I vividly remember one day, aged 14, climbing like a pilgrim the worn wooden steps to Tolkien’s room in Merton college, Oxford in the company of his grandson, who was a school friend. I was clutching my battered paperback copy of The Lord of the Rings, much reread. And there was the great man in his beautiful room, crowded bookshelves up to the ceiling, a vision of lawns beyond. He sucked his pipe and chatted benignly. I was encountering the most important writer in the world, as it then seemed, though I was struck by the mismatch of this tweedy English grandfather and his lofty Wagnerian creation. He was telling me of the physical pleasure of writing. “Did I enjoy the sensation of using a really good ink pen?” I could see why he might be asking this when he signed my copy of his magnum opus: runic is the only word for the style of the inscription. Seeing Professor Tolkien in situ suddenly made it obvious how bookish an endeavour it was, this business of creating of an alternative world.
Showing posts with label fantasy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fantasy. Show all posts
Saturday, April 04, 2015
"Copiousness is the desired effect"
The vortex of the spring semester has engulfed me. (That, and Facebook leaching off minor life commentary.) A lot of tabs to close and light reading to log, only perhaps not just now. Instead, a delightful piece by John Mullan about George R. R. Martin and fantasy fiction more generally. Here's his description of the pilgrimage he paid to Tolkien as a teenager:
Saturday, March 07, 2015
Ogres in passing
Lorien Kite interviews Kazuo Ishiguro at the FT (site registration required):
“About 50 or 60 pages in, maybe slightly more, I thought, well, maybe I’ll show Lorna this,” says Ishiguro. “And she looked at it and said: ‘This is appalling — this won’t do.’ I said: ‘So what’s wrong with it? What should I change?’ She said: ‘You can’t change anything. You’ll just have to start again from scratch; completely from scratch.’”
Ishiguro couldn’t face the job of reconstruction immediately, turning instead to the short-story collection that would be published as Nocturnes in 2009. But when he did return to the Dark Ages, the approach was different. “The first time I had a go at this thing it was a bit like Sir Walter Scott, over-egged with a kind of period vernacular. The second time around I just tried to keep the language as simple as possible. I worked more at taking words from what you or I would say rather than adding things like ‘prithee’ — just by removing prepositions or the odd word here and there, I ended up with something that sounded slightly odd or slightly foreign.”
Tuesday, March 04, 2014
Closing tabs
Busy week, somehow. And excessively cold! My lungs are ready for spring.
I enjoyed many of the pieces in MFA vs. NYC, but Alexander Chee's essay was by far my favorite. Leslie Jamison's account of the book is good (via Chloe S.) - I have a review of Jamison's forthcoming essay collection in the next Bookforum, the book's a must-read if you are interested in the contemporary essay or the question of pain, female or otherwise.
Other light reading around the edges: two absolutely delightful young-adult fantasy novels by Sarah Rees Brennan, Unspoken and Untold. These books are perfectly to my taste (they would make a very good television series also) - only I have to wait until September for the next installment!
Stage Kiss at Playwrights Horizons is one of the funniest plays I have seen for a long time - especially in the first half, I was actually laughing uncontrollably out loud. (It was a matinee, so no outright feasting afterwards, but we did have a piece of pie at the diner next door - cherry for me, apple for G.) Between that and Antony and Cleopatra, it was a good weekend for theatergoing. Seeing No Exit tonight at the Pearl; 7pm curtain + short play = more realistic than serious mid-evening theatergoing for a school night.
Closing tabs:
Andrew Solomon on having the demons of depression exorcised - literally.
The inimitable Cintra Wilson watches the Oscars.
Excited about blurbs accumulating for my style book - official publication date is June, but I should have some copies by the end of May.
Last but not least, trilobite! (Time to reread Richard Fortey's book, I think.)
I enjoyed many of the pieces in MFA vs. NYC, but Alexander Chee's essay was by far my favorite. Leslie Jamison's account of the book is good (via Chloe S.) - I have a review of Jamison's forthcoming essay collection in the next Bookforum, the book's a must-read if you are interested in the contemporary essay or the question of pain, female or otherwise.
Other light reading around the edges: two absolutely delightful young-adult fantasy novels by Sarah Rees Brennan, Unspoken and Untold. These books are perfectly to my taste (they would make a very good television series also) - only I have to wait until September for the next installment!
Stage Kiss at Playwrights Horizons is one of the funniest plays I have seen for a long time - especially in the first half, I was actually laughing uncontrollably out loud. (It was a matinee, so no outright feasting afterwards, but we did have a piece of pie at the diner next door - cherry for me, apple for G.) Between that and Antony and Cleopatra, it was a good weekend for theatergoing. Seeing No Exit tonight at the Pearl; 7pm curtain + short play = more realistic than serious mid-evening theatergoing for a school night.
Closing tabs:
Andrew Solomon on having the demons of depression exorcised - literally.
The inimitable Cintra Wilson watches the Oscars.
Excited about blurbs accumulating for my style book - official publication date is June, but I should have some copies by the end of May.
