Tag: books

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books

I’m bad at reading long novels, except recently

Recently, I’ve actually managed to finish three novels that I’d consider fairly long:

  1. The Empress of Forever by Max Gladstone (480 pages, which doesn’t seem that long… except it’s a trade paperback)
  2. Lady Hotspur by Tessa Gratton (just shy of 600 pages as a hardback)
  3. It by Stephen King (eleventy-billion pages long, capable of killing a man if dropped on his head from two floors up)

I’m also in the midst of Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James which is… I’m not sure how many pages long, since I picked up the audiobook from the library after running out of Audible credits for the month. But it’s 24 hours long, which pegs it as significantly longer than The Empress of Forever, which felt pretty meaty as an audiobook at just shy of 20 hours. I’m also not sure how I’m getting along with Black Leopard, Red Wolf, since I’m enjoying the journey of it okay, but 11 hours in I also have no idea what the fuck is actually happening.

Anyway, I’m actually kind of impressed with myself that I’ve read this many long books. Because I’m generally not great at long books. I really loved Lady Hotspur and it still took me a long-ass time to read, because I was mostly just doing a few chapters at a time while I was on the exercise bike and couldn’t escape to do something else. It wasn’t until the last 15-20% that it suddenly just accelerated and I couldn’t put it down. That’s pretty much been my experience with all long books… lots of setup, lots of getting to know people, lots of moving all the pieces into position, and then it just goes balls-out for the last little bit.

Well, except for It, maybe. I had other feelings about It, probably because endings are the number one thing Stephen King isn’t real great at.

Long books feel like a lot of setup, but on the good ones, the payout is worth it. But I have such a difficult time sticking with the setup without wandering off and wanting to read something else. (I’m normally reading about four books at a time, but the real problem is wandering off to read something else and then never coming back because it just feels like too much effort.) So I’ve mostly avoided long books, which means I’ve really limited my second-world-fantasy intake, since it takes a lot of convincing to get me to invest the time in an epic fantasy tome. Maybe it’s that my reading time is so limited, and I read slowly enough (which feels weird to say since I used to think I was a fast reader until I met my housemate) that I feel keenly what a time investment it is. And I haven’t been willing to make that kind of investment into epic fantasy in particular since I grew up enough to realize Terry Goodkind was fantasy AU Ayn Rand fic.

The “it’s too slow and there’s too much setup” feels like an even weirder complaint to make in light of the main reason I’ve given up on all but a very select few YA–those things are too damn pacey. I’m not interested in relentless plot beats where every chapter ends with a cliffhanger and the characters never get a moment to sit and, you know, develop. Which leads to a different kind of boredom on my part. I really do like a lot of what longer novels can come with, because there’s so much more room for characters to really stew in what’s happening, and a lot more set up that leads to a bigger payoff, or more little twists for the plot to have… but I suppose I’ve gotten very picky about what feels worthwhile when it’s character development or setup time, because other than these recent reading efforts, I’ve dumped a lot of longer books because the length seems to come from lovingly detailed world building that I’m sure really does it for some people… just not me. Because about the time I scream “Get on with it!” at the book is when I DNF it.

(No, I’m not reading Game of Thrones and you can’t make me.)

The biggest thing is that my TBR pile is huge and always getting bigger, my waking, free-for-reading hours on Earth are limited and finite, and the major advantage that a short novel has over a long one is that I can read more of them. Long novels just really, really, REALLY have to be worth it. If a book is going to take the same time for me to read as 2-3 shorter novels, I’d better get 2-3 shorter novels of enjoyment out of it. Which may seem unfair if you’re someone who has written a brick and sees me passing it by unless it has a really immense hook like “Hey Alex, I know you’re really into Shakespeare’s histories so what if Henry IV but with ladies and lots of queer stuff” like fuck you just call me out by name next time. And as a counterpoint, if you as a writer can manage to squeeze that many words out of your head and go through the endless middle act(s) death march without wanting to jump in front of a bus AND craft it into a coherent story that people who probably aren’t me want to read, that’s unfair and I hate you. (No, I don’t.) (Yes, I do.)

