Long and Tangential: I read everything, including the footnotes, being inclined toward footnotes myself. (I sometimes have difficulty as lector, with Isaiah or Wisdom or even Paul to the Corinthians, not stopping to give footnotes to the congregation. No, Jim. Deliver the text as written.)
Regarding footnote 4, I'm dismayed that Zelazny may be forgotten or being forgotten. Set aside his later Amber books when he was writing in haste because he had incurable cancer and wanted financial stability for his family.
Lord of Light is an exquisite novel. Several times I've sat down to read just to understand how he does the frame and I look up and I'm 120 pages in. "The Game of Blood and Dust" is on of the most exquisite short-shorts I've ever read. In general, I think Zelazny may be a better short story writer than novelist, though I'd consider which body parts I could spare if the trade would get me a book like LoL or the first volume of Amber.
Contrary to all conventional writing advice, Zelazny said that in every novel he left out one important scene and included one extraneous scene, such as buying a present for a child's birthday party. I think this contributes to the three dimensional feel of his stories.
I'd read his prose for many years before I came to understand that part of its effectiveness is a poetic sensibility, something I think he shared with Mary Renault, another of my favorite writers.
As a change of pace, I'd recommend the novels of Alan Furst, set in pre-war and WW II France and surrounds. A lovely gloss is that one scene in every novel takes place at the same banquette in a Parisian restaurant. I think/hope you might like his renderings of the Seventh Arrondisement an Elsewhere in an Elsewhen. I would start with Night Soldiers if you decide to sample.
You're welcome. A couple of caveats: it opens for a substantial time in the Balkans and also goes to Moscow. Still, it's mainly centered in Paris.
Furst's prose is spare, not quite to Hemingway. (Like our hostess, he spends much of his time living in France.)
The biggest concern is that while it's emphatically not fueled by testosterone--the characters are pretty much ordinary people just trying to get by in difficult times--all the main characters are men. Most of the women are lovers of the main characters but well drawn people in supporting roles, not fantasies or stick figures, though one of the anti-aircraft gunners in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War gets more time on stage than many.
I just finished "Love and Ruin" by Paula McLain, a novel about war correspondent Martha Gellhorn and her marriage to Hemingway, which includes the period the two of them were covering the Spanish Civil War. Have you come across that one? McLain's prose is definitely not spare...though I came to it on the heels of re-reading Pat Barker's "Regeneration" and "Life Class" trilogies, and in comparison to those the McLain novel is far more emotional, but not, I think, overly so. McLain's book definitely won me over by the end.
I have not come across that one. Back in the day, I reviewed books on history and politics for the LA Daily News, the then #2 newspaper, getting paid a pittance. But I got to read interesting books. One of the most gut-punch books was on the Spanish Civil War.
I keep a note pad on the coffee table for writing down Film/TV shows/books that come to my attention. The short TBR stack is in the living room, the expanded TBR group is on a table in my office, and six *boxes* of TBR are in the garage. I finally got organized a while back and gathered the TBR together from where they had lodged, hither and yon.
Currently reading How the Irish Saved Civilization and All the Pretty Horses. HtISC is an interesting non-fiction companion piece to Yourcenar's The Memoirs of Hadrian, which I read only in the past year. It's easy to spot anachronisms of fact or language in a novel; what I found astonishing in Yourcenar was that I couldn't spot a single anachronism regarding mode of thought. They may be there but they're beyond my reach.
Which brings me to Pat Barker. I read her Women of Troy and, in what may be an unpopular opinion, I loathed it. Many phrases of dialogue written in Valley Girl and its sensibility didn't come near the level of tragedy in the vein. I don't require writing in that era to be high falutin' literary--Mary Renault is one of my idols and her style is very clean and doesn't point at itself--but as a reader I like to see respect for the period and the sources. Mining Homer is a high bar to be sure, you get a difficulty bonus from the ice skating judges for even attempting it. But it's not a success if you fall on your butt.
If my opinion of Barker requires redemption of my feminist-ally credentials, I'd throw back a rec of Carmen Maria Machado's Her Body and Other Parties. An National Book Award Finalist. Mainstream short story collection. I found the stories uneven from one to the other, one still mystifies me, but some are outstanding and even the ones I thought DNQW (margin note Does Not Quite Work) are worth reading.
