What Are We Doing at the End of the World?

My kid is having a hard time doing school work because, as he puts it, the world is ending.

I can relate. I'm having a hard time finishing my stupid novel (I have literally one scene left to write and I cannot write it), though the good news, I guess, is that I'm well up on my academic work because I use that as a way to kill time while I'm not writing the stupid novel.

We're also cooking a lot here. I am hunting for the perfect hush puppy recipe, and meanwhile cooking all the old favorites -- tuna casserole, chicken enchiladas, pancakes, stir fry, bagels, banana pudding, Dutch babies... every now and then the kid will say remember X? Remember how you used to cook X? Could we have X?



So I make X.

If you haven't read Naomi Kritzer's "So Much Cooking," now is the perfect time. It's about a woman running a food blog during a pandemic. Both wonderful and apropos.

I'm also reading so much. The public library letting us do curb-side pickups is keeping me in books, at least so far. I just started Emily St. John Mandel's new book, The Glass Hotel, which would normally be a seven-day book but which, thanks to the quarantine, I can apparently keep indefinitely. (In actual fact, though the return date on all my books is "whenevs," I can only have 25 out at a time, so I have to bring some back to get new ones.)

Emily St. John Mandel wrote Station Eleven, an excellent book about a pandemic and the world after the pandemic. I should do a post strictly on pandemic books.

I'm also listening to podcasts, which I never did before. My main ones are NPR's Science Friday and the BBC's book club. I listen at night, while I'm too tired to do anything else, and do jigsaw puzzled at the same time.

Long walks with the dog and the kid help keep me sane. The parks here are still open, and everyone keeps their distance. Also sometimes I just walk the neighborhood, though we don't have sidewalks, which given how busy some of the streets are around here (even now) makes that less enjoyable than it might be.

Also I sleep very late, though not as late as the kid does.

Also it's almost Passover. Even though we won't be able to have our usual tableful of guests -- our favorite part of Passover -- we're still looking forward to it, and getting ready for it. Dr. Skull is making chicken soup for the matzo ball soup, and we're planning the menu -- chicken and asparagus so far, plus a KFP cake which Dr. Skull has promised he will make.

What are all y'all doing?

What I'm Reading Now

Naomi Kritzer, Catfishing on Catnet

I'll be honest, I'll read anything Naomi Kritzer writes at this point. But this is a wonderful book. It's (sort of) the further adventures of the AI in her story "Cat Pictures, Please," which won the Hugo for the best short story in 2016.

Here, the AI is (among other things) running an online group called Catnet, where our main character, Stephania, hangs out with her friends. Steph and her mother are fleeing from -- have been fleeing from -- Steph's father for most of Steph's life, and most of the novel's plot concerns that.

But what's wonderful here is the characterization and the world-building. Kritzer captures perfectly what today's teens are like, and what their lives are like, living 80% online and only 20% in meatspace as they do. She captures too their ability to understand and to empathize and adapt, and how that is connected to their online lives -- to the fact that they know and experience reality beyond their small meatspace lives. This is good stuff.

The AI is also charming. I loved the AI in the short story, and the AI is wonderful here too.

Also the book is compulsively readable. I've read it twice now and both times I literally could not stop -- I read it straight through, even though it meant staying up far too late both times. I'll be very surprised if this one doesn't win a Hugo for Kritzer as well.



Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

This is a wonderful book. Ann Patchett is, at least for me, a hit-or-miss writer. I've liked some of her books (Bel Canto, The Patron Saint of Liars) very much, and others (Taft, Commonwealth) not at all. So I very nearly didn't even take this one down from the shelf at the library.

But it has a very pretty cover, and so I did. And the pages, which I read standing there by the New Fiction shelves, were very good. So I checked it out, and it was just a delight. Every page was delicious. It's one of those books I want to buy multiple copies of and force people to read.

Plot: a brother and his older sister, growing up in a wealthy but dysfunctional family, are ejected from their wonderful house and from that family by their father's second wife upon the death of their father. Their anger at this warps the next 30 years of their life.

