If I Ever Get Out of Here...

The best part of this book is at the end where author Eric Gansworth thanks Wacky Packages for teaching him to think critically. 

Not really, but this YA novel is full of twisted truths like that and has a similarly cracked yet wholesome sense of humor.  It's at heart a novel about friendship and not afraid to admit that boys can care about each mother deeply and touch each other's lives. 

Gansworth also does not flinch from discussing how racism corrupts professional and personal relationships, the history and current flavor of Indian-hating in small towns, ostensibly in the 1970s, or the taste, touch, smell, and feel of poverty on the rez.  The man can really write.  It's rarely if ever forced or overdone, which is tough in YA, with ALL TEH BIG EMOTIONS.  The Tuscarora reservation in upstate New York, like Lewis the protagonist, is flawed and complicated but home, the Lewis, his mother and uncle, and his best friend are deeply human and unique at the same time.

The protagonist's profound love for the Beatles and Wings was hard to stomach at times (sort of joking), but music was a through line that worked well to push up the intensity level of the conflicts between the main characters and others in their community.  The friends clearly care about it together the way true fans care about their fandom, and that honed the edge of the big plot points to the point of drawing blood without hyperbole or melodrama. 

The difficulty of dealing effectively and ethically with being bullied as a teen without backup from the school or greater community is the other main theme of the book.  There is a bit of a deus ex machina here, but it's true nonetheless.  It points out that ultimately it's often up up to adults in the community to step up and stop school bullying, because adults are often the drivers and protectors of the bullies.  Which means kids shouldn't be ashamed to need, ask for, or demand help and protection when skillz are not enough...

Keepin' it real with a droll and matter-of-fact tone always wins my admiration.  I only started this as one from a list of 2014 YA books to check out, but it's already one of the best books I've devoured in the Xmas break aftermath.    (And I've been no slouch over the last month.) It's hard to say more without spoilers, like any book that's not just a well-worn groove in a well-known genre, so go read it!

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Too sciencey!

Someone gave me a very intriguing book: The Tapir's Morning Bath, about biologists researching rain forest animals and ecology.  Great cover!  Thanks. 

I put aside KS Robinson's 2312 because it was so slow to start.  Now I may put away the other ebook I was about to try again, for SCIENCE...  without the fiction...

Exercise science

So I'm reading a lot of sports nutrition and training books, which have cheesy covers and read like pop psychology tracts.  Except for the sciency studies they discuss in passing.  Lou Schuler's The New Rules of Lifting for Women, in particular, has pages of footnoted studies that explain why women should lift weights hard and heavy like dudes. 

It's interesting reading, and makes one wonder how much stronger and more capable women would be without all that advice to tone and shape instead of pumping iron.  Some athletes are showing us, and more are in the pipeline.

The nutrition study data is interesting too, as it debunks the fad diet bandwagons our friends, coworkers, celebrity role models, and media keep trying to get us to jump onto, mostly.  What I found most eye-opening was simply how many studies had been done, as well as what people made of the results in a piecemeal fashion vs. taking the data in more holistically and sorting it out.  Matt Fitzgerald takes a good stab at this in Racing Weight.  Plus he has some good recipes.

I feel like I should be able to get a science fiction story idea out of it, but no luck yet...

Quote of the day

"There are mornings when it feels as if you rise up to the surface through a mud bath. With your feet stuck in a block of cement.  When you know that you've expired in the night and have nothing to be happy about except the fact that at least you've already died so they can't transplant your lifeless organs."

-from Smilla's Sense of Snow, Peter Hoeg

Not how I feel today, but a great line, particularly for the character, who was difficult to like until that.

Nightshifted

I started reading my Clarion West classmate's series about a nurse in the special unit for vampires, werewolves, etc., Nightshifted by Cassie Alexander. 

I was putting this off because I thought it was too cheesy a premise, and the genre is het romance (though apparently there's a lesbian character later on in the series.  But my ER nurse friend loved it, and then another friend I recommended it to...  And it turns out I put down "City Boy" to find out what happens next, darn it.  I may have to renew Ed White.

The blurb:  "Nursing school prepared Edie Spence for a lot of things. Burn victims? No problem. Severed limbs? Piece of cake. Vampires? No way in hell. But as the newest nurse on Y4, the secret ward hidden in the bowels of County Hospital, Edie has her hands full with every paranormal patient you can imagine—from vamps and were-things to zombies and beyond…"

Cheesy, been done except the nurse angle.  But it's funny and moves along just right.  And Cassie knows from nursing.

