I'll post links to Amal's re-posts as the re-posts become available.
eta: link added
"Day 2 - Peach Creamed Honey
Colour: Pale and cloudy, like lemonade
Smell: Rather unpleasant; sweaty underthings, but with a hint of lemon beyond it.
Taste: Oh, so delicious. Sweet, syrup-sweet, thick and sugary. I have to think of peaches to discern a peachy flavour; it comes out at the back of my mouth, the top of my throat. It's a mischievous honey, sexy and wry."
A poem today, partially blank verse, partially rhymed. It toys around the edges of a sonnet, but is not a sonnet. It is a poem of seduction, and it's steamy, full of double entendre and, indeed, single entendre. Peaches are sexy (because soft, moist, juicy, and sticky things are strongly evocative of sex), and it's hard, I think, to write a poem about peaches without it becoming a poem about sex. Amal doesn't even try to avoid it - as she says of the honey, this poem is "sexy and wry."
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
The Honey Month, Day 1 (2/1/2011)
A note, first, on what I'm doing. Last February, Amal El-Mohtar wrote a series of short stories and poems in response to a selection of honey that one of her friends sent her. The result is a slim book called The Honey Month, with 28 little pieces of writing and 28 descriptions of honey. I reviewed the book back a ways, and I liked it, but thought it might be better if read slower. So, this month, I will read one selection a day, and make a short comment about them.
Amal is a lovely person, one of those people who makes writing look easy. In addition to this book, she has a poem in the most recent Borderlands (Welcome to Bordertown
) book, and a short story in SteamPowered, a collection of lesbian Steampunk fiction. She also edits Goblin Fruit, an online zine.
I'm going to include the honey descriptions, but you'll have to buy the book for the rest:
"Day 1 - Fireweed Honey
Smell: Slightly resinous, warm, not very strong.
Colour: Mellow gold, an almost "typical" honey colour - what you'd imagine saying "honey tones" would mean, referring to hair or wood.
Taste: Gentle. Very similar to clover honey, but not quite as sweet: mellow, kind. No unusual notes; all I can think is "mm, honey," but without that extra quality that makes me so keenly understand the line from Romeo and Juliet where honey is "loathsome in its own deliciousness," where the sweetness takes on an added dimension so different from sugar, in a way that scrunches your nose when you're a child but closes your eyes when you're grown up. If I were to attempt to be sophisticated I'd say it was understated. Delicious, all the same."
The story here feels a little incomplete. I recall that I spent much of the rest of the book hoping there would be more to this particular story. As I mentioned in my earlier review, much of the fiction is reminiscent of Cat Valente, to whom the work is dedicated. This piece, with its dreamy protagonist and its star girl, is particularly in the Valente mold. This is not to suggest that it is derivative - Amal has a strong voice which is entirely her own - merely that it is easy to see the influence of the one upon the other here. Anyway, a tantalizing first taste, mysterious and sweet, but not cloying, with a hint of danger and wildness. Delightful.
ETA: Amal is re-running the original blog posts that were eventually collected as The Honey Month, with additional commentary, starting here. You should go and take a look, you won't regret it.
Amal is a lovely person, one of those people who makes writing look easy. In addition to this book, she has a poem in the most recent Borderlands (Welcome to Bordertown
) book, and a short story in SteamPowered, a collection of lesbian Steampunk fiction. She also edits Goblin Fruit, an online zine.I'm going to include the honey descriptions, but you'll have to buy the book for the rest:
"Day 1 - Fireweed Honey
Smell: Slightly resinous, warm, not very strong.
Colour: Mellow gold, an almost "typical" honey colour - what you'd imagine saying "honey tones" would mean, referring to hair or wood.
Taste: Gentle. Very similar to clover honey, but not quite as sweet: mellow, kind. No unusual notes; all I can think is "mm, honey," but without that extra quality that makes me so keenly understand the line from Romeo and Juliet where honey is "loathsome in its own deliciousness," where the sweetness takes on an added dimension so different from sugar, in a way that scrunches your nose when you're a child but closes your eyes when you're grown up. If I were to attempt to be sophisticated I'd say it was understated. Delicious, all the same."
