Sometimes, I really should know better. But, what the hell, I figured "Harry Potter fans will love it," was more marketing than anything else, so I picked up Emily Drake's The Magickers on a lark with a gift card and finally got around to starting it.

( Spoilers and disappointments )

Seventy pages in, and I think I have quite used up whatever benefit my doubt had. I'm sure that there are enough differences to avoid copyright infringement outright, but whether they're meant to be winks to HP fans or poorly-masked analogues, either way it's just tired and derivative. Bleh.

Tags: books, commentary, fantasy

Is it a coincidence that I'm doing a show with nudity at the same time I keep running across people who are scared of referencing genitalia? We already know little girls shouldn't know what to call their pee pee spot. Now we discover that many librarians don't feel like a nut:

The word "scrotum" does not often appear in polite conversation. Or children's literature, for that matter.

Yet there it is on the first page of "The Higher Power of Lucky," by Susan Patron, this year's winner of the Newbery Medal, the most prestigious award in children's literature. The book's heroine, a scrappy 10-year-old orphan named Lucky Trimble, hears the word through a hole in a wall when another character says he saw a rattlesnake bite his dog, Roy, on the scrotum.

"Scrotum sounded to Lucky like something green that comes up when you have the flu and cough too much," the book continues. "It sounded medical and secret, but also important."

The inclusion of the word has shocked some school librarians, who have pledged to ban the book from elementary schools, and reopened the debate over what constitutes acceptable content in children's books. The controversy was first reported by Publishers Weekly, a trade magazine.

I think my previous response to the "brouhaha over hoo haa" carries over here. I especially love that a librarian seems to think "you won't find men's genitalia in quality literature." Do they not cover past "See Spot Run" in Library Science programs these days?

(via)

Tags: books, commentary, culture

I have a more in-depth essay on the methods at play in the recent GLA mini, but for now, quick reactions to stuff I've read or seen lately:

Sir Apropos of Nothing: The opening chapter of Peter David's antihero fantasy series has a great hook. Unfortunately, we then backtrack to the rather literal conception of the title character, and embark on a lengthy history of same. For my money, the book just kind of wanders until it manages to get back to the moment that opened the book, and the whole thing suffers from the first person narrator working way too hard to explain how any seemingly commendable act on his part was either motivated by selfishness or entirely by accident.

Justice League Unlimited: The League members in flashback do and say nothing that requires them specifically as opposed to any number of Bat family members (and some of them are just problematic: why don't Hawkgirl and the other flying characters just fly over the stupid thorn hedge?). Amanda Waller, too, could have just as easily (and possibly more logically) been Batman Beyond's aged Barbara Gordon. This didn't feel like a (series?) finale for JLU so much as a repurposed Batman Beyond finale.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: Fun and sadistic, which is what it probably should be. I find it interesting that, when Willy Wonka was in the movie's title, Charlie was the one with a character arc. Now that Charlie's back in the title, Willy Wonka gets the development.

Fantastic Four: As an action comedy I thought it hit most of the right notes. I laughed a lot. I had a couple "hey, that's pretty neat" moments. And I very much enjoyed watching Jessica Alba's Sue Storm have all of her "Look at me, I'm sexy!" clothing choices go right under Reed Richards' radar.

War of the Worlds: Spielberg does an amazing job of making me believe the impending, inescapable death descending from the tripods onto the recurring, packed-in crowds. The problem comes when I'm then asked to believe that the protagonists in the middle of said throngs escape their doom when, in most cases, they do nothing different than their slaughtered co-crowd (and often do stupider things). After the first few escapes, the convenience of it all is just as inescapable as the death seemed to be.

Tags: books, movies, reviews, tv

I totally meant to do this meme (assigned me about a month ago by stotangirl). What can I say? I'm hopeless. Anyway:

1. Total number of books I own: I have no idea, and calculation's encumbered by the fact that the bulk of my books are still in storage under my mother's house in Michigan. But I'll do some random guesstimating and say each of the containers can hold about 80 paperbacks or 25ish hardcovers. Most of my books are in paperback, and I seem to remember there being somewhere around six or seven containers, plus what I've bought since coming to Florida and gotten as gifts...

My completely unscientific estimate is 500 or more.

2. The Last book I Bought: I believe it was Perdido Street Station by China Mieville. I couldn't resist the messed up description on the back cover involving a psychedelic insect. It's still, however, on The Stack of Unread Shame.

3. The Last Book I Read: Okay, the last book I finished reading was Alice Hoffman's The Probable Future. In the "partially read" stack are Peter David's Sir Apropos of Nothing and my perennial forays into the massive Bradbury Stories : 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales.

