Author: Emera

Most memorable reads of 2009

Plain and simple, our favorite reads of the year. What were yours?

Emera’s most memorable reads

In the order in which I read them, with review links where available, and blurbs where not. First, novels and graphic novels (with one manga series snuck in):

  • The Inside, by Isaac Marion (2008)
  • The Farseer Trilogy, by Robin Hobb (1995-1997). My first epic high fantasy in forever; mediocre stylistically, but the plot, characters, and attention to detail are captivating.
  • Swordspoint, by Ellen Kushner (1987). Swordplay, intrigue, and one of my favorite fictional couples. Exquisite, witty, bittersweet.
  • The Etched City, by K. J. Bishop (2003)
  • Battle Angel Alita, by Yukio Kishiro (1990-1995). Gadgets! Grunge! Explosions! Indestructible heroine, outrageously good art, and outrageous cyberpunk melodrama!
  • The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman (2008). Classic Gaiman goodness. Yearning, dark, delicate.
  • Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (1986-1987). Hmm, too obvious an inclusion? Almost relentlessly artistic, with unforgettable characters.
  • The Red Tree, by Caitlín R. Kiernan (2009)
  • Orlando, by Virginia Woolf (1928). Literarygasm! History, sexuality, and textuality.

Runners-up (enjoyed, but didn’t make as much of a personal impact) were Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl (2006) and Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife (2003).

And my favorite short fiction reads this year:

  • “Carmilla,” by J. Sheridan le Fanu (1872). Lesbian vampire + weird Gothic eroticism = yes please.
  • “Over the River,” by P. Schuyler Miller (1941). Beautiful concept, beautiful execution. One of my favorite vampire stories; masterful use of perspective.
  • “Unicorn Tapestry,” by Suzy McKee Charnas (1980). Same as the above. Great characters and atmosphere.
  • “Anna,” by Isaac Marion, illus. Sarah Musi (2008)
  • “Stone Animals,” by Kelly Link (2004)
  • “My Death,” by Lisa Tuttle (2004)
  • “This is Now,” by Michael Marshall Smith (2004)
  • “Exhalation,” by Ted Chiang (2008). Both meticulous and quietly wondrous.
  • “A Buyer’s Guide to Maps of Antarctica,” by Catherynne M. Valente (2008). Playful and luminous.

Hm, somehow that came out to 9 each. Overall, I read 59 books – not too shabby. Also, 2009 was a big year in that Kakaner and I started seriously book-collecting. And – clearly – we started The Black Letters. Bookish goals for the coming year are to continue to attack both of those pursuits with vim and vigor – and, for me, to start using Librarything again to track my acquisitions. Happy 2010!

—

Kakaner’s most memorable reads

  • Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) Robert Heinlein. An obvious classic for well-known reasons.
  • Requiem for a Dream (1978) by Hubert Selby Jr. A slip-through-your-fingers look at life for those caught in the downward spiral of drugs and addiction. Jarring, haunting, dark, and a harsh reality.
  • The Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Garden (2006) by Catherynne Valente. The meta-fairy-tale to end all meta-fairy-tales. It’s exactly what I suspect it set out to achieve– enchanting and breathtaking.
  • The City & The City (2009) by China Mieville
  • Locke & Key: Welcome to Lovecraft (2008) by Joe Hill. A masterful graphic novel debut that is just strange enough to mess with your head.
  • Kick-Ass Vol 1 (2010) by Mark Millar. Loads of fun and full of potential– yet another anti-superhero miniseries.

Other enjoyables but not overwhelmingly impactfuls: The Little Stranger (2009) by Sarah Waters and The Icarus Girl (2006) by Helen Oyeyemi.

The short fiction:

  • “Exhalation” (2008) by Ted Chiang
  • “Urchins, While Swimming” (2006) by Catherynne Valente. Beautiful modern interpretation of the rusalka myth.
  • “304 Adolph Hitler Strasse” by Lavie Tidhar. The funniest (and most offensive) thing I’ve read in a while– Holocaust fanfiction anyone?
  • “The Third Bear” by Jeff VanderMeer. Powerful and provoking.
  • “Born of Man and Woman” by Richard Mattheson. An intense, short tale of a mutant locked in a basement– a horrifying classic.

