Category Archives: Explorer Challenge

Giveaway

Alright. Many of you know that we just (I mean, last week) moved to Columbus OH. This is a huge, frightening and also exciting move for me, as I grew up in a rather populated town of 2000 people in NM: if you couldn’t bike where you needed to be, you were probably going to die of dehydration anyhow. Columbus is over a million people. Quite a change for me.

I drove around the city this morning to get myself oriented and found the two very most important parts of town: the library and the art museum.

Let me rephrase this: I LIVE IN A CITY WITH AN ART MUSEUM!

:)
To celebrate my braveitude, and the fact that the electric is on in the new house, I’m giving away two awesome mugs that I know you just can’t live without. Yeah, I’m pretty nice, huh? The black ceramic one is from the Columbus Metropolitan Library system, and the white one is from the Columbus Museum of Art. It reads “ART SPEAKS join the conversation” on the back and Columbus Art Museum on the other side. It’s a plastic travel mug.

20121115-150753.jpg

The Columbus Metropolitan Library has twenty branches, in addition to the Main Library. Gosh! That’s cool. The Main Library is less than a mile away, and the Parson’s Branch is on the way to the grocery store. The Parsons Branch is *tiny*. I think my house is bigger than the building, but it was totally hopping. They have a homework help session M-F 3 to 6 pm, there was a woman just there when I was getting my card who was a volunteer to help teachers -school teachers or homeschool parents– with training for childrens’ literacy skills, every computer was occupied, and they actually had some science fiction. Unexpectedly, they had a rather large collection of graphic novels at the branch.

The Columbus Museum of Art really is fab. They have an utterly enormous collection for a city museum. The most interesting thing about the collection is that they have at least two paintings by a lot of the really well-known artists, so numbskulls like me can better get to know that artist. So it’s not just one snapshot of “Here’s Kadinsky”, but actually an array of paintings showing the artist’s development. Also they have a well-balanced collection that includes women artists, too.  One of the current special exhibits is one on the Lego as art.

But anyway you don’t care about all that. You just want your awesome mug. I would encourage you to tell me about your library or a museum local to you on your own blog, with or without an essay, maybe just a photo, and then send me the link to the post. That would be as cool as me sending you a neat mug.

To let me know that you’d like one of these two mugs, just say so in the comments, or email me. If you live overseas, I’m going to mail you the plastic Columbus Museum of Art travel much because it’s lighter. I’ll pick two people to have a mug on… uh, Next Thursday, Thanksgiving.

Rushing through Rushdie

Paula expressed my experience reading the first chapter of Salman Rushdie’s the Satanic Verses: “a book that draws on a literary and cultural tradition so removed from my own that I couldn’t “get” the references, and acquiring the necessary background seemed impossible.” (this post)

I’ve owned this book since college and have been meaning to get to it since then (suffice it to say, er, two decades). I finally started it earlier this summer for the Books That I’ve Been Meaning to Get To party, and, like Paula says, I know I’m missing something, and I am unhappy with just plogging through to the end.

So, I decided that I needed some prep-work. The first stop on Three-Step-Plan to reading The Satanic Verses is Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Rushdie (1990).

This is a fantasy, no bones about it.

The boy Haroun’s father is a storyteller with a magical gift of gab. Too bad, his stories dry up, and Haroun must save his father by taking a journey to the Sea of Stories. It’s a wishy-wobbly squooshy-wooshy story told with puns and juxtaposed references to advertisements and popular culture from two hemispheres. Reading this, I feel like Rushdie’s a puppet master, pulling at the strings of my gutteral language instincts, taking me along on a wild dance.

The writing here is everything that  English can be. English is an asshole language, stealing things and breaking all the rules, mushing things together and making new.  I went into this book keeping in mind Anil Menon’s comments about Indian-English being just another form of modern English (“Spanglish”, anyone?). That was from the panel I got to attend at ReaderCon. I think my experience reading Haroun would have been very different without Menon’s enlightening thoughts at that panel.

There are over a million words in English because it is such a whore… I mean, a global language. Rushdie is a total power-lifter of this language. He brings to English the lyricism and rhythms of the other languages he speaks, able to share them with me, a monolithic, monlingual barbarian. I can hear other places, contents away in Rushdie’s English.

So, having familiarized myself with Rushdie’s global mastery of English, I am moving on to Midnight’s Children. 140 pages in, and already I am very, very glad I read Haroun and the Sea of Stories first, as there are similar references and play-on-words. Haroun was a total new experience, a delight, but short enough to be an edible chunk. Midnight’s Children is more of a study-book, in that I can’t read it when I’m bleary-eyed and I have to read a little every day and even take notes. (I know, crazy!).

Forgive me, I’ll be a while with Midnight’s Children, this fucker’s six-hundred pages.

