that she bears away from her. Her mother dies and she is left to protect her younger sister alone. That's the first three pages.

Her father gives her in marriage to a man who needs a wife to care for his children, who despises her and abuses her. She loses her younger sister Nettie. Celie almost succeeds in rubbing herself out completely. But then her husband brings his sick lover into their home. Shug Avery is a singer with a long black body. She knows who she is and what she wants. She changes Celie's life.

Walker conveys the drudgery and poverty of farm life that James Agee described in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, but adds the emotion and drama of an entire beautiful life, Celie's life from the beginning to the end of adulthood.

The dialect could have seemed trite, but it doesn't. Celie is real as pain can be on a page. I wanted to cry when she finally got her first little bit of happiness.

Darfur Diaries

2006-10-09T06:42:00.000-07:00

You should all buy this book. It is a project very close to my heart. It's an important story, and it deserves to become an international bestseller.

I only wish it hadn't had to be written.

Back to Business

2006-10-06T22:14:00.000-07:00

Work had me swamped and exhausted this week. Plus I've been dealing with some mildly inconvenient health problems. I've been reading, not haven't found time to review.

Here's what I read this week:

Irresistible Forces, edited by Catherine Asaro
A short story collection of spec fic/romance with some big name contributors. This will mainly be of interest to Bujold fans interested in 'Winterfair Gifts', a short set of Barrayar during preparations for a wedding featuring a romance between minor characters from her Vorkosigan saga. The concluding story, Jennifer Roberson's 'Shadows in the Wood' was also decent, but the three middle entries left me cold.

Foundation's Friends, edited by Martin H. Greenberg
Stories in honor of Isaac Asimov, written by stars in the field: Bradbury, Bova, Silverberg, Turtledove, Willis, Resnick, etc ., etc. There were a lot of gems in this collection, and a wide variety among the stories - appropriate given Asimov's prolific output. There was a nod to all of my favorite Asimov works, even some rather obscure ones. Very much worth reading.

Inside Job, by Connie Willis
This is a novella rather than a novel, but I'll take it. I don't know how Willis did it, but she managed to write a paranormal fantasy that is sure to become a beloved classic among skeptics and rationalists everywhere. What happens when the editor of a skeptical magazine encounters the returning spirit of H. L. Mencken? Willis treats her characters with love and respect that just shines through the page.

Fevre Dream by George R. R. Martin
Husband has started to read A Game of Thrones for the second or third time - he keeps giving up 150 pages in. Meanwhile I picked this earlier work up at the library. It's about vampires and steamboats, not a combination I would have thought of myself. Martin does a wonderful job of evoking the richness and complexity of life on the Mississippi, which makes this worth reading even though it does fall apart a bit at the end. Warty Captain Abner is a wonderful creation. Good for fans suffering withdrawal from Ice and Fire and fans of Twain's river tales.

Reading Journal Entry: Dark Mondays by Kage Baker

2006-10-02T14:21:00.000-07:00

Today's Yom Kippur, so I was going to only do four reviews this week. But I forgot to post one on Friday so, it all evens outs anyhow.

The last read of the week is a short story collection, Dark Mondays: Stories by Kage Baker. Kage Baker is one of my favorite authors. The time travel Company series is her best-known work, but she's also a wonderful short story writer. Mother Aegypt collected some of her earlier work, including some Company stories. Dark Mondays collects nine stories and doesn't contain any sops for the Company fanatics who are so eagerly awaiting the next installment (in my case, eagerly awaiting the right place in the hold queue at the local library). That doesn't make it less fun, though. Baker has a wonderful trick of making the fantastic seem believable and historical fiction come alive. The standout is the last story in the volume, The Maid on the Shore, which is a rolicking adventure story set in Jamacia featuring pirate and privateer Captain Henry Morgan.

Reading Journal Entry: Sinister Barrier by Erik Frank Russell

2006-09-28T21:43:00.000-07:00

The last novel collected in Entities, Sinister Barrier, was less interesting than the others. It's less humorous and mostly a straightforward adventure story. Our hero is a puckish investigator who begins by making connections between seemingly unrelated suddent deaths of scientists worldwide and ends by saving the human race. The idea that we're being manipulated by mysterious unseen forces is creepy but now seems a bit dated, and Graham the narrator is annoyingly brilliant; A 'lady scientist' makes an appearance, which is nice, but mostly as a foil for Graham to display his ardor/inappropriately sexual conversation skills. Russell's characters often had a paper feel to them. In his previous works the unusual nature of their occupation (professional terrorist/telepath/extraterrestrial being) made their extraordinary competence less jarring. Since Graham is a 'regular guy', hecomes out sounding more like an automaton.

Reading Journal Entry: Call Him Dead by Erik Frank Russell

2006-09-27T22:04:00.000-07:00

Mr. Harper is a telepathic mind living in a mind-blind world. He tends to keep his thoughts to himself except when he can't resist turning fugitives over to the police and succouring dying strangers by the side of the road. His penchant for amateur sleuthing lands him in trouble - he's tracking down some suspicious characters when he encounters a mind that is not as it should be.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers! This might sound derivative but only because it's been copied so many times.

Harper's perspective as a telepathic narrator is unique, but his path is too smooth to make this an interesting read. A sweet ending, though.

Reading Journal Entry: Sentinels From Space, by Erik Frank Russell

2006-09-27T21:41:00.000-07:00

Sentinels From Space, explains Jack Chalker carefully in his introduction, has a 'closed loop' plot. There's the plot. And then there's the other plot. Superficially this is a mystery/thriller about interplanetary friction between Earth and her colonies of Mars and Venus. David Raven is an individual of extraordinary abilities who has been recruited by the government of Earth to ferret out and defuse a separatist underground. He's not what he seems. He has powers beyond the ordinary, but in choosing to exert them in this cause he risks exposing himself as.... what? Read to the end to find out. I never saw it coming, but it all fit together very nicely and gave me that feel-good 'Aha!' moment.

Reading Journal Entry: Next of Kin by Eric Frank Russell

2006-09-25T21:49:00.000-07:00

Last week I reviewed Wasp by Eric Frank Russell, a British post-WWII science fiction author. Wasp was included in Entities: The Collected Novels of Erik Frank Russell, and I've been gulping down the rest of the collection as quickly as I can.

Wasp was hilarious.Next of Kin is prophetic in its echoes of Catch-22, published 3 years later.

It's an irreverent howl at officialdom. John Lemming is a skilled space pilot, one of the few types allowed a bit of craziness in a military force that seems eerily familiar. The work opens as he steps into the office of a Fleet-Admiral with his fly open. He never gives up railing against injustice, on the grand and the petty scale. Luckily for our side, he becomes a prisoner of war and is able to exercise his talents for good.

I never would have guessed where this ended up going - very funny. Good clean fun too, reminiscent of Heinlein juveniles (before he got into the polyamory thing). Straightforward enough that I was comfortable recommending this to my husband, whose latest read was Duel of Eagles, and who goes in for adventure stories and car magazines.

It's clear to me now that Russell was one of the most influential British SF writers of his generation, right up there with Aldiss and Wyndham. How did I not know about this guy? I thought I had exhausted the ranks of lantern-jawed, soap-and-brandy-smelling, no-nonsense adventure SF writers of that era. After all, I read my way through two fairly complete antiquated SF libraries - my dad's, and my high school's. I am so glad to learn I was wrong.

Reading Journal Entry: Flashman by George MacDonald Fraser

2006-09-22T07:38:00.000-07:00

I came across a mention of Flashman, the swaggering Victorian hero escaped from the pages of Tom Brown's School Days by the twentieth century George MacDonald Fraser, a few months ago, I can't remember where. He was described as misogynistic and cowardly. Then I saw the cover of a Flash book on George W. Bush's summer reading list and I could resist no longer. After all, it was pretty fun last time I read along with Mr. Bush.

Harry Flashman, son of a Victorian gentleman, exceeded all of my expectations for riotous behavior and general moral reprehensibility. The books purport to be his memoirs; in this volume he begins with his explusion from school at the age of 17 for drunkenness and proceeds to cheat in a duel, attempt to rape his father's mistress (after cuckolding him successfully once before), debauch a young virgin of good standing, etc., etc. He joins the military and is posted, to his great dismay, to Afghanistan. Flashman is a tremendous coward, and doesn't have any of that high Victorian gudgeon that drives his peers to sacrifice their lives for Queen and country. No, he prefers to leave his skin intact. He avoids danger whenever possible and takes to his heels in the face of the enemy a number of times. In his narration he indulges in a free flow of contempt for the natives of the countries he travels in, his military commanders, and every woman he meets.

He is a delightfully despicable character. By the end of the book I was rooting for the woman who wanted to castrate him. Sadly, he escaped.

A good part of the events take place during the end of the British conflict in Afghanistan. The British had placed a friendly ruler on the throne, but in 1841 and 42 the British were expelled and completely defeated, the affair ending in a disastroust retreat through snowy mountain passes in which 14,000 soldiers and camp followers died and only 1 Briton survived. Two if you count Flashman.

There are two Flashman novels on President Bush's list, Flashman at the Charge and Flash for Freedom. Flashman is not on the list. It's the first in the series, though, and therefore I can have to conclude that President Bush has read it. Through the release of his summer reading list he gives it and the other volumes (staid non-fiction and biographies, with a few mystery novels thrown in) publicity and by implication his endorsement.

What in the world is he thinking of to give public attention to this kind of character and plot? To a book set in an area where the United States is currently at war, with a narrator who refers in the basest terms to the native people? 'Nigger' is the least of it. Flashman is a drunkard, a coward, and an imperialist to his fingernails. It's impossible to avoid comparing the character to the man. Frankly I can't imagine what his people might have been thinking. It's enough to cause an international incident.

Reading Journal Entry: Wasp, by Eric Frank Russell

2006-09-21T18:21:00.000-07:00

Eric Frank Russell was British, and served in military intelligence during World War II. He was also one of the most prominent humorous SF writers of his time.

Wasp is, as Jack Chalker says in his introduction, "the only World War II novel that I know of set in the Sirian Interstellar Empire". It's about a man who is recruited to serve undercover in enemy territory committing acts of sedition and terrorism, a 'wasp' designed to demoralize and distract the enemy and commit resources that would otherwise be put to use on the front lines.

Our wasp is named Mowry, and he's very effective. Minor alterations to his appearance make him appear to be a native-born Sirian. With some fiscal and technological help, he infiltrates himself into the police state and begins wreaking havoc.

There's not a lot of real science fiction here - 'scratch the Sirian's purple skin and find Imperial Japan underneath', says Chalker. It's almost entirely a spy novel set on another planet. But it is very fun and should be enjoyed by fans of Bond and his ilk.

