Storybundle!

Good news! You can get so many books!

This is called a Storybundle. If you're not familiar with the practice, you pay what you want and get books. If you pay at least $15, you'll get eleven books, including mine!

These are all new books, published within the last three or four years, and all by writers like me, so you'll be helping to support new writers.

More information here.

Pandemic Fiction

Among all the other books I've been reading over the past weeks, I've also been reading and re-reading heaps of pandemic novels. This appalls the kid -- why would I want to read about what I can watch happening in real time?

I can't say why, but I find it comforting.

In case you do as well, here are some titles featuring pandemics:

Naomi Kritzer, "So Much Cooking"

(Here's the essay Kritzer recently wrote, about seeing your story come true)

Connie Willis, The Doomsday Book

Meg Elison, The Book of the Unnamed Midwife

Mike Conner, Archangel

Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

Cecelia Holland, The Lords of Vaumartin

Geraldine Brooks, Year of Wonders 

Laura Kasischke, In a Perfect World

Stephen King, The Stand

Sarah Pinsker, A Song for a New Day

Daniel DeFoe, Journal of the Plague Year

George Stewart, The Earth Abides

Pat Frank, Alas, Babylon (Not a pandemic, but hits the same buttons for me)

Frank Herbert, The White Plague

Virginia Bergin, Who Runs the World?

Joanna Russ, The Female Man (Plague occurred eight centuries earlier)

Also worth reading

Best-Selling Books

I wrote about book lists for 2018 here; but here's yet another. This one is for the books that sold the most copies in 2018.

You won't be surprised to find that a hefty number have to do with how to lose weight or how to eat some specific sort of food which will magically make you a better person. I think many people are replacing religion with food cults. Which, okay, I guess. Better an obsession with your diet than an obsession with heresy.

I've read only a few of these books, so I can't speak to whether this list has anything to do with quality.  I'm dubious that we can use capitalism to decide what a good book is, however. And I will say that the books I've read from the list weren't anything special.

What I'm Reading in 2018 (so far)

Willa Cather, Song of the Lark, O Pioneers, My Antonia, The Professor's House

What has prompted me to begin reading the entire works of Willa Cather, I cannot tell you. I started with Song of the Lark, and have been moving steadily through them since. Death Comes for the Archbishop is next.

Right now I am ambivalent about Cather. She's a wonderful writer, line by line. There's always a spot, ten or twenty pages into one of her books, when I think to myself, Wow. Some line, or some scene, just knocks me over.

On the other hand, in every book I've read so far, she just can't stick the ending. About a fifth of the way from the end of each book -- every time -- she takes a bizarre wrong turn, and chases it to its end, and then the book just quits. In The Professor's House, for instance, she creates an intricate world that deals with a history professor and his two daughters and their husbands. The oldest daughter was engaged to one of his students, a brilliant young man who died in the First World War. He left the daughter control of his research, and her new husband develops it and makes a ton of money from it. Frustrations and conflict abound, due to the wealth of the oldest daughter and the relative poverty of the second. The professor is not much help. He's also badly matched in his marriage -- he's a scholar, she's a flirty hausfrau.

Books Done!

I have sorted and shelved all* the books!

Say WAH HOO for me!




*and by "all" I mean all except the books in Dr. Skull's office. Those are his problem.

Sorting Books

Still sorting and alphabetizing books. I made it through the J's today.

You would not believe how tiring this is. I mean, most books can't weight more than half a pound, right? And I'm only working at this a few hours a day. But at the end of the day I'm aching like I've been bailing hay or digging ditches.

Also, books are very dusty.

Also, we have so much poetry. You'd think one of us was married to a poet or something.

Books I Am Weary of Reading

This article, by Rebecca Solnit, excellent in itself, reminded me of the ennui, not to say disgust, I've been feeling in bookstores and the local public library lately, taking books off the shelf, reading their flyleaf, reading a few pages of them, and then putting them back with a sigh.