Last but not least, trilobite! (Time to reread Richard Fortey's book, I think.)
Friday, February 22, 2013
Collation
Fifteen ways to file your cats. (Via Becky.)
Also, via Jane Y., knitting for reptiles!
I am having some satisfying work on my essay about minute particulars in life-writing and the novel. Also exercising up a storm and waiting for winter to stop.
Enchanted by a pair of novels and a novella originally recommended by some source now lost in the past of the internet; they are not of the highest literary genre, some people don't like reading stuff like this, but they are the kind of thing I particularly like, and so beautifully done I hardly can stand it! Appealing (gay) characters in fantasy world loosely based on seventeenth-century Holland, some magic but not excessive and narrative based on a crime detection plot rather than something more fantastical - they are absolutely delightful. A collaborative project by Melissa Scott and Lisa Barnett: Point of Hopes, Point of Knives, Point of Dreams. Must seek out more of Scott's novels and/or reread novels by Ellen Kushner!
Seeing Parsifal on Wednesday next week at the Met (this was a good teaser, but you may need a New Yorker subscription to access it) and 1 Henry IV on Thursday. Culture, sport, light reading - all good....
Also, via Jane Y., knitting for reptiles!
I am having some satisfying work on my essay about minute particulars in life-writing and the novel. Also exercising up a storm and waiting for winter to stop.
Enchanted by a pair of novels and a novella originally recommended by some source now lost in the past of the internet; they are not of the highest literary genre, some people don't like reading stuff like this, but they are the kind of thing I particularly like, and so beautifully done I hardly can stand it! Appealing (gay) characters in fantasy world loosely based on seventeenth-century Holland, some magic but not excessive and narrative based on a crime detection plot rather than something more fantastical - they are absolutely delightful. A collaborative project by Melissa Scott and Lisa Barnett: Point of Hopes, Point of Knives, Point of Dreams. Must seek out more of Scott's novels and/or reread novels by Ellen Kushner!
Seeing Parsifal on Wednesday next week at the Met (this was a good teaser, but you may need a New Yorker subscription to access it) and 1 Henry IV on Thursday. Culture, sport, light reading - all good....
Friday, December 21, 2012
Tuesday, June 19, 2012
"V is the Velocipede"
Back at home and on the grid, after detours to Cambridge and Philadelphia. Finally sent out the long-overdue Austen essay yesterday evening: a considerable relief.
(I seem to have been operating at about 30% of usual horsepower, due to some combination of residual fatigue and other distractions. It is ridiculous that I let that piece take up so much time....)
Next up: final revision of The Magic Circle! I have a hard deadline of Thursday, June 28 for getting it to my editor; he'll then go through one more time and I'll do quick turnaround on any further suggestions around the 4th of July holiday. The quality of his comments is really exceptional, and I have already said here that I feel he almost deserves a co-author credit, given how many good ideas he's given me. So: ten days of work, counting today. What I did first today at the library was to go through all of his pages of notes along with the manuscript itself, fixing the 80% of stuff that's minor and marking remaining points that will require more attention. This evening, I will do some pondering. Tomorrow I'll get started again properly at the beginning, with bulk of energy devoted to really significantly revamping the final section, which still isn't quite working.
Saw As You Like It at Shakespeare in the Park; it was quite good, with a Western stockade-and-country-music theme that reminded me of Frontierland at Disney. Other highlights of the weekend: the Butterfly Garden in the Academy of Natural Sciences and my first time on board my brother and sister-in-law's first boat at Fox Grove Marina.
Light reading around the edges: N. K. Jemisin's The Killing Moon and The Shadowed Sun; and Gideon Lewis-Kraus's A Sense of Direction: Pilgrimage for the Restless and the Hopeful, which must be one of the most unflattering self-portraits in the history of memoir-writing but which is nonetheless an extremely worthwhile and interesting book.
Bonus links:
My last academic book got a good review.
This made me think of some of the games in my novel (it would also make a good basis for some sort of TV episode); link courtesy of Bill Anders.
A nineteenth-century alphabet at the Beinecke.
(I seem to have been operating at about 30% of usual horsepower, due to some combination of residual fatigue and other distractions. It is ridiculous that I let that piece take up so much time....)
Next up: final revision of The Magic Circle! I have a hard deadline of Thursday, June 28 for getting it to my editor; he'll then go through one more time and I'll do quick turnaround on any further suggestions around the 4th of July holiday. The quality of his comments is really exceptional, and I have already said here that I feel he almost deserves a co-author credit, given how many good ideas he's given me. So: ten days of work, counting today. What I did first today at the library was to go through all of his pages of notes along with the manuscript itself, fixing the 80% of stuff that's minor and marking remaining points that will require more attention. This evening, I will do some pondering. Tomorrow I'll get started again properly at the beginning, with bulk of energy devoted to really significantly revamping the final section, which still isn't quite working.
