Two reviews of reviews (sort of)

Ursula LeGuin wrote a very useful review of Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood that I just finished reading, in which she touches on one of my favorite conundrums: what does it mean to call oneself “genre” versus “literary”? Atwood apparently likes rejecting the sci-fi designation, based on an arbitrary definition that I frankly find bewildering. (The dynamics of of genre/literary “tribes” are discussed in greater and amusing detail on Jeff Vandermeer’s blog here. This, of course, is all following the enormous brouhaha made by Lev Grossman’s bizarre less than carefully argued* editorial  in the Wall Street Journal about the so-called Victory of Plot in contemporary fiction. Sorry to link-fling if you haven’t been following this from the beginning, but I find it all pretty engrossing.)

Anyway, LeGuin provides a great review of the book, as well as very delicately, very incisively nailing Atwood for her fallacy in evading the designation of sci-fi. Being considered as a work of science fiction, LeGuin tells us, is not a limitation, but something that enriches the experience of reading a novel, gives us another dimension from which to analyze and celebrate a book’s creativity, fullness, and success.

Damn straight.

Separately, The Mumpsimus has become my favorite blog for reviews and discussion of speculative fiction. That its author, Matthew Cheney, is an English professor (as well as a writer of assorted fiction and nonfiction, and editor of Best American Fantasy) is not surprising: his reviews are lucid, accessible, and literary, filled with useful allusions and fun, thoughtful analyses. Every time I read a review of his of a book or story that I’ve already read, I want to go back and read the work again.

The excitement in his reviews is tangible – reading them is like sitting with a good friend and discussing the story at hand, tossing ideas back and forth and unraveling knotty plot points together. I also think that he tends to appreciate a lot of underappreciated and misread works. Case in point: his ecstatic, playful review of Kelly Link’s “Stone Animals” (which I loved and briefly reviewed here). Judging from the comments following, said story was not so well-received by many readers; I think it’s a shame that none of them seemed to get anything further from Cheney’s review. Note that his review is somewhat spoiler-y.

Unfortunately, his blog is also rather unwieldy to navigate, but the material is all so good that I don’t mind trawling.

*correction made following the reading of Grossman’s comments in response to all the heated criticism.

If you’ve ever felt inadequate about your bookshelves…

…take a look at Neil Gaiman’s library. As featured in Shelfari, which appears to be a sort of Facebook for people obsessed with books.

The only other time I’ve seen that many (predominantly) genre books in one place is, well, never. (Maybe Kakaner has seen more, given that she’s personally ransacked the catacombs of the MIT Science Fiction Society Library, but I’m still betting that Mr. Gaiman’s shelfapalooza could hold its own.) Also, this is apparently only “the downstairs library,” as the “upstairs library with all the good reference stuff in it” is not featured.

….uh.

It’s pretty delicious to go through each full-size photo and check out the individual books – like four copies of Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling’s Swan Sister, and a Swedish (?) edition of one of the Sandman volumes.

Now excuse me while I go and take a cold shower.

Unveiling our Top 10 YA Books List

The time has come for another list! As you will all soon come to realize, Emera and Kakaner have a dire weaknesses for creating and maintaining lists. We are also both fanatic collectors and readers of YA books, even in our post-teenage years

The list is reproduced below, but its permanent home is on our Lists page here:

The Black Letters Top 10 YA Books

In alphabetical order by author:

  • Alice in Wonderland (1865) by Lewis Carroll
  • Ella Enchanted (1997) by Gail Carson Levine
  • The Phantom Tollbooth (1961) by Justin Norton
  • Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (1971) by Robert C. O’Brien
  • The Island of the Blue Dolphins (1960) by Scott O’Dell
  • Bridge to Terabithia (1977) by Katherine Paterson
  • The Perilous Gard (1971) by Elizabeth Marie Pope
  • The Witch of Blackbird Pond (1958) by Elizabeth George Speare
  • Maniac Magee (1990) by Jerry Spinelli
  • Dealing with Dragons (1990) by Patricia Wrede

Well, we started with about 20 choices and it was slightly tricky narrowing it down to 10. The genres range from fantasy to urban fiction to historical fiction to animal fiction, which we believe is a pretty healthy smattering of YA genres. If anyone hasn’t read any of these, well, he or she should. All these reads would probably take about an hour, two hours tops, and promise to be most rewarding.

