Category Archives: Books

Books by others; whatever I’m reading.

Reading in 2012 – the whole shebang (#amreading)

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Here’s all the books and many of the short stories I read in 2012

1. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, by Stephen Greenblatt
2. Among Others, by Jo Walton
3. Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories, by Simon Winchester
4. Stone Spring by Stephen Baxter
5. Kat, Incorrigible (Unladylike Adventures of Kat Stephenson), by Stephanie Burgis
6. Remote, by Donn Cortez
7.The Pattern Scars by Caitlin Sweet
8. one awesome draft novel by a dear friend
9. Property of a Lady, by Sarah Rayne
10. Hark a Vagrant by Kate Beaton
11. Black Blade Blues, by J.A. Pitt
12. Redshirts, by John Scalzi
13. Broken Harbour, by Tana French
14. Sharp Objects, by Gillian Flynn
15. Are you My Mother? By Alison Bechdel
16. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
17. Catching Fire, by Suzanne Collins
18. Mockingjay, by Suzanne Collins
19. On Conan Doyle or The Whole Art of Storytelling, by Michael Dirda
20. Falling Angel, by William Hjortsberg
21. Between two Fires, by Christopher Buehlman
22. Black Diamonds; The Rise and Fall of an English Dynasty, by Catherine Bailey
23. The Warlock’s Curse, by M.K. Hobson
24. Little Star, by John Ajvide Lindqvist
25. Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn
26. The Keeper of Lost Causes, by Jussi Adler-Olsen
27. The Sin Eater, by Sarah Rayne
28. How to Archer, by Sterling Archer

Short Stories (there were others; I’m just getting into this habit).
“Men Who Would Drown,” by Elizabeth Fama
“Six Months, Three Days,” by Charlie Jane Anders
“Nell,” by Karen Hesse (http://www.tor.com/stories/2012/09/nell)
“How to Make a Triffid” by Kelly Lagor (http://www.tor.com/stories/2012/11/how-to-make-a-triffid)
“Your Final Apocalypse,” Sandra McDonald, Clarksworld
“A Scandal in Bohemia,” Arthur Conan Doyle

Rereads
Faithful Place, by Tana French
Into Thin Air, by Jon Krakauer
Broken Harbour, by Tana French

Why go through the portal?

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Janni Simner continued the conversation about portal fantasy that’s been bubbling along online, and one of the things she touches on in the process of discussing real-world consequences for a visit to Somewhere Else (something I hadn’t really ) is the question of why a character would go through the portal at all.

My baseline assumption in life had always been: OMG, why not go through the portal?

This is perhaps silly. I’d love to imagine I was a look before you leap person, but I am a looker. I look hard. In the real world, I’d hope the portal could wait awhile so I could invite my wife, pack the medicine cabinet, load up on food, coats, undergarments, tights, more tights, a fully-charged e-reader and a solar recharging panel.

I’d arrange cat care and send a few e-mails. There would be waffling about boots and which coat. That would have to be one patient portal, friends.

It’s not that I don’t want to go. I just don’t want to go without antihistamines, if you know what I mean. I don’t want to assume I’ll be back before the kibble runs out. Nobody really wants to be Rose Tyler, do they, showing up a year later and coming face to face with their own Missing poster and a freaked out mom? (Oh, I know there are lots of good reasons to be Rose Tyler. Rowr and all that. But you see what I’m saying.)

Does that mean the protagonist of my new series goes blithely leaping into another world without sober consideration and a pile of supplies? Actually, no. The first time–and I think this happens in a lot of portal fantasies–Sophie Hansa ends up on Stormwrack without warning or any kind of plan. It’s a deeply unplanned voyage to a magical realm.

And the second time, she knows full well what to expect, and she packs accordingly.

And now I #amreading At Home by Bill Bryson & Broken Harbour (again)

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I slow down on reading when I’m teaching a novel-writing class, naturally–having ten to fifteen student novels on the go takes up a certain amount of fiction-reading head space. It’s a regrettable side effect of an otherwise terrific process. So, as Novel Writing III wraps up, I’m crawling my way through Bill Bryson’s At Home: A Short History of Private Life
–which is written in a loveable, chatty style that makes one feel as though a good friend is telling you cool stuff just to please you–and the occasional chapter of Broken Harbor, by Tana French.

I’ve also read a number of Camille Alexa stories and poems this week, stuff from Push of the Sky. I’m getting to know CA better in real life; this is part of the process. But that too is something I’m taking slowly, mostly because the emotional intensity of some of the stories is cranked high enough to have made me cry on the bus, twice. I love intense, but sometimes you just can’t arrive at your destination an emotional wreck.

Belated #amreading The Warlock’s Curse by M.K. Hobson

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So, finally, The Warlock’s Curse!

Here’s the very pretty cover:

But what’s inside? I reviewed M.K. Hobson’s second novel, The Hidden Goddess, for Tor.com back when it came out. And I have been eagerly awaiting the sequel ever since.

The thing about this book is: what do I say? I am a spoilerphobe and I try to write spoiler-free book write-ups; this is sooper-hooper tricky in the case of M.K. Hobson’s Veneficas Americana series, because The Warlock’s Curse is intimately tied to the events of the preceding two books. This means a discussion of this third novel requires tapdancing around the revelations from three full books.

But here goes: TWC is mostly the story of William Edwards, a sweet and remarkably gifted farmboy with a talent for Otherwhere engineering. Will’s not quite eighteen, he’s a tad dyslexic and he’s been accepted as a fellow at the Telsa Institute in Detroit. Sadly, his parents have categorically forbidden him to go.

Will is a good-hearted kid–a sweet one, really–but he’s in a huge power struggle with his father and this has made him snarky and more than a little desperate. Then a chance arises for him to run off by accepting some help from someone in a similar situation, his childhood pal Scuff, otherwise known as Jenny.

