Library Monday, 8/8/2011

Tonight at the library, a homeschool steel drum band. Where else can you go to see that sort of entertainment for free? Also, I wish I had a camera with me. There's a pair of shelf sets in the YA section, where the YA librarian (who is also the Children's librarian, and she's hella cool) puts books of some note, or books on a theme, or something of that nature. Today, she had one side of the shelf all in red covered books, and the other side all in blue covered books. It was pretty awesome, in a quixotic sort of way.

Four books this week.

J.D. Robb - Conspiracy in Death


I read Holiday in Death during one or the other of my research trips, and kinda liked it. This is the book right after that one, so I grabbed it.

Peter Carey - Parrot and Olivier in America


This is supposedly a very funny book set in the United States at about the time of the French Revolution. I'm a little leery, because the author's name is much much bigger than the title of the book (which bodes ill), but the description (picaresque, historical) appeals - we shall see.

Carrie Vaughn - After the Golden Age


Carrie Vaughn trades in werewolves for super heroes - Celia West is the non-superpowered child of the two biggest superheroes on the planet, and this is a book about how she deals. It could be funny, we shall see.

Trevanian - Shibumi


So, on the new book shelf there was a sequel to this book, by someone else. The principle character sounds interesting (he's an assassin! he's very good at what he does! It's hard to explain why I thought the character looked appealing, actually. I like assassins? In print, that is.), so I thought I should read the first book first. Finding it took some doing. I'm a little leery of this one too, because one named author? But we shall see.

I would like to call your attention to a series of related posts re: the use of the term Mary Sue in casual criticism of books. Here's Holly Black's take on it, here's a post from Zoe Marriott, which inspired Holly Black's post, and here's something by Sarah Brennan, inspired by Zoe Marriott's post. I have used the term in the past, specifically in regard to John Sandford's "Prey" books - in that context, I mean that Sandford seems to be engaging in some wish fulfillment through his primary character. However, Ms. Black, Marriott, and Brennan suggest that, in general, the term is use to dismiss strong female characters. The suggest that this is wrong on a number of levels, and in the context of their objections, I agree, and shall endeavor not to use it in that way.

Friday Review, 8/5/2011

Two books this week, and most of a third, but that will have to wait until next week.

Holly Black and Ellen Kushner, eds, Welcome to Bordertown


Short short review - this is very very good. All of you who have been putting off reading this, waiting for some sort of sign that it would be ok to do so - stop waiting. Go, read it now.

Longer review - This has been a very good year for anthologies, hasn't it? Zombies v. Unicorns, Teeth, I'm sure there are others that I haven't read. So, this is a very good anthology - lots of good writing, some poems, even a short graphic novel/comic book. Bordertown books have always been good at bringing together established authors and elements of the newer generation, and this collection is no different in that regard.  You'll find old friends here - Ellen Kushner (who edited the work with Holly Black, but also contributed a piece), Jane Yolen, Steven Brust, Terri Windling (as herself, not as Bellamy Bach), Will Shetterly, Charles DeLint, Emma Bull - they're all here, and just as good as you would expect. There's new stuff from Cory Doctorow, Cassandra Clare, Neil Gaiman, and Catharynne Valente (none of whom can really claim to be new to the writing world, of course), plus Amal El Mohtar (of The Honey Month), Annette Curtis Clause, and Sara Ryan, all relatively new to the wonder of publication. Plus a number of other folks - the full list is here. Everyone one of the authors has turned in a brilliant piece of prose or poetry or graphic art, and that's fantastic.

But Bordertown books have also always been more than anthologies - they're shared world collections. That means that the stories collected in a Bordertown book should twine around each other, should contain sly references to earlier works, and nods to the stories shared in the current work. Initially, I wasn't sure that was happening in this book. Clearly, this collection is designed to do two things (in addition to the things that Bordertown books have done in the past, ie, showcase established and emerging authors, and tell some great stories) - welcome a new generation of readers to Bordertown while re-assuring older readers that their chosen destination has not changed too much. Hence the effort to include as many of the "original" crew as possible, clearly - even when, as with Mr. Brust, the author has moved on since contributing to earlier works. (Brust's poem seems a little out of place - defiantly in The World, spitting about motorcycles which run on gas, not magic - and he has, elsewhere, mentioned that he doesn't think it's a good idea to romanticize runaways, which this series does, a little. So, fair - Brust clearly needed to be included, but he wasn't going to write something he didn't feel anymore.) Through the first half of the book, I was concerned that these two new tasks (welcoming and re-welcoming) were taking precedence over the shared world concept. About a third of the way through the book, however, Catherynne Valente's story and Amal El Mohtar's poem played off against each other very nicely - either through planning on their part, or through sheer happy luck combined with good editorial chops, I could not say - and, later, there was a clear connection between Jane Yolen's translation of Tam Lin into a rap and the short story which followed, which referenced Yolen's rap. From there, it was clear that at least some of the spirit of the earlier collections was alive, and the little references, nods, shout-outs and winks were there, if you wanted to look for them (and knew what to look for).

