ase

Sister Outsider: Essays & Speeches By Audre Lorde (Audre Lorde): Like all fine things in life, to be taken in a little at a time, with great attention. That focus goes not only toward Lorde's words, but to one's reaction to them, because - I think - she exhorts the reader to be more aware of the world. There's only so much of that I can take without getting numb. (It's a contributing factor to my lack of social justice activism: I'm listening, but I'm not interested in exposing myself to the crossfire. "An Open Letter to Mary Daly" sounds eerily similar to some of the posts made during various *fail fights.) There's also a couple of pieces that don't encourage me to that end. I couldn't finish "Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger". Page after page of rage: stone in the belly, hot with freshly recalled injustice, bitter and salty as olives. I found most enlightening and useful essays like "Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference" and "Learning from the 60s" for reminding me of Lorde's core outlooks and her reaction to a historical moment. I liked "Man Child: A Black Lesbian Feminist's Response" for Lorde's reflections on trying to a healthy, happy, mature son in a house of two female parents; this might be relevant for lesbian parents today, at least so they know it's been done.

Audre Lorde identified as a radical. I think I identify as a moderate, perhaps selfishly: I can get the system to lurch along in my favor at least some of the time. As a woman, an African-american, the daughter of immigrants, and a lesbian, Lorde had no privilege to use as a lever in her favor, and four good reasons to critique the system with no compassion. I'm just lucky that, unlike some of her peers, Lorde does so through inviting, lively prose. Lorde challenges and rewards close attention.

( Table of Contents, for reference )

The Birthday of the World and Other Stories (Ursula K. Le Guin): Ever have that moment when you want to say, "you were the cool adult when I was younger, but I'm not sure I'm that person anymore"? I have that going with Le Guin's fiction. ( I enjoy her writing, but a lot of that enjoyment is rooted in attachment to existing work. )

Consider Phlebas (Iain M. Banks): ...no.

Pure space opera: star-spanning war killing billions, destruction of a Ringworld, mercenaries, aliens. Real sense of wonder stuff, in the right hands and at the right time.

It was entirely not to my taste.

Somewhere between the last fat space opera and this, I lost interest in the genre. I could see the sense of wonder, just out of reach: the amazing engineering of the Orbital, the Damage tournament, the reckless scale of the Culture ship, the colorful and dangerous characters. I just didn't care about any of it, and was actively repelled in come cases.

Perhaps it was timing - December was pretty soul-sucking - but the Consider Phlebas completely failed to engage my sense of wonder.

( Spoilers. )

Banks is pretty well-regarded in SF circles, so this may have been a fluke of weak writing and bad timing, but I'm in no hurry to go back to the Culture series. If I read another Banks novel, I'm going to pick up The Algebraist and see if I agree with the Hugo nomination.

Swordspoint (Ellen Kushner): "Every man lives at swordspoint . . . I mean, the things he cares for. Get them in your grasp, and you have the man - or woman - in your power", one character says, and this might be a story of maneuvering to put one's enemies in line for a quick stab to the heart. It's also a quasi-Regency fantasy of manners, but even that's an incomplete description.

I've seen Swordspoint rattling around the library for years, and finally picked it up mostly in anticipation of reading the sequel, which looks nicely gender-bending. When I picked up the paperback and saw the the Thomas Canty cover art, as well as an embarrassing number of laudatory statements, I braced myself for disappointment.

To my surprise, it didn't suck. I enjoyed the story of Richard, Alec, and the nobles of the Hill more than I expected. Whether it's Kushner's mannered prose, her delicate hand with character point-of-view, an unexpected vividness to the politics of the nobility, or some other facet of good writing at work is something I'm still thinking about. It's possibly the delight of unreliable narration. Megan Whalen Turner uses point of view and concealed thoughts to blatantly and entertainingly manipulate readers' attention in the Attolia / Eddis novels; Kushner also makes it evident she knows more than she's telling readers, and so do some of the characters, but with a restraint and deliberation that seems to say "it's more fun this way. Trust me."

The paperback I checked out from the library, a 2003 reprint, includes three short stories: "The Swordsman Whose Name Was Not Death", "Red-Cloak", "The Death of the Duke". The first features a would-be swordsman who is either a girl in disguise or a boy disguised as a girl - I got a little confused on that point - the second owes a debt to Fritz Leiber's uncanny and spirit-haunted Lankhmar; the third felt like I ought to be so sad, I think, but was a fitting end for a love story. I'm more curious to know what filled the years between Swordspoint and The Death of the Duke, and whether the latter is canon with respect to The Privilege of the Sword. None of the three were deathless, but it's interesting to see the evolution in style, especially from Red-Cloak, the earliest writing in the Riverside-and-Hill setting. After finishing these, I'm looking forward to The Privilege of the Sword.

