Category Archives: Books That We’ve Read

We See What We Expect to See.

At StellarCon this year we were able to attend a midnight reading of The Princess and Mr. Whiffle by Patrick Rothfuss.

That was a really neat, rare, one of a kind opportunity that I wasn’t going to let pass by.

The Princess and Mr. Whiffle, published by Subterranean Press, is printed in a children’s format, but isn’t a child’s book.

I’m not going to lie to you, it’s not one of my most favorite books ever, but that’s not really important.

What is important is what Rothfuss is doing with the book.

It has a twisted ending. I was going to use “surprise” there, but that’s the wrong word. All books worth their shit have a surprise ending. No, this is …yes, twisted.

Now that you have that twist, and better understand the underlying character motivation, the book reads completely different upon a re-read. It’s an entirely new book.

In all good illustrated books, the illustrations and the words have a synergistic relationship, more than the sum of their parts. Very much so in this book.

The first time reading the book, the illustrations are innocent and candy-land/fairytale-like. The second time through, the optical illusion of “seeing what you expect to see” dissolves and you see what’s really there.

We often go into books reading what we expect to read and can be blinded to a favorite author’s faults or whatever. We see what we expect to see.

Rothfuss recommends that you re-read Name of the Wind upon finishing Wise Man’s Fear, and both again upon finishing the forthcoming Book 3.

I guess I’m not really asking a question in this Friday Chat. More like something to think about and discuss.

We’ve all discussed before the value of re-reading. Before this Rothfuss event, re-reading to me was simply revisiting with an old friend. Catching up, sharing a cup of tea. Now, I’m re-thinking this concept.

Here’s what I mean.

There’s the re-read in which YOU are a different person than the person living in your body who read the book before. For example, reading The Chronicles of Narnia as a child and again as an adult are two vastly different experiences because of the 25 years of baggage that I’ve accumulated squishing my childish sense of wonder and delight. I’ve changed, not the story.

Then there’s the re-read in which the story changes because you bring with you the pre-knowledge and anticipation of what happens to those characters. This example from me is re-reading Green Rider (Kristen Britain) via audio. I’ve read this book twice, but this time (read #3), after having read book four in the series (just published last year) there are bits and pieces of Green Rider that–the first time around–were just descriptors or off-hand comments. Now, “I know what that means” or “I know where this is going” and catching these small bits in book 1 after reading book 4 these bits have new information for me. The book has changed.

Culture Ship Names

One of the many delights in reading The Culture novels by Iain M Banks is collecting the ships’ names. They’re self-named, I might add.

The first three days of their journey had been spent aboard the Torturer class Rapid Offensive Unit Nuisance Value.

–from Look to Windward by Iain M. Banks

And that’s all I’m giving you for free. You’ll have to read these books and start your own collection.

Whoreboy

Major…, I’m mightily suspicious that I’m being shovelled into something pretty damn dubious here. I’ll be honest with you, youngster; it’s not very likely that I’m going to agree to take part in your unknown mission even after I’ve heard Visquile’s message, but I’m sure as shit not going willingly through your ears, up your ass or anywhere else until I hear what that old whoreboy’s got to say, and I might as well hear it now as later. Making myself clear here?”

–from Look to Windward by Iain M Banks

They Never Lie

“Oh, they never lie. They dissemble, evade, prevaricate, confound, confuse, distract, obscure, subtly misrepresent and willfully misunderstand with what often appears to be a positively gleeful relish and are generally perfectly capable if contriving to give one an utterly unabiguous impression of their future course of action while in fact intending to do exactly the opposite, but tgey never lie. Perish the thought.

–from Look to Windward by Iain M. Banks

Furniture

“Yeah,” I heard, the man said, stepping back to look at the Homomdan. He appeared surprised, and Kabe formed the impression that he had been mistaken for a sculpture or an article of monumental furniture. This happened fairly often. A function of scale and stillness, basically. It was one hazard of being a glisteningly black three-and-a-bit meter tall pyramidal triped in a society of slim, matte-skinned two-meter tall bipeds.

–from Look to Windward by Iain M. Banks

Billowed Weight of Snow

The barges lay on the darkness of the still canal, their lines softened by the snow heaped in pillows and hummocks on their decks. The horizontal surfaces of the canal’s paths, piers, bollards, and lifting barges bore the same full billowed weight of snow, and the tall buildings set back from the quaysides loomed over all, their windows, balconies, and gutters each a line edged with white.

It was a quiet area of the city at almost any time, Kabe knew, but tonight it both seemed and was quieter still. He could hear his own footsteps as they sank into the untouched whiteness…. He had never known the city so silent.