Some highlights - an explanation of what happened. Thirteen years have passed for us in The World (since the last Bordertown collection), but only thirteen days have passed in Bordertown itself - they barely noticed we weren't there anymore; only the fact that coffee was getting scarce alerted them to the lack of our presence. Several stories played very very nicely with that idea. Cory Doctorow's story about how the internet came to Bordertown is brilliant, and the various stories with clear references to Worldly folks with no real understanding of how Bordertown works - those were nice too. Nalo Hopkins introduces us to the Caribbean section of Bordertown (which I didn't know existed) in a carnival tinged love story. Janni Lee Simner ponders what happens when the Twilight generation hit Bordertown - what if your idea of a perfect love is not an elf/faerie (soooo 1980s!), but a vampire, or a werewolf? Yup, Bordertown has those too. Holly Black and Cassandra Clare offer a lovely adventure story about drugs and swashbuckling gentlemen in masks. And Charles DeLint closes out the collection with a really heart breakingly beautiful story, which almost doesn't have Bordertown in it at all. (But it does have the Baltimore Fairy Festival - those are my people, sort of!)

Here's hoping we don't have to wait another thirteen years for a Bordertown collection. Maybe the next one will have a strong narrative thread tying everything together - or maybe it will just be a brilliant anthology, with lots of winks and nudges. And that, I think, would be ok.

I'd like to note that I picked Bordertown up last week after A Game of Thrones because I wanted something light after the unrelenting grey of Martin's opus. I was half way through the book when I realized that my "light" was a book about teen runaways living in a sometimes colourful, but often bleak, anarchic world, where what you are running away from is not necessarily guaranteed to be worse than what you are running towards. Perhaps that says something about me as a reader?

Steven Gould - 7th Sigma


The first year my wife and I ran our convention, we invited Steven Gould. We both loved Jumper and Wild Side. Standing Waves had just been released, and neither of us had read Helm, but we knew we liked what Gould wrote, so we invited him. He was a good guest. He enjoyed the food we offered him, he gave an impromptu Aikido demonstration, and he didn't get into a fight over politics with our artist guest (unlike the other author guest, who has since died, so I won't tell you his name). Anyway, Gould is one of those authors who, when I see he has a new book, I try to get a copy of that new book, because I'm pretty sure it's going to be good. So, when I saw Gould promoting 7th Sigma in John Scalzi's Big Idea, I placed an order at my local library. I was not disappointed.

So. When you go into a Steven Gould book, you're pretty much guaranteed a couple of things. The main character will be a young man with daddy issues. There's a decent chance that he'll be hyper-kinetic in someway - perhaps he will do Aikido (as in this book), or capable of teleportation (Jumper). He'll probably be the Smartest Guy in the Room (tm), at least part of the time. And the story will be an adventure of some sort, with fairly clear good guys and bad guys. This book has all of that. It also has some interesting complications, and some potential for a) a sequel and b) some thought on what, exactly, it means to be human.

7th Sigma, Gould tells us in the frontispiece, is a scientific term indicating something which is vanishingly unlikely to occur. In this book, that thing is the arrival (at some point in the near future) of a swarm of metal bugs. They come out of New Mexico, and eat all the metal in the Southwestern United States - New Mexico, Texas, Arizona, a little way up into Utah - and then they stop advancing, and stay where they are. (All the metal, by the way, includes mine tailings, the rebar in concrete [bridges and buildings collapse], and the metal in artificial hips, pacemakers, fillings - all metal. Humans are just slightly thicker air to them - if there's a human between them and metal, the bugs go through.) The Southwest has become a wasteland - an orderly evacuation occurred sometime after the initial swarm, and, fifty years later, people have slowly been trickling back into the Territories, settling in small communities, and building without metal - lots of plastic and ceramics, traditional muscle based farming and transportation, it's all very bucolic.

The bugs are a plot device, they aren't the story. The story is the people, who, good and bad, are going about their lives, trying as hard as possible to ignore the bugs. The bad guys here are corrupt cops running drugs (meth) into the Territory. The good guys stop them.

The principle character is a guy named Kimble. He does Aikido. He works with the federales too - doing spy stuff. He's fairly clearly (and Gould makes no secret of this) a direct reference to Rudyard Kipling's Kim (which I now have to go back and read).

The bugs aren't the story - but they are A story. There are hints throughout the book that the bugs are trying to communicate with the people - that humans aren't just "thicker air" to them - that humans are either a threat or a potential ally - it's hard to say. I think Gould has set himself up to write a sequel (although, rest assured, this book ends satisfyingly, and doesn't NEED a sequel), and I think the question of what the bugs are and what they want (beyond our sweet sweet metal) will be the story in that future work.And, when it comes out, I will pick it up. Because Steven Gould is a fairly solid pick, every time.