Darkcargoish Updates

Hi All.

Darkcargo has been very busy, even without my usual drivel.

I have cleaned things up a bit and moved some things over to their own blogs.

*GASP!*

It’s ok, everything will still be alerted to Darkcargo subscribers, we’re not going anywhere. Darkcargo has gotten too fat and needs new britches, that’s all. Basically, I’ve expanded the website in a linear sense so that we can get into better and deeper discussions of the books we’re reading.

So, here’s these new bits for you:

Some of this stuff will cross-post, some of it won’t. I will continue to post the YOBC selection of the month here on Darkcargo, but the discussions and reviews and so forth will happen over yonder.

Darkcargo will still host guest posts, interviews, Con-Going nonsense, dumb photos, the excitement of reading and falling in love with a riveting book. But by supporting some of the other things in their own sphere, we can better focus on SF&F. OK?

You can subscribe to each of these or only some of them individually.

Cheers!

Explorer Challenge: Poetry?!? Really???

When Lady Darkcargo finally revealed the Explorer Challenge 2012 guidelines, I was dismayed that poetry was on the list. I figured she wouldn’t be able to throw anything up there that would truly stump me. But, alas, a book of poems has never been a part of my forte. You could pick a book in any language, living or dead, and I would gladly undertake the challenge, little translating dictionary by my side.

So, you poetry lovers are probably rolling your eyes at me. And that is OK. Because I guarantee that I have rolled my eyes at your favorite poetry at one point or another. With poetry, I often feel that the essence, and sometimes the elegance of language, is lost in the effort to meet the meter, syllabic count, and the rules of rhyme. If those are the things by which a poem is judged, I think most folks that can count to 10, recognize a syllabic break, and can rhyme a word through the alphabet, can make poetry.

Is it pretty? Is it moving? Does it stick in your head for years? No. But it is poetry. And I just don’t care for the bulk of it, social brute that I am.

And yet….Lady Darkcargo challenges me in this way to force me to grow. Or at least become more widely accepting of teacakes and poetry readings. Recently, I finished Endymion Spring by Matthew Skelton, a children’s book about a magical book and an adventure through Oxford. In this book, Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti is mentioned a few times. A Victorian poem about goblins? Huh? Well, this I have to hear.

So I tracked down a free reading of it online over at Verkaro.org and took 27 minutes and 13 seconds out of my life to expand my poetry-dearthed inner self. Unfortunately, I liked it – which means I will have to seek out more such poetry and revise my stance on the genre as a whole. Sigh. Feel free to giggle. I know I had to chuckle at myself.

The original fairy tales had death and darkness and were meant to be lessons and warnings to children. Goblin Market falls into the same quality entertainment. There’s goblins, two sisters nearing adulthood, lots of irresistible fruits, and some layered advice about being chaste. Or female solidarity. Or perhaps feminine allure. Maybe. Which is great. A good piece of literature should have more than one interpretation.

Explorer Challenge 2012

I posted this discombobulated challenge last year, and despite its unclear expectations, it got a lot of positive response. I can affirm that there were at least two novels that I absolutely would not have finished without the challenge, and I think the same is true for Jessi and Kat and Wendy. So, a clear win on that front.

This year’s Explorer Challenge is much simpler: Read two novels published in 2012. =)

I was going to do the above challenge, but was encouraged to modify it after a series “LAME” bombs were lobbed my way from Darkcargoites whom I didn’t even think read this garbage blog anymore. YOUR COMMENTS ARE IMPORTANT TO ME, so keep them up–postcards, letters, email, whatever.

There are no prizes, no superior attitudes, and no, you can’t count books you’ve already read.

*a genre is a sub-category of fiction, like “YA” or “mysteries”.

Darkcargo Explorer Challenge–At least Five books, no more than two from each category, a combo of at least three categories:

  1. Read a history book published by a University Press. !!NONFICTION!!
  2. Explore poetry throughout the year. Find collections and anthologies, pick up poetry magazines, and actively seek out poetry. Find a poet that resonates with you, and tell me about this experience. If you already have a fave, your challenge is to find a new favorite poet.
  3. Read a travel book about someone who takes a trip from one geographical location to another before 1960 (not time travel or mental/drug-induced travel, sorry, or Travel Guides) !!NONFICTION!!
  4. Read fiction about a REAL place you’ve never been.
  5. A truly enormous book of Classic Literature. Enormous being defined as “can be used as a weapon when applied with blunt force to the head”. Some ideas are here, others are: All of The Lord of the Rings, all of the stories in the Sherlock Holmes cannon, anything by Dickens, etc.
  6. Start a new (to you) series. An excellent idea? Help me out with my Epic Quest for Pre-2K Fantasy.
  7. Read a published author who is CURRENTLY younger than you are. (That’s a weird clarification, I know. I mean, someone who really is younger than you are, not younger than you are now when they had their book published. No parallel universes here.)
  8. Read a published novel written by someone who is a citizen of a country in Asia, Africa or Central/South America.
  9. Subscribe to a literary magazine in your favorite genre. Read it.
  10. Find out if your local library is participating in The National Endowment for the Arts’ The Big Read program. If they are, read their selection AND PARTICIPATE IN THE ACTIVITIES. If not, ask them about it. If they are not participating or if the current selection doesn’t appeal to you here’s the list of books to choose from. My local library is participating. I’ve already read this, but can certainly still participate in the activities, and select another on the list.

