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The Books of July

During July I didn’t get as much reading/listening done as I often do. Summer takes up a lot of reading time.

Listened to:

The Water Knife — Paolo Bacigalupi (Narration by Almarie Guerra — who’s just fine to listen to.)

A violent and thrilling view of a near future filled with the conflicts of the New West- when water is running out and the drought just won’t lift. Sound familiar? Three character’s story arcs meet, cross, and recross. Angel the water knife: an enforcer employed by Las Vegas’ water mogul. Charged with obtaining (frequently by duress) and protecting the water rights that feed the Las Vegas fun machine and the arcologies — nearly self-sustaining living environments filled with water features and the rich who can afford to live there. Marie: a refuge from the dust bowl that is now Texas. One of the new Okies doing what ever she can to get by. Lucy Monroe: a journalist who has come to identify, perhaps too closely, with the residents of the now water starved Phoenix. It’s fiction but not so far-fetched when you consider the amount of corruption and violence that has accompanied the fight for water rights in the West in the past 150 years. It’s also got some pretty graphic violence and some almost tolerable sex scenes.

* Adults only. *

The Things they Carried — Tim O’Brien (narr. — Bryan Cranston aka Walter White or whatever- I’ve never seen the show, but the voice is prefect for OBrien’s stories.)

The pretense that these short stories are true stories continues all the way through the book, right down to its dedication to one of the characters — Rat Kiley. These are stories of Vietnam from the reaction of a kid getting his draft notice, through experiences “in country,” to the stories of those same soldiers at home again and living in a nation that doesn’t know what to do with them.
It’s an interesting meditation on the nature of fiction when a story teller uses it to tell more truth than can possibly be told in straight non-fiction. There are strong parallels to Phil Klay’s Redeployment which uses a similar technique to examine the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. O’Brien is IMO a better writer. As well, the national circumstances in which the soldiers were deployed and returned from deployment are different. And yet the same.

* An easier listen than I thought it would be. *

The Book Thief — Marcus Suzak (abandoned)

A story of a girl in WWII Germany and books. Told from the point of view of Death — which I should have liked and maybe would have liked if I had read the book. But listening to Allan Corduner try to do the voices of children just didn’t work for me.

* good reading book, bad audio book *

Neal Stephenson’s SevenEves (Great narrators. For the first two-thirds of the book Mary Robinette Knowel — a writer I admire whose work I cannot stand to read. It happens. For the last third Will Damron.)

Enjoyed the hell out of it. The moon breaks up and life on earth will end in two years. A race to get some fragment of the human race into space where they can sit out the destruction of earth (some 5000 years worth of it) and keep the species going. It has space ships and robots and nice geeky people and a couple of not so nice people. And a not too surprising ending — but I loved getting there.
There have been complaints in various circles that the Stephenson’s geekery is too much. That all those descriptions and bits of background and occasional info-dumps make the story too slow. I don’t find that to be the case. Especially in the audio-book version. There’s a nice leisurely pace to be sure, but I didn’t find my interest flagging. On the contrary I’m spent entirely too much time plugged into my headphones.

* saga length, epic scale *

Read:

(I’m reading less than I’m listening lately. One of the hazards of summer — too much else to do while it’s daylight and too little dark left at the end of the day to get much reading done.)

The Book of Speculation — Erika Swyler

If you like mermaids, circuses, curses, mysterious books, librarians, and curious family sagas then you should read The Book of Speculation. I can’t explain the title there isn’t really anything speculative about the book. But the story and characters are appealing in a summer read kind of way. And it’s summer so that’s just about right. Not too long a book. Maybe a week’s worth of bedtime reading.

* There are libraries and books! *

The Unnecessary Woman — Rabih Alameddine

It’s easy to become unnecessary in a world in which family is everything and old women only exist as grandmothers. Aaliya lives in Beruit. She is 72 years old, unmarried (divorced actually) has no children and little interest in her remaining family — a step mother and a handful of boorish half brothers. But she loves books, and literature, and philosophy. Her pastime is translating books that she loves into Arabic using a round-about method. All of the books she translates are originally in languages that she doesn’t speak. (She’s fond of the Russians.) To translate them into Arabic she uses several versions of the books in the two other languages that she does speak, English and French. What sort of translation this creates is a barrel of textual monkeys that is never directly addresses but the question of how much of the real you can access through representations lives somewhere at the core of the book. Nominally it is about the everyday and extraordinary crises that attend being female, old, and unusual in a strongly patriarchal society.

The voice of Aaliya is warm, witty, and occasionally baffled by the inconsistencies of the world. The difference between world as it should logically be and as it illogically is.