Saw As You Like It at Shakespeare in the Park; it was quite good, with a Western stockade-and-country-music theme that reminded me of Frontierland at Disney. Other highlights of the weekend: the Butterfly Garden in the Academy of Natural Sciences and my first time on board my brother and sister-in-law's first boat at Fox Grove Marina.
Light reading around the edges: N. K. Jemisin's The Killing Moon and The Shadowed Sun; and Gideon Lewis-Kraus's A Sense of Direction: Pilgrimage for the Restless and the Hopeful, which must be one of the most unflattering self-portraits in the history of memoir-writing but which is nonetheless an extremely worthwhile and interesting book.
Bonus links:
My last academic book got a good review.
This made me think of some of the games in my novel (it would also make a good basis for some sort of TV episode); link courtesy of Bill Anders.
A nineteenth-century alphabet at the Beinecke.
Sunday, June 03, 2012
Closing tabs
Jay Winter on Paul Fussell.
Susanna Rustin interviews Adam Phillips for the Guardian.
The FT has a very good lunch with George R. R. Martin (site registration required).
"It was as if a light had been Nookd" (courtesy of Anjuli and Alice).
I've been trying to stay off the computer due to what is probably a slightly pulled back muscle, but it's somewhat better this morning. It is fishy that my back is sore enough to prevent me writing my overdue Austen essay but still permits a couple of hours of exercise every day! Really I was just working too hard from January through May and am now having the traditional post-semester willpower collapse - having now slightly bored myself by watching the first two seasons of House as if under a compulsion, it is now preferable to write the essay, which I am hoping I might finish by the end of the day tomorrow so that I can get back to The Magic Circle for one more round of revision.
Susanna Rustin interviews Adam Phillips for the Guardian.
The FT has a very good lunch with George R. R. Martin (site registration required).
"It was as if a light had been Nookd" (courtesy of Anjuli and Alice).
I've been trying to stay off the computer due to what is probably a slightly pulled back muscle, but it's somewhat better this morning. It is fishy that my back is sore enough to prevent me writing my overdue Austen essay but still permits a couple of hours of exercise every day! Really I was just working too hard from January through May and am now having the traditional post-semester willpower collapse - having now slightly bored myself by watching the first two seasons of House as if under a compulsion, it is now preferable to write the essay, which I am hoping I might finish by the end of the day tomorrow so that I can get back to The Magic Circle for one more round of revision.
Friday, April 27, 2012
Friday night miscellany
Closing tabs:
Pankaj Mishra is unforthcoming at the FT on Susan Sontag (site registration required), to an extent that caused me to look up his earlier review and find it also somewhat withholding. I must confess that I am vaguely negative on Sontag; her abuse of her personal charisma (or at any rate the way that it distorted her ongoing intellectual development) is unattractive to me, and the only book of hers I can say really had a deep influence on me was Illness as Metaphor, which I read when I was quite young (14, 15?) and which along with Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory, which I read around the same time, opened up to me a vision of the sort of book I might want to write.
Maud Newton interviews Alison Bechdel about Are You My Mother?, which I must acquire as soon as possible. Here's the bit that most interested me (more details in Judith Thurman's New Yorker piece, unfortunately not available online - and I left my copy in the seat pocket on the plane, so I can't retype the relevant bit):
Miscellaneous light reading around the extremely frayed edges:
Sherwood Smith's Banner of the Damned, which I found appealing but also frustrating (Smith is one of the most hugely talented fantasy novelists of her or indeed any other generation, and yet she writes books so idiosyncratically that it hugely limits enjoyment and readership - in many respects this is much better than George R. R. Martin, only I thoroughly see why his books have reached a much wider audience and hers have internal constraints that will prevent them from doing so). Cannot imagine that I or, really, anyone else will ever teach such a class, but it would make a very interesting student assignment in a novel-writing class oriented towards epic storytelling and fantasy: it is such an unusual mix of the remarkable and the perverse in terms of storytelling virtues and vices.
Anthony Neil Smith's depressing and mesmerizing All the Young Warriors, which I highly recommend (it will thoroughly depend on your own reading preferences whether you will read either Smith or perhaps neither).
And now I am going to go and consume brain candy in the form of the second half of Robert Crais's Taken....
Pankaj Mishra is unforthcoming at the FT on Susan Sontag (site registration required), to an extent that caused me to look up his earlier review and find it also somewhat withholding. I must confess that I am vaguely negative on Sontag; her abuse of her personal charisma (or at any rate the way that it distorted her ongoing intellectual development) is unattractive to me, and the only book of hers I can say really had a deep influence on me was Illness as Metaphor, which I read when I was quite young (14, 15?) and which along with Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory, which I read around the same time, opened up to me a vision of the sort of book I might want to write.