4. Five books that mean a lot to me: Given how molasses-slow I am at reading prose, there aren't a lot of books I've read multiple times, so I'm taking this one back to "mean a lot" rather than "read a lot," since the latter would include pretty much two books (though they're both on this list, too):

Beloved by Toni Morrison - My first time reading this was also my first time experiencing literary criticism that refused to accept fantastic elements as literal. Seriously, the professor teaching it (and likely because of that, a good chunk of the class) decided all that wacky ghost stuff was entirely metaphorical and never meant to be taken literally. Given how the book ends, I found a lot of humor in watching the professor deny the supernatural elements without any irony.

A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley - I love Jane Smiley because she's always trying different things. She did murder mystery with Duplicate Keys, farce with Moo, American settler memoir with Lydie Newton. I don't always like the results, but I always cheer the refusal to be niched. A Thousand Acres was my first Smiley read, and I still like it as a hybrid of midwestern family drama and feminist fiction-as-criticism.

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury - Another narrative with an ulterior motive. I've been in a couple different debates over this one. There were quite a few "Bradbury's too good to be science fiction" kerfuffles, but the more interesting rumble came when a professor told me this book wasn't literature because it was, instead, a polemic disguised as narrative. As with Morrison above, I argued it was silly to insist that prose was so incapable of multi-tasking. Clearly, it's always seemed to me, the book's a polemic and science fiction and literature. So nyah.

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie - You know, this is still the only Rushdie book I've read, though I've read it three times. Anyway, Rushdie provides the ultimate unreliable narrator. Yes, he's crazy and he lies, but Sinai's so hopelessly invested in his narrative that I always wind up buying into it. It's one of most painfully, compellingly true lies I know.

Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman - Hoffman's one of the few people I read who can get me just with her prose style. This book was my first time discovering it. I was especially impressed by the way Hoffman played with her pov tenses to create suspense: each section of the book has its own "present," and the narrative in each moves from the past up to that point. It settles into present tense for short while, then Hoffman shunts the present to another spot in the future and starts all over. It lets the omniscient narrator truthfully declare absolutes like "never" even if later story points are contradictory. I get really excited about word craft and technique when I read Hoffman for reasons like that.


I'm supposed to tag five people, but I'm not, since I tagged when I did this one with movies instead of books (and cornered myself into doing the thing twice, obviously, by declaring "you can do this with books instead if you want." That'll learn me). But, hey, if you want to give it a go, have at.

Tags: books

I've been seething a little, ever since I read about the latest claptrap attempting to protect the frail children from discovering that homosexual people exist:

[Oklahoma]'s House of Representatives on Monday passed a nonbinding resolution calling for gay-themed children's books and "other age-inappropriate material" to be moved to the adult section of public libraries.

Republican state Rep. Sally Kern introduced the measure after complaints from the parents of a 6-year-old who had checked out "King and King," a book about two young princes who fall in love, from a library in the Oklahoma City suburb of Bethany.

I seethed, but didn't say much. It's a nonbinding resolution, which so far as I can tell lets the politicians behind it claim they've done something without actually passing any forceful legislation. If they want to set themselves up to throw their hands in the air and say "we tried, but those gosh durn liberal librarians did it," fine. The libraries seemed to be handling the measure in stride, so I'd let it go.

Others, it seems, aren't letting it go:

U.S. Rep. Walter Jones, R-N.C ... [has] introduced the Parental Empowerment Act of 2005, legislation that would create parent-based advisory boards to review at the local level material eyed for school libraries and classrooms. It would let parents, in blocks of five to 15, decide whether the country's youngest children are ready for themes of homosexuality and gay marriage, for example, Jones said.

He, for one, doesn't believe they are.

"To me, there is nothing more important than our children and their future," Jones said Tuesday. "The 5-, 6-, 7-, 8- and 9-year-olds - they're as innocent as a baby, and their parents need to know what's in their library."

So now the seething gets to be too much, and thus I rant.

I'm really exhausted by the continuing rounds of "children are too young to understand homosexuality" arguments. Mostly because they come in one of two varieties: those that seem convinced homosexuality can't be explained without explaining homosexual intercourse, and those that claim children will be confused trying to understand all these complicated kinds of love.

The first argument should be obvious in its idiocy. I shouldn't have to build a strong argument against it because, I'm sorry, it's just willfully ignorant.

The second has the ring of truth, but is just as flawed. It's basis in the perceived "simplicity" of a child's mind ignores a number of contradictory evidence, not the least of which is young children's uncontested ability to pick up fluency in complex languages in the space of time it takes an adult to manage your basic high school competency in a language exam (usually accompanied by an accent that makes native speakers wince).

