There are free books on the internet! I wanted to pass along this link - SF publishing house Tor is trying out this whole viral marketing thing, and the rewards they're offering are pretty good: a link to a downloadable .pdf full-text book every week! I just received my first book today (Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn, which I know nothing about), and next week's text is John Scalzi's Old Man's War - I've actually been meaning to pick up a novel of his, so I'm pretty excited about this one. So for all you SF fans out there, Tor.com wants your email address, and in return they will give you weekly free e-books. I'm pretty okay with that.
This is also probably a good time to tell you all about my favorite sites to get free books on the internet. I've had these links on my side-bar for a while, but for those of you who are interested, LibriVox is an archive of free audiobooks, produced by volunteers, whose texts are in the public domain. For a fantastic free archive of such texts, check out Project Gutenburg, which has gotten much more tech-savvy and user-friendly since I first discovered it in, like, 1999. Both places are great for discovering interesting books written, you know, a hundred years ago - I particularly enjoy browsing the medical texts, which are mostly hilarious but frequently terrifying. Also included in the public domain are, of course, all the Victorian era classics - I've been listening to Emma recently while knitting, which has been fun.
I am woefully - woefully - behind on the booklog thing, and I may not return to it, especially since I don't know if anyone but me is interested in reading about what I'm reading. I also think my ability to read literature critically has declined in proportion to my increasing ability to read nonfiction and academic literature critically, so I feel that I have very little that's new or interesting to say about books I've read recently. However, for completeness' sake, here's a list (more or less) of the books I've read since the last booklog update - as I recall, all were pretty good and worth the time.
Three Cups of Tea, Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin, 2006.
The Invisible Sex, J. M. Adovasio, Olga Soffer, and Jake Page, 2007.
Salt: A World History, Mark Kurlansky, 2002.
Fledgling, Octavia E. Butler, 2005.
Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth, William Bryant Logan, 1995. (Truly excellent. Seriously. Completely entertaining and you will never look at dirt the same way again.)
Atonement, Ian McEwan, 2001.
Treatment Kind and Fair: Letters to a Young Doctor, Perri Klass, 2007.
Master and Commander, Patrick O'Brien, 1994.
I've also been reading The Bread Baker's Apprentice, by Peter Reinhart, which was a Christmas present (thank you, Lola and Peter!) and a fantastic reference on the art of bread-baking. I've made a few breads so far, including the pain à l'ancienne and the pain de campagne, both of which turned out to be pretty tasty.
I have an ungodly number of works in the "to be read" pile(s), especially after I stopped at a Half-Price Books yesterday out by my clinic in Mentor and left with 7 new books. (Total cost was something like $32, so it wasn't such a ridiculous splurge. But a splurge nonetheless. And here might be the time to mention how much I love buying used books: the sense of history that someone else has read this, the economics of it, the fact that it's effective recycling that works. Love it.) I picked up a Spanish-English dictionary, a pocket guide to Spanish verb conjugations (in anticipation of heading off to Central America next winter to learn Spanish) and some books I've been meaning to read for a while: Octavia E. Butler's Kindred, Toni Morrison's Paradise, and E. M. Forster's A Passage to India. Unfortunately, they had only really crappy knitting books, but you can't have everything.
title from "Things to Forget," Sarah Harmer. (YouTube has failed me on this one, unfortunately.)
Showing posts with label book log 2007. Show all posts
Showing posts with label book log 2007. Show all posts
Friday, February 15, 2008
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Made Like Bread
You know, I really can't remember the last time I was able to read so much for pleasure... maybe during high school? This research block thing is suiting me just fine.