The story here feels a little incomplete. I recall that I spent much of the rest of the book hoping there would be more to this particular story. As I mentioned in my earlier review, much of the fiction is reminiscent of Cat Valente, to whom the work is dedicated. This piece, with its dreamy protagonist and its star girl, is particularly in the Valente mold. This is not to suggest that it is derivative - Amal has a strong voice which is entirely her own - merely that it is easy to see the influence of the one upon the other here. Anyway, a tantalizing first taste, mysterious and sweet, but not cloying, with a hint of danger and wildness. Delightful.
ETA: Amal is re-running the original blog posts that were eventually collected as The Honey Month, with additional commentary, starting here. You should go and take a look, you won't regret it.
Monday, January 31, 2011
Wil Wheaton on Librarians
As part of my (tenuous) on going campaign in favor of libraries (libraries are cool, and you should support your local library!), I give you a link to an article from Wil Wheaton's blog on librarians, and their awesomeness.
Monday Library Post, 1/31/2011
Ok, so I'm all ready for snowpocalypse (which probably won't be, because it never is) with a largeish stack of vampire novels for Blood and Honey Month.
Bram Stoker - Dracula
This seemed like a logical place to start.
Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt - Dracula: The Un-Dead
A sequel. To Dracula. No, really.
Dacre Stoker is the great-grand nephew of Bram Stoker, and Ian Holt is a Dracula expert. I don't know how much writing Stoker did and how much Holt did, but this seemed like an apropos moment to pick this one up.
Bekka Black - iDrakula
A modern re-telling of Dracula, using e-mails and text messages. How could I resist? We'll see how it holds up to the original.
Leonard Wolf - A Dream of Dracula: In Search of the Living Dead
Non-fiction book about "the role of the vampire in civilization ... from ancient Egypt to contemporary [1970s] American." I got a raft of recommendations from folks at Slactivist, and this was one of them.
Brian Meehl - Suck it Up
Vampires in the 21st century - drinking Blood Lite - a soy based blood substitute - and trying to organize Vampire Pride parades. Meehl was, at one point, a puppeteer on Sesame Street, so, naturally, he has experience with vampires.
That should keep me busy for a while.
A reminder, I will also be re-reading Amal El-Mohtar's The Honey Month
(now available through Amazon!) starting tomorrow.
Bram Stoker - Dracula
This seemed like a logical place to start.
Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt - Dracula: The Un-Dead
A sequel. To Dracula. No, really.
Dacre Stoker is the great-grand nephew of Bram Stoker, and Ian Holt is a Dracula expert. I don't know how much writing Stoker did and how much Holt did, but this seemed like an apropos moment to pick this one up.
Bekka Black - iDrakula
A modern re-telling of Dracula, using e-mails and text messages. How could I resist? We'll see how it holds up to the original.
Leonard Wolf - A Dream of Dracula: In Search of the Living Dead
Non-fiction book about "the role of the vampire in civilization ... from ancient Egypt to contemporary [1970s] American." I got a raft of recommendations from folks at Slactivist, and this was one of them.
Brian Meehl - Suck it Up
Vampires in the 21st century - drinking Blood Lite - a soy based blood substitute - and trying to organize Vampire Pride parades. Meehl was, at one point, a puppeteer on Sesame Street, so, naturally, he has experience with vampires.
That should keep me busy for a while.
A reminder, I will also be re-reading Amal El-Mohtar's The Honey Month
(now available through Amazon!) starting tomorrow.
Friday, January 28, 2011
Friday Review, 1/28/2011
(It has been suggested that, if I include an image of the book being reviewed, the break between reviews is cleaner. I'll give it a shot - let me know what you think!)
Scott Lynch - Red Seas Under Red Skies
This is the second of the Locke Lamorra novels. (Amazon tells me that the 3rd one is due out in the middle of February, so not too much longer to wait!) If I were lazy, I'd say that this was Oceans 11 meets Pirates of the Caribbean, and that would be moderately accurate. There's a casino, and a couple of con men, and also pirates. Locke is not all that far from Jack Sparrow in several scenes - he's a fast talker, he can get other people to cover up his own inadequacies, he likes dressing up - but I think that such a description would seriously cheapen the book, which is considerably deeper than either of those movies.
