Exile on Ninth Street

New Year’ Eve 2011 update of Books Bought, Books Read (with commentary as warranted):

Books bought since Oct. 1, 2011:

• The Edge of Reason by Melinda Snodgrass (An excellent, fast-paced urban fantasy novel featuring a battle between magic and reason.)
• Healthy Aging: A Lifelong Guide to Your Well-Being by Andrew Weil, M.D. (Has a good exercise routine for us old farts.)
• Wild Cards, Volume One, edited by George R.R. Martin (A collaborative novel-in-stories about alien viruses, a foppish alien, jokers—and maybe some smoker and midnight tokers—and reluctant superheroes know as Aces. Currently reading this novel. Interesting that SF and fantasy novelists, as well as other genre novelists seem to collaborate and create. Something not often seen with “literary” fiction.)
• Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain (Who wouldn’t want to be as cool, well-fed and well traveled as Bourdain?)
• Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson
• Metaphase by Vonda McIntyre (third in her Starfarers series)
• The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Twenty-fifth Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois
• Year’s Best SF 9, edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer
• The Edge of Ruin by Melinda Snodgrass (second in her Edge series)
• Marsbound, Starbound and Earthbound by Joe Haldeman (a trilogy)
• Make a Scene: Crafting a Powerful Story One Scene at a Time by Jordan Rosenfeld
• World-Building: A Writer’s guide to constructing star systems and life-supporting planets by Stephen L. Gillett
• A Novel in a Year by Louise Doughty
• Creative Visualization by Shakti Gawain

In the SF Masterworks series:

• Babel-17 by Samuel Delany (My first of Delany’s novels. A wild ride with hints of pre-cyberpunk. Also concerned with the nature of language, in this case a language that has to be understood in order to deal with a potential alien threat.)
• Gateway by Frederik Pohl
• Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes (looking forward to reading this after reading the original short story)
• Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick
• The Shrinking Man by Richard Matheson
• Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke

Books Read:

• The Accidental Time Machine by Joe Haldeman (Time keeps on slipping, slipping . . .)
• Healthy Aging: A Lifelong Guide to Your Well-Being by Andrew Weil, M.D. (Has a good exercise routine for us old farts.)
• The Edge of Reason by Melinda Snodgrass (An excellent, fast-paced urban fantasy novel featuring a battle between magic and reason.)
• Babel-17 by Samuel Delany (My first of Delany’s novels. A wild ride with hints of pre-cyberpunk. Also concerned with the nature of language, in this case a language that has to be understood in order to deal with a potential alien threat.)

An update to my pollysyllabic spree:

Books bought

• The Accidental Time Machine by Joe Haldeman
• Year’s Best SF 14

Books checked out

• In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto by Michael Pollan
• Healthy Aging by Andrew Weil

Books read

• The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
• Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury
• Embassytown by China Mieville
• Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke

I decided to shift genres and read some nonfiction after checking out Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food at my neighorhood library. I’m slowly jumping on the food/nutrition/health bandwagon, as I’ve hit my forties and have been trying to eat more vegetables, and be a little bit healthier in my habits, both physical and mental.

When I started reading the book yesterday, I had only read a few pages of the book and  found a curious editing choice in the copy I checked out. Library books, of course, are often abused: they’ve been marked in, had coffee spilled on them (I’m guilty of this abuse), have torn or even sometimes missing pages. I once even found a leaf in a copy Arthur Plotnik’s The Urban Tree Book . 

On page 6 of the library copy of the book, the previous borrower decided to take action (see PDF) and quibble with the author over word choice, scratching through the line “coming down from the trees,” not because the line is cliche, but because Pollan has chosen to refer to humans as an evolved species and not a divine creation. The “editor” in pen has inserted in the margin “being created by the All mighty God.”

I alternate between finding this funny in a Ned-Flanders sort of way (recalling Flanders marking out “darns” and “hecks” from either Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew) and finding it annoying. I can imagine this reader with pencil in hand, grumbling to himself and thinking, Gosh darnit I’m so sick-and-tired of these liberals and their making monkeys of us, I’ma gonna make the next person reads this here book think about the Truth and facts. Yep, they gonna know the Lord created the universe in six days and our world is six-thousand years old.