Cyberpunk communism

Io9 has a nice spread on communist architecture of the SF bent: funky as the  sample above.  Check it out...

I "reread" Paolo Bacigaluli's story "The Tamarisk Hunter" today by listening to a podcast of it ( Original here. ) on  Escape Pod.  It made me wish more "SF" really focused on science with less sketchy economic and social context.  The interaction of branches of government, states vs. each other vs. feds vs. corporations vs. supragovernmental entities, and tech vs. human nature is well done here, as is fitting for a story about the future of water rights.

I'm deep into Edmund White's autobiography "City Boy" and his "The Beautiful Room is Empty" after being properly devastated by "The Married Man," one of the best "AIDS novels" I've read in my quest to dig them all out of the library shelves where they are buried.  His writing is addictive.  Style with a capital S.  Or something.  I must get back to it...

Some Kind of Fairy Tale

I devoured Graham Joyce's new book, Some Kind of Fairy Tale, appropriately enough, sandwiched between two researchy  books about psychiatric ERs.  It earned the hype it's been getting.  (I was underwhelmed by The Silent Land, and therefore somewhat apprehensive.)

In a nutshell, teenage Tara goes missing and does not show up again until 20 (IIRC) years later, and her explanation is that a fairy man - though of course they abhor that appelation- abducted her (willingly, in the fairy sense of such things). 

As you might expect, a good deal of the book involves psychotherapy, with an oddball doctor who once subjected a village woman to shock therapy for a very similar story.  This was vaguely interesting, though his theories were purposely predictable, but the povs of the family and ex-boyfriend and their interactions with Tara were engrossing.

What do you say to such a story, in the English countryside, when so much rings true?  Lots of food for thought and clever language, without as much of the over- the- top grotesquerie Joyce often employs in the name of realism (like in The Tooth Fairy and Smoking Poppy).  I like his often grim, stoic character povs, as befits their stories, but a little more lightness was welcome here.

That said, though it might be a mistake to listen to this while falling asleep, next up for aidiobooks is Hell House by Richard Matheson.

Coldheart Canyon

I am feeling impatient for my potato water to cool so I can mix the sponge for Rusleipa, Finnish sour potato rye bread.  Experimenting with sourdough starter is starting to pay off, but I haven't mastered reading the recipes ahead of time to be able to plan for 12-20 hour sponges.

So instead, it gives me time to discuss Clive Barker's novel, Coldheart Canyon.  I was hoping to read something I'd heard

of by him, but this was the one available at the library, so I gave it a try.

Coldheart Canyon turned out to be very readable, though a real mishmash of a Hollywood satire, a horror novel, and erotica.  The different genres weren't blended so much as arranged like a collage, one, then another, then back to that, then that. 

The characters were pretty strong, even the villains, which made this work.  It also worked against falling into genre cliches.  The cheesy erotica parts were a little too horrific, and the horror a little to funny, or sexy, and the bits of satire added a nice edge.

It's ostensibly a ghost story- fading Hollywood it boy hides out in an old mansion and gets drawn into congress with the undead.  But ghosts, the Devil, his goat-boy son, and monstrous animal-human hybrids, plus some magic spells, make for a grabbag of horror tropes.  Hard to say more without giving too much away...

The ending kind of dragged on, much like Salem's Lot, but this paid off a little.better in the Barker novel.  I will definitely have to check out some of his other titles, while I'm on a horror kick.

Ear candy

Lately I have been mired in a small but detailed book that has slowed my pace a bit still Wallerstein's Historical Capitalism.  It's truly fascinating and I have to really think about it.  Also reading Peter Edelman's recent discussion of U.S. poverty policy, So Rich, So Poor, a good summary of his body of work on the issue.  And some anthologies on globalization and global economics.  Complementary.

I made up for this by reading tasty snack Lee Lynch's classic Naiad novel The Swashbuckler, which is good and as a bonus focuses on the inner world of butches in early 60s NYC (IIRC the years) who have their doubts about the rules and healthfulness (hi Anita - I still think healthiness sounds better) of the gay scene and the nuclear family imperative.  The main character, Frenchie, is from a French immigrant family and her main love interest is a Puerto Rican recent immigrant, and their relationships with her families are weaved into the story in interesting ways.  Not the usual gays in the ghetto without larger lives story, yet the ghetto's importance at the time is primary.