Most memorable novel I've read in the past couple of years is Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red. The points of view, including a corpse, a counterfeit coin, a tree, and a dog, are a marvel. No wonder it won a Pulitzer.
note to EK: I *can* write on an extended basis without a joke or smart-ass remark. I may need you as a character witness someday.
I'm not a fan of Pat Barker's Trojan War books either! And I love Carmen Maria Machado's work. So either your feminist-ally credentials are fine or my own feminist credentials are also questionable. Barker's World War I and World War II books are very different; no Valley Girl speak at all.
I think Mary Renault may have ruined me for other retellings of classical myth; there's just nobody who can compare. People keep recommending Madeline Miller to me, but I just didn't warm to Song of Achilles, and therefore haven't read Circe. I'm lukewarm on Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad and Le Guin's Lavinia. For me, Natlie Haynes is the best of the pack for modern retellings, but Renault leaves everyone in the dust.
Cormac McCarthy isn't my cup of tea, but I do like Marguerite Yourcenar and the Thomas Cahill book sounds interesting. If you want to stay in Ireland for a bit when you finish Cahill, and if you like armchair-travel books, I recommend The Summer Isles by Philip Marsden, in which he sails alone up the Irish west coast (and then the Scottish west coast) reflecting on myth, history, and images of the Otherworld along the way. I first read The Summer Isles during the first Covid lockdown, when we couldn't travel anywhere, which may account for my particular passion for it -- but it's a good arm-chair adventure all the same.
I keep meaning to try Orhan Pamuk's work, and I'd be happy to put My Name is Red on my reading list if you can assure me the dog doesn't die. I just can't bear books or films in which animals die or are mistreated, especially dogs -- which is limiting, I admit.
LOL! Last things first: the dog doesn't die. I think I neglected to mention that My Name is Red is historical, set in Ottoman Empire. The corpse, the dog, and the coin only have one chapter each. But the corpse is the first and the dog is the fourth, establishing early on an unconventional perspective to the story.
I've mixed feelings about McCarthy so far. A friend of mine likes him very much. I'm not wild about his style but his sense of place is very much like my friend's if it were transposed from the South to the West. The details of plants and animals to evoke a scene is very similar.
Always happy to find another person who appreciates Renault. When I was an emotional puddle after dropping my daughter off at college many years ago, I drove to a bookstore and picked up a duplicate copy of The Persian Boy to read over a steak dinner with two very good glasses of red wine. TPB and The Last of the Wine are my favorites. I've not read any of her romances but I did track down The Charioteer, which if nothing else gave this cis heteronormative person a new thought: part of being gay (or somewhere on the LGGQT spectrum) is that there is generally a specific someone who makes you realize that your are. Going from memory, one man asks something like, "Who was your first?", meaning "that you loved this way," consummated or not. From what I've read after, this was groundbreaking for a novel in the 1950's.
A trip to Ireland is certainly a hypothetical possibility. Timing is up in the air between being semi-retired but still having obligations and a need to move from one coast to the other for daughter and granddaughter in the next few years. I really need to embrace traveling solo. So far three days of theatre, museums, and dining in the City after seeing my daughter/granddaughter in western MA is as much as I've stretched myself. I cling to the point of view that experiences are better when shared; otoh, I should not let that make me a hermit.
Thank you re feminist credentials. I've heard some say that no man can really be a feminist. I don't believe that but I understand that I'm handicapped with a Y-chromosome and so much societal history. I'm also acutely aware of the demographics of this salon and have to fight my way past fear of stating the well known and looking like an idiot.
Falling in love with Lee all over again is a gift of 2025 for me. I read several when I was younger & now, they are resonating differently for me. Love how books change as we, the reader, do.
I've decided to trade the present-day madness for a journey back to 19th century Pre-Raphaelite circles by re-reading Suzanne Fagence Cooper's How We Might Live: At Home with Jane and William Morris, which is delicious. I just started the re-read this morning. Being back in that place and time with those particular people is making me so goddamn happy on an otherwise grim day. (It's literally grim, too, over here on Dartmoor: grey, damp, and cold. As if even the English weather is protesting what is going on across the Atlantic.)
