Who wants to wangst forever

It cannot be that long ago that I was a melodramatic teenling, can it? I mean, the earth's crust wasn't warm, as I recall, although granted back then we had actual winters, winters like today's youth don't get, winters with snow and ice and wind, winters where we had to go to school on sleds drawn by huskies and devil take the hindmost. (As if. Fairfax County's proud heritage of flipping shit and closing at any hint of precip can be connected directly to its one attempt to take weather forecasts with a grain of salt back in 1987, and the resulting Great Veterans Day Afternoon Snowshower Farrago of Infamy is still bright in memory.)

Still and all, back in those dim days of mine and yore, I do know that the teen angst "our love can never be, phewWOE" market was served by solidly cheesy programs like "Dark Shadows" and the Linda Hamilton/Ron Perlman "Beauty and the Beast," a show that I can totally think of without getting kind of red in the face and wanting to go back in time just to smack some taste into my 12-year-old self, who had enough to deal with anyway what with a demented civics teacher, "The Day After," and stirrup pants. Oh God, down this route lies post-'80s PTSD that ends with me in the fetal position humming Martika. Let's avoid the discussion, because that is not my point here.

My point is that, by virtue of being an agéd hag, I have totally missed the post-Buffy generation's vampire smolder fodder: the Twilight series. Fortunately, others have taken the bullet and I can critique from behind a cozy protective wall of second-hand pain. It looks like the books are truly hideous tripe, possibly worse prose than that found in my now-regretted collection of early Mercedes Lackey novels. Second, the introduction of a genus of vampires unwilling to go out in the sunlight not for the traditional "I will burst into flame and do a Savini dissolve" reasons but because sunlight makes them glitter is hilariously unforgivable, even if the resulting movie (hahaha, of course there's gonna be a movie) stars the cutie who played Cedric Diggory to such tasty effect. Third, there's a weird stalker/possessive vibe between the nominal protagonist (her name is BELLA SWANN, do you begin to see the problem here?) and the aggravatingly pretty vampire/objet d'crush that is hyped up to a point that is freaky even for adolescent-bait cheese lit.

On the other hand, but, and however, there has been a commendable resurgence of Sparkle Motion references and at least one kick-ass comments thread beginning, "And they unlived in sparkly flowery goodness forever and ever, or until he said 'Fuck it' and drained her like a jug of Thunderbird." To paraphrase Spider Robinson, shared pain is halved, shared snark increased, and thus do we refute entropy.

Desultory review: Territory

It's only fitting that Emma Bull's new Western fantasy Territory starts off with a note of thanks to John M. Ford. Although he gets the nod officially for loaning Bull And Die in the West, the writing seems to be haunted by his ghost. Maybe it's just the clash of genres, which he handled to such sparkling and disconcerting effect in The Last Hot Time, maybe it's an undiagnosed effect of Minneapolis living, maybe it's an intentional homage (and maybe it's just me). The book rambles a bit, in no hurry to tell you who's a good guy and who's a baddie or who wants what, but it's a safe bet that Jesse Fox, the cute horse trainer who wears smoked-glass spectacles at night, and unconventional widow Mildred Benjamin will turn out well. Motives for anyone but the two main characters are satisfyingly murky, and the descriptions of the Western boom town are realistic without turning into Deadwood parody. Highlights include Wyatt Earp's encounters with a woman who, to quote the author, uses etiquette as a martial art; descriptions of Tombstone's thriving Chinese community; and a Doc Holliday who, as usual, steals every scene he's in.

If Territory were meant to be a standalone, I'd downgrade it a bit for its abrupt ending, but apparently Bull's working on a second volume. This version of the West is as rich and strange as the Borderlands, another of Bull's stomping grounds, and I look forward to seeing more of it and of these characters.

Ain't love the sweetest thing

"Love is without envy or jealousy." AS IF.

Bitter experience?

