A Month in Reading: March 2012

I pledged to read a book a week and a short story a day in 2012. In March, I finished reading five books and I read thirty-one short stories. Here's a summary. 

Source

Books
In the woo woo category, I read Alchemy of Nine Dimensions by Barbara Hand Clow. In early 2011, I took a meditation class that used Clow's book as the course text. I'd been slowly reading my way through it since. The book is wonderful for the brief visualizations it includes at the beginning of each chapter. If you like the solid natural buzz that comes from really effective visualizations, I recommend it. Clow combines the woo with some quite rigorous research into different scientific fields, including geology, string theory, musicology, and quasi-scientific fields like sacred geometry.

A while back, I had a chance to view Battle Royale, the film version of the book by Koushun Takami. Yes, that Battle Royale, the book most commonly cited as being super close to The Hunger Games - so close that Suzanne Collins must have copied her idea from it. (Battle Royale was originally published in 1999.) I was super entranced by the ultraviolence of the film, which managed at the same time to connect with the pathos of a class of middle graders who must murder each other so that one of them may survive. I read the novel because I'd heard that it went into much more detail about the characters' backgrounds than the film could. It did.

(For the record, given Collins's background as a television writer and various other factors, I can see that it is possible and even likely that she cooked up The Hunger Games completely independently of Battle Royale, which is her claim.)

Battle Royale invites comparisons to The Hunger Games, of course. In a dystopian future Japan, the government takes a class of students to a remote location for a wargames exercise that only one of them can survive. There are no rules other than a few parameters that guarantee that the kill rates will be kept high.

That is where the similarities peter out, however. The students in Battle Royale know each other well: they've been part of the same class for years. They've already got longstanding loyalties, friendships, and animosities before the story begins. The question quickly becomes how well they can trust those loyalties, especially knowing that any trust can only go so far. They face a number of existential problems: do they play the game at all, or give up? In the context of the game, is it more appropriate to choose your own ending or try to fight the circumstances of the game?

Battle Royale also feels to me less like a YA book and more like a book aimed at a mature audience. It is violent and the emotional content and cultural critique seems to be pitched at a more sophisticated level. (Don't get me wrong - I love The Hunger Games, but if you wanted to ignore the bulk of the cultural commentary in that book and just read for Katniss's personal drama, you probably could.) I won't say "if you loved The Hunger Games, you'll love Battle Royale," because you really might not. But if you're into dystopian future lit you might do well to look at this significant contribution to the genre. It was absolutely massive in Japan and has been translated into a slew of other languages.

Continuing my journey into the pit of doom and on a totally level, I read The Road by Cormac McCarthy, which won the Pulitzer in 2007. McCarthy's prose is gorgeous and spare. The book is brief, thankfully, because from page one I felt like I was in a state of intense mourning that didn't ease until I finished. Wow. Just wow. This is post-apocalyptic fiction that pushes the question, "what if there was really almost nothing left?" about as far as it can go. The landscape the father and son move through is devastated, full of swirling ash and dead trees. Their food is whatever they can find in cans. Others have turned to cannibalism. They're trying to make it to the coast. As terrible as the situation is, the book is about the bond between father and son, about love that doesn't end, and about patience in the face of disaster.

I re-read The Hunger Games in anticipation of seeing the film. Great book. Not so sure about the film, though I do love Jennifer Lawrence and thought she was perfect as Katniss. I suspect it was a bit of a mess. My partner, who had not read the book but is very film-savvy, did not follow several of the primary emotional dynamics and came away with very different impressions of the characters, and no clue about what was happening in some key scenes.

Finally, I completed Neil Gaiman's collection Fragile Things. Highly recommended for "The Facts in the Case of the Departure of Miss Finch," in which an uncomfortable night out on the town goes horribly wrong or possibly horribly right; "Fifteen Painted Cards from a Vampire Tarot," full of rich and brief vignettes; and "Feeders and Eaters," deliciously gross.

Shorts
I read bits of Cemetery Dance, selected stories from Daily Science Fiction, issue 1.3 of Stupefying Stories, and I started in on the fabulous Fat Girl in a Strange Land antho.

Cemetery Dance 65 (December 2011) was their Graham Masterson special issue. Great interview there and two stories, "Anka" which was just awesome in a creepy fairy tale way, and "Saint Brónach's Shrift" about which I have a kind of amnesia. "Rainfall" by Maurice Broaddus was sad and lovely and evoked that feeling of trying to get things right when they just won't go. The issue is worth it for that story alone.