Maud Newton interviews Alison Bechdel about Are You My Mother?, which I must acquire as soon as possible. Here's the bit that most interested me (more details in Judith Thurman's New Yorker piece, unfortunately not available online - and I left my copy in the seat pocket on the plane, so I can't retype the relevant bit):
I do write first, but my writing is very drawing-based. I actually write in a drawing application, in Adobe Illustrator. So I'm not just writing in a word processing program, I'm creating these panels on the page and I create little text boxes for the narration or dialogue and I'm able to move that stuff all around. I'm thinking about the page as a two-dimensional field as I write, which feels to me like a kind of drawing even though I'm not drawing with a pencil or not drawing much. I will do occasional sketches. So that takes a really, really long time and that's how I get the whole story mapped out. If you saw the pages at that point, it would be just blank boxes with the text and the dialogue, with the narration and the dialogue and maybe a few images dragged in here and there.Super-librarian Dave Lull already left this link in the comments, but the opening chapter of Edward St. Aubyn's latest is a must-read.
Miscellaneous light reading around the extremely frayed edges:
Sherwood Smith's Banner of the Damned, which I found appealing but also frustrating (Smith is one of the most hugely talented fantasy novelists of her or indeed any other generation, and yet she writes books so idiosyncratically that it hugely limits enjoyment and readership - in many respects this is much better than George R. R. Martin, only I thoroughly see why his books have reached a much wider audience and hers have internal constraints that will prevent them from doing so). Cannot imagine that I or, really, anyone else will ever teach such a class, but it would make a very interesting student assignment in a novel-writing class oriented towards epic storytelling and fantasy: it is such an unusual mix of the remarkable and the perverse in terms of storytelling virtues and vices.
Anthony Neil Smith's depressing and mesmerizing All the Young Warriors, which I highly recommend (it will thoroughly depend on your own reading preferences whether you will read either Smith or perhaps neither).
And now I am going to go and consume brain candy in the form of the second half of Robert Crais's Taken....
Friday, April 20, 2012
A fan's notes
I am not sure whether it was idiocy or insanity that made me say yes to an invitation to participate in Sharyn November's blog book tour in celebration of Diana Wynne Jones; this time of the school year is so busy anyway, and on top of that I have a vast amount of work to do on my novel revision before I leave town for a few days next Thursday! I was supposed to write yesterday, but it just didn't happen, and I was smitten with guilt when I got home in the later evening from a work event and found Sharyn's email wondering what had happened to me....
But really it wasn't idiocy or insanity. It was the sheer fact that there is no single author whose novels I love more or whose books have brought me more pleasure over the years. I have a lot of different kinds of favorite novelist. I might name Haruki Murakami or Kazuo Ishiguro or Muriel Spark; Lee Child and Dick Francis occupy another axis of favorite reading, with Dorothy L. Sayers and Chester Himes popping in their heads at different angles; at the age when I first encountered the novels of Diana Wynne Jones, other favorites (this is a slightly funny list!) were Anthony Burgess, John Fowles, Robert Graves and Mary Renault. Austen and Dickens were favorites then and remain favorites now. Teju Cole is a new favorite; Charlie Williams and Ken Bruen are favorites on the five-year horizon, and really I could name about a hundred other favorites if I spent ten more minutes racking up the list. There are always the Narnia books, too, which so thoroughly imprinted me at age six when I got the boxed set for my birthday that I think probably every other novel I have read since them has been an attempt to find something as thoroughly and magically transporting! But there is some core sense in which Diana Wynne Jones is my absolutely favorite novelist. Her books have an unusual quality of being both delightful and emotionally true; they are also quite complex, although to the best of my knowledge they were published almost exclusively for children or young adults.
If you haven't read her before, you couldn't do better than to order the Firebird reissue of Fire and Hemlock (it has a new introduction by Garth Nix, another favorite of mine whose new novel I am eagerly awaiting). I had a battered paperback copy of this as a teenager that I must have read twenty times. Howl's Moving Castle is probably her most formally perfect book, and I have a particular soft spot for the Chrestomanci books and for the absolutely wonderful and probably underrated Deep Secret, which describes the occult layout of the convention hotel more persuasively and accurately than any other novel ever written. There are also revealing oddities like The Time of the Ghost, not her best novel but her most revealingly autobiographical one. It is a trope of all of her novels that some people and some situations are so toxic that they leach the most important aspects out of our personalities, so that we forget our most authentic selves and can be dimmed into partial 'split' selves that lose any ability to make decisions or maintain autonomy or self-respect; one reason that fantasy is a particularly cherished genre for me is that it seems to me invoking magical explanations and histories is the single best way to describe this dispiriting aspect of human psychology....
I am still feeling the loss of Diana Wynne Jones. I hate it that I won't get to read a dozen more new books by her, and I always secretly thought that one day our paths would cross. It was not meant to be! Her books are a treasure trove, though, and almost persuade me what I have sworn off, that it would be worth sitting down every few years to write a new novel if there was any chance it could capture some small part of the magic of one of hers.