–from Look to Windward by Iain M. Banks

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Harry’s Side Jobs, Part One

Copyright 2012 by Paula S. Jordan

Side Jobs

Stories from The Dresden Files

by Jim Butcher

ROC Books, 2010

There are eleven stories to review in this excellent anthology – all but three or so of the shorter Dresden pieces written to date – and there’s a good bit to say up front about the collection itself. So I’m going to take this in two parts; anthology comments and the first three stories now, and the rest next time. Unless it takes three parts. Butcher’s stories are that good.

As regular readers of the Dresden Files Series know, Jim Butcher lets some time elapse in Wizard-Detective Harry Dresden’s world between one novel and the next. Gives you the sense that Harry’s always out there somewhere, making his way in the really-mean streets of Butcher’s urban fantasy Chicago, and not bothering to tell you about it unless it’s something notable even for him. Something like a more-or-less friendly zombie T Rex running loose in the streets. And all that time, between the books, Harry is living a human life as well as a magical one. Maturing. Growing in magical knowledge, power and skill. Meeting adversity. Collecting scars.

With these stories Butcher gives you a few vivid glimpses into Harry’s life between the books. You get to see him grow.

The first story in the collection – and they are given in the order of the Dresden Files chronology – is a treasure for any reader who is also a writer: the first Dresden piece Butcher wrote and, in  his words, “an anxious beginner’s first effort” at marketable fiction.

Restoration of Faith takes place some time before Storm Front, during Harry’s apprenticeship at detective Nicholas Christian’s agency, Ragged Angel Investigations. Nick (who also appears briefly in Ghost Story) specializes in finding lost children.

On this occasion the lost – actually runaway – child is Faith, the smart, feisty, ten-year-old daughter of rich but unloving parents. After hiring Nick’s services to find her, they decide they’d rather not be known as the parents of a runaway. So they report her to the police as a kidnap victim, giving Harry’s and Nick’s descriptions as the perpetrators.

Two things impressed me about this story: the remarkably detailed backstory that Butcher had developed at that early stage and the level of writing skill he’d achieved in “only the third or fourth” story he’d ever written. Granted, he wrote it as a class assignment at the University of Oklahoma’s Professional Writing program, so he was not untrained. Even so, his ease with the language and keen insight into his characters’ inner lives were surprisingly good for a student writer.

As to backstory, a great many of the props, behaviors, and characters of the Dresden Files are already in place. Harry has his black canvas duster and a prototype of his power ring. He has a workable tracking spell and other dependable magical skills, complete with evidences of the system’s drawbacks and limitations. His intelligence, courage, sense of humor, and soft, self-sacrificing heart are already recognizable as the Harry of the later books. He encounters a powerful and nasty inhuman opponent out of fairytale who has violated the Unseelie Accords, and defeats it with the help, at first meeting, of a short, blonde, female ‘uniform cop’ named Murphy.

I call that a satisfying beginning.

Vignette, a brief piece written for a sampler handout at a convention, takes place between Death Masks and Blood Rites. For its length, and its quick midnight creation just before deadline, it gives some good, amusing insights into Harry’s life at that point in his still-developing career: the kinds of every-day distractions that could interrupt his studies, his relationship with Bob the Skull, and his cluelessness about certain aspects of the mundane world.

Something Borrowed takes place between Dead Beat and Proven Guilty. It came about when Butcher was invited to write a piece for Pat Elrod’s anthology My Big Fat Supernatural Wedding. He took it as an opportunity to explore the changing lives of the Alphas, the pack of young werewolves who were, at that point in the series, completing their college years and embarking into adulthood.

It’s a werewolf story almost – but not completely – without fur, exploring the impacts of both the mundane and magical worlds on the human lives of Alphas leaders Billy and Georgia on their wedding day. It is not, however, without magical challenges. Those come in the form of a powerful Winter Sidhe bent on avenging the Alphas’ involvement in the battle of the fairies described in Summer Knight.

Butcher’s character skills make for especially good reading in several insightful scenes:  Billy’s response when a hung-over, post-bachelor-party Harry, at his snarky best, confronts Georgia’s snooty stepmother; Harry’s slow realization that Billy is no longer a kid; the first encounter between Murphy and Bob the Skull; and the maturing team-of-two trust between Harry and Murphy.

All in all it is a well developed, satisfyingly suspenseful story of search and rescue, deadly magical tricks and traps, a foray into Chicago’s treacherous undertown complete with Harry’s special brand of pyrotechnics, and the multifaceted power of a kiss. A good read.

