Showing posts with label Jo Walton. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jo Walton. Show all posts
Thursday, October 04, 2012
The science-fictional guide to adolescencce
At the LRB, Stephen Burt on Jo Walton's Among Others, a novel I also very wholeheartedly recommend.
Sunday, June 26, 2011
Sunday update
I've been making myself crazy the last couple days with self-castigation about my missed race: it was painful but straightforward to decide to pull out at the beginning of the week, as I was still feeling so ill that I couldn't even imagine getting myself and luggage on a plane to Idaho on Thursday let alone actually exerting myself on the racecourse today, but as the antibiotics worked their magic and I started to feel more myself again, it was inevitable that I would second-guess myself.
In short, I know that I made the proper decision, but half of me still very much wishes that I were living in an endurance sport vacuum where I could just do things as irresponsibly and self-absorbedly as I wish and have the ill consequences affect nobody but myself!
ARGHHHHHHH!
I am holed up at my mother's house in Philadelphia, keeping my little cat company and getting some work done on my novel. Have been wrestling with certain plot-related obstacles: I am really overlaying the draft with an entirely new more thriller-type plot - Barbara Vine/Joyce Carol Oates thriller, not Lee Child thriller - but having a hard time getting the right balance of melodrama and emotional plausibility; I am working with a fixed quantity, a death at the end of the book, but I need to have it not just come out of nowhere. We will see what can be done.
The days loom rather long here, especially without exercise (I am going to venture out for a short run later and see how it feels - lungs finally almost entirely better), so I have read an implausibly large number of books...
(I did spend a very pleasant afternoon yesterday with my adorable little niece and her parents, and will have oysters tomorrow evening with my dad, so I am not altogether hermited up, much as I feel like skulking and lying low!)
A couple books that I was finishing the night before I left New York, out of desire not to bring excess physical books with me on complicated travels: Michael Gelb's Body Learning: An Introduction to the Alexander Technique (an odd book, worthwhile but strange; I think that this other one which I did actually pack in my luggage is probably in a more modern vein!); Barry Hughart's Bridge of Birds, a nice present from Brent.
A couple more actual physical books I brought with me and will now ditch: Charles de Lint, Promises to Keep (minor but pleasant - I think Colleen might have sent me this years ago, though really it is hard to say, books crop up from who knows where...); Margaret Mahy, The Magician of Hoad (I loved this one - but now see I could have had it for Kindle after all! Plucked it from the shelf at the Bank Street Bookstore a few weeks ago on a day when I felt short of anything good to read).
In the couple days before I left New York, I put the call out for light reading recommendations (will welcome more here, too, in the comments, if you didn't see my Facebook one). I need to stock up with a lot of books for the next couple weeks/months! I got a ton of stuff but am unfortunately already burning through it at a slightly worrying rate...
Kate Christensen, The Astral: A Novel. This one was a bit of a disappointment to me. I really loved her last novel Trouble, but somehow I just couldn't suspend my disbelief in the protagonist of this one: I initially thought that Christensen was ventriloquizing this unattractive late-middleaged male character to some more postmodern end that would soon be revealed, and that it would be a novel of multiple voices, and I was mildly dismayed as I realized I was going to have to keep company with him for the entire book. The writing is very good, but there is something deeply unbelievable about the premise and character (or perhaps it is just that I disliked him more than the novel seemed to want me to), so that I don't know I'd recommend it more generally unless it is, as they say, the sort of book you particularly like...
Cherie Priest's Bloodshot was extremely enjoyable: it is a less abbitious book than many of the others she's written, but that makes it fit more perfectly into the light reading mold! I will look forward to subsequent installments of this series.
A couple very good recommendations from Brent, who heard my call and kept the links coming: Suzy McKee Charnas's Dorothea Dreams, which is to a ridiculously exact degree exactly the kind of book I most love (it is a very good book in its own right, but the fit with my personal tastes is slightly uncanny!); and, also very good but less exactly my kind of book (definitely recommended, though - it's great!), Max Brooks's World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. Hmmm, I had better start brushing up my survivalist in preparation for the pending zombie apocalypse...