I've also been supplementing the study of historical capitalism with listening to the audiobook of Cory Doctorow's For the Win, which focuses on capitalism's social effects and bases in the current 'globalization' incarnation.  Or avatar.  It's full of protests and strikes, a 'Webblies' gold farmer union, As You Know Bob yet useful explanations of a wide range of historic and new social engineering-based economic scams, and tales survival in the urban wastelands shaped by the web economy.  And stuff. 

The wide range of characters are likeable and make bad choices that we all make as a matter of course in HC that keep things moving rapidly.  Some aspects are kind of...  It's Cory, and it's aimed at American geek boys is how I will put it.  But it makes for good commute- to- downtown day job well- entrenched- in - the- system listening.  While cooking and doing chores too...

I tried listening to French SF novel Gringoland by Julien Blanc-Gras, but its wackiness and literary style make it difficult to follow without really focusing.  Not sure I'll have the time right now.

Otherwise, I've been trying out a bunch of SF podcasts and queer podcasts.  Galactic suburbs, a feminist SF podcast from Australia, the Outer Alliance 'quiltbag' SFF writers organization podcast, and various interview shows have been the most interesting. 

It's an easier way to find out what's going on in fandom, the world of cons, and the writerly web networks than keeping up with blogs and livejournals.  For someone who does not Facebook and uses a phone on the run much more than a computer.  Web bookmarks take up phone dataspace, but the podcast app saves to the SD card...  So thanks podcasters for all your hard work!

American Psycho

I'm excited 'cos I got ahold of American Psycho y Bret Easton Ellis.  I read this as a teen, because it was sitting around, but did not realize what a great satire it was 'til the movie by Mary Harron and Guin Turner.  The lesbian version has depth.  Now I want to see what the original has to offer...

I'm still trying to finish Absolution Gap. It's long.  But it has moments of absolute brilliance.  And I like the gentically enhanced pig, Scorpio.  The baddies are pretty cool too.

I'm listening to the first LeCarre Smiley book on the commute.  I got hooked on audiobooks while sick and unable to hold my head up, much less hold and stare at a book for hours.  The Scottish accent of the last one was awesome, and the guy reading LeCarre's pretty good so far.  I like when they're not too slow.  I read fast...  The LeCarre starts rather slow, but the curious mystery about a guy's death is developing, with interesting character descriptions.  The telling detail...

Absolutin Gap

Quote of the day: "Joan of Arc was just a girl.  Look at the bloody mess she left."

Listening to the audio book for Absolution Gap, part four of Alistair Reynold's big saga.  Chewy far future true-to-science extrapolation with a huge cast of ornery characters.  Very satisfying, and the reader handles the complexity well.

How to Live in a Science Fictional Universe

I finally got ahold of Charles Yu's book, as an ebook.  So far it's pretty interesting, despite the laconic wordiness that originally made me hesitant.  It's growing on me...  It's kind of zippy and laconic at the same time.  Figuring out how to use Overdrive wasted time I could have spent reading, but it's not bad for phone reading.

"If you see yourself coming out of a time machine, run."  The best line so far.

I'm also reading Game of Thrones, because the GF had it lying around, and then bought it for me when she had to turn the library copy in...  Intensely readable.  It's rare that I truly like high fantasy, but Martin has the right touch to keep me plowing through 800+ pages without noticing the time.  In my youth we read all the Sword of Shannara bools again and again, and this feels like that- what the heck is gonna happen next?  How can things get any worse? 

Writing rule #1: Have the characters make the worst possible choices, every time.  Making this believable is the tough part... But if you can, gold...

Line of Beauty

"Well, it'll soon be over."

"What?  Oh, the election."  Catherine stared out into the drizzle.  "The 80s are going on for ever."

The Line of Beauty

I'm reading the novel for which Alan Hollinghurst won the Man Booker prize in 2004.  I read his first novel last year, but I'm finding this one much more readable.

From a review: "At 400-plus pages sprinkled with references to Henry James, his fourth outing aspires to the status of an epic about sex, politics, money, and high society. Though he's best known for his elegant descriptions of gay male life and pitch-perfect prose, Hollinghurst is most striking here for his successful, often damning, observations about the vast divides between the ruling class and everyone else."

