What I Read This Year

Merry Christmas, everyone!  And happy holidays to anyone who celebrates differently, but that particular one is my holiday of choice.

There are still a few days left in this year, and I'm on holidays so I could conceivably read several more books, but in the interest of posting something on the blog before the end of the year, let's just review what I've read so far.


Top 100 Books

I did really really badly with my Top 100 books these this year, and I blame it all on Finnegans Wake.  I reviewed all of them, though, so if you're wondering what I thought, help yourself to some links.

• A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, 484 pages
• Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, 628 pages - WORST BOOK! :( :( :(
• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark, 128 pages
• Scoop by Evelyn Waugh, 308 pages

Random/Romance Books

I read a lot more random books this year, but I was pretty terrible at actually writing reviews for most of them.  And I read another straight-up romance novel for the first time in quite a while.  Once again, these are just the ones I reviewed.  Enjoy, if you like.  (There are a few that I've reviewed but haven't posted yet.  I'm not going to "spoil" my reviews, though, so you'll just have to wait until they go up eventually.)

• The Long Walk by Richard Bachman, 370 pages - BEST BOOK! :) :) :)
• Hull Zero Three by Greg Bear, 307 pages
• World War Z by Max Brooks, 420 pages
• The Magician King by Lev Grossman, 400 pages
• Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L. James, 514 pages
• Out of Oz by Gregory Maguire, 568 pages
• Battle Royale by Koushun Takami, 608 pages

Everything Else

Novels

I'm not sure if this is actually the case, but I feel like I didn't read quite as many novels this year as I usually do (or rather, I read way more non-fiction than usual, but we'll get to that in a second).

• The Gates by John Connolly, 293 pages

A book that I might've liked if I'd read it when I was 13 or 15, this was a young adult novel that didn't read well for an adult reader.  The humour just wasn't sharp enough.  Basically, the story is about a young boy named Samuel Johnson, with a dog named Boswell (?? the book is full of name jokes like this that don't quite hit, e.g. Samuel's teacher being named Mr. Hume), who discovers that the gates of Hell are opening in his neighbourhood.  But the characters don't really have any depth at all and I barely cared about them.  This one was hard to finish.

• The Scapegoat by Daphne du Maurier, 329 pages

I'm not sure if I've mentioned before that I really like Daphne du Maurier, even though The Parasites was pretty weird.  This book is a good one, though, about an Englishman who loves France and meets his doppelgänger while vacationing there.  The other man knocks him out and they trade lives.  Apparently there's a movie starring Alec Guinness that I'd like to find sometime.

• The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles, 467 pages

You may remember that I really liked The Magus, and I got this book out of the bargain section of the bookstore.  While maybe not quite as high tension as The Magus, The French Lieutenant's Woman is more of Fowles' fascination with double-crossing, plus a layer of metatextual stuff that's pretty fun.

• Why We Broke Up by Daniel Handler, 354 pages

I really really enjoyed this book, which is a hugely long letter from a girl named Min to a boy named Ed.  It's a little conventional in its views, maybe, but I feel like it also really captures what it's like to be a teenage girl who is a bit strange and in love with a boy who isn't.  (I can't say I went through anything quite like that as a teen, but I'm sure it would've played out a lot like this if I had.)

• Bag of Bones by Stephen King, 732 pages - LONGEST BOOK!

Latter day King, which is to say it's perfectly readable but also easily skippable.  He gets into some iffy territory with the racial politics in this book, about a writer who loses his wife and retreats to their summer home, only to find that things there are not quite as they should be... (DUN DUN DUN).

• The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin, 323 pages

I feel like this book, about a man who goes to make contact with the people on a planet where everyone is basically sexless except when they're in their mating periods, is a little bit dated.  I liked it a lot, but there was something missing that I couldn't quite put my finger on.

• A Lion Among Men by Gregory Maguire, 312 pages

Ugh, boring but unfortunately necessary reading for the Wicked Years series.  You'll see more about this in my review of Out of Oz.

• I Shall Wear Midnight by Terry Pratchett, 349 pages

The conclusion (probably?) of the very excellent Tiffany Aching branch of Pratchett's Discworld series.    Basically it's an exploration of Tiffany's youth and vocation of witchcraft.  I really wish this series was more popular, but I guess everyone right now has a taste for grim dystopia rather than humourous fantasy.

• The Android's Dream by John Scalzi, 394 pages

My first foray into the work of geek celebrity John Scalzi.  I wasn't very impressed, unfortunately.  The story is about relations between Earth and .. some aliens who are looking for a breed of sheep, and if they don't find it, it'll basically start interplanetary war.  There were some good sf concepts but I thought the humour was weak overall, and for an author who's supposed to be all about diversity or whatever, there was a noticeable dearth of female characters in the book.  I've heard his hard sf is better, though, so I'll probably give that a shot before I write him off.

Short Stories

So I kind of don't like short stories very much most of the time, mainly because I prefer the more thorough immersion of novels.  But stories are cool, too.  I read three collections of them this year.

• East and West by Pearl S. Buck, 202 pages

Asians and white people, in Asia and America.  Some interesting stuff here about the way cultures clash.

• Speak of the Devil edited by Alfred Hitchcock, 235 pages

Mystery stories!  I got this book out of my grandparents' basement, my grandma being a huge lover of mysteries.  (My mom is, too.  It's kind of strange that I never got into the genre at all.)  The stories are old and historically interesting (mistaken identities and plane rides that would be literally impossible in the present day and age), but the book overall was meh.  It's not staying in my library.

• Luminous Fish by Lynn Margulis, 180 pages

This is a book that I saw in a bookstore a long time ago and didn't buy, but it ended up stuck in my head, so I finally got it online.  The stories are about science and love.  It was decent but not what I'd been building it up as in my brain, unfortunately.

Graphic Thingies

I'm trying to get into other media a bit more, specifically graphic novels, but maybe things like plays and stuff eventually too.  Anyway I'm really bad at reading things with pictures because I don't look at pictures.

• Hark! A Vagrant by Kate Beaton, 166 pages

But I love Kate Beaton.  And my copy is signed by the author with a drawing.  Yay!

Non-Fiction

Now that I'm done school, I'm trying to get more into non-fiction because it's basically the only way I'm going to learn anything anymore.  Also I'm interested in basically everything and I wish that I could read everything about everything.

• A History of Marriage by Elizabeth Abbott, 404 pages

What it says on the tin.  I loved this book, although it got a bit long at the end, where it gets into modern times.  It only deals with "western" definitions of marriage, though, due to the topic being way too huge to cover for global definitions of the word.

• Gold Diggers by Charlotte Gray, 385 pages

The Klondike gold rush!  A fun book and really interesting.

• Loving with a Vengeance by Tania Modleski, 114 pages

Academic exploration of romance novels and soap operas.  There were interesting things in this book (e.g. how the predictability of the romance plot is the only way that the books can work, because otherwise the hero would be a cruel, terrifying creep), but there was also a lot of Freud.  I'm hoping to read some more up to date discussions of the romance genre soonish.

• Future Shock by Alvin Toffler, 432 pages

An excellent discussion of the rapidity of change in the modern world and the unintended consequences for people.  While I find technophobia a bit annoying, Toffler makes a really compelling argument for why all new technology shouldn't be immediately embraced.

• The Purity Myth by Jessica Valenti, 262 pages

A book about virginity and how silly it is.  I liked it but found that it really only scratched the surface of things rather than thoroughly discussing them.

• Memories of the Future, Vol. I by Wil Wheaton, 135 pages

Wil Wheaton's recaps of the first half of the first season of Star Trek TNG episodes.  I really wish he'd release Vol. II at some point.  Anyway these are amusing and they're one of the reasons I became a fan of his in the first place.

• Sunken Treasure by Wil Wheaton, 84 pages - SHORTEST BOOK!

I had to buy this book at the Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo last year because I forgot to bring Memories of the Future with me so that I could get it signed.  But this is just a Wil Wheaton sampler, basically, and it's good, so that's alright.

• A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft, 133 pages

Oh.  My.  God.  I was absolutely not prepared for how fiercely Wollstonecraft makes her point about giving women the same rights and opportunities as men (I'm misstating it a bit, but it's hard to summarize quickly).  I think it's pretty safe to say that she's one of my new heroes.

And that's all, folks!  Total pages read for all of these books is 11020, which means that, as of writing, I've read about 31 pages per day this year.  That's about the same as what I did last year.  I really need to up my game.

And what about you?  Any standout books that you read this year?  I'm always looking to add to my reading list.

