Genevieve Williams' Booklist

What I'm Reading: Fiction & Non-Fiction

For 2004, I've decided to keep track of what I read—aside from reading for school. (Unless you're a fellow library science student, you probably wouldn't be interested in that stuff. Or maybe you would. After all, I am. I still don't feel compelled to keep track of it here.)

I'm always trying to remember the title of that really cool book I read a few months ago, that I'm just dying to tell someone about. Now I can just refer them here. (Note, Amazon links open new windows.)

Fiction

Evangeline Walton, The Mabinogion Tetralogy

(A retelling of the

, the major source of Welsh mythology and legend. The story of the rediscovery of this work is almost as interesting as the work itself. I really recommend it for readers interested in Welsh myth. It's not like Lloyd Alexander's Prydain books at all, staying much closer to its source material; unlike Alexander, Walton attempted a retelling, not an entirely new story. It's permeated with the sense of the illusory that is so common in Welsh myth, and the borders between the real and unseen worlds are often thin indeed. This is not a

world; it follows its own rules.)

Pat Frank, Alas, Babylon (Perennial Classics)

(One of the classic fictional nuclear-war scenarios, that still holds up well today. Although in some ways a product of its time, particularly in its portrayal of women and blacks (

was published in 1959), it's a good story overall and a very vivid picture of a small town trying to survive in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. I kept thinking of Butler's

when I read it, due to the similar theme of a small group of people trying to stay human in a situation where most have given up. The description of the bombs dropping is chilling. Worth a read.)

Orson Scott Card, Seventh Son (Tales of Alvin Maker, Book 1)

(I'd mentioned being interested in American folk magic and folklore, and how these things crossed the ocean with the immigrants. I'd already read Charles De Lint's

, and someone mentioned this. Only read the first book so far, but I'm enjoying it, although the nature of the villain seems pretty obvious to me. Possibly I've been reading too many blues legends involving crossroads meetings and going off to acquire unusual talents. I stayed up late to finish this book, always a good sign.)

Michael Moorcock, Behold the Man

(A man is so desperate in his faith that he travels back in time to witness the Crucifixion. Though I found this on a list of time-travel books, the time travel becomes increasingly secondary as the novel goes on, though at the end you're left wondering whether the protagonist changed history or not. I won't give away the ending— though you'll probably guess it within the first few chapters—but although this wasn't the best book on either time travel or apotheosis that I ever read, it was intriguing. I tend to get Moorcock and Swanwick mixed up, and I found myself wondering how this story would have worked if Swanwick had written it. Better, I'm guessing, but this isn't bad.)

James Morrow, City of Truth

(Very cool premise with lots of humor potential: the setting is Veritas, a city where people are conditioned to always tell the truth at all times, no matter how unpleasant or unwelcome. Everything's fine until the protagonist's son contracts a fatal illness. Determined to save his son, he sets about learning how to lie. I think the book was trying to make a point about the importance and value of truth, and the difference between literal and figurative truth, but it didn't quite get there for me. Still engaging and worth reading. By the author of

Towing Jehovah

Octavia Butler, Dawn (Xenogenesis)

(Octavia Butler's fiction is always more sophisticated than it seems at first. I re-read

Parable of the Sower

this summer and was struck in particular by the elegance of the protagonist's characterization, particularly how her use of language changes as she matures. Butler's prose style is so straightforward that it can hide a great deal of subtlety. Just on the surface,

is about the human proclivities that prevent us from fulfilling our potential—and how much those proclivities may be common to all life in the universe. It also has to do with the nature of love and how good we are at fooling ourselves. Butler won a MacArthur grant, you know.)

Kate Wilhelm, And the Angels Sing

(This is a delicious collection of short stories; I devoured it in a couple of days. Wilhelm has a great eye for character, and reading her stories was an educational experience: the stories are quiet, but often deceptively so, and her ordinary people have extraordinary things going on inside them. This kind of quiet, restrained drama seems to be the way a lot of my fiction tries to go, but I always have trouble making it work. Thus, reading

gave me some ideas. Genre lines mean very little in this collection; Wilhelm's science fiction remains a study of human experience, and the human experiences she describes always have something fantastic about them.)