I am reminded of a brief period in the late 1990s, I think it was, though I might have that date wrong, when it seemed like every single book being published was about some young (white) guy's experience in Africa. This was just after the movie Out of Africa hit it big, as I recall.

What If We All Read The Same Book?

My university, like many universities, has a program wherein all the Comp II students (in theory, at least) read the same book.

There's a committee that gets together every year.  The English professors can submit suggestions to this committee about what the book ought to be.  The committee looks at the suggestions, and then chooses a single book for all the Comp II students to read.

Teaching Utopian / Dystopian Lit

Right now in my Popular Lit: Utopian / Dystopian Lit class, I have the class considering a trio of texts.

We are just finishing up reading Robert Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, while at the same time we are watching John Carpenter's Escape From New York.  Then, after Labor Day, we will read Joanna Russ's The Female Man.


Robert Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966)

If you are not familiar with Heinlein's classic SF work, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a Utopian novel set in a prison colony.  (There's a McGuffin plot about a Revolution, which is almost incidental.) Heinlein posits that if we transport a heap of prisoners, many of them political, but some of them actually criminal, to a prison world from which they have no escape, and dump them with no laws and no social controls except those they make themselves, what will evolve will be an anarchist Utopia.

Reading and Writing

I'm having, on the whole, a bad week -- mainly work-related crap I can't blog about, but its very wearing stuff that makes me want to sell all my stock in humanity short. I mean, really. If this is what we're like, why bother? It's just disheartening and exhausting and I hate feeling disgusted by people in this fashion. I'd rather read Chaucer, who demonstrates the other end of the spectrum. (Not his characters, gah, no. Chaucer himself demonstrates it!)

But! For every human character who makes me want to condemn the lot of us to extinction, because really, what is the point if this is what we're like -- there is Chaucer; and there is George Eliot and Eleanor Arnason; and there is Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, who I am reading now, and her latest book, Mothers and Others, is just brilliant.

Of course, Hrdy always is brilliant -- I started reading her with Mother Nature, a look at infanticide, among other things (I'm really selling it short) and have since read everything by her I could get my hands on.

Mothers and Others is an examination of how humans became co-operative -- as Hrdy argues we are (rather than competitive, as most anthropology textbooks claim we are). Hrdy argues that it is the enormous expense of raising (provisioning and protecting) a human child from birth to adulthood that caused humans to evolve into co-operative creatures. We needed alloparents to survive as a species, more or less. (Translation: it did take a village.)

Not only is this an excellent book, well-written, supported, and researched, it explains why what is happening at my university is depressing me so much. Well, rats.

Coolness!

Via Crooked Timber, I find this site:

The International Digital Children's Library.

Basically, the site lets you link to online texts of children's books from all over the planet. Seriously, you spin a graphic globe, point and click New Zealand, say, and are presented with dozens of picture books and children's novels from New Zealand which you can read on your PC or your iPad, from all different eras. I'm having so much fun.

Not all of them are in English, but plenty are; and even among those that aren't, many have been translated, and others are picture books.

We're living in the future!

No Grils ALlowed

Over on Fansci, Barbara links us to this charmingly portentuous bit of work, published (oh where else) in the NYTimes.

Robert Lipsyte, who apparently writes books for boys about boy-stuff like football, is of the opinion that literature is being ruined by (you guessed it) the infiltration of girls.

See, back in the good old days, when those rotten girls kept off his lawn, I guess, it was men who wrote the books: men like Hemingway and Steinbeck.

And when YA fiction got invented, well. Men were still writing it: Paul Zindel, Robert Cormier, John Donovan. If an occasional girl did slip it, she had the decency to pretend she was a man: S. E. Hinton, M. E. Kerr. And she wrote about men, and about manly manly things.