So: the terrorism. Here we have a guy who goes about undercover and commits acts of violence against a civilian populace. That's not too popular these days. Why don't I feel repulsed by it? Well, this is clearly modeled after World War II, which was a conflict that required all-out commitment from the Allies. The niceties were not observed, because they could not afford to observe them. Germany and Japan wanted to invade and control Allies and were aggressors in the conflict. Casting the Sirians as the Axis in WWII makes civilian attacks less surprising. I can't pretend to be shocked by a character blowing up a hotel room in the context of Hiroshima.

Reading Journal Entry: Dzur by Steven Brust

2006-09-21T18:14:00.000-07:00

I've been waiting a long time for this book.

Brust's Jhereg series, about the adventures of a sometimes-thug, sometimes assassin Vlad Taltos, is one of the best 'live' fantasy series out there. He delivers elves and swordplay (everybody's favorite, admit it) without succumbing to the numbing sameness that affects much of today's generic medievalesque fantasy.

Taltos lives in a world dominated by tall, near-immortal Dragaerans, all of whom are sorted neatly into clans bearing the names of animals. Humans (Easterners) make a living mostly in the corners of this society. Taltos found his path with the Jhereg (basically the mob), named after a breed of scavenging lizards. He also happens to have two of said lizards as companions to whom he is telepathically linked. After working with the Jhereg for a number of years, he pissed them off wildly enough that the biggest price in history is on his head and he's been in hiding for a number of years. Now and then he emerges from obscurity long enough to have interesting adventures involving the most powerful Dragaerans in the realm and, sometimes, gods.

The most recent of said encounters endowed him with an unusual weapon whose capabilities he is still feeling out, and an unusual relationship with a goddess who seems to have been messing with his head.

OK, that's the set-up.

The hook for this one is that Taltos is drawn back into the affairs of the Jhereg because his ex-wife has gotten herself in trouble. After mismanaging the Eastern section of Adrilankha (the criminal/extortion aspects thereof) a mysterious organization of women called the Left Hand of the Jhereg is moving in and trying to displace her.

Vlad doesn't want her to get killed, so he has to figure out who they are, what they want, and how to convince them that they don't really want it badly enough any more.

Taltos is the narrator as well as the main character, and he has a spare dry voice that edges toward comedy. He doesn't explain much, which makes for a challenging read; more so, I imagine, for readers new to the series. This makes for an intense and engaging reading experience.

The story is framed by the courses of a meal at Valabar's, a restaurant whose culinary delights have been mentioned in passing many times in previous novels. Vlad's dinner companion is a Dzur; famous for their impetuousity, their skills with blade and spell, and their love of lost causes.

It's been five years since Issola was published. Brust has focused on another series set in the same universe, some five hundred years earlier (or so) in the meanwhile. But I like Vlad better, and I was so glad to see him again. There's something endearing about his wry observations, and something amazing about the way Brust manages to make them believable in a world that is his own creation but feels completely real.

Reading Journal Entry: Johnny and the Dead by Terry Pratchett

2006-09-19T17:47:00.000-07:00

A sequel to Only You Can Save Mankind, these are the continuing adventures of Johnny Maxwell and his pals.

When saving mankind, Johnny was dealing with aliens and video games. Now he's developed a disturbing availability to see dead people. The cemetery he walks through on his way home from school is a pleasant enough place, but he wasn't expecting to be handed the job of preserving it from developers by the inhabitants. They're nice people, mostly - it's just that they're transparent.

Johnny rises to the occasion, of course, and Pratchett's warm-hearted tone really makes the story work.

Reading Journal Entry: Defending Gary by Mark Prothero

2006-09-18T18:05:00.001-07:00

A true crime story written by one of the primary defense lawyers of the Green River Killer.

Green River is in Kent, the rural suburb of Seattle that my husband works in. The first victims (young prostitutes) were found in the river, and the name stuck as more and more bodies of young women were found, abandoned all over King County.

In toto Gary Ridgway killed at least 50 women and probably more like 80 to 100. He eventually made a plea deal with the prosecutors, who could only have successfully prosecuted him for a handful of the killings.

This book follows the case from Ridgway's arrest; Prothero was a public defender and was called in to defend Ridgway very early on.

This book won't win any literary prizes. Prothero obviously relied on transcripts and there are something pages of tedious interviews. But it is a fascinating story and that makes it a very worthwhile resource. Prothero really tried to get into Ridgway's head and figure out what made him kill, but ultimately he remains a cipher.

Reading Journal Entry: Lost Girls, by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie

2006-09-15T18:06:00.000-07:00

Ha, ha, I have Lost Girls and you don't. The first printing sold out the day it hit the stores. Luckily I had it pre-ordered.

OK, how do I review a book of pornography without terminally embarrassing myself and my parents, both of whom (at least according to my IP logs) read this regularly?

Mom and Dad: you can read this review. But I don't want to talk about it, EVER, and I'm not under any circumstances going to lend it to you.

First, the physical object. Beautiful. Absolutely fantastic. I hadn't seen any pics of the cover so I was expecting something all black and serious and not girly and fun. They are magnificently bound and produced volumes. They even smell good.

Artistically: Perfect for the subject matter, impressive design, the perfect marriage of art and words to convey story.

The story: Three women named Alice, Wendy, and Dorothy meet in a hotel in Austria on the eve of the first World War. Do those names ring a bell? Moore and Gebbie give us Alice as an older member of the English aristocracy; Wendy as a middle-aged, middle-class Edwardian housewife; and Dorothy as a windblown farm girl fresh from Kansas. They progress from sexual repression to bawdy smut as the political atmosphere goes from twilight innocence to threatening, stormy skies.

Each woman tells her story - and oh, what stories they are. Alice is first molested, then seduced by a schoolmistress and drawn into a corrupt ring of drug addiction and underage sex. Wendy and her little brothers are introduced to sex by a group of boys they meet in the park (the ring-leader, of course, is named Peter). Dorothy has her encounters with the Scarecrow, the Lion, and the Tin Man before finally confronting the Wizard himself.

I've seen people comment that this was the dirtiest thing they've ever read, which to me says they haven't been exposed to much anime. The worst things in here are multi-partner sex, some mild bestiality, incest, golden showers, and of course, tons and tons of underage sex.

Moore inserts an ironic commentary, from Monsieur Rougeur, the proprietor of the scandalous hotel, after reading a piece of work that I can only call 'the porn within the porn'. "You see, if this were real, it would be horrible. Children raped by their trusted parents. But they are fictions. They are uncontaminated by effect and consequence. Why, they are almost innocent."

The three women leave the hotel, much as they were cast out of the arena of the erotic in their previous lives. Alice leaves the precious mirror that she's carried with her on all her travels since childhood. "I once thought part of me was stuck inside it, but now. We've rescued her." They've reached some fulfillment. But the hotel is destroyed, and Europe is engulfed in war. Do 'beautiful and imaginative things...blossom, even in wartime'?

It's hard to blossom when you're dead. I think the ending acknowledges that masterfully.

Reading Journal Entry: The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre by Dominic Smith

2006-09-15T17:49:00.001-07:00

What is with these odd coincidences? A short month after reading one historical novel featuring Charles Baudelaire as a character, I find another. This time Baudelaire is the young friend of an aging Daguerre. The inventor of modern photography is losing his mind, the wages of a decade spent in close contact with the poisonous fumes of mercury.

He enters a netherworld of hallucination and paranoia with a bang. The apocalypse is coming, and he has a list of ten things he wants to photograph before the end of the world. The opening scene is impressive: it begins "When the vision came, he was in the bathtub' and cascades from there. The last item on Daguerre's list is Isobel Le Fournier, the love of his life, who married another man after a childhood romance. Ghosts of the past rule Daguerre's mind as he becomes less and less functional. He obsesses about his youth and loss of Isobel's love. After finding her daughter in Paris working as a prostitute he pays her to pose for him over and over again.

Flashbacks from his early life make up a large part of the book; Daguerre's early life is, alas, much more exciting than his decay among the riots and debauchery of modern Paris. I found the addition of Baudelaire as a character distracting and unnecessary. His work didn't play a part, and his famous mistress Jeanne Duval, featured so prominently in The Salt Roads, was missing. Why was he Baudelaire?

I think I prefer my historical novels, if they feature real people like Daguerre and Baudelaire, to be more firmly rooted in fact.

Reading Journal Entry: Dope by Sara Gran

2006-09-13T18:43:00.000-07:00

After just reading Too Darn Hot by Sandra Scoppettone, which is a detective novel set in New York in World War II, I picked up Dope by Sara Gran. Why? Because Bookseller Chick reminded me that this is the book that Max Perkins outed himself for. Dope is set in New York as well, in the fifties, a short decade after Faye Quick solved her murders. But it's a thousand miles away from it in tone and content.

Gran has played with the noir genre here, making her 'detective' a female ex-junkie trying to get by on what she can steal. Josephine (Joe) is hired by two well-to-do Westchester parents trying to find their daughter, who dropped out of Barnard and disappeared into the drug culture.

The great pleasure of this book was Joe. She's a horrible detective. Pretty good at being a recovered junkie, though. She makes the same kind of naive mistakes that I would make if someone hired me to find someone. She is never one step ahead. Gran expresses wonderfully the muddled mess of emotions and motivations that most of us walk around as - and I still don't know how she did it, because Joe's internal dialogue was spare and terse. Nonetheless her feelings leapt off the page.

I liked Joe and that made this a difficult book to read, because she has a pretty shitty life. But it paid off in delight and heartache.

Reading Journal Entry: Mr. Monk goes to the Firehouse by Lee Goldberg

2006-09-12T21:58:00.000-07:00

Mr. Monk Goes To The Firehouse is a tie-in novel for the TV series Monk, which stars Tony Shaloub as an obsessive compulsive detective. It's a wonderful show, that I have seen less of than I would like (I just put the first season on reserve to rectify that).

Shaloub's performance is wonderful, and Goldberg really captures the quirky charm of the character. The book is written from the point of view of his assistant Natalie, which is a nice touch.

I very much appreciated that it starts off as an invetigation of the murder of a dog impaled by a pick-axe, a nice touch of the hat to The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon, about an autistic boy investigating the murder of a dog.

Marjane Satrapi

2006-09-12T13:58:00.000-07:00

I went to see her when she came to speak about Persepolis....wonderful lady. Somehow the post got lost and it never ended up on either Seattlest or here.

Dr. Jonathan Wells

2006-09-12T13:55:00.000-07:00

I covered a Discovery Institute event last week for Seattlest. Here is the article, with a sketch of author Jonathan Wells.

Peter Jackson attached to Temeraire

2006-09-12T12:12:00.001-07:00

I really, really enjoyed Naomi Novik's series about dragons and the Napoleonic Wars.

Now it seems that Peter Jackson has secured the rights to film them.

I approve.

