Oh, Very Well

As if I could resist an opportunity to write about books.

I bring you the (belated) World Book Day meme, courtesy of Chera.

The Book I Am Reading:  The Night Calls by David Pirie.  It’s from my Unread Books list, which, although I failed to read solely from it for a month, I am still whittling down.  It’s the second book in a series called “The Dark Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes,” even though it’s actually about Arthur Conan Doyle as a medical student and his real-life inspiration for Holmes, Dr. Joseph Bell.  But you don’t have to pretend very hard to read Bell as Holmes or Doyle as Watson, and the turn-of-the-century Edinburgh setting feels authentic, if the narrator-Doyle waxes a bit melodramatic at times.  Supposedly this book is the introduction of the Moriarty analogue, so I’m eager to see whether this so-called real-life villain lives up to the fictional one.

The Book I Am Writing:  It doesn’t have a title yet, but it’s about a missing spaceship and a comic science fiction mystery duo.  One of the detectives is a technophobe, concerned about losing his identity on the internet, and the other one can tell when you’re lying.  Always.

The Book I Love Most:  It’s a three-way tie between The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin, The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell, The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, and Persuasion by Jane Austen.  I know that was four books, but you can’t really expect me to choose just three.

The Last Book I Received As A Gift:  Hmm.  Um.  I’m not sure.  Christmas feels like a long time ago, and I know I’ve bought books with Christmas gift cards.  But the last book I actually unwrapped was Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy, on Christmas evening.  It is a classic feminist utopia, a modernization of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland.  Now to get my hands on The Female Man by Joanna Russ.

The Last Book I Gave As A Gift:  Gifts by Ursula K. Le Guin, because I thought it name appropriate.

The Nearest Book to Me:  As I’m sitting at my desk, I’m eighteen inches away from my UKL shelf, and there’s a Bible and a book I’m borrowing (Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel) on the desk’s hutch, but the book at my elbow is called Time and the Other by Johannes Fabian, an iconic anthropology text loaned to me by a professor for research for my thesis.  I’m about to write a paragraph about how the “ethnographic present,” which serves to distance the observed Other in both space and time, is related to the defamiliarizing techniques of science fiction, which make something familiar into something strange, marvelous, or uncanny, as well as the reverse.