Novel Gazing Redux

It is time for some favorite things. I’ll start, and you join in.

1. Cloudberries.
2. Best-aunts who smuggle jars of cloudberries into unrelated gifts.
3. My ice cream lady.
4. Introducing my ice cream lady to the concept of cloudberries, because cool people and cool things should meet from time to time.
5. I do actually like crisp apple streudels. The song was pretty on-point there.
6. Clean sheets.
7. The library.
8. Transparent coping mechanisms that actually work.
9. Ambers, the fossilized tree resins.
10. Ambers, my niece and my friend.
11. Snow.
12. Trees. No, really, all of them. I like trees. I have taken to declaring myself a tree whenever anybody has a personality quiz on social media. Jo helped me figure out that I don’t have a totem animal, I have trees, and so then I answered a totem animal quiz with “I’m a tree,” and now I am answering “Which Hobbit character are you?” and “What is your Myers-Briggs?” and “Which heavy metal band are you?” with “I’m a tree,” because hey, it worked the first time. Probably this will stop amusing me at some point. But this is not yet that point.

Now you.

Several people do “first line of each month” memes at the end of the year, but the fact that I do book posts early in each month makes this less-than-scintillating blogging. (Especially since my book posts are not done chronologically, so I can’t use them to determine first book of the month.) But I went back through my archives just to see, for my own interest, what was what.

The moral of the story is that I need to stop being surprised by how many books I bounce off. I get books from the library on a pretty speculative basis–“someone but I forget who” is good enough for a recommendation when it comes to library books. “Maybe I’ll like this” is often enough followed by “okay, cool” to be worth my extensive library use, but it’s also very often followed by “orrrrr not, ew.” So: I will try to stop expressing surprise that the thing I expect to happen has happened quite so much. Really. Sorry.

But I really think this is a feature. I feel the same way about food: if you’re not trying stuff you don’t like, you’re not trying enough stuff. You’re missing stuff that would be on the borders of what you think you like but could turn out to be awesome. On Twitter last night, Jonathan Strahan asked if there was too much sff being published, if/since readers couldn’t keep up with it all. And that struck me as–how do I put this politely. Hmm. That struck me as filled with some quite wrong assumptions. It is not a problem if the world is filled with more wonderful things than I can ever behold or taste or read or learn or do. That is what we call a really good thing.

Also, we don’t all like the same stuff. If there’s just exactly as much sff as “a reader” can read in a year, there’s not nearly enough sff to keep me personally happy, because I will not like great swaths of it. I read faster than most people (which is not a statement of moral superiority but just a fact), and many of them like things I don’t like. Which: hurray for them! As we used to say in the dark and flannel-clad days of the nineties, rock on with your bad self! Eat my share of the pineapple while you’re at it!

And then if I miss sff that I would like that’s published right now, it will be there later for me to find later, when TexAnne or RushThatSpeaks or Papersky says, “You haven’t read Thingy? READ THINGY!!!”* And then I will! And there will be rejoicing over the reading of Thingy! Hooray! See? This is a good story with a happy ending.

I get that poor Mr. Strahan is probably feeling overwhelmed reading for Year’s Best purposes. I do. But a) that experience is not at all generalizable; b) there is no great advantage to everyone reading the same thing; and also c) nobody put a gun to his head and made him do this job as far as I’m aware. Oh, and also d) anyone who treats editors of any volume of Year’s Best as though they are idiots or jerks or whatever if they didn’t happen to get to Particular Story X is themselves being an idiot or a jerk or whatever. Don’t do that. Editors are humans. They will give it their best, but any “the best of” volume should be automatically prefaced in your mind with “SOME OF,” and on you go, not hassling the editors of same.

While I was writing this, XKCD popped up a post about reading every book. Heh. Lovely timing, internets.

*It might be someone else. But let’s be realistic here.

Lyndsay Faye, The Gods of Gotham. Historical murder mystery that in no way lives up to its title but is interesting anyway: very very early New York policing (that is, early policing, not early NY–mid-1800s, not the Dutch), party politics, etc. I will keep on with Faye’s stuff in this vein. I like historical mysteries.

