morgan_dhu | Entries tagged with books

I love lists of great books. I realy love lists of great sf books. Tor.com has published a wonderful list by James Nicoll of “100 SF/F books You Should Consider Reading In the New Year.”

It is a great list, full of great books, some of which I have read, some of which I know only by reputation but have often wanted to read. Maybe this year I will.

I’ve starred the books I’ve read from the list. 45 out of 100, with a few that I think I have read but it was very long ago and I’. not sure.

A plus sign indicates the ones I own that are sitting patiently in my TBR list. Yes, I have a very, very long TBR list. A woman’s reach should exceed her grasp, or what’s a heaven for?

*The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison (2014)
The Stolen Lake by Joan Aiken (1981)
Fullmetal Alchemist by Hiromu Arakawa (2001-2010)
Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō by Hitoshi Ashinano (1994-2006)
*The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (1985)
Stinz: Charger: The War Stories by Donna Barr (1987)
The Sword and the Satchel by Elizabeth Boyer (1980)
Galactic Sibyl Sue Blue by Rosel George Brown (1968)
*The Mountains of Mourning by Lois McMaster Bujold (1989)
+War for the Oaks by Emma Bull (1987)
*Wild Seed by Octavia E. Butler (1980)
*Naamah’s Curse by Jacqueline Carey (2010)
*The Fortunate Fall by Raphael Carter (1996)
*The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers (2015)
*Red Moon and Black Mountain by Joy Chant (1970)
*The Vampire Tapestry by Suzy McKee Charnas (1980)
+Gate of Ivrel by C.J. Cherryh (1976)
*Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho (2015)
Diadem from the Stars by Jo Clayton (1977)
*The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper (1973)
Genpei by Kara Dalkey (2000)
Servant of the Underworld by Aliette de Bodard (2010)
The Secret Country by Pamela Dean (1985)
*Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany (1975)
*The Door into Fire by Diane Duane (1979)
On the Edge of Gone by Corinne Duyvis (2016)
*Spirit Gate by Kate Elliott (2006)
Enchantress From the Stars by Sylvia Louise Engdahl (1970)
*Golden Witchbreed by Mary Gentle (1983)
The Dazzle of Day by Molly Gloss (1997)
A Mask for the General by Lisa Goldstein (1987)
+Slow River by Nicola Griffith (1995)
+Those Who Hunt the Night by Barbara Hambly (1988)
Winterlong by Elizabeth Hand (1990)
*Ingathering by Zenna Henderson (1995)
The Interior Life by Dorothy Heydt (writing as Katherine Blake, 1990)
*God Stalk by P. C. Hodgell (1982)
*Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson (1998)
*Zero Sum Game by S.L. Huang (2014)
*Blood Price by Tanya Huff (1991)
The Keeper of the Isis Light by Monica Hughes (1980)
God’s War by Kameron Hurley (2011)
+Memory of Water by Emmi Itäranta (2014)
*The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin (2015)
Cart and Cwidder by Diane Wynne Jones (1975)
*Daughter of Mystery by Heather Rose Jones (2014)
+Hellspark by Janet Kagan (1988)
A Voice Out of Ramah by Lee Killough (1979)
St Ailbe’s Hall by Naomi Kritzer (2004)
*Deryni Rising by Katherine Kurtz (1970)
*Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner (1987)
*A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle (1962)
Magic or Madness by Justine Larbalestier (2005)
*The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin (1974)
*Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie (2013)
+Biting the Sun by Tanith Lee (Also titled Drinking Saphire Wine, 1979)
*Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee (2016)
Wizard of the Pigeons by Megan Lindholm (1986)
*Adaptation by Malinda Lo (2012)
*Watchtower by Elizabeth A. Lynn (1979)
*Tea with the Black Dragon by R. A. MacAvoy (1983)
*The Outback Stars by Sandra McDonald (2007)
*China Mountain Zhang by Maureen McHugh (1992)
+Dreamsnake by Vonda N. McIntyre (1978)
The Riddle-Master of Hed by Patricia A. McKillip (1976)
*Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees (1926)
Pennterra by Judith Moffett (1987)
The ArchAndroid by Janelle Monáe (2010)
*Jirel of Joiry by C. L. Moore (1969)
+Certain Dark Things by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (2016)
+The City, Not Long After by Pat Murphy (1989)
+Vast by Linda Nagata (1998)
*Galactic Derelict by Andre Norton (1959)
*His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik (2006)
+Dragon Sword and Wind Child by Noriko Ogiwara (1993)
Outlaw School by Rebecca Ore (2000)
*Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor (2014)
*Alanna: The First Adventure by Tamora Pierce (1983)
*Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy (1976)
+Godmother Night by Rachel Pollack (1996)
Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti (1859)
My Life as a White Trash Zombie by Diana Rowland (2011)
*The Female Man by Joanna Russ (1975)
Stay Crazy by Erika L. Satifka (2016)
The Healer’s War by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough (1988)
Five-Twelfths of Heaven by Melissa Scott (1985)
*Everfair by Nisi Shawl (2016)
*Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)
*A Door Into Ocean by Joan Slonczewski (1986)
*The Crystal Cave by Mary Stewart (1970)
*Up the Walls of the World by James Tiptree, Jr. (1978)
The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner (1996)
The Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge (1980)
*All Systems Red by Martha Wells (2017)
The Well-Favored Man by Elizabeth Willey (1993)
Banner of Souls by Liz Williams (2004)
Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson (2012)
*Ariosto by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro (1980)
+Ooku by Fumi Yoshinaga (2005-present)

It’s been a while. I’ve been depressed, and sick - the first time in years that I’ve gotten a flu shot, also the first time in years I’ve gotten the flu - and not reading much and generally feeling unmotivated in the extreme. But I figure I should get back into the habit, so here is my book report for the oast few weeks.

Since the announcement of the Hugo finalists on March 31, I’ve been working on reading the ones I haven’t already read, which include novels from three Campbell finalists and, of course, the dreaded best series category.

Since my last book post, I have completed:

Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Falcons of Narabedla
Tanya Huff, The Future Falls
N. K. Jemisin, The Killing Moon
N. K. Jemisin, The Shadowed Sun
Sarah Kuhn, Heroine Complex
Mur Lafferty, Six Wakes
Frances Hardinge, A Skinful of Shadows
Peter Tremayne, Shroud of the Archbishop
Peter Tremayne, Suffer the Children
Cassandra Khaw, Food of the Gods
Sarah Gailey, River of Teeth
Seanan McGuire, Down Among the Sticks and Bones
Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty
Alexandra Pierce and Mimi Mondal (eds.), Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler

(As always, my thoughts on the books I read, feeble as they may be, can be found on my book journal at bibliogramma.dreamwidth.org)

Currently reading:

Kim Stanley Robinson, New York 2140
Martin Delany, Blake, or the Huts of Africa Part One
Olaf Stapledon, Darkness and the Light
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (ed.), How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective
Ann and Jeff Vandermeer (eds.), Sisters of the Revolution
Samuel R. Delany, Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts and the Politics of the Paraliterary

What’s next:

More Hugo reading, of course. I have two more finalists from the best novel category for both 2018 and 1943, plus most of the graphic novel finalists, plus three YA finalists, plus novels from two Campbell finalists, plus two related works finalists, plus examples from four best series finalists. Assuming that I can find free copies of all of these, either in the voters packet or elsewhere.

And there’s a bunch of other stuff I want to read, new releases and books that have been sitting on my TBR list forever. So many, many books.

And it’s reading Wednesday again.

I’ve been feeling a bit down this week, and in a lot of pain, which as usual has had an affect on my reading. I’ve spent a lot of time mindlessly playing one of my favourite games, called Rebuild. It’s after the Zombie apocalypse, and your responsibility is to clear out the town you find yourself in, collect survivors, feed them. It’s not as complex as a full-fledged RPG, it’s more of a turn-based simple combat strategy game, but it requires little thought, no manual dexterity, and it’s fun killing vampires. I don’t play the big RPG games because every time I’ve ever tried one, they’ve been dependent on manual dexterity. You have to be able to get past the guards at high speed, or jump precisely from the ledge to the rock in the middle of the chasm, or press the buttons in the right order, or something that involves complex manipulation of motion controls, and I have never been able to achieve that kind of accuracy, so I never get anywhere, and eventually I stopped trying to play them. Which is a pity, because some of them appear to be interesting, but I have no wish to get involved in a game and then get permanently blocked because I simply cannot execute a series of moves quickly or accurately enough. But enough about games.

I did get some reading done this week. Finished off a few things that I’d been slowly working through.

Books (and novellas)completed this week:

Shadowhouse Fall, Daniel José Older
Amberlough, Lara Elena Donnelly
There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra, Chinua Achebe
Strangers from a Different Shore, Ronald Takaki
Whose Land Is It Anyway? A Manual for Decolonization, Peter McFarlane and Nicole Schabus (eds.)
A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo, Jill Twiss
Hammers on Bone, Cassandra Khaw
Bearly a Lady, Cassandra Khaw

Books in progress:

Food of the Gods, Cassandra Khaw
Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, Dorothy Roberts
Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts and the Politics of the Paraliterary, Samuel R. Delany
Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler, Alexandra Pierce and Mimi Mondal (eds.)

What’s next:

I’m in a mood of completion right now, so I’m thinking I’m going to go through my TBR list and read the sequels to all those first volumes in a series that I enjoyed but somehow didn’t get around to reading the next volume when it came out. There’s actually a fair bit of that on my list.

And there’s always new books coming out, and this year I want to get a head start on books that might be potential Hugo nominees fir next year.

And there’s the rereads of Heinlein and Le Guin that are on my back burner at the moment, to which list I’m now wanting to add Octavia Butler, because reading Luminescent Threads has put me in that mood.

And I have some specific ideas about the “social justice” reading I want to do this year. My priorities include: reading more about Indigenous history and experience and the processes of decolonisation; more books about the history and experiences of people of colour in Canada; writings both theoretical and personal by black and Indigenous women; and experiences of transgender, non-binary and intersex people. Some of these are not going to be easy to source on a zero budget - libraries don’t have a lot of this material available on ebooks, and other sources go by popularity, but I’m going to try. I’ve already got several books in all of these subjects to start on, so we’ll see what I can find to add to that.

