starlady | Entries tagged with books: meta

I tried to watch Forbidden Planet last night, gave up and switched to Children of Dune after half an hour. I was morbidly curious what happens to Leto post-Children of Dune, and so I spent some time reading the plot outlines for the rest of the Dune saga on Wikipedia, and in particular the summaries for the two books that Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson wrote out of Frank Herbert's outline for Dune 7, Hunters of Dune and Sandworms of Dune. (You know who else besides Leto Atreides II has a shitty life? Duncan Idaho, that's who.)

And, particularly when I was plowing through the Sandworms article, I got to thinking that all of this sounded really damn familiar. In fact, I really do feel like I've read these books before, particularly in the Endymion half of Dan Simmons' Hyperion saga. (There's more than a passing similarity with Simon R. Green's Deathstalker books too, which are probably the ones I liked best.) Weird things with space Jews! Weird things with gender! Humanity warring against evil machines! Weird things with characters who are present over thousands of years, either through cloning (Dune) or through fucking with time travel (Simmons)! I don't know how much of the elements in the Dune books were present in Herbert's original outline, but it is a really striking set of parallels. And, quite frankly, as much as I enjoyed the Simmons books when I was in high school and didn't know any better (I got rid of all my Simmons books years ago and it felt so good), and ditto the three Dune books I managed to read before the weirdness got to be too much, I have no desire to see anyone do any of this sort of thing again. This may well be what a certain echelon of SF fans mean when they say the genre's fallen into a rut and people don't write books like they used to, but I'm okay with that.

As of two minutes ago I have read 62 books in 2012. The number is depressingly low, not least because I only count books if I read all of them, which trims a lot of the academic books, but what can you do. Some day grad school will be over and I will have my time to read back. *laughs bitterly at self*

So, 62 books. Nineteen of these (slightly less than 1/3) were by chromatic authors, which I am glad about; only 22 (slightly more than 1/3) were by men, which I am also glad about. At a roughly 10 percent selection rate for the year's best, I should be picking five or six books.

So, five best from 2012:

2012 was a mixed bag, I think. Some really good things happened! I went to Argentina to visit

via_ostiense in June, and got to meet some OTW friends; I went to Korea for a conference in November and had a really good and productive time; I did several things over the summer that were lucrative financially and good for my future career; I got my M.A. But I also spent a good chunk of the year being super freaked about money, and I also just worked a lot, for the entire year, without any breaks longer than a week or so. I didn't do anywhere near as much reading or writing or vidding or viewing as I wanted to do.

I only have two resolutions for 2013: see Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band live, and work through my backlog of book notes for my academic blog. Well, and the perpetual resolution of reading/writing/vidding/viewing more. And go to more classical concerts on campus.

As always, I am profoundly grateful to have my friends from the internet in my life, and I wish you a happy and prosperous 2013. ♥

Current Location: New York

It's international book week. The rules: Grab the closest book to you, turn to page 52, post the 5th sentence. Don't mention the title. Copy the rules as part of your post.

However, the imperial government's decision to leave only the question of women's franchise to be decided by Indian legislators in India did not go unnoticed by the female subjects of the British Empire.

I have added a "books: chromatic protagonist(s)" tag, since the clear response on the poll I posted was that people would find it useful. I am slowly retagging all the appropriate posts with this tag, but that process is not complete yet.

There are a few things I want to note. One of them is that I am defining "protagonist" as a POV character, and another is that I am attempting to take a catholic definition of "chromatic." Whether or not the characters would consider their status as non-white relevant, we do as readers, and I am attempting to use the tag in that mindset.

One problem with this is epic fantasy. I don't plan, at this point, to use the tag on the Inda books, for example, because although there are occasional chapters narrated by chromatic characters, the culture of the main protagonist, Inda, and his friend, is not marked as chromatic. I'm also not planning to use the tag for Michelle West's House War books, for example, although if future books return to emphatically chromatically marked cultures such as Annagar, I probably will.