But really it wasn't idiocy or insanity. It was the sheer fact that there is no single author whose novels I love more or whose books have brought me more pleasure over the years. I have a lot of different kinds of favorite novelist. I might name Haruki Murakami or Kazuo Ishiguro or Muriel Spark; Lee Child and Dick Francis occupy another axis of favorite reading, with Dorothy L. Sayers and Chester Himes popping in their heads at different angles; at the age when I first encountered the novels of Diana Wynne Jones, other favorites (this is a slightly funny list!) were Anthony Burgess, John Fowles, Robert Graves and Mary Renault. Austen and Dickens were favorites then and remain favorites now. Teju Cole is a new favorite; Charlie Williams and Ken Bruen are favorites on the five-year horizon, and really I could name about a hundred other favorites if I spent ten more minutes racking up the list. There are always the Narnia books, too, which so thoroughly imprinted me at age six when I got the boxed set for my birthday that I think probably every other novel I have read since them has been an attempt to find something as thoroughly and magically transporting! But there is some core sense in which Diana Wynne Jones is my absolutely favorite novelist. Her books have an unusual quality of being both delightful and emotionally true; they are also quite complex, although to the best of my knowledge they were published almost exclusively for children or young adults.
If you haven't read her before, you couldn't do better than to order the Firebird reissue of Fire and Hemlock (it has a new introduction by Garth Nix, another favorite of mine whose new novel I am eagerly awaiting). I had a battered paperback copy of this as a teenager that I must have read twenty times. Howl's Moving Castle is probably her most formally perfect book, and I have a particular soft spot for the Chrestomanci books and for the absolutely wonderful and probably underrated Deep Secret, which describes the occult layout of the convention hotel more persuasively and accurately than any other novel ever written. There are also revealing oddities like The Time of the Ghost, not her best novel but her most revealingly autobiographical one. It is a trope of all of her novels that some people and some situations are so toxic that they leach the most important aspects out of our personalities, so that we forget our most authentic selves and can be dimmed into partial 'split' selves that lose any ability to make decisions or maintain autonomy or self-respect; one reason that fantasy is a particularly cherished genre for me is that it seems to me invoking magical explanations and histories is the single best way to describe this dispiriting aspect of human psychology....
I am still feeling the loss of Diana Wynne Jones. I hate it that I won't get to read a dozen more new books by her, and I always secretly thought that one day our paths would cross. It was not meant to be! Her books are a treasure trove, though, and almost persuade me what I have sworn off, that it would be worth sitting down every few years to write a new novel if there was any chance it could capture some small part of the magic of one of hers.
Saturday, March 10, 2012
Light reading catch-up
I hadn't really intended to, but in effect I am clearly taking the weekend off (tomorrow I have ambitious exercise plans and am also meeting my dad for lunch and the matinee of Nico's ballet)....
Finally had time to read some novels, soothingly!
Edward St. Aubyn's At Last is pretty amazing; I like the aphoristic mode here better than the mode of more profound commentary, but these Patrick Melrose books really are a must-read (and as I said, I think the opening chapter of this one may be the single best novel opening I've read in recent memory).
I considerably enjoyed Anya Lipska's Where the Devil Can't Go, a crime novel about Polish immigrants in London (a good recommendation from Maxine!); Sharon Shinn's Troubled Waters is what my grandmother, speaking disparagingly of certain kinds of sliced bread, would have called 'pap,' but highly readable pap; S. G. Browne's Breathers: A Zombie's Lament is absolutely wonderful (thanks to Jared for the recommendation); Robert Harris's The Fear Index is goofily heavy-handed in its Frankenstein parallels but certainly a page-turner.
Bonus link (FT site registration required, but it's more interesting than what Harris tells us about finance!): school for quants.
Finally had time to read some novels, soothingly!
Edward St. Aubyn's At Last is pretty amazing; I like the aphoristic mode here better than the mode of more profound commentary, but these Patrick Melrose books really are a must-read (and as I said, I think the opening chapter of this one may be the single best novel opening I've read in recent memory).
I considerably enjoyed Anya Lipska's Where the Devil Can't Go, a crime novel about Polish immigrants in London (a good recommendation from Maxine!); Sharon Shinn's Troubled Waters is what my grandmother, speaking disparagingly of certain kinds of sliced bread, would have called 'pap,' but highly readable pap; S. G. Browne's Breathers: A Zombie's Lament is absolutely wonderful (thanks to Jared for the recommendation); Robert Harris's The Fear Index is goofily heavy-handed in its Frankenstein parallels but certainly a page-turner.
Bonus link (FT site registration required, but it's more interesting than what Harris tells us about finance!): school for quants.
Friday, August 19, 2011
Two lists
I might dispute a few of the choices on Lev Grossman's list of his top ten must-read fantasy novels (I like George R. R. Martin's books very much, but I think they are distinctly optional!), but his list of his top ten favorite cocktails in literature is indisputable!
Sunday, July 17, 2011
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!
Monday, May 09, 2011
Light reading catch-up
I took the weekend completely off from work, which was hugely beneficial; have now spent this morning writing up comments on MA essays and doing one last proof of an interview I've been involved with, and am now steeling myself to plunge into the week's most substantial job, grading the final assignments for the two courses I was teaching this semester. Flying back to NYC on Wednesday evening; midday Friday onwards is very thoroughly booked up with school-related things, so I am hoping the grading will all be done by Friday lunchtime...
