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Let’s Talk About Books!

Oof. May was A Month, friends. But it’s behind us now, and let us not dwell on the many disasters it contained (except perhaps the basement, which is still having, shall we say, issues). (Also, if you missed it, the first part of my new serial, Across Worlds with You, is now up! You’ll get a new part every month until we’re done.) But anyway, let’s talk about books. Specifically the books I have read lately. I mostly read scifi and fantasy (and my guilty pleasure, cozy mysteries) but I do try to read outside of that periodically to expand my horizons and all that jazz. We Have Always Been Here, by Lena Nguyen (2021, science fiction) I really liked this one! Aside from colony missions and strange new planets and other things you’d expect in scifi, you also get an interesting delve into consciousness, what makes us human, androids, and interpersonal relationships. I basically read it all in one sitting, which is hard because it wasn’t short. Built, by Roma Agrawal (2018, nonfiction) We have a local restaurant that uses random books for decorations, and this one caught my eye, and then when I looked it up it sounded interesting, so I hunted it down. Ms. Agrawal is an architectural engineer, and she explains how things like skyscrapers and giant bridges and what have you get built, as well as looking at historical examples and how they worked (or didn’t). I learned quite a bit! Not least of which…

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Comfort Everything, Take 3

A little bit of everything that’s been giving me comfort lately, because why not. Reading I’ve blogged about comfort reading before (one, two), but here are a few I didn’t mention… Becky Chambers: To be honest, I bounced off her space opera series, but I gave her a second chance with her solarpunk novella A Psalm for the Wild-Built and her writing worked much better for me in a shorter format. Hopeful, inclusive futures that don’t have giant stakes, just quiet travels and conversations and tea. Will definitely be picking up the sequel (A Prayer for the Crown-Shy). Angel Martinez: Another author of hopeful, inclusive futures, with a good dose of humour and adventure. My favourite of the three I’ve read so far is Safety Protocols for Human Holidays, a sweet and funny queer romance novella. Elizabeth Peters: I don’t know why I didn’t devour her entire Amelia Peabody series long ago, because it’s right up my alley, but I finally read the first one this year. British lady adventurer! Ancient Egypt! Archaeology! Banter! Unreliable narrator! (Not that she’s lying, but she misses things, especially things to do with emotions. Not unlike Murderbot — another comfort read.) I grew up on a steady diet of E. Nesbit, Arthur Ransome, Enid Blyton, and the like, along with an Egypt obsession, so it would have been a natural progression. Oh well, I’m hooked now… And I still go back to England for comfort reads like To Say Nothing of the Dog by…

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Comfort Everything, Take 2

Dear readers, this quarter of the year is always the hardest for me, and I know I’m not alone, especially with all the things going on this year. (Recently it seems like we’re saying that every year, though…) So this week I’m revisiting a topic I’ve covered before in these, um, pages: where to turn for comfort. Here are the comfort reads and comfort viewing that have been helping me get through lately. Books I’ve blogged about comfort reads before, so here are some I didn’t cover last time… Epic fantasy Although I read (and write) all over the science fiction and fantasy spectrum, I read Tolkien at a formative time, so fantasy will always be my first love. For about a decade now, I’ve been taking time around the holidays in December and into January to read epic fantasy. (No grimdark either, thank you.) This year, I read the first two books in Elizabeth Bear’s Silk Road–inspired Eternal Sky trilogy, Range of Ghosts and Shattered Pillars. Featuring a nomad prince in exile, a princess-turned-wizard, a very interesting horse, and lots of epic landscapes and cities and cultures. (CW: there’s a plague in the second book.) Book three will be next year’s read, and there’s also a sequel trilogy. (My previous epic-fantasy holiday read was N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, which is breathtakingly good but 100% not a comfort read.) Historical fantasy Still in the fantasy vein: historical fantasy, roughly defined as a past era in the “real world” with…