* You’ll enjoy Aaliya’s company. *

I Believe (after Ron Shelton)

I believe in the image, the line, the stanza, the iambic foot, the perfect word. Assonance, slant rhymes, that the formal forms still have a place in modern poetry. I believe that Shakespeare wrote the plays. I believe in a constitutional amendment outlawing poetry about poetry and the use of the word “suffuse.” I believe in revision, interlinear translations, publishing for readers — not editors, and I believe in long, slow, deep, wet poems that last three days.

Books of June

A writer’s notes about books.

Here are the books I read and listened to in June.

Read:

A Brief History of Seven Killings — Marlon James

In which there are a damned sight more than seven killings. Some of the narrative is true in a broad sense. The politics of Jamaica, the US efforts to direct Latin American and Caribbean activities, the CIA fetish of Cuba, and the involvement of the Columbian cartels in everything — all mostly true. But beyond that? It’s pretty much up in the air, I can’t tell you what’s true and what’s fiction. The attempted assignation of a character known as The Singer (a thinly disguised Bob Marley) anchors the book. All the other actions and actors spin into and out of that one act.

It’s a tough read because of the wild number of POV characters that you have to track (each chapter is helpfully labeled) and the heavy use of patois. You get used to the patois and you spend a certain amount of time flipping back to see where you left that current POV character. It took a lot longer to read than most things and it’s really long to start with. Still, I found the whole thing worth the trouble for the trip to times and places that are utterly unknown to me and the introduction to Marlon James. I have his The Book of Night Women in the To Read pile.

The Book of Phoenix — Nnedi Okorafor

Prequel to her well-known Who Fears Death which I liked a good deal. The term speciMen jarred me every damned time I came across it. It’s a hazard, trying to figure out names for future things. Good, readable early-disaster sci-fi. Okorafor’s writing is reliable and occasionally special. A story of gen-tech gone wrong — which is nothing new. A giant tree in the middle of NYC — new. Two things that looks like angels but aren’t — only sort of new. A phoenix-human hybrid would kind of look like an angel, no? Oh, and those spider things from the other book (Who Fears Death) and that alien seed/nut thing. That’s never really explained. Set up for another book?

Listened to:

Bossy Pants — Tina Fey
Yes, Please — Amy Pohler

Go listen to Bossy Pants. Not read it, listen to it. Really, it’s so much better if you listen to it. Tina Fey playing Tina Fey. It’s all here. Second City, SNL, 30 Rock, the Sarah Palin sketches, and the reality of being female over 40 in comedy. She might be my new idol. Amy Pohler was (and still is on occasion) Tina Fey’s partner in crime. Amy’s book is in some ways funnier. It’s got a lot more gags. Fey’s book is about being funny. Pohler’s book is funny. You know what I mean?

I Shall Wear Midnight — Terry Pratchett

The last of the four Tiffany Aching stories published while Terry Pratchett was alive. (There is one more coming in August.) I picked it to listen to on my daily walk to remind myself where the story had ended and because I remember liking it a lot. Maybe my favorite of the series? Until I remembered Wintersmith which has the better plot, and perhaps the most human Tiffany of the bunch. It certainly has the best of the other witches in it. Okay — I should have listened to Wintersmith…

Inkheart — Cornelia Funke

Why didn’t I like this? Precocious 12 year-old. Okay, that’s enough for me to not like something as much as I might. And yes, I understand that I am about to admit to liking a book about a young boy. Go read the comments on Ocean, the part that I don’t like is when we end up inside the head of the boy without the man.

The rest is okay. A little juvenile — but hey, middle grade book. One of those door-stopper books that middle graders and tweens like. Think Harry Potter but not so good for adults because the adults are one-dimensional. If you have an avid young reader of your own hanging around somewhere they just might love it.

Ocean at the End of the Lane — Neil Gaiman

Thoroughly reviewed a dozen times in a dozen places. Either you like Gaiman’s lush brand of fantasy prose or you don’t. If you do, you won’t be disappointed. Either you like grown up stories that really concern children and vv or you don’t. If you don’t, I suggest Neverland instead.

Sometimes the blended adult/boy voice of the main character leans a little too far to the boy. Yes, it’s a story about a boy, but the story is the explanation of the man and it’s the man’s reaction to it that we’re watching in the meta-view. SO the times when the narrator’s voice totally abandons his adult persona I feel a little cheated.

I started and abandoned The Girl with All Gifts — M.R. Carey.

The set up and the two main characters in the first handful of chapters were interesting. But then it turned into a zombie infection story. There’s just not much you can do with a zombie story that’s going to keep me interested once you’ve hit me with the scientist, the grizzled old military guy, the green military kid, and an idealistic young woman, in an escape vehicle broken down in the middle of nowhere and oh, by the way, there’s a zombie with them. Nope, not even a child zombie that seems to have retained all her human faculties. I stopped listening to it at the end of my walk one day and the next day simply didn’t care what happened to the characters, so I picked up something else.