Awkward!

"Othello with his occupation gone," she teased.
"Othello was a nigger," I said.

Ok, so, uh, the quote above is from A Farewell to Arms. This isn't the first example of the "N word" on The List (Scoop, I'm looking at you), but it's definitely the most shocking so far.

Every possible swear word in the rest of the book is censored, and then BOOM. Referring to a Shakespearean character, our main character Frederic Henry has only this to say. I'm not an enormous fan of this character to begin with, and this kind of attitude certainly doesn't help.

Current Distractions, Belated November 2012 Edition

I tapped out of NaNoWriMo way earlier this month than I ever have before.  Mostly because I hated my novel, but also because...

I went to Ottawa!

I'm pretty pumped that I've finally visited the nation's capital, plus Ontario.

That's right, I've never been to Ontario before.

Possibly even worse for the blog, though, my work schedule changed when I got back from the trip, so I've basically barely been home all month, and I haven't been writing many reviews, although I've gobbled up a few books.  Still, I'm really going to try to stick with doing a post ever two weeks.

What else have I done this month, though?

I'm not even sure.

74. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

Holy hell. Finally a book written in the 20s. -M.R.

Uncomfortable Plot Summary: Ernest Hemingway recounts his exploits disguised as fiction.

Year Published: 1929
Pages: 484 (in large print, bitchez)
First Sentence: In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains.
Rating: 3/3 (read it!)

Review:
So let's talk about Ernest Hemingway. For some reason I know him as a famous misogynist, but I don't remember where I got that idea. Ten Things I Hate About You? I have no clue. (In an effort to figure out where this accusation comes from before reading much/any of his fiction, I did read this article about Hemingway and early 20th century crises of manliness that was kind of intriguing.)

I read For Whom the Bell Tolls a few years ago and mostly came away from it with the feeling that I really don't know anything about Spain. Also the book was quite a bit of a slog, so I'm relieved to report that A Farewell to Arms is quite a bit better. Like, way better.

But it also makes it extremely clear why Hemingway is considered a misogynist.

The book is the story of Lieutenant Frederic Henry, who is, for some reason, an American driving ambulances for the Italian army during World War I. (I'll tell you right now, it took me an embarrassingly long time to remember that the Italians were Good Guys that time around.) Henry meets an English not-quite-nurse named Catherine Barkley, and then gets injured. Catherine ends up caring for him in the hospital, and Henry ends up caring for her in the hospital by getting her pregnant. (I saw a Hemingway biopic called In Love and War about a million years ago starring, no kidding, Chris O'Donnell in the lead role, that basically fictionalized the real-life version of this story. Y u so semi-autobiographical, Hemingway?) The ordeal of the story is basically Henry and Catherine's effort to stay together during wartime and also a time when unmarried women really weren't supposed to be having babies.

So this is a love story, but just look at this:

"And that's it?" Catherine said. "She says just what he wants her to?"
"Not always."
"But I will. I'll say just what you wish and I'll do what you wish and then you will never want any other girls, will you?" She looked at me very happily. "I'll do what you want and say what you want and then I'll be a great success, won't I?"
"Yes."
"What would you like me to do now that you're all ready?"
"Come to the bed again."
"All right. I'll come."
"Oh, darling, darling, darling," I said.
"You see," she said. "I do anything you want."
"You're so lovely."
"I'm afraid I'm not very good at it yet."
"You're lovely."
"I want what you want. There isn't any me any more. Just what you want."
"You sweet."
"I'm good. Aren't I good? You don't want any other girls, do you?"
"No."
"You see? I'm good. I do what you want."

I hope I don't have to explain why that passage makes me a bit uncomfortable. Catherine doesn't really seem like a fleshed out person, just a sort of beautiful fantasy creature.

I'm also not going to pretend that that ruined the book for me, though. There's strong stuff in it, Hemingway being, after all, the manliest of manly men. The style took a bit of getting used to (see a probable upcoming post on the topic for a more thorough discussion of this), but after that I had no problem with it. Ironweed was a little bit like this, although Hemingway is a more masterful writer than Kennedy, conveying everything he needs to in spite of his sparseness, at least emotionally. I found most of the actual action really dry, though.

The novel gets stronger as it goes on, and hopefully I'm not spoiling too much by saying that there's a lot of moving stuff that comes up at the end when Catherine finally goes into labour. (Not to mention my modern horror throughout at her constant alcohol consumption and apparent total lack of prenatal care.)

There are further Hemingway novels ahead on The List, but for the time being I'll say that this one is well worth a read, long before I'd recommend picking up For Whom the Bell Tolls.

- - - - -

"I wish there was some place we could go," I said. I was experiencing the masculine difficulty of making love very long standing up.

- - - - -

"Yes," said Gino. "But those were Frenchmen and you can work out military problems clearly when you are fighting in somebody else's country."
"Yes," I agreed, "when it is your own country you cannot use it so scientifically."
"The Russians did, to trap Napoleon."
"Yes, but they had plenty of country. If you tried to retreat to trap Napoleon in Italy you would find yourself in Brindisi."
"A terrible place," said Gino. "Have you ever been there?"
"Not to stay."
"I am a patriot," Gino said. "But I cannot love Brindisi or Taranto."

- - - - -

#50SoG

Here's a summary of all the stuff I tweeted while reading Fifty Shades of Grey in August and September. Apologies to those of you who are already following me on Twitter.

Have finally started reading Fifty Shades of Grey. Agh.

9:05 PM - 22 Aug 2012

Agh. Just noticed it's written in present tense. Agh. #50SoG

9:16 PM - 22 Aug 2012

"Penetrating gaze" lol #50SoG

9:20 PM - 22 Aug 2012

Are "long-fingered hands" a thing that women are into? I picture creepy spidery fingers when I read that. #50SoG

9:41 PM - 22 Aug 2012

Two chapters in and they haven't even kissed yet? What kind of romance novel is this?! #50SoG

9:49 PM - 22 Aug 2012

Is it weird that I still haven't figured out who'll be the D and who'll be the s? Also that no one's spoiled me about that yet? #50SoG

8:29 PM - 23 Aug 2012

No one says/thinks the word "crap" this often. #50SoG

8:32 PM - 23 Aug 2012

Ana is so ridiculously embarrassed about wanting like the most minor things. #50SoG

8:39 PM - 23 Aug 2012

"I wonder what it would be like to run my fingers through his hair--OH GOD HOW DARE I WHAT SORT OF DIRTY THOUGHT IS THAT" #50SoG

8:40 PM - 23 Aug 2012

"I'm used to getting my own way, Anastasia.. In all things." Ok spoiler alert he's the D. #50SoG

8:44 PM - 23 Aug 2012

"I inhale his clean, vital scent." Agh. #50SoG

8:49 PM - 23 Aug 2012

Not saying that people who don't drink or have sex during uni are bad or anything, but Ana's even more of a wet blanket than I am. #50SoG

9:01 PM - 23 Aug 2012

lololol Ana drunk dials Christian. Best part of this book so far. #50SoG

9:06 PM - 23 Aug 2012

I hope the T in CTG stands for Tiberius. No wait I don't. #50SoG

9:11 PM - 23 Aug 2012

"I mean, I'm all for pushing limits, but really this is beyond the pale." #50SoG

9:15 PM - 23 Aug 2012

Yeah right, not even a millionaire wouldn't have to wait for a glass of water at the bar. #50SoG

9:18 PM - 23 Aug 2012

Wow, these people in this book about sex are sure uncomfortable with their sexuality! #50SoG

9:22 PM - 23 Aug 2012

"He's my very own Christian Grey flavor popsicle." Agh. #50SoG

3:01 PM - 26 Aug 2012

ANA DOESN'T HAVE A COMPUTER. WHAT IS THIS I DON'T EVEN. #50SoG

9:30 PM - 28 Aug 2012

Reading through Christian and Ana's email exchanges is maybe the worst thing I've read in any novel ever. #50SoG

6:48 PM - 29 Aug 2012

Keep in mind "worst thing I've read" is always and forever short for "worst thing I've read with the exception of #FinnegansWake."