Written for The Blog Challenge Project run by Shaun Duke, @shaunduke on Twitter.

Categories
books politics

Thoughts upon finishing Stamped From the Beginning

The subtitle on Stamped From the Beginning is “The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America.” And Ibram X. Kendi is not fucking around on this one. This book took me an unusually long time to read—not because it was unpleasant, or even overly dense (as sometimes history books are), but because there’s a lot there, and the subject matter is extremely challenging.

I’m really glad I read it. Really, really glad. I encourage you to take the time to read and digest and mull it over as well. Buy the book, check it out from the library like I did, but go get it.

I’m going to think out loud on a couple of the points Kendi made that drew the most blood from me. But my mulling things over out loud should not be in any way a replacement for reading the book and getting Kendi’s thoughts first hand. Goodness knows I’m missing nuance and have my own major blind spots.

Continue reading “Thoughts upon finishing Stamped From the Beginning”
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books

Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen (and bisexuality)

Paul wrote a review of the book over at the Skiffy and Fanty blog, in which he makes some very good points. I don’t normally write about books, myself, partially to disguise my shame at how little I read these days compared to the number of movies I watch, but I’ve got a few thoughts of my own and wanted to get them down.

I’ve read this book twice now, in the sense that I’ve listened to the audio book–a lot of my reading these days is audio books, since I’ll listen to them while I’m describing core or taking a walk. I recently revisited the entire Vorkosigan saga since a friend of mine is reading the books for the first time, so that took me right back through to this book again. I hadn’t realized Jole had made an appearance of sorts in Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance until then, for example. But Lois McMaster Bujold is very good at either slipping little nods in, or going back and taking characters mentioned in an offhand way and really expanding them out. (Thinking of Arde Mayhew’s cameo in Shards of Honor, here.)

I’ve got a lot of feelings about the Vorkosigan novels in general, because I love them entirely too much and am also frustrated by some of the gender stuff in ways that are too tangled for me to really want to write out. But something that’s made these books incredibly dear to me is the fact that Aral Vorkosigan has been explicitly bisexual from the start, and it’s an identity that Cordelia has defended as his spouse. His bisexuality hasn’t been erased after decades of being married to a woman.

I can’t emphasize how special this is to me as a bisexual person. The fact that a beloved, amazing, hyper competent, badass, complex character is bisexual? Super important. The fact that it’s made a point that he is still bisexual even while in a monogamous relationship with someone of the opposite gender is even more so, because that’s something that is so often and easily erased in fiction. And I appreciate also that while Aral’s early relationship with Ges Vorrutyer is stated to have been incredibly unhealthy and self destructive, that’s a thing not pinned to his bisexuality; his sexuality is not a phase, isn’t just an act of rebellion, isn’t self-destructive in and of itself.

So then we come to Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen, and there’s a bit of retconning that goes on, where we find that Aral hasn’t been a happily monogamous bisexual dude for these last forty-ish years. For a couple of those decades, he’s been a happily polyamorous bisexual dude with Cordelia and Oliver Jole, a relationship that works because Cordelia is still so very, very Betan.

There are a lot of weaknesses to the book, not the least of which is that it’s such a dedicated character study that it really doesn’t feel like it has much of a plot. I like the characters enough that this didn’t bother me too much, though I missed the “Space Nancy Drew” (as my friend calls the Miles books) vibe that a lot of the other books had. But this book is special to me because of this exploration of the relationships.

I love that there’s a depiction of a loving, stable, polyamorous relationship. There’s always the thought of oh god, please don’t let this play into the “bisexual people are promiscuous cheaters” BS, which I’d argue it doesn’t considering no cheating was involved. (Bisexual people are also not all polyamorous–though some are–and at this point we’re starting to tread on the ground of wanting a character to be all things for all people, which is an issue specifically caused by lack of representation.) But this is something that really struck a chord with me:

“…And then there was that herm. Remarkable person in its own right, Captain Thorne, but do you know–the best thing about that fling was that for one whole week, I could stop worrying about my damned categories.” He blinked and frowned, as if this were a sudden new realization.