One of the many words those tiny, simple brains learn is "love." They encounter it in "safe" fairy tales like "Beauty and The Beast."

Beauty loves her father so much that she takes his place as a hostage of The Beast. Beauty loves The Beast, so much so that her tears of love transform him into the man of her dreams. They marry and live happily ever after.

Clearly Beauty is a treacherous creature, bereft of loyalty. First she loves her father, then she loves the beast. Or so she claims. Surely, if she loved her father, she'd have married him instead of leaving him all alone.

This isn't that hard. Little Johnny knows there's a difference between the way Mommy loves Daddy, the way Mommy loves the family cat, and the way Mommy loves him. If he doesn't, I fear Little Johnny is either simple-in-the-bad-way, or there are some disturbing things going on at Little Johnny's house. Love isn't all the same thing. We trust kids to understand that when it comes to opposite sex relationships; why would it be such an amazing leap for them to apply that to the same sex variety?

And you can pull out your "parents should decide when they learn" arguments all you want, so long as, when using that line of reasoning, you can honestly say you find it reasonable--rather than ridiculous, bordering on negligent--for a single mother to strongly object that her child is reading books at school that involve dual parenting. Because otherwise, you clearly aren't advocating parental control of when a child learns about relationships, but only parental control of when a child learns about relationships you yourself have a problem with.

What it all boils down to is that I think it's long past time that supervisory groups--be they the government or "Family Advocacy" cooperatives or whatever--stopped telling people that the very fact of their existence constitutes Adult Content. I have a hard time coming up with something more insulting than that.

Though, because I'm just disturbed enough, now I totally want to get a shirt that says "Parental Advisory: my life contains homosexual themes."

Tags: books, lgbt

Kevin Melrose links to this London Telegraph article, highlighting this bit about the appeal, or lack thereof, in science fiction:

[O]n the whole, the predictive world [science fiction authors] ask me to join is one I don't much care about: it seems pale and uninteresting to me compared with the fascinating richness of the real, complicated world around me. For my money, there is too much sophisticated technology, too much clever science and not enough raw emotion.

I always want to get snarky at those sorts of sentiments (that X genre--rather than Y book--focuses on its genre components to the exclusion of character), but I'm going to try not to because, really, that's rather a waste. Sarah Crompton, the author, admits she's generalizing, and focuses on the work rather than the fandom. A reasoned response only seems the polite thing to do.

Like Crompton, I haven't read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, so my comments will be just as generalized as hers. Let me counter her hypothosis with this suggestion: perhaps it's not (always) that literature of the fantastic spends too much energy on its fantastic and not enough on its literature. Maybe people used to "real world" reading, though, are more easily distracted by those fantastic elements, so much so that they miss the character and emotion and other elements that they feel make their traditional fare deeper and more meaningful.

I think it's a general principal for a lot of things, really. When you aren't used to cars, you look for that shiny one that goes real fast. Then you kind of get used to cars. They serve a purpose, and there are better or worse ones that are better or worse partly for their shiny but also for less tangible but entirely integral elements like crash test ratings and fuel economy and the like. That doesn't mean people who check those elements don't still appreciate the shiny exterior. Neither does it mean the shiny exterior serves no purpose other than being shiny. Aerodynamics play a part in feul efficiency, after all. Color can help with visibility to other drivers or reducing interior temperature problems. The sheen itself may be from a protective coating to help inhibit rust.

You get the point. Good writers bring in shiny elements that also serve important, complicated, human functions in their work. But if you aren't used to that, it's entirely possible that you'd be distracted by that bright red, sleek exterior, and never quite manage to see what else is going on both with and within that shell.

Tags: books, commentary, sci-fi

My choice for follow-up after giving up on The Runes of the Earth was Alice Hoffman's The Probable Future. I don't think I'll be giving much more than you can find on the dust cover in terms of plot details, but just in case, your requisite warning and cut tag:

( click for a vision of more )

Tags: books, reviews

Apparently, my longing for childish things is a spreading infection on my mind. Johanna mentioned a series from her childhood which struck a note in my brain. I remembered a series of books I'd read as a kid. I recalled the first one involved a clock that I was pretty sure struck thirteen. I remembered Edward Gorey-like covers.

Random googling and fiddling with the google phrase finally got my memory in gear, and I found it: The House With a Clock in Its Walls, by John Bellairs. And those Gorey-esque illos I remember? Turns out that's because Gorey illustrated the series.

I remember reading three of the books, though it looks like there are a few more. I feel nostalgia crying out for me to track them down and re-read them. Then I hear The Stack of Unread Shame laughing maniacally, and I think maybe I'll curb that re-reading until I make something more dent-like in the current stack.