I haven’t completed any if my books in progress over the past week, because I’ve mostly been reading pulp magazines from 1942. Twenty-four of them, in fact. I did not read cover to cover, but I gave every piece of fiction a few oaragraphs to engage me, and if it did, I read it. Say, about two-thirds of the stories published. Most of the magazines were Campbell edited - primarily Amazing Stories and Unknown Worlds - with a few others tossed in for variety.

I did this because I wanted to give a fair shot at nominations for the Retro Hugos. Certainly I found some gems that I would never have thought of had I not done this reading.

And I noticed a few interesting things about the stories I read, too. First, there were a lot of stories that touched, in one way or another, on the war. Not surprising, the US had just gotten into the war a few months before the year began, and writers, even those who write speculative fiction, write about the world they live in, even if they put it into futuristic or fantasy trappings. Time travel was big. I found a lot of stories that in one way or another dealt with time travel, forward or back. Robots were pretty big, too. Not just Asimov, but other writers as well. On the fantasy side, there was a definite market for humorous stories, with L. Sprague de Camp being particularly known for such. And ghosts. A lot of fantasy involved ghosts. Actually, both Anthony Boucher and A. E. van Vogt wrote time travel stories involving ghosts. There were a fair few ‘bargain with the devil’ fantasies, too.

It was really rather interesting, immersing myself in sff from another time for a week. But now I’m back to the present, and all my Hugo nominations are in, and I’ve got some things I want to read for myself.

Next week, back to regular Wednesday reading posts. At least, that’s the plan.

On Wednesday I was at the hospital dealing with multiple bureaucratic screwups in what was supposed to be a straightforward process of having some tests done and talking to a doctor about them. I arrive home exhausted and promptly slept the rest of the day. And the day after. And mist of Friday, too. So Wednesday’s book post is happening today instead.

Depression hit me for a few days this week, too, so my reading was impacted in a not good way. I feel so unlike myself when I can’t get into a book. But I think it’s turning around, slowly.

Books completed this week:
Raven Stratagem, Yoon Ha Lee
The Art of Starving, Sam J. Miller
Sleeping with Monsters, Liz Bourke
Up Ghost River: a chief’s journey through the turbulent waters of Native history, Edward Metatawabin
Fonda Lee, Exo

Books in progress:
Shadowhouse Fall, Daniel José Older
Amberlough, Lara Elena Donnelly
Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, Dorothy Roberts
Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts and the Politics of the Paraliterary, Samuel R. Delany
There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra, Chinua Achebe
Strangers from a Different Shore, Ronald Takaki

What’s up next:
Finishing the Hugo reading. After that, I’m not entirely sure. Reading Liz Bourke’s Sleeping with Monsters has given me some ideas, as the book includes essays about a fair few books that have been languishing in my TBR file for some time.

And of course, the Heinlein and Le Guin rereading projects.

Plus, I keep a little list of books that I hear about from various sources and the dates on which are being released. These are books that I feel I absolutely must acquire. The list is only a starting point, of course - I’m forever hearing about books after their publication that I would have put on the list if I’d known about them. This is how the TBR pile just keeps growing. There are a few books on this list from February I still don’t have, and there’s the list for March. I need to try to read these as I acquire them so the TBR list doesn’t get any longer. The February/March list:

Elizabeth Gillespie McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance
Djamila Ibrahim, Things Are Good Now
Therese Marie Mailhot, Heart Berries: A Memoir
Elizabeth Bear, Stone Mad
Nancy Kress, If Tomorrow Comes
Tomi Adeyemi, Children of Blood and Bone

I continue to read. This is a good thing and makes me happy.

Books completed this week:
The Compleat Werewolf and Other Stories, Anthony Boucher
At The Dark End of the Street, Danielle L. McGuire
What It Means When A Man Falls from the Sky, Lesley Nneka Arimah
Weave a Circle Round, Kari Maaren
The Illegal, Lawrence Hill
The Tiger’s Daughter, K. Arsenault Rivera
Provenance, Ann Leckie
So You Want To Talk about Race, Ijeoma Oluo
Proof of Concept, Gwyneth Jones
Want, Cindy Pon

Books in progress:
Raven Stratagem, Yoon Ha Lee
The Art of Starving, Sam J. Miller
Sleeping with Monsters, Liz Bourke
Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts and the Politics of the Paraliterary, Samuel R. Delany
There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra, Chinua Achebe
Strangers from a Different Shore, Ronald Takaki

What’s next:

Still doing Hugo reading, mostly young adult novels and a few related works. A few more recommended novels - Lana Elena Donelly’s Amberlough, Mur Lafferty’s Six Wakes, Annalee Newitz’s Autonomous - if there’s time. I read about a hook a day, so theoretically I have time for 15 more books before I have to finalise my ballot. Some more short fiction, current and retro.

After that, some rereads, Heinlein and Le Guin.

And I think I’ll do some concerted work on reducing the length of my TBR list, which at last count ran to 18 pages, single-spaced. I have a lot of lovely books sitting on my ipad waiting to be read, and they keep writing new ones to add to the list.

More adventures in reading in between watching the Olympics.

Books completed this week:
Samuel Delany, The Atheist in the Attic
Robert Heinlein, Waldo and Magic, Inc
Robert Heinlein, The Green Hills of Earth
Robert Heinlein, The Menace from Earth
Robert Heinlein, The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag (also published as 6XH)
Vita Sackville-West, Grand Canyon
Claire North, The End of the Day

Books in progress:
Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts and the Politics of the Paraliterary, Samuel R. Delany
There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra, Chinua Achebe
Strangers from a Different Shore, Ronald Takaki
The Compleat Werewolf and Other Stories, Anthony Boucher
At The Dark End of the Street, subtitled Black Women, Rape, and Resistance–A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power, Danielle L. McGuire
What It Means When A Man Falls from the Sky, Lesley Nneka Arimah

What next?:
More Hugo reading, obviously.

I have a few YA books to check out - mostly Nebula nominees, since I really don’t follow YA novels except when they get a lot of buzz or are written by authors on my automatic “must read everything they write” list - plus a couple of the other novels nominated for Nebulas that seem interesting.

And I have a lot of short stories and novelettes to read from the various suggestion lists around the Net. The fact that I can pretty much only read those published in online magazines, unless they’re in an original anthology I’ve managed to acquire, makes my task a little easier, but still, there is a lot of great short fiction out there and I’m always behind on my reading.

And there’s some books I want to read for the related works category, too. Time is running out.

And there’s all the other books, too.

Well, I’ve been reading less this past week than I have lately, because I have been pandering to my Olympics obsession, but I have still managed to read a few things.

Books competed this week:

Hidden Youth: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History, edited by Mikki Kendall and Chesya Burke
All Systems Red, Martha Wells
Akata Warrior, Nnedi Okorafor
Policing Black Lives, Robyn Maynard
Crip Theory, Robert McRuer
Nerves, Lester del Ray
Hell is Forever, Alfred Bester
Boundries, Border Crossings and Reinventing the Future, Beth Plutchak
Agents of Dreamland, Caitlin Kiernan
An Ember from the Ashes, Sabaa Tahir

Books in progress:

Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts and the Politics of the Paraliterary, Samuel R. Delany
There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra, Chinua Achebe
Strangers from a Different Shore, Ronald Takaki
At the Dark End of the Street, Danielle L. McGuire
The End of the Day, Claire North

What’s next:

More Hugo reading, contemporary and retro. More works by black authors in celebration of Black History Month. Maybe some other things just because that’s what caught my eye while persuing my list of books I have in my ebook collection but have yet to read.

Another week, another Wednesday, another book post.

What I’m currently reading:

Akata Warrior, Nnedi Okorafor
Nerves, Lester Del Ray
Policing Black Lives, Robyn Maynard
Hidden Youth, Mikki Kendall and Chesya Burke (eds.)
Crip Theory, Robert McRuer
Strangers from a Different Shore, Ronald Takaki

Books completed this week:

Null States, Malka Older
Homintern, Gregory Woods
Lethal Decisions, Arthur Ammann
My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me, Jennifer Teege
The Stone Sky, N. K. Jemisin
An Unkindness of Ghosts, Rivers Solomon
Akata Witch, Nnedi Okorafor
A. E. van Vogt, Asylum

What’s up next:

Well, still doing Hugo reading, and I have several books I want to read in the Related Works category - Beth Pluchak’s Boundaries, Borders and Reinventing the Future, Liz Bourke’s Sleeping with Monsters, and the tribute anthology for Octavia Butler, Luminescent Threads. Plus a few more novels - including some YA novels for the new not-a-Hugo category -and lots more short fiction - a couple of novellas that sound interesting and quite a few novelettes and short stories.

Plus, I need to do some reading for the 1943 Retro Hugo fiction categories (works published in 1942), if I can find the works I want to check out anywhere online. Fortunately, I’ve already read the books I feel are the strongest contenders for Best Novel - Islandia by Austin Tappan Wright, The Stranger by Albert Camus, Beyond this Horizon by Robert Heinlein and The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis. Deadline for nominations is March 16, so I need to get cracking on this.

Plus, I’m trying to focus on reading books by black authors, both fiction and non-fiction, for Black History month. I have lots of books to choose from in my TBR pile that fit the bill, so there’s no problem finding the books to read, it’s just a matter of balancing my two projects for the month.

The Heinlein reread project has been put on the back burner for now, and I’m also feeling a need to reread some of my favourite books by Ursula Le Guin, but that will have to wait til March.

So many, many, many books, so very little time.

Oh look, It’s Wednesday again, and that means its time for another book post.