Ok. First up, I liked the first book better. Much of what I liked about the first book was still present in this book, but not quite to the same extent. Lynch ran out of flashbacks half way through the book - I really liked the conceit in the first book, and was sad when it wasn't continued throughout the second. Where the first book was proud to stand entirely on its own, this book more or less requires a sequel to be complete - good marketing, perhaps, but lacking in chutpah. (That being said, I'm not sure how one might end this book without a cliff hanger ending, so what do I know?) Finally, at the end of the first book, Locke is battered, but arguably triumphant - in this book, not so much.
With that out of the way, I still really really liked this book. It had much of the energy of the first book, and it touched on a lot of the same themes - justice, class warfare, charming rogues and cunning plots, that sort of thing. Further, you could totally read this book without having read the first - Lynch includes many grace notes that reference the first book, but I think they are not so much that, if you started here, you would feel that you missed something.
I especially liked several scenes which present a compelling philosophy of heroism - what does it mean to be a hero? Making hard choices, says Lynch, and being willing to face the consequences of those choices. There were also several scenes which were deeply moving; I may have cried a time or two. If I become emotionally invested in the characters of a book I'm reading, I'd say that it's a pretty good book. In fact, I'm going to go out of something of a limb here and say this: if the third book is as good as the first two, I'm going to have to start watching for these at a price I'm willing to pay.
Taylor Anderson - Destroyermen: Distant Thunders
Anderson is four books into this series of alternative history.* Midway through World War Two, the USS Walker and the USS Mahan, US destroyers, have found themselves thrown through some sort of portal into a world where humans did not evolve. A world dominated by enormous monsters, both on land and in the sea. A world in which the most prominent sentient species are a group of highly evolved lemurs (the Lemurians) and a group of highly evolved lizard critters (the Grik). The Grik seek to control the planet, and eat anything that gets in their way. The Lemurians become critical allies for the American sailors, who help repel a major assault by the Grik, who have human assistance of their own - from the crew of the Japanese cruiser, Amagi.
In this book, things have become more complicated. There have clearly been several groups of humans from our world who have wandered into this new world, and they've started to have some sort of an influence. The Americans find themselves forced to deal with citizens of New Britain, a colony founded by remnants of an East Indian Company expedition, established on Hawaii. Alliances become complex, and the things which were black and white in the first trilogy suddenly seem less so in this book.
Ok. It's not great literature, but it's an interesting read. Taylor has done his research on the ships of World War Two, and has clearly thought about the attitudes and behaviors of his human protagonists, based on their historical contexts. (Some of this is a little off putting - Americans in the early 1940s were not exactly enlightened as regards gender equality, for instance) He's also put a great deal of thought into the world he's developing - there is depth there, and complexity. There is a strong element of war porn - lots of loving descriptions of specific weapons and what they are capable of - and towards the end of the last trilogy I was getting an icky sense that the Grik existed so that Taylor could have his protagonists slaughter enemies without Taylor feeling guilty about having his protagonists slaughter enemies. That icky sense is largely mitigated in this book - Taylor offers considerable nuance as his characters have some luxury of thought away from the confines of impending doom. Also, Taylor's characters develop nicely here - it's easy, I think, to have flat characters in a series like this, but Taylor continues to provide layers for his characters. So, good writing, good characters, lots of action and adventure, and giant fish. It's fun.
I would say, though, that I don't think you could reasonably start reading with this book - there's a lot of backstory that won't make sense if you don't start at the beginning.
Two final things. First, needs more maps. Taylor provides some; and in the past, there have been more - also, the maps come more or less where they are relevant in the book, which minimizes flipping back and forth between the front of the book and where you are reading. Still, there were several times when I wanted to know more accurately where things were happening - the Pacific Ocean is a big place, and narrowing things down a bit would have been nice. Second, Taylor seems to be introducing new ships and crews and such from our world with each book - that's going to get a little old if it continues. It already feels a little like deus ex machina - if the characters can't succeed without additional infusions of modern technology, perhaps they are not doing it right.