I am deeply embarrassed to admit I read a painfully small amount of books in 2009. Precisely 27. Compared to the 91 I read in 2008 and 100+ in 2007, this is like a punch to the gut. Usually Decembers are marked by furious reading, but seeing as I had no cushy winter break or finals period this year, December was marked by no reading. I’m going to chalk it up to graduating, finding my own place, working full time, and starting Real Life.

Resolutions? READ. MORE. Consistently update TBL. Make enough headway on Bokoclient to produce a passable GUI. And slow down on the book purchasing. Look out for an enticing upcoming book giveaway! And Merry New Years!

Additions to the horde

Since gifts inevitably and wonderfully mean new books. (Also, when it comes to books, I feel like there’s not that much of a difference between a horde and a hoard.)

Two pocket-sized, appropriately wintry, deliciously fully-cloth-bound-with-color-plate volumes of adorable. (Am I gushing too obviously? They really are that adorable, though.)

Neil Gaiman‘s Odd and the Frost Giants – didn’t even know it had finally been issued in a hardback edition! I spotted these for 50% off at Barnes and Nobles when snooping around with Kakaner and a couple of other friends, and predictably, both Kakaner and I ended up snagging copies.

Philip Pullman’s Once Upon a Time in the North – I love these little additions to the His Dark Materials universe. The actual story included in the last volume, Lyra’s Oxford, wasn’t too impressive (though it did hint at some awfully interesting sequel possibilities), but the presentation is impossible to resist – cloth binding, woodcut illustrations, fold-out maps and inserted postcards full of sneaky references for the HDM-obsessed… Books with personality and foldy-slidey bits, yes please.

Continue reading Additions to the horde

“Coppola’s Dracula,” by Kim Newman (1997) E

Date read: 10.04.09
Read from: Infinity Plus
Reviewer: Emera

Will I ever tire of vampires? It seems unlikely, at this rate. Kim Newman‘s novella “Coppola’s Dracula” was my first foray into his post-vampire-epidemic alternate history. Here he reenvisions Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, Dracula-style.

Protagonist Kate Reed is an Irish vampire – a contemporary of Bram Stoker, in fact – who’s been brought on the set of Coppola’s bloated, luckless production as a consultant, and bears witness to disaster after near-disaster as filming staggers onward. Interspersed with her coolly amused observations are excerpts of key scenes from the script, all paralleling Apocalypse Now (and Dracula, of course) and sharply rendered in Newman’s clipped, punchy, darkly humorous style.

I would probably have appreciated the central conceit more had I been more of a film buff, but I still found the parallels clever and entertaining, and Newman is deeply meticulous in imagining his alternate universe. However, the novella left me rather cold beyond that – though Kate is well-developed as a character, she’s so dispassionate that the story lacks emotional effect, other than conveying a lingeringly tragic kind of Cold-War disaffection. Well, that’s probably deliberate, so count that as another stylistic success for the story.

Go to:
Kim Newman

An unexpected holiday present for publishing

“Dreamy Sales of Jung Book Stir Analysis” (har)

Absolutely fascinating NYTimes article about how a hefty, pricy (list price $195), luxuriously crafted (“the book is partly hand-bound, uses two different kinds of custom-made paper and is printed in Italy”) reproduction of Carl Jung’s illustrated, hand-written The Red Book has been selling astoundingly well. It’s sold out in many locations and has garnered three more printing runs, despite understandably low initial expectations for its success. The article is a rather heartening read, even if it’s not indicative of the book industry’s success in general. Also, the book looks gorgeous, needless to say.

Alas, though, for Carl Jung, because when I think of him now, the first thing that comes to mind is his appearance as Tiny Carl Jung in the hilarious, bizarre nerdfest of a webcomic that is Dresden Codak.

I hope everyone is having a happy holiday!

– E

“An Old-Fashioned Unicorn’s Guide to Courtship,” by Sarah Rees Brennan (2008) E

Date read: 10.29.2009
Read from: Coyote Wild (Aug. 2008 issue)
Reviewer: Emera

Very vaguely following in our theme of fairy tales for December, “An Old-Fashioned Unicorn’s Guide…” is a dryly funny parody of fantasy romance and quest tropes, both old and new. Call it a PG-13 offering for fans of Patricia C. Wrede and Gail Carson Levine:

“Your principles disgust me,” Brianna murmured, entwined with Fernando’s manly form. “No matter how muscular your thighs, I will never be yours!”

She proved this by sealing her mouth against Fernando’s in a passionate yet distinctly defiant kiss. They toppled into some conveniently-placed ferns.