Reading Journal Entry: Desire in Disguise, by Rebecca Brandewyne

2006-09-11T18:48:00.000-07:00

My inspirations, the Smart Bitches, turned me on to Desire in Disguise when trying to help out a loyal reader. As described, Desire in Disguise sounded like delicious campy fun, and I had to try it out. It was everything I expected, right down to the purple prose.

Two cousins, engaged from youth, marry when she escapes revolutionary Frances. They quickly come to despise each other (through a set of amusing contretemps, of course) and become estranged. She periodically slips out of the manor to free French nobles in danger of beheading in the disguise of a pirate calling herself Rouge. He does the same, under the name Noir. The two masked pirate/freedom fighters meet and a grande passion is born.

Oh, it was awful. And delightful.

Back

2006-09-11T18:43:00.003-07:00

I owe so many reviews. But I am SO TIRED. So we're going to start with a clean slate this week. Since I read 3 books on planes this weekend I'm ahead of the game.

Reading Journal Entry: Too Darn Hot, by Sandra Scoppettone

2006-09-05T19:00:00.000-07:00

The sequel to This Dame for Hire, a hard-boiled detective novel set in New York during World War II. Faye Quick is one of those thousands of women like Rosie the Riveter who had to step into roles that enlisted men left behind. She's trying to keep her detective agency afloat while her boss is overseas. Solving a high-profile murder case in the last book has sent a nice stream of business her way.

Scoppettone does a wonderful job of evoking wartime New York with great period details, dialogue, and the horrible New York summer heat. These are competent little mysteries that win my personal 'best in breed'. I like Faye a lot, and the setting really makes the books priceless. Well done!

Reading Journal Entry: Circus World by Barry Longyear

2006-09-05T18:06:00.000-07:00

I have been waiting to read this book for about... 15 years.

When I was a lonely teenager in Italy a used copy of a science fiction book about a ship full of circus people crashing on an alien planet and building a new society, Elephant Song. I loved it, but I forgot about the series until recently. It came into my mind again and I realized that now that I am no longer marooned in a foreing country I might be able to find a copy of the other works. Voila, there is a book called Circus World and I have read it.

Circus World is a collection of connected short stories that explore the cultures of the circus world as it is affected by interstellar politics. Baraboo is in a strategically important location between two powers, and it can no longer remain isolated from the Galactic mainstream. But how can they retain their unique way of life?

The writing has a classic feel that makes it seem a bit dated (twenty years after publication) with some leaps of logic and odd racial stereotypes. But it's very fun - the traditional 'what if' question played out to an extreme.

I have it

2006-09-01T23:28:00.000-07:00

Precious, long-awaited....

Lost Girls

Circus World, by Barry Longyear

2006-09-01T23:22:00.000-07:00

Reading Journal Entry: Skin Folk, by Nalo Hopkinson

2006-08-30T18:43:00.000-07:00

Skin Folk is a collection of short stories by Nalo Hopkinson, the author of Salt Road who I saw read this summer at the Clarion West series.

She really won me over at the event and I've been seeking out her fiction since then. She is Canadian but grew up in the Caribbean and the tropes of that area infuse these stories with a light and heat that makes them truly original.

They are spooky, sexy and funny.

Reading Journal Entry: Stiff, by Mary Roach

2006-08-29T22:00:00.000-07:00

Stiff was on the bestseller lists for a long, long time, and generated a lot of buzz. I expected to like it a lot less than I did, because, while I'm really NOT stuck-up about romance novels, I can be stuck-up about non fiction. If stuff has too popular a feel to the prose, it bugs me.

In Stiff Mary Roach talks in excrutiating detail about the uses to which we put dead bodies - this I knew. I didn't know it was funny. Hilarious, laugh-out-loud funny.

And informative! Who knew that I could donate my body to be used in a car crash, dissected by surgeons, rotted on a meadow, plasticized as an art exhibit - and so on and so forth. I am almost intrigued enough by the museum idea to be tempted, but I think I'll stick with my current organ-donation-bury-the-rest plan out of consideration for the family.

I probably shouldn't have tried to read it during meals, though. That was a mistake.

Update on The Wedding Surprise by Trish Wylie

2006-08-28T22:34:00.000-07:00

Ooo, Trish Wylie does vanity Google and found my review of The Wedding Surprise. And she didn't like it.

My little blurb about her book sparked a 1500 word essay from the outraged author. It's too bad I didn't proofread before posting my 'review' as she calls it, because I made two mistakes - I misspelled Mills & Boon, and I omitted the word 'category' in front of 'romance' at the beginning of the review when I said 'I haven't read a romance lately'. As anyone could see from a cursory glance, I read romance novels a lot - it's category romances that I wanted to get a refresher on.

Wylie takes offense at a number of things I didn't say in my review, which is quite a feat. But since she so graciously directed readers of her blog to mine (with an invitation to 'add a comment of your own or if you're someone who has read the book and didn't think it sucked like apparently all romances do...') and picked it apart piece by piece, I'll go back and explain the parts that confused her.

Trish says: "I will smile graciously and take criticism with grace when it comes from someone who has any clear idea of what category romance is about these days... Which this person- Clearly doesn't -"

Geez, Wylie, I said right up front that I wanted to know what they were up to 'these days'. I don't know what more you can ask for in terms of a disclaimer. I guess Ms. Wylie thinks only the 'educated' reader (ironically she uses the term 'educated' as a put-down a couple of times in her post) should dare to have opinions make comments about the books that they read.

Trish says again: "If you don't like a particular book then fine, that's entirely your choice, and mine, and the rest of the planets - but don't knock an entire genre because of one book and the pre-conceptions you already have in order to make you feel like a more 'educated' reader. If you're an educated reader then you do your research, read across the lines and discover what the best-sellers are - allow that others may like something that you do not - and you do not feel you need to put them down because of it."

I'll give you a pass on the first part of this one, Wylie, because I said (mistakenly) in the review that I hadn't read a romance lately. But WTF are you talking about? I didn't pan romance novels. I didn't even pan category romance novels. I panned YOUR NOVEL. And I didn't even pan it that hard.

Wylie goes on to pick my 89 words apart sentence by sentence phrase, by phrase. "Now let's look at the words 'but it's probably not typical' - Well actually, I'd love to say I was the first category author to come up with Reality TV as a back drop(...)"

That's great. Modest of you. But what makes you assume I was talking about the Reality TV aspect of your book? I wasn't.

"The thing about the kind of people that run down the genre without knowing better(...)," Wylie continue to dribble in this paragraph, calling me 'too lazy' in the next line.

"Then we have 'It's a Mills and Boone book, and set in Ireland. It took me a while to get my head around that, but I got over it.' - Mills and Boon may be a London based publisher - but (...) the books are set ANYWHERE (...) They have a diversity of settings, of plots, of characters and of authors voices that mean to lump them all under the one heading for criticism is a tad naive, don't you think?"

It wouldn't be naive. It would be a complete non sequitur. I was surprised that the book was set in Ireland because the only thing that tipped me off to the location was the mention of Dublin and the Irish names for all the characters. I started off with an assumption that had to be corrected mid-stream. This was annoying. I don't think, nor did I say, that publishing books set in a variety of locales is worthy of criticism.

"'Not a bad idea, but not very believable either - truly fell apart at 'the big reveal'. (...)But to choose one, as it happened mine (which is why I found it) to use as a way of running down an entire publishing house... well... Do I really need to spell it out?

As to the 'not very believeable either' - I could choose to write 'real-life' romance from the experience of my friends and myself as modern day women in our thirties - but I'm writing books that are meant for 'escapism' - for guaranteed Happily Ever Afters for the reader - because that is what they want, it's why the romance industry exists - and really, isn't life depressing enough???"

I am truly baffled. Apparently the fact that I mentioned the name of the publisher means that I was running them down. And the fact that I said her book 'wasn't very believable' means I have a problem with upbeat endings for romance novels.

Her hysterical conclusion: I hate romances and have used my dislike of her book as an excuse to slander the entire genre.

Perhaps if Wylie had read more closely, and if she hadn't been 'too lazy' to educate herself about the person who she was making personal attacks against - she would have realized that I didn't slam the genre - just her book.

And it wasn't much of a slam at that. I felt the characters were mildly likeable and I did enjoy the set-up. I didn't feel the ending was believable - because the idea of anyone trying to solve a relationship problem by creating television montage is only less laughable than someone accepting such a montage as proof of sincerity from someone who had lied to them for months. It struck me as humiliating, heartless, and far-fetched.

To sum up, Wylie used an 89 word review which made only one clearly negative remark about her book to throw a hissy fit of a tirade in which she accuses me of saying a whole lot of things that I didn't say and don't think. She was snide in my direction, she invited her readers to make nasty comments on my blog, and she called me uninformed, lazy, naive, and narrow-minded

Thanks for the link, Trish Wylie. I like romances a lot. I didn't like your book much, though I didn't dislike it as much as you seem to think. I definitely don't like YOU. I don't appreciate your behavior, and I won't be buying any of your books any time soon.

Reading Journal Entry: Mission Child by Maureen McHugh

2006-08-28T18:20:00.000-07:00

Mission Child started by surprising me. The beginning of Mission Child was adapted into (or from, I'm not sure) a story in the Mchugh anthology I reviewed last month, Mothers and Other Monsters. That story was about a 'mission' among people on another planet colonized by Earth centuries before. The residents had lost their technology when rediscovered. The mission is run by believers in 'appropriate technology adoption' trying to teach and support a community in a wintery area where residents depend on hunting and herding engineered renndeer for food. Janna is a 'native' teenage girl living at the mission when a visit by itinerant young men goes horribly wrong. In the short story, she is charged with the safety of another young woman, a recently arrived off-worlder.

The visitors become drunk, and then violent. They kill most of the residents of the mission, including Janna's parents and younger sister. Janna survives by hiding; she is given an implant with the ability to send a distress signal and another that permits her to hibernate. The title of the short story is "The Cost To Be Wise", and it was one of the stories in Mothers that I had to walk away from. Janna and her new friend survive and are rescued. But her longing for the 'forbidden' offworld technology gives the story a terrible sting.

In the book, Janna is alone. She is not rescued and whisked away. She and her boyfriend are among the few survivors of the mission community; they must struggle to survive together, finding brief respite in a new community before encountering violence again. Janna finds herself a refugee and alone. She dresses herself in a man's clothing and begins to call herself Jan - it is easier to be a man than a woman in her circumstances. Eventually her circumstances change, but she does not. She is unable to let go of the male identity even though she assummed it under duress.

Jan's flights are multiple; from the very beginning until almost the end of the book she runs from one situation to another, desperately trying to avoid putting down roots or explaining herself to anyone. The English she learned growing up in the mission puts her into contact with the off-worlders again and again. She never really seems to grow up or recover from her first traumas. But eventually she finds some people she can call family. Ultimately this is a very sad book.

