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.)

In the early part of the twenty-first century there were people who believed we were being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s; those people were dismissed as loons, quacks who went out to New Mexico and watched for the Grays to emerge from Area 51.

At the time, I thought such people were at the very least misinformed, pretty damn weird, and probably sold jars of lime Gatorade to tourists believing they were buying alien urine. So it goes.

***

In my late forties I decided to begin taking a morning constitutional on the advice from the books of health gurus—to some these gurus are quacks as well—and on one of these walks, on a crisp cloudless October morning, in a quaint middle-class neighborhood west of my flat, I passed by a nice red-brick house of a family I knew only slightly, when I heard a slight rustling from their hedges.

I stopped and listened, thinking it was only a squirrel or a bird, or perhaps a lizard. But the sunlight dappling through the shade tree in the front yard revealed something else—an azure sparkle through the leaves. At first I dismissed it as perhaps some piece of trash, a beer can perhaps, caught in the leaves.

Later, after we knew the truth of the mattter, some who saw the pictures I took with my camera phone said they heard hissing in the night sky. Others heard nothing, but reported a mass of comets sho0ting through the sky,  an unusual enough phenomenon little reported by the media, which was too busy analyzing Kanye West’s decision to go into fashion design.

Anyhow, I started on my way once more, but then the rustling in the hedges erupted again. I stopped and turned and watched. Something was rising steadily above the leaves and limbs. I brought my camera into focus.

A glowing blue globe peeked from over the edge of the hedge. I trembled but felt compelled to approached, almost as if the Thing were laying some kind of Jedi-mindtrick on me.

The Thing rose silently. There were no visible means of propulsion. Clearly, a technology superior to any on Earth—as far a we know (who, after all, really knows just what the frak is going on at Area 51).

I moved closer. It hovered in place over the hedge. I saw no massive hole, no sign of impact whatsoever. It made no threatening moves, no sound, but I knew better. I knew from sci-fi flicks that nothing good could come of this.

I knew the invasion was on, and at the moment, was its only witness on this too quiet street . . .

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

Here is this week’s Booking Through Thursday (a little late):

What are you reading now?

Would you recommend it?

And what’s next?

I’m reading Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl. So far I would recommend it. It’s sort of a post-apocalyptic steampunk/cyberpunk blend set in a near future Thailand, in a world where food and calories are assets and genetic modification has run amok. So far very readable. And Bacigalupi’s world is well-imagined.

The next read will probably be a reread of Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination.

Gully Foyle is my name

And Terra is my nation.

Deep space is my dwelling place,

The stars my destination.

Here is this week’s Booking Through Thursday:

Sometimes I feel like the only person I know who finds reading history fascinating. It’s so full of amazing-yet-true stories of people driven to the edge and how they reacted to it. I keep telling friends that a good history book (as opposed to some of those textbooks in school that are all lists and dates) does everything a good novel does–it grips you with real characters doing amazing things.

Am I REALLY the only person who feels this way? When is the last time you read a history book? Historical biography? You know, something that took place in the past but was REAL.

A long time ago, I was a history major, intent on teaching history. I have a degree in history. But since then I have not read many history books, nor have I taken up teaching history.

I haven’t, however, completely disowned my past. I have read some excellent histories over this decade and will probably read some again in the future.

When I covered religion as a newspaper reporter and editor, I would dip into my history textbooks, especially Richard S. Dunn’s The Age of Religious Wars: 1559-1715,  which covers much of the Reformation, to add depth to my stories. At that time I also read Thomas Cahill’s Desire of the Everlasting Hills, a historical biography of  Jesus. From time to time I would also dip into Paul Johnson’s A History of Christianity, though I haven’t read the book all the way through.

Another historical biography I’ve read within the past five or six years is Karen Armstrong’s Buddha, one of the series of short, immensely readable, biographies put out by Penguin several years back.

Of late my reading has diverged toward possible future history, reading science fiction. After all, sans air cars and FTL travel, we living in a somewhat science-fictional universe. Of course here’s hoping our future history doesn’t include Morlocks.

Zen in the Art of Writing: Essays on Creativity Third Edition/Expanded by Ray Bradbury

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Most books on writing are a variation on a theme: they explain several techniques to improve writing; they give examples of those techniques; and then they supply exercises for practice.

Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing provides almost none of that sort of writing advice. The closest thing to that sort of writing instruction is a section in which Bradbury talks about how he makes lists of nouns and then reviews those lists as a source for ideas.