Though you and I have slightly different (though overlapping!) tastes in fantasy fiction, I'm in complete agreement with your thoughts about the field here, El. And having edited so many good writers of the 80s and 90s whose work is rarely talked about now (including some of Tanith's), I'm very much in favor of seeing this generation of authors acknowledged and read more widely.
I'm looking forward to Tessa's The Mercy Makers (I've loved her past books) and Katharine Beutner's book sounds intriguing. I'm off to order both now....
I'm too young for the yellow spine DAW books, but I have spent some time examining them at my local used bookstore. I think there's a fashion for "unclassifiable" stories now, actually, but only in the literary fiction area. Lots of literary fiction with fantasy or sci-fi elements but not actual genre fiction.
I've been a little obsessed with things written just prior to the outbreak of WW2, and I'll probably be reading one of those tomorrow (a short nonfiction book defending isolationism, which I'm looking forward to because I don't understand that view). If I may recommend something strange from that period, may I suggest a novella from 1939 called The Man Who Killed Hitler? It's a short tale of a man losing his grip on reality and identity and also fascism.
For those more musically inclined, I’ll point out an event Reggie Harris is participating in tomorrow, run by Betsy Rose, beginning at 12:30 EST. Here’s Reggie’s Facebook post about it:
I am in the middle of Joan Aiken's Paget Family trilogy, which I believe I started on the advice of either Ellen or one of her friends. It's a great distraction. I guess I only thought of Aiken as the author of the Wolves of Willoughby Chase - so glad to discover the rest of her works.
I have two recommendations, quite different to each other. I started reading _Ammonite_ by Nicola Griffith, a few days ago, and am re-reading it -- skimming-- to get some of the plot points clear in my head. I just checked the publication date and am gobsmacked: 1992. I would have sworn it had been written in, oh 2022. It's definitely sci-fi.
The other is _Except the Queen_ by Jane Yolen, 2010. It is a fairy tale. It's a call for us to be "glow worms" in troubled times.
I had a book picked out long before today: the last of the Thursday Murder Club series. Was saving it just for this occasion. It is far less relentlessly cheerful than I had hoped but has still provided many good laughs. I have ordered Killingly so I can read it later in the week.
I’m in a mystery mode, the Deborah Crombie/ Sara Paretsky type. And I have Sara’s “Pay Dirt”, signed by her at a Belmont Books event last Friday, waiting for me for tomorrow. Also lots of house cleaning because I’m hosting my book group this Thursday. And there’s snow. And coffee, hot cocoa, and later wine.
The core of a New Year's Ritual is an Admonition to "Begin as you mean to go on...." And I find that to be sound for all sorts of Commencements....including the coming Trumpian Regime.....
If I read, it will be Heather Cox Richardson, Timothy Snyder and perhaps some MLK Jr. — But MOST Likely I will read over two poems I started today and then continue WRITING them....
1. (Bending) Towards Justice —
How does it bend
....that Moral Arc??
Surely NOT of Its
own accord....
I see NO evidence
of such a Grand Design
or Dynamic
no matter how
prophetically promised
[by Martin et al.....]
Yet I cannot help
but hope that it would
could...can be True...
If...
And Only if we
Put our hands
to the Bending....
[Seems whole right there..... BUT there's MORE I need to say....]
=====
2. NOT My PRESIDENT….
I should NOT say that DJTrump is
”Not My President….” for as far
as I can tell, he DID Win the 2024
Presidential Election and
I can’t truthfully say that that
Election was Stolen from Kamala Harris
(the candidate for whom I voted….)
I would NOT say the DJTrump is
“Not My President…..” for as
Disappointing as the turn-out and out-come
of the 2024 Election was and is
I can’t disengage myself from
the democratic process in spite of
my disengagement from the results…..
[That's the Opening Negativity..... The Middle Understanding comes next.....and it's a
sobering realization that My President is AGAINST Me and Mine.....]
[[The Ending of this poem is to be a Positive Closing Statement of What I can/want to/will do...]]
Okay.... So It's HCR's book on Democracy Rising; Snyder's book on Tyranny or Fascism; and if I could find my copy of Sheri Tepper's AWAKENERS Duology I would start re-reading that......
I read Don't Bite the Sun for the first time just last week... And it's really an astonishingly good book.