6:50 PM - 29 Aug 2012

Ana's stepdad person is watching a soccer game on tv. In America. NOT LIKELY. #50SoG

7:15 PM - 29 Aug 2012

Was it something I ate? Oh wait, no, it couldn't be that because I never eat anything for some reason. #50SoG

8:27 PM - 29 Aug 2012

"No one's ever said no to me before. And it's so - hot." I know this isn't meant to be rapey but it kinda is. #50SoG

7:44 PM - 7 Sep 2012

Somehow the characterization of Kate strikes me as the most abysmal thing about this book. #50SoG

7:50 PM - 7 Sep 2012

"My voice is quiet, unable to hide the anxiety in my voice." REALLY?! NO ONE caught that in the editing stage?! #50SoG

7:00 PM - 8 Sep 2012

The word "peek" appears 20 times in this book, usually in the phrase "I peek up at him." #50SoG

7:14 PM - 8 Sep 2012

You should not need to be "peeking" at a person you're in a relationship with/fucking. At least not that often. #50SoG

7:15 PM - 8 Sep 2012

#50SoG: He's got right under my skin... literally. Me: *cackles*

7:19 PM - 8 Sep 2012

Ana thinks she could be friends with a bohemian-looking black woman. I don't think Ana could be friends with anyone. #50SoG #TeamKate

7:22 PM - 8 Sep 2012

Ana: "To keep myself awake, I start a long stream of consciousness to Christian on my laptop." Me: Please God no. #50SoG

8:30 PM - 8 Sep 2012

"I gaze at my mom. She *is* on her fourth marriage. Maybe she does know something about men after all." Hahahaha what. #50SoG

8:36 PM - 8 Sep 2012

"Holy fuck, he's here." I don't know how anyone can find Christian Grey sexy when Ana is LITERALLY AFRAID OF HIM. #50SoG

8:53 PM - 8 Sep 2012

What does it say about me and/or about #50SoG that I think the amount of BDSM in it so far has been very minimal?

7:34 PM - 10 Sep 2012

People say things "dryly" no fewer than 24 times in this book. #50SoG

8:22 PM - 10 Sep 2012

Current Distractions, October 2012 Edition

I'm not exactly sure what I've been doing all month besides working, trying to get myself to be a bit active, and watching assorted television shows, specifically Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and The Walking Dead, but also Breaking Bad and Futurama.

As usual I got my Socializing Engineers post for the month up just under the wire.

I have, however, been able to schedule posts for this blog every other week all the way up to the end of December, by which time I anticipate having been able to read The Day of the Locust. What I'm trying to imply in a roundabout way is that I'm attempting to get a regular posting schedule set up again, even if it's not a real, live review every two weeks.

It's highly doubtful that I'll be around much in November, though, because it's NaNoWriMo (aka my favourite month of the year and the only time I write fiction anymore) and also because I'll be going to Ottawa! All told, I'll be home for under ten nights all month.

Happy Halloween, everyone!

R26. Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L. James

Year Published: 2011
Pages: 514

Pairing: College student/new grad and businessman
First Sentence: I scowl with frustration at myself in the mirror.
Climax: I cry out a wordless, passionate plea as I touch the sun and burn, falling around him, falling down, back to a breathless, bright summit on Earth. He slams into me and stops abruptly as he reaches his climax, pulling at my wrists, and sinking gracefully and wordlessly onto me.

Review:
It's not exactly that I'm all talk about not reviewing romance novels. But when my friend invited me to participate in a semi-literary discussion of Fifty Shades of Grey, it was an opportunity that I just couldn't pass up. Almost all of the other participants in the discussion were English majors who used fancy terms like "the text" instead of "this fucking book," so I got a bit of an inferiority complex about it, but now here I am to post my thoughts on my blog where I get to be the loudest voice in the room.

Moving on.

If you haven't heard of Fifty Shades of Grey yet, this is probably not the blog for you. 50SoG is the first part of a trilogy about Anastasia Steele, a young woman just finishing her undergrad career, who meets Christian Grey, a zillionaire. Christian is into BDSM and is also "fifty shades of fucked up," but Ana loves him because he is very handsome and ... well, mostly just the handsome thing. They basically dance around each other and the contract that Christian wants Ana to sign saying that she'll be his sub, have lots of sex, and then at the end of the book, Ana leaves Christian because she can't do the BDSM thing. That is all that happens.

I suppose I should also mention that this book is based on the best-selling Twilight saga. Which is hilarious because I've heard Twilight called "abstinence porn," and 50SoG falls squarely into the "actual porn" category.

There are about a million issues with this book that I probably don't have time to get into right now, but we'll go through some of the most glaring ones.

1. The Characters

Pretty much every single person in this book is terrible.

Christian is bland and creepy, controlling, all that good stuff. He's apparently so good looking that all the women around him are constantly creaming their jeans, but it seems to me like anyone who actually met him would instantly hate him. He won't let Ana drive her own car, he dictates what she eats, and possibly most egregious of all he actually shows up at the hotel where she's having drinks with her mother across the country. So romantic, amirite ladiez? I really don't know how anyone can find him appealing while reading this book when Ana herself is clearly afraid of him. He's also the mega-rich owner of a huge company but he never does any actual work. How nice for him.

And Ana is just absolutely awful, by the way. She's a college student with approximately two friends who has never been drunk, had sex, or even liked a boy. She does not own a computer. The drinking and sex aren't really the major issue here, I know several people who don't drink or who waited to have sex until they got married. It's more the fact that Ana has no moral objection to either of those things and yet she somehow hasn't done either of them or ever even thought about doing either of them. Not only that, but all the guys in the book are pretty much throwing themselves at her, and it's also pretty much a non-stop drinkfest from page one on. Basically what I'm trying to say is that this is very inconsistent. Virginity, by the way, is an old trope in the romance genre, so old that it has actually fallen out of favour because it's ridiculous, except to E. L. James I guess.

Because the book comes to us through Ana's first-person narration, every other character is filtered through her and Christian is the only one who fares well at all.

Her supposed best friend, Kate, is portrayed probably more variably than any other character I've ever encountered, not just in this book but in any book. Apparently Ana doesn't realize this, but she actually hates her best friend, who she thinks of as a rich whore.

Ana's parents don't come out looking much better. Her mom is a flighty airhead who has been married four times. Her (step)dad is a taciturn and simple fellow. Ana is incredibly condescending to both of them.

And ¡Dios mio! Don't get me started on José, her Mexican stereotype.

2. The Writing

To an extent all of the characters are just victims of the writing. 50SoG needed a very firm editorial hand and apparently didn't get it.

Ana thinks the phrase "holy crap" about five hundred thousand times. She also "peeks" at Christian about eight hundred thousand times, and they both say things "dryly" no fewer than a million times. I understand that words will get repeated sometimes, but if it's so often that I start to notice, it's a problem. Not to mention that climax scene I quoted above, where "wordless(ly)" appears twice in as many sentences.

The dialogue is absolutely abysmal in places. At one point Kate says to Ana, "Yeah, took almost a year to have my first orgasm through penetrative sex and here you are... first time?" Penetrative sex?! I appreciate that these kinds of terms are helpful in things like sex advice columns but for casual girl talk between a couple of friends this makes no sense.

The weirdest/worst thing, though, would be all of the Britishisms:

• "I very rarely throw my toys out of the pram"
  
• "Apart from a silly drunk girl ringing him in the middle of the night"
  
• "My first time was horrid"
  
• "Just some tea would be lovely"

No wait. The actual worst thing is that the D/s contract is reproduced in its entirety within the book. And reappears at least once. I mean I know I'm not a published author or anything, but this is Writing 101 level stuff.

No wait again. The really, truly worst thing about 50SoG is that Ana has an inner goddess and a "subconscious" which are these really bizarre personifications of her libido and her conscience. This is incredibly lazy shorthand for her conflicted feelings, and also just really... annoying.

3. The Sex

I suppose this could technically qualify as a subset of my second point, but whatever. I've talked about the difficulty of writing about sex before. I'm not sure if it's actually the hardest thing to write (that distinction probably goes to death), but it's certainly up there.

Not to mention that even really good erotica isn't going to turn everyone on, mainly because different people get off on different things. Still, this erotica wasn't very good. Any sort of flow that it could be said to have was frequently interrupted by Ana's exclamations of "holy cow" or "wow" or what have you. Rhythm is crucial to good erotica, because it allows the reader to forget the absurdity of sentences like "tantalizingly, he slid his cock into her wet pussy."

Also, this book is famous for being full of BDSM but really I found that it's just alluded to more than anything else. Which is to say that they constantly talk about dominance and submission but the content is really tame as far as I'm concerned. I'm not sure what it says about me and my sex life that I think that, but I'll spare you that discussion.

4. The So-Called Romance

I touched on this briefly above, but I'm a bit mystified as to how anyone finds Christian alluring when he's this changeable, scary dude. Money, I guess, and looks. Which is disappointing.

