Dec 10 2022

The Best of Connie Willis by Connie Willis

The Best of Connie Willis brings together her shorter works of fiction — short story, novelette and novella — that have won either the Hugo or Nebula award. That she could fill a full-sized collection exclusively with award-winners is a testament to her skill as a storyteller and to the regard science fiction fans and writers have for her work: she has won more Hugos for fiction than any other person. Willis rounds out the collection with an introduction, afterwords on each story, and three speeches — one as Worldcon guest of honor in 2006 plus two versions of the speech she gave when named as a grand master by the SFWA.

The Best of Connie Willis

The earliest is “Letter from the Clearys,” published in 1982, and the most recent is “All Seated on the Ground,” from 2007. Willis won another Hugo in 2011 for a pair of novels about time travel to England in World War II, Blackout/All Clear. Of her work published since then, I have only read Crosstalk.

One of the most characteristic Willis scenes is madcap, cross-cutting dialog, something that could have appeared in a Marx Brothers movie, or one of Billy Wilder’s comedies. Usually, an overlooked character is trying to communicate crucial information to someone in charge, and that someone is too full of themselves to listen. Missed communication of this nature is the whole scheme of Crosstalk, but it’s the kind of moment that crops up again and again in Willis’ writing. It’s also a devil to write well. The author has to manage a chaotic scene, with plausible reasons for the characters to be talking past each other, while also ensuring that not only can a reader tell who is who in fast dialog but also pick up on the information being missed, share in one speaker’s frustration, and enjoy the humor of the whole situation.

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Dec 09 2022

I Don’t Care by Julie Fogliano, Molly Idle & Juana Martinez-Neal

This sweet picture book on what it means to be a true friend is a delight for adults and children both.

The poem by Julie Fogliano tells the tale of two quite different children who don’t seem to be getting along. But as the book progresses, readers see that the kids, who seemingly began by declaring how much they didn’t care about each other, actually don’t care about aspects of each other’s lives that have no bearing on their relationship, like the sizes of their houses or the way their lunches smell. What the kids do care about is how they treat each other with kindness and consideration and respect, a wonderfully affirming lesson that gets past the superficial to talk about the meaning of true friendship.

Written in a bouncy manner that invites read-alongs, the language was perfect for my reluctant young readers, especially at bedtime when little eyes and minds are getting tired. My youngest loved snuggling with me and turning the pages as we took turns reading the poem aloud.

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Dec 06 2022

How To Defend Your Lair by Keith Ammann

I love RPG books so much, I write my own. I also have a terrible weakness for buying more, especially if they’ll facilitate my own campaigns, whether solo or otherwise. Since most of my groups tend to play D&D (and I do a fill-in campaign for one of them. Oh, and professionally DM every so often, too,) anything that can help me sharpen my DMing skills is a must read.

So I was really psyched to get a copy of Keith Ammann’s How To Defend Your Lair. I’m not super familiar with online D&D personalities, but his credentials and endorsements are legit. I was a little taken aback by the combative tone of the introduction — hi, I’m a reader who is interested in what you have to say, not a PC to be battled — but that fortunately fades quickly, as Mr Ammann gets into the nitty gritty of what it means to design a big bad’s lair, and why you would want to invest the time and energy into doing so.

At which point, I need to make a disclaimer: if you are a vibes GM*, like me, a lot of this stuff might not be pertinent to you. I continuously ratchet difficulty levels up and down for my players because I do not think TPKs are fun and I also want them to each get their shots in before downing the bad guys. I like for my players to feel involved in combats, and to experience the terror of thinking they’re going to die (but not actually killing them.) As a GM, I feel that my job is to challenge the players but not frustrate them.

And as much as I’ve loved the hundreds of players I’ve run games for over the years, I can confidently state that most of them don’t play D&D, or any other role-playing games, in order to think. They’re there for the action, and they’re there for the drama. The fun ones are also there for the lolz. My job as the DM is to facilitate all this, to make my players feel smart and capable and like big damn heroes. I have thrown away so many puzzles and lowered the success rates of so many secrets just to make sure my tables have a good time getting through carefully constructed adventures, whether my own or others’ (I’m a big fan of running from pre-written modules.)