That’s it for now. See you next time for more of Harry’s Side Jobs.

The Endless Steppe

This winter, it’s unseasonably warm in places where it should be cold, and wet in places where it should be dry, and dry in places where it should be wet.

It’s chilly in the house today, but only 50 F outside and so I’m not turning the heat on. I’m also hurrying to finish this watchcap knitted from my handspun yarn that I made and really like, in order to be able to pop it over my head and resist the thermostat temptation.

But, this is all just so much luxury. I have the luxury of turning on the heat or not, I have other hats, this is very expensive yarn, even if made by hand.

This last summer, I read The Endless Steppe, by Esther Hautzig, a recalling of her and her family’s deportation from Vilnius to the steppe of Soviet Russia for the crime of being Jewish.

In the book, she recalls the effort of knitting–literally–for survival. In one vignette, she has been commissioned to knit a sweater from a skirt that has ended up in the trash.

In our fat and decadent culture, we talk a lot about recycling and up-cycling and re-using, but we don’t, really.

In this effort of the young Esther’s, this skirt was deemed trash in a society that went without shoes or light in the dark evenings and ate pieces of uncooked potato to survive. (Pieces as in “saving the rest for later” kind of pieces, not bite-sized pieces.) So, imagine this ratty, nasty piece of knitted fabric. She goes through it and unravels it, knotting together all the ends of yarn that have been frayed by moths or wear and tear, and designs and knits — IN THE DARK — a sweater for another person whom she met only once, taking measurements by making knots in a string.

It really was an engrossing and sobering and gratitude-inducing read, and every time I pick up a bit of my knitting I think about Esther knitting in the dark and the cow-woman who grew too fat over the winter to fit into the sweater Esther knit for her.

Redemption in Indigo, Karen Lord

Indigo is a plant-derived dye brought about by fermentation and very precise pH conditions. There’s a lot of superstition and mysticism involved with dyeing, especially indigo, because the ability to put extremely tight QC controls on the dyeing process, allowing the dyers to repeat a dyebath with precision, were not really available until relatively recently. The chemical processes of oxidation, reduction and fermentation were as close to magic as humans have ever really been, I think. Was this beautiful dark blue achieved because the indigo was allowed to ferment with chicken feet in addition to  fruit peels?  My cousin, the next village over, has a magical copper pot from which she dyes the most incredible and vibrant green. (photo from http://mekongtextiles.com/travel3.html)

Redemption in Indigo, by Karen Lord, Small Beer Press, 2010, is a story that feels like a fairy tale but is fully saturated and vibrant, making a fantabulous novel. It blows kisses to these kinds of old-fashioned wives tales and mysticism as it blows its way past Folk Tale on its way to Modern Fantasy Novel.

One of the many things I loved about reading this book was that the narrator often turns to the reader and berates him for being so simple-minded and expecting tropes and over-done themes.

“…but I am hearing some rumblings from my audience. You are distressed that I have spoiled the moving and romantic tale of how Love’s Laureate courted his beautiful wife? You complain that I have turned it into a cobbled pastiche  of happenstance, expediency and the capricious tricks of the djombi? I bleed for your injured sentiments, but to dress the tale in vestments of saga and chivalry was never my intent.”

I love that there is no single, single-minded Bad Guy driving the other characters around the plot. There are Tricksters, Benevolent Beings, Un-benevolent Beings, and people caught up in the workings. There is no damsel in distress, there’s a woman in a difficult situation trying to figure out the best path forward.

I love that Lord’s characters adhere not to MY western european senses of morals and What is Right, but to their own social mores and customs, and yet people are people the globe over, looking for gossip and good food.

The basic premise of the story? Paama is irritated beyond reason with her foolish bumble of a husband and moves home. In so doing, she attracts the attention of the Benevolent Beings who are in the midst of dealing with the errant behavior of one of their kind.

Redemption in Indigo is one of those very rare results in which every word is precisely where it needs to be. I’m eager to see if Karen Lord can successfully  reproduce her result. Thanks for this, Small Beer Press.

Mike Allen 101

“I’m pleased to know my evil plan is working.” –Mike Allen

Mike Allen publishes Mythic Delirium, a speculative poetry magazine in its 25th issue. He is also the editor of the Clockwork  Phoenix anthologies, and a Hugo-nominated poet and writer.

In this discussion, he talks about the books that have inspired him, how he sees his place in the genre, and about what is forthcoming from Mythic Delirium Press. Continue reading →