Reading Journal Entry: A Hat Full of Sky, by Terry Pratchett

2006-08-28T17:23:00.000-07:00

Yes, more Pratchett. Don't look at me that way! It's summer! And I'm reading as many books as I can in order to get in some more entries for the Seattle Public Library's summer reading drawing, which ends 8/31. I'll get back to the classics next month.

A Hat Full of Sky is very much a girls' book. It's a Discworld novel, but not aggressively. Pratchett has reined in his rampant footnotes and digressions and Ankh-Morpork makes no appearances. This has a very local, very anywhere-fantasy-land, and a very YA feel to it and there are no 'barriers to entry' for readers who are unfamiliar with the rest of (extraordinarily long) series. So much so, in fact, that I wonder if this was written with the American YA market in mind.

It's about Tiffany Aching, who is eleven and being sent away from home to be an apprentice to a witch. That's OK, making cheese on the farm was getting old, even though she was very good at it, and apparently in some previous book she proved herself to have some magical talents that probably need training up. Tiffany is very likeable and feels totally natural as a character. I'm surprised Pratchett does girls so well! There is a particular scene where Tiffany makes a mis-step with a group of her peers which made me redden in sympathy for her.

Tiffany isn't just magically talented, she also has a special relationship with several tiny blue men - The Wee Free Men of the previous installment. They are drunken, rowdy, very funny, and just want to help Tiffany. With everything. Sometimes this is a bad thing. But when a powerful magical creature begins to stalk her, they are determined to help.

The final conflict had more than a bit of Deus Ex Machina to it, but the way there was so amusing that I can't help but love this and recommend it.

Terry Pratchett on religion

2006-08-25T12:54:00.000-07:00

I was listening to an audio book of Pyramids by Terry Pratchett today and came across this scene; one of my favorites in the entirety of the vast Discworld series. I'd forgotten which book it was in. I laughed and laughed. Luckily I wasn't the one driving.

He'd always remember the first night in the dormitory. It was long enough to accommodate all eighteen boys in Viper House, and draughty enough to accommodate the great outdoors. Its designer may have had comfort in mind, but only so that he could avoid it wherever possible: he had contrived a room that could actually be colder than the weather outside.

'I thought we got rooms to ourselves,' said Teppic.

Chidder, who had laid claim to the least exposed bed in the whole refrigerator, nodded at him.

'Later on,' he said. He lay back, and winced. 'Do they sharpen these springs, do you reckon?'

Teppic said nothing. The bed was in fact rather more comfortable than the one he'd slept in at home. His parents, being high born, naturally tolerated conditions for their children which would have been rejected out of hand by destitute sandflies.
He stretched out on the thin mattress and analysed the day's events. He'd been enrolled as an assassin, all right, a student assassin, for more than seven hours and they hadn't even let him lay a hand on a knife yet. Of course, tomorrow was another day . . .

Chidder leaned over.

'Where's Arthur?' he said.

Teppic looked at the bed opposite him. There was a pathetically small sack of clothing positioned neatly in its centre, but no sign of its intended occupant.
'Do you think he's run away?' he said, staring around at the shadows.

'Could be,' said Chidder. 'It happens a lot, you know. Mummy's boys, away from home for the first time-'

The door at the end of the room swung open slowly and Arthur entered, backwards, tugging a large and very reluctant billy goat. It fought him every step of the way down the aisle between the bedsteads.

The boys watched in silence for several minutes as he tethered the animal to the end of his bed, upended the sack on the blankets, and took out several black candles, a sprig of herbs, a rope of skulls, and a piece of chalk. Taking the chalk, and adopting the shiny, pink-faced expression of someone who is going to do what they know to be right no matter what, Arthur drew a double circle around his bed and then, getting down on his chubby knees, filled the space between them with as unpleasant a collection of occult symbols as Teppic. had ever seen. When they were completed to his satisfaction he placed the candles at strategic points and lit them; they spluttered and gave off a smell that suggested that you really wouldn't want to know what they were made of. He drew a short, red-handled knife from the jumble on the bed and advanced towards the goat-

A pillow hit him on the back of the head.

'Garn! Pious little bastard!'

Arthur dropped the knife and burst into tears. Chidder sat up in bed.

'That was you, Cheesewright!' he said. 'I saw you!' Cheesewright, a skinny young man with red hair and a face that was one large freckle, glared at him.

'Well, it's too much,' he said. 'A fellow can't sleep with all this religion going on. I mean, only little kids say their prayers at bedtime these days, we're supposed to be learning to be assassins-'

'You can jolly well shut up, Cheesewright,' shouted Chidder. 'It'd be a better world if more people said their prayers, you know. I know I don't say mine as often as I should-'

A pillow cut him off in mid-sentence. He bounded out of bed and vaulted at the red-haired boy, fists flailing.

As the rest of the dormitory gathered around the scuffling pair Teppic slid out of bed and padded over to Arthur, who was sitting on the edge of his bed and sobbing.
He patted him uncertainly on the shoulder, on the basis that this sort of thing was supposed to reassure people.

'I shouldn't cry about it, youngster,' he said, gruffly.

'But - but all the runes have been scuffed,' said Arthur. 'It's all too late now! And that means the Great Om will come in the night and wind out my entrails on a stick!'

'Does it?'

'And suck out my eyes, my mother said!'

'Gosh!' said Teppic, fascinated. 'Really?' He was quite glad his bed was opposite Arthur's, and would offer an unrivalled view. 'What religion would this be?'

'We're Strict Authorised Ormits,' said Arthur. He blew his nose. 'I noticed you don't pray,' he said. 'Don't you have a god?'

'Oh yes,' said Teppic hesitantly, 'no doubt about that.'

'You don't seem to want to talk to him.'

Teppic shook his head. 'I can't,' he said, 'not here. He wouldn't be able to hear, you see.'

'My god can hear me anywhere,' said Arthur fervently.

'Well, mine has difficulty if you're on the other side of the room,' said Teppic. 'It can be very embarrassing.'

'You're not an Offlian, are you?' said Arthur. Offler was a Crocodile God, and lacked ears.

'No.'

'What god do you worship, then?'

'Not exactly worship,' said Teppic, discomforted. 'I wouldn't say worship. I mean, he's all right. He's my father, if you must know.'

Arthur's pink-rimmed eyes widened.

'You're the son of a god?' he whispered.

'It's all part of being a king, where I come from,' said Teppic hurriedly. 'He doesn't have to do very much. That is, the priests do the actual running of the country. He just makes sure that the river floods every year, d'you see, and services the Great Cow of the Arch of the Sky. Well, used to.'

'The Great-'

'My mother,' explained Teppic. 'It's all very embarrassing.'

'Does he smite people?'

'I don't think so. He's never said.'

Arthur reached down to the end of the bed. The goat, in the confusion, had chewed through its rope and trotted out of the door, vowing to give up religion in future.
'I'm going to get into awful trouble,' he said. 'I suppose you couldn't ask your father to explain things to the Great Orm?'

'He might be able to,' said Teppic doubtfully. 'I was going to write home tomorrow anyway.

'The Great Orm is normally to be found in one of the Nether Hells,' said Arthur, 'where he watches everything we do. Everything I do, anyway. There's only me and mother left now, and she doesn't do much that needs watching.'

'I'll be sure and tell him.'

'Do you think the Great Orm will come tonight?'

'I shouldn't think so. I'll ask my father to be sure and tell him not to.'

At the other end of the dormitory Chidder was kneeling on Cheesewright's back and knocking his head repeatedly against the wall.

'Say it again,' he commanded. 'Come on - "There's nothing wrong-"'

'"There's nothing wrong with a chap being man enough-" curse you, Chidder, you beastly-'

'I can't hear you, Cheesewright,' said Chidder.

'"Man enough to say his prayers in front of other chaps", you rotter.'
'Right. And don't you forget it.'

After lights out Teppic lay in bed and thought about religion. It was certainly a very complicated subject.

The valley of the Djel had its own private gods, gods which had nothing to do with the world outside. It had always been very proud of the fact. The gods were wise and just and regulated the lives of men with skill and foresight, there was no question about that, but there were some puzzles.

For example, he knew his father made the sun come up and the river flood and so on. That was basic, it was what the pharaohs had done ever since the time of Khuft, you couldn't go around questioning things like that. The point was, though, did he just make the sun come up in the Valley or everywhere in the world? Making the sun come up in the Valley seemed a more reasonable proposition, after all, his father wasn't getting any younger, but it was rather difficult to imagine the sun coming up everywhere else and not the Valley, which led to the distressing thought that the sun would come up even if his father forgot about it, which was a very likely state of affairs. He'd never seen his father do anything much about making the sun rise, he had to admit. You'd expect at least a grunt of effort round about the dawn. His father never got up until after breakfast. The sun came up just the same.

He took some time to get to sleep. The bed, whatever Chidder said, was too soft, the air was too cold and, worst of all, the sky outside the high windows was too dark. At home it would have been full of flarelight from the necropolis, its silent flames eerie but somehow familiar and comforting, as though the ancestors were watching over their valley. He didn't like the darkness.

The following night in the dormitory one of the boys from further along the coast shyly tried to put the boy in the next bed inside a wickerwork cage he made in Craft and set fire to him, and the night after that Snoxall, who had the bed by the door and came from a little country out in the forests somewhere, painted himself green and asked for volunteers to have their intestines wound around a tree. On Thursday a small war broke out between those who worshipped the Mother Goddess in her aspect of the Moon and those who worshipped her in her aspect of a huge fat woman with enormous buttocks. After that the masters intervened and explained that religion, while a fine thing, could be taken too far.

Reading Journal Entry: More Wandering Stars by Jack Dann

2006-08-24T18:14:00.000-07:00

More Wandering Stars from Jack Dann. This collection contains a sequel of sorts to Horace Gold's The Trouble With Water, the creepy but not-up-to-the-last-one Warm Dark Places. An Isaac Bashevis Singer story, The Last Demon, puts all the rest to shame. Woody Allen's meditations on the Tanach, The Scrolls, made me laugh out loud. A worthy anthology, but a bit slim. And it's been 25 years since this was published. Isn't it about time for some more Jewish-themed science fiction and fantasy? C'mon, Jack Dann! What have you been up to?

You'd think it's out there - but I don't know. I was looking for Jewish-themed speculative fiction for my Jewish book club (you can only read so many holocaust books in a row) and I couldn't really find any that were in print. Recommendations would be welcome.

Black Hole by Charles Burns

2006-08-23T18:00:00.000-07:00

This is the book I was running away from when I read two Georgette Heyer novels this weekend. Black Hole has been on my list for way too long. It's brilliant, and I wanted to buy it, but it was just too spendy and too heavy - both emotionally and physically. I kept picking it up and putting it down.

It's a graphic novel set in an alternate 1970's suburban Seattle. A weird disease changes people's bodies in unpredictable ways. The art is haunting & bizarre, white on black with a visceral quality that literally made me sick to my stomach a couple of times.