The standout Daily Science Fiction story for me this month was "A Different Rain" by Mari Ness. Short and cruel with an "oh" kind of ending.

I enjoyed several of the stories in Stupefying, and would keep an eye on it for future fun reading. Ron Lunde's "Highly Unlikely" forced me to stifle a laugh because it is hilarious and I was reading it at the garage while waiting for my car and did not want to appear insane.

Finally, a big hoorah for Fat Girl in a Strange Land. Crossed Genres did very well with this antho of science fiction and fantasy stories about fat women and girls. It was great to read so many stories with female protagonists, and equally wonderful to see how the writers incorporated (ha ha ha) issues of fatness, physical difference, prejudice and acceptance. So many great stories here. In March I read and loved "La Gorda and the City of Silver" by Sabrina Vourvoulias, "Cartography, and the Death of Shoes" by A.J. Fitzwater, and our very own Bluestocking's (aka Lauren C. Teffeau's) "The Tradeoff." (P.S. Vourvoulias has a book coming out that looks amazing. I plan to keep an eye on that one. You should too.)

A Month in Reading: February 2012

I pledged to read a book a week and a short story a day in 2012. I've just completed my March challenge. These are the highlights of February's readings.

Books
I read three works of non-fiction and one short story anthology in February (Dark Faith, which I posted about in my January reading report.)

Hostage to the Devil by Malachi Martin (HarperOne 1992) took me several months to read because I could not read it in bed at night. This slowed down my progress considerably because I do much of my reading at bedtime. This book is so cuckoonuts terrifying that I had to reserve my reading sessions for broad daylight. Malachi Martin was a Catholic priest and theologian who participated in hundreds of exorcisms during his lifetime. Hostage follows five case studies of people suffering from demonic possession and the priests who exorcised them.

Okay, okay, let's say you have a skeptical mind and don't believe in demons. Even so, there is something creepy about the concept of malevolent forces whose only recourse is to both hate and feed off us. It is a classic horror trope: maybe the classic horror trope. Fabulous storytelling here.

David Mamet's Three Uses of the Knife is his essay on the purpose of drama, broken down into the key problems and issues at play in each of the three acts. Although the focus is on stage and (sort of) screen, this is useful stuff for any writer of fiction. My favourite bit, on reaching the third act and the all-too-common montage / unnecessary pause for self-reflection that happens there (from page 76):

It has been said that a poem is never completed; it is only abandoned. Like a poem, a drama is difficult to structure. In my experience the dramatist gets tired at precisely the same point as the protagonist: facing the third act. The act is outlined, the task is plain, if difficult, and the very clarity of the task is dispiriting. 

Once the third act is planned, for better or worse, the play is done. Dramatists complete the act with whatever gifts of dialogue and invention they have been given, but the die is cast. The potter has fired the piece. Still, the act has to be written (the pot still has to be glazed), and the dramatist thinks, again, "Oh, come on - it's in my head. Must I go on? Are you really going to make me write it down?" 

I read that and I thought, amen, brother. I've been there on every story I've written. I like the idea of the unnecessary pause in the narrative (the fireside chat before the battle, the backstory about the detective's pet turtle) arising as a result of the writer being all tuckered out. (I guess that means we should be editing these out, right?)

The final book I read ("read") in February was Your Body Is Your Subconscious Mind, which is a lecture and an interview cobbled together, but substantial enough that I counted it as a book. Candace Pert is a pharmacologist who has researched and written about the interconnection between the molecules our cells use to communicate and our physical, emotional, and spiritual states. Most interesting facts from Your Body Is Your Subconscious Mind: neurotransmitters are found everywhere in the body, not just in the brain. Cell receptors - the little "keyholes" into which neurotransmitters plug - are not steady state. They change configuration from moment to moment, determining to some degree which precise versions of neurotransmitters can "unlock" them. Neurotransmitters seem to work at a physical distance from the cells they trigger. The brain makes insulin.

Shorts
I read my way through the last bit of the Dark Faith anthology. In particular I loved "Ring Road" by Mary Robinette Kowal and Lucien Soulban's "The Choir." Catherynne M. Valente's zombie tale, "The Days of Flaming Motorcycles," was everything zombie fiction should be and more.