In non-fiction I’ve picked up the second and third Food52 cookbooks. Recommend the 2nd Volume. Not so enamored of the Genius Recipes, too many over complicated preparations.

As well as iMovie: The Missing Manual. I urge you not to go there.

Things I’ve Learned Since Grade School — Dialog Commas

I’ve always had an unreasonably intimate, if somewhat stormy, relationship with punctuation.

On one hand I want punctuation to make sense — to be useful, predictable, and consistently applicable. On the other hand I want to be able to make use of it for my own ends — to fudge, push, pull, invert, and subvert its prescribed and proscribed uses. To make my particular meanings just a little clearer. I want to instruct my reader in how to breathe my prose. In how to inhale its meaning and to exhale its sense.

I start messing around with punctuation right from the beginning, my usual drafts are hashes of fragments, repetitions, parentheticals, fragments, whizzes, bangs, splits, splotches, hen scratches and flyspecks. Type some words, throw down a comma to indicate a break in thought, add a dash — a minor detour if you will. Type some more words, drop in another comma for a slight turn to the left, use a period to mark the end of the whole thought and it’s trailing little brothers.

Then a new paragraph, or maybe an extra blank line if I’m really going to jump the hurdle and land in some entirely other field. I love ellipses, en dashes, em dashes, parentheses; all of the brackets — angle, curly, and square. Each little glyph adding, to my eye, a slightly differ flavor of pause or linkage. They create connections or disconnections between the little thoughts that flow and stumble out of my fingers.

Eventually I make a proper first draft out of my mess. Using scissors, tape, and several colors of highlighter I take all of the fragments and push them to and fro and make them stand in, if not straight lines, at least convivial groups. Marshal them and march them out on to the field. Much of my crazy, lazy punctuation disappears in this process. Not all of it. And some mistakes are made.

A recent round of editing led to questions about how, exactly, to punctuate dialog. Because I had written a whole story using my usual, utterly consistent form of punctuation. Which it turns out is wrong about half the time. Grade school failed me in so many ways.

Worse yet, my wrongness makes my favorite editor twitchy because it involves commas.

Now I like commas as much as the next writer. In fact I like them a little too much. I’ve been known to sprinkle them about in my writing like jimmies on an ice cream cone. With a free hand. But in dialog? I have a problem with them. I can never get them in the right place when it comes to the dialog tags. And now, after being asked specifically to go look the damned things up, I know why. It’s because the rules make no sense.

To wit: this is the simplest, correct punctuation of dialog with attributions.

“Go away,” said Tom.
“Go away!” said Tom.
“Go away?” said Tom.

That comma in the first example is the source of my anxiety:

“Go away,” said Tom.

Why pray tell does the simple declarative sentence lose it’s simple declarative punctuation (the period) and get saddled with the breathy little we’re-not-done-here-yet comma? That comma leads me to expect that Tom is going to have more to say once we get done identifying him. That what’s coming up is more like:

“Go away,” said Tom, “I’m not finished wrapping your birthday present.”

Meanwhile, the exclamation and the question get the full dignity of their true it’s-all-over punctuation marks. But there’s no comma to set off the clause. Why? If there needs to be some sort of comma to set off the speaker’s words as a clause in the first example there should be a comma in the second and third examples. Why don’t we have:

“Go away!,” said Tom.

Or better yet…
“Go away!”, said Tom.

(Okay so we put the comma insides the quote because we always violate the order-of-operations and mis-nest our punctuation. We’re Americans. And we’re lousy programmers. That part I can usually remember.)

But still, why?
“Go away,” said Tom.

It completely baffles my sense of how punctuation should operate. It’s taken me almost 50 years to finally get this ludicrously illogical rule straight in my head.

But now that it’s lodged up there, I promise that I will do my best when re-working my dialog to forgo the humble period and to get all the commas lined up on the right sides of the quotes. Because misplaced commas make my favorite editor twitch and he has enough twitches already.

All In

Recently, after many years of being away from the art of putting pieces of fabric together with lengths of thread, I bought a new sewing machine. A sewing machine that requires not one but two getting acquainted classes for the new user, and whose owner’s manual is considerably larger than the one for the Dodge Aspen station wagon on which I learned to drive.

But the absurdity of a sewing machine with more computing power than my first desktop is a topic for another day. The thing that I want to discuss is one of my characteristic failings: my inability to approach a new craft or art with any sort of restraint or sensible plan. You see I got this new sewing machine and, rather than start back into sewing by making something I’m familiar with — clothes or curtains — I figured that I’d move straight into quilting.