Another problem is that the tag puts me in the place of judging who counts as chromatic. There's no way around that, and although I'm fairly confident that 85% of these decisions will be fairly obvious, there will be that other 15% that are ambiguous and that I may well get wrong. So, if you have questions or concerns about my decision to use the tag or not, please do let me know, and I will certainly listen.

Via Aliette de Bodard:

If you think colonialism is dead… think again. Globalisation has indeed made the world smaller–furthering the dominance of the West over the developing world, shrinking and devaluing local cultures, and uniformising everything to Western values and Western ways of life. This is a pernicious, omnipresent state of things that leads to the same unfounded things being said, over and over, to people from developing countries and/or on developing countries.

It’s time for this to stop. Time for the hoary, horrid misrepresentation clichés to be pointed out and examined; and for genuine, non-dismissive conversations to start.

Accordingly, here’s a handy bingo card for Western Cultural Imperialism–and we wish we could say we’ve made it all up, but unfortunately every single comment on this card was seen on the Internet.

Card designed by Aliette de Bodard, Joyce Chng, Kate Elliott, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, @requireshate, Charles Tan, @automathic and @mizHalle. Launch orchestrated with the help of Zen Cho and Ekaterina Sedia in addition to above authors (and an army of willing signal boosters whom we wish to thank very much!)

whump has done a text version of the card.

And on a related note, via

qian:

I was pleased to see that ardhra's brilliant essay What is cultural appropriation is now public.

Cultural appropriation isn’t simply the "taking or borrowing of some aspects of another culture from someone outside that culture". Cultures throughout time have traded, adapted, and borrowed artefacts, symbols, technologies and narratives from one another. The issue isn’t the aesthetic and material mingling of cultures, hybridity, or that human creativity crosses cultural boundaries. Those are aesthetic and perhaps moral issues, separate from the real political issue of cultural appropriation.

...

The problem isn’t that cultures intermingle, it’s the terms on which they do so and the part that plays in the power relations between cultures. The problem isn’t "taking" or "borrowing", the problem is racism, imperialism, white supremacy, and colonialism. The problem is how elements of culture get taken up in disempowering, unequal ways that deny oppressed people autonomy and dignity. Cultural appropriation only occurs in the context of the domination of one society over another, otherwise known as imperialism. Cultural appropriation is an act of domination, which is distinct from 'borrowing', syncretism, hybrid cultures, the cultures of assimilated/integrated populations, and the reappropriation of dominant cultures by oppressed peoples.

Read it all -- it's the best explanation of cultural appropriation I've seen. I read an earlier version of the essay and it was one of those moments where it's like something goes click in your brain and suddenly the world makes more sense.

Books I'm reading: I'm just about to finish, finally, Michelle West's Skirmish. It is so good and so darkly hilarious and so much the core of what I love about Michelle West books, I am very sad to see it end and I have consequently been taking it in very small chunks. For next week, I get to re-read my favorite parts of Mary Elizabeth Berry's The Culture of Civil War in Kyoto, which is an amazing book that everyone should read.

Books I'm writing: That magical pirate thing, and the princess thing (which may be getting an update to cod-1930s, because hell yes the 1930s), and also the Sherlock Holmes/Singsong Girls of Shanghai steampunk thing. Everything else is gravy.

The book I love the most: This…is a tough question. I usually duck out of this by saying that I haul His Dark Materials around the world with me (I do, and it's The Amber Spyglass out of all three of them that is a book of my heart), but of course I don't have just one. The Culture of Civil War in Kyoto would have to rank near the top of that list on the non-fiction side. It's just so good, you guys! It's about medieval Kyoto, yes, but it's also about cities and people and popular uprising and revolutions and it's directly relevant to today, period.

The last book I received as a gift: Well, I think that was William Joyce's wonderful picture book The Man in the Moon, from some of my chosen family for Christmas--it's the first in a series. I just learned via the internet that there are books for young readers as well as the picture books, and the first one is about the Easter Bunny and warrior eggs? I'm so there.

The last book I gave as a gift: …Hmm. I leant my sister my copy of Cat Valente's Deathless last summer with a strong recommendation, and she enjoyed it very much, and I think that will have to do for this category in the absence of my memory of Christmas presents.