Coming from the context that Barrayar is a socially backward place that’s not too far off our own landscape as far as sexuality goes, I felt this one. There’s this consistent pressure placed around identity, when you’re bi. It’s a sexuality that’s very easily erased by the assumption that you’re either gay or straight, depending on who you’re with at the time. Or that if you do fight through to say you’re bi, there are people who will argue with you, or say you’re confused, or challenge your self-identification. Hell, you can spend a lot of time questioning and doubting yourself. So not having to worry about any of that for a while? Yeah, that would be kind of nice.

And so now the Vorkosigan series has given us two bisexual male characters. (Petition to get a book where we get to see them together because I adore Aral anyway and don’t have time to write that fanfiction.) Not 100% perfect, but it shouldn’t have to be–the answer to that is more bisexual characters. All of the bisexual characters. Give them to me. People like me in this way exist in Space Nancy Drew Opera Land, and they have adventures and romances and are cool. They get to be messy and emotional and define themselves and find happiness.

That’s why, for all its imperfections, this book made me incredibly happy.

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books worldcon

The Hugo Nomination Problem or, I Am a Bad Reader

[ETA 5/3/15: It seems I was unclear that by a recommended reading list, I mean a large list with things added throughout the year that I can then winnow down myself. Not a short slate of nominees sized specifically to fill or partially fill categories. I have updated the post to reflect my position more accurately.]

I’ve been meaning to write this post for nearly a week, but work has been absolutely batshit and promises to continue to be so for another two weeks. So yay for the lunch break blog post, right? This is to say, if this is not particularly coherent or well-organized, please forgive me.

I was at Penguicon over the weekend, which was a fabulous convention, by the way, marred only by the fact that the assholes in the room next to mine would not shut the fuck up at four in the morning. But everything to do with the actual convention was lovely and full of chocolate glee, and I’m extra happy to have gotten to be on panels and then do karaoke with Steven Saus, Sarah Hans, and Michael Cieslak, to name just three of the many lovely people I met. (I met more lovely people, but their business cards are currently out of my reach and I’m complete shit with names. Sorry, everyone.)

By the way, karaoke? I still fucking kill it when I do Tribute. My demon voice cannot be stopped.

Anyway, on Sunday at Penguicon, I ended up setting off a discussion about Hugo nominations mostly because I was grumpy and wanted to go over what actually happened when the SFWA bulletin blew up (tl;dr version: “Haw haw ladies!” “Could you please not?” “Fuck you liberal fascists!” “No, sirs, fuck YOU.”) as opposed to what’s being incorrectly summarized everywhere, mostly by people fighting about the bullshit puppy slates. But anyway, after I got things going, two gentlemen started arguing about the Hugo nomination process, and I feel like a total asshole because I didn’t catch either of their names, but they both had extremely valid points.

Most Excellent Dude Number One has several working ideas on ways the WSFS constitution could be amended to de-fang slates so this bullshittery cannot happen again. (As I pointed out, well, in a couple years at best, since you can’t amend the WSFS constitution overnight.) Most Excellent Dude Number Two didn’t think that was any kind of solution, and that the only real way to fix things was some serious get out the vote effort.

Honestly, I’m not sure if either way works. I’d have to see some convincing math on any WSFS amendments and have a good long think about if it’s going to actually fix a problem or just make things worse. (Though I think there could be something to limiting nominations to three per category, say. That would shake things up a bit at least.) And it’s also a fact that the nominating and voting statistics for the Hugos are nothing short of embarrassing.

LonCon3, which I believe is now officially the biggest Worldcon ever, had 8784 attending and supporting memberships, which would be the people who could nominate and vote–and this doesn’t even count the attending members of the previous Worldcon, who could also vote! The most nominating ballots were cast for novel, with a total of 1595, just 18% of eligible members. The rest of the categories had far fewer nominating ballots, coming in at 3.6% to 11.3% of the membership. Actual votes cast tended to be about three times higher than nominating ballots. Still embarrassing, but slightly less so.