The  comment is not relevant to Pollan’s argument. The previous reader has co-opted the book as his own, as if it were his desire to have written a book about food and nutrition, but from the perspective of creationism.

After I posted this entry yesterday, I flipped through the book and discovered the previous reader had kept editing  as he read when Pollan made reference to humans being an evolved species, an animal, a mammal, a primate.

The first thing these edits caused me to think of is my own obsession with debates over evolutionary theory (a theory based on hard science; of course, the scientific method could arguably be an ideology; certainly evolutionary theory, or rather correctly, the theory of natural selection proposed by Darwin, et al, was much abused in Darwin’s own time through Social Darwinian theories) and creationism (an ideology that is a subset of the ideology of religious fundamentalism that makes serious leaps of logic, faith and misreading).  Pollan, interestingly enough, talks about currents in food science as nutrionism, “an ideology . . .[a way] of organizing large swaths of life and experience under a set of shared but unexamined assumptions.”

Anyhow, I believe in evolution, in natural selection; I believe we are animals, mammals, and primates and there is good, solid, examined evidence to demonstrate that life primeval wasn’t Flinstonian in nature, as some creationists try to demonstrate.

That said, the next thing the creationist editor caused me to think about was a recent Facebook discussion about artistic intention and the intentional fallacy. Clearly, the creationist editor misread Pollan’s book, and read into it an argument against creation, and seems to ignore Pollan’s—from what we can gather through textual evidence only—intention: “My aim in this book is to help us  reclaim our health and happiness as eaters.”

Or is this Pollan’s intention? Perhaps he really is trying by writing about an interesting topic such as food and health to sideswipe us into believing we evolved tens of thousands of years ago and monkeys are our uncles ?

I tend to think opening the evolution-creation debate wasn’t Pollan’s intention, but I’m just another reader of a so far well-written book-length argumentative essay that tries its best to examine unexamined assumptions about food.

This week’s Booking Through Thursday:

What’s the first book that you ever read more than once? (I’m assuming there’s at least one.)

What book have you read the most times? And–how many?

Maybe, subconsciously, early in our lives we’re all re-readers. We want the same story read to us over and over because we somehow know we can’t read the same river twice.

And I’m sure the first rereading I did was probably a children’s book or books and certainly comic books which I ravenously reread. As I think about this topic,  images fill my mind of panels vaguely recalled of Disney’s version of Robin Hood (Robin and Maid Marian were foxes and the Prince was a fey lion) and in particular a story of Robin evading King Churl, a warthog. I liked Churl’s warthog minion, specifically because they carried crossbows and I have a fascination with crossbows even though I’ve never used one.

And I recall rereading Alan Dean Foster’s adaptation of Star Wars, because like so many in my generation, Star Wars was/is an obsession. (Foster’s byline was later usurped by George Lucas.)

As far as most reread: that honorific would probably not go to a specific book, but to Hemingway’s short story “Hills Like White Elephants;”  it’s the first “literary” story I loved and led me to my lifelong obsession with Hemingway.

Of his novels I would have to say I’ve read and reread The Sun Also Rises the most. And then I’ve completely abused Kenneth Lynn’s biography of Hemingway, trying, at first embarrassingly enough, to seek out clues about how to be a writer, how to live like a writer.

Another favorite reread — and sometimes it’s just passages I reread — is Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys. I reread a few passages last night when I got stuck in my own writing. Chabon can make a hangover and throwing up from too much drinking seem elegant and morally revealing.

Of course, again, I think the pleasure of rereading is rediscovering a book or story, and realizing it’s never the same old story.

OK, it’s been a long time since I rock-and-rolled with Booking Through Thursday, so here it goes again:

What’s the largest your personal library has ever been? What’s the greatest number of books you’ve ever owned at one time? (Estimates are fine.)

Is your collection NOW the biggest it’s ever been? Or have you down-sized?

What’s the fewest number of books you’ve ever owned (not counting your pre-reading years)?

My estimate is that my library, at its largest, probably hit 400 books — I’ve never counted.

My best estimate now is that it ranges around 300 books, maybe  more, maybe less. I’ve sold and traded some during recent moves, although I’ve also bought some, too.