'It' is transmitted by sex, and only affects teenagers. We follow the stories of Chris and Keith, who each come in contact with the disease in different ways.

Ugh - take a trip back to high school, and then add horrible nightmarish stuff on top of the already horrifying experiences you remember.There are some very trippy dream sequences. This was very difficult to read. But it needed to go back to the library, so after reading two Heyers as insulation I picked it back up again and struggled through.

Good - sad - serious art. Extremely uncomfortable on every level. Not only did the art make me nauseated a couple of times, but there were at least two times when I felt my cheeks burn with embarrassment - remembered or symnpathetic? Hard to tell.

Reading Journal Entry: The Masqueraders, by Georgette Heyer

2006-08-23T17:35:00.000-07:00

This Heyer, on the other hand, has a bit more dash to it, and is definitely more memorable. Pre-Regency, the characters are allowed the fashions and flourishes of the Georgian period - red high heeled shoes, powdered wigs, wide skirts - and use them to good will. In fact, the two main characters are cross-dressing siblings who fool all of London society into accepting them as a brother and sister when they are in fact a sister and brother.

I did not quite expect this. It was fun, and funny, and very amusing that they should fall in love (with gender-appropriately dressed individuals) and be all sorted out nice and tight with decent identities and so forth by the end of the book.

This was unexpectedly one of two books about cross-dressing that I read this week, and compared to Maureen McHugh's Mission Child it falls a bit flat. I mean, c'mon, Georgette, surely there had to be a bit more going on with these two than a simple desire to escape the consequences of Jacobitism. No?

Reading Journal Entry: Sylvester, by Georgette Heyer

2006-08-22T10:51:00.000-07:00

A new Heyer! Two, actually, this week. I will be so sad when I've read the last one. Heyer is the Queen of Regency, and this is a very palatable example. It's her 'Pride and Prejudice'. I read this rather quickly, though, and the characters are bland enough that they are beginning to slip from my mind. Sylvester: self-important Duke, with very good manners. Prudence: plucky but timid (?) authoress of a roman a clef skewering said Duke. They conceive ill opinions of each other, but Fate Brings Them Together! Most satisfactorily.

Reading Journal Entry: Secrets of the Lean Plate Club by Sally Squires

2006-08-18T22:32:00.000-07:00

This diet book is written by a who wrote a nutritional column for the Washington Post. Pretty standard feel-good diet fare, with the usual scaremongering about the dangers of fat (THE FAT IS COMING TO GET YOU!)

The best part about this book is the advice to start weight-lifting, which comes with illustrations and instructions for exercises that can be done by beginners.

Readng Journal Entry:The Wedding Surprise, by Trish Wylie

2006-08-17T22:33:00.000-07:00

A romance novel! I was curious to know what they're like these days, so I picked up a random recent volume at the library.

A Wedding Surprise is certainly recent (it's about two people who agree to participate in a reality show) but it's probably not typical. It's a Mills & Boone book, and set in Ireland. It took me a little while to get my head around that, but I got over it.

Not a bad idea, but not very believable either - truly fell apart at 'the big reveal'.

Reading Journal Entry: Black Powder War by Naomi Novik

2006-08-16T18:01:00.000-07:00

The third volume about Captain Lawrence and Temeraire takes place after the successful resolution of the crisis with China. They are called suddenly away to deal with an international crisis - Great Britain has bought two dragon eggs from SItanbul, and they must be secured before they hatch in a few months time. The urgency necessitates an overland trip (for a nice change from the previous long sea voyages) which allow for plenty of adventurous encounters and local color.

I didn't feel this colume was as successfully plotted as the previous two - things seemed to resolve themselves mid-book, and the last third of the volume almost dragged, with nearly a completely different storyline. She did leave us with a kicker of a teaser for next time, though. Damn her. Hurry and write, Naomi Novik!

A response

2006-08-15T21:52:00.000-07:00

I previously expressed dismay at Will Duquette's review of S. M. Stirling's Dies the Fire.

Will has responded in a somewhat prickly manner. I didn't say anything of substance in my post, and he seems to read in a great deal more than I intended. The reason I didn't say much is because, as the title of the original post stated, I really was at a loss for words. At the time I wasn't sure why his review struck such a wrong chord for me.

Since he went to the trouble of noting my response with a further explanation of his feelings about Wicca, sprinkled with concern about his - gasp - intolerance, I've taken a few days to examine why his words struck such a wrong chord with me.

I was not offended, nor do I think he was 'intolerant'. Duquette may remain faux-gasp-free. My reaction had nothing to do with the merits, or lack thereof, of the Wiccan faith. In fact, my opinions about Wicca align in many respects with those that Duquette expresses (although I like to believe I would choose more tactful phrases than "hodgepodge of play-acting and high fantasy" and "willfully self-deluded").

Duquette disapproved of a positive portrayal of characters following a religion other than Christianity. His exact words were, "It troubles me to see them lauded in what is arguably a mainstream novel."

Religion, Duquette explains, is a matter of truth, not of psychological utility. Besides, real pagans converted to Christianity. I'm not sure what his point is with that bit of info. So back to me.

I'm not Wiccan. But I'm not Christian either. I'm Jewish. Until fairly recently, there haven't been many positive portrayals of Jews in literature. It's been pretty much Shylock & Fagin all the way. And these twisted ideas of Jews were used to justify the worst kind of hatred and violence.

When I read the above, I think: well, what SHOULD Wiccans have looked like in this book? What would a book that did NOT trouble Duquette look like? Should the main character have been less 'kind, intelligent, and clearly sincere'? How charismatic is it OK for them to be? Should mean, stupid Wiccan characters have been included for balance? Or is it OK for them to be positive characters as long as none of the other characters are influenced by them?

What about Jews? Or Mormons? Are positive portrayals of people of those faiths disturbing? And what exactly does 'mainstream' mean? It's OK as long as only the religious minorities involved are exposed to them? Hmmm. I wonder.

Yeah, I find it sad. In fact, you might say I find it 'troubling'.

Reading Journal Entry: Throne of Jade by Naomi Novik

2006-08-15T21:47:00.000-07:00

Throne of Jade is the sequel to His Majesty's Dragon, which I gulped down a couple of weeks ago. I loved the idea of combining a historically realistc Napoleonic warfare with dragons, and I was thrilled to learn that the publishers released all three books in quick succession. That meant I didn't need to wait another year to find out what happened to our lovely black Celestial Temeraire and his daring Captain Lawrence. I just had to wait two weeks for the Seattle Public Library to get me one of the fifteen copies they bought.

It was a long two weeks, but it finally arrived, and I brushed aside the 37 other books I have sitting on my 'SPL' bookshelf in favor of Throne of Jade and its sequel Black Powder War.

At the end of His Majesty's Dragon, Lawrence had become reconciled to departing his beloved Navy and entering the Aviation Corps. Temeraire had proved his mettle in defense of the British Isles and revealed himself to be in possession of a smashing new fighting ability: the divine wind, which is pretty clearly an audio shock wave of some kind. Fun stuff!

But at the beginning of Throne of Jade, Lawrence and Temeraire aren't basking in the gratitude of the multitudes. An embassy from China has arrived, demanding the return of the precious Celestial they had intended to be a companion to the Emperor of France. As Temeraire refuses to be separated from Lawrence, and Lawrence refuses to lie to Temeraire in order to trick him on board ship, things are at an impasse until Lawrence finds himself volunteered for a trip to China.

The long sea voyage is not glossed over; one reader complained about this, but I enjoyed it very much and I think many others will also - because the Naval atmosphere is so compelling. Novik again does a great job weaving the realities of 'dragon support' into the historical situation. Temeraire and Lawrence find themselves on what is essentially an aircraft carrier that has to support three different entourages. There's the regular crew, Temeraire's crew, and the Chinese embassy. Plenty of opportunities for misunderstandings and tension.

Well done, although I wish some incidents had been wrapped up more neatly.

Reading Journal Entry: The Salt Roads, by Nalo Hopkinson

2006-08-14T18:01:00.000-07:00

I saw Nalo Hopkinson read from her next book last month at a Clarion West event. She was so magnetic that I immediately rushed back to the library and reserved all her books (no, I didn't buy them - why? Because I read 5 books a week, duh, if I bought them all I'd be poor.)

In The Salt Roads Hopkinson interweaves several storylines about black women connected by Ezili, the goddess of love, and the power of the sea road on which the Ginen were taken from Africa. The three women are Mer, a healer in Saint-Domingue; Jeanne Duval, a historical figure and the lover of Charles Baudelaire; and Meritet, who becomes St. Mary of Egypt.

These are richly told, heartwrenching portraits. Hopkinson is really skilled at evoking the historical era; the smells of the Mer's cane fields, Jeanne's powder and makeup, and Meritet's dusty Roman roads.

Hopkinson's vivid writing makes up for the lack of resolution. Ultimately the three stories (and Ezili's story) didn't come together in a satisfactory way. I can't decide whether the loose structure is a strength or a weakness. I think, though, that it's enough. It's good as it is. Forcing it into the mold of a traditional story arc would have crippled it.

Adjectives I will apply to this book: interesting, exciting, thought-provoking.

In which I muse on an unnamed self-help book

2006-08-12T10:37:00.000-07:00

I can't review the last book I read this week because it would get me in trouble.

Let's just say I've been experiencing some difficulties in one of my relationships. And I picked up a self-help book that references said relationship in a derogatory manner in the title. Out of a sense of self-preservation, I will not be revealing the name of the book.

If you're reading this, and you know me, it's not you. Really. I swear. It's totally not you!

You (generic reader you) are not missing much, though, because thus wasn't a great book. Pretty run of the mill. Classifies people into neat little categories, tells a few funny anecdotes about how moronic people can be, and gives the reader a nice slap upside the head. The problem may not be your fault, says this (and every other self-help book), but it is at this moment your responsibility. You are undoubtedly contributing to the problem. So adjust your expectations and your attitude.

I adjusted myself and tried wearing a new attitude this week. So far, so good.

Reading Journal Entry: Saving Dinner the Low-Carb Way by Leanne Ely

2006-08-10T17:34:00.000-07:00

This cookbook and dinner planner was recommended to me. Ely provides no-nonsense dinner recipes that won't cause anyone's palate to rebel; she includes shopping lists and serving recommendations. A strength is that nutritional information is provided and she does not adhere to any particular 'brand' of low carb diet. Very sensible, not too exciting, but it did give me some ideas....

James Tiptree, Jr. biography released.

2006-08-10T12:54:00.000-07:00

I am so excited about this book.

I attended the release party and wrote about it for Seattlest here.

