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.)

http://www.paulahellergarland.blogspot.com/

A good novel. Better on the second read. Obviously influential to the genre–cyberpunk in particular. But I seem to be missing why it’s such a seminal SF work. Still, Gully Foyle maybe most memorable character in SF.

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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 . . .

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

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.

Do you carry books with you when you’re out and about in the world?

And, do you ever try to hide the covers?

Yes, I carry books when I’m out and about. Of late, when I go to substitute teach, along with my lunch in my backpack, I carry Year’s Best SF 12 to read on my breaks.

It’s a short story anthology from 2006 and includes Nancy Kress, Joe Haldeman, and Ian MacLeod.

Short stories are really good for the hour or so of planning period time I usually have available for myself. Much better than reading the same copy of Wired or Time or Newsweek found in the teacher’s lounge.

No, I don’t hide the covers of books I carry around, unless it’s a big stack in the shopping bag from the bookstore I’ve bought them from.

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.

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.