Yep.  It's the subtle Jamesian social observations channeled through a somewhat naive, self-centered, and ethically unmoored character that make it fascinating.

Hollinghurst wrote of it:

"In the case of The Line of Beauty, the narrative germ was accompanied by a dreamlike perspective of Kensington Park Gardens, a street that, when I first lived in London in 1981, I walked along several times a week on my way to swim at a local baths, and whose imposing houses, rather scruffier then than now, made me wonder about the lives led in them –it was all a part of my romantic sense of London as a scene of infinite possibilities, both real and fictional."

In this discussion of his work, he also discusses the impact of AIDS on the writing of The Swimming Pool Library from 1984 through 1987 (just as ACT UP was forming in NY).  In The Line of Beauty, the protagonist, Nick, comes of age as a gay man starting in 1983, and what the the reader knows about AIDS casts a shadow on his choices.  Sex, drugs, politics, class, race, and even gender in a more subtle way (with Nick very focused on observing men), it's all tightly entwined.

Hollinghurst also wrote, "My whole instinct was to work by irony, and to make the world of money and power that young Nick Guest is drawn to absorb him and then expel him, as if from some phony paradise.  Nick was to be an unpolitical person in an age reconfigured by a political revolution."

This jibes with an astute online review that labeled TLOB a reverse bildungsroman similar to Maurice, where coming of age as a gay man leads to exclusion from society.  In other words, a ghetto novel in the disguise of a study of the ruling class from a gay POV.  Or something.  An interesting angle, definitely, with very compelling prose.

The Dark Wife

I'm reading this, and found out it just won a Goldie award.  Well-deserved.  The best thing about this is author Sarah Diemer's tireless promotion for her self-published work is paying off.  Here's a brief but inspiring interview.

"All of my life, I was told by peers that what I wrote was far too niche to sell. I challenged that--there's nothing niche about my writing other than the fact that every single main character is a lesbian. I write about zombies and unicorns and clockwork worlds and fairies and monsters and gods and goddesses and angels and demons and werewolves and vampire hunters and straight people enjoy my stories--which range from hardcore fantasy to speculative fiction to biopunk to mythic punk--and love my characters."

Quote of the day.

Trying to get up the energy to work at an increased pace and then go home and write 5 *more* pages.  Of fiction.  Changing gears is going to be hard.  But that's the plan. 

Write-a-thon Day 1 for me.  Yesterday was get out of work early to go to the chiropractor only to find out he had fled to the hospital where his wife was in labor early day.  I wandered around Uptown running all the errands I've been saving up, and thinking about world-building.  Cheapo Records was playing old school British punk, very helpful.

Ten Thousand Saints

The book that kept me up too late all week and almost  made me miss my lightrail stop was the recent novel Ten Thousand Saints by Eleanor Henderson.  It's her first novel, and wow...  Really beautifully written but fast-moving.  Lots of little but building conflicts and secrets, some real suspense, despite being a small picture literary novel.  The main protagonist is a teenage stoner boy with ADD, or maybe FAS, stuck in smalltown Vermont with his pot dealing dad and pipe blowing artist mom.  He gets hooked into the NYC straight edge scene of the late 80s, and the homoerotic side of its aggro homophobia and gender exclusionism is explored heavily. 

A welcome development, cos that scene was so...  heavy with angst and denial.  The politics of AIDS in late 80s NYC and the Tompkins Square riots figure in, but the small town seediness under the bucolic facade is the real well-captured highlight here, IMO.

More on The Businessman

It's the little details of Minnesotan attitude that make it so readable and funny to me, one of those things one either loves or hates.  Like this:

The son-in-law of the middle-aged Minnedota woman ghost is eating a huge spread of chips, beer, pizzas, dip, liver sausage, and BLTs, and she thinks,

"Her son-in-law had never seemed so alien to [her] at this moment.  To have made such a pig of himself at some grocery store and to not have yielded to a single sweet.  No cookies, no ice cream, no Sara Lee cake- it seemed perverse and unnatural."

Hee.

Sarah Schulman on Gentrification of the Mind

Sarah Schulman has another intriguing book out: Gentrification of the Mind.  It's on my short to-acquire list, along with Carol Anshaw's new novel,  Carry the One and Saladin Ahmed's debut novel,  Throne of the Crescent Moon.