The Lathe of Heaven (Ursula K. Le Guin, 1971) This novella deals with George Orr, a man whose dreams become reality, changing both past and present. I enjoyed it - the premise was unique and I found the novel intriguing. I actually read this a few weeks ago, and while I thought this was an interesting read, I don't know that it made much of an lasting impression on me, overall. A solid novella, but not one to which I'll be returning. (Of course, having been written over 30 years ago, the elements that now seem a bit trite could certainly have been ground-breaking; I'm not terribly familiar with the history of SF.) Oh, but! I almost forgot: this is the origin of a quotation I've known for years, without ever knowing the source, and which is even more poignant in context: "They said nothing of any importance. They washed up the dishes and went to bed. In bed, they made love. Love doesn't just sit there like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; re-made all the time, made new." (p. 153) I had heard the last line quoted, but I particularly enjoyed the juxtaposition of this declaration with the simple descriptors of any night at home with a partner.
Pope Joan (Donna Woolfolk Cross, 1996) I had read this sometime during late middle school/early high, and was pleased to run across it again. According to her back-of-the-book bio, Cross isn't originally a novelist, and it shows in the often predictable subplots. However, the main story is remarkable. Written as historical fiction but clearly well-researched, the basis of the book is the legend of Pope Joan: a woman who, sometime in the mid 800s, became Pope and reigned for two years. In her afterword, Cross provides evidence for the historical basis of the legend, which she believes to be true. The novel itself suffers from some idolization of the main character, reminding me a bit of Jean Auel's Ayla. (Joan is a master scholar, a priest, a physician, and singlehandedly responsible for re-introducing reason and logic to Rome. Et cetera.) But overall, the story is great and well-told, and if the point that Women Can Do Anything is a bit belabored, I'm kind of okay with that. I remember feeling the same way when I read this circa age 14 - I could see that this novel was written with a purpose and agenda in mind, but it was still an excellent story and an agenda I could get behind. Additionally, Cross has clearly done her research regarding quotidian life in 800s Europe, and while I am no expert on such things, there was nothing that rang false, and I thought she did a great job of putting you in that place and time with detail that was relevant and never seemed forced or gratuitous.
The Things They Carried (Tim O'Brien, 1990). I had read Going After Cacciato in high school and always meant to look this up, so when it turned up of Barnes and Noble's sale table, I snagged a copy. I sailed through this, and probably read it too fast for proper appreciation, but I will definitely be re-reading. It is, at first glance, a collection of short stories written about the Vietnam war, but I think it is best described in Amazon.com's review: a "sly, almost hallucinatory book that is neither memoir nor novel nor collection of short stories but rather an artful combination of all three." There's an almost ... drunken feeling to the book, the consequence of an unreliable narrator who freely admits to his unreliability and, indeed, revels in it. Favorites among the group were "How to Write a True War Story," "Style," and "The Things They Carried." But the following passage, from "Stockings," caught my attention: not an original simile, perhaps, but I really enjoyed O'Brien's descriptive economy of speech, and since I seem to be quoting today:
"Henry Dobbins was a good man, and a superb soldier, but sophistication was not his strong suit. The ironies went beyond him. In many ways he was like America itself, big and strong, full of good intentions, a roll of fat jiggling at his belly, slow of foot but always plodding along, always there when you needed him, a believer in the virtues of simplicity and directness and hard labor. Like his country, too, Dobbins was drawn toward sentimentality" (p117).
Traveling Light (Katrina Kittle, 2000). I read this book first during my sophomore year of college, I think, or possibly the spring of freshman year - my roommate Rachel, a native of a Dayton suburb, recommended it to me since the author is essentially from her hometown. After reading The Kindness of Strangers, I picked it up again. The novel is about Summer, a young woman who has moved back home to care for her brother Todd, who is dying of AIDS. On re-read, I actually didn't like Summer all that much - her existential angst is a bit less appealing now than when I was 19 - but all the characters are exquisitely drawn. It's another heart-wrencher, but this one is much less bleak than The Kindness of Strangers, and overall, it's a wonderfully crafted first novel. I enjoy Kittle's works, I think, because her artistry is not in her prose, but in her characters, who feel incredibly immediate and real. Her language is good and doesn't get in the way of her story at all, but ... I don't find myself quoting bits of her novels but rather thinking about her characters. And that maybe sounds like a criticism, but isn't - I enjoy that she can people her novels so effectively with layered and nuanced individuals; no character, no matter how peripheral, seems wasted or one-dimensional. She's an excellent story-teller, and I think this novel is a great example of that ability.
