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The Backlog, Part One (September Reading)
I had brilliant plans for a special two-month deal, but then I noticed it was swiftly heading for a three-month book log. So here's September.
The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University (Kevin Roose): The subtitle says it all: a Brown University student transfers to Liberty University, bastion of evangelical thought, to learn what's behind all those conservative Christian stereotypes.
Basically, I was sold in the first section, "Prepare Ye", where Roose seeks help from one of his Christian friends to prepare for "Bible boot camp":
Roose's frankness about the participatory nature of his semester (culturally) abroad is a key point: he talks about the changes in his perspective and ingrained behaviors as a result of obeying Liberty's stringent written and unwritten rules. He also takes a very human approach to his exploration of Liberty's culture, focusing on his interactions with individual dorm-mates and other people on campus. This is, fundamentally, about the building blocks of culture: individuals, in concert with their environment. One of Roose's Brown friends comes down for a weekend, and on seeing him interact in the dorms, Roose reflects: "Liberty students who struggle with lust. Secular Quakers who enjoy prayer. Evangelical feminists who come to Bible Boot Camp out of academic interest. I used to think my two worlds were a million miles apart. But tonight, the distance seems more like a hundred thousand miles. It's not a total improvement, but it's not meaningless, either." (p213) Which is not to say it's all smooth sailing, but Roose does a great job reminding liberals that hey! Conservative evangelicals are people too.
The Language of Bees (Laurie R. King): First of a two-part Russell-and-Holmes adventure which - about - I keep trying to type "Holmes' illegitimate son by Irene Adler comes for assistance finding his missing wife and daughter" with something like a straight face, and I cannot do it. Small adorable girls make a cameo, people race about England in dramatic fashion, and the arts world is mildly mocked. This is the umpteenth in the series, do not start here; people who like the series, you will like this. I am not sure if I should mention the thing with the ending or not; it's a spoiler but might be nice to know going in. I keep waiting for tragic foreshadowings of WWII and Holmes' passing, and remain disappointed that so far, this has not been played for significant pathos. I am not in love with the Holmes canon or character, so other people may have different reactions.
Science Fiction: The Best of the Year (2007) (Ed. Rich Horton): I saw this on the discount shelf and picked it up because![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ann_leckie had a story in it, and I realized I hadn't read any of her fiction, even though we've been reading each other's LJs for a couple of years now. I liked her story, and would love to do a book club sort of discussion of it, because I think different people would get different things out of it it. It wasn'tmy favorite in the collection, because Walter Jon Williams made an appearance in the table of contents. WJW is one of those writers who isn't high on my radar, but rarely fails to entertain me. Carolyn Ives Gilman's "Okanoggan Falls" also happened to hit several bullet-proof story attractors, including a major hook for further development. I am a novel-reader at heart. Blurbs for particular stories:
"Another Word for Map is Faith", Christoper Rowe: stopped just when it was getting interesting. How is faith capable of material feats in this future world? Is the callback to Le Guin's "Another Word for World is Forest" deliberate?
"Okanoggan Falls", Carolyn Ives Gilman: alien invasion story. This is interesting because of context, and because it opens so many doors. Okay, the alien sex pheromones didn't hurt. What's the difference between collaberation, survival, and assimilation?
"Saving for a Sunny Day, or the Benefits of Reincarnation", Ian Watson: the worldbuilding premise is, "AIs rule the world through soul-brokering", but about halfway through the driving question becomes, "why do AIs want to rule the world, and is this kind of evil?" but the story answers this with "well, maybe the AIs are controlling us all as part of their plan to survive the heat death of the universe, and there's something about farm animals and now we're done." There's a change in story focus from "AIs mediate reincarnation" to "what are the AI motives?" that causes a major story wobble.
"The Cartesian Theater", Robert Charles Wilson: flashback story about death and the soul, in a sort of hard-boiled venue. It's like a perfect recipe to make me say "meh", until the last paragraph, where it looks like the AIs (different AIs than Watson's) may have engineered a Scene for their own purposes.
"Hesperia and Glory", Ann Leckie: Epistolary story about a man who tried to return to his romantic Burroughs-esque Mars, as seen by a man who says, "how many Princes of Hesperia can there be? There is only room in the story for one. What of the rest of us?" This isn't a story about a Mars that never was, this is a story questioning the motives for never-Mars stories and why people keep writing them. Or that is my interpretation. Perhaps I have been hanging out with angry fangirls too much, but I appreciated the message while not being entirely sold on the narrative; epistolary stories start out one down with me, because I find the format so distracting.