I'm rereading The Citadel of the Autarch (which Wikipedia contends was once misprinted as The Castle of the Otter) and savoring, as always, the illusion that I will someday understand exactly what is going on in the story. In the meantime, I enjoy Severian's company. Damn but Gene Wolfe can write.

Since the time I had ridden Vodalus's charger out of Saltus, I had supposed in my innocence that all mounts might be divided into two sorts: the highbred and swift, and the cold-blooded and slow. The better, I thought, ran with the graceful ease, almost, of a coursing cat; the worse moved so tardily that it hardly mattered how they did it. It used to be a maxim of one of Thecla's tutors that all two-valued systems are false, and I discovered on that ride a new respect for him. My benefactor's mount belonged to that third class (which I have since discovered is fairly extensive) comprising those animals that outrace the birds but seem to run with legs of iron upon a road of stone. Men have numberless advantages over women and for that reason are rightly charged to protect them, yet there is one great one women may boast over men: No woman has ever had her organs of generation crushed between her own pelvis and the bony spine of one of these galloping brutes. That happened to me twenty or thirty times before we reined up, and when I slid over the crupper at last and leaped aside to dodge a kick, I was in no very good mood.

Between the covers redux

The things we find in our old e-mail. I had forgotten this. Seeing it again is just.... Oh dear. Oh my. Oh goodness. I mean really.
SFW, except if you drool.

Between the covers

Guh.

The NYT just ran an article about judging people on the quality of their personal libraries, as though this is some shocking new thing. Really, are there people who don't do that? (Sez the woman who dated a guy who didn't read for fun and who owned I'm guessing maybe 30 books total, but to be fair he was fantastisch in most of the other departments.) I'm with the Jezebel commenters who cite Kundera and Rand on their lists of run-fast-run-far dating dealbreakers, although if the overall library is diverse enough you can kind of maybe forgive it. On the positive side, namedropping The Master and Margarita is a-ok numbah one, finding out that a coworker had read Foreign Devils on the Silk Road made me happy for an hour, and I was tempted sore to perma-borrow a vintage cloth-bound edition of Paradise Lost that someone showed me recently, by force if necessary, because huffing dustmites? Is my anti-drug.

Another knight of the Golden Age

RIP Arthur C. Clarke. I didn't read much of his stuff when I was hoovering up SF stories with the usual preadolescent enthusiasm, and I never cracked 2001, but damn if "The Nine Billion Names of God" doesn't have one of the most elegant closes of any short story ever. It was the kind of story that stuck in your mind, rousing echoes years later—"Hey, do you remember a story where, like, monks are trying to recite the names of God? And they hire a pair of engineers? Or am I making that up?" "No, yeah. It was next to 'Nightfall' in an anthology I had." "Oh right, the one about the planet with all the suns?" "And the fire? Right!" Then of course the corrupt president of Earth in "Babylon 5" was named Arthur Clarke, as part of Harlan Ellison's not-at-all-subtle series of references to classic authors (the evil leader of the telepaths was named Alfred Bester, and there was at least one other name dropped with the grace of a neon-green anvil). Dying at 90 in your tropical paradise doesn't sound like a bad way to go. [ETA from comments: Serialkarma's father called her last night to say, "I thought you would want to know that Arthur C. Clarke died tomorrow." Which, like Making Light's contribution, is a fine and proper epitaph.]

Dang, with all the excitement about Pi Day and going to see the National Geographic's amazing frog exhibit (waxy monkey frogs! Chinese gliding frogs! frogs by Leonardo, frogs from Mars!), I missed writing up the one event I wish I'd stayed in Texas to see: Bandera's Wild Hog Explosion. Hogs are an invasive species and do all kinds of damage, so there's very little love lost for them among country people, but the creatures are smart and dangerous enough that hunters treat them with a certain respect. None of which, it must be admitted, is evident in the idea of wrassling a squirming pig into a burlap bag, but at a guess the ensuing hijinks would be worth the visit. Add a beer and a Frito pie, and that right there is a good date.