The Lathe of Heaven (Ursula K. Le Guin, 1971) This novella deals with George Orr, a man whose dreams become reality, changing both past and present. I enjoyed it - the premise was unique and I found the novel intriguing. I actually read this a few weeks ago, and while I thought this was an interesting read, I don't know that it made much of an lasting impression on me, overall. A solid novella, but not one to which I'll be returning. (Of course, having been written over 30 years ago, the elements that now seem a bit trite could certainly have been ground-breaking; I'm not terribly familiar with the history of SF.) Oh, but! I almost forgot: this is the origin of a quotation I've known for years, without ever knowing the source, and which is even more poignant in context: "They said nothing of any importance. They washed up the dishes and went to bed. In bed, they made love. Love doesn't just sit there like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; re-made all the time, made new." (p. 153) I had heard the last line quoted, but I particularly enjoyed the juxtaposition of this declaration with the simple descriptors of any night at home with a partner.
Pope Joan (Donna Woolfolk Cross, 1996) I had read this sometime during late middle school/early high, and was pleased to run across it again. According to her back-of-the-book bio, Cross isn't originally a novelist, and it shows in the often predictable subplots. However, the main story is remarkable. Written as historical fiction but clearly well-researched, the basis of the book is the legend of Pope Joan: a woman who, sometime in the mid 800s, became Pope and reigned for two years. In her afterword, Cross provides evidence for the historical basis of the legend, which she believes to be true. The novel itself suffers from some idolization of the main character, reminding me a bit of Jean Auel's Ayla. (Joan is a master scholar, a priest, a physician, and singlehandedly responsible for re-introducing reason and logic to Rome. Et cetera.) But overall, the story is great and well-told, and if the point that Women Can Do Anything is a bit belabored, I'm kind of okay with that. I remember feeling the same way when I read this circa age 14 - I could see that this novel was written with a purpose and agenda in mind, but it was still an excellent story and an agenda I could get behind. Additionally, Cross has clearly done her research regarding quotidian life in 800s Europe, and while I am no expert on such things, there was nothing that rang false, and I thought she did a great job of putting you in that place and time with detail that was relevant and never seemed forced or gratuitous.
The Things They Carried (Tim O'Brien, 1990). I had read Going After Cacciato in high school and always meant to look this up, so when it turned up of Barnes and Noble's sale table, I snagged a copy. I sailed through this, and probably read it too fast for proper appreciation, but I will definitely be re-reading. It is, at first glance, a collection of short stories written about the Vietnam war, but I think it is best described in Amazon.com's review: a "sly, almost hallucinatory book that is neither memoir nor novel nor collection of short stories but rather an artful combination of all three." There's an almost ... drunken feeling to the book, the consequence of an unreliable narrator who freely admits to his unreliability and, indeed, revels in it. Favorites among the group were "How to Write a True War Story," "Style," and "The Things They Carried." But the following passage, from "Stockings," caught my attention: not an original simile, perhaps, but I really enjoyed O'Brien's descriptive economy of speech, and since I seem to be quoting today:
"Henry Dobbins was a good man, and a superb soldier, but sophistication was not his strong suit. The ironies went beyond him. In many ways he was like America itself, big and strong, full of good intentions, a roll of fat jiggling at his belly, slow of foot but always plodding along, always there when you needed him, a believer in the virtues of simplicity and directness and hard labor. Like his country, too, Dobbins was drawn toward sentimentality" (p117).