I’d probably have to say, oddly enough, I had the fewest books when I was in college. Textbooks, of course, I didn’t keep. And sometimes I sold back stuff I liked for necessities like beer.

Then again, maybe I had a pretty decent library then, too. Perhaps it only seemed small because most of the books I had were paperbacks, and they don’t take up as much room.

OK, decided to re-up a meme. The idea is pilfered from Nick Hornby’s wonderful book about the joys of reading and acquiring books The Pollysyllabic Spree.

Books Bought thru June 1–June 20, 2011

• Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury
• Minority Report by Philip K. Dick
• Embassytown by China Mieville
• The City & The City by China Mieville
• The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
• Halting State by Charles Stross

Books Read, June 1–June 20, 2011

• The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick

Philip K. Dick’s kind of become an obsession. Also trying to read and collect the SF Masterworks  (the photo link is not my collection, but I wish it was ) put out by Gollancz (Oh, by the way, I have a birthday coming up in July. Hint, hint).

Also, I’m not being a good Buddhist at all (not that I’ve ever declared myself a Buddhist officially), given I’ve skipped meditation a few times lately, have imbibed some intoxicating drinks in recent days, and find myself too deeply attached to reading and acquiring books to ever renounce this particular form of sweet suffering.

The Hemingway Hoax by Joe Haldeman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What intrigues readers and Hemingway fans so much about the manuscripts lost in Paris in 1922? Hemingway was so obsessed with that episode—his wife at the time, Hadley claims they were stolen—he wrote about it some 40 years later in his posthumously published memoir A Moveable Feast, and the story was recently retold in Paula McLain’s The Paris Wife.

Scholars, biographers and novelists have speculated about the what-could-have-beens if those manuscripts were somehow to surface. It’s a question that intrigues fictional Hemingway scholar John Baird so much that, at least in some universes of Joe Haldeman’s The Hemingway Hoax, he’s cajoled by con man Sylvester Castlemaine to forge those manuscripts, and get the forgeries published as the real thing, a scheme that may alter Earth’s history in several universes.

Once Baird takes on the task, he alerts the attention of the Spacio-Temporal Adjustment Board, a time-space policing agency with a license to kill. An agent of STAB jumps back through time-space to stop Baird by any means necessary.

One trip, one threat of death should be enough to stop Baird, but something happens to throw off the space-time continuum and Baird gets flung from one end of space- time to another, each time persisting in writing the forgery until the interdimensional hitman can convince him otherwise or kill every manifestation of Baird known to exist.

This was a fun read for me, as both a Hemingway and Haldeman fan. It’s always intriguing to think about what direction a writer might have taken if he published once-lost manuscripts or kept working on some manuscript that taxes him so much he gives up wriiting. Haldeman’s story puts forward the question of what effect, if any, does literature or art have on history. It’s a fast-paced witty novel with a twisted plot.

And watch out literary forgers—STAB may just be watching.

View all my reviews

What Dreams May Come by Richard Matheson

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Richard Matheson’s What Dreams May Come sets itself up as a memoir of sorts (SNARK ALERT: unfortunately some memoirs deserve that tag, too), a piece of nonfiction dictated from the afterlife. Obviously, it’s a novel, the story of Chris Nielsen, who dies in a car accident, and whose spirit is transported to the afterlife, or a realm of the afterlife known as Summerland.

Before Chris’ spirit goes to Summerland, he finds himself stuck in a sort of purgatory in which he has to accept he’s dead. What keeps him in this state is his wife, Ann, whose grief he witnesses, and his desire to assure her that she’s going to be fine.

Once he finally enters Summerland, he’s guided and acquainted to this level of the afterlife by his cousin, Albert.

Like Dante’s visions of the afterlife, Matheson’s afterlife consists of many levels and Summerland isn’t quite heaven, though it’s not unpleasant–it’s a place of perpetual sunlight and summer where spirits come to work to get to higher levels, a heavenly corporate ladder of sorts.

Though Chris finds Summerland pleasant enough, he never finds it satisfying because he longs for his wife. His love for her seems boundless, and when she commits suicide on Earth, his love takes him on a journey to hell to rescue her, to get her spirit to see life/the afterlife is worthwhile.