Books completed in the past week:

Tender, Sofia Samatar
Race, Gender and Sexuality in Post-Apocalyptic TV and Film, Barbara Gurr (ed.)
Late in the Day: Poems 2010-2014, Ursula Le Guin
Amatka, Karin Tidbeck
The Fire This Time, Jessmyn Ward (ed.)
The Changeling, Victor LaValle
No Time to Spare, Ursula Le Guin
The Adventure of the Incognita Contessa, Cynthia Ward

Books I’m currently reading:

Null States, Malka Older
Policing Black Lives, Robyn Maynard
Hidden Youth, Mikki Kendall and Chesya Burke (eds.)
Crip Theory, Robert McRuer
Homintern, Gregory Woods
Lethal Decisions, Arthur Ammann
Strangers from a Different Shore, Ronald Takaki

Next on the list:

No idea. More Hugo reading, I suppose. There’s still some novels and short fiction I want to read before the nominations close. And some related works - Beth Pluchak’s Boundaries, Borders and Reinventing the Future and Liz Bourke’s Sleeping with Monsters, both from Aqueduct Press, among them.

And there’s a lot of social justice literature I’ve got sitting on my ipad waiting to be read. And a huge backlog of fiction and other cool books to be read as well. While I seem capable of reading - which is not always the case given my fluctuating health - I really do want to take advantage of it.

Trying to make Wednesday Book posts a thing again. I want to make more use of Dreamwidth, I’m too much on FB, I think.

So. Books finished in the past week:

Theodora Goss, The Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter
Nancy Kress, Tomorrow’s Kin
Farah Mendlesohn, Spring Flowering
Nancy Kress, Yesterday’s Kin
Tade Thompson, The Murders of Molly Southbourne
JYYang, The Black Tides of Heaven
JY Yang, The Red Threads of Fortune
Kate Harding, Asking for It
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker, All the Real Indians Died Off

Books I’m currently reading:

Strangers from a Different Shore, Ronald Takaki
Homintern, Gregory Woods
Tender, Sofia Samatar
Race, Gender and Sexuality in Post-Apocalyptic TV and Film, Barbara Gurr (ed.)
Late in the Day: Poems 2010-2014, Ursula Le Guin
Amatka, Karin Tidbeck
The Fire This Time, Jessmyn Ward (ed.)
Lethal Decisions: The Unnecessary Deaths of Women and Children from HIV/AIDS, Arthur Ammann

Next on the list:

Who knows? I want to get some more Hugo reading done, so maybe Jemisen’s The Stone Sky, Victor Lavalle’s The Changeling, Rivers Soloman’s An Unkindness of Ghosts, or Malka Older’s Null States. Might try catching up on Laurie King’s Mary Russell series. Or reread some Le Guin that I haven’t read for a while. I’ve been reading a lot of non-fiction in recent months, I might be feeling more like some fiction for a while.

There are a lot of writers whose work I love, and collect without thinking or checking reviews, because I know that whatever they write will be something I want to read. There are a fair number if writers whose work I keep coming back to, rereading, exploring, for many reasons. In some sense, you coukd say that all of these writers are favourites. But if you asked me who is my favourite writer, and made me pick just one, it would be Le Guin.

It wasn’t just her work, which was some of the best fiction, not just speculative fiction, written in the past 100 years. It was what she wrote about and how she thought about what she wrote, and how she lived what she wrote. She was an inspiration, as a feminist, as a political thinker, as a human being. She did an amazing thing, something you don’t often see geniuses do. She questioned herself. She interrogated her thought and her work. She was open to finding that she had been wrong, and to showing us all how her understanding had changed. She was never afraid to learn, and relearn, and learn more. She never rested on her laurels. And in that, as in so much else, she still has so much to teach us.

Goodbye, Ursula, and fair travels.

And another Wednesday reading post. Hoping that the trend will continue and I will be able to keep reading and posting about it through the pain and medical shit. So....

Books completed:

Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation, Damien Duffy
The Power, Naomi Alderman
The Epidemic - A Global History of AIDS, Jonathan Engel
Crash Override, Zoe Quinn
Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet Book 3, Ta-Nehisi Coates
Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race, Reni Eddo-Lodge
Monstress: The Blood, Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda

Books currently reading:

Strangers from a Different Shore, Ronald Takaki
Homintern, Gregory Woods
Tender, Sofia Samatar
The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter, Theodora Goss
Race, Gender and Sexuality in Post-Apocalyptic TV and Film, Barbara Gurr (ed.)
Asking For It - The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture

Coming up next:

My reading intentions are still much the same as last week. More Hugo-related books - fiction, graphic narratives and related works that might be potential nominations. More books that can be loosely categorised as social justice books. Maybe a few Heinlein novels. Whatever else strikes my fancy - I’m thinking I might want to read some historical fiction or mystery/detective/suspense thrillers.

Yes, I know it’s Thursday, but I’m still doing a Wednesday reading post because yesterday did not really exist fir me, being as it was a day in which I spent most of the time sleeping in an attempt to recover from my hospital visit on Tuesday.

Books completed in the past week:

Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life
Ruthanna Emrys, Winter Tide
Nnedi Okorafor, Home
Malka Older, Infomocracy
Jacques Pepin, The Origin of AIDS
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Black Panther: A Nation under Our Feet, Book II

Currently reading:

Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation, Damien Duffy
The Power, Naomi Alderman
The Epidemic - A Global History of AIDS, Jonathan Engel
Gregory Woods, Homintern
Zoe Quinn, Crash Override
Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore (this promises to be a slow read, because it is one if those densely researched and written texts that could form the basis of an entire university course, this one dealing with the migrations of Asian peoples to and within America, and I like to read these a chapter at a time, to allow salient points to settle before moving on)

What may come next:

I’m doing some concentrated Hugo-related reading, so more of the recommended sff novels and novellas from last year that interested me - Jemisin’s The Stone Sky, Goss’ The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter, Yoon Ha Lee’s Raven Stratagem, Malka Older’s Null States, Thompson’s The Murders of Molly Southburn, Samatar’s Fallow

Also, I might read a few more Heinlein novels to carry on my project of doing a full reread of all his fiction before Farah Mendlesohn’s book is published this fall.

And there’s a bunch of non-fiction books sitting in my TBR folder that I want to get to: Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body; Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People about Race; Robyn Maynard, Policing Black Lives; Pamela Palmater, Indigenous Nationhood; Susan Cannon Harris, Irish Drama and the other Revolutions; Kate Harding, Asking for It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture--and What We Can Do about It; and many, many more.

So the next books I read could be some if these, or they could be something completely different, depending on my mood. There are so many books I want to read, and those darned authors keep writing more of them. (Just kidding, more books is a good thing, even if I don’t live long enough to read all the ones I want to. Maybe heaven is a gigantic library where I can read for all eternity.)

Dear science fiction and fantasy reading friends... I find that one result of my medical woes this year was that I read much less than usual, and hence I view the rapid approach of the Hugo nominating period with some dismay.

I have the beginnings of short lists in the short fiction categories, but I’m way behind on novels and am almost clueless about related works. If anyone has any suggestions about a novel or sff related work from 2017 that blew tham away, I’d appreciate hearing about it as I really need to do some concentrated Hugo reading over the next month or two. I welcome recs for short fiction too.

Christmas morning has brought me a wealth of wonderful presents.

Thank you so much, to my extended family - Angela, Sadie, Nancy and Mary - for a treasured gift, the ebook version of Susan Cannon Harris’ Irish Drama and the Other Revolutions. Susan’s scholarship touches on so many points of interest for me, and academic presses are so expensive, And, just.... wow, thank you, thank you, thank you.

And much gratitude to my beloved partner, who supports my reading habit with such marvelous gifts of ebooks:

Charlie Angus, Children of the Broken Treaty
Danielle L. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street
Andrea Ritchie, Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color
James Daschuk, Clearing the Plains
Edmund Metatawabin, Up Ghost River: A Chiefs Journey Through the Turbulent Waters of Native History
Pamela Palmater, Indigenous Nationhood
Robyn Maynard, Policing Black Lives
Farah Mendlesohn, Spring Flowering
Linda Gordon, The Second Coming of the KKK
Samuel R. Delany, Dark Reflections
Mary Beard, Women & Power
Helen Epstein, Another Fine Mess: America, Uganda, and the War on Terror
Arthur J. Ammann, Lethal Decisions: The Unnecessary Deaths of Women and Children from HIV/AIDS
Mindy Klasky (ed), Nevertheless, She Persisted
dequi kioni-sadiki (ed), Look for Me in the Whirlwind
Mikki Kendall (ed), Hidden Youth: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History
Angela Y. Davis, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle
Naomi Klein, No Is Not Enough: Resisting the New Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (ed), How We Get Free

I wasn't reading for a while. Then I was, again.

I've actually read a fair number of books since my last Wednesday book post, which was.... A rather long time ago. May, to be exact. I won't bore you with all the books I've read since then, but I will give you the ones I've read this month.

Jayme Goh (ed.), Wiscon Chronicles Vol 11: Trials by Whiteness
Rosemary Joyce (ed.), Revealing Ancestral Central America
Rebecca J. Holden and Nisi Shawl (eds.), Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler
Katherine Burdekin, Swastika Night
Alison Weir, Katherine of Aragon, the True Queen
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction

Books I am currently reading:

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America
Adilifu Nama, Black Space: Imagining Race in Science Fiction Film
Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk, Saanaq
Joanna Hickson, The First Tudor

There's a particularly interesting story behind Saanaq. It's been called the first Canadian Inuit novel. Written over a period of two decades, first in Inuktitut syllabics (published in transliteration in 1984) and later translated into French (published in 2002) and English (2014), it was commissioned by Catholic missionaries working in Nunavut, who wanted to improve their ability to communicate with the indigenous peoples living in the region. What they asked for was a simple phrasebook. What Nappaluk began writing was an episodic novel that, in telling stories about the Inuit people and their lives, served not only as a reading primer but a record of indigenous life in Nunavut and the arrival of Europeans in the area, from the rarely-heard perspective of an indigenous woman. It's written in a very simple, storytelling style, as befits a language primer, but it is both engaging and provides a fascinating glimpse at life among the Inuit just as Europeans were beginning to encroach on them.