I started in on Fragile Things, Neil Gaiman's story collection. There is something about reading single-author story collections that is extra instructive. You pick up a subtle thread that runs through all the stories, even in a collection as eclectic as this one. If you want a sample, "A Study in Emerald," a Lovecraftian Sherlock Holmes story, is available online. Worth it for the fun typeset. Because I used to be an academic I enjoyed "Bitter Grounds" also.

With all this collection and anthology reading I didn't focus as much on online stories in February. I did pick up a copy of  Stupefying Stories (issue 1.3), because it's a new-ish magazine and I hadn't had the chance to look at it yet. I read and liked "Oogie Tucker's Mission" by Gary Cuba. Because I hang out in some woowoo social circles who are all "2012! The end is nigh!" the final image of this story stuck with me for a while. More on Stupefying in my post on my March readings.

My final recommendation for the month is "Killing Merwin Remis" by Jason Helmandollar, a gem that I found in my Pseudopod feed, originally posted in September 2011. If you have ever had a neighbour you hated, this is for you. Big Anklevich's narration is absolutely delicious.

By the Lake

So, I've been away. Specifically, I've been in a Muskoka chair on the grassy shore of this jewel of a Northern Ontario lake. While I was there, and during the bits of September and early October that weren't spent there, I was sick with Deathflu (tm).

Look out for this flu, people. Everyone I know who caught it ended up with wicked bronchitis that stretched on for weeks. I'm (mostly) better now, but it took a while.

But ours is not to whine. My point is that normally while I'm up on Lake Charming, I spend most of my days scampering through the woods, meditating, and doing tai chi. The wild energies in this pristine natural setting are nothing short of mind blowing. No coincidence that throughout history, those who like to meditate tend to retreat to mountainous caves where no one will bother them and there is a low chance of human contact. The Lake Charming property is home to deer, moose, otters, beavers, herons, loons, ducks, jays, chipmunks, red squirrel, bear, and wolves. (Wolves!) It's an amazing place for a retreat.

This year, though, I was debilitated with Deathflu (tm). I had no choice but to sit in a Muskoka chair and read. (I know. It's terrible, isn't it?)

And read I did. I read up a storm.

I read at home, but it's all too easy here to get caught up in television watching and the daily grind. Some days it seems like it's all I can do to grab twenty minutes with a book, never mind the long solitary hours necessary to finish a novel or a story collection in one bite. But it's all about how you choose to spend the time you have, you know? And yet again I remembered how wonderful it is to sink into books and not come up for air. Since I've been back, I've been cultivating my reading habit on three fronts:

• novels! This week I read Uglies by Scott Westerfeld (wow) and Hater by David Moody (double wow)
• short stories! I've taken up a new reading challenge that I'm tracking at Stringing Words. I've pledged to read a short story a day in November
• research! It's only three short weeks before the beginning of NaNoWriMo - that's National Novel Writing Month for those of you who have been living in a hole. I'm planning an epic plot featuring political intrigue in an alternative England ruled by female necromancers. To gear up, I'm reading Machiavelli's The Prince, and reviewing Shakespeare's first tetralogy (the Henry VI plays and Richard III) 

What are you reading?

Read This: Mama Fish by Rio Youers

You know when you read a book and there's just something super familiar about it? It's not just that the characters are like you in some way, although they might be. It's more like you're talking to someone who grew up in the same town you did, and is almost exactly your age. You share a slang, a lingo, a frame of reference, or several frames of reference. It's uncanny.

I had this feeling, persistently, while reading Mama Fish by Rio Youers. I chalk it up to the fact that the narrator, Patrick Beauchamp, is pretty much exactly my age, and Youers is from Canada, so there may be some crypto-Canadian subtleties in there that lulled me into a sense of familiarity. Like Patrick, I've been in a near-death-causing accident (although I busted my arms and head, not my back, so I'm still able to walk and only partly made of metal). More importantly, Youers is a great writer, so the experience of reading Mama Fish is immersive.

This slender novella riffs on a couple of familiar tropes: the rapid absorption of new technologies into society and the weirdo kid at school, but does so in a manner that's completely fresh. The story flips between Patrick's memories of his spectacularly failed attempt to befriend Kelvin Fish, the high school outcast, and his present-day experiences as father and paraplegic. When he goes back to his old home town, past meets present, and there is revelation! and cataclysm! The writing is lyrical, and the subject matter speculative.

