My March book report

Technically, tomorrow is the last day of March, but since the weekends are an endless slog of work for me without time to read let alone blog, I'm turning this in a day early.

For those of you playing along at home, I set myself a goal of reading all of the books I own which I haven't read yet. There are 252 of them, so I have my work cut out for me.

Trips to the library are not helpful in attaining this goal; alas, the first book I read in March (after the ones I've already talked about from my vacation) came from the library. It was Marion Zimmer Bradley's Sword and Sorceress XXI, a collection of fantasy short stories with female protagonists. I liked quite a few of them (Lee Martindale's "Necessity and The Mother" about an inn run by ex-mercenaries was my fave). This was mostly in the interest of research; they are accepting admissions for Volume XXII and I wanted to see if the story I'm working on fits in or not. It's sort of a faux-Sumerian setting, and these are largely European, but not exclusively. Well, we'll see how it goes. From the stand point of a reader and not a writer, this was enough of a taste where I'm curious to read the first 20 volumes. I shall abstain; I have 252 books to read first, right?

So I'm a huge fan of Ursula K. LeGuin. I've read the Earthsea novels over and over, and her books on writing are a constant resource for me. I'm particularly fond of the Tao te Ching she did (I have quite a collection of Tao te Ching translations, and they are all a bit different. Of course the multiplicity is itself a rather tao thing. The Tao that can be translated is not the true Tao...). I've been remiss with her sci-fi, though. I did buy nearly all of her sci-fi novels over a couple of Christmases (ah, gift cards), and I read The Left Hand of Darkness (still my fave, actually, for sentimental reasons. Which means it made me cry, and books generally don't do that to me). I got halfway through this one:

Worlds of Exile and Illusion, but stopped for some reason, then got all distracted with Miles Vorkosigan books (and there are a ton of those, and they get better as you go so there's no stopping until you're done). So the first thing up was to finish this off. It's actually an omnibus of three short novels: Rocannon's World, Planet of Exile, and City of Illusions. They're minor works from her, really, but they all had touches I liked. The sci-fi version of the faery story in RW, where the woman goes under the mountain and what seems like an evening to her is decades to the rest of the world when she returns (because she was travelling at relativistic speeds); the years-long winter of PofE; the taoist ideas which culiminate in the MC becoming two people and yet one at the end of CofI (I liked that one the best).

Still, if you want to see what LeGuin can really do, start here:

From a nonemotional point of view, I would say this is a better book than Left Hand of Darkness (although, as I mentioned, that's still my fave, what with the crying and with the wintery landscapes. I bet you never knew I loved wintery landscapes...). Certainly it made me feel completely inadequate as a writer. There are so many ideas here. She blends physics, politics, and philosophy together, and she does it with real, human characters who are not cardboard cut-outs fronting for various ideologies. I don't like utopia stories, and I seldom like dystopia stories; they are often just novelizations of straw man arguments. This is not that. There is ambiguity here. If the anarchists on Anarres have a utopia, it is one that requires its members to constantly fight against the pitfalls that group dynamics will inevitably fall into (although I'm suddenly intrigued - what would a pro-bureaucracy novel look like?)

(Monkeying around on Wikipedia led me to a new phrase "libertarian socialist". I've never heard of such a group. The human ability to divide groups into subgroups and sub-subgroups never ceases to amaze me).

Next up: The Word for World is Forest. I've always adored this title; apparently it wasn't LeGuin's choice. She called it Little Green Men, which actually fits the story better. And yet the title it has now (which Harlan Ellison came up with, from a line in the book) is so evocative, it would be a tough call. This one is very short, I think technically a novella. The ending is killer. I managed to convince my husband to read it (if you knew how little he reads these days, you'd appreciate what that means; I think it helps that this is so short).

It's not hard to see that this is a book about the Viet Nam War, but I didn't find it dated at all. I'm almost ashamed to admit, but I liked the character of Davidson. Now, if I met this guy in real life, I wouldn't have such positive feelings, but as a character he's really a guy that lives in his own skin, if you know what I mean. And the way his self-delusion builds as the story continues is quite a trip to read.



Last Book: The Telling. This one is basically a thinly veiled novelization of the last century of Chinese history, when the People's Republic of China took over. The old ways are outlawed, there is a push for one unifying language and an alphabetic writing system. There were a lot of little touches I liked: the way everyone pretends to like coffee because they're supposed to, the library in the caves high up in the mountains. But in the end this is a book I admired without really engaging in it much. I might have had a different impression if I hadn't read it right after The Dispossessed and The Word for World is Forest. It was good, but not great.

