What I'm Reading Now

As always, this is what I'm reading NOT for review columns.

Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future

KS Robinson writes these massive SF novels that are filled with intricate, splendid, convincing worldbuilding. They don't really tap into the reader's emotions, which is a characteristic of hard science fiction, but they're interesting to read. This one is about climate change. It starts with a really grim chapter about a heat wave in India that kills very nearly everyone in the area, 20 million people, and gets more hopeful (a little more hopeful) after that. It's more or less about what we might do if we want to survive the next century. It's also the most accurate portrayal of how to change the world that I've ever read. Bit by bit, one thing and another, lose lose lose lose lose win.

It's less hopeful than it might be because I'm dubious that we will do any of this stuff. (Robinson makes it clear that we will have to do hundreds of things -- there's no silver bullet.) Instead, we will keep shoveling profit into the maws of billionaires, destroying our ecosystem so a handful of people can make a little more money. 

Fair warning: this one is massive. It took me three days to read it. (Usually I'm a book a day reader, though sometimes two days if the book is particularly long.)

Still, it was an interesting read. I wish I believed in the future Robinson shows us, that's all.

Andrew Joseph White, You Weren't Meant to Be Human

Another good but depressing book. Written by a trans author, this is SF/Horror. A possibly alien intelligence located in a bug/worm swarm recruits people in dire situations, making them members of its swarm and using them to do things. Some of the things are fairly awful. The main plot line concerns a trans man who the swarm causes to become pregnant, despite the fact that pregnancy makes the man suicidal.

It's a very grim book about what happens when people are denied rights or agency, and gives us an engaging look at what it is like to be trans or a woman or poor in our current world. (It's set in the near future, but things have just kept going the way MAGA "Christians" want them to go.) Crane, the trans man, is particularly well done. A horrific read, but worth reading if you can take it.

T. Kingfisher, What Stalks the Deep

The third in her Sworn Soldier trilogy, this one takes the gang to a coal mine in the Appalachian mountains. It's always nice to hang out with Alex Easton and Angus again. This one has a great monster, and also some really claustrophobic stuff that I had to skim through. There's one good dog and one bad, except the bad dog isn't really a dog.

A quick, enjoyable read, except for the bits where they are crawling through the mine that might collapse on them at any moment.

Weather Report, Other Report

It is foggy, damp, and cold here. I took the dog to the park at dawn and since no one was there I could let him off the leash, his favorite thing. He ran and ran and ran. There were squirrels! There were birds! Once he lost sight of me in the fog and panicked, but when I whistled he came charging back. Squirrels! Birds!

I have gotten approval on the structural edits of my third Velocity novel (Down the Core, watch for it in early 2027) and now am messing about with ideas for the fourth. I'm also reading for the next round of book reviews.

And I plan to make soda bread this morning. Retirement is a full life!

The soda bread -- with black currants

Weather Report, Bird Report, Dog

It's been very cold here lately -- sleet and freezing roads yesterday, and today sunny but 22 degrees when I took the dog to the park at dawn.

A good time was had, but when he spotted three Great Blue Herons in the stream that runs through the park he plunged into the woods along the bank for a closer look, and got hopelessly tangled. I had to wade into the brush and take him off the leash to get it untangled from the trees and liana vines and brambles and -- you guessed it -- he ran off further into the woods, trying to find the herons (who had long since flown lazily and gracefully away).

Eventually he came back, entirely unrepentant. "What a ridiculous dog you are," I said, and he wagged his entire body at me happily.

The Current State of Academics in America

EDITED TO CORRECT MY ERRORS:

I'm sure most of us have heard about the TA in Oklahoma who gave an Evangelical student a bad grade on her paper because (1) the student's paper did not meet the assignment criteria, which required the student to demonstrate that they had read a specific article, and to write a reaction to that article and (2) the only source the student alluded to was the Christian Bible. (She didn't cite it.)  Among other things, this student apparently said that trans people were demonic.