Jenny, like Will, has a streak of genius and parent troubles. Being a girl, she’s expected to sort out her issues, tighten her bustle and quietly enter into fruitful matrimony with some San Francisco society gentleman to be chosen later. Instead, she and Will embark on a partnership–they flee together to Detroit, where the Telsa folks are located, and pursue their separate agendas.

The only hitch? They have to get married to pull it off. Soon our teen heroes are on the run with a barely legitimate marriage certificate and more money than sense. Everyone is after them, and there’s also another problem they can’t appreciate: nearly everyone around Will has told him a lie or two over the years, Jenny included. And hidden behind his parents’ lies is a secret so awful it might destroy the two of them and a decent amount of U.S. real estate if things go awry.

It’s a novel. Things go awry.

TWC plays out against a backdrop of magic, politics, and plague. An evangelist preacher is taking steps to try eliminating all magical ability from the U.S. population. He has already managed to inoculate most of the younger generations, but he’s trying to wipe out the abilities of the privileged elder generation who grew up with magic.

It’s tricky, at times, that this book is so intimately tied to its precedessors. I can’t imagine reading it without having read The Native Star and The Hidden Goddess. A certain amount of the pleasure I derived from reading it came from knowing all the things William doesn’t. And as a second complaint, I will say it ends on a whopper of a suspenseful situation. Being obliged to put it down without having the next book ready and waiting was very sad. See how sad?
I sent this picture to L to hint that she really should make a Scrabble move now.

As for the novel itself: it has the usual grandeur of Hobson’s writing, the delightful characters and hilarious dialog, and the no-punches pulled savagery of a bare-knuckles brawl. In marrying and running off from people determined to protect them from everything including the truth, Will and Jenny dress themselves for the slaughter. And I do not use that word lightly. The little bit of responsibility they bear for getting themselves into trouble hardly rates against what happens to them.

Is Hobson saying we should meekly accept lying by authority figures for our own good? No, obviously not. But TWC is very much about displaced pride, the inability to ask for help and the inability of one person, however talented, to stand against massive corrupt organizations, be they political, corporate, or sorcerous in nature.

Gone Girl, with spoilers

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A number of my students are reading Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn right now. It was on my list; Barb had recommended it to me, and I’d liked Sharp Objects a lot, so the timing seemed perfect.

A lot of the reader reaction I’ve seen online about this book boils down to omg, omg, wow, this is so good, so well constructed but then that last page… whuh?

So, here’s my answer to whuh? Agree or disagree, as you please.

My take on the end is simply this: what we are looking at in Gone Girl is a story where an abused spouse goes back to a partner who will, inevitably, kill them.

This is murked up–in a good way, I think–by a couple things. First, there’s the gender switch. Amy’s the abuser, Nick the victim. This is statistically atypical and in this piece of writing it serves to muffle the usual dynamics of abusive relationships. That is to say, it makes it all a little less obvious, especially because the power imbalance between Nick and Amy isn’t as unequal as it would be if he was female. She has the money and everyone’s on her side, but he’s got male privilege: he is bigger and stronger than Amy. He could throttle her and–but for the inconvenience of prosecution–be free of her.

The other reason we don’t all go “Oh, yes, Nick’s a battered husband, it’s sooooo clear,” of course, is that the man is no prize. He is spectacularly un-self-aware, emotionally shut down (this itself is a result of growing up with abuse in his family of origin) an almost pathological liar, desperate for approval, a conflict avoider and, of course, an adulterer.

He’s kind of awful, right? But you know what? This rings true to me: it accords with what I learned back when I was working in a transition house for battered women. Having a violent spouse doesn’t grow you a halo. You might have had one anyway, and maybe you can hang onto it. But usually, the life horrific will amplify your pre-existing unlovely qualities. Stress and terror don’t always make you a better person.

Anyway. Nick starts working towards breaking up his marriage, in his icky passive-aggressive adulterer way. Amy takes it into her head to kill him. If I can’t have you, nobody can. She puts him through a completely awful experience… and then desperation and his clever, craven begging draw her home to him.

So why does he stay with her?

–First, there’s a journalist-amplified version of the What will the neighbors think? effect. Everything that has happened to Nick has happened in a shiny and unforgiving media spotlight, and he knows that if he makes the wrong move, the whole country will cast him as a villain.

–Then there’s the fact that Amy has smoothly and glibly explained all his accusations to the cops, negating what legitimacy he might otherwise lay claim to. I don’t know where the silly boy gets these ideas. I would never hurt him!

–For awhile, there’s more fake evidence against him in Amy’s arsenal–it’s the I can still hurt you, honey, and nobody can help you, thing.

–She also convinces him that he can’t really exist without her love. That somehow it’s she who defines him. You’re nobody without me, baby. That’s his big epiphany.

–Finally, of course, there’s the actual baby. Given that he doesn’t believe he can get away, let alone get away with custody of a child, is he really gonna leave a kid to his wife’s tender mercies?

So Nick capitulates. He tells his sister and the one sympathetic cop that he’s giving up the fight, and he sinks into trying to dance to Amy’s tune. To fulfill her every whim. The scene with his sister is heartbreaking and, again, very true to life. The cop is philosophical–she’s seen this before.

On page the last, what we see (or confirm) is that Nick’s days are numbered. He can’t humor Amy perfectly, forever–nobody could. So we see that he’s made a remark–“I feel sorry for you”–that is sticking in her craw. And she’s shutting down the story when she says “I have to have the last word,” because now she’s wrapping up what went before, and moving on to her next project. It seems to me that this is the inevitable beginning of and justification for Amy’s next attempt to take on the role of Punch, to find a new way to murder her cheating, flawed and lamentably unlikable Judy.