I thought I might just be Ursula'd out, but then I started the book I'm reading now, The Lathe of Heaven and knew from page 1 that was definitely not the problem. "...as the vast diurnal pulses beat in the moondriven sea." See my arm? Goosebumps.

So the tally at the end of the month (and I have it on an XCel spreadsheet because I am such a geek): I now have 249 books left to go. *sigh* Yes, a couple of books sneaked in the door so I didn't net much. Still, there's always April and six more LeGuin books to go. I'm debating where to go next: Diana Wynne Jones or William Gibson?

Check it out!

Linda Cambier (a member of my fantastic critique group SFFEditors and a fellow Backspacer, so you know she's cool) has a story up at Quantum Kiss. It's called "The Ultimate Vacation" and is well worth the read. Click the link, you know you want to...

Marie Brennan is the coolest

She's practically making my mission statement here. And she sounds just as pissed off by these attitudes as I am (it's a good thing, that pissed off feeling, it fuels the writing). Key quote for me:

How much future-oriented SF out there (as opposed to, say, alternate history) includes religion as a part of the daily lives of the characters? How much of it involves religion for the protagonists, instead of the aliens or Those People Over There? Some, but the prevailing idea seems to be that we'll have gotten over the religion thing by then.

I also like what she has to say about the magic vs. technology fallacy (have I mentioned I love the way she does magic in her novels? Oh yes, I have.). Although it doesn't get directly stated in my current WIP, one of the underlying rules of the world my novel is set in is that magic and science can achieve the same goals (for instance, time travel), they just work the problem in different ways. (The novel I wrote a few years back which is sitting quietly under my bed will potentially someday be reworked as book four or five in this series, if it ever goes series. I mention only because this is how I know the world setting of the WIP so well; I've been immersed in it for eight or so years now).

Well, I just had to share that. Back to work!

It's a good thing I like to read

I mentioned in my last post my desire to get my to-be-read stack down to a manageable 50 or so books. That got me wondering, how many books do I own which I haven't read yet? It's a metaphorical stack, you see, I tend to shelve things right away because I'm anal. So I took out a yellow pad and went shelf by shelf, counting everything I've not read which I intend to read (so this isn't counting reference books or my husband's architecture books or my boys' books unless I'm intending to read them cover to cover).

The final tally: 252.

Good lord.

OK, lest you think I'm a total impulse buyer in bookstores, a good chunk of those are books of my husband's which I didn't buy myself but do intend to read (the Niven, Heinlein, and what have you), and an even bigger chunk is books that my mother-in-law gave me a year or so ago: all her books from college. It was a wealth of riches, particularly for someone like me with an interest in history and period literature, especially from ancient Japan, China, and India.

Still, 252. You realize if I read a book a week (which is about my average), it would take me five years to read them all. And that would be assuming I didn't buy anything new (which isn't in the realm of possibility; I have five things on preoder from Amazon.com coming in April-August). Plus there are all those China Mieville books I haven't read yet, and I'm dying to check out John Scalzi (his blog rocks). Then there's this novel I'm supposed to be writing...

At any rate, I intend to make updates at the end of the month of what I've read and what the to-be-read count stands at now. You all can help keep me honest. I've got my work cut out for me!

...in which I go to Las Vegas and bring the snow with me

So I'm back from my weeklong vacation. I didn't read three novels in a week like I did last time, but I did read two and some change.

As mentioned previously, we had some blizzard-type weather just as we were leaving town. It dumped on Minneapolis a few more times while we were away, but now that we're back it's in the 40s and it's all starting to melt. Yep, we missed all the fun. Happily, one of our neighbors quite unexpectedly snowblowed our driveway for us, which is really appreciated when you get home at 1:30 in the morning because the flight home was delayed and you've been dreading hauling suitcases seemingly full of bricks and sleeping children (they always seem heavier when they're sleeping) over a couple of feet of snow into the house. So thank you, Patrick!

Of course the flight out of Minneapolis was more delayed than the flight in, although this apparently had nothing to do with the weather; we were waiting for our plane to make it up from Mexico. We spent nearly four hours in the airport play area watching our departure time get bumped back again and again. This play area seemed designed to magnify any sound made within it, and the little girls waiting to go to Orlando were playing some sort of game that involved lots of shrieking.