Traveling Light (Katrina Kittle, 2000). I read this book first during my sophomore year of college, I think, or possibly the spring of freshman year - my roommate Rachel, a native of a Dayton suburb, recommended it to me since the author is essentially from her hometown. After reading The Kindness of Strangers, I picked it up again. The novel is about Summer, a young woman who has moved back home to care for her brother Todd, who is dying of AIDS. On re-read, I actually didn't like Summer all that much - her existential angst is a bit less appealing now than when I was 19 - but all the characters are exquisitely drawn. It's another heart-wrencher, but this one is much less bleak than The Kindness of Strangers, and overall, it's a wonderfully crafted first novel. I enjoy Kittle's works, I think, because her artistry is not in her prose, but in her characters, who feel incredibly immediate and real. Her language is good and doesn't get in the way of her story at all, but ... I don't find myself quoting bits of her novels but rather thinking about her characters. And that maybe sounds like a criticism, but isn't - I enjoy that she can people her novels so effectively with layered and nuanced individuals; no character, no matter how peripheral, seems wasted or one-dimensional. She's an excellent story-teller, and I think this novel is a great example of that ability.
Saturday, September 8, 2007
"Heaven ain't close in a place like this"
The Killers' concert was indeed delightful - their energy kind of lagged toward the middle third of the set, but the first and last 6 songs or so were phenomenal. I think part of the slowness at mid-show was that the songs from Sam's Town just aren't as high-energy as Hot Fuss and there was some dissonance involved with mixing more ballad-type music with straight-up, drums-and-bass rock. I thought, too, that the front end of the show was pretty heavily weighted with their radio singles, and that the crowd kind of got what they were looking for a little too early. But despite the pacing issues, the concert was a lot of fun, and I'm glad we were able to go.
Tonight Ben and I are going over to Karen and Brandon's for a potluck - Karen's parents are in town, so that will be fun. I'm in the process of making eggplant roll-ups, but while my eggplant slices are cooling, I thought I'd update my book log.
Measuring Time (Helon Habila, 2007). This novel is set in modern-day Nigeria, and is the story of two twin boys living in a largish village, Keti, some distance from Lagos. LaMamo becomes a professional soldier and Mamo, who ends up being the main character, becomes a historian and writer. I enjoyed this immensely - Habila's writing is spare and his words carefully chosen. Now that I've been thinking about pacing above, I realized that the pacing of this novel worked well for me - the chapters are all each only a few pages long, and the tone is well-suited to the story he's telling.
I took a course in Nigerian literature in undergrad, but we focused there on the immediately post-colonial era, and the native fables and folkstories that predated contact with European cultures. It was particularly interesting for me, then, to see a portrait of Nigeria today, reading about the problems with the current government structure and the quotidian experiences of village life. I was used to reading stories set within the traditional family and village structure of Igbo society, and so it was interesting to see how European and Christian influences have changed that society. The first example, of course, was that the twin boys were permitted to survive infancy, and the familial structures in the village seemed to be modeled more on the Christian practice of one wife per husband versus the traditional compound style with several wives in each family. But even beyond my interest in Nigerian literature, the characters were well-crafted and engaging, and I thought the story was interesting.
The Kindness of Strangers (Katrina Kittle, 2005). This book ... basically kicked the crap out of me. I started it yesterday night, and literally could not put it down until I had finished. It's a novel about incestuous sexual abuse, and it's very raw, emotionally. It's told from varying 3rd person limited POV, and it's ... powerful. I've read Kittle's other two novels, and she has this overwhelming talent for putting you right there with a character, which is a heart-wrenching experience when that character is an eleven-year-old boy whose parents have been sexually abusing him for years. And it's not heart-wrenching in an Oprah's book club, tear-jerker bestseller sort of way, but as if you're actually there watching this horrifying situation come to light. It resolves not happily, necessarily, but as well as it could, and the whole novel just feels so incredibly real. I feel about this book as I feel about the movie Traffic, maybe - I can't say I enjoyed reading it, because there's nothing enjoyable about the story she's telling - but I am incredibly glad I read it. It makes you feel exactly what it must be like to be in the middle of a tragedy, right down to the overwhelming anger you'd feel towards nosy Carlotta in the bakery and the it's not true, this can't be happening to me feeling of having something like this unfold right next door. I would wholeheartedly recommend this book to anyone who could stand to read it, but I think you have to be ready to have your feet kicked out from under you. This is a novel I'm going to be thinking about for years.