Alas, I am doing the usual thing where I wrestle with too many books at one time.  The current reads are Celluloid Activist, the bio of Vito Russo that was nominated for a Lammie, and Tom Disch's The Businessman is going down like a smoothie with maybe too many raspberry seeds in it.  I keep having to stop to pore over pretty passages...

Anyway, here's an interesting interview with Sarah Schulman to whet your appetite for a hefty hardcover (or e-book but only in adobe editions):  from 12th Street.

One of many good quotes:

"12th Street: Do you see Occupy’s strategy as queer?

Sarah: No. I think that having winnable doable goals backed up by direct action is a strategy of profoundly repressed people in crisis. Gandhi used it, Martin Luther King used it, and the Labor movement used it. People who have to have change or they will die use it."

A Couple Good Books

I finally got around to reading The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi, a Finnish writer living in the UK. I was lazy about it because people made it sound like it had a lot of difficult science in it and the author has a physics degree. It sounded daunting, although the short story I'd read by him, last year's award-winning “Elegy For A Young Elk,” was readable and more fantasyish in writing style.

The Quantum Thief was very readable after the first part, which was not difficult from the science but more from the writing style. I had trouble figuring out how the 'game' it involved worked. After that point, the book read a lot more like Steampunk with an alien planet setting. Very gadgety, clocks, capes, watches and all.

It earned the hype, mostly. (There was a lot of hype. I'm not sure this is the Great White Hope of hard science fiction.) I wasn't in awe of his story- and world-building powers by the end, like I often am with Alistair Reynolds for instance, but I enjoyed the read.

I'm not sure whether I want to follow the series – will have to see what the blurbs say about which characters it follows and whether the plots sound interesting. The characters in The Quantum Thief weren't very likeable, but that didn't matter for it as a standalone. It fit the plot.

The quantum physics part wasn't as integral and interesting as, say, in Spin State by Chris Moriarty, but the detective story angle of much of the plot kept things moving, with some pretty unexpected twists and turns.

Before that, I read Elizabeth Hand's sequel to Generation Loss, which I liked a lot despite how grim it got. The sequel, Available Dark, is equally death-obsessed and macabre, but not gratuitously. Death metal, vinyl collecting, and photography, what more could one want... except stark Norway and Iceland settings.

The protagonist, Cass, is a photographer and aging New York punk with a lingering habit. She has a believable enough mix of good and bad qualities to allow her to make the bad choices needed to get her into deep trouble, to provide jeopardy. I like her despite myself, since writing aging punk characters in SFF is like pandering to aging SFF-loving punx like me. The mystery plot also kept me guessing, and stayed surprising.

Now I'm on to The Businessman by Thomas Disch, which I took awhile to get to but have been plowing through quickly now that I started. His wit is truly wicked, and some of his language just hits the mark where something plainer, used to make the same observations, would not have the same effect.

Engrossed

I almost missed my stop this morning on the way to work because I was busy reading "The Effluent Engine" by N.K. Jemisin in the e-anthology Steampowered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories.  I had just gotten to the scary part.

I would be getting back to this book tonight but a NYT article about the upcoming movie "Pariah" caught my eye while sitting down on the couch.  This is on my shortlist of things to watch out for in 2012.  Though the amount of hype it's getting is starting to make me skeptical.  But only so much.  It sounds quite well made, with good acting.  Almost too good to be true...

Another thing to look out for was Steampowered 2, until I found out the e-book was already out from Torquere books.  Their website search engine was kind of wonky.  Both Tables of Contents are chock full of interesting sounding stories, which should make me almost late for work for weeks to come...

I spent some time this weekend in Wisconsin, and besides enjoying tasty latkes at Monty's Blue Plate Diner during a rest stop, I used the GF's grandma's wifi to catch up on the best analysis of the politics of steampunk on the web, particularly Beyond Victoriana.  I have to do some rereading and thinking before trying to say something more, not being as familiar with steampunk due to my tendency to like harder SF better, but there was much food for thought out there.  Some discussions were linked to those had at Wiscon in prior years, which have also been deep and wide conversations with some very incisive analysis.

The Steampowered books seem like a good stab at taking the genre in the direction that more critical analyses have outlined.  Will have to see...

Finally, here is A very good best of 2011 book list.