But that's OK, because I was on the banks of the Mississippi, eating catfish and biscuits in a house on stilts listing over the water. In my head, anyway; I was reading Jon Clinch's Finn. It's based on Huckleberry Finn, of course (it's about his father), but stylistically it's something else entirely. It's dark and completely engrossing. I was particularly fascinated with the dialogue. Not only are there no adverbs in the dialogue tags (she said gleefully), there are no tags at all. And the punctuation for dialogue is all periods and question marks, no ellipses or dashes even when someone trails off or is interrupted. It's all implied. Very minimalist, very cool. I would recommend reading it just to enjoy all the nuances contained in the words "I know it".

I was halfway through with that before we even landed in Phoenix (did I mention we waited in the plane for an hour before even taking off, waiting our turn to get our wings deiced? I'm just grateful this all happened now that my youngest is five and capable of dealing with it. If this had happened when he was two or three, it would have been a complete screaming nightmare.)

I finished Finn in snatches while we were on the road. We went to Hoover Dam and took the dam tour, took a lot of dam pictures. The boys were quite impressed. We also saw the work they're doing to build a bridge so traffic can bypass the dam. It's way too far up there; there is no way you're ever getting me to drive across that thing once it's done. It needs to be built, though, and apparently it's quite the feat of engineering. No trucks have been allowed on the dam since 9/11 and all other traffic passes through a security check first. The horse trailer in front of us had been inspected, but the door hadn't been latched properly afterwards, so we drove through the curves and turns of the road leading to the dam watching this door loaded with tackle swing open then shut, open then shut. Nothing got that guy's attention; not flashing your headlights or pedestrians gawking and pointing. He crossed the dam and kept going past the parking lot; I have no idea when he discovered his door was open. For someone like me who can't go to bed with the closet door cracked open because it's supposed to be closed, it was an exquisite form of torture.

Then we went to Vegas. As we crossed the pass and started down into the valley we could see clouds hanging over the city. As we got closer it started to rain. Then the rain got slushy. Then, just as we pulled onto Las Vegas Boulevard and got our first glimpse of the Luxor, it honest to god started to snow. It only lasted a minute and of course it didn't stick to anything. I just have to say, I went to Vegas and it snowed for me.

We spent the next two days running around Vegas. It's like Disneyworld for grown-ups, only it doesn't cost anything to roam around, provided you never get thirsty or hungry or buy anything in the shops. Everything costs twice as much as a midwesterner like me thinks it ought to. I can put Michael Jackson's million dollar Las Vegas shopping spree in some context now (I mean, it's still nuts, but it's nuts in context). We went through the Venetian, which has a canal running through it complete with bridges and gondolas, false fronts on the buildings and a ceiling painted to look like the sky. The Luxor was cool too, all done up like Egypt. There was someplace else that was all Roman (yes, already it's all starting to blend), and lots of things were covered in decorations for Chinese New Year.

In short, it made me really want to play Tomb Raider again.

(You're getting the edited highlights here; we also drove down some parts of Route 66, which is Oliver's avowed favorite part of our vacation, and we saw a replica of the London Bridge in Arizona which is certainly a cooler tourist stop than the biggest ball of twine).

So then we were back in Phoenix and had a few days to just mellow out. I specifically had left this book on my unread stack to bring with on vacation. I had read Marie Brennan's first book, Doppleganger, on my last vacation, so I wanted to bring the sequel with this time. The cover is an improvement over the last one. The book is a perfect follow-up; it widens and deepens the world in lots of cool ways. I like a well thought-out magical system, where the way things work makes logical sense, but where the people using it don't necessarily understand every aspect of it (like physicists working on string theory, for instance). The first book hinted at things which are more developed in this sequel about where their magic comes from and how it works. All I can say is: wow. I like the sense of magic as where science and religion meet; if you're intrigued by that idea you're definitely going to want to check out Marie Brennan. 'nuff said.

I mentioned I only read two and some change this time, the "change" was the first chunk of Temeraire. This is actually a 3-in-1 from the Science Fiction Book Club, a compilation of Naomi Novik's series of dragons in Napoleonic times. Sort of Master in Commander meets Eragon. I was intrigued by the idea and had her name on my "to be bought when I've worked the to be read stack down to a manageable 50 or so books" list for a while now, but when SFBC offered it as a 3-in-1 I caved and bumped her up to the top. Also, Peter Jackson is making the movie version. Apparently he has a thing for trilogies. I'm only 80 or so pages in (mostly read on the plane back from Phoenix; the upside of night flights, it's easier to get some reading in when someone is sleeping on your shoulder rather than asking to go pee every 15 minutes). It's already caught my fascination. Lucky me, I still have another week off of work which should be enough to polish this off.

Then back to my own novel. Sadly, I can't polish that off in a week...