Clay's Ark (Octavia Butler, 1984). This - I'll have to read again, I think. I liked it, but I kind of blew through it to see how the plot turned out. Part of the problem was that I knew that this novel was part of the Patternist series, but I hadn't known that it was more of an offshoot than a continuation - I kept waiting for the characters I knew to appear, and didn't realize until about halfway through that this was going to be an entirely separate novel from the preceeding ones. I really don't have any concrete thoughts on this yet, so I will definitely be re-reading, but I think I might wait a little while to do so.
Tonight Ben and I are going over to Karen and Brandon's for a potluck - Karen's parents are in town, so that will be fun. I'm in the process of making eggplant roll-ups, but while my eggplant slices are cooling, I thought I'd update my book log.
Measuring Time (Helon Habila, 2007). This novel is set in modern-day Nigeria, and is the story of two twin boys living in a largish village, Keti, some distance from Lagos. LaMamo becomes a professional soldier and Mamo, who ends up being the main character, becomes a historian and writer. I enjoyed this immensely - Habila's writing is spare and his words carefully chosen. Now that I've been thinking about pacing above, I realized that the pacing of this novel worked well for me - the chapters are all each only a few pages long, and the tone is well-suited to the story he's telling.
I took a course in Nigerian literature in undergrad, but we focused there on the immediately post-colonial era, and the native fables and folkstories that predated contact with European cultures. It was particularly interesting for me, then, to see a portrait of Nigeria today, reading about the problems with the current government structure and the quotidian experiences of village life. I was used to reading stories set within the traditional family and village structure of Igbo society, and so it was interesting to see how European and Christian influences have changed that society. The first example, of course, was that the twin boys were permitted to survive infancy, and the familial structures in the village seemed to be modeled more on the Christian practice of one wife per husband versus the traditional compound style with several wives in each family. But even beyond my interest in Nigerian literature, the characters were well-crafted and engaging, and I thought the story was interesting.
The Kindness of Strangers (Katrina Kittle, 2005). This book ... basically kicked the crap out of me. I started it yesterday night, and literally could not put it down until I had finished. It's a novel about incestuous sexual abuse, and it's very raw, emotionally. It's told from varying 3rd person limited POV, and it's ... powerful. I've read Kittle's other two novels, and she has this overwhelming talent for putting you right there with a character, which is a heart-wrenching experience when that character is an eleven-year-old boy whose parents have been sexually abusing him for years. And it's not heart-wrenching in an Oprah's book club, tear-jerker bestseller sort of way, but as if you're actually there watching this horrifying situation come to light. It resolves not happily, necessarily, but as well as it could, and the whole novel just feels so incredibly real. I feel about this book as I feel about the movie Traffic, maybe - I can't say I enjoyed reading it, because there's nothing enjoyable about the story she's telling - but I am incredibly glad I read it. It makes you feel exactly what it must be like to be in the middle of a tragedy, right down to the overwhelming anger you'd feel towards nosy Carlotta in the bakery and the it's not true, this can't be happening to me feeling of having something like this unfold right next door. I would wholeheartedly recommend this book to anyone who could stand to read it, but I think you have to be ready to have your feet kicked out from under you. This is a novel I'm going to be thinking about for years.
Clay's Ark (Octavia Butler, 1984). This - I'll have to read again, I think. I liked it, but I kind of blew through it to see how the plot turned out. Part of the problem was that I knew that this novel was part of the Patternist series, but I hadn't known that it was more of an offshoot than a continuation - I kept waiting for the characters I knew to appear, and didn't realize until about halfway through that this was going to be an entirely separate novel from the preceeding ones. I really don't have any concrete thoughts on this yet, so I will definitely be re-reading, but I think I might wait a little while to do so.
