January 2011 – Mostly About Books

January 2011 Pt. 2

Here’s the sequel to yesterday’s Stuff I’ve Been Reading. But I’m frustrated about it for two reasons: One, I can’t figure out how to make the numbering show nine through seventeen, and I don’t want to retype everything, and Two, when I copied and pasted from my Word document, WordPress retained the Times New Roman font, which it never does. So since I’m impatient and irritated because I have a sore throat and my brain is foggy on cold medicine, you get the wrong numbers and the wrong font. Sorry.

Something Rotten by Jasper Fforde. Thursday Next #4 is just as hilarious as ever, especially because it includes Hamlet and Friday, Thursday’s infant son. (9)
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon (50%). I was surprised by how little I could tolerate the stream of consciousness narration and inane dialogue, the strange conspiracy paranoia. (2)
Jingo by Terry Pratchett. Pratchett = Happiness. (10)
Omega: The Last Days of the World by Camille Flammarion. A former post discusses this early science fiction at greater length, but if you are looking for a book with exciting narrative, Flammarion will disappoint you. (4)
Old Filth by Jane Gardam. I found the original receipt in this book–it was on my list of longtime Unread Books–I’d owned it since October 2009. Fortunately, I had pretty good taste during that month, because Gardam’s contemplative novel about a retired lawyer was well-written and insightful. (7)
The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi. Sequel to Old Man’s War, this deals indirectly with the characters from the first book, but can stand on its own. (8) [Why has the font changed again! WordPress, you are not my friend right now.]
Shopgirl by Steve Martin. Don’t read this if you’re sad and lonely, because it’s a melancholy book under its guise of glamorous California living. (8)
Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin. A mammoth work of magical realism, this novel does not bother to explain everything that happens, but the beautiful prose will carry you along so well that you have hardly any time to stop to wonder how, for instance, the horse has begun to fly. (7)
The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells. For my science fiction class. Wells’s classic was a lot more comic than I expected. I intend to write about this book at greater length tomorrow. (6)

Most enjoyable book: The Broken Kingdoms by N. K. Jemisin

Longest book: A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin, with Helprin’s Winter’s Tale a close second

Shortest book: Shopgirl by Steve Martin, with The Invisible Man a close second

Number of official Unread Books read: Ten

Number of rereads: One

Number of tissues used while writing this post: Six

Now I think I will have a nap.

January 2011 Pt. 1

Hello, all. Here is Part One of my Stuff I’ve Been Reading post. I anticipate finishing another book before the end of the month but wanted to talk about my reading, so I decided to split the list in half. Here are the first eight books.

Wildwood Dancing by Juliet Marillier. This truly enjoyable historical fantasy came to me courtesy of Chera at the Sirens Conference this past fall, as a birthday present. Jena, the second of five daughters, must figure out how to maintain her father’s business during a hard winter while keeping secret her and her sisters’ journey to the realm of the fairies. (9)
Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell (60%). The reason I stopped reading this serialized novel of the elderly women of Cranford was because it felt very much like a serialized novel. The chapters were discrete and episodic, and I found, halfway through, that I didn’t much care what happened to the sometimes silly middle-class inhabitants of the tiny country village. (3)
The Broken Kingdoms by N. K. Jemisin. What happens when a blind artist who can see magic encounters a god in disguise? Find out by reading Jemisin’s excellent sequel to The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. (10)
When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro. Christopher Banks’s memories of living in Shanghai drive him to return there from England as an adult to search for his kidnapped parents. But in the minds of Ishiguro’s protagonists, all is never as it seems. (8)
A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin. If you love multigenerational fantasy epics, you’ll love this series, but in my opinion, this book is too long. (4)
Old Man’s War by John Scalzi. This is a witty, action-packed revisit to Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein. (7)
A Bit on the Side by William Trevor (40%). Trevor’s slow-paced stories of Ireland are the epitome of literary realism. Unfortunately, that simply isn’t my favorite style, although a student of Trevor’s short fiction could become an excellent writer indeed. (2)
Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy. Connie, a woman in and out of mental institutions, is able to communicate with the distant egalitarian future. Her experiences there alter her behavior here, and ultimately the fate of the future lies with the choices she makes. (6)

Note: I have given each book a rating out of ten–not to indicate how well they were written, but to measure how much I liked them.

Tune in tomorrow for the rest of the list!

January 27

I have been drinking a lot of tea and reading a lot of books. Periodically I will drive to campus and teach writing to students whose names I keep forgetting. This weekend I will commence writing the preface of my thesis, and then I’ll have a genuine complete thesis draft of about a hundred pages. Things are coming together.