Evangelicals are having screeching tantrums, even though Oklahoma University is kissing the student's feet and giving her everything she wants. This is discrimination, you see, to require a student to write a paper that fits the assignment.

ETA: Also, apparently this student's mother works for Turning Point, and the student may have taken the class in order to get the instructor (who is trans) fired.

ETA: I also once had a student refuse to read an assignment (a James Baldwin short story) because reading it went against her religion. (It had the words 'damn' and 'hell' in it.) I failed the student for that assignment, and my university supported me. AS THEY SHOULD.

In my last few years of teaching, I had a student very much like this one. She wanted to write a paper explaining how Jesus was an historical figure. I discouraged her from choosing this topic, because I said she would not be able to find legitimate sources to support that claim. She insisted she could. Reluctantly, I allowed the topic.

What sources did she cite? You guessed it. Verses from the Bible and an interview with her pastor. I taught students to write papers by doing several drafts with them and holding conferences. Over and over, I told her she either had to find legitimate sources -- not the Bible, not her preacher, but sources published in reputable, peer-reviewed journals -- if she wanted to stick with this topic.

She ended up with a very low grade on the paper, because not only did she never find -- or as far as I could tell, try to find -- reputable sources, she couldn't write a grammatically correct complete sentence or a structurally correct paragraph either. Because that was the major paper for the semester, she had to repeat the class. She didn't complain to the dean, fortunately for me, because -- like OU -- I suspect my dean would have caved.

After that semester, I began assigning topics instead of letting students choose what they wanted to write about. I still got a lot of terrible papers, but at least none of them could accuse me of failing them because they love Jesus.

This TA clearly is doing a great deal right -- requiring legitimate sources, explaining clearly and calmly how the student's paper does not meet the criteria. I would not, myself, have allowed a student to write about why trans people should not exist, but she is a student herself, and still finding her way. At her age, I did indeed allow topics like that, but I always knew my university would support me if I treated the student fairly (as this TA did). Now every Evangelical/MAGA student knows they just have to claim that they are being persecuted for their religion and the university will fall over its feet giving them whatever they want.

There is no way to educate students if this is how the system works. 

Social Commentary

I now live, as many of you know, in the nearest thing to a socialist city you're going to find in Arkansas. Our governor and legislature and much of the rest of this MAGA state hate us with a passion because so many progressives/hippies/liberals live here that it's easy to fund our library, the bike trails, the free busses and the food banks.

And yet. People are homeless here. People are living in their cars. (I encounter them often, since I go early to the dog park, when they're still in the parking lot there.) Some, I am sure, have addiction problems. Many just can't make the rent, which is high in this city, considering it's in Arkansas -- a single shabby one-bedroom rents for $1200/month, and requires passing background checks, providing paystubs, and putting up a sizable deposit as well as the first and last month's rent. Plus you have to sign a year long lease, and if you default before the year is up, you're evicted. Trying getting another apartment with an eviction on your record.

(Why so pricey? Everyone wants to live here, and then also we have a yearly influx of rich kids from Texas who come to attend our R-1 university, probably not because it's a good university as because it's got the Razorbacks. Razorback football is a cult.)

The city is working at building (a) affordable housing and (b) affordable housing aimed specifically at artists. This is what cities should be doing, obviously, but it's not here yet.

A lot of the people living in their cars, or occasionally in tents deep in the trees around the dog park, have jobs. Many also drive for door dash or deliver for Amazon. They're not "lazy," and they're not "illegal immigrants." They're unable to rent an apartment on minimum wage plus a side hustle. (We do have immigrants, but they're mostly working construction, which I assume pays better.)

Are they hungry? They're not eating well, I can guess that from the fast food wrappers scattered around their cars. (There are trash cans, but I guess I might not want to get out of my car when it's 20 degrees out either.) Food banks are useful, but frequently they require a kitchen, which someone living in their car will not have. They don't look healthy, or happy, on the few occasions I see one stumbling back from the single bathroom in the park.