Next up: a fat little omnibus I got for $6.99 used at Amazon after reading Jo Walton's description of the trilogy as having "a high 'I want to read it' quotient," which is really another way of what I mean when I beg for light reading - it might have serial killers, it might have swashbuckling swordsmen, but it has to have a high want-to-read quotient! Interesting: when I purchased that shortly after reading Walton's post, there were tons of cheap copies, but clearly there was a run on it, now all the copies available via Amazon are significantly more expensive!
In short, I know that I made the proper decision, but half of me still very much wishes that I were living in an endurance sport vacuum where I could just do things as irresponsibly and self-absorbedly as I wish and have the ill consequences affect nobody but myself!
ARGHHHHHHH!
I am holed up at my mother's house in Philadelphia, keeping my little cat company and getting some work done on my novel. Have been wrestling with certain plot-related obstacles: I am really overlaying the draft with an entirely new more thriller-type plot - Barbara Vine/Joyce Carol Oates thriller, not Lee Child thriller - but having a hard time getting the right balance of melodrama and emotional plausibility; I am working with a fixed quantity, a death at the end of the book, but I need to have it not just come out of nowhere. We will see what can be done.
The days loom rather long here, especially without exercise (I am going to venture out for a short run later and see how it feels - lungs finally almost entirely better), so I have read an implausibly large number of books...
(I did spend a very pleasant afternoon yesterday with my adorable little niece and her parents, and will have oysters tomorrow evening with my dad, so I am not altogether hermited up, much as I feel like skulking and lying low!)
A couple books that I was finishing the night before I left New York, out of desire not to bring excess physical books with me on complicated travels: Michael Gelb's Body Learning: An Introduction to the Alexander Technique (an odd book, worthwhile but strange; I think that this other one which I did actually pack in my luggage is probably in a more modern vein!); Barry Hughart's Bridge of Birds, a nice present from Brent.
A couple more actual physical books I brought with me and will now ditch: Charles de Lint, Promises to Keep (minor but pleasant - I think Colleen might have sent me this years ago, though really it is hard to say, books crop up from who knows where...); Margaret Mahy, The Magician of Hoad (I loved this one - but now see I could have had it for Kindle after all! Plucked it from the shelf at the Bank Street Bookstore a few weeks ago on a day when I felt short of anything good to read).
In the couple days before I left New York, I put the call out for light reading recommendations (will welcome more here, too, in the comments, if you didn't see my Facebook one). I need to stock up with a lot of books for the next couple weeks/months! I got a ton of stuff but am unfortunately already burning through it at a slightly worrying rate...
Kate Christensen, The Astral: A Novel. This one was a bit of a disappointment to me. I really loved her last novel Trouble, but somehow I just couldn't suspend my disbelief in the protagonist of this one: I initially thought that Christensen was ventriloquizing this unattractive late-middleaged male character to some more postmodern end that would soon be revealed, and that it would be a novel of multiple voices, and I was mildly dismayed as I realized I was going to have to keep company with him for the entire book. The writing is very good, but there is something deeply unbelievable about the premise and character (or perhaps it is just that I disliked him more than the novel seemed to want me to), so that I don't know I'd recommend it more generally unless it is, as they say, the sort of book you particularly like...
Cherie Priest's Bloodshot was extremely enjoyable: it is a less abbitious book than many of the others she's written, but that makes it fit more perfectly into the light reading mold! I will look forward to subsequent installments of this series.
A couple very good recommendations from Brent, who heard my call and kept the links coming: Suzy McKee Charnas's Dorothea Dreams, which is to a ridiculously exact degree exactly the kind of book I most love (it is a very good book in its own right, but the fit with my personal tastes is slightly uncanny!); and, also very good but less exactly my kind of book (definitely recommended, though - it's great!), Max Brooks's World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. Hmmm, I had better start brushing up my survivalist in preparation for the pending zombie apocalypse...
Next up: a fat little omnibus I got for $6.99 used at Amazon after reading Jo Walton's description of the trilogy as having "a high 'I want to read it' quotient," which is really another way of what I mean when I beg for light reading - it might have serial killers, it might have swashbuckling swordsmen, but it has to have a high want-to-read quotient! Interesting: when I purchased that shortly after reading Walton's post, there were tons of cheap copies, but clearly there was a run on it, now all the copies available via Amazon are significantly more expensive!