So yes, there’s definitely a get out the vote problem, though I’m left wondering just what WSFS can be expected to do about that, other than finding ways to make voting and nominating more accessible. I’d be in favor, for example, of severely lowering the price of supporting memberships, in order to open up the process particularly to people in non-US countries who are already getting screwed by the exchange rate. Education efforts? Maybe.

But as sad as the actual voting numbers are, the real problem is the nominating numbers. And I don’t honestly think that’s something that can be fixed easily by amending the bylaws.

Forgive me if I assume my personal experience can stand at something close to average, but I think the nomination issue isn’t really one of accessibility. There have been many years past when I haven’t nominated for the Hugos at all outside of dramatic presentation, because I quite literally had not read anything that had come out that year. There is a lot of good literature out in the field, and a lot of bad. I have only a very limited amount of time to read. The only reason I’ve been reading much newer stuff lately is because I’ve been trying to help with the occasional podcast for Skiffy and Fanty, or because I have writer friends who have new things coming out, so I make it my business to actually read them. (And I don’t do that nearly as often as I should, sorry guys. I’m such a shit.) But there’s also a very real reason why, on the podcast, you hear me mostly on movie episodes, and why here I mostly talk about movies. Movies are a much smaller time commitment, and I know I can sit down and get through one in normally less than two hours and still be able to have thoughtful opinions.

I’m not going to nominate things I haven’t read. I’d like to think most people who are interested in the Hugos are honest enough to not nominate or vote for things they haven’t read. So I’m thinking what we have is a big blob of voters like me, who have no idea what the fuck we’d even nominate because we haven’t really read that much, and in fact we’re waiting for the list of nominees to come out so we know what we should be reading.

Is that something WSFS can really fix? I guess you could argue for some kind of juried award, but then you’re only as good as your jury.

This is the point where I obviously speak only for myself, but what I need is help, to be honest. I don’t need someone breathing down my neck and telling me I need to nominate when I have no idea what the hell I’d even nominate. Some of it’s a self-actualization issue, where I need to just get off my ass and find the time to read more, and try to read things the actual year they come out. But it’s pretty overwhelming, guys. We are blessed to live in an age where your genre choices are not limited to what you can find on the spinny racks at the grocery store, or on that one shelf in your local library where the dude with the funny-smelling coat always hangs out. Which is awesome! But it also means that there’s so much coming out every day, at some point book mountain gets so high that you’re like fuck this, I don’t even know where to start so instead I’m going to make myself a cup of tea and play World of Warcraft while Captain America: The Winter Soldier plays on the TV in the background.

I’m sure this does not reflect on me well as a human being. I also know I used to read a hell of a lot more back before I didn’t have a full time job and a part-time writing gig and a daily commute during which reading tends to give me severe motion sickness. But here it is, the call for help. I seriously need some helpful soul, or maybe some kind of crowd-sourced thing that can tell me what I should be reading as things come out so I’m not floundering under drifts of pages on book mountain when the Hugo nomination period opens. Preferably some recommendation engine where my fellow writers, bless you guys I love you all but damn I know how we are, are not allowed to nominate or push their own books. I don’t want reviews, I don’t even want opinions, I just want a simple but large list of titles and authors and maybe a helpful link where someone can say hey, I think this book should totally get a Hugo and/or other award or is just awesome and you should read it anyway, and then other people who agree can maybe give it a plus one, and that’s it. Let me form my own opinions.

Does something like this already exist and I’ve just never seen it because I’m a failure at google? Is this something a complete computer incompetent like me could set up on her own site pretty easily? I’d do it in a heartbeat if I knew how.

Categories
books

Toot toot, here comes the book nostalgia train

Sunil was talking about his childhood love of the Babysitters Club books on Twitter earlier and that me thinking. I wasn’t actually a fan of BSC despite being in its perfect target demographic. I think I remember even knowing other girls my age that loved those books, but I… didn’t get in to them. Possibly because I found the concept of babysitting so incredibly uninteresting.