Now! All these "young female novelists fresh from MFA programs" are writing books with "overwhelmingly female" imprints! (Whatever that means. Mr. Lipsyte is a writer, but half the time I can't tell what he's talking about, except that he doesn't like girls. That comes across clearly. For instance, he claims all the books he loves from those "good old days" which are entirely about "men," written by "men" about "male" problems are "not gender specific." However, books being written today, by "young female novelists" which contain girl characters -- not even entirely girls, mind you, they just have girls in them -- are "simplistic" girl's books.)

Lipsyte seems to believe it is the fault of the women and the girls that boys do not read; or, more specifically, that girls read more.

He reminds me of the conservative thinkers who are all in a knot because more women are enrolled at and graduating from universities now, and doing better at those universities, than are their male counterparts; and more young women are doing better at academics in high schools as well lately too. This, too, is the fault of women, I will have you know. (Or specifically, feminists!) We have, nefariously, corrupted the academic process...somehow...so that boys can't win anymore.

I suggest to you, rather, the fault lies elsewhere -- perhaps with the culture itself? The culture that tells boys (and girls, but to a lesser extent) that reading is a stupid activity, a sissy activity, not something a Real Man would waste his time on?

A culture that says reading isn't as important as video games and football and American Idol?

A culture that does not, in fact, seek out, pay, and publish decent writers or their books? So that it is only crap writers of either gender who end up in the bookstores? (No, I'm not entirely serious with this last one -- but yes, 98% of what is ending up on the shelves these days, you gotta wonder what they're thinking at the big publishing houses.)

A culture that thinks teaching students to score well on a ridiculous standardized test is much more important than teaching them to love books?

Students reach my freshman classroom never having read an entire book through in their entire academic career: in their entire life. That's got nothing to do with "young female novelists from MFA programs," Mr. Lipsyte. It's got to do with misplaced priorities in American culture.

Or maybe it just is American culture. Sports, guns, God, and NASCAR, yeah? What do books have to do with America, really?

Weekends

We had a big party yesterday, saying goodbye to one of our friends / ex-students who is going off to Minnesota to an MFA program. Now it is raining (again!) and I am working on editing stories.

And my child has an ear infection.

Now you may think this is no big deal. What kid does not have an ear infection from time to time?

Well, mine. That's what kid does not.

She has hardly ever been ill, per se, in her life. Not that she hasn't been sick -- from age seven to about ten she was sickly, as the 19th century used the term. Failure to thrive, as biologists might call it. Once we determined she was allergic to something about corn syrup -- which this is as far as we ever got, thanks to my useless clinic and even more useless health insurance, which did about thirty thousand dollars worth of tests while discovering nothing at all -- but once we, by which I mean I, took her off all foods containing corn syrup* her symptoms disappeared and she began to thrive at last.

Where was I? Sorry. I'm still miffed about the corn syrup issue. They didn't even test for allergies. Gah.

Okay. So except for that, she's hardly ever been sick. Bronchitis when she was two. The flu when she was six. Croup at eight. A stomach virus at eleven. I can literally count the number of times.

The effect of this is, whenever she does get sick, it's full mode panic on her part. A fever, to her, literally means she's going to die. "What's wrong with me?" she cries. "Does any terminal illness start with an ear ache?"

"It's an ear infection," I said. "We'll go to the clinic tomorrow."

"Am I going to die?"

"You're going to take some Tylenol."

"And then I'll die?"

"And then you'll go lie down. Ai."

I'm not even sure it's an ear infection, frankly. I think it might just be the weather. Another big front is coming through, and my bones feel like someone's been hitting me with sticks all night anyway.

Meanwhile! I'm reading a book Dr. Skull brought home, Earth Abides, written in 1947. Sort of a mid-century The Stand. Only without the religious whackatude. A super-measles wipes out 99.99% of the population, and...absolutely nothing happens. At least so far. I'm about halfway through the book. It's very well written. And historically interesting. Not sure it's any good yet. But it is making me feel very feverish.