Gardner Dozois, Geodesic Dreams: The Best Short Fiction of Gardner Dozois

(When Gardner Dozois taught at Clarion West 2002, I was impressed by his combination of insightful criticism and impeccable taste in fiction with a sort of toilet-bowl humor that led to him giving a dramatic reading of the now-legendary Worst Sex Scene Ever Written. He recently retired as the editor of

, and back in the day he was a slush reader for

. In fact, he was the one who picked what would become George R.R. Martin's first professional sale out of the slush pile and put it in front of his boss. Dozois is a very good writer as well as a now-legend in the SF field, and this collection of stories is excellent. It's also, by and large, pretty grim—I kept thinking of Michael Swanwick, whose books always make me want to jump off a bridge—but well worth reading if you can find it. I got my copy from the library and it's currently overdue.)

Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky

(A sequel to

, mentioned below. I think, but am not sure, that this might be something of a reaction to the Charmed/Craft/Sabrina/Teen Witch phenomenon, a sentiment I can't help but support. I have a number of thoughts of my own about what means to be a witch, Wiccan, Pagan, or what have you, and this isn't really the time or place to go into them, but I think that Pratchett gets it. I don't know what his religious opinions are and it doesn't really matter; just read this book. I have a sneaking suspicion that there might be some commentary on Harry Potter in here, too, but not having actually read any Harry Potter yet I can't be sure. Bound to get to that eventually, though.)

Yann Martel, Life of Pi

(Yann Martel is the M. Night Shyamalan of the fiction world. You decide whether that's good or bad.)

G.K. Chesterton, The Annotated Thursday: G.K. Chesterton's Masterpiece, the Man Who Was Thursday

(One of the most interesting things about this book is that, judging by some of the supplementary material in this edition, almost everyone liked it more than Chesterton himself did. That said, I can see where Neil Gaiman gets it from, and what he likes so much about Chesterton. There are very few authors who can get away with the "He woke up and it was all a dream!" ending, but Chesterton is definitely one of them. Almost everyone I've talked to thinks this book is weirder than I think it is, but I think that says more about me than about the book. It did give me what I hope turns out to be a fabulous idea for the ending to a story of my own.)

Dan Simmons, Endymion

(I'd heard it wasn't as good, and I agree—but it's still interesting. Simmons needs to work a little too hard to make the central conceit work, and I feel as though the theme of physical integrity representing spiritual integrity has been sufficiently hammered into my skull, thank you. Am I still going to read

? Well. Yes.)

Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography

(Gender-bending time traveler bounces back and forth between love and poetry until discovering that they're the same thing. It's called a "meditation on gender", but it's entirely possible to read it as a meditation on the proliferation of literature. Try it and see.)

Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men

(One of Pratchett's juvenilia, but fun for all ages. It can really be summed up with this quote:

their

Plus it has the Nac Mac Feegle in it.)

Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, Or, the Evening Redness in the West

(The story unrolls in its own time like a classic country blues tune against a landscape as barren and alien as any science fiction novel and as familiar as a hundred spaghetti Westerns. If the Western is the American fantasy novel than Cormac McCarthy is its Michael Swanwick, subverting the genre's tropes to explicate his theme of impossible struggle against darkness. There is no chance for victory, but we fight all the same because to do otherwise is to accept the abyss's embrace. None too surprising that Hollywood chose to film

instead of this.)

Robert Jordan, New Spring (A Wheel of Time Prequel Novel)

(Is no one editing these books anymore? Good heavens.)

Lloyd Alexander, Westmark / The Kestrel / The Beggar Queen

(A childhood favorite, being read in fits and starts between finishing one bitch of a paper.)

Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

(Many years ago, I began this book and got stuck right around the bit with the sofa in the stairwell. Finally, today, I finished readhing it. While I can't imagine that it's had as much of an impact on my life as the

series (which I read at an impressionable age and love to this day), I did enjoy this very much. Adams is sometimes referred to dismissively, which I think ignores the fact that the very best humor can only come from a profound understanding of its object. See also Terry Pratchett.)

Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion

(Sequel to

which, you'll recall, I read on my recent trip to Europe. It ends on a hell of a cliffhanger, so I bought the sequel and read it in something like four days despite being in grad school and having a big pile of library books shortly due for return. Simmons has that ever-elusive page-turning style that makes one want to read just one more chapter before going to sleep. And his ideas are good, too, though not as groundbreaking as when Hyperion was initially published (not that long ago either, folks). To sum up: Forget

. Based on a lot of the same ideas, Simmons' work is more thorough, more intelligent, more interesting, sexier, and more satisfying, with a far less disappointing ending. At least so far--I hear the Endymion books don't quite live up to expectations.)

Guy Gavriel Kay, The Last Light of the Sun

(Kay worked on Tolkien's posthumous publications with Christopher Tolkien. He's written a lot of epic-style fantasy and is generally highly-regarded. This book is based on Norse sagas and Anglo-Saxon history and legend, particularly Alfred the Great. It's even written in a style reminiscent of the sagas, where entire life stories that touch upon the main narrative are related as little stories of their own. Despite all of this, I didn't especially like it. Kay has the history and legend of these cultures down--in fact, he mirrored them a little too closely--but I found the story lacking in the economy of language that makes the northern sagas and epics--and Tolkien, for that matter--such a pleasure to read. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to curl up with

Dan Simmons, Hyperion

(I bought this book in the early 1990s. It subsequently traveled with me through several moves, one of them cross-country, without being read. The reason was that the first chapter just didn't appeal. And yet I kept the book, because everyone kept saying how great it was; it did, after all, win a Hugo in 1990. Finally, on the plane to and from Budapest on a recent trip, I read it. It's mind-blowing; structured rather like

, it's the best fictional treatment of religion I've read in years. Unfortunately, it doesn't so much end as cut off abruptly, so now I shall have to read

to find out how it all comes out. Presumably.)

Charles Stross, Toast: And Other Rusted Futures

(The ultimate coffee addicts. Intelligent stock portfolios that launch Denial of Service attacks on your brain. Stross takes Vinge's Singularity and bolts right for the horizon with it. And that's just the first few stories.)

Pamela Dean, Juniper, Gentian, And Rosemary

(I've just re-read this for, I think, the fourth or fifth time, and I finally got it. I think that I liked Tam Lin (The Fairy Tale Series) better--the ending wasn't as abrupt as it is here--but Dean's lyrical writing carries me every time.)

Jean Anouilh, Five Plays : Antigone, Eurydice, The Ermine, The Rehearsal, Romeo and Jeannette

(I read

in high school, the other four plays just recently. French literature always makes me feel existential. I think I'll read something Saxon next. With swords and drinking in it.)

Mary Gentle, Grunts!: A Fantasy With Attitude

(I love Tolkien. Obviously. But, through no fault of his own, he spawned a genre more notable for derivative hacks than enchanting original stories. This is the perfect antidote. I will warn you that Gentle's orcs make Tolkien's seem positively charming by comparison.)

Alice Hoffman, The Probable Future

(This was a Christmas present. For the first two chapters I wasn't sure I'd like it; then I was hooked. Good book.)

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King (The Lord of the Rings, Part 3)

(This was a re-read. I'd just seen the movie and

to read all my favorite bits again.)

Robert Kellogg & Jane Smiley (introductions), The Sagas of the Icelanders

(Perhaps this should be categorized as non-fiction, since the sagas do cover verifiable historical events. When I've finished my course in cataloging, I'll let you know.)

Non-Fiction

Jane Chance, ed., Tolkien and the Invention of Myth: A Reader
Humphrey Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography
Randel Helms, Tolkien and the Silmarils
Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution
Rick DeMarinis, The Art & Craft of the Short Story
Felix Pryor, Elizabeth I: Her Life in Letters
Marc Drogin, Anathema!: Medieval scribes and the history of book curses
Brian Fagan, The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization
Denis Johnson, Seek : Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond
Richard Fortey, Life : A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth
E.P. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus
George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind
Barry Raftery, Pagan Celtic Ireland: The Enigma of the Irish Iron Age
Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly
Robert Jourdain, Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy
Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting

What I want to read next (Amazon wishlist, opens new browser window).

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