Storm Reading

So, today I live in NYC, and walked out in the world, to see how it was doing after the storm. I live in one of the areas seemingly least affected, with the power never having gone out, no flooding, and a minimum of destruction. So the people were out in force - re-stocking on groceries, getting coffee, eating pizza. And going to the bookstores. Every bookstore within walking distance of me that was open was filled with people on all levels, people browsing, bringing their kids to browse, or to pick out a new book or toy.

It was busier than when I had ventured out on Sunday, when before I shopped for groceries and other hurricane supplies, I went to the Strand to buy some cheaper used books for when I thought the lights would go out.

Being from California originally, I'm used to storms and blackouts, but not hurricanes. The closest I ever came was a huge storm that hit Northern/Central California a few years back. I was living in Santa Cruz, and got just over the hill from the SF Bay Area right before they closed the freeway due to bad weather and falling trees. When I got to Santa Cruz, power had been blown out over most of the city and the campus was shut down for safety. Power didn't come back on for a day or two, and it stayed storming.

I got through the nights of that storm with friends - going to the one pub in town with gas stoves, and drinking beer and eating greasy food by candlelight, then playing sardines in the dark by flashlight.

But the days I got through with Jane Austen. No internet, can't go outside - I sat in the living room with the most light, and lit some candles to reduce eye strain as the unseen sun set. And I got through the storm with Jane Austen.

Again, as with pretty much everything, Jane Austen isn't for everyone - but for me, it was one of those things that because I was forced to read it in the high school setting, I dismissed and didn't like Austen at first. Then, out of curiosity and boredom, I tried Pride & Prejudice again. Now it's one of my favorite books - and Austen is my go-to for being trapped, alone in the dark in a storm.

The world of these books is far removed from the one I live in - no electricity, matters of gossip and manners and marriage raised to utmost important. It's a time when candlelight is ubiquitous, and entertaining oneself is dependent on being able to endure solitude, to not be bothered by a room in silence, and conversation with people you don't like is an art. Most importantly - the books are always hopeful. Written at a time of rampant classicism and patriarchy, the books undoubtably have their issues of classicism, feminism, racism, and worse. But they also place utmost value in sincerity and honesty, in intelligence and integrity, and always have hope that those that are good will end well, and those that are otherwise will get what they deserve.

It's about having hope, and having hope and faith in yourself and your beliefs (no matter how secular or mundane) be rewarded.

And what better to have by your side in the dark and stormy night, but a candle and a stack of books full of hope and love?

Stay warm and safe and dry through the night.

Banned Books Week 2011

Welcome to the end of Banned Books Week!

This year's Banned Books week has taken place from September 30 - October 6 of 2012.

If you don't know, for some reason, Banned Books Week is an annual national celebration by schools, bookstores, libraries, and others in favor of free speech, specifically by celebrating and promoting banned books.

The Huffington Post has published this article (and sparkly interactive graph!) of the ten most challenged books of 2011, and the reasons why they have been banned.

I unfortunately have to admit that out of these 10, I've only read (along with just about everyone else) the Hunger Games books - but you can be sure this handy list just got added to my pile.

Most of the books that are most popular, most prolific, that last the longest and are recognized to have the most cultural value end up banned by someone at some point or another. Harry Potter shaped the dreams and vernacular of an entire generation. Salman Rushdie had a jihad declared on him for the Satanic Verses.

Books are important for how they connect and affect people - even the ones who haven't read them. Reading what's been banned and making our own decisions about them connects humanity together, and breeds tolerance, dialogue, and understanding. Think about it the next time you read a banned book.

Welcome to the City, Less Fun, More Games

So I've been meaning to read China Miéville for a while now.

Of course, I thought for a long time that China Miéville was a female author, and was super excited for an eminently successful female fantasy/science fiction author whose work did not purportedly rest on sex and/or dragons.*

China Miéville is in fact a man.** A eminently successful and respected man of many talents, recommended by many of my coworkers and favorite authors, not the least of whom is Neil Gaiman.

Some disappointment in this may have contributed to a more prolonged delay in picking up Mr. Miéville's work. Also the disappointment when I realized that the book featured above is in fact not called Presidio Street Station, and does not in fact take place in San Francisco, my city of birth.