*is it alt-hist, though? I'm not sure. I think I described it as "folks from here sent off to somewhere that history went entirely different," so I'm not really sure it qualifies. Clearly, I need to define my terms. I'd say that alt-hist suggests a novel set entirely within a history not our own - Harry Turtledove comes to mind, as does Cherie Priest - and this represents something different. I'll have to think about it.
Cassandra Clare - City of Bones
I read the prequel to this some weeks ago - The Clockwork Angel
- and I liked it enough to pick up the first part of the original trilogy. It's a YA novel in the urban fantasy genre. It has a spunky female lead, and she doesn't fall in love with the vampires. There's considerable action, lots of secrets and running around New York with shadowy denizens of the shadows, fighting against other shadowy figures. The plot was fairly twisty. Although Clare telegraphed a lot of her twists well ahead of time, there were a couple of plot twists I didn't see coming, which is always nice.
This book is deeply rooted in the experience of being 15, and I think you need to approach it with that in mind. There was a great scene early in the book where one of the supporting characters presents some truly awful poetry - one of the other characters suggests that it sounds like the poet has eaten a dictionary and is now vomiting up words. This made me wince a little as I thought about the poetry I was writing when I was 15 - it sounded very much the same. With your inner 15 year old firmly in charge, however, you may find this to be an amusing book. My wife has requested that I bring home the next two books, so watch for reviews of them as well.
Next week - Blood and Honey Month begins!
Scott Lynch - Red Seas Under Red Skies
This is the second of the Locke Lamorra novels. (Amazon tells me that the 3rd one is due out in the middle of February, so not too much longer to wait!) If I were lazy, I'd say that this was Oceans 11 meets Pirates of the Caribbean, and that would be moderately accurate. There's a casino, and a couple of con men, and also pirates. Locke is not all that far from Jack Sparrow in several scenes - he's a fast talker, he can get other people to cover up his own inadequacies, he likes dressing up - but I think that such a description would seriously cheapen the book, which is considerably deeper than either of those movies.
Ok. First up, I liked the first book better. Much of what I liked about the first book was still present in this book, but not quite to the same extent. Lynch ran out of flashbacks half way through the book - I really liked the conceit in the first book, and was sad when it wasn't continued throughout the second. Where the first book was proud to stand entirely on its own, this book more or less requires a sequel to be complete - good marketing, perhaps, but lacking in chutpah. (That being said, I'm not sure how one might end this book without a cliff hanger ending, so what do I know?) Finally, at the end of the first book, Locke is battered, but arguably triumphant - in this book, not so much.
With that out of the way, I still really really liked this book. It had much of the energy of the first book, and it touched on a lot of the same themes - justice, class warfare, charming rogues and cunning plots, that sort of thing. Further, you could totally read this book without having read the first - Lynch includes many grace notes that reference the first book, but I think they are not so much that, if you started here, you would feel that you missed something.
I especially liked several scenes which present a compelling philosophy of heroism - what does it mean to be a hero? Making hard choices, says Lynch, and being willing to face the consequences of those choices. There were also several scenes which were deeply moving; I may have cried a time or two. If I become emotionally invested in the characters of a book I'm reading, I'd say that it's a pretty good book. In fact, I'm going to go out of something of a limb here and say this: if the third book is as good as the first two, I'm going to have to start watching for these at a price I'm willing to pay.
Taylor Anderson - Destroyermen: Distant Thunders
Anderson is four books into this series of alternative history.* Midway through World War Two, the USS Walker and the USS Mahan, US destroyers, have found themselves thrown through some sort of portal into a world where humans did not evolve. A world dominated by enormous monsters, both on land and in the sea. A world in which the most prominent sentient species are a group of highly evolved lemurs (the Lemurians) and a group of highly evolved lizard critters (the Grik). The Grik seek to control the planet, and eat anything that gets in their way. The Lemurians become critical allies for the American sailors, who help repel a major assault by the Grik, who have human assistance of their own - from the crew of the Japanese cruiser, Amagi.