(After that I need to get back to my long-overdue essay on Restoration drama and the novel; with luck, I can send that out before the end of the month? Next week's still looking a bit busy with school stuff, but the week after is relatively empty and I should be able to polish it off then.)
Plans are starting to come together for my Coeur d'Alene trip at the end of June, which is pretty exciting (even if it remains absurdly complicated and/or expensive to transport a bicycle cross-country!).
I was really so busy in the past few weeks that I lost track of logging my light reading!
I read two quite different 'trilogies' of books that shared the quality of being both addictive and somewhat bad (or at least not ideal representatives of their respective genres); the first was three novels by Lois McMaster Bujold, whose books I've never been able to get into but who comes very warmly recommended by Jo Walton, whose books I love. These were The Curse of Chalion, Paladin of Souls and The Hallowed Hunt. They are totally addictive, I started a new one as soon as I'd finished the previous one and looked forward to subway travel so that I could dig back in on whichever one it was I was reading, and yet they are also strangely shallow, facile; the storytelling is completely fluent, the writing is fine, but there is something quite unsatisfactory about the characters and the stories as well, they miss being really good books by a long stretch. Can't put my finger on it more precisely, but there is just a slight pro forma feel.
(I don't know whether I already said that I'd read Charlie Huston's The Shotgun Rule and Holly Black's Red Glove - worthwhile contributions by two writers I particularly enjoy. I am sure I did already say that I loved Henning Mankell's last Wallander book, which I felt rose to greater heights than most of its predecessors.)
Then I read three serial-killer thrillers, also quite addictive even as I was internally grumbling about the way they seemed like Patricia Cornwell 'lite' (also they are full of the most outrageous implausibilities and some quite melodramatic writing here and there): Cody McFadyen's Shadow Man, The Face of Death and The Darker Side. Couldn't put 'em down, though!
On the plane on Thursday I enjoyed Molly Jong-Fast's The Social Climber's Handbook. Also catching up on last few issues of the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books...
Over the weekend I completely devoured Mira Grant's Feed. I was initially suspicious, as the book seemed a bit too clearly to jump on bandwagons I have seen too much of already in recent years: like, put together one pinch Hunger Games, one pinch M. T. Anderson (who really already had that title!), two pinches Justin Cronin and a tiny dash of Bruce Sterling's Distraction. But I soon changed my mind: I thought it was excellent, I can't wait for the next installment!
(After that I need to get back to my long-overdue essay on Restoration drama and the novel; with luck, I can send that out before the end of the month? Next week's still looking a bit busy with school stuff, but the week after is relatively empty and I should be able to polish it off then.)
Plans are starting to come together for my Coeur d'Alene trip at the end of June, which is pretty exciting (even if it remains absurdly complicated and/or expensive to transport a bicycle cross-country!).
I was really so busy in the past few weeks that I lost track of logging my light reading!
I read two quite different 'trilogies' of books that shared the quality of being both addictive and somewhat bad (or at least not ideal representatives of their respective genres); the first was three novels by Lois McMaster Bujold, whose books I've never been able to get into but who comes very warmly recommended by Jo Walton, whose books I love. These were The Curse of Chalion, Paladin of Souls and The Hallowed Hunt. They are totally addictive, I started a new one as soon as I'd finished the previous one and looked forward to subway travel so that I could dig back in on whichever one it was I was reading, and yet they are also strangely shallow, facile; the storytelling is completely fluent, the writing is fine, but there is something quite unsatisfactory about the characters and the stories as well, they miss being really good books by a long stretch. Can't put my finger on it more precisely, but there is just a slight pro forma feel.
(I don't know whether I already said that I'd read Charlie Huston's The Shotgun Rule and Holly Black's Red Glove - worthwhile contributions by two writers I particularly enjoy. I am sure I did already say that I loved Henning Mankell's last Wallander book, which I felt rose to greater heights than most of its predecessors.)
Then I read three serial-killer thrillers, also quite addictive even as I was internally grumbling about the way they seemed like Patricia Cornwell 'lite' (also they are full of the most outrageous implausibilities and some quite melodramatic writing here and there): Cody McFadyen's Shadow Man, The Face of Death and The Darker Side. Couldn't put 'em down, though!
On the plane on Thursday I enjoyed Molly Jong-Fast's The Social Climber's Handbook. Also catching up on last few issues of the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books...
Over the weekend I completely devoured Mira Grant's Feed. I was initially suspicious, as the book seemed a bit too clearly to jump on bandwagons I have seen too much of already in recent years: like, put together one pinch Hunger Games, one pinch M. T. Anderson (who really already had that title!), two pinches Justin Cronin and a tiny dash of Bruce Sterling's Distraction. But I soon changed my mind: I thought it was excellent, I can't wait for the next installment!
Saturday, March 05, 2011
Things of minor note
Closing tabs:
High Gygaxian (via The Dizzies).