Return of the desultory review, quotes edition

The Diary of a Young Lady of Fashion in the Year 1764-1765, Cleone Knox
[ETA: Damn. The book's a fraud.]

Actual review portion: What a trip! Cleone Knox comes across as a smart, energetic Irish girl with an eye for the fellas and a fine sense of adventure. She outrides at least one importunate admirer, gets a double salute from the King when presented at Versailles (Louis XV liked the pretty girls), and dishes hilariously entertaining gossip. It’s a pity that the diary is so short, but what there is of it is marred only by the prudish editing in the early 1900s. The editor's prim notes indicate that there were some juicy details that were simply too scandalous, darlings, which makes me miss them all the more.

On to the quotes!

Wondering whether to run away with the dashing David Ancaster: “My inclination is to go—my prudence bids me stay but Lud! if one listen to prudence one might die a Spinster!”

Further considerations in re: bolting with Mr. A.: “’Twould be Highly Indelicate for me to show my doubts to Mr. A., and I could scarcely say as I stepped into the Chaise, ‘By the by, Sir, I hope you are not trying to ruin me,’ yet the more I think of it, the more I recollect the fact that amidst all his passionate love Making the magical word ‘marriage,’ so dear to the heart of every young unwedded female, did not once occur!”

The idea of the European Tour with her father and brother no consolation for being torn from Mr. A.: “Would the sight of the finest Churches and palaces be more agreeable to me than a loving glance from his Wicked black eyes. Plainly no.”

On the Bath fad of publishing poems praising the ladies of town: “I have had 3 addressed to me, but they are Too Insipid and Weak to waste time and Paper upon copying them in. I suspect that they find my name not an easy one for rhyming, else one poor Youth would not have been constrained to couple Cleone with Moaning!”

Fellow travelers unintentionally plant the seed for Cleone’s future adventures: “Last evening 2 young gentlemen arrived at our Auberge in a chaise…[to] all appearances Brothers…This morning coming downstairs I passed their chamber and glanced in, the door being ajar. What was my surprise to perceive seated on the bed in Deshabille not 2 young men, but One young man and a Pretty girl with long black hair. Yet two young Gentlemen left the Inn half an hour later.”

Distressed at the arrest of a French admirer, she cross-dresses (see?) and sneaks off to go see a spiritualist for news and instead encounters an unwanted admirer: “I hastened into an inner chamber and came face to face with the detestable De Belisle, who grabbed me in his arms and began embracing me like a Lunatick…In a great fright I yelled and kicked and screamed. Thank the Lord, I had the good sense to draw my sword and deliver him a blow in the chest with the hilt, which made him leave go.”

While wandering the sights of Venice: “A gallant in a crimson cloak slipped a three cornered note into the bosom of my gown. The usual request for a rendezvous.”

Sneaking out of the house to tour Carnival: “…I slipped on a cloak and mask over male attire (breeches and coat of rose satin and sulphur waistcoat) climbed down the balcony into a gondola, and so away!...Kisses are plentiful but the Mask is mighty convenient, for it does away with the need to blush. Took me an hour to return from the Piazza to this place. Experienced some odious little adventures, and was constrained to draw my little dagger now and again.”

Final entry, dated May 29, 1765: “Stupendous Discovery! Mr. A. is in Venice.” And they lived happily ever after.

Sing, o muse

Christmas: This Time It's Orthodox has passed into history now, and I have a lovely stack of books to show for it. They are mostly from the library. Except for the Serenity graphic novel, which I get to keep forever or until it disappears in my stacks, and Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, which I think someone must've recommended as a bit of odd history.