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Haunted Inspiration

On the farm where I grew up, we had a haunted barn. It looked sort of like this one. My mom didn’t like to talk about it, and she never told the stories when she knew we kids were around, but I heard them. It wasn’t “and then I saw a pale figure dragging chains” or “Get out!” or anything. It was the night she was milking the cows, and a hand reached in through the gap of the door to lift the hook from the eye-bolt, but it couldn’t reach far enough. The arm was clad in plaid flannel like my dad always wore, so my mom said “Hold on, honey, I’ll get it,” but when she opened the door no one was there. Later she learned my dad hadn’t been in the barn at all. It was putting a horse in a straight stall with the tie clipped to his halter, and finding him the next morning reversed in the stall (butt to the manger) with the tie wrapped around his leg. It was hearing footsteps walking down the aisle between the hay mows upstairs, and knowing the wagon was parked there and no one could be walking across that floor. And then getting the dog for company because she was spooked but she had to finish the chores—and the dog wouldn’t go into the barn. It was trying to bring the horses in from pasture on a wet and windy fall night, and they wouldn’t come near…

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Achievement Unlocked

My first job in Arizona was at a day-care center. For years afterwards (and still sometimes, for reasons) I would tell people, “I can handle eight one-year-olds for eight hours alone. I can do anything.” Yes, it was a constant round of diaper checks (every child had to be checked every hour, and changed if needed which they usually did need) but I kept eight one-year-olds happy and healthy for eight hours a day and that is a confidence builder right there. When I worked at Taco Bell, my brag was that I could make a six-pack of tacos, from taking the first shell to closing the box, in twenty-six seconds. And it would be right. Some people over-packed the meat, or under-packed the cheese, but my tacos would be exactly the way the company wanted them made. And I’d do it in twenty-six seconds despite the fact that I couldn’t get all six shells in one hand like some of the “steamers” I worked with. Two was the best I could do, and still move fast. Outside of Taco Bell, that’s not really a very useful brag, though. I stuck with the “eight one-year-olds” bit in other places. Then my dear friend moved from Ohio to Arizona, and I drove her truck. “I drove a seventeen-foot truck from Ohio to Arizona by way of shudder Oklahoma,” I would say. “I can handle this!” For whatever value “this” was. By the way, that’s a seventeen-foot bed. The truck is twenty-three…

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Whittling Away at the TBR List

Like many authors and some other people, I hoard books. I hardly go into a bookstore, used book store, or library book sale and come out empty handed. But then do we read those books? Oho, of course not. There’s always something shinier, or your holds have come in at the library, or you were passing a shelf at the library and saw a cover you had to have, etc. (I try to mitigate this somewhat by delegating shiny books to either my Amazon wishlist or my library account’s For Later list. In the pandemic age, where the library is closed, I have found myself buying eBooks of the things that would normally have gone on the library list, so this is not helpful.) (Especially since the library’s digital library is available, so who even knows.) In December we had to buy a new six-foot bookcase to accommodate the books just laying about, so when 2020 started, I made a pledge. And that pledge was to read one book that I’d bought at a library book sale a month. Since I typically read 3-5 books a month (though more like 6-8 in the pandemic age), this still allows me leeway to read whatever else I felt like. Now, I’ve made pledges like this before. A few years ago, I thought I’d read one new book off every bookcase shelf until I made it all the way through all my many bookcases (and then start over, I assume). I think I…

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Escapist Literature

Nope, not talking about it. I hope you’re safe, I hope you’re well, and I have faith you are doing all you can to protect yourself, your loved ones, and total strangers. That said–I’m gonna talk about escape books. A reader once told me that mine is the book she reaches for when she needs a break, when she needs to get out of reality for a while. (This one, specifically–Knight Errant.) It made my day, and continues to make me happy. I never wanted to write a world-altering novel–I just wanted to make people as happy as many a book has done for me. So. In no particular order–my escape books. I’m not linking them all, but here’s Indiebound if you’d care to go look for any. None of these are exactly new, but hey. Spoiler warning. If you don’t want spoiled for a title (probably just a little,) don’t look at the paragraph that starts with that title! The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien I first read The Hobbit in 8th grade (so, 12-13 years old.) It was a very bad time for me, but The Hobbit took me away so magnificently, I reread it about eight times in a row. Even after that, I still carried it for months, rereading bits, and especially the chapter Flies and Spiders. Poor Bilbo, lost and alone in Mirkwood, but then he found his courage, and rescued his friends! It was a time I needed courage, and Bilbo finding his, gave some to…

