I see the light and it's made of lasers!

Book: The Ascent of Wonder: The Evolution of Hard SF

Authors: Lots (edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer)

Published: 1994 (collection; Tor)

Pages: 988

Holy shit was this book ever difficult to get through, guys.

Let me clarify right now that I don’t mean because of the quality; it was purely a size thing. Almost 1000 pages crammed with tiny type about physics and biogenetics and astronomy and advanced mathematics and, weirdly enough, more than one whirlpool. Plus dragons.

I’ve been chipping away at this collection since the beginning of July, and it really helped to take two, several-smaller-books-sized breaks. Even then, finishing it still gives my brain that way-too-full sensation of going to a museum and reading every single plaque next to every single exhibit. Ow.

And that is what this gi-fucking-normous book functions best as: a very complete history of sci fi. (Well, up to a point. The youngest story in here is older than I am.) I read it because I want to learn more about the genre, and it gave a really thorough tour through a lot of different trope origins, teaching by showing off examples. Which was the best way to learn, because here you get all the lasers and moon colonies where people have already gotten cynical about the wonders of space and deep-sea aliens and sentient monkeys who escape wearing orange Bermuda shorts and carrying their typewriters and children’s games that lead into another dimension and Asimov computers compiling information about life’s biggest question until the end of time.

It’s all blended together, in case you can’t tell. I think partly because I read all the intros to the stories, too, which each boiled down to “This guy is awesome and [chose one] severely under-appreciated” OR “recognized as one of the leading writers of the genre and a bunch of people still copy him.”

(Regarding that last adjective, there are a relatively decent number of female authors represented here, which is to say two more beyond Anne McCaffery [dragons!] and Ursula K. Le Guin. The collection was also co-edited and compiled by a lady.)

I thought the one they chose for Poe was weaksauce because it’s a sailor describing how he got out of a whirlpool, which, while still affecting, was the most conventional Poe story I’ve ever read. Also, maybe I’m just not appreciating historical nuance, but H.G. Wells’s “Hey, Tanks!” (actual title: “The Land Ironclads”) was also not nearly as good a representation of that author as they could’ve picked. And I can’t really get over McCaffery’s dragons getting put into a collection dedicated to hard sci fi when the definition of the subgenre specifically eliminates magic as a reason for anything.

But once I got into the rhythm and let my eyes skim the passages with incomprehensible engineering equations in them, I had a great time. I’m struggling with the decision about what to do with this physical book now, though. To the pros and cons list!

It throws my spine out of whack whenever I try to lug it around in my shoulder bag, and I automatically deduct major points from any reading material I can’t carry with me at all times.

As a city girl whose pedestrian ways has grown a healthy wariness of potential muggers, I appreciate having a blunt object that will stun but not kill and look completely innocent while doing so.

I can’t see myself ever plowing through the whole thing again, like, ever.

But it’d be great to have to spot-check and keep as a future readings list for authors I would never come across again.

Oh, hell, I’ll just keep the damn thing so I’ll have an excuse to either weed my crowded fiction bookshelf or build another one that looks like the TARDIS. 

Growing up with help from words

This pile of books is all about growing up in some form or another, and I burned through them because I'm clinging to that topic like a five-year-old to their teddy bear since life keeps reminding me that I have no idea what I'm doing. Perhaps these guys do.

Book: Lizz Free or Die

Author: Lizz Winstead

Publication: 2012 (Riverhead Books)

Pages: 302

Lizz Winstead definitely does. She created the Daily Show and ran it for a couple pre-Jon Stewart years, but that's your typical 18-hour we-became-a-family-with-FCC-fines TV writing experience. The really interesting bits are how she got there, and really good part is that she actually answers that in a satisfactory fashion: she worked her ass off at a day job and comedy clubs and writing in a giant armchair until she made herself known. She also talks about her family, my favorite quote from the whole book being her dad saying, "I raised you to have an opinion. I just thought it'd be mine." HA! 

She's more straightforward and less joke-a-minute, which makes some parts less funny and a little bit more sincere than maybe they could've/should've been, but on the whole it's a great non-cheesy yet still inspirational collection of ways how a wiseass lady made all her hard work pay off.

Plus this happened as proof that Liberry Tom is awesome:

 

Book: I Was Told There'd Be Cake

Author: Sloane Crosley

Publication: 2008 (Riverhead Books)

Pages: 228

Sloane Crosley's also a good, aspirational essay read. She's young enough to inspire envy by her publication history but frank enough about exploiting her own faults and later insight (like when she as a Jewish kid went to borderline-Bible camp and neither she nor her parents realized it until years later). Her subjects are typical (dating, life in NYC, career, religion) but with specific, neurotic twists (a plastic pony collection, baking her first and terrible boss a cookie in the shape of her head, her parents' extreme fear of indoor fires and insistence on having Christmas as well as Hanukkah) that shows she knows how funny details are. She knows that life is weird and unfair and sometimes we just have to embrace the absurdity to get through it. And she's there to record how it goes down.

Book: Such a Pretty Fat

Author: Jen Lancaster

Publication: 2008 (New American Library)

Jen Lancaster, on the other hand, does not go down without a fight once she figures out what she wants to change about herself. Her memoir is about her quest to get past her own ego enough to get in shape for health reasons. I love that she's the exact opposite of every other dieting memoir in the fact that she starts from a place of self-love instead of hate. She's quick-witted but in way that's predictable if you've been paying attention to pop culture for the past six or seven years. Her lack of motivation is understandable but starts to sound ridiculous and whiny when you realize that she's getting paid to do all this and record it in a sort of meta-diary. 

She also stages conversations for exposition. I can tell, what with the block of text and the eerily specific questions her friends pointedly ask her at weird times. It was like seeing an obvious body double for Chantum Tatum (did I spell that right? Probably not; I don't care because he's not nerdy or British) in Magic Mike when he did the serious break dancing: I see what you did there and it's a little stilted but okay fine, it gives the general idea. 

Book: 20 Something Essays by 20 Something Writers

Authors: various

Publication: 2005 (Random House)

All the writers in here wish they could have Lancaster's job. They're all struggling, mostly with careers and why any of us are here in the first place, and they're all eloquent about it. I liked the one about the soldier who starts a mustache-growing contest with his fellow recruit to distract them while they're in Kuwait. I liked them all, but that was my favorite. The one about a new dad working a late-night Wendy's shift was good too but not any better, and it bothered me that there was an editor's note claiming how in love they fell with that one and why that one won the prize. Maybe that just speaks to the excellent level of overall quality in here. 

I enjoyed these, but now I think I'm going to jump ship from reality literature for the next couple offerings. These were almost too real.