For posterity, I will note that I read all of Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar novels which I had not previously encountered. (Alberich duology, Owl trilogy, Skif novel, Collegium two-of-incomplete-trilogy, Lavan Firestorm novel; that's, um, a lot of id vortex.) Pray let us never speak of this again.

Numbers game: 13 total finished. 13 new, 0 reread; 12 fiction, 1 nonfiction. 2 short story / essay collections

Changing the World: All-New Tales of Valdemar (Mercedes Lackey, ed.): I know someone who had a story in this, and after I read the one story, I was compelled to flip through the rest of the stories. If I had gotten more than a flicker of amusement from anything other than "Interview With a Companion", I would be less ashamed to admit I read this. Unfortunately, it reminded me of all the things those crazy kids can get up to when they're mind-bonded to a psychic spirit-horse and kicked off a Lackey binge.

My name is Asher Lev (Chaim Potok): Hasidic Jew's artistic passion sets him at odds with his family and the Orthodox Jewish community. Potok's novels sometimes show up on high school reading lists, so I picked this up in a spate of culture, and came away thinking certain family issues make a lot more sense in context of the Law, even if no one's been to temple in 30 years. As far as the book itself, I think Asher Lev was a bit of a self-centered brat, but his selfishness is in the context of a rigid and homogenous community (justifiably?) anxious about its future, so I am more interested in Asher as an insight into community or society, and where it breaks down, as well as the Jewish community in the late '40s through '60s, than I am interested in his art-related angst.

The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant (An Adoption Story) (Dan Savage): Dan Savage and then-boyfriend-now-husband-in-Canada adopt. The title is nearly longer than the book, but it's a funny take on the serious topic of open adoption.

The Valdemar binge of shame and overtime, or, what my brain could deal with during a 50 hour work week: the Arrows trilogy, the Last Herald-Mage trilogy, the Tarma and Kethry duology and collected short stories, and a special power-skim edition of By the Sword and the Winds trilogy.

( Emotional reactions to emotional books. )

My Lackey binge is over (I hope). There are exactly two trilogies, one duology, and one short story collection worth reading, so once you've read the Arrows trilogy, and the Vanyel trilogy, and the Tarma and Kethry stories, you can stop. Many of the books set in Velgarth have an overdose of Tayledras being like Native Americans, but awesomer. (See also XKCD.) Obviously, there are a number of drawbacks to that setup, none of which I feel the need to discuss at this time.

Numbers game: 12 total finished. 3 new, 9 reread; 11 fiction, 1 nonfiction; 2 short story collections.

Faust in Copenhagen: A Struggle for the Soul of Physics (Gino Segre): a physicist's love letter to the quantum revolution. Segre opens with a 1932 gathering of prominent physicists in Copenhagen, and the humorous parody of Faust younger members of the meeting put on for their seniors, then bounces back and forth through time and across Europe to explain how they got there, and why it was important to quantum physics. This is really all about the awesomeness of the big players: Bohr, Dirac, Delbruck, Einstein, Heisenberg, Meitner, Pauli, Schroedinger, and others. It's a little scattered, because the focus is on people more than science, but is extremely enjoyable. Strongly recommended.

Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Edwin A. Abbott): Mathematical fiction; allegory; satire or parody? A. Square, a quite regular parallelogram, is opened to life beyond two dimensions and status measured in rigid sides.

Shattering the Stereotypes: Muslim Women Speak Out (Fawzia Afzal-Khan, ed.): Collection of written works by Muslim women. It's divided into six sections: nonfiction essays, poetry, journalism, religious discourses, fiction, and plays. Unsurprisingly, the nonfiction sections spoke most strongly to me. I especially had issues with the plays: scripts are the bare bones of a theatrical work, and constructing the mental stage, actors and actresses, props, voice intonation and the like was exhausting.

Anyway. Things to like: multiplicity of authors bringing a different focus to bear on the same topics, diversity of mediums. Things that drove me nuts: New Yorkers retelling September 11th stories. I get it! Fear, anger, hate, dark side! If that's the point - in the face of hate, we are all victims - it's been made. And made. And made some more. Now, solving of the problem, please.