Still, hooray for additional memories of good reads from my youth.

Tags: anecdotes, books

I've been trying desperately to like Stephen R. Donaldson's The Runes of the Earth. I was so very excited to see a new Thomas Covenant book on the stands late last year. I remembered finding the first two trilogies (or, most of them. I tracked the other books down) at a garage sale when I was a freshman in high school. I also remember liking them quite a bit. The chance to return to a world where a leper with a wedding ring could change the world had me all a flutter. I added the book to my wish list for Christmas, and my mother was kind enough to get it.

Things were going okay for a while. I was glad Donaldson or the publisher had seen fit to include a "what has gone before" section, since it had been so long between the second Covenant trilogy and this new book. I was notably creeped out by the current states of Covenant's family. And if Linden Avery (Covenant's former love interest and cohort in the second trilogy) was a little morose and ineffective, well, she was stuck in the real world. Soon enough she'd transition and be effective again.

Then she transitioned, and one of the changes to The Land in her absence insured she wouldn't have the power she'd made use of previously. Okay, okay, I can work with that. Obstacles make for stronger characters.

Except, really, she's not so strong. I know this because the narrator keeps reminding me, with all the purple prose he can muster, just how exhausted or overwhelmed or confused or frustrated Linden is. How she just can't bear any more. How she's either on the verge of tears or past the point of tears or fainting under the strain of her physical exertion. Each time, she's somehow sustained by the deep lore of The Land, succored by treasure berries or buoyed up by exotic spices in food or filled with the energy of Earthpower in hurtloam. Well, succored just long enough for her to go a few more feet, then once again she's faced with overwhelmingly confusing emotional exhaustion on the verge of tears and past it that clearly mean she can't go on. Oh, wait! More magic berries. All better. Or not.

And when Linden isn't bemoaning her circumstances and wondering how she can ever go another step, she's in the midst of exposition. Linden tells someone about her last journey to The Land. Linden hears a tale of the land from Covenant's first trip. Linden ponders a tale she's heard in juxtaposition to other tales she's heard or told. What can it all mean? How can it all fit together? So many questions unanswered. Here's one: Why the hell do I need to read reams of this stuff when you already recapped the whole bloody thing in the prefacing section?

I trudged through about two-thirds of this thing, though, because I kept thinking, here, finally, we've reached the end of the overwhelming self-pity and exposition from hell. Surely now she'll start, you know, doing something. I mean, there's a story to tell in the present, isn't there?

Then I thought: you know what, I did this to myself once already. I slogged through the entirety of Gregory Maguire's Lost because I told myself the man who'd done such a nice job on Wicked couldn't possibly be writing the going-nowhere, self-indulgent piece of annoyance Lost seemed to be. That time, there was a faint glimmer of interesting around the last 20 pages, but of course that's when the book stopped, so yeah, it really was the piece of annoyance it seemed to be.

Given the size of the Stack of Unread Shame, and the fact that it had been a good month and a half of trying to make my way through the book so far (I'm a slow reader at the best of times. It's especially hard to make prose headway when I just want to yell at the protagonist), I finally decided--despite a new glimmer of possible forward motion--it just wasn't worth forcing my way through another 200 pages.

I don't know if it's Donaldson phoning it in. Possibly the original books were just as overwritten, but in high school, I thought that was Good Writing or something. I prefer to think it's the former, but either way I think the first and second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant won't be coming out for re-reading for me any time soon. I think I'll just remember them as compelling fiction and leave potential disillusionment out of the equation.

Tags: books, reviews

Despite the Stack of Unread Shame, I couldn't resist snatching up a copy of C.S. Friedman's The Wilding when I saw it in the bookstore a few months ago. I had read her Coldfire Trilogy first, but was really blown away by This Alien Shore, a book that seemed to revel in the thought of, well, alienness. The Wilding shares those sociological sci-fi tendencies and continues to play with the idea of just how different we can actually be from one another. In case of spoilers, a warning and a cut tag:

( Cross the War Border for your Wilding )

Much as I enjoyed it, though, all of Friedman's time spent showing off her cultural construction skills may have left the actual plot of the book to suffer. It takes most of the first half of the book just to introduce the key players, much of the next half to get those players into the same room together. Meanwhile, seemingly important people take whole chapters, only to wind up being more or less unnecessary to the overall action.

What's left, then, is something of a rush to the climax, and a denouement that isn't, really. Important Event happens, then there are a few short scenes which do little to wrap up the many loose ends, but rather point to some (to me) obvious questions. I'm left wondering if this is meant to set up follow up volume, or if, like her complex cultural elements, Friedman's ending is an attempt at better verisimilitude by not "finishing."

Tags: books, reviews