What will I read next? I've no read idea. I seem to be drawn to non-fiction right now. Some of the unread books on my ipad that have been nudging me lately are:

Stephanie Coontz - Marriage, a History
Jill Lapore - The Secret History of Wonder Woman
Naomi Klein - This Changes Everything

So it coukd be any of those. Or something else.

The ongoing health crises of the past two years seem to have had serious negative consequences for my ability to read in a sustained manner, but recently I've been having more success in managing to read.

I have liked to read multiple books at the same time - this allows me to pick the subject that most suits my mood when my brain goes "I want to read sonething now, please."

Current books in progress:
The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander
Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler, edited by Rebecca J. Holden and Nisi Shawl
First of the Tudors, by Joanna Hickson, historical fiction about Jasper Tudor, uncle of Henry VII.

And I've just begun reading Adilifu Nama's Black Space: Imagining Race in Science Fiction Film, which looks to be very interesting. As the author describes his work:

"The present work examines the symbolic discourse and ideological messages encoded into black representation, including its structured absence, across a multitude of sf films as a symbolic dialogue with the multiple racial discourses and ideas surrounding black racial formation, past and present, that are circulating in American culture. Moreover, sf films of the 1950s to the current moment are discussed in this book with an eye toward drawing connections between sf cinema, black racial formation, and shifting race relations in America over the past fifty years. Too often the sf film genre is regarded as addressing only signature divisions in the genre: humans versus machines, old versus new, individual versus society, and nature versus the artificial. In this book, however, I place black racial formation at the center of these common dichotomies. As a result, a more complex and provocative picture emerges of how sf cinema, in imagining new worlds and addressing a broad range of social topics, has confronted and retreated from the color line, one of the most troubling and turbulent social issues present in American society."

If by some strange chance any of the sff fans reading this do not know that Farah Mendlesohn has written a major critical work on Robert Heinlein's opus, and due to contract issues has decided to crowdfund its publication.... Well, now you know.

If you like Farah's work, if you like Heinlein's work, if you want to give me a super present by helping to enable the publication of this work that I desperately want to read, please consider supporting this crowdfunder.

https://unbound.com/books/robert-heinlein

Somehow I spent all today thinking it was Tuesday, and so, not that it is technically Thursday where I am, I may as well make a Wednesday book post.

Books read:

James S. A. Corey, Leviathan Wakes
Max Gladstone, Three Parts Dead
Max Gladstone, Two Serpents Rise
Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda, Monstress: Awakening
G. Willow Wilson, Ms. Marvel Vol 3
G. Willow Wilson, Ms. Marvel Vol 4
Fran Wilde, The Jewel and Her Lapidiary

Currently reading:

Judith Merril, The Merril Theory of Lit'ry Criticism
Ben Aaronovitch, The Rivers of London

Up next:

The next volumes in the Expanse and Peter Grant series, because i want to read at least two volumes in each of the Hugo nominated series.

Also, I should catch up on the graphic novel series Saga - I read volume 3 when it was nominated, and I should read volumes 4 and 5 before I read volume 6, which was nominated this year. I'm waiting to see which of the nominated graphic novels will be in the Hugo voters packet, hoping not to have to buy them all.

I also still have to read Traveler of Worlds: Conversations with Robert Silverberg, by Robert Silverberg and Alvaro Zinos-Amaro. And i'm going to take another stab at Ada Palmer's Too Like the Lightning. I tried to read it earlier in the year and bounced off hard - I simply could not get into the story or the characters. But it's been so well received I should give it another shot.

And that will finish up the Hugo reading. Other hooks I hope to get around to soon are The Winged Histories by Sofia Samatar, Wall of Storms by Ken Liu, Core of the Sun by Johanna Sinisalo, Penric's Mission by Lois McMaster Bujold and a host of other things - including, I think, more of the October Daye novels, the Expanse novels, the Craft Sequence novels and maybe the Peter Grant novels.

So many books, so little time. My ipad is full of books I want to read and haven't had the time to.

So, last time I posted, I was lamenting that I just couldn't seem to read any more. Well, as suddenly as if someone flipped a switch in my brain, it's come back. I'm almost afraid to talk about it, in case it runs away again.

But, it's Wednesday, and for the first Wednesday in some time, I have books to talk about.

Read in the past week:
Seanan McGuire, Rosemary and Rue
Seanan McGuire, A Local Habitation
China Mièvile, This Census-Taker
Kij Johnson, The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe
Aliya Whiteley, Brushwork
Lois McMaster Bujold, Penric and the Shaman
Kai Ashante Wilson, A Taste of Honey
Seanan McGuire, Every Heart a Doorway
Becky Chambers, A Closed and Common Orbit
Liu Cixin, Death's End
Jean Roberta and Steve Berman (eds.), Heiresses of Russ 2015

Also, some assorted short fiction (stories and novelettes), including Ursula Vernon's The Tomato Thief and Nina Allen's The Art of Space Travel.

Most of this reading has been for the Hugos. I am feeling much better about actually being able to do the reading necessary to make informed voting decisions.

Currently reading:

I'm slowly making my way through The Merril Theory of Lit'ry Criticism, a collection of essays, articles and anthology introductions by Judith Merril, published by the most wonderful Aqueduct Press.

Up next:

More Hugo reading. I still have the graphic novels to read, and a few of the novelettes. Plus, at least one or two books from the remaining Best Series nominees - James S. A. Corey's The Expanse series, Max Gladstone's The Craft Sequence, and Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London series. Also, in the Related Works category, the Silverberg book.

Once @i finish all of that, some friends made me promise to give something by Brandon Sanderson a try, and there's at least a dozen novels from last year, plus some novellas and shorter fiction. Then, try to catch up on the new and interesting stuff from this year....

But at least there is reading again.

The week started well for reading, but degenerated rather sharply toward the end, as my unending medical woes took a turn for the worse and my brain became unable to deal with anything more complicated than endless games of Bejeweled.

Books/novellas completed:

Laurie Penny, Everything Belongs to the Future
Victor LaValle, The Ballad of Black Tom
Mary Robinette Kowal, Forest of Memory
Mary Robinette Kowal, Ghost Talkers
Roshani Chokshi, The Star-Touched Queen
Charlie Jane Anders, All the Birds in the Sky
André Carrington, Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction

Currently Reading:

N. K. Jemisin, The Obelisk Gate
Diana Pavlac Glyer, Bandersnatch: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and the Creative Collaboration of the Inklings

Next:

More from my Hugo reading list.

i've been feeling very unwell this week, so my reading was somewhat slowed.

Books/novellas read:
Andrea Hairston, Will Do Magic for Small Change
Bao Shu, Everyone Loves Charles
Matt Ruff, Lovecraft Country
Nisi Shawl, Everfair

In Progress:
André Carrington, Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction
Everything Belongs to the Future, Laurie Penny

What's Next:
I'm reading for the Hugos, so whatever is next will be something from my Hugo reading list.

trying to get into the swing of things.... This is a good way to start, I think.

I've been too sick to read much of anything for months, but even though I'm still feeling hellish, and my blood tests agree that there's some bad shit going on inside me, I'm pushing myself because the Hugo nominations are coming up fast.

In the past week, I've finished two books that I'd been reading through at a snail's pace, Nancy Ordover's American Eugenics, which is an important but very painful book to read, especially if you are a person of colour, a person with disabilities, or queer. I also finished Margot Lee Shetterly's Hidden Figures, on which the unexpected blockbuster film is based, and was given some hope along with the stories of struggle.

Begun and finished this week:
Lois McMaster Bujold, Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen
Kameron Hurley, The Geek Feminist Revolution
Sofia Samatar, A Stranger in Olondria

Currently reading:
André Carrington, Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction
Andrea Hairston, Will Do Magic for Small Change

What's next:
Novels, non-fiction and novellas from my Hugo reading list. Probably either The Merril Theory of Lit'ry Criticism by Judith Merril, Octavia E. Butler by Gerry Canavan or Words Are My Matter by Ursula K. Le Guin for the next non-fiction book. In novels, I'm thinking Matt Ruff's Lovecraft Country or Nisi Shawl's Everfair. Novellas, Victor Lavelle's The Ballad of Black Tom, Kai Ashante Wilson's A Taste of Honey, and the two Penric novellas by Lois Bujold. Plus, of course, a scattering of novelettes and short stories.

If anyone else is reading fir the Hugos and has some graphic novel recommendations, I'm still adding to my reading list in that category, as I am woefully ignorant of who's writing what that's really good. Do suggestions are welcome.

As ever, more in depth comments on the books I've read can be found on my book blog, bibliogramma.dreamwidth.org.

So, The turning of the year has come and gone. Our celebration was as always quiet, perhaps more so this year because we have had an annus horribilis which has only just barely begun, we hope, to improve.

So we sat in the living room and exchanged gifts and ordered a feast of Chinese food and watched the Doctor Who Christmas special, and the Murdoch Mysteries Christmas special, and had a lovely time.
My prezzies were wonderful.

A long list of ebooks:

Andrea Hairston, Lonely Stardust
Carter Scholz, Gypsy
Charles Saunders, Abengoni: First Calling
Charles Tan (ed), Lauriat: A Filipino-Chinese Speculative Fiction Anthology
Chinelo Okparanta, Under the Udala Trees
Craig Laurance Gidney, Skin Deep Magic
David Pilgrim, Understanding Jim Crow
Deborah J. Ross, The Heir of Khored
Deborah Wheeler, Collaborators
F.H. Batacan, Smaller and Smaller Circles
J.M. Frey, Hero is a Four Letter Word
Jackie Hatton, Flesh & Wires
Jeanne Theoharis, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks
Johanna Sinisalo, The Blood of Angels
John Miller, Judi Dench: With a Crack in her Voice
Katharine Kerr, Dark Magicks
Marge Piercy, My Life, My Body
Michelle Sagara, Cast in Honor
Minister Faust, The Alchemists of Kush
Rachel Pollack, Alqua Dreams
Sheree Renée Thomas, Shotgun Lullabies
Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Signal to Noise
Sumiko Saulson, Things That Go Bump In My Head

And the extended version DVDs of Hobbit II and Hobbit III

it's Wednesday again - how time flies.