The novel is uneven, an OK read.

Matheson’s afterlife is New Age-y and universalist in outlook: Buddhists get Nirvana, Christians get Heaven (eventually, although it’s not an immediate reunification with God), and Vahalla is probably in there, too. He explores several theological/philosophical concepts, in particular the soul’s attempt to move level by level in the afterlife, until reunion with God is acquired. Most often this climb up requires rebirth on Earth, until the soul is perfected.

Matheson also plays with the fiction/nonfiction them by adding a bibliography of book about death and the afterlife at the end of the novel.

Its weakness: the idealistic, overly sentimental relationship between Chris and Ann. It’s almost too perfect. Granted the novel is fantasy, but their relationship lacks in realism, though Chris protests it wasn’t perfect—like most couples they fought over money, they almost got divorced—his protests are unconvincing. They always make up and smoothe things over perfectly, even in their most difficult journey—guiding Ann into the afterlife to be reborn.

View all my reviews

I Am Legend by Richard Matheson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Don’t expect Will Smith’s movie I Am Legend  (2007) if you read Richard Matheson’s original 1954 novel. As with any novel-to-film adaptation, directors take poetic license: the film’s vampires, for instance, are soul-less brutes.

Though the film holds up on its own, it’s no match for the novel.

Robert Neville is the only human left in a post-apocalytic world inhabited by vampires. To survive, he locks himself in a boarded, locked and garlic-filled home at night, and stalks around a devastated Los Angeles killing the vampires by day.

While the novel has vampires—a horror staple—it works just as well as science fiction (it’s in fact part of Gollancz’s SF Masterworks series, the books of which I’ve been trying to find and read, in part as another reading project, as well as to learn from SF masters). The vampirism, Neville discovers, is a disease, and an apparently uncurable one.

And though Neville struggles to understand the disease, it turns out (spoiler alert) he’s the legend of which the novel’s title speaks.

The novel is a dark but philosophically powerful book, ultimately humanistic in outlook, despite its ending.

View all my reviews

Hill Country Chronicles
By Clay Coppedge
The History Press (2010, $19.99)

Texas’ Hill Country covers about 25 counties in the central part of the state, including Travis County, home to Austin. It’s a region as thick with legends and characters as it is with Ashe junipers, better known as cedars to those who live here.

The region, its legends and characters, and even the cedars get covered in Clay Coppedge’s Hill Country Chronicles. Coppedge, a journalist and freelance writer, has put together a collection of essays that tell the story of this rugged and sometimes forbidding land, an area pivotal to Texas’ history.

Coppedge is a storyteller at heart, and some of the best pieces in the collection are those in which he tells the stories of the region’s characters, such as outlaw Johnny Ringo. If the name rings a bell, that’s because Ringo is associated with the Clanton Gang and the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Ariz. Although Ringo gained notoriety as an outlaw, some sources claim he never fired a shot in Tombstone.

Ringo did fire a shot or two, as Coppedge writes, while making a stay in Burnet, Texas, where he was arrested Christmas Day for firing a shot across the city square. Texas’ Hill Country was also where Ringo probably earned his reputation as an outlaw during the Hoodoo War, a bloody feud over cattle between recent German settlers and their American-born neighbors.

Ringo, Coppedge writes, shot and killed Jim Cheyney, a resident of the area, after Cheyney had invited Ringo and his partner Bill Williams in for breakfast.

Coppedge also delves into Texas heroes such as Jim Bowie, telling the story of how Bowie may have come into possession of his namesake knife. “A good bit of evidence suggests that the real Bowie knife of legend and lore was designed and made in Arkansas blacksmith named Thomas Black . . . . Black’s design was long and heavy and was distinguished by an evil little upturn at its tip and scooped top blade.”

Coppedge’s stories range far and wide through the region. He writes about its people, its places — Luckenbach,  for instance, the blink of a town made famous by Waylon, Willie and the boys — and its critters: from armadillos and unappreciated mules to the state dinosaur, the Pleurocoelus. And he does it often with dry humor and insight, which makes the book worth a read.