July 2009

Now I live somewhere else, officially.

We turned in our keys at the old place.  It was quite a letdown after so many days of moving, but the lady in the office did wish us good luck.  (We needed it, too, to pack everything in the car.)

Since I won’t finish the book I’m reading before the end of the day – not even if I sat down and did nothing but read until midnight- I’ll submit my Stuff I’ve Been Reading list for July 2009.

• Things I’ve Been Silent About by Azar Nafisi
• Embers by Sandor Marai
• St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell
• The Winter’s Tale by William Shakespeare
• Against a Dark Background by Iain M. Banks
• The Name of the Rose (parts 1-4) by Umberto Eco
• The Soul Thief by Charles Baxter
• The Virtues of War by Steven Pressfield
• Crown Duel by Sherwood Smith
• Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
• Rereadings edited by Anne Fadiman
• Firebirds edited by Sharyn November
• Mairelon the Magician by Patricia C. Wrede

I consider this month light on reading, especially since Good Omens was read aloud in the car, three other books were rereads, three were either essay or story collections, one was a Shakespeare play, and The Name of the Rose was not entirely completed (I am reading it on a schedule with Chera). As an excuse, I would like to offer my being out of state for one week and moving for another.

Unfortunately, nothing I read that was new was stellar: the Banks was not a Culture novel, Russell and Baxter were not quite as I expected for different reasons, and for me collections often lack the emotional scope of a novel.  With classes coming up, my gratuitious science fiction and fantasy (re)readings must come to an end.  At least I got to say “until later” to Crowley and Aziraphale, Meliara and Shevraeth, Kim and Mairelon.

To compensate for the fact that I’m beginning August with nonfiction (With Lawrence in Arabia by Lowell Thomas), I’m going to be juggling three writing projects that are distinctly not real: an outline of a serious science fiction novel, a chapter in a collaborative YA fantasy novel, and… GIZMO.

Tea

The vital box of kitchen things – the one with plates and my perfect-cup-of-tea hot water dispenser – is still at our old apartment, so to make tea this morning, I actually had to boil water.  Tea snobs say that you should pour the water just as it begins to boil (although I think this might be more important for loose leaf tea rather than tea that comes in bags): naturally, I messed it up.

I put the water on the stove on High, turn away for a maximum of four and a half seconds to figure out the buttons on the new microwave, and when I turn back, you guessed it, I have a rolling boil.  Which has prevented me from drinking any tea yet, because I’ve completely reformed from drinking tea too hot.

But our church is at least an extra twenty minutes away now, and I stayed in bed a whole five minutes after my alarm went off, and I still have to blow-dry my hair.

So it comes down to the eternal question: dry hair or empty cup?

Sigh. Life is full of these character-defining questions.

…Empty cup.

Halfway

We’ve halfway moved!  For the next several days we will be ferrying our lives between the old apartment and the new apartment, which is tedious but cannot be avoided.

Somehow we have to buy more bookcases.

But now we have an honest-to-goodness library to put them in.

[I am reading Rereadings, essays by writers who revist books they loved, edited by Anne Fadiman.  It is group therapy for book addicts: clever and insightful, and almost as comforting as rereading old favorites.]

Jane Austen and God

I’m packing to move on Tuesday – the reality has finally set in – and I am not particularly looking forward to moving my thirty-two boxes of books down three flights of stairs and up three flights of stairs.  The occasion to pack, however, has provided me the opportunity to refamiliarize myself with my inventory, to get a sense, if you will, of my own tastes.

I estimate that between my husband and I we’ve got about 10 boxes of fiction, 3 boxes of mass market-sized series, 5 boxes of reference, 1 box of comics and graphic novels, 5 boxes of modern fiction and military history, 4 boxes of ancient history and philosophy, 1 box of Tolkien and Lewis, and assorted others, including the following:

“WRITING REF 2.” This box contains the second half of my collection of books about writing.  A couple of memoirs have sneaked in, C.S. Lewis and Anne Fadiman, and as soon as I unpack, I’m going to read Ray Bradbury’s Zen and the Art of Writing, which I’d completely forgotten I owned.

“QP SFF.” This box contains hardback and trade paperback books of science fiction and fantasy. Authors include Neil Gaiman (whose autograph is hanging above my desk: thanks, Sarah), Orson Scott Card, S.M. Stirling, and Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces, which I also have yet to read.

“UKL & BARD.” This box contains at least twenty books written by Ursula K. Le Guin, including some of her nonfiction, such as The Language of the Night.  It also contains my desk copies of the Shakespeare class that I will be assisting this fall.  I recently read “The Winter’s Tale” for the first time, and enjoyed it very much.

“J.A. & GOD.” This box contains all of my Jane Austen, about whom I wrote my undergraduate thesis, as well as about five Bibles (NIV, KJV, NASB, NLT Bible in 90 Days, etc.).  Did I actually read the Bible in ninety days?  Of course not.  If I recall aright, I caved in Numbers.  I have, however, read Emma at least six times.

And there, folks, is a fair assessment of my interests and values.  Creative writing, science fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and God.

Meh

I haven’t posted.

Neither do I feel like it.

Vague stirrings of guilt caused me to click on ‘New Post.’

…And this is what you get.

Meh.

St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

I came across the author Karen Russell in Best American Short Stories 2007.  When I realized that St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves was the title story of a collection, I made a point to pick it up.  The “Wolves” story is a first-person narrative about an adolescent without parental guidance encountering some conflict causing emotional change towards maturity.  It was a very good story.

The other nine stories of the collection, however, are about nearly the same thing.  The two third-person stories were better, I think, because one of them was from the perspective of an elderly amputee and wasn’t a coming-of-age story, and the other alternated between two perspective characters (one of them an adolescent without parental guidance…).  I suppose props (or kudos or points or whatever) go to the Best American editors for picking out the best story.  Not that the others were bad, I hasten to repeat, but they were the same kind of story in the way that each story in Secrets of a Fire King by Kim Edwards was the same story: something lost and something found.  Karen Russell’s theme is strongly ambiguous adulthood.  She just happens to deliver it best in “Wolves.”

If Russell publishes more short stories, I may read them in periodicals or anthologies; if she publishes a novel, I will be quite excited.  So we’ll see.

7.0 / 10.0.

Stuff I’ve Been Reading: June

Sorry it’s late, but I’m back home now…

Books Bought or Obtained

• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard
• Gifts by Ursula K. Le Guin
• Voices by same
• Powers by same
• Water Witch by Connie Willis and Cynthia Felice
• Serenity: Those Left Behind by Joss Whedon
• Serenity: Better Days by same
• Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
• Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link
• Against a Dark Background by Iain M. Banks
• Things I’ve Been Silent About by Azar Nafisi

Books Read or Reread

• The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
• Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
• Gifts by Ursula K. Le Guin
• Voices by same
• Powers by same
• Water Witch by Connie Willis and Cynthia Felice
• Matter by Iain M. Banks
• Serenity: Those Left Behind by Joss Whedon
• Serenity: Better Days by same
• The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon
• Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
• Longitude by Dava Sobel
• A Slight Trick of the Mind by Mitch Cullin

I read an unprecedented 72% of the books that I bought this month (eight out of eleven; I count Nafisi’s book because I’ve fininshed it too, though not, technically, in June).  A perhaps unsurprising 30% of my reading this month was Ursula K. Le Guin.  I also count three rereads, two graphic novels, and one nonfiction book, a little out of my norm.  The obscene amount of SFF you see, however, is because of my impending Graduate School Reading List: I will read just exactly what I want to all the way up until the moment that I have to read what I have to.