I have completed my reading of Lavinia Collins' The Warrior Queen, Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me (which was profoundly troubling but that's all right because it was meant to be) and the Future Eves anthology edited by Jean Marie Stine.

I also read a fair bit of free-standing short fiction, all of which I have made brief comments on and posted to my book journal. Most of it is freely available on the Net, and my comments include URLs. Some of it is very good.

I am currently reading a number of things - I seem to be in a mood for moving back and forth between several different works rather than reading any one thing in a sustained fashion. Books on the go: Laurie Penny's Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution; Gender Outlaws: the Next Generation, edited by Kate Bornstein and S. Bear Bergman; Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany, edited by Nisi Shawl and Bill Campbell; Ken Liu's The Grace of Kings; The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Edward James and Farah Mendelsohn; and of course, Metzel's The Protest Psychosis.

Up next? More short fiction, more sff novels from 2015, and likely a few other odd things from my extensive TBR list.

I did not make a book post last week. This is largely because we have had two bad and very smoggy weeks, in which my brain took a long vacation and left me incapable of doing much more than playing solitaire on my ipad.

Fortunately, my brain came home again and i have some reading to report.

Since my last book post, I have finished Katha Pollitt's Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights, Margaret Atwood's Second Words: Selected Critical Prose 1960-1982, and Isabel Allende's Ripper. I have also read India Edghill's Queenmaker: A Novel of King David's Queen, Gillian Bradshaw's Island of Ghosts, and Syrie James' The Missing Manuscript of Jane Austen.

At present, I am reading Lavinia Collins' The Warrior Queen, the first volume in her Guinevere trilogy, and Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me. And I'm still working on Metzel's The Protest Psychosis, and am also picking away at Stine's Future Eves anthology.

Coming up soon: it's time to start some serious reading of sff published this year, so that I will be prepared to nominate. I have drawn up a list of books I have seen recommended in multiple places - most of which I was planning to read anyway - and will be starting in on the ones I've already got on my virtual TBR pile. I've also got some recommended novellas lined up. I should start looking at recommended novelettes, short stories and graphic novels, too. And related works.

As ever, if you're interested in my thoughts on anything I've read, check out my book journal:
http://bibliogramma.dreamwidth.org/

Well, this was a week in which best-laid schemes really went agley.

I had planned to spend a lot of time reading, but it was a very bad no-good week in terms of health issues, and I was far too full of pain and exhaustion and nasty poisonous smog and other crap that insisted on invading my personal sphere that I could barely read. Instead I spent easily six or more hours a day mucking about on Facebook and playing computer solitaire.

I did, however, finish up Sharon Butala's The Girl in Saskatoon and Anya Seton's The Mistletoe and the Sword.

I'm picking away at a few books - Jonathan Metzel's The Protest Psychosis, Katha Pollitt's Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights, Margaret Atwood's Second Words: Selected Critical Prose 1960-1982, and Isabel Allende's Ripper.

Some may note that it's taking me a very long time to read The Protest Psychosis. There's a good reason for that. You see, unlike most of the books I read, my copy of The Protest Psychosis is a real paper book, not an ebook. For the past three or four years, it's been almost impossible for me to read paper books because they are so toxic. But there are books I want to read that I bought before that happened, or that my partner bought for himself (or I bought him for one celebration or another) and I decided I wanted to read, or that do not have an ebook version. So I put them inside plastic bags and read a few paragraphs whenever I am strong enough to hold up a paper book, and not so sick that I can't tolerate the amount of toxin that comes through the plastic. Naturally, it takes me a long time to read a book this way.

By the way, as I finish books, I post my comments about them on my book blog, in case anyone is interested: http://bibliogramma.dreamwidth.org/

I have a few things to say about the Hugo Awards this year and the sadly rabid puppies who did what puppies do all over them. I know that, as puppies, they will keep on doing what puppies do, because they can and because they are full of the bubbling rage of denied entitlement, so I offer this suggestion. If the puppies really want to put the stories they think have been neglected up for consideration against all the other award-nominated works, don't load up a voting slate with crap that ranges from mediocre to barely readable. Because for this year's Hugo's, that's what they did, with few exceptions - most of whom pointedly disavowed themselves from the puppy kennel by declining their nominations.

If puppydom really wants to make a statement about what it thinks speculative fiction should be, then they should lead with their best. Nominate - as individuals, not as a slate - the very best of what they like in science fiction and fantasy. Honour original ideas, good writing, strong characterisation, tight plotting. Because nominating material that is merely competent, or worse, is not the way to showcase the kinds of fiction one loves.

Seriously. I read all the Hugo-nominated works in the fiction categories this year. And rejected the puppy offerings as not worthy of an award, a rejection based on merit, not genre or content. There was a lot of bad to mediocre writing there. There were some competent and interesting pieces, and one or two things that suggested real potential. But nothing that demonstrated the level of skill that merits a
Hugo. And that had nothing to do with the kinds of stories being told, some of which I enjoyed despite the quality of the work.

If indeed there are great works out there being overlooked or ignored, then next year, when we look at nominations for the best works of speculative fiction, let's see the best of all of speculative fiction's many faces, including the genres beloved by the puppies - because work that's good will be recognised for what it is. It doesn't need a slate to support it. And if the Hugo voters as a whole decide that no, the quality expected in a Hugo winner isn't there in the puppies' choices - then if puppies want awards for the stories they like to read, they should demand that kind of quality from the writers of the kinds of fiction they prefer. Whining that they are being shut out purely because they are puppies doesn't cut it.

And that brings me to another point. Not everything that one enjoys is award-worthy. I love Mercedes Lackey's writing, she pushes buttons for me that few others do. But I don't think her work is Hugo or Nebula or World Fantasy Award calibre. And that's all right. Maybe your most favourite authors will never win an award - because they are competent writers who know how to tell a story that you and others think is lots of fun to read, but are not trying to challenge you, or blow your mind, or take you somewhere you've never been before. Writers who lack the special something - originality, skill, perspective, vision, depth, power, insight, whatever - that lifts a book beyond the competent and entertaining. There's nothing wrong with that. Not every book can or should be an inspiration to other novelists, an example of the best a genre can produce.

In the long run, if we take them (or at least some of them) at their word and believe that this fuss is all about neglected kinds of stories and not that they just aren't comfortable with stories that challenge assumptions and decentre privileged viewpoints, then surely the gap between us is not as huge or as unbridgeable as they seem think it is.

Take me as an example. I've been a fan for going on fifty-five years. I read the old and the new with pleasure. I grew up on Heinlein and Asimov and Clarke and all the same folks they did. I read widely in the field now, as I always did. Space opera, military science fiction, planetary romance, sword and sorcery, urban fantasy - I read and enjoy these as much as I enjoy more philosophical, sociological and politically themed speculative fiction. I read for fun as much as I read for challenge and enlightenment. I accept that certain kinds of stories - urban fantasy and milsf, for example - are less likely to be found on the nomination lists for many reasons, some of which are inherent to the nature of those kinds of stories. But that doesn't mean I've stopped reading these kinds of stories, both new and old.

(I'll also note that when works that do draw on the motifs and themes of those "neglected" neglected kinds of stories do get awards, puppies claim they are tainted by the "message" of the work or the "intersectional politics" of the author. John Scalzi and Ann Leckie have won awards with books that sure read like space opera and milsf to me.)

But there is something else that's true of me that may not be true of some puppies. As the years have
gone by, my tastes in reading have grown and diversified. I still enjoy the things I used to, but I enjoy more kinds of things than I did then. The field of speculative fiction has changed, and grown, found new stories to tell and new viewpoints to tell them from. But the traditional kinds of stories are still around, still being written, and shock of shocks, I can read and enjoy them both.

Unfortunately, I'm afraid that there is more to this than a desire to restore certain kinds of stories to their traditional place nearer the mainstream of speculative fiction. Reading the pronouncements and conversations on various blogs, full of puppy paranoia, it's hard not to come to the conclusion that the puppies are frightened and confused by speculative fiction that takes the defining question of the genre - what if? - and puts it in the words of people who do not have the same experiences and perspectives that they do. It was fine to ask what-if when the asker was white, American or occasionally British, preferably male, unquestionably cis and straight and binary, and espoused good American values or at least some approximation thereof. Certainly, there have always been those who spoke from outside that narrow vision, asked the questions no one with those forms of privilege would ask. But mostly, in the beginning of the genre, they were not loud or visible or numerous enough to be disturbing. But as more and more "other/ed" voices began to ask what-if, and to challenge all the accepted viewpoints from which what-if had been asked before - well, that's when some people started to find it scary.

And that, unfortunately, is a gap that may be harder to bridge, the gap between those who can only imagine limited sorts of new worlds, in which they can remain the same as they ever were, and those who are willing to go further and question everything, even their own vision of themselves.

So.... Have been gorging on crime thrillers. In the past week, I have read Lesley Thomson's The Detective's Daughter, Tana French's In the Woods, Vad McDermid's A Place of Execution, Kathy Reich's Speaking in Bones, Annelie Wendeberg's Holmesian mystery The Devil's Grin, and Yrsa Sigurdardotir's Someone To Watch over Me. Branching out into horror, I also read Sarah Pinborough's The Taken.

And I finished Gretchen Grezina's Black London: Before Emancipation.

Currently reading Sharon Butala's true crime narrative/memoir The Girl on Saskatoon, about the murder of Alexandria Wiwcharuk on 1962. This has a certain amount of personal resonance for me because I was living in Saskatoon at the time of the murder.

I'm also reading Anya Seton's The Mistletoe and the Sword, a sort of young-adultish historical novel set in Roman Britain at the time of the Iceni Rebellion. Not a major work, like the books she's perhaps most famous for, Green Darkness and Katherine, but quite enjoyable. A bit reminiscent of Rosemary Sutcliff's The Eagle of the Ninth.

Having read a lot of anthologies during my Hugo reading month, I seem to have set Future Eves: Classic Science Fiction about Women by Women, edited by Jean Marie Stine, aside for now. I'll come back to it later.