Only Phonies Are Scared of Books: Catcher in the Rye

Editor’s note:

I’m kicking off the AtHomeCon2 with this article from Kat, as it exemplifies all that we believe in at Darkcargo. 

  • We believe strongly, from first-hand evidence, in the power of mouth-to-mouth marketing and independence from the large corporations.
  • We believe that readers will find a compromise between the quagmire of self-pubbing and the dogma of the Big Six.
  • We believe that book piracy and book banning equally undermine literary culture.
  • We believe education doesn’t end with formal schooling.
  • We strive for the continuing literacy and education of ourselves and other adults throughout adulthood, and we believe in the enduring power of literature to help us achieve this never-ending goal.
  • And most importantly, we believe that science fiction and fantasy can exemplify all that is worthy of literature.

We do not accept review copies, free-bies or payment on Darkcargo. We believe that our interests are more meaningful when we find authors and books through personal interaction.

Two ways in which we are challenging ourselves to actively participate in the bookish world is with the Ye Olde Bookke Clube and with the Explorer Challenge. Kat read Catcher in the Rye as part of the Explorer Challenge.

KaterMelon’s Explorer Challenge Book #3: Catcher in the Rye

There is a lot of hype about this book. I always heard that crazy people read this book, that it was something everyone should read, that it was banned in places, and that made it always seem a little dangerous to me. I felt like I wouldn’t understand it, or that it was going to be boring. I’m terrified to read books that I don’t understand, because if I don’t “get it”, people will be obnoxious about it. Now that I have read it, I think it’s a little ironic for me to have that fear. (I guess, like Holden, I don’t want to deal with phonies either. You either like a book or you don’t; it’s your own opinion.)

Well, if you’ve ever been 16, you’ll “get” this book. There’s no action, no serious plot, nothing terrible or hilarious or dramatic happens. It’s just a boy’s story about how he grew into a young man, but he may not have realized it at the time. Oh, adolesence! Feelings of rebellion, angst, contempt, nostalgia, sense of belonging (wherever that is), anticipation, disappointment, and undying loyalty. This was a pretty quick read, once I stopped expecting something incredible to happen (we watch too many action movies). It has a lot of laughs and I just loved the ending. I loved how he described things and people; using words like “vomity”, “old” so-and-so, and “that killed me”. Read it, you’ll know what I mean.

I laughed out loud at many parts of this book where he described something honestly, the way only a teenager could. I’m glad I waited to read it as an adult, and not when I was younger. I don’t think I would have liked it as much 10 or 15 years ago as I do now.

I found this drawing online, but not the name of the artist (I want to give credit where it’s due). So here is the link: http://www.listal.com/viewimage/1403125 I love it! It’s perfect. I think now tht it may be one of those “banned” books because of the language and the rebellion. If that doesn’t make it sound like a good read, I don’t know what will.

-K

P.S. Only phonies are scared of books. I’m not scared of books anymore.

Time Cursor, John David Krygelski

!!!…Review by Katermelon…!!!
Explorer Challenge: KaterMelon’s Book #2
Time Cursor by John David Krygelski
new author, new publisher, finishing it within the year it was published (barely!)

Time travel is difficult. Difficult to write about, read about, think about, etc.

But oh so fun when it’s done right!

I met Mr. Krygelski when I wandered into a now-defunct, once-popular large book store chain to meet a friend for knitting. A man in a cool hat was by the entrance next to a table full of books. He was very nice and asked me if I wanted to hear about his new book. (I was impressed because he wasn’t pushy) I said sure! He told me it was about a man who meets his future self the night before his wedding, and the events that occur afterward because of it. It’s hard not to say too much…so much happens in this story! I told him I love a good time travel story, but it’s hard sometimes when they don’t make sense. Mr. K told me he hated that too, so he wrote his own! So I bought the book, he signed it for me, and I went off to knit.

The villain is horrible. She is absolutely despicable and I shudder to think there may be people like her in the world.