Digital collecting at things magazine (I believe the original site link was via L. Lee Lowe; the underlying link to Things Organized Neatly is particularly worthwhile, as a cake theme seems to predominate!).
Light reading around the edges of an especially busy couple of weeks: Patricia McKillip's The Bards of Bone Plain, which I found evocative and engaging but much too reminiscent of the books of hers I endlessly read and reread when I was young, the Riddlemaster of Hed trilogy; a quite mediocre novel by Robert Crais; two novels by Jennifer Crusie on the recommendation of Jo Walton (I preferred Maybe This Time to Faking It); a comfort reread of A Girl's Guide to Kissing Frogs (not Victoria Clayton's best novel, but the one that came most readily to hand); and - last but most certainly not least - the second installment of Patrick Rothfuss's series, The Wise Man's Fear. It is not that those Rothfuss installments are the perfect books, but they are so wonderfully readable, I finished this one with a huge sense of loss when I realized how long I am likely to have to wait for the next installment. However I have just started reading a novel that seems to me wonderfully appealing also, so that is some small consolation: more anon!
(Saw a bunch of movies last week too, and a show, but don't know that I feel that need to blog any of it here.)
High Gygaxian (via The Dizzies).
Digital collecting at things magazine (I believe the original site link was via L. Lee Lowe; the underlying link to Things Organized Neatly is particularly worthwhile, as a cake theme seems to predominate!).
Light reading around the edges of an especially busy couple of weeks: Patricia McKillip's The Bards of Bone Plain, which I found evocative and engaging but much too reminiscent of the books of hers I endlessly read and reread when I was young, the Riddlemaster of Hed trilogy; a quite mediocre novel by Robert Crais; two novels by Jennifer Crusie on the recommendation of Jo Walton (I preferred Maybe This Time to Faking It); a comfort reread of A Girl's Guide to Kissing Frogs (not Victoria Clayton's best novel, but the one that came most readily to hand); and - last but most certainly not least - the second installment of Patrick Rothfuss's series, The Wise Man's Fear. It is not that those Rothfuss installments are the perfect books, but they are so wonderfully readable, I finished this one with a huge sense of loss when I realized how long I am likely to have to wait for the next installment. However I have just started reading a novel that seems to me wonderfully appealing also, so that is some small consolation: more anon!
(Saw a bunch of movies last week too, and a show, but don't know that I feel that need to blog any of it here.)
Thursday, January 13, 2011
Light reading update
I have to say that I hugely enjoyed Patrick Rothfuss's The Name of the Wind. I had heard very good things about it, but it is necessary to take epic fantasy recommendations with a grain of salt: however, it breathes new life into the old scarecrow of the genre with incredibly rewarding results. I will even go so far as to say that it strongly and pleasantly reminded me of David Copperfield, one of my top ten favorite novels of all time! My only regret is that I did not wait just a little longer to get to it, since my impulse on finishing it was to demand the next installment - but that's not out till March 1: however will I wait?!?
I had quite mixed feelings about Bound to Last: 30 Writers on their Most Cherished Book. There are a number of very good essays, but many of the others are on the short/shallow side (you get that bad magaziney feeling, cumulatively - there is no clear principle of selection for who is included, and people have spent quite evidently different amounts of time and thought in composing their pieces); there is also a genuinely distressing subtext of hostility towards electronic books! It is perplexing to me - I have seen it elsewhere recently too - why the sense of an opposition? It is surely not an either-or, a few of the writers here acknowledge this thoughtfully but more of them just lash out against the immateriality of the e-text.
Perversely, I read this book on my Kindle - I should have waited till I was back in the U.S. to order it, since I'm only reading it now anyway, but as soon as I heard about Ed Park's piece on "The Dungeon Masters Guide" I knew I had to get my hands on it at once, island living notwithstanding. That piece met or even exceeded expectations: it is a great little bit, and now I will have to get hold of a 'real' copy of the book so that I can xerox it and share it with others!
Other standouts: David Hadju on Ralph Ellison; Karen Joy Fowler on The Once and Future King.
Anyway, here's one of the bits I liked from Ed's essay - I too grew up on and loved those Wordly Wise vocab books! -- the whole pieces takes the form of 100 numbered points:
(I think I have some of these in a box in my office, I will see if I can dig them out; I am overdue for a posting on more Davidsonian juvenilia! I loved those workbooks - I would strongly recommend them to home-schoolers with kids aged 8-12 or so, I think they are ideal.)
I had quite mixed feelings about Bound to Last: 30 Writers on their Most Cherished Book. There are a number of very good essays, but many of the others are on the short/shallow side (you get that bad magaziney feeling, cumulatively - there is no clear principle of selection for who is included, and people have spent quite evidently different amounts of time and thought in composing their pieces); there is also a genuinely distressing subtext of hostility towards electronic books! It is perplexing to me - I have seen it elsewhere recently too - why the sense of an opposition? It is surely not an either-or, a few of the writers here acknowledge this thoughtfully but more of them just lash out against the immateriality of the e-text.