"Incarnation Day", Walter Jon Williams: WJW proposes a world, tells a story about that world, delivers a twist and nests the small story of an "incarnation day" party into a larger story about the nature of AI-to-flesh children in an undated future. Rock on. The prose worked, the story fit the style and length, I was entertained and my brain pleasantly buzzed by the idea of virtual kids.
"Exit Before Saving", Ruth Nestvold: Woman goes crazy from overwork. Or something. Women going crazy and imploding? Really not my fictional thing.
"Inclination", William Shunn: Son sent by his father to labor with the posthumans for the good of the "pure" human society. It's an interesting setup: old-school space fanatics separate themselves from the larger community of self-modifying semi-post-humans with good AI, but story itself is a classic "religion sucks, and makes your daddy abusive" straw man. At the point where the protagonist is weeping for angel wings to bear him away from his harsh, conservatively religious life, I lost it. The conclusion, and the protag's inclusion into the larger world, is a satisfactory end,
"Life on the Preservation", Jack Skillingstead: Postapocalyptic suicide bomber chick has a perfect day in a time-looped fragment of the past. The end is a bit coy about whether she followed her orders to trash the time loop, but the story was sufficiently pedestrian - seriously, "she turned the cone in her hand like the mysterious artifact it was"? Awkward ice cream descriptors as indicators of postapocalyptic deprivation? Is that the best I should expect? - I wasn't invested either way.
"Me-Topia", Adam Roberts: Future Neanderthals on a future space expedition run into a posthuman homo sapiens space environment. Then they run into the landlord and sole resident. Unimpressed.
"The House Beyond Your Sky", Benjamin Rosenbaum: War in very few pages. I hated it because I hate war stories played for death and angst and killing characters as a source of pathos. It's not intrinsically bad, but it's so very much not my thing I can't say I liked it.
"A Billion Eves", Robert Reed: Consumer culture propagating through alternate Earths, and a final question: can you develop a sustainable lifestyle? The basic setup is scary and abhorrent, and the author is aware of that, which gets points in my eyes.
Numbers: 3 total. 3 new, 0 reread; 2 fiction, 1 nonfiction. 1 short story collection.
The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University (Kevin Roose): The subtitle says it all: a Brown University student transfers to Liberty University, bastion of evangelical thought, to learn what's behind all those conservative Christian stereotypes.
Basically, I was sold in the first section, "Prepare Ye", where Roose seeks help from one of his Christian friends to prepare for "Bible boot camp":
"So, do you think you're ready for a semester of Christianity?" she asked ... "No, that's not what I mean. I mean, are you spiritually ready?"
She took my silence as a no.
"Kev, places like Liberty are designed to transform skepticism into belief, and you're not going to be immune to that. You have to be open to the possibility that this semester is going to be bigger than you think." (p14)
Roose's frankness about the participatory nature of his semester (culturally) abroad is a key point: he talks about the changes in his perspective and ingrained behaviors as a result of obeying Liberty's stringent written and unwritten rules. He also takes a very human approach to his exploration of Liberty's culture, focusing on his interactions with individual dorm-mates and other people on campus. This is, fundamentally, about the building blocks of culture: individuals, in concert with their environment. One of Roose's Brown friends comes down for a weekend, and on seeing him interact in the dorms, Roose reflects: "Liberty students who struggle with lust. Secular Quakers who enjoy prayer. Evangelical feminists who come to Bible Boot Camp out of academic interest. I used to think my two worlds were a million miles apart. But tonight, the distance seems more like a hundred thousand miles. It's not a total improvement, but it's not meaningless, either." (p213) Which is not to say it's all smooth sailing, but Roose does a great job reminding liberals that hey! Conservative evangelicals are people too.
The Language of Bees (Laurie R. King): First of a two-part Russell-and-Holmes adventure which - about - I keep trying to type "Holmes' illegitimate son by Irene Adler comes for assistance finding his missing wife and daughter" with something like a straight face, and I cannot do it. Small adorable girls make a cameo, people race about England in dramatic fashion, and the arts world is mildly mocked. This is the umpteenth in the series, do not start here; people who like the series, you will like this. I am not sure if I should mention the thing with the ending or not; it's a spoiler but might be nice to know going in. I keep waiting for tragic foreshadowings of WWII and Holmes' passing, and remain disappointed that so far, this has not been played for significant pathos. I am not in love with the Holmes canon or character, so other people may have different reactions.