This is a heavy kind of story; I had to put it down often to let the events sink in, and to think about the physics and other possibilities of time travel. It was so fun!! Subtle foreshadowing added a lot of suspense and the characters’ own curiosities explained every question I had. I never felt confused, even though the plot ran al over the place sometimes. Timey wimey stuff needs to make sense, not just scientifically but within the story as well. Time travel plots should veer off, loop around, and come back to some conclusion or explanation. Krygelski does this fantastically. Everything is connected eventually in a complicated but complete and comprehensible web of events.

Mr. Krygelski has one previous book, The Harvest, so I will be on the look out for it. If it is anything like Time Cursor, it will be a favorite.

P.S. Thanks again, Mr. Krygelski, I did enjoy the trip. :-)

Explorer Challenge: Melon’s Book#1

The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov
sci-fi published before 1960, new author

My husband suggested this one, since I haven’t read Asimov before. It’s from 1954. Plus, he has read all of the Robot series and if I read them we can talk about it! He doesn’t read as much as I do, so it’s a rare treat to talk about books we’ve both read.
I agree with Dark Cargo, that books should be a surprise, so there isn’t much I can say without ruining it.
I loved it!
I love how logic was a big part of solving the mustery. There is a murder of an important man, with no witnesses, and the suspects have been cleared. Now what? Based on the Three Laws of Robotics*, there are only so many ways this could have happened. “Motive”, one character says, “it all comes down to motive.” I admit I had my suspicions on who did it, but didn’t know for sure until the main character did too. I love how easy it was to identify with Detective Elijah Baley.
I also enjoyed comparing Asimov’s “distant future” with our present. The world he imagined a millenium from 1952 was eerily similar to 2011.
I’m excited to read the next in the series (there are four books): The Naked Sun.

*The Three Laws of Robotics
1: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2: A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law

Love at First Sight

One of my favorite experiences–one of the reasons I read–is opening a new book, meeting a new author, and that first line rings like a cathedral bell.

*sigh!*

“The first thing I can remember in this life is my father driving his white ox, Endurance, to the sky burial platforms.”
From Green, by Jay Lake.

20110917-101332.jpg

Nothing magical here: Explorer Challenge First Fail.

Note: This is an extremely atypical post for Darkcargo.com, but as it was a selection for the Explorer Challenge, the author is the 2011 Campbell award winner, it was mentioned in the Library Journal article, and I suspect the next novel in this series to be on the Hugo nominee list next year, I thought I had enough reasons to give my two cents about this title.

First choice for my participation in the Explorer Challenge was The Magicians by Lev Grossman: new author + Library Journal article category. This author and these books have been pinging on the radar screen quite a bit as the second in the series, The Magician King has recently released.

I picked it up on audio and have been listening to it at least once a day. The audio is fine. Mark Bramhall does a fine job.

I don’t understand what the hubbaloo is all about. What am I missing?

I don’t find it creative. I’m listening to this story and it is as though Grossman has taken his favorite stories, plopped them into a KitchenAid, and put a new label over each of the terms unique to the original novels. It is the Kids from Hogwarts–whose favorite books are the fake Chronicles of Narnia– go to Xavier’s School for the Gifted, and become alcoholic college kids. There’s a theory that “everything old is new again”, that all the stories there are to be told in the world have already been told and all we do is re-write them, but The Magicians is just stupid. The only possible saving grace for this book is the idea that maybe Grossman really intended to plagarise all these ideas as a satire.

They don’t play Quiddich, they play Welters. The kids aren’t separated into Houses, they’re separated into Disciplines. Quentin’s favorite books are the Fillory novels, the premise for these books being that a few special kids get whisked away repeatedly to a wonderland of magic and enchantment where they have adventures with talking beasts, where time passes differently than it does in the “real” world. And so on.

Without giving the story away, it seems that the hook in the tale might be that the main character has overstepped the rules of magic and created a Bad Event which kills one of the students, throwing a dampening blanket of post Tri-Wizard Tournament measures over the students & school. He doesn’t tell anyone that he thinks he’s caused this event, and the trajectory of the story expects the guilt to eat him up and make him who he is as an adult.  Ok, so now we’ve thrown Ursula K LeGuin’s Earthsea series into the KitchenAid.

Aside from the uninventiveness of the story and the world-building, the story is full of characters that I hate already by chapter 10. They’re always getting drunk, complaining, and whining. They’re self absorbed, pretentious and absurd. Their ennui simply kills any speed the narration has.

Truly. What am I missing here? I’m abandoning this, and so I am at -1 for the Explorer Challenge.

(They’re out playing this Welters game): “Elliot disappeared for twenty minutes and came back with six bottles of a very dry Fingerlakes Reisling he’d apparently been saving for just such an emergency, in two tin buckets full of melting ice. He hadn’t thought to bring any glasses, so they swigged straight from the bottle. Quentin still didn’t have much of a capacity for alcohol…”  blah blah snore.