Perversely, I read this book on my Kindle - I should have waited till I was back in the U.S. to order it, since I'm only reading it now anyway, but as soon as I heard about Ed Park's piece on "The Dungeon Masters Guide" I knew I had to get my hands on it at once, island living notwithstanding. That piece met or even exceeded expectations: it is a great little bit, and now I will have to get hold of a 'real' copy of the book so that I can xerox it and share it with others!
Other standouts: David Hadju on Ralph Ellison; Karen Joy Fowler on The Once and Future King.
Anyway, here's one of the bits I liked from Ed's essay - I too grew up on and loved those Wordly Wise vocab books! -- the whole pieces takes the form of 100 numbered points:
15. "In grade school, English class was divided between reading, grammar, and spelling. I liked the first, dreaded the second, looked forward to the last. The vocab book we used was called Wordly Wise. There was a whole sequence of them, with an owl on the cover."When I was in fifth and sixth grade, I used to race through two or three of those Wordly Wise lessons each week, burning through increasingly 'advanced' workbooks like a fiend: at the end of the week, I would take a spelling test on the words I'd learned (really I knew them already!), there would be perhaps 45 of them because I would have done more than one lesson's worth, and I would have to write a sentence to show that I knew the meaning of the word: but laziness and frenetic energy combined made me make huge absurd portmanteau sentences that would fit three or four or five of these words into a single sentence. I fear it left its mark on my writing style...
16. "At school I loved vocabulary lessons. Discovering new words. I remember distinctly the time we learned the difference between metaphor and simile--the time we learned what these words even were. The words themselves were so interesting. They weren't shaped like other words I knew. Simile reminded me of smile and, in doing so, made me smile."
17. "Dungeons & Dragons, particularly the Dungeon Masters Guide, was like the phantasmagorical appendix to Wordly Wise. My supplementary, self-directed lessons."
(I think I have some of these in a box in my office, I will see if I can dig them out; I am overdue for a posting on more Davidsonian juvenilia! I loved those workbooks - I would strongly recommend them to home-schoolers with kids aged 8-12 or so, I think they are ideal.)
Sunday, January 09, 2011
Tuesday, January 04, 2011
Light reading catch-up
Deon Meyer's Thirteen Hours was so very much the perfect novel of suspense that I felt ready for another installment of Powell: At Lady Molly's.
I enjoyed Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl quite a bit; it is not exactly my favorite type of book, and I felt that the opening stretch is overly complex in a way that might have made me put the book down and not pick it up again had I not been reading it on my Kindle (where I am as yet reluctant to start something and leave it unfinished, for reasons of digital tidiness), but he is an incredibly good sentence-writer, especially in this world of steampunk fantasy (Mieville!) where sentence-writing is not always a priority, and I'll certainly look out for his other books.
Barry Eisler's Fault Line was fine, but it is not perhaps quite as appealing as his Rain books (I think I enjoyed the Andrew Grant books a bit more than this too - the voice seemed more straightforwardly what I like - I guess I just prefer thrillers written in the first person, all other things being equal).
I enjoyed Catherine Fisher's Incarceron very much indeed, only with the proviso that I do miss in YA fantasy the richness and variety and complexity that can be found in the best adult fantasy (N. K. Jemisin being my best recent discovery in this regard). It is very good, though, and I am pleased to see the sequel is out - arghhhh, not yet available on Kindle, though - I was about to download it and start reading it right now!
I enjoyed Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl quite a bit; it is not exactly my favorite type of book, and I felt that the opening stretch is overly complex in a way that might have made me put the book down and not pick it up again had I not been reading it on my Kindle (where I am as yet reluctant to start something and leave it unfinished, for reasons of digital tidiness), but he is an incredibly good sentence-writer, especially in this world of steampunk fantasy (Mieville!) where sentence-writing is not always a priority, and I'll certainly look out for his other books.
Barry Eisler's Fault Line was fine, but it is not perhaps quite as appealing as his Rain books (I think I enjoyed the Andrew Grant books a bit more than this too - the voice seemed more straightforwardly what I like - I guess I just prefer thrillers written in the first person, all other things being equal).
I enjoyed Catherine Fisher's Incarceron very much indeed, only with the proviso that I do miss in YA fantasy the richness and variety and complexity that can be found in the best adult fantasy (N. K. Jemisin being my best recent discovery in this regard). It is very good, though, and I am pleased to see the sequel is out - arghhhh, not yet available on Kindle, though - I was about to download it and start reading it right now!
Monday, September 27, 2010
Friday, May 21, 2010
Gun with occasional music
Lev Grossman on what you say when you're asked whether you write fantasy or literature.
Not really related, but I've been keeping the link open on my browser and perhaps will insert it here, with tongue in cheek: Maddie Chambers' year-long project to build a miniature model of Bag End!
Not really related, but I've been keeping the link open on my browser and perhaps will insert it here, with tongue in cheek: Maddie Chambers' year-long project to build a miniature model of Bag End!
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