I was, however, super in to the Saddle Club book series. (And I’ve been surprised how many of my friends in various corners of the internet were also really in to those books.) Looking at the publishing dates on this series as opposed to BSC, I’d be willing to bet that they were a blatant ripoff of the basic concept, except instead of babysitting, the middle school girls rode horses. Which if you asked both pre-ten and current me, is about a zillion times more awesome.

So this just got me thinking about other middle grade/intermediate books that I really loved.  You’ll note that there’s a distinct presence of horses in a lot of it. I was pretty horse crazy as a kid, and I couldn’t even tell you why, only that it seems like a thing that happens to a lot of girls. During my childhood I can only remember one time I saw and interacted with a horse. The horse in question belonged to my best friend on the street, and her dad let me sit on it and then walked it in circles on a lunge line. I left with the conviction that I absolutely had to get a horse.

(Spoiler: I did not get a horse.)

But I think something else a lot of the books I loved had in common–other than horses–was women. Solving problems. Being friends. Going on all kinds of adventures. Having more important things to talk about than boys. Most of the books I read at that point were written by women, too. It’s a weird thing that, as an adult, until recently the ratio of characters and authors inverted. Also, I’d love to think boys would have enjoyed those books just as much as I did. At least if they were horse crazy boys.

Anyway, other books that I remembered after I got on the nostalgia train today:

  • Pretty much anything ever by Marguerite Henry, but particularly the books related to Misty of Chincoteague
  • The Enchanted Forest Chronicles by Patricia C Wrede – one thing that still sticks with me about these books is that the king of the dragons, Kazul, is female. Because king isn’t a gendered title to dragons.
  • The Secret of the Unicorn Queen by Gwen Hanson – Regular teenaged girl gets whisked away to a fantasy world where an Amazonian troop of women rides around on freakin’ unicorns and are super badass. What is there to not love about this? It’s like Gwen Hanson sat down one day and thought, “What I really want is to write the perfect wish fulfillment story for Rachael Acks, because that girl is going to go absolutely mental.”
  • The Black Stallion series by Walter Farley – holy crap, books with boys in them! (I thought Alec should be a girl. Sorry.)
  • Anne of Green Gables and sequels by Lucy Maud Montgomery – books without prominent horses or dragons, but Ann is intelligent and witty and very likable. She should have totally had a dragon.
  • The Song of the Lioness Quartet by Tamora Pierce – okay, this is definitely YA and not MG, but I have to mention these books any time I talk about something important to my childhood. I actually have copies of these still and reread them every couple of years because they’re that important to me. Fierce woman pretends to be a boy so she can become a knight, and then travels openly as a female knight, her country’s first? Yes, please, a thousand times.

Obviously, not a complete list of everything I read when I was little. These are just the ones that stuck in my head the most. What books give you some serious nostalgia?

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books

10 Books That Have Stuck With Me

Since it was a meme some of my friends were doing today, and I thought well why not. This would make a darn good blog post.

