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. 

"Hope" is the thing that other people steal--

Book: The Poet and the Murderer: A True Story of Literary crime and the Art of Forgery

Author: Simon Worrall

Published: 2002 (Penguin)

Pages: 265

This blog entry is brought to you by the lonely boredom that swoops down on me sometime each weekend and my attempts at combating it. I’ve shifted my volunteering at the Book Dispensary to Sunday afternoons because that’s when I’m most likely to need distraction that makes me feel useful, and helping them stem the relentless tide of genre trade paperbacks is actively soothing.

And they pay me the equivalent of $8 an hour in store book credit to do it.

So when I’m elbow-deep in James Patterson duplicates and see this book standing apart from its blood-font siblings on the true crime shelf, I don’t think twice about “buying” it, taking it home, and reading it in two large chunks over the next 18 hours or so. I’ve made a new friend.

(Aside: I’m non-snarkily starting to doubt the mental health of regularly indulging that impulse, especially considering the socially isolating aspects of it—which brings up a question of motive that is very fucking depressing: does it come from a pure place of loving to read with isolation as a consequence, or does my love of reading come from needing to fill the void I never really know what to do with?)

But for now I can counter myself with “Hey, I’m not killing people to cover millions of dollars of debt I’ve incurred from my decades of pawning off historical document forgeries.” That’d be Mark Hofmann’s job, in a knotty tale that begins with him forging documents designed to mess with the Mormon church by rewriting its history. His success and smugness about that leads him to branch out into American historical figures, get in way over his financial head, and blow up two of his creditors with homemade bombs so he doesn’t have to pay them OR fork over documents that don’t actually exist.

That doesn’t go well. He ends up in jail for life, but not before giving the author plenty of excuses to go into details about LDS mythology and modern structure, early American printing processes, handwriting, auction house procedures and corruptions, and how to build a pipe bomb.

It’s all really interesting stuff that flows well into each other, like a string of cursive that connects different letters in ways that aren’t intuitive until you see it in action. Except for the forward and afterword, the author keeps a pretty objective tone and also stays translucent about how difficult it is to know the whole truth about a guy who based his entire business and most of the rest of his life on carefully constructed lies. His only faults are tendencies to reintroduce facts that he’s already mentioned and to write an unnecessary chapter called Victims. We know, dude. You’ve shown us the careers, religions, and hobby joys that Hofman broke; they’re much more compelling to read about as that happens than in a obligatory-sounding list in paragraph form.

One of his forgeries, a “newly discovered” supposedly original poem from Emily Dickenson, gives the author an excuse to talk about the reclusive poet’s life and writing and publishing history, and those are my favorite parts. Dickinson is generally portrayed as a reclusive genius, and this book expands her life into one of combined frustration and defiance that she compacted into her writing. Maybe she was bisexual, in love with like fifty people over the course of her lifetime, embarrassed about her failing eyesight, perversely determined to rebel by keeping everything so private. She let it all out in her poems, which America has revered as an idealized example of pure artistic expression, when they finally got to see the damn things.

There’s not really a connection between Dickinson’s life and Hofmann’s except that he decided to forge her. But their brief intersection is a great jumping-off point to half a dozen related topics that all come together in one of the only true crime books where more ink than blood is spilled.    

O my brothers

Book: A Clockwork Orange

Author: Anthony Burgess

Published: 1986 (this edition--Norton Paperbacks)

Pages: 212

There's nothing to fear about this book; the slang is omnipresent but easily penetrated, while at the same time enough to keep the violence at an abstract distance. Which I guess is one facet of the point, another of course being the extra chapter that  was originally left out of the American edition (and, consequently, Stanley Kubrick's movie adaptation).

(Side note: After reading this, I want to watch the Kubrick movie to see how it stacks up to The Great Shining Debate, which is when Liberry Tom says Kubrick's The Shining is a great movie because it's shot so well and I say it sucks because it completely misses the point of the source material.)

I wasn't super shocked by anything in here. It's a fairly straightforward plot: brutal young man gets off on doing violent things to people, gets caught, gets put into mind-altering therapy that gives him visceral reactions to violence, tries to get right back into it, gets depressed and tired of it. 