I got through Spook Country pretty quickly, finding to my surprise that it had a genuine honest-to-deities plot. A William Gibson novel! With an arc! Who knew such a thing was possible? But I had to keep putting it down, lest the temptation to lick those delicious wicked sentences overwhelm me. When he's on his game, Gibson's balance of dry wit and perfect alienated observation jacks straight into the pleasure center of my brain and makes me cackle like an idiot. Pattern Recognition got me a couple of times, mostly with the text of the letters from the illicit archaeologist in Russia (thanks, guy who looked uncomfortable sitting next to me on the Metro! next time just switch seats!), but Spook Country was chock with lines that had me yeeping with delight. Fans of pure old-school cyberia will be disappointed, but people who like a cocktail of current events and black humor should have fun.

John Varley's Mammoth was another fast read. It rolls along at a good clip, mammoths and time travel and survivalism and animal liberationist movements. The ending ticked me off, though, because Varley basically waved his hand, said, "Eh, that bit's ineffable and nobody can figure it out," and seemed to cop out on explaining his looping logic and technological gizmo. Which, you know, fair enough, it's sciencey rhubarb and no real explanation would work, but it felt a little cheap. I'm glad that it was a library book.

I have read only the first page of the book of Clark Ashton Smith stories, but already I know (a) that the Inquisitors of Ong should really be the name of a post-punk band fronted by someone dressed as Ming the Merciless and I would pay a lot to see that show and (b) who Jim Theis was aping in his infamously horrible slush novel The Eye of Argon. "Things have crept in from nether space, whose incursion is forbid by the gods of all proper and well-ordered lands; but there are no such gods in Yondo, where live the hoary genii of stars abolished and decrepit demons left homeless by the destruction of antiquated hells." I jolly well bet that they have. Yondo: Set Up Camp!

First farewell of 2008

George MacDonald Fraser, OBE, the author of the Flashman series, the pitch-perfect novel The Pyrates, and a host of other works, is dead at 82. Coincidentally, I started rereading a couple of Flashman novels over the weekend, and I finished Flashman in the Great Game this morning. I had forgotten how much fun they were. Although the Flash books, like the Bond movies, tend to follow a certain pattern—encounter with prominent British politico, meeting with a beautiful powerful and/or famous woman with whom our antihero gits it on, scene of diabolical torture, historical battle, Flashy exhibits cadfulness but triumphs (or appears to) by sneakery or luck—they're tremendously entertaining. They're educational, too, but not pedantic; like Patrick O'Brian, Fraser had a gift for bringing history to life, weaving the story through events rather than making the fictional bits a frame for a lecture on names and dates.

Ave atque vale, Mr. Fraser. Thanks for everything.

(ETA: And Neil Gaiman, writing from a month in the future,[he fix] has his own take.)

Who is like the Group of Seventeen?

Today I learned that the key to some of Gene Wolfe's more obscure Shadow and Claw references can be found in Jorge Luis Borges's Book of Imaginary Beings. I was glad to see some description of Baldanders, since Severian's descriptions of that character and of Dr. Talos's play are confusing to the point of hallucination. But the Borges dissertation on the Fish that lives in the mirror is far more wonderful and strange than even the text about Father Inire's attempts to explain the Fish to a young woman of the court.

According to Borges, the ancient Cantonese believed that mirror creatures once invaded our world and were forced back by the Yellow Emperor, who condemned them to repeat, "as though in a kind of dream, all the actions of their human victors....One day, however, they will throw off that magical lethargy. The first to awaken shall be the Fish. In the depths of the mirror, we shall perceive a faint, faint line, and the color of that line will not resemble any other....In Yunnan province, people speak not of the Fish but rather of the Tiger of the Mirror. Others believe that before the invasion, we will hear, from the depths of the mirrors, the sound of arms."

Sweet dreams.