But with so much recommendation, and Mr. Miéville's new novel Embassytown racking up all the award nominations, I figured I at least owed it to read one of his books before I stopped working at an independent bookstore, where I am known as one of the few science fiction and fantasy "experts."*** And of course I had to start with Perdido Street Station, as the stubborn and crazy part of me still wanted to believe it'd turn out to have something to do with San Francisco.

But...guys. GUYS.

Holy shit, can this guy write. I feel like anyone who ever aspires to write and reads a lot, pays homage to the writers they enjoy, but at some level thinks "I can do this. Someday. It won't be this, but I can be this good."

I'm here to tell you now...you ain't never going to touch this guy. And neither am I. He has created a thrilling dark, complex, and whole world, where I opened this book and felt like I was visiting a foreign country - enough like my home to feel completely real, but removed enough to be strange, to make me want to find out more, and leaving me convinced at the end that there's more I'm going to need to go back for, that I missed on this trip. The story itself was multi-faceted, told from the perspective of multiple, multi-dimensional characters that were in fact totally real people, even while being members of alien species never seen on this earth.

The story itself was terrifying, depressing to an extent - but kept pulling me back in to find out what happened next, to finally get the answer to this mystery, or that mystery. The city of New Crobuzon, in which the book takes place, is a living breathing, multiple-cross bred organism, whose dark, damp bowels you are lost in, not knowing what's going to come next - if it's going to be a beautiful marvel, or a horror of teeth and pustulence.

I kept having to stop reading this book, because the things that were happening were so intense and immediate - again, in as completely real a way as bio- and steam punk fantasy can be - I had to catch my breath....but then would be picked the book back up five minutes later, because I had to know what happened next.

I'm still processing, weeks later, how I feel about this story. It was complex, dark, realistic - in terms of people, and  the play of politics and individual's strange motivations. It was vulgar and harsh, but also fantastic with the ideas of peoples and magic and theoretical science. There was sex and drugs, art and philosophy, politics and corruption. Horror, both of the impersonal forces of nature personified, and of the cruelty of humanity - or at least, of sentient beings to each other. Perverse and marvelous, full of heroics and betrayals - including a revelation post-climax, that changes the future of the characters at least, if not the world.

I'm not sure I'll ever go back and re-walk the streets leading to Perdido Street Station, but I feel I'm bound to be pulled back to New Crobuzon, potentially to see familiar faces. It was an awe-aspiring trip, but I'm ready to go back to smaller, simpler stories.

But I won't ever fully leave where I've been.

*Not that I have anything against sex and/or dragons. But while female fantasy authors are getting awards and acclaim, the truly famous and eminent ones seem to remain the ones who unload all the fast, cheap, and delicious sex (::coughcough::SookieStackhouseandLaurelKHamilton::coughcough::), or are the ones who unfortunately are deceased or don't seem to have written in the past decade or two. I have many female, contemporary fantasy and science fiction writers that I love, and devour their books voraciously as they come out. I love them, but I'm waiting impatiently for a female fantasy writer whose name means as much as Neil Gaiman or George R.R. Martin.

**Disappointing, but not nearly so much as when I found out Kim Stanley Robinson is also a man.

***I make no claim to being an expert. But I can make a bunch of recommendations in the genres.

In the Garden of Iden

So.

One of my favorite books of all time was given one of the stupidest covers of all time. Are we bitter about this? Yes.

This is not the cover you see on your left. That cover is the one that was on the book when I originally picked it up, the cover that actually gives some indication of what you're in store for - the one that drew me to pick it up in the first place (because really, while not judging books by their covers is great advice for people, in the capitalistic world we live in you need some sort of reason to think picking up a book is a good idea. Otherwise I wouldn't be writing this post, and you all would already be reading this book).

Anyway.

So In the Garden of Iden by Kage Baker is one of my favorite books of all time. It is the start of a series, but can easily stand alone, if you don't want to get too terribly invested into something (the series is complete though, so don't worry about a Martin or Rothfuss or Jordan situation - especially the Jordan).