Reading Journal Entry: Wolf Who Rules, by Wen Spencer

2006-08-09T17:40:00.000-07:00

We read Wen Spencer's Tinker in April. At that time I mentioned that Tinker's new dreamy husband, Wolfwind, doesn't really make much sense. I was hoping to get some of that sorted out in this sequel. But Spencer doesn't seem to have the words 'slow down' in her vocabulary. All that wacky stuff that Wolfwind did in volume 1 (like marry Tinker without her knowing it, and turn her into an elf without asking permission) isn't revisited. Instead, Spencer picks up right where she left off with the action (Pittsburgh has been catapulted seemingly permanently into Elfland - there's a big growing deadzone - Tinker still has the hots for everything with a dick) at the end of the last volume, throws in some additional complications, and gets to work.

Actually, there are a LOT of additional complications. The numerous plotlines become confusing and weaken the story. By the end of the book there are just too many players, and some of them are underdeveloped.

Still fun though!

Reading Journal Entry: Wandering Stars, edited by Jack Dann

2006-08-07T21:54:00.000-07:00

In search of interesting Jewish-themed fiction for my book group, I came across this collection of Jewish science fiction and fantasy stories.

Originally published in 1974, this is old enough that Isaac Asimov was around to write an introduction, and other Jewish SF authors could confess to hiding their religious/ethnic persuasion in order to avoid discrimination. It's also old enough that some of the best stories in the volume feel dated; funny, original, sad, often classic, they have a patina of other decades.

More than one deals with the problem of alien Jews. Most are funny. I was particularly happy to re-read Horace Gold's 'The Trouble With Water', about a Jewish store owner who annoys the wrong water spirit.

This is definitely worth a read, but I would like to see a collection of more modern works. We'll see how More Wandering Stars (originally published in 1981) delivers.

Reading Journal Entry: Only You Can Save Mankind, by Terry Pratchett

2006-08-06T15:09:00.000-07:00

Johnny Maxwell is a perfectly average twelve year old (with, perhaps, an embarrassment of interesting friends available to serve as supporting characters). His parents are splitting up and he spends a lot of time playing bootlegged video games. He's quite surprised when the bad guys - aliens - in his latest game surrender. It's just that they surrender so aggressively. They refuse to shoot back at him or other human players and they start fleeing computer screens all over the country.

It turns out it's not so much fun to fight people who have an infinite number of lives.

Pratchett layers on some oblique (OK, not actually so oblique) political commentary, as this is set during the first Gulf War. Johnny's buddies are hilarious, as is the girl geek he eventually teams up with. A very competent YA book.

Reading Journal Entry: Salt by Mark Kurlansky

2006-08-04T18:24:00.000-07:00

I first heard of Salt when the author objected to President Bush bringing it on vacation with him.

Well, he didn't exactly object, but here's what he did say:

"What does it mean that George W Bush, a man who has demonstrated little ability for reflection, who is known to read no newspapers and whose headlong charge into disaster after cataclysm has shown a complete ignorance of history, who wants to throw out centuries of scientific learning and replace it with mythical mumbo-jumbo that he mistakenly calls religion, who preaches Christianity but seems to have never read the teachings of the great anti-war activist, Jesus Christ, is now spending his vacation reading my book, Salt: A World History?
(...)maybe he should put my book down, walk outside and talk to the grieving mothers of the American youth he wasted, who are camped in front of the ranch."

Well, damn, that sounds like a man worth reading.

I can see why Bush found Salt attractive. It's not very demanding. Kurlansky surveys the history of human use of salt, with a dash of geological information as well. He dances nimbly between different cultures and time period, stringing together lovely little anecdotes about places and salt extraction techniques like salt crystals on a necklace of chapters. Or something. There's very little required of the reader except that he or she sit back and enjoy the ride. It's quite enjoyable, actually. This would be a good read for young adults. It's massive, but doesn't require a long attention span.

Kurlansky's Cod was recommended to me a while ago, but I don't feel the need to seek it out now that I've read its older brother.

Shoes with bling

2006-08-03T16:50:00.000-07:00

Reading Journal Entry: Murder by Magic, ed. by Rosemary Edghill

2006-08-02T22:22:00.000-07:00

A short story collection edited by Edghill, showed up on my reserve list at the same time as Warslayer. Unfortunately, there's no Edghill story in it! So I was disappointed. It's difficult to do mysteries well, especially within the added confines of a short story. And fantastical mysteries are even more challening because there are more conventions to balance. The result is an uneven batch of works. There were about five interesting stories in the collection; the rest range from lackluster to completely inadequate. I know I have high standards, but I don't think it's unreasonable to expect these stories to actually include a mystery.

I enjoyed most Laura Resnick's 'Doppelgangster' and Doyle's 'A Death in the Working'. Friesner's 'Au Purr' had a nice playful tone to it as well.

Reading Journal Entry: His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novik

2006-08-01T18:37:00.000-07:00

I stayed up late to read Peace Like a River. When reading His Majesty's Dragon, by Naomi Novik, I stayed up late, and then woke up early to read some more before work.

I like reading fantasy novels. I like reading novels set in Regency England. What could be better than a combination of the two? Dragon is set during the Napoleonic wars, and Novik pulls off the best evocation of the Royal Navy since Patrick O'Brian.

Captain William Lawrence, of the HMS Reliant, discovers at the conclusion of a successful naval engagement that he has captured from the French a large dragon egg. This doesn't come as a complete surprise, as dragons are a domesticated species and their handlers form a Regency equivalent of the Air Force. The egg is close to hatching. As aviators are viewed as near-pariahs, neither Lawrence nor his officers are eager to harness the being about to emerge. Nonetheless, such a valuable asset to His Majesty's forces can't be left to fly away unharbessed. They draw straws. And the dragon promptly turns up his nose at the poor midshipman and chooses the most senior office on board - Captain Lawrence.

Lawrence must perforce leave the navy and enter the Aerial Corps, a branch of the British military consisting of dragons, the men who have bonded with them, and various support personnel who are key to the war against France. Of course, Napoleon has his own dragons, and so does everyone else.

The rather typical 'newbie' plotline in which Lawrence and the readers are together introduced to this world is well-executed; Novik is obviously well acquainted with the era and gets the historical and cultural details right. The insular, but atypically relaxed culture of the aviators gives her an opportunity to have characters with more modern attitudes and dialogue without seeming anachronistic. Lawrence is a good guy with a pole up his ass when it comes to ethics (just my type) and Temeraire is charming. The aerial battles (and yes, there is some action after a long, long time spent on training exposition) are well-described and plausible. And finally, the biology and the zoology of the various dragon breeds is explored in a naturalistic way that lends some hefty underpinnings to the drama.

Recommended.

Reading Journal Entry: The Warslayer by Rosemary Edghill

2006-07-31T18:03:00.000-07:00

I like Rosemary Edghill's work a lot. She's been very successful co-authoring books with Mercedes Lackey that I don't like very much - I'm just not a Lackey fan. This is a stand-alone work that came out in 2003. I'm surprised I didn't see this when it came out. But I didn't! Until a search last week turned up some new Edghill stuff for me to enjoy.

The Warslayer is about the star of a syndicated TV show inspired by Buffy and Xena. Gloria McArdle is a failed Australian Olympic gymnast who somehow landed a role as Vizen the SLayer, guarding medieval English against the incursions of witches and demons with a pudgy nun sidekick, Sister Bernadette. She's on a publicity tour in the US when three sweet looking bald aliens show up at her door and ask her to save their race. Glory is trying to explain that she's not really a warrior princess when, woops! The magic goes off, and she gets taken along for the ride.

There's quite a bit borrowed from Galaxy Quest here, with a sharper eye to the foibles of fandom. The Allimir definitely need rescuing, and Glory finds herself suckered into trying. If only she could get rid of the completely impractical chain metal bikini that serves Vixen the Slayer as a costume....

An enjoyable adventure, and it did manage to surprise me just a little bit.

Reading Journal Entry: Kiln People by David Brin

2006-07-31T18:01:00.000-07:00

Brin has been one of my favorite modern science fiction authors; his one failing is that he tends to let plots spiral out of control. Kiln People is a stand-alone work, and although the twists and turns get a bit grandiose, he manages to keep everything under control and wrap up most of the loose ends in a neat little explanatory package. Which is no little challenge, because this isn't just a very ambitious science fiction work, it's a mystery as well, and it's written from multiple points of view (who are all the same person).

Kiln People takes place in a world where you can literally send yourself to work and stay home to play computer games. You can create disposable versions of yourself. These 'dittos' are imprinted into special clay that begins to decay a short time after imprinting - you 'upload' their experiences back into your head at the end of the day.

The world looks very different with an unlimited supply of artifical golems running around. Brin explores it through the character of Albert Morris, private investigator. Morris does most of his investigative work through golems, keeping his 'realbody' at home when possible. So we get slices of life from multiple golem perspectives as different iterations of Albert pursue different lines of investigation.

I believe one of the quotes on the back of the book used the phrase 'intellectually engaging'. It caught my eye, and I haven't been able to abandon the phrase. Brin's work is so interesting. I can forgive the occasional digressions and meanderings.

Friday's Review: Where's My Cow? by Terry Pratchett

2006-07-31T17:55:00.000-07:00

The existence of this book makes me laugh.

Featured prominently in Terry Practhett's best-selling fantasy slapstick series, Where's My Cow is the picture book that Commander Vimes reads to his son every night in Thud!. It's also a book about that book. Dizzying, I know! Yet not necessarily worth it for those who aren't already devoted fans.

It's fun, I'm glad I read it, but I don't know how suited it would be for real kids. And Vimes doesn't look at all like he does in my head.

Great Books: Peace Like a River, by Leif Enger

2006-07-27T17:52:00.000-07:00

I stayed up late at night to finish this book. I've been in sleep deficit for a week. I hope that's a strong enough recommendation.

Peace Like a River isn't on Robert Teeter's list of Great Books, but I'm labeling it that way anyhow because of home field advantage. When I conducted a poll of best works of American fiction, Peace Like a River came in second, with five votes.

It's very good. A magnetic read. It's about a boy growing up in the Midwest is the sixties; it's about his father, who can perform miracles; it's about his sister, who writes lyric cowboy poetry; it's about the older brother who changes their lives. Enger excels at producing tension; I knew that there was always something awful lurking around the corner because there WAS always something awful lurking around the corner.

I'm almost inarticulate in terms of describing how much I liked this book. I loved Swede's silly cowboy poetry and the way it changes as her family gets into more and more trouble. I love the way I could smell the cold as they drove along in the Badlands, and the cinnamon buns.

Reading Journal Entry: The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean

2006-07-27T17:34:00.000-07:00

Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean have collaborated on a number of projects; two or three kid's books (including The Wolves in the Walls, now adapted into a stage work) and the movie released last year, Mirrormask.

McKean's art is lovely and layered, with a multimedia look that makes me go all oogly inside. Combine this with crushworthy Neil Gaiman's writing prowess and what do you get? Millions of screaming fans, that's what. Here's their fun collaboration website.

