April 2011

Stuff I’ve Been Reading: April

I’ve done such a good job reviewing throughout the month!  Titles with reviews are linked; titles without get blurbs.

1. The Man from Hell by Barrie Roberts
2. Kindred by Octavia E. Butler
3. The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer
4. Possession by A. S. Byatt
5. Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett
6. Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins
7. The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing
8. Ringworld by Larry Niven (60%)
9. The Last Sherlock Holmes Story by Michael Dibdin
10. Asimov’s Science Fiction, June 2011.  If I ever get published in this magazine, I will have Made It as a science fiction writer.
11. Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.  We read this book aloud in the car, despite the danger of swerving off the road from laughing so hard.
12. Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins.  I didn’t review it because I didn’t want to spoil anything.  All I will say is that I thought it concluded things effectively and I enjoyed it quite a lot.
13. Waters Luminous and Deep by Meredith Ann Pierce
14. Contact by Carl Sagan.  A slow-moving, strongly science-based story of radio astronomers who pick up an unmistakably intelligent transmission from Vega, this novel was written by an astronomer about SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

What have you been reading recently?

Timed Writing

Here is how I get myself to write something that I’m reluctant to write.

I set the timer, for ten minutes to an hour.  I work hard and intently, without getting up from my desk, typing as quickly as is reasonable, until the timer goes off.  Then I stop.

Perhaps it is the timer’s promise that the amount of time I have to struggle with my writing is finite which makes the process work so splendidly.  Perhaps it is also reminiscent of Peter Elbow’s freewriting theories and of the no-holds-barred madness of NaNoWriMo.  Write fast, edit later.

I’m about to write for forty-two more minutes on the last paper of the semester.  (Because forty-two is the answer to the ultimate question, and by then it will be just after 9:30, when I will become creatively brain-dead.)  After that, I’m going to read in bed, knowing I’ll have worked long enough and well enough for this evening.

Setting the timer.  It’s magical.  You should try it sometime.

Waters Luminous & Deep

I found Waters Luminous & Deep: Shorter Fictions by Meredith Ann Pierce in a dollar bin at Books-a-Million.  I’d never seen or heard of it before, though I recognized Pierce from the Darkangel trilogy and Firebird Fantasy, the publisher, from some of my favorite young adult books.  So I thought, A dollar.  Why not?

This book contains eight lovely fairy-tale-like stories, each involving water in some way, although written over a dozen years and so not forcing the theme.  The legend of the city of Ys and “The Frog Prince” are some of the topics of these tales.  They are entirely charming, and my favorite is the final story, a novella called “Rampion.”  As Pierce says in her brief introduction to the story, why should a heroine always have to disguise herself as a man?  This heroine is very much a young woman who is discovering what it means to be herself–but the island of Ulys is such a rich setting for what amounts to the making of a myth!  I’m completely in love.

If you ever find this book somewhere, buy it whether it be one dollar or twenty.  You’ll enjoy the altered fairy tales, not always so bright, but as illuminating and deep as promised.

Counting Down

I have five (5) days of teaching left, including today.  I am, in the words of a distinguished colleague, jazzed about it.

This week my students are working on revisions of their analysis, which will be part one of a three-part final.  I am going to teach them how to write a Feedback Sandwich.  You start off with pointing out a strength, ease into a criticism plus your recommendation for how to fix the problem, then end with comments of the overall effectiveness of the paper.  The bad stuff is sandwiched between the good stuff, and you get twice as much commendation as criticism.

For the rest of the week, I’m going to talk to them about the sin of wordiness, and the following week, they will take a quiz and also present their “inventions”–their created final projects.

And then I will grade their projects, and then:

THE END

*and there was rejoicing in the street*

The Last Sherlock Holmes Story

While I tend to shy away from Holmes/Ripper novels (a great conundrum to Holmes fans why the great detective did not address that case), The Last Sherlock Holmes Story by Michael Dibdin was a stellar explanation of the truth behind those strange and terrifying events.

Prefaced, in traditional fashion, by the editors of the long-lost but recently found Watsonian manuscript, the tale is in Watson’s own voice rather than that of Arthur Conan Doyle, the writer of the known Holmes tales.  Watson’s true narrative pays homage to the Canon by being scrupulously correct in its dates and references.  However, the fiend behind the Whitechapel killings is nothing like what Watson originally thought: a primitive, brutal psychopath.  No, Watson gradually begins to suspect that Holmes suffers from a dissociative personality disorder, brought about by his addiction to cocaine.

The writing is beautifully authentic, creating the atmosphere of an original Holmes story with grace and ease.  The references to Lestrade, Mrs. Hudson, Mrs. Watson, former cases, and of course Moriarty lend the tale its familiarity; but the chilling truth, withheld until the end of the story, reveals a very different confrontation at Reichenbach Falls.  It is dark, oh so very dark, and absolutely delightful.

I don’t know how I’d never heard of The Last Sherlock Holmes Story before.  Holmes fans will love it.  I certainly did.

On Reading Lists

Apparently I am more likely to read stuff if I have a three-to-five-book list.  Because the worst part of finishing a book is always trying to figure out what book to read next.

Please?  Someone pick three books out of this list of books and say why I should read them in that order.  The most convincing wins!  Reviews to follow!

• On Writing by Stephen King
• The Last Sherlock Holmes Story by Michael Dibdin
• Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins (delivery estimate April 21)
• Waters Luminous and Deep by Meredith Ann Pierce
• Number9Dream by David Mitchell
• The Angel’s Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Ringworld

Ringworld by Larry Niven won both the Hugo and the Nebula awards when it was published in 1970, so I had high hopes for it.  However, after I’d read about a third of it, I had a hard time caring about the fate of the characters, so I skipped ahead to the last sixty pages.  As far as I could tell, I didn’t miss anything very important.  I don’t plan to read the sequels.

Louis Wu is two hundred years old, though he looks thirty.  A two-headed cowardly alien named Nessus invites Wu, along with a fierce catlike warrior called a kzin (think of an orange Wookie-Klingon) and one of the luckiest human women alive, to explore the manmade construction that looks like a giant ring around a star, with a landscape on the inside and a rotation just fast enough to give it the right amount of gravity.  It’s a stunning concept of what a civilization could do to evade overpopulation: make a new living place with extravagantly more surface area than a planet.

The exploration of the Ringworld is the main point of the book, although none of the characters has clean motivations for doing so.  What they find there, to me, was a bit of a letdown, considering the setup.  The engineers of the Ringworld met with some catastrophe several generations ago, and the quick degeneration of the civilization allowed several returnees to be taken for gods (I think).  Playing god is one of the major themes of the book, population control being another, and trying to direct fate turns out here perhaps slightly better than one might expect.

I must not have cared quite enough for Louis Wu to want to follow his story as patiently as I was being required to.  Intellectually I wanted to know what happened, but I wasn’t at all emotionally involved.  While the worldbuilding was flawlessly complex and most engaging, the execution of the tale simply wasn’t to my taste.