Finding joy

While I was off in the ATL cooing over my fluffy bed and whining about my schedule (unjustly, as mine was freer than many), I got a sobering e-mail forwarded through the church network. A man I knew, actually someone I had a monster crush on from about age 8 through 28, had slipped and hit his head while leaving a New York bar. He insisted that he was fine, but his friends noticed that he was bleeding from the ears and demanded that he let them take him to the hospital. A paramedic who periodically posts at Making Light once said that if you're wondering whether you ought to call 911, you should already be dialing. The doctors found hairline fractures above both ears and some intracranial swelling. He seemed oriented, responding to the time and place questions with "March" and "Pluto" respectively, indicating no damage to the smart-ass structures, and has been doing well since, apart from some blurred vision and a ringing in his ears. Today I got an update that he's being moved out of the ICU, has had the spinal shunt removed, and may be released as early as tomorrow. He may have some damage to one ear and will need rehab and observation, but the prognosis is very good. For this relief much thanks.

After a conversation about C.S. Lewis with a friend earlier this week and since I'm midway through The Narnian, I spent my first evening back rereading The Magician's Nephew for the first time since my teens. As a kid, I found it the least engaging of the Narnia books, what with the tedious logic about the green and yellow rings and the hopping between worlds, but this time I went through it at a good clip and even found myself getting teary at the scenes of creation. Now that I know a bit more about Lewis's mother's death, which by all accounts was slow and painful, I find Digory's temptation to steal a cure for his dying mother much more affecting. Reading it as a child, I don't think that I really understood that she was actually likely to die. I still prefer the allegory in Til We Have Faces, about which I get sniffly no matter how often I read it (dust mites in the binding, maybe), but I am glad to have my old copies of the Chronicles to revisit.

Grief

Terry Pratchett has Alzheimer's.

He mentioned the phantom stroke at the LOC bookfair this summer, and I hoped that it was something that his remaining neurons could work around. I want my favorite authors to live long lives, ideally to outlive me no matter how chronologically improbable that is, and to be writing straight up to the moment when they painlessly step out. I am greedy for them to produce more books and have good lives. This seems like a cruel trick.

Desultory review: 1491

It took me far too long to pick up 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, but now that I've gotten through it I join the hosannas. It's a kick to come across books that provide such a degree of shock and delight at the breadth of my personal ignorance and at how much there is to learn.

Mann's premise, which he supports with data from linguistic, historical, and archaeological analyses, is that the enormous mass of historical material on civilizations in the pre-Columbian Americas is presented poorly or not at all in most schools and the popular press. He tackles several common misconceptions among lay readers, including the ideas that Indian civilizations were relatively small or isolated, that native groups did not manipulate the surrounding ecosystems extensively, and that the European advantage in technology was the deciding factor in most Indian/European encounters. Mann's counterevidence often left me boggling quietly and trying to adjust to new interpretations of old data: He suggests that disease so far outstripped the progress of colonists that it is almost impossible to accurately estimate the original population of the two continents, but that archaeological and extant text data indicate that the population was almost certainly drastically greater than most of us think; that the enormous herds of buffalo and flocks of passenger pigeons observed by early explorers reflected an ecosystem reacting to the removal of human predation on managed species, rather than a natural bounty; that Indian government provided a model for Revolutionary War activists and Enlightenment philosophers; and that the Amazonian basin's nutritional abundance is in part the result of earlier civilizations' creation of flood-plain orchards. All of that is plausible, but how many of us learned anything like that in school? Did any of us doing our elementary-school Pilgrim pageants ever hear that Plymouth was built using material scavenged from the grave mounds of Squanto's decimated village, or that he may have picked up the trick of burying shad with the corn during his time as a captive in England?

The book has a few flaws. As Mann admits, he's probably getting minor details wrong, but in a lay-oriented survey of thousands of years of material, that's a forgivable offense. I got a bit bogged down in the academic in-fighting about teosinte's role as a maize ancestor, and thank God that there isn't a quiz on the Mayan political scene (although I did get the point: war and backstabbing and economic pressures and drought, oh my). It's more of a starting point for research than a primary or even secondary source, but since those aren't its primary goals, you can take the book on its merits.

It's too much to hope that a book this chock with juicy intel would be well written, but it is. Find a copy for your ainsel; I'll be in the corner, gnawing at the footnotes. Mm, historilicious.