  1. Alanna: The First Adventure (Tamora Pierce) – I cannot begin to tell you how much this book has affected me. It was one of the first real YA books I ever read, and it was the first that had a female character confronting and triumphing over institutionalized sexism using her wits. (Well, once you get into the rest of the series.) Alanna becomes the first female knight of her country, and becomes one of the best because of her determination. She changes the world because she refuses to give up, and then later she continues to become a knight but also decides she wishes to be a wife and mother–but only is willing to marry a man who doesn’t expect her to give up everything she’s worked so hard to achieve. All of these were incredibly powerful messages, particularly coming out of the age where it was basically all Babysitters Club and Sweet Valley High all the time. (This book is also why, when someone tries to tell me that representation isn’t important, that seeing women be the heroes of their own stories isn’t necessary, I I know they’re full of shit.)
  2. The Complete Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) – my mother used to read to my brother and me, and one of the books she read to us contained all of the Sherlock Holmes stories. Sometimes it would be one or two a night, and the novellas were stretched over several nights. This book (and the character) was the reason I created Captain Ramos.
  3. Dragonflight (Anne McCaffrey) – This was one of the first proper grown-up science fiction novels I read, and it had a huge impact on me. Written by a woman, and with a main character who was a fierce, cranky, imperfect, and driven woman. That Lessa is the one who figures out how to save civilization made this book stand out. I loved it, and it made me want to write science fiction.
  4. Night Watch (Terry Pratchett) – This book taught me that the best comedy has pain and marrow beneath it. The next book, Thud!, made me laugh out loud, and then it made me cry three times. There’s just such an emotional core to them. It’s meant that every time I have written something even mildly silly, I first think about what’s behind the silliness so that the story has a proper skeleton. I just wish I could write like this.
  5. King Henry V (William Shakespeare) – My favorite play ever. I read it out loud to my cats regularly. Stop judging me.
  6. On Writing (Stephen King) – “Kill your darlings.” Best piece of advice ever. And like everything Stephen King has ever written, it’s very fun to read.
  7. The Black Unicorn: Poems (Audre Lorde) – Audre Lorde taught me how to love poetry, and for that I will be forever grateful. There’s just so much beauty and rage and love in what she writes that I can’t help but come back to it again and again.
  8. History of the Kings of Britain (Geoffrey of Monmouth) – I cannot begin to tell you the number of ways I love this book. Obviously it made a huge impression on me because I love telling people about it. But it’s basically a completely fictional “history” of British kings, where Monmouth makes some amazing things up out of whole cloth, like the Britons repelling a Roman invasion, and then counter invading and sacking Rome. (It’s also likely the literary origin of Merlin as a character.) It was assigned reading in my British history class, and I loved it to pieces. The professor assigned it because she wanted us to really start thinking about the biases of people who wrote primary source material. It’s a strong lesson for that.
  9. A Man With No Talents (Oyama Shiro) – This book provides a view of modern Japan that I wish more people would read. It’s also an incredibly beautifully done translation.
  10. Interpreter of Maladies (Jhumpa Lahiri) – If Audre Lorde taught me to love poetry, Jhumpa Lahiri taught me to love literary short fiction.
  11. BONUS (if you can call it that): Dave Barry’s Book of Bad Songs – I randomly quote from this book. It makes me laugh uncontrollably. It’s got an entire chapter about MacArthur Park.
Categories
books

A few thoughts on Piers Anthony

Jason Heller wrote this excellent piece on revisiting the Xanth series as an adult, and I really recommend it: Revisiting the sad, misogynistic fantasy of Xanth

Which has subsequently made me think about my own relationship with those books. Because like most people in our general age group (I think Jason’s maybe a little bit older than me? I’m terrible at guessing ages though, so now I feel all awkward about it) I read those books in my teenaged years. Mostly because there wasn’t at that time a decent YA section in the local library, and not much of an SF/F section either. I think I ended up reading Piers Anthony because he had the advantage of being at the front of the alphabet, and had so many books out that he took up a shelf and a half all his own.

I read nearly everything the library had of his, and spent some of my pocket money on buying my own books. One different experience I had, though, was I found there was a very limited number of the Xanth books that I liked even at the time, though I couldn’t have explained to you why that was. For example, I really disliked A Spell for Chameleon. I think perhaps because I didn’t like any of the characters. The only Xanth novels I remember liking enough to read them more than once were Night Mare and Isle of View. (Though I also recall playing the Xanth videogame when it came out on PC, which was a frustrating experience.)

I do remember being really discomfited by the obsession with panties endemic to the series. (There is, quite literally, a book titled The Color of Her Panties.) Panties, which were pretty obvious shorthand for female sexuality, were used in the series as a way for women to exercise control over men; as an adult, it becomes very obvious why I found the entire thing so troubling. In fact, The Color of Her Panties was actually the book where I started losing interest in Xanth, and the last one I even attempted to read was Roc and a Hard Place when I was 15.

They just didn’t feel fun any more, and I had never felt connected to any of the characters–with the sole exception of Mare Imbirum. Who was, as you might guess, a horse.