“Rowena,” Ethel [the unicorn] said in a dark voice. “Aren’t you going to do something about that?”

Rowena [the other unicorn] looked up from the ferns, which she was chewing thoughtfully. “Have fun, kids!” she called. “Stay safe!”

Unfortunately, it gets far too serious and sentimental for its own good in the end, succumbing to a whole ‘nother set of clichés, but overall it’s terribly amusing.

Go to:
Sarah Rees Brennan

The Red Tree and false memories: a neurological addendum

After going on for so long about subjective truth and retrospective reconstruction of experience in my review of The Red Tree, I was highly amused when what I picked up to read after finishing the review turned out to have some highly relevant passages. From Michael S. Gazzaniga’s “The Split Brain Revisited” (Scientific American, 1998), a section reviewing research on false memories (emphases mine):

There are several views about when in the cycle of information processing such memories are laid down. Some researchers suggest they develop early in the cycle, that erroneous accounts are actually encoded at the time of the event. Others believe false memories reflect an error in reconstructing past experience: in other words, that people develop a schema about what happened and retrospectively fit untrue events–that are nonetheless consistent with the schema–into their recollection of the original experience.

The left hemisphere has exhibited certain characteristics that support the latter view. First, developing such schemata is exactly what the left hemisphere interpreter excels at. Second, Funnell has discovered that the left hemisphere has an ability to determine the source of a memory, based on the context or the surrounding events. Her work indicates that the left hemisphere actively places its experiences in a larger context, whereas the right simply attends to the perceptual aspects of the stimulus. Finally, Michael B. Miller, a graduate student at Dartmouth, has demonstrated that the left prefrontal regions of normal subjects are activated when they recall false memories.

These findings all suggest that the interpretive mechanism of the left hemisphere is always hard at work, seeking the meaning of events. It is constantly looking for order and reason, even when there is none–which leads it continually to make mistakes. It tends to overgeneralize, frequently constructing a potential past as opposed to a true one.

Continue reading The Red Tree and false memories: a neurological addendum

The Red Tree, by Caitlín R. Kiernan (2009)

Date read: 10.31.09 (unintentional, but awesome)
Read from: Personal collection
Reviewer: Emera

It’s raining, my socks are wet, and for these reasons I think I’d rather finish up my long-overdue review of Caitlín R. Kiernan‘s The Red Tree than do anything else.  And as there’s a red oak outside my window, I took a picture of it looking appropriately old, red, and potentially carnivorous at about the same time that I finished the book:

The review is spoiler-free, by the way.

The Red Tree is one of the best books I’ve read all year, and I’ve already been itching to go back to it and let it screw with my head some more. I’m not quite sure what I was expecting when I started it (probably something more lushly Gothic, like Alabaster), but what I read wasn’t what I was expecting, and then it was better than what I expected. It’s a jagged, rattling, hurtful book, and incredibly atmospheric. The horror is creeping and primal, almost inarticulable. People and paintings and animal bones appear and disappear; proportions and distances are warped; the brittle, chain-smoking protagonists labor under constant, sapping heat and suffer from surreal nightmares. At the same time, the emotions underlying it are so real: reading the book feels like holding an artifact of life, a snarled-up package of fury and self-hatred and despair. Yeah, it’s not the happiest book to read, but its painful authenticity is a large part of what makes it so compelling. There are no pretensions to darkness or the Gothic here, just a lifetime’s worth of the real thing.

After all, protagonist Sarah Crowe is a clear analogue of Kiernan herself: she’s a snarly, black-tempered writer of commercially unsuccessful dark fantasy who lives in Rhode Island, and she struggles with writer’s block and a seizure disorder. In Sarah’s case, she leaves the South to escape the memories of her failed relationship with an artist named Amanda, who committed suicide. Once in New England, she settles into an ancient farm house whose property is marked by a red oak of incredible age and size. Unsurprisingly, she develops a morbid fascination with the mythology surrounding the tree – in particular a half-finished manuscript left by the house’s last tenant in the basement – at the same time that a painter named Constance moves in upstairs. Cue much petty sniping, frustrated desire, and poorly concealed, creeping obsession.

Continue reading The Red Tree, by Caitlín R. Kiernan (2009)

Winter is for fairy tales

Reviewer: Emera

Actually, every season is for fairy tales, but fairy tales are particularly wonderful when the weather is miserable, I find. Below, quick reviews of two stories that I read within the past few months, both spun from fairy tales. With any luck, I should be able to post a few more later in the week.