Sadly I think the reason so many people are finding a romantic love story in 50SoG is because the book keeps telling them it's a romantic love story. There's a certain amount of mystery in every love story (why this particular person, and not someone else?), but the connection between Ana and Christian seems to be purely a physical one, with some very superficial emotional trappings i.e. he's wounded and she yearns to fix him. Beyond that it's hard to tell if the two of them have anything in common at all. (And how could they have much, when he's a billionaire and she's pretty much living on Kate's charity, as far as I could tell?)

In a shorter book (A Room with a View for example), I'm prepared to accept a certain amount of telling when it comes to how the central pair might feel about one another. But 50SoG has over 500 pages to convince me that Ana and Christian are meant to be together, and it fails.

So, how to wrap this up.

This book is a very clear spiritual successor to Twilight, in that the same things that obviously made Twilight popular are at work here, too. The bad boy who finds the dowdy, bookish girl inexplicably alluring, and changes all his misguided ways just for her is one of the most familiar daydreams of my teenage years. I can't even pretend that I've abandoned it entirely in early adulthood. But these days I'm more interested in finding a person who is stable and who wants to do fun things with me.

I'd like to see women reading better erotica and overall better novels than this, though, without the extremely problematic portrayals of sexual and romantic relationships.

75. Scoop by Evelyn Waugh

Uncomfortable Plot Summary: You can't believe everything you read in the paper.

Year Published: 1938
Pages: 308
First Sentence: While still a young man, John Courteney Boot had, as his publisher proclaimed, 'achieved an assured and enviable position in contemporary letters'.
Rating: 3/3 (read it!)

Review:
I never would've believed that the man who wrote Brideshead Revisited could write a book like Scoop, and yet here we are. Whereas Brideshead Revisited was a largely unremarkable dirge of a book, Scoop is basically hilarious and I loved it.

My word association for "scoop" has everything to do with ice cream, so although it makes sense that the book is in fact about reporters, that came as a bit of a surprise to me initially. Our lead reporter/main character is a young man by the name of Boot, who is sent to a fictional African country called Ishmaelia to cover the civil war supposedly breaking out there, for his paper, The Brute. When, after a several-weeks-long ordeal, Boot finally arrives in Ishmaelia's capital, Jacksonburg, he finds a lot of other reporters there but not much going on. Meanwhile, he is continuously receiving telegrams from his paper requesting news stories. While his colleagues send various fabrications to their own papers, Boot dawdles and makes eyes at a young woman named Kätchen.

The novel satirizes the sensational foreign correspondent journalism of the 1930s, so while it's not entirely relevant in today's globalized and hyper-connected world, its points are still sharp and it's a very entertaining read regardless. It maybe needs that relevance to really justify its presence on The List, but frankly after the last few books I've had to slog through I care more about entertainment value than deserving.

I should caution, before I go too much further, though, that this isn't exactly the most racially sensitive book out there. I hesitate to comment on matters of race most of the time because it's not something that I know enough about or am finely enough attuned to in order to be able to do so without looking like a tool. In this case, though, if I'm going to recommend the book I have to at least acknowledge that it's far from perfect in this respect. Here it seems to me as if the people of Ishmaelia are generally sort of indifferent to the European reporters and would rather just be left alone, which is all fine, however a lot of the finer/more specific details fall closer to or over the line. The book is generally poking fun at everybody, but it's a different kind of "fun" in some cases. It's no Lord Jim or anything, anyway (I mean that in a good way, although I apparently completely left any discussion of race out of that particular review).

Moving on, all of the characters were great. Boot's family, in particular, dealt with most near the end of the book, are just pure gold. The writing is generally solid and even superb in places, in the sense that really comedic writing is extremely difficult to do, but Waugh succeeds (again, that bit with Boot's family is genius). He uses the Hemingway trick of not telling you how anyone is feeling, but keeps his vocabulary large, to good effect. I can't confirm this, but I feel like there are echoes of this version of Waugh in Terry Pratchett's writing, both in terms of rhythm and presentation (Pratchett novels, however, tend to have a bit more intricacy in their plotting).

Anyway, just read this book, ok?

- - - - -

The sole stationary objects were a chrys-elephantine effigy of Lord Copper in coronation robes, rising above the throng, on a polygonal malachite pedestal, and a concierge, also more than life size, who sat in a plate glass enclosure, like a fish in an aquarium, and gazed at the agitated multitude with fishy, supercilious eyes. Under his immediate care were a dozen page boys in sky blue uniforms, who between errands pinched one another furtively on a long bench. Medals of more battles than were ever fought by human arms or on earthly fields glittered on the porter's chest.

- - - - -

Current Distractions, September 2012 Edition

Ok everybody. I know that the blog has really been languishing lately and I can't do much more than apologize at the moment.

I'm going to lay some blame on the fact that I'm working away from home at the moment, and have been since July, and am trying to get back into the rhythm of that kind of work again.

Some of the media that's been occupying my attention in the interim:

Adventure Time - I've basically been reading all of these comics, and while I'm not an Adventure Time superfan like everyone else seems to be, I enjoy them nevertheless.

Community - I watched the first season of this show on DVD probably a year and a half ago at least, and just finally got around to watching the second season on Netflix this month. I'll be watching the third season, too, I'm just going to take a break and watch another season of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine first.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - I've been slowly reading through this book and it is basically blowing my mind. Every page makes me a bigger fan of Mary Wollstonecraft.

That's kind of it, though.

Tomorrow I have plans to finally get my hands on Scoop, and yes, I realize that I've been saying similar things since before summer or so. This time I really mean it, though.

Current Distractions, Extremely Belated August 2012 Edition

Friends, I am alive! Unfortunately that's about all I have to say at the moment, but hopefully I'll have a few things to post about in the coming weeks. Life has just been crazy lately.

Current Distractions, Belated July 2012 Edition

So my excuse for the lack of posting this month is about as lame as ever, but it's basically just that I've been up north working again and only have weekends at home, and time management is hard, dudes and ladies. I'm going to try to make it up to you in the near future with some supplemental posts, including one specifically about what it's like working camp jobs. You can consider the picture in this post as a bit of a teaser for that one.

I still don't have Scoop, so I may end up buying it. Hopefully it's good.

A Series of Posts About Series - Summary

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

Well, I'm all out of unfinished series, finally. This post is just to summarize all of them in one place. So:

• Acorna Universe by Anne McCaffrey, Margaret Ball, Elizabeth Ann Scarborough
  
• Asian Saga by James Clavell
  
• Bitterbynde Trilogy by Cecilia Dart-Thornton
  
• The Black Book (Diary of a Teenage Stud) by Jonah Black
  
• The Dark Tower by Stephen King
  
• Discworld by Terry Pratchett
  
• Dragonriders of Pern by Anne McCaffrey
  
• Earth's Children by Jean M. Auel
  
• Foundation by Isaac Asimov
  
• Gemma Doyle by Libba Bray
  
• Green Rider by Kristen Britain
  
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
  
• The Inheritance Cycle by Christopher Paolini
  
• King Raven by Stephen R. Lawhead
  
• Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
  
• The Looking Glass Wars by Frank Beddor
  
• The Lost Years of Merlin by T. A. Barron
  
• Ringworld by Larry Niven
  
• Twilight by Stephenie Meyer
  
• The Warlord Chronicles by Bernard Cornwell
  
• Various YA series by various authors
  

So friends, have you read/finished any of these? How many different series are you currently in the middle of? Do you sometimes get turned off of reading a book when you find out that it's part of a series?

Basically just let me know what you think!

A Series of Posts About Series - Part 3

This is the third part of my post about all the series of books that I've started and haven't finished yet. Part 1 is here and part 2 is here.


Asian Saga
Author: James Clavell

I didn't do my research properly, so my list of series is out of order. Nooooo. More to the point, Shogun is a pretty great book. It's not perfect, and I thought the love story was really missing heat, but the book couldn't fail to be awesome since it's set in feudal Japan i.e. there are totally samurai in this book. But the rest of the series is set all over the place in Asia (Japanese POW camp, Hong Kong, Iraq) and in time, meaning that the coolest things about Shogun probably don't carry over to the rest of the series.

Will I Finish It? I definitely liked the first book enough that I'd be willing to read more by James Clavell, so I might cherry pick some of the other books in the series. I won't decide whether I'll read the whole thing until then.


The Looking Glass Wars
Author: Frank Beddor

If The Wicked Years is a gritty reboot of Oz, The Looking Glass Wars is a gritty reboot of Wonderland, in which Alice is actually a princess of Wonderland, struggling to save it from the tyrannical rule of her Aunt Redd. While the first two books are occasional victims of excessive cleverness and I-see-what-you-did-there, they're still pretty enjoyable to read.