The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish is a picture book. It doesn't have the utter creepy scariness of Coraline; instead it's kind of sweet and silly but sassy too. This book has a bad attitude, and I love it. Dad gets swapped around town something fierce, clinging to his newspaper and his silence the whole time.

Gaiman's prose works are bestsellers (American Gods, Anansi Boys) which I've enjoyed, but his best work in my opinion is in illustrated media. This is one of his best. Is it earth shattering? No (and Coraline was). But it is a great example of a 'best of breed' type book.

You can tell he's a dad.

Reading Journal Entry: The Great Pretender by Millenia Black

2006-07-25T18:29:00.000-07:00

I checked The Great Pretender out because of a brou-ha-ha on the author Millenia Black's blog

Ms. Black spoke out with a vengeance when her publisher (New American Library), threatened not to publish her next book unless she made the characters black.

She prevailed in that dispute. Her book The Great Betrayal will be published with white characters as it was originally written. I imagine NAL got a ton of bad publicity out of that one (good move guys!)

So, yeah, brou all over the place, followed by a 'ha ha'. I had to check out her work.

I'm afraid The Great Pretender was one of the worst books I've read all year. I only finished reading it so I could write a review. The characters were horrible, unlikeable, poorly motivated paper cut-outs. The writing was stiff. The dialogue was unbelievable. The plotting was clumsy. If a gun is introduced in the first act in the form of a divorcing friend who knows dirty secrets, I expect a gun to go off in the third act in the form of said friend actually revealing some secrets, not getting laid with yet another minor character who I don't care about. There were not one, not two, but THREE unintended pregnancies. Plus an STD.

There was really nothing good about this book. It was one of those books that says 'hey, if this got published, maybe YOU should try writing a book again! Because this sucks!'

At a loss for words....

2006-07-25T12:15:00.000-07:00

I was surprised by this review:

"I was also interested in Stirling’s choice of Wiccans as his protagonists. Juniper Mackenzie is kind, intelligent, and clearly sincere about her Wiccan religion; and the fact that she practices what she preaches leads many other characters to adopt Wicca as the book progresses. I find that troubling.

If you think of religion as primarily an internal thing, as a way of viewing the world that helps you cope, then it may well be true that there are many paths that lead to God, as Juniper says at one point. By that view, Wicca makes as much sense as any other religion. But if you think of religion as being based in truth, as being our confrontation with ultimate reality, then obviously some views of the Godhead are truer than others. As a Christian, I believe that Jesus Christ is God and the Son of God: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Wiccans are not satanists, as such, and I do not hate them or wish to persecute them; I’m sure the proportion of good and bad people is much the same within Wicca as without. But they are, at best, misled–and as teachers, at best misleading. It troubles me to see them lauded in what is arguably a mainstream novel. That said, one of the basic messages of the book is that courage, fortitude, decency, charity, and other virtues are survival traits, and that’s a message worth spreading."

I find it sad that a positive description of characters following a different religion is 'troubling'.

Reading Journal Entry: The SFWA Grand Masters Volume 1, edited by Frederick Phol

2006-07-24T19:11:00.000-07:00

This was another short story collection that I read during my long weekend. And it was like revisiting old friends.

The SFWA Grand Masters collection includes significant works from recipients of the Grand Mast Award. This volume, #1, includes works from Heinlein, Jack Williamson, Clifford D. Simak, L. Sprague de Camp, and Fritz Leiber.

I am very familiar with the works of four out of five, but Williamson was a nice surprise.

Frederick Pohl provided some nice biographical material, but not nearly enough information about the stories themselves. I wanted to know date of publication, awards won, reasoning behind inclusion. This lack was especially baffling since several selections were (ok, seemed to be, I couldn't be sure since there was NO INFORMATION ABOUT THEM) nonfiction or autobiographical essays.

The real reason I picked this up is because I read at Nicholas Whyte's webpagethat it contains one of those SF stories that have won both the Hugo and the Nebula awards - Grotto of the Dancing Deer by Simak. I enjoyed it, but it's one of those great ideas that has been ripped off so many times that forty years later, it seems old hat..

Reading Journal Entry: Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris

2006-07-21T19:07:00.000-07:00

This was a short-story-licious vacation.

Sedaris has been writing for This American Life for a while now, and he's a real powerhouse when it comes to convincing people to be his adoring fans/loyal minions. Apparently he draws hundreds of people to his readings. My theory is he's planning a world takeover.

Luckily, he has a sense of humor. So dictatorial rule under Sedaris can't be worse than the current regimes.

This collection contains a number of vignettes from childhood and adulthood - funny and poignant.

I much enjoyed the ones about living in France and learning the language (or trying). They jibe with my own expat experience.

But, strangely, I can't think of much more to say.

They were funny. I enjoyed them. But....?

Reading Journal Entry: Mothers & Other Monsters by Maureen McHugh

2006-07-20T21:24:00.000-07:00

My first experience with Maureen McHugh's writing was China Mountain Zhang, which I picked up off the stacks of the Newport Beach public library about ten years ago. How many award-winning science fiction books are there about gay asian men? Not many, I'll tell you. I was smitten. The skill with which China Mountain Zhang is written was rewarded by a Huga, a Nebula nomination, the Tiptree award, a Locus Award, and others, as well as my undying devotion and a sincere girl crush.

I've been longing to read this collection of short stories, Mothers and Other Monsters since I saw her read from it at the Science Fiction Museum last month. Some of them are paranormal. Some are science fiction. Most are about families and relationships that seem so real they almost walk off the page. With a bonus kick in the gut. At the end of almost every story in this collection I had to close the book, put it down, and recover before going on to the next.

Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.

Reading Journal Entry: The Art of Detection by Laurie R. King

2006-07-19T22:06:00.000-07:00

I'm back! And boy did we have fun. I got a lot of reading, in, too. My favorite kind of vacation - exhaustion , naps, reading in regular rotation.

I finished Laurie R. King's latest, The Art of Detection. King manages to join her two best-selling mystery series in this: Kate Martinelli, a lesbian detective in San Francisco, is called in to investigate the murder of a Sherlock Holmes enthusiast. Said enthusiast had just discovered a lost Sir Arthur Conan Doyle story set in San Francisco; the text of the story is made available to the reader. It's a lovely bit of meta-book-action to read King's Sherlock Holmes solving a mystery within a story in a mystery being solved by King's Martinelli.

The action gets kicked off with the discovery of a body in a gun emplacement in Marin County Park, across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. There's a bit of exposition which some will skip - I found it all fascinating because a few years ago I explored that very park and toured a Nike missile site that had been turned into a museum.

Very enjoyable.

Great Book: Kim, by Rudyard Kipling

2006-07-13T19:53:00.000-07:00

After reading The Game, by Laurie R. King, I had to read the British classic that inspired it, Kim by Rudyard Kipling. Kim appeared as a character in The Game, which takes place in early twentieth century India. He was a mature adult, an experienced player of 'the Game' (fun with spies!) and functioned as a player and a prize.

I wasn't at all familiar with Kim, so I didn't have the background. Kim is the son of an Irish soldier - the legitimate white son of an Irish soldier. He is orphaned and raised in the streets by his father's native mistress. He apprentices himself to a Tibetan monk, and after a series of misadventures, is discovered by the staff of his father's unit, who drag him off to school and eventually recruit him into the service of The Crown as a number-letter combination. That's the plot. The meat of the book is a travelogue-ish description of the sights and sounds of India and the glory of 'The Road', the development of Kim from a devilish child to a devilish adult, and the lama's spiritual journey.

Poor Kim. I wonder why 'the woman who looked after him' receives such short shrift. She is, at the beginning of the book, the only soul who cares about him, but he walks away from her without looking back. He is so bereft of human connection that after only a few short weeks on the road with the lama, he can't bear to be parted from him.

What is the connection between them? The description of Teshoo Lama's faith is surprisingly accurate. He is seeking to divest himself of passions & emotions; to find his purest self so he can travel to the next plane and leave the Wheel of existence. Perhaps it's this lack of connectedness that attracts Kim, chameleon and orphan, to him. Kim isn't a Hindu or a Muslim, Kim has no caste, and he isn't really a Sahib either. Though he can't disguise himself as Kim is taught to do, Teshoo Lama is one of the few people in India who share his lack of definition and identity.

Reading Journal Entry: The Baby Inheritance by Ann Roth

2006-07-13T18:58:00.000-07:00

I grabbed this randomly off the shelf at the library and two days later Bam does a cover snark on it. So I had to actually read it and find out if it was as cheesy as she predicted.

Pretty much. A warm-hearted veterinarian who saves injured wild animals inherits a cute baby. Naturally she has a dark secret. Naturally she has a hot neighbor who also has a dark secret. Naturally, they are drawn to each other, but it just doesn't make sense for them to be together.

Actually, this wasn't half bad. Kind of lukewarm. As plots go it wasn't too outrageous. My main objection: the internal conflicts were kind of stupid. So, her kid sister died. So what? Go to therapy already! I don't have a lot of patience with stupid people in real life - on paper, even less. I could have bought it if she had subconscious resistance to the idea of raising a child because of a traumatic incident. But for a character to sit down and calmly explains that the reason she can't give her cousin's child to a loving family to raise is that her kid sister died of SIDS when she was five - that's stupid. Because you know what? Unless she's stupid, she already knows, intellectually, that it wasn't her fault. Some Johnny Hotpants saying, 'Hey, it wasn't your fault' shouldn't be earthshattering.

Reading Journal Entry: Best Places San Juan & Gulf Islands

2006-07-11T21:21:00.000-07:00

I've been using this and other guidebooks to plan a short vacation trip next weekend. It will be my fifth wedding anniversary. Husband and I have been together for eleven years total. For several years in a row we have gone back to Ithaca, NY, where we met. But we're both so busy this year that we decided it's time to start a new tradition in a new place. So we're visiting Orcas Island, which is within driving distance.

This has been by fat the best resource. It succintly describes each island and its individual resources in a way that the others really didn't. Very well organized. Highly recommended. And I'll tell you about the Island when we get from the trip.

Monday's Review: Year's Best SF11

2006-07-11T21:01:00.000-07:00

Year's Best SC 11, edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer.

It's been several years since I've read one of these 'best of' collections. Back then they weighed a bit more and were still edited by Gardner Dozois (LEGEND IN HIS OWN TIME)(I'm not teasing. It's true. He is).

This volume contains stories from 2005. It was a very nice change to read something brand new for a change. Very big names, and some of my favorites, too. My favorite was the second story, Deus Ex Homine, by Hanna Rajaniemi.

Trends: posthumans. Yea, once we get enough processingpower/nanobots/whatever, we will beomce as gods. I find this a bit tiresome and I hope it plays out soon.