The nearest book: The aforementioned Skirmish. Michelle West = ♥.

So, I'm still alive. The course I'm teaching for is great, but unfortunately the middle third of it is basically four weeks of straight grading (paper-exam-paper-exam) and on top of that I'm chairing our department's Visit Day efforts--we are going all-out to recruit people this year, and 34 people are coming to campus next Friday, and that is a lot and I have been inundated with emails about it since last week, when I had a two-hour meeting about, among other things, seating charts with mini-meetings about seating charts. So I am rather stressed out, and by "rather" I mean "really."

On top of all this, as usual, I have a ton of things to do--abstracts and conference proposals and articles and an informal but serious talk next month--which are slowly but surely becoming more consequential for my career and which I need to get better about prioritizing. All of these things are, in isolation, good, but putting them all together is a bit much. I'm very much looking forward to next Saturday, as you can imagine.

So, as of right now I've read 87 books this year; I'm hoping to finish Harbinger of the Storm this evening, which will make it 88. Quite a step down from last year, by the numbers, though I'm pleased to note that 46 of these books (slightly more than 50%) were by chromatic authors. NB: I count manga as individual books, because I almost always read manga in Japanese, which is where most of this total comes from.

So, here's a few books I think everyone should read, in no particular order:

All of these books are excellent, and well worth the time. Happy reading in 2012! As always, my resolution is to read more in the new year.

To say nothing of my chosen career path, and avocations.

One might mock—one does mock—the mastery of what is, after all, mere mock history. But the fantasy readers’ learned habit of thinking historically is an acquisition as profound in its way as the old novelistic training in thinking about life as a series of moral lessons. Becoming an adult means learning a huge body of lore as much as it means learning to know right from wrong. We mostly learn that lore in the form of conventions: how you hold the knife, where you put it, that John was the witty Beatle, Paul the winning one, that the North once fought the South. Learning in symbolic form that the past can be mastered is as important as learning in dramatic form that your choices resonate; being brought up to speed is as important as being brought up to grade. Fantasy fiction tells you that history is available, that the past counts. As the boring old professor [Tolkien] knew, the backstory is the biggest one of all. That’s why he was scribbling old words on the blackboard, if only for his eyes alone.

--Adam Gopnik, "The Dragon's Egg"

I--yeah. It's no accident that I consider my interest in history to be strongly motivated by an interest in narrative.

First, some important follow-up posts on #YesGayYA:

Author Marie Brennan has a cogent analysis of posts written over the last few days, as well as of the actual issues involved: Followup on "Say Yes to Gay YA"

cleolinda has a more in-depth hashing-over, What's going on with #yesGayYA, which is a great post through and through.

bookshop's post YA publishing & the de-gaying of books has a quotation from an anonymized agent letter, extracted from comments to the posts in the discussion. I personally don't fully agree with her chosen course of action, but it's a good post regardless.

PSA: Last Call for Delicious Users: Transfer Your Bookmarks by Sept. 23

I opted out of AVOS' TOS and switched to Pinboard, but I didn't have a huge collection of links widely used by other people in fandom. If you do, considering opting into the TOS is worth a few minutes' thought. Migrating your bookmarks somewhere else will also preserve them, though not existing links to them of course.

And finally, if you like contemporary classical music, you will want to download the "Remembering Sept. 11" concert, live from the Temple of Dendur, before the link goes dark on Sept. 18.

Current Location: my office
Current Music: William Basinski, "The Disintegration Loops" (Wordless Music Orchestra)

Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith have a post up at Genreville, Say Yes to Gay YA:

The agent offered to sign us on the condition that we make the gay character straight, or else remove his viewpoint and all references to his sexual orientation.

I've seen a lot of people say some incisive things about this, and I wanted to emphasize two things in particular to bear in mind. As Seanan McGuire points out, the issue here isn't that there are YA books with queer characters out there. Buying, reading, and recommending the YA books with queer characters that have been published is an excellent way to show your support for queer characters in YA fiction, to be sure. But a few isolated exceptions that prove the rule don't disprove the rule. And characters who are subtextually rather than textually queer in YA books aren't examples of queer characters in YA books; they're examples of characters in YA books who may or may not be in the closet.