Will I Finish It? There's only one book to go, and lots that I'm curious (and curiouser!) about, so I'll definitely be picking up the final book.


The Lost Years of Merlin
Author: T. A. Barron

This series is the origin story of Merlin (of Arthurian fame, maybe you've heard of him). I read the first several books during my teen fantasy binges, and I love King Arthur almost/exactly as much as I love Robin Hood, so there's that.

Will I Finish It? I'm not sure. Like so much that I read when I was a teenager, I'm not sure if these books were actually good or not. It's on the backburner, anyway.


Ringworld
Author: Larry Niven

I read Ringworld four or five years ago and it was amazing. From what I remember, a man, a girl, and two aliens take a spaceship out to investigate a mysterious ring built around a star and awesomeness ensues. In the introduction to the edition I read, Niven mentioned how he wrote the sequel, Ringworld Engineers because a bunch of insane (or awesome, I can't decide which) people called him on his bad physics. WHAT. Anyway, the female character who is bred for luck is a really cool concept, I love love love megastructures, and the rah rah engineers aspect of the series scratches my professional pride.

Will I Finish It? I'm not sure that I want to read all four books, but Ringworld Engineers is on my reading list for sure.


Twilight
Author: Stephenie Meyer

Before you say anything, I read the first Twilight book so that I could put my money where my mouth was in terms of ridiculing the series. Having done that, it was extremely obvious why teenage girls love these books: the first one was a slightly more polished version of the story I myself was writing over and over again when I was about 15, where the attractive troubled boy is drawn to the quiet, unremarkable girl, and loves her forever and ever.

Will I Finish It? I hardly think this needs to be asked. One book was enough.


The Warlord Chronicles
Author: Bernard Cornwell

My flute teacher (really) lent me the first of this historical fiction trilogy about King Arthur, and it goes right where King Raven goes wrong in terms of trying to put a realistic spin on a legend. The first two books have really influenced my ideas of ancient battles, at the very least (e.g. how keen a horse might be to break a line of spears, or the problem of corpses). However, I never quite managed to finish the third book.

Will I Finish It? I will, I'm just not sure when I'll get around to it.


Various YA series
Author: several

While lots of other people were apparently reading awesome stuff during childhood, by the likes of Roald Dahl and Judy Blume, I feel like I mostly read garbage mass market paperback series like the Sweet Valley Twins, its variants e.g. Sweet Valley High, the Babysitters Club, its variants e.g. Babysitter's Little Sister, and Nancy Drew Mysteries (I actually have zero regrets about Nancy Drew and I'm planning to devote a whole post to her one of these days). Now that I'm thinking about it, I wasn't just reading terrible things when I was a kid, and maybe I should do a post about my “formative books,” too...

Will I Finish It? I got most of these terrible books from a library trailer (not sure what this should actually be called) that stopped by my street each week, and basically had to get whichever books from these series that they happened to have, so I never read the entire things. At this point, that's ok with me, though. I won't be revisiting any of them anytime soon.


...TO BE CONCLUDED...

R25. The Magician King by Lev Grossman

Year Published: 2011
Pages: 400
First Sentence: Quentin rode a gray horse with white socks named Dauntless.

Review:
Right off the bat, I'll tell you that The Magician King is the sequel to The Magicians, and thus this review is going to have a bunch of spoilers in it for The Magicians. So for those who want to stop reading here, I'll say that I really highly recommend The Magicians, and only slightly less highly recommend The Magician King.

For those who don't care about spoilers and are still reading, the reason that I recommend the sequel less highly is that it's just really unnecessary and doesn't have enough magic in it.

You may remember The Magicians as being the best book I read last year. I read it after A Bend in the River and it's what convinced me to love reading again. The story is basically Harry Potter + Chronicles of Narnia + college angst, and it was the most enjoyable fantasy book I'd encountered in quite a while. Quentin Coldwater is a high school senior obsessed with a series of children's books about a magical place called Fillory. He's pretty mopey and, like, 75% of the people read the book seem to hate him with a violent passion that I reserve for the likes of Sebastian Dangerfield and, dare I say it, James Joyce.

 < MEGA FIRST BOOK SPOILERS >

Imagine Quentin's surprise when he's randomly selected to take an entrance exam at a magic school called Brakebills. His experience there is basically regular college debauchery, except while learning magic instead of your typical post-secondary courses. Quentin and his bunch of friends graduate and then basically squander their lives in magic-enabled decadence.

Imagine his surprise again, then, when it turns out that Fillory is as real as magic is, and the stories in the books are true but darker. Insanity ensues, by which I mean a lot of death and destruction, and Quentin goes back to reality and gives up magic.

The first book ends with Quentin's return to Fillory, with his friends Eliot, Janet, and Julia, to become kings and queens.

The Magicians was full of really intense, interesting magic, which provided relief from all of the angst. It also had some really scary monsters, particularly "The Beast," a very powerful humanoidish thing whose first appearance involves immobilizing an entire classroom full of people and then killing one of them.

< / MEGA FIRST BOOK SPOILERS (SORT OF) >

Imagine no one's surprise when Mr. Impossible to Please (i.e. Quentin) gets bored again at the beginning of The Magician King and decides that he wants to go on a quest to liven things up a bit. Insanity ensues once more, this time with ocean and inter-dimensional voyages, interspersed with the story of how Quentin's friend Julia developed her powers (she didn't manage to qualify to attend Brakebills, and thus had to use other means to learn how to do magic).

If you're one of the people who doesn't despise every character in these books for being too debauched, the next thing that may trip you up is Grossman's style, which is too expository to be truly great, i.e. he does rather more telling than showing. It works just fine for me, but I can see how it might not quite be your cup of tea.  The climax also lacks punch, although the shock of the culmination of Julia's story makes up for most of that.

As I say above, though, the main problems with The Magician King are a lack of magic and lack of reason for existing.

Where the original has all kinds of interesting magic in it, it's extremely sparse here. Quentin storms a castle at one point, but that's basically his lone grand magical display, and there isn't much else to be found in the book, outside of Julia's explorations. Even those are more alluded to than actually described. I was so excited to read this book because I wanted to see more of the cool things that Grossman might come up with, even though...

...As much as I enjoyed the book (even with its problems), I don't think it needed to be written. The Magicians has a nice open ending, after which everyone presumably lives (as) happily (as possible under the circumstances) ever after, but The Magician King seems to reduce the scope of that ending in disappointing ways.  I read this book for the same reason that I played Portal 2: I adored the original so much that I looked past all my doubts about a sequel because I just wanted more.  But where Portal 2 deepened its universe and retained everything that made me love the first game, The Magician King fell short of those marks.

I'd say that the book is still worth a read, but you could just as easily stop reading after The Magicians and not be missing too terribly much.

Quotations:

"Oh, Jolly," Janet said. She crossed her arms in mock outrage. "You should have let us catch it! Now it'll only tell your future."
   She sounded not at all disappointed by this, but Jollyby—a superb all-around huntsman but no National Merit Scholar—looked vexed. His furry brows furrowed.
   "Maybe we could pass it around," Quentin said. "It could do each of us in turn."
   "It's not a bong, Quentin," Janet said.

A Series of Posts About Series - Part 2

This is the second part of my post about all the series of books that I've started and haven't finished yet. Part 1 is here.


Foundation
Author: Isaac Asimov

This series is the first one where I became keenly aware of the difference between writing order and chronological order (I'm one of those people who thinks The Magician's Nephew should be read before The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe). The original Foundation trilogy is an sf classic, and psychohistory, the mathematical method of predicting the future, is in it, fully formed (although the book itself carries a lot of 50s weirdness, like how there isn't a single woman in the entire thing, if I recall correctly). Prelude to Foundation, which wasn't written until much later, tells the story of how Hari Seldon develops psychohistory in the first place, and of course I read it first because it comes first chronologically. As much as I love Isaac Asimov, Foundation the book was kind of a weird step down after that.

Will I Finish It? Contrary to everything I just said, I do still want to read the last two books in the original trilogy, but I'm not sure whether I'll read any of the other newer books. I'm fairly certain that Asimov has other works that are worth checking out first.


Gemma Doyle
Author: Libba Bray

This YA trilogy caught my eye thanks to the corset on the first book's cover (I am being serious right now). Gemma Doyle is a student at a girls' school that isn't quite what it seems i.e. there is magic involved. Not a very demanding read, and it falls victim to what I like to call the Historical Tomboy trope, where the main character is especially rebellious against gender roles of her time. (This is an exceptionally irritating trope in modern fantasy, but that's another topic for another time.) Still, Gemma's a likeable character and fun to follow around.

