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.

What I'm Reading

The weather continues cold here, and now today it's drizzling and foggy as well. If it were just a bit colder, we'd have snow, which would be lovely. Instead, the temperature hovers around the 35/40 degree mark, so that we're just miserable.

I've been drinking a lot of coffee, writing a little, and reading a lot.

What I'm Reading Now

I'm working hard on the edits for my new novel (tentatively titled Fault Lines), so I'm getting less reading done than I was in the early months of the Trump Regime.

But still! Here's what I've read lately:

Josephine Tey, Daughter of Time

Organizing our books turned up a number of books I hadn't read in years. This is one of them.

What I'm Reading Now

Even though we're in the thick of the semester now, bearing down on midterm, I am still swallowing books whole. I think this is my way of dealing with the horrors of the Trump regime. Literary Xanax.

Anyway! Here's some of what I've gobbled over the past month:

Laurie Frankel, This Is How It Always Is

I forget how I found this book -- maybe the NYTimes recommended list? However I found it, the rec was right. This one's excellent. Told from the point of view of the mother of five children who is also a doctor of emergency medicine when we first meet her, the writing here is great, and the characters, including of all five children, AND their friends, so well developed they all become real to us. Wonderful use of setting, also -- we move from Wisconsin to San Francisco to Thailand in the course of the novel, and Frankel gives us each place perfectly.

What's it about? Yeah, that's another reason to love it. Rosie and Penn have five sons -- except their youngest son, Claude, begins telling them when he's three that he's a girl. (Penn is a stay-at-home dad and a writer, by the way, though he's not the one writing this book.) The novel deals with their struggle to understand what to do -- and not like that, they always try to do the right thing -- and to deal with the fallout of their decisions. This is a great book, and not just about having a trans kid. It's a great book about being human.

The Kid's Comic Updates!

The kid's new comic updated!

Early reviews: The best online comic with only four pages so far, one reviewer states.

I couldn't agree more.

Read Fragile here.

The Roosevelts: A Review

I'm probably the last person in America to watch The Roosevelts, Ken Burns' documentary about the interwoven lives of Theodore, Franklin, and Eleanor Roosevelt. I stumbled across it the other day, and have been binge-watching since (quite a task since it's a seven episode series, with every episode being almost two hours long).

I don't know as much about this period of history -- the very early years of the 20th century -- as I do about other eras.  This is partly because in Louisiana, where I was schooled, history classes always stopped at the Civil War; and partly because when I went to the university (at least the university I went to) you could take either US or World History, and I went for World.

Review: Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman

tl;dr: Oh, Harper Lee, No.

As I started out reading this book, I had some hope. The writing is lovely, and the early chapters are nice enough: It's the mid-1950s, sometime just after Brown v. Board of Education was handed down, and Jean Louise is coming home from New York to visit her daddy in Maycomb.

There's a train ride.  There's some trenchant and interesting commentary on the South and Maycomb and the difference between New York and the South and on one's ageing relatives. Some nice details about Atticus and Aunt Alexandria. This fella Hank, a new character, is introduced -- he's not part of To Kill a Mockingbird, but in the new history, he was always there, living across the street from Scout and Jem, and he was Jem's BFF, and Scout has always, sorta been in love with him. Lee does a good job of making him interesting enough that we see why Jean Louise might actually be drawn to marry him.

Numb3rs: A (preliminary) Review

I'm probably the last person on the planet to watch the TV show Numb3rs.

I just started watching it this past week, on Netflix, b/c I have been having my intermittent chronic insomnia and  needed something to watch late at night (like, two and three in the morning late) when I am simply unable to do actual work anymore.

Numb3rs is the perfect show for that.  It's smart enough to be interesting, and yet dumbed-down enough (the writers patiently over-explain everything for teh ijit American audience) that the exhausted brain can follow it.

Reading C.S. Lewis

So I'm reading C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity -- for my sins.

Naw, it's actually because my students were doing some group work, and I happened to have a copy handy in my office, which I hadn't read in years.  I was killing time, in other words.

I read the first few chapters while they worked, and he infuriated me all over again.

First, this bit, where he is explaining how we know that there is something beyond sense and reason that makes us act with justice toward one another:

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!

Hunger Games

(Cross-Posted on FanSci)

The kid and I went to see Hunger Games, finally.

It's far from a flawless piece of work -- not exactly brilliantly shot, and with some skids in the pacing. Nevertheless! Boy, did it make my revolutionary heart pound!

(MINOR SPOILERS.)

And it had some nice moments, too. The character of Haymitch was one of my favorites in the book; Suzanne Collins did a great job developing the drunk ex-winner/survivor-now-mentor of new tributes, and Woody Harrelson plays him well. The minute at the dinner table when he glances from Peeta to Katniss and realizes that this year he might have a chance of bringing a kid home alive is just so nice.

And when Katniss volunteers to take Prim's place, and her district raises its hands in salute to her -- how that sets up, so perfectly, her raising her hand in salute to those in District 11, whom she can't even see. Wow.

And the scene at the end with the crystal bowl full of berries. Deliciously evil.

I took my kid to see it, and she loved it, too (probably even more than I did ), though she had to hide under my arm for the very violent bits (and there are some very violent bits).

On the way home, she asked me, and here is why I like the movie so much, "What if that happens? What if our country starts doing that?"

"Seriously?" I asked her. "You know science fiction is mythic, right? Do I need to give you that rant again?"

"No," she said. "No, no, no, no, please don't."

A brief pause, as we drove.

"But seriously," I said.

"Mom."

"Mythic means it's not about the real world."

[Despite what this guy and FOXX news think.]

"Mythic means it's a metaphor which will help us think about the real world."

By this time my kid is sighing and slumping against the car window. But she is listening, too, because she's that kind of kid.

"That means Suzanne Collins is already telling us about the real world," I explain. "No, it's not going to be like Theseus and the King of Crete*. We've already got the hunger games, going on right now. What else is it, when my students have to join the military to get health care, or pay for college, or feed their kids? Sure, it's not last-man-standing, but it's their lives on the line anyway. What do you call it when people have to sell their futures to have any hope of a decent life? While Cheney and his friends make billions off the deal?"

"Only it's not on TV," she said dubiously.

"Right," I agreed. "They keep that part off TV now, the death part. They've gotten a little smarter since Viet Nam. Winter's Bone," I said. "That's the other movie Jennifer Lawrence was in. It makes very nearly the same point, in an entirely different way. Ree, her character in that, she's planning to join the Army. That's how she's going to keep her brother and sister fed. How they're going to stay alive. That's the choice we give our citizens these days. If you weren't lucky enough to be born among the 1%, what are your options? Sell drugs, starve slowly, join the military, or hope you can win the lottery**."

"So we need a revolution," she said, knowing how all my rants end.

I sighed, and slowed down before we got to the first of the speed traps which is how, apparently, Fort Smith is funding its police force these days. "So we need something to change," I agreed. "Let's hope it doesn't come to straight up revolution. No one really wants that."

"Not even you?"

"Not even me."

*Which, by the way? Everyone who says Collins is stealing from Running Man or Battle Royale? Shut up, because both of those stole it from Theseus and the Minotaur, who probably got it from some other guy, and look up archetypal time, will you?

**Sell a novel, sell a screenplay, invent an iPad, win Dancing with the Stars, whatever. How many people are going to do that, out of 400,000 Americans? 28?

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