Hickey of the Beast Wednesday Post, 8/3/2011

(Linkage)

Chapter 21

This chapter describes the set up for Thanksgiving. In the academic calendar, American Thanksgiving (which is towards the end of November, unlike Canadian Thanksgiving, which is in October) is an odd holiday. Although it's officially only one day long, it's also always a Thursday (actually - it turns out that it wasn't a fixed date until after World War Two, but that's another story), so Thanksgiving turns into a three day break before a weekend - most schools give their students the Wednesday off for travel, and don't expect them back on the Friday after. (And, of course, students routinely ask for the Tuesday and the Monday off - often they start doing this as early as September.) In a semester system, Thanksgiving falls towards the end of the first semester, which means you really need a break by then, but there really isn't quite enough time to pick up the threads when the students come back - Thanksgiving happens and then, suddenly, the semester ends. It's this weird breathing space, right when you feel a need for a breathing space, but there isn't enough of the semester after the break to justify the break.

I bring this up, because this chapter feels like that break. There's 9 chapters after this one, and nothing much happens in this one. Connie gets some really nice character development - she goes back to the garden (the one with the dead dog or raccoon from the beginning of the book) and learns some important things about herself - but she doesn't get access to the book she needs (not yet, anyway), and the rest of her Scoobies are either off home or busy with their own Thanksgiving prep. So, a breather. And the next nine chapters are going to be a headlong rush to the end of the semester - and the end of the adventure.

Toronto Library Update

I posted about the plight of Toronto libraries last week. Here's an update - since Margaret Atwood came out in favor of public libraries, several of the city councilors have announced that they will not vote to close libraries in Toronto. Yay!

Contest post

Since only Beth sent me an entry, I guess that means she wins. Here's Beth's entry, which she cunningly disguised as a post in her blog, which is a pretty amazing blog, and you should check it out.

Beth - send me an e-mail with an address and I'll mail you the book.

Library Monday 8/1/2011

Just one book today,

China Mieville - Embassytown


I really enjoyed Kraken, so when I saw this on the new book shelf, I thought I'd give it a try. It seems to be some sort of first contact novel - humanity has found alien life, or alien life has found us, and we've established some sort of neutral ground - I confess, I did not read the dust jacket all that carefully. We'll see.

Friday Review Post, 7/29/2011

First, I'd like to remind anyone who was thinking about submitting an entry for the Zombies vs. Unicorns contest that Sunday is the last day to do that. At present, I have had only one submission...

Two books this week.

Rick Smith and Bruce Lourie - Slow Death by Rubber Ducky


This book will make you afraid to cook or eat anything, to bathe yourself or clean anything in the house, or to go outside, or to stay inside. Basically, Smith and Lourie spent a weekend deliberately poisoning themselves with toxins that arise in the sort of things we use on a daily basis, and then recording the change in their bodies' levels of those toxins. They looked at phthalates (in rubber toys [like ducks], and cosmetics [as scent]), teflon (in frying pans and stain treatments for carpets and furniture), PBDE's (fire retardant in furniture, electronics, and childrens' sleepwear), mercury (in tuna), Triclosan (anti-bacterial chemical, in soap, and garden hoses, and pizza wheels, and trash bags), 2,4-D (pesticide), and BPA (in plastics, like baby bottles and water bottles and all manner of other things). The results are really alarming. Their levels of these chemicals start out alarmingly high - suggesting that we all have fairly considerable background levels of some pretty serious toxins - and they get a LOT higher. Smith and Lourie don't do anything particularly weird with the chemicals - they don't drink teflon straight or anything like that - they just spend a weekend in a room treated with stain treater, eat a bunch of tuna (ok, Lourie eats a somewhat absurd quantity of tuna), cooking with teflon coated frying pans, using phthalate laden bath products, and drinking their coffee out of baby bottles (on the grounds that people heat baby bottles in the microwave all the time - plus BPA is in a lot of things that people heat in the microwave and then eat out of).

There's a lot in the book to make you angry too - the lengths that companies will go to in order to avoid dealing with the fact that they're poisoning their customers, for one. DuPont, which makes teflon, has bought off people in the West Virginia town where the stuff is made on two different occasions. The companies that make PBDEs lobby for more strenuous anti-fire legislation in order to put PBDEs in more stuff - never mind that there's no solid evidence that the rate of fires in the home has been affected one way or the other by having the chemical present in your TV and your couch. Although there is no evidence that antibacterial soap makes your household any less prone to catching colds and such, it has proliferated all over the place - possibly contributing to super-bugs, diseases which are resistant to standard forms of treatment (to be fair, an over diagnosis of antibiotics by doctors has contributed as well).