New books for August

In an effort to stave off our ridiculous acquisitions rates, Kakaner and I have undertaken a pact not to buy any more new books until… well, for as long as we can possibly restrain ourselves, and hopefully we’ve actually read the greater part of the books we’ve bought but haven’t yet read. But prior to that, I, of course, bought a lot of books this summer. Ahem. Here are some of the ones that I’m most excited about.

A 1905 (?) edition of Lafcadio Hearn’s  A Japanese Miscellany (originally published 1901) – I’ve been wanting to find a copy of his Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things for ages, with little luck given his relative obscurity. So I was astonished to see three beautiful, first-edition-or-nearly hardcovers of his works on a shelf at Skyline Books in New York City. No Kwaidan, but this seemed the next best thing. 1905 is pencilled in on the endpapers, but I suspect from this nifty index of Hearn’s work that I have the 1906 edition, which would make it second edition.

Continue reading New books for August

Valente on The Red Tree and horror

Author Catherynne M. Valente made a beautiful blog post yesterday on her reaction to reading Caitlin R. Kiernan’s newest release, The Red Tree. She discusses how she read the book, her early relationship (read: obsession) with horror novels, New England’s unique signficance in the horror genre, and what really lies at the center (or bottom) of horror – that is, not gore, but death, and secrets, and the horrible tension of not knowing them:

I just want to know. I always want to know. I want to know the secret at the bottom, and maybe horror as a genre still eats at me because it will not give me that answer, and so I can stay at the swollen, drawn out moment before revelation, the pre-orgasmic stretching before the inevitable tumble into disappointment and continuity errors. Good horror almost never shows all its cards, and yet I know the Queen of Spades and Clubs, oh, my terrible black Queens are there, and they would tell me all their worst deeds, if I could only keep my eyes open when the scary parts come, if I could only go down into my own basement, where the earth is frozen and lumpy and moldy, where I cannot bear to look.

I, for one, would be way excited to see Valente do a horror novel, which is what she certainly hints at wanting to do at the end of the post. Also, of course, this makes me want to get on top of reading Kiernan’s work – Alabaster came in the mail for me just this week!

Go to:
Catherynne M. Valente

Hugos a go-go

The winning Hugos have been declared, and I suspect that no one was too surprised by the results. For one, Neil Gaiman‘s The Graveyard Book did indeed take best novel, making this Gaiman’s fourth Hugo win, out of six nominations – one of which, for Anansi Boys, Gaiman actually turned down. Not a bad record, eh?

Other familiar names on the winning list included Ted Chiang, Elizabeth Bear, John Scalzi, Ellen Datlow, Doctor Horrible, WALL-E… I was also very happy to see that Weird Tales won for best semi-prozine only two years after its reorganization/makeover, and that Electric Velocipede won for best fanzine.

Awards season

I can’t say I’m qualified to blog about genre fiction awards season, given that I generally straggle at least one year behind current offerings in the field, but I’m still having fun following the buzz surrounding the 2009 Hugo Awards and World Fantasy Awards, the shortlists for which have been released.

SF Signal has an interesting panel feature asking a dozen-odd genre folk the following questions about the Hugo Awards:

1. How would you rate the track record of the Hugo Awards at directing readers to the best that the genre has to offer?
2. How well do you think the Hugo shortlist, year over year, represents to the outside world what speculative fiction has to offer?
3. Which of this year’s finalists do you predict will receive the Hugo award for Best Novel?
4. Which of this year’s finalists do you think should receive the Hugo award for Best Novel?
5. Which books do you think were missing from this year’s list of Best Novel finalists?