The other thing is that this particular instance is most obviously about a gay character in a YA book, but the same gatekeeping happens in regards to characters of color, to disabled characters, to just about any and all characters who aren't the normative straight, white protagonist that agents and publishers seem so happy to put out ad infinitum. None of the POV characters in Brown and Smith's novel are white, and I suspect quite strongly that even if all the POV characters were as straight as a yardstick, they'd still be having trouble finding representation. Maybe they wouldn't have been told explicitly that race was the reason; maybe they would have. It wouldn't change the effect of this systemic bias, regardless.

This is not about one particular book; nor is self-publishing this particular book going to solve the systemic biases in the publishing industry.

Data by

lightgetsin

I was recently treated to another round of “disabled people need to just ask for accommodations, then they’d be given them,” with the usual accompaniments of “you shouldn’t be so angry” and “you should be nicer."

So I figured, okay. I know this is bullshit from a lifetime of experience, but let’s gather some data.

What I did
I gave myself 7 days. Every time during that 7 days I ran into a particular kind of inaccessibility, I wrote to the owner/relevant authority and asked them to fix it. I aimed for short, factual, informative request letters.

On a happier note, Gene Yang, who is going to be doing the post-series A:TLA comics, has an interview up at Racebending.com! I am SO EXCITED.

But everyone should go nominate things for

eruthros' Alternative Best 100 Speculative Fiction Works.

Also, apparently you're not really Japanese until you've fallen into a rice field.

Current Location: Tokushima

Or basically, how much of your lifetime reading capacity have you wasted reading popular crap by mostly white men?

by way of

boundbooks: NPR Books: Your Picks: Top 100 Science-Fiction, Fantasy Books
NPR Books: Monkey See: NPR's Top 100 Science Fiction And Fantasy Novels: Parsing The Results

Bold if you've read, italicize ones you fully intend to read, underline if it's a book/series you've read part but not all of. Also added troisroyaumes's strikethrough if you never plan to read.

boundbooks - I'm also adding a * if I'd recommend reading it!

( 100 predictable choices )

Is The Crystal Cave good? It's almost the only book on here that I haven't heard of and sounds interesting.

Current Location: Takamatsu

Poll #7183 Greatest living SF writer?

Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 35

View Respondents

Greatest living SF writer?

View Answers

Ted Chiang (source: owner of Dreamhaven Books)
0 (0.0%)

Samuel R. Delany (source: me)
2 (5.9%)

Ursula K. LeGuin (source: me)
28 (82.4%)

Gene Wolfe (source: Neil Gaiman)
0 (0.0%)

someone else I will name below
4 (11.8%)

Write-in candidate?

View Answers

I just can't believe someone would put Ted Chiang over the woman who coined the term 'ansible,' but maybe I shouldn't be all that surprised.

The books I'm reading: Oh, so many, some for years. I'm hoping to finish The Silver Chair and Anne Allison's Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club this weekend.

The books I'm writing: That one with the pirates and the volcano, and that other one with the princesses which I will not re-set into a cod-1930s, no I will not. Plus some academic papers.

The book I love the most: Too many to name. But the one trilogy of books I haul around the world with me is Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials.

The last book I received as a gift: Mary Elizabeth Berry's Japan in Print and Christopher Bolton's book on Abe Kobo.

The last book I gave as a gift: Hmm. I have not given many books recently. I gave my dad Bob Woodward's new book for Christmas.

The nearest book: Dorinne Kondo's Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace.

The last book I bought myself: Mary Gentle's Lost Burgundy, C.S. Lewis and his brother's childhood stories, and Shriek: An Afterword by Jeff VanderMeer.

As if I could ever pick just one book that I love the most. And now I'm off to do all the tasks ever, including translating the new chapter of Gate 7.

I read exactly 101 books this year. I think that's going to be my goal for next year; I'm only off last year by 38, which frankly surprises me; I thought grad school would have more of a negative impact on my reading. Regardless, I don't want to go below 50 non-grad school books read in 2011.