In this collection of essays, Bradbury, using personal anecdotes about how he wrote and found inspiration for some of his most famous short stories and novels, spends most of his time not instructing on technique, but talking about how writers can tap their creative spark, their subconscious creative mind, their Muse by writing what they love and by writing with gusto and joy.

The lead essay’s opening paragraph sums the theme of the book:

Zest. Gusto. How rarely one hears these words used. How rarely do we see people living, or for that matter, creating by them. Yet if I were asked to name the most important items in a writer’s make-up, the things that shape his material and rush him along the road to where he wants to go, I could only warn him to look to his zest, see his gusto.

And how do you do this? As Bradbury digs deeper, he suggests you approach writing perhaps as a Zen master might approach it — through work, through relaxation, through nonthinking, and through further relaxation.

To work, of course, is a common piece of advice given by writers in writing advice books. Bradbury suggests a standard of setting a regular daily schedule, and a set amount of words.

But unique to his advice are the parts about relaxation and nonthinking.

Relaxation, as Bradbury uses the word, isn’t kicking back at the beach; it’s achieved through work. As you work, as you build quiet confidence in your self and your writing, you relax, your body responds to natural rhythms. And as you relax, you stop thinking and you create.

The essays are for the most part inspiring, in particular the lead essay “The Joy of Writing” and the title essay “Zen and the Art of Writing”. In fact, to writing, Bradbury adds a spiritual dimension lost in books solely concerned with technique, a spiritual needed to truly be creative.

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Embassytown by China Miéville

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

China Mieville’s Embassytown is as much an exercise in semantics as it is a science fiction novel about an alien culture on the brink of apocalypse as it comes to clash with human colonists.

The alien culture—the Ariekei—has a language that would be a fundamentalist’s/literalist’s wet dream or worst nightmare; it has almost no figurative language, and what little figurative language it does have, in simile, is taken as literal truth.

Everything is true or passes as fact. They cannot make subtle distinctions and have no room for gray areas of ambiguity.

The language, known as Language to human colonists, is so obscure, only altered humans, known as Ambassadors can fully understand it. Which leads to intrigue and near apocalypse for both Ariekei and humans when an Ambassador introduces lies into Language.

The Ariekei become addicted to the lies and crisis erupts. In the middle of this crisis is Avice Benner Cho, who has just returned to her home planet after years in the immer, a sort liquidy wormhole that allows for interstellar travel (Mieville is ever inventive with language). Avice is an unwilling participant in the intrigue, partly because her husband Scile, a linguist, is a co-conspirator and partly because she is a simile in the Ariekei Language.

Though Embassytown is as imaginative and inventive as Mieville’s Hugo-winning The City & The City, I preferred The City & The City and its intriguing look at how we see and choose to “unsee” (another of Mieville’s coinages)others set against the backdrop of a noir murder mystery.

Embassytown is, however, an intriguing look at how language can be abused, especially when varying shades of meaning are stripped from it and only literalism survives.
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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.

Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

One of the most common — if not the most common — tropes of science fiction is the alien invasion story. Its so common, now, its cliche. Still, it shows up, especially in movies and on TV.

Though the stories are commonplace, a staple of the genre, when those stories are well told, and not just shoot-’em-ups (that style has its place too, though, along with a tub of popcorn) they often give you a perspective of humanity’s direction, its potential, and even its faith in itself as a species to survive.

Arthur C. Clarke’s classic Childhood’s End does just that. It’s an alien invasion story with a twist. When the aliens — the Overlords — come, when their massive ships park over our skies, those ships don’t erupt with explosive death rays to blow up buildings, nor do they blow up the planet itself to, say, make way for a hyperspace bypass. Instead, the Overlords, essentially do nothing for years, except observe.

Well, observe, and then direct. Though the Overlords don’t initially show themselves, they do, however, make contact with humanity, and, in turn, indirectly begin to shape humanity’s course, bringing about world peace, and establishing a near-utopian society. As the Overlords establish this utopia, their true purpose unveils itself: Earth is something of an experiment, one conducted not by the Overlords, but by a God-like being, the Overmind. The Overlords, it turns out, are no more than servants and errand boys sent by the Overmind to carry out its purpose, to draw humanity into its being.

Clarke plays with multiple themes common to SF: utopia and dystopia, the limits of science and technology, for example. He asserts, through these genre commonplaces, that humanity is responsible for itself; its future can be either bleak and apocalyptic or it can be, if not utopian, at least worthwhile. We cannot, Clarke seems to suggest, lose faith in ourselves.

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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.