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A Surplus of Books

It’s moving week around here. My mother, my mother-in-law, my grandmother, the neighbors across the street, someone the next street over… It’s madness. But it’s somewhat removed madness, because I am not moving, and my mother does not want help, and no one else expects any help from my direction. The biggest thing has been my grandmother moving. My grandparents bought the house forty years ago (brand new) and have lived there since (well, my grandfather died some time ago, so Grandma has), so that’s a long time to accumulate stuff. My grandmother is in her late ’90s and has decided to move into assisted living (she’s perfectly lucid, so it was entirely her decision), so she’s also shoving off almost everything. Forty years of everything. My grandmother has five children (including my mother) and apparently there is a feel that everything must be fair about the shoving off of everything, so there’s a long list of things that Grandma is not taking with her, and everyone has to go through it and see what they like, and put in a claim on their preferences. People with children have to do it for both them and their children, so having children actually puts them at a disadvantage because every one of the five siblings gets an equal share. It has turned into a madhouse. I mean, it’s truly remarkable. I won’t go into that, but Good Lord. Last week I went up to visit (my mother also currently lives in the same…

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Remembering Ursula K. Le Guin

Did you all hear the news that legendary SF author Ursula K. Le Guin passed away recently? Her death leaves a great disturbance in the Force, to cross a few genre threads. She was one of the giants of science fiction and fantasy. And, thankfully, she was acknowledged for it during her lifetime — she won all the major genre awards (Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and the World Fantasy Award) and was only the second woman to be named a Grand Master of Science Fiction (after Andre Norton). I was always awed by her mastery of storytelling at any length, whether short story or novella or full-length novel. And storytelling for all ages, from picture books to YA to adult — very few writers can do that! Her writing was both precise and poetic, crystalline and immediately recognizable. She was interested in ethnography and sociology, how peoples relate to each other, what cultural assumptions we make without knowing. (For example, The Left Hand of Darkness is, famously, all about deconstructing gender.) But she was brilliant at character, too, and worldbuilding. How can one person be so good at so many aspects of writing? Yet she was. Personally, I’ve read about 10 or 15 of her books. Earthsea (a trilogy at the time) was my first exposure, as it was for many. Later I went on to The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness, her later Earthsea books and her collections of shorter works. I never got as far as her poetry…

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What Are Your Holiday Reading Traditions?

The end-of-year holidays are almost upon us! Whether you celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, Yule, Kwanzaa, or something else entirely, chances are pretty good that you’re looking forward to some days off work or school at the end of this month. (And if not, you’re probably doing a very important job, like working in a hospital, so my hat goes off to you.) If you’re in a part of the world where it’s cold, you’re probably looking forward to some cozy hibernating time. And that means…reading! (Okay, who are we kidding? My fellow Turtleduckers and I were readers before we became writers. Everything leads back to reading.) Last year, the word of the year seemed to be hygge, the Danish term for a feeling of cozy togetherness. This year, what I’m seeing everywhere is jólabókaflóð, an Icelandic word meaning “Christmas book flood”. (Jola-boka-flod is how it breaks down.) It’s an Icelandic tradition where everyone gives each other books on Christmas Eve and then stays up all night reading them. (Note: All gifts are exchanged on Christmas Eve, not just books, so there’s no danger of wakeful children spotting Santa overnight.) Which means most books are published in the months leading up to Christmas, but I digress. Like Neil Gaiman’s All Hallows Read, this is a tradition I can wholeheartedly endorse. For me as a child, it was always exciting to spot a book-shaped package under the tree. And I look back with fondness at the Christmas books that only appeared once a year,…

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