—

Nicole Kornher-Stace’s “Notes Toward a Comparative Mythology” (Fantasy Magazine, read 08.08.09) – Kornher-Stace has an edgy, almost jazzy voice that makes me think she’s probably also an adroit poet – she does have some poetry published with Goblin Fruit, I remember, but I have yet to read it. Make that a note to self.

“Two [babies] with webbing in the gaps between their fingers, toes. Supple and resilient stuff, and when the doctors sliced at it with scalpels, it grew back tough as bootsoles, lettuce-edged, and the very devil to excise.”

I had to read this selkie story twice for it to really click with me, but on the second read, I found that though Kornher-Stace’s wiry, ambitious language occasionally falls a little short of its aim, she’s a skillful, authoritative storyteller, and beautifully conveys the main character’s deepening anguish. The story’s emotional movements are spot-on – I found myself wanting to cheer and do a little dance at the end. I think Kornher-Stace is one to watch; I look forward to investigating her other works, especially her novel Desideria, which sounds right up my and Kakaner’s alleys.

—

Erzebet Yellowboy‘s “A Spell for Twelve Brothers” (also Fantasy Magazine, read 12.06.09) is a dark, not-so-successful retelling of the Wild Swans fairy tale. Its premise is interesting but unconvincingly executed, particularly since the author’s language is overly mannered and riddled with portentous, inexact metaphors. (“He stopped, he saw the star on her forehead and fell into its golden points.”) I read the first dozen or so paragraphs, then gave up and skimmed the rest.

Go to:
Nicole Kornher-Stace
Erzebet Yellowboy

Filthy lucre

I’ve always been curious about the logistics of actually trying to make a living off of being an author (a sci-fi/fantasy author in particular, of course), so a couple of blog posts, both recent and older, have been particularly interesting and informative in this respect:

I hope these kind of link aggregations aren’t too overwhelming (or irritating); I like compiling them as much for my own reference as for the purposes of propagating interesting links.

Go to:
John Scalzi
Catherynne Valente

Some words (and exploding high-fives) with Isaac Marion

If you’ve been following us for a while, you’ve probably noticed our mild obsession with the works of one Isaac Marion, a mysterious and sardonic Northwesterner who has independently published two novels and, on his website, many short stories – all horrifying, hilarious, and heartwarming in various measures. I first stumbled on his signature story – “I Am a Zombie Filled with Love” – by chance in the summer of 2008, fell in love, and shot the link to his website over to Kakaner.  Both of us became avid followers of his work.

This fall, we were thrilled when Marion announced that his novel Warm Bodies, a story about love after the zombie apocalypse, and based on the original “I Am a Zombie Filled with Love,” had been sold to a major American publisher. Even more recently, he announced that it’s also been sold for publication in the UK, and in Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, and Korean. On top of all that, he’s planning to self-publish a collection of his short fiction – something Kakaner and I have hoped for for a long while.

This week, we had the honor of actually interviewing Isaac Marion. Below, he shares a little (actually, a lot) about his life and influences, and reflects on Mass Amateurism, the zombie trend, and more.

Sir Isaac Marion

TBL: Isaac, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we try to write an author page for each author whose works we review. Could you give us a mini-biography of your life until now and anything else you think should be in an author bio of you?

I grew up in northwestern Washington and have lived in or near Seattle most of my adult life. My family was really poor while I was growing up; we lived in a lot of weird places, like tents and tow-trailers and my uncle’s mossy motorcycle garage in the woods, which was eventually condemned by the city and burned down. (I have a photo of it burning posted above my desk, as a reminder that things could be, and were, worse.) Even when we were living in real houses or at least mobile homes, we moved a lot; 27 times total before I set out on my own.

The year we spent in that motorcycle garage, which I dubbed “The Hovel”, was the year I started writing. I was 16, so of course I wrote a mind-blowingly overwrought thousand-page fantasy epic called “The Birth of Darkness”, which will never be read by anyone as long as I’m alive to prevent it. I always knew I didn’t want to do any kind of job that requires a degree so I skipped college and taught myself how to write by just reading and writing a lot, which I think was time better spent. Several years and a few dozen weird and unconnected jobs later, it paid off, and now I am apparently on course to living the dream. Exploding high-five.

Continue reading Some words (and exploding high-fives) with Isaac Marion