Something I found fascinating, reading it as a trans woman and lesbian, was how normal gender transition was in it... but how almost all (maybe just all?) the various romantic moments were man/woman pairings, even if they did go on to gender swap later. It feels like there have been significant shifts in which aspects of queer identity are clearly visible and which are stigmatised in more recent decades.
Also, Ellen, thank you for this: '...the language of their narration was refined: function following form, maybe. It wasn’t just there to move the story along. The EVENTS were never considered more interesting than the way they were told.'
I get tired of being told, when I comment that poor writing makes it difficult to enjoy, and sometimes to even read, a book. That I shouldn't blame the author (at one level that's true because too many authors are deprived of editors) but some ppl who call themselves professional authors, in both literature and journalism, are making egregious errors of syntax, diction, acyrologia, that no editor should have to deal with.
Serial Box, the original (and initiating) publisher of Tremontaine shifted focus & changed its name to Realm, and for awhile you could still get both audio & e-reads of Tremontaine through them. Right now they're restructuring again, and it's hard to find . . . but not forever, I trust! I'll keep you informed.
Thanks for the book recs! I went to Mount Holyoke, so I’m particularly interested in that one. Instead of reading today, though, I’m going to check out a wedding venue for my daughter and her non-binary betrothed. That feels appropriately enough like a middle finger at today’s event. It’s at a castle! Well, a castle-themed hotel, which is as close as we get to castles here in Southern California.
Long and Tangential: I read everything, including the footnotes, being inclined toward footnotes myself. (I sometimes have difficulty as lector, with Isaiah or Wisdom or even Paul to the Corinthians, not stopping to give footnotes to the congregation. No, Jim. Deliver the text as written.)
Regarding footnote 4, I'm dismayed that Zelazny may be forgotten or being forgotten. Set aside his later Amber books when he was writing in haste because he had incurable cancer and wanted financial stability for his family.
Lord of Light is an exquisite novel. Several times I've sat down to read just to understand how he does the frame and I look up and I'm 120 pages in. "The Game of Blood and Dust" is on of the most exquisite short-shorts I've ever read. In general, I think Zelazny may be a better short story writer than novelist, though I'd consider which body parts I could spare if the trade would get me a book like LoL or the first volume of Amber.
Contrary to all conventional writing advice, Zelazny said that in every novel he left out one important scene and included one extraneous scene, such as buying a present for a child's birthday party. I think this contributes to the three dimensional feel of his stories.
I'd read his prose for many years before I came to understand that part of its effectiveness is a poetic sensibility, something I think he shared with Mary Renault, another of my favorite writers.
As a change of pace, I'd recommend the novels of Alan Furst, set in pre-war and WW II France and surrounds. A lovely gloss is that one scene in every novel takes place at the same banquette in a Parisian restaurant. I think/hope you might like his renderings of the Seventh Arrondisement an Elsewhere in an Elsewhen. I would start with Night Soldiers if you decide to sample.
End Tangential Digression
I just ordered a copy of Night Soldiers based on this recommendation. Thank you!
You're welcome. A couple of caveats: it opens for a substantial time in the Balkans and also goes to Moscow. Still, it's mainly centered in Paris.
Furst's prose is spare, not quite to Hemingway. (Like our hostess, he spends much of his time living in France.)
The biggest concern is that while it's emphatically not fueled by testosterone--the characters are pretty much ordinary people just trying to get by in difficult times--all the main characters are men. Most of the women are lovers of the main characters but well drawn people in supporting roles, not fantasies or stick figures, though one of the anti-aircraft gunners in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War gets more time on stage than many.
I just finished "Love and Ruin" by Paula McLain, a novel about war correspondent Martha Gellhorn and her marriage to Hemingway, which includes the period the two of them were covering the Spanish Civil War. Have you come across that one? McLain's prose is definitely not spare...though I came to it on the heels of re-reading Pat Barker's "Regeneration" and "Life Class" trilogies, and in comparison to those the McLain novel is far more emotional, but not, I think, overly so. McLain's book definitely won me over by the end.
I have not come across that one. Back in the day, I reviewed books on history and politics for the LA Daily News, the then #2 newspaper, getting paid a pittance. But I got to read interesting books. One of the most gut-punch books was on the Spanish Civil War.