101 books, 5 rereads, meaning that I should be picking 8-9 books for the year's best at a slightly less than 10% selection rate. So:

Eight excellent books
1. Kraken by China Miéville
2. When Fox Is a Thousand by Larissa Lai
3. Scott Pilgrim (6 vols.) by Bryan Lee O'Malley
4. Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick
5. Fullmetal Alchemist (27 vols.) by Arakawa Hiromu
6. Bury the Chains by Adam Hochschild
7. Servant of the Underworld by Aliette de Bodard
8. Kamikaze Girls by Takemoto Novala (trans. Akemi Wegmiller)

Given that I read 1/3 of these within the last two months, I think there's definitely a degree of chronological bias here, but whatever; all of these books are great, and some of them, particularly Nothing to Envy and Bury the Chains, are vital.

I've done better than last year with reading books by chromatic and female authors, and that's a trend I want to continue next year; I also want to actually read some of the Japanese novels I have lying around, as well as more manga (I'm always resolving to read more manga). Half my resolutions relate to reading anyway, so, without further ado:

New Year's Resolutions
1. Get new glasses and new contact lenses (I already have the prescription);
2. Read manhwa! I'd love recs for English-language available series!
3. Watch Kdramas and Cdramas. Recs much appreciated!
4. Read more manga, novels in Japanese, and books in translation;
5. Get Netflix (again);
6. Go to the dentist, now that I have dental again after three years;
7. Keep writing, running, and biking

A very Happy (Gregorian) New Year to my dear acquaintance, each and every one of you. ♥
May 2011 be a very good, and better, year for all of us.

Until results from MA come in, with (mostly book) links.

bookshop, The flip side. Another incredible post.

zahrawithaz, More than 50 books by Queer People of Color (partially vetted for problematic portrayals). Oo, shiny!

China Miéville, 50 FSF works socialists should read. It's an older link, but awesome. Relatedly, the cover for Kraken is up!

Torque Control, Some books I want to read in 2010. (How did I not know there was a new David Mitchell novel coming out!?)

Via

fjm, The Apex Book of World SF needs to sell 92 copies by the end of January. It's even in English; no excuses, really. (Plus it includes a story by Aliette de Bodard! Her book isn't coming out Stateside until September. ;_;)

help_haiti ends tomorrow at noon EST. There's a wealth of stuff to be had, and an incalculable monetary need. (Thanks to

fish_echo for that last link.)

I caught the end of Working Girl on the tube about an hour ago (Sigourney Weaver's character is right when she calls the story a fairy tale), and I spent the entire credit reel staring at the World Trade Center. We really were stupidly--not innocent, really, just ignorant. And then my TV started talking Holmes09! This is what happens with "premium" channels I suppose.

And now to wash dishes. Oh, Massachusetts.

1. Avatar won the Golden Globe for Best Picture, and James Cameron for Best Director, last night. WTF WHAT WHY.
2.

bookshop's post is a dose of cold water on every fannish heart. Why are we still accepting subtext instead of text?

3. N.K. Jemisin, whose book The Hundred Thousand Kingsdoms comes out next month (yay!), has a post on why RaceFail was good for sff.
3a.

deepad has a "yes, and" post on the costs of engaging.
4. Everyone's seen

melannen's posts crunching the numbers on slashers' sexuality, right? The majority of slashers are queer.

5. Massachusetts voters go to the polls to choose a new senator tomorrow. It might be impossible to resist reading this as a referendum on a) health care reform and b) on President Obama's first year.
6. Martin Luther King, Jr. would have been 81 years old today. Given that two of my great-aunts died this year at age 88 (one of them just this past Friday), it doesn't seem unreasonable to think that he might have been here to see it, all other things being equal.

Edited to remove the simplistic categorization and to add 3a.

At the moment my tally for 2009 stands at 138 books. If I can force myself through the rest of The Secret History of Science Fiction by tomorrow night, it will be 139, but that book will not feature in this post regardless, so onward.