*It was the blogosphere that helped me diagnosis her! When the useless clinic was doing no good at all, and she had lost 12 pounds (at nine years old) and had chronic stomach pain, and would not eat anything, and could barely move around most of the time -- she spent all day sitting in one chair in our house -- I put out a blag, even before blags existed, and got all sorts of excellent suggestions, and that was one of them, that she might be allergic to corn syrup. We had already taken her off wheat and red dye, so taking her off corn syrup was, frankly, a snap.

Thinking About the Revolution

I've read two books in the past two days, Mote in God's Eye, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, and Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett.


Both were cracking good reads, by which I mean they kept me up until late at night, turning pages. Both I had read before -- Mote, not since I was a kid, Night Watch last year sometime, when I first discovered Pratchett. Night Watch is much more to my taste politically. Mote is somewhat to the right of my politics.


But as I lay in bed last night (or rather, very early this morning, given that I am suffering from the worst insomnia in my adult life, and am hitting the pillow somewhere around five a.m. these days) considering the differences between the two texts, and why one of them annoyed me so much, while the other appealed to me so strongly, well, it really was not just that one is more leftist and the other is hard right military POV.

Because it's not -- Pratchett has a bit of the practical military POV mixed in with his populist-Leftism, and I'm not bothered by that.


And clearly I am bothered deeply by Niven & Pournelle's ridiculous ideas of a women's place in the world -- and while what they do with the alien Moties sex-change and so on is interesting, it does nothing to negate their insistence that "real" people (by which they mean European-ancestry White Guys) will keep their women at home after marriage, doing the child-raising.



No, here is what bothers me most about the Niven & Pournelle worldview: its insistence that the correct attitude of the citizen toward his leaders is respectful trust. (I do choose that pronoun carefully. Only men are actually people in N&P's world, despite his tossing in of a token woman character.) It is assumed -- and then demonstrated -- in the N&P world that those in command, those who are born to command, and given command, know what they are doing, and having taken command, will do the right thing.


It is assumed, and then demonstrated in the text, that those who object to the actions of leaders -- rebels, outies -- are bad people, who deserve to die, who deserve whatever punishment, up to having their entire planet reduced to radioactive glass, is visited upon them: they deserve this simply for having questioned authority.


Since the story is told from the point of view of one of those in authority, Rod (yes, this is his name, nothing phallic here, move along) Blaine, who is written as an earnest hero type who works very hard to get everything right and worries about getting everything right, the reader is reassured that those in authority are Really Good Guys who Really Want To DO Right by those in their purview.


We're not meant to look at the way Sally (his wife) is stripped of her power ("Rod won't let me think about the Institute after the wedding.") or how everyone with any power is a European white guy or how the decisions are made by fiat behind the scenes by the few white guys with all the power -- oh yes, benevolently, and we are TOLD these guys know best, and since those guys have been written as so noble and brave and intelligent, not like the wicked outies, well, it must be true, yes?


This is the worldview of the conservative, who believes -- I guess -- that, so long as he is the right man, the big man in charge can be trusted; and that everyone in the empire will be happy serfs who will be happy to serve, so long as the big man tells them what to do, except for a few idiots, who can be happily shot, or shot down with cool logic. (One scene that made me dizzy with disbelief early in the book was when the parliament -- I guess it was parliament -- met on New Scotland, and everyone in the parliament "pledges allegiance" to a hologram of the emperor, and then bows to it. I guess N&P think this is realistic. I guess they think grown-up people would actually do this. And, since I can see Sarah Palin, Rick Santorum, and her ilk actually doing it, I suppose they aren't exactly wrong.)


Contrast this with Pratchett's worldview in Night Watch, which strikes me as much more realistic and adult.


For one thing, the leaders are mostly idiots, or crazy. (Which, watching our own Congress, Q.E.D.) The few who actually know what they are doing and actually intend to do what is best for the land under their purview know better than to expect the people to follow them from blind loyalty. Most people, as Pratchett well knows, are mostly interested mainly in their own lives and what is going to affect them. Who has time for more that that, mostly? Maybe five or six percent of us, tops. And even then, only part time.