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Dec 05 2022

The Odyssey translated by Emily Wilson

The first time I read The Odyssey, I was on a bit of an odyssey myself: from Budapest to Helsinki, and thence to DC via London. It didn’t take ten years, and I didn’t feel the need to plot a bunch of murders when I reached my new home. Nor did I lose my ship and all my men, nor did people who helped me get their ship turned to stone by an aggravated gods. I think I read Robert Fitzgerald’s verse translation, and I remember being enthralled, carrying it along on day hikes in the High Tatry so that I could get in a few pages any time I stopped. But that was more than a quarter century ago, and by the time I picked up Emily Wilson’s verse translation, I had forgotten all but the barest outlines of what happens to Odysseus, and more importantly, how it happens.

The Odyssey translated by Emily Wilson

Wilson’s introductory matter prepared me well for returning to The Odyssey, and I particularly appreciated her willingness to write about her personal relationship with the poem rather than pretend to some Olympian detachment from a work of art she was investing considerable time and energy into translating again. As with Karamazov, I am under no illusion that I have anything to add to the vast literature on The Odyssey, nor did I read the book with that in mind. As much as I had any particular reason for picking up this book now, I had three thoughts in mind. First, I enjoyed The Odyssey then, what would I think so many years later? Second, I had heard a radio interview with Wilson around the time her translation was published, and I thought she had interesting perspectives. (As indeed she did, which she spelled out in the introduction.) How did they work in practice? Third, and most ambitiously, I have long thought about a reading project on modern odysseys. I have a copy of Joyce, of course, but have never made a determined effort. I also have a copy of Kazantzakis’ The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, whose English translation was published in 1958. The front matter of my copy says it’s the sixth paperback printing, from 1966. I bought it used not quite three decades later. There are marginalia in the introduction and the first two books of the poem, along with a business card (Bailey Employment Service of Norwalk [CT]) marking, presumably, the reader’s place at page 50. Finally, I have a copy of Omeros by Derek Walcott. It’s something of a Caribbean Odyssey in terza rima. Before undertaking any of the modern versions, I needed to renew my acquaintance with their progenitor. So.

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Dec 04 2022

The Spirit Level by Seamus Heaney

Usually when I am reading one of Seamus Heaney’s collections, I use a slip of paper as a bookmark and note the poems that strike me as particularly interesting or effective, so that I can have them fresh in my mind when I write about them for Frumious, or as a guide when I return to the collection. With The Spirit Level I abandoned that practice about a quarter of the way through. I was noting practically every poem. The Spirit Level was published the year after Heaney won the Nobel, and it won the Whitbread Book of the Year, and the quality of this collection shows how deserved both awards were.

The Spirit Level by Seamus Heaney

The very first lines of the collection —

Upend the rain stick and what happens next
Is a music that you never would have known
To listen for.

— show some of what Heaney is up to. He is giving readers a music they would never have known to listen for. He’s taking a novelty item, the rain stick and capturing both the sensory experience of listening to the stick and its links to greater experiences, the simple wonder of it all.

What happens next
Is undiminished for having happened once,
Twice, ten, a thousand times before.

Is Heaney talking about the sound from the stick, the experience of rain, or the wonder of life itself? Yes.

You are like a rich man entering heaven
Through the ear of a raindrop. Listen now again.

Anyone reading the poem, anyone who has heard a rain stick, or indeed rain, has been improbably given unending gifts. Just pay attention. “Listen now again.”

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Dec 03 2022

Winter by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Once I got into it — this winter, after failing last winter — this went by fast, and why not, it’s a collection of short autobiographical, ostensibly seasonal snippets from a Norwegian author who’s often mentioned as a potential Nobel laureate. As an object, the edition of Winter that I have is a lovely book: thick pages, pleasing margins and layout, gorgeous occasional watercolor illustrations by Lars Lerin. I think Ingvild Burkey’s translation from the Norwegian is good; there weren’t any places where I stumbled during reading, or where the phrasing caused me to wonder what the original was. Knausgaard writes simply and directly, at least in Winter, and Burkey renders that faithfully.