But the plot is secondary. The rich eye for detail and characters, the wonderful grasp of the world of Philadelphia, New York, and their suburbs from 1940 through the 1990s, and the way families love and damage one another -- all wrapped up in this delight of a book. You must read it. No, really. You must.


Joe Hill, Full Throttle

Joe Hill is Stephen King's son. I haven't been impressed by his previous work, but this collection of short stories is not bad. A few duds -- I didn't much like the one about the haunted carousel, or the one about the tall grass that's been made into a movie (and also has an entirely unnecessary incest vibe, not to mention fetal cannibalism). But there's a wonderful story, "You are Released," in here, and a couple other very good ones.

I'd give it a B+.


W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

I really liked Maugham's Cakes and Ale, which I discussed in my last set of What I'm Reading Now. So I requested this from the library. It's a big fat novel, which is usually my jam. The first half was pretty good, though it bore a certain similarity to bits of Cakes and Ale -- the main character was an orphaned boy raised by his aunt and uncle, a Vicar, in Blackstable in Kent, who grows up to be a doctor. The second half, though, after Philip meets Mildred is both unbelievable and boring.

Why would Philip fall in love with this women who is boring, stupid, ugly, and annoying? Why would he become obsessed with such a woman, to the extent that he destroys his life and livelihood? I know we're supposed to believe that his human passion overrules his intellect, but please. What about her has aroused his passion? Nothing about her seems at all attractive, he's not even having sex with her -- unless I missed it, he doesn't ever have sex with her -- and yet we're supposed to believe that he's so overwhelmed with love and I guess lust that he can't help destroying his life because of his passion for this entirely crap woman.

(a) I don't and (2) it makes for a very boring second half of the novel because I'm just not interested in watching Philip do stupid things for a stupid reason for 400 pages.

Don't waste your time.

Cat Pictures, Please

Update: Due to Tom Mays' withdrawal -- good for him, by the way! -- "Cat Pictures, Please" is now a Hugo Nominee.  Yay!

So yesterday we're driving to the bookstore, as we do, and Dr. Skull says to me, he says, "Hey, did you hear about that idiot that's trying to wreck the Hugos?"

Book Reviews: Naomi Kritzer

I guess this is actually an author review.

Author rave, my precious!

I discovered Naomi Kritzer entirely by happenstance.  I was killing time on Twitter, so I wouldn't actually have to write this scene in my horrible novel, which had been galling me raw all morning, and I came across someone (I have no idea now who) recommending her story in Clarksword.

This story: Cat Pictures Please.

If you haven't read it yet, go do so now.  I immediately fell deeply in love, not just with the story, but with Kritzer, and began hunting out everything by her I could find. Which -- spoilers -- is how I operate.

If it's how you operate as well, here's Naomi Kritzer's homepage to help you out.

What do I love about Kritzer's fiction?

A list!

(1) So many women protagonists.

(2) Such wonderful lucid writing.

(3) Such physical writing -- flavors, scents, details about landscapes and clothing and how the world feels.

(4) Social fucking justice.  Fuck yeah.

(5) And yet! Complex and complicated ideas.  Nothing is simple or simple-minded here.

(6) Animals.  I loved how the animals are characters, too.

(7) LGBT characters. Brown characters.  Multiple landscapes -- we have complex and complicated cities, we have complex and complicated environments, we have economic systems, we have different languages, we have scholars and working class and rulers and the understanding that the most informed person in a given household is not, in fact, the master, but the kitchen maid.

(9) Character who learn, and are allowed to learn, from their mistakes.  This is great.  This means we get characters who can be wrong, who can learn better and do better. I'm thinking of the trilogy (which I highly recommend) that starts with Freedom's Sisters, but it's true in other examples of Kritzer's works as well.

(10) Kritzer always starts with the ghost pigs.  Not a wasted word.

In summary, what are you waiting for?  Go and read!