I plan to spend the rest of August reading the same sorts of undemanding sorts of things - thrillers, historical fiction, maybe some light horror. In September, I plan to start paying serious attention to the novels published so far this year that I suspect may be potential Hugo nominees. I have a supporting membership and I plan to use it.

I've been thinking maybe I ought to do this, if for no other reason than to give me something to post about every week. Of course, if you follow my book journal, you already know what I've read, but not what I'm reading or planning to read next, so this should not be too boring for you.

So... I finished my massive re-read of Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover post-Contact novels, including the ones written by others after her death. The last ones were The Alton Gift and Children of Kings, by Deborah J. Ross. I'm going to wait a while before tackling a re-read of the pre-contact novels - will likely take that on ad we get nearer to the publication of Ross' next Darkover novel, Thunderlord, a sequel to Bradley's Stormqueen.

And I finished Elizabeth Bear's Range of Ghosts, the first of her Asian/Mongol/Silk Road inspired The Eternal Sky trilogy. I'd actually started it some time ago, but put it aside to do the Hugo nominations reading thing, and then picked it up again once i got through that. A very good read, with some wonderful female characters.

Because I have been reading a lot of sf and fantasy in the past two months, I'm feeling a need to shift genres. I took a glance over the several hundred books on my TBR list and picked out some crime/suspense/thriller books to look at, and maybe some Tudorporn. My first selection was Kathy Reichs' recent murder in the mountains novella, Bones on Ice, which was fun, and also one of the better things she's written lately.

I'm currently reading crime thriller The Detective's Daughter, by Lesley Thomson - a new author to me, and one who has received sone good reviews. I'm not quite as engaged as I'd hoped to be - the author's frequent and totally unmarked switches of POV are a bit disorienting, though part of me is wondering if perhaps this is a case where shifts that were indicated typographically in the printed text in sone way that has not carried over to the ebook. It's not the first time I've seen that happen.

I'm also partway through Future Eves: Classic Science Fiction about Women by Women, edited by Jean
Marie Stine, which features short stories from the early pulps, most of them totally new to me.

Also reading two non-fiction books. Black London: Life before Emancipation, by Gertrude Gerzina, and The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease, by Jonathan Metzl. The titles speak for themselves.

Up next? In fiction, probably some more crime thrillers. I have unread books by Nicci French, Maureen Jennings, Kathy Reichs, Yrsa Sigurdardottir, Laurie R. King, Sujatta Massey, Tess Gerritsen, Jennifer McMahon, just to mention authors I'm already familiar with, plus some selections from new authors (to me) to try out, including Tana French and Val MCDermid. Also, I need to finish Bear's trilogy.

In non-fiction, I want to read Ta-Nehisi Coates's new book, Between the World and Me. Also, there are relatively new books by Laurie Penny, Barbara Ehrenreich and Naomi Klein that I've been meaning to get around to. Plus the several hundred other unread books on the ipad. Time will tell which I pick up next.

I learn via

oursin that today is World Book day, and that there is a meme questionnaire going around as a celebration of the day.

The books I'm reading: Alison Weir, Innocent Traitor; Suzie Bright, Big Sex, Little Death: A Memoir; Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life; Charles R. Saunders, Imaro: The Naama War; Helen Merrick, The Secret Feminist Cabal: A cultural History of Science Fiction Feminisms; Gwyneth Jones, Deconstructing the Starships: Science, Fiction and Reality; and I'm re-reading Emma by Jane Austen.

The book I love the most. This is a silly question. There are hundreds of books I love the most, depending on my mood and circumstance.

The last book I received as a gift: My beloved partner gave me a package of out-of-print (and one very expensive when new) books I have wanted to own that he found on various used book hunting sites. These included: Gwyneth Jones, North Wind; Gwyneth Jones, Phoenix Cafe; Eleanor Arnason, To the Resurrection Station; Diana Paxson, Brisingamen; Maureen McHugh, Mission Child; Jody Scott, I. Vampire; John M. Ford, The Dragon Waiting ; Patrick McCormack, The Last Companion; Patrick McCormack, The White Phantom; Ellen Galford, Queendom Come; and Joanne Findon, A Woman's Words: Emer and Female Speech in the Ulster Cycle.

The last book I gave as a gift: Christmas presents for my partner: Modesty Blaise: Death In Slow Motion, Modesty Blaise: The Double Agent, Modesty Blaise: Million Dollar Game, Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates, The History of Hell, Delusions Of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference, The Crowded Universe: The Race to Find Life Beyond Earth, Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche and The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease.

The nearest book: My e-reader is right beside me, and it contains approximately 100 ebooks I am reading or want to read. The nearest physical books are Charles R. Saunders, Imaro: The Naama War and Helen Merrick, The Secret Feminist Cabal: A Cultural History of Science Fiction Feminisms.

In the comments on the Tor.com post in which Patricia Wrede's book, The Thirteenth Child, is being discussed, Tor user Alo, in comment 196, quotes from a rec.arts.sf.composition post by Ms Wrede, discussion her own (then) work-in-progress:

The *plan* is for it to be a "settling the frontier" book, only without Indians (because I really hate both the older Indians-as-savages viewpoint that was common in that sort of book, *and* the modern Indians-as-gentle-ecologists viewpoint that seems to be so popular lately, and this seems the best way of eliminating the problem, plus it'll let me play with all sorts of cool megafauna). I'm not looking for wildly divergent history, because if it goes too far afield I won't get the right feel. Not that it'll be all that similar anyway; no writing plan survives contact with the characters, and it's already starting to morph.

I repeat my subject line:

She said WHAT?

::head explodes::

It seems that, according to Ms. Wrede, at least on the occasion of the quote:

1. The best way to eliminate sterotypes of marginalised people in writing is to eliminate the marginalised people from one's writing?

2. Eliminating whole nations of people with thousands of years of history and rich, diverse cultures when writing alternative history isn't "widely divergent history"?

I know something about being erased from cultural representations of both history and modern society, and about people who are in certain ways like me being presented as often profoundly insulting and disturbing stereotypes when they do appear in cultural narratives - after all, I'm a woman, a queer person, a person with multiple disabilities, both visible and invisible.

And this just makes me sick at heart.

This isn't even a case of someone not thinking about the implications of making such a decision in developing her created world. No, she actually thought about ways in which the indigenous peoples of North America have been portrayed in settler literature, identified what she saw as problems, and deliberately decided to make the indigneous people vanish so she wouldn't have to apply herself to trying to do a better job of representing indigenous peoples that the problematic literature she identifies as the genre she's working in.

I say again:

She said WHAT?

::head explodes::

I want to talk about what is possibly my favourite book, Margaret Laurence's The Diviners. It's the story of Morag Gunn, who grows up in a small Canadian prairies town in the period between WWI and WWII, and eventually becomes a respected middle-aged author dealing with her own daughter.

Morag is orphaned at an early age, and is adopted by the town garbage collector, who served with her father in WWI. She grows up poor and socially stigmatised, and all her adoptive father Christie has to give her for pride is his legacy of settler culture - the stoy of the Scots who left the British Isles under some duress and hardship, and established new homes and hopes for the future in the new territories, a trek made by both his and Morag's ancestors. He tells her stories of Piper Gunn, a heroic (albeit mythical) leader of the Scottish settlers in the Red river region of Manitoba. These tales not only help to sustain her pride, but eventually lead her toward her ultimately successful career as a creative artist.

But there's more to this book than an unquestioned revelling in the adventure of the colonial project. Becasue early on in her life, Morag meets her Aboriginal counterpart. Skinner (Jules) Tonnerre is Métis, and he too is poor and socially stigmatised and at the same time bright and creative with gifts too large for a sleepy prairie town to hold, but as a Métis, his options are very different. Yet he too has a mythic family legacy that gives him pride - the legends of his ancestor Rider Tonnerre, who fought in the Riel Rebellion at the side of Gabriel Dumont.

This is a book that tries to look at the settler culture of Canada from the perspective of both indigene and immigrant. And that doesn't shy away from rubbing the painful truths of Aboriginal experience in the face of the poor and socially outcast, yet at the same time privileged because of her whiteness, protagonist. Skinner and Morag are lovers at certain points in their long yet sporadic relationship, and for every step up the social ladder that Morag makes, there is some counterpoint in Skinner's life that kicks Morag - and the reader - in the gut, becasue no matter how hard it's been for her, she never has to face what Skinner and his sisters face.

And it's important that she try to learn, even though she never really does, because she and Skinner have a child, and no matter how hard Morag tries to pretend otherwise, her daughter is always going to be on the other side of the racial barrier, as her father was.

It's a subtle and complex book, one that explores a great many things at once - the power of story and myth, the struggles women face in being themselves (it's an intensely feminist book), the writing life among others - but this unrelenting juxtaposition of settler romance and Aboriginal realities is one of the things that lies at the heart of the novel.

As a white woman (and one of settler Scot background myself, and therefore having a personal inclination to be carried away by the tales of the heroic Piper Gunn) I don't know and haven't the experience to make a definitive assessment of how well Laurence did at this - but it's clear that she wanted to tell this story as a part of her creation, and that she tried very hard to do it right. And it's certainly had a powerful effect on me. (I have more to say about the book from a less directed perspective here.)

===================

Among my positive memories of the last few iterations of RaceFail was the opportunity to find many wonderful recommendations of books by people of colour.

Reading about a book that has erased Aboriginal peoples makes me only more eager to read books that don't erase the indigenous peoples of entire continents like North and South America or Australia and New Zealand, and that deal openly with settler/colonialist issues instead of handwaving them aside.

I'd love to hear about what you have read and enjoyed/appreciated/learned from about the settler invasions that isn't about an Empty Continent.

A platform-spanning discussion of Patricia Wrede's new book, Thirteenth Child, which originated at on tor.com with a review by Jo Walton, is taking place.

The discussion focuses on the ways in which the book, an alternate history fantasy in which First Nations people never arrived in the Americas, leaving the book's analogues for European peoples the luxury of settling in reality the Empty Continent that so much North American literature and popular culture seems to assume was there anyway (thus "vanishing" whole nations of indigenous - i.e., first arrival - peoples).