*crosses fingers*

I have always been a future-thinking person–for evidence, my personal journal usually talks about things I will do rather than the things I’ve done–and I’ve begun to think of Moving On. I keep envisioning the many possibilities of what I might do after graduation in May, and the main one entails not living in this apartment anymore.

Last night I dreamed of painting walls blue, and they weren’t these walls.

Meanwhile, I bought six books in a month in which I intended to buy none, but I’ve read twenty books off of my official Unread Books list since December, so I feel a little bit justified. I’m reading one of my Unread Books now, Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin. Before that was Steve Martin’s Shopgirl. My upcoming “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” post will be a bit schizophrenic, I think.

January 22

Good news, everyone. According to Omega by Camille Flammarion (a nineteenth-century astronomer), the world is not destroyed by a comet in the 25th century, despite the lengthy speeches of French scientists.

Instead–spoiler alert–the earth dies of old age many hundreds of centuries from now. The oceans gradually level the land, and the land gradually absorbs the oceans, until there are only two people left on a waterless planet: Omegar and Eva, the final members of a species that perfected itself in just enough time to watch the decline of its physical world. Happily, they die in each other’s arms and their souls are escorted to Jupiter, where, we assume, they live a bodiless life with other like beings.

And the earth dies and the sun dies and are absorbed into a new sun which creates a new earth. The new civilizations on the new earth have no memory of their ancestors, of course, but that is as it should be. And all of these ages are but a single point in the span of eternity.

Deep.

At least I can rest in Flammarion’s reassurance that in the future, while never, of course, reaching the intellectual capacity of man, woman nevertheless expands her mind to encompass the sciences without losing either her beauty or her delicate sensiblities.

January 19

I defy you to best this reading list, from the syllabus of my “Science Fiction and Science Fact” class this semester.

Camille Flammarion, Omega: the Last Days of the World (1894)
H.G. Wells, The Invisible Man (1897)
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland (1915)
George S. Schuyler, Black No More (1931)
Ursula Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)
Octavia E. Butler, Kindred (1979)
Doris Lessing, The Fifth Child (1988)

Seriously, this is what I get to read for class credit! Along with some Charles Darwin and Ray Bradbury thrown in.

This must be how people feel when they take a class in their area of expertise. Gleeful, with a little bit of awe.

(In other news, I lived through the first day of teaching this semester. One day down, thirty eight to go.)

January 18

1. First Day of School. This morning I got my new parking sticker and last textbook, so I’m all prepared for my first class of the semester tonight. I’m definitely not prepared for getting back to teaching tomorrow, but there’s time yet.

2. The Crying of Lot 49. I read the first three chapters, then skimmed the rest, because I just didn’t get it. I do get that it’s supposed to be a satire, but I suspect I was born in the wrong decade to truly appreciate it. Thomas Pynchon must be something one studies rather than reads for enjoyment.

3. Jingo. Terry Pratchett, on the other hand, is something one reads for a lot of enjoyment indeed. I love the books about Sam Vimes and the City Watch best.

4. Word Count. I should be writing my novel right now. I should be reaching 30,000 words. Instead, I’m thinking about making cookies and reading more about the pending war between Ankh-Morpork and Klatch. And instead of actually doing any of these things, I’m blogging about them. Blogging: Procrastination Has Never Been So Meta.

January 16

1. Halfway. I have reached the halfway point of my January NaNoWriMo novel, at five complete chapters and a total of 25,000 words. Fortunately or unfortunately, the novel will be longer than 50,000 words, so it’s not exactly halfway yet, but it’s halfway of my writing goal for January, so I consider it cause for celebration.

2. Science Fiction. Thus far this January, I’ve read as much science fiction as I can, working on instinct that during the semester, I won’t be able to read as freely as I prefer. However, this semester I’ll be taking a science fiction literature class, so my extracurricular reading can become “additional research.” After I finish rereading Something Rotten by Jasper Fforde (Thursday Next #4), I’m thinking of picking up Jingo by Terry Pratchett, or, for a more widely recognized classic, The Crying of Lot 49.

3. The King’s Speech. It was a tremendously well-acted movie, which I enjoyed a great deal. Except for the fact that what appeared to have been the entire retirement community had also chosen our 1:10 showing, and we were forced to sit in the third-to-front row on the floor. I’m sure it’s an even better movie if one can see it properly.

4. Parting Wisdom. Peanut butter fudge ice cream is really good. You should never pass up an opportunity to eat some.