( Bunches of quotes )

Again, I liked the nonfiction parts a lot. And this is a good anthology for getting a better understanding of where Muslim women are coming from, and how as a group and individuals these women don't need saving as much as they need respect for their persons and goals. Islamic feminists make compelling arguments that the Koran is a pro-woman document, which has been distorted by human patriarchies. Not all of these writers - if any - are arguing from the secular Western background many Americans associate with feminism, which is a compelling reminder of the diversity of women calling themselves "feminists".

Arrows of the Queen trilogy (Arrows of the Queen, Arrow's Flight, Arrow's Fall) (Merccdes Lackey): Reread. Purest wish fulfilment: by working hard and feeling self-pity and being nearly drowned or freezing in a horrible blizzard or being horribly tortured until you want to die you'll be loved forever by everyone. (The underpants gnomes' business model was recently brought to my attention. It's that sort of logic.) Trashy teenage girl emotional porn; literary Kit-Kats. Later Lackey novels are closer to stale waxy discount chocolate, but the Arrows trilogy is the fresh, pure product.

I got 194-odd pages into the 720-odd pages of Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (Steve Coll), so it deserves an honorable mention. I made it to 1986, and I think I got the highlights: covert ops leak, don't give money to Pakistan - or other organizations who you 90% disagree with - and wow, made peace, not war.

The Family Trade (Charles Stross): Boston tech journalist Miriam Beckstein loses her job and finds her birth family - a clan of universe-hopping feudal smugglers - in one of the more eventful months of her life.

I've struck out on Stross' Hugo-nominated SF twice, so I was pretty dubious when someone recommended giving his fantasy novels a shot. In this case, third time does pay out: Beckstein has the hallmarks of a wish-fulfilment character (also known as Mary Sue) but transcends her mysterious past and rare magical gift to be mostly her own person. Stross' solid grip on early 21st C assumptions works for him in this case: readers can sympathize with (overqualified) Miriam - tech journalist, ex-med student, budding businesswoman - while reveling in her adventures in a Boston run by medieval-tech-level Viking descendents.

Stross follows the rule! Miriam & Paulette's dating-related conversations don't start until Miriam actually falls for a guy.

I skimmed most of Eva (Peter Dickinson), which I originally read in middle school. Eva wakes up in a hospital bed after an accident and has to cope with the consequences.

The Invisible Cryptologists (Jeannette Williams): Nonfiction account of African-American employment at NSA and its predecessors from WW2 through the '50's. Dry, but informative: as usual, white employees had significantly better salaries and more and better opportunities for advancement. Draws on NSA documents and interviews with former employees to unearth a piece of buried history.

About Mothers and Other Monsters (Maureen F. McHugh): Short fiction collection. I'd completely forgotten I'd already read one of the stories - "Presence" - before, and I'd forgotten where it ended. I'd tacked on three months and a page or two. Thematically, got a bit old by the closing stories, but individual stories stood up pretty well. I especially liked "The Cost to Be Wise" (advanced world colonists use "primitive" natives for their own ends) and "The Lincoln Train" (post-Civil War AU).

The Hidden Family (Charles Stross): Sequel to The Family Trade. People travel between worlds a lot. Woman start businesses together. Entertaining, but this was my reaction to the end of the book: [Miriam] dared to hope the worst was over. "And then," my inner 12-year-old piped up, "a bomb exploded."

Realizing this is the seond of a series rather than the middle volume of a trilogy, I'm in no rush to keep going.

Technically, I finished the Sharing Knife: Passage (Lois McMaster Bujold) on May 2nd, so it should go in the May log, but it was remarkably not-obnoxious so I want to give it a shoutout. Standalone post to follow RSN.

Finally done catching up on what all you people were up to this weekend, which means I can start typing the Very Long Entry about my Independence Day celebrations. To keep everyone convivially distracted, I'm posting the annotated list of the ten and a half books I read in June.

Ten and a half. I desperately need to get a life.

Start With a Digital Camera: The Indespensible Guide to Getting the Most Out of Your Digital Camera (2nd Edition) (John Odam): The basics for using a digital, with a fairly heavy emphasis photomanipulation, using software like Photoshop. Somewhat dry, and occasionally cramped by use of too-small pictures; to show details like depth of field, a 1" square just isn't large enough.