Winter by Karl Ove Knausgaard

I liked the physicality of my copy of Winter, and I liked the concept: a book of short essays for each season, taking readers through a year, reflecting on changes and continuities, along with observations not necessarily prompted by the season. Winter takes in December, January and February, and is additionally framed by the expectation and then slightly premature birth of a daughter. The sections for each of the first two months begin with a “Letter to an Unborn Daughter” while February begins with a “Letter to a Newborn Daughter.” The baby turns out to be fine, by the way, and even the clubfoot that technicians thought they saw in ultrasound turned out to be a perfectly normal foot.

Some of the essays are quite good, especially when Knausgaard is observing the natural world, and winter’s effects on it. “Owls” and “Winter Sounds” from the December section, “Snow” and “Winter” from January, along with “Fish,” “Winter Boots” and “Snowdrifts” from February are all evocative and effective. They’re what I had hoped all of Winter would be like. Here is a bit from “Winter Boots” when he writes about what makes something memorable:
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Dec 02 2022

The Sisters #8: My NEW Big Sister by Christophe Cazenove & William Maury

Our favorite squabbling sisters in translation are back, from the dynamic creative duo of Cazenove & William! In this latest volume, Maureen and Wendy’s quarreling is getting so bad that their friends are setting up interventions. Can any of their efforts prevail against the tsunami-level bickering of the girls?

Wendy is the older sibling, a dark-haired teenager with the physical benefits of strength, size and speed. She has two best friends who are deeply concerned by the escalation of hostilities, and a boyfriend, Mason, who is as often the target of Maureen’s pranks as he is her co-conspirator, unwitting or otherwise.

Maureen is the blonde younger girl, an irrepressible ball of mischief who loves her stuffed animals and just wants to hang out with her older sister, whether Wendy wants to or not. The girls usually get along, but each reaches their breaking point in this volume, to the point where Maureen decides to start looking for a replacement big sister instead.

I gotta tell you, as an elder sister to a deeply annoying younger sister myself, I always have feels whenever I read this series. I’m definitely Team Wendy, tho very much appreciate how evenhandedly this creative team depicts the girls and their relationship. My favorite panels are usually the ones set when Wendy and Maureen have grown up, and look back more or less fondly on the things that used to drive them absolutely bananas as children. It was nice in this volume to get throwbacks too to when the sisters were even younger, to see exactly how long their tensions have persisted.

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Nov 30 2022

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Not quite 30 years ago I was backpacking around southeastern Europe when something unfortunate happened: I ran out of books. Well, technically, I did not run out of books; my backpack still held what a reasonable person would probably consider more than enough books. But since I had last replenished from the freebies at a youth hostel on Rhodes, I had read all of the ones I had with me, and some of the freebies were too dreadful to consider re-reading. A couple of weeks — how long they seemed! — later when I found an international bookstore in Heraklion, I did the obvious thing and stocked up. Not in number of books, mind, but in pages and heft. I bought two books. The first was Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain) by Thomas Mann, which I actually started to read. I made it to page 516, and there’s still a 100-drachma note that marks the extent of my progress. The second was a Penguin Classics edition of The Brothers Karamazov. I may have read the introduction, I certainly didn’t get to the main text. Yet these two served their purpose. I never felt unbooked again on that trip, which ended with me finding a job in Budapest.

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The year 2021 marked the bicentennial of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s birth, and for the occasion Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky revisited their translation of The Brothers Karamazov, “go[ing] over every word of our original version, catching occasional errors or misreadings, rethinking word choices, altering certain rhythms and phrasings.” (p. xi) Back in September, I attended a no-particular-book book club, and it was great! One of the participants mentioned that she was reading Karamazov. I had a copy of the bicentennial edition waiting on my shelves. And so, two months and 823 pages later, give or take some Notes and a not overly long Introduction, here I am.