I liked his Incarnations of Immortality series far better than Xanth, probably because I’ve never really been a fan of puns (clutch your pearls now) and the Incarnations felt like there was some meat to the stories at least. But there was some stuff I found a bit creepy in those as well, even at the time. What springs instantly to mind is the final (at the time) book, And Eternity. Which had a cool plot in it I really liked, about god being dethroned and replaced with a woman, but then on the other hand a rather major plot point in the book is a sexual relationship between a teenager named Vita and a much older male judge, which I found intensely creepy.

I haven’t read any of the books in years. I don’t have any desire to revisit Xanth, to be honest, but I kind of want to go back and look over the Incarnations of Immortality series and give it another read with a critical eye now.

On thing this does make me think about is the importance of libraries, then and possibly now. I read the Xanth books because they were there, and there were a lot of them available. I wonder who else I might have read if the collection at my local library had been a bit more diverse. I also discovered Tamora Pierce’s books because of my local library, and those had a profound effect on me.

It’s something I bring up every time someone questions the value of diversity in both authorship and characters. Considering Piers Anthony and the Xanth panty fetish, I can’t help but think it was a reflection and normalization of some incredibly sexist tropes. I’m glad even as a teenager, I felt that there was something not quite right.

Categories
books history japan

#FenCon: A few places to get started on modern Japanese history/culture

Once again I want to apologize to everyone who attended the Tao and Again panel at FenCon. I had no idea I was going to be moderator and thus was woefully unprepared. (And it didn’t help there were only two of us on the panel, so I didn’t even have a big group of other panelists to cower behind!) As promised, here are some recommendations of places to get started on research for modern Japanese history/culture. This list is in no way definitive or exhaustive, particularly considering “modern Japan” is a giant subject in and of itself, but hopefully it’ll help bring up questions and ideas that will lead to both research and stories!

If I think of anything else, I’ll be sure to add it to the list! (And please, drop any recommendations you might have in the comments.) For the most part I tried to grab books that are fairly easy to find in libraries or bookstores.

Factual
Shinohata – Ronald P Dore
Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II – John Dower
A Modern History of Japan (second edition) – Andrew Gordon
The Prison Memoirs of a Japanese Woman – Kaneko Fumiko [Memoir]
Gendering Modern Japanese History – Barbara Molony (ed)
Office Ladies and Salaried Men – Ogasawara Yuko
A Man With No Talents – Oyama Shiro [This is a memoir]
The Weak Body of a Useless Woman: Matsuo Tasuko and the Meiji Restoration – Anne Walthall
Patriots and Redeemers in Japan: Motives in the Meiji Restoration – George M. Wilson

Fiction
Rashomon and Other Stories – Akutagawa Ryunosuke
Black Rain – Ibuse Masuji
The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa – Kawabata Yasunari
Barefoot Gen – Nakazawa Keiji
Kokoro – Souseki Natsume
I Am a Cat – Souseki Natsume

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Uncategorized

Adventures with eBooks and DRM

Alternative title: I now totally understand why people might go pirate, and it has nothing to do with wanting free shit.

My husband and I bought each other Nooks last year as a combination birthday/Christmas present. I’d been really wanting an e-reader since we’ve long since run out of shelf space, and I didn’t want an actual tablet since reading on a backlit screen makes my eyes get really tired after a while. For the most part, I’ve liked having a Nook, and have happily just bought stuff from the Barnes and Noble online store.

Last night, I decided to do something a little different. I wanted to buy an ebook through the the Tattered Cover, because they’re the local independent book store and I want to support them with my money. A two hour adventure ensued in which I tried to figure out how the fuck to even download said book and then get it in my Calibre library. Because I had this, in retrospect, terribly naive thought that I’d buy the ebook, I’d get to download it, then put it on my Nook and yay, new book!

Oh no.