Will I Finish It? I'll probably pick up the final book in the trilogy sooner rather than later. The books read quickly and I'm interested to see how the story will end.


Green Rider
Author: Kristen Britain

Not to be too hard on Kristen Britain, but I think Green Rider was one of the last "conventional" fantasy books that I read in high school, before my frustration with the genre resulted in my rejection of most of its offerings. The series is about a young girl who becomes a sort of royal messenger, but the first book (the only one I read) isn't written very well, with strange character tics (the main character tucking strands of hair behind her ears, which happened so frequently that I still remember it now) in place of real characterization. Credit where it's due, though, Britain clearly knows more about wilderness survival that just about any other author.

Will I Finish It? This is one series I definitely won't be returning to. It's possible that the later books improve, but I'm just not the target audience for this kind of book anymore.


The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Author: Douglas Adams

Believe it or not, I had never heard of Douglas Adams before I read his obituary in 2001. I read the first Hitchhiker's Guide book that summer, and moved on to one or two of its sequels shortly after. At that point I'd been reading Pratchett for a couple of years already, though, and I found I liked Adams less, so I abandoned the series.

Will I Finish It? These books deserve another chance, considering their place in the geek canon (hence why I haven't even bothered to tell you what they're about). I'll get back to them eventually, for sure, but I still haven't decided whether I'll read Eoin Colfer's conclusion of the series.


The Inheritance Cycle
Author: Christopher Paolini

Probably the best example of derivative fantasy on this list, this is the story of a boy and his dragon, with clear Star Wars and LOTR parallels scattered throughout. I read the first three books at my brother's prompting, and the final book of the series, Inheritance, has finally been published.

Will I Finish It? There are tons of problems with these books, but my completionism means I really want to see how they'll end, so yes, I'm going to finish the series.


King Raven
Author: Stephen R. Lawhead

I love Robin Hood with probably most of my heart, and I'd enjoyed Lawhead's book The Iron Lance as a teenager, so I recommended the first book in this trilogy, Hood, to a friend of mine, and borrowed it after she read it. Unfortunately, further reading seems to indicate that Lawhead is excessively Christian, and his "historical" Robin Hood isn't close enough in tone to the legend, or adept enough in distinguishing itself.

Will I Finish It? Nope. I struggled through the last two books of Lawhead's Celtic Crusades trilogy, and I'm not really interested in reading anything else written by him.


Little Women
Author: Louisa May Alcott

When I talked about my love of unicorns in Part 1, I mentioned how that love had some pretty clear origins in movies and tv. Well. I can trace probably about 75% of my personality to Little Women (the book, not the unofficial trilogy). My early gleanings on everything from sisterhood, writing, friendship, romance, goodness, etc. etc. ad nauseam come straight from this book, and all of that has stuck with me to this day. I read Little Men a bit later, but I don't think I ever made my way to Jo's Boys. Anyway, you might imagine my absolute horror when I found out about a year ago that my copy of Little Women, which used to belong to my mom, is actually an abridged edition. What.

Will I Finish It? Most definitely. Of course, I need to get a full edition of the first book somewhere, and then I'll be diving in for sure.


...TO BE CONTINUED...

Current Distractions, June 2012 Edition

The fact that the "Current Distractions" tag is starting to look bigger than the "Top 100" tag in the tag cloud in the sidebar suggests I really need to get my act together. If you're curious to see what I'm reading at any given time (i.e. whether I'm staying on task and will be posting new reviews soon), in as close to real time as I happen to update it, I have a Goodreads account that I think I've mentioned a time or two before. We should be friends! In other blog-relevant news, Scoop is proving rather difficult to get my hands on, unfortunately, but now that I know it's apparently disappeared from the library, I'll be renewing my efforts to find it elsewhere.

Besides that, though, ladies and gents, it's summertime (and commarific). I spent a night at the lake this month, and it was just what I needed to make me realize the seasons have changed after all.

The most important things that have interfered with my free time this month are the graduations of my sister and my brother. My little sister finished her (first) undergrad degree this year (I now defer to her on all matters of childhood development and primary education), and my little brother got his high school diploma (meaning he's a kind of actual adult now, which boggles the mind). I'm tremendously proud of both of them, and also this makes me feel horribly old.

And speaking of being old, I'm trying really hard lately to procrastinate less, finish unfinished projects, and organize my personal archives, and a bunch of stuff like that. Plus my latest 101 Things in 1001 Days project came due this month and I've started a new one as of yesterday. I've been working for literal years on a way to organize all this stuff in a useful list form (I love to-do lists like nobody's business) with extremely minimal success, but then discovered Toodledo via a coworker. I've been using it most of this month and I really love it so far. It has very satisfying checkbox functionality.

And finally, probably my favourite thing that I'm doing right now is writing for the collablog that I have with several engineering friends of mine, called Socializing Engineers. June was the first month for it, but we'll be writing about a different topic (based on votes) each month. I highly recommend that you check it out, because I have brilliant friends who are awesome and I'm so happy and lucky to be doing a project like this with them!(!!)

A Series of Posts About Series - Part 1

I was going to wait until I got up to A Dance to the Music of Time to write this post, but since that's in the upper half of The List, it's still appallingly far away, and I'm reading Out of Oz right now, dammit!

In case you have no idea where I'm going with this, Out of Oz is the last book in Gregory Maguire's Wicked Years series, basically a gritty reboot of L. Frank Baum's Oz books. I'll tell you what I actually think of the book and the series when I review it, but it's gotten me pondering, once again, all of the different series that I've read or am currently not finished reading.

Book series are interesting things, and I really don't go into them lightly, because as a completionist I have terrible compulsions to finish anything I start at all costs, which I've talked about before. Still, sometimes you don't know that a book is part of a series, or only one book has really stood out over time (e.g. The Magnificent Ambersons, actually part of a trilogy). I can also get really turned off by a book when I find out that it's part of a series. Of course, book sequels and trilogies aren't usually the kind of obvious cash-ins that movies are, but they certainly can be, and books require a lot more time and energy to consume than movies do, and I don't want to have to spend weeks reading the earlier books in a series when only the fourth book looks interesting.

Anyway, this post is about the series that I haven't finished. They're in alphabetical order by series title, and may give you a bit of an idea of what kind of random reviews will be coming up. Maybe I'll save the series that I have finished for when I get to A Dance to the Music of Time after all.


Acorna Universe
Author: Anne McCaffrey, Margaret Ball, Elizabeth Ann Scarborough

Confession time: I love unicorns. I'm not sure exactly when this started, but I know it had lots to do with old school My Little Pony, The Last Unicorn movie, and Unico in the Island of Magic. Between the ages of probably three to six years old, whenever I encountered a wishing well I wished for a baby unicorn. Seriously. Anyway I'm the prime target for a series of books about a unicorn girl, and I sincerely loved the first few of the books in this one. Acorna is an alien found by three space miners, and the initial stories about her growing up with a set of very confused dudes are quite good, but the books are somewhat derailed when the other members of her species show up. I also got jaded on Anne McCaffrey before I got through the series.

Will I Finish It? Extremely doubtful. I would consider revisiting some of the earlier books, but the fact that I don't care about the story at all anymore is a pretty good indication that I don't need to bother finding out what eventually happens.


Bitterbynde Trilogy
Author: Cecilia Dart-Thornton

I've been oddly fascinated by muteness since I read L. M. Montgomery's extremely romantic Kilmeny of the Orchard, so the first book of this trilogy, The Ill-Made Mute, couldn't fail to catch my eye. The book is about a person who's been disfigured by some sort of magical poison and features all kinds of cool things like sky pirates, but an ending transformation soured me on it.

Will I Finish It? I haven't had any urge to return to the series after the disappointing ending to the first book, and given my general impatience with fantasy nowadays, I doubt I'll bother going back to this trilogy.


The Black Book (Diary of a Teenage Stud)
Author: Jonah Black

This series is extremely mysterious, as I just discovered while trying to track it down for the purposes of this post. I heard about the first book (Girls, Girls, Girls) in Teen People magazine, which I mind-bogglingly had a subscription to in the late 90s/early 00s, but only found the second book (Stop, Don't Stop) at the library. I read it and loved it. Jonah Black is a hero in the vein of Holden Caulfield, modernized, or at least that's how I remember him after a decade. There doesn't seem to be information anywhere about who actually wrote these books, and they apparently weren't that widely read, because wikipedia doesn't even have a stub article about them.