I took two main ideas away from the Introduction. The second is that the “author” of The Brothers Karamazov is a character within the story, and he is not Dostoevsky. That is, he is something of a throwback to the Enlightenment narrators who addressed the reader directly, and he situates himself within the town where Karamazov takes place. He mentions gathering reports to tell the story, and he says he was present at the trial that closes the main part of the story. He does not detail how he knows of conversations or mental states; the reader is meant to take the “author’s” near-omniscience on faith. Dostoevsky is nothing if not inconsistent, though. As Pevear writes, “There are stretches when the person of the ‘author’ seems to recede and be replaced by a more conventional omniscient narrator, but his voice will suddenly re-emerge in a phrase or half-phrase, giving an unexpected double tone or double point of view to the passage.” (p. xviii)

The first thing I took from the Introduction comes from its opening sentence: “The Brothers Karamazov is a joyful book.” (p. xiii) Pevear continues:

Readers who know what it is “about” may find this an intolerably whimsical statement. It does have moments of joy, but they are only moments; the rest is greed, lust, squalor, unredeemed suffering, and a sometimes terrifying darkness. But the book is joyful in another sense: in its energy and curiosity, in its formal inventiveness, in the mastery of its writing. And therefore, finally, in its vision. (p. xiii)

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Nov 22 2022

Everyday Hero Machine Boy by Irma Kniivila & Trí Vương

Oh gosh, what an affecting middle grade graphic novel! Honestly, some of the most entertaining and moving writing out there today is in middle grade literature, and this title is absolutely part of those ranks.

Everyday Hero Machine Boy starts out with an older couple, Mei and Goh, who are mostly in retirement from running a karate dojo. When Goh goes to pick up groceries from Mr Hound’s store one day, he encounters a strange phenomenon falling from the sky. This phenomenon wrecks Mr Hound’s greenhouse, and turns out to be a robot. Goh tries to stop the robot from any further carnage, but a sequence of mishaps and misunderstandings finds the robot running back to the karate dojo, begging for Mei’s mercy.

After some thinking, Mei decides to raise the robot as the child she and Goh never had. As Machine Boy slowly learns how to integrate himself into human society, he faces challenges that include going to see Earth’s mightiest heroes in concert — it’s less terrible than the musical depicted in Disney+’s Hawkeye, I promise — as well as navigating school and keeping a pet secret from his Grandma Mei. Along the way, he tries to make friends, and learns not only valuable lessons about being human, but also strange secrets about this city and planet he’s fallen into.

I’ll freely admit that I never really warmed up to any of the classic manga featuring robots. Left to my own devices, I probably would have never picked up this title either: there’s just something about the subgenre that doesn’t appeal to me. So I was pretty surprised by how easily Everyday Hero Machine Boy swept aside my long-held antipathy to robot books as its heartwarming tale unfolded. Y’all, I cried, and copiously.

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Nov 21 2022

Making Love With The Land: Essays by Joshua Whitehead

I didn’t understand what “creative non-fiction” was supposed to be until I read the first two magnificent essays in this collection, ironically even before Joshua Whitehead begins his somewhat disparaging essay on the subject. As with any art, there’s a strong sense of “I know it when I see it”, and I definitely knew I was looking at creative non-fiction with the first two essays, Who Names The Rez Dog rez? and My Body Is A Hinterland.

So it was interesting to see the entire subgenre dissected by the author in the essay immediately following, On Ekphrasis And Emphasis. I enjoyed the critique of Western thought that consigns the mystical phenomenon of everyday Indigenous life to, at best, magical realism, as this is a discussion I’ve recently been having about Southeast Asian experiences as well. I rather wish the author had engaged with this topic more as a conversation on that consignment’s origins in post-Enlightenment thought tho, whose original authors sought to escape the oppression of Western religious/mainstream authority on writing, a struggle and aim shared by modern Indigenous writing. This isn’t, ofc, a defense of rationalism: it just feels counterproductive, especially in a collection of essays searching for connection and understanding, to highlight only the differences and not consider the mutual goals.

I did appreciate overall the way this collection of essays engaged both with the NDN experience and with Cree as a living language (the essay A Geography Of Queer Woundings is phenomenal!) Most importantly, the frankness of Mr Whitehead’s discussion of the intersection between being queer and being Indigenous was a welcome exploration. I loved the grace of his dissection of a break up with a fellow queer Native in the essay Me, The Joshua Tree. He’s also admirably blunt about his struggles with eating disorders, and how that connects to his history of eating the pain of his loved ones, in one of the collection’s most brilliant extended metaphors.

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