I mean, if I can manage a princess seam how hard can a lot of straight lines be? Besides I’ve done this before. I think. Once. More than 30 years ago.

Every craft or trade has its magazines and journals. The quilters and knitters and woodworkers and boat builders and bike builders of the world can subscribe to and read and ponder and hopefully learn from a plethora of publications dedicated to furthering their art. And there are always new techniques to learn: appliqué, marquetry, hand pin striping. The magazines and books conveniently provide instruction in these things and along the way they provide a series of projects designed to let you learn the technique and put it into practice, generally on a small, nominally useful project. Some tchotchke that will serve no great purpose in your life beyond giving you a place to learn the new technique. Scarves, jewelry and cigar boxes, garden ornaments — any of them could be useful, if you happen to have a cold neck, a pile of bangles needing a home, a number of loose cigars. But you can only wear one scarf at a time (certain Hollywood practitioners of the fine art of BoHo fashion statements aside) and if you have enough jewelry to require multiple jewelry boxes, well …

The patience to work my way through even a few of this astounding number of practice items isn’t on the horizon. I could have, for example, started with a nice patchwork pillow project. A simple block. Something with only squares. Learned how to get the seams all lined up perfectly, and to get that all important consistent 1/4 inch seam allowance. And then made another pillow — something that had triangles in it: learned to work with bias edges and their tendency to stretch. And maybe added a little border. And then another pillow, one with, say, four mini blocks, something requiring the fine art of sashing between blocks. Something on which to learn how to get those blocks all to line up in perfect ranks and rows. And let’s not forget about the actual quilting: putting together the sandwich of pieced top, batting and backing, then basting the layers to hold it all in place while you quilt it. Stitched in the ditch first — the easiest — then on the next one, a few straight lines, moving on to some curves and curls… maybe a little stippling, or some pebbles? One little step at a time, ending up with what? An entire couch full of pillows that I hate.

Because yes, I have to say it. I hate patchwork pillows. They annoy the crap out of me. Single blocks look unfinished and random. And not in that good, artless, effortless way. They look forlorn, alone, bereft of their patchy buddies.

So here I am. I want to learn to do something but all of the Learn To Do This projects are little, useless time wasters, not the thing that I see in my mind when I think of being able to do that thing. There are no cute tea cozies in my knitter’s mind; there are beautiful sweaters. There are no cigar boxes next to that table saw; there are Mission style blanket chests. There are no patchwork pillows; there is a queen size bed quilt. And so I start with the thing I want, then figure out how to make it. It takes me longer than it takes someone who knows how to do it. I waste a bunch of material making mistakes that someone who knows how to do it wouldn’t make. And it most certainly is not as “nice” as it would be if it was made by someone who knows how to do it. Truth be told, I’d be time and money ahead if I had just sat down and done all the little learning pieces and then tackled the final piece. But to Hell with it. I don’t want the little learning pieces.

I want to dive right in and make the Thing That I Want. And I will, and I’ll love it. All of it’s flaws included. Okay, mostly, sometimes. A few of them have need up being untenable messes that can not be saved even by the blind love of a mother. I don’t think that there is a practice piece in the world that would have made that lime green, knitted tank top a good idea for me, no matter how perfect the execution.

So, no patchwork pillows. Nope, there’s going to be a sizable blanket when I get done with this sucker. And it’s going to be a bit of a mess. It’s going to have all of the beginner mistakes writ large and repeated a bunch of times because I’m kind of a slow learner and I’m going to try a couple of my own solutions every time I run into a snag before I give up and actually go to look up the Right™ way to do the thing. And everyday for the rest of the useful life of that object (and some of them have lasted a good long time), I’m going to be looking at those beginner mistakes. The unmatched seams and little pleats and wobbly stitch lines and probably a dozen more mistakes that I don’t even know are there yet.

Maybe you’ve always wanted to learn to fish, bake, draw, garden, knit, meditate, solder silver, or frame a picture. No matter what there’s the sensible beginner, without-a-lot-of-cost-and-risk way. Knit a one skein scarf, plant some marigolds in a planter by the front door, build a bird house, weld a garden ornament. Then there’s the Lara Way. The full, damn-the-doubters, make-the-whole-thing-and-make-it-a-useful-thing-right-now way. Knit an Aran sweater, build a garden shed, tear out the lawn and put in enough raised bed planters to grow all of your vegetables for a year, weld up a rat-bike frame from that old Honda you found in your uncle’s garage, or make a queen-size bed quilt. Because no one needs another scarf, or bird house, or garden ornament, or pillow as much as they need a sweater, a garden shed, a rat bike, or a warm quilt to sleep under. Especially a quilt.

Russian Prints Quilt — Once you’re snuggled under it, you can’t see the mistakes.