If I could recommend Mama Fish solely on the use of one word, it would be "whale," used as a verb, as in "to whale on" someone or something, as in, to beat the crap out of him / her / it. I say it often, but to see it written down is something else. Here's the paragraph, part of the scene in which Patrick finds a couple of bullies beating up on Kelvin Fish:

The cluster of trees was on the corner of Jackson and Columbus. They enclosed a lousy scrub of land where people used to dump their broken appliances and take their dogs for a crafty, no-need-to-scoop poop (you'll find a Dunkin' Donuts there today - make of that what you will). Hidden from the road, it was the perfect spot for a couple of bullies to whale on a defenseless kid.

I know, right?

Mama Fish could have been a technophobe's delight, a morality tale that tsk-tsks about the weirdness of our deep interconnectedness with the gadgets that we love so dearly. It does go there for some passages, but it doesn't stop there, which is part of its brilliance.

More impressively, Youers slings metaphors and similes like he's frickin' Mary Gaitskill. An accident victim's body is contorted on the road, "his legs curved over his head like a scorpion's tail," while "pale rags of steam fluttered in the air" from a busted-up car.

Personally, I like using simile and metaphor, but those moments in my writing always feel like my feet are leaving the ground, and I'm just as likely to face plant as I am to perform a neat shoulder roll and come up with my hands in a "ta-daaa!" (See what I did there?) More often than not, I stick with concrete description rather than go for a metaphor or simile, out of fear that I will fall flat on my face and cause a fuss. Reading Mama Fish reminded me of how poetic language can enhance a story. If you're a speculative fiction writer who is reading to enhance your craft, you could do worse than pick up a copy of Mama Fish.

Read This: Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban

One of the worst parts of being a grad student in English literature was slowly coming to look upon the act of reading as a chore. When you have to read, process, and produce gobs of insight in short order, it can really crush the enjoyment factor right out of you.

One of the best parts of being a grad student was having great professors who had incredible taste in literature. One of these, a very nice man who ran a course called "Modern and Postmodern Novel," introduced me to Riddley Walker.

Now that the emotional dents caused by grad school have started to smooth themselves out, I've been going back over my bookshelf and picking up things I remember thinking were cool back in the day. I just finished re-reading Riddley Walker, and let me tell you, it's everything I remembered and more.

Riddley Walker is basically post-apocalyptic fiction meets Tom Sawyer. It's 2300 years after some kind of man-made catastrophe, probably nuclear in nature, has plunged humanity, or at least England, into a new dark ages. Riddley Walker has just turned twelve, which makes him a man by his culture's standards. Through a series of happenstances, he finds himself running away from his semi-nomadic group and heading off for adventure with a pack of wild dogs and a boy his age called "the Ardship of Cambry." Hilarity, heartbreak, explosions, and an encounter with Mr. Punch ensue.

The thing that makes Riddley Walker both challenging and fascinating to read is the language. Reading page one of this book is like cracking open The Canterbury Tales for the first time. Your brain processes it at first as "foreign language: cannot read." By the time you're done page one, you're sort of getting it, but the language continues to be surprising and amazing through the entire book.

Here's what I mean:

Where they are theyre up side down in the groun. Like youwl see a picter of your self up side down in the water theres a stoan self of your self in the groun and walking foot to foot with you. You put your foot down and theywl put ther foot up and touching yours. Walking with you every step of teh way yet youwl never see them.

Theywl stay unner the groun longs youre on top of it. Comes your time to ly down for ever then the stoan man comes to the top of the groun they think theywl stan up then. They cant do it tho. Onlyes strenth they had ben when you ben a live. Theyre lying on the groun trying to talk only theres no soun theres grean vines and leaves growing out of ther mouf....them stoans ben trying to talk only they never wil theyre jus only your earf stoans your unner walkers. Trying ot be men only cant talk. They had earf for sky wylst you had air.

My spellcheck went crazy while I was typing that.

The entire book is full of the tragedy of everything Riddley's world has lost, as well as the natural energy and hope associated with change - change that Riddley himself helps to perpetuate. It's everything that great science fiction should be: rigorously imagined, and fired with the passions of its characters. There's enough difference between Riddley's language and ours that Hoban gets to sneak in some concepts not fully imaginable to most people today, but obviously real and true in Riddley's world.