Ada Lovelace fanfic ahoy

When did steampunk come back around? Even for those of us too lazy or self-conscious to join the dressing up, or to whom the idea of trying to make a DIY steampunk computer set-up is terrifying, the eye candy is sah-weet. I suspect we'll be seeing a lot more of this look once "The Golden Compass" comes out. The steampunk vibe is more organic than pure goth and more interesting than strict Victorian reproductions, but it has a smart brooding edge that pings my inner adolescent. Personally, I covet the Steampunk Workshop's trilobite with cog-laden innards but would not say no to a raygun or even a lapidary pick guard.

In the game of who-influenced-what, steampunk comes across as a concatenation of "Serenity" (which was a little less brass-gears-and-goggles and a bit more cowboy chic), "Stardust" and its flying ship, and "Pirates of the Caribbean," with of course heavy Captain Nemo references, maybe a little Deadwood-meets-Mad Max touch, and the corset/fetish vibe familiar from the goth scene. Eating My Words has a better description of the various fashion phyla that have so far arisen from basic Victorian fashion (if "basic" is the word for it; the Vickies believed in the upholstery school of clothing), including a spot-on note about how quickly certain conventions of pose and costume gel even (especially?) in alternative subcultures.

Unfortunately, given how sexycool I find the whole steampunk ethos, The Difference Engine remains on my No Go list. It would be much more fun to buy some boots.

ETA: Steampunk flux capacitor! Un. Glau. Bich. Even better than the version 2 laptop.

We band of what now?

Drat. DRAT. Yesterday was the day of Saints Crispin and Crispianus, patron saints of shoemakers, and I missed it. It's one of several saints' days I try to remember for reasons largely unrelated to church standing, right up there with the days of Saints Thecla and Severian (Gene Wolfe is pretty sneaky for an Aggie). The Crispin/Crispianus connection is the really obvious one about it being part of the speech that, to paraphrase a better writer, reached down the throats of a band of tired wet miserable outnumbered men and pulled them to their feet by their testicles. I'm sure Henry V only wished he'd been that eloquent, but whatever he said did the trick and the rest is just posing for the photographers. Portrait painters. Whatever.

Apropros of the young king's big day, however, herewith an excerpt from the modern version, from the late lamented Mike Ford. I will pay my penance by having "Bon Dieu, achetez-moi un Mercedes-Benz" stuck in my head for the rest of the day.

HARRY. What is not messed with, there we do not mess.
Our beer is strong, our judges paid on time,
And every jerk we whack has whacking won.
So lay it on the table from your boss
And what is up his snoot.

AMB. Let's cut the crap.
You sent a note that him what's runnin' France
Should give a wad of territory up
'Cause Crazy Eddie ran a game there once.
On this, my boss the Dolphin ain't so keen,
Says that you is a, or is smokin', dope,
An' wonders how you got in them long pants.
You risk a grabbing by the wide lapels,
And havin' your hat handed you real hard.
But hey, he pays his markers. So here is
A bunch of boodle that should square things up,
And put this stupid tsimmis in the bag:
So's all the gloves stay on. Thusly the swag.

Succumb to the meme

Bolding those you've read, italicizing those you've read a bit of, leaving the rest alone. I put comments in parens, because fish gotta swim and I gotta natter.
Ganked from Pharyngula.

• Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
  
• Anna Karenina
  
• Crime and Punishment
  
• Catch-22
• One Hundred Years of Solitude (Stone me if you must.)
• Wuthering Heights
• The Silmarillion
• Life of Pi: a novel (An odd book to become a bestseller.)
• The Name of the Rose
  
• Don Quixote (I took introductory Japanese instead of reading this. Chotto matte kudasai; I'll get to it.)
• Moby Dick
• Ulysses
• Madame Bovary (I was talking about this one just the other night. Death by arsenic is apparently no fun.)
• The Odyssey
• Pride and Prejudice
• Jane Eyre
• The Tale of Two Cities
• The Brothers Karamazov
• Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
• War and Peace
• Vanity Fair
• The Time Traveler's Wife
  
• The Iliad (Endless futzing about. Fight the war, ice your tragic heroes, and go home already.)
• Emma
• The Blind Assassin
• The Kite Runner
• Mrs. Dalloway
• Great Expectations
• American Gods ("Hey, you...Thought, Memory, whichever one you are: say 'nevermore.'")
• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
• Atlas Shrugged (At a certain point in late adolescence, most of us take either Hermann Hesse or Ayn Rand very seriously. I went with Hesse.)
• Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books
• Memoirs of a Geisha
• Middlesex
• Quicksilver (Ten pages in I developed a debilitating attack of the eye-rolls.)
• Wicked: the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
• The Canterbury Tales
• The Historian: a novel
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Love in the Time of Cholera
• Brave New World
• The Fountainhead
• Foucault's Pendulum
• Middlemarch
• Frankenstein (Assigned as a high school penalty when I trespassed by reading two books in as many nights and was a smart-ass about it.)
• The Count of Monte Cristo
  
• Dracula
• A Clockwork Orange
• Anansi Boys
• The Once and Future King ("He'm verminous, but he'm honest." Aw.)
• The Grapes of Wrath
• The Poisonwood Bible: a novel
• 1984
• Angels & Demons
• The Inferno
  
• The Satanic Verses
• Sense and Sensibility
• The Picture of Dorian Gray
• Mansfield Park
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
• To the Lighthouse
• Tess of the D'Urbervilles (One Hardy novel per lifetime is more than enough.)
• Oliver Twist
• Gulliver's Travels
• Les Misérables
• The Corrections
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
• Dune
• The Prince
• The Sound and the Fury
• Angela's Ashes: a memoir
• The God of Small Things (Not the same as Small Gods.)
• A People's History of the United States: 1492-present
• Cryptonomicon ("Bobby Shaftoe's gone to sea/ Silver buckles on his knee/ He'll come back and marry me/ Bonny Bobby Shaftoe." The rest of us will plan tourist visits to Bletchley Park.)
• Neverwhere
• A Confederacy of Dunces (People who like this book often hate the books I enjoy, so it's a useful litmus test.)
• A Short History of Nearly Everything
• Dubliners
  
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Hee.)
• Beloved
• Slaughterhouse-five
• The Scarlet Letter
• Eats, Shoots & Leaves
• The Mists of Avalon
• Oryx and Crake: a novel
  
• Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed
• Cloud Atlas
• The Confusion
• Lolita
• Persuasion
• Northanger Abbey ("You must not imagine that I am the sort of person who reads novels.")
• The Catcher in the Rye
• On the Road
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame
• Freakonomics: a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an inquiry into values
• The Aeneid
• Watership Down
• Gravity's Rainbow
• The Hobbit (Do not try to read this for the first time as an adult unless it is your fondest wish to die from cringe.)
• In Cold Blood: a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
• White Teeth
• Treasure Island
• David Copperfield ("Donkeys, Janet!" Fantastic.)
• The Three Musketeers ("Athos is a mountain." Also hee.)

Desultory review: Short Life and Long Times of Mrs. Beeton

An insatiable reading appetite combined with dilettante-ism means coming across information in odd ways. Thanks to a note in a review for Nanny Ogg's Cookbook, I found out about Mrs. Beeton's book(s) of household management and cooking. What the Joy of Cooking used to be for young American brides faced with the unenviable task of cooking a bear paw, raw porcupine, or sponge cake, Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management was for young Victorian women starting out in married life. Everything but sex seems to have found its way into the thousand-plus page tome (sex is quite literally covered in the NOC, however, apparently because the publishers objected to having books burst into flames). Despite the temporal incongruity, Mrs. B seems to have continued without a break for over 100 years, advising modern readers on the wonders of the microwave, Caribbean cooking, and how to pick a blender. Quite an accomplishment.