Though it goes against typical book-review protocol, I don't want to give away too much of what the actual premise and plot of this book is - part of the magic is of discovering what it's all about. I will say this book is set pretty solidly in a scifi world, though the majority of it takes place in Tudor England, during the reign of Mary I, "Bloody" Mary. There may be time travel involved. There may be some sex. There may be theological and temporal debates. There is chocolate.

If you like Christopher Moore, Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, Robin McKinley - if you like strong, intelligent, slightly bitchy heroines with a vulnerable core, sarcastic, smooth-talking con men, arrogant and wounded tall dark strangers, history and botany, theatre, classic cinema, and debates of free will and self-determination: do me, and yourself, a favor, go to your local bookstore or library, pick up this book, DON'T LOOK AT THE COVER, read and discover a new favorite book (possibly even author). And then you can look at the cover. And then come talk to me about it.

Why We Broke Up (or: The Human Experience)

So I bought a copy of Why We Broke Up a couple of weeks ago, but hadn't yet started reading it til last week - then a few pages only at first, standing in my bookshop after it closed, waiting for my coworkers to be ready to leave, saying to myself "Well shit, now I really do have to read this soon."

I re-started the book when I was last at work, and finished it today/tonight - bookending going to the actual event for the book (going, not working!) by being in the middle of it, and finishing it. Daniel Handler, of Lemony Snicket-Series of Unfortunate Events-snarky fame is what has made many people pick up this book. Some have picked it up because of the book's strange weight, a product of the quality of paper necessary to support Maira Kalman's fantastically unique illustrations (another reason people have paged through this book and gone on to read it). Probably most people have picked it up because no one can resist reading a break-up-romance, because everyone is either always in love, falling in love, or trying to get over love: and a breakup story is perfect for all of those.

You meet Minerva Green, known as Min to everyone but her grandmother, a quirky, geeky, unique teenaged girl who somehow winds up heartbroken by the co-captain of the basketball team. It's both nothing and everything you expect. Min is returning to Ed all the debris of their relationship, and with each object writing a letter that explains the events of their relationship. It's the thing where from the beginning you see why the two don't work together, why their relationship was doomed from the start - but still hoping, with each repetition of "and that's why we broke up" after a new observation on an otherwise poignant memory, that somehow the epilogue of this story will be a happy ending - or at least, an open one.

Min and Ed are real people, not the least because you know you don't know everything about them. Min's letter to Ed doesn't explain her relationship with her father, seemingly estranged, and she never did find out what happened with the mother of the boy she fell in love with - or, for that matter, his father who is never mentioned. You read their story, told through the beautiful and - at times - incoherent lens of first loveandheartbreak, and are swept up in the emotions. You're not seeing yourself and your lover (or the ex-lover you're remembering, or the not-lover you're wishing for) as Min and Ed, but behind the images of your story are overlaid your own memories - or wishes - of someone else, and other experiences that brought out these feelings for you. It's that damn personal effect that makes you want to cling to the hope of Min and Ed succeeding against the odds, of a reconciliation at the last, at some bittersweet promise for a future after growth, after healing - but you're going to have to read it to find out if that happens. Because if I tell you, you may just give up now.

But it's worth the story, and the heartbreak, to have the burden of emotion taken off of you for a night, so you can ride along with someone else's joy, and commiserate with their heartbreak without having to feel it yourself. Trace the pictures of each object-memory as you go, and walk through your own closet in your mind, picking up the debris of your relationships - and remember why you loved, and why you broke up. I still hope...but I also remember why.

Heartbreak and Magic (not necessarily in that order)

So I began the year determined to read a new book - hopefully multiple new books - in such a way as to make me once again excited to be alive, and inspired to pursue my own joy in creation and creativity.

After about a week of trying to decide which book would start the new year (a delay aided by my need to finish grad school apps, which I swore I would finish before I was allowed to read for fun. Also a visit from my mother), I settled on not only a new book for me, but a book brand new to the world at large: The Fault in Our Stars by John Green. The same day I bought this book, I also acquired a copy of The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht, a book my coworkers had loved, and a book I was a week away from working a reading/signing event for.