I keep a note pad on the coffee table for writing down Film/TV shows/books that come to my attention. The short TBR stack is in the living room, the expanded TBR group is on a table in my office, and six *boxes* of TBR are in the garage. I finally got organized a while back and gathered the TBR together from where they had lodged, hither and yon.
Currently reading How the Irish Saved Civilization and All the Pretty Horses. HtISC is an interesting non-fiction companion piece to Yourcenar's The Memoirs of Hadrian, which I read only in the past year. It's easy to spot anachronisms of fact or language in a novel; what I found astonishing in Yourcenar was that I couldn't spot a single anachronism regarding mode of thought. They may be there but they're beyond my reach.
Which brings me to Pat Barker. I read her Women of Troy and, in what may be an unpopular opinion, I loathed it. Many phrases of dialogue written in Valley Girl and its sensibility didn't come near the level of tragedy in the vein. I don't require writing in that era to be high falutin' literary--Mary Renault is one of my idols and her style is very clean and doesn't point at itself--but as a reader I like to see respect for the period and the sources. Mining Homer is a high bar to be sure, you get a difficulty bonus from the ice skating judges for even attempting it. But it's not a success if you fall on your butt.
If my opinion of Barker requires redemption of my feminist-ally credentials, I'd throw back a rec of Carmen Maria Machado's Her Body and Other Parties. An National Book Award Finalist. Mainstream short story collection. I found the stories uneven from one to the other, one still mystifies me, but some are outstanding and even the ones I thought DNQW (margin note Does Not Quite Work) are worth reading.
Most memorable novel I've read in the past couple of years is Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red. The points of view, including a corpse, a counterfeit coin, a tree, and a dog, are a marvel. No wonder it won a Pulitzer.
note to EK: I *can* write on an extended basis without a joke or smart-ass remark. I may need you as a character witness someday.
I'm not a fan of Pat Barker's Trojan War books either! And I love Carmen Maria Machado's work. So either your feminist-ally credentials are fine or my own feminist credentials are also questionable. Barker's World War I and World War II books are very different; no Valley Girl speak at all.
I think Mary Renault may have ruined me for other retellings of classical myth; there's just nobody who can compare. People keep recommending Madeline Miller to me, but I just didn't warm to Song of Achilles, and therefore haven't read Circe. I'm lukewarm on Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad and Le Guin's Lavinia. For me, Natlie Haynes is the best of the pack for modern retellings, but Renault leaves everyone in the dust.
Cormac McCarthy isn't my cup of tea, but I do like Marguerite Yourcenar and the Thomas Cahill book sounds interesting. If you want to stay in Ireland for a bit when you finish Cahill, and if you like armchair-travel books, I recommend The Summer Isles by Philip Marsden, in which he sails alone up the Irish west coast (and then the Scottish west coast) reflecting on myth, history, and images of the Otherworld along the way. I first read The Summer Isles during the first Covid lockdown, when we couldn't travel anywhere, which may account for my particular passion for it -- but it's a good arm-chair adventure all the same.
I keep meaning to try Orhan Pamuk's work, and I'd be happy to put My Name is Red on my reading list if you can assure me the dog doesn't die. I just can't bear books or films in which animals die or are mistreated, especially dogs -- which is limiting, I admit.
LOL! Last things first: the dog doesn't die. I think I neglected to mention that My Name is Red is historical, set in Ottoman Empire. The corpse, the dog, and the coin only have one chapter each. But the corpse is the first and the dog is the fourth, establishing early on an unconventional perspective to the story.
I've mixed feelings about McCarthy so far. A friend of mine likes him very much. I'm not wild about his style but his sense of place is very much like my friend's if it were transposed from the South to the West. The details of plants and animals to evoke a scene is very similar.
Always happy to find another person who appreciates Renault. When I was an emotional puddle after dropping my daughter off at college many years ago, I drove to a bookstore and picked up a duplicate copy of The Persian Boy to read over a steak dinner with two very good glasses of red wine. TPB and The Last of the Wine are my favorites. I've not read any of her romances but I did track down The Charioteer, which if nothing else gave this cis heteronormative person a new thought: part of being gay (or somewhere on the LGGQT spectrum) is that there is generally a specific someone who makes you realize that your are. Going from memory, one man asks something like, "Who was your first?", meaning "that you loved this way," consummated or not. From what I've read after, this was groundbreaking for a novel in the 1950's.