Thursday, September 6, 2007
Book Log
I've been seeing these around, and since I've actually had enough free time to read more than 3/4 of a novel lately, I thought I'd jot down some notes on the books I've been reading recently. I'm completely out of practice with actual literary criticism, so this will be more my thoughts and reflections than anything else. This list comprises what I've read over, hmm, the last 3 weeks or so. I may do this weekly, if I can manage to read enough in a week to make it worth it. Maybe biweekly.
Stranger in a Strange Land (Robert Heinlein, 1961). I actually pulled this out again a few weeks ago in order to tipsily quote things out of it at Karen. (Er, sorry about that, hon.) But I ended up re-reading it again in its entirety. This is one of my "go-to" books, that I read over and over, and I was shocked to realized I hadn't read it since starting medical school. (In high school and college, this probably got read every 6 months or so.) It's not a good book, in the sense that the plot is carefully constructed or that the characters are well-depicted, or even internally consistent, and it's horribly sexist and homophobic in places but... it's one of the best meditations on the human condition - and what it means to be human - that I've ever across. Thoughts and phrases from this book just stay with me, in the way that poetry or quotations from religious texts do; they have that quality of simplicity that signifies something different every time you come across it. Some of these are one-off lines ("Obscurity is the refuge of incompetence" "'Love' is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own" "Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition; they're almost incompatible") and some are longer paragraphs that manage to express exactly my own personal philosophy on a number of topics. It's an incredibly thought-provoking novel, and I find something new in it every time I read it; I'm glad I was prompted to pick it up again.
Bee Season (Myla Goldberg, 2000). This was... weird. I found it engaging and difficult to put down, but I'm not sure the author was saying anything I particularly needed to hear. I found the characters one-dimensional, even at the times they were clearly supposed to be Very Deep and Troubled, and... I don't know. I didn't not like it, but I'm not sure that Goldberg achieved her purpose - whatever it may have been. (The overall plot, without giving too much away, is that the younger, less gifted daughter discovers a real talent for spelling. The development of this talent brings to the forefront the background level of intrafamilial conflict, and the family members react to this in a number of ... fairly bizarre ways that I didn't quite feel were reasonable developments.) Hmm. I think I enjoyed this book more when I was actually reading it, but I don't think it holds up very well to reflection. Not one I'd re-read.
Mind of My Mind (Octavia Bulter, 1977). This was very good. I inhaled this book in one 3-hour sitting, and I'm continually amazed by the tight spareness of Bulter's writing. This was actually a first read for me (I was just talking with Sarah about how I've been rationing Butler's works, especially now that she's passed away, because I enjoy knowing that there's more of her work out there), and it's set, hmm, probably a hundred years or so after Wild Seed, which I had read a number of times previously. I thought the plot was engaging - twisty but believable, as is Bulter's style - and I ended up liking the characters. I'm interested to see how this fits within the rest of the Patternist series. I did think this novel was very plot-driven, and lacked the more meditative, reflective side of Bulter's later works. Told mostly in dialogue, and from a cycling limited 3rd person POV, Mind of My Mind was interesting, but I wouldn't say it was ground-breaking, and certainly didn't have the cultural and societal insight and commentary that draws me, again and again, to the Parable novels. I'm curious to see if my thoughts on this novel change once I've read Clay's Ark and Patternmaster.
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year (Ed. Jonathan Strahan, 2007). I was thrilled to see a story by Connie Willis in this collection ("D.A."), which ended up being good but certainly not my favorite of the bunch. Neil Gaiman's "How to Talk to Girls at Parties" I had already read here, and I enjoyed it more on re-read, but I'm not sure it deserves the buzz it's been generating.
I thought Cory Doctorow's "I, Row-Boat" was phenomenal, and I need to look up his novels. (The main character is a sentient rowboat, who tends to human "shells" - bodies that are available for tourists to download their consciousness into, in order to vacation in the tropics - and he's an Asimovist, following this religion the AIs have made, founded upon Isaac Asimov's famous Three Laws. How can you not love that?*)
Similarly, Ellen Klages' "In the House of Seven Librarians" was marvelous - a story told as a fable about "a young girl raised by feral librarians" (cited from the editor's preface to the story). Feral librarians! I worried that the story would not live up to such an intro, but, to my glee, it did.