Stuart Firestein, Ignorance: How It Drives Science. A paean to the stuff we don’t know, particularly the informed and thoughtful ways of assessing what we don’t know. A brief read, good fun, amusing in spots, nothing spectacular.

Tim Flannery, Among the Islands: Adventures in the Pacific. Too many personal details, not enough bat zoology. More small mammals, Tim Flannery! Nobody cares what you had to drink! Bats! Rodents! Etc.!

Christopher Fowler, Full Dark House. The first in the Peculiar Crimes Unit series, a mystery in two timelines (“contemporary” and WWII). Not amazing but readable, and I am looking for new mystery series, so I will probably read more.

Jessica Day George, Tuesdays at the Castle. A magical castle and its children work together to thwart evildoers. Go castle. Very much a middle-grade book.

Jan Guillou, Birth of the Kingdom. The last of the trilogy, and you’ll really want to start at the beginning. I loved this, but Swedish historical political novels are a thing I adore. This one was all set in Sweden; Arn had returned from the Crusades.

David G. Hartwell, ed., Year’s Best SF 18. Discussed elsewhere.

Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost. About Belgium and its relationship with the Congo region. Its horrible, horrible relationship. This is one of those things that I felt I should read to be better-informed about world history, but there’s a reason that that period is something of a template for evil. Adam Hochschild is very very good at writing about horrible things. I recommend him if you feel the need to read about horrible things and you want an author who will recognize the horrible and deal with it appropriately. (Also he included all sorts of stuff about the black Americans who were missionaries and lobbyists for the region, which I did not previously know and which was cool.)

John Kelly, The Graves Are Walking: The Great Famine and the Saga of the Irish People. And speaking of cheerful topics! But again: the Irish potato famine was a major thing, and I felt the need to be better informed. Kelly is really quite good about recognizing the ways in which the upper classes and absent landlords didn’t actually screw up, so that he can focus on the ways they really, really did.

Karen Lord, The Best of All Possible Worlds. I miss this kind of SF. The kind that does divergent groups of humans on different planets! I need more of that kind! This is like the SF I read tons of when I was 12, except smarter and better about a wide variety of demographics. Do want. The telepathy part is also in that category, except that I can take or leave telepathy books. But the rest is smart and good enough that the neutral of telepathy does not drag the book down to neutral. Mooooore.

Philip Reeve, Fever Crumb. If you want a YA about postapocalyptic whosits living in a giant head, this is for you. You do? I know you do. There are several people who do. Postapocalyptic whosits are very popular these days.

Ira Rutkow, James A. Garfield. What it says on the tin, with a focus on the medical stuff following the assassination. Sadly I had already read Candace Millard’s Destiny of the Republic, which has the same focus and is in every way a better book. So really, if you want to know about Garfield, go read the Millard, and if you still want to know more about Garfield after that, this Rutkow book will not help.

Sherwood Smith, Whispered Magics. Kindle. Some of the best of Sherwood’s short stories as well as a few that overweighted message with mode for me. I have always loved and always will love “Mom and Dad at the Home Front,” and there are some other really lovely things in here too. Well worth the nickel. (Note: nickel is proverbial. Actual book costs more than a nickel.)

It is Santa Lucia morning, and my house smells of yeast and saffron and hope.

Earlier this week, my friend’s son C’s class at school was learning about late-year holidays from different traditions, religious and non-religious. C is 7, and my friend commented that he didn’t understand why his family couldn’t celebrate all the things. And I thought about it, and I said, “…I don’t understand either.” Clearly you will behave differently when you’re making your own religious observance than when you are honoring the fact that other people do, but…holidays good. I am with C: let us have holidays.

But I did eventually figure out why not, and that is because C is 7, so he can’t do the work of making these holidays, and he is one of seven kids, so his parents kind of have full plates already. And I love the lussekatter–I love taking flour and butter and sugar and saffron and making light and hope in the dark of winter. But after the knead I kind of wanted to go back to bed myself, and I’m not 7. Sometimes joy just shows up naturally, but sometimes it’s hard work. Sometimes you have to chase down joy and club it repeatedly to subdue it and drag it back to your lair.