Why do I bring this up? Well, I saw this clip from 1984*, over on PZ Myers' site. It reminded me of a boyfriend I had at about the same time -- 1983, this would have me -- who assured me that no one starved in America, no one was hungry in America. I didn't know enough to push back at him. My own brother said the same thing, a few years later: people were homeless in America because they wanted to be. None of them were starving, or even hungry.

I'm hearing the same rhetoric from conservatives today. MAGA conservatives, anyway. People are homeless because they choose to be homeless. People begging on the street corners are making a fortune, they all have nice cars and five bedroom homes. People going to food banks are driving there in BMWs.

It's the Welfare Queen lie Reagan started in 1980. MAGA loves to believe it because it justifies their bigotry. It's okay to persecute the poor and the immigrants, it's okay to strip food assistance from people because those people are just junkies anyway, spending their money on cigarettes and booze. Hate becomes a virtue in their little bubble. That so many of them claim to be Christian is pretty...I was going to say hilarious, but actually it's disgusting.

They aren't just disgusting. They're immoral.

*I'll tell you what really astonished me about that clip -- how polite Pryor was the the wealthy old lady. He treated her with so much respect. I'd have lost it by the second lie she told. He slips a bit when she tries to take the moral high ground, but he's still saying, "Yes, ma'am," and "No, ma'am," to the very end.

Random Sunday Stuff

Thanksgiving went well, though I had to open the windows because so much cooking made the house too hot. Also, Dr Skull got stove up from the cooking, even though we did as much of the actual work as possible.

It was extremely cold -- well below 30 -- when I took the dog to the park this morning. He loves the cold. He got the zoomies and would have leapt into the (ice-crusted) pond if I hadn't yelped in alarm.

I need to go to the library today. But it is SO COLD. Hovering at 32 right now, with a sharp wind. Also sunshine, though, so maybe things will warm up by this afternoon.

Thanksgiving Morn

I took the dog on a frosty walk before sunrise and since then have been involved in preparations for dinner, even though in theory I have very little to do with the cooking. But Dr Skull is not able to use his hands well at the moment, so I am doing a lot of prep work for the dishes he is cooking.

It is beautiful weather here: about 50 degrees, sunny and crisp.

My part of the menu:

Bread

Sweet potatoes

Dr Skull's part:

Butternut squash soup

Cornbread stuffing

Pumpkin pie

(I made the cornbread and peeled and cut up the squash. I will probably roll out the pie crust as well.)

The kid:

Mac & cheese

Brussel's sprouts

Mashed Potatoes

The Turkey

The kid's husband:

deviled eggs

Uncle Charger is coming to dinner as well.

Novel Revision Submitted

I sent off the revision of the third Velocity novel (titled Down the Core) yesterday and so today I am at loose ends. I have reviews to write, of course, and I suppose I could do all the things I put off so I could work on the novel non-stop, like cleaning the bathrooms and dealing with the recycling.

Or I could re-read novels and drink hot tea. Maybe take a nap later.

Hmm, hard decision.

What I'm Reading Now

Stella Hayward, The Good Boy

On her 30th birthday, a woman is granted a wish by her magical grandmother. This is a family tradition -- every grandmother gives every granddaughter a wish on their 30 birthday. But Genie, a bit drunk and traumatized by life, accidentally wishes her beloved dog was human -- and voila! 

This is an adorable book. The best part is Rory, the dog turned human who still acts and thinks like a dog. He's a golden retriever with his own traumatized past, and he's just great. (The trauma is off the page and kept non-explicit.) There's a romance (not with Rory) and it's fine and charming as well, but Rory is the best part. If you're looking for a well-written, charming read with a happy ending, this is your book.

Elly Griffith, The Frozen People

This is sort of science fiction, so I suppose I could have included it in one of my review columns. But it's really SF-ish, so I decided not to. It's a good book, mind you, and kept me interested all the way through -- this division in the English civil service handles "cold" cases (so cold they're frozen, get it), by which they mean cases that can only be handled by sending witnesses back through time to observe the murder. That's the only science-fictional part about the novel, the time travel. Otherwise it's a straight-up murder mystery.