Friday, May 21, 2010
Story nature
The other night I read Jo Walton's Lifelode, and found it lovely. Quite unusual in terms of the form of narration (the model is Rumer Godden, someone I read very extensively when I was young and not at all since then), and extremely compelling. It is a NESFA Press book, and I am not sure I have read one of those before (I am happy to see it is now available from Amazon, as I think I had to order it directly from the press, which I always find less convenient); the introduction by the excellent Sharyn November compares it to Robin McKinley's Deerskin, a favorite book of mine, but to my ears the voice is perhaps slightly more reminiscent of Spindle's End. Anyway, a delightful little novel - Walton is certainly on my short list of favorite writers, as different as her books are from each other they all have that quality that will make me pick them up first and devour them before other available options...
Monday, March 22, 2010
Monday miscellany
A rainy day in New York...
Andrew explores a delightful index ("Eggs, correct handling of") and links to an old piece by Philip Hensher on the pleasures and perils of indexing (via Marginal Revolution).
Jo Walton on why professional writers have to be particularly careful what they write online about other books
Former student Ellen Bar's film NY Export: Opus Jazz has its PBS premiere this Wednesday at 8pm.
Last and least: publicity! (The picture was taken in the reading room at Butler Library - our main concern was to minimize disruption to sleeping undergraduates...)
(Also on the topic of publicity, it sounds as though I will most likely be signing advance copies of Invisible Things at Book Expo on the afternoon of May 26, and will hope to see some of you there.)
Andrew explores a delightful index ("Eggs, correct handling of") and links to an old piece by Philip Hensher on the pleasures and perils of indexing (via Marginal Revolution).
Jo Walton on why professional writers have to be particularly careful what they write online about other books
Former student Ellen Bar's film NY Export: Opus Jazz has its PBS premiere this Wednesday at 8pm.
Last and least: publicity! (The picture was taken in the reading room at Butler Library - our main concern was to minimize disruption to sleeping undergraduates...)
(Also on the topic of publicity, it sounds as though I will most likely be signing advance copies of Invisible Things at Book Expo on the afternoon of May 26, and will hope to see some of you there.)
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Swings, roundabouts
It is with a great sense of loss that I close the covers of the last of Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles.
It has been more than a month since I read the first of the House of Niccolò books; I have been living in the world of these novels, I do not want to come back to real life!
(Jo Walton happened to post something earlier today about the joy of reading an unfinished series.)
In less emotionally equivocal literary news, I started writing the little book on style this past Monday, in the grip of a feverishly strong delusion that it could be done in three weeks. Now that I've taken the weekend off, and now that I think about the fact that the week of May 14-21 is designated for private life rather than for work, I have scaled up the likely production time to six weeks, but it still seems to me genuinely possible that I might have a whole draft of the thing by the end of March!
(Can it be?!? It might indeed not be - but it is at least possible that the outcome of a lifetime of obsessive reading and writing has led me to a place where an entire book - a little book! - can be written in six weeks. It's based on the lectures I gave this fall, so really it's a question of making something out of things that are already there...)
The little book on style still doesn't have a real name, but in a productive sleepless couple of hours a few nights ago I had some (to me) thrilling insights into the bread-and-butter-of-the-novel book. It has a new title and a clear organizational scheme, both of which I find so secretly delightful that I think I must cherish the details to myself in private for a little while longer before announcing them to the world via Light Reading - but I won't start working on this until I have sent the little book on style to my agent (and there is an essay on Austen and Flaubert and aphorisms, with which the book begins, that I will send out separately).
Bonus link: the song I couldn't get out of my head while reading the last installment of Lymond; we used to sing it in my high school choir.
These books have also reminded me of how much I loved the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries between the ages of 10 and 14 or so - it was a feature of the school I went to that younger children especially were asked to enter into historical periods with an intellect infused with imagination, and I vividly remember the account of the death of Savonarola from the point of view of a young Italian nobleman I wrote the year I was in fifth grade.