A trip to Ireland is certainly a hypothetical possibility. Timing is up in the air between being semi-retired but still having obligations and a need to move from one coast to the other for daughter and granddaughter in the next few years. I really need to embrace traveling solo. So far three days of theatre, museums, and dining in the City after seeing my daughter/granddaughter in western MA is as much as I've stretched myself. I cling to the point of view that experiences are better when shared; otoh, I should not let that make me a hermit.
Thank you re feminist credentials. I've heard some say that no man can really be a feminist. I don't believe that but I understand that I'm handicapped with a Y-chromosome and so much societal history. I'm also acutely aware of the demographics of this salon and have to fight my way past fear of stating the well known and looking like an idiot.
Falling in love with Lee all over again is a gift of 2025 for me. I read several when I was younger & now, they are resonating differently for me. Love how books change as we, the reader, do.
I've decided to trade the present-day madness for a journey back to 19th century Pre-Raphaelite circles by re-reading Suzanne Fagence Cooper's How We Might Live: At Home with Jane and William Morris, which is delicious. I just started the re-read this morning. Being back in that place and time with those particular people is making me so goddamn happy on an otherwise grim day. (It's literally grim, too, over here on Dartmoor: grey, damp, and cold. As if even the English weather is protesting what is going on across the Atlantic.)
Though you and I have slightly different (though overlapping!) tastes in fantasy fiction, I'm in complete agreement with your thoughts about the field here, El. And having edited so many good writers of the 80s and 90s whose work is rarely talked about now (including some of Tanith's), I'm very much in favor of seeing this generation of authors acknowledged and read more widely.
I'm looking forward to Tessa's The Mercy Makers (I've loved her past books) and Katharine Beutner's book sounds intriguing. I'm off to order both now....
Thanks for the rec on the Morris book. I wasn’t aware of that one, but I’ve now ordered a copy.
I am also going to need a copy of the Morris book. Thanks for mentioning it.
For National Reading Day, I picked Seanan McGuire's new one, Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear in the Wayward Children series.
I'm too young for the yellow spine DAW books, but I have spent some time examining them at my local used bookstore. I think there's a fashion for "unclassifiable" stories now, actually, but only in the literary fiction area. Lots of literary fiction with fantasy or sci-fi elements but not actual genre fiction.
I've been a little obsessed with things written just prior to the outbreak of WW2, and I'll probably be reading one of those tomorrow (a short nonfiction book defending isolationism, which I'm looking forward to because I don't understand that view). If I may recommend something strange from that period, may I suggest a novella from 1939 called The Man Who Killed Hitler? It's a short tale of a man losing his grip on reality and identity and also fascism.
Queue, see my note about Alan Furst, above.
For those more musically inclined, I’ll point out an event Reggie Harris is participating in tomorrow, run by Betsy Rose, beginning at 12:30 EST. Here’s Reggie’s Facebook post about it:
https://www.facebook.com/635568315/posts/pfbid0KsTP1aqXPTFfKVpKrU8r7QpkhV81qF1S5bG9dM86eV3gj7cZiZCjgw3S3FjbkZGil/
Music is everything!!!
I am in the middle of Joan Aiken's Paget Family trilogy, which I believe I started on the advice of either Ellen or one of her friends. It's a great distraction. I guess I only thought of Aiken as the author of the Wolves of Willoughby Chase - so glad to discover the rest of her works.
If you can find it, _The Dragon Hoard_ is a gentle delight of a young adult novel by her.
I have two recommendations, quite different to each other. I started reading _Ammonite_ by Nicola Griffith, a few days ago, and am re-reading it -- skimming-- to get some of the plot points clear in my head. I just checked the publication date and am gobsmacked: 1992. I would have sworn it had been written in, oh 2022. It's definitely sci-fi.
The other is _Except the Queen_ by Jane Yolen, 2010. It is a fairy tale. It's a call for us to be "glow worms" in troubled times.
Wishing strength and courage to all.
Brigid Manning-Hamilton
I love Except the Queen! Though to give credit where credit is due, it's a collaborative novel written by Jane Yolen and Midori Snyder.