Will I Finish It? I don't think so. I remember good things in this book about teen sexuality and so on, but I think I've moved so far past the target audience that it's too late to put in the effort to track down all of the books.


The Dark Tower
Author: Stephen King

This series is King's opus, about a gunslinger chasing a man across a disintegrating world. I'm a moderate to huge fan of King's, and I've read the first three books of this series and also a prequel tie-in that was in his Everything's Eventual short story collection. I'm a lot more picky about fantasy these days, but this is unique enough to hold my attention.

Will I Finish It? Absolutely yes. At this point it's been so long since I read the first books, I pretty much have to reread all of them. Sadly the series apparently falters at the end, but that's not going to stop me.


Discworld
Author: Terry Pratchett

I almost definitely haven't sung Terry Pratchett's praises anywhere near enough on this blog so far. He's one of my favourite--if not my absolute favourite--authors, and I've read at least ten of this fantasy series, set on a disc-shaped world, held up by four elephants, all riding on the back of a space turtle. The series has basically everything: witches, wizards, vampires, werewolves, dwarves, barbarians, deities, and above all EXTREME HILARITY. I've jumped into it willy-nilly (basically whatever I could grab at the library or spot in the bookstore when I had spare change) for a dozen plus years now. I should also note that there's a YA sub-series about a girl named Tiffany Aching that is absolutely remarkable.

Will I Finish It? My plan is to read/reread the entire series from start to finish in the very near future. Don't worry, though, I'll still try to provide some variety in my reviews.


Dragonriders of Pern
Author: Anne McCaffrey

Say what you will about Anne McCaffrey, the woman was an absolute genius for cool concepts. Pern is a planet plagued occasionally by a destructive rain of "Thread." When it was settled by humans, they ended up genetically engineering intelligent dragons to help combat the Thread. This all sounds 100% hokey but makes perfect sense in-universe. The series is an intriguing mixture of fantasy and science fiction, but either the writing or storytelling eventually leave a lot to be desired. I think I read the whole original trilogy and cherry-picked a few other books in the series, intending to to read all of it but getting bored by Nerilka's Story and The Skies of Pern.

Will I Finish It? This is another series where I'd be more likely to go back to earlier books than to actually finish reading. Anne McCaffrey's son Todd has inherited the series, which feels a lot like Brian Herbert's inheritance of Dune: something I'm not at all interested in.


Earth's Children
Author: Jean M. Auel

This series was the subject of one of my “classic” reviews from that awkward in between period where I couldn't figure out whether I wanted to make fun of romance novels or not anymore. Anyway, it's basically about a cave woman who invents everything and has lots of hot sex, and ridiculous as that is, I can't get enough of it. The Land of Painted Caves book is reportedly the absolute final book in the series, and it's the only one I haven't read yet.

Will I Finish It? I'll definitely be grabbing that last book from the library one of these days.


...TO BE CONTINUED...

76. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

Uncomfortable Plot Summary: A ridiculous teacher manipulates young girls.

Year Published: 1961
Pages: 128
First Sentence: The boys, as they talked to the girls from Marcia Blaine School, stood on the far side of their bicycles holding the handlebars, which established a protective fence of bicycle between the sexes, and the impression that at any moment the boys were likely to be away.
Rating: 2/3 (meh)

Review:
So I think that The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is the first book on The List that I just really don't know what to say about, at all. There was a lot about it that I liked (just look at that first line!), but I'm not sure if it was its brevity, or the way it's written, or the fact that I was pretty stressed while reading it, but basically the whole thing just sort of washed right over me without leaving much of an impression.

The story is about Jean Brodie, a teacher of junior students at the Marcia Blaine girls' school, and her "set," consisting of Sandy, Monica, Rose, Jenny, Eunice, and Mary. This is in Edinburgh (which I always read as "E den burg," ugh), by the way, over the course of several years in the 30s, and then beyond a bit, too. Basically Miss Brodie is a sort of emancipated woman who wants to create the girls in her image, and also she's kind of a huge tool. The book isn't so much about her as it is about the fallout of her influence on her set, and what becomes of all of them, and also a few scandalous things that I won't get much into so that I don't spoil them for you. But I should at least mention that it's really nice to have a female perspective for once (the last book on The List about a woman, written by one, was The Death of the Heart.. which I was overly mean to, and the only other one besides that was Wide Sargasso Sea).

I love the portrayal of pretty much every character in this book, sketched broadly but distinctly for the most part (a bit like the ones in Loving), although there isn't enough space to really flesh out all the members of the set. I really enjoyed the writing style as well. Apparently the technique Muriel Spark employs here is called "prolepsis" or flashforward (the English majors in the audience are laughing at me right now), and I've seen it before and love it every time I encounter it. It's revealed very early on that Mary will die young, and that Sandy will become a nun, making it even more imperative to read on and find out how the blanks will get filled in (I seem to recall a fair bit of this sort of thing in Midnight's Children, but I could be remembering wrong).

I have to apologize for this review being all over the place and indecisive and just generally unhelpful, anyway. The book is short enough that I can safely say that it's worth a read, even though I don't know what to make of it myself. Mostly I just can't decide whether I'd care to read it again, or, like, whether I even liked it. Sandy's imagination probably makes it worthwhile all by itself, but I'll let you decide.

Quotations:

'Do you think Miss Brodie ever had sexual intercourse with Hugh?' said Jenny.
     'She would have had a baby, wouldn't she?'
     'I don't know.'
     'I don't think they did anything like that,' said Sandy. 'Their love was above all that.'
     'Miss Brodie said they clung to each other with passionate abandon on his last leave.'
     'I don't think they took their clothes off, though,' Sandy said, 'do you?'
     'No. I can't see it,' said Jenny.
     'I wouldn't like to have sexual intercourse,' Sandy said.
     'Neither would I. I'm going to marry a pure person.'
     'Have a toffee.'

No Place for a Lady

Based on a conversation or four that I've had with friends and family lately, there seems to be some interest out there about what it is that I actually do for a living, and my feelings about it, and that sort of thing. So, since this is my blog, and my gimmick is that I'm an engineer with zero qualifications whatsoever to talk about books, I'm going to try to write a little bit more about what being an engineer means to me, what I do at work all day, etc.

For this first post on the topic, I'm going to go a bit abstract. About a month ago, I discovered that the enrollment of women in engineering at my alma mater was nowhere near as high as advertised back when I was in school three years ago, or when I was going to various recruitment events as a high school student. As far as I knew, female enrollment in the college was somewhere around 30% while I was there, with some disciplines being better (chemical) or worse (mechanical). Whereas an annual report from my professional association revealed that it was actually only 20% overall last year, meaning that three years ago it was probably even worse. My discipline, civil, is right around the average.

I'm not sure if I've mentioned this before or not, but I went to an all-girls Catholic school for six years, from grade 7 to 12 (inclusive, obviously). Thanks to a bunch of factors, not the least of which was the fact that I was a shy, awkward teenager, the four dozen or so girls I went to school with were basically the only people I knew in my city. I had very rare interactions with the opposite sex in the form of my friends' friends, my parents' friends' kids, and also, mercifully, the internet, but otherwise my social circle was overwhelmingly female. By the time I made it to university, I didn't know anything about boys. They were a kind of abstraction that I understood in standup comedy terms, plus teen loner cynicism. Remote caricatures, in other words, and I was also pretty positive that there was no chance I'd ever actually get to know any guy ever in a meaningful way.

(My Catholic girls' school experience is a post for another time, but I'm literally 100% less bitter about it than that paragraph makes me seem. I think maybe I could mine a post about half-forgotten teenage girl psychology out of it, too.)

Anyway, of course I ended up choosing one of the last male strongholds in post-secondary education as my degree of choice. Mainly this happened because of my dad's encouragement. I'm sure there are parallel universes where he's an engineer himself, but in this one he's a tradesman and has been doing various construction and maintenance work since he was 17. I didn't really know what engineering was, beyond "problem solving," but that was good enough considering I didn't have any idea what else to do, having abandoned my childhood dreams of "figure skater" and "princess" quite early on. So I trotted happily out of my convent school and onto the university campus, where I learned, for better or worse and under considerable emotional duress, a lot of math and science, and also that the male of the species are people too.

Or, tl;dr, I went from a very female-dominated environment directly into a very male-dominated one, and the experience was difficult and formative and blah blah really unique blah I'm very glad to've been through it.