"Do the job that is put before you," Sam Vimes says in Night Watch: that's what most of us do, and it's what Vimes, who is one of Pratchett's best leaders, and best heroes, mostly does. Vetinari, Pratchett's other best leader, and other best hero, though a more ambiguous one, also appears in this book, at the very beginning of his career. Vetinari is Practchett's demonstration for why we should and should not trust our leaders -- he is a tyrant, the all-powerful, brilliant, wily ruler of Ankh-Morpork, not exactly benevolent, though he may well have, ultimately, benevolent ends.


Still, Sam Vimes does not trust him; Sam Vimes is always wary of him, and always acts to keep him in check. Sam Vimes, at one point, arrests him, because no one should be above the law. In this book, Night Watch, when the leaders of the city are entirely powerful, Sam Vimes (under the name John Keel) leads a revolution: moving the barriacades, bit by bit, so that, daily, more of the city is under control of the law, and less and less is under the control of whim and tyranny.


Niven and Pournelle's worldview, it came to me, as I was lying sleepless last night -- that is exactly what they want. When you want the government to be under the control of some powerful man who you are forced to trust to be benevolent and good, what you are trusting in is whim and tyranny. Sam Vimes/Terry Pratchett's worldview -- where we do not trust, but hedge the rulers around with laws and rules, and then, warily, warily, keep the rulers at heel with those laws and rules -- that worldview puts the government under our control. Perhaps it means the government is less able to act; it also means the government is less able to put its boot on our throats.

I suppose it all depends on what you want from a government: death to the rebels, or people who are free to quarrel in the streets if they damn well feel like it.

And On A Much Lighter Note!

Strange Horizons is looking for a few good women to do reviews!

See here.

FanSci Updates!

New post by me!

Go read!

New Blog!

Hey look over there!

What's that?

It's a new blog!  FanSci!  Go see!

(Why, yes, I am one the bloggers!  Also Marilou Goodwin and Barbara Ann Wright, fellow writers and travelers.  Enjoy!)

Book Review: Coal: A Human History, and More!

So for my Hanukkah present I got an iPad.

This is totally inappropriate for two reasons.  (1) I am not 10 years old, and Hanukkah presents are for children and (2) Hanukkah presents are supposed to be tiny things, like, well, a book, or a box of chocolates.

But Herr Dr. Delagar, that is how he rolls, and he knew I wanted an iPad (I have been visiting the iPads at BestBuy for the past six months), so voila!

I love it.  How much do I love it?

I don't think I can go back to reading books the other way.

And you know me, I love books.  If you had asked me two years ago whether I would give up physical books, HA!  I would have laughed at you, HA!

But I have now spent -- what? fifteen days?  Reading books this way?  HA!  I am never going back to reading books on paper.

When I do have to -- as occasionally I do, because not all books can be accessed via iBooks or Kindle (the iPad comes with a free Kindle app!  How cool is that???) -- it's just so dragggy!

Books on paper have to be held open!  Their pages shut if you aren't keeping them braced EVERY MINUTE!  You can lose your place in them!  With books on paper, if you don't know a reference, like what a "negus" is, or where Catalina Island is, and you don't happen to be right next to a computer or dictionary, why, you just have to STAY IGNORANT!

With the iPad?  You tap the page, and two seconds later, you're in a dictionary or on Wikipedia, or on the net, and you know!

Also!  You can take notes on the text, type them right in.  You can sort of do that with a paper book, but you have to write it in the margin, and maybe there is room and maybe there is not, and it's your awful handwriting, and if you change your mind about the note you can only erase so much.

Also!  All my books can go with me everywhere!  In one tiny little skinny folder.  

(Also -- and this is the dangerous part, I admit -- with the iPad, if you want a book?  You tap STORE, you look the book up, you tap BUY BOOK, and TWO SECONDS LATER, you have the book.)