I had a book picked out long before today: the last of the Thursday Murder Club series. Was saving it just for this occasion. It is far less relentlessly cheerful than I had hoped but has still provided many good laughs. I have ordered Killingly so I can read it later in the week.
I’m in a mystery mode, the Deborah Crombie/ Sara Paretsky type. And I have Sara’s “Pay Dirt”, signed by her at a Belmont Books event last Friday, waiting for me for tomorrow. Also lots of house cleaning because I’m hosting my book group this Thursday. And there’s snow. And coffee, hot cocoa, and later wine.
The core of a New Year's Ritual is an Admonition to "Begin as you mean to go on...." And I find that to be sound for all sorts of Commencements....including the coming Trumpian Regime.....
If I read, it will be Heather Cox Richardson, Timothy Snyder and perhaps some MLK Jr. — But MOST Likely I will read over two poems I started today and then continue WRITING them....
1. (Bending) Towards Justice —
How does it bend
....that Moral Arc??
Surely NOT of Its
own accord....
I see NO evidence
of such a Grand Design
or Dynamic
no matter how
prophetically promised
[by Martin et al.....]
Yet I cannot help
but hope that it would
could...can be True...
If...
And Only if we
Put our hands
to the Bending....
[Seems whole right there..... BUT there's MORE I need to say....]
=====
2. NOT My PRESIDENT….
I should NOT say that DJTrump is
”Not My President….” for as far
as I can tell, he DID Win the 2024
Presidential Election and
I can’t truthfully say that that
Election was Stolen from Kamala Harris
(the candidate for whom I voted….)
I would NOT say the DJTrump is
“Not My President…..” for as
Disappointing as the turn-out and out-come
of the 2024 Election was and is
I can’t disengage myself from
the democratic process in spite of
my disengagement from the results…..
[That's the Opening Negativity..... The Middle Understanding comes next.....and it's a
sobering realization that My President is AGAINST Me and Mine.....]
[[The Ending of this poem is to be a Positive Closing Statement of What I can/want to/will do...]]
Okay.... So It's HCR's book on Democracy Rising; Snyder's book on Tyranny or Fascism; and if I could find my copy of Sheri Tepper's AWAKENERS Duology I would start re-reading that......
Thank you Ellen for this Question.....
I read Don't Bite the Sun for the first time just last week... And it's really an astonishingly good book.
Something I found fascinating, reading it as a trans woman and lesbian, was how normal gender transition was in it... but how almost all (maybe just all?) the various romantic moments were man/woman pairings, even if they did go on to gender swap later. It feels like there have been significant shifts in which aspects of queer identity are clearly visible and which are stigmatised in more recent decades.
Yes. Yes, indeed. Thanks for your insight.
Also, Ellen, thank you for this: '...the language of their narration was refined: function following form, maybe. It wasn’t just there to move the story along. The EVENTS were never considered more interesting than the way they were told.'
I get tired of being told, when I comment that poor writing makes it difficult to enjoy, and sometimes to even read, a book. That I shouldn't blame the author (at one level that's true because too many authors are deprived of editors) but some ppl who call themselves professional authors, in both literature and journalism, are making egregious errors of syntax, diction, acyrologia, that no editor should have to deal with.
I worried about that paragraph! Thank you so much for reassuring me that it made sense to you.
I am so delighted to read that Tremontaine is coming back. I was heartbroken when the people who did the initial distribution vanished.
Thank you - this makes me so happy!
Serial Box, the original (and initiating) publisher of Tremontaine shifted focus & changed its name to Realm, and for awhile you could still get both audio & e-reads of Tremontaine through them. Right now they're restructuring again, and it's hard to find . . . but not forever, I trust! I'll keep you informed.
Swordspoint was an absolutely formative book for me and I have devoured all of its sequels and prequels with joy.
Thanks for the book recs! I went to Mount Holyoke, so I’m particularly interested in that one. Instead of reading today, though, I’m going to check out a wedding venue for my daughter and her non-binary betrothed. That feels appropriately enough like a middle finger at today’s event. It’s at a castle! Well, a castle-themed hotel, which is as close as we get to castles here in Southern California.
Well that is justabout perfect.
Congratulations on your daughter's wedding.