The last chapter is hopeful. It offers suggestions on how to avoid toxins in your every day life, and also points out that North American and European societies have been increasingly quick to act to prevent the spread of toxic substances. A large portion of the last chapter details the successful effort in Canada to have BPA removed from consumer products like baby bottles - a first, since Canada has generally fairly lax toxin laws, relying on more strenuous laws in the United States and Europe to keep toxins out of the Canadian market place. You could probably skip the rest of the book, which is scary, and read just the last chapter.

The problem with the book - well, there are a couple. First, the writing isn't that great. Lots of choppy sentences and sentence fragments, to no good effect - they aren't used to convey emotion or a need for haste or anything of that nature, they're just there. Second, the suggestions for avoiding toxins are expensive. Eat organic food from your farmers' market. Cook in cast iron or stainless steel, not teflon. Use scent free cosmetics. Avoid cheap children's toys. Smith and Lourie point of that a cast iron frying pan will last longer than a teflon pan - it will pay for itself in the long run - and works as well, if not better. But, if you can only afford a cheap frying pan, being told that it won't last as long as an expensive one (and might hurt you in the process) is not helpful. This is a fine example of what Terry Pratchett calls the Sam Vimes Theory of Economic Injustice:

"The Sam Vimes "Boots" Theory of Economic Injustice runs thus:

At the time of Men at Arms, Samuel Vimes earnt thirty-eight dollars a month as a Captain of the Watch, plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots, the sort that would last years and years, cost fifty dollars. This was beyond his pocket and the most he, Vimes, could hope for was an affordable pair of boots costing ten dollars, which might with luck last a year or so before he, Vimes, would need to resort to makeshift cardboard insoles so as to prolong the moment of shelling out another ten dollars.

Therefore over a period of ten years, he, Vimes, might have paid out a hundred dollars on boots, twice as much as the man who could afford fifty dollars up front ten years before. And he would still have wet feet."

Finally, there's a strong sense of "this is hopeless" about the whole thing - as quickly as consumer groups and governments get one toxin out of the marketplace, a new one steps in to take its place - PCBs becomes PBBs becomes PBDEs, and so on. The solution to that, perhaps, requires rethinking the way we, as societies, reward corporations - but that's an entirely different story.

George R.R. Martin - The Game of Thrones

So. Martin is a huge name in the fantasy publishing world right now, and this book (the first in the Song of Ice and Fire series) is a big reason why. The most recent book - A Dance With Dragons - came out July 12th, and I decided that I would re-read the first four books before tackling that one. Which is a problem, since everyone else seems to have had the same idea - I had to borrow this book from a friend, because the library had no copies available any time soon. Kinda like whenever a new Harry Potter book came out - you couldn't re-read unless you owned the series, because the books were not on the shelves. A further complication, of course, is the fact that HBO is currently showing a TV adaptation of the novels (or, at least, the first one) which has met with considerable acclaim, and so people are just now discovering that there are books.

Anyway. If you're already reading the series, there's not much I can tell you that you don't already know. If you aren't, and you like thick, meaty, character driven books packed full of revenge and blood and politics and lots and lots of gloom and grey, then this series is for you. (I like all of those things, incidentally. I like them a lot). These are dense books that document the way that a fantasy kingdom falls apart when the strong hand at the middle withers and dies. Martin doesn't pull punches - he kills off characters left and right - and he is indiscriminate - honorable characters and dishonorable characters are equally likely to get the chop. Actually, the line between honorable and dishonorable is really hard to draw in these books - Martin is very very good at generating sympathy for characters you thought you hated - and also at making  you hate characters you thought were fantastic and lovely. He switches between points of view with each chapter which is a little distracting, since the characters he follows are rarely in the same place - this makes it hard to follow a specific plot line. Never to the point where you want to skip a chapter to get to the plot line you wanted to continue - at least, not in this book - but it's a little frustrating. Every chapter is a cliff hanger, and the next chapter never picks up where the first one left off. The character switching, though, means that you get a good sense of how various people think of themselves as well as how others think of them - this is part of how Martin is able to manipulate reader impression so deftly.

A complaint - Martin seems incapable of finishing things. It's clear from this book that there's a whole series of books ahead - currently another four, and I have no idea if Dance of Dragons ends the cycle or not - and Martin writes slowly. I'm not complaining about the long wait for the latest book - that would be uncouth (and, as John Scalzi points out, Martin has written and published as many words since 2005 as Scalzi has - but all in one big book instead of several little ones) - but it would be nice to see that there was some sort of end in sight. I'm not saying I'm not going to forge ahead - indeed, I've already read the first four books, so I'm covering familiar ground - just wish I knew that there was somewhere to get to at the end of it all.