That's not to say I didn't like reading about all that. It's still a fascinating journey, and it's all in the narrator. This book is one of the strongest arguments I've read for the importance of unique character voice. Alex goes from simple to sick to existential, all his confusion wrapped in his comforting blanket of slang whose familiarity isn't nearly enough to protect him from the changes forced on his emotions. He remains a sympathetic character in a way that makes me feel like a terrible person for saying that, which means he's very well-written. A well-written sociopath.

The last chapter--I don't see how it's such a controversy. It's the logical, if somewhat muted, continuation of Alex's life. Leaving it out could be seen as approving such violence that he's gotten back into, or at least saying that it's an inevitable part of decaying society, but it's made clear that even though he's pushed past his conditioning, Alex won't be able to sustain his sociopathic behavior for much longer without it taking an even more crushing toll.

Anyway, go read this and see if you can tease out the metaphor for clockwork oranges. I didn't get that bit.

Paddling my own canoe

Book: A Jury of Her Peers: Celebrating American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx

Author: Elaine Showalter

Published: 2009 (Random House)

Pages: 512 (not counting end notes)

After reading this book, do I remember all the obscure women writers who paved ways but have gotten little historical credit?

Erm. No. Not really, no.

But do I get a sense of how their contributions pushed women writers forward in general?

Yes! Totally internalized that. They were badasses just by picking up pens when their societies were looking at their ink-stained hands and were all, "You're wasting perfectly good baby-holders there."

Did I discern any real change in women writers' progress to get taken seriously as artists through the centuries/decades?

Yes and no. Women have made it to "real people" status now, and their contributions to the canon are taking at least 85% [personal estimation] as seriously as men's. Yay. But according to this book, since the first colonial ladies, the conflict has always boiled down to art vs. domesticity, with variations of compromise, praise, and scorn of one or the other, which didn't depend so much on the era of the ladies as the determination of individual ladies themselves. There's been major progress in what details are no longer taboo to mention, but whatever a woman writes still does and has constantly commented on her stance. Even when she pointedly staying quiet about the argument, that's a statement about it too.

What did I think about the women writers who refused the label of "women writers"?

I think they had/have the right idea because the label still confers a condescension of sorts, and what group wants their work all lumped in together just because they happen to have one thing in common that affects their art in wildly different ways to super-divergent amounts? But I do think it's worth mentioning the perspective a writer is coming from on material and to what degree gender/sex affects this view on an individual basis. That'd be a pain in the ass to use for bookstore and library displays, though.   

How worried was I about the word "celebration" in the subtitle?

Fairly. It made this book look a lot more fluffy and uncritical than it actually is. But, again, this is one of my 90% finds from the dying Border's in my hometown last summer, and once I got to the part where the author rips Gertrude Stein a new one, I knew the author wasn't here for an unconditional love sisterhood meeting.

Which--okay, I tried to read 3 Lives and no, I didn't understand it. Postmodernism is one of those things I'm comfortable not understanding. But this author really, really hates Gertrude Stein and showed it by putting aside objectivity long enough to criticize so personally I started wondering if Stein had ever spit on her or something.

Bookshelf, donate, or trash: Bookshelf. It's a good reference book, inspiring without getting sentimental, and a good abbreviated history lesson. But ultimately, it works best as a very springy jumping off point to go find out more about the more interesting yet less covered ladies of the pages.

Pushed him down a well

Book: Dolores Claiborne

Author: Stephen King

Published: 1993 (Viking)

Pages: 305

Crusty old New England lady lets loose about the time she murdered her husband by pushing him down the well! Now she’s testifying in the suspiciously similar death of her fellow crusty old New England lady employer! Aw, yeah, Stephen King, you work that regional dialect into one break-less story and add a complete solar eclipse just for good measure. We know how you do.

It’s such a pitch-perfect voice the whole way through. And the story leans completely on the horror of what regular human beings get up to when they get mean. The eclipse is nothing except the way to conceal revenge and heartache. It’s a straightforward psychological dissection channeled through a lady who would snort at that phrase and say she doesn’t know about no psychology, she’s just tellin it like it happened.

I got into it a little bit more than I got into Thinner because the narrator was so well-defined. If the mullet King is wearing in his author photograph is any indication with the copyright dates, these were of roughly the same writing era for him. A good vintage.

Donation Pile, Bookshelf, or Trash? Bookshelf. It’s not my favorite King book, but it’s my favorite voice of his.