Seven excellent (fiction) books:
M.T. Anderson, The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation: Volume II, The Kingdom on the Waves
Roberto Bolaño, 2666
A. S. Byatt, The Children's Book
Kelly Link, Pretty Monsters
Neal Stephenson, The System of the World
Shaun Tan, The Arrival
Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making

Books I gave as gifts:
Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren
Adam Gopnik, Angels & Ages
A. S. Byatt, The Children's Book
Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
Shaun Tan, The Arrival

This was the year I rediscovered sff; hell, this was the year I rediscovered reading for fun. I very much hope that I can keep up the reading in 2010; my goal is to expand my reading range, as well as, in general, to read at least 100 books. We'll see. On that note...

Five 2010 books I want now:
Servant of the Underworld by Aliette de Bodard
A Wizard of Mars by Diane Duane
Lord Sunday by Garth Nix
Cast in Chaos by Michelle Sagara
City of Night by Michelle West

With two prominent exceptions, all the non-fiction books I read this year were excellent, and are recommended. Relatedly, I didn't post about Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama, but it's great, and I think it's a book (along with The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing) that every U.S.-ian should read.

All the links go to the Dreamwidth entries, but there may be more discussion on the LJ posts.

And beneath the cut, without links-back or italics,

( the full list )

Current Mood: accomplished

So I mentioned that I might or might not make a post about my disagreements with io9's 20 Best SFF Books of the Decade. (They call the list simply science fiction, but with Harry Potter and Jonathan Strange on it, it's not just sf. Thanks for that insult, guys.) I was leaning toward might not until I saw

jonquil post these choice quotations about Cory Doctorow's new novel on her journal. I can't stand Cory Doctorow as a writer, and

rachelmanija's posts related to Little Brother are a good illustration of why.

So this list is shorter, because I don't think I read 20 sff books of the Aughts that were truly...I'm not even sure of the word. But I have read all of the ones below, and could go on at length about them if prompted. I took the ones I had read and agreed with off io9, then added.

Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Trilogy
J.K. Rowling, the Harry Potter books
Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
China Miéville, Perdido Street Station
Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass
Kelly Link, Pretty Monsters
Naomi Novik, the Temeraire series
Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book
Shaun Tan, Tales from Outer Suburbia

Some of the comments to the io9 post are pretty spot-on; I think the best is the one pointing out how white it is, which is a valid criticism of my list too. I haven't read enough sff by chromatic writiers; I also think I don't, or haven't, read enough sff of ideas--but I also think that not enough sff of ideas is written. And I don't count "literary fiction" as sff, which lops a chunk of the io9 choices off my reduced list.

What do other people think? What are the sff books of the decade by chromatic authors? What sff novels (of ideas) would you nominate? I think that my list is a beginning and that I am left with far more questions than answers, which disinclines me to try to make any sweeping statements.

I had to explain "harshing [one's] squee" to my dad tonight. Which was amusing.

In other news,

cofax7 brought to my attention that apparently there is a war on that I did not know about--the feminist war against science fiction! That's right, those damn women [and PoC, and non-heterosexuals] are going to destroy...um, what exactly? oh, that's right, civilization as we know it, since the presence of characters who aren't [straight, white] males in any given text automatically invalidates it as a work of...science fiction, or something. I guess this means I'm a foot soldier and didn't know it, in a war (to quote The Hunt for Red October) "with no battles, no victories...only casualties."

And finally...well, nothing much else is new. Graduate school apps blah blah blah.

Current Mood: seriously?
Current Music: VNV Nation, "Joy"

It's a magical world

Great space operas of the 80s

2012, in books and in general

that book week meme

Books tagging update

Cultural imperialism bingo and cultural appropriation

My so-called life, partially told in books

Books of 2011

I think this manages to say a lot about me, actually

Things for Friday

One link forward, two links back

I can't remember what I was going to say

The NPR "Top 100 SFF Books" meme

Because this has been bothering me since Wiscon

Happy ἐξελαυνω Day! Also World Book Day

2010: The year in books

Marking time

Monday by the numbers

2009: The year in books

Begging to differ

why do I fight? and why do I feel that I carry a sword through a battlefield?

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