The main plot concerns a powerful minister in the government, bruited as a possible Prime Minister some day, who is writing a book about his family history and wants to clear up the rumor that one of his great-great-grandfathers was a serial killer. So our main character is sent back to 1850 to act as a witness, and gets stuck there. Meanwhile in the future/present, the minister is murdered. Are the two connected?

I love time travel novels anyway, but this one is also very well done. Good writing, great characters, and a couple of cranky cats. If you like a little SF in your murder mystery, this might be worth picking up.

Helen DeWitt, The English Understand Wool

Helen DeWitt wrote one of my favorite books, The Last Samurai. This is a bit different, and much shorter (really a novella) but every bit as good. An 18 year old, raised in Morocco and various cities (Paris, London) by fabulously wealthy parents, reared by those parents to be spectacularly well-bred (never doing anything mauvais ton), suddenly learns that (a) her parents are not her parents and (b) she has very little money left indeed. What she does about it is one of the surprises of the book. 

As with Samurai, DeWitt plays with form and structure here. She does it very well. This book is a delight, and it's short enough to read in a few hours. 10/10, no notes.

Emma Straub, This Time Tomorrow

This one is also (sort of) science fiction/fantasy. A woman on the eve of her 40th birthday figures out how to return to her 16th birthday. There's a portal, sort of. But it will only ever take her back to that one day, her 16th birthday. She can, however, change things, which changes her life in the future. The one thing she keeps trying to change is the death of her father, who in the initial story is dying of lung cancer. The thematic arc is she has to learn to accept her father's death. 

It's not a bad book -- nice writing, and the characters are pretty well done. But it's the kind of SFF which people who don't read much SFF end up writing. (To her credit, Straub knows this and lampshades it in the book.) The science fiction convention that features heavily in the various timelines is really well done. Straub's father is Peter Straub, so that makes sense. 

The notion of 1996 being the ancient past kind sent me.

Harper Lee, The Land of Sweet Forever

I read this one so you won't have to. Lee is famous for having written every high school teacher's favorite book, To Kill a Mockingbird (I also loved this book as a kid) and then never publishing anything else. Because of this, it was a truism among the (male) writers in my MFA program that Truman Capote had "actually" written Mockingbird. 

Anyway, now that Lee is dead, her heirs are publishing her trunk novels and uncollected works, including Go Set a Watchman in 2015 and this collection of short stories and essays this year. It contains several short stories written when Lee first started writing, none of them terrible but none of them very good, and several pretty bad essays about nothing in particular. 

Only read this if you're a completist like me.

James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

I read this as an undergraduate and again as a graduate student, so this is a re-read.

It's a lovely book. Joyce writes like an angel. Sadly, this one is overshadowed by his (incoherent and frankly overrated) later novels. If you actually like to read and don't just want to look like a hipster, this one and his short stories are where you should spent your time.

Deer

 Two deer were grazing out behind my house this morning:

There were also two squirrels in that tree. Shamus was in a puppy quandary -- which to bark at first?

Reading Before the Internet

Getting a review copy of Martha Wells' new book in literal seconds made me think about the world previous to the internet, when probably I wouldn't even have found out Wells had a new Murderbot book coming out until I stumbled across it in the New Fiction section of my library branch.

That's if my library happened to buy the book. Not always a given.

Back before the internet, if the library didn't have a book, I didn't have any way to find that book. Often I didn't even know that book existed. I do remember looking at the front of books I liked, where there was often a list of other books written by that author. Then I could (1) fill out interlibrary loan books and sometimes the library would find me a copy or (2) hunt used bookstores, hoping to run across a book or (3) go to the Walden's in the mall. This was after the Walden's bookstore opened in the mall, when I was about thirteen, I think. And Walden's didn't usually have the book anyway.

There were no bookstores anywhere within my reach before I was old enough to ride busses on my own (again, around 13). Drugstores had a section with paperback novels, as did the 7-11 about a mile from my house, and I would sometimes get books there. But mainly I got books from the library and from used bookstores.