And, according to Kathryn Hughes's slightly uneven but engaging book, she did it with almost no experience of her own. Isabella Beeton was only 21, married less than two years, when she started to help her husband in his publishing ventures, first by writing up fashion and then by lifting enormous chunks of other extant household manuals and compiling them into a monster book. She died only eight years later, probably of puerperal fever, leaving behind two boys. Two other sons died before the age of three, likely infected with syphilis passed from their father to their mother; the same disease is suspected in her multiple miscarriages. (In the age of penicillin, most of us are cheerfully ignorant of the mechanics and side effects of chronic syphilis infection, and long may we remain so. Parts of the book are very grim.) Hughes has done extensive research to show which parts of BOHM are lifted from various sources, showing clips side by side, and she teases out the code used to refer to unpleasant events in Victorian life. Some of her conclusions could probably be argued by someone with more knowledge of the period than I have, but the overall picture of social change, women's roles in the economy and the home, and how one relatively inexperienced young woman became the voice of household authority, bring a period we often think of as dour to vivid life. Good stuff.

Give an author a fish

There's a charming interview with Neil Gaiman over at the Guardian. Gaiman's blog has probably been one of the underlying factors in his recent surge of popularity; once you know about Kitty and Olga and how icicles grow by the wallport, you're sort of invested in actually reading the book that kept getting interrupted by a suicidally bad-ass feline and Cabal and demonic produce.

One thing I think that the stories about his blog have overlooked is his role in sales of other people's books. Bloomsbury, for one, owes Gaiman a debt for the early success of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Not long after the book came out, Susannah Clarke came to the DC area as part of her book tour. First-time author, dauntingly odd and very large book that defies easy description, few to no reviews out in the press...and the place was full. A quick survey in the autograph line after her reading established that at least 70% of the people were there for the same reason: "Oh, Neil mentioned the book was good, so I figured I would see what it was like." The book stood on its own merits (and HOW), but by giving it some favorable mention, Neil reached a large group willing to take a flyer on it; the early adapters, basically. Hey, he's using his powers for good.

And sushi.

No more Thomas Hardy!

Pride getteth in the way of taking the easy joke about the Beatles and my relief at finishing Jude the Obscure, so insert your own comments and take them as read. The plot, once it finally rambled into view, involved more angst: Jude and Sue wander around failing to get married, Jude's Pearl-esque spaceboy son from his previous marriage shows up and haunts them with his aged mien, hassles ensue regarding their growing family, freaky son kills himself and the other children "because we are too menny," Sue gets religion and goes back to the husband whose touch makes her flesh for to creep and makes a huge deal about how now she's a submitted wife and will actually have sex with him, Jude reunites with his scheming boozy wife Arabella, he never recovers his strength and dies while she's out gallivanting with the lecherous doctor, and the readers live happily ever after, amen, knowing that Hardy never wrote another novel.

I did, as promised, cleanse my brain with Making Money and a 1960 SF collection of short stories that I bought from a street vendor in New York on the strength of the cover art and the inclusion of Cordwainer Smith's brilliant "The Game of Rat and Dragon." I wasn't overly impressed by the Isaac Asimov "Ideas Die Hard," but I liked "Dead Ringer" for its pacing and "Volpla" just because. Someday I will find the poem that begins, "The owl and the pussycat went into space/ In a modified Jupiter C..."; it must be collected somewhere.

In other news, oh, what to wear to Oktoberfest? Die Ausgebürgerte offers a tip to da laydies. When I see "Die Dirndl-Trends 2007," I expect to see some Nordic futurewearz, but it turns out that the savvy Dirndl-trundler will not be plumping for PVC and chrome and quilted space fabrics this year. This year it's all about slumping around the walls of the pub and looking hopeful (or drunk). Next year? Who knows! Die clubben might be in.