It went on a bit long for me, so I stopped halfway through, but of what I read, I found Paul Graham Raven‘s answer to #2 particularly interesting and well-articulated. Steve Davidson’s responses were also useful in considering the history, scope, and overall “purpose” of the awards – mainly, that the Hugo Awards were not primarily conceived of as writing awards, but as gestures of recognition to a variety of figures in fandom. I guess that the idea of “best” is compelling enough that that ends up being the focus, as with all awards.

The top two trends in responses:

  • The Hugo Awards, being based on the votes of a small subset of people, are more likely to reward a particular sort of popularity than, necessarily, literary merit. This is expressed with varying degrees of resignation and ire by nearly every panelist.
  • Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book seems the top pick for best novel, with potential but unlikely competition from Neal Stephenson’s Anathem. (It’s a battle of the Nei/als, as one panelist put it.)

Go to:
Hugo Awards nominees
World Fantasy Awards nominees

Coolest random tidbit from a random book of the week

From Arika Okrent’s In the Land of Invented Languages: of the 500 invented languages that Okrent profiles, the two most commonly spoken today are Esperanto and Klingon.

This is probably one of those things that everyone [in nerd land] already knew but me, but still. Wow, Trekkies. I was always a Star Wars girl, but color me impressed. (Also, this makes me wonder how the number of Klingon speakers compares to the number of people who would declare Jedi as their religion.)

We don’t sparkle…

…but we do hunger immortally. And if we could stalk books and watch them sleep, we probably would. Below, find some of our most yearned-after books, over which sighs have been heaved and wallets have been fingered.

Emera’s delicious unattainables

  • Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere. Signed, limited, $200 (HarperCollins, 2009) – The first Neil Gaiman novel I read, and still one of my most beloved. “Deluxe Limited Numbered Edition, signed by Neil Gaiman, with a full cloth jacket in a fabric-bound slipcase. Includes two-color text and endpapers, and two full-color illustrated spreads. Limited to one of 1000. ” According to the man himself, it is also “several thousand words longer than the current US edition” and “has a bunch of odd, previously stuff in the back — my original outline for the BBC series and such.” Aiiiieee.
  • Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles: The Complete Edition.  Signed, limited & lettered editions currently on preorder, $300/$900 (Subterranean Press, 2009). Over 50 stories, essays, introductions, two full-length screenplays, full-color plates, “deluxe binding” on the lettered edition… excuse me while I expire in this corner. Subterranean Press: elevating book-shopping to a whole new level of debauchery.
  • Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn: The Lost Version. Signed, limited, out of print (Subterranean Press, 2007) – Beagle’s original, abandoned draft of his classic novel, featuring a modern setting and a completely different cast, apart from the unicorn herself. I always knew I would regret not buying this the instant it came out, which was at about the same time that I became aware of small press. This was also before I had multiple jobs and thus disposable income. Curses! It’s been unavailable on every book site that I watch, oh, pretty much ever since then, but I have put out watches for it on both Amazon and AbeBooks (which has a book-watching tool far superior to Amazon’s – Amazon’s commits you to buying the item if it ever becomes available, without your being able to review the condition and price first). It will be mine, someday.

On the other hand… stuff that’s significantly more attainable and will in fact be coming home at one point or another:

  • Kage Baker’s The Women of Nell Gwynne’s, a steampunk mystery novella about exclusive prostitutes who also happen to be the intelligencers of a secret organization. One reviewer described it as “James Bond in the 19th century.”  Could this sound any more AWESOME? Also, Kage Baker has a really cool name.
  • Caitlin Kiernan’s Alabaster, a dark fantasy short story & novella collection about an adolescent, albino, monster-killing girl named Dancy.  Again, sounds awesome, I love the cover art, and Caitlin Kiernan is one of those authors whom people keep telling me I’d like.
  • Peter S. Beagle’s Mirror Kingdoms. A “best of” short story collection. I preordered this in large part because I was smarting at not being able to find TLU: The Lost Version, and because I was resolved not to repeat the incident. Also, preordering of either the trade or limited editions is currently discounted – I got the normally $60 limited for $48, and Subterranean preorders give you free shipping. Win-win.
  • Finally, fellow bibliophile/blogger Vega, of The Athenaeum, was kind enough to obtain a signed copy of The Unicorn Sonata from Peter S. Beagle himself at San Diego Comic-Con for me. A thousand thanks!!