The Tattered Cover referred me to a store called Kobo. Which tried to then make me install their proprietary reader. But I wanted to just download the book myself, so ended up with an .acms file with absolutely no explanation what that even was. Well, it’s an Adobe DRM format, which meant if I wanted to download the book I then had to install the Adobe digital edition software, which then didn’t let me put the book in Calibre anyway because DRM you filthy disgusting pirate.

I was ready to just chew on things. I’ve now installed (non-sanctioned) plugins for Calibre that let me strip the DRM off the files, because goddamnit I paid for them and I can do that. But talk about ARGH.

Oh, and in the process I discovered that the B&N website downloads your ebooks into a hidden partition of your Nook so that you cannot even see them when the device is mounted to your computer. SO THAT’S NICE.

Other fun B&N anecdote: my husband has some ebooks from Barnes and Noble that contain a page with the message that the book was provided DRM free by the author. And then B&N added their own DRM anyway. Classy.

I want to be able to buy books from any site I want and not have to screw around with a different proprietary reader for each one. I want to not have to do google search adventures every time I want to figure out how to download my goddamn book and look at it. And in that sense, I totally understand why someone might turn to book piracy out of the desire to not have to deal with this bullshit, because just give me my fucking .epub and let me get on with my life. By the end of the experience I felt like crying out to the uncaring sky I JUST WANT TO GIVE YOU MY MONEY AND READ A BOOK WHY WON’T YOU LET ME.

I imagine various shops want to force customers to stick with proprietary software and formats, since it makes it more likely that people won’t stray from them and spend their money elsewhere. But I didn’t buy a Nook so I could be effectively owned by Barnes and Noble and badgered into shopping only at their store. I bought a Nook because I liked the specs and because I wanted to, I don’t know, read some fucking books. Isn’t the profit margin better for everyone with ebooks? Then why the hell make them more difficult to use than dead tree books? Why make an ebook a less liberating purchase than a physical book?

The people this fucks in the end – other than readers like me who spend hours ranting and sobbing at their computers – is the writers. If you make buying and then using something utterly painful, maybe that will keep some customers from straying. But it’ll make others stop buying it. I want to see my favorite writers get money. But I can’t say the temptation wasn’t there during the battle with the Adobe DRM because I was getting so damn pissed off.

Most of the time, writers have no control over if their ebook has DRM on it. I just wish the corporate paymasters would figure out that treating your customers preemptively like criminals makes the illegal option feel like the path of least resistance. I refuse to be in abusive relationships with other human beings. I sure as hell won’t be in an abusive relationship with a store.

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The Coldest War

Well, thanks to Ian Tregillis, I now know that I haven’t lost my ability to dive into a book and devour it in a matter of a few days. Apparently I was just trying THAT HARD to avoid The Casual Vacancy, which took me weeks to slog through. Ian’s new book, The Coldest War, I finished in less than a week, and this despite the fact that I was trying to design a poster for AGU at the same time.

(Spoiler: I finished the poster and it’s covered in strat columns. OH THE HUMANITY.)

The Coldest War is the sequel to Ian’s first book, Bitter Seeds. It’s alternate history, which I’m normally not that in to, so it’s another compliment to him that I liked these books so very much. Bitter Seeds takes place during World War II, and pits psychic Nazis against British warlocks. And trust me, that sentence does no justice to how fucked-up and awesome the entire thing is.

The Coldest War then takes place during the Cold War, following the same characters but years later. And I’ll give Ian this, I had absolutely no idea where he was going with it until the end, at which pointed I tweeted excitedly at him about how the third book better be coming out soon because oh my god what a cliffhanger.

My favorite character out of the series is, oddly, perhaps the most evil of them all – Gretel. She’s the psychic Nazi experiment that can see the future, and the first two books amount to her playing twelve-dimensional temporal chess with terrifying beings that aren’t even human. She’s evil, calculating, awful, and utterly fascinating.

Ian’s got a writing style that’s very clean and readable, and he knows how to keep things very tense. There isn’t a lot more that I can say about the story without giving some of the fun twists away, but I really recommend these books. The Coldest War also just won the first semifinal round of Fantastic Reviews’ Battle of the Books, and I have great hopes for it.