In this book, things have become more complicated. There have clearly been several groups of humans from our world who have wandered into this new world, and they've started to have some sort of an influence. The Americans find themselves forced to deal with citizens of New Britain, a colony founded by remnants of an East Indian Company expedition, established on Hawaii. Alliances become complex, and the things which were black and white in the first trilogy suddenly seem less so in this book.
Ok. It's not great literature, but it's an interesting read. Taylor has done his research on the ships of World War Two, and has clearly thought about the attitudes and behaviors of his human protagonists, based on their historical contexts. (Some of this is a little off putting - Americans in the early 1940s were not exactly enlightened as regards gender equality, for instance) He's also put a great deal of thought into the world he's developing - there is depth there, and complexity. There is a strong element of war porn - lots of loving descriptions of specific weapons and what they are capable of - and towards the end of the last trilogy I was getting an icky sense that the Grik existed so that Taylor could have his protagonists slaughter enemies without Taylor feeling guilty about having his protagonists slaughter enemies. That icky sense is largely mitigated in this book - Taylor offers considerable nuance as his characters have some luxury of thought away from the confines of impending doom. Also, Taylor's characters develop nicely here - it's easy, I think, to have flat characters in a series like this, but Taylor continues to provide layers for his characters. So, good writing, good characters, lots of action and adventure, and giant fish. It's fun.
I would say, though, that I don't think you could reasonably start reading with this book - there's a lot of backstory that won't make sense if you don't start at the beginning.
Two final things. First, needs more maps. Taylor provides some; and in the past, there have been more - also, the maps come more or less where they are relevant in the book, which minimizes flipping back and forth between the front of the book and where you are reading. Still, there were several times when I wanted to know more accurately where things were happening - the Pacific Ocean is a big place, and narrowing things down a bit would have been nice. Second, Taylor seems to be introducing new ships and crews and such from our world with each book - that's going to get a little old if it continues. It already feels a little like deus ex machina - if the characters can't succeed without additional infusions of modern technology, perhaps they are not doing it right.
*is it alt-hist, though? I'm not sure. I think I described it as "folks from here sent off to somewhere that history went entirely different," so I'm not really sure it qualifies. Clearly, I need to define my terms. I'd say that alt-hist suggests a novel set entirely within a history not our own - Harry Turtledove comes to mind, as does Cherie Priest - and this represents something different. I'll have to think about it.
Cassandra Clare - City of Bones
I read the prequel to this some weeks ago - The Clockwork Angel
- and I liked it enough to pick up the first part of the original trilogy. It's a YA novel in the urban fantasy genre. It has a spunky female lead, and she doesn't fall in love with the vampires. There's considerable action, lots of secrets and running around New York with shadowy denizens of the shadows, fighting against other shadowy figures. The plot was fairly twisty. Although Clare telegraphed a lot of her twists well ahead of time, there were a couple of plot twists I didn't see coming, which is always nice.This book is deeply rooted in the experience of being 15, and I think you need to approach it with that in mind. There was a great scene early in the book where one of the supporting characters presents some truly awful poetry - one of the other characters suggests that it sounds like the poet has eaten a dictionary and is now vomiting up words. This made me wince a little as I thought about the poetry I was writing when I was 15 - it sounded very much the same. With your inner 15 year old firmly in charge, however, you may find this to be an amusing book. My wife has requested that I bring home the next two books, so watch for reviews of them as well.
Next week - Blood and Honey Month begins!
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Note on comments and things
So, I've changed the comment system, which seems to mean that I've lost all of the older comments - I can still see them, but none of you can, which is a shame. When I get a free moment, I'll see if there's someway to fix that. In the meantime, I hope that the new comment system doesn't suck - we'll see?
I've also added a thing which recommends other posts - I don't know, though, the recommendations seem to be somewhat arbitrary - maybe that will change, we'll see.