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Kakaner’s Objects of Desire

  • Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card. First edition. $1000. ‘Nuff Said.
  • The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffeneger. First edition, signed, $225. I’m a bit torn about this possible purchase… the only copy I can find is a bit worn and stained. However, to still my grabby hands, I have pre-ordered this. I can’t wait for October 1st!
  • Starship Troopers, by Robert A. Heinlein.  First Edition ~$5000. These books are the reason why I feel it is important to make money… have an income in general. Of course, with a name like Heinlein, one should totally expect to spend at least this much money. At least there’s hope! There seem to be a couple copies floating around, although I would totally hold out for a signed edition.
  • Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke. 1st edition, 8th printing, signed. This will probably be pretty high on my list, despite the fact that I already own four… other… editions…

What I Currently Have…

  • The Scar, by China Mieville. Limited 1st Edition, signed, #407/1000. Gold-edging, ribbon marker, overall droolness.
  • Ender in Exile, by Orson Scott Card. Signed 1st Edition. I’d always wanted to see Card’s signature in real life… it’s powerful! Huge round, loopy OSC. What a treasure =)
  • The City & The City, by China Mieville. 1st Edition (well, technically I think), signed, and personalized at a China Mieville author event I attended! Incredibly treasured, and sits proudly next to The Scar.

Moving onto less well-known authors, but equally treasured in my library:

  • Kings and Assassins, by Lane Robins. 1st Edition signed! Personally shipped by the author– everyone should read Maledicte. I own two copies of Kings and Assassins and one copy of Maledicte.
  • Warm Bodies, by Isaac Marion.  1st Edition, self-published, one of 100+ copies, signed. I am of the strong opinion that Isaac Marion is going to experience great writing fame in the future. Although Warm Bodies isn’t necessarily my top choice when it comes to his works, his short stories (all available on his website) are delectable and must-reads.

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Anyone else out there hankering for oh-so-tantalizing books? Those teases.

“The most frightening American poet ever”

My knowledge of poets tends to be acquired in a desultory fashion, so I’d never heard of Frederick Seidel until I read “The Edge of Night,” an entertaining and well-written review of Seidel’s collected poems by  David Orr of the New York Times. Seidel is an anomaly as a professional poet, in that he’s rich and disconnected from the literary-academic world; apparently he’s also “one of poetry’s few truly scary characters.” This may seem nonsensical to you unless you’ve ever read a poem that made you wince, or cringe, or hunch your shoulders and shiver and try to forget you ever read it (and I don’t mean in a that-was-so-bad-I-wish-it-never-existed way, which of course happens too, and more frequently); then you should know how viscerally emotional and disturbing poems can be.

The excerpts of Seidel’s work featured in the review seem menacing, meaty (in both sense of the word), and evilly funny. I’ve read some pretty horrifying poems – I’m thinking of some of C. K. Williams’ early, angry poems here, one of which I would quote but am embarrassed to – and many cringe-inducing poems (mmm, Sharon Olds*), but I’m not sure I’d be consitutionally capable of reading a whole collection of Seidel’s work. The full poem featured in the review made me feel as though someone with too-cold hands had run their fingers through my hair the wrong way. Brrr. Orr also provides some useful, interesting commentary on Seidel’s place in modern American poetry, particularly his early relationship with Robert Lowell’s work and his later parallels with Sylvia Plath. Orr also comments on Seidel’s none-too-infrequent exclusion from anthologies – a fact that would also explain my lack of knowledge of him.

Also, I love articles that send me off on multiple fascinating tangents generally culminating in a trip to Wikipedia – in this case, Orr’s reference in the review to the perhaps apocryphal funeral tradition of sin-eating. Too cool.

*Sharon Olds is disarmingly adorable in person. If she ever reads near you, go. I didn’t like her poetry until I got to see her read it.