I write to you today about both of these books, not because they are particularly similar in any form of story, character, or writing style, but because these are the books that started my new year in a most particular way, and did in fact make me excited to be alive, feeling all those emotions that you feel when in such a state, and did in fact cause me to consider and pursue again my own joy in creation and creativity.

The Fault in Our Stars (or TFiOS as the nerdfighters would call it, and I will too for brevity's sake) is a book of heartbreak and truth, one of the few books that has actually made me break into tears - though whether they were ones of sadness or joy I couldn't fully say (though sad is definitely a much less complex emotion, given the circumstances of the book). John Green spent 12 years writing a book about a teenage girl with cancer - specifically creating a girl, fully fledged and grown as a real living breathing person, sprung from his head as a person you know, who you want to know, whose despair and hope and love and ache you feel as your own, and whose life may be defined by cancer, but whose identity defines those around her. He wrote of Hazel, Hazel Grace , and the boy who walked into her life on one leg, Augustus Waters. It is a perfect story where the perfection is always false - but seeing and admitting that makes it somehow more genuine. It's a book of hope for the future, while knowing that the future has an end date sooner rather than later. It's a book about love and identity, and how to live when all you know is that you're dying - and how to live alongside those whose hearts you know you are going to break. It's written with the language of the everyday poetry of teenagers and lovers, dreamers and poets, words that I breathed in and out like Hazel's oxygen.

The Tiger's Wife, in contrast, is anything but a book of the everyday. Written in the US, it tells the stories of those who have lived through and are rebuilding after the wars in Eastern Europe. Love is a sidenote for a book about determining one's identity as part of a nation and community, about the physical and intangible remnants after death, about the search for mystery, for the stories and truths that show that there's more to life than what's around us. Tea Obreht surrounds her reader with a glittering ocean of words, the art of which both took my breath away (and caused me to subject an innocent bookshop full of people to an especially poetic passage about the dead, during an event mic check), while also causing me to despair that I would ever be able to wield words as beautifully as this. In the past and in the far past, in first hand accounts and second and third, all from the same voice, but telling stories she is further removed from, Obreht's Natalia explores mystery and reality, and the conflicts and battles of real life and war, and again of mystery to try and find her footing in a world she has inherited after her grandfather's passing.

These are two very different books: One of the everyday, one of the foreign (in many ways). One of youth and one of the old. One of the modern world of the US - and one of the old world. Yet somehow they are also complementary: both books are about realizing the value of your life in the face of death - one your own, the other those who've come before you. TFiOS brings hope in love, and the inexorability of life. The Tiger's Wife strives for hope in the mysteries of the magical stories of the past - but in the end is an affirmation of your own power and responsibility, to pick up the pieces even of the messes left by our forefathers, with or without reassurance of more beyond.

Each book left me bittersweet for numerous reasons, and despairing of my own talents for different reasons - but each also left me determined to dive back into my life, to make myself matter within my own world. And hey, led me to write at least this blog post, so it can't all be despair. You will devour TFiOS, addicted and in tears by the end. You will bask in wonder with The Tiger's Wife. You may like one or the other better - I know I did. But you won't regret reading them once you get there.

Hello. Hi there. How are you?

So last night I was talking with a friend online, and we were sharing a love of the wonderfully weird things that you can do with and at math. She was explaining her love of a particular proof.

Earlier in the night I had been talking with an old friend from high school, who was subjecting herself to GoddamnAutoCorrect in an attempt to wean herself off of trash TV.

Both of these conversations led me to an impulse, and that impulse made me realize I have a super power:

I know the future book you will love.

My friend who I was discussing math and proofs with I told about Little Brother by Cory Doctorow. The friend on DamnYouAutoCorrect (who I have a tradition of giving books, who majored in English with a thesis written on magical realism in Rushdie, and the movements precursor's in Borges, just so you have more context) I started telling about Charles De Lint, specifically recommending his first short story collection Dreams Underfoot, or else the novel Memory and Dream.

Late at night, having just finished series two or Sherlock, debating fictional conspiracies and laughing about my life, I discovered at least one super power I have, that I didn't know before I have.

I'm going to share it with you.

Check back for more.