A favorite book at the time was Elizabeth Marie Pope's The Perilous Gard, which I still think is pretty much a perfect novel for children, but I was also already at that stage beginning to read T.S. Eliot and Dorothy L. Sayers and Nicholas Blake and through them to discover the beauties of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. In sixth grade I wrote a half-hour adaptation of Twelfth Night for our class to perform; I was steeped in the language and mythos of Shakespeare...
I said to Brent the other day, regretfully, that much as I still somewhat aspire to write airport thrillers in the vein of Dick Francis, my gifts as a writer are not really in the direction of that minimalist leave-everything-out-but-the-essentials intelligent storytelling that you see in the best of Francis or of Lee Child. I do not know, either, that I could possibly write a series of the scope of Dunnett's or of those of Susan Howatch, which I also love, partly because I am keeping a lot of my imagination in reserve for intellectual writing, but I would think that a very fully imagined historical series would be a better fit with my actual strengths and preferences than a series of stripped-down thrillers about men and women of action...
I have had several conversations recently (it has partly been prompted by walking the ramps at the Guggenheim) about a very happy insight that has struck me in the last year or so, and that seems to me in great part a function of being age 38.
Options close down - the infinite range of possibilities that seemed open to me at age twenty (at least if I was in an argumentative mood) is now significantly narrower - but unlike what I would have thought if you had been able to persuade me of it at that age (which you would not), this is a good thing.
We are constrained by our individual temperaments in ways that are very difficult to understand when we are eighteen or twenty or indeed thirty - it comes upon us gradually, though, at least if we are lucky, that we were right not to go in the direction of being (implausibly) fighter pilots or investment bankers or (more plausibly) epidemiologists or chemists - that our lives have to be governed by what will suit us best as well as by what we think we should be able to do...
It has been more than a month since I read the first of the House of Niccolò books; I have been living in the world of these novels, I do not want to come back to real life!
(Jo Walton happened to post something earlier today about the joy of reading an unfinished series.)
In less emotionally equivocal literary news, I started writing the little book on style this past Monday, in the grip of a feverishly strong delusion that it could be done in three weeks. Now that I've taken the weekend off, and now that I think about the fact that the week of May 14-21 is designated for private life rather than for work, I have scaled up the likely production time to six weeks, but it still seems to me genuinely possible that I might have a whole draft of the thing by the end of March!
(Can it be?!? It might indeed not be - but it is at least possible that the outcome of a lifetime of obsessive reading and writing has led me to a place where an entire book - a little book! - can be written in six weeks. It's based on the lectures I gave this fall, so really it's a question of making something out of things that are already there...)
The little book on style still doesn't have a real name, but in a productive sleepless couple of hours a few nights ago I had some (to me) thrilling insights into the bread-and-butter-of-the-novel book. It has a new title and a clear organizational scheme, both of which I find so secretly delightful that I think I must cherish the details to myself in private for a little while longer before announcing them to the world via Light Reading - but I won't start working on this until I have sent the little book on style to my agent (and there is an essay on Austen and Flaubert and aphorisms, with which the book begins, that I will send out separately).
Bonus link: the song I couldn't get out of my head while reading the last installment of Lymond; we used to sing it in my high school choir.
These books have also reminded me of how much I loved the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries between the ages of 10 and 14 or so - it was a feature of the school I went to that younger children especially were asked to enter into historical periods with an intellect infused with imagination, and I vividly remember the account of the death of Savonarola from the point of view of a young Italian nobleman I wrote the year I was in fifth grade.
A favorite book at the time was Elizabeth Marie Pope's The Perilous Gard, which I still think is pretty much a perfect novel for children, but I was also already at that stage beginning to read T.S. Eliot and Dorothy L. Sayers and Nicholas Blake and through them to discover the beauties of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. In sixth grade I wrote a half-hour adaptation of Twelfth Night for our class to perform; I was steeped in the language and mythos of Shakespeare...
I said to Brent the other day, regretfully, that much as I still somewhat aspire to write airport thrillers in the vein of Dick Francis, my gifts as a writer are not really in the direction of that minimalist leave-everything-out-but-the-essentials intelligent storytelling that you see in the best of Francis or of Lee Child. I do not know, either, that I could possibly write a series of the scope of Dunnett's or of those of Susan Howatch, which I also love, partly because I am keeping a lot of my imagination in reserve for intellectual writing, but I would think that a very fully imagined historical series would be a better fit with my actual strengths and preferences than a series of stripped-down thrillers about men and women of action...