Finally, February is rapidly approaching. I've been toying with the idea of a theme month, and February is pretty short. What I'm thinking is a month of vampire novels - we got a bunch for Christmas - and maybe a day by day re-reading of Amal's Honey Month - call it "Blood and Honey Month". I don't think I have quite enough vampire books, though - this is your chance to make use of the new comments to induce me to read horrible vampire fiction. It's been suggested that I need to read at least one Stephanie Meyer, for instance.
I've also added a thing which recommends other posts - I don't know, though, the recommendations seem to be somewhat arbitrary - maybe that will change, we'll see.
Finally, February is rapidly approaching. I've been toying with the idea of a theme month, and February is pretty short. What I'm thinking is a month of vampire novels - we got a bunch for Christmas - and maybe a day by day re-reading of Amal's Honey Month - call it "Blood and Honey Month". I don't think I have quite enough vampire books, though - this is your chance to make use of the new comments to induce me to read horrible vampire fiction. It's been suggested that I need to read at least one Stephanie Meyer, for instance.
Monday, January 24, 2011
Monday Library Post, 1/24/2011
Four books today:
Robert Conroy - Red Inferno, 1945
Mr. Conroy writes alt-history novels. This one ponders what would have happened if the US Army had crossed the Elbe River and moved on Berlin at the end of World War Two. Basically, Conroy suggests that the Soviets would have attacked, dragging the US into the Cold War earlier and hotter than they would have liked. This is one of the periods that I study, so I was intrigued.
Elaine Weiss - Fruits of Victory: The Woman's Land Army of America in the Great War
A book about the "farmerettes" of WWI. I was really looking for a non fiction book this time out, and this caught my eye. I know little about this aspect of the war, so I'm looking forward to it.
Kit Whitfield - Benighted
Ms. Whitfield and I are regular contributers over at Slactivist - she more regular than I - and although I knew she had written a book, and that I had seen it at the library, I have not read it. I resolved to correct this shocking oversight on my part. It's a book about werewolves, sort of - 99% of the world are werewolves, and the 1% live as a frightened minority, supposedly protected by the law. It's a fantasy novel, but it also looks to be a crime novel. As with Ms. Mohtar's poetry, I hope that I like it - it's hard to give bad reviews to the work of people you know.
Paolo Bacigalupi - The Windup Girl
Mr. Bacigalupi writes depressing post-social collapse novels about how Monsanto is going to kill us all. In a not too distant future, calories are wealth, food is very tightly controlled, and the world is a desperate place of genetic engineering, drought, and starvation. Believe it or not, I've been looking forward to this, so I was very happy when I saw it today.
Robert Conroy - Red Inferno, 1945
Mr. Conroy writes alt-history novels. This one ponders what would have happened if the US Army had crossed the Elbe River and moved on Berlin at the end of World War Two. Basically, Conroy suggests that the Soviets would have attacked, dragging the US into the Cold War earlier and hotter than they would have liked. This is one of the periods that I study, so I was intrigued.
Elaine Weiss - Fruits of Victory: The Woman's Land Army of America in the Great War
A book about the "farmerettes" of WWI. I was really looking for a non fiction book this time out, and this caught my eye. I know little about this aspect of the war, so I'm looking forward to it.
Kit Whitfield - Benighted
Ms. Whitfield and I are regular contributers over at Slactivist - she more regular than I - and although I knew she had written a book, and that I had seen it at the library, I have not read it. I resolved to correct this shocking oversight on my part. It's a book about werewolves, sort of - 99% of the world are werewolves, and the 1% live as a frightened minority, supposedly protected by the law. It's a fantasy novel, but it also looks to be a crime novel. As with Ms. Mohtar's poetry, I hope that I like it - it's hard to give bad reviews to the work of people you know.
Paolo Bacigalupi - The Windup Girl
Mr. Bacigalupi writes depressing post-social collapse novels about how Monsanto is going to kill us all. In a not too distant future, calories are wealth, food is very tightly controlled, and the world is a desperate place of genetic engineering, drought, and starvation. Believe it or not, I've been looking forward to this, so I was very happy when I saw it today.
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