Out of university, things got even more male-dominated when I started working in construction, a rough and tumble business that's no place for a lady. At my company, only about four out of the 27 people who share my title are women (i.e. 1 in 7 or 15%; the reason I don't have exact numbers is that some of the names are ambiguous and I don't know all of the other people who work here). When I include everyone that falls under the project management umbrella, that number remains pretty stable at 18%, but I think you can see it's not exactly balanced. The last time I was on a job site, I was literally the only woman working on the job with a crew of about forty guys (not the only one on site, just on that particular job, which I hope is a clear distinction to those outside the industry). Women are still so rare on construction job sites that we turn heads wherever we go. I like to joke that I've never actually seen any guys working because they're too busy watching me walk by, but that's not very far from the truth.

By now, if you're still reading, you're probably wondering what I'm trying to get at with all of these numbers.

Well, I have two different and conflicting reactions.

First, I find this kind of work environment really stimulating, even if "stimulating" should sometimes be read as "really, really, really stressful." I'm always conscious of people I deal with at work making snap judgements about me based on the way I look (e.g. boobs!) or sound on the phone (e.g. like a child). I'm conscious, too, of the fact that thanks to my inexperience/occasional airheadedness, I can't necessarily prove those snap judgements wrong all the time. But I feel good about the fact that I'm here at all, and I value the distinctness of my experience, not to mention the challenges of the job itself. Maybe everyone automatically assumes I'm a secretary of some kind the second they step into a site trailer, but if I have any influence on changing those assumptions, then I'm glad to be able to do that. My job definitely isn't perfect, but it has a novelty to it, for reasons including and beyond my non-traditional role, that I'm not sure I could find anywhere else and that I know I'd miss.

And in case you're wondering, I do recognize that as more women enter the profession, the experience that I've had will gradually be lost. I'm not sure that this is relevant, though. While I personally really benefitted from being in a male-dominated environment, it's more important to me that the field is challenging. The experience I've had isn't just valuable to me because lol now I'm one of the guys, it's because I have education that qualifies me to work in an area that conventional wisdom would like to deny me. I want to discuss engineering on its own merits, like whether the work is rewarding, or if it's something you can do without having to raze your personal life.

Second is less positive. Engineering is a profession that I care about even while it seems to disappoint me at every turn (this could be another post all by itself), to the point where I'm upset that it's so male dominated but I don't want to do anything about it. I can't recommend it on those merits I just mentioned because that's not how it is at all. I wouldn't wish the bad parts of this job on anyone, so I don't want to encourage any unsuspecting young people, including girls, to get into this line of work, and would maybe even go so far as to discourage them from considering it. There are huge structural changes required before I'm prepared to suggest to anyone that engineering is a good choice of career, regardless of what gender they are. I'm sure that there are some companies or places where engineers do cool, socially responsible, innovative things that they feel good about, while maintaining reasonable work/life balance, but right now those are few and far between.

This makes me so sad. For the mathematically minded, or for me at least, there's a certain joy in working out solutions to practical, numerical problems (as opposed to abstract problems, which I tend to struggle with and then address with blunt force and middling success). I've gotten that feeling from engineering, in school and sometimes even at work. The strange social forge I went through may have turned me into a kind of odd person, but nevertheless a person that I really like, and I can't deny that engineering has been a big part of that. The fact is, though, that the trappings of the job overwhelm that joyful solving feeling most of the time. I wish that I could feel good about doing recruitment, and go out and talk to girls in schools about a thing that I love, girls who are maybe scared of boys the same way I was and can't imagine standing toe to toe with them as peers in a field that nobody on the outside ever sees or hears much about (no matter how much proselytizing happens within the profession). I recognize that I'm in a position to be a role model, I just don't feel good about the role I'd be modelling. Engineering is a thing that I'm doing right now, and not something that I utterly hate, but that doesn't mean I think anyone else should do it.

I just don't know what the solution to all of this is. How do you encourage more girls to get into engineering if the ones who are already engineers don't feel comfortable mentoring them, maybe to the point of active dissuasion? How do you change the profession so that more women engineers would be willing to take on mentorship roles, or even just so that all engineers have a better quality of life? Is this something that needs to be left up to a foot vote, or should engineers be trying to change the profession from within? I've been struggling with these kinds of questions for a while now, and I just don't have any answers. What do you think?

Current Distractions, May 2012 Edition

As I believe I mentioned at the end of last month, I moved into a new place this month, which was my main distraction and has basically left me completely exhausted and drained and all that good stuff (not really good at all, though, this is my worst case of burnout since my brief stint at a lame-ish jobsite early last September, if not before).

This is the chief reason why I never got around to writing about the Calgary Comic Expo: I just didn't have the energy. So I'll tell you briefly that I had a really great time, except for the part where I got kicked out for a few hours, due to poor planning on the part of the organizers (it looked at first like they oversold, but I eventually realized that they actually just didn't anticipate so many last minute arrivals--it still feels like a bit of a no-brainer, but it's water under the bridge at this point and I think I'll give them one more chance at least). I'm not ashamed to admit that I teared up at TNG EXPOsed, and not just because I'd been in a corset all day and had a good portion of the skin scraped off of my ankles by my costume. And I met Ryan North (Dinosaur Comics), who was super super super nice, and Kate Beaton (Hark! A Vagrant), who drew pictures for my friends and me, and Wil Wheaton, an event I was too starstruck by to parse.

I at least had the energy to read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, though, and I have the review almost ready to go, so it'll be posted as soon as I get around to editing it. The clever plan I mentioned last month is a no go, mainly because I'm finally reading The Magician King as of yesterday and I just want to write a review of it and post it now.

And finally, I somehow lost the review I wrote of A Lion Among Men, which I'm really disappointed about and so I might read Out of Oz and review that right away to make up for it.

Anyway, hopefully I'll find some more time this summer to concentrate on the blog, although summer is hardly the best time to be cooped up inside writing blog posts. Hopefully you're all doing well and haven't missed me too much. :)

Current Distractions, April 2012 Edition

I should begin by saying, in case I haven't yet, that The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie isn't at the library in my city, but I just now remembered that the library system is now province-wide, so I've requested it as of a few minutes ago. As soon as it comes in, I promise I'll read it as fast as I can and get the review posted. Fortunately it looks like it's really short. In the meantime, I'm building up "R book" reviews, although I have a clever plan for the R25 book review that I hopefully won't flake out on, but I won't tell you about it yet, just in case.

In case you're curious about what might be coming up as far as the random book reviews go, in a fit of me being myself the other day, I decided to add all the books I have on my bookshelf that I haven't read yet to my "to-read" pile on Goodreads. I'm really picky about ISBNs over there, but the fact is that a lot of my inherited books are so old that there are no ISBNs printed on them, so I had to be lazy with a few. I also have a bunch of French books that I'm pretty sure don't exist anywhere in Goodreads at all, and that I'm not interested in adding. Anyway, there are over thirty books on that last, which at my current reading rate will take me about two years to read. Argh!

Basically April consisted of preparations for the con of choice, which, now that it's over, I can tell you was the Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo, which I'll definitely be posting about as soon as I can throw something together over my upcoming lunch hours at work and/or next weekend at a coffee shop. I also finally finished watching The X-Files, got through season 3 of Being Human U.K., and watched the first season of Misfits (which I'm happy to recommend on the strength of Iwan Rheon's performance alone).

Also, I did my taxes, watched The Incredible Hulk as the last missing piece of the preparation puzzle for The Avengers, and I'm not even sure exactly what else. As I mentioned in my previous post, I won't have any internet next month, so presumably I'll have a lot more to write about when the end of it rolls around.

In Which I Apologize In Advance

In case you all hadn't noticed already, I'm basically terrible at keeping up with this blog, and for the next one or two months, it's only going to get worse. You may remember that a couple of years ago around this time, posts that up 'til then had been going up on a weekly basis dropped off abruptly (or rather didn't, now that I'm looking into it a bit more closely--I had a much better buffer back then) when I ended up getting a job and moving.

At the end of next month, I'm going to be moving again. Recognizing that I'm an internet addict (funny that doesn't translate to updating this blog on a regular basis, isn't it?) I took the extraordinary measure of actually cancelling my internet an entire month in advance, so that I'll be packed and ready to go when June 1 rolls around, instead of scrambling like mad in the final days.

I don't think that the blog will be completely quiet until the end of June, or anything, but I definitely am not going to be worrying about updating it at all until I'm settled in to the new place.

Try not to get into too much trouble in the meantime, and don't stop RSSing me just yet!