There were a number of short shorts from Nature, which apparently has been publishing one-page SF shorts in every issue. I had no idea. They were fun and made me think of Petrona. I approve of this intrusion of levity into science's sanctum.

Well worth reading or buying.

Great Book: The Plot Against America by Philip Roth

2006-07-07T17:52:00.000-07:00

Roth's The Plot Against America was nominated by some critics for the New York Times' best book published within the last 25 years contest. And it's also this month's book club selection for my Jewish Book Club.

The premise is that of a faux memoir or alternate history memoir. Philip Roth writes in the first person about his childhood growing up in a Jewish suburb of Newark in the forties. The crucial difference is that in this life, Charles Lindberg enters the Presidential against Franklin Roosevelt in 1940 on a platform of keeping America out of the war. He wins by a landslide, precipitating a dangerous slide in American politics towards the kind of anti-semitism indulged in by Hitler.

This is the first work by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Roth that I've read. I can see why he's so popular. He does a superb job of invoking the sights, sounds, and smells, the fears, hopes and relationships of this community and of his family.

The premise is ambitious and intriguing, and carried out very thoroughly. Lindberg WAS a known anti-Semite and Roth builds a completely believable scenario.

Then the end of the book happens. The house of cards collapses. Roth fails to pull an astonishing ending out of the bag. Perhaps because Lindberg was a real individual Roth was reluctant to demonize him to the extent that would have made this a really ground-breaking, mind-blowing 'it could happen here' story. But then why write the book at all?

I am frankly perplexed by the ending of the book. And disappointed.

Thursday's Review: Ranger's Apprentice: Book One: The Ruins of Gorlan by John Flanagan

2006-07-07T17:48:00.000-07:00

Yay, another derivative adventure series! Will is too small and spindly to enter 'warrior school' so he gets apprenticed to a 'Ranger' who taches him how to 'Move Silently', 'Climb', 'Backstab', 'Track', and a number of other skills stolen straight from Dungeons and Dragons. Guess what? Then he Saves the Realm! Mediocre story, derivative setting, boring characters. Interesting monster, I'll give it that.

Is it me? Have I outgrown this kind of book? I know not all young adult books are awful. I love Diana Wynne Jones. But the last several YA or YA-type books that I've read just seem so flat and bad to me lately.

Maybe it's because I'm reading them in between the classics, but I've been doing that for over a year now....

I am now blond.

2006-07-06T09:27:00.000-07:00

I expect to start having more fun any minute now.

Reading Journal Entry: Island on the Sea of Time, by S. M. Stirling

2006-07-05T23:07:00.000-07:00

I heard a lot of good buzz about this book. I was expecting more from it.

It's a high-concept book: Nantucket gets catapulted to 1250 BC. Coast Guard boat too close to shore gets pulled along too. What shall the soft-bellied inhabitants of the twentieth century do? Eric Flint pulled off much the same trick with 1632, except in West Virginia.

This meaty premise is treated with all the delicacy of a butcher. The writing is atrociously poorly edited, the characters are flat and endlessly unsatisfying. Stirling has made an effort to include different points of view, but the black lesbian Coast Guard Captain speaks with the same 'voice' as the white Prostestant police captain. The lack of introspection is monumental. We never learn the names of the children Our Lesbian Hero left behind. The island's only two Jews marry each other, but never mention their religion.

I thought this book would never end. It's this kind of mechanical, juvenile wish-fulfillment (the lesbian ends up having sex with a blond teenage Druidic warrior chick) that gives science fiction a bad name.

I got nuthin'

2006-07-02T10:57:00.000-07:00

What a pitiful showing last weeks - 3 out of 5.

Well, maybe I'm a little blogged out for the moment. I need a few days to catch up on my reading. And since it's a holiday, I'll take some time off. I'll be back with more reviews on Wednesday, July 5th.

Reading Journal Entry: Counting Heads, by David Marusek

2006-06-29T20:54:00.000-07:00

David Marusek wrote the beginning of this nbook as a novella titled 'We Were Out Of Our Minds With Joy'. I read that when it was first published, way back in 1995. It's about a relationship in 2092, from tantalizing flirtatious beginning to soaring apex to crushing disaster. I learned that Marusek had written Counting Heads from Dave Itzkhof's science fiction column in the New York Times.

The bulk of the story takes place forty years after the end of the novella, but, oddly enough, the world hasn't changed much. Some of the characters we met before are trying to work together to foil a conspiracy; but in reality this about an exploration of a high technology environment where computers are people and clones are too. Interesting, fun, but a bit scattershot.

Reading Journal Entry: Engaging the Enemy by Elizabeth Moon

2006-06-28T20:48:00.000-07:00

The third volume inE lizabeth Moon's 'Vatta' science fiction series.

Moon gives great space opera, and she has wonderful strong female characters in her books. Unfortunately that's about the best I can say about this one, a sequel to Marque and Reprisal and Trading in Danger. It's tremendous fun, but the plotting is loose and really, not all that much happens, despite the space battles and shoot-outs.

Fagin the Jew, by Will Eisner

2006-06-26T22:51:00.000-07:00

I read Fagin the Jew as a follow-up to Oliver Twist. Dicken's caricature of Fagain in Twist is frightfully anti-Semitic.

Eisner, one of the pioneers of the graphic novel format, decided to tell Fagin's story. He frames Fagin's life within Oliver's adventures; Fagin is in prison, sentenced to death, and he tells his life story to Dickens to set the records straight.

I was disappointed that Eisner spent so much time on Oliver's story; I would have preferred a greater focus on Fagin, Sikes & Nancy. Oliver's story is really only a small part of Fagin's. Also, in the retelling Eisner changed numerous details of Oliver's story, and since I just finioshed reading the original Twist, those changes jumped out at me in a bad way. It would have been better to cut most of Oliver's story and focus on the relationships that really brought Fagin down - Sikes and Nancy.

Someone complained on an Amazon review that there were too many coincidences - apparently that person hasn't read any Dickens.

Fagin the Jew Wwas enjoyable mostly for the historical content. I look forward to reading other Eisner works.

Reading Journal Entry: The Omega Diet, by Artemis Simopoulos and Jo Robinson

2006-06-23T20:37:00.000-07:00

Another diet book today. Why am I reviewing all these diet books? Because last month my doctor told me I might be insulin resistant. I've had a fasting blood sugar test and it says I'm fine. But I do need to lose weight, and I don't really trust the numbers anyhow.

The two diets that the doctor mentioned were the South Beach Diet and the Omega Diet. I've read South Beach, and I've conceived a violent hatred towards Dr. Agarson for lying about the desserts his plan allows. This week I got around to reading The Omega Diet.

Artemis Simopoulos is Greek, and a major theme of the book is how awesome the Greek diet (and European diets in general) and how awful the American diet is. "In Greece, when I was growing up, we would start the day with eggs that had just been pulled out of chicken's behinds, fried in olive oil that we hand-wrung into the pan right before cooking, and wild greens that my grandmother picked while taking care of the herd of goats that lived in the living room," etc.

This, the 'original' Omega Diet book, was published in 1999, and it's frsutratingly behind the times. Simopouls devotes an inordinate amount of time arguing against 'conventional' diet advice that is no longer accepted wisdom. Slightly condescending , oversimplifications are mixed with insta-techno discussions of the details of omega-3 fatty acids versus omega-6 fatty acids. Simopoulos spends a lot of energy on the 'ratio' of omega-3 vs. omega-6, but this is misleading; her real goal is to increase the amount of omega 3 acids in the diet. The 6 acids are everywhere, and will take care of themselves.

The diet plan at the back of the book includes variations for maintenance, weight loss, and swift weight loss, which is nice. And the meal plan is surprisingly moderate. You get to eat white flour, etc. In fact, this isn't a 'glycemic index' diet at all. The meal plan as given is very 'low GI', but the '7 principles' that Simopoulos lays out don't deal with that at all. In fact, she hardly mentions sugar or refined flour at all.

The recipes look wonderful, and I would not hesitate to use some of them. I won't be following it, but it's one of the better diet plans I've read.

Reading Journal Entry: Black, White, & Jewish, by Rebecca Walker

2006-06-22T22:53:00.000-07:00

Read this for book group. Not as much Jewish content as hoped - barely mentioned in fact. Nonetheless the book sparked the closest thing in real life I've seen to an internet argument, with one fiery member declaring loudly that the book was a piece of shit and totally uninteresting. He will use it for toilet paper.

I can't say I agree with that, but I must say that the book got a lot less interesting once she started talking about her boyfriends. I would have enjoyed hearing more about Walker's famous parents instead.

I think the book suffered from an overemphasis on the 'shifting self'; more about race relations would have made it a much more solid experience. More....something!

I printed out the publisher's suggested discussion questions before the meeting (it was at my house, and waht I had buyign vegetables at Costco, and arranging olives, and so forth) and my, weren't they awful. Both boring AND condescending at the same time.

Reading Journal Entry: Next Door Lived a Girl, by Stefan Kiesbye

2006-06-21T19:16:00.000-07:00

Stefan Kiesbye is German, and this is a very German book. It's littered with German names (the narrator is Moritz, and his friends are similarly Teutonic), and the sentence structure at times has been left with a delicious hint of strangeness.

This is a disturbing and scary novel. It's more a novella, really, but it certainly didn't need to be any longer to do what it needed to do, which is scare me to pieces and turn my stomach at the same time.

Moritz is at that 'difficult' age of adolescence. He is fourteen, hovering between a longing for female companionship and loyalty to his old tribe of friends - the 'Badgers'. Moritz lives in a small middle-class town. He's a very transparent narrator, so much so that he seems childlike in the straightforward way he talks about the people around him and the things he goes through.

I don't mean to imply that this is a horror novel. It's not deliberately, provocatively frightening, it doesn't go out of its way to be scary. It's just that the deliberate downward descent into brutality from the daylight normalness of a small town is irresistable. Do any of my neighbours have lives like this, I wonder?

Lord of the Flies,set in suburbia, and about everybody instead of small boys.

Reading Journal Entry: Shadow Lover, by Anne Stuart

2006-06-20T22:15:00.000-07:00

Bam reviewed this and I reserved it because it sounded like a really good read. And it was!

Carolyn is the type of romance heroine I like - she's 31, she's not too annoyingly passive, she's had orgasms and she's not a virgin. She does have a Haunted Past and mysterious origins, but in a totally believable foster child way. Carolyn was fostered by the wealthy McDowell family. They treat her like a servant. But she's stuck there for the moment, because the woman who raised her is dying.
Surprise! Her long-lost son shows up, after 18 years on the lam. But is he really who he says he is? And if so, is this Carolyn's chance to fulfill the mother of all adolescent crushes?

Snarky rich people, Martha's Vineyard, mistaken identity, violence, etc. The plot moves along nicely, and Carolyn and Alex's relationship is engaging without being over-the-top. Great fun.