Walter Jon Williams' "Incarnation Day" is another story from this collection that has stuck with me, also - now that I think about it - with the downloadable consciousnesses, but told from a very different viewpoint: that of a young girl with a penchant for the works of Samuel Johnson, who was conceived as a computer program and who becomes a legal person only when she is accorded the use of a body. This story became a insightful discussion about what confers "humanity," and it possessed an engaging plot and excellently crafted characters. Another one whose novels I'll be tracking down.
I'd say the anthology as a whole was good, and definitely a worthwhile read. From what I could tell, it was organized semi-thematically, which I didn't love, as it seemed after a while that you would read the same story three time in a row, only interpreted in different ways. There were 24 stories in all, clocking in at just under 500 pages; I can't speak to whether these were truly the "best" short stories of the year, since I haven't been reading more recently published SF at all, but they were consistently good and occasionally superlative.
To Say Nothing of the Dog (Connie Willis, 1998). This was another re-read. I scored a copy of this book at the Raleigh-Durham airport, from the used bookshop whose very existence delighted me to no end. This is a cute little jaunt of a novel, the premise of which is a quest to locate, using time travel, the bishop's bird stump (it's this ... thing, that no one can describe except in terms of its ugliness), in order to properly store the Coventry Cathedral, which had been destroyed during WWII. Combining SF and historical fiction, this novel is just fun - it's hilariously funny and a Romance in the classic sense of the word.
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I'm almost positive I'm forgetting a few here, beyond the knitting books that I haven't included, and there are a few novels that I've almost finished, but I think that's it for now. The most bizarre thing about writing this post? I actually knew the copyright dates for almost every work before I looked it up. I didn't realize that was information I actually stored about books.
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*In the interest of full disclosure, I find it necessary to say that my junior year research thesis for AP English was on Asimov's Foundation series. I ... may be a bit of geek, and I'm definitely a geek for Asimov's SF. Just sayin'.
Stranger in a Strange Land (Robert Heinlein, 1961). I actually pulled this out again a few weeks ago in order to tipsily quote things out of it at Karen. (Er, sorry about that, hon.) But I ended up re-reading it again in its entirety. This is one of my "go-to" books, that I read over and over, and I was shocked to realized I hadn't read it since starting medical school. (In high school and college, this probably got read every 6 months or so.) It's not a good book, in the sense that the plot is carefully constructed or that the characters are well-depicted, or even internally consistent, and it's horribly sexist and homophobic in places but... it's one of the best meditations on the human condition - and what it means to be human - that I've ever across. Thoughts and phrases from this book just stay with me, in the way that poetry or quotations from religious texts do; they have that quality of simplicity that signifies something different every time you come across it. Some of these are one-off lines ("Obscurity is the refuge of incompetence" "'Love' is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own" "Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition; they're almost incompatible") and some are longer paragraphs that manage to express exactly my own personal philosophy on a number of topics. It's an incredibly thought-provoking novel, and I find something new in it every time I read it; I'm glad I was prompted to pick it up again.
Bee Season (Myla Goldberg, 2000). This was... weird. I found it engaging and difficult to put down, but I'm not sure the author was saying anything I particularly needed to hear. I found the characters one-dimensional, even at the times they were clearly supposed to be Very Deep and Troubled, and... I don't know. I didn't not like it, but I'm not sure that Goldberg achieved her purpose - whatever it may have been. (The overall plot, without giving too much away, is that the younger, less gifted daughter discovers a real talent for spelling. The development of this talent brings to the forefront the background level of intrafamilial conflict, and the family members react to this in a number of ... fairly bizarre ways that I didn't quite feel were reasonable developments.) Hmm. I think I enjoyed this book more when I was actually reading it, but I don't think it holds up very well to reflection. Not one I'd re-read.