When I was in graduate school, I ran across a catalogue for a company that sold books through the mail. I can't remember the name of the company now, and usually the books weren't the kind I wanted to read, but I do remember the delight with which I greeted this catalogue every month.

Amazon began selling books in 1998, the internet tells me. That sounds about right. I didn't really become internet savvy until around 2000, but one of the first things I hooked into was online bookstores. One of these was Alibris, I think. I don't think I started buying books from Amazon for another couple years. 

I was still haunting used bookstores and relying on my local public library at that point. We were in Charlotte, NC, which has an amazing public library. And they would buy any book I asked them to. Our local library here will do that too, or at least so far they have.

There were also more bookstores in Charlotte I could get to, since I could drive. Charlotte had a lot of bookstores. Here, there's only one, and it's a Barnes & Noble, which usually doesn't have any books I want to read, though I do get my magazines there.

I still rely on my public library for a lot of the books I read. But now if I want a book and I know it exists, I can usually get it -- from Amazon, in a few seconds if I'm okay with reading an e-copy; from Thrift Books or other sites in a few days or weeks if I want a hard copy. 

There is also a great used bookstore here, the Dickson Street Bookshop, which I bought tons of books from when I was in graduate school and still visit sometimes.

In whatever ways the future has disappointed me (waves at everything happening in the country), thirteen year old me would have loved this aspect of 2025. No flying cars, meh, okay. But the books I can have!

Not to mention phones and tablets. Honestly I'd rather have these than flying cars.

Wooooo!

I scored a review copy of Martha Wells' new Murderbot book, Platform Decay. WOOOO!

That's my Friday night sorted.

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Support my artist son! Support an independent artist! Support a trans artist!

Beautiful and disturbing horror comic about a pregnant trans man living with an abusive wife and a ghost.

It's available on Ko-Fi and domestic shipping is free.

Other work available on the same page, including stickers and mini-comics. Get'em while they're hot!

Apropos of Nothing

This morning I was remembering a period of about nine or ten months in my 20s when, as a new feminist, I was determined to stop being "nice" and deferential. I quit laughing at things men said, for example. And I didn't smile as a reflex, just because I was a woman and my face was in public. And I started arguing. I did not stay quiet when I thought people were wrong. 

But also, I would take a stand and hold that position, refusing to give in even when I knew I was wrong.

I must have been so insufferable.

Sorry, everyone who knew me then.

But How To Retire?

Over on Reddit, someone asked an apparently sincere question: "If I don't start drawing my social security until I'm 70, how can I retire at 65?"

The longer question was that this person was seeing other people retire at 65 and did not understand how they were doing it.

I can't believe that level of cluelessness is actual. But maybe this person was like 20? Who knows.

The replies were all like, well, when we were in our 30s we didn't buy boats or jetskis or immense houses, we didn't spend a month in France, we put our excess money in the stockmarket and....

The notion that people exist in America who do not have "excess" money appeared nowhere in the discussion. I mean, I was making a middle-class salary (sort of) and there were many (many, many) months when we barely made it to payday. When the car broke down or someone got seriously ill, we had to put that on credit cards. "Just don't buy it if you can't afford it" did not apply.

I was only able to retire at 65 because I inherited my father's money. If I had to depend on social security, I would never have been able to retire. Never. My SS check is just a little over two thousand a month and if I had retired at 70 it would have been a little under 3000 a month. Try living on that.

I do have TIAA money, which has had from three to five percent of my salary per month added to it since I was a baby professor back in 1995. (There was frequently an option to increase that amount, sometimes by as much as five percent more, but we could never afford to do without those $$$.) TIAA pays out another couple thousand a month. We could have scraped by on that, maybe. 

But we couldn't have afforded six hundred a month for Medicare Part B, D, and G on four thousand dollars a month, and frankly we're only doing as well as we are right now because (due to my father's money) I can afford to buy those. If we had to depend on Medicare A (the only one the government pays for) we'd be literally thousands of dollars in debt right now.

If you're depending solely on your social security, you can't retire. Period.