Best Hanukkah present ever.

I'm reading on it, at present, London Labour and the London Poor, a couple of Terry Pratchett novels, a book of short stories by John Kessel, and another by Robin McKinley; I just finished reading Coal: a Human History, which I highly recommend.

Written by Barbara Freese, Coal travels through history, from the first use of coal, as jewelry, interestingly enough, to our modern era, when coal was instrumental in buying George W. his presidency, on through what effect coal is having in staving off any effective action against global climate change.  It's a relatively short book, packed with detail, and very readable.  Kept me up, engaged, more than one night until two or three in the morning.

Highly recommended, even for those who aren't, like me, in love with rocks.

Writing Work for Those Who Do Reviews

Bart Lieb of Crossed Genres needs you!

If you write genre book reviews, that is.

I’m looking for a few people who have experience writing reviews for genre fiction. This is for a new project that’s being developed. Review experience with short or long fiction is welcome.

It's for a new project he's at work on.  Go here for full details.

Uneasiness With Right-Wing Writers

The kid has been re-reading Jack London again.

Specifically, Call of the Wild and White Fang.

Call of the Wild has been one of her favorites since she stumbled upon it in her school library when she was six; White Fang she scarfed up a few years later.  Just a year ago, she located a fat book at the public library which had, along with Call of the Wild, about fifteen short stories by Jack London.

Well, you know, I'm not opposed to this, exactly.  I mean, it's not like she's reading Atlas Shrugged, is it?  Or Orson Scott Card?  How much harm can a little violence porn/Social Darwinism actually do?  I read them when I was a kid and I'm (mostly) okay...

When she was six I said nothing.

When she was ten, she had to do a report on an author for school.  She had been re-reading Call of Wild at that point too, and beginning to notice London wasn't exactly accurate on wolf or dog behavior.  WTF, she asked, though not exactly in that language.  I explained a bit about what London was up to.  I explained a bit about Social Darwinism.  Racism, I said.  Politics of the time he lived in, I explained.  Eugenics movement, I explained.  Not the brightest man who ever walked the earth, I explained, although clearly....

Moo, she said, which has evolved to be our code word for when she has had enough of this particular lecture, Professor Mama, please.

So when it came time to do a report on some author, I ever so casually suggested, hey, why not do Jack London?  Then I fiendishly found a couple of excellent (leftist, or as leftist as were available in Pork Smith, Arkansas) kid's biographies for her.

Then I did my best to drop hints while she was writing the report: "Did you read this part in the book?" I would ask.  "Did you see this section?  What do you think this means?"

So she's reading the books and stories again.  And she's asking me questions.  

One of the questions she's asked twice now:  "Is it okay for me to read Jack London even though he believes racist things?  Even though he's writing about eugenics and Social Darwinism?"

"Yeah," I tell her.  "Yeah, you can read him.  You should read him, in fact.  You need to know what he's saying.  But you shouldn't forget what he's trying to do to you.  And you shouldn't forget he's wrong."

After a moment, she says, "He's wrong about wolves.  That part really bothers me.  Wolves don't act that way."

"Well, what does that tell you?  If he'll misrepresent those facts, what does that mean?"

"Maybe he thought that was how wolves acted.  Maybe they didn't know any better back then."

"Maybe.  He misrepresents how dogs act too, though, you said.  Right?"

She frowns.

"Which he's doing to make his points about Social Darwinism and Eugenics and which race is superior and how breeding between the races is doomed.  He's ignoring facts to score his points," I said.  "That's what it should tell you.  So, well.  You can read the books because they're fun.  Just don't forget they're also lies."

Which, well, that's the harm of all porn, I guess: it's based on lies, in order to promulgate some whacked theory, some alternate reality its creator wants to exist.  And if he can get enough people to believe it with him -- as the Social Darwinist/Eugenics people did for awhile, as these Teabaggers are doing now -- well, you've got trouble.