Mind of My Mind (Octavia Bulter, 1977). This was very good. I inhaled this book in one 3-hour sitting, and I'm continually amazed by the tight spareness of Bulter's writing. This was actually a first read for me (I was just talking with Sarah about how I've been rationing Butler's works, especially now that she's passed away, because I enjoy knowing that there's more of her work out there), and it's set, hmm, probably a hundred years or so after Wild Seed, which I had read a number of times previously. I thought the plot was engaging - twisty but believable, as is Bulter's style - and I ended up liking the characters. I'm interested to see how this fits within the rest of the Patternist series. I did think this novel was very plot-driven, and lacked the more meditative, reflective side of Bulter's later works. Told mostly in dialogue, and from a cycling limited 3rd person POV, Mind of My Mind was interesting, but I wouldn't say it was ground-breaking, and certainly didn't have the cultural and societal insight and commentary that draws me, again and again, to the Parable novels. I'm curious to see if my thoughts on this novel change once I've read Clay's Ark and Patternmaster.
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year (Ed. Jonathan Strahan, 2007). I was thrilled to see a story by Connie Willis in this collection ("D.A."), which ended up being good but certainly not my favorite of the bunch. Neil Gaiman's "How to Talk to Girls at Parties" I had already read here, and I enjoyed it more on re-read, but I'm not sure it deserves the buzz it's been generating.
I thought Cory Doctorow's "I, Row-Boat" was phenomenal, and I need to look up his novels. (The main character is a sentient rowboat, who tends to human "shells" - bodies that are available for tourists to download their consciousness into, in order to vacation in the tropics - and he's an Asimovist, following this religion the AIs have made, founded upon Isaac Asimov's famous Three Laws. How can you not love that?*)
Similarly, Ellen Klages' "In the House of Seven Librarians" was marvelous - a story told as a fable about "a young girl raised by feral librarians" (cited from the editor's preface to the story). Feral librarians! I worried that the story would not live up to such an intro, but, to my glee, it did.
Walter Jon Williams' "Incarnation Day" is another story from this collection that has stuck with me, also - now that I think about it - with the downloadable consciousnesses, but told from a very different viewpoint: that of a young girl with a penchant for the works of Samuel Johnson, who was conceived as a computer program and who becomes a legal person only when she is accorded the use of a body. This story became a insightful discussion about what confers "humanity," and it possessed an engaging plot and excellently crafted characters. Another one whose novels I'll be tracking down.
I'd say the anthology as a whole was good, and definitely a worthwhile read. From what I could tell, it was organized semi-thematically, which I didn't love, as it seemed after a while that you would read the same story three time in a row, only interpreted in different ways. There were 24 stories in all, clocking in at just under 500 pages; I can't speak to whether these were truly the "best" short stories of the year, since I haven't been reading more recently published SF at all, but they were consistently good and occasionally superlative.
To Say Nothing of the Dog (Connie Willis, 1998). This was another re-read. I scored a copy of this book at the Raleigh-Durham airport, from the used bookshop whose very existence delighted me to no end. This is a cute little jaunt of a novel, the premise of which is a quest to locate, using time travel, the bishop's bird stump (it's this ... thing, that no one can describe except in terms of its ugliness), in order to properly store the Coventry Cathedral, which had been destroyed during WWII. Combining SF and historical fiction, this novel is just fun - it's hilariously funny and a Romance in the classic sense of the word.
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I'm almost positive I'm forgetting a few here, beyond the knitting books that I haven't included, and there are a few novels that I've almost finished, but I think that's it for now. The most bizarre thing about writing this post? I actually knew the copyright dates for almost every work before I looked it up. I didn't realize that was information I actually stored about books.
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*In the interest of full disclosure, I find it necessary to say that my junior year research thesis for AP English was on Asimov's Foundation series. I ... may be a bit of geek, and I'm definitely a geek for Asimov's SF. Just sayin'.
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