Science Fiction: The Best of the Year (2007) (Ed. Rich Horton): I saw this on the discount shelf and picked it up because
ann_leckie had a story in it, and I realized I hadn't read any of her fiction, even though we've been reading each other's LJs for a couple of years now. I liked her story, and would love to do a book club sort of discussion of it, because I think different people would get different things out of it it. It wasn'tmy favorite in the collection, because Walter Jon Williams made an appearance in the table of contents. WJW is one of those writers who isn't high on my radar, but rarely fails to entertain me. Carolyn Ives Gilman's "Okanoggan Falls" also happened to hit several bullet-proof story attractors, including a major hook for further development. I am a novel-reader at heart. Blurbs for particular stories:"Another Word for Map is Faith", Christoper Rowe: stopped just when it was getting interesting. How is faith capable of material feats in this future world? Is the callback to Le Guin's "Another Word for World is Forest" deliberate?
"Okanoggan Falls", Carolyn Ives Gilman: alien invasion story. This is interesting because of context, and because it opens so many doors. Okay, the alien sex pheromones didn't hurt. What's the difference between collaberation, survival, and assimilation?
"Saving for a Sunny Day, or the Benefits of Reincarnation", Ian Watson: the worldbuilding premise is, "AIs rule the world through soul-brokering", but about halfway through the driving question becomes, "why do AIs want to rule the world, and is this kind of evil?" but the story answers this with "well, maybe the AIs are controlling us all as part of their plan to survive the heat death of the universe, and there's something about farm animals and now we're done." There's a change in story focus from "AIs mediate reincarnation" to "what are the AI motives?" that causes a major story wobble.
"The Cartesian Theater", Robert Charles Wilson: flashback story about death and the soul, in a sort of hard-boiled venue. It's like a perfect recipe to make me say "meh", until the last paragraph, where it looks like the AIs (different AIs than Watson's) may have engineered a Scene for their own purposes.
"Hesperia and Glory", Ann Leckie: Epistolary story about a man who tried to return to his romantic Burroughs-esque Mars, as seen by a man who says, "how many Princes of Hesperia can there be? There is only room in the story for one. What of the rest of us?" This isn't a story about a Mars that never was, this is a story questioning the motives for never-Mars stories and why people keep writing them. Or that is my interpretation. Perhaps I have been hanging out with angry fangirls too much, but I appreciated the message while not being entirely sold on the narrative; epistolary stories start out one down with me, because I find the format so distracting.
"Incarnation Day", Walter Jon Williams: WJW proposes a world, tells a story about that world, delivers a twist and nests the small story of an "incarnation day" party into a larger story about the nature of AI-to-flesh children in an undated future. Rock on. The prose worked, the story fit the style and length, I was entertained and my brain pleasantly buzzed by the idea of virtual kids.
"Exit Before Saving", Ruth Nestvold: Woman goes crazy from overwork. Or something. Women going crazy and imploding? Really not my fictional thing.
"Inclination", William Shunn: Son sent by his father to labor with the posthumans for the good of the "pure" human society. It's an interesting setup: old-school space fanatics separate themselves from the larger community of self-modifying semi-post-humans with good AI, but story itself is a classic "religion sucks, and makes your daddy abusive" straw man. At the point where the protagonist is weeping for angel wings to bear him away from his harsh, conservatively religious life, I lost it. The conclusion, and the protag's inclusion into the larger world, is a satisfactory end,
"Life on the Preservation", Jack Skillingstead: Postapocalyptic suicide bomber chick has a perfect day in a time-looped fragment of the past. The end is a bit coy about whether she followed her orders to trash the time loop, but the story was sufficiently pedestrian - seriously, "she turned the cone in her hand like the mysterious artifact it was"? Awkward ice cream descriptors as indicators of postapocalyptic deprivation? Is that the best I should expect? - I wasn't invested either way.
"Me-Topia", Adam Roberts: Future Neanderthals on a future space expedition run into a posthuman homo sapiens space environment. Then they run into the landlord and sole resident. Unimpressed.
"The House Beyond Your Sky", Benjamin Rosenbaum: War in very few pages. I hated it because I hate war stories played for death and angst and killing characters as a source of pathos. It's not intrinsically bad, but it's so very much not my thing I can't say I liked it.
"A Billion Eves", Robert Reed: Consumer culture propagating through alternate Earths, and a final question: can you develop a sustainable lifestyle? The basic setup is scary and abhorrent, and the author is aware of that, which gets points in my eyes.
Numbers: 3 total. 3 new, 0 reread; 2 fiction, 1 nonfiction. 1 short story collection.