Book post!

[roadrunnertwice]

Things I Read During April

Tamara Draut—Strapped: Why America’s 20- and 30-somethings can’t get ahead (4/5)

Draut lays out and exhaustively footnotes the thing that we all intuitively sense: almost everyone currently under the age of 35 is economically screwed, in some impressively creative and permanent ways.

The biggest thing I took away from this book is that the lending industry needs to be cleaned out with a firehose. My god, what a cesspit.

Steven Brust—My Own Kind of Freedom (4/8)

Expertly-done Firefly fanfic!

Minuses:

• The chapter titles were kind of silly and irritating.
• Overuse of that trick where you show how everyone’s reacting to a certain reveal (or snippet of dialogue), but artificially hide the article in question.
• Uh, you’d think Jayne woulda learnt that lesson the first time.

Plusses:

• It’s a really good episode—new layers of complexity in the Alliance/Independent war, more Blue Hand men, lots of good stuff.
• The seeming nonsense with Jayne actually pays off with some legitimately solid character revelations.
• Brust can totally write Wash dialogue. Really, if you can get me a good Wash, I’m on board with you. He is my favorite.

Incidentally, this was the book I used to break in my new ebook reader.

Rachel Manija Brown—All the Fishes Come Home to Roost (4/13)

Okay, so someone or another, probably matociquala, linked one day to a really incredible series of posts entitled “A User’s Guide to PTSD.” I’ll wait here while you go read all three (start at the bottom one), because they are a work of art. The author self-deprecatingly bills them as an attempt to raise the general quality of Gundam fanfic, but they’re ultimately exactly what the title of the series says: a comprehensive and explicit manual laying out just how it feels to have post-traumatic stress disorder, in compulsively readable prose with a minimum of histrionics. (Wait, are you still reading this? Go, shoo!)

References to Gundam pilots notwithstanding, the author is her own source material, and the occasional details and hints about her childhood sounded absolutely nuts. By the end of the series, I was dying to hear the rest of the story, and the Lacey library was perfectly willing to oblige.

So anyway, this is the story of Brown’s childhood, which was spent in an Indian ashram run by an obscure religion with a distinctly cultish whiff to it. It is mindblowing. It is also quite funny.

Also, the fact that she is apparently still on decent terms with her parents is amazing to me—I’m not sure I’d have come out of that with my sense of filial connection intact. Be sure to read the author’s online postscript after you’re done with the book.

Various Authors—“Shadow Unit: Ballistic” (4/14)

Bang.

Not to give anything away, but this was probably the single creepiest thing I could have chosen to wash down All The Fishes with. One of my favorite eps so far.

(Also significantly clarified what the profilers mean when they talk about “mythology”—the UNSUB in this one has a more restrictive mythology than anyone since the lady from “Breathe.”)

Brenda Ueland—If You Want to Write (4/15, skimmed briefly and didn’t finish)

This one was a recommendation from either Will Shetterly’s or Emma Bull’s site (or maybe from one of their joint ones); it’s a motivational/writing advice book written by a Minneapolis woman in the 1930s. It didn’t speak to me, so I didn’t stick with it. (Although there was one chapter that made me say, “Hey, that sounds just like that aborted LJ post I was writing about John Darnielle’s songwriting style and why Michelle Branch totally sucks!” So that was gratifying.)

You might have noticed that I’ve listed a whole lot of writing advice books in these book report posts, and I thought I’d say something about that. It’s not so much that I’m searching for advice to follow, or that I need a manual for finding the inner me and bleeding it onto the page, or whatever the topic happens to be with the manual du jour; it’s more that there’s this really rough period between the time when you seriously commit to building something worth reading and the time when you start to see some kind of tangible evidence that you are not completely insane for doing so. (After you become a wanna-be/gonna-be but before you become a sorta-are, in other words.) Getting past that point entails a constant forward push against a gnawing suspicion that you’re off your rocker, which requires a sort of ablative ego-shield if you want to get through it alive. What I’ve been using writing advice books for (and all the writing advice posts I read on the web and don’t post about here) is to recharge and buttress that shield so that I can keep on moving forward even when it seems quixotic and pointless. So yes, I guess I’m using motivational books to motivate myself. I do feel faintly ridiculous for it, but what can you do.

Charles Stross—Toast (?/??, short story collection)

I forgot to write this one down, so I don’t know when I read it. February? Maybe. It’s a collection of mostly older stories; contains some good stuff, but not a must-read if you’re already familiar with his work.

Catherine M. Morrison—“Elvis in the Attic” (4/19, short story)

Elvis spores? What?! Generic characters, but well worth a read for the escalating weirdness. (Too bad the site it was hosted on went kablooey last year.)

Douglas Wolk—Reading Comics: How graphic novels work and what they mean (4/26)

A delightful collection of essays, and a satisfying chaser for the “YAY THEORY AND CRITICISM” mood I was in after EMP.