I have had several conversations recently (it has partly been prompted by walking the ramps at the Guggenheim) about a very happy insight that has struck me in the last year or so, and that seems to me in great part a function of being age 38.
Options close down - the infinite range of possibilities that seemed open to me at age twenty (at least if I was in an argumentative mood) is now significantly narrower - but unlike what I would have thought if you had been able to persuade me of it at that age (which you would not), this is a good thing.
We are constrained by our individual temperaments in ways that are very difficult to understand when we are eighteen or twenty or indeed thirty - it comes upon us gradually, though, at least if we are lucky, that we were right not to go in the direction of being (implausibly) fighter pilots or investment bankers or (more plausibly) epidemiologists or chemists - that our lives have to be governed by what will suit us best as well as by what we think we should be able to do...
Wednesday, December 02, 2009
Stony places
At the LRB, Michael Wood on T. S. Eliot (with whose poems I was utterly obsessed from ages 11-13 or so - I have just been thinking about it as I spend the evening in a mesmerized trance of reading Jo Walton's excellent forthcoming novel Among Others, which is appearing too long a time from now even to have an Amazon link but is basically what you would get if you tailored Graham Joyce's The Tooth Fairy to be exactly the book that would most speak to me in the world, or at least to the grown-up version of my childhood self, complete with allusions among many others to Mary Renault, Josephine Tey, Anne McCaffrey, Plato and Tiberius/Sejanus courtesy of what I assume is Robert Graves):
[Eliot] tells his brother about ‘the kink in my brain which makes life at all an unremitting strain for me, and which is at the bottom of a good many of the things about me that you object to’. ‘Life at all’ is pretty amazing, and makes me think Eliot would have liked Hardy’s work better if he had paid attention to a poem like the one that begins: ‘For Life I had never cared greatly,/ As worth a man’s while.’ Of course kink and caring are different, but the sheer dissident simplicity of thinking that life is either all a strain or an acquired taste is certainly striking. Eliot’s description of himself as ‘within measurable distance of the end of my tether’ combines distress with elegance.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Publisher-agnostic
The Tor.com bookstore. It is an interesting and unusual approach - it is funny, I was just wishing the other day that someone would send me a big bundle of the books Jo Walton's blogged about there and that I haven't already read!
Monday, December 01, 2008
Friday, November 07, 2008
Great geniuses of literature
I have just had a great treat, namely rereading the first two volumes of Jo Walton's Farthing trilogy in preparation for a delightful light-readingish wallow in the third. The books are Farthing, Ha'penny and Half a Crown. (Previous Light Reading discussions here.)
These really are the perfect books - the obvious comparisons are to recent literary WWII-related alternate histories by Philip Roth and Michael Chabon, but they are so beautifully inflected with the whys and wherefores of some of my utter longtime favorites that reading them is like being magically given fresh new books by writers I have reread almost to death (Josephine Tey, Dorothy L. Sayers, Peter Dickinson). I think the first book in the trilogy is still my favorite, but these books are just delightful...
(Attentive readers will note that Walton includes, in this final volume, the gym shoes with rosettes from Miss Pym Disposes! And a number of other nods to other fictions of the time - I was thinking in particular, at the end, of Scott's Heart of Midlothian...)
These really are the perfect books - the obvious comparisons are to recent literary WWII-related alternate histories by Philip Roth and Michael Chabon, but they are so beautifully inflected with the whys and wherefores of some of my utter longtime favorites that reading them is like being magically given fresh new books by writers I have reread almost to death (Josephine Tey, Dorothy L. Sayers, Peter Dickinson). I think the first book in the trilogy is still my favorite, but these books are just delightful...
(Attentive readers will note that Walton includes, in this final volume, the gym shoes with rosettes from Miss Pym Disposes! And a number of other nods to other fictions of the time - I was thinking in particular, at the end, of Scott's Heart of Midlothian...)
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