I have a suggestion for readers of fantasy who want to look at the other side of the Empty Continent trope. First Nations (Cherokee) author Daniel Heath Justice has written a trilogy of fantasy novels from the perspective of a people who have been colonised. It is heavily influenced by his own heritage. I've only read the first volume so far (the other two are sitting on my TBR shelf), but not only did I enjoy it, it made me think. My own review of the first volume can be found in my book journal, here.

Ah, Christmas. The day that my partner and I replenish each other’s libraries for the coming year, and we get some other stuff from here and there, too. And now, while he starts making Christmas dinner (bird and fancy dressing and mince-meat pie, oh yum!) I'm going to be shamelessly materialistic about all the lovely books I am the proud new custodian of.

Warning: a post full of shameless materialism follows.

There was much squeeing and whooping as we opened our presents this afternoon. The full tale of books my true love gave to me is as follows (although I am told that there are some books which will be arriving later, when SJ brings them up from the States – buying used books online in the US from Canada works better if you have them sent to a US address):

New books by authors I’ve read before
Bloodchild, Octavia Butler
Stealing Magic, Tanya Huff
The Fall of the Kings, Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman
Thomas the Rhymer, Ellen Kushner
The Outstretched Shadow, Mercedes Lackey and James Mallory
To Light a Candle, Mercedes Lackey and James Mallory
The Kingdom of the Grail, Judith Tarr
Reluctant Voyagers, Elisabeth Vonarburg
The King’s Name, Jo Walton
The Prize in the Game, Jo Walton
Tooth and Claw, Jo Walton

Books by new authors
Kushiel’s Dart, Jacqueline Carey
Touched by Venom, Janine Cross
Black Sun Rising, C.S. Friedman
Bold as Love, Gweneth Jones
The Aware, Glenda Larke
Warchild, Karin Lowachee
Guardian of the Balance, Irene Radford
In Legend Born, Laura Resnick
Califia’s Daughters, Leigh Richards
City of Pearl, Karen Traviss

Books I’ve read before and wanted to own and read again
Alanna: The First Adventure, Tamora Pierce
In the Hand of the Goddess, Tamora Pierce
The Woman Who Rides Like a Man, Tamora Pierce
Lioness Rampant, Tamora Pierce
Sunrunner's Fire, Melanie Rawn
Stronghold, Melanie Rawn
The Crystal Cave, Mary Stewart
The Hollow Hills, Mary Stewart
The Midwich Cuckoos, John Wyndham

Anthologies
Women of War, (ed. Tanya Huff and Alexander Potter)

Non-fiction
The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihad and Modernity, Tariq Ali
1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus, Charles C. Mann

I did receive some wonderful non-book items as well:

glaurung also got me some CDs I’ve been after having: The Division Bell and Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd (I once owned these but lost custody during an amicable divorce); Birds of a Feather by Rough Trade; Mermaid Avenue, which is a disc of Woody Guthrie songs performed by Billy Bragg; and Storyville by Robbie Robertson.

glaurung’s sister* sent me the third season of Forever Knight on DVD, which completes my collection and delights me to no end. I’m sure most of you can guess what I’m going to be watching for the next several days.
My good friend Cathy gave me Loreena McKennitt’s new CD, An Ancient Muse, which is just wonderful to listen to.

It’s true that I mostly received fantasy and science fiction books this year, but I also plan to read most of the books I gave to

glaurung, which include such anticipated volumes as:

Bait and Switch, Barbara Ehrenreich
Virginity or Death, Katha Pollitt
Reel Bad Arabs Jack G. Shaheen
Demand my Writing: Joanna Russ, Feminism, Science Fiction, Jean Cortiel
The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Dispossessed", ed. Davis and Stillman
Drag King Dreams, Leslie Feinberg
Muhammad, Karen Armstrong
Boy in the Middle, Patrick Califia
James Tiptree Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, Julie Phillips
Mommy’s Little Girl: On Sex, Motherhood, Porn and Cherry Pie, Susie Bright

Yes, the days are finally getting longer again, which means more hours of daylight in which to read – which is admittedly irrelevant in this age of electric lighting, but still… there is much dancing and delight in this household, for the books are unwrapped and piled on coffee tables and the special “to be read” shelves and all is right with our little corner of the world.

Tomorrow I’ll be back to my misanthropic self, no doubt, but tonight, there are new books.

*I hate the term “in-law.” Sometimes I use terminology based on idioms I first encountered in Zenna Henderson’s books about the people: sister in love, sister of the heart, etc. Sometimes I just describe the relationship. When necessary, I use the standard terminology. But I really don’t like it much.

Current Mood: giddy

Whan and how did you arrive at your essential political, ethical and religious/spiritual philosophies? Have you always tended in certain directions and simply found the influences that brought you to where you are today, or did someone or something teach you/influence you/make you think about these positions and values?

Last night, I was talking with my partner

glaurung about some of the books and authors from my youth that I've been re-reading of late (details available on my book journal,

bibliogramma. I noticed that a lot of them, quite unbeknownst to me at the time, were fairly radical in some ways - Naomi Mitchison's Memoirs of a Spacewoman, Suzette Haden Elgin's At The Seventh Level, Samuel Delany's work... in fact, the other night, I was re-reading Rosemary Sutcliff's Sword at Sunset, published in 1963, and ran across a small passage in which her attempt at a historical King Arthur is looking around at his band of companions, sitting around socializing after a hard day's work of hunting down Saxons, and sees two of his warriors having a cuddle in the corner. His thoughts are basically - lots of warriors form such relationships while on campaign and away from women, but these two really seem to be in love, which is only going to make them better warriors because they won't want to fight poorly in front of their lover.

So I was sort of wondering if perhaps, it was all of this stuff I'd read as a child that had started me on the path to becoming a left-wing radical with some very strong feelings about social justice, a pagan animist with some very strong feelings about the unity of all things, and all of those other values that underpin who I am.

But then my partner pointed out that I'd also read everything Heinlein had ever written when I was a child, and a lot of books by other people, some fairly right-wing, militaristic, crypto-fascist, etc., and hadn't been particularly influenced by them, other than to think about what was wrong in their worldviews, from my perspective, anyway.

Having a working mother back in the early 60s when this was not really common for a white middleclass child may have had something to do with my becoming a feminist at a very early age, but my mother was far from being a radical in political terms. I was raised until the age of about 12 or 13 without any continuing religious influences, except for one grandmother who kept trying to put me into Bible classes, but I didn't see her often at all. Then my mother converted to Judaism, but I was old enough that she simply asked my to keep kosher in the house out of respect for her, so while I studied the basic principles with her, I wasn't being pressured to adopt any particular faith, which was a good thing because by then I'd already developed the basic structure of my own beliefs, which were not at all like those of Judaism or Christianity.

So what was it? What made me initially susceptible to a left-wing/socialist and at the same distinctly spiritual and mystical set of perspectives on the world I live in? Sometimes it seems to me as though I have always felt this way, and that I uncovered my core beliefs rather than developed them, as I would read or hear one thing that said to me "yes, of course, that just feels right" and then read or hear something else and feel that there was something basically wrong about it - and that the rest was simply refining my feelings of "rightness" and "wrongness" with evidence and reason.

And how about you?

Actually, I think this has gone around before, but...

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of it and the next 3 sentences on your blog along with these instructions.
5. Don’t you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.
6. Tag three people.

The book:
Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, Rebecca Solnit

Page 123 is the end of a chapter and there are only four sentences on the page, so I am posting the concluding paragragh of the chapter, which is sentences 3 and 4. In this paragraph, Solnit is quoting from Jonathan Schell's The Unconconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence and the Will of the People, which is another book that I highly recommend.

Schell continues, "Individual hearts and minds change; those who have been changed become aware of one another; still others are emboldened, in a contagion of boldness; the 'impossible' becomes possible; immediately it is done, surprising the actors almost as much as their opponents; and suddenly, almost with the swiftness of thought - whose transformation has in fact set the whole process in motion - the old regime, a moment ago so impressive, vanishes like a mirage." Cancun 2003, where the power of small-scale farmers and other activists proved supreme and the apparently inexorable advance of the WTO was halted and turned back, was one of those carnival moments of hope realized, one of the days of creation.

If you want to play too, consider yourself tagged.

For anyone who found my previous rant about the Da Vinci Code nonsense interesting, my discussion of the literary histoy of the Holy Grail as presented in Richard Barber's book The Holy Grail: History of a Legend is up on my book journal:

bibliogramma.

You know, I wouldn't have minded at all if Brown had said "This is a works of fiction. I've taken some historical people and things and reinterpreted them as is my right as a creator of works of the imagination, but this is literature, not history."

But no, he said it's all based on fact, when it simply isn't, and that makes all the difference to me.

So what do these two things have in common? I think you can figure that one out. Be creative.

For once and for all, it's just a piece of fiction. It's not based on history. There is no Da Vinci Code, there was no Prieury de Sion before Pierre Plantard - a right-wing ultramonarchist with claims to a Merovingian bloodline - and some friends invented it. The idea was so cribbed from the idiots who wrote Holy Blood, Holy Grail, which built Plantard et al's delusions of grandeur into a pile of wing-nut tinfoil hat conspiracy crap, and the saddest thing is that the focus on this idiotic vision of Mary Magdalen as the earthly vessel of the Lord's sacred seed draws attention away from what the Roman Catholic church really did conceal about her.

If you want to know something really revolutionary and dangerous about Mary Magdalen, read the Gnostic gospels - the ones that were excluded from the biblical canon and ordered destroyed, but have survived in bits and pieces here and their, most notably in the Nag-Hammadi find. The Gospel of Philip is instructive. So is the Gnostic text Mary herself is reputed to have written, called the Gospel of Mary (this one was found in Cairo in the late 1800's, not at Nag-Hammadi).