Wolk has a lot to say in this collection about the artier strain of American comics, but the best thing about the book is the way he defends the artistic and cultural value of cheesy superhero stuff. Highly recommended to people (like myself) who don’t really “get” modern superhero comics.

James Tiptree Jr.—“The Women Men Don’t See” (4/17, short story)

Quite awesome.

Elizabth Bear—“Your Collar” (4/23, short story)

…I’m not entirely sure how that last part worked. Maybe I’ll have to reread it later.

Emma Bull—“Shadow Unit: Endgames” (4/28)

(You know, I think reading the character Livejournals gave me the wrong idea going into this season. See, on LJ, Chaz Villette is the main character, with Worth and Gates in the main supporting roles and the rest of the cast as walk-ons. But in the arc of this first season, at least, Daniel Brady seems to be the central character.)

This: this was a good episode. The series seems to be hitting its thematic stride—as the profilers continue to talk about the Anomaly and the things it drives its hosts to do, the narrative thread seems to be having an extended conversation about free will. I dig the tension.

Lou Anders, ed—Fast Forward 1 (4/30, read about half of it)

Wow. Probably the most rock-solid anthology I’ve read in a long while. I’ll be back after May with the rest of the stories in it, but in the meantime:

• Robyn Hitchcock: “They Came From the Future” and “I Caught Intelligence” (poems)—Yeah, do the other anthologies on your shelf have Robyn Hitchcock songs? I didn’t think so.
• Tony Ballantyne: “Aristotle OS”—An extended philosopher joke disguised as a tech-support nightmare. True story: I read this right after I’d spent a whole morning wrestling with a printer and its obscure existential crises.
• Elizabeth Bear: “The Something-Dreaming Game”—Contains what may be the single bravest thing I’ve ever seen a fictional character do. No joke.
• Stephen Baxter: “No More Stories”—A touching story that made the top of my head come off. (And it totally faked me out, too! I was expecting a much less interesting explanation for the weirdness.)
• A.M. Dellamonica: “Time of the Snake”—Disquieting, but in a fairly conventional way. I didn’t feel too invested in it.
• Larry Niven and Brenda Cooper: “The Terror Bard”—Shades of Stross’s Accelerando. Not much in the way of new territory for me, but a nice little vision of life in a decaying solar system.
• Ken MacLeod: “Jesus Christ, Reanimator”—You know, I rather wish this one were true. I’d at least love to read Jesus flaming in his blog’s comments section.
• Mary A. Turzillo: “Pride”—Eh. You’ve pretty much read this story before.
• Gene Wolfe: “The Hour of the Sheep”—A perfectly bitchy little skewering—I loved it. (Except, you know, it would have actually worked better if he’d just stripped all the fantastickal/SF-nal elements out of it, because they distracted without adding anything. It was a plain old swordfighting story at heart, and seemed to be wanting a treatment more in the vein of Kushner’s Privilege of the Sword or the like. The only explanation I can think of for the random energy swords is that it’s a story from a recurring setting of his.)
• John Meaney: “Sideways From Now” (which might have actually been a novella, since it was like 70 pages long)—About a third to a half of this was devoted to a story I am well and truly tired of (“Mopey fellow misses dead wife so hard that he breaks reality,” c.f. The Raw Shark Texts et al), but the remainder is a fantastically engaging many-threaded adventure story, set in a clanking hulk of a mobile city that constantly crawls across the land in pursuit of the only known bubble of breathable air. Great atmosphere, beautiful renderings of a jury-rigged world, deft and respectful use of fantasy clichés… in other words, more than enough to compensate for the boring and mopey quantum engineer.

Comments

[nightswatch.livejournal.com]

If I'm not confusing her with someone else, Draut was actually on MPR a year or two ago pushing that book. She made a pretty convincing case, but it was interesting to see the generational gap that showed up among participants in the discussion; the boomers couldn't quite fathom that the problem might extend beyond merely personal lack of restraint, and the 20-somethings were all terribly aggrieved that life's so hard.

[roadrunnertwice]

Oh, god.

(She said in the introduction to the book that that exact generation gap was the reason she wrote it in the first place. Methinks some panelists were guilty of some skimming.)

[gyladia.livejournal.com]

"a constant forward push against a gnawing suspicion that you’re off your rocker"

I like the word gnawing. Currently I am reading an assigned book for a creative writing class I am taking and every time I pick it up, put it down, or even think about that book I get a feeling somewhere in the lower part of my stomach. If I breathe out really slowly and shallowly I can prolong it and try to pinpoint it.
But reading about motivation isn't helping me right now. That feeling never goes away. And I took the class because I have about 20 pages of a novel I've been writing (I know it's not a whole lot) but what I needed was for people to tell me what they didn't like and if there was anything they did like somewhere in that small mess. But it doesn't work like that apparently.
Ugh, it's like ravenous butterflies (and since I watched The Mist yesterday I'm having a hard time imagining even butterflies as nice bugs).