Sun in Glory, and Other Tales of Valdemar (Mercedes Lackey, Editor): If a line were drawn between the fiction section of the library and the checkout desk, it would pass about two feet from the "new paperbacks" display. This is my only excuse for picking up this collection, which proudly announces in the introductory blurb to the first story that the author is twelve. (And she writes like it. In ten years, if she has the determination the blurb suggests, she'll be a really strong writer. Right now she's writing about the wizard's apprentice who saves the day.) This is an OC fic collection, along the lines of the Darkover and "Honor Harrington" anthologies. The author who created the universe contributes one or more stories about a main character; a number of other authors chime in with stories set in the "background" of the universe. In this case, Mercedes Lackey wrote a "Alberich, Talia and Dirk are asked to Karse by Solaris" story, and everyone else wrote stories about Heralds or the impact of Heralds on people's lives.

The collection struck me as very fan-centric. It's authors dabbling in the shallow end of the universe. Which means they have to be really, really clever to send out a wave that stirs the deeps of canon. None of these stories did. The one that came closest was Michelle West's chancy "Winter Death", which, with one more scene - five sentences in the right place! - could be used to handwave the lack of Heralds with an empathic Gift in Talia's time. Clever backstory retcons (as opposed to the more familiar really dumb and pointless retcons) are something I adore in fiction. The lack of follow-through on that in "Winter Death" drives me mad.

The stories that know they're light and fluffy are a lot less frustrating, but still remain very minor. Points for stories like "Icebreaker" which try to show why the Valdemaran Everyman might enjoy not being a Herald. And "The Cat Who Came to Dinner" is cute in a relatively not-annoying way, even if I guessed the plot twist long before the protagonist did. But overall, the anthology's skippable if you're not a Lackey die-hard. Check it out of the library for "Sun in Glory" but save your money for stronger fiction.

Rider at the Gate and Cloud's Rider (C. J. Cherryh): Reread. Because it was there. Because it's such a summer pleasure to read one novel that starts on the edge of winter and the sequel that kicks off with an ice storm. Exactly as I remember them, and why do I always get to the creepy parts at one in the morning?

Learning to See Creatively: How to Compose Great Photographs (Bryan Peterson): Nifty book that does what it says. Focuses on applying the basics of design (line, shape, form, texture, pattern, color) to photographic composition. Since it's focused on the use of film cameras (not surprising, in a book published in 1988), some of the suggestions for changing film speeds, f-stops and lenses was wasted, but the extensive use of large photographs with clear explanatory captions was very useful.

The Art of Seeing (The KODAK Workshop Series): Introduction to film photography. It's a fairly short overview, with lots of hints about which Kodak products would be useful in different environments (some of which probably aren't in existence anymore; the book was published in 1984) in case we weren't sure who the publishers were or where they hoped to make substantial money. It's not bad, but the same material's covered elsewhere in more contemporary books that include sections on things that weren't available in the '80s, like use of home computers in image editing.

Last Herald-Mage Trilogy [Magic's Pawn, Magic's Promise, Magic's Price] (Mercedes Lackey): I had a few minutes before I had to check out and hop the bus home, and I was a little annoyed by earlier reading in the month, so I started skimming Magic's Pawn to see if Lackey was attacked by the Author Emeritus bug or if my mid-teen memories inflated her novels' worth.

To my shock - no. And yes.

This writeup grew to be as long as everything else up together, so it's getting its own entry. Pruning side commentary about personal hot buttons and how well or poorly the Valdemar series integrates its worldbuilding leaves out all the interesting chatter.

Deep Secret (Diana Wynne Jones): Reread. Magic and SF cons and a Byzantine empire looking for the emperor's heirs, oh my. The novel's very workmanlike. Reads smoothly and includes some fun with the Babylon children's rhyme. I mentioned once to samthereaderman that I wasn't a huge DWJ fan and got a nice double take out of him. I think the reason I'm not a fan is that DWJ began writing long before many of the current crop of "magic hidden in our world" authors, and (I suspect) broke a lot of ground for them. So where he sees her doing something fairly unusual, I see a retread of familiar themes. I suspect that this is like whining that The Lord of the Rings is exactly like Terry Brook's novels: a case of reading the newer stuff first. Sam, correct me if I'm wrong.

*Defender (CJ Cherryh): I came, I saw, I nabbed. I read a hundred pages before realizing I inhaled it one afternoon in December 2002. I don't see Cherryh taking the Foreigner series anywhere she hasn't already been, which has bumped it way down my reading priority list. The library's lack of the next (and currently last) Foreigner novel, Explorer, hasn't helped.

*Abandoned midbook, poor thing.