These excluded Gnostic texts identify Mary as not just one of Jesus' companions, but as someone very special to him - not because she was his lover, although she may also have been that, but because she understood his teachings better than anyone else. One passage of the Gospel of Philip says:

They [the disciples] said to him "Why do you love her more than all of us?" The Savior answered and said to them, "Why do I not love you like her? When a blind man and one who sees are both together in darkness, they are no different from one another. When the light comes, then he who sees will see the light, and he who is blind will remain in darkness."

Mary was the one who set the course of the Christian church after the death of Jesus. It is on her vision that the initial message of the Ressurection rests. Some passages in the Gnostic gospels suggest that Mary was one of the leaders among the early disciples, and considered by at least some to be the person Jesus chose to lead the early church. Mary preached. Mary was, as much as any of the disciples were, a priest, and following her example, other women in the first two centuries of Chritianity were also priests and preachers.

The Gospel of Philip also tells us that there was a power struggle in the years after Jesus' death between Mary and Peter - Peter refused to accept that Jesus would give higher instruction to a woman, but other disciples - Matthew among them - accepted Mary as, at the least, the recipient of deeper instruction from Jesus and thus a legitimate teacher to the other disciples.

Now, let me ask you - what is a more revolutionary secret? That Jesus might have had sex, or that Jesus intended to place the leadership of his movement in the hands of a woman who he believed understood his teachings better than any of the men around him? That Jesus had a child, or that he intended women to have the same authority as men within his church?

Please note: I am not a Christian. I am looking at the history of the accounts of the person we know as Jesus and his companions, at the history of the early Christian movement, and the history of the Catholic Church. Whether Jesus was divine is irrelevant to this discussion; he and his followers have impacted history based on the assumption that he was, and there are many accounts of how that happened. From a historical perspective, there's no difference in legitimacy between the texts that were preserved as part of the Bible, and the texts that were excluded, mostly on grounds of theology and politics.

But if I were a Christian, I'd much rather have the legacy of a woman who was called to lead the early church than a convoluted story about a bunch of men hiding a holy flower-pot.

This is an interesting glimpse into the way hard-core conservatives think. What kinds of books would you expect find on a list of the most dangerous books of the 19th and 20th centuries - both the top ten most dangerous, and the "honourable mentions"? Well, a lot of the books are what you'd expect, if you stop to think about it.

I can understand the presence of The Communist Manifesto, Quotations from Chairman Mao and Das Kapital - Western conservatives tend to be capitalists and classists, and anything that posits an alternative way of organising economic and social systems is going to be alarming.

I can understand the presence of The Feminist Mystique and The Second Sex, too. More shaking up of the status quo, scary stuff for people who don't want to lose one iota of power.

And of course, Charles Darwin is doubly honoured, with both The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man identified as dangerous books. Ooh, evolution, that's really evil stuff.

It's a fascinating list. But what really caught my attention was the commentary for two of the books in the top ten. First, John Dewey's Democracy and Education. What, you may ask, was so dangerous about this book? Well, aside from the fact that Dewey was a "'progressive' philosopher and leading advocate for secular humanism" (watch out for humanists, they might try to get you to treat people like, well, people), Dewey also "encouraged the teaching of thinking 'skills'." Oh, what a dangerous thing it is, to teach people to think.

And then there's the interesting case of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil. What did Nietzsche say that our fine conservative scholars found so dangerous? Why, he "argued that men are driven by an amoral “Will to Power,” and that superior men will sweep aside religiously inspired moral rules, which he deemed as artificial as any other moral rules, to craft whatever rules would help them dominate the world around them."

Can anyone think of some people who've been doing a lot of this sweeping aside of moral rules to make new ones that would help them dominate the world around them? Anyone?

I thought you could.

Another book meme. Oh well, I suppose that things in the "real" world are just so fucking insane that I'm finding more that I enjoy talking about in the world of books than the world of so-called reality. Not that I think what I'm reading in the newspapers is actually reality, but you all surely know more-or-less what I mean.

Taken from

chlaal

1) How many books do you have?

chlaal said "I'm amazed by the concept of people actually knowing how many books they have," and I'm going to have to agree with her on that. What also makes this question somewhat difficult to answer is the fact that my partner and I are both omnivorous readers, but even though we both buy books, they’re really all pretty much "ours."

Based on average books per foot of shelving multiplied by approximate feet of shelving, I'd say we have between 2,250 and 2,500 books. And no, in most rooms we can't see very much of the walls, why do you ask?

2) What is the last book you bought?

Actually, the last book I have was bought for me by my partner, but it was from my "wish list" of science fiction and fantasy books (a 5-page list, and growing I might add - how dare these people write more books before I've finished reading the ones they've already written?) - Midnight Harvest, by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, one in her very lengthy and entertaining Count Saint-Germain series.

The last books (shopping spree) I bought myself were mostly for my partner's birthday, but since I also intend to read them, I'll list them here.

Islam and Democracy, Fatima Mernissi
Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer, Nancy Mairs
A Troubled Guest: Life & Death Stories, Nancy Mairs
Lost in Space: Probing Feminist Science Fiction & Beyond, Marleen S. Barr
Future: Tense, Gwynne Dyer
Gifts, Ursula K. LeGuin
The Economy of Cities, Jane Jacobs

3)What is the last book you read?

The last book I finished was Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer, by Nancy Mairs. I'm currently reading Corporation by Joel Bakan.

4) Five books that mean a lot to me.

Hmm. The last meme I did listed ten of my favourite books, all of which mean a lot to me. So I'm going to see if I can think of five books that mean a lot to me that weren’t on the previous list.

1. Babel-17 by Samuel Delany. I read this when I was quite young (not yet 10) and every few months I still find myself in a conversation and suddenly realise just how much it influenced me, on everything from my approach to language and poetry to my attitudes toward gender reassignment surgery.

2. Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah, by Richard Bach. I've never denied I was a hippie. 'Nuff said.

3. The Glass Bead Game, by Herman Hesse. I gained a lot of insights about spirituality, epistemology, meditation, and the balance of life from thinking about this book.

4. The Dialectic of Sex: Case for Feminist Revolution, by Shulamith Firestone. For some people it was The Feminist Mystique, for some it was The Female Eunuch - and I'm not saying those books didn't affect me profoundly, because they did – but Firestone's book put feminism into a larger context and gave it a burning heart for me. I am the kind of feminist – and very likely the kind of socialist – that I am today because of the place she gave me to start my journey.

5. The Golden Bough, by James Frazier. I tend to see life, language, thought in terms of symbols, parallels, thematic connections. It's a deeply ingrained part of how I think, and I suspect I owe a great deal of that to an early and intensely thorough reading of this book.

So, interestingly enough, this turned out to be, not so much about my favourite books, as about some of the books that shaped who I am.

Just in case anyone is wondering, here are the authors and titles to go with the first lines posted a while back.

1. Once upon a time when the world was young there was a Martian named Smith. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein

2. This book is largely concerned with Hobbits, and from its pages a reader may discover much of their character and a little of their history. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien

3. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

4. I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith

5. The window of the bus was a dark square against the featureless night. Lea let her eyes focus slowly from their unthinking blur until her face materialized, faint and fragmentary, highlighted by the dim light of the bus interior. Pilgrimage: The Book of the People, Zenna Henderson

6. Chick with a harp. Her hair was the color of an angry sunset, and it fell to her waist in ripples of copper and red. Gossamer Axe, Gael Baudino

7. The river flowed both ways. The current moved from north to south, but the wind usually came from the south, rippling the bronze-green water in the opposite direction. The Diviners, Margaret Laurence

8. The Khadilh ban-harihn frowned at the disk he had in his hand, annoyed and apprehensive. At the Seventh Level, Suzette Haden Elgin

9. The people in this book might be going to have lived a long, long time from now in Northern California. Always Coming Home, Ursula K. LeGuin

10. I know I was all right on Friday when I got up; if anything I was feeling more stolid than usual. The Edible Woman, Margaret Atwood

I don't often do memes, but this one is fun.

From

chlaal

Book meme:
1. Choose five of your all time favorite books.
2. Take the first sentence of the first chapter and make a list in your journal.
3. Don't reveal the author or the title of the book.
4. Now everyone try and guess.

The first few are basically for free because they’re so obvious, so I’m going to list ten instead of five. There are a couple that I suspect might be rather obscure, so I’m giving the first two sentences, just to be nice. Oh, and I happen to think that in some cases, the prologue really is the first chapter.

1. Once upon a time when the world was young there was a Martian named Smith.

2. This book is largely concerned with Hobbits, and from its pages a reader may discover much of their character and a little of their history.

3. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

4. I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.

5. The window of the bus was a dark square against the featureless night. Lea let her eyes focus slowly from their unthinking blur until her face materialized, faint and fragmentary, highlighted by the dim light of the bus interior.

6. Chick with a harp. Her hair was the color of an angry sunset, and it fell to her waist in ripples of copper and red.

7. The river flowed both ways. The current moved from north to south, but the wind usually came from the south, rippling the bronze-green water in the opposite direction.

8. The Khadilh ban-harihn frowned at the disk he had in his hand, annoyed and apprehensive.

9. The people in this book might be going to have lived a long, long time from now in Northern California.

10. I know I was all right on Friday when I got up; if anything I was feeling more stolid than usual.

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Yay, a book list!
I’m back
Wednesday reading and life roundup
Final Hugo reading
Sometimes Wednesday cones late
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Wednesday likes to read
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Wednesday book post
In memoriam: Ursula K. Le Guin
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Book post
Oh dear, it’s almost Hugo time again
Christmas morning
So, it's time for a Wednesday book post
I'm reading again!
Public Service Announcement
Wednesday likes books
A miraculous restoration
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Wednesday Books
Holiday Doings
Wednesdays are bookish things
Wednesday book summary
Wednesday reading thing
Puppy thoughts
Wednesday reading report
The Wednesday reading thing
World Book Day
She said WHAT? ::head explodes::
Another white woman who wrote about settler culture
Antidote to the Empty Continent
Chistmas Loot
Where do our values come from, anyway?
The latest book meme
A grailing we will go...
Da Vinci Code, My Ass
The Ten Most Dangerous Books
More Bookly Memage
Answers to the Book Meme
A Meme

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