My mother’s favorite Christmas special is “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas,” the one with the wee mousies. And it has a song in it that is very much what she wanted to teach me, I think, about working and planning for the miracles you want to see in the world.

It’s very dark. It’s very, very cold. And there are sides of the dark and the cold we don’t even tell each other. But I have done battle with the dough and emerged triumphant, and victory is tasty indeed.

Happy Santa Lucia Day.

The first one in 2006. 2007, the beginning of the story. 2007, the end of the story. 2008. 2009. 2010. 2011. Last year.

Today I have a tired. Actually I have enough for two, if anybody wants to split off some of my tired and take it away for me and still leave me with a tired. It is December, it is so very much December, and I spent most of last week being sick, and despite having made epic strides in Christmas shopping online in the last two days, I am behind. I am so behind.

And my brain, dear sweet wacky brain, keeps making me behind-er.

Brain: “let’s not work on the new novel just now” does not map to “let’s work on a brand new short story instead!” That is not what that means, brain.

Brains.

Anyway, someone on FB asked a question about how she should spell a character name, because she was afraid that readers would mispronounce it. And I went, “Ooh ooh! I know this one, pick me pick me!” The answer is: they will. I mean, ideally not all of them. Ideally not even most of them. But if you write a perfectly normal name like Zhang, there will be readers who are twelve years old or from the sticks or some other explanation and will pronounce it Zuh-hang. You cannot let yourself get upset by this. You do your best and move on, and when someone has questions for you about your character Zuh-hang, you tell yourself, “I am so lucky, people read and care about my characters.” (And maybe you politely correct them.) But honestly, people cannot pronounce the names of actual other human beings they have reason to interact with. Ask Mr. Hjalmarsson of the Chicago Blackhawks. So the ones in your head? They’re going to get mispronounced. It is so far down the list of things for you to worry about.

Someone on the internet is wrong. Someone reading your fiction is wrong. Channel your inner Norwegian farmer uncle, say, “Ayeh, that’ll happen,” and get back to milking the metaphorical cows. (Really, not everybody has an inner Norwegian farmer uncle? Hmm. I will have to think on this.)

Dear self:

You tend to forget these things. Here is a list of what to remember. Not necessarily applicable to other people. Just you, self. Just you.

1. Make people who give you things in Christmas bags take the Christmas bags back again after you have opened them if at all possible. They like using them! You have no objection to getting them but hate using them! Win win! (1a. Find something to do with the stack of Christmas bags in the closet.)

2. Do not buy green wrapping paper. Really. You love green. I know. And some of the Christmas stuff is a beautiful deep dark green that looks great in the store. But when you, yes, you, self, imagine it under the green Christmas tree, you will invariably be disappointed at how it blends in rather than lending a festive hue. You will not reach for the green wrapping paper. The green wrapping paper will be with you always. Do not buy more.

3. Do not buy the giant rolls of wrapping paper. I know, they are economical, and you feel thrifty and pleased, and sometimes they have quite lovely patterns. But I know you. After the fourth year of taking out the same roll of quite lovely dark red with white snowflakes, it will appear dingy and sad from its sojourn in the closet, and you will feel dingy and sad. Don’t do it. Wrap in brown paper if you want to be economical; it will make you feel old-fashioned as well as thrifty. But mostly economize elsewhere and buy the only moderately giant rolls of wrapping paper.

4. There is a reason that toddler-Moo thought that “sparkly” and “sprinkly” were the same word. The shiny sparkly paper will give you sparkly carpet, sparkly sweaters, sparkly smudges on your forehead. Leave it in the store to sparkle there.

5. Make sure–no, really really sure–no, check again–that the shiny paper you have selected is not made of mylar. Even your mother, who objects pretty firmly to religiously-based swearing on religious grounds, has been heard to refer softly to the one remaining roll as “that damned mylar.” It is damned stuff, it is damnable stuff, and you are wrapping presents, not filling balloons. Check again to make sure. They may not have to tell the truth about whether things actually contain blueberries in this country, but they are not allowed to lie about mylar wrapping paper, so Upton Sinclair did not live and die in vain.

Just trying to look out for you, self.

Love,
me